159: The Text Pistols

Talking to the goddamn microphone. Ain't nothing more important than doing the show right now. I'm trying. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for May 13th, 2016. I am Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are you doing today, Brian? I'm all right. I'm in Mac land. Mac land? Yes, I finally made the complete 100% transition to nothing but a MacBook Pro on which I'm running absolutely everything. It's nice.

Told you. New computers could reboot in about five seconds. Yeah, yeah. The land of SSD is a good place to be. Yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad at all. You know, some minor quibbles and complaints and certainly a lot of money spent on accessories to get things nice and, you know, do that whole I'm just using a laptop as my desktop thing. But overall, not bad. One big complaint still.

But this is not surprising. iTunes. God damn, what a piece of crap. Yeah, it's a pretty big steaming pile of poo. It's horrible. And I'm trying to move my entire library over. And then I got a time capsule and I connected a USB drive to the time capsule that I'm trying to use as my media server.

Oh, that's a yeah, that doesn't really work that well. It's it works. It's just slow on import beyond slow. And then, of course, iTunes just keeps deciding to switch the library back to on the actual computer instead of on the USB drive. And I've had that happen four times now. And I hate iTunes. Yeah, it's not good.

Anyways, now I got that off my chest. So I got a hat tip from Mike Vinicor, friend of the show MXV. And I didn't even notice this. Is he bitching about something about vinyl again? No, no, this is about Facebook, which he bitches about often as well. But turns out they removed the remember me checkbox from login on the home page.

So you have to man like if you're on a like your work computer and when you, you know, quit the browser. Normally, if you uncheck remember me or like don't have that checked when you sign in and when you quit the browser, you get logged out. Right. Yeah. Well, they don't do that anymore. You have to manually log out of every computer you're on.

Oh, that's not good. That's really bad. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't affect me much because sadly, I don't think I ever log out on my home computer. And when I'm out and about, I would never use somebody else's. I just use the app. Right. But some people like, you know, log in from somebody else's computer and don't want to don't want to have that or their work computer, which you shouldn't be doing because you should be working instead of dicking around on Facebook all day.

But still for works. Yeah, that's true. But this is just it's one of those like little small changes that can have drastic repercussions. Like when you're the cleaning people come in at night and use the computer and can log into your Facebook account and do whatever they want to it.

We're worried about the cleaning people getting on our Facebook now or your boss or anybody else. That's a bit more of a or the jerk that sits next to you in the cubicle. Yeah, that is definitely. I think that's what you got to be more worried about. Not Conchita coming in and now don't be racist. OK, when's the last time you saw a white cleaning person in your office?

Never. OK. Oh, man. So that's that's pretty much all I got for follow up from before. But I think it's really interesting that they they made that move because I mean, yes, they want you to be logged in all the time and they want you to be trackable all the time.

And most people are. You know, it's just, again, grumpy old geeks. I miss the days when people would announce when they make changes instead of we have to find it. Wait, wait, wait. Where have you been for the last 15 years? Nobody does that anymore.

I've been on an old PC, apparently. Yes, you have. In the news. Well, it looks like Uber and Lyft did not do well in the land of Austin. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Yes. They have paused, as they call it, operations after their proposal one, which they spent over eight million dollars on. Didn't quite pass muster. Stay strong, Austin. Stay strong. I'm behind you on this.

Yeah, Austin is not asking for a lot. Well, they're asking for fingerprinting and the same things that the taxis have. They also required a physical presence. So Uber had to open an office there. Okay, good. Yeah, because then you have to pay some taxes. Yeah, it comes down to just everybody playing on the same playing field.

Yeah. I mean, this is, again, Austin is not asking for anything egregious or outrageous here. Play by the rules. You know, we'd love to have you in our city. We just want some tax money and we want to make sure that our citizens are somewhat safe. Yeah. There's another article by a guy named Jared Meyer, though, that I read this morning on Forbes.

And it's called, By Losing Uber, Austin is No Longer a Tech Capital. Really? Jared Meyer, you can blow me. First up, the title of this article has absolutely nothing to do with what was in the actual article, which we make fun of that all the time.

But, you know, it's clickbaity headlines. So I read it. And it's an interesting piece on, you know, the other side of the fence saying that, oh, you know, fingerprinting doesn't actually make us that much safer because the databases are off and out of date. But here's the deal. Taxi companies have to do it. So guess what?

Uber and Lyft should have to do it, too. Any other ride-sharing company that comes along. And by the way, just having some self-driven cabbies that actually have some sort of app that directs them not running in your company doesn't change your status as a tech capital. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. It had nothing to do with the actual article itself.

And, you know, this guy is definitely biased because he has a book coming out called Uber Positive, Why Americans Love the Sharing Economy. So, yeah, he's definitely biased on this topic. But I thought it was an interesting read. Yeah. I can't wait to read the book. We'll be talking about that one on this show. So speaking of more ride-sharing news, Apple has invested $1 billion in the Chinese ride-hailing service.

Did he choose him? Cool. Catchy name. Yes. It means, what was it? Chuxing in Chinese means, like, to commute, to travel, something like that. It generally means, give me a Lyft. A bunch of different companies, GM, et cetera, are starting to basically place investments in these various companies that have a foothold in the taxi markets in different cities because eventually they want to replace them with their own autonomous cars.

It's well known that Apple has been working on a car of their own, so this would make sense. They may never even end up in the U.S. market, Apple cars. Well, eventually they probably would, but I could definitely see them taking it and doing a test case in China with their car. And the best way to do that, get involved with one of these ride-hailing services already.

And besides, Apple's got to do something with all that gigantic pile of money they're sitting on. Yeah, they definitely need to start spending some of that. Spread it around. I wish they would spread it around here, though. But, yeah, Diddy Chuxing is, like, way bigger than Uber in China. They're in over 400 cities, and I think Uber's in 50.

Everything's bigger in China. Yes, especially the ride-hailing services. I'm glad he didn't go for the easy joke. I didn't. Okay, so Google is giving something away. They're catching on to the whole Elon Muskification of everything.

So we'll just give you stuff. I particularly only love this because they made a joke out of it. They are releasing software tools for an open source for their language parsing system, and they decided to release it and give it the name Parsi McParseface.

Yeah, they should have just kept it. I know the Bodie McBoatface thing was... Come on! Yeah, for five minutes, but come on. I mean, that joke is already too old. The Bodie McBoatface thing has already left the dock. So the Parsi McParseface is kind of silly. So we can't call this episode Podcast McPodfaceface?

No, we cannot. Veto. I veto that one. But yeah, this is a natural language processor that they're giving preloaded with English, so you can learn how to... Or your machine can learn how to read English. Yeah, it's cool. If I were more into coding and programming, which I'm not because I'm now old, I'd be all over this and checking it out, but I don't care.

No, I would definitely be all over this because it looks kind of neat. But yeah, no more programming. Stop it. Just kind of lazy. And speaking of that, article in the Washington Post that I found fascinating, Jason. We are now... You know, I thought it was bad enough when, like, 90s music and fashion was getting a resurgence.

We've now reached the point where the web design stuff that we did about 10 to 15 years ago is coming back as retro cool. I don't like this one bit. I do not like this. Actually, you know, I feel like we'd be somewhat of a hypocrite if we don't embrace this. First, let me mention what it is. Article in the Washington Post, the hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly and difficult sites, making websites that basically look bad.

Hacker News, Pinboard, Drudge Report, Adult Swim, a bunch of different sites are using this theory called web brutalism, which is the work of one guy. Well, one guy kind of popularized it named Pascal DeVille, or us back in the day, actually. He is an ad agency in Zurich, and he started a site called Brutalist Websites to showcase websites that he thought fit the brutalist aesthetic, marked by a ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy.

So basically a reaction against what we've railed against, which is the uniformity and lameness of current web design standards. Now, there's a big difference between – yes, the uniformity of design has gotten very boring. And I go back to 37 Signals with this.

They pioneered this same look back in the day when they started with Basecamp. Right. And just their – even their sales page has been replicated hand over fist everywhere. But anyway, they started this – that whole trend. And every site did start to look the same. And now you – you know, it's the square spacification.

Yes. There's like six templates out there, and they all look the same. So I do miss the old days when you could have fun with the web. Yeah. But just because you can have fun doesn't mean you need to make it horrifically ugly and not stick to web standards in – you know.

No, I agree. I agree. And some of the sites that they talk about – and I went and looked at his site, Brutalist, or whatever the hell it was called. And a lot of the sites are absolutely horrible. But then I looked at something like – they named Check Adult Swim. I looked at the Adult Swim website. It's interesting, it's colorful, and it's on brand.

It works. It's totally fine, and it's totally on brand. And I don't mind seeing these kind of sites again. Okay. Thank God, I say. It's up to you. Yeah. It just feels like a giant step backwards to me. After all the work we put in, now we're just going backwards.

It could be done well, just like most things. Not done well was a bit of coding on the Pottermore. Website. Because there's a new movie coming out called Fantastic Beasts, I believe. And it's going to involve an American version of Hogwarts University.

They had some JavaScript that some sneaky little kid found that basically stated the four houses in the American version of Hogwarts hidden in some JavaScript for a code that was going to be released in the future. So a little bit of a spoiler came out there from somebody just looking at code.

You know what? Yep. I have been at shops where this has happened before. Oh, me too. This has happened to me before. Yeah. It happens. People get fired over this. People get fired over this, which is somewhat unfair, especially if you've complained about not having decent dev environments in the past.

And especially if you've got like a Harry Potter, where you have a million fans around the world constantly poking and prodding at your site. Yeah. But it's just piss poor coding is what it is. It's not not thinking, you know, people just don't think it's like, oh, but you mean people will actually view source?

Oh, my goodness. You know, this happened with we did a thing for Universal and it was like, who's the big reveal? And the kid that was doing the JavaScript for it put in transformers in the code. And the guy says, oh, look, transformers.

That's what they're going to announce next week. Oh, so every head at Universal calls us and it's just like, excuse me, fire somebody. And half the half the department got let go. Oopsies. Yeah, yeah. Oopsies is right.

So kids, program safe. Obfuscate. Yes. Obfuscate. Here's a story I probably should have put more on of the week. There's a band called Yacht. And, you know, they're hipster and lame and stupid because when they're not even name checked as a Los Angeles band, they are called a Silver Lake band.

Yeah. If you are aware, for those of you not in Los Angeles is the worst, worst hipster part of all of LA. So a band called Yacht just, well, the story begins with. Let's just begin at the beginning. There are two primary members of the band and they are romantic and artistic partners since 2006.

Okay. So they're banging. Yes. And apparently they made a private video that was hacked and leaked online. Or was it? Or was it? First, they said that they're very angry about this and they're doing legal proceedings. They did a Kim Kardashian and said, well, you know, it's out there.

So we're going to try to make some money off this. So we're going to sell it now. So if you guys want to see it, here you go. Give us a couple bucks for it. Turns out, turns out, this was actually a pathetic PR stunt to promote the release of their new album and the sex tape, which actually didn't have any nudity or sex in it, is part of the video for their single that released and dropped.

You are a douchebag. Yes, they are. Hey, I didn't even know he was on our show. Yes. I forgot my soundboard working, so we have to. Awesome. Yeah. So this is pretty stupid and I'm not going to give him any more time talking about it. Yeah. Yeah.

They're assholes. Stay in Silver Lake and stay in Silver Lake and leave us alone. Yacht. Irving Azoff has written an open letter. Who is Irving Azoff? He's super massive, legendary artist, manager, music industry type. Okay, I've never heard of him. He's been around for ages, a huge behind-the-scenes player.

I mean, massive, massive. He basically told off YouTube, and he's not wrong, as much as I hate open letters. He says, you have built a business that works really well for you and Google, but it doesn't work well for artists. If music matters to YouTube, then why not give musicians the same choice you give yourselves?

Any artist should be able to decide which of their songs are available for free and which are part of a paid subscription service, or you should be able to opt out of YouTube entirely if you will not give the artist this choice. Can't disagree with that. Nope. Can't do it. So, and you can't do any of that. If you are into the music industry crossover with technology, as I am, and you must be listening to this podcast because we talk about it all the time, I highly recommend you go read his letter because it's quite good and it's quite long.

Then I'll pass. Okay. TLDR, he doesn't like YouTube. Pretty much, yes. Okay. Saved you a click. There you go. Facebook is in the news and they even put themselves in their own trending news because of their trending news. Okay.

So, yeah. Orbarissa, go ahead. They are being investigated by the government for basically, supposedly they're keeping conservative news out of their trending news feed. The big deal that has come out of this is they have been basically telling companies that their news gathering is completely determined by algorithms and machines.

Turns out there's a leaked document that shows that it's not. There is a group of about 12 people that were hired to basically curate the news. Ah, interesting. Which de facto makes them a completely news, they are an actual news organization.

They're no more different than Huffington Post. They're just a curing, yeah. Yeah. So, instead of it being all like automated, it is basically, you know, they had guidelines, they had suggested sites from which you would take your headlines, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, it was just like 12-year-old, or 12-year-old, could have been, 12, 12-year-olds in a basement getting paid next to nothing that determined the trending topics for about a billion people worldwide.

Yeah. No, that's how that works. I mean, they have the power to do that. Just because they say it's machine-based doesn't mean a damn thing. I did that at Technorati. I would always throw in stuff that I thought was fun into the top 10.

And Impeach Bush ended up being a trending topic because I put it in the trending topics. And people started to basically post about Bush being impeached. And guess what? It was just a lark that I had when I came back from a two-martini lunch.

So, this is how the internet works, people. This is how the sausage is made. Yes. And it is what it always has been. I don't understand why people are surprised by this or upset by it. We can continue on with the death of journalism and Facebook and how they're causing it.

Facebook Live is turning journalists into bad jackass copycats. This is a quick and interesting read. Yay, journalism. It's basically people desperate to get anybody to watch what they're doing, doing stupid stunts that are supposedly news organizations. Okay. Yeah.

I get annoyed when I see somebody post one of their Facebook Live things. It's like, oh, hey, I'm live now. I'm like, I don't care. I don't care. I really don't care. I didn't care when you were on Periscope. I didn't care were you on Meerkat or whatever other services that you're live on.

You know, this is just this, I think, was going to phase out. I think this is just another phase. It's going to be, it's not going to go away. Some people are going to do really, really well at it. But I mean, it's been almost a year and a half, two years where we've just been Meerkat, Meerkat, Meerkat, Periscope, Periscope, Periscope, Facebook Live, Facebook Live.

I don't give a fuck. Yeah. Google Hangouts were around long before that. And people, I mean, nobody cares. Nobody wants to watch your ass live. Yeah. So let's end the ranting with two stories from me that actually are quite uplifting and good. Okay.

Because, yeah, we'll talk about this. Go ahead. Continue. Germany. Hi, people. Deutschland. Uwe Atlas. I noticed when I was traveling around Germany just a couple of months ago how much there was just renewable energy everywhere.

I mean, everywhere. All along the train tracks when you're going throughout the country. There's solar. There's wind. There's hydro. There's everything. I was like, wow, these guys are really, they're killing it over here. And apparently, this last Sunday, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation thanks to a sunny and windy day at one point around 1 p.m.

The country's entire system of renewable energy supplied so much power that power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity. Yee-haw. So America, Trump, we're number one, right?

Making America great again, right? Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is, since I just drove across America, I did see a huge, huge increase in solar and wind across the entire country. Good. It's about time.

Let's get it going. Yeah. It's not government run. It's all private organizations for the most part. Well, I saw the biggest solar field I've ever seen, and it went on forever. And yeah, everywhere, because it was windy the entire way. I'm like, why is it always so damn windy out here? And then you just look for miles and miles and miles.

It's just wind farms everywhere. So we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. We'll get there, and hopefully we'll still be around to see it, because my next story is about an anti-aging startup called Elysium Health. Now, this is interesting. Well, we've heard about this, Reservatol and all those kind of different things, all these different things that people seem to think will extend lifespan.

The problem with such a thing is an experiment would take several lifespans to be able to test it, because obviously we need to wait around quite a long time to see if this actually extends our lives. Well, the Resveratrol stuff has been debunked. That really didn't do anything.

For the most part, it has been debunked. I wouldn't say it's been debunked. It's been proven that the amount that you would have to take is next to impossible. About 17 pounds a day. Which is not the same as debunking. Right, but the effects did not. If it were Mythbusters, they would say plausible.

I don't know if that's plausible. Anyways, so basically this company is saying, well, there's no way. That we're going to be able to do FDA testing on this, because it would take five generations. So we're just going to skip it. Yeah.

See, now, Brian, you talk about how cab companies and Uber like to skirt regulations and things like that all the time. This is something that you ingest, and they're going around the FDA.

I didn't say I was for it, Jason. You said you were, okay, go ahead. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me your side. I think there's a real problem with that, and there's no way in hell I would be taking this. Okay. Okay. I mean, I agree that there's something ridiculous about the process for the FDA, and that's even for regular pills.

We've heard about how it's just a complete and utter nightmare. And I don't know how you would approach this, because this is something that would take generations. And if you want, this is what I would say, buyer beware. I would say that you would have to sign up through some government system that would say, you know, you are taking this.

If I die, it's at your own risk. Yes. All that sort of thing. There's got to be something, some sort of middle ground for something like this, because I do understand. I mean, people, you know, we've talked about the singularity and Kurzweil and the crazy regime of pills that he's taking.

And to a certain extent, if you want to gamble on something like this, and you believe in it enough, why not? Yeah. This is definitely caveat emptor. Big time. Oh, totally. A hundred percent. So interesting. And that's off technologyreview.com. It's a really interesting full article all about their position on it, the science of what he's trying.

It's really interesting. Yeah. It's just funny that, you know, basically you're taking pills of nads. That's the whole point of it. Out of all of that, that's what you pulled out of the article. Of course. I'm taking pills of nads. Yes. We have met before, haven't we? Yes, we have.

So GitHub announced unlimited private repos now. So they've simplified their pricing. So on a personal level, you can get for seven bucks a month, unlimited repositories. And for organizations, it's $9 per user per month on 25 bucks a month for your first five users. This is great news.

If you run any kind of code repo, which I do, I still have, I got like 15 GitHub repos. So for me, this is great. I just, my bill just got cut in half. So if you'd like to write code, go get your GitHub on because this is a pretty good deal.

It is a good deal. I'm actually quite happy about it and signing up. And we'll be right back. But now a word from our sponsors. Loot Crate. Ah, Loot Crate. What a great way to support our show. Loot Crate is a monthly subscription box service for epic geek and gamer items and pop culture gear.

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At least the power, Jason. The onslaught of big summer blockbusters makes May the perfect time to celebrate some of pop culture's unstoppable, unrelenting, and unbeatable characters and objects. I don't know why an object would be unrelenting, but hey, it is.

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Security? Ha! North Korea. My favorite place. Okay. General Vincent Brooks was telling the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that he thinks North Korean hackers are actually pretty good.

Yeah. He said, well, I would not characterize North Korean hackers as the best in the world. They are among the best and the best organized. Is there a BuzzFeed top 10 list on this? Could be, but I'm telling you right now, they did not hack Sony. No. No, they didn't. I just thought it was interesting that people are still talking about North Korean hackers.

They apparently are pretty good. And since they can't leave the country, it's like the best thing for them to have is just an army of hackers where they can just attack everybody without going anywhere. They're attacking everybody and also downloading porn and storing it in their GitHub repository because they don't get any of that there.

That'd be my guess. Could be. So have you heard of this company called Dataminer? I have. Without an E. Of course, without the E. Without the E. Because, you know, that's what we do now. Yes. It's a private firm who basically does Twitter scraping and data analysis to figure out what you're thinking, what you're going to do.

Yep. And they're used by the cops a lot. Yeah. Not anymore. Okay. Yes. They won't let Twitter has banned spy agencies from using the analytic service, which Twitter owns a 5% stake in. Interesting move.

Why? Why would they do this? PR. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty much it. I mean, basically, you're what, saying, come on, come on, Muslims, plan your stuff here. Yeah. I mean, the whole point of it is just, it's very silly. It's just PR.

Well, Twitter needs PR right now. I mean, Twitter is dangerously veering towards Yahoo territory in terms of what the hell are they going to do? They're very, very close to that because, I mean, they're flailing. Yeah. They're totally flailing. I mean, you know, I've never been a big user, but even I've noticed when I'm on doing basically promotion for this show or whatever, things have slowed down a lot.

A lot. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. It's like I go on my Google Plus account and there's even more people talking than on Twitter. Really? No. Not really. What about LO? Ah, yes. LO. Look, you should feel good, Twitter. You're still better than Google Plus and LO. Yeah. Except I've got 10, like 11,000 followers on Google Plus and only 1,000 on Twitter, but nobody's on Google Plus, so.

Yeah. I still get notifications of people that started following me on Google Plus and it's always like somebody from India. Oh, I told them, just normal people, but. Okay. Yeah. I got on a couple of photography lists early on when it got big, so since then, not much.

Anyway. Oh, they're still doing this news? Adobe Flash has put out a new zero day patch for the third month in a row. If you're listening to the show and you actually have Adobe Flash installed on your computer, shame on you. Shame on you.

Seriously. It's even off my parents' computer. Well, because of me, but. Yeah, yeah. Sneak into everybody's house that you know. Actually, yes. This is your new job as a good grumpy old geek Samaritan is anytime that you're on anybody's computer for any reason whatsoever. And I know a lot of you people out there are stuck in the same position that Jason and I are, which is every single person in the world calls you for free tech support.

Your job, while you're mumbling and groaning and bitching about the fact that everybody in the world calls you for free tech support, is to remove Flash from every computer that you get your hands on. Yep. That is your goal. Go forth and uninstall, my friends. Yes. Yes, people. This is what you have to do. OK, there is a rule change, which the U.S. government is just basically going whole hog on.

We want to be able to hack into everybody everywhere now. So the Supreme Court approved this rule change that will basically allow U.S. law enforcement to get warrants to hack into users, computers and phones anywhere around the world. The interesting thing behind this is part of the deal is if you're using something like a VPN, that means the government no longer has to stay within any sort of physical location for their searches, that allows them to search anywhere in the world because you are hiding your location.

Well, that's a bunch of bullshit. Yeah. A second part of the change also allows for a single order to issue for an entire network of computers, such as devices belonging to victims infected with a botnet, basically meaning they only need one warrant to basically hit every computer around the world that's touched by that.

Wow. Yeah, this isn't good. No. No, I mean, I understand why they asked for it. It does make sense, but it's not good. No, this is this is a massive overreach. Yes, it is. I will have to I will definitely have to dig into this.

And this is a rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. Rule 41. Isn't that the one about sex on the Internet? Oh, that's rule 42. It's rule 42. But if I were writing a good spy movie right now or a spy book, I'd call it rule 41. Oh, God.

That one's free people. So let's see here. Pornhub. Speaking of sex on the Internet. And getting screwed by your country. Pornhub has joined the bug bounty program. So if you can hack if you can hack Pornhub, you can make anywhere between 50 and $25,000.

This is also kind of more PR than anything else, right? Doubtful. I mean, Pornhub has a user user base, too. And 60 million people a day visit Pornhub, which is pretty insane.

So if somebody got a hold of their user database, that could potentially be a bad thing. The thing, though, is it's like with 60 million people a day going there, it's just basically everybody you see on the street is probably going home and whacking it to Pornhub. It's ridiculous. Do they I assume then that they charge for stuff on Pornhub and they collect credit cards and whatnot?

I don't know. I don't. I don't go to Pornhub. I don't understand paying for porn, but apparently, I mean, that would be a problem. Yeah, no, I have I have never. It's one of the sites. Surprisingly, I've never been on Pornhub. I've looked at it a couple of times because they're always doing really great PR.

So I was, you know, whatever crazy ass thing that they come up with. I go take a look at that just because it's funny. But that's about it. Yeah. Yeah, they've got a they've got a bunch of rules on the site. If you go to hacker one dot com slash Pornhub, that's that's where where their list is of what you can hack and what you can't do.

So don't do a denial of service attack. No physical attacks against the office. No social engineering of our service desk employees or contractors. Damn it. Yes. Do not compromise a Pornhub users or employees account. No automated tools or scans.

Botnet compromise site or clients. Blah, blah, blah. No one handed hacking. It's no one handed hacking. So, yeah, check it out. And this is the first time I've heard of hacker one dot com. And I was checking it out. And it's it's it's a hub, not a Pornhub, but it's a the vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.

OK, so if you're if you're a hacker looking to, you know, make some money, these guys have given out seven point six million dollars in bonuses so far. Twenty two thousand four hundred and eighty seven bugs have been fixed. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty eight hackers have been thanked.

I you know what? I couldn't give a flying fuck about the thanks that seven point six million in bounties paid. That's the number I care about. And one hundred and thirty nine programs on here. So there's a lot, even Uber, Square, GM, Adobe. So maybe maybe these flash hacks are coming from here.

Slack, Dropbox and GitHub are also some of their customers. So if you want to go get your hack on, go check out hacker one dot com for sure. Do you remember the Wi-Fi sense deal? Oh, with Windows 10 now that you're not a Windows 10 user anymore. It doesn't really matter. But yeah, I remember it.

I made sure to shut it off. Yeah. This is the one where it would it would share your Wi-Fi passwords with your social media network connections. Yes. Which why would you want to do that? What could go wrong? Could possibly go wrong with that. So Microsoft is killing it. We have removed the Wi-Fi sense feature that allows you to share Wi-Fi networks with your contacts and to be automatically connected to networks shared by your contacts.

The cost of updating the code to keep this feature working combined with low usage and low demand, duh, made this not worth further investment. I would like to think that we took some credit for that because we railed against this when it first came out. Yeah, I'd like to think that we could take some credit for that, too, but I'm sure we can't.

No, well, we can, but it might not be true. Yeah. Well, hey, that doesn't stop anybody on the Internet, does it? That's correct. Capture the flag. I don't know what this is. I saw you put this in the notes. I have no idea. But you know what old school capture the flag is, right?

You have two teams and you try and get to the other person's base and steal the flag and come back. Yes, I understand the real game. I don't understand Facebook capture the flag. Well, this is a security. It's one way that people can learn security by breaking into systems and it's a platform, basically, for teams of hackers to go against each other and try and get into other people's machines and stuff like that.

Okay. Very popular at Black Hat and DEF CON and all those things. But Facebook had built a capture the flag system internally for their people to learn security and, you know, hacking and things like that. But they've just open sourced the whole thing. And it's kind of neat.

I was looking at it this morning. I don't have any use for it. Yeah. But it's pretty cool that they did this. You can go check it out. It's on GitHub. But you can spin up your own instances on your servers and set up teams and have hacking competitions. Cool.

Yeah. Something I will never do. Yeah, I know. Something I will never do either. But I just think it's pretty cool that, you know, everybody's getting on the open source bandwagon. So everybody is. And, you know, what can possibly go wrong with that? Well, actually, nothing, because it's free and open source. Absolutely nothing can go wrong with open source.

Point one. WordPress. WordPress. This is not something that powers 90% of the internet. This is something that you play with in your own spare time. I thought that was Pornhub. At the library.

Jason. Brian. What is this link that you have in At the Library? I wasn't able to finish a book, but did you happen to see what I put in the At the Library section? I did, and I just, I squeed like a little girl. I know, so did I. I'm so excited I've already pre-ordered it.

As we all know, the Grumpy Old Geeks are huge fans of Terry Pratchett, and it was very sad when he passed. And, you know, didn't exactly leave behind a last book that we really wanted to read. Until now. Yeah, because the last Discworld was not a Discworld.

It wasn't really a Discworld. It was more of the other story that neither of us were terribly fond of. However, the series of books that we did love, Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett did together, the, I don't even know what the series is called. It's the Long Earth series. The Long Earth series. Yeah. So they left us with the Long Utopia, which is book four, which was really good.

I mean, the whole series is great. I had just assumed, well, we're done. Yeah, because when we reviewed the last book, it was, we were kind of on the fence about Stephen Baxter taking over. Yeah. And I thought, yeah, go for it, man. I kind of went, no, let's just stop.

Yeah. But I was, I thought he did such a good job on the last one that, yeah, you'd let him go. Why not? Well, luckily for both of us, Jason. Yes. We have the best of both worlds. We're getting the best possible conclusion to the series. One more book is coming. Terry Pratchett was involved. They finished it together.

It is being released. I've already preordered it at June 14th, 2016, and it wraps up the story, and I am so beyond happy about this. I can't wait for this book. What a great series it's been, and the fact that we're actually getting a real conclusion written by both of them, I am beyond excited.

And it's 400 pages, so it is not small. Nope. Cannot wait. No, this is great news, even though I've got so many books that I've got to read right now. I'm clearing out the deck. I'm going to work my way through as much as possible because day one, I'm going into this one. Oh, hell yeah.

Hell yeah. We'll be binge listening to that one, as it were, because I don't read books, because I can't. You should call it at the earbuds. At the earbuds. Software, apps, and gadgets.

There's this new feature in OS X or OS X, whichever you want to call it, El Capitan. Yeah, I'm still getting used to that because, like, I was like, I don't even know what I have. What do I have? I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. I have to go look at which desktop images I have this week. But because I waited on El Capitan for quite some time because a lot of my audio stuff would not work under El Capitan, which is kind of the way audio software works, by not working.

As much as we like to, or as much as you've liked to make fun of Windows so much, I'm learning a whole new set of different things that one has to keep in mind for Mac. So not so different anymore. So there was a feature that I couldn't figure out what the hell it was. Whenever I'd shake my mouse, the cursor would get just massive.

And I'm like, what is that? It was a new feature to, it's called Shake to Locate. In case you have multiple monitors and you can't find your cursor, you just shake it and it gets really big. Yep. It's really annoying. I love it. You do? I'm so glad you put this in there because I don't shake my mouse like you.

I don't know what the hell you're doing with your computer, Jason. But I'm usually trying to find my cursor. Well, this is perfect for that because as soon as I read it, I did it. And I was like, this is awesome because I, you know, I have multi-monitor setup. I've got the laptop and then I've got the big monitor.

And sometimes I have no idea where the damn cursor has gotten off to. And this is fantastic. I love this feature. Okay. Well, if you don't like it, there's some, there's a link in the show notes on how to turn it off. Well, I enjoy it. Because it should have been turned on for you automagically. It was.

But I, again, I've never shaked my mouse like that. Okay. It ain't a Polaroid picture, Jason. Shake it like a Polaroid picture. So Instagram did some bullshit to get some PR. Yeah. They made it ugly. Yes, they made it ugly. They gave it a new monochrome look and then they crazed out the app icon.

Now, this is, you know, I wouldn't even put this in there because it's basically just PR bullcrap and it's kind of silly. But I do, I can't not read Instagram's head of design, Ian Spelter's quote about this because it's genius in its stupidity. Okay.

While the icon is a colorful doorway into the Instagram app, once inside the app, we believe the color should come directly from the community's photos and videos. Okay. Yeah, what a load of shit. So they just, they couldn't decide on a color palette. So they just chose none. Yes, exactly. Okay.

And then they tried to spin it as, it's all about you. Mm-hmm. And no more skew-morphic design. Yes. So now the icon is this colorful puke instead of being a camera so you could recognize it. Yeah. So you can't find it. Exactly. It's like, oh. Hey, maybe you can shake your finger and then it'll appear.

That was a, that was a real stretch. Yeah. No. Not, not all winners, people. Not all winners. Not all winners. Okay. We talked the other week about how Chrome has officially taken over as the number one browser and therefore became unusable through bloatware and things like that. And how people are starting to switch back to Firefox.

Firefox has, or Mozilla, has relaunched TestPilot for Firefox, an add-on that allows you to play around with their new features they're still developing without having to install their development feeds. Okay. And? That's about it, really. Have you tried it? Nope.

Nope. I'm still using Chrome. Look, I've got enough to get used to now just being full-time Mac. I can't switch browsers right now. I got work to do, people. Yeah. No doubt. I have Firefox on here just when I need to test something. Yeah, I do. So. But that's becoming very rarely that I ever open up a, usually when I open up Firefox, I have to wait 20 minutes for it to install like the 20 updates that have happened since the last time I opened it.

Yeah. That does happen a lot. WhatsApp has launched Desktop. That sync with your mobile device app so you can do what Mac has been doing forever. Okay. I don't use WhatsApp. So I have it installed on my phone just in case.

But I use that, you know, every now and again I'll pop in there and see if there's anything that I need to take care of. But yeah, I don't really use WhatsApp so I don't need a desktop app for WhatsApp. Yep. Me either. I was using it briefly for a while when I had a few people that decided that's their preferred method of communication.

And can we all get on board with just making one or two things, everyone? But now that they don't and I've got them to use other things like just standard texting, I no longer use WhatsApp. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's how it goes. Yeah. So in our drone talk over the past, we always said, hey, why don't you just put a parachute on the goddamn thing?

Yep. New company called Parazero has done that. When it senses your drone is going into free fall, it'll pop a little parachute and save your drone. Yeah. And hopefully save someone's head when it lands on them. I've been playing with my drone a little bit. We couldn't do it on the trip, which is what I really wanted to do.

But the winds were anywhere between 20 and 60 miles an hour for the entirety of our journey. So we didn't get to do it. But when I got to Chicago here, I started playing with it again because the wind is much nicer here. And I got to tell you, man, you got to go get one. They're fun. No, I'm going to stick out of it.

You already smashed your hand up. Don't care. Yeah, but I haven't done it since. I will. I will drone vicariously through you. OK, I'll start sending you some videos then. Oh, joy. More things for me to delete and not look at. Hey, at least it's not pictures of the dog. Drink.

Oh, God damn it. Hold on. Much better. Much better. And one final app that you may want to check out, particularly if you happen to be terrified of a Trump presidency, Maple Match. Maple Match makes it easy for Americans to find their ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency.

I actually do not know if this is a real app or not. I'm guessing not. But if so, it's a dating app so you can find a Canadian. I don't know. I recommend it. I'm married one. OK. I know a lot of people that have married Canadians. I think they're taking over just, you know, one couple at a time.

That's right. We're going to make Can-Americans.

Media Candy. Top Gear, the new show on Amazon with our favorite people, has finally gotten a name. I see that. I don't know if I like this name. The Grand Tour. The Grand Tour. I don't really care because I didn't care much for the name Top Gear.

It's about them. It's not about the name. The funny thing that people notice is it can be condensed to either TGT or GT, which is the reverse of Top Gear. So Amazon has revealed the show will not have a set location. It is traveling around the world, hence the name, The Grand Tour, and will have a studio audience on location for each area.

So I'd assume one would hear about that if they were going to do one in LA so that you could show up and be there, but haven't heard anything. I think they've recorded the whole first season by now, haven't they? I don't know. It doesn't air till the fall. So yeah, who knows? I mean, they've been out and about and sending, putting up Instagram photos and things like that from being on location.

I don't know how much they've recorded, but I'm super excited and I'm happy to announce that Top Gear is now Grand Tour. Yes. And I still have not watched the new British version. I mean, the trailer did look okay, but.

Well, that hasn't aired yet either. No. Yeah. Oh, that's right. I guess it hasn't. I'm trying to be ignoring it, so hoping that it'll pass me by and I won't, I won't feel the temptation to dig in. Well, I'm not going to let that happen because I will tell you when it's on. Okay. And speaking of weird things.

Yes. Glenn Danzig is back with the Misfits. Wow. That big, yeah, must be a. Run and dry. Run and dry, I'm thinking. Yeah. Last time they all performed together was October 29th, 1983. And they're doing. Say what? The two guys, the two main guys hate each other, don't they?

Well, all three of them hate each other. Well, Jerry Only and Doyle, they still perform as the Misfits. And even though it's the Jerry Only experience, it's terrible, terrible, terrible. But with Danzig back in, who's also terrible, I think this should be a terrible show.

But they're doing Riot Fest in Denver and Chicago. So I might get to see them. All right. Well, my opinion on the Misfits is they are in the Pantheon, the top three bands of all time, where I think t-shirt sales have outshined actual listening to the band. Oh, absolutely.

It's the Ramones, Joy Division, and the Misfits. Never mind the Bollocks also. There's a lot of Sex Pistols t-shirts out there too. Okay. That's true. Yeah. All right. The top four. Yeah. They're definitely in the top four of t-shirt sales outselling the music. But it'll be interesting.

Danzig, you know, he ain't what he used to be. Well, who is? Yeah, that's true. Somebody that is is a band that you love, Babymetal. Love Babymetal. And I'm a fan as well. They're fun. And apparently Rob Zombie is also a fan, but not so much his fans.

Yeah. I saw this when it came through. I was just like, lighten up, guys. Come on. Lighten up, people. Babymetal do rock. And Zombie took him down fantastically. All of the trolls on his own on his own social media. So good job on you, Rob. Good job, Rob.

I didn't have anything to rhyme that with. So we just go with good job, Rob. Brian Cranston, one of my favorite actors. He's going to start a Philip K. Dick Electric Dreams TV anthology where they're going to do a 10 part series based on Philip K. Dick's stories.

You have me. I'm intrigued. Well, let me let me crap on it for you, because Ronald Moore is going to be the writer and executive producer. That's it. I'm out. I know. No, I'm not going to watch it. No way. No, no, no. It'll be nine episodes will be absolutely fantastic.

And he will destroy the whole fucking thing in the 10th episode. I knew it. Fuck that shit. Fuck it. Can't wait for that one. Fuck it. We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors.

Moron of the week. It's like every other week, there's a new Kickstarter story that topped the other one. I mean, I thought it was bad when Kickstarter first started. But the fallout of these longer, longer tail Kickstarters that made lots of money is just absolutely fantastic.

I know. We should have just kept the segment. We really, we really should have. I mean, putting it more on of the week is fine. But I do miss, I miss Bob's Kickstarters in the balls. Yeah. We might have to bring it back if we keep finding this stuff. Peachy printer. The world's first $100 3D printer Kickstarter campaign was massive.

Let's see, almost well over half a million dollars. Yeah, 650 grand. 650 grand. Unfortunately, they've gone bankrupt because their financial manager embezzled over half of that to buy a house. Not even buy.

He built the house. So I wonder if he 3D printed the house. Because at least that would have been, you know, that would have at least been useful. I love these stories. And I love how people keep going, oh, Kickstarter is such a valid way to start a business.

Well, it's a valid way to build a house. That's for damn sure. Okay. Anyways, good times. Even better than that. I mean, I feel like we should just call this the Gwyneth Paltrow section. Well, because Kanye's out this week, so it can go with Gwyneth and Kanye.

Yeah, we do. We kind of cycle them in and out, don't we? This is when we can squint it the other week. It's Kanye. Her latest goop got into sex. Okay. It's goopy sex. Goopy sex. They're going to call it goop hub. So what do they do?

Behold, the $15,000 sex toy. Yeah, it's a 24 karat gold dildo. Oh my goodness. That can't be hygienic. We use the super expensive vegetable wash from Whole Foods to clean it. Okay.

I'm not even going to load this because I don't even want to see it. Well, she's not using it, so you're safe. Okay. Well, that might actually make it useful. Speaking of... The internet. That came out. That's true. That would probably break the internet. Next week on more of the week.

And finally, Budweiser has renamed its beer America. Until the November elections, Budweiser is swapping everything on its can, including its own name, to be as patriotic as possible. Yeah. Uh-huh. America, the podcast.

Yeah. You got to watch the commercials. They're so bad. It would have been so cool. I would have moved them from Moron of the Week to Ooh Fancy if they would have gone with America. Yep. Marica. America. That's what they should have called it. Man, what an opportunity missed.

Yeah, they totally. They dropped the beer on that one. That's okay. You should drop Budweiser. Ooh, fancy. Fancy. Ooh, fancy. I ran across this story this morning on TechCrunch, and it's researchers in the Outback are using land cruisers to create a giant wireless network, like a mobile wireless network that attaches to the front window of their Toyota.

They're land cruisers, so they can have basically because there's nothing in the Outback. But if you're within 15 miles of another one of these trucks, you can create, like, a mesh network, which is pretty cool. That is kind of cool. Yeah. It uses Wi-Fi, UHF, and delay-tolerant networking devices, and you can send emergency messages and geotagged information between the vehicles, which then get relayed out to the Internet in general.

So I think it's just a pretty neat story on how they're, you know, using the technology to kind of fill the gap out in the middle of nowhere instead of trying to run, you know, towers or cables. It's neat. It's neat. Asshole. So we didn't get many comments this week.

Guys, you're dropping the ball. We had, like, too many last week, and this week we had none. So definitely go to the website and send us some questions or comments or leave us some five stars on iTunes. Something. Talk to us, people. Talk to us. Jason's lonely. I know. He just moved. Talk to him.

It's just me and the dog. Drank. So that's all I got. Shout out to whiskey. You're the devil. Well, OK. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFilippo, and you can check me out at jpt.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister, and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus or at the AA meetings because Jason is a dog.

Hey, puppy, puppy, puppy. Gruppy Old 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 grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars, or better yet, tell a friend about the show.

Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes and Spotify and Apple Music if you can get your iTunes working on your new computer. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky.

You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 159. America. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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