569: It’s Not Easy Being Green

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, I have a little follow-up about Chaplain Steffen's comment last week in the reviews where he was talking about Earth's number one bully. And you assumed it was you? Yeah.

Yeah, it's not. It was about Elon Musk. Go back and reread it. You could throw in a name. That'd be helpful. Well, Earth's number one bully, when you think about it, kind of, he did. Well, that could be Putin. No, no, no. Come on. It could be many people. All right. Well, that's good to know that I'm not the number one bully. That's nice.

Yeah. Shout out to the person whose name I forget on the Clash Royale clan that pointed that out to me. And I'm like, oh, duh. Like, dude, that's Elon. Yeah. I'm like, sorry. Sorry, Steffen, for the miscommunication.

All right. Well, there you go. I saw a really great article over at Slate, The Birth of the Modem World, and it talks about the forgotten history of how all of this started. As the digital natives are getting older and older, you know, they just kind of assumed they were born with an iPhone and everything just kind of worked the way it works now.

And there was an internet and there was Wi-Fi. And you and I know better. I ran my own BBS way back in the day. Those of us that straddled the divide, that were born without all this stuff and kind of pioneered the history of it and used to put phones down into cradles for modems.

And this talks about all of that. So I just thought it was really interesting for the olds out there like us. Much like Generation X is forgotten in general, the way that all this technology started is also being forgotten. Well, I will give it a read. Sounds like it's fascinating. It is. A trip down memory lane.

Yes. I was listening to Twit this week, This Week in Tech. Really? With Leo Laporte and gang. I thought you gave up on those guys. No, I'm actually a sponsor. I pay them money every month so they can keep the lights on. I did send them a note to say I would love to be a guest on the show and obviously as being a Gen Xer, I am often forgotten.

Forgotten, yes. They did not write back. But I did hear this on the show, which was really, really eye-opening because Kevin Rose, who I know and worked with and he's gone off into crypto land and I've kind of distanced myself from him.

He was also one of the first guests on Twit on the first ever episode. It has been back often. Well, not anymore because Leo Laporte has put the kibosh on anybody shucking NFTs in crypto on his shows, on his entire network. So Kevin has been banned.

I just – I busted up laughing when I heard that. Well, you know, again, trailblazers that we are, we banned NFT shucksters from our podcast about five minutes after NFTs were invented. Exactly. Kind of saw the writing on the wall with that one. Yeah.

But yeah, no, it's still out there going strong. That whole Y Combinator demo day was this week and like most of the startups that are demoing are Web3 or crypto startups. Yeah, but I mean is it really?

I mean I liken this to the heyday of Seattle when all of a sudden they discovered Nirvana and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and then they signed about 7,000 other bands, all of which sucked and never did shit. We're in the sucked and never did shit phase of Seattle with all this stuff.

Okay. I like it. The money is still being thrown at them. They're being signed to labels left, right, and center. You'll hear one song on a radio that's got pushed and it sucks and you'll never hear from them again. Yep. Speaking of push, remember push? The web technology? Oh, push technology. Oh, yes. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of in the same boat, I believe. But we'll see. There's just too much money floating around still. So they're just grasping. Yeah. Exactly. They just need to blow up Andreessen Horowitz. That'll put an end to most of it, I think. But I saw this this morning. Now our podcast is on a list.

Great. Dude, we've been on a list for a long time. I saw this article, When Bitcoin Plunges, Butcoin Cheers. It's an article about a subreddit that I'd never heard of called Butcoin. Nice. And all they've done for the past 11 years is do what we do every week and make fun of crypto.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. So I highly recommend checking that one out. Cheers to Butcoin. In the news. Well, it's been a long time, Jason, since we've had basically a Facebook-centric news area.

But boy, oh boy, they've been busy. Do you mean Meta, Brian? Well, whatever. Whatever. Let's just use them interchangeably at this point. Meta has been fined 405 million pounds. By the Irish Data Protection Commission for its handling of children's privacy settings on Instagram, which violated GDPR.

It's the second largest fine to come out of Europe's GDPR laws. And the third and largest fine levied against Meta by the regulator. This comes from the photo sharing's privacy settings on accounts run by children. They had been investigating Instagram over children's use of business accounts, which made personal data like email addresses and phone numbers publicly visible.

They also covered Instagram's policy of defaulting all new accounts, including teens, to be publicly viewable. I love Meta's response. Okay. This inquiry focused on old settings that we updated over a year ago, and we've since released many new features to help keep teens safe and their information private.

Meaning, yeah. Yeah. We did that stuff. We're trying to... Not anymore. Really. Uh-huh. Yeah. Because you started investigating us, we fixed it. So, yeah. Um, uh-huh. And that was about it?

Yeah. Yeah. You can't rob a bank last week and say, but I'm not robbing a bank this week. I don't deserve to go to jail. Once you told me that robbing a bank would get me in trouble, I stopped doing it. Yeah. Yeah. But I get to keep the money, right? Yeah. Well, in other news, the DOJ is going up against Google for antitrust about their policy of buying the default placement in just basically every web browser on the planet except DuckDuckGo, I think.

Maybe Brave. Since Brave started their own search engine. But the issue here is that Google spends a lot of money to get those defaults. And if they lose this case, then Apple is going to be out quite a bit of money because they're going to pull in about $18 to $20 billion this year for that, you know, placement in Safari and, you know, probably more next year and more the next year after that.

It's insane how much money they're spending on that. I thought it – because I remember when I first heard the number and it was $4 billion. But it's been a long time since then. I didn't realize that it probably went up. I didn't realize it went up, you know, five-fold. Right. This will be an interesting one because what happens when – if this goes through and the DOJ wins and says Google cannot, you know, pay for default placement in a search engine.

Right. Who's going to be the – who's going to be the default? How do you determine what the default is? Yeah. And how do you determine if you got paid or not for it? Like because every browser will be able to set whatever they want as their default search engine now, right? But do we – You can do that. That's the thing. You can do that.

The only point here is that nobody can – Well, anybody can do it now. Yeah. But people are lazy, so they use whatever pops up. Yeah. And they just don't even know. Yeah. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to watch. You know why they don't know? Because there are so many different settings in browsers now. Mm-hmm. My God.

It's all buried. It's the same thing that Facebook does with all their privacy settings. Bury them and kludge them over the head with seven million different options. And then change them when they get caught doing bad stuff. Exactly. And then default back to the setting that you didn't want that you had to set on every update. Yeah.

Oh, remember those days. Privacy on, privacy off. Bluetooth on, Bluetooth off. Yep. Ah, the old days. And from the No Shit Sherlock file and going back to Facebook, Facebook engineers admit they don't know what they do with your data. Yeah. At all. I'm not surprised about that.

They can't track it. So, earlier this year, Motherboard reported about an internal Facebook document that said the company has no idea where users' data goes and what the company is doing with it. There was a previously sealed court hearing in March where two veterans' Facebook engineers confirmed what the leaked document revealed. It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly where the user data flows.

I would be surprised if there's even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively. So, once your data goes in, who the hell knows where it goes? They don't even know. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me one bit. You know how complicated that system is? Yeah. I mean, yeah, they have teams just for, you know, one little data lake over here, another little data silo over here.

All that stuff gets put in. There's APIs probably from every part of the company that can access it. Then it pulls it to someplace else. I mean, there's just no way. There's just no way anybody could know that. So, that's not a surprise at all. Nope, not a surprise at all, except for the fact that, of course, some of that data probably shouldn't go into certain pools, but it does because the system is so complicated and nobody's really watching it.

You know what else they had to have a team for, Jason? What did they have a team for, Brian? They had a team responsible for discovering potential harms to society with its own products. Maybe that might have applied to that particular thing about not knowing where data is going. We'll never know. Yeah, they didn't know, but I think that team probably got together and just said, well, everything that you do is harmful to society.

So, our job here is done. Thank you. Well, again, we'll never know because that team has been disbanded. Yeah, we'll never know. We'll never know. So, they had a team for this and bye-bye. See you later. We don't care. Yeah, the responsible innovation team.

What a name. What a name. The responsible innovation team. I mean, talk about something that they actually desperately need. This is a team they should keep around, but, you know, especially with your numbers going down and, yeah, it's just the big bet on the metaverse not going so well.

Yeah. I put my Oculus on yesterday and I had it on for like five minutes and I'm like, this is so dumb. I feel stupid. I did. I'm just like walking around like, you know, whipping a lightsaber around. I'm like, I feel like a twat. I've got to take this thing off.

And it actually kind of hurt after 10 minutes. Right. Not even 10 minutes. Well, yeah, 10 minutes because I had to reset like half the settings and wait for an update and all that crap. But I use it so often. Every time I put it on, it's like opening up my Xbox. You know, it's like an hour of updates just to play it for five minutes.

Well, some interesting news. More Americans are using iPhones than Android phones. Finally. Yeah. Finally. Took a long time. But, you know, Apple's always done very well in the U.S. compared to Android and compared to the rest of the world. So it's a tipping point finally reached.

Yeah. And there's enough used, you know, there's enough used iPhones around now where you can actually get them pretty cheap. Yeah. You can get the older models cheap. And they've started to put out, you know, bargain basement phones, like the SEs or whatever. I'm a pro guy, so I don't follow that side of it. So I could have that wrong.

But, yeah, that's pretty cool. But the cooler part is when Tim Cook got asked about turning off the damn green bubbles for Android users, he did exactly what the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world does. He says, well, my users don't ask for me to change it, so I'm not gonna.

And then he said, if you want it gone, buy an iPhone. I love it. That's what you do. That's what you do. That is the correct answer. Yeah. That's why he's got a, you know, a $3 trillion company. Yeah. Why should I cater to my competitors? Exactly. No, that makes total sense.

And I, you know, personally, as an iPhone user, I enjoy seeing the green bubbles because now I know, you know, who's an Android user and who's not. I know who to expect spam emails from. I know, it's demeaning and derogatory, but, you know, on some level, it's true.

I'm sorry. It is elitist bullshit, but it's there and it works. So, yeah, keep the green. It's not easy being green, so get an iPhone. Well, speaking of green, I know where some of that NFT money is still floating around. LG is getting a big chunk of it.

LG is bringing NFTs to its LED and OLED TVs just where you wanted them. Why? Dear God, why? Starting today, or last week, I guess, if you live in the U.S. and you own WebOS 5.0 or later TV, you'll have access to the company's new LG Art Lab platform.

It's a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs directly through your TV's home screens. Great. There's even a countdown feature that will remind you when NFT drops are about to occur. Is there a countdown on your bank account, too, as the price falls through the floor?

There's a countdown on me ever buying another LG TV, that's for sure. Actually, I don't know any, so I'm definitely not getting one now. So, yeah, it's really like the use case for this has got to be tiny. I mean, who's actually going to do this?

I don't know. Who wants to hook up their wallet to their TV? I don't even want an internet-connected TV. I don't either. I shut that part off. I turn it off on every TV I get, because I use the Apple TV or the Fire Stick for all that stuff. I don't use the TV version, especially since you can't figure out their privacy policies, and I don't want them sending me ads.

They send you ads. I bought the TV. Why am I getting an ad on my TV? Yeah, I get that, too. So annoying. I get an ad for whatever's on the Roku channel as I scroll to the right to find the Apple TV button so I can actually watch everything on my Apple TV.

Yeah. And in some sad space news. Oh, go ahead. More? No, no, no. Go ahead. Sad space news here, Jason. The fuel leak will likely delay the Artemis 1 launch to October now. There won't be another window, because SpaceX has to get in there to destroy our night sky. Oh, great.

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Media candy. Speaking of using your Apple TV to access things and my VPN so I can get access to U.S. networks that show things that I want to see. Star Trek Lower Decks is back. Season 3. We're up to three episodes now.

As delightful as always. All right. I will wait for the whole thing to drop, then go watch it. It is very funny. I got into Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power. I think we're, what, two episodes in. I've watched both episodes. It's exactly what I thought it would be.

It's stunningly gorgeous. Very slow moving. But I'm a sucker for this stuff. I love Lord of the Rings. And it's been good. I like it. All right. Good plot. Not much of a plot to speak of yet. Okay. Two to three things have happened.

I'm not entirely sure what they all mean, but it looks good. Look, I mean, again, you and I sat through the extended versions of all three movies and theaters, 12 hours plus. Didn't care. Loved every second of it.

Admittedly, The Hobbit should have been one movie, not three, but loved that too. Not all three, not the three movies of it. Condense it to one. Great. I love Lord of the Rings, and this is a good extension of it. I mean, it seems great. It's very, yeah, not much plot to speak of. I think that's the downside to being signed for five seasons immediately.

Oh, my God. It gives you time to fuck around instead of get to the point. That's true. I didn't know they were signed for five seasons. Oh, my God. When you drop a couple billion dollars on something, you're going to squeeze that lemon for all it's worth, aren't you? Yeah, yeah, pretty much, I guess.

I guess. And speaking of squeezing a lemon for all it's worth, I went back to try to finish the first episode of House of the Dragon, and I fell asleep on the couch. Perfect. That's, yeah, like 1% of the people I know actually like it. That's it.

People on Discord seem the opposite. They seem to be into House of Dragon and not really into Lord of the Rings. So no accounting for tastes, I guess. I guess not. I guess not. Or as I keep telling my son, everybody likes different things. Yes, they do. That's why country music exists. Exactly.

Something that everybody should like is coming back. I get a little upset at these definitions of seasons when a season can now be three to four episodes, apparently. But Somebody Feed Phil is getting its sixth season renewal, which is great. That'll be coming. I'm not sure exactly when it's dropping, but we're going to get Croatia, Philadelphia, Nashville, Santiago, and Austin.

So again, a one, two, three, four, five episode season. Five. I still haven't finished last season. Oh, we finally finished it just because, you know, bad news and you need Phil and delightful. It's just delightful. That's why I've been saving it. Yeah. I just put it on the back burner because I'm like, okay, this is like in my back pocket when I need something to perk me up, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning to finish Stranger Things season four. Uh-huh. Now, I'm getting into this like watching old series and doing reviews about them because it dawned on me, wait a minute, not everybody binges it when it first comes out.

They're stragglers. I still have not seen season four. That's something that my wife and I want to watch together and we've been very busy recently so we have not had a chance to sit down and watch it yet. And the biggest problem with it is each episode is like an hour and a half and the last episode is two hours and 20 minutes.

Now, the thing about this is the first couple episodes, slow going. Slow going for sure. Then it really picks up in the middle and I really enjoyed the longer episodes because I was kind of bummed when it was done. I'm like, oh, I want more so I can watch the next one. Now, the last episode, they took – well, here's the deal.

If you cut out 15 of the cliché plot points and about 90 minutes off of it, you would have a perfect episode. Jason, if you cut out cliché plot points from Stranger Things, you wouldn't have Stranger Things. This is true. That's the whole point of Stranger Things. But you can – when they're doled out a little bit here and a little bit there but when they pack them all together into one final movie at the end, I mean, I was rolling my eyes half the time and the other time I was on the edge of my seat.

They have the whole – I mean there's a love conquers all moment in there that is straight out of the Matrix, which I knew – I'm just like watching this and I'm like, oh, Brian's going to throw something at the TV for this one. And then it just keeps going and then it does have a Lord of the Rings ending where it takes 45 minutes just to get to the end.

So I got to say all in all, I really enjoyed season four except for – maybe it was just because I was tired and I just wanted to go to bed. I was like, come on. You binged – you binged like – you didn't binge episodes, Jason. You binged movies. I know. It was just – it was a long slog.

But I thought the payoff was good and I'm looking forward to the final season, which season five will be. They set it up nicely though. The part about it that really kind of got me, there's a lot of flashbacks in this season. And it dawned on me, I can't remember a damn thing about season one through three of Stranger Things.

Couldn't tell you either really. I couldn't – like half the characters, I'm like, were they in the previous ones? And then they show flashbacks of them all the way to the beginning. I'm like, oh, they were in the entire thing. I just forgot about them. So – but I definitely – if you have – you have winter coming up in Canada.

So you can lock yourself in for a couple of weeks. Yes, winter is coming. You can just lock yourself in and this will probably get you through the winter if you don't. Well, we have more than a few things to dole out. We've got Secession. We've got Better Call Saul. We've got Stranger Things. So we have a packed winter already.

Yeah. We still got the Downton Abbey movie. Yep. Haven't watched that yet. Yeah. Oh, man. Lots to do. Lots to do. Well, I'll tell you one thing that isn't going to be making my list of things to do. The Wrath of Khan is getting an official Star Trek podcast prequel.

Okay. Star Trek Khan Sede Alpha 5 will come for the period of time after Khan and his cohort of genetically engineered villains were exiled during the classic episode Space Seed and before Star Trek 2 The Wrath of Khan. So that little group of people stuck in one thing on a planet they can't go out in.

That's the prequel. And it's a podcast. It's a one-room drama. It's a podcast. But here's the big problem. Ricardo Montalban is dead. He is. How are you going to do Khan? Well, it's certainly why you can't do a live-action one.

Well, we do have the technology to reanimate the dead now. That is true. It is written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, who has done all the good Star Trek movies. So that is a plus. And the joke is made here that if you want to make a good Star Trek movie, you have him write and direct it and you cut his budget in half.

And that's exactly what they've also done with the podcast. So. All right. But I'm not going to be listening to it. I'm just. I will. I will definitely check it out. I know you will. So you'll tell me if it's any good or not. I will check it out. You know, some of these audio dramas are pretty good. And especially if, you know, it's. Yeah, it might have a good team behind it.

So we'll see. We'll see. I just. Again. Again. They're just stuck in a little ship on a deadly planet. I know. But who knows? Okay. Short story, perhaps. I'm just. It's got to be creative, you know. So, I mean, if they picked this time, it's going to be.

It's a tough sell. It's definitely a tough sell. Yep. But, Brian, we have figured out how to make money in the music business now. Okay. You just got to be shitty. I mean, we've known that all along. Well, poopy to be. Poopy to be exact. Yeah. Oh, okay. You have to be poopy because there are musicians that are making a boatload of money after kids yell poop at the Alexa.

And people are writing poop-centric songs. And, you know, they're pretty good. You got Poopy Diaper. That's one of them by Mike Bilenberg. You got Poopy Stupid Butt by Dandyland. Love that one. And then I Poop With My Dog by The Toilet Bowl Cleaners is another one that they listed in the article.

The problem is I can't even test this out when my son isn't around because Alexa throws up the whole, like, you recently listened to or go back to this and then he's going to see it and it will never end. Oh, yeah. You will definitely have a poopy home. Yes.

Ups and doodads. Well, Brian, Apple's big event was this week for the new iPhones and watches and new AirPods. The AirPods intrigued me. Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. Hold on. Breaking news. The only news that people want to hear. What did you buy, Jason?

I got the Watch Ultra. Okay. I got the Watch Ultra. Of course you did. Well, I'm still – I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. I'm running, I think, a Series 5 Apple Watch. Because I've been waiting for it and they kept using the same guts and all that stuff. So I'm just like, oh, wait.

And this one intrigues me. I like it. It's got a little bit longer battery life but not – according to Wired and their Garmin review, like, not even close to what a Garmin can do. But it's getting there. It's still cheaper than some of the top-level Garmins.

But I just like the bigger size. I think it looks cooler. It's got a bigger screen, which I like. And I don't know. It's new. I just wanted something new. So, yeah. Unfortunately, it's not going to get here until October 20th to 27th. And that is with Express Delivery.

Wow. So I got in a little late. But, yeah, I got the – that's the other thing. They all come with cellular. You can't not get it. Right. But you don't have to turn it on. Yeah. Yeah. After all of the – you had a cellular one for a while, right? The first one I had, which I think was a three, yeah, was cellular.

And I used that for a month and realized I always have my phone on me. I don't go out with just my watch. So I don't need that. I think I have the six now, I think. I can't remember which one, but it does not have cellular. And, yeah, it's fine. Yeah.

I seem to remember you being – I think for like seven or eight episodes, we had a Brian Bitches About Verizon fest because you couldn't get it either turned on or turned off or – It was a pain in the ass. Both getting it first initially working and then shutting it off when I didn't want it anymore.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm having that same problem with my iPad mini with 5G. Like for some reason, AT&T will not take my money. They're just like, we can't turn it on. There's been a problem. Call this number. I call this number. And they're like, oh, I don't know. I'm like, well, that's really helpful.

Thank you, AT&T. And they make it so simple. It's like, oh, you've paired – you have an account already. Can we just add this to your account? I'm like, please. I would like my 5Gs. And they're like, no, none for you. You get zero Gs. Yeah, because it dawned on me too that I always have my phone on me and then my phone has a 5G hotspot on it.

So, okay. Yeah. Screw you guys. Screw you guys. Anything else interesting from Apple? I was talking about this with a couple of friends. My watch is fine. It does what I need it to do. My iPads are fine. They're not top of the line, but I basically read on it or work out with it.

And the rest of it is my kid playing games. My phone is fine. The only thing I really need to upgrade is my Airbook. Yep. Yep. Get that new M2, baby. Nothing seemed particularly amazing. Yeah. The AirPods, like the new AirPods Pro, it doesn't seem to be that much of an upgrade for me at this point.

Like mine worked fine. Mine worked fine. They're great. So, yeah. I think a lot of people that got them when they first came out are having a lot of battery issues with them. Like they don't keep the charge as long as they used to. But mine worked for an hour and a half at the gym. That's all I need.

I'm not listening all day. So, yeah. Exactly. Yep. So, pass on that one. I did have Setapp update on me this month because I pay by the year. Yeah. And they finally, finally changed their scheme because it used to be like you sign up, you pay for the year, and then you can add on devices for like a couple bucks a month.

So, I'm like adding on all my different machines. But they finally, finally, finally put everything together into an easy package for the power users. It's called the power user package. You can get four Macs and four iOS devices. It's $13.50 a month if you pay up front for the year, which I did, which comes out to $161.88.

And it's fantastic now because you actually get – I have four iOS devices and I have four computers. And for me, it worked out absolutely perfectly. So, the iOS thing before was a pain because you had to do each individual iOS device.

And it's like, oh, God, do I really got to – yeah, you got to. Yeah, you got to. So, this is a – this is a definitely – it's just – I love Setapp because you get Bartender with it. You get iStat menus. You get CleanMyMac and a bunch of other stuff that I use. Gemini, Timator, all of that stuff is all included.

And when you do the math on it, it's definitely a deal. You definitely save money, especially when you're running multiple machines and you got to get multiple licenses. I think CleanMyMac alone would have cost me that for the year for all my machines. And you have to have it on all your machines nowadays. Pretty much, yeah.

Yep. I am a fan of Setapp. Well, Brian, I didn't get time to read a whole book because it's been a while since we've been back to the library. Yes.

So, I got a short one. Travel by Bullet, The Dispatcher, book three by John Scalzi. I've been loving this Dispatcher series. I think they're all like Audible originals, so they're not in print, I believe. But they're really good. Zachary Quinto, who played Spock in the Star Trek reboots.

Was also in Heroes. Heroes, yes, Heroes. God, that was such a good series. Well, no, no. It was not a good series. It was a good season. A good season, yes. The Writer's Strike killed that show. Yeah. But we did get Dr. Horrible's evil blog, whatever.

That was good. Before, yeah, Joss Whedon was canceled. But, so, yeah, Travel by Bullet, it's like a three-hour audiobook. Fantastic. Love this series. Well worth it. I think you get it for free if you have an Audible account. It's one of those monthly giveaways.

So, if you're an Audible subscriber, check it out. Excellent. I also have not managed to finish a book recently. Just haven't had the time, really. And then I'm also like, I'm at the beginning of book two of like this massive series. And the book is like 700 pages and the book is like 700 pages and just wrapping my head around having to work my way through that is killing me at the moment.

So, I think I need a small sci-fi. So, I'm going to look for one of those to kind of kickstart the reading habits. Once I'm done with that and I've gone back and I've finished the 600 to 700 page opus of book two of the series I'm working on, I found this link.

Somebody shared it with me. 11 books like the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. Now, I've never read the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. So, I was like, well, why am I looking at this? And my friend was like, because you've read almost every other one of these series related to it.

And, obviously, these are the types of books that you really like. So, I'm like, oh, okay. So, I'll go take a look. And, yeah, they list the Dune series. They list the Quarters of Time series by Paul Anderson. They list the 2001 Space Odyssey series by Arthur C. Clarke.

The Eon series by Greg Baer. Love all of those. The other ones, never heard of. So, this is a little bookmark for me of good books and series I want to read. All right. Well, I saw this link. I checked it out and I perused the offerings on the page.

And I picked up The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Haldeman. I've heard that's very good, too. I've never read it. It said that it was a duology, which was why I was hooked. I'm like, okay, two books. I can handle that. Turns out there are three. Yeah. That's what happens with these.

They tend to keep going. Yeah. But I got it. It's in my Audible queue. So, I will check that out. But, yeah, I looked at it and I'm like, yeah, these look good. So, I'll try one and I'll get back to you on The Forever War if you want to pick a different one. Oh, excellent. I guess I will then.

So, we'll figure it out. But, yeah, it seemed like a good little list of, like, big, saga, ambitious, fun books. So, we'll see. Yeah, you can read all those books with all the time you save when you're not watching Foundation Season 2. Speaking of long, drawn-out sci-fi stories that make no sense.

I kind of almost hope that never comes back. Oh, didn't they get picked up for another? I thought that was a three-season run at least. I think so. I think so. It's Apple money. When you throw that kind of money into the development of something, you're not just going to throw those costumes away. Yeah, even though they should.

Mm-hmm. Security? Ha! Welcome back to Security Ha! with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire 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 he's also the co-host of the new – or wait, are you the co-host or the host? How would you say that? I'm the host. You're the host? There is no co-host. No, it's just me. There are guests. Of Control Loop, where Dave talks to himself. Yeah. No, no, there are folks who do other segments, but I am the host, and it is a – it's sort of a newsread-y kind of hosting sort of thing.

So I don't have a co-host like I do on Caveat and Hacking Humans. Yeah. All right. Well, that is Control Loop, where Dave and random guests discuss ICS and OT. Well, it's good to be back. It's been a couple weeks, huh? Yeah, we missed you. Yes. Yeah, I had a nice vacation with my family.

We went to the beach, and as I was bobbing in the waves at beautiful Rehoboth, Delaware, the water was warm, and the weather was lovely, and I was bobbing in the waves with my brother and my niece, and I was thinking to myself, I can't remember the last time that my body felt this loose.

You know, just like, ah, I'm actually – this is what relaxation feels like. It's been so long, I forgot. So it was wonderful. I forget that, too. I also – I've been to Rehoboth a million times when I was a kid, and never was the water warm, ever.

Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, this is end of the season, so it's had a while. Everybody's peed in the ocean over the summer and warmed it up. I actually thought you were going, this is end of days in climate change. Well, there's that, too. There's that, too. That works, too.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of the interesting things, while we were there, President Biden was at his house right up the road, and what that meant was a couple times a day, Marine One and Marine 1.1 would fly by low and slow along the shoreline as he was coming and going.

But also, as you came into town, they had big signs up, those big electronic signs, portable electronic signs that said, FCC regulations, no drones. Right. Because the president was nearby. Yeah. Papa Joe don't like to drone?

Nope, nope, nope. Oh, well. So that was kind of interesting. But, yeah, I had a good time. Yeah. Did you get any pictures of Marine One? I did not. No, I was in the house usually when they flew by, but, boy, you could hear them. Right. Yeah.

Those are big boys. They are big boys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, since nobody here is doing it, I am bringing the Star Wars news this week. I don't know why. I'm the one who apparently just finds the Star Wars news now. Yeah.

Squid Games' Lee Jungjai, I know I butchered that, he's going to be in the new Star Wars. series, The Acolyte. Right. So I thought that was pretty big news. You guys have, well, Brian, you never watched Squid Game, have you? No. I did not need that kind of darkness in my life.

I have enough. Yeah. Dave, did you? Nope. Nope. Nope. Haven't seen it. Okay. Haven't seen a single frame of it. Here's the deal. Keep it that way. Just keep it that way. There still is no need for anyone to ever watch Squid Game or Squid Game 2, Electric Boogaloo, which I know is coming. But no, that is, I really wish, I would pay good money to get that out of my head.

I never want to see that stuff again. Oh, okay. I'm just getting, I don't know what it is, but if I was a teenager, I'd have been loving it, you know, like, ah, death, gore, destruction. Now that I'm getting old and I see the end, I'm like, no, stop it. Leave everybody alone. Everybody live. Let them live a happy life. Eat more fiber.

Yeah, I mean, the big switch for me, I mean, and I think it's for most people, but for you, I guess it was just age, Jason, is as soon as I had a kid, that all of a sudden, anything that involves a kid being in danger is on my no-fly zone. I prefer happy endings.

Like you just, yeah. Well, we all prefer happy endings, but. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, come on. NFL owners as well. You know, for me, when my oldest was born, we were big fans of the show ER.

That was in its original run. And after he was born, I couldn't watch ER anymore. I had to stop it. It's traumatizing. It upset me too much and just turned it off. Yeah. Yeah. It's real. But fictional violence is awesome.

So Star Wars, bring it on. Particularly since, this sounds interesting to me. It takes place in the past, so we're not tied to Skywalkers at all, and he's going to be a bad guy, and we're going to learn about the Sith. And, you know, there's always that warning, warning, danger, Will Robinson, in the back of my head, because anytime they try to explain anything in Star Wars, it ends up sucking.

But, you know, we'll see. Cautiously optimistic. I have been reading the stories about how they're going to pursue a more adult Star Trek with the TV shows moving forward, or Star Trek, Star Wars. I was going to say, oh, wrong series, wrong universe. Yeah, wrong series. You know, universe creep, like we talk about.

So, yeah, I'm potentially excited. Of course, with this announcement and the shadowy corners of the, well, what used to be the shadowy corners, but now the Trump-enabled, not-so-shadowy corners of the internet came to the cries of, you know, gosh, oh, it's more woke casting.

We have to put ethnic people in there. Like, fuck you guys. You're totally okay with a gigantic walking Wookiee. You're fine. But, God, every fucking human has to be white. Fuck you. Fuck you.

God, I just, I really like the tagline, the accolade is a mystery thriller that will take viewers into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark side powers in the final days of the High Republic era. Yeah, that's the problem. Every time they explain the secrets, it's not good. That's true.

We like them because they were secrets. Yeah. Yeah. It's just supposed to be mystical stuff. Read the room. Midichlorians? Fucking hell. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Mesa no like. The force is strong in this one. I better get a blood test first. Where's my Gillette razor?

The force is strong, as is the high cholesterol. Yeah. Oh, you need more cardio in your diet, young Padawan. Oh, so I have a little more follow up. Dave and I are both owners of the, a very RoboCop looking paintball gun that is meant to be for home defense, non-lethal.

I have, I have added to my, my armory this week. I got the Berna SD kinetic kit. Now I talked about this gun before on the air because I was taking the, the mall cop certification so I can get pepper spray and carry it legally here in California.

Right. I'm not done with it. I'm not done with it yet because I keep forgetting that I have to finish it. But so I just went and got the connect. Very Paul Blart of you. It is. It is. I am so lazy that I can't even finish the mall cop, the mall cop test. When you mail in the final application, you need to take it down to the mailbox on a Segway.

I know, I know. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to rent a Segway. So I got this thing and I haven't tried it yet. I got, and I did this time, I got a little portable target. The target's kind of small, so you still have to be fairly accurate with it. Otherwise, you're going to take out your neighbor's windows.

Well, yes, but when you're practicing, when you're practicing, the point is you have to get better at it. And if you miss, that's bad. Now, is this the same brand as the one we have? No, this is a completely new brand that I found. These guys do, they do their own guns because the guns that we have are basically, you know, just modified paintball guns, which are what these are.

But this one uses a different caliber, not caliber, but a different size CO2 cartridge. It is, seems to be more purpose built and mine, the one that I got, I will not be taking anywhere outside because I could get shot in a heartbeat because it is not orange, it is black, and it looks like a little Sig Sauer 40 that you would be keeping in your pocket.

And I got that on purpose because I want it to, when people are breaking into my house, if I got to pull it out, I don't want to look like I got RoboCop coming. I want to look like I got, you know, I got some serious shit pointed at your head. Oh, see, I bought the yellow one when I bought mine. Yeah, see, you're smart. I'm not. For the most part.

I shall not argue with that assessment. No, you shouldn't. You shouldn't. I'm smart enough to know that I'm not. And I went back and forth with, should I get the orange one or should I get the black one? And honestly, if I, if I have to, you know, use this thing, I don't want it to look like I'm pulling out a toy.

You know, that was the thing. It's just like, oh, they'll see it and they'll just like, you know, slough it off. Like, oh, one of these assholes, you know? And I'm just like, well, it's still going to, it's still going to mess you up really bad because these things are powerful. And if you get the pepper spray, definitely.

I just like this one. And I put a cartridge in it and I held it to feel the weight of it. It feels like a damn, it really does feel like a Sig Sauer 40. It was one of my favorite guns when I used to shoot. So is it smaller than the one we have? It's half the size. It looks smaller.

It is half the size. Yeah, it is. It is perfect, perfect firearm size. The other, the, the, the other one also takes a much larger CO2 canister. So you can get more shots off on the, the other one that we have. But I like it. I really like it.

I'll let you know after this weekend when I, when I actually go and test fire it. Um, but, uh, the, the other thing about this brand is their newsletter has a problematic headline, which I, which I tweeted about and I put in my Instagram, which basically looks like it's coming from the third Reich.

So I'm, I'm hoping that it's an accident, but if you sign up for their newsletter, uh, I was, I was a little taken aback by it. Let's just say that it was after I'd ordered it. Right. And, uh, now that I got it, I don't, turns out the books you're funding aren't very nice.

Now I don't have any proof. I don't have any proof. I'm just saying caveat emptor on it. And, and, and you can look at my tweets in the, and I think I, I think I just tweeted it. It might only be in my tweet. So, uh, twitter.com slash JP def.

Well, I was just thinking that since you said it looked like a Robocop gun, I know what I'm getting both of you guys for Christmas this year. I'm getting you that, uh, much famous online wrote. Remember when Robocop shot that guy in the dick shirts. So you can carry that around. Nice.

I think that will complete the ensemble, Brian. I totally do. I think that will bring it all together. Oh God. So, um, check it out. But yeah, like I said, caveat emptor, cause I, I had to put that out there because I was definitely like, Ooh, when I saw the newsletter.

Okay. Um, another thing that came this week was my C2C Caber QU USB-C cable tester that I discovered after we had our long discussion about cables on the show. It is cool. It is very cool. It is not consumer friendly.

Let's just say this is for high nerds. I'm reading the instructions. I'm like, what do you mean? I don't just push it in. I just don't plug it in. And it tells me something. You put the battery in and then you plug the cables in and it lights up and it's got two, two channels, like the left and the right. And it tells you what the cable can and can't do.

Now I would like a little digital readout that says a cable good or cable bad. So I can just throw it away. Um, and also what type of cable it is and what are the things, but no, there are like 10 different LEDs on both sides that you have to kind of match up. And, you know, look, I'm, I, I, I got accepted to Mensa and I can't understand the damn thing.

So far it's incomprehensible. I don't want my cable tester to have to come with a large wall size flow chart. Well, I don't want to have to go get a degree in electrical engineering to figure it out. So did you run around the house and grab all of your USB cables and see how they, how they reacted?

Yes, I did. I, well, I did it for about 10 of them and all the lights were the same. So I think, I think they're good. So I, here's the biggest problem. I know I had one bad cable, which looked exactly like a bunch of the other cables.

And when we were cleaning up the office, somebody grabbed all the cables and threw them in the same box. So now I'm on a hunt for the bad cable. I will find it. I will find you and I will kill you because I have a certain set of skills. One led light will be slightly different and you will forget to notice it.

And that will be that. It'll be 10% dimmer. So check it out. It's a, it's, it is a German Kickstarter that actually was created and showed up at my door. So I think that is the biggest, but that is the biggest ups thing.

It actually came. The Germans built it. That's why it doesn't, that's why it's not easy. It is very effective. And here is the manual. Whomp. It is only as descriptive as it needs to be.

All of the instructions are self-evident. Yes. That was just following orders. Yeah. Well, I have a bit of a rant about cables actually. So we just started school here. My youngest went back to high school.

He's starting his sophomore year. And he decided that he wanted to do a little bit of a kind of a comedy news show, like an improv comedy news show about the school. And so he went and he met with the principal and said, this is what I have in mind. And the principal said, that sounds great.

So he was going to go off and do this thing. And my wife said, well, what do you need hardware wise? Because, you know, we have a lot of stuff. And he's, they decided that he needed a stick mic, you know, just a man on the street, directional, handheld, dynamic microphone.

The old Sennheiser MK415. Well, yes. Highly recommended. But, yes, let's not be hasty considering that we're taking this to a high school and we also don't also don't know the degree to which this effort is going to stick.

So my wife bought him a very reasonably priced microphone off of Amazon, just a, you know, cheapy, generic kind of thing. But it had a eighth inch, you know, 3.5 millimeter jack on the bottom of it, actually a TRRS.

So, you know, that's got to be a TRRS. Yeah. The four connectors on there. Yep, four rings. And so the notion is we're going to plug this into an iPhone, which is going to be the camera. And so we will use the lightning to 3.5 millimeter adapter that came with many phones and that you can buy at the Apple store for a shockingly reasonable price of $9 from the Apple store.

That is shockingly reasonable. Yeah, it is. And so he gets this microphone and it comes via UPS and we go, we get the adapter, plug it in, run through half a dozen different apps and none of them can see the microphone.

Right. They recognize that maybe headphones have been plugged in, but no audio coming from the microphone. So I'm like, all right, well, this sucks. So I'd go through the house and I find another one of these adapters and plug it in.

Same thing. No joy. All right. So I go back to the original listing on Amazon and seeing mixed reviews. People are saying, it's great. It doesn't work at all. It's great. This thing sucks. Can't get it to work. And I notice in the description, it says, must be used with the, wait for it, original Apple adapter.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Right. Okay. So I think to myself, you know what? I have a different adapter at my office. A couple of days go by. I bring this adapter home, hold it up next to the current adapters.

And sure enough, it's a little bit different. The cable's a little shorter on it. Now, mind you, these are all sourced from Apple. Plug it in. Microphone works great. All right. Perfectly fine. What's the difference? Do we know?

That's what I want to know. And I can't find anything. I've searched for versioning documents on this. I've looked around. You know, usually when something like this happens, somebody's going to talk about it. You know what you need, Dave? You need a German adapter detector.

That's right. I need a German cable detector. Call the Germans. Yes. Let's start a Kickstarter, GOG.show. So, it's a mystery. I don't understand why one works and why one doesn't.

All of these adapters are supposed to be TRRS, so they're supposed to handle microphone and headphones. I don't know if this particular microphone is just a little bit out of spec, and so something shifted between the manufacturing run of the original adapter dongles and these.

Who knows? I probably never will know. I've already spent more time on it than I should have because we have a working solution. But I can't help myself. But it vexes you. I know. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand. It vexes me. It does. And there's no satisfaction to be found on the internet, which is even more frustrating.

Well, it's been that way for about 10 years, Dave. That's true. It's true. There is no satisfaction to be found on the internet anymore. So, I bring this to you guys for both speculation because it makes zero sense to me at all why this would be.

And yet, here we are. Something's a millimeter off. Mm-hmm. That's really probably what it's going to come down to. If you took everything apart and brought a laser sight to it, you'll be like, oh, yeah, that's nudged over one half a millimeter.

There you go. That's probably it. Yeah. Well, I've got a few links here in the show notes. If your son does decide to take this, you know, professional, the Rode VideoMic NTG Camera Mount Shotgun Microphone. I got one of these, and I also got the SmallRig Universal Smartphone Video Rig for iPhone, Samsung, filmmaking, vlogging rig, aluminum alloy, phone video cage grip with cold shoe mount for video maker, videographer, dash, 2791.

So, this little getup together with an iPhone works great. It is a shotgun mic, but you can also – the cage lets you hold the camera a little bit more steady and mount the microphone to it. So, it is a good, slightly upgraded, maybe prosumer is what you would call this rig.

And I can tell you that it works with the newer version of the Apple Lightning, the three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack adapter because I actually had to take one out of the box when I bought it new when I got this thing because I could not find all my original ones. I should have called you and asked if I could borrow yours, but apparently yours was in use.

So, can't do that. Yeah. All right. Well, that's good. Yeah. It works really well. And that new – or the VideoMic NTG, the new one, it is great because I actually use it on my Nikons because this is – I talked about it on the show when I got it because I was really surprised because since it is a shotgun mic, it needs power.

But it pulls power from the actual three-and-a-half millimeter cable. So – because I didn't know that there was a spec for power over that, but there is, believe it or not. And it actually works really well. So – Okay. It is not a cheap option. I think it's like $250 for the microphone.

Right. And the cage is actually reasonably priced at $39.90. Okay. If he's going to be doing a lot of stuff, that little – that rig is really nice. This is one of those purchases as a parent you go, look, I will get you this.

But this means you are dedicated for the remainder of the school year to doing this show. Otherwise – That's right. That's right. You are contractually obligated. Yeah.

All right. Let's move on to some actual security news. There was a bit. There was a cyber attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District starting on September 3rd. Although they say it basically – I read through this a couple times trying to figure out exactly what it disrupted.

And it doesn't seem to be anything. Everything seems to be working as planned. And they've got the Department of Education, the FBI, Homeland Security, Cyber Security, and Infrastructure Security Agency are working on trying to figure out what exactly happened.

Again, nothing seems to be out of place, but they were attacked. And as we've been talking about often in this area, this is just going to happen more and more and more. LAUSD is obviously a big target. There's probably some very disappointed kid in the basement that found he had to go back to school the next day.

It didn't work, but they are now developing – they're getting a task force together. They're going to reorganize their departments to better safeguard IT systems. All these kind of soft target areas where everything is dependent on computers now, but you wouldn't think that you would need basically a cybersecurity department.

I mean school districts have to have them now. That's pretty easy. If you have computers, you need one now, period. They did call almost all the parents in the – basically everywhere in L.A. At least everybody I talked to got a call who has kids in school.

They got like a robo call that told them about it. So they did do at least responsible disclosure. So that's a plus I guess. That's a plus.

Yeah, I want to say what, I guess two weeks ago or so as the school systems were ramping up, both the FBI and CISA – I guess it was a joint statement that they put out saying that they were expecting school systems to be targets because school systems are soft targets because as we've talked about here many times, they have limited budgets for protecting these sorts of things.

They have limited budgets for books. Yeah. That's why they keep banning so many of them so they don't have to buy them. Yeah, and they are required by statute to provide services. So they can't just shut down.

They have to do the things they do. And so that makes them an attractive target. So teachers now have to know how to not only protect cybersecurity, they have to also know how to shoot guns. That's great. Yeah, it's working out really great for them. Still no raise.

Still no raise. Yep. Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a Moscow traffic jam. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I do love this, though. Me too. As capers go, this is a pretty good one. It's a good caper. They reported hackers used Russia's Yandex taxi ride-hailing app to order dozens of drivers to converge on – I'm not even going to attempt – the name of one of the city's main thoroughfares.

And this already congested street came to a standstill for about 40 minutes while they worked to address the situation. So anonymous has claimed this, you know, again, a bit less what they used to do. But, you know, it's cute. I like it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a nice little nuisance hack. And I don't know how much you would call it a shot across the bow because, you know, but it's just annoying. You could have done this with a few cell phones legitimately ordering a taxi.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's fun. It's fun. And then something else happened. I've never heard of Kiwi Farms, but apparently these were not nice people. An infamous forum known for its online and real-world harassment campaigns, particularly against the trans community, I suppose.

They have been basically booted off the internet. We have often talked about there not being internet police, and there aren't, but when a bunch of companies all decide you're not going to be going anywhere, including companies in Russia, which is where they went to as kind of a last resort, you can actually get kicked off the internet.

So they have been. And I don't think anybody's particularly crying about this, but this is where Jason usually comes in with the slippery slope argument. Nope. Nope. Take them off. Kill them. Take them out. All right. Good. Cool. Nope. I'm glad we were involved. This was actually Ben Yellen's topic of discussion on this week's Caveat podcast.

And he made the good point that all of these tech companies who try to be absolutist on having a no censorship policy, you can't do it. It's just not possible because there are always edge cases that are so bad and so despicable and so dangerous.

That it's not possible to be absolutist on it. And that seems to be what Cloudflare has learned here, despite their efforts not to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, they've done this a couple of times now. And, you know, they put up the, oh, it's an internal struggle.

Oh, woe is me. Yeah. Kill them all. Get them off. Get rid of them. Then they, because they change their mind the next day. But they have to put up that front first to make sure that they, everybody thinks that they're, you know, on the side of free speech and all that shit. No, you know what? There's some despicable people out there. Kick them off the internet.

Fine with me. Yeah. Yeah. Ain't nobody got time for that. I agree. Yeah. And I guess it's worth mentioning, too, that by kicking them off the internet, what we're talking about is DDoSing them. Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. And DDoS is distributed denialless service where people throw a ton of traffic at somebody to take them offline.

And so in this case, what I think what's interesting is you have, let's call it the good guys, right? People who are trying to take down Kiwi farms are collectively DDoSing them. Cloudflare was protecting them from that. Then Cloudflare changed their mind.

Kiwi farms went to, as you said, Jason, a Russian provider. And then the Russian provider won't provide for them anymore. So without any DDoS protection, they can't keep their uptime. Nobody can hit the site. And no server farm can host them because then they get taken down.

Right. But it's an interesting kind of vigilante thing, isn't it? If the DDoSing comes from the air quotes, good guys, I guess sometimes, I don't know, what do you call this? Sometimes you just got to take things into your own hands for the greater good.

I mean, you know, both sides use bullets, Dave. It's not like there's evil bullets and good bullets. Except for me and Jason. We use paintball. Yes, you use paintballs. We use non-lethal paintball weapons. That's right. I just found it funny because they particularly pointed out that maybe this is the litmus test for when somebody is so awful, they should be completely taken off the internet.

When Marjorie Taylor, when you lose Marjorie Taylor Greene. Oh, you've gone too far. You've gone too far. So there's your litmus test. We'll call it the MTG test. So moving forward. Yeah. Well, on that perky bit of news.

I'm going to go play with some cables and see if I can find that mystery cable. Dave is going to be taking apart a couple adapters later and measuring things studiously. That's right. And I'll be having a beer. So enjoy, guys. All right. See you next time.

See you next time. Closing shout outs. We have no new Patreons. And I wonder if it's because of the alleged news out there. Now, again, allegedly. And I've yet to... This has been bubbling around for two days now.

But no serious news outlet has picked us up yet. It's just being posted around on social media, LinkedIn, all that sort of stuff. Patreon allegedly laid off their entire security team. Now, I've got to say, at this point, if it wasn't just alleged, somebody would have put up a news article about this.

But there are no official news articles. I didn't even hear about this. Yeah. Because I first saw it bubble up on our Discord and people were kind of going like, oh, maybe we should switch over to PayPal. If that's true, then perhaps, yes. Because you don't just... One does not simply lay off your entire security team.

No, when your entire job is to move people's money around. Yeah. So that would be bad. But again, it's not been reported anywhere reputable at all. So we'll keep an eye on this. Yeah. Breaking news. But soon you will be able to get us through Apple, if you want to subscribe in Apple.

I've been going back and forth trying to get all of the old episodes in to the new Apple feed. And it has taken a while. But I would like to report that this week, we finally have success. And all of the old episodes will be in there because we're going to be removing some of the episodes from the main feed.

Because we have too many. Right. We have, you know, there's over 570 episodes in our main feed. Yeah. And, you know, if you want them all, pay us. That's all I'm saying. Fair enough. Over at PayPal, we've got donations from Shaleen, David, Mark, and Ralph.

Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Matthew, Andrew, Jeff, and Linda. And no reviews this week. No reviews. Some sad news. Speaking of, well, before the security thing we were talking about at the library and great authors, Peter Straub, literary master of the supernatural, died at 79.

He's written a bunch of horror stories, obviously. And he had a good friendship and correspondence with Stephen King. And he wrote one of my favorite books, The Talisman, together with him. I love this story. And again, going back to the whole, like, early days of the internet and all that.

It was Peter Straub, who in the early 1980s suggested that he and Stephen King team up to write a novel on modem-linked computers and dot matrix printers, which was state-of-the-art technology for the time. Pretty cool, huh? Nice. Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Very nice. So he will be missed. Yep.

And also Peter Eckersley, co-creator of Let's Encrypt, died at 43, just 43. He did a lot before he kicked the bucket. So, yep, he was – when you talk about real crypto, he was into real crypto. None of this crap.

Yep. And I got to say, there's been a lot of way too early death around recently. I mean, 43 is crazy. I also just learned that two of my high school classmates have passed away relatively recently. By the way, thanks, Facebook, for not showing me the posts until weeks after they had passed because of your stupid algorithm.

And to many of your recent rants, Jason, to your point, be healthy. Without health, we have nothing because we will be dead. Indeed. Indeed. And I am going to be making an appearance at the MASH 50th Reunion Fundraiser. Okay.

So basically, you know, 50 years since the first episode of MASH. They had hoped for Alan Alda and they got Jason DeFilippo. They got me and I'm not even – I'm just there to help out because Jeff Maxwell and Ryan Patrick, they host the MASH podcast or the MASH Matters podcast.

We reviewed on the show a long time ago and I mentioned this a little bit ago. But they still have some tickets left if you want to come out. It's next Saturday, the 17th, and $75, tax deductible. You can – you know, you'll get a receipt. But you get a breakfast and some – you can watch Jeff and Ryan do the show.

I am just there to help with the tech for the show. I'm just going to – I'm going to be there to record for them and use my equipment because it's in the middle of nowhere. So there's no power, no nothing. And what do I have? I got a lot of gear that just takes batteries. So I'm going to go help the guys out and record their show for them.

But I will be hanging out there because it will be fun. I've never been out there and – Oh, man. That's cool out there. Yeah. Hopefully it will be cool because it's been hot as hell here recently. It's not going to be cool that way. It's going to be hot. Yeah. And from the press release, there is little shade, no electricity, cell service, or water, but there will be a port-a-potty on site for the event.

Yay. 50 people, one port-a-potty. Yep. Does a mash fan shit in the woods? I believe they might have to. Hope those muffins aren't bran. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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