Episode: 3706
Title: HPR3706: The Future of Technology
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3706/hpr3706.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:27:43

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3706 from Monday the 17th of October 2022.
Today's show is entitled The Future of Technology.
It is part of the series' privacy and security.
It is hosted by Lurking Pryon and is about 51 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, a philosophical look at the future of technology.
Matt, how's your week been?
You know, it's over, so I can now say not too bad.
Well, that's good.
Because, you know, I've got to put that positive spin on it.
You do.
It's really kind of important to put that positive spin on things.
Because, you know, I mean, do they like the negative spin?
Do you agree with that?
Say that again.
I was going to say, everyone likes a positive spin, right?
Yeah, the lie is sell for a reason.
I don't believe that at all.
You don't think so?
No.
No, do you have a possibility to be too real with people?
Well, no, I mean, if people like to positive spin,
then can you explain to me what the fuck is going on with Facebook and Twitter?
Oh, no. Well, we like it, right?
If you ask somebody how they're doing, nobody wants the truth.
Well, there's that.
But they've asked their sales, but it's from a consumption standpoint,
not from people you know.
Again, this whole theory about how people attraction works,
and the people who need support the most,
get it the least, because we're all in a boat, right?
If we're all in a boat, I guess it's an area I like to use a lot.
We're all in a boat, and you see somebody drowning,
and then you see a strong swimmer.
You might go for the strong swimmer,
because you think that like that person is going to like help you out.
Are you going for the, I guess the better analogy in that case,
is like somebody in a bigger fancier boat.
So you want to get to the fancy boat, so you can join the party.
Well, you got a hole in your boat,
and there's somebody kind of struggling in the water.
You can stop and try to save them,
and then maybe they could help you bail out your boat
as you're trying to get to the other boat.
But nobody stops, or very few people stop,
because they're thinking, I got a hole in my boat,
and I just need to get to the other boat.
And if I could go and join that other boat,
then I'll be happy.
But what they don't realize is that that boat has a hole in it, too.
So we usually leave it in their hole.
It's usually wrapped in fire, too.
It's one of those things.
I think it's just a human, natural,
a human interaction.
The people who need support the most often get ignored,
because everybody is worried about the hole in their own boat.
We are definitely an individualistic society today.
I mean, I don't think that we're meant to be that way.
I think that we're supposed to be social creatures
in our little tribes.
But the problem is, is our tribes don't exist anymore.
And I think that there was a reason for that.
We are tribes who have moved online.
Well, I mean, there's a number of reasons for it,
but first is jobs.
Second is a lot of us come from tribes that suck.
Yeah, I mean, you didn't even ask, you know,
our era, our generation growing up.
And you know what?
Maybe we need to have like a separate,
we get all caught up on these things.
Maybe we need to have a separate,
just general philosophy bullshitting podcast.
Or we can talk about this stuff,
because I think that's really interesting.
But our generation, like, I don't know about you,
but I guess I grew up in the country.
My parents on purpose bought a plotter land away from everybody else,
because they said that they always told us
grown up that they want to do, rather, import friends.
Then just have us hang out with whoever,
which actually meant no importing of friends.
We couldn't hang out very much.
So, you know, as a kid, I grew up kind of lonely
and envying other kids that lived in this subdivision.
But then when I was like a teenager,
and I had my bike and I could ride my bike to different places,
I would ride through subdivisions,
thinking that there were going to be all these kids
just playing out in the street and their work.
And so, it was really weird,
because it was like riding my bike through these ghost towns
in the summer, and that was, you know,
back in the early 90s.
And so, I think if we have to go either
earlier in our generation or to a previous generation,
and maybe it depends also on the area,
but that was my experience growing up.
There's just, you know, nobody hung out anymore.
There's all these houses close together.
There's kids that lived there.
I know, because they went to my school.
I knew around where they lived,
and they were all just inside.
And that was probably, you know,
to video game consoles, and they don't know.
Yeah, I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.
I graduated in 89.
So, I mean, video games weren't around when I was a kid.
And my generation, I mean,
you're at the tail end of my generation.
You're on like that line between generations.
Yeah, I'm like right at the end of Gen X.
Yeah, which sucks, but that's okay,
because nobody in Gen X actually fits anywhere.
There are a bunch of misfits.
We are.
We all played outside.
There wasn't shit to do inside.
And our parents would kick us out.
They would literally lock the doors.
And they would send us out and we'd go play.
And when lunchtime came around, my mom would come out
and throw a picture of a cool late on the picnic table
and some sandwiches.
And then it was be home before the street lights came on.
Yeah, I mean, and that's where I was.
I was out there riding my bike.
So, like I was expecting to see all these other kids.
Whoa, and, you know, it was, I got, it was,
gosh, that the nearest neighborhood was a little over a mile away.
So, I rode my bike over a mile to go and see
if I could find any of these kids playing out in the street
or just none of them.
See, I grew up in that transition period when video games,
because video games were like popular with kids
that were about 10 years younger than me.
And it wasn't really the same experience
for me and the people about my age.
Because the video games really didn't hold much for us.
We were already kind of moving beyond
the, let's sit around and play games
phased into other things.
So, but it was weird because we started noticing
just a disappearance of kids.
Like, there was nobody out to play.
And it's like they all just disappeared.
And we knew that they were there.
Because we used to play with them.
But then these video game consoles
became cheap and affordable.
And yeah, yeah.
I mean, it started before that with cable TV.
Yeah, we never had cable.
And there was like channel one, but we didn't have that either.
That sucks.
Although I have to admit, I didn't watch a lot of cable TV.
My brother loved MTV.
He was like glued to that damn thing.
That's back when it was music, though.
Yeah, we could watch that at my grandma.
She had cable.
So whenever we visit her,
we would sit there and watch MTV.
And yeah, all the music videos and everything.
But that was a big no in my house.
Yeah, that sucks.
But yeah, so you were, I mean, growing up,
you would have, it would be the Atari
or the Commodore 64.
And those were really mainstream.
It was the original Nintendo system.
Yeah, we had the Atari.
We had the Atari Play System.
And those were the games that I played.
Because Nintendo didn't come out until quite a bit later.
86 or somewhere around there, right?
And how my first computer was in Atari.
I want to say 2800 XL.
So it's a, I really want to find one of those
just so I can like have it up on a shelf somewhere.
That's the crazy thing is that
people back then had no idea
that they should hold onto those things.
Because now they're collectors items.
Even if they didn't work.
I know.
And it's like, it was crazy because I had an Atari monitor,
an Atari keyboard, an Atari tape drive.
I had a floppy drive that was Atari and an Atari.
Everything was literally Atari.
All of it.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And that's back before,
that's back when everybody was doing the proprietary thing.
And it's like, oh, you know, you have our stuff
or you just lose out.
And then later on, you know, yeah.
Well, Apple never quite caught on to that fad.
There's still all or nothing fad.
So it works for me.
I guess they've developed a cult and good on them.
I'm more of an open standard.
Let's be able to pick and choose kind of guy.
Me too.
I'm stuck on iPhone because I have a script on there.
That's where I do my writing.
And I could just say, oh, I won't write on my phone.
But it's really nice to be able to get some words in
when you're out and about.
I don't have a similar for Android.
Well, no.
It would have to be scripted because scripted is multi-platform.
So I've got an iPad.
I can write on the iPad.
I can write on my computer.
I can write on my phone.
So you can do the thing on Android.
No, because I don't have scripted to
that's the writing program I use on my desktop.
So when I pull it up, it interacts with the cloud.
So all of them, as long as I don't mess up my sync,
then all of my files are there.
So I can, you know, it's the program.
If they would develop it for Android, that would be amazing.
So it's not cross-platform.
No, well, like I can use it on Windows.
I can use it on Mac.
I can use it on iOS.
But they do not have it ported to Android.
Yeah, I don't think they're,
they talked about it years ago.
They think whatever partnership
that they were working on fell through.
They even used to have it support on like an early beta on Linux,
which was awesome because I threw it up on Ubuntu.
Right.
There was a point in time where I was really tempted
just to switch how to be there these two major platforms.
Oh, I ran Linux for years.
And I only switched over to Windows.
I want to say maybe two years ago, maybe.
And the only reason is I got a Surface Pro.
And I was dual-booting it with Ubuntu and Windows.
But the problem was I could never get the damn touchpad
to work in a Ubuntu.
Yeah.
I think that's what prevented me from full adoption was
anytime you wanted to change something.
For me, I didn't have enough time to become
a magical Linux wizard.
So it was always hunting the internet to figure out
how to get your Nvidia drivers to work.
Or, you know, why isn't this working?
Okay, well now what you've got to do is
you've got to load up these repositories
and then update these files and go and you got to,
you know, grab some stuff.
Imagine how much better the world would be
if like Nvidia just made their drivers open source.
No, it would be great.
Because I mean, as it is,
everyone in the Linux community,
you have to reverse engineer that damn thing
and then rebuild it.
That's the problem with Linux.
Is all these proprietary drivers,
you have to reverse engineer them
and build that into a solution.
And then every time they change something,
it's like back to the majority of the drawing board.
It's like somebody went and put a fork in the timeline
or we rewind it back to like 2000.
Wow, that's a real tournament.
Yeah, like, I mean, seriously,
it's like unreal tournament came out
and you could install that on Linux.
Right.
And so it was like that was the branch, right?
And then somebody said, no, we can't be having that.
We need to shut that down.
So they were like one of the, as far as I know,
one of the last game developers
to actually release like an installable
that would work on Linux.
And you know, gaming is, I think it's kind of like
the porn industry for videos
or isn't why we had VHS and DVDs.
It was porn.
It was porn.
But gaming is that same mechanism for computing
if games would have stuck with the developers
would have stuck with releasing on Linux
then maybe there would have been more of a poll.
But yeah, it had to have come down to
ATI and Nvidia and being lobbied.
You know, for Microsoft and like, hey,
we would really like it.
If you didn't make it as easy to develop
on this other platform where people aren't paying
because you know, it could be really insecure.
I don't know what they, I don't know what they sold them.
They sold them something good and that's where Linux kind of.
But it's really interesting to look at Red Hat
look how much of a presence it actually,
it's like got a ghost presence in IT
and enterprise everywhere.
I was going to say it's not much of a ghost presence
depending on where you're at IT.
Well, I mean, just go, just go take a look at, you know,
any of the job boards.
There's not as many positions for cis admins
for, you know, Unix or Linux.
And I think a lot of people when they just come out of school,
they don't realize how big Linux actually is.
That's what I mean by a ghost presence is it?
Yeah.
You know, I think that if you are getting started in the career in IT,
it would not be a bad idea to get some Red Hat experience
under your belt for sure.
I would definitely agree with that.
Because that's, you know, in an oversaturated market,
most admins don't have that experience.
Or maybe they took a class,
you know, with their computer science degree,
and so they could maybe pick it up,
but they're not power users.
No, I mean, I took a class when I was, I did
my bachelor's.
It was, you know, internet system software technology.
And I had one.
I actually set up, you know, Linux and did their little exercises and everything.
That by no means makes me an administrator,
especially not in Linux.
It's not as intuitive.
Right.
And yeah, that's a true story.
I don't know.
It's weird because, you know, if you watch,
if you watch where the world's going,
it kind of seems like Windows and Linux are marching like toward each other.
And it's like neither one really seems to
want to talk about it.
That's as like clarify that.
Like, what do you mean?
Well, Windows.
It's a feature for me.
Okay, so Windows, if you look at Windows Research and Development team,
pretty much everything that comes out of there is open source.
Literally everything that comes out of that team is like open source.
They've started including the Linux substructure
in Windows to make it easier to conform.
And if you look at like PowerShell,
I mean, PowerShell, the command structure is almost basically Linux.
I like using PowerShell too.
It's very powerful.
And they are giving more and more
ability to the people that administer the systems
and making it more friendly for them to do that.
They're opening the source code more.
There's even a lot of talk about them going open source.
And Linux, on the other hand, has been marching in the absolute opposite direction.
They've been marching down a path of consolidating forks
and trying to squeeze out certain parts of the ecosystem
that they don't really want to support or have mainstream.
And it's like they're trying to be as much like Windows as possible
to try and gather Windows users.
And it's like they're just on this,
it's like they're on two roads marching in opposite directions
toward each other and neither one sees the other.
So crazy.
It is.
And it's like, I think if they would like just sit down and say,
okay, let's meet in the middle.
I think we could probably end up with an awesome ecosystem.
I mean, imagine what you could do with the financial resources of Microsoft
and the open source resources that are available in the Linux community and put them together.
How do you do that without Microsoft is gobbling it up
because by its very nature, you know, it's what it does.
Microsoft, the days of making money off operating systems is over.
Today, it's no longer operating systems that matter.
It's APIs and apps.
And with the APIs that are being finalized,
an app in your web browser can have the same level of access to your system
as an operating system.
So really the need to run an operating system is irrelevant.
You can build apps, run them in the cloud, charge people a subscription,
and still make the same amount of money.
The operating system that runs on someone's computer,
that's just there to make the user feel good.
As long as that system can boot up a browser,
like Google was light years ahead of the curve.
They saw that thing coming.
I mean, if you look at a Chromebook, what is it?
It's a power source for a browser.
That's true.
That's it.
And that's where I mean, Microsoft sees the days of the actual operating system
coming to a close.
And I think that's one of the reasons they're willing to march toward open source
is because the time and effort put into developing an operating system,
like Windows,
when everything is migrating to an app-based structure in the cloud,
just it's not starting to make sense anymore.
I don't think you're going to recoup the money from the effort that you put into it.
And I think operating systems are eventually just going to be relegated to geeks.
And I think the average person is going to just be running a browser that connects to the internet
and they run all of their apps via their browser with APIs.
Hey, I want to argue with you, Robert, but I can't come up with a good argument
because I mean, even, gosh,
2010, we had browser, like HTML5 browser games that looked like you had installed.
You had installed the game like we always had, I think Black Ops, one of the Black Ops games.
It was basically a browser game.
And I remember thinking, what the heck, this is janky except it performed just like I had installed
like this huge multi-gig executable, you know, like whole executable, but the whole infrastructure
on my machine. And I want to argue with you because I don't necessarily like that future,
but if I ask myself why, I don't have a good reason because there's really, I mean, maybe
if you're screaming everything to your machine, then, you know, like, what is the data value
of having all of your data go through there? But really, is it any different?
Like, I think we live in an illusion right now. I have this OS.
I have the applications and the software that I have installed on my machine.
You do, but you get Office 365 and everything's actually taking place in the cloud.
You're sitting there using OneDrive. You're syncing everything to the Apple cloud. You're running
everything on a cloud back in. And the thing is, is we finally reached the point where there is
enough available processing power for ideas like virtual reality. The problem with virtual reality
was there was never the processing power available. You didn't have it, but now you have that
available in the cloud and all that's holding you back now is bandwidth.
That's it. I hate that you're right on this and I don't know why I hate that you're right
because we're already living there. We're just, it's like a faux reality.
It is. That's why it doesn't matter. I don't know why it matters. This is making me upset and I
have no idea why. I mean, it looks like the days of the computer are over. I mean, if you think
about it, you haven't carried a phone for the last decade. You carry a computer that makes phone calls.
Oh, yeah. I was thinking about that the other day. It's not really a phone. It is.
But if you really think about it, it's not really a phone. And I was, I think I was on a walk
and I had this thing in my pocket. And I was like, you know what? It's weird. If the law
of averages for everybody who owns a phone, you probably have like you walk down the street and
you think, oh, these, you know, none of us are really that rich. However, how many of us are sitting
there walking down the street with a thousand dollar piece of hardware sitting in our pocket?
And how many people do you know that still have desktops?
No, I do. Yeah, but how many people do you know?
I don't know that many people. And we live in the geek community. And even, even embedded in that
community, we don't know a whole lot of other people that actually have desktops systems.
Well, and I mean, a great point to that is a big portion of the market share for gaming has
moved to mobile gaming. You know, you've got these Gacha games. The latest big one, you know, is the
Diablo one that came out from Blizzard. And you've got people spend in some, like in the extreme
cases, streamers who are making that money anyway, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on
these in-game items. And it's all on, it's all on mobile. I mean, you can, I think there's a client
you get for the PC, but the majority of players are playing on mobile. And this is, I mean, I played it
and it's right there with Diablo 2, you know, it feels the same way, except now instead of,
you know, clicking all over the screen to move, you're just running around with your finger on your
phone. And it's so much more efficient. Yep, and they're making money hand over fist. So, and that,
if that, if that's what we're looking at, that is an app. That's that mobile code that you're
talking about. What's the difference between running an app there on your phone where most of
that stuff is streaming down from the server anyway. And just doing that. I can't disagree with you.
I want to. I walk and I don't know why, maybe it's because I'm legacy now. I'm just legacy,
and I don't like the idea that we're already, the truth is we're already living there.
But to see that's that's what that's my rationale for understanding why more open source is coming
out of Microsoft. I think they already see the future. And I think they realize the only way to
keep the Windows operating system going is to release it out to a community of people that are
actually caring enough to keep it going. And I think you're going to end up seeing some kind of
weird Linux Windows hybrid that will eventually replace both of them.
And I know there's a lot of people out there right now that are like, oh, I hold though.
And besides, besides just saying, hell no, we would never do that. But really,
what's what's to stop it from happening?
All right, listeners, those of you on either side. Welcome to. Welcome. Welcome to legacy. You feel
like I feel the exact one. I argue with it. You cannot like it. But it's probably it probably has
a lot more truth than we're willing to admit. So sleep on it. That's the question.
What I mean, come on. Do you remember when everything was going virtual and how many people were
sitting around? Oh, I'll never have virtual machines. I'm always going to have physical machines
anymore. But all virtual. You've got a couple of big beefy hosts. And now everybody's like,
oh, I'm not going to go to the cloud. Everybody's going to the fucking cloud.
People who tell me they're not going to the cloud. I'm just like, yeah, you are. It's just a matter
of who owns that cloud. That's it. Who writes the check for it? That's it. But
it's just the it's just the evolution of the game and recognizing where it's going. I think is going to
help is going to help people move in a direction that they can still have a job 10 years from now.
Right. And I think people getting out of college right now that say, hey, I want to go be a developer
from Microsoft. Well, you better get in on the app side of things. If you go trying to be an OS
developer, you're going to find yourself out of work. And that's not a happy place to be.
Very, very valid points here. And I mean, now on the server side, are we still going to have
operating systems? Well, VMware, you're technically as a VMware is technically an operating system.
Yeah. But that's it's interesting because I think if we go back, look at what the future looked
like in the 60s and then in the 80s, the future always looked really weird. But the future in reality
is not so much, it's not as different from today as we'd expect. So, you know, back in the 90s,
with the, you know, anytime you saw a hacker or a script kitty in a in a movie, it was all like
this weird crazy command line stuff. Can you do it? Yeah, you can. But I think that the future's
probably getting it like I have to agree with you. It's probably going to be running
preloaded apps for command processes in an interface. So, you know, if you're just starting out in
your career or you're just you're you're thinking about it, UI work is always going to be beneficial.
But please don't be like these new millennials running around creating UIs that I can't understand.
You're making me so old and I'm not old. Stop hiding stuff, put it in a logical intuitive manner.
Well, but the thing is is intuitive is relative. I know it's horrible. It's like everyone tells me
the apple was intuitive and I'll be, I tell you what, every time my wife hands me her iPhone,
I'm like, where the hell is shit? I don't know where anything is. I'm lost. It's not intuitive
to me. Right. Anybody's Android? I know exactly where stuff is and how to get there.
I think intuitive is relative and perfect example that you're bringing up here is before Steve
Jobs died. He was trying to sell everybody on the idea of a one-button mouse. And I wanted to
fly out the California and punch that man in the mouth. Like as a gamer, I wanted seven buttons
on my mouse and I wanted them all programmable. That made sense to me. That was intuitive. A one-button
mouse. What the heck am I going to do with that thing? Well, as the need for that mouse goes away,
it starts to make a lot more sense. I mean, I can just click with this thing. It's it? Yeah,
pretty much. There you go. There's no scroll. No, don't need it. No zoom? Nope, don't need it.
I can't go forward and backwards on the web browser without touching. Matter of fact, I won't be
surprised to see mice that don't have any buttons at all. Newtard mice. You heard it here, folks.
Touch screen mice. Touch screen mice. No, seriously. Did you ever think that we wouldn't have a
keyboard on a phone? It blows my mind that we can do what we can do on our phones. But I mean,
think back. Did you really ever think that there would be a phone that didn't have a keypad?
Oh, I get what you're saying. So I was thinking too fine too. You mean,
like touch-in numbers. How the heck are you going to punch in numbers if there's no phone?
There's no buttons on the phone. You're right. Now we touch our screen. We still hit, you know,
555 555555, whatever to call somebody. But we're not pushing actual buttons. That's what you're
saying, right? Yeah, and I don't see why wouldn't a mouse go the same way. Shut up. You could
have as many buttons on that damn thing as you wanted. It's all touch screen. Stop speaking truth,
the power rubber. And think about how much more responsive it would be. You don't need to be
quiet now. I don't like your future. I mean, come on. Have you played like Nintendo Wii?
Yeah, but even back then, what was your controller? Your hands. It was just a freaking fancy
accelerometer with a little button that you could push. That was it. This is weird because what you're
saying, these are topics that I've been excited about. And now that we're seeing the transition
into the future, it's, there is a little bit of fear with these things of like the world is changing.
And I don't know. Is it a control thing that I don't, I feel like I don't have any control over it?
Or zero control over it. I'm just going to tell you that right now.
I know that. So the only thing that you can do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
I mean, the days of the computer, the days of the phone, those things are gone. Even the days of
carrying a phone are leaving us. We're going to start wearing our computers.
I see that. Yeah, because I, I've seen people talking into their Apple Watch. And obviously,
you know, most of us, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have a way that you're
getting notifications. That isn't just your phone. I'm sorry. If you bought Google Glass,
like I did, it's not coming across your Google Glass because they don't even. I am so
I wanted one of those so bad. That also went way ahead of its time. Right. And I think I keep it
because I think it's probably going to be a collector's item at some point. It'll be back.
But, but yeah, that is not that was a version of the future that was too old.
It was too early. The thing is, I think Google has tested the waters for other companies to let
them know where society was and was not. And the thing is is you have to throw the thing out
there that scares people and then slowly let them get used to the idea. And I mean, come on.
If most people today realize that the vast majority of what they were doing on a computer was just
browser-based, that must be only think about it. No, that's why this is a, I can't argue with you
as you say it. And I try to attack it. I realize that the majority of what I'm doing is exactly what
you're saying. Yeah. And dude, is that a microprocessor smaller and smaller and smaller?
We now have cameras that are the size of a grain of sand.
Which is crazy, even if you just think about not even the optics, but the memory and the storage
and the control unit. That's insane. It is. So yeah, it only makes sense that things are,
this is probably one of those cases where things are changing. You go back to Moore's Law.
The things are changing way faster than what we're seeing in a marketplace because as you just said,
you know, Google Glass was way ahead of its time. But I was walking through the mall.
malls exist still. Yes. Because that's where the theater that we go to is. But we were walking past
the one of the eyeglass stores and I don't crucify me if I am wrong. I believe it was Ray Bands.
They had an advertisement there and they actually have a camera in the frame.
Just write it the joint. I think it was Ray Bands. But so now that is Google Glass. Maybe you
are not seeing, you know, they don't yet have the overlay for the lens. Because that might be the
bridge too far for consumers. But you can sell them on, hey, you can take pictures with your eyes.
Which was from Google Glass. And almost guarantee you that Google has a patent on there.
You also don't crucify me if I'm wrong. But now people can take pictures with their regular glasses.
And then it's just the next step to turn that thing into a heads-up display.
Yep. Then you do the overlay over the lenses. We already have polarized lenses or transitions.
And then those VR glasses get smaller and smaller. And then, hey, you can actually look through the
VR glass and see the world around you or not. And then the next thing you know, you'll be able to
stick it in your eye in a contact lens. Yeah. But what did we call those people? What did we call
all the Google Glass people? I never got called it because not very many people saw me with mine.
They were called Glassholes. What, Assholes? I guarantee it. You want some fun?
Go on YouTube. I just type in Glasshole. And I'm sure that you will get some of those videos that
people were just all up in arms about the Google Glass and making funny videos about people being
Glassholes, about using their Google Glass inappropriately in social situations. But what we're
doing is, you know, maybe that was too soon, but I introduced this idea to people. And now we're
going to slowly increase the temperature of the water and get people up to speed. Guaranteed,
there's tech out there right now that we could be doing stuff way more advanced than what we're
doing. But we're not ready for it yet. Wait a minute. Somebody already has neural implants.
Yep. Having holes in people's head with little tiny optical fibers going into the brain.
You sign in up for that? No. We'll check back with you in 15 years and see if you're still
feeling the same way. I'll be just too early. I'm not about being a guinea pig.
Please don't want to be early to the party. That's all. I don't want to, you know, I've,
yeah, no, I'm not one to ride that first wave. You don't want to be the space monkey,
I get strapped to the rock. Oh, or the person who has that freaking laser disc player?
Or that, that glass holder that bought Google Glass for $1,500 and it's a
$1,000 box. It would be a relic of futures past. Exactly. That's me. In case nobody got their reference.
All those HD DVDs that are laying around in someone's house or, you know, all even in those old
beta Macs or the HD DVD rolling back to earlier in this episode. I think that was the one where
the porn industry actually lost. No, no, was HD DVD or was it the Vue Ray? Vue Ray was where the
porn industry went. That's the same reason we have HTTPS because Microsoft had also developed
SHTTP where they just encrypted the traffic on port 80. Remember that? Yeah, Zula developed SSL
and moved the, moved the socket over to 443 and they were trying to fight per e-commerce and the
porn industry went with HTTPS and that was the end of SHTTP down the rabbit hole. Same way beta
Macs died. Porn industry went with VHS. The porn industry has really decided where technology has
gone for the last 40 years and you can argue with it all you want but it facts. Well, maybe that's
why the SEC has some hits for porn hub. They're really just trying to regulate by figuring out
where the porn industry is. Porn hub is a two and a half billion dollar company.
That's B capital B. Yeah, I don't think either one of us are necessarily advocating listener that
you go and do research at the porn industry to figure out where your tech career is going
just that they have an influence. They have a lot of apps.
Um, did you say apps? Yes. Those two make sure I heard you're right.
Oh, yes.
The intersection of technology and kittens.
Kind of crazy. It's a, it's a crazy world we live in.
Yeah, but this has been an interesting episode. I like this being able to kind of talk this stuff
out because, you know, especially I think in tech maybe in particular we've seen a big push to,
you know, be in remote and a lot of people probably don't get access to these conversations
as much as they used to. Earlier in my career, you know, we used to theorize about where tech was
going and you have to kind of have a basis of that and the interest in that if you're going to be
in the security realm because you also have to think about the implications of, you know, where is
security in those pivots? I mean, you have to think not only where is security, but where's the
adversary in those pivots? I mean, we just discussed that we have APIs that can have the same
level access to your computer as an installed application. Wait, what?
This goes both ways and, you know, I mean, technology is neither good or bad. It's just a matter
of how it's used, but recognizing where the industry is going and maybe being able to get in and
see where are the security points on those so that we can have that
cool whatever the hell it is that we're wearing five years from now and not necessarily worry about
it being horribly insecure. Now, privacy, that's a whole different story.
That privacy is always going to be, I think it's privacy is going to be, we're going to talk about
security going into the future. Privacy is where the real, that's where the real battle is.
Yeah, security, people are willing to accept that, but privacy,
but maybe even still, I mean, the people who really want privacy, they're not as many as you would
think. Yeah, especially, you know, I also wanted to disagree with you there and there's probably
a bunch of listeners who wanted to yell at you too, and they might have, but I think especially
the younger generations, they are very willing to trade privacy for something, because it's not,
they've grown up in a different world than we did, so it's not something that they've valued.
Well, let me give you a war story from the Air Force from over a decade ago.
We have recall rosters, and on the recall, you have the name of every person in the unit,
their rank, you've got their address, their home phone number, their cell number, their email address,
all of that information is sitting on a recall roster. Well, we had a good idea fairy come along,
who said, hey, we can get this third party company who will do robo calls, and then we don't have
to do manual phone calling down the phone tree whenever we need everybody to come in and report.
We can just have this third party company do it. So they went and gave all of those recall
rosters from every unit to this company with zero consent from the people who's personally
identifiable information it was. Welcome to the military. And out of the entire base, guess how many
of us objected to this and were allowed to opt out? Two separate numbers,
bar ratios. I think probably a lot more people objected to it than spoke up about it,
because the environment of the military, but not as many as any of us might expect. And
all out to opt out was probably maybe this is just my personal experience than painted cynical
nature, but zero. Five. Five were people allowed to opt out? Yes. Yes, people were allowed to
opt out. Five of us. And that was, that was only after we had taken our case to the inspector general
and opened up a case against the base. Yes, yeah, I'm not, I'm not at all surprised that it took
that much, but, but the caveat here might be military with the age group.
I think there's a lot of folks are not going to, well, it's a battle. Everything in the military,
you have to choose your battles. You're always, but the thing is this six months later,
everybody was wondering why they're getting all this spam on their cell phones,
because the company that they sold with the gig of everything too, was a notorious spammer.
And they sold all of that information to other third-party companies.
Yeah, you're the product. And they gave it to that company for free who then turned around to
monetize it. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. So I mean, when people talk about privacy,
I don't believe them at all. People like to talk a good game about privacy, but if they really liked
it, would Google and Facebook be where they are? Well, it's a trade off of privacy of convenience.
And most people, yeah, I think most people don't really, they're not considering the cost,
they're not considering what they're worth. Well, the thing is, it's legacy, right?
Like you and I might be up in arms against privacy, but maybe we're old-headed.
Well, but the thing is, people have the illusion of privacy. Oh, well, I signed up for Facebook,
but I've got my profile set to friends only. Okay, you've missed the entire real problem,
but we threw a smoke screen at you that made you feel better and
bring the privacy argument goes away. And it's not until a Cambridge Analytica pops up,
that people get all up in arms, and then the argument falls away again, because we have
attention span for any kind of lengthy battle. Right. And I think anybody who is just
by nature going to argue with Robert here, you can set up a free advertising account
through Facebook. So, want you to do that, and then look at the information that you can target,
and then you'll start thinking twice about your interests and your likes that you have on your
profile, like what movies you like, and what books you like. Those are all advertising target points.
It's not really data for your friends and family. It's for Facebook and the people who
advertise on that. Oh, absolutely. But definitely, you know, spend an hour to go set it up.
This is actually a probably a really good experience for you.
Facebook Pixel, and see what kind of data you can track just by having people
hit a website. People who never actually go to Facebook.
Yep, they'll have a Facebook account.
No, Robert's dead on here, and I think this probably goes back to
earlier in this conversation where I wanted to argue with him about the necessity of my desktop.
And the realization that most everything that we have either runs on apps,
like web-enabled apps, or could be moved there very easily.
And what in the industry is actually there because it needs to be
technology-wise, or because you can't change too many things all at once.
It has to be a slow transition for people to accept it.
And that's why you're holding on to a pair of Google Glass.
Yep.
Facts.
Well, hey, guys.
I think we probably ought to wrap this one up. We've got a bit long.
Do you have a pick of the week?
You know, I do.
When I was doing my security degree, one of the recommended,
back when I bought the recommended reading books.
This one was actually pretty good.
It's called The Feeding the Hacker by Robert Schifrin.
And it's, you know, it's way bold as a non-technical guide to IT security.
You know, maybe if you're really into the tech side, you know,
if you're the guy that runs, you know, the Cali Linux virtual to get in there and dive in,
this is still probably a good book for you to read because
you have to be able to relate to folks that are not technical.
And that's what I really liked about this book in particular,
is that it was a pretty decent read.
And, you know, a lot of the stuff is going to be pretty basic,
but it gives you a foundation to be able to have those conversations with folks that might not
be as technical, that maybe want to be technical, but they need to get a basis in, you know,
just the concepts and the principles.
So that's my pick of the week.
What's yours?
Well, you know, mine's also a book.
I might catch some black for this, but I'm going to go there.
Salman Rushdie, the Satanic Versus.
Okay, so give us your reasoning.
Why is this your pick of the week?
Well, first, what's been in the news?
Well, I mean, that's what brought it back to my mind,
but I've got two first edition copies of the Satanic Versus.
I bought it when it came out.
It was great.
I'm a fan of his other work as well.
But the story is hilarious, and I honestly think that the people in the world who are upset
about that never actually read the book.
It's very easy for people to be told something about a book and decide to ban it.
If you don't believe me, just look at Florida.
No, it's a great read.
It is funny.
It is not about religion.
It's about people.
And I'm just going to leave it there at that.
But if you haven't read it before, pick it up.
Give it a read.
It's funny.
It will make you laugh.
And you also will probably let be left scratching your head,
wondering why people wanted to kill him over this book.
That's my pick of the week.
All right.
Well, I mean, that might make some people upset,
but I would say sometimes if we challenge ourselves,
even if you go into something with a closed mind,
it doesn't hurt to expand your horizons.
You've heard me expand my horizons a few times over this episode.
It's a difference between morals and ethics.
Morals belong to you, ethics belong to everyone.
So you know, keep mind what's moral for you
is not moral for everyone else.
All right.
Well, thanks to listeners.
We'll catch you in the next episode.
Yeah.
Take care and have a good one.
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