129: Selfie Selection

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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 September 25th, 2015. I am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm coming to you live from DerbyCon in Louisville, Kentucky. Does that mean you're wearing one of those funky hats? No, I do not have a funky hat. Okay. No, not at all. Should I have gone to the Derby in LA and recorded from there? The Derby's gone, man. I know. It's long gone. Sad.

No, it's, it's, I've been up since 3 a.m. LA time because, you know, jet lag and all that stuff. So, yay. I don't think I'd get jet lag from that. That's short of a flight, man. Man up, dude. Well, we had to get up at 6 a.m. local time.

So that's 3 a.m. after traveling all day. Right. Okay. Yeah. I did see that you went to Morton's though, so I don't feel so bad for you. Yeah, we had a nice dinner at Morton's last night, just as a treat because it's, it was a long trip out here. Cool. Well, has the, has the excitement started?

Are you learning hacking tips? Have, have crazy things happened? Well, it just started at 8.30 this morning and my, uh, my boss gave the keynote at nine and I came up here, rushed up, set everything up to record the show and realize, oh, wait, I did the math wrong and I've been waiting up here for you because I screwed up and was here an hour early.

Yeah. I saw that email and I was like, I haven't even had coffee yet. Nope. See you. See you at the appropriate time, Jason. I know. I know. I appreciate you coming 15 minutes early though. It will make things go a little better. All right. So let's go. Let's go. I know you're in a hurry. Quick episode. Come on. Let's go. Uh, is in some followup.

Did you see the, uh, the Pandora's, uh, op-ed or the seat Pandora CEO op-ed? Uh, I did see it and it feels like the op-eds that I've read from every CEO of any streaming service so far. Yeah. They're like, uh, it's going to get better and it's good for the music industry now.

And of course he's going to say that because that's where his bread is buttered. Yeah. And you know, people were saying that a year ago and two years ago and three years ago and four years ago, I wouldn't necessarily say it's gotten better. I just think that the options have deteriorated to, okay, I guess we're stuck with streaming. Yeah.

I mean, that's basically what it's come down to. Uh, you know, it's, I, I personally don't really have, uh, I, I don't use Pandora. I know many people do and many people really like it. Uh, I see it as the new version of radio. Basically, uh, it's, it's online radio as far as I'm concerned and I've got no problems with it and that should be basically free.

Uh, the advertising model, uh, the difference now though, of course, is ad blockers and all that sort of stuff, which, which you can do with audio as well. Uh, there are different apps out there that do that. Um, you know, back in the day when you were driving around in your car and listening to the radio, you couldn't, uh, install something that would take away the ads.

So yeah, you could, you could change the station, you could change the station and, and yes, you can do that. So, uh, Pandora is, uh, generating more revenue, uh, whether that's getting back to the artist or not is always up for debate. Um, but their listenership has gone down, so we're going to see what happens.

Uh, there, as I'm sure you've noticed, they're running ads left, right, and center now that are trying to show the joy of listening to music as, as is, uh, Apple music as well, which I actually, Apple music's ad was pretty damn good. I thought, but, uh, you know, we've gotten to the point now where we basically have to do ads saying, Hey, music is awesome.

Uh, so great. Yeah. I actually use Pandora on my Sonos. We have a couple of different channels set up and I don't mind the ads because they're local, they're local ads, you know, cause you put in your zip code and you get, you get ads for local goings on and stuff like that.

And that don't, they don't bother me at all. Yeah. A friend of the show, uh, Mike is, is, uh, intimately involved with that. He works for a company that places ads on streaming media and things like that. So I kind of know the ins and outs of that. Uh, uh, I, when I was on Spotify premium or whatever the hell they called it and I was getting the ads that didn't bother me either.

It's a different way of listening to music. Like, uh, something that I think, you know, you and I are used to and maybe millennials aren't, but, uh, I always have my active listening when I am listening to an album and I'm paying extreme attention and I have passive listening, which is radio. And when I'm passively listening to something and ads come along, I passively listen to those as well or basically tune them out.

So. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I saw another interesting article this week on a petapixel and this, this is actually from a different, uh, source, but the source, I forget. Oh, it was the New York times actually was the original source on this, but these guys had a pretty decent writeup.

And the title of the article is, did I just give my hashtag permission? Question mark hashtag consent for photo usage is trending. Yeah. Um, so what this is basically is brands who take your artwork after if you've tagged them as the brand and then they'll take it, use it and come back and say, Hey, if you'd like to give us permission, say, you know, hashtag okay or whatever.

Yeah. And it's kind of silly. You know, it's, I'm sure the legality isn't there. Uh, I'm sure at some point, uh, lawyers will step in on this, but, uh, there are two sides of this. First off, most people are just thrilled. They got noticed. Um, so they're like, yay. Hey, you know, Calvin Klein likes my photo.

I'm awesome and famous for two seconds. Uh, and then the other side of it is I've always wondered actually, because I've been, uh, involved with campaigns that, you know, did hashtag whatever and collected photos and things like that. And, you know, from the earliest day on, I would sit in these meetings and kind of ask and going, well, you were using a really generic hashtag.

How are we, people are going to be posting things left, right, and center that don't necessarily have anything to do with us. And how do we go through and determine which is, which counts for our particular thing and which are just people using a hashtag. Um, and apparently that's happened a couple of times. So yeah.

Hashtag does not imply consent. No, it doesn't, but, uh, I don't know. So, uh, you know, just, it feels to me that just being out on social media these days apparently implies consent. Yeah. It's easier. What do they say? It's, uh, easier to, uh, beg forgiveness and to ask permission.

So yeah. And that's, uh, that's basically standard operating procedure for any corporation. They will just do what they will do until they were told not to. Yeah. That's kind of it. So let's get this puppy rolling. Okay. I got to get back to my hackins in the news.

Stumbled across an interesting article on science alert, um, by a Sammy Noreen from Goldsmiths university of London. And it was originally published on a site called the conversation, which I'm not aware of either. Um, the internet is eating your memory, but something better is taking its place.

High fives. Now this is a bit of an incredibly optimistic take on this idea, but I think we've all noticed it. First off, uh, name, tell me my phone number, Jason. Uh, no, I don't know your phone number. I don't know yours. Exactly. Nobody knows phone numbers anymore.

Yep. Uh, yeah, I, this is definitely, I mean, I don't, uh, this came up actually last night and I, I, I had found this article earlier in the week and I was out with a buddy last night and, uh, he asked me when I was, when my flight was, uh, cause I'm going to Europe shortly. And I was like, you know, five years ago, I would have that completely memorized.

I would know. Um, I offset all my memory into my travel memory is into my, my app called trip it. So I had to load that up to see what time my flight was. This is happening more and more. We are offloading our memory onto, uh, onto our devices. And I'm kind of okay with that as long as the devices don't break.

Well, we've talked about this before on the show, this exact topic on the before and we all, yeah, we all used to know each other's phone numbers because we had to, we didn't have a choice. Now we, we have a choice not to. And the interesting thing in this article is it's, they were talking about how we're kind of replacing our memory with a hive mind and kind of, you know, distributing memory, which is, it's an interesting take.

I don't know if I, I buy into the whole thing, but yeah, when the power goes out. Well, then you're dumb as a rock. Yeah. I like that. The, the group mind concept. And the other thing I really liked about the article was the, that they touched on briefly was, uh, talking about Paul McCartney and the Beatles and how, you know, they, they basically, uh, losing memory was actually a good thing because the, the things that were memorable enough to actually remember and be able to record were the really, really good things.

So we forgot the crappy ones. Yeah. It was a self-filtering mechanism. Yeah, I agree. So there's that. You and I are not on Snapchat. Uh, no. So, uh, we know people who are, and people have been posting things off of Snapchat that, uh, utilize this silly new feature.

Uh, Snapchat bought a company called Luxury, which is a two-year-old startup that lets you Photoshop your face while you video chat. Uh, for $150 million, Snapchat has basically added the ability for you to vomit a rainbow. You can vomit a rainbow and lose about 30 pounds.

Yeah. I, yeah, I was looking at this and I'm like, Hmm, that's, that was a very smart purchase on their part. I think it just, just from the, you know, the thinning aspect of it alone. Yeah. And the buzz that it got, because, uh, I don't, I saw at least 15 different people vomiting rainbows and I even, you know, for two seconds I was like, Oh, that's clever.

Maybe I should, nah, no, I just never opened the app. No. Cause I, I mean, yeah, it would require me to get Snapchat, get a Snapchat account and all that other stuff. And I'm like, no, thanks. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I'll pass on that. So, uh, and the big news this week was, uh, that, uh, jerk who basically raised the price of a drug, uh, 500 times, uh, Martin Shrekley or whatever.

Uh, not too much to say about this. It's not really a tech story other than it's, in my opinion, it is the, one of the very first times that the entire internet has basically shamed someone into changing their policies. Yeah. Has he, has he announced the actual price that he's going back to it?

Cause I don't think it's going back to 1350. He's like, we're going to, we'll take it back down some, but no, they haven't announced exactly what it's going to be, but they will bring 49 and I've got no problem with them raising the price a little bit to make a profit because of the bizarre way that, uh, the FDA works and pharmaceuticals and the same amount of R and D that needs to be spent on something.

But this guy was just a jerk. Um, uh, you know, he came from a hedge fund background. He's just, uh, uh, my friend called him an idiot. I don't think he's an idiot. I think he's an asshole. Yeah. Asshole is a little bit more descriptive. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So I don't really have anything else to say about that.

Uh, you don't really watch a lot of sports. I do. Uh, if you do watch sports, you'll know that draft Kings and fan duel have basically taken over all sports everywhere. It's the only commercials that run and they one or the other company basically sponsors every single sporting event ever in the world these days.

And, uh, on SB nation, there's an interesting video that, uh, where he, yeah, the guy actually has to admit that, uh, one of the companies basically supports us SB nation. So he can't really crap on them too much, but he runs through the math on this stuff. And basically, uh, you're never going to win.

No, you're not. I watched this video this morning and it's crazy. It's, it's, it's almost like the stock market with these, uh, what are those traders that do all the, you know, the automated trading? Like there's automated day traders. Exactly. Yeah. There's, there's algorithms that, that the, uh, smartest people and the, and the big winners are actually using on both these sites.

You have next to no chance of ever winning. It's a complete shell game. You're better off betting in Vegas or just with your buddies. Yeah. You're almost better off getting a date on Ashley Madison than winning one of these. That is very true. Yeah. So don't play those games. Although tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people are every single day, which is why they basically own all sports now.

It's human nature. We don't even care. It doesn't even matter that we know the odds are stacked against us. We go do it anyways. Cause we're dumb. We're very dumb. Uh, we are getting an Apple car though. Uh, we'll see. Maybe, you know, they say 2019 for development wrap up, but I, I don't know.

I, I think it's going to be longer than that. I'm just still surprised they're going it alone instead of buying Tesla or making a partnership. This really just, uh, who knows? I mean, I know Apple does crazy ass stuff before that are just crazy ass research projects and never see the light of day, but this one seems to be, it seems that it's going to actually come out and be a real thing.

I don't know if I'd buy one because I'd be worried about every time I start the car, Bluetooth would go on. And I'm pretty sure it would. So I think the interesting thing about this though, is they may just, they may end up doing design and then partner the manufacturing like they do with everything else. Right.

Yeah. Well, the, the image, the, the theoretical image on the techno Buffalo pages is, is horrifically ugly. Um, I would never drive. They just made that up. They do. But, you know, but I do like the name of the project, project Titan Titan. Oh, so I saw that you put in an article on this, uh, light based memory chip.

Yeah. This was an interesting read off of Gizmodo. Um, apparently we've, we're finally going to break the, uh, get away from, uh, get away from physical blah, blah, blah, whatever the hell goes on. We're going to be using light for memory and, and for chips and processing, which is going to basically give us a, a massive increase in speed.

And in the way that this thing works is really interesting because, you know, electrons are the, the bottleneck right now because the physical, yeah, physical motion is, is a big problem. So it's, it's been, they've been trying to figure out how to do this with light for ages.

And it's interesting, the technology that they came up with to do this is based on, you know, the old rewritable CD-ROMs. Yeah, exactly. They just put a new spin on it. Which is really kind of cool. Yeah. And they're just trying to make it smaller. And I, this is, if you're into this kind of stuff, it's a fascinating read. I love this thing.

And there's, you know, there's a long way to go, but there's a long way to go, but the company that figures this out is going to, uh, uh, you're going to want to have stock in that. And the, the really interesting thing is they figured out a way to do instead of just a one and a zero, a zero to seven, which gives you an entire matrix of storage capability and processing capability, which gets us the interesting thing in the article.

That got me was it gets us closer to an actual AI just because of the way that you can process with that kind of, you know, a matrix matrix of storage option options. The matrix will be taking us to the matrix. Yes, it will. Oh man. Yeah.

I mean that, uh, you know, the AI thing is, is always kind of been the dream there. And this is the kind of speed that would be required to have that. And, uh, yeah, then we're all just going to be batteries. Uh, the speaking of batteries, I think these things are electric. Uh, the first driverless pods to travel public roads arrive in the Netherlands.

This comes from the telegraph and these cute little guys, these cute little guys. It kind of looked like, yeah, the Google self-driving cars too. Everybody's making them square and potty. I don't know. Well, yeah, they, they always remind me of the, like the trams that you get at airports to take you to different terminals.

Yeah, they totally do smaller versions. Yeah. And I think these things go both ways. Not that they're, you know, high, but it looks like, you know, the, the, maybe not, but they look very, you know, symmetrical. It looks like it could just, it wouldn't even have to do a U-turn. It would just go, you know, go forward or reverse.

Yeah. Top speed of 25 kilometers an hour, which is, you know, a fast walk. Yeah, pretty much. And they're not going to run it like night or in inclement weather, but it's, you know, it's a good start. Yeah, I, public transport like that. I, I'm totally fine with, you know, it's, it's, uh, I'm totally okay with that.

Yeah. It's the individuals owning these things when it's going to get scary. I don't mind a driverless bus taking people around going down routes. I do mind, uh, you know, half the people here in Santa Monica swapping out their Prius for their jerk automated systems. Well, also there's a, you know, there's a system behind these that there's going to be people in rooms monitoring these because it's a public works project.

It's not you just buying the, the Tesla that can park itself or drive on the freeway. Yeah. See, big government can be good. Time magazine. Yes. Right. Used to be the bastion of great reporting and news. Ah, I remember I would read time and news week almost every week in college.

And I found this article and it says, this is Apple's weird new emoji. Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Everybody's got to play the SEO game. Wow. It's, it's, it's an article about an emoji.

Yeah. That looks funky. Yeah. Actually, you know, it's like the ABC symbol with a little comma attached to it. Yeah. Yeah. The emoji isn't even the point of this thing. It's the fact that time is writing full blown articles about Apple's emoji. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I, I actually found it a little bit interesting. How did this emoji appear? Because it's not part of the official emoji documentation. Uh, Apple just kind of put it in there. Apple does what Apple wants. That's very true. They do what they do. So did you see the going clear movie? I never ended up watching it.

Oh man, it was really good. Won an Emmy. Yeah. Well, I don't need a movie to tell me that they're actually jerks and freaky. Yes. I knew, I knew that already. No, we all knew the Scientologists were freaky, but there's a great article in daily dot called how the church of Scientology fought the internet and why it lost.

This is a long one. This is a very long one, but if you're interested in any of the Scientology stuff. Right. It's worth, it's worth reading. I'm still about halfway through because I fell asleep last night from jet or travel, just travel. Oh, and a food coma from Morton's.

Oh yeah. Well, that's understandable. Yes. I'm since I'm in the South and they haven't, uh, banned foie gras here. I got some foie gras butter on my steak and it was just, oh, so good. God damn, I'm hungry now. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, uh, all these, all the crazier group that you are, you, uh, it seems to go one way or the other.

You either find a fantastic supporters all over the internet because there are crazy people or you just basically die a death because people that actually are smart will kill you. Not literally, not literally kill you. Not literally. Not literally. Facebook is finally going to roll out a dislike button.

Okay. Yay. All right. Yeah. Who cares? I know. It would, they should have, this should have been a thing about four years ago, but fine. Go ahead. Well, yeah, this was, this was a thing four years ago when they just rolled out the like button and everybody was like, what's up with the like?

Yeah. Why is there no dislike or what? I don't know. Uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, kind of an acquaintance of mine loses, uh, loses somebody close to them in their life. And I don't really know them well enough to put a comment, but I don't feel comfortable liking it. Yeah. You want to acknowledge their loss, but you don't want to say, Hey, thumbs up, buddy.

Yeah. Or somebody posts about having a bad day. And again, I'm not interested enough to comment, but I would like to do something. So give me a dislike button. We're changing the fabric of society here. I tell you, man, I tell you. And in, in other internet meme news, selfies have killed more people than sharks this year.

Reports show good self self-selection. Ooh, selfie selection, selfie selection. Oh man. Have you seen that? Do they still do the Darwin awards? Uh, they do. It doesn't get the press that it used to for some reason, I guess, because there's just so many other stupid things going on all the time.

But yeah, they still do the Darwin awards. And I hope that, uh, that this will get a special mention in it. Yeah. The selfie section of the Darwin awards. Uh, yeah, this is, uh, it's pretty crazy. People are, God, people are dumb. Security.

So there was a small iOS, uh, update that came out and it did not turn on Bluetooth. So we're keeping with our on again, off again pattern. Uh, but more importantly, apparently someone has figured out that there is a iOS nine lock screen exploit that will allow people to get access to your photos and your contacts without knowing your passcode, man.

They had this a long time ago in like iOS five or six. And I guess it must be back. Yeah. Apparently they don't put like, uh, they don't put any comments in their code. Like this part didn't work. Don't put this back in. Yeah, really? They just grabbed a bit of code that they used before and oopsies, it's back.

So, uh, you know, if you're terribly worried about that sort of thing, people can access your contacts without knowing your password. If you hand them your phone and you just watch them play around with it for about 10 minutes. Okay. So that seems a bit weird to me, uh, in Google news, uh, France, we remember that, uh, France and most European countries, you know, they actually like privacy a little bit more than we do.

And, uh, particularly the French have been, uh, working against Google or with Google to increase the privacy and basically have the, uh, ability to basically ask to be forgotten. Um, which means that Google would then have to remove any, any information about you, um, by law.

Uh, well, the, the, the, uh, Google has been kind of doing that, uh, by removing people from Google.fr, but not from Google anywhere else. So France is basically saying, um, hold on a second. That doesn't really help us very much. How about you have to remove it everywhere? See, I'm, I'm, I'm on the fence with this one.

I really am because it's like, okay, I'm a French citizen. I want it removed from Google. And Google's like, okay, well, other French citizens can't Google you now, but for the rest of the world, but they can, they just got to, instead of Google.fr, they go to Google.com. Exactly. So it's a little bit ridiculous.

Uh, you either, yeah, I mean, we kind of have to decide, uh, I don't know if this is, again, we've reached this point where everything is global and you can't, it's almost impossible to have individual countries making up different rules about it. This is a global country. This is a global company and the internet is global.

We need some sort of, we need a United nations of internet. One that actually works. Yeah. Never going to happen. I know that, uh, yeah, it's, there's no point that this, if you're just removing it from Google.fr, there's absolutely zero point to this. I think this, this is pretty much Google saying, fuck you to the whole thing.

You wasted so much of our time with this thing to begin with. So we're just going to, yeah, yeah. We'll take you out, but guess what? Screw you. Screw you. You can still find it anywhere. Uh, I've never heard of Sistema software, but, uh, it's a health records, uh, package.

And some guy found 1.5 million Americans have been, uh, their records have been left open on S3. Oopsies. Yeah. Uh, this, the software left everything just kind of out there in the wind and didn't encrypt it. And this guy just kind of ran across it and he's like, oh, Hey, yeah, we've got your password hashes.

We've got your social security numbers, financial traction or transactions, injury reports, the whole shebang. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sistema software is looking into it. I like the, uh, photo used in the article of scrubs looking confused. Yes. Good stuff. Uh, that's, yeah, that's very bad.

We don't like that. Very bad. And if you're still buying Lenovo's, even after the super fish debacle, where they were putting spyware on their laptops as stock. Yeah. Yeah. They're still doing it. Of course they are. Yeah. Uh, this, this came from a link to boing boing from, uh, Corey doctor who put this in there and he says that he still uses Lenovo think pads.

Because he just likes the hardware and then he just takes out the hard drives and slaps in an SSD. And the interesting thing though, is I'm pretty sure that a lot of the stuff that they're doing is on the firmware, but I guess it would only work with windows if you have, if you're running windows.

Yeah. But you know, yeah, yeah, it is. It's on the firmware. So swapping out the drive isn't really going to do much, but I just, is Lenovo that much cheaper? I mean, I always, they're horrible pieces of equipment. Yeah. He likes the hardware. All right. Well, he has for years.

I remember, I remember we talked about him. Yeah. And in Snowden news, we've got, we've got, we've got, we've got a couple of bits of Snowden news today. A bunch of new documents have come out. The intercept has a writeup on it. I'm not going to go into it here, but they were tracking people's, you know, internet habits and, and porn and stuff like that.

Uh huh. Uh, if you're still, did you notice the code name? The code name was black hole. Oh no, no, no. There's a couple of this. Oh, karma. There's karma police. Yes. The radio head song. Okay. There's karma police. And, but the, where they stored everything was a repository called black hole.

Yes. Well, they're getting good with their names. I'll give that, but, uh, this is a little terrifying. That's pretty usual. That's the way it's been. It's the way of the world. I, my karma is in a black hole. I will have probably a lot more security news next week about things to be paranoid about. If I can get to a couple of sessions here at a Derby con.

All right. Well, let's move along so you can get out there and have a, have a strong security segment next week where I'll feel like killing myself. All right. Comment of the week. Dave Fish is our latest Patreon subscriber.

Thank you, Mr. Dave or Mr. Fish, whichever you'd like to be called. Thank you, Mr. Fish. I like to say that. I feel like I'm in some sort of British spy movie. Mr. Fish. Mr. Fish. Yeah. So thank you very much for that. Uh, we have a comment from Twitter, uh, which I think is definitely directed right at you, Jason, although not so much anymore.

Cause you've stopped doing this. Uh, this is from Moss 6502. Uh, and it is a, uh, a funny little graphic about people having to upgrade WordPress plugins. Yes. There'll be a link in the show notes. Go check it out. It is cute. Yes, it is. Our first iTunes five-star rating of the week.

I think maybe our only, uh, entertaining take on what is happening in the world of technology. This comes from Aussie Fishman. A lot of fish going on. Yeah. Big fish theme this week. These grumpy old geeks are about a decade younger than me. So I'm not sure the term old applies to them.

Old is relative. My friend, if it does, then I guess I am a grumpy ancient geek. The podcast is always entertaining and helps me keep current. So what is happening in the world of technology? Okay. Even my wife who is, and I say this in the most caring and nurturing way, a Luddite enjoys listening to the GOGs.

Awesome. Well played. Well played, sir. Yes. Very well played. Uh, yeah. Thank you very much. Uh, it is our only five-star rating because we got a three-star rating. Yeah. It said could be a five-star, but can only give three. And this is from Ruper. Ruper. Yeah.

Which is probably some, uh, tech to, you know, uh, app because there's no, there's no vowels. All right. Here we go. Like the podcast hosts, have a good chemistry and provide interesting information. However, personally would prefer the foul language would be eliminated or greatly reduced. It takes away from the show.

And I will unfortunately probably stop listening. Well, Ruper, um, you know, I, I respect your, your choices and your, your morality and your decision. Uh, obviously you've not paid any attention to pop culture in the last 10 years. Uh, Kardashians are famous for having sex on tape.

Miley Cyrus apparently no longer owns any clothes. Um, we drop a few F bombs. Yeah. And, uh, we do, you know, we went out of our way to make sure that it's got the explicit tag. We let people know that this is an adult show for adults using adult language. And, uh, that's the way we like it.

The whole point of the show was, uh, Jason and I sat around and said, we should record, uh, the kind of shit that we say sitting at the bar. So, yep, there, yeah. So there you go. Uh, you know, respect your decision. Uh, thanks for listening when you did. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's kind of a low class to throw a three-star in there when you like the content.

Yes. And because it is in the, you know, we have the explicit tag, so you can't really complain about that. It says it right up front. We, we are not, this is not a bait and switch. It says, it says explicit. So, you know, for the three-star rating, I would just like to say, fuck you. Uh, again, I respect your decision.

Moving on. Okay. This one comes from GOG.com. Gabriel writes, I feel validated after listening to you about Steve Gibson. I've been saying the same thing since he demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the Windows IP stack years ago. As for Marco. To be fair though, who really understands the Windows IP stack?

Uh, yeah, that's true. That's true. But Steve Gibson is wrong on a lot of things. Yes. As for Marco, it's obvious about his arm. Oh, it's obvious his arm was twisted by advertisers. His own announcement about taking down peace contradicts itself by pointing to alternatives. That's a, that's a very good point actually.

And the reasons he gives are thoughts he'd have had during the development phase. I don't think there was any grand conspiracy here. I think Marco is just, uh, very confused and, uh, doing what, uh, we said, uh, people were doing, throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Yeah, I think he jumped on the ad blocker bandwagon and then got a ton of shit from his friends.

Exactly. Honestly, that, that really sounds like what it is. Yep. I, I agree. So, uh, thank you very much, Gabriel. Uh, we have one other comment on grumpy old geeks.com. This is from Oliver, a friend of mine, a GOG like me turned me onto your podcast. Sounds good. Now I want to download the weekly podcast to my MP3 player.

I am so disappointed that geeks like you don't provide a podcast link I can use outside of iTunes. Come on guys. What about us real old geeks who don't want to use iTunes? Jason? That's actually just me being lazy. I know we should have direct download links. I'll probably go back and add those at some point soon since a lot of our old players need fixing anyways.

Cause thank you Libsyn for breaking all of our old inline players. But yeah, I know we should have download links and you know, we do have an RSS feed. We do have an RSS feed, but that's a pain in the ass. We should just have the download links. It's my, it's my bad. Okay. We'll get those in when we can. Thanks, Oliver.

We'd like to thank you all for your comments and, uh, your ratings except for that three star one. Uh, please do, uh, give us a five star rating on iTunes at, uh, grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes. Uh, you can reach out to us at twitter.com slash GOG podcast. Please don't bother with Facebook.

It'll get lost in the mix somewhere or visit grumpy old geeks.com or of course our favorite way at our Patreon page, patreon.com slash GOG.

Initially, I thought that all of my internet dreams had come true, Jason. Why so Brian? Well, a new app came out called a hashtag card block that, uh, basically promised to take away all mentions of the Kardashians online. Uh, which is nice. Uh, but then I read a little bit more about it and, uh, James Shamsie, uh, believes he's doing God's work here.

Uh, he's a 21 year old British viral marketer behind hashtag card block. Uh, it's a browser extension designed to scour your feet of all things, uh, Kardashian, which is, is lovely. I like that. Uh, but, uh, this kind of ties in with everything else, um, that we've been dealing with recently.

The whole, uh, ad blocking system. Uh, you can use this for anything, uh, including, uh, basically replacing, uh, anything that you want with something else. So we're basically, I mean, we've kind of always known that this is where things were going to go.

It's kind of the, the whole point of the internet to begin with is, is self filtering and replacing. So, but, uh, we are dealing with the aspect of, uh, basically people that don't pay for content and it's only advertising that's paying for things. And this is another way to basically kill advertising. Yeah. I mean, his, the concept behind this is he takes anything that has links to anything Kardashian as well and replaces them to charitable organizations, which is probably, which is something he determines.

So, yeah, so all this is, is it's a, it's a shitty ad blocker with a keyword list, which all ad blockers already have. And it's a, it's a, it has a regex. It's a regex wrapped in an ad blocker, wrapped in a crappy marketing plan just to get rid of the Kardashians in your feed.

Which is, uh, you know, it might prove his, uh, his title of viral marketer because you could not do better than to basically say that you're writing feeds of Kardashians and he's getting tons of press for it. Yep. And, uh, he's, he's going to have an enhancement in the future that you can also filter out Bieber. Yes.

Because he has to continue that, uh, things are going to, people will keep talking about him. This is just going to go away, but it's, it's clever. And, uh, yeah, you gotta be really careful about this sort of stuff. This is, this is going to be really interesting, but it's all browser extension based, uh, at the moment.

So, you know, what are you going to do? Just don't install it. Yeah. Like we said last week, this is all dumb manipulation. And once you, once you have, give somebody access to the dom, they can do whatever they want to with it. So it's up to you to not install it. If you don't want it. Yes. There you go. The more, you know, I watched the trailer for Steve Jobs.

I did too. What do you think? I think it looks like a steaming pile of shit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I'm happy that, uh, it's not just a, a let's, let's kiss his ass job, but we'll see job. Anyways, uh, I don't know.

It seems really boring. It looks extremely boring and it's like they, they took the social network, put Steve Jobs in it, made it really boring and did some really terrible casting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not crazy about the casting. It does. I mean, it even, it looks, it feels, it sounds like the social network.

Uh, could we have done something? I mean, Steve, love him or hate him, uh, or just accept him for what he is with his flaws. Steve Jobs is an incredibly engaging person and how you could make a trailer that it makes him look boring is beyond me. Yeah. It makes him look incredibly boring. And you know, Seth Rogen is Wozniak is terrible.

It's terrible. It is terrible. I keep expecting him just to start going and just like smoking a bluff on screen. That's just like, what? Okay. Anyways. Okay. Speaking of terrible, uh, uh, Jeremy Clarkson's Amazon prime show could be called gear knobs.

There's no way it's going to be called. There's no way it's going to do. No, it's funny. Yeah. I think they just threw out a couple applications for, you know, trademarks just to kind of, you know, just to have them. I'm sure there's another hundred names that they're still going through, but man, that's a terrible name.

Hey, look, that's just what happens. That's the way it works. Now it's, uh, you and I have both been there too. You're, you're at the initial like pitch meetings for something and people are throwing out names and, and you basically just go by every domain that they mentioned just in case. Just in case. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so Francis Lawrence, the guy that directed the hunger games series, he's going to be directing a, uh, a new TV adaptation of neverwhere.

Neil Gaiman's book. Yeah. I'm actually looking forward to this one. Cause it's about time. This one was rebooted. All right. I mean, did you ever watch the original? I tried to, I hated it. See in the interesting thing about that is he didn't start writing the book until the first day of shooting on that.

Right. So he wrote the script for it and then he's like, Oh, well I can fix this in the book because this is not very good, but I actually did like it. I've seen it a bunch of times. I liked it. Um, you know, yeah, I'm not, I'm not the, the huge game and whore that you are, but I do really love neverwhere.

So if this is good, I'll be happy to watch it. I, but like I said, the first, the first take around, did not like it. Um, Prometheus two is, is coming as we all knew Ridley Scott was going to be bringing it to us. And in the strange, you know, one of those, uh, the giant magnet situations, uh, I put this article in, I think two days ago and, uh, my TV, uh, as I've just been wandering around the house has had Prometheus on almost nonstop.

This is being aired constantly by some channel. Um, I actually enjoyed Prometheus. Um, I was a little disappointed because we all knew this is supposed to be leading into alien and it kind of did, but kind of didn't. Well, he's going to take care of that because it's no longer called Prometheus anything. The movie will be called alien paradise lost.

Yeah. I don't know. I thought Prometheus was just a steaming pile. I didn't mind it. Uh, it wasn't, if you went into it expecting something, then it was horrible. Uh, I already knew that it wasn't going to be what everybody was hoping it was going to be and I enjoyed it for what it was.

Okay. Yeah. I, I went into it expecting it would be a good movie and it wasn't. So that's why I was disappointed. You had, you had different reasons. I really liked the casting. I liked everybody in it. I loved the art direction. I thought it looked beautiful. I thought it, uh, it asked some really interesting questions and dropped some really interesting hints.

Um, yeah, we'll see. I mean, I, I'm, Hey, anything's better than that last aliens movie was. Oh, alien three, the David Fincher one. Oh no, no, no. Resurrection or was it? No, Resurrection was horrible. Three wasn't that great either. Three was, oh, three looked good, but yeah, that last one was a, oh Jesus, that was terrible.

And Joss Whedon wrote that last one. Now, you know, you can't always be a winner. You can't, yeah, no, you got to start somewhere, I guess. So you put a video in here that I loved. I knew you would. Yeah.

It's an acapella version of Rammstein's Duhast from, from this choir and it's, it's amazing. It's just, it's flat out amazing. And I had a second, uh, great magnet moment. Uh, I put this in last night and then I was, uh, again, over on the couch, probably on a commercial break for Prometheus.

And there was, uh, advertisements for the new American horror story, which is going to have Lady Gaga in it. And, uh, instead of even having Lady Gaga do the music thing, because we're all sick of her, uh, they're using Duhast as the soundtrack for the commercials. Nice. Yeah. Very, very nice. And in, uh, in other coincidental news, I just got an email today that Rammstein in America, the DVD version of their Madison square garden concert came out today.

Excellent. And it's got like two hours of behind the scenes stuff and it looks pretty decent. I'm not going to, I'm not going to buy it, but. That's a way too much Rammstein for me. Yeah. Well, we said there was more Edward Snowden news and there is.

He did an interview, um, where he starts to talk about aliens. Yeah. Well, he was on StarTalk, you know, radio. So he, it kind of makes sense that he would kind of go down that alien route at some point. Sure. It makes total sense if you're trying to remain credible for doing something illegal and trying to start a whole movement behind it.

It's the perfect thing to do. Why wouldn't you talk about aliens? Yeah, I know. Uh, wait, wait, wait, wait to screw up your credibility there, buddy. Yeah. Not a good call. Uh, so bad move there. Um, and, and. But his, I mean, his, his rationale is that, okay, well, any advanced civilization is going to use encryption.

So any communications we get from them is just going to sound like background space noise. It's like, wait, what? Yeah. Uh, you know, not, not as a finest moment. And speaking of other people who I really liked that did not have fine moments, Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins, uh, both, uh, both did horrible things with this kid, this poor Ahmed kid.

Uh, they took horrible positions on this. Uh, absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. This was a total step on your dick moment this week for them. I mean, Richard Dawkins is just kind of turned into a crazy man. He's going to really has. Yeah. He's just turned into a troll and kind of an asshole.

Yeah. I'm not, I'm not a big fan. Unfortunately, we lost the, we lost the best of the, uh, best of the atheists out there, which I'm totally blanking on his name right now, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens. There you go. I, that, that man was, he would never have done something as stupid as this. Oh, absolutely not.

Or either of them, uh, Bill Maher on real time, basically, you know, he did the, the kid deserves an apology, no doubt about it, but look at it. It looks like a fucking bomb. Fuck you, Bill. Thank you finally for at least agreeing that Bill Maher can be a fucking idiot. Oh, he totally can. Um, usually he, you know, I'm spot on with him, but yeah, he, he just, uh, he really blew it with this one and yeah, Dawkins basically saying he didn't even invent this clock and blah, blah, blah.

What was his motive? Oh, shut up. Yeah. God damn it. Uh, bad week for people I respect. Ooh, fancy, fancy, ooh, fancy. Brian, have you heard of Einstein's riddle?

Uh, I did when you put it in the show notes three weeks ago and then I did it immediately. Yeah. They're saying that, uh, it's rumored that only 2% of the world can solve this riddle. It's got, you know, it's like a 15, it's got 15 data points and, uh, you know, a question that says who's what, I mean, go read it.

It's long. I don't want to bore anybody with it. It's, it's really interesting. And, uh, I think you should go check it out. It's in our show notes. Uh, if you are going to check it out, go ahead and skip ahead about two minutes here because here's the deal. Um, maybe only 2% of people could figure this out ages ago, but, uh, all right, let's keep skipping ahead.

Uh, if you know anything about basic maths and doing grids, this is easy. Uh, if you try to approach it, just thinking it through, you're never going to do it. That, that screwed me up for about five minutes and then I pulled out a piece of paper. I made a grid and five minutes later I had the answer. Yeah. It's not very hard.

It's actually not very hard at all. It just, it took me a couple of minutes and that was it. Yeah. So, uh, interesting. But, uh, as soon as the trick is make a grid and then as soon as you've done that, you're done. Uh, I don't even know where I saw this, but I have to read this because this is one of those, this literally made me LOL.

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail. And with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him, wait for it, a super calloused, fragile, mystic hexed by halitosis.

You deserve a cock punch for that one. Yeah, that one's so bad. That was great. That was great. All right. Well, perhaps I made the decision to read that, uh, not because I'm irrational, but because I'm just quantum probabilistic. This is a great article that, uh, basically researchers are trying to explain human decision making with physics theory.

And, uh, a lot of it is just, uh, you know, random quantum physics bouncing around is what makes us make our decisions. Yeah. I read this and it just kind of made my head hurt because anything quantum. And once you, once you start getting into Schrodinger's cat and talking about, you know, probabilistic relativity, it's like, okay, but I love this stuff.

So it is an interesting read. It's a very, you know, it's very on, on the surface and you really probably need to agree to get, uh, into it much deeper. But yeah, uh, you know, sometimes our decisions are not our own. It gets into the free, free will. Uh, do we really have it? Do we don't?

Uh, this article is basically kind of saying, no, no, you don't. It's just all random things bouncing around and that's why everything happens. Yeah. I tend to agree with that. Yeah. So there you go. And, uh, one more science bit that I found really interesting. Um, there are two super massive black holes that are going to collide.

And apparently what's going to happen is this great video. So go check it out on our show notes because it's beautiful and gorgeous and pretty exciting stuff. We'll be long dead by the time this happens, but you can at least watch it on YouTube. Yeah. Because, uh, the, about to, about to collide is a, is really relativistic.

Uh, it's about to collide for the scale of the universe. Not us. Closing shout outs. I'd like to give a shout out to one of my favorite bands of all time. Uh, Lush, uh, the band that, uh, the shoegazing scene. I got super excited last year when ride reformed, uh, Lush is kind of the Holy grail of the reformation.

We heard that they were never going to do it because unfortunately the drummer committed suicide, which is what led to the band breaking up way back in the day. Uh, and they've always been pretty firm about saying, Nope, we're not going to get back together. We're not going to reform. It's never going to happen. Well, never say never.

An official Facebook page has popped up within the last week. An official website has popped up in the last week with nothing on it. And Emma Anderson, one of the, uh, singer songwriters from the band, uh, tweeted about four days ago, seven days, dot, dot, dot.

So we shall see. I couldn't pretty much guarantee it's not going to be a new album because given the finances of the music industry, that would make no sense and make them no money. A tour will, and I personally will probably go to every show that I can. There you go. I liked Lush back in the day.

I thought they were pretty damn good. Uh, I'm a big fan. They're one of those, uh, bands that kind of crossed the line between shoegazing and pop. And of course I was in love with Mickey Rennie and probably still am. Okay. Sounds good. Well, I'm going to get running here because, uh, there's, uh, there's 2,200, uh, crazy security nerds downstairs.

I want to hang out with, and I'm going to go, uh, actually hang out with Jordan Cooper in a little bit. He's coming by. Excellent. Well, have fun, man. Enjoy your time. All right. Well, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Gilmesser, 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 a five-star rating or tell a friend about the show.

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And he's also on SoundCloud at H-T-T-P. Why do I always read that? At grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 129. Hack the planet, baby. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

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