Topic: Trackers

John Dvorak provides a "Tip of the Day" regarding affordable $25 fitness trackers that monitor sleep and blood oxygen using Chinese sensors. The show concludes with a classic "End of Show Mix" by Darren O'Neill, featuring a song about Dvorak's famously squeaky chair. The hosts sign off from Fredericksburg and Northern Silicon Valley, promising to return for the next episode.

Johns Hopkins University has discontinued its famous COVID-19 tracker due to a lack of available data as the pandemic's impact on daily life fades. The Biden administration plans to end the public health emergency declaration in May, though some medical correspondents warn that hundreds are still dying daily. The segment critiques the "devastating collision" of politics and public health, questioning the existence of a true public health system in the U.S.

The CDC corrected a "coding logic error" on its COVID data tracker that had inflated pediatric death counts by nearly 24%. The fix resulted in the removal of 416 deaths from the 0-17 age group, leading to questions regarding the reliability of the agency's public data reporting.

During a NORAD Santa Tracker call, a parent from Oregon ended his conversation with President Biden by saying "Let's Go Brandon." The President responded by repeating the phrase, leading to widespread media coverage and debate over the appropriateness of the remark.

An Amazon engineer calls for the Ring doorbell system to be shut down due to unfixable privacy issues. An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reveals the Ring app is packed with third-party trackers that send personally identifiable information to marketing companies. The hosts warn against putting "Alexa" devices in sensitive areas like children's bedrooms.

Specific mobile applications, including a King James Bible app and various period trackers, are identified as sharing granular user data with Facebook. The Bible app reportedly tracks specific verses read by the user, while other apps transmit hardware data such as battery percentage and accelerometer positions.

The hosts play clips of author Naomi Klein and the Director of the OMB discussing the "carbon bubble" and the financial cost of "climate denial." They mock the "climate math" provided by Carbon Tracker, which claims the world has a strict carbon budget to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius. The OMB director's statement that climate denial is "fiscally foolish" is labeled a "sackable offense" by the hosts.

First Lady Michelle Obama participated in the annual NORAD Santa Tracker program, answering phone calls from children on Christmas Eve. Transcripts reveal the First Lady informed children that Santa was flying over South Sudan and Rwanda. Observers contrasted the high technical performance of the Santa tracking website with the significant technical failures of the Healthcare.gov rollout.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) released its annual Santa tracker report, which a spokesperson compared to the technology used to track North Korean Taepodong missiles. The hosts argue that using military infrastructure to promote a fictional character trains the public to accept media lies and government-sanctioned misinformation.

A British teenager, Luke Angel, was banned from the U.S. after sending an insulting email to the White House. In Arkansas, schools are implementing "Meal Tracker" systems that require students to scan their fingerprints to pay for lunch, a move the hosts view as training children to be "good slaves" for a biometric future.

In the United Kingdom, interest rates on savings accounts have dropped to 0.1%, falling below the rate of inflation. Banks are reportedly preventing "tracker mortgages"—which follow the LIBOR rate—from dropping further, despite contractual agreements. This move by financial institutions is criticized as a breach of contract that would likely lead to lawsuits in the United States.

The discussion compares the volume of software available for Windows PCs versus Apple Macs. While PCs offer more options for specific tools like Flash to AVI converters, the hosts note that users must often wade through spyware and deceptive websites. They recommend trusted repositories such as Version Tracker and Tucows while lamenting the decline of user-friendly download interfaces.