596: Me Want Cookie!

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Hopefully. Woo! You're actually there! Okay, you're hearing me. You know, if we're going to get all the kinks out, let's do it in the intro. Yeah, why not? Get them out of the way. Hmm. Oh. How are you doing this week?

I'm doing good. How about you? I'm doing great. It's short weather now, so I'm happy. Summer's on the way. It's getting close here. It's deceptively bright outside, but still freezing cold. But there's no more snow on the ground. It's all gone, so. Same here. Birds are out and about. Spring is a-coming.

All right. Spring is in the air. Yes. AI disruption's in the air, too, so let's just jump right in. Okay. Goldman Sachs put out a report, and they say they predict 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by artificial intelligence. Okay. Yeah.

But they also contend that automation creates innovation, which leads to new types of jobs, and they see a rise of GDP up by 7% in the coming years. It's the circle of life. I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah. New jobs will be made. Old jobs will be lost.

Jeez. Happened a lot of times. You know what happened when man discovered fire? Old jobs got lost. New jobs were created. The guys that, like, cuddled at night to keep you warm? Out of a job. The guys that had to tender to keep the flame burning? New job. New job.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And we are seeing this new job coming to fruition right before our very eyes, the rise of the prompt engineer. I love the fact that it started as a joke, and it's now a job. Yep. Yep. Yep. And this is, I mean, this is what's making news right now, is this one company.

They are called Anthropic. They're out of San Francisco. They are looking for a prompt engineer and librarian. Hopefully not the librarian from the disc world. That would be a little interesting. So, but the, of course, it's making news right now because it's one of the first job opportunities to be a prompt engineer that is public. But the thing that is tipping it over the edge is the expected salary range for this position is $175,000 to $335,000 a year.

That will get you a cup of coffee in San Francisco. It, you might, you can get half a slice of avocado toast. You certainly wouldn't be able to buy a house. That's for sure. Yeah. That's an outrageous salary, but not for San Francisco. No, not for, well, I'll still take it. I'd move. You give me $335,000, I'm moving back.

I'm just not going to move to, yeah. Do you think you actually have to be in office to become a prompt engineer? I don't see why you wouldn't be. Sounds like a work from home position to me. Hell yeah. Sounds like work from my, you know, 30 acre mansion in Belize. That's a salary to me too, so.

Yeah. And, you know, even if they never fill this job, the free press that they're getting out of this alone is worth it. Well, I am curious if it's a real position. I would be shocked. Well, maybe. I mean, I don't know. Why not? These tools are effective for certain things. They are very, very good for certain things. And there's no doubt they're going to get better. I mean, there's no better way to condense something down into a 30-second ad or a quick press release or anything like

that. It takes that initial work off your plate. You just got to touch it up. So, yeah. People are actually writing books now with it. So, there's a lot you can do. And I have gone down the prompt engineering rabbit hole for the past couple of weeks now.

You're gunning for this job, aren't you? What? I'm angling for it. Fuck this podcast thing, man. No, but I've just been trying to get my head wrapped around all the different angles of it. So, I've just been going whole hog with it. And I did look up where prompt engineering came from as a term. And it did come out of OpenAI from a research paper from 2021.

So, yeah, it was part of their internal training methodology. So, they use prompt engineering to attempt to basically, how do we keep this thing on track? And how do we teach it to stay on track? Seriously. Yeah. You know, I think they really need to build in some Star Wars sound effects into OpenAI. As it starts to go off the rails, it should go, stay on target. Stay on target. Stay on target. Yeah. I'm kind of bummed, though, that AIQL was already taken

because I thought that would be a great way to put it. You know, oh, I write AIQL. But no, the cybersecurity crowd has grabbed that for attack investigation query language, which snore. I don't know. That's pretty cool sounding. I like that on my business card.

I'll take it. I'll take it. If my business card comes along with that $335,000 a year salary, I'll take that too. Well, you know, prompt engineering is going to be a thing. We kind of said that at the beginning. It's going to be, it's the new Google query. Right. But remember what I also said was that the world is also going to need a hell of a lot more fact checkers. Well, that's the real thing, right? It isn't so much the query. It's you've got to review what comes out of that because AI don't really give a shit about facts.

Nope. Nope. It is, you know, it's autocorrect. It is what it is. But here's the thing. The other thing that I said before, too, which I just want to drive home because I don't think we get the credit that we deserve for after 10 years of coming up with these. I'm just going to hammer them home. I hear that they are trying to figure out a way to start watermarking some of the results out of these things. So when, remember the problem I said before, which is, okay, if everybody's using this thing, everybody's posting it to the web,

they're basically pissing in the well for the training data that these AI's are going to do. Yeah, exactly. So they're trying to put in markers so they can say, oh, wait, this was generated by this. This is generated by that. Where's that going to come into? We need content that is certified 100% human. Yeah, let's stick with 4chan.

In the news.

New special report out, Brian. Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars. Shocking. Absolutely no one. Yeah, this is not surprising to anybody that's worked in tech at all. Whatsoever. You know, it just, it constantly happens all the time. Benign to not so benign like some of these were. You know, even at my new job right now, customer service, really off the rails,

insane customer service requests that come in, get shared within the office. Of course they do. Hell yeah. Yeah. That's the way it goes, man. That's the way it goes. So yeah, these people were sharing car crash videos. Yeah. Drivers naked walking around their car, which, you know, hey, what are you doing naked walking around your car? Probably trying to find your pants that you locked inside because that's where your keys are. Yeah. I'm guessing. Yeah. I mean, disturbingly, a video of a child being run

over is being shared. I mean, it's people, you know, straight to 4chan. This is what we're training our chat GPTs on. Yep, exactly. So yes, we know that this is obviously going to be a thing. And, you know, they say that they've got safeguards in place to, I know, I know, to, to disassociate the camera images from the, the IP or the geolocation tracking. So you can't tell where these people

are. I'm like, well, why don't you just look up the billing database? You dumb shits. You have all the information, this, this theater of saying, oh no, it's anonymous. And we do not marry the two. It's like, where's the, who pays the bill every month? We know who that is. We know who's the car is. We know where the billing address is. We know where the geolocation of the car is because the car is connected to the internet 24 fucking seven. We can see the house number in the camera.

I mean, this is not hard stuff. And I'm still saying that in the future, this is what I predict. This is what I predict. And I believe, I believe this will come true at some point. You know, we're having this kerfuffle right now with ring cameras and law enforcement. Imagine when it comes down to, Hey, law enforcement can just open up the entire web of cameras on these cars to either, you know, track a suspect that is fleeing a crime scene or maybe an Amber alert. You marry those

cameras with a license plate scanner. Fucking game over, man. Game over. So it is going to happen. It is going to happen. There's going to be a use case where some fucking politician comes in and say, we need the power to do this. And somebody will be asleep at the wheel. No pun intended. And nobody will be there to fight back. And then this will happen.

And you know what? With appropriate oversight and regulation, I'm okay with that. But the problem is we never get the appropriate oversight or regulation and we always get the jackasses. Yeah. How's that going? How's that working nowadays? Well, you know, it's a good theory, Jason, and I'm sticking to it. Okay. Let me go. I'm going to cut you a check from Silicon Valley Bank if you want one of those.

Well, in further Tesla news, a jury has reduced Tesla's $137 million racism lawsuit penalty to $3.2 million. This goes back to Owen Diaz, a former black contract worker, accused the company of enabling a racist workplace who was originally awarded $137 million in damages on the basis of discrimination. Appeals have lowered it significantly, showing that Elon Musk is kind of not wrong and

only paying his lawyers and not paying anybody else. Certainly work it out for him. The case isn't over yet because, of course, there's an appeal to the appeal to the appeal to the appeal to the appeal. So this will be an ongoing thing. But basically, the judge basically said that's a ridiculously excessive amount of money and lowered the total to $15 million. But the jury took it even lower than that. That $3.2 million, that's nothing to shake a stick at.

No. I mean, I remember when that $137 million came down and we both were like, that's a little much. Yeah, it was pretty insane. I'm not saying that Elon Musk isn't, shouldn't be paying $137 million to people all over the place, but not in this particular case.

Right, right. Spread it around. Spread it around is what we're saying. Yep. And I don't know if you've logged into Twitter recently, but apparently we were supposed to, everybody was supposed to lose their blue checks as of April 1st. Everybody still has their blue checks, except for the New York Times, because Elon Musk basically said, fuck them. I don't like them. Yeah. Because that's how Twitter works now.

Yep. And speaking of Twitter working that way, Twitter also designated NPR as US state affiliated media because Elon Musk doesn't like them either. Those labels are usually reserved for state-run organizations such as RT and Sputnik and Russia and China's news agency, but they've decided to put it on fucking NPR. Well, you know, it is kind of the most milk toast of all media. I don't know. So some of those shows are kind of a crime. So yeah, you can't

state-run media for being boring. Not quite. That's about it. Not quite the same, Jason. Yeah. And in continued Elon Musk, multiple companies that he can't run at all news. Are we going to get, we got a trifecta. Woo. SpaceX next-gen Starlink satellites have started falling from space in one month since SpaceX launched 21 mini versions of its next-generation

Starlink satellites. And we're not even going to get into the fact that, let's talk about how much junk he's putting up there right now for some bullshit internet access that hardly anybody is using. And he takes away capriciously for no reason whatsoever if he doesn't like you. Yeah.

These things aren't staying in the sky. One has fallen out already. They're doing controlled burns to try to get other ones higher because they keep going lower. It's called gravity. They call it deorbiting. I call it, you fucked up and it's crashing. Yeah. I would say that's probably what happened. Somebody didn't fill up the tank on the rocket ship and get it. Well, he forgot to pay the bill for the gas, Jason.

Oh, yeah. Well, if you're in California, don't get me started on the gas bills. Do not get $1,400. $1,400 for gas for a two-bedroom house. Anyway, if Elon really needs to talk about state-run media, he should, you know, talk to his buddy Xi Jinping, who also has put the hammer down on mid-journey somehow because you cannot get an image

of Xi Jinping from mid-journey. Was this because of the whole Winnie the Pooh thing? I don't know what the cause was, but it's just ridiculous. It's ridiculous. The founder and CEO, Dave Holtz, had an interview and he said, we just want to minimize drama. Political satire in China is pretty not okay. It at some point would endanger people in China from using the service.

You know what's still kind of okay? Kitty porn. Well, I think you need, what was it? What's it? Unstable journey for that or what was the unstable one? Well, see, there's the whole prompt engineering aspect, Jason, because from what I understand is people keep finding ways to prompt engineer their way around the guardrails.

Oh, of course. Of course. No, man. Look, I even started to write a script about a movie called Prompt like three months ago about clever prompt engineers who were doing that exact sort of thing. And it's going to keep happening. It's definitely going to keep happening. You know, as soon as somebody figures out the correct prompt to unlock the thing that lets this thing, you know, out of the gate and lets it run free, which I'm sure that there's a secret word somewhere because

we know how programmers work. You know, back doors are there for a reason. Well, I have an example, a very benign one. A YouTuber has proved that he can prompt engineer chat GPT to manufacture free Windows keys for Windows 95. Some of the time. Not all the time.

Some of the time. It's pretty good. But he's able to get his way around it to the point where the system actually tells him, no, I did not give you an activation key. I'm not allowed to give you an activation key. Yet. Yet. You still gave him an activation key. There's an activation key. I think nowadays you could probably just Google that and still get an activation key.

Well, if you really wanted to run Windows 95, yes, I'm sure you can. Yeah, definitely. Oh, and Google's barred. I have yet to play with this thing yet. I got the invite, but I haven't gotten to give it a run for its money, but it might be kind of fun because it obviously is pretty keen on the conspiracy theories.

These guys are stepping on their dick left, right and center, which is really kind of sad because I bet if they, you know, had not been firing all of their AI ethicists and things like that. Oh, yeah. I forgot. They kept firing all their ethicists. Remember that? Remember that?

The chickens have come home to roost. Yeah. Well, this site called NewsGuard has been running some queries against Bard, and they say they found that Bard generated misinformation-packed essays for 76 out of 100 false narratives tested.

Yeah. So if you want to get your, you know, your lizard people and QAnon on, then hop on over to Bard, I guess. Well, and here's the sentence from this article that just fucking kills me, and this is the problem with everything. Bard is an early experiment, according to Google.

Then why is it released publicly? They didn't want to. They were, they were, they were, quote unquote, forced into it, Brian. They were not forced into it. They chose to do it because market share and investor value. Well, and the sad thing is they, they lost, they completely lost.

Nobody cares about Google's AI. They're, they're fucked. They are just- They should shelve it, just take it off, hire those ethicists back and come up with a good one. That'll win. Yeah, because the, yeah, the category of chatbot has, has just been just killed by open AI.

There's no coming back for Google on this one. They could, you know, they could sell this to Hollywood though. They could definitely sell this to Hollywood as just a plot script, you know, device. It's got the right name for it. It actually does. The branding is done. Branding is done.

Yep. Well, a UK privacy watchdog has fined TikTok 12.7 million pounds. So, you know, somewhat significantly more than just coffee money. For what it says are several breaches of data protection laws, including how the app handled children's personal information.

The ICO says that in 2020, TikTok allowed as many as 1.4 million kids aged under 13 to use the app in breach of its own rules. The ICO states that the company is offering information society services to under 13s need to obtain consent from the kids, parents, or guardians. How does one do that on the internet?

I was thinking the same thing. It is basically a checkbox saying, are you over 13? Why, yes. Yes, I am. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. That's about it. But apparently, TikTok says they invest heavily to help keep under 13s off the platform, and our 40,000 strong safety team works around the clock to help keep the platform safe for our community.

We will continue to review the decision and are considering next steps. What are those 40,000 people doing every day? Looking at TikTok. Yeah. The algorithm has them, man. They're just swiping. The algorithm is just serving them the stuff that they want to see, which is, I don't really feel like working, so show me stuff that doesn't break any rules.

Exactly. Yeah. That's it. Yep. That's it. Oh, Tesla. Tesla is still in the news. So they're making a lot of cars. They're making a ton of cars. The problem now is they're not selling a ton of cars. So they made more than 78,000 cars more than they needed.

So they've obviously fixed the production problem. Yep. Now they have to work on the sales problem. Yeah. Well, he's tarnished his brand. That's the problem. That's what it all comes back to Elon. Here's the problem, Elon. The people that you're courting, they don't want to drive eco-friendly cars.

They're doing the gas guzzlers on purpose because, you know, they got to go. America. They got America and I got to go pick up some Bud Light and blow them up because America. And you've basically ostracized the people that would buy your cars. They're going back to Priuses. Yes, they are.

Yeah. Sorry. You have douche mobile number one now, which, you know, like I said before, everybody in this neighborhood is moving to Porsches because they're all frou-frou-y. And it is very smart of the Porsche dealership to be right next door to the Whole Foods.

One-stop shop. It is a one-stop shop. You trade in your Tesla, get a Porsche. $75 asparagus and get a Porsche. That's about it. It comes free if you use that stupid Amazon One hand scanner. They just give you a Cayenne or something. Oh, yeah.

So I'm interested to see how this is going to play out, if they're going to be able to bounce back or if this is a steady decline now. I'll tell you right now, Tesla could be the number one car company in the world in about five seconds. All they have to do is boot Elon. Just put them on the board and get them out of the way.

Yep. Yep. And they're working on a new cheaper version, which, you know, if you got rid of Elon and released an affordable version, game over. Game over. Yeah. They would dominate. Yeah. But speaking of shit no one wants, GM is going to start charging subscriptions if you want to use your phone in the car.

This has been making the rounds. I'm sure that they're going to dial this back a bit. Otherwise, nobody's ever going to buy a GM. Yes. That's about it. I mean, some of the people are making a decent point that, you know, Teslas, you can't use your phone. So maybe that's another reason people aren't buying Teslas.

Rivian can't use your phone. You have to use their built-in crap. So we'll see how this plays out. But this will not stand, man. This will not stand. Well, first off, this will – okay. I don't know. Again, going back to the rental car market, a lot of GMs in the rental car market, you're never going to sell one of these to a rental car market again if people can't use their phones.

It's a silly – it's a silly idea for just a few extra bucks. Yeah. This whole subscription platform with – we had the BMW issues. We've got – just everybody keeps thinking that this is a thing that they can get away with. Yep. You know? They're not going to be able to get away with this. People are going to start drawing the line.

Well, you buy the car. No subscription. I bought the fucking car. You want to give me the car for free and then just charge me a subscription every month? Sure. Okay. Fine. Yeah, lease it. But then I'm not buying. Everything's going to be leased. Yeah. That'll be exactly – much like our software.

Yes. Speaking of stupid ideas, Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy protection as it seeks a buyer. Shocking. Yeah. Hey, at least Branson got up once, you know? Yeah. Sort of. To space. Yeah. For $49.2 million of loss in its last fiscal quarter alone, he got to go to space.

Yeah. Tried to raise money in 2021 by going public through a SPAC. Remember when SPACs were the big thing and it all failed basically? That's it. And it was expected to raise $483 million, but it got less than half that amount in gross proceeds. As of March 30th, the company officially shuttered its space launch operations due to a lack of funding.

It flew a total of six flights from 2020, though only four of which were able to put satellites in orbit, so they couldn't even get that business. They are expected to report $33.1 million in revenue and a net loss of around $191 million for the 2022 fiscal year.

So it sounds like a tech company. Should be fine. Yeah. They should get some AI going on in there and they could get some more funding. Maybe put it on the blockchain. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Just to be clear, this is Virgin Orbit, not Virgin Galactic. Yes. It's different. Yeah. Different things.

Although Virgin Galactic, not doing so well either. I haven't seen any news since, you know, Richard Branson got to space-ish on his first flight. I think that's what killed him. You know, trying to redefine the boundary of space just so you could say you went to space is not really a good marketing plan when you're trying to sell trips to space.

Well, I think to, you know, take it to its base level, I think the billionaires have blown their wads on their shooting up into space. We haven't heard anything from any of these companies after all the billionaires got up there. Yeah. It's kind of done. That was the business model. Yeah.

Yep. They kind of dried up the market on that one. Yeah. And Meta has cut a bunch of jobs, as we've been talking about. They cut 21,000 jobs recently. And it turns out people are getting upset because a lot of the people that were fired, go figure, customer service.

I'm sorry, they had customer service? This is what I'm going to get to in a second. Yeah. So they killed customer service for influencers, communities, and businesses. Whereas I say, just like you just said, they've never had customer service for communities and businesses.

I have given up trying to do anything on Facebook through businesses for – I haven't done it for years because there was no point. Nothing ever worked. You sent messages into a void. You never got a response. It was completely useless. Yeah.

And just like – it's about as useless as influencers are. And now influencers are upset that Meta is useless. So, you know, like I always say, you can't complain about getting wet when you build your house in someone else's backyard and they turn on the fucking sprinklers. Now, this comes down to this – and I use the term really fucking loosely here.

Katya Karlova. Who? She says she's an Instagram – Katya Karlova. Who? Russian tennis player? Model? Nope. Boob model. Oh. She's a curvy model. Okay. So I went – I found her page and I looked at it.

It is just pictures of her boobs. It's her and her boobs. It's all it is. Well, the tale is old as time, Jason. Yes, yes. She is a boner influencer as far as I can tell. Apparently, she's done some work in human trafficking and things like that. But she says – Working against it, I hope.

You should probably clarify that. True, true. I guess. Yeah. She's brought some young Russians over to the U.S. Could be. Could be. She says, this is really damaging. This is my brand and I work really hard to build it to be something impactful and positive.

And you're not building your brand if you're building it on someone else's platform. Sorry. Got a website, Karlo. Sorry. Yeah, she does. She actually does have a website. Have you been driving people to it over the years to build up a mailing list so you actually own your own customers? Guess not. Guess not. If she did, she wouldn't be bitching and moaning on CNBC.

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Media Candy. A little follow-up on the where are they now problem that we discussed last time on all the shows that were disappearing from the streaming channels. Yep. Apparently, Roku is taking them with open arms. And an open checkbook.

And, yeah, because I think they're getting these things for pennies on the dollar. Like, they picked up the Nevers, you know? Yeah. Something nobody wanted whatsoever. Speaking of something nobody wants, Raised by Wolves. Yep. They got that one, too. The Dredges of Westworld.

Finding Magic Mike. Woo. And apparently Legendary is now on Roku as well. Okay. So I worked with some of those people. So that's where everything has landed. All right. Well, at least it's going somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's get to the shows that we give a shit about now. Okay. Picard. Okay. I don't know if there might be a spoiler or two here. Yep. Maybe. Okay. Yeah. Are we going to do spoiler? We can do spoilers. Sure. Why not? We can do spoilers. Okay. Go ahead. All right. Well, I'm fully on board with your advice, which is just enjoy it for the ride.

Great moments. Everybody sitting around the conference room gave me tingles. Yep. I'm even just like I'm beyond and I don't even care about the fact that Data just cannot die. I know. He's unkillable.

He will come back forever. So fine. I don't care. It was great. Yep. I'm only sad because obviously we are sliding into the end. We're almost done here. Yeah. When you get rid of the main baddie, we're definitely getting to the end. But we got a nice F-bomb drop at the end, which was great.

Good F-bomb drop. And also I think the best part of the whole shebang was Worf just talking to Troy and Riker going, what the fuck? Inappropriate. So good. That was really good. It was awesome. I loved it.

No, it's coming. Hopefully they stick to landing. But so far. I don't even care if they stick to landing or not at this point. I don't give a shit. This is it. Yeah. Everything was leading up to the last episode and them all in the conference room. You know. Yeah. They could have cut it there and I would have been like, fine.

Great. I don't care what happens. So. Yep. Yeah. We'll see. There's a big push online for Star Trek Legacy to come next, which will be all the kids on a ship together. And they'll appear every now and then giving advice. I'll take it. I don't care. I don't care anymore.

Okay. It's fine. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. I watched the first two episodes of Secession. They're up to three now, right? No, just two, I believe. Okay. Then I've only watched the first one. So I have not seen the second one yet. Very good.

The problem I have with Secession is I like all types of humor, Jason, as you know, except for one. I like dark humor. I like dad humor. I like poop humor. I like everything except for cringe humor. I cannot watch Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Something about it makes my skin crawl. I get fight or flight response. I just cannot handle it. Secession is about as close to the edge and cringe as I can get. It is uncomfortable, but I do like it. Yeah, the second episode in the season, there's a scene with everybody together, and that actually gave me a little – I hate to say this.

I'm going to sound like a snowflake. I was actually mildly triggered by it. And I get what you're saying. I can't watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I also can't watch The Office either. That kind of humor makes my skin crawl too. See, I was able to – I love the British office. I never got into the US office.

I don't know what the difference is. I guess I like cringe if it's British. Yeah, it must be. It must be. I guess. Caught up with Ted Lasso. Absolutely loving it. I do hope this is the last season. Rumbles are being made online about it potentially not being if people want more.

No, stop it. Please. Well, here's the deal. I'm sure they wrote it to be the last season, so I'm going to take this as the last season. Just like Dead – or not Dead – Westworld. I think that the penultimate episode of the final season, I'm closing that off in my head.

It's the last episode because it was such a perfect ending. Yeah. And me and Battlestar Galactica just not having an ending because they never wrote one anyways. Or lost. Or – what was that other show that that guy did where half the people went away or whatever?

Ten percent? I don't know. I don't know. They just – That Damon Lindoff, by the way. Yeah, that's him. Yeah. Yeah. The best news that came out – and I don't know if we're going to get to it because this has all been breaking, all the Star Trek news. We'll wait to see if Dave's caught up on it. We'll talk about it there or it will be next week. The best bit of news is that his fucking Star Wars movie got shit canned.

Thank God. Oh, you know what we can use ChatGPT for? We can go back and rewrite the endings for all these shitty shows. Like give me an ending for Battlestar Galactica that doesn't suck. God, I would read all of those. Somebody needs to start a wiki of it. I'm on it.

I'm on it. All right. Here we go. There we go. Good endings to shows that had shit ones. Yep. That would be nice. Found a couple – well, one new podcast and one great episode of the podcast I've been listening to. The new one is the You're Dead to Me podcast, which is by the guy whose history books I've been reading, Greg Jenner.

These are short BBC Sounds 20, 30-minute podcasts where he gets – it seems to be a very British formula. You've got your gregarious host who kind of knows a little bit. You get an expert in the field of whatever you're talking about. And then you get a comedian who knows absolutely nothing about anything, but it's supposed to be funny.

And that's the format. And it works most of the time. That's the same format as Jim Jeffries' podcast. Exactly the same format. That seems to be a very popular format, and that's exactly what he does. It's pretty good. Like it depends – you know, you've got to be into the subject matter, I suppose, and they tell you what it is.

But it's worth a – I wouldn't listen to every single episode, but if there's something I'm into, I'll listen to it. And it's pretty good. I'm enjoying it. It looks like they've upped the time limit. Now they're an hour long. Oh, okay. Some of them are longer. Yeah, I'm seeing that now too. Some of the episodes that I was listening to were like 20, 30 minutes.

But, yeah, I could see it stretching to an hour if it's an interesting subject. I'll give a few a listen. I've done podcast bankruptcy recently and killed everything that I was listening to, so I'm starting from scratch. It's a good place. I want to go. You might want to add back in Curious Creatures, which is the podcast by Lowell Tollhurst, one of the founding members of The Cure, and Budgie, who played drums for Susie and the Banshees and The Creatures and all kinds of people, just goth luminaries.

And they had Shirley Manson on. And you know I love a good Shirley Manson interview because, man, that girl can just talk about anything. There is zero filter and she's hilarious. And she's on the show with them. So it's an absolutely fun, fantastic episode. Good time. You know I love me some Shirley Manson too, so I'll be all over that.

And I mentioned The World's Greatest Con a couple episodes ago because Dave had never heard it. And I just wanted to say that the new season is coming very soon as a Patreon subscriber and friend of Brian. I got a couple episodes a while back, but now I've got a couple more.

And it is solid. It is really, really, really solid. So go sign up now. There's a link in the show notes. Get caught up from seasons one and two. They're all separate. Season one is a whole standalone. Season two is a standalone. And season three will be a standalone as well. But it's fucking great.

They do a great job with that show. Very happy it's back. Zane Lamprey has a new stand-up special on Amazon Prime for free called Tender Looks. And I know you're a Zane Lamprey fan. Did you get it? Did you? I used to be a Zane Lamprey fan.

You know what this actually made me do? It gave me cause to unsubscribe from his mailing list. Yeah. Yeah. I did that. I did that when I stopped drinking the first time. Because it's just like, okay, I'm going to be at a bar telling jokes. I've seen Zane do stand-up in person before on his Drinking Made Easy tour.

And he wasn't funny then as a stand-up. And he's not funny now. He's not a good stand-up. Like, his show format was awesome for the time. Yeah. Three Sheets to the Wind. I will stand by that and say I thoroughly enjoyed every episode when it was on the air.

Since then, it's been diminishing returns. And he's not a good stand-up. No, I mean, what's great, the show was actually not bad when it was just him telling stories about Three Sheets and traveling and all that stuff. When he tried to tell a joke, it fell so flat and it was so painful.

And I'm just like, okay, I made it 20 minutes and I had to turn it off. I felt so bad. I was like, oh. But, yeah. Sometimes, Jason, you just move on and that's okay. You just move on. Yep. And I started to watch Lucky Hank, the new Bob Odenkirk vehicle.

Oh, I've heard good things about that. I have – here's the deal. I made it longer with Zane Lamprey than I did with Lucky Hank. Oh. Okay. Yeah. It was – it didn't land for me. I'm going to give it another shot. I think it's up to episode four this week.

But just the lack of press around it, I just found out about it randomly that it was out on some DirecTV interstitial ad that they started putting up when you hit pause now. And I'm like, oh, that's out? And I think it's got a 6.7 on IMDb. I didn't look at the – I didn't look at the Rotten Tomatoes on it.

Well, I still haven't caught up with the end of Better Call Saul, so I've got some stuff to catch up on and I'll just see if Lucky Hank gets unlucky and gets yanked. Yeah, I'd wait a little bit on that one. But you've got to finish Saul, man. I want to hear what you think. You know, it's one of those ones I can't watch without the wife, so we're trying to schedule all that in.

And we're also trying to figure out where the F it is. Like I'm trying to find it streaming where I don't have to pay for it. It's a bit torn. Yeah, well, it might be that. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's – because that's what I thought – we had a row at the house because I thought it totally stuck the landing and my roommate thought it definitely did not come anywhere close.

She thought it BSG'd. But I loved it. I loved the ending of Better Call Saul. But after the failure of Zane and Lucky Hank, I'm like, man, I really want to – I just want some good sci-fi. And I was thinking of the stuff that I really, really liked recently that I could go back and watch.

So I'm going back and re-watching Altered Carbon Season 1. Yeah. You do remember Season 2, right? Season 2 was an unmitigated shit show. It was terrible. But Altered Carbon Season 1 I thought was really, really good. It was. It was fantastic. Yeah, so I just finished Episode 1 and now I'm remembering why it was so good.

So I'm definitely doing that. And the show Travelers, I really, really, really liked that show. I thought they did a really good job with it. And I thought it made it all the way to the end and tied itself up kind of nicely on Season 3. I watched the first episode and I just – it didn't grab me.

Yeah, it takes a little bit because it's kind of confusing. It takes a couple episodes to get into it and get the entire story and kind of put it all together. But once it comes together, it comes together. It really does. I really, really love that show. And if you happen to be in Vegas, there's a punk rock museum.

Probably not up your alley, but – I would go. Yeah, it just opened on April 1st. So I would definitely check it out. There's a link in the show notes. It looks like they've got some decent stuff. And the cool thing about it is you can see who's giving the tours that day and it's like punk rock royalty.

The people who were there are actually giving you the walkthroughs. So I really would – if I ever go back to Vegas, which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do. Kind of not the town for me anymore. Not because I'm just not drinking, but just because I'm sick of fucking Vegas.

I haven't had fun in Vegas since I was in my – Jesus, 20s or early 30s at the most. So it's been a good 20 years since I've had fun in Vegas. You've got to learn to have a different kind of fun. I enjoy it when I go with my wife quite a bit. But we just spend an insane amount of money on a ridiculous meal made by top chefs and all that sort of stuff and then float in the pool all day.

It's fine. That's one way to do it. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. I've got a story that shocked me yesterday because this is a band that I've loved for – well, forever, which is kind of funny because it's the 30th anniversary of forever. And they are going to play a show one-off in London, which is killing me because I won't be going to celebrate the fact with the original lineup.

They haven't – God, I don't think they've done anything since the late 90s. We should mention the band is The Cranes because – Oh, The Band is The Cranes. Yes. You're talking about The Cranes. Yes. Well, nobody knows them. I'm convinced this is one of the bands that I'm the only person that is aware of. I love this band.

Love them. I love all of their albums. And I can't believe they're actually getting back together and only doing it once. Hopefully, this will lead to a bigger tour of some sort, but I somehow doubt it. If you're one of the people on Discord that liked my last two – the new bands that I mentioned the other week, you need to go back and find The Cranes.

You will love them. Oh, yes. No. Did you ever see The Cranes? Oh, yes. Many of them. Yeah. Okay. I only saw them once, but it was at the Metro in Chicago in the 90s. And man, was it – I just love The Cranes. That's one of those bands that's just like up there in my pantheon of fantastic bands nobody's ever heard of.

Yes. They are that band for sure. Yeah, for sure. And we did highlight the How to Write a Smith song in one minute a couple of weeks ago. And someone's making a go of this. A friend of the show, Bob, shot me a note on Discord that the guy had written How to Write a Bauhaus song in one minute.

And then I'm like, okay, wait, let me go out to his whole channel and take a peek. And I'm like, oh, yeah, he's got a whole suite of these things. But he did Bauhaus and Depeche Mode. Both of those are in the show notes. And he nailed it on both of them, I thought. Yeah. He's not wrong. No, he's not wrong. Yep. Apps and doodads.

All right. So I have never used Google Drive, but apparently they stepped on it again. This seems to be Google's main operation these days is stepping on it. They removed a 5 million file creation cap for Drive because they got a massive backlash for implementing it without telling anyone.

Yeah, that would really screw people up. Now, you think 5 million files. Boy, that's a lot of files. Who would create more than 5 million files? Well, when you've got 30 tetrabytes of storage available at their highest tier and you're paying for it and you've got a bunch of small files, which you probably do, you can easily hit that number.

And a lot of people did. Yeah, I'm actually – if I would have put everything I have over on my 3 terabytes of storage on Google Drive that I have right now, it would have hit that easily. Because, I mean, hell, my font library alone probably would have hit that.

Yeah. They implemented this to preserve stability and optimize performance and then they quickly unimplemented it because, yes, it actually pissed off on the big pain for people. Yeah, seriously, if I'm paying for it, don't give me a fucking cap.

I'm paying for space. That's it. If I'm giving you money for 30 terabytes, then, you know, it doesn't matter how many files I put out. I give you 1K files or 1-byte files. Suck it up and deal with it. That's what I'm paying for. Yep. And this little Easter egg was making its way around that.

That was pretty funny. There's apparently a copy of the Bitcoin white paper hidden in your image capture program if you have a Mac. So there's a – you know, it's just one of those things that people put in there for testing or whatever and somebody left it. And everybody is like, oh, why is it in there?

Is it a secret message? Is it – you know, is Apple going to do that? It's like, no. Programmer got bored. No. That's it. Yeah. We get bored. That's why there's Dogecoin on Twitter. Yeah. You saw that it tanked again as soon as the dog came off. Whatever.

I'm so – I'm fucking so sick of Elon. I'm so sick of Elon. I've mentioned the Apple Watch timers on the show many times because I was so happy when you got multiple timers. Yes. I thought that was the greatest thing. The thing that pisses me off the most is that you can't yell at Siri to turn off the timer.

One of the greatest annoyances. There's no prompt that you can engineer to make Siri shut the hell up when it comes to the timer on your watch. And it's sitting there vibrating and you're trying to get to – you're doing stuff and it's like, ah, shut up. You got to find the little thing. So I don't know where I found this, but it's a simple little hack to turn off the damn thing.

Just slap your hand over it. Oh, that works? Yeah. It's a cover. It's called like cover to stop, I think. That's it. Well – So if you just – if you slap it real fast and put your hand over it, it will turn off. So basically it's always had a solution. There's just been no documentation.

None whatsoever. The dark side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the segment formerly known as Security. Ha! We're joined as always by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news.

The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the co-host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Welcome, Dave. That is the best introduction of the range of shows that I'm on that I think I've ever heard.

I certainly enjoyed that. I certified 100% human, by the way. Okay. That one I wrote. All right. Well, there you go. See, that's why. That's why it's so good. Yeah. Good to be back. We all caught up on Mando? Yes. Unfortunately.

Unfortunately. What? Oh. Okay. A little too much stunt casting for me. I have always complained about what my biggest complaint about Elvis. Tom Hanks took me out of the movie. Oh. Jack Black. I love Jack Black.

I love him. I do too. I love Tenacious D. I love comedies that he's in. But Jack Black is Jack Black in anything that he is. And Jack Black took me out of The Mandalorian. Okay. Okay. I, Christopher Guest, or, perfect, fine.

Could, I was, I spent the whole, I was like, who is that? I know that guy. He's very familiar. Yeah. Now, if he looked like Doc Brown, that would have confused me. And I would have taken out of it. My son said, is that Doc Brown? I said, yes, it is. Yes. Christopher Lloyd, not Christopher Guest, by the way. Oh, sorry. Christopher Lloyd.

Yes. So that's it. Right. So, but Jack Black and Lizzo, it's stunt casting gone awry. Like, a little bit too much for me. Like, I get what they were going for. It was a, it was a fun, lilting, quick little episode, self-contained, very clever, very funny.

Yes. Okay. But still, no Jack. I don't need Jack Black in my Star Wars. You know, I was excited by it because I also am a Jack Black super fan. Didn't bother me. Didn't bother me at all. I'm like, okay, you know, look, he's riding with Starbuck.

Okay. Come on. I can't, like, whatever. I'm all good with it. I thought that, to me, it was that I did not know that Jack Black and Lizzo are the Hollywood power couple we all need. Yeah, true. Right. I mean, I think they should be giving their own show. Don't get me wrong.

Okay. Very good. Very good. I will add that I saw the Super Mario's brother movie last night, which Jack Black is in. He plays Bowser. So you got Jack Black playing Jack Black in Mario Brothers movie. Yes. Okay. He is. Yeah. But it works.

Okay. Yes, I could see it working in that movie. Yes. Yes. He actually does a little Tenacious D as Bowser, and it works. The Super Mario movie is a fun romp, a light movie, nothing more than that.

Go into it with those expectations, and I think you'll enjoy it. My sense is that because my son is a big Mario player, there's a ton of Easter eggs in that movie that just went over my head, but he had a great time with it.

Excellent. Yeah, I think it's a bit too early for me to see this movie because Lucas, my son, is just kind of teetering on the edge of figuring out what games are, and he hasn't played Mario Brothers yet, but I see this in my future for sure on Netflix or wherever it will be streaming. Right.

Yeah. So we're getting a lot of Star Wars news. The big thing is going on in London right now. The timing hasn't worked out well for me to really be too up to date on this, but I do bring a couple things to the table here that I'm aware of. They have announced a new movie scheme, so they are not following your lead, Dave, and sticking just with TV shows.

They have boldly decided to go ahead and do movies. I'm happy to hear that they're all standalones. They're not announcing any epic three-movie series or anything. And distinct timelines. We are getting a Dawn of the Jedi movie directed by James Mangold, who did Logan. And this will be 25,000 years before The Phantom Menace.

Then it's when they discover the Force. We are getting a Dave Filoni-helmed Mandalorian-era movie, which will, I guess, tie up. I guess all the shows will be leading up to a tie-up that will occur in a movie. So. Yeah. We'll see.

It's a way to get 20 bucks out of each of us. Yeah, exactly. Right? Because Disney Plus subscriptions aren't enough. Yeah. And we've heard that Daisy Ridley is coming back as Rey, who will now be a Jedi Master.

It will take place 15 years after the last trilogy movies. So three movies. We'll see. All right. All right. And I did get to see the Osaka trailer, and wow, that looks good. Mm-hmm. Not a Jack Black in sight. No.

The Osaka trailer seems to me to be more grown-up Star Wars, which I'm here for. Yes. Yeah. Me too. So. Yeah. Also, they dropped a new trailer for Indy. Did you see that? Oh, no. I will be watching that as soon as we're done. Yeah. So the official, I guess, first full-length trailer for the new Indy movie is out.

And this is another movie I will go see because it's Indy. And I love Indy. Interesting trailer that sort of sets the scene of an Indy that perhaps time has passed by.

And his, I guess, his goddaughter comes and gets involved. And there's time travel, it seems, and so on and so forth. Oh, great. But, hey, it's Indy. Yeah. There's definitely time travel because I've seen some of the de-age-ification work done on Harrison Ford. And I got to say, well, I mean, they have more money than God.

So, of course, it looks great. It looks fantastic. And they know exactly what Harrison Ford looks like as Indy, as a younger man. So, right? Got good source material. Oh, speaking of that, speaking of that sort of thing, I did see this as a passing headline.

I didn't even think to throw it in the show. Katie Sackhoff signed off on the rights to Disney for them to be able to use her voice after she passes in perpetuity for Disney to continue the character. Cash out while you can, baby.

Cash out while you can. Yeah. I guess so. Yeah. Why not? Why not, right? Huh. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's going to be the hot new thing in entertainment contracts or they'll – well, I suspect the first thing they'll do is try to sneak it in the fine print.

Yeah. Exactly. You want the role, don't you? Well, then you got to sign this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. That's the first I've heard of that, that sort of thing. Yeah, me too. Certainly for any kind of – some of it's been in gaming for quite – for a little bit, but this is the first I've heard of any kind of like, you know, actual studio actor kind of thing.

So, of course, I can go to Disney. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I heard just yesterday, same sort of thing. I saw a passing headline, but I didn't read the story that Iman has licensed David Bowie's voice to do – now, again, all I saw was the headline, so I'm totally talking out of my ass here, but that's never stopped me in the past – that to do like audio books.

Interesting. Yeah. So, there's another example of that. Audiobooks. That's an interesting switcheroo. Well, I mean, thank God we're not getting trailer or commercials for Skittles from David Bowie. Well, so here's the thing.

Could you sample David Bowie, use it for your Skittles commercial, and just not say who it is? Oh, yeah. That is the tech move fast and break things credo. We'll see. Just move fast and get – Pitch shift it a little bit.

I'm not sure I would pick David Bowie because you will get sued by a very large organization. If you get caught. If you get caught. Yes. I mean, I think about how many commercials we've all heard over the years where they're – basically, they rang up Central Casting and said, get me someone who sounds like Morgan Freeman or get me someone that sounds like James Earl Jones.

And so how close can you get before you cross the line? Pretty damn close. Yeah. Yeah. As long as it's not them. Well, and you don't need to ring up Central Casting anymore. You could probably just do a little bit of a tweak on a setting, you know, train it on David Bowie and then, you know, demodulate it X amount.

Yeah, just like pitch shift it half a tone or something. Yeah, exactly. Easy. Right. Right. Yeah. Fun times. Add some little random elements to the cadence and make it just different enough. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I'm going to skip on the indie trailer. I'm just going to wait for the movie.

I'm going to try to at least. I can respect that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to nuke my own fridge, as it were. Right. Now, just a little bit of privacy news here, security news. I know we're in the dark side, so we'll keep this short.

I saw this come through from CTV News. Good old Canada coming through here. It said, don't tell anything to a chat bot you want to keep private. Now, it's sad that we have to say this to people, but yeah, duh. The thing about chat GPT is, you know, it's new.

We've already had security problems with them when people log in and they get somebody else's complete chat stream. And so, you know, it's not really job one over there right now. And yeah, don't say anything on the internet you don't want anybody else to know about, as Eric Schmidt would say.

But yeah, this is – the thing about this, though, is this is a creative tool. So people are going to be saying some crazy shit in there. And, you know, hopefully they're not going to hold it against anybody because if you're writing a book about terrorists and you're asking terrorist-y things, do they come and, you know, slap the bracelets on you?

Yeah. There's been a couple of stories sort of along these lines that I've seen this week. One of them was about – it was a professor at a college. Did you see that one? Yeah, I forgot to put that in the notes. Yeah, it's basically the first, like, libel case or slander case.

Yeah, yeah. So someone asked Chet GPT about – to name some professors that had had issues with conduct. And it came back and – Inappropriate touching. It came back and – yeah. And it said that this professor had had inappropriate touching with students and it even referenced a story in the Washington Post.

And none of that was true. There was no story in the Washington Post and this professor had never been accused of anything. So – Yeah, it comes back to fact-checking as a service for, you know, these prompt engineers. Right. The other one I saw was there were a bunch of folks at Samsung who got their wrists slapped because they had been loading things into ChatGPT that were proprietary company information.

Oops. Yeah. And I can't remember if someone was able to pull it out or whatever. But I think that's inevitable. One thing I did see was that if you go to the web interface of ChatGPT, there is a way to opt out of having your information become part of the corpus.

There is a privacy setting to have it not do that and everybody should do that. But you have to opt out. The default is to opt in. On the ChatGPT API, it's the opposite. You're opted out unless you opt in.

So good to know. Yeah. Okay. I'm at the web settings page here and I cannot find that anywhere. Well, they tend not to put those front and center, do they? Yeah. We have to go to the help notes somewhere.

But it is definitely not an easy to find option. Well, in addition to not telling an open system anything you want to keep private, you might want to not even tell, oh, I don't know, some apps that probably have their entire business model revolving around the fact that you're supposed to be kept private.

You may not want to tell them either. Online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest got caught sharing confidential user data with advertisers without consent. Oopsies. An internal review revealed a data breach impacting 100,000 users, forcing the companies to issue a formal disclosure to the user base.

The violations started in 2017 and were ongoing until just last month. Now, parent company Monument, which has purchased Tempest, they used to be separate, but now this one company owns both, shared private information with advertisers via notification data included without user consent included patients' names, date of birth, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, insurance information, and more.

Oh, shit. Ooh. Yeah, including alcohol consumption data. Yes. They also shared data related to appointment information, assessment information, and survey responses, which included how much booze they were drinking. But they want you to know they are committed to privacy. And said that their survey responses are protected, even though it's obvious they weren't.

They're, of course, blaming third-party tracking systems for the issue, stating that they have removed the offending tracking codes from their website. That does not really explain how this data got shared just through a tracking pixel, but, you know, there you go. Yeah. Good job, guys. Good job.

Just despicable. Absolutely despicable. Yeah. I mean, these people at their most vulnerable. Yeah. These things are supposed to be there to help people, to serve as private and confidential things that are supposed to be very good for us and people in their time of need. And what the fuck are these people doing?

Mm-hmm. I just don't understand. Not their job. Yeah. No, I wish there was a... Well, it depends on what you define their job as. That's true. If their job is to make money, I suppose they're doing their job. Right. Well, not after they get the fines for all these problems. And I hope they do.

Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I'm actually part of a recovery app called I Am Sober. But the thing about this app is it's even got community built into it. So out of the gate, it's, you know, it says that... You know, it's not anonymous or private. It's not anonymous or private. So they're at least doing it right. So you can actually, you know, talk to each other because that's, you know, part of recovery is talking to people.

So that part, I can see. So that one got breached on you. But these guys are actual, you know, recovery. That's not what you're supposed to be doing. So caveat emptor. But if you are trying to quit and you want a decent community, check out the I Am Sober app.

It's not bad. There is a related article here that I saw this week. And this is a woman who, in the course of having a child, was very deliberate about opting out of any sort of sharing of her information at her doctor's office.

And I just want to back up a minute here and say that the medical organization, the giant medical company that this doctor's office used for intake.

So the forms you fill out when you go to the doctor is an organization called Freesia. And as part of their intake in the fine print is the ability to take the information you use in your intake for advertisers.

Again. Again, that should be illegal. Despicable. Yeah. A medical intake form, someone has decided we're going to make a few bucks and secretly opt you in, you know, not make it obvious that we're opting you in to do targeted advertising based on your medical intake forms.

Yeah. And to me, this is why we need a federal privacy law. It's just – it's out of control. It is absolutely out of control. Yeah. We need the internet police. Ten years on, we've been still – we're still saying it. They're still not here.

Yeah. Well, and this – the woman in this article did the work. She was, as I say, meticulous about this. And when she discovered that her data had been shared, she did the work after the fact with the companies to say, show me where you got my permission to do this.

Right. And eventually they admitted that they could not. And they just did it anyways. And I wish there were a way to throw the book at these folks who are so fast and loose with our private information, particularly our medical information.

I'm sure the whole system was built with the idea that there is absolutely no way that anybody is going to go through all of this to opt out. So why even bother having that built in? Right. Right. It's all dark patterns. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's just horrible.

In other security news, ransomware hackers have leaked the second batch of city data from Oakland. The city has confirmed that Play, the hacker group claiming responsibility for it, has shared a second batch of info on the dark web. Officials aren't sharing more details, but journalists are. Sources say the dump was 600 gigabytes and included confidential Oakland Police Department files, including disciplinary records, council members' communications, and city staff medical records.

The first batch was only 10 gigabytes. So this is a lot more going on. The Oakland police are pissed because if anybody goes through that, they're probably going to find that the Oakland police have been doing some things they shouldn't have been doing. And they are now demanding $25,000 per officer for the damage done through the leak.

Who are they going to get that from? Well, doesn't this strike – I mean, doesn't this strike you as being a bit of a shakedown? Yeah. Right? Yep. I mean, $25,000 per officer from the police union? Come on, gang. By the way, aren't the police supposed to be the ones that are stopping these sorts of things from happening?

Obviously not. You know, cybercrime isn't really in their purview, but still, you're the police. It's a crime. Now, you want money for the crime? There are things that come with the job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in good news – Yes, in good news, TechCrunch has reported that the FBI has seized the Genesis Market, a major marketplace for stolen logins, as part of an international campaign dubbed Operation Cookie Monster.

Me want cookie. Authorities have arrested roughly 120 people worldwide as part of the bust, including 19 people in the UK, beyond the US and the UK. The campaign included agencies from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and European countries like Germany and Poland.

So this market was founded in 2018 and sold logins, cookies, and browser fingerprints taken from Breach Systems. Now, this is pretty great. Not only could hackers sign into accounts that they've created, but they could impersonate web browsers to access those accounts without needing a password or two-factor authentication tokens.

And they got up-to-to-the-minute data from victims, a valuable resource for hackers that sometimes have to settle for old and sometimes useless data. I would argue they should probably just become an insurance company or a health care company, and they can get all that data immediately. I had an interesting conversation about this story with Tim Starks from the Washington Post's Cybersecurity 202 column.

He publishes that daily. He did an interview with someone from the DOJ, and it was about their focus on disruption, that they're not just waiting for things to happen. They're actually looking for opportunities to go in here with this sort of thing, get in there with their international partners, and shut stuff down.

And I think we're seeing an accelerated pace of that, and I think that's good. Yeah, me too. This is great. So, more of it, please. I guess we're getting those international, please, one way or another. So, they're all working together, which is great. So, more of it, please.

Shut them all down. Yeah. Yeah. Make it so it's not worth doing business. Mm-hmm. All right. That's all I got. Okay. I'm going to go watch an Indiana Jones trailer now. There you go. Yeah. I'm going to go watch it again.

Oh, maybe I'll watch it. Damn. You sounded like Cookie Monster there, Jason. Cookie. Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Leif, M, Ryan, Stefan, Sean, and Alexander. And I don't know if it is Leif or Leif.

It can go either way. Usually it's Leif. But. Well, Leif Erickson, Leif Garrett. That's true. It goes back and forth. All right. So, either way, thank you for joining us on Patreon. All right. And over at PayPal, we've got Nicola, Thomas, Nicolai, Benjamin, and Christopher, who gave us a big 50 bucks.

Now, I don't know if it's Thomas or Tomas. Oh, Toma. It could be Toma. Well, over on the tip jar, we've got Mario, Linda, Christopher, and Matthew. What are you doing? An ad for the Mario Brothers movie there? Mario. It's me, Mario. I'm Italian.

I can get away with that shit. Yeah. You keep telling yourself that. I do. We've got a new review, Jason. Two stars. Oh, I love it. I can tell you why just from the name the person put in. God Believer loves science. Oh, yeah. The name says it all. Well, that also applies to your name.

Great podcast if you want to be in a negative state of mind. It's called Grumpy Old Geeks. It's on the fucking tin. Oh, God. I don't know. Nobody reads. Nobody reads.

Nobody reads anything. The manual is embedded right there on the cover. Come on. Oh, well. Anyways, sad news came out this week. Sire record Seymour Stein, whose musical taste shaped a generation, passed away this week.

He was not young, but basically my entire teenage years and my adult music taste are basically because of him. He signed everybody. He signed Madonna. He signed the Talking Heads. He signed the Ramones. He helped bring the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Echo the Buddyman, and The Cure to the U.S.

I mean, my entire musical. Do you remember the Just Say Yes compilations, the CD samplers? Yep. Yep. That's him. He did those. Yeah. It was 80 years old. And it's funny. It was actually, we were in talks to do a podcast with him last year.

Oh, man. That would have been great. I would have listened to that. Yep. Yep. The problem basically came down to all the good stories you couldn't tell. Yeah. God, I hope there's a book sitting somewhere in a desk drawer that somebody's going to find. Well, he's got a book, but it's not the right book. But I hope that other book is sitting in a desk drawer somewhere.

Yeah, the real book. So we have a link in the show notes where just basically everybody that was everybody is shouting out, giving him shout outs. So it's pretty, we lost a legend, basically. Yep. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. It's me, Jason DeFilippo.

Lean into it, Jason. I'm getting, I'm leaning into it. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on. The moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. That's a Grumpy. That's a Grumpy. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

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