657: Dick Detector

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. 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. Brian, we just talked the other day about how dumb it is to have auto software updates on. So I've got some literally breaking news. I think everybody in the world will probably hear about this one right now.

But there's a huge, huge Microsoft outage right now, which they're claiming is a Microsoft outage. But it's actually not. It's not. Yes. It's security software that runs on Microsoft computers is the problem. Yes. So yeah, if you're stuck in an airport right now or had been stuck in an airport before you listen to this, you're like, no shit, Sherlock.

So CrowdStrike, which is a security software company, released a patch that didn't work and is causing blue screens of death everywhere in the world right now as we record this, which is really funny. Yeah, it is. I'm very glad I'm not traveling this week.

Yes. Or trying to go to a bank in some places or in a hospital. Yes. Do you think we maybe have too many singular points of failure in this world? Well, that's what everybody's saying right now, that this is just another spoff. You know, it's a pretty big one. It's a pretty big one.

I love this. The Brody Nisbet, the director of Overwatch, fired, at CrowdStrike, posted on X indicating the workaround that they have issued. So you got to boot up the machine manually into safe mode. You got to go find a file called C-0000291 star.sys, delete it, and then reboot the machine normally.

So there you go. That's if your machine has already blue screened of death. You know, I understand that that whole process probably sends people into a tizzy. They go, I couldn't possibly do all of that. But we just called that owning a computer back when I was a kid. Keep your eye on the news for that because that's going to be everywhere.

We got two pieces of feedback in from last week's episode. I thought this was pretty good. Dan wrote in and said, here's your 12-cent MasterCard solution. I find the prepaid MasterCards a pain to use. I found I can use them to refill my Amazon gift card. I add them as a payment method, use them to quote-unquote buy an Amazon gift card refill.

Then they are easily used for my next Amazon purchase. Good one. Yeah. Still seems like more than 12 cents worth of work, but you know. Talking about it is more than 12 cents worth of work. Opening the email was more than 12 cents worth of work. Clicking the link was more than 12 cents worth of work.

Yes, yes. I do kind of wish they gave you an option to like donate to charity. Yeah, that would be nice. That would be nice. The other person that wrote in was Brian with a Y. Just listened to episode 656 in the schools making kids using Nokia phones. I have three teenagers and taking away phones won't stop anything.

Their school gave everyone a Chromebook. They chatted with each other all day using Google Docs live editing and got around firewall rules by using a rotating list of proxy websites. I have a whole list of domains I need the district IT to block, but they won't give me the time of day. Yeah, kids find a way. I get that. But still, the impulse is there, right?

Like you don't want them on Snapchat. Yeah, yeah. But they can still talk. Yeah, the whole live editing thing, you know, group editing on a text document, which has been around for 15 years now. Yeah. That's always been a workaround. It's been a fantastic workaround. You know, we used to use it at Technorati for meetings.

We would all have just a BBEdit doc open that we were all just talking in. And it's like, but here's the funny part. We were all chatting in that document. We were sitting in the same room. And this room was probably six feet by six feet by six feet, all four of us with our laptops on our knees. And I looked around.

I'm like, we are such fucking nerds. Well, and there's your argument for work from home. Yeah. Everybody goes into the office and they're just sitting and talking in Teams. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's it. We got a little more floppy news, just some follow-up here.

There is one more country that is still rocking the floppy. That would be Deutschland. Deutschland. The German Navy still has eight-inch floppy disks on their Brandenburg-class F-123 frigates. Okay. So they're working to get rid of those. So there you go.

Just another one still out there in the wild. Another German floppy. I think they make pills for that now. In the news. Brian, I know this has been making the rounds as well.

And I'm sure it tickles your little heart since you're not on AT&T anymore. AT&T has announced a breach on a third-party cloud platform, Snowflake, that exposed the call and text records of nearly all its cellular customers. Woo! My first question there would be, why are you storing all of our calls and text records onto third-party cloud platforms, Mr. AT&T?

That would be nice to know, I think. Don't you? Yes, I would like to know that. I would like to know why they are doing such a thing, considering they are one of the major carriers in the world. Yeah. I guess they just thought it was easier. Somebody probably got a kickback, Brian. It's probably somebody who got a kickback. Oh, yes. There you go. Yeah.

You know, my cousin made Snowflake. Throw him some business. That kind of thing. The comprised data includes phone numbers that AT&T subscribers communicated with, but not names, and coverage records from May 1st, 2022 to October 3rd, 2022. Plus January 2nd, 2023, for a few customers.

Just in case. So second question I have for Mr. AT&T is how far back do you keep these records? Correct. I'm sure there's some legal requirements for this, because, I mean, this is when the breach happened, so. Yes. You know, who knows? I'm sure there's legal reasons to keep them for probably ever, because there's sellable value back to the government at some point.

You know, I need to find out what Joe did 10 years ago. Pull up the records. Now, here's the only high point. The attack on Snowflake also affected other companies like Ticketmaster. Okay. There's at least a win in that one.

Yeah. So, some login credentials were stolen via malware. Yeah. Go figure. Go figure. Now, here's the interesting thing. AT&T customers' pilfered information was so valuable to cybercriminals that the FBI asked the company to delay filing a disclosure with the SEC because of potential national security and public safety concerns.

So, the FBI is looking out for you. All right. Thanks, FBI. I mean, I'm sure you had the records anyways. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't for them. It was for us, Brian. They do it for us. Right, right. AT&T also paid a hacker $370,000 to delete the stolen data.

All right. So, this is like a third-party guy who got in the middle and said, I will go check to make sure that they hit the button delete. Yep. Yeah, he hits the button delete. Give me my money. This copy has been deleted. Yeah. Now, the funny thing here is the third party got sent the money, but the guy who did the deleting and was the hacker, well, he's in jail because he was arrested in Turkey for other stuff.

So, this is kind of a complicated little process going on here. But, yeah. So, you can rest safe now knowing that AT&T has shelled out $370,000 for someone to probably have deleted your data because there are still copies going around for the segments that the hacker sent out saying, look at all the data I've got.

You want to come buy it? So, those chunks, they can't get back. So, most of it has apparently been deleted. Well, that's good. Thanks, Snowflake and AT&T. Yeah. Whee! And in other wireless carrier news, Verizon is facing a lawsuit after record labels say it profits from privacy.

A group of record labels that include Universal, Capital, Warner, and Sony, that would be all of the major ones, has filed a lawsuit against Verizon accusing it of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Basically, the TLDR is, Verizon has been provided lists of people that are stealing music and sharing it via the, I'm going to date myself here, sharing it via LimeWire and Napster.

No? Oh, great. I think they're using different things these days. But they are peer-to-peer file sharing networks. And Verizon said, we have acknowledged that we received these notices. And then the record labels said, okay, are you going to do anything about it?

And Verizon said, nah. So now they're being sued. So that's it. Well, they're carriers. Is it their job? They're saying it's not their job. And then I guess people are just kind of saying, well, whose job is it then? If we can pinpoint the people that are doing all the piracy, we know they're on your network.

Here's their IP address. They're not even changing it or blocking it or hiding it in any way, shape, or form. Can you do something? Well, get a court order. I think that's now what they're trying to do. Yeah. Get a court order. Yes. So we'll see what happens with that.

But, you know, if you're running a peer-to-peer service, you know, there are solutions, people. VPN. GoG.show slash VPN. That's right. We need to record little jingles, Jason. Ah, jingles.

Jingle, jangle, jingle. Hey, you got some time on your hands now. Write me a tune. I'll drop some lyrics on those deaf beats. I'll use AI, which is also being sued by the labels. God damn it. I can't even get work on my own show. This sucks. In a significant move, Meta has announced it will not offer its upcoming multimodal AI models to European Union customers due to regulatory uncertainties.

Good. Yes. Meta stated that the unpredictable regulatory environment in the EU has forced this decision. Actually, it's been pretty predictable. It involves regulations. This sets up a potential conflict, reflecting a broader trend of U.S. companies withholding products from European markets over regulatory concerns, which I've been predicting for quite some time.

I've been saying that they're going to take their toys and go home. They're looking at the markets and go, yeah, we're just not going to play, right? So their new multimodal AI models, capable of reasoning across video, audio images, and text, will be available globally, but not in the EU.

Also, I think Brazil as well. This follows similar actions by Apple, which recently decided not to release its Apple intelligence features in Europe due to regulatory issues. And it's going to continue. I'm telling you. The Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta's lead privacy regulator in Europe, has not commented on the matter.

Meta emphasized that training on European data is crucial for their products to reflect regional terminology and culture accurately. So they also noted that competitors like Google and OpenAI continue to train on European data. So shut up, Zuckernark.

It's like, they're doing it. Why can't we? Zuckernark. Despite the regulatory challenges, Meta will still release a larger text-only version of its Llama 3 model for EU customers. The interesting thing is they're saying EU customers, but the Llama models are open source.

So what's going on there? Not sure. Yeah, I love this. The EU, who barely makes anything nowadays besides tax havens for these companies, may be regulating themselves into the Stone Ages if they're not careful. So why should the U.S. be the only country to be about to enter the Dark Ages 2.0?

So they can join us. You know? Fair. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's perfect. Look, if there's one thing that we've known about talking about AI again and again and again, it's that maybe there should be some regulations. So I just, we all, I wish we had GDPR here.

That's all. I wish we had it here and they had to go through the same hoops here because that might actually slow them down and make them think about what they're doing. But now they don't have to because the U.S. is the world's biggest market still. Yeah. See, the thing here is GDPR was one bit of a much larger pie that came out. So we've got some more news about all of the regulations that the EU is tapping on here.

X faces potential hefty fines from the European Commission for deceptive practices linked to its paid verification system. The EU regulators' preliminary findings indicate that X's verification process, allowing anyone to buy a blue checkmark, misleads users and violates the Digital Services Act.

Another one. This practice undermines users' ability to trust account authenticity with evidence showing misuse by malicious actors. That's the fucking internet. I don't think it particularly misled anyone. We all knew exactly what was going on. We knew it was a pile of horse shit and people willingly bought it because they bought into his pile of horse shit.

Yeah, read the fucking label, EU. We know this shit. Yes. So the European Commission's preliminary findings also highlight issues with X's advertising transparency and data access for researchers. X allegedly fails to maintain a searchable advertisement repository and imposes access barriers to impeding supervision and research.

So they're basically saying X restricts researchers' access to public data either through prohibitive terms or high fees. Like, well, pay for it if you want it. Yeah. And, you know, give me a second here. If upheld, these findings could lead to fines of up to 6% of X's global annual revenue, which nowadays is about $12, and impose measures to rectify the breaches.

A representative from X has replied with, Le poop emoji! But the thing is here, it's like, these are still private companies. I get that there's restrictions on things, but it's getting to the point where it's like, you're not going to be able to do business if these things keep going.

I'm telling you that it's getting, Brian, you and I have talked about regulation. You were always for regulation. I came upon your side a while ago, a long time ago, many, many years ago, huge amounts of years ago. But this is getting to be ridiculous. I think the EU is really overreaching.

And the fact that they don't make any of this shit, they just want to tell us how to do it. I'm starting to get a little fuck-you attitude towards them there. I agree with you on this one. This one's dumb. X is still a private company, very much so. It's not a public resource. It's not a government-run agency, so you can't do this sort of stuff.

They can do whatever they want. They can do all this stuff. It doesn't matter. Just trying to regulate stupidity is where you get into the problem. And that's what they're trying to do here. Yeah, you can't regulate stupidity. So that one was the Digital Services Act. Let's move on to the Digital Markets Act now.

Now, this one really pisses me off. Meta is under scrutiny by the European Commission for allegedly breaching new digital competition rules. It revolves around Meta's pay or consent model, introduced late last year, which offers European Union users the option to pay for up to €12.99 a month for an ad-free experience on Facebook and Instagram or to accept personalized ads, something that we here would love to have.

Yes, I do feel that $12.99 a month is exorbitant for an ad-free experience considering that they've worked out to the cent that were worth about $0.05 a year or something like that. So why am I going to pay you like 90,000 times that amount just not to get an ad?

Actually, it works out to a little over $7 a year. Okay. Well, still. Still. $0.99 a month versus $7 a year. I'll pay my $7 a year. Yeah, that's what they call the fuck you fee. That's the add-on, the fuck you fee. So the commission's preliminary findings indicate that this model forces users to consent to the use of their personal data without providing an equivalent, less personalized alternative.

Wah. They're like, can we have all of our cake and eat it too? So they're saying if confirmed, Meta could face a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue or approximately $13.5 billion. Now, look. These people asked for an alternative.

Facebook gave them an alternative. I'm sorry, Meta gave them an alternative. Now they're bitching about the alternative, which I think is a completely reasonable alternative that we would love to have over here. And they're saying you're not doing enough. You know, it's like, where does it end? Where is that line in the sand going to be where, like, you know, you can just bitch slap them and say, okay, we've had enough of your shit.

Stop it. You know? Yeah, I agree. I agree. This one's a little bit of an overstep too, as far as I'm concerned. They, Meta gave them what they asked for. Shut up. Move on. Yeah. There's got to be, there's got to be middle ground here. There's got to be a middle ground. Come on. Yep. Well, Apple, NVIDIA, and Anthropic have reportedly been using YouTube transcripts without permission to train its AI models.

I know this is shocking because YouTube said you can't. Well. Yeah. And, of course, the way that they're getting around it is we didn't go out and get that ourselves. We bought a data set by a non-profit company.

Hang on a second. Bought a data set from a non-profit company. Just because it says non-profit doesn't mean you can't sell. A data set from the non-profit company called Eleutheria AI, which contains transcripts of YouTube videos. You didn't say we couldn't use transcripts.

Yeah. So, this is the way they were working our way through all of this sort of stuff. So, the findings of the investigation spotlights. AI is uncomfortable truth. The technology is largely built on the backs of data siphoned from creators without their consent or compensation. We, of course, know all this now. And it just, you know, continues going on.

So, yes. This is the way that everybody gets around it. We are sourcing our data from other companies. We cannot possibly police the way that they got their data. And, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. It's just how the government gets our call records without a subpoena. They just go and buy it. That's it. Yeah.

Yeah. So, same shit, different company. Surprise, surprise, surprise. So, this is an interesting one. The United States Postal Service was found to be sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with tech companies Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap. Okay. The data was shared via hidden tracking pixels on the USPS website, which collected information such as postal addresses and user activity.

The Postal Service claimed it was unaware of this data sharing and has since stopped the practice, though it did not specify the actions taken. I'm guessing delete. Delete the line of code. Duh. Yep. The issue was discovered by inspecting network traffic, revealing that addresses and other data were being sent to the companies.

Tracking numbers and in-transit mail data were also shared with advertisers, even for users not logged in. Oops. The Postal Service did not confirm whether it would ask these companies to delete the collected data. Good luck with that. Yeah. And these guys just raised the prices for a letter here.

Again, it's like 73 cents now. Now, look, I get Meta, you know, probably because of some stupid sharing widget that's been on there since the, you know, the age of Facebook. But Snap and LinkedIn, what the fuck are they doing over there? Why don't they, does anybody need or want this data?

Yeah. No, I mean. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, Meta is launching a pilot program to allow academic researchers limited access to Instagram data. Okay. The initiative aims to study the app's impact on teen and young adult well-being.

Researchers will be able to access data such as the number of accounts followed and usage patterns, but not demographic details or user consent. Or content, not user consent. There is no consent. Yeah, we know there's no consent. I'm sorry. That was a Freudian slip. I'm so used to saying that we're not going to give users consent.

Forget it. Meta's move follows criticism over its handling of internal research showing Instagram's negative effects on teens, especially girls. This project, conducted with the Center for Open Science, hopes to shed light on social media's impact on mental health.

Good luck. Yeah, I was reading into this a little bit more, some of the studies that kind of caused this to happen. This came when Arturo Bejar, former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook. Protect and Care? Yeah, they had one tiny office right next to the janitor, and that was about it.

Testified before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that he alerted the company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, by email of the dangers their product could be having on young people. He testified that seven days before the hearing, 13% of users on Instagram between the ages of 13 and 15 received unwanted sexual advances.

A month before the hearing, 41 states had also filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly misleading the public about the potentially addictive nature of its platforms. And he said, my experience after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards is that they knew there were things they could do about it. They chose not to do them, and we cannot trust them with our children.

It's time for Congress to act. The evidence, I believe, is overwhelming. Okay. Which lets you know nothing will happen. Nothing will happen unless you move to France. And going back a little bit more to the Digital Markets Act under the EU, TikTok. As far as the EU is concerned, TikTok requires strong ongoing regulations.

The EU's general court dismissed an action brought by TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, which argued that the platform shouldn't be considered a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. Now, if you're a gatekeeper, that means you're one of the big ones and you fall under a lot more regulation than you do if you're like a struggling up-and-comer that hopes to upseat the big ones and become the gatekeeper of Gozer.

Are you the gatemaster? Are you the gatemaster? So, basically, TikTok was trying to claim that they were not a big boy in the field and that, you know, we still have Instagram's reels and YouTube's shorts as meaningful competition. And the general court obviously disagreed with that saying, you guys are fucking massive.

What are you talking about? Seriously. Now, we can argue whatever we want to argue about the Digital Markets Act and the specifics on it, but certainly TikTok trying to say that they're just a wee little boy playing with the big boys in the field and need extra protection is a load of crap. A load of crap.

Oh, God. The shit these people do. I know. Tinder has launched a new feature. I didn't know Tinder was still going. Photo Selector. Great name. This is designed to help users choose their best profile picture using artificial intelligence.

The tool scans your photo reel, evaluating factors like lighting and composition to suggest images. Uploading all your photos into their database for a future AI. Oh, they don't mention that part, do they? Oh, they do. They do. To suggest images that may appeal to potential matches, users still remain responsible for the final selection of their profile photo.

To ensure privacy, the AI uses biometrics from the user's existing profile photo or video selfie to identify and exclude group photos. All biometric data is deleted after the search and no photos are collected from the device.

After a test run last August, Photo Selector will be available to U.S. users later this month and globally this summer. So believe what you want. Try what you can. But yeah. They're saying it's all on device. The new thing I learned there is you can do like video profiles. Yeah.

I haven't been on one of those in a very long time. I've never. So. Yeah. Yeah. I have. It's a sad, sad state. I am unmatchable to all of them. I am what we call, Brian, an edge case.

Ah. Yeah. So OpenAI's legal battle with the New York Times over copyright infringement has escalated, Brian. OpenAI is now demanding access to the Times' reporters' notes, interview memos, records of materials cited, and other files related to millions of stories.

This is their new way to get the data. Yeah. This is the second way to get the data. Now we can put it into our systems. Thank you. So they're basically saying that the New York Times is using prompt hacking to show that they're, that OpenAI is, you know, taking all this copyrighted material.

It doesn't take a prompt, prompt hacker to figure that out. Come on. Yeah. So what OpenAI is doing is they're basically trying to drown the New York Times in legal requests for too many documents because OpenAI has a lot more money than the New York Times does. Yes, it does.

So they're basically just going to strong arm them out of it, you know. And the New York Times may have wanted to think about that before they poked a bear. But we'll see what the courts say about it. You know, I think that it's ridiculous to ask for notes from reporters.

Yeah. Yeah. Those are protected sources. Protected sources. Yeah. OpenAI wants to know who Deep Throat is now. Exactly. And I'm sure they probably already have it in there somewhere. Come on. But yeah, yeah. No, because as soon as they turn that over, then they're going to, like, you know, search for it.

Then it'll be part of the corpus of OpenAI. And then we'll be able to search for it. So that gets rid of people's privacy and protection. So I think the courts will probably sign on the New York Times for this one to say, no, come on, OpenAI. You're asking a little too much. I think so, too. I've got a little police with drones in the news, Jason.

We haven't done any of these in a while. Because they've been keeping it pretty quiet. But earlier this year, the NYPD made the questionable decision to start deploying drones at the city's beaches. The point was to allow them to search for sharks so as to warn beachgoers and avoid Jaws-type situations. And also to help swimmers who might be struggling or who were out of reach of the local lifeguard.

Not a bad idea, really. No, not a bad idea at all. The plan, apparently, was to have the robots fly over drowning swimmers and drop flotation devices on their heads. On their heads. Bonk. Maybe next to them? Yeah. See if this anvil floats. All the drones are from Acme.

Yeah. So while the drones have so far saved zero human lives, they've managed to seriously agitate the local bird population, which has repeatedly seen swarming and dive bombing the flying robots. The AP quotes several wildlife academics and professionals, most of whom seem to think that the drones are having some kind of adverse effect on the beach birds.

Experts say the birds may see the robots as an invasive species, one that is a threat to their offspring. So basically this program, which has saved zero human lives, is now being proven to really upset the local systems going on there, and birds are getting very annoyed by them, and they're swooping at them and pecking at them and trying to take them out.

So maybe we just stop the program. Yeah. Or dress them up as the same species. No. You know? There we go. There's got to – we're going to need some kind of drone camouflage. I don't know. That's right. And from the other side of the country, in my old neck of the woods, a police drone nabs a vehicle burglary suspect in Santa Monica as futuristic surveillance becomes reality.

Police in California arrested a man suspected of burglarizing cars near the Santa Monica Pier over the 4th of July weekend. This would not be shocking. This happens basically every weekend at the Santa Monica Pier when it's nice. So this wouldn't normally be a particularly notable event, but it's basically the drone, which was going around – they call it the Drone is a First Responder Initiative.

Yes. Which isn't entirely true because if it was a first responder, there would have to be something called in or seen first. The drones are looking for things. Yes. It's not a first responder. It has been used in a variety of ways over the past two years, nabbing a home burglar and finding a man who assaulted a 73-year-old woman.

But it's never been quite used like this, which is just knowing that you're at the Santa Monica Beach, which is quite lovely, and there are drones just watching you, which is what they're doing now. Honestly, if my car got broken into, I'd be all for this. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's the old slippery slope thing that we talk about an awful lot on this show.

And it's one thing if it makes sense and if it's working like this. At least they've had some wins with this one as opposed to the New York one, which saved no one yet. Yeah, see, the thing about this one is there are light poles in the parking lot of the Santa Monica Pier that they could just put cameras on that wouldn't be buzzing around all the time.

They do have cameras on them. Oh, my gosh, Brian. Not only that, they have those mobile units that they crank up like a crane. They've got all kinds of crap there already. I think they just want more toys. Yeah, I think they want more toys. Look, man, if I was a cop stuck in a room watching video, I would at least want to be able to play like a video game.

Come on. You know, I cannot fault the cops for wanting to try. I really can't. It's just more fun. But yeah, honestly, though, I don't see this one as all that bad until the, you know, the seagulls at the pier start getting pissed off and attacking them, which will be next.

So it's fine. Yes. Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance left his Venmo public. I love it when this happens. Here's what it shows. The Republican VP nominee's Venmo network reveals connections ranging from the architects of Project 2025 to enemies of Donald Trump and the populist's close ties to the very elites he rails against.

So this guy isn't even 40. There's no fucking reason to have a public Venmo account. And he can't, you know, like Biden had his open too, but he's like, you know, a mummy. Ice cream. So this guy is young enough to know that you shouldn't have this shit open.

Yeah, that was pretty dumb. Yeah. And I've said it since this started. You know, it's one of the dumbest ideas ever to have a public record of all your transactions. And I'm looking at you too, Bitcoin. So it's just the beginning. So for those old timers listening, Blippi ran so Venmo could fly and Bitcoin could soar.

So if anybody remembers Blippi, hat tip to you. Dude, when you say Blippi to me, it means the kids performer that started off on YouTube and now has a deal with Amazon. So no, totally different Blippi. Yeah, different Blippi. Look, I 100% agree with you.

The whole idea of having this open, the whole public Venmo accounts. Every time I log in there and I see my friends and all the stupid shit that they're making public, all their purchases, I'm just like, you guys are insane. All transactions should be private until your banks are hacked and it's all sold to the highest bidder.

Exactly. If it's not on have you been pwned, it doesn't exist. Exactly. That's it. And listen, it's some interesting science news here. In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Harvard Medical School have delved into how individual neurons in the human brain respond to language.

This is really cool stuff. Led by computational neuroscience researcher Mohsin Jamali, the team focused on the left prefrontal cortex, a crucial area for language processing. Patients with implanted electrodes due to clinical needs participated by listening to recorded sets of words, sentences, gibberish sounds, and even a short story about Elvis.

I love that part. Using advanced neuropixel probes, the researchers could monitor the activity of over 100 neurons simultaneously. And then they did a lot of analysis on them to actually pinpoint individual neurons and how they interacted when you hear different words in the language, which is so cool.

The study marks a significant step towards unraveling the complex mechanisms of human language processing with the potential to enhance our understanding of both normal and disordered language functions. This is a great article. I recommend reading the whole thing, but it's neat, Brian. It's really cool, except for the fact that they forgot to remove the pixel and now all the data is being shared with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

Media candy. All right, Brian, if you've got a few bucks, this one's for you. Captain Kirk's original phaser and communicator used by William Shatner in the 1960s series will be on display at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego from Monday. Authenticated by Star Trek prop expert Don Hillebrand, these iconic items will then head to auction on November 9th in L.A.

And they're expected to fetch between $100,000 and $200,000 each. Each. Wow. So Comic-Con's running from July 24th to 28th this year. If you want to head on down to San Diego, I recommend you start now because it takes forever to get into San Diego when Comic-Con's going on.

That is true. I've never been to a Comic-Con. I briefly flirted with the idea of going, but now it's way too massive and I know I'll just never go. I was down there one year just serendipitously because a friend of the show, Fogarty and Stacy, lived there and I got to hang out with some of their friends.

So I basically lobby-conned Comic-Con. Right. I actually bar-conned it because everywhere we went, we met up with people at bars. That's the best way to do it, man. It was really fun. It was really – and what you do is you get all the cosplayers still out on the streets, which is worth the price of admission, Brian.

You would be like a kid in a candy store. I know. Oh, my God. So this is an interesting one. AMC has made a deal with Netflix bringing 13 series to the streamer, which is going to be good. So starting August 19th, there's a couple in here that are really good.

There's a bunch of Walking Dead ones, which I don't care about. Interview with a Vampire, season one. So you get to finally check it out without having to go to Sweden or AMC+, which nobody does. Anne Rice's Mayfair, Witches, season one, which I never even heard of. This is a good one. Monster Spade, season one, which I fucking loved.

I really love this one. It's a Sam Spade with Clive Owen. It's so good. It's really good. A Discovery of Witches, seasons one, two, and three. Dark Winds, season one and two, which I've never heard of. Another Fear of the Walking Dead, Gangs of London, Into the Badlands. Kevin Can Fuck Himself, which is – I've never heard of it, but sounds great.

Preacher, seasons one through four. I'm going to go back and watch that because that was a great series. And a couple other ones I've never heard of. So, but new stuff. But I was happy that they're going to do Interview with a Vampire on there. So hopefully that'll get some juice. It was renewed for season three already. So it has passed the Shoalmeister test.

Well, I've read all the books and it passed the Shoalmeister test there. But it's good to hear that the series is being received well. I'm excited about this because I would like to watch some of what they're calling the Rice Verse because Anne Rice. I love the Mayfair Witches books. I actually like them more than the Vampire books in many ways from what I recall.

So I'm very much looking forward to seeing that. Yeah, I'm excited. I do hope that they'll continue this. And this isn't a gotcha to get me to actually then go pay for AMC to eventually see season two of these things and all that. Oh, wait long enough. It'll eventually roll around in Netflix.

I can wait. I'm a patient man. Yeah, you have the patience of a vampire. That's right. And the problem I'm still having with season one is I've read the books a bunch of times. I'm like, can we move it along here? Come on. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that one. No, that one. I'm waiting for them to get to Paris, which is season two. So I guess I just got to power through. Right. A little more media news here. Hacker group NullBudge, which sounds like a erectile dysfunction problem there, claims they've nabbed 1.1 terabytes of Disney's internal Slack messages and files.

Ooh, that could be good. That could be juicy. So they're saying that they're protesting AI-generated art. Which Disney pretty much doesn't engage in. Yeah. So wrong company. I can't wait to see what comes out of that one.

Should be interesting. Yeah, I'm sure the Star Wars fans are going to lose their minds over, like, toss-away concepts thrown around that never had a chance of seeing the light of day. Exactly. A couple trailers came out this week that I'm very excited about. First, we've got the Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice official trailer 2, which is awesome.

It's so good. It's so good. I can't wait. Like, the original teaser trailer was enough for me to be all in on this, but when actually seeing parts of the movie now, and it looks hilarious. I can't wait. Yeah. It's going to just be, like, fantastic. Yep. And the Dune Prophecy teaser trailer 2 was released.

This will be coming out, a series coming out on Macs. I mean, they've got the star power on this one. I will be cautiously optimistic. I have to admit, these are based on Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert's books. The ones you bitch about as being shit all the time.

Fucking suck. But, you know, they could read as good stories. They definitely could be good movies or good miniseries out of it because what, you know, what they, they lack the poignancy and the detail and the depth and deep ideas.

They're more action books. And that's not really what Dune is about. So, fair enough. Fine. The trailer looks great. Yeah. I'm definitely going to give this a shot. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is September 6th and Dune Prophecy is in November. All right.

Good stuff coming. Yeah. I finally got around to watching John Wick Chapter 4. Uh-huh. You know, they, I think there was one that was John Wick Parabellum and they had funny names for it. This one should have been called John Wick Tedium. Is this still Keanu at this point? Yeah, this is the last Keanu movie.

Right. I ended up fast forwarding half of the fight scenes because I'm like, okay, I get it. He's going to roll around. He's going to shoot him in the head. He's going to roll around and shoot him in the head. Well. There's going to be a thing. He's going to roll around and shoot him in the head. It's kind of a one trick pony from the first movie, really. Yeah. See, I mean, it's, it was a really good setup in the first one.

And I just think they kind of, while they amped up the action, I think they just ramped down everything I gave a shit about. Right. Like, I really, really loved the first movie. And by the time they got to the end of this movie, I was like, oh, thank God it's over. It was okay, though. I mean, it's still like, you know, I still give it a B. But like, John Wick number one was like an A triple plus.

So it was, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I know I'm late to the game on that one, but I still got it. I finally got around to it. The Boys season four season finale was last night or yesterday. Oh my God, it's so good. But they are giving the Simpsons a run for their money for predicting the state of the world.

And they, I mean, this was written a long time ago, but man, it just kind of replayed last week. That's all it really did. I heard that they had to put a special notification before the screening because of that. So, yeah. Yeah. God. Yeah.

It was, it ended the season like they end all the seasons on a, holy shit, can't wait for next season. So it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. All right. Ups and doodads. So I was taking a course.

I wanted to just start broadening my knowledge about AI and do it legit, like with real people and all that, instead of just hating on it from the news stories and reading up on things that way. I found a class called AI for Everyone, which is taught by Andrew Ng. He's the instructor.

He's also the founder of deeplearning.ai and the co-founder of Coursera. It's on Coursera, obviously. He's pretty involved. He's been involved in AI from the beginning. He's worked with basically almost all the major players. He's worked with Google. He's worked with Amazon. He's worked with tons of people. So he knows of which he speaks.

It was a pretty easy overview course. It's only four weeks long, about 10 hours per week to do it. You would have died laughing, Jason. I wish we could have taken it together and sat in the back row. We would have been fucking making spit wads and showing up with jugs full of vodka and just laughing, you know, because the whole thing starts with like trying to do explanations of what's the difference between machine learning and data science and basically he just comes

down to everybody just tosses these words around interchangeably and the words have no meaning anymore. But really, this is what they should mean. And I was just dying laughing at that. You know, it just gets into basically 99% of AI is A to B mapping. That's it. A to B mapping with huge amounts of data.

And the rest of it, the generative AI stuff is a black box that we don't understand at all. Okay, everything you said on the show. That is it. That's what AI is right now, people. And this is from somebody at the very forefront of it. It's either A-B mapping or it's complete black box shit that we don't understand at all.

I love it. I love it. So I'm going to continue on. I'm going to try to take some more deeper courses because this was just like, I kind of, I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts, maybe even build something. So I'm going to find one course that does that next. But I do recommend this for people because even though it is kind of, if you've been listening to this show, you know exactly what AI is and a lot of this stuff.

But to have a real professional tell you that that's what it is, is first off, it was kind of a pat on my back. I'm like, okay, cool. I was going to say, are you claiming, Brian, that we are not real professionals? Well, we don't have all the money that this guy has gotten for doing it.

So there's that. And the other thing that I actually thought was hilarious is that the entire time he always prefaced things with like, and we should be doing this for the greater good of society. So always keep that in mind, even though that's not required. Okay. This is also the guy that wrote the rules for living at the beginning of the course.

So yes, yes. Yeah. Well, I don't know if, yeah, it must be because he's one of the co-founders of Coursera. So he definitely signed off on that shit. So yeah. How much was it? 60 bucks or something like that. It wasn't much. You know, next time everybody skip the 60 bucks for this one, skip to the next course, send us the 60 bucks, uh, patreon.com slash G-O-G.

You've already, Brian just told you, you already know everything in that course. Yeah, I just told you the course actually. So there you go. In fact, how about half price? You can just send us 30 bucks. We're in, done. Come on. And I'll, and I'll share the little, uh, stupid GIF or image. That you can share on your LinkedIn page to say you took it.

All right. Perfect. Done and done. Certified grumpy. Love it. That's right. Uh, a little bit of actual AI news. Uh, open AI announced GPT 4.0 mini and not 4.0, 4.0 for Omni mini, which is a new cost efficient model.

Uh, and it's apparently better than GPT 3.5 turbo, um, better than 4.0. So this is like their new, their new hotness. Okay. So, uh, but this came out last week. It's going to be for free customers. You get it now. I guess enterprise customers have to wait a little bit cause we get 4.0 maxi names are so fucking stupid.

Uh, they missed a massive branding opportunity. They could have partnered with mini Cooper here. Yeah, they really could have, um, does God, nevermind. Oh God. So, um, so that one came out. So that's a paid one.

That's, you know, open AI. Uh, Mistral has released Nemo. They found Nemo, Brian. Uh, this is a 12 billion parameter, uh, set. And, uh, they think that this one can still run on local machines. It's open source licensed under Apache, um, 128 K token context window, which is a lot.

Um, and apparently runs great for reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks. Uh, this one also speaks a bunch of languages fluently, which the other ones don't so much. So this one's a free. So you got a paid, you got a free option. There you go. Now, let's get into some fun news.

Bill Gates recently visited first Avenue elementary school in Newark, New Jersey, where the AI powered tutor con Mingo, con Migo, con is my amigo is being tested out. Uh, this is developed by con Academy, uh, con Migo.

I just, I feel like I'm going, I feel like I want to go to a Mexican restaurant in order. So can I get to con Migo? Like a big nacho plate. Exactly. Flour or corn. Um, is designed to assist teachers and personalized learning for students.

Uh, Gates was impressed by the innovative ways, which teachers like Leticia Colin and Cheryl Drakeford integrated AI into their lessons, creating customized problem sets and lesson hooks. And what they did was really cool as they took local, local people like local celebrities and worked them into the lessons, which I thought was a really neat way to do it and a good use for it.

Um, this is a really good, good, good read. Uh, Bill acknowledged that there are limitations, um, but they're working through it, but they're trying to find ways that, uh, instructors can use AI in really interesting ways to actually teach kids. And some of the, some of the examples in here were actually pretty, pretty hopeful.

I thought it was a good, good read. Now, since that is on the education side, this is where you and I come into it, Brian. Anthropic has launched a $100 million fund for AI startups called the Anthology Fund with investments starting at $100,000.

Okay. Besides financial backing, startups will gain access to Anthropic's AI models, $25,000 in Anthropic credits and additional credits from Menlo Ventures. I don't know what those are going to do, whatever. Uh, they will also benefit from expert guidance, networking opportunities, and workspace access.

Woo. Who wants a workspace? We got lots of it because everybody's working from home. Uh, importantly, there is no requirement for startups to use Anthropic's AI model, Claude, though it is expected that many will because it's free. And you get the credits. Yes. Yeah. Anthropic president Daniela Amode, Amode, expressed hopes that the fund will foster innovative AI applications, particularly in healthcare, education, and scientific research.

So Brian, we can go start an education startup that Bill will be, uh, on board with. You can, uh, lead now that you've taken the course and are certified in AI. That's right. That was my whole thing. So, you know, we can, we can, uh, we can loop all this together. You and I can do a startup and, uh, get some of that funding and, uh, get the fuck out of this podcasting racket.

I think we should, uh, generate an AI generated podcast, the Hugging About Education. There we go. There we go. We're in. We're set. We're good to go. Send the checks to. Don't forget. I also have a certification in digital ethics. So that should make me shine for Bill Gates. No, no, no.

Brian, we're talking about AI here. Ethics do not apply. That's actually, yeah, that's actually a hindrance in this case. Uh, well, some, uh, one of my favorite people that, uh, it was close to either being as annoying as Elon Musk, but he's not as good as getting himself in the headlines, uh, or as bannable from the show, uh, as Kanye.

But again, he hasn't really been out and about much recently since he got slapped back, uh, a while ago over his racist comments. Scott Adams found himself getting back into the news today through, of course, AI. Great. Yes. He claims he taught chat GPT dangerous hypnosis techniques.

In fact, Adams claims he's taught chat GPT to use hypnosis so well that it's dangerous and beyond psychedelics. Although the cartoonist hasn't offered any tangible proof whatsoever. Last night I had this idea. I wonder if I could teach chat GPT hypnosis.

Adam said on his rumble show Monday, rumble where you go to die. So I taught us some persuasion techniques. I call it waking hypnosis. He said he taught chat GPT some techniques of persuasion before adding additional techniques and techniques and techniques, and then stacked about six more techniques on top of the heck techniques.

And then he said he prompted chat GPT to technique to persuade the cartoonist to feel good, but he insisted he can't tell anyone what the prompts may be for your own good. The answer is I will never tell you those prompts. They are way too dangerous. Adam said dangerous because it will absolutely take over your brain.

It gave me an experience that is beyond psychedelics. It was basically that powerful and it did it instantly and it could do it as long as it wanted. It instantly put me in a state of bliss and it could keep me there as long as it wanted. It was unfreaking believable. And I know you're going to want to know how I did it. I honestly can't tell you it's too dangerous.

It is way, way too dangerous. He said, but that's coming. Because he is going to tell you because he's going to charge you for it. He forgot to preface the whole, he forgot to preface the rant with, first, I took a handful of mushrooms. This guy's such a fucking charlatan asshole.

God, man, how the mighty have fallen. Oh, it's, it's techniques all the way down. Techniques. Techniques on techniques. It's like a good DJ. Oh, here's a fun one. He Health has shut down its Kalmara app, which purported to detect STDs from photos using AI.

Huff dog or not. Yeah. Following an FTC inquiry. The app claims, including a 94.4% accuracy rate for detecting various STDs, were found to be unsubstantiated. A study cited in support was revealed to be flawed and biased, with key contributors having ties to eHealth.

The FTC's investigation highlighted that the AI was trained on a limited data set. We need more dicks. We need more dicks. And only tested on four STDs and not 10 is advertised. We need more disease dicks. Reports also indicated the app's failure to distinguish between an actual genital image and phallic objects.

We need to make sure they're actual dicks. He Health is committed to deleting all customer data. We need to delete the dicks. I want to know who at the FTC drew the short straw on that one. It was shrinkage. Shrinkage.

It's cold out. It's cold. Oh, God. Oh. Who came up with that one? Well, having taken the course, I can tell you that they do need more dicks in that study.

That lack of data is what usually leads to that sort of thing. So you need more dick data. Well, this isn't so much about dick data, but Apple has released the public betas for iOS 18 for macOS and iPadOS and all that good stuff. All the iOSs. All the OSs, yes.

I updated to 18 on my iPads and my phone. And so far, so good. I really, really like the dark mode, I got to say. Even though we've proven that it doesn't actually make a bit of difference for your eyes? Oh, no. It sucks for your eyes, actually. But that doesn't mean I don't like it.

Okay. I mean, you're talking to a guy who drank alcohol for 45 years. I'm fine with things that are bad for me if they make me feel good. And this makes me feel good. Just the one warning is, if you're going to update your Apple Watch, there is no rollback. For everything else, you can roll it back, but you are stuck.

So if it borks your watch, you're waiting until the fall. So I'm going to skip the watch for now. Because my watch is actually my favorite Apple device out of all of them. I love my watch. It's definitely the one I probably use the most. Yeah, I use it all day. It's fantastic.

I'm not going to... We missed a couple last week because we just ran short of time. So I just want to run through these real quick. Amazon is discontinuing Astro for Business Robot Security Guard to focus on Astro Home Robot, two robots that I don't believe I've ever heard of or knew existed.

Do you recall these robots at all, Brian? Yeah, we talked about the Astro for Business when they first announced it, yeah. Okay. I just remember the flying one that was going to come around your house and be like, you know, that kind of like a phantasm. I think the reason you may not remember the Astro for Business mobile security robot is we kind of focused on that bit of the story and went off on that.

Okay. Yeah, the phantasm home robot or flying robot is the one I was just like that. You want to do what? So, yes, you can buy the Amazon Astro Household Robot for Home Monitoring with Alexa. It includes a 30-day trial of Ring Protect Pro for a mere $1,599 if you can get on the invite list because you have to ask to be invited, which doesn't really – being invited to something is generally when one person says, would you like to join us?

You don't usually ask to be invited, which I thought was a little strange. It's like, can I be – can I please be invited to this? But they did that with the Alexa for car thing too, remember? We signed up for it and then they just never came out with it. Yeah, they did that with the Alexa glasses as well I think too.

Yeah, I get invited to that one too but then I'm just like, fuck no. This is one of those things where they built like three of them. So, let's see if there's actually any interest. Who signs up for this? Yeah, yeah, exactly. If we get enough bites, we'll put this into mass production and if we don't, we'll just quietly shuttle it.

Exactly. We'll sweep it under the rug. But speaking of robots, Fragaf on our Discord channel put in a link called The Tragedies of Reality Are Coming For You. And this is about how robots and LLMs, like there are crossovers in the problems that they're trying to solve.

It's actually a really good read. I'm just going to leave it there for people who want to go find it in the show notes. I recommend it. I thought it was a very interesting read. So, thanks, Fragaf, for throwing that in there. And I'm done with Diablo 4. I've moved on to Far Cry 6.

And I just wanted, I had to put this in here, Brian, because this is the insanity of gaming pricing. And I put this in here so you could see it, so you could believe it with your own eyes. I went to go buy Far Cry 6 because I knew it's an older game. And I bought it for the Xbox.

And I'm like, oh, maybe I can get a cheaper version for the PS5, which I still have. So, Far Cry 6 editions, standard edition, base game, $59.99. I'm like, oh, that's kind of pricey. Deluxe edition, base game, and ultimate pack, $79.99.

I'm like, no, not going to do that one. Gold edition, base game, plus season pass, $99.99. I'm like, fuck that. Game of the year edition, base game, season pass, ultimate pass, ultimate pack, and Lost Between World, which I have no idea what that means.

$30. Done! On sale, yeah. On the same graphic. That's amazing. Like, why? Because there are people that are probably really impatient. Yes. That thought that that was like the light version, even though they didn't read it, and went with a $99 version because people are dumb.

Dark patterns, too. Yes, very much on the dark patterns. So, yeah, so I did get the $30 game of the year edition, and it looks great, it plays great, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than everything else. That's amazing. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, with the vivacious and vocally versatile Dave Bittner.

Dave can be heard on the Cyber Wire podcast. Also exploring human deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, or diving into privacy with Ben Yellen on Caveat and understanding industrial cybersecurity on Control Loop. Dave's new show, Only Malware in the Building, is a monthly segment by N2K Cyber Wire and Proofpoint's discarded podcast, hosted by Selina Larson with Rick Howard and Dave Bittner.

It breaks down the most impactful malware stories into actionable insights for tech professionals and security executives in a most delightful way. Hi, Dave. Wow, I'm going to copy and paste all of that for my podcast descriptions. That was pretty good there, Jason. Very nice. Thank you. Thank you very much.

The first bit was written by the new Dr. Seuss AI. No, see, I've got COVID, so I'm in – that's why I'm a little froggy today. But, you know, it opens up the creativity. That's not true because I just found out I had COVID about 10 minutes before we pressed the record button.

And, yeah, I haven't gotten the worst of it yet. So I've got allergies. That's why I'm froggy. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm waiting for the fun to happen, yeah. My roommate had a really, really rough night, so I'm waiting for the hammer to drop on me. Get the Pax Lovid. That's what they say.

Not doing it. Not doing it. I've had too many friends – no, I've had too many friends get Pax Lovid. They were just annoyed by the metal taste for a couple days, and then COVID came back anyway. So I just power through it. I had good luck with it, and I'll share that my wife found that York peppermint patties are an excellent antidote to the metal taste in your mouth.

Oh, because they taste like metal. They're an excellent attitude to most bad things, I would say. Yeah, right. One should always have one on hand. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So shall we talk about the accolade finale? Let's do it.

Okay. I liked it. I liked it a lot. All right. Moving on. Yeah. Agreed. Next. Yeah. I liked it. Yeah. I mean, again, without spoiling too much. I'm a little disappointed that, of course, they had to tie it into, you know, a still old Yoda, even back then.

Like, I know the dude lives 900 years or whatever, but really, did we have to? Couldn't we just have it be separate? At least for, at least for like a couple seasons? Yeah. It was doing well. They could have just cut that last scene completely and it would have been fine.

Yeah. Yeah. You know? Fan service. Fan service. But I mean, you know, he did kill off almost every single major character, at least on the good guy's side. So you got to have some, and the big bad green Jedi master has not exactly endeared herself as a wonderful character that you love.

So I guess you got to bring in some good guy at this point. Yeah. That you're rooting for and still think the Jedi are good. Right. I've been rooting for the bad guy the whole time. So I'm cool. What are you, my son? Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Yeah.

No, man. Dude, as soon as I found out he was on the good place, I'm like, he's my guy. I'm going with him. But he's not the big bad, Jason. Did you not catch the reveal? Yeah. Yeah, I saw it. I saw it. Of course, there has to be an ugly, ugly master on the dark side. Ah, but have you heard of Darth Pelagius the Wise?

Mm-hmm. I'm not a fucking nerd. Really? Really. I'm a geek. I'm a geek, not a nerd. Ah, okay. The things we tell ourselves. Yes. Whatever gets you through the day, Jason. Look, I've got COVID.

I got an excuse. Aw. I like how we had sort of a, dare I say, sympathetic view of the dark side of the Force through this episode. That it's not so black and white. Yeah, kind of like dark side. Right. But, you know, it's not, you can understand how people can take that path and it makes it, the Jedi not seem so good.

Infallible. Infallible. So, yes, exactly. Right, right, right. That it is more complicated. They're more cult-like, you know, than. But I kind of do feel that the last few seconds of the show unraveled so much of that. Because then it did just get us back to, oh, there's the big bad who's definitely evil in the most evil way possible.

Very, very evil. And there's Yoda, the good guy. Yeah. I don't know. We didn't even talk about this. There was one point that was very, very cringy. It was a couple episodes ago when the then-Padawan, after the blood sample, did say their M levels are off the charts.

Midichlorines. Yes, well, it's all tied in now. I know. I do wish they just told the story, but, you know, what are you going to do? It's Star Wars. Yeah, that's true. Got to do the fan service. And still, overall, I thought it was a great show. I'm very much looking forward to another season of it.

Yeah. I agree. I did find it a little taxing to keep track of which twin we were looking at and whether they were the good twin or the bad twin. Because at some point, they swapped outfits and then they had the same haircut and, okay, who am I looking at?

And then they swapped personalities. Right. Right. My son has twins in his class and has become kind of decent friends with them. And their names are Sophia and Eva. And I just, whenever I see them, I go, hey, Sofiva. Yeah. Nice.

Leave it at that. That works. Yeah. Did you guys, I know you guys talked about this a little earlier on the show, but I haven't had a chance to check that out yet. The boys also wrapped up. They had their season finale. Yes, they did. Where are we coming down on that?

Oh, I'm so happy. I loved it. Okay. I'm so excited for the next season. What about you? I enjoyed it as well. Yeah. This is a show my son and I watch together, which is occasionally awkward. But. Always. Yeah. But I enjoyed it.

It had its fits and starts. But overall, I have to say, I'm glad that we're heading into a final season because I feel like this season they were stretching sometimes. And so it's good that we're on final approach and we'll get this wrapped up.

But yeah, it's a fun universe and I'm enjoying it. And I thought the last episode of the season was gratifying. They hit some good points. Yeah. They hit some really good notes, I think. Yeah. I didn't really feel like this season dragged it all for me.

I really enjoyed it. I liked the small Simon Pegg side story. I thought that was great. Yeah. All in all, I thought it was a solid season. Yeah. It was not bad. I also saw that you touched on the update to Overcast, the podcasting app.

I saved that for you, Dave. Let's talk about Overcast. Did you? You didn't talk about it earlier? I saw it in the show notes. Okay. We're all good. Let's talk about Overcast, Dave. Well, so I've been an Overcast user since, you know, 1.0.

And overall, I say I've liked it. As far as podcast app goes, it's been solid, served my needs well. And then, you know, they changed it. Yeah. I should say Marco changed it.

There's no they. There is just Marco. There's just Marco. Yeah. Marco changed it. I don't understand the impulse to do this because I also have been using it for an awful long time. I was late coming to it. I just stuck with Apple Podcasts forever. And then finally, Jason broke me down. And I was like, okay, fine.

I'll switch to Overcast. And it does exactly what it needs to do. Very, very well. Very easy to navigate. Not a lot of things you really need it to do. Why? Why all this? Okay. So the funny part is I've been a paid user since it began, too.

I was a beta user. The whole thing. I've been there since the get. And I've loved it ever since then. And it's been awesome. But yeah, what the flying fuck sticks for this new one. Oh, my God. So first thing I did was try to subscribe to the Accidental Tech Podcast because I knew that there was going to be an update from Marco about everything that they did with the launch.

Let me tell you, if you want to hear a two-hour long description from Marco about justifying everything that they did, then the latest episode of ATP is exactly that. Yes, I did listen to it. But at first, I couldn't subscribe to it because it didn't work. It said, sorry, there's been a problem.

Try later. Try later. Oh, okay. And then eventually, yeah, I couldn't subscribe to anything. And then when I came back, it had subscribed and it was downloading the episode. So I did listen to it. So he explains all of that. And he does ask for forgiveness for some of the problems. And they are legion.

They are fucking legion. Especially – now, here's my biggest problem with it. I've been listening to a podcast called Sobercast, and I've been listening to it for about a year and a half now. There's 1,000 episodes of Sobercast. I track where I'm at in that podcast by my listened checkmark.

So I've been going through here trying to get through all 1,000 of them. The new UI is so confusing. Instead of deleting an episode because I have it set to manually delete the episode, I swiped delete the podcast. And that cleared all of my checkmarks.

For everything I've listened to. And I was probably about 950 through the 1,000. I was so pissed off. I'm still so pissed off. And even looking at it now, I'm like, I don't know what's an episode, what's a podcast, how it's laid out.

It is so bad. It is so fucking bad. And all because he wanted to use Swift UI for it. I'm like, you know what? It wasn't fucking broken. But, you know. Yeah, I mean, I understand his desire. And let's, you know, remember, Marco is first and foremost a developer.

So his desire sucks. Well, but his desire to pay off his technical debt, right? And as you know, if you listen to that episode, he had a ton of technical debt. And he wanted to bring it into the modern era. And I respect all that from a developer's point of view.

And I went into this thinking that because there's nothing that people hate more than change, that there are going to be things that he changed that would be annoying and just break my muscle memory and all that. And so I was trying to be super understanding about that.

And for the most part, I have been. I've found things that I had trouble finding. And, you know, a lot of the decisions make sense. Or at least there's logic behind them. I might not agree with it.

But there is – it wasn't just done randomly. The main thing that I've found that is annoying me and that is going to create a bunch of work for me to get things back is that it doesn't seem to be respecting my settings for episode limits. So, for example, if – I generally use the most recent list in there to just scroll through what do I want to listen to today.

And, for example, I have the Cyber Wire set for two episodes. So it will just have the latest two episodes in there. So as to not clog up the whole list, right? Yes. Well, it's – with the update, it just has stopped respecting that setting.

So the setting is still in there. The setting transferred from the old to the new. So if I go in and look at Cyber Wire and check to see what the episode limit is set at, it's still set at two. But if I go to my recent episodes list, there's like 30 episodes of the Cyber Wire in there.

And I'm like, ah. You did notice that current and all toggle between the two? Yeah, yeah. Is that – so it's in the current? You got 30 in the current? Yeah, yeah. It's in the current, yeah. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So that's annoying and I suspect that's a buggy bug and hopefully it will get fixed.

And in the meantime, I'm going through and deleting a bunch of episodes. Hey, look at it this way. You got some free download numbers for your advertisers. There you go. Right, right. A bunch of people are suddenly seeing boosts because of a bug. Yeah. Yeah. Can we get that boost too, please?

Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just all in all, the buttons are wonky. And now there's one issue that I am – I got it first when I was on iOS 17 and now I've moved over to iOS 18, the beta, the public beta. And I can't really tell that much of a difference.

But I was just looking at some of the buttons are wonky and like the outlining is not right. It's just – but that whole thing with the mixing of the episodes and the shows and like you can't tell what a show is versus what an episode is sometimes. And the fact that there is no confirmation on deleting a podcast, which there should be I think, is really annoying, really annoying.

Because like I told you, man, I got a year and a half of work into that and now it's just gone. It's like, oh, man. I don't mind the confirmation on delete. I'm glad that there isn't one because generally like I'm either walking or I'm riding my bike and I just like swipe gone. Thank you. For a whole podcast though.

I'm not talking about just an episode. I'm talking for an entire podcast. Oh, right, right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. Yes. Yeah, I'm with you. So, yeah. Well, there you go. We'll see. Well, we'll wait for further updates. Yeah. So, your trials and tribulations, Dave, have sparked quite a talk over on our Discord channel.

Yes. Yeah. So, ElectroCat, I'm going to put a bunch of links in the show notes from ElectroCat over on Discord. He said, please pass this on to Dave. He says, there's never a time to quit. And he gave us a giant list of things that you could possibly do, which eventually ends with a hydroelectric power plant and a windmill.

Yes. I do believe you're going to build a nuclear reactor next, Dave. I think that is your next project for the summer. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. I was thinking maybe geothermal might be on my list as well. So, the first link that he has here, the socket adapter, that's what I have.

Okay. So, that's the one. So, he's on the right route. He's on the right move. Okay, good. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I love everything in this list. He's thinking the way I think. And so, I have that socket adapter. I'm on my second one. It comes in a two-pack. Remember, I told you the first one cooked.

Yep. So, I don't know if you guys see in the show notes. I put a couple of pictures in here. Oh, yes. So, you can see my setup now. I put two pictures in. One is the picture of the camera and then the power lead coming from the socket underneath of it, the light socket.

So, I'm still – the socket itself, the light fixture is a work in progress. So, I put a little cage around it, which is sort of a decoy for my homeowners association. Your HOA. Well, so as to not have a naked – It's like it's up to HOA specs there, Mr.

Well, it's not. No, I know. But what I'm hoping is that it's enough of a decoy because it's not a naked light bulb. I'll be filing a letter with the HOA. We shall see. And then the other picture I posted was my collection of solar panels, none of which are in use anymore.

You can see there's – that's three of the four because the camera itself has a solar panel built into it on the top surface of it. So, I wasn't going to take the camera down just to get the picture. But you can see the arms race that I took part in as I tried to make this work from solar and it's not working.

Or the solar didn't work. But it's functioning fine now. So, we'll see if that second adapter holds up when it's not under glass. Or winter. Yes. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. Four seasons. By the way, we'll post these in our Discord channel.

So, people can see them because I can't put images in the show notes. So, I'll put these in the Discord channel. So, if you want to see them, come on over to our Discord channel. So, looking at ElectroCat's list here, I had considered the notion of a solar battery combo unit. You see those – those are particularly popular for people who have trail cams.

Yeah. So, you have some sort of battery backup. The reason I didn't go down that path is it's added complexity, but also the camera itself has a battery built in. So, that's my battery. If I could get reliable power to it from the solar cell, that was my thinking anyway.

Yeah. That's what I have with my ring. That's what works really well because I've got a double battery in my ring plus a solar panel. So, even if it gets dirty, I've got time for them to tell me, hey, your battery is running low to go out and clean the solar panel. There you go. That works out well, yeah. I love the idea of the hydro turbine generator.

My house actually does backup to a body of water. Unfortunately, it's a lake, so the water is not flowing quickly. I could put something like this down where the dam is, but I'd have to run one hell of an extension cord probably. Or you could build another dam closer to your location.

Oh, man. The HOA would love that. Yeah. Beavers, man. No. Dave, don't you have turtles in that lake? Oh, yeah. We've got turtles the size of VW beetles in the lake. So, harness some turtles and point them at the hydroelectric dam and make them paddle to keep it going.

It's turtle power all the way down. Yeah. I was thinking about – what do they call it? Like when they build a mill next to a river, I think they call it a mill race where you have a little – you build a little ditch next to the body of water and water flows down it. Again, Neighborhood Association, thumbs up on that.

They would love it. I could put the wind turbine on my top deck. Again, Neighborhood Association, love it. Well, you know, you could have some birds that are protected in your area.

That would be a problem then. We do have bald eagles. We're going to need an environmental impact study done before you put that up. Yeah, we have bald eagles around here. That is true. Although, I wouldn't mind taking out a goose or two. That would actually be a good thing.

Yeah, it's interesting because here in Maryland, we have legislation where the Neighborhood Association cannot prohibit solar panels. But I don't think we have anything with wind turbines yet. Right. Well, I think you need to run for office, Dave.

Oh, yeah. That's what I want. What I really want to do is become the president of my Neighborhood Association. Then you can do whatever you please, Dave. Right. That will just lead me down a path of – that will be my turn to the dark side. That will be it. I was going to say dictatorial glee comes, Dave. No, I don't need that.

But, yeah. But thank you, everyone. I got some private notes from folks who expressed their ideas and also their enjoyment of this journey riding along with the three of us. Like I said, I hope that I am on a sustainable solution here even though it's not as environmentally friendly as I'd hoped.

But sometimes you got to know when it's time to move on. And that's mostly what I've done here. Clearly not, right? I mean we're still talking about it. Yeah, you have not. You have not moved on in any way, shape, or form.

Yeah. Actually, you know what? Speaking of this hydro turbine, it just struck me that – so if you look at the picture, on the other side of the wall where this camera is, is my hot tub. Now, my hot tub has flowing water. I could put the turbine inside the hot tub and spin the turbine with the hot tub jets.

I know there wouldn't be any loss of efficiency there, would there? No. No, this is like putting the big magnet in front of the truck to make it come down the street. Right, right. Yeah. We've solved it. This is it. This is brilliant. Brilliant. Moving on.

One more thing I put in here that struck my fancy this week was someone has collected a catalog of dark patterns. Dark patterns, as our listeners probably know, are those things on websites and forms and various things, to kind of convince you to do things you really didn't want to do.

It could be buttons that say – one button says yes, and the other button says maybe later. It's like, no, I want a no button. Give me a no button. Don't maybe later me. I never want to do this. So this site has a nice collection of dark patterns categorized, and it's worth a look.

It's just kind of fun if you're into that sort of thing. Yeah. So we actually have a link in the show notes about an FTC study that finds dark patterns are used by a majority of subscription apps and websites. They found that 76% of subscription websites and apps use dark patterns, and this is – they analyze 642 platforms, so it's pretty decent sample size for the size of them.

Oh, yeah, 67% use more than one. I love the – Common tactics include sneaking, which is used by 81% of websites. Obstruction, 70%. It finally comes down to one that I just really love, which is confirm shaming. I'd never heard of confirm shaming, and I've had to look it up.

It says, confirm shaming is the tendency to use language and UX design that guilts the reader into the option to decline, psychologically shaming them into opting in by making them uncomfortable. Wow. Confirm shaming. That's a good one. I mean, my favorite title from the list that Dave sent us is Privacy Zuckering.

Yes, that's a good one. That's the best. Yeah, that's a good term of art. I hope that sticks. All right. Well, if you need us over to hop in that hot tub so you can power up your light, let us know.

No, I think maybe I'll have you guys take turns on a stationary bicycle. How about that? Oh, I do that all day anyways. I should really. Actually, now here we go. I should probably hook that up to our power somehow. Yeah. My project is starting. There you go. See what you've done, Dave.

I know. I'm a leader, thought leader. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Josh, Maxwell, Havard, and Alzi. Welcome, everybody, for joining on that Patreon. Love it. Thank you all so much.

Yes. And over at PayPal, we've got Sloan, Linda, Natalie, Ocadio, Nathaniel, Ramsey, Brian, and Andrew. Thank you all. Over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore, Sean, and Karen. And just a quick reminder, just starting at $3 a month, if you want to get the show early, ad-free, and in high-res, join up on our Patreon.

$3 a month gets you started. If you want to give more, you can. We won't stop you. Patreon.com slash GOG. And if you want to transfer, don't go ahead. If you want to get $30, you can have the podcast of the year edition. Exactly. We'd love that one. And if you want to transfer from either PayPal or Stripe, just drop us a note, and we can help you get canceled and move over.

It's easy-peasy. And like I said, early, ad-free, and in high-res. Woo! Woo-hoo. And I love this. ElectroCat over on Discord put it best. Richard Simmons, Dr. Ruth, Shannon Doherty, the 90s are definitely over. So it's been a rough week.

This is all a pretty depressing week. And then we got, of course, the bell ringer today. Yeah, Bob Newhart, dead at 94. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, Shannon Doherty, 53. 53. I'm going to go back and watch Mallrats. I think her finest hour. Mallrats is a fantastic movie, and I was always a big fan of Shannon Doherty.

I know she could be quite the bitch, but so what? She had spunk and personality. Exactly, man. Exactly. Yep. Bummer. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for tuning in to Grumpy Old Geeks. Dive into the show notes and all the links from today's episode at GOG.show slash 657.

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