181: Instant Gratification Generation

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. If you dig the show and want to support us, please go to patreon.com slash GOG and share the love. Even a buck a month helps us out and earns our undying love and admiration and also helps me pay for nappies for the fruit of my loins.

And if you're interested in advertising on the show, please drop us a line at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com and we'll get you our ad rates toot-sweet. And the following content contains naughty language, so put your kids back in the box unless you want them to grow up being fully functional adults. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 181 for October 14th, 2016. I'm Jason DeFillippo here with my co-host.

Brian Schulmeister. That was a long... I gotta redo that so I can breathe. Yeah, you gotta do some more cardio if you want to make it through all those lines in a row. If I'm doing cardio, that means I have to leave my house and leaving my house just gets me sick. I got the sniffles. Yes, I'm sorry.

You poor little flower, you. I am. I'm weak. I'm weak. Speaking of weak, so I ended up with an iPhone 7. Weak. Did you get the regular 7 or the 7 Plus? I got the regular 7 because I'm still not down with having the gigantic phone thing.

Oh, but it's got the cameras, those cameras. I don't care. Oh. I figured you would care because you have the fruit of your loins. The camera from my iPhone 6S was taking good enough photos for me of the fruit of my loins. And also my loins occasionally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What has been mentally seen cannot be unseen. That's a different story. No, I mean, my phone basically just crapped out on me, so I didn't have much of a choice, sadly. But I definitely, like, you know, this whole chasing the rabbit's tail thing with these upgrades, it's got to be slowing down and stopping.

I really can't tell a goddamn difference between my 6S and the 7. It's faster. It's a little smaller. Theoretically, it has a much better camera. But I don't need this phone. I didn't want this phone. I'm sad that I had to pay to get to this phone.

Yeah, that's the hard part right there is paying for it. Yeah. So, you know, there you go. There's my review of the iPhone 7. It's nice, but so was my 6. Yeah, that's the funny thing. I've got the 6 Plus, not the 6S Plus, you know. And it works fine, except for the fact that it doesn't work.

That's the only problem. That's the catch there, isn't it? Yeah, because of the flaw in the logic board where the, since it's bent, the chips popped off for the touch recognition, so I have to turn it off and on all day long. But besides that, you know, besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Yeah, if it worked, I would just keep this for the, you know, the foreseeable future. But now I have to buy a new one. I'm thinking of just going with the 6S Plus, because it's going to be cheaper. I, you know, having lived with the 7 for a couple days, if I could go back in time, I suppose I actually could.

I suppose I got 14 days. If I could turn back time. So many things that cannot be unseen or unheard. Hey, man, you talk about your junk. I'm busting out some share. I'm just saying I would go back and in two seconds I would get the 6 instead of the 7. There really is no reason to have it.

Well, then take it back. Get a cheaper phone. I might. I might do that, damn it. Yeah. I'm lazy. So I did not get the new watch. I'm still rocking my Apple Watch 1. Right. The interesting thing is the watch is the one thing that they made thicker when they come out with a new one.

And I don't need GPS. I still, I'm a huge fan of my Apple Watch. I use it all the time. I love it. The problem is now with the new Watch OS 3, every single day, it just pops up the little Apple like it's restarting and locks every day.

And I have to force restart it. All right. So annoying. I love the new watch faces, though. It's like it's got everything on it. It's like, you know, control panel for my wrist. But the fact that it just stops working halfway through the day, every single day, when the battery is well over 50 percent.

This isn't like, you know, I'm running out of juice type of thing. I'm at like 60, 70 percent on juice and it just stops working. That is that is a fundamental flaw in your product, Tim Cook. That does seem to be a problem. I mean, I've got to say I've been crapping on the watch since they released it.

But when I was at the Apple store replacing my damn phone, the watch area was very, very busy. A lot of people taking a look at them. So who knows? It's funny. I see them all in the wild a lot now. A lot of people have them. It's surprising. I was I was actually every time I see one, I'm very surprised.

I'm like, oh, you got one, too, sucker, sucker. Yeah, pretty much. We are all we are all victims of the sunk cost fallacy. But I actually do like it. It does. It does save me some pulling out of the giant phone from my pocket, which maybe I should do that more and it won't get bent next time.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I found an article that I think basically encapsulates our show in a nutshell. Another one. Damn. Yeah. Another one. Yes. This is off of Recode. It's called I'm done pretending that Silicon Valley tech is visionary. I think we were done five years ago with that, weren't we? Let's see.

I started coding in 1994 professionally, so I'm thinking 1993 is when when the thing went to shit. But yeah, so what are some of the main points of this one? I'm curious. It's just a big, long article kind of from an insider saying, you know, we are all so smart, yet we do nothing good.

That's really what it comes down to. I'll read two choice paragraphs here. Silicon Valley is filled with intelligent, capable minds that are constantly looking for ways to exploit markets and seize windows of opportunity. Business is business. I love having new products. But first, convince me that another best way to send money to my friend's app that isn't PayPal, Venmo, or Google Wallet is actually necessary.

It's not. It's not. Not to mention that money transfer through Apple Pay could launch at any moment, and we would still have to compete with Facebook Pay, Snap Cash, and Square Cash for relevance. Right now, entrepreneurs aren't trying to fix things that aren't broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken. Healthcare, education, homelessness, poverty, food waste, climate change, et cetera.

These aren't even small market problems. There is so much room for people with good ideas to make change and probably make some good money while they're at it. Amen, brother. Yeah. Those are actually hard problems, though. Sending money to somebody is not a hard problem. So, Ergo, you go for the... You can't just build an app. Everybody wants the low-hanging fruit to become a unicorn, you know?

So, what are you going to do? Let me snap. Yeah, let me snap Cash in my balls. In the news.

In sad news and technology, Dennis Ritchie, the father of C and co-developer of Unix, has died. Aww. Yeah. He's a smart dude. Very smart dude. And a lot of the stuff that we use every day came from his brain. So, thank you, Dennis, and you will be missed.

Curly brackets everywhere. Just for you, buddy. In funny news, Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia page has been vandalized with pornographic images and pro-Trump messaging. And I noticed that I pasted pro-Trump message into our little note-taking system for our show, and it turned it into a little happy poo.

So, are you using one of the Chrome filters that we'll be talking about later? I am not. You know what it is? I am. So, every mention of Trump in our show notes has been turned into a poop emoji. That is very funny. Because I'm running it, and then it auto-saves it.

I was wondering if you guys were going to see that or not. That's awesome. Yes, pro-poop message. Yes. So, yeah, and stunning, you know, because they aren't baskets of deplorables. This is, you know, more than just a clever little Wikipedia change where you, like, change their death date to, like, 10 years ago.

This is straight up lots of words I'm not going to say on this show, even though we're an explicit show that involve rape and all kinds of really, really bad things. So, well done, poop fans. Yeah, fans of poop.

Yes, showing your class yet again. Yeah, and I went to go look at the image, but it's been blurred, so I can't. Looks very saucy. Yes, sauce is used. Much sauce. So, everybody knows the Galaxy Note 7 is no more.

Thank God. It has ceased to be. It is pining for the fjords. Well, sort of. People are basically having to be cajoled into turning theirs in. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that. Let's keep a bomb in our house. I know. Let's just say I'm happy I'm not going on a flight anytime soon because I don't want to be next to one of these idiots that hasn't given up their phone yet.

Yeah, no doubt. And I love how the fireproof box is what they sent back to return them. And the giant sticker is like, do not put this on an airplane. Yeah, there's all kinds of different ways to return your phone. If you have not done so yet, please do so. If you bought it directly from them, Samsung is sending out fireproof return boxes, which alone lets you know how ridiculous this is.

And they are actually now offering Note 7 users or owners up to $100 in credit to return their phones because, you know, these things are blowing up. So if we can't just get you to come return your phone because you're concerned about it blowing up your penis in your pocket, we will give you $100 to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Yeah, you know what? You don't deserve a penis if you need to get bribed to take your penis bomb away from you. And that in no way implies that only males would use the Galaxy Note 7. That's true. That's true. Which really sucks, though, is that, you know, as I was thinking about, you know, we were talking about the phones, you know, I've been contemplating a switch over to Android.

Because it's like, you know, most of the apps that I have now are cross-compatible. Like, there's an Android version of just about everything. I don't use anything that is, you know, Apple-specific almost on my phone. It's all cloud-based. And I'm like, oh, now's actually a good chance.

And when the Note 7 came out, I checked it out, and it looks like a really nice phone. Except for the part where it blows your balls off. So, too bad. Too bad. Poor Samsung. Poor Samsung. Sucks to be them right now. Also, it sucks to be Comcast right now.

It's always sucked to be Comcast. Yeah, just ask anybody that works there that you have to call when your shit don't work. Or anybody that has their shit. Yep. Many hours again this week, but neither here nor there. They have been hit with a $2.3 million fine, which is .06 seconds of income for them.

So, it's not really that big a deal for a practice known as negative option billing, which is when you sign up and they give you HBO free for a month and then charge you the next month without telling you that you're going to get charged. A lot of people have had this happen to them. And the great part about it when it usually happens, if you get on the phone and call them and say, you motherfuckers, I did not ask you to pay for it.

Give me this and I'm not going to pay for it. And what happens is you get another month for free. Then they bill you again. Then you get back on the phone. So, you can theoretically get HBO free for the rest of your life if you get on this loop. But, yeah, they got busted for it. Good for the FCC.

Thank you. Yes. One of the few times we'll say, yay, FCC. The only thing about it is I'm like, why don't you smack them for more money? But then I'm thinking about it and I'm like, no, because then my bill would go up. Yeah, exactly. It's not like they're not going to recoup all that money.

They're going to pass it along to us, the consumer. They will be providing positive option billings. Yeah. Even though I don't get cable, I'm still going to pay for this problem. Okie dokie. Amazon. You know, we joked about them opening up bookstores and we thought it was the douchiest move in the universe.

Yes. Now they're going to start opening convenience stores. Okay. All right. Here's the thing, man. It's like they're just they're going to be everywhere. We just have to get used to it. Amazon is going to be everywhere. They're going to put everyone out of business and we're all going to work for Amazon at some point.

Let me tell you what Amazon has actually done. We used to we used to decry the death of the small mom and pop shops on Main Street. They're making me feel bad for 7-Eleven. I know. Isn't that crazy? This is how bad Amazon is getting. It's not even mom and pop shops that we're worried about anymore.

It's longstanding international businesses that are getting killed by Amazon. They're making us feel bad for soulless, heartless conglomerations. Exactly. That's how bad Amazon has gotten. And you know what? I still ordered something from Amazon yesterday, so I'm not putting my money where my mouth is.

I had five boxes show up from Amazon today. I got shoes. I got a shower curtain. I got dog toys. I got cables. I got tons of stuff from them today. So you know what? We are digging. We are. We are. We are the blame. Yeah. Yeah. We are the problem.

Well, if you want to sell half that shit that you just got delivered from Amazon, there's more talk about the Facebook's new Craigslist competitor talking about, again, another big business that is running everybody else out. Everything is either going to be Facebook or Amazon in the near future. Well, I know I can get panties locally sourced.

Exactly. Well, this article actually makes a good case that Facebook's new Craigslist competitor should be a little bit debauched because if you want to take over Craigslist, that's where the fun stuff is, and you've got to offer that too. Otherwise, nobody's ever going to use you, and they're all just going to stick with Craigslist.

Yeah. Where's the poontang section? I'm telling you. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. That's what Craigslist was for. Missed connections and poontang. Yeah. I don't really get why Facebook is actually moving into this space anyways. It's such a weird nothing for them.

Because they have to provide shareholders their value. All right. So we have to keep loading on bloatware onto something that is already just doing quite well in and of itself. Yeah. Okay. Great. They want all the monies that they can get from Amazon, because all the employees have to go shop at Amazon.

So they need to make more money. Yeah. Well, speaking of the next thing that Facebook has now launched, they've launched their competitor for Slack, basically, Workplace, which has been around for a while. It was called Facebook at Work, and it was internal and beta testing. It is now out in the wild for everyone to use.

So if you are used to something like Slack, which I rather enjoy, it beats the hell out of 7,000 email chains. It's a nice way to work with other people. But Facebook does not ever want you to leave their ecostructure. So they have their version now. Yeah. The problem with this is, and this is why I like Slack, everything's in order.

So if Facebook is going to start applying the algorithm about what it thinks I should be working on first, then they can bite my ass. That is an interesting, I don't even think about that. I'm assuming that they don't. It has to be in order, because otherwise they're kind of messing with the company's internal business structure.

Yeah. But it's Facebook, so you never know. They might say, hey, you know what, we've looked at this and we've run it through our AI algorithms. And we think that actually you should not be working on that logo first, but you should be changing the design for the homepage first. And when you're done with that, then we think you should go clean the toilets.

And then when you're done with that, then you can do the logo. But you've got it completely wrong. You don't know how to do your job. We know best. It is not a free service. They are charging for it. And the reason for this that they're stating is it's an advertisement-free service, which means they're keeping their AIs so far out of the product.

Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see about that. Because Slack's not cheap. You know, we run Slack at work, and it's pricey per year, per user. So you have to actually be somewhat important on our team to actually get on Slack with us. Yeah, I mean, it's free for me, but I'm only on three different companies that are like five people and less.

So I haven't paid a dime, and it's fantastic. Yeah, I'm in a company, we've got 20 some odd users for my day job. And there are some people who are just like, you know what? You're only good enough for email. So that's what you get. Yeah, we're not going to pay for you.

You get email. So there's another Uber water option coming into life. I think we talked about this. There was one in Amsterdam that they were trying to do. Oh, no, that was Autonomous Boats. That's what it was. It wasn't the Uber for boats. It was the Autonomous Boats.

Well, this is an Uber for boats, but they've already stated that they basically plan to eventually go, assuming they make it at all, autonomous as well. They don't want drivers. Of course. It's called Sea Bubbles. Tiny Bubbles. Tiny Bubbles. They're electric-powered shuttles made of fiberglass and high-density foam with linen interiors.

Ooh, linen. They will be able to hold up to five passengers and a driver, although, and this is where they state, we're going to get rid of those drivers as soon as possible. Yes, we need a meat bag to hit the stop button in case something breaks. They're not drivers anymore. They are monkey button pressers is what they are.

Pretty much, yeah. I think that they are attempting to get this started up in Paris. Oh, oui, oui, gay Paris. Yes, but they have a problem that Uber did not have. The French. Well, Uber's had quite a few problems with the French. That's true, that's true.

As do most people, but good on them this time around. Now, the problem being, of course, that Uber didn't have to build any kind of infrastructure like the cars. They just had to build an app. Yeah, there's an app for that. So, these guys are trying to raise money left, right, and center because in addition to the app, they also have to design the vehicles themselves.

They're creating specially designed docks that will serve as charging stations, and they have to deal with all sorts of laws and all that sort of stuff that Uber didn't give a shit about. Yeah, because that's going to be a tough one, because the rivers and canals around Paris are pretty full already with tourists.

And poo. And poo? I don't know. I peed in the Seine. That was my one thing I did when I was in Paris. I had to do that. So, I've peed in all the great bodies of water around the world. The Loch Ness, the Inverness, you know. So, and I also peed in the Seine. So, if you fall in the Seine, you'll be getting some of my DNA.

You're welcome for that. So much information I did not want to know. Hey, you started with the poo. Not my own. Oh, sure. I've seen you drunk. So, good luck with that. And speaking of electricity, the UK is running an experiment.

I think we should file this under, what could go wrong? They're going to be sending signals over their power lines, which is basically just data, talking about what the prices are for power, and what the demand is, what the peak times are, and things like that.

So, your home of the smartness of the future can turn the lights down or turn the AC up when it's, you know, when the electricity is cheap. Or, I'm currently in a house with no heater, no working heater. So, I would like them to come here and turn my heater on for me.

But, I can't see how anything could possibly go wrong with this idea. Yeah, let's, you know, they played around with doing internet access over the power grid here in the U.S. for a while, and it failed miserably. Very interesting to see what, yeah. It's like, okay, let's, yeah, let's just give the Uber drivers the nitroglycerin delivery route, too.

Why not? It's like, separation of church and state would be good on some of this stuff. But they're trying it, and they're saying it's working. But this is in England, where there's only, like, 12 people anyway. So, we'll see how it translates to the rest of the world. Security?

Ha! All right, we are back with our friend Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. Let's get to some security. Are we going to be scared this week, Dave? Perhaps a little bit, but not so many scary things this week. But it has been an interesting week. Starting off with this article that was in Motherboard.

This is written by Bruce Schneier, who, of course, is a very well-known and well-respected security researcher. We love Bruce. We definitely love Bruce. Yeah, he's one of the big names in cybersecurity. And he's writing about the incident with Brian Krebs and Krebs on Security, the huge IoT botnet that took down Krebs on Security.

And this is a really interesting article, I thought. Bruce Schneier is making the point, sort of his take-home point, is that the only way we're going to solve this IoT problem is with regulation. What? Well, bear with me here.

I mean, it's not 100% perfect, but what he's saying is that there are no regular market forces that motivate either side to fix this IoT problem. And by either side, I mean either the consumers or the manufacturers.

Because from a consumer's point of view, let's say you buy, you know, the security camera is kind of the, you know, the example for this sort of thing. So let's say you buy a security camera. You, you know, you stick it on the side of your house to keep an eye on your dog in the backyard.

Well, that security camera is doing its thing and it's sending you images on your phone and to your TV or wherever you want to do that. And let's say that security camera gets compromised because you neglected to change the password. But that security camera, while it's doing its botnet stuff, it's also still sending you the images.

It's still doing its security camera thing. It's not like it ever goes down as a security camera. So chances are you won't ever know that it's been, become part of a botnet. And so you aren't motivated to fix it because, first of all, you may not know.

But also, it hasn't affected the device's functionality at all. That device isn't coming after any of your stuff. It's merely been conscripted into this giant botnet. And then from the manufacturer's side, they're not motivated because they're not required to do any updates to these devices.

He already paid for it, so what do they care? It's already been paid for. Most of the time, they don't have any mechanism to push out a software update. So they've moved on to the next model. Chances are that security camera is going to be sitting on that wall for a decade.

So Schneier is making the point that what we need to fill that gap is some sort of regulation where either, for example, the manufacturer's first step would be they are required to make you change your password when you get the device.

There could also be a situation where if we made it so that they were liable for the damages, that would motivate them to up the security on these devices. If someone like Brian Krebs could sue the manufacturers of the devices that attacked his website, then that could motivate them to make changes as well.

Okay, a few flaws in this problem here. Yeah, all right. Well, go on. So I just bought a four-camera system, and it's a no-name brand from China. Right. So first off, these are just like off-the-shelf parts that they throw together in a package, and I couldn't even tell you the name of the company I got this from.

So right there, problem number one. And problem number two is how is, say, Krebs wants to go after the people that manufactured the cameras. How is he supposed to find out who the camera manufacturer is if there's 100,000 cameras sending him data?

And all it is is just, you know, it's just a flood of bits. You can't go back and ping the camera. Like you can ping a website and get, you know, the version of Apache and the IP and all that stuff. Otherwise, you have to sit here and go and, like, track down every single IP that is coming after you, and that's just, you know, that's undoable.

Yeah, yes. At that scale, it certainly is. I think, you know, imagine a situation kind of like Underwriters Laboratory, right? So, you know, they are the ones who certify consumer devices that they are electrically safe to use in your phone, in your home.

You know, so you have, you buy a, I don't know, a clock radio or, you know, a toaster oven. You know, all those things are UL listed, and they have to be UL listed to be sold. So the suggestion would be that for, in order for a webcam, for example, to be sold in the United States, it would have to be listed by whatever, you know, governing body would do that as being, of having a certain amount of security or certain steps in place or things like that.

Now, certainly part of the problem is, and I think the flaw in Schneier's argument is that this is a global problem. And so, and he makes this point himself in the last paragraph of his article.

He points out that, you know, this is, this would only work for a domestic situation. And he says himself, this is a domestic solution to an international problem. And, you know, to your point, Jason, you bought those cameras from, you know, they came here on a boat from China.

Who knows what factory they came out of? So how are, how is regulation in the United States going to stop a global flood of, of rogue IOT devices? Or Samsung Galaxy Note 7s that just explode as well. Which, by the way, we're not certified by Underwriters Laboratory, I would like to point out.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I, what I think is, I mean, I think this is really, uh, it's, it's an article worth your time. He brings up some really interesting, thoughtful points. Um, uh, for me, the take home for this was how both the manufacturers and the users of these devices aren't, aren't motivated to really do anything about this problem.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of sad. Um, the, the lack of education on the consumer part is, is a real issue. Um, especially as, as things start to flood the market, uh, you know, we all know Apple's going to get into this. Amazon's going to get into this. Google's getting into this.

Everybody that wants to keep you in their own infrastructure is going to come out with their own internet of things, devices. And probably the best scenario for the near future is to stick with one of those and, and only use their things. But the price point, uh, you know, the cheap stuff from China that nobody knows about is always going to be, uh, more attractive to people that don't want to spend the money and, and aren't concerned about the security element of the thing.

Yeah. And, and yeah, just a case in point that four camera security system I bought cost less than one Nest camera. Yeah. Well, Nest price themselves ridiculously. I mean, that's, and the loopholes and the ways that they try to keep you within their infrastructures, i.e., you know, you had to then purchase the, the, uh, ongoing subscription.

Yeah. For storing things instead of being able to just store it on your own drive or your own cloud option. Uh, it's all, it's all designed to screw you and it's creating a system that's screwing all of us. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the thing that came with the cameras, I got a box that I put my own hard drive in and I can store up to, you know, however, however big my hard drive is, is, is my, uh, storage limit, you know?

So that's, yeah. The takeaway really is the internet of things is still the internet of shit as we've been, as we've been saying since day one. And only getting worse. Yeah. I guess the way to say it's going to get a lot worse before it gets a lot better. I, I fear. Yes. We officially recommend that you do not go by a refrigerator that has an internet connection.

Yeah. We'll get to that. We'll, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Uh, so, uh, speaking of Krebs, he's got an article about, uh, Microsoft and the no more pick and choose patching this week. This has been going around, but, uh, now you cannot actually pick and choose which patches that you want to apply to your windows machine, which I find good and bad at the same time.

It is in theory, extremely good as a long time Mac or as long time PC user and a Microsoft guy up until just about a year ago. This makes me so happy. I am on Mac now, uh, because the reality, the reality of the way that Microsoft has always rolled out these patches is if you are smart, you Google them first and you find out which ones break your fucking system because there's something in there that always does.

Yep. Now that you can no longer pick and choose every time that these things come out, people are going to be going down left, right, and center. That's pretty much the, uh, the upside and the downside in a nutshell. Yes. Long time windows user. I know exactly what this means for everybody. You're all screwed.

Well, uh, uh, coming, coming from it from a, a, a long time, um, app Mac user, um, and, and Apple has rolled out these kinds of security updates for, for as long as I can remember. Um, you know, these sort of bundled security updates, um, and, you know, Apple is even, you know, when you look, when you look at the description of an, of an Apple security update on the consumer side, most of the time it just says, you know, fixes security problems and stability problems.

Yeah. And that's pretty much all they tell you, right? Yes. Yeah. Nobody really goes into great detail what patches are anymore. You can't, you can't actually go to the Apple website and if you dig for about 10 minutes, you can find the list of security vulnerabilities that they fix, but they, they don't make it easy.

They do not make it easy at all. No, they don't. And, you know, I, I guess you could make the argument, you know, what percentage of people really care about this stuff? What percentage of people just care that, that they just want their computer to work? Um, you know, I like, like Jason said, I mean, there's two sides to this on the one hand, I guess, who does this benefit most?

You know, from Microsoft's point of view, um, this means there's going to be a lot fewer variations in system configurations than there used to be. And so that really makes it less of a headache for them of trying to track down, you know, if something's not working, trying to track down, oh, well, this person installed this patch, but not this patch.

And they put this one in out of order and, you know, so that's causing this problem. So you can see why they would, uh, why this approach would be good for them. Uh, the other upside is to, uh, a PC that won't boot definitely cannot get hacked. So, you know, problem solved.

You can install the update. Can't boot. Done. Yeah. Yeah. Done. Nice. Okay. Well, fortunately all of us use Mac, uh, and hopefully someday we'll get new Macs to buy because it's been a very long time. Maybe later this month. Yeah. Maybe.

I was hoping when Brian bought his, like the next day or 31 days in, it's usually 31 days later that the, uh, they come out with a, uh, a new model. When you can no longer return it. Yeah. Yeah. If somebody wants to buy me a Mac, I can guarantee it'll be 31 days because it has happened for the last five years.

Yeah. Uh, so have you guys heard about Geofedia? Uh, I had not heard. No, I'd not heard about them before I saw this article. Uh, interesting stuff. And by interesting, I mean, chilling. Yes. This is the company that was taking basically, uh, data from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and using it to track protesters, which they then handed over to the police.

So the police could go and arrest them. Let me stop you for a second, Jason. Are you telling me that all this information that we've been putting up about ourselves out on the internet for free is coming back to bite us on the ass? Goodness gracious me. I believe so. Who'da thunk it.

Shocked. Who'da thunk it. Yeah. Uh, let me post when I'm going on vacation. Whoop. I didn't need a TV anyway. Now, now, uh, I can just go to jail. Uh, yeah. So, uh, the ACLU put out a report on GeoFedia. And as soon as the report came out, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have pulled their data feeds to this company.

Uh, so, uh, hopefully you didn't have stock in this company because they're out of business at this point. But, yeah, this is, you, you post it online. You expect people can see it. Hmm. How about them apples? I think that there's a, there's some important details with this.

I mean, part of what they were doing was, um, the police were using this to, uh, basically tag people who had outstanding warrants.

So, it was sort of, uh, an easy way to, if you were taking place in a, in a public demonstration, uh, you know, political demonstration, then the police could, they were even cross-referencing, um, you know, facial, using facial recognition software to cross-reference, uh, social media stuff with people who have outstanding warrants.

And, of course, using GPS data from where people were posting. And, so, this would make it a lot easier for them to kind of, um, you know, round people up who, who are already in trouble with the law. Um, so, you know, I, I think this, to me, this is another one of those examples of something that they probably could have done before, but the fact that they can accelerate the process kind of takes it to a different level.

And, I think, you know, necessitates a closer look. Right, and they were using, I mean, yeah, it's because it's one-stop shopping. You set a geofence for where the protest is and then go to town on it. So, otherwise, you'd have to go and do it yourself, you know, so. But, the data was already out there.

That's the interesting thing. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things where you're stupid enough that you're posting pictures of yourself at, at, at, at, at one of these, uh, these protests. If you have a warrant, stay at home. Right. Stay at home. Order some Amazon and Netflix and chill.

You know, don't go out in public. If, if you're wanted by the man. Jason's promoting his, uh, stay at home and never leave the house policy that we were discussing off air just a few minutes ago. And, like I said, we know where that ends. Bam Bam eats you, Jason. Ah, Brian, drink. So, yes. Uh, so, the, the Verge did a follow-up article about this very story just, you know, the day after.

Uh, because it gets into, uh, there was uproar, how dare, you know, the government and the police use this information. Uh, but the fact is that these are just APIs and tools that are out there for anyone. And, and they kind of get into it saying, you know, if Pepsi, as, as a company, can use these tools to find disgruntled fans of Coca-Cola, why, we can't make a specific law that just, that just then says police can't use it.

Yeah. I mean, these are just tools. They're out there. So, you either have to take away the tools from everyone, uh, or, I don't know, you know, it's, it's just a tool. It is just a tool, but, uh, selling, selling, selling access to it, to law enforcement does, you know, reek of creep, but it's nothing that the cops couldn't have done themselves.

I don't know if that necessarily reaps of Creek because, uh, that's basically something that you and I have applied for a living for a while is companies would hire us to build onto other, uh, build onto APIs to get information. We got paid to do this. This is true. I, I, let's, uh, yeah, yeah, I guess you're right.

I have made a lot of money off of building these exact same tools. You guys are a couple of, yeah, you guys are a couple of creeps. Yeah. The only reason it gets weird is because it's being used for law enforcement, but it's been, it's used in the private sector every single day. So, yeah, it's like, you're in a Coldplay concert, it's the same difference.

Exactly. Hmm. Yeah. I'm trying to think of, I'm just trying to think of a fourth amendment argument, you know, are, are there, are there situations? And I'm sure, you know, we, there'll be plenty of people who will tell us, but, you know, are there situations where because of the fourth amendment, there are things that are perfectly reasonable to do in commerce that when the government does the same things that crosses a line of, it crosses some kind of surveillance line.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was something out there. Well, yeah, that's the thing. You're posting it to a pub, you're in public posting to a public forum on the internet that you signed up for to say, here, look at me, give me my 15 minutes. Right. You agreed to have your information shared via the API.

Yeah. So there's no expectation, no expectation of privacy. Yeah. These are not private accounts. These are public accounts. So, you know, we can say, we can say what we want, but I guess, yeah, we're, we're just as villainous as the police are on this one. The best thing that you could possibly do is give up your current existing social media accounts and go sign up with Ello.

Hello. I'm sure the Popo are not trolling Ello. They would be the only ones. I don't believe there's an API at all that exists either. So who knows? That's true. So have you guys heard about the Diffie-Hellman-Key breach this week?

I think I tried to order that for dinner last night from a Thai place. Yeah. That's the password Jason tried to use on his new security system. Yeah. Didn't, didn't work. Didn't work. So some cryptographers have broken basically the Diffie-Hellman key exchange to be able to put a trap door in it.

It's based on large numbers, large prime numbers and how they, it's a very technical article that Ars Technica has. And I actually listened to Security Now this week with Steve Gibson and he has a really good breakdown of why this is not a big deal, which was very interesting.

A lot of people were up in arms about it, but he breaks it down saying, yeah, they knew that this could have happened 30 years ago and it finally has happened. And now we're just going to move up to 2048-bit encryption instead of the 1024-bit.

Okay. Right. Anybody that was reading this, it apparently is a tempest in a teapot and just looks good in the headlines. Oh, go figure. People are writing articles to make things look good in headlines. What I liked in this article, I think it's just as a bit of perspective, is they said with 1024-bit keys, a trap-doored prime takes 16 million more times longer to crack.

So a 2048-bit key takes 16 million times longer to crack than a 1024-bit key. So they said that's 6.4 times 10 to the ninth core years, processor core years, compared with 400 core years it took for the researchers to crack, crack, crack, crack, crack.

Well, they did. Sorry. Dr. Freud, paging Dr. Freud, the trap-doored 1024-bit prime. So, you know, because, you know, bit depth is not linear, it's exponential. No, it's not, yeah. We go to 2048 and, you know, buy yourself a few millennia.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing I can tell you that's still going to be happening in about two or three millennia from now is people will still be talking about Hillary Clinton's emails. This is just more of a fun story about security because I just liked it so much. She did, her people used a program called BleachBit at one point to basically scan and, you know, defrag the drive so things couldn't come back.

Interesting side note, if you go to BleachBit site, BleachBit.org, they do have a photo, a funny little photo of Hillary Clinton in the right-hand corner now. So they're aware of the publicity that they're getting at the moment. But during the debates and since then, Donald Trump has been going on and on about how he acid-washed the emails and bleached them.

And after the debate ended, FactCheck.org reached out to his campaign to see what the hell he was talking about and what he could have possibly meant. Turns out that he actually really does think that she literally used chemicals to destroy her emails. He said so in a number of speeches in one particular one in August in Everett, Washington.

Trump said this exactly. 33,000 emails that she deleted, they're gone. Not only deleted, folks, she bleached, which somebody said they had never even heard of, in a very expensive fashion. Use chemicals so nobody will ever be able to see them. There you go. Can this be over soon?

Can this really please be over soon? It will not be over until acid-washed jeans come back in style. I'm wearing them right now. I'm wearing my acid-washed Daisy Dukes. Oh, God. Yeah. Grab them by the Daisy Dukes. Yeah, I wish I had bleach to get that image out of my mind.

Shake it like a Polaroid picture, baby. So, an ex-CIA, or I'm sorry, NSA. How did I get the CIA from NSA? Hmm. You know. Yeah. Three-letter organizations that cannot be named. Yeah. Seriously, the No Such Agency.

Yeah. So, this guy has written a little tool for you, if you have a Mac, which we all do now. This guy's name is Patrick Wardle, which is a fun name to say, three times fast. He's a former NSA staffer.

He wrote a little tool that you can use to tell if somebody is using your webcam and microphone, even though the green light doesn't come on. I'm actually using it right now. It's called Oversight, and yes, it's saying that it is active.

Oh, surprise, I'm making a podcast, and it's trying to use my microphone. Yes. Instead of using the tape over the camera, which I always do. So, it's kind of like Little Snitch, which I recommend everybody use if you have a Mac, because it's the greatest little tool out there for telling what your network is doing.

But it's free. Grab it. Open source. There you go. There's a popular item at security trade shows. A lot of people at booths give away. It's like a little slidey door that you put over your webcam, so you can slide it back and forth, so you don't have to have tape being put on and off.

It's just a clever little gadget. I actually have one. I'm looking at it right now on my Mac. I've never had one that closed, though. I need your brand, because all the ones I got, I went to DerbyCon. I got like five of them, and none of them would work on my MacBook Pro. It just wouldn't close all the way.

Yeah. This is on a 27-inch iMac, so it works. You know, a nice, big, smooth piece of glass. But, you know, it does nothing for the microphone, but blocks the camera. Well, just to, we'd be remiss to not mention this, because this is what I'm using.

I had to update Little Snitch, and they threw in a new program of theirs called Micro Snitch, which does exactly that. It monitors and reports on any microphone and camera activity. Well, I'll be jiggered. I'm running Little Snitch as well, and I did not know that. I'm going to have to go pick it up. So, yeah, I'm using both Little Snitch and Micro Snitch, and Micro Snitch had a heart attack as soon as I started this podcast, so I had to shut it off.

Oh, nice. Well, we love Little Snitch. I mean, a long-time Little Snitch user here, and it is sort of the go-to tool for knowing what apps are trying to send, you know, what data is trying to get in and out of your machine. So, it looks like Micro Snitch is a second license, so you can get the Little Snitch and Micro Snitch bundle right now.

You can save 50% off on Micro Snitch and get them both for $36.90. Not bad. I'd recommend it. I've been using Micro Snitch for a while. It's quite cool, and it's got a groovy little icon. Can't beat that. All righty. All right. So, I labeled this one IoT WTF, and I really think maybe that could be just a regular segment here for us, IoT WTF.

I caught my attention this week, is that several brands, Samsung and GE, among others, are now selling Wi-Fi-enabled ovens. Ovens? Ovens. And my comment on this was... We used to have it drop, and I can't find it anymore, but it's, you've got to be shitting me.

Well, my comment was, because what could possibly go wrong with an unattended, internet-enabled device capable of making fire? Yes. Yeah. Yes. I mean, in their defense, I almost could understand the usage of said thing.

You know, let's see if the roast is ready without having to run over there. However, the laundry app that is internet-connected, I'm baffled by. You know, it runs until it's done, and then you go get your laundry out. I don't need to check in on anything here.

Yeah, my, the last washer-dryer that my mother got, the pair are networked together, and my thought was, what could they possibly have to say to each other? You know, there's a washing machine, say, hey, you know, dryer, brace yourself. There's a load of towels about to be sent over.

You know, like, what do they have to say to each other? But in terms of the ovens, you know, I was digging into this to try to see what exactly are these ovens capable of and not capable of doing. It seems like you can fire up the oven.

It doesn't look like you can- Preheat to 350, there you go. It doesn't look like you can fire up the burners. You can get a status report on the burners. You can turn anything off that you want to. You can get a status report on anything, but it seems like you can only fire up the oven, which, you know, from a safety point of view, makes sense because the oven, you know, the oven's a metal box, so that's the thing that's, you know, least likely to go wrong.

However, my concern is, you know, what is inside of this box that's enabling all these things? Software. So, this device is connected to what? The internet. So, someone figures out a way to get in and rewrite the firmware so that, you know, you can't, you can fire up whatever you want on this device.

And, you know, lazy me, I go to work in the morning and I leave that pizza box sitting on the oven, you know, because I was tossing slices of pizza in the microwave the night before. And I go to work and someone hacks my oven and fires up the burners on the oven.

And now I got a pizza box on fire, you know, sitting on my oven. So, worst case scenario. But, I don't know. But it's completely plausible. Well, it is. I mean, that's the crazy thing. It is. It's completely plausible. And you can hook it up to Alexa.

So, somebody sitting outside your window can say, Alexa, burn my house down. Right. Yes, I did notice that as well. Someone outside could yell inside the house just to activate your oven. You got to be really careful with the Alexa and playing the talking heads burning down the house because.

Oh, well played. So, yeah. No, no. Stop this, people. Stop. Stop. Oh. What are we going to do? At the library. So, I got me some new books.

Okay. Washington, A Life by Ron Chernow. Somebody's been listening to Still Untitled. Yes. Adam Savage Project. The funny thing is, I bought that book about two years ago and I hadn't listened to it yet because it's 40 hours long. Right. I'm about eight hours into it and then I needed a break for a bit.

So, I switched over to Spaceman, An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino. Okay. And I binged listened to that the entire thing yesterday because I was stuck under the covers in bed not feeling well and needed some entertainment.

And what a great book that is. I really, really, really, really enjoyed that book. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I talked before about Chris Hadfield's book, which was also fantastic. This is slightly different because it's kind of the same journey, you know, from start to finish, from not being an astronaut to being an astronaut to not being an astronaut.

But it's completely different because his story about being an astronaut working on the Hubble was really fascinating and all the problems they had with getting that thing fixed. But I can't recommend this enough. And fortunately, next month, I get to interview him on my day job. So that'll be fun. Nice.

I actually listened to a book. What? I know. I did it your style. What? I figured I should at some point. I listened to Daddy Stop Talking and Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting by Adam Carolla. Oh, my God. I haven't been listening to his podcast in a while, which is helpful because basically 75% of any of his books is just recycled material from his podcast.

It was funny. It was fine. It was kind of nice to just have a straight-up narrative of a book instead of him going on 10 gazillion tangents. And it's his own voice, so I was used to it. So obviously, he reads his book well. And like he says, apparently, you know, compared to the written one because he doesn't write or read, he rambles on and on and there's a lot more content in his audiobooks than there are in the actual printed, written ones.

Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed that from some of his other books that I bought. Surprisingly, I did start listening to his show again. Oh, really? Yeah. I was running out of stuff. I subscribed to 70 podcasts and I found myself out of things to listen to this week. So I popped it back up because we'll be talking about another one of his shows shortly.

But I think he's toned down a bit. He seems to have toned down a bit. That's what I've heard as well. He's not quite as cranky. So I guess he goes back and forth with Dr. Drew on whether he should be going to therapy or not. So he must be back in. Could be. Could be. Yeah, because I listened to maybe like six shows in the past like two, three weeks.

And he's definitely because before I would finish the show and I would just feel anger and hatred towards the world. And now I'm like, I chuckle a lot. And I'm like, oh, that was actually pretty good. So, you know, maybe it's worth picking back up if you're looking for something to listen to. I will check it out again.

Maybe. Let's see. And because I did that and because you love your audio book so much, I did read an article in Salon that I've linked to in the show notes that talks about how the how audio books are basically saving the book publishing world because people still aren't buying real books much at all.

People aren't buying e-books too much at all. But people are buying audio books. So there you go. How about that? I still like to read. So I enjoy that. I don't. I am reading a couple Tony Hawk books at the moment, the physical books, but I prefer the audio books.

I honestly do. And as you pointed out, which I thank you still again for, is that it makes no difference if you listen to it or read it. The information gets into your brain all the same. Yes, it does. I got a whole bunch of apps this week.

Okay. You, sir, are now on Macintosh. So I think this one is going to be good for you. Okay. Airmail. Okay. I've been using, because all of my accounts are basically Gmail based. And for that reason, I've been using Mailplane 3, which is like a $45 app, I believe.

It's not cheap, but all it does is run multiple instances of Safari in one window. So you can just tab between your different accounts. And it does a couple other things, but basically all it is is a wrapper for Safari, right? Okay. Huge memory hog. I checked it the other day and it was using 1.3 gigabytes of RAM.

That's a lot of RAM. Yes, it is. So Jordan Harbinger, my boss over at the Art of Charm, said, hey, check out Airmail. That's what he's been using. And I'm like, ugh. Another app that I got to go check out, but I went and checked it out. And interface, much better.

Beautiful interface, as a matter of fact. And I love me some beautiful interfaces. $9.99 or $9.95, probably. I don't think they do $9.99 on the iStore because I don't think they like things that are odd. So I bought it for the Mac.

They didn't have a trial version, so I had to, you know, bite the bullet and just go for it. But for $10, it's, you know, well worth the try. If it sucked, then I would still be able to bitch about it on the show. And so I tried it, got all my accounts set up in it, all like six of them, and it's amazing.

And it has a unified inbox, too. So instead of switching tabs, going from account to account to account to account, everything's in one inbox. Right. Totally customizable. Now here's the fun part. You can save your configurations to iCloud, and then when you spend $5 and get the iOS version that works on your phone and your iPad, then you can just import them from iCloud.

Okay. Easy breezy cover girl. Nice. Easy breezy, beautiful cover girl. You can't forget that beautiful. You do have to put your password back in when you pull them up on iOS, which is good. I can't complain about that. Yeah. And since I have one password on my iPad and my iPhone, it was just a matter of a couple minutes to get everything set up, and I love it.

I am in love with this app. It's made my life so much easier because I switched over to Inbox for Gmail a while ago, and what Inbox for Gmail doesn't have is unread notifications like you do with Gmail. I can have it pop up on the tab like how many unreads I have, but for Inbox, I was actually spending more time using the Inbox app on iOS to go from account to account to account to account to figure out what fucking email I haven't read yet, that the little

round red thing was showing up on my icon. It drove me nuts. This one, fantastic. I am such a fan of AirMail. They have my $15, and it's a bargain at twice the price. Well, I will take a look at it because, as I've mentioned to you many times, the two biggest annoyances I've had switching over to be all Mac and getting away from my PC was QuickBooks, which is not really solved.

I've just learned to not despise it as much as I should. And the MacMail program. I hate MacMail. Oh, it's terrible. It's awful. I will take a quicker look at this and maybe switch over to it this weekend. Yeah, give it a show. It takes no time at all to switch over.

It even uses your Hillary Clinton email server since you run your own still. That's right. I do. So I can, you know, chemically bleach it later. Yes, you can. I've talked about Paziz on the show before. It is my favorite sleep app. They've released a new version, finally.

Unfortunately, here's the problem with the new version. Yep. It requires a subscription. Screw that. Five bucks a month. What? Five bucks a month for a sleep app. It's annoying.

It is really annoying. It's got a bunch of new features. It's got a female voice now. It's got a whole bunch of new stuff in it. But I'm sorry, Paziz in the old days was I have paid for every version of Paziz from the original Mac version, which was about $100. Every iOS version with the upgrades for all the modules, everything.

And now they want $5 a month? That's insane. It is insane. I am really upset about it. You can use the classic version, I think, because I tried out the $5 version and half of me was just like, I love the app. I want to support them. I will do the, they have the option, you know, to pay yearly, which is less, you know, it always comes out a little bit less.

You save like 15 or 20%. But then, you know, my better, the better working portion of my brain said, are you fucking, you're not going to pay that for a sleep app? No, try it out for five bucks and then, you know, make fun of them from there and figure it out and see if they reverse their position.

But, yeah, it's got a new interface, which doesn't matter because it's a sleep app. I don't care if you have pretty pictures while I'm falling asleep because my phone is going to be off, you dumb fucks. Talk to me. Play the music. Do the thing that you do well.

I don't care what pretty pictures you put on the screen. So, anyway, yeah, it's a massive disappointment for one of my favorite apps of all time. So, I'm really bummed I got rid of the old version because the old version worked great. I'm going to have to go back and figure out how I can backtrack to get the last version if I can even do it.

Well, maybe you should sleep on it first. I will do my best. So, my next one is FirewallTrump.com. Yes. This one is getting more and more exciting because what it is is, this is the reason that there is poop all over our show notes.

Yes, I've noticed that. Because it's a Chrome extension that turns the word Trump into a pile of poop. And, they seem to be updating it as I scroll because now the poop has changed. It used to be the straight poop emoji and now it's a very happy poop with blue eyebrows for some reason.

Yeah, I saw that too. It's very funny. It just changed while I was looking at it. How random is that? It's free. It's funny because I am sick to death of this election cycle and anything that can put a smile on my face during this travesty that we have going on right now makes and it's free.

Just get it. Go get it. It's free. It's free. It's fun. Yeah. It's probably stealing all my personal information in the background. And sending it to Trump. Yeah. It's probably sending it to the Mexican so they can sell it because they got to pay for that fucking wall. That's right. Yeah. That's how they do it. Okay. I got three apps in a row here.

These are going to go real quick. Overcast, Pocket Casts, and Downcasts. Those are Downcast. Those are the three podcast apps that I've been using for ages. Pocket Casts is the newest one that I've been trying. I bought it a long time ago. I didn't like the interface but I thought everybody's saying that the new version is much better so I tried it out for the last week and a half because they finally put in the strip silence option that Overcast has had.

It's terrible. The interface is god awful. Multiple clicks to get anything done. The only thing that they have going for them that Pocket Cast, I mean that Overcast doesn't have is discoverability. They have a much better discoverability option because Overcast is Marco Armin's little dictatorship where he puts in whatever he thinks is great and never updates it.

So for Discovery Pocket Casts is okay. Not the best. Downcast is the one I always used to go to because it's the most developer friendly. Not the prettiest. Not really even, I don't even know if it's maintained anymore. Overcast I'm going back to because as much as I think Marco's a douche, he wrote a good app.

And for listening to podcasts that is hands down the best way to consume them. But this coming from a guy who listens to a lot more podcasts than you do. That's true. And not just you, Brian. I'm talking to you, the listener. Everybody that listens to this show, I listen to more podcasts than you. And that is my go-to app.

So give it a shot. Okay. Even your baby agrees. I can hear him in the background. I know. It's not been a good day here in Babyland. But maybe I should get Also, Babyland was a great band. They were a great band. I do miss them.

I wonder what happened. There is an app that will basically notify your family members and the authorities if your phone detects you're in an accident. How does that work? I don't know. Life360, a social network geared toward family members, I have not seen this yet, has partnered with driver safety and analytics app Zendrive and created a driver safety feature that is now available to the 55 million families that are using Life360.

It is called Driver Protect and basically it uses things, technology in your phone like accelerometers and gyroscopes to detect if there's been an accident. I'm guessing there's a lot of false positives there. Could be, could be. Yeah, that'll be interesting. I don't know anything about this.

I'll have to look at it. But there's an $8 a month subscription fee, I noticed. Of course there is. Yeah. You know, they came free with my car. As soon as I pair my phone to my car, it has a 911 sync option. So as soon as you pair any Bluetooth phone to my Ford Escape, if I'm trying to make a fast escape and I run into a tree, it will call 911 for me and I don't have to do anything unless the phone dies in the accident along with me.

And at that point, I don't care. Right. Well, the reason that these people are doing this is they see something a little bit further down the line. The real opportunity from this partnership is insurance. It's gathering information for a different model for insurance based on usage.

So they're basically allowing yourself to be tracked everywhere you go and everywhere you drive. Yeah, you can just get that from Geico now. They've got the little plug that goes into the auxiliary port and will knock your build down or up depending on how big of a douchebag you are when you drive.

Yeah. Do you remember Richard Clarkson's floating cloud sculpture? Vaguely. We talked about it on the show a long time ago and I couldn't find it in the notes. It might have been something that we cut. Right. But now he's got a hypoallergenic felt cloud that floats on a magnetic base with lights inside that is a speaker.

Okay. Did you watch the video for this? I did. I think it's cool as shit. Yeah, it's cool. You know, it's never going to work in my house. No, no. It certainly won't work in my house either. I would have to put it like, you know, on an eight foot shelf to keep a little pause from it.

Same with you. I swear to God that thing is cool as can be. I'm just like, that's neat. I love the lights inside to give it the thunderstorm look. I don't like the colored lights. I like the white lights. I thought the white lights were cool, but the colored lights are way cooler and we definitely need a new category on the show.

Jason thinks this is neat. It is. It's neato time. Neato time with Jason DeFilippo. What I don't think is neat, though, is sound by human. Yes, I saw this. This is ridiculous. Somebody has watched The Empire Strikes Back too much in the scenes from Cloud City with the guys with the big earphones and earmuffs.

Lobot. Lobot. Yeah, these are over the ear basically headphones that you literally suck onto the outsides of your ear. They do a bunch of stuff. They've got translators in them. They've got speakers and you can rub your ear gently to make the sound go down.

It is a very creepy touch motion that this guy is doing in the video. He's like, oh, and rubs his own ear and I'm just like, it seriously looks like he's masturbating with the other hand when he touches his ear. It is creepy as can be. They are overfunded, so you probably will never get one by the time these are ready, which won't be for another year.

Yeah, and yeah, this has so many things I don't need or want in headphones, including a video of nearly naked people wearing them. That's what I'm saying. Where's your other hand, dude? Where's your other hand? Yeah, dumb.

Media candy. Rogue One, the new trailer is out. Have you watched it yet? I watched it this morning. The cheese is strong with this one is all I got to say. I like it. I loved it. No, I loved it, but come on, the end where they're doing all the motivational locker room speeches, that shit was cheesy.

That shit was cheesy. What do you expect? It looks like the best Star Wars movie ever made. I'm going to give you that, but it was just cheesy at the end. Well, I like the revelation, and if you watch the trailer, this is not exactly a spoiler alert, they tell you.

I don't like the revelation that it's the main character's dad that is actually building the damn thing under duress. She should be a stripper, not a... I know. She's got daddy issues. She should be in the, you know, with the fets, or not the fets, yeah, the huts. She should be dancing at some huts place.

Yeah, so I don't care for that. They don't need to be connected. That's just stupid Star Wars bullshit that you have to throw in. But yeah, this looks like the best Star Wars movie we'll have seen in a long time. It's great. It looks fantastic. It's got a different feel. It's a war movie. It should be fun. Yeah, no, definitely looking forward to this one.

Yeah. I was a huge fan of Says You. It was one of my favorite shows that was on NPR game shows. Unfortunately, the main guy, Richard Scher, passed away, I believe, two years ago now. I was going to ask if it was canceled, and apparently God canceled it. Well, yeah, well, God did.

Wow. Well, it's back, Jason. It has risen from the dead. Ah, zombie, says you. continue with that analogy. So they are back. They're doing the show with one of the guys that was on the panel is now the main host. And they have finally made it actually easy to get the show.

It is an app with a one-time purchase of 99 cents, and all the new episodes will go right in there. So it's fantastic. I'm very happy. Ah, we should do that. It's an incredible deal for 99 cents. You can get all this stuff for free. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, a Patreon, 99 cents, please.

Actually, you can't do 99 cents anymore, but we'll take a dollar. Pretty please. We'll take a buck. We'll send you a penny in the mail. No, we won't. That is, I ran that by the lawyers and we cannot send a penny in the mail. Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock is returning to HBO and I, for one, am terribly excited.

I would be curious to see if you, you should do this with your show and if it has legs, I remember loving Fraggle Rock as a child. I am not sure how I will feel about it now. See, I loved it as a teenager, so I didn't watch it when I was a kid, kid. I watched it when I was a little bit grown or upper.

So it, in the jokes, what I remember were more adulty than, than you'll remember. So that's why I'm hoping that it, I'm really hoping that it holds up. They're doing a remaster on it, so it'll look good. Um, I'm really, my fingers are crossed for this one. I really am because, you know, as much as I hate Brian Henson, I love Jim Henson.

His dad was awesome. Brian's a dick, but, uh, fingers are crossed for this one that, uh, they can bring it back in its, uh, original splendor. And will there be plans to make new ones? Nope, not, not yet. I'm sure if it, if it makes money, if it does well, they'll have to. Yeah, they'll have to because I don't know what the Hensons are up to at this point.

Um, probably making more Muppet movies, but I was interesting. I was listening to Jon Favreau on the Recode podcast today and he was talking about some of his VR stuff and for some reason it popped in my head a Labyrinth VR world would be awesome. Okay. I, are you not a fan of the movie Labyrinth?

Not a huge fan. Oh, really? It had Bowie in it. You, I mean, he was one of the only celebrity this year that we didn't kill. Oh wait, no, we did kill him. No, we killed him. We didn't kill Abe Vigoda. We killed Bowie. We didn't kill Abe Vigoda. Uh, okay. So, well, either way, I thought that would be a fun thing.

Um, Planet Earth, uh, favorite of stoners everywhere. Planet Earth 2 is coming out. The trailer looks amazing. It does. We'll link to that in the show notes. I, I have a 4K TV. I'm really looking forward to it. All right. You're not, that makes sense.

Not a fan? Not, not looking forward to it? I don't have a 4K TV. But, you can still watch it on your HD TV and it's still be. I, I am a fan. Okay. I enjoyed Planet Earth 1. Okay, I just hope they don't have, I hope they stick with the original, like, you know, you have to have Attenborough doing the voiceover instead of the, uh, what did they redid it with Sigourney Weaver and then they, they did the other one where Oprah did it.

Stick with it. Oh, yeah. I can do Sigourney. I can't do Oprah. Sigourney's fine, but stick with the British. They're better. They're better at this kind of thing. It's just better. Yes. And speaking of better, the Luke Cage Family Matters trailer, I thought was way better than the Luke Cage original trailer.

Um, I don't know. Do you watch this? I watched it. It was very funny. I was cracking up. I'm like this. I don't know how they got so many happy scenes out of Luke Cage where people are smiling and laughing and it's really good. I highly recommend going to our show notes which will be grumpy oldgeeks.com slash 181 and checking it out if you haven't seen it already.

And as far as I can tell, there's no, uh, no spoilers in there because I'm still only like four episodes into the show and there's nothing that really in this gave, gave anything away. No spoilers at all. Yeah. It's, it's just the credits. It's honestly just the credits. Yep. And finally, uh, our favorites from the upcoming grand tour, Clarkson Hammond and May were on the Adam Carolla show and I went back and listened to this as well.

It was a one-on-one which is, I was kind of bummed out about. I always like it when he has got the guests with, uh, with the whole crew, but, uh, they were funny. Um, you know, Carolla really tried to get stuff out of them and they were having none of it. Um, yeah, I thought that was really, I thought, I thought Clarkson handled it deftly.

Like he very, he, I mean, he deflected everything that Carolla threw at him about like, are you pissed off? Are you this? He's like, we were making our show, man. We don't, who cares? That was a long time ago. Now we're here. We're not there anymore. Yeah. It went really, really well.

It was good. And I can't wait to everything that they said about the grand tour has to be quite excited. Me too. I can't wait. I wish it started now. Uh, the interesting thing I did find out though, we were talking about the binging options with it. They are not doing that. They're not doing it. They're not doing it. I'm happy. I'm happy as a clam about that.

Now that I've been watching Westworld every week, like, you know, as it's dribbling out, I find myself more excited about the show that I have to wait. It gives you time to think about it, to contemplate. Not that there's going to be anything to think about with the grand tour, but there's something to be said for anticipation.

Yeah. Yeah. Fuck this instant gratification generation. Having said that, we're going to drop all 52 episodes of Grumpy Old Geeks on December 31st. The web's not dead!

Oh, no, it's not! On a list of things that I had no idea about and now, strangely, I find a sense of satisfaction that I do, Lifehacker once again came up with something useful. The chart for every vacuum cleaner attachment you own and what you should be using it for.

Oh, really? Yes. As opposed to me who just doesn't use any of them and sticks the nozzle into the places. That's what she said. So, that's how you end up with a kid, Jason. I don't know if you were aware of that. Yes, yes. That's why I don't have one because I read the instruction manual. Okay.

So, there you go. It's, yeah, things I did not know and the more you know. Secondary, I'm a Disney guy. I grew up next to it. It was the first place I ever worked. I had annual passes all of my life. It's been doing the rounds that the Disney Tower of Terror is closing.

And somebody feels very strongly about it because the article title is Disneyland's Tower of Terror is closing. This is a national tragedy. No, it's not. Spoiler alert. No, it's not. The link is in the show notes. It's a lovely article that gets kind of metaphysical about what the Tower of Terror could mean and means to her.

It's very funny. Sadly, in place will be an Imagineered new attraction called Guardians of the Galaxy. Yes, but it looks very cool. Have you seen the video about what they've done with the ride? It's pretty cool. I don't like changes to my Disney.

Well, then you shouldn't like California Adventure Fuckland or whatever it's called because that was a big change that brought us the Tower of Terror, which is crap. So I like the Tower of Terror. It was a good ride. What I have heard is the reason that that is not continuing is the license that they had for the Twilight Zone has ended and it's too expensive to renew.

Like Disney doesn't have enough money to renew a license. It doesn't mean they want to spend it. They should just buy the rights to Twilight Zone and be done with it. But anyway. And it is we're coming up on election time and I got my 266 page California state proposition books the other day, which I suppose I'm going to have to read and figure out how I want to vote on all these different propositions.

but a friend of the show sent me a link to basically all of them in haiku form. Okay. It's quite lovely. Proposition 62. Vote for this one if you want to eliminate the death penalty. Okay. Proposition 66. If you want the state to execute more people, this one is for you.

Proposition 65. Plastic bag makers put this one on the ballot to punish grocers. Fucking grocers. Proposition 58. Kids learning English won't need a waiver to take bilingual classes. It's all good. It tells you exactly what each one is in a little haiku.

Okay. Since I don't live in California, I'm cutting you off now. We're done. Okay. All right. Are you kidding me? Love it. Since Brian can't figure out how fucking Hackpad works, let's move on to the face cradle.

God damn it. Okay. I want to do many things to your face. Cradling is not one of them. Yeah. Same here. We'll deal with you after the show, little mister. I'll just hang up.

So I found a Kickstarter that we... Oh, yeah. This is just the craziest thing I've ever seen. It is, you know, those little neck pillows that you get at the airport? Yes. The ones that we talked about on the show that have the sticker on it or the tag that says do not use for sleep.

Yes. Well, now you can get a toilet seat that you can put around your face and hook it to a chair and look like a flying corpse. Right. It's at facecradle.me and there's a video that will be in the show notes. I highly recommend you go watch it if you are a traveler and want to really see how things are devolving in the world of travel comfort.

Okay. Mode number four, the deep sleep mode, which involves the strap that you put around the back of your chair. That's the one. I'm just saying if there is a five-year-old child that is sitting behind you when you are in deep sleep mode, they will unhook you and you will be face-planting into chair and probably breaking face.

Yes, there will be broken nose involved. Not in a million years would I ever do that. No. I mean, granted, that one, you could lower the tray, put your cocktail on it with a straw and just sit there, look like you're hanging yourself and having your cocktail while you contemplate all the mistakes you've made in your life, but mistake number one being that you bought the face cradle to begin with.

Yes. This is an Australian product so you have to buy it in Aussie dollars, but it is, I don't know. What have we come to? Sad. Closing shout outs. Happy birthday to fan and friend of the show MXV who turns 67, I believe, on Friday.

I thought he'd be 33 and a third. Oh, he's at least vinyl jokes. He's at least 45, but maybe 72. Yeah, there you go. Good man. And shout out to my friend, Joey Ito. We mentioned before that he interviewed President Obama for the new episode of Wired, but the video's out now.

Okay, cool. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool seeing my buddy sitting there, you know, slack John with the president. and even there's at one point where Obama says, I'm going to defer to Joey because he's the expert and I'm just like, damn, that's cool. That is pretty cool.

I like it when my friends are cooler than I am, which is basically everybody. I was about to say, that's a short bar. Yeah, yeah. Good thing you're not my friend. I really don't have much in the way of shout outs other than the Let's Go Dodgers. They're about to play, but by the time you hear this, they'll either have won and moved on or they'll have lost and I'll be miserable.

Oh, you're going to be miserable because the Cubs are going to take the pennant this year. Well, we'll be playing the Cubs if we win the game today. Ah, well, that would be interesting. That's for sure. I have a feeling that the Cubs are going to do it. They're doing pretty good. Yeah, I think they had their window.

It had to be last year, so it worked with Back to the Future movies. Yeah, that would have been great. That would have been great. I just don't, I'm going to go on vacation. Seriously, I do not want to be in Chicago when the Cubs win. Yeah, you should probably get out of Chicago. And also, I was chatting with my stepmom who works at an old folks home and there are people that are literally like hanging on for dear life because the Cubs are finally there.

They're like, I've lived 98 years and this is going to be it. The day after the Cubs win, there are going to be so many vacancies in all the old folks homes around Chicago because they're like, I can die now. Jesus, how morbid. I know.

And probably true. It's completely true. All right, 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'd like to hire me for all your podcast editing or producing needs. And I'm Brian Schulmeister 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 wanted to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a glowing review and five stars. At the very least, please share the show with your friends.

Grumpyoldgeeks.com is where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, ask us questions that we can read on the air and 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 Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.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 grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 181.

The cheese is strong with this one. At QVC shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love from beauty and fashion to home culinary and outdoor living.

Shop now at qvc.com This January Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Bruise Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel.

Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com