 It's Monday August 31st, 2020. I'm rim. I'm Scott and this is Geek Nights tonight. We are talking about biometrics It's a it's a tough time right now because Right around now. I mean year by year and all it varies a little bit would either be in Seattle About to fly to Seattle like this is the Pax time It's pretty rare. You're gonna get a Geek Nights episode in August 31st, right? like probably Maybe next year, but probably not the year after hopefully this is when like all my calendar Invites that I set to myself for like go-to-packs do things prepare slides like they're all popping up in my feed Up until this point the quarantine for all the trouble, you know, it's not the best time like I'd rather not have to be quarantined, but We haven't actually missed that many major Conventions or events because the summer is actually usually kind of our downtime But we're now hitting the period where we would normally go to a major convention every month for like five months in a row sometimes multiple in a month and this is the point where I'm actually going to not have that happen for the first time in God since 2008 Yeah, we pretty much been doing the same, you know, not you know Not daily routine has changed and things like that obviously but our annual Schedule, you know zoomed out the macro schedule has been pretty much the same for about ten years. Yep until now So there you go. Yep. I'd like I had a dream the other night where I was just like We are on our way to Pax West and then I was like, oh shit What hotel are we in and I couldn't remember and I didn't know what hotel we booked because we don't have a hotel We're not going to Pax West. I was like, we're in the Sheridan or the red lion red line doesn't even exist anymore. What's going on? motif We're in the one that has the new Pax table top in it. That's where we usually are. That's what I have one year We've been in it. Yep. That's where we would probably be again Probably yes. Yeah, so now now it's the weird time where there are things I'm missing that I would normally be doing that are big things that are like Milestones of the year Pax always ends summer for me and now there's no Pax so either summer is gonna go on forever rich I'll take that Yeah, but you know, I mean it's just people have to get ready I mean even though it's been many months already. I think you know, it's like, okay, everything's different now People have to accept that like yeah On the other side is not going to be going back to what you had before Not for a long time at least. I don't know there isn't Well, some things will probably be able to return to the what they were right But the point is is that it's not like, you know, let's say we get past the virus and get past fascism somehow in 2021 it's not like oh everything's fixed 2022 is not gonna suddenly look like 2018 or 24 or 2014 or you know any of the years of the past 10 years, right? It's gonna be that's gonna be a different look. Yeah, right? You don't go get a makeover and come out It's like oh, I'm getting a makeover right now, you know looking bad looking good changing things up You know, whatever you don't come out on the other side looking exactly the same as you went in I That doesn't happen. Yep. Some things will come back whatever whatever your life situation is except that now Yep, especially because we're there's a long haul in the u.s. So Even like vaccines and things like there aren't gonna be a lot of cons next year if any Yeah, we'll see how it all goes but there is a lot of tech news And we got to keep milk in this Apple story because it's just growing and growing and stuff keeps happening in it So the first thing I got to say about the Apple story is obviously this brewing has only was sort of started at that Congressional hearing and only went up since yeah, and I got to say while Apple is obviously none of the companies involved here good by the way Yeah, nobody's nobody's like clearly the right one. This is this is a bad guy battle here I guess it's like, you know dr. Doom and you know, like sleuth are punching it out but the point is is that You know of all those four companies that were at that hearing, right your Google your Facebook, right your Amazon and your Apple, right? Apple is getting the most blows here in the immediate aftermath, right? And why is that? Number one Apple has the most money of all those companies. Well, what's Apple's? I think has the biggest market cap effort in history of any company something some trillion Entire like US tech sector is bigger than many world like global regional economies right now Which let's not get into how the stock market doesn't reflect reality But anyway, I was got a lot of wealth and capital Apple. Apple is big, right and also, right Apple is philosophically At least on paper, right the enemy of those other three companies, right? If you look at the four companies in the box right Apple is the one where the customer is the customer, right? Which doesn't always mean you're the right good guy like Amazon treats the customer out of pedestal get So Google and Facebook the customer is the product, right on Amazon The customer is sort of the customer, right? But what Amazon does is they Exploit others in service of the customer while also taking the customer's data to help it better exploit others Apple right serves the customer, but sees itself as a luxury service So who do they exploit also the customer by making them pay they make everyone they work with pay, right? It's like, you know work instead of you know taking your data and selling it or spying on you or any of those things, right? We're just gonna make everyone pay developers pay customers over pay for me Ram everyone pay money, right and You know, we'll treat the customer nicely, but they don't treat anyone else nicely just the cut That's and so because of that, right that aligns the Google's and Facebook's of the world, you know against Apple Yeah, especially since they have to operate on Apple's platform, right? I know Apple's platform is not the majority is not a monopoly There are other platform forms for smartphones and tablets and everything But Apple basically has complete control over people who are fully into their ecosystem And the reality of the world is it's not easy for most people to switch ecosystems No But if you think about it, right Apple doesn't Depend on Amazon, right? It's like they might use some Oz computers or Google cloud computer Microsoft Azure stuff like that. They don't have those resources. I've heard like iCloud is hosted on those possibly it's unknown But I've definitely heard stories that Apple hosts their iCloud on other clouds, but they're not dependent They could just switch that up. They can do their own. They don't they're not dependent on that, right? But so like no one has a hold on Apple No one can make Apple do anything that they don't want to do right? But Google's got to put Google Maps on iOS Facebook's app is the number is like the number one way to use Facebook It's got to be on iOS right if if Apple kicks Facebook out of the App Store Completely like the default Facebook app or the Facebook Messenger app or the Instagram app Like some people would leave iOS to go get an Android phone to get the Facebook app But I think a lot of people would use this as an excuse to say I guess I can't log into my Facebook account ever again No But Facebook would be totally Yep, I feel like to be real like real about it I think Facebook would lose basically all of its non Dangerously crazy users and all of its young users and all that would be left would be like you and on conspiracies and anti-vaxxers And like angry mommy bloggers The point is is that Apples got a hold on the other people they don't have and they got nothing on Apple So that's why the battle rages. Yeah, so what's the latest developments in the battle? So first There was some shenanigans in with Apple's review process They miss on someone reviewing the WordPress app basically misunderstood it and misunderstood work the difference between WordPress the software and wordpress.com the site and There was some tussle and then Apple said oops are bad and fixed it Yeah so that's just a poor timing on You know something that happens relatively often in the Apple you know app store approval process Especially and it goes unnoticed when it happens to smaller apps of Apple not understanding The what the app is and getting their own policies wrong because they've got a whole team of people doing reviews who aren't necessarily Or even arguably I've seen people make an argument that sometimes what Apple has done to them is Be purposefully obtuse as an excuse to not let a nap in where there's some other reason they don't want that have to be in the store so the It's just bad timing for them to get exposed on that thing So what they've done is they now Apple came out? I think today and they were like okay, we got a new thing for our approval our app store approval process Right, so they are making some effort to at least look better or do better And what they're doing the changes they've made are that a if you're making just a bug fix patch like a small patch, right? They're just gonna let it go if your apps already approved Right now holding you up And then if they happen to find something in your bug fix patch that they don't like that is not approved They'll get they'll let your app stay up and basically make you fix it in your next You know your next go right so they're not gonna like because there's been a lot of times where people had bug fixes And they got held up or it's like they're just fixing a bug and suddenly they're apps out of the store And they're afraid to fix their bugs because you know yeah But a lot of this still result revolves around what are the parameters where upon Apple will kick you out or force you to Pay them the big so the second the second thing is they changed it so There is now some sort of appeals a better appeals process or an unappeals process where there previously was none or whatever So if you've got something That happens to you and you're not happy with the ruling you can appeal better I guess them before we'll see away from people to actually put in appeals and see what happens to them to get Yeah, to figure out how well that's working and the third thing is What was the third thing? Oh, so there was going to take suggestions and like input from Apple developers Into what the rules should and should not be so basically you can comment to Apple and say hey this rule is bullshit This rule is good. You should add this really should remove that rule. This rule is not clear, etc One of them will get 10,000 comments that are all just don't charge 30% for in-app purchases, right? We'll see how that works, right? So the in-app purchases so stories in that front and that front right Facebook tried to put in a notice in their app To let users know that Apple was taking a 30% cut Yeah, that they could go to Facebook they could go pay somewhere else and not through the app and deny Apple that money and pay the same price Right and Apple was like no you can't tell users irrelevant information. Yeah quote irrelevant information That is clearly a clause to let Apple Quash anything they don't like that anyone says in an app during the payment That's a definitely an ambiguous rule I'm sure you could go and find tons of apps with irrelevant information in them in their UIs That are approved and Apple doesn't give a crap. That's definitely a vague arbitrarily, you know ambiguously Non-consistently enforced rule that Apple has in there so that for situations like this they can you know have a rule It's like, oh, okay. We don't allow you know this right this is interesting because this is the kind of laws that say Black people can't vote without actually writing down black people can't vote and you write something else like oh Yeah, you can only register to vote on a Tuesday in the middle of the day in this part of town But you know what else this is a bunch of white people who guns there were a bunch of fights And there are still fights about when can companies of various types Include taxes and fees that they have to pay to other entities in their prices They show you versus when do they have to be added after the fact like some places? There are laws that say you can't include the sales tax in a price you publish because they the sales tax has to be Calculated after the fact to avoid the kinds of optics problems that state and local governments don't want to deal with Like weird laws and weird rules happen all the time I remember as a kid see your point the roller coaster park got a special exemption from the state of ohio To still collect sales tax, but not say that they were collecting it and just include it in their prices Which was not allowed anywhere else in the states Kind of like how some companies can say oh, we're charging you this fee That sounds like not equal protection under the law to me Yeah, well they applied it at like a county level where like sandusky county has an exemption Not equal protection under the law to me that equal protection probably doesn't apply to a case like that I mean, I know what the equal protection legally means, right? And that obviously states have arbitrary can arbitrarily regulate commerce I know that that is our that is legal under the law as written and as you know Enforced in the united states But in principle the same laws should apply to everyone everywhere And that's a case where it's like oh, I live in a different place different law, right? It's like oh, I'm in the next town over a different law. I make more money. I'm allowed to trade these stocks, right? I'm a I'm an accredited investor different laws for me, right? And I I see all of those as in principle You know not equal but what I'm getting here is this is this is more the question of Providing that information is harmful to apple's brand, but the information is true But apple is banning this information from being shared in a place where it would be relevant By claiming it's irrelevant. This is this is a battle that has never been resolved pretty much anywhere Right the second battle that's going on obviously the fortnight one the big one, right? The current status is that on ios you can still play fortnight But the developer account has been suspended so you can't download fortnight But if you've already got it you've already got it So what that means is all the ios fortnight players are stuck in the previous season of fortnight Oh, that's right. I know enough about the kids to know that that basically means they don't have fortnight And are not getting updates So it's sort of like a whole bunch of people playing Counter-strike source and then everyone else on all the other platforms playing counter-strike go Right, they all got the update, but ios isn't going to get the updates for now and uh, but the um the situation involving The unreal engine is still that you know if you're making games with unreal engine You can still get them on ios just epic itself can't get their games out, right? Yeah So the argument that I want to make that I haven't seen anyone make right which seems really straightforward to me Which is why I don't know there must be some reason That clearly that explains why me not a lawyer or expert in any way has thought of this Yet corporate lawyers paid lots of money have not thought of it or at least not said it There must be some reason because this seems so obvious, right? The most basic thing we learned about antitrust I even knew this as a kid from the microsoft case was that if you got a monopoly in one area You can't use it to help yourself win and take over another market, right? Microsoft had monopoly on operating systems for pc. Ah, but already here's the problem. What's the market? Is the market smartphones? I got none. I know I got you right you can't use that to wedge yourself in and take over in the browser department Right, that's what microsoft got called out on right? So it seems pretty obvious to me right this whole 30 percent app store thing that's going on right Instead of framing it as everyone has is like apple taking a cut of your apps, right? But it actually is Is apple is wedging out? PayPal Stripe right payment cut google pay Right, you cannot use if you've got an app in the apple app store You cannot sell let's say you got you got a game that sells coins. I see we're going with this Here's you can't use you can't use paypal to sell your coins in your game on the apple app store You must use apple pay So if you go to a restaurant, they can be like cash only or we only accept mx That's true, but the uh and arguably in some places those restaurants might be monopolies Because in that county there aren't and all the restaurants of that type But that restaurant is not itself have a its own restaurant pay And it does not control a significant portion of the restaurant market. Ah, but that comes back to the market What is the market is the market iphone users or smartphone users visa could not buy Uh if visa bought Several fast food chains and made it so the only way to buy food at them is with visa That might fly actually that might they might win that one Maybe but like imagine if mcdonald's and like they had a but they have to have a monopoly on fast food, right? So so burger king and taco bell and mcdonald's and chipotle and Wendy's and every single almost every single fast food like more than half of it is owned by visa Also, where does apple get the money from because apple has apple pay? But you still inject money into the apple pay system from something else like a credit card I want to see right that I think that You know, we should see paypal Stripe and all those payment processors should be the ones complaining about apple saying hey Developers want to use like our payment platforms, but they can't use them in the apple and their apps Their native apps in the apple app store, right apple is pushing us out with their antitrust, right? I don't think that would fly though because I think this is more as this is apple running a store Stores can use whatever payment things they would like to use But it's not you're not paying Uh, you know, you're not buying the thing from apple. You're buying the thing from the developer, right? Yeah, but you're buying it you're buying it through an apple run marketplace for it to be a store Apple would have to buy the app from the app developer and then read Amazon does straight pass through sales and they take a cut Yeah, okay. You can't just pay with anything on amazon Uh, you can't pay with a lot of things not anything though Rimco you can't use rimco to pay that payment process is not allowed If amazon said the only way to buy anything on amazon is with an amazon credit card I think that would be a little Ah, but amazon there's a much better claim that they have a near monopoly on Like online purchases, but they don't do that. You can use any old you can use discover But this isn't a payment processor. They're not taking a payment processing fee They're taking a you are using our platform to host your app to download the app the infrastructure everything Like this is a can marketplace. We are taking that fee on All payments and they're making you process all payments through them and not anyone else But it's for the purpose of them collecting the cut that you have to agree to to sell stuff in their marketplace You're welcome to not sell stuff in their marketplace play But I think because it's as a side effect. It's you know, anti competitive against other payment processing Uh companies that could force apple to adopt a different model, right? No, because apple could still apple could use apple could trivially say you can pay with any payment processor But we take 30 percent How would they do that? How would that be technologically possible? They Directly to PayPal and then to the app. Yeah, what they're saying is if you use if you if you're in our store You can't directly sell stuff without going through our cash register Which actually is very common in farmers markets and art fairs and all sorts of things Yeah, it's still you know, there's something going on there Yeah, i'm saying it just it is very hard to argue that apple has a monopoly except over people who choose to use apple technology But I there's an argument you could make over the fact that you sort if you're a developer, right? It's like even though a lot of people use android. It's been shown You know numerically, right that yeah You don't really make money selling like a game in the android Give google play store as much as you make money selling it on the apple store Yeah, it's like you sort of if you want to make money selling mobile apps It's like yeah the apple app store is where people pay for things the google play store not so much Yeah, and that also has the side looting thing going on there too, right? There's no but is any amount of money Acceptable for the owner of the marketplace to extract from the system for the purpose of providing the marketplace which costs money to provide Right. Oh, I'd say like let's say you get to mark two farmers markets in town Right and in one of them all the farmers make bank for some reason that has all the customers Right that pay the other one has a lot of foot traffic But for some reason no one buys anything there Yeah, right or very little and it's like They go to the big farmers market starts to crack down and do evil shit And they're like we don't have a monopoly look at that other farmers market and the farmers like we don't make any money in that market Yep, but there's also the problem of do the users Care or not most people who don't play fortnight don't give a shit Well for fortnight for now, but there's a lot there's a lot going on, right? Oh, yeah But I'm saying that I did I think it'll be very difficult for Anyone to win against apple in the end. It's just I mean, yeah, it's just an angle, right? That has not been discussed, right? It's like, you know, I'm just throwing on my armchair analysis It's not like I have special knowledge here I'm just saying it seems like, you know, it seems like they're wedging out the payment processors, right? You gotta use apple pay you can't use anything else I think that's a side effect like they don't care about the payment processors Their only goal is if your thing is in our store, we want to cut of anything you do Well, I think what apple actually believes is that, you know, is actually what they say Apple is they they're very good at saying what they believe, right? So they say it's like, yeah We want you to use apple pay because it's more secure. It's safer. It's a better experience for the customer, right? And all those things are kind of true, right? And that's why they don't want, you know paypal in the app store or whatever because it's like, yeah There's some shenanigans suddenly apple customers getting screwed over because something paypal did, right? They don't want that, right? But the side effect is you may or may not sort of be anti trusting out those competitors who aren't But if that were a real argument, they would just let you use any payment processor But they the rule is you still have to pay apple 30% of any transactions that happen in their store But then you could just hide the transactions from apple But hiding the transactions is how apple will then say you violated our rules and kick you out and probably win They know you hit them you hit them By going if someone could download the app and try it out if I pay money I'm saying technologically if I paid a paypal you got an app. I buy coins in your app Yep, so I go to the app paypal apple has no way to know how much money I gave you or that I even gave you money But that was part of my terms of service. You got to pay me 30% of all those transactions or I kick you out Everyone lies and pays you nothing. Yeah, then they kick them all out. That's what would happen That's how that works in the real world. How would they know you just say everyone would just say No one paid me Scott you in situations like this Usually what happens is the company that suspects the problem will approach the companies that are the biggest likely offenders Demand an audit and if they don't comply kick them out of their marketplace pretty sure apple would rather You know, it's a big difference between apple having to do that Also, all apple would have to do is have an employee try the app and say oh look I can buy stuff through paypal here And if I do that I will buy something now. Oh look that company did not give us a 30 percent The point is apple having to do that to every single app and the billions the zillions of apps in the app store And audit all of them versus automatically collecting 30 percent without having to do anything Right, I guess is apple obligated to create an in-app purchase ecosystem or not They could just say no in-app purchases. Fuck you And they could they could say no app on the app store is allowed to have in-app purchases Then they themselves would lose a shit ton of money because yeah Everyone would lose money. Yeah, because really is most people don't actually buy or install many apps It's not just the in-app purchases. It's also you buy a ten dollar app seven dollars goes to the developer three dollars goes to apple Yeah And even if the app has no in-app purchases after the initial ten dollar But the other thing is what if here's a hypothetical What if without taking a significant chunk of all the in-app purchases the app store itself is infeasible Won't make enough money And the the way for them to make money would just be to scale it back Do less reviews of products let less things in just make it shittier Like there's a lot of negative outcomes for everyone involved that could happen here Just have a different model for it that makes sense Like hey, you want to list an app in the app store if the app collects Is a free because already if you have a free app, right? They all you have to do is pay to be an apple developer And then you can put your free all many free apps as you want, right? But most people only make free apps because they want to have in-app purchases Most apps in the app store are free, which is what apple also says But if anyone makes an app that is not free in any way, right Then you have to pay apple a flat fee to list the app the listing fee I don't think that would make enough money for apple to even bother continuing with the marketplace The app stores exist to sell they didn't even have the app store on the first iphone The existence of the app store makes apple its money via making people want to buy an iphone It's not actually clear. We don't have data to show if that is true The fact that they make the 30% is actually it's a cart following the horse situation Oh, but I would argue that that 30 that that 30% is probably critical and was probably though I don't know part of their business plan all along. No, no, no. I'm pretty it feels to me I mean, I was there I was there alive at that time If that was a very different market too, yeah apple definitely I felt like at the beginning Caved in and made allowed the native apps by third-party developers, which they didn't want to do originally They allowed it You know with the intention that aha this will make people want to buy iPhones Right the and the app store is just a way to get people to buy, you know to make You know the phone desirable and then it's like oh, actually we're not making money on selling phones People are just keeping their phones for a long time not upgrading them so much We'll make our money on that. Oh, but the app store like how much money it's making. All right Well, that's where the money is I guess. Yeah, but here's there's sort of the final the real problem is still capitalism in that Many things always capital is but I'm saying many things like this Often what can happen in a market is the rent seekers Are actually using that rent to provide the service or to make it worthwhile to the people that own that company to bother Providing the service collecting plenty of extra rent. They could easily Charge way less rent. Ah, but if that would make them less profits, why bother? Why not just shut it all down like there's there might be a better one Because you're at least pretending to be less evil than the competitors. Ah, but fiduciary duty you are beholden to your shareholders To do the right thing for them not for society You already have the most valuable stock there is I think you're doing well, right? Yep, but I'm just saying there's uh, there are many things that if you strip away the monetization that late capitalism has Sort of thrust into those markets those products would just disappear entirely by that logic by that logic Why doesn't an apple shareholder complain and say hey While you should be charging 50% not 30. Uh, they do all the times shareholders Oftentimes activist shareholders will try to buy enough shares to force a company to be even more evil That is the thing that happens So if they don't have to listen to those even more evil shareholders, they only don't have to listen to those more evil shareholders because Smarter institutional investors hold on to enough of the stock to have enough of a majority Is that if you can fend off a guy who says you should be charging 50 instead of 30 Then you can fend off a guy who says you should be charging 30 instead of 10 Maybe not because sometimes like if the profits aren't high enough You can ask a judge to charge to determine the correct number you should be charging Assuming that what you're doing is legal in the first place Now what it comes down to more is that the company could just redirect strategically entirely If something is not worth the hassle to maintain a high squeeze rate of the profits from that area Also a lot of things like here's a good example facebook sucks facebook is evil facebook probably harmed america And the world in irreparable ways and facebook should be destroyed. However Nothing else Has the access that facebook has especially in local hyper local even rural communities So a lot of like left-wing activists organized on facebook because without that tool There is no other way to reach a certain subset of the population they need to reach What do you do about that when the thing that is like it because it's it's an essential tool Ah, but there's a there gets you from thorny your problem If you have the national social network that could also get real bad in a hurry for a whole different set of reasons That's uh, you know, that's the old uh, that's what you know, right wing people say Oh, if the government owns it, then it's not free the the if the government owns the printing press They will print you know, but would you trust our current government with would you trust our current government with the social network? Uh No, yeah hence The point is like twitter twitter is irreplaceable and twitter also needs to be replaced because it's dangerous and broken There's no way to make a competitor to it in capitalism that could possibly succeed In fact twitter itself can't succeed What you're gonna do so in some other news, this is a very One more news we can skip some of the other light ones, but this one Is very tech news This everyone kept talking to me about this is a very rim news This chrome feature and the dns thing Okay, I don't think we actually talked about this on the show We didn't talk about this I know about this there is a thing that isps do that is evil and I think should be made illegal Where the dns server they give you if you're not a smart tech person who knows how to avoid this If you type if you mistype a url They'll take you to some other site They'll give you a dns result to that anyway that takes you to some spam site Right, so you type into your browser Dot com which doesn't exist no one's registered that domain or pointed it anywhere And what you should get as a response from the dns server system, right is no such domain nx, right? But there's rules this this system is a hierarchy it works this way for a reason you're supposed to get an nx Which is yeah, you type in a non-existent domain. It does not register in the dns system But instead your isp will send you an ip address and say a Here's the i or c name or whatever Here's the address of that of that domain root of dot com and you end up at a website that is run by Verizon or who knows who usually it has some ads on it Right usually it's got ads and search results or stuff and that your isp is making money on that and tracking you And learning about you and such and such and they should not be allowed to do that Yep, so chrome chromium had a pretty good feature where cleverly It's a it's a way to detect if the environment you're in is doing there's a lot more details I'm going to skip because this is a news and I don't want to go deep There's a whole bunch of stuff about corporate domains and private dns that I'm just going to skip but basically What it does is it'll make up three random domains with like random top level domains like Right almost guaranteed that none of them will be real and registered so that when it looks for them It should see nx's right? Yep, and if it happens to accidentally pick a real one the odds of there being like, you know more than two out of three Uh, not nx coming back with like a specific ip address. Not likely not likely So that way they can find out if you're you turn out you open your chrome browser And it's like, aha, they know immediately if your isp is shady or not and can act accordingly So that'll actually work pretty well to detect if you are like using a hijacky shitty dns Like pretty good way and then the browser can change its behavior when you make a typo or type something that probably isn't a domain name Into your like url bar because the world decided that search and urls are basically the same thing now. Welcome to the your 2020 There's I have thoughts about that but that are nuance that are beyond the scope of the show But I I lament the fact that dns is not the strict tree hierarchy that it used to be so the problem is those requests If the if the isp is not doing something evil will basically go all the way up to the top of dns And end up asking the official hard coded. There aren't that many of them root servers of dns Hey, what the fuck is this top level domain? Yep, and since this feature was launched Uh chromium's basically been ddos-ing the root of the entire dns system There's good graphs here This kind of thing happens kind of often because people who come up with a very clever feature Don't fully understand the ramifications of how that feature will interact with Existing structures on the internet like dns or ntp It's just if you write code for something like chromium and it gets deployed You have to realize your code is running on an enormous number of computers around the world, right? So things that don't matter or work perfectly in your local test, right your test framework everything works great You do you do not there's no way for you to test the ramifications of your code running on You know every windows pc. Yeah, or most of them And uh, that's something that people who write code actually really need to think about But usually the person writing any particular piece of code Doesn't necessarily have that broad and classical understanding of all the possible ramifications And the people deciding about the features may not like they may assume that the engineers will work these things out There's not a good way to handle this, right? You're also only thinking about You know your computers whatever you're working on right my you know when I code at work I'm thinking about our work computers and I'm thinking about our users and their computers Right if there's some side effect for computers far away somewhere else I'm not thinking about those too much if I'm not directly interacting with them But code on a computer somewhere could affect code on computers everywhere And all the software of the world is not just one monolith that is written by one person But I would say the real solution to this problem like the only reason chromium even added a feature like this is to try to get around a real problem of People's dns servers hijacking things they type in to serve them ads or otherwise spy on them That really there is no technological solution to that problem short of nationalizing dns I think there is a solution to that problem. Um, I think the solution should I think regulation is the solution Well, that is one solution I think the operating system should do something about it right the operating systems, you know osx and windows Right, there's no reason that they couldn't just not when they do ghcp, right? They could A right they could collect right figure out which isps are good and bad They could figure out when you install the osx or turn the computer on they can figure out Which I don't ever goes down a lot of the same paths that the solution we just talked about goes down That is a clever solution at scale that may have unforeseen consequences But it won't it won't be pinging random things. They'll just build pretty quickly a database of which isps are good or bad You know look at what by gathering data on what url's people are typing in on their like operating system level That would people would not be cool with that They just look at your dhcp and then they would say okay these you know How do they know which I which which dns servers are bad? Especially if these are all 10 dots inside of isp private networks You just type if you just type like ip config on a windows computer you can just see which isp you have right? It's like oh, it's routing through. Yeah, I don't want windows making decisions I do not want my operating system making decisions based on the information I have configured in my network settings No, not something that you if you configure something in your network settings, but I configured dhcp Use the dns server. I pointed to that don't ask questions the default dhcp No, if you put if you type in a dns server, that's what you're using right I'm saying 99 of people who don't type in anything they just turn their computer on and don't touch the networking settings at all I'm saying you should still the operating system should still be obligated to trust whatever dns ever comes back in that dhcp request I'm saying it should only do that if you tell it to or if you're not on one of the if you're on Some sort of you know public isp windows should never care what isp i'm on that is a bad solution to this problem If you're on spectrum or fios or something and it's a known evil isp It should switch your dns server to be like microsoft's dns server Yeah, that that would lead to an antitrust microsoft is hijacking your dns request to their own private servers Microsoft sends you to google's dns server. It's not antitrust. They're sending you to someone else just someone that they trust Yeah, who that that that is a terrible idea Great idea That that idea is very similar to the idea chromium has That that is putting the logic to solve a problem Way too low in the stack and making a lot of assumptions for something that's going to be deployed at scale It's not going to make a zillion dns requests that are unnecessary I can imagine a lot of unforeseen consequences of that. I can imagine a lot of difficult to troubleshoot problems I can imagine a lot of corporate networks failing in novel ways I don't think a corporate network wouldn't have one of those i want to use my isp's dns I don't care about the hijacking don't decide for me. Don't don't send my request to google. I don't trust google Too bad if you're if your only argument is the one that's in favor of the evil thing We're trying to eliminate no i'm saying the operating systems network stack should be pure and specific Don't overload your bullshit business logic into it The network stack should not look at the isp you connected to and make a judgment about whether or not to Overwrite the dns setting that came back in a dhcp packet I think it should I think that is a terrible idea. And I think the right solution to this is a great idea It's much better than the chromium idea. Actually. I think the chromium one is a better solution because that's a piece of software It's not the operating system gotta make all kinds of requests, right in nonsense. Yes, but it doesn't mess with your network stack settings What you propose will just lead to a lot of difficult to troubleshoot problems It's actually would actually solve more problems because how many problems in non browsers are caused by having shitty dns That sends you to weird things on bad domains. Now all your other apps would suddenly have good dns operating system wide Yeah, I'd still think is that of only chromium having good dns Yeah, the problem is too. I don't want anyone To change what the network stack of the computer is they should You're changing you are a person who's going to type in your own dns service. Yes, but you don't assume what the other people want Yes, yeah, I if they're I am only assuming that if you're some customer Who's on the spectrum and you've never changed your network settings I don't want windows to make any decision based on what isp connected to but you know what it's better for a vast majority of people Actually, probably not most people are probably fine with those spam things because those spam things usually don't know better You'd be helping them out Yeah, I don't want to I don't want a low level systems to solve higher order problems That is a recipe for disaster It's not a low answer solving it on the problem on the level that it is If you want to frame it that way that's There's that your isp is setting your dns ip the ip address of your dns server to a bad dns server We're going to send it to a good one. We're solving the problem right at the spot where it's caused I think a better solution would just be to have a law saying that dns servers that are used in public in public isps Cannot return results that are not I don't think you're gonna You're not gonna get a lot of that law ever Uh, I mean, we're not gonna that law is more feasible than anything you proposed Like if you if you propose what you just said to microsoft you'd be left out of the room I don't think so. I think so they might be like, oh, I think that would be a terrible idea google liked it Google well though google is trying to get you to use their dns servers. They can collect a shit ton of data from you Actually, I don't know if the google public dns actually collects You think it doesn't it doesn't collect users specific data I think no, but it collects what your products what URLs are being queried. That's a huge amount of information Looking like who is which you are domains are the most queried and stuff like that Yep, it also does have enough metadata like there's enough metadata there to figure out who's doing what pretty easily If they wanted to yeah, yeah What are you gonna use open dns? That's all that's broken in a different in a different worst way I guess my my thinking is dns and dhcp should be sacrosanct relatively straightforward specifications That make those assumptions If people are using a non sarcosanct dns force them to use a sarcosanct one No, because google is not a sacrosanct one google has got a lot of problems google has a lot of weird stuff Here's the way you could do it You could effectively make a a list of known dns servers that are evil and just block them all and be like Not a lot right and then most people's windows boxes just wouldn't work and they wouldn't know why No, because they would say hey, you know your isp's dns server is on a A list of banned dns servers that behaves improperly Yeah, I remember netflix tried the hey your isp sucks complain about it and how that didn't solve any problems and just confused people Yeah, i'm just saying yeah, if you're if you're so uh, you know picky, right? I'm just saying as a general piece of advice don't try to solve high-order problems in low Level systems that is usually the wrong decision I'm solving the problem where it is. It's a problem of your dns server ip address being set to a shitty one I'm going to set it to a good one. Okay. Anyway, the last thing we're not going to talk about this in depth But here's a little piece of news uh Don't buy elan musk's brain implant and put it in your brain People want to people are people are into this Fuck puppet accounts or people that elan musk give drugs to I think there are people who want this and I All I will say you don't need to watch black mirror to figure this out Solving problems brain Brain interfaces should not be used until there are not mega corpse making them pretty much Until I can you know put together my own brain implant in my house Like I way I put together a pc in my house Yeah, right until you have a cyberpunk shop shop down in the corner next to the digital tattoo shop Zero I see you through anything Right Don't go and get at any Like I always said and I'm not going to get brain implant 1.0. I'll probably get 2.0 or maybe even 3.0 But if elan musk is making the brain implant, I'm not getting a million point. Oh, I'm not getting 2 million I mean All right, but anyway things of the day so What was my thing of the day, uh, I'll do mine first. So this is a pretty cool article I'm not It is plausible, but I'm not going to say that it's true But it may like it made the rounds news was talking about it It's an interesting story But it's basically the story it was published recently of someone who claims to have worked at apple And in the course of working for them helped Probably the cia Make special iPods that had Hardware and software in them that could collect and hide data But appeared from all outward investigation to be a normal iPod Right. Well, what the actual story is more like people from the the government, right? The the DOE which is already like that's nuclear stuff apple didn't give permission for this They probably wouldn't have ever right these people basically snuck into getting jobs at apple Developed it while working at apple and then disappeared Yeah, but we're told like there was like you read the story like I'm not going to read this story to you But it basically tells the story of how this thing supposedly went down And there's a lot of plausible stuff in here and it's an interesting fascinating story Obviously can't prove that true or false, right? There's no way to do that, right? Apple can't even prove it true or false probably right, but it seems true Ish enough right to at least be worth, uh mentioning It's a yep, and it's also like in terms of the details like worst case It's just a really good story But the details are tracking with what I Like just based on my own professional experience what I would Need in a product like that Like how would you do it? Like the details are pretty specific So whoever wrote the story even if it's false put a lot of thought into What would such a device actually need to be like in the real world? Yep It's basically like either if like if it's if it's true that it's true if it's not true Someone did so much work writing this to make it, you know So as as you know believable and plausible as possible and that itself is worthy of giving them a read Yep The only thing I don't think is plausible is the the article speculates about what they were trying to spy on And I don't think it was a geiger counter Like I can think of a lot of other sigin type things that someone would want to do with a device like that To smuggle data in and out of a place possibly from sensors Geiger counter, I think there were better ways to handle that but who knows I'm sure it's like I'm sure the government already had plenty of you know, tiny hidden geiger counter things That you wouldn't need an ipod one, but remember the key to an ipod is whatever it is Hide in plain sight with a device that can be inspected pretty thoroughly and still not return anything like any like Deviant result that would require further investigation You find some yep. It's an ipod Yep, like and if I hide a tiny like micro micro sd card Somewhere on my body. There are a lot of ways someone could find that But if someone finds my ipod because I handed it to them. That's a very different situation Yep, anyway, so my thing of the day is this little cute website lord of the manner dot i o And it's a little tiny sim city ish kind of game right you Collect some resources by building like you build like a little forest hut And the then it starts chopping the wood in the nearby area Then you get wood then you can use the will to build the woods to build other buildings Right, etc. The only buildings you can't build are the residential buildings that house your population They just sort of appear naturally as your you know domain Increases in quality, you know houses will appear and upgrade and it's just a cute little sim game It's not like the greatest game. It's not going to occupy you for a long time Right, but it's thing of the day because look someone made this in a browser It runs in your browser and it's like it's this nice. They're still working on it It's it's super speedy and responsive and it's like it could have been like a desktop app You wouldn't even know it's like wow you did this in the in the web. It's like that's pretty freaking impressive. Wow. Uh, good job um I played it only took me like hardly any time to upgrade everything to the max and get a huge pile of gold and jewelry and Pretty much every resource available um So, you know, it's not gonna occupy your Time too much. It's got a pretty good interface. I'm poking at it right now Yeah, it's a really good ui considering you know what it is You know what it does. You know what makes me really pleased with this I can zoom out to an appropriate level so many games. Don't let me zoom out far enough I'm saying like you zoom in and zoom out with the scroll wheel super smooth Yeah, it's it's pretty pretty damn good gives you some, you know, euro board game kind of feels a little bit, right? Um, but I think mostly it's just kind of inspiring. It's like, yeah, you know, imagine taking the async Uh, web sockets technology of like a jackbox or an atl 18 xx dot games and combining it with this kind of ui That's the kind of game that you can make on the web right now. Not too it's not too much difficulty Uh, you should try it. Yeah In the meta moment, uh, as we've said, we'll be live on september 4th coming up real soon at the country roll expo With joe j anime by its cover and also pretty soon after that That's in friday september 18th. Where is the finish line brand new lecture for our packs? We got some magfest stuff. We're working on uh, we might be making our first ever appearance at mag west because It's all virtual. We don't have to go we don't have to go there. Yeah, if there's any conventions far away Like magwest that we normally wouldn't go to ever because it's too far or not worth it. We can go there now. So Yeah, so stay tuned on all that Otherwise like type geek nights into google and find our stuff and hang out in our discord and watch our live streams And we got videos. We got stuff. We're streaming. We're hanging out We're doing things during the quarantine and as winter comes We got to do more and more stuff indoors and we might be making more and more content because what else are we gonna do Yep, uh, yeah, and I might uh, maybe we should read the book club book tale again. She at some point Yep, um, I'm trying to figure out at what point would I have enough free time to read books because without commutes I read some comic books yesterday But like we keep saying without a commute like I don't have a lot of time to read because I keep saying this because I think it's important for people who internalize The core the covid crisis does not mean you have to be like more productive in your hobbies or your pursuits Most people don't actually have any more free time now. They're just Restricted previous pandemics were during the flu epidemic to the people who survived and didn't get the flu Did they suddenly do a whole bunch of great stuff because they were at home all the time Yeah, do un-do unemployed people have a lot of productivity. No, I can tell you the last time I was unemployed Uh, I remember you you you went from zero to a hundred miles an hour at find new job Yeah, you put like every waking hour into finding a better job Not every waking hour, but I definitely you put in like a work week worth of finding a better job Yeah, I tried to stream like, you know some use stream maybe like once or twice Something in those days because that's the time it was right. It was a different time. You understand Like the mid few thousands I was unemployed for like a few weeks. Yeah, it was just like Some people are like well, I'm gonna do a whole I'm gonna while I'm sitting here and I'm not looking for a job I'm gonna do all kinds of shit. I did only a little bit of shit about as much as the little bit of shit I'm doing now, right? So That's you know, if you're doing a little bit of extra shit, that's good enough That's what you're gonna do. Yep. Like I'm spending a lot of time Like I decided I'm gonna try to get like way ripped like I'm working out a lot But that takes away time from all the other things I could be doing I don't have more free time So just do not fall for the illusion of free time during this You don't actually have more free time. You just have less options to spend that free time Uh, so we actually talked for almost an hour already And the listener actually just pointed out another classic This is like an old school geek nights Rimm and Scott argue through the news for 45 minutes and then are too hungry to do the main bit Is that what this show is because talk about some biometric of some kind So we don't we'll let's do the highest level of like What are biometrics and like the ramifications of that people talk about biometrics? They're usually talking about biometric authentication, which is stuff like fingerprint sensor You know apple face id some sort of system where you're using your iris detector in a movie But those exist kind of um You know where you're trying to prove who you are to your computer to log in or prove who you are to the Computers that it opens the doors and go in the office. Yeah, and that is one use of biometrics as one of many credentials As only biometric authentication, right biometrics as a whole is simply measuring human biology with computers right biometrics Yeah, your your heart rate sensor that you use the Fitbit. That's biometrics, right? In fact, the Wikipedia right here for the application of statistics to biology see bio statistics Yeah, if you got some like divide, uh a breathalyzer test wait, what the fuck for the fraudulently marketed thigh contour treatment see Peter foster It's some scam probably. I guess there's a scam that was called biometrics or something. Anyway, probably um, you know, uh, you could consider Uh, like a baseball, you know a speed gun used to track a baseball sort of biometric It's it's one step removed like it's an order like it's but it's capturing a holistic metric of a biological action Or a biological system At Usain Bolt while he's running and doesn't have when he gets hopefully better from kofi Then that would be a biometric, right? Yeah so biometrics like I guess they are A very powerful tool like way more powerful than you might realize even if you're already afraid of like facial tracking Like the power here is immense the danger here is immense But also the capabilities to better mankind are immense This is a field that needs a lot of care and judgment and thought and guidance and ethics Yep, it's like, okay. We can measure Hopefully most things about the human body. You can be completely measured and quantized in you know, many many If not all aspects, right? Well, that's great for your health if you have a doctor who acts in good faith Uh, because now we can figure out exactly what's wrong with you and fix it to the best of our ability What if your doctor acts in bad faith to try to scam you or harm you in some way? What if your doctor is acting in good faith? But let's say the technology that underpins american healthcare is shitty and all that biometric data gets stolen By someone who isn't your doctor even though your doctor is using it to help you That data could be used by a third party to harm you immensely Yep, uh, it's like, you know, it's you know, we talk about biometric authentication is being the one that gets the most attention, right? But it's like, yeah, it's like sometimes you want to prove exactly who you are And sometimes you don't want anyone to know who you are But your biology is the one thing that you cannot yet escape, right? So if there is biometric authentication Uh, someone who has access to it can always prove who you are even in cases where you don't want anyone to prove who you are And if the data is somehow messed up or the system is faulty It may become difficult or impossible to prove who you are when you want to prove who you are here are I have two examples. So one I worked as you know a long time ago. It look god. That was a long time ago I did project management and it for hospitals So I had to wash my hands and then turn the page a lot I washed my fingerprints off over time because of the chemicals I was using something that Happens to nurses often. So I didn't have fingerprints so the biometric systems that I used as part of the security infrastructure I interacted with either Would not work because I did not have something that would recognize as a fingerprint in their system or Recognized a fingerprint that was so generic that fucking any finger would open it if I was using my own system Oh, yeah, it's like, you know, they register some doctor who's rubbed his fingerprints off He registers with a blank fingerprint now all the blank fingerprint people can get in Yep, that's why while in the movies you often see single factor biometric authentication. Here's the two real dangers of that one What if someone steals that by like pulling your eye out like a spy and holding it in front of a camera That's already happens in every cyberpunk story. Yeah, but that's a real fair I have seen proofs of concept of sham eyes for retina scanners sham fingerprints Sham everything if you don't even need to steal you don't need to cut someone's finger off necessarily Just get their fingerprint and make a mold make it out of capacitive material that will feel like a finger Put a little warmer in it like once someone has the data that Comprises your biometric they have your biometric and can prove with that factor that they are you So let's you want to get really fun, right? Okay hypothetical distant future, right? We have something that's the equivalent of a camera for the super zoom lens And any when you aim it at you can get their full DNA sequence, right every single pair on the whole thing not just like, you know, right Like the full fucking thing you could and then you can make you print out a clone body. It's so precise I print out DNA evidence to obscure the crime. I just committed and pin it on someone else Right, uh, you know all kinds of crazy shit come on down that right so in authentication biometrics Must always be one of several factors though. I hear the patents out there I get a point out right now as long as humans remain biological technically in a pedantic and meaningless sense passwords Are biometrics because you they're physically stored in your brain and theoretically could be retrieved There's an engram in your brain somewhere that has your password in it There's a famous old Superman TV like episode I remember where someone is there's hostages and they're tied up and there's a donkey that can read minds Let's not worry about why there's a donkey that can read minds. It's Superman. We know this stuff Yep and basically the One of the three people knows the past like the combination was safe But you can't let them open the safe because there's like kryptonite in it and they're going to use it to kill Superman Like this whole plot. So basically the criminal brings in the donkey And they're like, I'll never say the password I'll never say the name of the like the combination and he's just like, all right Don't think about the combination to the safe and whatever what you do Don't think that number and then the donkey is just like 13 23 13 and they got the combination well Fuck you donkey. Yep But in terms of like forget authentication like the other I did a recent one This is something that happens to me today and this is one of this is not the like far future Security problem or even the near future security problem. It's more the It makes security more annoying for me So I work for a fancy company where I have to use three factor authentication to get into anything So I've got a physical device That I need to have on me to be able to get in that device has a fingerprint scanner on it It also has a sensor so it can basically detect light with a little camera on it It does a lot of stuff But one of the things I do with it is I have to scan my fingerprint to turn it on And once it's on to get into certain systems I have to hold it up to my screen and that system after I enter my username and my password Flashes timecode data that this device will then use with random seeds to generate a t o t p code And I need to use all those things to log into a system If I take a shower And I don't wait about an hour before I try to log in my fingers a little swollen up like from the water I can't fingerprint. It just doesn't fucking work can't log into anything So I just all right when I wake up in the morning I Log into the systems lock everything then I go take a shower then I get to work I just wrote a fictional story, right? So you go so it's indiana jones, right? And he's uh, obviously indiana jones knows something, right? He doesn't want the nazis to know yeah, so he's what he's but he's got to get past the nazis So what he did is he recruited a bunch of people to dress up like indiana jones And that way the nazis are going to catch a bunch of fake indiana jones And the real indiana jones is going to make it past all the nazis and deliver whatever, right? Good plan. Okay, so uh It's in a perfect sort of future Right, so the cost the indiana jones clone people, right? They'll have the same faces indiana jones so they get past the facial recognition system. They fool that, right? It's uh, You know the let's see. How else do they well? There's two ways to go This could go they all think they're indiana jones and they all try to steal the thing Oh possibly but the point of the story, right is like, you know, uh, so they they capture some indiana jones They want to figure out which one's the real one, right? It's like something as simple as something that even exists today forget for our future, right? Let's say the nazis have the the fitbit database and they know everyone's like heart rate zones Yeah, they they take some guns. They point them at the end of jones's and they make them run on treadmills And they say who can who runs like indiana jones? Yep It's like oh or you know I've seen systems where it would ask you and your friends to type a bunch of stuff and then If any of you type anything it's pretty accurate at telling who typed it just based on the natural kings Yeah, you're walking you rim could put on the the best lupin the third costume in the world Or lupin could put on the best lupin the third costume in the world And you just see by the way he walks. Oh, that's rim. Yep. It's you know, it's funny. I have an anecdote Not fake it either. There's nothing you could do the way I move my hands and the way my head Like bobs as I walk has caused numerous people to recognize me in vr before I introduced myself like oh, there's rim This has literally happened to me Yeah But let's forget about credentials here the other way this goes biometrics also data about you facial recognition Now listen old gig nights We talked a lot about like powerful cool things you could do with facial recognition like the killer app for google glass And of course, they're obvious as we're about to talk about dangers of this But if we forget the dangers first, here's the cool app. I always have a camera on I got software If I meet a piece of shit person like I meet a nazi I meet a republican I meet like some incel like dangerous person someone who's annoying and harassing people I want to be able to flag them like that person's annoying So that my close personal friends if they ever encounter that person their camera will pop up a warning and say Hey rim said this person's a piece of shit Cool cool feature also have the opposite thing right some shitty dudes coming up to you on the street normally run Don't talk do not engage. Maybe it says rim verified this person is cool person And I'm like, huh, maybe All right, I'll be like, oh, I know it was a listener and they just happened to recognize me and I was going to run away Yeah, thanks to thanks to this system that is not being used in an evil way Uh, you know, I was able to get a slightly more interesting morning by meeting a listener Yep Now cool like that that would be an awesome thing being able to share The information about dangerous people with my close friend network so that they could avoid situations like harassment at conventions That's a killer app. However, that exact same technology Is like You want to have super stalkers? That is how you have super stalkers. That is like you could track someone to the ends of the earth with that technology Yep Because people can't some guys some piece of shit guy also buys it is walking down the street Right looking at people and he sees someone and it's like, you know, his piece of shit friend labeled someone as an easy mark That sjw from twitter that crap Right and goes over and he starts something with someone else with someone he would have otherwise ignored You know, all these fascist groups would enable everyone with here are the biometrics of people We are targeting if you see them, you'll know those are the people to target like that's kind of already happening And this would accelerate that I don't know what to do about facial recognition Yeah, we haven't even begun to discuss the fact that, you know, any of these systems that depend upon machine learning Have been trained with, you know, basically racist data sets or, you know, biometric models To predict behavior or do other things are trained by data that will just institutionalize in code the same institutional racism sexism and other problems that already exist in the systems they're modeling It's like even if you were to train the data sets on, you know, a good proportion of data from across the board Right so that it would be equally good at detecting black faces and white faces and Chinese faces and, you know Iranian faces and whatever kind of faces Right and it is equally good at detecting male and female faces and child faces and senior faces and all right And if you removed somehow got a data set so large That it removed all discrimination and it was equally good at, you know, doing things Uh, suddenly that data set is so big that it's dangerous Yep, because that data set could be used to find trends and those trends could be used to target Individuals or groups of people who would be vulnerable to certain kinds of manipulation or attack Kind of like what happened in the 2016 election But on the tiniest scale compared to what's coming and the problem is facial recognition technology is Incredibly advanced already the killer apps we talk about only aren't made in public because For the most part people have recognized that they would be abused and misused to such a degree that the public can't be trusted with it I could not think of any like public people who would with facial any facial recognition apps Right that other than the one that people use which is sort your photo collection on your computer Yep, but like think my old gx1 camera like it can't even output video on its own hdmi port Yet it has a library in it. Uh, I haven't updated in a long time I I took pictures of all our friends like years and years ago with this dumb camera and I put names next to all of them It flags every picture with oh, that's scott. That's emily. That's all these people I could take that cat. It's not you're not accessing a date the database. It's not the I made my own database All right, you made your own database, which is fine because it's going to be small Only for you not very harmful, right? Not being merged with the databases of all faces everywhere, right? It's just for your personal use, right? It's like what what harm is there in rim sorting is photos or having a camera autofocus, but that's my data I could share it What if I drag a photo of someone I take into a reverse image search find other photos of that person and then use that to stock That already happens. You could just do that with a camera that doesn't even have Yep, I'm saying that already happens. The technology is already out there, but we're not controlling it and we're not Like handling it and the technology is getting so advanced that it's asymmetric Governments and mega corporations have access to advanced facial recognition technology That I do not have parity to use to counter the effects. They might have with it Yeah, but I mean it's like I was saying though. It's the it's not actually The detection technology of saying, oh, that's a human face, right? That's the most dangerous It's simply the large database is the most dangerous, right? If you don't have the large databases Then all the other things are real. It's like, oh, I have a machine that can read fingerprints. Yes So does everybody they're really cheap. You can just buy one But even without the large database I have a database of all fingerprints. Uh-oh Uh-oh Like you use a zoom lens to get good photos of one person you're making a database of one What are the by facial biometrics of one person? But then you see that now with the database of biometric data you compare that against a database of cameras all over the world dumb cameras video footage Troll all of youtube looking for where does that face appear? The biometric data itself is not even the primary danger It's the database of data that you could overlay that biometric information on to ask that data questions That could not be asked of it previously at a scale that no human had ever imagined when the technology was developed You could also learn things like you know say like you're an employer And you're collecting whatever biometric data you can on your employees and then you find out oh this employee has uh cancer Yeah, maybe they don't even know I Got to use a ring fit adventure or fitbit. That's collecting a ton of biometrics I don't think it's sending it to nintendo. No, but it can collect data And and sometimes SD card and your switch nintendo could collect it. I guess the most difficult thing is that It's not always obvious what data could be used for something in the future like it's not obvious to a lay person What kind of data is useful or not useful dangerous or not dangerous? All of it. Yeah, but like look at the difference a photo of your face extremely useful extremely dangerous Trivial to obtain cannot be controlled But heart rate data could be controlled But many people give that data away to a bunch of different sites like I give my heart rate data away to strava I just get I just use it like strava has all my heart rate data Yeah, I'm taking a risk there theoretically. I don't plan to use heart rate biometrics anytime soon, but someone else might use it against me But the real problem is these biometrics can't be changed. I might use it for you right to help fitness. Yeah What if here's a Yeah, what if somehow the government uses all this data They passed a law they passed all this data And they privately reached out to the four million americans who have a rare heart condition that was detected by ring fit Five in the year 2040 that would be an objective boom to society But at the same time Yep, but can we trust mega corporations or our current governments with that power? That's the same evil apple we talked about in the first hour of the show The same evil apple that did that thing is also trying to solve heart disease So I guess because now I am hungry. We've gone on over an hour If you don't if you don't know a lot about biometrics what I'd actually recommend Read the wikipedia page. We're linking to it's not long It's at the right level like I've been skimming it like this is at a level that you would understand Are you saying that this whole episode of geek nights was you reading wikipedia? Are you saying the geek nights? It's you guys reading wikipedia who don't actually know anything I mean, I do the live stream people can usually see what I'm looking at while I'm talking Sometimes the listener will see me type in the name of a movie We should just change geek nights to read wikipedia nights We pick a random wikipedia page and read it out loud to you Actually, the wikipedia goes way deeper than we went. We were mostly talking about That might be a useful for people who can't see Yeah, did you see here? Here's something to end on total aside Did you see that dude who has been filling the scots wikipedia with made-up articles forever? Uh, I read something about I read that like There's scots wikipedia. That's it's already supposed to be in the scots dialect I read a headline that said the scots wikipedia has mostly been written by a white guy So it's supposed to be articles written in the scots dialect partly to preserve that dialect and to make it More accessible like there's a lot of reasons why that's a good thing But most of the articles are written by this like american dude Who apparently was just writing articles with a fakie bullshitty scots accent Like uncle scrooge mcdock. Yeah Oh gladi the biometrics watch out. Yep. It's basically like Make a fake accent and just write articles in it and uh Well, you can at least they're all written by the same guy at the same account. Yeah pretty easy to suss that one out All right. I think that was a show