564: Blame It On the Rain

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. Happy birthday, Jason. Yay. Yay. You seem much more enthusiastic on Twitter about your birthday. Yeah, it's just I'm tired. I'm very, very tired. It's been a rough week.

Hey, I'm 51. I don't care. I made it. Still kicking. What are you going to do? Okay. Do a podcast. Yeah, let's do a podcast. I did send you a text this week that I thought was pretty interesting. I got an email from Goodreads saying, we are happy to confirm that we have completed your data request.

Your data will be available to download for the next 90 days. And it says, this is the response to your DSAR request on June 22, 2022. And I got the reply on July 30, July 30, Goodreads owned by Amazon, not an unfunded company.

And I told you I was not surprised by this. In fact, I thought that was a rather quick turnaround, given the fact that it does not behoove them to give you this data because it's the first step to deleting your account. And nobody wants that. So this is not something that companies really want to do and probably goes down to like some intern.

Do you think that Goodreads has interns? Seriously? I'm sure that there's some bookish young woman who is very excited with this job. Is she in search of a dashing older professor to like whisk her off her feet? Well, those are her favorite books.

Yeah, she's a Daniel Suarez fan. She's in luck. I just, I mean, I know Goodreads has and still has a very fervent following of people that are into it. I dipped my toes into it as well for a little bit and thought it was kind of cool.

But the upkeep was just too much and I gave up. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a link in the show notes if anybody wants to follow me on Goodreads. The bots still turn me on when like I start to read a book. Can't quite figure out how to say I finished a book, it seems. But so I am currently reading about 327 books.

But just look for the latest one. I put this in the show notes because it's been just, like I said, a fucked up week. I have a case of tennis elbow that I've had for like six months. One of those side effects of the stroke.

And I am doing one of these reach outs to the audience, all seven of you. If anybody has any good advice for tennis elbow to fix it without surgery, please drop me a note. Jay at jpd.me. And that's about it.

I'm just, I'm at my wits end. My doctors suck. And I'm looking for, I'm reaching out to the Dr. Oz's of our audience. I'll put her out. That'll go well. I know. A little, little inside joke for the tennis aficionados out there. This will probably upset you.

I wonder if they're going to rename it to pickleball elbow. What? The tennis people are laughing. Actually, they're probably angry. Okay. They're probably very angry. Yes, I know. I actually saw people playing pickleball the other day while walking through Hyde Park here in Toronto. It actually looks quite a bit of fun.

It is fun. It is fun. I don't know. Much more fun than tennis. Certainly. Tennis sucks, man. Start some pickleball action. And I threw this one in our show notes because, you know, we have our enduring joke of eggs are good, eggs are bad. And I just wanted to point out that now, according to science, rain is bad.

Rain? Blame it on, we can blame, Brian, we can blame it on the rain? We can. Blame it on the rain that was falling, falling. Blame it on the rain. Yeah, yeah. I should have somebody else read this article for me.

Little joke. Yeah. The old people get that one. Yeah. Yeah, the old get that one. No, so this is forever chemicals, more scientifically known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

We've talked about these before. These are basically these chemicals that just don't degrade ever, and they're bad for us. And they have now been found in rainwater everywhere, including Earth's most remote locations. So basically, according to the latest U.S. guidelines for PFAS in drinking water, rainwater everywhere on the entire planet is judged unsafe to drink.

Winning. We're done soon. Right? It's been a good run. It's been a good run. The funny thing is, like, this article is just kind of presented as, eh, yeah, you know, most people filter their water. In the industrial world, we don't drink rainwater. But many people around the world expect it to be safe and drink it, and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.

And a, oh, big collective shrug. I would just like to reiterate, you cannot drink water that falls from the sky anywhere on the planet anymore. That's fucked up. Honestly, we should probably just end the show there. Like, we're done. My God, if we didn't have advertisers, I would.

It's my birthday, after all. Happy birthday, Jason. Water's undrinkable. Yeah. In the news.

Brian, Twitter is on a rampage now. They're going after everybody that Elon Musk ever knew. Like, his kindergarten friends. You know. Yeah. All the baby mamas. We're going to have discovery of about 17 new children next week.

Okay. What do they say in Fight Club? Fuckers setting up franchises. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is good. As far as I'm concerned, this is good because, to me, it is actually imperative that Elon Musk lose this lawsuit. That may not be great for my Tesla shareholding.

But, again, as we've talked about since this came up, this is a lawsuit that basically says, do contracts matter? Do we have a social contract or not? And I would like to believe we live in a world where we do. Otherwise, blame it on the rain. Everything's meaningless. I was going to say, you just told us that we can't even trust rain anymore and you want the legal system to actually work.

You're asking a lot. Oh, we can trust rain. We can trust rain, Jason. We can trust rain to kill us. Yep. Yeah. Lovely. So, yeah, Twitter is they're subpoenaing basically all of his friends and anybody that might have had a chat with him about this. So, of course, Mark Andreessen is in there.

Jason Calacanis, surprisingly. A lot of people in here and some people who are just, like, pissed off just because they know him. They say they're getting dragged into it. But, hey, you know, dance with the devil, baby. I wonder if Elon happens to be in that Elon or not if Elon Musk happens to be in the Alex Jones phone dump that was accidentally delivered.

I was watching the trial live when that happened. My jaw hit the floor. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you say that again slowly, please? Now, I have accidentally emailed some things to people before. Oh, yeah. That that was slightly embarrassing or not good, but nothing quite like that.

And I am not a lawyer. No. Couldn't have happened to a bigger asshole, though. I'm just I mean, you talk about we have conspiracy theory guy on trial. But and then this happens. How many conspiracy theories have been born in like, you know, just the past 24 hours or 36 hours since that happened?

Because, you know, I told my roommate she had she had no idea. She doesn't even know who Alex Jones is. And I was just telling her about what happened. And she's like, oh, they got paid. They totally got paid. I'm like, you don't think that maybe they were just sick of their asshole client? She's like, no, no. Somebody paid them.

Some of the best takes on Twitter were like, and we'll get to this when we get to security. But it was like, seems like Alex Jones is the only person in the world that hasn't lost all of his tweets. Or all of his texts. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. I understood.

Oh, man. All right. So I was thinking that because we do try to avoid crypto in the news, but it's just so everywhere now that we can't avoid it, that I thought we should rename the segment to This Week in Grift instead of in the news. It's a perfect title. Yes. Take it away, Jason.

You start. Okay. Over at Bloomberg, they have a great article called The Disastrous Record of Celebrity Crypto Endorsements. And, you know, basically, it's just a list of everybody, every celebrity ever in the past three years who has gotten on board. I don't know if Jason Bourne will recover from, you know, his ad.

Oh, nobody cares for celebrities. Nobody cares. Another Bourne movie comes out. Nobody's going to go, oh, wasn't that guy that did the stupid crypto commercial with all the crappy 3D graphics? No, they're not. It's true. I would just rather have another Bourne movie, personally. The smart celebrities got paid in cold, hard cash rather than the coins that they were endorsing, so.

Yeah. Ain't hurting them that much. Here's the deal. If a celebrity endorses crypto or a non-celebrity endorses crypto, don't buy it. It's a scam. Are you sure about that? Because I'm about to read about 17 articles that, oh, wait, say that they're scams. Never mind. Okay.

The SEC has charged 11 people who allegedly set up and promoted Forsage, which is said was a crypto Ponzi scheme that pulled in over $300 million from retail investors. They basically went through this and said, it is just a Ponzi scheme. That's it.

They never had any assets that didn't rely on getting other people in to add more assets. They tried to shut it down. Didn't work. They kept going. They put up YouTube videos saying that they're great. Regulators in the Philippines and Montana tried to shut it down with cease and desist actions.

They just kept going because they can. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So the Philippines and Montana got together. Strange bedfellows. Strange bedfellows. Sister cities. I don't know what's going on there. I don't know either.

Odd. Forsage is a textbook pyramid and Ponzi scheme. The complaint reads, it did not sell or purport to sell any actual consumable product. Let's read that again. It did not sell or purport to sell any actual consumable product. That is crypto and NFTs in general.

That is the description. If you look it up. To bona fide retail consumers during the relevant time period and had no apparent source of revenue other than the funds received from investors. All right. One down. Good, good gig if you can get it. Okay. What's next? Next.

Nomad has confirmed that its cryptocurrency bridge, which is a service that lets you swap tokens between blockchains, was the victim of an August 1st incident where a slew of hackers stole nearly $200 million in funds. They took advantage of a misconfiguration to let any reasonably knowledgeable user authorize their own withdrawals.

The result was a chaotic hack where people could swap their crypto addresses into a known good transaction to steal the digital money. The firm is saying it's working around the clock to resolve the problem with help from law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms. Talk about an oxymoron. Blockchain intelligence firm.

I was, yeah, no, this is, oh my God. I love it. I love the, I love the fact that incident is in quotes. They're like, we had an August 1st incident. You mean $200 million. Oh my God. Incident. Yeah. Yeah.

Just an incident. You'll love this next sentence and what they put in quotes here. A securities team suggested that well-intentioned white hackers would return crypto that they took, in quotes, preemptively. This is now the new way of saying stealing. I took it preemptively.

I took it preemptive withdrawal. Oh my God. They cannot make this shit up. No wonder there's no good movies in Hollywood anymore. The fucking news is just too absurd. A $200 million heist would be like, you know, that was Michael Bayworthy a couple of years ago.

Now it's just like, you know, back of the news cycle. I'm going to go to the bank and withdraw preemptively right now, Jason. I am too. I'm going to preemptively withdraw my retirement fund and go sit on a beach preemptively. So I don't know why people are using these bridges.

I suspect it's for nefarious reasons to shuffle money around and try to launder it a bit. But I, you know, don't use them because this isn't the first bridge. An attacker swiped roughly $625 million from the Ronin blockchain underpinning Axie Infinity in March and exploit in the wormhole bridge led to another $325 million hack in February.

At some point, we're going to be talking about real money being stolen from these environments, Jason. You know, but that's the whole thing. It's these, it's not real money because it's all made up. So, you know, I could, I could say that the GOG coin is worth one gazillion, a trillion dollars and then you can take it.

And I could say I have been ripped off for that and then write it off on my taxes probably. So shit, we should get on that. I'm not so sure you can get away with that sort of stuff anymore because the regulators are coming. And finally, I've been screaming from the hills for this for, for two, three, four years now, but they're coming as shown to Robinhood, which is doing wonderfully in the news recently.

New York regulators have slapped Robinhood's crypto business with a $30 million fine. They found significant deficiencies in the company's compliance programs following a supervisory examination. So let's see what didn't happen here that they said that they were, that they agree agreed to do in order to run this crypto exchange.

Well, they didn't have enough people working in their money laundering compliance program. My guess is there probably was zero. Zero. Yeah. One. What else? Well, they failed to transition from a manual monitoring system, which is no longer sufficient now that it's much larger than when it started to an automated system that would trigger alerts and let people know something not good was going on.

They found the policies within Robinhood cybersecurity program aren't in full compliance with official cybersecurity and virtual currency regulations. They also mentioned that Robinhood improperly certified compliance with the department's transactions monitoring regulation and cybersecurity regulation. So basically they lied that they were compliant, but weren't.

Okay. Finally, the regulator said Robinhood failed to adhere to customer consumer protection requirements by not maintaining a separate phone number and displaying it on its website specifically for consumer complaints, AKA what every business does now, which is have no customer service except for complaining on Twitter.

Exactly. Just, you have to yell on Twitter. That's all it says. It just says, tweet me. Now, they don't even give you the ad address. They just say, tweet us. Yes, pretty much. And Robinhood's problems are continuing for the second time this year. They're cutting their head count on Tuesday. The company announced it would lay off 23% of its workforce while presumably staffing up their laundry compliance program, which didn't happen.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. According to the CEO, Vlad Taney, the cuts will affect every part of Robinhood's business, but will primarily target the company's operations, marketing, and program management functions. They blamed a deteriorating macro environment for the decision pointing to record inflation and the cryptocurrency crash as the primary drivers of the company's recent woes, conveniently ignoring all the lawsuits and regulations that they're breaking.

Yeah. And they just, yeah. Yeah. The fact that they're a bunch of assholes and overhired. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Robinhood is not a good company. It never has been. Probably never will be. Nope. You know? So, yeah, whatever. They're on my list of, you know, it's a short list.

It's Uber. Robinhood's on the list. Anything that Elon touches is on the list. So, they're in good company, I guess. Yeah. The thing I find funny about all this disruption is, you know, you look at it, you go, oh, too big to fail. Big banks. Oh, so bad. Wells Fargo.

Bank of America. Horrible companies. Let's disrupt and change the banking industry. And then we find out that the companies that have come in to disrupt and change the industries are actually even fucking worse than the original companies we had. Ditto taxi cabs and Uber. See, a market opportunity to grift.

That's it. Yeah. And I just love this one because it just, it tickles my cold black heart to see things like this. This is over at decrypt.co, which is a cryptocurrency website. But the title of the article got me. It's Inside the Crypto Bot Ghost Towns of Telegram.

So, now that, you know, crypto has kind of taken a dive and some of these tokens are missing and just, you know, people have done rug pulls and all that crazy shit. All that's left on Telegram now for some of these tokens is chat rooms of bots trying to scam other bots and get people to invest in their tokens.

Just talking back to each other in gibberish, which is just awesome. I mean, that it really, it is a side plot in a William Gibson novel that has now come to pass, along with the fact that rain will kill us. Well, the thing I worry about is it's one of these festering little ghost towns of bots chatting with each other.

That's where the true AI is going to emerge. Right? Right? I'm, I'm best, yeah, that, that is where, that is the, the pool of goo, you know, the primordial pool of goo. Q is a, Q has brought Picard to one of these chat rooms and is pointing at it.

Oh, you had to bust out the old fucking next gen reference. Damn right. Good one. Good one. Meta has been quietly testing a new live streaming platform and is ramping up creator outreach, outreach, read a 17 page pitch deck here.

If you want to, that they sent the influencers, blah, blah, blah. I did not read the pitch deck. I, I scanned the article for about three seconds because what I saw was they called this project super. Brian, it's super. Um, that's, that's as far as I could get.

I was, I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? They, they fucking named it super. It's a horrible name, but I've got to say it's a smart move because they want to get some of that Twitch energy going on and let's face it. Nobody wants to get into the metaverse.

So what do you do? You do this. It's as, it's as, it's as good as the metaverse is going to get right now. So cool. Is anybody going to use it? Doubt it. Yeah, doubt it for sure. There's like, you know, probably three influencers out there that this is relevant to, but, uh, yeah, but you know, for them, it's super, super.

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Media candy. All right. Well, uh, top of media candy here. I've got a note, uh, to talk about the new Downton Abbey movie, which is not new. It's been out for a while, but you can get it streaming. Um, and I have downloaded it and I'm ready to watch it, but I have not watched it yet. So, uh, that is going to ask you, cause you texted me about this, asking me if I had watched it yet.

And I said, no, I hadn't had it the chance. And this is definitely one of those ones where I have to sync up my schedule with my wife. Cause she's, we'll watch it together. Uh, is it available easily or do I still have to go to Sweden to get this easily? No, you can, you can buy it. You can buy it now. All right. Yeah. I asked my dad if he had seen it.

Um, and he had, he had went to the theater opening day with his wife and, uh, saw it and said it was, uh, it was a Downton Abbey movie. It was excellent. So just watch it. Maybe this weekend. Yeah. I was going to, I was, you know, I had it set for last night, but, uh, like I said, it's been a shitty week, but I did get to talk to a friend of the show MXV who, you know, recently had a heart attack.

So we talked about still being alive, which was better than watching a Downton Abbey movie. I'll go with that. Um, are you caught up on Westworld? I am. And it continues to be a pretty good show. I actually really enjoyed the conceit that they ran with on this last episode. It was cool.

Yeah, it was cool. I really, I, I, I don't know what they did over there, man, but, uh, I, I hope this is the final season probably won't be, but I hope it is. I hope it is too. Uh, but you know, sometimes, uh, injecting the fresh blood and replacing, you know, the creative team behind something can actually, uh, work very rarely, but right now it's working.

Yep. Yep. So I'll stick with it. Um, I also have a note in here, uh, for everything, everywhere, all at once. Um, that was another movie that I was going to watch and talk about. Didn't happen. Well, all, all I know about this movie is everyone everywhere tells me it's good, but I have not yet either.

No, I've seen the first, uh, 15 minutes twice. And, uh, uh, so just keep falling asleep. I'm old, man. I'm just old now. I just, I, it, it looks like one of the, one of the greatest movies ever made. And I can't stay awake more than 15 minutes at night. Well, I stayed awake, uh, much later than I should have last night because, uh, when I was, uh, out there and I came out to, to your studio and friend of the show and friend of both of us, Brian Blondell was there.

He was mentioning that, uh, some of his footage was used in, uh, the new documentary on Netflix train, Rick Woodstock 99, uh, cause he had been there. I probably with Alanis, I'm assuming, and I was working with Alanis at the same time too, which is how Brian and I became friends. Anyways, long story short, he talked about it and, uh, I realized, oh, okay, I should load that up and watch it.

Even though I'd already watched the HBO documentary about how the train wreck of Woodstock 99, but why not? You know, I'll throw it up. It's a three-parter about an hour each or so. Uh, what I did not expect, uh, Brian Blondell also mentioned that, you know, he was in it briefly. I did not expect him to be the voiceover narration of the very opening scenes.

What? So, of course, I was texting him immediately going, uh, you didn't, you didn't drop that dime on me. I didn't expect to hear your voice as soon as I loaded the thing up. Uh, so yeah, uh, that is our friend, uh, that is at the very beginning of that, uh, footage. He's driving along and looking at the wreckage and talking about it.

So I got through two episodes. I didn't tell me that either. That's cool. Okay. And I briefly saw him at one point. I'm assuming he was not at the rave tent and that was probably some cut footage of him dancing backstage, uh, that was used, uh, to set the scene of going to a rave. But yeah, um, uh, total train wreck.

Uh, yeah, it's, uh, I got part three to watch tonight, so we'll see. Yeah, no, I, I asked him, I asked him when I saw the trailer, I'm like, was it really that bad? He's like, oh, it was worse. Oh man, it was bad. It was, it was bad. I remember watching, uh, bits and pieces of it being broadcast from MTV at the time and going, thank God I didn't go.

I mean, imagine if Fire Island had continued and then they just started burning the entire island and raping it. Oh, nice. Okay. Basically what happened there. Yeah. All right. Watch it. It's really good. Uh, because I was traveling, I've got some slightly buzzed on a plane movie reviews.

Uh, I was hoping Downton Abbey was going to be available on the plane, but no such luck. And, uh, they hadn't revised their movies since I flew out to LA. So I was kind of, I was down to the B list choices on movies. Uh, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by both. Perhaps it was the whiskey.

Uh, the first was a movie called Best Sellers. Uh, this has Michael Caine and, uh, Andre Plaza in it. And, uh, he's a writer that has been coaxed out of retirement and she's trying to publish the book and she's taken over her father's publishing house and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It was actually very cute and well done. Uh, it would have failed immensely without Michael Caine. He makes the entire movie, but, uh, it's, it was good. I liked it. All right, cool. Oh yeah. I'm a, I'm a Michael Caine mark, so I'll definitely check that out. Yeah. You should check it out.

And then the other movie I watched is a silly piece of fluff called the lost city with Sandra Bullock. Uh, and, uh, Brad Pitt has cameo that is actually very funny and Channing Tatum. And she is also happens to be an author. Uh, she writes like adventure romance books and then ends up in a, adventure romance.

And it's, it's cute. It wasn't as stupid. Like if you had the option between watching the jungle book or the lost city, a hundred percent pick the lost city. Okay. Okay. It's actually quite funny. Yeah. Huh. All right. I like dumb movies like that.

So yeah, I mean, I think I'll actually watch that one, uh, Brad Pitt's whole cameo. Just, it kind of almost makes the movie. It was very funny. Uh, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Uh, caveat. That was by the time I had finished my whiskey by the time I'd started that one, but very good.

Well, I'm going to go to, go have, uh, I'm going back to the Mexican place that we went to when you were in town and I'm going to go have some Cadillac margaritas because it's my goddamn birthday and I don't care. And this might be the perfect afternoon movie for me. I would suggest it. Yeah. It was, it was fun. It was an enjoyable romp as they used to say.

Cause the Sandman comes out today and I was like, oh, I want to do that. But then I'm like, nah, a little too heavy. That's not an enjoyable romp. It is not an enjoyable romp. I don't know if anybody is familiar with the character called the Corinthian. Who eats people's eyes. No, not probably a very happy, uh, watch today, but this, uh, this, this is right up there.

Yeah. And, uh, uh, listener Joe wrote in and basically sent us a, a, a nice comment that is basically an advertisement for one of our affiliate programs. So I figured I might as well read it, right? Yeah. There is a workaround if slash when Netflix tries to start charging users for accessing content, when not in their own homes, uh, private internet access offers users a dedicated IP address.

You get a single IP address assigned to you that will only be used by you. So if you're always connecting to Netflix through this dedicated IP address, Netflix will never know your true location. GOG.show slash VPN. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. I hate writing copy yet. You say it saved me a couple of minutes there.

Preach. Ops and doodads. Brian, previously I talked on the show about the Opal C1 camera. It's this, uh, higher end webcam. It's like 300 bucks. Uh, there was a waiting list for it. Uh, I got it and, uh, I, I'd actually done my review before I gotten it and now I have it in hand and, uh, I gave it a, gave it a shot, plugged it into a Mac mini that did not have a camera and holy shit.

Is that thing nice? It is, it literally is the best webcam I've ever used is that's, you know, designed to be a webcam, right? It's got great software. It does actual gesture recognition too. So you can like do a pinch and zoom on screen and, uh, it will actually zoom.

It's got bokeh effects, you know, like depth effects. It is beautiful. It is a beautiful little camera. Uh, there's still, there's still a wait list, I believe. Um, but what, what I will tell you is I went in and used my code when I bought mine cause I was on the waiting list.

They let me go back in later and I just bought one for a friend of the show, uh, Chris Lockhead cause we're doing something together with video and, uh, got him one and they let you use that code multiple times. So once you're in, you're in, yeah. Once you're in, you're in. Yeah. So you, if you, if you do get in, uh, you should be able to use that.

Um, I don't know if my, if my code will, maybe I'll just put it in the show notes. What the hell? So I'll put my code in the show notes. Anybody that wants to give it a shot can. How's that? Cool. All right. Uh, but it is a fucking beautiful camera.

Next up. I did not know that Apple arcade could actually remove titles because I thought that whole point of Apple arcade is here's a library of great stuff that we paid a bunch of money for that you can just get on Apple arcade. You don't have to do the in-app purchases and stuff like that. And then I see this article that says Apple arcade removes first batch of originals leaving soon tab now gone.

I'm like, wait, wait, wait, what? And yeah, they're just taking fucking games away, which really sucks because I really do enjoy Apple arcade. I'd imagine that this is very similar to the streaming, uh, your Netflix rights and things like that. They didn't buy them outright. They licensed them for a period of time to be accessed for free through their, their program.

And once that license ends, bye-bye. It's Apple. They've got all the money in the world. Just buy the goddamn things, please. God. And where's flight control, please. I'm asking you, I'm asking you again, Apple, anybody at Apple arcade, go buy the rights to flight control.

I think that was what it was called. The one where you land the planes is the best game, the best iOS game ever. I love that game. Please fix it. Um, but what they did do is they, they got a jet pack joy ride to do a sequel and paid for that. So that's coming for Apple arcade soon.

I love side scrollers. I love tower defense games and I love that damn flight control game. So I'm happy that jet pack joy ride is going to have a, finally get a revamp. So that'll be cool. I think hopefully, hopefully they didn't screw it up, which is possible. Guess what's back.

What is back? When I'm back. And if you recognize that, and if you recognize that song, you probably illegally downloaded the MP3 of it and played it in Winamp because you're old. I did. I know I did. Well, it's back. Uh, I'm not entirely sure in this day of streaming and not actually having any MP3s on your phones or computers or anything like that anywhere will mean anything to anyone.

But if you want to download it for nostalgia stake, you certainly can. They've released their first update 5.9 RC1 build 9999 in four years. All right. It is the culmination of years of hard work, including two teams and a pandemic dictated hiatus to build a system that no one is ever going to use anymore.

Yay. I will. I will. For five minutes. Just for the shits and giggles. Yeah. For five minutes. For five minutes. Exactly. Yeah. So it's a, it's back. A radioonomy bought Winamp in 2014 from AOL to aid its online music plans, which I'm sure are working out swimmingly.

And the team has lately promised a totally remastered experience with podcasts and radio features, as well as a closer connection to artists. So listen to grumpy old geeks on Winamp coming soon. Oh my God. At least these guys actually put Winamp back out.

You know, you look at the douchebags that bought Radio Shack and turned it into a fucking crypto scam. You know, at least they didn't do that. There is no Winamp token. Well, maybe there is a Winamp token. That's the, that's what it is. It only plays songs that you bought as NFTs. And I found this website this week, Brian, I think is just awesome.

It's called Web Compare. Okay. And it has one single purpose. It shows the difference between photos taken with the Hubble and photos taken with the web space telescope. Cool. And it is cool. It is, Brian. It is neat.

It is very neat. Yeah. So the web kicks the shit out of the Hubble. There's, there just ain't no getting around that. The other cool thing about this, this website is if you go to the very bottom and you look on the bottom left corner, there's a little GitHub icon. So you click on that and then you actually go to the project that has all the source code for the website itself.

Right. Which is cool because it does this really neat little slider trick that does the comparison. So if you want to have that as a feature on one of the websites you're building, then go check out the source for that. So cool. Pretty cool. All right. And I'm going to podcast listener outsource, uh, uh, some stuff here.

Uh, basically I'm, I've been using Beachbody for an awful long time on my Apple TV to do workout programs and yoga and all that sort of stuff. And they are doing a fairly hefty price, uh, increase without really increasing any of their programming. And the, the stuff that they're starting to add is just not, it's just not geared towards me.

And it's, I'm getting sick of being sold their shakes every five seconds while watching the program. So to hell with them. So I'm looking for suggestions on good alternatives for yoga and weight and cardio programs. I'm also still on the hunt for a good stationary bike options that are not Peloton.

And I'm starting to wonder at this point, do I give in and try Apple fitness because they probably do all of that and it will work on my Apple TV. So, but if anybody has any suggestions, appreciate it. You have an Apple watch, so you can use Apple fitness. That's the downside of Apple fitness is you can't use it. If you don't have a fucking Apple watch, it was like, that sucks.

That's kind of dumb because it's an app on your Apple TV and you could still do the workouts without a watch. I know. And you're paying for it. Why are they not taking, yeah, taking the money. I don't know. It's really, I, I, it's annoying because, uh, there's some stuff on there.

I want, uh, my roommate to use and she can't cause she, I'm not going to give her my Apple watch so I can, you know, so she can work out and I'm not going to go buy one. It'd just be nice if you could watch, I don't know, a video of somebody doing yoga and play along at home without going to buy a, you know, $500 watch since I'm already paying for it.

But I guess they're trying to sell more watches. That's, that's really dumb. It's really, really dumb. Um, let me know while with the bike, because I'm looking for one of those as well. Although Pelotons kind of, if you check Craigslist nowadays, they are kind of going pretty cheap.

So it's the monthly, it's the monthly fee that gets, Oh, that thing. Yeah. Security? Ha! Welcome back to Security, ha!

With Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. Dave is also the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. And now he is the co-host of the Control Loop podcast, where they discuss ICS and OT.

Hi, Dave. How was your birthday? Hello. Happy birthday! My birthday was, was very nice. Thank you very much. And I appreciate all the well wishes from folks who reached out and wished me a happy birthday. It helped make it extra festive. Now, let me ask you this, Jason, as we're recording this today, is today your birthday?

Yes, it is. Ah, well. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Dave Manson. Happy birthday, Mr. Podcast Man.

Happy birthday to you. Woo! There you go. I've never been serenaded on my birthday. I don't do that for just anybody, so there you go. All right. Congratulations. All right. Thank you. I made it around the sun one more time.

So did you. That's right. Right. All systems nominal, orbit number 51 in progress. Yeah. Or whatever it is for you. Yeah. 51. Here we go again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm feeling a bit left out, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah.

What's your birthday, Brian? Are you a summer baby? I'm back in May, but a couple trips around the sun less than you guys. Yeah. He's a wee babe. Not quite eligible for, what, shingles vaccines, extra booster shots of COVID stuff.

Colonoscopies. Colonoscopies. Oh, yeah. How can we forget colonoscopies? Yes. You have so much to look forward to. I know. I can't wait. And you'll forget all of it because memory goes fast. That's true. I rely on it. I rely on it every day.

It's how I get through life. It's my quickly declining memory. It's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. Yeah. I'm often reminded from the Indiana Jones 3 quote. He's like, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember.

It is every day for me. I tell you what, drafts. The app drafts. Get it. Put it on your phone or on your watch, your Apple Watch, and you can talk to it and leave yourself notes all the time. It is the single best hedge against getting old and not forgetting. They're not remembering anything.

I use it every day because you just talk to it and it will remind you later. It's great. Well, I'm going to write that down. You wouldn't have to if you had the app already. Get to it. I know, right? Seriously. Well, speaking of hospital procedures and medical stuff, Meta is now, while The Verge is reporting that two proposed class action lawsuits are accusing Meta and hospitals of violating HIPAA, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and other laws by collecting patient data without

consent, Meta's pixel analytic tracking tool allegedly sent health statuses, appointment details, and other data to Facebook when it was present on patient portals. In one lawsuit from last month, patients said Pixel gathered data from UC San Francisco and Dignity Health portals that was used to deliver ads related to heart and knee issues.

The second lawsuit from June is broader and claims at least 664 providers shared medical info with Facebook through Pixel. Meta is saying that sites using Pixel need to obtain the rights to share data before sending it to Facebook. But the plaintiffs claim Meta refused to enforce its policies.

So, it's their fault. They should have known what this is going to do. Yeah. You trusted us? Are you crazy? Silly rabbit. Yeah. Lots of finger pointing. A lot of finger pointing and not good. Like, when you log...

Now that... You basically don't really have an option. You have to log into these patient portals to make appointments. I mean, I guess you don't have to. You can still call and all that sort of stuff. But they certainly want you to. And certainly my provider is... Almost everything is done through a portal. One wonders why they were installing Pixel on these portals in the first place, of course.

Right. Why? Why is it there? But it is disturbing to think that you could log in, it could glean what you're seeing your doctor about, and then serve you ads related to it. That's not cool. I have to admit, I'm a little in the dark here. Do you guys have better insights as to what the incentive is for sticking Facebook's Pixel on your homepage?

100%. I can talk to this one. Okay. It was probably a social, basically probably like a social installation to, because when you share pages from the main website, you want, like, there's different social things that you can get by putting the tracking Pixel on.

So when they share a URL from your main site, boom, you'd get a much prettier share box, you know, that type of thing. What they probably did was they put that Pixel somewhere, like, in a common template, like a footer or a header, where it's always going to be, and it just sits there.

You know, you install it once, it's like, okay, we're going to use it everywhere, not thinking that, oh, once they get past the membership section, this could be problematic, because I am sure that the guy who probably programmed the thing and slapped it in there has no idea what HIPAA is. So he just slapped in a tracking Pixel.

So I bet if you dig deep enough into some of these, there's probably a Google tracking Pixel as well for, you know, Google Stats, their web stats. These kind of things, just, they're use cases in one part of the website that people don't factor in for other parts of the website, and they just put it into common libraries that just get rendered when you just go to a page.

That's, that's, I, one, I'm like 99.999% sure that's what happened with these, these guys. Right. Makes sense. That's a really good explanation, Jason. Thank you. I'm, I'm, I'm curious too, like on the inbound side, wouldn't you think, and I, I'm, I'm chuckling as I say these words out loud, wouldn't you think that Facebook would have something in place?

So on the inbound side, when they started seeing things that were clearly related to medical stuff, they could flag it. But again, again, that, that would be what a responsible company would do. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. Here we go. Foresight and thought and protecting people.

Yes. I knew I could count on you and you did not disappoint. Yeah. So I appreciate it. Yeah. No problem. So maybe change will come. Yeah. Good luck. Good luck. But they, you know, they can't track your pants. So there's always that.

So it's all just above the crotch because there's no legs in meta. There's no legs in meta. Yeah. Oh, OK. Got you. I did have a bit of follow up that I wanted to let you know about, Dave. Remember the USB-C cable discussion that we had and we couldn't figure out what was what?

And then there was a Kickstarter at the exact same time that heaven, you know, mana from heaven just happened to lay this cable Kickstarter on my doorstep. It is shipping. It's done. It will be here soon. I just got the note to put in my address or double check my address and it will be shipping from Germany soon.

So once it gets here. Oh, that's good. I will definitely let you know. But I was just very excited that it's not vaporware. It's they actually made it and it is actually going to ship. Do we have time for a quick little side rant? Of course we do. He asks rhetorically. Yes. So as we mentioned before we started rolling here, I just got a new audio interface here for the studio.

I got an Apollo X4, which is a very fancy, you know, the audio guys on my team here are very excited that evidently this is going to make me sound like James Earl Jones. And that will be amazing. So happy to get that.

However, can I just rant and say that anybody who is putting out a piece of hardware that is this expensive and this high end and requires a Thunderbolt cable, include the Thunderbolt cable.

My Apollo X4 came yesterday. I could not use it until today because the cable shipped separately and was useless without the cable. Now, let me give a little tip of the hat to the tip of the hat to the folks over at Otherworld Computing, whose Thunderbolt dock that I use.

What does their dock come with? The cable. It comes with the cable. Because you can't use it without the cable. And Otherworld Computing knows this. Apollo, Universal Audio, get your stuff together. Start sending out a cable. Your users will appreciate it.

And that's my rant for the day. Oh, man. Oh, here's a question for you. Am I wrong? No, you're not wrong. You're not wrong at all. Over a certain price point, the box should contain absolutely everything required to use said product. And a handjob for that.

I know how much that thing costs. I doubt you would want a handjob from the engineers over there. I'm just saying. Amen. That's true. Just cut a hole in the box. I'll close my eyes. Oh, boy. Think of England. I was going to say, maybe I'm giving away too much about myself, but that headphone jack looks pretty good.

Two things. I've got an Apollo interface as well. And my Thunderbolt connection is the old school Thunderbolt 2, like the square one almost. Right, right. And a friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger, gave it to me.

He sent it to me. And he was at least cognizant of the fact that you need a Thunderbolt cable to actually use it. So he actually sent me a Thunderbolt cable with it that did not come with it. So thank you for that, Jordan. I don't use the interface right now, but it was very nice of him to send the cable with the interface.

But those things are ridiculously expensive, and I cannot believe it did not come with a cable. Right. That's right. But you're going to love it. You're going to love it. They are fine interfaces. Seems nice so far. So I'm looking forward to it. Yep. Yep. Hopefully my pre-sonus that I gave you will find a home there somewhere still.

Oh, yes. It will still be put to good use. Thank you very much. Excellent. All right. So we've had what I would consider to be a fairly security-related story coming out of the January 6th investigations that have been going on.

It's a problem that Alex Jones dearly wishes he had had this past week. But the writing over at Vanity Fair on this is stunningly good. And I had actually pulled a couple paragraphs. I'm not going to read them. I was going to initially. But, you know, then I'll just get hate mail because Trump people actually still listen to the show improbably.

I will read the headline and then we will discuss a little bit. For probably totally innocent reasons, the Defense Department also deleted the January 6th text messages of top Trump officials. So we have learned basically that the U.S. Secret Service has purged a whole bunch of its January 6th text messages in the days after the attack because we – even though they had been ordered to preserve them, it takes serious effort to permanently delete any electronic communications, let alone ones that are government records.

And there's probably a lot of interesting information in these texts, which is probably why it was deleted. We have now also learned that the Department of Defense also wiped phones of departing high-ranking Department of Defense and Army officials at the conclusion of the Trump administration, which they also weren't supposed to do, but did anyways.

So there is – I think I've seen some people, some knowledgeable people discussing this saying there is literally absolutely no way this should have ever happened at all whatsoever unless it's a conspiracy. At all. Thoughts, Dave? Oh, man.

I mean, you know, you want to think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation here. You want to give these organizations the benefit of the doubt. I always try to say never assign malice to that which can be explained through incompetence. But this is – sure is adding up on the other side of the ledger here.

Well, one organization – okay, maybe somebody stupid pressed the wrong button. Two? Right. Right. All around the exact same day. Mm-hmm. What a crazy random happenstance.

Wow. Imagine that. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we're on board. Same page here. We are. I would also point out that in addition to the good work that Vanity Fair is doing here, Kim Zetter has written a lot on this as well. She has a really good exploration of this whole thing.

So if this is something you're interested in, go look up Kim Zetter on Twitter and you can find her writing about this as well. Excellent. It's worth checking out. Cool. So I recently interviewed someone for our caveat program. It was a woman named Beth Goldberg.

She is the research program manager at Jigsaw, which is a unit at Google. Didn't they make those funny cards that you sent to people about 10 years ago? Yes. Yes. Jigsaw is a unit at Google who are tasked with doing research on things like misinformation and all that kind of stuff.

And they published a really interesting piece about conspiracy theories. And I think it's worth checking out both for the content of it, but it's also a really nice interactive piece here as you scroll through it.

They did a lot of nice work here on the actual design and how it works and all that kind of stuff. So my interview with her will be coming up on a caveat episode sometime soon, but some of the takeaways for me that I wanted to share was just, you know, how do you deal with people who are going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, people you love, things like that.

And one of the things that Beth pointed out was you don't confront them. You don't challenge them. She said the best thing – what their research showed was that one of the best things you can do is just listen to them so that they feel as though they're being heard and then just ask questions around the edges of what they're talking about.

So just – it's a process. You have to slowly plant little tiny seeds of doubt so as to not trigger them putting their shields up. I thought it was really interesting advice. Yeah, that's interesting. That jives with what's in Dave McCraney's new book about how you change people's minds.

And like one of the original stories at the beginning of the book is about changing how people vote. And it turns out that the really – the way to change people's opinions about voting is just to have a conversation with them and talk to them just like that. Just talk – you know, ease into it.

Don't spook them and just, you know, get to the points that, you know, are ridiculous eventually. But don't hit them over the head with it and let them – they have to come to that conclusion. You can't come to it for them and never tell anybody they're idiots. And cut them out of your life completely.

I find that works very well for me. See, that's my approach, Brian. It shouldn't be yours. You're the, you know, the negotiator. So why – I don't negotiate with idiots. You know, Jason, you remind me of – I have some friends who are politicians and part of being a politician when it's time to be elected or reelected is door knocking.

And that's, you know, whether they – it is exactly what it sounds like. They go door to door and they knock on people's doors and they introduce themselves and they tell you about themselves. But also they ask you if you have any questions or any concerns or anything like that. And I think that really speaks to what you're saying there, that as much as the notion of door knocking I find annoying because I don't want someone to come knock on my door and tell me all about, you know, whatever it is they're about.

It does work and it's one of the most effective things that they can do. So they find that it's time well spent. I would hate to do it. I would – oh, man. That would just be the worst thing. Oh, it would be horrible. Horrible. You two were not – I mean it takes a special person.

You two were not meant to be – I am to those people. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, the Dave McCraney book is called How to Change Minds. I covered it a couple of weeks ago. But if anybody is wondering because I just mentioned it, it's called How to Change Minds.

Go grab it. It's your local book retailer. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll have a link to this article over on the Jigsaw website. And, again, if you're interested, just stay tuned. My interview with Beth Goldberg is going to be on an upcoming episode of Caveat.

But I thought our audience would benefit from this as well. Excellent. Awesome source. Yeah. Well, I'm going to go do some birthday stuff, I think. Okay. Oh, good for you. Enjoy. Well deserved. Oh, yeah. Yes.

I'm going to train a new intern and eventually go have a margarita. It'll be fun. It'll be fun. Very nice. Enjoy your new Apollo. I think you're going to have a blast with that thing. I hope so. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Well, once again, happy birthday to both of you.

Talk to you soon. Closing shout outs. We got a cool email from Neil. He says, you asked about hiding AirPods in show 563. We're actually, not AirPods, but what is it? AirTags. AirTags.

Yeah. Yeah, AirTags. And he says, have a look at some of the ideas that the 3D printing makers have come up with on Thingiverse, and he sent us a link over to Thingiverse with AirTag. He's like, I like the ones that hide it in the stem. Keep up the grumpy work, guys. I don't like the stem ones unless it's underneath the seat because it's so easy to steal a seat.

You know, people steal seats all the time. That's why you take them with you. That's the only downside on that one. But there's some really cool options in there. So if you've got a 3D printer, check it out. The bike saddle one's pretty good. But yeah, there's some interesting things in there. Cool. Yeah. Thanks, Neil. Pretty cool. Thank you. No new Patreon subscribers this week.

No. But over at PayPal, we've got Judge, Matthew, Jonathan, Nicola, Thomas, Shaleen, Melissa, David, and Nicolai. Ah, and over at the tip jar, we've got Mario, Anne Q, Matthew, Linda, and wait, wait, wait for it, wait for it. Oh, Linda again. Hey, thanks, Linda.

Twice. Appreciate it. Thank you. And we have some reviews this week. First up is Matt, who gave us five stars. Good use of an AirTag. In your last podcast, you mentioned good uses of an AirTag. Last week, I rode in Ragbrae, which is a seven-day bicycle tour across the state of Iowa.

It's essentially week-long cycling, camping, and lots of drinking festival with 25,000 of other crazy cyclists. One of the biggest challenges after riding 50 to 80 miles a day is finding your campsite where our support crew is located, whose trucks are camping gear and luggage between towns. This past Ragbrae.

I just like saying it that. Ragbrae. I don't know. I stashed an AirTag in my luggage, and once I was in town, I used maps to navigate to exactly where my bag was. I'd say it was pretty convenient. On a side note, Jason, you're an inspiration with your recovery from your stroke and how you've improved your health. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Matt.

As I mentioned, I put AirTags in both our checked luggage when we traveled. We didn't have any issues. However, we have some friends here in Toronto that just recently left to fly to, I think, San Diego or something like that. When they landed, they did the same thing, put an AirTag in two suitcases.

When they landed, they found one of their suitcases was 0.1 miles away, and the other one was 3,252 miles away. So at least they knew not to wait for it, because it didn't make the flight. Definitely not there. So that's good intel to have.

Yes. Oh, man. And Lambdahl gives us the five stars and says, These guys are great. Funny, informative, crazy, grumpy. Basically, tech and popular media broadcasted by Sam and Waldorf. And when Dave Bittner pops in for his bit, it's kind of like the news person trying to give an accurate report and the Muppets distract him.

The only podcast I can listen to. Well, thank you, Lambdahl. Thank you. And one more five-star rating from DearLove210. Love the show. I'm excited to start season four of Westworld after your review. Chuck Palahniuk over Stephen King. Blasphemy. Would you rather see Happy Meals replace toys with NFTs or 9-volt batteries?

9-volt batteries. Carrots. Oh, nah, come on. Some fat kids these days. I know, but 9-volt batteries, you put on your tongue and it gives you a little ziz. You get some zhuzh. Yep, a little zhuzh. And sadly, this week, we lost Nichelle Nichols.

Yeah, there were so many articles at the same time because we lost Bill Simmons the same day and everybody was saying how Bill was so great. And then Nichelle would get a little tiny side article. I'm like, dude, they should get equal billing across the board. They were both inspirational to their own generations and they did great stuff and they should have been given the same billing is all I'm saying.

But, yep, it's with a heavy heart that she leaves us, but she had a good run. Yep, and another sad news. Shortly thereafter, Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers for 67 years, died at 94, which is what we call a very good run. Indeed. But he was definitely the sound of my childhood growing up in Los Angeles, in the Los Angeles area, and one of the best broadcasters there ever was, by far.

So, sad he was gone, but, you know, 94. Good run. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.showslashdonate 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.showslash564. 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.showslashcontact 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.showslashreview and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

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