145: The Curse is Real

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, number 145 for January 29th, 2016. I am Jason DeFilippo. And I am a big pile of virus. Oh, lovely. I'm glad we're doing this remote. Yes, I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm on day three of the flu. I don't know how I got it.

It's one of those things like people say that it's good to get out and see people. I call bullshit. Yeah, I was out and about a bit this week and somebody infected me and I've been just sweating in bed for two days straight. Nice. Awesome, right?

Lying in your own juices. Yes, but I have my hot water with lemon and honey, so let's get this done. All right. Well, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The curse is real, Jason. The curse is real. I unfortunately seem to have killed Abe Vigoda.

That is very sad, that website. You know, he had one job. He didn't update it right away. I checked immediately. Yeah, no, yeah. AbeVigoda.com. Yeah, didn't keep up with it. Took him a good 15 to 20 minutes. See, I wonder if he had a Google Alert set or how he was.

I would have. He had to have something. AbeVigoda.com had one job. One job. One job and didn't make it. Yeah, no, sad that he passed and creepy that we seem to be killing people left, right and center. I know. Everybody keeps telling us we have to have a Bieber and Kardashian episode soon.

Yeah, I know. Actually, the only reason I knew he passed is because we got inundated with tweets and emails and posts immediately. I know. Everybody's like, stop it. Stop killing people. Yeah. Well, we'll miss you, Abe. Yeah, definitely. So let's talk about some of the technical issues we've had and just apologize to everybody who had to re-download everything.

Yeah, that hit me too. I have two copies of everything in my iTunes now. Yeah, I don't know how to fix that. I mean, when you do feed switching with all new file names, it's going to happen. Yeah. And it depends on your settings for, you know, what your pod catcher is set for, if it's just set to download the latest episode or however.

But, yeah, we got a lot of downloads. Fortunately, we're not paying for bandwidth. That's true. Yeah, it doesn't cost us anything. Yeah, so PTR, we're transitioning over there. I think we're pretty much done now, right? So there shouldn't be any more issues moving forward except for other random issues. But we're working with them on it, and it should all fall together pretty soon.

Yeah, in due course, once their devs get on it. Yeah. Yeah, so just bear with us, please. And we got some reports or a report of an ad in the middle of the show at some weird point. And I checked, and I couldn't find it. I'm not entirely buying that.

We got that report came from someone who likes to troll us every now and then, particularly after a few drinks. Exactly. Exactly. Ahem. So, yes, there are pre-roll and post-roll ads. Yes. Since we are now a primarily fan-supported show, not an exclusively fan-supported show.

And there will be one or two in the middle, but we will time those so they are not obtrusive and in a section break. Yeah. So bear with us, and I'm sorry about the ads, but we want to make a living doing this, too. Yeah, we really would. So, yeah. We are with the network now, and this is part of what they do, so we're going to see how it goes.

It's the way that podcasting seems to be going, so we're on board with it, and I hope you still like the show. Indeed. It gives us more time to actually try and make a better show. Exactly. Not that you can tell from this episode. Hey, now. We're just getting started here.

I got my K-cup of delicious nothing. It's mud. I don't know why people do these things. I don't know why you have a K-cup. Those are the stupidest things ever. Well, somebody has one here at the office, and it was free. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I'll take free coffee over no coffee.

See, Web 2.0, free as shit. Mm-hmm. Amen to that. So we talk about, you know, the effects of technology on society and us as people, and I found a really good article called What World Are We Building by Dana Boyd, who is a very smart woman.

Mm-hmm. And it's an interesting read to think about what the internet has done, how things have been going, but it really kind of wraps up at the end, thinking about big data. And how we can kind of use it and think two steps ahead. So it, you know, because we haven't really thought a lot about some of the stuff that we've created.

We just kind of made it, you know? Yeah. And it's just, it's a good thought piece, I thought. I enjoyed the article a lot. There was a lot of interesting things in it. Yeah. It's definitely worth a read. Where we're going to go with this, who knows? But big data is a big issue.

We're not thinking about it. People are just, we built these things, and now we've kind of signed off on all these, a very small handful of companies that are collecting all the world's info at once. And we really need to start thinking about what that's going to mean for us in the future. Yeah. What are the ramifications once you have all this data?

And we've been seeing, you know, we've seen all the negative stuff. Let's get to some positive stuff. Yeah, that would be nice. But the next thing I'm going to talk about is definitely not positive. Okay, bring it on. This is a horrible click-baity headline. Nine out of ten Americans are completely wrong about this mind-blowing fact.

What is this mind-blowing fact, Brian? And it's a horrible video, and the music is absolutely awful. But if the facts are correct, it should make your blood boil. I'm not, this is all about income inequality. It's about the assumptions of how bad most Americans think it is, and how that's not even close to the truth of how bad it really, really is.

Did you watch it, Jason? I did. It's basically a video about what our perceptions are of how much money the 1%ers actually have, and then the actual reality of how much the 1%ers actually have, which is all of the monies, it seems. Yes, they have all the monies. It depressed the hell out of me.

It makes me want to vote for Bernie Sanders now. Oh, my goodness. I know. Well, we've got plenty of time still before we have to make any kind of decision. Yeah, yeah, and we're not a political show, really. And we're not a political show, but I urge you to watch this because you will be, I was even surprised at how the actual breakdown is.

See, you're one of the nine out of ten. Apparently, I am. I think the ten out of ten are the people that have all the monies. Okay. So I found going on that theme, you know, we talk about how the middle class is being destroyed and how tough it is to get a job as a programmer sometimes nowadays.

Oh, look at you with your newfound belief that there's no middle class anymore. Well, here's the thing. Um, Disney is basically getting screwed right now because they fired a bunch of people, tech workers, and are replacing them with the, you know, H-1B visa people who just come in and work for cheaper.

And they're having the people who they fired train the new people, which, if you read the rules of an H-1B visa, should be technically impossible because that person obviously could already do the job. Yeah. Yeah, the whole thing kind of stinks.

So they've got a class action lawsuit, I think, in their future. They're trying to get this thing into class action status because two people are definitely suing them and they're just really working on, for everybody else, the other 250 people that got laid off. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I wish this, that kind of thing actually applied to people that weren't out here on H-1Bs because I have many times had to train a successor that didn't know shit.

Yep. That was always fun. So Sprint, who I never, ever use because they sound terrible, they're firing at least 2,500 people. But how could they, why would they be doing that? Because they must be doing so well because all they're doing is offering the cheapest deals out there because obviously they can afford to, right?

Yep. And, well, I guess not. So a lot of it is their customer service people. So. There's customer service? Yeah, seriously. There's customer service with a telco. Hmm. Yeah. Uh, but they're, they're reducing costs by $2.5 billion this year because, uh, apparently people aren't using Sprint.

They're sprinting, they're sprinting away from Sprint. Yes. Well, you know, uh, I don't, again, they, all they're, all they've been doing, every single ad is saying that they're going to save everybody tons of money. So I guess they're not making any money and they're firing people and they're still, uh, okay, whatever. I, you know, I, I just sit here and go, I thought I understood how business works.

And then I was like, well, I guess I'm wrong because look at all these places. But then the headlines come out and go, Hmm, I was right. Interesting. Oh man. Well, the, fortunately all these people that just got laid off or fired, uh, they can spend their time practicing their mindfulness now because science shows us how it can transform your life.

Uh, I found this article in ink on ink.com. And the interesting thing about it is there's really, uh, well, now there's no more article because, uh, I apparently looked at it too many times and now it won't let me see it. Oh, you're limited to the amount of times you can see it. Yeah, apparently so.

Anyway, well, if you haven't gone to ink and you can see the article, it's, uh, it says that there's science that shows it, but there's actually no science in the article. You have to go to other sites. No, no, the article says there are multiple research studies and then links out and then studies and then links out.

And then during one research study and then links out. Uh, but I mean, I really do think that now more than ever, I love that phrase, uh, actually meditation is incredibly important. And mindfulness is incredibly important because we're all so distracted. And I mean, I, you know, I watch people sitting there working and then they grab their phone and the attention span is less than 30 seconds now for most people.

And, and doing a five minute, three minute to start two minutes to start, even if you can handle that meditation just to get you in the practice of actually paying attention to only one thing for more than 15 seconds. People is, is required now. Well, you know, we've talked about Buddhify and other, uh, meditation and mindfulness techniques.

So I'm on board with this, but I just thought it was very funny that, uh, in, in the title that says science shows, and there is actually no science in the article. Well, they head out to other places that have science. Summarize. They could have just summarized. Kind of like we do. Exactly. In the news.

Marvin Minsky, uh, the AI pioneer has died at age 88 and it wasn't my fault. Yeah. We did not mention him. No, we did not. But, uh, I was reading the, the, like a, a bit on the New York times. And he was a pretty fascinating dude.

I didn't really know a lot about him until he, he passed away and he was a really prolific guy for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, he worked along, he was a colleague of, uh, Ray Kurzweil, who we've talked about quite a bit, um, on the show and a bunch of other people. I mean, this is like the little brain trust that really way back in the day got us going.

Yeah. He should have, he should have hung out with Ray a little bit longer and taken all those vitamins that Ray takes and maybe he could have kept him for a little bit longer. You watch Ray. Ray's going to die next week now. Oh shit. We've got to be careful here. We have to use our powers for good. I know. We're just going to have to start bleeping everybody's name. It's going to be a bleep fest.

Yeah. Uh, in related news, a computer has just beaten a human champion at go, which is a game I've never heard of, but apparently it's orders of magnitude more complex than chip. Um, and some people are saying that this is the next step in AI, but to me, this just still seems like it's just incredibly quick algorithmic pattern recognition.

Well, they've got a couple of different AI systems that, that work to make this actually happen because go is a lot more intuitive than chess because there's so many moves. You can't actually pattern out all the moves. That's the whole point. And they thought it was going to take about 10 years for them to come up with the algorithms and the, the horsepower to beat a human at go.

But, uh, no, it did, it did not. No, it got here a little bit faster than we expected. Yeah. Yes, it did. So, uh, in related news to that, life hacker has a nice little interactive chart, uh, created by, I believe, uh, was it not fast company, but, uh, somebody, uh, the McKinsky global Institute, uh, did a interactive model for jobs and probabilities of your job being taken over by, by automation robot workers.

So the study up people again, Pilates, that seems to be the way to go. Well, whoever, I hope that they can automate the creation of these charts and graphs, because this thing is almost unusable. Ah, you took the joke from the first comment. Yes, it is. Yeah, no, this is a horribly done graph.

Uh, if you zoom in a lot, I mean, I find the data super interesting and you can also, uh, just actually link. There's a link off the like hacker article at the very end that links just to the data analysis. I recommend that over the stupid interactive chart. Yeah, it's really kind of tough. Yeah. Uh, one job that is surprising is, uh, Google has revealed that it's got over a thousand people, a thousand people trying to find crappy ads in their system.

Well, they're not doing a very good job. Actually, I haven't gotten a really crappy ad in a long time. I haven't either. Because I haven't got an ad blocker. Exactly. I've not seen an ad in a long time. And, uh, it's, it's interesting how they are using a mix of algorithmic and human to, uh, humans, actually 1000 of them at least to find out where their, uh, their spam ads and their malware crap comes from.

Yeah. Because we've talked about the armies of people who have to look at all the pictures that come through Facebook and look for porn and pull those out. But this is just, you know, I wonder if they, if there's crossover there. Well, I was going to ask, I mean, are these people, are they down the street from me?

Are they, are these U.S. employees from Google? It says it's a global workforce. Oh, interesting. So they have one manager in the U.S. Well, you know, here's the thing about it though. Ads are in every language. That's true. So you need a global workforce to actually patrol these places because, you know, if you're, if you speak Swahili and, you know, you're checking the Swahili ads.

I'm glad you're seeing the good in them, Jason, because I'm just assuming that means it's a 999 foreign workers getting paid next to nothing and one manager. It could be, but I doubt it. Okay. I sincerely doubt it. This is Google. That's true. Oh yeah. They do. They're great. They do no evil. Remember? Oh yes.

No evil. It's actually do no harm. I thought. No, no, don't be evil. See, they got rid of it so long ago that it's already, you know, gone back into the history of time. Also, technically we need to stop calling them Google. They're alphabet. They're R-alphabet. Yeah, that's right.

Yes. I've got two letters for you. VR and porn. Well, porn is traditionally always pushed forward technology. We, we all know this. Mm-hmm. I, I, yeah, I'm not into VR anyways.

And my thought on this is you basically have to have a safe room to watch porn if you're going to get into VR porn. This is true. You do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you need, uh, you need like the, uh, those like wheelie lock things that spin around like they use in Jessica Jones and like everything.

I mean, you gotta, you gotta lock that shit down. Okay. Yeah. I, I, I, it'd be interesting to see once maybe just to see what it's like, but for the most part, I think, you know, it's, I don't know. Yeah.

Look, I, I, I already find it silly. I mean, this is, you and I have been through this so many times, this, this new technology push. Uh, some of them last, some of them don't. The hype surrounding VR right now, uh, if you live here in Southern California, when you listen to KCRW, every other commercial is, you gotta get our cardboard VR viewers so you could watch our immersive performances in our new studio space.

I have no interest in any of this shit. None. I don't care. Um, every post on Facebook, at least from my group of friends, there, people are starting to get involved in it. VR, this VR, that this is going to change the world. Well, I, I'm curious to see how Oculus Rift actually comes off.

Cause I've never, I haven't used one, so I'm not going to poo poo it until I see it, but I'm not going to poo poo it until I see it either. I would, I'd be interested in giving it a shot. I'm not going to start porn. Um, just the same way that I wouldn't go see a 3d porn movie first either. Who wants that? Um, but I mean, it's duck.

I'm interested in giving it a go. Uh, I know I'm not going to be buying one. There's $600. No, thank you. Well, and you need a pretty powerful PC to run one. Yeah. You need a, you need a, you know, a heavy horsepower gaming machine to run that. It's not going to run off that janky old Mac book of yours.

I can tell you that right now. Hell Skype barely runs off this janky old Mac book. True that. True that. Oh man. Do you remember the days of, uh, patent trolls? Oh wait, they're still here. Like yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I found an Ars Technica article that's talking about how, uh, basically this one company has been, it's just, I mean, they're massive patent trolls.

Uh, was it Vernet X? Yes. Well, they always have the dumbest names. Yeah. These guys have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars from, you know, uh, Microsoft and now they're going after Apple. A it's about, uh, they're going for $532 million in damages from Apple.

That's, you know, maybe like 0.01% of Apple's earnings. So I was like about to say Apple won't even notice that being gone, but I hope they don't really. Yeah. It's about, uh, the VPN is a VPN technology. So they're claiming, uh, they own a lot of, uh, patents on VPNs.

They bought a bunch of patents that they never actually did anything with. Um, but Cisco, I got to give, give Cisco some, uh, chutzpah. They stood up to him, took him to court and they won. Awesome. Yeah. Go Cisco. Yeah. Go Cisco. When was the last time you bought anything from Cisco?

Uh, I'd be willing to bet there's probably Cisco chips and a bunch of things I've bought, but I've never, I haven't bought anything branded Cisco in a long time. Yeah. Cause they bought a bunch of, uh, what was the big wireless router company that they bought? The blue boxes that everybody had. Oh God. Uh, I can't remember what they were called.

I used to have one of those too. I don't know anymore, but. Dozens of them. And, uh, yeah, as soon as Apple came out with their extremes, then I got rid of them. But yeah, I guess people must still use those and, you know, enterprise, but yeah, I used to, I haven't bought a Cisco router in so long.

Not, not everybody's Apple. So I'm sure they're doing quite well. Yeah. And not everybody is famous on Twitter. And so the rest of us have to see all the ads. Yeah. This is a weird concept. Yeah. Let's take, let's take the top people and, uh, not bother them with ads, but let all the peons who go and flock to the Kardashians Twitter feeds, let them see all the ads.

But Kim, no, she won't see any ads. It's weird. Uh, I don't know what the hell's going on with Twitter right now. Nobody does. Yeah. It's, uh, they're, they're, yeah, they're rolling out weird tech like this, uh, revolving door over there. In fact, former Twitter product head, Kevin wheel is joining Instagram.

Um, you know, I just, it's not just Twitter though. I just feel like that whole tech space, it's round and round and round they go. Anybody got a good idea? Nobody knows. It's yeah. It's just musical chairs up there. It really is. Except they're all getting paid insanely large amounts of money. Yeah.

Obscene amount of money. Yeah. And they've got nothing. Um, the Atlantic, I generally don't read the Atlantic, but I found a really good article there. I'm a fan called the deadly delay over self-driving cars. Okay. And it's an interesting thought piece about, you know, the longer we wait to roll out self-driving cars, the more people are going to die because it currently at this point, they're already safer than we are.

Yeah. Yeah. So the thought is get them out the door as fast as you can and deal with the consequences later. Because I think what they're a lot of the issues that, and we've actually talked about this problem on the show before is the, do I, you know, when the car has to make a life and death decision, does it kill the one person or does it kill the group of people?

You know? Yeah. It kills the one person. I, yes, in theory. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt the numbers, uh, people, more people die from car accidents than anything else, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but there's just something to be said for free will. Um, there's also something to be said for the fact that there are so many car nuts.

There are more car nuts in this country than gun nuts. And look how it's going, trying to take it, uh, take away people's guns. Uh, when this happens, there's going to be a fucking big battle because people love their cars. Lots and lots and lots of people. They love working on them. They love driving them.

They love their restoring them. This is going to, this is not going to be just a switch. Ooh, now we have self-driving cars. That's that. No, there's going to be fucking battles about this stuff. I don't know if there's going to be battles, but I mean, I just want the option. I would love the option of just getting in my self-driving car and not having to deal with LA traffic.

Yeah. I mean, back and, you know, what are you going to, what are you going to do? Build multiple lines. Like one is for self-driving cars and one is for regular cars. I mean, this is the infrastructure costs alone. Why do you have to, why do you have to change anything? They're self-driving cars. They can drive on the same roads.

They just stay out of the, you know, that's the whole point of them. Well, that would remove half the safety factors. Not necessarily. You still get, you still get. Every bit of statistics in that model involved, there being no self-driven cars out on the roads with them. Well, we'll see.

We'll see how it's going to play out, but I would rather them be on the road now. I still not. No, I totally disagree. Not when it's been proven that you could hang a red sign outside your window and the car is just going to immediately stop. Well, that's the fun part. That's where we get, that's where we get to play.

Yeah, that's not good. So I got to give this guy some, some chutzpah credit here. This guy put up a, an igloo on Airbnb and they deleted it. Good for them. But yeah, for 200 bucks, you could go stay in his igloo. I saw that.

That was very funny. It was very funny. I also saw that there was a news report today that somebody had put up a Netflix and chill apartment. Oh, really? Yes. Wouldn't that just be a no-tell motel? I think so. Yeah. And this year, or I guess last year, was a very, very scary e-commerce earning season for any company that was not named Amazon.

How so? Well, apparently Amazon did very, very well. Etsy, not so much. eBay, not so much. Groupon, not so much. All brick and mortar retailers, not so much. So guess who did really well over the Christmas holidays? One company.

Big old Amazon. Yep. Well, you know, they make it easy. They really do. They really do. I mean, I will have to say, though, that I think it's suffering. It's starting to suffer. I'm an Amazon Prime member. I've started to notice that things are not showing up in the time frame that they're supposed to anymore.

I think with a lot of these things, it's like once you're the leader, you start to slack off a little bit. I'm feeling them slack off. But the reality is, it's still the easiest place to go. It is. It is. There have been a couple of times, yeah, lately where I go and they say, oh, same day delivery, free same day delivery.

And then it shows up four days later. Exactly. I'm dealing with that right now. I'm still waiting for something that's supposed to be here three days ago. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. You know, the infrastructure that is required to deliver all these packages is pretty enormous, especially when like at Christmas, they didn't even have enough UPS trucks.

I saw UPS guys using U-Hauls. They were literally, you know, loading packages from the UPS store into the back of a U-Haul, unless it was a heist. It could have been a heist, but I'm pretty sure that they just ran out of trucks. Yeah, perhaps. I've seen so many Amazon vans around my neighborhood recently.

It's ridiculous. Amazon needs to buy Uber. Hey, now. Yeah. And then they can just put all the packages in the back of the Ubers. And when they're driving by, taking somebody to the airport, they can just drop some packages off. And you can get like a 5% discount on your Uber fare if you can stop and drop some packages off.

Yeah, you can just choose the AMA Uber, which means that you have to stop and drop off a few packages first. There you go. Now, I found something that was really interesting. This company called Workhorse. Okay. Speaking of delivery, they're going after kind of the same thing that Amazon's doing with Amazon Air.

But these guys are doing it with other types of delivery. They have electric trucks. And what they have is a drone that sits on top of the truck. Right. And once it gets close to the delivery, the drone picks up the package, takes it to the house and comes back and recharges on the top of the truck. Okay.

I thought it was pretty cool. A pretty cool idea. It's literally the last mile problem. Yeah. I was about to say they're really only using the drones for the last mile, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of the whole drone thing. Well, you can save a lot of gas if you're still not, you know, how many, how many, depends on how many deliveries a day you make.

So if you can use the drone to cut out like, you know, a couple hundred miles, then that actually would save you some money and save some gas. But the other thing is the trucks are electric, so I guess that doesn't really count, but on the gas problem, but it's a, it's an interesting concept to, to hybridize that.

Right. And those drones are big. Security? Ha! Apparently there's a site out there, crash safari.com, that does exactly what it says.

Okay. iPhone and Mac users should be aware that clicking on the URL will make your Safari browser crash and could even force your device to restart. And that's not the worst part. People are basically passing around this URL in a URL shortener, so you don't really know that that's where you're going.

So it's basically getting rickrolled, except it crashes your entire phone. Okay. That's kind of a dick move. Yeah, pretty much. So it's essentially a JavaScript that calls the HTML5 history API repeatedly in a loop until it overloads your browser's memory. Wow.

Kind of clever. It's kind of clever. That should be addressed in an update, I'd hope so, in the near future. One would assume. Does it crash Chrome? No, apparently it's just Safari. Just Safari. Yeah. Okay. So it's fixable. It's fixable, and I don't use Safari anyways.

Well, I use it on my phone. I use Google on my phone. Ooh, look at you. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, interesting. So we have talked about, well, this is the security segment. We've talked about vehicle security and how it's always been an afterthought. Mm-hmm. Well, the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration are finally getting on board with getting these people in line and to think about security up front and use best practices before releasing the products.

But also, here's the crazy part. They want, this is the government saying, can you guys just deal with the hackers and, like, take their advice when they break something? Fix it? That would be nice. I mean, GM, we talked about that last week, has opened up their please report bugs to us thing.

So, yeah. I mean, cars are computers now, so we need to start treating them like that. Yeah, absolutely. Let's get some antivirus in there. Please, please do not put Norton in my car. Oh, boy. You know you're getting Norton. You get one year free. Great. Can I at least get Kaspersky? You used to get just Sirius for one year.

Now you're going to get Sirius and Norton. Oh, my God. Yeah. How do you uninstall that when you buy? You, basically, you get your car and then you have to, like, uninstall all the adware and all the other crap. Oh, that's going to be fun. Hey, at least we're going to be back in business, Jason. That's true, yeah.

We can start up a new company that will just take care of that for you. Oh, man. So, we were just talking about Amazon. There's an awesome article, unless you're this guy, Eric. It's called Amazon's Customer Service Backdoor. And it is a very good read on how people social engineered their way using Amazon's customer service and a little bit of info about this guy to, you know, just really screw with him.

Yeah. That was not fun. It was an interesting read and quite a nightmare. Yeah. And just the cluelessness of Amazon's customer service is, you know, legendary here. Well, customer service, they're not techies.

And they're not aware of this stuff. And they're just random, very lowly paid people. Yeah. Why are we surprised? Yeah. Well, I didn't say I was surprised. It was just a fun read. All right. No, it's a general social engineering hack, but it was pretty good.

Yeah. And now, the Internet of Things, our favorite thing to pick on. Finally, other people are really getting into making fun of all of the security holes in it. We've talked about the Shodan search engine before, where you can go and search for, you know, vulnerable webcams and, you know, just see what's out there.

Yeah. One of the creepiest sites I've ever seen in my life. Yes. There's a new article on Ars Technica calling, The Internet of Things Security is Hilariously Broken and Getting Worse. Now, one of the things that I found very interesting in this article is that the FTC is actually going against IoT manufacturers for not having best practices in their products.

Good. Yeah. They've even released a report. They actually released it a year ago. And I think we talked about this because it's coming back to me. The FTC report on Internet of Things urges companies to adopt best practices to address consumer privacy and security risks. And they list out some different things that everybody should be doing.

And this is the first one. Build security into devices at the outset rather than as an afterthought in the design process. Derp. Derp. Derp. Yeah. Good times. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? So much like that one Amazon customer had a very bad day, there was an Uber driver that had an extremely bad day.

Oopsies. There was a bug in Uber's code. They basically posted the 1099 information for 2015 to all you Uber drivers in their little dashboard. Unfortunately, every single Uber driver in the U.S. got one particular woman driver in Florida's tax information.

Oops. So instead of getting your own, everybody got hers. Lovely. Oopsies. Oh, man. Speaking of tax information, this comes out of Crookston, Minneapolis, which is, you know, or I'm sorry, not Minneapolis, Minnesota. I mean, this is like a local paper.

And they're running an article on how people are getting scammed from, since it's coming up on tax time. There are people that are calling, like, you know, basically just doing cold calling with a little bit of information, pretending they're from the IRS to get more information. Yeah. Social engineering is a far greater threat than any other cyber stuff that's going on.

Yeah. Here's the takeaway from this. The link will be in the show notes, but the IRS will never call you. No. They will not call. Yeah. I think you've gotten a few phone calls. No, they never call. They mail you. Right.

They give you, they send you official mail, then they take all your money. Okay. And then they mail you again and said, hey, thanks, we got all your money. That's about it. But I've never gotten a phone call from the IRS. So if they do call you, they're a scam. Yeah. In general, if anybody calls you and asks for personal information, don't do it.

Get a phone number. Say you'll call back. Get off. Google the number. Check with other people. Find out real stuff. Don't ever just take a call from someone and pass off your personal information. Yeah, exactly. Comment of the week.

All right. I would like to thank ACOS Polster. I believe I just butchered that for your PayPal donation this week. Also, thinking.fm. And I believe this is probably Sam Harrelson, a new Patreon supporter. Woo-hoo. Thank you. Woo-hoo. We love that.

We have a lot from Twitter. First off, we had Jason M. Bryant, who said, you called the shit poop. Well, yeah, we did. We have to keep at least our titles family friendly. Yeah, even though they get rewritten sometimes by... Yes, that's another new thing from BTR, which apparently when they put us on their homepage, they have their editorial staff retitle our shows for us.

Yes, apparently Internet of Poop was not homepage worthy. Yeah, I guess we'd have to do a little bit better with our titles. At I am the real Evan B. You guys had to go and mention Abe Vigoda, didn't you? This is why we can't have nice things. I agree.

I am the real Evan B. again. So I guess that means there should be a whole segment dedicated to the Kardashians now. Well, hopefully that just did it. We'll see. We'll see. Then I got in trouble. Here we go. So Fizhog roped in... Okay, say his name, Jason. Marcus Seiki. Seiki.

Okay. Yo, check out the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast, brother. They discuss your book and mispronounce your name. That'd be me. And yes, Jason then got into it. Actually, he wrote back, didn't he? Yeah, Marcus wrote back. Marcus wrote back. Many do. I won't hold it against. Thanks for the heads up. Thank you for not holding it against me.

To be fair, I actually read your book. So I've never heard your name pronounced anywhere. Jason listens to it. So he's heard it. So he should have corrected me right away anyways. I thought you were just being funny. No, I don't know how his name is pronounced. I've never heard it in the wild. That actually reminds me, like, it made me think when all this was going on on Twitter, I thought back to like being in sixth grade or something like that.

And I was, you know, like when you're back in your classrooms, you would like do the reading, do around the room reading, like somebody would read page, then you'd switch off to somebody else. And there was some story that we were reading and it was talking about the Grand Prix. Well, I had never heard the word Grand Prix.

My family, my family, German immigrants, we watched soccer. We didn't watch auto racing. And it spelled Grand Prix. So you were. So that's how I read it. And people laughed at me and I felt really bad. So thank you. You made me feel really bad. Tough shit. Tough shit. Anyways, sorry about that, man.

Now I know how to pronounce your name. Okay. And we have this one from iTunes, a five-star rating from Jake French. Great for keeping up with everything geek. Tech, internet, books, and a little of everything else. Thoroughly entertaining. Thank you, Jake. Well, thank you so much, Jake Fresh, because there's no N in there, Jason. Okay.

See, even I screw up. And we got a bunch from grumpyoldgeeks.com as well. This is from Zachary. Hey, guys, just wanted to say I love the show and keep up the good work. I wanted to let you know that your pleading for people to use 1Password does not fall on deaf ears. I have purchased it for both my personal and work computers.

Also, a quick question from months ago. What was the name of the Chrome extension that you guys mentioned to freeze unused tabs from using memory? I can't remember. Let me – I still – hold on two seconds. I think I still – I actually had to uninstall it.

I'll let you know because it did – it just ended up – I think there was a memory leak or something in it because it ended up really slowing down my computer. It was called Tab Suspender, and I did end up having a lot of problems with it, so I actually disabled it. Yes, I have it too, and it is not enabled on mine because there were problems with it, so I would say skip it.

Yeah, I would say skip it as well. Shane writes, you guys need to stop mentioning celebrities who aren't dead yet. We're trying. Yep, and Joe also chimed in with, so I see you took care of Abe Vigoda. You guys are on a roll. And Brian, the curse also extends to water heaters. After listening to your show where Jason's hot water heater broke, I came home from a business trip to find a wet basement and a leaky hot water heater.

Maybe you should spend more time talking about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Keep up the great work. Brian in Atlanta. Well, thanks, Brian, and thanks for being nonpolitical specifically because you took out both sides. Yeah, we appreciate it all. You can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcasts or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG.

And now at blogtalkradio.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpyoldgeeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air. If you have friends, hopefully you do, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review.

They really do help us out, and it'll only take a minute or two. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes, and it'll take you right there. I got a three-way face-off going on this week for my sci-fi books.

Okay. So we can start off with The Coldest War by Ian Tregellis. This one is, you've already reviewed this one, but I just want to reiterate that it was a pretty good book. Yeah, it's a great series, man. I can't wait to get to the book three now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's strong all the way through.

So, great series. Yes, and Written in Fire by Marcus Sakey. Mm-hmm. We talked a little bit about that last week. Finally finished it. Me as well. And, yeah, it's supposed to be the final installment, but it ends on pretty much an open-ended story.

So I don't know about that. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's final either, so you'll have to let us know. Tweet us back with that. Yep. Because I really enjoyed it. It was a great book. So, fantastic, and I would like to hear more. Yep, and the last one of the week is The Annihilation Score, a Laundry Files novel by Charles Strauss.

I did not know. I thought the previous one that I reviewed was the latest one, but this is a completely new one, and it comes from a different perspective. It's from the wife of the main character of all of the other Laundry Files books. Okay. Oh, go ahead. Oh, this is the series that you've been wanting me to read, and I'm definitely going to get on that next, but I've been knocked out with the flu, so I haven't.

Yeah, the Laundry Files series are great, and I'm going to order these in what I thought was the best to the worst this week. Even though they were all great, I have to say the Annihilation Score was the best of the bunch. All right. Because it's a completely new take on it, and it was an amazing book.

Second, I'm going to have to do Written in Fire. And then Ian comes in with The Coldest War at number three. That's pretty much my listing this week, but they're all great. It's a very close race. They're all amazing series, and I can't recommend them enough.

Excellent. And I'd just like to quickly throw out there that the pre-orders are out, and it comes out February 16th, for Brandon Sanderson's next book in the Reckoner series, Calamity. Ooh, great. Just letting you know. I put my pre-order in already. Awesome. Yeah, I'll definitely be getting that one.

And I finally did the math on how many books I've gotten on audible.com since I joined in November of 2002. 881. That's not bad, man. That's not bad at all. Yeah, good job. Software, apps, and gadgets.

You ever heard of this peach thing? No, what is peach? I don't know. It's another one of those things that when I dip into Twitter, everybody talks about for about three days, and then they stop talking about it. Apparently, it was some sort of messaging system, because we don't have enough of them. Oh, yeah. Definitely not.

A chat app created by the founder of Vine, Dom Hoffman. It was a big hit for about 15 minutes, as per usual. There's a nice little link in our show notes to TechCrunch that shows the drop-off chart of usage. And it looks surprisingly like a shark fin. Yeah, it's shark finned already.

So apparently, if you're just coming around to peach, give it up. It's L-O peach. L-O peach. And I saw something that I thought was really interesting, because we all like to complain about our ISPs and unlimited internet and things like that.

There is a company, the Aereo founder, wants to take on ISPs with millimeter wave wireless internet, which was the internet technology that was used by the military. So apparently, you could buy this box called Astari and stick it right outside your window, and they will deliver millimeter wave technology to give you wireless internet access at possibly fast speeds.

Possibly fast? Yeah, who knows? So we'll see if this gets off the ground. I'd imagine that there's – can you just use that space? Who the hell knows? But they're talking about taking this all around the country, so it sounds pretty interesting. Yeah, interesting to see what the speeds are on it, though.

It'll be interesting to see if we hear about it again in the next few months. That's true. That's true, too. This is what I've learned about new tech. Big press release and shark fin on talking about it.

Media candy. Brian, I wanted to believe. I actually have not watched them yet. You have not seen the X-Files yet? I have not. The flu has completely laid me up as of Wednesday, Monday, and Tuesday. I was busy those nights, and I kind of – I wanted to wait until I was of sound mind and body before watching, but I have unfortunately seen many of the reviews, and I hear that it's – we all hope for too much.

I've only seen the first one, and yeah, it's – here's the thing. I just – I think it sucks, but I don't care. That's the silly part because it's really great to see them again. Yeah, I mean, I'm enjoying that as well. So I'm looking forward to seeing them.

I'm glad I've kind of waited. I might wait to see – I might wait to watch three in a row. I might binge them because some of the reviews that I had read said that the first one was horrible, and they got better from there. Okay. Yeah, trust me, it's not hard to get better from the first one. Okay. But they're together, so that's good enough.

What I did end up doing in my stupor on my couch was I finished up Jessica Jones, which was excellent. I loved it, and I can't wait for the next season. And I finally went back after being convinced by Jessica Jones that maybe these gritty Marvel not-really-superhero things are good.

I went back and started to watch Daredevil per your recommendation, and it is better. Yeah, it's pretty damn good, isn't it? It's pretty damn good. Yeah, I want to go back and re-watch the fight sequence in episode two because that thing was epic, and it was just one shot. Actually, it's funny that you mention that because that's the one thing that kind of bugged me about Daredevil.

It's a lot of extended insane fight sequences in the dark, and I understand that there may be – they may be really doing it, and that's amazing, and it's all one big shot. But ever since The Matrix, anything like that to me just feels boring. Okay. They slow down with the fighting.

Okay, good, because I've gotten I think about three episodes in. I feel like 30 minutes of the 45-minute show is just extended fight sequences where everybody's just like, shoot, shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, bat, bat, bat. I'm just like, okay, I get it. We're fighting. Can we move on? It's a little insane.

Yeah, they slow down on that a bit, and it picks up at the end, but it's still – it's a great, great show. Other than the fight sequences, I'm really enjoying it. I also started listening to two new podcasts this week. I just wanted to try something new. The first, Anna Faris is unqualified.

Is she actually unqualified? Yeah, kind of, unfortunately. That's what I heard, too. I mean, she's cute, and she's a nice actress, and she's certainly very pleasant to look at. And the first episode that I listened to, she had her co-star on her show, Allison Janie, who I love from West Wing, et cetera, on.

And listening to Anna Faris and Allison Janie basically fake orgasms was wonderful, I will say. That was enjoyable. But basically, this just becomes a Hollywood little love fest. She has her friends on, and they talk about things. And she's supposed to be providing advice to other people, which is why she says she's unqualified.

And, I mean, she – you know, who knows? Maybe she'll stick with podcasting. Her first podcast sounded about as good as ours did. Yeah, as good as everybody's, you know, who is not a standard radio person. Yeah, and yeah, she's an actress. She used to read other people's lines.

True that. Not creating her own. You know, who knows? Maybe she'll do great, but, I mean, don't quit your day job. And why would you? Your day job makes you tons of money. You're podcasting. You're going to make nothing off of it. And then, finally, we all thought that, you know, we got over the high of J.J. Abrams not fucking up Star Wars.

It was great. Oh, my God, this is just going to be wonderful. And now Dizzy and Synergy have to step in. Harrison Ford will preview Star Wars Land in a not-at-all shameless TV special. Can't wait. So, this is Harrison Ford's goodbye. I don't know what the hell is going to happen.

But Star Wars does not have a good history with TV shows. No, they do not. So, this should be fantastic. Oh, yes, the old Christmas special. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Now, I get to watch TMZ every now and again because it happens to be on in my home sometimes.

You get to? I get to, yes. And there's this rapper, B.O.B., is convinced the world is flat. Right. Yeah. Because I always go to rappers for science news. But Neil deGrasse Tyson showed up on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and pretty much slams him in a fairly humorous little clip.

Okay. I've heard a little bit about this and I've watched some of it. So, it's very funny. It's like a three-minute clip. It's well worth watching. Yeah. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. Moron of the Week. We have many morons this week. We're going to start off with Sean Ludwig, who is a real estate developer from Manhattan, who was looking at 32 years in prison because he drunkenly crashed his car and left his friend to die on the side of the road.

Oh, lovely. Yeah, great guy, but here's what he did. He started Googling some things while he was dealing with bail hearings. Okay. Ten secrets to being a good liar. Percentage of bail jumpers caught. Does Venezuela extradite to the U.S.?

Can I leave on a cruise with an arrest warrant? Five countries with no extradition. Why do fugitives get caught? How do fugitives escape? And seeking citizenship in Venezuela. Nice. No bail for you. Oh. Next Moron of the Week is Wayne Simmons.

You ever hear of him? Nope. He's some, well, I'm not surprised because he's some blowhard that was always on Fox News giving his expert opinions. Okay. But he said he was a CIA officer for umpteen years and turns out he lied. And he's now being, uh, he's being sued, not sued, but they're pressing charges against him, I guess.

So for, yeah, you had me at Fox News to be fair. But, uh, yeah, they don't, they don't vet anyone, do they? No, there's a, uh, there's a good article in Rolling Stone called the rise and fall of a Fox News fraud. And, dear Rolling Stone, stop it with the autoplay.

Yes, please. Um, just because I couldn't resist, uh, this is my TMZ moment and I, I just like to have Kanye West in here anytime I can. Uh, apparently Kanye got in a bit of a Twitter tiff with Wiz Khalifa, who is dating his ex Amber Rose. And then that led to Rose basically saying that, uh, Kanye West, uh, fingered him in the butt and Kanye wants to let you know that he doesn't like a finger in the butt.

You know, I, I, I've seen that whole thing unfold and, uh, yeah, I really didn't ever care to know if Kanye liked a finger up the butt. But, and yeah, and this is why, uh, celebrities could use social media managers. Exactly. Hire us, Kanye. No, I would, no, no, no, no, no, not, not, not, not all the monies in the world.

Exactly. Not all the monies in the world. And then finally, uh, there's an article on money box called craft vodka is on the rise, even though it's basically a silly sham. Um, I did a vodka tasting many, many years ago. I was writing for, um, a magazine and went with my friend, uh, who was also writing for the same.

And we went and did a, a very involved vodka tasting. Okay. And what it basically came down to was unless it's flavored, you cannot tell the fucking difference. Okay. Yeah. Uh, even, even with pop off, it's stuff that tastes like nail polish remover. No, that will hurt you the next day, but in terms of just flavor, no.

Okay. If you do a blind taste test of vodkas, you will not be able to tell the damn difference. All right. Save some money. Get the cheap stuff. Yeah. Don't buy into this bullshit. Hipster, hipster, vodka craft. Shit.

I don't know where I found this, but, uh, since it was snowing out, I, it caught my, caught my eye and it's called de-icing concrete could improve roadway safety and guard against corporate espionage.

Like corporate espionage. I like this. Okay. So these guys have come up with a way to magnetize concrete, which turns, but basically will melt the ice on top of it. Okay. It's, it's interesting. It's an interesting concept, uh, but it also blocks against, you know, uh, radio frequencies in different electromagnetic spectrums, but some of them include the ones used by cell phones.

So, so you know what we could do if we made all the roads out of this, nobody could talk on their phone while they're driving anymore. I don't care about corporate espionage. I want everybody to get off their damn phone. Yeah. That'd be awesome. Cause I don't care how much we, we seem to pile on with the tickets. Everybody I look at is, is talking on the phone while they're driving.

It's insane. Nobody's paying attention to that damn law. Nobody. Nobody. Uh, anyways, great. Let's, let's try that out. Um, if you want to get your HP Lovecraft on and here's something else I've never been sure exactly how to pronounce cause I've never heard anyone say it. Tell me, Jason.

Cthulhu. Cthulhu. There you go. Cover your rooms in Cthulhu, Damask wallpaper and invite madness in. This shit is awesome. I want this in my, I want this in my office. I want it in my house. It is terrifyingly awesome. I totally dig it. I know the wife would say no, but, uh, maybe you can do it, Jason.

And I can come and hang out in the room and we can go insane. Yeah. It took, it took me a second to even see it. Yeah. It's, it's subtle, but it's pretty crazy. It's pretty cool. It definitely go check out that link in the show notes. Yes. And the final thing I found were these awesome kind of like LED mushroom lamps that if you bought quite a few of them, you could make a magical little forest in your house.

Uh, it's by a company called great mushrooming. And of course they're Japanese. So I have no idea how much this would cost to actually get any of these over here, but they're beautiful. There's a link in the show notes. They all look pretty damn amazing. They are pretty cool. Uh, the only thing I don't like about them is the on off switch because it's very big.

It is big. I'd rather that, uh, actually just be controlled through, uh, the internet of things. Ooh, through your smartphone. Siri, turn on my mushrooms. Because worst case scenario, uh, if somebody hacks into my mushrooms, I'm not so concerned.

The web's not dead. Oh no, it's not. I know we're doing internet radio here, but I'm going to talk about a video for a second. This is one of those things where you're going to have to go to the show notes and find the link.

It's called the fallen of world war two. And it's a kind of, you know, an infographic. It's very long, but it is very fascinating. And it compares all of the different casualties in world war two from the different countries, the different timeframes, how it compares to other wars in history.

And it's, it's really kind of sad, but it's very interesting to watch. And they did a really good job with the visualizations. Yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. I was just skating through it a little bit. It's a, it's crazy visualization stuff. It's looks amazing. I think, I think that cold medicine's kicking in.

I know I'm starting to, sorry, everyone. It's been a hell of a day. I thought it was going to be better. Nope. Not so much. Big words are hard. Are you kidding me? Love it.

We've talked on this show about pilot confidential before the cool blog and book that you turned me on to because I have a, you know, fairly decent fear of flying, which I, which I didn't have after I read the book. But now I found this article again in the Atlantic. I don't know why I got all the Atlantic articles this week.

Hey, journalism, man. Journalism. They actually do it. It's called how to not fly an airplane. Yes. Um, and it's a very terrifying read and even I was, wasn't going to read it. And then I, uh, was scrolling through and one of their like pull quotes, you know, that they put in the middle was as soon as we landed, the flight attendant quit.

I'm like, Oh my God. Okay. I got to read this. And it's about, you know, a pilot and co-pilot communication. And when, uh, one person lets the other person just make all the decisions, how bad things can happen. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It was a good read. It's a little scary, but, uh, you know, I, I think you're still okay, Jason.

Well, I'm not flying anywhere for a while. So I'll try and let, let this one, uh, slide out of my brain. Yeah. Good, good, good luck with that. Uh, speaking of letting things slide out of your brain, I, we're not a political show, but Donald Trump is also not a politician. So I think he's fair game, uh, since he's keeping, he continues to get endorsed by insane Christian value people.

I just wanted to point out that if Donald Trump were to win the election, he will be the first sitting U S president that owns a strip club. How's that for Christian values? I want to throw a shout out to the crew of the space shuttle challenger yesterday was, uh, 30 years ago yesterday was when, uh, it blew up.

I was in science class with my teacher. He almost fainted cause we were watching it live. It was, uh, it was a crazy day. Uh, I remembered it as well. I was in my seventh grade science class and, uh, we were actually watching it lives as well. So, uh, it was insane. It was really, really intense. I mean, remember, uh, it's insane now to think that like when, when NASA does launches and stuff, nobody even tunes in anymore.

Back then it was news. We would watch launches live all the time. And then that happened. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Uh, yeah. And I want to give a shout out to my friend Stacy who lost her battle cancer yesterday. Uh, she was easily the happiest, most ridiculous upbeat person I've ever come across in my life.

Um, fuck cancer. Yeah. Sorry, man. It's okay. Well, thanks for listening. We're going to end on a high note. Woo. Okay. Yeah. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo. You can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister.

And you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. And hopefully next week we won't have a repeat of the last couple of weeks. Grumpy Old Geeks is primarily 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 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, and Apple Music. 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 Stuchanski. 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 the episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 145. I'm pretty sure Kanye likes a finger up the butt.

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