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The Talk Show

243: ‘The God Awful Truth’ With Rich Mogull

 

00:00:00   Alright, first time guests on the show, Rich Mogul. Welcome to the talk show.

00:00:04   Thanks for having me. I famously sometimes don't do a lot of prep for the show. But I do keep a

00:00:13   running list of topics. And there in the time since my last episode, there has been a very

00:00:19   consistent theme on topics that are here to talk about. And they relate to computer security,

00:00:25   privacy, which are not necessarily two sides of the one coin, but are certainly related.

00:00:31   And I thought I've been thinking about having you on the show for a long time. And I thought, well,

00:00:34   for God's sake, if with a big list of security related topics, why not have rich on the show now?

00:00:39   Thanks. Yeah. I mean, it's excited to be here. So for people who aren't familiar with you,

00:00:44   what's your background? Alcoholism. Take my kids rock climbing. So now the

00:00:53   Yeah. Not at the same time. Okay. Yeah.

00:01:01   So I've been doing security for like 20 years at this point.

00:01:03   So it was actually a analyst over at Gartner.

00:01:05   That's when I first started getting involved with Apple stuff, spun out,

00:01:08   started my own company about 11 years ago. It's done pretty darn well.

00:01:12   I'm just doing a security advisory services and such,

00:01:16   and also have a new startup that's doing security stuff over in the

00:01:21   cloud. So this has been kind of my security's been bread and

00:01:23   butter for a while now pays the bills.

00:01:25   And it never, never gets old. It's a growth industry. So it's

00:01:30   like plastics. It is, you know, there are, I always say it's

00:01:35   like, it's kind of an interesting exercise is what

00:01:38   are, what are the fields where it's it, you've got a bright

00:01:45   future, or at least opportunities ahead. And I would

00:01:48   say computer security is one of those, you know, there's all sorts of fields, you know,

00:01:54   and it's not funny when, you know, industries get disrupted, and people lose jobs, etc.

00:01:59   It's, you know, but security is one that's good to go.

00:02:03   John "Slick" Baum: It's weird to see, you know,

00:02:05   when I started like 1520 years ago, it was kind of a small thing. I mean, even for the

00:02:09   Apple stuff, we were, you know, almost screaming into the void. And now there's things like

00:02:14   Russia and China and cars and rockets.

00:02:19   And so it's been a, it's been a pretty wild ride.

00:02:21   Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember talking about the Russians 20 years ago. All right.

00:02:25   I mean, I remember talking about them, but not as it relates to personal security.

00:02:28   See, we knew there was a movie red Dawn. If you watch that,

00:02:31   it was a precursor to everything.

00:02:33   Uh, I haven't watched red Dawn since I think red Dawn came out when I was exactly

00:02:40   the age of the, the protagonists of red Dawn.

00:02:43   I'm going to guess red dawn without looking at IMDB.

00:02:46   I'm going to guess it came out in 1984.

00:02:47   I probably cause I'm, I think you and I are about the same age that it resonated.

00:02:54   Let's see. Let's see how close I am. Let's see. Red Dawn.

00:02:58   Yup. 1984.

00:03:01   Damn. That's impressive. Why in the world? I,

00:03:05   I was just talking to a friend about this, about it.

00:03:08   I can remember very specifically weird things from like the eighties.

00:03:13   I could tell you exactly what year certain World Series were. I believe I was talking,

00:03:18   it was, we were talking about Super Bowls. And I remember that 1984 was the season where Dan Marino

00:03:22   broke all sorts of passing records. Like why in the world, I don't remember it vaguely as the mid

00:03:28   80s, but specifically 1984. What a waste of brain cells. Whereas stuff that happened two, three years

00:03:34   ago, I'm like, I don't know, I got to go look that up. Like when did the iPhone 8 come out? And I got

00:03:39   got to sit there and count on my fingers like what year it was.

00:03:43   Yeah. I can't remember two days ago,

00:03:46   but I remember my exact emotional state when I saw the very first preview to the

00:03:51   Michael Keaton Batman. It was, it was really exciting going back to the eighties.

00:03:55   I just,

00:03:56   I'm writing my moped after around town when I was 16 years old or 17 after

00:04:01   watching Top Gun, just, I was, man, I was,

00:04:03   I was right there on my crotch rocket moped, right?

00:04:07   It is funny because I remember the Keaton Batman too very vividly and it was in hindsight looking

00:04:13   at it. It is so Tim Burton-y and sort of comical and farcical. You know, it's almost, it almost

00:04:22   verges on the border of a musical, you know, like the scene where Nicholson's Joker comes in and,

00:04:29   you know, in the restaurant where Vicki Vale is waiting for him and his henchmen are, you know,

00:04:36   spray painting all the artwork and knocking stuff over. It's almost a musical, right? Whereas as a

00:04:42   kid being used to the Adam West that this is what televised Batman looks like, right? The the

00:04:49   Keaton Batman look like this is this is seriously dark and serious.

00:04:54   Well, it's like all those two because you've got Burton or like Zack Snyder, who's now remade

00:04:59   Watchmen three, four or five different times because all of his DC movies look the same,

00:05:04   right. But with Burton, I mean, he's more creative than that. But it's just that tone. But that was

00:05:08   early enough that, you know, that that tone was like new and original. Yeah, I still think casting

00:05:13   Michael Keaton as Batman is still one of the master strokes of casting and movie history.

00:05:18   Like, and everybody was like, Oh, my God, this is ridiculous. How can Mr. Mom be Batman?

00:05:22   That was not only was that genius, but the way they brought him back for Spider-Man Homecoming

00:05:28   and that role. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The maturity and the gravitas he brought to that and that that

00:05:32   history for those of us who are old enough. Yeah, sorry, I'm nerding out here. I know you want to

00:05:37   talk about security. But he's a terrific actor. That's the thing. That's the thing is that Michael

00:05:41   Keaton is just absolutely a terrific actor. And it's one of those things where there's all sorts

00:05:46   of serious actors who cannot do comedy. And there's all sorts of actors who can do comedy who,

00:05:50   who can do serious stuff. You know, Robin Williams would be a terrific example of that, where,

00:05:55   my God, when he got serious, it was, you know, he could be, you know, as good as any actor on

00:06:01   planet. Then you've got jerks like Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum, who are like these buff action

00:06:08   gods and they just act really well and they are funny as shit. I just saw Bad Times at the old

00:06:14   Royale and I'm like, Oh, Jesus, where did he come from in this movie? It was amazing. Yeah,

00:06:18   I liked that movie. That was pretty good. Yeah. It reminded me sort of of a 90s throwback, you know,

00:06:24   like the almost theater-like limitation of how few sets there were. Like the whole thing took

00:06:35   place at the hotel. I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't watched it, but it's very good,

00:06:38   entertaining. My main thing now these days is just, can I predict exactly where this movie

00:06:46   is going or not? And the answer was no, and so I was interested. Well, I mean, that's why I love

00:06:51   last Jedi, which is so controversial for a lot of people because I had no idea where that movie was

00:06:55   going till the end. Yeah, I didn't love it, but I liked it, you know, and yeah, I don't expect them,

00:07:01   you know, if I wanted to, you know, I should have devoted my life to trying to become a writer for

00:07:05   Star Wars if I wanted to. I don't know, there's an awful lot of people who seem to want to write

00:07:10   write the next Star Wars movie and it's like, you know, just sit back and enjoy. Yep.

00:07:17   I have a one piece of follow up. There was on the last episode I mentioned offhandedly and of course

00:07:22   I mentioned something offhand it suddenly becomes a big story on Mac rumors that somebody told me,

00:07:28   somebody who would know told me basically that Apple has been selling Apple TV pretty much since

00:07:34   its inception, since the original Apple TV, that they more or less sell them at cost. And they're

00:07:42   they're not a big profit maker,

00:07:43   and that they're selling to HomePod for under cost.

00:07:48   And this got picked up by MacRumors,

00:07:51   and oh my God, did I hear from people who said,

00:07:53   no way, Apple doesn't sell anything,

00:07:57   everything they have is super high margin,

00:07:59   blah, blah, blah, I can't prove it,

00:08:01   I'm not saying that I know this for a fact,

00:08:02   all I'm saying is a source that I trust very much said so.

00:08:06   And to me, it makes a lot of sense as to why HomePod

00:08:09   is so much more expensive than its ostensible competition.

00:08:13   That's all I can say about it is,

00:08:18   boy oh boy did I hear it from people who said,

00:08:20   Apple doesn't sell anything at less than a high margin.

00:08:22   And I just think people are underestimating

00:08:25   like when 99% of everything they sell

00:08:27   is either a Mac, iPad, or of course iPhone,

00:08:32   that something like HomePod or Apple TV

00:08:34   that sells in relatively minuscule amounts,

00:08:39   if it was selling at cost or about cost,

00:08:42   would have no effect on their margin whatsoever.

00:08:44   - I think the, I mean, I use both of those devices.

00:08:49   We're all in on that.

00:08:50   And there's such a clear quality difference.

00:08:52   I mean, not just the build construction,

00:08:54   but the reliability of the most of the other things

00:08:57   that I've tried, including the Alexas.

00:08:59   It's pretty noticeable.

00:09:00   It would not surprise me at all,

00:09:03   or at least in the first year or two

00:09:04   of the manufacturing of those.

00:09:06   - Yeah.

00:09:07   Well, and I just think that, you know,

00:09:08   And the backstory that I've heard on HomePod makes a lot of sense was that initially it

00:09:11   was meant as a sort of, you know, like a more of a Apple TV peripheral where you'd plug,

00:09:20   you know, hook it up, or maybe not hook it up with wires, but that it was meant to be

00:09:24   like the speakers for your Apple TV or something like that. But it really was I get to it's

00:09:27   another one of those cases where my rule of thumb of take Apple at its word, it's usually

00:09:33   the truth where their description of it as primarily a speaker, not really a, "Hey,

00:09:39   this is our answer to the talking devices thing." First and foremost, it's a serious,

00:09:48   high-quality speaker system, and then it just happens to have Siri as the interface secondarily.

00:09:54   That's honestly the truth of it. I don't know. People make a lot of hay over the market

00:10:00   share this thing. But there's there's no question. I mean, Apple has there's no way that Apple

00:10:05   introduced this thing at $350 and expected it to compete in a unit sale comparison with

00:10:13   Amazon things that cost $60 or Google's low end Google home things, Google voice, whatever

00:10:19   they call them.

00:10:20   Jared Ranerelle Well, you write about this all the time. And

00:10:23   one of my personal pet peeves is Apple come out with a new product and everyone assumes

00:10:29   because it's not a one-to-one parody with something else that's already on the market,

00:10:33   down to price and features. And if it doesn't work exactly the way the thing that was there

00:10:39   first worked, then there's got to be a flaw with it. And yet they built all these class-defining

00:10:45   devices. And in many cases have taken the time to nurture those through the process. I mean,

00:10:50   some of them they drop like, but whatever, what was the HiFi stereo thing and a few others. But,

00:10:55   But I mean, it, it seemed pretty clear that this was a longterm bet from the beginning

00:11:00   on the home pods, at least.

00:11:01   No.

00:11:02   Have you ever heard my story about Steve jobs in the iPod?

00:11:07   Hi, fi.

00:11:08   No, I had a friend who worked at Apple and long story short, had to have a meeting in

00:11:14   jobs is sweet and got up there, you know, five minutes early, of course.

00:11:20   and checked in with Jobs's personal assistant and relatively small. I've seen Tim Cook's

00:11:32   office. I don't know if it's the new one. I guess it was his old one at Infinite Loop,

00:11:36   not the new one at The Ring, but very humble relative to what it could be. But he's got

00:11:45   a receptionist or a personal assistant, and then he's got his own personal office. And

00:11:49   over to the other side. There's, there's, you know, like a boardroom type table where

00:11:53   the meeting was going to be, but he could look right into jobs, his office, I forget

00:11:56   what year this was maybe, you know, 2009, 2010. And he said he expected it to be like

00:12:05   this austere monk, like, you know, there'd be nothing in there except a glass desk with

00:12:11   like mint condition, one mint condition, iMac and nothing else. And he said, instead it

00:12:18   It was a relatively small office and it was just stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes

00:12:23   of the now did at that point discontinued iPod Hi Fi. Like they discontinued it, but

00:12:30   John's loved it so much where he was like, we'll put 40 of them in my office. Just like

00:12:35   in the box. Yeah. Like just the retail boxes. Like that's right. That's where they were

00:12:42   storing them and it like threw them off and like it was like, I got to get my head in

00:12:46   game because this is a big meeting. That's awesome. I have no idea what happened to this

00:12:52   iPod high fives, but that's my Jason still have one. He probably does. I don't know. I never bought

00:13:00   one because I never really had an interest at that time of a, I never had any kind of plug my iPod

00:13:07   into a speaker system thing. I don't know why, but I didn't. I was the same way, but I worked at a

00:13:13   desk. And so I had iTunes and I had computer speakers and that was fine. Yeah, that sort

00:13:17   of was my situation was I already had decent speakers, decent enough speakers connected

00:13:23   to my computer in my office, my home office. And there was no other nowhere else in the

00:13:28   house where we needed speakers. So and I never really got one. But everybody said had good

00:13:32   sound. I don't know. Small consolation. All right, let's get started, though. Let's see.

00:13:41   on my list. Well, there is a little bit of other news. WWDC 2009 Mac Rumors has published

00:13:48   their best guess. Pretty educated that it's going to be June 3 to 7 in San Jose. No surprise

00:13:54   there. There's sort of a cottage industry in guessing the WWDC dates because people

00:13:59   want to see if they can get, you know, like a cheaper hotel room or, you know, book it

00:14:05   in advance or whatever. And everybody I know has been guessing June 3 to 7 for months.

00:14:10   I mean, going back to December. But MacRumors uncovered some like, like a, wherever, whatever

00:14:18   the name of the public field is where the bash, the annual bash is held, there's already

00:14:25   there was already something on the schedule for the Thursday of that week. It even had

00:14:29   Apple's name on it, which is sort of like an up. Oh, but the big tell to me and I didn't

00:14:35   I didn't realize this was that O'Reilly is holding something called the velocity conference the next

00:14:41   the very next week at San Jose, because that would be the only other guests that would be a

00:14:46   normally scheduled WWDC would be the week starting June 10. So I'm, you know, I feel like this is a

00:14:54   lock. I've actually made a hotel reservation based on this. Do you go to the DC? I usually fly in for

00:15:01   for like a day and we'll have me come for the, uh, the keynote stuff, but I tend not

00:15:06   to have the time to stay cause that time of year just with the security industry stuff

00:15:10   going on.

00:15:11   Yeah. Yeah. I think I usually run into you there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most years the, um,

00:15:16   I'm so glad they moved it though. Like, uh, I have to go out in a couple of weeks, San

00:15:19   Francisco for our big security trade show conference of the year. Uh, hotel rooms are

00:15:24   for anything within walking distance of Moscone between 700 and a thousand dollars a night.

00:15:29   Oh my God, it's nuts. It actually makes San Jose's four to five fifty rates look reasonable.

00:15:37   I got friends staying in Oakland for five hundred and nine. That's the discount. The

00:15:43   discount is you stay in Oakland. You're probably a good. I've taken the Muni for that because

00:15:51   I've flown into, I used to fly into Oakland all the time on Southwest. So I know that

00:15:55   Muni trip, it's like about 30 minutes and then you get off it right on Market Street.

00:16:01   Jon Moffitt If you time it right.

00:16:03   Dave Asprey If you time it right, right. I mean,

00:16:06   it's not super inconvenient, but it's not certainly not super convenient. But yeah, when the all the

00:16:11   hotels are $700 to start and the ones that are lower end in that area are not $700 a night hotels.

00:16:20   Some of the places I've stayed over the years when especially when Mac world was still over there

00:16:26   and because I have to pay my own way to those. The yeah, there was not good when they first moved

00:16:33   when Apple first moved it to San Jose two years ago. I'm not Mr. I'm not miscounting right? We've

00:16:40   had to two and counting. This will be the third WWDC back in San Jose, I believe. Speaking of my

00:16:48   shoddy modern memory pretty sure so because I skipped one yeah I'm almost

00:16:52   sure I went to one I remember the first year two years ago they even mentioned

00:16:57   hey this should be more affordable you know San Jose should be more affordable

00:17:01   compared to San Francisco and it's like at this point the hotels for San Jose

00:17:06   are more expensive now than San Francisco was three years ago so it's

00:17:11   like what's the point but then if you like price out San Francisco it is like

00:17:16   like, oh my God, this is crazy land.

00:17:19   It is--

00:17:20   - It depends on what it is.

00:17:21   Like I've had to go out for meetings with Apple on occasion.

00:17:23   I haven't done those in a while, but when I was,

00:17:25   like depending on the amount of warning,

00:17:27   it was $100 a night for halfway decent room

00:17:30   or $500 a night because somebody had some event

00:17:32   going on in the Valley.

00:17:33   - Yeah, it definitely varies tremendously.

00:17:36   I don't know what this,

00:17:41   I guess I'm glad it's not in San Francisco anymore.

00:17:43   I like San Francisco as a city better than San Jose,

00:17:46   but my God, the cost is just, it's just off the charts.

00:17:51   - Yeah, I think they both suck.

00:17:52   I mean, no offense to everybody listening in the Bay Area,

00:17:56   but at least that, the Moscone area, San Francisco,

00:18:00   if I never have to go back there, I'd be fine.

00:18:02   - And it's, you know what sucks?

00:18:03   I tell you what really sucks is getting from SFO

00:18:06   to San Jose, I guess I gotta get a Uber.

00:18:09   Last year, I made a huge mistake and just got in a cab,

00:18:12   and I think I should have known from the year before,

00:18:15   don't do it, 'cause it's like a $110 cab ride.

00:18:19   - There's more with traffic.

00:18:20   - It was like ridiculous, and it's not that far,

00:18:24   but I guess 'cause they are technically San Francisco cabs,

00:18:29   San Jose is, I don't know, you cross some sort of perimeter

00:18:34   of this is a normal San Francisco cab ride,

00:18:36   and then all of a sudden it's like a $110 cab ride,

00:18:39   and I already feel like there's a vacuum sucking

00:18:44   making money out of my pocket.

00:18:46   - Like you're not flying to San Jose Airport?

00:18:48   'Cause that's, I mean, it's right there.

00:18:49   - Well, I could in theory,

00:18:51   it is extremely close and convenient,

00:18:53   but from Philadelphia,

00:18:55   it's even with the hassle of getting from San Jose to SFO,

00:19:00   there's no direct flights from Philly.

00:19:03   So I'd rather have a direct flight to SFO

00:19:06   and deal with getting there than have a stop.

00:19:11   I don't know, as I've gotten older,

00:19:13   have become almost allergic to anything other

00:19:17   than nonstop flights.

00:19:19   Mostly, but not necessarily because of it takes longer,

00:19:22   but because it doubles your chances

00:19:26   of something going wrong, right?

00:19:28   A mechanical problem with a plane,

00:19:30   weather from the inbound city,

00:19:33   weather at the city that you're at,

00:19:36   that anything can happen to delay it.

00:19:37   - Yeah, I mean, I fly two, three times a month.

00:19:40   I'll take the 6 a.m. direct over a 10 a.m. with a connection or something, even if it's

00:19:46   less convenient. And never, ever, ever check bags if you have a connecting flight or you're,

00:19:51   I mean, that's just-

00:19:51   Trenton Larkin That's another one too, right? And for,

00:19:53   because my wife always comes to WWDC to help with the live show and stuff. And so we definitely

00:19:58   check bags and yes, checking bags with a connection is just, you might as well just kiss your luggage

00:20:05   goodbye. It's like rolling the dice.

00:20:08   Yeah, I've been known to pack spear clothes and toiletries in my carry on if I have to

00:20:13   check back.

00:20:14   All right, first, first topic. Big one is this I almost forgot to put on the list, but

00:20:20   the Jeff Bezos story with the National Enquirer, which when I first started writing about it

00:20:25   on Daring Fireball, it was a week old at least. And I had sort of ignored it because initially

00:20:31   I had filed it under sort of personal gossip, which I tend to stay away with. Not out of,

00:20:37   I'm not trying to be holier than now, but it's just not my bag. If so-and-so is a famous

00:20:45   industry executive and they are having marital strife or running around on their spouse or

00:20:52   something like that, that's just not daring fireball material. I sort of filed it under

00:20:57   that and didn't really give it much thought. But then, wow, Bezos—I'm sure everybody

00:21:04   listening to this knows the basic gist of it, where Bezos wrote a post on Medium, which

00:21:10   is interesting. I'm sort of anti-Medium in general and really wish more people would

00:21:17   have their own blogs. But this was sort of a perfect use of Medium because I don't think

00:21:21   it would have been appropriate at all for him to use either some sort of Amazon blog

00:21:28   or somehow like publish an op-ed in the Washington Post, which he owns. I don't think either

00:21:34   of the, I think both of those would have been very inappropriate. I've go so far to say,

00:21:37   and I'm sure he knows it too. So having medium as this neutral platform and then being able

00:21:44   to tweet the link and every, you know, his Twitter is verified like his tweet while it

00:21:50   didn't contain the meat of the subject was the sort of, well, this was definitely Bezos.

00:21:56   isn't somebody saying they're Jeff Bezos. More or less coming out and having email proof that

00:22:03   the National Enquirer was trying to extort him into saying things that weren't true,

00:22:09   lest they reveal even more personal information, texts, pictures from his girlfriend.

00:22:22   You know, it's like coming out of the, I'll put my security hat on instead of my movie fanboy hat.

00:22:28   And this is a really fascinating story because you look between the lines and like one of the

00:22:36   problems in security, you get really paranoid and you'll hear zebras. You know, you'll think

00:22:41   zebras when you hear those hoof beats. And then, but then sometimes it's a zebra and boy, this,

00:22:47   this sounds like a zebra to me because the story of the brother of the woman he was having an affair

00:22:56   with somehow getting her text and releasing it in that way, maybe he was responsible for it.

00:23:01   But the way all of this lines up and the Trump stuff and the Saudi Arabia stuff,

00:23:05   I suspect it's not the extreme of the conspiracy. But I mean, it really, I don't know. I like to

00:23:13   sit back and wait and see how these stories develop versus jumping to conclusions.

00:23:17   Right. So the basic story is that, and it seems as though everybody is in agreement at this point,

00:23:22   although it's not, there's been no conclusive proof that her brother somehow is, was the one

00:23:29   who released the, these text messages, which I'll come back, which phrase I'll come back to in a

00:23:35   moment and photos exchange between the two to the national enquirer. And it just bizarrely, I mean,

00:23:44   it's just like what are the odds that Jeff Bezos's girlfriend would have a brother who is a long time

00:23:51   associate of Roger Stone who's now been indicted and a well-known Trump supporter. The most

00:23:58   innocent looking walking out of jail photo in history. With Trump being a vocal and continuous

00:24:08   critic of the Washington Post and Bezos' ownership thereof, Trump seems convinced that, you know,

00:24:18   Trump had clearly, whatever you think of Trump politically, he clearly comes at this from

00:24:22   the perspective of if you're a billionaire who owns a newspaper, of course, you wield

00:24:26   your ownership to pursue personal vendettas, which is a not how the Washington Post should

00:24:35   and B, not how Jeff Bezos, by all accounts and appearances,

00:24:40   Jeff Bezos is doing his ownership of the Washington Post,

00:24:44   editorially is completely hands-off.

00:24:48   He is, you know, and knowing that, you know,

00:24:52   I don't know anybody personally at the Washington Post,

00:24:54   but you know, from what I know of their leadership,

00:24:58   that, you know, they wouldn't stand for it.

00:25:00   You know, they're not going to,

00:25:01   but it, like, good luck convincing Donald Trump of that.

00:25:04   Well, I mean, it's it's inconceivable to someone like like him. I mean, look at I mean, look

00:25:10   at the history with a my in the National Enquirer, which has directly been used. So why would

00:25:15   he possibly think that Bezos would have ethics or something?

00:25:18   Right. And so Trump doesn't own the National Enquirer, but he's longtime friends with

00:25:22   the guy who does whose name unbelievably is David pecker, which has used his friendship,

00:25:31   even ownership, it's friendship with the owner of the National Enquirer to a bury stories

00:25:36   damaging to him famously, and now part of the Mueller investigation in terms of the

00:25:40   payoffs that they made to keep women that Donald Trump had affairs with their stories,

00:25:46   you know, what do they call it catch and kill, where the National Enquirer would give them

00:25:50   $100,000 for the exclusive rights to their story and then just bury it, put it in a literally

00:25:57   put it in a safe and use the National Enquirer to slander, in the non-legal term, let's say in the

00:26:06   colloquially, Donald Trump's enemies. For example, National Enquirer was the publication that ran

00:26:12   on the front page on the cover, a story alleging that Ted Cruz's father helped kill JFK.

00:26:20   By the way, I found the headline. It's Bezos exposes Pecker.

00:26:26   That exposes how could I forget Bezos exposes.

00:26:29   Well, and so the most stunning thing to me, other than that is, I mean, you write that headline,

00:26:36   you retire. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. But the I can't believe anything

00:26:43   that Enquire publishes is even true. Like I just assumed that was fiction. It was like,

00:26:48   the onion for Oh, see, I'm like disparaging there.

00:26:52   See, I knew that that's not the case.

00:26:55   Like the Weekly World News,

00:26:56   I don't even know if they still exist,

00:26:57   but in terms of like the heyday of supermarket tabloids,

00:26:59   the Weekly World News was the one that was like the Onion,

00:27:02   where they had like Bat Boy and Aliens and stuff like that.

00:27:06   The National Enquirer, because they deal with real people

00:27:10   and could therefore be sued for real money,

00:27:14   plays by different standards.

00:27:16   And famously, I would say one of the biggest bits of,

00:27:21   I don't want to say history altering, but certainly affected the political landscape

00:27:25   was that they were the publication that revealed that John Edwards was cheating on his wife.

00:27:32   I forgot about that.

00:27:34   Who was in 2008, or was he Kerry's vice president in 2004 nominee? I believe he was, right?

00:27:47   I think so. Yeah, Kerry O'Gourd.

00:27:48   And then in 2008, everybody remembers 2008 as a very close Democratic primary between

00:27:54   Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

00:27:57   But John Edwards was in that.

00:27:59   I mean, and it was a very serious three-way race for quite a while.

00:28:05   I mean, it's not, you know, certainly not out of the imagination that he could have

00:28:10   been vice president under John Kerry or presidential nominee in 2008, but they broke the story

00:28:17   that he was cheating on his wife.

00:28:19   You know, no, you know,

00:28:22   there's probably a lot of people like you

00:28:23   who think everything in The Enquirer is fake or made up,

00:28:26   but it's not, it's, you know,

00:28:28   I don't know that it's, (laughs)

00:28:30   I don't wanna swear that everything is the god of,

00:28:33   you know, the exact truth,

00:28:35   but it's, you know, it's more true than not

00:28:38   in terms of what they print,

00:28:40   because they're, you know, liable for slander and libel.

00:28:45   - Well, and this kind of spun off the conversation.

00:28:48   How did they potentially get those texts?

00:28:50   - Right, that is, right.

00:28:52   And my thing that I wrote about,

00:28:54   and I always, I really wish that publications

00:28:58   would get more serious about it,

00:29:00   is what format, what medium were these

00:29:04   quote unquote texts sent as?

00:29:06   I would think if you really,

00:29:08   most people would think by a technical definition,

00:29:11   a quote-unquote text message is an SMS message,

00:29:15   or MMS, whatever you want to say, but that's a text.

00:29:20   But colloquially, people call texting

00:29:23   pretty much anything that has DMs.

00:29:26   And they certainly, people certainly refer

00:29:28   to iMessage messages as quote-unquote texts.

00:29:33   Which is, it's only natural for people to say that,

00:29:38   because Apple, one of the reasons iMessage

00:29:41   has become so successful, so popular,

00:29:43   is that Apple integrated it with the same app

00:29:48   that's used for text messaging, messages.

00:29:54   So if you send your text, your actual SMS text messages

00:29:57   with the same app as iMessage,

00:29:58   it's only natural to refer to them as text.

00:30:01   But once you get to the technical level

00:30:03   of how did they get these,

00:30:05   boy is there a big difference between iMessage and SMS.

00:30:08   Yeah, I mean, they are night and day SMS being completely broken and insecure at this point

00:30:16   and I message, you know, not perfect, but but really good. I mean, almost as close as

00:30:21   you can get without introducing barriers to usability. That way, that would take away

00:30:26   that that seamless experience.

00:30:30   You know, and the big one is that I message is end to end encrypted. Where the encryption,

00:30:37   you know, Apple doesn't see the messages.

00:30:39   Now, one of the reasons I want you on this to show

00:30:42   is that doesn't mean that there's no way to get them

00:30:46   from your iCloud account,

00:30:48   but they're not on your iCloud account stored unencrypted,

00:30:52   and there's no way that Apple sees them.

00:30:55   Like, I send you an iMessage, it goes, you know,

00:30:57   I type it on my phone,

00:31:00   and it is encrypted as it leaves my phone,

00:31:02   and it isn't decrypted until it gets to your devices.

00:31:07   - Yeah, and it's a really, really interesting way

00:31:10   that they set that up where you've got these key rings.

00:31:13   So think of it as a ring of your house keys.

00:31:16   And every time you basically are sending a message

00:31:20   to somebody and I'm dramatically oversimplifying,

00:31:22   but your, every message is encrypted with the key

00:31:25   for that person and device.

00:31:27   And these are all different and the encryption is entangled

00:31:29   with device IDs depending on kind of which versions

00:31:32   things you're on and which things you're using. Obviously, it's stronger on iPhones and iPads,

00:31:37   and it's going to be a bit weaker on Macs if you've got those synced up. As well as now,

00:31:42   we've got it up, as you said, stored up in iCloud, but encrypted in no keys up in iCloud.

00:31:47   And so it's all device to device keys exchanged. So in a situation like this,

00:31:52   for somebody else to gain access to those, if it's SMS, stupid easy. You just go to the carrier

00:31:59   and you get a record of it or you hack the phone. For iPhone, you either have to hack the device,

00:32:03   which we know is possible, but like kind of nation state level stuff, for the most part,

00:32:08   or very serious attacker level stuff. You have to have physical access to the device. But even then,

00:32:13   I mean, was he doing screenshots and then forwarding these on via email to the Inquirer?

00:32:18   Like somehow it sounds like the Inquirer has those texts and has those images,

00:32:23   which means somehow they weren't just viewed and conveyed verbally to them. They were

00:32:29   actually forwarded on and that's a big deal. Yeah. So that involves that means some deeper

00:32:34   level of access if it was iMessage. Yeah. And well, but one of the things one of the things that

00:32:41   is game over is device access, right? So if her brother if she had a relationship where she

00:32:46   trusted her brother, she being Bezos his girlfriend, if she if her brother she trusted her brother

00:32:53   enough that he could have her phone and either knew her passcode or God forbid, she doesn't even

00:32:59   use a passcode. But if he could get into her phone, or could get her to say, Hey, can I use

00:33:04   your phone for a second? You know, let me look something up. And she trusted him enough for that

00:33:08   it's game over, no matter what you're using. If I'm hanging out with the president's public enemy

00:33:13   number three, and my brother's friends with his like, buddy, Roger Stone, I'm probably not going

00:33:19   I'm not going to let my sister touch log into my devices, but yeah, I mean,

00:33:23   that's feasible and, um, and there's no interception by the way,

00:33:27   just to like, maybe he could trick her and add a device,

00:33:31   but then you have to approve that and put in your wife.

00:33:32   It's really hard to it's doable. It's not, not easy. Yeah.

00:33:37   Uh, I do wonder though how he exported them. I like, I do want to know, like,

00:33:43   I, I don't want to, I don't want to see the pictures,

00:33:48   honestly, but I do want to know how like how I still want to

00:33:52   know even if he's the guilty party, you know, even if that's

00:33:55   true, I still want to know how he got the pictures. Did he

00:33:57   screenshot them? Did he and if so, how did he get the

00:34:01   screenshots off her phone? Right? Yeah. You know, did he

00:34:05   take pictures of her phone with his phone? Is that you know,

00:34:08   did she leave her Mac unlocked during Thanksgiving?

00:34:11   Who knows, right? Because it has to be your phone. It could be

00:34:15   something like that. Then there was even a story along those

00:34:17   lines in the—I forget the title—the latest tell-all book to come out of a former Trump

00:34:24   administration official, some low-level guy who was like a speechwriter who got called

00:34:30   into Kellyanne Conway's office. Do you see this story?

00:34:34   No.

00:34:35   Uh-uh. I'll have to look up his name. But basically, he needed to write a speech and

00:34:43   and he came into Kellyanne Conway's office

00:34:45   and she said, "Here, just use my MacBook."

00:34:48   And she opened her Mac, or was open or whatever,

00:34:52   and he sat there and was typing this thing

00:34:54   on her MacBook Air, and she's over at her desk.

00:34:56   He's like at a table, she has a fair,

00:34:59   she's high enough up that she has a fairly spacious office

00:35:01   in the West Wing.

00:35:03   As he's writing, doing this speech writing thing,

00:35:06   he's seeing all these iMessage alerts come in

00:35:11   in Notification Center, and she's totally

00:35:15   blabbing inappropriate stuff to the press.

00:35:17   (laughing)

00:35:18   - Oh, I did hear about that, yeah.

00:35:20   - Just, and I don't think she's, she's not a stupid woman.

00:35:26   I just think it was easily, she just easily forgot

00:35:30   that she was logged into iMessage on that,

00:35:33   and that whatever you're doing on your phone

00:35:36   in iMessage is going to, if you're signed into iMessage

00:35:40   on your Mac too is going to be mirrored over there.

00:35:45   - You know, I mean, mistakes happen.

00:35:48   I was given a presentation the other day off my iPad Pro

00:35:52   and Face ID timed out and I logged in.

00:35:54   I'm like, oh shit, I'm screen mirroring.

00:35:56   Like everybody just saw my password.

00:35:59   - Oh really? - For my device.

00:36:01   And I've never done that.

00:36:02   I mean, I teach training classes at like Black Hat,

00:36:05   Def Con and never done that.

00:36:07   - How did they see it though if it wasn't just bullets?

00:36:09   Is it because the letters show up before they turn into bullets?

00:36:11   They've show up for a split second before it goes into bullets. And I'm like,

00:36:14   ah, that's fine. And it's like, I use different, we'll get to passwords later.

00:36:18   I use different ones for everything and I can change it. It's no big deal, but.

00:36:20   Yeah. It's a, I think it's called pit of vipers or a team,

00:36:26   team of vipers.

00:36:27   My 500 extraordinary days in the Trump white house by a cliff

00:36:32   Sims, I will copy and paste this and put it in the show notes. But,

00:36:36   But let's also be clear. We don't know if she was on an iPhone as well.

00:36:40   We know Bezos uses predominantly an iPhone based on his tweets.

00:36:43   We don't know if she was. But the thing is, is even SMS,

00:36:47   it's not like direct interception of SMS is something that the average

00:36:54   person on the street can pull off.

00:36:55   Right. Right. But it's on the table.

00:36:58   And part of what made Bezos post extraordinary was

00:37:03   that he alleged that there was some sort of nation state involved in it at some level

00:37:08   without getting specific, but then said that they were told by the AMI, is the parent company

00:37:16   of the National Enquirer, by representatives of AMI that David Pecker, the owner, was particularly

00:37:22   quote apopleptic, very angry about allegations or an investigation into their relationship

00:37:30   with the Saudis. It has since come out, somebody else reported a couple of days ago that at

00:37:37   some point, I guess at some point this guy, MBS, whatever his full name is, was coming

00:37:43   to the United States and it was going to be a big deal. Somehow AMI printed up a bunch

00:37:48   of these, the New Kingdom, a big flashy glossy magazine talking about how great Saudi Arabia

00:37:56   is under MBS's new leadership, blah, blah, blah. Apparently, paid by the Saudis to some

00:38:05   degree, to the degree that AMI went to the US Justice Department and asked whether they

00:38:11   should register as foreign agents for Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, like you said, me, can

00:38:21   Can I go, if I wanted to go snoop on my neighbors' SMSes,

00:38:25   is it within my means?

00:38:27   Would I even know where to start?

00:38:28   How to intercept their unencrypted SMS

00:38:31   or their cell phone calls?

00:38:32   No, I don't even know where I would start.

00:38:34   - Well, call me.

00:38:35   It's not that, that actually--

00:38:37   - I wasn't gonna say that,

00:38:38   but that actually is where I would start.

00:38:40   Hey, Rich, this is gonna sound weird.

00:38:44   (both laughing)

00:38:46   This is gonna sound weird.

00:38:48   You know, can the Saudis do that without question?

00:38:52   there's no no question that the Saudis have it within their capabilities to intercept cell phone calls or

00:38:58   SMS messages and part of this, you know just to not to go too far in the Trump area

00:39:03   But this is one reason why a lot of people are very upset that Donald Trump apparently makes a lot of phone calls using an iPhone

00:39:10   Not good

00:39:13   Well, and let's tie this to a previous security story, which was the and I can't remember the name of it

00:39:19   But it came out that there was that tool that they were remote exploiting iPhones with yeah that that is still in use

00:39:25   It just has more limited utility

00:39:27   Yeah, but some zero day that gave him persistence and been able to track on the device and there, you know bunch of

00:39:33   mercenary types from the US and Israel which unfortunately do exist

00:39:37   Had come up with that kind of like the gray box for you know

00:39:41   governments trying to break into phones. And that story broke right before this story. So

00:39:46   really interesting. Like I said, I don't want to rush to judgment. Something absolutely smells off

00:39:52   and it does not smell like there's, this is a, you know, an Occam's razor simplest explanation. Is it

00:39:58   kind of a thing? I think as this story unfolds, I don't think we even, we're going to see things.

00:40:03   I don't think we're even predicting right now. It could go in so many different directions.

00:40:06   It is not as simple as Bezos is a famous public figure and the enquirer happened to, you know,

00:40:14   somebody said here, take these embarrassing photos of him and publish them. It's more than that. What

00:40:21   more? I don't know. But it's it's not as simple. Here's some embarrassing images of a famous person

00:40:29   in their extramarital affair.

00:40:32   I'm by the way, very glad you made it so clear. You don't want to see the photos because I was

00:40:37   getting a little worried about that. I got to say, you know, it is an it. It also is interesting.

00:40:43   And I have to I have to say, I'm not saying anything that 1000 other people haven't said,

00:40:46   but I salute Jeff Bezos for his getting in front of this, because he's obviously risking further

00:40:53   embarrassment, right? They like the gist of the National Enquirer's offer to him, whether it

00:40:58   amounts to legal extortion or not. Apparently, I've read enough stories about it that there's

00:41:04   actually you know, that's questionable. It's not cut and dry whether what they've put into writing

00:41:12   amounts to legal extortion. But certainly, in the common sense of the word, they were trying

00:41:20   to extort him, which was to say, shut up and say that you've concluded that there was no

00:41:27   political motivation and what we published and we won't publish the following list of pictures

00:41:32   which we have and have been holding back. You know, that's extortion. Again, a lot of lawyer,

00:41:38   I'm not saying amounts to legal extortion, but the legal definition of extortion in the United

00:41:43   States. But certainly in the common sense word saying you're going to say something that you

00:41:48   know isn't true because apparently Jeff Bezos is under the belief that there were political

00:41:52   motivation. So they were asking him to say something he doesn't believe in exchange for

00:41:57   something in his favor. Yeah, I'm going to say that's extortion. And so getting in front of it,

00:42:05   I say extortion. Yeah. I mean, it's not even like regular extortion and it's a huge issue in society

00:42:11   and a growing issue. Like, I mean, my kids are younger than yours and I've got both daughters

00:42:16   and a boy and the conversations I'm going to, I need to have with them on this very sooner.

00:42:21   not going to be comfortable. Yeah, it is weird having a 15-year-old.

00:42:25   You know, I mean, we've tried to be upfront about it. We've even talked about the Bezos thing,

00:42:30   like, "Here, look, you know, don't take pictures." So I had a "Don't make jokes. Don't put anything.

00:42:38   Don't text anybody." Whether it's a group text, whether it's a single text, don't text anything

00:42:43   where you wouldn't want a screenshot of it seen by the principal at the school. Seriously, don't do

00:42:49   it because it's going to happen. Or in 20, 30 years when that pops up. Oh my God, I can't even

00:42:55   think about it. But there's a I'll just tell one story related to this real quick. The I can't tell

00:43:00   you how the various associations work. They get back to me on this one in large part because I

00:43:05   no clue because my wife told me I didn't listen to that part. But the there was a high school kid

00:43:13   and some relation of ours knows the mom through like, you know, three separations removed or

00:43:18   something. And this car full of girls shows up banging on the door and the woman opens up the

00:43:23   door. And there are these girls are like, we need to talk to your son about child porn.

00:43:27   Oh my God.

00:43:28   She's like, what? Like what? And you, you know, you're thinking what I was thinking when I first

00:43:32   heard that part of the story and cut to the chase for time's sake, the girl had sent him a naked

00:43:38   selfie unsolicited, like fully unsolicited. He got it. And this kid's 15, 16. He's like,

00:43:45   whoa, I don't want to be dealing with this and wiped it right away. And because he spurned her,

00:43:50   she was going to get her revenge by pick up his phone. It's child porn. He's got a picture of me

00:43:56   on there, which he didn't because he had erased it. And needless to say, the mom gave these girls

00:44:01   a massive talking to once the story kind of unfolded there. My wife's response is like,

00:44:05   have some self-esteem, man. It's like they weren't even in a relationship. And she sent the picture.

00:44:10   Yeah. I don't know. I've seen a lot of stories along those lines where it's just, you know,

00:44:14   two 16-year-olds and they start sending pictures and legally a picture of a naked 16-year-old is

00:44:22   child pornography, but the interaction isn't... The technical advances, what's possible for kids

00:44:34   to send each other and what they would be tempted to do are so far ahead of what the law

00:44:43   has been written to protect against you know it's it is I don't know I mean

00:44:50   literally I mean I'm so old that literally we had to we had to write our

00:44:55   notes on pieces of paper I mean it sounds goofy now right I mean I I can't

00:45:01   even imagine that that's even a thing anymore right kids don't send notes to

00:45:05   each other with tiny little slips of paper cut off you know you just rip off

00:45:09   the corner of a piece of paper and tiny you know with your with your

00:45:12   unbelievably acute 16 year old eyes right in microfilm size text. It never even occurred to me,

00:45:21   I never got caught exchanging notes as a kid. I came close one time, but never got caught. But

00:45:29   it never even occurred to me that with as small as I would write the note that the teacher wouldn't

00:45:33   even be able to read. Yeah, the way they're growing up with and even the socialization is

00:45:41   different. I mean, I look at my, so I've got older nieces and nephews and then my kids who are nine,

00:45:45   eight and five. And for them being social is being on devices.

00:45:51   Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:51   Like my wife and I, we can't say go out and play with your friends because they all play with their

00:45:56   friends on their devices now. No, it's definitely social. I mean, it's hard to parent because I

00:46:00   don't know. We don't know how much to say, you know, step away from the device. But if we,

00:46:08   if we pull him off his computer,

00:46:11   it's not going to make him call up a friend

00:46:14   and go to the friend's house.

00:46:16   It just means he's not in the group text

00:46:19   that is all playing different games at the same time,

00:46:23   but texting and talking to each other.

00:46:26   In some ways, it actually makes parenting easier

00:46:28   if you accept it, because I'm not schlepping him

00:46:30   all over town.

00:46:31   Actually, it's, you know.

00:46:34   And we don't have to worry about where he is,

00:46:36   and he doesn't have to come home late.

00:46:37   where he is, he's in his room. So it's actually, you know, in terms of being a lazy parent,

00:46:42   it's actually kind of convenient. Whether it's doing any long term social harm to his

00:46:47   socialization and whatever, I don't, I hope it's all right. But I got to tell you, it's

00:46:52   a little bit easier in some ways.

00:46:55   You know what I'm looking forward to my, I guess my kids becoming brooding teenagers

00:46:59   instead of elementary school kids where we have to drive to eight different activities

00:47:03   a day per child.

00:47:04   - Yeah, we're hitting the brooding years.

00:47:06   They come on quick.

00:47:07   It happens fast.

00:47:10   Happens very fast.

00:47:12   - It comes on you fast and it leaves you fast.

00:47:14   - I'm trying to remember what grade it was.

00:47:15   I think it was eighth grade.

00:47:16   Eighth grade social studies.

00:47:18   Mr. Wheeler-- - How do you remember that?

00:47:21   - Well, I told you before we started recording,

00:47:23   I have very vivid memories of exactly when

00:47:25   and where certain things happen.

00:47:26   Mr. Wheeler had a basement classroom

00:47:30   and he had a classroom with an office,

00:47:35   like a little cubby hole, not a cubby hole,

00:47:37   but he had a door behind his desk

00:47:39   and it was a private room for him.

00:47:42   Wasn't part of his classroom.

00:47:43   Not many of the classrooms had this.

00:47:45   - So his Matt Lauer room?

00:47:48   - Yeah, effectively.

00:47:49   Well, he definitely smoked it back there

00:47:52   'cause he would sometimes come out

00:47:54   and in a way that you might think

00:47:57   they're never gonna know I smoked,

00:47:58   But certainly as a teenager

00:48:00   where you have these acute senses,

00:48:01   you could smell that he smelled like smoke.

00:48:04   And there was no way he went outside

00:48:05   because it wasn't close to exit.

00:48:08   But my friend Mark and I had a note going

00:48:12   where we had drawn, the gist of the note was,

00:48:15   what's in Mr., what's back there?

00:48:17   Mr. Wheeler's back room.

00:48:19   And we would draw things and you'd add something,

00:48:24   then fold it back up and give it to Mark.

00:48:27   and Mark would add something and you know, you'd like one of them was like a big pile of boogers.

00:48:31   You could occasionally catch Mr. Wheeler picking his nose. So we there's like a big pile of dots.

00:48:38   And then you'd label it with an arrow. It's a pile of boogers. And how many people listen to

00:48:42   this podcast? He just named dropped his nose. I'm hoping that I'm hoping I'm hoping Mr. Wheeler

00:48:47   doesn't listen to it. Sorry, Mr. Kef. I tragically died of ALS three years ago. But it was it just,

00:48:54   I mean, I'm not even gonna, I don't even remember the specifics, but let's just say that the boogers

00:48:58   were the least of the problems, you know, in terms of like, it was rated R, it was a rated R note.

00:49:04   Let's just say, you know, it's just, I, off the top of my head, I'm going to guess that somebody

00:49:12   drew like a pile of porno mags, you know, just a pile of, you know, just, it doesn't matter if it

00:49:18   was artistically looked like a pile of magazines, you just label it pile of porno mags. And remember

00:49:23   when you used to have to actually go buy your porn in a store. Thinking about generational

00:49:28   differences. Yeah, that was those were the days. Well, anyway, I got caught with the note.

00:49:32   Mr. Wheeler said, john, what do you got there? I had the note in my hand.

00:49:38   And, and I made I made an immediate, I made it I'm very proud of this is why I remember I

00:49:48   I'm calm, cool, and collected under pressure.

00:49:50   I took the note, I wadded it up,

00:49:53   I put it right in my mouth,

00:49:55   with him looking right at me, and I swallowed it.

00:49:58   (laughing)

00:50:00   - I'm gonna need a moment here.

00:50:05   - This is the honest to God truth.

00:50:06   I wadded the note up with him looking right at me,

00:50:10   'cause I realized there's no other way out of this.

00:50:13   I'm either coughing up this note,

00:50:14   which was literally maybe the worst possible,

00:50:17   literally had a diagram of the room behind his classroom with all sorts of awful things.

00:50:23   Or I can swallow the note. The only way I could get rid of it would be to eat it. And

00:50:28   it was on a small piece of paper relative to the amount of content in it. It wasn't

00:50:34   like an entire eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. It was maybe like a, probably about

00:50:38   the size of an index card. You know, I'm laughing, but that probably saved your ass. I wadded

00:50:44   it up, put it right in my mouth, chewed it up, swallowed it right there in front of him.

00:50:49   And I said, "Nothing." And I don't think I got into any trouble. I don't believe that

00:50:55   I was—I believe that he was so amused by the reaction that I escaped any sort of penalty.

00:51:07   I really do. And it turned out he was my homeroom teacher. And then in ninth grade—I no longer

00:51:12   had him for social studies, but I had him for—I went to a relatively small public

00:51:16   school where it was 7 to 12, grade 7 to 12 all in the same building. So I still had—I

00:51:21   didn't go to a different school between 8th and 9th grade. I still had him for homeroom.

00:51:26   He was a basketball coach, not at our high school, but at a neighboring high school.

00:51:30   We ended up—as contentious as our relationship was as a student, by the next year, I was

00:51:37   like the maybe like the pet favorite in homeroom. So we patched it up. But that's my story

00:51:44   of

00:51:45   I've got nothing of that level of

00:51:50   I don't know what you would do. I guess I guess what you would do is delete your text,

00:51:54   right? If somebody catches you with bad text, you can

00:51:56   Well, I mean, kids today to like for a lot of the stuff they're using, you know, signal

00:52:01   or wicker style apps are the ones that look like it's one app and then there's the

00:52:06   hidden text messaging behind it. Yeah. There's a whole list of, uh, if you'll look for it,

00:52:14   and I don't know where it is, or I pull it up and pop it in the show notes, but there's list of apps

00:52:18   that actually have hidden messengers. Then you flick things a certain way. Uh, and it looks like

00:52:23   some other kind of a game or something more innocuous. So the, the teens that are like

00:52:27   under the gun, cause I've had, I've known people that have had issues with troubled kids. So,

00:52:31   depression or suicide or drugs and those kinds of things. Unfortunately you get old enough

00:52:36   you've got friends with those kids. And those are the kinds of apps that the smarter kids

00:52:41   and they all verbally, you know, kind of network those things among each other.

00:52:45   So there are ways of doing it that they can't get caught. I think probably most kids just

00:52:50   use text message and get caught. But let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It's our

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00:54:24   All right, so we need to know. We need to know what Bezos was using. Was it iMessage? Was it SMS?

00:54:33   Was it something like Signal or WhatsApp or something like that? I don't know, but I can't

00:54:39   wait to find out. I hope we do find out eventually. And I'm also curious, just whatever it was, how

00:54:45   those messages got to the inquirer's hands and what format they were. Well, and if there was an

00:54:51   the obvious route, like, oh, I let my brother use my computer during Thanksgiving. I think

00:54:56   we would have known that earlier. I guess at least the investigators would have. Yeah.

00:55:01   I mean, I mean, I guess what you could do, you know, off the top of my head, what would

00:55:06   I do? I don't know. I mean, and did he know? Was it like an open secret within the within

00:55:11   their, you know, the brother sister relationship that she was having an affair with Bezos?

00:55:16   I mean, it's, I'm guessing it was, you know, that somehow they were close enough that he

00:55:20   knew and he betrayed her. But I guess if he got access to one of her devices like a Mac

00:55:25   or even her phone and he could take screenshots or you know, you can't really forward text

00:55:31   messages. You know, there's no forward command like email. So I think there is actually an

00:55:36   iPhone. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Let me I'm pretty sure. Let me pull this up. But I'm

00:55:42   pretty sure I've forwarded messages. I can't remember how. Yeah. Let's see. Tap and hold,

00:55:49   more and then click forward and you can send it to somebody else. So there is a forwarding.

00:55:53   I don't see it on iPad. How do you do that? So you select it.

00:55:58   Yeah. If you select the message and I just tap. Oh, I see. And then there's a little arrow message.

00:56:02   Yeah. Oh, same, same place where the tap back comes.

00:56:06   Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same little curvy arrow as the wife.

00:56:10   And I use that all the time sending out like addresses for, you know,

00:56:13   kid drop off and pickups and those kinds of things when we're coordinating.

00:56:16   Well, there you go. I just learned something. Well, I guess he could forward them if he knew

00:56:21   about that screenshots would be an easy way. You know, and then, you know, there'd be this trail

00:56:28   of those messages between her and him, you know, and then just quick delete those from why you

00:56:36   still have her device. And then all of a sudden, she's got no sign that he did it. Well, I mean,

00:56:43   there's trails here. So the hardest thing for the private investigator to find would be if it was

00:56:49   handled at the carrier level and anything within the system there, because first of all,

00:56:55   I doubt the guy built an MZ catcher and was like sniffing SMS and doing phone cloning stuff. I mean,

00:56:59   maybe he was, but that's serious. And those are also federal crimes. The other side of it is it

00:57:05   bringing into the iCloud stuff. Like if all he did was add a device to the device chain, first thing I

00:57:11   do if I go into a situation like that is I look at all the registered devices because that'll tell

00:57:15   me now maybe he took the device off and it would disappear. But, and also if multi-factor

00:57:24   authentication was set up, you know, you do an interview. I mean, there's no way to sneak that

00:57:28   through without punching that code in. So there's, and you can even dig through key

00:57:32   chains and stuff if you really got into the deep forensics of this. So, I mean, it should be

00:57:37   traceable if it involved one of their devices at all.

00:57:41   - Yeah.

00:57:42   The other things, you know, and I think it's pretty simple.

00:57:48   I think it's as simple as the brother

00:57:49   having access to something.

00:57:50   But, you know, in terms of how safe are you

00:57:53   with your iMessage, number one, I do think everybody,

00:57:57   I really do think everybody should have two-factor

00:58:00   on their Apple ID accounts.

00:58:03   And I don't know at what point, I don't even know,

00:58:05   like if you sign up for a new one,

00:58:06   Did they even let you do it without two factor?

00:58:09   - You can, 'cause I don't have that turned on

00:58:12   on my kids' accounts.

00:58:13   - Right, I don't know that my son does either, I don't think.

00:58:16   - So I've got that on mine.

00:58:18   But it really wants you to put it in.

00:58:21   You've got to deliberately make choices

00:58:24   to not implement it.

00:58:25   - Right, but if you do the iMessage in the cloud,

00:58:30   it does open you up to somebody being able to,

00:58:35   if they only have your password, being

00:58:37   able to read your iMessages if you're not using two-factor.

00:58:42   Yeah, well--

00:58:44   I wonder--

00:58:45   I haven't logged in--

00:58:46   I'm going to log in iCloud, because I can't remember.

00:58:48   I thought it didn't display the messages in iCloud.

00:58:51   Yeah, maybe it doesn't.

00:58:53   I got no messages.

00:58:54   No, there is no messages.

00:58:55   So even when you have iMessages in the cloud,

00:58:57   you can't read them online.

00:58:59   So I guess the other way you could get them

00:59:00   would be through the backup.

00:59:04   if you could somehow restore somebody's iCloud backup

00:59:08   to a device, you could restore the text messages

00:59:13   that are in their backup.

00:59:16   But I think if you have iMessage in the cloud,

00:59:18   then those are no longer backed up in the backup.

00:59:20   - No, but if you add the device to your device ring,

00:59:23   now the thing is for that,

00:59:24   you get a notification on every device.

00:59:26   So when you add one, you have to,

00:59:28   even if you have two-factor authentication turned off,

00:59:31   you get notifications on every other device.

00:59:33   Like every time I, I mean, you and I both test stuff,

00:59:36   you more than me, every time I like add a new Apple watch

00:59:39   or whatever, it's like, oh crap, you know, then.

00:59:42   - I can't believe at one point this fall,

00:59:45   I couldn't believe that I could still continue

00:59:47   to add devices to my iCloud account.

00:59:49   'Cause I had like, I still had my year old iPhone,

00:59:52   a two year old iPhone, my new iPhone,

00:59:57   three iPhones for testing, my Apple watch,

01:00:02   my personal Apple Watch, Apple Watch for testing.

01:00:06   I mean, it was unbelievable.

01:00:07   I mean, it was, but you know, it actually works

01:00:10   and it kind of makes sense 'cause you would guess

01:00:11   that there are people within Apple who are going

01:00:14   through testing devices at a rate that even makes me

01:00:17   as a product reviewer, you know,

01:00:20   seem like I don't have a lot of devices.

01:00:22   - Yeah, I mean, they probably have accounts with, you know,

01:00:25   a hundred devices on there just to see what happens.

01:00:27   - But boy, when I like at the end of the review season,

01:00:30   when I went in and like started like,

01:00:31   forget this device, forget this device, forget this.

01:00:34   It was kind of cathartic 'cause I,

01:00:37   even though I'm just like eliminating them

01:00:38   from this list of devices,

01:00:40   it felt like I was cleaning up a mess.

01:00:43   - I haven't done that spring cleaning

01:00:47   and I've got, you know, like you since, you know,

01:00:49   iPhone one stuff still in there and half these devices

01:00:52   I've handed off to other family members.

01:00:54   So they're fully wiped and I know I need

01:00:57   to be better about that.

01:00:59   I'm, I'm, I'm revealing my passwords. I'm talking about not cleaning my devices.

01:01:03   I'm really sound like a security expert on this thing,

01:01:05   but it's like a lot to remember to go through and clean those out.

01:01:09   Uh, so what do you, what do you think about, here's the one thing too,

01:01:14   about this Bezos story that I would like to come out and if it comes out that

01:01:18   they really are just SMS text messages,

01:01:21   and I guess it would be technically MMS if, if there were,

01:01:24   as there apparently were photos involved,

01:01:27   if they were intercepted.

01:01:31   And again, it doesn't look like that's the case,

01:01:32   but I kind of almost hope that it is

01:01:34   just in terms of serving as a public service announcement

01:01:38   that SMS and MMS are not end-to-end encrypted

01:01:42   and therefore somebody could intercept them over the air.

01:01:46   Like it's just a bad state of affairs.

01:01:48   And the thing that I would really like to catch on

01:01:51   is the idea that this next generation

01:01:55   carrier-based texting system, RCS,

01:01:58   is also not end-to-end encrypted.

01:02:00   And I just think it is nuts that we as a society

01:02:05   are going to accept a new standard

01:02:06   that does not involve any encryption whatsoever.

01:02:09   - We're building foundations of society

01:02:14   on text messages at this point.

01:02:16   And like in the security industry, it was a huge deal.

01:02:19   So NIST, National Institute for Standards and Technology

01:02:22   came out and said, "SMS doesn't count

01:02:24   just two factor authentication. They like a year or two ago, they just flat out said it and people

01:02:29   are screaming a lot of vendors and like providers and stuff that no, you have to allow that. You

01:02:34   can't say it's not allowed. Because once it goes into that government standard, when you do your

01:02:38   security audits and stuff like the stuff I spend most of my day doing, you know, that becomes a

01:02:43   huge issue. And it was interesting because Apple is really early on the edge of circumventing SMS.

01:02:48   Yes.

01:02:48   And using their own mechanism and like way early on that compared to other alternatives. And even

01:02:56   some of the alternatives like my bank, I'm not going to tell you who they are, but like I log in

01:03:00   and I have two factor turned on and it's every phone and every email address I have registered

01:03:04   with them. That's not two factor like sending those messages out because it's insecure.

01:03:08   But to go back to the encryption piece, this is a generational tragic mistake that we're probably

01:03:16   are going to make at this point. And the carriers don't want to implement it for cost reasons or

01:03:20   whatever else. And we do actually have, it would not surprise me if there's government pressure

01:03:26   behind the scenes because they want to, but they, they would still be able to build in intercept.

01:03:30   I mean, that's the law. They have to have lawful intercept at carrier level stuff. As well as the,

01:03:37   like we even saw pressure. There were financial services companies lobbying Congress,

01:03:42   not to use the stronger encryption standard in TLS 1.3,

01:03:47   because then they couldn't sniff their employees

01:03:50   when they did that.

01:03:51   It's like your convenience,

01:03:53   you want to fundamentally make the internet weaker.

01:03:57   But that's how people think sometimes.

01:03:59   They're the same people that think global warming's a scam.

01:04:03   I don't know.

01:04:04   - Yeah, well, let's not go down that path.

01:04:07   I am not going to brag about my personal security practices

01:04:12   'cause I'm sure it lacks in many ways,

01:04:16   but I don't reuse passwords and haven't for many years.

01:04:20   I mean, at some point I did have my quote unquote

01:04:24   standard throwaway password and I still remember it

01:04:28   and I don't think I actively use anything that still has it,

01:04:31   but it was sort of, you know,

01:04:33   anything where I wasn't really concerned about it.

01:04:35   Like, ah, if this got hacked, you know,

01:04:37   my credit card's not even hooked up to this thing,

01:04:39   I don't care, I had a password.

01:04:40   I don't do that anymore.

01:04:42   Last year, maybe a year ago, maybe even a little more,

01:04:49   I was talking to Mac Jay Cichlowski,

01:04:54   I hope that's how you pronounce his name,

01:04:56   but the pinboard guy.

01:04:58   And he spent a lot of last year helping,

01:05:00   he spent much of 2018, probably 2017 and 2018,

01:05:06   helping Democratic candidates around the country,

01:05:09   small grassroots candidates running for Congress

01:05:13   and other offices with fundraising

01:05:16   and with getting their security together.

01:05:19   Because there were an awful lot of security lapses

01:05:22   in the 2016 election.

01:05:24   I mean, John Podesta's email, his Gmail account was hacked.

01:05:29   I mean, it was literally, you know,

01:05:30   and it turns out there really wasn't anything

01:05:33   scathing in there, but there was stuff that was embarrassing.

01:05:36   A couple of Democrats had their Gmail accounts hacked,

01:05:39   pretty much because they got spearfished,

01:05:41   from my understanding,

01:05:43   where their account was really only protected by a password.

01:05:47   They got an email that either they

01:05:49   or somebody who worked for them clicked the link,

01:05:52   followed through, and entered their Gmail password,

01:05:54   and that's game over.

01:05:56   Without Two-Factor, they already knew your address

01:06:00   'cause they sent you the spearfishing email,

01:06:02   and then you give them your password, and there it is.

01:06:05   then they use it, they download all your email,

01:06:07   and even if you know it, it's too late, they got it all.

01:06:10   So he was helping people with that.

01:06:12   And he was in Philadelphia and we had a beer.

01:06:14   And after the Matt Honan thing a couple years ago,

01:06:19   where Matt Honan, who's now an editor at Buzzfeed,

01:06:22   he worked at various other places before,

01:06:25   but he more or less had his entire digital life stolen.

01:06:28   - Yep.

01:06:29   - And one of the ways that that happened,

01:06:32   and it wasn't through entirely lax,

01:06:33   It wasn't because he was really doing bad stuff,

01:06:36   but one of the ways that it happened was

01:06:38   the people trying to hack him took control

01:06:42   of his cell phone account at the carrier.

01:06:47   I don't know if it was Verizon or AT&T or whoever it was,

01:06:49   but they went there and socially engineered,

01:06:52   "Hey, I'm Matt.

01:06:53   "I lost my phone," or whatever their story was.

01:06:57   I need to get a new SIM with my phone,

01:07:01   somehow they got a SIM with his phone number. And then all of his two-factor stuff that was sent by

01:07:06   SMS went to them instead, and they took his iCloud, and his iCloud was in, you know, his email was in

01:07:13   charge of all sorts of other stuff. And all of a sudden, you know, he was in a world of hurt.

01:07:17   So I took his advice, and I believe, to the best of my ability, anything that uses SMS as the second

01:07:26   factor no longer uses SMS as the second factor. I use something else like the I don't use Google's

01:07:33   authenticator app. I use Authy. But it's the same one. I use it's the same. I'm glad to hear that

01:07:38   you use it. But you know, it is a way. How would you describe it? You can probably describe it

01:07:43   better than I can. Yeah, it's called we call it OTP or one time passwords, which is there's a

01:07:49   it used to be like this crazy expensive thing. RSA secure ID was the only way to get it with the

01:07:53   little key fobs. It's the same thing in an app where there's some cryptographic synchronization

01:07:58   that goes on between the app and your phone and whatever the server is on the backend.

01:08:04   They share a couple of keys and then they use time codes. And so every minute it generates a new key,

01:08:09   which leads to a new kind of anxiety because I have to use it multiple times a day. I flick

01:08:13   it open and I'm like, Oh shit, three seconds left. Can I type it fast enough or not?

01:08:17   I hate that. Well, three seconds is no question. If I open it up, and I've got three seconds left,

01:08:24   no question. I'll just wait. Yeah, yeah. On the line there. All right. Well,

01:08:29   have I been drinking? What's my dexterity like right now? And for me, it's one of the rare

01:08:35   things that to me is harder to do on a laptop or desktop with a real keyboard than on a phone,

01:08:43   because the numbers are arranged like I can enter a six digit number on a three by three,

01:08:51   you know, with the zero at the bottom keypad way faster than I can on a keyboard where they're

01:08:58   arranged across in a row one to zero. See, I've got an iMac Pro with the big keyboard,

01:09:03   which I don't use for anything except entering those passcodes. So on a laptop,

01:09:09   Top top, it actually does take me longer. And so if it's like 1510 seconds, I'm like,

01:09:13   I think I could do this. But if I make one mistake, I'm screwed. Oh, what do I do? But

01:09:16   anyway, but yeah, you get like a one time password that lasts 30 seconds at a time that

01:09:21   you use with your regular password. Also, that's why it's the Yeah, right. So you enter

01:09:26   in, you know, your name at your email.com, your regular password, and then it'll say

01:09:32   what, you know, here, enter your six digit, whatever account and you know, you go to,

01:09:38   you know, you go to your app that has a different one for every service you register and you

01:09:44   get have these series of 30 second one time password. So I switched everything I could

01:09:48   to that. You know, and I feel better for it.

01:09:53   Yeah, that or like what Apple where there's the out of band. Like I use a product called

01:09:59   duo security. It's a commercial tool, Cisco bottom. I've got some friends that work over

01:10:04   But, uh, like for some of my work related stuff, like one of my VPNs and it's cool.

01:10:08   Cause it sends a push notification that pops up on my Apple watch.

01:10:11   And I just click approved, like right there on the watch when I'm logged in, which is slick.

01:10:16   And I don't have to kind of type in the code, but it's the same level because it's locked to

01:10:20   the device I have on me that I've already authenticated with. Right. And like your

01:10:23   Apple watch is only going to show that if you've already unlocked the Apple watch through your

01:10:28   Apple watches passcode or through the connection to your phone. So in other words, if your Apple

01:10:33   watches just sitting there on your desk off your wrist. It isn't going to show the alert.

01:10:37   You did inspire me. I pulled up my one password because I use like you unique password. I don't

01:10:42   know. Do you use one password or I don't pass. I don't use any of those things to be honest.

01:10:46   I really use that built in just teaching stuff. Yeah. Which we, which we have to get to

01:10:50   might be, might be a mistake. Yeah. And I use one password. I just looked it up. I've got

01:10:57   1,358 unique passwords and going back to 2008.

01:11:02   And, uh, although apparently I had no password on my secure assist blog for,

01:11:07   at some point, I don't know, cause that's a blank,

01:11:09   but it's actually kind of fun to look back my mobile, me password,

01:11:13   my Yahoo from 2008, three hack Yahoo. That's good stuff.

01:11:18   No, I do have a,

01:11:20   I do keep passwords outside the key chain in, uh, you know, Jimbo,

01:11:24   an app from barebone software that is only for the Mac.

01:11:27   - Is that still supported?

01:11:29   - Yeah, it's still actively developed.

01:11:30   It's-- - Wow, okay.

01:11:32   - It hasn't really had a major update in a while,

01:11:34   so I don't know, but still works perfectly on Mojave.

01:11:39   So I have 637 passwords there.

01:11:42   I don't know how many are in my key chain.

01:11:45   - And that does have encryption, if I remember.

01:11:46   - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's, and I, you know,

01:11:49   part of it is the satisfaction,

01:11:50   I know the people who wrote it, so I know,

01:11:53   I know I've, I trust it. It is, uh, you know,

01:11:57   and I don't keep that password in my key chain. So that is, you know,

01:12:01   that is one of the,

01:12:02   that's like one of the few passwords where I have to keep it somewhere outside

01:12:06   the kitchen.

01:12:07   Yeah. My iCloud and my one password password or the two and my system login or

01:12:12   the, I guess the three passwords I don't have stored anywhere.

01:12:15   My friend, uh, Brent Simmons, uh, collaborator on,

01:12:19   on our app Vesper and just a long time friend. And he's been on the show many,

01:12:23   many times. But we were on Slack together and a couple of weeks ago, he just wrote,

01:12:29   "I can't believe this. I've had the same login password on my Mac for 10 years and I suddenly

01:12:34   can't remember it." That has happened to me because it is a muscle memory thing. I type

01:12:43   it without really thinking about it. I can think about it right now and I could write

01:12:49   it down. But it has happened to me where it's a different sort of memory from just actually

01:12:56   typing it on the keyboard with muscle memory than actually thinking about it. And if you

01:13:01   actually think about it, sometimes you can like temporarily forget it. And it is, it is terrifying.

01:13:06   So I've had to read mine over the phone to my wife. Like I'm traveling and my,

01:13:11   she needs something off the computer and I don't have, I'm not having an affair and I don't have

01:13:16   have dick pics on my computer. So it's okay. I don't care if she gets in there and I can't

01:13:20   remember it. So I will pull out a keyboard and just type it in. Yeah. Dictate it as I'm typing

01:13:28   it. Type it into a temporary like text edit document so you can see it and be like,

01:13:32   Oh yeah, that's actually looks like a goofy password. There you go. No, I'm like that.

01:13:36   And it's, you know, and then he like, he was at work at the Omni group and then he like went home

01:13:40   and he went just like the commute and he went home and then he could just type it and it was like,

01:13:44   okay, I got it, you know, but he needed that, like, sort of contextual break. Yeah.

01:13:50   Yeah. Well, that's my biggest fear, like getting hit by a bus, and then my wife can't get into

01:13:55   stuff. I know because she does. And I have some of those written down and I've got a copy I sent to my

01:13:59   my lawyer and we know but she like, my wife's technical. And for some reason, she just doesn't

01:14:04   want to use one password. Now that is that is something that I want to set up. I want to set up

01:14:09   like, I don't know if it would be a safe deposit box. I don't know if it would be something I give

01:14:13   to my lawyer, but some kind of binder of written stuff that exists in a place where there is a,

01:14:18   if John is incapacitated, here's everything you need. I don't have that set up. There's an awful

01:14:25   lot that is in my brain. And- Well, you got to maintain it because once you set it up,

01:14:30   the passwords change. So I'm like, all right, well, set up so she can get into my computer

01:14:35   in one password. And I just told her, if things get really bad, you call one of my partners from

01:14:39   work and like Chris Pepper, because he's a friend and he's super technical and can kind of walk

01:14:44   through and figure it out. And maybe they can open up to the hacker network and somebody can get into

01:14:48   my stuff if the paperwork is no longer current. Chris Pepper is one of the handful of people who

01:14:54   should be an employee of Daring Fireball, but I've never paid him a nickel, but he has reported

01:14:59   more type of typographic errors on Daring Fireball than I could ever count.

01:15:06   We put him on retainer at secure roses like eight years ago. And so he for his typo reporting

01:15:14   ability, I just said, just go in and fix it. He's just a bond. He's an absolute emails. He's an

01:15:18   absolute savant. And I agree with I would say, his hit rate number one, he catches all the mistakes

01:15:24   and mistakes, of course, get fixed. And when he has a quibble, like a suggestion for this would

01:15:29   be better, I would say his batting average is somewhere between 90 and 95%. And I would say,

01:15:34   no more than one out of 10, but probably closer to one out of 20 times. Will I actually reject

01:15:40   his suggestion and stick with what I have? Yeah. We haven't like edit some of our more complicated

01:15:46   research papers that we do. And occasionally he'll have a miss on those, which changes the context.

01:15:51   And he doesn't just edit me. It's my, you know, I've got two partners these days at Securosis and

01:15:56   he had, it's all of us. And now with the new company, the startup, um, I just give him the

01:16:00   the email of our marketing guy, and so he'll send him all the corrections. So he's pretty good.

01:16:06   Before we move on, let's just talk about the various ways that people can send private messages

01:16:11   to each other. And I'm curious what you would recommend. I almost exclusively use iMessage,

01:16:17   simply because almost everybody I communicate with is on iMessage. And I can't even remember

01:16:28   the last time I sent SMS other than when I do get some kind of like confirmation

01:16:34   from some service or something, you know, it's all automated. Everything I get by SMS is automated.

01:16:41   That is a weird aspect of being in the United States. I totally get it. Every time I write

01:16:48   about iMessage, I have readers all around the world and I totally get it that in Asia and Europe,

01:16:54   iMessage is not really a big player and WhatsApp is huge and there's other ones, other services

01:17:00   in other countries. I totally get it. But here for me personally, iMessage is,

01:17:04   everybody I want to talk to is on iMessage. And then second to that, and this is what you and I

01:17:09   have used a lot, is Twitter DM. Not because I think Twitter DM is secure, but because everything

01:17:15   that goes over Twitter DM, it's almost more like a more convenient form of email. I don't trust it

01:17:21   any more than I trust email, which is to say in terms of security, not at all. But, you know,

01:17:29   and I have my Twitter DMs open. I did this a couple months ago and I thought it would be

01:17:34   a disaster and I'd have to quick hurry, shut the door and close them. And it's actually worked out

01:17:39   amazingly well. I don't really get, I get very little spam, maybe like two or three a week.

01:17:45   And, you know, the ones that I get that I wouldn't have been able to get before,

01:17:50   In other words, DMs from people who I don't follow are very, you know, they're nice. They're

01:17:57   just from readers and readers at the website and listeners of the show. And I kind of the

01:18:01   thing I kind of extra like about it is the nature of a Twitter DM user interface wise

01:18:08   promotes brevity. I mean, no offense to those of you who send very long emails, but email,

01:18:16   You know, it's very easy to write a long email and it's very, it's not so easy to write a very

01:18:20   long DM. And so getting feedback from listeners and readers in the context of a DM is actually

01:18:26   more convenient than an email for me. Yeah, I use iMessage for anything and everything I can. The

01:18:33   problem is, is I have a wider range of people, I think, and quite a few in particular, like family

01:18:39   members and some friends that are not on iMessage. And so then I've got to use SMS for them, but I

01:18:45   I don't put anything in there that would be not sensitive, but at work I do.

01:18:48   So there's times I need to exchange passwords and, you know, not a lot,

01:18:53   but I'll just go to iMessage.

01:18:54   It's I trust the encryption on that.

01:18:56   Uh, Twitter DM.

01:18:57   Yeah.

01:18:58   Is same thing.

01:18:59   Number two, I've got multiple ones here with various people, but again, I, I

01:19:04   assume it's insecure, especially cause I, um, uh, had some of my stuff hacked.

01:19:09   So it wasn't me.

01:19:10   It was, there was one of those big exposure things and this is a while ago

01:19:13   now. And somebody got into Dan Kaminsky's Twitter's and Dan and I had exchanged some messages about

01:19:20   something. And one of the things was not horrible. It was mildly embarrassing. It was something like

01:19:25   because it was about somebody else, but it wasn't insulting in any way. But it was enough. I had to

01:19:31   go talk to this person who I think was wicked drunk at the time. So he didn't care when I went

01:19:36   to him finally had the conversation, you know, and that re reinforced, you can't trust it.

01:19:41   I hate to say it. I have to use Facebook stuff. I really try and minimize and compartmentalize it.

01:19:47   Like I only use Facebook from my phone. I have it isolated out from like everything else and

01:19:52   Facebook messenger. So I have to use that sometimes for like, you know, family members and friends

01:19:57   that like I don't talk to more than once every five years. And, uh, but the sensitive stuff,

01:20:03   iMessage first and Signal or Wicker would be the two that I would drop back to after that.

01:20:08   Trenton Larkin See, Signal I know, and that is,

01:20:11   you know, very well known, but I'm not familiar with Wicker at all. How do you spell it?

01:20:17   Jim

01:20:18   Wicker's, yeah, W-I, I think it's W-I-C-K-R or W, let me pull it up. Yeah, it's one of those

01:20:23   different spellings. So it's W-I-C-K-R. And Wicker, me is the name of the app. I guess they changed

01:20:30   to name of the app. A friend of mine started the company. So someone I do stuff with at Def Con and

01:20:34   everything, which is how I got involved there. So a bunch of the Def Con crew, because I work

01:20:39   at Def Con, will use Wicker. But it's one of those two. But I, like, I mean, I use either one of them,

01:20:46   like once a year at this point. The thing I don't like about Signal is that it, your ID is your phone

01:20:53   number. And I don't like giving out my phone number. Like I've seen a lot of people in the

01:20:58   in the press who publicize, you know,

01:21:00   you can reach me on Signal privately

01:21:02   and here's my phone number.

01:21:04   And I don't have, I have secondary phone,

01:21:09   I'm certainly not gonna use my main phone number for it,

01:21:12   but I have like a, you know,

01:21:15   if I spend 50 bucks a month for a second SIM

01:21:17   that I keep in like an Android phone just for testing

01:21:19   and to have another SIM, I could use that, I guess,

01:21:22   and I don't really care if it's public,

01:21:23   but I don't know, it still feels like an invitation

01:21:26   to have my phone ringing off the hook.

01:21:28   - Yeah, well, and for me, it's people that I know

01:21:31   in the industry and who wanna, they don't trust iMessage

01:21:34   or they use Android, which I don't understand

01:21:38   any security pros that use Android at this point.

01:21:40   You just shouldn't be doing that, but some people do

01:21:44   'cause you know, freedom or something, I don't know.

01:21:47   And so that's when I have to use Drop Fact to signal.

01:21:51   - Do you feel differently about Android?

01:21:52   Do you feel differently about Google's,

01:21:53   like the Pixel phones?

01:21:55   - I would use a Pixel phone if I had to.

01:21:57   They're not there yet.

01:21:58   And that's the problem.

01:22:00   Like, Apple is such a lead because of how tightly

01:22:04   integrated the hardware is, and their secure code processors

01:22:07   are better than the Google Pixel, what they have

01:22:10   available in those devices.

01:22:12   But yeah, I would be, if I had to use,

01:22:16   I tell everybody, if you have to use Android,

01:22:17   use a Pixel, I wouldn't really, even the Samsungs,

01:22:19   I'm not a Wii, that would be like the third choice,

01:22:21   would be a Samsung.

01:22:22   - Yeah.

01:22:26   - All right, let's keep going.

01:22:29   So a couple episodes ago, Joanna Stern was on the show,

01:22:33   I think it was two episodes ago,

01:22:34   and she even mentioned at the end of the show,

01:22:36   I said, "What are you working on?"

01:22:36   She said she was working on a piece about webcams

01:22:38   and webcam security, and then that column dropped last week.

01:22:43   And I was intrigued by, so she hired a security researcher

01:22:48   to help attack her knowingly to see how he could take control

01:22:55   webcam on her. She had an HP notebook running Windows 10 and a MacBook running presumably

01:23:03   Mojave. I don't know if she said, but a recent version of Mac OS X. I was intrigued by the

01:23:11   vectors that were used to try to take control of it, but I disagreed with her advice at the end.

01:23:16   Therefore, I wrote a response to it. Probably everybody listening has read it. I assume,

01:23:23   I don't know. I don't assume that everybody in life has read the stuff I read during Fireball,

01:23:28   but I sort of assume the people who listen to this podcast have. So I won't rehash the whole

01:23:33   thing, but I thought it was just very odd. I thought that her column sort of proved that

01:23:39   webcams are pretty safe if you're running, you know, recent versions of either Windows or Mac OS

01:23:46   10 and pay attention to the default security warnings for things that you've downloaded and

01:23:52   and things asking for permissions.

01:23:55   And yet her advice, she was like,

01:23:57   I'm still putting a cover on my webcam thing.

01:24:01   - Yeah, I've got friends and stuff who do that.

01:24:03   And maybe it's 'cause they haven't just dug into,

01:24:07   you know, particularly on Apple, what they do.

01:24:09   So first of all, if you're on a recent Mac,

01:24:14   and I don't know how many years back,

01:24:15   probably about two or three years back,

01:24:17   I don't really worry at all.

01:24:18   The webcam is tied to the light.

01:24:22   and that's done in hardware. Now, I had asked Apple, I think a year or two ago,

01:24:28   and I didn't get a response, which was, is it hardware locked or is it a firmware lock?

01:24:35   The difference being, if it's hardware locked, there's like some circuit that triggers it.

01:24:39   If the camera is on, the light is on. And firmware being there's very close to that,

01:24:45   but there's like a little software decision that's made, but technically you could blow through it

01:24:49   by compromising the firmware.

01:24:51   Either way, that's not something that's happening

01:24:53   under normal circumstances.

01:24:54   - No, and there was, and it's one of those things

01:24:56   where once something bad happens,

01:24:58   it lands in people's memory and then they never shake it.

01:25:01   And there was an interesting story

01:25:03   that the FBI had some sort of exploit,

01:25:06   like in the mid-2000s, that could take control

01:25:09   of a MacBook's webcam remotely.

01:25:12   But that's a long time ago on very different hardware.

01:25:16   Yeah. And Windows systems, I don't think most of them have that level of protection,

01:25:21   but the operating system is a lot stronger as well these days than it used to be. So,

01:25:27   I mean, I actually have an app that'll tell me if my microphone or my camera is on. The

01:25:31   main reason I have that, it's one of the ones from Patrick Wardle who does a lot of security

01:25:35   research. It's more for the microphone part than the camera part that I've got that attached.

01:25:40   And also see what, I'm just curious, you know, what processes are turning on my mic throughout

01:25:44   the course of the day. How's Chrome going to screw up my computer today is how I otherwise

01:25:49   refer to it. But, um, yeah, Patrick Wardle has a utility. Do you know the name of it

01:25:53   off the top of your oversight oversight? And I know that the guys at the, who do little

01:25:58   snitch have a utility too. Oh really? I miss that one. I have little snitch on like everything

01:26:05   I own. It's not part of little snitch, but they, uh, they have a utility that does the

01:26:09   the same thing and gives you a notice when somebody,

01:26:12   when anything is accessing the microphone.

01:26:15   And that was part of what I wrote was that

01:26:18   I don't get this paranoia about the camera.

01:26:20   I kind of do, I don't wanna be obtuse.

01:26:24   Like I kind of get it that nobody wants

01:26:27   to be surreptitiously photographed.

01:26:29   And there are people out there doing,

01:26:33   with bad intentions, and there are,

01:26:36   most people don't really know how a computer works,

01:26:38   And so they have no idea whether they can trust that by going to

01:26:42   xyz.com, whether xyz.com can access the, you know, can

01:26:48   somebody clever who's making this website somehow turn on my

01:26:51   webcam? And can they do it without having the light come

01:26:54   on? I don't know. So I'm just going to cover it up. I mean, I

01:26:58   mean, it is a real issue in a couple of cases. One, depending

01:27:02   on like on Windows, I'd be much less confident. And it's Windows

01:27:06   is way more secure than it used to be,

01:27:08   but there's not the hardware software ties

01:27:10   the way we get with Macs.

01:27:12   I mean, that's one of Apple's--

01:27:13   I've got a piece I've been meaning to write for like a year,

01:27:15   which is Apple's strategic security advantages,

01:27:18   and owning the hardware and owning the software

01:27:20   is just a massive advantage over everything else.

01:27:22   That's why Google Pixel is the most secure

01:27:25   of the Android devices, because Google has that control

01:27:28   of the entire ecosystem there.

01:27:30   So I do worry a little bit more,

01:27:32   even though Windows 10 is actually much better

01:27:35   than it's ever been and is really,

01:27:38   infection rates are a lot lower,

01:27:39   it's still potentially more likely.

01:27:41   On the Mac side, I don't worry about it at all

01:27:44   unless I'm talking to somebody

01:27:45   who's on a really old computer.

01:27:47   And again, my definition of really old and yours

01:27:49   might be different than other people out there.

01:27:52   - The objective development group

01:27:55   is the people who make little snitch.

01:27:57   They also make the excellent,

01:27:58   one of my favorite utilities of all time, Launch Bar.

01:28:03   but their app for letting you know when somebody

01:28:07   has the microphone or the camera is called MicroSnitch.

01:28:10   Anyway, I'll put a link in the show notes.

01:28:12   - I'm just having to use Launch Bar.

01:28:14   It seems like everybody else is going to Alfred and stuff,

01:28:16   and I love Launch Bar.

01:28:17   - I love Launch Bar, and I've looked at Alfred,

01:28:20   and it looks like a great alternative,

01:28:23   but I've never seen any,

01:28:27   I don't see anything that would make me want to switch,

01:28:29   mainly if only because I've got these crazy muscle memory

01:28:33   for LaunchBar. But anyway, but they're two great utilities. I don't know how anybody,

01:28:38   a power user goes without them. But yeah, I don't know. I just can't believe that people

01:28:44   are so paranoid about the camera. I get it. I get it. You don't want pictures of you,

01:28:48   but boy, I sure wouldn't want to be surreptitiously recorded either. And there is no indicator

01:28:54   light for the microphone. And quite frankly, to me, it all comes down to the question of

01:29:00   of do you trust the software running on your device?

01:29:03   - Yep.

01:29:04   - And I get it that there's people,

01:29:08   and in the old days computers are so complicated now.

01:29:10   They're so much more complicated.

01:29:11   Like part of what makes on a really modern MacBook,

01:29:15   the camera is for the webcam

01:29:20   goes through the T2 security system.

01:29:24   And that's an iOS computer.

01:29:27   It's a computer in the computer.

01:29:29   And to use a variation of a word used by Jeff Bezos,

01:29:36   it's a complexifier.

01:29:38   It's really cool that there is an iOS computer running

01:29:42   inside your Intel-based Mac computer doing

01:29:46   a bunch of security-related stuff,

01:29:48   including completely controlling access to the camera

01:29:53   so that nothing on the Mac can actually touch the camera.

01:29:56   It has to make a request through an API,

01:29:59   and the API has to go through the T2, which is running iOS

01:30:02   and has a secure enclave and all this other stuff.

01:30:05   That's all cool, but it's complex for me to understand,

01:30:10   and I have a degree in computer science

01:30:13   and spend my days thinking about these things.

01:30:15   For a typical person, it's a black box, I get it.

01:30:19   - Yeah, I'm not actually sure the T2 covers the camera.

01:30:23   I'd actually pulled up that document before that.

01:30:24   - I know, it doesn't say so in that document,

01:30:26   but I was told by somebody that it does go through there.

01:30:28   I don't know.

01:30:29   But since it's still just an API call

01:30:33   that anything can make,

01:30:35   I think that's why Apple doesn't really call it out.

01:30:37   It does go through the T2 though.

01:30:39   And I think-

01:30:40   - 'Cause Face ID uses all the Secure Enclave stuff for sure.

01:30:43   - Yeah.

01:30:43   - Yeah.

01:30:44   - And I think that it's partly just to make it harder

01:30:47   for anything on the Mac to access the firmware

01:30:50   behind the camera.

01:30:52   You can't even get to it because it's through there.

01:30:54   So I don't think they brag about it in the white paper,

01:30:57   but I know I've been told, I don't know for a fact,

01:31:00   but I've been told for a fact by somebody who would know

01:31:02   that if you have a Mac with a T2,

01:31:05   the webcam access goes through there.

01:31:08   - I had thought that, but I was right.

01:31:11   I flat out pulled up the paper

01:31:12   because I knew we were gonna talk about this.

01:31:14   Like, oh, it's not in there.

01:31:15   - So the cool thing that it does that the T2 ones do

01:31:18   is that the microphone, and it is a physical disconnect,

01:31:21   when you close the lid on a modern MacBook that has a T2,

01:31:26   the microphone is physically disconnected.

01:31:28   So that there is, you know, there is,

01:31:30   the microphone actually doesn't even have

01:31:32   an electronic connection, you know,

01:31:33   it doesn't even get power when the lid is closed.

01:31:35   It's actually physically disconnected.

01:31:38   So you only have, you know,

01:31:39   your microphone can theoretically only be used

01:31:41   when the lid is open.

01:31:42   - You know, and that's also really good

01:31:45   because I don't know how many like conference calls

01:31:47   you're on, people are always closing their laptop lids

01:31:49   and not realizing they're not running

01:31:50   the microphone on their headset and it stops that annoyance.

01:31:54   Well, you know what? All right. So let me go through. Since I wrote my rejoinder to Joanna's

01:32:00   piece on webcams, let me, you know, I heard from readers, you know, all very polite. And it's one

01:32:05   of those things where, you know, we can agree to disagree. And it actually makes me very happy

01:32:10   in this era of, of everything turns into a shouting argument and nobody listens to the

01:32:16   the other side, where it was all reasonable and it made me very happy about the level

01:32:21   of discourse between me and my readers. But one of the reasons that readers said, "Well,

01:32:30   I get what you're saying. I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I can't

01:32:35   live without a webcam cover," like one of these little stick-on things with a switch,

01:32:40   'cause I'm on conference calls all the time.

01:32:43   And I want, you know,

01:32:44   I just want to know that I'm not being photographed

01:32:49   when I don't think I'm being photographed.

01:32:50   Totally reasonable.

01:32:51   So you know, that to me isn't voodoo.

01:32:54   It's not a, I have no idea what an attacker could do,

01:32:57   and so who knows what's running on my computer.

01:32:59   It is, I know exactly what I'm running.

01:33:00   I'm running whatever, you know,

01:33:03   video conferencing software,

01:33:05   and I want to physically control

01:33:08   when I know that I'm being photographed or not.

01:33:10   And that's totally reasonable.

01:33:12   - Yeah, and that goes back to the software trust.

01:33:14   Like everything I've got running,

01:33:15   I've gotta open it and turn it on,

01:33:17   but I know there's things that people use in enterprises

01:33:19   or whatever where it could pop it open

01:33:21   or they accidentally have it on when they join a call.

01:33:23   Yeah, I'm cool with that.

01:33:26   To be honest, there's something to be said for placebos.

01:33:30   It makes you feel better.

01:33:32   My wife gives me crap all the time

01:33:34   because I'm a scientific skeptic.

01:33:36   I'm a paramedic. I got a bio like in college, like somebody comes out with the latest,

01:33:41   I'm doing this diet or that diet or this or that or chiropractic or whatever. It's like,

01:33:46   yeah, none of that shit works, but I'm not going to tell you because it's not going to improve

01:33:49   anything and it's causing no harm to you to do that. Joanna's article though, I didn't like

01:33:54   because, and she is an exceptional journalist. Like I feel like that I don't like to criticize

01:34:00   that, you know, somebody who's that good at what she does, but all those articles,

01:34:06   and this is a bigger issue, it's like really easy to fall into this trap when you're working

01:34:11   with a security researcher hacker type, and they may not even realize they're doing it,

01:34:16   where you want them to show you something, they come up with a way to do it, but you got to do

01:34:21   like the four or five manual steps to allow it. And she detailed all of those out. What I've

01:34:26   learned over the years, though, is people lose that context when they read those articles.

01:34:29   - Right, right.

01:34:30   - So they headline the first graph and the last graph,

01:34:32   and then they forget everything in the middle.

01:34:34   - Right, that was, I don't think it was the very ending,

01:34:37   but it was like the ending of part one of my thing,

01:34:39   which is basically people are gonna take away from this,

01:34:41   the Wall Street Journal says,

01:34:42   you should cover up your webcam.

01:34:44   - Yeah.

01:34:45   - And that to me is the wrong conclusion, right?

01:34:47   And the steps she had to jump through,

01:34:49   but and to Microsoft's credit,

01:34:53   to me it was equally convoluted on the Windows machine

01:34:57   with the modern Windows 10 and Windows Defender running,

01:35:01   you had to ignore some pretty,

01:35:04   some pretty really big warnings, yeah,

01:35:07   really big warnings you had to click through.

01:35:10   And the guys under which her Mac's camera was compromised

01:35:15   was somebody applying for a job that she was looking for

01:35:20   to help with video production and send her a resume

01:35:24   that required LibreOffice.

01:35:25   Number one, who sends the resume in that format?

01:35:27   I mean, who doesn't--

01:35:29   Somebody who doesn't want the job?

01:35:31   Right, and once opened, required decreasing the level

01:35:36   of macro security in LibreOffice to a point

01:35:39   where LibreOffice says, are you sure this is really insecure?

01:35:42   I mean, whose resume has--

01:35:45   A has macros, period, but B has macros

01:35:47   that require you to decrease the default security settings.

01:35:50   And then even then, it still said,

01:35:53   are you going to allow this app access to your camera? Cancel or okay?

01:35:57   Yeah, it's so we have this thing on and the light went on,

01:36:03   there was still, I haven't seen any proof. And again,

01:36:06   maybe there is a way and maybe it's a deep dark secret on the dark web and it's

01:36:10   tightly held secret that there's some kind of way to get the Mac book or modern

01:36:14   Mac book camera on without having the light come on. But if there is,

01:36:17   I haven't seen it.

01:36:19   You know, it's a category of something

01:36:21   that we call stunt hacking.

01:36:23   And stunt hacking is where you do

01:36:25   something big and exploitative to get attention frequently.

01:36:29   Now, this was not directly that case.

01:36:32   And I want to be really clear about that,

01:36:34   because the researcher wasn't like trying to trick her

01:36:37   or make it out to be bigger than it was.

01:36:39   This was a legitimate collaboration

01:36:40   between the journalist and the researcher.

01:36:42   And he's like, yeah, here's the technique.

01:36:44   So it's not really stunt hacking in the same way.

01:36:48   And sometimes stunt hacking can be good.

01:36:50   So when Charlie Miller and Chris Vlasic hacked cars,

01:36:53   because that was legit, it was sensationalistic,

01:36:57   but it also woke people up to an issue

01:36:58   that was legitimately being ignored.

01:37:02   The problem is when it goes bad.

01:37:04   And that's why I'm very sensitive

01:37:06   to these kinds of articles,

01:37:07   because the average reader's not gonna know the difference.

01:37:10   Years ago, when TJX got hacked,

01:37:12   I actually was working with 60 Minutes.

01:37:15   I got introduced to a 60 Minutes producer

01:37:17   to do a whole piece on that kind of hacking.

01:37:20   And if you remember, that was like,

01:37:21   they were using WEP for their network.

01:37:23   And so the bad guys' wardrobe used the old,

01:37:27   for those who don't remember,

01:37:28   WEP was the not very secure wifi standard encryption,

01:37:33   broke into their network

01:37:35   and they were able to sniff the credit cards

01:37:36   and got many millions.

01:37:38   And I remember it was like, it was enticing

01:37:40   'cause I'm driving around with this producer

01:37:42   and he flew into Phoenix where I'm living these days

01:37:45   or those days.

01:37:46   And I'm driving, I think it was outside of a home Depot and I'm like, yep.

01:37:49   Okay.

01:37:50   I'm doing war driving.

01:37:51   Like, yep, that's insecure.

01:37:52   That's insecure.

01:37:53   And he really, he's like talking about where the cameras are going to be placed

01:37:56   and where Leslie stall is going to sit and all this other stuff.

01:37:59   And he wanted me to like, Guarantee that that was not insecure so that she

01:38:03   could walk into the office with the tape and show them, you know, have

01:38:06   that, have that gotcha moment.

01:38:07   And I looked at the guy, I'm like, I'm not breaking the law to be on TV.

01:38:11   Like, is that secure behind the scenes?

01:38:15   I'm not going to fake it and say that it was definitively insecure because yeah, could

01:38:21   I break that wireless network easy?

01:38:23   Like at that point it was so easy, anybody could do it.

01:38:26   But behind the scenes, maybe they have those connections encrypted and I couldn't do anything

01:38:30   bad.

01:38:31   Like I don't know.

01:38:32   I'm not going to put my reputation on the line.

01:38:34   And they ended up doing that story like nine months later with other people and which I

01:38:39   was, I don't need that kind of fame.

01:38:41   So I was totally fine with it.

01:38:42   was really interesting because there's different desires,

01:38:47   the journalists, you need the page views and everything.

01:38:49   Some researchers do want to build up their reputations,

01:38:52   but it's a fine line when you start writing these pieces

01:38:55   without the right context.

01:38:56   - Is it sort of like, you know, like, hey,

01:38:58   like in the physical world, like, hey,

01:38:59   the front door is open, I can just open this front door.

01:39:02   And I don't know if I can go in there

01:39:05   and steal money from their cash register.

01:39:07   I don't know if the cash register is locked or not,

01:39:09   but I'm not going into the store.

01:39:11   I'm not going into their store while it's closed in the middle of the night just to see.

01:39:15   You know, it's even more like I walk and I look and I see the door cracked open or the

01:39:21   window cracked open like without even touching it. Yeah. Yeah. It's that.

01:39:25   But I'm not going to pop it open and go in.

01:39:27   No, because fucking Robocop might be in there. Like I'm not. Yeah, exactly. Now,

01:39:33   admittedly, I think they probably had horrible security behind that. But um,

01:39:37   and fully compromiseable, but I can't guarantee it. I'm sure it's not going on in national

01:39:44   television and saying I could.

01:39:45   I will say this. I heard from somebody who knows, I mentioned a few episodes ago that

01:39:50   I'd mentioned that famously everybody seems to think Mark Zuckerberg uses a webcam, a piece of

01:39:56   tape over his webcam because there was a picture of him once a couple years ago sitting in front

01:40:00   of a MacBook with a piece of tape over the webcam and a piece of tape over the microphone. And I

01:40:05   I mentioned, I don't know which episode it was,

01:40:07   I mentioned a few episodes ago that,

01:40:09   I don't know if that was actually,

01:40:12   nobody's ever confirmed that that's his device.

01:40:13   Somebody who works at Facebook wrote to me and said,

01:40:15   "I can confirm that Mark Zuckerberg

01:40:17   does use a webcam cover."

01:40:20   So there it is, Mark Zuckerberg does.

01:40:22   But he said it's probably not even his choice.

01:40:24   He's got like a team of like eight security people

01:40:26   and he just does whatever they say.

01:40:28   But I will say this, a piece of tape over your microphone

01:40:31   does not block the microphone.

01:40:34   And I encourage anybody who thinks that it does to try it.

01:40:37   Put a piece of tape over your microphone.

01:40:39   - Has somebody done that?

01:40:40   - I've seen people do it.

01:40:42   So the thing that I've seen that you can buy on Amazon

01:40:45   is you can buy, I don't know what they call it,

01:40:48   but you can buy like a dummy microphone

01:40:51   that plugs into the microphone jack

01:40:53   and it doesn't actually do anything.

01:40:57   But when you have a microphone plugged

01:40:58   in the microphone jack, the MacBook defaults

01:41:00   to using that external microphone as the microphone.

01:41:03   And so it's just like a dummy plug.

01:41:06   - Yeah.

01:41:07   - That would actually work to block your microphone.

01:41:09   So if you actually do, for whatever reason,

01:41:11   want to block your Mac's microphone by default,

01:41:15   I would suggest buying one of those.

01:41:16   Guess what?

01:41:17   They cost exactly as much as you think.

01:41:18   They're like $4 at Amazon.

01:41:21   But buy one of those.

01:41:22   Don't think you can cover your microphone

01:41:24   with a piece of tape.

01:41:25   It doesn't work.

01:41:26   - And don't be a target,

01:41:27   because if the attacker actually really wants

01:41:30   to get your microphone and they know,

01:41:33   I mean, they can just look for multiple sound sources

01:41:35   and switch.

01:41:36   - Yeah.

01:41:37   - It's just, I'm assuming that's probably not built

01:41:38   into average malware, so that makes sense.

01:41:41   - Yeah.

01:41:42   Basically though, like I said before,

01:41:43   it really does come down to,

01:41:44   do you trust the software running on your device?

01:41:47   And if you don't, I mean, it's like game over.

01:41:50   And you know, like, well, I don't know why anybody

01:41:51   would trust their keyboard.

01:41:52   If you don't, if you think that your computer

01:41:54   is running software that could take control of your webcam

01:41:58   and could take control of it in a way

01:41:59   that wouldn't even show the indicator light,

01:42:02   I don't know why you trust your keyboard.

01:42:03   Why do you ever, I mean, I don't know how you could live

01:42:06   if you don't trust the software on your device.

01:42:09   - Yeah, I mean, keyboards have firmware on them

01:42:12   and there's actually been stories,

01:42:13   there's been versions of those that have been cracked.

01:42:16   But I mean, these are like rare.

01:42:18   I mean, this is the whole like thing,

01:42:19   like what's the real risk to the average person?

01:42:22   Like, I mean, you're kind of a target.

01:42:24   I'm kind of a target in different ways because of the--

01:42:26   - I'm more of a target than an average person.

01:42:28   - Yeah, but not a big target.

01:42:30   And so our risk assessments are different

01:42:34   than like Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg.

01:42:38   And the nature of the kinds of attacks

01:42:40   that you're gonna be subject to

01:42:42   are gonna be completely different.

01:42:43   The average person just getting malware,

01:42:45   if that malware can't like pop that microphone right away

01:42:47   or get that webcam right away,

01:42:49   they're moving on to the next one.

01:42:50   - Yeah.

01:42:51   All right, let me take a break here

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01:46:34   they weren't a sponsor. You know, I've listened to the show. I've not heard that ad. I'm looking

01:46:40   at the website now because I travel a lot. I will say this. I wouldn't put gold bullion in

01:46:47   a suitcase if it's got a TSA approved lock. I can't. I mean, it's the best you can do. It's the

01:46:53   best you're allowed to do is a TSA approved lock. Let's just face it, a TSA approved lock is not

01:46:58   really much of a lock. I can't can't have a can't have rich mogul on the show and let it let it go

01:47:04   that. Well, did you ever remember that story where somebody took a picture of the TSA guy holding up

01:47:09   like all the keys on the key ring? And then everybody's skin? Okay, let's go 3d print all

01:47:13   all the TSA locks. Oh my God. That was can't make this shit up. That was a good one.

01:47:19   Yeah. I can't say that I used the lock. Well, but it's, you know, pretty basic airport security is

01:47:27   to, you know, I don't think you can go more than 50 feet without hearing a recorded voice telling

01:47:31   you not to leave your bag unattended. I'm like really particular about how I organize the inside

01:47:38   of my bags. Yeah. And I travel just cause it's gotta be the same. You spend enough time on the

01:47:43   road. You don't want to think about it when you show up someplace at 2 AM,

01:47:46   which is why, sorry, I'll stop browsing their website. Now,

01:47:49   go back to the interview.

01:47:51   Let me think about what else here, let me look at my list.

01:47:55   And what else do we have to talk about? We're still, still have a fair amount.

01:47:58   Let me say this while we're talking about, I mean trusting that the,

01:48:03   the software on your device, there's been a story.

01:48:08   It started with Facebook and then it expanded to Google, but,

01:48:12   But Facebook for a while had this VPN

01:48:17   that they were quote unquote giving away free.

01:48:19   It was called Ovono, Avano, I get it wrong,

01:48:24   doesn't matter, they had to get rid of it.

01:48:26   But basically they were using this VPN ostensibly

01:48:29   to provide you with security with a VPN,

01:48:32   but they were using it to snoop on all of the VPN traffic

01:48:35   to see what people were doing on their phones

01:48:37   and using it to figure out,

01:48:38   hey, everybody's using this WhatsApp.

01:48:40   Even though they want $20 billion, it's worth it because look at what we can show people

01:48:45   are doing.

01:48:46   Well, Apple put the kibosh on that.

01:48:48   And then immediately afterwards, Facebook started distributing an app and paying people,

01:48:55   including kids down to 13 years old, like 20 bucks a month or something to install this,

01:49:01   which was effectively giving Facebook all of their traffic.

01:49:06   And they were just, you think, "Well, that can't go through the app store."

01:49:10   Well, it wasn't going through the App Store.

01:49:11   They were distributing it as an enterprise beta,

01:49:13   which is not what the enterprise beta system was meant for.

01:49:16   So TechCrunch uncovered that.

01:49:20   Turned out Google was doing something similar

01:49:22   and Google got on top of it.

01:49:23   And rather than taking Facebook's root of,

01:49:25   we didn't think we were doing anything wrong,

01:49:27   Google was like, "Ooh, we're sorry."

01:49:29   (laughs)

01:49:31   But there was an embarrassing few days for Facebook

01:49:35   and I think for Google too,

01:49:36   where Apple had revoked their enterprise certificates,

01:49:39   which meant that all of their beta software

01:49:42   inside the company was inoperative.

01:49:45   So even like beta versions of Facebook

01:49:47   and I guess Instagram and all sorts of custom apps.

01:49:50   - It wasn't just beta,

01:49:51   it was their internal app certificate.

01:49:53   So any enterprise apps, beta or not.

01:49:55   - Yeah, and like Facebook has an app,

01:49:57   I forget what they call it,

01:49:58   but it's effectively like a separate version,

01:50:00   a shadow version of Facebook just for employees

01:50:03   where that's how they communicate with each other.

01:50:05   All of those things stopped working

01:50:07   'cause they revoked these certificates.

01:50:09   But it turns out, and I really had no idea about this, but as this story was unfolding

01:50:16   and I was writing about it, people would write to me and say, "This is a bigger story than

01:50:19   you think," and they'd link to various things.

01:50:24   All sorts of companies are, in our present tense, misusing enterprise certificates in

01:50:30   the same way to effectively allow what we've always thought wasn't really allowed on the

01:50:35   iPhone, which is sideloading, which is loading native apps, not through the App Store. I mean,

01:50:42   there's gambling apps, there's porno apps, there's just all sorts of apps that aren't going through

01:50:46   the App Store that you can get, you know, just by installing a beta certificate.

01:50:53   Well, I mean, I knew sideloading was going on. I mean, I work with enterprises. So I see those,

01:50:58   you know, all the time as part of their, you know, legitimate internal apps and stuff that they get

01:51:02   loaded. And I knew, I've seen this abused actually in malware. So the one kind of

01:51:08   tricky malware thing that does work on iOS, if you can pull it off, is if you get

01:51:12   someone to deploy one of those device profiles, then they can have full access

01:51:17   and sniff all the content on your device at that point, potentially, depending on

01:51:21   how all that stuff's configured. I just had no idea it was being used for, you

01:51:25   know, all these other side store things. And so it makes me wonder, like, we

01:51:30   use Circle here at home to monitor the kids.

01:51:34   And it's an app.

01:51:35   It's like the Circle by Disney thing.

01:51:37   So I got the little puck.

01:51:38   And it actually does some things that

01:51:39   are normally bad for security, but are usable to monitor

01:51:42   kids' activity.

01:51:43   So we can limit the amount of YouTube time and stuff

01:51:45   that they've got with the younger kids.

01:51:47   It's great.

01:51:47   And they have a version that will work on devices.

01:51:50   And I know you have to use a device certificate,

01:51:52   and basically what these apps do.

01:51:54   So it kind of makes me curious if there are lines

01:51:57   and if that's considered legitimate or not.

01:51:59   they don't hide that that's what it does. So I'm kind of hoping that is real.

01:52:02   Have you ever seen this site builds be, you know, like building builds.io and they have the store. I

01:52:10   mean, go check this out. I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. I mean, and it's chock full of I

01:52:16   mean, it seems like the main thing that builds.io has our game emulators. Like Game Boy emulator and

01:52:26   a PSP emulator and an S super, because all these emulators are not allowed in the App

01:52:32   Store for copyright reasons. So you can't put like a Nintendo Game Boy emulator, you

01:52:37   know, in the App Store because Apple isn't going to let it fly for copyright reasons,

01:52:42   because the only way to play the games is with, you know, using game ROMs that you don't

01:52:47   have legal right to. But this builds.io is just chock a block full of emulators. And

01:52:55   you said, Bitcoin miners and stuff to itorrent clients, all sorts of stuff. There's some

01:53:02   other, I forget, I just linked to it yesterday and they already got shut down after I linked

01:53:06   to it. But it's like a whack-a-mole type thing where they, you know, every couple of weeks,

01:53:09   they just come up with this. Somebody told me they just come up with a new name and just

01:53:14   go to a new site and have a new certificate. And it's just from some random company in

01:53:18   China. But effectively, it's just a way to to stream pirated

01:53:22   movie and TV content. I mean, this I had no idea that I mean,

01:53:26   there's a this is a giant

01:53:28   No, I had I'm looking at this now and all the Yeah, I had no

01:53:34   idea this. Oh, yeah. All these. Yep. It's like box movie box.

01:53:39   Yeah, I mean, it's just it's rampant. It's absolutely like

01:53:42   Facebook is far from the exception. And if they ever

01:53:44   looked at I mean, it almost makes me I don't I'm not I can't

01:53:47   say I'm sympathetic to Facebook, but it almost makes me think that maybe they had an excuse

01:53:51   here, like, "Hey, everybody's doing this." There is a rampant market inside loaded iPhone,

01:53:57   iOS native apps that go through the developer certificate system. My question, and I wrote

01:54:06   yesterday, I really don't know the answer. Is this something that Apple was blind to,

01:54:10   or are they purposefully turning a blind eye to it and they kind of know it's going on

01:54:13   and for whatever reason, they accept it?

01:54:16   I mean, there's-- I don't know.

01:54:19   It's tough to police that.

01:54:20   But Apple does have a little bit of money to hire cops.

01:54:26   Yeah, I don't know.

01:54:27   Certainly, I know enterprises use this

01:54:30   in all sorts of different ways.

01:54:32   Typically legitimate, but I've seen ones that are kind of

01:54:35   on the line in terms of employee monitoring sorts of things.

01:54:38   But at that point, that's usually like work devices.

01:54:40   They own it.

01:54:40   It's not the same thing as a consumer.

01:54:42   And I think that's what those certificates were meant for.

01:54:45   These ones, looking at that build IO,

01:54:47   I had no idea it was that big.

01:54:49   I mean, I knew it was happening.

01:54:50   I didn't know it was that big.

01:54:51   - It does this, it seems like it would be a big job

01:54:55   to police this, but it doesn't seem like

01:54:57   it would be too big a job for a company of Apple's resources

01:55:02   to police with a reasonably sized force.

01:55:05   And I've been saying for a while,

01:55:07   I suggested a couple of weeks ago,

01:55:08   like the effectively that I think Apple should have

01:55:11   effectively like a bunco squad for the App Store,

01:55:15   which would be not entirely, you know,

01:55:18   in the way that like,

01:55:20   hopefully everything that goes through the App Store

01:55:25   gets reviewed by the App Store reviewers

01:55:26   and they would catch things like

01:55:28   blatant copyright violation,

01:55:30   like a game that uses Mario as a character

01:55:33   that is not from Nintendo.

01:55:34   Well, you would hope that Apple's app reviewers

01:55:37   would catch stuff like that.

01:55:40   But there are all sorts of other ripoffs.

01:55:42   There are a ton, there's just a cottage industry

01:55:46   in ripoffs where people find popular apps in category X,

01:55:51   let's just say weather apps,

01:55:53   and they find a popular weather app,

01:55:54   and then they make an app that is like a visual clone

01:55:57   of a popular app and give it a name that is super similar,

01:56:01   and then hope that when you search for that app,

01:56:04   their ripoff version shows up high in the results

01:56:09   they make money. And there's all sorts of goofy look at the top grossing charts, you

01:56:13   can it's not that hard to find a bunch of apps that make you think like, why is this

01:56:17   there? You know, like, why are there antivirus utilities that are doing well in the iOS App

01:56:23   Store? Like what in the world? You know, given the sandbox restrictions of, of App Store

01:56:28   apps, what in the world could you know, whatever you want to say about what antivirus software

01:56:32   is useful for on the desktop? And how many of them are actually useful and how many of

01:56:38   of them aren't on iOS, it's almost ridiculous. Why are they

01:56:43   doing so well? And and I, so I sort of feel like outside the

01:56:47   App Store review system, Apple should have a team that is

01:56:50   specifically looking for fraud in the way that a police bunco

01:56:54   squad is looking for things like three card money games and

01:56:57   pickpockets and stuff like that.

01:56:59   I mean, I think whether or not it's going on now, it's

01:57:02   inevitable, because I mean, let's think back to the whole

01:57:05   reason iOS is so secure. I mean, you know, remember Apple pre iOS security was kind of

01:57:10   an obscurity thing and Apple realized they can't grow the market unless people can trust their

01:57:16   devices. And if the app store gets too overloaded, which is I think it is approaching that because I

01:57:23   run into the same issues. I mean, I install apps all the time and I'm not infrequently,

01:57:27   I end up installing the wrong one because it's plus plus weather, whatever, as opposed to,

01:57:32   you know, whether I mean, you know, how Apple works, once the reputation damage hits a particular

01:57:37   point, then they they're usually on it. I think it's just flown under the radar. And it seems like

01:57:42   this last year, last 12 months, it's been kind of becoming part of the social consciousness a little

01:57:49   bit more. I would hope so, you know, and then you get to the other aspect of this, which another

01:57:56   recent scandal in the App Store were these screen recording frameworks and I

01:58:01   Don't know if screen recording is quite the right word

01:58:04   It's not like they were taking movies

01:58:05   but you know more or less these frameworks that you can install third-party frameworks and you put them in your app and then it'll and

01:58:11   you know give the you know, let's say you have an app and

01:58:14   Then you install this framework and then it'll give you feedback on all of your users on what buttons they pressed and what path they

01:58:22   Took through like the first run and all of this stuff

01:58:26   which, in theory, is useful, but you would think would be odd to be restricted to your

01:58:33   beta testing. And if you were going to use it in production, it should have some kind

01:58:38   of warning and opt-in, opt-out type thing before it starts going. And the story was

01:58:45   scandalous enough—there's another one that was broken by TechCrunch, to their credit—that

01:58:49   you know, last weekend was going through and systematically looking for apps that have

01:58:56   these frameworks in them and then sending developers notices that you know, that you've,

01:59:00   you know, you need to submit, you have 24 hours of submitted updated app that complies

01:59:03   with the terms of the App Store. And again, this it gets to a point I wanted to make with

01:59:08   you is that this isn't necessarily a security violation, but it's definitely a privacy violation.

01:59:14   Because you have a reason, you have reason to expect that the buttons you click as you

01:59:18   you go through an app that you've just downloaded

01:59:20   aren't being sent back to the developer.

01:59:22   - Yeah, both of these issues together

01:59:27   are really interesting because they're abuse of the system.

01:59:32   So you talk about trusting the software.

01:59:34   I actually come from a different perspective.

01:59:36   I don't trust all the software I run on my systems,

01:59:38   which is why I love iOS because it compartmentalize it.

01:59:42   So I don't trust Facebook worth a shit.

01:59:45   And I have to use it for various family related

01:59:48   And I'm in the 501st Legion.

01:59:50   That's all Facebook-- or not all Facebook, but a lot of it.

01:59:53   The communications is there, so I need to be on that.

01:59:56   But I only run it on iOS and with all the restrictions

01:59:59   around it, because I trust that Apple has given me

02:00:01   a secure compartmentalized platform.

02:00:04   So even if I want to use something untrusted,

02:00:06   it's in its own container.

02:00:08   And the side loading of the apps is one way

02:00:10   that can just blow past that.

02:00:12   And the screen recording frameworks,

02:00:14   it's not as bad because it's still within that app.

02:00:17   But if you're not communicating that to the people using it,

02:00:20   and in particular, like some apps are fine,

02:00:23   but if it's an app that has like private info

02:00:27   that you think, I don't know, I don't like that,

02:00:29   I just don't like slimy vendor stuff.

02:00:33   If they disclosed it to the users, totally different.

02:00:36   I mean, then you know, everybody does click streaming now

02:00:38   on their apps, like they're keeping track of everything

02:00:40   you click on a web app as it is,

02:00:42   but it's different than like full on screen recording

02:00:44   in my book, but maybe not.

02:00:47   - I don't mean to be holier than now.

02:00:49   I don't, but I had an app in the app store recently,

02:00:54   Vesper, the text editor, a little note-taking app.

02:00:57   It never in a million years would have occurred to us

02:00:59   to do that.

02:01:00   And I realize our app is relatively simple

02:01:04   and we didn't have big venture capital things to satisfy

02:01:09   and we ended up not being successful,

02:01:12   so maybe we should have, I don't know.

02:01:14   I the reason why we failed though wasn't because we didn't track what users were tapping and what they were typing and I

02:01:21   It I don't know it. I wouldn't want that information. You know what I mean? Like I feel like that's

02:01:27   Something that the industry I hope is sort of coming to grips with is that that for a long time now

02:01:34   It has been if you can collect it collect it because of course we want this information we can do something with it

02:01:40   Whereas I feel like people

02:01:43   Companies are starting to come to grips with the idea of we don't want it. We don't want this information on our hands

02:01:50   We don't want it to be there. We don't want to have to protect it

02:01:54   Like if we don't have it, we can't be hacked and have it stolen. I

02:01:57   Wish more people thought like that. Actually, I don't because it would dramatically affect my income

02:02:02   right and but everything you collect as a company about your your users is

02:02:09   is a liability in a sense.

02:02:11   And maybe you'll come to the conclusion

02:02:13   that the benefits of that data are outweigh the liability,

02:02:17   but you can't overlook that it is a liability

02:02:20   because now you've got this thing to protect.

02:02:23   Whereas if you don't collect it at all,

02:02:25   you've got nothing to lose.

02:02:26   - Well, like we have trackers in our product.

02:02:28   It's in beta right now, but they are for errors.

02:02:32   They are, we track which of the features

02:02:35   are using or not using. Not kind of a screen capture thing. If it was a consumer based app,

02:02:44   there's just a level of stuff that I wouldn't want. To be honest, I think a lot of this data

02:02:50   correlation and big science and AI stuff like we hear, I think most of it is crap.

02:02:54   I know Amazon sends everything to Facebook because I hurt my knee. I bought this thing,

02:03:01   fitness device to do rehab on it. And I'm in Facebook and I see ads for the thing I just

02:03:06   bought on Amazon. You know, I paid for it. I don't need two of them. And it lasts more than

02:03:12   like the two months since I've had it. And you know, it's not like one of them is some

02:03:18   rinky-dink company. These are two of the big five, right? You bought it on Amazon and the ads are

02:03:23   showing up on Facebook. I have not seen a single ad that would actually drive me to click on it

02:03:28   buy something more often than not, it's stuff I've already bought.

02:03:31   Yeah. I recently I don't know, I think I mentioned this a few times recently, but for years,

02:03:38   up until just like, maybe like two months ago, I didn't have any ads on Instagram. And I don't know

02:03:44   why I don't know if it. I don't know if it's because I literally signed up on the first day

02:03:49   that Instagram was public. I wasn't on the beta. But I knew people on the beta. And I thought that

02:03:55   That looks like a neat thing.

02:03:56   I'm gonna keep my eye open.

02:03:57   And then the day that it launched,

02:03:59   I signed up 'cause I wanted @Gruber.

02:04:02   I don't know if it's because I signed up early.

02:04:05   I don't know if it's because I'm slightly internet famous

02:04:08   and I got white listed for a while.

02:04:10   I don't know, but I went years without getting ads.

02:04:12   Now I get Instagram ads and I tapped one one time

02:04:16   and then every single ad I saw after that

02:04:19   was for the exact same thing.

02:04:21   Everything.

02:04:22   And that's not tracking across.

02:04:24   It's just within the app, but it is--

02:04:27   - Was it Cars for Kids?

02:04:29   It was Cars for Kids.

02:04:30   - But it's crazy.

02:04:31   It's absolutely crazy.

02:04:33   But the stuff that happens cross company like that

02:04:37   is really maddening.

02:04:39   And I don't know how they don't think it's creepy.

02:04:42   Like in the real world, if you went into Nordstrom

02:04:47   and you were looking at black boots and you thought,

02:04:52   - Well, you know what?

02:04:53   Maybe I want my wife to give her opinion on this.

02:04:55   I like these, but I'm not gonna buy them right now.

02:04:57   Okay, thanks.

02:04:58   Thanks for letting me try them on.

02:04:59   And then you leave and then you go down the street.

02:05:02   If somebody like in the next door down there is like,

02:05:04   hey, hey, Rich, you want some black boots?

02:05:06   Wouldn't you be freaked out?

02:05:07   You'd be freaked out.

02:05:09   That would be so weird.

02:05:10   - Just yesterday, I had a conversation with somebody

02:05:15   and they work at one of the major brands

02:05:17   on the security team there.

02:05:18   And this is work related stuff.

02:05:21   and it came up their big data analytics,

02:05:22   like the stuff we're talking about right now.

02:05:24   And I can't give you any context,

02:05:26   like this is like literally household name kind of a thing.

02:05:29   And the guy was laughing, he's like,

02:05:31   "Yeah, we've not seen a single bump in sales

02:05:35   because of this, what I'm guessing

02:05:37   is a multimillion dollar program."

02:05:38   But it just creeps the shit out of me.

02:05:42   - It goes back to the sympathy I have for people

02:05:45   who do run webcam blockers, right?

02:05:48   because you know something's creepy going on

02:05:51   in your computing life where you buy a knee brace at Amazon

02:05:56   and all of a sudden Facebook is showing you

02:05:58   therapeutic knee braces.

02:06:01   You know something creepy's going on.

02:06:03   So where do you, you know,

02:06:04   you don't understand what's going on.

02:06:06   I don't even understand exactly how that connection is made.

02:06:09   Why not just play it safe and cover up your webcam?

02:06:11   I get it, you know?

02:06:12   So I stand behind my rebuttal to Joanna's piece,

02:06:16   but I still, I have deep sympathy for the people

02:06:18   are just like, see what just what they see that is going on in front of their eyes. It was stuff

02:06:24   like that. I can see why they're like, screw this. I'm covering up. Well, and related the whole thing

02:06:29   like was Facebook listening into conversations and using that to drop ads in which we don't think

02:06:34   they were but right. But it's not implausible. Like I fully believe if Facebook thought they

02:06:38   could get away with it, they would do that. Right. And you know, like I've pointed out several times,

02:06:42   the microphone doesn't have an indicator light. So I kind of hope, I almost think someone moved

02:06:49   to Europe, like the GDPR stuff is finally starting to hit over there and actually have an effect,

02:06:53   the privacy regulations they have. I don't think we're going to have anything here,

02:06:57   but I do have a feeling, I don't know, maybe the optimist in me that, you know, there's kind of

02:07:02   the potential for generational shift. I'm okay giving away some of my privacy. Like I go to

02:07:07   Disney World, I get the magic band, they track me and my kids and everything we do. And in that

02:07:11   context, that isolated context for whatever reason, I've made the informed decision. They're

02:07:16   not hiding what they're doing there. Within my computing, I use all Apple everything because

02:07:22   when they went all in on privacy, which was only what, like within the last five years that they

02:07:28   started really, really putting that into place, knowing that I had a nice safe place to go where

02:07:32   my privacy was respected, I'll pay extra money for that. And that's my choice. But the average

02:07:37   person doesn't, you know, it's just a markets thing and they don't understand necessarily.

02:07:43   Although I think the survey data is starting to show people kind of understand more and

02:07:46   they're not okay with it.

02:07:47   Yeah, I would say Apple's. It's a big, slow ship, but they started steering in the direction

02:07:55   of privacy more, I would say about five years is when they went public with it as something

02:07:59   that they touted. But like one of my favorite stories I got from from somebody at Apple

02:08:04   was on the creation of iMessage was when they had the idea for iMessage and that they had

02:08:11   the idea that we could do this end-to-end encrypted thing or we could just do our own

02:08:18   messaging service and sort of usurp SMS when you're communicating iPhone to iPhone. They

02:08:28   clearly had it in mind, Apple device to Apple device.

02:08:32   One of the dictums that came down from the very top, I guess, yeah, because when iMessage

02:08:37   came out, Steve Jobs was still there. But from Steve Jobs down, it came from whatever

02:08:43   we do, engineer this such that we don't have the messages. We don't want them. We don't

02:08:50   have them in any form that's readable. It was never an afterthought. It was just a notion

02:08:59   with no code or diagram, but let's, you know, one of the top level bullet points of iMessage

02:09:04   from the beginning was let's engineer this from the ground up where we never have the

02:09:08   plain text of these messages ever. And for the reason of we don't want them, we simply

02:09:15   don't want it. There's nothing good can come of us having it. So let's engineer it that

02:09:19   way.

02:09:20   John "Slick" Baum: And if you look back at when they just are hiring history for people

02:09:25   on some of the security and privacy team,

02:09:27   you can kind of start seeing when people

02:09:29   who were really well kind of respected

02:09:32   and cared about that stuff started going in as well.

02:09:35   When was iMessage?

02:09:37   When did that first get, was it with iPhone one?

02:09:39   No, it was later. - No, no, it was later.

02:09:41   I'm gonna say like 2009 was when it was announced,

02:09:44   famously with, oh, maybe I'm conflating it with FaceTime.

02:09:48   I don't know.

02:09:49   I'm gonna guess 2009, doesn't matter.

02:09:52   - Yeah.

02:09:53   - Yeah, I mean, it takes a long time,

02:09:54   but it's so embedded into their culture now.

02:09:57   - If it had happened in the '80s,

02:09:58   I could tell you exactly what year it was.

02:10:00   (laughing)

02:10:02   But yeah, but that's been, you know,

02:10:05   but again, that sort of thing that I've been talking about

02:10:07   where they've been conscious for a while

02:10:11   of let's not collect anything we don't wanna collect

02:10:15   because bad things can happen.

02:10:17   - You know, having covered data security,

02:10:20   like that was, when I used to work at Gartner,

02:10:22   like over a decade ago, that was the part of it

02:10:24   that I covered and one of the top recommendations is

02:10:27   like don't have data that's gonna create a liability.

02:10:30   - All right, here we go, I got the Wikipedia history.

02:10:32   iMessage was announced by Scott Forstall

02:10:34   at the WWDC 2011 keynote, June 6th, 2011.

02:10:38   - Yeah. - So there we go, 2011.

02:10:40   Yeah, exactly, what were you, I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

02:10:46   - No, no, I was saying like way back

02:10:47   when we were advising companies, don't keep data

02:10:50   if you don't want that liability,

02:10:51   but in particular it's on the marketing side

02:10:54   or anybody in the advertising base

02:10:56   has just slurped up that stuff forever.

02:10:59   And sometimes there's interesting things

02:11:01   that kind of bite you in the butt.

02:11:02   There was, God, was it Dropbox, I think,

02:11:06   had to do a disclosure related to GDPR.

02:11:09   Like they weren't tracking the data,

02:11:12   but what happened was there was one part of their system

02:11:17   that was saving a log file down

02:11:18   that people didn't even know was being saved down

02:11:20   to that system. And I could be totally wrong if it was Dropbox or Twitter. I mean, it was just one

02:11:27   of the big kind of consumer names and they fully disclosed it, closed it down. And a bunch of

02:11:31   people started screaming their heads off and it was like, no, this was a legitimate technical

02:11:35   error. Like somebody didn't turn off this one log thing. And it was just sitting there in a secure

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02:14:22   All right, we're getting towards the end right here, Rich.

02:14:27   There's this key chain stealer story,

02:14:29   which I can't let go by without talking about.

02:14:33   What the hell happened with this?

02:14:35   This seems like a nightmare.

02:14:38   - Yeah, again, so this is full on,

02:14:42   like an overlap of, I don't know,

02:14:44   I'm not gonna say stunt hacking in this one.

02:14:47   So a younger researcher released a video,

02:14:50   had a way to get into the key chain

02:14:52   and steal all the passwords on an entire system,

02:14:54   so not just the current user.

02:14:56   and built a tool to go ahead and do that.

02:14:59   The functionality of the tool,

02:15:00   like Patrick Wardle we were talking about earlier,

02:15:02   the kid sent him the code,

02:15:04   he validated that the whole thing worked,

02:15:05   put a video out there and said he wasn't going

02:15:07   to release any more information

02:15:08   because Apple doesn't have a bug bounty program.

02:15:10   And this is like- - For the Mac.

02:15:11   They don't have a bug bounty program for Mac.

02:15:13   - Yeah, for the Mac.

02:15:14   And even for iOS, it's limited.

02:15:15   - Right, you have to- - And so this is like, yeah.

02:15:18   - It's like invite only.

02:15:19   - Invite only, and so this is like a full-on firestorm

02:15:23   of like disclosure and was it real, was it not real?

02:15:28   So I sent you a link, Dan Gooden did an article

02:15:31   over at Ars Technica, which is really good that,

02:15:33   well, yeah, it was just, you had to have some pretty deep

02:15:35   access onto the system to make this work anyway.

02:15:38   So you would, it is the kind of thing you would put

02:15:40   into malware if you were writing malware,

02:15:42   but you gotta get that malware to run in the first place

02:15:44   to pull those out.

02:15:45   And that doesn't work under certain conditions.

02:15:47   It only had access to certain, not the iCloud key chain,

02:15:50   but the local key chain.

02:15:52   kind of a thing.

02:15:53   So the issues for me that I thought were fascinating.

02:15:58   One is, I get it.

02:15:59   It's your vulnerability.

02:16:01   It's not really a vulnerability.

02:16:02   It's your exploit.

02:16:04   And you discovered it.

02:16:05   And as a security researcher, it is your right

02:16:08   to do with it what you want.

02:16:10   But what's the public good here?

02:16:13   Releasing a video and saying this is possible

02:16:15   and then saying you're not going to disclose stuff

02:16:18   unless you get paid.

02:16:19   You know what?

02:16:20   Take it.

02:16:21   go sell it to Saudi Arabia or something,

02:16:24   or the US government, preferably, or whatever.

02:16:26   If you want to make money off of it,

02:16:28   if Apple doesn't have that.

02:16:29   Or release the information responsibly to Apple,

02:16:33   like notify Apple, let them clean up.

02:16:35   Apple used to be kind of dicks about that,

02:16:37   now they're pretty good,

02:16:38   or much better than they used to be.

02:16:40   I've heard much more positive things about,

02:16:43   really, really positive things in many cases

02:16:45   about researcher relationships.

02:16:47   But releasing the video and creating the hype

02:16:50   and doing it that way, I don't know,

02:16:52   it's just like not, whatever.

02:16:54   - In his defense, I mean it's not really a defense,

02:16:57   but you know, he is 18, so maybe it's the folly of youth.

02:17:02   - Yeah, it's true, and some of that's a culture

02:17:06   on the security side, particularly the research exploit side

02:17:11   where you have to build up your reputation

02:17:13   by kind of releasing stuff in public,

02:17:15   and then you get the better, to be blunt,

02:17:17   the better job opportunities and stuff in some cases.

02:17:19   It's a weird, it's like actors, kind of a meritocracy.

02:17:23   It's a meritocracy, but it's not at the same time.

02:17:25   - It puts Apple in a weird spot though,

02:17:27   because it's like, you know, it certainly,

02:17:29   I'm sure it caught the attention of Apple's security team

02:17:31   and the keychain team, and they would like to have some,

02:17:35   they'd like to see the code and fix it.

02:17:38   I don't know that they have enough to go on to fix it.

02:17:41   So here's this thing that is,

02:17:44   and Patrick Wardle has a good reputation,

02:17:47   and was a former NSA consultant or whatever he did.

02:17:52   He used to work with the NSA

02:17:53   and certainly is highly reputable and vouched for it.

02:17:57   Had access to the code and said yes, does what he says.

02:18:00   So it's out there, but Apple has no way to fix it

02:18:05   other than independently finding the bug that he was using.

02:18:10   And from what he showed, it seems very difficult.

02:18:15   proof of concept video doesn't really show you the how at all. It just shows you that it works.

02:18:19   Yeah. And I mean, Apple can likely, you know, they've got smart people, there's enough details

02:18:26   in the blog post. And even if you, if you look at the updated posts, he's good. You know,

02:18:30   he even says, quote, this is not a security bug in OS 10. Everything works as designed.

02:18:34   This is post exploitation technique. And so, and I don't understand what that means. What does that

02:18:41   - Yeah, so for compromising a system like this,

02:18:44   there's a couple of things you need to do.

02:18:46   First thing is you need to find that open door.

02:18:48   So that's the vulnerability.

02:18:49   So somebody has a crappy lock on their door,

02:18:51   the window lock doesn't work.

02:18:53   And that's the thing that you can use

02:18:55   to get into the system.

02:18:57   Sometimes it's tricking the user to install something

02:19:00   with privileges.

02:19:01   I mean, that's the way all that targeted phishing stuff

02:19:03   works.

02:19:04   Sometimes it's what we call drive by.

02:19:07   If you get like a drive by browser exploit,

02:19:09   means you hit a website and it exploits you.

02:19:12   It's harder today, we used to have a lot of those.

02:19:14   Or there's some other kind of virus

02:19:17   or something that could be transmitted through email,

02:19:20   whatever.

02:19:21   There's a variety of techniques.

02:19:22   So you got to get your toes, your fingers,

02:19:25   into that system with that initial exploit.

02:19:27   Once you get that exploit, or you

02:19:29   have to have the vulnerability, then

02:19:31   you have to be able to exploit that.

02:19:33   And so if you think about system integrity protection and ASLR

02:19:37   and a variety of--

02:19:39   and kernel ASLR, all those things

02:19:41   that you see announced at WWDC or in those security papers,

02:19:45   that's all to reduce if that vulnerability is exploitable.

02:19:50   So on iOS, all the compartmentalization

02:19:52   is, even if there's a malicious app,

02:19:54   it doesn't have access to much.

02:19:55   It's kind of stuck in its own little sandbox.

02:19:57   So it shouldn't be able to affect other apps.

02:19:59   So you've got the vulnerability.

02:20:01   Then you have to be able to exploit the vulnerability.

02:20:03   And then you have post-exploitation.

02:20:06   And that depends on what you're doing. So one of the things you likely want to do is escalate your

02:20:10   privileges to get up to like administrator or root level. And then there's all sorts of other stuff

02:20:15   you do. That's where you install the webcam sniffer and microphone sniffer and keyboard

02:20:21   sniffers or Bitcoin miners. That's all post exploitation. Have the vulnerability exploited,

02:20:27   get your footprint, then do the bad stuff. And this is a part of the bad stuff. So this is post

02:20:32   exploitation, which means you already have to have compromised that system for this thing to work.

02:20:37   And it does some things that are bad, but it's not an actual vulnerability on the system. And

02:20:43   Apple does have things to limit post exploitation in various areas of the system. T2 chip, you can't

02:20:53   exploit and nail the bootrom. So, for example, one of the things, think about jailbreaks and

02:21:01   and tethered versus untethered jailbreaks. So a lot of your listeners probably know the tethered

02:21:06   jailbreak, like you got to redo it every time you reboot your phone, because the boot of the system,

02:21:11   the secure boot process kicks out whatever you did. It's like running in memory, the moment you

02:21:16   power down and power back up, it reboots, it's gone. The T2 chip, for example, on the newer,

02:21:21   I mean, admittedly, not a lot of systems have it, brings those same protections to the Mac.

02:21:25   And there was earlier stuff to help reduce the persistence of what you could do.

02:21:31   So that's kind of that whole chain of stuff. Yeah. Well, and it won't be that long before

02:21:35   I, everything like that has to start slow, like the T2, you know, and it won't, you know,

02:21:41   five, six years from now isn't that long. And then all of a sudden the vast majority of max

02:21:46   inactive use will have a T2, you know, it's just how it works. You got to get started.

02:21:51   It's one of the cool things about Apple is because again, they control both that hardware

02:21:55   and software, there are other cryptographic copro or sorry, um, security coprocessors on the market.

02:22:02   Like you go to AMD and you read through their stuff, or I'm sorry, arm and the arm specs have

02:22:07   that in there. AMD has chips. And in every case it's this secure, you know, it's a system on chip

02:22:12   thing, uh, that's designed specifically and they all have similar functions. Apple's more mature,

02:22:18   but because they have both the hardware and the software, they can do cool things like embed

02:22:23   certificates for software updates. So you can like completely wipe your Mac and start over

02:22:27   using a secure, you know, kind of chain because Apple's actual company certificates embedded.

02:22:32   Trenton Larkin Yeah. Last thing I wanted to talk about,

02:22:36   and it's not really, it's not really, I mean, hopefully it fits for good. But there's that

02:22:40   group FaceTime bug a couple weeks ago. And that was the other thing that people brought up in

02:22:46   response to my, hey, I don't think you need, I really don't think you need a webcam cover.

02:22:51   And they were like, well, what about the group FaceTime bug that just shows bugs can, you know,

02:22:55   if they can, if they're a bug like that can slip by, I don't trust anything.

02:22:58   And I have to say sort of bad timing on Apple's part, like it really was a bad bug.

02:23:07   But I can see how it happened. You know, it was just like a weird, it's like a weird bug in the

02:23:14   flow of answering a phone call, you know, a group FaceTime call, where it was like accepting the

02:23:20   the group FaceTime call before you actually accepted it and left it connected.

02:23:25   Yeah, I mean…

02:23:28   But you can see how that spooks people, right?

02:23:30   Yeah. I mean, it's a full legit spook. Like when I read it, I'm like, "Oh crap,

02:23:37   I think it was an airport because I travel a lot. Do I need to turn my FaceTime off? All right. Well,

02:23:43   somebody calls me on FaceTime other than my wife, then I'll turn FaceTime off."

02:23:46   Right.

02:23:46   And within an hour it was blocked anyway.

02:23:48   Yeah.

02:23:48   I mean, these bugs, even if you're really good at security, they're going to happen sometimes.

02:23:53   Apple does miss stuff like everybody. They're much better than they were 10 years ago,

02:24:00   15 years ago. And some of these bugs, people get all crazy about some of the lock screen bugs that

02:24:08   come up and the lock screen bypasses. Yeah, it's exactly the same sort of thing.

02:24:13   Yeah. You can fuzz against some of these situations and others, it's actually hard to

02:24:18   build a test harness to find all of them. So I don't know the details about how this one slipped

02:24:22   through the cracks. But this to me, this was a good security story. Like it was bad that it

02:24:27   happened. The reporting and the disclosure stuff was messed up. Kids get a bug bounty,

02:24:33   by the way. So that's cool. And we know Apple is going to fix that. I mean, they publicly

02:24:41   apologized for that. And they blocked at the servers like within an hour. Like I had people

02:24:45   still on Twitter, like three hours later, turn off FaceTime, turn off No. And then I'm like,

02:24:50   Why would you turn off FaceTime? And they're like, Well, just in case. Okay. I mean,

02:24:55   have fun with that, guys. Yeah, I don't know. I wonder how many people have turned off FaceTime

02:25:02   and left it off. And in the light of this, it was never more than a group FaceTime bug. And they did,

02:25:10   like you said, I mean, ideally, the family's report would have been somehow escalated and

02:25:17   been seen by the right people. And they would have taken action sooner. But it does seem like they

02:25:23   were able to disable it at the server side as quickly as you could expect them to once it did

02:25:29   escalate. Yeah, and then an individual FaceTime still worked, which was great. Right. So I mean,

02:25:36   there was the escalation, of course, with all of these things. And this ties into the previous

02:25:40   story the whole bug bounty thing comes up and I will say like I never thought Apple had to do a

02:25:44   bug bounty. I think they can be valuable they cannot be valuable depends on how you do it.

02:25:48   I do think though now that Apple's had it out there like if you're going to do it really do it

02:25:54   and then they've got a little bit of a half-ass. I mean Microsoft does a similar thing where there's

02:25:58   very definitive bounties for very high value Windows exploits but ignoring the Mac or whatever

02:26:07   You know, that makes it a little tougher story for them

02:26:11   to kind of justify that.

02:26:13   - All right, last but not least,

02:26:14   I wanna talk about Amazon buying Eero.

02:26:16   Because Eero, I have to say, is a long time sponsor

02:26:20   of this podcast in particular, but Daring Fireball,

02:26:24   they've sponsored weeks at Daring Fireball as well.

02:26:27   I have Eero, wifi network equipment,

02:26:31   that's what gives me wifi at home.

02:26:35   I'm still using them, I'm going,

02:26:36   I plan to continue using them.

02:26:39   But I have to say, I'm a little disappointed by the news.

02:26:43   And I want to talk about it in an episode

02:26:46   when they're not sponsoring the show.

02:26:48   Yeah, I mean, I'm on Ubiquiti myself because of not privacy

02:26:52   concerns, just because of the nature, because I could.

02:26:55   Yeah, well, Ubiquiti, from what I understand, is higher end.

02:27:00   It takes a little bit more expertise to set up,

02:27:03   maybe a lot more expertise.

02:27:05   It's good stuff.

02:27:06   I've heard nothing but good things about Ubiquiti's Wi-Fi stuff. I like these sort of just plug

02:27:12   it in and forget it aspect of the Eero thing because I'm lazy. And I hear too, you know,

02:27:19   at least till now I do trust them. And it really is the ease of setup makes it really

02:27:25   easy to recommend to friends and family. I mean, again, the Eero is not sponsoring this

02:27:30   episode of the show. But I will say their stuff is really, really easy to set up in

02:27:34   and their app has a really, really good interface

02:27:38   for configuring stuff,

02:27:40   anything that a normal person would wanna configure

02:27:44   on their WiFi.

02:27:45   And I guess the thing that I wrote was that,

02:27:50   look, I liked Eero as an independent company,

02:27:54   just having a WiFi company

02:27:55   that was just doing their own thing.

02:27:57   I kinda knew in the back of my head

02:27:58   that the end result for them

02:28:01   was probably gonna be an acquisition,

02:28:03   and I was sort of hoping it was gonna be Apple

02:28:05   for privacy reasons, and that maybe that would be

02:28:09   Apple's re-entry in the Wi-Fi market.

02:28:11   I could think of worse places than Amazon.

02:28:16   Could've been Facebook.

02:28:17   But the truth is, owning a Wi-Fi base station

02:28:23   gives you everything you would want.

02:28:24   In terms of that stuff that Facebook was doing

02:28:26   with their VPN, in terms of like,

02:28:28   we'd like to know what people are doing

02:28:29   with their network traffic.

02:28:30   Well, if you control the base station,

02:28:32   you could do that.

02:28:34   - Yeah, I had really mixed feelings.

02:28:37   So it was a Euro or Ubiquiti

02:28:39   when I was deciding on my network.

02:28:41   And the main reason I went with Ubiquiti

02:28:43   is 'cause I've got the background

02:28:44   and I like to tinker with that stuff.

02:28:47   I had a different one before that was an Euro competitor

02:28:50   that's kind of tanked, Luma,

02:28:52   'cause I had known some people over at the company

02:28:55   when they started that.

02:28:56   So here's, put the security hat on,

02:29:02   here's a risk assessment.

02:29:04   One is they can't do that without at least notifying you.

02:29:07   Right.

02:29:07   Track all that info.

02:29:08   So you're covered on there or FTC violations

02:29:11   or what's left of the federal government could go after them.

02:29:15   And then they would lock themselves out

02:29:16   of the European market and stuff where you just can't do that.

02:29:20   Two, your cable company or whoever

02:29:23   you get your internet from tracks absolutely everything

02:29:25   anyway, as does your phone company.

02:29:28   Like, that traffic is just there.

02:29:30   I hate it.

02:29:31   I've looked at VPNing and I do use a couple of VPNs

02:29:36   for at times, mostly when I use Facebook,

02:29:41   'cause it's just to fuck with Facebook.

02:29:42   But the, even like I've got gig ethernet,

02:29:47   there's not a gig ethernet VPN supported anywhere

02:29:50   I can get my hands on.

02:29:51   So there's like a sacrifice you've got to do there.

02:29:53   So that data is getting out anyway

02:29:55   and Amazon or whoever could buy it.

02:29:56   So I don't mean to diminish the risk,

02:29:58   but the creep factor is really there.

02:30:00   And just the fact that that was everybody's first response,

02:30:04   like you, when Eero got acquired, it's like,

02:30:07   "Damn it, now Amazon's gonna read all my websites."

02:30:09   - And I have an Echo in the kitchen, you know,

02:30:14   right next to our HomePods.

02:30:16   - Same here.

02:30:18   - I have one, so it's not like I'm anti-put, you know,

02:30:22   and I've got another one in my living room,

02:30:24   which I really probably could disconnect

02:30:26   'cause I don't use it anymore.

02:30:29   but more or less just for controlling lights

02:30:31   and shades verbally.

02:30:33   So I'm not, it's not like I'm opposed

02:30:35   to putting Amazon internet connected devices in my home.

02:30:39   I don't know, but, and like I wrote yesterday,

02:30:44   there was a, I forget who had the story,

02:30:46   but somebody asked Amazon for comment,

02:30:48   do you plan to change the terms of service for Eero?

02:30:51   And they were like, no, we don't at this time.

02:30:55   And I get it, like I even wrote, I get it, I get it.

02:30:58   They're not going to say no.

02:30:59   They're not gonna, the ink isn't even dry on this.

02:31:02   It hasn't even been approved.

02:31:04   It's not a finalized acquisition.

02:31:07   Although I can't imagine why it wouldn't go through,

02:31:10   especially in the Trump administration.

02:31:12   And that's not anti-Trumpism,

02:31:14   that's just general Republicanism as being more amenable

02:31:17   to less likely to pursue,

02:31:25   to look askance at an acquisition for anti-competitive reasons. I mean, I would bet big money that

02:31:33   this will, you know, that Amazon will successfully acquire Eero.

02:31:37   Well, it's like, I mean, it just somehow it's like, I don't know. And again, I don't think

02:31:46   that if you're an existing Euro customer, you have as much to worry about as what does

02:31:49   it mean going forward when there are new devices that come with new terms of service? Like I don't

02:31:55   really, you know, Amazon's not stupid. And I don't think they're evil. I really don't, you know, so

02:32:01   they're not going to do something dumb and, you know, turn your existing heroes into spy spying

02:32:07   devices without telling you. Well, like, I mean, the vast majority of my professional works on

02:32:13   Amazon, with Amazon Web Services stuff and doing assessments, building things and everything else.

02:32:18   I mean, Amazon, you know, it's another big company. I think what this comes down to in a lot of these

02:32:24   privacy related issues, because I mean, that's a big chunk of what we've talked about through

02:32:30   the last couple hours is like, it's just privacy after privacy after privacy. And

02:32:35   it's a really personal thing. You know, it's like, all of our lines are very personal and not

02:32:43   always logical. Like I don't do the webcam stickers, but I won't use an Android phone.

02:32:47   I minimize Google services and Facebook, even though I have to use Google for a ton of work

02:32:53   stuff. And then I'm like, well, the Google, the G Suite stuff, they have privacy because you're

02:32:59   paying for it. It's enterprise versus like, there's just all these lines there. And it's

02:33:02   becoming, you know, it's hard to navigate it. But I think when like with the Euro, you know,

02:33:07   it's something you've come to trust and expect to behave a certain way. And when that it's that

02:33:12   fear that that's going to change. It's just totally legitimate. Well, and the other the flip

02:33:17   side of it, the elephant in the room is the fact that Apple has exited this market, the

02:33:21   consumer Wi-Fi base station market. You've said at least two or three times during the

02:33:26   show that you've gone all in on Apple stuff because you trust them. As a company that

02:33:35   more and more promotes itself as a protector of personal privacy, it just feels like an

02:33:39   an abdication for Apple to exit this market.

02:33:44   I can only presume that there are good business reasons

02:33:50   for it, that they weren't making significant money

02:33:52   with the airport base stations.

02:33:55   If they were, why in the world would they get out of it?

02:33:59   But as a company that wants to promote themselves as,

02:34:02   "Hey, get into our ecosystem and we're gonna protect

02:34:06   your privacy 'cause we have no interest

02:34:08   or financial reason otherwise, boy,

02:34:13   if you don't have a base station, you can trust--

02:34:15   it's all from moot anyway, right?

02:34:17   Your devices, your Mac, and your iPhone, and your iPad

02:34:21   can all be as private as Apple can possibly make them.

02:34:25   And if your Wi-Fi network is transmitting everything

02:34:30   you do to Amazon, it's all for moot.

02:34:34   That is the single most perplexing thing

02:34:37   Apple's product line to me, even over various, we can get all the debates about the Mac books

02:34:42   or the different iPad sizes and our iPod touches still around. I mean, things like that. The most

02:34:48   perplexing to me is if we look at Apple's longer term strategy of TV and HomePod and watches and

02:34:56   phones and iPads and everything else within the home. And as they expand out with HomeKit,

02:35:04   Like, how do they not have the thing that ties all of those together?

02:35:10   Yeah.

02:35:11   I mean, it's like the linchpin of it all. And one of the biggest obstacles of getting

02:35:17   somebody moved up on technology with like friends and family who aren't good at this stuff is

02:35:21   routers. Like I can't just, I can't point them to something and say it just works. I can't kind

02:35:27   it out because of Euro or like the Netgear Orbeez and stuff are much better. But imagine if it had

02:35:33   all the password sharing features that we now have between iOS devices. Like, I mean,

02:35:38   there's just so much I don't, I don't know why it's not there. Yeah, there's a lot that

02:35:42   I could do with a modern, you know, you know, because the airport that they sort of stepped

02:35:48   away from was years old at the time anyway, you know, that it had been years since it

02:35:52   had been significantly updated. And like you said, there's all sorts of stuff they've done

02:35:56   recently, like with the password sharing stuff. You know, that that if man if it was built

02:36:02   into the base station level would be even more convenient. There's all sorts of little

02:36:06   things like that. I don't think they did an airport update in the whole era of, what was

02:36:13   the name of it? It was like a catch all phrase for this.

02:36:16   AC?

02:36:17   No, but what's the integrations between like iPhone and Mac?

02:36:21   Oh, continuity.

02:36:23   Continuity, right. In the era of continuity. I mean, surely there's ways to do things that

02:36:29   that could make continuity even more fluid

02:36:32   and less of a delay,

02:36:34   like when you go to the sharing sheet on iOS

02:36:37   and you wanna open up the current webpage on your Mac,

02:36:40   just if the base station is looking for stuff like that,

02:36:43   I mean, surely they could make it more convenient.

02:36:46   I mean, then the password sharing thing

02:36:47   for the Wi-Fi is so cool.

02:36:49   Every time it doesn't come up very often,

02:36:51   but when it does, I'm like, oh yeah, that's pretty cool.

02:36:54   - Yeah, I've always closed that window

02:36:55   because I'm tapping other stuff 'cause it's so cool.

02:36:57   I forget it's there.

02:36:59   Well, and I mean, like some of the more, you know, just getting devices hooked onto the network.

02:37:05   Or man, I just want my iTunes, Wi-Fi backups to work. Like those don't work on any of my,

02:37:14   I can't get it to work on any iOS devices anymore. And it's probably some networking thing that a

02:37:18   tool like that could, could just deal with that for me. Yeah, it does. You know, whether, you

02:37:23   know, whether they were making a lot of money on it or not, it would, it just seems baffling to me

02:37:27   that they got out of that market. And it's like, I don't know what they you know, what

02:37:30   is Apple's recommendation for Okay, so what should I use for my Wi Fi? What did they what

02:37:35   can Apple say that they stand behind and say, here's what we think you should use instead?

02:37:39   Yeah, I mean, again, it's just astounding. It is the glue for their entire ecosystem

02:37:45   in the home. And they have nothing for it. Yeah. It seems untenable, to be honest, like,

02:37:51   I don't know, you've got all the little birdies. I don't have little birdies anymore. Well,

02:37:54   I don't have any little birdies that have said anything about airport or anything along those

02:37:59   lines. So, you know, if there's something cooking, I have no idea. I hope there is, but

02:38:03   it sure looks like they're just leaving it aside and, and boy, it really could use Apple.

02:38:09   Apple. Are you listening? Cause I really actually, I mean, I'm,

02:38:15   I'm all in on this other stuff now is expensive to set it up, but for everybody,

02:38:19   every place else I am, I'd love to have it. Yeah. All right. Rich mogul. Thank you for being on the

02:38:23   show. Everybody, your long standing website and consultancy has been Cirque Securosis,

02:38:30   sec, you are os is.com. Probably the easiest way to get there, though, it's just Google rich,

02:38:38   mogul, mo, g, u, ll. And you got a new now what's your new you mentioned is at the outset of the

02:38:43   show, you got a new startup you're you're you're working at? Tell me

02:38:46   Jared Ranere: it's it's pretty cool. It's called disrupt ops. So it's cloud operations and security

02:38:51   automation. And basically I was talking before about Amazon Web Services. We built a platform that

02:38:57   can kind of go in and not just find problems with your environment, but automatically remediate

02:39:02   those, integrate with your existing workflows, do things like, "Hey, we found this public S3 bucket.

02:39:07   We'll send a notification to the right person." They don't close it in three days. We shut it down.

02:39:12   So it's like all this really cool, like software defined workflows and automation to help secure

02:39:20   cloud environments and then also like save money. Like, you know, we, hey, you got all this stuff

02:39:25   you're not using. Why don't you let us shut it down? Stuff like that.

02:39:27   Yeah. I just saw somebody, somebody recently who had like a photo sharing thing, had a, uh,

02:39:32   uh, S3 bucket that was public and should not have been public and had guessable names of people who

02:39:39   were fishing all sorts of pictures out of there that they shouldn't have. That's a common one.

02:39:43   Yeah. And the weird thing is, is it's like, and that is in a lot of ways,

02:39:48   my CEO and I fight on that one all the time. I'm like, it's so easy. We shouldn't talk about it.

02:39:51   And he goes, everybody still screws it up. Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why. But

02:39:55   public S3 buckets are a huge one. Yeah. So that's great. So it's disruptops.com.

02:40:01   Yep. Is the name of the website. And your title is VP of product?

02:40:05   Yeah, actually. Oh, aren't you important? No, not really.

02:40:12   It's fun though.

02:40:13   - People can also, and perhaps where people listening

02:40:17   to the show are most familiar with your name

02:40:19   is you're a long-standing contributor to Tidbits

02:40:21   where you write on security related issues, tidbits.com.

02:40:26   And on Twitter, rmogul, and that's with two Ls.

02:40:32   You know, my wife, I told, my wife said,

02:40:35   "Who's on the show?"

02:40:36   And I said, "Somebody knew Rich Mogul."

02:40:38   And she said, she said, that's his real name. And I have to admit, I'd never occurred to me.

02:40:45   All the years I've known you and I've known you at least 10 years. It never really occurred to me

02:40:49   that your name is almost like a comic book character. So I didn't know. I, it never

02:40:54   clicked for me until I was like a junior in college. Cause I'm at a bar. I shit you not.

02:41:00   I'm at a bar and I'm like hitting on a girl and I go, hi, I'm rich. Like I can tell you the name

02:41:06   of the bar. Speaking of memory things, it was the catacombs in Boulder, Colorado,

02:41:11   and I'm at the bar and I'm like, Hey, I'm rich. And she looked at me and she goes, that's nice.

02:41:14   And I turned away and I'm like, Oh, damn it. Why did I not figure that out earlier?

02:41:22   Jeff book, Jeff Bezos, a rich mogul, you the rich mogul.

02:41:29   Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I'm and I look a little like Louis C. K. So I'm in bad company

02:41:34   of these days. Yeah. Keep that on the down low. All right. Thank you, Rich. I appreciate it.

02:41:39   Thanks a lot, John. It was fun.