DogHouse 04: World of Breaches

today is Friday August 23rd and you are listening to episode number four of the doghouse podcast from doghouse systems.com this is the dogghouse podcast podcast we'd like to welcome everybody back again this is episode number four and today I have Abby and Lorenzo once again joining me how are you guys doing doing good doing great thanks for having us we have a pretty packed out show this week so rather than too much small talk I think we can just get right into it unless you do want to talk a little bit about the hot weather we had earlier this week I really hope it cools down it was so hot the weather stripping on my car roof came off and I had to reattach it this weekend are you serious we were driving around and my wife looked out her window passenger side and saw the weather stripping hanging down so pulled it off in a parking lot put it in the trunk and went home and reattached it wow no wow that's crazy yeah I think uh what was it 106 on Monday or Tuesday it was brutal it was brutal walking out of here it's cooling off a little bit and it's all good this week we are going to be uh talking about feels like once again more Doom and Gloom but uh it's something that we it brought up uh conversation internally with us and we thought you know let's go ahead and talk about it which is uh unfortunately in this case it's the national public data breach uh that had recently taken uh taken place but uh we have some thoughts to go with it uh some things that hopefully might actually be able to protect uh all of you guys that are listening um so we'll get into that in a little bit and we're also going to be talking about the new expansion the for World of Warcraft the war within um there's a lot of excitement about that it's a lot of folks are really pumped and ready for this uh 10th expansion so um we're going to be diving into that shortly uh along with some other fun games that Abby was able to dig up and uh we'll be able to go through those and then finally we will also be talking uh in regards to a followup to Tiberius is question from last week so we have a little bit of followup on that but uh I'll tell you what Abby if you would go ahead and take us into our first segment yeah our first segment is bark bits which again if you are not aware is our tech industry News segment and like John said we're talking about uh Social Security numbers exposed in the national public data breach so lorenza all right so going through this quickly so we can get to the more fun news no kidding hey uh aak database which contains an estimated 2.7 billion records has been circulating among thread directors for several months in April of 2024 a hacker using the Alias us dood offered to sell the data for $3.5 million earlier this month a thread actor named fenis released a more extensive version of the database for free in the show notes we'll link to reports from Telecom Tech news and also Krebs on security if readers want to follow up and uh follow a deep dive that Krebs actually posted okay so a lot of people are worried about their information being out there so how can I protect myself and my information first I want to say the things that we're about to mention here are things that we have done for ourselves with technology things are in constant change and what works for us today might not be the best thing in the future but for now these things that we're about to discuss have worked well for us uh what I would do is encourage each of you to do your own research as well to find a solution that works best for you um I I'd first like to recommend opening a Credit Karma account they were recently purchased by into it and we're going to provide a link to the signup page Credit Karma is a free service that uh they provide free access to your credit scores from Transunion and Equifax and uh this will allow you to monitor your credit daily for any kind of errors or inconsistencies if you have already taken steps to freeze your credit and let's say you don't have a credit karma account yet you're going to need to temporarily thaw your credit to be able to create that account so speaking of freezing your credit once you have your credit karma account set up it's time to do exactly that which would be freeze your credit so we're going to provide a link to freeze your credit at the three major credit bureaus uh this page has links to set up a freeze as well as links uh to lift unfreeze or Tha your credit so let's say you're purchasing a car or a home in the future they are going to need to run a credit check in order to provide that financing so for them to do that you'll want to thaw your credit which is going to let you choose a specific amount of time that your credit won't be frozen so you may set it up for let's say a day or two to let them go ahead and do that and at that point uh you can either manually set the freeze to come back or uh from the websites you could just have it automatically re-engage at that point yeah that's great info to have and once you've done that and protected your credit it's time to start securing your online identity um two very important Tools in that toolbox are to use a password or pass key manager uh one password's pretty well reviewed and I think personally here we tend to use bit warden for our personal accounts yes um and then to also enable everywhere you have possible two- Factor authentication not via a text message or an email but via an app there is truly an app for that um I think uh some of the popular ones here are aie you can also use Google Authenticator or Microsoft authenticator but it's very important to not store your passwords and your authentication codes with the same service I agree that way if one is compromised that thread actor doesn't have access to everything with that one compromised account and that's a real good point I'm I'm glad you actually brought that up Loreno about uh not just relying on your phone number uh being that method of two-factor authentication because uh there are ways that bad actors out there can get a hold of your sim uh SIM card info basically Sim hijack you and while you're sleeping at night and having no clue they could take over your uh your sim card and essentially uh clear out your bank account if they were to have access to your password for that bank account so yeah exactly same goes for email if you choose to use uh Microsoft or Google's authenticator and they're email provider and you need to reset a password or something that lets you choose to send an email while they have access to both exactly yeah yeah and then and going back to what you said if you were to use something like one password or bit word and the other step we would uh recommend is to take the time to go back to all of the passwords you already have set up and make every single one unique because you definitely don't want to uh be sharing passwords across uh different sites yeah anywhere you've reused a password is somewhere that essentially does not have any security left if either of those Services is uh compromised and also don't add an exclamation point to the end of your password when it's time to change it exactly probably the first thing someone would try if they're just trying to brute force it but uh all that all that's not to alarm you or uh scare you just it's important to know which tools you have at your disposal to make sure that you're online identity and also your personal finances are safe uh so on a not so Doom and Gloom note from us we've heard about some tech announcements this week and I think Lorenzo might have some more information on it definitely so uh this week Asus announced three new Wi-Fi 7 products including a triband Rog Rapture GT gaming router a dual Mound router and a new Wi-Fi 7 USB adapter that USB adapter is interesting because it allows you to upgrade a system that doesn't have Wi-Fi 7 capabilities to Wi-Fi 7 the Rog Rapture gt- be1 19,000 a mouthful of a product name but a cool product nonetheless supports Wi-Fi 7 also known as 802.11b Wi-Fi 6 which is 802.11 ax along with backwards compa compatibility with 2.4 GHz networks as well and it also includes two 10 gbit per second ports that's going to be wired ethernet and 5 2.5 gbit per second ethernet ports it also supports 320 MHz Channel bandwidth on the 6 GHz band which unlocks much higher throughput with all that said what does this mean what is Wi-Fi 7 Wi-Fi 7 is going to allow for wider bands that's that 320 MHz Channel bandwidth partial Channel usage multiple connections across bands and use of three bands simultaneously which basically means that your devices that support Wi-Fi 7 can transfer more data in a shorter amount of time can use multiple channels concurrently in case there's interference or if you live in a college dorm or in an apartment building or just have lots of devices on the network you can make use of multiple bands at the same time to allow you to continue a stable stream without interference or without dropouts um but it's important to know that your router and your device must must both support Wi-Fi 7 in order to take advantage of these things how about from a distance standpoint it seems like as we've gotten faster over time it it still sometimes you go back to the older 2.4 GHz to be able to get that distance so is Wi-Fi 7 going to be similar to Wi-Fi 6 no that's one of the really interesting things about Wi-Fi 7 is Wi-Fi 7 makes use of 2.4 five and 6 GH band simultaneously okay so it can broadcast to the same device across any two of those channels at a time that way if you're walking away from your access point you can still maintain your connection on the 2.4 GHz baned so you have greater range just maybe a slightly lower throughput and your device doesn't need to notify you of that change it all happens uh seamlessly in the background all right so this week in our Tech treats which is our gaming corner of the podcast we're going to be talking about the World of Warcraft the war within expansion and we have Matt joining us again this week to talk more about it how you doing hey guys doing good so the prep patch has been out for a while uh and if you did buy the heroic Edition uh you'll have maybe already even played it yesterday um but still a few things you can do before uh the war within launch um if you have any of the awakened raids uh that you haven't done yet you still want to get through those uh you can take care of those cuz that as as well as the Mythic dungeon season 4 will all be unavailable after Monday uh so if you have any other achievements or titles anything in the Mythic plus season 4 you need to get done with uh take care of that this weekend uh there is also I'm sure you already know a world event um going on for the pre patch uh which is in Dragon blight uh D swallow Marsh or the Searing Gorge uh and you can Farm some um currency there that you'll be able to buy some catch-up gear um if you need to for the expansion and some new features coming uh we're going to have a new race uh or a new Allied race actually uh the earn uh which is kind of like a a beta dwarf uh they they're kind of like the Titan forged dwarfs from um BFA and then there's also the war bands which is something a lot of people are really excited about um you'll have an account-wide Region Bank uh warbound gear that can be transferred through your account um kind of like soulbound uh but you'll actually be able to transfer to your own other characters um as well as there's a nice way to easily transfer currencies cuz I know in the past you've always just had to mail yourself gold or something or other currencies even um but now you'll just be able to do it real quick and easy along with account wide uh reputation gains which is going to save everybody hours and hours of time I count why transmog collections flight paths achievements there just a lot of quality life stuff um the thing I'm probably most excited about is the hero talent trees so for every class uh they have um anywhere from two to four uh new talent trees within your own talent trees that will blend um whatever two you've picked so they have uh and a lot of them are based off of character from warcraft's lore uh like they have the sunfury Mage which if you're an Arcane and a fire Mage it'll blend those two uh kind of like uh kaleas um they have the far Seer Shaman like Drear the orc um for Elemental and restoration Shaman and uh another quality life thing they now have Arachnophobia mode you can turn on that'll change most spider models to crabs if that's something worried about oh perfect that's for me we get a a lot of new players with that that's cool so I think that the war band bank that's going to be pretty interesting as far as how uh basically you can share amongst your other uh your other characters I think people are really going to get into that yeah it's just a really nice way to save a ton of time for people yeah save a lot of grinding for sure mhm all right Matthew I appreciate uh all of that great information I know we're real excited about being able to jump into the game and yeah it's going to be interesting the the new Allied race the thn but from what I understand with that it can also be shared with the horde yeah it'll be like um like the P pandarin was um back uh with missa Pander when that came out uh they are an Allied race though so you will have to unlock them um kind of like the high mountain torren and all the other Allied races so On a related note the instance came back last night oh yeah I so excited uh for Scott um I don't know I think they're he's debating whether to call the reboot episode one or episode 667 uh so you know he had uh kind of put put the uh show on pause retired it a couple years ago but uh with all the exciting things that are happening uh with Chris Metson coming back to Blizzard I think you know first of all that is huge yeah and I think for what he's going to be able to do to the franchise it's going to be uh incredible so lot of excitement there uh they actually flew Scott out last week and he had a great uh sitdown uh interview with Chris and uh we'll provide a uh link to that in case uh any of our listeners uh would like to check that out that already haven't and uh so now you know he's brought it back uh he's got a new co-host Bobby and I could tell the chemistry was great with the two of them last night they did a two-hour show I I think initially he was thinking about doing it monthly um although I'd love to see him you know even if it meant having a shorter uh type of episode I'd love it if he could bring it back weekly but he's a real busy guy as is and uh we'll just have to wait and see but uh again I know a ton of people were really excited so to help help kick off the reboot of the instance we teamed up with them to give away some time cards uh actually 60 of them and uh or no not 60 EXC very generous yes no so we did six 60-day uh time cards and if uh you guys would like a chance to win it head on over to frog pants.com contest and along with the time cards they're also going to be giving away uh a copy of the war with epic Edition and Scott also had a friend at blizzard set him up to give away six 2008 BlizzCon Mount cards which are at this point extremely rare oh yeah um I know I know you've mentioned a few times how you would like to be able to have one of those yeah because you've got yours y that day we were lucky enough to be able to go to BlizzCon that year uh we were in the Kingston booth that year uh teaming up with them and uh yeah so that's a polar bear mount with a murloc sitting at the front with the BlizzCon flag and uh so folks if you have if you're interested go over again frog pants.com contest speaking of which also we're going to have Scott join us on a future podcast and uh we're real excited about that and I know Matthew probably has a ton of questions he'd love to ask scottt in the upcoming episodes we're also going to be giving away some time cards of Our Own and we've also got some other blizzard related goodies so stay tuned On The World of Warcraft note uh steel series and blizzard are releasing a World of Warcraft Edition gaming headset mouse mouse pad and a limited edition key Cap all will be available on steel series and blizzard stores starting September 24th and on another note gamescon 2024 is is underway from the 21st to the 25th and you might be asking yourself what is gamescon it is the world's largest gaming event held in Germany last year they reported that over 320,000 people attended so here are some highlights so far Borderland 4 was announced for a 2025 release Civ 7 has a release date of February 11th 202 5 which will be 8 years after Civ 6 they also announced Indiana Jones and the great circle release date December 9th 2024 for PC and Xbox Marvel Rivals is being released December 6th 2024 uh Dune Awakening for PC has an early 2025 release date and then stalker 2 heart of Chernobyl has a release date of November 20th of this year so Matt of all these uh games that are being announced so far because they'll they'll they may have some more announcements coming up in the upcoming days of this convention I think I already know the answer but what game are you most looking forward to well I I didn't play Borderlands 3 um but the first two I spent hundreds of hours in um and I saw the little teaser for that so I thought that would be pretty cool um I've been see more stuff about Marvel Rivals uh that looks really fun too um again I didn't play OverWatch 2o but I had hundreds of hours in OverWatch and this kind of looks like a Marvel equivalent of that so that looks pretty fun cool that's what they've described it as is an over a Marvel OverWatch too yeah I've seen some of the Early Access gameplay and it it looks really cool all right so for the free games of the week from epic games we have gigantic Rampage Edition it has 4.3 stars on Epic normally $19.99 for the base game uh gigantic Rampage Edition is a premium and definitive release of the original 5v5 multi-player online battle arena hero shooter gigantic choose a unique hero and team up with other players to control objectives it includes a new game model crossplatform play new Heroes and new maps I'm bummed because it's Rampage in all caps and I thought Abby was going to vocalize it throughout scream out Rampage I feel like I'd blow the microphones out and I'm not going to do that the other one is the Kalisto protocol normally 59.99 with 4.2 stars on Epic um survive to escape the horrors of Kalisto using a unique blend of shooting and close quarter combat players will need to combat rapidly evolving creatures while Scavenging to unlock new weapons and gear to outrun the growing threat of Jupiter's dead Moon please note that this game has a mature content rating of 17 plus um humble am I going to have I got to prep myself Humble Bundle has beam dog and owlcat RPG Masters where you can get Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader Pathfinder Wrath of the righteous balers gate 2 enhanced Edition and more the link for that will be in our show notes last week in our pack talk segment which is our kind of tech corner where we help you with your Tech questions we had Tiberius is static issue and this week we're following up with Tiberius he emailed us back and mentioned foot pedals uh saying that it dawned on me that the induced static from the chairat may be traveling through the carpet even though I'm not touching PC equipment sure enough I unplugged my two foot pedals and the issue cleared up 90% one pedal was way worse then the older one which I independently tested uh note that the static issue was occurring when the pedals just sit on the carpet without me even touching them with my foot thank you for all the help I'll follow up once all of the products mentioned in the last episode are in use yeah no that is uh definitely an odd issue um I would say if one of the pedals is way worse um to try to Source a replacement pedal that's more into of the newer one or see if maybe there's a uh a different product out there that could do the same thing um I know that tius also uses a sort of a macro PAD as well uh maybe a second macro pad or or remapping the controls on those foot pedals might be a good solution um other than that maybe try putting an antistatic mat like we Linked In last week's show notes um underneath those foot pedals to just alleviate some of that static buildup yeah I guess the only thing I would wonder is would it potentially uh slip on the mat and maybe that's why he's currently got it on the carpet I I like your idea of if uh he can still Source out the pedals maybe get a replacement because if one's worse than the other getting a replacement set may help fix it um so that may be worth a try yeah no uh in those situations 3M double sided tape it would be my go-to that's a good point no that's a great point I use that to reattach the weather stripping on my car and it is great way to bring it back home I love it yeah that 3M VHB shout out to that product that's a great idea um so that that would kind of give you the best of both worlds keeping it on anti-stat maybe try that first uh and then if not maybe get a replacement set the fact that it helped you know like almost alleviate it get it 90% better is good great and and in a separate note he did mention that as far as his workflow goes having the pedals was very important to them so I'd say go ahead and try those couple of things out and please let us know how that works out for you so I think that wraps us up for this week Matt thanks for joining us on this episode yeah always happy to be here so with all that being said Abby why don't you go ahead and let our fine listeners know how they can get in touch with us of course as always you can email us at podcast dogghouse systems.com you can leave us a voicemail at 24810 4347 or through social media Instagram Facebook X and threads dogghouse systems thank you so much so next week we're going to be talking about AI uh that's going to make for some very interesting conversation I'm sure and uh we're also going to be planning on having Matt and Waldo join us uh to give us or give us their thoughts on the World of War uh warcraft's their new war within expansion and if you have any uh questions in between time that you'd like to hit up with uh like Tech uh tech support type questions leave us an email or a voicemail at uh the places that Abby has already kindly left and uh we hope you guys have a wonderful upcoming weekend and uh we'll be talking to you all next week I really hope one of you plays with the uh crabs I'll play with the Arachnophobia mode on yes [Music] oh