103: A Tidal Wave of Stupid

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Good morning, Brian. Morning, Jason. Or afternoon for me because I'm calling you from the wilds of West Virginia today. Wow, that's pretty crazy. Yes, the land of fracking and poverty. Yeah, both of those things for sure. Yeah, I shit you not, I went to the convenience store the other day to go buy some bottled water because this is the land of fracking and I don't trust the groundwater.

And they literally used the counterfeit pen on my $10 bill. Awesome. Yeah, this is a very poor town. That's most of West Virginia, right? I mean, all of it really. That's got to be one of the lowest income areas in the country.

Yep, yep. Not an iPhone in sight. Wow. Blackberries? Nope. Flip phones? Well, the only flip phone I've seen is mine, so not that. No, it's a lot of Android phones. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been watching the West Wing a lot, right?

Yeah, I'm actually going through and re-watching it. My wife has never seen it, so she's enjoying it. And it's been long enough that I'm actually really enjoying watching it, too. So we're on season four already at this point. Excellent. Have you gotten to the Garbage Day episode? Yes. Yeah, so today is Friday, which is Garbage Day.

So let's talk about garbage. Very good. This actually just kind of – I just saw it a few minutes ago, so I'm not entirely up to speed on this, but so I'll let you maybe do the intro, Jason, since you've done it a little bit much. Full disclosure, though, before I get too into this, I have worked for Garbage in the past.

Oh, interesting. Okay, well, this will be fun then. Yeah. So last night, my friend John on Facebook posted a link to the open letter to Garbage from photographer Pat Pope over whether the band should pay to use his photos in a new book. Yes. Now, I have not read this letter yet.

I only saw the Garbage rebuttal, so you'll have to give me the salient points here. Okay, here's the skinny. Pat Pope was Garbage's photographer way back in the day, back when the band was a band or a thing, and he took a bunch of photos with them. They paid him.

They used them. For some of them, apparently on another album, they used his photo without any permission. He only found out when he went into the store to buy the album, which has happened to me as well. So I have – this is very near and dear to me. Yeah.

So Garbage is self-publishing a book, and they sent him a thing saying, we can't really afford to pay you to use your photograph, but we will give you proper credit. And so he wrote a very long email or open letter to them saying, yeah, so where do you guys stand on this paying for other artists' work?

Is this like a thing that only musicians have special access to? Or do you agree that other creatives should be paid for their work? Mm-hmm. And that's pretty much the gist of it. All right. Hold on a second. I'm already confused a little bit. They did pay for all these photos the first time around, correct?

For use for the albums. Ah, okay. So it was a specific – ah, yes. Exactly. Well, I'm very aware of these things having been in this world for a long time, yes. So for those of you that don't know, when you contract out for certain things like this, then it is limited use that you purchase for.

It's – if you're doing promo shots, they're exclusively for promo shots. Bands cannot turn around and use your stuff for like merchandise or things like that unless they come back to you and pay you for those rights. Exactly. So the usage rights they paid for were for promotion and album covers, not for a book.

Correct. So they're saying, hey, can we just put this in our book? We're self-publishing. You know, we're a poor band. And let us use your work for free. Yes. So now you've seen Garbage's rebuttal. And what did Garbage say in return? Garbage basically said that we were doing this as a thing for – a nice thing for our fans that we don't really have enough money to put it together to begin with, and we're not going to make any money off of this.

So how about you just be cool and put it in there to promote yourself? And what's your take on that? That was the gist of what they said, correct? That is exactly the gist of it. Because I've also only read that once. My take on that is bullshit. Excellent. We're on the same page.

Again, full disclosure, I am a huge fan of Garbage. I love their music. I'm a huge fan of Shirley Manson in particular. She is very good at speaking her mind, and I tend to agree with her 99% of the time. And as I mentioned, I did work briefly for Garbage as well.

This is particularly interesting to me because what they were attempting to do, the kind of an overview of their career, probably most likely as an e-book and then maybe as a print book as well, is something that I have been trying to do for bands for a long time.

I've actually done two of them. I did one for Brad Paisley and I did one for Coldplay. I have pitched this idea to about 30 other bands, some of which that I have relationships with, some of which were kind of blind. But the reality of the music industry right now is they will claim that they do not have any money, and that has been the stopping block for me doing more of these things, which fans actually really do like.

Nobody wants to pay for it. And one of the bigger hang-ups is the fact that you have to go back and get rights from photographers or video or whatever you want to include, particularly in a multimedia book. And that can be a big hang-up because people want, understandably, to get paid for something that is going to go into a product that the band is charging for.

Yeah. And their claim that we're not going to make any money off of it is ludicrous. It's ludicrous. No, it's actually not. It's not ludicrous. That's the problem, and this is where it gets a little bit more hairy and complicated. Putting together a comprehensive e-book overview of something, of a band's career, can be roughly in the $40,000 range.

And that's before you're paying off a lot of the rights for photographers or video or all these things that we talked about. You want to include some of your own music. Well, you actually have to license that from your record label. You have to pay them to use your own music because they own your music. And the actual cost of these books, you have to keep relatively low for anybody to actually buy them.

It's really going to be only your diehard fans that are purchasing the book. This is not going to be a New York Times bestseller by any means. You will be lucky to break even. Okay. So I know the financials on doing these e-books very well. They will not make money.

They will not make a ton of money. They may make a little bit of money if they're really lucky and people are really interested in it. And that does, you know, step aside the whole, I don't know what formats they were planning on doing it. They did say in their post that they've already canned the idea of even doing this book at all because it's become too much of a nightmare.

And this is where it starts to get sad because this is something that fans would love to have. I would like to see this book from garbage because I'm a garbage fan. A lot of the bands that I've approached about doing these books, fans would love to see a comprehensive, really nicely designed overview of somebody's career.

But it just becomes too complicated. The financials become overwhelming. And again, I'm not sure what formats that they were going to do it in. But nine times out of ten, it's easy enough to pirate these things. And it's going to be all over the web for free. So nobody's going to pay for it anyways.

Okay, but my point is there's the possibility of them making money on it. Yes, yes. And this has been a massive shift in the industry, specifically the music industry, but a lot of entertainment in general. The whole concept of being an entertainer and doing this for a living was you would take a gamble.

You would create something and then you would put it out there and be what it may. Now, I can't believe the amount of times I've had meetings where I was basically asked by management, how much money am I going to make? And I'm like, I don't know.

Do you know how much money you're going to make when you put out an album? No. Really? Seriously? You do it and you put it out and you promote it and you hope for the best. But that has shifted in the industry and there is a reticence to do anything without knowing that there will be a profit in the end.

And that's wrong. That's not how entertainment works. That's not how life works. That's not how life works. What the hell? But that's the way it's approached now. That is the, that's, you know, that's just the way that business is done these days. And it's sad to see that that, you know, garbage has gone independent.

They're not, I don't think that they're on a record label anymore. I know they're self-managing or at least they have their own management company now. It's unfortunate that they're doing the same thing. And yeah, this is one of the times that I don't agree with their stance at all. Well, I figured you were going to, you were going to eat them for lunch because they, uh, they busted out the Amanda fucking Palmer reference and they're like, we're just going to ask.

Let's, let's, let's take a book or a page from Amanda Palmer's book and let's just ask and see if everybody's nice and will give us their stuff for free. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is why I don't like Amanda Palmer. This is why I've been so anti-Amanda Palmer because it's an infection. It's, it's, it's, you create this concept that things should be free and that we should just ask and it's going to be lovely and wonderful.

That's not the way the world works. That's not how it should work. That's not fair to the rest of us that are creative. It's, it's, uh, it's an infection. And I don't like seeing this Amanda Palmer thought spread throughout the industry. And it's why I've been so actively against her concepts.

Okay. Well, let's stick with the music side of this. I, I, I'm, I'm with the photographer on this one, obviously, because I've had it happen to me. So, okay. We agree. Because the other thing is, is I have been asked if I would donate my services to put together these eBooks, which is something I do. And I'm like, why would I do that?

Why would I charge you like 1% of my cost of doing business to do this for you? It's like, sure. Come, come play at my, come, come play your music at my apartment while I'm doing the eBook, bring your whole band, bring your roadies. And then while you're playing for me, then I will work on your eBook.

Yeah. And it's, it's really fun. I mean, I'm not mentioning names in particular, but like I've said, I've approached many, many bands about this, but then it even gets to the point where like, they don't want to pay me up front to do the work for something that they will then charge for. So my immediate rebuttal is then, okay, fine, I'll do it, but I want a percentage.

And then they just laugh. Why would you get a percentage? Because I'm, I'm, I'm bearing part of the risk. Exactly. Yeah. If you're bearing the risk, then you need to share in the windfalls because it's going to make a better product. That's stupid. Yeah. So much like a garbage, garbage, deciding not to do the eBook, 99% of the artists that I've gone through the dance with and wasted a lot of my own time explaining it to them and going through the financials.

None of them are doing eBooks. So basically the consumer loses. If you're a fan of these bands, you're losing. You're not getting what would be really cool product. Okay. Let's, let's keep on with the music industry thing here because title launched this week. I did not watch this. I didn't, I could not bring myself to watch the announcement.

I saw, I saw Madonna humping the table and I'm like, I'm not watching this. I cannot bring myself to watch this. I just couldn't believe that they did an Apple style keynote with this incredibly long video trotting out all these, basically the 1% of musicians who all have a small stake within the company itself to launch what is basically the crappier version of Spotify.

Have you tried it? Well, we tried this way back in the day. Remember Jason, we tried it before Jay-Z owned it and it was only the high quality streaming service. We did the AB testings and all of that sort of thing. Um, yeah, but I, I mean, all that really happened is Jay-Z bought it and then, you know, put a slapped on a $9.99 lower quality streaming version and, and up the interface.

They have a better interface. And so I, I immediately went out and tried it because you could get 30 days for free to give it, to give it a go. And it was $9.99. I'm like, okay, let's give it a shot. And there's no way to import any of my music to give me my playlist. Like you can with Spotify or RDO.

The, uh, half the music that I listened to is not there. And I don't care about any of the bands that are the exclusive deals. So it was in the, yeah, the interface was like, yeah, literally janky ripped off Spotify by a junior designer who is, I mean, okay, Spotify's interface sucks to begin with, and you're making it worse.

Come on. I mean, the only thing that they didn't have was the green, that, that hideous putrescent green that it's on Spotify. Yeah. That all the artists that have the tiny little percentage and change their social icons too, which has been gross. Um, no, this whole thing just almost gave me an aneurysm.

Look, uh, this is going to happen. I mean, Apple's getting into the game soon enough too, as well. It's all about the streaming services. I'm glad that there's competition. It's I'm glad it's not just Spotify out there. Um, but the whole rollout of this was just so ridiculous and whatever, uh, it's a joke.

Um, it's not going to be, you know, the big claim here is this is great for artists because it's artist owned. Well, it's owned by the 1% of artists that have all the monies already. This will do, this will do absolutely nothing for any other artists out there. And they still, it's not like they're free of their label deals.

It's still the labels that, that they have to negotiate with. And, you know, they're talking about how all the artists that are involved are going to do all their exclusives only there. Well, label still has to approve that. And if they're getting a better deal from Spotify, you better bet your ass it's not going to be on title. So, yep.

I think it was funny. I went through the cancellation process and it was basically two pages of questionnaire, but there was one question that summed it all up. It's like, it's like, why am I leaving title? And there was one checkbox. It says, well, all my friends are on Spotify, so I'm just going to go over to Spotify and I like check.

Hey, you know, at least it shows that they know what the main interest is or the main point is going to be, you know, where are all your friends at? It's just like any social network. So this is the LO of streaming. Hello, goodbye. Yes. We were plagued with April Fool's this week.

I actually didn't think it was that bad this year. You were talking a couple of days before April Fool's. You were kind of like going a little crazy about, oh, the internet's going to be completely useless. This is the worst day of the year. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It wasn't that bad. I think people are finally getting the hint that it's stupid and you're just going to embarrass yourself.

John Oliver's video that they put out because they were off this week. I summed it up. It's like, if you do an April Fool's Day joke, you're just being an asshole. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's something that you and I have talked about a lot. There's a link in, I put a link in the show notes to Salon that runs through 15 brands that prove April Fool's Day is an awkward, embarrassing mess.

We did never talk about April Fool's specifically, but you've heard me rant before about, I don't understand why brands have to tweet every single holiday. I don't understand why brands have to be involved with day-to-day life in that sense. It doesn't make sense. It's stupid. And for brands to really get involved in April Fool's, unless you've hired professional comedians and you've come up with a really good idea, don't feel the need to just do something to do something.

Exactly. And that's what all these brands do now. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be National Tree Day and all of a sudden every brand has to do something about trees. Knock it off, people. No, I didn't see a single one. And I just stayed off the internet that day. That's honestly, it's all I did.

I'm like, screw it. I'm not even going to bother because at some point somebody's going to send me a gotcha and I'm just going to be pissed off at them. Well, to be fair, there was a gotcha and it was a very good one. Okay. What was it? Leaked footage of Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear's fracas has emerged.

Okay. That did come out on April Fool's Day. The Lad Bible, which I follow on Facebook, they are quite funny a lot of the time. They did put that out. I clicked on it. No, I knew it was going to be fake and it was fake and it was genius. And the link is also at our show notes. And if you're a Jeremy Clarkson fan, I highly recommend you watch it.

Just know that it is not really the leaked footage. Well, you kind of figure that out in about 30 seconds when the family guy chicken comes out. That's true. Yeah. Quick follow up on Terry Pratchett. There was actually really nice and touching post that went out this week.

Tributes to Sir Terry Pratchett from a bunch of other writers. It's a good read. Yeah. Definitely check it out. Yeah. And let's see. Oh, I was going to talk about, all right. Part of the fun of being in an office in a corporate environment, number one, germ incubators.

I am sick this week and not at the top of my game because even though I only go into this damn office once a week, I managed to get infected by whatever disease was going around that stupid office. So I'm not feeling great. But I did want to share something I saw on Gizmodo, which most of our listeners will probably love because we are all techie people.

It's not my job to plug things in and other nightmare IT stories. And I decided to, I would share something that happened to me last week as well, which is what made me end up finding this article. I had the enjoyable time of trying to explain to someone who is a digital expert that if you put your video directly on Facebook, it will not increase the YouTube views of your video.

Seriously? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Man, yeah. Oh, run. Run for your lives. Well, you know, what are you going to do? I've gotten, I think I'm just older now that this stuff no longer upsets me. I just kind of go a little bit numb and I realize, all right, well, if you're going to pay me to explain this stuff instead of just do it and do it correctly the first time around, fine.

You're a professional facepalm expert now. That's pretty much it. Pretty much, yes. I think I'm going to have to update my LinkedIn profile with that. But enjoy the Gizmodo article. There's some really good ones in there. My favorite being the one that it's titled after, which is a woman called in to tech support to say that she needed to plug in her monitor to the wall as the cleaning people had accidentally pulled it out.

And she told the tech guy that it is not in her job description to plug things in. So they had to send somebody out over 40 miles to plug the monitor in for her. I have no words. I just have no words. It's good stuff, people. Good stuff. Go check them out. It will sadden you greatly to the level that some people just have no clue.

Yeah. None whatsoever. And I wanted to follow up really quickly on Periscope, which is Twitter's meerkat killer and has pretty much, as far as I can tell, officially done that at this point. I don't think anybody is actually on meerkat anymore. I actually made a point out of launching this Periscope up every morning and just kind of checking out to see what was going on to see is this going to be a thing or not.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no. Unsurprisingly, there's a massive harassment problem. Shocking. And that has been what I've noticed as well, because I just kind of randomly open up whatever. Anytime it's a chick, it's just dudes commenting the entire time.

Show us your tits. One of the most egregious things I saw was actually right before we hopped on this call to start doing this recording, which was, I literally can't believe this happened. It was some mom who was basically showing her kid on Periscope, which is, first off, why the fuck would you do that?

Why are you showing your toddler running around on a live streaming app? See previous article from Gizmodo on IT stories and how people don't know how to use the internet. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing has become a mess already anyways. It's just all people, it's already become overrun with self-promotion.

It's like news agencies showing their anchors getting ready. And it's just, it's not what it used to be. Oh, are you saying it's not as good as chat roulette, which is basically dongs for days? Look, the reason that this became such a thing is because it was over two weeks at South by Southwest where only the people at South by Southwest were using meerkats.

So it was a tiny little group of people all involved in doing the same thing. And that was awesome. Once you open this up to the entire world at large, it loses all meaning and it loses any sense of belonging. And it becomes what happened this morning, which is a mom putting the camera on her young daughter and then the comments just being, let's see your mom.

Okay. That's all. This is disgusting and it's horrible. And this is bad. Well, between that or show me what's in your fridge, that meme that's going around. Yeah. The inanity of daily life is just put under a spotlight when you have things like this.

And it's, for me, it is already shark finned. I did it for a couple of days. I watched my friends basically post pictures of them driving, hanging out, doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Shouldn't periscoping you while you're driving be illegal? Absolutely. You're not supposed to be able to be doing, you're not supposed to be using your phones when you're driving and people are periscoping their drives.

While their phone is in their hand, not, not in a cradle or anything. They're holding it and looking at it. And looking at it and responding to the questions like, show us your tits that come up. Yeah. Yeah. Genius people. Well, you know what? Culling the herd is a good thing, but when you run into me while you're periscoping, then, you know, hopefully you die in that fire.

In the news. Now, you know your new product has a problem when people are contacting customer service and corporate PR to find out if it's an April Fool's joke.

I thought this was. This is what happened with Amazon Dash buttons this week. We have reached peak consumer laziness. I really honestly hoped this was an April Fool's joke. Yeah. These are little buttons that tie to your phone that if you run out of detergent or coffee or whatever, you can just press a button and magically more will arrive in two days.

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. These have been making the round. So this is this has kind of been overdone. So we don't want to spend too much time on it. But the fact that these exist is is a testament to how ridiculously lazy people have become or how how how Amazon thinks we have become to just get us to buy more crap.

You know, I mean, it's stupid and it's lazy, but you can definitely see the the PR bounty since bounty is one of the premier people that's involved in this. That this was I mean, it's a genius idea for co-branding and for Amazon getting in there a bit more with all these popular brands that are in the physical realm that one doesn't normally think of to go to Amazon for you would go to your grocery store for this.

So this is a smart move on their part to try to shift that away. So we're going to get this whole, you know, market that people that just run down to the grocery store or Target, we can get them with this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to get into the home, you know, consumables market. Exactly.

And speaking of the home, now you can have somebody come and wipe your ass for you went through your new toilet paper. You just bought Amazon home services will sell you a thing and a person to come do that thing for you. Yeah. So they're going after the Angie's list and all of that sort of market now.

So they're going to have Amazon verified people in your area that can come and do all the stuff around your house that you should learn how to do yourself. The upside of this, though, is I bet their screening process is going to be off the charts thorough. You probably you're going to have to be bonded. You're going to have to have, you know, all of the the, you know, the I's crossed and the T's dotted to get on this list.

So I think that might actually be decent if you need somebody to come in and set up your new piano or whatever the hell it is. Yeah, that is the one good part about Amazon. I, you know, I worry about them taking over the entire world because they're doing a damn good job of it. But yeah, their verification process is probably going to be absolutely stellar.

And I would tend to probably trust people that will be on Amazon's list more than anything else, except for, of course, the old school way, which is friends and word of mouth. That's true. Although I've had some pretty incompetent friends come over and screw things up. Then I had to go hire a professional, you know, that if friends can only take you so far, but, and just to stay on Amazon taken over the world, they have officially moved up to Canada to start testing their drones and they are, they're, you know, really moving forward with this.

It's going faster than I thought it was going to. Yeah. Well, you know, the problem is the laws here and they're still going to have to wait for that. And that's going to go nice and slow. I'm actually a little surprised that Canada isn't on the ball with this because they're usually a lot better about having good restrictions and things like that.

But apparently, yeah, they, they're, they're being smart about it. They're like, they want to own the, this drone testing space. And the, what Amazon needs to do is, I mean, they need to test their autonomous delivery with, without line of sight. And Canada has put a, put aside like, was it 700 square miles specifically for, you know, autonomous drone testing, which is smart for them.

And I think, I think this is really going to push the ball forward. And once, once Amazon is starting to deliver all their groceries in other countries, then we'll take note and say, okay, come on back. Yeah, that's exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. The Guardian got access to their secret facility and I can't wait to see what kind of drones they're coming up with because they've got some pretty smart people working on it.

And I bet a lot of them are going to look kind of like that Google drone that delivered the dog biscuits, which is, you know, vertical takeoff, uh, horizontal flight, then vertical landing. But, and it's interesting in this article, they say that, you know, 86% of Amazon's, uh, deliveries are under five pounds.

So if you can, if you can slap that on a drone that just runs on electricity, it's going to be, it's going to be a total game changer. I still think that it's, you know, we've got a bit to go with the regulations and the technology, but, you know, given, giving them unfettered access to airspace to work on it and work on it quickly with the budget that they have, I think they're going to solve a lot of the problems a lot faster.

Yeah, I'm just not looking forward to the future where there's just going to be 10,000 drones in the air all the time. Well, hopefully they'll work on the noise problem. It's not even the noise. It's the visual, man. Yeah. It's like that new TV commercial. Yeah, exactly. That TV commercial where they're all, I can't even, this is how well advertising works, folks.

We have no idea what the product was. It was a car. I think it might've been an Audi. I might've been. Um, but it leads me to, uh, my next article, which it was, uh, an article called the shut in economy by Lauren Smiley. And this was posted on medium in one of their, uh, you know, paid for play magazine sections.

And honestly, this is a chilling article just to think about how many people now, like, I mean, it's, it's, it talks mainly about San Francisco and New York and, and, you know, these really, uh, small tech bubbles where people are just working and working more.

So they need to outsource everything. Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, here's the, here's the interesting thing. These people are, are spending money to have the daily minutiae taken care of them for like, you know, getting food, doing laundry so they can work more.

They're not using that time to take back their lives. They're using that time so they can work more and be more productive, but they're, they have to work more to make the money to be able to spend on people doing the things that they should be doing themselves. And the people that are doing all the things are the ones that are actually benefiting because they get to go outside and see people and meet other people.

And it's turning this whole economy into a bunch of shut-ins who don't even want to talk to each other anymore. Yeah. And, and, you know, I mean, that's what the whole San Francisco thing is enabling right now. It's, it's, we want to outsource every aspect of our lives that we, except for working.

Um, I don't understand it. I, you know, when all this first started, it's, it's a very attractive premise. The idea of, you know, signing up to a website and putting in your groceries and just having them brought to you directly, I use that for a while.

And then I suddenly realized, well, I don't know. I actually like getting out to the store and going around. I'm doing this with books. Certainly I'm, I'm getting a lot of my books off Amazon now, instead of going down to the bookstore. Of course, it doesn't help that there aren't that many bookstores anymore. Um, it's, it's, it's, but I mean, it's easy, but it's dangerous.

It's dangerous. And it goes far beyond just buying books and groceries, you know, outsourcing things like cleaning your own home, which I mean, everybody has a cleaning lady nowadays up there, it seems. And in Los Angeles, it's a staple, but the fact that everything, you know, you get to the point where every, you have an outsourcer for your outsourcers, which is what Alfred is.

It's like, okay, I'm going to hire somebody to take care of my outsourcing for me because I can't be bothered with outsourcing. And you, and you can even pay extra. So you never see them. It's like, they'll do their, do your laundry and put it in your drawers for you. So I'm like, I don't understand this, this level of disconnectedness with just the basics of everyday living, you know, cause I didn't grow up like that.

I grew up cleaning my own house, cleaning my own toilets, making my own food and things like that. So when I see all this, it's just, it's just a bizarre thing that just really makes me think that it's, you know, we're becoming WALL-E. Well, we are. And that's, that's the push right now. And certainly in the tech community and VCs and all that, everything that everybody is trying to come up with the next app, that's going to take the next aspect of your life that you should do yourself.

That may not necessarily be pleasant, but whatever it's life and let's find a way to outsource it or automize it or whatever it, um, it's like, like I said, it's a really attractive proposition, but it's very dangerous. And I've made an effort in my life to try not to do that so much.

Um, and I don't want to, I want to do my own grocery shopping. I want to clean my own house. Yes, I have a maid because in LA you do, but she only comes once a month and that's the super deep clean. I make a point out of, you know, every weekend I clean my house, all of these sorts of things.

I want to do it myself. I've gotten, uh, it's a, it is kind of a twenties something, especially if you're working in the tech field or all these sorts of things that, uh, it's not, it's not the journey, it's the destination. Well, I'm switching back as I'm getting older and realizing, no, it actually is the journey.

It's not the destination. I want to learn how to do things. I don't want to outsource it. I'm going to, for instance, I have a new ceiling fan here and do I really know how to put up a ceiling fan? No, but I'm going to spend this weekend figuring it out because I think that would be interesting rather than hire someone to come off Amazon's home service to do this for me.

Yeah. From just a resilience point of view, you think about, you know, these people that are just getting into their own head, staying in their, their apartments all the time, having somebody else do all the work for them. If something goes wrong, they're so unresilient that they're just not going to know how to do anything. It's like, I would much rather be one of the hirees instead of one of the people that's doing the hiring, because I'm going to know more about what the city's like.

I'm going to know people. I'm going to have contacts, all that kind of thing. Because in San Francisco, something bad is going to happen. You're going to have an earthquake. The bubble's going to burst. You're going to have riots. You're going to have something. Something's going to happen there. And these people are just going to be stuck in their towers going, where's my Uber? I can't get out.

Where's my Uber? Well, and there's something else to, you know, these people supposedly really like science and they understand these sorts of things. There have been countless studies that say that once you make past a certain income level, it depends on what city you're in, your happiness does not increase anymore.

And by the way, you people are probably not going to be running the company. You aren't going to be multi-millionaires. You're just going to make enough money to basically feel like you're making a ton of money. But your happiness level doesn't increase at all. Make a little less money. Get out and see the world. That's why we're here. Yeah, no doubt.

Hiring somebody else so you can work more is just, it's mind-bogglingly bad. Because, you know, I understand it because I've been through that. You know, Cosmo. Cosmo used to save my day because I would work later because I didn't have to go to the store. But then after a while, you kind of learn that, no, it is the journey.

It is just having experiences instead of sitting there and having everything brought to you and hand-fed to you. Yeah. So, okay, I think we're belaboring the point now. But you get what I'm saying with this. It's a great article, even though it's on medium. Go read it. I thought it was fantastic. I really enjoyed the article as well.

It does make you think. So, Project Spartan, the browser, it's out. Have you tried it? I have not. I've seen some of the screenshots from Ars Technica, and they're fairly underwhelmed at this point. Yeah, it's not very, I don't like how it looks just in the screenshots.

I've got to whip out my laptop later and get the download on this and give it a shot. But on the plus side, it seems to have a completely modern engine, so we don't have to do a bunch of recoding when this thing hits and gets out there. Not that anybody will upgrade to it anyways, because, frankly, people that use Windows are probably still using IE7.

But it looks all right. Yeah, it does have a newer engine, but from the HTML5 compatibility charts, IE11 is still better than this is. Great. So they've gone backwards a bit. But it's a beta. It's a beta. It's a beta, yeah. I'm sure it'll get up there.

Yeah, but it uses a completely new rendering engine. Why they didn't use, you know, any of the ones like WebKit or whatever Chrome is spun off, they're just gone with that. I don't understand, but they have to have their own thing for no reason whatsoever. Yeah, and they're baking in Cortana, which, whatever.

Again, that's not my thing. I guess maybe the kids like that sort of stuff. Get off my browser, you filthy kids. Exactly. So the Senate's taking a peek into Google in the White House. Apparently there were some FTC docs that were let go from a Freedom of Information Act request that have kind of said there might be some tomfoolery going on here.

Because Google was getting ready to get hit with a pretty big antitrust suit, and a lot of things happened behind the scenes. So this is kind of playing out, but the Senate has started to stick their nose in it and wants to find out what happened. Okay. So this will be a developing story as we go. That'll be interesting.

Definitely. Now, this is completely off of anything we've talked about, but I had to throw it in here because I'm sure some of our listeners have not seen this. Probably half have, half haven't. But this dude injected his eye, well, squirted on his eyeballs, basically some substances that let him see in the dark.

That is awesome. It is pretty damn awesome. I mean, and he looks like pretty crazy when he gets the stuff in there. Yeah, it's basically a solution that let him see in the dark for up to, what was it, 164 feet.

How long does it last? It seemed like it lasted a couple hours. That is amazing. I love this. Yeah, there were no ill effects, and by the next day, his eyes were back to normal. That is so cool. I mean, I would prefer that they eventually figure out a way to bake this into some sort of contact lens so I don't have to have stuff dumped directly into my eyeball, but this is pretty damn cool.

Yeah, I don't know if this would work in a contact lens because I think it has to actually, you know, get with your physiology, but it's pretty cool. I'm in, I'm in, count me in. I much prefer that these guys do all the testing beforehand. Yes, well, yeah, this is straight to the military, right?

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even think about LASIK because my vision is so important to me. I will not mess with my eyeballs. So, yeah, squirting stuff in there so I can possibly see it. I have terrible night vision, so I'm definitely in for it if they can make it work right. Yeah, or I could just switch on lights. Oh, that too.

That too, I guess. I do have a lot of nice flashlights for that very reason. Yeah, there you go. So, mobile get-in is coming. Yes. You know what that is? Yes, I do. It's when Google is going to finally switch their search results to be based on mobile optimization as well.

Which is a good thing. Yes, it is. And it's going to cause a lot of problems, and a lot of people are going to be up in arms and crying and say, I don't know why my ranking dropped. Well, my clients will know because I've emailed them many times about it, and it's their own damn fault for not updating their sites. Okay. Yeah, pretty much everybody I know has been on the mobile thing for a long time.

You know, responsive design has been around for a couple years now. It's nothing new. Yeah. And if your website is not responsive or reactive in some way, then you're missing out. Because over half of, over 60% of the general public now checks out websites on a mobile quote-unquote device.

So, get with it, people. Get with it. And even if you, you know, can't do a complete and utter redesign, there are some tags that you can use to make it at least somewhat better for the most part, as long as you're not 20 years behind. Yeah. Now, this is an article that you put in, getting back on the Meerkat versus Periscope thing that was out there.

Well, I didn't put this article in because of Meerkat and Periscope or really even what the, you know, the article talks a lot about that. The article talks mostly about tech journalism and how bad it's getting because of the fact that people went apeshit crazy over Meerkat over basically just two weeks and Periscope as well, which we just discussed is completely useless.

So, it takes to task how the tech industry has responded, the tech news industry has responded to both these things launching and how ridiculous it was. Although, I would, the main reason I put the article in it is because in this discussion, which is quite well done and I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think you do as well, Jason, about how, you know, tech news is just ridiculous.

Well, and it also, you know, falsely inflates the importance of some apps and websites over others that genuinely are trending or have a better foothold in the audiences and the communities. Yes. Yes, it does. But as I was reading this article, I looked over to the sidebar where they do the trending and related articles and saw these headlines.

Twitter's awesome Periscope app can make anyone into a TV news broadcaster. One of the most useful iPhone apps ever is coming to Apple Watch. Here's what it will look like. Eight awesome paid iPhone apps on sale for free for a limited time. Also, Apple just accepted a rare $999 app.

So, that's kind of some of the shitty journalism I believe that they were talking about. Yeah, do as I do, not as I say, apparently. Yes. So, yeah, they don't, you know, walk their own walk. Yeah. But it is an interesting article. And it does talk about how Meerkat was, you know, artificially inflated to get where it was.

And how the investors are probably a little pissed off right now. Yeah, they should be. Poor Jared Leto. Yeah. I found a nice little article on Slate. If you're not a huge web developer, you probably don't know about all the things like HTML tagging and that we use for search results and all that sort of stuff.

But they did a little deep dive onto what the New York Times and CNN uses for their tagging during tragedies, which I thought was really interesting, including things like calling banners screaming banners and doing a bunch of trigger words. And on the nice part, because we've discussed unfortunate ad placements before, that there are certain tags like ad sensitivities that they use for their systems.

So, you know, you don't get a horrible ad on something that has been tagged as tragedy. It's about time. I mean, this is kind of basic things that they should have been doing from the olden days. Yeah. But after getting, you know, screwed so many times by putting like by putting Expedia ads on, you know, plane crashes.

Yes. You know, get it. Get a cheap flight today on right next to the burning Hulk of a 747. They've learned their lesson now. And finally, they're proactive about just saying, hey, you know what? Here's our system. Let's do let's have the author meta tag it and say, OK, or the editor.

Who am I kidding? Nobody has editors anymore. I was about to say what editor. And just say, OK, this is a sensitive article. Don't show stupid ads. Yeah. And so this is, you know, this is kind of a common sense thing. Yeah. But, you know, you and I both understand why it wasn't in play originally, because, you know, that would have taken people actually talking about it and being sensible.

And nobody wanted to pay to build it. Exactly. But you know who did want to pay to build something is Facebook. Well, they got the money. Their new headquarters has a massive nine acre garden on the roof with a half mile walking circuit. I love that. I think it's beautiful.

I think it's pretty neat. Yeah, me too. I love this idea. I think everybody should be doing it. There's actually been countless studies about how it's really good for the environment to do it. So spend a little money. No, they spend a lot of money. Well, yeah, but theirs is nine acres. Yeah, it is a pretty big building. Yeah.

If you don't have to have a helicopter pad on your roof, put up a garden. And, you know, I would personally say, well, why didn't you just build a park down the street so we could go out to the park? But they said, ah, screw it. We got the we got the acreage. Let's just put it on the roof. Besides, you know, if we built a park down the street, normal people could go into it.

Well, that and the people would have to leave the building. This way, they have to go through the office to get to the park. And then when they're done at the park, they have to go back through the office. Yes, let's bring to mind the shut-in economy. Yep. And this is a fun one. Airbnb is now available in Cuba.

I love the fact that Airbnb was allowed to start doing business there before most of us can go there. Yay, America. Ah, yes. My friend went there not too long ago and said the food was terrible and there's no reason to go to Cuba. Well, I've heard different stories, being, spending a lot of time in Toronto and knowing a lot of Canadian friends and they've been allowed to go for years and they all love going and say it's very beautiful.

Oh, it was very pretty, but he said you couldn't get a decent meal to save your life. That's okay. Whatever. Airbnb is there. I'm sure they're going to fix it all. I guess there's a thousand rooms available now. So that's a pretty decent chunk. That is a decent chunk. And I don't know, because my last Airbnb experience wasn't all that great.

I don't know if going to Cuba to Airbnb would be any better. But it's worth a shot. If you're going, check it out. I'm going to wait until I get an Uber plane. Security? Ha! Speaking of your Uber plane, they have just hired away, well, they've got a new chief of security and they got them from Facebook.

Well known for their security, the Facebook. You know, the funny thing is, when I first saw this, I just started laughing. Yeah. Because I was confusing privacy with security. Oh, right. Their security record actually hasn't been very bad. Yeah, that's true. Their privacy record, on the other hand, is abysmal.

Yes. And so they hired Joe Sullivan, who is 46, surprisingly. So I'm thinking that Facebook put him out to pasture and there was no room for him on the rooftop garden. And they're like, okay, you know what? You're getting a little too long in the tooth, gray in the hair. Just move on. Yeah.

Just get out of here. But the fact that he's 46 and has worked at Facebook for half of the company's career, and still wants to go get another job scares me because I'm like, how much? This guy must not have cashed out at this point. Well, how much more money does he want? Mm-hmm. That is interesting.

He's got to be loaded, but whatever. Maybe it's a power thing for him. Could be. Could be. Maybe his wife just doesn't want him around the house. Or that. Yeah, this is an interesting one that I found through Naked Security. How one man could have deleted every video on YouTube. Oh, if only he would have.

I know. This is one of those things where it was another API hole. And he called up Google and said, hey, excuse me. Before I delete all the Biebs videos, I should tell you about this. And they gave him 5K for it and said, sure, thanks. And they fixed it, and off they went.

Wow. Only 5K. I guess that's the maximum allowed under the program rules, unfortunately. They need a better program. I just would have killed them all. Killed it all. I'm telling you, man. Like Fight Club. Yeah. If he had just put out a hat and said, hey, I'm starting a pool. You want to beat Google's 5K?

I'll give you the secret to get rid of all the videos. I mean, granted, it's the same as before. They could just pull him back from backup, but it would have been a major pain in the neck. Yeah. And big news. Mm-hmm. But he probably would have ended up in jail for some reason. Oh, I wonder why. Yeah, I wonder why.

So let's talk about privacy. I did mention last week that certain folks thought that paying for privacy as a service was going to become a thing. AT&T is going to be testing this out. Yeah, with their new Giga whatever. Yeah. Giga crap. Giga power.

Giga power. Yes. I actually choked on that. AT&T's fiber Giga power service is going to come with a new optional charge, which will basically let you opt out of them sharing your information with trusted partners. See, I don't see this as an optional charge.

I see this as extortion in blackmail. Yeah, me too. Yeah. And we're supposed to be able to opt out like free, not have to pay for it. So this is a very disturbing trend. And apparently everybody else is kind of watching to see what happens because then everybody else is going to roll it out. I know, you know, nobody listens to us in this particular segment and, you know, you're still not using one password and all of that sort of stuff.

But if you think, read this article in our show notes and tell me that you aren't scared about all the information these people are collecting from you. And I guarantee you, most of you don't know all of this. If you're not a bit creeped out by it, well, then I don't know what you're doing.

I give up. This segment is not for you. We should just call this segment, We Give Up. Yeah, it could be. But if you don't want to give up, go to grumpy old geeks.com slash VPN. See, I'm still choking on the gigabit, whatever. Giga power. Grumpyoldgeeks.com slash VPN.

Sign up for private internet access. It's a cheap VPN that we use, and they cannot see what you're doing. So, I mean, the problem is you have to do it all the time. You shouldn't have to do it all the time. You should do it when you want to do it. But if you're going to get this AT&T service, and it's coming out only in Atlanta, but still.

No, but I mean, if they even get any response to it, actually, they're probably hoping that nobody's going to pay it. Yeah. Because that just gives them carte blanche to say to hell with it. No one cares. And they're still probably doing it already anyway on your regular connections. Yes. But I don't get my internet through AT&T because they are, I had their DSL for years, and it was one of the worst services I've ever had.

Right. Yeah, I've never, I was an AT&T cell phone guy at the very beginning, but then switched to Verizon just because they were bad. They were horrible. Yeah, I still got them for my phone. Yeah. Damn it. Yeah. So, there's a new product that promises to be the all-in-one cybersecurity solution that we would all need.

It is called Usher. Now, I looked at this thing, and this isn't for the everyday Joe. This is for enterprise. Yeah. And what you can do is you can set up your Usher server, and it will do all of the biometric verification, the two-factor auth, and password identification through your mobile phone.

But this isn't a general public type of application, which is what I thought it was when you first posted it. No. Yeah, me too. But, I mean, you could set it up in your own house. You can. You can actually set up your own networks and try it. Yeah. Yeah. You can make yourself basically the head of your own company and be your own IT person.

Yeah, you get your own swipe cards, you know, and your own fobs and keep asses for your kids. But it does. I mean, you know, this points out that something like this, I'm a little surprised that a Norton or a Symantec has not come out with a basically, you know, consumer-level version of this. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a 1Password for different auth schemes, like your two-factor auths and all the things that go with it.

But this is kind of tailored to work with certain hardware vendors and hardware platforms and things like that. But it looks cool. I mean, it actually looks pretty decent. It's from a company called Coda. Jesus, what the fuck today? Yeah, I know. I feel the same way. It's from a company called MicroStrategy.

And they've been around since the 80s building enterprise software. So it should be decent and reliable. So if you have a small business that needs greater security, check it out. We'll link that one in the show notes. Definitely. And speaking of the show notes, go there right now. We have a nice little link to an article that basically ran through the Target data breach and started to look into the real financials of it, which is really interesting.

Not so much to discuss on a podcast, so we're not going to run through everything. But it's called What Have You Learned Target? And it talks about, you know, there was the $10 million settlement that Target reached last month about the class action suit when they got the 2013 data breach. They're basically saying Target incurred almost $252 million in expenses related to the breach, which is pretty crazy.

Yeah. But when you look at their entire revenue, it's almost nothing. Yeah, it's almost nothing. But, you know, it's one of those things where you hear about a data breach and you just don't connect real world numbers to it. And you go, well, how much could that possibly cost? They're going to have to change a few systems out. No, it's fucking expensive. And it also doesn't cover the cost that the banks and the credit card companies had to pay to reissue all those cards.

Exactly. That then comes back on us for that. So there's lots of hidden costs in there. But definitely check it out. It's a good read. Yeah. Now, an even better read, though, I'm sorry, is all of this news about the two ex-federal agents who have been basically swept up in the Silk Road case for being thieves and dirty cops.

Yeah. This is a great story. This one guy stole almost $800,000 in Bitcoin, facilitated half of the death threat machinations to get the Dread Pirate Roberts to basically, you know, have somebody killed, not saying that, oh, I'm the guy that stole all the money.

It's an incredible story. It's still ongoing, but we're going to have links in the show notes for it. Definitely check these out because there are a lot of implications as to what it's going to mean for the conviction on the Dread Pirate Roberts that already happened, even though the lawyers are saying, no, it really doesn't matter because he still made the death threats, even though those were pulled from the actual case, it's, there's a lot going on here that's just fishy, very, very fishy.

It's a, yeah, the whole Silk Road thing. I mean, I don't think we're going to get a real story out of this for like 10 years, 10 years from now, you and I are going to be still doing this stupid podcast and we'll be talking in at the library about the real deep dive into this whole situation. God, I hope not.

Me too. Oh man, I found a good article on Krebs on security. This week. It says, uh, sign up at irs.gov before crooks do it for you. So this is for our- I did that immediately, actually, after I read this. Yeah. This is for our American listeners. Um, crooks can go to irs.gov and set up an account as you with very little personal information.

And then when you go to, and then they can actually change your mailing address and then get your refund check sent to them and to go in and actually have them change the address and, and, and reclaim your account is apparently a very big nightmare.

Yeah. And so if you don't have an irs.gov account, go get one before somebody else does it for you. Yes. And as Jason pointed out, it takes, uh, only a couple of minutes and you need very little information about yourself. Yeah. Easy breezy cover your ass. Yes.

Go do it immediately. If you are American and if you are American or not, I found a Corey Doctorow posted this and you put the correct attribution in there, supposedly NSA proof passwords that are super easy to generate and memorize. I saw this as well.

And, uh, it just seems like it's, it's like six or seven words strung together that have no, it's from like a six or 6,000 word or six or 7,000 word dictionary. Yeah. But apparently very hard to, uh, crack.

They're saying, you know, millions of years at trillions of guesses per second. Yeah. Which even, that still doesn't make any sense, but just from the, yeah. Yeah. I don't really get this and I don't see how, I mean. I didn't, I didn't watch the video. I, cause I use one password. I just don't believe it. I, I, I use one password.

It's a lot easier. Um, and I just don't, I don't believe that this is that much more secure and it's called, it's called diceware, diceware passphrases, which just makes me think this is the dungeons and dragons of passwords. Well, they say it's for better entropy. Use a 20 sided die. Uh, yeah, at some point I'll sit down and, and go through this video, but.

Look, we can't even get people to use one password. We're going to get people to do this. That's true. That's true. Okay. Maybe I won't. Okay. Moving on. Uh, Slack was hacked. Do you use Slack? I do not. I use Slack, uh, every day. It has taken over for my daily business where work stuff.

We don't use email anymore. We just use Slack and they got hacked and they did a pretty good job of, uh, disclosure, said exactly what happened, talked about their password hashing mechanisms, which are, which are good. They did. They, they, they're using the right password hashing. So there's no, like no real worry that if your password was in this list that got taken, that they could crack it, you know, they could reverse engineer it.

And with mine, it doesn't matter because I used one password anyway. Uh, yeah, it was, uh, it's a pretty good, you know, disclosure statement that they gave and they immediately turned on two factor off. They were working on it. And so they just kind of bumped it up to the top of the queue. So now you can get two factor off with them.

I got to try this Slack thing. Everybody's loving it. Oh my God. It's great. All right. I'm going to set up an account and start sending you messages. Uh, well it's, it's by team. So I, you need to get me on your team and I don't think I'm going to join team Brian. Whatever. Here's a fun one.

Neil Moore, who is a, uh, criminal in the UK, faked a bail email and got released. He signed up. It's basically a reverse phishing scam where he signed up for a domain that looked like an official domain, sent a couple of emails and then they let him go.

Yeah. That's awesome. It's beautiful. Genius. I love it. Except he got caught and went back to jail. It's just, we always forget how utterly un-tech savvy most of the world is. Even though everybody uses tech all the time, it's, we always forget, Jason, we always forget how easy it is to fake these things and people buy it.

Look, honey, a Nigerian prince wants to send me some money. Really, dear? Let's sign up. Yeah. Now, we've got a couple here from the EU. They are... Look who's posting all the Facebook stories. Not me. No, no. Well, hey, I even posted an Uber story.

How about them apples? I know. You're sick this week. I'm giving you a break. Thank you. Facebook is basically, when you sign up for Facebook in the EU, your data is going through first Ireland and then to the US. So, basically, the EU is saying, you know what?

We can't protect you anymore under our safe harbor framework. Right. So, if you don't want to be spied on by the NSA, well, then quit Facebook. Okay. That's pretty much it. They're just saying, yeah, you know what? We can't control it. The NSA is going to get it at some point because it's going to a US server.

And, yeah. Yeah. Which we all know. Yeah. So, sorry. Sorry if this is new news. As far as I know, nobody in Europe has left Facebook. Me neither. I don't know anybody. I don't know that many Europeans, though. I know tons. Okay. They haven't left.

In another related article, Facebook accused of tracking all users, even if they delete accounts, ask never to be followed. How does that work? It's called a cookie. This is one of those ones I wanted to put in here because this is bad tech journalism and tech policy.

This comes from The Independent, another British paper. And the actual tech that they're talking about is just general cookies. Yeah. Which can be cleared. Which can be cleared. But they're saying, oh, we have to, you know, you have to have a cookie statement and all this stuff. And it, like, there are loopholes with it where you don't have to have the statement if you're not being tracked for other types of uses.

Facebook actually comes back and says, guys, you're idiots. We tried to sit down with you and tell you and explain to you how this works, but you don't want to sit down with us. You just want to put out these papers and, you know, kind of give us a bad name. Yeah. So this is, this is like the other side of the coin.

Point Facebook. Yeah. Honestly, they're like, guys, you're, you're stupid. Just stop being stupid. Yeah. There's an interesting, there was a, it was an NPR actual, it was an audio story, but I read the words. Oh, wow. Yeah. After Snowden, the NSA faces recruitment challenge.

Didn't you just tell me last week I should go apply? Probably. Yeah. Just because I know you hate your corporate job. This would be better. It's the NSA. You think that's not corporate? Oh, true that, true that. I forgot. Government kind of trumps corporate.

Yeah, a little bit. So they're having problems getting top tier talent now because of the Snowden revelations. I'm a little surprised by that. I'm not. I'm not at all. These, these young idealistic kids who thought they were saving the world just find out they're spying on Grandpa Joe down the street or saying, yeah, that's not what we signed up for, which is fine.

And also you have to take into account that Facebook and Google and Apple have buckets of money that the government doesn't. That is true. It's a two-pronged thing here. But yeah, some people are actually intrigued by the fact that they get to be spies and spy on everybody and they're like, sign me up.

Those people you should not hire. Yeah. Don't be too, we don't want to hire the people that are too eager. Although, you know, I find it comforting to know that the brightest young minds of our gen or the younger generation. They're not our generation. Yeah. The brightest minds of the younger generation prefer to work at Snapchat versus the NSA.

Yeah. Oh, I didn't even put in the Snapchat stories this week. There was some interesting things around Snapchat, but actually not that interesting, I guess. So that's why I left them out. Okay. Google it if you care about Snapchat. Now, this is an interesting story. I got this one from Naked Security again.

GPS tracking counts as a search, says U.S. Supreme Court. Okay. I like that. Yeah, well, here's the interesting bent to this one. Torrey Dale Grady is a repeat sex offender. Okay. He finished serving his time in prison. Right.

But North Carolina courts want to track him with a GPS ankle bracelet that will be monitored by satellite 24-7, telling them where he's going to be at every moment of every day. Well, isn't that still basically being in jail then? Yeah, and he fought it, and he won. Good.

And this is only in North Carolina, because there are several states that do this currently with sex offenders. Right. Who track, they're forced to be monitored 24-7. Look, I get that nobody is supposed to want to be on the side of a sex offender, but... Yeah, once you do your time...

You're out of jail. You're out of jail. This is bullshit. Once you've done your time for your crime, you should have the reasonable chance to get back your life and maybe seek therapy, get better, and...

Yeah, and let's... I mean, let's... You know, I don't... It doesn't say what Torrey Dale Grady did, and he is a repeat sex offender, but let's also recall that there are millions of people that are on the sex offender roles that did things like streaking in the quad, because that is considered a sex crime, public nudity.

I mean, we've got to be really careful about this stuff. And teenagers or underage kids who sent naked pictures of themselves are now registered sex offenders. Yes, they are. So, you know, and again, you're out of jail, you're out of jail. This is bullshit. Yeah. Well, fortunately, the Supreme Court of North Carolina said it was bullshit, too, and said, no, you can't.

Go North Carolina. I know. How about that? How about that? And finally, Obama has signed an executive order imposing sanctions on overseas hackers. So, if they catch you hacking and they find out you've got a U.S. bank account, we keep all the monies. Okay. Which, I didn't know that this was new.

I figured they were doing this already. Why does it have to be a special thing just for hacking? If it's a crime, it's a crime. And if you've got your money here, we get to keep it. Yeah. Unless, of course, you know, you're a high government official in a different country. Well, I think... Yeah, also... If you have the oils, then we...

The other interesting thing, though, is basically they seize your money without a trial. That's really where the difference comes in. It's like, okay, we've tracked this back to you. We think it's you. Right. We have a fairly good idea that you are the hacker in the Ukraine that is taking, you know, our trade secrets.

We found out who you are, and we found out you have a bank account down on Main Street. We're going to take that money, even if we cannot, you know, prove in a court of law that you are that person. There's a lot of suppositions that go along with going from dude who hacked something to taking the money out of the bank.

Yeah. There's a lot going on there. So this just kind of cuts through, I think, a lot of the red tape that normally they would have to go through the courts and get a conviction before they froze the assets. But yeah, that's how it works nowadays. A big thank you to our newest Patreon supporters, Dean, Bob Waltman, and Dan Pick.

And of course, thank you to all of our Patreon supporters, because we just charged you. Yes, thank you very much. Yes, the end of the month. So thank you very much. And if you would like to help support the show, go to patreon.com slash GOG, or you can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and click on the big old button in the sidebar.

Yes, you can. We got some comments this week. So the first one up is from Dan Pick, who also just supported us. So thank you very much for that, Dan. His comment is, I just found your podcast, and so far I enjoy it. I enjoy two bits. Is that right? Am I reading correctly?

I'm sorry. I'm sick. Just found your podcast, and so far I enjoy it to bits. I even ponied up four of those bits a month. I'm an old fart myself, probably older than you guys, and still work in the IT industry. In the state of Michigan. All right. Go Michigan.

I wanted to bring two things to your attention that frost my nards. I can tell you're old because I haven't heard nards since I was like four. One, Photoshop subscriptions. I've been a licensed user of Photoshop since version four. I will never pay a monthly fee to use it. If you think it's a reasonable fee, come back to me in 10 years when you can't justify the cost anymore because the price starts to skyrocket.

Then you'll find out your files are shockingly no longer supported by CS6. Software subscriptions are for suckers. Yeah. Two. No, well, I was going to say, we totally agree on that. There's no disagreement, but unfortunately, I, yeah. When you work with a bunch of crazy graphic designers, they refuse to use the old versions of software because they do put in little things that are very helpful.

You know, we talked about this model last week. Yep. We both hate it. No fun. Anyways. Yeah, no fun. Two. EULA's. Who the hell can read all that sheet and understand all of one? I'm all for software protection, but you could be giving your firstborn away in one of those and never know it. EULA's grant too much power to software companies, I think, who reads them anyway.

Thanks. Great show. Yeah, I've never read one. I've read a couple of them before this show. We read the iTunes. Oh, actually, that was just the terms and service, not the EULA. Yeah. The EULA is the pain in the ass when it comes with packaged software. And now you have to click through before you can actually install the software. But yeah, nobody reads those and you probably are giving away your firstborn.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is a site. I'll try to Google it and get it in the show notes that had a couple of lawyers that went through some of the bigger ones out there and started to point out the really disturbing aspects to them. But, you know, what are you going to do? This is the world we've created for ourselves. Woohoo. Yep. So our next comment comes from Jay Lester.

This is from the Grumpy Old Geek site. Hey, guys, love the show. My team just uncovered some shady behavior by Bitly that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. For the past two months, Bitly has been appending affiliate parameters onto their shortened links without really telling anyone. Whoops.

That may not be illegal, although it sure feels wrong. We'll be using a different link shortener from now on. Some relevant links slash media coverage is below. And we'll put that in the show notes. Best, Jay Lester. Thank you very much, Jay. And this is not a new phenomenon. No.

Amazon links are notorious for being able to swap out affiliate tags. And even Facebook was doing it back in the day until they got busted. It's anybody that has, basically, who can shepherd your URLs from when you put them in to the user has the opportunity to rewrite the affiliate links.

And a lot of them do when, A, they need money. B, they don't think they're going to get caught. And, yeah, and C, until they get caught and there's a big enough stink. The fact that Bitly's doing this is bad. Yeah. The biggest aspect is B, until they don't think they're going to get caught.

The stuff gets buried really easily. It's really easy to hide affiliate links. I don't know what the legal status is on this. You'd think there would be one, but usually law tends to be very far behind on these things. And it's a no-brainer why people would do it.

You're leaving money on the table otherwise. I don't think that rewriting affiliate links should be legal, but certainly I don't see an issue or a problem with if somebody hasn't put an affiliate link on it and you're providing that service for free. Yeah, that's the slippery slope with that is, like, if there is no affiliate link, I don't have a problem with them slapping one on.

Yeah, just not rewriting mine. Yeah, if they're taking my link and rewriting it, and I think in the old days when Facebook was doing it, they would keep two copies. They would have your copy that if you did a hover, it would show in the status bar that you're going to the link with the proper affiliate attribution.

But when you clicked on it and went to it, it actually put in theirs, which was super sneaky. Yeah, that is very sneaky. I would love to see reports from some of these bigger companies that I wanted to see what they're getting from Amazon per month. Yeah, and this actually made me think of something.

With the FTC's guidelines on affiliate marketing that are out now, you're supposed to have a disclosure that you are basically getting affiliate income when you promote something on your site or blog, which almost nobody does. Well, how can you fit that into your Twitter stream? You're limited to characters.

This is when you're, like, writing a blog post. Twitter's exempt. Okay. But if I'm posting something and they're rewriting it somehow, so I put a link to a Bitly link to Amazon on my blog post. Somebody clicks on that Bitly link, and then there's affiliate money that's generated for Bitly out of that.

Does that break the chain and then make somebody responsible for the guidelines on affiliate marketing? Probably not, and I haven't had enough time to do research on it. But it does kind of bring that into play where they could be, you know, breaking the law on your behalf by using their service in a very stretchy kind of way.

Yeah. Well, just for clarity, people, in our show notes, when we link to Amazon, we're using our own affiliate links, so please click on them. Yes, please, pretty much. So, yeah, we'll definitely check those links in the show notes, and it's sketchy when people do that. They really shouldn't, and Bitly should definitely be not.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a weird thing. But, yeah, rewriting, definitely against, if you don't have one, I don't have a problem with them slapping one on them. Yep. Okay, well, thank you very much for the commenters this week, and thank you to our Patreon supporters. And if you would like to support the show, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and we'll take any amount because it makes us happy.

Yes, it does.

Media Candy. So, as I mentioned before, I've been in the lovely town of Wheeling, West Virginia, for the week, and there's not a whole lot of nightlife here. What? No, no nightlife. No boogie woogie? Everything shuts down. No boogie woogie. There might be some line dancing somewhere, but I don't know.

With the amount of cops that run by our window, it might be just, you know, line up dancing. Nice. So, my mom and I have been kind of binge watching some stuff, and we watched Bosch. You're loving these Amazon shows. Well, Bosch is, yeah, it's the first, you know, series that I've watched that got made from their, you know, their pilot season that I've seen.

Right. The pilot season stuff that I liked this year hasn't been made yet. It won't come out until next year. But Bosch is a great, basically, detective drama. It's really cool. It's got Titus Williver in it, and, you know, a bunch of people from The Wire are in it. Right.

And it's just a fun, solid cop drama where the cop isn't a bad guy. Oh, that's refreshing. Yeah, I'm so sick of these goddamn antiheroes, like, you know, in The Shield and everywhere else, where it's like, the good guy's the bad guy, but kind of. We're still under the shadow of Tony Soprano.

Yeah, definitely. And this was just a refreshing, straightforward, good L.A. cop show. I really liked it. It's only six episodes. Oh, no, ten. Ten, sorry. Ten episodes. And I loved every second of it. Great. I might have to check that out. Is it all shot here in L.A. too? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. That's refreshing, because everybody's bailed on L.A. for shooting for tax reasons and other things, and I always just love it, watching shows where I know, you know, I was just on that corner last week. That's what I was doing the entire time I'm watching it, and they were pretty faithful to their driving around town, and the police station that the show is based out of is the Hollywood station over on Gower.

Oh, nice. Yeah, right by my old office at the CNN building, so it's fun to watch. Cool. I will be checking out this TV show once I'm done with West Wing. And I watched Going Clear. Did you see it yet? I have watched half of it. Okay. Well, I mean, okay, I grew up here in L.A., so the cloud of Scientology has always been around me.

I've always known it's complete and utter bullshit. I think it's great that this got made. I will pay HBO for the next ten years just because they financed and produced this, and I think it's great that it's getting aired and that people are finding out what a complete and utter load of shit this is.

The only thing that I would say is you could do a documentary on any religion and make it look just as ridiculous. No, not as ridiculous as these guys. Come on. Pretty damn close. Yeah, still. I liked it because you got to see a lot of video that I'd never seen before. I'd never seen any L. Ron Hubbard video, and he is creepy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the behind-the-scenes stuff that was really like – what was it from They Live? It was the Human Power Elite, which is what the Human Power Elite was based on the Scientologists to make fun of them. And the parallels are very similar. And just definitely check it out.

And, yeah, Tom Cruise, nut job. Absolute nut job. It's going to be really interesting to see what is going to happen with Travolta and Cruise and their careers after this is getting out there. It does not paint them very well, and it shouldn't. And even people like – God knows I love Beck.

I love his music, but come on, man. Come on. Yeah, a lot of people got sucked into this. But near the end of the movie, they do say that, you know, national – or I'm sorry, global membership for Scientology is down below 50,000 now. So that's a major drop.

Yeah. So hopefully it will be down to five soon, and then those five will go to jail. Yes, that would be nice. So I'm going to also put a link in the show notes for an anonymous protest I did of Scientology back in San Francisco back in 2008 because that was a fun day. These are great photos.

Thank you very much. They will be in the show notes. There is just no avoiding the listicles, and Lifehacker does some of my favorite ones because they're kind of techie-based.

I love this one. It's the best single-purpose websites that do exactly what they say they do. I love it because I love just the stupidity of the web and the idea that people spent their time to put together something like these sites, such as Down for Me, Down for Everyone, or Just Me, which I've used many times to see if a site is completely down or if it's just me.

Speedtest.net, you and I use that all the time. Every day? Every single day? Yeah. How secure is my password? Don't need to use that anymore because we use one password. You know what's fun, though? I did use this, and I ran through a bunch of my 1Password things, and I'm in the 29-million-year range to crack my standard 1Password, just basic, off-the-shelf passwords I use now.

Yeah. I'm not going to run through the whole list, but it's fun. You know, it's a cute little thing. My favorite one that I was not aware of, which I now need to share with all my friends who send me crazy links that they think they've just discovered, is it old. Is it old? Yes, so you pipe in whatever meme or video or YouTube thing that you're trying to pass around, and it lets you know, oh, this has been around for a couple months.

Stop it. Oh, that is genius. Yeah. I'm a little sad that they don't have DoIHaveEbola.com in there, but... You did not make the list, Jason. Sorry. I did not make the list. Apparently, nobody has Ebola.com anymore. Well, that's how it is. Yeah. So I've got one.

What if Morrissey lyrics were motivational posters? I love the concept. Very funny. The concept is fantastic. The execution is terrible. Again, yeah. As you know, you posted this a little bit earlier in the week, and I was like so excited about it, and some of them were really funny, and I wanted to like repost some of them, but they're just so horribly done.

It's a shame when you have a great concept like this, and you know a good designer didn't make them. They're really, really funny. They could be amazing, but then again, there's absolutely no money in investing the time in it, so obviously nobody did. Yeah, and of course, they also stole all the photographs that they used for the pictures in here, so it is...

But clever. It is very clever, so check those out. You will get a chuckle out of them if you know anything about Morrissey. Yes. Are you kidding me? Love it! I could have used Is It Old for this particular link, because it is old.

This has been around since May 29th, 2014, but it's great. We're not going to discuss it too much. This is something... Go do some homework, listeners, and go find the show notes and go listen to this. It's called Can You Trust Your Ears? Audio Illusions by ASAP Science, and it's really cool.

You know, I studied this stuff. I have a degree in audio engineering, and I only knew two of these. So it was a fun little three-minute listen, and you can challenge yourself and basically have your mind blown. Yeah, I've ran across this because I fucking love science on Facebook posted it.

And somebody made just a quick 15-second video of the main illusion, where you just switch between looking at two different mouths while somebody's saying something, and what you hear changes by what you see. Yeah. Which is crazy. He was saying bar and far. Strangely, I only heard bar.

Well, he was only saying bar, but I heard far when I looked at the one. I was making a joke about my booze habits, but okay. Oh, bar, bar, bar. Got it? Yeah, wow. Oh, God. And you're the one on cold meds. I know. Still funny. Yeah, talk about an illusion.

Closing shout-outs! I want to give a shout-out to one of my favorite old-school shoegazing bands, Ride. They have just reformed after quite a long time, and they're playing a bunch of shows out and about basically everywhere. Rather randomly, they just announced a show pre-Coachella here at the Roxy on April 8th, which I will be going to.

I'm very excited. I bought the tickets. They played the Roxy April 10th, 1991, and I was there. So exactly 24 years minus two days later, I will be seeing them at the exact same venue, which is probably not great in terms of career trajectory, so I'm sure they're not too thrilled about that.

But whatever. I'm excited about it. And the absolute insane thing about the Internet is I was Googling this stuff to find out, because I was like, I know I saw Ride at the Roxy. And the entire show that my high school senior drunk ass was at 24 years ago is up on the web in good quality.

So there's a link in the show notes if you'd like to listen to the show. I love that stuff. It's amazing. Yeah, I listened to it the entire day when I bought those tickets. I was like, this is great. A lot of the old Green Day and Jawbreaker shows I used to go see in the suburbs of Illinois, all that stuff is up on YouTube.

It's amazing. Somebody actually, I don't know how they got such great quality audio of all these shows from way back in the day. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to go back in the time machine. Yes, it is. So I'm going to have a quick shout out to Uncle Pete's in Wheeling, West Virginia, because we've gone there a couple of times for dinner because, you know, there's not a whole lot else to do here.

And the bartender, when I went in the second time, I'm looking at the menu and I'm like, man, I can't remember what kind of beer did I have last time I was here? Asking my mom. And then the bartender just yells over the bar, Stella! I'm like, okay, I was here one time. I come back the second time days later and she still remembers what I was drinking.

That's service. That is. The fact that it was Stella was sad, but. Well, you know, you're in West Virginia. I'm impressed they had it. I thought it'd be Pabst. No, if you go down the street, I can get some Newcastle here and there, some Guinness in a couple of places, in the can and bottle, of course.

Nothing on tap. No. Okay, let's wrap this up. I got to catch a plane tomorrow and then catch a plane the next day and I'll be out in L.A. seeing you guys pretty soon. All right, man. Get out of West Virginia. I will do that. You get feeling better, cold man. I'm going to take some drugs.

Excellent. 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 grumpyoldgeeks.com and follow the links. The level of love is still the same.

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Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 103. Jay-Z is a brilliant businessman.

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