Fakes

0:00Welcome to userFriendly2.0 with host Bill Sittance, Technology Architect. And this is userFriendly2.0, welcome to this week's show. Bill Gretchen, welcome. Hello. Hello there. So, you know, it's weird how fast the year is going by. We're just talking about it. It's our 10th week already. And a lot of interesting things to cover this week. We are going to be talking about fakes. A lot of listener questions have come in about this. And it seems to be a problem that's getting worse. And what this is referring to is hardware devices that look just like and are sometimes sold for a price just like the real thing, but aren't the real thing. I ran into this myself and we'll talk about that a little bit. And some of the problems that this is creating. We're also going to be talking about something else,

1:00a little bit of retro tech today at the end of this segment. Listener questions have come in again. What are all the plugs on the bottom of different video game consoles for? And a lot of these haven't been used. So they're kind of there, but you know, it's a good question. And one that we are going to explore just a little bit. So that will be what we are going to cover this week. And before we do all of that, let's go ahead and see what's in this week's news. All right. Can friction maxing fix your focus? And what is that? I don't know. Gretchen would have fixed your focus. I don't know about mine because I needed to figure out what this even was talking about. To what this is BBC reporting on this. And what they are talking about is the fact that technology is creating a situation where we don't have the attention. Oh, I'm sorry. I was looking at something else. The attention span that we used to. So that being said, yeah.

2:01It is actually causing some problems. And attention span is getting shorter. Critical thinking capabilities weakening emotional intelligence fading. They don't memory getting worse. These are all sound like bad things. And there's still high levels of stress and loneliness. And what's going on here is the fact that we have modern technology, especially with the onset of AI, we don't do a lot of our own research anymore. Everything is done through electronics and that kind of thing when it comes to this stuff. And what friction maxing is is the idea of rebuilding tolerance for inconveniences. And then doing things that might be a little bit old school like reading. That kind of a thing using analog solutions. In my case, where I really ran into this plane and cassette tape somebody had sent me, I really didn't have the patience for trying to figure out where the part of that was really something. I didn't even realize it until later because it's like this is really kind of annoying. I know. And there's something that was very much the normal and nobody cared about,

3:03but that's just an example of this type of thing. And some research has been done to this. And one of the best ways to handle this is taking technology breaks again going old school, things, doing an analog kit. You're going to go for a picnic, bring a sketch pad, bring a book to read, don't bring your phone, don't bring your laptop tablet, you know, that kind of a thing. So it is another part of this that's kind of a footnote. A study just came out that in a lot of schools, high schools, middle schools, that type of thing, instead of books, they're giving the students from books, you know, which is a type of a laptop computer or iPads or whatever. And they're finding that that is affecting things too with critical thinking and all that in schools. It's just not where it once was. So we don't want society to get, you know, stupider, which could very easily happen for lack of a better term, right? But it could very easily happen with these type of things. Is there are a lot of people they're finding that really don't know

4:04how you would go to a library and look something up in an encyclopedia, you know, that's made out of paper or whatever. How do you find a phone number? This is not a new problem when I was originally going to become a school teacher. So I did a small stint with a middle school teacher when I was in college. And she said that the children are having a difficult time. Their attention span has been shortened. And she felt that it was about the same amount of time between a television show, commercial break, television show, commercial break. It was like the kids needed the commercial break. They weren't able to concentrate more than that amount of space. So this was 80s when this lady was telling me this. So this has been building. And building and building. Yeah, it's an ongoing problem.

5:06We're really seeing the end of the other end of it now. One of the things is you look at school schools have a budget and it actually costs less to use electronics. Then to buy books every year and the other things that would be related to that. So, you know, from that standpoint, it does solve some problems. But like what you're talking about with a commercial break and timing yourself for that. It's turning into these type of things. There's a lot of distractions. Now, I know here in Oregon and a lot of other places. We're requiring that students have their phones off during the day. The idea of having an affordable phone when I was in high school would have been really weird. But most do. And there's a lot of good reasons for it. Safety if you're stuck somewhere, that type of a thing. And I think that having access to help when you need it and access to communication when you need it outweighs some of the disadvantages of this. But certainly turning the phone off during the day while you're at school. And one thing they can do with school electronics is be able to. You know, go through and figure out what is available and what's not on these devices. So that the students are looking or not being distracted by social media and other things that would distract them with their phones.

6:10But even so, it's still creating a very different way in critical thinking and other things. And is creating a situation where there just isn't the focus they're used to be. So, you know, technology solves a lot of problems, but this is one that I think that we're going to have to work for is to make sure it doesn't become a new problem. And unfortunately, a lot won't. Ram prices have skyrocketed by 200 to 300% in early 2026. Yeah, so if you've needed to buy memory for anything, you've probably noticed this. If you haven't, you will soon, because the price of most technology is going to go up to do this pretty much anything that is computerized electronics, not just your laptop, desktop or phone require memory. Even my 1986 pinball machine, I'm still restoring requires memory. It's just part of anything that uses a microprocessor, microcontrollers, even TTL logic, that kind of thing. And we saw a spike in memory prices back in the late 90s.

7:11I remember that there were break ends at computer labs and stuff, people stealing the ram out of computers. And I have a funny feeling we're going to see this again, because what's happening here, like you said in the headline. Is 2025 July of last year, 32 gigabyte DR5 get, which is a format of memory that's used in a lot of computers. Would be about 95 bucks. You could even get it for 80 if you didn't care if the memory lit up, which I don't. Like there's physical RGB lights and stuff in the in this stuff, which, you know, it's kind of cool. Yes, but it saves money not to do that. Today, that same kit is on and what I found it for the cheapest was $350 for refurbished. And retail prices were between five and $600 for the same thing, not faster, not a different brand. Same apples to apples comparison in Europe, prices peaked in February and between 430 to 490 euros.

8:11It is just really, really expensive. And then the other part of it too is even playing it sometimes. What's happening is memory allocations are limited on what can be manufactured. And AI data center builds are getting this where they're actually sending people to the manufacturers to buy everything up before it even hits the market. Which is a brand that makes a lot of memory isn't even selling to the consumer market anymore, just the data centers. And this type of thing is causing a huge, huge lack of supply, which is what's running the prices up. And, you know, I was thinking I, in my desktop, I have 128 gigs of RAM or the purpose I run virtualization and, you know, do editing and stuff. And I wait a little bit longer here. I could just sell the memory and pay off my house. They're going to shoot themselves in the foot because if we don't have computers and electronic equipment that we can use to access the AI type stuff.

9:11Well, who's going to use it? Yeah. Yeah. The AI is a bubble. It's going to pop in. Yeah. It's going to go down the hill and they had to hear a little bit too, because that's the reason, you know, common question is, well, why don't they add capacity? Because of that reason, there will be eventually a point that the sales of memory to AI data centers will stop or at least slow down. And at that point, they don't want to have so much production that there's a glut on the market. You know, so that's, that's where that's going, but it's creating this problem. All right, meta workers say they're seeing disturbing things through user smart glasses. Yeah, this follows right under the topic of creepy a little bit. Yeah, you really think about what's going on here. So what this is referring to is meta glasses, which is a product that Facebook has had out for a while now and is basically a pair of glasses we've talked about on the show before they'd have a video camera. And you can take photographs and you can take video with them obviously with the video camera.

10:13Now I have a set of these we won't tell meta, but I did a jailbreak on mine and we did the firmware a while back to use them for a different purpose now. But the idea of having that convenient is something that is kind of cool. You just have to think on the side of the glasses and you're recording. But what a lot of people don't know about is these videos aren't necessarily private, especially if you're sending them up to the meta AI for. Search or whatever reason this is not done on your glasses or your phone it's sent out to a data center somewhere. And that video is now accessible by in this case anybody that works for meta that has rights to that. And what they're doing is it's not necessarily nefarious they do content review. So if you had things like you know child pornography or something that someone was recording the ideas is to be able to catch it and shut it down. I think that is a very good thing. But what happens is is you have to have people that review this content and these people are reviewing things. That is not something that I or hopefully most of our audience would want to just look out and it's part of their job and if they refuse to do it they don't keep the job on top of that.

11:21A lot of this is being sent overseas so it's not even contained within the United States. But things like people using the restroom or you know adult activities let's just leave it at that that type of thing are getting caught on video. And having to be reviewed and it goes a step further where things like dead bodies and abuse and all that kind of stuff and yeah. They find it they filter it and they are catching some people because they're doing this. But still that kind of a position I think would be a very difficult job to do. And the other side of it is I think most people don't realize that these videos are even accessible outside of their own private phone. Yeah, that's got to be weird. Yeah. Major retail operator files bankruptcy. Customers have less than a month to use their gift cards. So the retailer that they're talking about here is Eddie Bauer. Which is kind of sad because this was along in a nice story it was you know one of the places you went that was a little bit.

12:24You know a little bit of step above a lot of different other things so. You haven't told March 12th if you have a gift card for any of our make sure you use it because that's like a week. For give or take to go. And what it is is the stores are in a shutdown point sales made it stores are final and cannot be exchanged to return. And what this is is in the United States and Canada the retailer is filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. And they are shutting down and actually not their brick and mortar operations. I had about 180 retail and outlet stores in the US and Canada and those are the ones that are shutting down. So it looks like the gift cards won't be usable online either it's just at the end of that that's it. So if you have an any Bauer card dig it out from wherever it's sitting find something to buy. There's plenty of stuff with the closing sales you're probably going to get a better deal. But if you don't do it here. The time it shuts down and closes they just aren't worth anything anymore and that's March 12th. And this is one of the problems with gift cards because you're paying for something.

13:25And depending on the credit of the retailer or whoever is going to honor that card to do it. And if they don't you're kind of just out your money. Yeah. That's really sad. All right dramatic changes have been observed in one of the universe's biggest stars. And this is not Hollywood. No. In space. All right. This recording will do her hand wrote the article and what we are looking at here. Is a store called W O H G 64. And they're saying it's the stellar equivalent of Jimmy Hendrick. So we do have the Hollywood equivalent here just a little bit on this. What's happening is is it is progressing a lot faster than most stars do it went from red to yellow. And these type of a thing and something that yellow hyper giant. Usually takes billions of years in time to accomplish.

14:25And this is happening very, very quickly. Now I don't know about that. Right. And you can speak to this. I looked it up. The death star only took 19 years to build. And the second death star was like three years. So that's not billions of years. Right. And it didn't take them very long to blow it out either when they finally decided to. And I have a funny feeling that, you know, stars that go like this do live harden in quickly. And that will be the case here most likely with this. But it is again, it just a, you know, we really don't know a lot about space. And I think more we learn the more we figure out what we don't know, even things like the Voyager. Being outside of the solar system now, that kind of a thing and finding all kinds of things that they didn't think would be the case. And, you know, so kind of called this little footnote on that, by the way, they think they're going to be able to extend the batteries now into the 2030s. So I don't know if somehow they got recharged remotely. Maybe, maybe, maybe some little gray alien stop lights in here will fix that for you. You know, talk about a battery charging service that's not at a gas station.

15:27You know, that's really remote. Oh, dear. HBO Max Paramount plus streaming services will merge after Warner Brothers Discovery deal. So we talked about this a little bit in Netflix wanting to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. That has not happened Paramount is now in the bidders seat on that. And if it's approved, because somehow this isn't a monopoly. But with Netflix, it was somebody I need to explain that to me. But in any of it, maybe less of a monopoly is a situation here where if that happens to save money, and I can understand this, they would put the apps together. So there's pushback on this happening because HBO has always been a very specific brand, usually with quality programming and even back in the ancient days of cable, where you had a converter box to receive it. If you subscribed to HBO, it was a very specific thing and you would kind of get what you paid for.

16:29And some of these other streaming services are not like that so much. Now, I won't say, you know, here that Paramount is bad. It's not at least in my opinion, I have that and I get their app as a freebie through one of my credit cards. So, you know, I use it. But putting them together does seem like they're putting two different things together along the same reasons why Discovery did not merge their app as it is now with Warner Brothers. One is like home repair and stuff like that and the other one is a completely different idea. Yeah, movies exactly right and other content. But it's going to be interesting to see where this will happen over bring other things like sport offerings, TNT, CBS Sports, that kind of a thing. So, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to make for a streaming app that does a lot. And there is a lot of streaming fatigue right now with having to get a lot of different things for just, you know, you want this and you have to go to that and then the other ones are different ones. So, I think it will help a little bit with that. But we don't want to see the whole monopoly thing here either because that's going to run up prices even more than they have been.

17:32So, you know, I can kind of understand both sides of the coin, but here from a situation of what's going on. If the merger is approved, then that is what's going to happen. And I would imagine that the one app probably would cost a little more, maybe not love to see how they do that. Yeah. All right. MIT creates injectable gel capable of repairing nerves. Yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah. Good. You know, the only problem with this is that MIT doesn't seem to know anything about it. Oh. And, you know, that's a, that's a thing, right? So, the reason I included this is because we talk a lot about what you see online and the fact that you can't take it. And you can't take everything at face value. Yeah. This is something that is based on something that MIT is doing, which is actually quite amazing. But it's been taken to this idea of, you know, being injectable and just kind of fixes you like Star Trek.

18:33We're not quite there yet. But what they are looking at doing is having a hydrogel that will help nerves heal. It's designed to mimic the body's natural tissue, provide a scaffold where nerve fibers can grow. And release healing molecules that reduce inflammation and guide nerve growth. And yes, I did read that off the press relates now. In studies, to an extent, this type of thing is working. It has not been demonstrated on humans yet. It's still lab and animal testing where they're looking at this kind of thing. So it's more like a back to tank idea where you, you dip your, your arm or your hand into like a healing solution. Instead of having it injected into your body or what am I misunderstanding? The description of this is more like surgeons reconnect nerves and use this technique to get it to heal. Oh, okay. I don't think we're there. I think what the thing if it is is being able to reconnect nerves in of itself is a big deal. Oh, yeah. You know, but yeah, it's not a gel where you inject it and all the sudden, you know, everything's happy, you know,

19:37centering back to you. Do you understand what I'm talking about when I say back to tank? Yes. Yeah. And again, no, this looks like this requires a surgical procedure. They're also looking for a real rollout of anything like this for 10 to 20 years beyond where they're at now in the testing phase. But you know, I like, I like to see stuff like this despite the hype on Instagram with it being able to reconnect nerves in of itself. Is a big deal and a huge thing for quality of life for people that have had damage, you know, so it's a good thing to see it happening, but it's not quite to the extent that it was pushing. So anyway, all right. So another question that comes in. We've been talking retro tech. And I'm going to just cover this very briefly because we don't have a lot of time here left in the segment, but. A lot of people are asking questions about the different gaming console, so like Nintendo PlayStation Xbox, that kind of thing. And over the years, a lot of these consoles have had works on them.

20:38And the original Nintendo had one on the bottom and a lot of the others have followed suit. And these type of things were put out for the idea of future proofing to some extent these consoles, but in a lot of cases, they were never used. Now, from a technical perspective, what we're dealing with here is something where it's an expansion port that can access usually the system bus in some way, be able to interact with the hardware, the computer that's inside the console. So that's kind of cool. You know, if you could do it, Nintendo off was playing off for some things, the original one was going to be a modem. Yeah, some of the other ones they were going to make a disk drive. And I believe that was the game here where that was going to go for being able to save stuff. And that kept getting delayed delayed it did finally come out in Japan. We never had it here, but that would have been a use for this. And you see this, you know, I'm picking on Nintendo a little bit here, but there's some other things to say. Genesis had a port originally planned for modems and networking access external peripherals diagnosis, which is what it actually ended up being used for on the only thing.

21:43You know, so you see this across the board, the super Nintendo had one for a CD ROM drive. They were going to put together in partnership with Sony, which went a different direction when Nintendo decided to do some other things that Sony was unhappy about, which is how we got the PlayStation. That was originally going to be the so the Nintendo PlayStation, you know, so these things go a different direction. Some parts of this are research and development that kind of thing. One of the biggest ones I think it literally was the PS2, what they called the fat model and it had this giant compartment on the back. And it was meant for a hard drive upgrade. There was one game that they did come out with that and one game did use it final fantasy. I think it was 11 or one of them 10 11 something like that. And a hundred dollar upgrade, but most people used it to hide the sandwich extra TV remotes, you know, old bars. I hope that not one of the first or someday. You know, but again, and then after the fact what happens with a lot of these things is in most console life spans, they will reissue.

22:50So you had a PlayStation two thin or whatever it was called that removed the Sun, all of a sudden, if you have people that have bought whatever perfect, it isn't work anymore. We said, I don't need Atari 7800, they had an expansion port that was never used and then just kind of done away with. So the one thing about ideas is we're seeing these things used in home brew. So a lot of developers now it's a lot easier to build things where you will connect a Raspberry Pi or a Duno or something to these expansion ports, which is a lot more powerful than the original console ever would have been adding all kinds of features and different things like that. I've won on my Atari 8 bit computer that allows it to go online that component that allows that to happen is something like 10,000 times more powerful than the actual computer. But hey, it works and it works well. All right, next segment we're going to be talking about face this is user friendly 2.0 will be back after the break. Welcome back, this is user friendly 2.0, check out our website user friendly.show that is your one stop for all things user friendly.

24:10Send us your questions, your comments, we do our programming based on what you want us to cover and that's how we find out. And on that line, we've had a lot of questions coming in about face and this is nothing new, but it is getting a lot worse. And what we're talking about here is the things that are manufactured that look just like a real brand that maybe even say the name of the real brand but are not made by that manufacturer. And therefore usually inferior and don't work as well. And I talked about this when it happened to me while back I was working on my home network and I had to net your yeah, neck your switches ethernet switches and freeway that doesn't know these are just devices that are part of your network where you kind of plug everything and it concentrates it puts it together and then figures out what goes where from the internet. So it's a device that's been around for a very long time. But as things have been upgraded, I had originally gotten a set that were 2.5 gigabit and I had used them for about a year and a half with no problem.

25:14Well, recently I had to make some changes to my network for my backups and all of a sudden we started having all kinds of just weird problems that wouldn't work for doing the backups properly. But you couldn't even see the backup storage device on the network and then start digging into it and figuring out well my women that's on Wi-Fi I can get right to it. But the stuff that's on the wired network doesn't work well it turns out after wasting about 6 hours trying to figure out what's going on because it did not occur to me to check this. The switches are fake. Did you pop it open? Yeah. Oh, cheese. Okay. Yeah. Well, of course I did. I wanted to see what was actually going inside. Now they're branded net here. I got them off eBay. Which is always, you know, you're not guaranteed anything there. But I use it, but I've had pretty good luck with it. You know, all the express it's like if you get the real item, you're doing well. But this was something that was in it. They were very well made. Metal case, all the stuff that you would expect from the original thing.

26:16And it was very interesting is the largest component in there was where all the plugs were. And then there was a ribbon cable that went back to this little tiny PC board with a blob on it. And the other end went to the power supply pickup. A blob? What was a blob? A lot of times when they manufacture processors or chips. I want to either do it cheaply or do something where you can't figure out what it is instead of putting it in a plastic package like what we all think of as a chip looking like. It'll have the silicon straight on the board with just some kind of gunk put over it. A glue or whatever the case may be so that you can't get into it. It's cheaper to manufacture it that way. And that is not how Nick here makes the equipment. So. And I can, I can really speak to that because when I finally did get my real neckier switches from Nick here. I took them apart and there's a lot more going on inside. Just because it, you know, it works properly and magically when I put these on my network. It automatically cleared everything up. It's like the wisdom. Are you saying that we need to open our equipment to see if it's real?

27:22I'm not advising that, especially if you don't know what you're doing with that. You can have mains voltages and other things and certainly mess stuff up. And if it's working okay, you're probably fine. But you want to make sure that number one, if you get something used. So this would be eBay, Facebook marketplace or even new through some of these platforms. Certainly all I express in some of those to be a little bit skeptical. And maybe check it out if the thing comes in and it's really lightweight or there's something that feels like it's off. It might not be the real thing. And this is actually something that in addition to being annoying can be dangerous. And we're going to get to that here in a little bit. What we've done is a little research with the help of chat GPT to put together a list of different devices. Different pieces of hardware that are coming up more and more is fixed. And don't worry. We didn't hallucinate here. I actually did check each one of them and they are correct. So we're not going to talk about a technical device here that doesn't exist.

28:23At least I hope not. And anyway, but that being the case. The list that kind of finally got put together. You start to think the first one is counterfeit USB drives and SD cards. Now we actually did talk about this on the show once before. And what this basically is is you'll get a something that's an unbelievable deal. By the way, that's the other thing to take a second look at. Flash drives to terabytes USB for nine dollars is the example given here. Now if you go on and price something like that in a lot of cases, the capacity that's claimed doesn't even exist. And if it does, it's going to be a lot more than nine dollars for something like that, right? And what they're doing in a lot of cases here is the device itself is actually real. And it's been purchased, used or, you know, from something that's old tech or whatever the case may be. And they've changed the capacity on it. So they've gone in and hacked the device so that it'll report that it's too terabyte when it's really maybe only 32 gigabyte. And so when you start using it, it works.

29:25That's the other thing too, but what generally happens in these things is is you're going through when you hit the real limit on whatever it is. It doesn't know to tell you that it's full. So it just starts overriding from the beginning again. So you lose data. Lovely. You know, especially if you're using them for backups or that type of a thing. And you won't realize it usually until after the return period is gone. So, you know, that's a, that's a big concern. Our next one on the list is fake power supplies, big chargers. And this is one of the ones where things can get dangerous. And I've actually seen this where it's claimed to be made by company, you know, a valid vendor like Apple for a phone charger or Samsung or something. And I ran into this once where it the one I got was a fake. I figured it out when the plug broke before I plugged it into the phone, which was a good thing. But what's happening here is that you miss a lot of the safety components. So voltage regulation being one. And what that's talking about is if you have your expensive iPhone or Samsung phone that's a grander more.

30:31And you want to recharge it and the phone's expecting a five volt charge line or whatever it is. I'm just using that as an example. And you plug it in and the voltage coming to it says it's five volts. But is fluctuating around and as much higher or lower that can damage your device or even destroy it. And that's why if you spend a lot of money on one of those iPhones. And frankly, that's not even if you don't because you don't want that to happen. And the thing of it is is that type of thing in addition to being able to screw up your device. There are examples out there of causing fires. You know, one of the examples we're given here is electrohusion risk of damage to devices, which we just talked about. But the thing of it is is yeah, you have a charger. And if it doesn't have heat protection or voltage protection and something short circuits. Well, instead of it turning off, it's going to start on fire. And it's not worth saving the few bucks. And again, look at it if the price is something completely unusual or something feels wrong about it when you get it.

31:35Have a little suspicion, you know, and then the thing is is okay. You're assuming that you're talking to adults. What if your kids are also using this stuff? Yeah. And they're not going to know any better. And simply overheating could burn them. I mean, you know, it's all kinds of things that could happen that it doesn't go things. And yeah, fake apple chargers are one of the most counterfeit electronics in the world just because they're expensive for the real fine. But you see this everywhere else. And on that train of thought is counterfeit lithium batteries. This gets really dangerous. What could go wrong here? Hey, Bill, I'm going to throw that to you. What would happen if you had a counterfeit lithium battery with no protection on it at all? Well, they explode. Yeah. Well, you know, mine. Yeah. To put it mildly. And obviously, you know, I make a little bit light of it, but we shouldn't because that is very, very dangerous. And batteries are expensive. Another reason they get away with this kind of a thing. Camera batteries, power tool batteries, sells different things like that.

32:37Some of the things are the capacity on it will be a lot more than it is. Now, I ran into this once with a default and what makes a lot of power tools and they use in my case. I think it was 18 volt batteries to go on these to run them. And I needed a second battery and I ordered one. And this was through Amazon. And I got the battery and didn't think about it too much. I charged it and used it a little bit and then came back a couple of weeks later and it wouldn't charge anymore. So it went that way and I look at it. It's the same color, same plastic, same molds. Doesn't say to Walt anywhere on it did on the packaging, but not on the battery. Now, fortunately, I was still within my return window on it. So I was able to send it back, but it wasn't even cheaper. It was about the same price as the real one. I ended up buying a battery plus later. Wow. So I didn't save a lot on that. You know, so that was completely a scam. Well, I know there was a story recently that I came across to somebody had a charge pack. You know, like you used to recharging your cell phone on the go.

33:37And it was barely doing anything and they opened it up and it was three regular lithium batteries and 12. Fake batteries. Yeah, it's blanks. And you're talking like a power bank, probably. And yeah. And you know, and again, that type of a thing. It's one thing when it's annoying and just doesn't do what it's supposed to do with the other side of it. Again, no thermal protection. That can cause overheating of wires bill as you say of explosions, which has happened. This is one of the reasons they have to regulate lithium batteries when you get on the planes because this has actually happened. It's not a theoretical thing. And sometimes even with the real stuff when it's effective, but you definitely see this among the fake things. And are definitely something. And again, that can screw up your device. Certainly won't hold a charge for very long, but like what you're talking about can burn down your house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A big one is that there is a chip that goes on most lithium things.

34:39Cell phones. A lot of them. Where we'll stop the charging at a certain stage, usually about 99, 98% of acts charge so that it doesn't go over and cause an explosion. Right. And a lot of these fake ones, they don't include that. And the reason why I know about these is that they don't include those on a lot of RC cars, which my stepson is very much into. So you have to get what's called they have a chip that it plugs into that allows it to charge correctly. You know, it's, and the other thing of it too is it's just agreed thing really because one of the devices that does regulation like this is a component called a thermistor. And there's a lot of other ways to do it, but it's one that's been around for a long time and being into repairing the old arcade cabinets. These were used a lot of line protection and cost me about a buck 68 to replace the one that goes on the line voltage. So something that would into a low voltage battery pack would of course be a lot cheaper.

35:41That's not a lot of money really when you think about it. And again, some places if you went to alley express and you know it's 10 cents for this. Okay, you're it's going to be fake. But when you're getting some of these devices off reputable retailers, which even in some cases can include best buy an Amazon like we talked about. That's pretty bad. And again, it's something that is becoming a lot worse and moving on to the next one here. This one is interesting as fake computer processors. And this one would be really bad because you're looking at a situation where the stuff's expensive. So if you're doing building your own computer or if you're a company that you know like Dell or something that buys an Intel process or that type of thing and it up with fakes. It could really screw things up. Now it's your best. It might be a re labeling of a lesser CPU. But you know, some of what this talks about here is seller sending a CPU shaped piece of metal. And I think you would realize that one I would hope. But if what they're banking on is there's going to be a certain amount of people that would get the box in the mail.

36:47Is that it somewhere until they get around to their project, which is after the return window. And then they can't do much about it, you know. It's it's a crazy thing, but we're seeing it all around next item on the list, which we kind of already talked about is fake network equipment. And that's exactly what what happened here. Some of the other things that come up with this is a name brand Cisco being one of them that is fake a lot is two things you want to be careful of. Number one is these type of devices usually have firmware, which is software that runs the device that's built into it. Most electronics of that nature routers certainly does and that type of thing. This can be very compromised on the fake one and also have back doors that other people can get into it. If someone can get into a back door on your network router. They can get their behind your firewall usually and they can get to, you know, anything in your network. Yeah, do some of the cases are really bad where they can turn on the camera and your computer and watch what you're doing without you knowing about it.

37:52Those type of things certainly getting financial information and all that kind of stuff. And the other thing of it is to is you don't know what's in it like my switch is same type of thing. I have no idea who made them. You know, and now dumb switch doesn't have firmware, so I didn't have the back door problem, but a lot of networks most networks actually use smart switches where you can configure them and everything and those do. I don't need it for what I'm doing, but it's certainly most commercial networks would have that. I think a lot of home ones do as well, you know, so it definitely creates a problem. And one other note on this, this is not a new thing. But on a lot, this came up really in the 90s is a big problem is cash memory was a new thing. 46 microprocessors in that era started having cash 386 some of the higher end ones too. And you would get a motherboard which had what looked like cash memory on it, but if you looked at it, the prices weren't hooked up to anything and of course it didn't work and it wasn't real.

38:54But they could charge a lot more money for this, you know, and again, the consumer may not know what's going on and even. You know, hobbyists that builds their own computer might put this thing together unless they start benchmarking or going in to try to enable this stuff, they may never actually see it that it's not really there, you know. So I don't know and again, I'm not trying to give everybody a downer, but this is something that we need to be aware of because it can cause very bad things fake HDMI and display cables is the next one on the list. And if you go, if you've ever gone to certainly a retailer like Best Buy and bought say a monster 8k HDMI cable, you need to have one one the lottery probably, but to that point is these are generally very expensive. And if you look on Amazon, I can get that exact same able to that brand or eBay for something for, you know, a tenth of the price. And it might look just like it when you get it, but it will not work very well.

39:57And you know, and the other thing if it is to is HDMI Bluetooth, all of these type of things have versions and of himself. So if you need the latest version of HDMI because you run in let's say a 4k television with Dolby vision and all the other, you know goodies that you would have on that. And you get an HDMI cable that's branded that but an older version it's not going to work right and you're not going to know what's wrong. At least at first, it'll feel like the television isn't working quite right or, you know, something else. And it definitely is a problem. I have not run into this personally, but I know that there are those that have. And again, and this one's a little bit harder to deal with because Best Buy and I will pick them on on them for this does really mark up their tables. They are a lot more expensive than they should be. And in some cases, you can really find a better deal if you look online and, you know, other retailers and that type of a thing. But then it's hard to know is it just a better deal because they've marked it up versus is it pay or is it an older version.

41:01So exactly how do you know that you've gotten a bad cable? Well, I did a little research and got an old pagan ritual from the old gods and I ask them. Okay, well, that might be a little intense for some people. You know, it might not be the way some people want to go. And I'm getting about that, of course. But some of the things is is the fact that it won't work right. That is your first clue flickering, different things like that. The device is going back to a lower resolution, not doing what they're actually supposed to do. The other thing of it is if you look at it and the build quality is really bad, commercially produced tying cables aren't going to look like that. You do when you spend more money get a better product in that sense. And you know, a situation is where with this it's really just that you have to run it and use it and see if it doesn't work right or if it looks on or if it's really just too good of a deal. Yeah, you know, I was looking at that hairdryer cable that went south on me and I was looking at it thinking, should that have really done that?

42:04It looked bad and I was kind of surprised when I saw that big flash come out of it. You know, I was looking for some reason the brushes on this real quick aside. Gretchen had a hairdryer that blew up on her was made the brushes on the motor were plastic with a little tiny piece of metal in the middle. And it's a simple motor. And that's why it failed like that shorted out just because that's that was a con air that should have done that. And it didn't broke from the heat. Wow, you know, I mean, I think if I'm going to double check that because none of the internal components said con air come to think of it. See, you think that was a con air. I still have it. I'll look at it. So all right, let's get into the scary stuff. This is the stuff that really can cause problems counterfeit automotive parts are becoming a problem. Things like brake pads put in fake brakes. That'd be bad airbags being filled with cloth or paper instead of the actual inflators.

43:04Hopefully. Yeah. And think about putting that in your car and get an accident. I mean, that could kill you. I mean, it's not funny. That really good. I'd be better off without the airbag. And, you know, in these type of things, another area was in the light aviation had a problem with this. That a company was sending the companies that were doing the repair work on commercial planes like Southwest Airlines and United and stuff, fake parts. And they were not charging less for them either in the airlines got them thinking they were reputable. And when this came out, they had to ground a lot of aircraft and go through and check and see if the repair components they used were real. You know, anything like the one where the panel went flying off the off the plane. I don't know if that was directly related to that. I think that that one for my if I remember, remembering correctly. Going, which was the manufacturer that simply didn't put the clamps in the door or something, but I would need to look that up to be sure.

44:06It wasn't fake. It was just simply not there, which would also be a problem, right? Yeah, but when you think about that and Bill, I know you've done a lot of mechanical work over the years. Can you imagine getting a fake oil filter and what that could do to your engine? Well, you know, oil filter quality alone matters a lot. Not to plug anything, but I use Napa filters because just actually seeing them cross section is significantly better than any other filter I've seen out there. The Napa Golds. Yeah. I mean, there are better filters. Don't get me wrong. And their ratings are good. I don't think they're not a sponsor or anything, but it is a good brand. I've had to look with them too. And it's not bad to talk about things that do work. But again, if let's say that you went to, you know, your auto part store and bought your Napa filter. And the auto part store buys from usually a reseller or some kind of wholesale company. And let's say they didn't know it was fake and somehow it got into the stream somewhere back up channel. You know, that's where these things can get really scary.

45:08For your business that changes oil filters and you didn't notice or you didn't see what it was. Is it obvious? Not really. No, really. It's just painted on and it says Napa. You expect this as Napa or whatever frame. Exactly. But like the biggest risks and mechanics. And this comes from everywhere, even building bridges and other things is bolt quality. Oh, yeah. You can get some really, they're bolts coming grades for those who don't know. And let's say you have a grade eight, which is a very high quality bolt. It's been happened where the bolt quality has been junk or they've been knocked off bolts. This has caused things like wheels to come off vehicles. I mean, it can be catastrophically damaging. Yeah, very easily.

46:08I mean, you know, when you think about it. It's just at the end of the day. And then when you think back to some of the other things like fake brake pads. You would have no idea what the quality of these would be they probably work initially. But you know, if something goes wrong with that system and you can't stop, it can kill you. It's not, you know, something just to screw around with saving money. And taking it to the next topic goes in with the most one that I would consider the scariest is fake medication. Yeah. And this very much as a global problem, medication costs a lot of money and they're finding things. The examples we've had here are fake insulin fake COVID tests, which has been a big deal fake blood glucose strips. This goes on to a lot of other things where your medication will look just like what it's supposed to with the dosage might be off. It might not even be the medication. So if you're taking something like let's say you have heart trouble and you're taking a medication to regulate that. And you get a fake one that could easily kill you or the wrong dosage. Fine. Do you remember our friend Peter when he was still alive and he ended up with a pill that had rice powder in it.

47:16And he was allergic to rice powder and he wasn't supposed to have that. Yeah. And these these type of things happen. And you know, again, you're looking at the distributor and where is all this coming from. And there have been shortages during the pandemic. There was a time where you simply couldn't get medication even the ones that you absolutely needed for a while. And you know, the supply lines are something that you can't always verify another one where this is is flu shots. And they've had a couple of instances over the years where it will on the good side be sailing because that won't do anything bad to you if you injected or other stuff that might. And of course, you know, if it's one thing you got to get a flu shot because you don't want to get the flu and then you get sick. But you got to consider that a lot of these type of medications are used invulnerable people that if they get the flu, they're going to die or have some really bad problem with it that isn't just being in bed with chicken soup for a week or two. And when that happens, we saw a couple of children dying from that type of a thing and they did track that down and figure out where it was coming from.

48:18But it was a situation where you know, it's just down right you can't trust your medication, you know, and that type of a thing and then that couples with the fact that a lot of people because of the cost of these things will buy from international pharmacies and all of that. And again, that takes it to another level, but if you some of these injectable things are three four thousand dollars a piece. So it's like you either have a choice of doing that or you don't get it at all, but now, you know, it's hard to be able to track down and know what's real. I don't know. I just think this is all really scary and send this if you've ever seen an example of this, hopefully it hasn't happened to you, but send us your examples. I'd love to see this and see what's actually happened user friendly dot show until next week, this is user friendly 2.0 keeping you safe on the cutting edge user friendly 2.0 copyright 2013 to 2026 by user friendly media group incorporated all rights reserved the content is the opinion of the show's participants and does not necessarily reflect this station or platform requests for material use interviews,

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