Nc_2023_02_19
[0:00] Music.
[0:09] Apple bias. Today is Sunday, February 19th, 2023, on this show number 928.
[0:16] Well, we have a fun show today. We've got the last interview by Bodhi from CES, and he did a terrific job with it. Also, I love his intro. It's so funny.
Anyway, then I'm going to tell you about a neato portable USB-C display that I got recently, and then we have security bits with Bartbouche shots. And it's not even a depressing security bits. In this week's programming by stealth Bart continues his mini-series on shell scripting,
Ccatp #759 — Bart Busschots On Pbs 145 Of X — Shell Conditionals
[0:41] by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and, then he shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird and many things are the opposite of what you'd expect, like how 4 is actually greater than 10? Not really, but that's what it looks like. Anyway, he gets us there in the end so that we do understand, it. Now I was most excited to finally learn what phi means or phi which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen it before in apple script and now I know what it means. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes at pbs.bartafisser.net and of course you can find the show in your podcatcher of choice. Now you may have a problem with the download, of this episode. I did my original recording, I uploaded it, did all the off-phonic leveling and everything and it got FTP'd up there and before I published I discovered that there was a mistake in the audio.
I hadn't dragged one track to where it should be so it was a mess.
But I didn't publish the show.
[1:45] Now when I tried to publish the show I ran into all kinds of grief with Libsyn who has.
[1:49] This really weird FTP thing they do and the interface is terrible and they kept telling me I already had the episode up there even though I deleted it and I got it fixed last night and it was working just fine and then this morning Jill of Kent and Dorothy both notified me that it was broken.
[2:06] I don't know why, but I did it a third time, and then I think that it has worked.
So if you don't see this episode in either the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed or the Programming by Stealth feed, just delete the episode and then refresh, and pull the latest one, and it should be correct as long as Libsyn doesn't delete it again.
On the topic of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Helma helped me do something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and that's to create a table of every single episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, and who was on it.
That way I could do metrics of how many times people have been on and that sort of thing.
And I've always wanted to have that some record of who did I have on Chit Chat Across the Pond Light.
Anyway, when I went through and did it, I thought something was wrong with the way we had extracted everything from the database.
Oh, because when I looked at it, it said I haven't done any Chit Chat Across the Pond Lights in 2023.
That's because I haven't done any Chit Chat Across the Pond Lights in 2023.
I have three or four ideas of people I need to ask to be on the show and I will be having Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite.
I just haven't done it yet and I'm not going to do it next week so I promise it will come back. I don't know why I just stopped doing them for a while but I will be back with more Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite.
Imedisync Isyncwave By Bodie At Ces (No Blog Post)
[3:19] BD Salutations, everyone. This is Bodhi or I am Bodhi. We are Bodhi.
I'm not really quite sure how to do introductions for podcasts.
Anyway, I have an interview for you today that not only is very interesting, it was particularly interesting to me because I have a family history of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, other brain diseases.
And I'm going to be honest, my older family members have not successfully avoided getting, these diseases. And there's some that are even tracked by the University of Washington.
So yeah, that's fun. That's fun history to know. Anyway, I interviewed Cody Newman of iMedisync about their new wireless dry EEG measurement, and therapy device, the iSync Wave.
IMedisync claims that the device can help in early detection of Alzheimer's and dementia.
[4:23] Which as I said before, that runs in my family. was something I was very interested in.
Before we get to the interview I just want to explain a few things starting with EEG. EEG, is short for electroencephalogram and that measures your brain waves. It looks similar to the untrained eye when you go in and you get an EKG done at your doctor's office for your heart.
Similar thing for your brain. In my experience when getting EEGs they normally dip the electrode in a gel and then they put it on my head.
And that's to help get a better signal from the brain. The iSync Wave doesn't have any type of gel whatsoever.
It just has a bunch of sensors on the inside of the helmet and they'll stretch the helmet out, they'll put it on your head.
They'll do some minor tweaks because they wanna make sure they're getting the best signal from your brain.
It didn't take them long to adjust the helmet on me because I'm bald and I have a fairly regular shaped head.
[5:25] Once the helmet was on, I had to go through a couple of steps.
There were some times when I had to close my eyes, I had to open my eyes and then I had to stare at an object, kind of in the distance.
The whole test took about 10 minutes.
And all that information that they got from my brain was transmitted wirelessly from the helmet to a tablet, for a practitioner to read and report back to you on.
[5:54] All right, I think that's enough explanation. Let's go ahead and listen to the interview.
[5:59] All right, I'm here with Cody and Cody, you work for. I'm Meddy Singh.
And we're at this really cool booth. You guys have this really super neat helmet.
Actually, I thought from a distance, it looks kind of like a Roomba.
And then when I got up close, I was like, oh, geez, this is neat.
What is it that we are looking at today?
Yeah. So we have a dry 20 channel EEG headset.
So no gel, no paste, and kind of designed for quick and easy scans.
That's how we're able to do so many demos here.
We're kind of nonstop cranking out EEG readings.
And what are we scanning for?
So the data can be used for whatever you'd like to be used for, but the kind of summary reports, that we're providing give you an idea of overactive or underactive parts of the brain.
And it's also doing an Alzheimer's and dementia screening.
So just to give people an idea, Cody and I talked about this briefly.
But I do neurofeedback for PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
[6:59] And what it does, neurofeedback, and you worked in this field.
[7:03] So correct me if I'm wrong.
Is it the kind that I do provides a little pulse and it interrupts your brain from having unwanted rhythms, right?
Is that close?
[7:14] Yeah, exactly. The brain is full of frequencies and certain frequencies belong in certain places and not in other places.
So we're kind of all sorts of methods to kind of train your brain to get those good frequencies where we want them.
All right. So here's where this this technology freaked me out just a little bit.
I had a person who's really well trained in this. I said, what can you see based on my EEG?
And she said, I can see that you've had many concussions, which is true.
And she's like, you see these little spiky things right here?
That's your brain because you've had concussions.
I'm guessing your analysis from, what's the device called itself?
Icing Wave. Icing Wave. The analysis from Icing Wave can tell me, if I put it on right now, it could tell me that I've had concussions.
You can analyze that.
What else can it do? Like, what really, what are you marketing toward? This is obviously a diagnostic tool.
It's not something that we're using for therapy. Yeah, I think I pretty much asked you a lot of questions without asking you a question. Well, that's fine. I love it. I got lots to say about it. So.
[8:20] I mean, the EEG reports we generate in the hands of a clinician, like your neurofeedback technician.
[8:26] We can see all sorts of things. Concussions is like a really quick, easy one, but also mental health disorders, there's telltale signs for PTSD, any sort of trauma is pretty easy to see, those, sorts of biomarkers in the brain. So using our device, we don't give you any sort of diagnosis, automatically besides the Alzheimer's and dementia, but we give you all the data you need. So if you, understand the brain and know what you're looking at, you can find out a whole plethora of things.
[8:55] From that data. And then if somebody wants to, you know, but let's say they want to have this this test done. Obviously they're not coming to CES within the next day or two. So how would they get this test done at their, clinicians office? How would they find this specific test? Is there a list of, vendors on your website that you use or doctors? So this device is actually just.
[9:18] Getting started in the US, but with that said our software is has been out for, about 10 years and you can get that with any sort of any equipment that any, clinician has. Right any standard EEG where they put a bunch of electrodes on your head.
Yeah so if you even just Google EEG therapists in my area or go to the QEG board you can find licensed clinicians and anyone can upload that data to our, cloud database and get that beautiful analysis we have as well as that, Alzheimer's and dementia screening. Awesome and then Cody is there I asked of everybody, is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't ask you?
[10:02] Well, I think something in this field, it can sound a little bit almost spooky, too good to be true.
So why should you trust that this device can do all that it says it can?
[10:17] And I think the best way to think about it is that this is all extremely research-backed.
[10:21] We're not just guessing out here. And I think ourselves, we do our own research to make sure that we can get large enough data sets that we can give claims that we know people can trust.
[10:32] So our Alzheimer and dementia screening has a 91% success rate in an 800 person study, and all of our other software packages have been verified against other amplifiers, other, electrodes, and this is a field full of research and we're just joining in.
We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here.
And then are you currently seeking FDA approval or do you have FDA approval for this?
So we have FDA approval as an EEG device.
Our software is going to have FDA approval in the next month.
[11:02] Okay, cool. Well, Cody, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. I want to thank Cody for coming on and chatting with me.
I was talking to another representative in the iMedisync booth and they were telling me that this, device is also the iSync Wave is also a therapy device and sometime in June or July they'll have FDA approval to use it as a neurofeedback device. And if you're curious as to how much this costs, It's about $30,000 for the whole system.
If you want to learn more about iMedisync, you can go to imedisync.com.
[11:38] Well, thanks so much for this, Bodhi. Like you, my family is riddled with Alzheimer's, so I'm pretty interested in any new developments. I was reading some of the material on the iMedisync website, and I found something that I really appreciate. They specifically say, that their data set takes sex into account, meaning they can view the data about your brain relative to your sex. Over the last 50 years, we've only done research with male data on most drugs, and they're finding out that, shockingly, women are actually different from men. I mean, who would have expected that? But it isn't just male doctors doing that, male researchers. It's male and female researchers have only researched drugs with respect to men. So finding these new tools that are looking at going, no, we need to analyze things based on your sex as well. And they actually had people of different color too. So I think they might have a bigger data set than they even said. But I definitely want to keep my eye on this tool as they get approval. Also, please always keep your goofy the intros no matter how serious the subject is.
You always make me laugh.
Taking It Up To 4K With The Kyy Usb-C Display
[12:40] I've been a fan of portable USB-C displays for a while now. I started with a tiny 12 inch 2K display, and then later bought my daughter Lindsay the Cocoa Power 15.6 inch 1080P USB-C display.
She doesn't have an official office with a desk at her house, so having this light, low profile, portable external display is ideal for working from home.
Now she works at a company where their labs and processes are often audited by potential customers, which means a day or sometimes two in a conference room, fetching documents and explaining these processes.
She started bringing the coca part of the audits and everyone was amazed and delighted that such a thing exists.
She kids that she should get a commission on how many of them she has actually sold because of her demonstration.
[13:25] My son Kyle also works often in a mobile environment and he also had a 15 inch 1080p, USB-C display and he loved his too. After watching how useful these are, I asked Santa for a Cocoa par and it has been a very delightful tool for me. In particular, it's super useful to me when I do the live show on the road where it's not possible to have too much screen real estate. You always need more. Now as delightful as my office is with a fabulous chair and a giant 32 inch 6k display, and all my tools at my fingertips, I find that I spend too much time in my office.
Sometimes my mind gets numb and I need a change of venue to just freshen it up.
When it's warm outside, I love to sit in the backyard at our picnic table, and work in the fresh air and watch the cats and dog wander about while I write articles for the show.
[14:13] Now I've tried using my 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Sidecar as an external display, but the wireless connection between it and my MacBook Pro seems to be unreliable.
When it's wired, the iPad Pro charges itself from my laptop, draining it super quickly.
But the Cocoa Power was perfect for the job.
But you know me, I'm always on the lookout for something better.
The only thing wrong with the Cocoa Power was that it was 1080p.
And living the 5K and 6K and Retina display life for so long, it was a little bit hard on the eyes for me.
[14:45] I found and Santa delivered the KYY 15.6 inch 4K portable monitor.
Now I'll start with the pricing because it will encourage you to consider this display and keep listening.
Currently, the Cocoa Power 15.6-inch 1080p display is $200 on Amazon.
The KYY 15.6-inch 4K display is on sale for $240 on Amazon, just $40 more.
Now Jill let me know this week right now, right at the instant when I'm talking, there's a $20 coupon off which brings it down to $220, so it's not very expensive.
The KYY 4K display is simply gorgeous.
It's very bright at 400 nits peak and has a 1500 to one contrast ratio, and it supports HDR and has a 60 Hertz refresh rate.
Now, often these external displays can be made bright but they start out dark when you first plug them in, and you always have to fiddle about with the controls to bring them up.
But the KYY is bright immediately.
I love my displays always at full brightness but of course you could turn it down if you prefer.
Now, if you do want to fiddle with the brightness and color profile and other things, you absolutely can.
There's a toggle button on the left side to get into the screen controls and a second button to use as a selector.
You can even create a user profile for say, red, green, blue, the, you know, how much of each you'd like.
And then you can choose between two profiles, one for warm and one for cool.
So overall you actually get three, there's user, warm and cool.
[16:15] The best part of the controls is that they stick after you unplug the screen.
I set mine to 100% brightness, I unplugged it, and when I plugged it back in it was still at 100%, and it had the user color profile set the way I like it.
[16:29] This is a 16 by 9 display and it's 3840 by 2160 resolution. Now using system settings to change the resolution of the KYY, the default shows as 1920 by 1080.
But remember, it's a 4K display, so it's actually using 4 pixels to make each point on the screen.
This means the text is super clear and crisp, and the graphics look excellent.
I had it set up side by side with my 14-inch MacBook Pro when we were at Lindsay's house for the live show, and Steve looked at it and said he thought, if anything, the KYY display looked better than the MacBook Pro display.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, but we can definitely say that it looks great.
Connectivity is important, of course.
The KYY has two 3.1 USB-C ports, and I can use either to connect to my Mac, with the Mac providing power to the display so I can be truly mobile.
Now when I'm on the road, I often need to plug in a lot of devices.
And since Apple and their infinite wisdom took away one of my USB-C ports, I can actually run out of ports when I'm on the road.
But here's the cool thing about the KYY 4K. I can connect the KYY display to power via USB-C, and run another USB-C cable to my Mac, and the KYY display does power pass through to the Mac, so I actually gain back a USB-C port if I need to use power.
[17:50] Now if you're of the HDMI persuasion, the KYY also has a mini HDMI port, and it even comes with a mini HDMI to full size HDMI cable.
I find it offensive that my laptop comes with HDMI now, so I always use USB-C, even when it would be more convenient to use HDMI.
I am really glad that it came with this cable though for when I need it.
With USB-C and HDMI as options, the display works across newer Windows and Mac laptops, as well as older devices. They advertise it as being a great accessory to a gaming console.
I'm not a gamer, so I haven't tested that out, but I bet it would look great.
[18:26] The crazy thing about all of these USB-C displays is how thin they are. The KYY display is about, the same thickness and weight as a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. But the KYY is 15.6 inches diagonally, with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio so it's super wide and that makes it feel even lighter because it's actually so big. Now for those tracking details the KYY display is 0.3 inches thick and weighs 1.7 pounds while the 12.9 inch iPad Pro without a keyboard is 1.5 pounds and 0.25 inches thick.
The KYY comes with a cover somewhat like the cover you can get with an iPad. It connects magnetically and in an origami fashion is also the stand for the device. Now the, advantage of this kind of covers that the display can stand in two different positions, an upright position or more laid-back position, and it does protect the display. Now the KYY in its origami stand position has a big area for support behind the display, but more importantly a big flap out in front. When.
[19:27] You're in a road warrior environment the last thing you have is gobs of extra table space. It's only a slight annoyance, but the magnets are also not quite as strong as I'd like them to be, so as you're flipping it around to be a stand it has a tendency to fall off. When the, cover is closed it does feel secure though. The Cocoa Power in contrast has a stand, a kickstand on the back, rather than one of these floopy cover stands, which means it took up far less desk space when it was standing, and I really liked that better. A lot of people like to have an external display set in portrait mode for reading long webpages or editing text documents.
The KYY supports 90 degree rotations so you can put it in portrait mode for just this purpose.
Using displays and system settings I chose 270 degrees which allowed me to prop it up with the origami cover with the cable coming out of the top. I could definitely see the advantage of having large documents in portrait mode. That said it was pretty precarious using the origami cover like this. It did stay upright but I think a stiff breeze might have knocked it over.
If you have a need for portrait mode you might want to come up with a better way to prop it up.
[20:38] Now you might be wondering, what did I do with my lovely Cocoa Par? It turns out Kyle's wife traveled with his USB-C display, and sadly the display did not survive the trip. When Kyle learned that I was going to be getting a new display from Santa, he happily took over custody of the Cocoa Par so now everyone's happy. Speaking of protecting the display, the Cocoa Par came with a perfect case to protect it and to carry a couple of cables. The KYY only came with the origami cover. I knew, knew that wouldn't do for traveling so I went on the hunt for a good case. I found the $28, Losong protective carrying sleeve that is designed specifically for 15.6 inch portable displays. So add that into the cost when you compare it to the Cocoa par. The Losong protective carrying sleeve is super soft inside with protective padding and the best part is it, comes in purple. It also comes in boring gray and black if you don't want any joy in your life. It has a zippered pocket to hold the USB-C and HDMI cables safely away from the screen.
[21:41] The bottom line is that I remain a huge fan of portable USB-C displays. They're relatively inexpensive even for a high resolution display like the 4K KYY. They give you screen real estate while traveling and even if you just need a change of venue at home. If Cocoa Power made a 4K version of the display, I would have bought that in favor of the KYY because of that kickstand, but I'm still super happy with my new high resolution 4K KYY USB-C display.
[22:11] But wait, we have an update to this article. I was chatting offline with Jill from the North Woods about the KYY 4K display, and I mentioned that the only thing I didn't like was the big flappy cover to hold it up because it takes up so much space on the table. She suggested, why don't you buy a travel-appropriate iPad stand? I had never even thought of that and didn't even realize these things existed. She bought the Amazon Basics Adjustable Tablet Holder Stand, for a grand total of $10 to hold her external USB-C display. I looked at a lot of alternatives that looked more elegant, but they were all very heavy, which is the last thing you want with a travel device. I went with her suggestion and it works great. This little plastic stand, when folded up, is 7 inches long and around an inch square. It opens up with two legs with notches flat on the table surface to hold the bottom edge of the display. The legs can be spread wide or narrow and detents to hold the position. You can even hear it. I'm doing it right now.
[23:12] The third vertical leg is what props up the back of the display. It has two elements so it can be bent into different positions, again with detents so it won't sag. There's a slightly soft surface on the third element to protect your device. At first it looked too small to hold up the display, but it turns out it actually works perfectly. Thank you so much for the recommendation Jill, this is excellent. So now this adds $40 to the cost because about a $28 case and then the $10 stand, so about $40 more in the end. But I'm really, really happy now that I've got a good stand that that doesn't take up a bunch of space, and it's protected in its case and I'm happy with my KYY 4K display.
[23:55] Okay, now for the real value of the live show is the live audience.
After I finished describing how I bought the Amazon Basic Stand that Jill recommended, Mike Price posted that 12South, who make fabulous, beautiful things for the Mac and other devices, they have a thing called a Compass Pro.
Now, the Compass Pro has been around for a long time, but they've released a new Compass, Pro that is completely redesigned and they show it holding up an iPad.
Now the reason that's funny is because I've reached in my drawer and I have a compass pro that I've had for years and I haven't had any use for it.
And guess what? It works really, really well to hold up my new display.
Now it does weigh a lot more than the Amazon basics plastic display, but it's elegant and thin and I already owned it.
So if you own a compass pro that's sitting in a drawer and you're not using it, you can, use that to hold up your new 4k KYY display.
Support The Show
[24:50] Are you listening to this or reading it on the web and thinking, wow, the people who create the podfeed podcast really do a lot of work to bring this awesome content to me?
Do you think about how web hosting costs money, database hosting costs money, and blog themes cost money, and lighting and microphones and computers cost money?
Well, if you've been wondering how could you possibly help offset these costs, please, consider going to podfeed.com slash Patreon. Here's the cool thing about Patreon.
You get to pick how much to donate. You can choose a dollar an episode of the Nocilla Cast, but if that's still too rich for your blood, you can change the monthly max to a dollar.
Just a dollar a month. Think about it. And you get all of the shows.
I only charge based on how many Nocilla Casts I do.
Now you gotta admit, you get at least a dollar's worth of knowledge or entertainment out of the Nocilla Casts, chitchat across the pond light, and programming by stealth, right?
Well, you can follow the link in the show notes and your podcatcher of choice to become a patron and earn my unending thanks.
Security Bits – 19 February 2023
[25:46] Well, it's that time of the week again. It is time for security bits with Bart Bouchard.
[25:47] Music.
[25:59] We are back in the saddle. We're on our game, right Bart?
Oh, sure. I have great coverage of all of the security news.
There is almost none of us. Oh, well, good, right?
Yeah, I was saying to you, you know, given the subject matter, this is, it's good.
But if you're looking for content for me this week, I'm sorry.
Now it turns out you're not looking for content for me because you do have content for me.
It's just not this content and you have lots of other content too.
Or did I get bumped to another show?
Yeah, I think you're actually getting bumped to next week because I had a couple of things I wanted to play this week.
But no, you have a great contribution. I'm very excited about because I'm taking the kids to Disneyland next week and I was I was very grateful to find out that I had missed that you would send in a nice beefy contribution that I really, really enjoy.
So that'll be a teaser for next week.
And it's evergreen content, so it literally will not go stale.
Excellent. Well, enjoy, enjoy Disneyland. That should be fun.
[26:57] We have a small amount of follow up. So I mentioned, I think it was last time, certainly recently that a cautionary tale about using air tags attract pets because.
[27:09] The type of battery that goes into the air tag is particularly dangerous to be, be like if kids either that does the it's really bad and the same goes for pets.
And it was TMO I think actually gave the warning and I linked to their warning.
Well, they've not done a follow up post about devices specifically built to track pets.
So they don't use those kind of batteries and they're basically they're designed to track your pet in a pet safe way.
So if I scared you with the previous one, here are some alternative some options for, own scaring or whatever.
Yeah, the one problem with all of the other trackers for pets, and I've been following this space for a while, used to interview people at CES regularly on it, is they're all subscriptions. They're like $12 a month kind of numbers.
When you know you could put an air tag in for nothing. I wonder if there's a way to make a cover for it that, well, you have to make a cover.
You're sure the dog won't chew and eat.
After I scoffed last time about how would a dog get a collar off, somebody described their cat that would take the collar off like once a week.
[28:15] Of course that's a cat. We had Houdini when he had to have, when he had his infected bite on his neck and he had to wear a collar. It was a constant battle because we turn her back and the collar would be gone.
It's like how?
At one stage we found that he would wedge his head through the banisters of the stairs, and then get it trapped and then walk backwards.
Okay. I don't want to offend all the dog owners, but dogs aren't that smart.
Most of them, maybe a border collie could do it, but that's about it.
But we had a cat that escaped from a chain link fence cage at a hotel.
We had the cat and the dog in this chain link fence cage that had a dog house on the back.
It had a lock on the front door and a lock on the back door.
And every night or every day when we'd go to the cage, the cat would be outside and the dog would be inside.
And the doors would be locked and the cat would be on the outside.
We never figured it out.
My dad finally put plywood or two by fours around under the cage to see if like he was wriggling under the chain link and the cement between the little divots, you know, and the, wood was in place and the cat was outside.
The cat was right there. He didn't run away.
He just sat outside and just scoffed at us. Don't take the job.
[29:24] Exactly. Because that's what cats do. Our cat loved nothing more than to taunt the chickens.
I said the chicken coop.
I'm here and you're not. Neener, neener. Well, you did name your cat Houdini. What did you expect?
Well, it wasn't Houdini. That was our old cat from when I was a kid.
But the one that escaped the collar, though.
Well, that was Houdini. Actually, you know, he was named Houdini, because he was a stray who arrived to a friend's house who couldn't keep them.
And everywhere they tried to keep him to keep him safe, he would escape.
So he was named Houdini because he was an escape artist. We took him over because we had a house.
We could have a pet in.
And so we took him on. Anyway, yeah, Houdini, that's how we got his name. Right. Okay.
Okay. That was our follow up. We have no deep dives, I'm afraid to say.
So that takes us on to action alerts.
So Microsoft Patch Tuesday was on Valentine's Day.
Not particularly much to love, though. So as Naked Security put it, 36 remote code executions, three zero days and 75 total vulnerabilities.
So patchy patchy patch patch in Microsoft land. 36 remote code executions?
That's a big number, right?
Oh yeah. Yeah. Three zero days is also a big number. Like, you know, most months it's zero, maybe one. Three is a lot.
Yeah. Wow.
So is that for Windows or is that all their different things?
[30:49] I think that's all other different things to be honest, because Microsoft just dump them all on you at once. And it's very hard to draw a line between Microsoft's products.
It's a big blob of Microsoft and this week I believe they're calling it Microsoft 365, but next week it could be something completely different.
Right, right. Okay. Yeah, so patch everything.
[31:08] Yeah. And if you're on the Mac side, yeah. And if you're on the Mac side, do the same because we have iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, watchOS, TVOS, HomePod software.
They all got serious security fixes, including some stuff in the kernel, including one zero day.
So we're one third as many zero days.
And I think that zero day is a remote code execution bug, if I remember correctly.
It is and it's in, it's in, it's in web kit, which is a particularly bad place to have a remote code execution bug because that means the various advertisements could theoretically get you.
So that's patchy patchy patch patch for sure on that one. Good news is that there is, there was a bug, which there was some unfounded reporting that it was being abused to leak location data.
Apple were very quick to say, no, no, no, no, no, that absolutely is not what was being It was a blogger basically doing a little bit too much inferring based on a little bit too little evidence.
And of course, when you say things like Apple leak location data, the universe just went, nuts. So yeah, I did see that one. I was like, really? Yeah, no.
It was the answer. The short answer is no, not really. So that's good.
Wordy warnings then. I think this was breaking as we record.
[32:23] I don't know if we knew it was breaking, but in hindsight, it was breaking as we were recording last week or two weeks ago, it was a massive, massive amount of ransomware, largely focused on France where there was a massive ISP that was infrastructure using VMware.
But it also hit major institutions in Ireland and much of Europe.
This was a big red letter day for ransomware and it all hinged on older versions of VMware's ESXi virtualization platform.
[32:57] If you had it facing the world and unpatched, there was a zero day in it and a ransomware gang got in and what they encrypted was the disk images for the virtual machines.
So your entire servers just evaporated into nothingness.
So this is big government public groups. What does that have to do with home users?
A lot of people use this ESXi stuff as hobbyist because VMware's licensing is quite decent to small people as well as to big people.
VMware sort of span the gamut a lot better than the others do.
So there's a lot of hobbyist stuff on NASs and stuff would be VMware.
Okay, okay. So if you're using VMware Fusion, for example, on your Mac to run another operating system that would not be affected, but if you're ESXi, you'd be on a NAS, some sort of network storage?
[33:46] Yeah. Yeah exactly. So ESXi is like a bigger version of Fusion. It's like the big boy Fusion for one of a better description.
So I was kind of surprised. It's used a lot at all scales, big and small. So definitely patchy patchy patch patch.
Definitely significant news that OpenSSL got a big patch because OpenSSL is probably the most prolific provider of transport layer security or TLS, which is what puts the S and things like HTTPS and PopS and IMAPS. It's a pretty big deal TLS and they patched a bunch of critical bugs. So if you are running IOT devices or if you run your own web server, probably a good time to make sure there's no updates waiting for you. Just give it a, wee patch. Good time. Thanks for watching.
[34:34] And then we have a final fire extinguisher. So it is a true fact that Reddit did so for a data breach.
The good news is it was really quite contained.
It was basically one of their developers got tricked, got phished.
And so they got into a few development systems, but they didn't get into anything with actual customers in it.
So it was contained and they had the processes in place where they could basically tell what had happened and reporting it responsibly and lock it down very quickly.
So the case of the system's working really. So that was actually probably a good news story all in all.
[35:14] Um, because you know, the question, everyone gets breached. The question is, do you know?
And if you, and if you do discover it, de-discover it now we're in six months.
So this was actually quite a good thing all in all.
Yeah. Moving on then to notable news. news. Now, maybe you can talk me down on this first story, but there has been a lot of kerfuffle, about air tags being abused despite the fact that Apple put a lot of effort into putting safeties onto air tags to make it very difficult to stalk someone with an air tag. It's actually, the reason there are so many new stories about people being caught stalking people with air pods is because air pods are really good at preventing themselves from being used for So there's actually a sign of Apple's protections working.
So Tile have decided to compete with Apple by creating a stealth mode designed to be, undetectable. Good, good.
The protection they're putting in place is that you have to register with Photo ID with Tile.
So that in the case of you not being detected stalking someone, they can give your details to the police who are never going to come looking because they've made an undetectable tracker. How does that work?
[36:27] And if Apple did this, can you imagine what the internet would do?
[36:32] Well, the worst part is I heard this reported and I heard it reported in, oh yeah, a lot of these trackers, you know, like Apple's air tags, they all do this.
You can use them to track people.
[36:42] But they weren't getting to the detail of what Tile had done.
They were just saying, oh, I've heard these trackers are bad because you can stalk people and they've missed the entire boat on that.
This is a case of where I think Apple possibly could have gotten ahead of this in marketing ahead of time if they thought about it.
But didn't they? Because the actual keynote where they announced the air tag, they spent a chunk of the keynote explaining the safety features before the thing even launched.
And it was one of my comments.
The keynote at WWDC is not marketing. Marketing is putting it in ads, having talks about it.
Marketing is a different thing than just where the nerds hang out.
[37:29] But that was the media event that launched it. When they launched it to the press, they gave the press, like the part of their story when they announced the product, part of the product's actual story.
You know the way like when the iPad came out, it was a netbook that doesn't suck and Steve Jobs told a big story.
Well, the story they told us about the airtags was that we've taught about this upfront.
Yeah. But again, one event clearly was not enough for people to remember the message, right?
Basically, I don't think the message was ever going to be remembered.
I think Apple did do a good job of putting it out, but I think that may have just been an impossibility.
Possibly. Yeah. Possibly. Yeah. Anyway, hindsight's great. Okay.
So it's not that I'm missing something obvious and that this isn't a terrible idea.
This is a terrible idea.
This is a terrible idea.
Okay. I don't see how it isn't. Okay.
I'm not going mad because I was reading, I can't be reading this right. I think I am anyway.
In Twitter world, things have gotten a bit weird.
So we now know thanks to Ed Ross in our Slack posted the link explaining the why.
So SMS is a train wreck.
[38:42] There are many reasons. No, no, no. I'll explain what's happened in a sec.
But I just want to put the context here. SMS is a train wreck.
No, no, no, no, no. OK, yes. Yeah, no, no. I will zoom right out here.
The protocols that carriers use to communicate with each other are insecure.
So they are based on trust and it's global and there are carriers around the world who should not have that trust.
And so there is a constant flow of fraud going on and it's a bit like the credit card industry.
They sort of baked it into the cost of doing business and the telcos are like, yeah, yeah, we know there's like 10% fraud, but whatever.
We're all paying it and that's just what it costs to be a telco and God, it would be really difficult to re-architect GSM.
Well, someone who's not happy with the rate of fraud is a guy called Elon Musk.
He obviously got a giant big invoice. Obviously this is the first time the invoice for SMS came in while Elon was running the company and Elon saw the invoice and went holy moly this SMS messaging stuff is expensive.
And someone said yeah and there's about 60 million of that as fraud.
So Elon has responded by saying that you can't have SMS two factor authentication unless you are a Twitter blue subscriber.
[39:49] Now, I think that you should just turn it off. Just actually make proper two-factor authentication.
Why you would pay for poorer security, I don't know. But anyway, that is how Elon decided to react.
It is a cost center, therefore it is for paid customers.
Yeah, so the way the news came out was just that Twitter had disabled SMS two-factor authentication unless you pay for Twitter Blue, and we were all speculating on why.
And Ed Ross, as Bart said, came into our Slack and posted, podfee.com slash Slack, and posted the answer.
And it was actually Elon talking in a Twitter Spaces interview where he talked about the problem with the fraud.
And it was a, he said it was costing $60 million a year.
And that's, he was funny. He says, you know, not to give him any air time for being good, but what he said was interesting.
He said, you know, we'd be willing to do like 10% fraud, you know, but not $60 million a year fraud, just like what you said.
[40:47] But one of the people doing the interview said, yeah, but what about the customers who suddenly, can't get into their Twitter accounts? And he says, well, we're working with the telcos to help them, get back on board. If they want to try to do that, then we can start figuring out a better way to do.
[41:01] It. Well, okay, so I'm reading from their blog post. So they published the blog post on the 15th, of February. So that's four days ago. And what they say in the blog post is that the account will will simply not have multi-factor authentication will be removed from the account.
[41:16] I'm not saying the person's question was legitimate or intelligent, because Elon's answer wasn't helpful.
But Elon didn't think about the human that couldn't get into their Twitter account, if that had been true.
So it probably isn't. It sounds like it isn't, but...
If you are using two-factor authentication through SMS on your Twitter account, and I read a report that I didn't necessarily research and see if it was substantiated, but it said that 75% of the two-factor authentication on Twitter is through SMS.
So if you have that today, you really do want to switch it over to using an authenticator app, and I personally think using it through OnePassword is the easiest way to go, because you're probably already using OnePassword.
If you listen to this show, you listen to Security Bits, And you can do the two factor authentication from within, um, within one password. And the reason you might look at your Twitter account, go, I don't really care. You know, it's fine. You know, whatever.
My Twitter account doesn't matter to me. But the reason it does matter is because someone can pretend to be you.
So you can have your account taken over and all of a sudden it's a Nazi hate speech account that can have damage. Yeah.
[42:24] And it has Tim Verporten after he passed away, someone hacked his Twitter account and they were posting obscenity things.
And Tim was the kindest generalist, never in a billion years would have ever done that.
And I had to go through a world of hurt to prove to Twitter that he had died and that this account needed to be shut off.
And they eventually did.
But the last thing in the world I wanted for Tim's legacy was for somebody to see that.
So you really do want two factor authentication. And the easiest way is to just do it through one password.
Bear in mind, Alison, that Apple's built-in keychain now has to have a multifactor, authenticator support built right in. So for people who are in the Apple community and don't have one password, you literally have it native in your OS.
I'd like to see how that works. Does it, will it scan a QR code or do you?
Absolutely. It's exactly like one password. Exactly like one password.
I wonder how I'd find out how to do that. But anyway. Okay.
You'd have to turn on iCloud keychain, which you do. I mean, I don't know why you would, Alison.
You have, you have a better solution. Why would you? Right.
But well for experimental purposes, I've got a SCO demo account. I could screencast online demo account. I can test it with.
[43:32] So it's all built in now as of, I think it was last September's operating systems.
The bottom line of this story is I'm really happy that the answer about Twitter disabling SMS two factor authentication followed the mantra of follow the money, not follow the crazy.
Okay. Right. When we first started, it was follow the crazy and I'm just, it's refreshing to have it be follow the money for once.
Yes. And the other thing is a lot of people misheard it as they are turning off multi-factor authentication, full stop end of story. And I spent a lot of time correcting people going, no, no, no, no, no.
It's just one of three methods available to you that's going away.
You can still use a hardware token and you can still use the TOTP, which is Google Authenticator.
Auths apps, authentication apps. Yeah. So I hope they send a message to people when they shut it off.
[44:28] That would be nice. Yeah, like a proactive banner in your app saying you are one of the people whose two, factor is going to be turned off in 28 days in 27 days in 26 days.
Pay us $8. Even if they say that, I'd like people to know.
Right absolutely yes yeah yeah definitely. Switching on then to what I think is happier news so we know that 2023 is the year that the Digital Services Act in the European Union and its cousin the Digital Markets Act come into force later this year but the wheels are in motion. So the Digital Services Act is the one that will affect Apple the most because Apple is mostly a services company and in order to fall under the DSA at all you need to have 45 million active European users, and so from February it is now the responsibility of the companies to report their numbers to the commission in preparation for enforcement of the act later in the year and we can now confirm that falling under the DSA will be Apple, Google, Meta and Twitter. They all have more than 45 million active European users. So it's happening. DSA is on the way.
And you see that as happy news because?
[45:42] Because the Digital Services Act gives a whole bunch of privacy and user protections from large companies. It's basically GDPR++.
Okay, good.
[45:52] And we did an entire episode on it and I spent so much time reading legalese, and I never want to see it again, but my notes are there and they're good.
So I'll be reading back to myself. I often read my own show notes.
We did a big episode on the GDPR and I still reference those show notes a lot. Oh yeah.
I've sent people to that just recently. I'm telling you, everybody listening, if you ever want to remember something, blog about, it because you can always search the internet for the answer.
And since Google tends to give you your, or maybe all search engines, give you back something in your own frame of reference.
If you're logged in, like I thought I was really famous because I was always finding my articles and then somebody said, Alison, try logging out of Google and see what happens.
It's like, oh, I'm not nearly as cool as I thought I was.
But anyway, but all the time I want to know how to do something.
I just Google it and it'll tell me, Yeah, you wrote about this in 2018.
[46:46] And my answer is often I did. Oh, look at that. I did.
Exactly. By the way, I don't think they're mostly a services organization.
Apple. Okay. Sorry. Right. But hardware isn't covered at all.
So on the stuff that is so between the DMA and the DSA, the DSA is the big one for Apple is what I meant.
Okay. Okay. I just wanted to pick that nit right there. Okay.
Although if Tim Cook is definitely pushing Apple to be more of a services company.
You're right. They're not. They're not. The iPhone is still, if you see a pie chart of Apple revenue, the iPhone is still more than half a pie.
[47:24] Like it's the line is there's a kink in the line and it's it's convex, not concave.
It's kind of impressive and scary, I guess.
Anyway, where are we? Top tips. Lots of stuff in here.
So one of the things the European Union introduced is something called Safer Internet Day, which is in early February and it's a European initiative but a lot of American companies are starting to piggyback off it too, which is nice and it's quite the heck not.
It's like World Backup Day or whatever, why not piggyback off something like this.
Apple are one of the companies who chose to piggyback off it and they did a big press release basically linking to their existing resources for kid protection and parental controls and all that good stuff.
But they've also added some new resources. So they have a really nice families page, apple.com forward slash families, where they give you quick links to all of the different tools they have been making available for years. There's no new tooling here. Excuse me.
This is just a new way of accessing the existing tooling. And the other thing they have done for people who have Apple stores, there is a new Today at Apple's session called Your Kids and Their Devices.
Oh that sounds really good. That's a great coincidence by the way to everyone. I just muted my mic because I had to cough, right as Bart had to cough and I couldn't save him because I was busy coughing at the same time. So I'll give him a second there. I'll just vamp for a minute.
That's pretty cool. Thank you. You're welcome.
[48:53] And we both have the wonderful WaveXLR with the mute button right on top. So handy.
It's the best. Yeah that is one of the reasons I bought the WaveXLR was that mute button that that makes no noise. I'm gonna sneak in an excellent explainer.
[49:06] Okay. So there's obviously a lot of talk about AI right now, about chat GPT and BARD and all these different things that are doing these crazy things.
And they're all based on machine learning. And one of the things that has informed my understanding of why we don't know how AI works, and you'll hear people say, well, we don't even know how the algorithm does what it does, this machine learning.
We don't know, we don't understand.
The reason we don't know why is explained in a really cute, good video by CGP Grey.
He doesn't do anything that's not amazing, but this one is about five years old, and I rewatched it to make sure that I still thought it held up.
And it's a really good way of explaining why we don't understand.
So I put a link to it, it's a little YouTube video.
I think it's, I don't know, 12 minutes long. The first couple of minutes are kind of fluffy, but then it gets into exactly how these machine learning works and why we don't understand it.
I just thought it was a good little reminder to go in if you're trying to go, well, wait, a minute, why don't we know? We wrote these algorithms. Why don't we know?
It's because we aren't writing these algorithms.
Yeah, we're teaching the computers to teach the computers. We're not teaching the computers.
And that layer of indirection is hugely different. Actually if you listen closely, we aren't even teaching the algorithms to teach the algorithms. We're teaching the algorithms how to test the algorithms because there's no way to to teach it because we don't know what to tell it to teach.
[50:29] You gotta watch the video to see the distinction. It teaches itself, right? Because basically you're putting weights on a neural network.
No, it's a good video.
Watch the video. Watch the video because testing is very distinctly called out as different from teaching. That it can test if it got it right, but it can't teach it to do it right.
[50:48] Okay, that word was getting worse here because the way we have, the way we get the computers to learn is by telling them when they're wrong. Exactly, exactly. And that's what this algorithm says, or this video says, it's a very cute little explain, it's got little cartoon robots and stuff in there.
They're really goofy looking and they get thrown in incinerators and it's very funny, but it really struck me.
The other thing to say is that was from the age when AI had had its previous growth spurt when all of a sudden there were classifiers everywhere and your phone was suddenly being able to recognize your cat and your dog in your, in your iCloud photos and stuff.
So that's when that dates from, which was in the year of classifiers.
And so everything is still correct in that video, but more so.
Like the level we don't understand is bigger. There are, I believe it was 89 layers between the front and the back of the neural networks and chat GPT.
That's 89 levels of abstraction. Zero of which we understand.
It is astonishing how deep those networks are nowadays.
Astonishing. So it's interesting that this is a five year old video, but it has been retitled.
I just noticed the title is how AIs like chat GPT learn.
[52:02] Good job. Wise bit of SEO there. Yeah. Wise man. A wise man there.
Excellent. No, that's a fantastic and I can highly recommend that I loved that video when it came out five years ago.
And while you're there, just watch everything he's ever done.
Watch him explain the the UK.
The UK.
The UK one is hysterical. Another favorite is the the line between Canada the border between Canada and the United States, I learned so much about geography there. It's fantastic.
And one Alistair will love is the one on runway numbering. That's also fantastic.
That's a recent one. Oh, I haven't seen that one.
All right. You'll love it. It's ready to go.
[52:43] Yeah, definitely. Okay. How far have I gotten? Oh, yes.
Okay. So Mac Observer also took advantage of it being European safer internet day to release a really nice blog post, how to set up an iPad for a child. Walking you through, I have just bought an iPad.
I am giving it to my kid. How should I do so safely?
They walk you through, you create a child Apple ID, which belongs to your Apple ID as the parent and then how you set up the various parental controls.
And it walks you through all the decisions you should be making.
And obviously depending on the age of your child and the maturity, which is not the same thing as the age, you'll obviously toggle different buttons, different ways, but it walks you through it all very nicely, which is a useful resource.
So it's in my, I have a bookmarked in my to keep folder because when I have friends and family who ask me these questions, it's good to be able to just link them to someone who's better at expanding than me. That's a good idea. Lindsay and Nolan have run into an interesting problem where they want Forbes to have a standalone account, but I have a family plan and we already have six people in the plan. So the only way for him to have a standalone account and be able to take over the apps they've already bought is for them to split off and be their own family for, significant cost per month since we do Apple One and so I'm paying for everything and that's.
[53:59] That's prohibitively expensive.
Adult children are not supposed to be on your Apple family anymore.
He's not adult, he's six years old.
Oh, you mean them? Yeah. So it's supposed to be a household.
The definition is a household and they're quite loosey goosey about it, but it's a household. And the reason it's all linked back to one credit card is because it's for a household.
And the reason... So by linking it to one credit card, they don't have to be all strict about it by IP addresses because it's self-limiting.
And that's also why they only let you have six members. It is meant so when they become adults, they should run their own family. So Kyle should be an organizer of his family, which would then be making child accounts for his kids.
Ummm...
They show in their example, three adults and two kids. So I don't think that's true.
There is a second type of child, which is when you set up your Apple watch for your grandma.
[54:53] Like it is a household can often have people of the older generation and the younger generation, but it's designed around a household.
[54:59] That's why it's six, right?
Six is not a huge number. It's not designed for extended family.
Because if you think about it, if you have three kids and they have three kids, then it's three times like that's way more than six, right?
[55:12] That's. That's really.
[55:12] I don't, I'm not finding evidence of that, Bart. If you do.
Well, when I set it up, that was absolutely how it was described to me when I set it up all those years ago. And the fact that it's for six people tells you it's not intended for your giant, big extended family.
[55:29] Like six is not. I'm reading the documentation and not finding limitations on that.
[55:36] Well, the limitations is it's forced to be one credit card and you're only allowed to have so many child accounts.
You can add anyone to your family sharing group age 13 and older and invite them to share an Apple card.
Yeah, they're sharing your Apple card, right? You and up to five other family members can share access.
[55:57] Right. So there you go. It's six, right? So that limits your size.
It doesn't say, yeah, but it's not saying that they have to live inside your, it says, one adult in your household, the family organizer invites four or your family members. When family members join, they get instant access to the group's subscription content.
Right. But it's the size of six. That's household sized. And they use, they do use, but I'm saying they don't have to live under my roof.
Right. That's what I'm saying. Apple chose not to go the pejorative route because they forced you to use one credit card and only six people. So that's instead of having to get into the whole faff like Netflix of trying to figure out whether you're sharing it inappropriately.
They just say, that's all on the one credit card. So if you're prepared to share credit card bills with each other, I guess your family.
What I'm pushing back on is you said I can't have, I'm not supposed to allow adult children to be in my family group and I don't see any restriction on that.
No, no, it's not designed for you. I don't think I'm violating the terms and conditions.
Sure. If I implied that I would, that was not my intention. Okay. That's what I've been arguing this whole time. Okay.
No, no, no. The product is not designed for a multi-generational expanding.
It's designed for a household, right?
So at this age, your kids are old enough that they should be family organizers.
It's great fun being a family organizer.
Well, it is, but not for 30 bucks a month.
[57:14] It's not that much fun.
[57:16] Right. Yeah. I was being a bit facetious because it's a regular cause of friction in our house.
It was like, you're the family organizer. Could you enable blah, blah, blah for my Apple ID?
I also have to see all of the weird sci-fi he reads. I don't care.
I think you can allow him to have full admin access because I'm pretty sure Steve does to.
I've set them up as a parent, but there's still things I get told about everything because I'm the organizer.
Oh, OK. So he doesn't need my permission to buy weird sci-fi, but I see it all.
[57:49] Anyway, we've got way off the reservation today. Yeah, we have. OK.
Nice article from Mac Observer.
And also Apple have released five tips for how to secure your Apple card, which if you are lucky enough to live in a place with Apple card.
[58:01] They seem like sensible suggestions to me. I don't have the luxury of an Apple card, so I don't know how saying they are, but they look sensible.
I do want to talk about that one. There's a few things, there's some that I was already doing.
You can turn on transaction notifications and I love that.
I love knowing instantly that it worked or better yet that it didn't work.
It's like, oh yeah, I got to fix that or and I've had trouble with that a few times.
Or the amount is wrong, right?
Someone could put it, if someone's typing into the thingy, they could theoretically hit a zero too many times or something.
Because you know the way when you enter an amount in those credit card terminals, you don't type the decimal point. basically for, you know, for something in the tens, you basically type four digits and the last two digits are cents.
And so you can very easily go zero, zero, zero. And then you will get a notification on your watch saying you just paid 160 euro for this fish.
[58:52] No, I don't think so. What is that good of a fish?
[58:56] The other one, the one that I did turn on that they suggested that I didn't know you could do, I hadn't really thought about why this would be as easy as it is, is to enable advanced fraud protection, which basically changes the three-digit CVV code.
And the reason it's easy is because, well, if you're like almost everybody else, your credit card number got changed on you recently because somebody defrauded it, right?
You get that happens all the time, which causes the three-digit code to change.
So I don't know my three-digit code right now, so I turn this on.
So it changes for all future transactions. It just keeps changing, but it doesn't break any that are pre-existing like for a subscription, which is an interesting feature.
So the pre-existing one still works because you already used it, but it doesn't work again, which is cool. Right. It works with that vendor.
[59:47] I think there's a mapping gets created between that code and the vendor.
And so when you sign up for another subscription, it will be a different code.
And so if they get hacked, it will be Jesus. Then the hackers can't abuse your details.
Yeah.
Another thing I didn't know you could do, and you don't need to do this now, but you can lock the titanium card, the physical card.
So if you lose the card, you can lock it instantly from the app.
And I did not know you could do that.
And another thing they put it out in this number four was that you, the importance of, removing lost or stolen devices from your Apple account, because if you lose your iPhone, somebody has access to anything you were using with your Apple card.
So you want to make sure you remove it. So I thought that I thought the steps were real interesting.
I only changed one thing, but I now know more things.
[1:00:37] There we go. That's that's I mean, you're a high end user. So if you found something of value, then, good link. I did find something really interesting. And this doesn't have anything to do with the Apple card probably, but we used it extensively in Argentina. And when we got back, we had a bunch of credits. So like I paid $40 for something and it shows the $40 charge. But then I have the same thing with like a $9 credit back. And it happened two or three times. And I've no idea why it might It might've been an exchange rate thing.
Argentina's real weird. It's got a, there's a government exchange rate and there's the blue, not black market, but the blue market they call it, which is a much, much better exchange rate by like 50% better.
I mean, it's hugely better. So if you go get money on the street, you get a better rate than through the government. If you use a credit card, you're supposed to get the blue rate, I think.
And so I think what might've happened was the retail rate was the government rate, And then we got the money back because it changed to blue market rate.
That's the only reason I can think that would have happened.
It was different stores, different amounts of money.
And I got a whole bunch of refunds from Amazon recently with the title of currency exchange adjustment.
[1:01:51] Oh, bank error in your favor. Yeah. I was like, okay, thanks Amazon.
You, God knows you deliver enough stuff.
Since I signed up to Prime, it's a, that's just, yeah, the start of the pandemic, I turned on Prime and now it's just the case of we've run out of blah, blah, blah.
Ding, ding, ding, ding. And then the next day it's magically here.
I do want to thank Norbert Frasza for explaining to me while we were on the trip.
What is this blue market thing? Because we were all like, what the heck is that?
He goes to Argentina a lot. so he was able to explain it to me.
Excellent. Unless I am missing something in my own show notes, the only thing I have left is a palette cleanser.
I have one for you. And it's very related to what we've been talking about.
I think you're a big fan of this guy as well. I immediately recognized his face in the video.
But basically, this is a video that gave me a whole new way to think about this whole big AI question.
It doesn't tell you, like, oh yeah, here's the answer to life, the universe and everything, because literally no one knows what's going to happen next with AI.
[1:02:53] But he laid out a way to think about it. So, you know, innovation happens on a sigmoid curve.
And the question is, are we at the bottom of the curve where it's about to get steep, and things are about to change massively?
Are we at the Napster phase, is how we put it?
Or are we already at the top of the curve? And this is as much change as we're going to see. And we're done.
Hmm. Any answer to that question? No, but he basically had to do how to think about it.
Right. How do we think about this AI thing? And so the question I'm now going to be looking at is, how are we accelerating here?
Are we climbing up the curve or are we at the top of the curve?
So it's just a really nice way to think about it.
And he gives a very good explanation. It's just really well thought out.
It's very thoughtful. So I really enjoyed it.
I do want to give, I've been trying to think of a good place to say this, and I, don't think I said it last time we talked right after the trip, but we talked a lot about chat GPT on the trip with Dr. Andrea Ghez's son is a brilliant young man.
And we spent some time talking about chat GPT. And he came up with a really, really good use for it that isn't weird or stupid and the veracity of the answers don't actually matter.
He is in the position to start interviewing for jobs because he's coming up on the end of his engineering degree.
So he asked it, if I want a job in this, what kind of questions am I likely to be asked during the interview.
[1:04:13] Oh, excellent. Right. Cause it's a pinion or, or, you know, it's some smattering of these kinds of things might come up.
So he got prepared for those interview questions and he said, if I want a job in this, what kinds of things would be good to have on my resume?
So he's going to cherry pick through that and say, Oh, well, I do have that.
I don't have that. I can go, I should emphasize this.
And I thought that was a really, really clever use of it. It kind of opened my mind up to non-stupid uses of, Right, because it's, I think it's going to develop into a tool not to replace humans, but to help us to more efficiently get to the point where we can add our creative spark to things.
And what's particularly interesting to me is Microsoft's implementation in Bing, where, you type to it like you do in ChatGPT. It's actually GGPT 4 instead of 3, so it's a more advanced version.
But it doesn't just give you the little paragraph.
It shows you underneath all of its resources. So why am I telling you what I'm telling you above?
And it gives you, this is what I'm enjoying from to give you this summary, which takes away a lot of the mystery me, right?
And it should help you detect when it's hallucinating because you can see down at the bottom that, oh, I don't believe that website for one minute.
Therefore I shouldn't believe the paragraph based on that website. I don't believe.
[1:05:28] Oh, that's, that is really, really interesting. I like that.
Cause that's been one of my big concerns is, or annoyances about it is if you're looking at a response to a regular search query, you can see that that this is from, you know, Bob's wingnut website.com.
And the next one is from.gov or, or, you know, the, uh, uh, institutes of health or whatever.
The grass Tyson or whatever.
Yeah. And so you can kind of weigh it, but when you just ask chat GPD, you don't know where it got its information.
So that's, that's a, that's good.
So the fact that it knows that sources has me thinking there's probably a future where you could say, ignore everything from X website. So you might see the search results coming up and you say, eh, ignore all the stuff from that source.
And then it would redo its paragraph and show you a new set of sources, and you could basically use that to hone things right down. And the other thing it does is in the sidebar it gives you a summary of the page you are currently on.
[1:06:23] Oh, exactly where. Yeah. So you know exactly where it's getting it from.
But instead of you having to read through 20 million pages of Wikipedia, you get a, collapsed little summary at the top, which I wish Wikipedia would do.
And so, you know, it's, it's, it has me opening my eyes to this idea that it's not necessarily a scary future. It's not, it's not going to be AI is evil or AI is good.
It's going to be, there is good AI that is well engineered and helpful.
And there is shoddy AI that's not very good. and we're going to end up picking and choosing and hopefully the best AI wins.
I've been watching some TikTok videos where teachers are spending time with students, having them actively use things like ChatGPT and then to discuss what do you do with that information?
Because you can only teach people the tools to how to analytically look at this information.
You don't want to teach them ChatGPT.
You want to teach them how to vet information as a teacher, I think is one of the, especially for secondary education, I think that's the best thing you can do.
It's funny, I'm trying to change my search engine and edge to Bing so that when this comes out, into public beta or something I can start playing with, I can do it.
I can't figure out how to change the default search engine back.
[1:07:41] Oopsie. They've got a search settings and I typed in default search engine and it went, no, I got nothing.
I don't know what you're looking for. I typed in Bing. It's not there's nothing in here about it.
Good job on your search, Microsoft. I'll have to Google it.
[1:08:02] Oh, not that note. We can't top that. Right. We have to stop right there.
Remember, you have to stay patched. And there's lots of patches.
Remember all those zero days.
Stay patched so you stay secure.
[1:08:14] Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at Allison at podfeed.com anytime you like. I even answer people.
If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over.
You can follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. And of course there's a link in the show notes.
Remember everything good starts with podfeed.com. If you want to join in the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely NoSilla Castaways.
You can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation at podfee.com slash Paypal.
[1:08:47] And if you wanna join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfee.com slash live, on Sunday nights at five p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NoSoloCastaways.
We missed you this week, Kevin.
Thanks for listening and stay safe.
[1:09:01] Music.