639: TikTok MotherF#C&3R!

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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. I had my first Cybertruck sighting yesterday, Brian. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's uglier than I thought it was going to be. I've yet to see one in person, but what exactly did I write you yesterday when you told me?

I said, I mean, just from the pictures, it looks like a fucking prop that they made with no money at the very last season when they knew they were being canceled of the original Battlestar Galactica. That's what the thing looks like. Yeah. And I said it was a rejected design from Demolition Alley.

Yeah. It's about the same size because I don't know if you remember that Demolition Alley truck used to be on Cahuenga when you'd come over the hill towards Universal. I vaguely remember that, yeah. It was always there and I always wanted to buy it because it was for sale. Some guy in Texas ended up buying it. But anyway, I digress. The thing is fucking huge and ugly.

I saw the thing go by like this silver whale and I'm like, damn. Here's the other thing that struck me was I thought, you know, maybe there was going to be some kind of intrinsic value in seeing it in person to make it kind of pop and go, woo, neat.

No, it looks cheap. It looks absolutely cheap. It does. Yeah. I mean, just you can even tell from the photos. Like I can't wait for a sighting in the wild. I don't think there are any here in Toronto. But yeah, I don't know. But I did see yesterday that, you know, we were talking about Rivian because they fired a bunch of people and it looked pretty bad.

But they did an announcement, announced a couple of new cars. They look great. Oh, good. They look really nice. Like one of them is like kind of a hatchback. So, you know, it's like they're it looks a bit like a mini Countryman, but from the future. Ooh, neat. Might have to look into that if I make my way back to Los Angeles.

There you go. You better make your way back to Los Angeles. God damn it. We'll see. Election. Shut up. There is one less Cybertruck on the road because it did slam into the Beverly Hills Hotel sign. Fortunately, it missed the sign because the the the concrete encasement protected it.

But basically ripped off the wheels. I don't know that. I think Peter Thiel was driving the Cybertruck because any mention of who was actually driving it has been expunged from the Internet. Hulk Hogan was actually making a sex tape. Yeah, that's why he crashed.

Yeah. The Hulkster was getting a Hummer in a cyber. But the original reports say that it was a valet. And then, of course, Elon Musk has to stick his nose into everything saying, oh, the valet must have been surprised because it has more.

It's faster than a 9-11. Look, most valets aren't like from Ferris Bueller's Day off Elon. Yeah. Yeah. I've met many of the valets at the Beverly Hills Hotel because I used to go there for brunch. They're all very good guys and they know how to drive very fast cars.

But it doesn't matter because it turns out it wasn't one of the fucking valets. All right. So, that was just fake news. Fake news, Brian. Fake news. Okay. A lot of that about. Yeah. But what's not fake news is a study that comes out of the UK about the four-day workweek.

Not the four-hour workweek. That's in Ferris, Stan. This is the UK. They did the four-day workweek pilot. They did it for quite a bit of time with quite a few companies. And here's the deal. 61 organizations took part in the plan here.

So, at the conclusion of the test, here's what we got. The initiative continues to show significant positive outcomes. According to a comprehensive study involving qualitative research teams from several universities, employees have sustained improvements in physical and mental health, work-life balance, and overall life satisfaction.

Yeah, that's great. You'd figure that comes out of, you know. Yes, of course. You get to work less. I'm working a day less. This is awesome. Yeah, and you make the same amount of money. Fine. So, the pilot, which was aimed at reducing burnout without sacrificing job satisfaction, appears to have long-lasting effects beyond initial expectations.

Now, here's the kicker. Almost all participating companies have chosen to maintain the four-day workweek, confirming the benefits of this innovative work model. So, here's the deal. Out of the 61 companies that took part, at least 54 confirmed that they're going to keep to the policy.

That's 89%. Nice. So, 89% of those companies obviously did not see a reduction in profit from the move to the four-day workweek, right? Yep. So, here's an idea. Fuck UBI, all right?

Fuck universal basic income. We're going to blow this out of the water. Mm-hmm. How about now, if we found that we can have a company that worked for four days, still be profitable, well, what if we just doubled the staff? Then we just have, you know, rotating teams, four days on, three days off, and then there's like an overlap day?

We can hack the shit out of the workplace efficiency balance and actually make companies more profitable while employing more people and making everybody happier. How about that? Never going to work, Jason. Never going to work. Well, come on. I want my Nobel Prize right now. Give it to me. The thing is, it does work, which the study proves is just ain't nobody going to do it.

Well, I'm sorry, 89% of the companies are going to stick with it, so we're going to see how that goes. And I think from there, the fact that there are going to be offices empty three days a week, if people are still going back to the offices for these companies, it didn't really tell me if they were remote companies, hybrids, or all in office, you know, and what types of companies.

I didn't get that deep into the study, but still. I'm all for this. I think a four-day workweek hybrid is awesome. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And honestly, you get just as much done in four days, and you're happier. Easily, yeah. Yeah, less time on the TikTok. In the news.

Speaking of the TikTok, the U.S. House of Representatives are fast-tracking a vote next week on a legislation that would give China's ByteDance six months to divest from short video app TikTok or face a U.S. ban after a committee unanimously approved the measure on Thursday. We've obviously tried this before.

We do remember this. Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban the app in 2020, which it could have done except there was money at all. But they're going for it again. So why? Well, we don't really know. There were a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings about this.

A closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns about TikTok's Chinese ownership has seemed to have spurred this into action. I have heard things. I'm sure you have as well. I think this one's for real this time. It's not – I mean, obviously, I think we're concerned about where all of our U.S. data is going and all this information is going to.

But more importantly, I think a smoking gun was found about just proving that the Chinese are using this to destabilize our election process. And I think that's what's heading this. It does not surprise me in one – not at all.

No, not one bit. I don't think anybody is surprised by this. But the fact that they're actually going for this now and all of a sudden out of the blue tells me that they found something for sure. Yeah. Of course, waiting six months isn't that fucking useful. No. I don't know if anybody's got a calendar over there.

Yeah. Now, the funny thing would be is because Biden just had a TikTok account spun up not too long ago. Yep. What if that was the honeypot that they used to find what they were doing over there in China? Man, that would be some dark Brandon shit, wouldn't it? That would be. That would be some dark Brandon shit.

Cyber dark Brandon. I like it. Well, TikTok seems pretty worried about this. On Thursday, some TikTok users opened their apps and encountered this message. Speak up now before your government strips 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to watch shitty short-form videos. This will damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience.

Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote no. Now, okay, fine. You know, a lot of companies have done this when facing regulation. They, you know, basically like put up pages that said, you know, hey, go talk to your Congress people about this because it's not cool for us.

Um, so do that for me. And, uh, the difference with this one, you have no option to exit or swipe away. The only action is call now. And until you click it, it does not go away. Oh, that's, that's beautiful. Yeah.

That's beautiful. Good times. I, uh, personally, I would love to see TikTok band. I, I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do when my kid is old enough. Anyways, I want this shit gone. Yeah. No, my, my roommate is on it like for an hour every day.

That's like her. That's like nothing. I know. She's not even a power user. I know. But I get to hear what's, what's being played. Right. And it is bone chilling. The shit that she's getting shoved at, like just endless conspiracy theories in that fucking robot voice. And that stuff is so easy to make.

I just thought about doing it just to, just to, you know, fuck around with her and start putting in TikTok videos with the just craziest shit. Cause that's what, that's already there though. I, you know, to get through that noise would be incredibly hard. Yeah. Unless you, unless you're Chinese. Yeah. Unless you're the Chinese government, then you can get right through.

Yes. Or if you've read this next article that I found on 404 media called inside the world of TikTok spammers and the AI tools that enable them. This is a fantastic article that goes really deep on the people who are basically just, you know, weaponizing TikTok for financial gain on this, for this one.

And I have to recommend the podcast that goes with it. They, they have a sister podcast and they, where they go behind the scenes on the article. And it's hilarious listening to these scammers are basically scamming each other. So it is turned into an Ouroboros of scams that there are, there are guides on how to sell guides, to make money off of selling guides to the people who want to buy the guides to do the thing.

It's hilarious. God bless late stage capitalism. Yeah. And these are all on paid discord channels, surprisingly. Wow. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of that going on, but you, I mean, it's a, it's a longish article, but it has lots and lots of detail. So I highly recommend getting a cup of coffee, kicking back and reading this.

And if you, if it's behind the paywall, pay the people. 404 media is phenomenal. And they, I gladly give them my 10 bucks every month. Very cool. Well, I mean, I know you've been on and off Facebook a lot or basically any of the meta apps. I don't know. Have you ever been locked out and unable to get back in?

Has that ever happened to you? Absolutely. Yes, it has. It's impossible. Right. It's, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work. And finally, what you have to do is find somebody who knows somebody. That's how it, what it comes down to. Yeah. And I mean, just that, that's a more extreme example, but we've been complaining about how there's no customer service at all anywhere.

Right. Like you used to go to Twitter, but now everybody just ignores it because, oh, well, gee, I wonder why. Because the head of Twitter got rid of his entire customer service department and just does poop emojis. Gee, shocking. So everybody's kind of given up on this. Well, a group of 41 state attorneys general are demanding that Meta step up and support services for users who have been victims of hacks and ad account takeovers and been locked out of their accounts.

I basically put this article in for this one sentence. We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company. The group writes in a letter addressed to Meta's chief legal officer, which is kind of true. So they're basically saying you need to invest in this.

You need to have customer service for this. We are tired of people writing us because Reddit, on Reddit, that's basically what they're telling people to do. You have no option unless you know somebody to get any help from the company whatsoever. And for people who haven't known anybody, they are going to their local state law enforcement.

Yeah. Or the FBI. Yeah. And they've been able to actually help more than often because, you know, you're either going to listen to somebody, you know, or when the government comes calling, you go, okay, we'll take care of Jane Doe's account now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how that subpoena power actually works.

But yeah, it's, I mean, think about it this way too. It's like, it's kind of hard to do a customer service department when 3 billion people are your customers and there's only 4 billion people left to actually hire to do that. Hmm. That's true. But, you know, they got to do something.

They got to do something. It's ridiculous. No, it's ridiculous. And here's the funny part. As soon as I heard this, I'm thinking, hmm, I'm wondering how I can game that department once that gets spun up to actually use them to take over other people's accounts to say that I was hacked and actually get somebody else's account.

Because you know that's going to happen. Of course that's going to happen. Yes. It's all crap now. Well, initially this was looking like it was going to be the lawsuit episode, but we kind of breaking news, pushed it down a little bit. But let's enter into lawsuit land now, Jason. The EU has fined Apple nearly $2 billion, well, $1.95 billion in U.S. dollars, for restricting alternative music streaming apps on the App Store.

It's the EU's first fine for Apple and it's its third largest ever announced. This is not Aka change, although Apple is a trillion dollar. Let me start doing the math on that. Kind of might be. I mean, it's a lot of coffee, but it's still coffee money. Yeah. So this is following an investigation opened in 2020 following Spotify's filed complaint alleging Apple took steps to suppress the music service due to competition with iTunes and Apple Music.

The commission has announced that Apple bans music streaming app developers from fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app and from providing any instructions about how to subscribe to such offers. To which I kind of say, is it really that hard? We all know Spotify exists.

Yeah, but it still doesn't matter. It's the principle of the thing. Well, I know. And we've been dancing around this since Microsoft released the first version of Windows. Mm-hmm. You know, it's their thing. It's their package. They put on their preferred software apps. It's really not that hard to find other things.

But I agree. You shouldn't be doing this. So, well, and so the EU thinks so as well. So hence the $2 billion line. Yep. And I think it's going to get worse because the Epic Apple fight is back on.

Back on big time. Yeah. So, TLDR here. You know, we all know the story of Apple and Epic already with the lawsuits about the store and the percentages and all that crap, which, you know, kind of goes into the DMA where we have these new stores coming online in the EU.

Well, as – and the eve of everything opening up and unicorns flying out of, you know, Tim Cook's butt and everybody getting along happy. Well, Apple decided to say F you again to Epic and shut down their developer account because the head of Epic made a tweet.

Tim Cook kind of did a musk here. He totally pulled a musk here. Don't you say – you said that? Oh, really? Now I'm going to bitch slap you. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Let me pull out my $3 trillion cock and whack you in the face with it is basically what he did.

Except – except the people at the EU are not very happy about this. EU Commissioner Terry Bretton says, under the DMA, there is no room for threats by gatekeepers to silence developers. I have asked our services to look into Apple's termination of Epic's developer account as a matter of priority.

All right. So, yes. So they might be fined a few more billion dollars if they keep this crap up. So this is an ongoing story. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think Apple thought that they were going to pull a mic drop on Epic, but it turns out – I don't think it's going to turn out the way they think it is.

No, I don't think this one's going to – I don't think this – the odds will never be in Tim's face. So we'll see how that's going to go. Now more lawsuits. This one – this one – I just love this one. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI over AI and the word open because when Elon came along, he said, ah, this is going to be open.

Let's do it. Whee! And at the beginning, even when OpenAI was founded, you and I were scratching our heads on the show. We're like, wait a minute. Didn't Elon last week sign something that said AI is terrible and is going to destroy the world?

Oh, yes. That's right. He did. What did he do this week? Oh, he invested in an AI company. Hmm. Interesting. Hmm. Interesting. Yes. So Elon is basically saying that OpenAI is now just a subsidy of Microsoft and that the profit motive has driven them off the rails.

Kind of sounds like X. Yeah. OpenAI and Sam Altman said, hold my beer. And then they said, but his emails, but his emails, would you like to see them? So they've basically come back and said, here are all the emails that Elon sent that said, hey, we're going to have to be for profit.

So his lawsuit is trash and make it go away. So we're going to see how this plays out. But OpenAI has just said, fuck you. I mean, literally, that's that's that was kind of like, you know, Biden in the old debate. Oh, shut up, man. It's basically the same thing.

So in this case, I'm on Sam Altman's side. Me too. And OpenAI's side. I think it's I think it's just a stupid, frivolous lawsuit where Elon is still trying to put roadblocks in the way. So OpenAI. So so him and his grok can get a little bit of a leg up.

Yeah. As far as I can tell, nobody uses. Except Elon. Except Elon. Yeah. Well, since we opened up the Elon hole, we did get a bit of listener feedback. Don wrote in. Enjoy the podcast, but have some listener feedback. A few shows ago, you were going off on Elon Musk about something.

You said something to the effect of him being a drug addict. First, I don't know anything about his drug habits, except that he likes psychedelics. Second, I don't like Elon Musk myself, but I don't think it's helpful to disparage people who may be addicted to substances, legal or not. People who are addicted to drugs are just people with a health problem.

Trash talk him for being a dick, not for his possible health problems. The hypocrisy is thick when you read off an ad for THC products in the same show. For what it's worth, I do enjoy edibles myself. Okay. First, his dabbling with recreational drugs is documented in depth.

It's no secret. It's not being outed by any means from getting stoned on a podcast with Rogan to ketamine. There is no doubt about this. Psychedelics is a new one to me, but given his relationship with Grimes, that doesn't seem too surprising. I just haven't seen that documented. I myself may have dabbled in some of these things.

Also worth pointing out that THC oils and whatnot have no active compounds, but that's a different story. I have nothing but utmost empathy and respect for people struggling with addiction, but there is a great deal of difference between my, say, cousin or friend or even myself struggling with addiction versus somebody with a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of one publicly traded company, Tesla, and as the CEO of five other companies which employ thousands of people whose livelihood depend on it.

With great power comes great responsibility. You should be held to a higher standard. Agreed. And I put a link in the show notes to Elon Musk's drug habits, so you can go check that out. That came out before our rant on it, calling him a drug addict, because it was in the Wall Street Journal.

So we put a link to a different one because the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall. So, and speaking on disparaging people who are drug addicts and that ilk, I am 429 days sober. I'm going through, like, addiction recovery. I can say whatever the fuck I want about Elon.

Sorry. That's the way it goes. I am in active recovery. I spend three hours a day on this stuff. I can call him out for being whatever the fuck he is because it says it in the press. So we're going with that. But that's neither here nor there or anywhere. What it really comes down to is exactly what you said, Brian.

He is the CEO of a publicly traded company. He's also the CEO of a company that is beholden to NASA, which has very strict rules and regulations about drug use and the things that they shoot, I don't know, into fucking space. And he has broken those rules.

So that is what gets my goat on the whole thing. He should not – he should be removed from the boards of those companies if he wants to keep smoking the wacky to wacky. Yeah, he can do whatever he wants. By the way, legal. If he wants to go – it's legal. But it's legal, but it's also not legal to drive a car.

It's probably not legal to launch a rocket into space while you're high. NASA, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, I know. That's the whole point about this thing. It's not what he's doing. It's the position he's in as somebody who is doing it. If he wants to go fucking party in Ibiza and all that sort of stuff, fine.

Take a leave of absence from all your companies. I think it's Ibiza. Yeah, I know. I hate people who say Barcelona too. Barcelona. All right. Well, Klarna, CEO, says, hey, I can do the job of seven – I think it's Klarna.

Klarna. Klarna. No, it's Larna. The K is silent. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So they're canning – or the AI that they have can do the work of 700 customer service agents. Well, send them over to Benna. Yeah, they need them over there. So maybe Klarna needs to get in bed with Llama and then they can all work together.

You and me? Yeah. So, yeah, they're going to be knocking off a bunch of people because it turns out that if you go look at the stats in the article, the AI is actually doing way better than the people are. That's not surprising at all. No. The people are working off of an outdated handbook.

They don't make any decisions or think. Or generally speak the language natively. That's true, too. For the most part. Yeah. There's a couple links in the show notes about this. There's another one called How Klarna Uses AI on Ben's Bytes. A great newsletter I highly recommend subscribing to.

But, yeah, check it out. They've got the numbers there. It's ridiculous how much faster the AI is doing it. Customers now resolve their issues in less than two minutes, a stark improvement from the previous 11 minutes from a human. So, yeah. Yeah. We're not saying they're getting great customer service.

We're just saying they're getting adequate customer service in a faster time. Well, back to lawsuits. A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agaral, are suing Elon Musk and Hex over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits because their big, fat cushions weren't enough.

But I agree. Get the money that you're owed out of these people. So, yeah. Elon Musk had basically – they're just not paying the severance. He bought the company. He fired them all immediately. He tried to get out of paying them. He tried to say it was for just cause and all this other stuff, but basically it's going to go to court as it should.

Yeah. Pay up. Yeah. I mean it's disgusting that Agaral is entitled to $57.4 million in severance benefits. Yeah. Somebody was getting paid a little too much. You think? I can see why Elon is a little peeved at that. Yeah. I mean it is ridiculous the amounts of money, especially when you think about how well Twitter was doing.

It's just – why are you getting paid that much? Yeah, that's the point. I mean it's no WeWork situation or even What's-Her-Face from Yahoo, our favorite executive that got paid gazillions of dollars to run a company into a ground. Yeah. What are you going to do? Well, here's what you're going to do.

You're going to sell all your data to AI scrapers. Tumblr and WordPress are now going to be selling all of your datas who belong to them to any AI company that wants to give them the cash. This is – I haven't been able to find out anything about this in the past couple of days.

It seems to have kind of died down in the news. But yeah, basically if you have a Tumblr account or a WordPress.com account, they will not be – if you have a self-install WordPress, they won't be scraping it. Although, someone did say that, well, if you're using Jetpack, they might be.

Yeah, because they kind of access everything then. Yeah, they have access to everything. If you're using the WordPress Jetpack backup, they're going to literally have your entire site over there. They're going to be rolling out, of course, an opt-out option. Not an opt-in, of course. No, not an opt-in, an opt-out.

And they say – they say that if your data has been previously scraped, they will let the provider know that you would like to opt-out. It does not mean that anything is going to happen after that point. They're just going to say, hey, Joe over here doesn't want to opt-in anymore. Ha-ha!

Okay, see you later. Yeah. Yeah. Well, going back to the Apple lawsuit about the different music apps, there's another proposed class-action lawsuit coming that is accusing Apple of monopolizing cloud storage for its devices. They're basically saying if you don't use their iCloud, they make it very difficult for you to use anything else.

And this one I actually 100% agree with because iPhone and iPad users have the option to store certain types of files with non-Apple cloud storage providers, but not all. You still need iCloud for app data and device settings. Only iCloud has permission to host those.

So you are stuck 100% using iCloud. Yeah, yeah. You can't use that stuff – you can't use Dropbox with that. Nope, you cannot. Well, there you go. So I think $2 is going to be coming to us soon, Jason. I don't know, man. The way Apple's going, I don't think they're going to have $2 left. I'm sure, though.

I think they're going to be okay. I'm guessing. I'm guessing. The funny thing is even if they open the App Store, let anybody do apps, if they just shut everything down and said, hey, it's the Wild West, like, I don't know, on my computer that I bought from Apple that works just fine with everybody's software, I bet they would do okay.

Yeah, I think so too. They would still be okay because everybody would just go, oh, I guess I can just use iCloud. There's another one that I can try. That one sucked. So I'll just go back to iCloud. You know what they should just do? Invest in iCloud and make it not suck so fucking much. That would be nice.

That would be nice. I don't know why it takes five minutes to log into it every single time I have to log out because you still haven't fixed message and writing Android and it just craps out every now and then. And why is it that every other week when I log into my messages on my computer that I'm logged out and I can't log back in, period, without three reboots?

Yep. In a, you know, P-RAM zapper too. Jesus. Remember when you had to zap the P-RAM? Oh gosh, yes. I zapped that P-RAM often. Yeah, the four-finger salute. I love this next one. Just from the title alone, Google launches $5 million prize to find actual uses for quantum computers.

Hey guys, we're spending a lot of money building these things. Yeah. What are we going to do with them? But it's quantum, man. It sounds cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Google has shacked up with XPRIZE and they're going to basically try and figure out how to use these things in the future.

It's literally what it says on the tin. They're trying to come up with algorithms that will have like some net beneficial use to humanity, not just TikTok, not just quantum talk. I'm sure it's going to speed up the blockchain, you know, the thing that was going to change the whole world. Don't even get me started on the fucking blockchain.

Oh, wait. We're about to. We got two stories coming next. You know what? Let me just get started on the blockchain. Never mind. Google, good luck with you. Good luck with you. OpenSea's partnership with Coachella is a sign that NFTs can be more than profile pictures. Actually, to me, it's a sign that Coachella's jumped the shark.

No shit, brother. In a groundbreaking move, OpenSea has joined forces with Coachella, leading the charge in showcasing the evolving utility of NFTs beyond just digital profile pictures. I'd like to know how this is groundbreaking, because this is one of the first things that people tried to do with NFTs.

Brian, Brian, wait. Groundbreaking. This partnership heralds the launch of three unique NFT collections that bridge the virtual with the physical, offering exclusive VIP experiences and merchandise for the iconic music and arts festival. The first collection dubbed the VIP Plus Plus Oasis Lounge Keepsake, this is hard, has already hit the market priced at $1,499 each and limited to 1,000 NFTs, granting holders

special access to the 2024 festival and additional exclusive perks. Well, you better keep it limited, because the fucking whole point of a VIP area is it's limited. Well, there's 1,000 people going to be in this VIP area, so it ain't that fucking limited. The toilets are still going to be broken and crappy.

Yeah. You know, basically, I have an idea, and it's kind of an idea that has come before. Sell them a pass and a badge. That worked pretty well. Wristbands. I've still got my collection of VIP Coachella wristbands.

They worked really well. They did work really well, didn't they? Mm-hmm. So if my phone died because I'm out in the middle of the sun all day, hanging, doing drugs with Elon and dancing to Grimes, and my phone dies, and I can't pull up my QR code or my pretty NFT bobble to get into the VIP area, do I just have to pee myself right there in line?

What's going to happen there? Come on. Well, let's talk about another stunning use of blockchain and how it's changed the whole world. The crypto community took a victory lap on Tuesday with the news that the price of Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $69,210. Woo!

Well, then they got a little more depressed when the value dropped a full 8% just a few hours later, but it marked a stunning recovery from the crypto crash of 2022. So, of course, Bitcoin's rally was evidence for BitBros and that cryptocurrency is a good investment, but there's just one problem with that.

Math. Okay. Adjusted for inflation, Bitcoin is actually worth less than it was three years ago. So, let's do the math. The last time Bitcoin broke records was on November 10th, 2021, when the price of one Bitcoin hit $68,982.20.

But perhaps you've heard about skyrocketing inflation over the past few years. When you adjust for inflation using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that's about $76,544.11 in today's dollars. In other words, when Bitcoin hit its most recent peak, it was worth $7,334 less than it was in 2021.

Okay. That's a difference of about 9.6%. So, it did not hit an all-time high. Great. Do you think that's going to stop the BitBros from GMing the Twitter feeds every day? Nope. Nope. Not at all. Oh, now, here's another one that had me scratching my head.

Scientists warn dimming the sun is simply too dangerous. Well, thank God. I was about to hit the button. I know. I got this little dial on my wall here. It's in my cyber truck. It's right next to the windshield wipers. Yeah.

So, basically, there's a very long article that say, yeah, unintended consequences could be really bad, guys. Like, really bad. Who even threw out this idea? Unbelievable. Like, we have the ability to do this. Well, we kind of do, which is the scary part.

Well, yeah, but that's going to kill us all. Well, yeah, no, there's a lot of other things that are going to kill us all first, Brian. Oh, thanks. A cheery episode as per usual. Woo!

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Media Candy. Brian, have you been checking out Constellation? I actually watched the first episode last night. And what did you think? I really liked it. I thought the effects were top-notch. I thought the acting was fantastic.

And it's certainly an intriguing premise. I'm looking forward to watching more. All right. They're up to episode five. I'm halfway through that, and I fell asleep. I had a long day. Now, it wasn't the quality of the show. It was actually pretty good. I was just so damn tired. Yeah. No, it looks like a really good show.

So, I'm definitely, I'm up for it. I'm breaking my means to have three seasons rule. But, you know, it's the Apple shows. They pour the money in. So, why not? Yeah. God, if they can keep Foundation on the air for this long, why not? Yeah. Unfortunately, I had a Dune 2 fail this week.

We wanted to go see it in IMAX. Apparently, kids go to IMAX movies a lot now because they were all sold out. Oh, all right. Yeah. We were going to go check it out on Wednesday, and we went, like, Tuesday night, we're checking, oh, let's go get some tickets. And then it's like, oh, wait a minute. They're all sold out.

Yeah. I want to go in and see it. I just don't know when I'm going to get a chance because my wife is not interested, and it's certainly not an appropriate movie for a seven-year-old. So, it's got to be some time I can actually get to a theater alone. So, we'll see about that. We'll sneak out to one of those midnight showings.

Right. You're an old man. You don't do past midnight, I'm guessing. No. Not anymore. Not when I have to be up at 6 a.m. No, thank you. Yeah. No, thank you. No sandworms worth that much trouble. But speaking of cancellations, The Brothers Soon has been canceled by Netflix after just one season.

That's a bummer because I actually really did enjoy the show. You know, it's on my list to get into. I got that, and Shogun is on that list. I think that'd be a fun one, too. But, yeah, and here's the thing. This thing was in the top 10 of English language series, and if that can't make it on Netflix, then what's the fucking point?

I'm wondering if they just had trouble booking everybody. You know what I mean? Like, Michelle Yao, she's busy. She's a busy woman, yeah. It could have just been like, you know what? We're not going to be able to line everybody up again for this for, like, five more years, so we're done. And, you know, even as we watched the last episode, my wife and I both kind of looked at each other and went, you know, if that's it, we're okay with that.

Wouldn't mind more. But if that's it, that's fine. Oh, good. Okay, that's worth watching then. Yeah, totally. It wraps up a show. Like, it's done. They could do more if they wanted to, but it certainly was self-contained. Oh, good, good. Oh, that makes me happy because I was kind of bummed that I was going to pull the Schulmeister and bail on it.

But, no, if it does wrap up well enough, then cool. It does. Go for it. You're not going to be disappointed. Okay, great, great. Another thing that puts me in a happy mood is Crime Scene Kitchen has been renewed for a third season by Fox. Okay. I'm a simple man now, Brian.

You do like these shows. Shows like Crime Scene Kitchen actually make me very, very happy. I don't know why. You know, I do have brain damage, so, you know, your mileage may vary. Just saying. I don't know. You know, it doesn't explain for me because I'm kind of the same way.

Not those shows. I like the actual cooking ones, but I can throw on the Food Network on their Saturday and Sunday morning programming and just watch for hours. It makes me very happy. All right. We are old. That's the way it goes. Shauna Ruan, Discord hat tip for this one.

The Fallout trailer came for the Prime video series. It looks pretty good. All right. I'm not a huge fan of the game Fallout. I just think the mechanics piss me off. But this actually looks pretty good and pretty funny. So enjoy watching that with the ads that they now interject because you're paying for the service.

Maybe I'll just go to Sweden. Fuck them. I won't feel bad. I pay for, you know, Prime already. So, hey. You paid for that content if you get it somewhere that doesn't have ads. Whatever. I should actually join the class action lawsuit because I'm going to have to pay for bandwidth to circumvent their shitty ads.

That's right. Yeah. And the time involved. They can charge my hourly rate for watching their TV show. Fuckers. Nice. But anyway, it comes out April 11th. That's all I want to say. All right. More streaming news on that. Warner Brothers Discovery plans to join Netflix and Disney in preventing max users from sharing their passwords with friends and family who don't live in the primary household.

As per usual, there is actually no real information about how they're going to do it or what options will be available, but they will start a crackdown later this year. The funny thing is that this is a thing. Yeah. This all started because Netflix actually stepped on their dick at the beginning saying, we don't mind if you share your passwords.

Yeah. Which was stupid. It was dumb because then people who hadn't been doing it started. Uh-huh. They got together with their friends. Yeah, I just assumed that they'd had, you know, some kind of password protection locked out on it. So I never did it until they said, hey, we're okay with it.

I'm like, here you go. You know? Yep. I'd be more bothered by it if I didn't think within the next year or two that there's basically going to be two to three services and that's it because they're all going to consolidate. But, you know, whatever. Yep. Apps and doodads.

All right, Brian, we're going to start off with a Steam game today. Okay. Yeah, you're going to be right up here for this one. They got this one from Dataplex on Discord. It's a big hat tip there. It's called Epstein. Okay. And here's the description. Survive a mysterious island and thwart the sinister plans of Jeffrey in Epstein.

Battle the blood-dependent Morbidors and forge alliances with other survivors to confront Jeffrey in his grand temple. Master survival tactics and strategic gameplay in this intense adventure. Bravo. Now, here's what would get me to actually play this game.

You should be able to play as Donald Trump or Prince Andrew. Bill Gates. Or Bill Gates. Now, if they did that, I'm in. That would be funny. That would be funny. The thing about it is it looks terrible.

It looks like a horrible game. Of course. It's, you know, but I just kudos to the developer for the effort involved. Yes, very clever. Very funny. Yep. And I've been diving back into drafts this week. I've been using it for a lot of different things. Just, you know, real quick note-taking and things like that.

But I saved the stories that I read on this show every week using Reader and the Read Later feature. And then I was using Pinboard as well and drafts to capture all these things in three different places. So it was a slog at the end of the day to go try and find the stories to reread to put in the show notes.

So I've decided to just use drafts for all of it now because drafts has really good capture tools, I found out. It's kind of what it's really good for. So I found the bookmarklet this morning that works in Chrome and Brave and Chromium-based browsers, basically, that work with your drafts account.

I have drafts pro, so I don't know if it works for the free version or not. And it has turned out to be much easier at the end of the day to just look at this list of links and have it categorized and flip through them and then put them in the notes or dump them. It's just – it's been a godsend. And just, you know, taking away – I canceled my Pinboard account because it's like it's 2024.

Who needs a fucking Pinboard account? I probably still have one somewhere. Well, I didn't even know that I had mine anymore except it – you might want to check because they auto-renew and don't tell you. Of course. The only reason mine canceled is because the credit card that I had had been fraud-flagged for something else.

So they're like, hey, your Pinboard account's expired. I'm like, okay, good. Good. Thanks. Preach, buddy. So drafts has been great for that. And the other reason I was really getting into it too is because I was been digging into Ghost, the publishing platform.

And I am extraordinarily impressed with Ghost, I have to say. I looked into it briefly as a WordPress replacement for my work. And I was really impressed by it too. It's a solid system. Well, yeah. It's a solid system because it can replace a blog. It can do a Substack-style newsletter, paid.

And it can do a Patreon replacement for podcasts. But can it do NFTs, Jason? I actually think it might be able to. I think it can. I think it can too. But the nice part about it is it's one payment. So if you're going to be like a – if we decided to do Patreon, we'd have to pay like $300 for the whole year.

But we keep all of the money. There's no percentage on top of that that they take. You still have to pay the Stripe, you know, fee, which is not nearly as much. And since Patreon has kind of jumped the shark and started charging exorbitant prices for absolutely no service, besides canceling your users when Patreon fucks up.

When they screw up, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No. So Ghost is really, really piquing my interest. So I started a new blog on Ghost. Yes, I started a blog, Brian. Okay. From the old days. It's over at jpd.me. You can sign up and – I hope you're not writing daily tech updates.

No, I'm not writing daily tech updates. Go fuck yourself. I'm just trying to save you the trouble again. No, I'm not doing that anymore. No, no, no. Unless there's a big paycheck involved with it and a staff, then I will do anything daily again. But if you're not going to bit near me, give me a staff and give me a paycheck, then no.

No way. It's silly. Silly. So, yeah, I'm just – I'm loving Ghost so far. But, yeah, check out the new blog, jpd.me. All Ghost powered. And you can even sign up with – I didn't even know it was going to be a thing, but you sign up for an email newsletter. It will send you an email when it comes out.

It's like front and center. Nice. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Now, the other thing that I've got this week, I've been beta testing this behind the scenes. It's called Clean My Phone from our good friends at MacPaw. All right. And I used to use Gemini to go and try and clear up duplicates and things like that, except I had a couple instances where Gemini just didn't really work that good and deleted a bunch of stuff.

So I've been using it very sparingly. And when Clean My Phone came out, it has a really beautiful declutterer and deduper. And it will actually look for blurry photos, kind of similar photos, actual duplicate photos. I cleaned off 13 gig of dupes, just pure dupes off my phone.

That there alone is worth the price of admission, you know. Very cool. It does come with a speed tester, too, which I don't know why. Why not? You can check your internet speed in there as well. But it also has some AI organization tools in there that are, I think, getting – I think that's going to come with time.

But the actual cleanup storage is the hero of this app. And it is well worth it. I don't actually know how much it is because since I've been beta testing it. But as soon as my beta expires and I have to go buy it, I'm going to get it right away. So link in the show notes. Check it out. All right.

Definitely will check that out. I mean, Clean My Mac is a staple. So I'd love to have one for the phone. Yeah. And if you want to get Clean My Mac, check the link for Set App in the show notes as well because you can get Clean My Mac with your Set App account. So there you go. There you go. At the library.

So, Brian, I forgot another book last week that I was meant to add to my list of shit that I'm reading. The Bezel came out from Cory Doctorow. This is the second in the Marty Hench series. I read the first book in the Hench series before and I reviewed it for the show and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I thought it was probably Cory's best bit of fiction so far. So this one, I did the Kickstarter to buy the audio book read by Will fucking Wheaton, of course, which works. He actually did a really good job in the last one. He's getting less annoying to me, mainly because he's not in every single book that I listen to.

It's a real kick in the nuts when a Doctorow comes out, a Scalzi comes out, and any other random sci-fi comes out, and they're all read by Will Wheaton. What world am I in? I know, exactly. I mean, it's hard to know. We get universe creep already, you know, just from trying to keep the story straight.

But when the same person is reading the stories, it drives me crazy. So I started it, but yeah, working my way through it. I did finish Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which I've been talking about for a couple weeks on the show.

It's actually a short read, and it is what it says on the tin. It's all about slow productivity. I mean, it's Cal. He does what he does, you know? So if you're into that kind of – if you're into Cal Newport stuff with deep work and now slow productivity, I highly recommend it.

If you already, you know, practice that stuff, it's a nice refresher on how to just slow the fuck down and actually get deep into an idea, which is why I partially started the blog. So I can have a place to put all this stuff that I've been thinking and writing and, you know, basically talking to myself in a dark room.

Now I get to talk to myself in a dark room, but everybody gets to see. So there you go. Right. I ended up reading – well, I had finished one of the first Contact series books by Peter Cowderan for the last episode, and because I had finished it, and then I got super lazy, and I went to Amazon to try to find a new book to read, and I was just like, goddammit, I'm too lazy to find anything right now.

He's got 20-some-odd of these. I'll just do another one. Brian, you're not supposed to do that. That's why we made the rule. Well, that's for books that, like, are linear though, right? They're continuations. This is just the same author. They're all different. It doesn't matter, man. You've got to break it up.

Well, I know. I should have, and I broke my rule. But sometimes rules are made to be broken, Jason. Okay. Okay. Well, what about – why didn't you read the second part of that last one that we were going through? Because it's not out yet. Oh. Well, that would be a good reason not to. I didn't know it was out yet. That was the first thing that I attempted to go do, and then I realized it's not out until, like, June, I think.

So we've got to wait a moment for that one. Oh, good. I can take my time. I'll put that one at the back of the list then. I thought I had another one on deck for that. Okay. No, no. That's – God, what was that book called now? Infinity Gate? Infinity's Gate, yeah. So the second one is not out yet.

So I will get that. I preordered it so just magically appear when it's ready. So I did read another Peter Cowderan book from the first Contact series. I read The Art of War. I think it might be one of my favorite ones so far. It was very enjoyable. I mean, these are just, like, popcorn, you know, work through them within a week books, and they're fantastic.

About how many – like, 270, 300-ish? Yeah, around there. Yeah. And just, you know, it's not, like, deep thought reading, so you burn through it pretty quick. Right. But it's not a short story. No, they're not short stories. They're books. Okay. Okay, I was – that's why I was – there's so many of them.

I thought maybe he was doing, like, you know, just medium to short stories on them. No, they're full-on books. I mean, they're no Neal Stephensons, but they're books. Who is? Who is? And then I put in this article about Kara Swisher's book tour because Burn Book came out.

And I was trying to figure out – I was trying to cut this article down to size to be able to read it, but there are so many good zingers in here and explanations that I gave up. And I'm just going to leave the link in the show notes and say if you sometimes question Kara Swisher's journalistic integrity, this article is for you.

I'm looking out – I'm just – I'm glancing at some of these and it's like, ooh. Yeah. Now, don't get me wrong. I still enjoy Pivot. I like my Kara. I can only take my Kara Swisher with a healthy shake and seasoning from Scott Galloway. I can't take her by herself.

But this author of this article makes some really good points. I tried to listen to the last two Pivots and I didn't know she had the book out and then it just started off with – Well, it's all self-promotion right now. It's all self-promotion. All she's doing is promoting her book. Yeah. So I will wait to listen to Pivot when they get back to actual stories and she's done with this.

Why? Skip it. It's not worth it. I like it. I like Scott. But I don't like Scott by himself either. There's something about their combo. See, their combo has just gotten too contentious for me. It just makes me feel like an abused child watching their alcoholic parents argue. It's just no fun.

Okay. It's no fun. I still enjoy it.

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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. Hello, Dave. How you feeling?

I am feeling much better, thank you. I had a little flirtation with the COVID there. Yeah, I was going to say, how was that little cold that you thought you had? Well, turns out, turns out, yeah. So, I tested, I guess, Saturday morning.

We record on Friday afternoons. And I thought I had a bit of a chest cold. Tested on Saturday morning. And sure enough, it was COVID. You could have gotten us all sick. I know. What the hell? You're supposed to stay home from work when you have COVID. I know, I know.

I'm a rascal. But, yeah. So, Saturday was my worst day of just being sick. Saturday and then through that night. But I did get on the Paxlovid, which I will say, compared to my first round of COVID, this was my second time, would not recommend.

Zero stars. The Paxlovid, I think, did accelerate the recovery. If nothing else, it motivated me to get better because of the horrible metallic taste in my mouth. But, pro tip, York peppermint patties are quite good at fighting the metallic taste in your mouth.

God, I haven't had one of those in years. I know what I'm buying later. Yeah. No, just pop one in your mouth and just let it sit there for a while and it'll fight that metallic taste. But, anyway, I'm feeling much better. I do have, at the end of our segment here, I'm going to share.

I'm going to share with you guys a funny experience I went through while I was bored out of my gourd, being sick for several days, and the Facebook rabbit hole I went down. So, stay tuned for that. All right. Okay. Well, Steve wrote in, hi, guys.

I plan to leave a more thought-out message someday, but I had to make sure you all caught the February 29th Cyber Wire. Check out the little bit on piracy towards the end of the podcast. I'm sure Dave didn't have anyone in mind as he uttered those lines. It's regards a 10-year, younger, but ever grumpy geek.

To which Dave, I say, challenge accepted. Okay. So, I saw this in the show notes. And first of all, I had to go back to the February 29th Cyber Wire because that's like 400 shows ago. Yeah, exactly. And Steve could be on to something here.

I would say, I would say probably Jason crossed my mind. I think I was also thinking of my oldest son who has a very, you know, you're not going to tell me what to do kind of attitude towards life.

But Steve, very observant of you, and you got me. Yeah, I listened to that too. And I was like, okay. Very funny. So, a little Star Wars news here.

I didn't quite understand the title of the article. It says, Andor will soon give you the most politically tense sequence in Star Tours. Well, I'm not a reader this week, so I'll put it in here for you guys. I just saw that Ahsoka and the Mandalorian are going to be joining Star Tours, so I thought that was kind of cool.

I'm very excited about that. I do wish you could pick which one you got when you went on the ride. It's random, so you don't know what you're going to get. Well, well. Okay. We've discussed this. Insider tips coming soon. We've discussed this one, yeah. Yeah. So, if you sidle up to the ride operator, strike up a conversation.

But I don't like talking to people. Their staff, Brian, you can talk down to them. I don't know how to help you then. Just because you're a hacking humans guy, and you've sorted out all this engineering, human engineering. This is how I get what I want in life.

So, you sidle up to the ride operator and strike up a conversation and ask them, God, golly, gee, how much control do you actually have over this thing? Is it totally random? And then they will tell you, oh, no, it can be random, but if I want to, I can control it.

And then they'll get a gleam in their eye, and they'll lean in, and they'll whisper, and they'll say, where would you like to go today? And they'll say, oh, I'd like to go to Kashyyyk today. And they'll smile and nod. And sure enough, you get on the ride, and to Kashyyyk you shall go.

All right. Well, we are planning a trip to Disneyland when we go back to LA over the summer. And rather than myself, I figure I might have a better chance if I coach my son up and send the seven-year-old to the ride operator to request a flight then. I think it's a good idea. Yeah. Okay.

Well, exciting. I like the ride. I like the fact that they're continuing to add new things to it. That's great. I do, too. I'm not terribly excited about Andor, to be honest, in terms of, but I'm sure they'll make a good ride out of it. No, but it keeps this ride fresh. And the only thing I wish is that you could, there was an option to ride the original.

Oh, is it completely gone? It's completely gone, yeah. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I think I rode it 8,000 times. Yes. Yeah. I have it pretty much memorized. But even if it, like, one in a hundred times, it just randomly came up or something, that would be delightful.

Well, I don't think they can anymore, because they took out the original robot and put in C-3PO, right? So none of it would really make sense. That's true. Yeah. Max is over living in Galaxy's Edge at the bar. He's a DJ now. Yeah. How the mighty have fallen.

Well, I mean, after that trip. Well, he got a demotion after the trip. I mean, you're not keeping him on salary after that. I don't know. Generally, they fail upwards, don't they? Yeah, probably. It's funny. I've only ridden that ride maybe in my entire life eight times, and I still, I remember every little bit of it, so.

I think I rode it eight times the first time I was there. Oh, I know I did, because they had a 40-hour, the park stayed open for 40 hours straight when they first opened the ride, and I had skipped out of my parents' house. One of the only times I got grounded in my youth, and we went for like 20 hours, and I think I went on it at least eight times.

Wow. Good times. Yeah. Yeah. I put this in the show notes mainly for you, Dave. I'm not going to read it out. We can maybe put it in the show notes, but Neloy wrote in with a far more in-depth explanation of wavelengths and what our phones can admit, and kind of backing you up a little bit and taking a little side slam at Sebastian, who wrote in last week.

Take it to Discord, guys. Come on. Yeah. Maybe it's that Sebastian could be a little more gracious. Yeah. In his presentation of his argument. Grumble, grumble, grumble. But a period, yes, yes. Most of this goes along with what you were thinking, so well done, Dave.

Well, the take-home sentence for me is the one that reads, Dave's explanation of an LCD is also correct. That's all I needed to read. There we go. Validation. Everybody needs a little validation now and then. Yep. That's all I needed. All I needed. Thanks so much, Neloy, and also to you, Sebastian.

Just maybe work on the people skills when writing those emails. Okay. I'm going to be over here. You guys figure that one out. I love it when Jason, who is the one that would normally be doing this sort of thing, backs away as if, oh my God, you guys, you've gone too far.

Yeah. Meanwhile, most of Jason's emails are like, fuck you, you motherfucking fuck. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean most? All. Yeah. Write me an email in the style of Jason. You have been fired.

Right. Do not use any profanity. And the chat GPT bursts into flames. Just a period. That's not compute. Just a period. It's all that's left. So this is interesting.

New FCC rules would crack down on connected vehicle abuses. Apparently, the rash of people being cyber stalked from their automobiles has gotten the attention of the FCC. And they're going to start gathering some info to maybe make some rules down the line in the future.

So it's a step in the right direction, I guess. You know, I think so. I think you combine this with we've we've really seen a ramping up of actions from the FTC on these sorts of things. Particularly, they've been going after a handful of data brokers clawing back some of the things that they can do and finding them and so on and so forth.

So I think we're seeing some regulatory oversight of some of these things that at long last. Yes. I think Ben Yellen and I have talked about this over on the caveat show. And I think part of this is that it's a reflection of exasperation that Congress can't get their shit together.

And so the regulatory agencies are like, all right, if you're not going to do anything, we're going to use the power that's given to us and try to make some positive change here in the world. Good. Yeah, I'm all for it. It's just it takes too long to go through the through Congress.

So, yeah, you start it up. We all know this is wrong. Everybody. Everybody knows this is wrong. So, yeah, do something about it. Yeah, it would be really nice if I don't know the fucking automakers would. But no, because they want to track you. Yeah. Well, just the basics of being able to stop your abusive spouse from tracking your car location, set it to private mode.

No, they won't even let you do that. I think everybody is so their mouths are watering over this notion that there could be additional revenue streams. Yep, exactly. That this data is valuable. And so, wait a minute, we collect a lot of data, don't we? Well, yes, we do, boss.

We could sell that data, couldn't we? Well, sure we could, boss. Is that a bad thing to do? I don't know, boss. What do you think? And off we go. Yeah. I'm sure it's really useful that BMW knows an awful lot of people are on the 405 freeway. With their heat seaters on. Yes. Or seat heaters.

Did I say heat seaters? I did. You said heat seaters. Seat heaters. They're heat sinking, heat seeking seat. They're heat sinks. Move on. Next story. Maybe I'm not over there. I have heat seeking buttocks when I get in my car in the morning. Yeah. There you go. It's funny.

My Explorer that I sold, I had access to that thing for about 10 months, I think. Yeah. Did you harass the new owners? No, I didn't. I uninstalled it because I didn't.

Okay. I remember we talked. Why does the phone keep starting in the driveway? Why is it venting while I'm in it? What's going on? We had talked about this, I think, at the time. We had talked about how shoddily these apps were programmed and that, you know, it just doesn't, there was, they're difficult to disconnect.

It's not just, you know, it's actually actively difficult to do it when you sell your car along and people just don't know. They don't know about it. So, yeah. Yeah. And it's bad enough, like, just getting into a rental car and everybody's phones and all their data is in there because they didn't realize that they said yes and they didn't think to disconnect and, yeah, it's great.

Everybody does is suck up your address book. Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of fun to go through and see if a celebrity had your car or PA at least. I was going to say, okay, LA boy. My God, Tom Cruise was in his Kia. Right.

Oh, that would be great. Let's just go, no, let's just do fake, fake address books and load up all the rental cars we can with them. Oh, my God. This is an interesting one. In a concerning report, Shane Jones, a Microsoft engineer, has highlighted serious issues with the company's AI image generation tool, Copilot Designer.

This tool, powered by OpenAI technology, was intended to encourage creative visual expression through text prompts. However, Jones's investigations revealed that Copilot Designer has been producing disturbing content that violates Microsoft's responsible AI principles.

Yeah, if you feed it with one of Jason's emails, what do you think is going to come out of it? What do you think is going to happen? Right. So this is set off a chain of events that now there are certain things that you cannot have Copilot Designer try and basically do graphics for you for.

And I tried it out. And yes, the guardrails are still up. Abortion rights activist is a term that you cannot use anymore. Oh, interesting. Yes, because apparently people were putting in trying to make like posters or something for an abortion rights rally or something like that.

And it was basically taking the making the abortion rights people demons. Oh, nice. Oops. Yeah. I see no issues with these technologies. This is great. Everything is just fine. Yeah.

I mean, it's we've talked about this before. These things reflect us as we actually are, not as we aspire to be. Yeah. Yeah. Very true. That is the truth hurts. There's a cold, hard truth about that. And I think what's interesting about this case against Shane Jones is that part of what's happened to him is he's come up against Microsoft's legal department.

They've been putting pressure on him to shut up. Shut the fuck up. What's interesting is Microsoft's legal department, actual demons. Oh, how true.

It's so funny being an old, if you're an old, if you're an OG Mac user back when Microsoft was the evil empire and it's just interesting to me, the degree to which they have scrubbed that image.

Like, I don't think people today know that. Yeah. The way we did. Microsoft is very much tends to be on this, on the right side of things these days and even often leading the charge, which is not the case as it used to be. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it was, that was a long time where it was, I mean, look, look at the Mac versus PC ad campaign, you know, right. And that was, that was just a, you know, a straw man for Microsoft. So. Well, it's funny when you have to, you have to reinvent yourself when you're no longer dominating the industry the way that you once did.

Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. We'll see how this, this plays out. But yeah, as of right now, anything with, I think the word abortion in it is, is off limits. Now, just a quick question about this, Jason, because I, I, I have not really delved delved into this.

I think you've dabbled a bit, Dave, but I know Jason's really gotten into this and I, I didn't read too far into this story. These things aren't kicking out these problematic images from prompts, just, just generic, white, safe, you know, normal prompts, right?

You actually have to prompt it with like keywords that would make these horrible things. Correct? It depends. Oh, no, no, that's the point of this one. Oh, no, okay. Yeah. That's the point of this one. That's wonderful then. Okay. There was, Google had to put some guardrails on theirs in the past couple of weeks because They overwoke.

Oh, they overwoke. Oh, right. Yeah. I saw the, I saw some of those images. Yeah. They were saying like, show me a picture of the founding fathers and like half of them It was a Bennington ad. Right. It was a Bennington ad. Exactly. It was a Bennington ad. So, it overcorrected. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's tricky. I mean, it's tricky. We'll see to what degree we get there. And once we're past the gold rush stage and it settles down, I liken this to, you know, back when desktop publishing was new and people were making newsletters that included every single font.

Yes. I feel like that's kind of where we are. That's where we are with, with LLMs and these image generators right now. It's just, there's all the enthusiasm. How lucky, how lucky we are to be alive at this time when the gold rush is going on right before yet another one of the most important elections of our entire lives.

That's right. It's only important if you let it be, Brian. That's all. Just sit back, relax, and close your eyes. Yeah. You say from your perch up there in Canada. With your, with my penis and my whiteness. Yes. And your health care.

So just to get back to this real quick, the AI side of things, what you're talking about, Brian, you know, just from generic vanilla things, it was causing some problems, but a lot of these in the same, this was the problem with the Google AI, the Gemini problem was that what they're doing is they're taking a basic simple prompt and then rewriting it on the backend and then feeding that to it.

So they're using the, using the LLM to create a more detailed description of what it thinks you just said to give it to the image prompt or to make it, to make the image better. So I, I got around, I was playing around with that, trying to figure out how I could get around it. And so I, instead of using the word abortion, you do a legalized termination of life in vitro or something like that.

And you can get around it. Yeah. Fairly. Basically keyword searches really. So, yeah, you just have to, you know, it's all, it's all about, uh, prompt jacking as it were. But anyway, when you do the basics, it fucks you. I'm going to drop a, um, link here in the show notes in today's cyber wire, we're covering this little bit of research that, uh, some folks did.

They, they did a contest, uh, on prompt hacking. Several universities around the world did a contest on prompt hacking. So I don't know if this is for the show, but Jason, I think you'll probably devour this research, uh, for fun and profit. So enjoy a little less on the profit side, but I don't make any profit anymore.

Yes. Profits dried up on the internet for me a long time ago, but for fun, I'm in. There you go. Uh, so here's a new one. A consumer reports investigation uncovers significant security flaws in video doorbells sold by major online retailers, including Amazon and many, many more Walmart, Timu, a couple others highlighting the risks associated with Ekin groups, uh, video doorbells.

Uh, did you guys get a chance to cover this one? Because it seems like a pretty big breach when, uh, when you get into it a little bit. Uh, no, we didn't cover this, uh, specifically. Um, I guess if anywhere, I would talk about this on hacking humans, but, um, I have to say my response to this story was to just kind of shrug and go, yep.

Well, I mean, it comes around to the fact that you can actually just walk up to a doorbell and pair, pair your phone with it and walk away. And then you have access to the house pretty big. It's a pretty big breach, you know, you know, they don't have any, any, anything like, you know, you don't have to like find the code on the back of the doorbell to type in, to pair it.

It's just, you can just pair it and go. Yeah. Well, I mean, here we go. You know, no, no, no, absolutely no oversight on, um, no vetting of any of the products you can buy on Amazon. So basically just become a drop shipping company at this point.

Like most of the results that you get back on anything are just drop ships. So it's ridiculous. Yeah. So if we had, uh, I don't know, the consumer protection agency, you know, some, something some sort of government agency that our taxes are supposed to be paying for should be doing something about this.

Right. We need a, uh, an IOT version of the FDA where things in the same way that pharmaceuticals are tested, drugs are tested for safety, things that are over the counter. There's a certain amount of rigor that goes into making sure that they will do no harm.

If we had something like that for the consumer electronics space, perhaps this sort of thing wouldn't happen. But now you go to Amazon and you say, show me the cheapest China sourced video cameras and that's what you buy and this is what you get.

Yep. I've got a bucket of those in my back room. Right. Right. And that's the thing is that from a certain point of view, they are great. They are cheap and they work and they, they perform well. They, they probably have great little cameras in them and they're, but.

And it turns out. It's the long term price. Right. Yeah. Right. Along those same lines, the LAPD is letting people know in the Wilshire area of Los Angeles that there is a wave of burglaries happening where people are coming in with cell phone jammers and turning off their security systems because a lot of the security systems nowadays are reliant on cell service, not just internet.

So, right. They can, they can kill the power. So they kill the power to the building that gets rid of the internet, but then you still have the backup battery in the cell unit, which then they just turn on the cell phone jammer and take your skivvies. This is why I always have a home alone style surveillance and countermeasures in my house.

Right. You're fully booby trapped. They can do nothing against the bucket of tar that I precariously perched on the doorway. I just went with 300 pounds of teeth and fur. Well, you have Chewbacca living with you.

Yes. I got Bam Bam and Gigi and then, of course, little Dino. Right. Nobody's breaking. You've met Bam Bam. Nobody's coming into my house. No, no, no. I was scared to come into your house the one time I came over. That's when Bam Bam was a baby. She wasn't even a, it wasn't even a thing.

No, man. I wasn't sure Bam Bam wasn't going to eat me. Yeah, she probably would have. Yeah. She doesn't like guys. Well, there you go. I put a couple of things in here. So, interesting video. It's called Why TikTok is Becoming a Conspiracy Playground.

And it's a nice little explainer video about the explainer videos that are on YouTube about how to make conspiracy theory videos and how easy it is to do using these AI tools and the basic formula that you need to use to do it.

And TikTok's being flooded with these things. And my roommate watches them all. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I just thought it was interesting to see how the sausage is made here and have it laid out so bare. It's really kind of fascinating.

Well, to your comment earlier, Dave, this is also a reflection of ourselves, isn't it? It is. It is. And it makes me sad. You know, when we grew up, we were hoping we were going to get Star Trek and instead we got Blade Runner.

I just wanted a jetpack. And all I got was a WordPress's one that steals my data. There you go. So, I want to close here with a little personal story about a very strange thing that I experienced while I was sick with COVID.

So, being sick is extraordinarily boring. And I was laying in bed with my phone and I was scrolling through Facebook. And one thing that the Facebook algorithm has accurately figured out for me is that I enjoy stand-up comedy.

I enjoy watching, you know, little bits of stand-up comedy, right? I like to laugh and I like to watch clever comedians doing their thing. So, I was watching some stand-up comedy and it was going from one to another, you know, little Facebook shorts or whatever they call them on Facebook.

Reels, yes. Thank you very much. And somehow, along the lines, I noticed that it had switched to all female stand-up comics. That's all I'm getting right now. Which is fine. Is that right? Yeah.

Okay. Mm-hmm. All right. So, which is great. So, I'm enjoying these female stand-up comics just going through. And here's the thing. Somehow, unintentionally, instead of being on my main timeline, it had switched to Facebook's video feed.

The video button on Facebook. All right. So, I'm in that button. And after, I don't know how many female stand-up comedians, up comes a video that starts playing as a teenage girl in a doctor's office.

It's a movie. It's not like a, you know, like a… Oh, I've seen this one on Pornhub. I was going to say, you got transferred to Pornhub. That's not the video section of Facebook. Well, that's, so, that's where I'm going. So, it's this teenage girl. I'm going to say she's probably 15.

Okay, didn't see that one on Pornhub. Just making it clear. So, this is what I'm going. This is where I'm going. Let's just say she was 18, but she looked 15. She's laying on an examination table in a doctor's office. And this is clearly, like, some 70s era, I'm going to say, French art movie.

Right? The soundtrack does not match the movie in any way. The soundtrack is just sort of generic, old-timey music. But this beautiful young lady is laying on the table there, and she is barely dressed, and she's wearing the sheerest of underwear, so that basically all the things that you would want to see…

So, you could tell it was 1970? You could, indeed. You could. Yes, you could. Thank you, Brian. You're welcome. For filling in that detail, I was having trouble outlining for myself. So, I was so disturbed and disgusted with this video that after about a half an hour…

Wow, you're a trooper. Well, your wife must be very pleased. I was going to say. She's always happy when he stays home from work. I did not see the show taking this turn.

But the thing is, so there's this one scene, and this young lady is clearly in love with her doctor and is making doe eyes at him. Who amongst us isn't? Right. And the next scene, this same young girl is in some kind of, like, Catholic school with nuns, and she's flirting with this young, beautiful nun, and she's got…

So, this is some 1970s, like, French art sexploitation film. One of my favorite genres. That's what I'm wondering. And I don't know why Facebook thought this would be something I would enjoy. But were they wrong?

I was going to say, the question is, were they wrong? How good is that algorithm? Yeah. Okay, so I switch away, I switch away, I scroll, I keep scrolling. Get, get, enough of this. I need more.

I was fascinated by it. And someone in the, looking through the comments, because I'm trying to figure out, what is this? Like, what is this? This is not a, this is not the kind of thing that I am used to seeing on Facebook. Okay, so next comes two young ladies in their underwear, in a bed.

It's like a 1990? No, this is modern. This is up, this is up to date. And they're, it's like a live stream kind of thing, and it's, oh, look at us, here we are, and we're in our bed in our underwear. And so, I'm like, okay, what's happening?

Like, this, in my experience, Facebook has been pretty good about not having this kind of stuff on their platform. At least that I've seen. And so, I felt as though, somehow, right, some switch had been thrown.

It was like, okay, you've been, you've been browsing for 10 hours straight, so now we're going to show you the good stuff. Come behind the beta curtain, Dave. Right, right, exactly. But here's how it ends. I keep scrolling, I keep scrolling, and now I'm getting a mix of the female stand-up comics and more of this just weird, you know, very uncomfortable kind of stuff.

And then finally, it happens. I get a 9-11 conspiracy theory video. And I think to myself, I win. This is it. I have won. I have won the algorithm game.

Where somehow, I have gone through comedy, creepy, right on the edge of inappropriate, softcore pornography. And we're right, going straight into 9-11 conspiracy theories. You passed the initiation test.

Yeah, I'm done. Thank you, Facebook. I will collect my prize on the way out. Yep. I don't think the fever that I had, I don't think this was a fever dream from COVID. That's what I was going to say. That's the next thing. Is this a Paxlovid fever dream that you're having here?

I don't think so, but. Because it sounds like it. Yes. I was questioning myself. Like, what is this? The algorithms are just insane. Like, again, I'm also getting female comedians. I don't know why. I don't watch clips. Well, it is today.

Today is International Women's Day. No, but this has been going on for weeks. So they could have been ramping you up. For weeks. Oh. Yeah. And Facebook thinks I, at least as far as reels are concerned, I love female comedians and Selena Gomez for some reason. I've never heard a Selena Gomez song. I don't know anything about her.

But reels is convinced I am in love with her and cannot get enough of 10-second clips with robot voices talking about Selena's life. That's my Facebook reels. Yeah. Well, you see, that could be a backdoor promotion to the new show that came out on Peacock where they – it was Yolanda and Selena where the actual killer was interviewed for a TV series.

So maybe there's some kind of shadow Selena-ness going on in the background. Perhaps. I don't know. But my point being just reels is fucking weird. But I think Dave wins. Dave wins. For sure. He got the better version of that 70s show. Yeah.

It was really weird. I mean, just weird and disturbing. Yeah. But it made me see how it happens. Yeah. Right? Like, how do people get taken down these rabbit holes?

This is it. This is – Persistence. Right. Yeah. Right. You got to want it, I guess. Or just hanging in there. I don't know. And it hasn't been back. So it didn't stick, which I'm happy for. But, yeah, I don't know.

It's just weird. I'm curious if any of our other listeners have been – had an experience, a weird experience like this. You know, just unexpected. Have you seen 70s softcore porn on your Facebook feed right now? Right in.

We want to hear from you. Jason's just scrolling right now trying to fucking trigger the algorithm. Come on! Right. I know. And now that you know it's in there. That was so weird. I wish I knew the name of the movie. I'd share it with you.

But I don't. Check your history. And I'm certainly not going to start Google searching for it on my work computer. Ah, that's the end game. I'm going to burn this laptop now. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, on that bombshell.

All right, guys. Yeah. I'm going to go take a shower. Me too. Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got Simon Screamland in Bree. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Over at PayPal, we usually have quite a longer list. This time, Levi. What happened to PayPal? I don't know. Maybe they did a Patreon on us. Oh, my God. I hope not. Me too. Maybe the last episode was so terrible. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

What did I say? Over at the tip jar, we've got Sarah, Matthew, Christopher, and Jeff. Thank you, everybody. And as I mentioned, for now, if you want to sign up at Patreon, as little as $3 a month, we'll get you the shows a little bit early and ad-free and in high definition. Woo!

Woo-hoo! We have a new five-star review from Jeff. You guys rock. Jeff from Arizona Department of Corrections thinks that you guys are great. Almost free. Woo-hoo! Congratulations, Jeff. Congrats, Jeff. I hope to see you outside sometime. Was Jeff the one that went to us before?

Maybe not in person. No, who cares? I don't... You should meet the people that I hang out with every day, Brian. Well, there's a reason I'm not in Woodland Hills. A little jail time does not scare me. No, we got somebody from... I think Jeff has written in before. I think Jeff has.

Okay, that's what I was wondering. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great. Thanks, Jeff. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 639. 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. Almost. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about. GOG.show slash review is where you can cost us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air.

Stay grumpy. I was thinking about that, how the Spinal Tap crew, whoever wrote that joke, that is probably their most significant contribution to the culture.

Yes. Right? Everybody knows this goes to 11. That's a common – even if you've never seen Spinal Tap, you know this goes to 11. Yeah, it definitely is the biggest of all of them. For sure. That came out of 11.

And we don't know who the word Smith was. Right. Yeah. I wonder. I bet it's on the director – like the director's commentary on the DVD. Good luck finding that. I mean it's probably the guy that plays the guitarist. Because, I mean, all those guys are writers and hilarious comedians.

Yeah. Yeah. But who knows? Could have been anybody. It's like trying to figure out who wrote the Monty Python bits in every sketch. Good luck. Right. Right. Oh, no. The use of 11 as a maximum predates This Is Spinal Tap by almost 40 years.

What? In 1947, the Baldwin Locomotive Works and the Chesapeake and Oil Railway introduced the Chesapeake and Oil Class M1 Steam Turbine Locomotive. The locomotive's throttle included 11 settings ranging from 1 to 11 full speed.

Ah, but they didn't make a joke out of it. Yeah. Nobody knew. They were serious. There were like five engineers working on the railroad who knew. Hang on, hang on. They thought it was hilarious. During a trial run with a reporter from Popular Mechanics aboard, a C&O engineer expressed his dissatisfaction with a local speed limit of 75 miles per hour, noting that he would sure like to be able to pull it back to 11.

So, I don't know. Who knew? Yeah. All right. All right. There you go. I hope you were recording that bit, Jason. That's not... Actually, I am. All right. Throw that in at the end. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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