 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan with the New Silicast Podcast, hosted at podfeed.com. A technology feed of 5,000 episodes like Apple Bias. Today is Sunday, April 2nd, 2023, and this is show number 934. Well, Steve and I got to spend a rare weekend with our entire family. Kyle and his family flew in from Texas, and we all converged at Lindsey's house to celebrate her daughter, Sienna's third birthday. I even got to see my brother Grant, so it was a positively perfect weekend. So that's why I'm on my road mic here, but we're still doing the live show, having a good time. And we just had a rare appearance by Forbes, my grandson, during the live show here. With any luck, Sienna will wake up in time for the end of the show to babble senselessly into the microphone, so that's always good. Anyway, but don't worry about the show. We have lots of content for you. We've got two really interesting interviews from the C-Cent Assistive Tech Conference, recorded and edited by Steve. Remember, on these interviews, the audio is great because we record them as though everyone is blind, so you don't have to see what we're seeing, but you can also watch the video version of all of the interviews at the links in the show notes. Barry Fulk is going to be here to tell you why you probably want to come to Mac Stock in July a day early, because of the Midwest Mac barbecue and wine tasting event. The video from the North Wood steps in with a review of a cool app she's been using on her iPad for a really long time, and Bart Bouchard finishes this off with a very tame and mild security bits. I've done a lot of interviews with people who have devices for magnifying things on screen, back from the early days when my mother had a device that did that, but Low Vision International has some tools that work on the device you already own that I thought would be really interesting to talk to Kimberly Klein about at Low Vision International. Thank you very much. We're glad to be here at CSUN. As you mentioned, we do have devices that work for people that have existing devices. We always feel like you've already invested money in something. Let's just add to that. So our latest product is our iPad product, so if you have an iPad already, that's what you need because we actually don't sell iPads. We're just now connecting a distance camera that can do distance document and self-viewing to that. And with iPad, you cannot plug in a camera, so you have to connect via a router so wirelessly. So we've made a box. It's kind of like it's a long rectangular box. Like maybe a one shoe box. Yeah, very good. One shoe box. And you'd have to have a pretty small foot. And inside that box is the router system, and it's also the battery to power our distance camera. So the camera is up on an articulated arm and looking down at a document in front of us. That is exactly right. And you could take the camera and rotate it out forward and open the actual lens to be able to get distance as well. The unique thing about this is a lot of times we have... Oh, it's upside down by the way we're doing it. All of our products can be used. Well, let me just put it back on the stand. Here we go. The iPad keeps being too smart for us. So she's now pointing the camera down at the document. And then what do we see on screen here? We see a document that has several of our products on it. And then within that, just like a regular iPad, you can pinch and zoom. You can change the color. You can change the contrast. If it was like a column and you wanted to do a line marking, you could divide the columns. You also could do OCR. So you could take a picture of it, have it read it to you. And then if you want to own that text, you can then save it to a USB. You could save it as a PDF. You could save it as a WAV file. You could save it as RTF so you could bring it up in almost anything. So again, you're using your existing iPad that you have. You're just connecting to our distance camera. The beauty of it is we sell a lot into schools, not just schools, but into schools, kiddos don't want to look different than anybody else. So this device could set off on the teacher's desk. Other kids wouldn't even need to know they'd have it. Everybody has an iPad in the classroom just like them. Then they can control everything through the software. Oh, hang on. Since it's Wi-Fi, that's why the device can sit on the teacher's desk. That's right. The kid is just sitting there with an iPad like everybody else next to them, but they're seeing it in a different way. They're seeing it how they need to see it, whatever color, whatever size. If they want to plug in a headset, they could even do OCR. With permission from the teacher, they also can take pictures of the board. If someone's doing a presentation with permission of everyone, they can video it so maybe they can come back and gain the information later because they can't take notes fast enough or they just are trying to focus on taking notes so they didn't really hear the presentation. So everything that somebody might need, not just school, but work or even home, a home environment because iPads are so popular and that's why this is our brand new product that works with the iPad. I'm really glad to see this because a lot of stuff I've seen at CSUN has been towards the Android environment because Android lets you do so much more to mutate the environment that Apple doesn't allow but this is a way around it but for the device it's the most popular. But we don't want to leave our Android brethren out, correct? No, absolutely not. We have a company of their humanware and they do Android quite well. But you do Android with this as well, no? No, with this is just the iPad. We do have a Windows solution. That's what it was, it was Windows, yes. So if somebody has a Windows they don't have to use it. We do sell the actual device with this one but if they have their own there's no reason for them to buy another one. So describe what we're looking at here. We are looking at a Surface Pro 8 tablet which is 13 inch screen and all we've done is take this tablet, we've added our software to it and we built a stand. It's totally portable, it's under 9 pounds and you have the ability to add anything. So if you're a ZoomText user or any type of screen reader user, you know, JAWS, Supernova, any of those things you have that ability to put this on here because this is Windows. So if I go out of our software I'm now at the desktop. So you can add anything to it. Part of this stand is this articulated camera. Where's the lens? Because it looked like it was looking at me. Right here and then right there you can go across the room as well. So she's just jumping the lens on it but it's looking at me. I'm very confused. There's three cameras. For example, Windows lets you attach a camera. So it was using the internal camera on the tablet and now it's looking at your camera. And then you also can use the camera underneath. So we have three cameras. We have a downward-facing camera and an upward-facing camera and our camera that's on the articulating arm that can do distance document self-viewing. You have the ability with all of them to do video, take pictures and to do OCR. So our cameras are 10x optical zoom lens cameras. So that means you could be sitting in a classroom pointed aboard 15, 20 feet away zoom in on it. If there's type written you can do OCR from that far away. Oh that is really really cool. There's so much I love about this using the device that you already own number one. But also the cost of the overhead projector sort of things. I don't know what you call that kind of device. But the cost of that big part of that is that it's dated. So maybe you want a higher resolution camera or whatever. Now you can replace the tablet and you're not re-buying everything. Exactly. In fact we've had this product out for about three years and when we first started we were using Surface Pro 5s. Now we're up to eight. So when we got up to eight the stand's a little bigger because it's 13 inch versus 12.3. We had people that said, oh we want to pull our tablet out and move it but Kimberly it's not going to fit. So we built the stand so you can extend it out. Everything new again. You just get the little kit to extend it. We can do it or you can do it. We can walk you through it. Oh that's fantastic. This is really cool. So where would people find more about the oh wait you had one more to show us. So yes. This is you're using our existing camera. So again we believe if someone invested in one of our cameras again they should be able to utilize that. This particular camera is called the Magnolink S. It's similar to the other camera like a very bendable arm that goes up and down. It's a little bit sort of like two hinges. So this product can fold all the way down. I've closed one part of it. I'm now closing the other part. It's 4.2 pounds. It's really cool. So I'm holding this up in my arm that's like a foot and a half long and maybe eight inches wide. It folds up. I'm holding it with one finger. So this is the portable unit and does it still hook up to one of the mini shoeboxes? Yeah. No. You use it. Well you can if you're using it with the iPad because you have to connect wirelessly. But if you're using it for PC or Mac we give you the cable and you just plug right in and power from that. So PC, Mac, Chrome if you're using it with the iPad yes you do need to use the actual power in the router. But PC, Mac and Chrome you just cable it in or you can plug this just into a monitor. You can see the TV right up where you can see it. These are really innovative solutions and that feels like really good hardware design. It's pretty. It's clean. Simple yet elegant is what I would describe it as. It's a really good hardware design. It's pretty. It's clean. Simple yet elegant is what I would describe it as. It's a really good hardware design. Simple yet elegant is what I would describe it as. So if people want to find out more about these devices where would they go? Well you can contact me directly. Everything is hand built in Sweden. We've been making products over in Sweden for 46 years. We weren't always in America. For the last seven years we now have LVI America. I'm Kimberly Klein. I'm the director of sales. I oversee North America. So they can contact me directly at 702-468-6611 www.lvilemavictorindia lviamerica.com Perfect. This is fantastic. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming by. It's a good thing we always record with a live audience because alert listener Mark heard me start playing this next bit you're about to hear and the very beginning I say ever since MacStock was cancelled MacStock was never cancelled. It's Mac world that I met was cancelled and it will make a lot more sense in context if you remember the very first time I say MacStock I mean Macworld. All of the other times hopefully I really am saying MacStock when I mean MacStock. Anyway, let's get to our conversation with Barry Falk. After MacStock was cancelled a lot of us were really sad about the community that we lost and Barry Falk who's a crazy man decided to solve that problem by inviting all Mac people to his house for a barbecue. Barry? This is the crazy person himself Barry. Hey Al, thanks so much for having me on today. Alright, so you actually invited well most importantly you convinced your darling wife Bobby Ann to let you invite all Mac people to your house for a barbecue. Right, so the original thought was I really did miss the Macworld was such a great event and it was always a chance to catch up with the community and it could be anything that you do all to like you hosted some really cool events there as well and I just loved it and with MacStock, I'm sorry, Macworld at the time going on quote hiatus on quote I was like, well I'm missing that and I think it was about two years after the first cancellation it was like I need to do something so you're correct I convinced my wife that I'm like what if I just invited some friends over I figured it'd be local and it was kind of my expectation. That's how you tricked her into it. Yes, exactly because my nefarious plan worked so originally you know it was going to start out that and it was just literally I was going to grill in the backyard have some people over a couple hours and start from there we have a nice little backyard and I thought it'd be fun and I believe the next step is you and I started talking about it I don't remember why specifically maybe I just mentioned it and you were like hey Steve and I will come out like really and you were also generous enough to let me on the show and to talk about it because I really do love the community here and it was one of those things that I always felt that I wanted to give back somehow so you were set to come and then it kind of started snowball because several many of your listeners said hey if Allison and Steve are going and Barry is going to be there well might show up we better be there and it was an amazing amount of traction very quickly because this I want to say it was only within six, seven weeks before the actual event it wasn't like months okay we're just some spontaneous too it shows everybody missed it right exactly and it was amazing so people were reaching out about the event I gave them the details I'm like hey it's going to be in this date come on over the only real stipulation I had is either I know you or you know somebody that knows me I figured that's a safe way of making sure we're at least doing a little bit of vetting and with your audience and I ended up on other shows such as Matt Geekab I think I may have even talked to Ken Ray and a few other people in the casting world and everybody was super supportive it was great letting me come on the show talk about it and it spiraled very quickly in a good way where all of a sudden that 6 to 10 became 20, 30, 50, 80 and I think the final number was just shy of about 125 and I could even be low on that number so imagine if you will a yard full of wonderful people in the Matt community that literally my wife knew nobody other than me so this was a very literal divorce inducing event if things went poorly 8 years later or whatever it is we're still together and we are going to do it again that is super exciting so lots have changed in terms of my world I'm actually now based out of San Francisco I'm not even in Chicago but we still have the house there so and talking to you and talking to Steve and talking to Bobby Ann we said hey we could do this again hang on we've skipped one little step in here Midwest Mac barbecue is what helped spawn MacStock the conference so Mike Potter said hey wait a minute if all these Mac people are going to be in town I should make a conference so he made a conference exist and the genesis of MacStock so MacStock has kept going obviously the last couple of years have been a little bit hit or miss but it should be coming back strong this year and so when you say the Midwest Mac barbecue is back that's going to be right before MacStock right that same weekend correct so logistically I'll put this out now I'm sure we'll repeat it it is Thursday by 20th so we wanted to give a little bit of time so if people were interested they could come to Chicago early and it doesn't matter pretty much any the whole day will be open I'm going to figure if food will start around 2 o'clock but if you're going to be landing early or you're in the area and you want to come by early great just let me know like don't sit near by yourself or the gas station waiting for 2 o'clock come on early I'll even make breakfast don't say that you're hosting 30 people for Eggs Benedict if you don't watch out I live by myself out here now I had to learn how to cook for myself so I did make a mean scrambled egg and we really are just going to keep it open all day I hate saying goodbye so we may run late into the night and that's fine but the reason I thought it would be nice to do it on a Thursday is that way people could stay in the area so they can stay late they can head out to Woodstock that night if they want or they can just enjoy the area Chicago is of course a great city hang out there during the day Friday your house is pretty close to the airport right yeah I'm less than 10 minutes away from O'Hare so real easy to get to very easy taxi UberLift ride and you know again I think once we get a little bit closer we can coordinate rides for people so maybe people arriving at the same time they can share a ride and just try and make it as easy as possible for everyone I'll even put information on the website about the event about hotels in the area some other things to do so I will note now and again later and in the show notes I'm just using my own domain for this one so it's berryfalk.com b a r r y b a r y okay so you said it's going to be a barbecue what does people pay to go to this? yeah so I mean basically I'm hosting this out of the goodness of my heart I'll probably run some sort of go fund me so if you can throw in a few bucks great if not I'm happy to have you over there the plan is to have variety of food enjoy good barbecue but typically when we get to the size and I'm not good at estimating clearly so I'm not going to guess how many people will be here but let's just say 50 or 60 I'll also cater in again based upon whose RSVP so that will become an important part as we get closer to the event and open to whatever so your traditional barbecue where we have pork or beef and all sorts of nice sides but if you're vegetarian or vegan or have other allergies just let me know we'll accommodate that I'll have plenty of you know soft drinks water juices but last time I was really into the craft beer scene so I had a lot of beer people brought a lot of beer or other drinks happy to have that but over the last I mean I've always enjoyed wine but over the last several years I've really gotten into wine and moving out right to the next door to wine country has really accelerated that you're right next to Napa right yeah it's about an hour drive and I'm not saying that I'm pathetic and lonely on the weekends but I have free time so about once a month I do some research it's very important that I do research yes that's part of my day job I make it part of my weekend so I research wineries up there do some tastings I usually will stay up there you'll also find the Shocking Alice and then I've made a whole bunch of new friends out in the Napa Valley area and so I'll hang with them and they'll introduce me to some new wineries as well so I've enjoyed the journey of learning about wines everything from how they're planted and grafted onto the rootstocks to the different type of grape clones the different processes of fermentation the whole you know cycle of bud break to variation to harvesting to the bottling some of you may know I have a slightly obsessive personality so when I really enjoy something like the Mac community I really enjoy it and so I thought it'd be kind of fun to make that as part of this event is not just a barbecue and just hanging out but if people are interested about learning about wines or simply want to taste wines or maybe we do a bit of a more formal tasting a blind tasting and see what people think I think that'd be a blast so one of the things I've done is convert our formal living room that was never used except for the last barbecue and a few other formal events to a wine lounge this started out at a wine tasting that Bobby and I did and we may have had a couple drinks and they were selling something called a riddling rack which if you're familiar with champagne is how champagne was basically bottled and then stored and turned on a regular basis so the yeast and all that would settle properly and we thought that would look really cool in our house how do we get it and how do we ship it to Chicago so talk to them it was super reasonable it's this really cool I mean it's six foot tall it's like an A shape and it's like hardcore wood so again if you're there you'll see it and we set it up as a centerpiece for the room and then we started moving things around got a proper wine cooler got some barrels some nice chairs so it's a really nice place to relax so it's very exciting to me that we're able to kind of add into this but if that's not your thing hang out on the deck hang out outside we'll have tents just in case and we've actually closed part of the deck oh okay because it did rain I think the first year right it rained quite significantly the first year so it was a good thing we had tents but one of the things about Chicago that I like and I know Allison you never get rain where you're at except this year except this year is being outside in a storm is actually really cool at least I think so but you don't want to get wet so we thought hey what about closing part of the deck so we could be outside when it's still really nice out in the summer and so we ended up working to enclose half of it with some drapes to keep the wind in or out to bring it on how it is so we can close the drapes and then we also have a fire table in there so if it's a little cooler in the fall warm it up nicely we have a fan on top that you know swings the air around if it is still so we really kind of made it almost like a three seasons room so it's really exciting so you've basically redesigned your house to have the Mack community come visit you is what you're saying that is the primary reason that is correct it's in that and wine alright well this sounds fantastic so if people want to check this out you should go to BarryFolk.com you can read a little bit more of the details of what he's talked about you can see how to contact him to tell him if you're interested in coming last night during the live show of the Nosellicast so far eight people who were there are going to come to Mackstock so as usual the Nosellicastaways will represent yes they leave the way as always well thank you so much Allison I really appreciate it I'm very excited to be hosting again it'll be great to see everybody and be back with not only community but to see the Mike and Mackstock it'll be great the Midwest Mack Barbecue and Wine Event will be awesome I can't wait so excited thanks again Barry thanks Allison when I bought my iPad way back in 2010 either the first app I bought or one of the first apps I bought was Corculus it is a virtual cork board now part of the reason I like computing and computers so much is I can't read my own handwriting or I can't even cut a straight line when I imagine making a billboard full of cool pictures or making some kind of art with photos I'm really terrible at it I can't cut to save my life so I found that when I had the iPad I was able to do amazing things that was technically impossible for uncoordinated Jill to even get to the iPad allowed me to be creative for the first time in a successful way Corculus was great for my iPad I was able to make these boards organize my thoughts and this was a decade before anyone ever gave me access to Visio when it came time for my server administration projects I would sit out and draw my server plans using this app my company was kind of cheap and so they never gave me software that would properly allow me to draw server diagrams for my farms so when I had this product I was able to do that successfully this was way back in 2010 and over the years I somewhat forgot about this but recently I did a podcast about creating vision boards and using all your senses in order to bring your goals forward to you and suddenly it came back to my brain Corculus I could make these vision boards in Corculus and have them around digitally I didn't find a large format printer to print them out but certainly you could bring them to a local printer and get those printed out and hang them on the wall so I came back and started using Corculus again and after my time away I found a couple of really interesting things first of all it was purchased by someone else I'm not sure if he was involved in the first Corculus or someone entirely new but he brought new energy into the project and recently recoded it so it uses modern codes and modern APIs bringing it up to standards but he made it even better he listens to people talk about it he's put new enhancements into it and I can tell from the way he talks to reviews and responds to reviews that he's trying to make Corculus into something amazing and if you don't know what Corculus is again it's just a giant cork board but you can have other backgrounds too put cards, post-it notes photos embed PDFs, have emojis and lines of string if you're one of those people who likes to sit in the closet and figure out who the murderer is with photographs articles and pieces of string attached to it you no longer have to hide this in your bedroom so people don't wonder what's going wrong with you you can now put it on your iPad and keep it private if you're a conspiracy nut really trying to pull the threads of everything that's going around you can also figure that too on your Corculus board but for me I just wanted better visualizations when it came to my goals recently I started working on marketing my podcast and trying to get more listeners I wanted to show my friend who's very visual what a marketing plan could look like and after reading the one page marketing guide I was able to create sort of a marketing plan for myself using Corculus and even with all these different parts that you can put in your Corculus board it uses Markdown Language you can embed code in there it uses the Apple Pencil Scribble so you can write and it will transcribe text or you can just draw on things if you have a good hand at it one of the things I loved about it way back in the day is magazines used to be expensive so I would be able to take pictures of magazines and put them into my vision board but now we have a whole digital world in front of us and the world is really your oyster when it comes to Corculus you can put darn near anything in it in my marketing plan I had a PDF telling me how to do better with SEO well on my SEO area on how to market my podcast there goes the PDF it's all together in the end you can make it anything you want anything of it around where it's wedding photos whether it's pictures of a kid whether again it's a vision board and you're looking at your goals anything you could imagine you could make with this at one point I was in a fiction writing contest with a friend of mine and I laid out the whole fiction story in Corculus so I knew what would come first and if the order of the book changed around I could move the cards around I know Scrivener does that too but this was a quick and easy way for me to write a short story without a lot of overhead one of the neat things about Corculus is when you create your board you can also embed other boards into your board and then you can bring all your boards together if I was writing a story maybe each chapter is its own board and then there's a total board that has all the chapters in it with the pro version which is iCloud which is nice because it goes on my Mac and my phone and my iPad my brand new iPad and you have the ability to share it which means I could share it as a PDF a graphic image or I could just save it as a Corculus board so if my friend also had a Corculus board I could just share the file with her directly he recommends putting it in a place like Dropbox so you both have access to this particular file there used to be a standard version when it came to Corculus way back in the day when I bought it but it's a lot of overhead to keep track of two different versions of a product it's actually a lot of work so he gave a subscription price there's also a very reasonable lifetime subscription price back in the day I can't imagine what I paid for the other version in fact I think it was free so I've been using it all these years for free but for a monthly subscription price it's $1.99 for a year subscription it's $1,499 and the lifetime subscription which is what I bought after he went pro is $3,499 but let's talk a little bit about how it handles in using it itself I found that on the iPad it's great I can grip things I can move them around I find the navigation flawless of course this always started out as an iPad app and then it went to iPhone now with it being on Mac I understand that you can bring a lot of things into Mac using Catalyst but sometimes the navigation is a little different in this case I found that it was hard at first to get around to being able to drop and drag things I would have to draw boxes around it you know with the mouse in order to grab something and move it around right clicking on it it's very easy so that you can edit the item itself it also helps you find it and then move it and reshape it a little bit but to me I think the iPad use of it is far superior than the way you use it on the Mac again I had a little bit of clunkiness with it when I used it on the Mac that might be me as much as the app itself but definitely on the iPad it's intuitive and it works just the way you would hope it works it's a good flow chart a good diagramming device it's a lot of fun to use I use Visio at work which is a very serious app and it all to use Corculus does a pretty good job it has ways of aligning objects it will help you shape objects so that they're in a column or in a row together it does a really good job of trying to give you what you need when it comes to colors and manipulating the items that you're embedding inside of it for my purposes to create just some visual boards to share things with friends to make something fun with that printer and I'm going to print some of these out it's great and it's been fun for me to use so if you're looking for something that's good for you good for your family, good for kids so they can get their ideas out plan something, plan a vacation this is the right tool for you I like where it's going and I like the fact that the developer is very interested in improving this tool and making it better than ever and if you have any questions again you can find me on Alison Slack channel and you can find me at Jill at smallstepspod.com thank you for listening and have a great week well thanks for the great review Jill and to everybody I really recommend you listen to the podcast over at smallstepspod.com I do and I love listening to her I'm just happy all the time when I hear her anyway I wanted to make sure she knew and you knew that I looked into Corculus and it turns out you can still use Corculus for free with what they call the basic version iPad or Mac with the basic version you get just three boards so that kind of makes it a great way to find out of Corculus will work the way you think check out corculus at corculus.com and it's spelled Cork C-O-R-K-U-L-O-U-S so of course use the link in the show notes one of the problems that people's low vision and cognitive capability problems are is trying to read prescription bottles and a company called Scriptok from Envision I'm sorry the company's Envision America the product is called Scriptok aims to solve that problem I am here with Amanda Tolson and she's going to tell us all about it yeah so thanks for coming over to the booth I love sharing this information Scriptok is a free service that's provided by the pharmacy as an ADA accommodation meaning they have to do it well it's yes they do they don't have to do it well but they are doing it well they don't have to do ours there are other options on the market but ours is pretty common in most of your chain so this is what you're going to find I forgot to tell you this is an audio podcast with a video component so presumably nobody can see you okay Scriptok is available at lots of pharmacies throughout the United States Walmart, Sam's Club Kroger brand, Albertsons lots of them so it's a free service it's a home that reads all of the prescription information on the label or they can use a free smartphone app so how does it read label, how does that work so the pharmacy puts on a special RFID label that has all of the text data stored in it and that's actually on the bottom that's actually on the bottom of the of the bottle correct that's correct they place that label on the bottom of the bottle or if it's a box or package like that they have a special hang tag so you know where it is to find it okay so I've got one of these prescription bottles in my hand it's got a little RFID tag on the bottom and she's holding a device that's maybe four inches in diameter and I'm going to hold it somewhere on top on the top you just place it right there on the top of the device there's three raised buttons at the bottom we're going to press the center patient John Jay Smith medication 250 milliliters so it's amoxicillin for John Jay Smith that's right and it would keep telling us how to take it how many refills we have remaining everything that's on the print label is going to be read out loud to the patient including warnings oh including warnings yeah that's the good one don't drink with that I don't care what you say so the RFID tag gets put on by the pharmacy and the device the script talk is free to the consumer yes exactly so that's a weird business model for you how does that work so the pharmacy it's just built in that the pharmacy by software and hardware and labels from us and then we make sure that the patients are getting everything they need to access the labels that are being created the pharmacy just fills out a form and says hey John Smith is going to use us for script talk we have an entire patient care advocate staff that reaches out to the patient goes over it says hey do you want the app do you want the device and then they get them set up with whichever one and we follow up with them on a regular basis to make sure everything's still working right for them so this is we're helpful for a lot more than purely completely blind people oh absolutely there's no visual acuity qualification for this which means it does not matter why you need this service you can get it whether it's a literacy whether you have a cognitive need to listen to an auditory instruction doesn't matter you're eligible so dyslexia I'm just getting old and can't pay attention long enough absolutely all of those are great reasons why you would need something like this well this is really really interesting and free did she say free to us the pharmacies cover the cost absolutely free free free that is fantastic so where would people find script talk and that's without a T by the way so it's like prescription script talk yep so it's S-C-R-I-P and then T-A-L-K all one word you can actually call us at 1-800-890-1180 and we have an entire patient care staff that can help you or you can find us online at www.invision and that's en-v-i-s-i-o-n america.com very good well thank you very much this is really cool I've never heard of this before this is fantastic great thank you for coming by well how cool was that I am I'm really excited about that one for people that I think that was that is such broad appeal well anyway this week Trevor did something really cool with Patreon he changed the currency of his support from US dollars to Australian dollars where he actually lives I think it's excellent that Patreon lets you pick the currency that makes sense to you so instead of getting some weird monthly payment that's the round off of today's currency exchange rate or something like that it's a proper round number for your ledger and you can make sure that it stays that same round number you know you can control it and so I think that's one of the good things about Patreon by the way I was just telling the live audiences that I will never forget Trevor Drover met up with us in Australia when we had a tweet up before the Macmania cruise and then he brought Steve and me two bottles of red Australian wine so not only that he's a patron how cool is that but I've got another story like that a dear friend of mine in real life became the newest patron of the pod feed podcast she brings me delicious homemade baked goods she was a chef in a former life and I thought that was payment enough but she went to podfeed.com Patreon and pledged an amount in the currency of her choosing that showed the value that she gets from all the shows so thank you to Trevor for his continued patronage and thanks to the treats and the new pledge from my in real life friend well it's that time of the week again it's time for security bits with barbou shots let's see you said it was going to be a slightly less agonizing report this week yeah it's kind of quiet I don't know if that's the news reporters have stopped reporting all the not so scary stuff or if that's that we are actually getting better at this as a as an industry I was pondering that now well I was trying to sort of mentally think has what I'm talking about changed and I am maybe there's been enough high profile things that the baseline has shifted maybe yeah so we talk about the big stuff like all the little breeches just our noise now well no I meant it in the positive way as in that I think your average think about your average small company security wasn't on the radar at all a decade ago now it is so maybe it's true maybe we've just gotten a little bit better and I probably have changed it now but individuals I doubt have maybe by accident because there's more our tech is helping us more so it's less our problem which is how it should be right more stuff updates more automatically or with less friction but if I look at the people that I talked to on the cruise when essentially every single person asked me for help with their phone had a big number on the you have an update screen yeah that's true okay so we're not quite there yet anyway it's a long way of me saying show notes aren't that long today which is good I just realised that I have the wrong byword window open so I can give you a preview of Let's Talk Apple on Thursday but how's what I do a command tab here and switch over to this other window where I can tell you that it is the 2nd of April one piece of follow up Apple's emergency SOS via satellite has arrived in six more European countries they would be Australia Austria Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and Portugal which is pretty cool yeah I have decided to do a deep dive into Australia that isn't all that deep but it's got a bit of news and it has a fun name have you heard of the Acropolis Acropolis so the Acropolis is an ancient building in Greece and Apocalypse is a terrible thing and then Acropolis is a bug with cropping oh I thought maybe it was a bad thing that happened in Greece I don't well actually maybe one of the researchers was Greek I don't know for sure I think it's a play on the word I think it's basically just word play on crop and apocalypse but anyway it all it started actually I'll give you the TLD and then I can give you the story so basically if you use the markup tool which is part of the image editing suite on a google pixel and it's not part of android it's actually part of the stuff google do just for the pixel and if you use that tool to crop an image or if you are a windows 10 user who uses the oh it's a specific tool in windows 10 no it's the snip and sketch in windows 10 and the snipping tool in windows 11 but not the snipping tool in windows 10 okay we'll change the show notes to reflect what you just said then because you said snipping tool in windows 10 and 11 ah yes because I changed it further down I forgot to change it in the TLD or yes I'll fix it so what is it called in windows 10 it is the snip and sketch tool snip and sketch okay and what does this horrible thing do it means if you crop an image it doesn't actually remove the data from the file it only makes it visibly not there anymore so if you like crop out your house number and then post that on social media it's still there yeah yesish but not on social media because social media are very very price conscious so they recompress every image you upload to save themselves on storage costs and in the process they accidentally protect you from this book so not intentional how do they do that well they recompress everything right when you upload it to twitter you'll always see it recompressing it because what they're actually doing is increasing the compression to give it a worse image quality because hey everyone's screen is tiny and it saves those money it's a penny an image but penny an image is kind of important so they've accidentally protected this all I'd be curious what happens I mean maybe they all compress them but I know on mastodon it's far less compressed it's one of the reasons I love following photography now is they don't all look like a horse poop the photos actually look really great but they probably compress them some just not as poorly as well they re-encode them anyway because you can see it if you use the mastodon app as opposed to one of the third party apps you can actually watch it because it says server processing and you can basically see it redoing your image and then it comes back to you yeah well I have seen that they do it for a couple of reasons one of the other reasons is to strip away location data so that you don't accidentally duck yourself which is nice of them too but anyway so the good news is social media is actually not a problem here the other thing is that this is the png format so we really are talking screenshots here not photographs because photographs are almost always going to be jpeg they're not going to be pngs because png is the portable network graphic format so it really is designed for graphics rather than photos so it's screenshot okay so I take a screenshot and I drag down the top edge to cover up my home address that's still in the file yes that's the danger so the way that this all comes down to the fact that if you save an image over if you save a file over itself and you don't then tell the operating system that the file is now smaller then the bottom of the file stays right where it was and the bottom of the file okay so you start writing at the top and whatever was left at the bottom is still left at the bottom of the original image right so you're pouring I don't understand top and bottom when you're talking about a file start and finish position zero in the file it has a logical address sorry we're really stomping on each other here today so what I'm trying to ask is when you're talking about top and bottom are you talking about I cropped the bottom of the photo or are you talking about the text in the file the askier whatever the text is being cropped from the bottom I think it's you're not going to guarantee quite the same but generally speaking the bottom of the file is the bottom of the picture but what if I cropped the top of the picture then it would be the top right yeah only then you're probably safe because then you probably have two copies of the bottom right so well I'm wondering whether one of the other things that could happen here do they do anything like what Apple does where you've actually got versions of the file that exist that's not what's going on here that's not what's going on here so this is a much more simple thing so basically you have a png file and the operating system says it's so many k from top to bottom from start to finish wherever you want to describe it and you use a little drag and drop thing and you crop a piece off and then you hit save not save as and the clipping tool just rewrites the data it needs to rewrite there's a special symbol sort of a sequence of bits that means end of png data and it just writes the end of png data and then just doesn't bother to truncate the file so it doesn't tell the operating system and now make this file smaller so what's left on the operating system is the original image data behind it so if you crop from the top the chances are that what's left is a duplicate of what's still in your image but if you crop up the chances are very high it's never guaranteed what if I crop from the left to the right then you're going to get some of your data you're going to get left over with some of your data and you really can't trust that it's not data that matters so this in the list of terrifying horrible days this does not sound terrible horrifying because you have to you have to send it to someone in a format that isn't the way most people send stuff which is through social media right you have to email that maybe or text message to somebody and crop it in a certain way yeah it's odd though that it's the google pixel from android and windows 10 and windows 11 like that's like they made the same mistake logic mistake yeah incidentally yes because it's not the same code base that was one of the things that they looked at it's like no this isn't the same code it's just the same mistake okay that's odd it is very odd but there we go so it has been patched so the march version of the update to the pixel phones fixes it on pixel land and in windows Microsoft consider this they're of your mind Alison they consider this so not important they're not doing software update you need to go to the windows store and get the updates to the windows store if you want to update those tools yeah you feel pretty much the same way it's not a catastrophe the only minor inconvenience is this goes back to the origin of those apps so you kind of have to think yourself have I ever cropped something that was actually important and sent that not through social media right to someone I don't trust and yeah but my hair is not on fire that's the worst yeah if we have that's the worst news we have this week I can live with the acropolis yeah many it was fun to talk about it's kind of cute name yeah yeah so what should we do to protect ourselves Bart patchy patchy patch patch there we go wow the delay is really long today because even with video which usually stops us dumping in each other we're so far behind it's difficult but hey I should have plugged in I should have plugged in ethernet which is sitting four inches to my right which I did not I will make it through action alert time apple have patched their old stuff so if you're getting a bit of deja vu when you hear them when you see things like iOS 15 and macOS Big Sur it's not a mistake it's not a typo apple really have fixed iOS 15 and macOS Big Sur and it's basically a week later than the patches we talked about last time for iOS 16 and macOS Ventura and they do include a pretty nasty zero-day in WebKit so patchy patchy patch patch do you know how far back this goes iOS 15 and macOS Big Sur okay so anything that can be running those let's mention again how my two year old android phone can't be patched from bone it's graceful it's actually disgraceful it's not just sad it's anyway moving on to notable news I just I think it is worth mentioning that if you put any stock in Twitter blue check marks you need to stop doing that now as of April 1st which is yesterday the check mark has exactly one meaning you paid Elon that is it that is the end of the meaning of the check box the notable people have now lost them they mean nothing other than you paid for this blue thing but wait a minute but wait a minute I understand that originally it was you had to be somebody and there was some vague sort of hand waving that verified that somebody was somebody in order to get the blue check mark then there was the whole thing that he said okay I just want money and he asked for eight bucks and everybody was registering fake names like they were pretending to be Elon and so all these people were getting these fake accounts and the whole thing with was it Eli Lilly where they announced that they were going to make the insulin free so then they went back to where you had to actually verify that you were who you were so I thought it means maybe this means that the people who had blue check marks because they were who they were lost them because they're not paying but you also I thought you also had to be who you said you were in order to get the blue check mark and pay they're not making that guarantee they're basically they're doing enough to stop themselves getting in trouble so they're moderating for their own benefit they're not giving us any so Facebook have told us up front that on their platform when they do check bucks it will mean verified photo ID and they have described a process so that is a strong verification okay Twitter have made no promise and it's run by Elon Musk if you want to assign some sort of value to that tick box by all means do I am up signing zero maybe it'll be like if they say they're Eli Lilly they're probably Eli Lilly but if they say they're Allison Sheridan and he hasn't heard of Allison Sheridan then they could be anybody probably yeah probably is probably the right words to apply to the tick boxes they're probably who they say they are yeah okay if I was feeling skeptical possibly but no let's go with probably that's been nice I think my favorite thing about all the AI stuff right now is that I think we're learning all to not trust anything until we verify stuff ourselves I hope we are nothing is trustworthy so we used to think a lot of stuff was and then some stuff was tricking us now we just have to assume everybody's trying to trick us at all times make sure you get three sources that are independent from from sources that you trust because two out of three could be lying to you yeah and maybe accidentally or maybe not and the next story is kind of fun so we have the UK government's anti-cyber crime people have been doing interesting things for a long time like they actually have school programs that try to divert young kids who are doing nasty things that isn't quite bad or just like you know knocking their friends off the internet to win at some sort of a game and so after trying to divert these people away from the dark side into the light side and they have all sorts of programs in schools to encourage people who have these kind of skills to to apply them as security on the white hat side instead of the black hat side I love that I've always thought encourage those kids those ones who want to recruit right right but they're now they've also revealed that they're doing something else which is equally clever but somewhat different they are running fake DDoS services so DDoS for hire services where they allow you to register take all of information and then at the point where you're expecting a control panel to launch an attack at your friend who's you want to knock off World of Warcraft they're telling you hi this is the British this is illegal don't do this kind of thing again interesting by the way DDoS being denial of service or distributed denial of service attack so they give them the tools the services to do it and then no they don't even no no so they're pretending you said they set up a service to do it right so these are all so malware as a service right so it's like going to a storefront and getting as far as the checkout and you complete the checkout but at no point in time do you ever have a tool right I mean they show them that they're going to let them do it that's interesting and that's in the UK that's in the UK and they basically say that if you're a UK citizen you will be receiving a visit shortly from the from the police and if you're outside the United States we have passed your details on to your country's law enforcement if we're outside of the UK no no if you're in the UK the police will call if you're outside the UK they will pass on the data to your country you said outside the United States you met UK in both places yeah okay so in your notes you also say they set up fake booter sites what's that same thing that's that's that's a booter so at an Isle of Service with the point of kicking someone out of a game is called in slang by gamers booting oh okay okay I hadn't heard that yes yeah so it is fun it is fun I like these kind of thinking outside the box kind of things that the UK are doing so this is good since I stopped you so many times on that I'm going to say it again if you're in the UK they tell you the police are coming if you're outside the UK they tell you we have referred you to your police department or FBI or whoever it is is appropriate for your country yep who may or may not care right if you're in Russia anyway it's related and I think it's big news I also think it's not going to do anything but an open letter has been written with some fairly substantial signatories including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk asking everyone who's doing AI to take a pause for six months because it's out of control and we should all stop and have a good we think about it so a little bit polyana to assume that that's going to happen because looking at this realistically this is not a bunch of charities this is a bunch of for-profit companies we are about to see a potentially massive upset to the most lucrative business on planet Earth which is search everyone sees that Google are going to have to fight to retain their position and everyone sees that there is a possibility of upsetting the apple cart no one is stopping voluntarily best case outcome and also Google tried to not do it quickly and they got caught behind because they tried not to launch it right away but everybody was launching theirs alright I guess we're in also true I think the best case scenario here is that regulators take heed because the only this is what regulation is for because businesses are supposed to do business that's their job their job is not to do everything else they are businesses and someone else is supposed to be the cop that keeps everyone on the straight and narrow and sets some sort of basic rules everyone follows so I think best case this raises awareness this gets us thinking about how do we regulate this even the people in the open letter don't think that we're in immediate danger of oh what's that thing from Terminator Skynet like no one is saying Skynet is here now everyone's kind of saying yeah but if we don't actually stop then at some point we're going to get there so I think this brings you time for people to you know for regulators and stuff to cop on and so I think it's a good thing but I don't think it's going to no one's stopping here's another fun angle that they were talking about on the external tech podcast was and and I don't remember which company it was I want to say it was Microsoft but so you know how the the AIs have been trained on all available data right and they've gone out and scraped every website every artists drawings every every program in in all of github they've done all this they've taken all this data and then now they're spitting it out and they're all perfectly good with taking everybody else's data that they never asked for in a lot of cases weren't weren't even ever given a cloud to take but now what they've started noticing is that the AIs are copying from each other so like Bing's AI is is copying from Google's is copying from chat GPT and now they're all mad at each other saying well you can't take from ours so they're okay with they stole from the artists and the programmers that's okay but it's not okay if you steal if you steal from me now that I've got this data and so they're starting and John Syracuse basically said this could cause it to wither on the vine I mean it could dry up because it's going to get cyclical and also it's got no data and then it just we're done I don't know that that's gonna happen but it's an interesting way to think about it well this is one of the reasons I think that they're not all quite the same as each other because one of the things that's interesting about firefly from adobe is that it's explicitly only trained on images they have the rights to which means it's it's it can't do things like show me a picture of Steve Jobs doing blah blah blah because it doesn't have those kind of images but it's really good at generating clip art you know I want a picture of some flowers and I'd like you to write the word hello filled in with pretty Easter Bunny or something right and it can do all that because that's what's in its library of because they used to have sell stock and so their images they have trained their AI and you can buy access into it so that kind of stuff is perfectly legal Getty images are doing the same which is why they're also suing the pants of I can't remember which of the generative AI ones it is they're suing the pants of because some of them Getty logos appear when you ask the right I've seen that well so if nothing else the lawyers are going to make a lot of money and the legislators are going to spend a whole lot of time so like seven years from now this legislation of which you speak will come into play long after it's all changed that's basically what I think is probably going to happen possibly I was also reading an interesting take on it from Paul Krugman who pointed out that the lag between new technology coming and the technology changing the economy is surprisingly long because electric motors didn't really revolutionize industry until after World War one even though we had electric motors well in the late 1800s because we were using them as if they were not so with steam engines your factories have to be these multi-story buildings where everyone is physically close to the conveyor belt connected to the one steam engine in the basement so you had a typical picture of a male is this really tall building with all the floors and everyone's all crammed in because it's a physical connection to one engine whereas with electric motors every machine has its own motion its own motor so what you actually want is everything far apart so you can move your own materials and so you can move around your product and so everything works fine no one realized that until after World War one when everyone was rebuilding and it's like oh yeah we don't want tall factories we want spread out flat factories and it took decades for the industry to change and for the economy to have its boom and computers I don't think that's what's happening with AI I think it's going a little faster than that there's no structure that has to be built again I'm not I don't believe we're going to see this massive change that suddenly the whole economy is different than no one has a job anymore I don't think it's going to happen that quick oh I didn't say nobody's going to have a job anymore I'm saying that there's a business and people are already making money on it yeah right but not business the economy so people are predicting that the economy is about to be completely changed there's a difference between some businesses changing what are you calling the economy the GDP of America will go up by 5% you have all of these kind of predictions being made and how we don't have to worry about debt and stuff because our GDP is going to explode the economy is going to take off the economy is the totality that is what economy means it means everything so we had a tech boom in the 90s no no that's the actual definition of an economy between economists is the total of the money anyway the computer boom happened in the 90s computers were invented in the 60s and 70s and then I went kaput anyway yeah it's maybe live in interesting times hello moving on then the next thing I just have is an interesting insight so I'm a huge fan of Nilai Patel because he's a very very well read an intelligent person who has the ability to ask insightful questions and he does a lot of homework before his interview so whenever he interviews someone I care about I listen because I know I'm going to learn well his guest this week was the CEO of Mastodon and I was most curious to see how he was thinking about his company and therefore the platform that you and I are both getting way more engaged in since we don't quite like what he loves doing with Twitter so highly recommend ask me a question here because Mastodon is part of the Fediverse it is a federated service there's a lot of things in Mastodon using the Mastodon technology that are not owned by the CEO of Mastodon so what does the CEO of Mastodon own what exactly is that so the CEO of Mastodon owns a company who writes the open source stuff that they make freely available and hope everyone steals they literally said I hope everyone takes this they write the official app and they manage the official web page so if everybody's forking the code and doing what they want with it then there isn't really one Mastodon that's what's getting me confused for example one of the things that the CEO of Mastodon did not want is the ability to forward a toot and add content to it you can boost it which lets your followers see it or you can reply to the person that posted it but you can't reply and boost at the same time and he said that he wanted the replies to go to the person who wrote it or posted it because you're more civil if you know that they're reading it so it was a little different angle but clients are writing it where you can do that so they're obviously simulating it okay but I'm saying that's why I still get lost on what Mastodon is because there is a version of the code that might be the official Mastodon but if other people aren't using that one and it looks and feels like Mastodon and you're using it and you're on a different server it just gets muddy in this case because it isn't owned by anybody then I strongly recommend you have a listen because one of Nilai Patel's fascinations is governance and where lines are how decisions are made what levers there are what levers is this guy pulling so it's actually I think you'd enjoy it actually just given on this discussion I think you'll love this yeah and the next one I have in because it's cool tech it is related to security and I think if I were say the US Defense Department I would be heartened that this research is happening I would be well it's published with the intention of being used so I would be taking them up on that offer with great gusto so researchers in Germany in the Ruhr University and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy have developed an algorithm that can take the schematics of a CPU down to I think it was 15 nanometers was the lowest they could do at the moment I think it was 15 yeah I think it was a 15 nanometer and they could then take a photograph of a die and they could match to see if the die matched its design in other words has the chip been tampered with in a supply chain attack and so they tested it in a very clever way they tested it by altering the plans so they got a chip they designed the chip and they got it built and then they changed the plan and then they checked the physical chip against the altered plan which should of course be wrong because it's exactly the same thing as a hacked chip from a correct plan and so their algorithm works and they published it oh that is really really neat the um you know where they could have used this was it Forbes that had some claim, Forbes are wired that had claimed that an Apple chip that was tampered with and they were never able to prove it Bloomberg and it's one of two reasons Bloomberg never get any link juice from me, I will never link to Bloomberg because they never retracted that article yeah well they never retracted it or proved it or corrected it well I mean they claimed that it had happened and there was never any proof of it but they said yeah you just don't know I'm sorry they just lost all credibility in that because that story is still there but I'm saying you could use this tool if it has happened yes right right that is really really cool now you say this was via the no-cellicast community where did you get it now I'm having say it may have come into me via mastodon but I think it was via mastodon from a no-cellicast away oh okay there we go we'll take it and if it wasn't a no-cellicast way on mastodon yeah a lot of my followers are from no-cellicast ways on mastodon great that's that's kind of all the all the big stuff so I have a palette cleanser but it's an unusual one so the concept of palette cleansing is that it's not scary security stuff so what I have here is titled immemorial so it's an article about the death of Gordon Moore the man of Moore's law but it's really well written and I learned more about Gordon Moore and his amazing contribution to everything I love than I had ever known before yeah right I knew Moore's law and I knew he was involved in Intel but I didn't know nearly half of what happened before I was born which is not unusual I suppose remind people which one Moore's law is so Moore's law is that the transistors on a chip will double every two years meaning an exponential growth of computing power and as I think it was actually the article pointed out most people who predict exponential growth are wrong because stuff will grow exponentially for a short amount of time and then taper off but with our computers we have had actual exponential growth and it's not exactly a factor of two but it's pretty darn close as I recall he was actually kind of surprised that it kept working like he didn't really mean it to go on as long as it did well he didn't expect, yeah he projected forward a line and he did sort of expect it to create from his projections not decades later and and it's just actually kind of fascinating because most of these things don't work out like that but this one did but the thing is it's also is it a prediction that came true or is it a target that was met and I think the answer is yes and because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy because the industry strove particularly Intel given that he was one of their guys they strove to meet or to stay up with Moore's law so at some point in time it became the target not a prediction which is kind of interesting well after a while it does appear that Intel slowed down on that right? yeah well they're now meeting in a different way right so we're now getting more cores on one die so we start making the individual cores faster and we're now starting to double the number of cores right so it still keeps up surprisingly well and the M series chip are keeping up darn well too they're amazing pieces of tech right so well is that all we got? yeah I did promise you it was short and you were kind enough to let me go for a slightly longer cycle because today was great I have been rained on every single day since we recorded last week and today the sun was out and I got to spend extra time with the sun so thank you very nice that's exciting we had sun here it kind of freaked me out I'm not used to it hang on no you're not in California that's why you freaked you out okay no I am in California it had been raining and cold for so long we came down to Lindsay and Nolan's in San Diego and I didn't pack shorts it was like 70 degrees out yesterday I'm basically wearing like my pajama shorts I got nothing all I have is pants I have jeans and shoes I didn't bring flip flops I know it's a nightmare it's crazy I tell you I'm sure you live so no more atmospheric rivers or whatever weird things you guys had well I haven't checked the future whether it keeps coming back well fingers crossed and of course until next time remember to stay patched so you stay secure well that's going to wind us up for this week did you know you can email me Alison at podfeed.com anytime you like if you have a question or suggestion just send it on over you can follow me on mastodont at podfeed at chaos.social remember everything good starts with podfeed.com if you want to join in the fun of the conversation you can join our Slack community like Jill does at podfeed.com where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely no-cello castaways you can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon like Trevor and my baking friend or with the one-time donation at podfeed.com slash PayPal and if you want to join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5pm pacific time where you can correct me like Mark did and you can also join the friendly and enthusiastic no-cello castaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed