635: Optical Vortex

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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 DeFilippo.

Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. You alright again, Brian? No. No. I mean, yes, I'm good. This is the second week in a row you've brought us in with a sigh, so I'm worried about you. At the beginning of the week, I went for my cancer checkups.

CT scan, blood work, and all that sort of stuff. So, results have come back in. Cancer-free still. Alright. But I've been feeling, you know, I was sick last week. I was a little down. Cough has not gone away. Guess what the CT scan uncovered? What? I have pneumonia.

Oh, no. So, good times. I mean, it's not that big of a deal. Antibiotics for a while. I don't feel bad, so it's mild at best. So, I just don't want it to get worse. But, yeah, got to go back to the doctor, get the antibiotics, be on that for, what, 10 days or something like that.

Like everything else, I blame Canada. Me too. It's too damn cold here. Come on back, Brian. We miss you. Alright. No amonias there. Alright. We got a little follow-up here. And this one comes from Jason. Not to Jason. To both of us.

I don't like much of Elon's political lunacy any more than you guys. However, you are talking out of your ass again regarding the brain implants. This is scientific research that should be taken seriously. Per a recent BBC article I read online, quote, Among the other companies to make similar advances in the field is the EPFL in Switzerland, which has successfully enabled a paralyzed man to walk just by thinking.

That was achieved by putting electronic implants on his brain and spine, which wirelessly communicate thoughts to his legs and feet. Now, let me clarify for a second here, Jason. I am fully, fully behind any kind of scientific advancement for the human race whatsoever.

Put it in my brain if it works. What I am against is the man-child running the company that does it. I don't trust Elon, the drug addict, to run a company that puts shit in people's brains. Because a leader, you know, or an organization is led from the top down.

So if you have a crazed fucking drug addict running the company, who knows what you're going to get at the bottom. So that's my only complaint about Neuralink and Elon Musk. And, oh, and the fact that they killed all those damn monkeys and lied about it. That was a problem, too. Well, yeah, that's the problem. When this email came in, I was thinking to myself, now, hold on a second.

People take from what we say what they want, and they seem to cherry pick it. Because I do remember saying immediately afterwards that I want this kind of stuff to succeed. I want it to. I want the research to continue in a very good way, in a very transparent way that doesn't kill a bunch of monkeys and then you lie about it, et cetera, et cetera.

And also, I believe I said, I'm assuming and, of course, hoping that the Neuralink transplant was to somebody who basically we were at the last resort. Something like that. So, okay, fine. Again, to the very line from the email, and you and I 100% agree on this, this is scientific research that should be taken seriously.

Yes. Elon Musk cannot take anything seriously. Exactly. That's why he should not be doing it. Yes. Yes. That's it. That's all. Yes. And, by the way, it's not the killing of the monkeys that I have the problem with. It's the lying about it. It's the lying about it. Covering it up.

Yes. Because why are you covering it up? Because research has its risks, and we know animal testing is required for some of this stuff. That's just the price of admission. It's terrible, but that's why we have what we have today, you know? Just why are you lying about it? Because there's some shady shit going on.

That's why. So that's why I don't trust Neuralink, and I don't trust Elon. So there. Now, as somebody who has brain damage from a stroke, keep – other people, keep making shit, because I'm going to need it sooner than later. Right. Now, speaking of brain damage, let's move on to Chris Dixon's new book, Read, Write, and Own.

You touched on last week with your pivot interview that you talked about. I went back and I listened to it, and yeah, that was a shit show. He has really nothing to back up what he says. But – so Molly White, who we adore, did a book review on Read, Write, and Own, and it was a very, very long review.

So I took the entire review, and because we live in a world of technology now, I threw it into chat GPT, and I just asked, does Molly like this book? Here's what we got back. Molly White expresses significant skepticism and criticism towards Chris Dixon's book.

She highlights inconsistencies, contradictions, and lack of critical engagement with blockchain technology's limitations. Molly points out the irony in Dixon declaring RSS dead despite its widespread use, including on his own website. He criticizes Dixon for failing to acknowledge his firm's role in the tech industry's current state, which is a shit show.

The absence of successful blockchain examples and the superficial treatment of alternative technologies further contribute to the reviewer's critical stance. Additionally, it keeps going on, but basically she says it's a shit book from a shit guy. So there you go. Yeah. I mean, you didn't – all you had to do was listen to like five minutes of that segment on Pivot, and yeah, you would know that this guy's full of crap.

Mm-hmm. Now, it gets better because it made the New York Times bestseller list. Well, that's a low bar these days. It is a low bar these days. That's actually – the numbers are pretty high because everybody knows how to game the system now. Right. So there's a great article over advice on how tech firms make these crypto books top sellers.

And, you know, they game the list. They buy a ton of their own books to give to their employees as gifts. They buy print ads in major newspapers, get on podcasts like Pivot and Hard Fork. And they just basically do all these deals with pre-orders and things like that.

They basically just game the system to the point of half the time they buy their own damn books to get on the system. That's what they give them as quote-unquote gifts. But they also run competitions with other entrepreneurs and people in their – since they're investors, they get all of their little companies underneath them that they've invested in to buy copies to give to their staff as well.

It is an entire game. And I love what she says here. Perhaps he should have released the book on the blockchain because he says himself, user evangelists are more authentic and effective than corporate marketing programs run by hired teams. Well, turns out that's not true either.

Nope. Sorry, Chris. And again, from what I remember from his discussion, every single application he could even possibly think of on the blockchain was just a way to get enough attention for it to go into traditional distribution methods. There you go. That's it. In the news.

Pink slips keep on coming, Jason. Oh, yes, they do. Yep. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, is laying off 10% of its workforce according to an SEC filing and confirmed by a company spokesperson. The company has reported a total number of 5,367 employees at the end of 2023's third quarter, so the layoff should impact around 540 people.

Not insignificant again. No, but there's going to be some apartments opening up in Santa Monica. If you want to move back. I don't want to be in an apartment anymore. Oh, he's spoiled. Well, come to the valley. It's great here. So, here's the line of corporate bullshit I like to include these these days.

The layoffs would best position our business to execute our highest priorities and ensure it has the capacity to invest incrementally over time. The layoffs were necessary to reduce hierarchy and promote in-person collaboration. None of those sentences – here's a gadget's little quote there.

None of these sentences really mean anything. So, let's just go with corporate restructuring. There you go. Yeah, but I like this – reduce hierarchy and promote in-person collaboration, meaning they're firing people who work from home. Yeah, that's exactly what that bit meant.

So, you're going to see a lot more of that coming, I think. Microsoft is doing some gaming layoffs, including 86 jobs at Skylander Studio Toys for Bob. And let's see, 86 there and a bunch more at some other gaming companies.

Now, this has got the FTC's attention because they approved this merger where they said, we're going to do right by Activision Blizzard and all that sort of stuff. And now the FTC is going, hold on a second. Now, you got them and you're firing them all?

Mm-hmm. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of what happens. Yeah. But the thing is that they – this is a crazy thing. In California, you have to basically tell people that they're going to get laid off months in advance. Oh, yes. You have to like – you have to file with the state. Yes. Yeah.

Which is nuts. Which is why I don't know if I ever want to have a company that has employees in California. Jesus, that's a – Well, I mean I love California, but there is a reason that people who – when they start businesses get the hell out. Get the hell out. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I just saw this one this morning.

Grammarly is laying off 230 employees as a part of – wait for it – business restructuring. They're Grammarly. You think they could have come up with a better phrase. Seriously. Come on. You've got all the words. Yeah. And apparently they have all the monies too.

They're just looking at their organizational design and current skill sets and they're just going to be moving people around like out of the building. Yeah. Here's the thing. Grammarly is one of those companies that I gladly pay for. I love that company. So I hope that there's no shenanigans going on behind the scenes that's going to screw that company because Grammarly, their integration into my system is flawless.

I love it and I don't want them to go away. They make me sound smarter all day long. There you go. Well, Warner Music Group is also doing layoffs. They plan to lay off about 600 staffers in an effort to free up more money for music investment across the next decade.

The majority of impacted staffers, which represent 10% of the company, which I thought Warner was bigger than that, but I guess not, will be at the company's owned and operated media properties, corporate and various support functions, as well as in-house ad sales function. So a bunch of things that probably shouldn't have been involved in a record company anyways.

Yeah. Most things shouldn't be involved in a record company. Just saying. So, yeah, Warner Brothers is losing a bunch of people. And related to all of that, I saw this article. I can't believe I was actually looking at USA Today. I think a friend of the show, Mike, actually sent this to me because he loves USA Today.

This is a graphic that shows how Americans' total credit card debt reached record highs. So we had that brief period during the pandemic when everybody kind of stopped spending money and savings and all that was good and getting bolstered. That's all gone now. Credit card debt has rose to a record $1.13 trillion at the end of last year.

Credit card balances increased by about $50 billion, or 4.6%, in the fourth quarter of 2023. Credit card delinquencies, the amount of time in which cardholders fall behind in making payments, has also increased. The percentage of card delinquencies, 90 days or more, rose to 6.4% from 4% in the fourth quarter of 2022.

So, yeah, we have spent all that money we saved, and now we're spending the money we don't have again. Yep, yep. I can tell you that's true for me. So out of that $50 billion, I'm sure a couple of that's mine. Yes, and cast your minds back to the great resignation and what we said at that time.

Do not do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it because all we've been doing is reading off pink slip notices and talking about how we're all in debt and losing money again. Four months now we've been doing that. It's getting kind of depressing. I'm starting to get pink fatigue.

Just Barbie. Yeah, that's true. Amazon is going to be doing okay, though, because they're going to start charging you for IPv4 addresses a lot more. I mean, they were charging before for static IPs.

But now they're trying to get people to move to IPv6, but I think it probably behooves them that they don't get people to move to IPv6. Because they're looking at making about a billion dollars a year, a billion with a B, for renting out IPv4 addresses. At, wait for it, half a cent per IP per hour for all of their addresses.

Okay. That's nuts. That's about $43.80 a year. Per address, yeah. Yeah, since they have 132 million addresses, which is nuts. One company has, you know how hard it was for me to get a Class C back in the day?

Yep. Jesus, it was so much paperwork. Oh, God, it was such a pain. And these guys have 132 million of them? It's good to be Amazon. It really is. It really is. It's good to be Google, too, because Google has finally killed off the bard. It is now called Google Gemini.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And now we have three flavors of Google Gemini. We've got Nano, Pro, and Ultra. You tell me the difference at a glance. I couldn't. Here's the surprising bit. There's no Plus. No, no. I was waiting for- Stayed away from Plus, yeah.

Yeah. Gemini Plus. The thing is now, if you want Nano and Pro, I guess you can get for free. But if you want Ultra or Gemini, see the whole thing, this is the crazy part. You have to get Gemini Advanced to get Ultra.

And that's $20 a month, but it's free for the first two months. I need my AI to tell me which AI I should get. Right. And you have to get a Google One AI premium plan to get Ultra and Advanced. And Jesus, I am baffled with bullshit.

You certainly don't make it easy. Yeah. No. And here's the other thing. So when you get the Google One subscription, they also give you more storage for photos and Gmail and Drive. Because it's like, because yeah, why not? I don't know about you. I was paying for an extra two terabytes of space on my Google account.

And then last month, I think I talked about this, like I had to delete all my photos. Because what they did was they screwed up with allocating. I paid for it, but they didn't allocate it to my account. This happened to other people I know, too, who were paying for it. And I did all the stuff.

I deleted it. And then they charged me again. And I'm like, what the hell? So I just canceled it. And then they gave me a refund on the unused portion of it. Pro-rated over time. There is something going on over there where they just – apparently the AI has taken over because Bard is running the billing. I don't know what's happening over there.

I've always had a bad feeling about Google. I've never really gotten involved in their infrastructures. I've avoided as much of Google as I can. Obviously, everybody has a Gmail address. I have a backup address that's a Gmail. I've tried to never give them money because they just seem to kill programs that actually work.

And they keep the programs that don't. They're just a mess. They're just a big, god-awful mess. With zero customer service. Yeah, zero. With no customer service either. So I avoid Google like the plague. Yeah. Yeah, I would never host a website there.

Seriously. Because I've never known anybody that's had a good experience trying to host on their infrastructure. Yeah. It's always been a shit show. It's god-awful. Yeah. AWS is still hands down. Like my kid's school uses Google's school kit or home kit or I can't even remember what it's called.

Logging into that thing is a goddamn nightmare. Like it's impossible. And this is just supposed to be for parents and teachers. Most of the teachers give up using it like within two weeks of every school year. Yeah. I'm tempted to kill my business account there because I was grandfathered in for 10 years and, you know, I am no longer grandfathered in.

And now it's costing me 45 bucks a month for like six email addresses. Yeah, fuck that. And it's like, yeah, it's just inertia that I don't want to change. I don't want to have to go move the DNS. I don't want to have to worry about losing mail here and there. And, you know, I've got people on there that are about as technically savvy as a slug.

So trying to get them to move that, you know, figure out how their email is going to work and they live across the country. It's like, oh. Well, I got to say, I have this as a shout out for later in the show or at the end of the show, but I'll do it now. Shout out to Anthony at notehost.ca slash hey.cafe. That's where I've been posting my personal email for ages now.

And except for the fact that he's trying to restructure a bunch of things and I have to move something soon. It has been great. Yeah. Wait till you have to move. I know. I know. I did that last week. It's not fun. Give me the sheet. Yeah. No. But as far as my email goes, it's been great.

So I didn't know that. Yeah, I should. I should move my email over there. Yeah, you should. It's easy. Yeah, and Anthony, if you decide to move your infrastructure, again, I'm coming to Canada and finding you. Yeah, or we'll just buy out the one server. Don't touch it. Yeah, don't touch it. Leave ours alone.

So getting back to Google and Gemini. Now, of course, this is going to happen. In their privacy policy, they tell you that Gemini is going to retain your AI conversations for three years by default.

Okay. So you have to go in and, you know, flip that switch manually if you don't want it to actually, you know, save them. It says they will save them still for 72 hours to, quote, maintain the safety and security of Gemini apps and improve Gemini apps.

Right. And they also say that regularly human annotators routinely read and label and process conversations. So they say that the conversations are, quote, unquote, disconnected from the Google accounts. Sure they are. Yeah, we've heard that before from you guys.

We've also heard that you stop tracking and incognito mode is not. And, yeah. So caveat emptor on Gemini. Or, again, just don't use Google stuff if you can avoid it. Yeah. Yeah. You can throw a rock and hit an AI company nowadays.

So go for it. Not to say that any of those are any better. None of them are. It's the exact same thing. I'll wait for apples. Yeah. Or just write it yourself like we used to do. Oh, wait, I sound like an old curmudgeon now. Oh, God.

Quit spray painting that graffiti on my lawn. You misspelled something. Get the AI to do it. Back to one more AI story for me here. GitHub. This is one of those things that drives me crazy. The headline is, AI tools like GitHub Copilot are rewiring coders' brains.

Yours may be next. Not once in this fucking article do they mention your brain being rewired. It's because we wouldn't know. We don't know any of that stuff. That is what we need Neuralink for. Yeah. Coding rewires coders' brains. That's what does that.

So does reading or eating or watching TV. Our brains are constantly rewiring themselves. Yes. It's called neuroplasticity. People read all about it. Yeah. But not those stupid companies that claim to increase it. Yeah. So it says in here, GitHub research in collaboration with MIT shows that Copilot allowed coders faced with relatively simple tasks to complete their work, on average, 55% more quickly.

By the way, I think half of this article is written by AI because it is really hard. If you read the whole thing, it's kind of a fuster cluck. This increase in productivity suggests that companies could get the same work done with fewer programmers, but companies could use those savings to spend more on labor in other projects.

My argument here is, why don't you get more coders? Because if you're going to save money, you can get more coders to do more stuff. Forget the other projects. You know, building is always underfunded, you know. So save the money on middle management.

Get more programmers in there. And they say there are other potential side effects of tools like GitHub Copilot besides job displacement. For example, increased reliance on automation might lead to more errors creeping into code. But I would say, forget might, will lead to more errors.

One recent study claimed to find evidence of such a trend. Although they say it reported only a general increase in mistakes since Copilot was introduced, not direct evidence that the AI helper was causing an increase in errors. While this is true, it seems fair to worry that less experienced coders might miss errors when relying on AI to help, or that overall quality of code might decrease thanks to autocompletes.

Duh. Duh. Of course. Yes. This is called the substack effect. This has been around for ages. You Google the problem. You find the result from the forum. And everybody grabs the same damn code, which probably had an error in it in the first place.

And we all plugged it in. That's what we all did. Yep. And I can tell you there was one flaw that got me when I was a junior programmer. I grabbed a piece of code to do a mail to thing, just to, you know, shoot off an email. And it had no scrubbing of input data whatsoever.

Oopsies. And it snuck into JPEG magazine's code base. And this is when OpenDNS was next door to us. They were just starting too. And they're like, guys, you guys are sending about 4 million emails an hour.

Do you have any idea why? We're like, no. And then we all looked at the code. And we're like, no, it looks fine. It's fine. And their guy came over and looked at it and goes, you guys are fucking idiots. I'm like, but I got it from substack. It was okay. Or not substack. Oh, no.

I said substack. You said substack. It was, what was it? Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow. There we go. Yeah. Yeah, I got it from Stack Overflow. And, yeah, it was horrible. And then guess what I learned to do that day? Input scrubbing for everything. And I became a better programmer for it.

I learned security. So, yeah. So, yeah, this is going to keep happening. Now, the real fun part is going to be when these things, like we talked about with ChatGPT and OpenAI's GPT models, they're basically, you know, getting all of this information from the internet.

And you can't tell what's written by the AI and what's not written by the AI. And it just keeps sucking itself back in. And you get an Ouroboros effect. And, yeah, everything just turns to shit. And we just turned to mutant jelly machines who can't find their shoelaces. It's going to be great. Let's just get to the end game already.

I'm tired. Okay. Speaking of jelly machines, what do you got next? I got some AI stories. Two companies based in Texas have been linked to a spate of robocalls that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden. The audio deepfake was used to urge New Hampshire voters not to participate in the state's presidential primary.

As many as 25,000 of these calls were made to residents of the state in January. They have issued a cease and desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws. We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we're taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom, and other individuals or entities.

So they were using tools from the AI voice cloning company Eleven Labs, which we play around with ourselves. Which everybody uses. Yes, and everybody uses. Because they have no guardrails, by the way. That's why. But they banned the user responsible, Jason. See, that's it. That's all they're doing. No, but the company says it is dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools and that it takes any incidents of misuse extremely seriously.

Bullshit. No, I'm sure they take it seriously. They just don't do fucking shit about it. No, you can clone anybody's voice. Yeah, there's no guardrails at all. Not like the ones that are built into the more commercially viable AIs and even image generators and all that, all of which have guardrails.

And Eleven Labs just got a shit ton of funding, too. Yep. But, yeah, no, you can put anybody's voice in there. All you have to do is check a box. It's like going to Pornhub, you know, as a 12-year-old and saying, yes, I'm an adult. Yeah. That's it. They have gone back to the 1990s level of security when it comes to this stuff.

And just to say that they are dedicated to preventing misuse of audio AI tools is a flat-out bald-faced lie. Of course it is. It's a lie. Yeah. You're starting to get that outrage that I get every now and then when I actually start to care a little bit. Oh, I don't care. I'm just saying that they're full of shit.

Of course. They're flat-out lying. Yeah. So, there you go. But the FCC is not taking this lying down, Jason. Oh, no. Immediately on Thursday, they outlawed robocalls that contain voices generated by artificial intelligence. We talked about this last week because they were considering it and we went, well, how are you going to do that when you can't even outlaw regular robocalls?

And they can't. Yeah. But they're illegal now, Jason. They're illegal. Okay. They will face steep fines maxing out at more than $23,000 per call, which is actually financially like if you get caught doing this and you don't pick up and leave town immediately, you're going to be in for a lot of money.

The law will also give recipients the right to take legal action and potentially recover up to $1,500 in damages for each unwanted call. Okay. Good luck at that. You'd be rich if I went after every single person that robocalled me. Well, no. You'd be rich if you could actually figure out how to get a Pakistan company sued in the United States and get any money out of them whatsoever.

Yeah. Yes. So, no. I forgot to put this in the show notes. There was a great article on 404 this week about a company in Pakistan who was basically creating fake credentials. They were a credential mill. They had, you know, university – they were just spinning up universities, making fake accreditation websites, the whole nine yards.

It's an insane story. I'll find it and throw it in the notes. But basically, like, there was no repercussions for anything that they did. I mean, people were getting fake pilot's licenses. Pilot's licenses. Have we not learned anything since September 11th? Apparently not.

Apparently not. They said they drew the line at medical licenses, which I'd call bullshit on too. Yeah, I doubt it. Back to the AI thing. Meta plans to ramp up labeling of AI-generated images across its platform, Facebook, Instagram, and threads, to help it make clear that the visuals are artificial.

It's part of a broader push to tamp down misinformation and disinformation, which is significant as we wrangle with the ramifications of generative AI in a major election year in the U.S. and other countries. According to our good old friend, Nick Clegg, the company has been working with partners from across the industry to develop standards that include signifiers that an image, video, or audio clip has been generated using AI.

Of course, that only works for the tools that agree to put those in, many of which do not. So they say they're working on tools that will be able to detect invisible signals, namely AI-generated information that aligns with the C2PA and IPTC technical standards.

Again, you can take that out if you're using your own open source versions of stuff. So there you go. So what are they going to do about that? Well, they're going to rely on people, people reporting it. And we all know how well reporting anything to Meta goes. Yeah. It goes into the big black hole called fuck off. Yep.

So we have Meta saying that they're going to do that. Then we have a maliciously edited video about Joe Biden that has been on Facebook that went to Meta's oversight board. And guess what they said? It can stay out there. Sure. Why not? Whatever.

Keep it. So which is it, companies? What the fuck are you people doing? Nothing. Nothing. Lip service. Nothing at all. So this is a video of Joe Biden. It was edited to make it look like he was repeatedly touching a young girl's chest.

In fact, this is a video in which Biden simply placed an I voted sticker on her shirt after she voted in person for the first time. The oversight board said that the video is not a violation of Meta's narrowly written manipulated media policy because it was not edited with AI tools and because the edits were obvious and therefore unlikely to mislead most users.

Which I guess is fair if you're going by the letter of the law. But they do. And of course, they did say we're concerned about this policy because it's kind of bullshit. You should reconsider this policy quickly given the number of elections in 2024. That oversight board is such a joke.

I so want to be on it so bad. Are you kidding me? They're getting paid millions of dollars to do. Fuck all. Oh, God. So great. Get me on a board, people. Put me in, coach. I'm ready to board. Exactly. And we have another story about a video call, Deep Fakes.

An employee at the Hong Kong office of a multinational company transferred nearly $26 million to scammers last month after unwittingly attending a video call with Deep Fakes of his co-worker or he or she's co-workers. Including the company's chief financial officer. The employee was the only real human attending the video call while the fake participants were impersonated with the help of artificial intelligence.

Scammers found publicly available video and audio of their impersonation targets via YouTube, then used deep fake technologies to emulate their voices and to lure the victim to follow their instructions. And because the people in the video conference looked like the real people, the employee made 15 transactions as instructed to five local bank accounts totaling 20 million Hong Kong dollars.

Wow. That's right out of a movie. It's fantastic. Oh, yeah. The employee only realized it was a scam after independently contacting the company's head office about a week later. Can you imagine? You'd been sitting there for a week going, I don't know. Hey, guys.

I transferred away 26 million dollars. Was I supposed to do that? Oh, Jesus. No? Shit. Well, it sucks for you guys. Wow. You know, I feel bad for them because... I do, but I don't.

Wouldn't you double check before transferring that amount of money? It's a video call, man. I mean, that's a pretty high level of sophistication. Yes, but if I'm talking 26 million dollars, I want it in writing or at least email chain.

Well, no, you don't want the email chain. I mean, the email chain is the worst. That's how I told you. One of my friends got scammed for out of $10,000 because she transferred a client's money out because she got, you know, scammed on a thread. All right. I would pick up the phone and call the CFO. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's ways to get around that, too. It's just crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Biometrics now. No, it can fake that. Oh, I think we need to... Oh, yeah. We just need to go back to shiny rocks. We need to just trade shiny rocks.

A piece of leather with notches on it. That's what I'm going to do from now on. That's it. Pelts and furs. That's it. Well, thank God I'm in Canada. Plenty of that shit around. Yeah, seriously. I'm rich, bitch. Oh, man. One guy that's not rich is Khalid Itam. He was working at MoviePass and he decided to have a party at Coachella back in 2018.

And he barred a bunch of money from his buddies to pay for it and turns out he didn't have the money to pay him back. So what did he do? He sent a bunch of fake invoices to MoviePass totaling $260,000. Must have been a hell of a party. I'm thinking the party was probably $50,000 and he just figured I'm doing – in for $1,000, in for $20 or $260,000 of them.

Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, he was found guilty on two counts of wire fraud. They did try and get him on money laundering, but that was – he was acquitted on that one. Now, in this article, it also says that – I had totally forgotten about this. The DOJ charged two chief executives, Theodore Farnsworth and J. Mitchell Lowe, both sounding totally like fake names.

They were indicted for securities fraud for engaging in a scheme to artificially inflate the price of the company's stock by misleading investors. Wait for this one, Brian. Because this one just made me chuckle. I almost spit out my morning coffee. The false statement involved claims that MoviePass's business model, in which subscribers could see unlimited movies in theaters with no blackout dates for a flat monthly fee of $9.95, was – wait

for it – a tested, sustainable business model. Okay. Well, it had been tested, that's for sure. One part is true. Now, I think that you need to take away the toys of the people that invested in MoviePass based on that.

Look, I think – That's just common sense. I think that – I think an employee misleading a company that has – that itself misleads its investors, I think it's fair play all around. Everybody got what they deserved? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, pretty much.

Fuck them. Okay. Well, Itam is going to be sentenced in April 29th. Here's the kicker on that one. And he faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. Wow. Yeah. Hope that was a good party. For $260,000. And we got people stealing billions and they just basically get a bracelet and get to stay at home and play Call of Duty.

That's insane. That is insane. I feel bad for that guy. That's way, way, way, way too harsh. The punishment. Yeah. Four maybe, but 40? Jesus. Yeah. It's going to be a long time before he goes to Coachella again. No shit.

Yeah. Taylor Swift, pop star Taylor Swift, has threatened legal action against a Florida student who set up multiple social media accounts that release time and real-time information as to the whereabouts of her personal aircraft, according to the Washington Post. If this sounds similar or familiar, it's because it is.

This is the same guy that did the Elon jet scandal of late 2022. Same kid. Poor guy. So he's tracking a bunch of people's stuff. I don't, we all know this. He does it. The information's out there. He just collates it and tweets it out. He's not on major platforms anymore because he's been banned from all of them.

But obviously you can't ban people from things like Mastodon or Telegram or other things of that nature. So he's doing it. I mean, to Taylor Swift's credit, she does get, you know, she's so big that she gets threats to her life constantly. Listen, this is kind of a bullshit thing.

If he was just a nice guy, I would be like, okay, I'll leave you off this, whatever. But he's not, he's going to fight it. So I guess we're going to find out if this is legal or not because it's, I don't see, Taylor Swift has enough money to just let her lawyers go with this until it's done. Yeah.

The thing is though, it's public data. It's all public data. Yeah. So it makes no sense that he should or could be sued for this. You know, he's basically repackaging public data. Stop flying a private jet.

There you go. Or go first class everywhere. There you go. That'll, that'll be better. Sure. Oh man. Okay. So finally, some good news about science. You hear that, Jason? We're talking about good science again. Any monkeys die from this one? No. Didn't lie about it?

Not yet. Okay. As far as I know. So far, so good. Yeah. So far, so good. Amazing spiral shaped contact lens uses optical vortex to correct vision. Scientists have developed a groundbreaking spiral shaped context lens known as the spiral diopter, which creates an optical vortex to correct vision under various light conditions and distances.

This new technology promises to transform not just the field of ophthalmology, but also enhance consumer gadgets like VR headsets. So this thing is pretty cool and it apparently works really well with your peripheral vision as well as your, you know, straight on vision.

So they can start using these things in, in applications like not just like eyewear, but drones and self-driving cars and things like that. So it has a wide range of applications, but I just want them.

Yeah, me too. And I suck. I'm like, I'm like, I just had to start getting reading glasses and I, you know, I'm, I'm getting that slide. So I would love some contact lenses from this stuff. Let's do it. Yeah. I've had glasses since fourth grade. So I would like, I would like them now, please.

I'm, I'm, I'm that guy now that literally has to take his glasses off and put the phone to his nose to see it because I can't get glasses. It'll let me see it like in the right distance. So. Right. Please give me the optical vortex. Well, this sounds good. I'm ready to have vortexes in my eyes too. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media candy. I got a note from John Lucas Jackson on Twitter. He says, listening to the January 20th episode, you're completely right on the first episode of the bear. It gave my wife and I anxiety. However, you have to get past that first episode.

It's not the best representation of the show. We binged in a week and it's a, and it's phenomenal. So, okay. I'll give it a shot. Cool. Because maybe it's, maybe it's just like pilotitis, you know? Yeah. Because the first is always the pilot and it's always, it always changes after that. So like Battlestar Galactica.

Yeah. Yeah. Back when they had a plan. The pilot episode was boring as fuck though. Yeah. Wait, no, I actually liked the pilot episode. The two hour, the two hour movie. Yeah. The, the initial early pilot.

Yeah. I fucking loved that. Nah, the show was way better. The show was, the show was, the show was good, but I thought it, I thought it kept up the thing, but I, as a, you know, getting back into Battlestar, I loved the pace on it. I thought it was great. I saw poor things this week.

Oh, that's the, that's the Emma Stone is a nympho thing. Emma Stone, congratulations to her on her first porn. Really? It was fantastic. It's basically porn. Okay. It's kind of a Frankenstein retelling. It's, it's extraordinarily good.

I loved it. I've heard great things about it. I want to watch it. Yeah. Yeah. And so a friend of mine saw it in the theater and I said. Couldn't whack off. No, couldn't actually. And I, when I, when I talked to him about it, I'm like, yeah, it was really weird. Cause I shot it on video and he's like, it didn't seem like that in the theater.

So I think when I saw it, I saw it, I saw an Oscar screener. So I got the DVD of it. And it was obviously like either, either on like super high frame rate on film or shot on, it looked like it was shot on video, which gave it this hyper-realistic quality, but it was just like, it was really cool.

The visuals are cool. The story is amazing. It's based on a book that I never read. Now I don't have to. But yeah, I fucking loved it. I thought it was fantastic. And a note on Oscar screener DVDs, they have made these things absolutely impossible to copy now.

Can't rip it to your drive. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, in the old days you could rip them, you know, if you got like Mac the Ripper or whatever, or at least just make a disc image of it if you wanted to save it and watch it again later. Because it is Emma Stone porn. So why wouldn't you want to save it to watch later? That's all I'm saying.

Nope. Can't do it. Cannot make a disc image of it. There's no way to rip these things. They put enough. I think that they're working with Apple to the point where they, you know, they put in like enough bad sectors and things like that where it dies. Or they've got some kind of behind the scenes protection going on. So I think what you'd need is like a 15 year old Mac with a DVD drive to, with the old software to make that thing kind of work, which I don't happen to have lying around anymore.

Right. I did have a DVD, like a USB DVD drive, a Blu-ray drive that I bought years ago. I think I got one in a box somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. This was the first time I got to bust it out and use it. And then it still just didn't work. Too bad.

Either way, when this movie comes out, check it out. It's really good. Really good. Will do. Yeah. Even just, even without the, the porny bits, it was, uh, that, that didn't even, that was part of the story and it added to the story. It wasn't gratuitous. Right. In a way that you'd think it would be. It was just actually a necessary part of the storyline.

And it was just, it was just a great movie. I thought. Cool. Uh, I watched Leave the World Behind on Netflix. So much potential. So much potential. So little of it actualized. So little of it actualized.

Uh, the scene with the Teslas was phenomenal. That was about it. Um, so much potential. So leave this movie behind is all I got to say. Okay. Don't waste your time. I wasn't really planning on it. Now I definitely won't. So. No. Uh, some surprise news came out at Disney this week.

A surprise new sequel to Moana will be released in theaters on November 27th. Disney has announced this animated film is separate from the upcoming live action adaptation that's currently in development for 2025 release. Uh, Moana is one of those movies that got me that it was one of our coronavirus movies.

A hundred percent. So we watched that endlessly. We listened to the soundtrack nonstop. I'm very excited about this. Apparently it was originally developed as a TV series. They were going to do an animated series out of it. And, uh, Iger liked it so much. He said, nope, let's turn it into a movie. Particularly since a bunch of our movies have tanked recently.

And we know this will be a win. There you go. Okay. Yeah. Coming soon. Very excited. Less excited about the live action version because I don't like Disney live action stuff. Nah. Leave it animated. Yeah. Apps and doodads.

Well, Brian, I don't know if you've noticed, but Apple released a new gadget this week. I have seen so many videos of dumb fucks walking around, stopping in the middle of crossing the street, waving their arms around like they're moving things because I guess they are moving things. What is wrong with people?

Did you see the video of the idiot driving the Tesla robo car, robo cyber truck with stupid things on? Yeah. That guy's going to be dead in a month. I think he got pulled over. I hope so. Yeah. I think the cops intervened on that one. First off, the first one, the first article that I guess everybody's talking about, there's a Gizmodo article with a very clickbaity headline.

Will Apple's Vision Pro make your real life unbearably boring? Well, the answer to that obviously is no thanks to Betteridge's Law of Headlines. And he's saying out – he's hoping that – this guy's against it.

He's very against the Vision Pro. I personally am very for the Vision Pro. Inside my house while I'm working or watching or consuming media. Not out in the wild. I have thoughts on that. We'll talk about that in a second. Okay. And he says, Apple execs should definitely be worried that ridicule is incoming.

Indeed, the Vision Pro is just one clever pejorative away from having its highly expensive hardware transformed into a global joke. Anyone who remembers the term glassholes will know what I mean. On that note, what should we call people who wear Vision Pros in public? Sound off in the comments if you have thoughts. Here's what I think that they are. They're vulnerable.

They are vulnerable to attack. Do you people not understand situational awareness? You are wearing $3,500 worth of equipment on your face and you will not notice when somebody bangs you up from behind. Exactly. Yep. It's just like, come on.

Yes. Yes, you can see through it. We know that. But you're doing stuff. This is worse than looking at your phone. Because, yeah, there's millions of reviews. This one just rubbed me the wrong way. Because I don't think there's going to be a glassholes moment for it.

I think there's just a common sense moment. People, wear it at Starbucks. Don't wear it while you're walking. But anyway. Exactly. People said the same thing about AirPods when they came out. Oh, everybody looks so stupid with their AirPods. Everybody's got AirPods now. Sorry. That disappeared. Because you know why?

It's a damn good product. All of the reviews that I'm reading are, can't wait for version two. This is going to be, it's fantastic stuff. There are flaws in it because it's version one. They wanted to get it out. But as far as I can tell, everybody's saying that it is the coolest thing that Apple has put out probably ever.

So, I know that there are a bunch of Apple haters out there going, see, I knew they were going to say that. I'm just going on what people have written. I have not tried it. So, I don't know. I'm 100% a version two or version three guy before I get this thing. Yep. And yeah, I just don't think it belongs in the public sphere, like not out while you're walking and stuff.

It's for work. Or sitting at home. Yeah. Sitting at home and doing whatever. Watching some Emma Stone porn. But it's the same way I feel about phones. Like, I get pissed off when people are walking around with their phones because they're not looking up. How many times do we all dance out of people's way all day long when we're out walking now?

Dude, try walking down Hollywood Boulevard. Yeah. Bullshit. Put your fucking phone away and pay attention to what's in front of you. Yep. So, speaking of people walking around in public, this is acceptable behavior because it's Casey Neistat. He did a review called The Thing No One Will Say About Apple Vision Pro.

It is a very funny, very funny review. Worth watching. He ends the video with, like, go buy Apple stock because this new category is going to be off the hook. But he has a very good revelation about how he, like, after wearing it for several hours, how he just kind of melded into it and blended into it and that it was just became natural, which is very cool.

So, highly recommend going to watch that video. It is very, very good. All right. A little bit about Blue Sky here, which we're going to discuss in slightly more lurid detail later with Dave. The open source Twitter alternative is getting rid of its wait list and opening its decentralized platform to everyone, one would argue, about a year too late.

But here we are. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see what's going to happen. They currently have a little over 3 million users, although that number could and should rise now that you don't need an invitation to join anymore. They're decentralized, I guess, which you could say is a good thing compared to Threads, which has kind of taken over most of the steam at this point.

And people seem to be really liking Threads. I was going to transition. That was part of, like, my Christmas promise to myself is get off X and move over to Threads. And I started and then got so bored and didn't care. So, kind of stopped halfway. But I still have Blue Sky.

Never go on it. We'll see what happens, I guess. We'll see what the market decides. I think they got a million people signed up that first day. Okay. Transitioned over. I went back to it and was checking around because I was using it a bit when I was doing Boot Up. And it was basically John Scalzi's Blue Sky at that point.

I found enough people to follow where it's like a normal series of, you know, activity now. Yeah. I like it more than the other ones. I like it more than Mastodon. I like it more than Threads. I definitely like it more than X because X is kind of a ghost town compared to the people that I really used to talk to on there.

X is a ghost town with sketchy ads and continued, you know, upsells. I do like a lot of the features that Blue Sky has integrated. And I like their open platform. And, yes, Facebook is based on ActivityPub, which is, you know, the same thing as Mastodon and all that stuff.

But it's still Facebook and it's still Threads, which gives me the heebie-jeebies. It may, but we always talk about critical mass. Even if Blue Sky added a million, that takes it to four. Threads is at 130 million. See, here's the thing, though. I am firmly behind the fact that critical mass is bullshit anymore as far as my enjoyment of a platform.

I don't care if everybody's on it. I actually prefer a few people to be on it. Oh, I'm not worried about the enjoyment, Jason. It's just what we discovered with so many, so many different apps and even just – what was that stupid news app that died a couple weeks ago? Oh, yeah. The problem if you don't hit critical mass is this thing is going to fucking go away within a year.

See, that's the point, though, with this is they've built the protocol. So you can spin up your own servers. Now, they basically just kind of wrote the HTTP for social networks, which, you know, it seems to be a pretty decent, vibrant community. I recommend checking out the episode of Hard Fork podcast that came out today with the CEO of Blue Sky on it.

She does a really good job of kind of hyping it. And I went back on it and, like, all the people that I actually like are over there now. So it was kind of refreshing to pop back in and say, oh, this is where you've been hiding. Right. You know? Like I said, that's how I found out the Good Omens news on, like, a week before you found it on X because Neil was posting it over on Blue Sky.

Right. And there's a bunch of other people over there. But I like how you can get customized feeds for different moods and different things. And so you can get a feed of people that you don't actually follow. It's kind of like lists on Twitter, I guess. Right. But it's just – it's kind of – it's nascent enough where it's still fun.

And it just doesn't have that icky factor of Zuckerberg or Musk. I mean, yeah, there's some hints of Dorsey floating around, wafting around. I think that might just be the stink coming off his beard. Yeah. Or the patchouli. Beard trimmings. Yeah. I actually reinstalled the app and I've been diving back in and, you know, followed a couple more people this morning.

So – and I like the username systems because you can basically tie yours into your own domain. Like I am at jason.fyi. Yeah. So, like, pull my own domain because that way it's portable. I take my people with me. If I want to go start up my own server, I can take that list of people with me and not be tied down to it.

That's the whole decentralized part of it that is really nice. You can't do that with threads right now. I can't take my threads followers and pop them over to another Mastodon instance. They say it's coming, but they said we were going to be able to edit our emails four fucking years ago. So, who knows? Right. So, I'm just – you know, I don't know.

I'm going to give it a shot as far as – I don't really care that much about social media anymore because it's been nice. That's the thing for me. Yeah. I just don't care enough. I don't need it. I don't want it. Yeah. Yeah. I just – you know, to keep up with some of the people I want to keep up with, I find it nice to be able to pop in and just have a cursory glance around and not feel compelled to have to post all the time because I know that that was a fool's errand all those years ago.

I'm not an influencer. I'm not, you know, getting free vacations to the Bahamas or Aruba to go take photos. So, it's just chatting with some friends. That's all I'm using it for because I'm old now. I'm old. Speaking of old, Slack just turned 10. Crazy, eh?

Yeah. I feel like I was using it about nine years ago. Yeah. I was using it 10 years ago. I was on the beta. There's an article over at Wired called Slack is turning 10 years old and wow, has it changed everything. And I would say, well, that's actually not true.

Slack is kind of irrelevant now because Microsoft Teams won that war big time. Microsoft Teams won the work implementation of Slack war for sure. I'd say Discord won the war in general. Yeah, Discord definitely. Slack is one of those things where I only have installed now because one company that I work with is using it.

Well, it's the same reason that I didn't install it. But every now and then I get the emails when I've been tagged in a thread and I open it up in a web interface. And I see the logo and it feels so retro to me now. Like Slack just feels old. Because it is. Yeah, and I still can't unsee it. When they rebranded and recreated that logo, it's a pinwheel of dicks.

The Slack logo is a pinwheel of dicks. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Actually, far more appropriate for Discord as a logo. Yeah, actually. It's fun. Scott Beal just opened up a new Discord server for Laughing Squid and a bunch of old squiddies are over there.

So that's been kind of fun. That's actually been the most fun I've had on quote-unquote social media in quite some time hanging out with all that crew. Dissing our own channel. Jeez. I'm on both. I'm on both. I even posted a meme to our meme board yesterday. Come on, man.

I'm engaging. So, yeah, it's just an interesting read if you care about Slack, which I don't anymore. I actively dislike Slack. So I had to get some stuff from Amazon this week. And I got a couple of things that are pretty cool that you might like, Brian.

Okay. First, it's called slip drive. It's basically a little sleeve that you stick onto the back of your laptop monitors that you can tuck a hard drive into or a battery. So either one, and then you just run a cable to the side. So it's a mounting place. So I have all these little hard drives that I'm using all the time.

Yep. And trying to move the laptop with all that stuff, it's just a nice way to anchor it to your machine so you can move it around. And I found that I just keep – I have one that's dedicated just to my time machine. I have an SSD for my time machine backup that I just keep there all day long. It's so much nicer when you're dealing with a laptop.

They're cheap. $15 for the – or $16 for the small one, $17 for the big one. It's basically just like a sock that you slide your hard drive into. Yeah, that's pretty clever. Yeah. Trust me, they're great. I've got them on both my laptops now, and I love them. Cool. And to go with that, I got the ShinKey 90-degree right-angle USB-C adapter, 40 gigabits per second data transfer, USB 4, Thunderbolt 4, Type-C, male-to-female connector extender for mobile phone, switch, Steam Deck, tablet, laptop, two-pack.

Okay. For $7. They're basically little right-angle connectors, so you can just basically change the angle of your cable so it's not sticking so far out. I like that, too. Yeah, for $7, they're great. All right. Adding to cart. Now, yeah.

So there's – as part of my 12-step recovery program, there are a lot of times when I have to – I don't have to. I have taken the commitment to handle Zoom meetings for some of the meetings I go to. And in doing that, I found a gadget that one of the guys turned me on to, which is basically – because, you know, you have a webcam and you're in a big auditorium and you have to run the webcam to your computer.

You don't have a USB-C cable that is 50 feet long, right? Right. Nope. I found this gadget called the Sewell U-Link U10 USB 2 over single Cat5E6 extender 200-foot, 480 megabits per second, 4-port V2.0.

This lets you run USB over Ethernet. Okay. It is awesome. So basically at the camera, you have a little box with a power cord. You plug that in and then you just run Cat5 across the auditorium and plug it into a little receiver box that plugs into your computer and boom, you have a webcam all the way across.

It's awesome. It works with any kind of USB stuff. Okay. So for – and it's a four-porter. So for podcasting, you can plug in multiple mics and run that at distance instead of having these massive, you know, USB cables running everywhere. It is the greatest little invention. I never knew this existed.

Me either. It is so cool. Yeah. It's not too cheap. It's $120. But compare that to buying, you know, a 50-foot USB-C cable, which I don't even know if they make. I don't know if they even go that far. It's pretty cool. So along with that, I got a really nice little retractable 50-foot Cat6 spindle like you see for garden hoses.

It works great. So I got – that's – because I needed to have my own backpack. So I basically have a Zoom meeting and a backpack now. So I've got the camera. I've got one of those Insta360 webcams with a pivot on it so I can move it around and stuff. Decent microphone on it.

Gets a job done. Run that to my laptop across the auditorium and boom, Bob's your uncle. It's great. That's fun. Thank you for letting me be of service. You're welcome. And also I found a great site called Check Your Decaf because I've been drinking decaf coffee. I know you probably can't tell, but I'm on the decaf train now.

Apparently there's a couple of different methods of making decaf coffee. One is treating it with methylene chloride, which is the one you don't want because it can cause brain dysfunction. So obviously you don't want that one. I go for the Swiss water method. But there's a site called Check Your Decaf where you can pick your brand of decaf from a list and it will tell you how it's actually decaffeinated, which comes in handy.

So I've actually – I had one brand that turns out was done with chemicals. So I got rid of it and moved over to a much more eco-friendly brand for the brand. So quick question on this. If you've switched to decaf coffee, are you still mainlining non-decaf tea? No. Okay. All right.

No. No. I have – in the mornings I have like three cups of decaf coffee, which works out to be a third of a regular cup of coffee, I think, which gets me through several hours. And then in the afternoon I just have herbal tea. All right. Cool. Good for you. So I had to – yeah, the caffeine was really screwing with me.

So I got it down. And now it's – now my body is readjusted to the point where the decaf coffee still gives me a good enough buzz where I can be chatty. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. My friend sent me this one. This is a great website. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators.

Okay. So what it is is you can search any state. It's a list of all of the – like the state treasurers who manage all of this unclaimed money. Okay. And so I went in and put my name in in Illinois.

They had $12 that Pizza Hut owed me from the mid-90s. Okay. I went – I got a job at Pizza Hut. I went in for the training. I sat through half the training and it was Martha Quinn on a videotape doing the Pizza Hut training.

And halfway through it, we're like, screw this. Let's go skate. They actually clocked me for that hour watching the show. So I had like $12 in – and the check – so I filled out the little thing. Check shows up today. I just got the notification that it's coming in the mail today.

So free money. So check it out. It goes by state. So any state you lived in or have done business in, just put your name and deets in and it's legit. So free money. I have no free money for me. Unfortunately, I just checked. Okay. Did you check all the states?

But I've really only been in one in terms of living. Okay. I thought you lived in New York for a while. Yeah, but I didn't really have a property or anything. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Well, I got money. All right. Good for you. Everybody should check it. I'll take it. You never know. Yep.

And this morning I was Googling. I wanted to check my internet speed because I've recabled everything and everything is hardwired now. So I was trying to get to speedtest.net, which is the internet speed tester I always use. Yeah, by Ookla. Ookla. Yeah. And by the way, do you have the hack on the app for your phone that turns it into Satan cat mode?

No. I have the app on my phone, but I don't have the hack. Okay. Go look for the Easter egg. It turns it into basically a Satanic cat mode and it gives you a Gregorian chants and fire while it's checking it. It's awesome. So I basically just typed in speedtest and it popped up with a thing from Google saying, would you like to test your speed?

I'm like, okay. Boom. Clicked it. It's like built into Chrome now. Yeah. To test your internet speed. It's like, oh, okay. I basically did the same thing, but I still probably end up going to speedtest because I like them because you can compare to other providers in your area. Plus your Gregorian chants. Who knew?

Exactly. Exactly. That's only for the app though on the phone, sadly. But yeah, the link is in the show notes for that. It's just a how-to on how to do it, which is basically go to Google and search for internet speed test and click run speed test. There you go. Not rocket surgery.

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. We should actually rebrand this to Shit Shower and Shave with Dave. We're going to go with the last one. Shit Shower, Shave and Star Wars. Oh, the four S's.

Yes. The things that everyone's life needs for true happiness. Fulfillment. True. Yes. Well, we missed you last week, Dave. Well, thank you. I appreciate you allowing me to take the break.

Just, you know, just wasn't quite up to it. Wasn't feeling myself and needed to take a little time. So good to be back. And, uh, lots to talk about today. Christopher writes in, I am rarely highly critical of this podcast, but how did you decide not to call this week's conversation with Dave shooting the shit with Dave?

I won't be dumping the show anytime soon, but I rarely strive to understand how you could get through such a massive load of bathroom discussions without squeezing out a new title to the segment. Still, I couldn't wipe the grin from my face. Okay.

Christopher put the time in. He did. That's right. Kudos to Christopher. Oh, yeah. Very nice. Nicely done, sir. Yes. And Kevin writes in from the last show. Dave's bathroom dilemma reminded me when I worked on the same floor as the trading desk in the Helmsley building in New York City.

I got to work early on purpose so that I had a chance of using the bathroom before it was defiled. I trained myself intensely not to have to use the bathroom during the rest of the day. After lunch, it was like watching a herd of elephants complete with newspapers held by their trunks. God help those who had to use those hot, unventilated bathrooms later in the day.

Luckily, I got a passcode to the bathrooms of a different floor. I guarded it with my life. And he gives us a link of how to poop at work, bathroom etiquette, and types of poop. All right. I will check that out with great interest.

There you go. Yeah. Bear down on that, Dave. Oh, yeah. I did have a little bit of Star Wars news, too, that not so much news as just a revelation that I didn't realize happened. I did not realize Pedro Pascal was not in The Mandalorian Season 3 at all.

That was not him. It was just his voice. Yeah. And he's going to be doing the same for Season 4. He's literally phoning it in. If you never take off the mask, who cares? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So I had no idea. It fooled me. So does that mean he's not going to be in the movie?

I think he'll be doing the movie. But it's just Season 4. There's too much money to do the movie. Yeah. Too much upside potential. Yeah. Huh. Don't want to miss out on that check. Mm-hmm. Hopefully, he's busy doing Last of Us Season 2. He's busy doing everything.

That's true. He's the man of the moment right now. That's for sure. I think he's going to be in the new Fantastic Four remake, which I'm sad about because I hate the Fantastic Four and don't think it should ever be remade. But that's just me. Why do you hate the Fantastic Four? Nobody's ever done it right. That's true.

Well, I think no one's ever done the movie right. Yeah. That's what I mean. Yeah. It's true. And I don't understand why – there must be something about the Fantastic Four that makes them impervious to having a good movie because so many have tried and no one's been able to do it.

I don't – and I'm not sure what that is. Yeah. No idea. But I like them in comic book form. I remember they were in one of the first Spider-Man comics. He went and met with the Fantastic Four. I just like the Silver Surfer.

I never cared for the Silver Surfer ever. Maybe that's it too. I just don't – I've never been a Fantastic Four fan. I was never a superhero comic book fan. Yeah. I was more of a G.I. Joe guy. I liked the thing a lot. I thought he was cool.

I don't know why. I think he was – I don't know. Sort of – We need a Hulk. But what should we do? Right. Can't be green. Exactly. I was saying he's sort of the thinking man's Hulk. But that's – I mean that's – But they've changed the Hulk into being a thinking man.

That's true. That's true. The Hulk is now a genius. So – and I guess he always was but not when in Hulk form but – Yes. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. See, this is why we stick with Star Wars. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, yeah. It's much more consistent.

You should stay. A million people were just listening going, stay in your lane. That's right. Exactly. Shit, shower, shave in Star Wars. God damn it. That's right. Stay away from superheroes. Oh, man. Well, speaking of bathrooms, there was some news going around about how three million smart toothbrushes were used in a DDoS attack, which never happened actually.

Yeah. Did you guys get to cover this one? Yes. And I have a lot of thoughts about this. Oh, go. Do tell. And I want to unpack this because I think there's a lot at play here. So we covered this twice.

We covered the story and we covered the retraction. And as our listeners know, the primary, I would say, function of the Cyber Wire Daily podcast is aggregation.

What's that? Shareholder value. Well, I stand corrected. But we do aggregation analysis and synthesis. Okay. Probably in that order. And we don't do very much original reporting.

So a typical report from us would say the BBC reports that such and such and such and such happened or the Washington Post reports that such and such and such and such. And so with this toothbrush story, similarly, we reported it that way.

And I want to say it was like, I forget, Cyber News or someone had done an English translation of the Swiss newspaper that had originally reported on this. And so that's what we referred to. And I'll admit that in our morning production meeting, there was something about the story that struck me as odd, which was I kept thinking, why would these toothbrushes be on Wi-Fi?

Because most devices like this are Bluetooth, right? There's no reason for it to hit your Wi-Fi. But the flip side of my thinking was, well, these days it's so much cheaper for everything to have a microcontroller in it than any kind of dedicated hardware that it makes sense that something as silly as a toothbrush would have so much more processing power than it needs.

Just because it's the cheapest way to build something that it could be a potential target for something as simple to do as DDoS. Right. So we went with the story. And the next day when it turns out that it never happened, and I have to credit a researcher, Kevin Beaumont, he was the first one I saw who was posting on social media, was on Macedon saying, the toothbrush story did not happen, did not happen.

It's a made-up story. And sure enough, that's what it ended up being. It was – what seems to have happened is that some folks from Fortinet, which is a security company, spoke about this in a hypothetical way.

And somebody ran with that as if it had actually happened. And now you got a game of telephone going and it snowballed and here we are today. So the day after when it became – when the realization happened that this was not actually a real story, we covered that.

And in our coverage, I tried to make light of it by saying that the – you know, yesterday's extremely fun story about toothbrushes turns out to not be true, which is so.

So I've been thinking about this a lot, just in terms of how we do our own coverage, to what degree are we responsible for the coverage that we link to, you know, how much culpability do we have for having gone along with the crowd in reporting this, should we have had more scrutiny, is that our job?

And I'm not sure. And I was curious to check in with you guys to see what you thought. Yeah. That's a lot to unpack. Over a stupid toothbrush. Well, I mean – well, everything that you've just said also applies to this very show right now.

Yeah. It's the same thing. We don't go out and do research. We don't go out and do reporting. We don't go out and talk to people. We delete every single email that comes from every single PR person telling us that they have somebody that wants to talk to us. So we get no firsthand information.

We do the same thing. We aggregate. Jason and I decide which stories we think are interesting to talk about or too big that we can't talk about them. And we use other people's reporting. We don't verify. We don't do anything. We just do that. Same thing that you do. Is it worthwhile?

I think so just because there's so much news out there and you want to – you find an aggregator that aggregates things that you're interested in. Be it tech, be it whatever. Be it Star Wars. There are Star Wars aggregator sites out there. Certainly sci-fi ones. I like to think of us as curators.

Yeah, curators. Exactly. And that serves its purpose. I mean what else is a record label really? They were a curation service. Same with movie studios. A mob-funded scam? That's what – Well, you know, tomato, tomato. But does it serve a purpose?

Yes. But do I think that we need to do a clearer job of perhaps telling people that we are not journalists or certainly when organizations get big enough? I think so because I think that line is blurred and purposefully so often. That's my thoughts on it.

Yeah, shit happens. That's how I kind of look at it. You know how you were feeling last week like you just didn't have it in you, Dave? Let's see. So this was not the right week for me to ask you guys this question. These deep inwardly facing questions perhaps we should save for another time.

I try. Here's the deal. I try. I don't know if Jason did. No, because if you look at the vast majority of stories that you've done, how many thousands of stories have you covered in your tenure as the host at the Cyber Wire, Dave? Well, it's funny you should say that, Jason.

We just did. We just just yesterday we celebrated our 2000th episode. I saw and I liked your post. Average, average, average, the number of articles that you cover on each episode. Multiply that by 2000. You know, that's a lot of stories.

You get one through and everybody loses their shit. Come on. Everybody has a bad day. I think the other point that I would make, I agree with Jason, shit happens about that. I think the other point that we should make as an argument for both Jason and myself and you, Dave, is we've been doing this for so long that we have bullshit radar built in.

We know, so we are adding our own journalistic spin to this to some degree because we've just been living it for so long. Like Jason and I just earlier in this episode, we started to read some of the articles and some of the points and we're like, that's bullshit. They are lying.

We have, I can, we can go back into the archives and present the other 17 times this company has lied about the exact same thing because we've done it for so long. So to some degree, we become trusted voices in these fears, right? Yeah. And that is journalism to some degree.

Yeah. Thinking back, I can think of one time when I know that we got something just factually wrong, like we were just mistaken. And it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a fact that, you know, really had any implications.

But it was something that the work we did was incorrect. And we corrected it the next day. And we corrected this the next day. But that's what people do. I mean, real news organizations do that.

Daily. Yeah. Daily. There's a whole section in the paper that is just like fixes and addendums and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. The we fucked up section. Here. Fixed. Okay. Yeah. So there's another element, though, that I want to touch on here, which I think is worth talking about.

In some of the back and forth about this over on Mastodon, and it was between Kevin Beaumont, who I said was the person who initially started calling this out. And there's a security researcher named Patrick Howell O'Neill, who I think was really a voice of reason here, who was pointing out that he'd seen way more people complaining about the incorrect story than the actual coverage of the story itself.

And people just piling on. And, you know, some people were complaining about the lack of high-quality news sources and how everything's just aggregation and there's so little original reporting anymore.

And all that's true. And I'll admit, you know, reading that kind of stuff is a little, you know, hard to swallow sometimes when they're poking at what you do. Blame Ariana Huffington. Right. But...

I think there is this impulse that I've seen in cyber in particular, and it's not exclusive to cyber, but I think lots of people in cyber have this impulse towards smug superiority.

And I think this comes from them being used to doing, like, intellectual sparring for sport with each other, right? It's like the comic book guy on The Simpsons. Exactly. Exactly. And when you're right about something, and when a group of you together decides that someone else was wrong about something, it is those idiots.

You know, ha, ha, ha, ha. Look at those idiots. Those, you know, they don't know anything. They don't know, you know, they don't understand how whatever technology is that we're discussing works. No gif, no gif, no gif, no gif. Right, exactly. Right. And on the one hand, I get it, and I get being in a group, and I get feeling, you know, like you're part of something, and I get all that.

And there was a time when I certainly probably took part in that. Now, that time for me was probably when I was about 15. So, but I see lots of people who still do it. And I think this is one of those cases where it's a bad impulse.

And the piling on for something that in the long run, as Patrick Howell O'Neill points out, a year from now, nobody's going to remember. This didn't impact anybody. This didn't affect anything. There's no danger here.

Somebody, an interesting story caught someone's imagination, and they wrote about it, and they exaggerated, and we all talked about it. And it turns out there wasn't much to it, but nobody died. Yeah. The other thing I was trying to figure out, if there had been any really important cybersecurity stories where somebody got it wrong, and everybody jumped on board, and I was thinking of Bloomberg's The Big Hack.

You remember that one? Oh, yeah. That was the one. Back in 2018, Bloomberg had that story where they said that China was using this little tiny chip inside. It was inside of computers and systems, and it turns out nobody could find any evidence of it at all.

Yeah, that was great. It turns out it was actually just TikTok. Right. They didn't need a chip. They had a social media app. But that was one that was, I mean, there was just tons of coverage about that when it first came out, because it was certainly newsworthy.

Well, the thing that struck me about everything that you've just said, Dave, is you were talking about how you used to act like this when you were 15. I think we've been saying for a while that the problem with the internet and the way it is now and the anonymized social media is it's so easy to be that vindictive, quirky 15-year-old.

And people are just that way now. That's the default way that people seem to act online these days. People say things that they would never – if you were all at a conference and you were getting a drink together at the bar and having a chat, you would never talk to each other the way that people do online.

But they do. Yeah, that's true. And I suppose some of it is the lack of social cues. Some of it is the lack of social norms. Some of it is the lack of social consequences. Yeah, consequences I think is the big one. There's a complete lack of consequences. And again, we'll lose listeners here again.

Thanks, Trump. A lot of this came from those four years. It was just you can do whatever the fuck you want. I push back on that a bit because people were like that before that. Not as bad, I'd say. I think it's the same.

I don't think that really changed much. People were assholes online long before he came around. Go back to AOL. You blame AOL. I know. I just said go back to AOL. Coming on the internet. And now this week we've got Twitter showing up on Blue Sky. Same thing.

By the way, I've been playing around with Blue Sky. We talked about it earlier in the show. Well, this is an episode out of time. We're doing this out of the wrong order. There is a very vibrant furry community on Blue Sky, Dave. Oh, boy. Okay. Very vibrant.

All right. Well, Dave is sticking with his furry mastodon and that's it. It's sick. Okay. Yeah. Oh, boy. It's tempting, Jason. It's tempting. They have customized feeds that you can subscribe to. And I was shown like six different furry feeds and I'm like, well, let me go check those out.

And they're very entertaining. There's a very. What if it turns out that all along Jason has been the real furry here? Well, he might be the most dedicated one moving forward, I'd say. He has found his community apparently on Blue Sky. There is some craftsmanship that goes into those outfits, I'm telling you.

Fine craftsmanship. They're expensive, too. I know. We bought you one. Well. True. You know what to get Jason now, Dave. Mm-hmm. Yep. No hand-me-downs.

No hand-me-downs, yeah. At least well laundered, please. Yeah. Take it to the dry cleaner. That's for sure. All right. I think we've killed it, gentlemen. Yeah, I think so. Nice attempt at a serious topic, though, Dave. I'll give you points. I know. Well, maybe next week.

That's two fur coins for you. There you go. All right. Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon. We started out with a segment called Shit Shower and Shave with Dave. What do you want? What do you want? We brought it full circle. We got serious in the middle. It was like a serious donut. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we got no new sign-ups this week. What's wrong with you people? Did you know that for just $3 a month, you can get the show early and in high res most of the time? Sometimes. Don't we make it? Usually. Usually. It's usually at least a little bit early, maybe half a day.

It's either half a day, anywhere between half a day and five minutes early. Depending on how much crap happens to me that day. Caveat emptor, but it's only $3 a month, and it keeps us going. And please, consider signing up over at Patreon. Patreon.com slash GOG.

And over at PayPal, we've got Levy, Jonathan, and Ralph. Over at the tip jar, we've got Christopher, Christian, and Jeff. All right. Light week. Light week. No reviews. Still no reviews. What the hell, guys? We're slowing down out there. Shower and Shave with Brian and Jason.

Coming soon. I'll do a second shout out to Anthony at notehost.ca slash heycafe. One of the reasons maybe we didn't get any PayPal or Patreon is my email crapped out at some point, but I contacted him really quick and he fixed it. So thank you so much for that. Appreciate it. All right.

Thanks, Anthony. And I have a weird one today. I found out that my old website, Spew, when we first met, I had two interns. I had Steve Lappin and Ward Bones. Steve, unfortunately, died during COVID. And I just found out Ward Bones, my other intern, died in 2022.

Nobody ever told me. That's sad news. It is sad news. It's very sad news. And in about next month will be the 30th anniversary of that website. Oh, my God. 30 years ago, I started that website with my girlfriend, Missy, in an apartment outside of Chicago.

Strange road since then. We are old. But can you believe that we were building websites 30 years ago? We're going to have to update our bios. 60 years of combined experience. Yeah, no doubt. That's terrifying. Oh, my God. Oh, speaking of people passing away, I forgot to put this in the show notes. Mojo Nixon.

No way. Oh, no. Mojo Nixon passed away this week. Mojo Nixon, Carl Weathers. It's been a poopy week. Yes, it is. Well, on that happy note, go check out patreon.com slash GOG. And until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Ryan Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 635. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment. Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is free and can be almost as good as cash. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans beyond the cool Discord channel, not the other one that Jason hangs out on.

Head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about. And 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.

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