Today we go over some evil tech schemes from 2022 and give thanks that most of them fell apart, as all evil things eventually do.

• Yuval Noah Harari warns the next generation that evil organizations could use biometrics to monitor our minds - for years I've called this the Soviet's greatest dream.
• In very related news, Microsoft tried to turn kids into QR codes that require daily validation. They dangled fear in front of people in order to gain their trust - something I've termed Fear as a Service.
• Airyx is/was an attempt to create an operating system that looked and acted like MacOS, but without all the bloat and paranoia. (Sort of like ReactOS did for Windows!)
• The excellent Jeff Johnson explains how Apple is just living off its brand reputation, and Apple is no longer what it was. I concur and people need to know this. He also mentioned that Steve Jobs was NOT an engineer, and instead was an advocate for the USER, and they no longer have that.
• The IRS was duped into giving a company $86 MILLION for a facial verification technology. LUCKILY since they're in the public eye, people caught on to this and shot it down. Two questions remain: When can people shoot down other bad ideas in the tech industry from less visible organizations, and did the American Taxpayers get that $86M back?
• Almost every Big Tech company is an evil monopoly in its own subsector. GoFundMe was caught REDISTRIBUTING funds it raised rather than simply refunding them to users. Luckily this too was a high-visibility case, so they didn't get away with it.
• Finally, we read some fan-mail where one of my clients was almost duped into the Fake Rental WiFi Scandal. I swooped in just in time, but how many millions of others out there were hit by it?

Find these concepts and more in the preview edition of my forthcoming book, now available at thecomputerexorcist.com !

Tonight on CEP! It's a New Year's Special Edition TaS Episode!

• Rather than the usual Foghorn Leghorn, I told all the scammers today I was Eddie Munster. Hilarity ensues, for us.
• I made the first (Medicare) scammer sigh right off the bat.
• The next one, a paypal impostor, says i can call him James. So i call him anything but. He tried telling me that "hack-kers from Michigan" took my bitcoins using "micro viruses", and other wild fake tech terms to dazzle me. He said they tried to get into my "serwer" so i said "What? They got into my Star Wars?" My personal favorite is the part where I describe the Firefox icon on my screen. When he tells me to download his evil UltraViewer software, I take him on an ADD-fueled wild ride.
• The next two are car insurance/warranty scammers who asked what car I drove, so I told them i drove some classics.
• The next one is a cable company scammer calling herself Lydia, so i call her Medea. She offers me a fake discount, so I whip out the calculator and got her so confused, that she agreed to apply the discount twice.
• Saving the best for last, everybody's favorite scambaiter returns! Karl Mailchimp created another persona, a pierogi farmer named Ross Pierogi. The scammer alleges that someone stole his credit card, so he plays along with that on-the-fly, ad-libbing, creative genius we've come to expect. Wait til you get to the part where the guy tries to spell "help desk host" to him.

As always, please warn your friends about phone scams by sharing this episode! Visit becomeanexorcist.com to join the good fight.

Tonight on CEP! It's a year-end roundup of article headlines!

• WSJ decided to allow Claude AI to run its office vending machine. Chaos ensued. They must not have read the article where Claude's own creators had the same results.
• Accounting firms buying virtual office buildings in the Metaverse... a place where people grope each other.
• Robot vacuums receive update attacks that cause them to get drunk and bump into your furniture... while toasters from the 1940s keep working.
• Is Ninite really the ONLY tool for safe downloads?
• Michael Dell is thoughtful and charitable... the opposite of the arrogant, reckless technocrats.
• Microsoft ditches Bungie, but keeps Halo. Sony buys Bungie and tightens control over them.

Buy my book and training program at thecomputerexorcist.com and have a prosperous new year!

Tonight on CEP! My special guest is Rochester's own Warren Buff-It! No, he's not the Oracle of Omaha, but he details cars for the stars. We discuss:

• Some of us aren't cut out for corporate, and that's okay!
• Starting a small business, being free to be who you were meant to be, planting seeds, and leaving a legacy.
• Chasing dollars versus being your passion
• Preserving your reputation
• Tons of menus but nobody can figure out the heated seats or radios
• Squeezing the balloon
• CarBravo, GM's surprisingly good answer to Carvana
• New car screens as the latest way to over-stimulate and control
• The thankful demise of in-dash app stores that bring you to Dunkin Donuts
• Captive audience vs Taking care of people
• Country songs about self-driving trucks
• How Bluetooth car locks can be easily hacked - and how one journalist took a potshot at Tesla
• Cloud-controlled cars, and the unsurprising news that GM user accounts were hacked
• The gorgeous Mercedes EQXX goes 626 miles on a single charge, with juice to spare! Where did they go wrong with the production model?
• BMW's IDrive 8 - how it took everything from version 7 and threw it out the window, proving yet again that most software gets worse with each new version.
• And finally, some of the coolest cars Warren has detailed over the years.

Help raise awareness for cloud-controlled cars! Tell your friends about the show!

Tonight on CEP! Another Torment-a-Scammer Medley!

• One scammer noticed my number and hung up immediately. Another hung up when she heard Foghorn. I have a feeling they're on to me and have me flagged in the Secret Scammer Database.
• Apple impostor calls me up and says I have a problem with Apple Pay... It was a CLASSIC support scam where they told me to download "security softwares", which is actually a fully legal remote support tool that allows them to take over a victim's PC. I took them for a wild ride. "You want me to search for some tigers? I found some beautiful tigers!"
• One scammer made the mistake of asking me how I control my diabetes...
• The next guy asks me flat out for my social security number, and we have a little circular argument about it.
• A Medicare back pain guy calls and we bond over Walker Texas Ranger.
• The last guy wants my Medicare card number, and my doctor's name. It turned out to be one of the funniest ones yet.
• Finally, Karl Mailchimp returns to torment a Norton impostor! With Karl, you're always in for a good time.

If you want to join the good fight, be sure to sign up for the technician webinar waiting list at becomeanexorcist.com!

Dr. Mike joins us for the ten thousand download celebration!

• The industry is realizing what Marc's been saying for years: Storing your passwords in your browser is an excellent way to hand them to bad guys.
• Microsoft was apparently nostalgic for Y2K: This week's Outlook flaw was a Y2K22 bug that couldn't handle emails dated 2022!
• MS Word spellchecker now attempts to make your writing more woke. Politics aside, why would we let the most incompetent organization ever dictate how we speak?
• Culture peaked somewhere around 2008. Everything else since then has been worse.
• Insecurity and peer pressure lead people to buy iPhones so their text messages show up in green. People are only buying it for this petty reason.
• Apple, Verizon, Microsoft, and others have grown not by merit but by growth schemes.
• Bad guys can hijack people's computers and harness their computing power. Norton saw this and said, "Hey, why don't we do this too!" The inside scoop on the Norton Crypto-mining Scandal.
• How Middletown, OH fell to a ransomware scheme, which implies their IT staff doesn't have Computer Exorcist training.

If you know of any organization that would like to actually be protected from ransomware, send them to TheComputerExorcist.com !

The fascinating insightful Kenley C. Vogt returns to finish up our discussion on computer history and why he wrote a book to teach kids the fundamentals of AI usage.

• How cable companies added up old analog channels to bring you a fast Internet connection
• Multiplexing: How fiber optic companies pass multiple signals through the same piece of glass
• Why PC salesmen are so arrogant (Like economics, the industry is all man-made and arbitrary!)
• How these power-hungry AI data centers will eventually (hopefully) give way to more distributed forms of computing
• Why schools are always behind on technology, adopting it after the students have.
• Why we should learn to do math without a calculator first, before learning to use it.
• Why we should learn to think for ourselves before just diving in to AI.
• How programmers need to STOP and THINK before acting!
• Then finally we discuss his book: "The Adventures of AI and the Little Learners"
• Can AI be my friend? How does AI work? Can I trust AI results? Will AI replace my teacher? How to use AI in the classroom?

Buy his book "The Adventures of AI and the Little Learners" on Amazon!

Tonight on CEP! The fascinating insightful Kenley C. Vogt joins us to talk tech ethics, computer history, and his career as a network engineer:

• How TV repair guys would deliberately fry tubes just to confirm their claim that you needed a new one.
• How TV salespeople would deliberately lower the focus on a TV, just to sell you a pricier model.
• How two 1952 IBM computers played checkers against each other... and learned from their mistakes.
• Self-healing networks, a 1986 AT&T StarLAN running at 1 Megabit!, and an early 90s Nortel network running at 100!
• His experience designing cutting-edge networks for IBM, Steven Spielberg, Kodak, Hawkeye, and a Russian embassy
• Business and computer history: How we got to where we are now.

Stay tuned for next week's episode where Kenley discusses his book, "The Adventures of AI and the Little Learners", available at KenleyCVogt.com