101: Meerkats Without Pants

What the fuck? Sorry. Hit the mic. I'm having a Dr. Drew moment. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

We decided not to do intros anymore. Why not, Brian? Because they're kind of dumb. Yeah, it was a little cheesy, wasn't it? Yeah, I figure people are just going to listen to the show anyways. The idea was to give you guys a couple hints about what we'd be talking about, but, you know, you're reading the little synopsis we write anyways, so who cares?

Yeah, and last week it got kind of confusing because I was reading things that you wrote in the really wrong tonality for the piece, and I was just like, what am I reading? How is that the wrong tonality? Why you got to make it bad? Why you got to make me bad, Jason? No, no, no. They were totally fine. They were fine, but I did not know where to put the emphasis.

That's all I'm saying. Speak English good. Me talk pretty one day. Yes. That was actually a decent book. Not a big Sedaris fan, but I like that. I think that was his only good book. I didn't care for anything else that he wrote. So, Brian, happy two-year anniversary.

Is this really, it's been two years? It has been two years. Last week was our 100th episode, but this is our two-year anniversary. Wow. Well, congratulations, Jason. We've been doing this for two years with absolutely no benefit to ourselves. Oh, bullshit. Come on. How many friends have we made from this? How much other good stuff has come from it? Tons.

Okay. Tons. That's all I'm saying is tons. All right. Well, happy two-year anniversary. And yeah, here we are still. We're still kicking along day in, day out. Yes. So, yeah. Sorry about the half hour of prep up to get this show going. We have new equipment again, and it was a little bit more complicated this time.

Yes. Well, maybe if we didn't switch up the recording process every single time, we could start on time instead of a half an hour late. You saw how big that board was that I had, right? Yes, I did. That thing was monstrous, and I've traded down now. Now I've got a little Apollo Twin Duo doohickey, and it's much easier.

I can put it in my carry-on. But this is the first time we've done it remotely with us. And yeah, actually, we took out more technology that was in the way, and everything worked. My little Griffin iMic was problematic this time. I think it's broken. I think it got broken on the plane.

Yeah, that would suck. But yeah, that's Audio Engineering 101. Start removing things. Oh, yeah. And things magically sound better. Yes, yes. You pare down the chain. Yes. So one of the first things I had in the show notes, because it was happening today, a day of recording, that I wanted to mention, but now I realize that I didn't do the math on the timing very well, because it's already over.

There was a total solar eclipse today. Yeah, it's over. It's totally over. So everybody enjoy that, or, you know, in past tense terms, anyways. Yeah, definitely. It was, the thing that got me was, I woke up this morning, and I saw this beautiful picture from the International Space Station, and it just didn't look right to me, because just the way the angles were and everything, I'm like, okay, this is pretty, but I bet it's shopped.

So I did a little Googling, and of course, found out that it was shopped, and I put it into our Patreon page for our Patreon supporters and said, hey, look, don't fall for this. And, you know, even up till now, people are still retweeting that picture, thinking that it's real. And I'm like, ah, see, if you follow us on Patreon on Grumpy Old Geeks, you'll get the early skinny.

We're like, we are like, you know, we're Insta Snopes. I guess we are. And actually, we both have started kind of posting a little bit on the Patreon, and the Patreon only, using the Patreon only format. So if you've supported us there, you get to see our silly little posts ahead of time.

Just out of curiosity, was there some sort of meeting that I wasn't invited to, where it was determined that instead of saying things are Photoshopped, we're just going to call them shopped now? We've been calling it shopped for, God, years. I think it came out of 4chan. Not a fan. Why? That sounds stupid.

What's wrong with Photoshopped? Gets the point across. Totes. Yes, whoever Adobe's competitors are that are pushing this agenda on us. Well, who's going to say they're gimped, okay? Actually, I think we need to try to start that as a trend.

Hashtag gimped. Have you ever used gimped? I have, yeah. But, I mean, you know, I've been using Photoshop since version 2. Yeah, same here. Same here. Version 2. Yeah, I stick with it. Remember there was, oh, God. Oh, man.

You just sent me back into the past. Remember there was another program that we took images into that was specifically for web optimization? DeBabelizer. Bingo, DeBabelizer. I could not remember the name of it for anything. I love DeBabelizer. Oh, DeBabelizer was awesome. We actually used a version of that for the Truman Show poster.

Remember the original poster that was like a mosaic? Yeah. Our friend Dave Riegler wrote a bunch of scripts to take all the photos from the set. When we sent a photographer down to the set, and he built a DeBabelizer script to build that thing. And then, like, the artist went in and kind of tweaked it with masks and all that.

But that poster, the Truman Show poster, was done in DeBabelizer. Very cool. Talk about old. I miss the old days, man. It was a lot more fun. ResEdit. Give me a copy of ResEdit for OS X. That would be nice. Speaking of modifying things with software, there was something really cool that went around.

We talked about Terry Pratchett at great length last week. We're not going to again. But there was a bit of a tribute that was occurring online from all us geeks, where basically you could add a bit to your HTTP headers that talks about the X-Clex overhead. So Terry Pratchett will be living on forever on the internets.

Yeah, this was a tribute to one of the books where when the Klax was kind of like the internet of the disk world, and when someone died on the Klax, they would send their name around as a tribute, and people just figured out, okay, here's a couple simple snippets that you can just drop in your .htaccess file or whatever it is on the rest of them, and it will just send an extra HTTP header that will just live on, and it is X-Clax overhead is the header, and it says GNU Terry Pratchett.

So we're running that on Grumpy Old Geeks, and I will add that to all my other ones, and just keep it there. There should be a WordPress plugin for that. I agree. I'm surprised that somebody, well, that would actually take effort and time. Well, because what you're going to do is you're going to take a three-line snippet that goes in your .htaccess file and turn it into a 400-line PHP script that has to be loaded and maintained and is probably hackable.

Yeah, there you go. Just like everything else on WordPress. Sorry about that. No problem. It's a force of habit. It's okay. Just a little insider baseball, everyone. Jason actually wanted to make one of the Patreon rewards that he would stop talking about WordPress, and I would stop talking about Uber, and I said no to that because I'm not going to stop talking about Uber.

And the funny part is I put the Uber links in this week's show notes. I know, I didn't put a single Uber link in. That was all you. But let's do some more follow-up. We talked about GigaOM shutting down last week, and there's a really decent article written by, it's over at Slate, so go ahead and make fun of me, Jason.

I'm not, not. Again, journalism, and Will Oremus is quite the good tech writer, actually, and he pays a little tribute to it and basically says it was a great site. It didn't pay the bills. No, it was a fantastic site back in the day, and they always did really good stuff. And it was, yeah, it's just unfortunate that they're gone.

You know, I only went there so often because, you know, they didn't have the good headlines, but they had the good story. And when I was doing Metrically, we went over to their office, and it wasn't that ostentatious. I don't know what everybody's on about, but I guess it was early days. I guess so. I mean, I definitely did notice that, you know, everybody else was cribbing them for the two years that we've been doing this show, nine times out of ten.

If I check the actual attribution of the real article, it went back to GigaOM. So they just didn't write the catchy headlines, so now we're stuck with all these sites that no longer have anywhere to get good tech news. So I want to follow up on a little San Francisco douchebaggery. There's a company that just started called Leap, which is kind of like a private bus.

Or is it spelled like L-P because, you know, you can't use any actual vowels. They've got enough funding where they actually could buy vowels. Wow, they could afford vowels. Well, it's actually, they didn't get the Leap.com because there's so many other Leaps out there, but they are RideLeap.com.

And it's a bus. It's a nice bus. It only runs in the marina, which is the douchebaggy part of town. Well, it used to be the only douchebaggy part of town. Now it's just encroached everywhere. Now it's just one of everywhere. And I got in a big fight with some people on Facebook about this because my friend Robin Anderson, she's like, we've hit peak douchebaggery.

And I'm like, okay, let me check it out. And, you know, it's a $7 bus ride. They've got nice seats. You can buy nice food on the ride. It's got Wi-Fi. And it's only like a three-mile stretch for this $6 ride. But I'm just thinking, I'm like, why is this like the penultimate douchebaggery?

And we got in a whole thing and I'm like, I don't see it. I do not see why this is so douchebaggy because it's just a bus route. It's a bus route for people who can afford to take a nice bus and they're not doing, they're not doing Uber. So it's not a single ride, you know, single ride solution. A bunch of people can get on the bus.

You can meet with your friends, all the stuff, and you can carry more stuff. Who knows? But it was, it's just one of those things where I think that everything that comes out of San Francisco now that there's this knee-jerk douchebag reaction. It's like if something announces they're immediately the worst thing in the history of the world, let's bag on them, period.

I don't think it's the worst thing in the history of the world. And, you know, but it is, it is a little douchebaggery. Why? Well, it's not. I mean, it's haves and have-nots. And if we're just going to go ahead and call it and that's the way things are now, fair enough.

Let's say, you know, we used to have drinking fountains for different types of people. Now we have different types of buses. Don't even go there because- Why not? Well, because that was a completely different issue. If you can afford to get on this bus, you get on the bus. And the bus isn't that overpriced.

I prefer to get, I would get on this bus just from security standpoint because I hated taking the bus in San Francisco because it is so sketchy. I've seen so many snatch and grabs on those buses that between the buses and the muni trains, I have to have seen at least 20 or 30 snatch and grabs where as the doors are closed and somebody would just grab somebody's laptop and run out the door.

Well, you know, I'm being a bit of a hypocrite because I freely admit I would never get on a public bus here in Los Angeles either. But if there was something like this that was a little bit more upscale and projected and had, you know, comforts, I would probably pay extra for it as well. So I'm being a hypocrite, but I'm saying I don't like the precedent. I'd rather see money spent on the actual public transport system to make it nicer than somebody coming in as a separate entity and doing a basically dual class system.

OK, now let's put this in perspective here. You would not get on a bus in L.A. No, I rode the bus all the time in L.A. I liked the bus in L.A. I thought they were really nice, really well kept and security was top notch. If there was any problem at the next station, there were two or three sheriff's cars waiting waiting for you to take them off the bus and take them to jail.

I saw many people get arrested. I never felt scared on the L.A. buses and I was terrified on the San Francisco buses. So that should give you some kind of perspective on the difference. I mean, there's a big difference. All right. OK. So in a city that is making money hand over fist, has all these captains of industry, all these companies doing incredibly well.

There should be a lot of tax money pouring into the city. Why aren't they making it better and safer using all that tax money? Yeah, not my department, but I'm just talking. A valid point given the discussion that we're having. But I'm saying it, I'm just talking about why is Leap douchey compared to everything else?

That was the impetus for the point. And I don't think it really is compared to everything else. I mean, my point was, if you want to talk about peak douchebaggery, we're talking about this on Facebook. OK, I mean, let's put this in perspective. I'm just I don't think it's horribly douchey.

I don't like the precedent. I'm not a big fan of it. I would opt to not support it unless, of course, as you're saying, the buses really are that bad up there, in which case you kind of just shove it up and do it. But it's not super douchey. I again, like I said, I don't like the precedent. I don't like the idea of setting up, you know, dual class systems in a city where you're separating people more and more.

But there you go. It is what it is. And obviously there's a market for it. So which leads me to my next point, because apparently God is the biggest douchebag in San Francisco. You want to talk about segregation and devising the population here. Ow, ow. As an atheist, I will not even I personally can't even let that slide.

It's not God. It's the people's representatives of God that are the douches. Not that I believe in a God, but for these people that do, it's not him. It's his, you know, it's his people down here that think they've got the inside track. St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco has a system that basically douches the homeless people that sleep in the doorway.

They have sprinklers that come out and will pour water on them to get them to go away. Talk about, oh, double standard there. Yes, bring us your, oh no, that's Ellis Island. I was going to read the wrong. Yes, that would be the wrong thing. But this one, this story got so big, it was actually on the Today Show this morning.

And apparently the pastor or the priest or whatever the hell they've got there. He said that it was, you know, a misguided attempt and they apologize as they should. It's, I don't get that. That, that whoever, how did that got past anyone is beyond me. Well, you know, it could have just been the man poo sanitation system where they just try and wash out all the man poo from their doorway every day, because that is a problem in San Francisco.

Yeah. But yeah, if people were taking a nap while having their man poo on the steps of the church, I can see where there, there might be some confusion, but it's just, it's just one of them funny ones, I thought. Yeah. Yeah. Not what you hoped for. Anything to get less man poo in San Francisco is a good, a good idea.

I mean, I applaud, I applaud them for the effort, but their timing sucked. Like at least let the guys get up in the morning and go down to the shelter or the, the laundromat, like the one I used to work at where they would come in from the park and just dry their dirty clothes in the dryers. That was always fun. I'm sure San Francisco had a decrease in man poo over this last week because, uh, but coincidentally, Austin probably had an uptick because everybody's over there now for South by Southwest and the tech conference.

Well, there's a difference between man poo and human filth. Oh, there you go. Yeah. My bad. My bad. So I'm just saying. I, I, so I found this one. Um, there's a family that makes more than a million dollars from the YouTube videos of their kids playing with their toys.

How can there be so many people making money on YouTube? Just playing with toys? I don't know. It is a market that we obviously have missed completely. Uh, apparently let's maybe, is anybody up there like doing things with like old school star Wars and star Trek stuff? Maybe we've got to start this.

No, I'm not playing with toys. That boat has passed. It's not as the guy with like new audio equipment every other day. It's just more expensive toys, man. But this is, I'm sorry. My, my universal audio Apollo twin does not have a Kung Fu grip.

Okay. There's the difference. I'm sure you could find one that does, but these people used to run an employment agency and they're like, okay, Hey honey, let's kill the employment agency. And then just go post, you know, pictures of our kids playing with toys on the net and just exploit, let's exploit our children for money.

Okay, dear, let's do that. Rock on. And that's how these people are making a living now. They, they got rid of an employment agency that helped people get jobs to take pictures of their kids. Yeah. Well, they're making almost a million dollars a year. I'm sure they weren't making that from their employment agency. No survival of the fittest.

It's like, you know, who cares now? Let's just go on and do it. It is. It is just game on out there. It really is. So actually let me, uh, I was, I'm going to skip ahead to one story since we just talked about that. This will depress the hell out of you, but I'd be remiss not talking about it because I do every week.

Another great article on salon by Joseph Coleman. Um, basically it's his American economy nightmare, um, about how he couldn't find work. It took him almost two years. He applied over 750 different job applications with not one viable offer.

He had to go work at target. And he talks about this thing called the black cloud that basically has settled over his family for the last few years. And, uh, this is happening to more and more people. So I'd be remiss not to talk about it. And I think everybody should go read the article. I know you won't.

Well, I've had a black cloud over my head for 20 years and it was called the IRS. Um, but yeah, it's, it, it's, it is what it is. That's, that's what we've been talking about. You're, you're harping on that there is no more middle class and there are no jobs. Well, there you go. If you're lucky enough to, uh, get a YouTube channel playing toys, playing with toys for a million dollars.

Hey, good on you. But it's, it's game on out there for everybody else. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And, uh, now you put this last one in, which I thought was pretty funny. Um, a Texas man was arrested for paying tax and $1 bills because last week you had your issue with your change. You couldn't get rid of your change, your change, as they say.

My change was not accepted by Wells Fargo because they determined that they do not need to take legal contender if they don't feel like it. So this, you know, this story leapt out at me, obviously, because as, as you mentioned, a Texas man attempted to go pay his local tax, uh, in $1 bills. Now, this is a misleading headline, a very misleading headline because he came in there with these like tightly packed origami folded $1 bills and there were 600 of them and it took them six minutes to unfold a single bill.

I can tell you read the comments on this story, Jason, because that is the only place where, in which origami is mentioned. Well, my brother does origami. It does say that they were folded and tightly packed, but as it says in the comments, I don't care how much you fold that piece of paper. There is no way in hell it could ever take up to six minutes to unfold each bill, which is what the, uh, the office claims.

Well, this is a tax entity that he was going to. And after I've dealt with the IRS, I can tell you that they're probably, you know, you know what, I'm going to stop there because I can get in a lot of trouble for the next thing I was about to say. Yeah, that would be a good time to go ahead and shut up. Okay.

Well, and I'll shut up about not, you know, legal tender is supposed to be legal tender and they are required by law to take it anyways. Peasant, we only want your Benjamins. Exactly. In the news.

We've talked about the Amazon drone program and how it's probably doomed to failure because they want to run autonomous drones. Yeah. But they have finally won some FAA approval to start testing out in the backwoods of Washington. Well, yeah, I mean, good, fine.

I'm okay with that. I, I, it's never going to work in a city like Los Angeles. Well, probably not because the, the ghetto birds will knock them down, but, um, you know, I like this idea for, for the far to reach places for the people that are living out in the hinterlands that want to, you know, do their Amazon shopping as well.

So they can just, the hinterlands, so they can destroy all the local businesses by getting their stuff cheaper from Amazon delivered by a drone. Rock on. Like we said, it's game on out there. No, it's definitely game on. What they're trying to do now is they're testing their, their equipment. So they have to have a pilot, like an actual licensed pilot, because those new drone rules have not gone into effect yet.

And it's on private property. They have to stay below 400 feet, but they've been testing indoors. So for them, this is at least a minor step forward. They want, you know, less regulations, but apparently the license they got is the same thing that like Boeing and Lockheed Martin get when they want to test drones. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. It's a, it's like, you know, just a proof of concept kind of license, but it's interesting. They're going to move forward with it. We are going to have Amazon drones within, I'd say 10 years at the very, very outside. I'd say five. Yeah.

At least in those kinds of areas. Like I said, I think big cities is going to be a, that's going to be a whole different battle and there's going to have to be a lot of changes in legislation and how we use our air spaces and all that sort of thing. I mean, I don't want that here in Los Angeles. I don't, cause there's so many people, it's just going to be a black sky of drones flying all the time.

And have you heard them? They're not quiet. No, they are not quiet at all. They're, they're much like the Roomba. You think they're going to be quiet and then you actually get in the store and hear one and you're like, Jesus Christ, I could never have this in my house. Or that wacky Dyson fan that you have. I thought that thing was going to sound like, you know, nothing. And it's just, it's still like, I know, I know.

That was my big disappointment for Mr. Dyson, who I, I love your vacuums, but your fan sucks. His vacuums have the proper amount of suction. Yes, they do. Now let's not make any suction jokes, Jason. It was a nod to Craig Ferguson. I used to watch the late, late show. He always used to use that line. I'm just checking.

You're not here in person, so I can't kick you in the shin. So the Paris police have raided the Uber offices and the French guys over there are like, no, no, no, no Uber. I'm just saying it's not my story. That's my one comment. Actually, I did see, I would be remiss not to report this since you just reported this as well.

I did see that Germany banned Uber a second time. How's that working out? They let them go and now they banned them again. So we'll see what happens. No, I mean, the EU is cracking down on them. They're like, no, get your license. Get your license. Stop taking jobs from normal people. And let's, you know, let's regulate this shit.

Pay your taxes. I know we're all rah, rah America here in America, but the EU does, is leading the charge on this sort of stuff and they're, they're doing a very good job of it. So we will be monitoring this situation. And the Mars one project is a complete and utter scam.

Mars one. Yeah. Mars one is the project to send people one way to Mars. And it turns out that the reality show that was going to fund the whole thing has fallen through everybody. It was a pyramid scheme. It was an utter joke in a pyramid scheme. Game on. Go figure.

I couldn't, I would love, if there's any smart producers out there, they're going to round up all these people that applied and make a reality show out of them. Oh man. It's got to happen because these are the strangely odd, weird people. Yeah. It just, it's a weird fucking world we're in.

You think? But somebody who had a wonderful job has quit. The Google CFO has quit and he left a very, uh, lovely note, uh, talking about how he was, uh, he and his wife were hiking Mount Kilimanjaro. Okay. Like you do, you know, like you do when you're the CFO of Google and I'm sure they had the private van taking them around.

And the wife goes, well, when's the time for us? I'd be like, bitch, you're on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. What else do you want? You know, most people only have like two weeks of vacation a year if they're lucky and, uh, you know, they're pressured into not taking them. So I think you had your time.

Well, and then you got the other Google, like a sea level guy who's up like doing the high, high level skydiving that beat, uh, the Red Bull guy, you know, it's like, okay. Um, do you realize how much privilege you have by having that job and being able to take a vacation to go to Mount Kilimanjaro?

Most people can't go to the Jersey shore. Okay. Yeah. It's like, wah, wah, wah, wah. Well, you know, get on them. This is the society we've created. This is the American dream, right? He got a great job that paid him a ridiculous amount of money so much so that he could actually just walk away from it because he doesn't have to work again.

Awesome. Yep. And there's a lot of them out there like that. Now, now I don't think the ad execs, uh, that did this Tinder stunt at South by are going to be walking away anytime soon. Um, have you seen this one where they, uh, they basically made a fake Tinder account with a bot?

Uh, it was only a matter of time, right? Yep. Uh, you know, people have been, people have spent the last six months, very alerted, very smart people have spent the last six to six months to a year trying to figure out a way to game Tinder and to make it basically an ad. And they have done it.

They're promoting a movie called Ex Machina that, uh, just happened to premiere at South by on Saturday, last Saturday. And, uh, yeah, really cute chick on, uh, Tinder and, uh, had a, had basically a really kind of interesting bot behind it.

Uh, and a lot of people fell for it and it was just a movie ad. Yep. This is not the first time this has happened by the way, but it's a, you know, it's an interesting, from the marketing perspective, I can see where they thought that it was a good idea, but you're dealing with people's junk.

They want to go stick it in something. And when you, when you do a bait and switch like that, when you think you're going to get some, you know, bumping uglies and then you have to go buy a movie ticket, that's a really big disconnect. This is the way that this stuff works though. I mean, I'm not surprised that they went to Tinder.

Snapchat's already been kind of run over with this kind of marketing. So they, uh, they were smart to try something completely new. Uh, you know, if I were a Tinder user, I'd be pissed off and, and maybe the, uh, the ageist related pay level would weed this sort of stuff out. There's a model for them. Yeah.

If I was Tinder, I'd be pissed off because you don't want people that in there gaming your system thinking that, you know, I'm now every time I like hooked up with somebody on Tinder, I'd be like, is this an ad or is this real? Is this real life or is this just fantasy? I don't know.

I'll just make a deal with Coca-Cola and have branded condoms. What? Well, that way I can add them back when I meet them. Uh, you lost me on that one too. Uh, nevermind. Uh, you know, I don't care about this story. That's the problem. Whatever it's Tinder and it's getting gamed like every other social media has been and every social media will be that comes on along as well.

It's it's, that's just going to happen. But yeah, I'd be pissed if I were Tinder. Uh, and Microsoft who had, as we've been talking about is killing off the Internet Explorer, quote unquote brand. That's the part that we missed in our previous, uh, discussions about this. We talked about Project Spartan, which is their new web browser, but they're killing Internet Explorer as a brand, but they're not killing it as a technology.

It's still going to, it's still going to underline, uh, underlie the Windows quote unquote finder. Um, it basically, the file Explorer is still going to be Explorer, which means it's still going to have all the same security holes that Explorers always had, which is like the reason that they want to kill Internet Explorer should kill Internet Explorer is that it is synonymous with you are going to get hacked.

And our website won't work. Well, that too. Yeah. Web developers hate it for a different reason. Yes. But man, talk about, talk about a lipstick on the pig moment. Yeah. Well, I will see. I mean, as far as I know, um, there, you still can't even see the Spartan browser anywhere.

It's not on any of the releases that they're doing. I'm excited enough just to see it from, from our perspective in terms of working on the web, because theoretically this engine will actually work pretty well. Uh, it's not, it's also not terribly surprising that Microsoft isn't getting rid of the, some of the major guts. I mean, let's face it, uh, Windows is built on that engine at this point, so they would have to have started completely over.

Which might be a pretty good idea. Yeah, it might be, but yeah, you know, with budgets and meetings and blah, blah, blah. So Twitter is experimenting with TV timelines. I saw this one on Mashable of all places. Uh, I think a friend that is probably no longer a friend linked to this one, but, uh, what they're trying to do is kind of scope your, your tweeting to a TV show, right?

Now, Twitter is notoriously bad at things like time zones and stuff like that. And TV is a very delicate medium when it comes to things like, oh, spoilers and Twitter is delicate when it comes to spoilers. That's why I built an entire thing called Ruinous Bastard to, to spoil things for people.

Now we tried this at Technorati like 10 years ago and it failed miserably. We, we had everything kind of laid out because people were blogging about their TV shows. Yeah. And if we put those blog results into the search results and people put a spoiler in the title, we got tons of crap for it because we exposed it like right on the thing.

It's like, oh, here tweets about American Idol. Oh, this dude lost. Ah, Jesus, screw you. You suck. Right. You know, that's exactly what's going to happen with this. I, I, this is what, this is a prediction for me. I stand by it. Uh, Twitter TV timelines are dead before they even start. Yeah. I agree with you.

It's, it's, it's, you can't do it. You can't in a connected world where things still aren't launched, uh, at the same time at the same place or all that. You just can't do this sort of stuff. I mean, it's, it's a nice enough idea. I don't mind it. In a utopia, it would be great. But the fact that it's not in a utopia and it's, it's, it, there are too many variables when it comes to story like that and everybody needs to have seen the story.

Yeah. Well, I, we're moving away from that whole idea anyways. I mean, that's, that's been the concept behind, you know, TiVo and it's just expanded from then to there, you know, with Netflix dropping entire seasons, all that there, there, there is no, like, there's no serial thing where you can count on people seeing things at the same time.

So we're moving further and further away from that and, you know, whatever it is what it is. It's called time shifted viewing for a reason because we shift the time. Yes. Yes, it is. Oh man. So, uh, and Facebook is now going to let you pay friend to friend through their messages app.

Um, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Nope. No. Do you really want to give Twitter your debit card? Cause it's only debit card. Facebook. I'm sorry. Facebook. I'm still stuck on Twitter. That's okay. Um, there, there's a family of birds living in my wall right now.

So I'm hearing tweets all the time and not, and I'm, I'm hearing physical tweets. Yeah. Facebook's going to have a really big wall to climb with that one because of the trust factor that they do not have. Same with Twitter. Uh, only taking debit cards is stupid. Just make the deal with PayPal or credit cards.

I wouldn't, I won't give my debit card to anybody because getting your money back from a fraudulent debit card transaction is so much harder than it is with a credit card. Cause credit cards, I mean, there's so many regulations around fraud and credit cards that it's, it's, it's so, you know, they, they did that because they want you to feel safe shopping on the internet.

Debit cards are a completely different beast because you're dealing with a bank and you're dealing with real money on the spot. So yeah, I would never in a million years put my, my debit card into Facebook. Yeah, I agree. Uh, I, I like the concept.

I don't like the implementation. I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I think, uh, you know, if they implemented it in a way that made sense and that we're talking about good on you, that that's great. If you're using Facebook messenger to talk to your buddies all the time and you want to do this, send them the five bucks through that. It makes it easy.

That's nice. I don't mind it. Or meet up at the bar and give them five bucks or that, you know, which is better. Yeah. Uh, continuing Facebook news. Uh, this is not exactly news. We've all known all along that it's almost impossible to get rid of your Facebook account if you wanted to, but they have rolled out an entire new feature that is called auto reactivate.

So they are even pushing you further and further to never, ever, ever shutting off your account. Wait, wait, wait, explain this, explain this to me because it's always been when you, when you cancel your account, if you log in within two weeks, it just brings everything back like you never left. Yeah. And that is still the same thing, but now they have added something to these settings and security tabs that, uh, pushes you towards actually not shutting down your account completely anyways, but if you want to take a Facebook break, they have an auto reactivate

feature so you can click on it and deactivate your account for a set amount of days. But anytime that you log back in anyways, it also turns back on. So it's a bit stupid. Yeah, no, they, you're, you're stuck. You're, you're there, you know, even deleting the post. Yeah. Even deleting posts is a nightmare.

I go through like once every month or so and just clear out my backlog and you have way more time than I do. Well, I do it when I'm just sitting around and I, I, my brain is spent from the day and I'm like, okay, that's out of context. That's out of context. That's out of context.

Kill them all. You know, I, you know, you know, my book is out of context. Well, that's the thing. You know, my battle with contacts and especially with Twitter and contacts, I'm like, I want a 24 hour tweet. That's it. Just give me the option in system. We've had those other services that let you like that will go in and delete for you, but then you're giving them your API credentials.

And I don't know, I just want to, I want a service that lets me post a few things, but it's never going to happen because nobody, they don't, that's not their business model. Their business model is to have you keep coming back and say, I have 30,000 tweets or what it's drives me crazy, but it's nature of the beast.

It is the nature of the beast. Another Facebook tool that has been rolled out. I love this one. Okay. For the, for the next Patreon level, Brian will never talk about Facebook again. I'm fine with that. I'd love to not talk about Facebook. So cough up the money people. They rolled out this, this Facebook suicide prevention tool, which is basically a little draconian and weird to me anyways.

It's a tool that they said will lock people out of their accounts. If they're having suicidal thoughts after their friends have informed on them about their suicidal thoughts. What could go wrong? And then to unlock their accounts, suicidal users who may not be suicidal.

So that's already kind of a weird statement. It could just be their friends being jerks or whatever. Then they need to opt for reading Facebook suicide prevention materials. First off, who wrote those, who vetted those? And when did Facebook become some sort of licensed psychological organization? Well, I'm sure, I'm sure on that level, they've got like the highest paid psychologist in the country for that.

Cause they can afford that. They can afford that, but that doesn't mean they have an outsource. It doesn't mean they haven't done it. That doesn't mean they paid for it. Anyways, the funny part about this story is a guy tried it out. Because it's a tool and I want to see if it works or not. So he gave it a shot and he got detained.

Detained? Like physically by the popo? Yeah. Did you say what? San Mateo police regarding a suicidal post. And then he confirmed that he wrote the post, which he was also doing. He also informed the police that he was not actually having suicidal thoughts and had no such plans.

But he posted his feelings because First Amendment rights entitled him to do so. And then he was handcuffed and taken to a mental health watch for around 70 hours. Good Lord. Remember all those snatching grabs I talked about on Muni? Can't those guys just go deal with that instead of dealing with some guy who posts something on Facebook?

I'm sorry. I've also, I've got to say that this is obviously an extreme and kind of stupid example. But Jason, you and I are developers and we work on the web. And generally, anytime any of these services roll out something new, we feel compelled to test it out to see how it works.

No, I've got a test that's coming up in the next segment. Yeah. That's all this guy did. Wow. I would be suing Facebook and the San Mateo Police Department at this point. I have little doubt that he will be. So 70 hours in a psych hold.

Yes. For posting that he was feeling suicidal on Facebook. I'm sorry. Right there. That those are there are damages to be had for that big time. Definitely psychological damages. PTSD, especially if this guy was a developer. Oh, he is not built for a psych ward.

No, no. I've got one from Bandcamp. Remember Bandcamp? That time at Bandcamp? People are all over the Bandcamp. If they've got a crappy band, they're on Bandcamp. Fans have now given artists $100 million through Bandcamp.

That's impressive. I thought that was a pretty cool milestone. I thought I'd like to point that out. Because the only time I've ever really heard of anybody making money through Bandcamp was Zoe Keating. When we talked about what she was doing, she was making like, what, 25 grand a year out of it? Yeah. So the fact that $100 million has been kind of dished out.

And probably, you know, what are they taking? So $100 million has been to them. So $30 million is Bandcamp's profit, probably. Yeah. You know, good for them. Yeah. I'm totally okay with this. Again, I am fine with concepts like Bandcamp and Patreon, which we ourselves are on, and Kickstarter and all of that.

I am fine. You are not fine with Kickstarter. You did not just say that. I'm fine with Kickstarter for its intended purpose, of which basically stopped being used for within three months of it launching, which is, you know, for people to subsidize and come up with their own products in their own way if there are no other proper avenues for them to do so.

According to Brian's rules of Kickstarter. That's, well, hey, it's my world. Anyways, that is my rules for Kickstarter. It's the same for Bandcamp. I'm totally fine with Bandcamp. If my neighbor's, you know, 15-year-old kid gets a band together and wants to put it up on Bandcamp and sell stuff and make connections with people, totally awesome.

If Metallica wants to do it, fuck you. That's my rules. Although I don't know if Metallica can actually get an album deal anymore. Well, that's a damn good point, actually. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit. We didn't talk about the Hillary Clinton hashtag email gates at all last week, and it is kind of in our wheelhouse.

I'm not going to talk about it in the way that everybody else is. If you know the story, you know the story. What I find interesting about it is the way that we are actually archiving things, federal archive rules, digital archiving, and how bad they all are and how that whole area needs to really be kind of kicked up a little bit.

It's really interesting to me, so much so that actually I was kind of almost, I started to look around to online programs about basically the same thing, about archiving and library programs and all that. And unfortunately, they're all so stuck in, they're not up to date with technology.

There should be a program out there for digital archivists, and I would take that. I would get a master's in digital archivary. Digital archivary. Go get a job at the NSA. You know, they're just going to listen to this podcast, and I'm never going to get the job. No, they might actually hire you, because you're in their wheelhouse now, as you said, because you want to archive things, and that's what they do best.

Yeah. Well, I think it's a really interesting thing, and I think that is a growth area in terms of jobs in the future. And we can get all down, and it's game on, and stuff like that. But people who become experts in doing digital archiving, that's going to be a big deal. Yeah, I mean, and I still think that the NSA has an image problem.

And if they did just change their name to the National Archivist Association, then they would be, you know, have carte blanche to take every communication ever saying, we are archiving this for history. It's actually not a bad idea. Unfortunately, they'd be called, nah.

Okay, well, I'm not a branding expert, obviously. Yeah. Oh, man. So, the Japanese have been on a tear here. They have just beamed energy through the air, a la what Tesla said that he could do before he died. And didn't we talk about that company that, just a few weeks ago, that's run by that woman here in Santa Monica that's trying to do the wireless charging?

Yes, we did. And portals. Is this not the same kind of stuff? Well, these guys did 1.8 kilowatts of power through the air to a receiver 170 feet away. Okay, that's impressive. It's not a huge distance, but still, that's a decent amount of energy. And what they want to do is they want to put satellites around the planet, get solar energy, and beam it down to the planet.

I love that idea. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Somebody hacks the telemetry on the satellite, and poof, there goes your president. I've seen real genius. I know it can be done. Yeah, it's a great concept. Yeah, there are many things that could go horribly wrong with this idea, but it's a good concept.

Outside of the fact that I just love the fact that Tesla has actually been proved, maybe he really did do it. I mean, it was just, he claimed to have done it, right? But now that we've seen it done, all right, Tesla. Yeah, no, I still, I'm still a huge Tesla fan. Me too. Fuck Edison. Guess I'm not allowed in New Jersey anymore.

Wow. But Tesla has been- He comes out strong against Edison. Tesla has been allowed to start selling in New Jersey now. So apparently the feud is over. Eh, good. And on another power note, researchers at Michigan State have figured out how to make a completely transparent solar cell.

Cool. This is a game changer if they can make it work, because what they're doing is they're using ultraviolet light and light that's outside of our spectrum to capture in the glass, and they have the photoreceptors around the edge to gather the energy. And it's funny.

You string this all around your house. You attach it to your Tesla home battery. Bob's your uncle. You know what? I was really upset. We didn't get Bob's your uncle into our 100th episode. I feel like we failed the listeners. I put it as my own personal note to make sure that we got it in this time.

And I was driving with my dad back from Chicago telling him about this, and he was like, well, why would, who cares about a completely clear solar cell? I'm like, you have a window on your house. You have a window on all these skyscrapers. Everything is a window. We have clear glass everywhere. We're in a car with clear glass.

Yeah. You know, it's like turn everything into like an energy collector and really harness the power of the sun. Yeah. With current design standards and things like skyscrapers, like you said, there's way more surface spaces being used by transparent windows. So this makes total sense.

This is great. Yeah. If they can pull enough energy out of it to make it worthwhile for the cost of production, like over time, I think it could be a complete game changer. Agreed. Let's talk about something stupid now. Yes. Wait a minute. We haven't been?

Oh, that's a good point. All right. Continuing on with stupid. A new fish was discovered, a previously unknown species, a catfish specifically, and it has been named after one of my favorite Star Wars characters. It is called the Pecolotia greedioi, or basically Greedo.

Greedo. It kind of looks like him a little bit. It totally looks like him. Yeah. And this catfish shot first. Yeah. No, it's, uh, I saw that and I'm just like, oh, okay. I can see that. I can see the, the homage, the homage. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. So, um, Brian.

Yes. What are you going to do in a year when California runs out of water? Move to Toronto. Good point. Solved. There you go. Okay. I like the way. See, now this is the way that everybody needs to think. It's like, okay, we've got the technology. We can do this. Uh, no, let's move.

Remember the Sam Kinison Ethiopia bit? Yeah. Why are you living in sand? Exactly. Move. Start walking. Yep. So, uh, yeah, you know, I mean like the, the gig that I've taken on this year is, is very specific towards climate change and the climate situation and then the upcoming conference in Paris in December.

So I am obviously following the news on climate change very closely just to keep myself up and know what I'm talking about. Uh, this was a big story. Uh, we have less than one year of water left apparently, unless we get a shit ton of rain, which we're probably not going to get. It's going to be a big problem.

It's specifically a huge problem down here in Southern California where we're basically struggling with water rights with Northern California. And, and, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's in the Indian reservations and yeah, they're sending all their, they're, they're selling their water to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola who then trucks it out of the state.

Yeah. And then I will go ahead and get on my rant again about, uh, I, I'm stealing this one from Adam Carolla. The entire city here in Los Angeles runs the damn sprinklers for public areas, whether it's rained or not, they don't go out and check them. They're running all the damn time and all my idiot neighbors that have lovely green grass yards.

What the hell? We can't do that here anymore. No. And I mean, the problem is politicians. It honestly is politicians. Yeah. So, yes. Well, and also it's all almonds and walnuts. Have you read the, the, the, uh, viral, uh, articles going around about almonds and walnuts?

That's been kicking for a long time specifically around Southern or something, you know, here, here in Venice and Santa Monica, where we have all the hippies and it's who do nothing but drink almond milk instead of regular milk. And you know, it takes a shit ton of water to make that. Oh, I'm sorry. I want to Snopes that one.

I haven't, I haven't had time to do the Snopes on that one, but it sounds very Snopes worthy. That it takes a gallon of water to make a single almond and five gallons of water to make a walnut. That really sounds out of bounds. Well, we'll have to post that link in our Patreon only stream. Okay.

Way to pander. So Brian, I was in Los Angeles for a little while. I got to meet some Sony insiders.

A little back chatter, a little back chatter, a little, uh, under the table, you know, back channel. You talk to me, I talk to you kind of thing. Guess what? What? I was right about the hack the entire goddamn time. It was somebody on the inside. It was somebody.

Well, I'm not going to say definitively that it was somebody on the inside, but sources close to the matter. And if you listen to the morning dump with Jordan Cooper, you will know why that's funny. Uh, say that, uh, yeah, no, we know who did it. We know exactly who did it.

And we didn't want the government to come in and say it was North Korea because we knew it wasn't North Korea. Right. And they were strong armed into taking that position. Well, I'm sure 30 years from now, we'll find out something was specific was going on with North Korea and there was a damn good reason for it.

Yeah. Well, they were just trying to get a win because they'd been dealing with the hacking stuff and they're saying, Oh, our NSA hackers, you know, figured this out. They're still trying to find any win they can for all this Snowden crap that comes out. But yeah, um, everybody that I, I, I talked to several people inside of Sony who had to deal with this and they're like, no, no, it was not North Korea.

We know, we know exactly who it was. So there you go. Are we, are we going to be hearing about this in the news then at some point when they go after the specific person and charge them? Never, ever, ever. That's interesting. So that person, the person who perpetrated this entire horrible ordeal for them and cost lots of people, their jobs and the, the shareholders, a lot of money gets to walk because Obama's administration came in and I'm not hating on Obama personally.

I'm just, I'm hating on the, the system came in and said, uh, no, you guys are going to tow this line and you know, I'm sure they'll find another way. It'll, it'll be like at the end of the born identity and the first one, when the guy walks away and just gets shot in the back, you know, I like it when we get all X files on this podcast.

Well, you know, Hey man, I'm, I'm sticking to my guns on it. I stuck to my guns the whole time and it turns out, we both called bullshit on North Korea. So, no, I'm not taking away. Yeah. You totally, you, you agreed with me. You were, you were on the team. I was on the team. Uh, let's, uh, the target data breach from 2013, uh, $10 million settlement is apparently what they're going to be paying out for that peanuts, uh, victims will be eligible for up

to $10,000 in compensation each, which actually isn't too bad, but I don't, I don't, this is one of those Uber things. I think there'll be a magic target unicorn out there. Let's find anybody that got $10,000. Yeah, there's definitely going to be the target unicorn, but the thing is 40 million people were affected, but to get a piece of the pie, you have to show that you incurred harm from the hack.

Yeah. So you have to actually show that somebody used your credit card or committed fraud and blah, blah, blah. Or you spent time redoing all your cards and it, it caused, cost, it could have mouth, costed you business, costed. That's costed you business. It accosted you.

Target accosted you and then it cost you business. So yeah, it's a, it's an interesting one where it's not, nobody's going to get any money out of this. I think that $10 million is going to go right back into target's pocket. Most likely. I don't know how long it's going to sit in a trust, but $10 million for target is about three and a half minutes of revenue.

Yeah. So we have talked many times about how Android apps are just the worst of the worst when it comes to getting hacked. Yeah. Apparently Google has finally jumped on the bandwagon and they're having people manually review apps now that are going into their Google play store.

Wow. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Daylight of dollars short. You know, what they should have been doing since day one. Since day one. Granted, it's all written in Java. So that might be the limiting factor because nobody wants to read Java all day. Yeah, that's true. Maybe, maybe, maybe Facebook suicide prevention identified too many Google employees that wanted to kill themselves after looking at Java all day.

So that's why they scrapped the program. Yeah. What a horrible existence that must be. Oh, Jesus. They've got automated tools, but apparently they've had those for a long time and hackers just keep getting past the automated tools. Well, yeah. You know, we call that WordPress. Dude, Expression Engine.

I've had to deal with Expression Engine all week. Oh my God. WordPress is the gold standard for the most beautiful software ever written if you've ever had to work with Expression Engine. The crazy thing is Expression Engine is like crazy expensive, right? Crazy expensive meaning like $219.

Okay. That's not crazy expensive. No. No. But all the plug-in, by the time you're finished with an Expression Engine website with all the add-ons and plug-ins, you're looking at about a grand. Yeah. So in that case, it's expensive, but the problem is I'm dealing with a five-year-old Expression Engine site that has like 20 plug-ins in it, and to upgrade to the latest Expression Engine, I need all those plug-ins to upgrade, and half of them have upgraded because there's

no money in it for plug-in vendors for Expression Engine because they sell like 10 copies a year. Yeah, not too many sites out there running on it. No. I mean, if it worked, it would be great, but it is so convoluted. It is so unbelievably and utterly convoluted. I took a look at that at once, and I was just like, nah, I'm out.

Yeah. So we didn't talk about this exploit. It's called the Freak Exploit. This comes on, this is after Heartbleed, and we'd done enough, you know, HTTPS exploits that I thought we could skip this one because I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but turns out it kind of is.

Right. So what it is, this is a throwback to when the U.S. was putting embargoes on strong encryption to the rest of the world. Remember those days where you couldn't go, where you couldn't send your buddy in England a copy of PGP? Right.

Because you would go to jail. And then we forced really weak encryption keys on people that were doing, you know, cross-border transactions with cryptography. Well, the Freak Exploit basically is a time, it goes back to that time where you can tell somebody, say, hey, no, you want to do a secure connection, but here's the deal.

Don't give me the strong key. Give me the weak key, your little 512-bit encryption key, and then we'll talk. And then a hacker gets that key and then just throws it into his Amiga that's sitting on the floor to crack it, you know, in about 20 minutes. Then they have that 512-bit key, and then they can decrypt all of your transactions back and forth.

And there's still, they've fixed it in a lot of the OSs. 8.2 still, it's fixed in iOS 8.2, but on an app level, because when you're dealing with apps, you're dealing with web communication. So the app is talking to a web service.

The web service may not have been patched. So your old Apache server that's still running old-ass versions of OpenSSL still may not have been patched, and it's probably still open to heartbleed if you're that lazy. Um, can still read the data. So if I'm on the network, I can, I can break that.

And it's, it's still out there. It's a thing. And thousands of the top, you know, top apps on Google Play and iOS app store are still vulnerable. Here's the deal. I don't bank on the internet anymore. I don't. I go to the bank now because of all this crap.

All right. Um, yeah, I don't know what to say. It's one of those, I, I, again, it's totally screwed up. It's, but I'm, I just, I, I'm too lazy and online baking is fine. And I, I, you know, I have, I have a tin hat, tin foil hat, but it's over in the corner.

I've not put it on yet. Well, because this re this goes into our next story, which is online privacy. Nihilism runs rampant in the U S. Um, and we have said this forever. We're going to, we're going to talk about this. We're going to tell you how terrible things are.

You're not going to do a goddamn thing. And then when you get hacked, you're going to say, why didn't somebody tell me this? And why, who can I sue? Yeah. Um, no, I don't do online banking anymore for a lot of these very reasons. I don't have a banking app on my phone. I go to the branch period.

Um, the problem is when I go into the branch, they won't take my money. Well, I use the ATMs. That's all. But yes, you, you know what? You need to go to the grocery store where, and, and use the coin star and then get your PayPal certificate. Because if you get, if you get a voucher for groceries with the money that you just gave them, they will take like 9%.

But if you get it into your PayPal account, they'll go, they'll only take 6%. Right. Right. Anyway. So yeah, uh, nobody's changed anything almost. It's, they're like, oh, I don't care. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Whatevs. Yeah. So this is an Ars Technica story and they run down, I think it's a pew research, uh, study that they, a couple hundred Americans and they're like, yeah, no, haven't really changed much.

A little bit here and there, kind of changed a little bit of my posting profiles. But for the most part, they're like, I'm not doing anything wrong. Why do I care? Which we debunked a thousand times in the show. God. Sort of. Damn it. Kind of. Not really. Yeah.

Go watch Glenn Greenwald's Ted talk. That's all the, that's everything you need right there. Okay. Anyway, um, we were talking about, we were talking about experimenting with, um, you know, a new web service when the Facebook suicide guy got shoved in, uh, the padded room for 70 hours.

And, and by the way, when you're, when you're on like a psych watch like that, they lock you in those cells naked. He spent 70 hours in a cell naked. Some people pay good money for that. Well, probably not that kind of cell. That's 50 shades of wrong, as I've said before.

But anyway, so I tried out the Yahoo two-factor auth, or I'm sorry, not two-factor auth, auth without two-factor. This is their on-demand passwords that came out this week. They call it a new simple way to log in. So I went to, I went to, first I went to Flickr.

Yes. Right? So I've got two Flickr accounts. I've got my personal Flickr account, and I have a Flickr account for the Apple TV in the house where I live that is a shared Flickr account for the screensaver on our TV. I'm not joking. We have a Flickr account for our screensaver so we can share pictures that come up on the screensaver when we're watching Apple TV or when people come over and we just want to show off our photography. Okay. Well, it took me like half an hour to figure out how to log out of Flickr. Talk about lock-in.

There's almost no way to figure out how to do it unless you randomly click on your little circle icon in the upper right, which has no disclosure triangle, has no UX to tell you that that actually does something besides take you to your profile, like back to home.

And then it shows you how to log out. Yeah, but that's how everybody is starting to do that now because the point is to keep people engaged. Do not let them log out. That's the thing. Soon, once you log in, it is fucking Hotel California. That's it. I'm calling it, this is the Hotel Californian of the internet. Once you sign in, you can't sign out. Permanent cookies, you're screwed.

So once I finally figured that out, I went and set it up and I got my little thing. I synced my phone with it and I tried to log in. The first thing it shows me is my username and password box. Yeah. I'm like, okay. I hit my one password button, it filled it in, and then it comes back and says, no, no, no, no, dude, dude, what are you doing? No, no, no. You've got the easy auth. You don't have to put in a password. Press the button, we'll send you a text. Got my text, typed it in,

and it is five letters. That is the super secret password they send you is five letters. And I plugged those in and I was logged in. This entire process, I got no less than 21 emails from Yahoo to set it up, to change my phone number because they had an old phone number and it was a mess. And here's the fun part. They're like, I'm like, okay, I want to, I go to my profile. I get logged in on Yahoo with my old account. I go there. I'm like, okay, let's turn this

on. Let's do this thing. Then it says, okay, what phone number do you want? And it shows me my old phone number. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not it. I put in my new phone number. I'm like, okay, we sent you a text here. Put it in the number that we sent you in the text. I'm like, okay, great. Put in the number. The next screen is a confirmation dialogue of all my personal information says is it doesn't say, would you like to change anything? It either says, no, I don't want to sign up for, you know, easy auth or everything's okay. But the phone number was

wrong. I'm like, uh, no, that's the old phone number. I just didn't use and there's no way to change it. So I had to go through that. Then had to go back and find the place in the profile to remove the old phone number. It was a mess. Yahoo is still just as bad as they ever were. Yeah. But now safer. Okay. Yeah. My five letter login hotel, hotel, hotel, California.

I'm telling you there's soon they've taken away our ability to read things in a chronological order. Next, they're going to be taking our ability to log out. Right. Yep. I agree. Isn't it fun? And rant. And rant. Okay. Skipping Jason's entire rant. If you still have any interest whatsoever in trying to actually combat privacy nihilism, there isn't, there's a decent, I mean,

first off use one password people. I mean, I don't know how many times we've said that on this show, just get it, use it done that you're at. That's half the battle right there. And if you're interested in going a little bit further, there's a nice little article that again, from slate, make hackers jobs harder. And it runs through some basic principles, things that I had never even thought about, like establishing a credit freeze, which is a great idea. And I'm going to do that. Um, it's just some very simple ways to keep your, your information, your private information private and you spread it around

a bit. So people can't put together an entire story of you, which is the real problem. It's when people get five to six pieces of your data and can basically construct your entire life out of it. That's when it gets scary. So this is a good way to some basic, just simple, easy, not that big of a deal way to start making your work a little bit more private and safe. Everything in this article, we have told people a thousand times, except for the credit freeze. The credit freeze was actually a really

good idea. It sounds difficult to do, but once you do it, then nobody can do a credit check on you and they can't get a new credit card. I have taken the opposite approach. I have unbelievably horrible credit and nobody can get a credit card under my name. There is that option. Just screw up your entire financial existence and nobody's going to want to get you, hack you. Exactly. Just be a horrible person that nobody would ever want to be. And then you're set. There you go. We call that the

DeFilippo method. There's another article that I put as a counterpoint to this one, which isn't really a counterpoint, but it's just adding a little bit more onto it. Parisa Tabriz, she's an American Iranian Polish hacker who works at Google and she manages the Chrome security team. And she did a medium article on the same stuff. It's basically how to protect yourself. It's a short read. It's a good read. And that one is, is almost identical to everything we've always said. But if you need

a refresher or if you're new to the show and want to know that everything that we've been telling people for two years now, go sign in and check out these articles. They're pretty good. All righty. Now, David Petraeus. Yes. Not Patreon. Petraeus. David Petraeus.

Basically got a slap on the wrist for taking home binders of, of not women, not women, uh, classified documents, but showing them to his lady, uh, who was an author, uh, basically got a slap on the wrist, no jail time. And, uh, thank God he didn't post. He was feeling suicidal on Facebook.

Oh God, we could only hope. Um, Stephen Kim, who was, uh, he's, he's been imprisoned for, he was sentenced to 13 months in prison for violating the Espionage Act by basically talking to a Fox news reporter about one single classified document on North Korea. His lawyers have come out and said, um, double standard, let my guy out now, even though he's been in jail since June, which is way more time than Petraeus would ever do. So hopefully he'll get out, but it's a really good

article talking about, and, and follow the links in the article, because you can find a lot of different stories where the people that are in power or have been in power get a pass. Yeah. And Stephen Kim doesn't. Now here's the difference. And this is what I think that, uh, people on first look and all these other, uh, news sites kind of gloss over the people that have been in power have all the secrets. This is, you know, this is blackmail material. It's like,

well, you're not going to let me off. Well, let me tell them about the little tie boy you have stuffed in the closet up there. You know, I'm not saying that's a thing. I'm just saying that could be a thing. This is Washington. That went dark fast. Well, this is the security segment. This is what we do. Okay. So, but you know, these guys are the ones with the secrets. They've been in the meetings. They know everything. And they're like, let's not piss that guy off. Stephen Kim,

eh, who cares? You know, he can, he can rot. He'll get out later. This is journalist at the door. Who cares? Right. So it's a good, it's a really good article though, to talk about the dualism when it comes to sentencing from government, uh, employees or government, like super insiders versus just general whistleblowers. Yeah. So I just, I, I highly recommend that one. Okay. And on that, on that vein, it's another first look article. This one's I just want to gloss. I'm not going to

gloss over it, but I just want to say, go read this one. And it talks about the rebranding of mass surveillance versus bulk collection. This is the same thing that happened when we talked about torture versus enhanced interrogation. These people are trying to change the dictionary to make them sound like good guys. And it's bullshit. It's, we all know it's bullshit, but we just need to call them on the bullshit, how to do that. I mean, this is a British thing where they were really getting

into it, but still it's just, just knowing is half the battle. Yes, it is. And you'd be changing the word. Doesn't change what it is. No, it doesn't. And Barbie apparently will know everything. Yeah. I saw this one. You think they would have learned from the whole Sony TV thing or Samsung TVs.

The basically is Barbie is shipping with a microphone in it. And, uh, there you go. Yeah. This is a silly story. Uh, the parents are up in arms about it. Here's the deal. Don't buy the doll for your kid. It's Syria. That's it. That's honestly, that's it. That's what it is. So don't buy the doll for your kid. Don't buy the doll for your kid or be, how are we still in a world where people think that this

wouldn't happen? You know, you have to know how it works. You, uh, whatever. No, that's what I'm saying. I mean, there, there are things that we can control. There, there are the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Okay. We, the Barbie is a known known. Yes. We know how this works. It's going to record your shit. Don't buy it. Don't, don't go up in arms. Don't get it banned. Just don't buy it. Also it's $75. I mean, granted, I haven't been in a Toys R Us in probably

20 or 30 years, but isn't that crazy expensive for all for a Barbie? Yeah. Um, I don't know if you remember a girl I dated named Missy, uh, the Barbies that I bought for her to gain favor, uh, we're about $200 a pop. So yeah. Okay. You know what? Bob Mackey, go burn in hell.

Comment of the week. First off. We'd like to thank our Patreon supporters this week. Chien, James Morrison, Dan Roski, Sam, Brian Bettle, Zaddy Mortis, Gary Inman, and Mike Tamal. Yeah. Thank you all very much. Uh, these are all the people that have signed up and, uh, gave us some, uh, some dough on Patreon since our last show, since we basically launched it now. So it seems to be going all right. Um, I'd also like, yeah, I'd also like to notice, uh, note that we've got

extra PayPal donations also from Dan Roski who has double dipped. Thank you, Dan and, uh, Kevin LaFleur. And those are very much appreciated. Yes, very much so. And I would also like to thank Mike Tamal because he did give us the single largest donation to grumpy old geeks in the history of grumpy old geeks by $1. And, uh, we gave it back and said, dude, go sign up for Patreon. You want,

you want to get the goodies. So we gave him back his money and he just said, okay, well, I'm going to go to Patreon. So it's, it's much more fun on Patreon because we're posting a bunch of stuff behind the scenes. And, uh, we'll talk about some more at the end of the show. Yeah. I also want to talk about James Morrison for a second. Okay. He was our, our guy that was, uh, driving around Africa in his motorcycle, downloading our show from all these different countries. Yeah. That was awesome. Yeah. Back when we used to look at the stats by country and

trying to figure out, Hey, we got listeners in Africa now. And then he, he wrote us and he's like, yeah, dude, I'm on a motorcycle trip around the country or the continent. Sorry, not the country. And we're just, it was so cool. And, uh, he wrote us on Patreon and we're just like, I mean, it's, it's awesome. He's working on a movie about his, his trip. So as soon as that's done, we will let you all know, because that is one of those, that's my bucket list item is to go on like a massive motorcycle trip and just have a great time like that. And he did it. So cheers, James.

Yeah. Cheers, James. And Jason, you just got to whittle down your recording rig a little bit. Dude, I'm down. I'm down. I'm getting there. All right. If I can find a, like a boom for my shock mount that isn't, that doesn't take up a large suitcase, I'll, I'll get there. Maybe I need to invent one. I should Kickstarter that. Oh yeah. No comment. Uh, but we did get comments, uh, from, from some of you lovely people, uh, Brian who battle, who did, uh, join us on Patreon wrote in

to say, you mentioned you were a fan of says you, uh, I am also, but a show I enjoyed even more was my word, same concept, but it's the BBC version from the sixties and seventies. So it has extra British wit. Um, I'm going to definitely have to check that out. So, cause excuse me, I have not had enough tea. Okay. Okay. People donate a little bit more on Patreon and we'll get Brian a cough button. Yeah, we need a cough button. That'd be great. Uh, and it continues. My tech question of the week is what will be more

beneficial for destroying the evil cable empire cable companies and broadband providers, Google fiber or the new net neutrality rules. On the one hand, you're selling your soul and data for super fast broadband. On the other hand, you are relying on government regulation. That always works. Thanks and keep up the good work. Brian battle. Uh, what's your thoughts, Jason? Um, I am down for the net neutrality rules because that open, that opens up competition to other providers. And it also makes it harder for

the NSA to, to grab your data because there's a lot more providers, but then again, they just grab the trunk line. So that doesn't count. But, um, anyway, yeah, Google fiber while in concept sounds great. I don't want to give a company that is tied to content, my internet connection, because then they're, they're always going to be a trade-off. I would much rather pay somebody whose only job it is, is to give me a good connection to the internet. That's why I hate having to deal with Comcast,

Time Warner, and in Google, all these companies that have a vested interest in their own content empires. Like if Netflix came out with an ISP tomorrow, I wouldn't sign up for that. You know, I want the homegrown down the road ISP with a giant pipe that I can just pay every month. And that's what they do for a living. That's it. Yeah, I agree. Uh, and I, I feel that, you know, Google fiber, if it just took over, we're just, uh, you're just trading one evil for another. Uh, we know,

you know, Google got rid of their do no evil slogan a long time ago. Um, obviously their service looks great, but I'd, you know, I'd hate to see if it really rolled out and they put their full weight behind it. You just get another crappy monopoly. So what's the point in that? So here's hoping for the new net neutrality rules. And if anything is actually going to help whittle down the evil cable companies and they broadband providers, I actually think it's going to be not coming from the internet side of things, but from the TV side of things. Uh, when we see Apple TV rolling out their

subscription services to get you away from Time Warner cable for your channels, when we see HBO launching their own pay apps, so you don't have to buy into the cable companies that way, that's, what's going to slowly weaken them down. And here's to that. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're dealing with a couple of different, uh, problems there though, cause it's not quote unquote TV, you know, it's not like the local CBS affiliate is going to open up their own ISP. Uh, you're still dealing with this massive conglomerates just talking about

weakening the conglomerates a bit. I want more competition. I want them all involved. I don't want this bullshit. It's not a monopoly because that we have Time Warner and Comcast when I can only get Time Warner in my area, that is a fucking monopoly. Let's go. It is. But the, the big problem is these are the people that put in the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. So trying to separate those two, I really just wish we had separation of church and state when it comes to, uh, pipes and content. Like why can Comcast own

universal and the pipe that it delivers it? That is just not the way things should go. I agree. Uh, Dan Roski again, thank you very much. Uh, gave us a five-star iTunes review and said, nuggets of goodness nuggets. I like it. We give nuggets. Uh, I've been listening to GOG since about episode six. My condolences. Sorry about that. And I consider it one of my three essential podcasts.

I look forward to a new episode every week, whether or not, you know, anything about information technology, you will find nuggets of goodness in this show. Congratulations on 100 episodes. Thank you, Dan. Very, very much. Yes. Thank you, Dan. We have had Tim Ferriss as a guest on this very podcast before, and, uh, we've talked a little

bit about his books, including the four hour chef. Uh, but I finally actually tried his sexy time steak recipe, uh, two nights ago. Uh, the link is in the, uh, there's a YouTube link in the show notes and it was also the Patreon feed earlier this week when I was making it. This thing was frigging delicious.

Really? It really was. Uh, I mean, I, to be fair, I did buy very good ribeyes to begin with, but the whole process of doing the dry rub, sprinkling salt on it to, to whisk out the moisture and let the salt sink into the meat and then actually putting it in the freezer to get rid of all excess moisture before doing basically a sear with a pan and then putting it in the oven. I've never made a steak that way before. Beautiful. It was easy. It looked amazing and it tasted absolutely great.

So I urge if you're a steak fan, you should try this out. I'm definitely going to try that. I I've seen the recipe. I think I've seen the video before, but it just seemed like it was a lot of steps when I can just take it and slap it on the grill and deal with it. But I, you know, that is the way that I have always made steak. It's just been, you know, maybe a marinade if I'm trying to get a specific flavor, but just slap it on the grill and cook it. This method, it was absolutely delicious. I think I'm going to be trying it more and more and see if it, you know, just, I don't have a barbecue right

now. That's a completely different thing, but you know, barbecuing a steak is a damn good way to go. But this, this whole method of doing the sear and then bake in the oven, plus all the steps that he took before to make the meat really tender and get all the moisture out. Absolutely delicious. Oh, that's awesome. I'm still like, I'm working my way through the four hour chef, but it's, I mean, so far it's a great book. It's a totally, totally great book.

If you're interested in cooking, this is a, it's a great way to go. So I'd recommend picking it up and playing around with some of the recipes. So I've been trying to get to the time to sit down with Data and Goliath and read it because it's, you know, it's a word book. It doesn't go right into my, my head holes. And I realized I had Spam Nation, the inside story of organized cybercrime from global epidemic to your front door by Brian Krebs in the queue on my audible, uh, you know,

doohickey, my app, my app on my iPhone. And so I, I, I bumped that up the queue and I listened to that over the last week, man, that's a good book. It's a really good book because it talks about why, for the most part, why Spam exists, who's doing it and the history behind a lot of it with, with regard to mainly Russia, like Russia and the Russians and their inability and unwillingness

to prosecute hackers in Russia, the safe haven ISPs. And the fact that, you know, they, they kind of have carte blanche out there for the most part had, right. This entire thing is the story of how they went from the wild West, not that long ago, we're talking like 2009 to, uh, basically, you know, global prosecutions now and all the botnets, you know, all these hackers who are, who are trying to

get malware on malware on your machines are just trying to sell you boner pills. It's nuts. Yeah. And it's, it's a really, really fascinating read. And I learned a lot and I, I always used to get ads for bulletproof hosting and I never quite understood that that was an actual hacker term that means that we don't actually respond to cease and desist from government organizations.

Right. And, you know, I mean, if I, if I'd have known this stuff back in the day, I would have been a completely different person and I would have been in jail right now. So I'm glad that I missed it. Um, and the funny thing is that these guys didn't make a lot of money, like the, the biggest spammers in the world who were sending over a billion pieces of spam a day made about $3 million a year.

That's, that's not exactly a small amount when it, when you look at the, when you look at the fact that it costs about $500 million a year to get rid of the spam problem. Yeah. It's, it, it is a very small amount of money to make for the amount of havoc it costs. Exactly. And these guys didn't think that they were like really breaking the law. They thought that they were just bucking the system and saying, fuck you to the man because they didn't believe in our, you know, our draconian U S laws. So they're just like, yeah, we're going to do what we're going to do. It's, it's nuts. It's a great read. I mean, it's pretty short too,

but if you really want a backstory on the history of this stuff and just the, you know, the behind the scenes goings on about how the stories got, got out there and all these guys, it's, it's, it's a crazy read. Honestly, definitely check it out. All right. Maybe I shall.

Uh, I actually ended up reading Departure by A.G. Riddle. Uh, we had a comment, uh, last week about this book, um, because I had talked about reading, uh, the, the Atlantis, uh, thrillers, uh, three of the books by, by A.G. Riddle, which I actually really did enjoy. Um, I wasn't so sure I was going to read Departure because I, I had read the, the synopsis and wasn't too crazy about it, but lo and behold, at some point, probably after, Oh, I don't know, five or six glasses of wine a few

weeks ago, I must've purchased it inadvertently because as I finished my previous book, I noticed it was sitting in my Amazon Kindle app. So I'm like, eh, I guess I bought it and it's here. So I'll read it. Um, and I did, I went through it very quickly. I read it in probably two or three days. I think partially that was mostly me last night going, I need to finish this so I can talk about it tomorrow or else I have to wait a whole another week and I won't remember anything about this damn book.

It was okay. The first, just okay. It was okay. The first half I, he was basically rewriting lost. He might as well have called the character Jack and, um, the middle bit got a little bit interesting with some time traveling stuff. That's not exactly a spoiler. It says it right in the synopsis. And he had some interesting ideas, but, uh, the end just left me kind of cold and bored.

Um, I didn't think it was a great book. If you're going to read something by A.G. Riddle, go back and read the Atlantis books. Uh, this one, it was a miss for me. Okay. That's too bad. Yeah. I mean, it's fine. You know, crap or read. That's basically what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Some decent ideas, not well thought out. That is actually unfortunately been a bit of a recurring theme for me as I'm reading a lot of these new sci-fi authors. And unfortunately I think Amazon is going

to be helping them out quite a bit because Amazon is now rolling out the, they're basically the book version of what they've been doing with TV shows, which is if you are not a published author and you don't have all this stuff going on for you, you can submit your books to be voted on and the winners will actually, you can finish your book and it'll get published by Amazon. The Kindle Scout program.

Yes. Yeah. Kindle Scout is like them being basically being A&R for really crappy books. And as, as, as much as I make fun of you for posting slate articles, this is actually a really good overview and a really funny overview of why this program is so terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go through the article because it's the, the examples that they, that they show for the first picked books for, for the slate

or the scout program are just hilariously bad. I mean, really like, like seventh grade bad. Pitbulls versus aliens. Oh, I like that one a lot. Oh man. This is, this is, uh, look here, here's the difference between Pitbulls versus aliens can be the next M night Shyamalan, a ding dong movie. I don't think he's going to be doing any more movies. Uh, the difference between, uh, this with TV,

Amazon doing it with TV and with books is that if you're doing a TV show, there is a pool of people around you that can stop you from your really bad and stupid ideas. There are meetings and there is a certain degree of, you know, uh, group think that goes into them. So they tend to be somewhat decent.

If you're sitting at home alone, writing your book, nobody is giving you feedback and you could put any old piece of crap up here. And the fact that if you get picked, you don't, you, you, they publish the manuscript that you gave them. It doesn't go through a professional editorial process. It's just like, here it is. Okay, let's put it out. Yeah. And of course, you know, Amazon then signs you to a deal.

So they're hedging their bets to make sure that they get all the money out of this. Well, it's a, yeah, you get a $1,500 advance and then 50% of revenue. So what's, why don't people just self-publish with the Amazon? Self-publish anyways. I, obviously, you know, their, their Amazon wants people to do this and they figure that you'll get more eyeballs this way because people will be attracted to it. It's the same way that it's the same reason that Amazon didn't just put up their TV shows as a network. It was, you know, American idling the situation to get eyeballs.

Vote. You tell us which ones you like and we'll make those. And it just gets more eyeballs. It's Kickstarter, you know? Well, no. And there's, there's this like underlying promise of promotion and marketing when you get picked up, but there's, there's really nothing that says, okay, we're going to put X amount of dollars behind marketing for it. We're going to, we're going to feature you in this spot or that spot. There's, it's, it's really just like, it's a really poorly thought out program in

my book for everybody except for Amazon. Yeah, exactly. Except for, yeah. Okay. We need a love story with a man in a kilt who's driving a drone to his lady on the fjords. Yes. But the man in the kilt is a learned professor and the woman happens to be much younger than him. Oh yes. The Brian theory of science fiction. I love it. It's so fucking true.

Software apps and gadgets. Brian. Yes. Have you heard of the meerkat? Uh, you know, it was mentioned everywhere on Twitter, uh, especially over the last couple of weeks. Cause I guess something happened. Uh, I had not paid much attention to it. And, uh, this week I did download it and play around with it and it's nice.

See my, my shark fin radar went off when it first came out. Yeah. Because everybody was like, Oh, meerkat's the new thing. You can do video on Twitter. I'm like, Oh God. Yeah. All this has happened before all of this will happen again. And then immediately, almost immediately Twitter shut off meerkat. Yeah. Cause why would they let them do that? We'll make our own. Thank you very much. Here's the, okay. To start off with, I just want to talk really, uh, for a second about

the quote unquote social graph, my social graph, meaning my connections to people on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Honestly, to me, that is my data. I've, I want to share that to another service. I should be able to, because those are my connections. I've made those connections. I spent my time on your network and I, I, this is my, this is my data. Why can't I take my data?

That it's free. I would pay gladly to take my data, but that's not their business model. Cause that doesn't work so well. I just go back to my, my, uh, experience with blog rolling when everything from the get go was built around you owning your data. You could take it with you in multiple formats and it garnered me so much respect and adoration from my user base. And it just was like the basis in the foundation of the service was these are my links. I want to take them with

me when I leave. And I'm like, if you want to leave, go ahead. But that having that, that constraint on me, knowing that they can take their data anywhere made me build a better product. And when I see people like Twitter and Facebook, just having these little data wars, it pisses me off.

Well, the internet, you know, you, the internet went right instead of left. That's the reality. We can't go back. So this is, this is the business model. The business model is your data. It's not your money and it's not because you're are free. It is not your data. It is theirs. Yeah. Everybody, you know what? We always talked about the freemium model. Freemium being, we give you a little bit of a service and if you want more of the service, you pay for it.

And I think we lost so much when we've moved away from that service, when it comes to like these big box social boutiques and it sucks. It really sucks. So yes, Meerkat got shut off from Twitter and now the service to me is almost useless because I can't click on a link in Twitter and go to somebody's Meerkat video and it's a mess. And so it doesn't do anything for me anymore.

That was the big problem for me because I didn't download and install it until after they had already shut, shut them down and off Twitter. So when I launched the app, I was like, okay, now what? Yeah. There's nothing there. Well, and it's the weird thing because, because when I signed up with Twitter, but none of my, I signed up literally, I clicked sign up while Twitter was still working. And I got, I was in this weird in-between state from when I clicked sign up to when I tried to off my account was exactly

when they cut them off. I was like this weird edge case. So I got like half and half, but for a while there was an explore, explore function where I could see other people's stuff. And that seems to be gone now. That is definitely gone because I have been unable to really find anything. I've watched one or two streams that I was able to find basically just by clicking around on the web. And I was able to go ahead and find something, but it's right now it is a completely hobbled app. And this is a big lesson.

And again, I don't know how we changed this because this is the way that we have decided the internet is going to work. But if you are an app developer trying to do something, you really need to think twice about basing your entire application on somebody else's system. Again, something we've been saying for two years. If you, if you put your, all your eggs in the basket of somebody else, don't expect them not to steal your eggs.

Yeah. Seriously. And the fact that they, you know, out of the gate just tied it so closely with Twitter, who is notorious for shutting off API access. If you just fart in their general direction, you're out. So it made no sense. And now they're, you know, they're coming out saying, Oh, we're going to build our own social network. Gee, what a novel idea. You morons.

And I've, I've gotten, I watched like Mike Elgin type for a little bit, but like Sean Bonner's over in Japan, walking around, uh, checking out like some cool stuff in Japan. And he's, he's meerkatting every now and again while making fun of the service. But I wanted to check him out because he goes to Japan all the time. And I know he's checking out the coolest stuff. And I, by the time I can get, I can figure out how to get from my, my Twitter app to the meerkat app to make it open. He's done

like shit. Uh, it's, it's a mess. It is a total and utter mess. It is a mess. Uh, it's, it's, you know, it's an interesting application. They were smart to do it. They were, you know, they were quick and they got some good publicity and some cool people were starting to use it. And, uh, then Twitter basically spanked them. And now it's a question of, can they get their own version of a network up and running for a backbone that isn't Twitter while they still

have eyeballs on them and there's still some interest? Um, I personally don't think that they're going to be able to do that. I think they might, because you know what? The quality of the product was actually really high when I checked out the video streams in the chat for, from the, the few that I could get into before they took away the discover feature. Um, it was actually really good. I thought it was, I thought it was an actual decent product.

And there are a ton of applications for this. I mean, even podcasters, we could, we could be meerkatting video while we're recording our podcast and people could watch that in real time. It would make it easy. It would make it relatively simple to do. Um, there was a really interesting article on medium, which is interesting for other reasons as well, because we couldn't figure out who the hell author damn thing. Uh, let's talk about that for one second. Uh, because you, you, you link this

medium article and I'm just like, Oh, medium, whatever. Q Q, uh, you know, reactive sigh. But then you're like, who's the author? And I looked at it and I'm like, no, you're right. There is no author. It isn't the quote unquote medium back channel, which means that it's probably paid content by medium. But why does that mean that they can't say who wrote it? I know that's really interesting. And I, I, I liked this article and I kind of wanted to talk about it a little bit, but now I kind of feel like it's almost discounted because I feel like I'm reading an ad. Yeah. Yeah. It could be sponsored

content from, you know, from meerkat because there is no attribution to who wrote it. There's a, there's a really horrible clickbaity venture beat article called let the meerkat backlash began. The meerkat backlash began when, when meerkat launched, which means that this goes back to my whole knee jerk reaction to anything that comes out of Silicon Valley. Now it's like, if you make it, they will shit on it. This is like, this is field of poop. That is what we're dealing with now. Yeah.

Anyways, the, the, the articles made me start to think that, you know, again, it's, it depends on if it catches on or not. And it's, it's there, they have some struggles ahead of them, but the articles basically say meerkat is one of those things that meerkat can do to TV and to reporting as the same, that basically podcasts did to talk radio, which is replace it.

No, no, no, no, no, no. You know what? We've tried this before with Ustream, you know, we've had the technology wasn't there yet. The technology wasn't as good yet. Ustream kind of sucked. Well, no, I don't know about that. I've been on Ustreams with half a million viewers. It wasn't that it was, well, yeah, it might've been, I mean, it wasn't a technology issue. I think it might've been more of a UX issue. Yeah. I think UX and it wasn't mobile, which is where the push is now and people are, and we've created more, there's more acceptance towards these kinds of things than

Ustream did, than Ustream was at their day. You know, you didn't have a 12 year old girls hopping onto Ustream to check things out, but they will launch an app. And well, the thing is, I mean, I, Ustream came out before the iPhone one. And when, once the iPhone one came out, I actually met with a bunch of the guys from Ustream and we talked about what we could do with it for our blogging network. And like, can we, can we put this in the hands of our bloggers and get them out there? And

the technology was just too early. We didn't have HTML5. We didn't have any of the, everything, cause everything was flash, flash video back then. And now we've got HTML5 video. So there is a chance for somebody to come, come back and redo that model. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to bag on Ustream just for, you know, not being cool enough or hip enough because I thought they had a huge amount of traction and you know, they were just too early. I think they were ahead of

their, they were ahead of their time, which is a big problem. And the time is pretty much right for something like this. And Meerkat was there at the right place, right time. Unfortunately, now they have a massive hurdle and we'll see what happens, but I can definitely see Meerkat being useful. And unfortunately, you know, pretty much going straight into what we were talking about with Tinder and South by Southwest being taken over by ads pretty quickly. Oh yeah. No, once, once you get, once you get porn on it, we're good. But, uh, um, and Twitter went out and bought their

competitor. So they're going to do it in-house and do it poorly. We're going to have another Vine, you know, like we know, we all know how great Vine did. So I don't know. It's, it's going to shake out, but I don't want to discount it, but I just think that whoever was doing their product development on the Meerkat side needs to be fired immediately because unless they haven't already, because just no tying their product so closely with Twitter out of the gate is a bad, bad idea.

You know how that worked. You know how those meetings worked. It went, we need another a hundred million dollars in investment. If we're going to build our own network or we, we have to get this out right away. So let's just big piggyback on Twitter. When some clueless VC says, well, you have to have the social component. Let's tie it in with Twitter. Why didn't you tie it in with Facebook? Oh, because Facebook doesn't let people do that without paying them gargantuan sums of money. Um, yeah, well, Twitter doesn't either. You know, there, there's so much cluelessness that go,

that went into this launch just from a product development standpoint. I've been through this cycle so many times in the Valley with these people and I know the conversations they had and they were all wrong. Yeah. But you know, there you go. I need a cough button to subscribe on Patreon.

Yes. I wonder how much they cost. We'll find out. $39.95. So I'm going to guess what I've got this week. What? Apps. Oh boy. I finally got some new apps. Okay. Well, it's been a while cause we, you know, we haven't really done, you know, we talk about software apps and gadgets, but I haven't had like new iOS apps in a long time.

That's true. And I've got two. Okay. First one is Alto's Adventure. This is a, it's a game. It works on a iPhone and iPad. I prefer to play it on the iPad because I've got an iPad air one and it's beautiful. Okay. You are a llama herding snowboarder who likes to pick up coins and do backflips.

I know many of them. This game is kind of a mesh between the design aesthetics of Monument Valley, the gameplay of something like, not angry. Oh, what's it?

Oh, damn it. I'm flaking now. The bird, tiny bird, tiny wings, tiny wings. Flappy bird? No, fuck flappy bird. Tiny wings. Okay. And it's just fun. It's a side scroller where you go down a mountain, you capture your llamas, you pick up coins, you do grinds and backflips.

And I'm only like 19 levels in, so I'm not that far along, but it's a blast. It is a, it is the, I can, I consider the two apps that I'm going to be recommending here as pooper games. These are total pooper games and, uh, Alto's Adventure. It's a dollar 99, a ton of fun, beautiful, great soundtrack.

The music and the sound effects are awesome. And, uh, the physics are a little hard to get used to. If you've played the next game that I'm getting ready to tell you or, or, or, uh, skate, the skate video game where you're doing ollies and stuff. Cause you have to like kind of prime those and do jumps and stuff.

Most of the physics take a little getting used to, but it's a beautiful little game. Right. For a buck 99, absolute buy. Totally. Next one is called Pumped BMX 2. This is a full 3d game where you're riding a BMX bike on a course and they give you, uh, you know, challenges for each run.

And there's like hundreds of permutations of the levels that you have to get through. It's a blast. I hate riding BMX. I was never a biker, but as a skateboarder, I get the physics, I get the concept and it's fun. It's there's short challenges and it's a blast.

This one is 399. It's a little more, you know, I can see how they are charging that much because it's all 3d, but I mean, for the money I would go Alto's Adventure, but if you've got four bucks, go buy Pumped BMX 2 and Alto's Adventure, because I think they're both beautiful games that are fun to play when you're sitting on the crapper because they're very short throw.

Very short. I will play neither. I know you won't. Because I'm just not a gamer. I'm not talking to you. I know this is, this is not for me, but let's speak a little bit about the last game that I actually did play because it did make the news this week.

Angry Birds. I got into Angry Birds for a little while. I even played the Star Wars one for a bit. Angry Birds is basically, I think everybody in the world has now played it and they're all pretty much done with it. Profits, revenue is drove by 9% and profits fell in half in 2014.

So they're still getting by. People are still buying it. They're trying to market some new games that will either catch on or not, but certainly no way, not in the way that Angry Birds did. But they're still doing all right with their Angry Birds stuffed dolls and actual physical product and branded merchandise, which is selling pretty good.

But that's going to slow down as well. But luckily, we're getting an Angry Birds movie. Yeah. No. An animated film, of course, which will include Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage. So that's going to suck. Well, the fact that their revenue dove by 9% and their profits fell by half?

Yeah. How's the math work on that? I'm not entirely sure. They must have been hiring a lot while their revenue was going in the crapper. Yeah. Must be. So anyway, yeah, I'm not too upset by the Angry Birds thing. Because yeah, it was a one-trick pony that they milked to.

Oh, I ended up being like an 18-trick pony. Yeah. They did all the branded versions, which did really well for a while. So good on you. It was a fun game, but that's it. Moving on. Yeah. I think the Rio version was my favorite of the branded ones. Right. That one was more fun than the Star Wars one. I agree.

The Star Wars one is what actually eventually killed my interest in Angry Birds. I played that for a little bit, and then I was like, all right, I think I'm officially completely done. Yeah. They totally over-milked it. The Rio one, though, was fun. Even though I never saw the movie, now I feel like I saw the movie. So, okay.

Next week, more apps, more gadgets, maybe.

Media Candy. In honor of our 101st show, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite concert films of all time, because it's not just a concert film. It actually followed some fans around, and it was really well done. Depeche Mode 101. This was released way back in 1989, and it's also kind of fun because I was at the show that is featured in this, because it was done at the Pasadena Rose Bowl on the June 18th of 1988.

It was one of the first concerts I ever went to. It's actually a really, it's half documentary, half concert film. It's a great performance. The band was at what I consider to be probably one of their commercial peaks. Music for the Masses tour. Really good. If you've never seen it, and you're a fan of that type of music, by all means, you should see it now.

Link is in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 101. Second article I found was, we discussed this a little bit earlier, but Slate did a calculator to basically see if you should cut your cable cord and start just using the streaming services to get all the shows that you want.

It's relatively well done. You know, you put in your price for your cable plan, then just the internet, then you've picked the services that you'd want to subscribe to, some of which aren't even available yet, or the pricing is unsure. And then it gives you a little year-long result to tell you how much money you would save. See, I'm done with these.

I'm done with these cut-the-cord calculators, because I have cut the cord. And what happens is, by the end of the whole thing, you realize that Netflix doesn't have anything to watch, Hulu's out of stuff, and all you want to do is watch the news. You want to watch the local news, and then you just break down and pay for it anyway.

Yeah, I mean, this is kind of exactly where I'm at with this, too. Everybody's starting to talk about how, oh, we can get rid of cable, and then we can just subscribe to all these different things. Most of them are absolutely useless. I still wouldn't be able to watch Top Gear on BBC America, although I may not be able to anyways, if you've been following that news.

Sad, sadness, sadness, sadness. I know. But yeah, and you know, Downton Abbey and all that. Basically, if I wanted to cut the cable, I would just have to basically use our friends in Sweden and be illegal, and I'm trying not to do that. No, yeah, it is extremely easy to cut the cord if you want to be a pirate.

It is utterly, it's totally easy. I can do it right now, but I would prefer, and also there is the hassle of having to deal with downloading, converting, moving, and all that crap, whereas otherwise you spend, I mean, I think we spend $100 a month on the TV portion.

You press the button, it shows up. There is a convenience fee right there. And the DVRs are massive now, so you can store so much stuff, and it'll record everything for you, and so you can watch everything time-shifted. I'm not cutting the cord anytime soon.

I know. And you know, see, this is where the dichotomy comes in with trying to deal with how do we get rid of the cable providers and the content providers and all that crap, but when they make it so easy, it's almost impossible to cut the cord. It is the thing that the music industry fucked up on.

Make it easy, and you get our money. They should have taken the Napster deal. Yes. Anyway, Bruce Sterling gave his South by Southwest closing talk this week. There's a link to it in the show notes. It's under SoundCloud, and it's awesome.

He basically is Bruce Sterling for, you know, 50 minutes. I love the guy to death. He's just Bruce Sterling. He has now become kind of just the eccentric old man on the stage, and I just love him to death. He really is. It's a good talk.

Worth listening to. And now, I am extremely late to the game on this, but the Power Rangers Unauthorized Hardcore Bootleg Universe version, it's a 15-minute video where Dawson from Dawson's Creek and Starbuck from BSG have one of the most all-time epic short films of all time.

This thing was so good, and I'm so mad that I waited this long to see it. There's like 13 million views on it. So it's not, you know, granted, that's not, this is the fucked up part. That's not a lot in the YouTube universe now. I'm like, oh, 13 million? Yeah, half of our audience has seen it probably.

So you've got to watch this. It is amazingly good. I have such a hatred of the Power Rangers. I know it's a reboot, and I know it's gritty, and it's dirty, and of course, it's got- It's not a reboot. It's just an alternate universe.

It's an alternate universe. I probably will not watch it, but I'm sure we're going to get funded to do something. You have to watch it, because it is- You can't force me, Jason. No, it's- I swear to God, this is like old-school Hong Kong Kung Fu meets Pacific Rim.

No, I'm not watching it. You are such a- God, I would strangle you. Roland Cole is pollution for porn dudes with pickup trucks. I don't even know what to say about this.

We're fucked. We are fucked as a race. Yeah, this- God. Because of just being assholes. This is a story about people with pickup trucks that they probably can't afford, modifying them to spew as much pollution as they can into the environment because they don't like people in Priuses and environmentally safe vehicles, or they're just stupid assholes who want to be douchebags.

Yeah, you basically said it. This is why we can't have nice things, and this is why I've given up on the world. This is why we can't have a nice fucking planet. I'm sorry. It's not nice things. These people are spending anywhere from a grand to five grand modifying their pickup trucks to be able to spew, to like overclock the engine, to just burn diesel and spit black smoke into the environment.

Yeah, awesome. No, I just like, oh, I, they went straight from the short bus to the fucking Ford dealership to buy their F-150. That's, that's the only way I can describe this because this is so fucking stupid and so selfish that it's, it just makes me angry to think that people like this are out there and they're like, you liberals are all, I'm like, fuck you.

You're just stupid. I agree. I'm not a fucking liberal. No, you're not. I can vouch for him on that one. He's definitely not a liberal people.

I found a link that I knew would be perfect for you, Jason. I bet you didn't know I posted this just for you. You did? I did.

I knew you'd be all over this. I am so all over this. It's not even funny. I have no idea how I found it, but I did. Thejacketmaker.com. Leather jackets and winter coats and long coats, uh, basically made from your favorite movies.

They have matched the styles. Exactly. You can get anything that you want. You can have a Superman coat. You can have a watchdog coat. You can get the green lantern jacket. You can get a Daft Punk black leather jacket, everything. This is where you would just lose your mind. And, and which one do you think I'm going to get?

I have mine picked out, but which one do you think I'm going to get? I don't know. I don't know. Uh, take a guess. Take a wild guess. Well, I'd have to look at it as if something, do they have the matrix coat in here? They do. They do. Okay. But that's not it. Okay. Oh no, no, no, no.

No. Is this a doctor who thing? God, no. What do you think I am? Some kind of nerd? Well, obviously I'm making very bad guesses. You watch power Rangers. Asshole. I am getting Tyler Durden's leather jacket. Oh, okay. That one is pretty good. It's a nice looking jacket.

Uh, you know which one I'm going to get? The Daft Punk one. No, no. Actually, I'm going to get one that's related to a movie that I didn't particularly care for, but the Bourne Supremacy, Kirill Longcoat is bad ass. Oh, I haven't seen that one. That is a beautiful coat. Ooh, the Californication Hank Moody jacket's also pretty swank.

I love Californication. I know you did. You're going to spend so much money at this place. Oh my God. People kick it up. I'm not going to be able to afford pants, but I will have the best leather jacket in the history of the world. That'll be a look. Yes. Maybe they have the, uh, the Brokeback Mountain jacket then.

Hey, hey, hey. Where does it say just because I don't have pants doesn't mean I want to like climb Brokeback Mountain? Ah, just saying. I have no more words. I think you, I can't wait for you to roll into your next story. Are you kidding me?

Love it. I had no idea what my next story was when Brian was saying that. And I just looked at the show notes and said, yes, are you kidding me? This week is dicks by mail. If you'd like to send somebody a bag of dicks, you can now do so.

Now to clarify, they're gummy penises. They are gummy penises. But you know, if, if, if you always want to say choke on a bag of dicks, now, now you can, I think this is inspired by what would the glitter guy, the glitter bomb. Yeah. Yeah. Sent out.

So, you know, these clever things appear. I, you know, I think we need to make a little note in our show notes to go back a year from now and see if either of these companies are still around. Cause I'm guessing this, this is just passing fancies. Well, the glitter one already sold. So it's gone. Okay. There you go. But yeah, no, ah, I, I should have read ahead.

I should have read ahead. Well, you know, I don't listen to the show, but you don't read the show notes. I wrote the show notes. Damn it. No. So yes. If you'd like to send somebody a bag of gummy dicks, um, and at the bottom, it says this site was created to put a smile on people's faces.

Um, okay. Yeah. I'm not so sure about that. It's not meant to be a threat or a way to bully. If you are sending this with the intent to ruin someone's day, then maybe it's you who needs to eat a bag of dicks. No, my friend, no, my friend, you created this site.

You need to eat a bag of dicks because the only way that you would send somebody a bag of dicks is because if they need to eat one, because they're an asshole. So take that dicks by mail, uh, closing shout out.

I want to give a shout out to Finn McCool's here in Santa Monica, which hosted our little grumpy old geeks get together. The other week, a couple of people came down. We had a good time and drank many beverages. I also just want to give a shout out to them for surviving St. Patrick's day. I popped in there early in the afternoon, uh, because it just gets crazy.

So hopefully they're still standing. I actually haven't looked. Yeah. Many thanks to Finn's. They've always been excellent to us. Every time we come down there and bring folks and have a good time and their food is just so damn good. I always go there with the intention of getting fish and chips, but you never do.

I never do because they have such a great menu and this sounds like an ad, but it's not. It really isn't because like, uh, they haven't paid us crap. No, they, I don't even think we've got a discount. Oh, we did get a free round of fireballs one time because Bob had the Yelp coupon. Oh, fireballs.

Oh, they did retweet us when we talked about it. So yes, absolutely. So, uh, I want to talk about our first Patreon giveaway. So if you are a fan of us on Patreon, you, I mean, you can do this for a dollar a month. That's 12 bucks a year. Come on, join in. Uh, next Friday, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and I'm going to pick a name at random and that person gets a clocky.

You know what a clocky is? I do. Yeah. Well, well, you just shat on my joke there. I'm sorry. I do not. It's a, it's a little robot alarm clock that you set your time. And then when the time goes off, it starts talking, yelling and, and it's a robot that jumps off the table and runs around the room that you have to catch to help you wake up and turn it off.

Yeah. That's actually quite clever and pretty cute. This, this, this clocky that I'm giving away came in Tim Ferriss's, uh, whatever his random bag is that I get every other month. Oh, his quarterly, his quarterly box. Tim Ferriss's bag of dicks. It is, oh, the four hour cock.

Great. Um, oh, did I, did I say cock? I meant clock. This is the four hour clock. Um, so yes, I have the, the cocky, no, the clocky, uh, and I'm not going to use it because I don't use alarm clocks because I have my sleep time to wake up with other, other things I got.

Um, so, uh, this is a $40 value and, uh, we will include shipping if it's in the U S if you win outside the U S we'll see what we can do. Um, but I think all of our Patreon subscribers so far in the U S, uh, but yeah, I'm giving this away and this is the first every week going forward.

I am going to be clearing my, my archives of cool stuff that I've collected that I don't use. So for, for those of you out there that are a little bit worried about that, I'll be throwing some things into. So it's not all just Jason's collection of randomness. I will state for the record that the auto blow to will not be in the Patreon giveaways.

I thought you had to send that to someone already. No, no, nobody, nobody got it. Nobody wanted it. Nobody ponied up for that. Imagine that. Yeah. Surprise. I'm sorry. But, uh, the next thing that I have up is, uh, my Arduino kit that I bought or actually that my mom bought me.

Sorry, mom, if you're listening. Um, I put it, uh, the, the circuit board together and my grand plan of while I was stuck inside in the winter to learn everything about the Arduino fell apart because I'm like winter sucks.

I'm going to Los Angeles. Yeah. So fall apart. Yeah. So our first giveaway on the Patreon page is going to be the clocky. And then after that, uh, I've got the Arduino and whatever Brian feels like throwing in. And I've got a, a closet full of stuff that I'm going to be given away.

So, yeah. Yeah. So we're going to be rolling those out regularly on the Patreon page. Cause we're just into this. This is the way that we're hoping that we will get supported by all you wonderful listeners moving forward. Uh, we're going to do postings. We've already done a few. If we have some media stuff throughout the week, you know, like when we had that great song, we're going to post that when we originally find it, it'll be on the Patreon only subscriber streams.

So you can hear it before we talk about it. And we're just going to do crap like that moving forward. And also if you're on the Patreon page and you have ideas of stuff that we can do to make the jump, the monkey jump, um, just tell us cause we're, we're kind of out of ideas for stuff that we can do.

We can do like hangouts where we have a beer and chat with you guys. I've seen other Patreon guys do that. I'm totally down for that, but you know, we just need some ideas. So just hop on in, send us a message and say, Hey, this would be cool. And we're open to it. We're totally open to it. We just want to have some fun with it because this gives us a, a cool back channel where we can hang out with people who like care about the show and are fans of the show.

And we're finding out that there are a lot more than we actually anticipated. So yeah, who know? And we really do appreciate the support and the people that have signed up. So if you have not joined us over on Patreon yet, get in there now because Amanda Palmer showed up and she's going to suck all the air out of the room. Like she always does. And honestly, we, I mean, we have a dollar a month option.

It's 12 bucks a year. I, you, you can do that. Honestly. I mean, if you just want to just hang with us and chat, that's cool. And if you don't, that's fine too. Enjoy the show for free. I do want to throw a shout out to, uh, Kyle and Kenny Roderick from Transmission, the transmission podcast.

One of my favorites. They just celebrated their one year anniversary yesterday. Congratulations. Yeah, totally love that show. And, uh, Kyle, I had a slice of cold pizza for you just to celebrate and, uh, definitely check those guys out. They are recording a bunch and they do live shows.

You can hop in the chat room and hear them live. Although I prefer the two X, but you know, that's just me. Um, it's hard to do that to live people. I still hang out in the chat room and it's a fun time because we get to talk about stuff, but, uh, uh, those guys. And, uh, of course, Jordan Cooper from dump AM who I I'm finally back in town.

So I can hear that because if you're in Los Angeles and you have to get up at 6 AM to listen to a podcast live, it's tough. All right, Jason, let's wrap it up. These we've been, we've been going on forever already. We're just, they're not paying us by the minute. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think there'll be some editing. All right, man. Have a good week, sir.

You too, man. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show. No, really it is. Go to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and pick your level of awesomeness and we'll love you forever. If you can't spell Patreon, go to grumpy old geeks.com and follow the link in the sidebar.

We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Please go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars. Better yet, turn some like-minded friends onto the show and you can make fun of us around the water cooler on Mondays. You can also find us at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast.

Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 101. Send money. Nobody wants Jason without pants. Nope. Not interested. Not interested.

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