555: Zuck Bucks on Black

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, let's talk about cryptocurrency for a moment. Can we? Must we? Must we? We must. Okay. Beeple got his fans ripped off because he had a very insecure account. Way to go, Beeps. That one was kind of funny. The Seth Green one is the one that's making the news right now. I'm sure you've seen that.

It's kind of hard not to. Yeah. Something about he was going to base a show on some NFT that he owned and it got stolen or something like that. I so just don't give a shit about NFTs anymore. I really just like, if you're trying to base your business model or your finances on NFT, you're a fucking moron.

And you're an asshole. I'm sorry. You're just kind of an asshole. We're going to move greater fool theory to greater asshole theory pretty soon here. GFT for NFT. Yes, that's it. GFT for NFT. So yeah, the Seth Green one, he had a board ape that he had named and was building an animated show around.

And for days, it had been gone from his account. It took him a week to notice. Right. And then started tweeting about it and would like it back. But the person who has it now, apparently it was stolen, then transferred, and then re-bought. So yeah, good luck.

If only you still couldn't base a show on a drawing that anybody can look at. Well, he had the rights to it. That was the thing. When he had the NFT, he had the rights. If only he couldn't purchase a different fucking stupid thing to base it on. I think it's already been produced is the problem.

Whoopsies. Which I bet is what happened. Yeah. But hey, look, we know that they can fix it. Come on. Yeah. I mean, you know, how different is this from when you do your entire show, but you forgot to buy the domain? You can figure something out. You can figure something out. That's what they usually figure out.

Yes. Thanks to those many vacations I took to people who did not secure their domain before they started a TV show. Looking at you, UPN. Yeah. Yeah, he's not getting it back, but he lost the... Well, he might get it back. Who the fuck knows? Who cares? Who really cares? But he gets what he deserves. He's building a show around an NFT.

Yeah. And speaking of basing your business around crypto and whatnot, the darling of the market, Coinbase, is having a rough time. Yes, they are pausing hiring amid the plummeting crypto market. So they have frozen hiring for two weeks, although it will honor offers that have already been sent and put new projects on hold.

It is also reportedly trying to reduce how much it spends on hosting services. So, you know, cut costs when your income is decreasing rapidly. Along with not hiring as many people as it expected, they're looking to minimize employee attrition. Now, their plan for this is we're going to give you more of our shares.

Coinbase's stock has dropped over 75% in the last six months and is on a downward trajectory still. So, you know, thanks. Sure, sure. Appreciate it, buddies. It's interesting that they're worrying about their hosting costs.

It's not like their YouTube, you know? That's a strange one. Yeah. I mean, I guess you need the backups for the apps and the traffic and the, you know, concurrent hits and all that sort of stuff. You're probably... Oh, it's not a small thing to run. No, no.

But, you know, that's just one of the weird things. It's like, okay, how much did you overspend on hosting? Come on. Open up a couple AWS buckets and forget to secure them like everybody else. Exactly. Come on. It's the 2020s. I want to talk about, for one second, though, this freaking argument that everybody in crypto says that it's just like the web was when the web was new.

Cryptocurrency is over 10 years old now. The web, when it was 10 years old... Oh, my God, Brian, what had we done at that point? Everything. It's incomparable. It's incomparable, the two. Yeah. The web is, you know, the force of change for the entire planet.

What is crypto? It's a scam run by a bunch of kids. And the one thing that they kept saying that crypto would be good for, you know, is in times of economic downturn, et cetera, et cetera, because it's not tethered to a dollar or any kind of real money or anything except hopes and dreams and prayers and thoughts.

It proved not to be any good for that either, because as soon as we started to have signs of recession, guess what tanked? Crypto. So, yeah, because it's all bullshit. Yeah. But what isn't bullshit, Brian, is a great story I heard from our friend Brian Blondel. So I apparently missed out on this when I left Illinois.

But remember the Facebook class action lawsuit against facial recognition and biometrics? Yes, yes. Mm-hmm. Everybody got a cool couple bucks. Yeah, well, it was more than a couple bucks, because Brian's sister got in on it, and she got $390. I've never gotten more than 15 bucks out of a class action.

That's awesome. I got $100 not too long ago, but it was basically a refund, so it didn't really count. I think it was $101, so I got that $1 extra bump. So, you know, what normal people do in the Midwest when you get a windfall, you head to the casino.

Yeah, that explains a lot. Yep. She went to the casino and started playing the, I don't know if it was video poker or just, it looks like a slot machine. We have a photo of it. And she played for a little while, and then boom, $5,927.53 later, she left the casino a happy woman.

So, that's the moral of this story is, she didn't buy crypto with her payout. She just bet on, she put her Zuck bucks on black, and she walked out a winner. Congratulations. In the news. What comes home to roost, Brian, when, is it the, it's not the cows coming home to roost.

That would, that would be a very weird visual. Chickens. Chickens, Chase. The chickens. Okay, I couldn't remember if the chicken, the crows. Well, I believe Uber's chickens are coming home to roost, it seems. Maybe, kinda. I, I'm always reticent to, to say anything because of the John Oliver skit. We got them.

Yeah. It looks like, looks like they, they might be finally coming to grips with the fact that it's just not gonna work. CEO Daria Khosrowshawi sent out a memo the other day where he says, It's clear that the market is experiencing a seismic shift and we need to react accordingly.

We will absolutely have to do more with less. And so it just goes on to basically say that they're going to be pivoting into food deliveries and freight because it's really hard to move a bunch of people around the city and make a profit on it, it turns out. It's astonishing to me that they're actually admitting it all, but they don't really have much of a choice at this point.

You know, everything that you and I have said about Uber the entire time that we've been screaming about Uber has all entirely 1000% come true. So we were right. There's a very great article, The Decade of Cheap Rides is Over, over at Slate that gets super in-depth into Uber's business model.

It explains the bullshit that it all was. It's the article starts by talking about how there was the car sharing models that were immediately preceded Uber and mustachioed Lyft and all that zip car and car to go that tried to disrupt automobile ownership first.

And the main reason that they all went out of business was Uber because all of a sudden Uber swept in and getting a door-to-door ride was cheaper and more convenient than renting a car yourself. I will back that up. I had a zip car account until Uber came out in San Francisco. But as we pointed out at the time, Uber's prices were artificially low.

Well, they were taking a loss based on the $30 billion of investment that they had that allowed them to basically create a long runway to operate below actual costs. So they've never made any money. And the reason that they ran below costs and operated that way was to drive everybody else out of business.

And then once they had the monopoly, guess what's going to happen? Prices are going to rise. Average user Uber prices rose 92% between 2018 and 2021, according to data from Rakuten. A separate analysis reports an increase of 45% between 2019 and 2022.

So they're basically saying this is the equivalent of what economists are calling the end of free money as interest rates finally are starting to rise. The problem is it's been a decade. They've had a decade to train people to get them out of the habits of having their own cars or taking public transportation or all the other systems.

It's trained our cities and our governments who have stopped putting money into and funding public transportation systems. And now we're stuck with this bullshit system at rising prices. Thanks, Uber. But we have scooters. We got scooters, though. Come on. Do we have scooters?

When I first came into Toronto, I saw quite a few. And I mean, obviously, you know, during the winter, no, there's no scooters. But they haven't seemed to come back like the, you know, everything else in spring. We've got birds back. We've got plants back. I have yet to see a scooter. So I don't know if we have scooters anymore.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So, you know. It's about time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We waited long enough. So now we've driven. We've driven taxi companies out of business. We've driven any competition out of business. We've driven any alternative models out of business.

We've destroyed our city infrastructure. We've gotten rid of public transportation. And now we're stuck with very expensive Ubers and incredible amount of congestion in downtown city cores. Yay. But it's the future. But you have to look at this, though, as one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in history.

That's all you have to look at it as. Right. You know, and I was thinking about this. It's like, how many Saudis put in a lot of money into Uber that have lost that money? You know, it's a very clever way to, you know, try and get reparations for 9-11. But very slowly and under the table.

I'm just saying that there are other ways to skin a cat. If only the Saudis would have been as smart as most of the initial investors in Uber. Your Tim Ferriss's and whatnot that got out early and pocketed all the cash. Exactly. So we'll see how that works out with the Saudis who are buying into Twitter.

Yeah. Good luck. And speaking of things that are working out real well for everybody, injury rates of Amazon delivery contractors climbed 40% last year, according to new reports. So this is the third-party delivery network that has been put together by Amazon. Sometimes you get the Amazon van dropping you off.

Sometimes it's just a white-label van that you could have gotten rented from public storage or whatever with some dude driving it, dropping off your packages. That's most of them. Yep. That's most of them these days. That's right. Because you know what? Cheaper and not owned by Amazon. Yep. Outsourced. So the Strategic Organization Center, or SOC, has been compiling data about this.

And the rate of injuries have increased dramatically between 2020 and 2021. There was nearly one injury per five full-time equivalent workers in 2021, which is an incident rate of 18.3. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent incident rate averaging among all couriers and express delivery services is just 7.5 per 100.

So the Amazon drivers are doing considerably worse than everybody else that's in this industry. There's a lawsuit being filed by one company earlier this year, which ascends to near-complete control by Amazon without the e-commerce giant providing required safeguards.

DSP drivers are regularly monitored by Amazon through the company's Mentor app. Isn't that a nice name for it? And surveillance cameras installed inside vehicles. According to one driver in Indianapolis that the SOC spoke to in March, Amazon uses a system of scores that rank drivers against their own co-workers, gamification, in terms of delivery speed and completion rate.

The driver said she knew of 15 drivers who were terminated for not meeting Amazon performance demands. So, yes, there's aggressive time limits that could rarely be safely met. That's normal. Amazon, of course, says this report cherry-picks data from less than 10% of our delivery partners to tell an inaccurate and misleading story.

Safety is a priority across our network, which is why we've rolled out technology like I like how they changed surveillance camera to innovative camera systems that have helped lead to an overall reduction in accident rates of nearly 50%. And we'll keep investing in new safety tools. So, yeah. I want to call bullshit on that.

I want to call bullshit on that reduction of accident rates by 50%. Well, we just saw that's not true. We just saw it's not true, according to the other reports. So, there you go. So, I mean, you knew those cameras. Once those cameras went in, we said it that it was going to be bad. And now we have numbers to prove it.

Well, and it's worse than that. Bloomberg notes many of these DSP operators are veterans, retirees, first-time business owners, and neophytes to the logistics business. So, they're people that know how to drive and need a gig. This is gig economy again. Here we are.

Awesome. Yep. And some of the people that I know – I know one person that was actually getting ready to spin up their own little DSP outfit because she was driving for – she actually was a sole operator with her own van. And the way that they put the numbers out there where they will subsidize your new vans for you and you just kind of – you just basically sell yourself into indentured servitude to Amazon for a couple years.

So, you know, that's their way of outsourcing is to give you the tools to do it and not give you any support. It's the exact same model that – speaking of John Oliver, as we did earlier, that John Oliver talked about with trucks just a couple episodes back, right? Like, we'll help you get the truck, then we'll charge you outrageous fees.

Oh, and we'll charge you exit fees if you want to get out of this program. Yeah, I didn't see that episode because my app doesn't work. Yeah, so for everybody that has quit their jobs and wants to work from home or wants to just travel around the country while they're working, it's gotten a little bit easier for you.

Starlink launches a satellite internet service for RVs. Okay. Yeah. This is a new product meant specifically for RV dwellers and those who can't wait to get connected to the satellite internet service. Right now, you would have to – for a regular account, you would have to apply and you will be put on a wait list.

You'll probably get on the true social quicker until 2023. But you will be able to get Starlink for RVs immediately and will ship out to buyers right now. The downside is your network resources are always deprioritized and the service costs $135, which is $25 more than a regular connection.

Also, in addition to the deprioritization, which means slow and intermittent congested areas and peak hours, you cannot use it while your RV is driving. So if there are two of you and one person is driving, you can't work.

Okay. And just to prove how many stupid people are out there, SpaceX chief Elon Musk also added on Twitter that the dish is too big for cars, although that did not stop at least one user from bolting it onto their vehicle's hood. Yeah, I saw that one. That was great. That one was great.

Fucking Mad Max out there, I swear to God. I'm telling you, every day, every day. Oh, guess who's back, man? Adam Neumann is back. Or Neumann. Neumann. Neumann. Neumann. And he's back with the blockchain, Brian, because why not? I saw this, yes.

Why not? Why not? Oh, my God. It's perfect for his personality. Oh, he's on brand. He's definitely on brand. So let's break this down. He's got blockchain, scam, carbon credits, bigger scam, believe it or not.

And he's got an investment. He's got $70 million. Why does he need $70 million in investment? Who keeps giving him money? I have no idea. I don't know what, I mean. Have they not looked at a paper? Have they not watched the show with the delightful Anne Hathaway?

She was delightful in that. I only got halfway through before I hate stopped watching it. But doesn't he have enough money that after he built, you know, the investors for WeWork out of how much? How many billions did he walk away with? Well, I mean, one can argue that he is an incredibly smart man because look at all the money he's built out of people time and time again.

But again, being on brand and being smart, you never spend your own money, Jason. You find somebody else's money to spend. Yeah, I should learn that one. And then you bilk him out of it. Okay. So carbon credits on the chain coming soon to nowhere near you because it's going to fail miserably.

Other than the press release that was put out about it, I have seen probably about a hundred articles discussing it. And every single one has the word scam in the headline. So I don't know how well this is going to do. I wonder if they can get their 70 million back. It's probably a bit too late.

It's been put on the blockchain, Jason. I think we talked about this story a while back. It was everybody wanted to get access to Facebook's political ad targeting data, or at least researchers did because they, you know, kind of wanted to see what happened when Trump won that election and what was going on.

And, uh, they never did it, but now they're going to, apparently. They're finally going to open up a little bit and peel back the curtain and let researchers see something. And here we go with acronyms. I got to love this. Researchers who are part of the company's Facebook Open Research and Transparency Program, or FORT.

So they're going to give researchers a bunch of targeted data. Uh, let's see. But the information was only available for political ads during a three month period before the 2020 election. So you can have some data, but not the data that you actually want. And it's really interesting. I can imagine the coder, the coders that, you know, put these systems together are like, do not let anybody hear this stuff.

Okay. Yes. We'll, we'll give them this little bit and we'll cherry pick it. Yeah. That's why you only get three months now. Cause they're busy scrubbing the rest to make it palatable. Yes. The one time that delete actually will mean delete. It's true. This book. Yep. Oh, that and Mark Zuckerberg's, uh, messenger account.

That was, that was. Oh yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And Walmart is expanding drone delivery service across six States now. So they've been, uh, testing it out for a while. They're going to expand by the end of the year. The retailer plans to add 34 sites to its existing drone up network.

That's a good name too. Uh, so this will reach approximately 4 million households in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah, and Virginia that will have access to drone delivery. Now for delivery fee of four bucks, you can order up to 10 pounds of groceries and household items.

I don't know about you, but other than potatoes, I don't usually measure out my groceries by poundage. That's a, that's one of the games from guys, grocery games. So now you can, you can play, watch your weight and, uh, and drone spotting at the same time. Yeah. And if you use the service, Walmart says to expect your package in as little as 30 minutes.

Notably, they did not make the denominator Domino style guarantee. Yeah. Yeah. And there's no outer boundary on that as well.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.

Media candy. It has been a week of comedy documentaries, Brian. Yes, it has. First up, kids in the hall, comedy punks. I saw this drop, which is surprising. This, this dropped, I believe after the first season, or at least they, they, they bubbled it up to me after the first season of the new reboot came out.

And since I was so uninspired by the new reboot, I thought, figured I'd watch this and relive some of the old kids in the hall. Right. And fantastic documentary. I love the documentary. And what I realized is I don't remember a goddamn thing about kids in the hall. So my review could have been completely off.

It was all a very long time ago. Yeah. I kind of initially questioned the timing as well. You'd think they would have dropped this first to build up the anticipation for the show. Maybe they knew that in comparison to their old work, the new show wasn't so good. So maybe not do that. I don't know what the thought process behind it was.

Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to go back and watch some of the old stuff before I dive into the rest of the new season. I'm going to finish the new season, but I want to go back and just kind of wrap my head around my old memories of kids in the hall, because I'm, I'm guaranteed from watching the documentary. They are absolutely nothing like I thought they were.

Oh, I mean, I swear to God, I still, in the back of my mind, when I hear boot to the head, I think it's the kids in the hall, but it's not. No, it's not. It's not. And then we got George Carlin's American Dream, which was phenomenal. I stayed up way too late last night finishing it because it was so goddamn good.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I started the way I did it. I did kids in the hall episode, like, cause they were all in parts. I did part one of the kids in the hall. Then, then George Carlin's did part one of that, did both of those in one night, which was kind of cool to watch him back to back. Then the next day I just did George Carlin because it was just so damn good.

I had to go right back to it and stay up way too late. I thought it was great. I tangentially kind of knew a little bit about George Carlin pre super angry 90s George Carlin and, you know, late 80s, 90s George Carlin. But it was really awesome to, the whole first episode is, is like, you know, George Carlin, I did not grow up with because I didn't know and I was too young.

And it was really interesting to see how he got to where he was in his journey. And then the second half both infuriated me and made me so deeply, incredibly sad because nothing has changed. Like, no, that, that was all done 20 years ago.

It's all exactly the same. Nothing's been fixed. Everything that he's talking about, you could, you could go up on a stage right now and say the goddamn exact same things. Everything. It's so frustrating. Yep. Well, I mean, it was so frustrating that it really turned him into just somebody that was just completely and utterly bitter about the human race.

It was really, really kind of, it really bummed me out how he just kind of went down that really, really dark hole near the end. I like, you know, it's, it's kind of true though. He's, yeah, it's like, you know, individuals are great, but when you get people in a group, they tend to suck.

They do tend to suck. Uh, then last night I stayed up and I watched, uh, the Ricky Gervais special, Supernature. Did you get a chance to watch this one? I have not watched this yet. Okay. Um, I will say that Ricky is in fine form. Um, I loved it.

Absolutely loved it. Yeah. I hear some, some trans people are pissed at him, but comedian, so. Comedian. Yeah. And the trans jokes were pretty funny because he explained at the beginning that he, how he's going to use humor and irony throughout the entire piece. And he does.

And of course, some people are going to get pissed off. You know, I have not watched it, but something funny related to this kind of happened. I am friends with somebody on Facebook that is, I mean, kind of tries to hide it and deny it, but is definitely a Trumpite.

And I don't know why I'm still friends with this person on Facebook because I try to cut that shit out of my life. But he's there and he posts occasionally and he considers himself, you know, he likes to just say, I'm just joking and trolling, but you're not joking and trolling. You believe that crap. And, you know, he's all like cancel culture every, Oh, we just come for everybody.

And he posted something like, wow, Ricky Gervais's special was only out for four hours on Netflix and he's already been booted off of Twitter. And it took me exactly three seconds to look at Twitter and see that Ricky Gervais has not been booted off Twitter to which I then replied to his post.

No, he hasn't. And then he said, Oh, I'm surprised it's taking them that long to kick anybody off that says anything bad about anybody. I'm just like, shut the fuck up. What's the point in posting something that says that that is blatantly not true. And then I realized, Oh, that's what they all do.

They all just post things that are blatant lies. So there you go. Oh yeah. You just pull out, pull, pull out what you think you want to happen. Yeah. But yeah, whatever. Like this is easily provable. Anyways, whatever. What else is easily provable? Is somebody feed Phil season five is now out. I'm going to take my time.

I think. Yeah. I was considering watching an episode and I was like, not in the mood. Need, need, need, need a little bit of good vibe in my heart first. You got to stoke the fire a bit. You know what I mean? So don't watch Ricky Gervais first then. Okay. Just, just saying, just saying, don't watch that first.

It's a good show, but I don't think I left it feeling like upbeat about the world and humanity. Well, Gervais isn't either. Gervais and Carlin have a lot in common. Very much in common. Yes. A hell of a lot in common. They're very similar, very similar, except George Carlin was a hell of a lot funnier.

I mean, Ricky Gervais is funny, but George Carlin, come on, no comparison. I did try Phil's new podcast that you talked about. The first one was okay. The second one was, oh, they were going to talk about that everything everywhere movie. So I couldn't, couldn't listen to it because I still want to see that really badly.

And I was thinking it was, it wasn't, I had a hard time with it because they were eating. I think I can't, I can't take that. Yeah. You can hear him chewing and lip smacking and forks on plates. And yeah, I figured that might drive you a little wild. My misophonia is even just thinking about it acting up and my back is tightening up.

So no, I think I'm going to end up passing on that podcast. I could have been good. Could have been good. Um, here's something that might be good. Westworld season four. They dropped the trailer for it. Um, it doesn't need to be made. I'm trying to even remember how it ended.

See, that's the problem. It didn't end very well because they finished it during the lockdown. Right. And it was, it was a really bad CGI fight at the end. Oh, right. Right. You know, it, it was just, it wasn't a good ending.

I thought. I can't, I have to, I have to say, I feel like the show has ran, run its course. I don't want or need anymore. I know, but the trailer looked kind of good. All right. I was kind of, I was kind of intrigued by the trailer. I'm like, yeah, you know, there's not a lot on right now.

I just watched candy on, on Hulu. We should tell you that how, how close to the bottom of the barrel I'm scraping. Right. Um, which actually was pretty good, by the way, I kind of recommend it. Uh, but yeah, I'm going to give Westworld a shot. I think, uh, I'm going to give him a pass on that ending just because it was COVID and it was, don't forget, it's a changing of the guard.

The Nolans are out. Right. And we have a new crew taking over. So it might be worth sticking your toe in just to see how they're going to treat the world. Right. Might be worth it. Just saying. Okay. Uh, I watched the bad guys. It's the new DreamWorks movie out, uh, animated for kids.

Um, my son loves, my son loves this book series. There's like 15 of them. And this is the first movie being made. Um, it's, it was very clever, very funny. Uh, the soundtrack is actually awesome. It's very like old school heisty, like 1960s style music.

So it's, it's really, really well done. Very, very great soundtrack. Um, very funny movie. I, you know, if you got to watch a kid's movie, this is a good one. So I thoroughly enjoyed it. So it wasn't bad. And a little nose to, uh, make us upset again, Jason.

Uh, Sirius XM has bought, uh, Conan O'Brien's podcast and media company for $150 million. Uh, yeah, I can see that happening. Yeah. It's a five-year talent agreement to keep hosting his podcast. Uh, in addition to some of the other shows that he produces under his, uh, banner name.

Uh, get this, they have a staff of around 50 producing about four or five podcasts. Yep. Awesome. He did have a great line at the end because I do love him. He's funny. When I started in television, my ultimate goal is to work my way up to radio.

O'Brien. There he goes. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Uh, yeah, I can see 50 people for, you know, multiple shows like that. See, if you do a podcast right and you get big money, it does take a staff, not just two guys and a couple of microphones. You know? So you're saying we need to hire people.

We need to hire fast. We need 48 people. Stat. 47 and a half. Bittner counts as a half. But we're outsourcing. No benefits. And we're paying you. No benefits. Apps and doodads. Brian, we've talked about time zone converters and meeting schedulers a lot on this show.

And, uh, what was that conversion site that, uh, we talked about that you were a big fan of? Oh God. I can't remember. It was the calculator site. I think so. I think it was a calculator site. Yeah. Cause I use a time calculator from there for client billing, but I found this one, which is the greatest visualization of time I've ever seen.

It's called every time zone. If you just want at a glance to find out what time it is anywhere in the world quickly, uh, this is the greatest. It's just so simple. Uh, I haven't seen anything this good. Have you? Uh, that's pretty good. I mean, it's pretty simple.

Yeah. I mean, I, I can't think of anything where I would need to know anytime, anywhere in the world. And generally I, what I, what I do most of the time is I just use my, on my phone, I've got, you know, a couple of different time zones set up on my clock. So that that's great for everything that I need, but yeah, if there's some obscure thing and you can actually remember this website to bring up at the time.

Perfect. Oh, I made a bookmarklet for it so I can pop it up. Cause, uh, I deal with, part of my thing is dealing with contractors who are around the world. They are, you know, VAs and things like that. And they're all over the place. So I never know who's where. So it's easy for me to look up real quick to find out if they're sleeping or not.

That's all I need to know. Is it, is it three in the morning over there? Okay. Then I won't, then I won't hit, uh, you know, the notify anyway link on messages, but. Right. Which is my favorite to use. I love, I love seeing like when I text somebody, it says, this notification has been muted.

Would you like to alert them anyway? I'm like, fuck yeah. I'm calling answer, bitch. So I wish they had that button. That'd be much better. But the answer, bitch. Yeah. I got a little grippy follow-up after talking last week about my grip trainer.

I was doing a, you know, a lot of the grip stuff with it. And I noticed I was getting the claw hand. So I'm like, oh, well, you know, when you work out, you generally work out the antagonizing muscles when you're, when you're doing it. So if you're doing one way, you do the other. If you're doing a curl, you do a press, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, well, what the hell do you do with your hands?

I found out. I got the four pieces, hand therapy, finger stretcher, four levels, hand resistance bands, hand therapy for arthritis, carpal tunnel, and post-surgery recover. Finger exerciser for guitar and rock climbing. I love that guitar and rock climbing.

You know, alternatively, you just put out your palm up and then you take your other hand and you push down on your fingers. So that kind of does it too. It's not as good. Trust me, it's not the same. This thing is hard. I got, I got two sets of them so I could do them in parallel because one of the things that I have to deal with is trying to make my body symmetrical again.

So I don't look like a freak walking down the street. So I'll do all my exercises in parallel. So I got two sets of these things. And even on level one, I can only do like 15 reps before my hands are like on fire. Try that with just putting your hand on it. It doesn't work as well. So for $499 a set, well worth it, I think.

One of your cheaper purchases. Yeah. It is. It is. Well, let's move on to one of my not so cheaper purchases. For my birthday last year, I got myself the Sennheiser HD 650s. There are a set of headphones, but they're open back. They're open back headphones, which I'd never had before.

For the work that I do, which is very detail oriented with audio, I need, you know, very controlled, a very controlled situation to listen with my headphones. These were not it because you can hear everything around you. It's why I'm not wearing my Sennheisers right now.

Yes. Exactly. Well, yeah, because you did. And then it would basically come through the microphone because they were so loud. And so I never used them. They sat in a drawer. I was like, okay, they were, when I bought them, they were $411.88 after tax. Now you can get them for $340.33.

And I bring them back up again because since I had that new office, it was quiet enough in there. I could actually use them now. Right. They are extremely comfortable for long-term wear with glasses. Yes. That's why I'm bringing them back up because I have to wear glasses all day and I have to edit with headphones all day.

And the ones that everybody uses that I'm on right now, listening to you with right now, the Sony MDR-7506s that everybody uses sucks if you have glasses. They're terrible if you have glasses. Yeah. I can't wait to get these things off my head. Yeah. So if you have glasses in a very quiet room and want some really nice headphones and have way too much money to spend, I recommend the Sennheiser HD 6500 or 650s, although I believe the 660s are out now.

But either way, I was surprised. They're phenomenal for music listening as well. Absolutely phenomenal. Remember Magic Leap? Mm-hmm. Kind of, sort of? Oh, I totally remember. They had their awesome promo video of a big whale jumping up in the middle of nowhere and splashing water.

Speaking of middle of nowhere, that's Magic Leap. Vaporware. That's Magic Leap. Well, not quite, Brian. Not quite. Remember, they did release the Magic Leap 1, so there was an actual product. It used to sell for $2,300. But if you have your own museum of the internet that you want to stock with hardware, might I recommend picking up a Magic Leap 1 right now?

Because you can have it for the low, low price of $550. $550, you say? Yes. That's not such a bad discount until you realize it is no longer in development. There will be no new apps for it. And basically, you are buying a very cute sci-fi-looking paperweight.

So when are you ordering one? I'm not. I'm not kidding. Almost. Trust me. If it was $55, I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. But $550 is a little ridiculous. You got them sitting around. Why not see if you can offload them? Somebody's going to buy this crap.

Oh, yeah. I mean, hell, just take it and part it. You know, makers will buy these things and see if they can, you know, pull it out, reverse engineer it, make something fun out of it. If I was a maker, I'd totally be buying these things. They're pivoting, right? Didn't they pivot to some sort of B2B kind of thing? We're going to do like construction and, you know, doctors and all that sort of crap?

And has any of that even happened? Not yet. Well, you know what happened? The press release happened. Right. Which is what Magic Leap is good at. They're really good at press releases and raising money. I was hoping for a big video of like a heart exploding in the air in the middle of nowhere.

Oh, that would be great. Like some doctor dropping the Magic Leap 52 model or whatever the hell they're going to try to market. So they're good at press releases and videos. Yeah. They're going to try and bridge the enterprise market with the telemedicine market with the first-person shooter market.

So the surgeons are basically going to have six shooters and they have to shoot the cancer off the virtual heart. I think that's how they're going to position this new app. Awesome. Apparently just get any 18 to 21-year-old disaffected male in the society and tell them it's a school and they'll nail it.

Off you go. Off you go. Go save the world. So cure cancer. All right. So the consolidation across the gaming industry is continuing. Take-Two now owns Zynga. That is a phrase that has next to no meaning to me, but $12.7 billion sure does.

And that's what it does. So this is what it does. Rockstar Games and 2K are now under Take-Two's umbrella along with Zynga. As a result of the deal, Take-Two now has a bigger stable of well-known mobile and casual gaming franchises, including that one that you used to play five years ago and nobody plays anymore, Words with Friends.

So I'm sure that was worth a lot of money. Oh, my God. So I looked this up. I wanted to see, because I knew Mark Pincus. He was the guy that founded Zynga back in the day. I knew him when he ran Tribe.net. Remember that one? Vaguely, yeah. That was a pretty good one. Yeah, it was in between Friendster and Facebook somewhere in that same time frame.

I was at Technorati back then. I remember just seeing a lot of notifications like, join my tribe. And I was like, no. It was fun while it lasted. Wasn't there another one called Path for a while? It was always, follow my path.

And I also said, no. Path. See, Path was the first one, I believe, that had the 50 user limit. So you could, you know, you wouldn't hit that Dunbar number. But it was, I liked it because I thought the design was awesome. They did a great job with the design on it.

But yeah, it lasted longer than it should have. Right. I remember that. But as you were putting in this news about Zynga, just, you know, out of the side of my mouth, I'm like, well, shit, is he going to have any fucking Sid Meier's news? Because what is it with these old gaming companies that you're putting in here?

And because Sid Meier did, he's a Canadian, one of your hometown boys. Now, he created Civilization. So I just thought, okay, funny Civilization. And I just did a quick Google search and there was Sid Meier's news that was actually relevant to the story you posted. I'm like, well, isn't that silly?

Take-Two had actually bought the rights to Civilization a long time ago from Infogrames. I thought it was Infogames, but I don't know if this is a bad misspelling. Whatever. So they bought the rights for that a long time ago. And then somewhere along the way, they picked up the company that Sid Meier worked for.

So Take-Two now owns Sid Meier, Civilization, and Farmville. Go figure. Well, they got it all. They love that turn-based thing. They just love the turn-based thing. Yeah. And there's more gaming news. Sims 4. You know, I remember playing Sims briefly.

Feels like a hundred years ago now. You'd think that they would be beyond a fourth one at this point. Should be like Sims 75. But they're at Sims 4. They are adding an inclusivity feature to the Sims 4. Starting today, you'll be able to customize the pronouns of your Sims.

They say it's one step in the direction of a more inclusive experience for Simmers. A screenshot of the feature suggests that players will be able to enter whichever pronouns they prefer into text boxes. The settings show how the pronouns will work in context, too. Example, he, she, they would like a grilled cheese. They worked with GLAD.

How about GFY with like a grilled cheese? Well, I think this is totally fine. I think it's hilarious and that it actually seems to be upsetting people that don't care that their children get shot up. But, you know, pick your battles, I guess. Be mad about this. I'm just surprised The Sims hasn't come out saying that, you know, they're a metaverse.

Because they kind of are. You know. They are. Yeah. Yeah. With the definitions people are throwing around nowadays, they certainly are. And it certainly works better than Meta's version. Yeah. I think you get pants in The Sims. Yeah. Plus. And legs. Yeah. Whole thing. Yeah. So Gordy wrote in, I read an article that says, keeping your apps running in the background on an iPhone is more efficient than closing them.

I was wondering what your take on this is. It also brings to mind the, my phone is listening to me. Even though the apps are sandboxed from each other, can they still sniff network traffic on the phone when running in the background? I always clear apps after use. Your opinions. Brian, I would like to welcome you to our new segment.

Let me Google that shit for you. So. So he was wondering what our take is on this. Our take doesn't matter. Let's just get to the facts, ma'am. Yes. Okay. Background app refresh will wake up an app that has gone to sleep and get data from it.

You can toggle that. You can turn it off. It can't read data from other apps. It's not on all the time. It just wakes up to do a few things, goes back to sleep. If you don't have that on for that app, it's asleep. It's not doing anything. So you have to let it, let it do its thing. So, but it can't do anything that it normally wouldn't normally be able to do.

And as far as closing your apps, no, you don't do that. You don't need to do that. It's actually wrong to do that. Wrong emic, wrong instinct to do that because every time you close it, you have to open it back up. It has to reload. It has to reestablish network connections, load history, check state, all that crap.

Every single time you reopen it after you close it. So don't close your apps because once they're closed, they're asleep. They're not taking up resources and it's faster to open them because they come back from a sleep state. So Gordy, I hope you liked your journey down the first inaugural episode of let me Google that shit for you.

I still close all my apps. I don't know why. I just do. Habit. Security? Ha! All right. How you doing, Dave?

Ready to get into this? I'm doing all right. Yep. Cool. I'm already in my Obi-Wan robe with my lightsaber. I'm in my 24-hour wait period. That's right. Right. You can't camp out at the movie theater, so. Nope, doing it at home. He's just sitting in front of the TV.

My kid who does not really understand Star Wars yet thinks I'm a weirdo, but fuck him. That's all right. He's just got to get used to that. Yep. When's it out? Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Oh. Oh. Okay. Nice. Yeah. So don't plan on any security next week.

As you can hear, we're back with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyberware Podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans. Please never mind the garbage truck going by in the back. Co-host of the social engineering podcast with 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.

And let's get back to this Obi-Wan thing, because I thought it was next month. I'm losing my mind. You are. You are wrong. No, Buzz Lightyear is next month. I got it confused with the boys. Did not get the boys in Buzz Lightyear confused. No. It's definitely two distinctly different shows.

So we talked last time about that Apple Super Drive. And lo and behold, you can still buy them on the Apple website. Yeah, I think I shot a note to you that said, I wonder how much of devices like this sticking around are because of the needs of the educational market, who are still probably slinging interactive CD-ROMs in front of their students.

Or, you know, our nuclear weapons, you know. Yeah. Right. True. Good. Yeah. Both ends of the spectrum. I thought about that after you sent me that. And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right. Probably, you know, like all those bootleg copies of Encarta that they have stuck in their desk.

Yeah. I just think about how many projects I have that are on either CD-ROMs or DVDs that were archived that are slowly bit rotting away. And, you know, I'll never know. I was going to say you have zero because they've all rotted out now. Right. Right.

Exactly. Right. I did mine like 10 years after, like I got my first CD Ripper, I think in like 97, 96, 97. And in 2003 or 4, I started to pull the stuff off of them and they were half dead already.

So. Wow. I don't know if anything's going to last that long. So, which is a perfect segue into the backup topic that we have talked about in the past, because I think I have cracked the, cracked the nut finally. I finally said, screw it. Because I found out that there is a three terabyte option for Dropbox now.

Now, three terabytes basically covers everything that I, that I care about, that anybody after I'm dead will give any fucks about whatsoever. I think a thumb drive could cover that, Jason. Maybe a post-it note that just says, please feed the dogs.

That's about it. That's about it. But after, after the hospital visit, I've just been doing a lot of thinking. So I've now decided to optimize for my demise, which means that. Catchy. Yeah. I thought so. I thought, you know, I can.

OMD. You'll have to fight with the band for that, but, you know. OMD, right? Secrets. When I was in the hospital, giving all of my passwords and information to my roommate, just in case anything happened. It's like, okay, here's this, here's that.

And then I'm just, I'm sitting there in the hospital thinking like, oh God, what about the servers? What about the photos, family photos, all this stuff? And I'm like, I really don't care about that. I don't want to be thinking about that anymore. So I'm like, here's what, here's what it is.

It's Dropbox. Everything just goes into Dropbox, period. It's got enough space. I was doing it with, I had it spread out over multiple cloud services. You know what? No, there's no need. Because these guys are, it's solid enough at this point. Everything can stay there.

You set it for online access only, so it doesn't take up all your hard drive space. In the past couple days with my gigabit internet access, which I love you. I love you, AT&T. The only time I'm ever going to say I love you, AT&T, is when I have my gigabit. I put up like two and a half terabytes of photography.

It just goes now. So that has let me put everything there. And I'm just, I'm trying to get everything optimized, like I said, for my demise. So I never have to worry about, again, like where that paperwork is. You know, where's the articles of incorporation?

Where's the dog paperwork? All that stuff just gets scanned. Everything's in Dropbox. And I'm, you know, setting up a will with my attorney because there's a few things that have to happen. The first thing, and the reason I'm putting this in on Dropbox, another issue is that you can make things very shareable.

Because one of the caveats in my will is that when I'm gone, all of the photography that is available becomes public domain. And that's just something I wanted. Because I've got a lot of photography from, you know, going back to the 80s. Which, you know, could be a good historical record for somebody somewhere down the line.

Free artwork. Right. And just that process. So I'm just keeping that in mind. So if I, just the beer truck, you know, if I get hit by a beer truck, it doesn't inconvenience the people that are still here. I want to be as less, I want to be, I want to leave no trace, as it were, except a bunch of photos that you can go put on your Instagram sayings.

That's all. So do you have an envelope that's labeled in the event of my untimely demise that you keep for your roommate or your lawyer that has your Dropbox password? Or how are you managing that? Currently, it's a thumb drive with some, you know, notes and instructions in it.

And there are three of those that exist right now. One here, one remote, and actually one in my briefcase because it's going to go to my attorney. It's going to stay there. And then I'll just update those if anything changes. But the other thing I'm looking at is setting up some kind of family plan just to have another account that can have access that isn't the main account.

So if that password changes, which it will at some point, that there is an account that's not logged into that has a very secure password that, you know, has never really been on the internet besides creating the account. And that's it. So trying to, you know, still working out the logistics of it.

But that mindset is kind of what – because we talked about losing files and backups and all of the crap that goes with it. And it's like, you know, just trying to get it to the point where we don't think about that anymore because there's a lot more important things to think about. Yeah. No, it's great if you can optimize that.

I think that's a great idea. Do you – I mean do you feel as though three terabytes will do it or are you setting yourself up for a who could possibly need more than 640K on their computer situation, you know? What I'm going to end up doing is splitting it to three terabytes for me, three terabytes for business.

Okay. Actually, the business account can go up to 10 terabytes, which is good because I've got client backups. The client files go there because I don't care if those go away over time. I'm only keeping those as convenience for them anyway and I'm a pack rat. Right. I have a hard time deleting somebody else's work when they don't care about it even.

I'm like, someday you're going to want this. Trust me. Trust me. I'm the same way. Yeah. Yeah. So that's half of, you know, my synology right now is filled with client work. So that stuff gets pushed off so that can go away. But the family stuff, you know, movies, photos, documents, that stuff is all in one main account that is just purpose built for that.

I'll tell you one thing my family did was we created a Google Photos account that is a family account that everybody has access to if they want to toss their photos in there. So anybody in the family can put any of their photos in here and it's shared with everyone.

And so that way there's an archive of the photos for the family. You know, nothing. I mean, obviously you have to be careful that things don't automatically get uploaded there because that can be embarrassing. But it's been a good resource. And, you know, particularly when you're in that mode in life where people are passing away and things like that, it's nice for everybody to be able to go through there and see things quickly.

And having just like the facial recognition to say, where's all the photos of dad or where's all the photos of, you know, Uncle Bob. And anybody can go in and do that. Yeah, my wife and I should do that with our photos. We haven't gotten that far. We do it. We use Dropbox. We have a Dropbox folder that's shared between the two of us.

And that's got all our legal documents, mortgage paperwork, all that sort of stuff. And then it's also got a password file, you know, this text file with here's the basic accounts. Here's what you need to use. Here's here's we, you know, retire on Dropbox. Yeah, all that's on Dropbox.

Scary. I don't keep the passwords on. You know what you can do now, though, since you're a 1Password user, you can set up different vaults that can be shared after and things like that, that are a little more secure than just a text file with passwords on Dropbox. Yeah, it's an ongoing battle to get my wife onto 1Password so we can actually share things that way.

But these are things that actually, you know, we both access quite frequently. So that's the problem. So I just got to push her into 1Password. I know it shouldn't be sitting on Dropbox, but we also, you know, it is what it is. You do the best you can with the people that you've got to work with.

Something about cobblers and shoes and children somewhere, I guess. Yes. Oh, and it's better than having nothing at all. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I wanted to provide a brief update on my 5K iMac to 5K monitor project. Yes.

Which has gone mostly well. I have run into one glitch. So the teardown went fine. The rebuilding went fine. It works fine. Interesting little tidbit that when I plug the monitor into my MacBook Pro, it comes up in the, you know, displays control panel and it says 5K iMac.

Huh. Which is kind of interesting. That's kind of cool. I'm guessing that. Yeah. I'm guessing. I've thought about it. I think because the operating system will run on a 5K iMac, it probably, something in there just says, oh, I know this resolution.

You know, that's a retina display at this. So that's probably a 5K iMac and it's – that's how I suspect it's getting its hooks in there to figure out it's a 5K iMac display. But it works fine. Yeah. I don't know. It's as good an explanation as any.

It works fine. It looks great. There is one glitch that I think may end up biting me in the end and yesterday I hooked it up here in my studio to see how it works and it fired up fine and it powered up fine and everything looked great.

And I was getting a low-level hum in my studio monitors. Uh-oh. Like a 60 hertz hum. Yep. And I'm thinking, crap. Right. So I go through the dance that you always do when you have hum, which is you start moving your cables around.

You know, is there a cable crossing paths with a power supply? Is there – all that stuff that we all know how to do. And I'm going through and I'm thinking, oh, well, maybe, you know, the way that I have the cables strapped down on the back of the monitor here to secure them, I have the monitor cable running next to the power cable.

And it's a pretty beefy power cable because this 5K monitor draws some juice. Um, so I separate them, no, still humming. And then I think about, oh, inside the monitor, I kind of strap these two cables together as strain relief.

Mm-hmm. Right? And I'm guessing that these two cables being in proximity with each other is what's causing the hum. Here's the problem. How do you open up a 5K iMac? Sledgehammer? It's glued shut.

It's glued shut. Right? So part of the kit that I got to do this whole job was I got a kit from iFixit that include new strips of adhesive to glue the glass back on the aluminum case. So if I want to go inside to even see if it's the problem with these cables, I got to pry the glass off.

I got to get new glue. I got to get all that kind of stuff. So... And this is how projects tend to peter out. Well, first of all, I want to get the advice from you guys. Do you think that I'm likely on the right path here, that it is these two cables being in proximity to each other is likely what's causing my hum?

That sounds reasonable. And you've narrowed down the fact that it is the monitor causing the hum. Yes. Just to be certain here. Yes, yes, it is that monitor causing the hum for sure. Have you tried one of those power cleaner plugs that you can get to plug the main power into and it supposedly whips out?

I have. Okay. I have. I have actually tried. I tried plugging the monitor into different outlets. I tried plugging it into a power conditioner. I tried running an extension cord to put it on a different... Have you turned it off and turned it back on again?

Yes, I have. Did you wait the full 10 seconds? Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I think you've narrowed it down to a likely culprit. I think so. And I think you need to see this through, Dave. Well, here's the thing.

So I have two options. Either I take it apart, try to figure it out, put it back together, or I relegate this monitor to some location where there are no external speakers. Bingo! There we go. That's my other option.

There's the winner. Yeah. Yeah, so I think... This is how men come to a consensus. Yes. Thank you very much. Good job, Dave. You finished. When all else fails, lower your standards. Yes. It's always worked for us. So I think that's where I am.

So I think that's where I am. If any of our listeners have any suggestions here, I would love to hear them. But I'm pretty sure that's where things stand. So for the moment, I've put the project aside while I think about it. Right.

There you go. There you go. There we go. So it's, as they say in the military, it's an incomplete success. Other things before we get to some security stuff. I'm going to see the Top Gun Maverick movie tonight. I'm jealous. I would love to.

And I have to say, I am excited to see it. The reviews are very good. Probably similar to the two of you. I was a junior in high school when the original Top Gun movie came out. I remember going to see it in a packed movie theater in the summertime and how exciting it was.

And I have to say, given all of the crap going on in the world and in my life right now, I am looking forward to two hours in a dark room full of strangers just being somewhere else. And I think this movie is exactly that. So I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah. Please do. Not my kind of thing, but the reviews are great. And I would like to see this as well at some point. So I'm with you. Yep. At this point, I'm too old to sign up to be a naval aviator, but my eyes are bad anyway. But you can wear the sunglasses, Dave. That's right.

Get myself a bomber jacket and cosplay as a naval aviator. Why not? Probably easier to put that together than the Stormtrooper outfit. Just saying. Right. So Dan wrote in. Hi, guys. Loving the show. You briefly mentioned the ability to delete orphaned or forgotten accounts in last week's show with Dave.

I recently used the services of mine.com, which is an automated tool to contact customer service of websites that have accounts associated with the emails you provide. It worked really well for me. I had over 80 customer service departments email me back confirming account deletion. I am in the UK, so this may be a GDPR thing, though.

So I was intrigued by this and immediately went to go check it out. Mine.com is not that site or service. I had to Google around a bit and found it. It's actually saymine.com. And unfortunately, it requires access to your email account. And right now, they only support Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo.

So first off, you have to trust this company enough to let them troll through your email. And secondly, it has to be a Gmail, Microsoft, or Yahoo account to be able to use the service. I don't use those. I've had my own custom domain and mail server for as long as God has had email.

And so this is not of any use for me whatsoever, unfortunately. But sounds good, I guess, if you trust them enough. I guess. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it works. That is a tremendous amount of trust to put in a third party.

But hey, you only live once, right? How bad could it be? What's in the EULA? What's in the EULA? Yeah. So I do not allow any third parties access to my email account and will never do so.

So sounds like a great service, but want one that doesn't have to go through my email account. Or at least maybe I could just forward emails to it or something. That would be something I would try. So there you go. And we got another week. More news about Clearview AI. This time they were fined £7.5 million and told to delete all UK facial recognition data.

So there you go. It was ordered to stop obtaining the data of UK residents and delete any it had already collected. And they noted that the company illegally collected more than 20 billion facial images for its database. Although they no longer offer its services to UK organizations, the company has customers in other countries.

So the company is still using personal data of UK residents. And that's what they got them on and what they're suing them on. And I don't know how they're going to, you know, make sure that this is all scraped out of their system. But hopefully it will be. And hopefully this company will eventually find themselves out of business.

But that's a lot of hopes. Yeah, it is. Well, and as this article points out too, they recently settled with the ACLU to not do facial recognition in the U.S. other than for law enforcement. Yeah. Which is kind of a big deal.

That's a big carve out. But still, it seems like they could be on the decline. Yay. You know, these conversations about deletion and GDPR and all that kind of stuff led me down a little mini rat hole.

And I know I'm risking retreading old ground here. But one of the articles that I found that I thought was interesting was about the whole notion of definitions of deleting versus erasing and how those are not the same thing. As you all have both pointed out many, many times, setting visibility to zero is not the same thing as actual destruction.

And this article talks about, from a legal point of view, what the differences are. So some of our listeners might be interested in that. The other thing I was wondering about was about backups. In other words, if I back things up, stick them on a shelf in my locked closet at my place of business, and someone comes to me and says, I want you to delete all my data, am I obligated to go through every single one of those backups?

Or am I obligated to delete it if the time should come when I try to restore from those backups? I don't know the answer to that, but I just thought it was interesting to think about it. My understanding is yes, at least as far as GDPR is concerned.

We deal with that quite a bit with the company that I'm working at right now. We have GDPR procedures. We don't, we do, you know, we have to go through and remove them everywhere. And I asked about backups. So, and apparently, yes, that's if you're being strict GDPR compliance, you have to take it out everywhere if somebody requests.

That seems like a heavy lift. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I'm sure most people aren't GDPR compliant because of these sorts of things. Right, right. You know, it's a lot, you know, and that's the problem with backups and restoring from backups, right? Because who's going to remember?

Because one of the other things about GDPR is not only do you have to remove all the records, then you have to get rid of the record of the person requesting that you took out, that you remove them, right? Because you can't keep any information about them. You can't have a, you can't have a file that lists everybody that requested GDPR removal.

You have to get rid of the request. So if you're restoring from backups, that's a hell of a loophole. Yeah, that's just a, that's a messed up, just, just think about it. You know, you got SQL dumps out the wazoo. You're doing 20 SQL dumps an hour.

You got to go through and remove somebody from, how do you, how do you even do that? You know, I don't, I don't even understand how, how you would do it. Well, without, without destroying the integrity of the, the actual dump, you know? Yeah. Because you're going to, you're going to change.

I don't know. Insert IDs and things like that. It's going to be, you know. If anybody out there is a data scientist working at any of these big companies, I'd love to hear about how you deal with it. I guess you just have to, you could, you probably could do a find and replace and just replace the, you know, just replace the data with redacted or null or something, but, or removed by GDPR.

Do you have to have some sort of metadata, metadata log that says, Hey, we removed this bit of data. Here's why this has been nulled out. I think if that's your policy is to, you know, just replace everything with generic placeholder text, then you would, you should know that that's what it is.

I don't think you'd have to even like write back to your own terms of service. Wait, what am I doing here? Let me, let me check our terms. I think from just an engineering point of view, I think if you just say, you know, removed, thanks to GDPR, that would be good enough.

And that would at least leave most of it intact, unless there's some kind of restrictions with string lengths and things like that, which could be part of a, you know, part of an input. Like if you're re-importing and you change the length of a field, is that going to break your import? I mean, there's so many things to think about.

My head's starting to hurt. The last thing I have for us this week is, I don't know, kind of fun. There's a new ransomware group that are calling themselves the Goodwill Ransomware Group. And they come in, they find your vulnerabilities, they lock up your stuff.

And if you want to get your data back, you have to do some good things and share the good things you've done on social media. So, for example, you have to go and donate some money to some needy people or clean the park or just do good things and share your good things on social media.

And the Goodwill Ransomware Gang will see the good things you've done, and in exchange, they will unlock the stuff that they have ransomed. And, yes, this is silly, but welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. Oh, what a bunch of assholes.

What a bunch of assholes. I think Goodwill is going to get hunted. That's what I think. There you go. You know, I thought about a potential business model for ransomware folks, which was to basically have your ransomware be nuisanceware, where all you did was you went in and you compressed a few key files and you just said, look, five bucks, I'll give you your stuff back.

And then you just make your money by volume, right? And so it's not a big enough thing that it's going to put anybody out. It's probably not a big enough thing that you're going to be attracting a whole lot of attention from law enforcement. So there's this whole notion of nuisanceware rather than something really destructive or I don't know.

Who knows? I mean, but then I guess the downside is you could be turning off someone's insulin pump and then, you know, bad stuff. Because they didn't clean up a park. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. And by the way, isn't nuisanceware just Microsoft? Mmm.

Clippy. Zing. That's right. Yeah. Right. I think the blood sugar's low. All right, guys. That's what I got. So before I go, let me just say, I feel the need, the need for speed.

You're going to have a hell of a couple of days. You're going to have that, and you're going to have Obi-Wan. I know. It's going to happen. Listen, I deserve a break. Yes, you do. I agree. And I think there will be no security whatsoever next week. It's not a contest.

Yeah. It's not a contest. We all have hardships and challenges, but I'm looking forward to just unhooking my brain for a few hours and just... I hope it takes your breath away. Closing shout outs!

Over at Patreon, nobody signed up this week. Nobody. You guys do know you get high-resolution, ad-free, early-release episodes over at Patreon, don't you? Yeah. Don't you? Well, you do now. There's been activity at Patreon, though, but it's kind of keeping us stable. Like, some people increase their donations.

We really appreciate that. Some people have decreased their donations. We understand hard times out there. You must be working for Uber. We get it. So, fluctuations, but stability. Over at PayPal, we've got John Andre, Tom, Mark, Joseph, Ajinka, Thomas, and Humphrey.

And over at our tip jar, we've got Ross, Joshua, Daryl, and Ashley. Woo-hoo. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, that donates. Honestly, we really, really, really, really, really do appreciate it, and it does keep the show going. So, without that, we would be... I don't know. What would we be, Brian?

Lonely. Because we wouldn't be talking to each other every week. Well, we probably would be, anyways, which is a depressing thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So, I got a quick update on my studio slash office space. Yeah. Did I mention on the show that I talked to their retention specialist last week?

No, but I do love a good retention specialist story. Okay. You're going to love this one. So, it is funny. So, I'm at Spaces, which is a Regis company for my little office now. And somebody on Discord said, you're with, like, you know, one of the devils of real estate. It's a mega corporation, horrible to deal with.

And now I found out, yes, that is true. Yeah. You should be with the Philbin company. Seriously. Come on. At least that was the funny half of the duo. So, I had this space and I was looking to get another space in the building to build out a studio. Blah. It didn't work out. So, I canceled my office and I found a new place.

Talk about that in a second. But when I canceled, their retention specialist got on with me and I'm like, okay, well, you know, this other thing's going to might not work out. So, what if I do a six month with you? What kind of deal can you give me on a six month commitment?

And she said, for a six month commitment, we can give you the deal of $180 a month more than you're paying right now. Ooh, what a deal. What if I do a year? Well, we can get that to $75 more than you're paying now. And I'm like, you do know how negotiations work, don't you?

I give you more of a commitment. You give me a deal. This is not going the way it's supposed to go. It's like the SiriusXN model. I know. So, I'm like, yeah, I think I'm going to pass. I think we're good. We're just going to cancel and I'll go about my merry way and you guys have a good time.

And then the self-appointed retention specialist at my branch decided to take it upon himself to try and get me another deal. And so, he got it down to, if I do a six month, it'll only be $85 more. And if you quit now, we'll only charge you a $75 exit leaving fee.

I know. And they've already got like almost $5,000 of mine locked up in holding fees that you can't get for another month and a half after you're gone. They live on interest is what they live on.

They're just, they don't care if those offices are open or closed, I swear. So, in doing so, I went and I found a new office space. All right. It costs twice as much as what I'm paying now, which is not an insignificant amount of money. But for that, I get over 10 times the space.

So, if everything goes according to plan, by tomorrow, I should have in my hot little hands the draft of a lease for the new studio space that I'm going to be opening up, which is a 1,200 square foot studio space in Woodland Hills, California, that anybody will be able to come and record at and keep the lights on.

All right. So, I'm setting up, I'm actually setting up, the way the place is laid out, it's got two giant rooms. So, I'll have two separate studios. You can do video and audio and video in one, audio only in the other one. And the reason I knew this place was perfect is the guy, I walked in there and it was dead quiet.

And I'm sandwiched in between the 101 and Ventura Boulevard. So, if you know what I'm talking about, you know that that is not a quiet place to have a studio. It's a loud area, yes. I walked into that room and it was like going into a treated movie studio, if you've ever been in one, you know, where it's treated for the acoustics and it just sounds like your head's going to explode.

It was like that kind of quiet. And as I'm like videotaping the place going, this might work. The guy's like, therapists used to be in that office. And there are apparently sound requirements for therapists' office so they can't hear in the other offices.

So, they've had all of the floors and the walls and the ceiling soundproofed. Nice. If that wasn't a sign, I'm just like, I'm in, I'm taking it, I'm taking it. But the main plan is once you get the lease signed, get everything started to move in, I'm going to start doing, have some interns over.

So, I'm going to teach people some of my editing techniques and things like that in person with the hopes that down the line we'll have jobs because I'm still turning down editing jobs day in, day out. So, if we can get some people in there, we can have some jobs, we can have a cool place to hang out. We can have, you know, Grumpy Central here in the San Fernando Valley.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me, please. If you get up to 50 employees, we can sell it for $150 million. Dude, I got the space. I just got to get those bed racks from last episode. Yeah. The little cube farms. I got enough room.

We can have, you know, half of the room will be studio. The other half will be birthing. You know, getting your birth and sleep in between shifts of editing. And then we'll have you grinding for Golden Warcraft in the other room. You know, we're just going to have our own little sweatshop going on. It's going to be perfect. And it's too bad you're not going to be here in the States in June.

My friend Jordan Harbinger, my ex-boss, he's doing his first live show in Venice on June 13th. So, I'm going to go down there with some buddies. I think Fogarty is going to come up from San Diego. Ryan Holiday is going to be the guest. So, if you like Ryan, come on down.

It's $25. Door's at 6. It is at the Venice West. Tickets are at jordanharbinger.com slash tickets. There's a link in the show notes. But come on down and say hi. I'll be there. Sadly, I'm going to miss that because I'm not going to come in until the following month for the summer. But the breaking news for me there is the Venice West has finally opened.

That had to sign on it coming soon for about, oh, I don't know, six years? Wow. Pre-pandemic. So, nice to hear that they've actually managed to open it up for events. Good. Yeah. I never heard of it even. That's because it's never been opened.

So, let me know how it looks. That's what I'm like. I will. I will. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed 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. Just look for that little share button in your player. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 555. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

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

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