@WakeUpCall – ‘Wired Wednesday’ with Rich DeMuro

KFI Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro joins Wake Up Call for ‘Wired Wednesday’! Rich talks about new features on TikTok, Warner Bros. DVD disc rot, scam call hack, and the Gallery LA.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's say good morning now to the host of Rich
on Tech on KFI. It's KTLA's tech reporter Rich Demurro. Rich. Okay,
both Will and I got to know what is an
interactive restaurant? And tell us about the one you just
went and saw.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah, I stayed out way too late last night going
to downtown LA for this this place called the Gallery.
So this is a new restaurant that's kind of like
think about like.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
A modern theme restaurant.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
So it's a bunch of theme park designers that decided,
you know what, let's do something kind of fun and different.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
And so you go in.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Not only is the bar really cool and it's got
all these little interactive kind of things going on in
the background, but then you go into this dining room,
and in the dining room, they've got all these projectors
on the ceiling that are sort of hidden, but they
project things onto your table. And then of course the
walls all come to life as well. So while you're eating,
this was like appealing to the five senses. And so

(00:55):
they had like fire, I guess, not the senses, I
guess the world the earth. It was like dirt and
fire and water, and so the whole room comes alive
with this sort of different theme depending on what you're eating.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Okay, and what were you eating?

Speaker 2 (01:11):
All kinds of stuff. I couldn't you know, it's it
was all like five course meals. So it was a
lot of like the first one was like the one
it was like a solid served on a bed of
dirt and it was I mean, it looked like dirt.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
It was not dirt.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
But the whole point of this place is that it's
sort of interactive and it's a sensory experience. The dinner
theme is elementa. But here's the deal. I predict that
this place will be rented out by a lot of
companies because because of the design of the room, it's
very tech forward, Like the whole thing can kind of
be it can take on different looks. So I imagine

(01:46):
like if you're premiering a movie or a new album,
you can transform this room to kind of fit what
you're trying to do. And I think that's the true
magic of it.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, cool, it was the food good.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Food was good.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, yes, I didn't try the duck, but everything else
I did try and it was it was good.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Okay, let's move on to scams. Because man, they're coming
up everywhere. I just got several messages on my phone
and I was like, I got to ask rich about this.
Where I got texts and the text appears to be
from Microsoft. It says Microsoft someone else might have accessed,
and then it shows like the asterisks and a bunch

(02:27):
of those and then the last two letters or numbers
of my email address, and it says you can recover
at And I'm like, no.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
No, yeah, I've been getting yep, yeah, a lot of
people getting that one. Be careful, a lot of people
getting that one. For sure, that one's trying to steal
your Microsoft log in. But there's just so many these things,
just NonStop all.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Day, every day.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
And what I talk about on my radio show is
that the scam artist do something that's very similar to
what we actually get from a company. So they take
that actual Microsoft confirmation text or fraud alert text and
they kind of re engineer it right to be scammy.
So it looks the same, it reads the same, but
the link that you're getting is not the right one.

(03:12):
So just be very careful look at who these things
are coming from. And if you don't expect them, you know,
be a little bit spidy sense, like, okay, I didn't
really try logging in what's happening here?

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, okay?

Speaker 1 (03:23):
And then over on the phone side, you know, like
when I get a phone call, sometimes it says spam risk.
When I don't recognize the number, I'm not sure if
I should pick up or not. But you have a
way to detect spam calls.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, that one, you know you can safely not pick up.
But as any parent knows, if you've got kids, you can't.
Even if it's a number you don't recognize, you kind
of have to pick it up just because you know
who knows. And that happened to me once my kid
broke his arm, and it's like, I should I pick
up this phone call?

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Should I not? Thankfully I did.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
But I tried this new thing where basically I got
a call I didn't know if it was a scam
artist or not. Is from the Bank of America credit
card Verification Department, sounds very official, And I said, I
think this might be a scam. So I pressed the
little recording icon on the iPhone and I said, this
call will be recorded, And all of a sudden, as
soon as it announced that to the call boom, the

(04:13):
person hung up. So I was like, oh, this must
be a scam, So I posted this to my Instagram.
Many people have tried it since, and I'm getting lots
of reports that it almost works like a charm every
single time, And I think it might even work for like,
if you just want to get off the phone with
like a telemarketer, just press that. Once they hear that,
they don't want to be on the recording.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Okay, good, good to know. And then I'm having issues
with my DVD. But this is a different thing. There's
something called disc rot.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, I just basically wanted to say that because I've
never heard of disc rop.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
But I understand.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
You know, if you've got old tapes around the house,
like those are definitely at risk of like going bad,
so definitely get those digitized. But DVDs are supposed to
last like one hundred years. But apparently there was some
manufacturing issues with Warner Brothers Home entertainment discs like these
are you know, movies from two thousand and six to
two thousand and eight, so they're failing prematurely, which means

(05:10):
people are putting them in their drives and they're not loading.
They're freezing while they play, or they just don't play
at all. And so Warner Brothers apparently is aware of this.
You can get in touch with them. They will either
replace the disc and if they can't get the disc anymore,
they will give you a title of similar value. So basically,
if you've got Warner Brothers movies that are a little
bit older on DVD, put them in your DVD player

(05:32):
if you still have one.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
I mean, who still has this thing?

Speaker 1 (05:35):
I have a DVD DVD player but it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, I mean in La, look where, you know, it's
a movie city, so people probably have more than other places.
But check them out. Make sure you don't. You don't
want disc rot to ruin your day.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
I know. And you can hear Rich say disc rot
and so many other things when you listen to him
every Saturday from eleven to two right here on KFI.
He is KFI is tech Guy. Rich Dimiro. Can also
follow him on Instagram at rich on Tech. His website
where you can get all the information of the stuff
he talks about is rich on tech dot tv, and
of course you can see him every day on KTLA.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Thanks so much, Rich headed that way. Now have good