174: Morphable Faraday

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 174. I'm Jason DeFilippo here with my co-host... Kyle Roderick. Kyle! Oh my goodness! How did you get in here? Hello? Anyone else in here? No, I don't think Brian is here.

No, he's not here. And I hear you're recording from a closet somewhere in the OC. Trapped in the closet. Yes, I am, Jason. Oh, that is one of the greatest things ever made by the hand of man. I must say that. I love trapped in the closet so much. That whole series. You know, I do have to say, speaking of geek things, the Weird Al, like whole...

Expanse of the cover of that Trapped in the Closet series was fantastic. I have never seen it. I'm going to have to go check that out. Highly recommended. Yes, we'll have to put that in the show notes. So yes, if you haven't guessed, Kyle is not Brian. Brian is trapped in the...

What do you call that? Where the babies live? Because I don't have one, so I don't know. The nursery. Brian is trapped in the nursery. Hello? I'm here. Oh! I lost you there for a second, I thought. Yes, I'm sorry about that. It's okay. It's okay. Yes, Brian is trapped in the nursery.

So we got somebody trapped in the closet to come and help out this week. And since Brian loves beer and you love beer, I thought this would be a fine transition to go here. So Kyle, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. So I co-host a podcast in the mornings. Used to run every day, which I know you just quit your everyday thing. Yeah. I know exactly how hard that is to do it for absolutely no money.

I host the show, co-host the show, On Good Stuff FM, a podcast network that I also co-founded. I feel like we've got a lot in common here, Jason, you and I. It's called Morning Show. It is a morning zoo-style fart jokes, tech news, food-focused trivia extravaganza.

Used to do it every day. Now we're going Tuesdays, Fridays. It's a whole lot of fun. I do it with my brother. He somehow gets his butt out of bed in the morning and does that show with me and is able to keep it together. I'm usually up super early anyway, and that show is a great way to just kind of get me energized in the morning and get moving for the day.

Yeah, it's better than Gatorade. I'm going to get up and do a show. It really is. Unless you haven't done the prep beforehand, and then you wake up and you go, oh my God, I got to do a show. It's awful. It is absolutely awful. Doing it every day, too. Super difficult to prep for. But yeah, we found a way.

I also... So speaking of why I get up super early, I travel all the way up over to where Brian is to work for Untappd, a social drinking application on iPhone, Android, Windows phone. I do design and user experience for them.

I've been working there for about two and a half months now, and it has been fantastic. Third Street, though, in Santa Monica is absolutely bananas. It's great at eight in the morning when I get there, but after that, it is crazy. Okay, so now we have a third-party opinion here.

Brian bitches and moans all the time about Priuses almost killing him on Third Street when he goes down to Finn's for his pub trivia or just out for his bike rides. Can you back up the assertion that Santa Monica Prius drivers are the worst of the worst? I would only say no because there's so many people down there, especially during the summer, that if you cross when you're supposed to cross, not when there are green lights, but when

the walking sign is on, walking sign is on, when you do that, there are enough people that if a Prius shows up, they won't run you over. Okay. You can cross wherever you want. I don't have a problem with it. I think Priuses are fine. I've been driving.

I've actually been driving a Ford C-Max, and it is glorious. I don't even know what the hell that is. It's silent. Completely silent. What is it? A Ford C-Max? Yeah, yeah. Kind of. It's hybrid slash plug-in electric sort of thing.

I just bought a new Ford, and they didn't give me that option. I got an escape because I had to escape the fucking hell that was Southern California. It has zero cargo, though, so that would not have been helpful for you. No, because I own a Black Bear. Yep. And I didn't even say Bam Bam, so you don't have to drink. But you work for a beer company, so feel free to drink.

Yes, please. So, Untappd, it's about drinking socially. What if I want to drink antisocially, which is generally what I want to do? That's fine. Thankfully, you can utilize the Untappd API, which just has a shitload of beers. Tie that into whatever offline application you want.

There are plenty of them out there to check in, keep a selling list, et cetera. I will be starting a Betty Ford app and tie in the Untappd API. Exactly. And you can get AA points, and we'll go from there. Boy. Yeah. The sad thing is, I've actually quit drinking, so I can't even use Untappd anymore.

Yeah. Yep. This is what happens when you get old. I know. I know. I've got to put out there, I don't really feel like a grumpy old geek, but I feel I've just hit that 30 mark. So, old enough, grumpy old enough geek, maybe?

Here's the deal. You're in training. You are a grumpy old geek in training. I've listened to your show. You're definitely on the path. I'm on the spectrum. That's fine. Yes. When Brian and I hang up our hats, we will pass the baton to you, and then you can take it and run with it, and then you can bitch about the flying car Uber service that just came to your town.

Oh, boy. The self-driving drone, whatever. Self-driving flying Uber drone. That's what we need. No, thanks. Okay. We're going to get into the show in a second, but I had to do a little follow-up, because I have talked about Kanye West and his love for the Calabasas McDonald and how he goes to the drive-thru every day, and Brian didn't believe me, and I'm so mad that he's not here, and I should state for the record that, yes, Brian is trapped in the nursery because

he did have his child, Lucas Han Schulmeister. You know, I'm a fanboy for many, many genres of science fiction, but naming your child Lucas Han, I think maybe he has a problem. I'm just saying.

I'm just saying. I don't know how he got, how he, you know what? I think he spelled Lucas differently. That's how he snuck it past the wife. But he spelled it with a K instead of a C. But yeah, yeah. Lucas Han Schulmeister. Yeah. Wonder where that came from. Well, congratulations, Brian.

A hearty congratulations from me here. Yes. An unhearty congratulations from me here, because I think that I'm going to be doing this by myself a lot in the near future, if anything from his text messages today, have anything to say about it. Oh, boy. So going back to the Calabasas McDonald's, Kanye West has penned a poem about said McDonald's called the McDonald's man for the new Frank Ocean magazine, which I don't know.

Here's the thing. I hear about this Frank Ocean album magazine. I don't know who Frank Ocean is, you know, I know Ocean's 11, but I don't know Frank Ocean. Neither do I. And I didn't know that there was going to be like a 300 page zine that came out around the same time that this blonde album, I think is the name of it, came out.

OK. And that's what this poem is from. This is where it was actually published. Yes. I put the poem here in the show notes just so I can. I'm going to randomly I'm going to close my eyes. I have the whole poem here in the window. I'm going to move my mouse around.

I'm going to I'm literally moving the mouse around and I'm going to click a line and I'm going to read the line. Oh, boy. McDonald's, man. OK, that wasn't a good line. I'm going to do it again. To overthrow the French fries plan.

At least it rhymes. And then we'll go to the next one. I always knew them French fries was evil, man. And then apparently the article I got this from just has expletive where all the good stuff is. So it is smelling all good and expletive. So I don't know.

You have to read this. It is so unbelievably bizarre, but it ends with. Last line that smooth apple pie. Now, I knew about Kanye's obsession with whether it be just French fries or McDonald's in general, but I was trying to find YouTube videos of people actually either rapping this or poetry slamming this or something in a McDonald's.

Anything, any sort of YouTube sensation. Nothing. There was nothing out there. There were people trying to analyze what this was about. And McDonald's has actually said they've they said, yes, we know that this exists and we posted about it, but that's it.

And no one else is really talking about it. OK, so could these be the first lines read of Kanye's poetry on a podcast? Could be. Oh, slam it, Jason. Oh, man, we are. We are breaking ground. Oh, them French fries look good, though.

I knew that Diet Coke was jealous of the fries. I knew the McNuggets was jealous of the fries. I could see it through his artificial meat eyes. Really bad. This is really bad. What the hell are artificial meat eyes? I have no idea. This is what happens when you eat Happy Meals every day for 10 years.

Your brain just atrophies and then you just turn into Kanye West. In the news. Obama administration is, quote unquote, privatizing Internet governance.

This is the thing that's going around. This was on the homepage of the Wall Street Journal. I would like to say, get a better headline writer for this. What's happening here is we are finally giving up control of DNS because the United States has been in control of DNS since the beginning of the Internet because we fucking invented it.

But since the Internet is now an international organization of bunches of computers who like to hack us quite a bit, and we are finally giving up control to ICANN on October 1st. That sounds pretty good. I mean, this is something that has been in the works since 2014.

It's not new. It's not new. They put a date on it. They said this is going to happen. They said ICANN's ready for it. And so let's just do it. It's fine. No, it needs to happen. It is. It has to happen. We have to give up the keys to the kingdom because here's what I don't want.

In some bizarre, you know, random world where a TV celebrity might become president, that he would have the big black button that you can press because I'm not going to make it a red button because red buttons are fun. He would have the big black button that could turn off the Internet.

And you can build that right now because we have control of DNS. Would that be the BBB, I guess? That would be the BBB. So this is a good thing. This is a very good thing. But the Republicans are coming out against it. And there was a BBC article, which I there were some things in it that kind of got me thinking about the old the Internet is a series of tubes.

No, I heard I had heard that phrase before. I had no idea that it was a part of a video like a spinning and, you know, GIF moving video. I mean, maybe that's showing my age a little bit, but you never heard that. The Internet is a series of tubes.

Never. OK, well, that's that does show your age. You are definitely a young buck. I apologize now. Yes, this was a I think he was a senator from Alaska and he was actually a friend of a friend who died in a plane crash after this whole thing came out.

And it was that part was kind of sad. But the whole thing where he said the Internet is a series of tubes was a was a big thing back in the day. It was like maybe 10 years ago, but it was very, very, very funny. This episode was going to be called the Internet is a series of tubes. But so many fun things have happened since then.

We have we have had to scrap that one. But yes, the video will be in the show notes. If you have never seen it, definitely go check it out. But the the Internet will survive after we hand it off to ICANN. We're not handing it off to ISIS. We're not handing it off to ISIS.

OK, that's definitely. That's what I thought you said, Jason. No, no, we're handing it off to ICANN. We're not handing it off to Network Solutions, who who are in my book worse than ISIS. But yes, no, ICANN is a global body. They are the people who unfortunately greenlit all those horrible domain names like Dot Ninja.

So but, you know, everybody's got their flaws. Morningshow.am. Facebook has a new app called Life Stage. This is a an app for 21 and under people.

I don't really care about them because I don't know any of them. I prefer not to. Well, actually, well, I kind of do because of Brian now has a 21 and under. But he's he definitely hasn't hit the the 13 year old benchmark for being on Facebook.

But here's the deal. Every profile field in this app is a video. So you have to make a video for every profile field. That to me sounds like a lot of work. I'm old and I will not do it. This sounds like one of those tapes that you would get with someone saying, hi, I'm Kyle.

And I like long walks on the beach and pizza. Things like that. Like you would order these tapes or you would watch it on public access TV and you would see these people. See, now here's here's where I'm confused. You remember public access TV, but you don't remember the Internet is a series of tubes.

You and my friend are a contradiction. I know. I know. Maybe you just watch too much Wayne's World. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's a very scary thing. But here's the thing that lost me. It was designed by a 19 year old named Michael Saman.

Your app is designed by a 19 year old. Now, there are things that 19 year olds know that we don't with how people, you know, the these aren't millennials. These are post millennials. I don't know what the hell we call these kids nowadays. Since nobody can actually agree on what a millennial is.

They're not millennials. But anyone under 22. So I guess we can rope them into whatever life stage users. I have friends in their 30s that call themselves millennials. I'm like, what? I don't get it. But nobody can agree on what a millennial is.

Here's the deal. Design takes experience. And a 19 year old does not have the experience. And I'm thinking a 12 year old design Snapchat. So if a 19 year old design this app, it's probably better than Snapchat. So, you know, maybe it'll have legs.

Maybe it will. The crazy part, though, is that they already have things in place to deal with creepy people who are going to sign up for this. Apparently, if you're over the age of 22, you can only see your own profile. It'll let you join it.

But you can only see your own profile, I guess, to be narcissistic about it. Well, here's the funny thing. And, you know, if you're, you know, if if you're a man of, you know, extended age and you're trying to sign up for these things, the only thing you're ever going to see is your own profile anyway, because nobody's going to be your friend.

And so I don't think that that's actually outside the bounds of what the features would normally be. So I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. Nobody's going to friend you anyway. Put it this way. This is how much faith Facebook has in this product. They the team that created this was the person you mentioned, as well as a team of three engineers and one design contractor.

And that's it. In a company that basically took over Menlo Park, this is nothing. This is the janitor staff. This is this is no one on the Facebook campus. These are unpaid interns, basically. The funny thing about that is it's like, OK, there's a design intern.

If you've ever looked at Facebook, I think the whole fucking thing is built by a design intern or contractor. You know, it is one of the worst designed websites I've ever seen. So I think they're sticking with their guns on that. You know, they're all about hacking the planet, but they're not about making it pretty.

And as a designer yourself, what do you think of it? Have you have you tried it? Have you tried to sneak in as a 30 year old and look at yourself in the in the Facebook mirror of sadness and loneliness? No, no. And I honestly, it's strange working for a social network.

Now I have zero will to be on pretty much any other social networks. I have completely entrenched myself in the world of beer drinking and alcoholic fat white boys. Exactly. So that's that's where I'm going to hang my hat for now.

I'm not going to sign up for L.O. I'm not going to join my own group. I'm not. I'm usually staying out of MZ. Oh, I never even saw that come around. So, no, I'm not on it. Oh, see, if you sign up for MZ, you could at least get a free T-shirt. Hmm.

OK. Yeah. If you wrangle five of your friends and you can get a free T-shirt, I have mine. I will. I have to wait till Brian comes back and take the picture of me in my MZ T-shirt before before we post it. But because I don't have an L.O. T-shirt, but T-shirts are apparently the the the currency of the new the new social network.

Well, welcome to the year 2000. Oh, man. Well, I don't remember getting a LiveJournal T-shirt. I guess that was 97, though. So might be might be pre-textile. Another Facebook one. Oh, oh, my God. I'm looking at the list.

We got two of them. Facebook. This one's going to be quick. Facebook testing auto playing videos with the sound already on. They're testing this in Australia. And the only reason they're testing it in Australia is because there's far away enough that we can't hear them screaming. Turn this fucking thing off.

I have nothing to add. Absolutely not. This is this is not going to. I got press on recode. It's going across the Internet right now. This is not going to happen. No, it's not going to happen. No, no, not going to happen. I mean, this is this is one of those things where kids have these same kids.

The janitorial staff of Facebook has decided, hey, what if we just turn on the sound and then everybody would be like, I'm engaged now because they're I'm like, I don't have to press a button like, no, because you've never had a fucking job where people will be walking in your office and say, what the fuck are you listening to?

You're supposed to be doing spreadsheets, asshole. Exactly. It gives you the same feeling that downloading Vine did where it would just immediately start playing things and screaming in your face because everyone wanted to be noticed. This is a definitely a persistent issue on the L.A.

Metro that I now take every single day. Everyone on Facebook is listening to these videos and playing them straight away. So I don't know. Without headphones? Yes. Without headphones. Oh, this is why I had a nervous breakdown and why I left Los Angeles.

Last one. Here's where Facebook's being semi-altruistic. They're giving away the software it uses to understand objects and photos. This is there's a couple of different projects here. One's deep mask, sharp mask and then multi-path net. This is not what they're actually using on the live site.

This is, I think, the dregs that they figured out were kind of OK, but not really working. And it's what they were using to describe photos for blind users, which is pretty cool. You know, and if somebody is smart enough, they can take this code and reverse engineer it and maybe build something out of it.

I think that's cool. You know, some of the Facebook open source stuff, I'm behind. But this is I wish they would give away the stuff that they were actually using. But I think the CIA probably has rights for that for a while. Or something better.

And this is this is really this is the plebe stuff. This is the bottom of the barrel. The worst image recognition that they they could have dropped up with their small, tiny team. You take a picture of bread and they like, yes, bread toast. Maybe something.

It's some sort of yeasty product. Might be rye. Might be toasted. We don't know. But it is definitely bread. Mm hmm. Definitely not a terrorist. We don't do that. It's not a terrorist. Speaking of social networks, Jason, Twitter apparently is the place where folks in Silicon Valley go to die.

Their careers, at least. This does not surprise me. I know a lot. I know a lot of very smart people that went to Twitter. Some of them were the founders and their careers have gone to die. So reportedly, at least what this article is getting at, it's saying since Dorsey took the helmet Twitter, the company has shed almost a dozen top level employees, including heads of engineering, HR, communications, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, down the line.

Now, the point they bring up is that in the majority of these cases, these executives are basically unknown after they leave Twitter. Of course, they're there and then they leave Silicon Valley never to be seen ever again now.

Yeah, because you know what? Here's what they don't tell you in the contract when you sign up for Twitter. Your career only lasts 140 days. Sure. Then it's over. Then you're deleted. Well, the contract's only 140 characters. So, I mean, you can only fit so much in there. Yeah.

No, this doesn't surprise me. I know, like I said, I know people that work there and it's an abattoir for people's souls. They come in, they think that they're doing the best thing that they can do, and the upper management team generally beats them to death.

And then they go away going, I never want to work in technology again. Sure. And some of the examples that they're giving out are saying, hey, this person worked at Apple for 14 years. Then they went to Twitter. They lasted four months and then they left.

Oh, they must have not been believing in what they were doing. And I think it doesn't have to do with that at all. I think it most definitely has to do with they've been in technology for 15 years and they realize how fucked up Silicon Valley is and they want no part of it.

And they want to go live on a farm somewhere and not get the farm, but they want to live there. They want to completely shut off the world and live away from what Silicon Valley is turning into, which is just a complete and utter bubbly shit storm waiting to explode.

You know what? That is a very astute observation because I think these people that have lived in the Valley and worked in the Valley for that amount of time, I was in it for 21 years. So these people that went from Apple for, you know, 14, 15 years, they look at a place like Twitter and Google and Facebook, like with all the money that they're throwing around and the options they're throwing around.

They're thinking, I can go there, work for a couple of years, cash out and then go literally buy the farm, which, you know, I don't think they found the irony in that one. But and there are two options here. Either, yes, they figured out that, like I did, it's really stupid to stay in tech when you're a person of a certain age because you cannot get hired.

And or they went to Twitter. They got such a good deal that they cashed out and can now literally go by that farm and are like, fuck you, San Francisco out. Drop the mic. If stock options are a part of that 140 character deal that they got, for sure, you're in, you hit your 90 days, you're out.

Hey, you only need seven characters of that to be a millionaire. That is true. Yeah. Speaking of things that die, Jason. Yes. Pokemon Go is apparently on the decline. Ten million users are now gone from the game, I guess.

Augmented reality, whatever we're calling it now. It's a game, I guess. It's definitely a game. Yeah. Engagement's down. Downloads are down. Time spent in the app is down. Are you still playing? No, I'm not. I still, I walk around my neighborhood because my neighborhood is kind of, you know, I'm in the Midwest.

I have many Poké stops and gyms in the neighborhood. And I walk by my dog several times a day and I go by all of these areas. And when it first came out, there were hundreds of people in the local park playing Pokemon Go. Now, maybe three.

So, at different times a day, you know, depends on when school's out. Kids are back in school, so it's a little bit different. But when it first started, I mentioned this on the show before. There's an LRAD on the top of the bandshell here in town. And when there are too many kids that assemble in the bandshell, they fire up the LRAD and make them disperse.

Wow. The LRAD has not been fired since at least maybe a month after Pokemon Go came out or how many weeks it's been. It's, you know, it was like three weeks where there was, you know, lots of kids playing. And literally, they would fire up the LRAD.

And me and the dog were walking by and I'm like, what the fuck is that? And they're like, oh, it's the thing on the top. And I look at it, I'm like, that's an LRAD. Okay. And if you don't know what an LRAD is, Google it. It's not a pleasant thing to hear. And fortunately, it was only pointed at the children because I was on the other side of it.

If you're going to harm the children, that's fine. I was on the other side. I'm a taxpaying adult sometimes. And I had a dog who has very sensitive hearing. So I was very happy about that. Man, I can only imagine. Well, so I'm over in Santa Monica, like I said. That apparently is the Pokemon Go capital of the world.

People go there to every 10 feet. But there's a stop. There's dinosaur things. There's little statues. There's the pier. Folks are going from all over L.A. County just to go to that area and, I guess, make the journey across Third Street to just get Pokemon.

I have not seen people with their phones out. I literally work right there. And I have not opened my application while sitting at my desk to catch Pokemon. So it's just not it's not catching my fancy anymore, I suppose.

What level did you make it to? 17? Oh, my God. You kicked my ass. I'm at like nine. Okay. Okay. Well, so there's all these mechanics in the app that I think they held off on in these early stages to where we can push it out in six months, try and get engagement and users back into the app.

Maybe you deleted it. Maybe you download it again. I think the numbers it's shark finning right now. But I think the numbers eventually will start to go back up around the holiday times when people have more time. There's two issues here.

I don't think we can call this a shark fin because a shark fin is rapid adoption, massive fall off. This has had a fairly slow adoption. I mean, it had a rapid adoption and then kind of plateaued and then dropped off. So it would be kind of like a shark fin that got cut off in the middle.

And so you have a you have a ramp and a plateau and then a drop. So maybe it's a free willy since it's kind of folds over the top. This is a family show. Don't talk about that. Sorry about pornography kind of thing. Jesus. I invited you on here because I thought you were a classy motherfucker, but not at all.

Okay. So Pokemon Willie. That's what we're talking about now. Yeah, it's I think what's going to happen is I think it'll kick back up on the weekends. When the kids are or you know what they need to do. They need to start putting Pokemon stops in schools. And then that's why we can we can really, you know, streamline education and and really get to the next level.

But they were the device. You know, the devices are coming, right? Right. So once the devices come, I think we might see another uptick because the holiday shopping season's coming and we know that kids like devices. Oh, yeah, that's true. I just pasted an image in there for you to see exactly what I'm talking about.

That's the free willy. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. That actually, yes. I think we have a new technology term instead of the shark fin. That is the free willy. Please put that in the show notes, by the way, because I don't want to. I don't want people to think that I just sent you a dick pic at all.

No, this is not a dick pic. Okay. You might be a dick, but this is not a pic of your day. Oh, my God. I've never seen free willy, and now I never will. Instapaper, one of the early inventions of Marco Arment, the little butt boy of the Internet.

I'm not a fan because I used to run a site called blogrolling.com back in the day, and I did all of the technology that he built for Instapaper, but he's a millionaire and I'm not. So we call this the sour grapesification of the Internet, and so he sold Instapaper for a lot of money, and he worked on Tumblr for a while doing the same stuff that I did with CMSs.

Yes, I am. I am Mr. Sour Grapes, but that's fine. Jason, bitter. Yes, I am. I am a bitter old motherfucker. No, no problem there. But Instapaper was sold to this little consortium in New York, and they have dumped it now to Pinterest.

And here's the thing. Nobody cared. Nope. Nope. Everybody that cared about Instapaper stopped using it when Marco sold it, and everybody went to Pocket after that or any of the other read later ones. I personally went to Pinboard. And if you want a really funny account to follow on Twitter, follow the guy that makes Pinboard.

He is one of the quintessential grumpy old geeks, a smart guy, and a smart ass. So. Yeah. Not super frequent posts, but a very good follow. Oh, no. Actually, when he goes on a tear, he goes on a tear. True.

So. That is true. Yeah. But he's a funny dude. The crazy thing about this whole acquisition, the terms of the deal. No, it's not an acquisition. It's an acquire. True. True. Everyone's moving over to San Francisco. Yeah. It's kind of crazy.

Terms not disclosed. They're going to operate as a standalone app. It just sounds like Betaworks had been shopping this around for three years and finally got someone to bite. Yeah. It's like, oh, Marco gave us a bill of goods, and now we have to get rid of this thing.

Gosh, I don't want this. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to take a web page and turn it into text and save it in a database. Hmm. Oh, that's fucking tough. Well, the crazy part, I guess, and the part that folks could potentially have issues with is they're going to try and turn it more social.

They're going to make Instapaper have recommendations and try and suggest things or try and freemium it. And they've been trying to do all of this in the meantime after they had been acquired. And apparently it's just not working. So, hey, let's throw some pretty pictures in there and try and extend it into Pinterest users.

It's a dead tech. It's a dead tech. Nobody cares anymore. You know, honestly, nobody cares anymore. This was very important at the time. It did what we needed it to do. You know what it needed to do? It needed to save a web page when I was riding the subway. That's all it needed to do.

Nobody cares anymore. Honestly, you know what I think they're doing? I think they're listening to podcasts, which is what they should be doing. So, screw Instapaper, Viva La Podcast. Woo! All right. Uber has lost $1.2 billion in the first half of 2016.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys. But yeah, that's a, that is an unfathomable, unfathomable, I couldn't even say the fucking word, amount of money. How do you lose $1.27 billion unless you're the United States government handing out bundles of $100 bills to Iraqis?

That's the only other time I've ever heard of that much money going away. Just drop that airplane. Just shh. Yeah. I'm like, obviously, you know what? If they were giving bundles of money to the Uber drivers, we wouldn't be, we wouldn't have a show.

Well, that seems to be apparently the reason that Bloomberg, the automated video that started playing right when I visited this page, seems to think. So, they're giving their drivers subsidies and saying, hey, we're going to pay you a higher, we're going to pay you a livable wage, and then we're not going to make that much money off of it because we're not going to charge people that much money.

That flies in the face of everything that has ever come out of what is going on with Uber and the news about their drivers. Nobody can make any money on Uber. So, if they're subsidizing people who can't even make a living wage, there's definitely a problem there.

It's not a subsidy. It's money. Like, you're paying me to do my job. What about me doing my job as a subsidy? I don't get it. But, they also apparently attribute it to trying to expand into other markets, including China, places.

That didn't work. They had to sell. Nope. And so, they're completely gone. And apparently, that has also contributed to this $1.2 billion, with a B, loss in this first half of 2016. Yes. And just to put it in perspective, that is $1,000 million.

That's, I mean, when you have to wrap your head around a billion dollars, that is a million dollars times $1,000. They gave away $1,000 million. A 0.21 perception. That's a lot. Just carry a decimal over a little bit, and then somehow have that just go straight into my bank account.

If you lost, just lose it over here. Lose it to me. Well, yeah. You know what? I will drive in a circle and take old ladies to the grocery store every day for like, you know, a millionth of a percent of that, because that would still be more than I make right now. So, I'll take it. So, Kyle, you're a pizza fan.

I am. Huge pizza fan. You're a huge pizza fan. And I think that, I think the reason that I had you on the show is because we are compadres in the fact that we both love cold pizza. Team cold pizza. Team cold pizza. Yes. We have covered Domino's, drones, and robots.

Well, actually, we haven't covered the drones yet. We've covered the robots on this show. But it has apparently come to fruition. So, Kyle, would you please tell me about Domino's pizza drones? The flying pizza, Jason. Flying pizza. So, what's happening right now?

Sorry. Isn't it like the flying spaghetti monsters, like, arch nemesis? That's what it seems like. The evil flying pizza. Now, if you were cut by a pizza, Jason, on your hand, and it bled, it was actually just tomato sauce. Okay. From the drone, because you cut yourself.

I do like thin crust, so I can see getting cut by a pizza crust. Yeah. That's a possibility. So, Domino's. Oh, I'll get back to the story. Domino's has been given the green light, apparently, to test, in New Zealand, pizza delivery via drones. Now, the fast food chain has partnered with the drone business Flirty, I guess, to launch the first commercial drone delivery service in the world starting later this year.

Now, we know that 7-Eleven has already delivered some food. I don't think that pizza was part of that cargo. No, pizza was definitely not part of that cargo. There are probably chili dogs and Tums in that delivery. Slurpee, and yeah. Yeah, some other good stuff.

Doritos, maybe the stuffed ones. You know, gross, right? Yeah. Domino's said that it would use drone delivery alongside its usual delivery methods. So, a drone's just going to be, I don't know, a helper? It'll just show up into the pizza shop and say, hey, load me up if you want to load me up.

Because it's only offering this pizza drone delivery in a certain distance from the store, I guess. And it won't offer the full range of products. So, it'll only be probably small personal pan pizzas, thin crust, something that's not heavy.

Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, you got to go thin crust. If you're going drone, you know, you have weight ratio things to have to really kind of think about, you know, not too much sausage, definitely no stuffed crust, because the stuffed crust would screw up the balance on the drone. So, you have to deal with it, you know, avionics when you're dealing with drone delivery.

I feel like you wouldn't be able to have toppings on there at all, because they can kind of be asymmetrical with where the toppings are placed. Well, that's why we need pizza scientists actually creating the slices for the drones. Or just robots making the pizza. Just get rid of all the people.

That's coming. It's coming. It's coming. I'm 100% fine with that. Speaking of robots, Singapore is going to be the first place in the world that is going to have a fully self-driving taxi service. I've been to Singapore. I don't know if I would get into a self-driving taxi in Singapore, but it's better than a tuk tuk in Thailand, for sure.

A company called Newtonomy that is out of MIT is going to be launching up to 1,000 of these by 2018. So, here's the deal. It's only in the business district, which does have really nice streets, really good markings, and we'll get to the reason why that's important later in the show.

But we'll see how this goes. There's still going to be an engineer in the car that has his foot on the brake. It's like, you know, your grandpa doing the driver's ed stuff. But we'll see how it goes. Yeah, and they only have six cars right now. So, they plan on having dozens by the end of the year.

But it's just... But up to 1,000 when they're in 2018. Okay. All right. I mean, I... Hey, dream big. Dream big. Singapore is small, but they dream big. Not saying I don't believe them, but to have a researcher in the backseat and someone behind the wheel the entire time that this is happening, this doesn't...

I mean, this just sounds like publicly available something that Google has been doing for the last five years in the Bay Area anyway. This doesn't sound like a huge leap for self-driving taxis. But it's at MIT and MIT guys are smart. That's true.

So, we'll see. It's true. And Google's self-driving cars are imploding. Ford's on the market. And we'll get to the stuff in Pittsburgh in a second. But yeah, there's so many people right now that are like... This is almost off-the-shelf technology. So, it's getting to the point where we're going to hit a tipping point really fast.

And then everything's going to crash. And then it's going to take another five years before it's actually commercially available. But we'll see. Sorry. I just had to laugh and take a breath for a second. Because we keep talking about this stuff. And it's just like, oh my god, this guy's falling.

This guy's falling. The taxis will be driving us to CVS. No, they won't be. Not for quite some time. NPR. We like NPR, don't we? Because they have podcasts. Yeah. Mostly. Yeah, sure. Serial. Season 2.

Fuck off. The NPR website is going to get rid of comments. Now, I put this in here because we are grumpy old geeks. And comments on websites are something that we all pioneered back in the... Well, when comments became available on websites.

We made that stuff. Pioneer days. Yes. There are going to be no more comments on the NPR website. And since it's public radio, you'd think that the public could talk about the stuff that's on the radio. No. Apparently, the reason that they're taking it off the website is because nobody comments on the website anymore.

Right. The argument was apparently that most folks are doing this on social media anyway right now. And the total number, once you got down to it, month after month after month, combining three months together, a mere 2,600 users out of whatever, the 33 million you need.

Yeah, exactly. Are actually writing comments on the website, which is no one. These are either rampant trolls coming back and writing whatever it is on the latest serial episode. I don't know what you can do. But who knows?

There obviously is no reason to keep this around if only a very, very, very, very small percentage of their users are using it. I can see the product decision here. Yeah, and we've been seeing this for a decade now. The decline of comments on websites has been just, it has been a downward trend.

I feel really bad for the guys that discuss the outsourced comment system. They have to be just sweating bullets. You know, it's, those guys, and I know a couple other companies that were in the comment space. It's just, it's dead. It's dead.

You know, Twitter, where comments go to die. Or live, for that matter, honestly.

Security? Ha! We are back this week with our good friend David Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. Hello, Dave. How are you? Hello, doing well, doing well. Been a busy week this week. Lots to talk about. Well, then let's cut to it. I hear Apple has done some goodness out there.

Yeah, that's right. There's a, there is an update to iOS 9. It's iOS 9.3.5. And if you have an iOS device, do not delay. Go ahead and update your device as quickly as possible. Yes, don't dawdle. Don't dawdle, people. Because this one's, this one's actually serious.

Yeah, this is a serious one. And hats off to Apple for, for patching. This one quickly for responding in a way that aligns with how serious the attack was. So what happened was there was an activist from the UAE.

His name is Ahmed Mansour. He got a fishy-looking SMS text message. He sent it off to the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, and they recognized this text message as indeed being malware. It's from an exploit chain called Trident, which is from a group called NSO Group, an Israeli-based firm.

And they sell what they refer to as government-exclusive lawful intercept spyware products. They sell zero days, basically. They sell zero days. So this is a group of zero days for iOS devices. They are not cheap. So this isn't the sort of thing where you're going to have script kitties and hackers out, you know, tossing these around at you.

But, you know, once they get out in the wild, then people go ahead and try to use them. So it was reported to Apple. Apple turned this around in about two weeks and pushed out the patch. So please don't delay, don't dawdle. If you're on iOS, go ahead and make that upgrade. It's an important one.

Yeah, and the interesting thing about this is this is a non-feature upgrade. This is just to patch these security holes. So that's how important it is that Apple would push an update that is just security, that they're that bad. Yeah, it's a pretty light update, too. I actually did it last night, and it's not a large package.

So they're just laser-focused on this. That's what she said. Thank you very much. But I'm pumped. Please tip your waiters. So the problem with this is that I was looking forward to my beta 6 of iOS 10, the public beta. Yep. It came for my iPad.

No big deal. Got it. Got there. Went to check my phone. Not available. Talked to my friends who were on the beta. Like, oh, yeah, I got it last night. This was like in the morning yesterday, and I'm just like, oh, yeah, we got it last night. They pulled the beta 6 patch, apparently, for auto-update, and I can't get it now.

So I think they're going back and maybe applying this patch to the beta 6 update. Yeah. But, I mean, that's the only thing I can think of, because I can't get my beta 6. Poor baby. I know. It makes sense, though. And better safe than sorry.

Yeah. But that means right now I'm still vulnerable. So, can I at least have my beta 6 features while we wait? You know, before you push beta 7? So, at least you can be having fun while you're being completely compromised. Exactly. I can have that little scribble thing that they have, and I hate that thing, and I need to find a way to turn it off.

Man. All right. Anyway. Okay. Now, this one I found just for you, because you are a Baltimore adjacent, I believe? Yeah, we are in Baltimore. You're in Baltimore, okay. I live just outside of Baltimore, but our offices are, if you've ever been to the Baltimore Inner Harbor, that's where we are.

We are right down by the water. And so, yeah, this story certainly hits home for us. Okay, yeah. So, this is a story about a plane that circles Baltimore that was funded by some, what are they from, Texas?

These Texas billionaires who made their money on Enron, by the way. And they're taking pictures of Baltimore all the time from a plane in live video, sending it back to the Baltimore PD to follow up on crimes. So, you are being tracked 24-7 from a plane in Baltimore.

That's what this is about. And it came from Bloomberg, and it's a great article. Well-written. Yeah. Well-researched. And the video, it's a seven-minute video, well worth watching, because it's fascinating. It really is. I love the way they described it as basically being a DVR in the sky.

Yeah, it was like TiVo for Google Earth. Right, right. So, imagine, you know, it's basically a Cessna, you know, flying around over the city, and it has an array of cameras that are videotaping, you know, constantly, and the computers take the feeds from those cameras and stitch them together.

So, you get this full view of the entire city, a video of the entire city from above. It is not high resolution, so while you can see cars moving around, you can see people moving around, you can't tell what make and model of the car is, you can't identify anyone specifically.

But the police are already using this to solve crimes, because you can tell, you know, a car left this garage at this time of day, and it went onto this street, and it drove down this road, and it stopped in this parking lot for this amount of time, and that can help with an investigation.

Yeah, because what they can do is they can track a crime, and then scrub backwards to find out where the origin point of that vehicle was, where the end point of that vehicle was, and deduce from that who the bad guys are, and then send people out to arrest them. And, you know, on the surface, I'm all in for this.

This does not bother me. Yes, it is rife for the abuse of power, but when used responsibly, I think this is a great technology. The only, it's 192 megapixels of video, which is insane, and it's streamed in real time, also insane.

Yeah. And it's a 30 square mile block, which, from one little plane, and this is, you know, this came out of military tech. The guy who created this did this for the military back in 2007 when they needed ways to find people who were leaving IEDs in war zones.

Right. And then he came back home and then, you know, commercialized it and has been updating it. But he can't find anybody that's going to pay for it. That's the thing. The ACLU is pretty much blocking him at every turn. So are you creeped out by this? No. I think I share your concerns.

I think this sort of thing is inevitable. Right? Yeah. I think certainly there are good uses for this. I think, you know, already it's being used to solve crimes. I think the troubling side of this is the police thought that they needed to do this without telling anyone.

They thought they needed to fund this through a third party foundation so that the money was hard to trace and it didn't show up on the books. So, you know, that's interesting. It's sort of a beta program. I think if you're going to do something like this, it has to be out in the open.

And I also think that judicial oversight is absolutely critical. I think before anybody goes and has access to that DVR in the sky, someone needs to run it by a judge and say, this is why we want to look at this. Because I could very easily see someone going to the guy sitting in front of the monitor and saying, hey, I would really like to know where my political rival went last night.

Or where was my wife? Or where was my wife? Right. As simple as that. Yep. And yeah, I mean, that's the part of it that concerns me. I think it could absolutely do good things for the community. I think it could help increase safety and help solve crimes and all those sorts of things. But I think we have to err on the side of being careful with it because it's certainly, it could certainly be abused.

Yes, absolutely. And you know, right now the resolution is not great. But as we know from Moore's law and history, the resolution will come down very quickly because it's not that expensive to get better resolution cameras. It's a 12, yeah, 12 camera array right now.

So make it a 24 camera array, you know, put better zooms on them, get better cameras. That's all you got to do. Planes in the sky at a lower altitude. You know, there's lots of ways to make this, you know, higher resolution. So, you know, interesting trial run.

Again, you know, there are troubling parts of this about me. I'm not opposed to it, you know, outright, but I really do think we need some kind of oversight. You know, it's a who watching the Watchmen kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. And also what happens when this isn't just a dude in a Cessna out there for 10 hours a day, but what happens when it's a solar powered, you know, drone that stays up there 24-7 and there's 100 of them, you know?

Right. And what happens when someone puts one up there just for commercial use, just for, you know, plain old, you know, figuring out, you know, when does Jason go to the store? When does Jason do his shopping? Yeah. You know? And honestly, that's not illegal because you're out in public.

Right. There's no expectation of privacy in public. So, you know, we talk about this all the time. There's this sort of shift of as they're able to vacuum up more information about you, do we have to recalibrate our expectations of privacy or come at it from the other direction and kind of maybe dial back what you are allowed to vacuum up in public?

And so lots to think about and discuss with that. Yeah. No, I mean, we can come up with facial recognition busting masks right now, so we're going to have to come up with busting hats so people can't tell who we are. We're going to have to have, you know, morphing hats so they change shape as we walk down the street so it can't lock onto us.

Right. Just clever camouflaged umbrellas. And speaking of facial recognition, that is pretty good. I like the camouflage umbrellas. Facebook. Actually, it's not about Facebook. It's about facial recognition. How it can be tricked by using the simplest of Facebook photos.

So if you're trying to, like, spoof somebody's facial identity, you can go get a bunch of their Facebook photos that are always taken at different angles. Not everybody is doing, like, ID photos because they're all in different shapes and movements and facial expressions, happy, sad.

So you can get a full range of expression. Then you just map that onto a 3D model and hold it up in front of a facial recognition camera. This is a combination of a bunch of different technologies, you know. We've seen for a while, you know, systems that are able to kind of gather up a bunch of photos from a different location and turn them into a 3D model of that location.

And so being able to do that with people's faces is sort of inevitable. And I mean, as far as biometrics go, we've even seen people with, you know, a DSLR at a conference when somebody, some person raises their hand on the dais, they can take a picture of their hand, then print a copy of their fingerprint and use that as an actual biometric to get into a, you know, into a system.

Yeah, and as we've talked about before, the thing about biometrics is that they are, they are secure, they are, they can be very convenient, but they're not changeable. They're not changeable and they are utterly copyable. Right, so once your fingerprints are compromised, your fingerprints are compromised because they are yours for life, you know, same with your retina scan, same with your face.

You know, if you want to get, once DNA scanners get cheap enough, they'll be like, oh, here's a, give us a little blood. Oh, let's, let's, or give us a swab of your, your cheek and put that in the scanner to open up for your, your 1Password account. It amazes me, you know, I, I use Google Photos for some of our, our family photos.

I find it a convenient place to, to store and archive photos and it amazes me how Google Photos is able to keep track of my children even as they age. Oh yeah. You know, so the shapes of their faces are changing, their haircuts are changing and it still manages to know who's who.

Because I think the, yes, the, the shape of their faces is changing, but the geometry is not that different. It's just expanding. That's right. So I think the variance over time, it just learns that, oh, this is somebody getting older. These are smart people. They figure that stuff out.

Yep. And speaking of smart things that this part, this one, I am fascinated by this story and it's from the Atlantic, which I generally don't go for my technology news, but it's an article called All the Ways Your Wi-Fi Router Can Spy on You.

Mm-hmm. And I had never thought about this kind of, this technology being something that wasn't just how do I get my Pokemon Go when I'm sitting in my living room, you know? Right. Right. What they're doing is they're taking Wi-Fi signals and the variance in Wi-Fi signals based on how the signal changes when there are disturbances in the room and the Wi-Fi has

to kind of route around, it kind of comes down to like how they deal with signal degradation and strength to, to get you the best signal. It's just, this is kind of like a, a, a side chain of just them trying to make Wi-Fi better. Right.

And what they can do is- Multiple antennas. Yeah. And so you're, basically we're big bags of meat and water. That's right. Some of us more than others. Tell me about it, brother. Tell me about it, brother. So when we walk into a room, like signal impedance changes, and then they can kind of figure out by looking at how the signal changes, who just walked in the room?

Which is just insane. Right. Now it does, the system does have to be trained. So, you know, it has to learn different body shapes. And then it can identify them later. So tie that into your Google photos and your, your home Wi-Fi and you're, you know, Bob's your uncle.

Well, yeah. I mean, what struck me is it could be an interesting methodology for home security where, you know, if you train your Wi-Fi system to recognize everyone in your family, if suddenly it sees something moving through your home that is not your family and it knows, you know, you're, you're out of the house, then maybe it alerts you and says, you should take a look at your security camera because there's a bag of meat moving through the house that ain't you.

And it would be interesting if it's like your friend down the block who's come to your house and visited a few times, like your neighbor came over a couple of times and it knows, hey, that's Joe from down the street. He just broke into your house when he saw you go to the store. That would be kind of interesting. Right, right, right. If it could, yeah, correlate with someone who'd been in the house before.

Or, or correlate with every other Wi-Fi router in the neighborhood and say, hey, we've got this same pattern down the block or we've got this pattern on the other side of town. So it's, it could be, yeah, hey man, I love, I love me some sci-fi here. So that just, just, you know, extrapolate it out.

How does that work when, when you can profile people based on their sack of meat and, and walking down the street, you know, take your cell phone signal while you're actually out looking for Pokemon Go, it knows where you're at, where you're pinging, where your phone's pinging, then it correlates that to when you go home, you know, I, I love the big brother type of stuff, but yeah.

Get, get, get started on that screenplay. I definitely have to. The thing about this, the thing about this, it can actually read lips and it can do key logging with fairly good accuracy. Yeah, it's, you know, I, I say this often, you know, clever humans, this is, uh, just being able to tune in on the most subtle changes in signals, um, and, and having the processing

power available to look at such fine detail allows them to, to, uh, get all sorts of information out of these signals. And, um, it's kind of magical in a way. It is. It's like, it's one of those things when, when we started this show, I was so, I was almost anti-tech because I knew that things like this were on the horizon, but as they start to come over the horizon, I'm kind of fascinated by it now.

I'm just like, okay, we're screwed. Forget it. Privacy's dead. You know, okay. We got drones in the sky. We got, but the fact that your wifi router can actually do this is unbelievably kind of cool. It's definitely cool tech. It'll be interesting to see if it actually ever comes to anything.

You know, I, I, as with all these things, it's something that could be used for good or evil. I'm starting a new clothing line. Morphable Faraday. That'll be the, so that's it. That's a, that's a, that's a great DJ name. Don't you think? Morphable Faraday.

Morphable Faraday. With the stacks of wax and the platters that matter. Yeah. Put me on a gurney. That was an hour of journey. All right. Right. All right. All right. We should probably move along. Let's move on. I'm having too much fun though.

Go on. Okay. Next one. All right. So there was a hack to a gamers forum. Grand Theft Auto forum was hacked and the bad guys got about 200,000 gamers identities and other personal information. This is from a fan site, GTA gaming.

And they got about 200,000 IDs out of that one. This is, this is actually the tip of the iceberg because the actual hack comes from vBulletin, which is one of those really horrible PHP bulletin board systems that nobody wrote properly.

It was, I mean, it was, it's a mess. I've read, I've read the code on these things and tried to fix them and they're just, they're, they're a total shit show. Okay. And vBulletin is, vBulletin and PHPBB are the two main offenders on this, but there were over 27 million actual identities taken or logins and credentials taken from a total of 11 websites.

Most of them were in Russia. The Grand Theft Auto hack was just one of the, the, the few that were here in the US, I believe. Yeah. Another one was Epic Games. They had 800,000 accounts taken. Yeah, but it's in the millions from literally 11 websites.

Moving on, there's, there's a, Matthew Green, who's a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, another place right here in Baltimore near us, has, he and his team at Johns Hopkins did some research on iMessage's encryption.

And of course, Apple likes to, likes to say and sort of crow about how iMessage uses end-to-end encryption, which is a good thing. Um, but, uh, Matt Green and his gang discovered that iMessage's protocols are not terribly secure.

And in fact, they have some, some pretty significant weaknesses in them. Um, what's interesting, um, about this, obviously I'm not an expert when it comes to cryptography, but, uh, we have people who help us on the Cyber Wire who are. I spoke with one of our experts this week, Jonathan Katz, and he was, uh, he was saying he was fascinated by this story because the, the weaknesses that were discovered in iMessage are the kinds of things that he teaches in his intro to cryptography class at the University of Maryland.

Don't! Just like, um, yeah, just real basic stuff that, but he made the point that, um... Wait, are you saying that iMessage uses, like, root 13? Well, I, I don't know. But he would, his, his point was that this is what can happen when you roll your own.

You know, Apple came up with their own encryption protocol in-house, um, and if they had gone with something that was standard, you know, something that had been really, you know, beat upon by, by the public, by, you know, sort of peer reviewed, then this sort of basic, uh, 101 level vulnerability doesn't happen when you use industry standard stuff.

So it's sort of an object lesson in, um, in roll, not rolling your own, uh, why standards are, are a good thing in general. And, um, so we'll see what happens if, uh, if this gets patched by Apple or how they, uh... So this wasn't part of the, the patch that came out this week?

Actually, uh, Matthew Green and his group, they did report this to Apple, and Apple has implemented, uh, sort of short-term patches to, uh, to take care of the, the, the better part of the issues that they, that they discovered. Um, but, uh, they're saying that, um, Apple really should do a major overhaul of the iMessage protocol, uh, and then really look forward to, uh, maybe not rolling their own in the future.

Oh, that's great. I'm glad, I'm glad to, hopefully, you know. At least, we're safe for now. For now. Yeah, and, and I think, you know, it's, uh, end-to-end protocol is a good thing. So, um, you know, I, I, I don't think Apple's incorrect in, in pushing that and, and saying that, that, that overall, that's a good thing to, uh, to have happen.

But it does mean that perhaps your iMessaging isn't as secure as you thought it was. Okay, so protect your eggplant emoji, you know, midnight sexting people. That's right. That's right. You never know who's, who's looking. I recall way, way back in the day, someone said to me, never put anything online or in any sort of electronic form of communications that you wouldn't put on a postcard.

All right. So I want to, I want to wrap up this week with a story that we just love, uh, the Cyber Wire. We, we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, we tried to shine as bright a light on this this week as possible. This is from, um, Pflugerville, Texas. Uh, KXAN, which is an NBC affiliate, did a story on a fourth grader cyber security project.

And we just love this, we love this young lad. He, uh, he set up a Wi-Fi hotspot in the local mall and, uh, he set up a, he put a, a, uh, terms of agreement on the, on the hotspot. So before you logged onto the hotspot, you had to agree to the terms of, of agreement.

Uh, he had an hype, he had a hypothesis that more than 50% of people would, um, would click through without reading the terms and agreement. Uh, and in the terms of agreement, he said things like, do not connect to this Wi-Fi hotspot.

If you are reading this, do not go any farther. You know, like he could not have been more overt that this is a dangerous thing. You should not connect to it. You were a fool if you're connecting to it. Did he, did he, did he throw it in all your bases belong to us just for good measure? I, I sure hope he did, but, uh, he, he, he guessed that about 50% of people would log on and he was just about right.

There were 76 people who connected and 40 of them accepted the terms and conditions. Wow. Yeah. I love, I love this kid. He is, he is our next Kevin Mitnick. Yeah. Hopefully on the, on the, more on the white hat side than the, the black hat.

Yeah. This young man's name is Evan Robertson and, uh, hats off to, uh, hats off to heaven, to Evan. I think, uh, he's definitely going places. Hopefully we'll see big, big things from him in the future. I think he's probably on a, on a private plane on his way to Google at this point. That's right.

Uh, he was actually invited to speak at DEF CON, uh, in Las Vegas. See, I'm telling you, yeah. Okay. So get your kids on this. You know, if you want, if you want your kids to be superstars, teach them, teach them cybersecurity now. So, uh, you know, a happy, happy little story to end our little security segment for this week.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Dave. And we will talk to you again next week. And everybody check out the cyber wire. Comment of the week. Brian is not here, but we are still doing comment of the week because he's here in spirit and in baby poop.

So to kick us off this week, take it away, Kyle. This is coming from, uh, iTunes. Jason, it just says, okay. By San Kaur. San Kaur. Just says all. They say all. All is the, uh, the, the comment.

It was a five star. So I don't care what it says. It could say fuck off and die, but it was a five star. So thank you, San Kaur. Thank you so much. We appreciate it very, very much. And this, this comes to us from anonymous. Anonymous wants to know, Jason, the VPN ad on your site.

Period. Yes. Interested in, into buying a plan. Period. What are your guys's opinions on it? Is it worth the $40 a year? Does it make a difference in your internet speed? Okay. Anonymous. Here's the deal. Uh, we wouldn't be actually advertising it if we did not believe in it.

Uh, we both use it. I use it every day. I especially use it when I'm going to Sweden to go find the latest bad Hollywood movie because Hollywood movies have become terrible. But yes, I do go to Sweden on, uh, our VPN. Here's the deal with the VPN.

It will definitely make a difference in your internet speed. It will knock it down based on the distance from you and the VPN servers. Because how it works is you cryptographically connect from your computer to another computer. And then your traffic is what we call tunneled through that connection to those servers.

Those servers go out, get all the goodies and send it back to you. So nobody can see what's happening in between there. That's why it's called a virtual private network because it's private. But since you're going to those computers, so there's a lot of steps in between. And I have a connection that gets me around eight megabytes per second down on an average, you know, file download.

With a VPN, the VPN that we promote, private internet access, I will get between two and four, depending on where I'm connecting to, from where I'm connecting to. So if I'm in Romania and I'm connecting to the UK, it could be slower. If I'm in Romania and I'm connecting to Cleveland, it will definitely be slower.

But if I'm in Cleveland connecting to New York, pretty snappy. So hope that clears it up for you. Jason, this is from Roz Thomas. Roz writes, hello again. I don't live in Pittsburgh, but an hour or so away, given Pennsylvania's roads and construction zones.

But I follow what's happening there. Uber has partnered with CMU, Carnegie Mellon University, for the self-driving car project. Pittsburgh has a lot of startup companies, probably because the area is very affordable. I would assume so. However, deploying the cars will be a true trial by fire, as this article points out.

I travel to Pittsburgh a few times a year and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about driving in, around, or through it. Enjoy the article. And I hope it isn't behind a paywall for your next podcast. Keep up the great work. That is, again, from Roz Thomas.

Thank you very much, Roz. And this comes from triblive.com, and it is, law-abiding, self-driving Uber fleet will be dangerous fit with yinzers. Yinzers. I had to look that one up. Okay. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes to Pittsburghese, because I was born in Pittsburgh.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, and I lived in Pittsburgh about, you know, a couple years ago. And what she says about driving in Pittsburgh is accurate. It is one of the most terrifying places to drive, because it's, half the roads don't have markings.

There are no paint. There's no paint on the side of the road. It's, half the time, it's dirt roads. It is one of the worst. It is, you can only survive if you're driving by instinct, which means that this is a true trial by fire for these cars.

Because, well, they are going to deploy them into a, you know, one of the better parts of the city in the triangle downtown. They're not going to, hopefully, they're not going to let them go outside of the city. But this article is really funny.

Whoever, what's this guy's name? Eric Heil. Or Heil. Heil. Heil. Heil. Heil. Definitely read the article, because this guy, this guy knows his stuff. I wouldn't even mind having him on the show sometime, because he's pretty funny. Yes, Pittsburgh is quite possibly the worst town in the United States to unleash Uber on the road with their self-driving cars.

And yes, Roz, I agree with you. It is traumatic driving in Pittsburgh. No doubt about it. And Jason, this one comes from Twitter, from Moz6502. They say, at GOG Podcast, I never received my coin, and I just got this.

And they included a screenshot. Yes, a screenshot is, we've talked about coin on the show before. The aborted attempt at the device, the credit card device where you can, you know, scan all your credit cards. A coin is dead.

Coin is dead. Did you get a coin, Kyle? I did not, no. I saw it come and go, and there was another product that worked exactly the same way, and I just, I'm sick of backing Kickstarter projects or pre-orders or anything. I've been burned too many times, and I am not going to do it again.

Were you Kickstarted in the balls? I feel like I was. Yes. So, if you didn't get your coin, what this article or what this letter is saying is that you have a limited amount of time to get your money back. Otherwise, you're screwed. And if you've got your coin, well, you're still screwed because we're not going to support it anymore.

Thank you very much. We'll see you around. Shove off. Software, apps, and gadgets. We've talked on this show a bunch about sleeping, and I found a sleep app for my watch because I have the Apple Watch.

Do you have the Apple Watch? I do have the Apple Watch, but I do not use it because I am on Android now. I am on Android. I am on Android now. I brought on the enemy. I know. I know. Why do you have an Apple Watch if you're on Android?

Just because I haven't sold it. I have such a distance. There you go. Jason, I am so old and crotchety now. I can just let it sit there on the charger and not use it. Okay. Well, you know, everybody knows I'm a Fitbit guy. But the Fitbit that I have, I lost the little band to do the sleep tracking.

And I'm thinking, I have a $400 Apple Watch. It should be able to track my sleep. Not really. So I had to buy, I had to spend three more dollars. Three whole dollars. I want my three dollars. So I got, I got Sleep Pulse Motion 2, or Sleep Pulse 2 Motion, as they say, depending on if you're dyslexic or not, to go with my Apple Watch and my iPhone.

So I got the 6 Plus, and it works great. And what it does for me is I put in how much sleep I want a night. I need seven hours, period. That's, that's, that is non-negotiable. I need seven hours, or I am a zombie. So if Bam Bam gets up in the morning, Brian, drink.

Kyle, drink too, if you're so inclined. If I don't hit that number, it tells me, and it gives me a little percentage, and it also tells me my heart rate. I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, but I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, and I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, and I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, and I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, and I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do, and I don't know how much sleep I'm going to do.

So I'm like a hummingbird who's going to die very young. So when I see my heart rate go down to 48 beats per minute at night, I'm just like, oh, I'm living longer now. Does it automatically call the ambulance if it just goes to nothing?

I really hope not, because if I forget to charge my watch and then I have to pay a $1,000 ambulance bill, that would really suck. So it hasn't done that yet, but you have to tell it when you're going to sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, when your dog's licking your face going, I got to poop, Dad.

Then you say, I'm awake now. For $3, it is one of the best sleep tracker apps I've ever tried, and I've tried a bunch of them. I highly recommend it. So for me, I know you guys have talked about a lot of different sleeping aids and tricks and blue light versus red light.

One, I guess, like brain trick that I have been doing is utilizing a one hour and 15 minute loop of essentially the sound from inside of the Starship Enterprise on the Next Generation television show.

Now, I've tried a whole bunch of these. Tried regular brown noise. I have tried YouTube videos. By the way, by the way. Yeah. Mentioning brown noise, I discovered that when I lived with a friend who would talk to his girlfriend every day, MXV, I could turn brown noise on in my earbuds, and I could not hear their conversation.

So if you have a roommate who is talking a lot and you just want to tune them out, brown noise is the way to go. I don't think my wife will appreciate that, but I'll let her know. Well, maybe she would appreciate it if you're doing podcasts and she would like to have some silence.

That is absolutely true. So I've been trying all these different sounds, YouTube videos, three hours of bandwidth sucking YouTube videos that you can't just force to be audio only. Spotify, different rain sounds, everything.

I finally found on Google Play Music, which is my service of choice, Jason. I found something called Interstellar Nap aboard an enterprising starship. So they tried to get around. I see what you're doing there. I see that.

So they tried to get around some of the like CBS, Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry trademarks. It smells like spirit teen. I see. Exactly. Yes. And that has seemed to do the trick.

Now, recently I've been combining that with my Withings Aura. It'll play like. Oh, you say Withings. I thought it was Why Things. Whatever. It's with things. It's with me. It's why I have no idea how to say it. I was thinking when you said that, I'm thinking Withering Heights.

Yes. It's I don't know how to say any of these startups anymore. It doesn't matter. You just see the words and then you know what it is. Either way. Hey, you're filling in for Brian. You are the guy that mispronounces everything, no matter what you do. It's okay. That's fine. I'm fine fulfilling that role.

It's cool. So I've been trying this. It's worked out great for me. I tried to share this with you, Jason, to show you what it sounded like. Sent the Spotify link and it's totally broken. Yeah, I went to you said, well, first you sent an iTunes link and I'm just like, oh, yeah, not available in the U.S. store.

And then you sent the Spotify link and I'm like, nope, not available on Spotify. And I'm just like, looks like CBS or Paramount has gotten wise to the fact that you would like to have a good night's sleep and they have just screwed you. Jerks. Set phasers on unfun.

That's right. Well, fortunately, you hit me up offline and I still have the actual sound effects for the Starship Enterprise from Next Generation because I worked on First Contact and I have that. What? Yes, I do.

Oh, man. Okay. All right. Straight from the sound department. I still have. And you know what? When you wake up in the morning, you can be shot by phasers from the Borg if you like. I have every sound effect that was available from Star Trek First Contact still.

And if you're a lawyer for Paramount, no, I don't. I'm lying. I'm making that up. A fan of the show MXV or actually friend of the show MXV sent me a link this week on text. He's just like, okay, I have a mission for grumpy old geeks.

You need to go check this out because I'm so goddamn tired of Facebook taking me off of most recent to top news. And it's a plug-in for your browser called FB Purity, which sounds like one of those things where you're not supposed to have sex until you get on Facebook.

But turns out it is really cool. It's really hard to get onto your browser because Facebook apparently strong-armed Google into taking it out of the Play Store. That's why you can't just go to the Chrome store and say, hey, I would like to get FB Purity.

Anything that you go to the Chrome store and type in FB Purity is a scam. Do not install it. Go to FBPurity.com. Link will be in the show notes if you just can't type it and want to click it because you're lazy. Go get it. Install it.

And it will change your entire Facebook experience for the better. It's insane. Now, on a related note with the Facebook experience, Jason, I've been saying your name a few times during our conversation here during the show.

My phone lit up with a push notification saying that you updated your status yesterday and that I should go read it. So now I'm freaked the fuck out. You'll be uninstalling Facebook right now.

Wait, it just heard me through your headphones? It heard me saying your name. And so it decided to push me a notification saying, you have some content that I might be interested in. That is really fucked up. Unbelievable.

Wow. I mean, one time on Does It Have Legs, I said some naughty words. And Siri yelled at me and said, Jason, language. Out of the blue. And this was before Hey Siri. Right. But that is really disturbing.

It's bad. It's all bad. Media candy. Blade Runner. We love Blade Runner, don't we? Oh, why? Well, we love the original Blade Runner.

Right. Well, there's going to be a sequel. We've known about that for a little while. And now they've added the Suicide Squad star, Jared Leto, to their cast list. Well, you know, it was already it's one of those things where we're all just like, hmm, do you really gotta?

But now now we're just like, really? Do you gotta? Well, and the thing is, there's so there was so much hype around his most recent movie, Suicide Squad. And that just completely tanked, completely crashed and burned.

But, oh, well, here, let's clarify. It completely crashed and burned with critics and fans. Financially, it is a success. That is true. It is a huge success. I feel like you can't fail these days.

Well, Josie and the Pussycats. But you can't fail these days. I mean, honestly. So here's what's happening. The plot details, apparently, are super minimal still. We don't know what this is going to be about. It'll take place decades after the original film.

And I guess it's got some concept imagery and they've got a director. So things are starting to line up for Blade Runner 2. It's supposed to come out October 6th, 2017. I've seen basically nothing for this so far.

Unfortunately, what we do know today, though, is that a construction worker did die on the set. So that's a very saddening thing. Unfortunately, it wasn't Jared Leto. But, you know, one can hope.

But he's not in construction. But, yeah, it's one of those things where it's just like, ah, Ridley Scott gave up on the project to go work on The Martian. That says something. That Blade Runner, one of his, you know, babies from the old days.

He's just like, eh, I'm going to go over here and play in this sandbox. So not really garnering hope for the future of Blade Runner. Yep. Me either. But going back to the past, okay, you know, Blade Runner is the past for Ridley Scott.

But do you remember the monkeys? Not really? No. I didn't think so because you're a little young buck. Well, I remember the monkeys. I watched them every day when I was a kid. They were the manufactured beetles. It's in Chekov in Star Trek came around because of things like the monkeys.

And this was all this manufactured pop. It's like, oh, no, you think today is the manufactured pop? We started a long time ago. Here's the deal. Michael Nesmith, who was one of the original, he was actually the only musician in the monkeys when they came around.

He is going to be with them for one last concert at the Pantages in L.A. Unfortunately, I was going to see if Brian could go and get us some interviews. It is now sold out. And now he has Crotch Fruit. So he is not going to be able to make it.

And it's just one show, right? Yeah. Michael Nesmith will be there for one show. The other two surviving monkeys will be on tour. But yes, Michael Nesmith will be there for one show. And speaking of people going on tour, Metallica is back in action.

Are you a Metallica fan? I was when I was like 12 years old. When you were 12 years old, they were already dead and gone. That's the problem. Let's just say the Napster days, I was probably a Metallica fan until they totally shat upon it and was no longer a Metallica fan.

Though, in the Bay Area, as a Giants fan, I get saturated with Metallica swag and Metallica Knights. So I'm pretty much burnt out on the band, and I don't even listen to them. Yeah. So, yeah. One of the engineers I worked with at Technorati went to high school with him.

So he was always just like, yeah, I hung out with Hetfield and the guys. Yeah. Well, their new song, Hardwired, which I joked with Brian on Facebook. I'm like, this should be our new Grumpy Old Geeks theme song. He's just like, I'm emo. No.

So that will not be happening. But they're going on a massive tour next year, which is going to be probably awesome, which I will not see because I'm old and I have a giant black bear that cannot be alone for more than 20 minutes before having social anxiety disorder.

Well, speaking of things that are giant, Jason, DreamWorks Animation, we knew that they were going to be acquired by Comcast. They've sold a while ago, $3.8 billion. Well, that deal now is completely closed and finished. So I guess DreamWorks is a little, they got their pockets are a little bigger.

They're a little happier. Their stomachs are a little bit fuller. Well, they were, well, it's spun off by a couple of billionaires already. So who gives a fuck? You know, that is, that is true. It's just, it's on the heels of folks like Pixar being picked up by Disney. You're getting the two teams now, Mac and Windows, Android, DreamWorks and Pixar.

It's always been that way, but now they will just be, there'll be huge conglomerations of multi-billion dollar CGI studios that pay people shit. Yeah, exactly. And turn out, you know, Shrek 45.

The Comcast sweatshop is now in effect. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so let's, let's find out if the Comcast brand moves over to DreamWorks. It's just like, so we can, we can call in and not get support on how bad your animated short was, you know? More like Nightmare Works at that point.

Yeah, it's like, how to not show up for your appointment, Dragon, part three. Oh God, because, you know, Comcast, Universal, all these, it is, it is going to come down to two companies at the end of the day.

And then, then we'll be back to deregulation and everything like we did with Ma Bell back in the day. It doesn't make me sick as having an alien in my tummy though, because Aliens 30th Anniversary Blu-ray Edition is coming out. And you know what? It's going to only cost $10.

What? That does not make me sick at all. And it's coming out with new cover art, of course, because, you know, they have to do that. They'll spend a couple bucks on that. But it's also got new documentaries, which I'm really, really excited about.

The inspiration and designs of Aliens. Also, you know, a comic. It's coming with a comic from Dark Horse. So, for $10, you get, let's just back that up. You get the Blu-ray of Aliens, period. For $10, worth it right there.

You get a comic book. And you get a new documentary. How can you not go for that? That's incredible. What a deal. It is a deal. It is a deal. It's due out on September 13th. And it is available for pre-order.

And I've already pre-ordered it. Doing that right now. Yes. Absolutely. Click on that link and go buy it. And give me a nickel. I'd appreciate it. And in the last bit of media candy. The Art of Charm, the company I work for every day.

We did something new this week and we interviewed the artist Lecrae. He is a rapper. He is a Jesus rapper, as it were. He has a Grammy for a gospel song. And this interview, I spent four and a half hours editing it yesterday.

And normally I wouldn't talk about this stuff on the show. But this was one of the best interviews I think I've ever been a part of. Because he is a super smart guy. And I hate religion. And by the end of it, I wasn't mad. So if you want to hear just a really cool interview with a guy who's been through a bunch of stuff.

Like growing up without a dad. And really not having role models. And still coming out on the other side. And being successful. And just coming to grips with how shitty it is to be a human nowadays. And how hard it is. Check out the interview.

I'm pretty proud of it. So I'm putting it in the show notes. I will go have to check that out. Are you kidding me? Love it! Now, Kyle, I know you like pizza.

But I like chicken. I like chicken. Fried chicken. KFC has put out quite possibly one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life. Which is KFC sunscreen. This is fucking disgusting, Jason.

Seriously? This is so... Now, that's... This is something that we would cover on Morning Show. So if you're interested in listening to, I guess, a clean take on what I... If your kids want to hear what Kyle has to say about...

Exactly. So with this... I mean, this is SPF 30. Finger licking good. Like, I would be so tempted to stick this in my mouth. That's the problem. But I don't care. Here's the great part about it. They only had like 3,000 tubes of it.

And it went out the door so fast. They sold out and it was free. Well, they didn't sell out. They gave out. So they're sluts. They're KFC chicken sluts. But you can't get it anymore. Which sucks. Because I want to smell like a goddamn fried chicken.

Because maybe... I live in the Midwest. I live in the flyover states. Maybe I can get me a woman if I'm walking down the street smelling like 11 herbs and spices. Is all I'm saying. Now, the thing is, I would love... I wouldn't put this on my body. That's for sure.

Because it just would not... My cats would go ballistic, Brian. Oh my God. My dog might eat me and kill me. Right. Exactly. So we don't want any of that. But I would get this bottle, open it up, and leave it in a hot car for a little while.

And just fill that space with that lush 11 herbs and spices. And then come back to a giant hornet's nest that just eats your face off. Ugh. No, thanks. Way to go. Yeah.

Way to go, KFC2. I still... I hope they re-release this. Because I don't know where my local KFC is. Because they've merged with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. For most of the United... Like the contiguous United States. I have not seen a KFC in my neighborhood.

But I have seen Taco Bells and Pizza Huts. So I don't know where to go. Maybe you can... If you see one, send me a bottle. Closing shout-outs! My first shout-out is to Amy from Blog Talk Radio.

She was one of our go-to gals there. And she did us right. I really appreciate everything you did for us there. And I thank you very much. And someday in the future, I hope to work with you again. Jason, I just want to give a shout-out to the other podcasters over on my podcasting network, goodstuff.fm.

Go check those guys out. They've got some great shows all over the spectrum, not just tech news. I also want to give a shout-out to Jordan Cooper, who is not on his pooper and not on this podcast, because now we get Kyle Roderick to come join us, because Jordan decided to not do tech news anymore, because he's off playing sports ball.

It's too sad. It's too sad. Jordan, I really miss you, and I miss the morning dump, but I understand doing a daily show is difficult. But my final closing shout-out is to my co-host, Brian Schulmeister, and his baby, Lucas Han Schulmeister, and his fanboyness.

But I love you, bro. I can't wait to have you back. Keep cleaning those diapers. And do not feel like you need to post everyone to Facebook, like I post all the pictures of Bam Bam. And, by the way, drink, Brian. Thanks for listening. I am Jason DeFillippo, and you can follow me on Twitter at jpdef or jpd on Instagram.

And I'm Kyle Roderick, and you can follow me at dogburps on Twitter or morningshowam. I thank you very much, Kyle, for joining us. You know, it's late at night over there in the O.C., and I know that you want to get back to your beers, but I appreciate you filling in for Brian, and he appreciates it as well.

And hopefully we can have you back again. And if you ever need some co-hosts for the morning show, you know where to come. Absolutely. Thanks, Jason, for having me, and it was a blast. Grumpy Old Geeks is a 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 and get 10 exclusive tracks.

Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy, and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 174.

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