 Well, the internet's so slow, because I'm streaming video. I can't do anything. That is true. We're both streaming from the same place. Luckily, I got files, but you're over the wireless. I could give you a wire next time we do this. Now, let me pick my news. I'll put this in the window over here. What else can I do? I can end the broadcast. I have zero viewers. I can turn the video on audio on and off. I can add it. Oh, we got someone. There's someone here. Whoever it is, you get to see what Geek Nights looks like before Geek Nights happens. And it looks really creepy when I look at the monitor where the broadcast is, because my eyes are all the way to the right on the screen. All right, I'll stop looking at that. So you're doing the news on the, I guess I should do the, oh, there's a bunch of people watching now. Yeah, I'll stop looking at that. I kind of want to, I have to talk about the Google case at least a little bit. It's over, we've talked about it already. No, it is over. We didn't talk about it, the final answer on API is not big. We talked about it already. Well, we talked about what will happen if one way or the other, but now we know the answer. I want to spend two minutes on it. I just want to be like, Google One, API is not copyrightable, it's a noteworthy thing. Since there's people here, let's say. See, you have to be able to just minimize the window. Doesn't need to be open, just close that shield. This is your problem. It's not even distracted by people and I was affecting the show, just minimizing the window. It's not the show, this is the pre-roll. Yeah, OK, just minimize the window and don't look at it. Is this any different from what we normally do? Yes. So. Just minimize and don't look at it. All right, let's see, I need, I'll do the, I'll mention the Google thing. You can express your disdain if you want, but I'm doing it anyway. You want to talk about the spy telescope, so I can make that my news. OK, I told you it was my news. OK. And I'll do, all right, the CapCopter, that's cool. The Perkylosis thing is interesting, but I don't have anything to add to it. The Continental Drift thing is cool, but not cool enough. That's for the main bit. Wee, I got to say, for Tuesday. I just don't know how anyone can. That's until after the E3. Let's not go with this pre-E3 bullshit. I'm just saying, I don't know how anyone can be excited about the Wii U personal controller. I mean, they've had two attempts at this and didn't do anything with it. If I was the boss in Nintendo, you know which one they didn't make? Well, we'd have one. We'd force the Pokemon MMO. Yeah, I'd just be like, look guys, here's what we're going to do. Number one, we're going to make Nintendo software, not just for Nintendo things. We're going to make it for everything. And number two, we're going to make our things be open and not suck. Number three, I'd hire as many people as possible and force them to make games that use the open cable equivalent. I'd be like, and also we're going to make more games. You guys make too few games, a lot more games. There needs to be frigging stuff all the time with the games. And none of these, oh, we don't have enough games coming out. Let's just re-release an old game for the new system bullshit, right? New Mario Tennis, new Metroid, new, you know? Well, we need a new Mario Tennis. Of course, new everything. And everything awesome, at the same time. It's your Nintendo, you don't make crap with it, when you actually make one, except for when you do. Well, there's kind of trouble. They make too many of those middling sort of ad games, like Kirby canvases. Like, all right, it's not bad, but it's like. Well, I guess my trouble is that the games. It's sort of like an ad game. Every game to Nintendo games should be like, oh, snap. Well, what about games like Minish Cap? That were great, but they're great for someone who's not good at games and hasn't really played a lot of Zelda games. No, every game. Every game? Every game should be awesome. Everybody. Ta-dee-do-dooda. All right, I think I will talk about the. Now that the TLDs are happening, we didn't really talk about Google's the domains they're going after. I still think this is a huge mistake allowing the TLDs. But if they do allow them, you've got to be stupid not to go get them if you can afford them and you need them. Oh, let's see. It's like, I don't think you should allow these rocket cars on the road. It's only the roads full of rocket cars. Well, even though I disagree, I don't think rocket cars should be allowed. I have to get one now if I plan to drive, because they're all over the place. And I'd be stupid to get a non-rocket car. And that's what happens. The thing is, I feel like, well, I'll talk about them in the show. I'll make it my news. It's a bad idea, guys. But now I'm forced to go along with this bad idea. So you want to get .gignites? It's all you pay for the old TLD. You pay for it. Digital luxury services for a car. Oh my god. Really? Really? All right. Give me one second to do some investigative journalism. Is there any reading someone else's article? No. Oh my god. No, this is not someone else's article. This is someone else's SEO-spammed website that is now the number one thing that appears if you search for this. Oh, good god. Let me read this. I can't from this time around. Demons. One's just critical. I just read online systems. Time to shoot. And the exact same time. You know what? I'm going to leave this Google thing and do it in the Chrome. OK. Google likes the Chrome. Sierra, you're out. Maybe it'll be faster. All right. Well, let me get the show ready. Let's just start. My computer will be dying. I got plenty of OpenE, because I'm going to Toronto tomorrow. I don't want to go to Toronto. I can't overwrite the other show we didn't upload, because we didn't upload it yet. Google+, how do I log into you? You're always trying to get me to go to this people you know. Because they really want you to add more people that you know. I'm more annoyed that Google Voice is the one thing that's not listed with all the other things when I log into my main Google account. All right. Auditions ready? I got an OpenE, I got a news. CatCopter is pretty good. That's going to be my thing. I'm going to find the article on the Google thing, so I can talk about it for like two minutes. Google Java. You ready to go? Otherwise, let's do this. All right. I had it set for an emulator, so let me set it back. There we go. Much better. Much better. OK. It's Monday, June 4th, 2012. I'm rim. And this is Deep Nights. Tonight, Government Hackers. Is that your thing of the day? No. It should be. Just look at it for a minute. That's pretty good. OK. So this is the second episode of Geek Nights that we did, but isn't online yet, because our new website is not complete. It's actually complete, except for the part of the upload. That works. Except for the podcast part. It actually works. Except for that part of Geek Nights. Except, no, it actually, hard drive, space saving mechanism does not work. So what's taking up all the space, because the episodes aren't there? The episode. But I thought we put all the episodes on our lips in. On the computer, when they are ID3 tagged and such. Ah, but why don't we have a cron job that deletes them after? I don't know. Because then the database will become very confused when they're. So it archives both the local file and the. That is the default behavior, where Jango keeps the files in S3. So I take it the database doesn't have the old 2005 episodes, because they're not local. I still need to dump that database, but I digress. So I can do my auto back up to my local NAS and make the torrent I want to make of every episode of Geek Nights from 2005 to like now. Because I can host it here if one person downloads it, whatever, I have plenty of bandwidth. If 100 people download it, BitTorrent takes care of that. Yeah, I don't think that would be good enough. Exactly. But as long as, basically, it'll never hurt my bandwidth more than, we'll see. We'll see what actually happens. I was trying to calculate. I realized it's more complex to calculate, because I'm still seeding for the people and depending on the algorithm, but anyway. But yeah, I've got to miss our burning wheel game tomorrow, and almost didn't do a show today, because I just got back from Istanbul, and now I've got to go to Toronto. I don't want to go to Toronto. Mostly because the children have cigarette faces, friends. Mostly I'm flying like porter air. Apparently, I didn't know this, right? Because we lived near Toronto. We just, like, drive there. But there's an airport in the middle of Toronto, like on this island, and there's one airline that flies to this tiny little airport. So I'm going to fly to this tiny little airport, which means I've got to leave from Newark over here. You can fly to Rogers, here, which is amazing. And then what? Take the slow ferry? Is that thing even still there? I don't know what happened. I'm going to see if that thing's still there, because that was, if the word boondoggle ever described a thing, it is that thing. There are things that are much more. How about that empty hotel in North Korea? All the multiple empty, unfinished buildings in various communist nations. Ah, but that is not boondoggle. That is simply communism. Maybe communism is the biggest boondoggle there. Possibly. But then which brand of communism? Red communism. Not, you know, Pilgrims or, OK, theism part. So what do you got for me? It's Monday. It's Tuesday. Why would I have it for you? I don't have anything for you. Nothing for you. I have a news to read for the listeners of the show. All right, news away. News away. So, you know, NASA, it's been a hot topic lately ever since the space shuttle cancelling and the SpaceX increase in the first commercial space vessel made it to the unmanned, made it to the space station. I was really excited about that. It is pretty cool. But, you know, for quite a long time, NASA has, you know, the hot topic has been the NASA budget, how small it is. How it used to be like a few percent of government spending, and now it's half a percent of the budget. So every dollar you give to the government in taxes, one half of one penny is for NASA, and the rest is for other shit. That is not NASA. So, you know, everyone's like, raise the NASA budget to just one percent. Come on. But that way one whole penny will go to them. That doesn't look like it's happening, but nerves are yelling for it. So it turns out that one of the things NASA has been working on for a long time is replacing the Hubble Telescope, which is a pretty awesome thing. And we went up to repair it a whole bunch of times. But it's expensive to maintain. Wait a minute, a whole bunch of times? How many times did we go up there and do anything to it? Pretty sure we went up there and fixed it two or three times. OK, anyway. I'm just based on memory of news and stuff. But then I don't have numbers. You can go read Wikipedia, Hubble Space Telescope, and find out. But anyway, it's not doing too well. It's kind of old and crummy. We could do a lot better pretty easily. And there's a project to do that that NASA is sort of spending too much money or time on, called, what's it called? It is called the James Webb Space Telescope, right? It's been eating up the science budget. So apparently, the Washington Post just reported, the Department of Defense just gave two better-than-hubble telescopes to NASA. Like, here you go. So we just had these lying around. We just had these lying around unused. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. So clearly, what these are are spy telescopes that are so obsolete, or spy satellites at least. And the reason they had extra ones is because they were the spares, right? And the real one must have been, right? So if these are spares, because the Department of Defense always makes spares of everything. What was the quote from our contact? Why build one when you could have two at twice the price? So if these are spares that are on the ground, that means that you know they had one in space, and they had at least another spare in space. So there's multiples of these things. They're just turned around the wrong way. And if they're giving the ground the never-used spares to NASA, that means that the ones in space are like they're done with those. And they put up new ones already, or maybe this speculation, like all maybe since they have drones that are better, they don't need the space telescopes to spy anymore, or all kinds of stuff. But the point is, there's at least one in space, if you're not using any more, just turn it the fuck around. Well, you have to swap out the sensors, at least. I mean, you're looking for different stuff with space telescopes. If we had a space shuttle, we could have gone up there and fixed it. The thing is, this is just a really fascinating story, because it highlights so many of the high-level arguments that nerds have around the military and space and everything, that the military has so much money that they got just extras, the thing that NASA just can't find enough money to build. But it's actually a lot more complex than that. Yeah, but one of the major defenses of defense spending is that, look, it brings about all these great things like internet and such like that, with the great research that we do. That's where actually most of the defense budget is things like that, and also building things after we've prevented them, like a whole bunch of jets or the Ford class aircraft carriers, or a whole bunch of tanks or a whole bunch of boats or guns or whatever it is. But the problem is, is that those things, all too often, they keep citing all these examples of those things eventually becoming consumer-grade goods or used by other people outside the military, things that were invented in the military, like the internet. But apparently, the thing is, when you invent something in the military, their primary goal, even though those things may happen, their primary goal is defense and also offense, even though they call themselves defensive offense goals. A whole lot of offense. And in games of defense and offense, when you invent something new and awesome, you've got to keep it secret. Otherwise, the other guy has it now, and you're in big trouble. Well, it depends. For example, in software design, say you have an interface that's really cool. For some software, it's really cool. You can show it to people like they see it, and maybe they'll try to copy it. Now, if your idea was not actually, like, there wasn't that novel, then they could just copy it from the interface, and they've got the same thing as you. Your thing was worthless. But if the back-end architecture is the real important part, then they can see it all they want. They still can't copy it. Yeah. But the fact that they know you have it, for example, something like a spy satellite telescope, right? Just because they're knowing it exists. But they can look into space, figure out where it is. So, yeah, you say that, but then game theory, that information itself becomes part of the equation. So you make them know that you have this Uber weapon, even if you don't, for example. Or you let them know, yeah, we can see everything you're doing above ground with these satellites. So the point is you're not going to start giving the technology for this space satellite to people outside of the military who are just like at NASA or whatever, who might leak it, or who knows what. Or to just people on the streets that they can make their own. What that implies is that there is not that much special about these compared to what the military is using now. Exactly. And this is why we should take, even though putting money into defense can result in research and new inventions that eventually might be used by us. I see where you're going with this. You should instead take that money and just give it to research directly that's open in public research. I'm going to make the argument of I wouldn't necessarily say instead, because that begs the question that the value of the defense spending for the purposes of defense is not there. No, because here's the thing that makes it work. It's like, oh, let's say we had given the money to invent the even better space satellite that we probably have to NASA. And NASA had invented the even better space satellite that we could have. Well, first of all, that knowledge of how to make that awesome thing and it being used for space research would have resulted in way more benefits than just looking at terrorists and walking around somewhere. And two, it's not like the Defense Department wouldn't have it also. They would still just get it from the NASA and still have to spend the size satellite necessary. I think it comes down more to the logistics, Scott, of how the money is allocated. I mean, how much of that money do you think is allocated to pure research in the military versus here's a specific task and intent? And even if, so NASA invented the space thing instead of the Defense Department inventing it, therefore everyone in the whole world knows how to make one. But, sure, great, everyone knows how to make one. And we've got them. You still don't know how many we've got, where they are, what we're doing with them. Yeah, well, Scott, I guess the argument against this is that I'm still not convinced. Anyone else who wants to make one, it's not like they can afford to make one anyway, even if they do have. So you rephrased what I said before, and you added a little bit more nothing to it. I don't think you just made a compelling argument, because these satellites, one, they weren't a technology problem, they're an engineering problem. And they were made for a specific purpose. I think NASA's biggest problem is that there wasn't a very public, very direct goal that they were working toward with the majority of their effort. Yeah, they were. They were just suckin'. What was their goal? The James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to replace the Hubble, but it's been way over budget and not due to it. Yeah. So you realize, Scott, these satellites that the military is giving them still have to be completely retooled to do the science thing that NASA wants to do, because the military has no reason to do that part. It is still much easier making a whole new thing. Yeah, Scott, you realize the military made these satellites for one purpose. The only really useful part of it, as far as I can gather from the articles I read on this for NASA, is that the satellite itself is already made. But it's not a special satellite. The special part is the part NASA's going to add and make to it, which is the actual sensors and everything. What I'm saying is if that money that was given to the Defense Department to make these things in the first place have to give it to NASA in the first place, it would have gone the other way, and we would have had them in both departments for a much longer period of time. Maybe or maybe not, because we don't know what other fruit came out of the research in the military privately. Yeah, so it would have been even more fruit going both ways, because any NASA invent. Wait, wait, wait. So your argument is we don't know, so therefore clearly it must have been more. OK, I'm giving them less. It might be. How could it be less? I'm saying that we don't know enough about what the money is actually spent on to have a discussion about that. I'm generally. What is it if the Defense Department invents something? Did they invent something, Scott? Yes, but did they invent something, or is this just engineering? They made some satellites. Sure, they had money to make a satellite. If they had money to make that, if that money was given to NASA, we could have had both defense satellites and NASA satellites, but instead we only have defense ones. Well, apparently no. We have both, because they gave them to NASA. Yeah, like extra what? Maybe they had some purpose for it. We had to have them a long time ago, right? Maybe or maybe not. We don't really know. I mean, the military probably had them for a bit for something. No, they're not giving it to NASA, it's not old. Yeah, the thing is, nothing I've read says that these are particularly novel technology for satellites. It's just that they already made them. Anyway, so we don't really need to dwell on it, but I'm sure you've heard the news. Google won APIs. No, we didn't, because the ruling had not been made the last time we did the show. Oh, big difference. Yeah, because of the case before, the jury had ruled on some of the points about fair use and whatever, but what had not been ruled on was the thing that the judge had to decide. Basically, the case went like this. Jury, tell us if Google infringed, and if fair use is a defense. Independently of that answer, the judge got to say whether or not it even mattered. Whether or not APIs are even copyrightable. And I bring it up again partly because this is a case of a judge who said, look, this is a technology thing. I'm going to learn the technology. And he basically told the Oracle lawyer. When the Oracle lawyer tried to argue that this API and this shared code was so hard to make and so many millions of dollars in damages, the judge basically said, look, I learned how to do this and wrote the code that you say is so hard to make in a couple hours. Are you really going to sit here and tell me that this is millions of dollars of damages? The thing that I, an old judge guy, figured out kind of on my own in my spare time. And the Oracle guy's response was basically, well, I'm not an expert on computers. Then why are you lawyering computers? But no, this is important because this is one of the times where the courts actually, there is no complaint from a nerd on how this all shook down. Except for the fact that it shouldn't even happen in the first place, because these patents shouldn't exist in the first place. How much time and money do we waste? But in this case, it was about copyright. And copyright now, we have a ruling. You cannot copyright an API. That's really important. Had that gone the other way, it would have been trouble. But no, the real thing I want to talk about is we complained from the beginning, and this was first a thing, that this expansion of the top level domains in DNS is a bad idea. There's so many reasons it's a bad idea. But it's happening anyway. There's not much we can do about it. So I wonder what the actual end result is going to be. Because Google, at least, sees this for what it is. And they got like .google. They're doing what every big company's forced to do now, getting .the company name. But Google also went for .lol. And I have a feeling if anyone is going to do the right thing with .lol, it is going to be Google. They're probably going to make Google.lol, Google. I wonder what they're going to do. I think they're going to make that another one of their domain name shorteners, for one. I don't know what else they'll do with it. But I don't know how many of you paid attention to how these domains are actually being allocated. Well, you have to run your own root servers if you get one of these, right? I didn't read that part. I assume so. Yeah, which means you have to prove that you can actually run them. Well, but excuse me, it's got not root root, not the 13 at the core. Because those delegate where, com, net, whatever are. So they have to run the root. But if someone who runs com, does this verisign run com or something? That's a lot of servers. Google will probably have to run .lol and .google and .docs. It's interesting that Google is going for docs and Google docs. Yeah, but that's a pretty generic term. I'm sure they know how to run the server. Oh, I trust them. They'll probably write their own. But I would suggest that many of you look at how the lots are being allocated in terms of what domains are up for being and available when. Because they're not going to release them all at once because this is a cash grab. So every stupid bullshit domain that some spammer gets has to get its time in the limelight as, check it out. Here's the list of new domains this month, or this week, or this whatever. So they're doing something that's kind of called digital archery, where they give you a link or something like that, and you have to click it, or shoot it, basically, as close to a particular time as possible. And whoever is closest wins. Yeah, you didn't pay attention to this stuff at all, did you? Are you sure this is real? Yes. So I've already found, for example, that there are a ridiculous number of people trying to offer a service of winning this archery for you. Wasn't Google just going to win? Yeah, what I'm going to say now. At the time at clock, with a computer right next to the computer, you have to hit. I am going to suggest that every Google domain, every time Google is involved in digital archery, they're going to win. And I defy anyone else to win, except possibly. Well, it's a targeted system. Don't even get me to say, I've got a better system. You ready for the system? First come, first served? That's a good system. Brown Robin? I've got another good system. As soon as they're approved? Whoever pays the most money wins. All right, so you have to pay both to be ahead of everyone else for your domain and to get your domain. All right, we can do that. Google will still get them all, because they have untold millions of dollars. What's interesting is that already a lot of professional associations are trying to get dot-bank and then work among themselves to make that a secure place. I still posit that the vast majority of the new top-level domains will be untrusted and or ignored by the vast majority of people on the internet. I'm definitely not going to be trusting anyone. I will probably use that Google, because I've realized that my personal workflows, like my life stuff, pretty much like my life workflow online is really inside of Google the whole time, kind of like how when I do audio and video stuff, my workflow is pretty much inside of Adobe the whole time. So I think I'll be on dot-google a lot, but I don't know how much I'll trust in this other stuff. We're going to make sure Pirate Bay gets Bay. Pirate.bay. How about that YAR? Dot-R-R-R-R-R. How are they going to host the servers so everyone will just block them easily? We'll see. I just wanted to point this out, because the last show we did, I mentioned this archery thing, and I don't think many people really knew what that was. Here's what's going to happen, though, right? Let's say I make dot-YAR, and that's all Pirate site, isn't it? Then most people are just using the time-mortar DNS server or the Verizon DNS server. Those DNS servers, if you ask them, hey, what's the IP address at scott.yar, they'll just be like, yeah, I don't see anything called scott.yar. I never heard of it. It knows this thing. The thing is, DNS blocking, we know it doesn't really work to actually stop people from firing. No, but it stops normal people from going itself. I put up billboards everywhere, but scott.yar, check them out on the website, and they'll really get to it. They're smart. We'll see what happens. I really just wanted people to see this archery thing, and a sheer number of people who appear to be trying to turn that into a business, I'm so disappointed in the internet that this is happening. It's pretty dumb. I cannot do it so well. Of course, our choices are like, I can or government? It's like, why don't we just bring in the head of so many people? That's kind of a secondary thing, that as much as I complain about the US government and I can and all these things, I really don't want the UN to have any power over the internet as a technological thing. I'd rather have the US end or I can than, I don't know, the rest of the world combined. There should be some sort of open source academic guys who run the thing. Yeah, who picks who the academics are? We vote the way like deviant votes. OK, so we do a democracy. Yeah, but it's all Linux guys. So only Linux guys? All Linux guys just, you know, get the freaking So here's how it is. If you want to vote, if you want to vote, you have to SSA, no, you have to telnet to a particular IP address and port, IPv6 only. And there, you have to use get and set commands directly, natively. It won't allow anything else. To follow an arcane dungeon crawling game served up entirely by a get to vote. If you are big, fat, you have a big ass white beard. And rainbow suspenders. Use them, you have rainbow suspenders, and you've only ever seen me use this command line and you've seen other computers like what the hell's that? Anyway. Everyone knows who the guys are. All right, things of the day, meta, guess we'll talk about Connecticut and anything else. 1QA4, anything else? No, you didn't take the key. Not a lot of it. I can follow it. All right, let's do it. Time for things of the day. But anyway, things of the day. This made the rounds on the internet with a ferocity and a rapidity that will rarely be repeated in the world. It's a thing so epic, I can't say awesome, because it's both awesome and not awesome. Can't say crazy, because I've seen crazier stuff. This really just counts as epic. So a dude, his cat died. I don't know the whole story. Cat's dead. Cat's dead, that happens. No one, immortal dog only works on dogs. And he taxidermied the cat and turned the cat into the best remote-controlled helicopter the world has ever seen and proceeded to fly around and scare the ever-living shit out of cows with it. This video combines everything that is both right and wrong with the internet together. The only thing it's lacking is rule 34, and I'm sure that's coming. I just want to point out the number one comment on this video is in Cyrillic. The number two comment says, and I quote, am I the only person here that wants to know what that music is? It uses weird, like, cute Japanese cat music. It's like the kind of music you'd hear in the opening video to a dating game or something like that. I don't know, it's odd. But this is the kind of thing, you'd see a picture of it and think, wow, that is not real. That is obviously a photoshop now. And not only is this real and epic, but the way he made the cat into a helicopter just makes it better. Like, the way the cat is, like, splayed out. Like, it's flying, like, holding four propellers. I thought you just said the propeller coming out the cat's top, like, well, you know, hold. No, this is, I imagine the cat was named Orville because the video is called the Orville Copter by most people. This is pretty great. So take this video out. I'm Jacking. So this video is this guy explaining how the accelerometer and the cell phone works. And most people, you might know how a regular accelerometer works. Yeah, there's a couple different kinds. But very few people know how you make that ridiculously small. And it's sort of the same way as we did the differential gear one, where it's like you see the basic concept with the tinker toys. And you're like, oh, the tinker toys. But then you see how they miniaturize it and get it to be so much more precise, even though it's the same mechanism. It's the same thing. It's like, what's an accelerometer? It's a ball on a spring in a jar. Well, how do we make a ball on a spring in a jar in a few nanometers of silicon? And that's what this video is about. The thing is, historically, accelerometers are notoriously inaccurate in many situations. And much of what I've read is that the main reason accelerometers seem so good recently, partly is due to better software to interpret the data coming from the somewhat flawed accelerometer and constrain it reasonably to figure kind of infer what you're actually doing. That's a whole, like, neat thing that I don't know enough about to say anything more than what I just said. Yeah. I guess this video is good if you watch it. So in the meta moment, the book club book is QTEEN84 or 1Q84. I'm pretty much, I'm almost done with it. And since I'm flying to Toronto tomorrow, and while I don't want to go to Toronto, I'll probably finish the book on the flight home. Yeah. So we'll do a book club show on it real soon. I don't know when this episode will actually air. We have a previous episode we did that also may or may not be online yet, though I guess by the time you hear this. I'm probably going to fix this when I get home. Yeah. But Connecticut is coming up in the Hartford Convention Center in July. We run the panels and workshops department. The vast majority of the schedule is done, complete, up on the website. And you should go because it's in everything con. And we have panels on almost any crazy topic you can think of. It's going to be an exciting time. You won't get to hang out with us, though. We're kind of busy. Also, we upgrade our website, which is why I might take one. We're getting that little geek night sperm out all over the internet. Right. So come to our website if you really want, or just keep following us wherever you follow things. Yep. For example, many of you might be watching the live stream of this. We're trying out the Google thing. If it works out, we'll start doing it regularly. Kind of see what we do before and after the show, which usually is sit here, kind of quiet, occasionally saying, that's bullshit. Don't use that as your news. Let me add this to my to-do list. See, possibly integrate the. We should integrate this, especially if this video, like the video of the current show, is always just up there. That'd be cool. I'll tell you right now, we're probably going to try to integrate this to a different YouTube account for regularness, rather than it going up on, I guess, my personal. I'm not actually sure what YouTube account this is going to go to. Probably my personal one, which every time I upload a video that is not my little pony, you would not believe the amount of feedback I get from people that's like, yeah, where's the more pony stuff? Why are you putting up non-pony stuff? I feel like I need to segregate the pony stuff from the other stuff. I think you can make channels. You can. I did. I don't think anyone who uses YouTube knows how to subscribe to just a channel. Because 99% of the people subscribed to me are just on the account as a whole. Just ignore them. Yeah? OK. PaxPron, PaxDev coming up. We will very likely be at PaxPron doing one or more panels and events, maybe, or maybe not be up. What was that awesome panel I did with you on there? I was going to ask you that, because I kind of forgot. Oh, it was about the concept of something about getting people. Pokemon and air hockey? Yeah, that was what we were calling it Pokemon and air hockey. But really, it's about getting, you know, you go to a gaming con, like an anime con. And there's the guys who only care about one kind of anime. So they go to the thing about that thing. So things about that thing cater to the hardcore people already know about it. Like at a geek convention, like for computers. Say we did a panel on public key cryptography. People who already know what that is are going to expect it to be way inside baseball. Because otherwise, they already know how it works. And anyone who doesn't know what it is is not going to show up to the panel about that. So you get to the situation where it's impossible to get people who are unaware of a particular nerdery or geekery into that thing at a nerd or geek conference, because you're either superficial, but people who are into that thing won't go to it, or will hate it, and people who aren't into it won't think to go. Or you're hardcore, and the people who are into it go to it, and you never get anyone else. That's too much of an explanation for a meta moment. Meta moment. But we will, oh yeah, I've got to put the thing back up in the studio. The sun and move. Oh god. Oh god. Also, we will very likely be doing the board game tabletop workshop thing again, because at Pac-East, that went really, really well. I was amazed. Got taught a bunch of people how to play a really long winded German board game, and they sat silently the entire time. And then they all played the board game. I was kind of amazed. Other conventions, not going Otacon, because they hate us, we're blacklisted. Yeah, whatever. And we'll be going out of Boston next year. MagFest is coming. That's enough conventions. Enough conventions. Any other meta events? That's pretty much it. Shows will be a little sporadic until I get off of this travel schedule. So turns out, we learned recently that Stuxnet, Flame, there's been some high-profile viruses, which happens from time to time. But by all appearances, these were written by the government for political purposes. Usually, the thing most of the viruses and things out there are part of botnets that are set up by Russian. I feel like we could do a whole panel or a whole show on the history of malware. Because think about it, it went from, yeah, but it went from, but it went from harmless pranks like the form virus to actively malicious, like the ogre, to just trying to make money, like the botnets and the spam bots. And now we've got government cyber warfare, which the cyber warfare has been mostly a joke up to this point. Well, I mean, it's kind of funny because we don't really know how much of it has happened or is happening because it's super secret. And all we know is what we discover on computers around the world. And the US government has been very proactive, openly proactive, like, there's going to be cyber war. Let's prepare for it. For years, since the 90s or even earlier, they've been like, yeah, there's going to be computer warfare where people will attack other countries, computer systems to deal economic or even physical harm. And we have to prepare to defend against that. But meanwhile, they said it was going to happen. Yeah, you know why it's going to happen? Because you made it happen. You pretty much started it. I mean, from the evidence that we have, not only were they very loud about suggesting that someone else was going to start it and that they had to have defenses against it, but yeah, they pretty much also built the offenses and started it. I guess, Scott, this is not a new thing. And I point you to, are you familiar with the Siberian pipeline sabotage incident of 1982? I do remember that the pipeline was sabotaged. You don't remember details of the pipeline sabotage? Basically, the details of this are that now there's different classified and declassified or whatever. Basically, it is alleged pretty solidly that the CIA inserted a sort of trigger or some bad logic in these chips that they knew were going to be used to control the valves on this pipeline. And then we're able to later cause it to explode. This is in 1982. So I read recently that someone definitely, it could have been a BS story, because I only read the headlines. I don't know if it's true. But there's always been this sort of worry that you buy chips made from some other country that can have a back door in them. First of all, if you're worried about that, that probably means you're doing it on your chips, because you know it's possible. Well, Scott, you think that. I want to point out, I worked at IBM a long time ago. I actually did stuff in the factory where the PS3 chips happened. Like, people use my turtles to do that crap. So many of the chips that are in technology that the military would like to use or the government would like to use, no one in the United States makes the chips, nor any analog of those chips. But there are rules where certain kinds of things have to be made on US soil to prevent that sort of thing. And many times, the US military government is in a situation where they need X. No company in the United States makes X anymore. And they have to get it from China. So we kind of shot our own selves in the ass for that one. What I'm saying is that recently I saw a headline, which could be just on the internet, that said they confirmed finding a back door in some Chinese chip somewhere. Yep, I saw some articles downplaying it. But stuff like that does happen. You know. It's not that hard to do if you're making the chip. But if something's in the chip, it's like, what the fuck can you do? You can't just patch it with a download. But thinking about the complexity of that kind of hack, say you make a special Intel chip, like a CPU, it's got to be such that it can hijack something the OS is doing and give you a back door into the OS's stuff. I mean, if you know the vast majority of the time, the OS is going to be like Linux kernel or Windows, right? There's a lot of common elements there. You can target something that's on a lot of machines. Or you just need to know what machine you're hitting. Or you can write something so generic. You could get just an assembly program in there that runs in the background and just takes every other CPU cycle or something if you're that low. And so it's like, OK, the computer's going slowly. Or maybe the computer's so fast I don't even notice it. But really what it's doing is, in a space you can't even see because it's just assembly code running in the CPU is reading bits out of your hard drive and it's sending them over the network wire. And the only way you can see that is if you're looking at the network traffic directly. Even if the aerial wouldn't see it, it's on the same computer. You need to look from another computer. Yeah, but at the same time, the complexity of controlling all the bits to where there's no sort of audit logs someone would notice. But then in the real world, security doesn't work for crap. And very few people do the level of due diligence that all the experts say once you do. So what do we do about it? It appears that the US government may have made, or made with other people, flame and possibly Stuxnet. Well, we know that pretty everyone knows they've made probably most of these. Yeah, probably. The evidence is very high to both of us. They're so complicated. And if you look at the data, it's going to take a long time to really look through all the deco files. Well, did you see today there was an article about how they happen to be signed by Microsoft certificates? Right. So you don't know, right? When you install some software on a computer, right, it always, like Windows, is like, hey, this driver is not signed by us, which means we didn't verify this is a good driver. It's just so many dollar difference on the internet. Are you sure you want to trust this? Yes, no. Now, in order to apply that signature to avoid the yes, no questions that it's trusted by the operating system, you need a private key, which we've talked about in the show before you build this in episodes of that, or watch a good YouTube video about it. And that private key is only in the possession of Microsoft the company. Because when you're buying Windows, well, you're trusting Microsoft with your operating system. You trust them with telling you a driver is good or bad. You're already trusting them anyway, right? Because they wrote all the code in the OS. So, I mean, come on. So if this virus is signed by Microsoft, that means one of a few things. It means, number one, Microsoft made. Well, Microsoft says it is a spoofed certificate, and they've already issued a patch to prevent it from working again. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, let me finish. No, let me finish. I was listing the things it could possibly be. And I didn't finish one of the things it could possibly be. Yeah, because I think the thing's pretty obvious. OK, not to people who listen to show and are experts. So the thing it could possibly be, number one, is Microsoft did it. I highly doubt that. I'm not, well, not did it. Yeah, so I'm saying did it as a made-flame. Yeah, no way. Number two, somebody else made-flame, and then paid or got Microsoft to apply the digital signature to it. The government could have coerced Microsoft into doing that, or maybe Microsoft did it willingly for money, or free, or who knows, possible. Number three, somebody was able to get the key from Microsoft, or crack it with some incredible computer, or guess it, or who knows. Unlikely. And then apply it themselves without Microsoft being involved. I call unlikely. My guess, my gut feeling, is that the government may or may not have advised Microsoft to let this go. Microsoft just gave the keys to the government. Or Microsoft signed it, or something. Because now that it's public, Microsoft immediately had a patch available. Now, for all I know, it's probably pretty easy to issue a patch that just says this particular certificate is no longer good. That's pretty much what the patch says. Hey, anything that was signed with this certificate is no good anymore, and anything that you see this certificate coming through denied. The thing is, if the certificate is that easily spoofed, well, Microsoft's in trouble anyway. So if the government got Microsoft to do it, I'm not saying this is what happened. I'm going to pull a Fahrenheit 9-11 here. It is interesting that Microsoft had a patch so quickly to- That's not hard to make it to really good. Exactly. But were I the kind of person who was trying to convince people of a certain narrative? It is interesting how quickly I really wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was at least someone at Microsoft or Microsoft as a company was in on this with the governments. It's a likely scenario. I think more likely is someone- It's not a conspiracy theory. Mathematically, it's a matter of math. What's more likely, this somewhat believable conspiracy theory? OK, I don't like to believe conspiracy theories. Or incredibly powerful computers define the odds of powerful cryptography. They're also the possibility, I read somewhere, that it was like a third-party hand-off kind of cert. There could have been some other- Ah, but it was third-party hand-off cert? Definitely the government. I mean, really. Everyone knows it, David. Well, there was another article to have such a- It's like, you rob the convenience store. Everyone knows you're out the convenience store. But then how many perm evidence it was you, but there was another article on Slashdown that was so much better, the headline says it all. Antivirus firms out of their league with Suksnet and Flame. Seriously, antivirus as software. Like, you know, McCarthy, all these antivirus vendors. Yeah, as a technology professional, that software is bullshit. Doesn't do crap. I feel like in my professional opinion, you should never use software like that. If you're running Windows, just use Windows, you know, Defender, it works fine. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, that's not, you know, just don't even really pay attention to it. But really, real security takes place at all these other layers in the stack. The local PC with its antivirus, that'll keep out baby's first, you know, Trojan. But anyway, let's talk about display specifically, because this is an interesting thing about it. Most, you know, like you were saying, throughout history, we've seen viruses, it just makes balls pull it around the screen, we've seen- Well, because it was cool hackers being like, I wrote a crappy virus based on something once, and infected a bunch of my friends' PCs, and I got it. You've seen ones that control people's computers, and make them sense spam, you've seen ones that destroy people's computers, and you've seen all kinds, right? We've seen ones that show people ads, there's a lot of those still going on. And there probably have been ones that have been the sort of cyber warfare thing that we didn't see. But this one, in particular, the way the flame works, is if you get it, you probably won't realize you have it, first of all. And second of all, what happens is your computer is basically just spying on you all the time, and sending all the things it's spying on to somebody we can't really tell who. Because it's very well concealed and proxied in those things. You know, that's a dinner up. So it'll turn your webcam on and look at you, and turn your microphone on and listen to you, but you won't know your web skins on because the light won't be on, and it'll get your key presses, and all your web history, and all this stuff. It basically just spies on you like crazy, and then sends that information somewhere. No, the reason what I was interrupting for is that I feel like we could do a whole show on the fact that the internet's like, on one hand, the RIA and the MPAA are always like suing people with IP addresses. And yet, you can send information out in the internet to whoever you want with no one, even like big governments, not able to figure out who you're sending it to. And the technology is to how that works is actually pretty neat. I think the best example.