562: It’s Fuego Out There

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 in the fucking room. Oh my god, that is Brian Schulmeister across the table from me. It's kind of scary. You're wearing glasses like an old man now. I am an old man now. You're not drinking like an old man. I know. I'm drinking the non-alcoholic, what is it, Lagunitas Hop.

I'm drinking the all-alcoholic. That is all-alcoholic. I got you the old Rasputin, which was one of my favorites not long ago. I appreciate it. Yes, I am in, what is the cleverly named studio where the name just slips off the tongue and it's so catchy that I cannot remember the name of the studio now?

Well, that's good because it is the unnamed studio right now because I found out that somebody else had taken the name West Valley Studios. Okay. Porn shop? No, surprisingly not. Surprisingly not. It's a miracle. Yeah. They make most of that in Russia these days, don't they?

No, Chatsworth. You just got to go a little bit more West, about a block. All right. By about a block. I'm here in the studio. It's very nice. It is very nice, I think. We have a mutual friend. Yes, Mr. Brian Blondell is over in the corner there. Trying not to laugh too loud. Yep.

Should be easy. We're not very funny. Exactly. So it's funny. I wanted to throw this in for follow-up because since speaking of Mr. Blondell being here, we have a mutual friend who turns out, as we were talking about COVID, or we were talking about Disney last week, he had just gone to Disney that same day that we were talking about it, then came home and had his third dose of COVID.

So as someone who just got over it, and that time is ticking very fast, you're the last person I'm going to see probably from the outside world very shortly here. Yeah. The last time we were together and did a show, we went in lockdown for the very first time.

Oh, shit. So here we are doing a show together as cases rise. We just – okay. Yeah. Yeah. David Bowie was us. Now, did we just go to Planet, too? See you in two years, fucker. Shit. Where's the toilet paper this time? Oh, God. Yeah. I didn't show you the secret teepee room that I have here.

I'm not giving up all of my secrets. Well, let us hope history does not repeat it. Who are we kidding? This is America now. We're done. No more – yeah. Nobody's wearing a mask. We're going to strap guns to our fucking faces before we strap masks on. Yeah. Already done. Already done. I got a double Glocker in the car, so.

I have a feeling there's some heat in here somewhere. I know you. All right. Well, let's do a little more follow-up. The James Webb Space Telescope is capturing the universe on a 68-gigabyte SSD. That's it. He can't mine very much Chia with that.

No. We can't have space Chia. And that is the problem because they found out somebody is running a mining operation on the chip right now, so we're fucked. God damn it. But, yeah, basically it just takes a bunch of pictures, stores them, downloads them, on to the next. Yep. So, you know, that's fine.

Yeah. Hopefully there's a backup, some kind of redundancy you'd think. Well, yeah. You know. Our plan is to send Elon up. With the new Seagate. To replace it. He doesn't even need a rocket ship anymore. Have you seen his torso? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

That man is built like a rocket ship. He is. He is. Oh, man. So, yeah, the JWT, they're making NFTs. That's all it is. Okay. Great. Okay. What galaxy are you going to buy? I don't know. I don't know. But Russia is going back up with NASA, which is a really strange turn of events since we hate them right now because of, you know, that little kerfuffle in the Ukraine.

Yeah. Not the Ukraine. Ukraine. Ukraine. I know there will be emails. Where all our software comes from. Yeah. Your software will just stop working because you keep calling it the Ukraine. I know. Next time you try to clean your Mac, it's going to go, it's not the motherfucker. Yeah. So, these guys have been yelling at each other.

They were playing a game of ISS chicken for a while between NASA and Russia. Is this just we're losing the war? We could use some good publicity? I think so because that whole thing with, was it Dmitry Rogozin, which sounds very much like Joe Rogan. Maybe he's the Joe Rogan of Russia.

That's why we got the. It's the hair treatment that Joe Rogan uses. Okay. That's it. It's the one that he hawks. Oh, my God. So, he's out. And as soon as he's out, then NASA just decides to say, okay, you guys can hook a ride with SpaceX.

So, I'm sure this guy is really upset right now. But he didn't seem to be the calmest dude. He could definitely use some chill. Have you spent much time listening to Russian politicians? True. Dmitry people? Not a calm bunch. No, no, definitely. When you're weaned on vodka, chill is not in your name.

Unless your vodka is chilled. I put this next one in here for you because you have the kid who's big into space, right? And you're, you know, Mr. Moneybags. Sure. That's why I'm here doing this podcast. That's right. That's right. Got too much money. Well, you can use some of those ill-gotten podcast gains and buy Buzz Aldrin's moon landing jacket, which is now up for auction.

Pretty cool, but very expensive. Very expensive. $2 million for a members-only coat. Yeah. Take a pass on that. Yeah, it's an old used coat, too. But it has been on the moon. I'd want the whatever outfit he wore when he punched the guy that said that he never landed on the moon.

That's the outfit I'll go for. I found this one because I just had to put it in because of our love for statistics. We just have such a love for statistics. Research suggests that software piracy lowers poverty. This comes from Torrent Freak, one of our favorite torrent blogs.

What do they talk about? Piracy. So this is in their wheelhouse to talk about it. And it says, Piracy is a controversial topic, and research into the effects of copyright infringement is wildly debated as well. A new academic study adds an interesting angle by suggesting that software piracy might lower poverty.

While this is a plausible conclusion, there could actually be more factors at play. You think? All right. You think? Well, let's just kick this around the room for a second. I can see a world in which, if you were, say, trying to learn Photoshop. Yes. Especially back in the day, like perhaps two people at this table did.

Maybe. And you didn't have the two grand to buy the Photoshop package that you needed to be able to use Photoshop. And you realized that if you just took your root file on your computer and set it to Adobe not phone home, you could use the pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop to therefore learn Photoshop to therefore get a better paying job.

And hoist you out of poverty. And hoist you out of poverty. So then you can pay for the Photoshop. Then, yes, I can kind of understand that. Yes. However, Torrenting Debbie does Dallas Volume 15 so you don't have to fucking pay for Skinamax is not really what I'm thinking here.

No, that is probably not going to lift you out of poverty. Stealing Beeple's NFT is probably not going to do much for you either. No, it's not. But, yeah, scenario number one, quite plausible, I have to say. Mythbusters would give it the plausible stamp. We'd get a plausible. And next up, eggs are good for you again.

Oh, good. I had some for breakfast. In the news. Brian, the speed round went so good last time I thought we might do it again. Except none of these look particularly speedy.

Well, this one's quick. The Millennium Tower is going to fall over still. Okay. Everything they try and do to hoist it up actually makes it worse. So I'm thinking maybe they just call it a day and it might fix itself. All right. But I really do want to know, did they try turning it off and turning it back on again? Probably not.

And speaking of millennials sinking, TikTok is cutting jobs around the world, Jason. Oh, okay. This is happening everywhere, of course, and it's finally now happening with TikTok. Some TikTok employees have already lost their jobs. Others are told to prepare for a meeting with the HR department as part of the video platform's global restructuring efforts, Wired Reports.

Now, millennials, those of you that are listening to us right now, you have had a wonderful job market almost your entire career coming out of college. Yes, you overpaid for college and you're still going to pay that off. You'll be paying that off forever. But you've had great jobs. You've never had an HR department say we need to speak with you on Monday.

Guess what's coming. Yeah. Yeah. You might want to spend that weekend hitting LinkedIn, polishing that resume. Yep. Yep. So they've talked to the people in the companies, only cutting employees and teams that managers believe haven't been contributing enough.

They claim that only 100 employees are being laid off, which is but a small percentage of around 10,000 employees across the U.S. and Europe. I'm thinking these news outlets are starting to, like, latch on to any change in the headcount at any of these companies and calling it a news story. Because what did Microsoft lay off the other day, like 300 people out of their 180,000?

Yeah. And that made the news? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to start calling balderdash on these. All right. Chasing against the media. You mentioned the sexy and svelte Elon Musk previously. He is a dreamboat. I understand why he has 7,000 children with 850 million baby mamas. That's right.

That's right. Hey, man, it's only a simulation. What is the point in running your own companies if you can't fuck the employees? Exactly. That's what I've always said. I know. I used to watch David Letterman. He's my idol. I just need employees. Anyway, the judge. You better watch her.

Yeah, Brian. Whoa. I gave you no baby. Yeah. Somebody's staying a contractor. Well, a judge has finally ruled that Twitter can move forward with their lawsuit against Elon Musk. Okay. So expedited then?

Yes. Yes. So that's going to go to trial in September, which will be fine. Well, that's what they wanted, I think. They didn't get moved to October, I believe. It's been a long day. I have not actually read much. I just, I skimmed last night. So cut me some slack. Well, it's bad news for Elon.

Yeah. He wanted next year. He wanted to move it to February next year. He wants never. Let's be honest. True. Because it is this, again, as we've talked about on this show, if he wins this lawsuit, agreements have no bearing. Yes. But nothing, literally, our social contract will crumble and fall to the ground.

Like, he cannot win this lawsuit. No. He just can't. He cannot win. We are so, like, off the deep end if he wins. He'll probably win. I know. You know it's coming. That's why I live in Canada. That's not the only – Elon Musk did not make you move to Canada.

No. Supreme Court helped. That does help. That does help. We have been talking – well, you know, with the Elon thing, it is getting a little old and tiresome. Now we have to wait until October for a resolution to this thing. I'm sure in between we'll have many a glorious tweet from the Muskmeister.

That was – like, if I were Twitter right now, I'd kick him off the goddamn platform. That would be fucking hilarious. Why wouldn't you? All he's going to do is trash talk your company. That's it. That is the only thing he's going to do. I suppose that's good for your lawsuit.

I was going to say, that actually is good for Twitter to leave him on there. Right. So, yeah. Okay. I guess we just answered my question. Answered that question real quick. We solved a question. Yes. Ten years, one question answered. Well, we're getting there. We're getting there. So, all of this idiotic blustering is for – to avoid a $1 billion fine, you know?

But it's not – no, no, no, no. It's sort of. It's not even close. What they're going to try to get him to do at the bare minimum – Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is he's got to pay the difference between the $55, whatever he sent – And where the current, like, death charts of underground. Right.

But if he was smart, he would have just paid the billion dollars and walked away. I'm pretty sure he tried to. You think he did? I'm sure he Venmoed them. We should be able to look it up on the Venmo chain. See, if he would have just paid them off in Doge – He would have sent it with a poop emoji.

We need a poop emoji with a bunch of Dogecoin after it. That's how he would have done the deal. Just pay him in Doge. Because, I mean, it's funny. I mean, it's a billion-dollar fine, which I guess is a lot. But nobody ever pays those, except now we have Russia suing Google – or hitting Google with a $375 million fine, which is good.

Yeah. You know, we always talk about it's, you know, usually, you know, creamer money for the coffee pot. But good, except for why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The why part – I'm just going on the number of the fine. If it were the EU hitting them for a fine for, say, GDPR violations, then I would say, yeah, that's good.

Yeah, yeah. This is just – But this is some bullshit. It's total bullshit, but it's fun. Okay. No, no. Russia is saying that they had to take down fake news about the, you know, the invasion of Ukraine. Which they did. So – As far as they're concerned. Yeah. From their – to quote Obi-Wan, from a certain point of view.

Exactly. So, you know, I can see why they won't pay this fine. But it's nice to see a $375 million fine. And then, you know, once you move over to China, China, we got Didi getting fined over a billion dollars, $1.28 billion for whatever the government decided to fine them for.

And we understand here that this is just the Chinese government saying we don't want you in business anymore. Or we want you to be in business with – For us. Yes, exactly. Thank you for the fine. Thank you for the fine. Yes. Yes. The whole point of this, though, is that nowhere is anybody still paying fines of any consequence, really.

And if you do want to have a fine, run your own authoritarian country. That's about it. All right. I'm coming around to your view that Elon Musk is definitely going to win that lawsuit. Told you. Yeah. Told you. A little NFT news here. Minecraft is saying no to the NFT.

Good. Yes. Here's a lovely quote, and I really love this one. NFTs are not inclusive to all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. Minecraft developer Mojang wrote on its website, the speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encouraging profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

Long-term joy and success. One point here quickly, just to point out, 99.9% of games involve having or having not. That is the point of a fucking game. Well, especially Minecraft, you go and you have nothing and you mine something.

Yes. But you're not mining NFTs. I'm down with them not doing the NFTs. But again, the scenario have and have-not is integral to all games. Right. Yes. They want it to be more inclusive, have and have-not. Basically, they just want you to buy everything in-game so you don't have to go to another blockchain and spread the money around.

Yes. Or all their licensed merchandise, of which I have bought tons for my nephew because he's very much into Minecraft. Ah, one of those. One of those. Sticking on the cryptocurrency, we're back to a lot of big miners still sucking up all the juice for all of the local people and- Sunken cost fallacy.

Yeah. I don't understand why they're still going, but- To the moon, Jason. I know. Now's the time to mine. It is. It's like now's when you buy stocks. Exactly. You know, when they're on sale. One of them is regulated. One of them is not.

And one of them is not. Well, as an end around, apparently, some congressional Democrats would like a little more introspection on the power usage from these companies. Do we think this is ever going to happen? No. I personally think that congressional Democrats have some other things to pay attention to right now.

Well, we got another. Well, that's tomorrow. Actually, it's tonight in a couple hours that they're going to be done with that. So, right? Okay. Then we're back to, you know- Back to the crypto thing. Let's stop people from buying graphics cards. Yes. Yeah. Okay. That would be, you know, I tried to start up a PC of my own.

And did you see how much those things are? Yes. A little ridiculous. Now, we've been friends, frenemies with Adam Neumann for quite some time now. When were we friends with him? I don't know. I thought he was kind of funny at the beginning.

Before he, you know, crashed WeWork, there was some stuff he did at the beginning where I thought was kind of interesting. Okay. You know. I, for one, thought he was a douche. Day one. Okay. You called douche day one? Yes. Okay. Well, I called- DD1. DD1.

Is that on the blockchain? Can I look that up? I have an NFT. Okay. That's what I was wondering. Limited number. DD1 through 20, limited editions. Okay. On the douche FT chain. All right. Well, you know, he kind of basically screwed the whole, you know, WeWork thing up pretty badly.

But he's getting another chance right now because it's really hard to put it into words how much of a shyster it takes to go from what he did and how he walked away to moving into carbon credits, which is known to be absolute and utter bullshit across the board.

You show me one study of carbon credits that has done any good in the world. It's basically a way to move money is what I'm thinking. I think it is a way to launder money for major corporations. And especially now since Adam is involved, but he does want to put it on the blockchain so we can see where all the payouts go, I guess.

I've heard that this has been pushed back. It's not launching anytime soon. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because probably it got a bit of attention and people like looked at him and said, do you really want to lose all that money that you stole from WeWork? Because if you do this, you might go to jail. Why so? Why do you think so?

There are regulations about these sorts of things. There are regulations about carbon credits. These things are regulated. It's a regulated industry and he's going to disrupt it, which never goes well. No. Well, hopefully. Well, you know what? I wish him all the best. I don't.

Oh, no, no, no. I do because maybe we'll get him this time. Maybe. Okay, John Oliver. We got him this time. We got him. Where's the button? Where's the button? No, this guy. Okay. Say what you will. I mean, he was a bullshit artist at WeWork. Yes. But he is also the most successful person in the history of bullshitting.

The entire history of bullshitting. Nobody has made more money than him bullshitting. That's true. He walked away from that company. Yeah. Richer than God. Yep. Yep. No, because- Why he's even trying to do anything else points to serious psychopathic behaviors. Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he has to do that.

But yeah, because you were saying he is the most successful bullshit artist in history because Trump, as we know, is not successful. He's not successful. No. He had a bigger platform. No steaks, no water, no vodka, no hotels, no casinos, no second presidency.

Yeah. No. Adam actually did much better. And it probably took less time than Donald Trump. So that's good. And since we always say that cryptocurrency is a dumpster fire, well, this is actually a fire now because five villages were evacuated and a rail line was closed as a wildfire has burned 14,000 hectares near Attica in northwestern Spain.

The fire was reportedly sparked by equipment used by a contractor to dig trees for land life. Land life is a carbon offset company that focuses on reforestation and speaks out about its autonomous planting, remote monitoring, and blockchain verification.

Way to go. Okay. I mean, yay. Sort of. I mean, isn't it ironic? I'm all for planting trees. I don't know why we need it to be autonomous. There's plenty of kids out there. Well, they have to plant trees because they just burned down 14,000 hectares of them.

Yeah. I don't understand this. Okay. No. Okay. Is there real autonomous planting? Is there, okay, remote monitoring, fine. You stick a fucking camera up and you can look at it every now and then. Is there real block share verification on the trees that have been planted? Or did they just say those things to get some funding and some press?

You know, I really don't care about the company. I just think it's funny that they burned down Spain. Well, one portion of it. Well, the summer is young and this is the second fire that they have started. The same company. You think they would have maybe hired a new contractor? I don't know.

Look, at this point, we're in the UK. The Air Force could not land their planes because it was so damn hot that the runways turned into jelly. Isn't that right out of termination shock? Yes. It's right out of termination shock. It is and it actually happened. So, you know, could be this company. Could just be hot.

Yeah. Could just be. Yeah. Hot. How do you say? Oh, it's on fuego. Yes, it's fuego out there. It is fuego out there. And yeah, just because I wanted a little funny here. Elon Musk did disclose that Tesla does own some Dogecoin.

Why? You know what? Kudos to him. Because for once, some bullshit that he peddled, he actually put his money where his mouth was. Yeah. I'm good. I'd be disappointed if he didn't have it. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can purchase things at the Tesla store in Doge.

So, do you want a flamethrower? I don't know how many Doge a flamethrower costs nowadays. Actually, I have to mention, I should mention this now. I actually just drove a Tesla the other day. Oh. A friend of mine here got one. Yes. Well, since I'd moved and I went over to visit and we were going to go grab some pizzas for the kids.

And he's like, he tosses me the not key. Okay. And says, you want to give it a spin? And I'm like, I've got to do some market research. Yeah. I'm a shareholder and I'm a shareholder who is very conflicted. A shareholder who likes to shit on the owner of the company constantly. Yes. But, you know, that's just my personality.

So, I gave it a spin. Would not buy. Really? Too weird. Okay. I like the electric vehicle. I love that part of it. That thing has some, like, he even, he has a base model. It's got, you step on the gas and to the moon. To the moon, Jason.

To the moon. I can see NFTs from here. But the weird thing is if you take your foot off the gas, like, the car practically stops. Oh. There's, like, no coasting because, you know, they do the- Yeah, the regenerative braking. Yeah, the regenerative braking. That thing stops, which is weird. Like, I almost got in two accidents because I didn't really get that.

And I, the laptop right there while you're driving. Uh-huh. Where you play games and watch Monty Python. Okay, do we have a rule about using phones or not? Because if we have a rule that you shouldn't be using a phone or a computer while you're driving, you should not be able to drive a Tesla. Because that controls everything.

Really? You have to do touchscreen and, like, there's not LiDAR, which is kind of cool. I guess there's some voice stuff. But still, if you, like, want to do anything, you've got to, like- Oh. Which is it, people? Well, you gotta be- Can I answer a text or can I drive my Tesla? Here's the point, Brian.

The reason that all of that shit is there is because, by now, we were supposed to have self-driving cars. He's late again. I did not include the article that I had just read. It was a very long-form one. It was about Apple's 10-year struggle to do self-driving cars.

So the TLDR on this, and I'll find the link for the show notes, is basically, if Apple, with all of their people, cannot figure this out, and they cannot, nobody else is. Right. And here's the other funny part. Tesla went with the wrong technology.

They thought that they could do it computationally with regular cameras and no LiDAR. Oh, they 100% cannot. It's impossible. Because I turned on that, he showed me that view that you get on the screen. So he's like, basically, you could just like, you could block out everything and just drive using the screen.

And I was like doing this side by side. I was like, it did not see that person. Okay, that says that's a person, but there's no person there. Like, it doesn't, it's not. It's not there yet. It's not foolproof. It's not there yet. Yeah. At all. It's cool. Uh-huh. But I don't want, it's, sorry, let me quote you.

It's neat. It's neat. But I don't want neat going 95 miles an hour on a freeway next to me. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. When you mentioned that you, because when you take your foot off the gas, it just kind of stops. My Jeep does that too. And I don't have regenerative braking though. I don't know what's going on there.

That's called a Jeep. I was going to say, I think that, I think that's a feature, not a bug. But yeah, I, I have a 401k with Charles Schwab. As do I. And I got an email from them. You may have gotten the same emails. I did. About NFT 101s, taxes, risks, and more.

I wrote back and I said, I am not a moron. I just love that they have a very long, uh, you know, talk about what NFTs are and all that, but at the very bottom, they actually do give you sound advice for the time being. However, there's a lot to be said for taking a go slow approach to this new asset class and all the risks it entails.

In general, those interested in crypto assets like NFTs are wise to limit their exposure to no more than 1% of investable assets. I would go zero. I would say zero personally, but 1% is actually not bad. 1% for crypto.

I'm down with, although even, you know, I would stick with your bitcoins or your ethereums, not your doges, but, uh, you know, yeah. Don't be stupid. Don't put it in an ape. Nope. Because as we found out, uh, some of the bored ape people aren't that smart. I love this one.

This NFT guy, uh, he was, he was a collector. He has his own ape out there and, uh, but he lost 100 ETH because he was fucking around trying to be a funny guy. So it's kind of complicated, but he was buying these .eth domains and putting in ridiculous bids on them in an auction that nobody would ever get.

But for some reason, some, some guy bought one for like a bunch of money and then automatically flipped what he was doing and took the guy up on his original offer to pay 100 ETH for it. And then he got the money and they did all this transfer back and forth.

But either way, it was fucking hilarious. You can read the, the breakdown of it, but it was some guy probably drunk sitting there dicking around on Twitter. I mean, we've all done it. We've all done it. Not a lot of us have lost $150,000 while doing it. So, well, if you added it up over time, Jason, that's true.

If you, if you count all of my drunk Amazon purchases in one go, no, I have done it. It has been a trickle trickle effect. So if you count all the jobs I've lost for, for talking out of my ass on salaries, if we add that in, dude, I'm in the millions, I'm actually in the millions.

You are. Yeah. Oh man. You should be much more successful, Jason. I should. Fuck you, Jack Dorsey. Fuck you. Yeah, it's his fault. It is his fault. Fuck you, Budweiser.

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Media Candy. Ryan, I was just looking around the internets, because I was thinking about Star Trek, and I was like, oh, what new is coming? What fresh hell do we have here now that Strange New Worlds is over? And I'm like, do we get Discovery Season 5 and 6 in one go?

Not over. Don't say that. Over for now. Over. It's paused before the next season. It has been renewed for two more seasons, at least. Okay. So the goodness will continue. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. So they don't bring back fake Kirk. I saw a screenshot, or basically, I think it was a GIF, like on Swear Trek, of Kirk on the bridge.

And I'm like, that doesn't even look anything like that guy. No. Not even close. No. Somebody owed somebody a favor. I think that's what it boils down to. Right. But anyway, I found an article that, they call it, set phasers to stream.

Here's all the Star Trek content on Paramount+. So I looked through the giant list, and I didn't see anything coming up that I remotely cared about for a while. So it is- Lower decks? As not worth the money. I'll wait until it's done. So I set phasers to cancel.

And when something else good comes back, or maybe that's, well, that's going to be a long time for Strange New Worlds. So when something mediocre comes back, like the next season of Picard, I will then pop back in and get my content, I guess. Paramount Plus has got me because I'm a soccer fan.

Ew. So they do CONCACAF, and they do USA games, and so I'm kind of screwed. I know. Yeah. But fortunately for me, I get it through Apple, so it was one click to cancel. Got my little notification yesterday. It's like, your thing is expiring.

Would you like to renew it? No, I don't think I will. Right. So- There you go. I love, I just love how Apple handles all of the streaming bullshit that we have to deal with every day of our lives now, because, you know, we're just entitled silly people who like to sit at home and give people money to watch shit on TV, but- They make it easy.

They do. And nobody else really does. And speaking of people that don't make it easy to cancel, at least a million people figured out how over at Netflix- Yeah, whoops. Netflix lost nearly 1 million subscribers last quarter. They warned that they would lose a lot in the second quarter this year, more so than they did in the first, and that made waves.

And that came true, although they say it wasn't as bad as they feared it would be. They lost nearly 1 million subscribers, 970,000 to be exact, in the second quarter, far more than the 2,000 or 200,000 member decline from quarter one, but not as bleak as the 2 million that they were preparing for.

Hmm. I wonder if they factor in how many people died of COVID, because we got a decent amount. You know, you have natural causes for some of it. Unless someone's around to turn off that subscription, it's still rolling. Oh. Well, you still got to pay the credit card bill.

Yeah, that's true. You know, you got a couple months in there before they come and knock in. Yeah. They also got hit pretty badly by unfavorable foreign exchange values for the U.S. dollar, so that did not help very much. They're expecting a turnaround. Stranger Things 4 is helping. It's a very popular show.

I have yet to watch it. Yeah, I watched a little bit of it. I think I got to finished episode two and just have not had the pull to go back. My bet is Kate Bush is going to do better than Netflix soft Stranger Things 4. What do you mean? I don't know. You don't follow popular culture.

No, I don't. Brian, look at where you are. This is where I live. You're in my cave. Have you ever heard the song Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush? No. In our wheelhouse? Nope. In our age group? Nope. Okay, never mind. Everybody else out there got it. I'm sure. Okay, I'm slow. Yeah, even Brian.

I'm slow. Even our studio audience is cracking up. Yeah, sure. Okay. And the other thing, of course, that they're doing it that they've been talking about is including charging for additional homes, which they're still trying to figure out. We and I have talked about how are we going to define what this is if you pay for a service that is a streaming service and you have it on your iPad and your iPad does not stay in your own home.

How do we determine how this is going to work? Well, they've got a new plan. Okay. What's the new plan? The new plan didn't work at all. First plan was kind of an optional, like, just tell us if you're using it in multiple households and we'll charge you. And no, no, no, that didn't work. Okay, okay, okay. We've got a better plan. We've got a better plan. We've got a better plan.

So they came up with their new better plan, Jason. Starting August 22nd, users in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras will have to pay for extra homes if they want to access the streaming service outside of their primary residence for longer than a short vacation.

Okay. Subscribers can watch Netflix on their phones or tablets anytime and as much as they want, even when they're traveling or visiting to another place. So win for millennials. Okay, perfect. If you want to watch your TV on your phone, if you want to watch Blockbuster special effects on your phone, you sure can.

Well, I tell you what, dude, this iPad right here, best screen in the world. Telling you, I'd rather watch on my iPad. That's because you buy cheap big TVs. Kiss my ass. I prioritize where I'm going to go. I like to watch on a TV still.

And if you want to stream on a TV, you can only access Netflix at no additional charge for two weeks while away from a primary residence. Also, they log that residence. So it needs to be a vacation. And if you try to ever go back there again and you've used up that two weeks of time in that location, you are no longer allowed to stream Netflix from that location.

This is so fucking complicated. Right? This is ridiculous. It gets better. After those two weeks are up, if they go back to the location where they previously maxed out free access to the service, which isn't free because you're paying a subscription, Netflix will ask you if you'd like to add a home for an additional fee per month.

So now they're adding additional prices to add additional homes. Basic tier subscribers can only add one extra home. Standards can add up to two extra and premium up to three extra. Okay. Netflix says it uses information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activities to detect homes.

But it's advising people to make sure you don't use any of those pesky VPNs or proxy services because then we wouldn't be able to figure out where you're at. This is such bullshit. But the company will also allow members to stop paying for an extra home whenever they break up with their significant others that they used to go over there to watch Netflix with when they're no longer Netflixing and chilling with that people.

They can replace an added home up to three times every six months. Did you get all that? Because I have a flow chart. I'd appreciate it. I would appreciate it if you had educational materials for me. I don't think the customer service people, when you call Netflix's number, will understand any of these rules or how this all applies.

No, let's have somebody from Argentina call Netflix customer support in Bangalore and try and hammer that out. Now, I'm on the second tier of service and I've been going to my girlfriend's house for six months. Now, we've only used 1.5 hours of my allotted two weeks.

However, I've started dating somebody in the same apartment complex. So how would that geolocate an IP to the next girlfriend that I have? Who's three floors above her. Yeah, so slightly higher. Slightly higher, yes. Yeah, yeah. What do you say? Have you turned it off and turned it on again?

I'm going to have to ask you to go to tier two service, sir. My God. Can I just... You pay, you get to watch it. We solved this last time. We solved this last time. It's devices, active devices. I pay for four active devices on my account.

Who gives a shit where they're at? Look, and if you think grandma knows how to deactivate the device I set her up on, she doesn't, okay? No, she doesn't. Once the device is activated, it's never getting deactivated. No. I've got Macs on my account that are 15 years old, I swear.

It goes back to the beginning days of the Apple ID. I got... Remember I told you I got those Apple AirTags? Yeah. I finally went into the Find My iPhone services the other day. That's right. That's how you see it. And I was like, I had my phone from 15 years ago. Eight laptops that I haven't seen in years.

Yeah. Like, oh my God. It's a walk down memory lane. It's like, oh, that was the phase where I named all my computers after Buffy characters. Oh, that's the one where they're after Firefly characters. Oh, that's Farscape. I could tell, like, the progression of the naming of devices as I went over time. Yeah.

Oh, man. HBO's House of the Dragon trailer has dropped. Brian, did you get a chance to watch it? No, because I don't give a shit. Good. Okay, good. Because I saved you two and a half minutes. Game of Yawns is what I call it. It was the... It's a sequel, which is a prequel.

Well, it's a prequel. It's a prequel that's a sequel to... I was looking for a better rhyme. To something that didn't end well. No, but it kind of plays as a parody of itself at this point. I wanted some more tits and swords, and The Witcher came along. I'm happy. Okay. As long as you got your tits and swords.

Yeah, it's good. Yeah. They need to redo Spartacus, because Tits and Sand was that one. I like that one. I wish Dune was Tits and Sand. That would be better. Yes. The spice must flow. We're going to have to cut all that part out. Like David Chappelle territory here. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Did you ever work with Rob Sheridan from Nine Inch Nailed Days? I've never worked with him. I've met him, know him, yeah. Is he cool? He seemed nice back in the day. Okay. I mean, everybody seemed nice back in the day, because we were all drunk. You were all on drugs and drunk, yeah. I mean, you know. It was a great scene.

Yeah. It was just weird seeing him pop up in The Verge last week, because he's doing another AI generative art project based on some old Nine Inch Nails stuff. Okay. It's an interesting read. He's doing interesting stuff. I ran across him two Christmases.

Was it? No, it was two Christmases ago, because last Christmas I was out with no brain, because he has a holiday T-shirt that has, it's like basically a bunch of VHS tapes with the titles on it. I talked about it on the show back then. I loved that shirt. It was great. I don't know who stole it, but it's now gone.

I'm sure you can order another one, Jason. Yeah. Now you can order them and put in your own titles. But the big controversy with his was he put Die Hard on it, because it was all Christmas movies. It's not a controversy. It's a Christmas movie. It is a Christmas movie. But some people. No. They're wrong. Gif, Gif, Gif. They're also wrong. They are also wrong.

Yes. That's right. They can buy an NFT of Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, and they can fuck off and die. And lo and behold, Jason, I have found another podcast to listen to. Okay. I barely am able to catch up with the ones I listen to currently.

There's been some cruft. I've dropped a few things, but a new one has popped up. The story behind the song podcast. Not that this hasn't been done before, but I like this one. And, of course, I found it, as I find all podcasts, through the medium of Shirley Manson. Okay. Because I will listen to Shirley Manson babble incoherently in a corner because she's funny.

And there was some publicity that she was on a new one talking about the Only Happy When It Rains song and all that sort of stuff. So I was like, I will listen to this because I have to drive from Anaheim to Woodland Hills, and that's going to take 17 days. Yes, welcome. So let's find some new podcasts. It's by Consequence, consequence.net.

And they do a couple different music-related podcasts. This one is the story behind the song, the kitsch here, the stick. The thing they get you with is the artist gets to pick one song that they want to talk about, and then they pick one big song from the artist's career to talk about.

And then they do background of the artist and all that sort of stuff. Okay. It was good. I liked it. I even listened to a second one on the way here. It was Roland Orzabal from Tears for Fears, which was also good. So the podcast did not rely on Shirley Manson being as wonderfully Shirley Manson as she can be.

It was also good with the Tears for Fears guy. Okay. Now, here's my question about this, though, because didn't Shirley Manson have this exact podcast that we listened to? Pretty much, yes. I was like, I'm like— It's not that different because her thing was like, well, she picked one song. Like, I want to talk to artists I like about the pivotal song that they think changed their career.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. But it is musicians. What else are you going to fucking talk about? Okay, I just want to make sure I'm not going fucking crazy here because I'm like, you know— You're not going to ask them about their favorite chess game. New podcast idea. Come down to the studio. Let's make it. I'm in. I'm in.

What is your favorite opener, Mr. Slash? Yeah. So it's pretty good. It's relatively new. I think there's only like 10 or 12 episodes so far, but I'm enjoying it. Okay, cool. I'll check it out. I do like that format where they pick a song, they play some.

And I like Shirley Manson's podcast because she had all the monies and it was one of the very few actual podcasts that could play the song that they were talking about. Well, they don't play the song on this one. Oh, they don't? Oh, they do not. Aw. But they talk about it. Okay, so now we know what their budget is. Yes. They have a podcast budget.

They have a podcast budget. Remember when we used to put music in ours? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you're a lawyer out there, don't go back and listen to these. Shut up. Don't tell them where to look. Apps and doodads. Brian, I was looking around the Twitter the other day and I saw an article by my old buddy O'Malek called Instagram is dead, where he posits that Instagram is now dead.

It has basically turned into QVC. And I could not. I went through his analysis and I do believe it is spot on. I could not find any flaws in his thinking. I found a flaw. Okay, let's hear it. Let's hear it. He should have written this 10 years ago. I know.

When he actually had a platform. When it actually would have had a point, too, because Instagram has been this for a long time. He talks about how, oh, Instagram should be photographers putting up photos. That Instagram existed for approximately a year and a half. A year and a half. That was a long time ago.

It was. Yes. Yes. And then it carried on for a while until Kevin Systrom and his other co-founder left Facebook in a rage, you know, a rage quit. Which I can't blame them for. They got a billion dollars for their company that they spent, what, six months on to build.

I don't know if you exactly rage quit with a billion dollar payout. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it is terrible. I was checking it out. I got a new notice today that they're even streamlining my timeline even more so I can see more photos and videos of people I don't follow.

So it is going the route of Facebook where I am seeing a bunch of shit from people I don't know. And I'm also seeing the thing that I saw with Facebook a long time ago, which was the death knell of Facebook, which is people aren't actively leaving. Or at least my friends aren't actively leaving Instagram yet. But posting is way down.

Okay. People are no longer posting as much as they used to. No, they are. You just can't see it because they change the damn timeline. No, because I go and look. Oh, you do? Okay. Like it's starting to get that. I'm screaming into the void. Nobody's seeing my stuff. Why am I doing this? Fuck it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was – because I was on there the other day and it's just like you have to keep toggling between these new pages now and it is an ad every second post.

And it is always for shit that I've just bought. So it is really, really working for those advertisers out there. They are – they have to be making bank off that Facebook buy. So, yeah, I just – at this point, it's just habit. You know, I take a photo. I post it somewhere.

I got no other place to put it. Can we go back to Ello? They're still around. We are running out of social media to do stuff on. I'm definitely – like Facebook, people don't post as much anymore. I still use it to communicate with some friends that I would never see in person. Twitter is a – I know you love Twitter, but you love – Twitter is a weird beast and it's not for connecting with friends.

It's for getting in fights with people you'll never meet ever. Yes, that's what it is. Which I see its appeal for you. Exactly. I understand this. And again, Instagram was becoming the one way that I was keeping in touch with friends because they would post and I would see what's going on in their life. But I'm starting to see that die off now too because they just can't leave it alone, can they?

No. They have to make it bad. Yeah. They just have to. They can't stop themselves. That's Marc's raison d'etre, as they say in French. I'm sure we'll all move to the metaverse shortly and I will never know if my friends lost their legs. Yes, yes. We all float around in a pantsless void of fun.

Fun. Sounds kind of like my teenage dream. Pantsless void of fun. That's all I wanted. This is going to a strange place. That beer is working for you. No, I mean just – I'd still have legs and genitals, just no pants, Jason. No pants. No pants. Yeah, that was my teenage years.

That's pretty good. I miss those. Your chairs are a little squeaky, by the way. Well, it didn't squeak until you sat in it. It was nice and quiet until you showed up. Yeah, you know what? Chairs don't fucking squeak if nobody's in them, Jason. Well, we're just going to have a squeakless podcast from now on.

It'll just be dead silent. Actually, it's now making me think of the Haunted Mansion shit I was watching on Disney Plus last night. That chair squeaks and there's no people sitting in them. And, well, speaking of ghost sites, Empire Avenue, do you remember them from a very long time ago?

Vaguely. It was basically buying and selling stock in yourself and other people. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a brief trend. There were like 10 sites at once that launched with that kind of crap. Yeah. This was kind of like Hollywood Stock Exchange, but for people.

Yeah. So I'm on there. Because celebrities aren't people. Yeah. You know, People Magazine tells us that they're just like people. They are? Yeah. Really? Nah. One of their segments. I don't think so. Okay. I was just looking at this because I got a note when we were going through some shit this week. And it said I joined in February 20th, 2011.

And it's just interesting because when they said that, I remember when I joined Empire Avenue because I remember the shitty contract gig I was in when I signed up because I was talking to my buddy. He was like, hey, did you check this site out? I'm like, nah, looks stupid. Hey, I'll check it out. Signed up. And for some strange reason, for the past, well, 11 years and change, every two weeks I go back to this site and buy something with my fake money that it keeps generating to watch my stock price go up.

This thing, I don't know why it won't die and why I can't let it go. You need real friends, Jason. I know. I know. For some reason. Can you take them out, Brian? Can you introduce them to someone? Anyone? See, COVID. COVID. Yeah, COVID. Okay.

Well, I'm glad that you're doing well on Empire Avenue. Would you like to know? No. I am now worth, yes, I'm worth 1,189 eves. What are eves, Jason? They're like NFTs. Did they create it? Did they turn it into a crypto coin?

Or are they just? They would still actually be in business. Yeah, there is one guy running it. The twist is, it's Jason. Yeah, that's it. This is my bizarre attempt. I've waited 10 years to bring you back in to my grand experiment.

Anyway, moving on. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. We talked about the nothing phone. The nothing phone that launched and- That we can't buy. That we can't buy and doesn't exist here and basically it just has glowing lights on the back. They stuck a ring light on the back, yeah.

It looks like a Borg charging station. Kind of, kind of, except in white, in old Apple white. Or Tron, if you hold it at the right thing. Yeah, Tron. Tron, I can see that. So, but because we can't get one, enter dbrand. The accessory maker has announced a new something line of skins that promise to transform your iPhone 13 Pro Max, Pixel 6 Pro, or Galaxy S22 Ultra into nothing.

Do all employees of the brand watch the bears? I don't know, but I actually, I have a soft spot for this company and I'm about to read you the statement and I think you're about to become a huge fan too. Not that we'll ever buy anything from them, but we'd like this. Okay, hit me. Some might accuse us of theft. Here's our counter.

We stole nothing, the company says on its website. That's not theft. It's plagiarism, which is definitely not a crime. We checked. Dbrand adds after noting it spent a lot of time taking apart electronics and investment, the company says, makes it uniquely qualified to rip off an industrial design and creatively reinterpret it for other devices.

Beautiful. I love these guys. They rock. We checked. We checked. Not a crime. Not a crime. Oh, man. Yes, I do love these people. We have to find out more about them. Somebody I did know about, which this is a surprising one that just came in right before we started.

Text Expander. Yes. Do you use the Text Expander? I don't. I love it. I live by it. They even send me a thing every week that says I have saved seven minutes by using Text Expander. I don't know how they- How many Eve did you make saving those seven minutes? 14.37.

Depends on the exchange rate, though. Right. Yes. I don't know the Eve exchange rate. But it's surprising to see Text Expander in the news because they just took $41.4 million in funding. And turned it into? I don't know. Because they're a profitable business.

Right. Oh, they got a new CEO. That's why. New CEO comes in and says, give me money. Right. And apparently they did. But yeah, they've been around since 2007. They're profitable and they get the job done. Why would you take $41 million? I don't get it. The product seems pretty done.

Not much you can add to it. It's pretty done. It does what it says on the tin. Yep. Oh, you know what it was? Don't need to do any more product development. It was actually $41, but they hit the expand button and it just popped out the rest of the zeros on it. Ooh, I'm going to try that on my bank account.

Security? Ha! We are back 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 Dave, what is your shiny new show again? It's called Control Loop, and it's all about industrial control systems. Excellent. So if you missed a few shows and this is the first time hearing about it, go subscribe because Dave needs more listeners.

That's right. That's right. It's about protecting civilization, keeping the lights on, all that kind of stuff. Who cares? Obviously, Congress doesn't. I know. That's right. That's right. So real quick, before we jump into this, I just got to let everybody know that we are, the first half of this show was recorded, as we mentioned, in the studio with me and Brian across from each other.

And now we are back to being across the world. Everybody is on different microphones. So there is definitely a shift in sound quality from what you were just listening to to now. Five people that care. Trust me. Trust me. With the emails I get, I think more people care than even listen to this show.

So from the emails I get, when something goes wrong. Never start a presentation with an apology, Jason. I know. Jason loves the front load with the problems. I don't know if it was so much an apology as an explanation. Most of us try to brush it under the carpet.

Jason's like, this is going to suck. Yeah. Hey, everybody. No extra charge. No extra charge this week. We're providing a little bit of 60 hertz hum. No extra charge at all. So enjoy. Enjoy. Probably it'll calm your nerves and heal your soul.

It's better than a crystal. G-O-A-S-M-R. Well, we just mentioned about stuff that Congress doesn't care about. Here's something that they've decided to care about right now. They are issuing a call for the FTC to regulate how VPN companies operate.

Now, VPNs are something that has become very near and dear to my heart since I moved to Canada because it enables me to access things that I could not access otherwise, which is very nice. But I think we all do know that that's a pretty unregulated wild industry that does do a lot of deceptive practices and people, often companies will shockingly lie about the services they're providing and the security that they're providing.

So not necessarily a bad idea for Congress to get involved and say, hey, we need to pay a little bit of attention to what's going on over here. Can I step in here for a second? Because I see this as missing the mark on the problem that they're trying to solve.

Maybe fix the other problem that is, I mean, this is fine. This is, this is all well and good, but the actual problem of why people are having to run to a VPN, maybe work on that problem. That would require the internet police, Jason. They're going to, the internet police is going to fix Roe versus Wade.

Oh, well, I mean, that's not the only problem here. Yes, they are. This article in particular brings to light the fact that VPNs may have gotten slightly more important for women given the recent rulings here in the States. Yes. There are many people, many reasons why people use VPNs, not just that.

So, yeah, you know, VPN is, is a bandaid. Yes, but I'm not sure that we're ever going to get rid of the causes of the scratches and bruises that the band-aids are for. True. True. VPNs are such a shady part of the cybersecurity industry that in general, it's one we don't touch.

Like, we don't take ads for VPNs. We rarely do stories on- GOG.show slash VPN. And it's just because it's so hard. And, you know, the times that we've done stuff on or with VPNs, a lot of times it's come back to bite us.

So, it's, and it's hard because there are good VPNs out there, but how do you know? And it's really hard to know because there's so many bad ones. That's why you go to GOG.show slash VPN, because we've done the work for you. Well, I'm interested to see how that works out for you long term.

To be fair, we have not followed up on their procedures in an awful long time. We don't, we don't have, we don't have anybody embedded there to tell us if they've gone bad. Right. Brian, you're not down there doing audits. I thought we talked about this. You're supposed to be the audit meister. Come on.

Yeah. When presented with a subpoena, many VPN companies changed their tune. So. That is the, that's the one thing that we know that we like our VPN for. Yeah. They have actually gone to court with the FBI and came out, you know, on the good side because they said that they were no log VPN and they proved it in court.

So that's, that's why we stick with private internet access. Yeah. Who knows if they've turned on the log button since then, but I'm hoping not. Because that is one of their best selling points. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I think Jason, you make a good point. It'd be great to be heading towards a direction where we don't even need VPNs.

If the, or if it was just automatic, you know, if you could basically not have to think, not have a separate product to do this function. I will tell you one thing though, that perhaps VPNs might go away for security reasons, but given international rights for media, they will never go away for being able to access certain shows when you're out of the country.

Mm-hmm. Ever. Yeah. And it's really not actually that hard to roll your own VPN. So it might be something to really look into if you're that serious about it. You know, you can spin up a VPN on AWS pretty easily. You're still going to have some tracking with just the outer layer of Amazon, just from the billing side of it.

But as far as I know, nobody has been, nobody that's rolled their own VPN and done it right has ended up in court and handing over their own logs. Yeah. And I wonder to what degree did the VPN companies accidentally stumble upon this, this whole thing of being able to say you're from a different part of the world than you are as a value proposition.

And because, you know, over time that's become a major part of the marketing push for these things. And I wonder when they, at the outset, did they think that was going to be a thing? I think at some point, I don't think so. I think at some point they realized what we've all realized doing this segment for almost 10 years now is the general public does not give a crap about security or privacy.

So they had to find a way to sell their product. And what people do care about is being able to stream the shows they want to see. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's a good point. And we general, in general, we hate copy protection. We hate digital rights management.

All that stuff. There's, yeah, just, I get, I get wound up. It really grinds my gears. I get wound up just thinking about it. That chaps my dazzle. So another thing we've talked about on this show, we've talked about the way that law enforcement gets around some of the, you know, bulwarks and, and restrictions that we put in place in terms of our privacy and our data by simply purchasing it rather than collecting it themselves.

And we've had some news come out this week about that records have revealed the scale of Homeland Security's phone location data purchases. The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained records linking Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other DHS divisions to purchases of roughly 336,000 phone location points from the data broker Ventel.

They say this is just a small subset of raw data from the Southwestern United States, includes a burst of 113,654 points collected over just three days in 2018. So I have a feeling this is the tiny tip of the mountain of data that is being purchased.

The data set has been delivered through the Freedom of Information Act request, and there are an awful lot more requests for data incoming. So I have a feeling we're going to find out just how much data they're purchasing, which is all the data. Yeah. I think you're right. I don't remember who's working on it, but I know there are some legislators, and I believe it's bipartisan, who are working on shutting this down.

Well, to your point, Dave, that you always make, it's probably bipartisan because neither Republicans nor Democrats would like their data exposed. When I saw this story, I was thinking about that John Oliver segment that he did.

Remember the one where he bought up the data? And it doesn't seem like much happened after that, at least not that we heard of. But I was thinking more of that needs to happen. And, you know, the EFF or John Oliver or these groups, because this data is not expensive.

And if you just started buying it and publishing it, oh, here's where, you know, Senator Jablowski was today. And here's where he was yesterday. And just, you know, publicly available information available for sale. That would be the way to jumpstart getting this stuff put under lock and key.

Of course, the problem is that Congress often just protects themselves and no one else. Yes. Or the Supreme Court and no one else. Yeah. Right. Right. But yeah, I mean, this runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment. This is a blatant – I was going to say reach around.

That's not the right word. This is a – Appropriate for this show. End around. End around. That's what I'm looking for. This is a blatant end around of the Fourth Amendment being able to buy this data that they would otherwise need a warrant to get. So this is absolutely a loophole that needs to be closed.

Yeah. So I hope it happens. Reach around with Dave Bittner next week on The Cyber Wire. I was thinking we rename our show to blatant reach around. I like that. Yeah. As opposed to a subtle reach around. Is there such a thing as a subtle reach around?

I don't know. I wish I remember the senator's name that got busted tapping the bathroom door with stalls. But I think that was an attempt at a subtle reach around. Yes. Yes. There you go. And I saw this story and I just thought this is so typical and not surprising.

TikTok's global chief security officer is stepping down from that position. We'll shift to a strategic advisory role. This is Roland Cloythier. There was all the concerns about US data and basically the report that basically said, yeah, okay, so there's super admins in China that get all the data no matter what you do.

So rather than there be repercussions, we'll just shift this guy over and probably pay him more and just change the faces involved. We'll just give you a big pile of money to sit here quietly and not say anything. We can't have you front and center anymore.

So you go over here. We'll put somebody else there and not actually change anything at all whatsoever, which is business as usual, really. Yeah. At least they're taking some play notes from at least United States tech companies because that's what we do. True. Brand.

Shuffle people around and that or the Catholic Church. I get them confused sometimes. Well, not much difference these days. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what ultimately is going to happen with TikTok here. And I hate to say this makes me think back and actually say the words, was the Trump administration right when it came to how they felt about TikTok?

I suppose, I mean, to continue, I mean, TikTok clock metaphor, stop clock is right twice a day. So perhaps they were, but it just keeps getting worse for them. And it seems as though at some point we're going to have to have some sort of regulatory step in here.

One would think, and we're seeing the calls for it, but in terms of it keeping getting worse for them, to my earlier point, nobody cares. Because they're all busy, they're all busy scrolling on TikTok. Yeah. TikTok is rapidly gobbling up all the market share.

Everybody is on TikTok. TikTok is becoming the predominant social network. So yes, it's getting increasingly worse for them in terms of the stories coming out, but certainly not for their bottom line. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I wonder what they could do here. Could they spin off and become a wholly owned U.S. company, but then somehow they'd have to prove that they weren't sending the data back home, which of course is virtually impossible to do.

Especially if you go to GOG.show slash VPN. That's right. Yeah. The folks at TikTok are really looking for a solution to this. And lucky for them, they happen to be listening to today's show and all their problems are solved. They can tunnel right in there, China. Yep.

Good to do a service. All of a sudden, all that VPN's bandwidth goes through the roof. They're not sure why. I mean, you know, the obvious Band-Aid solution is you just move everything over to the U.S., you spin off a subsidiary, you still get all the monies, but then – and China's government gets mad at you because the data stops coming through, theoretically.

But will they do any of that? I don't know. Certainly there are calls for them to do so. Or do you just wait it out because social networks don't last forever? At some point, TikTok will be the new snap. Yeah. I guess it's a matter of how much stuff is flowing through TikTok that is of importance to national security.

That's what it will ultimately come down to, I guess. All right. Well, my story this week, this is from the folks over at TechCrunch. And this is about some security flaws in some GPS trackers that are used globally. There are millions of these vehicles out there.

And the researchers over at a company called BitSight have found about half a dozen vulnerabilities in the MV720, which is a hardwired GPS tracker. So this is the kind of tracker that would be in your delivery truck where you see a sticker on the back that says, this vehicle monitored by GPS.

This would be the hardware that monitors that vehicle. And not only does it monitor the location of the vehicle, but it can do things like disable the engine. So it has its hooks into – I guess the CAN bus is probably how it's doing what it does.

But who knows? So what's more interesting about this is that, yes, there are millions of devices that are vulnerable to these vulnerabilities that they found. But BitSight has reached out to the company who makes this.

It's a Chinese company. It's a company called Mikotis. And they have basically been ignored. CISA reached out to Mikotis and have been ignored. So they're saying if you have these devices in your vehicle, disconnect them because – Because this is probably not a bug.

This might be a feature. Right. Did they try tweeting at these companies because nobody checks their email anymore? Well, maybe they just need to get over on TikTok. Yeah, just send them – they need to dance their issues and send that to them. Yeah.

I mean they reached out almost – nearly a year ago and they just can't get any answers from the company who makes these. Governments. They're just like people. You reach out to customer service and you can't get any answers. Yeah, that's not good.

But they could – yeah. Theoretically, they could shut vehicles down in the middle of a highway or all sorts of bad stuff they could do that could be a threat to life and limb. Nuclear power plant operators? That stands out from this article? It's not just trucks?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So if you have something of this brand, go looking for a different brand and not just a relabel. Right. It's probably a hard thing to find one that doesn't come out of China though. That's a good point. Are there any homegrown hardwired GPS tracking systems anymore?

I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Certainly not that cheap. I say using my Chinese-made iPhone that includes GPS. Just when I was thinking, I'm like, hey, what do we have that has GPS that's on us all the time? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Only designed in Cupertino, folks.

Can you imagine – I mean just – I'm sure – I mean obviously Apple must have a tremendous amount of scrutiny of everything coming out of China for all the obvious reasons. But it's just – it would be easy to imagine a science fiction story or something like that where – a thriller where it turns out that the – buried deep within the hardware is something that we don't know about.

I think I've made that story up many times on this show but it was about software, all of the software engineers that got into Apple early to put in the flaws. Put in the zero day that you can then cash out on later. Yeah. I can see infiltrating – was it Huawei?

No, no, Huawei doesn't make it. We banned Huawei. Who's the company that makes all the iPhones? I forget. Oh, I can't remember. But yeah, basically just planting people in there. Foxconn. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah. Whatever happened to the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin?

That boondoggle kind of bit the dust. Oh, that was a total boondoggle. Yeah. Yeah. Total boondoggle. My – last I read on that, they had an office, like a reception area and a handful of people working there doing nothing.

And even that was I think going to be shut down. But that was a complete boondoggle. Nothing came of it. But I hear they're pivoting to be becoming a TikTok data center. Yes. And maybe a VPN. Yes. All right, guys.

That's what I've got this week. I will see you guys next time. Take care. Stay safe out there. Closing shout outs. Over on Patreon, we've got crickets. Nobody. What's wrong with you people?

You get free episodes early with ads. No ads. Something like that. Sometimes early. Sometimes early. Sometimes not so much. Well, I've been getting better. I've been getting better. You have been. I have been. Over at PayPal, we've got Ramsey, Tom, Michelle, Andrew, John, Tom, John Andre. I don't know why I always want to say it that way.

Wasn't there a character? Andre. Did you ever – you watched – surely you watched Project Runway in the first few seasons. Of course I didn't. Don't call me Shirley. You did, right? Yeah. You remember Andre? Yes. Andre Harrell. In my brain, every single time I read John Andre's name, I see Andre.

He should be flattered. He was awesome. And Joseph. Sorry. Yes. Joseph is awesome too. I blame old Rasputin for this. Yes. And over at the Stripe Tip Jar, we've got Sean, Karen, and Ross. And we've got some reviews, Brian. Look at that. We do. We do. Coming off our two-star review last week, which I personally enjoyed, we have five stars this time.

The first is from Prin533. I think that's Prince. Princey. There's no C there. P-R-I-N-S-E-E. Princey. That's a five. It's Hacker. Leet. Leet speak. Oh, Christ. Well, okay. There was Fire Emoji and then French Fry Emoji.

That's the title of the review. Okay. Fire Fries. Fire Fries. Always look forward to notification that a new GOG has been released. When I haven't played it in a while, my partner will ask, I haven't heard you listen to them for a while. Is everyone okay? I look forward to these. Heart Emoji, Heart Emoji, Heart Emoji.

Okay. Well, we put them out every week, so usually. Generally. Generally. We'll take it. We're all okay. We're all okay. We are all okay. Nancy Anderson writes in, this is the best podcast. This is a highlight of my Fridays or Saturdays when I save them for a dull weekend.

These guys are frank, insightful, and incredibly knowledgeable. They keep the topics moving and post links on episode notes, so even if it's hard to figure out spelling, et cetera, it's easy to find stuff. I've learned a lot about current equipment, new tech developments, and sometimes current BS, looking at you, crypto. Thank you, Jason, Brian, and Dave.

I've listened for years and need to tell you how much I appreciate all your work. Thank you, Nancy. Well, Nancy, I have to say, if this is the highlight of your Friday or Saturday, might I suggest Empire Avenue? Fuck you, Brian. Get out of my studio.

Well, it's been great being here the one and only time. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 562. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel. If you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans. You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars and a couple fry emojis. Stay grumpy. Get the hell out of here, Brian. Good job, boys. Hey. That's awesome.

I like recording here. I'm going to move back. It's actually kind of nice.

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