Protecting screen time

Welcome to changeloggin' friends, a weekly talk show slash open source sales pitch. Thank you to our partners for helping us bring you world -class developer pods week in and week out. Fastly .com, fly .io and typesense .org. Okay, let's talk. Well, we're here today to discuss securing our local networks, not necessarily from malicious hackers, but from things that we don't want in from the outside. And we are joined by another guy named Jared. Adam, you're going to have

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differentiate when you're afraid of us. We have Jared Henderson here. Welcome to the show. I'll just say, shaboy! Oh yeah. He also responds to that. That's what my wife calls me. That's what my wife calls me. Well, we're happy to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Thanks for reaching out. The topic we're going to discuss is one that's been on my mind as a father and a person who runs his local network and tries to figure out how to do that well. There's all kinds of ways you can go about, managing your children's internet access. And none of them are awesome. We've been making heavy use of screen time for certain things. And I appreciate that Apple puts screen time in there and the controls are fine grained, but cumbersome and not reliable. We find that it doesn't remain through iOS upgrades and stuff. The worst thing that could happen is you feel like you're all set up and raring to go and safe and secure and stuff. And then an iOS upgrade breaks your settings and all of a sudden you have a hole in your strategy. So we found that with screen time. Yeah, that just happened to me and my two oldest kids, iOS 17. I had their phones pretty well locked down to where I was pretty comfortable with it and been going good for a number of months. And then they both just upgraded to iOS 17 without asking me. They're excited to, I don't know, make poster images or whatever. And there's kind of a major regression from my perspective at iOS 17 with the parental controls. And I ended up actually downgrading them back to iOS 16 because Apple hasn't fixed it yet. But that's the kind of thing that makes me feel bad for non -techie parents. There's not really a happy path for downgrading iOS. You're not supposed to do it. So I had to kind of go use some of my programmer skills to kind of pull that off and that kind of thing happens. But I agree with you also. I mean, the fact that a lot of the controls Apple give are great and there's just things like that where an upgrade comes out, a new release hits, and then all of a sudden you're kind of like, wow, what do I do? You're stuck. And yeah, we've had issue with the usage statistics specifically. So our teenage daughter has had issues with overuse of her phone, as I'm sure many teenage, not just girls, but boys also have this problem. I mean, these things are so incredibly compelling, these devices, that even as full grown adults with, what is it, Adam? Our prefrontal cortex fully formed. All the things, right? Like grown men can't even manage their own screen time sometimes. We have our own solutions for dealing with addiction. It's really difficult for teenage girls and boys to deal with that. So she's had an issue with overuse. And so one of the reasons we use screen time is we can actually limit her use to specific times of day, to a certain time period or max hours per interval. And we can also monitor so we can see if it's being used when it's not supposed to be used. And the reporting has just been really bad to the point where we can't even trust it. We're like, we have to trust her or trust it. And it's like, at this point, she seems to be more reliable because it showed her using her phone at 2 .34 a .m. and we just knew by circumstances, that just wasn't even a possibility that that happened.

And it

also showed her using it while she was at volleyball practice and the phone was here in our laundry room. And it's just like, well, if we can't rely on the reporting, what's the point of it all? Just completely self -destruct. So it's very frustrating as a parent to be able to handle these things. Yeah, it makes you sometimes want to just kind of throw your hands up and say like, oh, it's too complicated, I can't do it. And just kind of hope for the best and cross your fingers. And that's something that I think, sadly, probably too many parents kind of end up doing. And it's not that I blame them, like the tech is complicated and it's buggy and it's changing all the time. But yeah, that sort of feeling of like, this is overwhelming, it's too much, I can't do it, I can't trust it, I'm just gonna, you know. And there are the burden of kind of whatever restrictions you do put in place or filters or things like that. And if they end up being like complicated and hard to use, then it's just too easy to kind of give up, you know? So there's other things besides content that we also like to block. I mean, you have tracking, right? You have ads, you have all kinds of stuff that people want to send to you that you don't necessarily want. And there's other, there's lots of solutions too. So beyond just Apple devices, I know Adam and I have both been pie hole fans. Adam got me into the pie hole, which is a Raspberry Pi, you did, man. All the way in, huh? You know, you said it enough times that I finally was like, all right. Pie hole, pie hole, pie hole. They're great, I'm just kidding. Which is a really cool piece of software. Jared, I'm an early mover and you just fall late for it with me, man. It's like, that's just how it works, in some cases. Eventually I'm gonna watch Silicon Valley, you know, eventually I'll watch it, but. Not today. Probably not. But I did get around to the pie hole and that's a really cool piece of software. Adam, how did you come across that? What were you trying to solve and do you use it for content stuff as well as just ad blocking? Man, I don't even know how I came about it. I don't know, honestly. I can't remember my origin story with it. I just did and I was like, I mainly wanted to block ads, like anybody might when they do find it. And so I'm looking for a solution. I'm like, well, a network level solution makes the most sense because it's DNS. Like if you try to do a DNS lookup and it fails because it goes into the DNS black hole, then that to me made the most sense because I didn't want to have to go from browser to browser, computer to computer, and do protections, which I think, you know, makes sense on a home network or even a business network, obviously. I've never ran a business network to be like, here's how you secure a network. But that's how I got into it. And I think the main way I use it now is mainly just to block ads and mainly to block tracking related things. I used to do more local DNS naming with different services within. And I just happened to be wearing the shirt today, Tailskills T -shirt. Tailskills replaced that for me. It's not an ad, I love them. They do sponsor us. They are one of our sponsors, but for me, Tailskills replaced the need to worry about specific IP addresses locally for services because they're just in my tail net. And I could just give them a name and that name is resolvable by Tailskills tail net, essentially. So I used to do a lot of like, you know, piehole1 .lan, for example, as a DNS entry in the DNS of piehole. Using it as a DNS server, basically. Right, for internal services mainly, you know. Yeah, for custom machines. Yeah, exactly. And I just think Tailskills just made that obsolete for me, really. I don't even need the feature anymore. Cool. Well, I got into the piehole because of you and I set it up, of course, for ad blocking as well. But what I really wanted was content restrictions, parental controls. And obviously moving up the stack from the device to the network is really nice because it gives you a central location to manage such things. It's still really hairy. And now you're talking whitelists and blacklists and other kinds of lists. And you have to source them sometimes from like people's GitHub repositories and you wonder if this one's up to date, is it good? All of these kinds of questions. And I ultimately heard about NextDNS, which is a really cool service. Also not a sponsor. I'm currently a user of, no, not a sponsor. In fact, we've never spoken with them. I've invited them on the show just because I like what they're up to and would like to learn more about it. But I haven't heard back. If anybody knows the NextDNS folks, we'd love to do an interview with them. But they're basically like piehole in the sky. And so they're gonna do that for you. You just point all your DNS records at them and let them manage that. You can go in and configure and adjust and you can turn on different things. You can make it, you can have it force YouTube safe, safe browsing mode, what's that called? YouTube has a safe mode, which will turn off comments, for instance, if there's nasty comments going on, which is really nice, except for at the network level. And when you run a YouTube account and you wanna respond to a comment, it's like comments are turned off. And so you start wondering, how am I gonna poke holes in this for myself and stuff like that? But they have those kinds of restrictions, which is really neat. Google Safe Browsing, they forced that at the network level. Really cool stuff. And in my opinion, better than the piehole, cause here's the problem that I had with pieholes specifically was like, now my local area is quote unquote secured. And Jared, I know you're gonna take issue with that. We'll talk about, allow lists versus deny lists and kind of

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the facts that you can get around a lot of these things with a little bit of effort. And we know that teens are the ones who have the time and the inclination to put the effort in, especially when their parents aren't tech savvy. But for me, it was like, well, the piehole is cool, but it's on my local network. And what happens when my devices leave my local network and they're on cell service or they're on someone else's wifi and there's like hacky things you can do to get that to work in order to like basically VPNs. And it gets very, I mean, now we're getting super technical. And the nice thing about NextDNS is that they do have like an app that you can just put on the kid's phone and it's gonna automatically route everything through NextDNS. And so you still have them even on cellular, on somebody else's wifi, you have at least that going through that service. So I'm a fan of that. That's so far been the best solution for me. But Jared, you can tell us what you found because you're actually got to the point where you started scratching your own itch and building something to solve this problem at your house. You wanna tell us about it? Yeah, sure. And NextDNS sounds interesting. I'd be curious, like, can your kids go change their DNS settings on their phones though? Like, are they locked out of like, you know, as a parent, are you able to get them like wired into NextDNS and then? Right, so it's a combination in our case of screen time plus the app. So they can actually go in and change their settings. Now, are there workarounds for that? There probably are. I think at a certain age and a certain skill level, they do need to have some agency and autonomy. Like if they really wanna get around things, they will. So mostly we're blocking like, don't make it easy and don't make it accidental. You're like, a lot of our kids are the age where they're not looking for this stuff. This stuff comes to them. And so we don't want the accidental stuff cause you can't unsee what you've seen. But that would be the combination that would keep them from changing their DNS servers. Obviously on a PC or a Mac, you can just do that kind of stuff. So it's hard, there's many ways, many ways. You said you're using screen time to do this? Yeah. Like screen time, I think just keeps them out of the controls of disabling it. So with a lot of these things as parents, you can kind of like turn some sort of protection on, but then you got to make sure, because like iPhones don't have a concept of like a less than privileged user, you know, so you have to kind of use screen time to prevent them from undoing. I mean, there are managed users, but those are like a little bit more complicated to set up and usually like an institutional environment. So, but yeah, I'm a huge, like, I think the DNS layer stuff is awesome. I'm a huge Piehole fan. I think I heard about it from Jeff Atwood's blog. I don't know if you know who he is, but years ago, and I've installed seven or eight of them cause I tell my friends about them. And most, the problem with Pieholes is you, you gotta be a little bit like able to go install Linux and kind of shell into something and you know, and so I've ended up doing that for a whole bunch of families and love it. I consider it kind of like, I don't know with a lot of these tools, I don't know that you can ever find something that's kind of like a silver bullet. That's just gonna kind of take care of all your needs. So like the mindset I've sort of developed over the years is defense in depth, you know, you got like Piehole is awesome. Something like next DNS sounds great, but you don't just don't want to put like, you know, all your chickens in one basket or whatever the term is, you know, like just kind of multiple layers, including like technical solutions, DNS level solutions, filtering, blocking on the device that goes with them, but not even just that, not technical things, just some physical limitations of like, maybe, you know, my kid doesn't have their device at night or my kid, you know, does their homework out in a public space instead of here or there. There's like all kinds of different ways you can kind of approach this and, you know, until there's some sort of like super single solution that's gonna kind of do everything. I think what parents really need to do is, is kind of stack a few of these solutions on top of each other, you know, and the ones people who are more tech savvy can maybe layer in some of the more kind of technical stuff. But like, if you're not as, you know, comfortable with that stuff, there's like a lot of really useful and valuable things you can do just in terms of like, kind of normal physical safety sort of rules and just ways you live in your house and stuff. But yeah, like coming back to the, I don't know, you were asking about like the Piehole, like I've used it for years and I appreciate the ad blocking. I mean, the internet's almost unusable these days without the ad blocking. But I also like was trying to, my kids, when I was initially setting up my Piehole, my kids were kind of getting into that age where I felt like I needed to just start to be really cautious and careful. A lot of that's just cause I remember getting into a lot of stuff when I was a late teenager that I wish I had never gotten into, you know?

And so

I went out and like pulled down all those like GitHub jists of these huge like blacklists of literally millions of domains. I think it sounds like Jared, you've looked into that. Yeah, done all that and like I was pretty excited and I thought like, man, I've got literally millions of domains of these, hopefully up to date, like the best blacklists that are like, and I had this idea of, hey, it's open source, people are contributing to these jists and these huge piles of blacklists and was kind of pretty hopeful that this was gonna be a really strong solution. And I still think it's valuable, like I said, as a layer, but I mentioned this the other day when we were talking that one of the things I did fairly early on with my pie hole is I kind of went into pen testing mode and I said, okay, I've got millions of domains blocked on my local network. I wonder if I can find a way around this thing. Like what if I were, you know, I put myself in the shoes of 17 year old me and I had time and inclination. And so I disabled images on my browser and just started to see what I could find and just started Googling stuff and was pretty kind of discouraged when I found that it took me, I don't know, I forget, 90 seconds or something like that to find something that wasn't on one of those lists that was pretty awful. And that kind of was in some ways kind of like a formative experience for me because I kind of realized like, man, as good as, like you can have the best, most up -to -date blacklists in the universe, but it's just a problem that I don't think can be solved that way. There's so many websites, so many domains and think about like people, purveyors of adult content, what's one of their biggest kind of like nemesis is these like block lists and these filters. And so there's this incentive on their side to continue to like proliferate new websites and new domains and because they're not gonna be blocked. And you know, you may have heard that there's this dot XXX domain and I'm not sure how much it's used, but my understanding is that people in that business really dislike that because they feel like, oh, that's just gonna make it so easy for people to block out a whole TLD. And so because of that, there's this incredibly long tail of domains that are filled with adult content and other things and I just kind of like realized, I don't think that this approach works. I don't think that the block list in and of itself could ever be safe if you're trying to avoid accidental exposure is huge. I totally, I think there's certain ages where that's probably the biggest concern, but there's also some other ages where you get kind of those like Adam was referring to, those motivations, those underdeveloped brains, those extra time, those hormones flowing and then you get some really motivated people with time and then it's just so easy to get around these things that work by a block list, you know? Yeah, I can definitely see that and I do agree on the technical side of things, like with a pie hole, there's a lot of these solutions where I get distraught as like, okay, I can get this working and it was effort and difficulty. But I have so many friends who would also like to secure their home networks and to protect their family from stuff they don't wanna see and this doesn't scale. Like I can't go to each person's house and manage their pie holes or whatever solution they have and so you kind of throw up your hands at a certain point and say like, okay, do you have to be a technical person in order to even have a decent strategy, you know, even a strategy that has holes in it, but something, you know, at least you're in the game. And I feel like for the most part so far and maybe services like NextDNS, which are more approachable than a pie hole, but it's still like, most people don't know what DNS is, you know, and they have to learn that and sometimes, well, you gotta learn something to enable to protect your house. I suppose if you put in a security system, you gotta learn how that security system works and you have to learn how to operate it and so you go ahead and learn the villain that is DNS. The villain, yes. But it's just too hard. I mean, it's so hard to do well or to even to be in the game. So it's kind of, it's frustrating. It is frustrating. I think even, I will concede that the pie hole is not obviously a silver bullet. No. And it's not even like the best bullet, really. It's just a bullet. It's a bullet. Yeah. Right, it's got its own challenges too. Lists, but it is a good line of defense and I think, you know, employing many things that can protect, obviously screen time, something at the DNS level if it makes sense, maybe something like your application Gertrude, which we haven't really mentioned yet, but I think we will, that gives you other layers to do and I think even with being techie or being someone who's technical, I think at some point you become a just -in -time learner in life. You don't really learn the things you need to know until you need to know them, right? And if you need to protect your network and you hear from a friend that pie hole makes sense, maybe you get Linux curious. Maybe you get Docker curious. Maybe you don't, you know? Maybe you just were like, I'm never gonna do that so I'm gonna go with NextDNS, which I think makes a ton of sense. But even with NextDNS, you've gotta install an application, you've gotta have some understanding of the way that traffic flows in and out of a device. And I think you just have to bite the bullet, right? You just have to learn something about how the internet works, how the web works, how requests work. To have some level, I don't think a Silver Bullet will ever really exist. Do you think that's a possibility? I don't see it coming anytime soon at least. I don't know, maybe some AGI will take care of it in a few years. Right, that's true. At that point, it's a different story, right? Like an AGI? Yeah, that we got other problems, I guess. Yeah, that's a whole different situation. Like, hey, I'm protecting you. No, no, no, no, I kinda wanna be there, okay? This one's on purpose, just kidding. I'm just kidding. Just go ahead and raise the kids for us, okay? You know? Right. I even think about this. I know Jared, you and I talked about this. When I go on Instagram, which I don't do too often, mainly because it's just such vanity and I just have despised. Aside from the people I follow, I don't like that they expose me to suggested things that my friends, like the friends of friends thing. Let my following, let my for you tab or whatever it is be what I wanna see, my following. And now they make it the default is the for you versus the following, which I just don't like. I wanna select who I wanna follow and see that content. But if I go to search, which is technically browse, it is just a swath of content that is not something I'm trying to go and find. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Trapping, like if you're a weak -minded person with maybe low morals or in a place in life where you're just willing to mess up or you're susceptible to being messed up, then I think that search tab for, you select any dude and you go to their search tab on Instagram, I bet you it's got suggestive content in there. 100%. Sexual suggestive content, guaranteed. Yeah, I mean, I don't even, like this might sound funny to people, but I don't even let myself on those websites, you know? Because. Screen time, man. Just kidding. Screen time yourself. I mean, that's part of like, I'm trying to, we're talking about kind of managing our children and trying to keep them safe and stuff. You gotta manage yourself, you're right. You do. I mean, I do think there's a place where sometimes if you can't manage yourself, you should still be trying to manage your children, you know? But ideally, you wanna manage yourself and stuff like that. And there's huge parts of the internet that I just, it's not useful, it's not valuable, time is too short. I don't want those. I mean, we're always kind of like drinking in thoughts and ideas and images and stuff and all that affects us. And so I think, I mean, it would be useful if us adults would also maybe start to be really like thoughtful and careful about even what we allow in. And why am I going here to this website? Why do I, is there any real value that offsets anywhere close to kind of the torrent of stuff that it's pouring into my brain, you know? And so I just don't go there. Yeah, the algorithms are designed for engagement. They're designed and they're really good at keeping you engaged and they know what sells and hey, sex sells. And so even if you're trying not to, there it is and you're just gonna be attracted to it and you have to be able to somehow turn that off. But I found even on YouTube Shorts, which is probably the vertical video platform that I use the most because we post there. So like it's part of my work, which makes it difficult to entirely just turn off. And I find that I train it, you know, to, you can just, obviously you have a few levers you can pull. Did my thing just make a bubble? Yeah. Did you guys just see that? Yeah, I think I saw a bubble. Yeah, I saw it. Cause you thumbsed up, yeah. My screen just bubbled. What is going on? These computers. Sorry, totally distracted me. Mine doesn't do that. Cause I think you're probably on the newest OS, right? Did you upgrade? I did upgrade. I'm on Mac OS Sonoma. What's a new one? That's a Sonoma thing. And so when you move your hand, it puts bubbles on the screen? What kind of feature is that? Right, so Jerry got derailed from his conversation because a bubble popped up in his video that no one is seeing. And they're like, what are they talking about? Talk about stuff you don't wanna see. I don't wanna see bubbles. That's what they're working on in Cupertino right now, is bubbles. That's right, man. It's the AGI behind the scenes, know what we do and what we want. The brightest minds of our day are putting bubbles on your screen when you raise your hand. All right, so that's stuff you don't wanna see either. But I was saying that you can, there's a couple of levers you can pull, which one of them is like, obviously how long you watch the video. So if you don't wanna see it, just swipe away right away, which is why, by the way, people say things like watch to the end or wait for it or these kinds of things. Cause they want you to be on that video for as long as you can, cause that helps them get boosted. The other one's obviously the dislike button. And I deploy those liberally against anything like the girl who does the jump roping, the Australian girl who does jump roping, really, really high quality jump roping to the beat and stuff. And she's really good at it, but it has the other angle of she's a tall, skinny blonde and she's not dressed appropriately for my tastes. And so I got to swipe away and yet it's kind of interesting. So I like, oh wow, she's really, oh, swipe away, swipe away, dislike because I don't want to come back. That's right. And then over time I found that it'll go away. And then like a couple of weeks later, without any prompting from me, here comes the Australian girl, jump roping again. And I'm like, hey, I disliked it. I pulled all the levers, but it's just sticky content and they know that people like it. And so they just keep sending it your way. So I'm always playing the meta game on these social networks, as you can tell and seeing how it works on the insides. But it's frustrating that you can't like entirely say, nah, never show me the Australian gal again. I mean, she's really talented, but I just not interested. Eventually they're going to send it back your way. I want to applaud them though on one thing. Cause like I have not seen this content at all. You haven't seen the Australian girl, jump roping? No, I have not seen that one, but this one is in like the video flow, whatever that is like the main screen on the application or even on the web. This is like during the election when, I guess during the end of Trump's presidency and like when things were just really getting very, very heated, like that last year and a half ish of just like constant politics everywhere, nonstop. I'm just done with thinking about this and being berated by the internet. Like I'm on here to check out mountain bike videos, barbecue videos, maybe the odd home lab video from my friend Techno Tim or whatever. Like I'm here for that. That's my reason for being here right now. But I do have other personal interests and sometimes they are financially inclined. And so I care about the government and who's in office and how that's going. And how my friends are being impacted by it. And I blocked like Fox News and CNN and Sky News and like all these different things. But then you have these indie content creators that are almost if not more reputable than the mainstream outlets. Like as the climate changes for trustable content, so to speak. And so I blocked them. I can't see Fox News anymore. Like I've never seen it again in my main feed. Now I have seen somebody else talk about a clip from Fox News, so it still gets in that way. Or remixing. Right, exactly. With a reaction, you know, the one where the person's just watching the other video that you already showed you weren't interested in, but there it is. That's why they have reaction videos, they get past that. Cause I've blocked Fox News and like all the major outlets is like just parade this political climate content, this negativity and positivity in some cases. Like I just don't wanna see any of it. So I applaud them and the fact that I've never seen Fox, CNN, Sky News, and I'm just gonna like, I don't know who all, but like several of them where I'm just like, I'm done. I don't wanna see any more of you in this feed at all. I'm here for the barbecue, the occasional home lab stuff and whatever else. That's it. And the mountain biking. That's right, in the mountain biking. Show me how to change a tire, man. Come on. A microcosm of that is, did you know that during the remember the Johnny Depp trial, which was probably 18 months ago now. Yeah. The algorithms were so keen on that content that actual other creators started to shift their posting away from whatever they, I don't think Techno Tim did this, but for instance, like if you're a home labber, content creator on YouTube and everywhere else, all of a sudden Techno Tim's talking to Johnny Depp trial. It's like everybody actually, it was so juiced. I've seen that. Our good friend from Heavy Spoilers, he did that. Oh, he switched to Johnny Depp trial? He put out two videos, yeah. Yeah. Paul from Heavy Spoilers, he put that, he was on a version of this show before, I guess, backstage. Yes. Talking about Tenent, really, but Heavy Spoilers, he ended up in there. He was like, I don't really want to talk about this, but I have to. I didn't notice that really until you said that. I knew that there was some blowback from other creators getting infected, basically. A lot of people were doing it because it was just, they were getting so much more engagement and coverage and boosting of the algorithms as they do that, which to me just shows how kind of pathetic we are as a culture and how, I don't know, I guess we just serve at the pleasure of the king and the king is the algorithm of whatever platform you're currently on. And so the incentives are really there. Or who controls the algorithm. Yeah, to do whatever you have to do to get into somebody's face. And as a parent, that's pretty scary because they are highly incentivized to get in your kid's face. Jared, you were saying that you don't think block lists ultimately are good enough. So you've taken the other approach, right? It's just like, instead of saying all the stuff that can't come in, you're saying, here's the only things that can come in. Is that right? Yeah, that's been my thought. Now, I understand that there's lots of different people and families in different scenarios, different ages and different thoughts on this. And everybody's not gonna land in the same place for sure. But I think I'm not alone. I think there's a decent number of parents that feel like they wanna be pretty darn strict and careful about what content their kids either accidentally or intentionally expose themselves to. I feel like if you're kind of on that end of the spectrum where this topic feels really important to you and you kind of care about being really careful, then you really kind of have to flip it on its head in my mind and that whole concept of, let's just try to block out the bad stuff. Let's trust that somebody's got like a list somewhere. I don't think it works as well as people think. I mean, it works somewhat. It is better than nothing. It's one of those defense in depth or if that's kind of all you're up for and that's the only appetite you have, I would say do it. I'm not against block lists, but I would encourage like every parent, like if they're dealing with this stuff at home or thinking carefully about it, I would encourage you to kind of take that penetration tester mindset and just, if you think, okay, I'm good. I've taken these steps. I've got this device over here. I checked these settings on their iPhone or their computer. Just, I tell people to kind of like put yourself in this sort of thought experiment of imagine, take your kid's device, whatever they're using, and imagine that somebody would literally give you $100 ,000 if you could find something really inappropriate in the next 10 minutes. And I would wager that in the vast majority of the cases, you could probably find something. And I just - For 30 seconds. Yeah, maybe 30 seconds. I just kind of want to like open people's eyes to that and like, I don't want to discourage people, but I just want people to think realistically about that. I think sometimes like the vendors, whether it's Apple or the people who are selling kind of like safety stuff, sometimes I feel like they kind of sell us an illusion of safety instead of real safety. They say like, hey, don't worry. Like all parents want to like have this taken care of, but also this is not the kind of thing that like parents enjoy doing. Nobody like wakes up on a Saturday and says, you know, I'm just going to totally dial in my kid's like devices. That sounds fun today. And so we're susceptible to this kind of idea of like, hey, here's some marketing that says we're going to block 5 million websites. Okay, done. Now I can move on and think about what I really want to think about. But I just feel like this issue is just so important and probably like not talked about enough and not deeply considered enough. It kind of pays to have that mindset of saying like, it's worth taking some time as a mother, as a father, and just saying like, what do they really have access to? What could they get to if they wanted to? What could their friends share with them? You know, what could, if you kind of open up that whole little bit, if you're willing to kind of like take the, what's it, the red pill or the blue pill? I forget. One of the pills. Take the pill, then one of those. Red pill. The red pill. I think you might kind of be a little bit shocked. And that's where I think if you kind of have this little bit of awakening and say, okay, we got to do something a little bit more intense than this. Right now, what makes sense to me, just kind of at a fundamental level is like, you've got to flip it. You've got to block the entire internet. And then you've got to just safe list the parts that like, you want your kids to have access to. And different parents are going to have different appetites. I'm kind of on the strict side with my kids. It makes sense to me. So many thoughts about this, but I think if some people knew like how strict I am with my kids and their internet usage, they might say like, you're a little bit crazy. But I talked to them a ton about why we do this with them. I talked to them about stuff that I got into as a kid. I talked to them about what I keep myself out of as an adult. And it's not just this kind of like comes from on high of like, this is, I'm going to block you out of everything because you're a terrible person. It's in the context of like a lot of dialogue and relationship. And I kind of, I think they understand it and they're kind of, they become sort of allies with me and they'll rush in and bring me their phone or bring me their computer and say like, hey dad, I found a, this isn't working or I found this thing. Can you block this for me? And they've kind of internalized that like, this is an important thing to do, but I'm kind of on a tangent. But yeah, the idea of kind of like safe listing instead of block listing, I think is huge. And that's, when you look out there in the market for tools to do that, there's just very, very few tools do that and I think it's because it's complex, it's hard to do, it can be cumbersome for the parents, requires some technical savvy that a lot of parents don't have and it's just so much easier to kind of press the easy button of like block the bad stuff for me. Yeah, that's the experience I had. I knew I wanted to take this approach of blocking everything. And so I found what I thought was like the best thing on the market for Mac computers. That's kind of what my kids, we're mostly like an Apple household. And I'm like, okay, for Mac computers, how do I do this? I go, there's only a couple things out there that'll even let you work in that mode. And I used one of them for a number of months and just found it incredibly onerous and difficult and time consuming. And like you were saying earlier about some of the screen time stuff, like kind of buggy and just weirdly stopped working. And as a programmer, like I guess most parents, they would probably just be like, this is terrible and they would probably turn it off. But as a programmer, you're kind of like, it's not how I would have done it. You know, I would have built it like this. Why can't this talk to an API? And why can't this, why do they have to bring their computer over here onto my desk? And why do I have to type this domain in here? Like I would build this. And I just started like, you know, when you have to use a piece of software you really don't like, you just kind of build up this like wishlist of like, I wish I'd had this and this and this and this and this. And one day I just kind of, we had one of these bugs, one of these failures where luckily my daughter came to us and said like, hey, this just stopped blocking the internet and I can get to this and this and this. And that kind of just like pushed me over the edge. And I said like, I got a little extra time. Like there's always that, you know, naive feeling when you haven't tackled a problem, you're always like, how hard could this be? You know, and just thought, I'm gonna give this a shot. And that's kind of how I got deeper into this world than I was back then. So does this work on iOS or is this Mac only for now? Like what's the, it's a one man show I'm sure, right? So give us some of the lay of the land of like your footprint and where you protect and whatnot. Cause I've got questions about iOS more so than the desktop really. Yeah, it's a good question. So yeah, it's mostly a one man shop right now. So it's pretty small. And to be honest, like I built the thing almost 100 % for me at first. Like I knew I would use it. I knew my brother would use it, but that was, I didn't even necessarily think that anybody else would use it. And so I'm mentioning this just to kind of answer your question about iOS, because I didn't have a need. And honestly, I still don't have a need for running like my own software on iOS. Although that's slightly changed with that whole iOS 17 regression that hasn't been fixed yet. But my kids and their iOS devices, I felt pretty good about partially just because I don't give them devices until probably way later than most people. And that's just one of those simple, like you want a simple non -techie thing that parents can do to keep their kids safe, I'd say start by giving them a phone way later than most everybody else. It takes no technical skills, just takes a little bit of courage. My kids didn't get phones till they were quite a bit older. And then using screen time, all the really good stuff Apple gives you, I had those things super locked down. Like they don't even have Safari, they can't even browse the internet on their phones. Because their phones are for like calling us, for texting, for a couple apps that like I think are valuable. There's a little bit of like a mindset thing, like why do our kids have phones? Why do they need them? Do we want our kids to have these devices that are just these unbounded portals to the internet for arbitrary exploration? Like, I don't know that that's a great idea, you know? There's some wonderful things about smartphones and you can, you know, know where your kids are and you can, stuff like that. But I think sometimes we just don't think about it and we just think, well, all the friends have a phone, I'll give them a phone and just we're okay with everything that like comes along with it. And I know Android has some good tools in this regard too, I'm just not as familiar. But basically my kids had like their iPhones super locked down and I was comfortable. But what they needed to do is they were doing a whole bunch of schoolwork on computers. It was like during COVID and we homeschool anyway. And more and more as they got older, they're working on computers. And so for me, it was like, I need something for a Mac, that Mac OS, that was like my target. And so anyway, I was totally just scratching my own itch and saying, I'm gonna build this for me. And if it works for me, then I'll be happy. And so kind of the initial like prototype of like what's now called, well, it always has been called Gertrude, it's Mac only. And that's where it still is today. But Adam, you're asking about iOS. Like I have users kind of reaching out to me who've said like, it's a common thing as people say like, oh, I want it. Why doesn't it work on iOS? Why can't you do it? And I'm open to, yeah, I don't know. There's some challenges there just from the like API surface of what Apple like exposes for people like me, what you can and can't do. The core answer is I built a thing kind of for me to start with. And what I needed was a way to lock down Mac computers, not iOS devices. But I recognize that not everybody's in that same boat. And I actually have some real shortly, I'm gonna be doing some like prototyping, some experiments with kind of porting Gertrude to iOS. And I don't know if it's gonna feel like, yeah, this is worth it and I should go there, but I'm at least gonna experiment with that. There's some aspects of what Gertrude can do that will work on iOS in the parameters that like Apple gives you. And there's some things that we do in Gertrude that I literally can't do. And so it would be kind of a different animal, you know what I mean? But I know there's an appetite out there for it and I'm definitely looking into it. What kind of stuff can't you do that you're doing? Well, like for instance, Gertrude right now allows you to, you can opt into this feature where it takes a semi randomized like intermittent screenshots approximately every so many seconds, right? So Gertrude really is like a combination of the sort of white list blocking of the internet that I described, plus a whole bunch of kind of like tools and concepts around remote administration of that to make it easy for parents. But it also has like monitoring in the form of, they're totally opt -in, but there's two ways you can do monitoring. You can take screenshots and we don't ever hide this from the kids. Like we don't, it's not like a sort of a creepy, scary, like, you know, spy on you thing. If I've got that feature turned on, your kid sees in their menu bar that Gertrude is recording their screen. So that's something like no matter what they're doing, no matter whether they're on a browser or using some app or doing homework, Gertrude can just take you pictures of what they're doing and they upload it. And then kind of on the parents' free time or whatever, just in the Gertrude web app, you can just sit there and thumb through and see all the stuff that your kid's doing. I mentioned that because that's a thing that like macOS allows you to do. Now you have to grant permission one time for kind of like if you've ever used Skype or anything that wants to record your screen, you got to give it permission one time. But once you've done that, I can like arbitrarily take screenshots and upload those for parents to review. And iOS just doesn't let you do that. Like they don't, it's just a much more constrained environment. They're worried about privacy. They're worried about battery life, stuff like that. And so you can't, if that were an option, then maybe I would have worked on porting Gertrude to iOS sooner because the whole screenshot feature is honestly like it's like a fantastic tool for accountability, not for spying on your kids. Some people kind of get a little bit like creeped out about that, but like it's not, but for with their knowledge is sort of like a transparent thing of like, hey, I'm giving you, like when I give my kids a computer to use for schoolwork, there's not an expectation of privacy. This is like a tool I'm giving you to do your school on and I'm going to be able to see what you do on it. And they can see that I can see. And it's just very, it's very similar to like, if you know, if I had the time to, I could say, hey, son or daughter, like when you do your homework, I want you to sit on the kitchen table and I'm going to be over here chopping onions in the kitchen. And you know, I'm going to look up every so often and just kind of make sure you're doing what you're supposed to be doing and you're staying where you need to be. It's just most parents don't have the ability or the time to kind of like pull that off. But anyway, Gertrude lets you do that. And it opens up actually some really fantastic kind of other properties that you can do as well. Like turning off the filter temporarily for a little bit, as long as you have that oversight. But that's sadly something that just, I don't, I haven't fully fleshed out like what iOS will let me do and what they won't do. I think there's some possibilities if I install a Safari extension that I might be able to like take screenshots while they're on Safari, if long as I have code running inside of Safari at that time. But it's just, it's just a much more constrained environment and the macOS compared to iOS is like kind of like more like the wild west, you know. Yeah, totally. This is why VPNs exist. I mean, it really is. Cause it's the easiest way to get to most of the controls you're trying to do. Like that's what they do at corporate levels, right? Like if you're on a corporate device, DNS, you're usually VPN and that's DNS essentially. You're VPN into a certain network that has DNS restrictions. And that's why DNS tends to be the primary lever pulled by most, you know, network security folks. Yeah, I wonder if managed phones have those kinds of access beyond, you know, to the camera, to these things to run in the background, whereas a typical iPhone wouldn't. I could only see why Apple wouldn't want you to do that because specifically battery life, I think, would be significantly affected if you're screen recording the entire time the device is in use. But I think that Gertrude would be useful for iOS folks even without that particular feature of the monitoring just with the allow list. You know, the blocker is a huge part of what it does. And I suspect many parents aren't as interested in the monitoring as you are and would still use it without that particular feature. What that sounds like to me is very much like, I think schools have these things where like they're making sure you're not cheating. You know, you're using a computer and you can seriously cheat. Of course they have all their restrictions on you can't use this, that or the other thing. But at the end of the day, somebody watching you or even just the illusion of somebody watching you is oftentimes enough to detract from the cheaters in school. I know when you take the GED, they actually have somebody. You can take the GED here in Nebraska remotely and they have somebody who just sits there and watches you. Like you have to have your webcam on. It's not automated, it's not a computer. It's like a human whose job it is is to just watch you while you're taking your GED remotely and make sure you don't have a book open or using a phone to Google things along the way. So I definitely see that as a very useful feature especially in school room scenarios or people who are using these computers as tools and not as playthings, right? What's up friends, I'm here with Vijay Raji, CEO and founder of Statsig where they help thousands of companies from startups to fortune 500s to ship faster and smarter with a unified platform for feature flags, experimentation and analytics. So Vijay, what's the inception story of Statsig? Why did you build this?

Yeah, so Statsig started about two and a half years ago. And before that I was at Facebook for 10 years where I saw firsthand the set of tools that people or engineers inside Facebook had access to and this breadth and depth of the tools that actually led to the formation of the canonical engineering culture that Facebook is famous for. And that also got me thinking about like, how do you distill all of that and bring it out to everyone? If every company wants to like build that kind of an engineering culture of building and shipping things really fast, using data to make data informed decisions and then also informed to like, what do you need to go invest in next? And all of that was like fascinating, was really, really powerful. So, so much so that I decided to quit Facebook and start this company. Yeah, so in the last two and a half years, we've been building those tools that are helping engineers today to build and ship new features and then roll them out. And as they're rolling it out, also understand the impact of those features. Does it have bugs? Does it impact your customers in the way that you expected it? Or are there some side effects, unintended side effects? And knowing those things help you make your product better. It's somewhat common now to hear this train of thought where

an engineer developer was at one of the big companies, Facebook, Google, Airbnb, you name it, and they get used to certain tooling on the inside. They get used to certain workflows, certain developer culture, certain ways of doing things, tooling of course. And then they leave and they miss everything they had while at that company. And they go and they start their own company like you did. What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on that kind of tech being on the inside of the big companies and those of us out here, not in those companies without that tooling?

In order to get the same level of sophistication of tools that companies like Facebook, Google, Airbnb and Uber have, you need to invest quite a bit. You need to like take some of your best engineers and then go have them go build tools like this. And not every company has the luxury to go do that, right? Because it's a pretty large investment. And so the fact that the sophistication of those tools inside these companies have advanced so much and that's like left behind most of the other companies and the tooling that they get access to is that's exactly the opportunity that I was like, okay, well, we need to bring those sophistication outside so everybody can be benefiting from these.

Okay, the next step is to go to statsig .com slash changelaw. They're offering our fans free white glove onboarding, including migration support in addition to 5 million free events per month. That's massive. Test drive statsig today at statsig .com slash

changelaw. That's S -T -A -T -S -I -G .com slash changelaw. The link is in the show notes.

It sounds like though that Gertrude is not a preventative when it comes to the screenshots. It's like more information for the parent to use or whomever is monitoring whomever. It could be, let's just say this, like it could be an older adult, a parent who is no longer that well off mentally that's being scammed, right? Like you still have to protect somebody. Like it could not be just a child. It could be somebody you care about deeply that doesn't have the expertise, knowledge, or cognitive ability to really maintain themselves. Like it sounds like it's more of an information tool than a blocker. Like it's blocking the internet, but when it comes to screenshots, that's just giving you feedback to what's happening, right? Like that's the information to go as a person deal with, not at a technical level deal with. Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense. And you're right, like it works great for parents kind of watching over their kids and kind of being careful with their kids, but that's not the only relationship that if you have any sort of relationship where somebody is kind of looking out for somebody else, you mentioned like, you know, elderly people and scams and stuff like that. But I had a Gertrude user reach out to me and say they were, you know, I kind of market more to like parents and children, cause that's, you know, what I made it for. But I had someone reach out and say like, oh, I'm using this with my fiance. And they kind of were saying, oh, this is the first thing that's really worked for us because it's so like you can remotely, basically whoever is like the parent in the relationship can kind of like remotely manage stuff. And that was one of the things that like, I was so frustrated about the fact that I had my kids, it's like, if I wanted to like allow a website, the only thing they could do is like literally bring it to me and I had to type it in. And this person who reached out to me said like, hey, I live across the city from my fiancee and I was trying to like manage their allowed websites through this other thing. And like, we would literally have to drive to each other for me to like unblock something for them. And so they were kind of saying just the ability to kind of like remotely say like, hey, I get a notification, I get a Slack or a text when they need something then I can just do it from my computer. And that's kind of one of those things that like, I think takes, I don't know, it's never gonna be as easy to maintain like allow lists as it would be to just block stuff out. But there's all these little things we can do to sort of chip away at the usability and the difficulty of like actually succeeding with this approach. The screenshots are kind of like one thing that really actually goes a long way towards that because if you can see what your kids are doing or the person you're helping protect, there's this real natural like accountability. And I found using it with my kids a whole bunch that like I had a bunch of sites that they needed to get to for school every day that I had unlocked and they just used them and they just worked. But they had all these kind of weird little edge cases where, you know, oh, hey dad, I've got to get on this like Zoom call with my teacher and they're gonna want me to go here and there and they're gonna send me links to click and I can't allow those in advance. I don't know what they are and they might never need to go back there, you know? And so I didn't kind of realize this when I first started it but by having those extra layers of like monitoring, including screenshots, it allowed me to kind of like build this feature where I could temporarily just turn off the filter because, and that sort of came from just all this is just me scratching my own itch, you know? Like I had this six months period where my daughter, every single like Friday at 1 p .m. I would have to turn off her filter for an hour and I would say to her, hey, you know, remember I'm still getting screenshots. I kind of wink at her and send her back with her like computer unfiltered. And then I thought like, why does she have to bring me my computer for this? Why can't I just like remotely control this? I'd rather sit here in my office and just get a Slack message like I do with the other stuff, you know? And so kind of built that feature and it's become like super really handy for parents or for people protecting other people is like they know like, hey, I'm watching and they know that they're being watched by somebody who's trying to help them. And that means you get these sort of like rare times where it's like, oh, the filter's frustrating and I can't, I don't know where I need to go but for a few minutes I need to go somewhere. You can just turn it off but there's this like sort of this extra layer of safety of just like the oversight that something like screenshots or the other monitoring feature like provides, you know? And some neat things fall out of that and that's where I'm so constrained on iOS that like I've been wondering like, will it be worth it, you know? But I think it might be. If we can go back to that fiance situation and just address it to a certain extent, I think that it's easy because I even had this natural reaction and had to kind of gut check it. It's easy to think little of somebody who would be in that situation and say like you're seriously, you're gonna monitor the computer usage of your fiance across town but as unseemly as it is to talk about, porn addiction is a very real phenomenon and it can be very destructive and it can destroy relationships and one of the things that happens with that is lack of trust and this could be a tool to help build trust, to provide accountability and to help that person who is addicted, but addicted folks need help, that's why we call it addiction and there's all sorts of backsliding and problems and even if you desire to be done with something in your life, your natural inclination is to fall back into that habit and so I think it's a great thing that you can provide that as an option for people who otherwise wouldn't have that trust, maybe that trust has been tarnished and they're trying to rebuild that to have that option, they can both opt into and they can help each other and they could really repair something that was potentially broken. So I know when you said somebody watching their fiance, my gut was like ugh, who would need that? But then I had to stop and realize that people do need help and that people do become addicted to porn and sometimes they can't stop and they won't without some sort of help and so just wanted to broach that even though it's not the most fun topic to talk about. I appreciate that, I think you're exactly right. Yeah, it's one of these things again, like no one really loves to talk about it, but I think there's a ton of people who are in really, really painful and destructive addictions to pornography and they desperately want out and I don't think a relationship like the one I described works without both parties wanting it to work. And so it's a little bit less, like I as a parent, I can just use my parental authority and say hey, you're not gonna get on the internet except for in the ways that I allow you, but in a peer -to -peer adult relationship, I think there needs to be buy -in, but I can tell you that it's not just a couple people who want that, the kind of like the algorithm and the access and just the ubiquity of what's available on the internet these days has, I don't know, there's been a huge, huge cost to that for tons and tons of people and there are, and not everybody, but there's a very significant number of people out there that I think are caught in a really painful, emotionally destructive relationship with pornography and the tools for them are, there's people out there building tools for this and I wish them all the best, but I think we need more tools, we need better tools, and we need to be willing, I think, to talk about this a little bit and just acknowledge how big of a deal it is and we've just gone through this incredibly transformative period in history of kind of going, I think all three of us, like when we were kids, there was no internet, we had our problems and we had different stuff that came our way, but the ease at which you can find stuff on the internet nowadays and the quantity and the, I hesitate to use the word quality, but I think you know what I mean, like the, it hurts a ton of people, it really, really does. Well, you imagine somebody who's addicted to alcohol and they find themselves living next door to a liquor shop, like these things are, and the internet is a double edged sword, I mean, it's so valuable, it's so useful, it's so necessary today in 2023 for your life that there's few of us that could just opt entirely out of the entire thing, I mean, most of them are like retired, you know, they're like, nah, I don't need computers, I'm retired. Most of us need to be there and we need tools to help us to be there in a way that is beneficial for our life and not destructive. How long have you been working on this, long time? I should actually look at the day, I feel like it's about three years, again, it started as kind of just this little, like hacky prototype of can I whip something together that'll just be better than what I was using, you know? And I think that was around three years ago, maybe three and a half years ago, I kind of got the like pre -alpha version and just install it on my kid's computer, started using it, it was like had no, almost no like configuration. I always knew from the beginning, like one of the core things I wanted to do is to be able to like remotely administer it as the parent, like I didn't wanna, like there's a couple of things like that, like I wanted to be able to do it from my computer, not their computer. I also knew I wanted to like share, like if I was unlocking something for my one son, I wanna unlock it for my daughter a lot of the time too, you know? And so I had a couple of the very sort of nascent, like key features I built into the very beginning, but it was kind of like, like I took all these shortcuts, like the first, I had no like configuration or real API, I had like JSON files, like an S3 somewhere and like I could just go and add my domains up there and like did that for a while and just kind of proved out the theory a little bit and said like, hey, this is actually like, this is pretty slick. I already like it better than what I was using. Not everybody is gonna be able to like manually edit JSON files for config. So maybe I'll wrap a, build a proper UI with a database is kind of like an API and stuff like that. But just kind of incrementally as I was building stuff for myself and then like a few people who knew me pretty closely were like, hey, can I use that? And then every time a few more people used it, I would kind of have to like make it a little bit more friendly and kind of wrap more sort of features around it and stuff like that. But recently I've been working on it most of the time, but like for a while it was like pushed really hard for a couple of weeks, got something kind of working, went back to what else I was doing and kind of let it sit for a while, you know? Mm -hmm. Why'd you call it Gertrude? Is that your grandma's name or something? No, not my grandma's name. Naming things is hard, right? Actually, I happen to, I always, whenever I'm working on something, I tend to give them weird names, oftentimes people's names, but I happen to have been, right when I started working on Gertrude, my second daughter who I think was 10 or 11 at that time, I was reading this book with her called Gentle Gertrude and it was all about this governess. And I thought that's kind of a cool term. Like I thought about using the word governess, but I didn't love all the implications. And then I just thought, I'll just call it Gertrude. So this is a book I read. Gotcha. That's an interesting strategy for a piece of software. I mean, we talk about naming a lot, whether a name is good or bad, and lots of names are functional or they'll reference something, pop culture, not too many proper nouns, like human names as a piece of software name. I assume that helps a lot with like namespace conflicts. Nobody else is calling it their app Gertrude probably. So easy domains, easy branding. For some reason, I do picture kind of a nanny or something, like someone who's watching you like a nun, perhaps. Like a nice matronly, grandmotherly figure. Yeah, yeah. I think of a nun or something who's running a classroom. I don't know which, not necessarily a positive connotation in that regard, but nonetheless, interesting name. Well, that's kind of what it was. It's an obsolete term based on the internet. Governess is a woman employed as a private tutor who teaches and trains a child or children in their home. There you go. Often lives in the same residence. Yeah, people should use the proper noun naming. My old business, we had all these internal tools. We could never figure out what to name them. We had like this reporting backend, we called it Bob. And then we had this other thing that kind of did all of the like business logic in our web app and we named it Tim. And we just, I don't know. So maybe it rubbed off on me from just naming stuff after random names, but it works. I choose, for my machines at least, I choose usually some sort of ship from a movie. So Endurance is my kind of primary main beefy machine. I have another one called Homestead, which is actually not, it isn't my home and it is my homestead, but it is actually the ship from the movie Passengers. They were flying on the homestead going to their destination or whatever. I'm like, that's kind of cool. It doubles up. It's like in my home as a primary machine and it's also called Homestead. My favorite naming convention of all time was when I did all of the names from the TV show MASH because there's a bunch of good names. So you had Radar and that was our Nagios box that was watching the network. You had Hawkeye and Trapper. Those are the mail servers. You had Hot Lips Houlihan. She was the - I was just gonna ask if you used Hot Lips. We did. It was the XMPP server. So maybe a little bit going after her there with the Jabber. So, cause she was always running around. And then we had, oh, we used them all. I can't remember them all now, but well, it's a doctor, the stuffy guy, not Winston. Yeah, I can picture him. I can't think of the name. Yeah, the bald guy. Anyways, eventually that network outgrew the show MASH and I got angry cause I was like, ah, now what am I going to do? I think we might've switched to Seinfeld or something at that point. But the good old days of treating our servers like pets, not like cattle, you know? All right, cool. So Gertrude Mac OS only for the time being, apparently has a web app component. So I assume that you're Swift on the Mac OS side and what are you running in server side? What's your tools of choice? Yeah, so it has a web app. You're right. That's kind of the parent or the person who's functioning as the parent in the relationship. You know, they use a web app so they can kind of administer and review stuff and unlock things for their kids no matter where they are, as long as they have a web browser. I am actually running Swift on the server too, since, which is not a terribly common thing to do, but yeah, the whole Mac app's written in Swift, partially because I was learning and kind of getting into and kind of enjoying Swift. I thought like, well, maybe I could, you know, Swift on the server is kind of a thing and sort of a new area at that time. At least it's been, it's a little more mature now, but I kind of jumped in in fairly early days where there weren't like a ton of libraries and like, it's not like everything was already solved for Swift on the server, which is a little bit appeals to me cause I'm a little bit of a guy who likes to roll my own things, you know, sometimes, but the, yeah, the API is written in Swift and talks, that allows me to actually share some code, which is nice. That was one of the, some of the core like types that are shared kind of between the API and the Mac OS app. Like they're literally like the same Swift code and they're just a SPM module and both the server app and the Mac OS app can like import that and share that stuff. And then of course the web app's built in TypeScript, but I do some interesting stuff with the interesting to me, at least about like a type safe, like API about just a little bit like GraphQL. I do some kind of my own deal where I kind of take some of the types that live in the Swift world and kind of generate TypeScript, types for them. I know you're not a big TypeScript guy, Jared. You haven't seen the light yet, but you'll get there one day. But

so

yeah, we're kind of heavy on the TypeScript side for the whole web app world, but then it's like a ton of Swift other than that. That's cool. So I had never met somebody doing Swift on both sides. I've heard it's a thing. Are the website frameworks and everything, you said it started off there was kind of rough. Are you using anything that's like a major framework or is it all libraries that you're gluing together? How does it feel from that perspective? Yeah, I'm currently using something called Vapor, which is sort of one of the, it's probably the most well -known like Swift server web frameworks. Although if I were starting again today, I actually might, there's some other ones that have, it's a little bit more batteries included full. It's a little bit aiming to be kind of like the rails of Swift. And I personally lean a little bit more towards like I would rather kind of have pick and choose some smaller parts and there's some more slimmer frameworks. There's one called Hummingbird out right now that I've kind of have my eye on a little bit. But yeah, I use Vapor, although I use kind of, I don't use a ton of it. It's got a templating language and it's got an ORM and I actually ended up sort of slightly rolling my own Swift ORM for talking to Postgres. The ecosystem is pretty decent and it's growing all the time, there's fewer holes now. Like if somebody were interested in doing Swift on the server, I think honestly the thing that draws the most people I think to Swift on the server is if they're in some sort of situation like I was where their primary thing they're building is either an iOS app or a Mac OS app and they just have tons of code and tons of logic and business types kind of in Swift. It's pretty compelling to be able to just say like, we can share a lot of this code and we don't have to like have our server written in Go and our iOS app written in Swift and then do the three language thing. And it's a pretty great language too. I've actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It's got its warts like they all do, but. Sure. Oh, the isomorphic application. Everybody's going after the JavaScript isomorphic apps but it turns out Swift also can play that game. That's pretty cool. Have you considered open source or self hosted? You're trying to make a little bit of money off this but it seems like some of your audience are the kind of people who would love to self host and then there's plenty of people who you could still make money off of who are just regular Joes who want the solution. And so I don't think it necessarily would detract from your sustainability story by allowing the nerds like us, you know, cause Adam wants to go self hosted with everything. So have you considered that like open source the web app side or, you know, self hosted kind of give to the indie hacker community at all? Yeah, that's an interesting thought. I've never actually seriously considered it. Yeah, I mean, at this point you're saying I'm trying to make a little money. Right now I'd just be happy if I stopped losing money on it. Is where I'm at to be honest. How much you got into it if you don't mind us asking like. I mean, not vast treasures or anything. I would have to like, it's an expensive little side project right now and the number of like users that is not really offsetting yet so you're currently bleeding at the moment. Yeah, I'm bleeding a little bit, but it's all right. I wonder how much of an appetite there would be for like a self hosted like you're saying like basically the API and the web app if somebody could host that, put that on their own domain make sure their Gertrude Mac apps talk to that API. Yeah, exactly. Like maybe you add a config screen that nobody normally sees but they could just change the backend, you know in the Gertrude apps on the desktops and then use their own just because autonomy is of interest. Sure, transparency. Yeah, all the things. Well, let me ask you this question because one of the reasons why I've been like right now the web app is not a public repo on GitHub and, but one of the things that's kind of made me reluctant to do that is like, I'm building a like piece of software for like security and safety for your kids. And I had this thought that like if it gets moderately popular, like, and someone says like, oh, like, do you know that like the Gertrude parents website is like on GitHub and I've got people crawling all over it looking for things that I didn't realize little security holes trying to reverse engineer something or find some route where I forgot to do my authentication correct or something. I think I got all that stuff nailed down pretty good but I love doing open source stuff. And as many of the things that I can just do like I got this whole other world I work on that that's a hundred percent open source. But whenever I've thought about it with Gertrude I've thought like, oh, this is just not something that I think makes sense to be like completely open. And so, but do you think that my intuition is wrong in that regard? I would tend to think it is. I understand the intuition. I think it's the devil you know versus the devil you don't know. I think if Gertrude becomes popular you'll have as many are offsetting contributors and smart parties who are helping you with security as you would people who are coming against you, your security. And so you'll have more eyes on the source. Of course, that means potentially people will find you more problems but also means people fixing more problems. And I think today's attackers are significantly good enough that they don't really need your source code in order like the fuzzers are good enough. They can just bang on your API in all the weird ways and find bugs where especially if that's all you're exposing as a service, I think they're not necessarily gonna find too much that they couldn't find themselves just by banging on it. So not a guarantee, but I think, you know it needs to be secure historically has been an argument for not open sourcing things. I think there's a lot of things that need to be secure that are out there in the open source world and there's studies and stuff that prove that they're potentially even more secure than they would have been otherwise. I can see both sides of that but I think it's more of a coin flip than it is like you're screwing yourself by doing it. I think it kind of depends on the long -term vision too really let me ask you a couple of questions I guess to understand your long -term vision. Do you, would you work on this full -time if you could? I would, I think so because I care about it, you know because I think it's like legitimately could be helpful you know, it feels worth doing. I know that maybe sounds a little like I'm singing Kumbaya or something but I really do feel like there's a some of the stuff we talked about about people hurting and addictions and also just like young people kind of getting getting into addiction when they they shouldn't even have access to those sorts of things. Like those things kind of feel really important to me to be honest. And so if Gertrude like filled a little niche that like was legitimately helpful to some people I'd be, yeah, I'd be pleased to work on it full -time. I mostly am already right now, but. Mostly. Well, have you thought much about the business model? Have you thought at all about the business model? Cause you just said you'd be happy to not be losing money. So I'm curious what you thought about the business model. There is a model currently. Yeah, you got to pay me five bucks a month. That's the model. That's the model, okay. Maybe that's a naive way to think about it. But like it's a, yeah I just thought a monthly subscription is kind of like you know, enough to pay for, start there. I've always kind of been the like, you know have people pay for it from the beginning kind of bootstrap it. I'm pretty averse to like, you know not that anybody's knocking out my doors with VC money or anything, but like I my first sort of small business that I made I built a thing and I charged it for it from day one. And that sort of like ethos kind of always appealed to me a little bit, a little bit like the 37 signals and their early literature about like, hey like build something, charge for it. And bootstrap it. And that always kind of fit with what I wanted to do. And so to me, like there's a lot of things where people are taking software and like everyone wants a monthly subscription, you know and I feel like there's a lot of software where it's like really this is a monthly thing where they're kind of shoehorning it into that. Whereas I feel like this is like seems really logical of like a It makes sense. It just kind of like, it's natural that like I've got to keep the API running. I got to pay all this stuff for all, you know, on S3 and I gotta be able to text you and I got to do all these other things. And so I need a little flow of steady as long as you're using it. But I've tried to be really like generous too that like, I know parents, like right now like if you sign up for Gertrude you can protect all your, your whole family. I don't have a limit right now, but you got 12 kids you know, protect them all on, on your monthly subscription. You know, maybe that won't be sustainable and maybe that's why I'm not earning any money yet. I'm not maybe the best business guy, you know, but. What we're getting here from is Jared asking you about open source and you know, your concern for like is that, does that make sense? Cause it's a security tool. And then I think about things like PF sense which can be deployed on AWS. You can protect in the cloud with a, you know in their words, the, you know, a secure open source firewall that everybody can trust security starts here kind of thing. And I just wonder if the model of open source might make sense because of the distribution and the freedoms. And so if you found a way to do that and I'm not ideating on the business model necessarily but one of PF senses ways to make money is through support and management and things like that. I think that's part of their, their business model. I just wonder if there's ways that you can help families deploy this for themselves, provide support. That also means more people potentially. But I just wonder if open source that route gives you the distribution and the freedoms within the software to reach the widest market, you know, globally because it's simply out there free and you provided the host of service. So you consume the open source. You host the open source service with things up around it but I can easily also stand up my own version of that with Docker on my network or whatever, or, you know on a cloud, on a VPS, I can one click deploy digital ocean. If I don't want to like manage local infrastructure with whatever and all I'm doing is API calls to my $10 a month thing at digital ocean. I'm just thinking out loud here because I'm not seeing all those are good or right or bad. It's just, are there freedoms that come with it being open source and distributions that come from open source that kind of are at the core of what you're trying to do anyways which is provide a useful tool to the world that might also be more secure because of more people knowing about it, caring about it pouring back into it, et cetera. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm real sympathetic to that. And like, I'm already, my wheels are spinning a little bit and just thinking, yeah, why don't I open? I mean, not so far as to immediately go to like building a self -hosted version just cause that's a lot of work but like just a simple step of like, hey, I could go open source this stuff. It's probably just as secure. Like that actually sounds really good. And I think that like, there's a possibility of like long -term kind of like allowing the self -hosted stuff. That'd be great because if they want to self -host it and take on themselves the expense of like maybe put it on a $5 digital ocean droplet, that's great. The one thing I would sort of push back on that is like there's a pretty small percentage of like, like we're not talking about a developer tool here. Like if we were talking about like, this is like you guys normally talk to developers and you're people building tooling for companies and engineering teams and stuff. Gertrude's a thing for like normal parents. And it's a very, I would guess it's a very, very small percentage that would have any sort of idea to think like, oh, can I host this on my own Docker instance? You know, and like you guys are super technical and knowledgeable about that stuff and it just make it clicks with you. Like, hey, I want to run it myself. But like, honestly, one of my main sort of passions about this whole thing is I really feel bad for like ordinary parents with ordinary computer skills and just the sense that most of them are completely overwhelmed by this. And I would like to put a lot of time and effort basically into like helping normal parents succeed at keeping their kids safe. And to me, that feels more compelling than, I don't mean to say that you're not important too, Adam, but like that small percentage of people that might potentially run their own. I'd love to do both and maybe I will, but like I just think, oh, the soccer moms out there and just the whatever, like I want them to not feel overwhelmed. And so that's what I'm working towards. My thought is this, is that you don't have to choose one or the other. I think you can do both. I think that Gertrude, the hosted version of it is for, in quotes, the soccer mom or somebody who just doesn't seem to be that connected to technology, spinning up a Linux box or managing a VPS or whatever it might be. These things that we know because we're technologists and we play with this stuff because it's fun for us, that's where I think that comes into play. Like Linux is widely distributed because of its model. It's open source nature. It's many distros of many flavors. PF Sense is widely used because it's open source. It's also a security tool. Imagine if they kept PF Sense behind the scenes and said, okay, this is not open source. This is only a pay -for -product. Would it be the same PF Sense? It is probably arguably one of the most deployed firewalls out there, aside from say UFW, because that's like it's free and an app getaway. And it's pretty easy to install that and configure it. But PF Sense is a tried and true router, firewall, all these different things rolled into one and you can deploy it on cloud. You can do it in many different ways. It's the core software, I think. And again, back to how we got there, wasn't me advocating, hey, open source this, but more so the security measures. Can you be more secure or can you have potentially better software that meets the needs of the world if the world uses it, if the world can give back to it and care just as much as you care, but still give you the freedom to spin up Gertrude, the hosted version of it, which is for the everybody's essentially, the non -techies. This is how I would look at it, is that Gertrude is in no way, what's the word, threatened by an open source self -hosted option because of the reason that you stated. Like if it was a developer tool, I think developer tools need to think more seriously before the open source, because they are more directly cannibalizing their line of income than you are. Because 98 % of the people that need Gertrude don't know what open source is. They're Swift for the server and they're never gonna stand up a self -hosted version or Docker for that matter. And so you're not really in a position to cannibalize a potential income stream, which is one of the things open source can certainly do. If everyone just self -hosts it, they don't hire you to host it, then why would they pay you any money? So I think that's not a threat for Gertrude. So then what's the upside, right, on the other side of the equation? Well, you said there aren't very many people who are technical and have this problem and maybe understand Swift, but I mean, you're talking to somebody from not halfway around the world, but halfway across the country, who even shares your exact same name. And I'm technical and I can code Swift and I have the same inclinations that you have. And so you found at least one other person, and Adam also, where the potential, like the world is big, there's a lot of people, and what you could find is like, maybe you find nine more Jareds out there, people of like mind with you who also want to hack on this. And maybe they're the only ones who ever care about that open source version, but now you've multiplied yourself times nine and you have a community of folks who have their own ideas and their own skills, and maybe they can fill gaps that you don't have, and you could hack on it together with them and they self -host theirs, you host yours. I mean, it could be a very Kumbaya moment. Maybe that doesn't happen, but like it's low risk, I think. And there's an extreme upside of realizing, actually, there's hackers out there and you just might attract them. And maybe all of a sudden Gertrude gets better than it ever would have been because one of those hackers has a great idea you never thought of, and by the way, he opened a PR while you were sleeping, and all you gotta do is hit the merge button. I mean, there's potential high upsides, and I think in your case, the downsides are relatively low. So I would encourage you to think about it, and I think no guarantee that that happens, but that's how communities are built, and communities can do amazing things. It's more possible that way than it's not though, right? Like if you do the open source route, it's more possible to gain, technically, free labor contributors. Ideologically, you're aligned, so they're giving their thing. That's how open source works. But you're more inclined to get it going that route than you are not, because you can't, not being open source. You have to be open source to get that gift. Ray, back to you. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm definitely open to you guys being right about that, and like I said, the fact that it's even just a code not being open source is kind of against my inclination to begin with, and so yeah, I'm intrigued by that, and you're right, like I don't see it being like a threat, even if it were a threat, that's not why I'm doing this. So yeah, there's not a huge downside. Really, the main downside is prioritizing the time and investment of just like, you can't just like wake up one day and say, oh, I have a self -hosted version. That's a whole bunch of work to put in, but I just need to ask myself like, would it be better for me to work on an iOS app before that, or build in more things for the core Mac app experience? But like, I'm really sympathetic, and I appreciate the insight on that. I would certainly open source it before I set up a self -hosted. Actually, I'd open source it, and on the readme, be like, if you wanna self -host this, accepting scripts and pull requests and whatever, because that would be the first thing I would do as a guy who wants to self -host it. If I see it's open source, I'd be like, okay, is there a Docker image? Oh, there's not a Docker image. Well, that's an easy pull request for me. I'll go build a Docker image and see if Jared likes it. And so you may start getting those kind of contributions to where you never have to build a self -hosted version, because that's maybe what the community does, for instance. Now you'd have to build stuff into the Mac app as well. So I'm not, I don't wanna act like it's zero work. And I definitely think the iOS app is probably a higher priority, but how much do you have to do to open source a thing? I mean, that's a question people probably ask themselves. And it's like, okay, a code review, a license selection, a readme, make sure there's no secrets in there, that kind of stuff. Maybe clean up the ugly parts if you have an ego as big as most people's. And that's about it. Yeah, it's pretty easy. I feel like I could basically click the button in GitHub today if I wanted to. Make public, yeah, exactly. Maybe I will, because I'm pretty careful about environment variables, but it would help me keep in the free tiers of some of these services I use too. It's frustrating, like you go off this cliff when you got a private repo, you know, I've often - True, free for open source, bam. Right, so you guys are talking me into it. Let me blow your mind with one idea though too. Oh, you got an idea? Just more of an observation, really, right? Like I think about the long view of this, you know, 10, 15 years down the road, let's just say, which is not impossible to consider, right? The internet's gonna be there, people are gonna be there. Hopefully there's been no what were threes or fours or whatever to make that. So assuming none of those things happen, right? Like we're still here, internet's still here, people are still here. Today's child is tomorrow's mother or father, right? Like if this is open source and it has a long life, and they were once in their past protected by their loving parents, and in the moment they didn't realize all the details, right, but I know it's hindsight. Like I think back to my mom all the time, things she did and things I didn't like as a kid, but now I appreciate as an adult the ways that she, you know, covered me and protected me or guided me. And I think, wow, that software protected me when I was younger, I didn't agree with it, but it's still there today, and it's still, it's like Linux, it just keeps growing, you know? And it's just there, and it's known, it's got the brand equity from being

available.

I don't fully agree with the name Gertrude, so let's maybe workshop that one, but you know, either way, the idea is that today's child is tomorrow's parent, right? They have a past of being protected and a future where they're like, I don't know, I've got some kids, or I've got this fiance situation, or this accountability partner situation, you know, with someone from their community that they're just trying to help, you know, be more safe, you know, because of this choice back in the day that made the long term more possible. You have this lifetime of a legacy in a way, you know? That'd be cool. Yeah, that'd be great, yeah. I like the thought of, the generations are gonna turn over, it always happens, and that's one thing that I feel like a little bit, we're living through this weird transition period where our parents didn't need to really, I wish they had kind of been a little bit more careful, but the internet was such a brand new thing in 1996 when I was getting in trouble that they had no clue what I was even doing, you know? But we've kind of moved past that, and we're raising kids in this environment, and they're gonna be raising kids in this environment. I hope we can kind of, as a society, sort of figure out a better way to kind of navigate this, and I don't think kind of doing nothing or just sort of hoping for the best is a good approach, you know? I think that we're gonna have to gain some wisdom, and then we're gonna have to pass on some wisdom, and it'd be great if, like I've seen some teenagers and adolescents who their parents have been really careful with them, and I think it's borne really good fruit, and I've seen them transitioning into adulthood, and it makes me really hopeful for kind of what they might be able to do and sort of passing on that wisdom, and so, yeah, I love the thought of people kind of using Gertrude multi -generational. Sounds awesome. Mm -hmm. It's either that or go work for Apple, you know? And solve the problem at the top. I mean, that's like a version of DNS solving, because I really think a lot of this should be built in as ubiquitous as Apple is and as privacy and safe as they say they are. I think there's so much to be done with screen time, so much to be done with even the idea of profiles, with an iPad, for example. I know we're talking about iOS here a little bit, but you don't have that notion in that kind of device where you have layers of security, essentially. You just don't have that. And I think it should be damn near outlawed. It'd be different if they were a minority. They are a majority and so influential in leadership. I don't understand why schools can have protections, but parents can't, or households can't. There's almost no paying attention to household operations from a security standpoint. We have to rely on open source tools like Pilehole, which is super awesome, but it's got limitations, right? We gotta rely on screen time. I mean, it's poor reporting, as Jared mentioned. Jared won, or I asked, ya boy, ya boy, that Jared. And it's just fraught with error. It's not meant to be a tool. It's actually called screen time. It's not called security time. It's just meant to sort of give you the necessary initial levers to do some things to monitor your screen and the time you spend on it. Not so much like security time or screen time. It's only scratching the surface. They may have even done it just because they had to. It's not like they went the depths necessary. And I have no idea. If there's somebody from Apple listening to this and they're like, Adam, you're wrong. We've gone super deep. We have a freaking division built around this. We spend a billion dollars a year doing this. I'm sure that's probably true, but talk to us. I would say that screen time is very well built out in terms of like feature set, and they thought of a lot of aspects of it. So I think it is almost to the point where it's difficult to do right because there's so many little sub screens and is it content restrictions or is it app limits or there's lots of, it could use some work, but I do appreciate how much they put into it because it does give you at least one layer as we've been talking about that you can deploy at the phone level. I'm curious about the PC side, the Android side, the Linux side. So I mean, if you're at the Mac OS level, like your big market at the desktop still is Windows, right? So like Gertrude for Windows is probably next on the list after Gertrude for iOS, I would assume, isn't it Jared? Yeah, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it, but I'm also, like I said, mostly a one man shop at this point. I got my nephew helping me with a bunch of the website stuff but, and my son a little bit too, both of whom have been protected with Gertrude. It's pretty funny. I got two people working on Gertrude who are a little bit less now as they've gotten older, but who were being protected by Gertrude while helping me build Gertrude, it was pretty cool. Be careful now, that's where the real security holes come from, you know, always from the inside. Yeah, but I've thought about Windows, because that's the thing, again, I built it to scratch my own itch and we use Mac computers and sometimes I tell people, I'm like, ah, I built this thing and they're like, oh, it's great, like how do I put it on my window? My kids use Windows and I go, ah, I got nothing for you at this point, but I'm open to it and there's some, you know, I have hopes that if I were to ever look into that that there's like a lot of like core business logic and code even, I mean you can compile Swift down with LLVM, just turns into machine code, you can run it on Windows, in fact, the Arc browser is about to come out with a Windows version and that whole thing's written in Swift. Interesting. And they've actually got a guy who's on the core team of Swift who's working on their, like Swift on Windows is a little bit like, it's lagging behind, but it's coming there, that's one of those areas where like I think Rust is like ahead of Swift, is like their sort of cross -platform story is better, but Swift has some pretty nice properties that make it good for, you know, theoretically good for compiling for different targets. So I've been watching that world with a little bit of interest and wondering, of course there'd be a layer that's like independent at some level where I have to talk to Windows APIs instead of the like APIs that Apple gives me for network filtering and stuff like that, but I've had thoughts that like if this kind of like gets a little bit of a life of its own and it feels right and enough people kind of want it on Windows machines, then I'd definitely be open to looking into that. Not to beat the dead horse, but that's another area where an open source community does the kind of thing. It's like, I want this on Windows. Oh, we're a little bit busy over here, but we would certainly help you get that going. And then somebody else is actually - PR is welcome. Yeah, somebody else is, you know, taking that on if they have an API they can hack against that they could sell phones or something. So I'll drop it. I've made my case, but - Point taken, I get it, I get it. It's true, it's just true. Like whenever you don't have enough stuff to do, it's also a nice excuse. Like, well, we'd love a Windows support, but you know, we don't have the funds, so PR is welcome. Who's? All right, anything else guys, before we call today? Gertrude .app. Yeah, Gertrude .app is the place to go, right? Yeah, head over there. How do you spell Gertrude, Jared? How do you spell it? G -E -R -T -R -U -D -E. Dot app. Dot app. Sorry, I told you I'm not a good marketer, yeah. So good. Gertrude .app. But yeah, check it out. I mean, it's, I don't know. I think a little bit like the audience of like this podcast we're almost all like techy people, mostly software engineers and stuff. And I think in some ways, it's because some of the complexity involved with kind of the approach that Gertrude takes doing like a allow list instead of a block list. It's like, it'd be easier I think to, you know, for developers to kind of like check out. I think they could probably like grok it quicker than most people at this point. Although I'm, like I said, I really care about the average parent. That's who I'm working towards, you know, but I don't have all the things built that I want to. And I think that like developers could like actually probably more easily kind of get some use out of it for now. And I also think like we have a little bit, you were talking about how like we can't install pie holes on all our friends' houses and that's true. But I also think that we do have a little bit of responsibility that falls to us to help the people that we have close relationships with. And if you're gonna like spread out your time of technical things, maybe let's all do a little bit less like fixing our neighbor's printer and maybe kind of help them with this stuff instead. I think it's long -term, it's so much more important to help people feel like they, you know, have control and that they're kind of guarding the hearts of their kids as they grow up. Like that's a thing I would encourage like people just listening to this. If you're probably in the top, you know, 5 % in terms of like tech savvy or top 1 % and just consider like helping a few people like figure this out. And I think it'd be time really, really well spent. For sure. Well said, Adam, any last words from you? Nah, I just wanna commend you on the website too. It's a great website, a lot of good information there. I love the visual of the losing game of the amount of websites on the internet. I think that's just super cool how you've visualized that. You mentioned the help you got from your nephew. I think you're all doing a pretty good job for being an upstart. A single person slash extra helper upstart. I think that's pretty cool. Definitely better than most out there to show off who you are. You've thought through a lot of stuff and you also offer a 60 day trial, which is, you know, very generous of you. Nice and long. I dig it. So you're saying he's a good marketer. Is that what you're saying? I think he did a pretty good job, honestly. I mean, this is pretty solid. This is a good base to build from, for sure. I appreciate that. It's not a, you know, boring single page that's not, it's got a lot of great information on there. It's compelling. If you have this problem, this is a compelling page. I appreciate that. If any part of it looks good, it's my nephew's doing. His name's Kaia. He's, I got no design skills whatsoever, but he's good at that stuff. Shout out to Kaia. Get him working on that Windows app. Come on. Yeah, that's right. Have it on my desk next week. All right, that's all for today. Thanks for hanging out with us. Bye, friends. Bye. Our changelog plus plus members get a big. Big. Big. Huge. Bonus on this episode. It starts with Adam fan manning about tail scale and eventually turns to nostalgia for the dial -up modem days. I don't know, man. I still remember the day when I was on IGN .com on my parents' dial -up modem. And I was about to peep a screen cap for the new Zelda game. And I literally sat there as it loaded in line by line. Line by line. Yeah, I remember those days. And I'm like, here it comes, here it comes. I mean, like 15 minutes later, I could view this image. And I was, I was pretty stoked, honestly, even though. I'm right there with you. I was downloading music from, you know, unknown sources. Just waiting for it to come. 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