170: Brian's Getting a Drone!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. The following content contains graphic, explicit, and vulgar language. And with that out of the way, welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks number 170. I'm Jason DeFilippo here with my co-host.

Brian Schulmeister. How are you, Jason? I'm good. Happy last day to upgrade to Windows 10 for free day. Well, I no longer live in that world, so this does not apply to me. But for those of you that do, it's going to be $120 for the home version, and Windows 10 Pro will be $200. So do it today, because that's $0.

Yes. Free is the best price. It really is. Much like this show. And one thing that's not free is Yahoo. No, apparently not. It's going for almost $5 billion, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I found an article in Bloomberg, which is an op-ed piece. But since we, you know, always talk about why these people are so stupid and make so much money.

Marissa Meyer. This seems to break down some of it and offers some fixes. What's interesting about it is, and the title of the article is, CEOs are paid fortunes just to be average. Or in Marissa Meyer's case, a seat warmer for four years. Sub-average.

Yes. They're paid on the price of the stock, but the interesting thing is they have almost no control over the stock. Not really. No. I mean, side, you know, not really. Yeah. It's a joke. I mean, come on.

Yeah. Performance of the company clocks in at somewhere around 30%. You know, the rest of it is market forces and external forces and outside market stuff. All that crazy stuff, you know, that you have to wear a suit to really give a shit about. Yeah. But it's interesting that this guy points out that, you know, they should really have a completely different set of KPIs for these people to get paid on.

And he lists a bunch of them. And I thought it was a pretty short, nice, interesting read and that people out there do agree with us. Yeah. Oh, in a perfect world. That will never happen. iOS 10 is coming. Yes, it is. Do you have the beta? No.

I don't remember if you get yourself involved in those programs or not. Not anymore. And I'm back on my 5S because my 6 Plus, the repair they did on it doesn't work. The screen stops working after about a minute. Right. So I have to turn it off and turn it back on. So I migrated back to my 5S, which is, yeah, I'm going to take it back and see if they can try and fix it again because I got a 90 day warranty on it on any repair.

And if they can't, it'll just be, I'll wait for the 7 and it'll come with the 7. Right, right. Well, I looked at some of the stuff that came out when they were announcing iOS 10, the sketches and messages and all that kind of crap and heart beating tapping, which seems a little bit ridiculous. And one of the more ridiculous items that I've seen, but I put it here in our follow up because we spent a lot of time talking about sleep.

And different methods that we have used to get better sleep and the importance of it and whatnot. They are coming up with an updated clock app as part of iOS 10, which has a feature called the bedtime feature. You put in the amount of time that you would like to sleep and it makes a graphic and then tells you you should probably go to bed now if you want to sleep that much.

Okay, does it tuck you in and give you a story? No, no, that would be useful. This is just, this seems stupid. Again, this is engineering a solution to a problem that really isn't there. I don't know. I'll give it a shot when it comes out. You never know. Yeah, you never know. I try it.

It's free. It comes with it. I'll give it a shot. It's free and it is going to have new sounds, which is nice. Okay. And, you know, if you're not using night shift mode already, definitely get on that because that really does help. Yes, it does. Get rid of that blue light, people. Yes, you know, that's the version of Flux that was stolen and put on the iOS.

Yes. Neil Young's Pono, your favorite piece of hardware. I'm sorry, what's that? Yes. Neil Young's Porno. I mean, Pono. I don't know what you're talking about. It's actually still around. You can still buy them, but you can't buy any music for them now. At least not for several more weeks because their store is offline because their other provider got bought and now they have to go with another company called 7 Digital out of London.

And it's taking them a little bit more time than they thought. And it will take several weeks to complete the migration. Awesome. Well, that's good. Yes. But you can still buy the Pono. So you can go buy something without being able to get any. I don't know it very well. So you may be able to put your own music on it.

Who knows? I'd imagine you probably can, right? Well, who knows? This whole thing is so stupid to begin with. You may not be able to. So I do like the fact that if I Google Pono, I get Pono Burger instead of Pono Music. So that's good. That's good. If you do an image search, maybe you'll get Toblerone.

Oh, let me look. Oh, yeah. There it is. In the news.

We've got a lot of news on self-driving cars today. Yay. We're going to start off, though, in China. Okay. Yes, far away. Chinese auto authorities are collaborating with the police to develop regulations around testing self-driving cars on the country's main roads. This is because they've been pulled from the main roads.

The government said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are not going to test your self-driving cars on our main highways. Seems wise. Yeah, so until they can come up with these regulations and ratify them, they must stay off the road.

All right. Isn't China the one that had that crazy-ass bus that let people drive through the middle of it? Yep. Okay. It's not done yet, but it's on its way. That one's on its way. I'm sure they, well, they're not going to be able to test that on main roads either. No way. Here's the thing. It's not on the road. It's over the road. Oh, that's a good point.

Yes. And in the U.S., federal regulators are saying that car makers just cannot wait on perfect for automation. They need to, like, forge ahead. So you have the Chinese being incredibly safe and you have us being relatively safe to be safer. It does depend on how one defines perfection.

Yes. I'm not expecting anything perfect. This is tech, after all. None of it's perfect. Oh, we know that. Oh, yes, we know that. So, but they're saying, what's his name? Mark Roskind is one of the guys from the, well, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

And there was a big auto conference last week. And he was saying, you know, look, this stuff saves lives. So, you know, we know that you know what you got to do. So keep on it and make it work. Yeah. So I think that's, I think it's good that that's going on for sure.

No, me too. One interesting thing. This is not about self-driving cars. This is about your neighborhood crowdsourced driving car. Your favorite people, Uber. Yes. You know, they're always like, oh, you know, we're saving people's lives by getting drunk people off the road.

Turns out, turns out, the original studies were accurate about DUIs being reduced. Okay. Well, there comes a point when you have had too much to drink and you don't really care about calling an Uber because you want to save some money and skedaddle home yourself.

Yes. Well, turns out Uber has yet to reduce drunk driving deaths. What? At all. Yep. It'll save you on a ticket, but you can still get killed because you have to take an Uber to actually save a life. I have to say, I'm totally shocked that something that Uber uses to promote itself isn't correct.

No, I know. Who'd have thunk it? Who'd have thunk it? So, yeah, this new report comes out from the American Journal of Epidemiology, and they're saying that ride services like Uber and Lyft had no impact on the country's overall rate of drunk driving fatalities, about 10,000 a year.

And this is a test from 2009 to 2014 of the 100 most populated metropolitan areas in the U.S. I mean, certainly here in Los Angeles, that was a big part of Uber's push, you know, because the taxis has always been a kind of a miserable proposition here.

It was, hey, you get to go and party now. Yep. Yep. Well, not so much. Okay. Shocking. Yahoo. Let's get back to that. There is an exhaustive list on Slate right now showing all the various different things Yahoo tried to do to turn a buck or two and lets you know if Verizon, if it's part of the Verizon acquisition, if it's being shuttered, and rather amusingly because it's such a long list.

It takes you back to the past. A lot of these things were discontinued ages ago, and I forgot they even existed. Some of these things I didn't even know existed at all, but it's a fun little list to kind of snicker to yourself until you realize how much Marissa Mayer got paid. Foxy Tunes. Yeah. Rocket Mail.

Wow. Yeah. Yahoo Kids, which is originally Yahoo-legans. Ah, Yahoo-legans. I remember that. Oh, I remember when that launched. That was great. Yeah. Yahoo Maps is actually being acquired for reasons beyond anybody's idea. So Yahoo Meme, a microblogging site.

I've never heard of that. It was conceived as a mix between Twitter and Tumblr, discontinued in 2012. Okay. Man, there's a lot of stuff in here. Wow. Right. Look at all the shit that they did. Key word being shit. Yeah. Therein lies the rub. Yahoo 360.

Remember that one? Vaguely, yes. Yahoo 360 plus Vietnam. Woo. Discontinued, discontinued, discontinued. But the first one I went to look for was Flickr. And yes, going to Verizon. Tumblr, yes.

Going to Verizon. Yes. The things that actually work. Well, they're both ish. Yeah. Tumblr, after it went to Yahoo, pretty much went downhill. Flickr has just been dead for a very, very, very, very, very, very long time. Yeah. Sadly, all the best that Sean Bonner could do by making a website to try and get Marissa Meyer to save Flickr did not work.

So. Yeah. Oh, well. I think I'll just, I probably still have a couple thousand photos up there. I think I'll pull them and kill the account. Probably wise. No, no reason to have more cobwebbed accounts floating around out there. Exactly. Try to reduce your digital footprint, as it were.

Yes. Yeah. So another shitty company is trying to sell itself right now. SoundCloud. Oh, yeah. SoundCloud's paid goo music service, which is a complete and utter mess. And it's horrible. I, you know, I gave it a go because I figure it's in our wheelhouse and I should.

I don't understand it. It's horrible. There's not much there. I don't care. Basically, they, SoundCloud owners, are exploring strategic options, including a possible sale at a valuation of $1 billion. Unfortunately, even with Twitter's $70 million investment in them recently, they are only valued at $700 million.

So it's. How is that company worth $700 million? It's not even their music. They got. I agree. But hey, they think they're worth a billion. Yeah, that's true. Hey, man, you put yourself up for a billion. You talk it down to half a billion. Everybody goes home at like $475.

And considering it's SoundCloud, everybody goes not happy. Yeah. That's a. What did you just buy? Nothing. Nothing. Because they don't own any. They said they own. They own a couple of flash players and some servers and hard drives.

The content is not theirs. Exactly. We are more valuable to Facebook than we used to be. OK. Well, I'm glad somebody values my opinion. Your opinion is worth exactly three dollars and eighty two cents. Well, that's better than it was last time. This is what Facebook.

Three dollars and sixty cents last month or whatever. Exactly. It went up from from three sixty to three eighty two. That is what Facebook is making per person. The reason that this metric is starting to matter more and more is because Facebook used to value itself based on user growth. Now that everybody in the fucking world is on Facebook, other than starting the you must breed and have many children approach, which luckily they have not started yet.

As far as we know. As far as we know. They are going with user value rather than user number. So. OK. Yeah, this makes sense. I mean, you have to. Yeah, you have to. Once everybody's on. This is the same problem Apple is facing, which we'll get to in a few seconds.

Once once you've got everyone, you can't grow your value anymore that way. Everybody's there. You're not. So makes sense. Olympics are coming. This should be a hell of a shit show. Oh, yeah. I'm hoping it's not. I would love it just to go off smoothly and be a wonderful experience, but I think most of us think that's not going to happen and you will be able to watch the Olympic lowlights.

I will not call them highlights on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. NBC obviously owns the rights, which is incredibly expensive and very lucrative. The first deal that they announced a while back was with Snapchat because you got to get the kids and now they will also publish up to 20 Olympic highlights per day on Facebook and the Facebook owned Instagram and a two minute daily recap show complete with highlights that will be exclusive only to Facebook.

They will also be posting some stuff on Twitter just via their own Twitter account. They're not making any specific deal with them. And I wonder I'm assuming they'll also be using Facebook's live streaming since Facebook is pushing that so hard. So interesting. You know, who's not listed anywhere near here is YouTube.

What? Yeah. No YouTube. I'm sure they're going to do something there because you have to at this point. You have to be everywhere. But they'll probably just put up some clips under their own account. Yep. Yeah, probably. And yeah, I, I, this is a, I just don't care about the Olympics anymore. I really don't.

It's like, you know, it's after the last couple, it just doesn't really float my boat anymore. Maybe I'm just getting too old. Yeah. Or you're not a big sports ball fan anyways. You don't get it. When I was a kid, I always loved watching the, I watched the Olympics start to finish. I always loved the Olympics when I was a kid, but cause it's not, it's not regular sports stuff.

You know, I always liked, I always liked it. I thought it was fun. Well, I'll be watching. I was a big track and field fan. I loved watching track and field. Right. Okay. Well, I'm feeling a bit, uh, I'm a bit thirsty. You'll then call a drone. Exactly. 7-11. Nobody saw that coming.

I think we all thought it'd be Amazon, right? Yeah. This came out of left field. 7-11. 7-11 made the first commercial delivery by drone. Uh, this occurred, uh, in Reno, Nevada. So they've, uh, drone startup Flirte. This sounds like it should be a dating app, right?

Yeah. Flirte. Flirte. Uh, it's took on, this took place on July 11th. Uh, an autonomous drone, uh, flew a mile from a 7-11 location to a private home in Reno. The initial delivery included a chicken sandwich, donuts, coffee, candy, and Slurpees. Ooh, hot and cold.

I know, interesting. Sweet and savory. Look at all that. Who decides they want a chicken sandwich and a donut? And, well, maybe this might have been for two people. Because you had donuts and coffee, chicken sandwich, and a Slurpee with, uh, candy for both. So someone is on breakfast schedule and somebody else is ready for lunch. Yep, indeed.

They must have a kid. Probably, yes. Uh, there's, there's actually a video of it, which is kind of boring, but the interesting. Yes, it is. That's why I didn't include it. Yeah. Uh, the interesting about that, this is FAA. This was an FAA approved delivery.

Yep. So this wasn't them going rogue. I wonder, I want to know how 7-11 got the, uh, rights to start doing commercial deliveries by drone and Amazon couldn't figure it out. Well, I'm guessing it's something to do with this Flirte company. I'm sure they did the hard work and 7-11 just did a partnership with them.

And they're probably not big enough to go with Amazon. So this, you know, this is, let's make some waves and do it first. And it could be that Amazon was always trying to strong arm, strong arm the FAA into getting them to let them do whatever they wanted. And Flirte actually was nice and flirted with the FAA and said, hey baby, can I fly my drone?

Probably. By the way, I've never, I don't believe this, these stories of Amazon strong arming people. That just doesn't happen. No, no, no. They only got that big because they're so nice to everybody. Exactly. That's why. As we related to earlier, Apple's business is getting smaller and smaller.

Apple's business has shrunk for the second consecutive quarter, driven by declines in its iPhone business. But because Apple still plans to do between $45.5 billion and $47.5 billion sales this quarter alone, powered by a new iPhone release, nobody's really too worried yet.

And they shouldn't be. Because they also have how many $17 trillion in the bank. Yeah. Yeah. They've got a ton of money in the bank. Sure. Their business isn't growing with their iPhones. And let me tell you why. Apple just sold their billionth iPhone. Yeah. And the thing is, they last, too.

They last no longer. You don't need to update them as often. We still kind of do. But we don't need to. And in fact, we're going to start doing it less because I don't know if you've noticed, all the telecoms are starting to pull their subsidies on these things. So you basically have to buy it outright, which is an insanely large amount of money.

So you wait a while to do it. And a billion devices. I mean, that is a massive tech milestone. Like, nothing hits that. Well, except Android phones and PCs. And they're out there. But the iPhone got to a billion in less than a decade.

It took the computer industry until 2002, which is 25 years to ship its 1 billion PC. So it's on a rocket to the moon. No, it's a big deal. It's definitely a big deal. But you know what that means? That there's a lot of used iPhones out there that you can go grab so you don't have to buy a new one.

Yeah, secondary market is actually getting to be quite large on that. The interesting thing, speaking of iPhones and getting smaller and smaller as they do every year, we're finally going to hit the wall on miniaturization on Moore's Law.

So we've got about five more years. And that's about it. Yeah, that's about it. They're going to have to start going vertical, which means that they're going to be bigger. Or quantum. I don't think you're going to get a quantum phone anytime soon. Damn.

It should be called the leap when it does happen. Just saying, people. Seriously. I should brand that now. You should. Go get that domain. I think quantum leap might already be a trademark, though. Could be. Speaking of copyright and trademarks. See, I teed that up for you.

I know. That was a softball. Carol Highsmith is a photographer who gave away 18,755 of her photo photographs to the Library of Congress. Well, those dickwads over at Getty and another company called Alamy have been selling them.

And they actually tried to charge her for illegal use of her own photos. This is content bots gone amok and assholes basically, you know, selling your own photos back to you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can't stand Getty. I'm sorry. They are. They're a terrible company. They just have these scrapers out there going after everybody. Now, I am all for getting paid for your work, but they get to be very ridiculous.

They're very much like the MPAA suing the children for downloading one song and things like that. Yeah. A little bit of human oversight in the process is kind of required, and it generally doesn't happen. No. So I hope she wins because it's a $1 billion lawsuit.

And the math is in the article that we linked to. So the normal rate for a photograph that you can go after for damages is $25,000. So it works out to be like $42 million-ish for, I forget however much, whatever it is.

She can charge three times what you can normally charge because they've been busted for doing it previously. This is the third time that they've been sued for this. Right. And they've lost previously. At some point, they'll lose enough money to actually throw some humans back into the mix, hopefully. Well, they won't be able to afford them, hopefully, and they'll just go out of business.

Security? Ha! Well, I guess the largest news in security would be the DNC hack this week. Yeah, I guess so. Is it an act of war? That's what people are asking. Yeah.

We've spent a good bit of time obviously discussing this on the Cyber Wire. You are correct. This would be the number one story we've been covering this week. And the answer is no. It is not an act of war. The people who spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things are obviously very deliberate about what does and does not constitute an act of war.

You know, and I think you really have to come at it from the point of view of what is espionage versus what is an act of war. And again, the people who talk about this, they talk about war in the kinetic space, which is a nice way of saying, you know, things that blow up, bullets that move, things that move quickly and cause damage.

Spinning reactors out of control. Yeah, those sorts of things. But, you know, I think countries all know that everybody goes in and pokes around and looks at each other's stuff. And that's espionage. And that's sort of, you know, acknowledged. We do it. Everybody does it.

And so you sort of wink and you nod and you try to minimize the other people doing it. But there's sort of an honor among thieves mentality is my understanding of it. When you go in and start breaking stuff, for example, when the Russians went in and started messing with the Ukrainian power grid, now we're talking about something different because now we're talking about things where, you know, lives could be on the line and so forth.

So, you know, this going into the DNC servers is more along the lines of an act of espionage. You know, where it starts to get close to where it can affect things is if you make the case that it actually could be monkeying with our election.

Yes. See, that's kind of where I came down on this. I don't believe it's an act of war to go in there and get said information. But potentially releasing said information at specific times seems to border on the line a little bit.

Yeah, and certainly there's been a lot of discussion about that and, you know, people are saying whether or not it's an act of war, it is something that will require a response from our government, either, you know, public or behind the scenes or whatever.

You know, another thing with a cyber act of war, our government has been very cagey about specifically defining what an act of war is in cyberspace because they don't want to get boxed in. They don't want to draw some line in the sand that says, if you do this, we will then, you know, respond with missiles and guns.

Right. So they want to keep that. And, you know, there's a good argument to be made for keeping that kind of loose. Yeah, I agree. But that seems like a perfect segue into how somebody in our potential government did decide to respond to this. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

No longer presumptive. Oh, yeah. The Republican nominee has responded in his own way by basically suggesting that Russia should hack Clinton's emails so he can get access to those. Yeah. See, this for me just is the latest statement in a long line of dumbassery coming from Donald Trump.

Well, and he did what he normally did, which is as soon as he saw some of the backlash the next day, he tries to step it back by saying, hey, of course I was just kidding. Well, it does not matter to me in my mind. And it's the question is, is this treason?

People are kind of saying no, but it's also just really, really, really stupid. Yeah, I mean, if you want to get technical and pedantic about it, it is a very high bar for something to be charged with treason. Treason happens after there actually is war.

So, you know, and the Supreme Court has looked at this. And so, no, you know, under the standards for treason, no, Donald Trump did not commit treason. However, you know, it does, it still, it makes it a reckless thing to have said.

It is troubling. I will just leave it at that. It is troubling that a major candidate would suggest such a thing. It reminds me of, yes, and of course, you know, we're shocked, shocked that Donald Trump would say something and then have to walk it back. You know, he reminds me of that kid in middle school who would always say something horrible or offensive and then follow it with, just kidding, just kidding.

You know, just kidding, so. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's step away from the politics now and talk about something a bit stupid. We've talked about the Internet of Things a lot on both our podcast and this particular segment because there's a lot of security aspects to it.

This is just kind of a silly story. Amazon's Alexa has, they've made a partnership with a company called, I believe, let me see, it's another A, so it all gets quite complicated. Amazon's Alexa has partnered with August to control August door locks.

These are e-locks and you can now lock the door with your Alexa device by basically just saying, hey, Alexa, lock the door. Now, what's to stop somebody from standing outside the window and yelling at Alexa to unlock the door? Ah, but hold on.

That's where they actually thought about things a little bit and they don't allow you to unlock the door with it. That seems like the one thing that I really needed to do. You spend $200 on their lock and then another $80 on a smart bridge to wirelessly connect the lock to your device so you can unlock your door while you're sitting in your house and that's the only usage that you can get out of this.

Or another $150 for a locksmith to let you back in when you accidentally lock yourself out. Or I'm figuring, since it's basically a one or zero state on this lock, eventually a hack that will unlock the door. Yeah, to me, I think it's kind of an investment in laziness.

So, you know, if you're up in your bedroom at night and you really don't feel like going to check whether or not you lock the door or not, you can't yell out to Alexa and have her lock the door. But to only have, you know, partial functionality of this. And it's, I mean, I would suspect that, I mean, it would seem crazy that this August door lock, however it's connected to everything else, you must have an app on your phone or something to remotely activate it.

Otherwise, what's the point? So, you know, the integration with Alexa is one thing, but I don't know. This is a head scratcher. See, I can't get Alexa to pick the right Pandora station half the time. So I really don't know if I trust it with the actual security of my home.

Yeah, I agree. It is a bit silly. Yeah, and one would assume that you do have an app that unlocks your door. But obviously the voice, the whole voice thing is a whole different thing. And are these things going to start to be coded to certain voices so you can't have a stranger outside saying, hey, unlock the door, that it has to be your voice.

What happens if I record it and splice it together using, you know, all these wonderful tools that we now have on our phone to do audio editing? Oh, boy. Internet of Things is going to be a lot of fun, isn't it? The image that came to my mind was Fred Flintstone standing outside of the door, banging on the door, yelling, Wilma!

You know, just imagining someone outside the door yelling, Alexa, let me in! Oh, well. Yeah. The Internet of Things is just getting better and better, as we'll find out in our next stories. Yeah.

So a couple of other IoT-related things. We had a story this week on the Cyber Wire about wireless keyboards that, in this day and age, we're not encrypting the traffic between the wireless keyboard and your computer.

The security firm Bastille found that there are millions of these keyboards out there. These are the cheap ones. These are keyboards that use a mouse dongle with your system. So these are not keyboards that use Bluetooth. But they have a range of about 100 yards, which is pretty good distance, by which someone could monitor the wireless traffic between your keyboard and your computer and basically listen in on everything you're typing.

Yeah, that's word drivable, easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you are using a wireless keyboard and it is not using Bluetooth, check it out. I think the thing that I find, like I said at the top, in this day and age, the notion that a manufacturer would be making a keyboard that does not have any sort of encryption between the keyboard and the device.

This is something that I guess we would all assume they were doing, and yet, you know, to save 50 cents on each device, I guess that's all the motivation they need to not do that. So you really need to check these things. You know, buyer beware.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people play on the fact that nobody does the research on this, and there's just an assumption. And obviously, it's not happening. Of course, now I'm terrified because I realize mine isn't Bluetooth, but I did spend a lot of money on it, so I am hoping that it is encrypted. Oh, yes, because that always works out the best.

Yes, exactly. That's the way it always works, right? It's like those guys that spend all that money on their BMWs, and a $25 key fob hack could get you into a BMW about two years ago. So, yeah. Yeah, it really works. Great. Yeah, moving on, you know, speaking of things that you never thought would ever have any security holes, light bulbs.

Light bulbs. Well, I firmly stick with the, my light bulb does not need to have any kind of connection to my computer. Yeah, so a story this week that Osram's Lightify smart bulbs, they found they have. They might want to rechange that name there from smart bulb.

It doesn't seem so smart. Yeah, yeah, merely adequate bulbs. They found, I believe it was nine security holes in these light bulbs, and they patched some of them, but there are still some of them that are open.

And the problem is, as with a lot of these IoT things, that these bulbs could be a way for someone to get into your home network, the vulnerabilities in these smart bulbs. So, if you have an Osram smart light bulb, go check out to see if you have one of the ones that has the security holes.

Like I said, not all the holes have been patched, so you might want to go down to the local hardware store and buy yourself an incandescent light bulb and screw that puppy in until the holes are patched and go rethink your life. And do you really need to have a smart light bulb in your house?

Seriously, we can't get people to patch their computers that they're on all day. Who's going to remember to run up the software updates for their light bulbs? Oh, Jason, you're going to love this, too. I was looking through this, and one of the biggest problems is the fact that the admin interface web management tool, they didn't check, they didn't project for injection on the form submission script.

Okay. How many times did we have to deal with that back in the day? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But what a perfect example of the challenges of Internet of Things stuff. It's not really a challenge, though. That's the thing. I mean, if these people just put 10 minutes into security, they can just get the basics down at least.

Right. But doesn't that speak to the notion of how we're purchasing things on Amazon, we're running after the cheapest price, which means it comes from some no-name manufacturer, distributor, who knows where. And the point of this article was, isn't it – part of the title of the article was, isn't anything code audited anymore?

Yeah. No, no, it's not. That's the extra expense, just like the keyboards. You'd have to hire, actually, more than one programmer to work on it. And why hire two when you can get the same crappy code for one? Most likely, that code was probably purchased for $5 off some of those cheap code warehouses.

I need two. So, you know, we need a form. Okay, there's one. Yeah. Let's move on to the next – my favorite IoT thing of the week. We need to have a segment just for IoT, I think. Because this is just getting out of hand. Pets left hungry as smart feeder breaks.

Owners of the smart pet feeding device PetNet were told by the company that they had to go feed their pets manually because their server was down. Now, isn't it just a timer? Don't you just put food in a box and set a timer? Why does it have to go to a server to figure out when Fluffy needs a snack?

You'd think that there would be backups for this. And it should fail forward. It's like, okay, if it can't get to the server, unlock the box. And release the food. Exactly. Just dump all the food. Dump all the food. Yeah. Right. So instead of having a really bad day, Fluffy has the best day of his life.

Exactly. I really do not understand at all why this is connecting to a server. At all. That's what I'm saying. Well, it could be your bridge for when you're, you know, if you're out on the road and for some reason your cat, you know, gives you a call and says, hey, Joe, I'm hungry.

Can you give me a snack that you can, you know, release a few bits of kibble for it? But we do not need smart pet feeders. You know, this is the person who has, a person who loves their pets and we all love our pets. But this is the person who really loves their pets and has a camera, you know, in the house that they can monitor on their mobile device so they can watch the pet taking a nap.

And then they can, you know, they can talk to the pet over the camera and then they can say, you know, hey, Fluffy, ready for a snack? And Fluffy's tail starts wagging or Fluffy the cat starts purring. And then they press the button on their phone and, you know, half a dozen bits of kibble drop out.

And, you know, so you had a chance to interact and feel good about your pet in the middle of the day. As you're being a terrible cat parent. Well, yeah. So, but I can see, you know, the functionality is appealing to a certain set of people.

I can see there being an attraction to that. But I think, Jason, as you said, yes, fail forward. Yeah. Because seriously, I'd rather come home to a fat dog than a dead dog. Exactly. Exactly. So, sorry, Bam Bam, you're not getting one of these anytime soon.

Brian, drink. It's way too early for that. All right. So our next story is the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the U.S. government over the DMCA. That's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I admit to having a bit of a thorn in my side about the DMCA.

It is, to me, it is a, it's been a longstanding piece of legislation and it's had all kinds of things wrong with it. So a couple of people are suing the government, Andrew Bunny Huang and Matthew Green, who's near us in Baltimore.

He's at Johns Hopkins University. They're suing the government over the DMCA saying that the people can't apply fair use. Yeah. Because of the DMCA. Yes, the copyright's way too strict. They've got a good case. Yeah, it's way too strict.

And I think, you know, one of the best examples of this is, for example, you know, you buy a car. These days you buy a car and your car is full of software and you own that car, right? That car belongs to you. You bought it free and clear.

Well, according to the DMCA, there are situations under which if you want to work on that car, if you want to work on the software on that car, let's say, you know, you wanted to do an alteration to the software to give your car more horsepower or better gas mileage or something like that.

Well, if you did that, the car manufacturer could come after you for altering that software, for decrypting that software to do that modification to something that you bought, that you own free and clear. And a lot of people are saying they have a problem with that.

And I think there's a good case for that. What do you guys think? No, yeah, we talked about this a little bit. Jason and I got in a huge argument about this last week. See, I think that you buy it, you own it. But that's... Again, I don't want to rehash the same argument with Jason.

I agree 100% that the DMCA goes above and beyond what it was ever meant to do. My only point last week is I understand where the impulse for this came from. It was to protect copyright, intellectual property.

It's being used incorrectly. It is far too vast and there are some really troubling concerns. I agree with this lawsuit. I think that once you buy something, you do own it. But I also do understand why this came to be, and specifically from the music industry.

If something that actually would have worked in terms of Copyright Act for the music industry, we wouldn't be in the situation that we are now, but we are. And yes, if you buy something outright, if you buy a car, you should be able to do what you want with it. Agreed. Yeah, and a big part of this also was when DVDs were brand new.

That sort of coincided with the DMCA. And so there was the whole thing where, you know, DVDs are encrypted, but the encryption was cracked in about 10 seconds. Yes. And so Tools to Rip Your DVDs came out, and the DMCA says that, you know, if you go out and buy a DVD and then you rip that DVD and watch a copy of that on your iPad, you are in violation of the DMCA.

Yes. And a lot of people have a problem with that. Yeah, that was the old DCSS. Yes. Right. Yeah, well, the guy that tattooed the algorithm on his arms or back or whatever and wasn't allowed to leave the country. Right, right. Yeah, and we've gotten past a lot of that, you know. And actually, to that point, one of our – our editor was at a global automotive cybersecurity summit last week, the Billington Automotive Summit.

And the automobile manufacturers all made the specific point that they are looking for white hat researchers to, you know, bang away, hack away at their systems. And they have said, we are not going to come after you for trying to hack into these things because we think the safety angle is more important than the intellectual property angle.

So that's actually a shift from the automotive industry and the kind of thing we'd like to see. But at any rate, this lawsuit – we'll see how this lawsuit goes through. I think the DMCA, in my opinion, is definitely due for a reworking.

It's been a problematic piece of legislation from the outset. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed across the board. All right. Well, thank you for joining us today, Dave. We will talk to you soon. And belated happy birthday. Oh, thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Great to be here. I'll talk to you guys next week. All right. All right.

Comment of the week. We got a comment at grumpyoldgeeks.com. This is from – I love your name – Swell Schultz. How swell is that? He's a swell guy. He is. Hi there. I was listening to your last podcast of 2015 and heard you guys bitch about not having a decent audio player for the iPhone.

I think we do that once every three episodes or so. Yeah. It's like once a month at least usually. This is a legitimate complaint. The Apple solution sucks. I use an app called USB Disk Pro on my Apple devices. Not only can you drag and drop files and directories directly to the iPhone and iPod using Wi-Fi, but it has its own built-in media player.

It also has photo capabilities, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and Evernote stuff. It's very simple, and I like simple. Love your GOG podcast. I've sent you a few bucks here and there. Hope to help out more in the future. Keep up the great stuff. Well, thank you, Swell. Thank you very much, Swell. We're going to use some of those bucks and probably go buy USB Disk Pro.

I'm thinking about it because I've gotten so annoyed with the inability for me to actually deal with and manage music on my phone. This sounds perfect. Yeah. My iTunes Match account is done, so getting music over, back, and forth, and around is a real pain. Yeah, and it's almost gotten to the point where I just don't even bother on my phone.

That's kind of where I'm at. I'm actually using, I'm just using Spotify on my phone instead of using the vast music library I already own. Yep. That's about it. It's so stupid. Oh, man. Has Spotify fixed the Wi-Fi when you leave your house problem yet?

Nope. I still have a good two to three minute lag as I walk down the street. So you just have to remember to just turn off Wi-Fi like two minutes before you leave your house so it picks up and goes. Pretty much, yeah, which is, again, stupid. Yes. Thanks, everyone. Technology is awesome.

Oh, it's great. You know how the audio industry said you don't have to be perfect? Let's shoot for a little bit closer to, yeah, or at least just roll back to the ones that worked, Apple. Yes, it used to work so well. Anyway, grumpy old geeks. Okay. This next one comes from Twitter from Andreas Krohn, friend of the show.

He's like, maybe not a grumpy enough story for you, but still interesting. We put this one here. We didn't put it in security because it was a fan suggestion. How I made LastPass, give me all your passwords. This is an article about two different, well, there are two different major LastPass hacks that came out, and they've all been fixed now.

So kudos on LastPass for doing it. But it was a very interesting hack, which I really liked, which I never even thought about. It uses that little bit of web code that goes in your browser extension. So he kind of backtraced it and checked some of it out and found out that they were doing really bad encoding on the URLs that they were pulling and parsing to figure it out.

So you could just throw in a little bit of a little bit of at code or at symbol, because one thing that a lot of people don't know is if you do HTTP colon slash slash a username, it's the at sign, a password, then a colon, then the URL, or it's reverse that.

I can't remember. It's been so damn long. But there's a way to use a username and password in the actual domain name itself. But so you can you can have it pulled out and you can do all sorts of other stuff with it. But he was using the at symbol as actually, no, it's a little different. He was using that as a break to spoof another domain.

Yeah, that's what it was. I see passwords and at signs and I get I get all nostalgic for the old days. I wonder if you can even do that, I guess. But anyway, yeah, it's very cool. Thank you for the link. And this has been fixed if you use the last pass. Yeah, and the fix was actually pushed in less than a day, which is pretty, pretty damn quick.

So they're responsive about it. So good on them for that. Not bad. Yeah, we like one password, though. Yeah, it's prettier. It's prettier. 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 Grumpy Old Geeks dot com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you have friends, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out and only take a minute or two. Go to Grumpy Old Geeks dot com slash iTunes and it'll take you right there. At the library.

This week, I finished Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval? Yuval? I don't know. So you went into that with the hesitation that I usually do with names like that. Oh, and here's the crappy part. I practiced that before the show, but then I loved it.

This is an amazing book. It really does follow the entire history of humankind and how terrible and horrible we are to basically every aspect of the world we touch. But the really interesting thing that that I took away from it is how much of our society and how we interact with each other and everything we deal with is basically just kind of a shared lie.

Right. You know, you go from things like money, which is, you know, a completely fabricated, but it just goes through everything. And it's just like by the time I was done, I'm just like, oh, hmm, this was a crazy book and I don't know what to go with it. That's why I get so angry all the time.

It's we do. It's all a fabrication. We have created a societal contract to basically believe in this bullshit. And it's so frustrating when people just decide, nope, not going to. And they do whatever they want. We make a deal, people. We're held together by these tiny little strings.

Yes, we are. Very, very thin threads at some point. Yes. And then I read I needed something to kind of cleanse the palate. So I read At Home, A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. Oh, I love Bill Bryson. And I love this book. What did you think? I love it. It's adorable.

It's an adorable little book. It's amazing. It's awesome. I mean, who knew that finding out the how Foyers came to be would be so damn interesting? I know. That's the funny part about it. I mean, when you really want to dig into Bill, you go for, you know, his short history of nearly everything.

Yeah. Or the travel. The travel stuff's good, too. I don't like that as much as when he goes deep on these topics, though. Okay. Right. Yeah, I loved At Home. I thought it was great. I mean, again, it's so fascinating to see all the things that we take for granted and how they came to be. Mm-hmm.

Highly recommended. So check it out. And I don't have anything on deck for next week. I'm going to have to go find something fun to check out. What do you got? I'm halfway through something, but I'm not going to mention it yet because I really can't decide if I like it or not. Okay. So if I end up liking it or at least it's interesting, then I'll talk about it next week.

And if I end up throwing it down in disgust, I'm not going to mention it. All right. Brian's reviews. To be or not to be. Exactly. That is the question. Software, apps, and gadgets. Microsoft is all over the iPhone these days.

Oh, no. Why? Get off my iPhone. Yeah. Well, they've already got Office over on your iPhone. You've got the well-regarded email app, Accompli. I guess it's well-regarded. I might have to check that out because Mac Mail's fine, but come on. Everything I do is in Gmail, so I use Gmail.

Yeah. There's a calendar app called Sunrise. I use Google Calendar because it's convenient. I use Fantastical for that. Yeah. And let's see. Microsoft is offering up a rival to the built-in camera app. Microsoft Picks. It's a free app from Microsoft Research.

It focuses first and foremost on delivering better pictures of people. It does this by continuously taking pictures when the app is open and then using an algorithm to choose the best shot or shots from among 10 images, seven taken before you push the button and three after. This makes sense because the human mind is slow, and generally the picture that we wanted to take happened right before we actually press a button.

And when we press the button on our phone, we actually move the camera. So we're not getting the exact shot. We hope we were getting. We have this with burst mode already, though, I believe. I guess it doesn't really start until you hit the button. Maybe. Maybe. This just goes continuously, basically, all the time.

And it's pretty smart. If you follow the link that we have in our show notes, they do some side-by-side comparisons of shots taken with the iPhone camera app and then the Microsoft Picks, and they are notably better. I will give it a shot. And I will give it a basically 100% bet that this will be built into the next version of the iPhone camera app.

Yeah, probably. Although Microsoft's pretty good about patenting things. That's true. That is true. Although, you know, yeah. Yeah. Anyways, it looks good. I'm actually going to download it and give it a shot. I don't take a ton of pictures. The reason I'm kind of talking about it instead of having done it myself is I figured you should give this a go.

Yeah, I'll definitely give it a go. Because you are a camera guy. Yeah. And I can look forward to a lot of shots of your dog. Yeah, it'll definitely be happy with that. And then at some point, I'll look forward to shots of your baby. The only problem with this, and the reason most people like me don't go to alternate camera apps.

I've got like 20 camera apps that I've gone through. You can't get to them from the lock screen. You can get to the Apple camera app really fast from the lock screen. Otherwise, you have to open it, find it. Even if you put it right on the home screen or in your favorite bar at the bottom, it still takes time to get to it.

But it would be nice if Apple would let us customize that. But it ain't never going to happen. No, that is not going to happen. So last week, I brought to light some of the cold, hard realities of our surge protectors. This week, it's batteries. So there have been some exhaustive study on exactly the best way to charge your phone battery.

Okay. Basically, it's a massive pain in the ass. Never go from zero to 100%. Try to never be at 100%. You should probably stick around 40% to 60% most of the time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is unbelievable how batteries actually work versus how we think they work.

I don't think I'm going to read this. Yeah, you probably don't want to because it'll just bum you out. Although it did make me think that maybe we should start our own Kickstarter to create a smart charger that automatically follows all best practice rules. And you could just leave your phone plugged in overnight, but it would never go all the way up to 100, it would stick it within the certain limits, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because we all just plug in our phones overnight.

At least we could come up with a smart overnight charger. Well, we could come up with it. We could Kickstarter it. We could take the money and then go to the Bahamas like everybody else. Yeah, exactly. It's a win-win. Okay. We're going to have to cut that out. I actually said everyone else loses. We win. Yes. Yeah. Well, I've been waiting for this app on iOS for so long.

Scrivener for iOS is finally out. Yeah, you talk about this all the time. It's finally here. Finally here. I played with it a little bit this morning. I just haven't had time to write anything yet because I do my morning pages in good notes with the pen because I'd like handwriting for those.

But when I'm actually writing articles and stuff or doing research for the show, Scrivener is awesome for just throwing pages in and being able to move stuff around. I love it. So I grabbed it. It's 20 bucks. I'm extraordinarily happy about that one. So you're saying it's better than notes?

It's not for it's not notes. It's not for it's mainly for if you're writing books or screenplays or things like that. It lets you let you build chapters. You can have research that you like like virtual cork boards and things like that. It's a really deep app for for like serious writing.

But I can I also use it for research because I'm just I got handy with it when I was doing blog posts for Metblogs and doing like, you know, my long form posts. Right. I would always use it for that and pull in different websites and research and pull from different, you know, different sources. What is this long form of which you speak?

I know that's it. It went it went went away with Twitter. Apparently it kind of really did. Uh, and speaking of apps that, uh, well, that I paid a lot of money for that I can't use anymore. Right. Uh, Omni Graffle. Right. I, I, I wanted to pull it up today and do a quick flow chart in my iPad.

I haven't used it in a while and, um, turns out I can't anymore. I spent $89 on Omni Graffle. That's a lot for an app. Uh, it was the, the most I've ever paid for an app on an, on an iOS device and, um, it, it, they bricked it.

So for me to use it now, I have to go get Omni Graffle two, which is 50 bucks. Pretty screwy. Omni Group is, uh, they have a history of, uh, charging a whole lot of money and being really crappy on the upgrades.

And, um, if you've ever used Omni Focus, you, you would know that for sure. I paid a ton of money for Omni Focus and, um, yeah, the, they, they do this a lot. So that's why I don't use Omni Focus anymore. Right. Um, and it's apparently why I'm never going to use Omni Graffle again, either.

I need to go find an old iPad that I can run it on, but yeah, so it's cost 50 bucks to upgrade, to get, uh, Omni Graffle two. And then what I get is then I get a free upgrade to Omni Graffle two pro. Right. But I have to have them both on my, on my iPad.

Uh, and Omni Graffle two looks great, but you know what? Omni Graffle one worked just fine, but now. It, it won't even load. Right. So yeah, kiss my ass Omni group. Kiss his ass people. I won't be buying anything from them ever again.

Um, what I'll do is I'll, uh, get some graph paper and I'll flow chart and then I'll take a picture of it. Ah, show them. Yeah. You show them Jason. Okay. Well, I finally found, I finally found some drones for you. I, I'm looking at this right now and I'm considering pre-reserving one.

Yes. The star Wars battle quads. These are bad-ass. These are so cool. They're, I mean, come on, man. So you got, uh, you got tie fighters, you got X wings, you got the millennium Falcon and you got speeder bikes. These things will go up to 50 miles an hour and shoot late, shoot fricking lasers.

They shoot fricking lasers, man. They shoot fricking lasers. And if you register now, you can save between 200 and $300 on each drone, which means they're going to be expensive, but you can register for free. That's the nice thing. You don't have to put anything down. They just put you in a queue. Uh, so I was going to sign up for one just to be in the, in the, in line for it.

I just did. Okay. There you go. I'm getting me a millennium Falcon. You, uh, you actually got in front of me. That's, that's good. Um, yep. This will, this is finally going to get me into the drone world for sure. That's what I figured. I've been playing around with the idea of getting one for a while and I've just kind of been too lazy, but the idea of me flying around my own millennium Falcon that shoots fricking lasers, uh, I'm in all in, I'm assuming there's camera functionality as well in these.

Doesn't look like it. Doesn't look like it. I think they're, they're high performance. You should be, you're supposed to be looking at it, not, uh, looking through it, but, yeah, I figured as soon as I saw this, I'm like, Brian's getting a drone. Yes. Yes, he is. He is pre, he is reserved.

Media candy. So I don't know, Brian, if you were a fan of mystery science theater back in the day. I enjoyed it. I wouldn't say I was a rabid fan. If I was a bit hung over on Sunday morning, I'd watch an episode. Yeah. That's kind of where I was. I had a bunch of friends who were like super fans and, and could actually quote the, the jokes from the robots watching the movie, watching the quotes that they could already, already quote.

It was also meta back in the day. It was, it was, but, uh, they have hit their fundraising campaign and they're, they're coming and, uh, the, uh, the new people will be Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt, the people on the ground. I am not terribly familiar with Felicia Day, but I do have to say that this is a perfect gig for Patton Oswalt.

Well, it's a perfect gig for Felicia Day too. She's the, the, the geek sweetheart. So she was in the guild and she created the guild and has done a bunch of other stuff. She's, uh, she's a, she's a pretty good actress. She's a really good actress. I will say. And, um, she was also in, uh, Dr. Horrible.

She was the, the girl in Dr. Horrible. Lots of things I didn't watch. You never watch. Oh man, that's one thing that they really should get to get on that sequel. But anyway, uh, Jonah Ray from the Nerdist will be the new guy in space with the robots. All right. Um, I'm on the fence about that one.

I've seen him live a couple of times and he's meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. Okay. Who knows? Well, mystery science theater was kind of meh, meh, meh, meh half the time. So maybe it'll fit right in. I tend to agree with that. Um, did you see Star Trek Beyond? Yes, I did. What'd you think?

Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. I actually quite liked it. I gave it three yawns because I was so bored in the middle of it. It ran a little long, but I will give them credit for the, the, the triad, the Kirk Spock McCoy, um, thing is really starting to click.

Yeah. The problem I had with it is it was all the beats were so telegraphed and I mean, if you've seen the other two movies, then you just know how this thing is going to flow and it flowed exactly on formula. Well, I find that to be an issue with any iteration of Star Trek in a, as a movie, I think it's a problem.

Uh, and I enjoy the series far more than I enjoy any of the movies. Um, and you know, it just is what it is. It's like, we can't have a movie now unless we blow up the enterprise. Yeah. I'm so over it and I want to get back to the series. And the reason I quickly brought up Star Trek Beyond is because we have our first, uh, look at the USS Discovery, uh, Star Trek's new series that will be starring, starting next year, I believe early next year on CBS.

Yeah. Um, before you get all excited, it'll be sadly, yeah, it's going to stream, but whatever, that's fine. Uh, but before you get all excited about the fact that we're actually getting a first look at it, it is built as the test flight of the Star Trek Discovery and, uh, it's basically just a CGI fuck fest.

Okay. So you don't see anything, you don't see a character, you see nothing. You see a ship kind of slowly move around a CGI landscape. Yeah. And it's kind of an ugly ass ship in my, my opinion. Yeah, it's not, uh, anyways, I'm hoping that the actors will be great.

I'm hoping the casting will be spot on. I'm hoping the writing will be there and everything that isn't in the movies will be there. And it's going with the prime timeline and not the JJ Abrams, uh, timeline, which, which is good. Yes. Which is good because in the JJ Abrams timeline, we do not have Picard.

No, we do not. So, and we like Picard. Make it so. Make it so. Uh, and then I did find an article that I just got annoyed by. Uh, this is over at slate of the browbeat section. It's by Marissa Martinelli. This is, uh, I was going to just say, you know, you and your slate articles, half of them are really annoying.

This one takes the cake though. This one is frustrating. This is a star Trek was among the best franchises at representing people with disabilities and tell star Trek beyond. Why, why, why do we have to tear down the institutions and the people that do the best job when they don't do exactly what you want them to do every single time?

Well, because that's what you have to do to get page views. Yeah. Well, fuck off. This is so for fuck's sake. I, you, you, you spend the entire article saying how fantastic star Trek as a franchise is done with this and that God damn it. You didn't put it in the latest movie. Shut up.

Yeah. Boo hoo. He had a life as I include the video from William Shatner doing that. So yes. Yeah. Okay. Moving, moving beyond a star Trek, um, Marvel fans will have to wait until 2018 for more daredevil and Jessica Jones.

This makes me very, very sad. That does bum me out as well because, uh, uh, somehow beyond all logic, I got into both those shows and Jessica Jones was so good. I, I love Jessica Jones. Yeah. We're getting a Luke Cage season later this year, but maybe we'll get a Jessica Jones, you know, crossover.

Some cameo. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. 2018 for daredevil and Jessica Jones. And I don't, and the ones in 2017, I don't care. Would you please turn whatever that is off? My mom keeps calling me. Well, that's why we have new buttons. Well, I am muted now.

I forgot it was on. Yeah. Okay. After the second time. Okay. Go ahead. All right. So I found a new podcast and this is actually a podcast based on a, uh, radio station in your neck of the woods, Jason. Okay. WBEZ from Chicago.

Oh yes. I've heard of it. Yes. This is hosted by Jim DeRogatis and Greg Cott. And I want to give a tip of the hat to a friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, who sent me a link to their latest episode, which is with Moby. Uh, and it's an absolutely fantastic. Listen, um, he's a fascinating person to begin with. Um, and then he just put out, I guess he's putting out a book, which I'm sure I'm going to read, uh, and he goes into the history and where he came from and the rise and how, you

know, this vegan non drinker guy ended up becoming massive rock star and getting sucked into the world and drinking and being miserable at the height of his fame. Uh, absolutely great. Listen, um, love the episode. The two hosts, I wouldn't exactly say they have a ton of personality.

You don't really listen to them, but if you'd like music, I would, uh, highly recommend you go take a look at the exhaustive list of episodes that they have. They're up to a 556. Whoa. Um, and if you see, well, yeah, I mean, remember they're on a regular radio station. They've been around for a while. They're just, uh, turning these into podcasts.

Uh, if you see any artists, uh, that you actually really like, you can do a worse than listen to the episodes. I've, I've listened to about five or six now with a couple of different artists I really enjoy and I've liked every single one of the podcasts. So great podcast about music. Oh, okay. So then see kids, you can still do a podcast and not even be a good host.

Yeah, it happens. Here we are. Here we are. Um, and then finally in the media category, I know I'm a bit late to this game, but, uh, I was, uh, uh, it was some night after the DNC and I wasn't tired yet. So I was scouring around for a free movie to watch and I found one Lucy.

Uh, this is from 2014 Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, and actually a decent concept for a movie. She accidentally, uh, triggers the ability to access more than 10% of her brain going all the way up to a hundred percent. Uh, Morgan Freeman plays the, you know, learned scientist that has been studying this sort of thing.

This could have been an interesting movie. Instead, it was an excuse to have admittedly the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson wander around and shoot a lot of people. Yep. Um, so there you go. I'm going to tell you, I, I, I'm going to tell you why this movie failed. Okay. It was written by Luke Besson.

There you go. He hasn't written a good movie since, uh, Leon. This is basically Leon with, uh, with a sci-fi plot behind it. That doesn't really matter at all. And Scarlett Johansson walking around shooting things instead of Natalie Portman. Yeah, that's kind of it. Um, I, I, I had enough to drink that night when I saw it that I actually kind of just went with it and enjoyed it because you have to get rid of the stupid premise of the, we only use 10% of our brain.

There was no need for that to be there. Unfortunately, that was the bit that I was into. Uh, that has been so, so debunked so many times you should know that Mr. Psychologist, but yeah, I know, but still it could have been the good premise for an interesting exploration and in sci-fi, uh, they didn't need it in the movie at all.

I would have been fine just watching Scarlett Johansson walk around in skimpy outfits, shooting people. See, that's pretty much where I went with it. And I didn't bother me. That's, you know, it was, it's a, for me, it was just a popcorn movie. I will say in 20 years, this will not have legs. No, it will definitely not have legs.

Very, very few things Luc Besson does have actually has legs. And this is what, you know, that's why he originally retired, I guess. But now he's back and he comes back with this. Yeah. Not so good. Meet the Allens, Jason.

The Allens. See, when I, when I saw this in the show notes, I had to keep squinting because I thought it said meet the aliens. And I'm like, Ooh, aliens. Cool. But no. Well, they kind of want to be, um, this is what. This is the thing that upsets me. We talked a little bit about the societal contract earlier. I hate when people try to try to get away with shit.

All right. So I'll just read this because it's funny and it upsets me. Uh, the first things the Allens, a British family of four, want you to know about them is that they are followers of something they call off-grid parenting. Okay. Common and sometimes questionable alternative parenting practices such as homeschooling, avoiding vaccinations and modern medicine, co-sleeping, and extended breastfeeding.

Oh, so they're creepy. Yes. There are also less common ones such as lotus birthing, letting the placenta and ubilical cord fall off naturally, and avoiding shoes for their children. Still, this is not enough for the Allens. They yearn for a family life even further off-grid and have hatched a plan that will help them move closer towards self-sustainability and being a bit more free-range and less institutionalized.

Now, so far, they're loony. They're just hippie kooks who... Yeah, they're hippie kooks, and I don't... I'm not particularly bothered by this. Well, here's what I get asked. Hey, what, avoiding vaccinations? You're not bothered by that? You're the big... Well, that... You're the big vaxxer.

Yes, that does bother me, but hopefully they're living in the middle of nowhere, and I'm fine with that as long as they don't come into contact with me or my children or anybody that will ever come in contact with me and my children. Okay. So, yeah, that part does bother me, but not to the point where I'm tearing out my hair. That happens now. Okay. The second thing the Allens want you to know about them is that they can't do this without you.

Yes, their master plan for self-sufficiency involves moving to Costa Rica and buying a big plot of land where they can grow food and have access to wildlife and nature in its natural state, as they explain on their fundmytravel.com campaign page, accompanied by a must-see video.

In order to make this happen, they need $100,000 of our money, which they will pay back by sharing the treasure trove of knowledge they anticipate to gain by living off the land. In the meantime, they'll continue getting on by housing and child benefits that come from the government. You fuck nuts.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No. Yeah. Yeah. Get a job like the rest of us. Save your money. Then go live in the middle of nowhere. Exactly. You do whatever the hell you want, people, but do it on your own dime. I mean, you're annoying enough that, you know, I almost kind of want to pay you to go away, but not that much money.

No, not that much. I'm going to have to go watch this video. Yeah, do it. It's infuriating. And just the fact that there is fundmytravel.com. I'm sorry. No. No. No. No. And no. Yeah. I just, I want to, I want to hijack that domain and redirect it to get a fucking job.com.

I agree. Thanks for that one. No problem. We have a second idiot. This was actually in our security segment, but we kind of ran a little bit over. So I pulled it out because I found this guy so infuriating. YouTube star named Jack Johnson.

The Jack Johnson I know is the Hawaiian hippie guy who plays a lot on his guitar and I don't like either, but that's the old person, Jack Johnson. Apparently this one is some kid on YouTube. He's a 20 year old pop rap, YouTube, Vine, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram heartthrob. Whatever the hell that is.

And you know, he's an idiot. He asked his nearly 4 million fans to basically give him their Twitter passwords. And why would, why would he do this? Well, he wanted to go into all their accounts and post a photo of himself with the hashtag hacked by Johnson.

So yeah, this is not good. It's a jerky thing to do. It's an idiotic thing to do. Sadly, a bunch of people actually gave him their passwords. Oh my God. And he did it. This is not good. You are a moron.

And if you had any doubt about it, we have a link in our show notes. And in addition to the whole story, it does show a number of his own tweets, which involves something like, what if you got catfished by someone and you show up to their door and they are an actual catfish?

Oh, highbrow. If I was an actual catfish that lived in water, I would be mad, offended by everyone using my name as a synonym for ugly and deceptive. Okay. This guy's a fucking idiot. Yep. Fucking millennials. Four million people.

Sure. Yeah. Great. It's a world. It's a world. It's a world. I can't even put a qualifier on. It's just a world. Yeah. It's just a world. Ooh, fancy. Fancy.

Ooh, fancy. I like space, Brian. And I cannot lie. On July 20th, 2015, NASA released the first image of the sunlit side of the Earth from the EPIC camera on NOAA's Discover satellite.

Hold on a second, though. I do want to point out that I'm a little annoyed with NASA attempting to chase after the millennials with their naming. Epic. And then they dropped the I in Discover and the E. Yeah. They dropped all the vowels except the O. Yes. I guess they bought one of those from Pat Sajak.

The camera has now recorded a full year, and they made a really cool movie of it. I did like the movie. Yes. Earth. One year on, seen from one million miles. It's pretty cool. It's, you know, if I was if I was into the the funky pot weed, I would probably probably have some of that and then watch this on a big screen TV and it'd be like, dude, it's pretty cool.

Check it out. Depending on what happens in November could be a completely different movie next year. That's true. Just saying. You know how I love my moleskins, Jason. Now, is it a moleskin or is it a moleskine? It's a moleskine. OK. I love my moleskine as much as I like my café latte.

Café latte? And rather conveniently, they have to have come together. Oh, two great tastes that taste great together. Exactly. It's like peanut butter and chocolate. I don't know why they did this, but why not? On Monday, the moleskin brand, which I didn't realize it was founded in 1997.

I thought they were around a lot longer than that, but I guess not. I did, too. It's a little surprising to me, but that doesn't that little card that comes with it. I thought it like came back to the 50s or some crap. I would have guessed as well. Apparently, I was very early on the moleskin bandwagon. A moleskinie.

Yes. Yes. I mean, I'd have been at the same time. That's. Ah. Yeah. Anyways, they opened up a café in Milan, and as the headline in the article says, it looks exactly like you think it would. It does. It's kind of really boring.

Yeah. It's boring and plain and functional, just like my moleskin. So, there you go. You can go hang out at a coffee bar in Milan and have your moleskin in front of you and take notes. Interesting. Yeah. Not really.

I'm trying to pull something out of that, but. Like, okay, it's a café based on a notebook that we thought was like, you know, ancient. And you know why? Because it had a rubber band on it. And then, because we used to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Sean Connery had a, you know, a book with a rubber band on it.

So, you think, oh, it must be old. Nope. Yes. 1997. The only plus is that it's a café based on a notebook, not the movie The Notebook. Yeah. There you go. So, we have to find the good things in this. Fortunately, I still haven't seen that movie, and I won't. You don't need to. You won't need to until you get a girlfriend.

Which means I won't. Sal, Jason, tiny violins. Hey, I'm not saying anything. I'm fine. Keep moving on. Let's talk about beer. Well, here. Let's get you a good job, then. The Smithsonian will pay someone $64,000 a year to drink and research beer.

Funded by the Brewers Association, the position will last for three years and seek someone who's interested in research, documentation, and collecting American brewing history. The Beer Historian, I'd love to have that on my business card, will work as staff members to develop collections on the burgeoning craft beer movement. The ideal candidate that we'll have, and here's where we run into problems, advanced degrees in American business, food culture, or similar history specializations.

So, and you should also have proven experience in research and oral history interviews, as well as writing for scholarly audiences. Sadly, you don't get to just drink beer. No, we spent most of our career just drinking beer, and yes, that's why we are not qualified for the beer position. Overqualified on the first aspect, not so much the second.

Overqualified on the first aspect, one might say. Yes. Oh, well. Sad. I was so excited for a few minutes. I know. The web's not dead.

Oh, no, it's not. Oh, the ice bucket challenge. Remember that annoying thing that happened? Unfortunately. Did you ever do it? No, because who gives a crap about me? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Celebrity's fine.

Whatever. I don't need to do it. A group of researchers have identified a gene implicated in a bunch of scientific stuff that I'm not going to attempt to pronounce. Blah, blah, blah. Basically, they're saying the ice bucket challenge actually did help ALS research, and there has been recently a breakthrough, which is all very exciting.

Until you figure out that, wait, it's not. This went everywhere, and then Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing basically said, uh, no. Yeah. So, no, no, the ice bucket challenge and the money raised, certainly while a good thing, did not directly cause anything to happen and stop it, and this is troublesome and various other kind of bummer things.

It screws up a bunch of things that deal with long-term funding for diseases like this. So, basically, the doctors are saying, uh, no, stop. Shut up. Don't say this to anybody else. Take it down. Knock it off. Please keep giving us money. That's helpful, but let's not keep pushing this idea.

And in the single best thing I've ever seen on the web, or at least this month, um, this is pretty awesome. Uh, somehow, somewhere, some footage was found, uh, from the Rolling Stones doing a commercial for Snap, Crackle, and Pop Cereal.

Nice. It's pretty awesome. They sing an original song. This is basically just after they formed. They look incredibly young, and, uh, it's fucking hilarious. Okay. And, but, was it actually Snap, Crackle, and Pop Cereal, or Rice Krispies? I was going to say, that's Rice Krispies.

Yeah, I was re- I'm too into the song at the moment. That's what got me, because, you know, they- they basically do the whole thing. It's pretty awesome. Okay. I'll check it out. Yeah. Pour on the milk and listen to the snap that says it's nice. Are you kidding me?

Love it! Da Vinci. He of the Moleskine notebooks full of cool ideas. Yes, the Codex. Yes. The Codex Eye, or whatever, whatever the- I don't know what the plural is for Codex.

Code Eye? I don't know. Who knows? Probably. Da Vinci would know, but he did. He would. He did. Books full of just amazing things, everything that we know about Da Vinci and revere about him, and also just tons of doodles in the margins, as it were, which most art historians have dismissed, uh, basically almost all of them as irrelevant.

But no! No! Who's that you've said? From Ian Hutchins, a professor at the University of Cambridge, showed that one page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contained something groundbreaking, the very first written records demonstrating the laws of friction. Ooh.

Pretty cool. This was obviously discovered later anyways, but hey, once again, Da Vinci beat everybody to it. Not bad. Not bad. And, uh, I've got a- I've got a video in here, uh, that, uh, might mean that, uh, Da Vinci beat everybody else to something else, too. The Truth About the Shroud of Turin documentary about, uh, Leonardo or Jesus?

Which one is the man behind the shroud? No, really? A lot of evidence came out a while ago. This is a documentary from, I believe, 2009. It came out on the BBC. Give me the spoiler alert here. Uh, that Da Vinci was basically experimenting with early stage photography, and the picture on the Shroud of Turin is him.

Oh, cool. It's kind of neat. That is kind of neat. Lots of evidence actually points to it being true, but, you know, a lot of tinfoil hatters will say, no, no, no. But, uh, a friend of mine, uh, Calby, friend of the show, Calby, sent me a bunch of stuff on it, and I read, read up on it, and it seems like it could be legit.

Well, that's, that's pretty cool. I've also heard that one of the scribblings, uh, basically detailed the first attempts at crowdfunding. Fund my codex dot dot com. Closing shout outs!

I have a couple anti-shout outs this week. My first, yes, my first anti-shout out goes to Comcast, and Comcast's ridiculously terrible customer service, uh, all week long. My, uh, my internet's been up and down and up and down in the middle of the day, in the morning, at night, all across the board, and I'm wired into the router, so it's not Wi-Fi flapping or anything like that.

But if they don't catch it at the minute that it's out, they won't do anything to help you. They won't give you any diagnostics. They won't put any traces on the line. They won't do a damn thing. And every time you call back, you have to spend two hours with someone from India, reading a manual to you, asking you to turn it off and on again.

You are officially starting to sound like my dad. We have hit grumpy old geek territory. Oh my, dude, it's so bad. And then my, my second anti-shout out is to Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles. Shocking. Yes. My, uh, I, I don't have an office there anymore, but I have a contract for two years worth of internet, business class internet.

Um, yeah, my, uh, my cancellation on that one, price of a small used car, 7,500 bucks if I wanted to cancel that account. Wow. Yep. So instead I have to pay 560 bucks a month or $580 a month because we've got taxes.

Uh, so yeah, close to $600 a month for another year and a half. So that's literally pissing money into the wind. Pretty much. Yeah. Uh, good times. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Tom Warner. Thanks Comcast. Fuck you both. All right.

Well, uh, Hey, Grim Harrison, this is a nice one now. So we're moving away. Thank you. Shout out to Grim Harrison. Uh, one of our Patreon supporters who did a long post on Patreon, uh, about the issue that I had with the power transformer blowing the other week. Um, super geeky.

Thanks a lot for this. And yeah, I, I've already submitted claims to SoCal Edison. So it should be covered hopefully because, uh, this was, uh, it wasn't just a power outage. It was bad power delivery. It was a massive, massive surge. In fact, I saw two of my neighbors pulling out their refrigerators and throwing them out yesterday because, because of that.

So I was much more lucky than that, but, uh, still, yes, I, I ended up having to spend quite a bit of money, both replacing, uh, power, power surge protectors and, uh, getting a couple things fixed that got a little bit fried. So I have, uh, submitted. So thank you very much for all the thought that you put into that response.

Well, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me. And I'm Ron Schilmeister and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Funks. Grumpy Old Geeks is a partially fan supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to or can't donate, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show.

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

You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 170. Stay on target. Stay on target. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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