148: Give Me Secure iPhone or Give Me Death!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for February 19th, 2016. I am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How's it going, Brian? Are you back from the lovely land of Hawaii? I am back and it sucks. Well, I'm sure. There's nothing good about being back. Of course, especially because you went back to Santa Monica. I don't mind Santa Monica so much. It's nice. I'm near a beach again. It's just I also have to deal with work and crappy contractors who – contractors in the digital and professional realm.

There's crappiest contractors in the fix-your-plumbing realm. Well, we're contractors, so watch out there. You and I actually follow through and respond and don't bail on projects like many other people do. Oh, somebody's having a bad day.

Oh, yeah. It's not the best week. But, hey, here we are. I woke up to a flat tire, which, you know what? All things considered, I'm okay with. That's true. Maybe if you had a Prius. Prius still have tires. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. I do want a little – speaking of cars, I want to do a little follow-up on the Lyft thing last week. Some people may notice that the video that I was talking about is not on the interwebs. Gee, I wonder why that came down. Well, you know what? Since you're so smart, you tell me. I don't know. I'd guess that they probably rectified the situation with you and you didn't want to be a dick.

No. Absolutely not. I've never heard back from Lyft. Their safety division never got back to me, period. Shocking. I didn't follow up with them because I talked to a good friend of mine who kind of said, you know what? There's one problem with you right now going after this guy. You know nothing about him. He knows everything about you.

Oh, so paranoia. No, just common sense. It's just common sense because this guy, you know, obviously an immigrant who was screaming at me in Spanish wearing camos. So who knows where he came from? He could have been in the Guatemalan army for all I know. But the fact is that I don't live alone.

So I have a roommate. We have pets. So it's not just me that I would have to worry about. You know, if it was just me in an apartment, I'd be like, yeah, screw this guy. I'll do whatever I want to do. But it's it's I'd be putting somebody else at risk just because, you know, if I get this guy fired, who knows what he's going to do? OK, so are you are we not following up anymore?

Are we just letting it go for this one? Because here's the deal. I wasn't physically harmed. I was emotionally traumatized. I thought the guy tried to run you over. I'd be following up on this, but I wasn't actually harmed. If he'd hit me, absolutely. We'd be in court right now. Yes, it was it was annoying.

It was obnoxious. He was an asshole. I don't want to really like just go down that rabbit hole for that. So well, I assume you're no longer going to use Lyft. Hell no. OK, fine. I'm sure in two months when you tell me about a Lyft journey you took, I'm going to get mad at you.

The only reason that I didn't the only reason I ever took Lyft in the beginning was because my Uber app broke and now Uber's back and now my car is broken. So I have to use Uber to get to go get my car. OK. All this stuff. But anyway, it's a pain. Mm hmm. But that's why I just it was it's honestly it's just, you know, he knows he knows my home address.

He that's where he was taking me. So he's got that. OK. So I went to Tim Ferriss's live event, which I mentioned last week. Yes. During the live event, he was giving away gift cards for $50 to start up a DonorsChoose account.

OK. I've been a DonorsChoose fan for over. I mean, since they started, I've donated over $10,000 to them. But now I've got this $50 gift card. So what I want to do is give it away to a listener. OK. So we need to come up with a contest on the spot.

Oh, well, that's awesome, Jason. Come on, man. What you thinking, Capon? This is great pod. Let's let's have a big pause while we come up with something. I, I, I, I, I, fuck, I don't know. I think, Brian, that we should do a tagline giveaway.

OK. Or DonorsChoose. And DonorsChoose is a charity that gives basically school supplies to classrooms in need. So if a teacher can't really get the school supplies she wants to actually teach her class because we live in a goddamn third world country now, you can donate to specific classroom needs.

And at the end of the program, the kids send you thank you notes, which is really cool. I've got a stack, like, at least a foot high of all the notes that kids have sent me over the years. And it's really kind of cool. So it's like, I really want to get people into this. But, you know, our tagline's kind of stale.

I think maybe we can use a new one. So the person, the person to send us the best tagline, you can send it to us on, what do we get? Twitter, Facebook, which we never check. The website. The website. Patreon. What else we got? I think that's about it. That's enough.

I think you can get to it. That's enough ways to get in touch with us. Yeah, come up with a cool tagline. We may or may not use it, but definitely the funniest one will probably win because that's the way we roll. And then you'll get a gift card and you can do something really nice. Yeah, we'll mention the winner on the next show. So get us those things by, what, you say, Wednesday?

Yeah, I'd say Wednesday's good. All right. And that would be Wednesday, February 24th. Yeah, the 24th. Awesome. So get on that, people. Indeed. And, you know, we've been talking about the Internet of Things, which we'll talk about a little bit more in here. But there's an awesome article by Bruce Schneier in Forbes.

Did you get a chance to read this? I did. I did. It's called The Internet of Things Will Be the World's Biggest Robot. Yes. By and large, he says it'll be a benign robot, but I just see the Terminator. I know. After all the stuff we talked about, it's really hard to not think that it's going to be terrifyingly bad.

No, you know, this is a very nice best-case scenario. Here's what wonderful world we could have if all this comes together. The problem is, as you and I know, the Internet of Things is certainly not ready for prime time, and there's massive security issues that I don't really see any way to kind of fix.

Yeah. No, they can be fixed. People just got to fix them. We know how well that works. I know. Tell me about it. Yeah. We have additional Grumpy Old Geeks breaking news.

If you use the Grumpy Old Geeks app and prefer to listen to the show that way, you may have noticed it hasn't been working recently. Well, version 2.0 is ready, thanks to a friend of the show, Trent Hamilton. So get on it, upgrade, and you can now listen to the show again via our own Grumpy Old Geeks app, which has a new user interface and an ugly yellow color.

Why do you think it's ugly? I don't know. It just bothered me. I know he grabbed it from the emoticon thingies, but bleh. Well, you know, hey, here's the deal. It works. Yeah, it works. So that's good. And I do like the new user interface.

It's quite nice. So, yeah, get on that. It's a good way to listen to our show. Yeah, he did a bunch of really cool stuff with that little grid that pops up at the beginning, you know, all the animations and everything. That's all, like, algorithmically generated. Woo-hoo. Yeah. We love algorithms. Yeah, Trent's a smart guy.

Yes, he is. And we appreciate the fact that we've never paid him a dime for this. That, too. So if you want to go pay him a dime to build your app, his link will be in the show notes. It's animated.com, but you can't really spell it because he did some kind of web 2.0 shit with it.

He actually put too many vowels in it. Yeah, it's kind of like anal-mated. Okay, so in – see, now, the news this week is kind of sad. Why is that? Stephen Fry has quit Twitter. Oh, no. Oh, no. No Twitter.

You know, I love Stephen Fry a lot. I think he's an amazingly funny guy, but I actually had to stop following him on Twitter because he was so just – just chatty. He's a chatty Cathy. Well, he's a bit like Michael Moore. Like, I couldn't follow him anymore because it was just way too much.

So he has now quit because these comments over a BAFTA controversy, which he called the – what's her name? Was it Jenny Beaven? Jenny Beaven, yes. Jenny Beaven. He called her a bag lady even though she had won the award for best costume designer, which was funny.

Yes, and he also made fun of himself in the same post. He called himself the outrageous misogynist swine. Yeah, this whole thing is – It's Stephen Fry who is very funny and makes jokes. He's a comedian. This is the world we are now living in. This is why John Cleese has now come out and said he refuses to play any universities anymore because everything has just gotten way too politically correct and nobody can take a fucking joke anymore.

Yeah, no, it's ridiculous. And she wasn't offended. So this is the problem I have with Twitter. If the person themselves isn't offended, who the fuck are you to be offended for them? Exactly. Yeah, just shut up and this is why I'm not on Twitter. If a tweet falls on the internet and no one is offended, this is an actual tweet.

Yeah, well, Stephen Fry will come back. This is not the first time he's quit. He will hopefully be back so you can get – well, you don't follow him anyway, so what does it matter? It doesn't matter. I would rather him stop tweeting and actually go and, you know, make good television, which is what he's really good at, or good films or write books. Yeah, write books.

His books are highly enjoyable. Yeah, I do wish that – I mean, unfortunately, this is part of being a creative person now is you have to promote your brand everywhere possible. I would prefer that people focused on actually doing the things that they do that I enjoy. It's like when you watch Real Time with Bill Maher and you know that there's going to be the overtime thing or you – you know, all these poor people that do their wonderful TV shows and then have to actually sit there live when they broadcast and be on Twitter to answer questions.

Who gives a fuck? How about you just make the cool content? Yeah, seriously, go write something new. Exactly. And there's a follow-up on this one from the Harvard Business Review and the reason Twitter is losing active users. Well. There's a gazillion reasons for that.

But this was just an interesting read, I thought, because it's like if we're going to fix Twitter or anything else, we must put people's well-being before our own institutional performance because the former drives the latter. Yeah, it's basically him saying people suck on the internet, so, you know, be excellent to each other, and then Twitter will fix itself.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. No, it's not. I mean, Twitter was tailor-made, unfortunately, for the kind of abuse that we're talking about. I mean, it's even more of a perfect venue for it than comment sections. It's anonymous, and you can tweet to anyone, and it's even, and you can just be a dick. And so, therefore, people are.

And the funny thing is about this, it still drives me nuts that everybody's like, oh, there's bullying on Twitter. Twitter's terrible. People are being, you know, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. Go read a single YouTube comment. You can pick any YouTube comment at random. It is worse than anything I've ever seen on Twitter. That's very true.

And it's one of the reasons that I do like Facebook. I mean, at least Facebook is tying you directly to an identity, and it does cause people to be somewhat slightly better human beings. Slightly. Slightly. You know, it's not great. And speaking of Facebook, I think I mentioned that I was working on an instant, instant, what the hell are they called again?

Instant article project for a publisher, and Facebook has actually now announced that they're ready to open this up to basically every publisher in the world. And this is the instant articles, in case you didn't know, is a bit of craziness that Facebook is doing to basically host all content.

So, yeah, the theory is that they bring it up faster because they're connected to everything and they have better connections than you do. And to increase the Facebook user experience, this is a good thing because as soon as they click on something, it appears really, really fast. The, you know, other idea basically being they get to keep all the – they are owning and publishing the content themselves.

And they have some built-in ad solutions that they would like you to use, obviously. But they are going to open this up to everyone in theory. However, they do not define what a publisher is, which is very important in this day and age because basically everyone is a publisher. So, if I have my own blog, does that mean I get to use instant articles?

Nobody is really answering that question. It seemed like it was leaning in that direction. It does seem that it's leaning in that direction, but there is no actual real response or clarification on that yet. Which will be interesting because if that is the case, then you will be able to publish on Facebook and basically tap into their ad system and basically you could basically just try to start making some revenue.

We could actually post our show notes and put in little Facebook ads if we wanted to, Jason. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, you know how I feel about this kind of thing. I'm like if you don't own the platform that you're publishing on, then you basically give up. Now you got me saying basically every – you said basically like 18 times that last sentence.

Now I'm stuck in it. Whatever. You give up your rights to piss and moan about not making any money if you're giving away your content to somebody else to profit from. Yeah. How does it feel to be a Luddite, Jason? I'm not a Luddite.

I'm just a realist. I'd rather have my own website. The world has moved on. Of course it has. Nobody cares about your personal website. Somebody's got something up their butt today. Anyway, Facebook plans to put ads in Messenger. Speaking of ads and things that people don't like, you don't use Messenger.

Am I correct? Or did you finally give up the ghost and move on? No, I've never not used it. It's just not my preferred method of communication. I feel that Facebook Messenger gets lost in the shuffle a lot of the time. And if it's something that's really important, you probably shouldn't write me that way. And I found that actually people – my messages to people also tends to get lost in the shuffle.

I think it's just one of those third-tier, fourth-tier communication mediums unless it is your primary one. Email is preferable, especially for work-related things. Yeah. No, yeah. If it's work-related and people are sending you stuff on Facebook, that's ridiculous. Well, it happens. I know it does.

It's still ridiculous. And I tell everybody, I'm like, do not do that. Yeah. So I'm okay with Messenger. I think it's fine. I have a couple of friends that that's basically the best way to get a hold of them, which I find weird, but okay. Yeah, I do too. I mean, there are definitely friends who reply faster on Messenger than even a text message or a phone call or a voicemail or an email.

Yeah, actually, a friend of the show, Fergal, who co-hosted with me one time when you weren't available, that's the primary method to get a hold of him. If I text him or send him a Facebook Messenger, he will reply on Messenger way earlier. Yeah. Also, same with friend of the show, Dr. Teeter.

He's like, don't text me. Don't text me, bro. So we're going to have ads in Messenger coming up. And this is for companies who you have voluntarily broken the seal with and written to first. What is that?

You have to write them on Messenger first or do you just have to say like them on Facebook? It seemed like you have to talk to them on Messenger first, like you have to send them. Well, I've never, ever spoken to a company on Messenger, so in theory, this will not affect me. But I am willing to bet this will slide into if you like them on Facebook.

Of course. It's always, it's a slippery slope. Yes, yes, it always is. Or a Criscoed rooftop or whatever the hell you want to call it. Criscoed rooftop. Okay. We're bouncing around a little bit, but this actually fits in a little bit better here. So I'll mention this really quickly. Cosmopolitan editor Joanna Coles recently did an interview where she was asked about publishing to Snapchat since we're talking about sending your content out to other people to own.

And she had a really basically the same attitude that I think most people have right now. Fuck it. If it doesn't work, who cares? We'll at least try it. Yeah, what do I got to lose? Exactly. And what we're increasingly discovering is it's worked for them because the younger generation doesn't give a shit about Twitter, doesn't give a shit about Facebook.

They're all on Snapchat. Yeah. So it is the de facto new social network for at least the millennials. And here's the interesting thing. I've actually checked out the Discover section on Snapchat. It's pretty entertaining. It's not bad. No, it's not.

It's a good... People are putting out some good content and this is an interesting format to do it. And at least they're not following the, you know, basically standard way that other people are using it. They're not drawing words on things like, this is an important story, arrow, arrow, arrow, or anything like that. It's a decent content distribution medium.

So, yeah, no, it's actually kind of fun. And they, now, pardon the pun, they're in poop-sized nuggets. So if you want to sit on the crapper and go through a different channel's stories, you can do it, you know, kind of in one load. None of this is long form or in-depth. It is very straightforward.

Oh, man. Yeah. Moving on. Moving on. Anyways, apparently, the global chip industry is readying itself for a future beyond Moore's Law. Moore's Law, if you're listening to this, you know what the fuck that is. Everybody's been predicting the death of it for a long time now because you can only shrink.

I'm hungry, apparently. Yeah, because physics. That's why Moore's Law will... Yeah, because physics. So they're trying to figure out what's going to be next. And so far, they still think they're going to be able to keep with it, at least for a while. Yeah, we're at 14 nanometers, and they're thinking they can get down to 5. But after 5 is when things get really dicey.

So it's like another 10 or 12 years. That's when we really need to advance the physics before we can do anything else. So we shall see what happens. And Spotify is making an interesting move in terms of advertising. This is particularly in Canada at the moment.

They haven't done it in the U.S. right now. But instead of going with a third-party, you know, internet-based ad solution, they're starting to reach out to local radio people. You mean like what Pandora has done for like a decade? Yep, exactly. Okay. So Spotify is going to try to do that now as well, which we shall see.

I spoke to a friend of the show that is actually deeply involved in the industry, and he said there's no way this is going to work out for them. But we'll see. Yeah, I don't know if you know if it's worked out for Pandora. Well, no, it hasn't. The interesting thing is because since I play Pandora all day long, I do get local advertising because I'm like, I put in my zip code.

I'm like, if I want to listen to an ad, I don't want to listen to an ad from, you know, Sheboygan. I want to hear something locally. Actually, I do enjoy those. I like listening to ads from other places. You hear about like restaurant chains that you've never heard of before. It can be kind of fun, but after a while, it gets kind of boring. But like I know every car dealership within a like 50 mile radius who's having a President's Day sale this week.

I know all the furniture stores that are having sales. It's, you know, if you got to listen to it, because the downside with Pandora is if you sign up for, if you pay them money to get their high quality, no advertising stream, does not work with the Sonos.

Absolutely does not work with the Sonos because the Sonos can't handle the high quality stream. So I wasted money. I gave them money for no ads, but I can only play the ad version. Oh, well, how's that? I don't know. But in this article, my favorite part was this guy, Les Hollander.

He's got a very bizarre job title. Global Head of Audio Monetization. You work for Spotify. I think you can probably drop the audio out of your job title. Well, you know, no, they might want to move into video too. Maybe they're going to sell t-shirts.

Maybe. Oh, man. And I saw this one this morning, which just kind of, it's a head scratcher. I haven't followed up that much yet. So, you know, your mileage may vary on this, but Hillary Clinton's top donor just bought the onion and started publishing Hillary specific propaganda immediately.

Yeah, this is from the freethoughtproject.com. So take it with a grain of salt. Your mileage may vary on this one. This could be total bullshit, but I just haven't had time to do the due diligence on it. Well, to be fair, I do tend to look at the onion every single day. And as far as I can tell, there's an even distribution of who they're shitting on still.

Okay, good. Pew. I don't worry about it too much.

Security? Now, the big brouhaha this week is finally Apple has laid down the law and they're saying no to the U.S. government who's saying you're going to build a backdoor. And they're saying, nope, nope, nope.

No, we are not. So we'll see what happens with this. This will be the big deal. It's the final battle, as it were. I don't know if it's the final battle, but it's actually the start. Well, it's the first shot. How's that? Yeah, this is the start of the war. Tim Cook's letter to the customers of Apple laying out the case for why they're not going to do this for the government.

It's compelling. It makes sense. And we obviously agree with it. Oh, yeah, definitely. 100%. No, we cannot allow this to happen. If this happens, forget it. Game over. Even Congressman Ted Lieu, who is one of the very few people in government with a computer science degree.

Or any understanding whatsoever. Has also come out and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. Everybody knows this is a bad idea, except law enforcement, who are just like, we don't care. We want it. Give it to us. Yes. And, I mean, what's the law that they're coming up with?

Something from like the 1700s? Something like that, which is ridiculous. I mean, yeah, this is the first shot in the war. This is going to be a very, very big deal. So we're going to have to follow this one very closely. This could be very bad. No, yeah. Yeah. So we will see.

We'll see what happens. But, you know, thankfully for the government, they have John McAfee working for them, apparently. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, he's offering to help. He is offering to help. He says, yeah, man, I'll decrypt that phone. Give me three months. I'll take it.

Was it three months or three weeks? It was either something. But it's going to take time because you have to kind of very slowly brute force it because the phone is set to delete on 10, you know, 10 attempts. Yep. So you have to do 10 attempts, turn it off, turn it back on, or nine attempts, turn it off, turn it back on, nine more, turn it off, turn it back on.

Yes. And we've actually covered systems that they've made. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know why they're not just using that. I'm not sure why they're not using that either. It's, oh, by the way, the 1789, it was the All Ritz Act is the specific thing that they're trying to use to place a backdoor.

What I particularly like about the letter that he wrote is he will, he says, we will primarily use social engineering. Unfortunately, the people that the phone is from are dead. So I'm not sure what he's going to be doing there. And the final sentence of his letter that he wrote to the FBI, if you doubt my credentials, Google cybersecurity legend and see whose name is the only name that appears in the first 10 results out of more than a quarter of a million.

I love this guy. No, he's got, he's got, he's got cojones. He's not going to be president, but. No, no, no. And the winner of the most brilliant article written about this entire thing, link is in our show notes. BFNN.co.uk. The FBI asked you to how they managed to get into everyone's iPhone.

So now, if you really want to figure out a way to hack into an iPhone, I guess you would ask you to. Oh, that's great. Now, I see if not the onion posted that, then I wouldn't be worried that they were going away. But that's, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's very funny. Good side. Oh, man.

So moving on with real security. No, not really. So, um, Internet of Things. Yeah. So we, as we keep saying, we're going to, we're just going to pound this into everybody every week and maybe they'll take note or not.

Who knows? Um, yes. Uh, U S intelligence chief says we might use the Internet of Things to spy on you. I think the only thing wrong with this title, this comes from the guardian is the use of the word might. Yeah. Might is a, an interesting addition there. I suppose that was to keep them out of trouble.

Yes, it will be, we will use the Internet of Things to spy on you. Yeah. You don't, you don't need to worry about any cracking into an iPhone with the Internet of Things. You can just walk right in. Obviously, because we already know about the security systems where you can turn them off and walk in and break a window, come in the house and be gone.

And the security system doesn't know the difference. Um, there's all sorts of problems with this and it's funny, I just had to get a new TV and it was difficult finding a non-smart, decent sized TV nowadays. Uh, there aren't many out there. No. Yes.

No, I do not want Wi-Fi or even an Ethernet port in my TV. Well, that's your, yeah. Good luck. I got one. I got, I got it. It actually turned out to be, you know, it was like 270 bucks for a 40 inch Samsung, like an older one. Right. But yeah, it's an older one.

All the new ones come with all that. Yeah. It's going to get harder and harder and harder. So buy a lot of electrical tape to cover all those little cameras. Uh, I have a relatively new Samsung. It does not have a camera. I will not get a camera in my TV ever. Um, and I was able to shut off the listening features.

I don't talk to any of my remotes. I don't talk to my TV. I don't talk to anything. I have nothing that is listening to me all the time. So I suggest you turn all that shit off. You know what I think Samsung just released another notice saying, uh, don't talk about your personal private information in front of our TVs.

This is so insane because remember the old days when this is what we were trying to build. I mean, it's like we wanted cameras everywhere. We wanted all this stuff. We wanted voice recognition. That was like a, the Holy grail getting decent voice recognition. Yeah. And it just even just mo blogging.

Remember mo blogging on my, I had it on my sidekick. I wrote Pearl script so I could take pictures and everything would be connected. And I had webcams when people could watch me coding up, you know, movie websites. I thought it was cool. And now it's just creepy. It's so, it sucks. Yeah. Now we're scared of, of who's getting that information and what they're doing with it.

So thank you, Mr. Snowden ruined it for everyone. Yeah. Uh, so let's talk about, uh, our government's, uh, trying to repair cybersecurity. Uh, I know Obama laid out a budget proposal for 2017, which include the snap, the cybersecurity national action plan.

Uh, yeah. Um, well it's, you know, it's, it begins with the, it's CNAP. Yeah. So I'm like, okay. Yeah. Knap, uh, or, you know, nap just thinking it's cause they're napping on the job. Yeah. It's a $3.1 billion fund, uh, that will be administered by a chief information security officer for the country who absolutely has zero power to do anything.

Yeah. That's part of the big problem. Um, there's a lot of talk about this. There's a link in the show notes to an article, uh, off of slate that gets into some of the nitty gritty details about what they're doing and some of the problems with it. Uh, you know, at the end of the day, we don't even know if this is a this is going to come to be because another president will basically either change it or remove it.

So we'll see. Yeah, no, it's, this is, it's one of those lame duck things where he's like trying to do something. I mean, he probably means well, but it's a day late and a dollar short on that one. Totally. Yeah. Oh, and we did have a hack of the week. We need some sort of sound effect for that.

Uh, the Hollywood Presbyterian hospital, uh, got a ransomware attack and, uh, they were basically told that, uh, if you don't give us a $3.4 million in bitcoins, uh, we're going to destroy your computers and all your information. Okay. And so this is the first time I believe that a hospital has been, uh, at least, uh, Oh, that you know of.

That we know of. Uh, and then, uh, the followup is they paid them off, but only with $1,700 in Bitcoin. $17,000. $17,000 in Bitcoin. So significantly less money, but, uh, as sad that they did pay them off. Um, that's unfortunate, but no, I'm glad the hackers are open to negotiation.

Well, that's true, I suppose, but I love the fact that the, uh, that they basically came out with a statement saying that patient care has not been compromised in any way. Nope, not the care, just your information. Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it, it was basically, uh, what, what kind of attack was this?

Uh, ransomware. Okay. So they didn't, I mean, they got in, but all they did was actually just encrypt everything and then they couldn't get to it. Yeah. Granted they could have stolen it, but. Well, they probably did. I mean, come on, you don't just go in there and not take it. Well, I actually, a lot of these people do because it's just a botnet that's set up to automatically go in on, try and get into any system that it can get into and just encrypt it with the ransomware because it's, it's headless.

It's just running. So they're not like, you know, pulling everything back. It's just like, okay, oh, look, I got into a system. It's encrypted. Send me the money. That's it. Send me the money. Send me the money. Send me the money. Twitter password recovery bug exposes data of 10,000 users reports as ED net.

Luckily they were all just bots. Seriously. If you do, if you do the math on 10,000 users out of all of Twitter users, the chance that there's like one human in that 10,000 is extremely low. Yeah. And that human still has an egg for the icon. Yep.

I mean, I have over 20 Twitter accounts, but Jesus. Yeah. Well, you know, I know it's you. Well, it's like domains. You just get it to get it and keep it. And then that's it. Yep. There you go. I think I have most of the cast of Atlas Shrugged. Wow.

How's that turning out for you? I just have them. They're funny. People still tweet at me. Like I have Midas Mulligan. People tweet at me. I'm like, okay, that's funny. That is pretty funny. Actually. Oh man. And in lighter news, husband learns his wife is pregnant from her Fitbit data. Oh, okay.

This was funny. I mean, come on. You got to admit this was funny. Like her heart rate had been going up and up and, you know, was staying above a certain threshold and he was, he just posted up to, I believe it was Reddit. Yeah. To Reddit. And they said, uh, maybe, maybe she's pregnant. Turns out. Yep. A fellow Reddit user.

This is unpleasant, which is a great username. Not as good as, not as good as penis from last week. No, not as good as penis. Uh, yeah. Actually that's, that's quite funny. Uh, so most of the world, or at least most of Reddit knew that, uh, this woman was pregnant before she did. Yes. And now she has an Instagram handle called baby Fitbit.

Oh Jesus. I sense her being in an ad soon. Uh huh. We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors.

Comment of the week. Uh, big thanks to Marco Masenzio for his $5 pledge on Patreon. Thank you very much for supporting us on Patreon, our preferred method of support. Thank you very much, Mr. Masenzio. Masenzio.

We got an iTunes review from Boston Yankee. And this is, this is a little bit of a long one, but it's pretty good. Are you worthy of the grumps? Take this simple five question test. Give yourself one point for each yes. One, are you interested in technology, sci-fi, music, or basically anything interesting?

Two, are you a geek or grumpy? Three, do you suspect that while surely there must be good in the world, quote unquote, they are probably out there. Number four, do you enjoy learning about new technology trends? And finally, number five, do you already guess that you are not worthy?

Because the answer to all interweb machine questions are no. Score yourself. Zero to two points. You are likely running IE5 on Windows 95. Please go back to playing Minesweeper. Three to four points. There's hope for you yet. Subscribe now before it's too late.

Five points. Welcome, fellow grump. You're still not worthy. Oh, that's genius. Thank you. That's one of the greatest comments we've ever gotten. I love it. Thank you, Boston Yankee. Yes, thank you, Boston Yankee. And judging from your name, I have a guess that you might be a friend of mine. So I will find out when I go to the bar next time if this is who I think it is.

But thank you very much. Buy him a drink if he or she. This definitely gets a pint. Five star, another five star for review from MM345678. I hope your password is better than your username. Me too. Great podcast. Got totally hooked after just one episode.

You guys are really funny and mostly right on most things internet. Enjoying the show greatly. Good stuff. Thank you, MM345678. And mostly, you know, hey man, mostly is better than most people. So. Yes. And we would mostly recommend that you probably use one password. Because I'm guessing that it might be admin12345.

You can find us on Twitter at GOG podcast or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpy oldgeeks.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, 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 only take a minute or two.

Go to grumpy oldgeeks.com slash iTunes. It'll take you right there. I got to spend a lot of time reading in Hawaii. It was wonderful. So I've got, I finished two books.

I finished Glass House by Charles Strauss because I haven't started the library files yet. And there was a request via the interwebs. The laundry files, not the library files. Sorry. It's at the library. I got confused. And I really, really enjoyed it. Glass House was fantastic. It was a pretty hard sci-fi, but a really intriguing premise.

Definitely worth a read. Great book. Cool. I will definitely be picking it up. Yeah. I don't want to talk too much about it because that'd be massive spoilers, but it was a really good, really good hard sci-fi that made you think a lot about the near current situation and near future.

So really good. And then finally, I also read Calamity, the last of the record series by Brandon Sanderson, which just came out and I got the, I pre-ordered it. So it just magically appeared in my Kindle app and I was very pleased about that. Good end of the series. Oh, good.

Okay. Phew. Yeah. It's on my list for next week, but yeah, I definitely, I was worried. No, it was, it was fine. I mean, like I've said about his books all along, they're a bit easier. They're, they're not terribly challenging and you kind of, they're, they're a bit young adulty, but it's, they're comic book.

I mean, that's, they're comic book stories basically. So, you know, going from Glass House by, by Strauss to Calamity by Sanderson was a bit jarring. Uh, but I, I got into the flow again immediately just because I enjoyed the story so much. I really do like it.

Um, it, it somewhat predictable ending, but it was a fun journey to get there. Okay. I'll definitely check it out for next week. I am looking forward to it. I've been trying to, pardon me, enjoy this last Ian Tregellis novel. I cannot get into it. I have, I have put it down three times so far.

I've gotten into it and I'm just like, oh no, it's not, it's not engaging me. So I'm going to have to like take a break and wait for the mood to hit. But yeah, I'm just like not really digging it. So I got the three body problem by, I don't know how to say this person's name.

I'm saying chicks in Lou. Uh, very close enough. Six in Lou. I'm saying chicks in Lou. Um, this is a, you know, it's a famous Chinese sci-fi book that's going around right now. Everybody's talking about it. Uh, the Adam Savage show is going to do a spoiler cast on it next week. So I figured I'd been, might as well grab it to give me something to get away from the Tregellis thing.

Um, I don't know. I don't know. The jury's out. I still have about, um, 5% to go for the big reveal at the end. Right. But for the most part, I wasn't that impressed with it. I mean, it's interesting. It's, it's very physics based, which is kind of cool, but for the most part, it wasn't super well-written.

Well, um, it wasn't a translation, which is a problem. That's especially for science fiction that can often be problematic. Well, I mean, look at 10Q84. Was it 10Q84? Um, Murakami. And that, the, you know, the flowery language definitely kind of was transported into English very well, even though I didn't really care for the story that much because it was weird.

But he's well known for having an amazingly excellent translator. Like, yeah, his translator is beyond ridiculous. And everybody kind of agrees with that, especially people that read and speak both languages that have read both. So, um, that's, yeah, this is going to be an issue.

So, um, I'm actually going to listen to the spoiler cast, uh, first to decide if I want to go back and read this. Okay. Um, I'm, I'm, I'm going to pass on the next article that I had, which is kind of, it's life, uh, imitating art. Um, but we'll wait for, uh, another week.

And then after you've had a chance to figure out if you're going to read it or not, then we'll talk about the, uh, the link. All right. Throw that in the hopper. I'm going to throw it in the hopper, but yeah, at this point, I'm not really, I'm not going to recommend it. Okay. Uh, yeah, uh, I actually just, uh, got the first of the, uh, the laundry files.

So I'm reading that at the moment anyways. So, uh, I will make my decision after I finished the first one. Awesome. All right. Until next week. Until next week. Software, apps, and gadgets. Now we talk about one password a lot on this show.

We might've mentioned it once or twice. Once or twice. I really wish we had some way to get some money for that. Well, why would they pay us? We talk about it all the time for free. Exactly. They're listening to the show, laughing their asses off. I know. I know. Well, now they recently introduced one password for teams, um, which we, it's, it's in beta.

We're trying to get into it for, uh, my work, but now they've got one password for families. Okay. So, uh, if you have a family, then go get one password for it. Oh yeah. So you can share your personal passwords with your entire family. Which is, you know, sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing.

But if you, uh, I think it'd be great if you had a kid, especially a teenage, uh, and you wanted to make sure that you kept access to everything. So, yeah. Well, I, I think about the other side. If you get hit by a bus or the beer truck problem, you know, right. Right. Driving to work, you get killed by a beer truck and then your wife can't figure out how to get into your mutual funds.

And then they lose the house and the kid ends up on the street. Uh, you know, I just going down the progression there. There's a simple meatware solution to that, which is you write down all the passwords and you put that in your, uh, safe in your house. And have you done that? Yes. Okay. Well, there you go.

Uh, you could print it out probably instead of writing them down. Well, you know me. That's right. You and your Moleskines. Uh, I got really nice pens for Moji and you know. Uh, those Moji pens are awesome. Aren't they? It makes writing a joy. So, uh, remember the thing maker from way back when you were a kid, like way back.

Vaguely. Yeah. You basically put goo into molds and then you've got a, you've got a little squiggly toy out of it and you could kind of, you know, mix and match them and stuff. Well, uh, Mattel is jumping on the 3d printing bad bandwagon and is going to bring them back. All right.

And with a $300 3d printer for kids. That's pretty cool. Actually. It's really cool. Uh, the thing I'm starting to think of, well, go ahead. Cause I have a second story that leads into this and my thoughts. Okay. No, I just watched the video on this.

It's on fortune and it looks pretty cool. They're going to have, you know, like, cause there's thing verse out there now for people with 3d printers to go just get CAD files, throw them into their, their maker bot or whatever and make, make gadgets. So they're going to kind of do the same thing with toys, which is kind of cool.

It is kind of cool. Um, do you remember being a kid though? Um, did anything that your parents ever got you ever cost $300? Um, well, they didn't buy me the drum set I wanted, right? They, uh, uh, the millennium Falcon was $79 and that was probably the biggest toy I ever got.

I think it was about 79 bucks. Yeah. Yep. Yep. But, uh, not $299. Hey, but adjusted for inflation. I think that millennium Falcon would be like 1200 bucks. This is around now. It's possible. Uh, so there's another little, little toy that's out for kids. That's rather pricey. This, uh, this is at $500. Um, and I love the headline off of this is, uh, from Gizmodo rich kids and tiny Tesla model S ride ons will now be looking down on YouTube.

Yeah. So yeah, there's a little Tesla model for kids, uh, cost 500 bucks. Uh, this might be the only Tesla I could ever own. So I'm going to get it for myself. Unfortunately, the, uh, can only support drivers up to 81 pounds. So I'm really going to have to drop some weight. You will. You need to get like four of them.

One for each leg. Two for each leg. Oh, you know, one for each butt cheek and one for each leg. Uh, in the picture of the, the grownup Tesla with the cover on it next to the little baby Tesla with the cover on it is kind of like, Oh man.

Yeah. It's a bit. Okay. But you know, Hey, there's kids that drive around my neighborhood. That have little beat little beamers and stuff. But I think those are like, you know, 150 bucks, not 500, not 500. So they're going to be using Tesla technology in these. You can charge it up to the same really expensive thing that you haven't installed in your house yet.

And, but I mean, I'm looking at it. It's like, yeah, you've got the same little port. You've got the same, you got replaceable batteries in it. I mean, it's kind of cool. It is kind of cool. Yeah. I just wouldn't get it. I never would have gotten anything like that from my parents. No. Okay. So a friend of the show, Dr. Teeter sent me a note about a Patreon and their emails, how they're putting in tracking in their emails.

Yeah. There's beacons in the emails apparently. Yeah. So I talked to him on the phone and I'm like, how did you figure this out? He's like, oh, I found a Chrome extension called ugly email. So if you go to Gmail, it puts a little eye icon next to it to let you know that people are spying on you. Right.

And, you know, I, I assumed that this was already there on every email that goes out because I've done it in, you know, pretty much every email platform that I've used. Yeah. And the one thing that I've noticed that we're using this plugin, I tried it and MailChimp is the primary culprit here.

MailChimp does this for just about every newsletter that goes out. So I found a ton of newsletters that I get and they've all got it and they all come from MailChimp. Also, MailChimp owns Tiny Letter. So if you use Tiny Letter and I'm looking at you, Sean Bonner, Mr. talking about that stuff all the time, guess what?

Yours is being tracked too. Yeah. And who knows? I mean, I don't care. I personally don't care about this because it's like, you just want to know open rates. That, yeah. I mean, I was about to say anybody that, uh, any mass mailing, anybody that does any mailings at all whatsoever, this is all for tracking purposes to see who's opening the emails, what links are they clicking on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's just, it's big data and it's not surprising from any marketing perspective. It's no different than Google analytics and everybody's got Google analytics on their website. So, um, yes. And Patreon, but here's the, here's what, uh, Dr. Teeter said that was disconcerting about Patreon is that they don't put it in their terms of service that they're tracking the emails.

Right. So he contacted them and they wrote them back right away and they said, we're going to look into it. Yeah. I mean, they may not have known that MailChimp was doing that, but I don't know why you wouldn't know that, but okay. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Okay. I found another one from Gizmodo optical data storage squeezes 360 terabytes onto a quartz disc or ever.

I saw this as well. And first off the forever should be automatically scratched away from that because probably not, um, never talking absolutes. Yeah. Never talking absolutes. Uh, it couldn't do it for as long as 13.8 billion years, which isn't forever, which is not forever. So therefore wrong. Uh, and the biggest problem of course being, uh, good luck finding something to read it.

Yeah. Because that's always the issue. I still have zip drives around or zip discs around. I couldn't tell you how to find a zip drive anymore. Yeah, no, I, I actually, I had, I threw away a zip drive because the problem with zip drives was they use SCSI. Uh, you good luck finding a machine that has a SCSI port.

You can't even find a fucking Mac that has a USB board anymore. Uh, well, no, I got USB ports. I don't have a CD drive. So CDs are out the window. It's nuts. Um, and this last one, this is, um, I'm going, I'm going to throw it out there and just say exactly what this is.

It's kit, kit.com. Yes. This is Pinterest for nerds, not for women, for nerds. They, uh, you, you make your little kit and you put all your stuff in it. So I've got an everyday carry kit that I made because that's the one that everybody was doing. I've got a books kit with one book in it.

I've got a podcasting kit with all my gear and it's just a way that you can post your stuff up so people can come and take a look at, but it's an easy, for me, it's an easy way to link to like people ask me all the time, what do you podcast with? I'm like, Oh, here's a link. Go to kit.com slash JPD slash podcasting done.

Here's an easy way for me to find out what you have in your house. So then I can social engineering, follow you on everything. And then I can find out when you go on vacation and then I can figure out what your password is to get into your, uh, internet of things enabled, uh, door. And then I can steal the things that you posted on here. Well, the fact that I'm a podcaster, people already know that I've got shit in my house.

Um, uh, I can't, yeah. Okay. But the only reason I'm the only reason I'm actually, I would like to point out Jason that you're actually, uh, posting this content that they now host. So it's, you could have just made a post on your own website about this. Yes, I could have, but this is a new thing.

I'm just trying it out because I need content for the show. The one reason though, that I, I am actually saying that this exists because I normally wouldn't do this. And because most people don't, one of the things, one of the settings in your personal profile is what's your Amazon affiliate ID. I was going to ask that exact question.

Do they, do they grab that or do they allow you to get the, uh, the affiliate links? I get the affiliate. Okay. That's so they're posting it. They're hosting it. And all these big model that I don't know. Yeah. Be either. They're brand new. They're brand new. The only way that they could make revenue is if they actually grabbed the affiliates.

That's what I was, that's what I was assuming too, but you know. Okay. Well, they won't be around in two months. Yeah. They're new. I don't know what the, what the deal, you know what they're probably going to have. They're going to have sponsored kits, you know, so you can go look. Oh yes. Yeah. And maybe a premium level of service that I couldn't possibly tell you what it would be, but yeah.

Yeah. Who, who knows? And this is honestly, these guys didn't, if, if this isn't just two dudes in a, you know, in a bedroom eating Doritos that made this, that's kind of screwed up. Cause this is really easy to make. It's really not that hard, but it's, it's cute.

I mean, they did a good job with it, but it's, it's interest for nerds. They're, you know, keep an eye on them. Yep. Okay. Keep an eye on Jason's stuff.

Media candy. Kanye West. I know this should have been a moron of the week, but it's media candy. He's already been our moron of the week, like three times. I know, but that's why I go keep the tradition going. But anyway, uh, BGR.com.

I guess that's like some kind of music thing you guys talk about. Cause you're a music guy, right? I'm not aware of the site. Oh, you have? No, it seems to be a catch all. It's not just tech entertainment, social lifestyle, business deals, podcast. Oh, well, every time I go here, it's all about music.

Kanye's decision to make life of Pablo, a title exclusive is backfiring spectacularly. Well, he is a, one of the artists that has a stake in it. So this is not surprising. Uh, the, the fact that title is still kind of around is somewhat surprising, but these people have a lot of money to keep the, you know, keep the disc spinning for a while.

It's true. Anyway. Yeah. He's, uh, the most pirated album on the internet right now. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I suppose, I mean, people do say that if you're into that kind of rap and stuff, it's good. Um, I'm not into it. I don't care.

I really just wish society as a whole would stop rewarding people that just managed to get publicity, but okay. Well, I mean, he's been in the news because he's been insane on Twitter. It's a $53 million in debt and give me money. Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. First off, he's actually, it's not debt.

Uh, that's the amount of money that he's invested in his own ventures, which is not debt per se. Um, he still could have an incredibly large amount of personal net worth. Um, the, give me $1 billion on Twitter is probably not the best way to approach it. Um, considering, uh, you know, he's on Facebook.

Yeah. I mean, he owns Facebook, uh, not Twitter. So that was stupid. I mean, he's just an idiot. So, uh, whatever. I'm so sick of him. Here's the, here's the, I mean, here's my, my theory about this, right? He lives with Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner in the same house right now, right?

Yes. This feels so manufactured. It's beyond belief. I don't think that any of this is real. And then you've got the thing with the Puma shoes and the other daughter and all this crap that's going on. This feels so manufactured for just shock value. And just to get people talking, it's ridiculous.

Yeah. I mean, uh, the monetization that the Kardashians and Kanye by, by default now, um, get from just getting attention is ridiculous to me. So he, the album's a loss leader. He knows that he doesn't give a shit. It's all about publicity, which for some reason or other, again, this is something about society.

I just don't understand, uh, leads to people somehow spending money on things that involve him and he makes money. I don't get it. I don't get it. Uh, well, I think he's, I think they're smart. I think they're actually very smart. I don't like it. I don't approve of it, but I think they're fucking smart. Well, yeah, obviously.

I mean, for some reason, somebody that, uh, or a group of people that the majority of human beings on the planet find wretched and horrible and disgusting and a complete waste of time and space, uh, continue to make money hand over fist. So yes, they're obviously smart. It's unfortunate, but there you go.

There you go. Uh, so we talked about daredevil and you finally came around and you liked daredevil. You thought there was just too much Kung Fu. Uh, well you got to admit there was a lot of Kung Fu. Okay. I like Kung Fu. I'm a, you know, I'm a Jackie Chan fan.

Me too. I liked all that stuff prior to the matrix and now it's all just special effects. So well, and quick cuts and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, not, not in daredevil. That's all. I don't know. It was also dark. I couldn't see half the damn stuff. I'll turn your brightness up.

Uh, go, go back and watch episode two. There's no CG in that. And it's all practical and it's one take. So anyways, I enjoyed the show. Yes. So there you go. Um, now we talked about Peewee. Peewee's big holiday. That's coming back to Netflix a couple episodes ago. Um, I watched the trailer.

Yeah. It looks really funny. Yeah. Actually, it looks really funny. Yeah. I'm looking forward to seeing it. So I'm not, I'm not a huge Peewee fan, but that looks really like it's going to be really good. And the crazy part is like Paul Rubin 60 something.

Oh, he doesn't look a day older than he was when he did it the first time around. They have to like grab him by his ankles and dip him in makeup to make him look that good. Probably. Yeah. Uh, yeah, it does look pretty good. Um, another trailer actually just came out as well. Well, this is more of a teaser trailer.

It's not a full on trailer. The absolutely fabulous movie is coming. Um, and I enjoyed the, the brief re-entry into the world and I can't wait for the movie. Yeah. Ab Fab is one of those shows that, like I said, I've never seen. And man, so good, dude. How many seasons were there? Uh, they, I think that, well, typical British sitcom.

Uh, they did three originally, I believe that they came back for another three, like six to seven years later. And then they did a Christmas special another two years after that. It's, you know, it's just like seven episodes of the show total. Uh, yeah, there's not that many, dude. You can catch up in like a weekend.

Okay. Yeah. Cause you know, British TV, it's like, oh, we've done a season. That's three episodes. That's it. Yeah. Pretty much. Um, uh, actually I believe I have the DVDs for all the original. So I'll let you, uh, next time I see you, I'll just give them to you.

Awesome. That'll be great. Cause I have it. I have a Blu-ray player. That will work with my new dumb TV. I'm reasonably sure these aren't Blu-ray. No, that's fine. Um, I found a new documentary that I'm really excited to see. It's called terror. Oh, okay. It's about a guy who was like an, he's an ex black Panther.

Who turned FBI informant and the documentary talks about how these FBI informants are kind of railroading people into these situations that don't exist to basically get paid. And it is interesting because I did a, an episode of the art of charm with Steve Rombaum and we talked about these FBI informants who did exactly this, but they did it with a scam artists and things like that.

And they would get people to be like fraudsters. And now they've changed from fraudsters to terrorists because it gives them, it gives the FBI easy win. So this documentary, it's like, okay, we're going to go on an FBI sting for a terrorist, but we're not going to tell the FBI we're bringing a camera crew. Nice.

It looks really good. The trailer looks really good. It is going to be out. I believe it is on the 22nd, which is Monday on PBS here in the States. So it's won a ton of awards because it came out last year and it's going to be interesting. I'm really looking forward to this.

So I would recommend checking it out and then maybe we can talk about it next week on the show. That means I have to watch it. Okay. Of course. All right. I'm giving you homework. Great. Hey, you're giving me ab fab. I'm giving you terror. I think, I think that kind of sums up our relationship. Pretty much. Yeah. I'd much rather have the ab fab.

It's funny and nice. Speaking of fab. Okay. My old friend. Tell me that was not a good one. Exactly. My buddy, fab Morvan from a Millie Vanilli who now lives in the Netherlands, got a job for KFC in the Netherlands.

Okay. It's a really cool little mini documentary that's tongue in cheek. It's pretty funny. He takes the piss out of himself, which he always does. But it just talks about his journey. It's like two and a half minutes long, but it's on the homepage of KFC.nl. And I don't know how I came across this.

It came across my radar and I'm like, oh my God, fab's still doing stuff. I don't know how to do stuff out in Europe because I knew he moved back, but he's looking good. He can sing his ass off. Don't, don't discount his singing, but it's fun. It's fun. Okay. KFC. Yum. In the Netherlands, no less.

I suppose it's good stoner food. All right. Yeah. You sent me an article during the week about the MLB blackout rules and the class action lawsuit that was just settled, I believe, on Tuesday, where the league reached an agreement to basically stop their crappy blackout stuff if you bought into their MLB packages.

Yeah. This comes from a friend of the show, Jason Bryant, who is a wrestling podcaster, not, not pro wrestling, like pay for the seat. You only need the edge kind of wrestling, but like college wrestling is a good guy. Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, this is an interesting article. It's just pointing to, I believe I did make the prediction that this would be the year of unbundling.

This is the beginning of that to a certain extent. So MLB, if you buy into their package now, they can't screw you on not getting your local team's games. And you can basically buy into just seeing your team's games. There's single team packages now instead of having to pay for the full package, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Very good for the consumer. It makes sense at the MLB level because they're making their money no matter what. The whole thing when this gets to cable, because we've kind of talked a little bit about the finances on that before and that the larger, you know, the networks that get larger ad revenue and share kind of fund the crappier, weirder stations or maybe even not crappier, just more niche stations that don't get that kind of money, which is where unbundling gets dangerous in that realm.

But as far as baseball goes, this makes total sense. They're making money no matter what. And the price difference is not that significant. I mean, $110 for the full package versus just paying $85 for your own team. Come on. Still a lot of money. So that is a step one and story one about the great unbundling that I see happening this year.

The second one is the FCC just voted to break the chains binding you to your cable box, basically meaning that no matter what, you should be able to get a third-party box that will run whatever cable service that you are tied to so you don't have to use the ones that they provide or that they specify anymore.

Interesting. That's actually really interesting. This is really interesting because this means that basically, in theory, I will be able to use my Apple TV and be able to plug cable into it and just use that from now on instead of using any cable box, which then opens up different app situations for broadcast cable.

This could be potentially a massive game changer for what cable is. Yeah, because, you know, right now I'm looking at my cable modem, you know, and up until not too long ago, you had to, you know, rent the modem from them. That was always the thing. I spent a lot of money and bought this cable modem, which actually is faster than the one that they were going to sell me for the same package.

Yeah. And I did the math on it, and I'm like 18 months. So I signed a two-year contract, and I'm actually saving money by buying it myself, and then I own it, and I can take it wherever I go. And it's rated up to 500 megabits. Right. So a two-year contract, 18 months is what the rental would have cost.

You know, if you do the math on these things, it works out better if you just buy it and own it yourself because they do have longer legs than what they're going to sell you. Yes, but the problem being with that is that the cable companies would then often switch up different ways, and then all of a sudden you would find the one that you bought is no longer compatible with their service.

This lawsuit is basically saying you can never fucking do that again. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So everything has to be compatible. You have to be able to use third-party services. And again, like I said, this could potentially be a massive game changer because we are seeing these boxes that we use are becoming smart boxes like Apple TV.

So there's a whole different paradigm that could come into play here. So I'm all for this. I think this is interesting. I wonder if this will maybe resurrect TiVo from the dead. I mean, they're still around. I'm even seeing, you know, there's commercials that they're starting to run again. So I think that they're trying to claw their way back a little bit.

But this would be a big boon for them because, obviously, they've always had a great interface and all that sort of thing. So if that becomes your major set-top box now and that becomes your cable guide and everything like that, that's a great opening for them. No, totally. I mean, I've got DirecTV, and I love DirecTV.

They do the best job, I think, of the interface and all that stuff. But it's still nowhere near as good as a TiVo. TiVo really knocked it out of the park over a decade ago. Yeah, I mean, I had TiVo for a long time. I finally stopped with it because it was silly, and, you know, DVRs were built in, and I was having to rent it from the cable company anyways, just like we were talking about.

But TiVo has always had, by far, the best interface. And I totally miss it. They nail it on that. The problem that they had was the business model, which is the subscription. Yeah, exactly. You always had to pay extra for their subscription just to get your guide. Yeah, I had a lifetime one on my old box, but it wasn't HD.

Yeah, and it transfers with the box. It's not transferable to a new box, which was always a flaw. Yes, exactly. So, you know, there's a chance here for them. But I would, if you're listening, TiVo, do the lifetime subscription. Yeah, just out of the gate. It's a loss leader for you. Come on. Speaking of loss.

Oh, boy. Yes. I got an email this morning from Zane Lamprey, and he's talking about his new show. One sentence killed the show for me. Let's hear it. This show is about travel, adventure, and having fun with my lovely, lovely wife, Mel. Yep.

Yeah, I'm out. These are home movies. I watched a couple of them. They're home movies. Mel is adorable. She's very cute. She's pretty funny, but they're still home movies. There's no story behind this. It's them doing, it's them with a, you know, their iPhones.

Yeah. Doing road trips. Yeah. And I'm really only interested in him and his take on booze. That's always been the thing that I've really liked. And yeah, the, I mean, I get, anyways, no, I'm not going to be watching this. And it's only on YouTube, obviously, because.

Oh, it's on Facebook too. Sweet. Yeah. So I do have one actual podcast recommendation that I found a couple of weeks ago that I've been really loving. It's called the Cyber Wire podcast. If you're into the security stuff that we always talk about, these guys do a daily wrap up and have really good news.

And it's a really good format, really professional, like not, not the crap that like we put out. No, this sounds like it could be on, on, you know, CNN. That's good. I highly recommend it. I will have to take a look. Well, you'd probably want to listen, not look.

Well, you know what I mean. And we'll be right back. But now, a word from our sponsors.

Ooh, fancy! Fancy! Ooh, fancy! As depressed as we always get about technology, particularly when we talk about anything coming out of Silicon Valley, like the latest app that solves a problem that didn't exist. Oh, hey, somebody's going to come pick up my laundry and do it for me.

Great. Dude, no, no, no. They're going to send you quarters so you can go do your own laundry. Oh, I wonder what ever happened to those guys. They closed. No. Big surprise. Yeah, the problem with that, though, is like somebody probably, like the founder probably still is living off the venture capital he got from it, which is, he should be shot dead.

Okay. Anyways, that being the problem, here is the solution. Here is why we like technology and why we got into it in the first place. This is on futurism.com. It is the Duke School of Medicine showing augmented humans technology is changing lives.

You want to feel good about where the world is headed instead of feeling bad like you do after our security segments? Watch this two-minute and 31-second video. No, tear fell up out my eye for some of them. And I knew some of them from before. Some of them have been viral before, like the woman who heard for the first time.

Exactly. Yeah, that one. No, it's definitely, it's a tearjerker because it's so cool, you know? Yeah, and this is what we could be doing with our tech, so. Yeah, but dude, we do not have a prosthetic leg to stand on here because you and I work in entertainment. Come on.

Yeah, I know. I've been trying to get out of that.

The web's not dead. Oh, no, it's not. Back in college, one of my favorite pieces of art was Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, which, of course, I purchased in my freshman year in college and immediately put in a crappy $3 plastic frame and put up in my room.

It's a great piece of artwork, which I totally, you know, destroyed. How did you destroy it? I don't know. It got moved around so many times and then beer was spilled on it. You know, the college stuff. Okay. It's not like I had the original, Jason. This was a print. No, I figured that.

Anyways. You probably got this at, what, Hot Topic? No. It was Spencer's Gifts back then. Spencer's Gifts back then. Yeah. Hot Topic probably carries T-shirts that are made out of this these days. Absolutely. But this is the web's not dead. And somebody has done a very nice annotated and interactive exploration of the artwork.

So you can zero in on the trumpets coming out of people's butts and things of that nature. Fantastic. This is really cool. This is what the web was made for. And it also comes from the Netherlands. We have two Netherlands stories today. That's pretty cool. I'm going to go have some fries with mayonnaise. I was actually watching this this morning and it's really cool.

I didn't know that. I mean, I've seen the piece, obviously, but I didn't know that much about it. So I'm going to go back and watch the whole thing because it is pretty cool. Yeah. It's it's quite it's very well done. It's very cool. And it's a super interesting piece of art, even if you're not particularly into the dark stuff like I am.

Now, I've seen all of the asteroid movies, including the ones with, you know, Bruce Willis, which was God, those movies are horrible. They're great.

Absolutely great. Deep Impact I worked on. And I like Deep Impact. Armageddon is my favorite, though. Hands down my favorite because it is so cheesy. You know, it is the it is kind of air of space. What about Space Cowboys? You know, I didn't get into that one.

I saw I basically caught the end of it. And I'm like, I don't need to go back and watch the beginning of this one. OK, did we run the gamut of all the major asteroid movies that came out around that period of time? That could be those three, I believe. I think I think we're good with that now. OK, but Russia is now wanting to test their ballistic missiles on asteroids.

And after seeing Armageddon and showing what would happen if a nuclear missile actually hit an asteroid and turn it into lots of little asteroids that are still big enough to cause a metric shit ton of damage. This seems like a bad idea. Well, it's good to want things because that's all they said is they want to test improved ballistic missiles on the asteroid.

I'd imagine there's some technological hurdles involved in that, which makes it still just a want, not a going to. I have related news to that, which gives me a little worry. The director of Star Wars Episode 9 wants to shoot at an outer space.

OK, I guess you've seen that OK Go video. Yeah. What is this guy? Nobody told him that wasn't in outer space, though. Colin Trevorrow, who also directed Jurassic World, which also worries me because he will be directing Star Wars Episode 9, basically said, I would like I would want to be able to shoot at an outer space for the movie.

Yeah. OK, good luck with that. Interesting. But, you know, I want a million dollars. There are many things that I want. I would like to take a poop on the moon. Yeah. OK, well, you know, Virgin Galactic has finally finished rebuilding Spaceship Two, so maybe he can get a, you know, a seat on that.

I don't know how he would film in it because it's kind of tiny, but, you know, you never know. Well, I mean, it's got to get the camera out. Yeah, this is not going to happen. There's no way. I mean, was he going to go to the International Space Station in film that this makes no sense.

Yeah, I'm sure they let him up just shoot a movie. And speaking of no sense, I have been I have been bouncing around product hunt dot com. Hmm. Why do you do that to yourself? Oh, my God. It's like comedy. It is. Honestly, I mean, you have to go start hanging out there because this is everything we make fun of.

I know there are so many stupid things on there that it boggles the mind. But they do have a podcast section now. So we're in that. Oh, thanks for putting us in there. Sure thing. If you're on product hunt, feel free to upvote grumpy old geeks on product hunt. But we're going to tear it apart every now and again.

I found a new one called Splend. This is Splenda. Almost without the A. So this could be Splenda for Web 2.0. He dropped a vowel. No, this is an Australian service that says if you're broke and can't afford a car, we're going to rent you a car so then you can pay it back by driving for Uber.

Come on, man. That's great. Jesus Christ. Wasn't Uber trying to do that themselves? They were going to do and then they basically got told by the government, don't you fucking dare. Exactly. They were going to sell you a car that you had to pay back by working for Uber.

By driving for them. Yeah. You know, that's called indentured servitude. And we got rid of that in the 1800s, I'm pretty sure. Wow. Okay. I suppose there are different rules in Australia. I will talk to my friend in Australia about this and see what the fuck is going on.

You get to use the car 24-7 for personal, you know, personal errands, pleasure or leisure. And also to work your ass off to pay it back. If you want a second job, if you have a job, you have to go watch the how it works video because it's basically talking about a guy who's a waiter whose car's busted and he's not making enough money to pay the rent.

And they're like, well, we can help. Jason, your car is broke. Yeah. My car is definitely broke. I should move to Australia. Yeah. You can get your splint, which is using their wonderful, this is a web 2.0 app bullshit template for their website. And you have to watch the video because on all of the driving that they do, they're driving down the middle of the road.

Now I know in Australia, they're supposed to drive on the wrong side of the road. Oh, like pole position style, which is how I thought you would drive when I was seven years old, because that's how you drove on every video game. Yep. Yeah. Now they're driving down the middle of the road and all of them, I'm like, okay, well, maybe they've got some kind of insurance scam going. They just want people to drive down the middle of the road, get in accidents and, oh, and they cover your insurance too.

Well, that's a, that's a, it's a, it's a subtle attempt to get you to crash your splint. So you have to get a second splint to pay off the first splint. How splendid is that? Closing shout outs. Now we've talked about some sad things on the show the past couple of weeks.

And unfortunately we have to keep that ball rolling. I want to have a hearty condolence to really good friend of the show, MXV, who, whose dad lost his fight to cancer yesterday. We're thinking to you, buddy, uh, just be strong. Yeah. Sorry, man. Um, and wow, 2016 is just sucking.

Um, Harper Lee, who passed away this morning, um, and a friend of the show and personal friend of mine, Paul Gordon, uh, who, uh, was a side guy. He played, uh, keyboards and guitar for B 52s, the Goo Goo Dolls, a bunch of other bands. Uh, he passed away yesterday. Very, very young shit, man.

Yeah. Sorry, man. I didn't know you knew him. Yeah. Yeah. He's a pretty good friend of mine. And so, yeah, so that's, that's two personal friends this year. Uh, in addition to the, uh, large amount of, uh, various, uh, celebrities and public figures. Wow. I don't know what the hell's going on this year.

I don't know. Everybody be careful. Yeah, seriously. I'd personally like it if, uh, none of my friends died anymore this year. Just keep living. That would be fantastic. Yeah. And we're not going to name any names because we know we have the power. No names, uh, anymore. Paper. Paper. Yeah.

Um, so on a lighter note, uh, shout out to the Pope. Damn it. Because, uh, the Pope has, uh, said contraception is okay by him for women in Zika countries. So that's a little opening to, uh, go ahead and use a condom because it's 2016. Yeah.

Seriously. So thanks, Pope. Uh, and in the lightest of light notes, uh, I've talked a lot about the band Lush. One of my favorite bands from the nineties, from the shoegazing scene that, uh, talked about how they're coming back and doing a reunion tour. And, uh, like many bands do, but unlike many bands, they've actually wrote a new EP and the very first song and video, uh, from that came out this morning and it's good.

Oh, good. Yes. It's a, there's a collective sigh of relief for me and my friends. That song is actually quite good. So awesome. Yeah. Well done Lush. And I'm looking forward to seeing you, uh, in April. It'll be fantastic. Yeah, no, I really, really like them and I'm glad that you say it's good.

I won't be going to the show, but, uh, I will be listening to the song. Yes. So, uh, yeah, I think we almost kind of came out of the bad news with a happy ending. Yes. On that note, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Showmuster and you can follow me on Twitter at SlenderFungus.

Until next time. Grumbial Geeks is a partially 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 grumpialgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five-star rating 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 Swachanski. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy.

He's also on SoundCloud at grumpialgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpialgeeks.com slash 148. Seriously, people, stop dying. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

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