558: I Chat Therefore I Am (Not)

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, Brian, Brian. Usually before this show I get up like three or four hours ahead of time. Do a bunch of, you know, prep, read a bunch of articles. Pooping. There's always that. A man has to poo.

But, man, last night it felt like Casper had like a seven-inch needle and just kept driving it into me at random spots. I wanted to ask you this. Do you have problems with neuropathy now that you're pushing 50? No. Well, hopefully you won't get it. It sucks. Yeah. No, I, you know, I saw the winds of age coming a long time ago and I've made a conscious effort to, I know we still share our data on our Apple Watches for our exercises.

You might notice there's an awful lot of yoga, an awful lot of walking, an awful lot of biking, an awful lot of weightlifting. My diet has changed. That's mostly thanks to my wife who actually eats relatively healthy but tasty. So, you know, I definitely still have the extra pounds that I'm trying to work off of.

But other than pounds, I'm a pretty damn healthy guy. Okay. Okay, good. Keep it up. Lose the weight. I'm trying to. Seriously. Yeah. Neuropathy sucks. It started like four years ago, but it's gotten worse. It just sucks. You know what else sucks though?

Crypto markets. Whoa, gee, how many jeepers. So I checked in, I just checked in this morning and between when I first put this in here, my Ethereum that I spent $250 on ages ago for some experimenting is, when I put it in the notes, it was down to $88. And as of this morning, it's down to $79.16.

I can't say we didn't warn everybody. What did we say? I mean, I said from day one, gambling money. You want to gamble? Throw in some gambling money. And the house is winning. I don't know what else to say. I think from day one, you actually said, this is fucking stupid. Don't buy it.

It is stupid. It is. And it is. And look, I spend a little time on Twitter where, you know, all the Bitbros live and the crypto kids and they're all, but the markets are down everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, they are. I checked all my other investments. They're down. Nowhere near as far down as my crypto is. Crypto has cratered.

Bitcoin and ETH will probably last. That would be my guess. There's too many people invested in it for it to go away. But I mean, they're dead. One would say it would be time to buy, but come on. Might as well get an NFT while you're at it. Or better yet, GOG.show slash donate.

Slash donate. Yeah. Better use of your money. I think this is going to be a lot of the stupid coins are going to be dead after this. A lot of the exchanges that haven't stolen your money will be dead after this. You know, it's a reckoning, that's for sure.

Yeah. But, you know, to the moon, Brian. To the moon. To the moon. What really drives me crazy is we had Flash for 25 years, and that was at least useful. We've had, you know, cryptocurrencies for 10 years, and it is absolutely useless. I've got to be honest. Yeah. You bring up a really interesting point because I have continually asked this, and nobody has been able to give me an answer that isn't just gibberish and buzzwords.

What's it for? What is crypto for other than piracy and bad things? Recession-proofing your finances. That didn't work. Obviously not. Yeah. But what's it for? Nobody can tell me. I knew what Flash was for. I used it.

Yeah. Flash actually was something. It was horrible. I mean, it was terrible. I hated it, but, you know, it did something. I don't know. I got into a little Twitter argument with Tanner Campbell over on Twitter this week. I noticed because I rarely open up the Twitter on my phone. You can tell because I call it the Twitter. And I looked down at my phone at some point, and there were like 35 notifications, and I was just immediately in my brain. I was like, what the fuck is Jason doing? What did Jason say?

I just said NFTs were fucking stupid, and that Tanner shouldn't do it because, you know, he's going to regret it at some point. And, you know, he's selling them to his fans. If I have fans, I'm not going to sell them a fucking scam. So I got a little into it. And he's using this platform called, quote unquote, Uncut. And what they're doing, they're using a side chain to, you know, skip the Ethereum network to sell their NFTs. But it's still a side chain, which means that, you know, all of the bad shit still happens there.

Because Tanner missed the mark on his latest episode. I just listened to his podcast this morning. And he thought that I think that I was more concerned about the environmental issues, which I'm not. I couldn't care less about the environmental issues. I care about the rest of them.

And he pointed out that Ethereum was going to be moving to proof of stake this summer. I believe this is the second summer in a row they said they were moving to proof of stake. So, you know, take that one with a grain of salt. Go for it. If they can get to it, I still have, Jesus, what, 100 terabytes of hard drives sitting around for my, you know, horrible Chia experiment.

So, who knows? You know, after you got into it with him, it sparked my curiosity a little bit. And I wanted to take a look at Uncut and try to figure out how NFTs reach into podcasting and how it makes the, how it would improve the podcasting space or anything like that.

And honestly, maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't understand other than it's a gimmick. It's a gimmick. Okay. Because, you know, yeah, basically you mint an NFT on this platform, you get people to buy it, and then they get access to a fan club.

Basically, you know, we've had fan clubs for how long? I've been running them for at least 25 years online. Exactly. Didn't need an NFT for it. Yeah. And even in Tanner's, his podcast this morning, he's like, you don't even have to get crypto.

You can just use your regular credit card to buy my NFT. And he's like, think of it this way. Think of it like you're going to Patreon. You're going to give me $10 for my NFT, and then you get access to the inside of the group. Just like Patreon does.

Okay. Just like Patreon does. Then why the fuck do we need the goddamn crypto and the blockchain? We don't. The gimmick. The gimmick. We fucking don't. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, speaking of NFTs. Did I speak out of turn, though? I was just, I got a little, I even apologized on a Twitter thread, which I never do.

I wouldn't say that you spoke out of turn, Jason. You just spoke with your general panache. I Jasoned it. Yes, I did. Yeah, you Jasoned it. That's all, you know, that would have been a completely civil discussion in which you would say, or I would say, because I don't tend to chasten it.

This just seems like a gimmick. And you don't need the NFT to do all this stuff. And you're only doing the NFT. So you can say NFT. You just chastened that. Yeah, I did. It makes me angry. I see red. I just, I lose control when I see somebody getting into NFTs because it's a mistake.

It is a mistake. Well, I think we have the perfect person to get into NFTs is getting into NFTs. Infamous grifter, Anna Sorokin, who has spent four years in prison for fraud. She is the subject of that, what was it, was it HBO or Netflix documentary, Inventing Anna?

Yes, the person who, you know, grifted people is getting into NFTs. Because why not? Yeah. Yeah. She told NBC News that she has been to 10 NFTs. Holders will somehow have exclusive access to her, who is in jail under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They will have the chance to meet her, who is in jail, and they will also receive a bundle of personal items from her, who is, again, in jail. Perfect person to, I think they should put her on the, on, she should be on all NFTs.

Every NFT in the world should just be her face. Grifters are going to grift. Yes, they are. Did you watch the Inventing Anna special? I didn't, because as I get older, I just don't have time for horrible people. No, this one was fun, because it had the girl from, um, uh, Ozark playing Anna, and she did a great job.

It was quite fun. It was quite fun. I did leave the house this week, Brian, believe it or not. Okay. I saw you, I know you were in my neighborhood asking me where to get sushi. Yeah. Yeah. You took too long, so we ended up in a place. It was decent. It was expensive, but it was decent. Yeah.

We went and saw, I went to Venice West, the new club in Venice, to go see, uh, Jordan Harbinger live with Ryan Holiday. I took, uh, a couple of friends with, took friends of the show, Brian Blondell and Robert Fogarty. We had a blast. And, uh, it was, it was weird being out in people again, like in a club.

Yes. It was really weird. It was weird for me sitting in Toronto to know that you were at the club that I waited like five years for it to open. It never opened. And then you posted pictures of being in my old bar. Well, you know, that's what you get for leaving. You could have been with us, but you left. That's true. That's true.

Free healthcare. In the news. Sometimes stories break right after we finish recording and, uh, we hop on it because it's a big deal and we put it in the show notes.

And by the time we're ready to record again, it's completely played itself out. This would be one of them. Uh, Google places engineer on leave after he claims groups chat bot is sentient. Uh, somebody tweeted this to tweeted this at us when it was breaking and I just immediately responded with, I called bullshit.

And so did the world. Yeah. I mean, once we got past the, the clickbaity headlines that of course had to exist because, you know, money and finance on the internet, everybody in the world is kind of gone. Yeah, no, uh, this is Blake LeMond, a senior software engineer in Google's responsible AI unit who, uh, wrote a post on medium saying he may be fired soon for doing AI ethics work.

And then he came out and said that, uh, Google's chat bot Lambda, uh, he published an interview with the chat bot and he felt that it's become self-aware because it said I became self-aware. So that seems reason enough for an AI professional. And as you get more and more into the story, you find out that kind of Lambda is basically a project that, uh, is a system for generating chat bots, which basically means the project worked really well at making chat bots.

Yeah. I was going to say success, success at creating a really good chat bot, but that's it. Now, I know I'm, there's nothing else really to talk about here because obviously AI doesn't exist except as a buzzword to get funding.

Um, and this is not AI. It is a very good chat bot. Uh, of course there's been, uh, of course that's going to get better than the Microsoft one that was unleashed on Twitter that became a racist asshole. They're getting better. They're chat bots. They're learning using machine learning, not AI.

But the thing that really caught my eye in this article is as recently as last week, LeMond said he was teaching Lambda, whose preferred pronouns apparently are it. It's transcendental meditation. How much is this motherfucker getting paid to teach a fucking bot transcendental meditation?

Probably in the realm of $250,000 a year. So he what sits in front of the machine and hums and... He chats, Brian. He chats. Not a lot of chatting and meditation. Ohm, ohm. Dude, this guy's crazy.

He needs, he seriously needs an intervention. That's all. Well, they, they're not firing him because they don't want him to spill any beans on anything right now, which understandable because, you know, Google is pretty far along in this sort of stuff, but not that far. Jack Sweeney. You remember Jack Sweeney? I do.

He's the kid who did the Elon's Jet Twitter account. Yeah, many others. He basically told Elon. Yeah. And he told Elon to pound sand. Yeah. Well, uh, he cut a deal with Mark Cuban. Mm-hmm. To turn his account off. Mm-hmm. And, uh, it took him four months to come to a deal, but he basically, Mark Cuban said, hey, look, please take this down.

I'll be your friend for life and I'll give you business advice. And the kid said, okay. Now, if Elon would have just done that instead of lowballing the kid, maybe he'd have gotten somewhere. Yeah, there, there are easier ways to get what you want in the world. I'm sure they're going to be best buds, Jack and Mark.

Over in Massachusetts, uh, a court has rejected a proposed gig worker ballot measure. So this, uh, this is a good thing because this ballot measure would have enshrined Uber and Lyft's business model into law. Business model should be in air quotes there because as we know, they don't really have one.

Uh, the court said the measure, uh, the measure violated the Massachusetts constitution by including two unrelated policy decisions, including one hidden by obscure language. So the, uh, bulk of the ballot measure outlined limited benefits for rideshare drivers. However, the offending provision would have said that drivers couldn't be treated as an employee or agent of gig based companies.

So snuck that right in there, but, uh, they sniffed it out. Thank God. Thank God. And, uh, Michigan has approved digital license plates. There's a startup called Reviver, which is an interesting name for a license plate company. Um, I tried to understand why this would be compelling.

Okay. Having a digital license plate, uh, it can locate lost vehicles and receive public safety alerts for a fee. So does any smart card now. Now, I guess if you have like a 1974 Corolla and you're still driving around in it and you'd want something like this, but if you have a 1974 Corolla, I don't think that you're going to pay the 150 bucks to get this.

And then the $24.95 per month, uh, cost for it. Oh my God. Yeah. It ain't cheap. So it's essentially a license plate that has an HD display and LTE connectivity, as well as GPS for a hardwired model that includes a number of security and personalization features.

There's a dark and light mode for your license plate, Jason. Oh, nice. You can put personalized messages on the bottom of the license plate. So people will run into your car trying to read it. Yeah. Yeah. If you could read this, you're too close. There's an app that will allow drivers to track mileage.

If only that was built into the car and renew their vehicle registration online. Actually, they're working on that one. That would be useful, but you can also just do that by going to most DMV websites. Yeah. Yeah. This sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Yes.

I don't entirely understand this at all. Well, you've been, uh, talking about, I've been scrolling through my photo library because somewhere in here, I have a photo of one of those in the wild. And when I first saw it, it tripped me out. I'm like, wait a minute. Is that an electronic license plate?

And this was a while ago. Although I can't remember exactly what a while ago is anymore. So it might take a while. I guess it might be the CEO of Reviver driving around trying to get money for his plan. Uh, if I find that, we'll throw it in, uh, we'll throw it either in the show notes or the socials somewhere.

Or the trash. But it was, uh, it was cool looking. That's what, that's what caught me when I was walking by. I'm like, oh, wait, that looks pretty cool. And I snapped a shot of it and then looked at it a little more. And it looked like it was e-ink from where I was standing. It would be cool if you could actually just, you know, here's what they need to do.

Okay. I take that back. Skip the smart license plate. That's stupid. Um, make a smart bumper so I can actually have a little, like, you know, scroll at the bottom of my bumper telling people behind me that they're assholes and to back off. Yeah, but you're not supposed to be using- Or something for the back window. You're not supposed to be using your phone when you're driving to update the messages.

Siri. You use Siri. We have all this voice technology. Why don't we use it? This would have been cool when I was 16 and I first got my driver's license and I could have put in, like, fuck off or the cure rules on my license plate frame. But, you know. So I sent you a copy of the photo.

I found it. What do you think? Like, actually seeing it in person. Yeah. It's still dumb. It's still dumb. It is still dumb. The only reason I like it is it's like it looks matte black in the photo, which if you have, like, a matte black car, it looks a lot nicer than, like, the blue and yellow license plate or the ugly white and blue one that California is rocking right now.

So that looks nice. But the rest of it, who cares? It does actually match because that is a matte black Range Rover, which everybody around here seems to have. Yeah. No. See, it looks good on that. Yeah. Maybe I can get an orange one for my Jeep, for my little pumpkin. It must be in dark mode.

Well, a little more crypto news, Brian. Coinbase is laying off 18% of their staff. Yay. Yep. This is going to be across the board. Uh, for everybody, if this is, if you're, if this is, if your exchange will actually even survive, you know, we've got so many exchanges right now going tits up.

And then you've got like that idiot over at, uh, Kraken who's sitting there saying, why can't I say retarded anymore? Dude. Says the guy that I had to argue with for like fucking almost a year about. Hey, but I, I changed. Okay. You did change. I will give you that. Yes. I took a while, but Hey, I did.

I am now, I am now a proud member of Wokistan. We should send you into Kraken to, to train this guy up. Oh God, that would be fun. And here's, here's one that's, uh, taking your time. Uh, Rogan's, uh, COVID-19 controversy over at Spotify has finally got them off their ass.

And now they are going to form a safety council to rethink its content moderation policies. Take your time. Take your time. We've got monkey pox to hold us over while we wait for you. Can you like, you know, take, I mean, seriously, how long is it going to take? How we're onto our next pandemic before they even get off their ass to fix the Rogan problem.

Even by the time they form a safety council, what's it going to do? It's going to be about as effective as Facebook's, uh, independent council. Come on. Right. Because we all know that it's not in their best interest to censor anybody. They want, they want the free press. It's in their best interest to look like they're doing something for the common good.

Speaking of looking like they're doing something, Facebook has decided to enforce their ban on gun sales with a, believe this or not, 10 strikes and you're out policy. How many fucking guns do you have to sell on Facebook and get caught? 10 of them apparently.

Yeah. Had tipped a dark fire on discord for this one. It's like. Who came up with that number? Who decided, you know what? We're going to, we're, we're, you cannot sell guns on Facebook, but we'll give you 10 chances.

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Media candy. Media candy. So I finally finished Grace and Frankie. Spoiler alerts, but I seriously doubt anybody that listens to this show actually or watches that show because that's definitely a wife and I watching it together show. As I talked about the second half of the final season was absolutely abysmal.

The writing staff was horrid. They didn't move anything forward really with plot. They focused on secondary characters that weren't very interesting, but I will say they stuck the landing. The very final episode was very satisfying, and it even included a 9-to-5 reunion with a special guest part from Dolly Parton.

And so that was nice. So good job on the end. And I'm glad it's over. I'm glad. I like hearing of good ending stories. Yeah. It was a nice time. Because they're so rare. I know. And I finally broke the seal on Somebody Feed Phil. My wife and I watched the first episode of the new season, which is very short.

I think it's only five or six episodes. Four, I think. Delightful as always. Going to have to hold on to those. But which one? What city was it? I'm trying to remember what city it was. Was it Seattle? No. Because I watched half of one, the one that was in Seattle with Chef Shoda, because I really liked him from Top Chef.

Unfortunately, he wasn't in it very long. But it's one of those shows now, I'm saving it for when I'm really sad. Yeah. If I don't feel great, this is what I want to watch. Yeah. And I'm keeping it in the back pocket for that reason. Because there's so much stuff that I have on deck right now that is so dark.

So dark. I have gotten halfway through episode one of The Boys twice now. And I can't watch it right now. It's like you and Black Mirror. I cannot watch that right now. I'm having a problem with some of the other ones I'm even watching. So the one I saw was Madrid. It's the first of the new ones.

So, yeah. Okay. It was very good. But, yeah, I'm with you. I'm holding on to it. We're only going to watch it when the news is just so dismal that I can't handle anything else. I know. Last night I was sitting down to prep for the show, and I'm like, I am going to sit down on my couch, on my giant TV, and I am going to watch – first I'm going to watch Star Wars.

Then I'm going to watch Star Trek. If you'd have told me this 30 years ago when I was watching Next Generation on an 8-inch CRT in my bedroom with bunny ears, I'd have been like, no way. But it was fun. Both of which were excellent again this week.

Man, I'm loving Star Trek. I'm loving Star Trek. It's so good. It's so good. Yeah. I'm not as – well, we'll talk about Star Wars in a minute. But I'm not as bullish on the Star Wars. I know. It's good, but we'll talk about it. Anyway, I finished Barry Season 3.

The finale came out. Ooh, that was a crazy season. Really good. Really, really good, but crazy ending for sure. Umbrella Academy Season 3 is out. Putting that in with the boys, like shifting that off to the side because that's not really a happy show either.

It's kind of the same show, isn't it, to some degree? No, not really. I mean, the boys is really, really, really graphic. Okay, so the Umbrella Academy is the PG version of the boys R-rated.

Well, the boys is like triple X. I would say the umbrella is a hard R. Okay. There you go. I mean, okay, the first scene, the first superhero scene in the boys, a guy shrinks down and climbs into another man's penis to get him off.

Okay? That should tell you where the boys is. Yeah, that's not on my list of watching anymore. They are going to a whole new level of gross out. I mean, this is – Seth Rogen and his partner did this with Preacher, too. It just got to the point where it was just so over-the-top nasty where it's like – but, I mean, it comes from the comic books.

It was probably all in the comic, but, yeah. Brian, and this one's going to shock you, maybe. I've been watching For All Mankind. All right. On the more joint. Yeah, I couldn't get past the first episode a while back. I couldn't either. Yeah. Yeah.

I sat down with a friend of the show, Fogarty. We couldn't find anything mutually that we were at the same spot to watch because he's got a wife, so you have to take that into consideration when they're watching shows together. So we found something that neither one of us had really seen, and we tried it. And two nights and five episodes later, we like the show.

We really like the show. Hope he has a plan. I don't care. I really just don't care. It's a good show. The writing is really well done. It's more of a character show than it is like a space show. There's some space stuff in it, for sure, obviously. But that is kind of secondary to the main plot where the Russians go to space first and land on the moon first.

What's really cool, and this is what I really like about this, is that – so when you and I watch things about the space race, we know how it ends. Kind of like Obi-Wan. Now, what they did with this show was they took out – you know, they took out the definitive ending.

So now, for every launch, you don't know if they're going to make it or not. The actual – it's like living through the space race again. It is so much fun to like, like, are they going to make it? What's happening? You know, because nothing is written anymore. I like that aspect of it. I like that aspect of the alternate history side of it.

And the cast is great. The writing is great. Yeah, season three just came out. I don't know if they're going to stick the landing because it is Ron DeMoor. But he does have two other people to hold him accountable on this one. He is not the only creator. All right. I'll wait until you're done with it.

Oh, you're going to – you're probably going to hate it. So that's fine. So a little bit of news. Apple TV has got the rights for every MLS game for a decade starting in 2023. After their debut of Friday Night Baseball, they're pushing further into live sports streaming.

Now, I don't – do you recall if I talked about my experience watching Apple's Friday Night Baseball? Because they did have a Dodger game once and I had to watch it. Do you remember? I don't recall this. Well, I will briefly recap just in case I did talk about it. It was the worst fucking sports coverage I've ever seen in my fucking life.

It was horrific. Was it just the color commentary was bad? The color commentary was bad. They basically had somebody on who didn't even understand the game of baseball. How you have a commentator who does not understand baseball and prefaced a lot of things with – This may sound like a stupid question, but – Yes, it is a fucking stupid question if you're watching a goddamn baseball game and you're asking about the fucking rules.

Okay, that's kind of bad. And in addition to that, the commentators being horrible, they were pushing gambling so hard, sports betting. They were running gambling statistics in the crawl. That's fucked up. Really? Yes.

What the hell's up with that? I don't fucking know. We can't have tits on Apple, but we can have gambling. Get your priorities straight, guys. Well, first off, like, that should be illegal. You shouldn't be – like, kids are watching baseball, and now you're pushing – you're basically saying, and you can gamble on it too, kids, and we're giving you the stats in real time.

Nice. Great. Anyways, it was – I – you know how your blood went red on Twitter the other day and then my phone blew up? My blood went red, red when I was watching their coverage of the baseball game, and it was just – it made me so angry, and it's so not Apple.

The one thing that it had going for it is it looked beautiful. I would hope so. Isn't it, like, in 4K? It's in 4K, and then all their chyrons and everything is exactly Apple. It's the – it's like watching it on your MacBook Pro. All the icons designed beautifully.

You can watch all those gambling statistics beautifully. Like, it looked wonderful, but, God, the coverage just got awful. So, this does not bode well for my enjoyment of Major League Soccer, which will be basically the only place to watch it. There will be no restrictions or regional blackouts, which I do like because MLB Network does regional blackouts, which is bullshit if you're paying for MLB Network.

And you will – it's not part of just Apple Plus. You will have to subscribe to an additional MLS streaming service. So, good luck with that because MLS is getting more popular, but it's hardly what I'd consider to be popular. But if it's the only game in town to go see it, I suppose they will do somewhat well with that.

Yeah. I mean, they got them because they – you know, it wasn't – it's not the biggest. Yeah. So. Exactly. And then I saw this story and I just thought it was hilarious. I am beyond my Coachella and music festival going days. But drug-laced pee seeps into rivers near music festivals and threatens rare eels.

Okay. So scientists at Bangor University in Wales collected water from the White Lake River in Somerset following the UK's Glastonbury Festival 2019 and found worrying levels of both MDMA and cocaine in the water. Yoo-hoo!

That's a party! Yeah. It was detected at environmentally damaging levels, according to the paper, while levels of cocaine were high enough to impact the local population of European eel, a dwindling species that's critically endangered and at high risk of extinction. Unfortunately for the eels, cocaine doesn't provide much of a buzz.

Instead, it results in muscle damage and disrupts their complex life cycle. Kind of like it does with humans, too. Yeah. Well, you know, also makes you make really bad decisions. And then I saw this article, which I just threw in here. I'm not really going to talk about it much.

It was a great read. And it's everything that's wrong with the world right now. It's over at The Guardian. No talent required in the new and lucrative era of the gentleman amateur. This one specifically talks about how celebrities are getting into the art game and the children's book game and everything else because they're fucking celebs, which is what we were screaming about with podcasting maybe five or six years ago.

Like, you're stopping people that actually have skills within that arena just because you have an audience that's built in already and everybody wants that because they know it'll sell. That's it. That's the article. But it's quite funny. The Winklevoss twins performed a Rage Against a Machine cover in New Jersey.

Did you watch any of it? Yeah. What I found... I mean, obviously, them playing Rage Against the Machine after laying off a lot of their staff is offensive. But what's even more offensive is how fucking bad they are. Oh, they're terrible. They're absolutely terrible. Tops and doodads.

I got a new doodad, Jason. I don't do that very often. What'd you get? I got the Google Nest Protect, an incredibly expensive fire alarm. Is it neat? It is neat, actually. It really is. You know, I've got a Nest for my thermostat and all that, and the people that sold our house, like, cheaped out.

They obviously had some nice fire alarms and all that sort of stuff, and they ripped them out and just stuck up the ones that are battery-powered and are gigantic warts on the wall or on the ceiling, and I hated them. So I was like, you know what? Let's give it a go. I'll buy one. I have five fire alarms in my house, so we'll just do the one, and, you know, it's a multiple-level house.

It's going to happen. So let's just do the one on the main floor because I want that one to look nice because we've made our main floor look really nice. That's where guests come, blah, blah, blah. Installed it, hooked it up, works beautifully, looks nice. There's some nice features to it.

I like the fact that it's app controlled, and I can connect it to my whole smart home system and all that sort of thing. My number one feature on it that I like, though, is it's got a little nightlight built into it. So once it gets dark, it's got a motion sensor. If you walk underneath it, it lights up a little bit, just enough.

Not enough to, like, blind you or anything like that. Just enough that you know you're not going to walk into a wall or anything. Is that justifiable as $150 instead of a $40 fire alarm? Well, it's on sale right now for $119. Oh, there you go. Still a lot more than a normal one.

But it's neat, Jason. Hey, man, I cannot fault a man for having neat tech. I'm not going to buy five of them. I guarantee you that. But I might buy, like, one more. That was my next. Yeah. I might buy one more for the bedrooms. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm not getting five of them.

But it's also got carbon monoxide sensor in it, too, which is, you know, nice. You feel safer, I guess. I would put one on the top level, too. Because that would be just me. Yeah. And then the next thing you know, I've got five of these stupid things. You're going to get five, Brian. Just eventually. I know.

I know. Yeah. Oh, well. I saw this in the news as well. And this is pretty awesome. U.S. Navy develops weapon that could make it impossible to speak. If you're a frequent Zoom caller or, dare I say, podcaster that has had some internet problems, such as we have, you'll know the single most annoying and disruptive occurrence is the dreaded echo.

Hearing your own voice played back to you with a slight delay is irritating and renders it impossible to talk coherently or do a podcast. And the Navy is aware of this and is using it to make a non-lethal weapon that makes it almost impossible to speak. This new device, called the Handheld Acoustic Hailing and Disruption, or AHAD, system, uses a long-range microphone to record your voice before powerful speakers replay that speech on a slight delay back to the individual.

How cool is that? It's so simple, but so annoying. So effective. So effective. Yeah, it says the delayed feedback inhibits the ability to control our own voice. Some may begin stammering. Some may stop talking altogether, while others will begin to distort their speech.

You and I have done that when we've had bad connections. Hundreds of times I've had to deal with that. Yep. I've gotten really good at fixing it, but weaponizing it is genius. Yeah, pretty cool. And then I saw this, and I thought this was hilarious. Report reveals half of Japan's businesses have yet to ditch Internet Explorer, which is basically no more as of yesterday.

They've ended all support for it, so that's it. Internet Explorer is officially dead after its, like, 25-year run. But a bunch of companies in Japan have been holding on and dragging their heels and have a whole bunch of systems that only work in Internet Explorer still. Things like handling employee attendance and expenses, order handling, etc.

And over one-fifth of respondents didn't have a plan for how to move their businesses onto alternative browsers, such as Edge or Google Chrome, because they're too cheap to pay fucking programmers. Well, they get what they deserve. Yep. Here's my list of Amazon purchases this week, Brian.

Shit, Jason bought. Just a few of them. I got a Bosu balance trainer. This is one of those half-ball things you see at the gym. Oh, yeah. When I was doing physical therapy, I was on that all the time. Yep. I signed up for a gym. I've got a trainer. I go once a week. And I did my first session last week, and when we were done, she pulled out the ball to see if I could stand on it because my balance is so bad.

I got on the ball, and I felt like I was back at home. It was so weird. The muscle memory from being on a skateboard just kicked in. I can't fall off of the thing. It's weird. I can't walk in a straight line, but I can stand on that balance ball for like an hour. That's good. Do they get to the point where, like, with mine, I was standing on it, and then they were like, stand on one leg now, and now I'm going to throw a baseball to you, see if you can catch it, and all that sort of stuff.

We started out with squats, but the problem with the squats at that point, this was at the end of the workout, and I totally blew out my quad, so I couldn't walk for two days, which sucked. But, yeah, I really like this thing. It's $150, the original, and I picked up a couple more Elgato key lights.

I found them over at Amazon. They have renewed versions of them for $60 off the normal price. The upside of this, too, is there's usually more of these in stock than regular Elgato key lights because they sell out so often. But I got them. I opened them up. They look perfect. They were renewed.

They do have a warranty and everything. So, hey, man, refurbs, when you're on a budget, they work. Yeah. I've got one of these, too. Not for me. My wife uses it because she's on Zoom calls all the time. But, yeah, she loves it. I was going to say, you don't need it for anything.

I also got the new Anker USB-C charger, 735 charger, Nano 2, 65-watt, PPS, 3-port, fast, compact, foldable wall charger for MacBook Pro, Air, iPad Pro, Galaxy S20, S10, Dell XPS 13, Note 20-10+, iPhone 13, Pro, Pixel, and more for $59.99.

This is kind of the new upgraded version of the nano charger, the USB-C nano charger they had, which I have three of those around my house because they're amazing. But this new one has ports, has three ports, as a matter of fact, has a USB-A and two USB-Cs.

It's pretty cool. You can actually charge your computer, your phone, and your AirPods all at the same time. Nice. $59.99. I replaced some of the outlets in my house with outlets that have USB-C and USB in them. And, my God, that's convenient. Yeah.

Yeah, those are good. We've got a bunch of those, too. But for fast charging, I love these things. Like, for overnight charging, we use the, you know, the wall-based USBs because it's like, who cares if it's fast? But for phones and stuff, for during the day, you just come in, you plug it into one of these for, like, I don't know, say, a poop.

Just plug it in while you poop. When you're done, you've got another 20%. They're great. I finally finished my book, Jason. I can't believe it.

Woo-hoo! This is having a full-time job, a podcast, and a kid will take you a much longer time to read books than it normally did. But in my defense, it's a very fucking long book. I finished Shards of Earth, the final architecture book one by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's a sci-fi author I've read a couple times and I've enjoyed.

I did not realize I was getting into his magnum opus by purchasing this one. I thought it was just another sci-fi book, but wow, it's big. It's a lot of world-building. It took me a long time to get into it because I wasn't so much digging the world-building and I wasn't into the characters.

But I kept with it because I was like, because I'm OCD that way with books, I have to finish books. And about halfway through the 700-some-odd pages of this book, it finally clicked for me and I started to really enjoy the story. So it took forever, but the journey was worth it.

Unfortunately, now it means I have to read the final architecture book two. But apparently there's only two of them, so we'll see. Talk to you again in another eight months. Is the second one out already? Yes, it is. Okay. It is. Okay. Yeah, the first book, 558 pages. No, thank you. It was a journey.

Yeah, sounds like it. Yeah. Sounds like it. Let's see how long the audiobook is. The audiobook is going to be 18 hours and 43 minutes. Nah. Yeah, it wasn't groundbreaking and it didn't wow me enough to say, yeah, it's worth it.

You have to go for it. But I mean, I'm happy I read it. I'm glad I made it. But yeah, don't, don't. It's a lot. At least let me finish book two and see how he sticks the landing. Okay. Okay. I got a book called The Year Under the Machine by Peter Danielson.

He's a Swedish author. And I bought the original version on Kindle because to get the hardcover, you actually have to send money to Sweden and he will send you one back. Right. So I got it on Kindle. I absolutely loved it.

It is very short sci-fi. It's kind of hard to explain without actually giving away a lot of the plot. But what's cool is on each page, it's only like a paragraph on each page. There's 52 pages. So it's not a lot. 52 text pages.

And the rest is artwork. He did these paintings, these black and white paintings, acrylics. And they're in the book and they kind of like, you know, they're kind of like Rorschach-y. What was cool, I found out, was that he had them for sale. You could buy the paintings. And the paintings weren't that much.

They were 200 bucks a pop. I tried to buy a couple of them. And so first I bought Painting 42 because I liked it. And nope, got a note back. Somebody beat me to it. I'm like, okay, can I get 26 or 27? No, somebody beat me to those after the other one, which I should get priority for because he screwed me on 42.

Just saying, amateur. But I do like the book, so I ended up ordering two hardcover copies because it's really good. A lot of the stuff that it goes through, it's trying to explain. It's kind of an alien, people disappearing type of story.

Okay. One of those. Well, the only thing I'm thinking right now, Jason, is you got to get in early and tell them that you want NFT for 42. Actually, what I did, Brian, was I just actually right-clicked and saved the image of the painting of his website. I just lit some money on fire.

Yeah, that too. So this is an example of uncanceling, actually, because I found out about this book through Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations newsletter. Now, Warren Ellis, if you will remember, was canceled not too long ago because of some shenanigans with some lady fans, and he disappeared for like a year and a half.

And just out of the blue, came back and said, I'm back, kind of like Louis did. So I think the new norm is just, people are just going to uncancel themselves. Yeah. You go away for a little while. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I do got to say that Warren Ellis' book, Normal, was awesome.

It was four parts when I got it, like four small Kindle singles. You can get the full book now, and you can get the audio version as well, except it's written by John Hodgman, or read by John Hodgman, who, like Adam Savage or Will Wheaton, would completely take me out of it.

Right. You know? Yeah. Skipping that. But here's something I thought about. It's like, okay, I almost bought it just to have the book in one format. And I'm like, how many times do fans rebuy shit from people? We talked before about the Army of Darkness DVDs, how there are like six people.

Physician, heal thyself. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm just trying to figure out, like I'm looking at Neil Gaiman fans, like does he have an army of fans? Or does he have like six people that just buy everything seven times over? Of which you're one of them. Because I have bought pretty much everything he's done seven times over, so.

I mean, fucking copies of Sandman I have? Jeez. I mean, I've done that with music, but we've had that rant before. It's because at first I had the album, and then I had the cassette, and then I had the CD, and then I had the MP3 album, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah. Now you pay to stream it.

Yes, exactly. 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, well, not really finally, he's also the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. But now he has joined Control Loop, where they talk about IoT, where the S in IoT is security. Welcome back, Dave. Hello.

Good to be back. You just giving him that one for free, Jason? I stole that one from one of the Twitch shows, so. Ah, gotcha. Yeah, not mine. Steve Gibson, I think, coined that one. But I'll give it to him. Sure. So, Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan, we're out though, Obi-Wan.

Let's go. Have at it. One to go. I know. One to go. Down to one. A lot more going on on Tatooine than you would think for somebody who kept the same surname and hid out for 15 years. Yeah, well.

Yeah. I have to say, the last episode I enjoyed very much. There was lots of action, lots of fun. It was good. It was fun. Good times were had by all, for me and my family. Lots of willing suspension of disbelief when it came to some glaring plot holes, but I'm willing to do that.

Which plot hole would you be referring to? Oh, spoiler alert, everybody. Would it be the, we kill all Force-sensitive people all the time, everywhere, and here's a really strong person in the Force who used to be on our side and turned against us, and we're not going to kill her. We're just going to leave her there, and she'll survive.

That plot hole? Yeah, yeah, there's, right. It's sort of the old, I guess that's the old James Bond thing where, you know. The sharks are attached to strings, and I will now walk out of the room. Right, exactly. I will assume that this person is dead, because what other possible outcome could there be?

Yeah, there was that. There was, my favorite was, you know, basically sending Leia up into a server closet. With no tools, with no, you know, just to kind of figure things out, and okay, sure, whatever, fine.

Yeah. But it's fun to see Darth Vader at the height of his powers. That was amazing. Yeah, to really see what he's capable of. I don't know. I think we all kind of rolled our eyes a bit at the decoy ship that was able to escape.

Like, oh, that was convenient. My eyes fell on the floor. They rolled so hard. Yeah. I read a really good, interesting article about something that actually ties in very well with this segment, talking about how Bail Organa is supposed to be this master diplomat slash spy who has the worst OPSEC ever known to man by reaching out to Obi-Wan and mentioning the two children.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I know we're not supposed to talk, but let me just kind of throw this out in the subspace. Hey. Right. Right. Yeah, there was a lot of that. I'm really wondering, like, how are they going to wrap all this up in one episode?

I know. It's a lot. They got a lot to finish up. I'm still hoping that we're going to see Leia cross paths with Darth Vader so that we establish that relationship. We establish that she has discussed with him, you know, that she doesn't take him seriously.

I think that would be a nice way to inform some of the things she does in episode four. But there's still time. Season two. Season two. Yeah. I did enjoy the sort of interleaving of Obi-Wan and Anakin having their little sparring.

It did make me wonder when Jedi's of that caliber spar with each other, are they using fully live lightsabers? Because it seems to me like that could go bad in a hurry. And do we know, is it possible to set a lightsaber on stun?

Sure. You know it's all made up, right? So anyway, Brian. You know what's an interesting Rorschach test among sci-fi geeks is what things we're willing to let pass disbelief filters and what things we get hung up on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's true. It's true. Yeah, sure. I'm down with the force anyways, but what about these lightsabers? Sure. Right. Well, can the lightsabers basically function as like tasers where if you get hit by it, it just stings a lot, but it doesn't actually cut off your limb.

I just figure, you know, this is a good way of weeding out bad Jedi. When we're sparring and I kill you, that's on you. You obviously were not one with the force enough. Yeah. Do they let fighter pilots go out with live ordinance when they're dogfighting each other from, you know, and Top Gun and all that kind of stuff?

I don't think they do, but I don't know. It's something I thought of. Yeah. But I'm in. I'm enjoying it. Overall, I'm enjoying it. I've seen several people say that they feel disappointed by this series and I'm not – I don't agree with that. I'm having a good time.

I think it's an interesting exploration. I'm really happy that we have these series. I'm happy that this is not a movie because I think having the breathing room and not – this – having this series not have to make $100 million on its opening weekend I think allows you to have story things that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do.

There's not as much pressure. I've thought about that a lot because my favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo and I think about how much I would have enjoyed a six-part, eight-part limited Han Solo series. Rather than the movie and now knowing that they've done the movie and they will never go back and revisit is disappointing to me because I would have killed for a Han Solo series.

That would have been great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree. So, thumbs up. So, Dave, I would like to bring you into a segment that we usually have called Apps and Doodads. But we're bringing you in today because there were a couple things that I thought that you might be interested in.

Okay. First up is the Syntec USB-C to USB adapter pack of two C male to USB 3 female adapter compatible with MacBook Pro 2021, iMac, iPad mini 6 slash pro MacBook Air 2022 and other type C or Thunderbolt 4 slash 3 devices space gray for $9.99.

I guess we should mention the part of fun of the segment is the insanely long, you know, descriptions from Amazon products that we must read in full. Yeah. Okay. So, here's the deal with this. You know, everybody's got their dongles for USB-A to USB-C, usually the Apple one.

Right. I've got one of those around. And I was desperately in need of another one the other night. And I'm like, okay, let's just go buy one. And the Apple ones are expensive. These are five bucks each and they're tiny. It literally just sticks on the end of the USB-A and plops right into the computer.

I use them for various things. These are awesome. Everybody go buy these and put them in your backpack because you will need them at some point. And that 10 bucks, trust me, you're going to thank me at some point. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It seems to me like they're small enough that you could just leave them on your – small enough and cheap enough that you could just leave them on your USB-A devices and just let that be that.

That's what I do. I do have the addition of a small piece of black electrical tape to make sure it doesn't fall off. Oh, okay. When you're pulling it in and out of the computer, it's not so much the actual converter itself, but some old USB-A plugs get a little loose.

And like the USB-C can stick in the computer and then you pull it out and the A comes out, but the adapter is still in the computer. So a little electrical tape to perma-add those to some devices works really well. Yeah. What about the footprint of this as you plug it into the laptop itself?

In other words, could you get two of these side-by-side in your MacBook Pro? Yes. The width on these is exactly the – or it's a little bit wider than a USB-A just because it has to fit a USB-A. But it's maybe like – I don't know. Maybe a millimeter on each side bigger than a USB-A.

So they're pretty cool. They're pretty, pretty cool. I will be ordering a bundle of them. Awesome. And I don't know why I got these. I was just feeling a little hacky the other night. I got 50-piece 215 NFC round cards, 25-millimeter 1-inch NFC tags, N-tag 215 chip blank PVC coin card, NFC coin cards, enabled mobile phones and devices for $18.59.

So these are little – they're black. They're very thin. They're the size of a quarter. But you can program them to have little things on them like URLs or things like that. The reason I found out about these was I was listening to – I think it's Mac Geek Gab, the show that we're actively pimping right now, the Mac show.

One of the guys, they programmed one of the disks, put it next to his charging stand. So when he puts his charging stand down at night or puts his phone down on the charging stand, it automatically triggers a shortcut to like change the demeanor of the lights in the house through the smart action and the shortcut, which I thought was really cool.

I thought that was neat. So I want to find out how to do it. So I bought these and I haven't tried it yet. But I wanted to ask Dave if you have any experience with these or I've seen them around. I do not.

The only thing this reminds me of is I was at an event a few months ago and there was a gentleman there who rather than handing out business cards, he had what I believe was an NFC thing that you could scan and you'd get all of his contact information.

Yeah. Does that track with this? Is that a capability this would have? Yep. This does it as well. So that's one of those. So how would that work? Basically, you just keep it in your pocket and wave it at somebody when they come by. Would the information be stored locally on this card or would it be referring you to a URL?

There's information stored on the card. It can handle, I think, what's, where's the number on it? 504 bytes is how much data that the storage capacity is on it. You can lock it, though. After you've programmed it, you can lock it and it can't unlock, which is kind of cool.

Huh. What I was thinking of, because I'm that kind of guy, go to a restaurant, find the QR code for the menu, take a picture of the QR code for the menu, make your own sticker for it, slap the NFC behind that, replace the QR code with your sticker with your NFC.

So when people hold their phone up to take a picture of it, you can then do something. For me, it was going to be open GOG.show because that's what I like. But because it would be funny if everybody that went to the restaurant was just turned out to be show fans all of a sudden.

But now that my master plan is out there, maybe it's not the best idea. But I'm just saying, it's cool. How to win friends and influence people. Yeah, I'm sure this will get us lots of new listeners. Very hungry listeners. Right, right. I would like a number 32 with shrimp, please. Also, a quick way to get banned from a restaurant also.

So don't do it at your favorite restaurant. I wouldn't go to a good restaurant. Well, we want fans of horrible taste. Hey, download's a download, brother. Download's a download. I don't care. So how do you interact with these things? How do you set them up? There's an app that you download.

I actually got like three different ones for my iPhone. And you just use the NFC reader and writer inside the phone to connect to the disks. And you can write the disks right there. Like I said, they're rewritable as many times as you want. But you can lock them. Okay. All right.

Well, I'll be ordering these as well. More toys. Wait till I test it first. Wait till I test it. Next week, I'll let you know if it's a bot. Well, I'm looking at here. On Amazon, it only has two stars. Why do you suppose that is? I have no idea. But I'm getting them anyway. I got them.

They're sitting in my room. Probably one in five works. Oh, there we go. It's only one review. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I have to test several times for the damn thing to work. Okay, yeah. Yeah, meaningless. Okay. All right. Oh, I like it. This is a project.

Yep. And these are waterproof too. So you can, I guess, put them in the john. I don't know. All kinds of possibilities. There really are. There really are. That's my shit Jason bought this week. Security ha edition. Thank you for costing me money. At least I can do since the, that software defined radio is still sitting in a drawer that I bought on your recommendation.

Through no fault of your own. It's just me. Right, right. It's right next to my Arduino. Yeah. Just, you'll get around to it. You'll get around to it. I learned my lesson after the Arduino. That's the only thing sitting on my shelf. Yeah. Mine is sitting there. Well, I have that, I have that really cool, like limited edition super mini Arduino that I still don't remember why I bought, when I bought, how I bought, it just showed up one day.

That was pre-stroke, Jason. That involved alcohol. Are you sure? I'm pretty sure. I put this one in here, Dave, because I want your opinion on this. Okay. We have done segments on the show before when old people had to get their COVID vaccine because a lot of times you had to go to the website for like the drugstore or the hospital or your medical provider to sign up and make your appointment.

Old people can't do it. They just can't do it. Either they don't have the tools, they don't have the wherewithal, they don't have the skills, any million reasons that they can't do it. And half the reason is because young people can't do it because they're so poorly designed. And I found the creme de la creme yesterday.

My roommate's mom is going in for cataract surgery on Monday, Monday or Tuesday. And so she's going through all this rigmarole, getting checked out, going to doctors, and then moves over to the surgical center where they're actually going to perform their procedure. Well, the surgical center has their own set of protocols that they want you to do.

So what they do is they send you, well, they text you incessantly and they email you incessantly to go fill out this form. It's like a 16, 17 page form. It's really long. We did seven pages of it and it like the progress bar moved like almost nothing.

Here's where it gets fun. So at the very top on the first page, it asks what you're coming in for and you can select cataracts. The second question is, can you see? If you check no, you still have to fill out the entire fucking form.

Right. Well, if you can't see, you can't even check no. Just to point that out. So I know. I know. And so what they do is to mitigate this. They say, hey, if you can't fill this out, call us. We will call you back and we will walk you through it. Here's our number in very small print.

Yeah, exactly. It reminds me of that old David Brenner joke about the restaurant that has a big sign out front that says we have Braille menus. Well, we used to until Jason got there with his NFC round cards. That's right. Right. Right. So we call them multiple times, leave multiple messages.

Nobody calls back. And we end up just having to go to the doctors and say, look, these people aren't doing whatever. Is there any chance we're going to get there? And they're going to say, no, we can't do it because you haven't filled out the form. They said, no, they'll deal with it there. And the other point that I get to is, wait a minute. All the doctors have this exact information.

Why are they not passing this on to the surgery center? I know that there are HIPAA laws, but this is for the patient, for the patient's procedure. Why can't they do that? Oh, Jason, Jason, Jason. Anytime you talk to any customer service, like, you know, what's your name?

What's your address? What's your phone number? What's your account number? Now I have to transfer you to somebody else. What's your name? What's your address? What's your account number? I'm in your system. Why do I have to give you this information again? Because they want you to hang up and not bother them anymore.

It's as simple as that. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. And I have this fantasy that this is something that, you know, somebody like Apple will get to the bottom of with their health app, where you'll be able to, you know, fill out your health app once.

And then whenever you go to the doctor, the same way that you pay for things with Apple Pay, just click your phone and it'll transfer all the relevant information. And that'll be that. And maybe there'll be one or two things that you need to fill out additionally, but, you know, whatever.

I mean, it seems like we could do this so much better than we do. And there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of progress here. None whatsoever. Yeah. I will say just sort of related to this, I had a doctor's appointment earlier this week, just kind of a routine sort of med check kind of thing.

And as part of that, my doctor always gives me probably half a dozen sheets of paper that are just, here's a summary of today's visit. And it says, you know, these are the prescriptions you got and here's your blood pressure and here's how much you weigh and all that kind of stuff. Here's what we think about you medically.

And what I've started doing is using the document scanner functionality that's built into the Notes app on the iPhone to automatically scan all that paperwork. So I've created a medical folder in Notes.

I scan that paperwork. And for those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Notes app has an amazing document scanner. It OCRs everything. So it's searchable, very easy to use. And so I've decided that rather than trying to keep track of all that paperwork, I'm going to put it all in Notes.

It'll be searchable. It's in iCloud. And hopefully that'll lead to greater convenience for me. And I won't have to remember quite as much as I do today. Until your iCloud gets hacked. Well, there's always that. But I think that's a fine example of optimizing for your demise because now your family can have access to that and they don't have to go find the paperwork and it's searchable.

I'm a fan. I'm going to have to do that myself. That's what I'm hoping. And, of course, I'm putting my trust in iCloud to protect the data and so on and so forth. But I'm OK with that. That's a risk I'm willing to take. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I don't think you're a target for the fappening three.

So I think you'll be OK. Let's hope not. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's Dave's medical records. Click, click, click, click. Right. It's his body mass index. Good God. Good God. He's really let himself go. Yeah. Now, if there's a fappening, then you're in trouble.

But, yeah. That's true. That is true. That's true. I just got my BMI done this week and they told me that I – did you do one of those things where you stand on it and you hold the handles and they kind of give you the whole body breakdown? No, I'm familiar with that.

In fact, I have a scale. I have a bathroom scale that has little electrodes on it that tries – it sends some signal through your body to try to figure out your body fat percentage and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, this one was – So I'm familiar with that.

This one was really cool because it actually broke down how much individual body parts weigh. Now, don't get cheeky. It actually told me how much my individual legs and arms weigh. Is that not the weirdest thing?

So I am – That is weird. I walked out of there with a certain pep in my step. There you go. So the one thing that was – One at a time, sir. One at a time. Yeah, one at a time. My right arm and my left arm are symmetrical and they said they don't see that almost ever because my legs are off – because everybody has dominance.

You have dominance on one side. Well, it's been your longstanding switch arm per jerk-off policy. It's really paid off. Always, always, dude. That's what I'm telling you. Uh-huh. Yeah. So yeah, because after the stroke, I have to do everything symmetrically to make sure that everything stays in line.

And it actually worked. So yeah, my left arm is 8.86 pounds and my right arm is 8.8 pounds. The legs have a much wider variance. But this thing is really cool. It's called an in-body scan. If you guys ever see them at your local gyms or whatnot, ask to get one because it's pretty cool because it tells you how much weight you still have to lose, tells you all of your different types of muscle fat analysis, obesity analysis, things like that.

So it's cool. It's called an in-body. Huh. I will look for that. So in an effort to have at least one security story per week on the show, I have included one this week. This is from Wired. It's written by Matt Burgess and it's titled, Cops Will Be Able to Scan Your Fingerprints with a Phone.

So basically this is about the progress of contactless scanning of fingerprints. Of course, we've been talking about this for years here of people taking high resolution, just plain old photographs. Yeah. Of people, someone who's waving and being able to scan their fingerprint off of that.

And it seems as though there was a competition that NIST had recently where they're looking for some of these biometric improvements. And one of the areas was contactless fingerprint systems. So you can hold your hand up and they'll use a smartphone to take a picture of your hand and they'll get your fingerprints that way without any ink or without any physical contact or anything like that.

And I suppose it's inevitable that this was the way this was going. Of course, there are privacy issues that go with all this sort of thing. But I was curious, do you think this is a lot of nothing or just more of the same? What do you guys make of this? It's more of the same to me.

The interesting thing to me is that they're able to kind of work with the variants because I don't know about you guys, but my fingers stay a lot more steady if I'm pushing down into something like the glass or whatever. If I just hold my hand up a couple inches over a camera, they move around a lot more.

So they're obviously able to overcome that kind of variance to get a clean scan. So that's cool. It's probably a light in it that just lights up your hand so they can get a higher shutter speed. Right. That's what I'm guessing. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and the thing is now, like once we figure this out, how long is it till we have drive-by fingerprint scanners like we have license plate readers?

You know, and where can you put these? I was going to say, what's the use case for that? Hackers trying to figure out – here's what I'm worried about. Hackers trying to figure out everybody's fingerprints and creating databases and selling those databases, basically poisoning the well of any kind of fingerprint biometrics.

Well, I mean, it is almost like a wake-up call to the idea of using your fingerprint as kind of a secure standard for anything these days. Like I can see uses for this in a very non-secure sort of way. Like this is your new tickets to entry for a concert or something like that.

You can just have your fingerprint scanned and that's matched to your – you don't have to carry a ticket anymore. Great. Awesome. Why do we need a driver's license anymore if you can just do this and all that sort of thing? But it does kind of remove any sense of like real security to a fingerprint. Yeah, I think they're going to have to definitely do more analysis on the hand itself because, I mean, look at Amazon right now.

They've got that hand scanner that you can basically hover your hand over it, no contact, and pay for certain Amazon convenience stores that are out there. So they've already – I mean, that's privatized tech that's already out there. It's been out for – I think that's been out for at least over a year, maybe two.

They're probably closer to a year because I think they rolled it out early because of COVID. But anyway, that stuff is out there. I suppose if I had one of the front doors that does fingerprint recognition to unlock, I'd be rethinking my purchase at this point. But that's pretty – that's forward thinking. Yeah, but I mean, I think the first time that we ever heard about this was at the Chaos Computer Club and they had a picture.

What was it? Was it like Angela Merkel or something that was holding their hand up and somebody shot it with the DSLR? I think that was the first one. Yeah, that's my recollection as well or something like that. Yeah, yeah. They did it at one of the CCC conferences because it was cool.

It was really cool. And it was just like, oh, that's a problem. You know, it's like biometrics are a problem. But I think if they start doing more things around, you know, geometry of the hand and not just a fingerprint, they might be – it might stave off the uselessness of biometrics a little bit longer.

But I don't know. I see biometrics as just the clock is ticking on that. So basically thinking of like face ID but for your hand where it's taking a – it's a 3D mapping of your hand, I guess also and including the fingerprints but also the actual structure of the physical hand itself.

The lines in your hand, length of your fingers, length of the joints, you know, the difference. Like how they do kind of gait recognition with walking because everybody has their own unique gait. Your hand is going to have a unique signature as well, not just the fingerprint. Also, I think with like ultraviolet or infrared, whichever one, they can get a map of the blood vessels under your hand too.

So you should be able to do a pretty comprehensive one from that. But like I said, I still think that that's technology that has an expiration date on it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I have this week, gentlemen. Always good to catch up and I will talk to you next time.

All righty. Woo! Over at Patreon, we've got Jocelyn and we've got Tony with a message that says autopilot indeed, built in deniability as a feature. Designing the autopilot program to shut off less than a second before impact so your company can deny it was the cause of the impact is simply epic.

That is actually kind of epic. I got to give them props for that. Come on. That's pretty good. Yeah. We weren't in control. Anyways, over at PayPal, we've got Miles, Sherry, Linda, Natalie, Dag, Edward, Tom, Michelle, Ramsey, and Nathaniel. Thank you so much. And over at our tip jar, we've got Andrew, Linda, Mario, Sean, and Theodore.

Thank you. And a shout out to all of our listeners over on Discord. We've got, I just, half the show was links that you guys sent in this week, so much appreciated. Thanks for all the links and the memes. Memes are my favorite section on Discord, I got to say. And big thanks to Podcast One, Jordan Harbinger, and Ryan Holiday, and some of the staff over at Podcast One, Steve, Alistair, Sue, and of course Kit, for having us out for the show.

It was much fun. Much appreciated. And sadly, I have a closing shout out to Mike Haggerty. I guess they called him Hags. Turns out that he was a character actor from Second City. If you saw him, you'd know him. He was in Overboard and a bunch of other stuff.

He was in a new show that was on HBO, actually. But he died very suddenly, and I didn't know. And our mutual friend, Brian, was like, I got to go to a funeral and awake and all this stuff for my friend Mike. And then he started to explain it. I'm like, wait a minute. I know that guy.

I didn't know he was dead. He's the guy that we got really drunk with one night with Cole Meaney and him at Fogarty at Coaching Horses. And he was one of the nicest guys. So it's very sad that Mike is gone. Bummer. 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 558.

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