180: Chabuduo!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

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And with that said, the following content contains graphic, explicit, and sometimes vulgar language. And welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, episode 180 for October 7th, 2016. I'm Jason DeFillippo here with my co-host... Uh, Brian Schulmeister. I hope we're recording now, Jason. I realize you're just trying to get your dream of having a whole show without me.

Yeah, yes, no. Little technical difficulties all day long. Uh, fun times, fun times. Yes, we're recording a little late because of my lovely experience with Comcast today. That being the instant we're supposed to start recording, router stops working, then once I get the router up, Skype stops working, and it's raining.

Yeah, and if you think that was boring, listeners, I had to listen to that, except about the 25-minute version while I was trying to fix things. Yeah, that's about it. Yeah. Okay, well then, what do you have that's exciting, Mr. Whiny Pants? I got nothing. I got a baby. Okay. I got poopy pants. That's what I got.

Okay, Brian Poopy Pants. That's your new name. Instead of crying Brian, you're now Poopy Brian. All right. I hope we get a one-star comment with that in it. Of course we will. Of course we will. Yeah. All right, Jason. What you got here? Okay, so just a little bit of follow-up here. I don't know how I found this. This guy, Steve Hughes, he's an Australian comic that I found recently that I really liked.

He does a good bit on political incorrectness in society today, so I put this video in the show notes for anybody who's interested in it. I recommend it for a little chuckle. It is chuckle-rific, but I like his take on being offended. It's like, so what?

I thought it was well done. I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was pretty funny. Okay. Looks ancient. I think it's about three years old. It's not that old. He looks ancient because he's a heavy metal dude from Australia. You know, they age faster down there. Yes, they do. Something about the way they spin around their hair.

Oh, yes. Ooh, dancing. Dancing, dancing. So, I've had the New York Times for a week now. Uh-huh. So have I. Well, yes, you got the upside of getting a free digital version because I bought the paper version for seven days a week. Well, the first two days didn't show up. Had to get them to start sending it, which was fun.

Yep. Then, this morning, I go outside, and my paper is basically a wet brick and completely unusable. You'd think that they would check the... Oh, wow. So, it became like a 70s sitcom. Yeah, pretty much. So, I come and throw it away. Go on their website. Say, I'd like a... You know, if you write to them before 11.30 Eastern time, they will send you another paper.

This was like 8 in the morning Eastern. So, I'm like, I'd like another paper. Yeah, never showed up. So, got to go back. So, if there's anything interesting in the New York Times today, I don't know about it. Well, one could just look at the digital edition. Nah, it's much better when I'm having my coffee to look at the print version.

I like the paper version. I can actually scan it much faster. All right. I dig it. And we have talked about the Internet of Things. Yes. This one actually comes from John McAfee via Boing Boing. He went to Home Depot in whatever podunk town he's living in now, down south of the Mason-Dixon line.

And somebody had put Pornhub on one of those fancy refrigerators we talked about last week. That is very funny. I do like the fact that he... What in our current cybersecurity paradigm accounts for this edition to his tweet? That picture just would have done fine.

I used to do this at the Apple store. Oh, yeah. I mean, not specifically. I used to run around and put up, like, a bunch of my client websites whenever I was bored. You know, this is going to happen. Of course this is going to happen with the Internet of Things. Yeah. I mean, this is the best use of the web browser on a refrigerator that I've seen yet.

I don't know what he's complaining about. Really? I'm surprised at the resolution. Yes. I can see a pimple. Great. In the news.

It's been at least a week since we crapped on Kickstarter. Yeah. All right. So, the coolest, we've talked about this. This is the... It set the funding record for Kickstarter. It's the most highly funded thing ever, which is bizarre. It's a do-it-all cooler camping thing that, you know, they took it over $13 million.

It's basically a cooler with a blender in it and a Bluetooth speaker and USB charging and a bunch of other crap. We've talked about them in the past because they came back and asked backers for more money at one point because they initially priced things too low and they decided they needed more money.

And so, people gave more money. And then they started to sell them at a discounted price on Amazon, its own website, and other retailers online before sending out all the ones to the people that backed the project in the first place. Ooh, that takes some chutzpah right there.

It does indeed. It takes some fuck you. We don't care what you think. We got your money. And the website currently states that if you hand over $400 for a cooler right now, they'll ship it within 48 hours. Or you can just buy it cheaper on Amazon. You can get it for $205 at Amazon. There you go.

So, what a bunch of assholes. And the Oregon Justice Department is currently investigating them as they're Portland-based. I guess they're probably spending way too much time waxing their mustaches. That could be a euphemism. It could not. They've had over 315 complaints over the course of the last year alone.

I mean, this is the exact problem with Kickstarter. They have responded saying, you know, basically, Kickstarter guidelines don't – there's no mandatory timeline. So, basically, buyer beware. So, yeah. So, basically, fuck you is what they've said. So, again, this is the entire problem that we've had with Kickstarter from day one.

These are people starting up businesses that have no idea how to run a business. So, there you go. All right. Kickstarter always – never ceases to amaze. Never ceases to amaze. And then I've got two kind of long-form articles that I'm not going to get too deep into, but I thought these were both great reading this week.

The first one is called Chez Boudoir. Chez Boudoir? I think I made it more French than Chinese. You did. You actually made it en français. I made it say bon français. Chez Boudoir in de boudoir. Rough translation. Close enough. This is a long, long, long article that goes deep, deep into – Extraordinarily long.

How China has become the land of disastrous corner cutting and how that basically is a problem and symbol of modern times that people are basically cutting corners left, right, and center because the almighty dollar or yen, as the case may be. Actually, yen is in Japan.

That's true. Yeah. Well, you know, my wife is Chinese-Canadian. You'd think I'd know these things. I do not. So, anyways, a very long and good article. I read the whole thing. I thought it was fantastic. I know Jason just skimmed it. I actually read the whole thing. Oh, did you? Look at you. Speaking of biting me, did you read the second long-form article?

Yes, I did. Which we were just laughing about earlier, BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is doing deep investigative journalism now. I know. Very deep. Yes. This is the not-so-wholesome reality behind the making of your meal kit. I know you are a fan of Blue Apron, or as I'm not referring to it, you, Apron.

I got my box yesterday. If we weren't so late, I would be cooking some Blue Apron up tonight. Even after reading this long-form article. Well, this is just what happens when somebody tries to scale a warehouse business in a supply chain business too quickly without the knowledge of how to do it properly.

Or, as I put in my notes, this is what happens when some chefs and a couple dot-com biz kids try to run a warehouse. Yeah. You know, the horrible working conditions. Have you ever worked in a warehouse doing fulfillment? It sucks. Hell no. I did. I worked for several years in warehouse jobs, picking and plucking and shipping and all that stuff.

It's terrible. It is a horrible job. Just because this has food probably makes it a little worse because it's chillier. But these guys tried to, they ramped up too fast. They, you know, they scaled too quickly. And the one thing that I have to say for them is the problem is their marketing department's way too good and they spend way too much money on podcast advertising, which I would recommend that they keep doing.

By the way, yes. Here. Here even. And, you know, maybe not after hearing this particular story, but, you know, come back. I think, see, I think what's going to happen with them is they're going to take some of that massive amount of money they have and fix things. That's, now that it's out in the public, I don't, there's nothing too egregious in here that, you know, made me think that it was, that I'm going to stop using them.

I'm thinking that if I keep using them, they will take the money and make it better for the employees that work there. See, you think that, I think that this is just a symbol of everything that's wrong with our, our, our economy 2.0. You know, we hear these stories about Amazon. We're hearing these about all of these companies that are doing so well, air quotes, because they're fucking their employees, basically.

Horrible, horrible conditions. They don't give a crap. It's, it's rush, rush, rush. Let's not put any thought into the process behind how we do things and to hell with those people anyways. And I think they'll fix this over time. I'm, I'm hopeful that this will be a kick in the pants for them to be publicly shamed and get their shit in order.

Well, I hope you're right. I hope that we don't have to go to drastic measures to fix things like in our next story. Okay. Another big story came out about how bees are basically going away. They're just, the entire hives are just disappearing left, right, and center. And nobody really entirely knows why.

On Santo. On Santo. You know, we've, to the point where the White House has basically said, this is an emergency and we need to start thinking about ways to stop this or, or we're all going to die. Because if you understand the food chain, if bees go, we all go. Yeah.

We're screwed without the bees. I hate bees, but it's bad. Yeah. It's very bad. It's very bad. You can Google that if you'd like, right next to the chemtrails and 911 being an inside job. Except this one, this one's actually real is the problem. This, this one's zero. So last year, Harvard University researchers, uh, began working on robo bees.

Yes. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a B placement. Oh, very good. Uh, B size robots with the ability to lift off the ground and hover midair went tethered to a power supply. Now, obviously these are first steps, but the thought being that basically if we lose the bees, we'll have robots to take their place.

Yep. Yep. It's coming. Yes. They think, they think about 10 years and they'll have, they'll have robo bees out there. Then we'll have to get, uh, figure out how to stop the birds from eating the robo bees and die. Well, we'll just replace the birds with the robo birds. Yep. That's where it's all going.

Yep. I don't know if you watch Westworld, but hey, here we come. We'll get to, we'll get to Westworld shortly. Yes. Um, uh, Facebook came out with marketplace this week, you know, place where you can go buy crap from your neighbors. Kill Craigslist. Does anybody use Craigslist anymore?

I've sold a bunch of things in the last month. Oh, good for you. I, uh, I, I never had much luck on Craigslist. So anyway, uh, this is their version of it. And so I, I checked it out before the show. The first thing that comes up on, uh, my local neighborhood, a pair of panties for $5.

I think, Oh, gay. Well, you know, nature finds a way. Yes, it does. It's like robot bees. Oh, so I could buy panties. A lot of, uh, old iPhones that are overpriced. One Uber driver who is saying, use my link to sign up. And then once you hit 200 rides, I'll give you, uh, X amount of dollars to, you know, use for Uber and things like that.

Uh, the scammers are coming, you know, of course they're going to come. Of course they are. So, and they'll figure it out and sort that out with some sort of algorithm that, you know, algorithms, they're all about algorithms and everything goes so well. Yeah. And there's a lot of, a lot of women who are doing these, uh, home businesses out of their garage, you know, MLM type of marketing scams, trying to sell their cosmetics or their herbal oils and shit like that.

Yes. Yes. There was not one thing in the 10 minutes that I scrolled through that was actually worth buying. Yeah. That's not so surprising. Um, so yeah, speaking of Facebook and their algorithms, people you may know, I personally have been creeped out by this a couple of times.

I don't know about you, Jason. You have no many, you have no idea how many phone calls I get over this single feature. They're like, how the fuck did they know that I knew this person 20 years ago that people call you? Yes. People actually do call me. Here's the, here's the reason why the people who are freaked out about, uh, people you may know are people that still use the phone.

So they're not exactly the most technologically savvy. So they get really freaked out when Facebook does something like that. Or they're very technologically savvy and they won't use that, uh, Facebook messenger without the two way. Two way out. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I've been creeped out with it just like, you know, kind of great magnet sort of stuff where, you know, a friend of a friend will have mentioned somebody in the very next day they're popping up and the people you may know thing.

Um, so recode went and basically asked Facebook, how the hell does this creepy ass thing work? Uh, because for a while it was location based. Uh, I think there was a few stories about like psychologists would have their patients start to pop up. Uh, which obviously you can't, you can't have that sort of shit.

So Facebook did completely remove everything involving location. Um, they'd asked them about that and they said, uh, the company claims that while the previously used location info, like whether two people live in the same city as a way to rank friend suggestions, it no longer uses any location data at all for this product.

Um, does Facebook use phone contacts to make friend recommendations? Yes. If you share your phone contacts with Facebook or Facebook messenger, which basically if you use them, you kind of have to, uh, this company will use that info to recommend your contacts as friends. You may know. Um, so yes, the phone thing does work.

Uh, do both parties need to be saved into each other's phones? No. If somebody has added your number to their contact list, you will see them in your suggested friends list, even though you've never put them in your own phone list, which is kind of weird. Oh, I wonder how many, I wonder how many degrees of separation they pull out of that too. So yeah, because I would like to talk about as a service, I would like to know, I would like to get a list of people that have my phone number that I don't have their number.

Yeah. I would love to cross purpose that and see who the hell has my number in their phone. Well, here's the thing you might have, uh, let's say you have your business partner's number in your phone. Your business partner has somebody else's number in their phone and then they bounce between the, you know, the second degree of separation.

So the third person might not have your phone number, but they have an intermediary's phone number that intermediary is friends with you. So, well, they get that deep in their questioning. So we don't know. They have to, they have to use the, the front with a friend, uh, they ask in Facebook, see who, who you call and who you text.

No, it does not look on that. Technically it could do so on an Android device because Google allows that information to be shared. Uh, Apple does not. Uh, but Facebook says it does not utilize this capability. I'm sure that they weren't under oath. So who the hell knows? Who knows? Can Facebook see who you email?

No, it claims that they cannot see your emails, but there's a caveat to this. Uh, Facebook that says that some common email programs automatically save contact information to your phone's contact book. When you email someone that includes Gmail. Yep. So if Facebook can see your contact book, if you share it.

So sending someone an email could mean they're saved in your phone and thus used in friend suggestions. Uh, finally, they asked about web activity. Can Facebook see who I look at on LinkedIn? For example, uh, because we all know Facebook has web cookies everywhere. Um, but no, it says they do not use the web activity to recommend new friends.

So apparently if you're both on Pornhub together, that will not cause you to become friends. Yeah, because everybody in the known universe would be friends. Yes. So that's all we know about that. Um, and then moving on from that, uh, we don't really ever talk about the big Apple announcements, so we won't go too crazy with the Google announcement, but it is worth noting because we like to talk about the internet of shit so much, uh, on here.

Google has moved into hardware big time, big time. So they announced a whole bunch of crap, uh, that they've kind of never done before. They've got some phones, which actually look pretty good, um, with a really nice camera in them. Uh, they've got a new, uh, they've got basically the step up from the cardboard headsets for VR.

A pair of sweatpants now. It's basically a pair of sweatpants, but it looks a lot more comfortable. It does look a lot more comfortable. Much better than a piece of cardboard strapped to your face. Yeah. So, and an entire platform called the daydream, which is basically their, their VR thing, which looks pretty groovy.

Um, they've got the Google home, which is going up in direct competition to Amazon's echo, uh, which actually next show when we have more time, cause I know we're a little rushed today. I want to talk to you about, because I'm either going to get an echo or I'm going to try this Google home pretty soon. Um, uh, they've updated their Chromecast, uh, to a 4k version and, uh, Google assistant, which is their AI kind of thing is baked into everything.

They've also put out their own router, Google wifi. Um, so again, obviously going up in direct competition in a number of ways with both Amazon and Apple, uh, it's, it's basically the, going to be the, uh, the infrastructure war, you know, are you going to use all Apple or are you going to use all Amazon or are you going to use all Google?

Yeah. And all of this hardware stuff makes me really wonder like what happened with the whole nest thing, you know, because with all this hardware, you'd think that the nest team would be part of all of this stuff, unless they just rated the nest, uh, you know, talent pool to make all this other stuff, but you'd think all of this stuff would be under one brand instead of them trying to maybe like spin nest off.

Yeah. I thought that as well. When I first heard about all this, I was like, it's what about nest? What about all of that stuff? Uh, it appears to be a hundred percent completely separated. So I, to me, it seems like they're leaving nest out to, to fucking rot basically. Yeah. It's very interesting too.

On the, the wifi side of it, I, this is not a bad price, 300 bucks for a three pack of these routers to place around your home. I, that's basically, I mean, I, well, to be fair, I do have, you know, the Apple product has the backup built into it, the time capsule. Right, right. I don't use that. I actually just have a hard drive connected to my Mac.

So for me, this might actually be a decent, decent replacement because the Eero is just way too expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a three pack of those is 500 and this is 300. So, yeah. So I want to have a chat with you next week, a little bit about, uh, you cause you've got the Amazon echo. I want to talk to you about what you think about it, but I may go with the Google home because I've reached the point now where I think it'd be kind of cool to have something sitting around where I could basically just throw on some classical music while I'm swapping out a nasty diaper.

There you go. And it's cheaper too. It's only 129 bucks. Well, if you're a prime member, I think the echo is 50 bucks right now. So no, no, no. They're still pretty expensive. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Well, cause there's two different, there's two different ones. You get the little, there's a little puck one that doesn't have a speaker. You could get the full one that has a speaker that actually for me works like a Sonos replacement.

Ah, gotcha. So, but, uh, at this point, you know, that only works in one room. They're not really networked so well, but I haven't tried the little ones cause I don't need it. I only listen to music in my kitchen and the speaker on the echo is actually really good for that. So moving on. Let's talk more about that next week.

Moving on. We all love the EFF. Don't we, Brian? F the EFF. No, I'm just kidding. I love, I love, I love the EFF. I'm like, why be, why are you hating on the EFF? Uh, they have a new series on, uh, article or certain new series of articles about shadow regulations.

These are the back, the backroom deals that threaten freedom of speech on the internet. Right. Now the EFF sometimes can go a little bit overboard. I think just a little bit. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm a fan of theirs, but, and I have contributed in the past, but yeah, uh, but this, they've got a whole set of, uh, new articles coming out about these shadow regulations.

And, uh, I just thought it was a very interesting because, uh, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting new term that they, they coined. Um, but it's been going on for years. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, let's all change our websites. Slack just stops this sort of thing from happening. So the thing I like about it is.

Which obviously worked. Oh yes, absolutely. Just ask Yahoo. Um, uh, there'll be a link in the show notes. Go check out some of these articles. Uh, I, I like that they're putting these out because it's just, it's an easier way to point people to different aspects of the things that are happening.

If you're trying to, uh, you know, explain something to somebody there, their articles are usually human readable, not like, not like some of the over technical stuff. So I like to pass around some of their goodies when these come out. So if these are, uh, uh, you know, they're, they're bite-sized nuggets on how we're getting screwed on freedom of speech.

And they have a, uh, one of their infographics that they've updated as well, but it doesn't really work that well. Might want to, uh, instead of hiring lawyers, maybe one time, uh, hire a better web designer. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I know two available. I know one available. I'm out of that racket.

I forgot you quit. I'm out of that racket. Uh, another article I found on Quartz that I thought was really fascinating is how countries like China and Russia are able to control the internet. Well, there's a big line coming in and they cut it. Yeah, pretty much what they look for. They look for the, the line, you know, um, cause the internet is supposed to be, you know, you're supposed to be able to route around it.

But when they have, when you have giant trunks coming in that feed the most of the country, you can, you can systematically shut those down or filter at those points of, uh, input. So it's just a, it's a good read on, you know, how China does what they do and how terrible it can be, uh, for just Chinese citizenry in general, uh, when, when the, the nasty ass government controls all of the access coming into and going out of the country.

Yep. And we'll be right back, but now a word from our sponsors. So you're racing against the clock to wrap up three projects, prepping for a meeting later in the afternoon, all while trying to tackle a mountain of paperwork. Welcome to life as a freelancer. Challenging?

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Enter grumpy old geeks in the how did you hear about us section for that free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Security? Ha! All right. We're back again with security with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire.

Woo-hoo! And Brian. Hello. We got everybody again. Yeah, we're all here. Woo-hoo! All right. So let's jump into it, Dave. What should we be scared of this week? Well, I mean, the big story this week was another NSA contractor was arrested in a possible – the story from the New York Times, NSA contractor arrested in possible new theft of secrets.

There's a gentleman named Harold T. Martin III. He goes by Hal. And he lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland, which is not far from where we are here at the Cyber Wire. Did he open the pod bay doors? Yes, he opened something and shouldn't have opened it.

He was arrested back in August and he was charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. And they found him with over a terabyte worth of goodies. So Snowden part due, but busted.

Not really, because they haven't charged him really with anything beyond the theft. They haven't proven that, you know, he actually had it with intent to distribute, as it were. So it was just like in his gym bag? They call him a hoarder. He had multiple computers. And literally the FBI – one of the FBI guys was like, yeah, he's kind of a hoarder.

Okay. Yeah, I mean there's lots of speculation. You know, as these things attract speculation, there's lots of speculation that perhaps he'd been working for Russia as some sort of a mole. There's been speculation that perhaps he would – may have been connected with the shadow brokers compromise of the equation group with those zero days that were exfiltrated from NSA.

But, you know, it's – this is all just speculation. There's really no evidence to back those up. That's just, you know, what people are wondering about. Of course, his lawyers have said that they've seen no evidence and what they know is that Hal Martin loves his family and his country.

There is no evidence that he intended to betray his country. So they're going to be arguing that he had no intent of, you know, distributing this to any foreign nations or anything like that. Well, the problem with that is Edward Snowden used that same defense. I love my family and I love my country, which is why I'm doing it.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point. So, you know, until – as more details come out, we'll learn more. But, you know, for now, lots of speculation and, you know, it's sort of, I guess, embarrassing to NSA to have this happen a second time.

Well, especially from Booz Allen Hamilton. It's like, here's the takeaway. If you want to go steal government secrets, get a job at Booz Allen Hamilton. Well, let's be fair to Booz. I mean, these people are highly vetted not only by Booz, but by the government as well. And also, I think it's fair to say that after the Snowden incident, Booz certainly upped the amount of scrutiny of everyone who worked for them, you know, their contractors, their employees.

So, I think Booz is an easy target, but, you know, one of the reasons that this could have happened to Booz and not someone else is that Booz has so many employees in this space. You know, they are one of the largest contractors. So, even just as a matter of statistics, you know, it would be likely that if something like this were to happen, it would happen to Booz because – ironically, because Booz is such a large contractor who is so well-trusted by the government.

So, surely there will be some shakeouts, you know, people will – I'm sure there will be some heads that will roll and people who will lose jobs, but I don't know that it's fair to use Booz as a punching bag in this one. Oh, but it's so much fun. I try to never use Booz as a punching bag.

I like it too much. Yes, and you said to be fair to Booz, and this is Grumpy Old Geeks, we're always fair to Booz. We're always fair to Booz. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm not going to argue with that one. All right. Moving on. So, of course, we had the story this week about Yahoo – lots of continuing bad news for Yahoo.

Of course, we had the half a billion email addresses that were stolen from Yahoo. And then this week came the story that Reuters reported that Yahoo had conducted mass email surveillance against U.S. citizens in assisting the NSA or the FBI.

That would require people to use the Yahoo email address, which I'm not sure anyone does. Well, I guess enough people did that the government was interested in it. Now, Yahoo has pushed back against this Reuters report saying that the article is misleading and that, like, you know, other providers, they interpret government requests to try to minimize disclosure.

You know, they're saying that – reports are saying that Yahoo had modified some sort of a spam filter to look for particular phrases or code that the government had asked them to look at of things coming through their email system.

So, you know, this is more potential government surveillance, but more bad news for Yahoo, who, of course, is in the midst of trying to sell themselves to Verizon. And I think the sale price is doing nothing but going down, down, down.

Yeah, Yahoo is in the really unfortunate position of being Yahoo. Yeah. Just when you think it couldn't get any cheaper. That's right. I mean, I think it's interesting, you know, one of the things that did come out this week, the director of the NSA, Director Rogers, said that he thought that this account sounded implausible to him.

He said on the record that he thought that this account sounded implausible to him, the notion that Yahoo would be doing this kind of mass filtering for the FBI. So, take that for what it's worth. But, you know, that's one person's informed opinion. Yeah. Stranger things have happened, though.

Yeah, well, if you want to keep your Yahoo email password safe and secure, apparently there's a new way to do this. We've talked a lot in the past about air gapping, and we all know that wireless formats like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not terribly secure. But there's some folks over at the University of Washington that are now sorting out a way to basically be able to send signals from a touchpad or screen held in one hand to a smart device in physical contact with the other hand.

And therefore, we could transfer passwords and have secure entry to all sorts of devices by basically using our bodies to conduct things. Okay. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. What happens when you go out on a bender and like have a bunch of shrimp fried rice the night before with soy sauce and you're all bloated the next day from Chinese and beer and your attunement is off?

I mean, what, last week we had Wi-Fi as mood ring, and now we've got meat bags as passwords. Yeah, this is kind of fascinating. I mean, the researchers are using existing technology in the smartphones. So, things like the fingerprint scanner or actually the display, the touchscreen display, which, you know, they can vary the capacitance of those things.

And then that varied capacitance signal will flow through your body. And what's interesting about it is that it'll flow through your body, but it does not flow through the air, which is the kind of the interesting security thing about this is that, you know, you're not using Bluetooth, you're not using Wi-Fi. The signal's going through you, and they can actually read the signal to something that you're touching.

Now, the bit rate is really slow. It's about, I think they maxed out at around 50 bits per second, which, you know, those of us who are old enough to remember 300 baud modems, this is even slower than that. But, you know, for something like a password, just a couple seconds of contact could be enough to send the password through.

So, I don't know that we're ever going to see this on anything, but it's interesting technology. And, you know, kudos to them for thinking about this kind of thing. I think it is, you know, thinking outside the box. So, kind of cool. Yeah. It's one of those things that we on this show put in the category that Jason has termed neat.

Well, this one, you know, I think of this one, I'm like, well, do you still have to be alive to use this? Or can somebody bonk you over the head and then log you in? Well, I mean, it's not tied to you personally. It's just, you're the conduit. You are merely a big, basically a big hunk of wire.

So, it could be any bag of meat. There's nothing about you that would be different from anyone else. Gotcha. Okay. The password is not stored in you. It's on the device and it's just then being triggered and run through you. So, it could be anything. You could put it in through your dog, Jason. All right. Bam, bam. Come here.

I shouldn't have said that. A little loud. Okay. Facebook is in the news with their end-to-end encryption and messenger. Well, the buried end-to-end encryption. Yes. Right. The very buried. So, the hard part about it is it's per conversation.

You can only use it on one device. So, if you want to use it on your computer, you can use it on your computer. I got the notification on my phone when I just reinstalled the app because apparently Yahtzee with Buddies wouldn't let me log in again until I put the app back on. So, beware, kids.

If you want to get rid of Facebook and play Yahtzee, you can't do them at the same time. Anyway, yes. It gave me the option to use that device as my secure messaging platform. So, I did it. But I have no one to converse with. So, we haven't tested it thus far. But, yes. It's very, very buried.

And it's on a per conversation only. So, there are better apps out there for end-to-end encryption if you want to do messaging and not get caught. Yeah. It's interesting why I don't – I guess they said the rationale for why Facebook may bury this is that it's hard for it to support lots of different things like sending photos or movie files or, you know, whatever, things like that.

But, I don't know. I mean, you know, iMessage is end-to-end, right? So, it's doable. Yep. Yep. But the problem is, as I've railed about on this show many times, is nobody sticks with a single form of communication anymore. So, I'll get one text. The conversation will then move because they'll decide to send me a Facebook Messenger message and then, you know, a smokescreen next.

So, it's just so annoying. That is – the beyond annoying thing about this is the one device because the whole point of these sorts of communication methods is the convenience. I can be sitting at my computer and be answering a conversation. And then, on the go, I'll continue the conversation on my phone.

And the idea that I'm basically losing the encryption because I had to pick one or the other that it would be encrypted on is fucking stupid. I mean, it really just is. Well, there you go. I can not disagree with you.

Yeah. I don't think anybody is disagreeing with you here, Brian. I think we're all on your side. All right. Just pointing it out. Yes. You use strong words because you feel strongly about it. Shockingly, I feel strongly about something involving Facebook Messenger. Yes. Yes. Yes. All right.

Fair enough. Okay. Moving on. TechCrunch had an interesting article. What makes IoT ransomware a different and more dangerous threat? All of it. Well, yeah. It's very, very interesting. They bring up some very good points where, yes, with the Internet of Things now, with ransomware transitioning from just your computer and not being able to log in and get your pictures of your kid or your puppy, you can now have so many things connected that they can put some

ransomware on an actual device and then hold you hostage. But when it comes down to things like cars, well, you can't start, you can't go to work today unless you send us 20 rubles, things like that. It's very interesting. And, you know, it's going to be one of those things that's evolving as we see with them.

Or if you're on, say, you're in your car and they say, you have to go, you cannot go below 50 miles per hour. Wait, exactly. Was that a movie? Hold on a second. Internet of Speed. It should have been. Yeah. When they reboot Speed, that's exactly what it'll be. There'll be an IoT hack on the bus.

Right. Exactly. Like when they redid Spider-Man and they was no longer a radioactive spider. It was a genetically engineered spider. They'll just update it for the current technology. I think this is interesting also for, you know, when you're looking at things like hospitals and even just the threat of something like this.

You know, what if someone, it's sort of like a bomb threat. You know, what if I called in and said, if you don't send me, you know, 10 Bitcoin by noon, every insulin pump in your hospital is going to go offline. Oh, yeah. Whether or not that, whether or not that actually could happen.

You know, all I have to do is demonstrate that I have the, you know, once, if I can, if I can demonstrate to a hospital that I can take one insulin pump offline, for example, so that, you know, the hospital knows that perhaps, you know, someone out there can make good on this threat. I think that's an interesting scenario of being able to, would merely being able to make the threat get something like a hospital to be able to pay the ransom rather than risk the possibility of, you know, loss of life.

Yeah, and I think we've covered a couple stories already of some different hospitals that have been hit with ransomware, and I believe one of the hospitals did pay them off, right? That was the... Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it has happened. Absolutely. They have paid them off. And so I think that's really, you know, an interesting scenario.

And then obviously there's things like when you get into the industrial IoT with things like power grids and, you know, water systems and control systems for dams and things like that, then you've got a lot of sticky business there as well. Well, we need to get on our screenplays before this becomes a reality so we can write near future and not past.

Yeah, it's an interesting article. It's a pretty comprehensive article. It's worth a look. Yeah, I thought it was very well thought out. I was surprised this came from TechCrunch. That's usually just press release central. God, we're getting news from BuzzFeed, TechCrunch, and actual news and reporting.

What's happening to this world? It's confusing. It's your positive attitude that I admire, Jason. Yeah. What's the name of this show? Oh, that's right. Never mind. So I found this other one in Fortune about basically a CRM for restaurants, high-end restaurants for the fancy pants is out there called Seven Rooms.

Have you guys heard of this? I have. I have not heard of it, no. Brian's the fancy pants when he gets to go to the really nice places. What's it like? Yeah. Expensive. David, I'll be sitting outside looking in the window out of a Dickens novel.

Right. We'll be across the street practicing our violins while everyone else is out having fun. Yeah. So this is a CRM for when you go to these swanky restaurants, they log you in, and then they know everything about you. They know your zip code, birthday, allergy information, previous food and drink orders, and your spending habits, along with a photo.

So they can cater the night for you. This has been around for years. I mean, I've known tons of people that have managed bars and restaurants, and they just didn't have a fancy app for it. They took notes on people, whether they were good tippers, whether you should go ahead and give them the fancy seat or not, how bitchy they can be, who they usually come in with.

All this stuff has been tracked on a regular basis anyways by anybody that actually knows how to run a place. But now it's in the cloud. Yeah. This is in the cloud. So whoop-dee-doo. Well, and they can share among different restaurants. So you can get information from – if someone's trying to game the system by jumping from place to place, maybe you can get the drop on them by finding out if they were – if they're a good person or a loser at the place down the street.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is the weird thing. It's the fact that this is obviously going to be shared amongst different groups of people. So I reserve the right to be an asshole at one restaurant and not get punished for it in the next one. Yeah. You know, you can't really go across vectors there because the food might really suck at one place and it might be fantastic at the other.

And if you're pissy about the food sucking, then you get dinged for going to the other place, which has better food. You know, hopefully they thought about that. And there's, you know, actual ratings of the restaurants as well to kind of balance it out. Yes, because Web 2.0 is well known for its thought processes.

Oh, yes. That's right. Well, no, that's why – you know, they were back in the day. But we don't work there anymore, so. Yeah. I thought it was interesting, too, in the article. They said that since they started this, LinkedIn and Facebook have put restrictions on their APIs, which makes it harder for seven rooms to automatically get this data.

So a lot of it – they're just relying more and more on the data being entered manually, which is interesting. I mean, I think that allows for more opinionated bits of data to go into the system than just sort of, you know, scraping the internet for your social media information.

Okay. Well, I'm not going to be going to any of these fancy pants restaurants anytime soon, so I got nothing to worry about. Let me know when it comes to White Castle and Chick-fil-A, and then I'll turn on my happy face then. I found a great article in Medium this week.

You guys heard of Coinbase? Yes. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So one of their employees basically got hacked through his cell phone provider, and it's an amazing tale of how their security team came to his rescue and also the other people in the company.

But did you guys read this article? I did. It was fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. I mean, it just walks you through the process. Yeah, it's really interesting. Take us through it. Okay. So, well, I want to get to the takeaways on this first.

Okay. Because there are some things in here that I did not know you could do. Well, actually, we'll just go through it. Basically, this guy gets some texts in the middle of the night saying that, hey, what's going on here? You know, we want you to check out a survey. And then he got something about his account password being changed.

And he's like, oh, well, let's call Verizon and figure out what's going on. And through the process of going through Verizon, found out that somebody got through into his phone account. And they started backtracing. Because with your phone account, you can get two-factor auth to other sites.

And they got into his Facebook account and all sorts of other stuff. Now, this is the part that is a takeaway. You can actually lock that at the provider level. So, kids, go out and lock your phone at your provider so they can't move it.

Because what happened to him next was that they didn't know is the bad guy put in a change of provider for his phone number. Which is a really sticky, as you would say, Dave, on your show, it's a really sticky wicket to get fixed. It is. And fortunately, this guy had a really amazing team that got his phone number back within a day, which is unheard of.

Yeah. But, yeah, then they went through everybody in the company. But I don't want to spoil too much of the story because it's so good. Yeah. One of my favorite lines from it was they said, We reviewed access logs from the employee's personal and corporate online presence with no unusual findings.

Because this employee is awesome, he uses a password manager to establish long, random, and unique passwords across all his services. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yep. See, people, you can be awesome, too, if you just go get a password manager. We prefer one password here at the Grumpy Old Geeks just because it's the prettiest.

Yeah. And then also, you know, once they got a hold of this guy's stuff, they started just hammering all sorts of people throughout the company, you know, to try to get their passwords and try to get them to send Bitcoin and all kinds of things. So it really is just – it's a real page-turner, as we like to say, but definitely worth your time.

It's a good read. It's a good find, Jason. Yeah. And I applaud Coinbase. With all of the hacks that are going with these Bitcoin companies, like, what, Mt. Dox and – or was it Mt. Dox or Gox? I can't remember. Don't remember. Yeah. I mean, they're so dead by now. But, yeah, all these Bitcoin companies keep getting slammed and slammed and slammed.

And this company had an amazing team that got this taken care of, like, too sweet. So kudos to Coinbase, even though I'll never use them because I don't dabble in the Bitcoin. It's for degenerates and hackers and people on the dark web. Yeah, I think the big take-home, I think, for me is that, you know, if you think you're okay using two-factor, but that two-factor is coming to your phone via SMS, not so fast.

Yep. Yeah, they have some tips at the end for that. When you're using two-factor auth, use app-based and token-based. Yep. And only use SMS if there's no other option. Which is most things. Yes. Well, with Google, I use the Google Authenticator and Battle.net.

I use the Battle.net Authenticator. They're the only two things I use two-factor on, really. But they use an app called Authy, which I've never heard of, but I guess it's the cool thing to do. But it's a non-SMS two-factor auth. So, if you're a startup, then go get Authy, I guess.

Or unless you wanted to get Hackty. Yeah, there you go. All right. I think that's it for this week. I don't think that was actually too scary this week. No. Usually most people leave here. More of a crime and punishment edition, really, than frightening this week.

But, you know, there's always next week. And, you know, we're coming up on Halloween, so we won't have to try to, you know, come up with some really scary stuff. Yeah. We'll try and scare the bejesus out of you. That's right. All right, guys. Until next week. I finished a new book.

I finished a new book. Woo-hoo. Yee. I read Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Leffam. Okay. Never really heard of him. I think that was recommended to me by Tim Ferriss a long time ago, and it's just been sitting in my queue at Audible, and I was looking for something different.

It's about an autistic detective who comes from an orphanage when he was young and works for some gangsters in town. It's an interesting read. I gave the story a three-star and the actual narration a five-star, so it averaged out to a four-star.

It's just, you know, the Tourette's thing was kind of a fun angle, but all in all, it was a pleasant read and something that was completely outside of everything that I've been reading to try and, it was a palate cleanser. Right. For the most part. But, yeah, it was cute. I wouldn't recommend picking it up, though, so.

Okay. My book was a palate cleanser as well, and I definitely don't recommend picking it up. In fact, I had told myself not to pick it up, but I broke my own rule again. God, these guys keep suckering me, and so I read the latest of the continuation of the Dune series.

They just, Brian Herbert, the son, with Kevin Anderson, released another one. I thought you said on this show that you were never going to read them again. Well, I mean it this time. All right, this one's called Navigators of Dune, and it wraps up the Great Schools of Dune trilogy, which are the three books they wrote, in addition to the other three that they wrote before that, and the three before that, and then the five before that.

All of which fucking suck. Oh, God, they're so boring. I could write these myself. They telegraph things from ten miles away. I don't quite understand why, because Kevin J. Anderson, I've read some of his books that he wrote himself, and they're pretty good.

They're run-of-the-mill but strong sci-fi. These books are so fucking predictable. They're so goddamn boring. Don't do it. Save your money. Read the original series. It's genius. Stay the hell away from the rest of these, and I will never, ever, ever, ever read another book by these guys. Yeah, until the next one comes out.

Unless it's on Prime Reading and it's free. Yes, Prime Reading is the new goodies out now. If you're a Prime member on Amazon, they just keep giving us stuff. I like it. You know, I look through – there's not that much there. There's a thousand titles, they said. Yeah, find a thousand random books that you actually like.

Have you ever been to a yard sale where they had boxes upon boxes of books? And nothing to read. And nothing to read, man. And that's what – I scrolled through this. I mean, there's some stuff in there. In fact, actually, if any of our readers are Prime members, there's The Atlantis Gene by A.G. Riddle, which I reviewed and pretty much recommended on this very program.

That's in there. There's The Man in the High Castle if you want to read that. But that's really about it. I was excited about the magazines because I thought this would be fantastic for flying. Now I can get access to some of these magazines for free. But there's really not that much in there either that I'm all that interested in.

I mean, they've got the bigger stuff. You've got your Esquires and GQs. But nothing I'm too into. But you can get the Complete Peanuts Volume 1. Yeah. Yay. I mean, to a certain degree, I guess I should be happy about this because when these things appear and I'm like, I'll take advantage of them, sure.

But this sucks for the authors. They don't get decent money. This is – it's just not good. But, you know, again, I'd like to see the back-end deals on this. What are you getting if you put your book in here as an author? What are you getting as a magazine if you put your magazine in here?

But we'll never find out. So pennies on the dollar. Pennies on the dollar. That's for sure. And a quick coming soon notice for – you know, we do love our Terry Pratchett. And he has unfortunately passed away. We are getting a small collection of early stories written when he was just 17 years old and working as a junior reporter.

I'm not sure if I want to read this or not. But it is a Terry Pratchett book, so it's going to be hard not to. It's called The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories. I believe it is actually now out. No, pre-order still. January 3rd is when it's coming out. I'm going to let you do that one, and you can review that.

I'm still reeling from The Salmon of Doubt, you know? Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure if I want to. I think I kind of want to just let things be as they were. Yeah, I would go for that because, yeah, The Salmon of Doubt had the first half of the last Dirk Gently novel. And I was such a huge fan of Dirk Gently, and I read the book, and I read the first half of the story, and the first half of the story was so amazing that I will never, ever get to finish.

It's just like, oh, it's soul-crushing. It really is. Software, apps, and gadgets. What isn't soul-crushing is delicious, delicious coffee.

Mmm, coffee. And just in time for Christmas, shockingly, here comes the R2-D2 coffee press. Now, we've reviewed, well, we haven't reviewed because we've never bought any of the things, but we've talked about a number of Star Wars random kitchen items on this show, so I figured, why not one more?

And this one is definitely doing the rounds amongst my Facebook friends. It looks cute. It's a little R2-D2 coffee press. It's $40. That's a little much. So it's not exactly cheap. Yeah. But it's dishwasher safe. Isn't that nice? I tell you what. Go get a $10 French press from Bed, Bath & Beyond and put an R2-D2 sticker on it, and then you save yourself $30, and you still can have your Star Wars lovin'.

Yeah, it's cute. I do like the Death Star toaster, though. If I wouldn't have just bought a toaster oven, that might be something I'd look into. Since somewhere along the way, my Hello Kitty toaster that someone gave me for Christmas went on Walkabout. What kind of fiend steals somebody's Hello Kitty toaster?

A real peek at you. Seriously. Yeah. So, Bill Maher finally... Speaking of peeking at you... Yes. Bill Maher caught up with something we talked about a long time ago. He did a story about your dildo is watching you. And I don't know why I picked the real time with Bill Maher link, except for the fact that it came up in my feed.

This is... We talked about this thing. It's the WeVibe. It is the Internet of Things vibrator. We talked about it back on episode 84 with Tara Brown. The episode is entitled No Talent Ass Clown, which was not a jibe at Tara. Yes, that was actually one of our probably worst titled episodes ever, because it seems to refer to Tara and definitely does not.

It does not. So, the WeVibe folk have played, shall we say, fast and loose with their data collection processes. Again, I don't know why you would ever think this would be a good idea, but there is a woman in Chicago, so perhaps you can go track her down, Jason.

Yes, she's probably lonely, so I can go find her. She's lonely and she may have a Hello Kitty toaster. It could be. She's identified only as NP in her lawsuit. She is suing the makers of WeVibe, the personal vibrator that can be controlled by a smartphone, because basically they collected information about her and other users, preferred vibration settings, dates and times of use, and attach it to their email addresses if you registered your device.

Yes. I want to know how she figured it out, because, you know, that puts her up on my list of smart people who like to have fun. Well, every Thursday at 5 p.m., a bunch of employees from WeVibe would be right outside her window. Go, go, go, go. Nobody could really figure out why.

Yeah. Anyways, there you go. Okay. And then on Recode, rather than actually downloading an app and reviewing it, we're just picking on apps now. Recode did an experiment talking about App Bloat, which I think you and I both noticed.

They bought a successful app. They loaded it with extras and watched it fail. Apparently, apps can get too big. If you go over a certain limit, people basically stop using it. And they proved that. You can read all about it if you'd like to. For me, I just, my takeaway from this was, I can't believe how big all these apps are anyways.

The current size of the, do you know, okay, Jason, guess what the current size, you probably read this in the show notes. I was going to say, it's right in front of me. I don't really have to guess. Okay, you at home, right now, guess what the current size of the bog standard iOS calculator app on your iPhone is right now.

Just guess. Take a wild guess. It is 68.1 megabytes. This is one of the first things I think I remember programming in BASIC as a calculator. The size of a PHP calculator download from GitHub, including all the graphics, 122k.

Yeah, but are they retina? Why is it 68.1 megs? There's a lot that goes into these apps, honestly. There's too much. If you go through and read the entire article, they really, they kind of dig pretty deep into this.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, there's a lot of bloatware going on and a lot of basically bad programming. And also, just the runtime itself is not small. I mean, even your most basic app for iOS is not Wii. You know, it's not like just a couple lines of code. There's all sorts of packaging that goes along with it, with the SDKs and all the built-in stuff.

You know, networking and all that crap. Exactly. All righty. Well, Oculus is in the news today because they had their big summit. Woo-hoo! Did they come out with sweatpants? They did not come out with sweatpants, but they are making their product work better on lower-end PCs, which has always been the thing.

It's like to get an Oculus now, you have to go get like a $1,000 PC, minimum. That's like bare bones. And they're saying now that the new engineering advances will let you use a PC that costs just around $500. All right! Which isn't bad, you know. No, but, you know, if you can afford an Oculus, you can probably afford a pretty decent PC.

That's true. Just saying! Well, that's been the reason I haven't even jumped into it because it's like, if I could spend another $1,000 on top of the silly goggles and all the other stuff that goes with it, I'm not that interested, you know? Yeah, I'm not even interested enough to go up to the sweatpants version.

I'm sticking with cardboard. Yeah, you stick with your cardboard. They've got some other – they've got a ton of announcements that I'll throw in the show notes, too. They're actually working on a web browser, a VR web browser. Because that's what we need, another browser. Yes, and a whole – and a suite of VR tools for the web. VRML, anybody?

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Oh, God, I can't remember the Microsoft one that we did development for. Damn it! Chromes? No, I can't remember. Oh, well. Yeah. Yeah. There's been a few of these things in the past. They all sucked. Yeah. We did the Enterprise and VRML for First Contact. That was – that was one of the uglier things that I've ever done online.

It was pretty hideous. Awesome.

Media candy. The Germans. Ah, Askes Eichnet. Yes, they like bands like Rammstein. I believe it's Rammstein. Yes, Rammstein. The best video I've seen all week.

And I realize it's old and I just didn't get around to it for whatever reason and hadn't seen it. And maybe it has extra resonance now that I have a child. But this is a German parent, a German mom, getting ready to sing her daughter to sleep with a nice little lullaby.

The Prodigy's Firestarter. Yes. It is awesome. It is pretty awesome. I popped that on before we did the show and I was just like, yeah, I can get behind this one. I'm totally down with it. I'm going to try it on my son at some point. She's very exuberant.

She is. She gets into it. So, good stuff. We've talked about anonymous content in the past. That's the company behind Mr. Robot. Yes. Well, it looks like Lauren Powell Jobs has, she's an investor now, which is interesting.

That's Steve Jobs' widow, by the way. Yes. If you didn't know that. She wants to make more, you know, heartfelt movies and things like that. But. Okay. It's just, it was a strange one. About anonymous content. I threw it in here since it was in the news, but. All right.

Cool. We'll see what comes out of that. All right. I want some more heartfelt Mr. Robot. Yes. I just want some more Mr. Robot now. Oh. Okay. Well, we'll get to that in a second. Okay. So, I binge watched Luke Cage this week since there was really nothing else to watch on TV.

Have you checked it out yet? I saw that you binge watched it on the book at the face and I saw that you were not so pleased with it. I did start it. I'm only two episodes in, but so far I love it. Hmm. I actually, I mean, it's hard, you know, two episodes in is kind of ridiculous in terms of trying to make a full on judgment of it.

But so far I would say, you know, Jessica Jones is my favorite. I like Luke Cage more than I like Daredevil. Daredevil has been bumped down to number three now. Well, see, and that's interesting because the first couple episodes of Luke Cage, I'm like, they hired the B team for this. I didn't think the writing was a solid. I didn't think the acting and the directing was a solid.

By the end of it, it got better for me. But, yeah, I wasn't really that thrilled with it. And by the end, it has like a bell curve. I thought it started out weak. It got good in the middle and then it ended weak in my book.

All right. But, you know, everybody else seems to love it. Yeah, I'm into it so far. I'm not binging. I'm going to take it basically like an episode a week and work my way through it that way. But so far, I'm really digging it. I Googled to see kind of what was going on because, you know, my rule.

I broke my rule to watch. I know it hasn't been canceled yet. So I'm surprised you watched it. It hasn't been canceled. It hasn't lasted more than two seasons, et cetera, et cetera. So I had to Google to be sure. I felt safe because I like Jessica Jones so much. And I'd like Daredevil so much. So I was like, all right, it's the same crew of people, same universe.

I'll give it a go and break my rule. And I ran across an article on Vulture that perfectly explains why I actually enjoy these Netflix superhero shows. And I can't stand all the goddamn movies that come out. Do tell. Do tell.

Well, it's a very long article again, but it gets into basically the gritty realness that is involved with these shows and the fact that they're they're personal stories. There isn't they're they're not saving the universe. There's not massive special effects there. There's nuance. They're not necessarily just good guys or just bad guys.

There's always somewhere in between. It's much it's just way more interesting than another. Let's throw a bunch of people in tights to save the world. Bullshit that you get with the movies. OK. OK. I think the other issue, too, is they have more time to actually tell the story.

You can you can do character development when you when you have, you know, when you have seven superheroes on the screen for two hours and 15 minutes. It's really kind of hard to get into deep character development. I agree. But I would argue that all of those characters probably are not as interesting as the ones that they chose to make these series out of in the first place.

Yeah. I mean, I know that they try and do the character development in their own movies. Like you had three Iron Man movies before the Avengers hit and you had a couple of Thor movies and a couple of these movies and a couple of that. But all in all, it's the same damn movie over and over again. I saw the new new one and it was just like I nodded off in the middle of it.

Well, the big scenes. One of my big arguments for Star Trek should be a TV shows and not not movies. There should be. Yeah. This reboot is over. They killed it. Fast and Furious guy killed it. It was a terrible movie. Yes. Go back to. Well, hopefully the CBS thing won't suck because Star Trek should always be a TV show.

It should never be a movie. God damn it. So first contact was good. And I can say that because I worked on it, which I will mean the only time I will say that because one of the things I'm most proud of. Yeah. It was only 20 years ago and I haven't done anything good with my life since. All right.

All right. High school quarterback. Send Demas high school football rules. Okay. I found a couple articles on Mr. Robot. One of them is from NoFilmSchool.com and it is a video about the framing of Mr. Robot and how they use it to tell stories.

And it's fascinating. I really enjoyed it. Or any other David Fincher thing ever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, David Fincher didn't do this one. He wasn't there. But, you know, take some lessons from his playbook. But it's a very interesting little video.

I highly recommend checking it out. The second one I have not actually read yet, but I thought I'd throw it in here because we always criticize Sam Esmail on Bite Club, as they called it. And it's an article on how he handles criticism of the show. He takes a big bath in his money.

Yeah. There you go. He Scrooge McDucks out at the end of the day. Say what you want, motherfuckers. You know, we never really talked about the end of Mr. Robot, the second season. I think we've got enough distance now. I think we can talk about it.

It's been a couple of weeks. If you haven't seen it, spoiler alert. Well, here's the problem, Jason. I have so much distance in terms of it being like a week or two. And it was so boring to me. I couldn't fucking tell you what happened. And I think you were making fun of me because I fell asleep in the middle of it because it was so boring.

I really don't. I don't know how it ended. I could not tell you right now. All I know is I was bored. He got shot. OK. Is he dead? Of course not. We're going to have to get more. Yeah. No, they say it at the end of the episode. He's like, I want to be there when he wakes up.

Blah, blah, blah. It was boring. It was boring. I think I might be done with the show. We say that at the end of every season and we pick it back up when it comes back because there's really nothing else to watch that time of the year. I guess so. That's that's fair enough. Speaking of new shows that I have.

Well, at least new to me. One of them. This is not a new show by any stretch. I added into my DVR recording queue Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. No, this is not. You're not talking about the podcast. You're talking about the Nat Geo show. Yes. The Nat Geo show. OK. That's interesting because I actually binge watched all of those episodes that they had on Hulu last week.

Ah, well, I've actually removed it from my DVR queue because what I've decided is I like my Neil deGrasse Tyson in Twitter chunks. I do not find him engaging enough to watch a TV show. I find his personality not conductive to hosting a TV show or an interview show.

And I find the guests that are not the guests, but the sidekicks that he has sitting with him grating. Chuck Nice. You don't like Chuck Nice. No, not a fan. And I find that they don't know their audience well because the people that are going to watch the show don't need the Star Trek references explained to them.

And the people that need Star Trek references explained to them ain't going to watch the show. So I found it painful. I just couldn't do it. I'm not into it. Don't care. OK, so here's the interesting thing about it. I listen to the podcast. The podcast is great because there's two things that you can do with the podcast.

You can skip the commercials and also you can listen to it at one and a half X, which tightens the whole show up. And it's much easier to listen to him in audio than it is to watch him on TV. I put it on in the background while I was doing other stuff in the house. So it was kind of like listening to the podcast, but much slower.

It's kind of the same thing. But yeah, when they're in front of the studio audience, it is kind of painful to watch. Yeah, it's not comfortable. No, but you know what wasn't painful to watch Westworld. Yeah, I mean, I fucking loved it.

I watched it twice so far. Yeah, I watched it twice and I love it. So I can't wait to see where they go with it. I I really was worried about it. I wasn't sure what they were going to try to do with it. I wasn't sure how it was going to look and feel.

Love every second of it. Not a single other than the main actress. I'm not terribly crazy about her. What's her face? I can't remember her name right now. She rings a little hollow to me, but everything else is absolutely fantastic. Yeah. She's not my my favorite choice for that role, but I didn't hate it.

I thought I thought she was, you know, I thought she was fine. Evan Rachel Wood, the Michael, Marilyn Manson's ex-girlfriend. Who isn't Marilyn Manson's ex-girlfriend at this point? Quite a lot of people. Anyways. Yeah, I don't think that she's great.

I think that was a casting misstep, but I could be proven wrong. Who knows? We'll see how she plays out later on. Everybody else. Perfect. Perfect. I love the cast. I think it's just I think I cannot wait to see what they do with the show. Yeah, I know. I wish I wish this was bingeable for damn sure.

I'm glad it's not. I think, again, this is another one of those things where like if you just sat and watched all the game, I just think it's better. The anticipation. I can't wait for the next week's episode. I know. I know. We used to have watching parties for Game of Thrones on Sundays, and I just don't have anybody to have the watching party with anymore.

So it's just me and Bams. But man, I am definitely going to be looking forward to this show every single week. Until they fuck it up. Who knows? Maybe it'll just keep going well because they got so much ground to cover because what I want to know is what's the world like outside, not just inside the park?

What is the world that generated this park? The real world that are that people are going to escape from into this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's you know, that's season three. I didn't get to say Ash versus the Evil Dead this week, so I don't have any follow up on that one, but I'll definitely have that in the queue for next week.

Yet another thing has made me actually wish I lived in New York City. Nothing could make me wish I lived in New York City. There have been a few things recently. There was the Bill Murray who went and bartended at his at his son's bar in Brooklyn. And now I want to basically go to a liquor store and grab a big bottle of champagne.

And I want to head out to the Socrates Sculpture Park where emerging artist Brian Zasniznik. I'm not even going to try to say his name. Zasniznik. Has taken over Long Island City Park and basically put up a multitude of concrete Christopher Walken bus that kind of look like the Easter Island characters, except it's all Christopher Walkens.

Yeah, this is really cool, but I wish they were all different. It's all the same bust. That is a bit of a bummer. I would like to see. Yeah, I agree. There could be a bit of a bust variation. The busts are a bit of a bust, but I mean, still, how if you did not know it was there and you just stumbled into this park, how fucking confused would you be?

That would be that would be worth it right there. This this is what art's all about, people. It is the walk in.

The web's not dead. Oh, no, it's not dead. Now, Brian, we're old school dogs. Yep. We come from the early days of the web. Back. Yep. I believe we're both back before the center tag.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. HTML 1.0, bitches. Blink. We need a hand signal for that one. I miss blink. I really do. I love the blink tab. And then Microsoft's abortive attempt at doing the same with Marquee. Remember Marquee? Oh, Marquee.

Good times. So there's a website called Traffic Magazine, and they have an interesting little timeline of the birth of the web and some screenshots of some of the older sites. But it's cool because it has like when different milestones happened online.

It's kind of a crappy timeline because it's just a big graphic. You know, the technology exists to do really cool interactive timelines. Yeah. There could be images when I rolled over these things. There could be links out to the Wayback Machine. Yeah.

There's a lot of things you could have done with this if we would have spent any time on it. And, well, there's an open source library to do just amazing timelines, which I think I researched for a project for you one time. Yes. Yes. And these guys just made a graphic. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

I originally found this through Digg, though, and surprisingly enough, I still get the Digg newsletter every morning, which actually has some good stuff most days out of the week. What they've done, though, is they've gone back to the Wayback Machine and have a nice list of homepages, like the oldest homepages that you could find from the Wayback Machine from some of the more famous sites, which is pretty funny.

Many of which look quite nice to me. Tell me about it, man. The start of this article on Digg is, web design has, comma, to put it gently, comma, made great strides since the 2000s. Has it? Well, and this isn't even the 2000s.

This is in the 90s. And I think they're full of shit. I would argue you look at these pages right now and then turn off your ad blocker and go look at any page. And I would say, no, no, we have not made great strides. No, we have not. And it's getting worse.

They, like, you know, I was at Business Insider today. I couldn't even look at the article you put in the notes because I had to turn off my ad blocker. It would not let me look at it. So I turned it off. I went there. Pop-ups, autoplay video, noise. It's just like, ugh. It's almost impossible to read anything anymore.

The web has gotten worse. It has gotten worse. I mean, my favorite on here is the old CNET homepage. I loved it when that came out. And I stole that site and used it over and over again for many, many years. And it's a simple sidebar with a list of links and the new stories.

That's it. Yeah. But nowadays we have to fuck everything up with JavaScript and CSS and all these stupid kids. Get off our web, Lon. Are you kidding me?

Love it. Now, Brian, you don't travel as much as you used to right now that you have a little young in and not. Yeah, it's a little difficult at the moment, but I used to travel very, very often. Now, when you traveled, did you drink? Heavily. I was going to say that was it was kind of I didn't even need to ask that, of course.

And if you look at my Instagram account, you will notice that pretty much before every flight, I always take an Instagram picture. It is if I didn't do it now, it would be bad luck. It's basically a double Bloody Mary before I get on the plane, period. Right. And I, you know, I have my standard whiskey and Coke while I'm watching my movies on my flights.

And I find flights to basically be bearable with a bit of a buzz. Otherwise, they suck. Yeah. Just the entire entire meat flying meat tube experience is better with booze, not booze Alan Hamilton, just booze. And you'd think that with all of the assholes that are flying every day, that us drunkards would be the the worst people on the planet.

Turns out, turns out we're not. Sober people are bigger assholes than we are. Who'd a thunk it? You know, I don't listen to Adam Carolla's podcast much anymore, but if you listen to him, you know it. It's the guy who takes off his shoes and then puts them up on your back of your chair.

It's the dude who puts out his yoga mat and starts doing yoga in the aisle. It's the people with their fucking dogs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, come on. And again, I also think that, you know, we all need we all need a personal drunk rating because there are good alcoholics and bad alcoholics.

Yes. When I see what I'm on a plane, my entire goal is to pass out and not bother anybody or be bothered by anybody. I have exactly have a strict set of of guidelines when I fly that is to be as unconscious as humanly possible and then get poured off the plane and into an Uber and go home.

That's it. That's the goal. And I guarantee you, if you're sitting next to me on the flight, you want me drinking the more I drink, the nicer I'm going to be. You get me sober. I'm going to fucking hate you. Yep. That fucking kid behind you that keeps kicking your seat. Ah, yes. That's what I want to eject your seats on the planes.

Well, it turns out that only 23 percent of the cases of unruly passengers were people that were intoxicated on drugs or alcohol. Right. And this is because last year, basically, the cases of people being assholes on a plane, get these motherfucking assholes off my motherfucking plane, have increased 7 percent.

It's not surprising. The whole process of flying is so degrading now. It's so ridiculous. I mean, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. I'm sorry. I screwed that up. 16 percent. Only the amount of ticketed passengers has rose 7 percent. So the asshole quotient is outpacing ticket sales.

Wow. So people are becoming bigger jerks, even though there aren't that many more people flying. Yeah, but people are more self-centered now. Yeah. Every day. Every day. Every day. Yeah. Anyways, just give me my damn drink. Seriously. Don't make me ring the buzzer and ask for another one.

Come ask me. And the answer is always yes. I do want another. Comment of the week. All right. We got some comments from Twitter this week.

First comes from JC. Signed up for FreshBooks with the referral. I recommend posting this somewhere because it's easy to miss. And this is a screenshot that he posted of where to put in, how to put in the, how you found out about us on Grumpy Old Geeks. And it comes after you sign up.

It's like the page after. And yes, we appreciate that. And FreshBooks even liked it. So you're doing something right there. I'll try and post that in. I'll grab your screenshot and put it in the show notes. Awesome. Yes. Thanks for that. And it is somewhat buried. But, you know, go try it out for free, people.

Yes. No credit card required. Exactly. Let's not do another live read here. All right. We also heard from Andreas Krohn on the Twitter. This is true and makes me feel very grumpy. And he links to an article from Hackernoon.com. How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016.

I don't want to know how that feels. I looked at this article and I scanned it. And the article makes it pretty much look like it still sucks to learn JavaScript. Yes. I would not wish that language on my worst enemy. It is one of the worst things in the world to program.

It's pretty horrible. Yep. Yes. And Blonde Sazzle writes to us on Twitter. Forget self-driving cars. This is what you want. Japan tests out self-driving chairs that take the pain out of queuing. And we actually covered this last week. So get up to speed, Blonde Sazzle. But thank you for thinking of us.

Yes, we did cover it last week. But this is an actual video of it in use as opposed to I thought it was just a joke. So apparently they are actually really using it somewhere in Japan. But that's not too surprising, isn't it? That's not surprising. Hey, it's a good idea. It's not a bad idea. It's a great idea. Now, Jason, I would like you to read the first five-star rating because I want to read the second one.

I know you do. Okay. This comes from Woody Bergman. My favorite tech podcast. Smart enough that I'm always learning something, but not at the level where I need a computer science degree to understand it. This is one of the few podcasts where I listen to every show as soon as I get it. Being an old or maybe former goth, this also has the benefit of including what little news there is about some of my favorite old bands like Susie, Bauhaus, The Sisters, et cetera.

All that and they're funny too. I am so grateful for these guys. Well, we are grateful for you, Woody. We appreciate you. Thanks, Woody. I was actually going to put in an article about the Sisters of Mercy just for you this week, but then I forgot because you're old, you know, because I'm old. I'll try that again next week.

Anyways, our second five-star rating is from Carl Weirstraus and I'll give him points for performance art. I would have appreciated the straight up rating, but you did give us five stars. So fair enough for that. Jason, your dog won't shut up.

Jason, it's your neighbor, Mr. K from 4B. Your dog won't shut up. You won't answer your phone and I have no other medium to contact you with except through this podcast review. So take care of your dang dog. He's annoying everyone around here. I need him to shut up. I'm getting a migraine and it has dog written all over it.

I don't know where you went off to or why he just won't shut up. Trust me, he didn't go anywhere. Jason's there. But if you didn't get here soon, well, you'll be sorry then. Grumpy old idiot, stupid dog owner. Good podcast though. Thanks, Carl. Yeah. Thanks, Carl. I don't live in an apartment and my dog's a girl, but I appreciate the, I appreciate the performance art.

I will stick with the confusion about your dog being a girl because if your dog was a girl, should be named pebbles, not bam, bam, bam, bam was the boy's son. Right. I know. Hey, you know, this is a new world. Apparently anybody can be whatever they want. This is not the, the sixties or the fifties or whatever the hell the Flintstones was out.

Should have named your dog Bruce Jenner then. Ah, shut up, Han Solo loving motherfucker. Okay. This next one comes from Gerald Thomas. Happy young geek. I've always been interested in tech from a very young age, but never knew much about the tech world. Earlier this year, I decided to make a career switch into coding.

Oh, I'm sorry, dude. You shouldn't have done that. And I was looking for podcasts that would inform me on all things tech. While this podcast wasn't something I expected, I have to say it sparked my interest with all the different categories and interesting articles. P.S. The voice that announces the segments reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Well, that would be a friend of the show. Robert Fogarty. Bob's your uncle. Bob is your uncle. Uh, thanks so much, Jarrell. And, uh, sorry about that coding thing. I'm sorry. We don't talk about it much, but now you know why. There's a reason. Closing shout outs.

Shout out to friend of the show, Chris Punani. I mean, uh, Patroni or, uh, Patreon or whatever the hell your name is, uh, from the Grime Life podcast who sadly lost his cat crumb of 17 years. Uh, sorry, man. It's terrible. Sucks. Yeah. And I think the cat's name is actually Kroom.

Kroom. Yes. Sorry, Chris. Uh, also, I want to give a shout out to Caroline Crawley. You may not know her actually. Uh, who is the writer, uh, that liked, uh, uh, Woody, Woody from, uh, our comments might appreciate this story.

Uh, Carolyn Crawley has passed away. Sadly, she was the singer for Shelly and Orphan, uh, a nice little kind of gothy band. Uh, also guest vocaled on a lot of this mortal coils stuff, which are still some of my favorite albums of all time. Uh, she will be missed. Okie doke.

I haven't heard her, but, uh, I know Dave Bittner was a, was a fan that, uh, just discovered her. So I'll go check her out as well. Yes, I will. We will have a video in the show notes. So you should go check that out at, uh, grumpy old geeks.com slash one 80. 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, or if you want to hire me for your podcast editing and producing needs.

And I'm Brian Schillmeister and you can follow me on Twitter at slender fungus. Visit patreon.com slash GOG and sign up to help support the show. Even as little as a buck a month helps keep the bandwidth baby formula and puppy chow flowing. If you're cheap or broke, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a glowing review and five stars.

And at the very least, please share the show with your friends. Grumpy old geeks.com is where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, ask us questions that we can read on the air or find links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like. We're also on Twitter at GOG podcast and on Instagram at grumpy old geeks.

Intro music for the show is provided by the band among us. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Apple music, or get 10 exclusive tracks when you sponsor us on Patreon. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochanski. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy.

And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpy old geeks.com slash Andy, where you can listen to this song in its entirety. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 1-8-0. Guess what? I got a fever.

And the only prescription is more cowbell.

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