583: Neurodivergent Fool

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 2023. Yeah, 2023. And you're in the land of the orange right now. I am. I am in the last few days of my trip out to see my mom in lovely Orange County, California.

The weather's been miserable basically the entire time I've been here. And yes, the argument can be made that the coldest cold here harkens back to the very end of summer in Toronto. It's way colder in Toronto. The difference being in Toronto, they build for weather.

Yeah, they don't do that here. I've been colder here inside every building than I've been in Toronto the entire winter with snow. So, yeah. And it's just been gloomy. And this is not what you come to California for. So, and there's been a, it hasn't been the best trip out here.

There's been all kinds of whatever, but such is life. Here we are. It's what makes us grumpy, right? So, adversity, goddammit. Seriously. Oh, it can't be sunshine and unicorns all the time. It'd be nice if it was every now and then. Every now and again would be nice. Yes.

But we take what we can get. We take what we can get. We do. So, since the last episode, I've still been off Twitter. It's been lovely. I noticed that you're very much on Instagram, though. You send me reels the same way that people used to forward emails back in the 90s. That's fun. I just, sitting on the crapper. What the hell?

That doesn't take, it doesn't have the same cognitive load as Twitter does, you know? That's true. But I found this article called, In Praise of Real, Not Tweetable Conversations by John Steinberg. This is over at, I believe this is The Information. It's a really good article. It's short, but it talks about how, you know, you can have conversations with people and actually learn things and change people's minds. It's kind of nice.

Isn't that what we do here? Is it? Not really. I guess. I mean, when was the last time one of us changed our mind? Well, no, we've been pretty good about that, actually. Over the years, I think we'd find out that we've had a pretty good track record about changing each other's minds. We're just both stubborn, and it takes two to three years of harping on a topic.

Strong opinions held on with a death grip. Yes, yes. Hey, but look, I came around to regulation. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. I've scaled back all my social media considerably. I've made a few posts since I've been back home, but that's mostly just checking it.

And old, old, old haunts and things like that. I really don't miss social media very much. Surprising, isn't it? Yeah. Or maybe not. It's just, it's not the same anymore. I mean, I think we've talked about that. You know, as soon as they started messing around with the algorithm and based it on ads and pushing things from companies and organizations and scaled back on actually, you know, seeing your friends posts, then friends stopped posting and people started disappearing.

And it was a reverse feedback loop or actually, it was a feedback loop of suck that really caught on. And they've ruined their own products now. There's no doubt about it. So it's 2023. We started the show in 2013. And I think we've been bitching about algorithmic feeds since probably before we actually started the show.

So maybe it's time for us to just, yeah, maybe it's time for us to just get over it. What do you think? Well, it took us 10 years. I think so. Yeah. Or, you know, the social media companies will die. Well, yeah. I mean, I, when I do peek into Twitter to just, you know, take a quick gander at the news or whoever's posting whatever, it is a ghost town compared to the way it used to be.

It definitely is. I guess everybody's too busy over at Mastodon. Trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out how to fucking make it work. In the news. I'm going to bring us in, but I just want to make a note.

I forgot about this as we were setting to record. We are coming up on Disneyland fireworks time. So if you hear any loud pops and bangs in the background, I'm a stone's throw away from Disneyland. Those will be the fireworks going off. Wonderful. All right.

Hey, it's better than garbage trucks, right? That's true. And airplanes. All right. And dogs and babies. Speaking of Twitter and social media and the much ado about nothing that is going on, I don't know if when you, the few times that you've popped in, you've noticed one of the big new feature counts that Elon Musk rolled out, which is literally a view count of how many times your tweet has been seen, which was available before, to be fair.

You just had to dig for it. Right. And you could only, I think, see your own stuff, not other people's. But now you can see the number of views on anybody's tweet. And the TLDR on this, nobody gives a crap. Nope. You are farting into the wind on Twitter, basically.

So he had hoped that this would show how alive the site is. And there's this really great article over on Slate that kind of like, it went through, let's look at view counts on some notable big tweets that have happened versus real life events. Okay. So Barack Obama shares his favorite music of the year on December 24th, 34,500,000 views, which is equivalent to the last 30 minutes of the 2022 World Cup final, which drew 33 million viewers.

Greta Thunberg's epic takedown of Andrew Tate, December 28th views 187,400,000, which is the equivalent of two Super Bowls. And, of course, Elon Musk asking if he should step down as the head of Twitter on December 18th, which had a huge count as well.

And I seem to have clopped that out, and I can't be bothered to go figure it out. Yeah. It's in the article in our show notes. It was huge. Huge. But the point being, the point being views are massive, but they are often accompanied by a comparatively paltry number of interactions. So we are all posting, and people are seeing it and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, but there is very little to no interaction whatsoever.

Yeah. You figure two Super Bowls worth of views on a tweet. So you think about that. How much money does the Super Bowl make on that many eyeballs? Hundreds of millions of dollars, Jason. Yes. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than Twitter, apparently. Well, let's talk quickly about the lack of money that Twitter is making and their cost-cutting mechanisms, as we discussed, which is to basically lie, cheat, steal, and not pay people.

Twitter is currently being sued for not paying their San Francisco office rent. Wait, wait, wait. Did Elon buy Twitter or did Trump buy Twitter? I'm confused. Same. Same playbook, it seems. Same, same at this point. Just checking. Stakes or Teslas? You pick. Okay. California Property Trust, the owner of the building that houses Twitter headquarters, is suing Elon Musk's social media company for failing to pay $136,000 in rent.

According to a December 13th New York Times report, they had in recent weeks stopped paying rent on all of their global offices to save on costs. I don't know if he knows how that works. I also feel the need to – well, you know, I as a normal individual would enjoy saving on costs as well, so I believe I would just stop paying my mortgage to do that.

Yeah, why not? Why not? Yeah. I mean, why not, right? Then you too can be the richest man in the world. They also face a lawsuit. Well, you can – it's really easy to save and make a lot of money if you'd never pay anybody for anything. I'll give you that. Yep. So there you go.

And fire all your employees. Another asshole move. Yep. Yep. Well, since we have a lot of fines in this episode today, which always makes me a little bit happy here, Meta just got dinged for $414 million for basically letting personal ads be run when they weren't supposed to be run.

And it kind of basically what they do is they took the rules and shoved everything into their – what do you call it? The privacy policy, right? Right. Or the terms and conditions, privacy policy, interchangeable, same shit, different day. Well, it apparently is against GDPR, so you can't do that, which I thought was rather interesting since it says terms of service on it.

You should be able to do that, but apparently they don't like it over there. So bing, bing, bing, ding, ding, ding, $414 million, which for Meta right now is actually a lot of money. It's becoming increasingly more significant.

Yeah, as every day goes by. Yeah, you know, Meta still could be – I just don't know what they're going to do. They could still be a very viable company if they would just stop pouring what little money they have left into the leggy metaverse that nobody cares about.

Nope, that nobody gives a shit about. So yeah, it's 450 million people that they service in the EU over there, right? A total addressable audience of 450 million. Let's just put it that way. But they have to fix their system, and they just don't even know how they're going to do that at this point, I guess.

So they could lose up to 7% of their overall advertising revenue, which would be pretty – considering how bad advertising revenue is doing at the moment anyways, to lose some just because you couldn't match GDPR requirements, that's going to hurt.

That's definitely going to hurt. This one's going to hurt Coinbase a little bit too. They just got dinged for $100 million. Speaking of shit, nobody cares about. Yeah. 50 million goes to the New York State Department of Financial Services, so I'm sure they're going to be really happy about that windfall. And the other ding is they're required to spend $50 million on improving their compliance program.

Brian, we need to go into the compliance program business because if they're getting – spending $50 million on it, I'll take a cut of that. Yeah, no doubt. Definitely take a cut of that. So basically they're saying – Coinbase is saying that, well, we had a really good year and that we had a lot of growth and, well, we contract out that whole compliance thing.

They're not real employees. It's third party. You know how it goes, Brian. Yeah, I know. They're not – yeah, I don't want to pay for their health insurance and I don't want to have to pay overtime or – Training. Follow any pesky regulations or rules for employees and, you know, who really cares about compliance anyway?

Oh, you care about compliance? Oh, shit. And you're suing us? Oh, no. Yep. Yep. Oops. So yeah, they did not have a big enough staff to keep up with the compliance needs. But Coinbase did lay off 18 percent of its workforce, which was 1,100 people back in June because the CEO said that they overhired.

So they needed to dial it back. Yeah, maybe they could have just – I don't know. Maybe trained these people to be compliance officers because there's a lot of nasty stuff they got through and there's just a massive backlog. I mean we're talking over 100,000 transactions that they couldn't even verify.

So it's like, oh, dear. Are you telling me – are you telling me that a company that is entirely based on completely unregulated financial markets let illegal things go through? Brian, I know it doesn't sound true.

I find that hard to believe, Jason. It's incredulous. In this day and age. My God. Coinbase isn't even – I mean Coinbase isn't going anywhere that's the biggest, but they're going to be firing a lot more people. Coins are dead. They're just dead.

Yeah. It seems to be that way. Crypto's dead. There's no coming back, man. There's no coming back. You're not even going to the moon anymore. You're just trying to land in the ocean. And Apple got fined from France. They got a tiny one. They only got an $8.5 million fine by doing kind of a similar thing that Meta was doing with their advertising and figuring out how that works.

But at least with France, what they did was they tried to figure out how many people were actually going to be affected in France and then give the fine accordingly. Since this wasn't the whole EU going after them, it was just France. So they got the coffee creamer fine.

Only $8.5 million? Come on. That's like three seconds. Look, I mean I think every company has been trying to figure out what to do with the declining ad revenue, internet-based ad revenue, since suddenly people seem to have cottoned on to the fact that it was all a sham anyways.

And we're seeing a lot of tricky business going on as people are trying desperately to save ad revenues. Like us. I'm not surprised. We are too. Yeah. Like us. Jason at GrumpyOldGeeks.com if you want to buy some cheaper ads because we've got some openings.

Come on through. We'll give you a discount. We've got openings. Come on over. So Tesla's had some bad news and I'm not just talking about their falling stock price. Again, a company that – okay, yes, the stock was definitely inflated. I would argue it's a buy right now except for the fact that Elon Musk is running the fucking company still.

If they got rid of him, if he stepped down – Is he really though? Well, is he really? Yes. He's definitely joined the school of Jack. I was getting ready to say he's Jack in this one. None of which I pay attention to. Yep. You know, all Tesla has to do is push him out and put a real CEO in place and their stock will skyrocket again.

Anyways, they've got some other problems as well because according to Bloomberg, the NLRB, Tampa regional director, filed a complaint against the automaker in September for breaking the law when it told employees not to discuss their pay with other people, illegal, and not to talk about the termination of another employee, also illegal unless you've signed an NDA.

In addition, based on filing the news organization obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, they repeatedly told employees not to complain to higher level managers about their working conditions. Who the fuck are you going to complain for? Now that my job is being – now that my job is being a higher level manager, I wish that somebody in my company would tell employees not to complain to me too.

Yeah, I thought shit rolled a pill. That would be nice. Come on. So a little bit of problems there. Some good news actually for Tesla, but the market, of course, being what the market is, doesn't really think so. They delivered over 405,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2022, which is a new company record.

And all of them are at the Whole Foods on the corner, every single one of them. Yeah, pretty much. I keep saying it's a solid company. It's the fucking CEO that's dragging it down right now. And it is, of course, short of Wall Street estimates. Why is it short of Wall Street estimates? Again, the cult of Elon that drove it up in the first place.

Get that guy out. Put an actual person in charge that knows what they're doing. And it's a decent company again. God damn it. Well, it's somebody who could spend the whole day at work, you know? Yes. Yes, not walking through the office with a sink and claiming you're sleeping in a tent in Twitter's offices and that you're not paying rent for.

Yeah, and did you see the new one? He's a fucking squatter. Actually, he is. Well, I guess, you know, when you are in San Francisco, that's kind of it. I wonder how much man poo is around the office at Tesla. I mean, at Twitter now, because they did fire the janitorial staff. So I think they are embracing the San Francisco ethic of being homeless and crapping everywhere.

That's it. Well, I've got another find for you. Grubhub has been ordered to pay $3.5 million to settle a Washington, D.C. deceptive practices lawsuit for charging customers hidden fees and using deceptive marketing techniques. Basically, they offered things like unlimited free delivery, but still charged a service fee.

Yeah, yeah. So not so much unlimited free delivery. That is definitely false pretenses. They've also accused the company of listing 1,000 restaurants in the area without their permission by using numbers that route to Grubhub workers or creating websites without their eateries' consent. Oh, God, thank God. I'm glad they got dinged for that.

But it's only $3.5 million for that? Because I remember we covered that when that happened. But, Jason, keep in mind, this is only Washington, D.C. And now that this went through and they've had to pay up, you want to tell me other cities aren't lining up to do this? Oh, goody, goody gun drops.

And we've got some government news on the tick of the talk. I feel like we've been talking about the government banning TikTok for a very long time. Donald Trump was still in office when we started talking about this. Oh, God, yes. Oracle was going to get involved and then Microsoft and none of that ever happened.

And billions of dollars have been spent and lawyers have been fattened up and bought wonderful houses all based on something that took almost four years for anything to happen. And all that's happened at this point is TikTok will be outlawed on – now, get this. It says almost all devices issued by federal governments after lawmakers passed the bill.

Almost all devices. But the bill carved out exceptions for elected officials, congressional staff, law enforcement agents, and other officials. That sounds like an awful lot of people. That's a hefty chunk. That's a chunk? That's a hefty chunk, yeah. Yeah.

So, not really. If you happen to be a janitor at the White House, you don't get TikTok anymore. No, you don't. No, you don't. You have to be an elected official to be able to talk anymore. Yes. Oh, Jiminy. Salesforce is also cutting some people.

Oh, about 7,000 of them will be let go, which is about 10% of its workforce, surprisingly. I'm still not entirely clear what they even do. Yes. As far as I can tell, it's just basically a MySQL database with a hefty price tag.

But now they also own Slack. Don't forget, they do own Slack. Overpaid on that one a little bit. That's not going well. So, we've got Salesforce, 7,000 here. Amazon is actually going to lay off 18,000 people instead of the, I think they were going to do 10,000 before.

And I think they're moving it up to 18,000, which is probably 0.01% of Amazon's workforce at this point, because it seems like everybody works at Amazon nowadays. But, yeah, the hits keep on coming with all the layoffs. And I'm putting all these in here because we did talk about this when everybody was quiet quitting or, you know, moving on the great resignation.

Now it's like the, oh, great, we're fucked. Instead of, hey, do I get another job offer now? No, you don't. No, you don't. No.

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Media candy. Speaking of Amazon, I watched a show on Amazon before the holidays and right before I came over here called Good Rivals, which is a three-part documentary about the rivalry between the U.S. men's national soccer team and the Mexico men's national soccer team.

If you're interested in soccer, this was a lot of fun. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You know, I needed something after the World Cup ended to keep the Soccer Jones going. So, that did the trick. Yeah, I can't believe they haven't put out a new Ted Lasso to coincide with the World Cup. That seems like it would have been a no-brainer.

They definitely F'd the timing on that. I agree. Yeah, I think they should do another Good Rivals, maybe season two, where they go against the, they have the rivalry between the U.S. men's soccer team and the U.S. women's soccer team. That might be a good one. I think they mostly sorted that out financially.

Oh, that's good. So, we might be getting along these days. That's good. Yeah. That's good. And I've got my, not drunk, but cranky on a plane movie reviews really quickly as I sat and waited for four hours on the tarmac, but thankfully beat the Blizzard out and actually did make it here.

Nice. So, I ended up getting in three full movies because of the delay and everything else. First up, I watched Nope. What'd you think? Nope. I loved it. I don't get, I don't get why people loved it. I don't know. I just, I loved it. I thought it was a good movie.

I thought it was, I mean, it wasn't like, you know, a barn burner, but I thought it was good. I thought I laughed. I chuckled. It was quirky and was fine. It was, I don't know. I just, I found it very boring. Okay. Then I watched Jurassic World Dominion. Oh, God.

This is the one where they brought back the original cast in a desperate attempt for nostalgia and getting people into seats. Don't know why they bothered. So, that's a nope, too. That's also a nope. All right. It was fucking stupid and derivative and lame. Okay.

And finally, I watched 3,000 Years of Longing. Okay. Yep. That's a yep. That was fun. Okay. That was quirky and weird, and I can't really even talk about it without spoiling it, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it. All right. It was a good time.

I'll add that one to the queue for sure. And a little follow-up on 1899. I forget who wrote in, but gave us a very long diatribe of how terrible 1899 was. And apparently, everyone thought so because Netflix has canceled season two. So, you will not be getting- Yes, even Netflix agrees.

Yes, Netflix agrees. The algorithm agrees. But a big yep for Slow Horses season two. I am so happy with that show. It is so good, and it has been renewed for two more seasons. I think season three is already in the can, and they're going to start shooting season four soon.

All right. They're trying to push these ones out faster because it's a short season. It's only six episodes. So, you can binge the whole thing in a day if you're pretty good at it. I just love that show. It is hands down the best spy TV series probably ever made because it's just so damn good.

What wasn't good, though, was Treason with Charlie Cox. Saw this one. It was a mini-series, again, on Netflix. Some of the worst writing I've seen in a television show in a very long time. The continuity was really terrible.

All in all, I give this three-man poos. I give this three-man poos. It was terrible. Just absolutely terrible. Thank God he's got that daredevil thing to fall back on. Yeah. Have we got any news? Are they bringing it back or not? They are bringing it back.

I saw a poster, at least for it, an announcement that it's coming back. So, he's not just going to be shagging She-Hulk. Okay. He's getting his own show again. All right. Now, just bring back Jessica Jones with Ritter. Yeah. And I'll be happy. Seriously. They can bring back The Punisher, too. The Punisher was fantastic.

All of those were good. Except for, what was that? Except for Iron Fist. Yeah. That was not good. That was not good. Did watch Knives Out, Glass Onion. Oh, my God. Okay. Excellent. I thought it was better than the first one. Okay. I'll have to watch it.

Ryan, what's his last name? Ryan something? The guy that destroyed Star Wars. The guy that destroyed Star Wars. Yeah. We'll just go with that. We'll just go with the guy that destroyed Star Wars. The guy that ruined Star Wars. Yeah. He kind of redeemed himself for me on this. He should stick to this genre. Did he kill Harrison Ford in this one, too?

Oh, wait. No. He died in the first movie. Never mind. I saw an article called The Great Podcasting Market Correction over at Bloomberg. And they're talking about how all of these huge deals for podcasts are going away now because everybody's figured out that they overpaid, which really makes me sad.

Not that it's going away. I'm glad that it's going away because fuck all these carpetbaggers. It's that we never got overpaid. We never got overpaid. That's what really pisses me off. And now it's gone. So. But that's fine. We'll be here. We'll still be here. You know. All these guys that spent all this money, crash and burn.

Be my guest. We know you overpaid. You know how much it costs us to do this show? Well, you know. Also, you know how much we make on the show? It's definitely not in the same ballpark. Low numbers. Right. But we're profitable compared to most podcasts out there in these ranges.

So the guy at QCode thought he was going to get $100 million for his company. I'm like, you're a podcast company, dude. You got like seven shows. Go fuck yourself. Turns out Amazon said the same thing. Go fuck yourself. All these companies have cut all their deals way back. So if you didn't have a check in hand, good luck getting one now.

Good riddance. Cups and doodads. You'll be happy to hear, Jason, that there were a couple new deliveries that I've just taken. I bought while I was here in the U.S. because they're cheaper. I haven't had the chance to set them up yet. But I do have a brand new, sitting in a box, Apple MacBook Air M1.

All right. Can't wait. You didn't get the new one? You didn't get the M2? Oh, sorry. No, the M2. My bad. The newest of the new. Yes. Like, please. In midnight. It's beautiful, and I can't wait to get that up and running. I'm curious to hear how it works with the fingerprints.

I heard the fingerprints were really bad on it, but it looks cool. I want one. Yeah. It's not even out of the box yet. So I'm going to figure all that out before I get on the plane so I can just shove them all in my backpack. I also got the new MacBook Air, my brain is not working, iPad.

So that's great because my son has basically taken over my old iPad, so I need a new one. Anything else? And I've also got the new Apple TV with the robust remote that I'm very excited about. So I'll be taking that and swapping out the one that never seems to work properly in my basement.

Yeah. I've got three of the new ones, and they're fantastic. It's like I'm never getting anything else. Yeah. That's just such a great way to watch TV. It's so much. Like, my brother-in-law has Roku, and he always brings it down with him. So over the holidays, he had it plugged into my mom's TV, and it's just like such a janky service.

I'm like, that's so inelegant. But much more portable than the Apple TV. Yeah, it is. What was it, just a Roku stick? Yeah, yeah. They have bigger versions that have more horsepower in them. But the thing is, it's like they don't have any decent, like, transcoding, you know, horsepower.

And the CPUs are like tiny little things. And at least, you know, the Apple TV is, like, beefy. It's a workhorse, you know. It's basically an iPhone with a remote control, which is nice. And I've got Roku TVs everywhere. I've got an Amazon Fire TV, that giant monster.

All of them, 201, all have Apple TVs plugged into them because all of the built-in stuff is just garbage. Garbage. Yeah. So that's cool. That's cool. You had a day at the Apple store. How nice. I did. Using that friend discount? Yep, of course.

I used the friend discount and came to the U.S. So, like, I'm, like, thousands of Canadian dollars ahead right now. Excellent. Excellent. In other sad Apple news, Dark Sky is officially dead. Sad. It's sad. It's sad. That was coming for a long time.

I know, but it's one of those things where it's like, oh, God, it's so far out. It's never going to happen. And then it does happen. But I have to say that the new weather app is really nice. They did take some of the best stuff from Dark Sky and actually improved on it. So that's actually a plus. Yeah.

So. I think so, too. It's fine. I'll miss you, Dark Sky, but I welcome my new overlord. Yeah. Yeah. Now I can check every five seconds when it's going to stop raining here. It doesn't seem to work all that great, at least for the timing. It's not as good as Dark Sky was.

I saw this on the news here because this was kind of a major thing. Basically, this couple drove their car off a cliff, which, you know, in and of itself is pretty insane. And they survived and the their new iPhone emergency SOS over satellite actually worked and they were able to get rescued.

Amazing. It was just amazing. Totally amazing. That's great. So it was just and I saw the phone. They had pictures of the phone on the news when they after they crashed. That thing was just jacked up. But they survived and they were rescued pretty quickly.

So I thought that was a pretty good, pretty good story. That's awesome. I've got a lot of articles here in the apps and doodad section that I'm just going to gloss over real quick because there's... Let's face it. We're tired. We're extraordinarily tired. This is after the holidays and all.

I've been going on a really deep dive into the generative AI stuff just to kind of learn the landscape of it. So I've got some interesting things in here because the fun part for me is just to watch how artists, photographers, basically everybody is saying, keep my shit out of your data set.

And there are places now where you can go and register and say, hey, don't put my stuff in there. But since half this crap's open source now, it's like, good luck. Good luck with that. I have not installed any of those yet, like stable diffusion or anything like that.

I have not put those on my machine yet, but I probably will at some point soon just because it's kind of fun to play with. I still love mid-jury. I love just having it to be able to pop in and play around. And there's a cool article that I'm going to dig up and put in the show notes on LinkedIn where somebody is going through and basically talking to a lot of these, quote unquote, AI artists, basically typists, you know, prompters, as it were.

But yeah, it's just kind of fun to hear their stories about it and see some of the stuff that they've put out. Because like I said, my friend Bill is just like killing it with it. I don't know how he's getting people with 10 fingers. And he's got some secret sauce, I guess, because I can't get anything with less than 47 fingers to come out if there's a hand involved.

Sometimes even when there's not a hand, it'll just throw in some extra fingers for shits and giggles. But yeah, if you want to check out any of these links, I'll throw them in here because they might be a little long in the tooth at this point because I've been adding them in here for two weeks. But oh, but we do have the news that John Carmack has finally quit meta and said, you know, screw you guys, I'm going home because they just can't get it together over there.

So that's not a good sign when John Carmack says that you guys are going to fail because, you know, he's kind of the, you know, this big, super ding dong, the big, big swinging dick in the, in the world of, you know, that kind of thing. So maybe you can get back to making more Quake games.

First up, I got the audio book for Nomad, the Nomad Trilogy, book one by Matthew Mather. I don't know where I found this. Did you recommend this one? I wouldn't say I recommended it. I've read a lot of the Matthew Mather books and they are the prime example of shitter sci-fi.

Thank God. Thank God. I thought it was going crazy. Easy reads, quick, painless, kind. There's usually one good idea in there that is stretched out beyond belief, like taffy at a fucking fair. But fine. Yeah. Okay.

I was expecting more. I didn't, I didn't realize that I had gotten a shitter sci-fi book because now it makes sense. It is a total shitter sci-fi. I'm like, this really does not have a lot of meat on the bone. As long as that's all you want from it, they're fantastic. And he's a fantastic writer. If you're hoping to have your mind blown, fuck that.

Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely not that. I was just like, really? That's where you're going with this? Okay. Well, maybe I'll go back and have another listen to it because I kind of went, I kind of just kind of zoned out for a lot of it because I was just kind of like bored because it really wasn't that fantastic.

Look, they're, they're completely forgettable books, but they passed the time. That's exactly what it was doing. I needed something to, to just, you know, go for a walk and have in the background because I wasn't really, I just wanted something, you know, mind numbing that I basically wanted a voice talking at me. It was something new. I'm sure he would not be thrilled with being described that way as an author, but he does it brilliantly.

Okay. Hey man, he's making more money than we are. So good on him. I bought it. So there you go. I also read Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin, which is, you know, it's kind of the polar opposite of a Matthew Mather book.

Right. So it's, it's, it's a really interesting read. I don't, I never really followed Temple Grandin very much except for a TED talk here and there. Are you familiar with her at all? Yes. Okay. Um, have you read any of her previous books? No, I've never read anything. I'm just familiar with her and her story.

Okay. Yeah. If you're, if you're not into that kind of thing, this'll probably be a very boring read for me. It was, you know, for, I, I, I like the, uh, was it neurodivergent books where people talk about people with different ways of thinking because I fall firmly in that category. So you think I like to find my tribe wherever I can.

Um, so yeah, I thought it was, uh, I thought it was a decent book. If you're into that, like I said, if you're into that kind of thing, uh, I give it a thumbs up. If you, if you have no idea who Temple Grandin is or care about different types of thought patterns, you might want to skip it and go get Nomad, the Nomad trilogy book one by Matthew Mather.

Or any of his other books. They're all kind of the same. Security. Ha! Welcome to security. Ha! With Dave Bittner for the year 2023. Dave is the host of the Cyberware 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 control loop, where they discuss ICS and OT. And it's been a couple of weeks since we talked, Dave. So what are the next seven shows that you have signed up for?

Yes. There, believe me, there are conversations happening. With the new year upon us, there are lots of ideas being tossed around. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. Okay. I am so not surprised. I will say, you know, with it being 2023, this is the time of the year when I send my editors an audio file of me just saying the word 2023 over and over again in every possible inflection.

Oh, so you can slot it in. Right. So when I misspeak and say 2022, they have it available. That's fairly smart. You're kind of a professional, I guess. Well, I would say this is not my first rodeo. True. True that. True that. So how was your Christmas? Christmas was lovely.

Had family over to the house. I think as a lot of our listeners probably know, I bought my parents' house 15 years ago or so. And so that's home base for everybody. Nice. And I have a brother and sister who live nearby and my father lives nearby. And so everybody comes to our house for Christmas morning along with my two boys and my oldest son's girlfriend, my wife, of course.

And so we have a good time. Regular Waltons over there. Yeah. That's right. We're, you know, making our way through, I call it the year of firsts since my mom passed. You know, it's a year of first Thanksgiving, first Christmas, first, you know.

So every one of those, there's a little bit of tug at your heartstrings because there's someone not there. But we did well. We had a good time. And I think it was a nice break. You know, Cyber Wire shuts down between Christmas and New Year's.

And it's a welcome opportunity to kind of relax and recharge your batteries and think about what you're going to do in the coming year. So that was much appreciated. Excellent. So I'm feeling good. How about you? I hate Christmas. I hate New Year's. I hate time off.

I like to keep working. Yeah. Time off does not do well with me at all. So it's been, it's been a trying time. I'm so happy to be back to work. Are you familiar with the song that Oscar the Grouch sings on Christmas Eve on Sesame Street called I Hate Christmas?

Long, long ago. It doesn't really ring a bell now, but I can't, I couldn't hum the tune, but I do vaguely remember it. Yeah. Well, look, I'm sure it's on YouTube. It's worth a look. We'll look it up. Yeah. And speaking of Christmas, Brian is not here with us right now because he is in California specifically, he is at Disney today.

So. Oh. Yeah. Wow. La dee da. Exactly. Exactly. Well, good for him. His old stomping ground. Yeah. Yep. Yep. There's no more Captain EO though to lure unsuspecting tourists for little smoochy sessions.

So I'll have to make do, I suppose. Considering he's probably there with his wife and child, I'm guessing there will be no sneaking off to the Wedway people maker with random tourists. That's right. Let's hope. Let's hope. Yeah. Well, good for him. That's a good time.

Yeah. I'm sure he's taking advantage of all of the Star Wars goodness that it has to offer. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll be interested to hear back from him on that. We've got a trip planned in early March. We're going down to Disney World and that'll be my first time with all the new Star Wars stuff.

So looking forward to that. Well, look at you kids getting all Star Wars-y and stuff. So it's pent up demand. Believe me. Believe me. Yeah. I got to say though, I did find the Honest trailer for Andor while we were on break and I threw it in the show notes. Did you get a chance to watch it?

I did. It was really good. I thought it was pretty spot on. Yeah. I thought it was spot on. Yeah. Yeah. So that link will be in the show notes. I highly recommend anybody who's seen Andor, go watch it because it is right on the nose. Right on the nose. It is the Star Wars for us old people now.

That's right. That's right. Right before the Christmas holidays, I bought myself a $50 piano on Craigslist for the office. Every now and then I go on Craigslist and I look through the musical instruments section and up popped this Yamaha digital piano.

It's a YPG-625, which is, you know, older model, mid-2000s Yamaha digital piano, sort of a prosumer kind of thing. It's not the kind of thing a pro would take on a gig, but it's also not a toy.

It's got weighted keys and all that kind of stuff. So popped up on Craigslist for $50. It has some problems, but none that are – none that keep it from being just something you can sit down on and play piano and have it sound like a piano, which is really what I wanted. So now I have this piano at the office and I have to say I'm loving it.

I am totally loving it. Just to be able – for me, and I am by no means a good piano player, but I find it very relaxing to sit down and play the piano. I have a piano at home and so having a piano here at the office, I can just turn to the piano and just helps clear my head and I find that very nice.

So $50 well spent on myself right before the holidays. Hopefully, I'll get some pleasure out of that in the coming year. That's cool. That's cool. I actually had that exact same keyboard for a while that my brother gave me when I moved to California, lugged that thing around for years until I finally got rid of it at a garage sale.

Okay. Very nice. But ironically – Did you get more than $50 for it? Probably not. Probably not. And it had the full stand and everything. It was in mint condition too. Oh, wow. Okay. This one's got a few miles on it. Yeah, my brother's was played fairly well and then I was trying to learn so I got the stickers for the keys and yeah, that didn't help.

And then I got that Lumi keys, one that took forever to get that I have here at the office now. It's a little portable keyboard with lighted keys that you can learn to play with your iPad. So it's like rock band to learn how to play. Yeah, that didn't work either. So then when I bought this couch that I have here in the office, I bought it at a garage sale and they had a $20 Yamaha keyboard there that I'm like, well, maybe somebody else would like to play at the office.

So I bought that and nobody wants to play the keyboard at the office. So that is just taking up space that I'm going to have to get rid of at the next garage sale. So yeah, I could have, I could have hooked you up, man. I had plenty of them. Over the years. Yeah. Well, I'm a sucker for a good digital piano.

And so this is fun. And like I said, I'm not terribly good, but it makes me feel good to do it and helps me relax. So it's all that matters, man. That's all that matters. So we do have a Christmas present for you that's on the way still. It has been on the way for over a month now, it seems.

Oh, my. It's on a slow boat from somewhere. It is, actually, as a matter of fact. But hopefully by next episode, we'll be able to discuss it because it has cleared the borders and is en route. So it should be there hopefully early next week.

All right. I'll look forward to that. Very nice. Thank you. At this point, we were figuring it would be for next Christmas. Right. It's taking so damn long. Yeah. But yeah, we will discuss that next week. It is not a keyboard, thank God. Oh, yeah. Right.

It turns out. It turns out, yes. So it's funny. We did the first part of the show on Wednesday because Brian had to go do his Disney thing. And I got this Shure MV7 microphone, which is supposed to be like the SM7B for all you microphone nerds out there.

Right. That was a pretty decent microphone. I used it for that first part of the show. So that's why it sounds a little different if you're hearing me now talk to Dave. Is that the USB version of the SM7B? Yes, it is. The podcast-y one? Okay. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I fired that puppy up.

Oh, man. Was that a waste of money? Really? It's like $250 and it is not great, sadly. So I'm trying to fix the audio from the beginning of the show. But what do you not like about it? It is echoey and about as plosive-y as you can get, which is a real bummer.

And I've got pretty good mic technique. So the fact that I'm popping plosives on it is pretty bad. So I brought that up because since we're audio guys and we're talking about the pianos, I thought maybe somebody in the audience. I've actually recommended that microphone to a couple of people and they've gotten it to work well.

So I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm just – I don't know. I'm bad at USB, I guess. No, I don't know. I think you've got to find the right mic for you and microphones are – like any – like I think microphones are like musical instruments. And you have to find the right violin or the right guitar or the right piano for you, the one that fits your style.

And just because somebody says a microphone is great and works great for them, that doesn't mean it's going to be the one for you. Absolutely. Yeah. I've got a case of microphones here that I've tried over the years. That's right. Yeah. I got Sennheisers to Neumanns to Schur's to – you name it, I got it in there.

And I just keep coming back to my old tried and true RE20, my ElectroVoice RE20. It is the – it doesn't have that cool proximity effect that most dynamic mics have, but that's okay. I can deal with that. What is your take on the Neumanns? Like I think – I've used them before, but I can't say I've used them extensively.

But they certainly have a lot of mystique about them. I think largely because they're so dang expensive. Yeah. I mean is it worth it? Is it like most audiophile things where the last 10 percent is 90 percent of the cost? Kind of, kind of.

The problem I've had with them is you have to be in a studio. You cannot use that thing from your house. I see. I'm less – it comes back to the same thing as the Blue Yeti when I tell new podcasters to never buy the Blue Yeti. They do sound great if you are in an underground bunker with no sound anywhere else.

But otherwise, if you want to hear the dog fart three houses down, that's the microphone for you. Right, right. The Neumanns are exactly the same. And it just comes back to having condenser mics because they are very sensitive. It does sound beautiful when it works. I did do the show with it for a while. I got the cheapest Neumann you can get.

Okay. It was like the TLS 102 or something like that. And it does sound fantastic, but it is finicky as hell, and you can just hear everything that's going on around you. Right. That's a really good point, I think, that it's not just the raw quality of a microphone.

That it's also the degree to which it is forgiving in your environment. Yeah, because we both use, I believe, dynamic mics. Oh, wait, no, you're on a condenser, aren't you? No, actually, we just got SM7Bs in the studio for the new year.

We just switched over. I could have sold you those, too. I just sold all four of mine. Did you? Yep, got rid of all of them. You got to drop me a line, man. Well, last time I dropped you a line, I sent you a few toys. Yes, yes, no, believe me, I'm grateful.

Yeah, no, they've just been sitting here because everything else in the office here is, I've got black RE20s for the studio because they look cool and they sound great. And they are forgiving because the pickup pattern is pretty nice. It's really hard to screw up on them, which is why it's good for me.

Right, right, especially, yeah, I mean, if you find yourself sort of one man banding it, even from an engineering point of view, to have a forgiving mic like that can be the difference between a good day or a bad day. Yep, absolutely. And that was what I found with the Neumann when I was doing the show with it, is that I would spend more time in post than it was worth.

So, yeah, it was just like, oh, man, do I really need it? Literally, I could hear a leaf blower from down the block and it would pick it up. It's like, oh, I mean, it does. It does sound great. But by the time you filter out everything else, you're back to sounding like you're on a cheap mic.

It's like not worth it. So you have to have a $15,000 audio booth before you can buy the $2,000 microphone. That's kind of the rule of thumb, I think. That's practical. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But if you can, more power to you.

If you have the means. That's right. It's certainly something to aspire to. Yes, yes. Going back to Star Wars for a second, though, I did see that season two of The Bad Batch is out. Are you a bad batcher? No, I started with The Bad Batch, got a few episodes in and just kind of lost interest.

OK. Yeah, I made it about 10 minutes into the first episode and lost interest. Yeah. You know, just it didn't stick. It was – I didn't hate it, but it didn't have enough to keep me going. Gotcha, gotcha. Well, enough microphone and Star Wars talk because I'm sure people are falling asleep at this point.

I did see that LastPass had a really bad Christmas and got completely breached and basically fisted by some hackers, which is about the only way you can put it because everything was stolen.

Literally everything was stolen. I think we did manage to find a different way to put it in the Cyber Wire. But, yes, that is – it is not an inaccurate description of what happened. So you want me to dig into it from my understanding?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, we can riff on it a bit because it's – I'm curious your take on it because I'm sure that you guys have a little more nuanced approach to it. Well, so I think as most people know, LastPass is one of the big names in password managers that they're with 1Password and there's a bunch of them.

But there's a handful of them who are sort of the top tier and LastPass is or was one of them. And so it's a basic password manager. So the bad guys got in and they stole people's vaults, which is where all of your passwords are kept.

Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, no problem. That vault is encrypted and that is true. Yep. Mostly. The key is is that your vault is encrypted using your master password as the key generator for your vault.

So if you have a long, complex master password and you are not reusing it anywhere else, chances are you're in pretty good shape because the only way for them to come at you is to brute force your passwords or to brute force your key based on that.

And odds are you're not low-hanging fruit when it comes to that. If, however, you have reused your master password or it is a short password or a simple password, I would say go in and for anything that's important to you, change those passwords.

I see people saying do that anyway. It's not a bad idea, but I don't know that it's critical that you do that if you have a good master password that you have not reused. I was talking to someone earlier this week who surveys professionals and consumers on this sort of thing.

And since their breach, LastPass dropped from number one to number four in being password providers according to this survey that these folks put out. So, you know, these breaches have an impact on people's business.

I think LastPass is also getting dinged for some of the ways that they've handled this. Oh, you think? Yeah. Putting it out right before the holidays and, you know, not getting the information out there. And also the CEO is saying, hey, yeah, it's, you know, we do our part, but it's your responsibility to have good password hygiene.

It's like, well, it's your responsibility to have good security. So, you know, we pay you to do your job. So do your job, you know. That was kind of a, that was like, you know, kissing a slap right there.

Yeah. And I think a password manager should be able to protect you from yourself. So, in other words, the strength of the encryption of my password vault, in my mind, should not be dependent on the strength of my master password.

Those shouldn't be tethered together. My vault should be strong encrypted no matter what. But that's not how they chose to do it, evidently. So, yeah, it's, I'm not surprised that they've gone down to fourth. I'm surprised they're even on the list anymore after that.

I still, you know, we stand by one password here at GOG. And I don't believe they've ever had any kind of major breach that I've ever heard of unless I missed it, which I don't think I would because I follow them pretty thoroughly. Have you ever heard of them being breached for anything?

I don't think so. No, nothing comes to mind. I would say it's easy because LastPass has handled this in such a poor way. It's easy to kind of crow about them and use them as an example. And to a degree, they certainly deserve it.

But at the same time, I'm hesitant to say, well, this wouldn't happen at the other password manager companies because this could happen to anybody. Right. Because we don't know what's under the hood at anyone else's place.

And they don't know what their own weaknesses are quite often. Right. I mean, everybody goes into this in good faith with all the best intentions. Obviously, you know, LastPass didn't mean to do this. They came up short on some of their security things for sure. And, you know, they're getting held over the barrel because of it.

And again, deservedly so. But I just say let's be careful before we tut-tut on one company and say, well, that would never happen with this company because you don't know. It could happen to anybody. And there's plenty of people out there, security professionals, who would say it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

True, true. Because this does come down, I believe, to an employee giving access to the hackers. So, you know, it comes down to, you know, your people are always going to be one of the biggest weaknesses for sure. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. But, yeah, if you use LastPass, I would change anything that you had in LastPass, starting with the most important stuff first and working your way down.

And hopefully you at least do use, you know, different passwords on every single site. You don't reuse any passwords. Right, right. If something is important to you, use multi-factor authentication. Get yourself a YubiKey. Like anything that has to do with money or anything that has financial value to you.

Have some kind of secondary verification. And, you know, Google put out their research, oh, probably about a year ago, that when they add a YubiKey to someone's email address, bad guys don't get in, period.

It's not like 90%. It's like at all. So that's the best thing you can do. If it's important to you, put some kind of hardware verification behind it. Don't rely on a username and password. And it's not hard to do anymore. No, it's not.

It's not. That reminds me I should probably do that for some of them too. Yeah, never too late. No, we always get a little complacent, all of us at some point or another. That's what I do like in some of the password managers. They do tell you when you've reused passwords and when passwords are weak.

You know, you can just sit there and spend a couple hours on a Saturday and go through and just shore up your defenses for shizzle. But this isn't also – this isn't the first time LastPass has had problems. So I think it's easier to bang on them because this is not their first rodeo when it comes to, you know, breaches of some form or another.

Yeah, no, that's fair. It's legit. They've taken it on the chin a couple times. Well, to lighten things up a little bit, I don't know if you've seen this, but the DEA has put out their emoji drug code decoded PDF, which gives you all of the different types of emojis that your kids might be using to buy the marijuana and things like that online.

Did you get a chance to look at this? Yes, and I'm looking at it right now and as a parent. Yes. Of a teenage boy and another boy who's older, who's in his young – you know, early 20s, I don't find this useful to me at all.

No, it's not useful at all. I mean – Universal for drugs is Canada. They use the emoji for Canada. The maple leaf. Yes, the maple leaf to be universal for drugs. What if you're a Canadian?

Or a hockey fan. Yeah, you're just always stoned or looking for some molly or I don't know. This reminds me of – did you ever hear – there's a great clip of Casey Kasem from American Top 40 back in the day when rap music was first starting to become a thing and Casey explains and defines what all of the cool terms are in rap.

Oh, no, I didn't. And we'll have to dig it up and find it for you. But it's like – and in rap music, bad means good. You know, it's that kind of a thing. It's hilarious in hindsight. But, you know, I mean I guess the DEA is doing their best here.

They're trying. I don't know. I don't go through my kids' text messages and that's a choice. I feel like my kids deserve to have a certain amount of agency. I guess if I thought there was a problem, maybe I would start looking around for things.

But I guess – what are you going to do with this? How is this actionable? Oh, I found a maple leaf on my kids' texting emojis. You know, I guess you follow up. You make – check in, make sure everything is okay.

But it's kind of silly I guess. On the one hand, I think it's silly. On the other hand, I can see how for some people it might be the beginning of a useful conversation. Yeah, could be. Could be. I just – they have a disclaimer.

It says, these emojis reflect common examples found in DEA investigations. This list is not all-inclusive and the images above are a representative sample. So, I mean, this comes from their actual investigations, which I think is kind of interesting. Right.

So, it's data-driven. I mean – Yeah. You know. Yeah. I do like that the – you know, the code for mushrooms is a mushroom. Not really trying to hide that one. Hard to crack that code. Yeah. Boy, that's really – yeah.

It's a little astrology, right? It's a little – like you can find whatever you want in these emojis. True. Yes. I don't know. But I just – It's funny. I like it. Yeah. It gave me a little chuckle. A little bit of chuckle. Yeah. Absolutely.

So, I put a clip in here for your enjoyment and it's somebody trying out one of the new AI tools from Adobe with their podcast app, their podcast – I guess they're calling it – it's a platform, right? I guess. Kind of.

Yeah. Yeah. They're putting out tools here and there. They've got like a voice enhancer. They've got basically kind of a thing that's like what we use Riverside right now when we're doing our shows. Right. They're bringing things out.

It's slowly they're coming out. Yeah. It's called Adobe Podcast now. It used to be called Project Shasta. Right. Right. So – Me as Shasta back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. When you couldn't afford Coke or Pepsi, show her Shasta.

So, this is a video from someone who's trying out one of their AI-enhanced audio tools. And what it made me think of was, you know, back in the day when I was, you know, back in the beta cam days and broadcast TV and all that kind of stuff, we used to wonder about the notion of having Zoom microphones the way we have Zoom lenses.

Could you – and obviously, we have shotgun mics, those sorts of things. But those help. But it's not the same as having a 20X Zoom lens where somebody could be 40 feet away and you could have a close-up of their face. Or even look, you know, a pro football game where somebody can be, you know, in the other end zone and they have a 100X lens where they can Zoom in on the ball.

Right? Mm-hmm. This kind of – this demo shows that with this AI tech in the right circumstances, and we'll talk about that in a second, this is kind of like a Zoom microphone. And what this guy is doing is he's just talking into a mic, a camera-mounted mic, and every couple seconds, he backs up some and he backs up some and he backs up some.

And when this tech is enabled, he always sounds on mic. Even like 40 feet away, he sounds on mic. Wow. OK. I'll definitely give that a – give that a check out because anything to make this job easier, I'm down with.

Exactly. Now, here's where it won't work. In this example, this guy is standing by himself in an open field. So not only is it making him sound on mic, but it's also filtering out atmospheric sound, birds. He talks about there's some cars driving by.

You don't hear any of that stuff. But where I suspect this would be useless would be in a crowd of people. Oh, yeah. So in other words, if you wanted to have a shot of somebody walking through a crowd of people as they're talking to you, this would be useless for that because the AI wouldn't be able to know whose conversation am I trying to pull out here.

But if you just have a shred of audio, it seems as though this will take that and just make it sound like the person is wearing a lav. Well, iZotope is going out of business. I don't know. I mean it's – it really is amazing, isn't it?

I mean some of these tools, I guess – I can't say I didn't imagine them coming, but now that they're here, it's really impressive. I find myself with my jaw on the floor at how good they can be.

They exceed my expectations sometimes. Sometimes they're crap and they don't work well at all and you think, well, that – they can't use that. But every now and then when it comes along, there's one built into Descript that's quite good. If you have somebody in an echoey room or something like that or someone who's slightly off mic, you just click a button and bam, they sound like they're in a studio on mic.

And I don't think there's – I don't think there's any shame in using these tools. As you said, I think there are folks out there who think, well, I'm an audio engineer and I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way. No, I don't have time for that. Yeah, exactly.

Like life's too short. If I could have a one-button solution and it sounds good, then heck yeah, I'm going to use that. I mean I've spent the last 10 years of my life learning how to do exactly what you can do with one click of a button right now, which is annoying, but it's also like – Right, like this.

There you go. Yeah, it is annoying, but I would like to maybe do other things. So I'm fine with it now. It's like, yeah, I'll do something else. So now I read audiobooks, but now Apple has come out with AI-read audiobooks. So now I've got to find something else to do.

It's like, damn it. I saw that. Yeah, I saw that this week. Yeah. Yeah. Believe me, that's on my radar. That's what I do for a living. All of these AI voices are – you train them for a little bit and it's like pretty damn good. Well, I just – I mentioned Descript, which is – for those who aren't familiar with it, it's an audio editing tool.

You load audio into it. It transcribes it and you can edit your audio as if you were in a word processor. And, you know, it works better at some things than other things. But one of the things you can do is train it on your voice so that, for example, if my audio editors need to replace a word that I misspoke, they don't need me to do that.

They can just put the word in and Descript has been trained enough on my voice that it will put in a passing – a smoke and mirrors version of my voice that in real time and passing, nobody would ever know it wasn't actually me for a word or two. And this is just to let the audience know, Dave's not actually here today.

I wrote this whole thing myself. That's right. That's right. Actually, Jason hasn't been let out of that padded room in over a decade. That's right. He's just been banging away on AI technology to keep himself company. Dave O'Brien does not exist.

Yeah. Have you ever seen us in the same room? No, you have not. You have not. No, but now I can use the AI image tools to create a nice panorama of all of us in the same room with 35 fingers each, of course. Sure. Sure.

This last link I put in here was something that I put in because it made me chuckle. It amused me. And I also have a love of subversive humor. And this is exactly that. It's a Chrome plug-in called Butter. And it's a URL cleaner. And, you know, we could all – URL cleaners are handy because anybody who's been spending time in your browser knows that when you're searching around and trying to share something from a news organization, there's always all kinds of UTM codes or tracking info and all

that kind of stuff that goes on the tail end of a URL. And there are lots of tools that strip that off for sharing. This particular tool strips it off but it replaces it all with the word but. Love it. Yeah. Love it. It's all just but.

And the person says, why buts? And he says, imagine a dark, smoky room filled with marketers. They've been up for days working on their latest campaign and are finally seeing the results in real time. One of them points at the screen and another nods positively before taking a long drag off their cigarette before rolling their chair closer to a nearby printer that is constantly printing.

The marketer does a double take then drops their cigarette to the floor. They rip a sheet from the printer and bring it closer to their sweaty face. You guys, they say, why does this UTM code say butts? Doesn't that sound fun? I thought so. And there is the subversive side.

I just love people scratching their heads and saying, why are all of our URLs coming back with butts? Nice. I like it. I like it a lot. I'm going to install it for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I have a URL cleaner that I already use, but that one is now going to the dustbin.

Love it. All right. Well, Happy New Year. Happy New Year. And I look forward to having Brian join us next time. And he'll have to tell us all about his experience at Disneyland. I'm jealous that he's there and I'm not, but I hope he's having a good time and he's having good weather there.

Over at Patreon, we've got Alistair, Laika, and Thomas. Thank you very much. All right. I'm going to need a big breath for this one over at PayPal. Over the last two weeks, we've collected quite a few. So thank you to all of you, including, but not limited to, Ramsey, Tom, Andrew, Brian, Mike, Andrew, another one, John, Humphrey, Matthew, Tom, Mark, Charlie, Simon, Nikolai,

Jonathan, Judge, Matt, David, Nikola, Joseph, John, John, Andre, Thomas, David D., Elaine, Vincent with a big $100 donation, Eric with another $100 donation, and Kendall with, I think, our highest donation we've ever had, $150 in one go.

I'm pretty sure we got a bigger one than that at one point. Oh, you know what? You're right. We got a $1,000 one. We got it at some point. Didn't we? Damn. Yeah. Yeah. You guys got to step your game up. Step it up, people. Come on. Come on. Yeah. The $1,000 donation that went there. That was pretty impressive. Over at the tip jar, we've got Karen, Linda, Daryl, Ross, Nick, Ashley, Adam, Daniel, Mario, and Matthew.

Thank you all very much. And Brian, I will have you note that I did not put those in alphabetical order for you just because you got butthurt last time. So you're welcome. Merry Christmas. I don't want them. I don't want them in alphabetical order. I'll do my sections in alphabetical order because I enjoy it.

You do you. I'll do me. You do you, neurodivergent fool. That's me. Must be in alphabetical order or else I cannot read them. And we have a new five-star review from Newey. Top show even all the way down in Australia. Been listening to the show for many years.

It's always great. During my 45-minute drive to work, GOG is always something at the top of my playlist. Keep things just the way they are. Well, we shall. We shall. Because if it's broke, we don't feel like fixing it. No, we don't. Even if it is broke, forget it. Even if it works, we'll probably try and break it somehow.

You know, that's how we roll. Yep. And yes, RIP to Pele. I was amazed that I got this one in here before you. But I do remember Pele from me. You did beat me to it, but. Yeah. I do remember watching Pele in the old days when I was a kid and he was the superstar in the Wheaties box.

So, 82. Good run. The original GOAT. No doubt about it. Best player of all time. Probably one of the best athletes of all time. Unbelievable. And a great guy, too, by all accounts. So, sad to see him go, but he made it through one last World Cup.

Good for him. Good run. Until next time, I'm Brian Sheldeski. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. A very tired, neurodivergent Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy this show, please visit gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 583. 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, it's Discord is the main social network for now.

Except for what he sends me, reels on Instagram. Oh, hey, man, I'll stop if you don't like them. I thought they were pretty funny. They are funny. It's just all of a sudden, the guy that got off social media is sending me DMs on Instagram all the time. There you go. You got to have an outlet somewhere. Come on. You can also head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

We haven't had any questions in a long time that were decent. So, come on. Come on. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy in 2023. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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