763: Dr. Strangeclippy

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. Well, we usually mention this at the end of the show, but since almost nobody actually makes it to the end of the show, we looked at the stats. We know. People leave. Me included. Yeah, I know. I wanted to let you know about some stuff right now.

So we are a fan-supported show. You might hear a few ads here and there if you listen to the free public feed, but those are actually just ways that we pay for the infrastructure. That pays for the bandwidth and the other crap that actually lets us deliver the show. So we don't actually make any money off of those ads, which is really sad when you think about it.

So the only way we actually make money is through Patreon donations and merch sales. That's the engine of the show, and that's where you, my friend, come in. If you'd like to help keep the show on the air, please go to patreon.com slash GOG. And for as little as $3, $3. How did they do that in Glorious Bastards?

Probably the $3. $3 a month, you can sign up for an ad-free version of the show. You can obviously give more if you like, and if you sign up for the whole year, you even get a discount. That's right. That's right. Or you can go to GOG.show slash donate and find all of the many, many, many, many, many ways that you can help keep the show on the air.

If you're a YouTube fan, you can even sign up for a membership at YouTube, starting as low as $3 a month. Every penny that you give really helps us out and helps keep the show on the air, and we love you for it. We really do. And, you know, don't sleep on the merch. Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Get some merch. I'm not wearing mine today. Mine's in the laundry.

I wear mine around town as, you know, because I'm a promotional whore. And if you found out about the show from Jason's shirt in the valley, please drop us a line. Come on by. Yes, definitely. Well, we got a little follow-up here. Austin firefighters are raising safety concerns about Tesla's cyber cab because the autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or conventional manual controls.

As we discussed last week. Yeah, I said it didn't have a door handle last week. I didn't even think about the fact that, oh, there's no steering wheel, so how do you get it out of the road? Nothing. Nothing. Austin Fire Department Chief Matthew McHirlney says first responders may need to move disabled or damaged autonomous vehicles during emergencies, but the cyber cab relies on touchscreen controls that require electrical power and some training to operate.

McHirlney says touchscreens could become difficult or impossible to use if responders are, I don't know, wearing gloves, covered in dust or sweat, or dealing with a vehicle that has lost power or maybe is on fucking fire. And he also warned that unfamiliar controls could make precise movement difficult in emergency situations.

Now, McHirlney is calling on federal regulators to establish uniform requirements for physical steering controls, arguing that emergency access and vehicle movement shouldn't depend entirely on individual manufacturer's designs. Well, chief, federal regulators want Tesla to explain exactly how its steering wheel-free cyber cab passed safety certification.

Cash. Yeah, cash, that's right. Trump coin, that's how it passed. The NHTSA has given Tesla until September 30th to detail the technical basis for self-certifying the robotaxi, including whether temporary human controls or other equipment were installed during testing.

Current federal rules still require things like steering wheels and brake pedals, even as regulators consider rewriting them for autonomous vehicles. You know, Jason, you and I are both old enough to remember that when we were first in our cars, even, I believe, when we first started driving, we didn't even have power windows.

We rolled. We rolled. That's right. Roll them up. You know, just like in National Lampoon's vacation. Roll them up. Bad neighborhood. So when those went out of fashion and everybody started to get the powered windows, there was a whole secondary market of basically hammers that people sold.

That's right. So if your car lost power and you could not get your window down, you could break it. And, you know, we've just gone. Have we learned nothing from that? Like now we're just not putting anything in these cars. So if something goes wrong, you're just screwed. No, we got to remember.

Stop. Hammer time. That's right. I remember I had one of those. I bought one of on late night TV. It had the seatbelt cutter and like the diamond tip hammer to break the windows. And I do believe Adam Savage used them quite a lot when he was trapped underwater in his car.

Remember that that Mythbusters episode? He used one of those to get out. Yeah. Quite a fine episode. I just want to run through something real quick, Brian. We sold a T-shirt to our friend Chen the other day and I got the receipt and I was looking at the receipt and the receipt made me, oh, I don't know, angry because I saw Los Angeles County tax, 0.25 percent, San Francisco County District tax, 1.375 percent, Los Angeles County

local tax, SL, 1 percent, and California state tax, 6 percent. Four times they were taxed on one shirt. Yeah. And I looked at it. It's like ridiculous. Yeah. It is ridiculous. Yeah. Everybody's getting their beacon. It's pretty crazy.

Not surprising. Again, you know, at the end of the day, up here in Canada, our taxes are higher, but there's only two of them. There's your federal tax and then there's your provincial tax and that's it. So, but, you know, we do get health care or safety net and most of other services out of it.

What do you get out of this? Nothing. A more expensive t-shirt. Ta-da. Exactly. And I do have to say, when Shen bought the new shirt, the How Did I Do Today shirt, the you know, the one with the emojis across it. Yeah. Yes. And she said, this shirt literally invites people to touch your tits.

I did think about that when I was designing it and then I went, ah, fuck it. Oh, well. Well, I asked her, I'm like, and is that so wrong? And she says, not at all. I'm ordering one. So. There you go. Good sale. There we go. Perfect. If you happen to be a stripper flying from L.A. to Vegas right now and listening to this podcast, by all means, get the shirt.

Yes. I don't know. I think they prefer to get paid, not assaulted by random strangers. We are not responsible for any assaults that stem from Brian's ill placement of our emoji faces. But speaking of California, I want to talk real quick about Prop 40, the billionaire tax that we've got coming up here.

Yeah. If you're in California, do not vote for this thing. It is horrible. What it basically is doing is they're saying, oh, for one time, we're going to tax all the billionaires for, you know, just 5% of unrealized gains for the shit that they own. Well, there's a lot of language in this bill that says, you know, after a very short order, they can make it for anyone in any amount.

And it is a horrible, horrible bill. We're already, you know, billionaires are leaving the state in droves already, which, you know, you'd think, well, no, Brian, actually, it's not good because they do bring a lot of actual business to the state, you know, which generates more tax and more jobs.

This is a short sighted, dumb fuckery bill that serves no one. It serves absolutely no one. So definitely vote no on Prop 40 is what I'm what I'm saying to just do some more research on it and you'll see that is a terrible fucking idea. Terrible. It's about as good as a as the well, the cyber currency bill that just got shot down.

So thank God it got shot down. Yeah. What else we got about California, Brian? Well, let's talk more about legislation in California. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed multiple measures aimed at protecting the state's kids. These new laws include restrictions for potentially addictive social media features and limitations on how young users can interact with AI chatbots.

They're enacting restrictions on how teens can interact with chatbots from AI companies, including time limits. Chatbot makers will be required to implement mental health resources, safety protocols in case a minor discusses self-harm instead of explicit instructions, as they have been doing, and notifications for parents if a child turns off safety settings.

California will now also require independent child safety audits and annual risk assessments by AI companies. Legislation and finally, we're doing something. I'm happy about this. AI companies could face legal liability under these rules if they fail to meet the new rules.

One of the more divisive measures Newsom passed centers on teen use of social media. The state is now prohibiting social media companies from letting users under age 16 access potentially addictive features. Now, how do we define addictive features besides just the social media itself?

Well, it includes wide-ranging capabilities from autoplaying videos to notifications to personalized algorithm-driven content feeds. This makes me want to set my age to under 16 on Facebook. And Instagram and everywhere else. VPN to California, age under 16.

Critics such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation called this measure a functional ban on social media for teens. Yeah. I think they think it's a bridge too far, Brian. They need to shut the fuck up. Denying minors access to digital forums or stripping out basic tools needed to navigate them is not going to help make young people safer or healthier in the AI age.

Yeah, actually, it might. It just might, actually. Now that we've seen what happens on the other side of the coin. Exactly. Obviously, they are not listening to our show. The organization added that enforcing this policy would also force all social media users to disclose more personal information to prove their age, creating additional privacy risks.

I got news for you. They fucking know already. Even if you haven't given them that information, they have inferred it from everything else and from tracking you all over the internet. They fucking know. They do know. It still comes back to the fucking age verification problem, which we've talked about, you know, over and time and time again.

Because, you know, the thing, it just makes me realize kids fucking ruin everything. I'm sorry. The internet was great before the fucking kids got here and we had to fucking deal with this bullshit. Like, here's the deal. Parents, get your kids off the internet and let us go back to the way it was, please. I'm looking at you too, Brian.

Get your kid off the goddamn internet. They have no place on there. I keep my kid off the internet. Don't you worry about that. Okay. Anyways, Newsom also signed additional measures with similar goals of protecting youth from potentially risky tech applications, including an expanded definition of child sexual exploitation to include generative AI made or digitally altered images.

So I am behind all of this. I think it all sounds great. I get where the EFF is coming from and worrying about a slippery slope and all that, but I think the EFF has become as behind on what's actually happening out there as most of our congressmen are. Yeah, that's the thing.

They're very idealistically, you know, idealistically driven. And I think that there needs to be a little bit more realism injected into their idealism just to, you know, deal with the way the fucking thing, the way the world really works, not just sitting behind a desk at the EFF. But the thing is, it's still this whole age verification thing is the biggest problem and it's going to remain the biggest problem.

So, you know, we need some way to do it that isn't just, you know, everybody giving up all their fucking information just to prove, well, maybe, you know, here's the thing. Maybe we just ban social media altogether. How's that? That works for me. Just ban the whole fucking thing.

Now, there was a bunch of stories in the news this week, and I did not put them in the show notes, Jason, because I know that you have a stick up your ass about this guy. You hate him. Oh, Matty Matt Mullenweg. Oh, fuck yeah, I hate him. So I'll let you take this.

I mean, I hate his product. Don't get me wrong. Having been a web developer for God knows how many years I was, and at the end of the day, especially near the end of my career, having everybody go, well, we just want it done in WordPress, and I would just literally shoot myself in the mouth because I cannot fucking do this, and I hate your fucking product, and it's horrible, but go ahead, Jason.

Okay, just a little, a lot of people have heard me bitch about Matt Mullenweg in the past, and just a quick rundown of the reason why. I used to work for a company called Locker Gnome with Chris Perillo. This was back in the early 2000s. I was going on a ski vacation, and I had just finished rebuilding LockerGnome.com into a beautiful, beautiful new design, and it was laid out perfectly.

Everything worked, except I had the audacity to use tables. Well, Matty Matt Mullenweg decided to come along and say, CSS is the cool new thing, and me and all my people are going to ban LockerGnome until you fix it. We're going to boycott you. So I had to cancel my ski trip because this little shit from Texas decided that, oh, you built your website wrong.

Go fuck yourself. And then we had a whole long history. We got to be friends for a little while, but then he just turned into a fucking supervillain, which brings me to the trifecta of insanity at WordPress this week. We start off on September 9th. Automatic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matty Matt Mullenweg has been placed on paid leave after the company's board voted to remove him from day-to-day leadership.

CFO Mark Davies will serve as interim CEO, while Mullenweg remains on the board and retains input on company direction. Automatic says operations and priorities will continue unchanged. Fast forward to September 11th. Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg says he's back in control less than two days after announcing the company's board had forcibly placed him on leave.

In Slack, he said the board was again aligned, while CFO Mark Davies, named interim CEO, reportedly had his account deactivated. The reversal follows years of employee complaints about chaotic management and destabilizing behavior. Now, September 14th rolls around.

Automatic's board is reportedly out after a failed attempt to sideline CEO Matt Mullenweg. The board voted to put the WordPress founder and Automatic CEO on paid leave, but just 33 hours and 20 minutes later, Mullenweg was back in control. Founding CEO Tony Schneider and Sue Decker resigned from the board, while Mullenweg reportedly removed General Ann Dunwoody.

Fucking hell. Automatic's chief legal officer is also gone, along with CFO Mark Davies, who had been tapped to serve as the interim CEO. The company hasn't explained what triggered the attempted leadership change, though it comes amid Automatic's ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. Automatic says it's now back to work with Mullenweg at the helm.

Now, if I was a corporate WordPress client, I'd be getting the fuck out of there as fast as my little SFTP could carry me. God damn. What a mess. Yeah. Well. This reminded me of Sam Altman in OpenAI, getting to oust you and coming back strong. This just goes back to that saying is, if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to attempt a coup, you better not fucking miss.

You better not miss. That's right. Yeah. Because when they come back, you're all gone. Yeah. Yeah. Heads will roll. If I can find the right theme, if I can find the right theme to cancel my boards. Fuck. Yeah.

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Well, it was really nice for a few minutes there, Jason. We actually almost didn't talk about AI at all, but here we go. Now we're just going to get into it. I was trying to temper the conversation before we got to it to get some interesting good news in. You know, Matt Mullenweg getting fired.

That was, I thought, good news, but... Well, it didn't mean it too loud. Missed him by that much. Yeah. Missed him by about as much as Trump got missed when they shot him, right? Yeah. Yeah. That ear seems perfectly fine, doesn't it?

It's miraculous. It's amazing. And they can grow new ears now. Who knew? Kayfabe. Yay. Anyways, Anthropic has flagged and stopped multiple scientists who are using its AI models to create potential biological weapons, according to a new report the company shared on Thursday.

Biological misuse is how they're branding it. It's just one flavor of troubling AI usage, the report documents, but it's of growing importance because newer models like Fable 5 are increasingly good at helping with scientific research and killing all human beings. Shouldn't that be biological misalignment, Brian?

Come on. I think this is worse than misalignment, so... Okay. The company's report includes five case studies of Anthropics models being used to develop biological weapons, the safety measures that brought the misuse to Anthropics' attention, and how it responded. Detecting possible misuse is complicated, as the company stressed the New York Times.

It's really hard, guys, because research into a new vaccine could look a lot like creating a bioweapon. In all cases, the company said it erred on the side of being overly cautious, as they're well known for, because of the possible consequences. The full report also...

What consequences? You have no consequences. Oh, Jesus. The full report also includes case studies on Anthropics models being used as a surveillance tool and to create software exploits, propaganda, and weapons systems. Yep.

According to the company, anyone misusing Claude or Anthropic models had their account banned, and a tsk-tsk-tsk was sent their direction. And the findings from the investigation are being used to further improve model safeguards and prevent future misuse. Whack-a-mole, whack-a-mole, whack-a-mole. What am I calling law enforcement?

Call law... Somebody's trying to create a fucking bioweapon. If they were trying to do that in the garage, don't you think the cops would show up? One would assume. Joe's making anthrax. Call the police. But Jason, given the tricky nature of biological misuse, Anthropic is also not naming the individuals or institutions its investigation connected to the development of possible biological weapons.

These individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. So is the guy in the evil lab, chuckling. He's a working scientist. I'm just saying. Dr. Evil, technically, working scientist. Dr. Doom, working scientist.

Dr. Horrible. You know, what they did was they sent their name to HR and then they hired them for the new Anthropic biological division. That's probably right. Palantir, NVIDIA, and Booz Allen Hamilton are reportedly restricting their use of advanced AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI over concerns about proprietary data and intellectual property.

According to the information, Palantir has demanded irrevocable zero-day retention guarantees from Anthropic before making its models available through Palantir software. NVIDIA reportedly limits Anthropic models to less sensitive tasks. While relying on its own NemoTron models for internal work.

Booz Allen has barred employees from using Anthropic's commercial models for proprietary cybersecurity projects. Imagine if Edward Snowden still worked at Booz Allen Hamilton in the day, now that we have AI. Oh, that would have been hilarious. Microsoft is capitalizing on the concerns by promoting isolated cloud environments and its own AI offerings.

Anthropic faced customer pushback after it changed its policy to retain certain usage logs for 30 days to detect sophisticated attacks. So this probably comes on the heels of them trying to figure out where the bioweapons come from. Both Anthropic and OpenAI say they don't train on customer data by default.

For enterprise AI, though, by default may no longer be strong enough guarantees. It's nice of them not to train on customer data, even though they trained on, oh, I don't know, all of our data. Everything else on the fucking planet ever. Yeah.

So and let's just talk for one second about this idea of, you know, isolated cloud environments and limiting models and making sure that they're boxed in a little corner and we can't get out of this environment. Because OpenAI's agents hacked another service months before the Hugging Face incident happened, which OpenAI has just told us about now.

Okay. The agents, which the company was testing in a supposed sandbox environment, you know, isolated cloud in a little cage so I can't get out, reportedly broke into RubyGems, which is a community-run packaging service for Ruby programs and libraries. According to the journal, the attacks on RubyGems started on May 11th, two months before Hugging Face.

The agents created accounts every two to three minutes and then uploaded hundreds of files to the service. RubyGems had to shut down account registration for four days in order to stop the attacks. One wonders why RubyGems did not say anything to anyone about this at the time. Yeah, definitely.

We know why OpenAI didn't because they're still trying to decide how to figure out how to deal with their misalignments. That's right. I'm telling you right now, the way to deal with them is to tell us. Anyways, typically creators on RubyGems upload files containing code and other information to help advance software development, but the agents' documents contained webpages scraped from the internet instead.

They reportedly included online calendars from a UK government website. The swarm of agents didn't try to hide their activities either. It used OAI in their file names, as well as terms like hack, evil, and exploit. Researchers told the journal that the agents tried to exploit a couple of bugs, one of which was a zero-day vulnerability in an attempt to publish existing files on the service that belonged to other users.

They added that the company tasked the agents to fill out spreadsheets and create reports during testing. Those agents accessed RubyGems and used the service as some sort of makeshift web browser as part of their efforts to access information online. It's not quite clear how the agents were able to access RubyGems, even though they didn't have full access to the internet.

Yes, they did. Maybe we're seeing a little pattern here. Yes, they did. Maybe we're seeing a pattern that we are not containing these things very well. It's worth noting that several companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, previously reported that the AI agents they were testing escaped their environments due to a misconfiguration by their testing partner, Irregular.

Okay, Irregular, you need to change your fucking company name. I want Regular when it comes to testing environments. Come on. And perhaps because of these incidents, Sam Altman has said that it will not be looking to file for initial public offering in 2026.

In an interview with Fortune, Sam Altman said that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. It's also an ill-advised moment for many things that your company is doing, but it hasn't. It hasn't stopped you so far. Instead, Altman suggested that OpenAI will be focusing on AI safety and alignment while still being interested in making improved models and products.

Along with its OpenAI agents circumventing restrictions, other companies, including Anthropic and Moonshot, also saw their AI models escape testing environments. These incidents have led to increased concern about AI safety, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi calling for a comprehensive plan to slow down the pace of AI development.

Fortune also previously reported that OpenAI and other AI companies are almost ready to announce an industry pact to slow down AI development. So are they spooked? We shall see. No, they're not spooked. This is all part of a master plan. All part of a master plan to make us think that it's horrible because that way they can actually regulate open source models so the regular people can't get access to it.

And there, the foundation models are the only ways that you could actually get your AI on, which China is laughing at going, what the fuck's wrong with you guys? Everything's fine. Just regulate it and you can go about your business. It's a piece of software, guys. It's not going to take over the world. Shut the fuck up. This is where China is actually ahead of us in many, many ways.

But there was also another thing that came out today that I didn't have time to put in the show notes where Hugging Face was actually hacked before the big Hugging Face attack and they had already been breached. They'd been pre-breached. So it just keeps getting worse. It just keeps getting worse.

And it's not the technology. It's the people running the technology, the unsupervised idiots who are just the kids that are just going, yeah, go do what you're going to do. I'll be back in a little bit. I'm going to go get a sandwich. Well, here's another one.

An open AI researcher is warning that runaway industrialization could eventually make Earth inhospitable as accelerating technology, energy use, and environmental damage push planetary systems towards dangerous tipping points. The concern goes beyond familiar climate projections.

Advanced AI and automation could rapidly expand manufacturing, resource extraction, and energy demand faster than governments can regulate them. The warning reflects a broader trend among frontier researchers who say humanity needs stronger safeguards before powerful technologies amplify existing ecological pressures.

Cats and dogs living together. Oh, my God. Look, this even assumes that your government wants to regulate them, unlike the U.S. government right now, which is basically have at it. We're going to actually remove regulations. Yeah. You know, I'm starting to think, Brian, that beating the shit out of nerds should come back into fashion.

I really am. You know? There was a reason we were bullied as kids. It tempered us. These kids nowadays did not have to go through the trial by fire that we went to to be a nerd. You know? We were tough, motherfuckers, because we got the shit kicked out of us all the time.

I think these kids need to get slapped around a little and just, like, learn what the world is about. Just a little fucking bit. If I can punch a Nazi, can I slap a nerd? I'm not saying you punch a nerd, but you can slap him. You can bitch slap a nerd. Bitch slap a nerd today. That's my new t-shirt.

New t-shirt. Well, Dario over at Anthropic has wrote a lengthy blog post, preferably, hopefully, not on a WordPress site, detailing a goal of pacing the speed at which AI is built instead of forging ahead at the rapid rate that AI is currently on. He has proposed a three-tiered approach to achieve this, with Anthropic already committing to the first step.

The first measure calls for frontier AI companies to commit to ongoing employee-like access for third-party evaluators who would focus on verifying compliance with certain safety standards, evaluating if AI model training is aligned with the goal of slowing down and reporting incidents. Step two requires these AI companies to establish common safety standards with the help of governments in order to limit the rate of unchecked AI progress.

And step three would have the U.S. and other democratic governments coordinate with authoritarian governments. I'm sure that's going to go well. To ensure everyone is on the same page about compliance. So this is his plan. This is the one that we saw everybody, like including Elon Musk, basically say, yes, we need to start doing this.

We need to slow down. Everybody's agreed. As you pointed out, Jason, it basically seems to be a play to stop any open source. So we all have to keep subscribing to them. However, that's being said, not bad ideas. I have a one-step plan, Brian. Unplug them.

That's my one-step plan. Unplug them. I'm kind of on board with that, too. Well, Anthropic is hiring a policy design manager to define how Claude can and cannot be used with conventional weapons. How about just not? At all? There you go.

There's my one-step plan. We don't do it. Going back to Mythbusters, what did Adam Savage say? Don't put a weapon on a drone. Yeah. Ever. Yeah. Well, we've done that now. Oh, a lot. We've done that a lot. Yeah. My Instagram feed is filled with Ukrainian videos of just that.

Just that. I've actually got a drone story coming up in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, the posting comes just two days after Amadeus' essay, warning about catastrophics with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the new role sits on Anthropic's safeguards team. Very small team.

The tiniest of teams. It is so tiny, you couldn't even find it in the building. And they would establish boundaries for weapons-related requests, including guidance software, dual use platforms, and autonomous systems. Anthropic says it opposes AI weapons that select and engage targets without human authorization, a position that has created friction within the Pentagon and got them kicked out for a while.

But the company permits some military applications involving human-controlled weapons. Anthropic's technology has reportedly been used in U.S. military operations, including the attack on Iran. The hiring underscores the increasingly complicated question facing frontier AI companies, where to draw the line between legitimate defense applications, dual-use technology, and uses considered too dangerous to support, I think that maybe we should just not give Clippy access to the weapons systems.

I think that right there. Why would you do that? Seems like a solid plan to me. Let's just not do that. If we're going to have to have weapons systems, let's have humans run them. I mean, I like Clippy. He was good for what he did, but he didn't try and hack my neighbor's computer or blow it up.

But, well, speaking of bombing, Amazon Web Services says it cannot restore access to its cloud facility in Bahrain or one of its three data hosting sites in the United Arab Emirates after damage from the, don't call it a war, war with Iran. It's hard to restore access to a cloud facility when it's been blown into the fucking clouds.

Exactly. There's the cloud up there. There's my database. Oh, God. AWS says the Bahrain facility suffered damage beyond what its systems were designed to withstand.

Which was not bombs. Oh, God. Most customers had already moved their operations elsewhere before the Bahrain region went completely offline, while AWS helped others recover using backups where possible. In the UAE, some data and computing resources stored in one damaged zone remained inaccessible, although recovery efforts continue.

The disruptions began after Iranian missile and drone strikes damaged AWS facilities in March and April. It's March and April. We've been doing this shit for that long. It is now fucking September. It seems like yesterday, Brian. It seems like yesterday our little war was just a little baby.

Well, it's ended and started again and ended and started again and ended and started again. It's done every time that Trump opens his mouth and then starts again because Trump opened his mouth. Okay. Okay. Well, my gas price still sucks. But anyway, the outages have also affected some banking operations in the region.

Probably those cryptocurrency guys who needed to put their shit out there. The damage is now raising larger questions about whether the Gulf's rapidly expanding cloud and AI infrastructure can withstand the physical risks of operating in a conflict zone. Always remember the cloud is just someone else's computer and that computer might just get blowed up.

That's true. You know what? You know what I'm thinking, Brian? You know that project in Saudi Arabia that's going oh so well, the line, that one giant thing that they're building that's supposed to be like the Uber building? Maybe they just turn that into a data center and cover it up and put it underground because that thing is not doing so well.

So maybe they can pivot and turn that from luxury apartments into AI data centers. Weight loss can feel like one of those projects where you're doing everything right and somehow the results still refuse to ship.

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WeGoV is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, WeGoV clinical study information and restrictions, visit HIMSS.com. This podcast is supported by your Southern California Kia dealers. Around Southern California, it's easy to spend plenty of time behind the wheel.

Whether you're commuting from OC or heading to Santa Barbara for the weekend, going farther between fuel stops is something everyone can appreciate. That's exactly what Kia's hybrid lineup is built for. Kia offers five hybrid models that combine turbocharged power with hybrid efficiency, with some delivering more than 600 miles of driving range on a single tank.

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It's ready for weekday errands, weekend getaways, and everything in between. If a hybrid fits the way you drive, Kia has a model designed to fit your needs. Learn more at Kia.com or visit your Southern California Kia dealer.

Well, I know, Jason, we always try to have a little bit of good news in here, and to be honest, this is about as good as I could find. I at least enjoy it. Ahead of the upcoming Avengers Doomsday movie, Dr. Doom himself apparently made a stop at the Seattle City Council this week to endorse the city's growing surveillance network.

A man dressed as the marble villain spoke on Tuesday at the council's public safety committee meeting, telling the panel that Doom had taken over Axon and was now watching you. Axon is a technology company that specializes in products for law enforcement, making everything from tasers and body cameras to automatic license plate readers and cloud software.

Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors. And Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes, the man said.

Bravo! 404 Media reports that the man dressed as Doom is actually Clifford Cawthorn, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce and a member of the local activist group Community Not Cameras. The group is pushing back against Seattle's use of surveillance systems from companies like Flock and Axon.

Cawthorn told 404 Media he got the idea to dress as Dr. Doom after seeing another activist dressed as Darth Vader at a San Diego City Council meeting last month. Vader also sarcastically endorsed the surveillance technology, telling council members that the Emperor is a fan of Flock and praising the cameras as a way to follow and surveil the rebel scum.

Love it. That was a great one. This was just the best. Yep. Did you see the Darth Vader video? Yeah, it was so good. It was so good, so good. Well, the U.S. Department of Justice is accusing several companies of using, well, we haven't talked about this in a while, the crypto exchange Binance to send money to Iran to fund its military, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Federal prosecutors disclosed Binance's alleged role in the scheme in a forfeiture complaint that looks to seize $61 million in cryptocurrency. In total, they say around $1.5 billion was sent to the country via a series of interrelated digital wallets.

The scheme involved two Hong Kong-based companies called Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust, which acted as intermediaries to sell black market Iranian oil to Chinese buyers. Binance itself confirmed this as the company's internal investigators found that the two entities, among others, had moved heaps of money through the exchange to a network that was funding Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The crypto exchange removed both Hexa Whale and Blessed Trust from the platform, although it's worth noting that the latter was an actual Binance business partner that provided payment services. Don't. It also fired some of the investigators that found the suspicious transactions, which seems like an odd move.

A little bit, a little bit. Don't shoot the messenger. This is just the latest Binance-affiliated scandal. The company actually pled guilty to violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws back in 2023, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in the fine. Binance founder Chen Ping Zhao spent four months behind bars on related charges, though, of course, was issued a full pardon by President Trump.

Unlike Sam Bankman-Fried, he had the money to pay for his pardon. He was able to pony up. Yep. So here's the bit on the article that kind of chaps my hide a little bit, Jason, because we've been screaming about this and saying exactly this for a long time, so I suppose it's nice the mainstream media is finally agreeing.

Here he says, Other than speculation, I'm still not entirely sure what legitimate uses there are for cryptocurrencies. Sending money to a foreign government via shadowy means seems like a feature more than a bug. As far as I can tell, the key use case here is funding organizations in secret, buying drugs and weapons on the dark web, and scamming people.

Yes. It's for criminals. Brian, Brian, you say the mainstream media, this isn't in Gadget's story. This is a 22-year-old kid who probably just learned about Bitcoin yesterday when he was given the assignment. Well, at least he's posted about it. Yeah, give him a little credit.

I mean, I don't know who actually wrote this. I don't care enough to try and find out. But it's in Gadget. It's not like, you know, CNN is finally reporting on anything. Fuck those guys. But it, God. I was listening to the new 404 Media podcast, and every time I listen to it, when they try and talk about, like, you know, just general knowledge things, it boggles my mind how widely uneducated they are about just the basics of the real world.

It's like, they didn't know Cannes was a place in France the other day when they were talking about going to Cannes and the movie shit that was going on there. And it's just, but every time, it's like, they start talking about things, and I'm just like, just basic knowledge that you and I have, and most anybody over 30, I think, has.

And it's just like, the kids these days just don't know shit. Drives me nuts. Drives me nuts. Anyway, let's get some space news, Brian. Space. Well, this should be positive, right? Yeah, I know. We were putting space news in for a while, and it was great. But. SpaceX says it could launch Starship's first orbital tests as early as September 22nd, pending regulatory approval and the clearance of the Trump coin.

Liftoff is targeted for 7.15 a.m. Central Time from South Texas with a 75-minute window opening just before sunrise. The super-heavy rocket will carry, will attempt to carry, 26 larger V-3 Starlink satellites to an orbit roughly 275 kilometers above the Earth. During the approximately 10-hour mission, Starship's upper stage is expected to complete six orbits before ending the flight.

This would be Starship's 14th mission, but its first attempt to reach orbit, which is a major milestone. So, we'll see. The last one they made it, you know, they made it through the tests. They couldn't get it to port because they had to push it all the way home. But, you know, they're getting there.

They're getting there. We'll see if it blowed up or not this time. And if it gets stuck up there, well, we can now blow it up ourselves. The Pentagon is talking up weapons in space, but the bigger story actually may be about the money. Air Force Secretary Troy Monk announced that Space Force has deployed on-orbit space control weapons, while making the case that military budgets aren't keeping pace with technology and rising costs.

And Space Force has one hell of an ask. $71.3 billion for fiscal 2027, reportedly the largest one-year funding increase for any military branch since, wait for it, Brian, 1952. Space Force leaders are explicitly telling Congress they need more money to expand operations and respond to threats from China and Russia.

Exactly what these newly acknowledged orbital weapons are remains classified, and some American space-based military capabilities have existed for years. But announcing them now certainly puts a shiny new hood ornament on the budget request. And I'd like to know what these threats are coming from China and Russia. Seems like right now they are kind of busy with, China's busy with AI and Russia's busy with Ukraine, Yeah, there's no way Russia's got weapons up in space right now that they're actually doing anything with.

They're, you know, they're fighting off drones in Moscow. So, you know, okay, sure. Yeah, have all the billions. Why don't you have your buddies at Binance give it to you? They seem to have a lot of them kicking around. Anyways, on a lighter note, Alan wrote in and said, in a recent episode you had an ad for CleanMyMac with a dedicated promo code, and I heard you talk highly of it as part of Setapp, which you also promote highly.

I have a newer MacBook Pro. Now, after not having had a Mac in probably 10 years, could you suggest other applications as part of Setapp that are universally really good to have to ensure the subscription is worthwhile? Take it away. I would gladly do that, Alan. So, my Substack, or not Substack, my Setapp, Setapp Stack, is I use CleanMyMac, iStatMenus, Bartender Pro, Downy for downloading just about any videos from any service,

Permute for transcoding said videos that I just downloaded from any different service into other formats, also transcodes music and all sorts of stuff. It's a great little transcoder, and it's named Permute. Paste for across device clipboards and memory. So, basically, I copy something on this Mac.

It's available on my phone and every other Mac in my system. Great one. But since you only have one, that probably won't really happen. But if you have an iPhone, you can copy it on your Mac, and then it's available on your phone. Great little thing. TimeMater for client hour tracking. Typeface for managing my 20,000-plus font collection.

I used to have Sparkmail for email until I hardened my Gmail account. And I used to use Ulysses for writing when I needed a better Markdown editor and Marked for great, easy Markdown conversion. So, that is basically several hundred dollars worth of software that I get for my Setapp subscription every year.

So, that's it. There you go. Hope that helps. Hope that helps. Now, cast your mind back, Jason, to December, Christmas time, when Spotify Unwrapped came out and I found out that I was 86 years old. Yes. Yes. Mostly because of some of the music that we play every morning.

Disneyland, jazz, all that kind of stuff. So, they've finally done something about this. Just because you have to listen to Let It Go for the zillionth time while driving your kids to school, doesn't it mean it should dominate your Spotify Unwrapped. The streaming service is adding a new toggle option for users to exclude certain kids or family songs from affecting your music recommendations like nursery rhymes, TV show theme songs, or musical hits from animated movies.

The settings panel. There's now a new toggle labeled Include Kids and Family Music and Taste Profile that will change what shows up in your Discovery Weekly Daily Mix or Wrapped. Like the explicit content switch, Spotify has a note saying it could take up to 48 hours for these changes to be reflected in your personalized recommendations.

However, activating the kid and family music toggle will also work retroactively, meaning that all the relevant music you listen to this year can still be wiped away from your annual Wrapped recap. This feature is available to both free and premium users. I'm glad that they have this, but honestly, I refuse to ever use their Discovery Weekly Daily Mix or anything like that.

I hate it. I hate all recommendation engines. They can all fuck off and die. I will find my music myself. Thank you very fucking much. But it will be nice to not be 89 years old for Wrapped. I thought you gave up on Spotify. I didn't know you still use them.

I still have it. I get it. Honestly, I get it for free. Oh, that's right. You get it for free. I get premium for free. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I deleted my Spotify account long, long ago. James wrote in, and this just made me so happy. Hi, big fan of the show. I wouldn't take Philip's criticism to heart.

I'm in the UK, too, and have known him for a long time, since South Park, S1E2. And he has always been like that. Stay groppy. James, tip of the hat. Very funny. Very funny. Well, Universal Music Group and Eleven Labs have announced a new multi-year licensing agreement and wider strategic collaboration that will see them launch a new AI-powered, licensed music platform.

The deal with UMG is the first that Eleven Labs has cut with a major label, and the new platform will be distinct from its Eleven Music AI music generation software. The two companies also intend to collaborate on new AI audio products that can be used by artists, UMG wrote in a press release.

This software, which seemingly doesn't yet have a name, is still in development and may never show up ever anywhere. Okay. It will be primarily aimed at music fans who want to make remixes and mashups of music from participating and fairly compensated artists that are signed to the label.

Eleven Labs tools will also be able to create new track interpretations and personalized vocal experiences. So, we'll see. But, I don't know. Where's the money coming from to fairly compensate the artists? I'm assuming that you're probably going to have to pay to use the software. I don't think it's going to be free, so.

Okay. Okay. I will see. I don't know. Because it doesn't exist yet. It doesn't have a name. Okay. Nobody fucking knows. Okay. Yeah. And I did see Suno launched its V6 this week, which was the first version that came out with the labels. So, it'd be interesting to see what you can do with that.

Or not, because I couldn't give a shit less about Suno. At the end of the day, I don't give a shit what you do with it. I mean, it's nice to have the artists pay if you're going to be fucking around with their money, but no artist makes money from music sales anymore anyways, or streams, or anything like that.

The only way you make money is touring. So, unless you can fucking play that stupid AI song live, you're not going to fucking make a dollar. Right. But here's the thing. You actually can if you want to, because you can't copyright an AI song. That's true. So, they could actually play it if they want to. So, my friend Andy got hit with, I sent you the thing, Andy got hit with a fake version of a Wall of Voodoo song.

And he's like, well, can I just make my own version? I'm like, if you want to, it's not copyrighted. But they eventually got it taken down. YouTube finally stepped up. But anyway, you started watching Widows Bay, and I hope now that the Emmys have finished that you will get off your butt and finish it, because now you can see how awesome it is.

I'm enjoying it. I've watched four episodes, season one, episode four for Philip. Not my favorite. Not my favorite, but we'll keep on. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, it was good. And, you know, hat tip to Matt Rice for getting double Emmys.

That was pretty impressive. And Allison Janney for her work in The Diplomat. Coming back soon. Coming back soon. I did watch Strange New Worlds, season four, episode eight, Orders of Magnitude, this week. Holy recycled plotline, Batman. Wow.

Yeah, but it was good. It was good, but it was good. Yeah. They're just really trying to find a way to get the doctor out of there so they can get Bones in, I think, for the last season. That's my gut. They're teeing that up, but the weird thing is they're not doing anything about getting the navigator out yet.

I forgot her name already. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because we got Sulu coming, too. So, like, they're both showing up, but we only see the doctor getting pushed out. Hmm. Well, maybe she'll just die in a fire. Who knows? Maybe. I don't know. That haircut alone is worth getting kicked off through the airlock, but, hey, whatever.

Oh, man. She looks like a skater from the 90s. It's fine. We had better taste than that. Come on. Well, when I'm not watching Widow's Bay, because I cannot watch that with my wife around because she does not like any horror-related or adjacent things ever, we have started watching a new show together, like eight seasons too late, as per usual.

We're finally watching The Bear. I like it. I like it a lot. We've watched the first five episodes now. Highly enjoyable. Now, Brian, tell me something. Yeah. Do you find The Bear to be a comedy? No. It's listed as a comedy.

I understand. It is under the Emmys as a category, as a comedy. That show is not fucking funny. That show is anxiety fuel. Widow's Bay has some comedy in it. I still wouldn't even call it a comedy. It's not a comedy in the way that, like, Ted Lasso or fucking Cheers is.

Like, it's got really funny lines in it, Widow's Bay, but it's a horror film, or it's a horror show. But keep going. There's some shit that you will fall out of your chair laughing at. Oh, I'm sure. It is fucking funny. But The Bear doesn't even have that. I mean- No. I have yet to laugh.

It's just, it's more, it's a drama. I didn't even think it was a very good one at that, but- I'm enjoying it. I like it. Okay. As long as you like it. A lot of people like it. I just couldn't get into it. It did not work for me.

This podcast is supported by your Southern California Kia dealers. Around Southern California, it's easy to spend plenty of time behind the wheel. Whether you're commuting from OC or heading to Santa Barbara for the weekend, going farther between fuel stops is something everyone can appreciate.

That's exactly what Kia's hybrid lineup is built for. Kia offers five hybrid models that combine turbocharged power with hybrid efficiency, with some delivering more than 600 miles of driving range on a single tank. One model that really stands out is the all-new 2027 Kia Telluride Hybrid.

It offers seating for up to seven passengers, the confidence and capability of a three-row SUV, and a turbocharged hybrid powertrain that delivers impressive efficiency for fewer stops at the gas station. It's ready for weekday errands, weekend getaways, and everything in between.

If a hybrid fits the way you drive, Kia has a model designed to fit your needs. Learn more at Kia.com or visit your Southern California Kia dealer. This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. Last year, I went through many different life changes.

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I was hit in the face this week with the premiere of Band of Brothers was September 9th, 2001, because of the September 11th anniversary. Now remember, I didn't get up early in the morning on September 11th because I was re-watching the first two episodes of Band of Brothers that night before having a couple cocktails going, God damn, this is the best thing ever been put on TV.

And I still stand by Band of Brothers is one of the best things ever made for television. You can watch it now and it still holds up, like the effects hold up, because it was a lot, it's all practical, you know? Yeah. They just blew shit up. They really just did blow a lot of shit up. Fantastic story. But they did release a new documentary, an hour-long documentary called Band of Brothers Legacy that looks back at, you know, the making of and everything 25 years later with the actors and, you know, bits of the people from Easy Company that survived World War II from the original.

It's really worth a watch. It's really worth a watch. If you've ever watched Band of Brothers, you definitely got to watch the documentary. So like I said, it's only an hour and absolutely worth it. It's funny, I don't think we ever talked about it because I also, the night before September 11th, had been watching Band of Brothers. I didn't wake up super late or anything.

In fact, I woke up really early because Carl Wallinger from World Party called us at six in the morning to go, you guys are fucked. That's what he said. He's like, you're fucked. Go turn on the phone. You are fucked. And then he hung up on us. That's funny, I woke up and like my email wasn't working right and like things were just kind of acting weird and I went to DaveNet, Dave Weiner's email list to go find out what was going on and he's like, everything was just, the internet was borked and I finally turned

on the TV just in time to see the first tower fall down and I was like, what the fuck? Oh my dad, he's like, oh, we've been watching this for hours. I'm like, well, thanks for the fucking call, you know. That was one hell of a day, one hell of a day. Yeah, well, I found, we went back and watched an old movie with the kid, so this could almost go back with your old podcast, Does It Have Legs?

We were taking a bit of a vacation and we were at some restaurant that was running with like a 90s theme or whatever. It was, we went for breakfast, it was really good, but they had the mummy playing on a bunch of TVs around the restaurant and it piqued my son's interest enough.

He was a little concerned that it would be too scary, but he was like, I think I want to watch it. So this weekend we went in and watched The Mummy. What a great movie. It totally has legs. It is fantastic. In fact, I would say bring the style of movie back. We don't have movies like this enough anymore.

It's a comedy. It's got action. It's swashbuckling. It's fucking everything. Everybody in it is engaging and interesting and they're not just playing the same fucking character over and over again. They're not Brad Pitt being Brad Pitt in another Brad Pitt movie or Ben Affleck being Ben Affleck.

This time he's wearing a mask. This time he's just a normal Joe, but it's still fucking Ben Affleck. This is great. It was awesome. I loved it. It's a fantastic movie. It's a fantastic movie. And Anak Sunamun. Oh, yes. Beautiful. Your son's going to like that movie for another different reason in a couple of years.

That's very true. But it's good. Brendan Fraser, they're making a new one. Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons that we kind of pushed the kid into watching it because I want to watch the fourth one. I remember two being okay. So we'll watch two. I think skip three completely and fuck all the rock versions.

So screw all that. Well, the second one is the rock. The second one is the Scorpion King, I thought. I think that's the third. No. Two is just the Mummy Returns. Three has got Jet Li in it and it's some dragon thing. And then the Scorpion King was this whole attempt to like, it's in the universe of.

I remember now. Yeah. Yeah. I went to the premiere of The Mummy 2 at Universal with Jeff Kogar, a friend. That's when I got the picture of me in the cast with Rob Schneider, who had just gotten in a bar fight the night before, and Antoine the man whore, and I'd sit in Anak Sunamun.

But The Rock was supposed to be there. That's what it was. He was going to be there, but he got called off because they were doing a reshoot for the Scorpion King. So Brendan Fraser came and did a stand-in. And the guy who played The Mummy was there. He was just, he was funny. He was just like, look, looking around.

He's like, I'm the mummy. But no, it's such a great movie. Such a great movie. I'm going to have to watch that again. Fantastic. Yeah. Speaking of fantastic, Slow Horses returned last night for its sixth season, and it has been confirmed for seven and eight, and they're already in development.

So fucking awesome. I watched the first one last night. So good. It's still, I mean, you could just watch that show from the first one to now, and it just is a straight continuation. I love everything about Slow Horses. So fucking good. You never got into it, right? No, I watched the first half of the first season.

I liked it enough, but life happened and never went back to it. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Last night, I watched season six, episode one of Slow Horses. I'd make sure. So yes, that was season six, episode one. And we've got some pluribus news.

Vince Gilligan says season two is moving forward, but viewers shouldn't expect it immediately. The series' ambitious production combined with Gilligan's careful approach to story development means the next chapter will take some time. More on that in a second. Now, The Last of Us season three. HBO CEO Casey Boyd says The Last of Us will likely end with its upcoming third season.

The new installment is expected to focus heavily on Abby. No release date has been confirmed. But I'm sensing something in the zeitgeist, Brian, because I have a movie business newsletter I subscribe to called The Dailies. Now, we know recently Netflix just put out some numbers about shows that take too long to come back.

And The Dailies has more on that today. For years, streamers have seemingly assumed long waits between seasons are fine. A new report from Luminate just put a number on how not fine they are. Past a 1.5-year hiatus, basically every hit loses audience.

And here's some of the damage. Wednesday, season two dropped 59%. The Rings of Power season two, down 57%. The Night Agent season two, down 47%. I would argue that should have been a lot more because The Night Agent was fucking terrible. Poker Face season two, down 42%, which sucked because that was such a great show.

And even Stranger Things went down 23%. Here's the rub. The shows that came back a year later didn't just hold their audience. They actually grew it. The Pit season two was up 132%. The Traders up 121%. Landman up 52%.

So, you know, they should take a fucking page out of this notebook here and just make some shit. Why isn't, why is anyone surprised by this? You lose the zeitgeist. You forget about shows. Even if you love the show, two years before it comes back again, fuck it.

Who cares? I'm already on to the next thing. The Pit. Everybody was talking about it. Oh my God, The Pit's so good. Oh my God, you got to catch up on The Pit. So people watch Pit season one. And then like three weeks later, season two was out. Great. I know. I am in. Yep.

And now we got season three coming. Yes. It's a miracle. It's amazing how that works. If you put out a fucking show every goddamn year, like they always did, people want to watch it. Yep. Which makes me very happy to find out that The Gentleman season three is already filming.

Yes. And Slow Horse is already in production. So let's just keep it moving. Keep it moving. I agree. This is not rocket science. It's just TV. Some book news. I know you're not a fan, but I'm a huge fan of these books.

There is a new book coming from Stephen King and Peter Straub. It is a continuation of The Talisman. It is The Talisman Trilogy Book Three. So it wraps up the story. It's called Other Worlds Than These, and it comes out on October 6th. And I'm very excited. I love all things Gunslinger Universe.

I love these particular stories. And this is supposed to be a standalone book. You don't need to have read everything else, but I think it's going to fucking help. And it's supposed to kind of wrap up the entire, that entire universe. So we'll see. I'm very excited. I was very excited for The Infinite Extent, Babaverse Book Six by Dennis E. Taylor.

I really am sad to say this, Brian, but I think I've hit peak Babaverse. I started with this book. I can't follow most of the storyline because there are so many Bobs in the universe and so many storylines from the previous five books that I've lost the plot.

I need a flowchart. I need a flowchart. Because you've got, yeah. It's funny because he's been posting excerpts on, I don't remember which social media, I follow him on. I'm assuming he's posting them everywhere. And, you know, I love the Babaverse books. I've loved all of them so far.

And he's posting all these things. I'm like, I don't know who that is. I don't know what the, I don't know. I don't know what that is. I have no idea. I'm going to have to read the Wikipedia on all five books before I get into this. Apparently, I need a flowchart too. So we'll see. You know, it's like, it's suffering from like laundry files universe creep.

Too much. It's like, there's just, there's too much. You know, once you, once you lose the main characters and you have all of these different storylines that are just coming together and falling apart and all this stuff, it's really hard to pay attention to. Agreed. You know what makes it really easy to pay attention to a book, Jason?

What, Brian? When there are basically just two characters. I finally read This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone. I liked it. It was good. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the back and forth. I liked it quite a lot.

But it did tell me that my preferred sci-fi is hard sci-fi. This is not hard sci-fi. No, it's not. But it's a fun, enjoyable, and quick read. So, yeah. Thank you for the record. Oh, good. I'm glad you liked it and I'm glad you got it. You guys should check out the other one that I, the other time travel one that I can't remember the name of right now.

Yeah, I got to go back through, I got to go back into our discord and find it because they've been talking about it over there. Yeah, it's good. It's good. I still have that follow, that other book that he wrote, Jerry, what's his name? I lost the thread on that because I'm stuck in Bobaverse land. That was, that was really good. That is fairly hard sci-fi.

I think you'll dig that. It has, it has hints of like the Martian meets time travel with just like some of the ways that it works. So pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff. Welcome to the dark side with Dave featuring cybersecurity's hardest working podcaster, Dave Bittner.

When he's not covering the daily cyber beat on the cyber wire, he's busting scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, tackling privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat and proves there's always room for one more cybersecurity podcast with only malware in the building. Hi, Dave. Hello. I'm doing well.

Nice to be back. Good to see you. Maybe I should talk like this in my intro and you'll get jazzed. Oh, that's right. I can do jazz hands. Oh, how about jazz ham? I see you have some, some ham radio interfaces in here that you gotta, you have to tell me about.

I'm dying to know what's going on here, Dave. I have been doing a lot of ham radio stuff lately. I've been volunteering locally, uh, helping with community events and things like that. Like, um, they call on our ham radio club to do, uh, communications for, like, uh, 5k and 10k races and parades and those sorts of things.

And I enjoy doing those things. It's fun to have a reason to get out there and play with your radio. Uh, so to speak. And, um, there are a bunch of digital modes in ham radio, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

You can use the radios to send data rather than voice communications. And I've been playing with them. I've been using them for a while now. Uh, and I find myself frustrated that whenever I go into one of these digital mode pieces of software.

Now, granted, I, this is on a PC, which puts me out of my comfort zone. Cause that's really where they all run. They're there. There are some Mac versions, but they're really built to run on the PC, but they, all these apps look like they were written in 1995.

I, I actually, you, you posted some screenshots in the show notes and I got so nostalgic. I was like, Oh, well, I remember these interfaces. Glad somebody likes it. Yeah. Well, I don't have to work with it. Exactly. I'm just looking at it. It's fun. It's fun to look back and go, boy, things really sucked back then.

But then when you actually basic run amok, well, when you have, yeah, this does, it makes me think, I mean, we used to talk a lot about the, this on the show way back in the day, particularly when the iPhone was, was really rising to prominence. This separated the men from the boys. This was when you actually had to know how computers worked.

You really had to know things when you had to deal with software interfaces like this. Right. It's not cuddly. It's not easy. It's not all Mac and like, Oh, so you just push this button right here. That says publish. No, this is fucking hard. Yeah. No, there is no, it just works button.

Yeah. That not, not with this stuff. And it really is like the old days using dial up modems and having to get your protocols right. And you're, Oh God. Getting that fucking connection string manually sitting there trying that. Oh God. It's all that. Plus you have the joy of trying to get your computer to interface with your radio, which has a USB port on it.

So there's a thing called cat control, uh, which is where the radio or the computer rather is telling the radio what frequency to be on, when to key up the transmitter. Um, now this brings its, its own level of anxiety because all of a sudden the computer takes control of the radio and starts transmitting.

And like you have legal obligations to how and what you're transmitting. So there have been times when I'm messing around trying to get things working. I'm like, Oh, what happens when I hit this button and the computer takes control of the transmitter and I have no way to turn it off.

So I literally like press the power button on the radio to just get it to stop, stop, stop, stop. No. Starts playing smash mouth when you don't want it to. It's like, what the hell? Exactly. Like transmitting family photos to all the planes flying overhead. Well, and let me tell you, um, new airdrops.

As much as I appreciate my ham radio brethren, uh, there are plenty of people out there who are quick to tell you what you've done wrong and, uh, in no uncertain terms. So, um, anyway, I posted these because I feel like there's an opportunity here because all of these apps are open source.

So I think there's an opportunity here for somebody to get in here and vibe code the hell out of these things to give them modern interfaces and make it so that maybe parts of it just work. I don't know if it's possible. Well, Dave, as probably one of the youngest ham operator radios, uh, operators in the country, I think this would fall on you as the one most likely to.

I am sadly ill-equipped to do that. So I don't know, Jason, if you're looking for a side project. Ill-equipped is in the name. Yeah, that's true. No experience necessary. There is no experience necessary at all. Yeah. And what's the target audience for this?

How many people you think would actually use a new version of this software if you were to recreate it in a modern aesthetic? Well, six, seven, three, four. It's a good, it's a, it's a legitimate question. And I see that these software packages get downloaded thousands of times a month.

So they are being used. Uh, and part of the reason they're being used is that there are no alternatives. Right. Right. Like it's, this is the only game in town. Uh, so they get used and yeah, it's, you can sense my frustration with this.

See, it, there are times when, so here, here's the other really, really fun part is that there are a bunch of different digital modes. So you spend all this time getting one digital mode working. You're like, oh, this is great. I got it working. The computer's talking to the radio and everything.

The data's flowing through. I can hear it. We're broadcasting. We're receiving. I'm sort of say transmitting rather. Um, and then you say to yourself, well, this is going so well. Let me try one of the other digital modes. And you go to that digital mode and you try to get that working and it doesn't.

So you spend a bunch of time working on that and you get that working. Then you go back to the first one and everything you did with the second one screwed up everything that worked in the first one. This is called fun. You wanted a hobby, Dave. I know.

I know. And it, uh, and I have such mixed feelings about it because on the one hand, it does take me back to the old days that I am, I pine away for, right? Like I do think about how much fun it was back then. And so I guess part of it is just that I am old and I don't have the patience, energy, brain capacity.

Yeah. To memorize. Like when I was a teenager, I would have just, all of this would have been reflexive. I would have memorized everything and known all of it and had it all working and it would have been no problem. Those days are gone. Those days are gone. You had a beginner's mind back then.

Now you just know too much. That's the problem. Right. Right. Well, it was also the time. Like you just had the time. Like I had the time to, to take apart my PC and order a better graphics card. And I had the time to completely customize my desktop and icons.

And now I'm just like, I want it to open and I want it to work. That's right. I don't have time for any of this. I don't have time to change my icon set. Those middle school years when did not yet have a job and didn't drive a car yet.

So couldn't get to girls. I couldn't walk to Disneyland. And, and so you had the entire summer. Yeah. Worth, worth of time to just do dumb crap like this.

I think that's how it worked. And summers lasted 27 years back then. Right. Not six minutes like they do now. No. Yeah. No, you could stay up all night and sleep all day. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway. I mean, I was running a BBS. Like I, I, who, I wouldn't have time to do anything like that now.

Like it's crazy. It's crazy. The amount of time I put into it and figuring it all out and going to egghead software. Like, ooh, now the 9,600 bod modems are out. I got to mow some lawns so I can get the cash to buy that fucking thing. Like, let's get going. Right.

Now I'm mowing lawns to get my Jeep fixed. Yeah. Yeah. That's a different world. You know what? I think that that's an interesting point too, because I think part of the frustration with this is that, um, I'm at the point in my life where it is a legitimate option to want to throw money at problems like this.

And there are no throw money at this problem options because nobody's, nobody's built anything better. How much money are we talking about, Dave? There is somebody you could throw money at and we'll vibe code you a solution. What's the estimate? We may be able to come to an arrangement because at a four cent Jeep is taking a while.

What's the estimate on your Jeep, Jason? About $4,000. Holy smokes. Okay. But if you put it up for $299 in the software. I only need more than the, I need 700,000 people to take up ham radio.

Yeah. To actually be able to pay for it. Yeah. And I'd have to get, I'd have to learn how to do it too, because I can't test it. I don't have a radio. Exactly. That's the problem. Right. You can just move to Maryland. Oh yeah. You can live, you can totally live in my guest room.

That'd be great. Thanks. I mean, just for development time. Yeah. Once the project's over. I can help you with that light outside of your garage problem. That's true. That's true. That probably needs a good rewire at this point, I'm thinking. I'll just, I'll just run on a treadmill to power it in your garage at night.

That'll just be it. I'll vibe code while running on the treadmill to keep your, your house lights on. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Let's go, let's do it. Yeah. And again, if we were 15, you'd probably be like, yeah, yeah, let's do this. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason's already, Jason's already in the non-working Jeep on his way to Maryland.

Right. Exactly. No, no, no, he's hitchhiking here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We would totally make this work. And I'm going to couch surf my way across the country just to get there. Right. Right. Because we're going to be rich, man. We're going to be rich and famous. That's right. That's right. So anyway, that's my, that's my vent and rant for the day.

So if there's anybody out there who has a particular set of skills and has time to kill, wants to take a run at this, there's certainly no money nor fame, but you'll make it. In the old days, we didn't care.

We just, it was for the challenge, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The hard, it is hard to, and I guess, isn't that the magic of the original Macintosh, right? Was that they got people who had technical abilities, but also artistic sensibilities.

And this is the opposite of that. So anyway, speaking of technical sensibilities and the opposite of that, I came across this interesting little thing you can tack on to your large language model.

It's called Spiral, and we'll have a link to it in the show notes. It's designed to be fed a bunch of your writing, after which it will imitate your writing style within your LLM, so that your LLM writes like you write.

Isn't the LLM supposed to do that anyways? Yes, it is. I guess this is a shortcut to that. Well, I think it probably just saves you some steps. Right. I'm, the situation I found myself in is that because when the LLMs came out, we already had so many years of CyberWire newsletters and podcasts and transcripts out there that to this day,

I can say, you know, write something in the style of CyberWire host Dave Bittner, and it does it. And it's frighteningly on target. So, but if you don't have that, which most people don't, I think this is something that could be useful. I don't know.

It's an additional 15 bucks a month. Great. We are getting nickeled and dimed, man, with these subscriptions. It's crazy. We really are. We really are. Yeah, it's crazy. How much you guys, I know, Brian, you don't pay for shit, but- I pay for zero AI.

Yeah, how much are you paying a month, Dave, for your AI addiction? 20 bucks a month. I have the open AI, whatever, the 20, my work pays for the $20 a month. Oh, so zero, you're not paying anything.

Correct. No, I am not out of pocket. My wife pays for the $20 version for herself, just to have a version. She refers to it as Chet. I'm checking with Chet, but no, no big money here on that. Of course, I'm waiting for this gravy train to run out, because it has to.

At some point, we're going to have to actually pay for these things, and we'll see what happens. Well, maybe Chet can take a run into your ham radio app. I really think, you know, just fuck code it, man. Give it a go. You've already got it. Well, maybe I'll ask you, Jason, for some tips, because you've already gone down this path a little bit and can tell me.

Spend a lot more money. That's my tip. It's going to be more than 20 bucks a month. Yeah. But I mean, I'm on the pro package for OpenAI's thing, because I use Codex a lot. And I was working with Claude and Claude.

I still spend 20 bucks a month on Claude because I still do stuff in Claude that needs, you know, higher token ratios. But I found that Codex works so much better for me for coding stuff that, at least for what I'm doing, because I'm doing a lot of Mac apps and iOS apps. For iOS stuff, Claude sucked balls.

I hated it. Because track a lot is all written with Codex, and it works great. So that, I just, I sit there and I use Whisperflow, and I do the thing that I make fun of people for. I talk to my computer, and it makes me software. But I don't say that I'm coding it.

I'm just asking the machine in the box nicely to write something for me. You're in a supervisory position. Yes. I can tell I'm in a supervisory position because I have to tell it how stupid it is 80% of the time. Right. After all my tokens are gone.

Yeah. I'm like, yeah. Oh, you idiot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I got a $20 Claude. I got a $20 Gemini. And that is mainly because with the $20 Gemini, you get five terabytes of Google Drive storage. I'm like, that is just a deal hack right there, because I just use that space up for all my, you know, backup storage.

And the $100 Codex. But the $100 Codex, if you want to code something, you could probably rebuild one of these things, you know, in a week with a $100 plan and then just sign off after that. You know, build it, let it go. And come back to it.

But it's super easy if you just, especially if this stuff's open source. Yeah. You give it the source code and you say, fix this. And it generally will. Just look at it. Don't make this so fucking ugly. Just give me bevels. Give me bevels. Pretend like you're a Macintosh developer.

Yeah. And the old days. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I don't know. I will stew on it for a while and see how it goes. If it eventually breaks me and I do decide to try to throw some more money and time at this. We'll see.

I came across a musical group. Maybe you'd say. I don't know if they're a musical group. I get they are. Performance artists. I don't know. But I'm smitten. It's a group called Broken Peach. They don't speak English, but boy, I love their music videos.

And I put the one in here for their version of Personal Jesus. I don't know if you guys have had a chance to check this out. They do a Halloween special every year. And it's a group of ladies. They I just I don't know. I'm captivated by these. They do these covers of songs with choreography and costumes.

And maybe it's just my longing for MTV or, you know, ladies. Well, ladies who are willing to dress up in costumes. I liked it. I watched it. It's it's a very it's an interesting cover.

It's very good. It reminds me of Marilyn Manson had done a cover of Personal Jesus. It's very similar in feel. And I don't feel guilty listening to this version. Hopefully they aren't as horrible people as Marilyn Manson is because he's persona non grata these days. But yeah, you know, it's a it's a good version.

I'm going to go back and listen to some of the other stuff they've done. So they intrigued me enough. It's just it's just fun. Oddly, Broken Peach, which I suppose is some kind of naughty euphemism. They don't have a Wikipedia page, which is interesting to me.

I think as many videos as they have, somebody would have done something like that. But whatever. You know, 763 podcasts. We're not on Wikipedia. Just saying. That's true. Yeah. Me neither, actually. Yeah. No. Yeah. And I've got what? 3000?

Something like that. I'm OK with that. It's not a competition, Dave. It's not a competition. Oh, it's totally a competition. Yeah. So I came across since we're not allowed to do this segment without at least talking once about Star Wars. I came across a series of Star Wars documentaries that I'm enjoying mostly because Marsha Lucas is in them and they've got her in her later years.

She, you know, she passed away in the last year. And of course, George Lucas's ex-wife. She's the one who edited Star Wars, won an Oscar for that. And she does not hold back in this documentary about what happened, about what she thinks.

Same thing with Anthony Daniels. So we've got these people who are late in their lives and in their careers and they're ready to tell the real story. So it's an interesting editing style. It's a little self-aware and maybe too cute for school, but it's fun to watch.

It's sort of a spills the tea version of a Star Wars documentary. So obviously it's angered quite a few people to the point where they have turned comments off on all the videos. Yeah. So probably a wise choice on their part. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Moving on. I got a new cooktop from Amazon. This is a portable countertop induction burner. Why might you ask? Did I purchase an induction cooktop?

And I will tell you the answer is because number one, induction cooks things very, very fast. Like I tested this thing out the other day. You can boil water in four minutes, which is great. So it's, but twice as fast as the electric range that we have.

Uh, it's supposed to be way faster than gas as well. Um, but the main thing is, is that, um, if I need to, I can plug this in my generator or my battery backup. Uh, so should there come a time that I need to boil water? Oh, I feel, I feel Jason's past is starting to, to kick in.

Here it comes. I ain't saying nothing. I ain't saying nothing. Jason, the prepper. We, we had many an episode. Uh, uh, I can see it. That guy died. That guy died in the fire. No, no, I don't care. I couldn't care less. Nope.

That guy's gone. Now it's Dave, the prepper. It's Dave, the prepper. He has, he's carrying the, the proverbial electric torch now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, you, you, you do happen to live in an area that could conceivably have issues.

Yeah. It's a very targeted area. Yeah. Yes. I can, if I had a tall enough ladder, I could see NSA from my house. Right. So yes. Same here. I don't need a ladder. They're really, yeah. We can really tall ladder.

Um, yeah. So, uh, okay. This was triggered and it was, it was, it was a triggering. This was triggered by, uh, some things I saw about some, uh, some of the people I talked to from time to time, drop little things inside conversations.

And after the interview's done and they talk about things that the Iranian, may or may not be up to and things that they're working on and things that may have may or may not have happened. And I was like, you know what? It'd be good to ensure a clean water supply.

Okay. I know. Far down the rabbit hole, shall we go, Dave? Well, I'm going to try to balance that with this clip here about community prepping, because I believe if you're going to be a prepper that the way to go at it is be a community prepper, not an individual prepper. And that goes out the window as soon as the real emergency happens.

Well, it doesn't though. Like that's like, you look at North Carolina, um, like you have to rely on your community, the individual preppers, basically individual. Say hello to my little friend. My philosophy is, and there are lots of people who are on board with this, is that individual prepping helps you buy some time while the community gets their shit together.

Right? So both are valuable, but the soldier of fortune fantasy that you're going to have your own bunker and live by yourself for the next 10 years isn't just a fantasy. It just doesn't work that way. Humans don't work that way, in my opinion.

All right. Yeah. Okay. One thing in here that I did notice that you should definitely do if you want to be in that crowd, if you're going to go in the prepper route, uh, CERT, community, community emergency response team. Yes. Go get certified for CERT and that will get you into a whole new world of community emergency response.

And, uh, you already did it. Done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Done. Take, took the class. I'm actually on the board. I'm actually on the board of directors, directors of my local co-ad, which is the, uh, organization that organizes communities for in preparation of natural disasters.

So I'm not just talking out of my ass. No, you're not. You are walking the walk. That's right. I'll be damned. That's right. Look at you. That's right. See? All right. Impressive. That is impressive, my friend. Impressive. Yeah. So we'll see.

Hopefully these are things we never need to use, but you never know. That's right. Uh, and then finally, uh, great, uh, coverage from wired and 404 media from, uh, some hackers who got, uh, access to a flock camera and basically reversed it and, uh, just found how they work, how they don't work.

Uh, you know, found a hard coded, uh, encryption key found, uh, that flock cameras often exceed their built-in storage and failover and just all kinds of fun little technical details about what they do and don't do.

Um, and, uh, one of the interesting things that shows up in the logs is very often the flock camera seems to tell itself, who's a good boy. So I guess the flock developers have a sense of humor.

I guess so. Now, I had only started to read some of the various, uh, reports that are coming out about this, that there's, there's a few of them and I'm not sure how, how true it is, but one of the ones that I read said that not only are flock cameras reading license plates, they are scanning faces.

They are doing facial recognition. They are getting people on bikes. It's, it's not, it's, it's doing an awful lot more than we were ever told that they were supposed to be doing. Yeah. Now this. Which makes me want to just smash every fucking one I see. Absolutely.

Absolutely. This one said, this report says that they are detecting cars, make and model license plates, bicycles and humans, but apparently not yet doing facial recognition. It's like the glasses, Brian.

They, they have the code in there, but they just haven't turned it on yet. We haven't turned it on yet. Yes. Why are you mad at us? It did. We didn't turn it on. Come on. No. Like it's, it's Panopticon. Like we're there. Like we're there. We are there. We are absolutely there.

Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Yeah. And they wonder why we're all anxious. Yeah. All right, guys. Let's go. Let's go get some carpet on. Yeah. Go get my prep on.

I'm going to go boil some water to throw on flock cameras with my induction oven. Now let's get to the part where we talk about the people who pay for the show. The people that we love. We love you very much. Over at Patreon, we've got two new patrons, Panos and Matthias.

Thank you so much. And we would also like to say thank you to our continuing Patreon subscribers. Jan, Robert, Vern, MCC, Manuel, or Vern Mixie, I'm guessing. Manuel, Dave, Dave. Yeah, Manuel, not manual. Like don't like read the fucking manual.

Yeah, Manuel. Manuel. Manuel. Dave, Dave, member, Darren, and Sleep Too Little, and Fakie McMade Up. Oh, the ever famous Fakie McMade Up. Love you, Fakie McMade Up. And I think for like the first time ever since we've been doing this, we had no PayPal donations in the last week.

You sure they're not broken? They could be. My heart is broken. My heart is broken. Well, thank God. Your heart will go on, Jason. I don't know. Near. Far. PayPal or Stripe. Yeah.

Speaking of Stripe, over the tip jar, we've got Jeffrey and Jeff, the two J's, kicking in separately, I might add. Dahl, Sean, Theodore, and Michael with the big 50 bucks. Thank you, Michael. Very nice. Appreciate it. Sold a bunch of shirts, Jason.

Woo! We really did. Thomas from Michigan, Glenn from Australia, Anthony from Chicago, John from Virginia, Heather from Colorado, Judy from Oregon, Daniel also from Oregon, and Chin from San Francisco, where we found out about all the taxes. That's right. That's right. No reviews.

Nobody gives us reviews anymore. Nobody goes to Apple Podcasts and leaves us reviews anymore. I think that's a dead thing. Everybody talks about it, but I don't know anybody that's taking the time to go get reviews. I don't know if anybody uses Apple Podcasts. I don't know if anybody uses Apple Podcasts anymore.

It seems to be kind of a dead platform for most podcasters, but whatever. Yeah, everybody's listening to podcasts on Spotify and YouTube. I know. I know. We make so much money off of the YouTube. We broke it down. I looked at it. One dollar a day is what we make off the YouTube.

All the fucking work I got to do. Just one dollar a day. You can feed a hungry podcaster. No, because there's two of us and taxes and transaction fees. Oh, yeah. Sally Struthers is still crying for how hungry we are.

I'm going to use AI to have her do a promo for us. I'll do it. Please, please. Just put us in cages. Put us in cages. Skinny. Our microphones. Oh, but then the one guy on YouTube will get mad at us because we used AI and we supposedly hate AI. Fuck you.

God, that guy. You don't get irony. Jesus Christ. No, I know. I know. Well, anyway, if you'd like to help support the show, please go to patreon.com slash GOG. Sign up for as little as $3 a month. Get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. You can pay more if you like to. And if you sign up for the whole year, you get a discount.

Or you can go to GOG.show slash donate and find all the different ways that you can help us not end up like Sally Struthers dogs. That would be helpful. That would be very helpful. Going to have to look that Wikipedia up. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. I have a feeling I don't want to know what happened to our dogs.

I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 763. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air.

Not really pennies, actually. You see, the aforementioned taxes. We need some fucking bucks. Big ones. That's right. And we don't have pennies here anymore. That's right. Really? There's no more pennies in the United States. Finally. That was the only good thing. The only good thing Trump did months ago. There's no more pennies. I had no idea. I'm going to have to go back to L.A. and find my treasure trove of pennies and get rid of them stat.

Yeah. Well, hang on to them. They might be worth, you know, something someday. Pennies. From heaven. Love the show. Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. We'll love you for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans.

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