TFGL2021 - S4 - Ep 1 - Double Data Leak
Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.
Fay Schofield is on hosting duties and she’s joined by TFGL regular Greg Ashton.
Our special guest is John Fitzgerald. John works on digital evolution at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, working with charities to assess and improve their digital capability. John is also a trustee at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
If you’re a charity listening to this, John would love you to go get a Digital Checkup to help you to assess your organisation’s current digital maturity and how this compares to other organisations of a comparable size. The check up will help you to identify your strengths and the gaps your organisation is facing. Head to digital.checkup.scot to find out more.
Transcript
Fay: Hello and welcome back to the Tech For Good Live Podcast. If you're new here, run now and never. I am joking, of course. Welcome. We're a podcast focused on chatting about using tech to have a positive social impact in the world. If you're a regular listener, thank you. But God help you that you clearly have nothing better to do. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about data leaks. We're going to be talking about the rise of the humble text message donation and a different type of worldwide, a world wide web. Arachnophobes feel free to tune out at that point. Myself included. All of this and more coming right up, but joining me on the merry journey today, we have Greg Ashton. Greg, have you got any phobias?
Greg: Like, everything. Just life in general, pretty much. Spiders, escalators, you know, just the usual.
Fay: [laughs] Why escalators?
Greg: It’s just whenever I go up, I think I'm going to fall down. I believe there is a terminology for that.
Fay: There's a thing that if you get off the escalator and you still feel that you’re moving.
Greg: Not everybody has that apparently. So I have a very vivid imagination, so I can imagine danger every time.
Fay: It would also meet you a great spy maybe if you're like imagining.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. I am constantly watching all the exits and garners never sit with my back to the door.
Fay: [laughs]
Greg: Yeah.
Fay: Never sit too near an escalator. Cool. Um, and me, I'm Fay. I'm going to be your host today and I, myself, am absolutely terrified of our future eight legged overlords, especially as the moment there just seems to be a rise of them. They're gaining traction. I don't know.
Greg: You know what winds me up about that. All the news articles are like, horey spiders. I'm like, what, why do they have to go on about their sex lives like that? They’re just in my house.
Fay: I've seen some big ones that I never quite thought I would see the size of in the UK. A friend of mine said that she saw pink ones, which are apparently like, they've only just hatched. And I was just like, well, that actually makes me feel sick inside. Um, yeah, not a fan, not a fan. So when we get to the last news story, I might not be engaged in that much. But thank God we have a guest with us today. John Fitzgerald. John works on digital evolution at The Scottish For Council Voluntary Organizations, working with charities to assess and improve their digital capability. John is also a trustee at the Joseph Roundtree Charitable Trust. You're a very busy, very busy chap, John. And same question to you. Do you have any phobias?
John: Yes. Unlike Greg, it's not a long list, but I'm very, very scared of needles.
Fay: Ooh.
John: It's not like looking at a needle in general that’s a problem. If it's not going into me, I'm okay with it. But if it's going into an A&E, it's pretty bad.
Fay: Oh God.
John: I managed to stay upright during my COVID jab by looking the other way [laughs].
Fay: Oh, bless you.
John: And thinking very hard about other things.
Fay: Oh bless you. I just, yeah, I can't think of anything worse. Like if it was, you know, getting your COVID job and you've got to face your fear, like if it was like, get your COVID jbb, but have it done by it by a spider, I would've just like,
Greg: [laughs]
John: That could be very efficient. They could be very efficient. They could do so many things at once.
Greg: [laughs]
Fay: They’d be very efficient.
Greg: Maybe they could hold the syringes [laughs]
Fay: Oh God, they'd put them in their fangs. Oh, no. But John, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Um, yeah. Thank you for joining us today. Cool. All right. That's enough from me. Greg, over to you, this week's topic. Stat of the week. Kick us off, what's happening?
Greg: Yeah. So I don't know if anybody heard about the T-Mobile data breach recently. It was a pretty big one. So 53 million people had names, addresses, social security numbers leaked online. I'm not sure if it was solely US details that were leaked, but certainly that was a fairly big portion of what was leaked. But this isn't about that story. It's actually about what can happen with that information. So a group of researchers looked at this issue and found that there were 17 websites that were put in customers' accounts at risk of hijacking after what's known as a SIM swap scam. So to be clear, a SIM swap is where a criminal steals a victim's phone number. They convince the mobile carrier that they need to switch their SIM card to a new one, which they have, obviously, because they've got all their other details. They answer the security question. And they can get everything moved over to their mobile. Why this is an issue is because if you have two factor authentication, so you get a message to your phone, which a lot of providers do for various things now. If they've got your phone, that means that they can then access that two factor authentication So one big player in this is WordPress. So thinking about all those charities with websites built on WordPress and they could have their access removed, other things done to that website through this hack. So, yeah, it's frustrating for those customers because you're looking at a huge potential for risk to people that use things like WordPress and, you know, you would expect more from providers like that.
Fay: This is mad. It's like, I haven't even heard about this, but this just sounds as though it could be like, super, well, not only frustrating, but as you say, for like any charities or anything like that, that are using WordPress, there's so much, there's so much potential to do harm here. Um, yeah. John, have you heard about this story or come across this obviously from your work?
John: Yeah,, it's a funny one because actually one of the really consistent things we do a lot of the time is recommend two factor authentication. Because it is better than nothing. It really enables a higher level of security. And of course, the way that so many people do it is through SMS because it's easy, and doesn't need a different device, you know, you've always got your phone with you these days. And like historically when SIM swaps started, they were focused on people with lots of Bitcoin. So they were going after people that had high value targets and you hear these stories about incredibly rich Bitcoin bros who’d had their SIM hacked and suddenly became penniless overnight. And that felt, you know, well, that's obviously a big deal for them, but it's not something that everybody around the place needs to worry about. And I think, you know, one of the worries here would be even if a charity is not handling a lot of money and the threat of having their systems entirely locked out can really be a big one And I think the fact that lots and lots of personal details are out there means that it lowers the cost of hackers to try this. Cause that's always the challenge is, you're trying to find ways to stay secure, that are expensive enough that hackers won’t go for you. So it's bad news, I think, for charities using these. Maybe it's a chance for people to kind of reflect on how they have secured their systems, if they've done it at all.
Greg: Yeah. I think that's a really good point is, you know, when you look at these things, it can kind of feel a little bit like, well, why should we even bother? But you know, it's better to do something and increase the complexity around people accessing your systems. My friend's dad was the chief of police in Manchester and he always said, you know, a locked door only stops an honest man but you know, he also said that it's all down to opportunity. So if they see an opportunity, they'll take it. So if you make it as difficult as possible, remove those opportunities and you can kind of reduce that risk. But yeah, it blows my mind because I remember the Experian hack a few years ago and they were saying, well, there's no indication that anybody has been harmed by this. And it was like, well, yeah, it's just happened. The information is now on the web. It's just a matter of time, you know, your details could be on one of those lists. It could be a year. It could be two. It could be more. And then someone's like, oh, I'm going to use this one as a fake account now. So yeah, I think companies like T-Mobile and Experian, that have these massive stores need to be held to a higher level of account for this.
John: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think the problem is they often go down the corporate comms route and think well, let's not say anything that might make us liable. So we can see why they do that, but it could be really problematic. I mean the practical thing we often encourage people to do is to look at the have I been pwned dot com website. And have I been pawned.com is pwn for obvious reasons.
Greg: [laughs]
John: To make it hard to say it on a podcast. And that just gives you a flag against if you've got an email address that may have been compromised, you can look in and make that check. Yeah. And I think the obvious one is not having a kind of backup email address and an account that is a personal one or that you're using for everything else But yeah, it's a bit of a constant challenge, but I think as you say, Greg, it's not like you don't need to be Fort Knox, but you do need to be not the biggest target in the room is the way to go.
Greg: Yeah, or the easiest. They always like the easy prey.
Fay: Which apparently is me because I just put my email address into, have I been pwnd dot com and it's like, yes, you have. Seven times. And I'm like, what.
Greg: [laughs]
John: That's pretty good, actually. I’ve seen worse.
Fay: Well, thank you. Thank you for being kind. I'm just like, oh my God. Like, okay so my phone is fine, but my email, apparently, no. I've been targeted seven times. But I am one of these idiots that gets text message where it was like, this is the HMRC. You're owed a tax rebate and I literally started putting it in my details.
Greg: Noooooo.
Fay: I know. I said to my husband, but I was like, oh my God, I’m getting some money back. He was like, why are you putting in your bank details? I was like, so they can make the transfer. Apparently it's people like me that are the easy targets. Nevermind. Um, yeah, it is super. It is really interesting. And it's something that I don't think many people would think about. You know what I mean? It's like, oh yeah, I've got to step two, like two step authentication. Like I'm super secure. Apparently people like me who think that they've got that and we're not super secure. So there you go. But your other stat of the week, this week, Greg is also about a data leak and half. Is that right?
Greg: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So this one's a little bit older, but I wanted to include it because it's quite an interesting story. So there was a hack of the gun trader site, which is kind of like a Gumtree style website for people buying and selling firearms in the UK.
Fay: Woah. Okay.
Greg: And there was over 110,000 entries grabbed from this site and posted online, including mobile phone numbers, email address, geolocation data and lots more, including bycrypt hashed, passwords, whatever they are. It didn't stop there though. A person or persons Then reformatted all that information as a Google earth compatible CSV. So you could install that onto your Google earth and you would be able to see, using the geo location data, the exact location of each of those people the last time they used Guntrader, which is pretty terrifying. Yeah, it's high level doxing and the register spoke to a person or persons who, who claim to do this and they couldn't see anything wrong with what they’d done. They said, ‘if a judge and jury of our peers find us guilty of any offense, We will accept the punishment with good grace and apologize to anyone who can be defined as a victim. However, we don't see what we've done is criminal’. Basically the reason for them doing this, they were angry with the Countryside Alliance for spying and building illegal databases on hunt saboteurs. So it was kind of a tit for tat. So this was a group of people who were against hunting and they were saying that Countryside Alliance was doing the same thing to them. So they've turned the tables. But, yeah, it's, it's pretty terrifying. I read one story about a guy who had used it, the last time he'd used it was at his parents' house and you've got to, you know, you've got to worry that someone may use that information to attack someone I haven't seen any stories that it has happened so far.
Fay: Or not attack them as the case may be, if they’re a gun owner [laughs] Like, I’m not gonna go to that house.
Greg: Yeah. So yeah, this is an example. I certainly do not agree with the Countryside Alliance. Don't agree with hunting. But you know, there's, there's things that you do and things that you don't do, and this feels like one of those things you just don't do.
Fay: Yeah. That’s just weird.
John: Yeah. It is crazy because I think, yeah, I mean the two things I think about is, first of all if you're slightly paranoid gunner anyway, it's going to make you too bad either. You're going to be like, right, you're going to get the barracks up. And the other one, I guess, is, you know, it's going to make people that buy and sell guns want to be more obscure. So this isn't a government gun register, obviously, but it's going to make them say, well, you know, we want ways of conceding our identity, which is obviously problematic. And I think that kind of thing came up. You see things where the police do a sting on these very private encrypted chats that criminals use. And they always have to work out when to do it because when they do it, they'll get a big drag net of people that they've hauled in but at the same time, as soon as they do that, they can't spy there anymore because the criminals move on to somewhere else.
Greg: Yeah. I think previously we talked about following the shooting in the south last month, that the police were talking about doing reviews of people's social media before allowing them a gun licence. And, you know, we kind of talked about that intrusion and privacy. And I said, well, if somebody wants to do something like own a gun, then you've got to sacrifice a bit of privacy. You know, you've got to present to the law and say, I am a safe gun owner and I can prove it. Here's evidence. And part of that I think is opening up your social media to that level of scrutiny, to say that you can be a safe gun owner. You know, in other situations it shouldn't be a blanket access for, for any kind of thing. But if you're applying for a license, you know, and you don't want people going the other way and saying, I don't want anyone having access to any of my information because of that exact reason.
John: Yeah. I don't know if you watch Superstore at all, but it's quite a funny sketch in that it's the show about the big American store and there's a guy there is quite a kind of liberal character and he gets put on the gun counter for a shift and he works out there is this term in the contract that says if you're minding the gun counter, you do have the right to refuse customed to anyone. So he spent an entire shift saying no no no no and it caused all kinds of reactions, but it's funny, one of like you T what stance he kid to, to slow it down?
Fay: I think I could quite, I lived in America for a bit. I don't think I could quite deal with the pressure of having to possibly turn down somebody wanting to come in and buy a gun. So, I mean, Yeah.
Greg: [laughs] Yeah, I'm pretty sure it would not be a sitcom style. Oh no, I can’t?
Fay: [laughs] Those pesky kids are preventing me from buying a gun. Probably not. But yeah, it's just crazy, crazy stuff going on in terms of hacking and mobile phones and everything else. But on the mobile phone note, it seems like this is quite a nice charity news of the week.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah, it's really good news. So the latest Annual Market Review for phone paid services catchy, so really sexy publication, uh, written by the research firm Analysis Mason and published by Phone Paid Services Authority. So, you know, they're really, really interested in the results of this, um, have shown that, uh, UK charity donations by premium rate SMS rose to 65.8 million in the year to the end of March. Up from 40.1 million in the previous 12 months. And it's a record high. It's over 16 million more than the former high, which was 49.6 million. They think that this was kind of pushed by telethons, such as the pandemic inspired Big Night In. The raising of the cap on one-off donations to £40 and organic growth in recurring giving, all contributed to that. So, yeah, it's a really, really good result. I remember years ago, working with Ross for blind children and they were doing some stuff around text messaging and they were finding they were having real good traction, um, doing outdoor kind of fundraising things and rather than getting people to drop stuff in Benz or swipe a card, they were using text message and they saw some really good results. So yeah, it's good to see that this is kind of continuing to pick up.
John: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I saw a seminar kind of trends from another survey. I think it was called the MNR benchmarks and that was comparing the US and the UK and in both territories there had been massive growth in online donations and mobile as well. It's striking that in the US there was a lot more asking, going on and a lot more giving going on, which is a kind of interesting cultural thing. But I think one thing I really liked in the survey I saw was, those charities helping people experiencing poverty or homelessness, state civil, they saw a real boost, which I thought was great. Cause you know, those organizations are helping them, people experiencing, they were the urgent needs. They were getting more income as a result. It's a good example of kind of people go into the need, which is not always what happens in the fundraising world. Yeah.
Fay: It's a really, it's a really interesting one. I actually used to work for MNR when I was out in the states. So it's just having seen the kind of data that they pull in. And just the difference in how US-based charities, as you say, John like use SMS. It's like there's always, well, not always, but there tends to be always like a consistent kind of SMS donation ask. Whereas here it seems to have grown in popularity kind of over the past couple of years, especially through the pandemic. So yeah, so it is good to kind of see how that is growing for your work. John, obviously, um, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organizations, which I realized I totally butchered in the intro. So sorry about that.
John: [laughs] Don’t worry.
Fay: Wanted to get the name fully again. It's kind of, you know, so the work that you're doing with charities there and digital evolution is kind of SMS, something that you actively kind of look at as part of that, or is that a little bit outside the scope of the work that you do?
John: It does come in there. Quite often we end up advising quite small organizations. And I think one of the challenges they often face is they get stuck into kind of dabbling with a few different channels. So rather than sitting back and saying, what are the really important channels for us, they try a bit of everything. And that means they're not really able to invest enough to really see the return. And I think the other thing with any channel like via SMS or email is it's not just about the ask but the experience as well. And I think often organizations get quite focused on there's a particular goal or thing they want to achieve on the pitch for that. And then they might do quite well, or it might be a bit lukewarm, but there's not the kind of thinking onward through the journey about what's going to happen later. So that’s something that we're trying to encourage charities to do is to kind of look at the slightly bigger picture and think about, right, suppose you get 200 more people in contact with your work. It's not just about what they might give you on a given day, but about how they might stay with you for the longer term. And if I may make a little plug, at the end of this month, 28th of, not the 28th, the 29th September, and we've got Leslie Pender from British Red Cross. She's going to be talking about supporter experience. So about that kind of joined up thinking about how you talk to people about what you do and how you involve them and that kind of thing.
Fay: Nice. And yeah, feel free to plug away. Plugs are always, they're always welcome. But, yeah, it's great to see kind of, you know, SMS being used in this way and hopefully more people and hopefully more charities can begin to expand and use it even more as part of their fundraising efforts. Moving, I say moving slightly away from phones, I'm trying to, I'm trying to make pivots. It's not happening that well.
Greg: [laughs]
Fay: Apple makes phones, but yeah, tech news of the week, Greg, what's going on.
Greg: [laughs] You've really fumbled that.
Fay: I did. Sorry.
Greg: I mean, you were almost there. You could see it. You were just brushing it and then you just thought, fuck it.
Fay: I can’t be asked [laughs]
Greg: No. Can’t be asked. I’m just going to gie up.
John: You could make it, I'm sure you could make kind of walled garden kind of segway couldn’t you?
Greg: Yup.
John: Cause that comes up in the digital fundraising world. Like, was it Just Giving, hung up their buckets recently, said their economic model wasn't so good.
Greg: Oh really?
John: I think it was Just Giving or maybe it was Money Giving, but one of the really big platforms that offered the kind of end to end solutions that said it wasn't economic anymore because they were being pushed people on the margin.
Greg: Yeah.
John: Kind of the opposite problem to Apple, I guess, where they've got a humongous margin.
Greg: Yeah. They're the ones doing the pushing [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. So we're on to Apple. And we're starting to see the early signs of the fight on big tech monopolies. So I don't know if anybody has seen an ongoing case between Apple and Epic Games who make Fortnite, which probably will have heard of at some point, which is the mobile game. And Epic were really annoyed because as you may know, or may not, that when you sign up for, when you download an app through the app store and sign up for a subscription on an iPhone, you have to do it through the App Store. Then Apple takes 30% of everything that that company makes. Epic was saying, well, that's bullshit. They shouldn't be allowed to force us to use that payment subscription service. And this has been going on for awhile and the judges sided with Epic and said, that is true. They should allow other apps and other ways to pay for digital services. Apple have kind of got ahead of this actually and started to make some changes. So they're going to provide so com uh, apps that provide content like Netflix, Amazon Kindle, they're going to show links to the website so users can sign up for paid accounts through the websites. So they've already started making concessions. Some people are saying that that is because they can see the writing on the wall. So they're trying to get ahead of it and control what they give it away so that they can kind of head off some more stringent kind of requirements from the government. Yeah, they basically, they kind of said, they did that typical thing of going we lost, but we didn't really lose. So their announcement following the judgment said ‘the court has affirmed what we've known all along. The App Store is not in violation of antitrust law. As the court recognized success is not illegal’. So they've kind of gone, yeah, we lost, but not for antitrust, which really, really makes me laugh.
John: Yeah. It’s a bit he says, she says. I guess the other thing I immediately thought of is, you might get a kind of legal judgment that says have another payment option, but you can guarantee the way the design will be, will not tilt in that direction.
Greg: Yeah.
John: And that's kind of what matters ultimately isn't it is like, it's not whether, and I always think of the example of like, cookies and websites. You have these humongous banners, they're supposed to be giving you rights, but they're almost always designed to like, make give them away.
Greg: Yeah.
John: [laughs] So yeah. It's a kind of slippery slope.
Greg: Yeah. I guarantee there will be dark patterns galore. So they'll just be like, they'll make it as complex as possible for them, for somebody to use a different payment thing. So they'll just go for the easiest one, which will be through the Apple Store.
Fay: And did like, the line in the article though, when it's talking about the trial. So it was basically the trial included a public and often emotional fight between Epic and Apple.
Greg: [laughs[
Fay: I just loved the way that they kind of described that. Yeah. What impact is this kind of going to have Greg, on anyone that's kind of using the Apple App Store or like using Apple Pay? See, that was a nice segue into your joined up next piece.
Greg: [laughs]
Fay: I shouldn't tell people that I'm trying to segue, but yeah. What does the future hold like, you know, with all this kind of in mind?
Greg: Yeah. I don't think the customers, they don't, the users, they don't see much change really. Whether they subscribe through the app store, the only thing will be is if you wanna support the people that you're buying a subscription from all, you'd want to use their own payment thing, but I guess there's going to be, like John said, there's going to be that whole battle now it's to see if these providers can work out a way of making sure that people use that subscription service rather than going through the App Store. And yeah. Interestingly, you mentioned Apple Pay there. So there's new research been released last week by somebody called Pymnts. They’ve basically removed all the vowels. It's really annoying.
Fay: [laughs]
John: I don't think you pronounced that correctly there.
Fay: [laughs]
Greg: [laughs] Pymnts. I am payments dot com.
Fay: P-Y-M-N-T-S. [laughs] Oh, John, how would you say that? It’ll sound better in a scottish accent. Go on, how do you say it?
John: Pymnts.
Fay: Pymnts. There we go.
Greg: Maybe it’s pymnts.
Fay: Pymnts.
Greg: Yeah. And actually it's a PI website. They really like pies, but also payments. Yeah, so they found that only 6% of shoppers with iPhones in the US had used the platform to pay for their in-store purchases at some point in the past year. So, yeah, really showing that, um, it's been around since, I think like 2011 and they've grown from I think 11.6% having an Apple Pay supported device to now nearly I think it's 43.5% of devices support Apple Pay, but only 6% of people are actually using that functionality. And I kind of started a conversation in our Slack channel to see if people used Apple Pay. And, um, a lot of people were kind of saying the same thing only if I forget my card or things like that. So a lot of people kind of using it as a backup, but no one seeing it as a serious, uh, way of paying for things.
John: That's interesting. I use it quite a lot. So mindful of all the kind of, you know, ethical wrinkles or things about, you know, monopoly market share and so on. I just find it really convenient. It's one less thing. You know, these days you've got to remember a face mask, for when you go around and shops. That is one bug bear I’ve got about things like Apple pay. If you've got face mask on, it’s a very complicated process. But like to the point, my wee son, a wee while ago saw a coin on the street and he said, what's that? We’ve not seen very many of them.
Fay: Woah.
Greg: [laughs]
John: So that's not just Apple Pay, but the contactless payment as well. Cause you know, it's just easier. You can tap your card or whatever. So coins are becoming a bit of a rare find. Which is kind of funny.
Fay: It is. It's like, do you remember when checks used to be a thing? Like, when I first moved to the US our landlady was like, okay, I expect a cheque each month.
Greg: An actual cheque?
Fay: An actual cheque. We had to go to the bank and get a checkbook to be able to pay rent. And it was just like, that was just mad.
Greg: But it takes her longer to get the money then.
Fay: Yeah. Yeah, it does. But you know, American, not American thinking. That was just one instance, but like that's just mad to kind of hear it coming back around with coins. Like, if your son John was like, what's that? That's mad.
John: Yeah. I mean, he has been known to say that about things he actually knows about.
Fay: [laughs]
John: Yeah. I started out my career as a fundraiser. One of my jobs was getting cheques from various small trusts. It was actually quite nice. You could feel an envelope with your fingers and work out if there's a cheque in it or not. It was quite a nice feeling.
Greg: [laughs]
John: But then the awkwardness if they did a cheque but made it out wrong. And you had to write back and say, we're really glad you've given us some money, but we need to send another cheque.
Fay: I thought you were going to say, you'd feel the envelope and you could tell how much they’d donated.
John: I wasn't that good a fundraiser [laughs]
Greg: [laughs]
John: That's like ninja-level fundraising skills.
Fay: That's a magic trick in its own right. Right. God. But yeah, it is, it is just mad. Isn't it like how we have all obviously needed to shift, to kind of contactless and just this idea of like money exchanging hands and just, yeah, the thought of where’s that coin been like? It's still, well, anyway, not good. Not good. Cool. All right, John, you have a really nice story for us this week. We normally have like, yeah, for rant or nice of the week, it tends to be a rant most of the time. So it's actually quite refreshing to have a nice story of the week. What's going on? What happened to you that made you smile?
John: Well, I had a problem with my bike. I love my bike. I like riding my bike. I like fixing it occasionally. Sometimes I'm not able to fix it myself. So I had this small mechanical problem and I thought, right, I need this bike fixed. And I went along to a lovely local bike shop here in Edinburgh called Gamma Transport Division. And they were super busy. Like every bike shop is has often got a four month waiting list to fix bikes. They’ve gone nuts during the pandemic. But they said, look, we've got a few minutes. We'll just have a quick look and they fixed it beautifully. So it was a really nice example of, you know, a good local business doing what they do well. Because like supply chains or bikes is crazy as well. Now, like all the parts they've got, I think obviously factories have been closed by the pandemic. Cause they’re made in China. That big ship that got stuck. Apparently one bike company, their entire year stock was in containers on that ship.
Fay: Oh shit.
John: So all their customers are going right. New bikes this year. So, yeah, it was just an example of if you've got those little local businesses, they can just help you out in a jam. And that was great. So I was very happy about that.
Greg: Yeah.I'd heard about the shortages, I didn't realise there was like four month waiting lists. I mean, anybody wanting to open a new business, bike shop guys, that sounds like an area hungry for more bike shops. You've got four months waiting lists, there's more than enough people to go around.
John: Yeah, I know. Yeah. So the bike shop in the high street here, this guy had come in from coop bridge, which for listeners not on the Scottish geography is right the other side of the country. And they said, why have you come all this way? He said, well, my local bike shop says they can't do a puncture or anything for four months.
Fay: Whoa, so he traveled all the way across Scotland to just get his puncture fixed?
John: Yeah. I mean, the thing I was a bit confused about is, there’s probably, I don't know, about 17 bike shops between here and there.
Greg: [laughs]
John: But maybe he had local family or something, but yeah.
Greg: He just really wanted to go to that one bike shop.
Fay: He just wanted to go to Edinburgh. I mean, who doesn't. Edinburgh’s lovely. Yeah. Have you found yourself using your bike more John, like during lockdown and stuff?
John: Yeah, definitely. It's just a nice way to get around. Yeah. When you don’t break it, it works fine. And yeah, like in Edinburgh, like a lot of cities, once you get your head round the nice routes to ride, it's all quite doable by bike.
Greg: So yeah, nice routes to ride. You mean avoid the hills?
John: Um, yeah, there are many kids, net of bruh. I'm not going to lie. And the best bike routes kind of go east west across the city. So you don't have to do too much skewing up and down. But they're all on railway lines, which is kind of funny, like tech example, where there used to be eight different railways going all around the place. And now they're turned into bike paths.
Greg: Oh nice.
John: So I don't know whether that’s progress or not.
Greg: Yeah.
Fay: You’ll probably get there quicker, to be honest.
Greg: If we could change the roads into bike lines instead of the railways that'd be much better.
Fay: It would be much better. It would be much better. I would need to learn how to ride a bike. I'm terrible at riding bikes. I just fall off. I just fall off.
John: You just made me think of a bike related rant, which is Edinburgh had this quite good cycle hire scheme. So, but like the. The bikes in London, very similar to that. They're having to cancel it and take them all away because so many of them are getting nicked.
Greg: Same in Manchester. Good to know it’s not just here [laughs]
John: No. I don't know if it's a rumor, but a company doing hire bikes in Glasgow. Maybe they're like more secure bikes. I don't know. I do know that the Glasgow bikes have the most annoying payment system ever.
Fay: Do they use Apple Pay?
Greg: [laughs]
John: No [laughs] something much more convoluted than that. So it's like that problem of to make that system work. It needs to be easy, but if it's too easy you get everybody nicking them.
Greg: Yeah. I don't know what it is. Like Manchester had the ones where you just, they had a tracker on and you could just leave it anywhere and then they will collect them and put them in areas rather than the bikes down in London, where they were plugged into a stand. And they were supposed to have locks on them unless you paid. But, you know, kids were just like repping the locks off, throwing them in the canals, generally just like taking them places and stealing them and all sorts of stuff. And I was just thinking like, you know, I've been to cities where they have these things, you know, I was in the south of France and you could hire skewers and they're trying to do that in Manchester at the minute. And I was just. Yeah, it will be fine for a trial, but the minute you put them out on the street, they're just going to disappear. And it just, yeah, it really got me thinking about, you know, what is it about certain places where you put them out there and a bunch of people go, right. I'm going to fuck with you now. I just don't know what it is about the Manchester and obviously the Edinburgh mentality where it's just like,fuck you guys.
John: Yeah. I mean, my really altruistic kind of optimistic side, says. If somebody who needs a bike is getting someone a bike, maybe that's okay. But then if the net result is you can't run a bike kind of scheme anymore, that's not cool.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah.
Fay: It is just a bit mad though, and kind of looking at it from the other angle. And you mentioned in scooters Greg just reminded me of this, but there was like, I think it might've been earlier this year, but there was a big campaign for like blind and visually impaired people like blind and visually impaired groups for demanding like an end to kind of, um, scooters across the city, just because people get hit, they’re dangerous. And were kind of calling for like no go zones, um, for like, you know, certain areas of the city to not have scooters allows to kind of go through them just because yeah, they can be dangerous to obviously people who are blind and visually impaired. Yeah, it just made me think of that story. But anyway, I don’t know what our feelings are about scooters, they just looked like a death drop to be completely honest. But then again, maybe that's just me. I'm like, oh no, it's two wheels. It's not safe. Let's not try it.
John: Yeah. You do see them zipping a lot here as well. And they're totally silent or can be very, very quiet so I can see why they’re dangerous. Cause at least to the bike, if somebody is going fast on that, you'll probably hear it.
Fay: And they've got a bell as well. So talking of stuff that's silent and deadly, Greg what's our and finally for today?
Greg: [laughs] So I thought we were going to be talking about farts but we're not. We’re talking about spiders [laughs]
Fay: We’re talking about spiders.
Greg: My dogg's got really bad farts at the minute. It’s literally just constantly.
Fay: Ohhhh.
Greg: Yeah, it's terrible. Anyway, moving on to spiders. So yeah, and finally, this artist has spent eight years and two million arachnids later and has created silk fabric from spider silk. Apparently it has been tried multiple times throughout history. Many people have tried to do this and no one has achieved it. And he's made these little detailed fabrics made from the silk of golden weavers. They did it in a really nice way as well. So clearly the golden orb, weavers were unionised. Because they weren't captured and forced to create this cell. What they would do is they would collect them from the Highlands of Madagascar, harvest their silk and then, and then let them go.
Fay: It's just the first line in the article, tropical female spiders the size of a child's hand. That's it. That is enough to make me not want to read it. And also they can eat their puny male relatives for lunch and produce an extraordinary golden silk.
John: It’s that boring conversation at dinner time. I play a little game with my son. If he's eating his feed slowly, I put my hand across the table and say, it's the hungry spider. And that usually encourages him to eat up.
Fay: I'm not surprised, especially if it's like, oh God, no,
John: I don't know. I don't have to tell a story once, but one of my funniest experiences at an in person residential trading thing. We did a patch, acute chest style thing where people were talking about what was going on in their organization. And one participant decided to illustrate it with a big, massive picture of a web and a spider because it was protected behind her was absolutely massive. And I was standing up at the front. I could see somebody at the back, like having a proper, I want to run under the table. I could barely handle the phobia moment. We went to the persons take this light off. It was really funny. So it's like, a thing to add to the manual is don’t put a massive image of a spider in your PowerPoint.
Greg: Unless you want to freak people out.
Fay: Oh God. I'm like, I've signed up to go to like this weird Harry Potter Forbidden Forest thing in Manchester, in November. Side note. But there’s a part on the website, which is like, if you suffer from arachnophobia, let us know before you go on the tour.
Greg: Ohhhhh.
Fay: Because obviously, I don't have the giant spiders in trees and I'm like, oh my God.
John: Do they give you a brown paper bag?
Fay: Exactly. Possibly. Oh,
Greg: I remember, um, I have family in Australia and we were walking round. We stayed at this kind of nice little town that was on the coast. And there were no streetlights and there was a hotel nearby that had a bar. So we walking back. And as we were walking back, someone went, Ooh. Yeah, we should probably put our lights on actually. And I turned the light on and there was a tree just in front of us and there was all kinds of hell hanging from the branches. And they were like, oh yeah, that's why you need to put your lights on.
Fay: That’s awful, actually awful. Like the only, the only kind of wild when I say wild like, I don't mean like, you know, tiny little, I say tiny but they’re pretty big this year. But like, um, we were traveling around the Us and like, we just like ran over something and my husband was like, oh God, don't look back. And he'd accidentally run over a wild taratula. And it was just like on its back with its legs, like, yeah, no. RIP. Sorry to Mister Tarantula but that tree in Australia is literally going to keep me up tonight. Anyway, that brings us to the end of the podcast. John, thanks for joining us. Where can people find you online? Another opportunity to plug. What do you want to plug?
John: I’m on Twitter on at johnfitzg and I think the thing that's I'd love people to check out is our digital checkup@digital.checkup dot scott, where you can do a free self-assessment work, where you are on the digital learning curve and get some help to help you improve your situation.
Fay: Amazing. Thank you very much. Listeners. What did you think? Sorry, to all the arachnophobes, including myself out there. We'd love to hear your thoughts. So please do feel free to get in touch with us on twitter at tech for good dot live. Or email us at hello at tech for good dot live. We would love it as well if you gave us a nice iTunes review, told your pals about this podcast, um, just quick thanks to Podcast.co for hosting our podcast. And also please don't forget this podcast is completely run by volunteers, you might be able to tell, and we survive on sponsorships and donations right now. Our primary goal is to make sure that every single one of our podcast episodes is accessible and we're trying to do that by getting each episode transcribed. This costs money and we desperately need to make this become a reality. So if you've ever tuned into one of our podcasts or attended one of our events, please do donate to us by visiting our website and clicking the big donate button at the top. Thanks everyone. Bye.