169: Tinfoil Toupe

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 169. This is July 22nd, 2016. I am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. The following content contains graphic, explicit, and vulgar language. So if you are repelled by any of those things, then fuck off. Okay. That works for me. Okay. How are you doing today, Brian? Oh, I think you and I had very similar weeks.

Oh, you mean crappy? Yeah, pretty much. I'm happy it's Friday. Yes, I was sick all week. I think I'm coming down with that thing that Scott Adams had where you're just tired all the time. And you can sleep for like 18 hours and you wake up and you're just as tired as you went to sleep.

I call that life. Oh, man, it's tough. It's tough. And then the other times when I'm not sleeping, I'm throwing up. So it's a great week. Woohoo! Yeah, that sounds fantastic. Mm-hmm. So we'll move right on to it. Yeah, so I got all my stuff back from California. Well, I got some of my stuff back from California. I don't know. We didn't really talk about that that much.

Everything that I held dear and near to my heart was basically broken in the shipment this week or the last week. And sadly, our grumpy old geeks Mjolnir is basically no more. Oh, that's sad.

Well, it is a symbol of my broken friendship because the guy that made us Mjolnir also packed all the stuff that got broken. So, you know what? There's a bit of irony there. He giveth, he taketh away, Jason. He does. He does. Joey giveth, Joey taketh away. And so at least the fracture is not unfractured, which is very funny.

So our glass show art made it, which adorned to my studio. Okay, so a piece of glass made it and a piece of plastic did not. Yeah, it's one of those things. It's like, you know, the church that gets destroyed in a tornado, but the candle still burns. Awesome.

Yeah, that was the way, you know, that's how it's been lately. Just bizarre. Yeah, I've had some similar things happen. I went and saw Sting and Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl last Saturday, which was an amazing show.

Oh, my friend Ken Hertz was there. Yeah, it was fantastic. Yeah, he was in the front row, so he had better pictures probably than you did. I don't take pictures at shows. I've been so turned off by the hordes of people just watching shows through their cameras these days that I just, phones away the whole time.

I just enjoy shows now. Remember, by capturing the moment, you miss it entirely. Exactly. So to hell with that. So anyways, I went to the show. It was great. Came home. 2 a.m., just hear an incredibly loud bang. Get up out of bed. Smell basically electrical fire.

Oh, no. So transformer right outside our house, blue, knocked out power over the whole block. Every single surge protector in my house fried because the surge that occurred was so big. So that was good times, and then we didn't have power for basically 24 hours, and it was also my wife's baby shower the next morning, so that was not fun.

There was a fire outside, basically. So I had to call both the fire department and then call the electrical company to say, you know, your shit just blew up. I was going to say, your shit's on fire. Send somebody. Yeah. Your shit blew up and is on fire. Send someone.

We only, only one casualty, though. This, you know, first world problem. My wine fridge is a casualty. Thankfully, it was relatively new, so it's under warranty, so a new one is coming. But all the surge protectors did blow. You're a bourgeois motherfucker. I know. I just found it too funny not to mention that.

Yes. Anyways, all the surge protectors did blow, and I had to go replace them all. So when I did go on Sunday evening after we came back from the shower, I went to Home Depot to go buy a bunch of new surge protectors. Because Amazon, you know, track, the game, the fuckery that occurs on every level of the internet these days.

I found some really good surge protectors on Amazon that I was just going to order, and, you know, it said, if you order right now, you will get these tomorrow. Right. By the time I put them into the cart and went to checkout, tomorrow then became four days later.

Yes, I see this now. Available at a lower price, in stock, but may require an extra one to two days to process. Yeah, well, it didn't say that at the time. So anyways, I ended up having to go to Home Depot to go pick up some, because obviously I needed to get things up and running again. While at Home Depot, my four-year-old car battery died.

Okay. I've had some power issues. You definitely have had power issues this week. I know you're usually mad with power. Now you're just sad because of power. Yes. You're sad, sad with power. Power has fled from me. So anyways, almost everything is now fixed, but it did take basically the entire week and knocked everything off track.

So good times. I did find some pretty nice surge protectors. They are on Amazon. Links is in the show notes. These are some of the sexiest power strips I've ever seen in my life. Right? They look cool. They are very cool. They rotate so you don't have to deal with your wall wart issues, which most standard surge protectors are.

That's what I'm saying. That's problems. They're expensive. They're like $23.78. But my goodness, this thing is cool. Yes. And I will let you know how they actually go because they are finally arriving tomorrow. So they look pretty good.

The other thing I should probably mention, just as a public service announcement, surge protectors have a time span. They have a lifespan, as it were. They go bad. They do. I didn't know that. Most people are set it. Forget it. With a surge protector, you've got one that you probably had in college that you've taken around with you everywhere and you plug everything into.

Chances are that is no longer a surge protector. It is just a power strip. They go bad. Why? Do you know why they go bad? Well, there's the link in the show notes that will tell you exactly why. But basically, they have something in them called a metal oxide varistor.

Move, as it were. And every time there are – power also continuously spikes to a certain degree. It's not a linear thing. It is – it's all over the place. It's not perfect. And every little spike basically knocks out a little bit of that metal oxide. So it degrades over time.

Oh, okay. So at some point, it is no longer a surge protector. It is just a dumb power strip. And if you do have the kind of power surge that I had in my house and you have very old surge protectors, they will do nothing and your expensive equipment will get fried. That's very good to know.

So everybody, take a look at your surge protectors. If you haven't thought about it for a long time, please do replace them. One of my neighbors had this issue. His melted. Oh, man. So, yeah. I managed to weather the storm, the power surge, rather all right.

He did not. And go replace your surge protectors. Do yourself a favor. Spend a few bucks. It's worth it. Yeah, I just replaced everything because I, you know, lost everything in the move. So all my stuff is new. And I run a Furman rack mounted power conditioner for all of my electronics.

It's not very expensive. A little bit above and beyond what most people are going to do. Most people don't have rack mounts that they're going to run their power. I don't either. Mine just sits on my desk. I put some felt between the thing and the floor. It's fine. But the deal with it is it wasn't as expensive as I thought it was going to be.

And I have power issues here at my house because this is a house that was built in the 1800s. And I still have fuses, like the ones you have to screw in. Yeah. You know, I don't have a modern power board and I have power issues all the time. So I'm actually going to go out in the next, well, after I get paid next time because I'm poor.

And go get a couple UPSs for some of the main stuff in the house. But just to have another layer of conditioning and protection. But yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, it's one of those things where it's like you're going to plug your $3,000 laptop directly into the wall.

Well, you're you're a moron. You deserve what you get then, you know, and it is an edge case when these things happen. But when they do happen, it happens hard. And yeah. Oh, yeah, I can tell you it's it's it's incredibly rare and hopefully it'll never happen to you. But when it happens, oh, boy, the entire house stank.

It was great. Oh, lovely. So just everything got fried. It was unbelievable. Well, see, I got a dog. My house always stinks. That's true. Drink. God damn it. Gotcha. Now, I found another article off Lifehacker that, you know, you.

There's still a thing. I didn't know Lifehacker was even still a thing. Yeah, there's still a thing. Although Facebook is going to kill them because, you know, they did what everybody did and tried to move everything over to Facebook. And now the algorithm is screwing them. So but they are still a thing. And I did manage to see this one. And we've talked about this a lot because you are a self-described digital nomad.

And you not as much as you used to be. I used to be. I used to be. I'm not. Definitely not as much as I used to be. Not as much as you used to be. But in the lifespan of this particular podcast, you have moved four times. Oh, yeah. No, I've got at least 10,000 miles under me during the, you know, the tenure of the show.

And before that, I've got probably 100,000 miles under me back and forth between Chicago and L.A. at least twice. And I think you had a stint in West Virginia as well or Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. And I did not live in West Virginia. My mom moved to West Virginia, but I lived in Pennsylvania to move her to West Virginia.

So, yeah. So I've been all back and forth a couple of times. Yes, yes. So there's a big, long article. This is also popular right now because, you know, Trump and the popularity of any kind of article about either moving to Canada or just getting the hell out of the U.S. is doing very well.

Oh, it's like George W. Bush revisited. Great. Exactly. Except maybe a little bit more urgent. Except nobody's going to do it. Except nobody's going to do it. So a big, long article about being a digital nomad. Updated, certainly, since I was one. It's pretty interesting. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

So if you are contemplating, you know, have laptop, will travel. This is a pretty good run through of what you need to do and what you should do and taking advantages of a lot of Web 2.0 stuff that didn't exist when you and I were really kind of moving around a lot. Good stuff.

Okay. I'm going to send this to my friend Jason Sanderson, who I just hooked up with this week. He's in town after his two-month traveling around the U.S. He's from Sheffield, I believe, in England and has been living in Poland and Barcelona, but came over here to do – you know, it's like when we have some time off, we go to Europe, he comes to the U.S., you know?

Yeah. Yeah. He's been staying in hostels for like less than $30 a night, has not paid more than $100 for a flight, and has been to like 10 cities. It's ridiculous. So I'm going to get a bunch of tips from him, and we can put that – you know what? I'm going to do a post. Once I get all those links, we're going to put that on our Patreon page for our Patreon subscribers.

So if you want to check out that stuff, then definitely check us out at patreon.com slash GOG. Nice plug. And we'll definitely get that stuff in there because I want to get more of that fun stuff in there. Cool. So we talked about Bunny, Bunny Hong, before because of the Wired series that we covered on the future cities, and he was a staple in there.

He's suing the U.S. government. Okay. For Section 1201 of the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this is the part that screws makers by not being able to deconstruct a lot of the way things are built because things are encrypted now.

And it's a very complicated system now where if you try and reverse engineer something to make it – to fix it even or, you know, something that you own that you paid for, you can go to jail for it. And it's ridiculous.

So he's, you know, stepping up and going after the government. It's not. I mean – Well. What do you mean, well? You paid for it. Well, then fucking say some words instead of whining. What are you going to say? I understand that it's being used above and beyond what it ever should be.

The problem – the vagaries of the wording and the legality specifics are issues. The intent was, of course, to basically protect copyright. It's to protect music and movies. I understand and respect. Yeah, but it's not intended to stop people from learning how the things that they make work.

So in the future, we have people who can make things. That's the whole problem. It's stifling innovation. That's what I agree with, Jason. I agree that it's being used far too much. It's being extracted beyond what it should be used for. You know, I mean, basically this came around because of fucking Napster again.

This exists entirely because we were trying to put some sorts of digital rights management to protect digital music and other things. And that usage of it, I 100% agree with. Okay, well, that's completely wrong.

But let's – you know what? Let's move to In the News because we're going to – we're going to just run right in this. Because it's not completely wrong. What? Because it's not completely wrong. So let's just move on. Okay, so the EFF has an article called More Copyright Law Does Not Equal Less Copyright Infringement.

And it shows out for the past five years the UK, which is not a thing probably much longer, their intellectual property office has done a study on piracy. And they found that it's basically at the lowest point it's been since the history of the study, since they started doing it.

And they say one of the key factors – That's because everybody already has all the music illegally. No, they say one of the key factors is subscription services, especially for music but also for movies. Oh, I'm sorry. Should I jump for joy on that? Because we've done gazillions of stories about how it's basically a tiny trickle and not enough money to even exist off of if you're a musician getting – thanks a lot for subscribing.

To Spotify, that and my own $0.55 won't even get me coffee. Hey, but at least people aren't pirating it. If I were a musician, I would say, what difference does it fucking make? Steal it or pay for Spotify.

I'm making the same amount of money. Well, then take your stuff off Spotify. You can do that if you're a musician, can't you? You can take your Among Us stuff off Spotify. Yep, I sure can. Have you done it yet? No, because I don't give a shit. Okay.

I've never seen a dime from anything with Among Us anyways, so it doesn't matter. Well, of course you have. But if I were – Fans of the show have given us money so they can get their 10 exclusive tracks. That's true. Go to patreon.com slash GOG. Pushing that. I am. I am for sure.

Okay. So, yeah. Okay, great. There's, you know, subscription services seem to be working. It's going to stop people from going to kick-ass torrents to download the entire catalog of Bob Dylan. But at the end of the day, it means crap because the content creators are still not making any money. So, it's not working.

Okay. Right? I mean, if Oxum's Razor, you go straight down to the end, it doesn't matter. It's not working. The musicians are still not making any money. Okay. Okay. And that's Occum's Razor, not Oxum's Razor.

I don't know if there's an X in there, but – So, it's a new rule. Okay. This is Schulmeister's Razor, which you got at a Dollar Shave Club, which just got bought for a billion dollars. Yeah. Maybe we should sign up as an affiliate for them. Oh, yes. Speaking of affiliates, if you have bought a Loot Crate box from us in the month of June, we would love to hear from you.

Please, send us an email at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com and let us know if you got your box or not because we heard that there were some issues with some shipping. But if you subscribed through us, we want to hear if you got your June Crate or signed up in June and got your crate.

That's all we want to know. Just say yes or no. Sound good? All right. Sounds good to me. Okay. Moving on. All right. Snapchat's getting sued. Oh, I'm sure. Okay, great. What do they got now? By your state, actually.

Well, not in your state, but in your state. They are being sued because apparently they are illegally collecting biometric data, particularly if you're using any of those filters because it does facial. Well, they're saying it doesn't do facial recognition. Snapchat. And the plaintiffs are saying, yeah, it does.

And you're collecting and storing this information, which is illegal in the state of Illinois. Yeah, we've covered this Illinois angle before with the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The thing that Snapchat does is they don't actually store it.

That's real time. They take your data and map it real time to hundreds of faces that they've manually created to kind of get that same biometric data. But they don't store it. They dump it. I mean, it's literally a real-time translation.

If I seem to recall about four years ago or so, the theory that, you know, they didn't store any of these snaps being taken either. Yet somebody hacked into their servers and dumped about 20 gazillion nude photos snaps. Right, but that's different. So what they do say, when they – my point being is when they say that they aren't storing it, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't storing it, as we've seen repeatedly.

Yeah, I just think it's too much data to store. I don't even think that they could transmit that much data. You know, that's what the algorithm is there for. I understand why people are paranoid and don't trust them because why would you trust them? But I think that there's too much data to be stored. And this happens in real time, you know?

I don't see this as a thing. I think that Snapchat will actually win this one. They probably will. Until I know we're bass-ackwards. Who knows? Well, I would actually say the exact opposite. That's what I found most interesting about this story, that of all 50 states, only Illinois and Texas have regulations about how biometric data should be used and stored, which I think is very forward-thinking.

Yeah, that's interesting, especially Texas. Deez. I know. Jesus. Yeehaw. You can have a goddamn gun, but, you know, keep your hands off these sketchings of my face. That's basically their rule. I almost did a spit take on that one. Okay, let's go on.

What do we got? All right. Leslie Jones from Ghostbusters basically experienced what I've always felt about Twitter. It's a fucking Denzian shithole. What's a Denzian? A Denzian? I don't know. I'm tired, Jason. I'm sorry.

I just like making fun of you. But the dude who started a lot of this stuff against her has been permanently – he's been permabanned from Twitter now. How exactly does one permabanned from Twitter when you can just sign up with a different name and a different thing and maybe use your VPN to log in?

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You know, it makes no sense. There's no such thing as Manning. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, look at my thousands of accounts. You know, Milo Yiannopoulos or however the – yeah, I think it's Yiannopoulos. He's a giant douchebag.

He started off with Gamergate. He's got a podcast, which means he's definitely a douchebag because if you have a podcast, you are automatically in the douchebag club like we are. But this guy is just – he's a grade-A asshole is what he is.

Yep, and there's a lot of stupid people on Twitter and Twitter is – you can be – white males get harassed on Twitter. I can't even imagine what a black female is going to deal with. I know. I know. So it sucks for her and she unfortunately fed the beast.

She made an attempt to basically try to deal with it and handle it and tweet them back. Don't feed the trolls. You can't do because they will destroy you and that's what happened. So she finally just gave up. So it sucks to be her. But, you know, don't be on Twitter.

I mean, people just don't learn. I mean, look at Stephen Fry. He quit Twitter because he engaged the trolls. Just don't, you know? Yeah, just don't. The way it goes. It never works. So let's go on to cars.

Germany is putting together some new legislation that will basically put a lot of requirements on autonomous vehicles, some of which I think we would agree with, others not so much. They are requiring that a driver remains seated in front of the steering wheel and that there be a steering wheel, which we're not entirely – the data is out on that one, I believe.

Because generally, if you're going to need to do that, you're going to be in a panic and that's not going to go well. Yeah, yeah, no, it turns out that that's actually a bad idea to have the steering wheel. A brake pedal, sure, but a steering wheel, let the machine do the driving. Yeah, so – and they're also requiring a black box, which makes total sense.

No problem with that. We've already got that, though. Tesla's got them already, too. We've got those. They're making it a law, Jason. Okay, because, I mean, we've got those in our cars right now, you know? Yeah. And they're used in court all the time in accident investigations, so. Yep. And you know who can't access them? Us. Yes, yes.

Interesting how that works. Well, go, Bunny. Give me some introspection there, Bunny. I love you. Mercedes, speaking of Germans, they have an autonomous future bus, which is kind of cool. The future bus.

It's a bus of the future. I touch my monkey. Yes, it's – they've ran it through Amsterdam, and they did a 12-mile route, and this is using their new system called CityPilot, and they've got another system called HighwayPilot, which is for their semis that's coming very soon.

But CityPilot lets buses drive partially autonomously in specially marked bus lanes up to 43 miles per hour, which is probably like, what, 60 kilometers an hour, or close to that? But they do keep a human on board to monitor for safety.

Yep. Which is fine. I have no problem with that. It doesn't say if he has a steering wheel or not, but in the pictures, it's a sexy-looking bus. I like the bus. This is probably the nicest bus I've ever seen. Yeah. I was going to say, leave it to the Germans to make a damn good-looking bus.

I like this thing. Even the inside is cool, you know? The inside looks like a lounge at a swanky airport that you would have to pay to get into. Yep, definitely. It's very cool-looking. And continuing on with this trend, Elon Musk unveiled Master Plan 2.0.

The Master Plan. He's not German, but he might as well be. No, he's South African. Yeah. Which doesn't give him that much extra credibility. There's some similar history there. Yes. So, yes, I have read the Master Plan.

What do you think of the Master Plan? Because I think the last part of the Master Plan is what you would have the most issue with. Which one? What was the last? Well, let's go from the top. Basically, what they want to do is... So, they're working really hard to get solar everywhere.

Yes. That really is the big thing. It's like solar everywhere. And they really want to... Hmm? Got no problem with that. Think that's super smart. Love it. Yeah. Okay. So, number one is create a low-volume car, which would necessarily be expensive. This is the original Master Plan, right? So, let's run through the original.

Create a low-volume car, which would necessarily be expensive. Use that money to develop a medium-volume car at a lower price. Use that money to create an affordable, high-volume car and provide solar power. No kidding. This has literally been on our website for 10 years. That's number...

That's the original, right? Yes. So, getting to the next bit. Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage. Okay? Yes. Love that. Love that. Love that. Except I have trees around me and I have no...

It would not work here. Next. Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments, which they're doing with the Model 3. I found out my brother even pre-ordered one. I'm joking about this thing on the show. My brother actually put his money where his mouth is and is in the queue, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. Develop a self-driving capability that is 10x safer than manual driving via massive fleet learning, which is what we've talked... We called this one when we said that these guys are going to kick Google's ass because with a flip of a switch, they are getting so much more data than Google will ever do with their little tiny fleet.

These guys have thousands and thousands of cars on the road. The last one, the last one is the one that I figured you would have a problem with. Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it. This is Tesla Uber. It's Tuber.

Yeah. I mean, again, it's fine. I don't have a problem with it. I do. If we ever get to that point, why the hell not? Because I, you know, as we talked about, like, you know, with my ex-friend who destroyed everything that I love and own, people don't respect other people's property.

So you get people in your car, they're going to destroy it. This is massive. This is ramping us to the point where we're basically, you're not going to, it's technically going to be your property, but kind of not. People are already stopping to care about cars. Millennials don't give a crap.

This isn't for us. This is the, this is the whole next generation. Yeah. Okay. I bought this car. Now I'm going to use this to pay for it. And nobody really cares about cars anyway. So whatever my car does while I'm sleeping, I don't care. Master plan. Part three is going to be, you never own a car again.

Yeah. That's basically where it's going. I think that's the next stage. Yeah. Yeah. Because they say that, you know, if, if there's not enough Tesla owners, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us, no matter where you are, which means that, yes, at some point, why bother buying a Tesla when you can just get a lift?

Exactly. And not an L-Y-F-T. No, no, no. Fuck those guys. They'll dump you in the middle of the 405 because you don't like Jesus. Yeah. You know, it's, I like him. I, you know, full disclosure, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm invested. I like his plan.

I think it makes sense. I hope he can pull it off because if he does, then my investment's going to go very, very well. I like his cars. I like where he's headed with it. And I agree. I think they can kick Google's ass in about two seconds because of all the cars that are already out there. They're doing millions of miles of, you know, roads a day.

The, the interesting thing is they actually do lay out how much data that they need and it's billions of miles of data. So they're, um, they're getting there. Yeah. What is it? Uh, 6 billion miles is what they're looking for. 10 billion kilometers. Um, they're happening at 3 million miles a day.

That's a long way to 10 billion. Yep. So yes, it is. So if you haven't heard anything about this or haven't been keeping up with it, uh, slate has a good wrap up of master plan 2.0, uh, links in our show notes. I particularly liked the writer's take on this.

Uh, there's this one, uh, which way you want to go with it. I'll just read this little paragraph. You could react to a blog post like this as the unhinged ravings of a man whose grand delusions have finally taken him off the deep end, or you could take it as the gospel of a modern day techno prophet whose visions will shape the future of energy and transportation.

You'd be relatively equally justified in either view. I'm down with the techno prophet. Yeah, I'm fine with it. I got no problem with, with Elon, you know? Yeah. I think he's doing good stuff. And, and we also had the, the, um, the SpaceX relanding this week or last week as well, you know?

Yeah. So we're getting, you know, he's taking us to space and, uh, making us safer on the roads. Yeah. Yes. So all in all, I think it's, I think I, I got no problem with this guy. I don't care if he's a megalomaniacal supervillain, he's doing good stuff. If the, as long as the cars don't turn on us and to turn into Decepticons, who gives a shit, you know, I just hope it happens while I'm still alive.

Me too. We'll see what happens. Um, I also found another kind of related article on slate this week that I really loved. It's by Samuel Arbsman. Maybe, you know, this guy, he's got a, a, a book coming out called, or currently out called overcomplicated technology at the limits of comprehension.

And this is just a big, uh, dive into basically how everything is being hidden from us these days. Uh, particularly, uh, with our computers, it's just the more technology we have, the less we understand what is actually going on under the hood. And the more difficult it is to find out what's going under the hood, which relates to your back to bunny, everything, all roads, all roads lead to bunny.

Yes. And, uh, we've had some discussions about this just off the air, particularly related to our podcast, which is, you know, we, we're supposedly going to be able to have the ability to track absolutely everything, but so many things are being hidden. Um, this also relates directly to the idea of having the steering wheels on these autonomous vehicles, because he's argues when our systems are so completely automated, we have little ability to respond when something goes wrong.

But we're also starting to, as we just discussed, find out that maybe we shouldn't be responding because they are better at it than we are. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, we're in that, we're in that weird gray zone where we have to really kind of, you know, take a look at the fact that we suck at a lot of stuff.

So maybe let, let, let's, let's build some systems that are better at it than we are. Look at, okay. You don't think about this, but when you get on a plane, that, that system has been completely autonomized, you know, pilots are in charge of that plane for seven minutes out of a flight, seven minutes.

And they don't even have to be in charge for seven minutes. Those planes can take off and land by themselves. I was on a British Airways flight in the nineties. It was actually 1990 and that plane landed by itself. And the pilot came on and said, ladies and gentlemen, you have just experienced a completely autonomous landing.

Thank you very much. And thank you for flying British Airways. And it was a perfect landing. So we've had this technology for 27 years, you know, it's out there and it's coming. So people just need to get used to it. I think. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the interesting thing that I got when I was reading just this abstract from the book.

I think I definitely want to go read the book. Not only are we in a gray area in terms of the specific time, I'm thinking more of the gray area of us being gray. We came into technology, technology, technology, having full access, knowing how everything worked, being able to deep dive into our computers and see everything that's going on.

And now we've made the switch to where basically you can't get into the system anymore. You have no idea what's going on for us. That's disturbing for the kids being raised with their iPhones. They don't give it a second thought. No, they don't. So they're not the makers, you know, I'm sure.

I mean, it's a small subset of these kids who are out there who are, you know, the engineers of the future. Right. Yeah. But I think that what I think the vast majority. Yeah. But what I think Bunny is trying to, you know, argue is the fact that since these kids can't get into it, they're not interested in it because they're shut out of it.

So if we give them access to it, it's going to revitalize that that spirit of, hey, I can make something like this. You know, I can be a part of this. That's the entire point. And yeah, I agree with that point. I agree with it 100 percent.

Oh, holy shit. My God, Brian agrees. I was just stating that the intent behind some of it was spot on. So anyways, totally agree. So we had stuff going on in Turkey. It's been a weird, weird month for the world during a weird year for the world.

2016 is bizarre. Yeah. During the attempted coup, social media services were totally shut down in Turkey. We also had WhatsApp being blocked in Brazil the other week. And there's a good wrap up link in the show notes of various areas in the world where basically countries have entirely shut down Internet access for randomly bizarre reasons.

And if you think that can't happen here, I'm just saying it can. Some of this stuff is bizarre. I mean, beyond bizarre. Like Iraq blocked the entire Internet to stop sixth graders from cheating on tests. What? Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Say that again, because that needs to be reiterated. Say that again. This is just one paragraph in here that I found the most interesting. There are a lot of different countries that have shut it down for very strange reasons. But one of the strangest involves school exams. Over the past six months, four countries have shut down the Internet because of school exams, purportedly because both students and underpaid teachers looking to supplement their income have leaked exam answers online.

Iraq blocked the entire Internet to keep sixth graders from cheating. So this is happening out there. The entire Internet. Wow. OK. For a test. So when our Internet goes down during SAT time. OK. Yeah.

Well, there's a lot in here. There's a lot to unpack. Way more than than I'm going to even attempt to here. I just I find this fascinating and I highly recommend everybody give it a read. OK, well, I'm going to come back on the other side of this because there's an article in backchannel dot com by my friend Dan Gilmore. Dan's an awesome journalist.

He's a actual journalist. I've known him for 15 years. Yes, he's an actual he's an actual journalist. His piece is forget Comcast. Here's the DIY approach to Internet access. And what it is, it's talking about this. It's called the Giphy or Giphy.

I think they call it Giphy. I watched a video. The video will be in the show notes. I think it's if I don't have a Spanish accent. I don't have a Spanish accent. I'm from Barcelona. Giphy is what they say. What it is, what it started off as is this one guy, Ramon Roca, who is an engineer by day for Oracle and he's still an engineer for Oracle.

And he started this movement to do a mesh network in his town and because his town didn't have very good Internet access and the telcos in Spain are just as bad as everywhere else apparently.

So what he's done is built this kind of like ground level, like, you know, ground up. I can't. I'm losing the words. It's a grassroots. Grassroots. That's what I was saying. Grassroots. Movement to have people.

See how I didn't make fun of you for, like, not saying the right word. Yes. Well, at least I pronounce it right. That's the way it goes. I don't have the word, but I can pronounce it when I have it. Anyway. So, yeah, this guy has built this system over, like, over a decade now. I think it started in, you know, the early aughts, as they say.

But he's been doing this. It's a great, great read. Very, very exciting. They got an award from the EU in 2015. And the video that will be attached to the show notes at grumpy old geeks dot com slash 169. You can see, like, literally some of the stuff on the ground, how they are running fiber to these, like, far off places that would never get Internet access from the telcos.

Because for the telcos, it doesn't make any sense because it doesn't make them enough money, you know? Right. So the people are taking back the Internet, which is really cool. So, you know, the sixth graders in Iraq obviously have to get on the bandwagon here so they can get their cheat sheets.

Or maybe just, instead of doing that, maybe just study like everybody else. Or there's that. Indeed. And we were talking about Bunny before. This is a pre-Bunny one because I'm going to run into his next one. Rewarding Disobedience is a piece on Medium.

But my friend Joey Ito, who runs the MIT Media Lab, they have just announced a $250,000 award. This is a one-time award. Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, one of the founders of LinkedIn, since he's a gazillionaire now, just threw in $250,000.

And this is an award about righting society's wrongs. It's called, like I said, it's Rewarding Disobedience. And there are different, there are key principles that they really want to highlight here.

The principles include nonviolence, creativity, courage, taking responsibility for one's actions. And the disobedience can be in, but not limited to, the fields of scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate.

Hmm. We've been talking about that a little bit, this show. A little bit. Yeah. And after that, I would recommend rolling into the next article, which is Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance. Now, this is a project that Bunny's working on that is an attachment to your smartphone that monitors the signal coming out of your smartphone.

So, it could be any phone. It is platform, nonspecific, and it sees when your phone is sending data and where it's sending data. So, this is a very interesting project. Kind of a cell phone version of, like, Little Snitch, which we both wrote on our Mac.

Right, yes. This is Little Snitch meets, I don't know how they're going to do it, so it might be like a mini Stingray where it kind of intercepts the signal and sends it back out. Not sure. But I saw, did you guys cover in security, as I was sleeping through it this morning, that Snowden has an app coming out that's supposed to be able to catch signals that are coming in?

We did not, because the app's not out. We don't cover stuff when the app is not out yet. We cover lots of things before they exist. What are you talking about? But if it's an app, we don't generally do it. But anyway, yeah, they're dealing with the freedom of press. So, freedom.press.

To build this thing. And it's very interesting. I don't know what it's going to look like or how it's going to work. But they have kind of a mock-up, Bunny's got a mock-up on the site, where it's kind of like a little clip-on to your iPhone. Right. So, we'll see how this works out.

But it is, you know, it's a great concept. And if you can, you know, watch the watchers, it'll be interesting. I'm definitely interested to see what ends up happening with that. Yeah, well, hopefully he'll get the $250,000 from Reed from MIT and be able to keep building it.

Because, you know, for journalists who are trying to, you know, or honestly, for sources of journalists, like, you know, the journalists could give the sources this thing to make sure that they're safe while they're, you know, contacting the journalists. Right. Okay.

Now, you use, well, theoretically, you could use something called Kick-Ass Torrance to talk to our friends in Sweden. I do not, but some people do. Yes. Many people do. Apparently, the alleged owner of the file-sharing website, Kick-Ass Torrance, has been arrested.

I think his name is Artem Wulin. I can't tell because there's a big thing that says disable your ad blocker before I can read the article. All right. Well, anyways, he was arrested by Polish police on U.S. charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The news and charges came as Kick-Ass Torrance appeared to be experiencing technical difficulties. It is back up now, in case you were wondering. But this will be interesting. He's being charged with running today's most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials, even though other studies have said that this isn't happening anymore.

Well, no, no, no. Here's the thing. Torrent sites don't host anything. They do not host anything. That's the whole point of it. That's – they are – they're just a – they're a search provider, just like Google. They are literally just like Google.

In fact, most people use Google to find their torrents. That's what I'm saying. So this is bullshit. You know, any torrent owner – and, you know, look at Peter Sund and all those guys from the Pirate Bay. I still think that their arrest was bullshit, and I think this guy's arrest is bullshit, especially because he's in Poland on charges in the U.S.

I did not know we had a copyright arm of the military that can go to other countries and extradite people on something that is akin to just running a search engine. Well, that's not what happened. The Polish police arrested him.

He has not been extradited. So, yes, I agree that it seems a bit odd that we can tell them, hey, go arrest this guy on U.S. charges, but we did not send a copyright police military state over there yet. Well, how much you want to bet we had boots on the ground that said, this is where he's at.

Go get him. I don't think we need boots. We got drones for that. We got drones for that. All right, baby. Pokemon, go! Fuck yourself. The big news this weekend, Pokemon, was the video of the douchebag hitting the cop car.

That was – as far as I can tell, this is – we have reached peak Pokemon Go. Are you still playing? No, no, no. I mean, I played it at the beginning just to find out what it was all about. And I'll pull it up every now and again to show people what it's like.

And I'll, you know, I'll catch a Pokemon just to show people, like, how the stuff works. And they're like, oh, that's neat. I'm like, well, yeah, but don't start playing. And they're like, no, I wasn't going to. So that's how it works. But there are still, like, hordes of zombie people walking around.

As Merlin Mann said in Back to Work, taking photos of the sidewalk is what it looks like they're doing. Yeah. That's – I really saw it for the first time in the wild last night, actually. I went and saw the Psychedelic Furs. Shout out to my friend Amanda.

Love them. Shout out to my friend Amanda Kramer, who plays for them these days. What? They did the free show. Yeah. No way. My friend Amanda. Yeah, she's a touring keyboardist. She plays with a friend of the show, Carl Wallinger, a.k.a. World Party. She plays with Susie when Susie tours, and she plays with Psychedelic Furs when they tour.

Well, aren't you the cool motherfucker in the room? Damn. So they did a free show at the Santa Monica Pier last night, and I was down there watching. And there were a lot of people just kind of staring off the other direction with their cameras out. Wow. Psychedelic Furs are playing, and you're going to fuck with your phone.

Talk about a waste of – a waste. Yes. Man, I love the furs. Oh, it's great. It was my first in the wild watching a whole bunch of people play Pokemon Go experience, and it was frightening. Little weird zombie people.

They are. They're little weird zombie people. And I know a lot of people that listen to the show play Teeter. I can tell he's still playing because his step count is twice mine, which it generally is half mine. So he's out there. Yeah, and his updates have gone from photos of cats to photos of Pokemon.

Yep. That's pretty much it. Okay, 50-year-old man out playing a game like that. Sure. What are you going to do? Venture Beat had an article where cemeteries top the weird places I found Pokemon charts. It's just – you know, we didn't really cover this stuff last week.

We had so many stories last week. We left a lot of them out. And, you know, people going to Auschwitz and catching Pokemon and all these different places. It was just like, it's disrespectful. And the game should actually know what these places are and not – you shouldn't be able to play there.

There's a lot of the responsibility on this on the game creators. I mean, they should be mapping these things out and putting dead zones. Oh, poor choice of words. Since you just started with cemeteries or whatever. You know what I mean. Yeah. No, they should really have blackout zones, as we'll call them.

But cemeteries, I'm okay with cemeteries. Who cares? You know, they're dead. But places where atrocities happened or places that are museums and things like that where they're, you know, talking about the atrocities that happened, eh, cut them some slack.

See, I'm not down with you on the cemeteries either because I think that's disrespectful. I mean, you wouldn't – where do you draw the line? You're going to say this cemetery is okay, but if you went to Arlington National Cemetery, that's definitely not okay. This is true. Yeah. I mean, there is – yes, there is – we have a Civil War cemetery here in town, and in the middle of it is where people are catching Pokemon all the time.

So, yeah, you know what? Just respect the dead. I believe that is true. Speaking of the dead, Oliver Stone. Talk about career dead? Is back out of nowhere because he's got to, you know, promote Snowden.

So, he's down at Comic-Con this week. And he gave his opinion about Pokemon Go. I think we need to get him on for our security segment so he can wear the tinfoil toupee. Okay. The tinfoil toupee. They are data mining every person in this room, he said.

He called the game and similar apps surveillance capitalism and said they would lead to a robot society. It's what they call totalitarianism, said the director. He's fucking insane. You know, here's the thing about – here's the other story that we did not cover last week that I had because we just ran so long.

The entire thread of Pokemon Go and security and tracking and all this stuff came from a single blog post. Yeah. One single blog post. Then it spread. And I was telling every journalist friend of mine, stop it.

Stop it. Stop it. Do not fucking follow this thread because it's a really stupid thread. And two days later, they were backpedaling and apologizing. Guess what? It's not a fucking thing. It's not a thing at all. They can already track you, you dumbass.

You have a phone in your hand that has GPS on it. The game doesn't matter. It makes no sense. Makes no sense whatsoever. And the whole thing about the Gmail or the Google permissions, that turns out that they were lazy and they flipped a bit in the API.

And they were just like, yeah, well, we fixed it. Who cares? You know, it's not a big deal. All of that stuff was bullshit. But people needed to crap on the new thing that made people happy that were out having fun. That's what they do nowadays. And I'm just like, stop it.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. I mean, I know that's what we do, but don't step on my – get out of my crappy lawn, you know, my grumpy lawn. Yeah, I agree. That's not the issue with the game. The issue with the game is what we have been talking about, which is the mapping of virtual spaces over real spaces and not respecting the real space for what it may or may be, including a private space.

And The Verge gets into this in a really great article by Addie Robinson. I highly recommend you read it if you're interested in this at all. It goes into all the weird things that are happening when we overlay physical spaces, invasive feelings about a company that, you know, is basically directing people to go onto your private property.

Sure, there are a lot of companies out there that are using this to their advantage and good on them by, you know, creating spaces for people to come to to play it and basically trying to sell them their stuff. But for people that don't want the traffic, there's nothing you can really do about it. There's nobody to complain to. There's no system to have things taken down from the game owners, which I think they need to address.

And unsurprisingly, nobody is sure how the law should even handle this. This is uncharted territory that we've got to sort out and we've got to sort it out quick because this is just the first thing that's here. Don't think for two seconds that basically the 20,000 different versions of this are about to come out now.

Yeah, and well, here's the thing. The 20,000 versions can come out because you look at Ingress like that was here before. Nobody cared about that game. The only reason that this game is popular is because it's Pokemon. So if we had a Harry Potter version of it, that might work, but you have to have an established brand.

This is, you know, the Amanda Palmer issue. We always come back to Amanda Palmer. Spend your money on it and, you know, get get your get your fame from other sources and then leverage it for something else, you know? Yep. So anyway, you want to date somebody that's on Pokemon Go?

Now you can go to PokéDates. So you can walk around with each other, not talking to each other. Yep. Yep. OK, you can you can you can set up your schedule and say, hey, I'm going to go catch Pokemon over here. You want to hook up and not talk to each other.

I guess you can talk to each other, but you can stare at your phones instead of into each other's eyes and, you know, have some kind of human bond and connection going on. But now let's fuck it. Let's just stare at our phones, which I guess is what people do anyway. So this is the future of dating. We stand around and not not have sex and look at our phones.

I'd rather poke than Pokemon. Seriously. And we'll be right back. But now a word from our sponsors. Security. Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire.

How's it going, Dave? Going great. Good to be back. Busy week this week. Lots going on. Lots going on. Lots of people getting hacked. Well, the usual stuff. Let's jump right in. I mean, obviously, a big story in the general news was the Republican National Committee.

Their big convention was this week. And Avast software set up a hotspot, a Wi-Fi hotspot at the convention to kind of prove a point about people logging into anonymous free public hotspots and why you should not do that.

And what they discovered was lots of people were jumping on their free, unsecured hotspot. You mean all those hotspots that I see that say free internet access are not, like, you know, actually legitimate? Not a good thing.

Not a good thing. Do not. You should not go jumping on free Wi-Fi. It's a good place to get hacked. But anyway, Avast was making this point. And not surprisingly, lots of people were jumping on to play Pokemon Go, accessing things like Tinder and just regular web browsing and things like that.

Avast says they did not keep any personally identifiable information, but they really did this as a proof of proof that if you set up a Wi-Fi hotspot, sure enough, you're going to catch a lot of people on it. And to remind people, don't do that.

It's not a good idea. When in doubt, you know, use the data on your phone. Use your phone's mobile data plan when you're in a place where you're not used to being. Or use a VPN. Oh, absolutely. Or use a VPN to protect yourself that way.

Yep, always another good option. Moving on, though, Macs and iPhones have a serious vulnerability was revealed this week. They're calling it a stage fright style bug. Stage fright was a vulnerability that affected Android last year.

This is a bug that affects TIFF files, which is a form of, it's a graphics file. And there's a situation where someone can send you a TIFF file and with no interaction from you, that TIFF file can cause a buffer overflow or an integer overflow. And they can get, they can do remote code execution on your device.

Wow, from a TIFF? From a TIFF file. That's insane. TIFFs are like, that's old school. I used to have TIFFs on my CyQuest drive. Yep, yeah, it's an old school format, but still gets used for things. And the point is that the system still supports it.

Even as old as it is, a port for a TIFF file is built into the operating system. So someone has figured out a way to take advantage of this. To their credit, Apple has patched it. So the security updates for both OS X and iOS are out, and it's been patched.

So this is one you should jump on. This is not one that you should delay your patching on. It's good to keep your devices up to date, of course. But word on the street is that this is a particularly bad one. So please update your device and make yourself not vulnerable to this one. Make yourself not vulnerable to the file format we used in 1989.

Great. Yeah, right. Well, but you know, it's a good point that sometimes these things sort of linger around and you never know where a bad guy is going to find a way into your system. Seriously, yeah. There's another interesting story crossed our paths this week. Snapchat has filed a patent for a facial recognition technology.

And of course, we're all familiar with facial recognition from things like Snapchat, things like Facebook. Even your photo apps on your computer use facial recognition to tag people, to recognize people. And privacy, people have privacy concerns about this, justifiably so, particularly with social media.

But Snapchat's patent actually comes at it from a different direction. What they're saying is, with this patent, that they'll use facial recognition technology. The situation would be where I would take a photo of you and me.

And if you had set your privacy settings, where you did not want photos of you shared far and wide on social media, Snapchat would use facial recognition to recognize your face in my photo and would alter the photo to make your face unrecognizable.

So you would have third-party control over other people's photos of you through the use of facial recognition technology. But only in Snapchat. Correct. This would only be in Snapchat within their ecosystem. But, you know, I think it's an interesting development coming at it from the other direction using facial recognition technology to actually protect privacy.

So, you know, hats off to Snapchat for thinking about this kind of thing. We'll see if it ever hits the market. You know, patents don't always become products. But it's an interesting development. We did cover a similar app that was, I think it was a week or two ago, that was trying to do the same thing. It was just like, use our app, and if you're in somebody else's photo, but it has to be using that app.

And I think those guys are now put out of business. So they probably had their press release, and Snapchat's like, well, you know what? We've already got a patent in the works because their lenses technology is beyond believable. And the work that they've done behind the scenes to do the facial recognition that they've done, I give them, you know, serious props for that.

So I think if anybody can pull it off, I think these are the guys to do it. And since most people are sharing on Snapchat nowadays, don't ask me why. I'm an old guy, but it's pretty cool. Me too, me too. Yeah. I hear the kids today really like it. Yeah, get off my digital lawn. Get your face off my lawn.

That's right. That's right. So interesting stuff, and it's a development to watch, you know, something that could head in a good direction for everybody. Yeah, for sure. We've got another story. This is a good guy story. The Fed shut down some tech support scammers and froze their assets. What caught my eye about this is- Wait, wait, wait.

Did the Fed shut down the geek squad? They did not. But what they did do was they tracked down some of these companies who are responsible for these pop-up ads that you get when you visit some websites that say, your computer's infected, you know, please call us.

And then you call in and- Oh, God. Thank God. The bad guys get you on the line and they say, oh, my gosh, your computer is, it's worse than we thought. You know, let me get in and try to fight it right now. You know, and so it's that sort of thing. They get people on the hook and then they'll either charge them a few hundred dollars to allegedly clean their PC or Mac and then they'll try to sign you up for a monthly subscription.

And, of course, the whole thing is a big scam. Now, I- You don't say. Yeah, I know. Shocking, shocking, shocking. But I don't know about you, but I've just pretty much thought that these sorts of scams would come and go and would run their course.

People would move to one scam or another. And I really, you don't really hear very many stories about them being shut down. So I think it's important to share that in this case, the good guys, the Federal Trade Commission filed complaints and they got shut down on July 8th. Their assets were frozen and they're going to be taken to court to see what happens next.

I hope they're taken to prison. I don't care about court. I want them to go to prison. Yeah, at the very least, you know, they're going to be shut down and fined. But, yes, it would be great to see some jail time for these folks because, in my own personal opinion, people like this are the lowest of the low, taking advantage of unsuspecting people and, you know, scamming them out of their money.

I know, I mean, we're both in the tech world. So I don't know how many friends that you have that have called you that have been victims of this. But I've had at least five people I know be a victim of this. Yeah, yeah, we actually did a story probably a month or so ago.

Joe Kerrigan's a guy who comes on our show from Johns Hopkins University from their Information Security Institute. One of their tech guys got called by one of these scammers and their tech guy just strung the guy along. The guy – I remember that story. That was fantastic.

They just strung him along, just basically chewed up his time to try to, you know, make – and also to see what exactly – where the bad guy is doing. So I'm happy to see them shut down. There's a new – moving on, there's a new Trojan called Delilah that's – it's blackmailing employees and recruiting insiders.

This is particularly bad. So what happens is you get this Trojan on your system. It starts taking screenshots. It starts tracking your browser history. Now, I maintain that one of the most intimate pieces of information about anyone is their browsing history.

Right? Yeah. Think about all the things that Google knows about you from all the things in your life that you've searched for, be it, you know, medical data, you know, things about – who knows? You know, your whole life is – Your kinks and all sorts of – all sorts of the fun stuff that they can blackmail you with. Absolutely.

So Delilah gets in there. It starts tracking your browsing data, starts taking screenshots. It can tap into your webcam to take screenshots of you while you're browsing. And then they contact you and they basically say, all right, here's all the stuff we've got on you.

We don't want money. We want you to go to your business and start stealing stuff for us. Or we want you to give us access to your company. Or else we are going to reveal all this personal information about you. That's some evil shit right there.

I cannot disagree with you. Yeah. It is really evil and it's working. So, you know. Yeah. This is just like, you know, this is some Cold War action going on here. It's like, you know, trying to recruit spies.

It's terrible. Yeah. And, you know, I think, again, it points out the fact that it is the human factor that is often the big weakness when it comes to these vulnerabilities. You know, you have a company. Pebcack, yeah. Yeah. You have a company and your employees are, you know, an employee gets this Trojan installed on their system.

And next thing you know, they feel like they're, you know, over a barrel and, you know, perhaps feel like they have no choice but to go along with a scam like this. So it's something to be aware of. Obviously, you want to have all the regular protections on your system to protect yourself against Trojans.

But if you're an employer, I think another thing you want to do is educate your employees to these kinds of things and let them know that if something like this happens, you know, we have a mechanism by which you can come to our security people and say, hey, you know, this terrible thing is happening to me.

Help me work through this because I don't want to make this worse. Yeah, definitely. It departments definitely need to be aware of this. And they should have policies in place that says, hey, look, if you're getting blackmailed for, you know, whatever you're watching on Pornhub on company time, we'll give you a pass. Just let us know and we'll take care of it.

You know, they need to have that in place. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of porn and Pornhub, because I know, Jason, you likes your porn. We are moving on to actually a congresswoman, Representative Jackie Speier, who's a Democrat from San Francisco, introduced a new bill in Congress last week that would make basically revenge porn.

It would set a federal penalty for for posting revenge porn with a maximum penalty of five years. Now, what's what's significant about this is that there are many states that have revenge porn laws. I was going to say, I know California has it because that one guy got, what was it, 18 years?

Yep. 18 years, 18 years in prison. And so and for for those who may not know, revenge porn is where, you know, you have a couple, they have a relationship. Someone takes intimate photos of the other person. Typically, what happens after they break up, one of the two people, and it's usually the guy, posts these intimate photos online.

There are actually been websites that specialize in revenge porn. And of course, this can totally blow up the person who's who's the victim can blow up their life with these, you know, what they thought were were photographs just to be shared between them and the person that they're having this intimate relationship with.

Now it's on the Internet and for everyone to see. And that can really ruin someone's life, life, life, life, actually, you know, can affect their job, their family. It can be a devastating thing. So many states have had legislation in place to to fight this.

But this is the first time that it's going to the federal level. I think that would be I think the federal level is good. And I think five years is a good cap. I don't think that that guy deserves. I mean, this I mean, the guy that was sentenced to 18 years was a monumental douchebag because he did run the site and he also blackmailed people into taking their, you know, basically saying, hey, if you're on our site, pay us more money and we'll take your photos down.

And it didn't take them down even. So, yeah, you know, so he's getting the ass raping he deserves in prison. But I think for most people who just post pictures of their ex who do this, five years is a I think that'll be a good deterrent, especially if it's federal.

Right. And I think that's the point here is that if we know there's a law and this is well publicized, that is nationwide, then then that could could serve as a good deterrent to make people stop considering these terrible things to do to people. Yeah. Don't be a douche law.

That's what they should call this. Yeah. Well, right. Right. Somehow I don't think that'll make it through committee, but you never know. You never know. And then finally this week, interesting, interesting development in terms of privacy. There's a police department that has asked a 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man's fingers to unlock his phone.

OK. Have they not heard of superglue and acetate? You don't need a 3D printer to do this. Well, evidently you do, because it has to do with the conductivity that some of the 3D scanners on the phones need. This is why they've demonstrated.

Now, you can't just use the fingers of a corpse to activate. Stick them in the microwave. Warm them up a bit. I think it's a little more complicated than that, Jason. Come on. Nuke them and go. So what's interesting about this, I mean, this is a man who was murdered, and the police believe that there could be evidence about his murder on his phone.

So he is not the person that they're interested in to try to charge with a crime. He is the victim. Well, but, you know, there's a privacy angle to that. Yes. Yes, there is. Now, this also speaks to the fact that courts have ruled that your fingerprints are not subject to Fourth Amendment protections.

So a password is subject to Fourth Amendment protections. So the police cannot compel you to give up a password, but they can compel you to give up your fingerprint. Your fingerprint is considered physical evidence, and they can compel you to give up your fingerprint. So, you know, interesting development.

They're working with this lab that is actually doing a special type of printing. They're including some metallic elements in the printing so that that conductivity will be there, and they'll be able to unlock the phone. If you're someone for whom security is really important on your phone, this speaks to the fact that perhaps you shouldn't rely on only your fingerprint to unlock your phone because, you know, there have been breaches.

The big OPM breach included fingerprint data. And this police force is using previously acquired fingerprint data. So this victim had had his fingerprints taken over the course of his life for some reason, either a security check or perhaps he had a run-in with the law.

They took his fingerprints. That's the data they're using to generate these 3D prints. Okay, so they're not actually scanning his corpse. That is correct. They're not taking the prints off of his corpse. They're using stuff they already had. So, again, circling back to things like the OPM hack, many, many fingerprints were included in that hack.

So you could connect the dots and say that it could be possible for someone to use that data to generate 3D prints of your fingerprints and access your device. So if you are someone for whom security is very important, you want to use something other than your fingerprints on your mobile device or other scanning devices.

But I suspect if you're one of those people for whom this is really important, you probably already know that. Yeah, seriously. And we covered a story from the CCC, the Chaos Computer Congress, last year where they actually did a hack with a guy with a high-resolution DSLR, basically a prosumer DSLR who was taking pictures of somebody that was speaking at a conference.

And she held her hands up. And from that, they could actually get her fingerprints and then recreate the fingerprints, print them, and use them. So, you know, fingerprints are definitely not something that – biometrics is kind of a false hope for security, I think.

I think that's what we're learning as this happens. Right, right. Total side issue. I remember there was an article a few years back in National Geographic about fingerprints, and they actually found a group of women who had no fingerprints. Evidently, there was some sort of genetic situation, and it seemed to only pass through women in this one particular family.

They had no fingerprints. Their fingers and toes were completely smooth. Was the family name Shifty Bank Robbers? Because, man, that's – No, they didn't – but – and, you know, so there were ramifications of that. But I thought the most interesting thing was that these women said it was actually hard for them to pick things up, like a plastic bin or something that was smooth.

Not having the grippiness of your fingers made things were much more slippery for them. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. Okay, we've got to dig up that article and put it in the show notes because that's fascinating. I love that. I thought so, too. The more you know, right? The more you know.

Knowing is half the battle. There you go. All right, Dave. Thanks for coming on, and we will talk to you next week. All right. Have a good one, Jason. Talk to you soon. Comment of the week. We got a new PayPal donation this week from Chris Costello.

Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you so much, Chris. Sent in a comment. Hi, Brian and Jason. Thank you so much for such a brilliant podcast. I have subscribed to 154 podcasts in Pocket Casts, which gives me a great ability to cherry-pick shows and topics I'm interested in. There are only a dozen or so that I listen to every episode of, including yours, and any time a new GOG episode appears, it always gets played immediately, no matter what else I'm listening to.

Thanks again for your entertaining, informative, infectiously funny podcast. I've learned so much through you guys, discovered brilliant books, et cetera. I don't think I'm as grumpy or as geeky as either of you. But I'm working on it. But don't be sad, because one out of three ain't bad. You're sycophantically Chris from Ireland. P.S. Come visit soon.

I'll buy you a pint. I would love to. I would love to as well. We'll see if we can get over there at some point. I miss Ireland. It's a great place. Me too. It's one of my favorite places to go. You know, I mean, we've gotten so many great reviews recently, so thank you, everybody out there, so much.

You'd think it'd be super easy for somebody that was trying to rep us to put together some sort of one sheet. Oh, yeah. Oh. Well. Interesting. Oh. Hmm. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. This comes from Roz Thomas. This is an iTunes review. We got a five star.

Since you always ask for these in addition to Patreon support, here is mine. I've now unlocked the achievement. Cha-ching. When is the Does It Have Legs podcast showing up? I'm really looking forward to it. I thought of Jason when I recently watched John Carpenter's The Thing.

I hope you get to it someday. Big Trouble in Little China holds up better in my geek opinion, so I'd like another grumpy opinion on it. We did do Big Trouble in Little China on Does It Have Legs, and I'd never really seen it before, so that was a good one. The Thing is, one of those ones I just never cared about, but if I can find somebody who will watch it with me, I'll do it.

But Does It Have Legs is coming back on Monday. We sat down. It was me, Seth, and Chris from the Grime Life podcast, and we actually did The Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's crazy to think it's that old.

Yeah. No, that movie's ancient. All right. We got another five-star rating. Okay. I know why you set this up in this order, because there's no way. What's Dow with Thirlik? So, I think that somebody just rolled their fingers across the keyboard to create their name there, but that's cool.

I'm a GOG. I've been listening to this podcast for almost two years, and it's become my go-to podcast to start my weekend. They point me in the direction of the latest in technology news with a heaping side dose of cynical opinion to keep it all honest. I highly recommend it for all ages, even idealistic young post-millennials. If I'm lucky enough to have this read on air, I'm hoping for a bam-bam shout-out drink, Brian.

The other reason I timed it just right. God damn it. There you go. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Harvey Menfrin-Jensen. Harvey Menfrin-Jensen.

Yes. One of the greatest movies of all time, which I would love to do on Does It Have Legs? But I'm trying to find somebody that has the same sense of humor so we can actually talk about it. We'll get to it at some point. All right. You can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcast, on Instagram at Grumpy Old Geeks, or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG.

We have a website at grumpyoldgeeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air. If you have any friends and they're not all playing Pokemon, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out. It'll only take a minute or two. Go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes, and we'll take you right there.

And you can listen to our podcast while you play Pokemon Go. So, double win! At the library. I mentioned last week that I was reading Your Favorite Band is Killing Me, What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meeting of Life by Stephen Hayden.

And I tore through that thing in two days, basically. I loved this book. He's a dude that, you know, I'd want to sit and have the proverbial beer with and just talk about music all day long. He was a writer over at Grantland along with Chuck Klosterman, who we've also talked about on this show before, who is also a music critic and at least used to write about music.

He doesn't so much anymore, so I feel like perhaps Stephen is taking over for that because this was a great read. I loved every second of it. He basically just takes some of the bigger rivalries in music, either real or imagined or never even created, and discusses them and then talks about his life and how the various music that he's discussing has been a part of his life.

And it's just, it's great. He's a great writer. I loved so many of his opinions. I would get in fights with him about others. It was fantastic. It made me think. And if you are a great, crazy music head like I am, these are the kind of discussions I have with my friends all the time. So it was a fun read.

Excellent. Yes. I'll be skipping this book. Yes. Probably not for you. Definitely not for me. Blur versus Oasis, Beatles versus The Stones and what that means if you pick one or the other. Biggie versus Tupac, Kanye versus Taylor. It's just fun.

Total fun. Loved it, especially since I actually know some of the people that he's been talking about in the book, which was even more fun. So good stuff. Okay. Yeah, I fell asleep when you were doing the verses there. So definitely not a book for me. Software, apps, and gadgets.

I saw the coolest thing this week. This is a, it's from bottlecutting.com, which, you know, you'd think would be some kind of goth, you know, sadness type of cutter thing. But what it is, it's this crazy device that lets you take beer bottles and turn them into drinking glasses.

Or candles. Or candles. Or candles. Well, the candle thing. Who cares about candles? I mean, yes, you can have Jesus candles or Guinness candles or whatever kind of candles. But for the most part, it's just for taking the top off of beer bottles. Right.

It's kind of neat. I would have had, yeah, if they would have had this when I was in college, I'd have been all over it. Mm-hmm. It's a way to resurrect, it's a way to resurrect your dead soldiers, as we say. Exactly. But I watched the video, and you can do it, you can do a glass in five minutes. Very cool.

I think, you know, for holiday gifts and things like that, if you know somebody who is like a serious beer hound, and send them a six-pack of their favorite beer in glass form, I think they'll like it. I do know somebody that I think will be getting this for Christmas now.

Okay. Rock on. Usually he doesn't listen this far into the show, so he won't know. Okay, well, I was hoping it was me, but I guess not. Damn. No, you get nothing. That's the way it works. That's my life. Okay. I finally got, I've been a year in the making, I was going to get a sit-stand workstation.

Obviously, the changes that are occurring in my life right now, involving a soon-to-be offspring, have had me kind of condense my workspace as well, so I didn't go for the massive system that I was thinking of getting. I did get the Ergotron WorkFit C dual sit-stand workstation. I love this damn thing.

The Ergotron sounds like a fake name. It sounds like a fake product. Welcome to the Ergotron 5000. Yeah, it's a funny name, but it's a great desk. I'm loving it. It took a little bit to put together. The link in the show notes goes to a dual monitor set up for another 40 bucks.

I was able to get the, basically convert that from dual monitor to one side holds my laptop, the other side has got my monitor. It's a relatively small and compact workstation, which has forced me to basically take a lot of things off my desk that I don't need anyways, which is good.

I was like, wow, I haven't touched this in over like a year, and it sits on my desk all the time. See you later. Get filed somewhere. It's on wheels, so I can wheel this from room to room as needed. So, you know, I can go out into my living room or I can go to the bedroom for doing the podcast or wherever the hell I want.

Everything is on here. Is that a power strip on the base? What they do is they provide a way to attach any sort of thing. They show it. That's like a desktop system. So if you weren't using a laptop, you could actually strap your tower to the base.

Oh, okay, because I'm looking at all these cables on it, and I'm like, hmm. Yeah, well, that's exactly what I'm going to do with it. I'm going to go find some sort of plastic box, drill a hole in the bottom so I can run the power, you know, my power strip through there. And, you know, stick things like basically my iPad and let them sit down in the bottom and charge up.

So I haven't made that mod yet. I'm still trying to work on it, but that is my next step. Otherwise, everything is in here and fantastic. My mic even fits here for podcasting quite well. So it's a great desk, and I'm loving the ability to sit and stand. I'm standing right now.

I was sitting for the first half of the podcast. I tend to switch back and forth often throughout the day. Super easy to adjust. Well, excellent. I'm looking at the photos of some of their different ones, and they have different types of women for each type of desk for some of these different ones.

I think this is a different company, but it's very funny. Oh, I see. You're down on the Amazon page. That's a different company. Yeah, the sponsored products related to this item. I'm like, okay, the 48s have two really, one of them's a nerdy hot girl, one of them's a bombshell, and then if you go to the 60-inch, they've got kind of a plus-size girl.

It's very interesting how they picked those out. Different company. If you go to Ergotron.com, actually, it's kind of interesting. These guys seem to have started kind of more in the industrial applications, like they made medical carts for hospitals and things like that. Oh, that makes more sense then.

Okay. I see that. So they finally did some consumer stuff, and their consumer stuff is fantastic. It's really nice. So it's interesting because one of my recent sponsors for one of my day jobs has been Veridesk, and what they started off with was a standalone unit that you buy, it comes pre-assembled, you drop it on your desk, and you can use it as a workstation on your desk.

And then when you want to stand up, it's got like little lifts, and it poof, pops right up, right? Oh, they've got the, Ergotron does those as well, just the attachments onto an existing desk. These aren't attachments. They're just literally just, you just plop it on your desk. Lay it on top of, yeah. Yeah. But they have, Veridesk also has a full desk version, and if you go back and watch Silicon Valley last year, this last season of Silicon Valley, all their desks were Veridesks.

So they've got those in there. I haven't tried one yet because they won't send me one for free. Bastards. So I don't know if I'll try it, but I have too much gear to have a standing desk anymore, which really makes me sad. I'm going to have to figure that out at some point because I do love a standing desk, and this thing's pretty cool.

It's kind of weird looking for sure, but as long as you like it, man, I'm glad you're standing up. That's good for you. Yeah, I actually really love it. And you could probably sort out some sort of method using one of these where you basically had a whole bunch of gear sitting on a desk next to you and then just have this little standing workstation that you could swivel around and just connect everything to it.

Yeah, I'll have to figure that out because I've got, you know, I've got three Mac minis. I've got two rack-mounted systems, two monitors, a KVM switch, a Zoom H6, a speaker system, and a printer, and then it all goes into my MacBook Pro. It's quite the setup here now, so I'd have to figure that out, but I would love to be able to stand up again.

I miss it so much, and my back misses it even more. Yep, it's a very nice desk, so if you're out there and you're considering it, please go to our show notes and click through.

Media Candy. So, Mr. Robot's back, and I finally got to watch the first two episodes. Uh-huh. I actually went and re-downloaded it again because it was so unmemorable, I forgot I watched the first two episodes.

You know, that's funny you say that because I came back from the Psychedelic Furs show, maybe a couple beers were had, and I hadn't seen the second episode yet, and I unintentionally fired up the first episode, which I had seen, and was almost halfway through before I realized, oh, I've already seen this.

Yeah. Not very memorable. No, it's a steaming pile of Mr. Robot shit, as far as I can tell. I do not, I love Christian Slater, and as much as I love Christian Slater, this show is still such a rip-off that I just can't watch it, and it's not that interesting.

You know, it's not that interesting this season to me, at all. I don't, yeah, I don't know where they're going to go with it this season. They're not really giving much of an indication in the first two episodes, which is usually never a very good sign. I'm going to follow it through just because it is what it is. I agree that it's a complete and utter rip-off.

I mean, all you're doing is various tropes from other sci-fi meets a healthy dose of Fight Club meets a healthy dose of Anonymous, and there you go. There's your show. Yeah, that's the thing. It's just like, no, this isn't utterly non-creative bullshit.

So, sorry, dude. I mean, I think that the, and here's the fun part about it. Okay. The production company, I may have said this last season when they were out, this comes from Anonymous Content. That's the production company that's doing it. David Fincher used to work with Anonymous Content.

So, the people that are probably filming this thing are the same people that probably filmed fucking Fight Club, you know? And at least there are writers and people who were, you know, Fincher adjacent. Fincher's not there anymore, but there is a lot of bleed over, and it's a lot of bullshit.

So, I'm calling this Mr. Bullshit from now on. We will not be talking about Mr. Robot anymore. At least I won't. Jason will not be talking about Mr. Robot anymore. Okay. I will continue to watch it, and if there's something to talk about, I will mention it. Well, let me know then. If they change up and it becomes interesting, you know, because Preacher's almost done, which is very saddening to me, because that's the most interesting series this season until we get to the next couple segments.

But Preacher has been so good, and I'm loving that. And then I watch something like this, and I'm just like, damn, this is a letdown. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not thrilled with it. Speaking of letdowns, we already know that Game of Thrones will only be two more seasons, and that each season will only be seven episodes.

So, we're only getting 14 more episodes of Game of Thrones. To add insult to that, Injury, they have now announced that... What's an Injury? I knew you were going to say that. You just can't let this shit go, can you? Every single time. Hey, man, we're going to get hate mail from it, so I at least have to make fun of you on the show for it.

We don't get hate mail for when I say something wrong. We get hate mail when I say the fucking podcast guy's name wrong. Anyways. So, after reliably premiering every spring for the last six years, they are pushing it to summer. We will not get this until summer 2017, and then we get our seven episodes, and then that's that.

And then they'll probably make us wait 25 years for the last seven episodes. Thanks, guys. Yeah. This is bullshit. You know, I'm fine with them. I'm fine with them. You could actually just give me seven more episodes and wrap shit up. I don't care anymore.

No, I want more. And the reason that there's actually a relatively decent reason that is being pushed back, because winter has now come in the show. They actually need winter weather to shoot. So they're shooting things later in the season that they have before. So there you go. Oh, there you go.

Okay. Winter is required, apparently. It helps. So. Yes. I didn't know that there were two left. I thought they were just going to do seven episodes and be done with it. But double, double that. So we'll get one episode of dragons per per season now.

Well, we'll see. I'm just, you know, it's sadness porn. That's all it is. But don't care. Love it. Okay. But what I love now is a new series on Netflix called Stranger Things. This is a breakout hit, which I had never heard of until everybody on the planet said, are you watching Stranger Things?

Because you are the guy that needs to watch this because this is right up your alley. Yeah, this is a this is basically exploded upon my social media. Most people I know are watching it. I didn't know what it was until the billboard appeared over the Whole Foods in Santa Monica. Oh, wow. Okay.

Okay. So this is this is not a this is not a sleeper anymore. No. So I am at episode six and a half at this point within 24 hours. Okay. I was I was tempted to cancel this show to finish watching this season because it is that goddamn good.

It looks to me as if this is a Stephen King story. No, I correct. No, no, I know it's I know it's not, but that's what it looks like. No, that's the that's the whole thing. I came into it. I saw that I watched the trailer for it. The trailer is not the show.

That's the great part about it. What it really reminds me of. It's do you remember Erie, Indiana? Vaguely way back in the day. It was a great little TV series. This is like a darker version of it, but it's about a missing kid.

And the the quest to find him. It's got Matthew Modine, but it's also got Winona Ryder, who is fucking off the hook. Incredible in this in this show. She's amazing. I'm like, you came back from nowhere and she's unbelievable in it.

The cast of kids that are in this movie are fantastic. Those are the Spielbergian kids. You know, when you when you when you go back to like, you know, a trope of really cool kids that are like the Goonies back in the day. Right. All in all. But the writing is great.

Matthew Modine's a douchebag in it. But Matthew Modine always plays a good douchebag. That's fine. He's doing it well. It's it's very X-Files like it's very Dungeons and Dragons like it's got all sorts of stuff. I just can't stop watching it.

I'm like I'm just I can't stop. It's so good. You have to watch it. Yeah. I mean, you're going to love it. Cool. I mean, I'll have to check it out. I might even break my rule about having to wait two seasons. Well, yeah, don't wait two seasons. They're waiting to hear if they're going to get picked up for another season.

But I think it's safe to say they are given the buzz online. So it's yeah. I mean, I read this morning that they're still waiting. But I think that this is such a such a breakout hit that they can't not come back. And I don't know what the ending is like, so I can't say if they leave it.

Yeah, I'm sure they left it open for another season. People don't people don't make TV without the opening for another season. But I love this. It's only eight episodes. So you're only looking at it's less than eight hours of your life. You can do it in a day. All right.

No, no, I can't do it in a day. That's way too much. Just sitting on a couch. Well, you can stand and watch it with your new ergo whatever 5000. Ergotron 7482. Thank you. So we got Comic-Con going on.

We also have Star Wars Celebration Convention, which is in London right now. It sounds like a gay Star Wars pride thing. Nothing wrong with that. No, I'm not saying there's nothing anything wrong. I'm just I'm wondering, is that like a gay Star Wars convention?

No, it's just a Star Wars convention. There's no rainbow lightsabers. Give it time. Anyways, that's going on right now. And there are a bunch of announcements coming out of it, including a virtual reality Star Wars experience that will be coming out centered around Darth Vader.

The project will tell an original story in the Star Wars universe that will be considered part of the official canon. And I guess the experience, which will include day and night cycles and changing weather patterns, will continue to progress even when the participant is away from his or her VR headset, which just sounds like a gimmick and a stupid one to me.

But I am excited about this possibility. This is something that might actually get me to strap on a stupid headset. OK. Yeah, we'll we'll see. When when's it do? When are we getting it? Nobody knows. OK, they don't say. Well, that's fine because we don't we still don't even know when we can get an Oculus Rift.

So, you know, that is very true. They're also putting out some an immersive VR experiment called Trials on Tatooine, which allows players to wield their own rainbow lightsabers. It's free today for owners of the HTC Vive, whatever. Did you really just say rainbow lightsabers?

I made that part up. OK, just just checking because I'm like, oh, that would be you really call the convention a gay convention. So, you know, I got to run with that. Animal Kingdom, a new show with Ellen Barkin, who you never would think would be back on TV.

Oh, my God. What a great show this is. This is on TNT of all places. There is a lot of swearing. There's a lot of nudity and a lot of sex. But there's also a lot of crime and violence. When I first started watching it, I thought I'm like, are they trying to be Point Break?

But with like it's like Point Break meets The Sopranos. That's kind of how I originally envisioned it. But now it's now that I'm seven episodes in. Wow. This is I'm going to use the words, Brian.

The breakout sensation of the season. I thought that was Stranger Things. Nope. This is the one because this is this is mainstream. You don't have to act. Well, actually, you do have to get cable for this one. You don't have to have Netflix for the for this one. You still have to pay for TV, apparently, to watch this stuff.

This is a really, really good show. All of my friends. I'm like, hey, have you been watching Animal Kingdom? They're like, well, duh. So I had no idea because I don't have a TV as I'm out of the loop on this stuff. So I might have a TV.

You watch a hell of a lot of TV. I was sick. I was in bed, you know, for most of the week. And I just like asked all my friends. I'm like, what are you watching? And this is these are the two shows that everybody said to watch. So, OK, I had to do it. And they turned out to be some of the best written and best shot shows on TV.

It's it's fantastic. And Star Trek Beyond came out. The premiere was down at Comic-Con yesterday. So at some point, I'm going to have to go see this. I was going to go see it today, but apparently they screwed up the timing. It's only a two hour movie, but the the turnaround for the theaters is surprisingly long for some reason, and nobody can figure out why.

So maybe it's because Jeff Bezos has a cameo. Oh, so we have to have the drones come in and deliver the popcorn. So that's that's the downside. Apparently, he does have a cameo in it. He plays Starfleet official. OK, I'll keep an eye out for him.

I won't. Well, but I am looking forward to seeing the movie. Also, more news have come out about that. Anton Yelchin will not be replaced in future Star Trek movies. So it will be interesting to see, sadly, what they are going to do with the Chekhov character.

Apparently, he's just going to have to somehow pass away at some point. Chekhov is going to bite the dust like the actor bought the dust. It's it sucks. But I respect their their decision not to replace him because, you know, these reboots are only going to last so long and then they'll reboot it again.

So for this, this run of the reboot, it doesn't make any sense to replace him. It really doesn't. It's like, yeah, I mean, this is super uber geeky, but I really don't consider these reboots official canon to me. The original cast is the original cast and they are continuing on.

Yeah, yeah, I'm fine with it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Honestly, I'm I'm the same way. You know, it's like if if we take this as canon, then there was no DS9. There was no next gen. There was no Voyager. And well, fortunately, there was no Enterprise. Talk about talk about a warp core breach.

Jesus, what what was up with that one? But, you know, this is this is this is a fun trope. It's fine, but it's not going to last for more than two more movies. And then we'll go back to the originals. So I cleverly snuck Kanye back in here.

Oh, Kanye was dead to us. Well, the article is called R.I.P. Taylor Swift 2009 through 2016. That's a loophole. If you pop, if you follow pop culture at all this week, you found out that basically all of this shit is complete, utter fabrication done to get your interest in your money.

They're all full of shit. They all lie. And it's all planned. None of this is fucking real. Taylor Swift is a motherfucking joke. Kanye is a joke. Kim Kardashian is a joke. Fuck all this shit. Stop watching. Stop paying. What the hell is wrong with you people? Well, tell me what you really think of the situation there, Brian.

Done. So, yeah, basically this whole uproar that Taylor Swift has had about famous. Now, Kim Kardashian leaked a phone call between Taylor Swift and Kanye where they basically discussed the plan to do all this stuff. See, that makes no sense to me. Why would she do that?

Publicity. Because it's all publicity. It's all a game. All they need to do the entire game now is to be on every single news cycle. That's all that matters. You know, fellow listeners of this show, go by Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday, and then you can really see how easy it is to manipulate the media and then take it to the next level.

And they're the best. That's where these people are at. They are. These people are the masters of media. And they're fucktards. So fuck you. Exactly. Now, speaking of fucktards, Danny Mathers. I don't know who she is. Apparently, she's Playboy's 2015 Playmate of the Year.

And since Playboy has announced that they are no longer featuring nudity, I suppose she's technically the last one, right? Well, yeah. How can you be Playmate of the Year if there's no nudity? Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, who knows? But she's a fucking idiot. What'd she do?

And this is, again, this is the problem with our technology. She took a Snapchat at her local gym, the LA Fitness, where a normal woman was in the changing room behind her naked. And she did not like how this normal woman looked. Oh, that's illegal.

You can't do that. Yes. She captioned her Snapchat, if you can't unsee this, then you can't. If I can't unsee this, then you can't either. And she is covering her mouth in a false shock because somebody behind her wasn't liposuctioned to death like she is.

And, yeah, it's not only illegal, but she's basically fat shaming somebody, a regular person who's at a gym working out. So fuck you. Luckily, basically, you know, the Internet responded appropriately and basically told her to go fuck herself. She has now been banned from LA Fitness.

Her radio gig that she had at some popular station is she's been suspended from. And hopefully she will now have to go back and work at a Hooters or something like that. Oh, good for her. I think she should be working at Denny's. But, yeah, man.

What a. OK. What a twat. That's all I'm going to say. What a twat. Yes. Anyways, it's all, you know, animals out there. We just don't know how to deal with this stuff. Bitch. Oh, fancy.

Fancy. Oh, fancy. So to make up for my bad feelings and vibe from the last two stories, here's some good ones. Some good things happen. This is one of my favorite videos of the week. The title is this is what happens when you play Star Wars music outside John Williams house.

So, OK, these two kids, I'm assuming high school band kids came, found out where John Williams lives. I'm assuming they probably live in the same neighborhood and basically came, took their instruments, stood outside his home and started playing the theme from Star Wars.

And then he came out and had a chat with him, shook his hands and very cool. It's a very funny little. OK, so he didn't say get off my lawn. He didn't say get off my lawn, but thankfully they also weren't catching Pokemon. So, hey, man, hey, musicians, go for it, man. I don't I don't believe in brass, but do what you got to do.

And they sounded pretty good, man. Listen to the video. It'll be linked in the show notes. Yes. And we're starting to get the first images from Juno, which is the Jupiter probe that is orbiting right now from NASA. The first image is obviously not terribly exciting, but this means more are coming and I cannot wait.

I thought the first image was pretty good because it had the two moons. It had Europa and Ganymede. And Io. And Io. Three. Count them, Jason. Well, I was I was waiting. I was I dude, I was throwing myself under the bus for you because I didn't think you would be able to pronounce Ganymede properly.

I can do the 2001 Space Odyssey. I'm up to I'm up to speed on my Saturns and Jupiters. I want to give a big shout out to to the musicians I've seen recently. I've been a bit burned out on music in the music industry, and it was great to go to a couple of shows and really, really enjoy them.

Psychedelic Furs, as I mentioned, and a friend Amanda Kramer, who's playing with them. The Sting and Peter Gabriel show. Absolutely fantastic. And I'm going to give a shout out to to some of my friends who have their own band, Roses and Cigarettes. I'm actually getting ready to run out of here relatively quickly to do a road trip with with two friends to go see them play, kick off their West Coast tour up in Solvang.

So that should be fun. So there's my shout outs. Nice. Nice. Did they do Shock the Monkey at the Peter Gabriel show? Yes. Yes, they did. Oh, yeah, it was good. Damn, I would love to see that. I've never seen Peter Gabriel live. Oh, really? Yeah. He's fantastic.

And the two of them together, I can't stress how good the show was. I mean, just amazing musicianship. What I've heard is that for most of the shows, they've kind of done, it's called Rock, Paper, Scissors. So they figure out who's going to open and who's going to close. So they kind of do mostly separate sets.

Then they kind of come together in the middle and do some songs for the Hollywood Bowl. They basically just stayed out the entire time. Oh, man, that would have been amazing. And I, you know, more concerts like that. Yes, please. It was unbelievably good. I liked, you know, Peter Gabriel would do an interpretation of the Sting song.

Then Sting would do an interpretation of Peter Gabriel's song where they would sing backups on each other's songs. It was unbelievable. Just get the chance to go see this concert. Do it. Yeah. This is two master musicians like who just have a catalog of classic hits playing together.

I could. Oh, man, I'm so bummed. I wouldn't wasn't able to see that. I was bummed that I didn't get to go see The Cure at the Hollywood Bowl, but this one would have been something to come back for because I'm a huge police fan and a huge Peter Gabriel fan. So, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm happy to report that Sting didn't bust out a loot once. I was going to say, I didn't see any pictures of him with the loot and none of those fucking songs either. It was, you know, a couple of his own solo stuff, but the earlier stuff, the hits. It was a hit. You know what?

That that's a that's that's the that's the cue that you can go to the bathroom. But he busts those out. It's like this. These are the bathroom breaks intermission. Yeah, pretty much. OK, well, I got a shout out to my friend Jason Sanderson, who was on his two month tour for the U.S. from England and parts unknown.

So thanks for hanging out the other night. And I'll put a link to to his website in the show notes. He is a master podcast editor, much like myself, I must say. But if you need need some podcast tips and tricks and stuff like that, you can talk to Jason.

He's a good guy. You can talk to me first. But if you if you don't like me, then you can go to Jason. I'll tell you, Jason DeFillippo is a master podcast editor because he takes out all of his mistakes. Yes, I do. It's amazing how that works. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show.

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You can find them on iTunes, Spotify and Apple Music, or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpy old geeks.com slash Andy show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 169.

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