178: Taste the Hate-bow

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. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. I've been using FreshBooks for years and love, love, love how easy it is to use.

Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy, enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section to get your first month of unrestricted use absolutely free with no credit card required. The following content contains graphic, explicit, and sometimes vulgar language. So lock up your women and hide the fried chicken and welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 178 for September 23rd, 2016.

I'm Jason DeFilippo here with my co-host. How long were you working on that intro? Wow. About 30 seconds maybe. All right. This is Brian Schulmeister. We're hiding the fried chicken. Yay. Apparently, you know, there's a line from Farscape way back in the day.

Oh, see, there you go. No Farscape for me. I was thinking, hide your kids, hide your wife. Old internet meme. Okay, moving on. We're old. All right. A little follow up on the Soylent that I was trying out. It is Soylent, but not deadly.

I haven't had any problems, any gastrointestinal problems like they used to have. It's actually a pretty good meal replacement. I'm giving it a thumbs up. Okay. But to be fair, you are not on a pure Soylent diet. You are using it as a replacement for certain meals, et cetera, et cetera.

So, you're not 100% Soylent. No. So, that could still be deadly. It could be. I wouldn't want to do it because the shakes are only 400 calories. Right. So, you know, it's good for like a lunch replacement. I'm not hungry for a couple hours after I have it, and I'm pretty used to the taste.

Now, it's not bad. You can even mix it with a little coffee, and you're good to go. All right. Well, I still will not be having it. So, it's cheaper than going to Subway, and I'm all about the cheap right now. Subway's pretty damn cheap, especially if you get their sub of the day. Well, this is two bucks.

My child was born on Tuna Day, or whatever the hell their advertising campaign is. Oh, God. So horrible. Oh, no. The wedding was on Tuna Day. It was something vastly inappropriate. Anyways, it was very fun. Oh, man. Okay. So, I'm sure you've probably seen the Save the Day campaign that's out there right now.

You know, because there's not enough Robert Downey Jr. in my life. There's not. But I didn't realize this was Joss Whedon's little pet project. Yeah. It's clever. It's cute. You know, I should have known because, A, it's all the Avengers people, and it's funny. Yeah, it is funny. And it will do fuck all in terms of swaying anybody's vote.

Well, of course not, but it's still fun to watch. Yeah, it is. It's one of the best campaign videos I've ever seen because it's funny. Yep. Yeah. So, there you go. Changing the world one laugh at a time. Very clever. Now, I'm sure if you scan through the comments on the YouTube page, you'll notice a lot of crap.

Why would I want to look at YouTube comments? Ever. Why would anybody want to? We talked about this a bit. Well, no, it wasn't. Who was it that launched their new system for trying to? I can't remember who it was. We talked about it last week. Instagram. Instagram is letting you put in safe words.

Safe words. Yeah. Keywords that you would keep out of your thing. And I said, well, what the hell is YouTube doing? Well, they've come up with a plan, Jason. They have a plan. I've seen their plan. Much like the Cylons, who did not actually have a plan. YouTube does not actually have a plan. They're rolling out a program called YouTube Heroes.

Yeah. So, it rewards people for reporting bad comments, writing accurate subtitles, and answering forum questions. They have basically gamified finding trolls, apparently. So, I'm sure this will work fantastic. They're crowdsourcing it.

That's all. They're crowdsourcing it. And, you know, we've seen this happen in the past with bulletin boards and AOL moderators. Remember the class action lawsuit that the AOL moderators filed against Time Warner after they did all that work and didn't get paid? We'll see if YouTube has figured it out.

I'm saying Yatube. Yatube. Yeah. This never really works out. I mean, I remember microcosmally running forums and things like that for bands. And, you know, you'd get different levels. You'd reach different levels when you had made a lot of positive posts and people had given you positive feedback.

And then you'd move up the album charting. Next thing you know, you'd be the next album name would appear next to your name. And it all worked well until they'd get in a big old fight with somebody else and then everything would explode and blow up anyways. So, yeah. Good luck. Good luck, YouTube.

At some point, the internet will discover that crowdsourcing really doesn't work very well. Yeah. Yeah. Until then, we're stuck with crappy YouTube comments. So, let's go back to just not reading them. Exactly. That's what I do. Yeah. It works pretty well. I don't read any comments anywhere.

So, that's good. Except for our own comments. So, this is follow-up on one of the comments that we got last week when we were asked what we thought about presidential candidate Gary Johnson. I have registered Libertarian in the past. I agree with a lot of the platform as it would exist.

However, any chance of me ever voting for presidential candidate Gary Johnson has gone out the window because of science. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What did he do this week? Because after the last show, I went and was doing a little bit of research on him and I found out his vaccination stance, which he has waffled back and forth on.

Yeah. I mean, this guy's kind of an idiot. I mean, I get Libertarian is government stay the hell out of private business and all that. But then there's just stupid. Yeah. His take on vaccination is stupid. This is – he's been asking a number of questions about climate change and he basically has kind of shrugged off the whole thing because, you know, eventually the sun will encompass the entire earth anyways.

Yeah. Looking at the long nihilist view there, Gary. Yeah. Well, for the next billion years though, Gary, what are we going to do? Yeah. You idiot. Smoke pot and climb some mountains and try and figure out where Aleppo is on a map. In the news.

Yahoo is back in the news today. Big time. What about you now? 500 million accounts have been compromised. Now, there's a message on the – on investor.yahoo.net that talks about the release. It's all over the news. Everybody's saying go change your password.

500 million accounts that everybody forgot they ever even had. Yeah. You know, go delete those 37 Yahoo accounts you had from, you know, 1998 and get back to work because nobody cares. Pretty much. The annoying thing about this, the main reason I wanted to bring it up is I'm seeing this every – in every news article that's out there today, everybody is putting in quotes a state-sponsored attack.

I would like to see – show me your work on that. Yeah, I don't buy that either. After – after Sony and after them blaming it on the North Koreans and me having sources inside Sony who said the Obama administration actually made all that shit up and they didn't want to blame North Korea, I think Yahoo is actually coming up with this just to try and say, oh, well, these people are really smart because they're state-sponsored.

Yeah. This isn't our fault. How could we possibly have stopped two people in North Korea? Yeah, I don't care about state-sponsored. I want to talk about responsible disclosure because this happened in 2014. Well, it's Yahoo. Are we expecting anything? Yeah. They probably just figured it out. Yeah.

Anyway, so, yeah, here's the deal. Don't use Yahoo. It's good news for Verizon. Maybe Verizon is the state-sponsored attacker so they can get the stock price down so their bid to take them over is actually cheaper. Could be. Can you hear them now? Yeah.

Can you hack me now? Oh, I like that. Oot. Show title. Yeah. Moving on. Moving on. We've had some problems with our power grid here in Southern California. We tend to do that because we're in the middle of a desert and, you know, rolling power outages when we all try to not die from heat. We've had some serious issues with natural gas leaks as well.

We poured a ranch here just recently. I mean, I think that thing was leaking for like three months and people had to be moved. Oh, yeah. Longer than that. I was there out in the valley when that was going on, and a lot of people made a lot of money from all the people that were being displaced and moved into temporary housing.

So we've got some power issues, but I think Tesla is about to make a lot of money off of this. We've all been really interested and excited about Tesla's home power systems, the power packs that people were going to, you know, get for your own house so you can pretty much get off the grid and, you know, just live off Elon Musk.

And I was like, I started to sing a song a little bit earlier. Here he comes to save the day. Elon Musk is on his way. So he's coming to save California, basically. Southern California. Edison is going to be purchasing tens of millions of dollars worth of Elon Musk's power packs. So we don't have to deal with rolling blackouts and massive spills anymore, in theory.

In theory. Until the lithium ion batteries start exploding. Yeah. You know, maybe, yeah, as long as he should start selling batteries to Samsung, I think, as well. I think Samsung would actually score a lot of points if they announced some sort of deal with purchasing them from him at this point.

I mean, that thing is still ongoing. We didn't put it in our news because it's so ridiculous. But, yeah, if you still have one of those, take it in. Take it back. Get one of those shiny iPhone 7s. Oh, wait, you can't. You can't. And, you know, they don't really don't dunk them in water, regardless of what they say, because reports are coming out about that as well.

Oh, interesting. Well, it's reasonably water resistant. Okay. Well, you know, well, they made such a brouhaha over getting rid of the headphone jack, so it would be, you know, waterproof, but. Don't stick your iPhone in a brew. Okay.

Or a ha-ha. Enough out of you. I didn't even mention Bam Bam, but it sounds like you've been drinking already, man. You know, having a child is a lot harder than they tell you. Yeah, I didn't. I don't even have a real kid.

I got a dog and I told you how much sleep I got. So, I, you know. Yeah, I know. You keep trying to compare your situation with a dog to an actual human. It's awesome. Yeah, well, you know, the consequences are somewhat the same. When they're first there, you can't sleep. That's true. Moving on. Amazon says it puts customers first, but its pricing algorithm doesn't.

This is an article from ProPublica. We are the ProPublic from ProPublica. I was about to say it's also an article from 1995. Oh, well, here's the deal. It's still about the same. No, it is. That's the thing. Everybody is using Amazon now, and it is.

What's that old term? They're horn schwoggling us, Jason. Did you get like a 50s dictionary? I feel like it. Am I like? Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Okay. Oh, you're going to start busting out some tomfoolery soon. That's right. So this article actually isn't from the 90s.

It's from September 20th, 2016. But the deal is they did a study of 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks and just compared what the search results came back. Oh, big surprise. Amazon favors themselves and the people who use Amazon services to ship the products.

Oh, color me surprised. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff, a whole lot of weirdness going on with Amazon. And you think you're getting the best price. You may or may not be. The prices change. There's all kinds of plugins now that are starting to come out that have supposedly beat Amazon's bullshit system.

So you can get the best price. But who the hell knows what's actually happening? Well, that's right. One of the ones I got recently was the one that goes through and tells you if the reviews for a product are bullshit or not. Yeah, I think we talked about that on last week's podcast. Does that work? It was a couple of weeks ago. I think it's called Fake Spot.

Yeah, it's actually pretty good. I mean, it's tied to a web. All the Chrome extension is it ties it to a website and sends over the URL and gives you the results. But I tested some different products on it, and it was a pretty interesting swath of results on it. Like, you know, you could tell, like, on the cheapy products that there was a bunch of fake stuff.

And, you know, you go and find some products that you know are going to have fake reviews, and then you test it against that. It gives you a pretty decent bullshit detector. All right. Well, I might have to give that a go, although I don't really ever order enough off Amazon. Well, I do, but I mean, I know what I'm getting. I do my own research anyways, as one should.

Yes, yes. Don't believe the buy. Yes. Put that little button. They want you to just get used to that first search result. You know, it's like, I'm feeling lucky. Just buy it immediately. Yeah. Move on. Speaking of moving on. And older news.

Here we are again. This is what we've been discussing for quite a long time. Ridesharing services, Uber, Lyft, et cetera. And the problems that they are having with the big state legislation and not letting them into places because, you know, freedom and fairness. Yeah, this comes from The Verge and it's the five issues holding Uber and Lyft back.

And it's here are the quick five. A level playing field. Yeah. No, they don't want that. Fingerprinting drivers. I'm OK with that. I'm fine. Yeah. I'd like to know that the person driving me down to Chuck E. Cheese or whatever is not an axe murderer. Mm-hmm. That would be nice.

Wheelchair accessibility is the third. Fair enough. We require it from basically everyone else. Well, yeah, you have to be able to order an Uber or Lyft that has a wheelchair ramp in it, you know, like you can at cab companies. So, yeah. Driver classification.

Are they freelance or are they employees? I like that. I'd like to know. I'm sure the drivers would like to know. Yes. And the argument that keeps continuing over state or local enforcement on legislation. Mm-hmm. So, yeah. There you go. I find this completely unreasonable.

Oh, my gosh. I understand why Uber and Lyft are spending so much money to sue about these things. Here's the deal. This isn't going to matter in 10 years. Yeah. As soon as they fire all the people. Well, yep. Let's see. Number one's out the window. Number two's out the window. Three will still be around.

Number four is out the window. And five will still be around. So, we're getting rid of three pretty quickly. Yep. And I just said 10 years. But apparently Lyft thinks it'll just be five. Yeah. Lyft says they put out, the CEO put out a big missive on Medium.

Medium. In which he is charting how he's going to fire all of his employees. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, he's basically saying by 2025, that will be it. Nobody will own a personal car anymore, which is a complete load of crap. Yeah. But he's saying that, you know, in general, at least in major city centers, that will be the end and the death knell of the personal car by 2025.

And of course, it will be Lyft that will be providing all the other things. Ask Tesla or Uber how they feel about that. See, and here's the interesting thing about Lyft. I haven't seen their self-driving car yet. Yeah. I actually watched a video the other day. Chris Messina, he works for Uber.

You know his name because he invented the hashtag. Yes. And works for Uber now. And he was posting a live video on Facebook the other night. And I saw it, like, pop up. And I'm like, oh, let's watch. And it was a video of him in the back of one of Pittsburgh's self-driving cabs. Right. And it was kind of interesting to watch.

Because it was at night, and they had the laptop up, and you could see what the car saw. And it was fairly interesting. Right. I give it that. I'm not going to get in one for a while. Again, I've made my position extremely clear on this. The only way that it will ever work is if it's across the board. It can never be a mixed system.

I am not getting in one of these until all the idiot Prius drivers in the area are off the road. See, as soon as they work out the bugs for another two years, I'm fine with it. I'll give it a shot. I said that about the internet 20 years ago. As soon as they work out the bugs.

Well. We never work out all the bugs. We just add new ones. That's true. Speaking of which, why don't you go roll right into your article about Tesla, which is all about working out bugs and new bugs. So, yes. Tesla version 8 is coming out. This time they got it.

Well, here's, you know. They have new features. We've got a couple. I'm not even going to go through all of them. New UX, new maps, voice controls are better. Their autopilot is getting better. They're using more radar. Autopilot and all this stuff. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The interesting one with the radar is that it'll be able to tell if a car in front of you, if there's an accident in front of the car in front of you that you can't even physically see yet. Which is kind of neat. Awesome. But, yeah. See, my brother ordered one of those new ones that comes out in like seven years when they finally get production ramped up.

Right. So, I'll get to finally ride in one when he gets his, but hopefully they'll have the bugs out by then. Very cool. Yeah. The best one, though, is the – and I broke this one out because the title of the article is just awesome.

Tesla just added a feature specifically for horrible people. And this is the cabin overheat feature. So, if you're, you know, if you lock your kid or your dog in the car, it will automatically turn the AC on for you. And you can set – you can't set it yet, but in a future update, probably 8.1, it will let you set a minimum and maximum cabin temperature.

So, it will always be in that range. I have a – I don't know how I feel about this. How are we supposed to – we're starting to make the world so easy for stupid people. How are we supposed to identify them and marginalize them anymore?

Well, speak to them and you can generally tell. I like the little subheading. What an awesome excuse for leaving your kids in the car. Yeah. You know, there's another – actually, this doesn't really hold water either. I'm going to say you have to be somewhat smart to be able to afford a Tesla because they're so damn expensive.

But I've met a lot of really rich, dumb people. Yeah. I was about to say I know a lot of rich, stupid people. Yeah. That doesn't really – Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of holding water, Jason. Okay. See what I did there? Yeah, I did. Nearly a quarter of the city of Amsterdam is covered by water and there are more than 100 kilometers of canals winding their way through the city.

So, self-driving cars, not really that great or useful in Amsterdam. But thankfully, we now are going to have self-driving boats. Mm-hmm. The program has the delightfully straightforward name of rowboat, which is awesome. It is awesome.

And it's being carried out by researchers from MIT and two Dutch universities. They have over 25 million euros in funding for the work and aim to have the first prototype, robo-boats, floating on Amsterdam's canals by 2017. I'm cool with this. Give it a shot.

I'm cool with it, too. Yeah, why not? I wouldn't want to be, like, you know, kayaking around one, but, yeah, go for it. Yeah, they don't seem to be that big. But, yeah, the kayak is the outlier in this. I don't know if you can kayak in the Amsterdam canals. I've never been, so I don't know. You've never been to Amsterdam? I've never been to Amsterdam.

I once thought I probably saw about 35 kayaks floating in different colors. Oh, good times. Maybe you just went to the coffee shop and had one of those brownies. Must have been that brownie I had. Now, the interesting thing that came out of this article was the Underworlds Project. I'd never heard of this, and they linked to it in the article.

And it's the, what are they, the sensors in sewer systems to try and track diseases in urban environments. Yes. Which is cool. Smart shit tech. Yeah. Pooptacular. Anyway, it comes out of MIT.

It's got a really nice website. Yep. I give that a thumbs up. So, if they can put these kind of sensors on the bottom of the rowboats, they can actually do some cool water, you know, water quality assessment and things like that. Excellent. That's very cool. I have never owned a GoPro.

I am not part of the cult of GoPro. I've had several. Yeah. You know, people seem to love them. And I know that they came out with a new version recently, and there was some that didn't do much for the company because people weren't all that impressed with the actual hardware. But apparently, the big update this time around is their software.

It's the GoPro Quick Software Video Editing System, which is basically automizing editing. Automizing? Automating. Editing. That's a new word. Automizing. It's been a morning, Jason. Yes. Yes.

So, yes. Now we are getting rid of the need to basically edit. Well, no. It's just a built-in editor that you can get stuff straight from the camera and do it on your phone or your tablet. GoPro software has been traditionally terrible. Yes. I've used it for when I had it in my car to do stitched together time lapses and make videos of L.A. traffic.

Right. Which I should put in the show notes. I used to make videos of my ride to work, which is just fascinating, I know. Such an L.A. thing. I tell you, living here in the epicenter of that, right here in Santa Monica, where everybody has a camera attached to their balls at all times, just in case anything might happen and then they can throw it up on YouTube, I can't stand this stuff.

I do like the comment from CEO Nick Woodman about this. He says, people don't buy action cameras for the hardware, but rather for the awesome story that they think they can tell. Keyword there, think, that they think they can tell. Because you cannot. Okay. The greatest thing about it, though, I look at having a GoPro and a dash cam as a deterrent because I used to have so many crazy things happen to me on the 101 every day.

And as soon as I put a camera up and turned it on, completely boring. Nothing exciting ever happened to me. So I look at that as money well spent. If I can actually keep the crazies away with my GoPro, it's like garlic with a vampire, you know? I will say I do. I agree with the motorcyclists that mount them onto their helmets.

First off, it looks badass. And secondly, I totally get why you do it because you get cut off every two seconds here and you've got video proof now. I saw the greatest one yesterday where this guy's leaving the parking lot and his mom is in her minivan and she's like, now be careful out there. There's lots of crazies on the road.

And about two minutes later, she rear ends him and totally knocked his bike out from under him. But good thing he had a camera. Good thing. Good thing. Yeah. I found an article on Recode that normally I'm a big fan of Recode. I think they do a good job with their journalism.

But this is such the bullshit non-story I have to call out. Peter Kafka on this one. Streaming music article, it took a couple of decades, but the music business looks like it's okay again. No. To begin with. Secondly, how you can have that title and have it be basically a five-paragraph article is beyond me.

Well, because it doesn't say it is okay again. It looks like it's okay again. Oh! See, I screwed up there. He's not actually stating a fact. I thought this would actually be an informative article, not a piece of shit. Well. My bad. Can't win them all. Can't win them all.

So he starts off with the premise that music sales went up 8.4% as compared to last year, which is basically the first time it's actually improved over a year. This is mostly due to streaming services, like most people getting hoodwinked into Apple Music, forgetting that they were paying for it, and then spending the next year and a half trying to figure out how to cancel the subscription because it's arcane.

And then goes on to say, this is all good, right? In the very last paragraph. Not according to Kerry Sherman, who runs the RIAA, the labels American Trade Group. He has a medium post. Medium. Complaining that, of course, musicians don't get shit for all this money. So there you go.

Thanks for nothing. Well, and also, you know, the music business, it doesn't say the artists. He says the music business. That's true. They're up. They've always gotten all the monies. Yeah. There you go. And Twitter, God knows what Twitter is supposed to be for anymore, but apparently they're going to become a TV network.

They streamed Thursday's NFL game and no one had anything bad to say about it, which is one of my favorite headlines. Is that because nobody watched it or because I have nothing bad to say about it because I didn't see it? Apparently, quite a few people did watch it. They're not releasing total stats on it, but, you know, a lot of people just sat there and talked about the fact that it was on while they watched it.

So it pops up, I don't know if you looked at the article, but if you do try to watch Twitter on, watch NFL on Twitter, it's a very circa 1992 Yahoo looking page that comes up with like the video on the left and then your Twitter stream on the right.

And this looks like a nightmare because football is only interesting if you're having nachos and drinking beer in a bar. And even then that's a, that can be a stretch. Depends on the company. Really, it does. Yeah. Uh, speaking of pages that look like Yahoo back in the day, uh, Gizmodo has an awesome article called the dark web is mostly full of garbage and they have some great screenshots of some of the really crappy sites that are on, on tour.

And, uh, yeah, it's, it's fun just to go back and look if you were around back then, like we were, I would actually love to go design pages for on the dark web these days. I know it looks fun compared to the bullshit that we have to make now. I know. Yeah. WordPress, Squarespace, medium.

Yep. Yeah. So, you know, if anybody wants me to build a site so you can sell your illegal drugs, as long as I get to put like little emoticons and animated GIFs all over stuff, that'd be fun. Yeah. I, I, I can, I can dust off some of my old, uh, zip disks. If you can find a zip disk reader.

Find a zip drive. Yeah. And then you pull off all of my GIFs. I was thinking about that the other day because I found another box of old tech and I was like, I wonder if I can even find a zip drive anymore. Uh, you, well, you can, but you can't find a computer that has a serial port to plug it into. Damn it. You gotta, you gotta go full stack on that.

Yeah. I was about to say, I can't even imagine how many adapters I would need to try to get anything going there. No, it's, yeah, it's not going to work. Just give it up. Yeah. So, uh, in the interest of basically destroying any audience that we might have, Jason. Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you for clearing that with me first.

Uh-huh. Yep. No problem. Uh, I wanted to bring up an article. This is a long read and well worth it. Uh, we won't discuss it much. I just want to throw this in at the end. And it's by Andrew Sullivan, who I have a love-hate relationship with. Uh, sometimes I love him. Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes I love to hate him. Uh, works really well.

But, uh, he wrote an insanely long article all about internet burnout and how it's destroying, uh, our humanity. And I tend to agree. Yeah. Here's the problem, you know, because he's like taking a break from technology. If he was still on technology and had the, uh, you know, basically the attention span of a flea like the rest of us do, this would be three paragraphs with a clickbaity headline.

So. Yes. See, this is how you know he has definitely taken a break from technology. He thinks that people are actually going to read all this. Yeah. Too many words. I didn't see a TLDR version. So. No. It is worth the read, though. I enjoyed it. And we'll be right back. But now, a word from our sponsors.

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Just go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and enter grumpy old geeks in the how'd you hear about a section for that free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Security?

Ha! We are back again with our good friend Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. How you doing, Dave? I'm doing well. Ready to jump in? Are you going to be singing for us this week? Are you going to be singing for your supper? Sure. Yeah, make a request. You know, what the heck. We'll do grumpy old geeks karaoke.

Why not? I can't imagine that will make us lose any subscribers. Do you? No, not at all. Not at all. No, no, no, no, no. All right. The kids will be flocking to us like a beaver concert. Nothing better than middle-aged men singing. Nothing better than that. Nothing at all.

Let's jump in. All right. Our first story today is about Tesla. We talked about Tesla last week. Absolutely. We talk about Tesla every week. It's either somebody running into a truck or somebody getting hacked. That tends to be about it. This is a hack. This is actually a good example of responsible disclosure.

So a group of Chinese researchers found a way to gain remote access to a Tesla Model S. And they were able to do things like open the doors in the trunk and open the sunroof and take control of the display. But they were also able to remotely activate the car's brakes while the car was moving.

Stop. It's Tesla time. Right. So this is bad. But to their credit, they notified Tesla. Tesla, you know, looked at the problem, fixed it. And then simultaneous to the fix being pushed out to the cars, they announced publicly what they'd found.

So that's the right way to do it. No, absolutely. And this used a basically a bad Wi-Fi hotspot. And then they did a man in the middle attack to get to through the web browser to get access to the car system. Yep. So this one, they didn't actually have to have physical access to the car, which is the crazy scary part.

Right. You're right. That is correct. The previous Tesla hacks, you actually had to have access to the car. So this was worse than that. Yep. But thank you, Tesla, for having a bug bounty program. Yeah. No, like I said, it's a great example of responsible disclosure. Everybody kind of doing the right thing all around.

So the next article that is interesting, you know, everyone remembers the story with the FBI and Apple. The San Bernardino one? The San Bernardino iPhone, where the FBI wanted to get access to that. And the FBI made claims that the way that an iPhone was designed, that they could not get into the iPhone.

Basically, they couldn't do a hardware hack. But there's a researcher from University of Cambridge who has demonstrated that, indeed, you can get into an iPhone this way. It's a technique known as NAND mirroring.

NAND is a type of memory inside the iPhone. And basically what this allows him to do is get an unlimited number of attempts at the password. So basically every time, I believe the iPhone allows you six tries before it locks up, you can basically hit the reset on this by mirroring the contents of the phone's memory to this outboard bank of memory.

And so every time you get to the sixth time, you can sort of hit the reset button and start over again. And they're saying with a four-digit password or four-digit number, it takes about 20 hours to break in. With six digits, it'll take about three months. But, you know, that three months might be okay for a nation state or to, they have that kind of patience.

But it's also with one guy working with one chip. You know, if they wanted to like have 10 of these going at any given time and then they could have 10 people do it, then they could cut that down by a factor of 10. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but I guess there's no reason why they couldn't do that.

I'm sure if there is a reason, one of our listeners will write in and tell us what the reason is. Yeah, the scary part of this hack was just how delicate he had to be on taking off that chip and get to, because it's on there.

It's really on there. And to get it off of there without ruining any of the connectors. And that's why he thought that the FBI didn't want to do it because they might be a little too ham-handed to get it off of there and break it. And if they break it, you're SOL. Yeah, it's kind of one and done with that. But it is, it's an interesting, if you're into this kind of thing, this, this researcher goes through the whole process.

He's got a YouTube video that's in the link that we'll share. And so it's, it's pretty neat and, you know, demonstrates that there's more than one way to skin a cat. And don't do this on your iPhone, at least not your main iPhone.

Not one that you want to keep, no. Yeah, I'm guessing it's going to take a little practice to get good at this, so. Yeah. Go get some of those old iPhones off of eBay to give it a shot first. It is, it is a delicate operation, but, you know, I guess if you're the type of person who's good at this sort of thing and if you're highly motivated, the point is it can be done.

All right, moving on. All right, so we know about keyloggers. There's a, there's a new keylogger out called iSpy. And what caught my attention with this one is basically if you are a person who wants to do some bad things, you can basically buy an iSpy keylogger subscription package.

And as you'll see in the link that we share, there are, there's some lovely, uh, marketing, uh, graphics and you can, you can choose which you want the bronze package or the diamond package or the platinum package to, uh, to basically buy keylogging as a service, um, complete with, um, tech support and, and, uh, and so on.

So this keylogger has a variety of functions in addition to, uh, you know, what it says it does, obviously logging keys. Um, it's capable of, uh, blocking websites. It's capable of downloading files. It can actually kill bots that are running. It can display fake messages. Um, it can just, just disable other, uh, processes that are running.

Um, so it's got a lot going on under the hood. Uh, it has a nice, uh, web panel interface. So I think the takeaway here is that, uh, as we, as we move along, um, this, this notion of having, uh, these sorts of things as a service, the, the bad guys are making this easier and easier, uh, for people to use these tools.

You, you really don't have to be, uh, a highly sophisticated, uh, user to enable these things, to get them running, uh, and to profit by doing bad things. Yeah. The nice thing about this though, that these guys probably haven't figured out yet, which they will at some point, um, selling this stuff as a service, uh, at some point you're going to have a lot of people connecting to your web portals and things like that.

And you're just kind of out there in the open. So I'm thinking that, uh, it'll make it much easier for law enforcement to find these people and, you know, take down their servers and then backtrace it to the people who are actually buying the service and go after them at some point. You know, I, I can just, I can, I can see that happening.

In the near future. Yeah, I, I, I think you're right. And I think, you know, a lot of these people, they, they depend on, or they, they, either they have a false sense of security that they feel that they've, um, um, you know, uh, successfully anonymized themselves so that they won't get caught. But of course, you know, bad guys, crooks always think they're not going to get caught.

Right. Yeah. That's kind of, that's kind of a staple of being a crook. If you go into it thinking you're going to get caught, you're not a very good criminal. Right. You're stupider than it needs to be to be a criminal in the first place. So, um, uh, but the other thing is that they, they tend to set up shop in, in places that, you know, turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.

Um, I mean, a lot of nations consider this to be kind of a petty sort of crime and, um, you know, they, they just turn a blind eye to it. So, um, but yeah, every now and then you see, uh, somebody gets tracked down and, uh, hauled away in handcuffs. Or, or get, or gets hauled away and we never hear from them again because it's, it wasn't law enforcement that found them.

Right. Yeah. That's a good point too. You know, when you're playing the game, uh, in the, in the dark underworld of, uh, of internet crime, uh, bad things can happen to you. Yep. Especially when we're talking about ransomware, because it is making a lot of money now. Intel has released a study saying that, uh, ransomware is up 3000% since it was first recorded in 2012.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like that old thing, you know, where they asked, uh, why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. And, uh, I think that's the case with ransomware. You know, ransomware is an easy way for crooks to make money and they can do it in, in small amounts, but it, it adds up.

And, um, for the people who get hit by the ransomware, they are highly motivated to try to get their data back. Um, and this article talks about how, uh, hospitals in particular get targeted. We've talked about that before here, where, when you have computer systems that are related to life or death situations, obviously a hospital is highly motivated to, to get those systems up and running as quickly as possible.

The bad guys know that. And so, um, they hit, uh, one of the places they target are hospitals. Yeah. And the interesting thing about the whole ransomware ecosystem at this point is there's so many bad actors in play right now that are like bad, bad actors because they're, they won't decrypt your data even after you pay, which is ruining the entire marketplace for ransomware because everybody's going to just say, ah, screw it.

Cut, you know, restore from backup. Because if I pay, chances of me even remotely getting my data back are, are shrinking every single day. That's right. Yeah. And the other thing that we, that we've heard from the folks that we talked to about this is that quite often what happens is, uh, even if you pay, then the ransomware, people come back to you and they come back asking for more.

Yep. So even with the first round of payment, they, they figure, oh, I got a hot one. Uh, you know, I asked you for a hundred dollars. Now, would you believe $500? Um, and at that point, um, you know, you're, you're, you're done for. If they're, if they're coming back for a second round, you might as well consider your data as good as gone.

Yeah. I mean, what happened to this world? Why do we not have any ethical extortionists anymore? I mean, ah, honor among thieves. Seriously. I mean, we made, we made a contract. You, you took my data. I want it back. I give you the money. Now give me back my goddamn data. People are monsters.

The where is there's no gentlemen and ladies when it comes to, to, uh, to crime. It is a shame. What, what, what does the world come to? These millennials, I blame it on the millennials. It's probably them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we, we, we never did anything bad like that.

Absolutely not. That's Gen Xers. We're, we're straight and narrow the whole time. Yep. Um, but it's interesting too. You know, we talk about, um, uh, hospitals getting hit, but, uh, there's a, a new, some new data coming out that shows that right now, another hot place for ransomware is the education market.

Why is that? Educational organizations are, are getting hit with, uh, hit with ransomware as well. Um, why have they moved from healthcare to education? I wonder. Well, uh, one of the things that they were saying in this article is that education is, um, typically, uh, not as well defended as hospitals are.

So part of it is that they are easy targets. Hmm. That's a big part of it. All the people in cybersecurity have since graduated and are out writing malwares. That's right. Yeah. They're getting back to those professors who, uh, who, uh, B minus my aching ass.

Right. Right. Exactly. Uh, but the point here is, is really that, uh, no one should consider themselves to be immune to ransomware. Again, you know, we say this practically every week, you know, back up your data, uh, keep backing up your data because that is really the best and only, uh, reliable way to, uh, to, to come back from a, uh, a good ransomware attack.

Speaking of good ransomware attacks, uh, there was a new one, uh, that came out this past week. It's called mamba, uh, kind of like the, uh, mamba is a snake. I was thinking mambo italiano, but that's a little different. Different thing. Yep. Yep. Actually, the black mamba is the fastest snake in the world.

Ah, yes. I have, uh, I have seen Kill Bill. That's right. That's right. Yes. Yes. Black mamba in Kill Bill. Yes. Also proving that when I was a child that my parents invested in a set of wildlife encyclopedias, uh, that I know that the black mamba was the fastest snake in the world.

But anyway, I, um, I digress. Uh, the mamba malware, uh, was, been, uh, discovered in machines in Brazil and the United States and India. Uh, Morphous Labs are the ones who discovered this. Uh, they're out of Brazil themselves. And what's particularly interesting about mamba is that it takes a different approach to ransomware.

Instead of, uh, encrypting your individual files, it's using a disk level cryptography. So it's just basically encrypting the entire drive. Is it actually doing the main drive and any, uh, connected drives or is it just the main drive? Nope.

It reaches out and tries to find, you know, basically anything that's connected to the computer. Uh, it goes through and tries to encrypt them on a, uh, drive level basis. So, you know, when you, um, it's, it's a windows, uh, it's a windows exploit.

It's a windows malware. So when you, when you fire up your machine, um, before, before you can get to the drive, uh, it says to you, give us our money or, um, or you don't get access to your drive. I do not, I'm going to have to start pulling my time machine, uh, drives off the network at night.

Cause those are my backups, you know? Well, I, yeah, I mean, that's a good point. Uh, and so I think it does make the case for some cloud-based backups, you know, backblaze and some of the other folks like that. Um, you know, there's that old saying, uh, belt and braces that, uh, you don't want to just have a single, single type of backup.

You want to have, uh, belt and suspenders for those of us in the United States. Um, and, um, this is a good example of why you want to do that. Um, now there's a, this, this is actually related to, um, there was another, um, ransomware that was like this.

It was called Petya. And, um, researchers were able to come up with a decryptor after Petya, uh, came out. So hoping that, uh, perhaps they'll come up with something for Mamba. But in the meantime, uh, it's a nasty one. So like we say, back up your data.

Yep. No. And, uh, I use, I use a very, a varied method. I have time machine for my daily stuff. I've got carbon copy cloner for full machine level backups that happen fairly often. Yep. And, uh, the nice thing about those, uh, CCC backups is you can just let it start running and it'll actually unmount the disc for you when you're done if you want.

So it's not sitting there on the network. So, you know, I plug that in like every other day and just get a, like a full snapshot of the machine and then it goes back in the fireproof safe. And, uh, also take those extra drives, you know, your old ones, when you upgrade, make snapshots of those, get them out of the house.

I have an, I have another offsite location where I have, you know, maybe like, you know, they might be a month behind, but at least it's not, you know, everything can go in, in, in, even if there's a fire or something like that. No, that's great advice. I mean, yeah, we do, we do the same thing. You know, when you do your backups, um, there's a saying in the backup business I've heard, which is one is none, which if you have one backup, you might as well consider it no backup.

So, uh, you want different, uh, types of media that you're backing up on and you want to have different locations, be it, you know, one locally, one in the cloud or two, you know, a couple of physical copies, uh, in different physical locations, uh, you know, store it under the, under the steps of your, your, your parents' house or something, you know, anywhere.

That's literally, that's literally where mine are. Is that right? It's funny. They're in the basement under the steps. Yep. Yeah. That's funny. So are mine. Um, but, um, you know, if there's a fire, if there's a flood, whatever, uh, you know, you want to have that stuff somewhere else. Absolutely.

Be safe out there. Yep. This next one I like. This is, uh, I don't know why. It's just something that tickles my funny bone about this. Someone is putting malicious USB sticks in Australian mailboxes. Uh, and you know, I mean, it's a, it's an interesting vector to attack.

Just walk down the street, take a blank unlabeled USB stick that you happen to have preloaded with, uh, whatever malware that you, that you want to use against the, the innocent victims and you just, you know, pop it in their mailbox. Who, when there goes to their mailbox and finds a free USB stick, they probably say, Hey, free, uh, free USB stick.

Of course, in this case, they'd say it in an Australian accent, which I'm not going to attempt. But, um, what are they? I mean, we've already seen time and time again, they've done these studies where they just, they litter a parking lot full of USB sticks and a huge percentage of them, like at secure locations, right?

Oh yeah. Yeah. Like at government installations, they litter the parking lot with USB sticks and people find them, they take them inside and they plug them in. It just struck me as funny that. I don't know why I, for some reason I pictured a kangaroo or a koala, you know, making their way down the street. And I know this is probably terribly, uh, somehow culturally insensitive of me, but, uh, that's what I picture in my mind.

So that's a little window inside of how my mind works. Well, I can do the kangaroo with the little baby Joey in the pouch. Like, like the mama's bouncing along, the little Joey's reaching in the pouch, picking out a new one, putting it in the pouch. Exactly. The pouch is full of USB sticks and, uh, you know, I mean, who, and who's going to question, who's going to question a friendly kangaroo with a little baby?

You're not going to think there's any danger there. No. You think it's good to go. I mean, a kangaroo is not going to do something bad, but especially with a little baby in its pouch, but no, no, it's bad. It's evil. And koalas are always stoned. So you, you would never would want to trust them. You know, you never, never trust a junkie with your date, with your crime.

Oh, no, high on eucalyptus. So, you know, again, the takeaway here, if you find, uh, I mean, what, I mean, the best advice is never plug in any USB stick that you don't know where it came from, you know, that it's not fresh out of the package from a reputable supplier.

Even those nowadays, it's like, uh. Well, it's true. I mean, it's so hard these days, but, you know, we, we've heard of, um, obviously, you know, ones from trade shows can be compromised. Um, we've heard of, um, you know, the, uh, the, people come to giving away free battery packs at trade shows.

Well, how do you connect that battery pack to your. Yep. To your phone. USB. USB, right. So the battery packs can be compromised. Well, you know, you've, there's stories about chargers that have, uh, phone chargers that have malware in them. So, you know, that's the downside of the power, uh, connection also being a data port.

Um. Yep. It's easy to get in. So, time to move on. Jason, do you have a printer? I do. I actually used it today. Really? All right. So, I think it's fair to say that in a lot of situations, printers are getting used less and less, which is where people are, you know, uh, aspiring to go more paperless.

Um, but, um, there's a, there's a point to be made that printers can be a, a, a serious vector to compromise your network and your computer. Um, partly because I think most people don't really think of printers as being, uh, dangerous. You know, the, the, the humble printer sits over there on the desk waiting for you to send it a command to print something.

But again, that printer, most printers these days, certainly most consumer level printers come with Wi-Fi built in. Oh yeah, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Air, uh, was it AirPrint and that? Yeah. All sorts. Right. So, as the printer comes out of the box, a lot of times that Wi-Fi is enabled with some sort of default password.

So, even if you hose up that printer to your computer with a, with USB or with Ethernet, um, if that Wi-Fi hotspot is still, uh, just sitting there, you know, beaconing for, uh, anyone to log on who may know the, uh, the default password, which of course we all know are not hard to look up, um, that could be a way for them to get into your system.

So, uh, you know, the lesson is if you buy a new printer, one of the things you got to do is make sure that you've disabled all that sort of stuff, you know, change the passwords, uh, standard hygiene kind of stuff. But the other thing to be concerned about is if you get rid of a printer, if you throw it away, if you sell it, um, a lot of printers have onboard memory, particularly more high-end printers, and they store what has been printed on them.

Some printers can have a, a record of basically everything that was printed on them. Um, so when you dispose of a printer, particularly in a business environment, you, you need to make sure that that printer's been wiped clean. Um, and I think that's something that a lot of people tend to overlook. Yep.

Most of them have hard drives in it, at least the industrial printers, as someone who worked at Kinko's for many years, I know this very well, right? Pull the hard drive, drill it, or, uh, you know, if you're, if you're just getting rid of it, or if you're, get it, get a technician to come in and swap out the old drive with a new one, because it does keep up to a year's worth of, and sometimes more worth of basically everything you've printed, because these things are scanners.

So to print it, they, if you're, you know, taking something, putting it into the printer, it's scanning it and saving a copy of that scan and then just printing it back out for the most part. So that stuff is definitely, you want to clean it up. So, uh, be careful with your printers. Just, you know, be mindful that, uh, you know, a printer is a device on your network.

And, uh, while it, you know, it's again, one of those IOT kinds of things where you don't often think about it having a bunch of brains, but it does. And particularly since printers saw these days often come with wifi, uh, you just got to be careful with it. All right, Dave. Well, I think that puts a, uh, feather in the cap for this week.

I think we, we scared people enough. Can't print, plug, can't have any USBs, crazed, crazed criminal kangaroos are coming to put malware in your mailbox. That's right. But just sit in a corner and, and a, and a curled up in a little ball rocking back and forth until next week. Perfect.

Thanks, Dave. I'll talk to you next time. All right. Bye-bye. Comment of the week. We have a new Patreon subscriber, a friend of the show. Michael Burns has kicked in some cash since he didn't use my link on Amazon.

I think maybe I guilted him into it. Woo-hoo. We love our Patreon supporters. Thanks so much, man. Yes, we do. Thank you very much. And, uh, we have some comments over at grumpy old geeks.com. The first is from Brett Reese. I think I got that name right. I think it's Barrett, but, uh, Barrett.

See what you gotta do. Okay. Whatever. Whatever. Grime life, dude. Yep. Yep. I know how much, uh, both of you hate Uber. Uh, yet they've been a blessing for those of us here in Pittsburgh who have had to deal with barely any public transportation for years. Bus routes keep getting cut and taxis are mostly non-existent unless you are near a downtown hotel or the airport.

By the way, I'm not sure when Jason was living in Pittsburgh, but the city really has turned around. There's new construction everywhere and more and more tech companies are moving here. Love the podcast. Uh, thanks man. Um, or woman. I'm guessing, I'm guessing man on this. I'm guessing. Well, I'm guessing 99% of the time our listeners are male.

Uh, for the most part, we're right. Um, uh, you know, uh, it's the same here in LA. I I've got to say, I mean, having ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft come into LA has been fantastic because there have no been no taxis anywhere. I, there never was. And we just didn't use them in as a culture that started to change here, which is great.

What I think Jason and I both have problems with, with Uber is their entire way that they conduct their business. It's wrong and not fair to anyone. So concept, great execution sucks. Yeah. And, uh, as far as just me living in Pittsburgh, I wasn't actually in Pittsburgh proper.

Downtown is completely different from where I was, which was Monongahela and, uh, some other little towns, but Monongahela, Monongahela, not Monongahela, some of those, one of those places with a funky name, the Monongahela river is one of the, uh, it's Monongahela, the Ohio and one other river.

That's where you get three rivers from where they all kind of come down at the point there. I got to write that down. That sounds like it will come up in pub trivia at some point. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you go, go dig up what the other river is. Cause I forgot, but yes, the Monongahela, the Ohio, and I'm just going to draw a blank on the other one.

Okay. Body of water. Yes. Fast moving river. Uh, the next, here's the next one from Gabriel and it's pagan, not Pagan. Yes. I was, I should have, I should have reordered those. This is the guy that's the original. Yeah. Oh, this is OG Pagan.

See my mispronunciation, which, you know, is entirely justifiable for that one, by the way. All right. It could really go either way. Okay. Let me get to the comment here. Look, Scheinberg should definitely not be accepted for Apple genius position. The guy's been an engineer for decades. His social skills are probably atrophied.

Piss off. I bet he'd be the type of attendant who would condescendingly give extremely complicated, obscure solutions to people. Uh, well, yeah, probably. To be honest, that is the exact kind I want. That's true. But he is the exact kind of person I want.

I want to go straight ahead to tech level five, which is this dude, because I've done one through four and the idiots that are in the genius bar now. So, uh, continuing the comment, the genius bar does not need the aggravation. I'd send him to Walmart as a greeter for two years to get him accustomed to interact with humans before thinking about putting him in a genius bar.

Oh, um, yeah, no, I, I, I have to disagree on this comment, but I, I a hundred percent want to walk up to the genius bar and have that dude. Yeah, honestly, I really do. Uh, uh, and the final line, he should start a consultancy, a blog or something.

Um, I think you should just fucking retire, man. After all that time writing software, go fishing or something. I'm sure he's got the Apple stock. I think he's okay for financially. So, uh, you know, just chill. And, you know, you do want to go up to the, the genius bar and have the guy go, oh, I wrote that.

I know how to fix that. You know? Yeah, I wrote that. I can tell you exactly what's wrong with it. Yes. This is how I broke that. Yes. Uh, let's see. And we have a five-star rating over on iTunes. Uh, this is from, uh, Jack Engel, who has now commented on all forms of social media.

So thank you so much. Yes. He's doing the grand tour. Yeah. He's doing the grand tour, as it were. Uh, the title is Guest Grumps and VPN. Uh, I like it when you guys have other podcast guests on since it saved me time searching around. I now subscribe to Cyberwire, D-I-H-L. That would be Jason's little thing.

Does it have legs? Yes. And a couple others off of G-O-G. That would be Grumpy Old Geeks. Uh, one recommendation from D-I-H-L. I just like to say it that way. Okay. Uh, Predator One. Um, have you tried to get John C. Dvorak or on from No Agenda? I assume that's the podcast he does.

Yes. Yeah. John C. Dvorak is old school, old school guy. Yeah. Uh, or do you think he is too big for you guys? He's not too big for us. He's just, maybe we're too big for him. Come on. No, No Agenda does really well. I'm kidding. Uh, I, I, I've met John several times and, uh, I think that he would, uh, he would out grump the shit out of us, but, uh, it's just, uh, and I'm glad you like when we have guests on, you are in the minority on that, but, uh.

Most people don't really care. No. Uh, which is why we kind of, we don't do it very often. And when we do do it, it's a big deal. Yes. Uh, continuing his comments, uh, I hear he grumps for wine. Maybe you can have a grump off. As Jason already said, we'd probably lose. Um, also, I know you guys recommend an affordable VPN service, but being a grumpy old geek, uh, 58, I soon forgot, uh, for VPN recommendation.

It's right on our website, man. Just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash VPN. If you want to type it in quickly, but, uh, yeah, you do have to turn off your ad blocker if you go to the website, because it is a little graphical ad. I was about to say, if you follow our other recommendations and use an ad blocker, you're not seeing it. So, but, uh, we do have a recommendation.

Jason and I both use it. I know a couple of friends that have used it as well. It is our favorite. It's fantastic. So there you go. Yes. And I think this week we'll actually probably put up a sponsors page since we're actually having sponsors on and things that we enjoy that aren't on the Amazon store. So we'll get that, we'll get that up this week for you.

So it'll be a handy way to go. I would say go to grumpy old, grumpy old geeks.com. I can't even say our own damn show name. Grumpy old geeks.com slash sponsors. Okay. And maybe we'll actually, you know, that will involve work. So hopefully it'll be there when you try to type that in. There's going to be two links on it. There are three links.

So it ain't going to be that hard. All right. You can find us on Twitter at GOG podcast on Instagram at grumpy old geeks or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpy old geeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, find out about our favorite VPN, 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. It'll only take a minute or two, and you can find it by just going to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes. There you go. Since I was trying to break up the gunslinger series and get into something a little different, I went with some sci-fi.

I got a fuzzy nation by John Scalzi. Okay. Interesting little book. Cute. It's short, cute sci-fi. You know, I think I gave it a four. It was, it's really, it's one of those like just cute sci-fi books, honestly. You know, that seems to be the thing with Scalzi.

Uh, everybody likes his books, but none of them are like home runs. Like you have to go read it. They're just good, which is fine. There's nothing. In fact, we need more people like that. So good. Yeah. And it was, I mean, it's an audio book. It was read by Wil Wheaton, which I think all of Scalzi's books are done by Wil Wheaton.

Now I think they have a little bromance going on, but the, the reading was good. Uh, will actually is getting better at voices, I think. So that was interesting. But yeah, I mean, if you're, if you want some popcorn sci-fi, that's not real. I mean, we're not talking Neil Stevenson here or William Gibson, uh, check it out.

It's fun. All right, cool. I will. I, cause I'm going to need another break because I finished yet another of the laundry files book and I cannot go back to it for a while now. I really can't go back to it for a while now. Uh, this one, I struggled. I'm not going to lie. I struggled through this one.

And which one is that? Oh, this is the Reese's chart. Number five. Okay. Number five is live. Um, this one is ostensibly about vampires. Um, it was still clever. Um, funny. Uh, I just, you can't read them as often and as quickly as I have been cause I'm burnt out.

Yeah. That's what it comes down to. I, I cannot read another one of these books for a while. Yeah. Give it a bit for sure. Um, the nice thing about this one is this is the one before you get to the stuff where I, this was, this is, I didn't care for this one as much either. I'll tell you that the one that comes after this, I really, really enjoyed.

Yep. And I can see that they're starting to shift away from what has been the main character. And obviously you've told me, so spoiler alert, they do, which is unfortunate because I do like the main character. I'm sad to hear that he's not going to be the main protagonist moving forward, but it is, maybe it needs to change up or maybe it's just me, but yeah, it's getting a bit on the boring side.

Yeah. Well, I mean, he, he's still in the, in the next one, but it's his wife is the main character. Right. So, and she's, she's a good character. I recommend it. Yeah. Okay. Well, I will read it, but probably not for two or three months. Yeah. Take it, take, take your time, take a break, get it out of here, get it, get the taste out of your mouth.

Yes. Uh, so this week we saw the release of the third book of the three body problem. Yes. Yes. You texted me to let me know it was out and I went, that's great. Um, I, so are you not going to read it?

Are you out? No, I, no, I will read it. It's just, uh, I'm, you know, I finished, I was finishing Reese's set up. I'm working on something else. So again, I just read the second one. So I'm trying to follow my own rules here and space it out a little bit. So, yeah, no, I had, I had two gunslinger books in between.

So I was, I was, you know, ready for it. Yeah. And, uh, it's big. It's 608 pages. Oh boy. Mm-hmm. The audio book is 29 hours. Okay. But, uh, I have, I think about 10 hours to go. So I'm about two thirds of the way through it.

A little less than two thirds. Um, I, I, I'm going to say it's, I didn't know where they were going to go with it. Now I do. Not bad. It's not bad at all. Surprisingly, surprisingly good. This guy, uh, this guy put some thought into his stuff.

Well, one would hope. Yeah, that's true. He wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't. He's an author that didn't think about this at all. Yeah. So let's keep reading his books. All right. Well, I mean, uh, uh, yeah, maybe I'll, maybe I'll cue this one up.

Actually, I probably should cue this one up a little bit earlier just because I did have a hard time coming to the second one after so long from the first one because it's pretty dense and the names and cultural things are, are tough to keep track of and tough to remember. So it might be good to hit this one while still, while the second one is still somewhat fresh in my mind.

Yeah, that's, that's kind of why I wanted to do it too, because between the first and the second one, I'm just like, oh, what was, who was that? What was that? Uh, there are still a lot of characters and, you know, since there is a lot of that, you know, cryogenic stasis stuff going on, people will disappear and come back later.

And you're like, wait a minute, that was 400 pages ago. Who the hell was this guy? Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, good to hear. It's good. Can't wait to try it. Software, apps, and gadgets. I have an app recommendation this week.

Okay. Um, this is if you are looking, we'll call this the Tinder for adopting a dog. Oh boy. Yeah, it's, hey, it's from our friend, Trent Hamilton, who did our Grumpy Old Geeks app for us. Oh, oh, congratulations, Trent.

Yeah, I have been following the, his development on this on social media, so I'm glad that he's finally launched it. Quick note on our app, Trent. You're not getting the HTML codes in correctly. No, well, you know, chances of him getting to it by listening to the show are probably zero, because I don't think he gives a shit about our show.

I don't know if he's ever even listened to an episode of our show, but. Oh, we will find out. It's our little experiment. Yeah, okay. He just did, he just pushed an update for us, too, because when we changed RSS feeds. Anyway, check out Puppers. It's a really nice design, and it has the standard swipe left, swipe right.

Uses open APIs for adoption programs for dogs. He's got the photos in there. You can save them to your kennel, or whatever he called it. I recommended the kennel, but I don't know what he's doing with it. Right. But yeah, it's a nice app, and if you're looking for a dog, it lets you geolocate.

It also lets you look by breed, age, size, things like that, and it gives you contact info for the animals that you're looking for. So if you're looking to adopt a dog, then go check out Puppers. It's free, and it's on the iTunes store. Yep. Check it out. Pretty cool. Apps with a purpose.

Mm-hmm. As opposed to Grammar Snob, which is the app I tried out. Let's go into stickers. Yeah, this is a sticker. I don't know if you've messed around with all the new iOS 10 iMessage things that you can do now, but there's a whole sticker category that drops in there, and Grammar Snob does appeal to me.

It's the perfect app for people that can't stand the way that other people type things anymore. Fogarty. Fogarty, this would be great for you. The one problem I have with this is I thought that it would automatically correct messages coming in from other people, so you would see it with these crossed-out red updates.

That is not what happens. You actually have to do it yourself, and you can send it back to the person, which is no fun because nobody likes to be corrected. And most people don't even realize they spelled anything wrong anyway, so they'd just be confused. Yeah. So it's a bit of a bummer. If they rewrote this thing so it actually edited incoming messages and found all the errors and just showed it to me correct, I would love that.

I would be all over this app and recommend it up and down everywhere if they did that, but it does not, sadly. Did you actually pay the 99 cents for it? Dude, I do so much bullshit for this show. I was just wondering. I did. Oh, you did? Okay. They made 99 cents off me to just disappoint me.

Story of my life. You know, and I was looking at the reviews, and this person, CBunch19, wrote, Literally the best app I've ever used. I'm like, oh, well, okay, grammar snob using literally. There you go. So is it figuratively the best app you've ever used, or is it literally?

Since we know that that word is utterly useless now. It is neither. So I got this gadget. Well, I got three of these gadgets. I run multiple heads display-less Macs, you know? Okay. And I was always having problems when I would VNC into them, or screen share them.

Yes. And you couldn't really get, they were slow as crap. The resolution was always off. And I was doing some research on it. And what it is is, when, even with PCs too. I just got a grammar snob for a second. What it is, is?

What it is, is? Look, man, I'm trying to describe this really stupid, esoteric fucking gadget thing I got. What it is, is? Hey, Bob. Bob's rolling over in his, well, he's not in his grave right now. Sorry, Bob. I killed you. Go suck a Pagan. Angel Pagan is the outfielder for the San Francisco Giants.

He pronounces it Pagan, not Pagan. Okay. Well, he can go back to the Dominican Republic and spell it Pagan. Whatever. If you're running a headless computer, what you want to do is get one of these things that you can plug in either to your DisplayPort or your HDMI port.

And what it will do is trick the computer into using the GPU to render the graphics when you're going in over VNC or some kind of screen sharing. And it will speed it up immensely and give you control over it. The ones I got were HDMI. They're 15 bucks each and have made my life immensely better.

It is, is one of the best things ever. It is, is. Yep. All right. I'm going to automatize is, is. Okay. So we had Ello. Uh-huh. Now we have Ello. Yep. Yep. This is Google's new messaging app. It's smart.

So they say. Because we all need another messaging app. Their big thing is they're saying this is a smarter app because we have all these things like bots in them, like all messaging apps have now. So there you go. It's yet another one. I do like there's a good review.

I like the fact that it says clean interface and simple controls. It's straightforward and pleasant to use, which means the teens will hate it. Oh, well, there you go. They're used to their Snapchat. And Snowden has chimed in on this one saying it's just Google surveillance. Don't use it because they rolled back all of their privacy things that they said they weren't going to do.

But now they do. And you have to go in and manually delete your messages if you want anything private, which we even know that doesn't even happen. I don't think that's as big of a deal as Snowden does screaming and yelling about this because they do let you switch off everything. It's just it's not the default, which, again, you and I have yelled about how it should be the default for years.

But it's not like they just said, oh, to fucking hell with this. We're going to store everything forever. No, you can turn it off. You just have to go into the settings and actually do it, I guess, because we're old and we're used to things like settings. Well, no, no, no, it's not in the settings. No, see, this is what they changed.

They changed their tune. They originally said it was going to be that way. And then when it came out, they're like, no, we changed it. And to do the private messaging, you have to go into incognito mode manually every time you start a conversation. And you have to go back. If you just use regular mode, you have to go back and manually delete the conversations.

There's no setting to turn it off automatically. Ah, misunderstood. Yeah. Well, okay, I'm back with you, Snowden, but not your movie. Your movie sucks.

Media candy. The only thing that would have ever made me potentially purchase CBS All Access, which is the subscription service for their streaming bullshit, has now been pushed very far back.

Star Trek Discovery, which was supposed to be their flagship launching in January, is now going to be delayed until May 2017. This is hardly surprising, as all we've had so far is a really crappy CGI teaser. No listing of cast, no word of shooting, which is supposedly taking place in Toronto.

And considering how many friends I have in Toronto, most of whom are rabid Star Trek fans, I would have heard something by now from somebody. As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has taken place on the show. So the fact that it will not be appearing in January is not surprising. Yep. Yep. So that sucks.

Well, and this might suck for you, too. The Dark Tower is actually going to have a spinoff TV series. I thought you might like that one. You know, it sucks for me. Now that you're working your way through it, you're going to be so pissed when you're done and you see this shitty movie and this crappy TV series they're going to try to do.

And the TV series Wizarding Glass is like, what, the fourth or fifth book? That's my new ringtone right there. I have no understanding of what they're trying to do or how they're trying to roll all this out. And I don't think that they do either.

Idiots. Yeah. Anyways, it's going to suck. So we've also got a new trailer out for a movie called Passengers coming in December with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Two people I don't give a fuck about.

I like Chris Pratt when he's being funny guy, but this doesn't look like funny guy movie. And Jennifer Lawrence, well, she's kind of a doorstop most of the time. I finally finished the Hunger Games movies recently. Oh, did you? I never saw the last one because it had gotten so bad.

Oh, my God. Well, I mean, I read all the books originally and I'm like, after the first book, I'm like, it was terrible. And they fixed it kind of on the second movie. And then they took the third book and turned it into two movies, which, you know, it's Hobbit Syndrome. Like, let's milk it. And it had the same Hobbit ending.

It was like 17 endings by the time it got to the end. And I was just like, can I just go to bed now? It was so not good. Yeah, I didn't bother. So this new movie with them, sci-fi comes out in December and 50 bucks. I'm going to tell you right now, 50 bucks says it's got the Love Conquers All ending to it.

Yeah, look, I watched the trailer because you forced me to. And that's what it looks like it's going to be. Yeah. So get not excited. No, not really. Not at all. In fact, I'd rather watch the movie about John McAfee, which I'm not a huge fan of.

But you bring him up a lot. So I think you have some secret love for him. I just think he's fascinating. He's so out there and so insane. Have I got the movie for you? Okay. Ringo, The Dangerous Life of John McAfee will premiere on September 24th. That is tomorrow, Jason.

Oh, Jiminy. At 6 p.m. Well, 9 p.m. Eastern time. It is a documentary about him. Director is on Showtime. So you'll have to get him to sleep. Sorry. Damn. And apparently it shows him. He's just insane. And he's a total monster.

And it's a documentary that emerges showing that he really, really, really loves himself. Oh, yeah. I could tell you that for sure. Just go read some of his tweets. So there you go. I'm fully expecting you to watch it. I will definitely watch it. No.

Awesome. I'm in. I just got to figure out who has Showtime that I know that I can watch it at. Excellent. Yeah. I might have to call Bjorn from Sweden. I agree. Going to Bjorn's house. That's the new code. Going to Bjorn's. Peter Bjorn and Jason.

Yeah. Hillary Clinton did something that I personally love, but I have a feeling that her campaign immediately regrets doing it. I think she needs to do more things like that if she wants to kind of connect with the youngins. She appeared on a special episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.

What is this Between Two Ferns? I've never heard of this. This is a show that Zach has done on and off for a while. This is on Funny or Die, where he interviews people between two ferns. Okay. Quite literally. I'm guessing you did not watch this. No. Okay. It was very funny.

Okay. I'm sure she's not happy she did this, but some of the lines that he threw out to her, which you can imagine she would never take in a million years. When you went to Donald Trump's wedding, did he write his own vows and did Michelle Obama write Melania's? I'll give it a read.

What would happen if you became pregnant? Quite funny. As secretary, how many words per minute could you type? She was secretary of state, people. I got it. I got it. That's crickets in here. Crickets. This is why Zach is the comedian, and you're not.

Well, you should have watched it then, so I didn't have to explain it to you. I'll get on that right away. And as of September 20th, it was the 40th anniversary of Susie and the Banshees as a band. On September 20th, 1976, when I was a three-year-old running around, singer Susie Sue and bassist Stephen Severin asked Malcolm McLaren if they could replace an act that had been scheduled to play the 100 Club Punk Festival and canceled last minute.

This was a chance to open for the headliners that night, which were the Sex Pistols. How cool of a show would that have been? There's a link in the show notes from postpunk.com that put together a video of the 40 years of Susie and the Banshees in a nutshell, and it is fantastic. If you're not a fan, you should listen.

And if you are a fan, I think you will enjoy 40 Years in 40 Minutes, Susie and the Banshees. Link in the show notes. Cool. I'll definitely check that out. I'm a fan of Susie and the Banshees. Yeah. And then I found some weird, interesting thing. Apparently, there's a new Scooby-Doo cartoon going on, Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated.

I will never watch this, except I do recommend watching the YouTube clip that I stumbled across and put in the show notes, which is a long Twin Peaks reference in the middle of Scooby-Doo. Okay. Is this the one with the WWE people? I saw something recently that Scooby-Doo was doing like this WWE crossover, and it might actually have been an older one, but I don't know if this was the same one.

No idea. Yeah, I just enjoyed the Red Room and the Midget dancing around in the middle of a Scooby-Doo episode. Okay. It's good stuff. You, I assume, watched the finale of Mr. Robot? Not all of it. Nope. Not all of it? I fell asleep in the middle of it because I was so bored. Maybe we should keep this article for next week then.

Okay. We'll put it in the show notes because a lot of people will see it, but we can talk about the finale of Mr. Robot. I assumed that you weren't going to watch it because you haven't watched them in several weeks. I powered through to get this one done in time. Yeah. Well, you see, you know, you cried, cried robot too many times and I'm just like, yeah, he's not going to watch it, kid.

Okay. Well, we'll talk about it next week then. Yeah. Yeah. Some sad news as we started to record. It was just released that Monty Python star Terry Jones has been, well, has revealed that he has a dementia diagnosis. Oh, man. Terry has been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a variant of science, science, science.

This illness affects his ability to communicate and he is no longer able to give interviews. So this sucks. Yeah. Thoughts with the family and Terry Jones, obviously cultural icon, unbelievable talent. Go watch the Monty Python. Donald Trump Jr. is rapidly in a race to become even more odious than his father.

I'm sure everybody has heard the story this week. He basically compared human suffering and refugees to Skittles, to candy. Yeah. The bag does not fall from the douche on this one. The interesting thing is the follow up on this story because he, you as a photographer, Jason, I thought in particular would enjoy this, he stole the photo of the Skittles that he used for his tweet and he stole it from a photographer who himself happens to be a refugee.

Well done. Well done. Good job, sir. Yes. Yes. That's a double douche dare on that one. Oh, man. Yeah. So hopefully he gets, hopefully he gets sued for it.

I, one would hope, but somehow the Trumps seem to get out of these things and it seems to be totally okay for them just to do whatever the fuck they want. Yeah. And I love that. I saw, where was it? Skittles came back with, you know, a bunch of retorts, but somebody actually posted the number that what your chances of dying from actually choking on a Skittles is versus dying from a refugee terrorist and it was like 3,000 to one for a Skittle and like 37 million

to one for actually getting killed by a refugee terrorist. Yeah. But facts don't matter. Nope. Nope. No. So in related news, I want to point out a national hero, except for the fact that he's Canadian, so he can't really be an American national hero.

He is a writer for the Toronto Star. His name is Daniel Dale and he has started a new feature. He is posting daily, absolutely everything that he's chronicling daily, every provable lie that Trump said the day before. Oh. Something which American journalists seem to be incapable of doing, so it takes a Canadian.

These are fantastic and it's not, you know, there's no, there's no political agenda. Well, obviously there's a political agenda. Yeah. There's no, there's no, there's no writing. It is not written as, oh my God, can you believe this idiot? It is straight up factual. Here are the things that he said that are provably false. Yeah.

Well, he's a Canadian and he doesn't want to have, you know, he doesn't want to be neighbor to the beast. You know, they don't want to build a wall to keep us out. No, they don't. No, they do not. They'd rather keep their money to spend on hockey than poutine. And maple cookies. Next time.

Are you kidding me? Love it. I think the internet of things has finally hit is nadir of stupid. Oh, I don't know about that, but this is up there for sure. This is up there. This is a real candle. Not, not, not like an LED candle.

This is a real candle that you can now control with a smartphone app. You have the power of fire in your, in your iPhone now. Why? Yes, you do. After you wirelessly pair using Wi-Fi. Yes. Wi-Fi. You'd think that'd be something that Amazon came up with for their, their tablet line, but.

You'd think. No, this is a company called Ludella and you can light or extinguish the flames of multiple candles at once, complete with scene modes that can get just the right look for that special dinner. There's even a safety measure that automatically extinguishes the candle if it's in danger of tipping over. How have we made it all these years, Jason, without this thing?

I don't know. I don't know. It's available for pre-order at $99 so you can control your fucking candles. Now, is this Kickstarter or is this a real thing? This appears to be a real thing. This is a, yeah, straight up. There you go. You'd figure this would really be a Kickstarter.

You'd think. There's the obligatory Kickstarter-esque video that goes with it as well, which I urge you not to watch. Okay. So, there you go. You don't have to tell me twice on that one. Close that window. Closing shout outs. Quick shout out today to Dave Remley, a fan of the show.

Hit me up on Facebook. Said how much you like the show and thanks for answering his question on Comment of the Week a little bit back. Yay. Mm-hmm. And another shout out to Trent Hamilton, our resident app developer who may or may not ever hear this, but definitely go check out Pupper.

It's pretty cool. And I wish him the best of luck with his new endeavor. Yes. No idea how he's going to make money, but. The one time I met him, he ranted about how he never wanted to do app development again. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. Runs in the genes, I guess. Sounds familiar.

Like the time I said, I'm never doing another fucking podcast. Yes. Or I'm never moving back to Los Angeles. Oh, yeah. See you in two weeks, Jason. No, no. I am a bit thrown by the Terry Jones news, so shout out to all of Monty Python, and in particular, Terry Jones. Sad news. I did not know, as I quickly Googled, that he co-wrote the Lumberjack song with Michael Palin.

So put that in the show notes for your enjoyment. Enjoy. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo, and you can check me out at jpd.me, where you can find links to all my social media and contact info if you want to hire me for your podcast editing and producing needs. And I'm Brian Schulmeister, and you can follow me on Twitter at SlenderFunkus.

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 better yet, 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 Patreon to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochanski. 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 178.

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