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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. 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. A reminder, we're off next week. I'm heading off to London. I'm very excited about this trip because, you know, I've always been a big traveler. You used to be as well, Jason, before you wouldn't go three straight blocks anymore.

Yeah. So I used to love traveling. My wife and I used to love traveling together. Then we had a kid. And then all of a sudden, the only travel that we did was when we were living in L.A. was coming to Toronto to see the in-laws. And now that we live in Toronto, we only go to L.A. to see my family. It's nice to be going somewhere different. So I'm very excited to be going to London.

We talked a little bit last week about the death of the English pub. And then one of my oldest friends, I have known Ross since I was like 13. We were Disney buddies running around Disneyland together. And he also actually listens to the show, which, thank you, Ross. That's very nice of you.

He was actually in London when he listened to the show about that. And he wrote in, Regarding your comments on the death of pubs in England, I visited several while I was there. And the experience was consistently underwhelming. Just not the lively watering holes I was expecting.

What was most disappointing was the complete lack of British beers on tap. No bass, no old speckled hen, no Newcastle brown ale, no Boddington's, no Watney's Red Barrel. Peroni? Sure. Asahi? You bet. I asked one of the bartenders about it, and he told me there was no customer demand. At this point, their clientele is mostly tourists and expats, and they want shit they recognize.

The sad thing is, the British pub up the street from my house has a great selection of British beers. What is this world coming to? Well, thanks for running in, Ross. And apparently, if you want an authentic British pub experience, you have to go to either Toronto or Portland, where he lives. Sad, sad.

Because we've got tons around here, too. We've got Irish pubs and British pubs up the fucking Yazoo. So, apparently, they'll be better than the ones I visit in London. Man, I can't believe you can go to London and not get any Newcastle. That's just ridiculous. I'm sure you can find it somewhere, but definitely, you know, the pubs have changed.

Yeah, that was like, you know, they'd have that in the bathroom for mouthwash when I was there. It's just like, it's like water. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. What are you going to do? So, a little follow-up on the ex-Twitter election cycle that's coming up. Well, so there's some back and forth going on that I thought was really interesting here.

Well, Linda Yaccarino has had a very bad week. Yeah, yeah, let's just get that out of the way here. She's had an interesting week. Let's be honest. It's a shit job that she never should have took, and it's not surprising. But, yeah, it's been a particularly bad week for her. Right. So, Elon comes on the horn saying that the election monitoring team has been eliminated.

And then she has to dial it back and say, no, it hasn't. And here's why. Well, apparently some people were fired from the election integrity team. Probably the ones with the integrity. Yeah, probably. I know at least one of them was from Ireland.

So, it was like the global election team. Right. And, you know, we have the local election team because we have the big election here coming up, which is going to be great. To say I'll be watching curiously from afar is an understatement. You, oh, God.

I just, I don't want to, I want to fast forward a year and a half. Can I skip, can I skip the commercials, please? Straight to the apocalypse. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just cut, cut to the chase. So, yeah, she's had to dial this back. And she did an interview at the Code Conference that I watched a bit of.

I watched the whole thing because it was such an awesome train wreck. You made it through the whole thing. You are a better man than me. It was so uncomfortable to watch. It was pure schadenfreude. That's why I watched it. I was like, I hate you. I hate what you're doing. I hate the fact that you're doing this for the money.

But I love the fact that you're so uncomfortable and it's so horrible and you hate your life. She really does. I mean, and here's the funny thing. That's the main reason I put it in here is five minutes in, she even forgets where she works. And, you know, because she's like over at X.

Like the first part, she's like, well, that guy worked at Twitter. We are X. And then she kept screwing up and calling it Twitter where she works. It's like, even you can't fucking figure it out. You are over your head and you are flailing. Your boss is a psychopath.

Well, I mean, it's so obvious. She is not CEO in any way, shape or form. No, no. She is, she is meant to be thrown. She's chum for the public. She's fucking vignata. She's ever asked to clean up Elon's messes or at least try to while he's busy making another mess while she's trying to clean up some particular other mess.

Yeah, it was, it was great. I mean, the reactions on Twitter, and I'm just calling it Twitter from now on. I'm not bothered with X. Yeah. We're like, this is probably the worst CEO interview I've ever seen in my entire life. That's from journalists. Yeah, that was a, that was a shit show.

It was awesome. Well, there was a, there was a worse interview. I have to say with Zuckerberg at South by Southwest long ago. That was the, that was the year. I forget her name, the, the quote unquote journalist who did the interview where we actually created kickedofftheinternet.com to say, can we harness the entire power of South by Southwest to actually get this woman kicked off the internet?

Cause she did such a terrible interview with Mark Zuckerberg. That was a really bad interview too. But this is, this is right up there. This is right near the top. This is, you know, when it comes down to worst CEO interviews, this is definitely at the top of the highlight reel. Yeah.

So good. I highly recommend watching the whole thing, Jason. It's, it's, it's just chef's kiss. In the news.

Amazon's in hot water, Brian. Hmm. The FTC joined by 17 states has filed a lawsuit against Amazon accusing the company of illegally protecting its monopoly. Go figure. You become a trillion dollar company by being nice. Yeah.

That doesn't happen. Are you kidding me? Yeah. They're just saying that this is, this comes down to the retail stuff, you know, the, the bits and bobs and, uh, actual atoms that they sell, you know, saying that they strong arm retailers, making them set their own prices that can't be any lower elsewhere, which, you know, rises, raises the prices for us and all this other crap.

The stuff we've all, all known all along. Yep. Uh, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's the Walmart playbook. Any, any big retailers going to have a playbook where they strong arm smaller, you know, suppliers to do what they want. It's the way it goes, which, you know, I'm happy the FTC is coming out swinging, you know, granted this was like her college thesis.

So, uh, she's gotta, she's gotta like really kind of step up at this point. But, um, you know, I, I give Lena Kahn all the props in the world. She's very intelligent, extraordinarily well-spoken and she knows what she's doing.

But she hasn't been very effective. That's the problem. Well, hopefully she'll be more effective on this one and hopefully she will stay ineffective. We'll talk about, uh, the Activision thing in a second. But if she really wants to, you know, hurt Amazon and fix some shit over at Amazon, let's start by splitting off AWS.

Yeah, they should be split. They should be different companies, a hundred percent. I would just point out quickly and maybe people will disagree with this, but Amazon in my opinion is doing a pretty good job of hurting itself right now. I think coming out and saying that you're going to add ads to Amazon Prime video has pissed off a lot of people because you're already paying for it.

So what are you doing adding ads? That's ridiculous. Uh, I think the shopping experience on Amazon is about 10,000 times worse than it used to be. I, the influx of, of just third party vendors that have really crappy products that aren't even remotely close to the descriptions, they're counterfeit, uh, they're the wrong sizes, they're horrible quality.

And if you, the paid ads and the sponsored ads, uh, is so buried, you can't tell anymore and finding organic products and searches is almost impossible. Amazon is really doing a good job of damaging their own brand right now. Yeah. They're just getting greedy. Really, really greedy.

Yeah. The sponsored post thing is really tough to get around and they make their people do that. I mean, that's the only way you get placement anymore. So yeah. Got to pay to play. Yeah. It's like the Facebook-ification of Amazon, you know, get, get you hooked and then, then start squeezing the, you know, squeezing the dials until they can get every last penny out of you to their own detriment.

Uh, and I do have to say the delivery, uh, the quality of delivery is going downhill so bad. I got two deliveries this week. Uh, one, I'll talk about it at the library. Uh, just, you know, beat to shit. Right. Absolutely beat to shit. Two different, two different deliveries, two different days.

The stuff was treated like garbage, you know, and, uh, I've noticed that definitely. So. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. Not the Amazon it once was. Bring back the bees. Said no one ever. Uh, speaking of AWS.

Yep. And what is soon to be probably the world's biggest antitrust argument here, AI, uh, some FTC better be sharpened in their swords for this because these things are consolidating into monopolies faster than you can shake a stick. First, we had, uh, uh, what was it?

Uh, Amazon investing $4 billion into Anthropic this week. Uh, now Amazon Bedrock is available, which is a fully managed AI service giving access to top foundation models, plus other tools to build customized AI apps. This is to get everybody locked into AWS as their cloud provider, because they're losing ground to, uh, what's the fucking Azure faster than you can shake a stick.

So, uh, this is, you know, them trying to plug their, plug the dam. Uh, so, you know, there's, there's so much going on right now with Amazon that it's, you know, if you spit, uh, or turn your head to spit, you'll miss something. Yeah. So we'll see how the FTC handles this, this upcoming AI apocalypse.

Because it's, it's gotta be, they gotta be salivating right now saying, come on, come on, just buy one more company and then we'll get you. Well, we'll see. I don't have high hopes because the FTC seems to be focusing on something that's already pretty much a dumb deal, a done deal. As, as you alluded to a little bit earlier, uh, they're back challenging Microsoft $69 billion buyout of Activision again, even though the rest of the world has said it's okay, even though it's obviously not a monopoly because they have a massive second competitor out there called Sony.

There are other game systems everywhere. There are game companies everywhere. This is, I don't know why they're wasting time on this. I don't either. Yeah. They're reviving the attempt to block it. Uh, normally they drop challenges, uh, to deals when efforts are lost in federal court. And despite the agency's effort, this move will not delay the deal from going through.

The worst case scenario for Microsoft would be divestiture, which means that they have to force a sell off little bits of parts of the company after the deal goes through. But the deal is going to go through. Yeah. And they've already done that. They've already done that with the UK. They're selling off the mobile division to Ubisoft.

So come on. I mean, what's left? There's not going to be anything left on the bone for Microsoft to buy once these people keep doing it. There are better things for your people to be focusing on. Like making more games. Or the FTC. Not the FTC. I don't want FTC games. No, no, no.

Well, yeah, you'd always lose. That's the problem with the FTC game. Lina Khan needs food. Badly. Oh, God. So, uh, yeah, just stop it, guys. Stop it. Move on. Um, now, now we get to a fun one.

H&R Block, Meta, and Google have been slapped with a RICO suit. RICO. Can you believe this? This is the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. Right along with the gangsters. That's the gangsters guilt. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you got to be a Gambino for this level of, of dumb fuckery.

Well, apparently, apparently the mob has moved in to Sand Hill Road. Uh, no, this comes back to what we talked about a couple weeks ago. This comes back to the tracking pixels on the H&R Block site that, uh, Meta and Google could, uh, basically get people's, you know, some of their tax information.

Yeah, um, no big deal. Yeah. Just the stuff that Donald Trump refused to ever release to anybody ever, because it's a big deal, especially if you're doing something shady. Which we found out this week why he didn't want to give up. Yes, we did. Woo. I skipped that. Shocking no one.

I skipped that whole news cycle. And then I, I turned back and turned the news on and they're taking his name off of the buildings. I'm like, what the hell did I miss? We got him this time. Holy shit buckets. Um, but anyway, this, uh, yeah, this is dumb fuckery.

This was, I don't even, I don't even know why they would do this. You know, see, the thing is, it still comes down to the fucking tracking pixels. And I'm like, is this really nefarious or is this just some stupid, dumb programmers wanting to see their stats to, to appease the, the, you know, the C-suite.

So they can see how much traffic they're getting. You know, that's, that's where I'm kind of on the fence. I'd have to really dig in and look at the tech on it. Um, I, I get the feeling that people just slapped on the pixel and turned on the hoses to get everything and didn't realize you'd be getting some things you're not supposed to be getting.

And you should actually pay attention to that and maybe look at the settings. Yeah. I do like this, uh, line in the article, H and R block, Google and meta ignored data privacy laws and passed information about people's financial lives. Financial lives around like candy. Yeah. Come on. Nice.

When it comes to, you know, embeds and pixels like that, you know, blog rolling, one of my first sites that actually did fairly well. I was pioneering a lot of that embed stuff. And when I first saw how much stuff I got from having my piece of JavaScript embedded on somebody else's website, I was like, this should not be, this should not be allowed.

This should not be allowed. And ever, I mean, that was in the early 2000s before I could have patented half the shit that I did because it was so new. That's how long ago it was, which I should have done. Idiot. Um, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now, or if we did, it'd be on my island, on my yacht.

Um, but anyway, just, I know how, how deep the data can go that you're going to get from this stuff. And it's, yeah, if you want to do it nefariously, it's very easy. If you just fuck up and put it in by accident, also very easy. Very easy. In fact, one might argue easier.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like late, leaving a handgun, you know, around a bunch of toddlers. So yeah, is what it is. Well, getting back to gaming companies, Fortnite maker, Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff for about 830 employees, which is quite a bit.

Um, but I can see why CEO team, Tim Sweeney admitted it. We've been spending way more money than we earn. Go figure. Well, you do that. You're going to have to lay people off. Yeah. Well, this is why he had the big fight with Apple because he wanted to earn more money and Apple was taking it.

So they're going to lay off a bunch of people. They will be offering severance packages that include six months base pay and healthcare, which is actually pretty good. They're also offering to accelerate employee stock option vesting schedules through 2024 while giving two additional years to exercise the options. Also excellent. Sounds like not working at Epic Games is actually more profitable than working at Epic Games.

So they've been working to reduce costs by freezing hiring and cutting spending on things like marketing and events, you know, parties on private islands. And, uh, but they're also going big in on the metaverse, which I'm not sure is exactly the way to go. So that is what they're going to focus on. They want to develop infrastructure for its games to exist in the metaverse ecosystem.

I'd like to remind everybody that the metaverse ecosystem does not exist. No shit. We'll talk about that in a second. Uh, they're also getting rid of Bandcamp, which why they own that in the first place is beyond me, an online music platform it acquired in mid 2022. It's coordinating a sale to SongTrader, without the E, a music licensing platform.

So there you go. All right. That time when I sold Bandcamp. Yeah. And speaking of the metaverse, we had Connect, which is the Facebook big conference that they have. It's been nearly two years since Mark Zuckerberg used Connect to announce that Facebook was changing its name to meta and reorientating the entire company around the metaverse.

That was two years ago? Two years ago. But at this year's event. At this year's event, he barely even mentioned the word metaverse. Nice. He said it a few times, but it was mostly AI, AI, AI, AI, and AI.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I just. Squirrel. We've been talking about the metaverse for so long and it's so ridiculous and so stupid and interest is so low except for the CEOs of these stupid companies. Nobody else cares. Not even the CEOs anymore.

I mean, everybody's getting rid of their, their metaverse divisions. Well, these CEOs care. Zuckerberg does. I just want to read, I want to read two quotes that came out of Connect and just, are these people living on the same planet? Pretty soon, I think we're going to be at a point where you're going to be there physically with some of your friends and others will be there digitally as avatars, as holograms, and they'll feel just as present as everyone else.

Or, you know, you'll walk into a meeting and you'll sit down at a table and there will be people who are there physically and people who are there digitally as holograms. But also sitting around the table with you are going to be a bunch of AIs who are embodied as holograms who are helping you get different stuff done, too. So, I mean, this is just a quick glimpse of the future and how these ideas of the physical and digital come together into this idea that we call the metaverse.

That sounds like fucking hell. You know that they have, like, legalized magic mushrooms here in California. I think maybe somebody hit the stash a little soon because I don't know where he's coming up with his hologram bullshit now. I don't either, and I don't know why you would want an AI that's simply tasked with maybe taking notes to actually be a physical hologram also sitting at the table with you.

Who the fuck would want that? Why would you want that? No. Hey, Clippy, get me a coffee. Who wants Clippy there with them in the meeting? So, second quote from somebody else sipping the Kool-Aid over at Meta. Angela Fan, a research scientist with Meta AI, says generative AI will change the type of experiences people have in the metaverse.

It's almost like a new angle on it. Fan tells Engadget, when you're hanging out with friends, for example, you might also have an AI looped in to help you with tasks. While you're hanging out with friends, you should be hanging out with friends. How many tasks do we have when we're hanging out besides get me another beer?

That's the only task that was ever needed when I was hanging out with friends. What the fuck are these people smoking? I told you, magic mushrooms now legal. It's insane. Okay. Who wants this? No one wants this. No one.

Yeah. Moving on to the next story here about the quote-unquote metaverse. Lex Fridman. Not to be confused with Lex Fridman. Or Lex Luthor. Or Lex Luthor. On Thursday, podcaster Lex Fridman released what he calls the first interview in the metaverse.

This is a YouTube video that I saw. Did you get a chance to look at it? I did. It's gorgeous. Yeah. It's really cool looking. Because it's not realistic. No, because... It's got the budget of a fucking Hollywood movie. And then some. This is where the billions of dollars that Zuckerberg has are going.

So what they had are basically two floating heads in a darkened room interview style. No legs, I might add. No legs. No legs. Insane amounts of detail and facial expression work being done. Now, what it took was hours of scanning with multiple, multiple cameras.

Hundreds of cameras, in fact. To be able to create these 3D models of these people's heads. So... And as the article humorously points out... Yeah. I put this in here. Yes. Go for it.

And if we're being mean, it's showcased using two people who are not notably very, very expressive. Watch it and just think of data. Just think of data. Because he is turning more and more into Brent Spiner as he ages. Amazing. It's crazy. Yeah.

And Zuckerberg thinks that soon you'll be able to do that with your smartphone. Nope. Not like that, buddy. I mean, each eyebrow had like, you know, had muscle 3D activators on it. It's crazy. It's... This is just not...

It's not tenable by any stretch. No. And again, nobody wants that. No. Nobody wants it. Not at least until Apple's comes out. Then everybody will want it. Maybe. Maybe. Hey, man. I'm saving room on my credit card for it, so...

Of course you are. Yeah. Hey, man. It's crazy new tech. You got to. Life's too short to be in Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse. I want to be in Tim Cook's ARverse instead. I will take the money that I would have used to buy Tim Cook's AR thing and buy their stock instead.

Let you guys buy all the ARs. Have at it. Have at it. Have at it. Speaking of not wanting people there, Gavin Newsom, my favorite. He has meta... Go ahead. I sure wish he would spend more time actually being governor of California instead of running for president.

Oh, but he's not running for president. Oh, of course. He hasn't been running for president for about his entire fucking life. Exactly. Ever since I met the guy when he was, you know, shit assembly guy in San Francisco. No, no, he's always been running. He will continue to run until he is president.

Yay. So he vetoed Assembly Bill 316, which would have required human attendance in driverless vehicles over 10,000 pounds. Right. Because what we want are vehicles over 10,000 pounds to have absolutely no safety regulators on board whatsoever.

Yeah. So he is now firmly in the sights of the Teamsters, which is somewhere you do not ever want to be. I love this. Lindsay Doherty.

She heads up Teamster Local 399 in L.A. On Tuesday, she said... I love this. She said Newsom has got to go, too, adding, if they fuck with us, we're going to get rid of them. Says one of the heads of the Teamsters.

Gavin done fucked up. Yeah. I don't quite understand why either, because it's had overwhelming support from everybody else. Everybody thought it was a good idea that maybe we shouldn't just let this go crazy yet. We should keep an eye on it. Let's have oversight. Let's have regulations. Let's make sure this stuff is safe first.

I don't know. This is out of character for him, actually. It really is. Yeah. It's kind of strange. It's kind of strange. Yeah. It must be some big check that showed up in his pocket. Exactly. Oh, wait. Who owns all the... Who might be giving him a big check for doing these sorts of things so he can fund his not-running-for-president campaign?

Yeah. Hmm. Let's all think about that for eight seconds and move along. Back to Meta for a second, though. I saw this and was just like, oh, God. Meta is set to launch AI chatbots, because, you know, AI is the thing for the metaverse, with unique personalities across its platforms to attract younger users.

Just what we need, computers talking to the kids. That's what could possibly go wrong. Yep. These bots known as Gen AI personas, you can see what you did there, they're currently being tested internally, and they were unveiled at the MetaConnect conference. Yeah.

God. I don't know. There's a ton of these. Snoop is one of them. I don't understand. Bob the Robot, inspired by Bender from Futurama. Yeah, Bob the Robot. There's a Tom Brady one, because the kids all want to talk to Tom Brady. You know, why? One bot named Gavin made an incredibly weird and bizarre law decision that is very much against everything he's ever done before.

Okay. So, keep an eye out for these. Keep an eye out for these. They're coming. Well, we're not going to have to worry about it too much, because you know what you need to get onto this new AI metaverse? What, Brian? You need power. Juice! You need juice! Unfortunately, the U.S. electrical grid is in desperate need of upgrades, watchdog warns.

What have we been saying for years? That we're basically in a third world country. Yeah, yeah. Brownouts, blackouts, rolling blackouts every summer. Texas! Suddenly, all of a sudden, people have figured out that our outdated electrical grid is not equipped to handle rising demands for renewable energy or the new normal threats of extreme weather and cyber attacks.

Gee, who'd have thunk? Oh, like I said, Texas, when it snows. Yes. We didn't need watchdogs or experts. Anybody that lived in Texas when it got a little chilly could tell you that the electrical grid sucks. Here's when I knew, like, Santa Monica was in trouble.

We were already having the rolling blackouts. Luckily, very few of them. Not very many happened. But all of a sudden, everybody up and down the street started to get either Priuses or Teslas. And then what they started to do was they would hang electrical wire, because they didn't have garages.

They would basically string electrical wire out to the street. And as you saw more and more of those- They've got an extension cord everywhere. With extension cords, basically. And I was like, holy shit, the grid is not going to be able to take this. And it's not. That's the problem we're finding. As more and more people are getting electrical vehicles, the grids are fucking at capacity.

All right. So my dinosaur-burning juggernaut is going to be in vogue for a while longer. Yeah, but I also heard gas was like six bucks in LA now. Oh, yeah. Woof! Yeah. Yeah. But I saved my route point, so I get a dollar a gallon off.

Woof! Yeah. I filled up three quarters of a tank the other day, and it was $75. Yeah. Thank God I only have to fill up my Jeep once a month, because my drive is three quarters of a mile to the office. That's basically gas prices regularly here in Canada.

But same thing. Like, I drive once a week, tops, because I take public transport. Yeah. Yep. And in a pinch, I could walk. Yep. But who would do that? God. Exercise. Nobody walks in LA, except me, every day.

But anyway, it's – yeah, it's going to be bad. It's going to be bad if they don't start fixing this shit. Yep. It's – because everybody's moving to electric. You're right. I didn't even think about that. But I love the vision of Santa Monica with just all of these extension cords on the street.

Like fucking Walmart 399 extension cords hanging off of tree branches. There's a new – there's a new avenue for, you know, slip and fall lawyers. Trip on somebody's extension cord while you were walking to the store? Call – call Saul. Well, that – I mean, I got to say that people were smart about it.

They were, like, literally stringing them off of trees to make sure that they weren't going across the sidewalks. Oh, my God. I wish you'd have gotten pictures of that. It's so good. Oh, man. Okay. Hat tip to Joseph on this next story. Human radiologists beat AI in diagnosing common lung conditions on x-rays.

Okay. We've talked about in the past that if you're a radiologist, you should be scared because the AI is coming. Well, it turns out – turns out – yeah, AI systems had a 56% to 86% probability of accurately diagnosing pneumothorax compared to 96% for radiologists.

AI's prediction was incorrect five to six times out of ten, indicating it cannot function alone at that rate. Duh. So, here's the thing. Radiologists have a couple different things. They have experience. They have access to the patient's history, so they know what they might be looking for.

And they also have, you know, previous images for the patient so they can check back and forth, which apparently they don't give to the AI to, you know, see progressions. But here's the deal. It's still not bad. I mean, it's a starting point. It's like, hey, maybe you should look at this, you know.

Yeah. Can flag things for further review by a real human. Mm-hmm. But, you know, I still – if I'm getting x-rays and I have a problem, I want a human to look at it. Yeah. You know. Although it did take the humans, you know, a couple tries to find my stroke, which wasn't very, you know, very good.

But, yeah. So, anyway, you know, always get a second opinion, preferably from a human. Yep. So, I'm saying – now, Brian, we're going to round out with some NFT news. Okay. Because it's been a while. It's been a little while. Because they're dead, right?

Yeah. Well, we'll get to that in a second here. Walmart is going to start selling pudgy penguins. Have you ever heard of pudgy penguins? I have not. Neither have I. They were the 19th largest NFT sales – or NFT collections by sales, right?

Okay. Sure. So, they were, you know, basically the pudgy apes. Okay. So, basically, Walmart is going to start selling pudgy penguins in 2,000 of its stores. Comes with a birth certificate and – Why do you need a store to sell an NFT? Well, these are the plushies.

These are actual physical goods. Oh, these are real things. Okay. They're making dolls that they're going to sell. Right. Okay. So, they're toys. They're selling toys. All right. But the original pudgies are on the Ethereum blockchain, as always. So, here's the deal.

Who didn't tell Walmart that NFTs were dead? But they're selling a real thing. They're hoping for the crossover from digital to physical. There is no crossover because there is no digital anymore because nobody cares about NFTs. And I don't think anybody will care about these stupid toys either.

So, all right. Good on you. Yeah. So, we'll see how that goes. Because in the same week, we have an article from Rolling Stone saying, Your NFTs are actually finally totally worthless. Researchers have found that 95% of NFTs, once hailed as a breakthrough in digital art and crypto, are now worthless.

Yes. So, they analyzed this company, Dap Gamble. Okay. Study titled Dead NFTs by Dap Gamble. Analyzed over 73,000 NFT collections and found that nearly 70,000 have a market value of zero ETH. So, okay.

Great. Rolling Stone. Big deal. In my inbox comes from Molly White, who we adore. Newsflash. 95% of NFTs have always been worthless, she says. True. Yes. But then goes on to say that this study is absolute and utter bullshit.

Don't listen to it. And she's very upset with Rolling Stone for actually picking it up and running with it because just the study was so fucking horrible. But the, you know, still kind of stands that NFTs are basically worthless nowadays. Right. And as that's going on, I sent that newsletter to you and friend of the show, Chris Lockhead.

Chris Lockhead turns around and sends me an article saying, if you invested $1,000 in Donald Trump's NFTs, how much would you have today? Okay. Well, with a six-month return, initial investors have seen a 139.5% return on investment with some early sellers gaining up to 1,000%.

Okay. All right. Now, things to point out here. One, this was the Series 1 of the Trump NFTs, which sold out pretty quick. Mm-hmm. And… Self-delugging sample. Yes, exactly. Three-month-old article, by the way, as well.

So, the Ethereum prices have actually gone up since then. So, these numbers, if you still had your Donald Trump NFTs. Now, the thing that I sent back to him, which I thought was my point, was if you have a – if you have $10,000 worth of JPEGs and nobody buys them, do you still have $10,000 worth of anything?

If an NFT shits in the woods. Exactly. So, what does the Trump camp do? I love this. This is where the genius part of whoever ran his digital campaign comes in.

So, from Series 1, they gave out some cards that were prize NFTs, which then you can burn, depleting the actual amount of NFTs, raising the value of the other values to get some kind of, you know, side, you know, carnival prize on the side.

Maybe you'll get a prize. Mm-hmm. Sort of. I would like to see the numbers. I would like to see an accounting of how many prizes were given out, sent out, blah, blah, blah. One free Trump steak. Have a bottle of Trump water. So, what they built into the entire thing was, you know, they built in scarcity.

They built in an engineered scarcity. So, when the first round goes out of these NFTs, they're going to start burning them because they say that some of them are prizes, which raises the value of the other ones that we'll see if anybody can sell. Trump did a second round of NFTs to try and get more money.

Those did not do very well at all. Those are actually down in value now. So, but the funny thing is, it's NFTs used for scams. Still, to this day, NFTs, crypto, all of the same bullshit. Just do not, whatever you do, do not waste your money on a fucking pudgy penguin.

That's a long-winded way of saying, don't go to Walmart and buy a pudgy penguin. I know what I'm getting, Jason, for Christmas. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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Brian, do you want to feel old today? I feel old every day, Jason, but go ahead. The world's oldest active torrent has turned 20 years old. Can you believe BitTorrent has been around for 20 fucking years?

I'm not surprised now that I think about it. I've been out of college for quite some time. That's about when LimeWire was active. LimeWire was not BitTorrent, though. No, I know, but the next iteration thereof. So, yeah, I'm not surprised by this. But it does make me feel old.

Yeah. Yeah, I was at the Wired party where Sean Fanning met Bram Cohen for the first time. And I was just like, what's the big deal? They're like, oh, there's some kind of rivalry because they're both distributed networking guys. And I'm like, okay. They're like, oh, there might be a fight.

And I'm like, what? That's a bunch of fucking nerds. Then I met Sean Fanning, and Sean Fanning's basically a jock meathead. And Bram Cohen's just like this, you know, wiry, goth, wannabe emo kid. And I'm like, well, if there is a fight, it'll be really short, to say the least.

And then I'm thinking about it. I'm like, oh, my God, Dad, that was a Wired party in San Francisco. So, that was like 20 years ago. Jesus Christ, we're old. Yes, we are. So, the point of that story, though, I was going to say is Sean Fanning is a pig.

I rode in his car, and it was just fast food wrappers everywhere. We had to kick, like, old milkshake cups out of the way to get in the back of his probably $200,000 Mercedes. I'm like, dude, go spend $10 to get your car washed.

Gross. So, yes, the Phantom Matrix was the first torrent. Do you remember the Phantom Matrix? I do. I do, yeah. Yeah. I totally had forgotten about it, and I didn't even realize that was the first torrent. But I do remember the Phantom Matrix. So, crazy. There you go. Crazy stuff. We old.

We old. I remember about a year ago when Getty came out and said, we're going to ban all AI art, and we all cheered and went, woo-hoo, that's good, because you're Getty, and you shouldn't have AI art. Let me guess. I don't know how the media has fallen, Jason. Let me guess. Because they have their own generative AI tool now.

Of course. It's unique because it's trained on Getty's own database of images, and the resulting content also comes with a royalty-free license. So, you won't have to worry about potential copyright issues down the line. So, yes, now that they have their own shiny little tool, it's all good. If I was a photographer with my shit at Getty, I would pull it instantly and say, screw you guys.

But, Jason, they're launching a contributor compensation model for AI licensing. Based on Spotify, I bet. Probably. Yeah. For every time somebody steals one of your images, you get one gazillionth of a cent. There you go. That's how it's going to work.

And great news. The WGA strike has ended, Jason. We have writers again. We don't have actors yet. Yeah. Great. Drew Barrymore is back. Yay. Yeah. Bill Maher, all the late-night people are back. John Oliver will be back this Sunday. So, because the writers have been doing nothing and haven't been allowed to do anything for weeks now, expect lots of jokes about the writer's strike on all these shows.

That's about what we're going to get. So, they've voted to lift the strike. We've got some idea of what's happening. Generative AI can't be used to write or rewrite literary material or anything it produces cannot be considered source material. Writers can choose to use AI if the company or studio consents to it, but studios can't force writers to use AI software like ChatGPT.

If the studio already has materials to hand over to a writer, they have to disclose if those materials include anything generated by AI. And finally, the exploitation of writers' material to train AI is prohibited under the new agreement. So, it's mostly AI stuff. They're also getting higher pay, increased pensions and health contributions, higher payment residuals for streaming projects, which is pretty important.

Foreign streaming residuals will be based on number of subscribers for services available globally, while domestic project residuals will be based on hours streamed by subscribers in the U.S., which means all those numbers will have to be published now. Finally. Which is kind of the big thing there that came out for me.

I think that's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, there we go. They've kind of gotten mostly what they want. It's only good for three years, but that makes sense because these things are moving so fast. Mm-hmm. So, there you go. We got writers, Jason. I just need some actors.

Give us back the actors. Cups and doodads. MacOS Sonoma is now available. Was earlier this week. Yay. Top features under the hood, but new features like high-resolution screensavers of real-world locations and updated login screen, interactive widgets.

Not much, really, but I've got to say I did the update, and my Mac is faster. A lot faster. Okay. Well, I won't know about this for months because I'm an audio guy, and you can't do that. Yeah. So, yeah, nothing will work.

I've gotten so many warnings. They're like, don't update. I'm like, no shit. It's not my first rodeo. Yeah. You know. The annoying thing about this update is that everybody who can't update or won't update, their system settings is going to have a nice big red one stuck on it for months.

Yes. And don't write in. I know that there's a shell hack to turn it off, but every time you reboot, it comes back. There's no way to get rid of it for good. So maybe in, you know, the next Mac OS, they'll turn that off. But no, no, they don't want to.

Just ignore it. Just an update badge. You'll survive. No. No. Those things are engineered to make me think I'm being hunted by a bear. That's why it's red. That's why it's in the upper right corner, because it has been engineered to make me think that I'm going to die if I don't update.

We've trained our eyes to ignore ads on screens. We can do this. Nope. Can't do it. Can't do it. You tell me you can do it. I'll tell you you're a liar. That's why I updated, man. It was bugging me. I'm telling you. Seriously. I'm just going to put a piece of tape on my monitor. I think last time I actually just removed the system settings from my dock, so I didn't have to look at it anymore.

That's smart. There you go. See? Anyway, I did get a new game this week, which is an old game. I was an aficionado of tower defense games. I played tower defense games. I played them all. Played them all. Mastered them all. Fieldrunners, still my favorite of the bunch.

Second favorite, though, was Geodefense, which was a very bare-bones, sci-fi, Tron-y-looking type of tower defense game. Disappeared many, many moons ago. Well, it's back. Somebody actually rebuilt it from the ground up in HD.

It plays exactly the same. It's still fucking hard as hell to beat. And you can get it with a couple levels for free on the easy. $4.99 to unlock everything, which I gladly paid. And I still haven't even beat all the easy levels yet.

And I'm really good at tower defense games. This game is hard, but it's fun. And it is satisfying as hell when you win. But in total, there's only 30 levels. But getting to the end, it took forever when that game first came out.

But it's nice to be – it's a quickie. You can play for like two, three minutes before you die and, you know, get angry and try to come up with a new defense. And then three hours later, you put it down. But anyway, check it out. Geodefense HD. So glad it's back. Well, I've been married for quite some time now and with my wife before we got married for even longer than that.

So I've seen the dating world change and go app-based and been very smug and happy about the fact that I don't have to exist in it. And I saw this article and it made me even happier I don't exist in this world. Tinder Select, the dating app's most exclusive tier, is rolling out now.

It will cost love seekers $500 per month or $6,000 annually for features like exclusive search and matching. And I assume automatic blowjobs. I was going to say, because $500 a month, man, you could just, you know, just pay for it.

Now, well, you probably still should because you would think, oh, well, there's this $500 per month level. I could level myself up and maybe I'll get more matches. No, you can't have it if you want it. Tinder has to decide that you should have it.

They decide who gets Tinder Select, not you. You can't just pay for it. Okay. They're only offering Tinder Select to less than 1% of its users it considers extremely active. Now, does anybody want that label? Yeah.

Hello, sluts. Yep. That's what they should call it. Hello, slut. I love this line in the article. Is this worse than paying for verification when you have less than 1,000 followers and other social media networks? Yes. Yes, it is.

I think the thing that they should really do, which would just... I would only want to match with Tinder Select females. I would, like, not even bother writing anybody and, like, oh, you're a Tinder Select, are you? Okay, well, McDonald's in 15 minutes? Exactly. Meets behind the dumpster.

So, now, all Tinder would have to do to just really blow everybody's mind... Dude, if this database leaks. Well, that too. But, also, start just doing an affiliate program. Just turn everybody into whores.

Well, kind of half. For every time you hook up, you get 20 bucks. Just turn everybody into fucking whores. That's it. That's amazing. That's all you got to do. That's amazing. I love it. I'm so happy I'm not single. Oh, God. Now, this is a doodad that I can get behind.

It's a desalination system that actually produces fresh water cheaper than tap water. Okay. Hold on one second here, Jason. Yes. Does it actually exist? Because I have been hearing about this since I was in high school. I know.

Me too. And we do not have one yet. These people have apparently made it. Engineers at MIT and in China have come up with a device. It's a small device at this point, and they're working on scaling it up. But it seems to work.

I will believe it when I drink from it. Yeah, when I have one in my backyard. They estimate that a system that is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase could produce about four to six liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts.

Sounds fishy to me. Yes, I know. But we'll see. We'll see if they cracked the nut. Yeah. We'll see. I want to believe, to quote the excellent Fox Mulder. Yeah. I want to believe as well. I still want to believe in the car that could drive on water by splitting oxygen and hydrogen.

And don't forget cold fusion. Cold fusion, too. There's so many of these. Hey, what was it? We just had one last week. We just had one about that material. Yes. Room temperature. Yeah. That didn't pan out either. So we'll see. Well, you know, I just... Let's be hopeful.

I want some good news, damn it. Well, I do have a little good news for me, Jason. Okay. I've been using Quad 9 for DNS for quite some time. And then all of a sudden, I noticed things are really slow. I don't know what was... Particularly image loading. Like, I would load up a page, like Instagram or whatever, and like all the text would appear and then image.

Mm-hmm. Next image. And that was happening everywhere. So I was like, this is fucking bullshit. Like, I don't want to switch back to my ISP's DNS because screw those guys. They don't need the data. So I switched over to Cloudflare's DNS because, you know, Cloudflare, they basically run the entire internet right now anyways.

And things are lightning fast now. So good. So much better. Yep. It's just 1.1.1.1. Yep. And they actually have services for, like, blocking... You could do a kid filter so no adult stuff gets through. There's one that blocks known malware sites and all that sort of stuff as well.

So you can dial in some different things with that. But yeah, it's so much faster. Quad 9 was great for a long time. I don't know what happened over there, but I'm glad I switched. Things are fast. Do they have an adult filter where no kid stuff gets through? Oh, God, that'd be great. Wouldn't that be awesome? I want a Red Hot Chili Peppers filter.

Oh, that would be nice. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Ding-a-ding-a-dang-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding. Fucking Grammy Award-wing songwriter my ass. At the library. So I had to take a break from the series that I've been reading about First Contacts because I already read too many in a row and that was a bad thing.

New book by A.G. Riddle, who has been one of my favorite shitter sci-fi authors for a long time. Usually has a good premise, kind of an action-adventure type story thing. Sometimes he writes series. This time he's definitely trying to write a series. I read a book called Quantum Radio by him.

Fucking utter shit. This coming from the guy you just said was your shitter sci-fi guy. Well, yeah, there's good shit. This is utter shit. Okay. This was one of the worst books I've ever read. I don't like to do bad reviews, particularly for authors that I've enjoyed over time.

But, God, I hated this book. I hated everything about it. I hated the characters. They were just so fucking one-dimensional and stupid. The story almost had a bit of a premise, but then I hated where he took it. I hated the ending. I hated the obvious setup for the series.

I can tell exactly where – I don't even need to read any future books. I can tell you what's going to happen. God, awful. Don't read it. But he's got other good books. I promise. I'm good. I'm good. Okay. So I needed something quick to get that taste out of my mouth, and I found a short story by John Scalzi.

And no, it's not Blue Sky because nothing on there is short. Yeah. Slow Time Between the Stars from the Far Reaches collection. A very good short story by him, actually. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it made me feel better about the world again. Awesome. Awesome. I will check that out.

I was reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Horrible characters. I can tell where it's going from a mile away. I can tell where it's going. Yeah. God, the protagonist was so hollow. Yeah. No, I returned it. I think I got to the point where he crashed his million-dollar car when I was doing the review last time.

Then I went back to it, and I plopped it back on. I'm like, you know, I really don't give a shit about Elon Musk. Why am I doing this to myself? Exactly. So I returned it to Audible and got my credit back, because Audible's awesome that way. And with that credit, I pre-ordered Making It So, a memoir by Patrick Stewart, which comes out- A couple days now.

Next week. Yeah, a couple days. Exciting. So that is a person's story I can get behind. Yes. So, and speaking of, or this is the callback to the shitty Amazon delivery, I ordered 42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams by Douglas Adams and Kevin Johnston.

Davies. This is a hardcover coffee table book that I got, because I love having nice big coffee table books for my coffee table. You know? Go figure. Banged the fuck. You know, I think they used it as a frisbee and hit every corner on the way to my door.

So I have to return it and get another one, because it's like, I'm not going to put that on my coffee table. Right. You know? The problem I've always had with coffee table books, Jason, is I have so many of them, I need more coffee tables. Yeah, me too. I cycle them. I cycle them. Currently on my coffee table is the, not Ars Technica.

What's the travel people? Which one? Lonely Planet? No, the really cool one that has all the crazy, bizarre stuff. I can't remember. There's an app that Fogarty and I were using as we went across the country to find really random stuff.

Either way, I've got their coffee table book out there. It's so good, I can't remember the name of it. And Hamilton that my family gave me for Christmas one year. I know Hamilton is so far out of the zeitgeist anymore, but it's still on the coffee table because someday I'll probably maybe never read it.

I don't know. But I was going to replace Hamilton with 42. So I'm checking out 42. And what it is, is it's a bunch of his papers that were left after he died in his estate. We grabbed them all. The problem with the book, it's neat.

It's a neat book. It's very big. It's very thick. It's very glossy. But it scans of his notebook pages. Douglas Adams has shitty handwriting. So it's, A, do not buy this on Kindle.

This is not a Kindle book. This is all images. So it's going to look really bad on a Kindle. I'm going to dig into it and find out if it's any good. But, you know, I think it's just going to make me sad that he's dead. I think that's the problem with this book.

Because they did do another book that, oh, it was something about a fish. I can't remember the name of the book. But they put another book out after he died of just, you know, the uncompleted short stories and things like that. Oh, yeah. I read that. Yeah, it had half of the upcoming Dirt Gently story, which really pisses me off because I still want to know why there was a half visible cat.

The Salmon of Doubt, that was the name of that book. That was it, yeah. Yeah, that was an interesting book. Also made me sad. So if you're a Douglas Adams fan, you might not want to get this because, A, his handwriting sucks. B, it's probably going to make you sad. And C, it probably will come beat to shit if you get it from Amazon.

Okay, now getting to something I actually did read, I finally finished the first book of Foundation by Isaac Asimov. What a great fucking book. Right? I finally got through it. It only gets better, Jason. The series only gets better. Okay, we need to talk about order here because on the Audible page, there are five Foundation books.

Prelude to Foundation came out later. Okay, so that's that. What about Forward the Foundation? What about it? Yeah, that's like the fourth one or something like that, right? Okay, they're listing that as book two. Oh, okay. So then they're saying Foundation is book three, and that's what I started with.

Then there's Foundation and Empire. Is that technically book two? Oh, God. I'm going to have to actually. Okay, so I read. Because then they're saying book five. Here's the order I read them in. Yes. Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation, and Forward to Foundation.

That's the order I read them in because that's the order he wrote them in. Okay, what about Foundation's Edge? Foundation's Edge, isn't that one of the ones done? He didn't write that. That was one of the continuing ones, right? It says by Isaac Asimov. So, yeah. Oh, that was 82.

Okay, so that was right before Forward, the Foundation. Okay. I would read them. See why I'm confused? Well, there's a Wikipedia page. Puts them in order that he wrote them. That's the way I would read them. Okay. Okay. Well, I finished Foundation, and I love it. They deleted my original one, and it gave me another one, because this one now has a new hyphenated title, Apple Series Tie-In Edition.

The only thing is the cover art and the fact that it's named Foundation. Now that you've read Foundation, does it resemble the show at all? No. Of course it doesn't. Not even close. And it only gets worse.

Harry Seldon is in it for like five paragraphs. And now he's alive again in the TV series. He is. Fighting dragons. Fighting space dragons. No, I was just like, oh my. I mean, that was half of the reason I read it is because everybody's like, oh, it's not that bad.

It's not that different from the books. I'm like, holy shit it is. Yes, it fucking is. It's not even remotely based on the names in the title. That's about it. Yeah, yeah, that's about it. So I'm glad you're reading it, and I'm glad you liked it. It is one of my absolute favorite series, and I think you're going to really enjoy the rest of the books.

Okay, so since I do take our own advice on this show, I am taking a break in between, and I started to read Starter Villain by John Scalzi last night. Okay, let me know how that is. I mean, I'm only like a chapter or two in. When you're done. Yeah, when I'm finished. Like we do.

Yes, exactly. So, but I like Scalzi, so we'll see, you know. Just not on Blue Sky. Not on Blue Sky. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast super host 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 host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Welcome Dave. That is, I, it's just way too many shows.

Yeah. It's way too many shows. I'm just expecting. You're just realizing that now? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's like, I mean, it's like asking who, who's your favorite child is, you know?

Like, I love them all, but they all have their quirks and features and good things and bad things and all that kind of thing. You can't wait for a few of them to go out to college and leave you alone. Yeah. Control Loop got held back a year. You know, every now and then I think about having an empty nest while I will miss the children.

There will be, I'll be able to convert that bedroom into a workshop. So there's an upside to everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start off with a little Ahsoka. Okay. What do you guys think?

We're getting to the end. Yeah. Story finally happening. That's nice. A little bit. Right. Yeah. I'm enjoying it. Yeah. It's good. It's good. I'm not so sure about Space Moses Ezra, but you know, it's. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I liked his, I don't need a lightsaber thing. That was, that was kind of a cool little thing that they did. Right. You know, yeah. I was wondering. The eternal Ewok connection was strong. I was wondering if he, at first, if he had somehow like vowed to not use any weapons at all.

Or if he's going to be a pacifist. Yeah. That one way passed. Yes. That's, that's, that's, those are the words I'm looking for. Yeah. But then in the midst of battle, he was using stormtroopers guns against them. So that, you know. So not that. That doesn't seem to be the case. Right. Not that. But. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. I, I, I'm, I'm very much looking forward to seeing, uh, seeing the last episode and seeing what cliffhanger they, they leave us on. I'm, I'm very curious what the cargo is that Thrawn is loading up. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's, we all had a happy reunion for, for our good guys.

And Sabine seems to have gotten off scot-free with all the lying and bullshit that she did. Yeah. What's up with that? Oh, so, you know, she's cute. The plot requires you. Yeah. You know. Yeah. I do, I, I do have to say a little spoiler alert here.

After the big fight scene and they're talking to Blondie there, who's like left by herself. And she's like, they're like, you know, put down your weapon and all that, but we could help you. And then she pulls a six fingered man from, uh, the princess bride and just turns and bolts. And I'm just like, that was great.

You know, I've got to say though, those two characters are the ones I'm most intrigued about with the whole show. Like I, I can't wait to see what salt and pepper beard fallen Jedi dude's going to do. And I'm really curious about where, where she's going to end up. Like they're the, they're the big mysteries for me on this show. Like I'm very curious about their stories and what's going to happen with them.

Well, I'm definitely interested in what they're going to do in season two, if he's still around because he's dead. Well, they're going to have to recast him. One would assume like there's no option. Right. Uh, Brian, have you seen Star Wars before? Okay.

They're going to have to hologram him. There are lots of options, Brian. There are so many options. None of them could. There's an endless array of options. That does not get in the way of Star Wars characters being in the movies. If I get a vote here, uh, Disney, I know you're listening.

Kathleen Kennedy, uh, please Darren Stevens bewitched this one and just switch, swap out the actor and don't, uh, uncanny valley us, please. Yes. Or, or, or now we, nowadays we can say you can Dumbledore them. Right. There. Well, yes. Well, not anymore.

I, well. So, uh, do we want to touch on speculating what the cargo is? Because I have an idea. Sure. I'd love to hear what you think they are. Uh, it has, uh, caught my attention that the boxes that they are wheeling into the hangar of the Star Destroyer are all coffin shaped and sized.

Yep. I thought that too. Yeah. People sized. Yep. So, what I think is they're bringing bodies from a previous battle that were on the planet. They're bringing them up into the ship and the, the witches are going to reanimate them and we're going to have zombie troopers.

That's my guess. Interesting. Hmm. Yeah. My other thinking was perhaps something cataclysmic happened to the Nightsisters and the planet and these are, these are Nightsisters in some sort of like suspended animation, Han Solo style. Hmm. Okay. That's interesting. Right.

Right. I think they're all, I think they're going to take them to the planet and, uh, unleash the Genesis device and reanimate them. They're all, they're all clones of Kirk's son. Exactly. It's David Marcus. Finally, at long last, it's the Star Wars, Star Trek crossover episode we've all been waiting for and this is it.

And they're going to use that. That's the thing they're going to use, right? There's going to be Spock troopers. This is Spock from every universe. Mm-hmm. Oh, oof. Anyways, we'll find out next week. So, pretty exciting. Yeah.

A couple things. The quick thing I noticed is how much the space whales remind me of Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors. I keep thinking Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and they're going to turn into a bowl of petunias any moment. Yeah. Just the shape of their mouths and it just, it really looks like the big Audrey from the Frank Oz film.

Yeah. They do. Yeah. And the other thing is we're careening towards this, what we know is going to be a cliffhanger. Yes. And I have mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, it's like, oh, it's going to be the last episode. It's going to be great. And the other thing is, oh, then I'm going to have to wait a few years before I find out what happens next.

It may not be. Writer's Strikes is over. So, we may not be. No actors. No actors yet. Yeah. I have one thought, which kind of ties into the internet in general and how the internet ruins things. I did a good job of avoiding spoilers, but I did see, of course, before I saw the episode, even though I watched it the day it came out, all these articles that said something along the lines of, you know, super surprise, old character cameo.

And how disappointing was it for me that it was just C-3PO? You know, but it was nice to get the Princess Leia in there. Yeah, it was cute. I wonder if we'll actually see Princess Leia.

It did strike me that it seemed like C-3PO had like a crick in his back or something. Like, it seemed like he was looking up at the ceiling more than I thought he should have been. Well, Anthony Daniels is in his 70s. He is. He is. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I was kind of meh.

C-3PO has always been one of my least favorite characters in the entire universe. I'm like, oh, okay, great. That shady uncle showed up that I don't like. It was really C-3PO for me was the Han Solo C-3PO interactions that always made it because he had no time for him and it was just hilarious.

Right. Yeah. I agree. I also think that beyond the original three movies, since then, it seems to me like Anthony Daniels has been doing an impersonation of Anthony Daniels doing C-3PO. Yeah.

There's something about it that doesn't seem, and I suppose it could be just that he's so much older, so he's trying to affect a younger sound than what was just his natural sound back then to match what he used to do, but there's something about it that's always been a little off to me in the recent things.

Like, it just seems forced, but that's a nitpick. Maybe they're using AI like they did with James Earl Jones now. Could be. Could be. I know there's somebody, I forget who it is. There's somebody who did C-3PO for some of the video games who does a dead-on C-3PO.

Like, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that it wasn't Anthony Daniels. Right. And my understanding is that they have used that person as leverage against Anthony Daniels. Anthony Daniels gets a little full of himself.

It's a little uppity. Yeah. But, yeah, but that's just, you know, rumors I've heard from some of my folks in the biz. It could be nothing to it. What will they do when they lose R2-D2's voice? Oh, dear. Right. Right. Okay, so, moving on.

I did get my Apple Watch Ultra 2 this week. This is an interesting watch. Yeah. It's much bigger than, well, not much bigger. It's 5 millimeters bigger. It's a 49 millimeter face compared to the 44 that I had on my Series 5.

I'm using the blue squishy band that it came with with the little loops on it. All in all, it's heavier. But when I put it on, I can't tell I'm wearing a watch. It is so well-balanced and the band is so comfortable, I forget I'm wearing a watch.

It is totally backwards to what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be this big clunky thing. It is not. Are you sure it's not because your body is so strained from your climb up the mountaintops and your deep diving that the watch is made for? Yeah, Brian, go fuck yourself.

Yeah. It's powered by your disdain for nice things. That's what it's powered by. I've had it on for four hours so far. It's 9.13 in the morning. I put it on at 5 a.m. I have 3,000 steps and the battery is at 100%.

Oh, there you go. That's pretty good. That's all that matters to me. I don't care. I do like the bigger face because you can put more crap on it. All in all, and it's got the nice little action button on the side, which I just have keyed to outdoor workout.

So I just press that once instead of trying to swipe through because I do use the outdoor walk open goal a couple times a day. So that's actually kind of nice. All in all, it's a great watch. So I think it's definitely an upgrade. And, like, you know, you were concerned about the size because you only had the 40 millimeter before.

I swear I can't tell that this thing's on. Yeah. So I did go to my local Apple store and tried one on because I was curious. And like you, my expectations were that this thing was going to be huge and clunky and I would feel it on my wrist and it would be heavy.

And even in the couple minutes that I had it on in the Apple store, it was none of those things. It was lighter and way better than my expectations. So, yeah, there may be one in my future. Maybe I'll put that on the list for Santa Claus and see if maybe I get one in my Christmas stocking.

My battery life has gotten a little bit better since the update. I went through, I restarted the watch and made sure that it wasn't running anything, that it wasn't supposed to be running. And so these days I'm getting to about nine o'clock at night before it hits me with a 10% warning.

So it does get me through the day where before initially I was getting to about seven o'clock at night when it would hit me with a 10% warning and that was no good. But writing's on the wall for this Apple watch. You got me, Apple.

Congratulations. You got me to upgrade and my perfectly good watch doesn't make it through the day anymore. Just wind it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I stumbled upon a feature recently that just through my own ignorance I did not know was there that is wonderful.

I was listening to a Bluetooth speaker. I was doing some little, I was actually assembling a piece of furniture out on my deck recently and I had a Bluetooth speaker that was playing a podcast. And I needed to adjust the volume and I was like, what happens if I turn the knob on my watch?

And wouldn't you know it, the little turning knob on your watch adjusts the volume of whatever you're playing on your phone through the Bluetooth speaker. Yes. How many years have you had that? Just figured that out. You know, you can't rush these things. I have almost blown out my entire family's eardrums when my son was playing with my watch as we were listening to music once.

That's one way to discover it. Yeah. And after I discovered it, I kind of smacked myself in the forehead because it is the most obvious function of connectivity that you would expect. Well, yeah, a volume knob. Imagine that. It's a digital crown, guys.

Digital crown. Digital crown. I stand corrected. That's right. But it really works and it works well. And so, you know, I go forward now knowing that that exists and I didn't know it before. And shame on me for not digging into it sooner.

But it was one of those happy little delights when you stumble across a feature that you didn't know was there that just makes your life a little easier. Yeah, the one that I discovered almost on accident was that you can just cover the watch when a timer is going off to shut it up.

I kept trying to do Siri commands and everything to shut it up. But if you just cover it with your hand real quick or your forearm, anything to cover the front of it will turn off the timer. But soon we will have the two-finger tap to do it. But for now, you can just cover the watch with your free arm to turn off the timer and shut it up, which is great.

Okay. See, I didn't know that one either. That's good. That's a good one. Yeah. So do we dare ask our listeners to send in their favorite little-known Apple Watch tips for us? By all means. Why not? Yes. By all means. There's probably a bunch of stuff in there that I – well, this conversation proves there's a bunch of stuff in there that we don't know about.

Yeah. Because there's no manual anymore. No manual. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there you go. So I had an interesting story that I found that I was reading through. I don't know if you have these where you are, Dave. And I'm not sure if you have them in the part of L.A. that you're in, Jason.

But these things were running around Santa Monica and Venice before I left years ago already. The little food delivery robots that kind of trundle down the street and, you know, will deliver toothpaste and condoms and hamburgers and all that sort of stuff. Porn.

Yeah. So footage captured by a food delivery robot in Los Angeles was used to arrest and convict two people after a failed attempt to steal it off the street earlier this year, according to 404 Media. Now, that makes sense. Now, idiots trying to steal the robot. So, yes, of course, we're going to use that footage that's in the robot there.

Serve Robotics, which works with Uber Eats for last mile deliveries in the area, shared video of the incident with the Los Angeles Police Department. Now, both proactively and after a subpoena. Now, I have questions about that sentence. Yeah. What level of video was shared proactively and then what level of video required the subpoena to get to?

So they don't really explain that. The other thing I have a question about is serve previously met with the LAPD to open a line of communication between the two ahead of any potential troubles. Now, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised because humanity and society has devolved so much that people beat the shit out of these robots all the time.

Right. So I guess that kind of makes sense. But, yeah. So then Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashini boasted about the resulting convictions on social media, tweeting, some genius once tried to steal one of our robots. It didn't end well for them. Then he got a lot of shit on social media because everybody was kind of like, what the hell are you doing with this video?

Privacy, et cetera. We don't consent to being recorded by these robots all the time. So he followed up with a softer stance, attempting to explain how the company balances its approach to involving law enforcement with its responsibility to the public and fostering trust. So they say the company's principles, and this is one of those key phrases, the company's principles doesn't mean shit at all.

Yeah. According to Kashani, include not using robots for surveillance or other purposes that violate the public's sense of privacy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, this is a really interesting case that is actually going viral in a way that they probably did not intend because all of a sudden people are like, huh, these robots are recording all of us as we walk around.

That's not cool. They've been deputized. But the thing is they're on a public street, which you can record anybody on as you want anyway. I mean there's no law that's being broken here by them recording you and passing it off to the cops.

There's literally no law that's being broken. You're on a public street. It is a thing that is rolling at you. I mean I have been known to kick a few of them in my time when I was in Santa Monica. So, you know, oops. But I don't see that this is actually a problem.

Now, if they're putting license plate readers on them and using them to issue tickets, I might be a little peeved. But, you know. But there's nothing against the law. Right. To your argument, Jason. I know. I said I would be peeved, but I wouldn't be surprised.

But I think that's the whole point of this is maybe we should have some sort of laws about this at this point if these things are going to be rolling around and recording everything all the time. Because there's a difference between saying you're walking down the street and everybody has a phone and you have no expectation of privacy versus there's a fleet of fucking robots going up and down the fucking city recording everything by a private company.

And we have no idea what they're doing with any of this stuff. But we do know they've met with the police to open up a line of communication, whatever the fuck that means. Right. Because, well, you know, they have to make deals with the city to let these things on the street. So I'm sure they have to make concessions here and there.

You know, I mean, and before the robots, you'd have to have influencers walking up and down the street videotaping everything. But they aren't an armed army of them that are all collecting all the video in one central place by one central company. Yeah, they are Instagram. Oh, that's true.

Instagram. Come on. It is Santa Monica and Venice. There are influencers on every corner. And if they're not on every corner, they're cooking around on their bird scooters. There's no sense of privacy. Okay, go ahead. Well, when I saw this story initially, I guess earlier this week, I was thinking it reminded me the degree to which we are in a post-privacy world.

Yep. When it comes to being in a public place. The only places where you can be sure that no one is videotaping you anymore is inside your house. With the blinds closed. If you have your windows drawn. Yes. It's all of your electronics in another room.

We've discussed the ring camera across the street issue before, which goes directly into people's homes unless they close their blinds. Yeah. Right. Exactly. I think about my house is in a little court with a, I don't know, a dozen or so homes. And I would say at least a third of them have ring cameras on their front doors, including me now.

I don't have the ring version. I have the, as we've talked about, I have the Eufy version. But that's just in my neighborhood. And every store has a security camera. Every, you know, now we've got light poles with security cameras. I mean, they're just everywhere.

So, but what that brings me to is this thing that Ben Yellenite and I have talked about a lot on caveat, which is kind of to your point, Jason, about whether or not this is legal. Is the need for some kind of recalibration when it comes to surveillance.

The physical requirements of surveillance used to be a self-limiting factor. It costs money to have a couple of undercover police officers sitting in a car across the street watching you day and night.

Now you can stick a camera on a pole across the street from your house that sees over the fence and just monitor it 24-7 and have AI looking for motion and doing facial recognition and all those kinds of things.

And getting back to the story that we talked about with the New York Police Department using drones and flying them over properties. Right, right. So, the laws were written at a time when there were self-limiting factors that no longer exist.

So, is it time to take a fresh look at these given the new reality and the reality that's only headed in one direction? I think so. Yeah, I think so too. Okay.

But it's not going to happen anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I suppose part of it too is just to what degree does the next generation care? That's a good point considering they're recording themselves everywhere all the time anyways and putting it out there. So, they don't seem to. They just want editing rights.

That's all. They just want to make sure they have your good side. Yeah, and they want to think that they're going to become, you know, influencers and make gazillions of dollars, even though they're not going to. Yeah. This leads me to something else I wanted to just quickly touch on here as I was going through some stuff on Mastodon, just kind of going through the feed, right?

And my feed, not surprisingly, is heavily populated with cybersecurity stuff. So, that means there's always breaking news and new breaches and new ransomware and new attacks and all this kind of stuff. And this is the life I've chosen. But what I find is this tension between two parts of my brain, the one part that goes, ooh, that is clever.

Oh, that is so cool. And the other part of me is just going, fuck. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel doing this podcast, too. Fuck again. Yeah. You know, like, it just doesn't stop every day.

There's more and more. Yeah. I mean, that's what we talked about when we were doing security at the very beginning. We all got breach fatigue. That's why we talk about Star Wars now. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I got a phishing call yesterday that was just so stupid.

I almost feel like I need to share it a little bit because it's just normally I just like it. I don't answer the phone or I just hang up immediately. But this one, I was just, it was one of those ones where I'm a contractor in your area. And I was getting ready to hang up.

And then I went, hold on a second. What area is that that I'm in? And the guy was like, well, the one that you just. Moved to, of course. And I said, well, which specifically? What's the name of the city I'm in? He's like, do you really want me to tell you that?

And I'm like, yes. Yes, I do. If you would like me to hire you as a contractor, I would like you to tell me what city I live in. And at that point, I hung up. But I'm just like, why are these people out there? What are they doing? Who is responding to this stuff? And then I just cried and went to sleep.

Yeah. Enough people to keep them in business. Yeah. Right. At some level, I guess it works. It's sad. Yes, it is. So I need a little advice from the two of you, a little guidance here. Next week, I am going to be out of the office.

I'm giving a talk in Bismarck, North Dakota. I have been invited up to CyberCon in North Dakota. Evidently, the guy who runs this conference has been listening to the Cyber Wire for a while and asked me if I'd be willing to come and do a keynote for their talk.

And I was flattered. And I said, absolutely. I will admit that part of the reason I'm going is that I can't imagine any other opportunity in my life to go to North Dakota. And so I'm curious to find out what North Dakota is like.

My understanding is that Bismarck is very nice. It's a charming, smaller city, lots of good food, lots of nice people. So I'm looking forward to all of that. What I'm trying to figure out as I'm putting my talk together, and I probably am about halfway through, is what are the insights that I have to share from my unique perspective in the cybersecurity

industry as an observer, not a practitioner, as someone who has done over 5,000 interviews with people. And by the way, the title of my talk is 5,000 interviews. What would the people in the audience be interested in knowing from me that they're not going to hear from everyone else who's coming from a practitioner's point of view?

And I was wondering if you all had any insights. If you were sitting in that audience, what were the unique things that I might be able to provide you with that other people might not, if anything? I would say the stories that make you go, fuck. Yeah, I was going to say, I have two thoughts on that.

First is you should 100% lead with the only reason I did this conference is because I could not think of any other possible reason I would ever end up in Bismarck, North Dakota. Yeah. That's a really strong opening. To the audience, yeah. I have a version of that joke that I am actually planning on starting with, which is I'm going to say, this is my first time in North Dakota.

I bet you all get that a lot. And the crowd went quiet. Right. We'll see how it lands. I really, I'll feel them out first. I don't know, but. I think one of the things that you can bring in it, and it certainly ties in with the 5,000 interviews is I'm certain like, you know, when people do these sorts of things, they like to talk about their expertise in their particular area and like one or two like amazing stories.

I think you need to impart kind of just what you said, even though it is a bit of a downer, just how exhausting this is, how many of these scams are running constantly, how it never ends, how horrible most human beings are that there's just so much of this.

It's almost unbelievable and it's exhausting. Right. And that everyone in that audience is exhausted. Right, right. We're all exhausted. We're tired. The weight of the world has crushed our spirit. Thank you.

Good night. That'll do. That'll do. Right. That'll do, pig. But I think that is something that, you know, I don't think a lot of people touch on is just how much of this there is and how it's just constant. How almost every phone call now that we get is somebody trying to scam us in some way, shape or form.

It's almost unbelievable. Yeah. So if it goes well, I'll wrap up and say, thank you very much. Once again, I'm Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. If it goes well, if it goes poorly, I'll say, thank you very much. By the way, my name is Jason DeFilippo. Check out grumpy old geeks.

That's right. Grumpy old geeks. That's right. Well, no matter how it goes, Dave, come back in two weeks to report, please. Yeah, we'll talk about our two vacations, you in Bismarck and me in London. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be great. I am truly looking forward to the trip.

I'm sure the food is going to be phenomenal. I mean, it's got to be, right? Yeah. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Jen. Welcome, Jen. Thank you, Jen. Over at PayPal, we've got Charlie, Simon and Beef Barron's with a big $50 donation.

Ooh, thank you, Beef Barron's. Over at the tip jar, we've got Daryl, Josh, Adam, and Nick. And we've got a couple new one-time tippers, Marcel and Kevin. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much. No reviews this week. And in sad news, Michael Gambon, who portrayed Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, well, the second Dumbledore after the first one passed away, has passed away at 82.

Decorated Irish actor. He was in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, King's Speech. My God, he's been in almost everything. He's won four BAFTAs, three Oliver Awards, two Screen Actor Guild Awards, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama. He was widely recognized as one of Ireland's all-time great actors.

So, sad to see him gone. And he had a corner named after him in Top Gear. Did not know that. Don't remember? Coming around Gambon. Oh, that's right? Okay. Yeah. There we go. Named after him after he spun out there when he was on his thing. Yeah. And guess who's not running for re-election this time?

Well, nose broke this morning. I mean, you never want to say anything ill towards those who passed away, especially trailblazers and people that did so many important things in their youth. But Jesus fucking Christ, you should have retired 10 years ago. My daughter, Dianne Feinstein, has died at age 90.

Yes. Thank you for everything you did. Thank you. And you should have stopped earlier. Thank you. Take note, everybody else in government. Yes. You do not need to be that old trying to make laws and running the things. And anyways. Here's the tip. If you need to print your emails, then you're too old to be in office.

Get the fuck out. I tend to agree with that. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And on that happy note, I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 620. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment and share the show with your friends because it's free.

At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Or you can head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about, or your tips on an Apple Watch that we didn't know about. GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air.

Stay grumpy. Good evening, Bismarck.

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