560: Wankpuffin

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, I'm coming to you today from the offices of the West Valley Podcasting Company. The WVPC. Or just West Valley Podcasting. We're going to go with WVP. I did get WestValleyPodcasting.com and I tried all the other ones, but the problem with West Valley, if you use that as just an acronym at the beginning of WV Podcasting, most people will think it's probably West Virginia.

True. And I know I'm far away from Los Angeles, but I'm not that far. Might as well be. Kind of. Kind of. They are. They are. Actually, you could probably get to West Virginia faster if you're on that side of the hill. Just go to LAX. Right. You can get there faster.

Most likely. Yeah. So it's been a fun week just unboxing, unpacking. I'm posting videos on socials. So if you want to see how it's going, everybody can go there. I'm at JPDef on the Twitter and JPD on the Instagram. You picked a really good week to be super busy and not just doom scrolling.

I'll give you that. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of like that side of things. I'm just kind of, you know, off doing my thing. It's amazing how hobbies and everything else gets put on the back burner when you actually have a business to get going. Like, I am so far behind on everything, but it's great.

It feels good. It feels really good. Well, I'm glad you're chipper. You keeping busy has kept you in a good mood. I have just been in doom and gloom mode. I'm, what, two hours now into my son's summer break. I'm already losing my mind. News is unrelentingly bleak everywhere.

I've gotten bad personal news. I am ready to pack up and get out of here and have a change of scenery. So excited about that. And then at some point I'll come see the WVPC. Just the WPV. Whatever. Just the WPV.

Not HPV. That would be bad. Yeah. I want to avoid that too, especially since there's, you know, no healthcare. I am in the Valley, so you do have to be careful. True. And speaking of you getting out, we are going to be off next week. Yes. So we are actually recording right before the holiday, which is kind of silly.

Well, it's actually- Everybody else took it off, but- It's actually the holiday here. It is Canada Day today. Yes. I was going to say it's Canada Day up there. And I don't know if you saw the podcast news, but Canadians listen to more podcasts per capita than Americans. So get on it up there, man. We need more fans.

Come on. It's got to be easy now. You should be able to throw a rock, hit a bear, and have the bear press play on a podcast player somewhere, right? I'll work on that. I think we should go more for the beaver community. Okay. Beaver or Bieber? I know they're both big. True. Sadly.

Not a fan of either. What do you got against beavers? Come on. They never did nothing to nobody except, well, knock out the internet and cell phone service last week. There you go. I found this on, I can't even remember where I found this, but it's really funny. It is called compound pejoratives on Reddit from butt face to wank puffin.

I have to say, if my son were a bit older, this would occupy him all summer. It's going to occupy me all summer because when I saw wank puffin, you had me at wank puffin. Come on. This is great. It says, I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes, collectively affixes, that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds based on a scan of Wiktionary's English derogatory terms category.

The terms covered a wide range of domains, including scatology, political epithets, food, body parts, gendered epithets, and animals. This is awesome. I could just sit here and look at these graphs all week. It is one of the best things I've ever seen. Come on. Wank puffin. Wank puffin is awesome.

Butt waffle. I mean, come on. I'm going to say that to my kid later today, and he's going to laugh for about three hours straight. Yep. Butt waffle is pretty good. Yep. Butt waffle is pretty good. Speaking of butt waffles, we've been having some trouble at the house with AT&T, of course, because they're AT&T.

Do you not listen to John Oliver? No, I don't because I can't get it because the HBO fucking app sucks. So the problems are irrelevant. But we actually had a rep call back to the house because this is my roommate's issues, not mine. Thank God.

I've got my own AT&T issues. So this woman calls back and she sounded like early 20s and she kind of went down everything with my roommate and said, this is what's happening. And then my roommate was like, no, that's absolutely not what's happening. This is where they screwed up, blah, blah, blah.

And she's like, okay, let me break this down for you. Here's the TLDR. And then went through it point by point. And I'm like, did she just say, here's the TLDR? Yep, she did. And she was awesome. She was awesome. This is somebody who is a, you know, a unicorn inside of AT&T.

Even when they were done, my roommate said to her, you should be president of AT&T. And I concur. I absolutely concur. We found the one good one. You've got the digital natives starting to come up in these companies and they know how the stuff works. I know.

I know. It's pretty good. I got the TLDR. You know what acronym they won't know though? What's that? RTFM. In the news. Well, I came up with this line because I was thinking about it being the 4th of July and Independence Day and all that sort of stuff.

The layoffs are coming. The layoffs are coming. Where now? Where now? As we have been predicting. Here they come. Tesla reportedly lays off 200 autopilot employees and the latest round of job cuts taking place at that particular company. They are everywhere right now. This one's like a double whammy good story for us because not only are the layoffs that we have been predicting coming, they're in the autopilot division, thus pushing self-driving cars back yet another 20 years.

Well, since autopilot doesn't technically exist, do those employees technically exist? Not really. Is there actually a real layoff here? If we open up the Schrodinger autopilot box, do we see anything? Are they alive or dead, Jason? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. So at the start of June, Elon told employees in the company-wide email he had a super bad feeling about the economy and that layoffs were coming.

He later told Bloomberg he planned to reduce Tesla's salaried workforce by about 10% over the next three months. This admission came after Musk told remote workers to return to the office or lose their jobs, a good way to make people basically give up their jobs and take them somewhere else, thus meaning he doesn't have to fire them.

Yeah. And then here we are. The layoffs are coming. So they're coming in a lot of places. This is just the funniest story that I found about it. So as far as layoffs could be funny. Yeah. I heard a couple of them today that I was just like, wait, they're laying people off and I forgot to write it down.

Yeah. Never forget to write things down. Well, you know, just fire up the Twitter machine and you'll see reports of layoffs. Speaking of Twitter, is he still on that Twitter jag? I think everybody's sick of it, so I don't see it in the news anymore. He is not. In fact, he has not tweeted in so long that him not tweeting has now made the news, Jason.

There are articles everywhere saying that it's been nine days since Elon Musk tweeted, which is an especially long time, particularly for him. Nine days. Wow. That makes the news. Maybe he's over on Truth Social. Maybe. Yeah. Since their SPAC fell through, maybe he's going to buy them for cheap.

Who knows? So we talked about this a long time ago. Joe Sullivan. He was the former chief security officer over at Uber. He's the guy that paid off the hackers after they breached the company and stole a bunch of stuff and got busted for it.

Yeah. So he's finally going to trial now, and it's interesting because when Daria Khosrashari came in and was the new CEO, he didn't even tell him what happened and was just still trying to keep it under the rug.

So Dara kicked him to the curb, fired him. Surprisingly, he's been at Cloudflare ever since. Okay. Which is – I'm surprised that they took him in after this. Yeah. But yeah, there was $148 million that Uber paid out for the main breach after – even after this guy got his paws on it.

The hackers were – they basically pleaded guilty eventually, and now he's coming. He's finally going to have his day in court. It took him long enough. Yeah. These things take a long time, don't they? Yeah. So back then, he paid them $100,000 in Bitcoin.

So since then, that $100,000 has probably been worth $200 million, and now it's worth about $100. So I wonder where they're going to tag it in that case, if they're just going to keep it at the $100,000 when the actual offense took place. But the thing that I find interesting about this and what his case is probably going to be around is that the government is really crappy about how they're forcing companies to do breach notifications.

Yeah. So I think that's where he's going to hang his hat. That's what the article is claiming. That makes the most sense to me because this whole thing behind you're not allowed to pay ransomware thieves is kind of just ridiculous. It's like it's up to the company.

This is commerce. It's their problem. The government, for their part, they can do whatever the hell they want. They can say, OK, the government will not pay for ransomware, but private individuals with private companies should be able to do what the hell they want in my book. You'd think that. Well. No comment.

Let's just say the let's just say the government ain't making the right decisions that often. OK, moving on, moving on. Airbnb is permanently banning all parties and events at host properties around the world. It announced this follows a temporary 2020 ban and instituted on house parties to comply with COVID related social distancing restrictions.

This is an interesting choice. I'm surprised that they're banning it completely because some houses that are put up on Airbnb are primarily made for parties, right? Yeah. I mean, quite a quite a few of them, actually. But I understand why nobody wants one of those houses in their neighborhood.

But some of these houses, again, like I said, especially like we've stayed at one in Palm Springs. That thing is made for a party. I'm also curious as to how they're going to define party, because what if multiple times during the pandemic, a family that we were, you know, basically partnered up with, we would rent Airbnbs and we would take both of our families there.

And technically, that's quite a few people. Now, obviously, it's kids and we were in bed at 10 o'clock at night, so it's hardly a party party. But what's the definition here? Like, you've got to get kind of specific about this sort of stuff. Yeah. When is a party a party? Yeah. I don't know.

But they're banned. I don't know either. I haven't been to one in four years, so who knows? Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they actually enforce this. But they do. I think they do have hotlines that people can call. They do. Like, go get to the neighbors saying, okay. They do. If there's a party, call the cops.

And it's not like they can stop the party, but they can take, you know, suspend your account or remove you from the platform, so then you just sign on with a different name. Yep. Yeah. Good luck. Whack-a-mole. Yeah, really whack-a-mole. So have you been paying attention to how many launches SpaceX has had this past year so far?

Quite a few. Not directly, but we have a mutual friend that posts about every single launch all the time, and so I see them that way. There's quite a few. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot, and there's just going to be more of them as these other companies come online, and maybe somebody else is online that we don't even know about thanks to that rocket into the moon that nobody can quite figure out this week.

That's a hell of a story. That is a hell of a story. Where the hell did it come from? Noah is doing a little bit of research right now about all this space travel and how it's affecting the environment, and it's not good news right now.

No, no. And it's going to get worse. It's going to get worse. So right now, we're putting in 1,000 tons of basically rocket poo into the atmosphere every year. It's soot. It's basically just soot from the engines themselves. Yep. Well, they're projecting that it's going to be about 10,000 tons not very long from now just because we've got so many launches going.

Thank you, Elon, for blocking out the moon and the sun. Remember, Jason. Starlink. But remember, Jason, it is up to you as an individual in the West Valley to limit your carbon footprint because that fucking matters compared to this.

Oh, it does. It does. Yeah. So we're going to see this. Hopefully, you know, they'll come up with cleaner burning rockets, but they've already, I don't know how they're going to do that. They've already got them burning pretty clean. So I don't know how this is going to play out. But pretty huge leap in technology to do anything about this.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Because it's not so much how much is being put into the atmosphere because, I mean, you look at how much is, you know, out there already. This is like, you know, this is nothing, but it's where it's being put, you know? Yeah. It's being put into the upper atmosphere, which is bad.

Yes. Very bad place to leave shit. We had to stop using Aquanet because of this. I know. They ruined the entire goth and punk rock scene. Exactly. To save the planet. So now we're just doing it for internet access, I guess. Great. So keep an eye on that and hopefully they'll, you know, I'm sure that there will be carbon credits that people have to buy, which is, you know, just another big scam.

Maybe they'll just buy an NFT and shoot that into space. Yeah. They'll make a carbon credit NFT, put it on the rockets. Yep. Okay. And in the wake of some of the decisions made by the Supreme Court recently, Amazon is now limiting sales of Plan B and other emergency contraceptives to three units per customer in the wake of increased demand.

So as soon as the overturning of Roe versus Wade happened, a huge spike in sale of Plan B and other generic brands of morning after pills took place. Rite Aid is also capping both online and in-person sales of emergency contraception to three per customer. Walmart has a more generous limit of 10 units.

So if you're particularly Randy, head to Walmart. Target limits online sales of Plan B to six orders per customer. Now, you know, this is just this is kind of a bit of a stupid story. It's all going to go away. This is this is hoarding toilet paper as soon as the pandemic hit.

This is a crazy much. Yeah. I don't even know how long these things last. Probably quite some time anyways. So, you know, I mean, I get it, but it's a bit of a silly story. Yeah. I mean, these are the kind of things you don't want to hang on to for too long because, you know, drugs do tend to lose efficacy over time.

And this is kind of one that you want to work. So get at it, people. Use them or lose them. Seriously. I mean, Jesus. People are fucking like bunnies out there. So get to it. Whatever happened to condoms, Jason? Condoms were such a staple of our early lives. Oh, they're so gauche now. You just know.

I guess not. Everybody's raw dogging it. I guess so. I guess I guess, you know, STDs and AIDS don't really matter anymore. Nope. They're just not hip anymore. So passe. So Facebook is on the abortion pill issue. They're on it like flies on shit because you cannot post anything about abortion pills and mail without getting them taken down.

Interesting how well their systems are working for this. Yeah. Yeah. There's another story going around about this kind of something similar. Brian, I believe you've seen that. Oh, yes. Well, the guns. An interesting thing that I've been seeing on Twitter that people have been doing comparisons between how quickly a post about abortion pills gets taken down versus guns, which do not seem to get taken down.

Plus, they had their whole rule about 10 strikes and you're out for guns, but zero strikes and you're out for abortion pills. Interesting policies. It is interesting policy. And and, you know, the policy is you're not allowed to, you know, pimp or request any kind of pharmaceutical through the mail.

Right. That's that's that is in their policy. It's been in their policy. So they are sticking to their policy on this, which honestly, I think is a good thing. OK, because it's open to. OK, great. In a perfect world where everybody told the truth and everybody was looking out for everybody else.

A, we wouldn't have this fucking problem. But B, we wouldn't have Facebook. We wouldn't have Facebook. Yeah. So, I mean, how many how many times are people going to get, you know, fake pills, fentanyl pills? You know, people will die because if if this was allowed to stand, people would take them up on it.

They would die. So what they're what are they going to do? They're just going to move to TikTok or they're going to move to Snapchat. They're going to do it over there. Yeah. So but look, I think I mean, I agree with you. It's a good thing, but I would like to see some sort of consistency here. That's all. That's all I'm asking. I'm sorry, but it's not going to happen.

But you know who else wants consistency? The Swedish, because the Swedish also asked Facebook, hey, do you guys keep a lot of our sensitive information like, you know, on our medications, our illnesses and oh, dare I say our sex lives? Well, turns out these these radio hosts are radio reporters, Swedish radio reporters.

There's something that rolls off the tongue. They created a fake pharmacy and populated it with fake visits and to make their make their data and they showed that Facebook does actually keep data when people come and put in different things that they're not supposed to put in.

And basically, Facebook is saying, hey, that's your responsibility as advertisers, not ours. I'm like, huh? What's up with that? I don't quite get that. It's Facebook being Facebook. We're just a platform is what they're saying. Except for when we decide to monitor things and decide which things can be on our platform and which can't be on our platform, then we're, you know, not so much a platform.

OK. Yeah. Here's the long and the short of is they don't care about you in Sweden. So they don't really care. And they even asked the head of head of policy for Sweden, Jan Evelind, Elvind, how it works. He's like, I don't know. Let me ask about that.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. It's like, I'll get back to you. I'll get back to you. I don't know. He literally says, I can't answer that. I cannot say how it works as I do not know the technology on that level. Says the head of policy. OK. Maybe, maybe, I don't know.

RTFM? Right. I guess. But there isn't an FM anymore. So, you know. No. There you go. I saw this one. I mean, these are dime a dozen stories these days, but this one's particularly funny to me. Axie Infinity is back open for business following a $625 million hack.

It's a cryptocurrency pay-to-earn game. Why anybody would be doing this anyways is beyond me. The hack took advantage of flaws in the Ronin network and the Ethereum sidechain that the game's owner, Sky Mavis, propped up to facilitate faster transactions. They've decided to come back, and they will continue to use the Ronin network, even though that was the base of all their problems.

And this is why people suck. So. Anyways, they began reimbursing victims of the hack, but they didn't account for Ethereum's drop in value over the past three months. Which means that users would only recover about a third of their losses in all their returning $216.5 million in funds to users after a $625 million hack.

So, buyer beware, I suppose. Yep. Yeah. It's going great. Yep. Everything's going great. Oh, that's what those rockets were that crashed into the moon. Exactly. A bunch of bored apes that finally got off the ground. It was just a Bitcoin sign on it. This is another old story, but I love this.

Gene Lavoff used to work at Apple. He was the former senior director of corporate law and corporate secrecy. I wonder if he had advanced information of certain things. I do believe he did. I do believe he did, Brian. I wonder if he followed the law about not using that information for personal gain.

Turns out he didn't, Brian. Oh. Turns out he didn't. Yes, he's finally copped to it. So, that's the news now. Oh, God. So, he made $227,000 in profit and avoided paying $377,000 in losses by misappropriating non-public information about Apple's financial information.

Not bad, but I would argue that that amount of money drop in the bucket to the stuff going on with NFTs and cryptocurrency scams. Oh, definitely, definitely. But, you know, this guy was – okay, here's the deal. This guy was the senior director of corporate law and corporate secrecy. That comes with a pretty substantial paycheck, I'm guessing.

Yeah. It is Apple, right? Yeah, it's Apple. You'd think? I'm sure he's making – he was making wonderful amounts of money that he could have just invested himself regularly and would have been completely fine. Yeah. No, I mean, and these are trades from 2011 to 2016.

Over five years he made this money. This seems kind of like a drop in the bucket compared to what he was probably making. So, this is just greedy. This is a greedy fuck. It's greedy.

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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy Alex wrote in saying, sorry to hear about your HBO Max app woes, but one thing I commend

them for is keeping the continue watching list consistent right at the top below their featured stuff, unlike Netflix and Hulu, which always seem to keep pushing it down further. I would agree with that, except I tend to get more than your average amount of lost connections with HBO Max, probably because I have to use a VPN to get into it, but I don't have that issue with Paramount Plus or any other streaming networks I connect to, and the continue watching list never, ever, ever remembers where I was in a show if a connection is lost.

Ever. It's so frustrating. Yeah, I've had that. It is frustrating. Their app is terrible. Their app is terrible. It is. It is just terrible. I started just using the browser app, you know, just watching it on my laptop because it works.

You're so millennial. I know. I know. I am joining the woke generation. So I saw an article about Roadrunner, the Anthony Bourdain documentary. Yes. Because it is also now finally on HBO Max. Yes.

It's interesting because the filmmaker Morgan Neville says, I made the film to get people to start to see him as a person again. His suicide really kind of messed a bunch of people up, most of my friends and myself included, because it was so out of the blue. I tried to watch it and I can't.

I just, I'm not interested. I don't know why. I'm like 40 minutes into it and I just, that was after three attempts. Two attempts, of course, being because HBO Max sucked and kept booting me out. But I finally got to 40 minutes in and I just, I've discovered that I just don't give a shit.

I finished it. What did you think? Was it, is it worth it? Or is it just, I don't know. I have a hard time with this one. It was, it was, it was a difficult watch. I was really sad at the end, which, you know, given everything else going on in my life right now, I didn't need at all.

Um, I, I personally would probably, I would tell you, wait a few more years, get a few more, uh, get a little more distance before you watch it. Uh, it's good. Uh, it was wonderful seeing him again, a lot of footage, a lot of behind the scene footage. Um, you really realize why you miss him so much, at least at the beginning, uh, the end gets the, the last, you know, last half hour is you, you kind of understand where he was not in a good place at all.

Uh, he was taking it out on people. You see, you see him basically losing the plot. Really? Um, it's sad. It was really sad, but, uh, God damn, I miss him. Yeah. I think I'm just going to stick to reruns. Yeah. I'm just going to watch reruns of this show because I don't, I don't really care anymore about behind the scenes stuff.

You know, I liked what he produced. I don't need to really dive into the, the man behind the scene. The one thing I did particularly enjoy was, uh, so many of the people that worked with him for so long talking about him, uh, about the good parts, not the bad, because they got to the later bits.

But, uh, you know, so if you watch the first 40 minutes, I think you're walking away at a good point. Yeah. That's what it feels like, you know, cause he's, he's on the rise. He's getting ready to start, uh, getting into TV and I'm like, you know what? I got enough. I got enough. Yeah. Good time to stop. Yeah. Uh, speaking of good times to stop Westworld season four is out at least episode one.

Uh, I watched it. I don't know if you did Jason. Nah. What do you think? Hard to tell from a first episode. Cause I don't really know where they're going to go with any of this, but it just all feels like diminishing returns and the, the, the interest of the show I felt was entirely the first season.

And since then it's just been getting worse and worse and less and less smart and less and less interesting. And I don't care. I just, I watched the whole first episode and I just don't care. Okay. See, I don't, I didn't care. So I could, I skipped the first episode.

Yeah. I'm with you. I think the first season was the best. Yeah. That's what it was all about. It was about like what's going on and, and, and, and all that. And now that they're out in the real world and I just don't care. Yeah. No. And it's a whole new team now.

So I just, I'm not going to invest in it. I'm invested in enough stuff already. Right. Uh, which I, the Orville is something I'm definitely invested in. And it turns out that there is a, um, an episode that they decided not to air and they turned it into a novella that is going to be released soon.

So hat tip to, uh, proudly resents on Twitter for sending this our way. Yeah. I, I am loving this series so far. I've watched the first four episodes. I started number five last night, but here's the thing about the Orville. They're long. They're like, they're like stranger things long, an hour and 15 minutes long, which isn't very long when you think about it.

But that extra half hour from a normal TV episode is like watching almost two episodes back to back and ain't nobody got time for that. You know, I, so I have to break them, break them into parts, but I really, really do love the season of the Orville. It is hard to watch that though, because I watched strangers or not strange things, uh, strange new worlds first.

Then I watched the Orville and I'm like, oh, brain hurt, brain hurt, confused, confused. Cause they've got, they've got some, uh, aliens, uh, the krill on the Orville remind me a lot of the dominion in, uh, DS nine.

So it's really kind of hard, really kind of hard, but I don't know. Hey, was a strange new worlds. Was that the finale this week? I don't, it certainly felt like it. I, I was going to look it up and see, I hope it's not because that's, that was what only the seventh or eighth episode nine, which is an odd number to start.

Literally not, but it's also a strange number to stop at. I think there's more, but it certainly did feel like it could have been a season, uh, a season ender. So I hope not because I love it. Yeah. I mean, we, we, yeah. I mean, we said goodbye to two cast members this time.

So that was, I, so I felt very, very much like the end, uh, but damn, that was a good episode. It was, by the way, I have a new, like major celebrity crush, uh, nurse chapel. I, oh my God, I love her.

I mean, that, but I mean, I loved her from the instant she set foot on screen, but that's not hard. Yeah. Uh, she's pretty awesome. Um, oh, and by the way, I got to say the Gorn, I think they kind of, they kind of screwed the pooch up. The Gorn really reminded me of reptile from the first mortal combat movie.

It was, I'm not so sure about the retcon on the Gorn. Couldn't they have just made another creature, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, but it's fine. Everything's fine. Uh, well, I was watching, uh, watching that.

I saw, or I, I just, for some reason this clicked in my head. I'm like, what happened to the Nevers? I mean, we all know Joss Whedon got canceled and got booted off the show, but is it ever coming back? And turns out it might be. Okay. I found a couple different articles because it's, it, there's an SEO trap that people do with any show that is waiting for a, you know, waiting for a renewal or, uh, an announcement.

There's a million articles that just say release date on it. Season X release date. Never has the fucking release date, by the way. Never. Never. It's all just SEO crap. This one doesn't either, but it's closer. Uh, they're saying that it's supposed to be, uh, sometime in 2022.

They are, they, they went back to film, so I guess it is going to happen. It had great ratings. I love the show. So fingers crossed. It'll be back soon, but this will be back soon. And this really makes me happy. Cinerama Dome is coming back along with the Arclight.

Yay. Only the Hollywood Arclight. Yay. Which is good. Cause that's the only one that counts. Yes. That is the only one that counts. So they got rid of basically all of the other Pacific theaters and Arclight locations, but they did keep the, the, the crowning jewel and they're going to end up calling it Cinerama Hollywood now as the, as the entire complex.

Uh, but they got a liquor license for two bars and a restaurant. So dude. I have seen so many movies there. I'm excited. I am too. I really want that to come back. I will go over the hill if they bring it back. So, and now that I'm clear from COVID, I am definitely going to get off my ass and I'm going to go see Maverick this week.

Now that I can go to the, I got two months of crazy time. So I'm going, what am I going to do? Some people go to Cabo. I'm going to the movies. Cops and doodads. Since I'm getting ready to travel and I'm trying to reduce the amount of things I'm carrying with me and one can always use charging cables.

I placed an order sent to my mom's house that I will pick up when I get there of, uh, my favorite charging cables of all my multi-USB fast charging cable are spirit four and three a charger cord connector with dual phone slash type C slash micro USB universal port adapter compatible with cell phone tablets and more four foot two pack.

I love these cables. I use them everywhere. This looks like a great cable, except that it's USB-A on the, I guess that's probably good because you can plug it into anything. Exactly. This thing plugs in anywhere. I can use it for everything. It is amazing.

I have, I have three of them in the house here. I will have two sitting around my mom's house. It's just fantastic. Particularly since so much of my kid's stuff doesn't use, you know, uses weird ass connectors that nothing else uses like micro USB. So it's amazing having all this stuff around. Oh, I am, I'm, I'm, I'm adding two of these to the computer right now.

Yeah. You should probably have these just hanging around your office. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I've got, I've, I have a complimentary charging station set up, so this will actually make it much easier. Yep. Cause this does have everything. It's got everything. It's got everything. You will never not have a connection.

The great thing is I use this. I use one of these pro tip. I use one of these for my Apple doc that does my phone and does my watch and does my AirPods. And then because it's got the extra Apple charger, iPad charges right there too.

It's amazing. Oh, this is great. Yeah. These cables are awesome. That was okay. Ordered. Ordered. Yes. Okay. What's next? What else can I buy? Well, Snapchat has a new product, Jason. Snapchat plus. Fuck. No. It's a new $4 per month subscription for passionate users.

Now that doesn't mean it's, that doesn't mean you get adult. That doesn't mean you get boobies. Different kind of passion, Jason. Different kind of passion. People that really love Snapchat. It offers exclusive experimental and pre-release features. Let me break down that press release for you.

You can pay to be a beta tester. At least Twitter blue, I get an undo. Yeah. Come on. You don't get that. Well, maybe. Could be a beta test. Who knows? Could be. You don't know what you're going to get, but you're giving them four bucks. Ripped off is what you're going to get, I'm guessing.

That's exactly it. You were talking about NOAA earlier, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They may have some more use, or may be able to detect all those rocket launches a bit better now because they've announced Tuesday that they have effectively tripled their supercomputing and therefore weather modeling capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing systems built by General Dynamics.

This is a $505 million contract. Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage. Sounds like my next Mac. Okay, $505 million for this project, right?

Yes. For these two supercomputers. Yes. That's less than the hack that we just talked about for the Bitcoin shit. I know. That brings into focus how stupid money we're talking about in this crypto NFT space. Yeah, it's insane, right? Yeah, $505 million could actually get you something.

Yeah, it gets you something. Two supercomputers. Good. So what these actually mean for the average American, they explain, is they are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events, more accurately track the intensity forecast for hurricanes. Both in the ocean, they're expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times before they do.

Useful, particularly given climate change. What do we get for our fucking $600 gazillion in cryptocurrency? A goddamn monkey, JPEG. People doing real shit makes me happy. I like seeing this. That's good. I ordered a new webcam. I know. It's weird.

It's 1990. I know. I know. Well, here's the thing. I have this Mac Studio here on my desk, which does not have a camera. I've got a Logitech plugged into it right now. So if I have to do just quick webcam stuff, I can.

But Logitech webcams are garbage. I'm sorry. Everybody has them. They're fucking garbage. Even the Brio is garbage. And they're not cheap. You know, what, that Brio that you have that I originally bought was like $200. Yep. Right?

It's supposed to be quote unquote 4K, my aching ass. It is just, it looks like shit. So this is the Opal C1. And I found out about this because Casey Neistat got one, like when they first came out, they've been locked down.

They're really hard to get. And so I signed up for the list, Jesus, in December. So six months ago, I signed up for the list. Yesterday, I finally got my order code. Thank God. So they're $300 plus tax and shipping.

So I paid $338.24 for it. And you're like, wow, that's an expensive webcam. Well, here's why. It's got a 4K Sony sensor. It's actually made of aluminum, which is nice. It's tiny, but it has a ton of speakers and it does a bunch of AI shit with your voice to make it actually sound decent.

You can do gestures, which is really cool. You can do like pinch and zoom gestures in the case. The camera will see it and zoom in or zoom out for you, which is cool. If you give it the peace sign, it'll sign off. Neat, right? Neat. I just want a good looking, good sounding webcam.

And I think this is going to fit the bill. Okay. So next week, I'll be able to, no, two weeks, we'll have a test. Hey, by that point, you might even be here. You can check it out. But I have to say, this is all a run-in since I don't have it yet, but this is a run-in to say, I love ShopPay.

Have you used it much up there in Canada? What is ShopPay? Might not be a thing. It's Shopify's, basically, shopping system, like their payment system. I do use that. All the breweries that do delivery around here are built in with that, and it's fantastic. Yeah.

You just put in the, it just texts you a code. You put in the code. Boom, everything's done. Yep. It's awesome. And I got the app, and the app sends me alerts, and it tells me when shipping is actually shipped, you know, because my Opal had shipped yesterday. No, it didn't. It shipped today.

You know, we've talked about this ad nauseum. They actually did ship it properly. I did get tracking, and actual tracking from the shipping vendor, not the, you know, your item is shipped, and it's going to sit in our warehouse for six months. Right. So, but man, ShopPay is awesome.

It is so convenient. And that alone, just the convenience of that makes me not care that it's not coming in next day or whatever, you know? It's kind of like, it's Amazon for patient people. Right. But I will say, just, you know, it's hella good.

There's no doubt about that. But Shopify really screws the merchants. How so? They're just expensive. They're crazy expensive. But they do a lot for you, so. Yeah, it's true. It's all about what you pay for. Nothing's free. One quick question about the Opal C1, circle back to that.

Is it, are the gestures modifiable? Are they built in? Because I know you. I don't know. You don't do a lot of peace signs. I think you need to be able to change it so you flip off the camera and it turns off the video. But then half of my calls would get turned off in the middle. Probably for the best. Because I'm flipping off the person. Probably for the best.

If it could run on a delay so it could preemptively know that my middle finger was coming up and just caught it out of frame. It needs biometric sensors and it can tell your stress levels. That's what it needs.

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. I got a quick follow-up here on Peter Danielson's The Year Under the Machine that I talked about.

And Peter had sent me my physical books. They are gorgeous. And what is cool is he actually got a photo print of the piece of artwork that I tried to buy and was denied because somebody got to it first. And he sent me the high-res scan of it.

He's like, here. Because he thought I was serious when I was joking about taking it off the website. Right. Because we were joking about NFTs. So he sent me the actual like a five-meg TIFF of it. Nice. So I'm like, that is classy. That is classy. So go buy his books.

The link will be in the show notes. The book is awesome. And the physical version is just gorgeous. It's small and gorgeous. So love this book. We are back again this week 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 the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. And the new control loop, where they discuss industrial stuff and gadgets and things like that.

Yes. I forgot your acronyms. I forgot to write them down. Good to be back. Yes. ICS, industrial control systems. Such as the Supreme Court. Yeah. Boom! All the stuff that keeps, yes, all the stuff that keeps civilization running, as they say.

Well, I've got a target for you here. It's Disney, because Barrett writes in saying, well, that's not good. And the new Star Wars Rise of the Resistance ride. Apparently some of their industrial control systems could use some fixing, because it seems to break down quite often. I've heard that.

Well, let me interject as somebody that basically lived at Disneyland for many, many years, from probably 10 till about 16 or 17. Rides break down all the time. And the more complicated the rides get and the more that they rely on computers and automation, the more they break down.

So this is not terribly surprising. Okay. Yeah. Seems excessive, though. Yeah. I will say, you know, I recently found myself with some work travel with a day to kill in Orlando. And rather than going to Disney World, me and my coworker went to Universal.

Yeah. Because it was easier to go to Universal. I didn't have to reserve a day ahead of time. And I was afraid of this very thing happening. Like, I have not been to the Star Wars land at either of the Disney parks. Neither have I.

Which is insane. Right? It's insane. I am a frequent Disney attendee. My family loves going to Disney World. But the combination of COVID and everything else, we have not been there in a while. And it kind of breaks my heart that it seems like Disney is making it – you've got to really want it.

Like, they're making it really hard to go to Disney World. It's demand, though. I just don't get it. It's hardly Disney's fault. Like, what are they going to do? Like, they're already letting in so many people that you're waiting hours for the peak rides. Like, there's just so much demand. I'm in the same boat as you. Right. I have not been to Star Wars land.

I lived – my mom lives five minutes away from Disneyland. Five minutes. I could rock there. And I have not gone due to the combination of COVID and then just the demand and too many people. Like, we've gone to Legoland. We've been to other parks with the kid.

The kid has not been to Disneyland yet. We're hoping to rectify that over Christmas break. But again, it's like we basically have to decide now and sign up for a day, which is insane. So, what do you think of the idea? I've seen some people float and they say that Disney needs to build another park in Middle America.

Like, stick one in Texas somewhere to take some of the load off of particularly Florida. Oh, I 100% agree. But it's just such a massive – like, even if they started now, it would be done in, what, 10, 15 years? Like, it's just – I've watched those – Disneyland was built in a year, Brian.

You should watch those documentaries. Disneyland was built in a year. Well, yeah. Start to finish. A year. A year. I know. But the Disney World was not. I know. Disney Paris was not. There's great documentaries on Disney Plus about all those parks being built. They're fascinating. Yeah. But, yeah, I think we need – obviously, there is more – there is enough demand to have another park.

I get why, you know, when you're coming off something like COVID and pandemics and then you hear about monkey pox and, you know, if you put all this investment into a park that sits empty for two years, you're, like, a little gun-shy, I suppose. But the demand is definitely there for Disney. There's no doubt about it.

They should sell NFTs. That's true. I think they do. That'll do it. That'll keep the coffers full while we have downturns. Come on. Little baby Yoda NFT to the moon. To the moon. Yeah. It's just – there's no off-season anymore.

You know, you can't – we used to be able to plan trips around off-season and not fight crowds, but I don't think that exists anymore. No, there's no such thing. Definitely. So let's move on to some news, I suppose. The FCC commissioner – well, one of them – is urging Google and Apple to ban TikTok.

TikTok is not just another video app. That's the sheep's clothing. That's what Brendan Carr wrote in his tweet, along with a copy of the letter he sent to Apple and Google asking the companies to remove TikTok from their app stores. So this is all the same stuff. This is – China's getting all your data, which, you know, they are.

And even the move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is probably not going to stop China from getting a lot of data, which they are. But nobody seems to be all that concerned about it anymore. Carr was the letter's loan signee. It doesn't look like any other FCC commissioners are involved. So thoughts?

Should we be more concerned about TikTok? No. What data are they getting? People dancing? Location, probably. I guess location. We found that out with Strava. You know, you could have the most benign little app that sends back the worst data that you can glean things from.

But, yeah, I personally just don't care. It's TikTok. I don't care. But, you know, I'm probably in the wrong. Dave, set me straight. Well, no, I don't think you're in the wrong. I think, sadly, any of the information they're getting from TikTok, there's probably half a dozen alternative ways that they could get the same information if they wanted to.

So TikTok may just be convenient for them to own, you know, own the whole thing. The other thought that crossed my mind when I saw this story come by was where does it put Apple where, you know, Apple had all their stuff's made in China?

So is Apple in more of a sticky situation than, say, Google would be where Apple is really reliant on the manufacturing base of China? Yeah, they have to be much more political. Yeah, Apple has a Kobayashi Maru for sure. I think, yeah, this keeps coming up.

And the fact that there was only one signatory on it kind of says, you know, what it really is. This is probably somebody who didn't read the original news from a couple of years ago. It is finally getting caught up and they're like, oh, my God, the sky is falling. The sky is falling. No, it's not. No, it's not. I think TikTok at this point knows that I like Jeeps and boobs.

That's about it. Well, I actually think the actual response is the sky is falling. It's just nobody gives a shit. Well, the problem is we're all looking down at our phones. So we don't see that the sky is falling down towards us. True. True. Speaking of TikTok, though, apparently they're having a problem with people doxing the Supreme Court justices on their platform.

They're playing whack-a-mole with that. Yet no tears shed over here. No tears shed. Oh, yeah. At least TikTok can be used for good, it turns out. Well, and then getting back to the whole data thing, there's been a lot of talk recently, just in the last couple of days about things like privacy or privacy, period tracking apps.

Well, relating to privacy, because since the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe versus Wade, Wade, weed. Don't take away their weed now. Don't take away the weed now. No. We have to have something left. Influencers, activists, and privacy advocates have urged users to delete their period tracking apps from their devices and remove the information from associated services, which is trickier than one would assume, because not every service has a way to get your data and make sure they delete it.

And as we often know, deleted means set visibility to zero. Abortion is now outlawed in several states, and data from such apps could be used in criminal investigations against abortion seekers in a missed period, or even simply an unlogged one could be used as evidence of a crime. So this article goes on to basically say, yes, but hold my beer, period tracking apps.

All your apps are doing this. So there's a bigger problem here, and this is really highlighting the need that we actually really do need some privacy laws and some legislation going on here about what kind of data apps collect, who gets to buy that data, who gets to access that data.

We need to solve this problem, and we need to solve it now. Well, yeah, I mean, I've seen stories that are trying to, I suppose, make lemonade out of lemons and say, well, what if the Supreme Court decision is the thing that kicks people into gear for some privacy things?

I mean, to me, that's sort of cold comfort. But I think if we start seeing states go after people for things like crossing state lines to go get abortions or health care or whatever it is that they think, or using some of this data.

As we've talked about here many, many times, I think when it happens to enough people in Congress where they're right, where it's their wives, daughters, sisters, whoever, mistresses, absolutely, who fall into this trap that they've created for themselves, just like we did with

video rental histories back in the day, they will quickly patch that hole, so to speak. But I don't know. It's interesting times. I would, yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man.

That's crazy. I don't. Yeah. It is. I'm turning into Kara Swisher now. We'll see. I don't know. We'll see. What do you think? What do you think? Well, I got a fun one this week. I got an email from OpenSea.

You are receiving this email because an employee of our email vendor, Customer.io, misused their access to Customer.io systems to download and share email addresses with an unauthorized third party. Impacted email addresses include those provided by OpenSea users and subscribers to our newsletter.

At this time, we believe that your email address may have been part of the Customer.io data incident. Please be extra cautious, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out, yes, they weren't hacked. They were basically somebody just kind of took away the goods.

There's a whole bunch of emails. I can sell these. Yep. Yep. 1.8 million users, as a matter of fact. So I haven't even made a purchase through OpenSea, but my email address is there because I've checked them out.

You know, I have an account. I was going to ask what, yeah, so, okay. What prompted you to create an account here? I was doing research for the show. And then at one point- We were going to sell a GOG one for shits and giggles? Yeah. We were going to do GOG number one, except, was it the Tech Meme Ride Home beat us to it?

And then I'm like, oh, screw it. If we're not the first, I don't care. Ah, I see. There was at least a little bit of, you know, juice by being the first person to sell, you know, a podcast episode. But I didn't care enough to put in the effort to be first. So that's why now I'm stuck with this.

Now you're stuck with spam emails for the next five years. Once again. Right. Great. Destination rears its ugly head once again. That's why I just, I don't wait anymore. If it's got to get done, it's got to get done now. Let's go. So, yeah, that's funny. I just thought it was a funny breach, as it were.

It is. Yeah. All of that, I didn't even get an ape out of it. I thought we would close things out this week with my favorite segment, which is Things Dave Likes. We should have a musical sting for this segment, don't you think? I'll work on one. Next time.

I'm thinking kind of game showy. I don't know what it would be, but. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Actually, I'm going to go through these in reverse order from the way I have them here in our rundown here, because I think that we'll save the best for last.

So, these are things I've been using in my day-to-day life, things I have purchased that I have found useful and I think worth sharing. The first one is I bought this little audio amplifier. It is a Fosse Audio BT-20A Bluetooth Stereo Audio 2-Channel Amplifier Receiver, Class D Integrated Amp.

So, this is a little tiny amplifier. Basically, I needed a way to power some speakers on my deck and previously, I had been running the speaker cables into my house, into a receiver that was inside the house and I thought, well, this is dumb.

I should just be able to do this through Bluetooth so that you can access it from your phone or whatever. In the end, we ended up using an old iPad that wasn't being used for anything else and now that is our outdoor deck music server through Apple Music. But, this little amplifier is, I don't know, under $100, I think.

It's 100 watts per channel into 4 ohms. So, it's really 50 watts per channel into 8 ohms, which is more common. But still, this little thing is about the size of two packs of cards and it has some punch. I am very impressed with it so far. It basically does one thing, just receives your Bluetooth audio and sends it out to a pair of speakers.

But for the price, for what it does, for the size, I'm impressed so far. This is one of those little electronic gadgets that somebody put together and I like it. Dare I say, this is 100%. Not only does it look like, but it is the type of sort of thing that one would go to Radio Shack for back in the day.

Yes. Yes. I could imagine this being a Heath kit back in the day. Right? So, my second thing on the list here is, so let me describe the problem that I had. You needed a month. I have a pair of – oh, don't we all?

Those of us who grew up in the 70s. So, I have a pair of Sony noise-canceling headphones. They are very nice. And on Sunday mornings, I go for a walk around my neighborhood. And while I'm out on that walk, I have a phone call with my best friend.

And we have a weekly appointment to have a phone call. We talk for about an hour and it's just a way for us to keep up and we've done this throughout COVID. The problem has been that my Sony headphones, the built-in microphones on them, there's like two little tiny holes on each earpiece, each can on either side.

And there is virtually no windscreen on those. So, anything resembling a slight breeze ends up sounding like a hurricane to the person that I'm talking to. And I thought to myself, if I'm thinking about a solution to this, it must exist.

So, sure enough, I went to Amazon and I found these little tiny wind muff stick-on things that you can get. It's two pieces. There's a little O-shaped piece of adhesive and you stick that over the little tiny hole and then there's this little tiny furry little muff like the dead cat on a stick from shotgun mics, but a little tiny one.

And then you stick that over it and sure enough, it gets rid of the wind noise. All right. Dead kittens for the wind. Now, the downside is, is that now my headphones look like they have a big pair of like hairy moles popping out the sides of them. But, lucky for me, I am at the age where I no longer care about looking cool.

So, I can walk around with my headphones having big hairy moles growing out of the sides and the functionality and comfort is more important than fashion at this point in my life. Getting old is awesome. It really is. You just don't care. I mean, no, you just, it just, you just loosens up and you can just be your authentic self.

And then last but not least, I have to admit that I love to have my back scratched. I don't know about you guys, but it's very soothing to me. It's one of the most soothing things in the world. And, however, sometimes my dear wife is not around to scratch my back.

She's very patient and, and is willing to do so when asked. But, sometimes if I'm somewhere else, I'm at work or she's not around and I have an itchy back and I have to scratch my back. So, I found this back scratcher on Amazon. And what makes this back scratcher special is that the part that scratches your back is made out of buffalo horn.

Now, buffalo horn is made out of keratin, which is the same thing that your fingernails are made out of. So, this back scratcher feels like fingernails, which I have to say is pretty darn delightful. So, you're saying that this feels better than the $45 Minnie Mouse one that, when we get at Disneyland, when one has placed their order to be in Disneyland six months from now.

It does. And, I will also say that it feels better than the 99 cent one that I got last time I was at South of the Border. Okay. Right. And all the, the Taurus Trap ones that, that you have as well. My favorite part of this Amazon listing is that someone in the Q&A part, someone says, where is the buffalo horn sourced from?

And the answer is, it is sourced from a buffalo. An organic buffalo or? Right. Right. So. Locally sourced buffalo. What are we talking about here? Right. Free range buffalo. Vegan buffalo.

Yeah. Organic, vegan. Antibody-free buffalo horn. Yes. For scratching your back. I find it disturbing in this, this Amazon listing that the, the, the muscular gentleman that they have demoing said back scratcher, they really should have shaved his back.

Well, he's really disconcerting. They shot this, these product shots before the back shaver product shots were the model for them. Right. Right. Right. Order of operations. Yeah. The daily rundown. They should have done that one first.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. So just a few things that I've found that are making my life a little easier. So check those out. Hopefully some of our listeners will find them useful as well. All right, guys, I got to run.

I'll see you next time. See you next time. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Joel and Mark. Welcome, guys. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we've got Thomas, Charlie, Robert, Matt, Jonathan, Matthew, Nicola, Judge, Melissa, Simon, Nikolai, and Thomas.

Thank you. And over at our tip jar, we've got Ashley, Adam, Anne, Alden, and a screw up the A-game, Mario. Way to go, Mario. It's always Mario. God damn Mario. Thanks, everybody, for your cash. We really appreciate it. And it keeps us going. Thank you all very much. And just another reminder, we are off next week.

So don't complain when there's no show and it's late because it's supposed to be late because we're off. Enjoy your summer. Yes, Brian is coming to the States for a, quote, unquote, vacation. I leave the country for a little while and everything goes nuts. I'm coming to fix everything, Jason.

Please do. Please do. You got your work cut out for you. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 560. And there you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

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, 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.