168: Crowd Based Pokeman Capital Management Solutions

I've got a Pikachu in my throat. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. The following content contains graphic, explicit, and vulgar language.

And with that out of the way, welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks number 168. I'm Jason DeFilippo here with my co-host, Brian Schulmeister. Woo-hoo! Morning, Jason. Good morning. That only took 17 tries. Change one thing and then the whole castle falls apart. I know. Now we have to put in a warning because people are shocked when we're rude.

Oh, God. Explicit. Oh, oh. Well, you know what I didn't put in there? Sometimes we have opinions. Oh, yeah. That's a good one, actually. I've been appreciating the comments that have been coming in saying we like your opinions. That's been good stuff. Anyways, how are you doing, Jason?

I'm good. I'm good. Let's roll through this. We got a great show today. We got tons and tons of stuff because it has been an amazing week on the internet, believe it or not. Really? Okay. Are you excited and stuff? Well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that in due course.

I don't know if excited is, you know, the right term. I might have to pull out a thesaurus. Anxious. Pensive. I woke up this morning really kind of second guessing. Of course, I'm seven months too late to second guess this anymore.

Bringing another child into this world because, you know, I'm obviously talking about Pokemon Go. Yeah, obviously. You know, the nice thing. So, you know, it's another week. Another tragedy. Yay. Well, okay. Yeah. Let's let's. Yeah. Yeah. No. On the plus side, though. I know, dude, on the plus side, I did find a really nice article and this is kind of done the rounds a little bit.

It's why the world is better than you think in 10 powerful charts. And he goes into, you know, this is important because news pushes bad stuff all the time because that's how they get click throughs and links and all that. And it's, you know, it's all fear and everything. So, and this is by Peter Diamandis, who wrote a book called Abundance.

The future is better than you think way back in 2012. Yes. So this is kind of basically new data based on the same kind of concept. Kind of. Kind of. And, you know, it's it does. You know, if 80 people would have died in Nice like a day and a half ago, I'd probably still be feeling pretty upbeat about this list.

Well, the thing. I'm not it for. Well, I am because, you know, look, random acts of bullshit happen every day. The fact that this happened in Nice, you don't feel bad when somebody blows up a bazaar in Baghdad. You don't. We've never talked about that on the show. And there are more people that die in in suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan every day than than happened in Nice.

So this is just, you know, just keep keep keep the shit in perspective. You know, yes. This happened in France. I'm sorry, my white, my white person privilege. Yeah, you are. And that's, you know, honestly, kind of kind of lame. You know, that's what we kind of got to get around with this stuff. There are bad things happening everywhere.

And just because one thing happens doesn't mean that the world is going to shit. So if you look at these charts, yes, things are getting better. Bad shit still happened. Bad shit is always going to happen. And with the way the media is working, which we'll definitely get to very shortly, they conflagrate everything that is bad in the world because that's what sells.

If it bleeds, it leads. This is nothing new. This has been happening since the dawn of the media. So, yes, a really terrible tragedy happened in Nice and in Paris not too long ago. You know, this is this is the way it goes. But they they basically turn this into the world is falling apart.

And what we've done on this show for three and a half years at this point is has bought into that stuff. I think that, you know, to be fair, to be fair, we're only showing that the tech world is falling apart and we're not wrong. Oh, that. Yeah, we'll get to that, too.

The thing that I hate about this blog post is that these charts are from about the age when his book came out. There's nothing here that's new. All of these things basically cut off 2003, 2003, 2009, 2010.

There's a lot of 2010, 2008, estimated 2013, 2011. So, you know, yeah, 2012 is basically the newest data. It's 2016. We have to have new data. So I'm just saying, get your charts in order before you, you know, run through here, because maybe there's an uptick on some of these that he didn't want to show.

But, you know, it's Peter Diamandis. He's a very influential guy. You know, he's the XPRIZE guy. And I, you know, I think he's I think he's fantastic and I love what he's trying to do. So he's into the singularity thing, too. So we'll see about that. Yeah. Now let's get into the other issues.

We have talked many times about why are all these programmers out there, the smartest of our generation, trying to make an app that farts? You know, the New York Times has a great article called Solving All the Wrong Problems by Alison Arif.

And I highly recommend reading it because, you know, she she just kind of lays out the fact that we are we are really spinning our wheels and going in the wrong direction. Don't you? Except for there's a service that delivers beer to your door.

I can get behind that one. Now, the app that analyzes the quality of my French kissing. Yeah, I'd rather find a girl instead of an app for that. But and by the way, we had a service that delivered beer right to our door. It was called Pink Dot. Yes. This is nothing new.

Yes. But an app to locate rentable yachts. That's something I definitely don't need. Well, no, of course not. Yeah, this is all kind of ridiculous. We we wouldn't have a show if this didn't exist. The reason we started the show is you me asking you what the hell is going on and why are these people making any money?

Yeah, that is the genesis of why we started this show. Yeah, it was like we used to build things that supposedly actually would do something when. Well, we were hoping to build that stuff. Really, we just built anything that somebody would pay us to build. But it has gotten stupid.

These are these are really, really smart people chasing their own tails, trying to get a buck to provide services that mean absolutely nothing. Nothing and don't improve life in any way, shape or form, really. But they're scratching their own itch. Yeah, whatever. Get some hemorrhoid cream.

QZ dot com has an article called tech workers think Silicon Valley and startups are losing their luster. Good. Finally, welcome to the show. You lazy bastard. And on medium, Cameron Moll, who runs a one of those job posting sites, says that tech job postings are down 40 percent and nobody's talking about it.

He runs the job board authentic jobs dot com and he's been tracking this since 2005 and about 40 percent fewer jobs have been posted this year. So, yeah, I mean, we've talked a couple of times this year about about how we about how various different entities are seeing the slow slowing down of the tech boom.

It's it's it's it's run its course. It's there's only so many more stupid apps that can be built. Brian, are you saying none of them are really making any money? Are you saying the bubble is about to burst? Oh, I think I think it already did. I mean, I think it's it's done. So, well, yeah, I think it definitely has is especially when you look at the the slowdown in VC funding and the fact that, you know, as we say, all this has happened before, all this will happen again.

We are going to have a cleansing, a culling of the herd. Everybody's going to go back and start working at McDonald's again. So all those like, you know, we're hiring jobs around town that you see at CVS, Walgreens, McDonald's, those signs are going to come down as everybody comes back from Silicon Valley and realizes that it was a pipe dream and you have to actually work for a living.

Well, they're not going to be going to McDonald's or anywhere like that because that's all getting automated. Yeah, they'll you can be driving Ubers for a while or you can run out your spare bedroom on Airbnb. I don't know what the hell else you're going to do. Are we talking about big robo? Big robo. Big robo's coming.

Anyway, yes. The other side of it is another QZ dot com. I got to read more of these guys. I don't know how I got two in a row. Silicon Valley's co-working boom is no cure for its crushing loneliness. And I can attest to this. Silicon Valley is a very lonely place to work because you're always working.

You never go out. And if you do go out, you see the same people over and over again. And most of the time it's people you don't like. Right. Well, I've actually I don't know if you've gone. Two co-working locations before I have more than a few times. I've worked out of one for nine months.

Yeah. OK, there you go. I I've done it more than a few times. It's it's cute, but I don't really ever interact with anybody there. Everybody's got their headphones on. They're doing their own thing. It's not like you're hanging out and partying with a bunch of strangers. No, it's it's like a lunchroom at a high school.

Everybody's got their click and they don't go outside of their click. That was that was honestly the way it worked. I worked at one when I worked at Metrically and we had, you know, seven or eight different companies in the same space. It was a very big warehouse space. We did have a big slide from the second story to the basement.

But that's fun. Yeah. For maybe zero times because you get butt burn as you go down. But anyway, it looked cool for the most part, though. Nobody talked to anybody else. Everybody stayed in their own little fealty. And it was ridiculous.

I'm like, I'd go around and talk to everybody, try and figure out what everybody's doing. And they're just like and put their headphones on and just like, dude, we're here in this space to collaborate, you know, stop, collaborate and listen. Get people are so stupid in Silicon Valley.

That's all I got to say. OK. Come on, man. Get some energy. Let's go. No, I despise Silicon Valley anyways. So we're good with that. OK. Yeah. Now, you brought up the Led Zeppelin story a long time ago and we watched it.

We watched it unfold. And now, oh, gasp. Their lawyers want to get paid. Well, Led Zeppelin's got plenty of money. Why don't they pay them? I don't know. I don't know why this is a story. But apparently Led Zeppelin isn't paying them. So Led Zeppelin lawyers want $800,000 for defending the lawsuit, which I think Led Zeppelin should pay because they hired them.

I don't get this. The entire point of hiring a law firm that is competent enough to save you from losing how many hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties that they've made on Stairway to Heaven is the fact that you pay them to save your ass.

Once they save your ass, you still got to pay them. Yeah. I don't really quite understand this. I mean, you're the ones that hired lawyers that are charging $330 an hour. You're the ones that wanted to defend and protect your own money.

And you won. So now you pay the people that provided the service. Oh, maybe Led Zeppelin. Here's the deal. I'm glad you never worked on Led Zeppelin's website. Me too. I wouldn't get paid.

I know. I've got a couple other music clients that are following this model. Yeah. So this seems this doesn't seem to be, you know, like a web thing. This just seems to be a musician thing. So, you know, it's increasingly become a music industry thing. And for obvious reasons, the industry itself is contracted.

Bands that used to make a lot of money are no longer making any money because the only way you make money is touring. You don't make any money off your album sales anymore. And that is just that's why I got out of the music industry over the past few years, because you just saw it contracting.

And any band that actually had money would hold on to it at any cost whatsoever. Like, I am not going to spend a single dime. We don't want they don't want to pay for anything. They don't want to pay for services. I was constantly like, you don't have to buy ads and papers anymore because that there's no point in that.

You don't have any actual physical kind of promotion that you're doing anymore. You don't do street teams or anything like that. Everything that you do is online. And now you don't want to pay for that either. Awesome. OK. Even the street teams are unpaid. Even those were tended to always be unpaid, except you had to hire the one person to organize them, of course.

Yeah, everything is light, sheet and steel in that industry. So the fact that Led Zeppelin's lawyers are not getting paid does not surprise me either. So they're going to have to sue Led Zeppelin to get their money now. This is the circle jerk continues. Yeah. And who's going to who's Led Zeppelin going to hire to defend them?

You know, it's like cheaper lawyers. Yeah. Yeah. The dumbest lawyers on the planet. It's like, oh, we didn't pay our previous lawyers, but we want you to defend us against our previous lawyers because we didn't pay them. OK, yes, and around we go. Orberus again.

Thank you. Freakonomics has an episode which falls right into Betteridge's Law of Headlines. Is the Internet being ruined is the name of the latest episode on Freakonomics. Now, I'm not a bit late.

Already ruined. Well, here's here's the interesting thing about this. It's not ruined. It is salvage. The Internet is salvageable. We're not we're not at that point. My point of this was the the ad at the beginning of the show was for a company called Kronos. I don't know how it's spelled.

I don't know what the URL is because they don't say the URL in the ad. And I went to the show notes and in the show notes, there's no link to the advertiser. Worst podcast show notes ever. Do not advertise on Freakonomics. We don't we don't put in ads.

We don't we don't control the pre-rolls. We don't control the ones that get bumped into our show. So we don't also have we don't have links to those in our show notes, Jason. Right. But this is different. This is a live read on Freakonomics. This is not this is not an inserted ad. You have a we have loot crate in our show notes.

Yes. Oh, good. Well, look at you, Jason. You're on the ball. I do this shit for a fucking living, dude. Loot crate everywhere. Anyway, the my point about this is the Kronos people are labeled as a crowd based human capital management solutions company.

That is what the flying fuck is that? Nothing. Nothing. Well, this is like human resources. That's it. Why don't you say HR? Well, yeah, kickstarted crowd based. We you know, this goes back to the old days of Wired and their buzzwords.

And when we knew there was a big meeting being called and we knew all those words would be thrown at us to mean absolutely nothing. Yeah. No, this comes. This is one of those Web 2.0, like when Web 2.0 first started. So it's a jargon generator. They went back to the jargon generator from the old days, from the way back machine and said, we need something that says HR.

Oh, crowd based human capital management solutions. If you got solutions in there, you're gone. Crowd based. Yeah, you're gone. Human capital. I don't want to have capital. But human capital. I love human capital. Human capital is is very Soylent Green.

That is very Web 2.0 in my mind. Nothing better than that. I know. So capital. The interesting thing about the show is it's actually a very good show. So definitely check out the episode, but feel free to chuckle your ass off when you get to crowd based human capital management solutions.

And my last one for the follow up is Invisible Talent by Kaya Thomas. I found this this morning, and she's a black woman who is getting her CS degree and comes from a school where it's basically, well, here's the one thing that I've never heard before.

Latin X. She's talking about like, you know, I don't know if Latina, Latino, but she calls him Latin X, which it must be a new thing that I'm not aware of. So feel free to. We are old. Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Feel free to send us some comments and educate us on that.

The thing about this is she's spot on, completely spot on, talks about how, you know, the tech industry and the tech culture is a toxic environment. Yes, we agree. This is what we talk about on this show. And I'm thinking about this. I'm like, OK, so, yeah, the black and Latin X computer science degree professionals who are coming out of school are going to have a hard time getting a job.

And it's stupid and it sucks. And, you know, I'm looking at me and you. We're the old guys who can't get a job either. You know, we are the we're the former team players. I'm thinking, like, why don't we all just get together and start our own damn companies and say, screw you little 15 year old white boys with your hoodies and piss off and go go to the next next generation.

The problem with that lies not so much with these companies, with the companies, with the guys in their in their hoodies. The problem lies with the V.C. The V.C. The V.C. are not going to fund companies because it's an old boys network, which is now transforming into a younger white boys network. And that's the way it works.

That's the issue. So we need we need some black and Latinx incredibly rich people out there starting their own V.C. to back tech companies that are being run by minorities or that's or do it, do it old school like we used to do and bootstrap it. You know, you know, these kids are coming out of school.

They don't have a lot of they don't have a lot of embedded debt. They don't have a lot of, you know, anchors tying them down. They could they could all band together and start their own companies and go from there. You know, the whole V.C. thing still, you know, bugs the crap out of me because most of the V.C.

money just goes to waste. I understand what you're saying, the bootstrapping thing. It's just I don't see anybody doing that anymore. I mean, I guess this is the one time that you could cheer on something like a Kickstarter because those are people that are trying to bootstrap themselves up, I guess, sort of. But that just doesn't seem to be the way the tech world works anymore.

You're not taken seriously. If you do that, you need a ton of money and an office with a slide to start. And that's the thing where I think that everybody is so focused on this V.C. bullshit that, you know, that's the dream. We need to get V.C. We need to have this to make a company and make it work.

You need you need a credit card in an Amazon AWS account to start. That's what you need. You know. Yeah. I had a credit card. I bought a couple of desks at Ikea. I bought a computer and I started a company. Well, or just go buy a cup of coffee and sit at Pete's all day.

You know, yeah, you know, you buy the desks when you need the desk. But, you know, everybody's forgetting, like, how hard we used to work on no money to bootstrap an idea and make it work. It's this whole thing. It's like the goal is to get V.C.

The goal is not to make a great company. So I want these kids to, you know, get it around their head that, OK, the tech and tech industry doesn't want you. That's what she says. The tech industry doesn't want us to be there. Guess what? You don't have to be there. You can go out on your own and kick ass without the tech industry, come up with a great idea, iterate, build it, go, you know, done.

And then you are going to kick ass in the future. And then, you know, those little hoodie, sodden little fucks will come to you looking for a job at some point. And that's what I hope happens. I'd still wear hoodies. I do, too, but I'm not looking for a job.

In the news.

I've found a great article on The Guardian. You should be warned in advance that it's a sub, you know, it's in the category called The Long Read because it is a long read. How Technology Disrupted the Truth. This is basically our show in a nutshell, except well, more well thought out and a little bit more UK based.

But this runs through the entire way that social media has basically destroyed the concept of journalism, reality, truth, reporting, etc. Okay, so that's the TLDR version, right? That's the TLDR, but it's definitely worth a read.

It's a fantastic article. Yeah, it's sad. You know, it goes, you know, it goes all the talks about Gutenberg and the print press and how all of this stuff works. It goes all the way back. Yeah, and how the open platform of the web, which with its initial promises, quickly became gated enclosures, including Facebook and social networks, and how, you know, certain voices are being rising to the top.

And basically, the lowest common denominator tends to always win. So, there you go. Good times. Yay! Okay, so yeah, you're right. They basically did encapsulate our show in one article. Okay, so Airbnb in Santa Monica.

You guys have had a fight with those people for a while. And Scott Shatford is the first person to fall under the wheels of justice. So, he has pled no contest. Yeah, good. Yeah, he's going to pay a whopping $3,500 in fines and has agreed to stop renting properties.

He's on two-year probation and said, fuck this noise, I'm moving to Colorado. Good. See you later. Get the fuck out of here. Look, again, here's the deal. Airbnb positions itself as you own your own house and you just want to make a couple extra bucks and you want to show people around your town and your city because their commercials are all full of, don't go as a tourist, live there.

And it's all this mom-and-pop-y style thing. Scott Shatford was not a fucking mom-and-pop operator. He has five properties in Santa Monica that he's renting. He is running a fucking hotel chain in this city. That is not what Airbnb say they are. Nope. I completely agree.

So, get the fuck out of here. The one thing I'm pissed off about is that it was only $3,500. I know. It should be more. But anyways, I'm glad that this is happening. I'm glad he's leaving. I hope you sell all your properties here. And, you know, maybe have some people with families move in and create a real city here instead of just sucking money out of the city, you asshole.

Wow. Tell us how you really think, Brian. That's how I feel, Jason. You wanted me to get fired up. I'm fired up. No, this is what needs to happen. Let's have Airbnb be what it claims it is. Let's not have it be a guy who's basically a slumlord figuring out a way to squeeze out even more money out of people.

Hey, I'm with you, man. I'm with you. All right. I should have thrown it. I should have thrown it in an Uber and a Prius story, too. I like it. I like I like fired up, Brian. Frying Brian. I got an Uber one coming up. We got frying Brian instead of crying Brian. I like this. Yeah, I like how you tried to make that a hashtag thing.

So global PC shipments fell 5.2% in Q2. Seventh quarter of the decline in a row. Oh, no. People can't buy PCs anymore because you know what? We don't need them anymore. We've hit that tipping point where my PC is going to last me for three years. Yay.

Yeah. The technology isn't speeding up enough. You don't need to upgrade as often as you do. My parents probably could use an upgrade on their PC, but frankly, they have tablets, and I don't think they need anything more than that. And they're coming around to the realization that they're okay with tablets.

The vast majority of people out there are quite fine with their – they don't need anything beyond a cell phone and maybe a tablet or an Amazon Kindle for reading. Having a PC is in the realm of the content creator or the app builders or whatever, people who are working within the industry.

And again, how often do you need to upgrade your computers anymore? Not as often as you used to. What's kind of scary though is the fact that this might slow growth on the actual upgrading of PC. It's a double-edged sword.

It could actually spur technological growth like, oh, we're losing ground. We need to actually innovate like we used to do or might be like, oh, why bother innovating? They're not buying them anymore. You can go on either side of that. I think we're seeing that happen is the whole area of the augmented reality and virtual reality because those systems do require fairly hefty and fast computers.

So you will see continued improvement in that area. But as for right now, it's still a pretty niche market. It's not mainstreamed yet. Yeah, and sadly, it's Windows. Yeah. That's really the sad part because Mac hasn't really – that's why nobody's like – even the guys at Oculus are like, we're not going to ship a Mac SDK.

Those machines are pussy. Why are we going to do that? Yeah, that's pretty funny. And it's funny because I also – I probably blew the curve because I bought three Mac minis this year. So I have three new computers that, you know, I even bought that just sit here.

And my friend was like, hey, you should have gone to Fry's. They have $80 refurb PCs that do the same job that your $550 Mac minis do. I'm like, oh. Yeah. That was a real – I'm like, oh, man. I'm so stuck – my head is so stuck up the Mac ass that I'm just thinking, oh, it must – I must have a Mac because it has Skype.

Well, guess what? I could run an Arduino with Skype and VNC and probably do the same job. You must have – You must have a Mac because it has Skype even though Skype is owned by Microsoft. That's what I'm saying. No, it's just, you know, just used to having Macs around.

I didn't even think. I'm like, oh, you know, I could have bought three $80 PCs for the price of half of one of these and, you know, spent the rest of the money on In-N-Out Burger. But I didn't because I'm an idiot. How funny that after you get me on the Mac chain, you're basically doing my PC argument for me.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm still – for creation and work, I'm staying with my Mac. My Mac is a beautiful thing. All I use these machines for is for Skype for you to talk to me. That's it. I would never create on a PC. What do you think I am? A fucking savage? Jesus.

So, speaking of creation, Virgin Galactic is starting test flights for their new spaceship and Futurism.com has a great little piece on the background on what it takes to make a spaceship and some behind the scenes from the guys who were actually putting this together.

And it was a really great little video. I highly recommend it because I'm looking forward to this. I'm a fan. I was there when Spaceship One took off the first time. Hey, well, they have no idea when they're actually going to be able to do the first real flight. But, you know, you got some time to get together the quarter of a million dollar ticket price and you'll be flying with Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and DiCaprio.

Well, I'm not going to fly it, but I'm looking forward to them actually doing it because we need more innovation in spaceflight. Honestly, I don't care, you know. You can make fun of these people for, like, financing it, but guess what? They're financing it and it's moving the ball forward.

I'm not making fun. It's better than building a stupid app. It is. It is. You know. Hey, hell, you know, if the Kardashians want to throw a couple hundred million at Virgin Galactic, go for it. I don't care. They might have to make the spaceship a little wider, though, because their butt just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing.

Can we put the Kardashians on the first test flight? Okay, next. Moving along. Okay. Speaking of stupid apps, Netflix, is it illegal to share your Netflix password, Jason?

Well, you know, I haven't read this article and I'm covering the stuff you put in the show notes. I'm going to say no. Well, full disclosure here. My family shares a Netflix account.

Technically, that is sort of somewhat legal because you are allowed to have, what, four or five different logins for what you pay for? Basic access for Netflix is two devices. Who cares who's using them at any given point? So, I had that for a long time and then I started to bump heads with some people that I've given my passwords to and then I upgraded to the four device plan.

It doesn't say anything about how many people are using it. You have four devices that you can use it on. That's it. This is where we start to get into the very murky reality of is it legal or not. And the reality is we don't even know because this is based on a law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is very long.

In fact, it was passed 30 years ago. So, the real answer to this is we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Hmm. That doesn't sound very generic. No. Not at all.

So, this article kind of really gets into the legality of it and the reality is we don't really know if it's legal or not. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. Depends on the judge. Depends on some specific situations. Nobody really knows. Okay. And in some cases, the judge didn't even – the judge that basically ruled on these cases didn't even know what Netflix was.

See, that right there, you should be recused. You should be recused right there. If you don't know what you're judging, you should be off the bench for that case. There is a very large gap in the legal field in terms of technology and knowledge about the technologies, which is sad and a shame.

And I agree. Yeah, you should be recused. You should only be judging things on which you at least have a basic understanding of. Yeah. We know what murder is. We know what theft is. We know what battery is. But, yeah. We judge a lot of things without having any real idea what it's about. Welcome to America.

Yeah. So here's my Uber article. This is on The Verge. It's another long-form article, but it's a really good read. It's all about how Uber secretly investigates its legal foes and finally got caught doing it, and they are now faced with a class-action lawsuit about it. The company has hired CIA-linked intelligence firms to look into plaintiffs and their plaintiffs' lawyers in many cases where they've been basically sued and tried to shut out of cities.

So they're playing dirty and using their money the way that you would use your money. Hey, man. Two strong arms. In the big leagues, they throw elbows. That's how it works. Yep. And that's exactly what they're doing. But even some lawyers are saying, hey, you guys are getting a little insane here.

Yeah. Well, we've known this for quite some time. Go back a couple hundred episodes on this show, and you can find that out. Yeah. So Uber are a bunch of dicks. We know that. And they have a lot of money. And to have a lot of money, you have to have powerful lawyers, and you have to have people who are cutthroat.

This is the world. Get used to it. So I'm glad that somebody's stepping up and saying, yeah, you kind of crossed the line there. Yeah. I'm sure Uber paid their lawyers, though, unlike Led Zeppelin. True that. True that. But now this one just is this is this is a chuckle story.

And I'm sure people have heard it by now, but we're going to cover it anyway. A mall security robot has knocked down a toddler and ran him over. What are you going to do? Yes. And, you know, they say he broke the first law of Asimov's rule of robotics or law of robotics.

And, well, maybe it just had really shitty sensors. So, yeah. And you have to program those laws in, which I don't think we're at that point yet. So, yeah. Honestly, that's the that's the real trick. So if the if the programmers suck, the robots are going to suck.

Nobody says that robots are perfect. So that's how it works. It's a funky looking little robot there, though. It's a well, it looks like a butt plug. It looks like a butt plug. I knew you were going to go there. That's kind of why I brought it up. Yeah, of course. I had a little internal bet with myself that you were going to do that.

Dude, you toss him. I'll hit him out of the park. That is it. That is the butt plug 5000 right there. Yeah. And, yes, you know, when you're on your way to the butt, ain't nobody getting in your way. And as I didn't wake up early enough to do the security segment with you guys this morning, because I'm a West Coast wussy.

I have two quick security things, security related stories that I wanted to talk about just briefly. As our last episode was entitled Come and Knock on our tour. And we've discussed a little bit about how tour is not flawless and there are ways to get around it. Researchers from MIT and the EPFL have found a better way in theory.

They've developed a completely new anonymous network called Riffle. Riffle? That promises. Yeah, Riffle. That promises to maintain privacy. Sounds like a potato chip. As long as those are Ruffles. Exactly. They have their new browser onion dip. I prefer ranch.

So Riffle and ranch. Okay. Okay. There you go. Double R's. So they are using something called a mixnet, where servers switch the order of messages as they're received without using inefficient public keys. Instead, they rely on verifiable shuffle, where you shake up a message's encryption but can verify the changes across all servers for the connection, which sounds super interesting, actually.

This might actually work. We'll see. Now, you know, the point is, what is Riffle going to be populated with? Is it going to be drugs and porn of a very nefarious nature? Or is it going to be stuff that we don't really need a lot of security for anyways, like, you know, the Kardashians? And speaking of really nefarious deep web kind of crappyoka, I found an actual website called deep.web.com.

And it's deep.web.com. And this is an article from 2015. And it's called Drops for Beginners. Why you may or may not want to use one. This is a complete how-to on how to do mail drops to get crap off the dark web.

And I was completely floored by this because I'm like, this guy's out in the open just telling you straight out how to do this stuff. And it's a pretty robust website that has a lot of tips for how to be a douchebag on the internet or the dark web, sorry.

The dark web or the deep web, whatever they want to call it. And I'm going to go through this site and just, you know, slurp this whole thing up. I'm sure I'm on a list because I went to this website. I know it. I know I'm now on a list. So if you don't want to be on a list, don't click on this link.

I would have been great if you would have told me that before I clicked on it. Brian, you're already on a list. It's okay. Trust me. You are me adjacent. So it's okay. And we had Dr. Teeter on the show. So we're both on a list that we never, ever wanted to be on.

Um, but this site, this site is fairly interesting because they just openly talk about, you know, how to do nefarious stuff on the web. I thought it was pretty fantastic. I'm just like, oh, good for you for having the balls to step out there and do that.

Even though you're really stupid. Good times. Um, yeah, yeah. And speaking of nefarious stuff, we've, we've discussed a number of times about, uh, going to our friends in Sweden, uh, to get things that in our defense, we just can't get easily or readily here.

Um, I have no problems with paying for my media and my content. I just don't feel like I have to wait an extra two years for something if it's already out on, say, you know, the UK. Um, and, uh, you know, hard to find stuff, et cetera. We, we use our friends from Sweden. That may be coming to an end.

Uh, NBC universal has patented a way to detect BitTorrent pirates in real time. The patent is titled early detection of high volume peer to peer swarms. Uh, now this seems to me that it's more, it's not about like finding you or me downloading something.

It's about finding, it's about knowing, okay, somebody broke into our, our system last night and the late newest movie that we want that we're going to release, uh, next month, um, has gotten out there and we see, okay, boom, we can find it now because all of a sudden there are 10 gazillion people trying to get this one file so we can find it and target it and take it down.

The interesting thing about this is that, um, as far as BitTorrent goes, there are already services out there that, that scour every single BitTorrent network and are downloading every torrent file and they just track every IP that connects to that torrent. So this is nothing new.

They just filed a patent for it, which, uh, probably has, um, I'm sure somebody is going to come back with prior art on this. Um, because this has been going on for quite some time. Um, this is how you get those, those letters from your, your cable provider saying, Hey, you downloaded Deadwood last week.

I'm like, yeah, I downloaded Deadwood because I missed it and your crappy ass DVR didn't work. So I had to go find it somewhere. Assholes. Yeah. Um, that's, that's the kind of stuff that gets us to, to use this stuff or, you know, you've only put up three C three episodes of the season and you're stupid on demand thing.

Why not the whole thing? You idiots. Yeah, no, it pissed me off. It's like, you know, at least look and see if I'm subscribing to that service before you send me a C and D because I'm already. Paying you for it. So if I go and download it, that just means you suck. Not me. Uh, assholes. But I think there's prior art to be, uh, be had here.

So I don't think this is going to be a big thing. And I think NBC universal, it's probably going to go to war with a bunch of other, uh, security firms that are actually doing the, the metrics on this stuff right now. And probably people they hire, it's probably the services that they hire that they're going to be going to war with, which is the funniest part.

Definitely. You know, as far as the security aspect on this goes, I still think that the, the best, uh, defense for, for these companies is a good offense. You flood the networks with fake stuff. Yeah. Which also happens to find content. Yes. It also happens by far the best way to get to do it.

You know, if you have 10,000 files out there that claim to be the new X-Men movie and it's just, you know, some old rip of like Pippi Longstocking that, that, uh, that basically works fairly well to stop people from getting your stuff. You're still playing whack-a-mole there. Um, it's, it's possible, but you know, I think that there are protections in place from these, these, uh, basically torrent sites that will, will knock that down.

Um, because it depends on, uh, ratings and seat, like number of seeds. So seeders aren't going to start spitting stuff back out if they find that it's, you know, a bad, a bad seed, but you know, we'll see how it goes. Um, yeah, disinformation always works there.

I, I've gotten a few of those actually that, you know, you get like halfway through it and it's like, you're taking food out of our mouths. You motherfucker show like babies crying and stuff like that. It's pretty funny. And we'll be right back, but now a word from our sponsors.

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Fuck yourself! Pokemon, the global phenom, has pervaded my little neck of the woods. And I'm sure, Brian, it has pervaded your neck of the woods as well. I actually haven't seen it out in the wild as much as most people seem to be seeing it.

I, you know, here, I don't know a Pokemon from anything. I never played it. I don't know anything about it. I couldn't tell you the names of anyone. Because we're adults. That's why. We're adults. There are, as we'll see, because if we had to create a whole segment just for this, there are no adults anymore.

Yeah. No, that's the thing. This is a friggin' kid. Yeah, this gap or bridges the gender and age gap and all the gaps. Everybody, as far as I can tell, is playing this goddamn game. Now, before we get into this segment, which is going to be a lot of crapping on it, I downloaded it.

I tried it. I think the tech is interesting and exciting. I think it's incredibly innovative and well done. And I'm old. That's the thing about it. It's old. I knew you were going to say that, but let me follow up on that. Yeah. I think it's cool as shit.

And I think that there are so many. I, for the first time, been genuinely excited. I would love to get a hold of the engine behind this, and I would like to build tours for museums that use augmented reality and all that sort of thing. I think there are fantastic possible uses for this in the future, even just the fact of all the stops and if they provided some historical context and information about the different things that you are seeing, I think this is great.

The other thing that I'm excited about with what's happening with this is we've talked a lot on the show about there not being mass culture movements anymore, except for the very rare things like big movies that generally suck that everybody pays attention to at one point in time, the dwindling even like things like the Super Bowl.

I thought the day of that was over, and it was going to be more niche markets. This is a genuine global phenomenon. Well, it's not global because it's only out in a few countries right now, so it's not global yet, but it's coming. Yeah.

If you read any of the press in the UK, they are freaking out about it ahead of time. They cannot wait for it to come. It is a true phenomenon, the likes of which we rarely see anymore, so I think that is exciting and interesting as well. And it's great to see a new form of something taking that over when it used to be, oh, great, here comes another shitty Spider-Man movie.

Yeah. That's cool. No, as far as apps go, this is definitely – it's based on the Ingress engine, which has been out for three and a half years, and it was developed under Google. This company was a Google company, and if you notice that it uses Google Maps for a lot of the data and all the waypoints.

You combined with your Google accounts, which had some people freaking out because they screwed up. Oh, I'll talk about that. Yeah, I'm going to talk about it in one second because I have some really fucking harsh shit to say about that. But the point is, yes, you're right. This is a global phenomenon. I go out every night just to see who's still playing in my neighborhood.

I'm level seven. I'm not very high up. I don't play that much because I like my battery. Well, that was insane. I had the app for two days. I had it on and off for two days. I caught something or other in my local bar, and that was fine for me.

And then I realized I'm not going to keep doing this, and I like my phone battery, and I need my phone, so I deleted the app. I'm done. I did my thing. It was cool. Battery Saver mode actually works really well with this because what it does is it turns the screen, like when you turn your phone upside down and put it in your pocket, the screen goes black, but it will still, like, send you signals when a Pokemon is nearby or if you're near a PokeStop.

But the thing about it is I live next to a PokeStop, like this giant water tower at the end of my street. I can walk out my front door and go 10 feet and re-up on Pokeballs and stuff like that and get stuff every five minutes if I want to.

And also catch a few Pokemon. But the thing is there's a circuit in my town that you can do and hit all the stops in about eight minutes. So if you keep doing that circuit, you keep getting more stuff. So there are packs of wandering teenage zombies looking at their phone walking the circuit every day, and it's insane.

And the smart ones are these kids on longboards who are skating around the neighborhood. I'm like, yeah, skateboarders, you go, man. Um, and it's, it's insane. Like, but the first, the first couple of days I'm thinking this is going to be the biggest shark fin in technological history.

Everybody's going to try it and they're going to, they're going to abandon it. I was completely wrong, completely wrong. Because, um, two nights ago I went down to the local park. We have a, we have a park down the street with a band shell where there, there are three Poké stops and a gym.

And there were 150 people in the park just playing Pokémon. It was insane. I, I still think this is going to shark fin. I think that there are too many people like me who are, everybody's checking it out right now and it's super exciting. But eventually it's going to be the people that are really into Pokémon that are going to continue to play.

Um, do you, do you know how big the card game was? Remember back in the day? That lasted for decades. You know, these kids, these kids fucking love it. Yeah, no, my brother was big into it. He's got stacks and stacks and boxes of cards. This is, this is a thing, you know, that's, that's the whole point of it.

It's like, you know, we had the technology years ago and now we finally have like this layer on top of it that gets the engagement going. This is like, you know, this isn't a, forgive me for saying this. This isn't a man to Palmer moment where somebody who, who spent their time building up their brand on a different platform comes to a new platform and then just basically takes all the money out of that platform.

That's what Nintendo has done with this. This isn't, there's some estimates that they're making almost a million dollars a day. 1.6 million, 1.6 million dollars a day from in-app purchases. And it's only going to grow. Now it's in Germany. Um, it'll get to Japan soon. Uh, it would better get to Japan soon because they're pissed off.

Like, wait, this is our game. What the hell are you doing? So, um, yeah, it's, it's going to keep going. But the, the greatest part about this is, um, since it is such a global and cultural phenomenon, what we're seeing is a compression of all of the really bad stuff that happens.

When you have a geolocated app with massive amounts of people doing really stupid things. So it's all compressed into a very small timeline. And I want to, I, the, the, the, the one analogy I want to bring up with this is when I worked on Titanic and yes, you make fun of me for, for Titanic.

I know you hate it. There was, well, you, you didn't write or make the movie, Jason. No, I, I built the website. I built the website, but I was, I was, I was, you know, there for a lot of the discussions about what was happening. And again, you know, we got a lot of behind the scenes stuff and what happened when they first started doing that scene where the ship tilts up and all the stunt people slide down the deck.

Remember, you know, like everybody's falling to their deaths, right? Um, there were so many injuries every time they did a take, there were 20 to 25 injuries that took out a bunch of stunt people every time they tipped up the deck. And they're like, what are we doing wrong? Why is this, you know, what's going on with this and what they figured out was the, the mean for how many accidents per stunt in the industry was X, right?

But what they were doing was so many stunts at the same time that it was all compressed down to make it look like this was a catastrophic event. Like we're hurting so many people, but it's like, no, we're not. But because we're doing so many at the same time with so many stunt people, we're still hitting the average of injuries per stunt.

And I think that what's going on with Pokemon is we're still seeing nefarious shit happen, but it's nefarious shit times X with all of the different people that are playing. No, I, I, I see where you're going with that, but I think it's much more than that because, uh, you've got, uh, our brains have barely wrapped around the fact that we have a cell phone.

Um, and now let's take me to the next. Okay. Come on. All right. I'm not going to even try to argue with you then. I, you're wrong. I'm right. End of story. Wait, all we do before Pokemon was people walking down the street being selfish assholes, not looking up, texting, doing whatever, talking on the phone in public places because they have a cell phone.

We are not ready for this. And this is added a whole new layer to it where people think they're invincible or think that they can multitask when they really can't. And now it's even worse because we're skipping a bunch of stories and we might as well just go straight into the ones where all these people are dying and doing stupid shit.

No, no, no, no, no, we're going to start at the beginning. We're going to, no, no, no. We're going to start at the beginning here. Okay. So the ups, I want to talk about the upsides of Pokemon, um, community. I've met a ton of my neighbors through this and it's, it's fantastic. I know, I know more people in my neighborhood now than I ever would have met.

I think it's fantastic that everybody's out playing because it does bounce for, through age, you know, age ranges and gender ranges. And I think it's, I, from that perspective, I think it's fun. I think it's really fun. And I think that also small businesses are going to take advantage of this.

And that's where we come to our first story from Inc Magazine, where local businesses are actually, you know, spending money doing beacons, which are, you know, to drive the Pokemon to come to where your business is. People are spending money to get people to come to their business.

This is the Pokemon SEO is the new thing. That's the really fun part. It's really smart. It's very, what, what companies are doing to attract people to their physical brick and mortars is, is very smart on their part. Good on them. Yeah. And I saw, I saw one, uh, one post on Instagram where it's like Pokemon for customers only, you know, you can't come in, you can't come in and, and, and snag a Pokemon if you're not, if you're not buying a sandwich.

And that, that's the problem. Cause many people are probably going to be doing that. They, the whole, you know, you have to play by the rules, by the societal rules, as it were. Yeah, you can't, you can't be in the bathroom if you don't buy a sandwich. So no Pokemon for you. A lot of restaurants are even supporting that by, you know, there's a example of a, some restaurant in Bay city, Texas, where they're offering kamikaze shots based on Pokemon characters at a discount, you know, and this is smart.

It's, it's very smart to these people, these companies and these physical locations to use this, especially right now. It's funny. So, you know, even big restaurant chains like Applebee's are going to social media, retweeting customers that have caught Pokemon on their, on their premises, let people know that they're there.

So good on them. I mean, I'm just thinking now it's like, man, what if they did the walking dead, like with the same type of engine where you're, instead of catching Pokemon, you're killing zombies, you know, it's like this whole, this entire engine, it really brings to light what you can do with the entire, you know, AR space.

So that's why I'm excited about it. I'm not excited about it because of some of the other reasons that we have coming up, but, um, you posted a video, you posted the video of the guys on Santa Monica pier, which was just kind of scary. It's insane. How many people were there?

Uh, it's, it's problematic. It's dangerous when you get that many people together in a group with, without the proper infrastructure in place, without enough police there to make sure that if anything were to happen, uh, we can respond to it. So it's weird that way.

Yeah, no, it's definitely, it's definitely one of those things that nobody was expecting to happen. You know, that's, that's the whole point of it. Um, and Pokemon go is everything that is wrong with late capitalism. This actually comes from a, uh, a comment that we'll get to in a comment of the week shortly, but, uh, this one, uh, what do you think about it?

Uh, I scanned it, uh, with this, we didn't see it until early this morning. I, I see where he's going with it in that, you know, all this money is just flooding to Nintendo and, and taking it out. And the argument that we need to make affordable housing so people can move to tech areas to, I don't know.

It feels a little Sturm and Drang for what it actually is. Well, it, it, it seems very, um, opportunistic. It's one of those opportunistic headlines, which I will talk about when we get to the end of this segment, which I have a, I have a, I have a little bit to say.

But, uh, yeah. And in addition to restaurants taking advantage of it, uh, there are some smart programmers that did as well. Uh, this guy, Jonathan Zara, he had a, he was a beta tester for the game. So he's had some time to play around with it before it, uh, hit, uh, hit the dirty masses as it were.

And he saw that there was the unwashed, uh, wandering, not paying attention to anything masses. Um, he saw that, uh, there was no chat in it. So he built, built something called GoChat, an independent app that you can use, uh, when you're in there and you can leave notes for people at locations.

And, uh, because he's a millennial, um, he, he didn't add advertising to the apps because he doesn't like ads. So right now he's going bankrupt because so many people are using it and using his bandwidth and et cetera, et cetera, that, uh, he's just losing money hand over fist.

And, uh, because, you know, he just, he doesn't like ads. Welcome to the world, you little shit. This is, this is what makes the world go round. Yes, it is. I'm sorry, everybody. I'm sorry that you don't like our pre-roll ads on our podcast either, but, uh, I don't like ads, but I also need to pay for things.

So this kid, uh, kind of screwed up there. So he's looking at, uh, some investors, but you know, Nintendo should throw him a bone and just buy it off him. No, no, they're not going to do it. Facebook should probably buy it, but we'll see. One of these giant companies with a giant bucket of money should just give him some and, uh, he will make more money off of that app than we made in our entire careers.

So I don't feel bad about this kid, you know, losing, losing a couple of bucks right now. Unless Nintendo goes the, uh, the Apple route and just, uh, builds it and bakes it in themselves. So, yeah, yeah, that I, I, I can, I can, uh, sympathize with that because that's what happened with blog rolling and WordPress.

Yes. So I, I had my, my IP taken for me too. Anyway, let's get to the dirty side of it. Pokemon go user playing while driving successfully catches a tree. Yeah. 28 year old, uh, basically ran into a tree while he was got a, you know, trying to catch Pokemon.

Um, this is the culling of the herd and, uh, I don't feel bad about anybody that dies while playing Pokemon. Um, two California men, the, this came out this morning, fell off an edge of an ocean bluff while playing Pokemon go. You know what? Uh, I wish they would have died because then it would have been easier to retrieve their bodies and we'd spent less taxpayer money.

Um, right. Uh, okay. So you're talking about some cases of stupidity, but then there's also been the cases of, of, of, uh, people just as smart as the restaurants, uh, except they set up, uh, things to get people to come there and then they robbed them. Yes. Yes. There've been muggings.

There've been stabbings, uh, right in front of my house. There was a hit and run, um, which I was hoping was going to be the first car accident, but turns out I was a little bit late. Uh, these guys didn't get hit soon enough, but yes, there was a hit and run outside of my house. Because like I said, I'm under a Pokéstop and, uh, these kids were sitting there checking their thing and they kind of slowed down in the middle of the street.

Somebody rear ended them and then drove off. Um, you know what? Playing Pokemon in your car is fucking illegal. It's illegal. Stop it. It's the same as texting. Going back to the point that I was trying to make at the beginning and you told me I was wrong.

We are not ready for this as, as humanity. We are not. Well, we're not ready. Then you're saying we're not ready for texting or anything else. We aren't. We aren't, Jason. No, we aren't. We're past how many loves. And every fucking, even before Pokemon Go, anytime I'm on the road, I look over and people are fucking texting.

We're ready. We are not capable of self-policing ourselves. We cannot stop. We're ready for it. People just don't want to do it. We can do it, but they just don't want to. What is the difference between those statements? We are not capable of self-policing ourselves.

We cannot do it. So you're just saying that we're just, you know, monkeys who just look for the red pill and want to press the lever all day to get the cocaine out of the chute. That's exactly what these wandering hordes of people are doing.

That's exactly what they're doing. God, I wish you never went to fucking psychology school. Yes, it would be much easier for you on this podcast, wouldn't it? Well, no, it'd be more fun. It would definitely be more fun. But yes. So, yes. Yes.

Oh, I might be right. No, you're not right. You're not right. There's a middle ground here where there is a self-policing line versus a I-can't-control-myself line. Next to Andy, nobody does. Next to no one does it. Pokemon Go has just made the problem more obvious and bigger.

Well, we're talking about an American audience here. Let's see how this plays out in the rest of the world. Hopefully, they are going to be better than us because we are just a bunch of idiots right now. Anyway, one of the other articles which came from blackbag.gawker.com was Pokemon Go is a government surveillance psyops conspiracy, which is the silliest of all the articles that got out and is clickbait.

This is clickbait. Complete fucking clickbait. The interesting thing, though, is all of the things that people have said about this summer and the Zika virus with the mosquitoes, this has put everybody outside. So, you're supposed to be avoiding mosquito bites.

So, Pokemon could be the first global pandemic enabler is what I'm saying. So, you know, maybe they're out there trying to get everybody sick. Like, I know I have I can have at least 20 mosquito bites on me right now that it's like a motherfucker, which is why I'm probably so grumpy today.

But, yeah, maybe this is this is how they spread the global pandemics. They spread them by Pokemon. But the CDC will pay you for your Zika infected semen. If you are a gentleman who is playing Pokemon and do get the Zika virus, you can get 20 bucks by jerking off in a cup.

So, I think you can get that anyways. I don't remember what the going rate was, but. Yeah, I don't either. You usually have to pay for that, but I guess this time you get paid. Pokegon is one of the Chrome extensions to get rid of all of the Pokemon stuff in your browser.

There are at least three other ones that I've heard of at this point. So, if you're if you're tired of Pokemon, which I think a lot of people are, you can get it out of your browser by just downloading extension. I'm already seeing a bit of a downturn in the amount of Pokemon stuff hitting my feeds.

There are still a few people, you, a couple other people that are still very, very into it, including Dr. I'm not very into it. Yeah, no, no, no. I'm not very into it. I'm into the the the anthropological side of it. I'm just I like watching people play it. Dr. Teeter has gone full, you know, nuts in.

He's like level 21 and going crazy. He's walking 10 miles a day playing this shit. And, you know, he's he's he's a nutbag with this. But, you know, good for him. He's got time to spare. Apparently, the rest of us have to work. Now, now, now talk about your next article that proves my point again.

The Auschwitz Museum says no to Pokemon Go. And this is just one idiot assholes. Well, well, apparently the Germans are, too. So if you want to go there. So this is when once Pokemon Go launched in Germany, people are going to Auschwitz and playing Pokemon Go.

And they're like, this is disrespectful to the memory of the people that died here. And this is nothing new. The Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles had a problem. And many. Having the same issue. Any cemeteries having it. Yeah. Churches, et cetera.

I mean, people are you got to people aren't respecting. Well, churches, I don't fucking care about. But, you know, personally care about them, Jason. But still, that's not the point. The point is that people are so wrapped up in their AR world. There are trampling all over the real world and not having any respect for any other people whatsoever because we just don't give a shit.

No, we don't give a shit. But it doesn't mean that we can't give a shit. You know, maybe this maybe maybe this will make people a little bit more sensitive. More sensitive. Only if we beat them over the head with it, apparently. Well, that's what we're doing with this segment. So go fuck yourself.

Security? Ha! All right. We're back again this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. How are you doing, Dave? I'm doing well. Good to be back. Yes. Yes. Sorry we missed it last week. I had some puppy issues and, you know, convention issues.

So we couldn't hook up last week just because of bad timing. And we missed you terribly. So. Well, I missed you guys, too. But lots to dig into this week. What do we have to start with? OK. We're going to start off with private Internet access, which is the VPN of choice that we promote here on Grumpy Old Geeks that we love.

They they've never let us down. And here's why they're actually pulling out of Russia. So there's no more endpoints in Russia. So if you needed to actually access the Russian Netflix, you're shit out of luck now. But what happened is the Russian government has passed a new law that mandates that every provider log all of their Internet traffic for up to a year, which is a very bad precedent.

And even Edward Snowden came out against this. This is a very bad thing. And since they have servers in Russia, they shut them down immediately because there are no log provider. They don't log any of your traffic. So if law enforcement goes after them and says, hey, we want to see what traffic this where this person went using your service, they can, you know, deny it out of the gate and out of hand because they don't log anything.

That's the way the service is designed. And it doesn't even have to be law enforcement. If a hacker got into their logs and they would be able to reverse engineer who you are. So it's a safety issue on both sides. Even if you're doing everything above board, you want to have that protection, you know? Yeah. And we've seen this before where companies who've been, you know, forced to either start tracking things or reveal things rather than do that have decided to just to just shut down, you know, to take the high road and say, this is not what we set out to do.

And so we're just going to close up shop. Yeah. What was that email provider that Snowden used? I don't recall off the top of my head, but that's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah. I'll have to find it and put it in the show notes. But they're sort of the textbook example of this. Yeah. They're like, we're not going to hand over our keys because just for you to find one person on our network means that you have access to every person on our network and we don't trust you to do the right thing.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Another story, Naked Security by Sophos, users sign away their firstborns on fake social network. I love this one. So, you know, you've got the EULAs, the end user license agreement, which we all see, you know, probably once or twice a week.

We sign up to something new or download some new piece of software and it presents us with several hundred pages of legal jargon that we then click through and say, I agree. Yeah. Click here to agree to our terms of service is pretty much what we do. Right. So someone made a fake social network and they included in the EULA that you will sign away your firstborn.

And of course, many, many people clicked through and without even reading and said, absolutely, you can have my firstborn. And I love how detailed the research was because this was an entire research project and they talked about how long people, like 70 some odd percent just didn't even read it.

And then the percentage of people that read it only read it for two to five minutes. And they had timed out how many words are in it. And they said, well, to actually read this thing, you need to spend at least 35 minutes on it. Right. Who has that kind of time? And I don't know about you, but my eyes sort of glaze over after the first paragraph or two of reading that sort of legal ease.

And that's exactly what they want, you know. Yeah, exactly. They want you to click through. Now, the interesting thing is that, you know, in this situation, does a EULA actually have any sort of legal standing? If it's widely established and understood that no one reads them, can they actually hold you to it?

And I think that's something that that is sort of up in the air. I don't know that it's actually been tested, but it's certainly something that that people who are interested in these kinds of things are keeping an eye on because it has actually been tested back in the 90s. I remember several lawsuits over this and the way the what what really it turns out to is the efficacy of the EULA depends on how much your lawyer costs per hour.

That's what we've really kind of figured out. It's like if you have a good enough lawyer, they will they will argue to the point of absurdity that nobody reads these things. If you have a crappy lawyer, you're screwed. So, you know, pay up for the laws, you know, like so many things in life. Yeah. My lawyer is bigger than your lawyer.

So away we go. Next story is a little bit of a breathless headline saying accessing people's browser history is almost like spying on their thoughts. This is from Slate. But it's a serious issue talking about Congress's the Senate actually is moving to renew the 2017 or move forward with the 2017 intelligence authorization bill.

And at issue here are the national security letters. These are where the government can go to a service provider, say, for example, AT&T or Verizon and say, we want this individual's browsing records, online activities and so forth.

And combined with that, there is often a gag order. Yeah. This is actually comes back to what we were talking about with Snowden's email provider. The guy couldn't talk about it for months or and just decided to shut down. So, yeah. Right. So the gag order means that not only do they have to turn the information over, but they can't tell anyone that they turned the information over.

They can't tell you. They can't even tell anybody that they've got the letter to begin with. Right. Right. They can't even acknowledge the request. So, you know, that's that. But what is at issue here is that the FBI is saying that we want the power to be able to do this without a warrant.

And that is where the sticky wicket is. That's where people are saying, no, if you know, if you need to do this thing, we recognize there are situations in where this sort of thing might be necessary for issues of national security. But get a warrant. Yeah.

No doubt. You need some kind of backstop. Now, the FBI's argument is that is basically an issue of velocity and saying that there are times when we need to do this quickly. And so we want the ability to do this without having to slow down and wait for a judge and, you know, get our warrant that it may it may affect national security by slowing us, slowing us down.

The other side is saying, no, slowing you down is exactly that's the point is exactly what our what our Constitution wants us wants to have happen. So it's still up in the air there. There it's a it's a tight vote, according to this to this article in Slate.

So we'll see where it lands. But it's certainly worth keeping an eye on. Oh, absolutely. It's not like we live in an episode of 24. You know, there isn't a clock that's ticking down, going beep, beep, beep. It's like, you know, you can you can get a judge out of bed if it's three in the morning and he will sign a warrant within an hour.

OK, that's we know that people do that or they could just have a 24 hour judge. You know, they could have a judge drive through so they can get there. They can go there and say, here, here, sign my warrant and then go off and go get the bad guys. But if the judge goes, this isn't a bad guy.

Well, then we then we have protections in place. Otherwise, there's no protection. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a matter of checks and balances and just making sure, you know, who watches the watchman and that sort of thing. So nowadays, we need we need people to watch the watch them. So, yep. Yep.

We're worth worth keeping an eye on. What's next? What's next? Let's talk about some Internet of Things. My favorite. Oh, medical devices, prescription for disaster. This this is a new article that basically describes that.

And, you know, we've we have mentioned this on the show many, many times that when people are doing this, this entire Internet of Things, they do not think about security. They think about the efficacy of their product, but they don't think about what can happen from side attacks or people who maybe not don't like the person that had the device installed in their body.

And there there's a lot of a lot of really nasty things out here. And when it comes to the the Internet of Things and medical devices, it is, as they say, a prescription for disaster, which is one of the worst titles. I mean, just I groaned when I saw that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a it's a strained headline. But the story is the story. There is something to the story. And this is something we've covered quite a bit on the cyber wire. What it comes down to is that, yes, these hospitals are certainly a hot target.

There is tons of personal information to be mined from hospitals. And what makes that personal information more valuable is the fact that it sells for more money on the black market than, say, credit card information or something like that. Yeah.

And yeah, follow the money, you know. But I think the important thing to to to take home from this is that what we've seen so far is that the bad guys aren't going in and basically, you know, trying to, you know, shut down your your dialysis machine.

You know, they're not out to to kill anyone. Not yet. I'm so I'm serious. Not yet. No, not not yet. So, you know, could that and will will there be cases of that eventually? Probably. But at the moment.

Let's say the president of the VP has a pacemaker. And and at some point that pacemaker is an Internet of Things enabled device. You know, somebody would probably really want that data. So could be it could be. And, you know, it makes I mean, it makes for a great a great movie script.

And it is absolutely possible that those sorts of things could happen. And so we should not take the security of those devices lightly. However, at the moment, the main interest of the of the baddies in this in this situation is using is using the vulnerability of these machines to gather up your information.

So the devices and they're using the IOT devices as a way into the larger hospital network. So you have some sort of I'll just make something up. You have some sort of, you know, infusion pump that is on the network that is poorly secured.

They go in to that pump and that's how they get into the network. That's how and now they have access to all of the personal information and then they go sell that on the black market. So, OK, so it's not just getting like the UDID of the the the pump and then just tracing that back to the account.

It's they're actually using that as a vector into the network. Correct. Correct. Because, you know, well, and as we saw, you know, we talked we talked not long ago about video cameras. You know, the thing is that all of these devices now they're running their own little systems.

They're little computers. And so because they're little computers with storage and processing power and all that sort of thing, if they're hosed up to your network, they can be a vector to get in. And, you know, I think about how many devices a hospital has. Every one of those devices is a possible way into the network.

Think about a botnet of artificial hearts. How insane with it, because we had the botnet of the cameras. So now, you know, all of these all of these bodily bodily augmentations all have computer chips in them and they're, you know, Wi-Fi enabled.

What's what's to stop somebody from sitting there and like all these people start to have palpitations because the CPU load is too high because they're sending too much spam. There you go. There you go. All right. Moving on. I'm going to go write a screenplay after this.

Yeah, you go. Good luck with that, Jason. You go do that. You go do that. I'm going to get Daniel Suarez on the line. We're going to we're going to collaborate on this one. I think that's an excellent idea. Moving on. Leaked passwords. We've talked many, many times. Don't reuse your passwords. And yet and yet and yet.

And yet, yes. Everyone does. I look, I our first show, I had to come out of the closet and say it happened to me. Two hundred and seventy some odd times I had to go back and fix all of my passwords that I had reused that one of them got got breached from.

It was my space, I think, where it came out. Right. Right. So someone's come up with a new tool. Shard. Shard. It's a command line tool and it's designed to allow you to test to see if your passwords are.

Test to see if you've you've used a password in multiple sites. Right. So this is, you know, for the geeks out there, this is kind of like set for the social engineering toolkit where it's, you know, just a command line tool where you can plug in some variables and then just let it run. And it will tell you if, you know, something is accessible and it it's supposed to be used for good.

But, you know, everybody's complaining that they can see this being used for evil at some point when you get all of these password dumps and you can reengineer this thing to go and use it for evil. But I'm pretty sure that it's not that hard to actually write this thing.

So, yeah. And I think also, you know, just points out, like we've said before, you know, I think we are kind of in a in a post password era where you've got to use multi-factor on anything that's valuable to you. And you've got to use strong passwords.

You can't just, you know, use the use your kids or your dog's name and, you know, you're combined with your birth date or, you know, all those all those simple little tools to make passwords memorable. They just they're just not good enough anymore. Use a password manager. Use multi-factor. Yeah, absolutely.

And I started using multi-factor for all of the the main stuff that I use. And, you know, I always used to joke. I'm like, oh, what if I need to log in here and I don't have my cell phone with me? I'm like, well, yeah, that doesn't really happen anymore because most of the time you're logging in through your cell phone. So. Right.

Right. And it is, you know, it's a pain in the butt sometimes. And sometimes you go, oh, I have to wait to do the multi-factor. But, you know, step back, sit back in your chair and go, this is for the best. It's it's I'm protecting myself, my my assets, my family, you know, my loved ones. So it's worth it.

Just get her done. Yep. So the FBI has been gathering iris scans and they're up to about 400,000 at this point. Which is an interesting thing. And this comes from Mashable, which I don't really go to for my security news for the most part. But yes, the FBI has been gathering all these iris scans from a lot of incarcerated individuals in the United States.

And one of the things that came out of this article that I had missed back in 2015 is that there is now an iris scanner that can scan your eye from 40 feet away. Which is nuts. Yeah, that's interesting. Interesting technology. I mean, I guess it makes sense.

At some point, it's only, you know, you're talking about optics. And so you have a good enough, high enough resolution combination of optics and an imager. Then, you know, it makes sense that you'd be able to do that. What's interesting about that to me is it's kind of like the license plate scanners.

You know, where if you're just, if you're at the point where you're just sort of vacuuming up all of this biometric data about people. Presumably, you'd have the capability to do it without their permission, if you're talking about a 40-foot scan. You know, we're talking about some interesting civil liberties issues, I think.

Massive civil liberties issues. And, you know, it's very much like Minority Report when he's walking through the mall. It's like, when does this technology become commercially available and when can anybody use it? Right, and to be clear, we're not saying that's what the FBI is doing.

They're calling, they're describing this as a pilot program that's been going on for the past few years involving police departments, the Pentagon, the Border Patrol. Yeah, and using the term pilot program gets them around any legal ramifications from taking this data from people.

It's not a quote-unquote program. It's a pilot program. We're testing. It's in beta, you know? Right, right. So, you know, absolutely worth keeping an eye on. So, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Everybody wear your sunglasses at night now. Yeah, I mean, you know, what happens if I'm wearing colored contact lenses?

Or, you know, will there be a market? We've already seen people have started, you know, marketing, you know, public disguise kits for facial recognition. And, you know, could there possibly be a market for, you know, contact lenses that disguise, you know, your true iris scans?

Ooh, that's very Gibsonian. I like it. I know. Yeah. But here's the big problem now. Nobody's going to be able to scan your iris because everybody's looking down at their phone playing Pokemon. Oh, Jay, you promised you weren't going to talk about Pokemon. I had to. I had to. All right.

With all the crazy stuff that's going on, the ACLU has put out a great guide on knowing your rights about what to do if you're stopped or detained for taking photographs of the police. This is a step-by-step guide and you should definitely know this because nowadays, I mean, as a photographer, I, you know, had to deal with this stuff a lot because I used to back in my college days in the 90s, I would go to protests.

I went to the Gulf War protests and we were we were photographing police all the time. Different world now. Everybody's a photographer. Back then we had press passes and we were, you know, giant cameras. And now it's like anybody with a tiny little phone is a photographer. So everybody needs to know this stuff.

This is this is a general knowledge problem where everybody should know this stuff. So I definitely recommend that go to ACLU dot org. We've got a link in the show notes and read up on it. Yeah, it is. It's worth your time. It's it's a good thing to know, you know, so you know what you can and cannot do.

No, you know, when can you stand your ground and to what degree and also what to expect if you do try to stand your ground. You know, what's considered a they speak about a safe distance from whatever activity it is that you're that you're observing and whether or not police are allowed to confiscate your devices.

Related to this, the ACLU actually has has released an app that facilitates recording events. And what's interesting about it is that as you're recording, it sends the video to the ACLU servers.

It's sort of they do it on a state by state basis. So, for example, we're in Maryland. If I see something going on, I whip out my phone. I start recording it. The file automatically gets uploaded to the ACLU. So if, for example, law enforcement confiscates my phone and, you know, magically and mystically, my phone either gets damaged or the files get erased.

While the phone is out of my out of my custody, which we, you know, we've seen has happened in many cases. That file has been uploaded. A random brick just fell on your phone. Sorry about that, dude. Right. Our bad. So, you know, in that case, the file has already been automatically uploaded to the ACLU for safekeeping and, you know, evaluation to see if, you know, if in the future it needs to be examined closer.

So worth checking out. It's good to know your rights and the ACLU certainly doing a good job in helping spread the word about that. Yeah, it's available in 17 states plus the District of Columbia. So it's not available in my state yet in Illinois. So go check it out and see if it's if you can get it for your state.

Yeah, because the laws are different in every state. That's why they have to have to segment it. Right. Right. All right. Let's move on. Let's get this. Let's wrap this puppy up. OK. Microsoft wins an appeal on data searches.

This is a big deal. The U.S. court announced that U.S. agents can't access data held on overseas computers. This is a fight that Microsoft was having with the Justice Department and a federal appeals court ruled that the government can't force the company to turn over emails or other personal data that's stored on computers overseas.

So, you know, if you're a company, if you're Microsoft, if you're Apple and you want to help ensure the privacy of your customers data for the moment, one way you could do that is to store that data overseas. It's an interesting development.

We'll see. You know, this is one that could could go to the Supreme Court. I think this will definitely go to the Supreme Court because this is a game changer. If a U.S.-based company can just say, ah, you can't have it because it's over in Ireland, that's that's kind of a big deal. Because since you're, you know, an American based company, they think that they have jurisdiction over everything, everything that you do.

Yep. Yep. So, again, worth keeping an eye on. But in legal circles, big news. Another big news story, actually, from our neck of the woods, coming from the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, they decided that, ruled that the warrantless use of cell site simulators, which are popularly known as stingrays, is now considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It is unconstitutional. So this is this is huge news. It is. The stingray devices, if you're unfamiliar with them, it's a device that basically simulates a cell phone tower. So let's say I'm a law enforcement officer and I think there's a bunch of bad guys, you know, holed up inside of a particular home or a business or something like that.

I can I can pull up outside with my stingray device and the stingray device pretends to be a cell phone tower. So everyone's mobile devices who are nearby, instead of hitting a real tower, they hit my stingray. I can pull up inside of my stingray and I can start gathering all sorts of information about their communications.

There's been speculation that even that these stingrays may even be able to listen in on conversations. But that's that's that's speculation. I don't know that that's actually been verified. But, you know, since these things were were discovered and it's worth mentioning that the government has been very cagey about these stingrays.

There's there's even been situations where when the the mention of a stingray has come up in court, the government has dropped the case rather than going into the details of how the stingrays work. But in this case, curious that curious, yeah, well, with with this case, we're beyond that.

And so they're now, you know, I think a lot of us who've been watching this for a long time have been scratching our head and saying to ourselves, how could this sort of use possibly be constitutional? And the Maryland Court of Special Appeals agrees. And we'll see if this one also goes up to to higher courts.

I guarantee it will, unless the only difference, you know, is like, who did we get that is worth, you know, retaining in the in the system? Because what this is going to come down to is how many how many cases are going to be overturned? Yep.

You know, because they're going to have to go back to the catalog and find out, you know, where stingrays were used and where it's public that they were used and figure out, you know, how many cases are we going to lose and how many people are going to go free. That depends, I think, on how hard they're going to fight for this. Right.

And again, worth pointing out that part of the big deal about this is is is the warrantless use of these devices. You know, they're saying, you know, it's one thing if you go to a judge can make your case. You know, this is why we need to do this. It's the unfettered, warrantless use that that they're saying is unconstitutional.

All right. Well, thank you, Dave. It's been an enlightening and very scary week again. Always a pleasure. I'll see you next week. I'll talk to you next week. And for everybody else, check out the Cyber Wire podcast at the cyberwire dot com. We'll be right back.

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Great podcast. Also, screw iTunes. I've been through my fair share of podcasts this summer, and this is still the only one that legitimately makes me smile when I see a new episode in my feed. Great mix of humor, tech news, hating on Kanye, woohoo, and politics. Even though I'm generally against obvious bias, I'm very okay with as many anti-Trump comments as you can throw our way, so keep it coming.

They really know their stuff, and as an engineering student, it's really great and sometimes horrifying. Window into the world that I will soon be entering. On a slightly unrelated note, I used to think that Jason was kind of a dick, and he probably still is. Thank you very much.

I appreciate that. But I've kind of grown numb to it at this point and don't even notice anymore. I can't imagine... Welcome to the club, buddy. Welcome to the club. Shut up, you dick. I can't imagine the show without your guys' direct and upfront take on how screwed up the world is, and I sincerely hope you keep making these gems.

As a college student, I don't have too much money to be donating if I actually want to eat real food. But I'll try to come up with something sometime soon. Don't worry about it. You're in college. Once you hit the nut, feel free. You guys definitely deserve it. P.S. I have now finished typing this review for a second time after iTunes notifying me the first time that my nickname was taken and then kindly deciding that this meant I didn't want my review anymore and deleted the entire thing.

But you guys are definitely worth the five-star rating, hence also screw iTunes parenthetical. Yes, sorry about that thing with the iTunes and the name. We've been running across this with a couple of my shows, and it really does suck. So basically, if you've never left a review in iTunes, make up some gibberish that's really long, and you'll be fine.

But sorry about that. But thank you for the review. And yes, fuck you, I'm a dick. Yep, nailed it. We got some comments on GrumpyOldGeeks.com. This is from Oliver in California. I got an upgrade to Android 6.01 on my tablet. Highlights I now have to swipe before I enter the unlock pattern.

Apparently, this was done to prevent butt unlocking. Well, my 9.7 tablet sure doesn't fit in my back pocket. It renamed my SD card, thus invalidating all the links to files stored on the SD card. And this, for the security conscious, it enabled the guest account that is accessible from the lock screen without any password.

And there is no way to disable the guest account. Way to go, Google. Yep. Okay. We don't speak Android. We don't speak Android. So sorry about that for you. Jeff writes, this seems like a great article for you guys to talk about.

And this would be the link to the Pokemon. This would be a link to the Pokemon Go economic problems, which we talked about earlier in the Pokemon Go Fuck Yourself segment. Yep. Thanks for sending that in. Next comment is from Greg. Hey, I'm 70 years old, retired, and have need for peaceful sleep, or I get really grumpy.

My grumpiness would make you two's grumpiness akin to Shirley Temple tap dancing on the steps. So harumph, quit the screech so an old man can get some sleep. I listen to the whole show. It just takes me, let's see, I should finish tonight. FTC, or is it FCC requirement? Indeed. Also, don't make fun of my typos, and I'll forgive you your stumbles.

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I've talked in the past about how Amazon has been the single best method for me to find out about when new books are coming by authors. You can find all the – find your favorite authors on Amazon. You can subscribe to it, and they conveniently send you an email when a new book is being announced or when it's going on presale or whatever.

It is – I have not found a better way. It's still fantastic, and much to Jason's dismay, they have announced that a new Dune book is coming, Navigators of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Now, I have to decide if I'm actually going to read it because I'm a little bored with their stories. It's not as good as Frank Herbert.

They're not as well written. They're not as interesting. But who am I kidding? I'm going to read it just to annoy Jason. Of course you are. And people tell me I'm the dick. Yep. And they're right. I finished the Apocalypse Codex, the fourth Laundry Files book by Charles Strauss, and I enjoyed it.

It was really, really good. I'm looking forward to reading more, but as I said, I do feel the need to take a break because they are a bit formulaic. So it's time to get away from the Laundry Files for a little bit, read something else, and then I can come back to it and enjoy hopefully the fifth story in that series. Okay, so on this one, is this the one where Bob was the hero or his wife was the hero?

This one was Bob. The wife wasn't even in it. Okay, so yeah. You know what? The next one that you're going to get to, I think, is the Reese's chart. I believe it is, yes. Yeah. I don't think that's... I'm looking... Oh, yeah. You know what?

Bob's a tertiary character in the Reese's chart, and his wife is the main character in it, which makes it so much better. I don't know. I like Bob. Okay. But here's the thing. His wife is actually more entertaining than Bob is, because she's got that crazy-ass violin.

Yeah. So, anyway, moving forward, it does kind of start changing tempo and main character. So the Reese's chart is the next one, and then the one I just finished was the one after that, which has another main character.

Bob's not even in that one. No, that's a shame. No, it's not, actually, because the way he wrote them, it really is interesting, like, how he's crafting this world, and he has the entire story mapped out to a 12-story arc. So, you just finished book four, I think, and so you've got, you know, a couple to go.

Yep. But he's looking at one every year, so he's finished the next one after the one I just read, and it's going to keep going in that kind of vein. But he's got the entire story arc mapped out to 12 episodes, and that's it. It's not going to go past that. But 12 books is a really long series.

Yeah. Yes, it is. And so, speaking of long series, I finished Calamity, the Reckoner series by Brandon Sanderson, which you had finished a while ago. I was not happy with the ending on this one. Well, this is one of those ones where it's like, how else were they going to end it?

Yeah, you know, it was just the entire story. It just didn't seem very well, like, it didn't seem like anybody cared, you know, with the writing and the character development. I just couldn't get into it. That's why it took me so long to get through it.

Yeah. It was decent compared, but it wasn't as good as, like, the original book, Steelheart, was fantastic. I love that book. They should have ended it there. And then when you went through the rest of it with the prof and everything, it's just like, Calamity was just, when you got to the end and found out what the whole giant secret is, it's just like, eh, didn't really do anything for me.

I felt let down by this book. I think you were expecting a lot more from it than I was. We were here, Exiles, who's that author, that whole series? Because I kind of read Peter Klein's. Yeah, Peter Klein's. The Ex-Heroes series.

Yeah. I read both that, and you introduced me to that one and the Reckoners series at basically the same time. Yeah, I was reading them at the same time, too. Yeah. I read them all at the same time, and I always felt the Reckoners was basically almost a kid's book compared to the writing that Peter Klein was doing for the Ex-Heroes.

That was always the more interesting, the deeper story. So I wasn't expecting as much from the Reckoners. It was always more, it felt like a comic book, and it went through like a comic book, while there's actually some depth and nuance in the Peter Klein stuff. Not that I didn't enjoy the Reckoners, again, but I just, I kind of, I knew where it was going to go.

I knew how it was going to end. There was only one way it was going to be, and it was never very deep, so. Yeah, I think the Reckoners is basically like young adult, you know, and I think you're right, because I was reading the Ex-Series by Peter Klein's as well at the same time. You know, when I introduced you to those books, I was doing them both back and forth, too, and I was actually getting confused.

And I'm like, wait, which world am I in? Oh, shit. Because there are a lot of similarities between the two. Oh, a huge amount of similarities, yeah. The Ex-Series, though, you know, the only thing that really kept me back is like every time they would talk about, because they turned the entire Paramount lot into their stronghold, and I'm like, that's where I used to work.

So, you know, every time they would talk about something, I had a geographical reference point. Yep. The Reckoners. And in the next book, they'll talk about the Pokemon that they find all over the place. Exactly. We're going to go find Lucille Ball Pokemon. Okay. But, yeah, this Reckoners, this final Reckoners book, it is done.

They can't go on from this. And if they do, or I'm sorry, they being Brandon Sanderson. Brandon, go start a new series and up your game. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's done. I mean, he wrapped it up. I mean, he could write more books within the world, because obviously you've just got superheroes, but it can't involve any of these characters.

Well, actually, it can, because there's a character that basically jumps transdimensional rifts. And you've got, you know, the fire guy, what's his name, from the other adjacent world. Yeah. He could write more, but don't. Seriously, don't.

I agree. Let's wrap that on the Reckoners. I mean, honestly, Steelheart, great book. The second one, decent. And the third one, meh. That's my wrap up.

And what do you say on the Reckoners series? I already had my say. That's my rant a little bit earlier. No, but just to do a wrap up for people who haven't listened before. It's I just did, Jason, earlier. I liked it, but I felt it was a very comic book, very kind of young adulty version.

I prefer Exiles. OK. I just need you to say that so I can edit it properly. God damn it. Let me drop a marker. Jesus, I'm working on radio now. I got to have fucking starting endpoints. My last book of the week is Open, an autobiography by Andre Agassi.

I love, like, you know, real world autobiographies instead of the fake autobiographies that, you know, you get some time in sci-fi. This was a surprise. This was a huge surprise. I didn't know much about Andre. I watched him play, you know, because I'm not a sports ball guy, but I knew I like tennis.

I played tennis as a kid and I knew when he was coming up through the ranks and, you know, he was married to Brooke Shields and now he's married to Steffi Groff. And but his his journey is really, really interesting.

The crap that this kid went through to get to where he is was just like insane. So, I mean, it's a very long autobiography, but I I really recommend it. I do. It's it's one of those things if you're looking to think about, like, if your day sucks, well, your day has not sucked as bad as his day sucked kind of thing.

But it's a it's a really good read. It's like I said, it's long, but I recommend it. You're not an autobiography guy. You're just down to fiction, right? I don't mind autobiographies, but I really have to be interested in the subject and I have zero interest in tennis. See, that's that's the reason I read this one, because Tim Ferriss gave me this recommendation.

He's like, you don't have to like tennis to like this book. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to take your recommendation this time to see if it pans out because I'm not a tennis guy. And I mean, I liked it, but so I know kind of how the scoring works, but that's all I know about tennis. This has nothing to do with tennis.

This is about basically the human drive to be number one. That's what this book is about. So like talking about him talking about his training, talking about his family and how he got to be number one in the world coming from a teenager who started playing tennis at like, you know, four.

So that's spent a lot of time at the Pokemon, Jim. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. Basically, he did not play Pokemon. There is no Pokemon mentioned in this book, but it's a it's a really fantastic read. And it's it goes from him dropping out of high school or it wasn't even high school.

I think he dropped out at eighth or ninth grade. And now he funds charter schools across the world because he thinks education is, you know, the way to go forward. And it's a really interesting. Like I said, it's an interesting story. You'd be really surprised. So I still recommend it.

And it has nothing to do with tennis. The tennis is is, you know, it's pervasive and goes in and out. Him talking about his different, you know, his path with tennis. But it talks about his mental state as he goes through tennis and how to find his way out of tennis.

Because at the beginning of the book, he says, I fucking hate tennis. Tennis sucks. And at the end of the book, he's like, I hate tennis, but it got me where I am. So it's a really good read. My next up is Warren Ellis's Normal.

I bought this. This is going to be my read for next week. It's a serial. It's a dystopian serial. So we'll have our new dystopian segment next week. And it's like cheap. It's like two bucks. So it's a serial. Check it out.

It's Warren Ellis. You can't go wrong. Cool. That's interesting. I like the idea of the people bringing back the serials. I always enjoy that. Funky. I also have a book up for next week. If anybody wants to play the game at home and read along, I needed to take a break from fiction.

I'm reading a book called Your Favorite Band is Killing Me, What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life by Stephen Hayden. All I have to say about it is I started it last night at 9 p.m. I went to bed at 1 a.m. I'm enjoying it. That's good. Especially.

I'm surprised you didn't finish the book, Mr. Fast Reader. I'm about 75% of the way done. I figured. All right. Until next week on At the Library.

Software, apps, and gadgets. Ricoh Theta S 360 degree camera. I got one. Woohoo. Yeah. It's neat. It's neat. It's a neat little toy. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford it when I bought it.

And I tried to return it, and they said no. So, I'm stuck with it. God damn it. I could really use the money, but they wouldn't actually give me the money back until August because it was a Prime deal, but kind of a Prime deal through a partner.

So, if you ever want to buy something through Amazon Prime, and maybe it's kind of a test run, check who the provider is on it because, yeah, I got screwed on that one, and I'm stuck with it. And that was like $350. That's kind of my utilities for the month, which sucks.

Oopsies. As far as a gadget goes, it's pretty damn cool. So, 360 degree camera, two 180 lenses on each side, has its own Wi-Fi network. So, I turn it on. I turn on the Wi-Fi button. I leave the room. I connect to it with my phone, and I can take 360 degree panoramic photos without me in the picture and come back, download them to my phone, post them to Facebook or wherever they're going to go.

Same with videos. I can do 360 degree videos with it. For 350 bucks, the technology is insane. I'm already tired of people's 360 degree photos. Why? But I don't know. I'm just not interested.

Okay. I mean... We did this way back in the day, and now I'm just getting a bunch of... We did it, and we got paid for it, and we did it for entertainment things, and now I'm getting 360 degrees of people's porches that I could care less about. I know, but I looked at the reason I got this thing was when I saw the Giger bar, and I'm just like, if you're traveling to really cool destinations, it's cool to have a 360 degree view in one photo.

I thought it was neat. For the price point, you can't beat it. It doesn't have anything to do with what we used to get paid for in the day. I think it's more of a social media thing. People post their lunch instead of waiting to post things that are actually of interest.

Well, yeah. Well... So, yeah. Sorry, people... As you fought so hard for in the Pokemon segment, yes, okay, probably people are fucking stupid. But, yes, I don't need a 360 degree view of your cheese sandwich, but I did check out the Ricoh TH1 water-resistant hard case.

We talked about the internet of vaginas a while ago, and this really kind of goes into that territory. It's very scary, and do not, ladies. I find so many phallic items in your stories, Jason. I'm just... Psychologically, I might need to explore this.

I've been listening to a lot of serious radio, and apparently everybody else on the planet, talks about this stuff. So, if you're going to be the prude, that's okay. We're good. Next up is Prisma on iOS. This is a filter that you can run on basically any of your photos that come through your phone, and it turns them into basically classical pieces of art.

I was really sick of seeing this on Instagram, but then I went and tried it out, and I'm like, oh, now I see why people are digging it, because it's actually really cool. Now I can make other people sick of it, too. Exactly. This is how memes start.

This is the meme culture. So, the only interesting thing that I really found out that I really liked about it, it's like, some of the line drawing tools on this, I could actually go out and shoot with my DSLR a comic book, run it through Prisma, make the panels, put the bubbles over it, and, you know, disrupt the comic industry, as it were.

Yeah. Or not. Or not. But it's still, you know, it's a fun tool that doesn't cost anything, because they're probably looking for VC money and going to sell to Instagram, probably eventually. That's what I'm guessing their game plan is.

If you go look at their site, there's nothing about paying for anything. It's, there's investor relations. These guys are, they built the tools, they're going to sell it to somebody, and then that somebody will either bake it into their program, or just delete it and take the team. That's what's going to happen.

Yep. Pretty much. Yeah. FarmBot. Yes. Not FemBot, as Brian would probably have me, you know, say. FarmBot is a- Also vaguely phallic. Well, it is very vaguely phallic, as it, you know, seeds the lawn with its, ooh, yeah, ooh, baby.

Yeah. Yeah. If you watch this in slow-mo, I've got to turn that off. I'm getting hot and heavy here. So what it is, it's a, a bot that will actually take the seeds, plant your garden, which you can control from your iOS device or any, any internet connected enabled device, and plant a garden, and it will check the soil moisture density and run your garden for you.

It's, it, this is the lazy gardener, and it's pretty cool, and it's not that expensive. It's like, you know, less than a couple grand, you know? What is it? Yeah, I don't think that there's any reason for anybody here who could actually just go do this themselves to have it, but I do see the widespread implementation of this in third world countries and things of that nature, which I think would be absolutely fantastic.

It's a pretty genius little device, and it can be hacked because it's the internet of things. It's three grand. So to get this, it's three grand, and you have a perfectly homogenous garden, which is pretty cool. That's all I'm going to say. It's pretty damn cool. It is.

Good thoughts. So Brian, you used to play the trivias. You like the trivias. Yes, I'm on trivia, real pub trivia people 3.0 now with a whole new team again. I'm a big fan of trivia. I've played many, many trivia games on the phone, none of which have really lasted terribly long, except for Trivia Crack, which is the article that you threw in the show notes for me, where the founder is basically talking about how to monetize and how they aren't really making any money.

Well, you know, this is where it comes into, why don't we figure out how we're going to make money before we build an app? Well, I mean, we made fun of the kid who did the Pokemon chat because he didn't even put ads in. Trivia Crack has ads in it.

I see them all the time. So we play ads. We make next to no money off of them. There's no money in inbuilt advertising. Well, there's money in advertising, but it comes with a huge audience. And Trivia Crack apparently doesn't have the audience that it needs to.

But they also sell like upsells for trivia packs, don't they? Yeah, but if you're just playing the game to play trivia, I don't care about getting the shards or the crystals or collecting the whatevers or the little bombs that allow you to to knock out two of the options.

I'm just playing trivia. So I'm never going to purchase any of this stuff ever. OK, why would I? Well, I guess I mean, I get some people, you know, just like with Pokemon, if you want to if you somehow become invested in some other aspect of the game, the gamification of trivia for me, trivia is a game already.

It is. Yes, it is. I don't need a game built on top of a game. Yeah, it's like trivia. Yeah. Here's a question. What's the answer? That's the game. Yeah, that's really is just the game. But what they've done to try to monetize it is they built a game on top of the game where you then collect all this other stuff and then you can do all this and that.

None of which I give a shit about. So I'm so glad gamification has come out of the lexicon. We haven't talked about that in like a year and a half now. So, yeah, it's true. Yeah. Well, seriously, when was the last time that gamification came up in in some like somebody's slide presentation as the next big thing?

It's been quite some time. Yep. Good. Yeah. Finally. Let's talk about Imsi. I, you know, I'm dyslexic, so I don't know if I'm if I'm actually saying ello when I see the words Imsi, but it could be the same letters.

But you sent me the invite to this. So I signed up for it. And I don't get it. I don't care. I spent two minutes looking around it and went, oh, there's a supposed community building, whatever that nobody's ever going to sign up for. So I posted.

I got my invites as well. And I figured, well, if anybody wants early access to this thing that I'm sure isn't going to last, I basically tweeted out, if anybody wants some invites to at MZHQ, a site you'll sign up for and lose interest with as quickly as at Ello World, let me know.

I've got a few. They wrote back rude. And I mean, I lost my shit when you sent me just like, yeah, that was, you know, it's funny, but it was really not that funny.

They should have they should have come up with something. They should have taken a second, taken a breath and come up with something a little bit better because, yeah, they could have they could have done a little te-te-te and we could have talked a bit about this or something funny or how does Ello feel about that? Something, anything.

It's interesting. Ello didn't even bother. But the funny thing is you gave him a softball and this was I know this was a yes and moment and they just said no. It's like you could you could have had them for, you know, five or six rounds of of really good improv, but they just said they could or they could have even explained to me about why they're innovative and different.

And this will be an interesting thing. They didn't bother. So although interestingly enough, you have the link in the show notes and I just clicked on it. So I'm looking at your page right now and I've got one of those automated bot things on the bottom corner that pops up and tries to talk to you. Obviously, it's not connected to any sort of database because hi, Slender Fungus, how are you liking Imsi?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. No, you didn't want to hear my thoughts. I already sent them to you and you said rude. And it's funny. So so my point was, I, you know, every time a new social network pops up, I'm going to go create a new community about me. That's what I'm going to do.

So so if you go to Imsi dot com slash JPD, that's my community all about me. And if you'd like an invite members, huh? And that's what pisses me off. OK, so here's the deal. First member is me and I sent out five invitations.

So out of that, two of my five friends have joined. So three of you can go fuck yourselves. Because we're sick of wasting our time with another stupid social network that nobody's going to give a crap about. I know that's the by the way, if you want it, it's I've got them, too.

I could care less. So no, I've got anybody. The thing is, once I started a channel, they gave me unlimited invites so I can I can. But once I did the five people, this goes back to Ello. And this is where the whole circle comes back around.

Ello makes money by selling T-shirts now. Right. In theory. Emsi basically gives away T-shirts. So once I got my five people to sign up, they're sending me a T-shirt. That's nice. OK, well, if anybody really wants to know what's going on with Jason, let me give you a guess.

There's two posts. One about the new Grumpy Old Geeks and the other one's his dog. Exactly.

Media Candy. First up this week, you've probably seen this. But if you haven't, it's the Game of Thrones Beginner's Guide narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. It's on YouTube and it is hilarious. Fucking dragons.

That's all I got to say. Next up, we've got the Long Now Foundation Seminars podcast. This was one I just ran across randomly this week. The Long Now Foundation, they're building a 10,000 year clock out in the, you know, the wilds of Arizona somewhere.

Tons of smart people work at this, you know, this organization. So I ended up signing up for it because I get access to a bunch of like really cool stuff. But on their podcast, there are three episodes I would definitely recommend. Walter Mischel. This is the guy that did the original test.

He's 87 years old. This is the original psychologist who did that test where the kids are like, you know, they put marshmallows in front of the kids saying, we're going to leave. And if you can wait, we'll come back and give you twice as many. This is the guy that did the study. Yeah. He did the study and he's he's on the show.

He's he's funny as shit, too. He's 87. He's just like, ah, whatever. Fuck it. You know, foul mouth and awesome. Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. He did a Red Planet one. Great. Neil Gaiman, who I know you don't like, but he did a great he did a great podcast on how stories affect society.

Good stuff. So check those out. The links will be in the show notes, but definitely check out the Long Now organization. It's really cool. If you sign up, it's eight bucks a month, but you get like a ton of free stuff. And if you're in San Francisco, you get premium, like, you know, early access to the tickets for the the monthly shows.

And they've got great people coming all the time and a free book. Look, I took a look at the site. I like them. I like what they're doing. The Long Now Foundation. I have two comments. First off, if they're forward thinking, how come their website looks like it's from 1992?

Because it's resilience. And then secondly, secondly, I am annoyed by how they do their dating. I get I get the Long Now Foundation and they're thinking of the next 10,000 years, but it's a little too cutesy that everywhere you put the year, it's zero one 1996 zero two thousand three.

But that's I mean, that's the whole point is that they're going for a 10,000 year clock. So they're going for the number one. You know, that's the point. I got I get it. So you put a picture of the clock up there with that. Well, at least they're all consistent. Entire sites. That's well, are they? I didn't.

Now I'm going to have to crawl through the whole site to see. Yeah. I mean, give them some credit. They're at least like trying to fucking do something. Most people aren't. I just said the two things that annoyed me. Anyways, speak of stuff. We call it the Brian shit sandwich. OK, it's good.

I didn't start. No, it was more of a shit open face sandwich. Shit open face sandwich. I wish we could use it for a show title. Yeah. Did you watch the premiere of Mr. Robot? I did not. I've downloaded it from Sweden, but I have not watched it yet.

I got the first two apps. What did you think? I guess we can't do a spoiler thing. I am annoyed that they rolled out the second episode the next night. I get that we have to do funky things all the time. And I also hated the after show. They do an after show. Do not watch it.

So I would never watch. I don't even think I like the show. So why would I watch the after show? Yeah, that's the thing that I'm not sure about. We talked extensively about that after they wrapped up the first season about how they were going to go to what direction they were going to go with it.

And if you can't tell where they're going with it in the first episode, it was decent enough to make me continue to watch. I'm not stepping away from it yet, but I have a lot of doubts about what they're going to do.

One thing that they did do, though, is at one point he drew in a notebook and he drew out a QR code, which if you cleaned it up and went to it, goes to an old school kind of looking like an old Geocities page website that they built as part of a viral marketing effort for the show.

So at least they're they're putting some thought and effort into taking what is a hacking show and doing something funny about it. OK, yeah, I'm just on them for that. But we'll see where the movie goes or where the show goes. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I lost interest like four episodes before the finale last year.

Once once once you realize that it's Fight Club, you know, and and it's just it's such a slap in the face to check Fallon. Hook and just like, ah, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. And like we said, there's a reason that that he never wrote a sequel to Fight Club, because what do you do with it?

And that did actually. So we'll see how that comes out. Yeah. OK, it's a comic. It's a comic book. It's coming out soon or it's out already, I think. But yeah, he did write Fight Club, too, but he didn't want to. That's the whole point. He didn't want to. He thought it was done. Yes, that is kind of a good end to the story because we can't let anything go.

That was actually good. I always enjoyed the Stephen King miniseries at the original one. It was awesome. They have to remake it, of course, because why wouldn't you? This is that miniseries is the one that turned me off of Stephen King. That's the I loved it. Well, the point.

Here's the thing. Everything up to it. Tim Curry was the clown. OK, you cannot get scarier than Tim Curry is a fucking clown. OK, but at the end, it comes down to an alien in a an alien bug in a cave. I'm like, what?

How do we get from crazy evil clown to alien bug in a cave? That makes no sense to me. Well, if you haven't read it by now, tough shit. So I love the book. I really enjoyed the miniseries. Tim Curry obviously made it.

Unfortunately, they're redoing it and it will not involve Tim Curry. Bill Skarsgård is playing Pennywise the clown. And the photo, the sneak preview of him doing it, he just looks stupid. So he's not scary. He's not even a clown. He's just got a little blood around his face.

Great. I mean, well, the show art looks good. I mean, the actual key art looks good. But yeah, that's fine. But that has nothing to do with how the miniseries itself is going to look. So no, no, no, the yeah, the photo of him looks really stupid.

But yeah. And finally, a tip of the hat to a friend of the show, Amber. She has been posting about this band called American Murder Song. I thought that, Jason, you might actually dig this because it is kind of this funky kind of Rasputina-y weird murder ballady stuff.

So I thought you might enjoy it. So I threw it in the show. Thanks for you. I found it to be okay and not so bad. So yeah, give it a listen. I did. It's okay. That's about it. Okay. There you go. Dean Kamen has been working on this prosthetic arm for DARPA for many, many, many years now.

And it's finally coming to market. It was called the Luke arm for quite some time. And I think that's what they're going to market with. It's going to be here at the end of this year. Is that because Luke Skywalker's hand was cut off? Yes, exactly. And when they originally debuted this, I think it was at TED where they debuted the video of it, they could pick up a grape without crushing it and turn it so he could eat the grape.

That was like the level of control. But it's like basically a mind control arm. But the interesting thing is what I took away from this is how long it takes to get something from prototype to market. So when you extrapolate that out to self-driving cars, and this is just an arm that can pick up food for you.

Think about 2,000 pounds of meat carrying steel. You know, let's put that in perspective on how long it's going to take to get this stuff out there. Yeah. We talked last week. There was the kind of rough chart that had been put out about self-driving cars. And we were, you know, people think it's going to be in the next five to 10 years.

They were talking 20 minimum away before we'd really be dealing with too much. So, yeah. And speaking of weird stuff, this, I hope, comes a little bit quicker because I am a grumpy old geek and getting older. And I have noticed, sadly and finally, that my better than average vision is finally starting to take a little bit hit due to age.

This saddens me greatly, but if this thing comes to market soon enough, I'm going to be a happy man. The Ocumetrics Bionic Lens, invented by Dr. Garth Webb of Ocumetrics Technology Corporation, is a painless implant that could change impaired vision forever. The lens will go beyond the standard 20-20 vision, giving patients the superpower of seeing up to three times better.

Instead of working like a contact lens, it acts similar to cataract surgery, but adheres to your eyes' natural lens. The procedure can be done in the outpatient office, simple saline solution flushed into the eye with a syringe. After 10 seconds, the folded lens opens up, moves itself over the eye's natural lens, and then you have better than regular vision.

It sounds awesome. I'm terrified of the idea. Can you take my money now, please? Now? Exactly. Take all my money? I mean, I still see great. I'm way off from having to have glasses or anything like that, but I know it's coming, and the idea of the LASIK surgery freaks me out to no end.

This sounds amazing. So he's hoping to have it available by 2017 after more clinical trials, but as you just mentioned, who knows how long it'll take to actually get through all that. God, I hope so. I hope so. Right? The rest of me will fall apart, but at least I'll be able to see it happen.

I've had glasses since I was four years old, so in contact since I was six, and so that's 40 years of dealing with this stuff. So, yes, if you can stick something in my eye and make it go crazy. You know, make fuzzies go bye-bye.

Make it go boom. Yeah. Yeah. So I found one on the Daily Dot, which is these giant motion-activated walls. It's... You have to go watch the video to really kind of understand how it works, but there are sensors in the walls that have proximity sensors, so when you walk to the wall, different animations happen based on your proximity to the wall.

I would love this in my house. It looks super cool. I'm sure it is ungodly expensive, but you just have to go watch the video. I'm sure it's ungodly expensive. I think it's absolutely beautiful. I also think it would be nothing but annoying after the first week. Could be.

Actually, could be. You know, I think there would be times... That's the problem. I think there's times when you'd want it on, want it off, so you could probably schedule it, maybe. I don't know. I think it would be fun. Yeah. I wouldn't mind that. I think it would be fun. I think if it was constantly on, it would be so distracting, always, like, grabbing at the corner of your eye.

You know, it would totally take you out of your Pokemon game. Oh, yeah. Well, unless Pokemon is in the walls. Well, that's the other use for this advertising.

The web's not dead! Oh, no, it's not dead! The source code for Apollo's guidance system, Apollo 11, you know, people that landed on the moon, things like that, is now on GitHub, which is kind of cool as crap.

It is pretty cool. Yeah, it's really cool. You can go through it yourself if you really want to. Most likely, you probably don't. In that case, we have a link in our show notes from Slate. The brilliant and surprisingly funny computer code behind the Apollo 11 mission, where they go through the code for you so you don't have to, and find some of the funnier things that we did in there, some of their commenting, just really the human aspect of this and what they were trying to build.

And it's funny. It's good stuff. Yeah. Talk about building an app. Let's build an app to get us to the moon. Okay. Yes. On something that has less power than your calculator. Yes. You know, it is probably the best fart app in the world if the Apollo 11 was farting its way to the moon.

Yes. One of my favorite Twitter accounts is the Internet of Shit. I don't know if you've checked this out, Brian, but it's a riff on the Internet of Things, you know, as we talk about a lot. It is well worth a follow because I have had more than a hearty guffaw from listening to these guys.

I've seen the Twitter feed is hilarious. It's very funny. But the Internet of Shit wrote an article as well. This is on The Verge. The author is Internet of Shit, and it's the Internet of Things has a dirty little secret. It's not really yours.

So in addition to his funny posts on his Twitter account, he actually delves, I'm assuming it's a he, I don't know, could be a she, could be a group. It's the Internet of Shit. They run down and basically tear apart the Internet of Things in much the same way that we always do.

And some of the bigger problems with it, which is the fact that you don't actually own any of this because it's all third party stuff that you are relying on. And he gets into the fact that, you know, companies need to step up and guarantee longevity of their Internet of Shit products, no matter the cost or bind it might put them in.

If I buy a thermostat, it should last at least five years and nobody is making any claims. No promises that your Nest, your Sonos, your Philips Hue, your Amazon Echo will work any longer than MySpace was in fashion. And then when everything is connected and nobody is responsible for the consequences anymore, what happens?

It's a very good point. Yeah, yeah, we've covered that point many times as, you know, we talk about people who have put products to market and then went out of business, you know? Exactly. So, and if you go out of business, how can you guarantee that something's going to be available for five more years if you don't have any money to pay the employees?

You can't. Yep, you can't. You know, so we assume a lot of risk as consumers when it comes to the Internet of Things, which is, you know, you just got to go in that with your eyes open. Exactly. Closing shout-outs!

Well, we don't really have any shout-outs this week. Well, actually, I do. Does It Have Legs will be coming back next week. I will be doing at least one show this week and maybe two. So keep an eye out for that. You can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash DIHL to get the subscription links to sign up for that.

Does It Have Legs is also, you know, one of our pet projects where we talk about movies that are at least 20 years old. We've got Strange Brew and The Last Action Hero coming up. So it'll be interesting. And we've got a new set of hosts for, co-hosts at least, for one of those.

The Grime Life guys are going to be joining me for The Last Action Hero. And MXV will be joining me for Strange Brew. Take off, eh? Awesome. I love Strange Brew. Well, we'll find out if it has legs. It does have Max von Sydow, but we don't know if it has legs.

Okay. Excellent. Well, I have no shout outs, so I will just say thanks for listening. I'm Brian Schaulmeister, and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. And I'm Jason DeFilippo, and you can check me out at jpd.me. And don't forget to check out our friends over at The Cyber Wire at thecyberwire.com.

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 stars or tell a friend about the show. Intro music for the show is provided by The Band Among Us.

You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Apple Music. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochansky, eh? You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash House of Andy, and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy.

Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 168. Pikachu! This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

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