554: Dicky Do

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. How are you doing this week? I'm all right. Hopefully we'll have issues solved as I have a second Eero Pro 6 set up. So we'll see how this whole mesh thing works out. Didn't work out well for you. We'll find out.

No, no. Well, I overmeshed. That was my problem. Yes, you did overmesh. Which we didn't know was a thing until we knew it was a thing. Yes. We did get a little follow-up from Lon who says, Just wanted to let you know that I'm the one person who found Grumpy Old Geeks via the mention on Tech Meme Ride Home. Well, welcome, Lon.

Well, thank you. Well, something we do here, Lon, is we discuss eggs a lot just because it's become funny. We do eggs are good news when we get it and eggs are bad for us news when we get it. And I've got a new one, a twist here, Jason. Eggs are no longer even eggs. What are they now?

Plant-based whole eggs could be served in U.S. restaurants this year. The company is called Yo Egg. And they claim to have developed the first plant-based poached and sunny-side-up eggs, which they expect to have in restaurants across the Los Angeles area by the end of the year.

They're made from soy, sunflower oil, water, and flour, and they're more sustainable to make. Except, you know, chickens. Yo, not an egg. They've got one gram of protein, so they're not a one-for-one replacement for chicken eggs in terms of nutritional value. But they also don't have any cholesterol, which we also don't know if is good or bad for us yet because every other week there's a new story about that.

So there you go. They have $5 million in seed funding. And they plan to use that money to scale production and start working on hard-boiled and scrambled egg products. What's next, Jason? We now have eggs that aren't eggs. I soon expect crypto eggs, NF tags, and the egg-a-verse.

NF tags. Nice. All right. Well, you know, now that I've done the story, you'll have to try Yo Egg when it comes to down. But am I going to have to rap? Yo Egg rap? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. I do remember that show, though. A little bit of follow-up here.

We talked last week about how Apple was having issues with their plans to return to work. Basically, people saying, no, I'm not gonna. The New York Times understands that Apple has delayed the return to offices once again, bowing to the pressure here. The iPhone maker will no longer require staff to come to the office three times a week by May 23rd.

Instead, they will reportedly launch a pilot that has some employees return two days a week in the weeks ahead. And anyone who doesn't feel comfortable can still work remotely, according to a company note, until they get fired. Ah, well, Ian Goodfellow, who was the guy who we talked about, the head of the AI.

Yes. Turns out he was a much bigger deal than we thought. He kind of invented general adversarial networks, GANs. So he just said, screw it. I'm going back to Google, because he came from Google. So he just went back. If you're that talented and that high up the chain, you can do that.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. We got quite a lot of pushback. Grimes wrote in, hi, GOG. I'm a huge fan of your show. I've been listening to you all each week for the last five years. Definitely my favorite podcast. Last week, you had a grumpy old rant on returning three days a week to the office. As an SDM at Amazon, I wanted to post my grumpy old born in 87 thoughts.

Wow. I have socks older than you. Our organization is wanting to go back a few days a week, but I have a hard time justifying the loss of talent that we would take due to more flexibility from the competition. Software engineering productivity has not slowed down to working from home in our organization. Some are even more productive.

We have hired past our building capacity. Less commuting is better for humanity. Going into a central office in some city center is a pretty new thing. Evolutionary time scale. So is living past 30. For most humans, we did things to optimize productivity there, such as coffee breaks. The same will be true for working from home.

Love you guys. Deliveroo. A lot of pushback on our Discord server as well. And I would like to remind our listeners again, as I pointed out a couple times, we're a very self-selecting sample. You folks out there, you all tend to be programmers. You're all very into IT.

You're all very self-independent. You're all very driven. We have really great listeners that are perfectly suited for working from home and work in industries that are perfectly suited to continue working from home, especially if you never want a promotion and you're happy just doing exactly what you do right now.

Most people aren't like you. Okay. Explain. Well, most people aren't in these types of positions. They're in different types of positions. Or again, as we've talked about all along through the whole pandemic, they have to go to work because they're in customer service or they deal with physical products or they work on assembly lines or they're not as lucky as a lot of us are that have the ability to work from home or they work in teams or they have creative kind of positions where you get that

synergy or a million other things that aren't programming in a silo from your basement, of which many, many of our listeners do. That's true. Yeah. There's one thing that I wanted to clarify from last week's thing because, yeah, we did get a lot of pushback on it.

I did say that it was arrogant that a lot of people are saying that, oh, I just don't want to work from home. I can't be bothered. It's too much for me. And, you know, you look at what happened with the guy from Apple, which, you know, he is kind of a, what you call a big deal.

He's in rarefied air. So he can do things like that. Yes. Yes, he is. So he can do things like that that other people can't. And what's driving me crazy about this whole thing right now is, yes, there are a lot of people that can work from home, but they are a small subset of greater humanity.

You know, most of humanity is out there doing their job so we can stay at home and do ours, right? You know, you can't sit at home if you're driving for Deliveroo. You can't sit at home if you're driving for Uber. You can't sit at home and do all this other stuff, but people want to still be able to.

And they just complain and complain and complain. And I just find that slightly arrogant, seeing that the rest of the world is getting off their ass and doing their job. Yeah, and, you know, I've fielded quite a lot of complaints, both I've, you know, heard about them from other people. I've also dealt with them within my own company.

They come in the forms of, but it's so expensive to go into work because you have to commute and maybe take public transport and buy a lunch, pack a lunch. And those expenses were there before the pandemic. Did we think the pandemic was going to last forever?

Apparently people did. A lot of people moved out of city centers and away from work because pandemic and they could and why not? I guess thinking this would be the way it's going to be forevermore or that it would never end.

I don't know what people were thinking. And it's on you if you moved that far away from your work and now your work wants you to come back in. That's your problem. That's not the work's problem. Yeah, I get that. Totally get that. And I'm with you on that. It is not it's not somebody else's problem if you've made decisions based on what happened during the pandemic.

And I said when the pandemic started, this was going to be a reset for society. And I still think that that's happening and it's underway. And the next few months, you know, everybody's been calling it the great resignation and all this other great crap. Well, they're in for a great bit of whiplash because the free money is gone.

You know, everybody thought that it was going to last forever. It ain't it ain't going to last forever. So, you know, that whiplash is definitely coming. Well, couple it with a recession and couple it with a tightening up in the tech sector. You may find yourself saying, I want to work from home and the company might be saying, well, you can just stay at home because we have to get rid of some people anyway.

So we're going to keep the ones that are coming into the office. Right. Because there is a lot of cleaning house right now. Yep. There's going to be a lot of pink slips coming out in the next couple of months. Mm hmm. You know, it's it just reminds me of the Sun Tzu quote, you know, during peace, prepare for war.

During boom times, prepare for now, you know, if you haven't been preparing and you haven't seen the writing on the wall and thought, you know, everything's going up, you know, we're all going to make it. Well, you know, it's called gravity. Things go up, tend to come down.

Yeah, they do. And when I've been talking about this and I've been saying, you know, I think that there's going to be a lot of people out of a job soon, that a lot of people are going to get fired. The immediate comeback is, but there are so many positions that aren't filled. Everybody's looking for work. Restaurants are looking for work. Amazon. Yeah, customer service.

Amazon warehouses are looking for work. Customer service is looking for work. All the jobs that you don't want to do because you can't, you don't even want to go into your own office anymore. Yeah, I think people forget how shitty working was. No, because we've had a real boom. And it was just the norm.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, yeah, it's nice that you can do whatever you want to do. We had that for two years. Now it's pull up your big boy pants again. Exactly. All that free money, you know, it's not free. I mean, the other thing that I also think about is a lot of people, the young, you and I have lived through recessions and you and I have lived through very bad job markets.

In fact, we came out of college into a particularly bad job market at the time. We were lucky enough to be in a burgeoning brand new industry and we're good at it. So we were lucky with that. So we were lucky with that. But people that weren't into IT or tech were screwed. But the generation just underneath us, a lot of the people that are in their 30s right now that have been living the high life, particularly if they've been working in tech for the last 10, 15 years, they've never been through this before.

And it's going to be a hell of a shock. Yeah, they have no idea what's coming. And one of the things that I really want people to really kind of understand and go towards is finding edge cases beyond the edge. Because as things, as you see, you know, we've got the Great Recession, the Great Whiplash, all of this crap.

It's everybody moving lockstep, looking for other people for advice on what to do. I'm going to give you some advice. Stick to the edges. When the dot-com crash happened, I stuck to an industry that let me use my skills but was recession resistant, which was entertainment.

I worked in movies. We had some of the best times during the recession. I made more money during the recession and the dot-com bust than I ever did because I found a place where I could ply my trade but in an industry that wasn't getting the shit knocked out of it day in, day out.

So, you know, right now, start looking for those if you don't have them already because, like I said, things are going to change over the next couple months, maybe like a year or two with the recession. We still have the war. Oh, my God, I went to go get my blood taken yesterday and the hospital did not have Band-Aids.

I shit you not. They were cutting up ace bandages so I could, you know, to hold my gauze on. Things are going to be weird for quite some time. So start looking for the edges where you can actually, you know, make a living where everybody else is out there hat in hand trying to get, you know, they're going to be going back to the restaurants.

They're going to be going back to that stuff. Try and position yourself in a way where you can end around them and not be one of the crowd. Yeah, I agree. And it's weird times and we're in for very weird times coming up. I mean, there's no baby formula for fuck's sake. How does that happen?

Well, you have... God invented titties, damn it. That doesn't work for everybody, Jason. Expect that. I know, I know. Yeah, it's just, it's strange times and the idea that we're just pandemics over and, oh, well, we got some good things out of it, like I can work from home and there's not going to be any negatives.

Oh, you've got to be kidding me. We're in for rough times over the next couple of years. So, it'll come back. Everything will come back. Just, you know, don't act all entitled. Yeah, wait for the wheel and plan and prepare. Literally, plan and prepare. Right now, I got rid of my office. So, that was the shortest experiment of all time.

I was, because it didn't have enough space, so I started doing some recon in the building, see if I could get a better space, like build out a studio in there. And the money they want for, you know, the location that it's in, because it is in the super ding-dong neighborhood of Calabasas, I can get five times as much space anywhere else, like a mile away.

So, I said, screw it, close down the office, and we're going to be waiting a little bit longer, like I said, for these things to change. I'm waiting for industrial office space to drop through the floor, which I have a timer on my watch. I give it three more weeks, and I bet I'm going to be able to get some of the best deals on office real estate you've ever seen.

So, you know, planning, preparing, but I'm sad to see that office go. I was kind of enjoying going in every day. Yeah, you'll get another one, or you won't. We'll see. Yep, still have a garage. Already pay for that. It's not extra money. Or, I could move up to San Francisco, Brian, and I could move into a brownstone shared housing test bed is what they're doing right now.

I think your old slip of saying a brown shit was pretty much exactly spot on. It is. This is, it's kind of like a box with beds in it. They call it co-living. It's a co-living space. They have these little sleep pods that allow up to 14 residents to share a home.

Now, okay, you're saying, okay, 14 people in a house. How big is the house? Well, they're saying that they can do this with a two-bath, three-bedroom, single-family house. 14 people. That's seven per bathroom? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, they didn't really do all that math, now, did they?

You said that we're turning into a third-world country. Now, 14 people to a, you know, three-bedroom house sounds pretty third-world to me. So, this is the future, Brian. This is the future. Well, if you want to work from home, there you go. There you go. You can have some friends.

You can all work from the same home. Yeah. Oh, God. They should just call this thing hotel suicide, because if you live in there, just end it. Yeah. Just end it. I agree. In the news. So, to surprise nobody, Elon Musk is basically trying to dance his way out of his Twitter purchase.

Basically, he's picked, right now, the bugaboo that he's going to use as the accuracy of a spot count, which we all knew before was not accurate. And he's trying to use that as a wedge to maybe renegotiate the $44 billion deal he has made, which, as many financial experts and legal experts have pointed out, is not a thing.

He has made a deal. You don't get to put them on hold until Twitter comes around to give you a number of bots, which, as you yourself point out, is as unknowable as the human soul. Yeah. So, you want a number that you know is unknowable to renegotiate a deal that you have already made that you cannot back out of or put on hold.

I don't know what he's doing anymore. So, yes, he then went on a Twitter spree, of course, because Twitter, and said he tried to crowdsource bot estimates from his own followers, of which many are bots. So, that's interesting. Yeah. And, of course, the Twitter legal team is basically saying, you can't do this.

You revealed how our methodology for estimating the proportion of bot accounts across our platform, which is proprietary information. So, can you please not do that? Then Twitter's lame duck CEO, at this point, did a series of tweets about external estimates of bots are likely wrong, since the platform includes private data in its account, to which Elon Musk responded with a poop emoji, obviously the right man to be put in charge of this platform.

Here's the deal. That's all I got. He's going to get sued. Yes. They're going to sue him. Forget it. It's whatever. It's gotten to the point of absurdity. I just don't care anymore. And I'm starting to not even care about Twitter anymore. It's like, just whatever. You know, Twitter was not here a couple years ago.

It cannot be here again. Life will go on. So, at this point, I'm just like, pick a side, sell it, don't, whatever. You've always got True Social. I was on that last night, Brian. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Now, everybody's like, oh, Twitter is the worst.

It's the worst. It's the worst. You have not gotten onto True Social yet, my friends. Wait till you see it. Oh, it is so bad. It is so bad. There's so much wrongy McRongenstein going on there and so much bad info and so many lies.

It is, I mean, it's mind-boggling to know that this thing exists. Now, this is an internet metric that I'm not sure anybody's ever calculated before. Actually, it's the internet, so probably somebody has. Do you think the sheer amount of misspellings is greater on Reddit, 4chan, or True Social?

4chan. I've been on all of them. 4chan's pretty, pretty bad. Okay. Just checking. I think it's an interesting metric. I want the misspelling metric for websites. News from Texas.

Because Texas is the place. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a lawsuit over HB 20, a bizarre law effectively banning many apps and websites from moderating posts by Texas residents. This was handed down without explanation.

And this should alarm anybody who runs a website without intervention from another court, which there will be. It's going to put social networks that operate in Texas at legal risk. So to recap this, HB 20 bans social media platforms from removing, downranking, demonetizing, or otherwise discriminating against content based on the viewpoint of the user or another person.

It applies to any internet website or application that hits 50 million active monthly users and enables users to communicate with other users, with exceptions for internet service providers and media sites. Now, all of this has happened because the judge does not believe that YouTube believe that YouTube is a website.

The judge appears to be somewhat confused and believes that YouTube is an internet provider rather than a website, which it obviously is not. Yeah. So the real problem isn't a judge that doesn't understand technology. It's that she apparently thinks relying on Section 230 strips website operators of First Amendment rights.

So only interactive computer services can rely on Section 230. The First Amendment kicks in if companies are expressing speech. If companies aren't legally liable for a specific instance of illegal speech, their overall moderation strategy shouldn't count as speech either. There's nothing in this logic that stops at the world's tech giants.

This reasoning would be a blank check for laws that require sites or apps or mailing lists of any size to accept a government mandated moderation strategy or open themselves up to libel and harassment lawsuits every time a user posts a comment. So basically, if this goes through everywhere, the internet no longer exists.

You know, Texas, just stop. Just stop. You know, you want us to take you seriously. And you keep doing shit like this. I mean, what do you expect the rest of us to do? Come on. I mean... I know.

It's kind of like, is it Florida or is it Texas these days? I know. Which is it? Which is it? And should we just let them to see? It used to reliably be Florida, but I mean, come on. Yeah. No, I wonder if this is one of the same judges that handle all of the stupid patent cases down there. Maybe.

It's just dumb. It's dumb. And this one's kind of dumb, too. Reports spotlights vast scale of ad text's biggest data breach. Now, it's not the biggest data breach. So let's just stop right there. What this article is talking about is basically ad targeting that they use with real-time bidding, which is how they sell advertisements.

You know? It's a very complicated process. Most of it's bullshit. But what you're doing is you're... It is bullshit. Yeah. But you're dealing with brokers who are talking with ad providers and all this other shit that goes on behind the scenes. It's all algorithmic and it is all in real-time and happens super-duper fast.

And it's one of those technology things that I can't wrap my head around. How they get it to work that fast. It's just like, how can you get anything to work that fast? But what they're saying is that when you're passing data back and forth on advertisements that you're going to bid on, user data is getting passed back and forth as well.

So, you know, for hundreds and thousands of times a day, your data is being passed around. You don't even know it. It is the, you know, the man behind the curtain, the mystery behind the scene. And they're saying that, oh, this is bad over there in Europe. And I'm like, yeah, well, this is just kind of the cost of doing business.

You know? People are still going to pass your information around. I don't think that this should be one of those GDPR types of things. What do you think, Brian? I'm going to pull my Kara Swisher. What do you think? I kind of agree with you. I mean, I hate this whole advertising model because as we know, the reality is it is all bullshit.

The metrics are bullshit. The actual users, the eyeballs that they're supposedly getting in front of are bullshit. Bots! Bots! Yeah, you're trading on how many bots are going to see your ad, basically. That's the reality of this. But it's phenomenal technology.

I don't think that the data that's being passed around is particularly bad. How are you going to get rid of this? I know Google is working on a new kind of attempt at advertising and all that sort of stuff that is better. But this is what we've got right now. I think this is, to use one of your favorite phrases, a tempest in a teapot.

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. I'm with you on that one. This one, though, is not a tempest in a teapot. It's actually quite funny. Miami's mayor backed Miami Coin Crypto. Then its price dropped 95%. Oh, dearie me.

Do you remember Miami Coin? I did. And isn't he getting paid in it? Yes. Yes. He was getting... Well, I knew he was getting... Well, the mayor of New York was Bitcoin. I can't remember. Miami mayor might have been Miami Coin. Might have been Bitcoin. I don't know.

But this thing is down to... Well, as of May 13th, it was 0.0032 cents per coin. Woo! Some big money right there. This company, Citicoins, is going around to major cities in the country trying to get them to adopt these coins.

And you, too, can have your own coin. Yes. Yeah. I would not want to be one of their salespeople right now. I mean... I mean, they shouldn't even be in business. The mindfuckery that's going on with all crypto right now is just so much fun to watch. But, yeah, this one, this is a pie in the face for Miami.

And I wonder how they're going to spin this. I mean, is there a way to spin this? I don't think so. There's not. It's you quietly sweep it under the rug and hope everybody forgets that you ever did such an asinine thing to begin with. You berenstain it. Yep. Exactly.

From the more Tempest in a teapot files, there's some outrage at Apple this week. Apple is going to change their policy for higher subscription prices. They've updated it to make auto-renews seamless, but this could also lead to surprise changes. So, under the old Apple policy, Apple would ask you to opt in if something that you've subscribed to is charging a higher price.

Going forward, it will allow developers to automatically charge higher prices as long as they meet a set of conditions. This includes they don't increase their price more than once a year. However, the increase must not exceed $5.50% of the current subscription pricing or $50.50% of the current annual subscription price.

So, you know, it could be significant and surprising. However, Apple notifies users of price increase in advance via email and push notifications. So, it's up to you to unsubscribe before you're charged if you're not happy with the new price.

It's not a sneak attack, they tell you. Yeah, it's not a sneak attack if you get the emails. I am running into, I think it's fine. I honestly think this is fine. It's the porn model. Yeah, I mean, just as long as there is a mechanism for them to let people know that their rates are going up and it sounds like there is.

So, what's the big deal? Exactly. Okay. I do have, I'm fucking app people. I'm dealing with an app problem right now with a company called Fable, I believe. Have you heard of them? Have not. They do book clubs. I have not heard of them. It's kind of like a book club thing.

I signed up with them when they did LeVar Burton's book club and I didn't get a renewal notice until it was already renewed. I didn't, and I signed up through the app. Right. And I didn't get a renewal notice. I went to the app and I'm like, what the fuck?

Because it's like 70 bucks a year, which is not jump change. I did it to support LeVar. I've supported LeVar for a year. I do not wish to support LeVar anymore. I would like my $70 back. I would like my $70 back. I go to the app. The cancel subscription button doesn't work.

Every other button on the page works except that one. Amazing. There's no other way to get to it. And it's a mess. It is a total mess. So I'm dealing with my Apple card and trying to get them to reverse the charge or get Fable to, you know, give me my money back or whatever. Because, sorry, LeVar, but I didn't even do the book club once, so I'm not even going to do it again.

So if anybody else has had problems with Fable, that's my point in bringing this up, let me know. Because I'm trying to get other people together who have been screwed by Fable so I have a better case to go up against them. Class action being organized by Jason. I want my money back. You can get your $0.70 back, too.

Yeah. Well, speaking of not well-thought-out plans here, Grubhub offered free lunch in New York City the other day. Many were unable to access the promotional deal, which was scheduled to run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time, when both the website and app started to crash, according to tweets from many frustrated users.

A large number of restaurants were overwhelmed with orders from hungry customers, prompting them to pause taking new orders or close for the day. So Grubhub's free lunch promo was actually just a deep discount to begin with. The offer was only good for $15, and customers were responsible for additional taxes, tips, and delivery fees.

And, yeah, so basically, here's a promo. Our whole system's going to crash doing this. And a whole bunch of restaurants said, we didn't even know this was going on. And now we're screwed. Well played, Grubhub. Well played. Yes. And maybe a sign of your great reckoning, Jason.

Netflix is laying off 150 mostly U.S.-based staff members this coming month in an effort to cut costs following the drop in subscribers, as they've recently had, as we all know about. This includes a number in senior-level positions.

Again, you know, not just the lower-level people, the bigger-level people. It's the second round of layoffs at the company, which numbers roughly 11,000 employees in recent weeks. An undisclosed number of writing and editing staff attached to Netflix's in-house fan website, ta-dum, were let go last month.

Yeah, I think they'd be first on the cutting block. Have you ever heard of it? No, because it's in-house. We don't work for Netflix. Although I think we need to start our own grumpy old geek's in-house fan website, Jason, where you and I just say how wonderful we are all the time. I think so, too.

Now, in an interesting move, and one that I kind of, I'm okay with, but I get that a whole lot of people aren't, employee morale has been low, obviously, since everybody knows they're kind of in trouble. They've updated their cultural memo.

Yet another thing that we don't have, Jason. We need a cultural memo. They wanted to warn prospective employees that the streaming services may not be the best place for those who cannot work on content they disagree with. As employees, we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.

Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you, reads the cultural guidelines. Good for you, Netflix. Oh, that's great. Your job is not to appease your employers, or employees, sorry.

Your job is to provide content for people that they enjoy watching. And if somebody's got to stick up their butt about a show that you make, maybe that's not the place for them to be working. Yeah, no shit. In porn, we had that. We had, believe it or not, lots of paperwork to work in porn.

You have to sign so many releases and disclosures about the fact that you are going to see things that you may not like. And there was a lot of things that I worked on that I did not like. But you knew it going in, and you wanted the job.

You put on your big boy pants, or took them off, as it were, when you went into the office. Depending on your position. Depending on your position, and the position of your position. And we just dealt with it. So, yeah, if people get upset because Dave Chappelle says some things that they don't like, yeah, get another job.

Oh, wait, you can't! Because everybody's firing everybody. I would like to point out, though, that the 150 people that they fired is like 0.12% of the entire staff. So, I think the more people that got fired are the people on the production teams for the TV shows and the movies that they're not going to spend money on anymore.

That's the one that they're leaving out. That's the really big number. And they're not considered employees. So, ta-dum! I thought this one was funny just because of the title. AI can predict people's race from X-ray images, and scientists are concerned. Okay. Concerned.

Why are they concerned, Brian? They're concerned about the stupid people that might be racist that are working in the medical industry. Yep, yep. They're worried about, you know, the same thing that we've been worried about with AI since the beginning. So, welcome to the party, pal. Welcome to the party. Yep.

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Media Candy. Brian, I've been trying to watch last week tonight on the HBO app on my Apple TV for three weeks now, and it will not play. I have... Do you have this problem? So many problems with the HBO app. I wasn't sure if it was because I'm going through my VPN, although every other app works just fine on my VPN.

Or if it was because I'm borrowing your account. But yeah, I'm having no ends of problems. I have problems logging in. I have problems getting like five minutes into the show, and then it's just dropping and not remembering where I left off at, and then having to go back, and then everything's slow, and then it dumps me out again.

I don't know what... I wasn't going to say anything because, you know, I'm living off the generosity of others. But yes, I've been having lots of problems. Okay, good. It's not just me. I did do some poking around the internet because that's what I do sometimes.

And I found out that people are having problems, especially with last week tonight. Like nobody can watch that show. It is totally broken on the Apple app. I'm sure it's some encoding issue. I can look at it on any other platform. So what I ended up doing now is I, you know, fire it up in the browser on my laptop and then just stream it to the TV.

Yeah, just toss it to the TV. It's the only way to make it work. It's great. Thanks, guys. And it's funny, too, because Barry, the new season of Barry, started on HBO. Works just fine. Watched The Invisible Pilot this week. Amazing documentary. Worked just fine. Try and load last week tonight.

Boom. Dead. Okay. Not just me. If you're having that problem, then, you know, it's not just you. That's what I'm saying. Let us know on the Discord channel, too, if you guys are having problems with it. Because I'm curious and see if anybody's found a workaround. I've uninstalled the app.

I've reset the system. I've done everything. And I can't fix it. I've done all of that as well. Okay, good. Have you tried Slower Horses on Apple TV Plus yet? I do not have Apple TV Plus currently. I'm waiting for either any of the two shows I watch on Apple TV to come back, Ted Lasso or Foundation.

Okay. Okay. Or when you get another laptop, which sounds like you might be due. Yeah, I am actually due for that. So we'll see. They'll probably just give me the stupid gaming thing again. Yeah, probably. Probably. Well, Barry is worth picking up. Season three is just as good as the other ones.

Might even be better at this point. I'm two episodes in and enjoying it. There's four out now. It's eight total and they drop on Sundays. Slower Horses, though. I'm two episodes in. Oh, my God. It's so good. You just. Yeah, it's just so good.

Sweden that shit if you can't get it. Okay. I mean, it's Gary Oldman in MI5 and just. It's just fucking good. I saw the promos for it. It looked very funny. Something that's mediocre funny is this New Kids in the Hall on Amazon. I don't know. Did you watch it?

I've watched two episodes. Okay. We're at the same spot. I'm. Did you laugh? No. I had mild. Okay. Mild feelings of amusement occasionally. I don't know. Is it because we're older and the humor that really tickled us when we were young.

Youngins and teenagers no longer appeals. And they're really kind of doing the exact same humor. Also. What's up with all the dicks? A lot of cock and balls. What's up with all the dicks? I've now seen every single character's anatomy in full.

Yeah. What's up with that? I'm not against it. I don't personally care. I just thought it was an odd choice to not have that many laugh out loud jokes, but an awful lot of penis. Yeah, that's, I'm just, I'm trying to figure out what the rationale is.

I think they're all nudists in their later age and they got, they got paid to be nudists. You know, good for them. Yeah. That's fine by me. I got no problem with it. I just thought it was out of character. I just honestly thought it was out of character. It was, it was shocking. Yeah.

What was more shocking is it just wasn't funny. Yeah, it just really wasn't that, that was the sad part because I remember the kids in the hall very, very fondly. Yeah, me too. And I mean, the funniest joke is the opening scene where they're talking about brain candy that picks off, kicks off the whole series.

I thought that was kind of funny if you know the history of brain candy. Yeah. But man, yeah, I'm, I'm kind of sad about that. It was, it was, I didn't even chuckle. Yeah, it wasn't that great. Um, and speaking of nudity, there's a new podcast in town called Naked Lunch.

Uh, this is our good buddy, Phil Rosenthal, uh, sitting around with, uh, David Wilde, who is, oh, I can't stand David Wilde. I really can't. He's a music journalist. He is hired to do, uh, to write all the music shows like the Grammys.

He writes all the jokes, which tells you exactly how funny he is. Oh, so he's not. He's horrifically unfunny. Absolutely horribly unfunny. Luckily, because Phil Rosenthal is a gigantic ball of energy. So far, I've listened to the Ray Romano and Brad Garrett episode and some of the Brad Paisley episode.

Not really that interested in Brad Paisley, but whatever. Uh, Phil is so full of energy that he basically does all the talking. So David Wilde just chimes in every now and then. And it's Phil Rosenthal. He's funny. He's gregarious. I could listen to him all day. Okay. I'll check that one out.

Yeah. As long as he is, as long as he's talking a lot, that's fine. Because he is a professional funny man, surprisingly. He is. Caps and doodads. Oh, for fuck's sake, Brian. I'm back on Brave. You are having Vivaldi problems that I am not.

Uh, maybe it's your fancy Mac and I'm just on an old crappy one. I don't know. I think that, I think that's it. All my, none of my M1 Macs can keep Vivaldi open for more than seconds. It's like, I'll, I'll open it up, look at something, change to another window, go back to it.

And all I see is Vivaldi booting back up and reloading the page I was on all day long. Okay. Well, at least you're getting those, you're collecting those Brave coins or whatever the hell they were. Uh, the, yeah, the bat token. I, I have turned off, I still had everything turned off.

Thank God. I still had all my, you know, settings and everything. So I just had to read, like re-import my bookmarks and I was back up to, back up to speed pretty quick. I, I gotta say the nice perk about that is all my bookmarks are on my mobile now. So that was the perk, uh, cause that at least syncs cause there is Brave for Mobile and there is news about Brave for Mobile.

They've got a new privacy hub. So when something gets triggered as, you know, being blocked, you can actually check it out and see what, uh, what the hubbub was all about. Right. The, uh, the interesting thing. Does it block itself? Yeah, really? You just did.

It's an episode of Black Mirror. It just powers off your phone and you stare at your, your sad face in the, in your phone. Um, the one thing I, that they did add is, um, this fingerprint, uh, futzer is what it was. It kind of randomized the data that goes back to any of the APIs that have, you know, fingerprintable data in it.

And it just adds in a little bit of randomness to kind of just, you know, poison the, poison the signal. Yep. And I thought that's great. That's a really good idea. Uh, more people should do that. It's something good came out of Brave. Yeah, really? Oh, surprise, surprise. So, so far it's fine.

Uh, if I can close tab icon is on the wrong side of the tab again. Yeah. God. The things you think would be standardized by now, but no, we gotta, we gotta be our own special snowflakes. See, Vivaldi at least did it right. They give you a toggle where you could say you want it on the right or the left.

Like that's some customization. I can get behind that. Uh, I did find a video this week cause we did talk about the DJI Mini 3 Pro on the show last week. So I get a lot of, um, recommended, uh, videos in my feed and I got this one called the DJI Mini 3 Pro.

51 Things You Should Know Before Buying. I don't want to know 51 things about anything. Well, the 51 things actually tipped me over the edge. So I ordered the damn thing. It, it was less than a week. I'm sorry. I tried. I tried, Brian. Uh, you know, you just don't listen to me when I say you're going to have it within a week and you say, no, no, no.

And then you do. I, I didn't know this video was going to come across my path. It was unknown, unknown constant or circumstances, man. Come on. It was, it was out of my control. I used my brain's AI to analyze your shopping habits, Jason. Yes, you did. Yes, you did.

So, um, yeah, that's on order. I don't know when it's going to get here because they're getting slammed. This thing is like the best drone that they've ever made, which is good for, you know, at least for the consumers. The video just kind of put me over the edge and they're like, this thing is the best drone they've ever made. So I've already got two people on, on the line to buy my other two drones and fuck it.

Okay. I'll get rid of these two because this thing does everything. And, and the one thing, here's the one real thing that got me over the edges. Their new, uh, remote control has the screen built into it and it's priced affordably. The biggest problem with the drones that I have that I doesn't, that makes me not want to fly them is every time I take it out to flight, I have to take my phone out.

I got to take the case off, get all the random cables plugged in and all that. It's not just take it out and fly it. It takes like 10 minutes just to get everything sorted before you can take it out and go. This new one, you can just basically take it out of your backpack, turn it on and go. No setup.

So for that, for that reason, I'm in, I got to do it. I can't help it. I did see a great article this week by Cal Newport, a guy that I have a love, hate relationship with. This is taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious, which comes on the heels of a study, which is linked in the show notes as well, but kind of something we already knew that getting off social media makes you happier, but there's an, it's a, it's a better study that's attached to this one.

So science, you know? Yeah. Well, part of the reason why getting off social media will probably make you happier is you won't see all the violent content that's all over Facebook. They're actually trying to do a better job of this. During the first quarter of 2022, the company took down 21.7 million pieces of content for breaking its rules around violence and incitement of violence, an increase from 12.4 million taken down in the previous quarter.

That's an awful lot of millions of things of violence being posted on the regular on Facebook. That is lots and lots of violence, but I mean, when you think about, I mean, that's for the year or the first quarter, 21.7 million for the first quarter. And that's just the ones they found.

Think of how many pieces of content are done. Exactly. Yeah. I'm like, think of how many pieces are posted a day and then kind of extrapolate onto that. Not a huge portion of the content. Just post your food, people. Yeah. Cheese sandwiches. Let's get back to the cheese sandwiches. What's wrong with you?

They're touting their AI and their proactive detection technology. More than 98% of the posts it took down were removed before users reported them, according to the company. Of course, this is also the same week where they're facing scrutiny for their response time following the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, where live recordings circulated on Facebook and other platforms, and they have had a whack-a-mole time of trying to take those down.

One copy posted to Facebook was shared more than 46,000 times before it was removed more than nine hours after it was posted, according to the Washington Post. You are not quickly. No. I saw this one, and I just had to laugh. We used AI to show what Twilight characters would look like in real life based on the books, and Emmett looks incredibly huggable.

You get basically one guess on where this comes from. Twitter. BuzzFeed. Come on. Oh, yeah. BuzzFeed originally, yes. Come on. That title is... There are seven million of these out there. I clicked on one of them once, I think quite a while back through Twitter, which was AI to show what the Harry Potter characters would look like in real life versus the actual actors.

And since I clicked on that one link one time on Twitter, my entire Twitter feed is basically what these characters would look like in real life using AI. That one time on Twitter. Yes. I thought they were cute, but I wanted to dive into how they got the quote-unquote AI to generate them.

And they used a site called Art Breeder. Now, I went to Art Breeder, and yeah, it's neat. You got to sign up, and there's a paid version if you want to put in your own seed photos and things like that. Now, here's what gets me.

I'm an ex-coder, you know? I enjoyed my time behind the keyboard. Now, Brian, you did as well. I would like you, when you get a chance, go to Art Breeder and view source. Oh, come on. Where the fuck is it?

I've forgotten Brave, where the fucking view source button. I'm looking forward to Vivaldi, right? I haven't viewed source in so long. I don't know where it is. View, developer, view source, command control U, I think. Okay, I'm actually looking at source code.

Oh, my. You will notice there's a tag that is missing from there that was just, you know, it's common. It's common. It's called the title tag, right? Where you get the title across the top? Yeah. These kids nowadays, too lazy to put in a title tag. But they will do a Twitter title with a meta tag, but they won't actually do the tag for the page itself.

Everything here is geared towards mobile. Like, if you look at the top, it's got all of the Facebook meta stuff. It's got all the Twitter meta stuff. It has nothing for the actual fucking web. It's entirely geared towards social media and mobile. Yep.

It's ridiculous. You view source on this and it's just like, it's not good. It's not good. I know, move fast, break things, but at least, you know, have the basics down, guys. Title's nice. Security?

Ha! We are back again with 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, Dave. Hello, good to be back. Thank you, thank you. Oh, we got some listener feedback in from Ross. I was listening to the latest episode and during security, ha, was very disconcerted by the talk of Dave's friend's video. I went back in my YouTube history and the exact video he had been talking about had been suggested to and watched by me on the 4th of May.

A coincidence? I think not, given Dave's love of Star Wars more than a week before your episode came out. Since then, YouTube has not suggested a single additional video by the USCSB or any video similar to it, which is completely unlike YouTube. My only conclusion is either Dave is a time lord or a witch.

If he's a time lord, there's nothing to be done. However, if he's a witch, then we must burn him. Love the show, blah, blah, blah. Yes, well, just to clarify, yes, I am a master of time, space, and dimension. So let's just keep that clear. I am not a witch.

Please do not burn me in a fire. That would be rude. Lord Bittner of Gallifrey. That is weird. That is weird that that video came up. Similarly to me, it was recommended to me, but I have not seen any other recommendations from the US Chemical Safety Board.

So I don't know. Maybe we're connected in ways. Maybe this listener and I are connected in ways that we are not yet aware of. And only through the future journey through time will we discover that we have been linked all this time. Who knows?

Yes, your relationship transcends time and space. That's right. As it does with all of our listeners. Oh, yes. I do want to throw out another tip that I got this week that I thought was a pretty good one. We've been talking on the show about, you know, how we have the smart car apps for our cars and our phones.

And we tracked it with my Ford. Like when I returned my Ford, it took them a couple days, but they finally wiped the car and wiped my access on the app, which is a new thing. But somebody mentioned this. I might have been on a Reddit thread or something, but the tip was to check the built-in address book and GPS in the car, not just on the app, because a lot of that stuff is stored in the car, along with your GPS history, which will have your home address in it.

Yes, check that. Also, this made me think of something that happened on my last trip to Los Angeles where we rented a car. Many of the rental cars now will allow you to connect to your smartphone. Be sure to make sure that the rental car forgets your information, because last time I was in L.A., I had all of Eileen's address book in my rental car.

I don't know who Eileen is. Come on, Eileen. You know, I think the other part of this that you need to remember, particularly with the rental cars, is that I don't know about you guys, but I would say probably, oh, 80% of the time when I'm returning a rental car, I'm in a bit of a hurry.

Yeah. I just, just the way it seems to work out. And so I, that is not the time to be trying to dig through menus to find how to reset the car's storage system. So it's good advice. Think about that ahead of time.

Or don't let it get its hooks in to begin with. Yeah, I was going to say, don't do it to begin with. This is the part where I go get some lunch. So I'm going to leave this here with you guys. Star Wars, The Rebellion Will Be Televised, the big article that came out yesterday, an exclusive look at the master plan for Obi-Wan Kenobi with Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen and or with Diego Luna.

And I, you guys figured that one out with Rosario Dawson and a fleet of new shows. So it's all you guys. Don't go far, Jason, because I have to tell you, I have not looked at this and I will not be looking at this. Me neither. I do not want spoilers.

I want no spoilers going into Obi-Wan or Osaka, which is one of my favorite characters. Little, I'm not entirely convinced that I do care or should care about the Andor show, but we'll see. Who knows? The Mandalorian certainly surprised me.

So there you go. But I want no spoilers. I did not look at this. I saw the pictures and I was pissed. And I wish I had. I'm the only one that reads the fucking article. I need I need an internet filter for Star Wars spoilers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers stat.

I've been avoiding it for a different reason, which is that in the promos for this, I've seen that they've been that a pull quote that they used was from Kathleen Kennedy talking about how the solo movie bombed.

And that one of the lessons from that was that they can't have new actors playing established characters. And and I like the solo movie. I like the actor who played Han Solo. So to me, it was just like, I don't I don't need to read this article.

So I have not. The problem. The problem with that is they took they took the one character that was probably the most difficult to recast because Harrison Ford was so charismatic as Han Solo and Han Solo became, you know, Han fucking Solo. Like, why start with him?

That's the hardest one. That's Greedo. You can you can recast Luke pretty easy, you know? Yeah. OK. Ladies and gentlemen, what's once Patrick Stewart plays Salacious Crumb, you'll never think of it in any other way.

And honestly, anybody could be fucking Darth Vader. Yeah, that's true. Find a tall guy. That's true. You're done. Mm hmm. Tall guy with broad shoulders. There you go. So how's the article, Jason? Yeah. Why don't you tell us about it over your sandwich? Oh, I see Jason has been cast as Jar Jar.

No, me sir. No, like. Oh, OK. Well, moving on. We'll move on from that. We won't be talking Star Wars until the show's actually on, which what? We're two weeks away or one week away from Kenobi. A week away from Obi-Wan. Very exciting. Yeah. Ooh. So forget about hearing security next week.

That's right. Oh, man. Well, one last bit of follow up before we move into the first article, believe it or not, the real security article. Today is we're recording this on May 19th. Some very, very important things are happening today. First is the five month anniversary of my stroke.

Oh. It is the also here's the only reason I bring it up is since it is five months. Today, I finally passed 30 pounds lost. Congratulations. 30 pounds, 30.1 pounds less of me than there was the day of the stroke.

So I'm coming along. I'm going to send you a double cheeseburger and a cake. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. What's the most noticeable physical difference you have in how your body feels to you with because of the weight loss? Oh, because of the weight loss?

Yeah. Oh, Jesus. Nothing fits right as far as, well, clothes. I had to replace my entire wardrobe. I went from a 36 to a 32. Wow. And I went from a 2XL down to a large now. So that's nice. And I have a jaw.

I have a jaw. You do. You cut your jaw back. I have a jawline back. Right. Did you lose your dicky-do? Do you know what a dicky-do is? No, but I found mine. 30 pounds. Hey, buddy. Where you been? Well, that's what a dicky-do is. A dicky-do is when your belly sticks out farther than your dicky-do.

So. I think that's also. That's funny. I've always heard it called a pup, but okay. Yeah. So you can look down and survey the parts you perhaps haven't seen in a while.

So that's good. That's exciting. And Dave has once again reliably given us a title for the show. Oh, yeah. So that part's fun. But yeah, it's actually painful. It's hard to sleep because everything is out of whack.

But, you know. Oh, interesting. Like you're bony, you're fine, you don't have as much built-in soft padding. Yeah. There's kind of that. I'm like, these are ribs. Why is my upper torso so, you know, divvety? Oh, it's ribs. Might I recommend one of Dave's wonderful pillows?

Oh, yes. I need to get a pillow. The company, which by the way, has not reached out to us, fuckers. No, there was a saying that I had. When I lost a lot of weight when I was a kid, I went from 240 to 170 in two months.

Wow. Yeah, that was 10 hours of skateboarding every day constantly to get that done. What I found, I had a line that I came up with after I lost all that weight and I was still having sex with my girlfriend, who was also skinny.

Two very skinny people having sex is really crappy. I don't know what these people are thinking. It's like sleeping on a bicycle. It's like trying to sleep on a bicycle and get comfortable. What's the point? Well, I'm reminded of, what is that line from Pulp Fiction?

How interesting it is that what's pleasing to the eye is not always the same as what's pleasing to the touch. Yeah, that part has been interesting. From the stroke side, though, I still, my right side is completely jacked. Can't think. Brian found that out today. I just completely lost the thread of what I was talking about.

That happens all the time, though. I can still do IQ tests and things like that well. Right. I still average about 145 in the logic IQ tests. I can barely remember my name half the time. It's really weird. I've also noticed, I think I mentioned this before, but when I first had it, I couldn't really see.

I had diplopia, so I had to wear an eye patch. Right. I wore an eye patch on, I'd switch back and forth, but I wore it mostly on my right eye. I was using my left eye to see, and then I would switch back and forth. But I was doing a lot of these tests, these cognitive tests, with an eye patch, and I noticed a distinct difference when I used one eye over the other.

And then you go back to the left brain, the right brain, the logic brain, the creative brain. You can quantify that if you test it long enough. If you wear an eye patch for a week, you will notice a difference based on which eye you are using at a specific time and how you perform a specific task.

It's trippy. It's really trippy. But with the weight loss, the fact that my brain still can't control my body, I'm like a marionette walking down the street. It's pretty funny. If I stand still, I look normal. You're like that guy in Men in Black. Exactly. That's the example I've been using since this started.

I feel like I'm filled with bugs all day long. Can you play video games? Twitch games, not so well. Not so well. The right and left thumb coordination still isn't there. So I tried.

I actually got a couple games. I tried that. The Quest is actually better for it. If you want to play video games, the Quest is good because you're using your whole body and it's bigger movements. It's not Twitch like you're using an Xbox. But yeah, video games, not coming back yet.

So that's that. So we can talk about security now. I just thought it's been five months. Well, congratulations. I'm happy to still have you around, needless to say. And wishing you continued recovery. I appreciate it very, very much.

And I still recommend that nobody have a stroke. Take care of yourself. Watch your cholesterol and your stress. Definitely your stress. But we talked about Texas a little bit in the show. We can talk about Texas again because I bet this story is going to be really big in Texas.

Data Marketplace selling info about who uses period tracking apps. Yeah, we're starting to see the knock-on effects of these idiots making laws and stuff and whatever. The point is that there are going to be apps out there that people are going to be mining, kind of like when the priest got outed as being gay for using gay dating apps.

So there's going to be a lot of this crap. So I'm not looking forward to the next two years until they figure out how to kind of police this. Yeah, I've seen a lot of comments on social media from privacy advocates who are recommending to women to delete their period tracking apps.

Because of the potential for where we may be going, it's not going to be worth the trouble and you just don't have control over what information is being shared. Exactly. And who has it? Right. No, it's scary stuff.

You know, it just reminds me. I was listening to Smashing Security, which with Graham Cooley and Carol Terrio, another cybersecurity podcast. It's a lot of fun. You should check it out. And Carol had a story this week about some of the online counseling apps that were bleeding all kinds of data.

So to the point where people would be talking about personal, private, intimate things in their app with their counselor and they would start to see ads that used the specific words that they were using in their sessions.

Wow, that's not good. That's bad. Yeah, it's about as bad as it gets. Yeah. Oh, they really are listening to you. Well, that makes my next story that's bothering privacy advocates pale in comparison to period tracking or therapy tracking.

But here we go. It's something that no one's asked for, but MasterCard's bringing it to you. They're unveiling a biometric checkout program. They hope to make the making a purchase as simple as smiling for a camera because God knows all the women out there love being told to smile. Or waving your hand in front of a reader.

So, and here we go. And this is where I always, with tech, I always end up going back to, I'm thinking of infomercials and how gosh darn hard it is to cook pasta in a regular bowl. You wouldn't want to risk holding up the queue by reaching for your card, phone, or watch.

Something I was unaware was a problem, but they think it is. Yeah. I don't know. I've been to the grocery store so many times with old people in front of me that this sounds like the best thing ever. Old people will not be paying for their purchases with a smiling MasterCard photo either because they will never get this set up properly.

True. So that's not going to solve that problem. So, yeah, obviously people are upset about this. You're trusting companies with photos and other sensitive body information. And as regular listeners to this segment know, you should not trust companies with anything, basically. So they need to reassure shoppers that spies and fraudsters won't abuse body scans.

They are stressing their data will be converted into a digital template and encrypted and that your face image stays on your device. But, again, is anybody asking for this sort of stuff? Yeah. I interviewed an executive last week for a company who's doing this thing in stadiums.

I think they're starting out in Mexico is where they're testing it out, and they've had some success with it. And the idea is you can – people opt in ahead of time to the biometric system, and it allows them to get into the stadium much more quickly than – and my eyebrows are raised because more quickly than scanning a barcode.

Okay. How much quicker is that? But it allows them to get into the stadium. And then once they're in, you can also use the biometrics to buy things like souvenirs and drinks and food and all that kind of stuff. I'm with you. I think this is a solution in search of a problem.

I can kind of see how maybe it could speed up getting people into a place, but you're still going to have to have your ticket in case the biometrics doesn't work. Yeah. So I don't know. But no, no, Dave, they worked 100 percent of the time. Biometrics are unfallible. Right, especially on people of color.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As anybody has stood in front of the Nexus eye scanners while traveling internationally knows, they work perfectly all the time, every time. That's right. That is – I have watched people get in the very long normal line, get through faster than me because eye scans don't work properly.

It's amazing. Let's see. Arthur wrote in, hi, and thanks for all the hard work. I have a question for either of you or Dave. I recently had an inactive account hacked, and it got me thinking that I should close my unused accounts. However, who knows how many accounts I've orphaned and forgotten before I started using 1Password. Any ideas on tracking down orphaned accounts via username or email?

And somebody put in the link here. Yeah, I did. I was digging around on this. It's funny. I've seen ads coming by on Twitter recently about an app that does this, which goes and tracks down things like this. And I couldn't find the ad, so I don't know the specific company that was doing this.

But there are apps that will help you try to track this down. I put a link in here to a story from Wired that has some guidance for deleting the old apps. I don't know of a way that you could put in a username or an email and automatically go through and track down all the possible places where you might have accounts.

But I guess you start with the low-hanging fruit. The other thing I would say is go through and start – so this person says that he's using a password manager. Great. Yay. Good for you. Go through and just change all your passwords.

In other words, make sure that you're not reusing a username from days gone by. So back in the day when we were all using the same username and password all over the place, chances are you know what that username was or what one of those four or five that you used to use.

Get rid of that. Don't use it for anything anymore. And that will help get you there as well. I think so too. And I remember we had a conversation – and this is way, way back, like first year that we were doing this podcast, we were talking a lot about the privacy aspects of like trying out an app and then not wanting the app anymore and uninstalling it and how you should do more than just uninstall it.

Now you should go back and make sure that they remove your data. And I remember being astonished at the time, and I'm hoping it's gotten better, but I'm sure it hasn't, of how many apps and websites have no mechanism for you to actually delete your account or remove your data.

And generally, you almost always have to end up just writing into customer service and hoping they respond to you. I know things have gotten a little bit better because I see things like remove my account and all that sort of stuff in apps these days, but a lot of them don't even have the option.

Yeah. All right. Well, before we wrap up today, I want to – It's our new favorite segment on the show. It's very popular. One of my new favorite segments, a few of Dave's favorite things, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. I have a couple things this week that are making me happy.

The first is the Otherworld Computing Thunderbolt 4 dock. So, as I said last week, I recently got myself a shiny brand spanking new MacBook Pro, which I am very happy with. It is, as Jason pointed out, the best laptop computer I've ever owned so far.

I agree with that. Love it. Love it. Love it. One of the issues is I've been trying to make that my primary computer. Before I got this, I had a Mac Mini here in the studio that ran everything for the studio. And then I had my laptop, which I would use when I was traveling.

It was kind of a pain to keep files synced between the two of them. And, yeah, we used mostly cloud stuff or email and those sorts of things. But it was still kind of a pain. So, I wanted to make the laptop my primary device. The problem with that is there are an awful lot of cables to plug in here in the studio.

There's the monitor. There's the studio monitor speakers. There's the Presonus. There's the keyboard. All that kind of stuff. So, the OWC Thunderbolt Dock makes it so that there is one cable that goes between my laptop and everything else.

Everything plugs into the dock. My laptop plugs into the dock. Everything gets connected. And it just works. And it's wonderful. It even charges the laptop. It's got enough power to charge the laptop. So, the other thing that this does for us is if one of the other editors wants to come into the studio and do a recording session, they can bring their laptop in, just plug in, and boom, everything's connected.

So, highly recommended. Have you guys used one of these? Not the OWC. I had the Bridge one. And then there was another one that I got off Kickstarter that was for doing up to three monitors. And it was unpowered. That's why I got that. I threw that one away this week because it was such garbage that it just didn't work.

The Bridge one, I still love. And I'm actually going to set back up at my station because I'm doing the same exact thing you're doing. I just got rid of a mini for the studio and I'm putting everything on my laptop. So, I'm going to use the Bridge. I'm looking at this OWC one and it's pretty nice. The question I have is, because this comes down to a lot of these Thunderbolt docks, is do you have an external hard drive plugged into it that you then plug your computer into?

Because what I found with these things is, if I have an external drive plugged into the hub, just through the random course of the day, it will unmount and mount by itself. Like, it will just, you know, the system will just see it and go, eh, we don't need it anymore.

And dump it and then remount it. Happened to me all the time. So, when you're doing backups or just anything with, you know, we work in big files. You know, if you're moving a couple hundred gig of files around and the thing just unmounts in the middle of it, it screws up your day.

So, have you had anything with that? I have not. I have an external SSD drive hooked up that I use as a time machine backup. And it is connected to the dock and it's been sitting there for a few days now just happily chugging away doing its thing. So, I've had no issues of mounting or unmounting.

When I plug the laptop into the dock, the drive automatically mounts itself and it's been solid so far. Hopefully, we just didn't jinx it. Yeah. Yeah. This is pretty cool, though. I love on their docks here. It says, Apple SuperDrive ready. OWC C3 dock ejector software also included.

A special driver that enables your OWC Thunderbolt dock to play and burn CDs and DVDs with Apple SuperDrive. Sweet. Wow. Where the hell are you going to find one of those? I don't know. Well, we just found out the iPad or the iPod was discontinued.

Maybe they still have these in stock. Who knows? Could be. I do like that it's also Star Trek basically skewed because it says, secure your workflow with OWC Klingon. And I like these little things that you can hold on, securely hold on the cables and screw them in.

That's a plus. That's a big plus. Yeah. I've had good luck with OWC's things. I've had several of their raids over the years. And both from the quality of the products and also the quality of their customer service, I've been pleased. So it's one of the places I go first when I'm looking for these sorts of things.

So, so far, so good. How much does it cost? This one is $300. Oh! Zimini. No. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. No, I'm just going to probably buy it, but I'm just saying. Yeah. I am also – I decided that I needed a project, that it has been too long since I'd done anything with hardware, technical, taking things apart, putting them back together.

This is partially in response to my gloomy mood after my mom passed away. And I came across this YouTube video where a gent had taken a 5K iMac and converted it into just a 5K external monitor. And so that's what I'm in the middle of doing.

As we speak right now, I have the iMac is in the other room and it is completely disassembled. And I – when we're done here, I'm going to go, you know, try to power things up. And the one thing that's not included that I kind of overlooked because the person glosses over it is that you need a fairly beefy 12-volt power supply to power the monitor when it's done.

You need like 4 amps of 12-volt power. And so that's what I'm sort of scrounging around looking for. I'm sure I have one around here somewhere. But anyway, I had a 5K iMac that was gathering dust, you know, one from 2015 or so. So I'm gutting it and I'm going to have a 5K external monitor.

So nice to have retina display. So that's what I'm working on. That's nice. I want to do that, but I got a 2018 and it still works pretty well. So I might have to wait on that. It's also got 64 gig of RAM in it. Don't want to lose that. Yeah.

That's cool because those monitors are beautiful. And it sucks because they took away target display mode, which you used to be able to use with the old iMac, which is awesome. So I can't wait to hear this. So let us know how that goes for sure. It's about 200 bucks or so to do the conversion because you need a board to handle, you know, the interfacing.

So for that, I thought that was a good investment and a fun project. So hopefully it will work out. And then last but not least, I got myself an Apple Magic Keyboard for my iPad. So I was in the Apple store eyeing it, kind of checking it out.

And I thought, oh, this is nice. And then I saw the price, which is like $300. And I was like, well, it's not that nice. And then I was sitting on the couch and my wife said to me, hey, Woot has Apple Magic Keyboards. Do you want me to get you one? And I said, yes. So I got one through Woot. It was about half price.

And it came and it's practically new. I suspect it was a return that they then reboxed and, you know, sent it out through Woot. And I have to say I have mixed feelings about it. As an Apple product, I like it a lot for all the reasons I like Apple products.

It is well made, well designed. It fits the iPad beautifully. It has nice tactile interface. It's nice to have a keyboard and a trackpad for your iPad. I still can't really use my iPad as my laptop because there are just too many things I need my laptop to do that the iPad can't quite do.

Like, you know, there's no audio hijack for iPad. Things like that. Even things just like clipboard managers and, you know, little things like that, that iOS just really isn't as flexible as macOS is.

But the one disappointment for me is that you can't flip this thing around and use it with your iPad. You can't sit your iPad on your lap in portrait mode with this thing and just sit there reading with it.

You have to take the iPad out of the case and it's just magnets. But that particular functionality is really inelegant and disappointing and it's kind of the one thing I wish it did that it doesn't do. So that's my mini review on the Apple Magic Keyboard.

Interesting. That's the – I have that problem with it as well, but I just take it off and hold it vertically. I mean, I get that you can't type on it or things like that. Yeah. It is annoying. That part is annoying because I do find myself wanting to spin it because most of the keyboard cases I've had, you were able to spin it and look at it and portrait.

Just flip it over. Yeah. Yeah. That said, I can't do that with my laptop either. So if I'm using the iPad in laptop mode, I don't really do that. True. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. When I want to use it in portrait, I literally just pop it off the stand and pop it back on.

Just leave it open and do it. It's super easy. Because if I'm using that with the keyboard, it's kind of in keyboard mode because the keyboard is heavy. It is so heavy. Yeah. I think the keyboard weighs more than the iPad. Yeah. It's ridiculous how heavy it is.

But there's a reason for it. It doesn't flex. So when it is on your lap, it stays flat. It doesn't bounce like the old ones did, which is great. And just the key action. It is a fantastic keyboard. 300 bucks. I hate you dying of fire.

It's great. It's great. I could have bought me an OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub for what this thing cost. That's right. That's right. But I got to say, all in all, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's every now and then I have appreciation for the quality with which Apple makes some things like this.

And they don't always hit the mark. But in this case, I think they did. This is a well-made thing, very much in the style with which Apple makes their well-made things. And to me, as someone who appreciates that, I find it very gratifying.

Awesome. That's what I have this week. All right. We'll hold you to it. All righty. We'll see. I'll keep you posted on the 5K iMac conversion. As I say, so far, so good. A lot of help from the folks at iFixit with tools and guides for taking things apart and stuff like that.

Oh, yeah. Those guys are great. It's fun. Yeah. All right, guys. All right. Talk to you guys soon. Until next time. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Terry. Welcome, Terry. Yes, thank you.

And over at PayPal, we've got Dag, Nathaniel, Natalie, Linda, Edward, Michelle, Tom, Andrew, John, and Ramsey. Thank you so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore, Sean, and the good Karen. Thank you, the good Karen. Better than the bad one. And sadly, no one wrote in demanding that we do that massive productivity episode.

So I guess we're going to cede that one to Merlin Mann. Let him handle that. Good. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 554. And 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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