134: Gimme Some Sugar Baby

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for October 30th, 2015, day before Halloween. I'm Spooky Jason.

I was not prepared for that. Happy pre-Halloween, Jason. I'm Brian. I'm crying Brian. I believe that was the garbage pail kid that my sister used to taunt me with. Nice one. Oh man, I love the garbage pail kids. I thought those were so fun. I thought they were fun too until my sister locked onto that and there was like five years of it. Oh, that kind of sucks. Yeah. Oh well, there you go. Yeah, Halloween.

I carved some pumpkins last night and the best part of carving a pumpkin, I roasted my pumpkin seeds. They are delicious. Awesome. I'm doing that tonight. Yeah, I don't know why this isn't something I do more often throughout the year, why it's just a one-time-a-year thing, because pumpkin seeds really are delicious. The nice thing about now though, yeah, yeah, go buy a bunch of pumpkins because they're going to be really cheap on Sunday. That is very true. I think I should do that and maybe try my hand at making my own pumpkin pie from scratch. Well, worth a shot. Yeah, I think so.

Are you a pie guy? Are you a baker? No, I'm more of a, my cooking is almost exclusively in the meat realm. I'm not much of a baker, but it is something I've wanted to explore in my process of trying to learn new things. I think that's next up is trying to figure out how to bake. Of course, that goes directly against my desire to also, you know, I'm working out an hour and a half a day and trying to lose weight, not gain it. So baking is maybe not the brightest idea right now. It's like, okay, I'm going to start baking and brewing my own beer. That does not make much sense at the moment.

Yeah. Yeah. I think dude, you're doing it wrong. Yeah, exactly. Wrong, wrong approach. I've been, yeah, I've been on a kick lately where I've been trying to replace everything that could possibly have, you know, carbs or starches in it with a vegetable. So my cauliflower stir fried rice is amazing. Okay. You've been talking about that. You've been talking about that a lot, posting it quite often as well. Yes, yes, yes. The maid came over yesterday and we made some salmon burgers.

With the cauliflower fried rice with this beautiful ginger soy sauce. And she was just in love with it. So if the maid is asking me for the recipes, I think it's a good sign. You know, what's really funny, Jason, is you love to shit on LA and even California quite a lot. Yet that was the most fucking LA sentence I've ever heard. The maid came over to check out my fancy, fancy pants cooking.

That sounds like a fucking vegan explosion from hell. Yeah, but I had a maid in Chicago that did the same thing. She liked my cooking there too. Everywhere I go, I have, I have a maid in every town. Then you hopped into your Prius and drove to Whole Foods. Yeah, kiss my ass for that. So we talked about crystal before.

Yes, we did. That was a couple of weeks ago and before you took your day off and we had friend of the show for a little co-host last week. So I'm going into this blind. Apparently you, you, you put us together and ran us through the crystal method. Yes, we have gone through the crystal method.

Yes. So I wanted to go into this blind because I'm assuming you've read this so I can react in real time to this. Okay. So it says if Jason and Brian work together, crystal predicts that their relationship will look like this. Okay. Oh, that's a very nice picture of me. It pulled up. Oh, very, very young. Um, so when at work, when working together, Jason and Brian need to remember to write important things down so they don't forget. This is why we have hack pad. Perfect. Okay.

Jason will get frustrated sometimes because Brian resists his direction or guidance, even against logic. Well, okay. True that. Yeah. The logic part is, is rare and in between. So fair enough. Brian might take it. Brian might make a sarcastic comment that Jason takes literally. That has happened a lot. You've been very pissed off at me about sarcastic comments before.

Jason might think that Brian talks too much, but we'll continue to listen out of respect. Respect me, bitch. Oh, these are, I mean, this is just great. Okay. Now when we're in group, well, we don't work in in conflict. In the event of a dispute, Jason will have the natural impulse to fix Brian by making demands, but Brian will not follow them. That's so true. Jason and Brian actually enjoy disagreement and see it as an opportunity to hash out new ways of looking at the world. Also true. Oh, okay.

I'll go. I'm down with that. Conflict between Jason and Brian might go unspoken, not because of resentment, but because Brian might not realize the problem exists. Totally ties in with the, my making a sarcastic remark and you getting all butthurt about it. Yep. I had no idea. And, uh, under the personal side, Jason and Brian will both probably end up in the most active, engaging circle of people at a party. Oh, so not true for me, maybe for you.

Well, I go wherever the booze is and that does tend to be the active, engaging people. Through that. So this is, this is pretty fun. It's actually surprising. Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's no different than astrology or anything like that. You can read into it what you will. We're totally leaving out the ones that we know are complete and utter bullshit just because they don't really connect to us at all. So we're reading the ones that we think are funny and somewhat true. And there's a lot of them, but here's, here's, we're going to leave it with this one. Brian and Jason will have a dynamic and times

quirky relationship highlighted by stretches of brilliance and occasional bouts of mutual frustration. I think we have a new tagline for our podcast. Yes. That could be the new title of the show. Mutual frustration with Brian and Jason. Perfect. I like it. Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, I'm going to have to run a, run my, my connections to a couple other people through this and see if they get as close as, and as well done as a, I'll, it probably won't because you and I are exceedingly active online. So Crystal had a lot of things to pull

from. Yeah, I definitely did. Only one bit of follow-up because again, you know, you weren't around last week, so I'm not following up on anything that I talked about with Fergal, although I do appreciate the lovely comments that we got. You were going on and on about how Hillary Clinton had the personal email server in her house and how stupid that was. And I totally agree with you. It's a fucking idiotic thing to do. And I can't believe that politicians would do such things. Uh, oops, oops. Nope. Nope. Not so good. Uh, the main Republican who's been going after her about it

is also using his own private email server. Oh dear. Deary me. Oh dear. Now it's not technically in his house, but it is private and it is very unclear as to whether he's using that purely for campaign work or whether the email is spilling over for political and congressional tasks, which it most likely is. So a little bit of hypocrisy there. It swings both ways. And, uh, obviously you and I need to pack up and move to DC and start a new, uh, consulting firm.

No, not going to happen. In the news. The hyperloop. We've talked about it a few times. This is Tesla's new fangled mode of transportation that will basically shoot you down a tube at 10 gazillion miles an hour, actually 760 miles per hour to be exact, which is terrifying when you think about it because one thing goes wrong and splat, you're dead. Uh, but it's, it's coming. They're building the text,

uh, test track. Uh, it's going to cost around $6 billion. Uh, it'll be a five mile test track somewhere in Quay Valley, California. I don't know where that is, but according to this article, that's going to be a self-sufficient solar powered township that is yet to be constructed. So that's $6 billion for five miles. So how much is it going to cost?

That would be the test track. The actual cost will be much cheaper as they, as they really build it. But it's also, it's Elon Musk behind it. He's got tons of money and he's going to make time. If this thing actually works, it will disrupt the flight industry and it will replace the flight industry. And it will be a billion upon billion upon billion dollar a year of revenue easily if it works.

Yeah. But he's not actually involved in this. He just gave up the idea and there are companies that are taking it and running with it. All right. Well, hopefully they'll sort it out. I would like to see this happen. One thing that does give me pause and makes me a little bit worried again, in this article, they were, uh, interviewing the Bop Gresta, which is the company that's actually building its, uh, uh, deputy chairman. And he said, it will change completely humanity.

Oh, like the segue. Isn't that supposed to be, it will completely change humanity. Uh, I say it will change completely. Humanity does not make any sense. That is not a real sentence. That is, that is not a sentence. So that I'm a little worried now. Hyperloop, go fast round in circle. Exactly. That sort of thing. So good times. Uh, yesterday I lost power because as I've screamed a million times and we are actually living in a third world now. And if there's a light breeze or somebody sneezes too loud, uh, the power lines will go down. Uh, if you

were in West lost or West Hollywood yesterday, you also lost power, not because of a breeze, because some jerk ran a drone into the power lines. Yeah, that's going to happen more and more. It's going to happen a lot. Good times. And now that we know that you can knock out the power with a drone, what about the people who are going to do it on purpose? That's right. We good times. What a wonderful world we've created for ourselves. Now that we're getting into the self-driving cars are going to be everywhere. There's a great article that I found called why, why self-driving cars must

be programmed to kill. Yeah. Um, this is part of the fun of, of kind of the whole concept of AI in general and a sci-fi trope that we've seen a thousand times. But if you're going to have an autonomous car and it has to make the choice between, uh, hitting 10 people or hitting one person, it's going to hit the one person. Well, that's, yeah, it's, you know, the, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the, or the one we should call it, uh, the Spock. Yes.

It should be the empowering, uh, AI in every, uh, autonomous vehicle. Yes. The Spock algorithm will, uh, so make sure that if you do see a crowd of people running into the road, you stick with them and don't stay on the side. Yeah. Stay with big crowds when, when, while this is going on, because, uh, you'll have a better chance of not getting run over by the dinky little cars that these things are going to be. Uh, well, the Teslas are not dinky. Those are true. The Teslas are not. Tesla will, will splat your ass pretty quick, especially if it's in like insane mode going, going a little

quickly. Right. Uh, you're always on the warpath about, you know, how we're going to lose our, our unlimited downloads and bandwidth and blah, blah, blah. And, and we are, aren't we? Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. It's going, it's going, just checking. So there's a couple, there's a couple articles that are going to be in the show notes about how, uh, New York's broadband speeds are under investigation by the attorney general's office. Um, and it's about time somebody did this. I mean, I, I can, I never come close to the speed that I am

theoretically paying for not even close. I'm a, you know, I I'm paying almost 500 bucks a month right now for 300 down 20 up. And I have never gotten more than 200 down. Yeah. Uh, and somebody needs to be looking into this. I, it wasn't a big deal so much when, when we all had the unlimited, uh, you know, bandwidth thing going on when we were just, when we were paying for a bucket that could never, never empty out, we didn't care so much.

But now that you're charging us for all the fucking little bits of sand that go into that bucket, we better be getting what the hell you telling us we're getting. Mm-hmm. And you know that you can't have it both ways, companies, you can't take away everything and you want to charge bit by bit. And then you find, then you start fucking slamming our bits away from us. Screw you. That's a load of shit. Indeed. Indeed it is. But that's the way the world works, isn't it? Well, yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, you know, Facebook is, is intentionally taking a

bandwidth away from, from their, uh, employees every Tuesday, apparently. So if you expect anything to go wrong, uh, if anything goes wrong with Facebook on Tuesday, it's going to take an extra amount of time for it to get fixed. They're calling it 2G Tuesdays and they want to give all employees an opportunity to see what using the app with an incredibly slow collection feels like and help close the empathy gap between Silicon Valley and emerging markets. Uh, there's a lot of things you can do to close the empathy gap between Silicon Valley and emerging markets. Don't be assholes.

Yeah. It just did, you know, on the surface, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Of course it is. It's like, what? No, this makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah. If you're a decent developer anyways, I mean, we always used to test our things against slow connections and we tried to always crunch down grab. Of course, a lot of that's gone away. Hasn't it? Developers don't really do that anymore. Do they? No, they don't. No. The kids nowadays are spoiled. Yeah. Maybe it does make a little bit of sense to do that to them then. May you give them, give them, give them some haze,

you know, uh, 28, eight modems and let them, let them dial up through the old AOL access points and live like we used to do. Oh, good times loading loading. Actually I had to see, I experienced that a little bit yesterday. Cause again, when the power was out and I was getting ready to hop on my bike to find coffee shops or whatever, God forsaken place I could find an outlet and some, some free wifi to use to try to get through my day. I was trying to download a podcast just over, you know, not over

wifi. God damn. That takes a long time. Really? I mean, mine's blazing fast. I can get it faster generally on my phone or my iPad using, you know, 4g faster than I can get it on my insanely expensive cable connection. That is, that was not my experience yesterday. I'll have to look into time war cable and see if they're throttling me. Um, well, you know, check it out, check it out. All I know is when I do, uh, when I'm on the road and I I'm publishing this podcast using Verizon 4g from my

iPad and just the up and down speed is blindingly fast, except I, you know, it's 50 bucks a month for five gig. Yeah. And that goes very, very fast. Very fast. Do not leave Facebook open. If you are on a throttled connection or a, uh, metered connection, I should say, unless you're their employee and that's what you have to do on Tuesday. Okay. Moving on a lawsuit against Apple for, uh, the iOS nine wifi

assist, which I am a hundred percent behind this lawsuit because it was a bit disingenuous. It was not, uh, exactly explained how this thing would work. And, uh, it came as a default on. So you actually had to switch it off. So people are now suing saying, Hey, Hey man, we didn't know that this was going to happen. I didn't know that this was on and how come I now have, you know, a $3,000 Verizon charge. I need to go look into this because I have that on still. You got to turn this thing off.

Uh, apparently it's getting a little bit better with their new updates, but I switched it off right away because nobody really understands the algorithm behind how wifi assist is switching over. If you don't know what it is, basically iOS nine included a feature that if your wifi connection wasn't so good and you have the blazingly fast fast 4g connections like Jason to, you know, publish things, it will switch off wifi and switch over to your, to your other connection because it's better. And it does

this without really informing you. So all of a sudden, a lot of people found themselves with very, very large, uh, wireless bills. Interesting. And so they are now getting sued. And, uh, I think it's a class action. I got to look into this too, because I, at least for the first month, I don't think I hit my cap cause I never really do anyways, but it was, uh, when I found out about this, I was like, that's some dirty pool there, Apple. Yeah. You'd think that that would be like an AT&T thing, but, um, I'm looking up the, uh, where it's at. It's buried like to find the,

yeah, it's way at the bottom under it is cellular wifi assist. Bye-bye. Yeah. You got to switch that off. If you haven't switched it off yet, people, and you're worried about, uh, your bill and you hitch it close to your cap all the time, switch it off now. And you should always have, uh, your, your, whichever carrier you're with, have it on. So they text you when you get close to your limits. Exactly. So I've always got that on because I've got so many people on my family plan that somebody leaves it on and I get dinged. Yeah. And, uh, since we're talking about Apple,

let's briefly mention Apple music again. This is an article in wired saying Apple doesn't need Apple music to win, which is why it will. And I somewhat agree with this. Um, Apple really doesn't give a fuck if Apple music is, is decent or not. And over time, they're going to end up getting everybody over anyways, and it's not going to end up mattering. Uh, I don't know about that. I mean, I've already canceled it. I don't know anybody that's still on it. Apple has so much money.

They could just buy Spotify and they still win, which is what they should do. I'm actually surprised that they haven't. I they've got to realize at this point that Apple music is a travesty. I mean, I guess the reason that they're not doing it is they still have so many deals with the different labels and entities for, for actual sale things. And if they bought Spotify, that's basically just saying to hell with anybody ever buying anything again, it's all just going to be streaming.

And that could be iffy for their business models and their arrangements with different labels. But once that's out of the, out of the park, I mean, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't they just buy it? Because Apple music is just, you got to burn it down and build it back up from the beginning or just take somebody else's that actually works. Well, the problem I think that they might run into if they buy Spotify is antitrust. You know, at that point, they would basically be like a massive monopoly. And what would you have left? Pandora and Rdio? No, you've got Google now and

YouTube. Let's talk about those two. It's not, I mean, seriously, I don't think it would be an antitrust issue because now you've got two of the other biggest players in the, in the entire industry, just tossing their hats in the ring too. Yeah. Google play, Google play music. That's pretty big if anybody uses it yet, but now they've got podcasting. It's coming. I'm actually kind of excited about that. I'd like to see you have no idea how excited I am about that. We might make a few

more ducats considering that Google has 80% of the, you know, the mobile market or something close to that. And every podcast player on Android is a steaming pile of shit, like actually building it into Google play, which is also cross-platform and you can use it on desktop, iOS and Android.

I'm, I'm super excited about this. Our shows have already been submitted and approved. And as soon as it goes live for everybody, we'll be right in there. Yeah. I'm excited about that too. So we'll see what happens. So in addition to that, uh, we also have a YouTube red launch this week, which I did no one think about this name. I did on every, every single tech podcast. It's the same thing.

Here's what happened. They were sitting around a boardroom and, and main guy said, Hey, let's call it YouTube red. And no one wanted to admit that they'd ever seen porn in that boardroom. I know that is the only way that this name got approved because if you Google YouTube red, red tube does come up very, very quickly. Oh, that's funny. You know what it's like? Remember when there were those, um, Oh, I forget. It was, uh, some Asian airline and there were all these plane crashes that they

had because nobody wanted to speak up against like, like if the co-pilot saw the captain doing something bad, like he wasn't allowed to speak up and tell him something was going wrong. And then the plane crashed and blew up. Yeah. That's the only way I can imagine that this name got approved, uh, is everybody just sat in that room and said, I'm not going to admit that I've looked at pornography. Yeah. Horrible name. Uh, it seems to be an interesting enough concept. I mean, because it's not just YouTube, you do get, uh, you get music streaming through Google. Uh, you get a

bunch of other things for all for one low price. It's not, it's not, it doesn't have the convenience that, uh, an Apple does, but, uh, it does seem to be pretty interesting. And I was sitting there wondering like who the F would pay for this. Um, and then I was thinking, you know what? Parents, because I, I, especially even just hanging out with my niece, uh, addicted to YouTube, love just sitting there playing, uh, watching children's videos on YouTube on an iPad. And I

was thinking these 32nd pre-roll commercials that this kid is being exposed to thousands upon thousands of them a day. I would pay this just so my kid didn't have to see that every day. Yeah, that's true. So that's about the one purchase thing that would make sense to me. Obviously there are just so many people that live on YouTube that this is going to make sense.

Uh, I think they were saying something along the lines of even if just like 3% of YouTube's music base, uh, paid for this, they'd be rolling in it. I don't think 3% are going to, but who knows? We'll see. Yeah. 3% is really high. I know. Yeah. Oh man. That's well, we'll see how it goes.

I'm not, it's nothing I'm interested in, but we'll see. Again, like, uh, I could see if I, if I were a parent and then I was doing the whole iPad and YouTube thing, I would probably pay for this just because of the sheer amount of commercials you're exposing your kids to every single day. And this would get rid of it and pretty quickly, but that's the only purchase model I can see for me. Uh, speaking of weird ass shit, Buzzfeed, uh, there's an article in recode where, uh, basically the, uh, Buzzfeed CEO said something

along the lines of 5 billion views are worth more than 18 billion impressions. I'm not following that math. Okay. Yeah. I haven't, uh, 18 billion. No, it doesn't make any sense. I don't know what you're talking about, but it came with a helpful gif animation that shows exploding circles.

It does have it. It goes, boo. Yeah. No, anyways, I don't get it. So, well, good on you. It doesn't seem to matter. They're making tons of money. So people seem to buy that crap. The interesting thing about Buzzfeed this week is, uh, the Gamergate and South by Southwest blow up.

I have not seen any of that. I've been in a bubble. Okay. Cause Buzzfeed is pulling out of South by Southwest. If they, if they don't, yeah, if they don't actually, you know, turn around the decision that, uh, the people at South by made to kill some of the, the Gamergate panels. Oh, I did hear a little bit about that. I didn't know Buzzfeed was connected to it. I think that was really dumb on their part. Why would you kill? Why would you kill the panels that are talking about this? We're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. That's, that's pretty

much the point. And you know, I saw the signatories on it and the main signatory is a Frank who I love to death. And there's a super smart guy. So this happened about three days ago and Vox media is also in on it and there really isn't any updates yet. So keep an eye on this one to see if anything happens, I guess. Yeah, I suppose we'll see what happens. When is South by Southwest is coming very soon, correct? It's in the spring. Okay. Not that soon then there's plenty of time. Yeah. That's the whole thing. Plenty of time for these nerds to figure out

if they're going to blow people up or not. Okay. Um, now this one I found, which I, I love. You actually beat me to it. I thought this was a, you know, science and booze. How could we not talk about it? Yes. I brought up the show notes because, you know, we have to write things down so we don't forget them. Uh, and you would already put it in there. So yes. Earlier this year, astronomers from the Paris observatory observed a comet in our solar system spewing large amounts of ethyl alcohol

about, what was it? 500 bottles of wine a day or something like that, or a minute. Somebody get Bruce Willis and put them on a thing. We need to rope this thing and bring it in. Yeah. 500 bottles of wine every second. So of course the Parisians found it.

I know. So yeah, we definitely need to fund space exploration. People come on. How much wine are we, are we losing here just to, uh, cause NASA is not funded. Yeah. We just leave that right out there. We've got 5,000 gallons on tap every couple of seconds. Oh, I know. Delicious. Delicious.

Delicious. And I found another one. My luck. It'd be fucking Merlot. I can't drink Merlot now. If it's a nice cab, I'm in. Oh, there you go. Um, the international business times has an article about drinking beer slows down Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Oh, good. We'll be doing this podcast well into our eighties. Yeah, I have. Um, well, I mean, I stopped drinking beer a couple of years ago, but, uh, maybe it's time to pick it back up. Uh, I've, I've kind of keep my beer consumption to

Sunday fun days. It's just, you can't go watch a football game and have some nachos and pair it with a nice cab. It doesn't work. So I know that is, that is kind of the problem, but yeah, I have Alzheimer's runs in my family. So I'd have to, you know, just get a nice, uh, nice Belgian beer once a week to slow down the damage. There you go. And see, this stuff's good for you. All things in moderation people. And just kill the rest of the brain cells that are left. There aren't that many.

Small loss. Security. If you think Jason and I sound a little bit weird on this particular podcast, as I think I just mentioned, uh, we have these Santa Ana winds going on here in Los Angeles at the moment. Uh, if you don't know what those are, they're just very dry, hot, painful winds that, that come through and everybody gets all nasally and congested and their nose turns red. And we all start to basically look

like Lindsay Lohan after a chic through a party. And it just makes everybody cranky because of the static electricity, because you, as you mentioned, they are dry and it just feels like your, your clothes are sticking to you. It's no. Yeah. It's, it's a bit nasty. And neither of us are sounding particularly great at the moment. So, all right, let's, uh, let's continue with being cranky and depressed. Let's do security.

All right. The U S Senate passes CISA, which is, uh, the cybersecurity information sharing act, which is, uh, it's a bill that basically says, Hey, if you're a company and you want to give us some info, this makes it easy for you. Um, there's a lot, there's a lot to it.

It's, you know, it's, it's a spying bill is what it is. A surveillance bill. There's a couple links in the show notes. If you want to read up on it, it's very terse stuff. And I do not want to bore half of the audience, which these things tend to do. Yeah. And, uh, Facebook is also, uh, in trouble because they said on the outside that, Oh, we're against it. It's terrible. And then, uh, there's some, some stuff came out that, Oh, they're actually kind

of lobbying for it. Yeah. Um, you can find out more of that at you betrayed us.org slash Facebook. Yeah. Great little title there. The funniest thing about this, and this is in the first link in the show notes, the boing, boing article, uh, where this could be why we have problems fighting against these sorts of things. Uh, that talks about all the people that were against it, security engineers, academics, uh, some technology companies, not Facebook, obviously, uh, still society organizations, constant constituents sent over 1 million

faxes opposing CISA to senators. Faxes. Who the fuck still has a fax machine? Actually, uh, you probably do. Do you have one of those, do you have one of those all in one printers? It does not have a fax capability. Okay. Cause I have two of those and they both can fax. Yeah. I gave up on fax quite a long time ago. I live with a real estate agent.

We need to fax things. Okay. Uh, and this one kind of made me really sad. Uh, it's from Dale Myers. Uh, he's a software engineer at Microsoft. Um, it's called one password leaks your data. I'm like, Oh man, not you guys too. Apparently. Yeah. And it's not that much data, but they're working on a fix for it. And, uh, yeah. Well, thankfully nobody listens to us anyway.

So nobody's using it. Just that one guy. Oh, there's a couple of guys. There's a couple. I think we're up to like six or seven. All right. Well, it's still pretty good. I still use it anyways. And, uh, they're going to fix it. Right. And I don't know the, I don't use the one password anywhere feature. So, Oh, I don't either actually. So the main problem is with that. So we're all right. It's not as bad as Patreon. We're not doing so well on our recommendations.

No, I feel really terrible. Oh, it just proves the whole, my whole belief on the security segment, which is everything's going to get hacked anyways. It is, but it's fun to talk about. It's true. And now, uh, from SC magazine, three quarters of industry pros say a breach caused by an IOT internet of things device is likely. What that tells me is the other one quarter are not very good at their job. Or they work for somebody who's making those devices. Yes.

And they're like, no, no, no, we're safe. We're safe. It's going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, there's another article in naked security called the internet of things. Stop the things. I want to get off. And it's just another article about how we're kind of screwed with the internet of things. Look when, when, yes, when, when it comes down to, uh, my, my parents having their toaster connected to the internet of things, they are not going to pay attention to any security aspects on that. In fact, the things that we have now, we don't pay

attention to this. I was, as I mentioned yesterday, I'd lost power. So I went down to the local coffee shops around here and I was getting online and I was having, uh, basically they have horrible connections. And I was talking with friend of the show and last week's cohost Fergal about that. And he was like, yeah, I often just connect to their routers and reboot them because they don't ever bother putting a password on them. Nobody cares about this stuff. And once we start connecting absolutely everything to the internet, we are screwed.

Well, there's a, uh, a kettle out there called from a brand called smarter called the eye kettle. Why, why, why do you need a kettle that's connected to the internet? This one, this one boggles my mind. But, uh, when you put in your wifi password, they store it in the clear. So people can actually do, you know, drive-bys and figure out what your password for your wifi is and then rename it, uh, rename their wifi to use your name and password. And then you can get into the other network. It's

it. Why, why, why do you need a, why do you need a kettle that is connected to the internet? I'm sorry. It's also $150 who pays that much for a kettle? Well, I paid $300 for my brother. Yeah, but yeah. Okay. Nevermind, but it's not connected to the internet. God damn it. Thank God. Um, in, in non-internet, uh, safety and security issues. This is just, uh, because I've just come

back from traveling and I travel quite frequently and I've, I've discussed before how my wife and I disagree about the locks on luggage and I'm right. And she's wrong. Uh, the other thing that we always disagree about is the, uh, hotel safe, uh, which, uh, you know, everything has to go into the hotel safe. And I'm just like, why it's, there's no way that this thing is secure. I mean, the maid has access to this. It's not secure. Uh, Lincoln life hackers says that basically you can peel off something. And if you've got a paperclip and a pocket knife, or even just a paperclip in about

two minutes, you got that thing open. So if anybody can get into your room, which is super easy these days, cause it's all electronic, uh, they could also get into your hotel safe. Yeah. Putting stuff in the safe just tells everybody where it's at. It makes it easy for them to just go by or just go by the room when the maid's like taking a peek and look, I have, I have said since day one, if I want to keep something secure in my hotel room, what I do is wrap it in my dirty underwear. I don't put it in the hotel safe or just take it with you or take it with you. Yes, exactly. I always go out with my

backpack. It's got my drive on it. Then I anyways, yeah, not that my wife listens to the podcast, but there, there you go, sweetie. Uh, so it turns out even the IRS has stingrays, you know, the stingrays, the phone surveillance gadgets. Yeah. Yeah. Why is the IRS using it? Maybe they're trying to listen in on phone calls on people that aren't paying their taxes. Yeah. I mean, they've got 2,500 special agents who handle criminal tax violations. So they're out going after the criminals.

Hmm. Yeah. I think I'm going to have to apply for a job. I don't think they'd take me. No, you'd have to fix a few things first, but they don't need a stingray to find out about your tax situation. We talk about it on a podcast that's available for free. Exactly. Oh, so GE smart city project. Have you heard about this thing?

Well, now they're going to be putting in gunshot detectors into the streetlights. Why? Oh, why do you bring these things up, Jason? When you know what my opinion is on this? I think it's a great idea. Oh, what? Yeah. Okay. Good. If people are shooting off guns where they shouldn't be shooting off guns, go arrest them. All right. You know, it's just, it's, I don't, I don't think that the, you know, if you start putting gunshot detectors in just like straight everywhere, it's a pain in the ass and it costs a lot of taxpayer money, but if they can do this

cheaply and put it in, in new streetlights that are going up regardless, I think it's a great idea. I don't think it's a bad idea either. As long as that's what, that's all they're using it for. The problem is I don't want microphones and absolutely everything that then is just picking up everything that's being stored on a massive drive and then using, uh, you know, various algorithms to search through it, to find out from conversations that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Next time you're walking around a city, look up. They're everywhere already. Didn't we, we put the urban field guide into surveillance equipment in one of our earlier shows. So, uh, uh, go back and find that if you think that you aren't being watched and recorded and camera-fied and all the time anyways. Yep. All you got to do is look up. Yeah.

Comment of the week. Our first comment of the week comes from grumpy old geeks.com from Jason. He says, question for the geeks. I am one of the lucky ones that has been involved in the Experian hack. If you guys know how this hacking works or how it happens, could you give a little insight on it? How are these hacks possibly done? And just how long could it take for someone to discover that they have been hacked? This is not my area of geek expertise. So I thought you may be able to shed some light. Thanks for the great show and have a great day.

Well, I mean, there are thousands upon thousands of ways to an Experian or anybody like that could get hacked. So that's a little difficult to tell. Uh, it's usually a combination of social engineering and a knowledge of technology greater than the company or the company's willingness to spend money on security. Uh, how do you find out? You generally don't until they tell us that you've been hacked. Well, yeah, well, yeah, that's the only way that, but I don't know if he's talking about how the company would know because the company should have tools in place that, you know,

basically look at the logs, look at access. Unauthorized access. Yeah. Yeah. IP addresses that aren't part of their internal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I think most of the time nowadays though, uh, they find out from Krebs on security when the hackers go to him and say, Hey man, I got this, uh, Experian hack file. You want some? Or they find it on the dark web and yeah, I generally that's the way. Yeah. I mean, hackers are not exact. They don't hack in and then keep it a secret. They want to go, uh, sell the stuff or at least trumpet their victories. So

they find out that way. And that's how a company will find out. Um, there's, yeah, that's really about it. I mean, unless you want to sit around all day and kind of monitor IP traffic all around the area or around a company that you're worried about. Yeah. Big companies usually have appliances that are, that are used specifically for this. Uh, they have kettles and kettles. Yeah.

So that's, that's one of the ways, but it's very expensive and, uh, very time consuming and they usually have departments for it. If they don't, then, uh, yeah, that's what happens. I think, uh, you know, as you mentioned, Krebs on security, if you just want to load that up every single day, uh, they're, they're usually one of the first, uh, to ever publish the big hacks.

Yep. All right. So we got another comment from Jerry from Patreon. He wrote in saying just to comment on the government security side, I work for one of the agencies as a federal employee. We have to go through yearly classes on internet and computer security, even so far as to sign a use policy. Now I can't say for all agencies, as I imagine there are some that don't have a robust policy, like maybe department of the interior, but those that handle sensitive and classified

information. Yeah. They know better. It's explicitly stated that you cannot use personal emails. So the CIA director, so the CIA director that did so he did it knowingly. Okay. Furthermore, to get classified emails read on off the government systems, they would have to be open from one end and re emailed. There is a sort of two part authentication process that happens. And one

part of that is a microchipped ID card connected to your laptop. Classified messages have certificates on them that prevent opening from unauthorized computers. Clinton's email server. She knew or at best she was snowed, but her people know because that software had to run on her email server or someone was forwarding them to her other email server from one of the chipped, uh, you know, classified laptops. That seems most likely to me, doesn't it? That's not terribly difficult.

I am not buying the didn't know factor at all. These are leaders. So if they didn't know, it should scare us that they are that ignorant. They are signing policies and laws without knowing the impact. Dear God. Um, please see, uh, every single time we've talked about any of this in security or news, they have no idea. Yeah. Clueless, clueless, clueless. Yeah. Uh, not surprisingly. So there,

these, these, these are politicians, uh, and you know, Jason and I have, have been doing computers and security since we were basically born. And some of this stuff is way over our head. Well, I'm not expecting them to be experts in any way, shape or form. Um, that's not surprising to me at all. No, they listen to their advisors and their quote unquote experts who generally, you know, they're on a government salary. Yeah. Or usually have, you know, are augmenting their income from

someone else and they have their own agendas. So there it is. Yeah. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you. If you'd like to leave us a comment, please do so at a Twitter at GOG podcast at grumpy old geeks.com. Do not bother with Facebook because we will never ever see it. And of course our Patreon page, patreon.com slash GOG. I think they've solved most of their problems and we could desperately use the ducats to pay for our bandwidth. Thank you.

At the library. It's been a couple of weeks since we had a good at the library. And I, since I took last week off, I had some time to read. All right. Congratulations. Thank you. I started off with, uh, I went back and, uh, we talked about secondhand souls, Christopher Moore's new book. Yes. And it's a, since it's a sequel, I thought, ah, it's been a couple of years since I read the prequel, which is a dirty job. So I went back and read that then immediately read secondhand souls. And I, I gotta say top notch. I recommend

both of them. I really can't believe I haven't gotten to secondhand souls yet, but, uh, in between traveling and I did take the damn book around with me to Europe everywhere. I just didn't get a chance to read it. And, uh, the fact that it's a, I got it as a real book, a physical book, not an ebook.

Uh, and I totally forgot that I actually do not, uh, I share a bedroom with someone and, uh, she tends to go to sleep a little bit earlier than I do. And, uh, I cannot have a light on when I'm reading. So I've been reading, I've been screwed on this one because it's basically eBooks in the bed or nothing. Uh, so I either have to get on this while I'm on the pot as it were, or during the day, uh, or I just have to go ahead and suck it up and download it as an ebook too, to be able to read it. But I'm very much looking forward to it and I'm glad that you liked it.

Yeah. It's just as good as the first one. And the first one was stellar. Excellent. Cannot wait. I also read the truth by Neil Strauss. Okay. Uh, Neil is, uh, you know, you know, a New York times bestselling author, tons of books on rock bands. And, uh, he wrote the game with a sleazy, like sleazy pickup artist book that everybody says. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of what the fallout of that lifestyle was. And it's, it's a really hard read. I I'm going to say that right now. It's very hard to read because it talks

about his relationships and the trauma that he went through and going to therapy and coming back from it. Ah, so this is the first that made some money by being an asshole. And this is my me a couple for being an asshole. Uh, kinda, kinda, but it's, I mean, it was fascinating and I really, really enjoyed it.

And we interviewed Neil on the art of charm podcast not too long ago. So links to that'll be in the show notes. But yeah, I mean, if you read any of his previous stuff, it's, it's pretty much a must read. All right. And speaking of the crapper, where you're going to have to read, read secondhand souls. Um, I've been reading a hundred deadly skills, the seal operatives guide to eluding pursuers, evading capture and surviving any dangerous situation by Clint Emerson. It's a

perfect bathroom reading because each tip is like, you know, a nice sit down time. I highly recommend it. Oh, there's so many jokes and so little time. Anyways. Uh, I went back to Dune because I did, uh, I have been getting those on my, on my Kindle. So I've been reading that. And, uh, I'm finally, I'm down to the last two, uh, of the, uh, original Frank Herbert books. And I just finished Heretics

of Dune, which is the second to last. Um, you know, I love the original Dune book. Uh, and I think most people do. I forgot how good these, these last ones were. Heretics of Dune was a masterpiece. It is so political and insane, and there's still the action to it, but the thought behind it, the entire universe is created and, and the real time implications for, for politics in the world today are just stunning. Uh, you know, the first book was great. It, you know, looked at religion

and you had your main character and there was all this action. These later books are, are basically almost entirely thought experience experiments, and they're absolutely fantastic. I could not believe how good it was. And I'm really glad I'm going back and rereading them again. Good. Oh, second to last. We're almost done. One more and I'm done. Oh, thank God. No problem. I'll go. I will read.

Second hand souls first. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. Software apps and gadgets. I've been saving my little ducats for about two years now because I wanted a new camera. I finally got it. Okay. I got the Nikon D810. Finally, full frame,

beautiful 36.6 megapixel behemoth. Yes. I love it so much. If you're a, you know, if you're a digital photography guy, it's, you know, it's up there with some of the best you can get. And like the iPhone six, a little better than the iPhone six. Okay. Actually a lot. But does it do the, the moving graphic, the moving photo picture thing like the iPhone does? Oh, well, I can do 60 frames per second.

1080p movies. Yeah. But you can't, you can't push hard on the picture and then it starts to move. No, you can't do that. Oh, that's a shame. Yeah. I'll pass on that. I'm being ironic. I know. Okay. So yeah, I've, I actually made a blog post on jpd.me about the image quality and put up a sample image that people can zoom in on and take a look at the quality on it. I've got some more tests to do on

it, but yeah, I'm, I'm loving this thing so much, but yeah, it was pricey. Yeah. I'd imagine. Yeah. I also want to do a shout out to handbrake. It's something that I, we almost never talk about, but is going to come into play real quick here because I use it to, you know, to get movies from some people that aren't in the right format. Yeah. It translates from Swedish. It does. It is my

Swedish translator and makes it so you can play it on your Apple TV or your iPhone six with the moving pictures or your iPad. It's well, it also has many, it's a great conversion utility. Yes. It's a, it does video transcoding beautifully and it's free. So yes, you ever need it, go get it. You should just have that on your computer at all times because you will need it at some point. Yes, you will. Especially if you're getting the new Apple TV that arrives today. Yeah. I guess I'm

going to have to upgrade. This looks pretty sweet. Yeah. I'll let you know how it goes. As long as it doesn't turn itself off every 15 minutes, I'm, I'm in my, I've got the latest and greatest like third generation Apple TV. No, I can't watch Netflix for more than 10 minutes without the whole thing rebooting. That doesn't happen to me, but I think you mentioned, well, then again, I think I'm just generation two. I don't even have the third generation.

Okay. Cause everybody I know that has the third generation has the same problem. You can't watch Hulu or Netflix without the whole thing rebooting. Right. All the time. That's that. Yeah. That has not happened to me. I'm excited purely about the remote because the, the Apple TV remote at the two buttons is almost useless and they are basically adding swipe and there's a full interface. And this is, I'm so excited. See, I haven't used that actual remote in so long. I just use my phone. You get

the remote app and try to make a rule about not sitting around and watching TV and having my phone. Oh, well, I mean, if you just have the remote app open that already has swipe. Yeah. But then somebody's texting me or I have to look at Facebook and this is too many distractions. I don't, I refuse to be a millennial. I want to get through an actual program. Okay. So yeah, it looks pretty

nice. Um, and it's, you know, it's got the new TV OS, which is an iOS variant and we'll see how it, see how it goes. I got to, you know, install all my apps when it gets in. Do you, is it ordered? Is it on its way to you as we speak? It's at my house right now. Oh, well, what are we doing this podcast for? Go, go. No, shortly, shortly. All right. Yeah. Let me know next week how it is. And then I shall place my order if it's good. Yeah. And, uh, I want to bring up a Kickstarter project

that's been making the rounds called the G row revolutionary carry on luggage. Now. Yeah. I looked at this. I normally wouldn't have brought this up, but, uh, the guy who's doing it, Ken Hertz, uh, friend of a friend. So I wanted to give him a, give him a shout out. I mean, they're, they're kicking ass with it as they're over a million bucks. Yes. They're doing very, very well. This is, uh, above and beyond what I would ever, ever need, but I could see this be for people

that are like traveling, like, and, and super, super techie guys that travel. This is pretty awesome. Built in charging station in your luggage. Oh, come on. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, again, like I said, above and beyond what I would ever need, but, uh, and yeah, but it's pretty cool.

They built a lot of stuff into it. Uh, I can't wait to see how security at airports will react to this, but we'll see what happens. I don't think it'd be a problem. I mean, I do like the bigger wheels on it and the lower center of gravity. So it's like just easier to roll over everything because I've got like an old Eddie Bauer right now with these little tiny wheels that falls over. If you just breathe on it wrong. Oh man. If you have not bought a new piece of luggage in the last five years, the technology improvement on things is stunning. The wheels,

everything, the weight, it's unbelievable. Yeah. It's time to, it's, I think it's time to upgrade once I try and pay off this damn camera. Okay. Once you pay off the camera, new suitcases. And a friend of the show, John Chevron who always sends us cool WordPress stuff. I should put this in security, but it is software. So, and speaking of auditing and security, uh, the WP security audit log plugin, it's a complete audit log for everything that goes on in WordPress. I'm going to give it a

shot this week because I've been looking for one of these that's actually decent. Yeah. I've, I've, I've messed around with similar types of things in the past and I found them just to be generating way more information than I need or not enough information. So again, let me know how this works. Yeah, we'll do. Cause yeah, the ones that I've tried, not enough information. It's like, I need to know who edited, edited a post, who uploaded that picture at like three 30 in the morning, you know? Yeah, exactly. I run, uh, well, I'm, I'm not so much running big sites anymore,

but when I was running sites that had, you know, like 15 authors, three admins and four editors, it's really nice to know who's doing what. Very true. And you can blame the right person. Exactly. I need to know who to bitch at. Exactly. Uh, I don't have a software or an app or a gadget.

What I do have is a Twitter, uh, Twitter feed. It's called a, the scene stir. And if you're old like me, uh, but you still like to go to a lot of shows, what this, uh, what this Twitter feed is really good for is they tell you set times for shows in the Los Angeles area. So if you want to go see a band and you only want to see the, the actual headliner, you will know exactly what time they play. So you can show up at 10 PM instead of showing up at seven, eight, 7 PM and having to

buy about $18, $30 beers. That's really nice. This is very useful. Again, you will never, ever, ever be early to a show if you don't want to be. Oh man, the subhumans played yesterday. Damn. It's also good for telling you who's playing because there aren't really good avenues for that anymore.

Yeah, really? This is, this is pretty cool. Yeah. I would, uh, I would say follow if you're in Los Angeles and you like music. I just followed. And I would like to give an anti shout out to, uh, what is generally my favorite audio app, uh, sound studio. It's what I do almost all my work in.

And they decided to do an update for El Capitan like everybody else's completely broke the MP3 export functionality. And I'm on Yosemite. I don't even need to go to El Capitan. Shouldn't have done that upgrade then. I do. I know it's one of the auto updates. I'm like, oh man, maybe it works for me. I mean, cause I've stupidly did go to El Capitan, which then broke some of the other audio things that we use for our podcast, which has been an issue.

Uh, but this will probably actually work for me. We'll see. Yeah. Give it a shot. Give it a shot. The layman coder does not work for El Capitan at all yet. So you can't even do. Yeah. You kind of have to go around the elbow to get to the asshole to get an MP3 out of anything anymore. So.

I guess I'll just wait a little while then. Yeah. Hang off. Hang off. I'll post an update. I wrote them to say, Hey, dudes, what, what, what gives?

Media candy. I saw what I thought was going to be a horrible, horrible movie this week. Hitman agent 47. Sounds horrible. The video game that it's based on was fun. Oh, based on a video game. Strike two.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, it stars Rupert friend, the guy from Homeland. I don't know. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, speaking of which I got to catch up on that. Yeah. I forgot the whole new season started. All right. Yeah. Same here. I'm, I'm, I'm way behind. I see the billboards everywhere and then I get home and I just forget.

I got a funny little story about that. Uh, Carrie Matheson. What's the actress's name? Claire Danes. Yeah. Uh, she must kind of live in the area. Cause, uh, last or it was two weekends ago, something like that. Uh, I was walking along, along the ocean here and she jogged by. And the only reason I knew it was hers. She had that pained Carrie Matheson face because she was running.

I was like, she looks, Oh my God, that is her. Cause it was like that. Everything's going wrong in my life on the show face. Yeah. Yeah. Though that's basically the only expression she has. Yeah. The only one she's got on that show. Yeah. So I do. That's the only reason I recognized her. And I was like, Oh, Hey, it's her. Yeah. She looks like Mr. Limpet. Oh, she's a daughter of. Yeah. Oh, she could reboot the franchise. Daughter of Limpet. Daughter of Limpet. God. I am so excited

though for tomorrow because Ash versus the evil dead is finally going to be out and we can finally stop seeing the, the massive press push for this thing. Or at least I could finally stop hearing about it from everybody that loves this stuff. I know. I'm just so excited. Did you hear Bruce Campbell on Kevin and Bean this week? Uh, no, I haven't listened to Kevin and Bean since I was like 20.

Uh, since I have a seven minute commute now. So I listened to seven, I listened to 14 minutes of Kevin and Bean every day. Oh, so they played the same two offspring songs. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No. So it's coming out tomorrow on stars and it has already been renewed for a second season. Well, all right. Good for, good for all you Bruce Campbell fans. Absolutely. I'm very excited to hear about it endlessly for the next two years. Well, you got to watch it, dude. I just never got into it. Get into it. All right. Should I do Dr. Who first or this? Fuck Dr. Who.

Oh, fancy. As a kid who grew up in Anaheim and had a, had an annual pass to Disneyland. Uh, it always has held a special place in my heart. Um, this started to make the rounds. I did not know this existed. Theme Park University as a site, uh, which talks about a lot of the local parks, but more interesting, uh, they are now doing an auction, uh, featuring hundreds of Disneyland artifacts from the

park's 60 year history. Uh, you can buy basically entire, uh, you know, the different carts from space mountain or whatever. You can all sorts of stuff, uh, including the people maker or I mean, people mover. Sorry. That's what we young, horny kids called the ride when we, you know, that was basically, if you asked a friend, a girl, if they wanted to ride the people maker, that meant you were going to go make out. So I would like buying one of those. It's a nostalgia. Yeah. Yeah. Swab it

for DNA first. That's yes. Well, I might find my own. Yeah, I know. Interesting. Anyways, it's really cool. And, uh, if I had the dough in the space, I would probably try to buy some, some of this stuff, but, uh, I do not, but it's interesting to think about it. And the other thing that I ran across this week, which I will not do, but I hope somebody out there does and gets back to us.

It's an optical illusion that makes you see black and white as green and red for up to three now, since I work on the internet in terms of design as well, this is not a good idea for me to do, but I, maybe some police departments could do this. If somebody wants to check it out and report back to us, I work in a visual medium. I cannot do this. I cannot even risk it. Now here's a hack for you.

If this actually works and you could hack into say the TVs and airports, you could mess up with quite a lot of people. Unfortunately, some of those people would, some of those people would be pilots. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's a bad thing. Closing shout outs.

Uh, my closing shout out is to a friend, Jenny Pagliaro. She's a part of roses and cigarettes, a local band. Um, she's also just been a friend for a long time. And unfortunately, uh, we, we are very old. Uh, she is not, she is only 32 and she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. And when you are a struggling singer songwriter slash, uh, you know, bartender, you cannot really afford to fight cancer. So if you want to pay it forward to someone you don't know, but I do, please visit Jenny's

cancer fighting fund link in the show notes. And, uh, if you give her a couple bucks, that would be awesome because when you are fighting cancer, it is very difficult for you to make it into do your bar shifts, uh, because you feel like shit all the time. Yeah, definitely. It looks like she's getting close to her goal. Yeah. She's got a very, very large and very supportive group of friends. So, uh, every little bit helps. So friend of the show, go, go friend her and be nice. Yes. Do it for us. Yes.

Thanks for listening. I am Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Shulmester 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 grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or better yet, tell a friend about the show. Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can

find them on iTunes, Spotify, title and Apple music. If you so choose. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpy old geeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in This episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 134. Give me some sugar, baby.

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