763: Dr. Strangeclippy

0:00Grumpy old geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schultmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong in the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schultmeister. 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, we people leave. Ladies and gentlemen, 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 into 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 in the air, please go to patreon.com

1:02slash GOG and for as little as $3.00, $3.00, how did they do that in glorious bastards? I'll do the $3.00, $3.00 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, 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. Not wearing mine today, mine's in the laundry. I wear mine around town as, you know, because I'm a promotional whore. But 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 cam because the autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or

2:02conventional manual controls. As we discussed last week. Yeah, I said, 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 McEuralney 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. McEuralney says, touch screens 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, maybe is on fucking fire. And he also warned that unfamiliar controls could make precise movement difficult in emergency situations. Now McEuralney 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 manufacturers designs. Well, chief, federal regulators want Tesla to exploit exactly how it's steering wheel free cyber cab passed

3:05safety certification. Yeah, yeah, 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 robot taxi, 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 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. Hold them up. You know, just like a national lampoon vacation. Roll them up bad neighborhood. So when those went out of fashion and everybody started to get the 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.

4:07And 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 by I had one of those. I bought one of on late night TV. It had the seat belt cutter and like the diamond tip brake hammer to break the windows. And I do believe Adam Savage used them quite a lot when he was trapped under water in his car. Remember that that Mythbusters episode? These were those to get out. Yeah, fighty 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% San Francisco County district tax 1.375% Los Angeles County local tax SL 1% in California state tax 6% 4 times they were taxed on one shirt.

5:11Yeah, 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. 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 the your federal tax and then there's your provincial tax and that's it. So, but you know, we do get health care, safety that knows to other services out of it. What do you get out of this? Nothing. A more expensive thing. Not, uh, exactly. And I do have to say when Chen bought the new shirt, the how did I do today shirt? The, you know, the one with the the the emojis of Ross. 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, I asked her. I'm like, it is that so wrong. And she says, not at all. I'm ordering one. So there you go. Good. So there we go. Perfect. If you happen to be a stripper flying from LA to Vegas right now and listening to this podcast, by all means,

6:11get the shirt. Yes. I don't know. I think you, I think they prefer to get paid. Not assaulted by random strangers. We are not responsible for any assaults that are stemmed from Brian's ill placement of our emoji faces. Um, 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 very short order, they can make it for anyone and 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

7:14that it that serves no one. It serves absolutely no one. So definitely vote no one, Prop 40 is 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 the, 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 or enacting restrictions on how teens can interact with chatbots from AI companies, including time limits. Chatbot makers will require 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.

8:18Legislation 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 intifusive measures in who some past 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, that includes wide raging capabilities from auto-playing videos to notifications to personalized algorithm driven content feeds. This makes me want to set my age to under 16 on Facebook. Just a few Instagrams. 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 I think it's they think it's a bridge too far, bro. They need to shut the fuck up. Denying minor's access to digital forums or stripping out basic tools needed to navigate them is not going to help make young

9:22people safer or healthier in the AI age. Yeah, actually, it might. It just might actually. Now that we see what happens on the other side of the coin. Exactly. I have you. 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 haven't inferred it from everything else and from tracking you all over the internet. They fucking know. They do know I I 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's just got 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. No, no parents. Get your kids off the internet and let us go back to the way it was. Please, I'm going to look at YouTube, Brian. Get your kid off the goddamn internet. They have my place on that.

10:23Keep my kid off the internet. Don't you worry about that. Okay. Yeah. Some 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 us. 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 opposed to our congressman art. 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, no, here's the thing.

11:27Maybe we just banned social media altogether. How's that? That works for me. 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, knows Jason, because I know that you have a stick up your ass about this guy. You hate him. Oh, Mattie Matt Mullinwag. 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 to 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 just a little, a lot of people have heard me bitch about Matt Mullinwag in the past. And I just a quick run down at the reason why I used to work for a company called Locker-Nome with Chris Perillo. This was back in the early 2000s. I was going on a ski vacation. And I had just finished rebuilding Locker-Nome.com into a beautiful, beautiful new design. And it was laid out perfectly

12:30everything worked, except I had the audacity to use tables. Well, Mattie Matt Mullinwag decided to come along and say, CSS is the cool new thing. And me and all my people are going to ban Locker-Nome 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, Mattie Matt Mullinwag 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 Mullinwag 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 Mullinwag says he's back in control

13:31less than two days after announcing the company's board had forcibly placed him on leave. In Slack, he said the board was again aligned. Well, 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 Mullinwag. The board voted to put the WordPress founder and automatic CEO on paid leave, but just 33 hours and 20 minutes later, Mullinwag was back in control. Founding CEO Tony Schneider and Sue Decker resigned from the board while Mullinwag reportedly removed general and done Woody. Fuckin hell. Automatic's chief legal officer has 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 Mullinwag at the helm.

14:32Now 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 the outside 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, they're, 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. Have you ever thought I should really be doing something to protect myself from stalkers, scammers and hackers, but you're not sure where to start? We'll go to www.joindeleteme.com slash gog in Enterco, GOG. You'll get 20% off. Delete me. Delete me removes your personal information that's being sold online. I've had an active online presence for more than 30 years. So there's

15:36a ridiculous amount of information about me floating around out there. Privacy matters to me. And I'd rather not make it easy for scammers to find my address, phone number or information about my family. Delete me does the hard work of removing personal information from hundreds of data broker websites. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash gog and use promo code gog at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to www.joindeleteme.com slash gog in Enterco, GOG at checkout. One more time. That's www.joindeleteme.com slash gog code gog. 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 trying to, I was trying to temper the conversation before we

16:38got to it to get some interesting good news in, you know, Matt Mullingway getting fired. That was, I thought good news, but well, did that last much? Yeah, missed him by about as much as Trump missed him, got missed when they shot him, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That ear seems perfectly fine, doesn't it? It's miraculous. It's amazing. They can grow new ears now. Who knew? K-fabe. Anyways, Anthropic has flagged and stopped multiple scientists who are using its AI models to create potentially 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 they be biological misalignment, Brian? Yeah. Come on. I think this is worse than misalignment. Okay. The company's report includes five case studies of anthropics models being used to develop biological weapons,

17:42the 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 bio weapon. In all cases, the company said it aired on the side of being overly cautious as they're well known for because of the possible consequences. The full report also includes case studies on anthropics models being used as a surveillance tool and to create software exploits propaganda and weapon systems. Yep. According to the company, anyone misusing Claude or anthropic models had their account banned and a Tisk, Tisk, Tisk 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. Why don't you want to call it law enforcement? Call it somebody's trying to create a fucking bio weapon. If they were trying to do that in the garage,

18:46don't you think the cops would show up? One would assume. Joe's making anthrax. Well, please. 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 juggling. 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 and Vidyan Buzal and Hamilton are reportedly restricting their use of advanced AI models from anthropic and open AI 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

19:47through Palantir software. In Vidya reportedly limits anthropic models to less sensitive tasks while relying on its own Nemo Tron models for internal work. Buzal and his barred employees from using anthropics commercial models for proprietary cybersecurity projects. Imagine if Edward Snowden still worked at Buzal and Hamilton in the day in the 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 and theropic 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 bio weapons come from. Both anthropic and open AI say they don't train on customer data by default. For enterprise AI though by default may no longer be strong enough guarantees. So it's nice to them not to train on customer data even though they trained on all of our data. Everything else on the fucking planet. Without yeah. So and let's just

20:51talk for one second about this idea of isolated cloud environments and limiting models and making sure that they're they're boxed in a little corner and we can't get out of this environment because open AI's agents hacked another service months before the hugging face incident happened which open AI has just told us about now. Okay. The agents which the company was testing and a supposed sandbox environment you know isolated cloud in a little cave so I can't get out reportedly broken to Ruby Gems which is a community run packaging service for Ruby programs and libraries. According to the journal the attacks on Ruby Gems 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. Ruby Gems had to shut down account registration for four days in order to stop the attacks. One wonders why Ruby Gems did not say anything to anyone about this at the time. Yeah definitely. We know why open AI didn't because they're still trying to decide how to figure out how to deal with their misalignments. Yeah it's right. I'm telling you right now the way to deal with them is to tell us.

21:57Anyways typically creators on Ruby Gems upload files containing code and other information to help advanced software development but the agents documents contained web pages 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 and 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 and 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 access Ruby Gems to and use the service as some sort of makeshift web browsers part of their efforts to access information online. It's not quite clear how the agents were able to access Ruby Gems 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

23:00including OpenAI and Thropic and Meta previously reported that the AI agents they were testing escape their environments due to a misconfiguration by their testing partner irregular. Okay irregular you need to change your fucking company name. I want regular but 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 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

24:02increase concern about AI safety with Anthropics CEO Dario Amote 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 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, 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 were they had already been breached. They've been pre breached. So that's it's it just keeps

25:05getting 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, eh, 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 US government right now, which is basically have at it. We're going to actually remove regulations.

26:08Yeah. 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, that was a reason. There was a reason we were bullied as kids. It tempered us. These kids nowadays have 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 had to 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 naughty, 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 and 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. First measure calls for frontier AI companies to commit to ongoing employee-like access for

27:10third-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. 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. 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

28:14with conventional weapons. How about just not at all? There's your, there you go. There's my one-step plan. We don't do it. What 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 did that a lot. I might 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 Amadez essay, warning about the catastrophic with 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

29:17permits some military applications involving human controlled weapons. Anthropic's technology has reportedly been used in US 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 two dangerous support, two dangerous to support. I think that maybe we should just not give clippy access to the weapon 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 weapon 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 speaking of bombing, Amazon web surfaces, 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

30:19access 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 started again and ended and started again and it's done every time that Trump opens his

31:23mouth and it 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 this 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. I'll raise remember the cloud is just someone else's computer and that computer might just get blown up. That's true. You know what, you know what, I'm thinking, Brian, you know that 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, you know, the Uber building. Maybe they just turned that into a data center and covered 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 data centers. Yeah. There you go. Wait. Loss can feel like one of those projects where you're doing everything right and somehow the results

32:27still refuse to ship. You're eating better, trying to exercise, doing all the things in the scale just sits there judging you. Wait, Loss by hymns takes some of the guesswork out of the process with access to affordable FDA approved GLP one medications, including the WGOV pill and WGOV pen. With WGOV at hymns, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight when combined with diet and exercise. It helps regulate your appetite, eat less and keep weight off. And WGOV is the first ever GLP one pill for weight loss. So there's now a needle free option. Everything happens online. You connect with a licensed provider who determines if treatment is right for you and if prescribed, medication is delivered directly to your door. No insurance necessary. You also get access to 24 seven messaging with your care team and in app nutrition and lifestyle support, including recipes, meal plans, fitness videos, sleep content and more ready to reach your goals. Visit hymns.com slash g o g to get a personalized affordable plan that gets you. That's h i m s dot com slash g o g hymns.com

33:35slash g o g. Wait, Loss by hymns is not available in all 50 states. We go V is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS to get started and learn more, including important safety information. We go V clinical study information and restrictions visit hymns.com. 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 Doctor 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 Marvel 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 as a technology company, the specializes in products for law enforcement, bringing 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

34:39neighbors and doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stock their exes. The man said a brother for a four 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. 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 doctor Doom after seeing another activist dresses 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 way to follow and surveil the rebel scum. Love it. That was a great one. Just the best. Yeah. Did you see the Darth Vader video? Yeah, so good. It was so good. So good. Well, the US Department of Justice is accusing several companies of using, well, we haven't talked about this in a while. The crypto

35:40exchange 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 dollars in cryptocurrency. In total, they say around 1.5 billion dollars was sent to the country via a series of interrelated digital wallets. The scheme involved two Hong Kong based companies called Exowale 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. Crypto exchange removed both Exowale and Blessed Trust from the platform, although it's worth noting that the latter was an actual Binance business partner that provided payment services. It also fired some of the investigators that found the suspicious transactions, which seems like an odd move. Little bit, little bit. Don't you have the messenger? This is just the latest Binance

36:47affiliated scandal. The company actually pled guilty to violating anti-money, money laundering and sanctions laws back in 2023, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in the fine. Binance founder, Chang Ping Zhao spent four months behind bars and related charges, though of course, was issued a full pardon by President Trump. Unlike San Bankman Fried, he had the money to pay for his his pardon. He was able to pony up. Yeah. 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

37:49mainstream media. This is an Engage It story. This is a 22 year old kid who probably just learned about Bitcoin yesterday when he was given the assignment. So well, at least he's got to get about it. Yeah, give 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 Engage It is not like CNN is finally reporting on anything. Fuck those guys. But it, God, I was listening to the new four or four 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 Khan was a place in France the other day when they were talking about going to Khan and the movie shit that was going on there. Right. And it's just, but every 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, most anybody over 30, I think has. And it's

38:50just 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 when it was great, but SpaceX says it could launch Starships first orbital tests as early as September 22nd pending regulatory approval and the clearance of the Trump coin. Lift off is targeted for 715 AM 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 B3 starlight satellites to an orbit roughly 275 kilometers above the earth during the approximately 10 hour mission Starships upper stage is expected to complete six orbits before ending the flight. This would be Starships 14th mission, but it's first attempt to reach orbit, which is a major milestone. So we'll see they they're last one they made it. They you know, they've 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,

39:54they'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 with 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 dollars 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

40:56coming 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. So yeah, there's no way Russia's got weapons up in space right now that they're actually doing anything with they're they're you know they're fighting off drones. Yeah, Moscow. So you know, okay, sure. Yeah, have all the billions. Why don't you have your buddies of finance give it to you? They seem to have really kicking around. Anyways, how do I don't know? Alan wrote in and said in a recent episode you had an ad for Clean My Mac with a dedicated promo code and I heard you talk highly of it as part of set up, which you also promote highly. I have a newer MacBook Pro now after not having had a Mac and probably 10 years could you suggest other applications as part of set up and a universally really good to have to ensure the subscription is worthwhile. I would gladly do that Alan. So my sub stack or my sub stack. So my set app set app stack is I use Clean My Mac. I stat menus bartender pro downy for downloading just about any videos from any service per mute for trans

42:02transcoding said videos that I just downloaded from any different service into other formats. Also trans codes music and all sorts of stuff. It's a great little trans coder and it's named per mute. Paced for a cross 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. If you have an iPhone, you can copy it on your Mac and then it's available on your phone. Great little thing. Time-mater for client hour tracking typeface for managing my 20,000 plus font collection. I used to have Spark Mail for email until I hardened to my Gmail account. And I used to use Lillices 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 set app 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 on RAPT came out and I found out that I was 86 years old. Yes.

43:03Yes. Mostly because of some of the music that we play every morning, Disneyland, Jazz, all that kind of stuff. But so they finally done something about this just because you have to listen to let it go for the zillion time while driving your kids to school. Doesn't it mean it should dominate your Spotify RAPT? 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 included labeled include kids and family music and taste profile that will change what shows up in your discovery weekly daily mix or RAPT like the explicit content switch. Spotify as 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 RAPT recap. This feature is available to both free and premium users. I'm glad that they have this, but honestly,

44:06I refuse to ever use their discovery weekly daily mix or anything like that. I hate it. I hate all recommendation engines that 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 RAPT. I thought you gave up on Spotify. I didn't know you still use them. I still have I get it from honestly. I 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 this just made me so happy. Hi big fan of the show. I wouldn't take Phillips criticism to heart. I'm in the UK too. And if known him for a long time since South Park, S1 E2. And he has always been like that. Stay groupy. James, tip of the hat. Very funny. Very funny. Well, Universal Music Group and 11 labs have an announced a new multi-year licensing agreement and wider strategic collaboration that will see them launch a new AI powered licensed music platform.

45:07The deal with UMG is the first that 11 labs has cut with a major label and the new platform will be distinct from its 11 music AI music generation software. 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 the label. 11 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. Some. Okay. Okay. I will see. I don't know because it doesn't exist yet. Doesn't have a name. Nobody fucking knows. Okay. Yeah. And I did see a Suno launched its V6 this week, which was the first version that came

46:09out with the labels. So be interesting to see what you can do with that or not because I couldn't give a shit less about Suno or the other day generated music 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 artist pay if you're going to be fucking around with their money. But nobody, nobody, 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 it's you can't copyright an AI song. So that's true. They could actually play it if they want to. So my friend Andy got hit with I set 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 Widow's Bay. And I hope now that the Emmys have finished that you will get off your button finish it because now you can see how awesome it is. I'm enjoying it. I watched four episodes of season one episode four

47:14for Philip. Not my favorite. Not my favorite. That's a we'll keep on. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, it's good. And I, you know, had tip to Matt Rice for getting double, double Emmys. That was pretty impressive. And Allison, Janie for her work in the diplomat coming back soon, coming back soon. I did watch strange new world season four episode eight orders of magnitude this week. Holy recycled plotline Batman. Wow. 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 two, they're both showing up. But we only see the doctor getting pushed out. Hmm. Well, maybe she'll just dientifier. Who knows? Maybe. I don't know. That haircut alone is worth getting kicked off through the airlock, but a whatever.

48:17Oh, 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 a 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. Ily enjoyable. Now Brian, tell me something. Yeah. Do you find the bear to be a comedy? No. It's listed as a comedy. It is under the Emmys. It's a category as a comedy. That show is not fucking funny. That show is anxiety fuel. Widows 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, Widows Bay. But it's a horror film or it's a horror film. But keep going. There's some there's some shit that you will fall out of your chair laugh at it. Oh, I'm sure. I'm fucking funny. But the bear doesn't even have that.

49:21I 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. A lot of people like it. I just didn't get into it. It did not work for me. I was 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 rewatching 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. It's you can watch it now and it still holds up like the effects hold up because it was a lot is all practical, you know, 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

50:25Band 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 2 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. It's like I said, it's only an hour and absolutely worth it. It's only 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 really I didn't wake up super later anything. In fact, I woke up really early because Carl Wollinger 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, I, I woke up and like, my email wasn't working right and like things were just kind of acting weird. And I went to Dave Net, Dave Winner's email list to go find out what was going on. And he's like, we're that is like everything was just the internet was worked. And I finally turned on the TV just to like just in time to see the first tower go fall down. And I'm just like, what the fuck? Oh my days like, oh,

51:29we'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 a we went back and watch 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 around the restaurant and it peaked 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 it's a comedy. It's got action. It's swashbuckling. It's 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 they're not they're not Brad Pitt being Brad Pitt

52:31and 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's awesome. I loved it. Fantastic movie. It's a fantastic movie and a noxunumoon. It's beautiful. Your brother or your brother your son's going to like that movie for another different reason in a couple years. So that's very true. So we're going to give him a one. They're making a new one. Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons that we we kind of push 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 the rock versions. So screw all that. Well, 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 jetley in it and it's some some dragon thing. And then the scorpion king was this whole attempt to like it's in the universe of that. I remember now. Yeah. Yeah. I went to I went to the premiere of the mummy to at Universal with Jeff Kogar

53:35friend. That's when I got the picture of me in the in the cast with Rob Schneider who just got in a bar fight the night before in Antoine the manhore and I'd sit in a noxunumoon. And 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 Frazier came and did a stand-in. And and the guy who played the mummy was there. He was just he was funny. He was just like 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 so. 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 watch the first first half of the first season. I liked it enough, but life happened and

54:38never went back to it. Oh, oh, I'm sorry. Last night I watched season six episode one of slow horses. I'd make sure. So just that was season six episode one. And we've got some blurbous 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 a season three. HBS CEO Casey Boyz 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 this like guys Brian because I have a movie business newsletter. I subscribe to call 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 has more on that today. For years, streamers have seemingly assumed long waits between seasons are fine. A new report from Luminate

55:38just 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% land man 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

56:39back again. Fuck it. Who cares? No. I'm ready 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. Fantastic. 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 the 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 horses 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 is a continuation of the talisman. There's a talisman trilogy book three. So wraps up the story. It's called other worlds than these. And it

57:41comes 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. All right. I was very excited for the infinite extent Bob averse book six by Dennis E Taylor. I really am sad to say this brand, but I think I've hit peak Bob averse. 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 flow chart. I need a flow chart 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 Bob averse

58:42books. I've loved 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 flow chart too. So we'll see. Yeah. You know, it's like it's 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, storylines that are just coming together and falling apart and all the 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 they're basically just two characters. I finally read this is how you lose the time more by Amal El Motar and Max Gladstone. I liked it. It was good. Yeah. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the back and forth. I liked it. 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. So no, it's not. But it's a fun, enjoyable,

59:49and quick read. So yeah. Thank you for the record. Oh good. I'm glad you liked it. 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 gotta go back through. I gotta 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 Pomever's 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. It's awesome. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave featuring Cybersecurity's hardest working podcaster Dave Bittner. Well, he's not covering the daily cyberbeat 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.

1:00:50Good to see you. Maybe I should talk like this in my intro. You'll get jazzed. Oh, that's right. You can do jazz hands. Oh. How about jazz ham? I see you have some some ham radio interfaces in here that you got it. You have to tell me about. I'm dying to know. So what's going on here Dave? I have been doing a lot of ham radio stuff lately. I've been volunteering locally helping with community events and things like that. Like they call on our ham radio club to do communications for like 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. So to speak. And 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.

1:01:50And I've been playing with them. I've been using them for a while now. 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 because 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 actually you posted some screenshots in the show notes and I got so nostalgic. I need me too. Oh, remember these databases. God somebody likes it. Yeah, 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 a muck, well, yeah, this does it makes me think. I mean, we used to talk a lot about this

1:02:50on 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. 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. 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 your. Oh, God. That's a good connection string manually sitting there trying that. Oh, 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, which is where the radio or the computer rather is telling the radio what frequency to be on, when to key up the transmitter. Now, this brings its own level of anxiety because

1:03:59all 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. No, start playing smash mouth when you don't want it to. What the hell exactly like transmitting family photos to all the planes flying overhead. Well, and let me tell you new air drops. As much as I appreciate my radio brethren, there are plenty of people out there who are quick to tell you what you've done wrong. In no uncertain terms. So 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

1:04:59to 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 has probably one of the youngest ham operator radios operators in the country. I think this would fall on you. I know most likely to. I am sadly ill equipped to do that. So I don't know. I'm looking for a side project in the name. Yeah, that's true. No experience necessary. There is no experience necessary at all. 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, four. It's a legitimate question. And I see that these software packages get downloaded thousands of times a month. So they are being used. And part of the reason they're being used

1:06:01is that there are no alternatives. Right. Right. Like this is the only game in town. So they get used and yeah, it's you can sense my frustration with this. See, it there are times when. So 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 state transmitting rather. 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 I have such mixed feelings about it because on the one hand, it does take me back

1:07:08to 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 patient's 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 pastures. Yeah, you had beginners' 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 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

1:08:12drive a car yet. So couldn't get to girls. I couldn't walk to Disneyland. And so you had the entire summer. Yeah. Worth worth of time to just do dumb crap like this. I think that summer has lasted 27 years back then. Right. Not six minutes like they do now. No, no, you could stay up all night and sleep all day. Yeah. So anyway, I was running a BB ass like 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 egg head software. And oh, now that 9600 mod modems, modems are out. I got most 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

1:09:16that 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 built anything better. How much money are we talking about, Dave? There is somebody you could throw money at. We'll vibe code you a solution. Yeah. What's the estimate? We may be able to come to an arrangement because that a force at Jeep is taking what? What's the estimate on your Jeep? Jason, that's about $4,000. Holy smokes. Okay. But if you put it up for $299, 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. Now then 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. Yeah. Just moved to Maryland. Oh, yeah. You can, you can totally live in my guest room. That'd be great.

1:10:17Thanks. I mean, just for development time. Yeah. I can help you with that light outside of your garage problem. That's true. That's true. It needs a good rewire at this point. I'm like, I'll just, I'll just run on a treadmill to power it in your garage at night. That'll just be it. A vibe code while running on the treadmill to keep your house lights on. Yeah. That's great. It's cost to it. Yeah. And again, if we were 15, you'd probably be like, yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason's already in the non-working Jeep on his way to Maryland. Right. Right. No, no, he's hitchhiking here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We would totally make this work. And I'm going to count 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. So anyway, that's my, that's my vent and rant for the day. So there's anybody out there who has a particular set of skills and has time to kill wants to take a run at this.

1:11:20There's certainly no money nor fame. But you'll make the old days we didn't care. We just, it was for the challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The heart, 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 in 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. And it's, 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

1:12:26write. Isn't the LLM supposed to do that anyways? Yes, it is. I guess this is a short part 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 a traditional 15 bucks a month. So we're we're we're getting nickel-ed and diomed man. Yeah, subscriptions. It's crazy. We really are. We really are. Yeah, it's crazy. I know Brian, you don't pay for shit, but I pay

1:13:27for zero AI. Yeah, how much you pay in 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 Zee, you're not paying anything. Correct. No, I am 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 chat. She's I'm checking with chat. And but no, no big money here on that. I of course, I'm waiting for this gravy train to run out because it has to. Yeah, at some point, we're going to have to actually pay for these things. We'll see what happens. Well, maybe chat can take her run into your ham radio app. I really think, just five. Five. 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 a lot more money. That's my tip. That's going to be more than 20 bucks a month. Yeah, that's the thing. But I mean,

1:14:28like so I'm on the the pro package for open AIs thing because I use codex a lot. And I was was working with clawed and clawed. I still spent 20 bucks a month on clawed because I still do stuff in clawed 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. Clod sucked balls. I hated it. Because track a lot is is all written in code with codex. And it works great. So that I just I sit there and I use whisper flow and I do the thing that I make fun of people for I talked to my computer and it makes me software. But I don't say that I'm coding it. I'm just asking asking the machine in the box nicely to write something for me. You're in a super advisory position. Yes, I can tell them in a supervisory position because I have to tell how tell it how stupid it is 80% of the time. Right. After all, I've known over again. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, you idiot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah,

1:15:30I got a $20 clawed. 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 that is just a deal hack right there. Because I just use that space up for it from my, you know, backup storage and the $100 codex. So, but the $100 codex, if you want to, 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 at this stuff's open source, you give it the source code and you say fix this. Generally will just look at it. Don't make it like an ugly. Yeah. 10 make bubbles. Give me bubbles. Pretend like you're a Macintosh developer. And the old days. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I don't know. I will stew on it for a while and see, see how it goes. If it eventually breaks me and I do decide to try to throw some more money

1:16:30in 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, 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 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 and feel. And I don't feel guilty listening to this version.

1:17:35Hopefully they answer some more people as Marilyn Manson is because he's a persona non-God of 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. 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 Wikipedia page, which is interesting to me. I think as many videos as they have, somebody would have done something like that, but whatever. 763 podcasts. We're not on Wikipedia. Just saying. That's true. Yeah. Me neither actually. Yeah. Yeah. And I've got wood. 3000 something like that. I'm okay with that. 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,

1:18:40she 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 T version of a Star Wars documentary. So. I'm 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

1:19:41burner. 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 is supposed to be way faster than gas as well. But the main thing is is that if I need to, I can plug this in my generator or my battery backup. So should there come a time that I need to boil water? Oh, I feel I feel Jason's past is starting to kick in. Here comes. I say nothing. I say nothing. Jason the prepper. We we have many an episode. I can say I died. That guy died in the fire. No, no, I don't care. I couldn't care less.

1:20:41No, that guy's Dave the prepper. Dave the prepper. He has he's carrying the the proverbial electric torch now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, 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. Yeah. Really. Yeah. We could really tall ladder. Yeah. So, okay. This was triggered and it was it was it was a triggering. This was triggered by some things I saw about some some of the people I talked to from time to time drop little things inside conversations and after the interviews done and they talk about things that the Iranians may

1:21:46or 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. So this is part of that. 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 because 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 my daughter, 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

1:22:47to have your own bunker and live by yourself for the next 10 years is just a fantasy. It just doesn't work that way. Humans don't work that way in my opinion. So. All right. Yeah. Okay. One thing in here that I did notice that you should definitely do if you want to be in that in that crowd, if you're going to go in the prepper route, uh, search community is 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 it. Take took the class. I'm actually on the board. I'm actually on the board of directors directors of my local co-ed, which is the organization that organizes communities for it 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 probably damn. That's right. Look at you. That's right. See? All right. Impressive. That is

1:23:48impressive. 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 some hackers who got 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 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

1:24:52some of the various, uh, reports that are coming out about this. 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 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. 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. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Yeah.

1:26:00And they wonder why we're all anxious. Yeah. All right, guys. Let's go. Let's go get some time 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 manual or Vern Mixy. I'm guessing manual, Dave, Dave, manual, not manual, like don't like read manual. Man, well, man, well, Dave, Dave, member, Darren, and sleep to little and fakey mick made up. Oh, the ever famous fakey mick made up love you fakey made 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?

1:27:06My heart is broken. My heart is broken. Well, thank God. Jason. I don't know. Hello, Mr. Rob. Yeah. Speaking of stripe over the tip, Jerry, we've got Jeffrey and Jeff, the two J's kicking in separately. I might add, doll, Sean, if the ador and Michael with the big 50 bucks, thank you, Michael. Very nice. Sold a bunch of shirts, Jason. 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 Iter Apple podcast and leave this reviews anymore. I think I think that's a dead thing. Everybody, everybody talks about it, but I don't know anybody that's getting, taking the time to go get reviews. I don't know if anybody uses Apple, if anybody uses Apple podcasts anymore, it seems

1:28:07to be kind of a dead platform for most podcasters, but yeah, whatever podcasts on Spotify and YouTube. I know. I know we make so much money off the YouTube. It broke, we broke it down. I looked at it one dollar a day is what we make off the YouTube. All the fuck is working on a day. You can feed a hungry podcaster. No, because what is two of us in taxes and trans fat transaction fees. Oh, yeah. Sally Struthers is still crying for how hungry we are. I'm going to use AI to have or do a promo for us. I'll do it. Please, please, just put us in cages, put us in cages, skinny or micro nose. But then the one guy on YouTube will get mad at us because we used AI and we're supposedly, hey, hey, I 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, send up for his little is three dollars a month. Get the show early ad free and high

1:29:08definition. You could pay more if you like to and if you sign up for the whole year, you get a discount or you can go to geog.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. Gonna have until next time. Look at the video. Until next time, I'm Jason the Philip O. I'm feeling I don't want to know what happened to our dogs. I'm Brian Scholmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at geog.show slash 763. Want to keep the grump in this alive? Toss a few bucks away at geog.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Not really pennies actually. You see the former mentioned taxes. We need some fucking bucks. That's right. And we don't have pennies here anymore. That's right. There's more pennies in the United States. 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 gonna have to go back to LA 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 some pennies.

1:30:09From Evans. Love the show. Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. He's just spread the grumpiness to friends, foes and everyone in between. We'll love you for it. Swing by geog.show to join our discord and chat with us and other show fans. It is actually quite a lot of fun. This is the only social media network I enjoy. Got thoughts, feedback, cool links. Hit us up at geog.show slash contact. Sorry. Got the green part there. And don't forget to leave a five star review. Which is she. I'll fuck the review. Nobody does. Nobody gets what we've got merch. Go and buy some cool shirts. We'll keep making more. Well, we've been slacking this last week, but we can't pull it out every week. Give me a break. It's been a rough week. Yeah. Go to shop.geog.show and stay grumpy.