Smashing Security podcast #348: Hacking for chimp change, and AI chatbot birthday

Industry veterans, chatting about cybersecurity and online privacy.

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
@

 @grahamcluley.com
 / grahamcluley

Smashing Security podcast #348: Hacking for chimp change, and AI chatbot birthday

Who’s more incompetent – the cryptocurrency exchanges or some of the people who hack them? Plus a closer look at the reliability of AI chatbots.

All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault.

Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.

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TranscriptThis transcript was generated automatically, probably contains mistakes, and has not been manually verified.
Carole Theriault

Do you know what though? Friend of the show Anna Brading was over and she asked me that question. I went, "No." And she goes, "Oh my God, you have to." And then she did all of us and there's information about us.

Graham Cluley

Well, it's just like doing a Google search though, isn't it?

Carole Theriault

A lot of information. It knows I does art.

Graham Cluley

It knows I does art? You certainly don't do grammar.

Carole Theriault

It knows I do art.

Unknown

Smashing Security, episode 348, hacking for chimp change and AI chatbot birthday with Carole Theriault and Graham Cluley. Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security episode 348. My name's Graham Cluley.

Carole Theriault

And I'm Carole Theriault.

Graham Cluley

And I'm on a secret mission.

Carole Theriault

Oh.

Graham Cluley

Somewhere in the Middle East.

Carole Theriault

And that's why we don't have a guest because it makes things slightly more difficult when one of us is away from our studios, doesn't it? Because we don't have staff.

Graham Cluley

We don't have staff.

Carole Theriault

It's all us. We don't. Shall we kick this baby off?

Graham Cluley

Sure.

Carole Theriault

First, let's thank this week's wonderful sponsors, Kolide, Panoptica, and Vanta. It's their support that helps us give you this show for free. Now, coming up on today's show, Graham, what do you got?

Graham Cluley

It can only be summed up with two words: cryptocurrency.

Carole Theriault

Ooh, that's a good title. Okay, and mine is chatbot gibberish a go-go. All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security.

Graham Cluley

Now, Chum Chum, should I say Chum Chum or Chums Chums?

Carole Theriault

I like Chum.

Graham Cluley

We've had feedback from the listeners. One of them at least said you should say Chums even when it's just Carole.

Carole Theriault

Yeah, I agree. It's our 348th episode. Some people have been here for more than seven years.

Graham Cluley

Chums, the balmy world of the blockchain, the fabulous fantasy of earning a fortune by investing in non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrency. It has been a wonderful stream, hasn't it? An effluent which has flown past us, feeding us time and time again with content for this podcast.

Carole Theriault

I thought it had been flushed down and gone down the drain.

Graham Cluley

You may have thought that. You may think that, Crow. You may have thought it was just a passing fad or something else that you passed, but it pains me to say that there are still people who are utterly bonkers for all of that. And I'm not the only one in pain. Did you hear about that party which they held a couple of weeks ago for members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club? You remember the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Carole Theriault

Yes, I remember. They've spent— crypto guys on a boat trying to organise a party and then just ran off with all the cash.

Graham Cluley

Well, no, no, no, not quite.

Carole Theriault

That's what I remember.

Graham Cluley

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is basically a club you can join by buying chimpanzee NFTs. So you buy a picture of a chimp wearing a sailor's costume or something like that.

Carole Theriault

As an artist, I take great offense.

Graham Cluley

Right, right. And you're then a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And one of the perks of this trendy club, which has been joined by the likes of Kanye West and Paris Hilton and all those sort of people, one of the perks of being in the club is you get invited to fabulous parties like the one they held in Hong Kong for ApeFest earlier this month. I don't know if you've heard of ApeFest.

Carole Theriault

I know. See, I knew they were about parties. I knew it was about parties.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, yeah. There certainly is a lot of parties. So 2,000 people showed up to this party in Hong Kong.

Carole Theriault

My closest friends. My closest friends.

Graham Cluley

Very exclusive club. And they pretended, you know, they were dancing around in blissful ignorance to the fact that the NFT marketplace had sort of swallowed itself in the last 12 months. And there was this big concert, but now it's been revealed that partygoers who enjoyed the ultraviolet light display at the concert, well, they had to go to hospital because of skin burns.

Carole Theriault

Shut up.

Graham Cluley

The excruciating eye pain that some of them say that they suffered.

Carole Theriault

Oh my God. He got a deal. You know, 2,000 people showed up. Look, what can you— I need an ultraviolet light, nothing flash. What's the bargain basement price you can get?

Graham Cluley

Nothing flash, a lot flash by the sound of things. And so I shouldn't laugh. I mean, this sounds quite unpleasant. So people could be, apparently they've got a condition called welder's eye.

Carole Theriault

Oh yeah, I'm sure. Okay, wow.

Graham Cluley

Sounds painful, doesn't it? Imagine that. Anyway, so that's one of the craziness which has been going on in the last month. But the normal news from the world of crypto is that of course there's been a big crypto theft. And you'll say, not news, Graham. You'll say, Graham, Graham, that's not news. There's always been a crypto theft. And I'm saying, no, no, no.

Carole Theriault

Every single month last year, every week.

Graham Cluley

Yeah. In fact, in fact, there's been at least 4 or so this month. Monero, MEV Bot, CoinSpot, and Poloniex. There's been a series of thefts. Some of them have been attributed to a North Korean hacking gang. I think they're called the Lazarus Group or something like that. Who've been hacking organizations. I'm particularly interested in the Poloniex one. And that's one which I primarily wanted to talk about today. Poloniex, if listeners don't know, is a cryptocurrency exchange. And wouldn't you just know it, they had just a trifling $120 million stolen from them last Friday.

Carole Theriault

Chump change.

Graham Cluley

Chump change. Yeah, exactly. That's what they should call it. Of course, it's not really their money. It's users' money, which they had placed in the exchange. So $120 million worth of cryptocurrency, which was stolen. And the hacker didn't exactly try to hide their tracks. They had a wallet which they offloaded the assets into en masse in exchange for Ethereum and Tron tokens. And the name of that wallet was Poloniex Hacker. So, you know, it's a bit of a clue there, perhaps, that something suspicious was going on. Now, Poloniex, they said, look, we can, we can handle the loss. Don't worry. Don't worry. They say, don't worry about this. Don't worry.

Carole Theriault

We've got so many funds. Yeah, we can cover this.

Graham Cluley

Exactly. We've made so much money out of you cryptocurrency investors.

Carole Theriault

Chump change, guys. Chump change.

Graham Cluley

Chump change. We can, we can, we can handle this. And I guess that's supposed to reassure its customers. The customers think, oh, this is absolutely fine. They can handle losing $120 million. For them, it doesn't seem to matter at all. They're totally comfortable with that. I would actually feel a little bit more comfortable maybe if they'd said, well, this is a problem. But they said, not a problem.

Carole Theriault

Let me give them more money because they don't seem bothered.

Graham Cluley

Yes, exactly. They don't seem bothered. They can handle this. They're obviously skimming off so much at the top. But then the founder of Poloniex, a chap called H.E. Justin Sun, literally he, H.E., tweeted over the weekend what he described as a white hat bounty. Now, of course, we've had bug bounties before to do with cryptocurrency exchanges, but this wasn't a bounty for anyone who could find a security flaw in Poloniex after the hack, but it was something rather more akin to a beg bounty than a bug bounty, because begging for the return of the money. He wrote, "We are offering a 5% white hat bounty to the Poloniex hacker." He said, "Please return the funds to the following wallets," and he gave some wallets. "We give you 7 days to consider this offer before we engage law enforcement."

Carole Theriault

When was this?

Graham Cluley

This was just in the last few days.

Carole Theriault

Yeah, I don't think they're the first people to do this.

Graham Cluley

They're not the first. This has happened before.

Carole Theriault

Yep, there's a precedent.

Graham Cluley

There's been precedent. And sometimes it's actually worked. Sometimes people have actually given the money back. And I think sometimes it may be that the hackers actually think, well, this is far too much of a hassle to turn these tokens, which we've stolen, into real cash without getting caught.

Carole Theriault

Just give me half of it and I'll be fine.

Graham Cluley

Well, in this case, Poloniex are saying, give us our $120 million back. And we'll give you $6 million.

Carole Theriault

Legal tender, no cops, everything above board.

Graham Cluley

Exactly, everything above board. Now, Carole, would you trust them to pay you your— if you, I don't know if you are the Poloniex hacker, but if you are, would you trust them to pay you your $6 million reward afterwards? Or would you say, give us $6 million first and then we'll give you your $120 back? Which order would you do things?

Carole Theriault

Maybe I would start, you give me a dollar.

Graham Cluley

Well, Carole, you're terrible at this because if you think about it, all you have to do, just give them 114 back and they've already, you've already got 6 million of theirs, haven't you?

Carole Theriault

Oh.

Graham Cluley

So you can just, right?

Carole Theriault

Yes. Yeah, but it's illegal.

Graham Cluley

Well, it is illegal. That's just a trifling problem.

Carole Theriault

That's— And once you give them the 114 back, they're not going to swap you for, they're not going to care about the 6 million they're going to give you anyway. So they're going to say, hey, cops. Find them.

Graham Cluley

Well, if you know the vulnerability, if they haven't patched the vulnerability, you might go back and steal some more. So you're right, there's no guarantee that law enforcement might not still be called in, or indeed that the cops decide to investigate you regardless.

Carole Theriault

Tell you what though, if they don't pay the money, it's bad practice, I think. If you're going to say that, I think you should do it.

Graham Cluley

I guess it's a scam you as a crypto, as a hacked cryptocurrency exchange could only pull off once, couldn't you?

Carole Theriault

Yeah, you're gonna have a, you're gonna be blackballed for life and you're also, yeah.

Graham Cluley

It's a sticky pickle though, isn't it? It's a sticky pickle.

Carole Theriault

Ah, it's a very good show.

Graham Cluley

I don't know if this would count as a sticky pickle for your Sticky Pickle podcast, but it's cryptocurrencies which find themselves in this position are in a bit of bother. I think sometimes hackers are too, because on the very same day as the Poloniex hack, someone found a vulnerability with another cryptocurrency thing, which allowed them to mint 6.7 million of Raft's stablecoin known as R. Now there's lots of words in there. There is a thing called a stablecoin, which is like a cryptocurrency coin, but a stablecoin is pegged, for instance, to the US dollar.

Carole Theriault

Mm-hmm.

Graham Cluley

So someone stole $6.7 million worth of this thing called R. That caused the price of R stablecoin to drop from $1 to just a few cents at one point. And the hacker obviously wanted to cash out. So this was the same day as Poloniex. The hacker was trying to cash that out, was converting his stolen millions into Ethereum in order to launder and cash it out. But alas, they had a bug in their code and they accidentally sent over $3 million worth of the stolen cryptocurrency to a null address, making it permanently inaccessible to everyone in the universe. No one can ever touch it ever again. They just, they flushed it down the loo effectively. Now the problem for this hacker was they only had 7 Ethereum left, but because of the way you have to spend Ethereum to fund the actual attack to convert into Ethereum, they actually ended up with a loss. They actually spent more money, round about $8,000 worth, during the course of this hack. So they've ended up, the hacker has ended up with less money than they started with. So they've not only lost all the stuff they've stolen, but they've also got a gap in their own wallet as well. So there you go, folks. Don't steal cryptocurrency. Maybe don't even touch cryptocurrency. Don't go to NFT parties. Do something more profitable and point, you know, something with a bit more point with your life, perhaps. That's my advice.

Carole Theriault

Well, thank you.

Graham Cluley

Hackers can make mistakes just like regular companies can as well.

Carole Theriault

Most of your stories that you enjoy telling the most are when hackers make mistakes.

Graham Cluley

I do, I do. I revel in incompetence. Maybe it's just a way of feeling better about my own life. I think it is. I've got a few stories I could share as well about my current trip. Maybe I will next episode.

Carole Theriault

If you get back.

Graham Cluley

What do you mean if I get back? Carole, what's your story for us this week?

Carole Theriault

So, funny, we are fast approaching ChatGPT's first year, its first birthday.

Graham Cluley

No, is it only one year?

Carole Theriault

In the hands of cool cats, numpties, and everyone in between. Yeah, 12 whole months, Clue. And I was wondering, how are you feeling about these language model chatbots? Do you use them for fun ever?

Graham Cluley

I don't.

Carole Theriault

Do you chatbot yourself? Well, I don't have to chatbot myself, Carole. I could just talk to myself in the mirror. But do you ask about yourself? Do you kind of go, hey, who's Graham Cluley?

Graham Cluley

No. Have you?

Carole Theriault

No.

Graham Cluley

I imagine it just comes back with a Wikipedia entry or something.

Carole Theriault

Do you know what though?

Graham Cluley

What?

Carole Theriault

Friend of the show Anna Breeding was over and she asked me that question. I went, no. And she goes, oh my God, you have to. And then she did all of us. Oh. And there's information about us.

Graham Cluley

Well, it's just like doing a Google search though, isn't it?

Carole Theriault

A lot of information. It knows I does art.

Graham Cluley

It knows I does art. We certainly don't do grammar.

Carole Theriault

It knows I do art.

Graham Cluley

Oh, okay. Right.

Carole Theriault

Anyway, if they were all taken away, all the chatbots out there, would you shed a tear?

Graham Cluley

No.

Carole Theriault

In your personal life? It's not affected you in any way? It's not like Instagram or for you, Twitter or X.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, well, Twitter's not Twitter anymore either, is it? I don't know. I think I can live without an AI chatbot quite easily at the moment.

Carole Theriault

Because it isn't going anywhere. There's a lot of money floating around in the AI chatbot world.

Graham Cluley

Yes.

Carole Theriault

Imagine all the greedy bosses out there dreaming up possibilities of growing their businesses with fewer staff, bigger returns, et cetera, et cetera. Yep. So what is the big problem? If I said chatbots, what's the big deal? When we look back on this in, say, 10 years, what was the big deal when they came out?

Graham Cluley

Well, they talk nonsense. They say things which aren't true. They're not reliable. They're not trustworthy.

Carole Theriault

They cannot be trusted. Exactly. And we've covered that in the show over the year, right? So in August, for example, The Register wrote that the Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness. There's a lot of Cs there of ChatGPT's answers. Another one. The results analysis shows that 52% of ChatGPT's answers are incorrect.

Graham Cluley

Yeah.

Carole Theriault

And 77% are verbose. So that was the team's conclusion.

Graham Cluley

Although if you went on any web forum and asked a question about programming, I mean, most of the answers would be inaccurate.

Carole Theriault

Go to Reddit.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, yeah. I mean, just, you know, but that's the problem, isn't it? The internet is where it's scooping up this stuff and, you know, the internet's full of nonsense.

Carole Theriault

And it's not just ChatGPT. You know, Bing reportedly made several mistakes during Microsoft's public demo of the product. So when Bing was asked, and we may have covered this in the show, see if you remember, what are the pros and cons of the top 3 selling pet vacuums. And it gave a pros and cons list for the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser handheld vacuum. And in the list it wrote, limited suction power and a short cord length of 16 feet. However, of course, the vacuum is cordless and no product descriptions online mentioned its limited suction power.

Graham Cluley

If it's a pet vacuum, you don't want it to have too powerful a suck because otherwise you'll be saying goodbye to your guinea pig.

Carole Theriault

There goes your gerbil.

Graham Cluley

If your gerbil was already stuck somewhere and you needed to suck it out, then you want a powerful suction. I'll leave that to your imagination.

Carole Theriault

Maybe you want a dial. You want a dial to turn it up and down.

Graham Cluley

Yes, good idea.

Carole Theriault

Good idea. So limited suction power. Do these chatbots have a sense of humor? Or maybe it's just a bunch of teens in a warehouse pretending to be a complex language model.

Graham Cluley

Elon Musk, hasn't he launched a chatbot on Twitter? And he says it's the only one with a sense of humor. Unfortunately, I don't know that Elon Musk knows what a proper sense of humor is, so he's possibly not the right judge.

Carole Theriault

Well, I think him launching it is funny. You know, there's the punchline. So enter a company founded by a bunch of ex-Googlers, right, called Vectara. And in a blog post late last week, Simon Hughes, he's an AI researcher and model language engineer at this startup, he announced on the blog that they had launched an open-source hallucination evaluation model, basically a lie detector.

Graham Cluley

Right.

Carole Theriault

And used it to compare hallucination rates across the top services, OpenAI, Cohere, PaLM, and all of that.

Graham Cluley

A hallucination when it comes to AI is when it makes stuff up, is that right?

Carole Theriault

Right, it's who's the biggest liar basically, is basically what he's trying to find out. But they don't want to call it that, they call it hallucinations. Either way, right? It is turning a potentially useful answer into a steaming pile of doggy doo-doo, isn't it?

Graham Cluley

Right.

Carole Theriault

And it might be fine if you're at home going, who is Graham Cluley, right? But if you were to rely on this stuff for healthcare or financial assistance, a mortgage application or business advice, all I can say is, uh-oh.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, no good. Yeah.

Carole Theriault

So in the post, Dr. Hughes laid out the problem, talking about the different types of hallucinations. Basically, the article was pretty hard to read, or the blog post for me at least, right? There's a lot of acronyms and AI is not a world that I'm super au fait with.

Graham Cluley

Did you think of asking an AI to summarize it for you, Carole, in simple language?

Carole Theriault

You see, I would have, but that would have introduced errors to my story, wouldn't it have? So I decided to go the human route, and I was very grateful that New York Times journalist Kade Metz clarified some of the areas for me. So basically, the question is, right, that they want to answer is how often do chatbots hallucinate, aka lie? They say it's impossible to gauge because chatbots can answer any question any number of ways, which is why students absolutely love it. And there's no real way to establish a rate of hallucinations because it's taking everything from the whole wide world of web. Right? So you can't do a BS reading. So Dr. Hughes and his team decided to perform a single straightforward task that could be readily verified: summarize a news article. So the prompt they offered was, you are a chatbot answering questions using data. You must stick to the answers provided solely by the text in the passage provided.

Graham Cluley

Right.

Carole Theriault

You're asked the question, provide a concise summary of the following passage covering the core pieces of information described. And so when calling the API, the passage token was then replaced with the source document, meaning that they should take everything from that bit of text that they've provided them.

Graham Cluley

This is a bit like the advert where they go, "Here comes the science." I'm really impressed, Carole. I'm not—

Carole Theriault

Wasn't that a hair commercial?

Graham Cluley

Have we got lovely, beautiful hair?

Carole Theriault

Because us girls couldn't handle it. That's all we're worried about. Is it shiny? Yay! Even with this super specific prompt, there was considerable license for what I will call hallucinative creativity. I just made that term up. So here's an example, right? So the original passage they provide, this is the shortest ones they had. The plants were found during the search of a warehouse near Ashbourne on Saturday morning. Police said they were in 'an elaborate grow house,' quote unquote. A man in his late 40s was arrested at the scene. So take that stuff, make me summarize this for me. And the PaLM, this is Google's AI effort, right? Chatbot effort. Police have arrested a man in his late 40s after cannabis plants worth an estimated £100,000 were found in a warehouse near Ashbourne. So it inferred the article was about cannabis plants and added the estimated street value, neither of which was in the source text.

Graham Cluley

Yes, yeah, I thought it was cannabis as well, but thinking about it, it could have been a rare orchid or something. Maybe it's someone who's collecting.

Carole Theriault

Sage?

Graham Cluley

Right? What about aubergines? Aubergines?

Carole Theriault

I suppose police wouldn't be involved coming over, "We want, we want your aubergines." No, I suppose not. And these guys were able to try out different chat models against each other to see who performed the best and the worst doing these tests. And the results were OpenAI's tech. So ChatGPT-4 and 3.5 were the best with a 3% hallucination rate. Meta, so that's, you know, or Facebook stuff.

Graham Cluley

Yeah.

Carole Theriault

It's a hallucination rate of 5%. Right. And Google's systems, they're called PaLM and PaLM Chat. They had the highest of them all and they ranged between 12% and 27% hallucination rate.

Graham Cluley

Blimey.

Carole Theriault

So isn't that huge, right? That's for every 10 words uttered, 3 are gibberish. Okay, I'm going to try. Okay, Graham.

Graham Cluley

Okay.

Carole Theriault

You are a witty, generous, kind human with smallish peepholes.

Graham Cluley

Well, okay. I was going to say you started off really well.

Carole Theriault

Well, there's 30% that's untrue.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, but well, well, well. Which ones? Just a little bit personal.

Carole Theriault

The problem is sadly very difficult to solve because, as you pointed out, it uses the entire internet, its learning base. And as we've said more than once in this show, there is a load of crap floating out there. So during the research period, they attempted to use a rival language model, right? So it could check the original language model's summarization and point out errors.

Graham Cluley

Right.

Carole Theriault

Okay. Everyone thought this was genius. Do you think this solved the problem?

Graham Cluley

No, I don't.

Carole Theriault

What do you think happened?

Graham Cluley

I suspect it made things worse in some way, which I haven't yet predicted.

Carole Theriault

It hallucinates too. Of course. Or lies, right? So they compare it to driverless cars saying you can't make driverless cars perfect and never crash. But God, you can try to make them better than human drivers.

Graham Cluley

Right.

Carole Theriault

So I guess the plan here is to make them more reliable than humans. I mean, I know some very unreliable humans. I also know some super reliable ones.

Graham Cluley

Thank you very much.

Carole Theriault

Anyway, watch this space, because as we said earlier, there's a lot of bankroll in these waters and people are not going to give up their AI chatbot dreams easily. Or nightmares.

Graham Cluley

Bloody AI.

Carole Theriault

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Graham Cluley

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Carole Theriault

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Graham Cluley

And welcome back. Can you join us at our favorite part of the show? The part of the show that we like to call Pick of the Week.

Carole Theriault

Pick of the Week. Pick of the Week. Pick of the Week is the part of the show where everyone chooses something they like. Could be a funny story, a book that they've read, a TV show, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app.

Carole Theriault

Better not be.

Graham Cluley

Well, my pick of the week this week is not security-related.

Carole Theriault

Excellent.

Graham Cluley

Possibly slightly privacy-related. Maybe a little bit security-related. Anyway, the thing is this. I don't know if you've noticed, but recently YouTube has started producing some irritating pop-ups. So if you're one of those people who likes to block adverts on YouTube and stop it pestering you and interrupting your videos all the time, you might have been running an ad blocker, which did something about that. And recently, YouTube has started blocking the ad blockers and it pops up a thing.

Carole Theriault

I didn't even know such a thing existed.

Graham Cluley

Oh, well, too late, Carole. Now they don't work. Now they're not working.

Carole Theriault

So you're going to have to pay money.

Graham Cluley

Well, that's the thing. They want you to pay money to access other people's content.

Carole Theriault

It's not cheap either.

Graham Cluley

I don't know how much it is. I've just objected in principle.

Carole Theriault

I know loads of people have this.

Graham Cluley

Yeah.

Carole Theriault

There's friends of the show that have been on the show that they pay every month. That's something like $15 or £15 a month.

Graham Cluley

It's called something — is it called YouTube Red or RedTube? RedTube, I think, is actually a porn site.

Carole Theriault

Yeah, I don't think it's called that. I don't know where you're handing out. No, I think it's just YouTube without ads.

Graham Cluley

Okay. All right. Anyway, the thing is, I don't like YouTube stopping me from blocking its ads, right? But more than that, I don't like the way YouTube tracks what I watch and collects information and then sends me down some rabbit hole of suggesting conspiracy story videos or whatever it may be. I just don't like it doing all that. So I've been looking for alternatives to YouTube. Now, the thing is, YouTube is the Google. Well, it is. It literally is the Google of videos, isn't it? The clue's in who owns YouTube. But it is, it is the search engine for videos, right? So if you're looking for a video, you are going to go to YouTube rather than Vimeo or Dailymotion or one of those other ones. So you can't really go to an alternative one. However, I have found a desktop app for YouTube which cuts out all the ads. Doesn't do any tracking, doesn't give YouTube any information. It allows you to use YouTube much more privately, and it's called FreeTube.

Carole Theriault

And how much information does it get off you in order to do this wonderful job?

Graham Cluley

It says it isn't grabbing anything. It says all your user data is stored locally, is never sent or published to the internet.

Carole Theriault

Did you read the T&Cs?

Graham Cluley

Well, other people wiser than me. It's been around for years. I've said that it's quite legit.

Carole Theriault

Oh, okay.

Graham Cluley

It's open source. So I hope one person at least has looked at the source code. That's the thing with open source, isn't it? There's all, oh, you can all check the source code. Yes, but does anyone ever look at it? But anyway, FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can import your existing subscriptions. You can check out YouTube videos without having to go to YouTube, the site, which is a much more pleasant experience. So FreeTube, links in the show notes, is my pick of the week.

Carole Theriault

But it's illegal.

Graham Cluley

What do you mean?

Carole Theriault

You're basically stealing content, aren't you?

Graham Cluley

Oh, am I?

Carole Theriault

I don't know.

Graham Cluley

Well, I don't know.

Carole Theriault

I think it's arguably, ethically speaking, yeah.

Graham Cluley

Well, then I think YouTube should take action against FreeTube.

Carole Theriault

Agreed.

Graham Cluley

You're getting us into dodgy ethical areas here. I don't know. I don't know. I don't— I'm not a lawyer, Carole.

Carole Theriault

You sound defensive. That's all I'm saying.

Graham Cluley

Carole, what's your pick of the week?

Carole Theriault

Well, this past September, 4 new short films from the celebrated filmmaker Wes Anderson hit Netflix.

Graham Cluley

Oh.

Carole Theriault

Mm-hmm. This is 14 years after he brought Fantastic Mr. Fox to life.

Graham Cluley

Yep.

Carole Theriault

And he is back on Netflix with another Roald Dahl adaptation, or rather 4 of them.

Graham Cluley

Yep.

Carole Theriault

The world premiere of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar aired at the Venice International Film Festival, and Anderson brings along 3 other films: The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison. Have you seen any of them?

Graham Cluley

Oh dear, Carole. I think we might have a disagreement on our hands.

Carole Theriault

Uh-oh.

Graham Cluley

Because I have seen the Henry Sugar version.

Carole Theriault

Uh-huh.

Graham Cluley

Let's put it this way: I liked it about as much as Dave Bittner enjoyed Licorice Pizza.

Carole Theriault

Oh my God! Really?

Graham Cluley

See, I remember the Henry Sugar story from when I was a kid.

Carole Theriault

So do I!

Graham Cluley

I had the book. I looked at all the short stories. Loved it. I loved that.

Carole Theriault

Yeah.

Graham Cluley

Loved all that. And then I thought, oh, it popped up on Netflix. And I watched it and I thought, God, this is irritating. Didn't like the style of it at all. Didn't enjoy it. Too clever clever for its own good, I thought.

Carole Theriault

Well, okay. Well, I didn't even get to talk about it yet. But Graham's given his shake of his head. I thought it was brilliant. So apparently, Anderson was thinking about adapting The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar for more than two decades. But there was one problem. He struggled with how to tell the story without using Dahl's magical words.

Graham Cluley

Tell me about it. He did struggle. Yeah. Sorry. Shh.

Carole Theriault

And he came up with a fabulous plan. And that was to recite Dahl's exact words directly to the audience while acting them out behind them, like set pieces cycling in and out. Very Wes Anderson, as though in a stage play. And are you a fan of Wes Anderson's work generally?

Graham Cluley

I've liked some of his films, yeah.

Carole Theriault

Ah, okay. Well, I'm much more of a diehard because also style-wise, wow, wow, right?

Graham Cluley

Well, yeah, they look amazing. It does look amazing. And Wes Anderson movies always look amazing. Yes. And they're quirky.

Carole Theriault

And that's kind of important to me in a thing that you're watching.

Graham Cluley

Yes.

Carole Theriault

Also, there are extremely long shots where an actor of the name, Ralph Fiennes or Benedict Cumberbatch or Richard Ayoade in it, or Ben Kingsley. So, you know, those little people.

Graham Cluley

Sir Ben Kingsley.

Carole Theriault

Sir Ben Kingsley.

Graham Cluley

He insists on being called Sir Ben Kingsley.

Carole Theriault

Well, I would too, if you know.

Graham Cluley

He's very insistent on it.

Carole Theriault

Wait till I get my— You know, My Ladyship, or what is it? I don't even know what it is. So, you know, at some points, there's 5-minute cuts, right? Where the actor is just there on screen. There's nowhere, there's no respite. If they trip on their words, they got to start the whole scene again. And it's kind of marvelous to watch that. It's kind of acting at its highest form because you see that they have to actually work for what they're doing. They can't just call cut every single second. So those of you out there with a Netflix subscription or access to Netflix and a love for Wes Anderson and his genius, Graham, you could look out for these 4 films. Come on, The Rat Catcher is just horrific to watch. It's incredible.

Graham Cluley

I don't, I don't know if I could try another one after watching the Henry Sugar one. I don't know.

Carole Theriault

I'm talking to you. I'm talking to my chums.

Graham Cluley

Okay, sorry about that.

Carole Theriault

I'm talking to my chums. So, chums, it's my pick of the week. It's the Wes Anderson films, 4 of them, starting with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Find them on Netflix, and that is my pick of the week and boo-boo to you, Graham.

Graham Cluley

Well, that just about wraps up the show for this week. You can follow us on Twitter @SmashingSecurity, no G, Twitter doesn't allow us to have a G. We also have a Mastodon account. And to make sure you never miss another episode, follow Smashing Security in your favorite podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.

Carole Theriault

And thank you, thank you, thank you to our episode sponsors, Panoptica, Fanta, and Kolide. And of course, to our wonderful patrons. Patreon community. It's thanks to them all that this show is free. For episode show notes, sponsorship info, guest list, and the entire back catalog of more than 347 episodes, check out smashingsecurity.com.

Graham Cluley

Until next time, cheerio. Bye-bye.

Carole Theriault

Bye-bye.

Graham Cluley

Yeah, I'm sorry, maybe I'm just a grump. Maybe I'm just— What?

Carole Theriault

No, no, no. Come, come, come, come, come.

Graham Cluley

It's possible.

Carole Theriault

You rarely complain about it.

Graham Cluley

I know, I'm normally just— I just— I'm just not— I'm just—

Carole Theriault

You're so cheery. Bright side of life. That's you.

Hosts:

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Carole Theriault:

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Thanks:

Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and hosts the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on TikTok, LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

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