164: NerdWatch 2016!

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 June 17th, 2016, episode 164. I am Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How you doing, Brian? I've got a bit of a soccer hangover. USA. USA. Okay. What happened?

Hey, man. You know, they beat Ecuador. I know, too, most Americans are like, of course we beat Ecuador. No, no, no, no, no. It was a big upset. So, awesome. I think by saying most Americans, I think you're giving most Americans a little bit more credit about caring about the footies.

Well, they don't care at all. So, you know, that's fine. How about a little follow-up? A little follow-up last week from my Blue Apron experience. Okay. Trying to, you know, get rid of hideous accounts. Kyle Roderick, friend of the show and host of The Morning Show, which hasn't done an episode in like a month or so.

So, I guess maybe ex-host of The Morning Show, sent us a tweet and said, I've used JustDelete.me to find out where to go to delete accounts and cancel subscriptions. I'd never heard of this site. I checked it out. It's awesome. It's massive. There's everything known to man here. But what I really need is I need a service where I put in my email address and it goes and finds out all the different places that have somehow got me in their registries when I'm not.

Oh, that would be an interesting one, yes. That would be very useful because, you know, it's all these mailings lists. And when you've had an email address for 25 plus years, it's amazing what you end up getting signed up for somehow. Yeah. I'm going to cover this one in security because I had a little issue this week where I had to go back and change about 270 passwords.

Wow. On multiple accounts. And they're all zombie accounts. Right. Yeah. One of my accounts got basically pulled in one of these breaches. And I got a note from Microsoft saying my Xbox Live account had been logged into. And they thought, ah, he probably didn't do that.

And they were right. I went in there and I checked the password on it. And then I went into one password. Mm-hmm. And yeah, I used it on 270 different occasions. It was one of my old basic passwords that I usually put in that password with the intention of going back and changing it later. And I didn't.

Oh, okay. That'll learn me. That'll learn you. That'll learn you real good. Eating my own dog food on that one. That's for damn sure. So, we've always complained about iOS and the fact that you couldn't remove the crappy, you know, Apple apps.

Yes. Finally, you'll be able to remove them from the home screen. The binaries still exist. The apps are still there. Still taking up disk space. But you can just get rid of the icon. Or you just do what all of us did and throw them in a folder and forget about them. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. This is, you know, this is just a cleaner version of the same thing.

Yes. It's an interesting thing when that's the most talked about story coming from the whole conference this week is, oh, you can get rid of their crappy apps. Yeah, I know. That really says something about your progress towards the platform. Yeah. Well, we never really discussed too much from Apple's big conferences, but there's, we got a couple links in the show notes.

HuffPo has, of course, their listicle about the coolest iPhone features that Apple announced, including the fact that they're destroying messaging and turning it into MySpace. Yeah, not a lot that's terribly exciting to me anyway. So, you know, it'll come and I'll make a comment about how Bluetooth gets turned on or not.

And that'll be about that. That's generally our Apple coverage because everybody else does it and we just don't care. Yeah. And in particular, there's a link in the show notes from Walt Mossberg, who did his kind of wrap up of everything that happened at WWDC. And basically, he's saying Apple is moving forward, just not the way it used to.

And yay for them. So there you go. How exciting. Exciting. Yay, Apple. Yeah. The Led Zeppelin trial has started and it's off to a shaky start. We've been talking about this quite a bit because this is super interesting to me. And it's really, like I said, this is a, you're doing something right if you're getting sued because that means you actually made some money.

Of course, Led Zeppelin made money. There are some problems going on already. There's some video performance that wasn't included in the case's exhibit list. So they're not allowed to show that. And they're also not allowed to bring in any of the history that Zeppelin has of plagiarizing other songs, which has always been fairly well known.

But also, you know, this is this is you're talking about the plaintiff can't can't do it. Yes. Yes. So there's there's already all sorts of problems with the legal trickery. That means that this is probably not going to be a good case study of what can really happen here because. Actually, I think it is because, you know, why you mentioned before that Led Zeppelin made a lot of money.

That means they have better lawyers. Yeah. Well, that's usually the way it works. Right. Like everybody talked about how this whole process, this with the political primaries has exposed to all Americans, how how the sausage is really made and everybody's all surprised. Well, this is doing the same for for, you know, law and trials.

I think it's like, oh, hey, the person that has the most money always wins. Interesting. Mm hmm. Well, look at look at Peter Thiel against Gawker. Yeah. Case in point. Yeah. And there's a link in the show notes again, not to get too into it. If you really want to get into the weeds on this one, it's an article from Salon that really kind of breaks down the whole trial and what it's going to mean for music.

Again, it's a it's a really good read. So there you go. Okie doke. Yeah. Interesting. In other interesting reads. I found this article is a couple a couple of weeks old. Right. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilizations video game. You know, I saw this one a couple of weeks ago and I was going to throw it in the show notes, but then I realized my only comment was Elon Musk must smoke a lot of weed.

You know, but I've heard this this theory bandied about before by physicists and the like and some sci fi movies. Yes. Very many, very many sci fi books. Yep. Here's the point. It doesn't matter if we are not. No, it's yeah.

It's not like somebody is coming and offering us the red or the blue pill. We're there. And if it is, it is. And if it's not, it's not. Then we will die without knowing. Yeah, I think. Well, I can probably guarantee we're going to die without knowing. Yeah. And a little follow up on AI and machine learning. Wired has a great little article called Deep Learning Isn't a Dangerous Magic Genie.

It's Just Math. Yeah. But, you know, on that route, almost everything is math. That's true. And if we're in a video game, so it's all. Yes. So are we. It's an interesting read if you if you really want to go deeper and deeper into the weeds on what this stuff is and what it's doing.

And it'll it'll either let you sleep at night or it will keep you up at night, depending on which side of the coin you fall on. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was a really good read as well. It kind of demystifies deep learning a little bit, which is, you know, it's just this is the new buzzword for artificial intelligence for AI.

Deep learning. Well, I mean, it's there. There are multiple areas of machine learning, and this is this is just one of them. And but it also breaks down all the other different types, which is cool. Yeah. So if you really want to, like, get up to speed, you can you can not listen to our daily podcast anymore.

But you can get it here at Wired dot com now onto the show. Yes. Up to speed is now just a character in somebody else's video game. In the news. Did you ever hear of the music service Rhapsody?

Yes, I have. OK, I like I said, as I was talking to the wife who works in the music industry yesterday, there's so many of these like level five services I've just never even really heard of or paid attention to. Anyways, they are rebranding themselves as Napster.

See, I already thought they did that once. Well, the deal is they were only they this was wraps. This was Napster. I was going to go to Napster. There's a new service. This is never was not Napster in the rest of the world. They rebranded themselves as Rhapsody in the US because of the bad baggage associated with the name Napster, which they've now decided apparently is not bad baggage anymore.

Yeah, it's very confusing because I went to the Napster launch party. When they rebranded as Napster. And then we had a mutual friend, Missy, who worked actually at Napster and then at Rhapsody. Yes. So I don't know why they're just flip flopping.

It's not going to save the service. Your name is not going to save your service. No, not at all. And but I just I'm desperately hoping that somebody is going to ask Lars Ulrich for a comment on this. That's that's all I really want. Yeah. You, sir, are a douchebag. Yes, he is.

And in the big news this week, Microsoft buying LinkedIn. Some why I don't know why it's big news. Well, I mean, it's the biggest, biggest acquisition, cash acquisition in tech history. It's twenty six point two billion dollars in cash.

That's why it's big news for a service that nobody understands. Nobody really uses. Nobody can really figure out what they're trying to do. Nobody. Oh, God. Why do everybody's got a profile, but nobody uses it. Yeah. And, you know, they pivoted so many times of the they tried to get people to write articles for free so that they would actually have content and try to tell you why that was such a great thing.

I the problem with us, Jason, is we've always made things that were useful. That was a big mistake for our careers. Well, most of my stuff was porn. So I guess you're right. Yeah. There's an article in Forbes that lists the four reasons why Microsoft did this, of which why they wasted the money on this, all of which I agree with.

There's just no point. LinkedIn is stupid. No, Microsoft is stupid. Microsoft is also stupid. So I don't get this purchase at all, other than you've bought a really, really, really large email database. Well, you know, there's value in that.

Or they could have just gone to, you know, the dark web and got the same email list. Since it's already been hacked and published, you can probably get it for like a couple of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Could have saved you a lot of money there, Microsoft. A lot in the news recently about how all the various telecoms are trying to provide better customer service because they all know that they're frigging horrible.

Probably the worst and most frustrating things in the world is dealing with your telecoms, dealing with your cable and dealing with your Internet access, et cetera. A very long article in Slate about an inside look at Comcast's efforts to make you hate it less. All of which I would say is not going very well.

I'm not on Comcast. I'm Time Warner, which is now. Who bought Time Warner? I don't know. Charter? Somebody. Somebody bought them now. I thought that deal flailed on the table, but. No, it went through. I believe it started. Anyways, they just recently updated their web app or their app on my iPad and all that stuff.

And they've taken out the ability to stream to Apple TV or Chromecast for no particular reason because they're assholes. Well, yeah, yeah, no, I got a new account rep because I use Time Warner business for my office back in L.A. And I'm trying to get them to, you know, knock my package down.

Yeah. And I called them the other night because my new account rep who comes from like 1996, I believe. But as a kid, he has like, you know, one of those pink unicorny sig files, which is like my you're supposed to be my business representative and you have a pink signature.

OK, anyway, he sent sent me an email saying that, hey, give it give me a call and we'll see what we can do to, you know, get you more speed without doing the research that I had the best package you can buy. But also on that email, he cc'd 15 other customers, all of all of the people that he represents.

What an idiot. So and immediately I got put on a spam list. Yep. I'm like, so I had to make a very unfun phone call and talk to his his his supervisor. So maybe I'll be getting a new account rep that can actually help me instead of putting me on spam lists.

Well, maybe. I mean, apparently they're they're really making efforts, but I seriously doubt that'll happen. Like I said, they killed off the ability to stream on their own app. Yet every you know, if I just go get HBO's app, they let me do it themselves. It's so stupid. They're just annoying people for no reason whatsoever.

And all the more reason to try to get the great unbundling is what I'm really hoping for this year. And it seems we're going a step in that direction. I have never heard of Sling TV. Have you? Oh, Slingbox. Yeah. Way back. OK. Yeah. They've been around forever. They're finally coming to Apple TV. So for a small little subscription, you will start to be you'll be able to get things like ESPN, CNN, CNN, AMC, a bunch of the kind of, you know, basic cable level subscriptions without having to have cable anymore.

Oh, there you go. So 20 bucks a month. Not bad. Yeah. That's not too bad. That's it's less than I pay for. Well, I said it's one cent more than I pay for my HBO. Yeah. But yeah, I don't even own a TV anymore. So I've been unbundled for a while and it's not bad.

It's actually quite nice. Good for you. You're one of those NPR people that goes, I don't even have a TV anymore, except you'll at least admit that you watch absolutely everything on your iPad. Absolutely. I got a beautiful iPad and I would still have a TV, but it didn't fit in the truck when I moved to Chicago. So, right. Because I just bought a TV and had my Apple, you know, my Apple TV, the latest one, which I hate with that stupid remote.

I love everything about it except that damn remote. Yep. Anyway. Yeah. So it's not a moral issue with me with the TV. It's just the fact that I just dropped, you know, a couple hundred bucks on one and I'm not about to do it again. Right. That money is gone. Speaking of gone money, Gawker definitely has filed for bankruptcy.

And this is this I put this in at the beginning of the week, so I'm not sure if much has happened since then, but they were talking about selling to Ziff Davis in which surprised the hell out of me because I couldn't believe Ziff Davis was still around. Yeah, that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Yep. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with that.

But I'm just like, yeah, oh, well, you know, yes, publishing karma. Well, yeah, that's that's the thing. I mean, I'm really unhappy with the fact that that lawsuit happened and it was enough to bankrupt them, but also Gawker sucks. So, you know, there's there's no winners here.

No. And speaking of there not being any winners, Twitter has invested a metric crap ton of money into SoundCloud. I know out of all places, SoundCloud. You're just throwing money away, Twitter. And really, you need to come up with a better business plan.

You should have saved that and figure that out yourselves. Yeah, honestly, because there's nothing at SoundCloud. There's nothing at SoundCloud. SoundCloud tried to make their deals with all the labels to become basically just another streaming service. And it's not working and nobody cares. Yeah, because nobody cared about SoundCloud to begin with.

And that's the thing about. Well, a lot of people actually did care about SoundCloud, but they cared about it because they were DJs and they were putting music up illegally. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It's nothing, nothing legitimate has come out of SoundCloud. Yeah, absolutely nothing. And Uber is now valued at sixty eight billion dollars.

And they're in the middle of doing another round of raising money between one and two billion dollars in leveraged loans. Basically, they're trying to put a lot of their resources into taking out all the homegrown companies in China and India that saw what they were doing here and went, hey, we're going to beat them to it.

So we'll see what happens. No, not interested. Yeah, me either. Another thing I'm really not interested in is Dropbox, which is now cash flow positive. Woohoo. So they are not going to go public anytime soon, apparently, probably because they're also going to have to try to figure out a long term business strategy.

Not that that stops anyone else from going public. Yeah, it generally doesn't. I'm a Dropbox Pro user. I've got I've got Dropbox Pro and I've got the the add on that lets you do it'll save your files for 30 days in case somebody accidentally deletes your entire folder, which has happened.

That's what happens when you have shared folders. Somebody can just go delete the whole thing. And when your entire business is in that folder, it's nice. It's worth that extra five bucks a month to have the security of saying undelete. And I just wish it came with you're fired. Yeah.

Yeah. It's surprising to me that there aren't stronger controls on on Dropbox for that, like, you know, give somebody access. I guess they do have. Do they have access and then you can't delete like you can just see, but you can't remove anything. I don't friggin know. I've never gotten that into it. There's read only mode. And then there's edit mode.

I think that's pretty much the only thing that you have. Those are the two modes. Yeah. Another place that's gotten a lot of money, particularly from tech A-listers, $23.8 million invested into a service called the Crisis Text Line, which offers peer counseling over text messaging and other new media, which I think we've discussed in the past because there was an app for it is not a very good idea because if you really need help, you need to go talk to someone in person, not through the texts.

Yeah, but I mean, suicide hotlines have saved a whole bunch of lives and those are staffed by non-professionals. You know, they get basic training on that, but those have legitimately saved lives. So I'm not I'm not that down on it. You know, I'm not horrible on this. I just still think it's best to go talk to somebody in person.

Right. But that's a lot of money. Yeah. But three in the morning after a bottle of vodka and you got nobody to talk to, you're not going to get your doctor on the phone or find a new doctor at that time of day, you know, and you just need somebody to talk to. Well, I think I might have the solution for that, but we'll save that for software apps and gadgets.

Okie doke. And a recent study by the International Journal of Business Administration looked at MBA students at the University of Florida, which is already a strike against you because, you know, Florida, to determine how reading habits shape writing ability. And it is officially true.

The Internet is making you stupid. Your study has proven that the more that you read online, the worse you write. And this is specific towards the kinds of things that you look online, like, you know, listicles as opposed to long form discussions and real actual writing. Yeah.

Read better stuff. Exactly. And this is I mean, this is kind of a no brainer. It's it's not. We've known this before the Internet. If you read People magazine, you were an idiot. And if you read long books, you were pretty smart. It's funny. It's like your your thesis will be five reasons I deserve an A.

OK, that's pretty good. Yeah. So my joke on this was let's see if anybody can replicate the study because we've had that issue recently, too. That's true, too. And if you do want to go read a long form blog, I recommend Wait But Why? We talked about that on a couple episodes. Yes. Yes. And we interviewed the guy, Tim Urban, behind that blog this week on my day job.

And he's a fascinating guy. But the blog itself, very long reads, very well thought out, and they will make you smarter. Excellent. I will check that out. I also like Atlas Obscura, another one of our recent finds that kind of gets into the more long form stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. If you want to move somewhere that is really kind of killing it in terms of future style lifestyles, I'd suggest Sweden.

They're within about five years of killing off cash completely. Interesting. Cash is making up just 2% of the value of all the country's payments already. Music, museums, street vendors, even churches are all starting to rely solely on plastic and electronic payments.

And they're saying basically all cash could disappear completely by 2021 in Sweden. That would be interesting. It is. Very, very interesting. Now, I'm, you know, for security and, you know, tinfoil hat wearing people, it was always like, let's keep the cash.

But now that they actually put tracking things in cash itself, why not just go all plastic? Yeah, seriously. It's, you know, as Kevin Kelly would say, it's inevitable. It's going that way. And it's, I mean, I always try to have a little bit of cash on me just because I find it easier to deal with smaller purchases and whatnot.

But I, again, like we talked about when Apple Pay first came out and I first started using it. It is so damn convenient. I love it. It's fantastic. It really is. Yeah, yeah. The tinfoil hattery will definitely continue. And, you know, how are you going to buy your weed with with plastic?

Well, it's legal here now, Jason. But is it in Sweden? Oh, that's a good point. Yes. I have a bunch of friends that have moved to Sweden and absolutely love the place. So they're doing something right. Yeah. I mean, they're basically they're small enough that they're able to rethink and retool basic tenants of society. This article is really interesting about that because it gets into they were the first unmanned convenience store in which you could basically what you use your smartphone to get into the store and then purchase food.

It's the first country that is going to go completely oil free. This is a great little society they got going on over there. Plus, the chicks are all hot, right? Yeah. But you still got that nasty winter. Yeah, there's that. Hey, but global warming. Global warming. That's true. Pretty soon Sweden will be, you know, beachfront like going to Thailand.

Yep. Have you heard of Ollie? I have not heard of Ollie. Tell me about Ollie. It's a company called Local Motors. They made the first 3D printed car and now they're debuting its first self-driving vehicle and it is up and running as of two days ago. It is a bus that can fit up to 12 passengers and it is equipped with IBM's Watson, which allows it to communicate with passengers so you can get in and say, hey, Ollie, take me downtown.

And it will, in theory. This is running as of right now. So human bus drivers are already being transitioned to robots. This is running on public streets in Maryland in National Harbor, which is the home of local motors. And they plan to launch very shortly on public roads in Vegas and Miami-Dade County in Florida.

Again, Florida. I don't know if you want to start there, but go for it. Have fun. Yeah. So do they actually I'm going to look into this after the show, but are they do they have actual people in there in case something goes wrong? It doesn't appear so. And they didn't say anything about that in the article. So we'll have to do a little bit of a deeper dive.

I mean, they've got photos of it and obviously there's there's no driver at all. But who knows if they're because that's one of the things that we've been talking about. Like legally, you're supposed to have somebody in there just in case. Right. Yeah. So I don't know. We'll have to look at that a little bit more. But good, good intro to the next article that I had, which is an article on Slate about the problems that will be coming for robot cars due to lawyers.

Once again, of course, always lawyers. Yeah, it goes really deep into the weeds of all the various lawsuits that could be coming because of because of self-driving cars. Interesting read. And there's a lot of obstacles that people are going to have to overcome, including Ollie's. So we'll see how they're dealing with it.

Do they talk about who they get to sue? Is it the car owner, the car manufacturer? Are they just going to sue everybody? That is the biggest dilemma right now because you will be able to sue the car manufacturers. So that is a problem. Because it seems like the lawyers would if there's an accident, you're in the car. They would come sue you and then you'd have to sue the car company.

Yeah. So we'll see how that plays out. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting. And let's see. Facebook has opened up suicide prevention tools to everyone. I guess we should have bundled this with the with the what the hell is the name of that company that they're doing. I'm doing so well this morning.

Told you. Soccer hangover. We should have bundled this with the other story about crisis text line. So, yeah, they've opened that up. This existed for a while for certain people, but now it's everywhere. So if I again, I don't know how I feel about this. This is very similar to what was it?

The periscope that was doing the judge and jury by by your peers. Yeah. You can flag one of your friends status if you're worried about them. And the your friend will get a message saying that somebody was concerned about your post. OK. They will get options to talk with a trusted friend, call a helpline, get tips and support or skip.

So basically, you can just ignore it anyways. So it's kind of a really nothing. You know, it's going to be more of an annoyance than anything when people start getting snarky and saying, you know, exactly. You know, when somebody posts something about the Kardashians, like I think that I think they're really thinking about suicide because really nobody in their right mind would post about the Kardashians.

I mean, especially with the way that you and I post. I mean, come on. I would have to flag every single one of your posts, but I know you're also being a snarky jerk. So, yeah, they got to put some deep learning on that. They do. They do. But, you know, good for them, I guess. Just like you said, it's better something than nothing, I suppose.

I don't know. There's a really interesting article on Recode about emerging ethical standards for studying corporate data, particularly Facebook's emotional, emotional contagion controversy. This really gets into it. I love this. It's there's so many interesting things going on with with big data and with basically particularly Facebook, because Facebook is the the behemoth in the room that is basically studying us and learning a hell of a lot about us.

Now, what are the ethics on this? And basically, will there ever be any ethics, which is what I'm more worried about? So more than likely not, because they're, you know, they're a corporation. They can do whatever they want. You can opt out of using Facebook. Yes, you can't. You can't. Never mind. Except you can't.

Yeah. I mean, you've tried it many times, Jason. Well, you always keep coming back. No, but when we also covered last week that, you know, Facebook is tracking you even if you're not a Facebook member. So that's yeah. Which is not good. And the final article that I've found, which I just loved, Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker.

Many a nation tired of explaining things to idiots. Well, we wouldn't have a podcast if we got tired of it. Yes. Well, apparently you and I are not tired of it yet. But this is a fun read. And you're not going to like it if you're a gun nut. And you're not going to like it if you like Trump. But if you're the rest of us, you'll think it's quite funny.

We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors. What is Loot Crate, Jason? Let me tell you. Loot Crate is a monthly subscription box service for geeks, nerds, comic book lovers, and pop culture aficionados. Basically, us. Every month, subscribers receive a mystery box full of collectibles, figurines, apparel, and memorabilia.

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That'll be dystopian for us because we need to make a buck or two. Security? Ha! All right. We're doing something new here with our Security Ha! Segment. We're actually joined by a security professional from the Cyber Wire podcast.

Welcome, Dave Bittner. Hey, glad to be here. I listen to your show every day. Thank you. And I'm like, oh, this is how it's done. This is what you should be doing with security. You actually, you guys know what you're talking about. So, we thought it'd be fun if you started to join us for our security segment.

Because as everybody knows, Brian and I have no clue what we're doing when it comes to security. We just think it's fascinating. Well, you built a successful podcast on that notion. So, we're happy to join you and maybe contribute what we know about cybersecurity.

Yeah, because all we do is tell people every week to use 1Password. And I think about 0.5% of the listening audience has actually taken our advice. And one of the things that I think is interesting that I'm going to have to bring this up on the show a little bit later so Brian can make fun of me too.

I got an email this week from Microsoft saying that somebody accessed my Xbox account. Now, I haven't had an Xbox for years. And I went and I logged in and I looked at the password that I used for it. And it was a password that was one of those old ones, you know, that you used to use all the time and then just never go back and change it.

Yep. And sure enough, it was somebody had logged in with one of my email addresses. And that standard password that I was using a long time ago. So, it must have come out somewhere in one of the breaches. So, first thing I did was I went to 1Password. And the nice thing about having a password manager is you can search on your password field and find out how many times you've used it.

Well, let's just say this week I've been going back to about 270 websites. So, I have to eat my own dog food on that one. That's my own dumb fault. We did a story earlier this week on the Cyber Wire about a company.

They're called K2 Intelligence. And they're working with the NFL Players Association to help NFL players do a better job with their social media. And they were speaking to this exact issue where people have all of these sort of zombie accounts that they've forgotten about.

You know, they'll go to an NFL player and they'll say, what accounts do you have? And they'll say, oh, I have Facebook. I have Twitter. I have Snapchat. And that's it. But they go in and they investigate and they find that they actually probably have, you know, 30, 40, 50 accounts that are just sort of, you know, rattling around that they haven't used in years.

And all those accounts can be vectors to get into your active accounts. So, you know, it's a real problem at all levels. Absolutely. Absolutely. And especially if you, I mean, some of these places you just can't even kill your account, you know. So they're going to be there forever.

So it's worthwhile to go back and just make a password that you're never even going to bother remembering. But it's at least like 13 or 14 characters. And that way it's, you know, even if it gets out, it doesn't matter. And then if you ever do need to go restart your MySpace account or your Friendster account, you can just reset your password.

That's right. Yeah. No, that's good advice. Good advice for sure. So what happened this week in the cybersecurity world that we need to know about? Well, the big story this week that probably people have heard about is that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, it was revealed that they'd been hacked.

It was an ongoing hack. It's been, people have been in there for several months. But the story broke this week. The person claiming to do, doing the hacking is calling themselves Guccifer 2.0. And that's actually sort of a reference to an older hacker who went by the name Guccifer.

The original Guccifer was famous for doxing some famous people, including President Bush, George W. Bush. And he also claimed to have gotten into Hillary Clinton's email server. The original Guccifer was apprehended and is currently awaiting, taking a little time off in a federal prison.

So he's got a stylish orange jumpsuit hanging around. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to find out what his fate is this fall. But in the meantime, this group, you know, a bad guy or bad girl or a group of bad people calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 are taking credit for having broken into the DNC servers.

They released the information on Donald Trump, the opposition research on Donald Trump, which is a 200-page-plus document, which is interesting. I don't know if you follow anything about Donald Trump.

I don't think there's anything particularly shocking or new in there. But just the fact that they were able to get in there and do it, just in the past 24 hours or so, the head of the DNC said that, well, yes, they got in and they got some information.

But they weren't able to access any of our financial information. Well, upon hearing that, Guccifer said, oh, here's a bunch of financial information. Don't taunt the hackers, you idiot. Right. Exactly. Yes. Don't whack the horn in his nest. Yeah.

So, Guccifer seems to be playing this you ain't seen nothing yet game with the DNC. So, stay tuned, folks. We're going to see how far this goes. It seems as though the Russians are involved in this, the documents that have been released.

If you look deep into the documents, there are some Russian characters and other signs that the Russians are involved. Of course, the Russian government is denying it, but that's exactly what you'd expect them to do. Yeah. Seriously. Oh, you caught us. It's not like Scooby-Doo where you just say, that's the bad guy.

Right. We would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those pesky kids and their dog. So, you know, we'll stay tuned. This is clearly a developing story, and I don't think it's over yet. In other news, I saw this on The Verge. The NSA wants to monitor pacemakers and other medical devices, and basically they've mentioned before that they want to dive into the entire Internet of Things as it's in its nascent stages right now.

Do you have any concerns about this, being a cybersecurity professional? Well, I think so. I mean, obviously, the Internet of Things is exploding. Just all of the, you know, our refrigerators are connected to the Internet these days.

And, you know, the question being, what could my refrigerator possibly want to tell me? But evidently, you know, needing to know right away that you need more milk is an important thing. But the point being that all of these devices connected to the Internet, these are all potential attack vectors.

These are all possible places where people can find out more information about you. And so, of course, that's something that the NSA would be interested in. They want to gather things about all kinds of people. And so any of these devices could be a way for them to do that.

Medical devices is particularly interesting because, you know, your medical records, the data about you, that's particularly personal information. And it's also particularly valuable information. Medical information is much more valuable on the black market than, say, credit card information.

Yeah, that's why we've seen this, the ransomware guys hitting mainly hospitals recently. Isn't that because they know they're going to get they're at least going to get the ransom from it. And if they're in there already stealing, stealing the docks and they can double dip on it. Well, that's yes, there is something to that.

And I think the part of the thing with hospitals is that, you know, hospitals have they're highly incentivized to get their systems up and running quickly. When you literally have lives on the line, being able to access patient records could be the difference between life and death.

And besides just that, obviously, all of the liability that goes with that, hospitals are highly motivated to try to get their systems up and running quickly. What's interesting is that what we're seeing lately with that sort of high profile ransomware is that someone will lock down a hospital, for example, and they'll say, you know, give us $20,000.

And the hospital will say, all right, here's $20,000. And then the ransomware people will come back and say, would you believe $30,000? And they'll ask for more. Usually, at that point, you know, the hospital cuts their losses and deals with it in other ways, you know, tries to go back to their backups, hoping that they have backups.

Yeah, if they have backups. Yeah. And a reminder, please, everyone, back up your data. It's the best way to protect yourself against a lot of these problems. You know, it's evolving, and the FBI is saying, is recommending, for example, that don't pay the ransomware.

They're saying, you know, protect yourself ahead of time, back up your data. But the odds of your data being unlocked by the ransom, by the ransomers, particularly in these high profile cases, seems to be getting slimmer and slimmer. The consumer-grade ransomware people, the people who get into your system and ask you for, you know, $100 to unlock your personal files, they sometimes will give you your data back.

But you're really rolling the dice with them. Yep, yep. And speaking of the ransomware vectors, to get it on your system, one of the main ways people do that is through Flash. And I just saw that there was a new Flash Oday that has just been patched again and again and again.

Yeah, Flash is the gift that keeps on giving. As we're fond of saying on this show, this has all happened before and it will all happen again. Yeah, it's true. And it seems like, you know, I think, you know, years ago when Steve Jobs stood up and said, you know, we're not going to be including Flash on the iPhone and everyone said, you're crazy.

You know, it's taken a while. It's taken, you know, many years to happen, but it looks like we're starting to see the final death rattles of Flash. And it's coming from the browser suppliers. You know, they're saying Flash is no longer going to be loaded by default.

It's too risky. But also importantly, there are now alternatives to Flash. HTML5 can handle most of the things that we would rely on Flash for. So, you know, Flash's day has come and gone. But boy, has it been problematic when it comes to cybersecurity.

So a lot of people are not going to miss it. Not at all. So the big news this week is Safari is the next generation of Safari in Mac OS, which they've just renamed from IR or whatever. They keep changing it. Yeah, it was OS X.

OS X. Now it's Mac OS. Yep. Yep. Because, yeah, OS X was on, what, 15 years? It's like, okay, I think it's time for, you know, a refresh here. Yeah, the good thing for, personally, I always had a pet peeve when people will call OS X OS X for some reason.

You know, and lots of people call it OS X. And it seems like, you know, no big deal. Again, it's more my problem than theirs. But I always thought everyone at Apple called it OS X. So the name of this operating system is OS X. But, so I'm happy because it's no longer going to be OS X.

I no longer have to listen to people calling it OS X. And that makes me happy. There you go. We won't even go into the GIF versus GIF debate then. But the good news is, yes, Safari will disable Flash in Mac OS Sierra.

Fantastic. Chrome is also doing the same thing in Q4. And Microsoft Edge already is, you know, getting rid of non-essential Flash. So if you still have Flash, we've said it before, we'll keep saying it until it is dead and you can't install it. Get rid of it. You don't need it anymore.

Same with Java. Yeah, it's still there if you need it. You can activate it. You know, Chrome will ship with it, but it's not going to be activated by default. So, you know, if you find yourself in some situation where you absolutely positively have to use Flash and HTML5 won't do, you're not up a creek, but we're all better off having it turned off by default, I think.

So, FBI, they have a massive facial recognition system in place that you're not allowed to find out about if you're in it or not, correct? Right. And now they say that the General Accounting Office came back and said, oh, there's 411 million photos in their database, and you cannot find out if you're in it or not.

Now, there's privacy implications here, but this doesn't really bother me because I can actually write a system that goes and scrapes the internet for probably as many pictures of Americans on Facebook as possible. I know many private investigators actually have machines running in their offices that are just scraping public photos off the net to, you know, have their own databases of people to track.

This part doesn't bother me. Now, what bothers me is when you take their facial recognition system that they're working right now, which is extraordinarily flawed. Their hit rate is tremendously low, and you couple it with an article that you sent me.

Can you tell me why I should be troubled about this and just tell the folks about it? Yeah, I mean, obviously, facial recognition software is developing quickly. I'm amazed at what a good job Google Photos does with my family photos. You know, even without knowing the names of people, it can track photos of my children as they age.

So – That's insane. Right. So, you know, they're growing. Their bone structures are changing. But somehow Google seems to be able to know that these are pictures of my older son. These are pictures of my younger son. You know, these are pictures of me. And so that is developing really quickly.

So it's kind of interesting that the FBI isn't as successful as someone like Google is. You know, maybe they need to team up. But – Well, yeah, yeah. There's an issue right now with that because – yeah, in Facebook's facial recognition is, off the charts, good too.

Both of those. They're private companies who have recently had a little falling out with the government, you could say, since Mr. Snowden let a few documents lie around. So, you know, government and private sector aren't really getting along that well.

Well, and – but, you know, speaking of the FBI and privacy, there's a story this week on Ars Technica that the FBI has been putting surveillance cameras on utility poles to keep an eye on people, places, and things.

Now, the FBI isn't really saying why they're putting these poles on – or putting these cameras on poles, but, you know, you can connect the dots on that. But what's interesting is there was an activist who took them to court who said, this is – you know, if you're going to put these cameras on poles, you need to tell us where they are.

And the FBI said to the judge that, no, if we tell you where the poles are, that will compromise our investigations. The FBI is making the case that there is no expectation of privacy in a public place, so putting a camera on a pole in a public place is not a violation of privacy.

The judge seems to be going along with that. That's a fairly established thing from my understanding of law. I'm not a lawyer, but I understand that that's a pretty set thing. At the same time, you know, I can't stand in the public park across from your house with a telescope and look through your windows.

You know, that's a violation of your privacy. But one of the things – the thing that caught my eye on this story was the FBI's Office of General Counsel made the point to the judge. They said as long as the people were observing and including just people who are not the targets of the observation but people who are just kind of coming and going in their daily business, as long as they don't know that they're being observed, then there's no violation of privacy.

But if we tell them that they're being observed, then we're violating their privacy and we'll have to deal with the implications of that violation. It's like a weird perversion of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's sort of an ignorance is bliss kind of thing.

You know, this story is new. We are – we're planning on digging into this story a little bit with one of our law experts on the Cyber Wire in the coming week or so. So if I find out more about it, I'll be sure to check back in with you. But, you know, it's an interesting one and this ongoing issues of as technology advances, what does that mean for everyone's privacy?

Indeed, indeed. And it's interesting like, you know, you look at London and they have, you know, how many hundreds of thousands of cameras, but they're all in plain sight. These guys are just being sneaky about it and saying, well, you know, maybe they're there, maybe they're not. Now, it'll be interesting to find out if some intrepid photographer can go around the city and figure out what these things look like and then crowdsource a map of where all of these cameras are.

Because once you know what it looks like, then you know how to track them and mark them. Well, and that is already being done. If you do a Google image search right now for FBI utility pole camera, you will find – All right. There are many photos already and there are people – you know, there are citizen groups who are troubled by this and so they're starting to do just that thing.

They're trying to crowdsource maps of where these cameras are located. I think I see a Kickstarter campaign in my future. As they say, time will tell. All right, Dave. Well, thank you for joining us and everybody check out the Cyber Wire podcast. There will be links in the show notes for your daily dose of all the things that will keep you up at night.

That's right. That's not how we try to sell the show, but we'll take it. That's good. It's good. All right, Dave. We'll talk to you next week. All right. My pleasure.

Comment of the week. We got a lot of iTunes today. We did. We're going to start with the first one from TootAllForAll. One star. Well, what star? Yeah. Oh. Now, this is I'm torn on this one.

Yeah, because he loves you. Summary. The original title of this show was a grumpy old anti-gun wuss and a poor guy who puts up with him, but too long of a name. So they settled for GOG. Crying Brian, as his sister calls him, has a mean streak and shows such little respect for his co-host.

I can't listen to someone so disrespectful and mean to a supposed friend. I would hate to see how he treats his non-friends. Hopefully, Jason will dump this guy soon. Bring back the Does It Have Legs show. Nothing but love for you, Jason. Yeah, OK. Well, Jason technically did dump me for the security segment, so maybe you just want to listen to that one from now on to TootAllForAll.

I do have to ask, do you have any male friends, TootAllForAll? Because I don't know about you, but the way that guys treat each other is they make fun of each other and they crap on each other because you earn the right to do that through friendship. It's called busting balls.

It's called busting balls. It's what you do. And besides, our show would be really boring if we didn't do it. Jason and I talk all week. We've talked for fucking 20 plus years. We're friends. He doesn't get... Jason is a lot stronger than you think he is. He does not get hurt by my ribbing him.

Trust me. Yeah. So, you know, I appreciate the love, but I would appreciate it more if you would just get rid of that one star. It's not good for anybody. That's not helping, Jason. No, it's not actually. That's actually worse. Yes. Anyways. Well, I have to apologize, Jason.

I didn't realize I was hurting your feelings. You make me so butthurt so many times a day. I think if anybody's been hurt on the show, it's been me. I guess I am crying, Brian. I'm crying, Brian. Well, this guy obviously really listens to the show because that was like a one aside once in one episode.

So I'm sure he's listening again now. Okay. Well, please just go back and change that. All right. So the one star rating was a kind of... It was a fluke. It was a fluke. Compared to the, what, when we have one, two, three, four or five star ratings that came along with that one. The first from E Salmon.

Fun to listen to. Thanks for putting on the podcast. It's great information. Thank you. Next one comes from MM345678. I wonder what your password's like. One, two, three, four. If you're a millennial, you won't understand. This is a great show about tech security, the internet, and life in general.

I absolutely love it. And I'm always very keenly awaiting the weekly drop. The authors make fun of morons, fad-obsessed hipsters, and the vast amount of human stupidity that now, thanks to the internet, has found a way to express themselves. Highly recommended, unless that is, you are a millennial, and have the 140-character Snapchat addled attention span of a drunk squirrel.

I think we have a title. I know. Thanks so much, MM345678. Love it. Next one, another five star from Atticus underscore Finchie. Podcast highlight of my week. Grumpy Old Geeks is simply one of my favorite podcasts of all time. I've been listening to this absolutely fabulous, absolutely fabulous podcast for a couple of years now, while others have come and gone for my subscription list.

GOG has stood the test of time. In a tech world with so much hype and over-promising and under-delivering, we need passionate and well-informed critical voices, and Jason and Brian provide just that. In the time that I've been a fan, it now feels like I'm meeting up with friends every time I listen. Grump on. Grump on. Thank you very much, Atticus Finchie, which is, by the way, a great name.

It is a great name, and you should be careful about being friends with me, apparently. I'm just saying. Next one comes from Stacy at 15. My weekly go-to for all things tech. I truly enjoy listening to your podcast every week. Working as a sales engineer for a cybersecurity company, you keep me updated with the latest topics that I can geek out with my prospects about.

Keep it up. We shall. We shall. Thank you. And this is from a Patreon subscriber. Thank you so much for that. And I guess it was on iTunes. I'm assuming a five-star rating as well. It was iTunes Germany, five-star. But for some reason, we're not getting the Germany ones, even though we pay for services that send us these things.

Interesting how that doesn't work. Yeah. Anyways, I do love this particular comment, so I shall read this one. After many painful months of dissecting all kinds of tech-related podcasts, I have come to the conclusion that Grumpy Old Geeks is simply the best of its kind. After first listening to GOG, I had to cancel my subscription because Jason and Brian constantly bummed me out by making me realize how effed up the world is.

Sorry. A few weeks later, I had to subscribe again because I realized they were right. I would give them four stars instead of five because they talk fast. They use slang, which makes it difficult for me as a non-native speaker to exactly follow their rants and praises, and they curse like street whores. Yes, we do.

Yes, we do. Sorry. Apart from that, their subscriber relationship management philosophy is we don't give a shit. Also true. However, I am giving them five stars because I'm afraid they will yell at me during the show. Keep up the good work, geeks. Finally, finally, I love your show. Greetings from Germany. Thomas. Well, thank you.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Danke, Shane. Danke, Shane. So we got another. We got a tweet from Jay Lester and it says, GOG podcast, a more logical argument than I expected. And this is an article on Medium called Why I Need an AR-15.

And this is from the founder of Ars Technica. Yes. And a very long article it is. And I haven't had a chance to read it yet. But you said you skimmed it, Brian. What did you think? I did. I read it. Since you're the anti-gun nut Crying Brian. That's right. Crying Brian still doesn't agree with this. There's you don't you just you just don't need this.

You just don't. And we're not going to get all too political. It's hard not to, particularly given what just happened this week again in Florida. You know, whatever. I'm just asking. All I'm asking for is registration and training if you want a gun. And I hate how the argument always descends.

If when I say something like that, the argument then becomes specific about specific type of guns. I don't give a fuck. I don't care what kind of gun it is. I really don't. Just can we can we at least agree with registration and training? That's all I'm asking for at this point.

I'm not trying to take your damn gun away. Registration training. Well, yeah, more background checks. I'm fine with. Yes, just rational stuff. So that's all we're asking for. That's all. OK. Anyways, we got a bunch of comments on Grumpy Old Geeks dot com, our website as well.

The first is from Gene. Question for the geeks. Jason, more comments. IZ Touch IP camera has excellent HD resolution. I'm purchasing one for a second home. See demo for quality. Pricing is all over the place. The office in the demo is located in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

It just keeps going and going. I'll check out the camera for sure. Yep, definitely. Yeah, for sure. So I appreciate that. This next one comes from Roz. Thanks for answering my question last week. I wrote it on my phone on break from work and missed the checkbox. I've been a Patreon supporter for a couple of months now and was too embarrassed to write and admit I forgot how to get my exclusive soundtracks.

We'll take care of that. Yeah, we'll take care of that. You basically just write us and ask for it. But I figured, what the hell? Ask. My other question was in regards to the VPN link on your site. If I start using a VPN, will I have to reauthorize my computer every time I log on to the Elder Scrolls online?

My web root security suite won't let me on the site unless I shut it off. I have the same problem with hide my ass VPN as well. I hope you review it just for the entertainment value for me. I found where all the Flash programmers work now, making hidden object games, my mother's favorite type of game and a constant security headache for me.

Thanks for the great podcast, guys. Well, a lot of places are banning some of the public VPNs because they get used for nefarious purposes sometimes. So a lot of game developers are actually banning them. There's not a whole lot you can do about that.

It's not even just game developers. There are a lot of sites that are very security conscious that you cannot log into if you're using the VPN. Yeah, just mainly the public, you know, paid VPNs. Yeah, you can actually go to Amazon if you're if you're technologically inclined, there's a pretty easy way to go to Amazon Web Services, spin up a very cheap instance and use that as your own private VPN.

That's quite smart. Yeah, I've done it before. It's you can write some scripts to have it done pretty quickly and then it'll spin up an instance for you when you want your own VPN. And you'll get you can like, you know, unregister the IP address and register a new one anytime. So that's that's a workaround for that if you want your own VPNs.

And I'm sure that there are higher end VPNs out there. But for, you know, 99 percent of what you're going to do, private Internet access works for me. I works for me. I'm subscribed. I'm using it. If you want it, go to grumpy old geeks dot com. Click through there. Yeah, turn off your ad blocker.

Turn off your ad blocker. Turn off your ad blocker. That's the only thing that runs on there. So you're not going to see anything else. Sign up with them. It's great. It's really very, very easy to turn on and off when you need to get into somewhere. And just, you know, remember to turn it back on when you're done using the thing that won't let you use it.

Yeah, there you go. All right. Another comment. This is from Thomas. Hey, Brian and Jason. I love the show. I'm ready to respond to one of Jason's requests for a good home security software that's not subscription based. I've used smart things and love it, but their cam software is sadly also subscription based. A friend recommended Blue Iris, which sounds like a porn star.

It works great with a plethora of IP cameras. I've used a Foscam IP camera that was around 60 bucks. It is not the most user friendly, but chances are that anyone listening to your show would be able to figure it out. You can save to any directory or stream online. Not only can you set up notifications, but you can black out certain portions of the field of view and a bunch of more technical stuff about this stuff.

And then he asks, what is the easiest way to rate the show on my iPhone? It drives me nuts that I can't rate podcasts in the podcast app. I click the link on your website. It takes me to the podcast app and I can't see any way to to give you the five stars you deserve. I actually don't know because as we've discussed at great length, the whole iTunes thing is really a janky piece of crap.

Yeah. I mean, you can you have to do it from the desktop. They they keep taking it out and putting it back in in the podcast app itself. Yeah, it's really hard to do on the phone. And I've noticed that they've now also added the ability to love podcasts, which I don't see how that does anything.

I don't even see where we would get love ratings. Yeah, I don't know. I don't understand what the hell that is. So you have to ask Trent Reznor. Yeah, yeah. Since he's, you know, in charge of that now. Yes. OK, so Anonymous writes in, hello, love the show.

It never fails to give me a few laughs and do some thinking. And I'm always very much looking forward to the drop weekly. Isn't this the one from before? You should really have a millennials section, although come to think of it, that is the show. So I decided I wanted to give you another five star rating in iTunes. I just thought you'd like to know that one, you can't do it from a Linux desktop like the one I'm on now.

You can't do that from an iPhone, iPad. When you hit the show's logo in the store, it bounces you off to the podcast app. The only way to do this is from a Mac where your iTunes doesn't know you're subscribed to this podcast. You can also do it on a PC. Maybe it's just me not being millennially enough.

I suggest you give it a go and see for yourselves on a loosely retired related note, not retired. No, I'd like to be retired. iTunes is probably the worst music player known to mankind. For me, I find it really hard even to make it upload my music to my iPhone. But even as just a music player, it's just plain dumb and borderline unusable.

Do you guys have a recommendation as to a good music player for iOS? I don't really mind paying a few bucks. I'm a believer in paying for good software if it's a decent app. Thanks for being awesome. Cheers, Marco. P.S. I'm fine with you quoting the contents of this, but please leave my last name out. I work for the big A and have recommended the show to a few colleagues.

The above would make for an awkward, awkward conversation. Well, yeah, I agree with everything that you just said. Am I aware of any other good music players for iOS? No. There used to be attempts at making different ones. I think most people have given up.

Remember Winamp? That was pretty good. But here's the other issue. You can't make an app that, I mean, they finally got around this with browsers because for a while they wouldn't let Chrome in there because Safari already did the same thing that Chrome does. Yeah.

Because there was that whole thing. It's like you can't do something that just directly duplicates the feature set of a built in app. So I haven't I haven't looked in a long time. I haven't either. Yeah. If anybody knows about it, write us in and we'll do some research this week because I would I would definitely love an iTunes replacement. My iTunes match subscription has run out.

So now it's like, oh, I'm free. I'm free from actually having to use iTunes to get my music. But I definitely need a replacement. Yeah. And regarding all your complaints about iTunes, you're in the building, buddy. Yeah. Walk over there and kick somebody in the ball.

Why don't you walk over to Trent Reznor's corporate office in the corner there and tell him that his program sucks or better yet, tweet him with hashtag iTunes sucks. Yeah. And fix the podcast app, too. I would like to be able to get a rate. Yeah. While you're over that way. And so explain what this love thing is, because we don't know.

Yeah. What the fuck? All right. You can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcast, on Instagram at Grumpy Old Geeks or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpyoldgeeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you have friends, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out and it'll only take a minute or two. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and it'll take you right there depending on your device. And we'll be right back.

But now, a word from our sponsors. At the library. All right. My first book of the week, Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden.

Okay. Yes. Michael Hayden was the director of the NSA during 9-11 and then eventually moved on to become the head of the CIA. And this is a memoir of that whole era. It is a very big book and goes into great detail on everything that happened and why it happened.

And it's an interesting read if you're into that kind of thing. Right. Not many people are, but if you are and you want to know a lot of the backstory and a lot of the back room talk, this covers a ton of it. And it comes from, you know, the man himself.

So, and if you get the audio book, he actually reads it himself. Very cool. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I was extremely excited on Tuesday when I got notified that the Long Cosmos, a novel of the Long Earth series by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett, was out and already whizzing its way to my iPad.

Ah, I haven't finished it. I know. I did. I tried. I tried. I tried. There's just been too much soccer going on. I am about 87 percent of the way through the book and loving every second of it. OK, yeah, you're getting there. You're getting to the end. Yeah, I'm close.

So we'll talk about it in detail next week. OK, yes, I finished it. And since because I thought Brian was going to finish because you texted me like, it's out, it's out, it's out and I put it a good solid two hours every single night. I just it's a long book.

Oh, that's that's crazy for you because you can usually finish a book in two hours. I know. I know. I'm so I'm savoring it, Jason. OK, but I do know what I'm going to read when this is done. Chuck Klosterman also has a new book out. But what if we're wrong? Thinking about the present as if it were the past a little review on Salon, which is linked to in the show notes.

I think it's a sounds like it's going to be a really good book. I'm really interested in it, so that'll be up next. And hopefully I will finish that for next week as well. OK, I'm going to have Kevin Kelly's book, Inevitable, finished by next week. I'm halfway through it and loving it. Absolutely loving it. But I will finish it and review it next week.

Cool. Software, apps and gadgets. Now, we talk about the Internet of Things often. Yes. And I ran across this and it is a very funny title.

Very funny title. It says, sorry, techies. I don't need your gadgets in my vagina. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's pretty funny. This is one of the better, more hilarious articles I've read in quite a while. Yeah. Yeah.

But while it's frustrating when the world's biggest tech companies overlook the existence of 51 percent of the world's population, it may be even worse when tech engineers start to pay too much attention to us. In recent years, an alarming number of startups have come up with the terrible idea that what women really want is to shove an Apple Watch up our vaginas.

Smart snatch anyone? And I just I just like fell out of my chair when I read that. Yeah. There's a nice breakdown of all the various products that people are trying to market out there for women, which generally involve inserting them, which generally women don't want to do.

No. So, yeah. I particularly enjoyed the French advertising firm that produced a parody of a product called Pouché. It's very good. You can upload your data to the Vagicloud and broadcast your mental status to the social network at anyone within 150 feet.

This is good stuff. Yeah. I think, you know, people stay away from this. Women don't want to put tech inside themselves in general any more than men would want to. One would assume. One would assume, but one assumes. You know what happens when you assume. This is when I don't like to look at the dark web.

Ah, yes. Yes. Every key. Remember that? Yes. What a stupid idea. Ah, yes. This is John McAfee's big push in product. Yes. It's a little, you know, Bluetooth dongle-y thing that you can wear a wristband with or whatever.

It's supposed to unlock everything as you get close to it. Yes. And given the amount of times I have lost my sunglasses or other items that are this small, I or even, you know, I lost I lost a Fitbit. Yes. So this would be the equivalent of losing one password with it unlocked on the street.

So not wise. I'm going to wait for somebody else to buy it. I'm not going to try it. But if somebody is out there and has tried it and spent the money on it, let us know how it's working for you. Because there was a lot of controversy around this thing about it not being really vetted very well by security experts, even though John McAfee, you know, started the entire antivirus, you know, industry.

Yes. And he's... It's not cheap either. No, it's not cheap at all. No. So this is... It seems like a very bad idea to me, but I would love it if somebody else tried it. Yeah, go for it. We've done enough experiments on this show. We paid for more apps than we can shake a stick at. So it's just somebody else's turn.

Yep. I bought a drone to test for this show. Somebody else can go buy something else. Yeah. And I'm not going to entrust my entire life as a little experiment for the show. Sorry. Yeah. Another thing that came out of WWDC, though, is Swift Playgrounds. Okay. This is really cool.

This is an educational tool for kids to learn how to program Swift. Yeah. And it's an iPad app and it looks really nice. Well-designed and... Yeah. They are going after the Minecraft share space here. Yeah. I will try it when it comes out because, you know, I have the programming capability of a small child now since I've stopped programming.

So I can't wait to give it a shot and maybe I'll learn Swift. Yeah. It looks pretty damn cool, actually. I think I might give it a go as well. All right. We shall see. Meerkat. Remember them? Oh, yeah. Came up with a great idea, then immediately had it stolen by Twitter because they relied on Twitter as their backbone.

And everybody now just laughs at the whole idea of all this anyways. Well, they're back with a new app. Shockingly, it's video related. This has actually been out for a while. Nobody knew it was connected to the company that started Meerkat. Now that's kind of out. This is called House Party.

Woo-hoo! Party! Party! This is what you can do, Jason, at 3 a.m. after a bottle of vodka instead of going to, you know, texting one of the little suicide prevention hotlines. You can load up House Party and see who's around and talk to them. Well, doesn't that sound great? Not really. So I downloaded it and gave it a shot, but I can't use it because absolutely nobody I know has it.

And this is basically this is basically the modern equivalent of a party line. Remember those from when you were a kid? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You just dial up the number and whoever happened to be on was on, except this is connected directly to your friends. You open it up. So it is your friend. It's not just you can't just go out to the world.

It's not like, no, what was it? Chat roulette. Yeah, it's not. You're not sure. Yeah, you're not going to get random dicks. I can't believe nobody's brought chat roulette back. Yeah, just, you know, Jason, just the dicks, you know, right? There's a good title. Damn it. Now, we always talk about how people aren't using technology to cure cancer, save the world.

Yes, I found a really neat actual technology thing this week. It's called Liftware, a technology thing, a technology thing. What it is, is it's kind of a spoon with a gimbal in it. Yeah, it looks weird. It looks weird, but it's for people who have tremors. So if you drink a bottle of vodka every night, you have to put it, then you have to balance it on a fork and then try and get it to your face, but it'll keep it steady.

Yeah. You just put a straw in your vodka and then your shakes will. But it's an interesting concept for people who, you know, have problems with shaky hands, which a lot of elderly do. Yeah. And it's a pretty damn cool video. Yeah. So it looked really cool. So and a friend of the show, Patrick, sent us in a really cool video about it's open bionics and the videos for called Augmented Future.

But it's this really cool bionic arm. Yeah. Very, very cool. I mean, it did. I don't know if it works that well, but man, the design is great. They definitely got some movie guys on this one. Special effects guys. Yeah. Just check out the video. It's in the in the show notes.

Yep. Now, the one thing that I freely admit that I miss about my BlackBerry and I love the iPhone. I would never go back. Well, BlackBerry is dead anyways. I miss the notification light that BlackBerry had. And Apple has never, ever, ever done that on their iPhone. Samsung is reinventing the concept with something called a smart glow, which is go, which will be right around the camera lens.

And, you know, it'll basically do these different types of glowing and lighting up for different notifications that you can set, which I think is great. I think that's really cool. And I wish that Apple had something like this. Yeah. Well, there you go. Now's your chance. You can go switch over to Samsung. Yeah, it's not going to happen.

Okay. But it's a cool concept. And Bluetooth 5 is coming. Okay. I still thought we were on Bluetooth 3. Apparently, we're going to 5 for the Internet of Things because they're going to need a lot more bandwidth to be able to screw up your life. So it's quadruple the range and double the speed and will be out by late 2016 or early 2017.

So the only time I will recognize this is when I do an iOS update and it turns Bluetooth on. Well, it probably wouldn't even be in devices then until 2018. Most likely, yeah. Or late 2017. We'll see how that goes. Yep. We shall see. So they finally come out with something that might get me to try out VR.

This looks cool as a Star Trek fan. This looks very cool. I am a Star Trek fan and they have a game called Star Trek Bridge Crew, which was unveiled at E3 on Monday. And they got some of the Star Trek guys to come in and give it a go and do, you know, from all the different universes.

So that's a little screwed up. But whatever. This looks cool. This is I'm not going to go out and buy an Oculus Rift or a Viver. You need like five of them. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. You need a whole bunch of people. But as they talked about, you know, kind of making these arcade areas where they would have all these things, I would I would wrestle up a couple of friends and go down there and give this a go.

It looks fun. I think once once this technology starts to proliferate some more, what you're going to see is you're going to see land parties like we used to do with Quake. People just strap up their PCs and go to their friend's house and wire up and then, you know, play games. And but they'll be doing it in VR and bumping into each other a lot.

Probably. Yeah. At least with a Star Trek game, you're seated the whole time. That's true. It's well, you know, hopefully. I mean, if you get hit by something, you have to run around the room like they did in the show. No. Yeah. Shake back and forth in your chair. Exactly. It would be funny if people started to, like, you know, get their living rooms remodeled in the into a bridge configuration to their friends when they come over.

There's no more man caves. Now there's man bridges. Yeah. That would be fun. That would be fun. The other thing that might be getting me into AR and we've talked a lot about Magic Leap and so is everybody without really knowing what the hell is going on with them. The mysterious augmented reality company, they have made a deal with Lucasfilm and ILM.

So they will be creating immersive Star Wars experiences, apparently, whenever this comes out. Now there's a video. I watched this video this morning. Yes. And I there's there's something about this video that I have to admit I had to go back and watch it three more times because the first time I saw this video, I thought that C-3PO was a dude in a costume and they had a they had a little remote controlled R2D2.

No, no, it's all done in in the actual technology. That is what they're saying. I'm always wary of this because I never believe them, because when we finally see what the product is, it doesn't look as good as the videos that they say were shot using their technology, but this is what it's going to look as it says.

This is shot through the lens of the Magic Leap. It is badass. Yeah, I will be getting on board with this. Yeah, I think this is why they're worth like all the monies right now is because the technology is probably going to be that good. I wonder how big the computer is going to be stuck to your back to be able to power this thing.

That is troublesome. Yeah, because, you know, they are coming out with backpack PCs now. So I think this will come with a backpack PC because I don't know how the hell else they're going to do it. Well, there's got to be a lot of computation in there as long as they make the backpack PC look like it's Yoda. Ah, that would be good.

See, then I could be I'm training on I'm training with them. Yes. That one's free, guys.

Media candy. I came across this article in ours, Technica, and I had to go check it out because we've we've joked about big data and algorithms for long enough. This is a movie written by an algorithm and they actually went out and filmed it.

That's pretty cool. They plugged in a bunch of scripts into this AI and it spit out an actual script and they filmed it. And it is one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Yeah, I didn't watch all of it.

I've read some of the different write ups on it. It sounds like it's basically about on par with like a D level sci fi crap movie that would have been made in like 1980. Oh, not even man, not even that. OK, it is so incomprehensive or incomprehensible, I should say.

It makes no sense. It is very silly. But the the acting in it is very good. They got some some good actors in there. You know, Tom Middleditch from Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Gray, Humphrey Kerr. So I don't know any of these people, but OK, well, you've seen Silicon Valley.

So, yes, I know that one. Right. Yeah, so you're saying I probably shouldn't bother watching this. I would not now that I've seen it. I mean, it is funny for like watch the first three minutes and then you're done. You don't need to see any more. It's not very long anyway. OK, but it's it's very interesting to see what what the state of AI script writing is.

So I'm pretty sure that Hollywood is safe at this point, even though this is the dream of all all of Hollywood to be able to stick in a script and get get another one out. You know, exactly. Yes, we finally get rid of Adam Sandler. I think I think he did that on his own. That's true. He kind of maybe he's been using this.

That could be the problem. He's been stuck in Netflix for too long. So Bjork has released the very first virtual reality album. Now, this is I found this on Gadget. I probably should have found a better source because the opening sentence is basically you can tell she's making some money from HTC here.

Now, over two decades later, she's released the world's first virtual reality album in partnership with HTC on their kick ass virtual reality platform. Oh, yeah. So it's press release. Yes. Press release, basically. But this is a it's not a new album. It's Volnikura, the album she released last year, which is based on a breakup and basically has done an entire VR aspect to it, which, you know, one is filmed inside her mouth.

OK. And I do like the quote. It's like I've really got a swan around my neck. Oh, Bjork. That's pretty funny. Yeah, I'm not too interested in checking this out, but good on her. I mean, she's one of those artists that just pushes pushes technology all the time. And I like that. So cool. And she's adorable.

And she is adorable. Kanye is not adorable, though. And he has released a trailer for a video game that this is hang on. This is this is monumental. This is monumental. It is. This is the first time we've mentioned Kanye and he's not in Moron of the Week. Well, I kind of put it last because it's leading into Moron of the Week.

And I see this is kind of on the border. He's more on adjacent. He's more on adjacent on this one. This is a game that players will adopt the role of Kanye's mom. Flying through the gates of heaven. I cannot recommend enough going to watch the trailer for this game because he is such a fucking asshat.

Anyways. Oh, man. OK, I got to go see this then. Dude, you got to watch this. And then on to Moron of the Week where this kind of belonged. Moron of the Week. We have a couple, which is probably why Kanye got bumped a little bit.

Yeah, it is a Moron-rific week. It is. Our first is Facebook. Facebook screwed up. They basically declared that the Philippines was at war. Whoops. Yeah. So was this one of the algorithm-based news stories that they promoted?

No, this is just somebody stupid that didn't look into the reality. And I've. OK, first off, here's what happened. Last Sunday was Philippines. It was their Independence Day. So they did one of those things where they pop up and say, you know, hey, it's Independence Day.

Celebrate your independence, Filipinian people, and post this image. Unfortunately, the flag is reversed. And the Philippines, in the Philippines, when they're at war, they flipped the flag. OK, so they basically said, here, post this. And by the way, your country's at war. Oh, yeah.

So this is just a matter of the article on Elite Daily then goes on to say, this is a perfect example of why you need diversity in the workspace and you have to hire people that are not white. And I'm like, they have tons of people from the Philippines that work there. They just didn't ask them.

Yeah, you got to ask. You got to ask. Anyways. All right. The second moron of the week comes courtesy of a friend of the show, Hannah, who saw this truck driving around the L.A. area, specifically Santa Monica, called Los Angeles File Keepers. They purport to basically secure your entire life for you.

Secure. If you've got stuff and you want it to be secured, go to File Keepers. Unfortunately, they build their site with Joomla, and it's broken, and there are a bunch of warnings about session starts all over their website. So if you can't even secure your damn website, people. Oh, man. Okay. You're not securing my files.

Okay. Here's a PHP tip if you're a Joomla programmer. Before you send a session, Cookie, there's a PHP function called header sent. Yeah. And if that returned, it'll return a Boolean. And if it's true, then don't send a session header.

Yeah. It's pretty straightforward. That's like, you know, that's Cookie 101, people. Jesus. But they are telling us that we should be confident because their files are secure. Yes. Yeah. Okay. On that same vein, another moron of the week would be Lockheed Martin.

Uh-huh. So they have run the database for the Air Force's automated case tracking system, which tracks fraud, abuse, whistleblowers, and, you know, all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the database had 100,000 case files dating back to 2004 and became corrupted, unreadable, none of the backups worked, and they are shit out of luck.

Oops. All gone. Over 10 years of fraud data. Yeah. Okay. Well done. Well done. Well done. All right. Up next. Moving on. Let's go. Upmarket sex toy manufacturer, Lilo, who, you know, have made some really interesting things, if you're into that sort of stuff, including, you know, the gold dildo that Goopy Gwyneth Paltrow uses.

Well, she may not actually use it. I don't want to slander her, but she's certainly tried to sell it to people. They're marketing some upscale condoms now, and guess who they got to be the figurehead for that? Oh, just enlighten me. Winning. Oh, no. Convicted domestic abuser and HIV-positive guy who went around very proud about the fact that he was not using condoms, even though he was HIV-positive and has some lawsuits about that, is now pitching their condoms.

Nope. Not interested. Yeah. And, yeah, I don't want to say too much about that, but it's pretty bad. And a friend of the show, Greg Bell, has enlightened me about something that's been going on Twitter for apparently a couple of years now. You remember Smash Mouth?

Sadly. Well, they don't do much anymore except try to protect their reputation on Twitter. They are in an endless Twitter battle, yeah, where they basically just keep tweeting people back saying, hey, we were popular before that song on Shrek, and hey, shut up, and hey, we write good songs, man.

It's worth a look at what they do. This is a perfect test case in exactly how you should not use Twitter. Yes, this is the how to not do well on social media. This is where we should use this as our business card for the reasons to hire us.

This won't happen to you if you hire us to manage your social media. Having managed social media for many bands over the years, I can tell you that this is the absolute worst case scenario of anything that you could ever do, including the hashtag just saying and hashtagging if facts matter when you're talking about your shitty songs that were number one long time ago.

I do like the fact that everybody is basically trying to say that the singer is Guy Fieri now, though. I know. That is the best. Yes. You've never seen him in the same room. And because we've had so many idiots, I do want to point out a hero of the week, Prince William, who took a stand against homophobia, and it's a royal breakthrough.

He is the first royal that has ever appeared on the cover of a gay-friendly magazine, and he went out of his way to basically support the community. Good for you, man. Well done. No, definitely. And he initiated it, which is the crazy part. It's like they didn't come to him.

Nope. You know, he went to them. It's like, hey, let's get some awareness out there. Yeah, the magazine is called Attitude, and he invited them last month to bring members of the LGBT community to the palace to listen to their experiences of bullying. So good on you, man. Well done. I like to see people who basically have this kind of power and clout given to them because of birthright.

Use it for something good. Good on you. And speaking of the royals, the queen had her birthday celebrations last Sunday, and she wore an amazing lime green kermit-esque dress suit thing for it.

Conveniently, green screen color, and the internet went apeshit with it. Oh, my God. These are great. It is fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Link in the show notes to Bored Panda, which collected some of the best ones that are out there. Unbelievable.

Absolutely. Oh, yeah. You got to go check these out. These are funny. Yeah. It's good stuff. Very, very good stuff. You know, the Photoshop ones are fantastic, but the video ones are even better. Yeah, those are great. Oh, good stuff.

Good stuff. We had talked the other week about these Star Trek related bikinis or not bikinis. Swimsuits. Onesies. Swimsuits. Swimsuits that came out for women. And I bemoan the fact that there was nothing for men. There is now. No Starfleet banana hammock for you.

No. But there is now. There's old school robes. So you could be like, you know, the Kirk slash Playboy Hefner crossover. I was going to say, you Hefner in space. Always wanted. You've always wanted to be. So they look comfy. Yeah. I don't know.

Are you getting one? No. No. I don't wear a robe anyways around the house. So I will not be getting one of these. But I'm glad that, you know, we have some equal opportunity. They do have socks. I like the socks. I might get those. I think I might have to get the robe because in the winter, robes are great. Because, well, in Southern California, it doesn't matter.

But here it does. Well, which are you going to go for? Are you going to be Command Gold? Are you going to be Science Blue or Dead Man Red? I think I'm more Science Blue. Yeah. I think you're a Science Blue too, Jason. It goes well with you. It'll really make your eyes pop. It will. My brown eyes.

And finally, from The Web's Not Dead, if you spend any time in L.A. whatsoever, you know that news people go crazy here about everything. If we get a little bit of drizzle, it's Crazy Storm 2016. When we have fires, the whole world is going to explode. There's a great article on LAist.

Mike Davis wrote a book called Ecology of Fear. No other city such as L.A. seems to excite such dark rapture. According to Davis, the destruction of the city has been a theme in at least 138 novels and films since 1909. So we do like to, we are obsessed with our own city's destruction.

That number seems low. It does seem low. I think it's got to be even higher. It's got to be higher than that. Yeah. Anyways. If you counted blog posts in there, it'd be in the millions. Oh, God. Yes. I think the fact of the matter is nobody likes Los Angeles.

Well, good. I wish more people that didn't like it would leave. Are you kidding me? Love it. Love it. In one of the stranger things I've seen in my lifetime, the FDA has approved a new weight loss device that sucks food directly from your stomach.

Basically, they stick a tube in your gut and they have a little thing that you hang around your neck, which has a bag of water in it, in a little pump system and some stuff that basically you attach the tube in your stomach to this little device and squeeze some water in and then out comes the food that you just ate and goes into a tube that goes right in the toilet.

This is bulimia for people who are too pussy to stick their fingers down their throat. Or, you know, they're very conscious of their looks and they don't want their teeth to rot out from the acids, I guess. Or they have really nice fingernails. Or they just can't stop eating. Yeah, could be.

But man. This is disgusting. Is it not one of the most repugnant things you've ever seen? You have to watch the video. You have to go and see it and watch the video. If you watch the video, you don't need the device because you're going to puke. Yeah, you're not going to want to eat anything anyway after watching this. So this is actually the new weight loss device is just go watch this video every time you want to reach for that hot pocket.

Yeah, it's pretty gross. Closing shout outs. My shout out is for Team USA. I can't believe that we won the game and I can't believe that we're getting to the semifinals in the Copa America and unfortunately we are going to play Argentina and we are going to lose horribly.

But hey, we're playing Argentina. That's pretty damn good. So anyways, go USA and on Tuesday. I hope everybody supports the team. I'll know you won't. I don't have a TV. I can't support them. Hey, ESPN app. I'm not going to pay for that. Okay.

You want to send me your password? I'll go check it out. It's actually done through Time Warner Cable. Sadly, that's how you do the authorization for it. So I, hey, by the way, Time Warner Cable, even though you stopped me from being able to stream to my Apple TV through your app, I can do it through ESPN's app that I just sign in using your credentials.

Okay. So thanks. You know why then? Because now they don't have to maintain it and they can just pass it off saying, well, everybody else's app does it now. So we don't have to. We don't want to pay a coder to be on staff to keep fixing this thing when it breaks. So we're just going to, we're going to outsource it to the providers. But the thing is that they had it in there.

They just took it out for the new version. Right. But, you know, OS, you know, the new iOS is coming out. They can cut budgets. They can cut budgets. Anyway, my shout out goes to Meatloaf, who collapsed on stage up in Canada the other night. They're saying it's dehydration, but hopefully he'll recover.

Sadly, dehydration has been the code word for celebrities' drug overdoses. But hopefully not, and hopefully he will be okay because I love me some bitch tits, Bob. I know. I'm so tired of losing musicians this year, too. So Meatloaf, pull through, motherfucker.

Please do. Yeah. And I want to thank Dave Bittner and the team at Cyber Wire for loaning him to us today for our security segment. And we'll have Dave back next week. And this is our first run at it. So, you know, we'll get our feet under us and we'll keep cooking.

And it's nice to have somebody who knows what the fuck they're talking about on this show every now and again. It is. It's very nice. And thank you so much for stepping in and doing that. And hopefully we're going to try to see if we can get, because we're all over the place, if we can get schedules aligned for all three of us to be able to do the security segment. But who knows? We'll see what happens.

Yeah. Well, here's the upside. You're going to be up really early starting pretty soon. Yeah, it's probably not going to matter anymore because I will probably be up at four in the morning and three in the morning and two in the morning. And so if you guys want to record it, you know, midnight your time, I'll probably be up at 3 a.m.

And 9 a.m. I don't friggin know. It doesn't matter. I'm going to be up all the time, so I'll probably be joining. Yes. And I'm sure you will be dynamic as can be on the microphone. Yeah, I'm sure I'll be thrilled. Huh? What? Somebody got hacked. Who fucking cares? I got to fucking change a diaper. Oh, yeah. So I'm going to have to get a bottle of whiskey. So that'll be when I mention the dog you drink, when you mention the baby I drink.

Yeah, that's the first time the whole episode. Hey, she went through training this week. She's doing really well. Drink again, motherfucker. All right. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo, and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schulmeister, and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. Grumpy 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-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 and get 10 exclusive tracks. You just gotta ask, people. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Sochansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy, 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 164.

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