Operation Quiet Piggy BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!

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With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, featuring Cybersecurity's hardest-working podcaster, The Cyber Wire's very own Dave Bittner. Thank you. I feel like I'm being introduced at a baseball game or something. I like it.

It's very nice. More Big Brother. Today on Big Brother. I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah. Even though I'm wearing a baseball hat, I wouldn't really know how to do anything with it. I'm with you. I'm with you. So, Dave, I just want to roll into this. You're a musical guy, and this came across my Apple Music this week.

Andrew Lloyd Webber announces remixed and remastered original Phantom of the Opera album as London production celebrates 40 years. So, I pay for Apple Music, so I listen to it from soup to nuts. And there's a bunch of extra stuff at the end with some demos and interviews and stuff like that.

Wow! They did an amazing job with the remaster. How so? It sounds so good. Huh. So good. I mean, there's so much, and it's lossless, and I'm listening to it with my AirPod Pro 3s, the latest AirPod Pros. It sounded so good, you know?

I was truly impressed. I didn't think I was going to carry, but I listened to the first bit of it, and then I'm just like, I just listened to the whole thing straight through. It was so good. Wow. As a Phantom guy, you know, I liked Phantom. Well, you know, I do too, and this got me thinking about how that era of musical theater that you and I grew up with was really a high spot, I think, in the history of musical theater.

Although, I guess I'm biased because it's, you know, my teenage years, and so everything musical in your teenage years is the best ever. But I think about Phantom and Les Mis, Little Shop, like, there were all of these shows that have held up over the years, and it makes me wonder, has Phantom held up?

Because I don't find myself going to listen to the Phantom soundtrack. I will now, on your recommendation. Yeah. For no particular reason. Like, I don't, I enjoy the music, but just not one that I've revisited in quite a while. There's a lot you can skip.

But, you know, the hits are still the hits, you know? Right. The hits are still the hits. It's like Miss Saigon, you know? That was, there's like three good songs in that, and I couldn't give a shit about the rest of it. But, like, Les Mis, I will listen to all the way through. I just love Les Mis. You can't beat that one.

Phantom, yeah, there's like, you know, five or six songs that are really good to listen to, especially in the new remastered, that I put into the queue, you know, for my little musical playlist for when I'm out for a walk. And I just want to live, relive the old days. It's, eh, no.

It's just like, I would like to see it again in person, but the last time I saw it was at the Pantages in Hollywood, and it was the worst production I've ever seen. Oh, wow. It was horrible. It was horrible. This guy was up there. You could tell he just, I mean, his shirt was open. His hairy chest was out there with his mask on.

He was like, rock and roll, Phantom. And I'm like, no, eh, no, no. Like, Michael Crawford had class. You got no class. I was lucky enough as a teenager to see Michael Crawford and, um, uh, what was, who's the woman?

Sarah Brightman. Sarah Brightman, the, uh, former Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber. You got to see their production? I did, yeah, in New York. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Also saw the original cast of Les Mis. I hate you even more. We had a family friend who was a Broadway costumer, so she had, um, contacts.

That's how we got in. But, um, yeah, you know, it's funny because I, I, I joke often with my musical theater friends that, um, theater folks, uh, love Stephen Sondheim, but audiences love Andrew Lloyd Webber, right?

You know, like, uh, the people who are, I think, I think people performing like Sondheim more than many audiences do because, but Andrew Lloyd Webber, nobody is like, nobody writes a catchy tune like Andrew Lloyd Webber, you know?

Yeah. Oh, I do have a friend. I do have a friend who was one of the original cast members in Cats. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. One of the guys I went to high school with was, uh, in the original cast of, um, Rock of Ages. Oh. Yeah.

There we go. Who's got the bigger, who's got the bigger musical? Boom. I'm willing to cede that one to you, Jason. No, I'm pretty much, I guarantee it's you, Dave. I guarantee it's you. I just, we just saw a lot of them because I was in college at the time and the, and your, your student pass in Chicago, theater in Chicago, you know, is pretty fucking awesome.

So you could go to any theater in Chicago and get a ticket for four bucks. So that's why I've seen Les Mis and Phantom over 25 times each. Would you say Les Mis is your all-time favorite soundtrack? Yes, I think so. Okay. Yeah, pretty much. I think mine is probably. Mine's The Empire Strikes Back.

Yeah. Yeah. We haven't talked to you yet. Yeah. Yeah. You know, every word. I finally have something I can talk to Dave about. So shut up, Ryan. You can talk about Star Wars in a minute. That's right. I think mine is probably Pippin. Pippin. Yeah. And I think, I think Pippin is an example of where the soundtrack is better than the show.

And it's a soundtrack you can listen to from start to finish and a lot of good tunes in there. The show gets a little bogged down in the book, but the soundtracks are real, real good ones. Oh, he's certainly one of my favorite hobbits. I do have to say, though, the other musical that I absolutely love is White Trash Wins Lotto that my friend wrote.

And I'm not biased because he wrote it because it's one of the funniest musicals ever written. I'm not familiar with that one. And you can still listen to it. Okay. It's on, I'll put a link in the show notes. It is available on Spotify and Apple Music and wherever. Or you can go to, yeah, yeah, I'll just put it in the show notes. It is the story of Axl Rose coming to L.A. and becoming a superstar rock man.

I'll put the video in there, too. They did a song on Conan back in the day, too. I'll give an honorable mention to the original Chess concept album. Did you like that one, Jason? I never heard that one. Of Chess?

Really? One Night in Bangkok? Oh, that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I had a friend who recently... That was Tony Head's brother that did that. That's right. Yeah. That's right. I had a friend who recently had the unwelcome revelation that the concept album for Chess was not actually the original London soundtrack, that there wasn't an original London soundtrack, that it was the concept album.

She was like, what do you mean? They didn't... I said, no, it's a concept album, like they did with Jesus Christ Superstar. And then they did the show, and the Broadway soundtrack is really bad. It's not good. Yeah. Jesus Christ Superstar was fun, though. I like that a lot. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's a great album. Sure. Yeah. But when you go to... With White Trash Wins Lotto, you have songs like A Mansion Full of Pussy and Drugs. So, you know, it is of a different ilk. Put it on in the car with your kids. You could. You could. If they're of a certain age, or you want to teach them about life.

Right. And STDs. Yeah. Yeah. So, kids, instead of having to talk about the birds and the bees, I'm going to press play. A one and a two. Yeah. Sure. Sure. That's a parenting approach. It's one of them.

Mm-hmm. Are we done with the Apple thing? Yeah, we're done. We're in for you. Well, no, I was, you know, I don't know. There's many other musicals. I was waiting for some Oklahoma. I didn't know what was coming next.

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Investing involves risk to principle regardless of the strategy used. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All right. So, Apple had a welcome home event. So, I wanted to talk about this a little bit because I've dabbled a little bit in home stuff.

You know, all these different controllable smart home items. I've got, well, I currently, I refuse to buy an Amazon Ring camera because I hate Amazon Ring and I don't like what they do with the police. So, I ended up getting one of the Google ones. So, I've got that.

I've got, you know, I've got Amazon devices around the house, which, you know, those have started to really suck because they're tanking that, their product line. The Alexas are just getting worse and worse and worse. I originally had a Nest thermostat and I had some of the Nest, the Nest Fire, why am I blanking on what they're called?

Fire sticks? No, the smoke detectors. Oh, oh, sure. The smoke detectors, which are fantastic. They're my favorite product because they have motion sensors and they have glowing lights at night. It's a very Star Trek feeling if you're going down the hallway to go pee in the night, like lights go on.

It's one of my favorite devices ever. But, you know, they're only certified for 10 years and, of course, Google has killed them as well. So, they're not replacing, you can't, they're just gone. They're just gone. Yes. So, I've been very upset about this and so I was kind of excited to see that Apple's finally stepping in and they're starting to do a whole bunch of products themselves.

So, they had the event and they announced a bunch of stuff, security cameras, doorbell, thermostat. They're not doing smoke detectors, unfortunately, but I hope that's going to come to with cool lights. Everything looks really good as you would expect Apple products to look.

They all look fantastic. So, also not surprising, everything is really expensive as Apple products are. So, I got pretty excited about this. I definitely am going to take a look at this.

I'm going to start saving money because everything is really expensive. And, as per usual, also with Apple, you know, wait for version 2. So, I'm going to let a bunch of other people, you know, be the tester units on these things, keep an eye on it. But, what did you guys think?

I mean, all this stuff looks pretty great. And, if it all works the way Apple stuff normally works, in my Apple environment, I'm kind of stoked about this. I think if I weren't as far down the path as I already am with home automation, this would be very tempting for me.

I'm curious to know how much do these devices interface and interact with my existing home automation systems. Which, let's see, I guess there's three systems that all interact with each other.

I've got SmartThings, which handles all of the, like, switches and doors and smoke alarms and things like that. I've got the Nest, or not Nest, what's the lighting one from Philips? Philips Hue, yeah.

I've got Philips Hue, which just interacts with SmartThings. So, it's all controlled through that. That works very well. And then, for security cameras, I've got Eufy. And, that's my doorbell. And, then there's two other cameras around the house.

And, I like those because there's no monthly fee. There's, like, a home base that has a recorder in it. So, everything gets streamed to that. They've held up pretty well. I did recently replace one of the cameras. I find the little base unit that Apple came out with.

I can't remember what it's called. But, I think that's compelling and kind of cute. And, I can imagine a world where that's sitting on my kitchen counter. Yeah. It's, but, what it made me think of, talking about the version 2.0, you guys remember, I think we talked about this.

That Apple had a patent on a Pixar-style lamp that was interactive and would respond to you. And, had, kind of, like, puppeted emotions and things. Like, that's what I want to see this device do. If it did that, I'm all in.

Right. You know. Like, it sees you come in the room and it turns towards you and follows you. I was expecting that. Yeah. I was expecting that from this. I was, I was truly expecting that. That's probably going to be version 2. Yeah. It's called the Home View. Yeah. Here's the, I want them for my kitchen and my dad's kitchen so I can just easily do, or the living room.

That is, I, I so want this for FaceTiming. Okay. And, I don't care about the rest of it. I use, I use Amazon. I use those right now with my mom so we can do video calls seamlessly between each other. So, if I, if I do switch, I not only have to buy myself one of these, I also have to buy my mom one of these.

So. Right. So, it gets even more expensive. But it's surprising, these are only $299, which I thought was actually a really good price point. Yeah. You know, it's, the biggest problem for me at the house here is, it's kind of like a CarPlay kind of ecosystem.

There's no app store, so you can't add anything onto it. And I didn't see Sonos listed as something that it can actually control, which sucks. Because I got a big Sonos system. It's, it's kind of the same with, like, one of the main reasons I use these devices is to stream music. And, and that's all well and good.

I do have Apple Music, but I also have Spotify. And I have a lot of playlists in Spotify. And if I can't stream my Spotify to these things, that's kind of a bummer. So, I, I do hope either you can do that and you can get some more apps or that that will be version two is going to be the app store where you can get everything in there.

So, yeah, it's, it's basically what I'm saying is I'm going to end up with all these things, but probably for none. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a matter of, it will be a year or so. It will be a year or so. Yeah. The other thing I thought was noteworthy from this presentation was they, they announced the new version of Apple TV and our house is all Apple TVs.

We have three of them. Actually, we have four of them. Three of them are hooked up. And they basically doubled the price of the Apple TV. The new Apple TVs are twice as much. And I thought Apple TVs are a little pricey to begin with. And was there anything there that, that made you go, oh, I need to upgrade my Apple TV because I didn't see anything that my Apple TV, my 4K Apple TVs currently do that those do that I want.

No, but, but I have some pre-4K Apple TVs. I've got three in the house total. One of them is, is the newest model, but the other two are pre-4K and those no longer can be updated. They have, so I have to get new Apple TVs at some point anyways.

Well, you should get them now, get the current 4K versions now before the new ones come out and the price goes up because the current 4K ones are totally fine. Yeah. That's a really good idea. I should probably just order a, well, I only need one. The one up in the, up in the, up in our loft, that's just where my kid goes and plays Nintendo and he doesn't need, he doesn't need, he doesn't need a new Apple TV with the latest functionality.

But I don't know, you know, on this show, I've talked repeatedly about how Apple fitness has kind of screwed up a lot recently. And the TV that I have in my basement where I do my workouts no longer gets any updates. And I know that they've fixed all the problems that I was having with Apple fitness, but I cannot fucking use it.

So I have to get a new one. The other thing I would recommend is, uh, look in Apple's refurb store, um, cause you can get a nice deal and they're, you know, it's an Apple TV. It's who cares if it's got a scratch on it or something, you know? Yeah.

We've gotten a couple of them there. Yeah, so might save a few bucks there. Cool. Yeah. So, yeah, I will be talking about these things over the next year or two. And, uh, as I take out, uh, take out, take out home loans and a refi to be able to get all this stuff in my house.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, this morning, uh, I moderated a panel in Washington, DC, uh, and there were a number of high level government folks on one of the panels that I moderated.

Uh, it was all I could do to not, uh, but what caught my attention in addition to that was he pronounced it sigh.

So not SI, just sigh. So this is what we're doing. I sigh every time I see super intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I tried to diffuse it by saying, acknowledging, I said, you know, SI or AI or whatever we're calling it this week, you know, just kind of make light of this stupid thing.

The stupid place where we're at right now. And I get it that this guy, uh, you know, um, has to pick his battles, right? He will get fired if he does not use this term. Yeah. I mean, it could, it could be, he's required to say this as part of his job.

And he probably feels like an idiot for doing it. But like, I could just imagine how everybody in that room was real time translating. Every time he said, sigh, we ought to go, wait, what? Oh, AI, right. And see, I have to do three steps.

I go sigh to AI to ML. Okay, sure. That's fair. Because that's what it is. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So that was my first encounter with sigh in the wild. And I have to say, I was unimpressed.

And I hope this nonsense goes away quickly because just, it's a, it's such a waste of mental energy. Everybody's energy. We covered a press release from the Justice Department a little bit ago on the show. And they use super intelligence in the press release from the Justice Department.

And I just, the F-U is the letters that I would like to use when it comes to it. Yeah, yeah. I get, I have had a couple folks, guests on the show who refer to the Department of War instead of the Department of Defense. And, well, whatever, you be you.

You know, I don't, I'll, I'm not on board with that one either. But, you know, again, this is, these are the things we're spending our time on. And it's just sort of silly nitwittery, if you ask me. Yes, and both the past two years.

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I found this other thing that delights me, absolutely delights me. This is the Pac-Man benchmark for AI model performance. Basically, they threw a bunch of different models at playing Pac-Man to see which ones are the best, which ones get the highest score.

Now, what's striking to me about this is how bad AIs are at playing Pac-Man. Okay. Because it seems that looking at the numbers here, the highest score of any of the models is just under 7,000 points.

What? Yeah, exactly. Which means they did not clear the first board. Wow. Most of these survive for about a minute, which makes me question how they're training it to play Pac-Man.

And you can go to the screen and watch some of the AIs play, and they're really bad at it. Even the ones that are supposed to be good are just the basics of Pac-Man, like going back into the ghosts, you know, randomly. Things that a normal human player would not do.

Nobody's baiting the ghosts by the little power-up. Nobody's doing all the stuff that you learned how to play by the second time you played the game. Exactly. Or, in my case, I had the pattern book that I memorized, and, you know, the pattern book teacher, you could get really far if you read the pattern book.

They obviously have not figured out how to steal the pattern book. Out of all the books that they've stolen in the known universe, they didn't get the Pac-Man pattern book. I'm watching it now, and it's frustrating how bad it is. Right, exactly. And I think if they had just pointed these models at a dozen examples of people playing Pac-Man on YouTube, people who are good at it, or even just one video of someone finishing the game, right, because there's a kill screen.

On YouTube, there is a perfect game of Pac-Man, where someone gets every power-up, every ghost, and they play it all the way through until the game breaks down at 256 screens. Just show it that, and it would do better than it's doing here.

So I guess there's a training shortcoming here, but anyway. Well, it's a thing. Don't use an LLM for something that should be standard machine learning, you know? Yeah. That's the problem. You're using the wrong type of, you know, superintelligence when it comes to this type of stuff.

There are models that could do this. I mean, DeepMind have figured that out already, you know? Then there are other ones that could do Pac-Man, I'm sure. But this is one of the downfalls of LLMs. They're fucking stupid. They don't reason. It's just a prediction model, you know?

Yeah. And I predict that they can't play Pac-Man. Yeah. That was a shame that they were not better at it than you'd hope they would be. So there's a cautionary tale. By the way, another thing, I put a link in here, when I was at my panel this morning, one of the speakers said, hey, have you seen one of these before?

And out of his bag, pulled out this little Lenovo portable monitor for travel. It's like a little travel monitor. And I want one. It's a little 15-inch display. It's powered off of your USB-C port.

So basically, it gives you a second monitor for your laptop while you're traveling. It's cute. I realize these have been around for a while. There's nothing new. There are cheaper ones available on Amazon. This one's like $179. You can get them for as cheap as $50, it seems. This one seemed well-made and solid and lightweight and all those kinds of things.

So when you're used to having a big-sized monitor at your desktop, and then you go on the road somewhere, and now everything's on your laptop screen, having something like this in your backpack, I think, would be a real lifestyle upgrade. So yeah, check it out.

Yeah. When I was doing a lot of traveling, I would have killed for something like this. It's fantastic. Yeah, pretty clever. The thing that I like most about it is that it's one cable. Just the USB-C port gives you power and video over it.

So, you know, nothing secondary to plug in. I mean, you could use this waiting for a plane at the airport, you know. Your laptop just powers it. So, pretty cool. Very nice. Yeah. Oh, I wonder if you could actually plug it into your iPhone. I wondered about that, too.

I want, yeah. You can. One of the images shows that. It's just an iPhone. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder. Oh, let me rephrase that. One of the AI-generated promotional images shows that, but we do not know if that will actually do it. We don't know if it's true or not.

It must be true. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Finally this week, I was curious if either of you had any thoughts or inklings or had heard about Balcony Solar. I do not have a balcony, so I don't know anything about this.

Well, it's called Balcony Solar, but that's just because most of the people in Europe where this is very popular, and, of course, they have a big head start on us here in the U.S., that's where most of those people have installed their Balcony Solar panels.

The way that this works is you get, let's say, three solar panels. Most of the regulations max out at 1,200 watts. So you set up the panels. You basically plug them into an electrical outlet that's in your house, and it just starts feeding the power into that and just offsets the cost of your electricity.

They say you save anywhere between, like, $10 and $30 a month, depending on what your bills are. Like, where you are, Jason, power is very expensive, so your payback would be quicker. But you can set these up in the backyard. You know what?

I never realized that you could put power into an outlet. Oh, yes, absolutely. So now I'm going to set up my exercise bike, and I'm going to plug that into the wall. And I'm going to be rich, I tell you, rich. Yeah, sure.

What could go wrong? Do you guys have a generator, a home generator? I do. So you know the trick, if you actually splice, take a cable and make it mail-to-mail, you can put the output of your generator and plug it into your wall and then use the other outlets in your house, which is 100% illegal.

And very dangerous. Don't do it if you want. It's a good way to burn your house down, but it does work. It does work. Until it doesn't. Yes. Like so many things. Then you get the insurance money. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I've seen these things have been showing up in my feed quite a bit.

Again, mostly from Europe. If I were still in my place in California, in my condo with a balcony, I 100% would install these. Living here in Toronto, where we get three months of sun, I'm not sure if there's any points.

And I own the house, so I could actually put them on my roof and all that sort of thing. In fact, my neighbor has some solar panels and I've talked to her about it and it's like she just did it to be cool. And honestly, it maybe saves her five cents a month or something like that. But so here it doesn't really make much sense yet.

But 100% if I were still in Santa Monica, I would have these up. Yeah. Yeah, I think another aspect of this is that it's really easy to find used solar panels. You know, people upgrade their roof or you can buy big used solar panels for like 50 bucks a piece that still have a lot of life in them and, you know, prop them up against something that's pointing at the sun and use something like this just to offset your power costs.

So I'm thinking about it, of course, you know, how great solar projects go for me. So we'll see. My only concern is how I would secure them against wind and, you know, I don't want one catching the wind and becoming a sail and coming through my bedroom window or something like that.

You're taking out somebody on the walking path that's out there looking for turtles. Yes, even better, even better. It would be bad. All those turtles. All those turtles. The turtles, the beavers, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But they just legalized it here in Maryland. So we are allowed to do it. And I got to see what my condo association says about it.

What a brave new world we're living in. When I was growing up in California, I never would have dreamed that I could have had some solar panels and smoked weed while I was saving all that money. All of it's legal now. It's crazy, crazy times. While I'm microdosing and talking to my AI.

Just don't try and make any dog biscuits in California. Yeah, just don't make pet food. That's right. Yeah. Right. Right. All right, guys. Well, that's it for me this week. I'm going to go listen to some Phantom of the Opera. Oh, yeah. Me too. Good idea. You be you.