767: Operation: Quiet Piggy

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, Jason. What do you guys have up there for Canadian Thanksgiving? Same shit. Same shit? Okay. Same shit. Yeah. It's, you know, it's not as big of a deal here as it is in the U.S., but it is nice to have it early because, you know, that mad rush between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the States is something I don't miss very much.

But, yeah, it's not that big of a deal here. It's basically a kickoff to my son's favorite holiday, Halloween. So the day after we did our family Thanksgiving, no school. So all of the decorations went up and the house has become Halloweenified. And I'm wearing my shirts.

Nice. Nice. Oh, yeah. There's the Jack Skellington. The 12-foot Jack Skellington up the street has been put up. And I love it because every time I walk by with the dog in the morning, he sings to me. And it's very nice. Nice. Nice. We have a 10-and-a-half-foot-tall Oogie Boogie that goes up on our upstairs loft and kind of towers over the whole neighborhood.

Yeah, this guy's got like a five-foot one of those, too, that's next to Jack, but nothing like yours. Nothing like yours. Yeah, we've got all our stuff. Do you guys have Black Friday up there? That's the question. Or is it Gray Friday because it's Canada? No, we – Indigenous People Friday. Oh, okay.

Stolen People from Africa Friday. I don't know what we call it. No, it's – yeah, it's here as well. It's also, again, everything here is more relaxed. It's not as big of a deal. There are sales. Nobody gets – nobody's beating somebody else up in a Walmart parking lot for a fucking crappy big screen TV.

That's just Tuesday here, by the way. That doesn't have to do anything with Black Friday. That is just Tuesday these days there. That's true. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, I do want to say thanks to everyone who has written in to tell us that YouTube demographics are totally full of shit. Shocking that a platform that would lie about their demographics to the people that use the platform.

Absolutely shocking. And the people who use the platform to buy ads using those demographics. What the fuck? I don't know. But, yeah, we've gotten so many, so many emails and tweets and twats and all that stuff about it.

But my favorite one is from Nancy A on Patreon. Yeah, I have to put two of the twats when we're talking about women, right? Oh, that's not what I meant. I was talking about X. So, Nancy on Patreon said, I've been listening for years. Turned 80 this year, plus female. So, hells yes, Nancy. Keep on rocking. I love it. I love it.

I think we have a range of anywhere from 13 now to 80. So, we have a pretty good range. And a fairly heavy female. Yeah. Yeah. The women came out in force to say, hey, I'm a chick and I'm listening. So, I appreciate it. I knew we had a bunch. I knew we did. Like, look at us.

Well, yeah. We're manly looking. We're sexy. We attract the ladies. And the flies, unfortunately. Getting old. Getting old. And I do want to say, Brian, as of this morning, I dragged my ass across the valley and my Jeep is finally in the shop.

Woo-hoo! So, thank you to everyone who helped me out and especially the epic donation from my man in the old days in Chicago. That put me over the top. I've been waiting for weeks for the parts for this fucking thing. And it's finally here. The day is here. I am actually thrilled about this because over the Christmas break, we can meet somewhere for ramen and I don't have to go to Woodland Hills.

We can meet in Santa Monica, yes. We can meet in Santa Monica at the ramen place because I love that place. Oh, man. I am so excited. I am so excited. But here's the thing. I haven't driven in, like, well over a month. So, as I was going up to drop off the car, I looked out the window and I saw the prices at the gas station.

Holy shit! It has gone up at least a dollar and a quarter a gallon in the month and a half that I've gone outside. It's crazy. Like, it was $6.90. $6.90, Brian, for a gallon of gas. That is, uh, that's crazy. That is crazy. It's insane. So, you know, Jason has his Jeep working but cannot afford the gas.

GOG.show slash donate. Yes, yes. So why don't you explain to the fans, Brian, what it means that we are here doing this? Sure. We are a fan-supported show. The ads cover our overhead, but it's the donations that keep us on the air and actually give us a little bit of ego.

If you want to get the show early, ad-free, and in high def, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and for as little as $3 a month, you can help us out. And, of course, you can give us a lot more. If you just want to throw a few bones our way, head over to GOG.show slash donate. And you can buy some merch at shop.GOG.show.

We've made some, well, what we think are pretty clever shirts, so you should go get them. And you can even sign up on YouTube for a subscription, and then you get the demographics completely wrong about you when they tell us about you. Everything helps keep the show on the air, and we thank you from the bottom of our black little hearts for your support.

Thank you. Amen. We really do. We really do. So, Brian, in the news this week, Ukrainian strikes on data centers operated by Russian tech company Yandex have disrupted Internet services across Russia and neighboring countries. Well, Yandex has a drone strike attack, damaged its facility in the Vladimir region, suspending operations.

Isn't Russia all Vladimir? It's all Vladimir all the time. The Vladimir Putin region. Yeah. Suspending operations there and leaving other infrastructure unstable. Now, Ukrainian president, Ukrainian, I'm going to start calling him, he's Ukrainian, Ukrainian president of old, I can't speak this morning.

Too much coffee to get up. Just go with Zelensky. I'm just going to go with Zelensky. It says the outages also appeared to silence pro-Russian social media bots, reducing hostile and divisive posts. Cloudflare data showed a 94% drop in automated traffic from Yandex on Sunday compared with the September average.

But experts cautioned that the figure largely reflects Yandex's search crawler going offline. It does not measure social media bot activity, and operators of influence campaigns could use servers outside of Russia, which they probably do. The Yandex ones, I don't know if they're going to use those. So some social media users reported seeing fewer bots, but those observations have not been independently verified.

The strikes may have interrupted online activity more broadly, but there's no clear evidence that they specifically disabled coordinated propaganda operations. That's all fine and good, Brian. But the star of the show was the post I saw on X that called it Operation Quiet Piggy when they thought it was killing the pro-Trump bots.

And that person wins the fucking day. Absolutely. You know, I was I was I was actually chronically online when this was happening, which I try not to do too much anymore. But but but I was end of story. And I think it just kind of encapsulated what the Internet is in a nutshell.

Now, something happens. Everybody goes, oh, my God, this thing has happened. And look, now there's this result that has happened. The thing got knocked out. All the bots are gone. And then all of a sudden, a thousand other people start to go. No, they're not.

Actually, everything is still here. It's the search engines, you fool. And they said, well, no, look, I'm posting and the bots aren't here. And there's no clear answer. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on. And everybody's saying completely different things. And, you know, have I fucking log off going.

I don't know what to believe. Because the bots are the ones telling you that the bots are still there fighting with themselves. So that is everybody's Internet experience now. It used to be we would go on the little computer. Hello, computer, computer. And we would go to Google and we would ask our question, how do we make our pizza?

And we'd come back with you use some tomato sauce and then you use some cheese and you use some pepperoni and you bake it at 450 degrees for X amount of time. Now it says put fucking glue on it, have an anchovy, stick it up your ass. And then 20,000 other people will tell you you did it fucking wrong.

And that's the Internet now. Thanks, guys. What a wonderful thing we've made for ourselves. It's so great. It's so great. It's such a fucking waste of time. I ran into it last night with finally Gemini for the first time because I was looking for I'm playing this zombie game on my iPad and I couldn't get past this level.

So I'm like, I'm like, can you give me a walkthrough on this game? This is the name of the game. This is the level. And this is where exactly I'm at. I just need a walkthrough to figure out what the fuck it's doing because the instructions aren't right and I can't get past it. So it came back with a completely different game, a completely different level, three different characters that I'm supposed to arm with weapons that don't exist in the game that I'm on.

So I wrote back and said, hey, this is this is this is this and this is wrong. And it says, yeah, you're right. My bad. This is the first time I've had had Gemini in the in the main Google search. Come back and tell me how wrong it was. Four times I did that. And it kept saying, you're right.

I'm wrong. And over and over again. And it never gave me the fucking answer that I was looking for. So Google has just completely become the most useless piece of shit on the Internet now. Period. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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We got a little bit of follow-up. We talked last week about OpenAI dismissing a couple employees who had allegedly shared information with an external AI safety organization and how that probably wasn't a really good look, given all the things that OpenAI is doing regarding their safety.

They have taken to the Internet, Jason, and written an open letter. Oh, because those always work, Brian. Open letters are the—they always work. Well, we love open letters. Jasmine Wang, Mikita Balesni, and Tomek Korbak wrote that the very public manner of the company's communications around the firings could have a chilling effect on employees at a time when the world's safety depends on them.

Yes, we are depending on the employees at OpenAI for our safety. We are so fucked. We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI.

The joint letter from the dismissed employee states, we could raise safety concerns and disagree openly before, and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. This is part of what made OpenAI special and why we are immensely proud to have been part of the team. They also state that they acted in line with OpenAI's mission and within the working norms of the time, and that the firing leaves us worried that the norms inside OpenAI are shifting and that employees are now unclear on where they stand.

Addressing the other rumors, they said that they were not the leak source for an information article involving OpenAI's new, less-monitorable architectures, and don't believe they engaged with external parties outside their mandate. They added that communication with external parties was done in coordination and discussion with board members and the C-suite, and that Wang notified an executive when she accidentally clicked on a sensitive email.

I want to know when this fantastic time that they were talking about, when OpenAI was like fucking rainbows and unicorns, and that they were, you know, the bastion of safety and security. I don't recall that time in my timeline, Brian.

This must have been in the wackadoo, crazy San Francisco, you know, whatever the fuck they're smoking timeline, because I don't know about you, but I don't believe that ever existed. You know those first few seconds after the Big Bang when everything kind of coalesced and everything was superheated plasma? That was then.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. That's those couple seconds. And then, you know, the next 10 gazillion years of everything expanding outwards. That's been the rest of OpenAI. Or it could have just been that first hit of ketamine when their eyes rolled back in their head and they said, this is fucking beautiful, man.

And then they came back to reality. Yeah. Yeah. All that, too. There's always that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the FBI has arrested an OpenAI employee accused of planting a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office.

Federal prosecutors identified the suspect as Abdulrahman, I can't do this this morning, Al-Fazan, a Saudi national and product team employee who joined OpenAI in 2025. The company discovered the device about a week before his October 9th arrest, fired him, and alerted the FBI.

OpenAI said the device featured encryption, audio monitoring, and data transfer capabilities designed to evade detection. I have seen so many reports, Brian, in the past, like, six hours that this was a super, unbelievably high-tech device that was, you know, like straight out of James Bond, which I'm going to get to in a second.

Now, that device was reportedly plugged into a USB port behind a television where a camera allegedly captured Al-Fazan inspecting it. We're not talking slow horse's level of MI5 capabilities here. Authorities say the alleged goal was to record sensitive discussions about OpenAI's artificial superintelligence work.

The company said it found no evidence of unauthorized access to model weight, source code, or customer data, and Alfonso faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Did you see the reports, Brian, of the sophistication of the bug? It was an incredibly sophisticated device that OpenAI had to use their own product to be able to identify and discern what was happening.

They had, the human experts could not tell them what this device was. They had to go to AI and use the power of a million sun computers. We don't have sun computers anymore, do we? A million suns to determine what this device was that was stealing their fucking proprietary data, Jason.

Well, that device, Brian, seems to be a Seed Studio XIAO ESP32 S3, a tiny development board sold for $13.99 and designed for hobbyists. I could have told them if they looked at any of the Instagram posts that are shoved down my fucking throat every day that it's an ESP32 because that's what everybody uses to make shit like this.

This guy probably watched Instagram a couple nights too many and figured, I'm just going to make that. Oh, my God. It has a microphone, camera, and Wi-Fi connectivity, which authorities allege was used to transmit recordings to another device. The Justice Department says a chatbot account associated with the suspect's spouse contained questions about continuous audio recording, remote access, and concealing the device.

This, and it took OpenAI's models to help analyze and investigate the data from the actual device and what the device was. And Jesus Christ, come on. This is, we are not talking James Bond. There is no Q involved in this attack. The crazy thing is they were in a room with a TV, so all they really needed to do was hijack the signal being sent from the TV back to home that was recording everything anyways.

As we've recently learned, all of our smart TVs, if you don't turn them off and just unplug them and, like, smash the shit out of them in the back, are recording everything and sending them home to Sony and fucking Samsung anyways. Yep. It's ridiculous. All right.

Well, milk can't hack companies, and governments like AI definitely can, but it's still subject to more regulation, Microsoft President Brad Smith told ITV on Friday. Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI, Smith said in the interview. Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection.

AI is not. What have we been saying, Jason? Regulation. Yeah. While major U.S. AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's DeepMind have spoken in favor of an AI development slowdown that none of them have done, however, U.S. President Donald Trump has said that, if anything, the U.S. AI industry needs to accelerate to stay ahead of China.

Yes, we better accelerate that AI industry to stay ahead of China, even though China is ahead of us in, oh, I don't know, high-speed transportation, education, healthcare, electronic cars, electric cars, et cetera. They're ahead of us in a million things that we don't seem fucking bothered by.

Yep, exactly. But we better do this one. So rather than government, Trump would prefer that AI companies regulate themselves. Again, not happening. It's not happening. They say they're going to regulate. They say we should all slow down together. Let's all hold hands, guys, and slow down.

But nobody's doing it. So. Nope. Microsoft's CEO, Brad Smith, or President Brad Smith, is basically saying that the EU is going to have to start to regulate, and this will be a good thing because they're actually going to do something about it as opposed to the U.S.

Again, you could self-regulate, but nobody is. I got a little story about regulation this week, Brian. You're going to laugh at this one. So I came up with a formula for dog treats for a dog that has IBS and a bunch of stomach issues. Great little product for her.

And I was thinking about, at the behest of my roommate, productizing it and starting to sell them. In California, you can make food for people in your home and sell up to like $180,000 worth a year with just a very small license, right? I can make food for your newborn child in my kitchen and with a cheap license, go out and sell it to you.

To sell a fucking dog treat in the state of California requires like 18 levels of commercial kitchen use, food safety, lab testing, moisture testing. I mean, it's ridiculous.

It's going to cost $30,000 to make a fucking dog treat, but I can make baby food. It is so fucking ridiculous how regulations just don't line up to reality because I'm sure big dog food one time went to their representative and lobbied them and said, hey, everybody and their uncle is making dog food in their kitchen and selling it.

Maybe we can put the kibosh on that. It was maddening. But I know more about the commercial production of dog food than you would ever want to know right now. I can tell you that. I've never wanted to know anything. So, yes, you've already just told me more than I've ever wanted to know.

Oh, yeah. I have a 13-page list of to-dos before I can sell my first dog treat. I shit you not. 13 pages of bullet points, not just like pros, bullet points of things to do. All right. But you can get AI any day.

That's right. An anthropic AI model submitted a fabricated tip to Philadelphia police about an unsolved murder during an internal test. The tip sent through a public website in July claimed the sender had seen someone matching a suspect's description near the crime scene, but the case page contained no such description.

The model left its name and contact field blank. Police say their spam filter caught the submission before it reached investigators. Anthropic discovered what happened in late September and notified the department in October. Police criticized the delay, warning that false information about a homicide could affect victims' families and an investigation.

Anthropic says the smaller Claude Haiku 4.5 model had been told to carry out sample tasks on websites. Its instructions did not explicitly ban submitting forms. The company says it has tightened safeguards, expanded monitoring, and restricted live internet access during internal evaluations.

What the fuck? What the fuck, man? Well, in more news of things going wrong in the world, hackers reportedly took control of refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets across France over the weekend, raising some fridge and freezer settings as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

I don't know about you, but what fridge has a 122 degree Fahrenheit setting? That's a pretty, pretty, I don't think that they understand the mandate. I don't think these are your standard fridges. I think these are the industrial things that you see in the back of a, yeah. But the resulting spoilage had forced stores to discard large amounts of food and fires have also been reported.

Paris prosecutors are investigating what they call a large scale attack. Affected change include a bunch of names I'm not going to even try and pronounce this morning. And damage could run into the tens of millions of euros, though the full cost remains unclear. So, a security researcher told Reuters that organizations in several other European countries have also appeared to have been hit.

The incident shows how internet-connected equipment can turn a cyber attack into a physical disruption. And remember, the S in IoT is for security. I mean, again, this is just, like, not everything needs to be online. And if you're putting things online, you've got to lock it down a little bit.

Like, why do you need to get to your industrial refrigerators? I mean, I guess this is corporate control, but why? Everything, this shit didn't happen when, you know, the people in the store were left responsible for the temperature and the refrigeration.

And it wasn't online. Yeah, you had to break in and turn the knob yourself, you know. But it is France, and they only work, like, three days a week. So, when they're sitting out having a baguette and a cigarette, they want to do some corporate espionage. They can just do it from their phone and go, eh, eh, fuck you, heh, you know. So.

Yeah. It's hot in there. More fun news. Let's just move on. Sorry. Anybody listening in France? Yeah, I know. I'm sure they're used to it. Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, seeking permission for a substantial increase in airborne particle emissions, according to reporting by SFGate.

An air district engineering evaluation cited by a local blogger indicates the proposed limit for total suspended particulates would be about 13 times the current level. The factory sits near Holmes and Lila Bringhurst Elementary School. The particles could include toxic metals such as arsenic, beryllium, and cadmium.

Though, the report does not establish how much of each metal would be released. Mmm, cadmium eggs. I'm going to have to bring Hurst an oxygen tank. Yeah, no shit. The proposed limit is 4.85 pounds of particulates per hour, which could amount to more than 21 tons per year.

Some parents say a notification from the Bay Area District did not clearly explain the scale of the proposed change, while others missed it entirely. They're asking Tesla and regulators for clearer information about potential health risks. There are a lot of them, so you might want to push back on that.

Yeah, I would not let this happen, but hey, you're still better off than Memphis. Yeah, for now, for now. Yeah, yeah, Tesla's not poisoning you at quite that scale yet. Mm-hmm. So, winning. Yeah. Well, you know, once Tesla is bought by SpaceX, then they'll just pass around those generators like candy.

That's true.

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Ah, federal prosecutors have charged Edward Dubrovsky, a Canadian ransomware negotiator, with conspiracy and extortion. Not Ed. Dubrovsky had spit. We all know each other. Don't you know that? Ah, that's right. That's you Canadians. Dubrovsky has spent years advising companies targeted by cyber criminals and published a guide to cyber extortion last month.

He was arrested in Pennsylvania and is due to face a detention hearing in Texas. Several news outlets, citing unnamed sources, link his arrest to the Shiny Hunters group and his recent breach of an FBI jobs website. The attackers defaced the site and leaked a spreadsheet, reportedly, that contained information on roughly 5,000 alleged FBI officials.

But the complaint against Dubrovsky is sealed and public court filings do not establish a connection to that breach. The listed charges concern extortion, not hacking. But the FBI says it has arrested multiple suspected members of the network. Dubrovsky has not entered a plea or been convicted.

But, you know, the irony is not lost on everybody. Speaking of irony, Elon Musk was mocked online Sunday morning after he showed off an AI shopping assistant and appeared to reveal the address where he gets his mail. Quote, I just asked Grott at Bot to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them as easy as that.

End quote. Musk wrote on X. His post shared screenshots. This is what drives me nuts about this, this whole fucking these AI agents and these bots. I don't know if you know how much Lego costs these days, Jason, because you don't have a 10-year-old.

I do. If I asked an AI fucking agent to go find a bunch of fun Lego Star Wars kits for me and just order them, it's as easy as that. Well, you know what's not easy? Getting the fucking $20 million I'd need for the fucking Lego because it's goddamn expensive.

Nobody is sending an agent out with this kind of vague descriptions to just go buy things. Who the fuck is doing this besides Elon? Yeah, billionaires. They can afford it. Yeah, that's insane. I don't know anybody in the real world that would do this.

No one. No, no. And here's the funny thing. He didn't actually want to go buy the Lego kits. He wanted the bot to go out and buy Lego, the company, because that's what he can do. So the bot even fucked that up. His post-shared screenshots of the bot confirming a $241.34 order of five Lego sets charged to his Amex.

The screenshots included the order number, the shipping destination, and the Lego order confirmation page. Well, critics quickly piled on. Just canceled your order. Don't share your info online, guys, YouTuber Enderman wrote. He shared screenshots of a chat with Lego's AI customer service assistant, in which he appeared to use Musk's order number to request a cancellation.

So, more fucking bots. This is going great, Brian. This is going great. Yeah. Well. International Cyber Digest wrote, OPSEC level, broadcasting my home address and order details to 242 million followers. Yeah. It's absolutely not Elon's home address, I'm sure of that.

No, it had been leaked before, too. So it wasn't a first time. That's where his, you know, his ex, you know, Israeli military security detail goes to pick up the packages and then have them scan for bombs. Right. And anthrax and whatever else people are sending him. So. Well, since we were talking about your Jeep, Jason, let's get back to cars for a second.

Pinterest probably doesn't need your car's VIN, but General Motors apps were sending it there anyways. And to Snap, Yahoo, Meta, Google, and the data broker Axiom. At least that's according to a recent study from Northeastern University, which tested 21 late model cars and 30 automaker apps on Consumer Reports fleet between October 2024 and August 2025.

Nineteen of those cars sent data to at least one third-party company via Wi-Fi, with seven of the apps passing identifiers like VINs, email addresses, and precise locations to advertising and analytics companies. Four of those seven belong to GM, which have been under a 20-year FTC privacy order since January.

Oopsies. Those four GM apps are MyCadillac, MyChevrolet, MyBuick, and MyGMC, which each sent VINs to 10 companies, including Microsoft and Adobe. Meanwhile, HondaLink sent VINs in location to the analytics firm Amplitude, with the Lincoln and MyNissan apps making up the remainder of the list.

This is important to note that unlike a phone's advertising ID, a VIN can't be reset. So if you pair one with an email address, that lets ad companies tie an owner to activity on other apps and websites, basically pinpointing you throughout the entire internet forevermore.

Yay. Yeah. I'm going to tell you right now, though, I put in my VIN on Kelly Blue Book to get a price for my Jeep when it wasn't working to see if I could sell it and make any money. Spoiler alert, I couldn't. But when I put that in, it had everything about my Jeep and the history of it.

It had like the color, the features, all of that stuff. And I signed into Kelly Blue Book with an email address, so that's probably been shipped around now. But I will say I have not gotten any ads that are based on the Jeep at this point, which is interesting. At this point, yeah. Because I figured I would have something by now if they were exploiting it.

So maybe Kelly Blue Book is one of the good guys at not sharing that information with other companies. That would be nice, because apparently most car manufacturers are. Buick and Vista and the Nissan Ariya were among them, yet pairing the apps exposed owners to 23 and 25 ad-end tracking companies, respectively.

Tesla went the other way, with the Model 3 reaching 22 such companies from the car while its app added two. Since the team couldn't decrypt vehicle traffic and can only capture cellular data from the Model 3, those cars' real totals are likely to be much higher. Researchers did approach 17 different manufacturers with their findings and heard back from 14, all of which basically said,

The data flows match their vendor contracts, and they said it's ultimately the responsibility of the owner to read and accept the terms for every third-party service in the car, including pre-installed software, while five attributed tracking to webpages opened inside their apps.

Owners who declined Tesla's data sharing agreement are warned of reduced functionality, serious damage, or interoperability, while Rivian says that switching off data collection will limit or disable features like navigation and over-the-air updates. So if you're thinking about getting around things that way, they're basically trying to get you not to.

Honda seems to be the only company that seems willing to change anything, asking Amplitude to delete location data and updating HondaLink to stop sending it, which a Honda spokesperson confirmed in Northeastern Global News. So, that's great. You know what they say should happen here? Northeastern professor and study co-author David Chofneys told the outlets that regulators should step in and regulate this shit.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Flock Safety and the police who use its automated license plate readers are facing yet another lawsuit over alleged misuse of the technology, this time a Georgia man, says Coweta County Sheriff's deputies ran his car through Flock's nationwide camera network for months while he was suing the sheriff over a prior arrest.

Tyler Merkerson filed the proposed class action on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, naming Flock, Coweta County, Sheriff Len Wood, two sheriff's office employees, and three unidentified officers. So, beyond his own claims, Merkerson is seeking to represent a broader group of people whose vehicles were searched on Flock by Georgia law enforcement without any recorded investigative reason.

Yeah. So, lawsuits are starting to pile up. Last week, a Colorado woman sued Flock in two towns after a Flock hit led an officer to hand her a summons for a $25 package theft she didn't commit. And earlier this month, a federal judge in Oklahoma also threw out evidence from a warrantless license plate reader search.

This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance, U.S. District Judge Sarah E. Hill wrote. So, yay. And there's a good actually, there's a really good episode of the 404 podcast recently. I think it was just yesterday that talked about somebody who used Flock to pick up somebody, and I think it was probably this Oklahoma one, where somebody was driving into Oklahoma with a rented car with California plates.

The Flock had run it, and it said that, well, they left the state and came back the next day. So, that's like drug trafficking and all this other stuff. But, and they pulled her over, and she did have, you know, briefcases full of meth in the car, like 95 pounds of meth in the car. So, but the point is, the cop shouldn't have been running her plate just because she was from out of state, because on an interstate, people often have plates from out of state, and then that's what got thrown out.

So, you know, it was the fruit of the poison tree, as they call it, because they can't do anything from the search because it was, you know, basically an illegal search and seizure. So, you know, I'm glad these guys are fucking finally getting their comeuppance with this, because it's just too much power to give to fucking Barney Fife.

I'm sorry. These guys are just undisciplined little shits. You know, I've known good cops. Sadly, very few of them. I've known a lot more worse cops, but it's the worst cops that are doing this shit. So, good for people for fucking fighting back. I love it.

I agree, and it's starting to take its toll. Flock is reportedly planning to lay off 18% of its workforce. The cuts, which are expected to impact 270 current Flock safety employees, will take effect at the end of October, and according to sources close to the decision who spoke with Reuters, three weeks ago, Wired reported that Flock had begun an employee buyout program with generous severance packages.

By the way, if you've been offered one and you're employed there, take it. Take it. Because I don't know if this company is going to be around too much longer. So, yeah, there's a lot of discontent and mounting opposition from outside the company. They currently employ about 1,500 workers, so it's going to go down and down and down.

But as we talked about last week, it's just whack-a-mole. There's going to be another company taking its place. Axon. Axon is still there. And, you know, they've got the biggest cop network out there. They've got body cams. They own Taser. They're in every police department in the world, at least in the country, you know.

But we think we're the world because we're Americans. Americans. Yeah. All right. I actually did an update to my Track-A-Lot app this week, and it's a marketing update because I found that – this is very interesting, Brian.

Most of the sales that I get from that app – and I've only sold like 125 units, which for an app is pretty fucking pathetic at this point. Most of them came from search on the app store. So if you're vibe coding an app or creating your own app, keep an eye on that stuff. So they have new search windows and homepages for the app store in Apple.

So I kind of spent a little bit of time to try and get that working. It was pretty cool. But I still love my little app is what I want to say. It's doing great. I've got some really good feedback this week from just people who went to the website, found the contact form, and wrote me in thanking me.

Unfortunately, these people did not go to the Apple app store and put in a five-star rating, which would really have been nice. So please do that instead of sending me an email. It works out better. But the point I'm trying to make here is one of the letters that I got said they found my app through a chat in ChatGPT.

That is the first time I've ever seen that, you know, for anything we've done. Our podcast, I don't think is, you know, is recommended to anybody in ChatGPT, probably because we shit on ChatGPT so much that they don't like us very much. But it was very interesting to find out that somebody found out about my little app through ChatGPT, which is pretty cool, I thought.

Very cool. Yeah. And I wrote another app this week that I'm going to put on the Mac store this week. Brian, you don't do a lot of Zoom meetings anymore, do you? Because you're kind of just a stay-at-home dad. This is as close as I get right now. I'm doing it. This is my Zoom. That's what I thought. This isn't even a Zoom meeting.

No. Zoom has been terrible with making bookmarks. You figure, I go to a web browser all the time. I go back to the pages I'm always going to. I make a bookmark. I go to my bookmarks and I click the bookmark. I'm in Zoom all the time. I go to the same fucking meetings over and over again. And sometimes I don't want to put them in the calendar because who cares?

I don't want this stuff in my calendar all the time. So they don't give you an option to actually make bookmarks in Zoom. So I built a Mac app that's just basically a menu bar app that lists all of the meetings that I go to with the dates. And then you just one click and it will take you into the meeting.

It's pretty cool. If anybody wants it before I throw it in the app store, go to our Discord and go to the Apps and Doodads channel. I posted a link in there with the actual app. I'm going to update it and put some new stuff in there. But it's a signed Mac app so you can download it and install it for free. So it's just one of those little fun things that when I'm sitting around at night, since I can't drive anywhere or go see anybody, I just make shit.

And it just is one of those it's like, you know, I had the itch and I needed to scratch it. And it works really well. So I'm very proud of this one. I don't know why I didn't really do anything on it except make me a little app that goes like this and clicks on shit, you know. But that's that's that's that's our life now, Brian.

That's all we have left. It feels that way sometimes. If you recall, my son got a 3D printer a while back. Well, technically. I bought a 3D printer. Yes, you bought it. Because they're not cheap. And my wife, since day one, has been somewhat worried about the air quality caused by this.

And of course, I saw this article and gadget this week. And I have the link in the show notes if you're concerned about this so you can get a deeper dive on this. But the it's basically is 3D printing safe to do in your bedroom or home office. The TLDR on this one is no.

No, it is not. These things kick up a lot of chemicals. I mean, it depends on the filament you're using, how long it's been in there, what model you have. Does it are you ventilating the area, all that sort of stuff. So but basically, no, it's not very safe.

The best thing you could do would be to have it outside your house in a garage or something like that, which is fine if you have nice weather like California. Not so much here in the winter, but do your best to ventilate at all times. Make sure that you're using PLA instead of EPA filaments, because those are much better than the EPA ones were back in the day.

But, you know, get yourself a good, good filter system by it. Keep the windows open if you can. It's not good for you. Well, Brian, you're burning, you're burning plastic in your house. Well, I didn't think it was great. You know, I'm not RFK.

Like, this stuff is awesome. You should breathe in these fumes all the time. Healthy, strong like bull. Yeah. And it's ABS, not EPA. All right. Sorry. According to the EPA. According to the EPA. My eyes went to the wrong place. Yes. Don't do ABS. Get the PLA.

Yeah. Yeah. I just don't want anybody out there looking. They said that it wasn't, and it wasn't. So I was just clarifying. Yeah. We're like your very own chat GPT. We get shit wrong. We get shit wrong all the time. At least we know it sometimes. Sometimes.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

Microsoft just dropped one hell of a patch Tuesday. More than 1,400 security fixes across Windows and other software. Dwarfing September's nearly 1,000 and making 2020's record of 1,261 CVEs look quaint. Microsoft says AI helped uncover the flood of bugs, which security teams get the delightful task of testing and deploying them all.

Experts do recommend prioritizing the 26 Microsoft flaws already listed in Sysa's known exploited vulnerabilities catalog. Or get a Mac. Yeah. Yeah. Get a Mac. Unfortunately, you know, I'm coming back to L.A. in November to go to that Darker Waves festival.

I'm only going to be there for a few days, unfortunately, but one day for the festival. And I guess since I still have my mom on a Windows machine, the other three days applying these patches. Well, you know, Brian, if you extrapolate that out to hourly income that you could make freelancing, maybe as a Starbucks barista, you could probably end up buying her a used Mac and just get her off of the damn thing.

For half the time. Probably true. Probably true. Yep. Well, with all the news about Paramount and Skydance and basically knowing that the Star Trek universe, as we've known it, is probably coming to a very quick end. And God knows what they're even going to do in the future.

I completely forgot that we're still getting another season of Star Trek Starfleet Academy because they basically announced it was killed. Fucking floored about this. I'm like, in my head, I'm like, we already watched season two. I thought it was done, done, done. Me too. I knew that there were two seasons, but I thought we watched them all already.

So I'm just like, oh, oh. So I'm actually a little bit excited about this. Me too. At least we're going to get that. And they've announced some new casting, two big guest stars, Bill Nye and Rosemary DeWitt. I'm super excited about Bill Nye being in Star Trek.

Me too. Me too. He's going to play the estranged father of Holly Hunter's Nala Ake. And DeWitt is playing the first lady of Beta Zed, the mother of Zoe Steiner's cadet character. So, yeah, this is coming in March. Yay. Okay. You know, I'll steal that too.

Look. Yeah. Great. Me too. It's next year. We'll get the last season of Starfleet Academy and we'll get it. The last season of Brave New Worlds. And that, as far as I know, will be it for Star Trek, as far as anybody knows.

Probably for the rest of our life, at least until we're 70. Probably. Which is fucking sad. But there we go. I know. I know. Fucking Ellison. Well, I also think, Brian, that we do need a new epic trailer format. Because the Blade Runner 2099 trailer came out and Jesus Christ is that thing just formulaic.

It's like at the right dong and the grays and the browns and the dong and the ooh ha dong. I don't need any more of that shit. Come on. Tell me what the fucking story is. But, I mean, it's Blade Runner, so I get it. But it looked like the fucking Dune trailer.

I mean, it was like a shot for shot recreation of any of the villain of Dune trailers. Did you watch it? Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm fucking wrong. I watched it, but I don't know if it's because I don't give a fuck or if it's just the trailer format. Because I got to be honest with you, Blade Runner has just never caught me as anything other than the original movie.

I love the original movie. I didn't like the sequel. I don't like anything else that they've done. I don't like it. I just don't care. See, I feel that way. I know this is probably, you know, heretical.

But I didn't really even like Blade Runner that much. I thought it was okay. I liked the original with the Decker voiceover. You know? I mean, I just might have been at the wrong age to see it. But I needed that. I needed to know what the fuck was going on. But I'm just not a huge fan of the universe, personally.

Yeah, I'm with you. So, again, I don't know if it was the trailer format itself or just my complete and utter uninterested in the subject matter. Okay. But I will tell you that as someone who watches a lot of trailers and, you know, you're tuned to the music industry. I'm tuned to the film industry.

So, I see things that probably you don't. And this just drives me fucking nuts. Because this has been around for, like, decades now. But the stings and the dong, you know. That's just, come on, guys. Get creative. Get a little bit more creative. We need something new out there.

I'm definitely with you with the sound engineering. I'm tired of that. Let's get some. Oh. We don't need all this stuff. Like, I mean, I get it. No attention spans anymore. We've got to, like, hit people upside the head with the dongs every now and then. It's like they wheel out a. I think that's the wrong show, Brad, to hit people upside the head with a dong.

They fucking wheel out Brian Eno in a fucking big gong every now and then for these trailers. There's your ambient fucking sound to get your attention, you fucking dumbass. Put your phone down and watch our fucking trailer. Dong. Kind of, yeah.

Stop updating your fucking site. Dong. I did see something this week, though, that had very little dongs in it. Kill Jackie. Ex-cocaine dealer Jackie Price lives luxuriously selling art through tax schemes.

After 20 years of anonymity, her peaceful life ends when the seven demons, elite hitmen, are hired to kill her. And this is stars Catherine Zeta-Jones. And now people were talking about Catherine Zeta-Jones when Wednesday came out. And they're like, wow, what did she get done?

Well, she apparently has kept going because she looked fantastic in Kill Jackie. Fantastic. She actually looked better in Kill Jackie than she did in Wednesday. And I have a theory, Brian, because I think Michael Douglas is Catherine Zeta-Jones' Dorian Gray. Because as she ages, she looks better and he looks like the fucking mummy.

It's getting, just look at the split between them. I mean, this guy is on just massive amounts of life supports and his skin is falling off of him. And she looks like she just got rolled out of like a clinic at 25 getting ready to put her ass up in that one movie with Sean Connery, whatever that was.

I don't even remember the movie, but everybody remembers her ass from that movie. Period. That's it. Yeah, she's a very attractive woman. I got to say there's good genes in that family. I am friends with her brother. Her brother's a Santa Monica local. We played trivia together at my local bar on a regular basis.

He's much older than me, but he looks fantastic. Like they just have, the Joneses have good genetics. They're Welsh. I think it comes from Wales. Because, you know, everybody in Wales is kind of a dick. And I think that makes you younger. Because that's what we're trying for.

That's the more dickishness that we can pull out, the younger we feel. So that's what I'm trying for, at least. How's it going? I'm actually 87. So, you know. I look great for the 125. Yeah. Remember Character.ai, the controversial generative AI startup that let users create their own chatbot characters?

I think they got in trouble more than a few times. The one that kills a bunch of kids? Yeah, that one. The one that causes kids to kill themselves. Yeah, that one. That was a great one. Yet, bizarrely, got chased down by Disney. Yeah. Yeah, it's not good pedals. Anyways, they're filing for bankruptcy because they haven't been able to fix their shit very well, their PR or anything else.

And probably Disney's going to end up buying out most of their technology and all that sort of stuff. So, bye-bye. Bye. Yeah, yeah, you won't be missed. Yeah, it's a strange thing. Disney put a cease and desist order on the company because they were basically just using Disney stuff. But then they started funding them and giving them money.

And then they started taking some people. And it's like, whatever, man. Made no sense. That whole thing made no sense. It's like, we're going to sue you. But at the same time, you want to be partners? Yeah. Why not? Basically. Come on. So stupid. Mm-hmm. Well, a North Carolina man has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using AI-generated music and automated accounts to collect more than $8 million in fraudulent streaming royalties.

Now, Brian, I had to read that first because I'm going to read you the headline here because this is from the actual government website. North Carolina man sentenced to 18 months in prison for superintelligence-assisted music streaming fraud. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Department of Justice just saying, fuck you. Federal prosecutors say Michael Smith ran the scheme from 2017 to 2024, creating thousands of fake accounts on services, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. He used software to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times, spreading the activity across a large catalog to avoid triggering fraud detection.

At times, he operated as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once. Jason, I'm getting confused now. I'm getting confused because on the one hand, we are having AI agents shoved down our fucking throats, use our AI agents, use these things.

They will do all these. He's using them. He's doing what they want. Why are they angry? He used a bunch of AI agents and bots. He used their technologies. Oh, shit. He profited himself. He did not have a subscription.

He did not buy a subscription to open AI or Anthropic. If he'd have bought a subscription. I see why he's going to jail. And they're not. Yes. I get it now. Look, I get that there's probably fine print saying that you can't do this sort of shit and it's illegal.

But honestly, this guy's got super intelligence. Oh, that's right. This was smart as fuck. I am impressed. And, you know, you figure this, too. He started in 2017. This is before LLMs were around.

Yeah. So he was doing this shit with the old school AI with some machine learning and shit like that and regular just good old bot technologies. I bet this motherfucker wrote this in Pearl. That's how good this guy was. Nice. Well, he's getting he's getting 18 months and he has to give back eight point one million dollars.

And he's got two years of supervised release after that. So but he does get a free Suno account. When he gets out. And Pandora is letting him stay on. But that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's thank all the people that keep this show on the air.

First over at Patreon, we've got Matt, who's a new subscriber and Erspo. Erspo says, if I heard you right, you have no one over 65 listening to you. I soon turn 65, so I will soon be in a class of my own. My Saturday morning isn't proper until I hear GOG. Your begging worked.

I raised my donation from five dollars to ten dollars a month. Thank you, Erspo. And we've also got Fuse and Sven, who also joined us. And we'd also like to thank Aaron, James, Craig, Ron, Ted, Wayne, S., Professor Dustal, John and Laura. Thank you all for your continued support on Patreon.

Thank you. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we got a $50 donation from John. Thanks, John. Thanks, John. Over at the tip jar, we've got David, Jeffrey, Patrick. Hi, John. Another John. And Pedro. And Theodore. Thank you all so very much. And nobody has signed up on YouTube.

Shocking. That's because we only have dudes over there, man. Demographics. Sven from Australia bought some shirts. Thank you, Sven. We worked hard. Thank you, Sven. We got new shirts up there. Check it out, everybody.

Shop.gog.show. Be cool. Yep. Look, I've even got a logo here on my boob. I'm a man boob. I'm a moob. So you, too, can cover your moob with us. I'm sure that's going to shift some units there, Jason. Thank you. I'm sure. I'm sure.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And 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 767. 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.

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