Mike Ritland

speaker
855 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Feb 2025

Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months
No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment
The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025 podcast
One that you don't know.
Exactly. So if you don't know your password, it should be unique per site and as long as hell. And that means you're going to have to use your password manager to autofill that or copy. However you're going to do it, you're going to need the password manager to feed that back and log into the site.
That combined with proper two-factor is going to secure so much when it comes to you being compromised by social engineering and phishing. Okay, that's good to know.
Yeah, yeah. So after that job, I was kind of bored of Wisconsin. And my friend at the time, the one who made the money spamming, he moved out to San Francisco a year earlier. and worked for a company called Longnow. They're the ones doing the 10,000-year clock that a lot of people are associated with. I think Bezos is on there, but Stuart Brand.
Yeah, so it's this idea. I don't think they've built it yet, but still working on it. But the idea is that they're going to put a clock, like an analog clock, in a mountain that stays accurate for 10,000 years. It's really to get people to think really long-term.
Just like who's really – it's hard for people to think more like even like one election out of consequences, right? Yeah. Like four years, ten years. Maybe you think as far as your kids. Okay, cool. Well, how about a thousand years or ten thousand years? Like that just changes how you think about the future and what you do.
what matters, what doesn't, and it's almost like a thinking prompt for people. It's like, nobody does it, start doing it. This was also, I think it was formed shortly after the Y2K bug, which was hilarious because computers started, a lot of the systems at the time were kind of birthed in the 70s, and they had two digits for the year, right? Like the last two. So, you know, 78, 79, you know.
Eventually, what happens when you get to 99 and it rolls over to 00? Is that 1900? Is that 2000? I don't know. Neither did the computers, right? But people were only thinking, you know, a couple decades. That's enough. Somebody's going to rewrite my software. No, we're still using that software today. So that's where the Y2K bug came from.
And it's like, cool, you needed to at least think, you know, that was in your scale. So you can have four digits of space for your ears. That was the entire Y2K bug. But I believe that was kind of around the same time that... Okay, 1,000 years. What about 10,000? It's probably where that came from.
The mountain, I think, is to keep it safe. They have to, like, keeping time for that period of time, like, you can't use any other timekeeping system. Like, you know, atomic clocks and stuff like that aren't accurate over that time span. So you have to account for like orbit variation, shift in the poles of the Earth and all of these other things.
Like they have a whole CAM system that readjusts the calibration of where that clock will be in X years over that span. It's absolutely crazy to like engineer with that in mind. It's like nobody thinks about like orbit variance over time of the Earth or the poles shifting. for the clocks they use. Like, it's just not a factor. But, what if you had to? I think it's really cool. Interesting. Yeah.
So, yeah, my buddy got a job just doing system for them and web development. And it's like, hey, if you want, like, a few weeks on my couch, go for it. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take you up on that. I'm going to use that to just move out there. I had no plan. I'm just like, I brought three students. No plan. No plan. I'm just like, I'm just going to do it and figure it out. Um,
which I guess is a very red team approach too. It's like you can't plan anything. You're just going to move and figure out what's in your bag of tricks as you go and work around the problems. But yeah, I'm like, I'm going to bring three suitcases. I prioritized one of them was like my gaming system. Like a whole suitcase was dedicated to just a computer.
Like, I don't know what I was thinking, but yeah, that was 30% of my luggage when I moved out, stayed out as cash for a bit. Got some random odd jobs doing like audio QA testing and stuff like that just to make it. And eventually got into the game industry doing sysadmin, IT, help desk stuff. And it just kind of grew from there.
And yeah, I stayed there for like, I don't know, 15 years in the game industry. But on the side, being in San Francisco gave me a lot of unique perspectives. So first of all, Stuart Brand is kind of the guy that was running the show over at Long Now. Stuart Brand is one of the original people on the hippie bus with Timothy Leary and all this other stuff.
They're going around the country doing the acid tests and stuff like that. But lots of just divergent thinking coming from that. And that was interesting just to kind of see. I didn't get that in Wisconsin. This is also kind of where the PC revolution came from, that type of right? We're just diversion thinking, what can we do? What mischief can be made? All this stuff.
The maker space, Maker Faire was out there as well. So this is just, this is more like hands-on hardware hacking, not like security hacking, just like hobbyist hacking, like 3D printers. Let's just build some stuff. The kind of stuff you'd find at Burning Man, right? Like the art, where you start mixing all these things together. That opened my eyes to just like different focuses and aesthetics.
There's a really good point to kind of deviate here, something called beam bots. Actually, I'm going to pull up this laptop here to show you a picture because it makes way more sense when you see it.
Yes, you're like, what? So, BeamBots, B-E-A-M. Biology, electronics, aesthetics, mechanics. It's just a kind of a design philosophy around building little robots. So, I just kind of had to show it because, I don't know, you're probably picking up a bit of an insect vibe from this, I would assume, right? Yeah. It does a couple of things. First of all, there's no PCB on here.
It's just freeform soldering. And all of these components, there's nothing extra for the aesthetics. It's all functional. So on the back, you've got a solar panel soaking up energy. This thorax here, that's holding the charge from it. And then these, this is really cool.
Showing 501–520 of 855 · page 26 of 43 ← Previous Next →