Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to Technato.
Welcome to another episode of Technato. I'm one of your hosts, Sophie Goodman. And before we jump in, I just want to take a moment and thank the sponsor of Techno Aci learning, the folks behind it pro. As a reminder, you can use that code Technato 30 for a discount on your it pro membership. Welcome back to the show. Happy new year. I don't know about these guys over year, but I have certainly missed this because this is one of my favorite parts of the week. So hopefully you had a happy new year and a safe holiday. And I'm wondering, guys, how was your new year? Don, how was your new know?
[00:00:35] Speaker B: It was good. Had a chance to spend some time with some family, had them come into town and hang out. And we went through the annual struggle that we have, which is we don't have cable television or over the air even. We do streaming services in the posette household. And so every year I forget about it until the last minute. I'm like, all right, how are we going to watch the ball drop? Because you have to have one of the network stations to see that. And so then we're like, all right, does this service have it?
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Is that live on YouTube things?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Maybe. I couldn't find anything. So we ended up having to do, like, a quick subscription just for a day trial run. This is the new world that we've entered into.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: I feel like when you have really, really little kids, I know that your kids are a little bit older, but maybe if you have young kids, you could kind of trick them and just. We have some relatives that they live on, like the west coast, and they would play the ball drop at central time or whatever. They'll play the ball drop for eastern time and tell the kids, okay, it's midnight, time to go to bed, and it's really like 10:00 there. So they kind of do the cheat codes a little bit.
[00:01:34] Speaker C: I'm not saying I've done that.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Just play one from a few years ago. It's a recording. Why does it say 2016? Don't worry about it. Time for bed.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: I made a mistake.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: It does drop the same way every year, doesn't it?
[00:01:46] Speaker A: It's basically the same ball. Yeah. Did you guys do anything fun for the new year?
[00:01:50] Speaker C: Yeah, we did. It was awesome. We slept a lot. Like, I did not get up before 08:00 I think, for like a whole week.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: That's nice.
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Amazing.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: That's the best way to ring in the new year. Well rested.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Well, hopefully you all had a great time celebrating the holidays and the new year as well at home. But enough of all that. We have got some news to talk about. A lot has happened in the last week, so we're going to go ahead and jump right in with this article. Some Linux news. This comes to us from slash, source based Gen two Linux goes binary. Now I've said this before, I know that you guys are definitely more well versed in Linux than I am. And that goes for Linux news as well. So why is this big news? Why is this important?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: All right, so if you asked me why Gen two Linux matters, right, so there's all these different distros you can pick that are out there. So why would you pick Gen two? Historically, Gen two has been one of the easiest distros to port to new processors. So I remember when the original Xbox came out and people were like, oh, I bet we can get Linux running on this. Gen two was what they went to first and it was just easy to add in new processor support or new architecture support and go that way. Over the years, systems like Arch, which I guess makes sense because Arch is in their name, but they've become really easy to port. But the way distros like Gen two do it is by doing primarily a source based distribution. So you can't just go and download and install Gen two and be up and running in an hour. That's not possible. Well, it used to not be possible. So what you would do is you download all the source code and then you would boot off of a minimum system that had GCC or whatever compiler you were going to use. And then you ran through and you actually compiled the entire operating system for your hardware. And one, it was really, really difficult, right? So a lot of people wore that as a badge of honor. But two, it meant that every binary on your system was specifically compiled for your hardware. If you had an AMD processor versus an intel processor, if you had an arm processor, whatever, that all the optimizations and things were specifically tailored for your system. So if you were looking for performance, you could usually eke the best performance possible out of gen two with the lowest resources. And it was all because of that source code distribution model that they had. Well, the biggest challenge to that is how difficult it is. And not just difficult in terms of you have to know a lot to do it, but you have to have hardware resources like Daniel, have you ever compiled Gen two?
[00:04:15] Speaker C: I've never done gen two, no.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: So I've done it a couple of times, maybe three times. And it didn't really matter how good a system was. Last time I did it I was on like an I seven with 32 gigs of ram. And I want to say it took about eight and a half hours to compile and build it.
[00:04:31] Speaker C: What a great way to spend your time.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: I did it like a decade ago and it took over a day. The system just sat there churning, compiling, compiling everything. Yeah. And God forbid you get an error along the way.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Oh man, that's when you start a couch fire, right?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
So what they're doing though is they're saying the challenge they're running into as a distribution is people who have slow architecture or like a raspberry PI. It takes forever to compile on a raspberry PI like four or five days. And so people don't do it, they just don't pick that distro. And they said, you know what, maybe it's time that we started distributing some pre compiled binaries. And so that's what they announced right at the end of December, is that going forward you can still do full source based distribution like you've done historically with Gen two, but now you can also get pre compiled binaries if you want. And they've been digitally signed. They're supposed to be shown that they're not modified. They're not going to be optimized for your system like a true source model would be. But it'll get gen two up and running on weaker hardware.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: So don, if I had the exact same system that they used to compile their binary with, would I get those performances?
[00:05:43] Speaker B: You would, except the odds are you don't have the same as what.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: I get that. Which makes me question number two is should there be maybe a repository, a database of here are compiled binaries that were done on this system with this hardware. And then as you start to grow that and people are uploading that into that database, you would be more likely to find something and kind of make that a little easier lift for a lot of people.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I think the maintenance burden on that would be a nightmare.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: Yeah, forget maintaining it, right?
It's just like, oh, I guess that didn't work. That's how a lot of Linux projects start anyway. Where we just go whatever, just throw it out there and whatever sticks is great. And then as people start to rely on it and as people start to become fans of it and they start to love it, you will see that maintenance start to grow and people start to curate and make sure, oh yeah, that does work. And this is the right architecture. And so if you have a rasp PI five with this type of whatever so and so. And this is what you're running. Here's your binary. If you're running a 2019 MacBook Pro with this intel chip, with this ram, bub. Here you go. And then that would be kind of cool.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen other people try that, and what I've seen and every implementation is different. So somebody could actually sort this out. But is where if I'm running a laptop that's like six or seven years old, yes, I can find it in their list. But if I go and buy a laptop today, it isn't supported.
So now you're cutting off newer hardware by trying to solve the problem for older hardware. So they have to kind of choose.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Who they're going to.
Let's say that you're a lover of this project. You obviously know that it exists. You just went and bought a new laptop, and you go, well, I'm going to trudge through doing all the compilation, and when I'm done, upload now, everybody else that comes after me gets to reap the benefits.
I'm going to plant the seed for a tree that I'll never sit under the shade.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:48] Speaker C: But others will.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I could see that. Now. You're the security guy.
[00:07:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: What would it take for you to trust uploaded binaries like that?
[00:07:58] Speaker C: Well, I probably wouldn't be using it on a system that I care about that I would be using.
If it is your main daily driver. Yeah. Obviously you got to take security in mind and reputations of people that upload. Maybe you use some sort of reputation system to help ensure that those things are a little bit more safe, that, hey, this person that uploads has a high reputation for quality security. High, no problems. But it's just like anything when it comes to containers or virtual images that are out there, it's the same kind of thing. So it would be the same security stance there. You just got to be careful.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: In my younger days, when I used to fiddle with things like trying to get as much performance out of my system as possible. Right. Where you'd overclock your cpu, you'd push your graphics card, you'd overclock your memory. Right. Whatever you can do to try and eke that performance out. Back then, I really did care about using gen two or using arch or whatever. Having it specifically compiled from my system, even though the performance gain was negligible, you would do it. As I've gotten older, I don't have that kind of time on my hand, I just end up grabbing Ubuntu something and calling it a day.
[00:09:12] Speaker C: That's what's fun, is like you said, when you get those errors, when you're 75% done compiling and then you go, okay, I'll treat that, whatever this happens. And then you get an error again at 90% and you're like, motherless son, I will kill.
Yeah, you think you were mad the.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: First time, just waiting for that second time.
[00:09:35] Speaker C: And God forbid you go for number three, which is a total roll of the dice. You're like, please, jesus, I beg you, please let this done.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: So I'm sure it's better today, but what used to happen to me was you'd boot into this really stripped down system that just had the core components you needed to compile. And so there usually wasn't a screen buffer. And so sometimes there'd be an error and the error would scroll off the screen and you had no way to see what the error was. And that was even worse. Oh man, I hate that.
Anyhow, it's interesting, you're going to hear a lot of people, well, it depends on what circles you run in, but.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: You go, oh yeah, don, real interesting.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: You're going to hear some people talk about how odd it is that Gen two, what's known as a source based distro, is switching to a binary distribution model. And it's important just to note that they're not switching to a binary distribution model, they're adding it in addition to what they already do to try and address a bigger market.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: I think that's where we can applaud them. I think that's the right way to go.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Will it work? I don't know if I'm going to go with a binary distribution. I wouldn't pick Gen two, right? So I don't know that it's going to work for them, but we'll see.
[00:10:42] Speaker C: You know how it is in the Linux world, man. They are zealots about their distros, and no one is becoming a heretic.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Well, speaking of zealots, I would love to get some context, maybe from you guys on this, because I like looking at the comments. I can't tell if this is like a serious outrage comment or if he's poking funny. He's being sarcastic. He says, philistines, sellouts, what next gen two? Run system d? This is a joke.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Then he's kidding.
I would say it's a tongue in cheek thing. So it's a joke, he's funny, but he's probably coming from a serious place, though. Like, if they're embracing this, how much further do they have to go before they embrace system D or other things?
[00:11:24] Speaker C: Next week, system D and gen two.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Honestly, I think that ship has sailed. Any distro that's resisting system D is just fighting a losing battle.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay. It's fun to scroll through and look at what people have to say sometimes, but it doesn't help if I don't know what they're talking about. So trying to learn. Trying to learn. We'll go ahead and move on to something. Maybe. Maybe I know a little bit more about this area. This is in the world of Microsoft. Comes to us from the register. Microsoft mixed. Mixed reality. This windows VR didn't even make it to the ER. They really had some fun with that headline. The wordplay department was in full swing. That was. I didn't realize that this was still something people were talking about. I thought a while ago that it was like, yeah, they had like, they hire all these people and then it didn't work out for them. But this is still an ongoing thing.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: It absolutely is.
I've made it clear over the years on the podcast that I am not a fan of VR and virtual reality. I don't think that it will ever get beyond the gimmick stage right, until you get to the whole ready player one type model where you're truly fully haptic suits.
But without that, you put on that VR headset and you can't see anything outside. So now you can't use a real keyboard anymore because you can't see it. I mean, maybe if you're touch type or you can't drink your cup of coffee because one, you can't see the cup. And even once you've got it, you got these giant goggles in the way. That kind of stuff is what makes VR not a real tool that we're going to use anytime soon. But mixed reality or augmented reality, basically the same thing that to me has a place, right? And the old demo that I used to see was really cool. You had a computer with no monitors, and you'd put on your goggles, and all of a sudden you had a massive monitor on the wall in front of you. And when you turned to the left or turn to the right, that monitor stayed right there on the wall where it was supposed to be, so you could turn and look the other way. And now there was no monitor in your way. You could function like a normal human being while having a super sweet, gigantic monitor. Or if you wanted to split it into two or four. You could just do that, think like, minority report, the junk's floating around in front of you, but you still see the real world. And Microsoft did a demo. I mean, it was probably five or six years ago now. Did you guys ever see that, their mixed reality Minecraft demo?
[00:13:38] Speaker C: No, I did not see this.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: So I'll try and describe this, but you google it, because the experience is pretty neat. Although it's all dead now, so maybe it doesn't matter, but they have a table sitting there. It's just a regular table. And they put the AR goggles on the camera so you can see what you would see through the Microsoft visor. And all of a sudden, a Minecraft world just pops out of the table like it was built with Lego.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Legos.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah, but they're able to swipe and move around the world and go underground and all that. And it's all right there on the table, like it's a physical object, like the holograms in Star wars or something. It's all right there. You take the goggles off, and then there's just a table sitting there, right? Super cool. Really awesome. I got excited about that. I was like, wow, now here's something that has some real potential, right?
But I think their demos were a little overproduced, and they hadn't quite refined the technology to where it needed to be. They ran into a lot of challenges with it. And so even though they demoed Minecraft that way, like, six years ago, it never even made it into an alpha stage where anyone could try it. Like, outside of those demos they did on stage, nobody got to touch that, which means it wasn't real, it didn't work. Like that was all faked somehow post production, or they had a very highly scripted demo to make that function. But Microsoft has finally called it quits on it. They said, look, we've been trying. We developed. They did some work with the army, if you guys remember the headsets that made all the soldiers barf last year, they got a little bit better. The barf count was reduced. I don't know how they measure that metric barfs per hour, the BPH.
But they just weren't able to penetrate it. And so they are kind of throwing in the towel on it. I think it's interesting timing, because Apple is gung ho on this and acting.
[00:15:29] Speaker C: Like they just come out with something not too long ago.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Yeah, the giant ski goggles, which, I mean, they will tell you, this is the greatest technology we're leading edge breaking barriers. But it's the same crap that hasn't worked for six years.
[00:15:42] Speaker C: I've met Apple.
I know their shtick, so we'll see where that goes.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Apple is telling us this is the year of augmented reality. Allegedly, their goggles are supposed to come out by April.
[00:15:54] Speaker C: If apple goggles caused cancer, they'd be like, it's the best cancer ever.
You'll never have better cancer.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: In fact, you don't have cancer.
[00:16:03] Speaker C: What's wrong with you?
[00:16:05] Speaker B: You get blue bubbles in text. Now, if you don't have cancer, you get green bubbles if you do.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: White cancer. Right? Or rose gold cancer. That's what.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Rose gold.
Nothing says Apple more than rose gold.
[00:16:23] Speaker C: My goodness.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: All right, well, it is funny to hear, to see two of the largest software companies, or just tech companies in the world, Apple telling us this is the year of augmented reality, and Microsoft saying, we're throwing in the towel.
[00:16:36] Speaker C: Why is this such a hard thing? It seems like we're there technologically, but apparently we are not.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: I'm going to use Chat GPT as my example, where when you look at Chat GPT at face value, it's pretty impressive.
[00:16:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Right. And if I go and ask it one question, it's pretty impressive. But once you start asking it a series of questions, things break down really fast.
[00:17:00] Speaker C: Right, what's your experience? And then we kind of shifted to Chat GPT, just because there's Chat GPT 3.5, which is okay, it does a neat job. Right. But what about the pay for Chat GPT? That seems to be a bit more impressive.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: It is. And I have that because we use it for certain things here at the office.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: I don't have any experience with it.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: So if you go in and you tell it, I'll actually give you a real example and you'll wonder why I did this and I'm not going to explain it.
And you tell it to write you a limerick. Right, okay. I need a limerick about something and you tell it. You want a limerick. That's eight lines. Okay, so I need eight lines. Very specific. Or ten lines is a proper limerick. Yeah. And so then it'll go in and it'll do it, and the odds are it'll be okay. But sometimes it'll rhyme things where, like, the word untold rhymes with the word untold. Well, of course it does.
[00:18:01] Speaker C: It's the same word. It doesn't know that. It's.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: If you say, okay, do it again, but this time make it 20 lines, it'll start duplicating itself in the same lyric. It doesn't have like, a human would look at that immediately and say, oh, you use the word told too many times. We would know that it doesn't. Little things like that break down. And to me, that's how VR and augmented reality are, is that when you first glance at them, the world is your oyster. You see all the possibility, but then when you actually start to use it, you realize pretty quickly that it slows you down significantly because you are faster than it is. It gets in the way of a lot of little things.
[00:18:36] Speaker C: Yeah, but you'd think that they would be able to do at least stop trying to shoot for the moon maybe, right? Maybe that's the problem that they're running into, is they're trying to make minecraft sets in front of you instead of just put my gps in front of me, make it a heads up display for a lot of things. Hey, I've got ambient air temperature, I've got humidity, I've got time of day. I've got direction that I'm going. Right. Just simple things that it should be able to accomplish that. My phone can do that. Yeah, I can do kind of. Well, like, I can tell you about what direction I'm going, I can tell you about what the temperature is. But it's nice to have that thing in real time and give me weather updates and things of that nature to kind of scroll across the top. I can look up and see it. This is the kind of ar that I've been looking for that Google Glass apparently tried to do, and then they killed that.
Nothing seems to be giving me this experience.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Text to voice. Text to speech.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Right. That's been around a long time. And if you've used a gps, you know, turn right on highway 72 or whatever, right? So that's a common thing. And most of us think that's pretty good. Like, text to speech has evolved. It's not pretty well until it tries to pronounce proper nouns, right? So here we're in central Florida, and there's Ocala, Mykinopi, there's cities with weird names, right?
[00:19:54] Speaker C: And my canopy.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: And the GPS will say my canopy every.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Just as you were saying proper nouns. I'm like, yeah, my canopy. That's why I mispronounced it, like, the first three years I was here because of my gps.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: And how much ram and cpu do you need to look up how to pronounce McKinnopi?
[00:20:08] Speaker C: Well, I mean, who cares, right? To me, that's not like a deal breaker.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: Citizens of.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: These little things, they add up.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: True.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Right. And so if we adopt text to speech, like, I do. Audible. I have an audible subscription, so I get a lot of audiobooks. Right, where a human being reads a book. I could, and I would save money on this if I just bought the epub and use text to speech, but it mispronounces so many things. And the sentence, Kate, that slows off. Well, it doesn't necessarily slow you down, but, oh, yes, it breaks immersion. It's just harder to listen to, and I'd rather just read it myself.
[00:20:47] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I guess that breaks it down to, like, there are things that this could be good at and things that it can't be good at, and we chuck those things that it's not great at to the fire, or we kick it down the road until it becomes good at it, and hopefully once it.
Oh, here we go.
Oh, my God. He actually has Google Glass.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: So. I never had Google Glass. Greg, you stole this from someone, and when they killed it, they killed the whole service, so they're useless.
[00:21:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: And he gave me his old set so I can wear it, and I can be a true glass hole now because it's not even turned on.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: Listen, Geordie Laforge, I'm going to wear.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: The rest of the podcast.
[00:21:30] Speaker C: I think you should.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Absolutely stylish. So what is this? Is this a sunglass attached sunglasses? Yeah, actually.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Hey, if you want to pull off a proper CSI Miami, you get this joby on here, which you can't actually do. Oh, my goodness. How does it attach? Yeah, I'm doing something wrong here.
[00:21:48] Speaker C: Don's palsy is stopping him from.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: This is great. We should just do this for every show.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Oh, you know what? It goes sideways.
There it goes. All right, now.
[00:21:58] Speaker C: There you go. David.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Career. These are dirty.
I feel like I just got my eyes dilated at the optometrist.
[00:22:07] Speaker C: When did that come out, though? That was like, what, 2015 or 2014, maybe. It was a while back, right?
[00:22:13] Speaker B: If only I had a voice assistant I could ask, is there a date on the top? I'm getting away from the microphone here.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Sophie, she's our voice assistant.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know what year this came out.
[00:22:22] Speaker C: What year did Google Glass come out?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Google Glass was initially released in 2013.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: 1310 years ago.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: Ten years ago.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: This will be a collector's item one day. All right, I'm going to hang on to this.
[00:22:34] Speaker C: No, you're not.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: I'm not saying companies shouldn't innovate.
[00:22:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: I'm saying that we, as the consumers, probably should lower our expectations.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: I totally agree.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: And I really do want a voice assistant. That doesn't suck.
[00:22:53] Speaker C: I do.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: I want Rosie from the Jetsons so I don't have to do laundry. I want stuff like that. It's just not ready yet.
[00:23:00] Speaker C: No, it's not, unfortunately.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: That is unfortunate. But, I mean, we got something great out of it, clearly. So this is the best segment ever.
The Google Glass.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: I've never put these up. Oh, yeah. You don't remember that whole campaign?
[00:23:15] Speaker C: I was poor. I don't have these kind of things.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: No, I think it was Microsoft.
[00:23:20] Speaker C: I think it was Microsoft actually called themselves Glass.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: No. So they had the Google glasses. And then there was a guy who wore his Google Glass into a public restroom.
[00:23:30] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: And people were all upset, like, how do we know you're not filming us? He was like, I'm not.
[00:23:35] Speaker C: There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: So he's in the restroom, he's uploading binaries to Gen two, and he's wearing his Google glasses. And somebody, some journalist or whatever, was like, what a glass hole? And then people kind of latched onto that term. And I think it was Microsoft that ran a whole ad campaign on it.
[00:23:55] Speaker C: Killed it.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, Google, once that term was out, like, that was the nail in the coffin. It was like the blue checkmark on Twitter, right? Where for years you'd see a blue check mark and you're like, all right, that's somebody you can trust. And then all of a sudden it changed.
[00:24:08] Speaker C: Every brother had it.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: And now it's like, oh, if you have a blue check mark, you're a sellout. And that tanked the value of blue checks. And that's kind of what happened to Google glasses.
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Okay, good to know. Little history there.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: What a crazy podcast.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: It's like you've got some kind of superhero apparatus on. Like you're going to shoot lasers out of your eyes. I love it. It's great.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: I feel like a d bag.
[00:24:32] Speaker C: I'm like, you're the Technato version. Laforge.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah. I need the hair.
What was that called? Banana clip.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: All right, well, that will conclude our newest segment here on techno.
We are going to stay in the. I know we started off talking about mixed reality, virtual reality, Microsoft, and we got on a tangent. We'll go back to the world of Microsoft. This article comes to us from Tom's hardware, the oldest known version of DOS. Unearth MS DOS Ancestor 86 DOS version 0.1 C, now available on the Internet archive. I probably don't need to read the whole headline for these. I probably could just read the gist.
[00:25:12] Speaker C: The lead headline gave it to you.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I probably could just say, yeah, they unearthed something. And then you guys can maybe explain, because you're going to have to explain it anyway because before my time, definitely.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: I don't know if you've ever watched any of the documentaries on how Microsoft got started and all the crazy backroom deals and stuff that happened. There's some really shady stuff, like drug deals, sort of, yeah. Really? They sold an operating system, got a massive contract with IBM before they even owned the operating system themselves.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: Did you ever watch the Pirates of Silicon Valley?
[00:25:44] Speaker B: I've seen most of it. I still watch the whole thing.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: So the scene where he is purchasing Dos from this guy, the guy is like stoned out of his mind. He comes into this crunchy house and he's just like, so do you have it?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: It's literally like a drug deal.
[00:26:02] Speaker C: He hands him a briefcase full of money and the guy's like, yeah, man, I call it Dos. Here you go. He hands him the disk. This is literally how it went down in the movie.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: So to me it's neat to see some of these older oss, but a lot of them have been lost to time, right? Because some of them were just distributed on like real to real tape. And so even if you had it in hand, there'd be no way to use it. I've gone through this myself.
I like os two. It's an old operating system, I enjoy it. I've got my copy. Never would have got, oh, you can't see it here. It's behind my copy of Microsoft. Bob, I've got a copy of OS two, 1.11 of the very early versions, not 1.0, I couldn't find that one. But I have 1.1 and to me it's neat to see some of the original versions and every now and then I'll go back and try and install them and see what a nightmare it is.
But this is like way back in the earliest days of what would become dos. And it's really got no value whatsoever for technology today. Like if you wanted to try and run it, but if you want to be nostalgic as all hell, this is a way to do it. 86 Dos. So this is before Microsoft owned it, version 0.1 c. A person had a disk stashed away somewhere that is in like mint condition. They posted pictures of the floppy disk and it's like it has not been touched. It's not branded Microsoft because Microsoft didn't own it. Yet it's branded. Seattle computer Products Incorporated. The serial number on it is number eleven. This is, like, one of the original copies of this. Like, if you want a piece of nostalgia, this is it. And normally you hear about these things being found and you don't get it. This person not only found it, put it up on archive.org. You can go to the Internet archive and download it right now and throw it in Dosbox or whatever and get it up and running and see what it was like, what we suffered through way back. I say we. This was before me. Even I was not involved in computers when this was out.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: This came out in 80, which was the year I was born.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
So it's some really vintage stuff. But I think this is the awesome part about the Internet. There's so many bad things on the Internet. But then to see something like this, like, really historic software now brought, digitized, brought online, and it's going to be around forever now, I think that's awesome.
[00:28:21] Speaker C: Yeah. Curating where we came from so we can look back and go, wow, that's kind of cool. To see, basically, the impetus, the start of where we became, like, a technological nation was through things like this. And this is one of the things that allowed us to become that and to really push into technology.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And I don't want to get into the whole religious argument over it, but there is a big contingent of people who are really against all the cloud services we do today because.
Let me flip this over to video games because it's easier to make the analogy. There is a big group of people, Daniel, you and I included, and you, too, Sophie, where. Where there's old video games that aren't for sale anymore that we still enjoy running. You introduced us to that Mario Kart game. Which one was it?
[00:29:11] Speaker A: Mario Kart double Dash.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: There we go. Which I'd never heard of. Right. But Mario Kart double Dash, you can't go to the store and buy it. I don't think I can go to an online store and buy it. But there are people who took the cartridge.
[00:29:23] Speaker C: You can buy them on eBay and stuff.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: It's just. They're outrageous prices. Yeah.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: 2003.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Somebody took it 20 years ago. Well, whenever they did it, though. But they took the cartridge, they ripped it into a rom, put it online, and now you can go. And if you want to remember, like, what was that game that I played 20 years ago? I can download the rom and I can play it out. Marginal legality there.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: But, yeah, I've always wondered why, especially Nintendo, specifically very litigious about roms and whatnot. Why?
With intellectual property that they own, I totally get that. Do they care? They're not selling it. They're not losing any money.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Well, so let's pretend that it's 100 years later, right? So the copyrights run out, the trademarks, whatever. All that stuff is gone. Maybe Nintendo has been out of business for 50 years, and so now it is legal to go and get it. You can. Right. But what if it was a cloud based game or cloud based software? What if I want to remember what Gmail looked like in 2003?
I can't.
[00:30:22] Speaker C: Yeah, that's not happening, right?
[00:30:23] Speaker B: You can't because it was a cloud based service. All the code was walled off. That's going to disappear. And so there's going to be a point in time where history kind of stops for software. And that's sad. I'll be dead, so it won't matter to me. But for our children, kids.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: It'S definitely something that, when I was reading through this, if it seems like, oh, wow, this is a long time ago to you guys, it's like I was not even a figment of anybody's imagination at that point. So this is all definitely far before my time.
[00:30:58] Speaker C: What about with code repositories like GitHub? If I have a website, I can put all that in GitHub, can I, and kind of curate it there?
[00:31:07] Speaker B: You can?
[00:31:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: The challenge there becomes, like, let's say I have a web application that I built, and I use terraform definition files to deploy it in AWS Fargate, right? And so I'm using AWS Fargate is no longer a thing.
[00:31:23] Speaker C: You can't make it happen.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: I would have to rewrite Fargate. That or change the terraform files to point to something else. Assuming terraform even worked anymore.
[00:31:32] Speaker C: Well, maybe when we get that far, 100 years from now, we're so good at computers, we just go, oh, this simple children's thing, and they code it up in 12 seconds and go, run. And it goes, oh, look, there's a website from 1998.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Maybe there'll just be AI stuff, and you can tell it, like, hey, I remember moon patrol. Can you just write that for me? And it makes moon patrol.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: The singularity. It will be fun.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: We'll see.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: Now, this does say that you can test it yourself. You can grab the disk image directly from archive.org, and then they've got instructions to get it working. Do you think this is something that either of you guys will do, or you'll pass?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: So I did it because this is the kind of person I am. So I brought up in virtualbox and got it running. I have an FPGA at home and it emulates a 486 and so I put it in 486 mode and I couldn't get this to boot on it. This was written for an 80 86, which is four generations earlier. So, yeah, I didn't have any hardware to actually do it, but in a virtual machine, it fired up.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Cool. Okay.
[00:32:33] Speaker C: Was it as awesome as you remembered?
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Yeah. To me it was just the fun of getting it up and running. Once it's running, you're like, all right, I'm not going to do anything.
[00:32:42] Speaker C: I can't really do anything with this.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: Yeah, because this was pre memory managers. So actually, I didn't see how much addressable memory. But you probably have like 64k, right? Not the 640k that some of us started with, but like 64k. Not a lot of memory to deal with.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Okay. Well, personally, I'm probably not going to poke into this, I don't think. But if any of you out there want to poke around with this and give it a go, see if you can give it a test run, you have the option to do that. Tom's hardware is the article that we pulled this from, so they've got instructions there on how to do that, if you are so inclined. I think we are going to take a short break just to kind of get our bearings and just admire the Google Glass here on Don. But don't worry, we will be back with more cybersecurity news in just a little bit here on Technato. Tired of trying to schedule your team's time around in person learning? Isn't it a bummer to spend thousands of dollars on travel for professional development? What if we said you can save money and time and still provide your team with the best training possible? The answer to your woes is live online training from ACI learning. With live online training, we provide our top in person courses in private online instructor led formats. You get to provide professional development in a manner that fits today's expectations. Entertaining, convenient, and effective. Our exam aligned courses inspire the full potential of your team. Visit virtual instructor led training at ACI learning for more info.
Welcome back for our cybersecurity half of Technato. Real quick, before we jump in, I just want to thank you for watching. And if you are enjoying the show so far and you stuck with us for this long, maybe consider hitting that subscribe button. Whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any of those podcast platforms. We'd love to have you watching and listening, and we love to hear your input as well. So feel free to leave a comment down below. Let us know what you like and let us know what you want to see on the show in the future. But enough of that. We will go ahead and jump into our first article, which is part of a beloved segment called don't make no sense.
It comes to us from a website called Fast Company, and it says, US water utilities were hacked after leaving their default passwords set to one. One.
Now, I mean, this is a really easy mistake. Could happen to anybody. They really can't be blamed. Let's just move on. I don't even know why we're talking about a.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: It's a real shame. We hear there's a lot of things in the media that are sensationalized, that are blown out of proportion. And we've been hearing for years the United States utilities grid is at risk that cyber attackers could shut off our power, cut our water and so on. There have been a few incidents over the years where it's actually happened. Right. So it was one not far from here, down in Clearwater, where their water utilities got broken into and an outside attacker was elevating the level of certain chemicals in the water. And this has happened most recently in the Israel Hamas Gaza Strip war. Yeah. So where attackers have actually tried to get into the israeli water system to raise the amount of chlorine in the water. You can really just damage that will kill. Yes.
So at a minimum, it'll turn your hair green.
[00:35:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: But either way, this is an attack we keep hearing about. And in the United States, at least, we know the government has set aside millions and millions of dollars in grants and things to help the utilities shore up their security. And as a citizen, we just have to assume that they're doing that. But then we see things like this where it was something like ten different utility companies were compromised, and it wasn't because of some third party software or vendor that got compromised or a library that wasn't updated or something like that. It turned out to be that they had not put literally any effort into securing their systems, that they had some of their industrial control or ics, whatever systems, or SCADA.
[00:36:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Okay. Some of their Scada systems where they were connected to the public Internet, where anyone in the world could connect and had left the password at the default, which was an amazing one. One.
And I don't know what to do about that. Like executions? Is that what it's going to take to finally get people to just do the most basic thing possible?
[00:37:11] Speaker C: We got to become an equilibrium.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: It's all about cybersecurity now.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: You will be scheduled for summary execution. We're using one. One. One as your password.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: What were they? Sense crimes. Sense crimes in equilibrium. I don't know if you've seen that one.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: I think you told me about it.
[00:37:28] Speaker C: Right. Future, where we have abolished all emotion.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: I haven't seen it, but I've heard Christian Bale. It's a neat premise. That's back when they made movies that were.
[00:37:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It was unique. And if you want to see some awesome fighting, if you are a fan of action flicks with, like, cool kung fu fighting, equilibrium is your. Yes, yes. But don, this is not, unfortunately, all that uncommon. Right. If you do a quick google search of the most commonly used passwords, your heart will probably skip a few beats when that page slams, because you're going to be like, well, I'm sorry, what password is a commonly used password? Yep. Like, and I don't mean like, that's a common password. Most commonly used. Emphasis on the word most.
We don't really like doing security, by the way. We like to talk about it. We like to say we like doing security, and we'll sure as heck hold your feet to the fire if you do it wrong and you get caught. But until that day comes, most people are like, I ain't got in trouble yet, so what's the problem?
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Yeah, the other thing is, a lot of times people shoot themselves in the foot, right? And they'll do something like, all right, so, hey, we've got this giant water control Scada system, and we don't want it to be attacked, so we're going to air gap it. All right, so you air gap it. Now, you can't get to it from a remote network at all. You have to physically be there. But then some technician one day says, well, I'm going to be on call and I don't want to drive into the office, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stick a laptop over there and I'm going to put. What was it? It was Teamviewer, I think, with Clearwater. But they put splash top or real VNC or something on there and they're like, yeah, so the other system's air gapped, but I can remote into my laptop and I can control the system from there, and I'm not going to set a password on my laptop. I want to be able to get in quick. Right. I'm on call.
[00:39:19] Speaker C: Nothing like shadow it to really sink the ship. Right?
[00:39:22] Speaker B: So there are times where companies are really making an effort to secure systems, and then it just takes one employee to undermine the whole thing.
[00:39:30] Speaker C: Well, they make other mistakes as well. Let's say they air gap decisions. Like, yep, we're going back to air gap. No more of this connections from the interwebs kind of thing. That's been dangerous. So back to air gap. And then they don't update anything because we're safe.
They have not assumed a zero trust model or a trust but verify model. Right. So they're not doing any updates, or they're allowing people to bring in their laptops or thumb drives that have viruses on them. And now you have problems. Right? So they think because I've implemented one security measure, we're good. Yeah, it was a good one. But that doesn't now exonerate you from any other security that you need to continue to do. You have to assume there will still be a breach. Right. You have to assume that a threat actor will find a way in because they're fairly ingenious about figuring out, well, what if I did this, and what if I did that and they got nothing but Tom on their hands? And if they are motivated to find their way into your network, you have to be extremely diligent at checking for weaknesses and then shoring those weaknesses up with mitigations and secondary controls or whatever you got to do. So you can never rest on your laurels when it comes to, especially if you are in an industry that is labeled critical infrastructure.
Hello. You should be the most diligent at these things. And the fact that you're one, one, one in it. Come on, man. Don and I used to work at. We've mentioned this many times. We worked at an insurance company together. My first day on the job, they're like, okay, we're going to log into this person called the help desk. They're having a little issue, so we're going to log in with the domain admin. When I saw the username and password, I was like, I'm sorry, what did you say? This is a DA account? Yep.
Okay, don, how did that happen?
[00:41:25] Speaker B: And how many people knew that password?
[00:41:27] Speaker C: Like, everybody. They're like, I've already logged in as the domain admin. I'm like, whoa, you're an insurance agent, not a domain administrator. You shouldn't be doing that.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: It takes a lot of buy in to do security, right? And you likely have an information security officer. Well, these type of companies typically don't, but you likely have somebody in the IT team who is concerned about security. But if the rest of the company doesn't have buy in, you're just going to get undermined. So this is one of those times where the headlines might sound sensational, but I think it reflects what's really going on out there, which is our utilities are at risk.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: We need Betty to go around chopping toes off.
I love the look on Sophia's face.
[00:42:13] Speaker B: I'm a little concerned, Betty. What she doesn't know. Is Daniel serious?
[00:42:18] Speaker A: You'll notice.
[00:42:19] Speaker C: Don laugh though, because he gets the reference.
We don't want anybody to lose any more toes here.
Let's do better cybersecurity, shall we?
[00:42:29] Speaker B: It's a simple requirement.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: I will add it to the list of things that I'm going to Google later. But for now, to avoid talking anymore about toes, we'll go ahead and move into our next segment.
Although that fits into the segment of don't make no sense because that didn't make any sense to me. This next segment is actually one of my favorites. It's called who got pwned? Looks like you're about to get pwned fatality.
Now, it's not my favorite because people get pwned because that sucks and I feel bad for them. But it is kind of fun to read about. So this article comes to us from TechCrunch. Comcast says hackers stole data of close to 36 million xfinity customers. You just finished talking about how a lot of times we see articles that have, like, sensationalized headlines. And in the case of the previous article, it actually was pretty serious. In this case. Is this worse than it sounds or not as bad as it sounds?
[00:43:23] Speaker B: No, it's pretty bad if you think about the US population and how we do customer accounts, right? So, like when you sign up for Comcast or Xfinity, it's not like you have multiple accounts for one household. So you might have four people in your house, but it's just one account. So when they say that the information was stolen for 36 million customers, it's really 36 million families. Right? And if you think about the US population, that's going to account for well over 10%. Probably creeping up to 20% of the US population right there. So this is a pretty big one. Now, we don't really know what data they got because Comcast hasn't shared a lot of that, but you have to assume that it's your name, phone number, mailing address. But in the United States, cable companies run credit checks on everybody when they sign up for service. So that means they likely have your Social Security number as well as other identifiers and some billing data.
[00:44:19] Speaker C: So the article does say that by November 16, Xfinity determined that quote information was likely acquired, end quote, by the hackers. And in December, the company concluded that this included customer data, including usernames and hashed passwords, which are scrambled and stored in a way that makes them unreadable. But, you know, it was something stupid, like MD five.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, even if it's the highest level of security, encrypting the password, they're just saying user data and not telling us what that user data was beyond those two elements.
[00:44:48] Speaker C: Those two elements.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: So we don't really know. And companies do this, right? It's a bit of a sleight of hand, right? They want you to think, oh, it was some data which included these two pieces to make us think like it's just those two pieces. And, oh, by the way, the passwords, they're hashed. They're scrambled, you're good. But the other data isn't right.
They're not telling us what that really means. And sadly, we do let this stuff fly.
They have said that there's other things that could be in there, right? Like the last four of your Social Security and so on. We'll have to see what happens there. But what I thought was interesting on this one, I know that I've said a few times here on the podcast, and I do this a lot. When I pick articles, I will either skip over Citrix exploits, or I'll mention how Citrix is very widely used in the medical environment. Hospitals all over the world use it pretty heavily, but Citrix is actually really big just in the enterprise space. A lot of companies use it. And in this case, that was the foothold the attackers were able to use to get into Comcast and Xfinity's network.
[00:45:52] Speaker C: Citrix bleed.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: Citrix bleed, which is a pretty bad one if you've got those systems. Obviously, if you don't use Citrix, what do you care? But if you do use it, it's a pretty bad one. A patch was released for this, to fix this exploit in October, and these attackers were able to use it and get in after the patch was released. Which means, in theory, if Comcast had been a little faster at installing patches, this could have been avoided. So this becomes a bit of like a morality tale.
[00:46:22] Speaker C: Yeah. And we've talked about this quite often here on the technato about the speed at which patching occurs and how fast can you get this rolled out? What does your patch cycle actually look like for out of band and critical and security patches and what you can do? And unfortunately, obviously, we don't know what citrus. Maybe citrus just got bad luck. Right.
Did they say exactly when the patch came out and then when they got hit?
[00:46:50] Speaker B: They say early October is when the patch was released. Yeah. And this breach happened October 16.
So it's a pretty short window. Less than two weeks.
[00:46:58] Speaker C: It's a very short window. So for an enterprise company as large as Xfinity, I would say it's probably not out of the realm of possibilities. At least they're doing something. I've seen way worse than two weeks. Yeah, let me put it that way. Okay.
Now, did they say that they. I didn't see that either. Did they patch on, or that's when they discovered the hack?
[00:47:18] Speaker B: They discovered the hack. Yeah.
[00:47:21] Speaker C: That would be my one question, is, was it the hack that prompted them to patch or were they going to patch?
Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Because if they didn't discover this for two months down the road and they still haven't patched, it's a different picture. I would want to know if I'm a lawyer or somebody that. Is there legal ramifications for this?
[00:47:41] Speaker B: Obviously not in the United States, no. God help us. All.
[00:47:46] Speaker C: Right, so here's what you got to do, ladies and gentlemen. Hopefully you can vote with your wallet and go to an xfinity competitor.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: Oh, wait.
In the United States, we allow monopoly for cable companies. Whoops.
[00:47:58] Speaker C: How about that? So at and t Internet, this all of a sudden became an at and t commercial.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: This is where the european listeners and stuff get to laugh at us. But it's true. We allow monopolies for certain media conglomerates, and Comcast is one of them. I remember when I lived in Seattle, I had two choices. I could either do, like, directv satellite, which sucks, or I could do Comcast for my cable. That was it. Those are my two choices.
And so you didn't have that option to pick a competitor. And the SEC only recently passed the rule that says if you're a publicly traded company, you've got, I think it's four days, no, 72 hours. I forget. It's a really short window of time that you have to notify people about a breach. And so that was only passed, like, a month ago.
[00:48:47] Speaker C: And I'm sure it's loosey goosey about, hey, we had a breach. Thanks for talking.
[00:48:51] Speaker B: And so when you ask one of the penalties there really aren't penalties for.
[00:48:55] Speaker C: This is the bottom of their email stick.
Here's some deals for this month. Plus, we had a breach.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And even on the PR side, look at Equifax, where they had this massive breach of all their data. They had to do a settlement, which was like a pittance for them. And all they did was give everybody credit monitoring, which was from them. Their own service was so horrible and nothing changed.
[00:49:17] Speaker C: So Starlink, ladies and gentlemen, seems to be a more viable option.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: Every, you know, it just shows. And I know I'm repeating myself on this, that I don't like government overreach. I don't like big government. But what we've got right now is kind of the Wild west, and we can't allow companies to have monopolistic practices.
[00:49:40] Speaker C: That's a problem. Yes.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Where we can't vote with our.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree. There was somebody in the comments that said that this was just a couple of months after a really critical software patch, I guess, was released. So it's pretty shortly after that. And they were like, this is unacceptable. And of course, people in the comments were upset, which is pretty much the standard for any of these articles.
[00:49:58] Speaker C: Bohica.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Yeah. I think about like, the bank that I worked at where we had a seven day cadence, so when a patch would come out, we had a seven day test window and we were pretty good about it. But even seven days, like every day you wait is a day an attacker could be exploiting that. And the attackers are getting really fast with this stuff. So I don't know.
Without being able to see the inner workings of Comcast, like, do they have an update plan? Were they testing that update to be rolled out? I don't know. A part of me likes to think that, no, they weren't, but we don't.
[00:50:32] Speaker C: Because that's all too common.
If it wasn't so common for us to see that we have no great scheduling or cadence for rolling out patches, if that was not the case, I'd be like, oh, man, they just got it ripped with bad luck. But more likely scenario is that the reason that they updated was because they found they were breached and they didn't want to do it again.
[00:50:56] Speaker B: Well, technically, we don't really know that they patched.
[00:51:03] Speaker C: Zero trust model right here. They did not patch.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Do not use xfinity.
[00:51:06] Speaker C: Shut up your cable right now.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: Well, apparently xfinity is requiring that its customers reset their passwords and recommending not requiring, but recommending that you use two factor or multifactor authentication. So at least we can hopefully say they won't be using one, one, one.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: But the passwords were hashed.
[00:51:22] Speaker C: Yeah, it's true.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: This is going to solve the problem. Reset your password to 1111, you'll be fine.
This solves all the problems. We'll go ahead and move on to our next article. This is part of a segment called behind bars.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: Bad boys, bad boys, break the law.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: So initially, this article confused me for a second, and I understand why it says this now. This comes to us from bleeping computer lapsus. Sus hacker behind GTA six leak gets indefinite hospital sentence. So initially I'm thinking hospital, just like you have a heart attack, you go to the hospital, that kind of hospital. But I guess it's because his capacity and abilities and desire to commit cybercrime, they're classifying it as like a mental issue.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: Yes. It's kind of a sad story, really.
We've reported on this before about the breach where they were able to, outside threat actor was able to compromise the rockstar systems to be able to get access to GTA six.
I don't remember if they got the source code, but definitely was able to gain access to the software and screenshots and leaked a ton of information out about this new game that was coming out down the line. And at that point, there had been no public releases of this information. And so it kind of undermined that company and what they were trying to release. Well, he got caught, got arrested, had to go to court, and was assigned a type of supervised detention, I guess, where he wasn't in jail, but he was at a government assigned hotel, basically. And they took away his laptop and things.
[00:53:07] Speaker C: But they didn't take his phone.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: They didn't take his phone, which I thought was really odd.
And he managed to get a hold of an Amazon fire stick to plug into the hotel tv. And using that with his phone, he was then able to go and hack into this company to get access to the game files.
[00:53:28] Speaker C: He hacked Rockstar games from his phone through an Amazon fire stick in a hotel room while under legal.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: So. So what they're saying is that the guy has a mental illness. There is something with the way he's wired where he just can't help but commit these crimes.
[00:53:51] Speaker C: He's shown to maniac. Right, who just can't, people can't stop stealing.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: But he has said that he looks forward to doing more cybercrime and he wants to go out and compromise more systems and who knows how much he's already done. And they're saying that this guy, he's got a real problem. And so this is, to my knowledge, the first time something like this has happened where they've said, all right, we aren't set up for the prison system to be able to handle it, so instead we're going to rely on mental health for this one. And so they have sentenced him to an indefinite sentence or whatever at a mental hospital, basically designating him. We talked about this earlier, Daniel, like, criminally insane.
[00:54:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I know. In America we have psychiatric prisons for the criminally insane.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: And this is in the UK. Just be clear.
[00:54:41] Speaker C: I didn't say if he is like, yes, I love crime, crime makes me happy. I'm going to do crime until the cows come home. Then what do we do with you? You obviously have the motive and the means to commit these crimes, and they can be quite costly for the people that you're perpetrating them against. So what do I do with you? I have to do something with you. You don't belong in a general population prison with murderers and rapists and whatnot.
You would end up dead pretty quickly or worse.
So we have to put you somewhere. We got to do something with you. I mean, this seems like he's going to be getting health care, he's going to be getting taken care of. So on one hand, it seems like this is the best option.
Maybe in home prison, maybe that would be better.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: I don't know, man.
[00:55:31] Speaker C: This is well above my pay grade. As far as what we do with.
[00:55:35] Speaker B: You, I will say I like crime and crime makes me happy, but I do it in saints row three.
And so that's the real differentiator there is that this guy does it in real life. Yeah.
And apparently just can't help themselves. It's very sad to hear that.
[00:55:55] Speaker C: There's a movie that came out about this a while back about this guy who could not stop committing crime. So they put him in this prison and he reformed a bit and they thought you're a great candidate for this new program, and they held his eyes open and made him watch these things.
It's called a clockwork orange.
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a crazy flick, by the way.
[00:56:15] Speaker C: It is a crazy, crazy flick. Have you seen it? You've seen it.
[00:56:22] Speaker A: The Wikipedia summary was enough for me.
[00:56:23] Speaker B: I didn't.
[00:56:25] Speaker A: I was like clockwork Joe. That's because I think I saw who directed it or wrote it or something, and I was like, something I might enjoy kind of.
[00:56:33] Speaker C: You absolutely would enjoy it.
It's ironic.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: I would like to respectfully disagree with.
[00:56:38] Speaker B: You on that point, sir.
[00:56:39] Speaker C: I feel like you would.
[00:56:41] Speaker A: I would have to skip a lot of scenes I think I would have to skip because I hated pulp fiction, and I think people thought that I.
[00:56:46] Speaker C: Would like that to that extent.
Not that I can remember.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:56:51] Speaker C: There was innuendo that something happens, but nothing graphic.
[00:56:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know.
[00:56:56] Speaker A: I don't know. I read the Wikipedia summary, and I was like, that was a mistake. Just like, when I read the summary for, like, human centipede and stuff, I was like, I shouldn't have done that.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Better off without that. Some things you can't remove from your mind.
[00:57:06] Speaker C: I know nothing about human.
[00:57:07] Speaker A: Well, good for you.
[00:57:09] Speaker B: At least you just read the summary and didn't watch it.
[00:57:12] Speaker A: No amount of curiosity. No.
Not worth the risk.
[00:57:17] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: But getting back to this.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: This is.
[00:57:22] Speaker C: Just a platform for us.
[00:57:25] Speaker A: It is unfortunate because clearly the kid's got talent. Clearly he's very smart and very good at what he does.
[00:57:29] Speaker C: And so he uses powers for good.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: Right. It's a shame that you can't just pick him up and change direction. Redirect.
[00:57:35] Speaker C: Luther.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
He's a genius. I mean, like you said, using his, what, smartphone, a keyboard and an Amazon fire stick while he's under supervision to do, like, if we could just take that and direct it against the forces of evil, like it's a comic book, it'd be great. It's just unfortunate.
[00:57:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I have a hard enough time using my phone as this tv remote control, like, getting that to connect the Roku app or whatever, to then use it to break.
Well, Daniel, you probably have used, like, a terminal program on your phone before.
[00:58:06] Speaker C: Use it all the time, actually.
[00:58:08] Speaker B: It's so small. And you got the on screen keyboard.
[00:58:11] Speaker C: So for this guy, on screen keyboard is the worst. There is a keyboard. For those of you that are out there and they're interested in listening, there is a keyboard you can download called the hacker's keyboard I've heard of that makes life a whole lot nicer for when you're using something like a terminal emulator inside of your phone or a tablet. It is a game changer. Absolutely. But, yes, it is small, but the convenience of it is really nice. So I use it a lot.
[00:58:36] Speaker B: I'm assuming that he somehow. Because they never really tell us how he used the fire stick.
[00:58:40] Speaker C: No.
[00:58:41] Speaker B: So I'm assuming what he did was, like, cast his phone screen up onto the tv so he could actually see things.
They never really said if he had.
[00:58:51] Speaker C: An Android phone or an iOS Internet connectivity or something. Maybe his phone did not. Maybe his phone didn't have Internet and they thought, we're safe. That's why he can have it. He used a fire stick, which gave him Internet or something. I don't know.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: They underestimated his power.
[00:59:04] Speaker C: I don't know much about firesticks.
[00:59:06] Speaker B: There you go. But, yeah, that's what he did. And to Sophie's point, he's obviously phenomenally talented to be able to do stuff like this. If there's only a way to get him to focus on the forces of good.
[00:59:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:59:16] Speaker A: Harness the powers for good.
[00:59:18] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:59:19] Speaker A: Well, maybe. Maybe we'll get lucky and maybe this will be something that comes back on Deja news in the future and he'll be reformed and using his powers for good. So we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed. That's our new year's wish. It's my new year's wish for this year. So if you did enjoy any of that conversation about human centipede and clockwork orange and cybercrime, we hope that you'll maybe check out some of our previous episodes. We have a new episode that comes out every week on Thursday morning, so keep an eye out for that here on the channel or wherever you listen to your podcast, Spotify, Apple podcasts, whatever platform you choose. And of course, we do have other things available as well. Specifically on our YouTube channel, we've got ACI learnings, webinars and live on social events. We've got one actually coming up. It'll be the day this episode is released at 02:00 p.m.. An. All things cybersecurity webinar with John Hammond. And so Daniel is going to be hosting that alongside myself. We'll get to answer all of your cybersecurity questions that you have. Are you looking forward to that, Daniel?
[01:00:09] Speaker C: Are you kidding me? Anytime we get together with John, yeah, super fun. He's a great guy. Obviously the most Internet famous.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: Yes, that is true that we have.
[01:00:18] Speaker C: On, but for good reason, right? Because he's always making really cool content. He knows a lot about a lot. So it's always great to have him on and be able to pick his brain about certain things. I'm sure we'll get some tried and true questions, but hopefully bring some interesting, unique questions to the table there. Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you listening and are going to tune in, I can't wait to really be push our limits make us go, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. Yeah, I want questions like that.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: Those are fun. It makes me feel better because usually I don't know. So if I hear Daniel say he doesn't know, I'm like, cool on the same page on this one. And I think we do have a couple of other webinars coming up, even just this month alone. We're going to have a new all things cyber the first Thursday of every month this year, so keep an eye out for that. But next week, I believe, don, you're going to be hosting a webinar. I think getting into it is that maybe.
Okay, we'll see.
[01:01:05] Speaker B: It's a definite maybe so inclined.
[01:01:09] Speaker A: And then I believe we have an audit webinar coming out later this month as well with ACI learning. So keep an eye out for those. Those are all going to live on our YouTube channel and our LinkedIn as well. And of course, the remainder of the Technato episodes are always going to be there for you to peruse, if you are so inclined. I think that's pretty much going to do it for all our upcoming events. Again, I want to thank the sponsor of Technato, ACI learning, the folks behind it pro. If you're watching from the Technato website, by any chance, you can click on that orange button that says sponsored by it pro, and that's going to take you to the it pro website. If you are interested in signing up, you can use the code Technato 30 for a discount on your membership. And drop a comment below. Let us know what you liked about this episode, what you want to see in the future, or just say hi. We like to hear from you. Tell us what you did for Christmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, whatever you celebrate. That's pretty much going to do it for me. Am I missing anything?
[01:01:53] Speaker B: I think that's it.
[01:01:54] Speaker C: You're missing something.
[01:01:55] Speaker A: Yeah, up here. A couple of screws loose, of course.
[01:01:58] Speaker C: Even stampede.
[01:01:59] Speaker A: No.
All right, well, thank you for joining us for this episode of Technato. Hope you enjoyed. Happy New Year, and we'll see you next week for another episode.
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