121: We Don't Need Another Hero

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.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for July 31st, 2015. I am Jason DeFillippo. And I am, as of yesterday, the currently underemployed Brian Schulmeister. What happened, Brian? Well, that wonderful, awesome project that I've been working on for the past seven to eight months has sadly collapsed and will not be occurring anymore.

And as of yesterday, I am no longer working on it. Oh, no. Yeah, it's time for me to find another J-O-B. Man, that sucks. It does suck. But, you know, that's the world we live in now. Which is an article I found on Salon that I find really interesting. We talk about this all the time, and the title from this one hits home particularly after yesterday.

Your Job Will Never Love You, Stress and Anxiety in Our Frightening New Job World. Oh, my. Yes. It's another lovely read about how basically companies don't give a shit about us, and you're on your own, and good luck with that. That seems to be a theme. It is. Yeah, it's a nice read.

I mean, it's a... It's not a very nice read. It's a terrible read. It's a terrible read, but it's very true. It will prepare you for the job world that actually exists now, as opposed to the one that people still promote, that we pretend that still exists, that our parents had, which is one where you have a lifelong employee, and there's mutual trust and respect, and we all take care of each other.

That does not exist anymore. It is a dog-eat-dog world. Yes, it is. So if you want to get really depressed about your current job, go ahead and read that. Okay. I think I'll pass. Okay. Well, actually, I can't pass. I already read it. Yeah. So I found this interesting article on The Kernel, which kind of goes back to something we talked about several shows ago.

Just talking about, you know, how Wi-Fi is affecting people, and we, I mean, even going back to, like, what, episode five or six, talking about that story where the Wi-Fi was killing the plants. Yeah, we did talk about that one, and then a couple months ago, it seems like, there was a study that came out that said it does absolutely nothing.

Exactly. And this is a story on electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Yeah. And then, you know, the nocebo effect and all that stuff. And it's, I have no idea if any of this means anything, but it's an interesting read, I just have to say.

I scanned through it. I read through it. There are far too many words in this article, by the way. It's a very long article to say we really don't know what the hell's going on. And it's funny, illustration by Jay Longo. It should have been written by Jay Longo. Yes. You know, this I put in there with, like, the peanut allergies.

It's amazing how none of this stuff really affected anybody a long time ago. I don't think, all credible science says that nothing is happening, that this is no big deal. And look at the reality. If it is, what, we're going to stop using Wi-Fi?

And we're all blanketed in it 24-7 now anyway, so we're screwed no matter what. Yep, pretty much. Go live in the woods by yourself. The problem will take care of itself in a couple generations. That's true. So I thought this was a pretty important week in terms of what happens online and privacy and morality and learning to mind your own goddamn business.

Or is that just completely and utterly gone? Oh, it's been gone. It's been long gone. Well, that seems to really be the theme of the week. We'll go ahead and start with Walter Palmer and the dentist, who... Yeah, the lion fucker.

He killed the lion, you know, which is horrible and, yes, super, super bad. Is it just me or did the entire fucking internet go absolutely batshit insane and absolutely hate this guy? He's, like, public enemy number one right now. This week, this week. Before, it was the guy from GoDaddy who killed the elephant.

Before that, it was Justine Sacco who, you know, flew to South Africa to the worst landing of all time. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. I hate to say it, but it's... I know, but it seems to be ramping up in terms of extremity and just insanity.

Yeah, this guy's a horrible guy. What he did is absolutely horrible. Did he deserve to get doxxed? No. Well, technically, what he did was poaching, so... Well, yeah. He broke the law and... I know, I know. Last I heard, we had institutions like police and authorities to take care of these things.

We don't take it into our own fucking hands. And that's what everybody does now. Everybody thinks they're entitled to go ahead and do whatever the fuck they want to somebody they don't like anymore. Well, you know, welcome to the Internet Vigilante Society. Well, this is not a society I'm happy about at all and I think it's absolutely ridiculous.

And it's difficult to talk about because what you're basically doing is you're defending people that kind of suck and are doing horrible things. But somebody has to. This is kind of bullshit. There's a couple stories that came out this week. Besides this dentist getting doxxed, which, you know, let the authorities take care of it.

Yes, he's a horrible person. Don't take it into your own hands. Then we had the two sisters at a baseball game who were sitting behind a couple and they were reading the wife's cell phone while she was basically sexting somebody else.

And then they took it upon themselves to let the husband know, which in and of itself. OK, fine. Give a note to the husband. But they didn't stop there. They had to document them being heroes and put it all over the Internet. So it's everywhere. And this caught on like wildfire, of course.

So this poor guy, it's bad enough that his wife was basically cheating on him or whatever, sexting with somebody else. But now he's been publicly humiliated everywhere. I mean, everyone knows this is absolutely ridiculous. And then there was another story. Another one.

This is over in England. And this is a guy who was on his plane and he did the same thing. He was reading texts from a chick in front of him. And she was basically bragging that she cheated on her boyfriend twice. And he got the name and then he tweeted it. And he's, you know, he was very specific, you know, to the guy's name, Dom, whose girlfriend just landed at the East Midlands Airport coming back from Zante.

Say, your girlfriend cheated on you twice and boasted about it on the plane. Laugh my ass off. What is wrong with people? Well, I mean, if you want to even go back further, you can go back to Reddit who, you know, they were doing their amateur sleuthing, mislabeled the Boston bomber.

And then the guy ended up killing himself. You know, this is this is just this is the world we live in. It comes down to personal responsibility. If you if these people are assholes, honest, I mean, that's it. You can't you can't you know, you can't engineer around assholes. All you people who think that you're doing a wonderful thing out there, you're as bad as the people that you're trying to basically shame.

Stop it. Let him or her whom is without sin cast the first tweet. Say it's I mean, it's just really, really bad. And there's a great there's a great article in Salon about it, which Twitter vigilante has gone bad. Stop live tweeting takedowns of harmless strangers in public.

Because, you know, it's it's gone beyond like major things. It's just if you're unhappy with someone now about anything, you post it publicly and you post photos of them and you post information about them. And this is not this is not the society. Is this a society we want for ourselves? Well, I mean, we've talked about privacy in the past in a different context.

You know, with Steve Rombaum's video privacy is dead. Get over it. Well, we that was in context of security and personal information. But now it's like everybody in public is like, you know, the neighborhood watch of the Internet. And they just but, you know, yeah, you go back to their place.

They're probably doing shit that's just as bad. It's like the senator who bashes gays and then gets, you know, stooped in the bathroom. It's the same problem. People people are inherently shitty, I think, is what this really comes down to. It really is. I mean, it's one of those things where the whole hope of all of this was to have a more open and free society.

And now we're fucking that up and we're making it more and more closed and more and more puritanical and more and more insane. It's we all have to follow anybody else's standards of morality or decency or whatever, just because now everybody has the power to take everybody else down. And instead of like being aware of that and just going, all right, maybe we should all just mind our own fucking business and move about our lives unless somebody is actually actively causing us pain.

Instead, we're going completely the other direction. Now we're all celebrities. Yeah, I just think everybody should let their freak flag fly and just, you know, do whatever the fuck they want. And then if somebody calls you out on it, say so. Yeah, it's none of your goddamn business. There is that. You know, you got it.

You got to go down swinging. But we talked about this book on the show before. So you've been publicly shamed by John Ronson. I haven't gotten to it yet, but I thought it tied into what we were talking about very well. Well, the title certainly does. And it's something I'd be interested in reading because this is who knew that this would be if you I would never would have guessed like five years ago that this would be what would just the norm.

Now it's the norm. It's you just call out people, whatever the fuck you want. I think Adam Carolla has got to be, you know, just doing a doing a jig in the end zone right now because this is what he wanted. He wanted everybody to call everybody out and shame them publicly. And guess what? It's happening. Yeah.

I mean, he is big on the public shaming and he misses it, but I don't think he's ever the point that he was making wasn't just like everybody, anybody just doing anything. It was more bigger institutions. It's more shaming the people that are shaping our lives.

It's it's big topic shaming, not not small personal shit that doesn't matter. Not at the individual level. Exactly. So we covered this on last week's episode and I wanted to put a little follow up here. This is about the drones that grounded the firefighting planes and helicopters.

The county is offering a seventy five thousand dollar reward to catch the pilots who were flying those drones. See, they're worth shaming. Mm hmm. It's drone pilots. These are the people that should be publicly shamed. I agree with that. Catch them. Get them out of there. Post horrible pictures of them.

Don't dox them because that's still too much. But yeah, let's catch them and let's let's find those assholes. Definitely. So you may have noticed after four years, I think, of not using LinkedIn, I have returned. I did notice because I got one of my rare you've received an invitation to connect on LinkedIn emails.

So you and I are connected. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad we're connected now. But I haven't we like determined that LinkedIn is really useless. So why why did you come back? Because there are certain aspects of it that I need in my new position and my new job as a yeah, as a programmer, I'd never needed it.

But yes, now I do. I just literally literally literally an email just came in from Jordan Harbinger asking me to join his LinkedIn network. That bastard is linked like hooking up with you and he hasn't even accepted my friend request yet. I'm going to have a I'm going to have a talk with my boss.

Oh, you got to you got to use your terminology, right? You're not friends on LinkedIn. You're connected. Oh, connected. OK, well, can I get some likes on LinkedIn? Maybe some some favorites or re re links? No, but you can you can certainly publish your your your ideas and thoughts for free and they'll make money off of it.

Yeah, I won't be doing that. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I just never left LinkedIn. I'm still there. And, you know, now that I am underwhelmingly employed, perhaps LinkedIn could be useful for me. Get a fucking life. No, no. For 10 years, I was on LinkedIn as a programmer and I never got a single job offer that panned out or was useful in any way, shape or form.

But now I need it because I'm talking to a lot of people and it really helps to be able to connect with a bunch of different people because I am now very social in my in my job. And, yeah, I mean, that is something that I will begrudgingly admit that LinkedIn is somewhat useful for.

It's kind of like a social network for adults in the real world. Yeah, honestly, yes, it is. Yeah, except you're not social. It's just a way to verify who people are and you can read a little bit about them and what they've actually done as opposed to what they had for lunch. Yeah, mainly for research. For me, it's great for research and, you know, it's getting to know people and getting to know connections.

So if I need to meet somebody, I can use LinkedIn to get an introduction to them, to get to know them and meet them. And we'll be talking about that more in a future episode. But, yeah, I'm back. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm there. LinkedIn.com slash JP DeFilippo, I believe.

That's my my personal URL. And I'm connected to your boss before you were. Yeah, I got to I got to have a word with him about that. So we covered DoorDash on a previous episode. So I wanted to have a little follow up. Yeah, yeah. Avoid. Avoid like the plague.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad service. I actually did a little bit of research on some of the other ones just because I was I was hungry and lazy a couple of days ago. And the price point on like E24 or any of the other ones, it's just it's too expensive.

It's not worth it. It's different if like, say, I was having a party or some other people were over. But for me, just to get my lunch by myself, it's way too damn expensive. Yeah, I was having a party. I had a bunch of people over and we wanted to get some Mexican. So we called up and said, give me some El Torito. And they went and they brought it back.

And I've got pictures of all this. Maybe I'll post them in the show notes. Maybe I won't. Who knows? But my $14 soft taco plate came back with a one single soft taco in a sad little shell that had obviously been under a heat lamp for about six days.

The burritos were fine. Everything else was fine. But that one part of the order was completely wrong. And, you know, I blame the driver. The driver didn't check the order. So they delivered it. And I just, you know, I didn't I didn't check it. So that was a little bit on me until I got inside and they were gone. So then I but here's the thing.

I immediately called customer service. I'm like, OK, let's let's do this like an adult. I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to make a phone call. Nobody answered. If nobody answers for a 24-7, you know, customer service facing business, gloves are off.

So ended up having to go through the app and get another reorder. The reorder, the interesting thing on DoorDash is they show you, OK, order is at the kitchen. Cooks are preparing. Driver picked up. Driver delivered. Right. El Torito is 1.3 miles from my house.

The driver took 22 minutes to get here. It was cold and they had they'd carried it basically sideways and upside down for most of the trip. So everything was it was it was a mess. So, yeah. And that was the free reorder. So but we called El Torito and we're like, hey, what are you guys doing with these guys?

They'd never heard of them. So what DoorDash does is they've got basically people who are ordering for you. You call them or you put it into the app. They phone in the order. Yeah. And then somebody comes and picks it up under the name of probably the driver. So we called El Torito and they're like, we have no idea who these people are.

We've never heard of them. We're really sorry that your order was screwed up. So come in, have a free meal on us, even though they had no reason whatsoever to do anything for us. And they're like, yeah, come on in. And we're like, no, that's customer service. DoorDash, on the other hand, fuck you guys.

Yeah, I've been in restaurants multiple times at when people when these services come in to pick things up. And I not once have I ever seen the driver actually open up the bag and look through it and check things. Yeah, they just grab and go. Ever seen it. So but I don't even know if they have access to the order.

It's just like, go pick up this and take it here. Probably. I mean, that's you know, this is our new economy. This is what we do. Yeah. But hey, thanks for the invite to the party. Yeah, I just wanted to bring that up because DoorDash is heavily papering Los Angeles. Like everywhere you go, you see flyers for them. So I just wanted to give this give this notice to all of our Los Angelino friends or any other city that they go to that it's kind of crappy.

Yeah, I don't use any of those services. Get off your ass. Go pick it up. Sometimes you had a few cocktails and you want a burrito. So I understand the need for a delivery service like this. But generally, good restaurants will just deliver. Yeah. So have you been listening to the Planet Money?

No, not recently. OK, I've been listening to it a lot, strangely. So a couple of couple of issues that came up. We were talking about self-driving cars on many, many an episode, and they were talking about a ride that they got to take in a Google self-driving car.

You know, the new ones, those little horrible concoctions, and they were going through a construction zone and a construction worker flipped his sign from slow to stop in the car, just jammed on his brakes and stopped. OK. Now, I think that this is ripe for a hack.

You think? Come on. All you have to do is go down to the Home Depot and pick up a little sign, and you can start messing around with people big time. Oh, my God. Especially when these things get on the freeway. Oh, jeez. You're driving along 70 miles an hour, you get in front of a self-driving car, and you just stick your hand out the window with a stop sign, and the thing jams on the brakes.

Yeah, there's some kinks that they're going to have to work out here. Yeah, this will be interesting. I mean, yes, they could probably, you know, figure out the telemetry on the sign and figure out if the sign is moving or whatnot. But anyway, if you're just walking down the street and you see a Google car come by, you just hold up your stop sign and just go, you're not going anywhere, motherfucker.

Yeah, good times. Yeah, there's another one about the water situation in California. Now, I consider this a dick move. Most of the farmers in Central California right now are planting the most water-hungry crops that they can possibly plant, pistachios, nuts, and all that stuff.

Yeah, almonds in particular. Yeah. There's lots and lots of almonds because they make a lot of money, and I'm so sick of being, like, browbeaten and shamed as a Californian about, like, taking showers or things like that. When anything that you and I could do doesn't make a dent.

Nope, not at all. All these privately owned farms that are basically just doing one crop, which is the most water-hungry crop in existence because it's the most money for them. We've got a water problem? Great. Start shutting down these farms. Yeah, and, I mean, they're tapping into the aquifers, and they've actually gone to oil drilling companies now because they used to have to go down 200 feet to get to the water.

Now they have to go down 2,000 feet to get to the water. Yeah, you don't miss the aquifers. Yeah, well, we've got El Nino coming. Maybe this will all fix itself. That's true. It's supposed to be a hot, sticky, rainy week here in California. A hot, sticky, rainy winter in California. So, and just because we have to, I funded Cards for Mindfulness from our friend Rowan Gunatulaki, you know, from Budaphy.

Yes. I got my update this morning that, shocking, they're behind schedule. Yeah, well. I kind of miss our Kickstarter segment. I did, too. We stopped it for so long, but now there's so much more news about it again, and it all just continues the way that we predicted it would.

Maybe it's time for a reboot. In the news. My favorite social network, at least in terms of design and functionality, has finally admitted it's going away.

Somewhat. Let's not say it's going away. Google Plus is still going to exist in a fashion. Yes. With nobody really using it. But, yeah, it's, Google has finally announced that it's no longer going to force people to use a Google Plus account when basically using Google for any of Google's services.

You automatically got a Google Plus account to use YouTube or anything else in existence, so they're finally going to decouple those things. Knowing how Google usually works with these sort of things, it's going to be a freaking mess for a long time, and nothing's going to make any sense. It is going to be a fuster cluck because Google has a history of not knowing how to deal with all of this account stuff.

I mean, it's like, oh, you know, still, if you use Google Analytics still to this day, you have to sign into that separately from your own Google account. Oh, yeah, same thing, just across the board, it's a mess. It's a total mess, and I could never figure out how YouTube worked, and that was a problem with a bunch of clients.

It just gets incrementally worse when you start adding in, like, client accounts. Like, I have seven different Google accounts that I sign in and out of depending on who I'm working for at the moment. So, that's just a mess, mess, mess, mess. Yeah, I mean, I've got three YouTube accounts, and all my videos are distributed differently because I didn't know who I was logged in as when I uploaded, and there's no way to consolidate it.

No, there's not. It's a mess. Yeah. But at least they're going to get rid of one. Google Plus will probably still stick around, I guess, in some way, shape, or form, or basically as it is. But, I mean, it's just going to be an elo. You know, people are just going to stop posting there. Google-alo.

Something like that. Weak. It was pretty weak. Yeah, but it's going to stick around, and they've already decoupled photos. Yeah. But whatever. You know, nobody goes there anyway for their social. No. No, they do not. So, I also want to give a tip of the hat to Dr. David Teeter, friend of the show, who sent a link last night to both of us, which was kind of funny.

This is off Engadget, and somebody did a study and found out that basically some of the cars on Uber's maps don't really exist. Shocking. So, you'll see a bunch of cars floating around, but that doesn't exactly mean there are that many drivers really around. Yeah.

It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. They just throw in some random numbers and say, yeah, let's put a car here, a car there, and make them think there's somebody coming for you. Yeah. They're just gamifying it, right? I need my Uber badge. The you-have-been-duped badge. Yeah. And then there was an article on Slate in their money box area, which is a particular part of the site that I enjoy because it delves into business and economics.

It sounds kind of filthy. Yes. It's my money box. If I could make money with my money box, I wouldn't be here. The rise of the gig economy is a giant myth. So, this goes through the real numbers on the number of people that are actually doing things like Ubering full-time as the myth seems to go right now that all we're going to do is pick up these tiny jobs and that'll somehow pay for everything.

No, that's a load of crap. Most people are still working full-time for real companies. Yeah, I was looking at those charts, and they're kind of interesting how, you know, everything has been kind of trending down, like people having their own jobs and having multiple jobs is trending down, and people are sticking with actual companies. But there's one thing I think that they kind of glossed over, unemployment.

Yeah. Because, yeah, nobody has a real job. Everybody's just unemployed. Yeah. They could use that on the graph as well because I'm sure that that would be an upswing. In fact, we know it is because we know the numbers and otherwise. So, yeah. So, there are more people that are just unemployed, and they're not doing this kind of bullshit where they work for Uber or Lyft or whatever else or, you know, the food service that screws up your El Torito orders.

So, yeah, so that's not really happening. That's all just big internet bullshit buzz. Okay, so your next one that you put in here is, can Jet.com take on Amazon and win? You know my stance on the question. Yes, if it ends with a question, then the answer is no.

And I would tend to agree with that. I had not even heard of Jet.com until I saw this article. So, then I signed up and took a look at it, and it is, I don't think Amazon has to worry. Oh, I'm sure Amazon does not have to worry. They're saying that they're algorithmically enabled to give you better prices on different things.

The video is really funny. They got the guy from Silicon Valley in there to do it, and it's like a five-minute video that we're going to put in the show notes because it's actually pretty funny. Yeah. But I think the best quote is, perhaps most concerning, Lore is one of the guys who started it.

Lore himself has acknowledged that in order for Jet's business model to work, the company has to sell $20 billion worth of items annually. Yeah, and I don't know if you even spent five minutes looking through Jet.com, but they're never going to sell that much stuff. I didn't even bother signing up.

I get enough spam. Although, if this lore guy is actually the evil data from Star Trek Next Generation, I'm intrigued again. Hmm, interesting. Speaking of crazy-ass people with love, Elon Musk gave a speech at, where was it?

He joined Stephen Hawking and over a thousand others basically to propose the ban on researching autonomous weapons, which I think we can all get behind. We don't like that idea. The whole concept of basically having a gun on a drone is terrifying in many levels. Especially if you live in Pakistan right now, because they've been dealing with it for how many years?

Yeah, exactly. So this is not a good idea. We don't like this. But the real thing that was interesting about it is this article goes in a little bit deeper and says that the reason that a lot of these people don't want the ban on this stuff is not because they'll actually exist, but because there's a limited amount of money and research priorities.

And they don't want us to focus on that. We want other things. Right. They want to take it away. They don't want to take the brainpower away from the private sector with the people who are trying to do good with AI and put it in the hands of the military and, you know, basically have the smartest people in the world figuring out how to kill each other.

Yeah. So that's an interesting point of view. And once again, I think Musk is nailing it. So I'm happy. Yeah. Check out the Future of Life Institute. I went through some of their stuff this week and they've got some interesting, you know, petitions you can sign. I don't know if it'll do anything, but it's worth worth checking out because these are the people that are really worried about, you know, AI actually going and taking a wrong turn.

Yes. I'm sure that signing the petitions online will have about as much effect as you posting your opinions on Facebook. Yeah. You know, I went to sign a petition on change.org about getting the Cracker Barrel renamed and I still see Cracker Barrels. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Now, we do have some good news for once.

Okay. Bring it on because I could use some. Intel and Micron have debuted a new storage technology, which is a thousand times faster than current solid state digital storage. This is really cool. It is cool as shit. Yeah.

It's called 3D Crosspoint, even though it's spelled X point. Because, you know. Yeah. There's too many vowels in cross. God forbid we have any technology that doesn't drop letters these days. Anyway, it is super cool and I can't wait for this stuff to come out.

It's pretty revolutionary. Yeah. No, definitely check this one out. And it actually came from CNET, which I haven't seen in a very long time. I'm like, wow. I know. So you posted a CNET link. I'm like, holy shit. Remember when we used to go to CNET for like everything? They had the best like tech reviews and then all the pricing and everything.

And I haven't gone to CNET probably in five years or so until this article. Dude, I remember watching CNET TV on USA at night, like after Silk Stalkings and watching a young Ryan Seacrest host some of the shows. I've been with CNET since the beginning.

And Halsey Miner, one of the founders of CNET, was an investor in one of my companies until he didn't pay his taxes and they took all our money away. And I think they confiscated his plane. Wow. Yeah. Good story. Well, if you go to the list of top people in California who owe back taxes, he was at the top of the list for years.

Yeah. Yeah. And we took his money. Nice. Let's talk a little bit about iTunes and their bloated, horrible system, which is still not working for me on my PC because of my large library, which is very frustrating.

And I don't know if that's ever going to get fixed. There's an article by Robinson Mayer in The Atlantic that talks about the tragedy of iTunes and classical music. Now, I would make an argument, first off, that I wouldn't blame the tragedy of the horrible state of classical music in digital or electronic form on iTunes in and of itself.

It's horrible everywhere. Nobody has ever really done a good job of actually creating a decent system for classical music in terms of, you know, what you're basically looking at is you've got one title, but 17,000 different performances of it by different orchestras, by different conductors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So how do you figure out all this stuff? How do you sort through it all? And there's never really been a good solution because the tagging systems that we've used are just, they didn't really cut it and people don't use it correctly and people don't use it right. And he goes into great detail about how this is basically almost impossible to keep any sort of track with on, in iTunes at all.

So, and he proposes what you and I have always proposed, which is somebody that needs to basically Apple needs to basically strip down the entire thing and rebuild it from the ground up. Yeah, definitely. I'm surprised Pono didn't take this and run with it because they're all about high quality music. That, that would have been a natural market for them actually is to, in fact, if it's actually it was funny, I'm on the Pono homepage right now and they have an entire classical section.

That is funny. If Neil Young would like to pivot his Pono, I would, uh, I would position it basically just as a classical music system. And I think you'd do quite well for it in the very limited market in which you would be able to sell, but it would actually work and you'd have a niche product that people liked.

There you go. That one's free, Neil. Yeah. And people who like classical music like high definition audio. So, I mean, it's a, it's a perfect fit. Yes. Anyways, point being, yes. One other thing about this article that really annoyed me, and this happens more and more these days, uh, probably because the state of online journalism is so horrible and, uh, the actual author of articles rarely write the titles or the little blurb that goes underneath it as somebody else does.

Um, the second line, the title of this article is the tragedy of iTunes classical music. Then the little blurb, the new version of Apple signature media software is a mess. No problem with that article. Totally talks about that second line. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do next to nothing in this article about large MP3 libraries or issues with that?

Just one basic thing that said, uh, they phased out large, large players. So you have to stream, but that's not really a big issue because most of the classical stuff is out there too. And you can just pick, uh, uh, not really part of the problem here. The SEO team wrote that second line.

Yeah. There's nothing in the article that really has anything to do with that. So that's freaking annoying. And that's actually why I went to go read the article in the first place, because as we've discussed, my problem with Apple music is I have a large library and it does not work. Yeah. No, I guarantee you the SEO team wrote that line.

Yeah. 1000% because they know that it's a trending topic with iTunes and they did their research and there's like, okay, large MP3 libraries, people can't do it. So let's, let's click bait it in there or SEO bait it. Yeah. So that's some bullshit right there. Okay. I found an article this morning that I haven't finished yet, but it looks promising.

So redaff.com the, uh, it started out as a newsletter. We talked about it a bunch. I love, I love my newsletter every day. They have great articles in it and they've started to do original content because apparently they, somebody in Silicon Valley gave them a bunch of money or the, I mean, the guy comes from my space or so maybe he got 20 bucks when he left and started this.

It's called less money, mo music and lots of problems. A look at the music biz by Liam Bollock. I've never heard of Liam Bollock, but, uh, so far it was a pretty good read. I'm about halfway through, so I'm just throwing it in here so people can check it out. Yeah. I, I, I saw that you put it in this morning and I haven't had too much of a chance.

I did try to scan over the entire thing, uh, without doing a super deep read, but, uh, this basically, um, this looks like, uh, a long form version with lovely charts and graphs and, uh, a little bit more depth and detail of everything that we've said about the music industry since we started this podcast.

Exactly. But they've got funding and we don't, so they'll be taken seriously and we won't. So that's why I just wanted to put it in. And they made some pretty graphs. Yes. We don't do graphs here at the art of, or not Jesus. Okay. Can you tell that I've, I've, my day job has kind of melded into.

Yeah. No, this is a, again, I, from what I've seen, it's a really, really good article. Um, I'm going to do a deeper dive on this and we may or may not talk about this again next week, uh, depending on if there's anything specific in here. Uh, I just like to throw this out to redeft team. Um, you know, grumpy old geeks are available for content creation.

Absolutely. Well, half of the grumpy old geeks team is. Well, this guy certainly is at the moment. Security. Normally I basically just sit back and relax and let Jason go apeshit on this section.

But, uh, I think you've started to infect me a little bit with your paranoia. I'm sorry. I take away from your checking your email time during the show. I usually Facebook. Okay. Uh, but I found a few this time around. Uh, we've talked about air gapping before and how that's basically game over for everyone.

Uh, researchers hack air gap computer with simple cell phone. Okay. How so? Well, there's a very long article on wire.com about it. You didn't get or what? Oh, I read through it, but yeah, I don't really understand it. This is way above my pay grade.

Okay. Since you don't get paid, that's not hard. Exactly. Neither do I. So I, I just kind of glanced at it. Yeah. We've talked about air gap computers, uh, being, uh, vulnerable from many different, uh, avenues. Some using the, the built-in speakers on the computers and all sorts of stuff.

But I tell you what, these goddamn Israelis, these are the guys that keep coming up with the, the, the ways to break the air gap computers. I swear every air gap story we have starts with the words in Israeli researcher. Most of the security stuff does these days. Let's be honest. But, uh, yeah, definitely. They're, they're definitely looking into this hardcore.

Uh, but they basically found out that, uh, uh, you can use a basic corporate owned cell phone with voice and text messaging features with no camera, video or wifi capability, and you can still do it. I, this is beyond unbelievable to me. Yeah. Well, it's not to me.

And by the end of this segment this week, uh, I think, uh, you'll understand. So let's be, let's be honest here. Black hat is going on right now. We're getting ready to start black, black hat and DEF CON. And every time this year or every year, it always has the best stuff because everybody's like kind of releasing what they're going to talk about.

And it's just like, Oh no, it is Christmas. Yeah. So, uh, here's a new one. Uh, researchers prevents or a present system for high speed anonymous browsing. So Chen Chen from Carnegie Mellon and George dances of, uh, the university college in London and a couple other, Oh shit.

A lot of other people, basically they've built a new system called Hornet, which is a low latency onion routing system that it kind of is a replacement for tour. Um, there is a very dense, uh, white paper along with this. Um, so, uh, yeah, it's basically, they say Hornet nodes can process anonymous traffic at over 93 gigabits per second.

Um, and it's, it's a tour replacement, which is, and it's got end to end encryption and it's supposed to be much better than tour. Now the problem with that is, Oh, you go ahead, go ahead. I, I, I have a question for you, for you. Yes. Actually, no, but, uh, more for, for everyone.

Do we really think that at some point, uh, tour or this alternative Hornet are going, is going to replace the standard internet? Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it though? Yeah, it would be nice. But the problem is it's not. And as, as you and I have stated before, when we were even just talking about tour, you kind of don't want to even install it and get on there because in general, it's all nefarious deeds.

Yeah. Welcome to the watch list. Exactly. So, but it doesn't matter anymore because you've got new browser plugins that can basically figure out who you are by the way you type even on tour. Now, see, that is not surprising to me.

I've always felt that, that, that can be a giveaway. Uh, even way back in the day, like when I was doing my own BBS and things like that, when there were real time chat rooms, you could tell, I mean, it was only like three or four people and you got to know them really well, but you could tell by typing speed who, who the person was.

This is not surprising to me at all. Yeah. It's called behavioral biometrics. And, you know, we talk about gate recognition and things like that, but I'm a huge like world war two nut. And when I was researching, you know, things like Bletchley park way back in the day, uh, when I was a huge fan of, uh, what was the Neil Stevenson book that you hated?

Cryptonomicon. Yeah. Cryptonomicon. I didn't hate it. I just, it's no snow crash. So when I, yeah, it wasn't. But when I got into that, you learned that, uh, when the telegraph operators in one part of Germany, we're talking to other telegraph operators, you learned their basically what they called their fist.

And that was the, how they actually sent the message. So people in England who were trying to replicate them would learn their fist, which is that like their gate, their, their, their finger gate. Yeah. They touched on that briefly in that movie that was just out. They did mention that. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. In, uh, what was that one with Benedict Cumberbucket, but anyway, yeah. So now they can figure it out. If you have, uh, basically if you have JavaScript enabled and somebody wants to put the JavaScript library on there to actually start testing it.

And the interesting thing was that they're talking about doing it from password or username and password fields. Another reason to get one password. I was about to say, there you go. People just yet another reason to have one password because there's no way of telling who you are because that shit just pops in there quick.

Low row hammer. So row hammer, Jason, this is, uh, this is probably one of the more frightening headlines I've ever seen. Security researchers just revealed a computer vulnerability that's frightening. Amazing and unlike anything else. And, uh, by the way, you cannot protect against it.

Yeah. You're screwed at all. Can't protect against this at all. No, you're, you're screwed. This is say this every segment and every, every episode, every time in this segment, we say we're completely screwed. And then every week somebody comes up with another way that we're completely screwed.

It just gets worse. Yes. And so this is basically a memory issue with the physical memory in your computer and people have figured out a way to, um, flip the bits on subsequent rows of memory to figure out what's happening and do something different.

Um, and they're, they, they have figured out how to take control of your computer by using this row hammer exploit. And the annoying thing is the chip manufacturers have known about it for years and they're just starting to maybe figure it out. Maybe that new, uh, crossover, whatever Ram will figure that out.

But yeah, but, but the thing is there, there can never be a patch for this. The only way that you could ever fix this is if they figure it out and you get new chips. Uh, there are firmware patches that you can get, but nobody's going to do that. So they haven't even bothered with it. Right. Um, yeah, this one is, it's, it's difficult for people to actually take over somebody's computer.

They've only done that in the lab, but they have proven that they can do that in the lab. And you know, if they do it in the lab, then next thing you know, we've got rage infected monkeys running all over London and you're screwed. That's true. That is true. It's science. It's just science.

Yeah. So, um, yeah, uh, read this one. If you just don't want to sleep tonight, that's about it. Or turn your computer off because it's done. Yep. Although, you know, we've already known that people can actually turn your computer on when it's off remotely. Well, that's true too.

So thank you, Hal. So have you ever heard of black dart? I have not. So this is a military thing that they do every year. They've been doing it since like 2002. Nobody's known about it until, uh, 2013, but what they do is they come up with things that, uh, suck and try and fix them.

And this year they're doing drones. Right. They're there. They've got a spot down in somewhere in Ventura County and, uh, they, they've got a bunch of drones that they're flying and they're having contractors come in and see if they can take down the drones. It's an interesting read because it goes through what the military is trying to do and what the obstacles are with dealing with these smaller drones.

They've got like, you know, big drones down to tiny drones. Right. And, uh, it's, it's a, it's a crazy story. I highly recommend this. And the surprising thing is this comes from the New York post, which I never thought I would link to in this show. But the other interesting thing is that there's a dude in, uh, serving 17 years in prison right now for plotting to pack C4 onto a, uh, basically radio controlled, uh, plane.

Like the, you know, those jets that they have that they do little air shows for. I love them. I think they're cool as hell, but he was going to put a bunch of C4 on them and fly them into the Capitol in the Pentagon and he got busted and went to jail. Good. So there are people out there that are doing the things that we were worried about, but fortunately there are people that are trying to, to take them down.

Well, we'll see, we'll see who wins. Uh, uh, you know, history is not exactly on our side. No, no. So, uh, I found an article that was related to the black hat hacker conference. Uh, there are two security researchers, Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger, who are going to present the results of a year of work hacking on a pair of $1,300 tracking point, self aiming rifles.

I thought they were $13,000, $13,000. My bad. Yeah. 13. These are 13 grand. Pretty damn expensive, but I'm not a gun guy. Jason, but I was not aware of, and of course I'm now terrified of the fact that people are making guns that have wifi. Why? Why would you have the internet of things does not need to involve your sniper, right?

Why? Oh, why? Oh, wifi. Because that way the rifle can actually put the, uh, the video feed from the scope to a spotter's, uh, tablet or computer. So they can see what's happening. If you've got a spotter that's doing your windage and your elevation and all that, they can actually help you aim, but they don't really need to with this gun because this game, this gun is self aiming.

You're like, okay, I'm going to, I want to shoot that. So when I'm steady, pull the trigger. I'm looking at this gun and I'm practically thinking it's self-aware. Yeah. This is the self aiming. Jesus Christ. This thing is insane. Uh, but, uh, basically they found out that you can hack into it and, you know, an anonymous remote hacker can basically take over your gun and do, do whatever he wants with it.

Well, what I loved about the video is like, they showed you how, okay, I'm aiming. I locked aim on this target. Now the gun is going to shoot the guy next to him. It's like, oh, okay. Talk about like, I'd want my $13,000 back right now.

If I'm trying to take out the president of Bolivia and I shoot his secretary. Yeah, it's good times. I mean, haven't we talked enough on this segment? Obviously the entire world listens to us. Don't you know that nothing is secure? So please stop putting wifi on things that can kill people.

Yeah. Okay. Like your car, like we talked about last week, everything. Uh, so anyway, this is a, uh, a post in the guardian from Thomas Lee, and he has finally come along to our side of thinking. And he's like, in the next couple of years, uh, there's going to be basically a nine 11 style cyber attack.

And that is about the only thing that is going to get people to wake up and stop putting wifi into everything. And use one password. But as we learned from the first story in the show, it doesn't matter if you don't put wifi in it because an air gap computer can be hacked too. This is why I'm saying that there is nothing that we can do.

So just do what you're going to do. Yeah. Um, and, and, uh, my, one of my favorite people, John McAfee has a really good blog and he has a post called hack anarchy out this week. And, uh, he's been talking about the Ashley Madison and adult friend finder and all those hacks.

Yeah. But basically he's saying you people need to wake the hell up, right? Completely wake up because there's nothing that you're going to do without basically tearing everything down to the studs and building it back up. Yeah, that's very true. And that's, you know, when we get down to it, this is what, this is why DEF CON and black hat every year just make me smile.

Like, okay, I can sleep at night now because I know that if I worried about it, I would never turn on a computer again. I would go like full unabomber. You have totally come around to my way of thinking. I have actually, which is scary. It's like, I started, I just threw my hands up in the air and said, there, there's nothing I can do.

Yep. And if you're Brinks, definitely nothing you can do. Uh, another black or DEF CON, uh, this is a DEF CON presentation. Uh, somebody figured out how to hack, uh, Brinks is safe in about 60 seconds. Oh, okay. Well, world safest. Yep. Even Brinks is not, uh, immune.

So, right. And, uh, I ran across something. I don't even know how, but this is so wonderfully old school and creepy and this feels so awesomely tin-hattied, but then I actually read the whole damn thing and it's not, it's just scary. Uh, this is a Google slide presentation by John Weissman and it's a LinkedIn or show notes.

So go check this out. He is a robotics NLP drones, aviation, NASA, USAF research lab. He's worked there. He was fired from Google because they made him work on YouTube ads as it says on the second or third slide, which is very, uh, this is uncovering FBI aerial surveillance.

This guy, uh, lives out, uh, in Eagle Rock. So, you know, he's over probably a JLP for a while. And he built a little tiny, uh, tracking system that, uh, basically scans skies and gets, uh, tracking codes from all the planes and helicopters going by. And he started to track all of them.

Uh, remember we had talked about that story about, uh, how the FBI was using basically just. Right. Yeah. They had their own private, uh, plane army that's going on and doing surveillance. Yeah. An army that just looks like, you know, your standard Cessnas and things like that. And he started to track them all and they basically, uh, I don't want to spoil it for you, but yeah, they're doing it.

Yep. And he has tracked them all and they're not very bright, uh, because, uh, he was able to trace them back to a couple of different, uh, shell companies that all have the same PO box address. The same. Yeah. The same PO box address is the U S department of defense. Yes. Uh, so there's at the justice department.

I can't remember one or the other, but this is a really terrifyingly fantastic slide presentation that, uh, basically just shows that, uh, yes, our government is, uh, in the skies all the time doing God knows what, uh, who knows. Yes. Your tax dollars at work.

And yes, it was the U S department of justice. And yeah, he basically for $65, he, he built this little device that just tracks transponder signals and he can get different types of data off of different, uh, you know, aircraft. Yeah. And he just did this for shits and giggles, you know, honestly.

And he figured all this stuff out and I love it halfway through his presentation, he's like, Oh, maybe those people in the, the, with the tinfoil hats were right. And then he keeps going. He's like, Oh man, they were crap. Yeah. That was, that was the funniest thing. He did have a slide saying, am I becoming one of those crazy people that's on YouTube?

Yeah. Well, I, I went through this this morning and this is a great fun. I have no idea how you found this, but it's awesome. I'm me either. And it's, isn't it so gloriously old school? I love it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like some fancy article on medium with rotating backgrounds. This is just a Google slide presentation.

It's amazing. Yeah. This, this guy didn't spend three months of designer time trying to figure out how to underline a hyperlink like they did on medium. Anyway. So yeah, we're fucked. Comment of the week.

Our first comment of the week comes from Comstock, Ohio. That's the username, not the place. Time to review. He says with his five-star rating or hers. I have never reviewed a podcast until now. I've listened to about 50 episodes of this one. That would be us still going through them all.

And compared to several others, I've tried nothing comes close in quality and content. Recently listened to some really bad podcast that made me appreciate this one even more. I guess it's time to start donating. Bring it on Comstock, Ohio, and we love you. And when you say that you listen to several others that are really bad, that's probably episode one through 100.

Yeah. I was about to say, if you've gone back by about 50, I'd suggest you stop now. Stop while you're ahead. Because then we, you know, when we go back in time, we start to be one of those really bad podcasts. We devolve into the lady boys. Yes. God, that was a hell of an episode. I know, but our SEO went through the roof on that one.

That's true. Our SEO was amazing on that one. Anyways. Thanks a lot, Comstock, Ohio. And yes, if you'd like to start donating, please feel free. You can visit our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG. Speaking of which, I had posted a photo of a friend of the show, Fergal.

I was out with him the other week, and he used his coin card, which we had talked about more than a few times, to pay the tab at our local watering hole. And I took a photo of that and posted it up on our Patreon page for our subscribers to see the coin in the wild. And Fergal then commented on the photo.

Do you think anyone cares? Well, probably not, Fergal. But, you know. We've got to do something here. We've got to do something. And it's the crap we talk about. By the way, the empty baby bottle alongside the empty Guinness glass makes for a great background. Coin works in 95% of the places I've tried it.

I guess it will work in ATMs where you just swipe the card, but not in standard ones that expect to find the raised numbers on the front. Once I get my new phone, I'll continue to use the coin card. It's a good conversation starter at the very least. All right. Well, there you go. Thanks, Fergal. Yeah. A silly hat is a good conversation starter, too.

And you don't have to rely on it to pay your tab when you're at a restaurant. I can think of a lot of conversation starters that I didn't pay for nine months before I ever got the product. True that. True that. Thank you, Fergal. Kickstarter in the balls. At the library.

I have finished the X series by Peter Clines, finally. And I'm very sad. Aw. Because he's moved on to other things. I don't know if I'm going to get any more books out of it, but all four of them were amazing, and I highly recommend reading them. They were a ton of fun. The last one was a little different, but it was really good.

It just took a little while to get going. Okay. I highly recommend it. I can't say anything bad about it. I am getting ready to download and consume the first one. Awesome. From Sweden? Where are you downloading it from? From the Amazon store.

Oh. Okay. Yes. Amazon. Piratebay.com. Anyway. The other book that I read this week is How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts. This would be The Invisible Hand, Adam Smith?

Yes. The same one. He actually wrote a self-help book before he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Okay. This is somebody who, this guy Russ Roberts, who I had to read this for work, actually. But the funny thing is, Tim Ferriss sent me a copy of this months ago, and it's been sitting on my nightstand.

And then I found out I had to interview Russ Roberts. And I'm like, oh, I guess I should read his book. It turns out his book's really good. He takes Adam Smith's book and just distills it down for how to live in the modern age using Adam Smith's principles. And they are surprisingly similar to everything that we deal with.

They dealt with technology that was run amok, dealt with stupid people. Everything is the same, but it just had flowery language that you couldn't comprehend. So Russ has gone through and actually made it comprehensible. Okay. That sounds pretty interesting, actually.

I do remember there's quite a lot of Adam Smith stuff that I wholeheartedly agree with. So I'd love to hear someone take his ideas and transfer them to the modern age. That'd be interesting. Cool. Well, I'll let you borrow my hardcover edition because I read it in hardcover. Fantastic. I do love a hardcover book every now and then.

I finally finished the other book that I was working on that I took a break from to read the very disappointing, oh God, what the hell was the name? Armada. Armada. Yes. I took a break from reading one disappointing book to go read another. The disappointing book that I was reading was, unfortunately, the third book in the Nexus arc by Ramez Nam called Apex.

I loved the first one called Nexus. The second one was okay. The third one... Phoned it in? Not so much phoned it in. This is a typical problem that younger sci-fi authors have or maybe even not very good sci-fi authors.

I don't know. The first book introduces an incredibly interesting premise that is kind of technologically based. And that is super, super interesting. And that makes the book really good. They've had a little bit of success. So they want to keep the story going.

Unfortunately, once you've introduced the main concept and shown the problems with it, now you've got to do character development or do something interesting with the actual characters. And that tends to fall short. And that definitely happened. The second book was still pretty good because the technological aspect was taken from the personal to the kind of global.

But by the third book, where it's just your main characters running around and you're supposed to care about them and you don't because the author isn't really good at developing characters. Well, that's a bummer. Yes. But that's why I would like to recommend the X series by Peter Clines, because by the fourth book, you really care about the characters.

All right. So we have talked... You have talked about Peter Clines and his X series for about five podcasts now. So we're done. Yes. Yeah. Well, I started with Fold and then moved into it. So Peter Clines is now on the back shelf. Yes. Except for the fact that I'm going to start reading them now. Gotcha.

I am going to be going to Europe a little bit later on in the year. And that means a very, very long flight. And I needed to get a new set of noise canceling headphones and I wanted in-ears so I could use them for other things as well.

So I got the new Sennheiser CX 5.00i in-ear canal headset. And I've had it for about two days now. It is frigging fantastic. I love these. I basically trashed my old iPhone white headphones.

I'm not using them at all anymore. Except, safety point, when I go on a bike ride. Because the noise canceling on these things is damn good and I can't hear anything when I'm out on a bike ride and I almost died. By a Prius? Probably. Although, they're silent but deadly.

So I'm not sure if it would have mattered too much. But yeah, these are really, really good. I can't recommend them enough. As you know, I'm a big Sennheiser fan. I'm wearing my HD 280 Pro headphones right now and I wear them all the time for the podcast. And they're probably one of my favorite set of decently priced studio headphones.

And these black in-ear headsets, this is now top on my list. They're really good. I can't recommend them enough. Oh, that's cool. I'm going to have to try a set. Because I'm still using the Apple headphones that came with my iPhone because finally they made an in-ear earbud that actually fits in my ear.

Not that round thing. These new ones I like, but I keep breaking them. They're not very sturdy. No, they aren't. I've broken a handful of them as well. So these are really sturdy and the noise canceling feature on them is fantastic. I actually can't wait to try them out on the plane and see how well they do.

But it sounds really good. Music sounds a hundred times better than off the Apple headsets. Oh, too bad. I'm flying in the morning and I don't think I can get same-day delivery on them. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah, bummer. Yeah. And for software, I couldn't help but notice that Facebook has kind of quietly started to try to launch an actual events area called events.

It's at events.fb.com. Because events in Facebook has always been the great promise, but it never actually works really well. So it looks like they're trying to do a huge revamp of the functionality, which would be fantastic if it actually works. Thus far, all I can tell is they spent quite a lot of money on creating videos that don't tell you much about how it actually works, but shows really happy people getting together.

Ooh, let's, I love shiny, happy people. Okay. Quick update on the headphones. Amazon has been doing this recently and I love this. I just threw it in my cart to see, you know, what kind of delivery options they had for the headphones that you just pimped on the show and I used your link.

So you're going to get a kickback. Free, free same-day delivery. Awesome, man. No, these are really good. I think you're going to like them a lot. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I'll have a follow-up review next week. So yeah, this, this Amazon same-day delivery, I get some dude that comes up in a Pinto at like nine at night and throws it on my porch, but Hey, who cares?

It's free. That's true. And they can't screw the, well, they can screw things up, but hopefully not as bad as El Torino's. Well, yeah. Yeah. Headphones. I don't care if they carry upside down and sideways. It's the, anything with refried beans, then you have a problem. That's where it becomes a problem.

Yes. And in free software news, Windows 10 rolled out as of yesterday and I spent the better part of the morning installing it and I'm running it right now. It's fine. Well, everybody that I saw on Twitter was like, ah, I didn't realize it was going to take all day to update and we're late for the show because it wouldn't boot fast enough for you.

So how fine is it? I did not have the all day to update problem. It actually only took me about an hour and 20 minutes to do the full update, but I was running. That's not bad for a full system update. No, I don't think that's bad at all. So I understand. I did see that other people were having much, much more problems, but I run a pretty standard and pretty secure Windows.

I was running Windows 7 and it, you know, it was a pretty simple update for me. It did not take long at all. Seems really stable. My one, yeah. My one problem with it right now is I hadn't even rebooted it at all yesterday since it started running. I did right before we started the show and it took quite a while.

So we started a little bit late because I was like, come on, let's launch already. It's very stable. It's, it seems to be a really nice, I mean, it doesn't look too different than Windows 7 did. You have, obviously they're trying to do one integrated software for everyone now.

So there's all these things that, you know, would work great on tablets or things like that. You see some of the Windows 8 style stuff, but you can pretty much hide most of it and just run it like your old operating system, which is absolutely fantastic. It's great so far. Can't complain.

Okay. Well, fortunately, when I come over, I'll be able to use your Wi-Fi because Windows 10 does share your Wi-Fi information with your contacts and I am your contact. Does it really? I did not notice that. Yeah. Check out Krebs on security. It's, this has been going around for a while now.

It's called Wi-Fi sense. And if you opt in, you can even share your Wi-Fi credentials. It's actually a, a, a, a hash of your credentials to, to any of your Facebook friends. And so when they come over, they can automatically get onto your Wi-Fi.

Actually, I don't mind that. Okay. It's, I mean, it is just two friends and contacts, right? Yeah. I mean, and you keep your, your Facebook, you know, contact list pretty, uh, pretty tight. But if you were somebody who was just, you know, like an author who has 5,000 fans, they can come with, you know, a can antenna and sit about a mile away and just snoop your Wi-Fi.

Okay. Yeah, that's true. So is there a way to shut that off? Let's see. Yeah. So, but this is, uh, no different than even when an, when an Apple operating system comes out, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, look at all the things that they, they opt you into that you probably didn't know about. So here's how you turn things off.

Yeah. But sharing my Wi-Fi credentials is something completely different. Like at my house, I've got two networks. I've got a guest network for friends that come over and I have a private network for me. Right. Anyway. Anyways, I don't mind windows 10 so far. Uh, there's a pretty decent review on it, uh, off recode that, uh, we've linked to in our show notes.

Walt Mossberg reviews it, uh, take a step back to move forward, which is exactly what they did. Windows eight was a travesty and windows 10 is kind of skipping back to windows seven. So yeah, windows seven was solid. I liked it. It was my favorite operating system of all time. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've heard me sing the praises of windows seven forever.

Um, and this seems to be pretty similar. I have not played around with the new browser too much called Microsoft edge. I will say that that thing launches in two seconds. Um, so they've definitely rebuilt that engine and it's pretty damn fast, but, uh, I've used it to surf around on a couple of different sites.

I haven't deep delved into it at all, but, uh, it's, it's fast and thank God that's not internet explorer anymore. And every website I've looked at seems to be working fine as opposed to internet explorer. Two seconds seems to be a long time. Cause it's about a third of a second on a Yosemite on my, my computer.

That was Chrome. I didn't actually time it. That was kind of just more a, it's very fast. Colloquialism. Yes. So we, we kind of made fun of the Mac book when it first came out. The, we called it the one port wonder. Yes. With the, uh, you know, the USB C connection. I'm trying it out.

Okay. I'm putting my money where my mouth is because I have to travel and I don't want to lug my 15 inch Mac book pro, which weighs a ton. Right. And I'm like, okay, I'll give this shot. I got, you know, two weeks to try it out and return it. If I don't like it, it's, it is so light. It's ridiculous.

There are a couple issues I have with it just where the keyboard layout is. Cause I'm used to certain things on the Mac book pro where you can pick it up from the side and not hit any keys. The keyboard goes edge to edge on this thing. So there are like a couple of spots. You have to train yourself to pick it up from a couple of different spots.

And you start hitting escape or typing and stuff. And it's a mess. That would drive me nuts. Took me a day. Now I'm used to it. Um, I love it. It's amazing. It's gorgeous. It's got a 12 inch screen, super retina, um, fairly fast, eight gig of Ram. I got the two 56 model.

So I've got two, uh, 256 gig hard drive on it. I can't do any audio recording on it because there is no way to plug in a thunderbolt device. Yeah. Which is no, it's not a problem. I, that's why I have a 15 inch Mac book pro. So that's that now if you have two computers, yes, yes, yes.

This is a first world problem. I understand that 100%, but when I travel, I don't want to lug that, but I need to be able, if there's an emergency to SSH into my servers and fix them, you know, and you can do that with an iPad and I've done it with an iPad, but it is a suboptimal experience.

So I'm giving this thing a shot. I'll give you the full writeup next week to see if I kept it or not. Um, but I'm going to take it on this trip, uh, tomorrow to Chicago and we'll see how it works out. But so far I like it a lot. It's, it is almost lighter than my iPad air with the case on it.

Wow. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Two pounds. It's ridiculous. And I, I mean, I could have gotten an air, which has all the ports, you know, and the whole nine yards with that. It probably would have been about the same price, but I'm like, uh, I'll give it a shot. Why not? Yep. That's why, that's why we have return policies.

That's, that's true. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to get a pro. I'm not going to be able to get away with one of these, but, uh, I just had a curiosity. I did place it into my Amazon cart. Uh, unfortunately I cannot get it same day, but I can get it tomorrow. Yeah. That's insane. Yep. I think you should get it tomorrow.

Well, no, I need, I need a pro. I can't, I couldn't get away with this. Oh, you put the, the, the Mac book into your car. You should get, yeah. To see if I could get that same day. Yeah. I just walked into a store and bought it like, like old school. And I got to laugh at all the people standing around the watch cases with nobody wanting to try them on.

Yeah. Those things are ridiculous.

Media candy. I am a, not part of the YouTuber generation. Uh, I don't really, I wouldn't have noticed, but even, you know, even being a, an internet guy like you and I are, it's just, I've not gotten into any of these YouTube shows and, uh, and I shouldn't because they are for young kids.

Yeah. Cause you're not 12. In fact, friend of the show Fergal's daughter is very into YouTube culture and loves some of these people and all that sort of stuff. And she, yeah, she's quite young. So, uh, I ran across this article on vice. There is a new YouTuber magazine called Oh My Vlog. And it makes me feel a thousand years old.

Now I encourage everybody to go to the link, which is in our show notes, grumpy old geese dot com, uh, to see the cover. It is basically tiger beat except technologically. That's the one I was trying to think of tiger beat. Yep. It's tiger beat. So I don't understand the issue with this because this has always been, this is just an update on it.

It is no different than tiger beat. And yes, looking at it makes me feel a thousand years old as would looking at a tiger beat. The thing that drove me crazy is the writer of this article, Joel Golby. Uh, again, he said it makes him feel a thousand years old. Uh, he's 28. Yeah.

Kiss my ass. So he makes me feel a thousand years old and the first, uh, most popular article I see on the sidebar here. When I look at the site also makes me feel a thousand years old. How to have one night stands in your twenties is the title is how different is it than it's no different than having one in your forties or in your teens.

Okay. Well, that's good to know. Then I can read the article. Yes. Might learn something. Hey, you know, knowledge is power. Yes. Knowing is half the battle. And then getting somebody to come home with you is the other half. That's the tougher one.

Really? Um, breaking news as of this morning, uh, top gears, Clarkson Hammond and may have announced who they are finally going to be making their new show for drum roll, please. Shockingly. It's Amazon. I did not see this one coming. I didn't either.

Um, I'm happy that my Netflix stock is still doing really, really well, but I was, I, my decision as to if I was going to get more or not was to entirely based on the assumption that these guys would be signing with Netflix. Now that they're not, it makes sense for Amazon. Amazon is making a big play now.

Yeah. And we put them in, in the contenders when this originally happened as one of the, you know, one of the companies that was going to be flying over with all the bags of monies. Yes. And, uh, turns out they had more monies than Netflix, which does not surprise me at all. No, Amazon of course has more money than Netflix, but, uh, I really did think that, uh, Netflix was going to make the play and that seemed to be the prevailing wisdom.

Uh, but, uh, no, they're, they're going with Amazon. So I guess I'll be keeping that prime membership. Oh, absolutely. No, I love my, I mean, I love my prime membership anyway, because I get headphones the same day, like a privileged fuck that I am. Uh, but now I get to watch cars that I can't afford.

Maybe that's what they're going to do. So you watch, you watch the new, whatever unnamed show is going to be, and then there's going to be a one click buy for the Aston Martin that they just reviewed on the show that week. Of course there is. This is going to be one click buys for anything they even basically mention.

Yeah. Fine with that. Dude, I cannot wait for this. I cannot wait. Cause you know how much money that they're going to have to do that show. Oh yeah. The budget's going to be, they're going to get a ridiculous budget per episode. There's no doubt about that. So this is going to be really good. And I think that there probably will be a bit more of a USA focus.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, but we'll see. We'll see. I mean, yeah, we just got to wait for it. I really hope though, that they had enough money to get the film crew away from the BBC that top gear had, because their film crew was one of the best in the business. They don't say anything about the crew, but they are the, the, the, the executive producer, Andy Willman, who quit with them is, uh, is going to be executive producing this as well.

So I'm sure, you know, crews aren't tied to contracts with things. So. Oh yeah, definitely. They're tight enough. They'll get the same crew together. So that'll be fantastic. I really looking forward to it. So they, uh, they're speculating or they're basically saying, uh, we'll be getting shows in 2016. Awesome.

I cannot wait. Yep. So, uh, I've been listening to a new album that I found, which is not a new album. It's a Rammstein's rare tracks from 94 to 2012. This was like getting a new Rammstein album since they haven't done one in so long. And I love it.

It's got some really cool older stuff that I'd never heard before because that's why they're rare. And, uh, if you're a Rammstein fan, go check this out. I put a link to the Spotify album in our show notes. I actually just canceled my Spotify subscription. What? Well, I decided to not be stupid.

I'm getting Apple music for three months for free. Why am I going to pay for Spotify? Now, if Apple music doesn't solve their problem at the end of the three months and I can never use my desktop system because of my library, then I will cancel that and then go back to Spotify. Yeah. I've already canceled my, I canceled the resub on my Apple music because I'm not using it because it doesn't work with the thousand dollars Sonos system I have in my house.

Spotify does. So does Pandora. So those two stay. Sorry, Apple music. You still suck. I loved you. I loved you at the beginning. Great catalog. But you don't work with anything. And half the time you just don't work. Yeah, that's they're going to have to solve that. So wait and see.

We'll be talking about it a lot more. I'm sure. Sadly, I fear.

I found an article on the Washington Post. Remember them? Vaguely. Yeah. I thought that was going to be the bastion of new media since Jeff Bezos bought them.

But, uh, eh, hasn't. That hasn't really happened. But there's a great article called an expert's must-see guide to half a million amazing historical videos the AP just put online. Yeah. I didn't know about this until I ran across this article, but the AP has put literally over a million minutes of video on YouTube.

550,000 videos. And this is kind of like a best of list. Um, and they're amazing. I can't wait to just kind of kind of go dive into them. Yeah. They're very, very cool. And thanks a lot, AP, for basically drastically increasing Google's worth again.

Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I mean, a lot of these are really, really cool. Uh, some of the stuff I've had, even just the, you know, kind of the top hits in this article, I haven't actually seen some of these videos before. I was a little disappointed though, that the, uh, the fall of the Berlin wall video does not include any of the Hoff.

No Hoff? No Hoff. It is Hoffless. You're going to have to go somewhere else for your Berlin Hoff. Closing shout outs. I'd like to give a shout out to resistance pro wrestling. That's about it. Now I'm going there this weekend.

I'm celebrating my birthday in Chicago and I'll be going to resistance pro wrestling at the barn in Willowbrook, Illinois on Saturday, which would be tomorrow. If you're listening to this on Friday, uh, if you're in town, come out, check it out. Uh, it's a great time and it's my last Chicago.

Go appearance until next year. I'm not, not, not going on tour anymore. Oh, no more DJing. No, no. Actually this time I'm taking photos because friend of the show MXV can't even lift his camera yet. So we got a new DJ and I'm going to be shooting the photos. Ah, very cool. So yeah.

And having a lovely barbecue with my family for my 44th birthday. You old man. You got it starting to go. Hey man. But since I moved back to California, I have lost as of this morning, 15 pounds. Congratulations. Yes. I, I, I, you know, I don't give credit to anybody but me.

God damn it. I was going to give credit to Tim Ferriss's diets and all that stuff and his teas. And you know what it is? Eat healthy, exercise more. Exactly. All that stuff is just bullshit that kind of, sort of, slightly helps just a little teeny bit. Pushes the needle a notch. Just needle, not even a notch.

It's just kind of, it's like farting in the wind. Yes. It is diet masturbation. Pretty much. Anyways, I want to give a shout out to Jason. Happy birthday, man. Oh, thank you very much. Happy early birthday. So when you come back, we will have to get together and have some drinkages. I think we need to do another live show.

Okay. Well. Cast of three. Cast of three. That's it. All right. Yeah. Let's do a live show and have a few drinks when you get back for your birthday. Then a shout out to Ikea, which actually does some pretty damn good kitchens, but it's going to ruin my weekend because I'm doing a kitchen remodel that starts as of Saturday.

So I've got to empty my kitchen and then the fun truly begins. That's when the fun starts. It's going to be a frigging nightmare, but it'll be nice when it's done. So yay. And I increase value of my home, which I, you know, I need to increase the values. With the underemployments. It's always about increasing shareholder value.

Exactly. I'm increasing shareholder value in my Santa Monica condo. Well, thanks for listening. I am Jason DeFilippo and you can find out more about me at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. And you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. Until next time. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show.

Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to or can't donate, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show.

Music for the show is provided by Andy Strachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 121.

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