194: 2 1/2 Minutes to Midnight

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. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm here with my co-host.

Brian Schulmeister. I was wondering if he was there. It's early today so I didn't know if you're properly caffeinated or not. Vaguely. Not as much as per usual. Yes, we are recording at a different time today but there's no point in telling you about that because we're going to be recording at a completely different time next week. Yes, we are. We are moving to Sundays to record and so Sunday night at the lovely witching hour of midnight you will get the new episode.

This gives us a chance to maybe spend a little more time getting the show together but also because Brian now is going back to work so we have to kind of shuffle things around. It's not so much that I'm going back to work as my wife is. I am continuing to do my part-time thing that I've been doing but yeah with the wife now no longer at home 24-7 the schedule gets a bit crazier.

So yeah, we are switching to a Sunday record and release date as opposed to during the week just because it's a hell of a lot easier for everybody involved. Yeah, well, let's speak for yourself but that's okay. We'll get it done. But we do have other big news and this is going to be annoying for some people and fantastic for others but it's great for us.

Grumpy Old Geeks is now part of the Podcast One Network. Woohoo! Yep. So what's going to happen this week is it's kind of the same thing that happened when we used to be at Blog Talk Radio and then we came back and we had to change the feed. Some people will not get a new episode because they subscribe to the actual RSS feed and not through iTunes or some other method of getting to us.

We're going to be working on all of that but if you do not get an episode next Friday just unsubscribe and resubscribe. The resubscribe is the important part. We need you to come back but you might get a couple extra episodes downloaded based on your settings because there's just nothing we can do about that.

We apologize in advance if you do get a few extra episodes. Yep. But overall we're pretty excited and happy about this so we're kind of joining the big boys of podcasting so we're happy to be going there. It's pretty funny because when we first started doing this almost four years ago believe it or not we would always talk about Adam Carolla and you know his pirate ship and now we're on the same network which is kind of neat.

Yes it is. I have an iPatch ordered. All right. We also would like to announce that if you don't want to have your own player or you're not doing it one way or another there is an app now that you can get the podcast one app. It is available for iOS and Android and you can get us on there as well.

Yes. It's at podcast one dot com slash app rather conveniently. So last night it's pretty simple. You can create your own account if you'd like. You can sign in find your podcast that you like put them down as favorites. Please do that for us. We'd appreciate it. Yeah. Fuck those other guys.

Get us. Get us. Yeah. Yeah. Just get us. Come on. You're not going for any of that other shit. Maybe Adam Carolla if you want to be in a bad mood. I also recommend Penn Sunday School and The Art of Charm obviously. Yes. All right. Enough with the pimping. I found this study and this is one of those many studies that say that you know swearing is good for you.

There are so many studies out there about swearing. This one comes from Vice and well the article comes from Vice not the study itself because if Vice did a study that would be pretty funny. That'd be like BuzzFeed doing news. Oh shit. Wait a second. So people who swear are more likely to be honest.

Yes we know that. So that's why we swear a lot on this show because we are honest. We are the most honest show on podcast one. Damn Skippy. Okay and I put it I put it this just for you Brian a six minute intro to AI it demystifies all of the terminology around AI machine learning this that the other thing and it's it's scrollable and pretty.

Yes it is except I still don't really understand what the exact definition is on the title card titled I know what AI means. I think it says intelligent behavior and an autonomous agent that is AI you need to define what intelligent behavior is you need to find what an autonomous agent is.

There's not a lot of intelligent behavior going on nowadays so I guess I can see where your problem might be there. Yeah no so I get this this is very nicely well done but it still doesn't entirely give you a very strict definition of what exactly the differences between machine learning deep learning and AI it attempts to give you a bit of a tree that you climb up but the actual lines of demarcation that you cross when you move from one to the other is still somewhat vague.

You know what now that we're on the big fancy podcast network I'm going to call Ray Kurzweil and see if we can get him on the show to explain it to you just so we can finish this once and for all. Damn right let's do it. On with the news. In the news. The resistance is alive and well on Twitter.

No who knew Twitter's actually become useful and interesting. Oh and anybody out there that thinks that we're going one direction or not you're not going to like this segment but it's news and we can't avoid it and it's we're leaving our opinions mostly out of it. Yeah we don't have to we don't have to put our opinions in this time because everybody else is doing it for us.

Yes they are. So the National Park Service has gone rogue so has the FDA NASA. In case you've been living under a rock somewhere let's first backtrack and explain that. Basically there's been gag orders placed by the current administration on of all things.

I mean okay NASA sure EPA okay fucking forest departments. Yep. Why are you gagging or anyways this is all happened. That was I mean that is that was the impetus because they did one specific thing which is their job by the way.

Exactly so let's skip ahead and just talk about that really quickly so we explain why the National Park Service has found itself under gag orders and not allowed to tweet. Because basically Trump didn't have much better to do after the inauguration except for pressure the Park Service to find proof for these his claims about his inauguration crowd.

The National Park Service did tweet the tweet out the famous photo that's been doing the rounds of the difference between the Obama inauguration crowd and the Trump inauguration crowd. That pissed off that pissed off Senor Trump. So basically he stopped he basically demanded that they stopped tweeting at all because he didn't like their tweet.

He called in the head of the National Park Service director Michael T Reynolds to talk to him because he's got nothing better to do than the first day of his presidency and ordered him to produce additional photographs of the previous day crowds that would show his inauguration crowd in a better light.

He believed that the media was fucking with him and lied and reporting the attendance and then yeah just continued on freaking out and shutting them down and then starting to shut down a lot of other services and putting gag orders on them. So there is a Twitter resistance going on how much of this is real versus how much of this is people bandwagoning on and going I'm going to make a rogue account now to yeah is up is up for grabs.

But on the plus side hey science I just love it the tagline you can take our official Twitter but you'll never take our free time. Oh well one hopes because well if they get they can certainly try if they get caught they're going to have a lot more free time.

I'm afraid yes they are well you know and some other people to have some free time that's kind of felt the same way about this is the State Department which basically resigned in mass the other day. So they were they were asked to leave that reports vary first for I think it's one of those we're quitting we you can't quit we're firing you that's kind of the way that one went.

So yeah there's a lot of turnover going on right now. Yep. Yep. A little tumultuous. We're yeah is that a word tumultuous. No it is when I haven't had the appropriate amount of coffee yet. I asked if you were appropriately caffeinated. Oh I'm on a schedule man.

Okay. Well I've talked about the you know the Donald Trump Twitter account on the show before and it turns out. Yes and we you know we discussed it saying that okay maybe it's better to have the information out there than whatever and maybe Twitter should keep the account going.

Well there are protesters now a whole dozen of them staging a protest outside of Twitter's headquarters and Twitter has declined to comment on the protest because it's 12 people. That's that's there are more people that crap on the steps of Twitter's headquarters every day in San Francisco that actually showed up for this protest.

So there are more people that just protest Twitter in general general than than just this. Hey look I don't think anybody wants wants Donald Trump off Twitter more than Donald Trump's own administration. So this is true. Ah well Uber we got a little chat.

I haven't crapped on them in a while. No. Oh well you know CEO Kalanick has started talking to his employees about why that or he's defending their relationship with the Trump administration which apparently a lot of employees take umbrage with. It says we'll partner with anyone in the world as long as they're about making transportation in cities better creating job opportunities making it easier to get around getting pollution out of the air and traffic off the streets.

So he's also they're both they're both they're both they're both really into eventually saying you're fired. That's true too because all Uber wants to do is fire your ass and replace you with automated vehicles. So yeah okay moving on we are closer to the doomsday midnight.

Ah yes I haven't uh I I believe we're the closest we've been since 1950s um 1953 is a matter of fact and uh if you're interested in that date go listen to the new hardcore history with Dan Carlin. Oh yes I agree actually and I was I just find this interesting because you know this is a he they did want to take us back to a to a better time.

Yeah well thanks right back to 1953. All righty yes and uh of course there's a the greatest uh Iron Maiden song two minutes to midnight well not the greatest Iron Maiden song but a great Iron Maiden song two minutes to midnight and uh two and a half minutes to midnight is a bad follow-up. Yes it is it's no it's no die with your boots on which is the greatest Iron Maiden song.

Oh my god Brian do you you and I agree on the the greatest Iron Maiden song is die with your boots on? Of all the random things for us to actually finally agree on who would have thought it was that? Seriously? I look die with your boots on is by far their finest song. I I I I got chills I'm high-fiving you right now but you're not here but I'm giving you a high-five for having the the greatest taste in Iron Maiden.

Nobody agrees with me on that. You're the first person that's ever agreed with me on that. That's all it is it's right it was and it always shall be die with your boots on. Wow I have a newfound respect for you now go gaze at your shoes and dye your hair black again. Um yeah exactly well damn it.

I was gonna go with a really bad segue about hoping not to have to die with my boots on anytime in the near future but if things go on the way that they do I might be an open rebellion myself. Um this is from the EFF uh they are not known for exactly making things up so they're pretty good uh unfortunately uh border agents have started to demand social media data from Americans.

We had talked about how there was a there was a there was a complaints being filed a couple weeks ago yeah about because they've started to request the information not demand uh they started to basically you know say what's your social media account information so we can have this on file and see what you're tweeting.

Uh now they are demanding uh now they are demanding social media handles and potentially uh passwords so they're looking through your accounts checking out your email et cetera et cetera. Uh border agents also allegedly physically abused one man who refused to hand over his unlocked phone uh if you're white you don't need to worry yet so far it's just the brown people.

First they come for the brown people then they came for the white people it'll it's coming it's coming yeah but uh yeah that's some bullshit and do they and do they check it like right there you know my password is fuck you one two three four. In related news uh the trump administration keeps trying to put a border agent at the entrance to the oval office so they can get access to donald trump's twitter account.

Oh god. Don't quit your day job. This is my day job sadly uh twitter has replaced the moments tab with a new explore tab instead i never even used moments or looked at it it was twitter's attempt to be with the snapchatty type generation uh they have not shared any meaningful metrics around moments since launch shocking a company not sharing any metrics about their products with people that they are trying to convince to use them uh and uh so now it's gone.

Yeah hit or miss hit or miss with with the old twitter nowadays i just i don't know i i still want my six pack so i hope they do good this year. Look all i yeah i know all i gotta say about twitter is it's it's definitely as it's got a resurgence thanks to what's going on in the world politically because that's what uh that's where people go i think that what i heard recently the the best one i heard was uh facebook is where you go to share your life instagram is where you go to fake your life and twitter is where you go to hate your life.

I love that i love that gotta write that down i don't think we could fit that on a bumper sticker but it's pretty damn good. Yeah so that's uh that's what's going on right now uh back to a little ai news uh the partnership on ai i believe we talked about these guys when they formed a while back you remember them?

Yeah yes yes yes we did we did uh discuss this and uh it's an ai think tank basically. Yes which you know basically means a lot of money is going to go down a drain somewhere and we're not going to hear too much come out of it. No pretty much but apple has now joined amazon google and facebook in the project so uh you know we've got so all of these in-home devices will be able to talk to each other but nobody still will know what it means.

I don't know yeah pretty much um well if you end up talking about this all on facebook and you're worried about border agents taking your passwords you can now use nfc to lock down your facebook page uh security keys including physical usb devices are now uh supported by facebook if you feel the need to you know lock down your photos of your cats that badly.

Well well you know some people might want their facebook locked down but uh that this is true there's there's there are a lot of use cases where you definitely want it locked down very well you know abused wives running from their husbands things like that um so there are legitimate use cases and uh i have a link in here for the fido u2f security key which is one of the premier partners with this new initiative it's 18 bucks on amazon prime i've got one coming so we can test it out and uh we'll report on it

in uh in uh the next show or two when it gets here yep pretty interesting so uh give it a go let me know how that works not that i will be using it anytime soon but i yeah sure so now yeah now they don't have to steal your password from your phone or get you to unlock your phone they can just steal your car keys because most people will just put this on their car keys exactly so every valet in in town will have access to your facebook account good times uh or you could uh go the uh pulp fiction route and shove that uncomfortable hunk of metal

up your ass for a couple years and really of course you could well if you're trying to get i just thought about that if you're trying to get past the border agents that's about the only place you can put it for a while until that becomes part of the search america uh yahoo yes pushing back their acquisition date because the sec is reportedly investigating them on why it took so amazingly long for them to disclose that they were hacked and it the reason it took that

long is because they got found out they never would have disclosed it but they got busted exactly they were not going to ever disclose the information it was disclosed for them that's the way it works so if any if you're going to be investigating anything and talking about length of yahoo it's why the fuck they're still around alibaba yeah that's about it ah good times or alt baba now or whatever they'll tell

oh yeah whatever the hell they're calling the damn thing clusterfuck is what they're calling it now okay uh in good news yes the chan zuckerberg initiative is acquiring the search engine meta this is a science search engine science they're going to clean it up and it's got 26 million research papers in it they're going to clean it up make it usable it's an ai powered research search engine so there you go some more ai for your for your uh your cocktail well good on them i support this and i hope

that they get this up and launched right before it gets a gag order well he's they bought it why would they get a gag order the government okay good times moving so yeah moving on jay-z is selling a third of title is that worth anything apparently 200 million that puts titles value at 600 million dollars which i still think is a stretch uh sprint is buying it uh i don't get that um

it is part of uh the death of net neutrality however because sprint has gone on record saying that uh they will be getting uh sprint customers will get exclusive artist content not available anywhere else and there will be no fee for streaming for certain tier levels over at sprint so they are buying a piece of a music streaming company to provide that as a loss leader for their phone services good times yeah let's buy a let's buy a service that nobody wants to put on our phones

that nobody wants well to be fair i i do believe title is actually uh good for the urban market i don't know if that is uh something that uh sprint sees itself as the leader in who knows um but yeah it makes next to no sense and i'm not surprised at all that jay-z is trying to get out he's been trying to get out for over a year it's just he finally found somebody that would actually pay some money for this thing you finally found a mark exactly okay uh there's a great article in wired about uh and i love this

rogue scientists race to save climate data from trump uh we talked about this a couple weeks ago didn't we uh no this was during this was during the uh the inauguration that they were trying to pull this stuff out it's this was like is when when the administrations change as we saw the entire you know uh whitehouse.gov website just goes away they switch um and that was one of the things that bugged me about what people were saying this week where it's like oh they took down all of these

pages for environmental issues lgbtqrstuv issues um when when the switch happened well they didn't take they took down the entire website is the issue it's like they didn't recreate what obama had and said oh well let's let's cherry pick it's like they made their own website and that just went up you know yeah well people were a little you know people went crazy people were touching people very touchy people went a little insane this week and and i mean to be fair it didn't really turn

out well um so most of the time we were right but people did freak out be ahead of time and didn't give things their proper due and freaked out about things that are just normal that would have happened no matter what the administration was yeah so everybody's got to chill out a little bit settle the fuck down but these guys were uh taking like getting the data out to protect uh just the environmental science data and research data yeah and they had to do i i do not i know exactly what

they were going through you know basically trying to build these pages on the fly to scrape them to get the information out of the database to recreate the database instead of just owning the database where you can just get the data and then rebuild the pages yes i i this is this made my brain we've all been there well people like you and i have been there so yes it is not fun it is a it is a fuster cluck yes it is it's about probably the worst thing that i've ever done yeah so um and let's go back to a

little bit of uh universal basic income ubi okay let's talk about some ubi so you we know we've talked about a bunch of the different studies that are actually starting up right now right yes uh we've got this one guy who we i i swear to god this this makes me sad that this guy is the uh the face of universal basic income his name is uha jarvanin uha jarvanin he's finnish so this this first study

comes from finland so i'm gonna i'm gonna go with uha jarvanin you're making fun of the name but it's like the john smith of finland that's what i'm saying but i'm trying to pronounce it if you know i if he if he was from sweden i could totally nail it you know work work work but he's from finland and i'm my finnish accent's a little off 37 years old wife six children he should use his basic income to buy a fucking tv i don't know how any anybody with that beard ends up having six kids that's my

point you got everybody's got to go look at the picture and see this guy's is a little toot and common chin beard that looks like it's like full of algae it is disgusting and i was hoping that he took some tree stuff and made it and stuck it on and it was like a funny photo and it doesn't actually exist but i think it exists yeah me too this is the guy who is like the the face of finland's uh universal basic income uh project so it made me sad but i'm glad they're still doing it but you know

they're only getting 590 bucks a month but the the whole point is they were saying that everybody's worried that if everybody gets a universal basic income they're just going to spend it on what they call temptation goods you know smokes and booze yeah and it and it turns out a uh the research done by the world bank said that no actually consumption of alcohol and tobacco went down once they got a universal basic income because they were trying to use that money to get their life on track and they

said hey use this to help your kids like on the actual money like in the envelope use this to help your kids use this to buy food and they actually did it so it's how nice yeah it's got the research is actually coming along really well so when uh when we need some money we're gonna move to finland damn right and grow out a strange beard i can't grow a beard so unfortunately it's genetics family curse i look like basically an old italian woman when i try and grow out a beard i'd have that guy's beard by

5 p.m yeah yeah big strong brian and beard that's right uh we've talked about delivery services and how much i can't stand them yes these uh freelance delivery services well yes turns out there's a new thing in uh in a couple cities this is mainly new york that uh the articles that i found about uh these were uh they're called ghost restaurants yeah and what they're doing is they're leveraging

small kitchen space and these on-demand delivery services to outsource the delivery but just cook the food and not have to spend the huge rent on the places where people can come put their ass and eat i think it's genius it's a slightly more legal version of the food trucks yeah yeah that's basically what they're doing so i i'm down with it i like this i wish there was more of this going on there's there's a bit of this going on here in the venice santa monica area it's a it's definitely it makes sense

in areas like this where um there's just a massive disparity between incomes uh there are people here that are you know students and just getting by and they're insanely rich all the silicon valley people that have moved in and uh rents go through the freaking roof uh all the restaurants become super expensive because the rents have gone through the freaking roof so things like this uh rise you know brooklyn here i mean that's it makes total sense and i'm totally up for it it's awesome

yeah at the end of the article though they make a very interesting point these guys are struggling because even though the you know the overhead is low the margins are still like ridiculously thin yeah but what they're missing out on is booze revenue yeah that a lot of restaurants yeah that's where they make it restaurants make their money yeah exactly so and they don't get that so still better off owning the liquor store around the corner from this restaurant probably probably

uh you and i love our alexas yes i do and we've been using them a lot and a lot of people out there are using the google assistant and enjoying that as well uh the problem is people are not sticking with all the different apps that are being built for it um 69 of the 7 000 plus i can't believe there are 7 000 of these things alexis skills or the voice apps that you have have zero or one customer review well see the thing is low usage it's actually really easy to make one i researched this we can we

could you and i could sit down and put an alexis skill together uh by three in the afternoon it's super easy i mean i i had thought about doing a grumpy old geeks thing for the flash briefing because you know why not but uh you know if it doesn't update every day it's kind of useless it oh yeah well we're not gonna update it every day yeah until you know unless podcast one works out real well we're not going to be doing daily shows anytime soon up to speed exactly so i mean i agree

with this assessment i mean i use mine for morning news i check whether i do the music player but that's really about it um a lot of the different briefing skills suck i i don't keep anything that isn't read by a human if it's if it's a news report and it's the alexa voice shooting it out gone it's gone gone immediately so the the article goes on to say that uh developers uh for alexa and google assistant uh sometimes enable voice apps there's only a three percent chance on average that a person will be

an active user by the second week that is beyond low that's ridiculous um the hard part is you're learning a new vocabulary and i have like maybe 30 or 40 skills installed on my alexa i can't remember a goddamn one of them that is a big problem i don't remember things also the interface to find skills is horrible terrible there there aren't really even categories you're just scrolling down some horrible long lists anytime i'm trying to find anything new to add to my flash briefing i'm

getting you know reams and reams of local news stations from you know pawtucky yeah poughkeepsie and i was like i don't get the it's really hard to find skills the so the store interface store it's not even a store the the interface for adding skills is crap most of the skills are crap the barrier of entry to developing skills as you said jason is really low so a lot of people have just made stupid you know idiot things that they basically just did as a test and then put it out in the wild because

why not uh clean that crap up have some sort of yahoo system buy yahoo to use their old method for for finding skills but yeah i mean the whole other aspect of it is you're learning a completely different way to interface with a technology and people just aren't doing it yeah no i i when i was trying to put new stuff on there i would actually take a post-it and stick it on uh the the tube so i would remember what was on there but then i'm like oh it's just ugly having post-its on there and then i

ended up not using the stuff anyway i think amazon should you know i know they're trying to build the ecosystem yeah i swear if they put a five dollar paywall in front of actually creating a skill it'd get rid of 90 of the crap five bucks a month to keep your skill up there i would pay that if i was going to do it yeah i agree people never really think about that and it's so true it's just make it a slight slight bit of effort and it knocks out half of the people that are just causing the worst problems i had just another check box you probably cut down half of the people

that is so fucking true but you know i i i totally agree and i wish it was better and on the you know their interface side of things amazon has really bad ui people they're terrible that i unfortunately am signed up for amazon music for a year because i forgot to go cancel it and i'm like i'll keep it whatever it works with the thing worst interface out of i mean you thought

itunes was bad holy shit amazon music interface i i scream at it i'm just trying to like find one song and it's like would you like to find something in in country and western no no i want this song i typed in the name of the song and even with alexa it's just it's miserable but the one redeeming feature of the amazon music app which i think is the coolest thing i've seen in a long

time it's called x-ray lyrics have you seen this no so i'm gonna go see hamilton on sunday and i'm like trying to listen to it because i can't i you know it's rap and hip-hop and all that i'm like i can't understand what these kids are saying but in on my phone it just automatically plays the lyrics beat by beat with the song so i can learn the lyrics as it goes and it's just built in wow which is pretty cool you got to admit that is pretty cool i will definitely check that out so okay moving on sorry uh voice

activated people maybe they need an ai to tell us in the morning hey would you like to try all of the skills that you've forgotten about yeah something like that we need something oh okay back to uber our friends at uber and this is this this is an interesting uh article because it kind of comes back to what we talked about with uh the amazon employees in scotland and uh actually tech people in silicon valley uh it's from bloomberg when their shifts end uber drivers set up camp in parking lots

across the united states oh boy yeah um this is going on all over the place in chicago walter howard sleeps most nights at the uber terminal which is basically a 7-eleven i i left my job thinking this would work and it's getting harder and harder howard said they have to understand that some of us have decided to make this a full-time career well it's not a career it's not they don't have to understand and you have to understand that they're going to fire you as soon as they can

yeah yeah these guys are trying to make like 300 bucks a day and they're usually coming around with 230 bucks a day how do you get to what's that 85 90 thousand dollar uh number that they kept throwing around oh yeah the average uh the average that most people make working for them yeah uh-huh yeah sorry guys uber is not short-term money if you got to do it in a pinch just not a career yeah side job if you want to make some extra cash i get that not a career no you want a career you

come here to la and you get started digging elon musk says he may start building a tunnel under la as early as next month this guy does not fuck around no he does not i want to know i want to know what vitamins he takes every day because this guy's got some energy i know he was on what he was on a freeway a month ago in la and said to hell with this i'm gonna make a company called uh whatever the hell he ended up calling it and uh here we go we're going hey what the hell why not let's do it

i it and he just it's like he gets it in his craw and he gets it done there was a story going around a while ago about uh someone tweets to elon musk about this problem and six days later it was fixed you remember those tweets yeah yeah okay well basically what it was was my friend loic who has a tesla was like i'm going to go charge up my tesla and these people are hogging the the charging stations and he's the one that tweeted to elon i'm like oh that's kind of cool loic's doing that

and then six days later elon's like yeah yeah you get billed if you don't move your ass when your car's charged it's like that was easy if we could only do that with another uh you know prominent twitter account out there we could maybe get some change from how great would that be if only all right yeah and speaking of that uh we've got a cognitive bias cheat sheet simplified this is one of the coolest things i've i've read recently um you know no political thing here whatsoever just the four

conundrums of the universe that lead to all cognitive biases the first being there's too much information secondly there's not enough meeting third there's not enough time and resources and fourth there's not enough memory go read this uh it will change the way that you think about a number of things that are going on right now yep and it's written by buster benson who uh i love because he wrote the original 750 words app that we used to talk about all the time on the show oh yeah very cool and he works at slack now so he's a he's a smart cookie i like that guy excellent uh remember the

publishing platform ghost uh vaguely so they were an open source kickstarted type of thing yeah from way back they're one of the few uh profitable companies that are doing publishing platforms hello and uh so these guys have come up with a new way for uh journalists to kind of publish their stuff i tried to dig into it a bit but the most amazing thing about this is there are other companies out there that are not wordpress that

are doing publishing systems that look nice and are profitable so good for them yeah good on them okay very cool security well it's been a week and we're still here so we thought we'd have dave bitner from the cyber wire back to uh give us a rundown on the scary things happening this week in cyber security we're still here too guys

we're excited to be here uh so uh we you know we we uh we soldier on and uh lots going on this week in the cyber security world um you think well yeah we'll we'll get to some of that uh some of that stuff in a little bit but i want to lead off this week with um the return of fancy bear uh as you know you know fancy bear is one of the um one of the the name that was given to one of the the exploits uh

the methods that the russians were using uh to hack the dnc among other people now i get fancy bear and cozy bear mixed up what's the difference well they come from two different uh russian organizations so um uh fancy bear comes from the gru which is russia's military intelligence so that would be the equivalent of the u.s's uh nsa basically okay um and the fsb uh cozy bear comes from the fsb which is

the kgb successor organization um and so the reputation of the two of them is that um fancy bear is kind of the the noisy one and cozy bear is the quiet one um just meaning that you know fancy bear isn't that hard to find make sort of uh makes its presence known and and cozy bear is uh much more stealthy which makes sense given their individual you know histories and the parts of the russian

intelligence service that they come from so uh fancy bear is back uh there's a report uh this week that uh they found fancy bear in a uk television station um this is a report in the international business times that um fancy bear has been uh has been discovered uh analysts from secure works which is a cyber security firm um they say that um fancy bear was in this uk tv station they're not naming the

station but that it's been in there uh they detected it or i'm sorry they gained access back in july of 2015 and it remained undetected for about a year hmm so uh you know interesting stuff certainly no one thought that uh the russians were just going to pay attention to the u.s and the u.s elections and leave everyone alone but you know more evidence that um the russians are uh allegedly the russians i mean

that's all signs point towards the russians uh it's pretty much uh a settled uh attribution but um you know interesting that they've taken up residence in a uk television station and you can imagine some of the reasons why uh information that a television station would have might be interesting to a foreign country hmm i've seen v for vendetta he went after the tv station so no makes sense yeah well i mean you

think about you know stories that reporters are working on uh you know even things like sources um uh of course you know business information and so forth you know all of these are things that foreign government could use uh to their advantage um you know at this point it's sort of espionage kind of stuff but um you know fancy bear uh poking her head up is uh certainly uh worth taking notice

and of course people are concerned about the upcoming elections throughout the eu um that the russians could be doing um you know similar things that they've been alleged to have done in our most recent uh u.s election so there is an alternate explanation here yes they're just really big fans of top gear and they couldn't get around the bbc's uh location awareness and not not letting them play on the

eye player there you go yeah it's a theory hey yeah but but and it remember sherlock was uh leaked early as well by it was a russian language leak that was uh out there so maybe this is uh we're getting we're getting uh closer to the trail here could be could be somebody needs to hire somebody like sherlock to go figure out how sherlock got sherlocked yes so uh obviously you know we're going to keep an eye on

that uh and uh you know where see where else uh cozy bear and fancy bear uh you know get their paws and other people's business all right um another story is uh there's a site called leaked source have you guys ever heard of leaked source yeah we've talked about them on the show a couple times when the big hacks come out and you can go used to be able to go check your uh to see if you were hacked right you could check to see if you were hacked but uh you had to pay a fee in order to do so

so um that got uh some people's dander up about that uh but then also the other thing about leaked source is that they would decrypt the passwords uh that were leaked so they would take a database of yeah they'd take a database of leaked passwords and uh for your convenience or oh i don't know maybe someone else's convenience they would decrypt those passwords and so anyone with a subscription could um have access to the free and clear you know usernames and passwords um so

it sucks because we're talking about them in the past tense because they no longer cease to be but that i didn't know that they were decrypting passwords that would have been a nice resource to have i could have some fun with that people yeah so um they're gone uh they have been shut down um uh someone on an online uh web forum said that um they're gone and they're claiming that

u.s law enforcement have uh come in and shut the service down uh i don't think many people are surprised that they would have been uh shut down but um you know it happened uh quickly and quietly um there's word that uh perhaps their databases have been shared with other people so it could pop up somewhere else sort of an interesting sidelight to this is that um the story in ars technica talks

about how uh leaked source was quite often the first uh place that a large uh breach would show up oh um so leaked source was very good it's sort of uh you know um uh scraping around on some of the online online underground forums looking for these databases and when they showed up they would then share them in this more easily accessible public place so a lot of journalists subscribed to and relied

on leaked source as sources um journalists in addition to researchers and and hackers and so forth but people who just wanted to to know what was the the latest breaches so uh sort of a you know a little um unintended consequence of this is that that early source that some people had become to rely on uh even though it was a perhaps a bit unsavory is gone but you know yay for law enforcement i i think

we hear so many about so many stories about you know the bad guys doing their things especially with ransomware and so forth that um and the the the uh the law enforcement uh shutdowns are seem to be few and far between so i think it's good when these things do happen to remind people that you know there are good guys out there working on these things actively trying to shut them down and in some cases having success doing it well they said that the the owner wasn't arrested but like what

would they charge him with on this because he's just basically taking the data that somebody else hacked and redistributing it but uh i'm just trying to figure out what the legal angle is on that i don't know i mean i wonder if you could have a um like a digital millennium copyright act on the fact that he was decrypting stuff maybe yeah that's kind of that's kind of a reach i mean i'm sure they probably put it under the computer fraud and abuse act yeah yeah it's pretty much put anything under that yes that's so damn vague logging in in the morning is under the computer fraud abuse

yeah forgot to clean up after your dog this morning and someone will come after you for or some stretch for that but uh yeah it's one of those laws like they have with uh uh i got a ticket one time and i got a ticket for speeding but then they gave me one for improper lane usage which is just an it's an add-on it's like you know would you like to supersize that ticket sure here throw it on and see what it sticks yeah so we'll see you know if anything happens and in terms of any charges or anything like that if this pops up in in another uh in another

incarnation another form but uh it'd be on the dark web yeah for the moment it's gone okay well i missed missed the boat on that one uh and and uh another interesting kind of uh policy uh story you know sort of uh reaching back uh back towards election time um the feds have launched an official investigation into why the department of homeland security may have hacked into the georgia state

governmental network which includes its election system uh so say what well and and you know it's interesting how much this is is procedural or or whatever but it seems like there's been some this is a story in the daily caller uh it seems like there's been some bad blood between the uh the georgia secretary of uh states network secretary of state um and uh the feds um the uh folks in

georgia have uh been upset that the feds have have designated election systems as critical infrastructure um the people in georgia say that that's a that's a they say it's a political power play to federalize the elections um you know they want elections to stay state-run and they want the feds to stay out of it so during the election the um the the feds uh it seems they they scanned uh

several of georgia's systems that included their election systems um and uh georgia wants to know why and um so the feds have said yeah we're going to take a look at that and we're going to we're going to see if there's anything to that you know it's a valid concern it's a valid concern you know was was this the equivalent uh of someone uh just sort of going around and checking the doors to see if the doors are unlocked you know was it uh could it have been that they were sort of trying

to rattle georgia's cages saying you know oh you know you don't like what we're doing well you know here's uh how do you like this um do we know do we know the extent on how far they went i mean this could just be a simple port scan of the network that got picked up which also by the way you can go to jail for against the computer for an abuse act for port scan yeah it seems like it wasn't much more than that uh that you know they didn't get in they didn't get in and you know rattle around and and

poke around and and you know change any data or anything like that uh but the very fact that they were scanning um has uh gotten uh the folks in georgia upset at them um and i think it's a it's a reasonable uh question and so um you know i i think good for dhs that they've taken the complaint seriously and are going to take a look at it and if it was inappropriate you know whatever response is

appropriate either a slap on the wrist or someone perhaps someone losing their job or something like that and we'll see where it plays out but but you know this on the run-up to the election the fed said that they were going to try and help everybody you know make sure that their election systems were secure so they may have done this to every state and just tried to go and just do a basic scan on everybody to see if there were just if there were any anything egregious opened you know that anybody could just walk right in on which to me would make sense if if you know dhs is doing that it does make

sense that i could also see the other side of it of you know that guy in the in your neighborhood who walks around walks up to everybody's front door and turns the front doorknob to find out who keeps their houses unlocked and uh you know that motherfucker's gonna get shot sends everyone a friendly letter who keeps their front door unlocked saying hey your front door's unlocked i noticed the other day you know that person might get a a visit from the neighborhood

association and so he'll be in the hospital because he's gonna lose an arm yeah yeah so we'll see how it plays out okay that's an interesting one for sure so um now this one was just because you know the the white house knows cyber you know they really really know cyber they're huge on cyber they know the cyber yeah yes they do know the cyber um and show you know actually we're

well i i just have to say we're the cyber wire so you know we know the cyber as well and the wire you got and the wire not just the cyber we know the wire as well so yes go on so sean spicer uh accidentally tweeted his password two days in a row which was pretty humorous yes yes baby steps baby steps new on the job i what i love is that uh some people responded and said well at least they

work decent passwords yeah i thought the same thing i'm like it it wasn't potus one two three four right right yeah trump rules with a z uh sure well yeah speaking of that and really knowing the cyber over there uh people are a little bit upset uh with with our dear leader uh apparently he's still using his unsecured personal android cell phone people have figured this out because of not only you

know his tweets are saying what his tweets are coming from uh he's been caught in photos using it uh he's been caught in video walking around using his unsecured personal cell phone still which you're not supposed to be doing um now that you are the the potus not just the potus and uh yeah so in addition to that uh people because you know we know the cyber people have done the thing where you you know you get a password reminder sent to your twitter so they've discovered that is uh he's actually still got

his gmail account connected to his twitter account uh update on that they have changed them all i checked them all this morning well thank god they finally got around to that because i don't know if you recall but a big deal was kind of made about i don't know somebody like the person he was running against using an unsecured unsecured private email server yeah who would that be yeah i don't know it's just a little interesting that you know they don't seem to give a shit now that they're in office but okay

hey whatever uh this hypocrisy among rival political parties i'm shocked shocked shocked as well that's what happens when you're winning i did a little uh twitter survey because twitter allows you to do these little sink the little silly surveys at this point so i just wanted to ask people out there what was the worst situation for national security a private email server any rudy giuliani website or an unsecure android phone and uh the unsecure android phone is at 87 with giuliani websites at 13 at the

moment so there you go um my thought about this is isn't there some sort of u.s government geek squad that kind of rolls in with a you know american flag painted vw bugs uh the second the president elect is called that shows up you know here's your phone don't worry we'll transfer all your contacts over here's a new laptop we're gonna move everything obviously not bit torrent you can't keep that uh you use tablets here you go here's the secure ones doesn't that happen right away well wouldn't

that be the secret service yes yeah so i was wondering this exact same thing and actually um i i mentioned this offhandedly to someone yesterday i was interviewing for our show and and he said that he he this was an insider he said yes the president had been given a secure phone so i was doing a little digging this morning you know prepping for our show here today and because i couldn't understand i'd seen lots of reports saying the president was still using his own phone

i'd see some reports saying the president have been has been given a new phone and the truth is that both things have happened um coming up to you know before he was sworn in the president was given an official secure phone um and by you know by the secret service and so that phone is the secure device same sort of thing that president obama had um that is an encrypted phone that he can use for

all of his official communications and so forth um however uh he still has uh in his pocket or his bottom desk drawer or his tiny little hands his old android phone that he is still using to tweet with he can't figure out how to change the password that's why he still logged in on it he's like i got a tweet from this thing right now i don't i would imagine that it is quite likely that his new secure

phone uh cannot have a twitter client on it i imagine that's outside of the the realm of secure uh apps on on the phone whatever it is if nothing else the uh public relations department is telling him that it can't have a twitter client on it because please god let's get him off that damn thing right so you know puzzling through this i think on the one hand you could imagine all right so he has

if they say to him all right fine um you know you can use your old phone but please just use it for tweeting and for nothing else um you know is is that really that different from him walking up to a computer with a web browser and tweeting um and of course the answer is yes because yeah go ahead this is a device that he's carrying around with him and it is indeed you know according to photos and

everything it is an older android device so it is a device that it is not possible to bring up to date when it comes to security and uh you know defending it against uh you know various modern exploits as we know one thing that can happen with uh mobile devices is that they can be hacked to activate things like their microphones and their cameras and bingo you know their their proximity detectors

their gps and all of those types of things so um yeah i mean i you you can't look past that as being a huge uh security hole but on the other hand i mean goodness there's a whole team of people whose job it is is to keep the president safe and also to protect his communication so i have to think that i mean obviously they've thought of this as well so the flip side is is that do you ever try and take it did you

ever try and take a toy from a stubborn child who will just cry every time you take it away yeah yeah that's that's i that's where i was going maybe not in those exact words but uh where i was going with that was ultimately you know he is the commander-in-chief he is the boss so if he says uh no i want to use my android phone um i guess the best they can do is say uh yes sir mr president

uh will you please allow us to secure it uh and to the best of our ability and um and and and they're doing that so it's a mystery i i it really is a mystery uh as to why we are i i i i guess what i'm saying is i'm hoping that there's more to this behind the scenes uh and i'm i'm i'm really trying to have

faith in the fact that there must be more to this behind the scenes than there seems to be you know i could basically apply that to the entire situation right now not just the specific one so yeah i'm with you yeah fun fun fun yeah week one week one okay woo all right if we're here for week two then

we'll talk to you next week exactly all right gentlemen have a good one stay safe out there okay now i thought this one was a joke when i saw this come through my facebook feed the other night or last night amazon has sold out of 1984 as america decides to read a goddamn book for once this comes

from gizmodo if only you would have read this one earlier everyone everyone yes i thought you're talking about me i'm like i read that when i was seven years old yeah me too nice god i was such a geek i had like sayings from the book written on my backpack uh well you know hopefully uh maybe next time fahrenheit 451 will get sold out and uh a brave new world by aldous huxley which i think is a better book than 1984 but uh i went and checked this last night and this morning sure as shit

1984 is sold out at amazon that is sad i thought it was a joke but no that's sad yeah the funny thing is i think maybe episode two or three of this show you know almost four years ago i i was in caught up in that 1984 gate on my kindle where they pulled it back after i bought it right right yeah so i couldn't even buy it back then i think it's on my kindle now but i'm not going to go read it again because

i can just look out the window this is true oh my first book for the week is empire games by charles strass ah yes i saw that it was released yeah new book and uh not the laundry files so i'm like hey let's give it a shot i like it okay i really actually like it it's got uh it it's kind of like

uh the long earth you've got really you've got you've got timeline jumping people that can go between earths okay but not that many of them and it's extremely interesting but honestly i'm really liking the the world that he's building here this is book one and i think it i think he started to build this world in another series and kind of rebooted it for this one but i like it i'm really really liking

it i'm i'm almost uh i think i'm about 80 of the way there on it and i i'm digging it very cool i will uh potentially give it a shot i think i want to finish up or catch up with the laundry files first i'm not quite uh caught up yet so okay uh well you better hurry up there's a new one coming soon that's what i heard but we're going back to bob yay always go back to bob always go back to bob now i sent you a book this week by steven pressfield did you get a chance to read it i scanned through it this is not

exactly what i would call a read it cover to cover book it's called nobody wants to read your shit yeah why that is and what you can do about it by steven pressfield who you know wrote the legend of bagger vance and um the war of art and many other other amazing books um i just i got about halfway through this one and i'm just like i was loving it and i'm like i gotta send this to brian because it could just it could as well been had said nobody wants to listen to your shit either

yes exactly it's a treatise on you know how to be brief and get your message across you know for coming from the world of a novelist and an advertising writer i just loved it i thought it was fun yes as we slip into hour two of recording tough shit the biggest the biggest podcast in the world in technology that we're going up against is three hours long three hours long so argument every time we'll go with what we get same argument

shut the fuck up and tell me what you read i read the swarm the second form of volume one by orson scott card and aaron johnson because i can't not stop doing this even though i tell myself i'm not going to read these books anymore every time a new one comes out i read it me smacking you in the face it was actually good i mean it's no ender's game it doesn't have the impact but if you're taught you know just a a quick read trashy sci-fi war book it's good i can't orson scott

card is just such a terrible human being i can't give him my money i i can't for anything other than the ender series i still read those damn things but uh yeah i i believe i talked about this last week my ability to separate the horribleness of the actual person from the product that they produce okay okay next next week on uh anthem library mind comp okay funny also sold out

ups and doodads computer start the segment yeah i was gonna use an image of scotty from star trek 4 holding up the mouse and talking into it for the artwork for this episode but i had to go with something other star trek related so yeah yes amazon finally lets us have one new wake word

and it is this computer and i did switch over to it and i love it of course you did problem problem is it is way more generic than the other words that you can use which means it's going to get triggered a hell of a lot more yeah you can't listen to radio heads okay computer that's out um yeah this is i i have not switched to it i do like the the i just like you know i like it because of star trek what's not to like about it but i'm not going to switch to it um it's fun though

it's fun trust me it is it is very fun i might switch the one in the bedroom just do it for a day it's fun you do it in the scotty kind of tone don't you yes i do absolutely yes kind of lilting up at the end computer computer computer yeah i really still want mine to i i want my wake word to be clatu so but we'll never get there but no i was having that discussion with uh with friends of the

show mike and fergal last night because we had talked about how they added computer and you know it was oh it's just a matter of time until they add everything no no it's not because they don't want they won't want any videos out there of people saying hey fuck nuts or whatever and and the thing responding and uh they can't use things that they're going to have to license because they're not going to pay for it so you can't use anything like direct out of sci-fi or you know whatever because they'd have to actually pay to license it you'll never be able to go hey han solo or hey millennium falcon

it's not going to happen but the thing is i mean they're they're still working on the training algorithms for have you ever done the voice training with yours yeah yeah i keep doing that and it does it does make it a little bit better and it's weird like some of the stuff it's like uh oh is it a wake word uh play album by sade and i'm like okay so what they're trying to figure out is if you know what how to pronounce sade yeah i mean that again we were talking about that a little bit earlier in

the program but it is the same you know you have to invest a little bit to learn how to to use this it's not just it's not the the promised land of just being able to talk to a computer like scotty did it's you have to know the phraseology and the methodology you know my wife yesterday was was in the room so funny was screaming uh louder echo louder echo and i was like you gotta reverse it

so i mean you have to you have to know how to use it it's it's not uh it's not true you know you're not just talking to a computer you are using coded words in a programming language you're just saying them out loud and if you fuck up the order it's not going to work so but they have to be able to do some fun stuff like for christmas i want to be able to say on donner and have it wake up you know on blitzen that would be quite good you have some fun stuff with it so they just need

to work on it a little bit yeah so i've uh found a new website that uh for my life right now is actually pretty good it's called fatherly fatherly.com and uh there are these durable sock shoe hybrids for workouts uh called skinners that are also apparently perfect for walking on legos no pain whatsoever i've been informed that this is in my future there is no way to avoid basically screaming at uh the top of your lungs in the middle of the night as you step on a lego so i might take a

look at these shoes i would highly recommend it if you've never stepped on a lego in your bare feet then uh yeah you're in for a surprise i have not so that that should be interesting oh so i tried to get my new uh you know the little apple ear snots yes and they're six weeks out i can't get them for another six weeks so i ordered them they're coming and i just couldn't take it anymore because sadly the other night i was uh i was listening to my my you know my hamilton on my iphone i took my headphones off unplugged them from the iphone

reached behind me on the couch and put them on the side table right while i was putting them on the side table i just let them drop and they dropped right into my glass of wine so oh good good job there i was out of headphones so i'm just like okay well let's let's see what we can get for now so i got these i went to amazon and i did a search for bluetooth headphones and i never would have bought

this brand it called towtronics okay um wireless 4.1 magnetic earbuds blah blah blah um 39 or 3799 and i looked at the ratings they're 4.3 stars out of 5 with 5700 reviews i'm like okay law of averages they got to be okay they are they're actually really good i love them all right um they're my first set of you know bluetooth with a little wiry thing it's got the microphone and the up and down button and all

that stuff on it uh battery is not great i have to charge it every night but um yeah they they fit fine and the little magnetic thing is cool is because when you take them out of your ears and they hang around your neck they kind of clip together to make a really ugly necklace right but but at least they don't go anywhere you know and for you know 38 bucks these this is a great little set and

the one downside is they're very much like um the 501c3 whatever earbuds that you got me to buy you cannot hear a lot about what's going on in the background but that also makes the music sound great so they actually sound pretty good okay so if you're looking for an interim pair that's you know in the 40 range you can't go wrong with these i really like them they come with a bunch of different sizes for the you know the little cones and the little swirly things that you that hold them in

your ear i am yeah and the nice thing about it is because since my ears are two different sizes i can change the size on one and the other and then they can stay where they got to go gotcha all right check them out all right and then going back to the amazon echo and making it really useful uh i've continued to argue that the one thing that we really need to get going with that is being able to control your tv and that whole system the logitech uh harmony was the promised

land which i got for christmas and i tried out and did not work at all uh it was quite horrible um it was non-harmonious it was non-harmonious i mean i couldn't even get it to work as a universal remote much less when they tried to get to go with echo that was total fail uh so i got the blue moo which is what you brought to uh my attention i believe two weeks ago or something like that something like that the blumpy is what i was calling it but the blue moo i have gotten it um i have gotten

halfway through setup i haven't gotten to integrating with amazon echo yet but uh i do the the setup process was a thousand times better than the logitech harmony i'm controlling as a remote in and of itself use with the app on my phone controls everything and it was reasonably painless to set up unlike the harmony so the next step for me is figuring out how to do echo integration documentation is not so great on that shocking yeah it is pretty new so i'll give him you know a pass on that so but i'm

getting there it does seem to me that i'm not going to be it's a bit clunky it's still going to be it's going to be like computer tell blue moo to turn the tv on so there's an extra step in there that one would hope and wish wouldn't be there but you're not going to get there until amazon basically does their own version of this yeah it should always just be you know computer turn on my tv but you're dealing with namespaces there so yeah yeah yeah so uh i'm going to continue on i'm going to spend the weekend uh trying to get it up and running with the whole echo integration i'll let you know how it

goes next week cool how much was this thing uh a lot cheaper than the harmony the harmony was 100 or 99 bucks uh right now the blue moo is 60 bucks prime free same day shipping on amazon okay so i'm gonna hold off till next week and you let me know how it goes and uh if you if you give me the thumbs up i'll i'll maybe try it because yeah i mean right now i can 100 tell you if you're just looking for a smart universal remote system that uh does self-learning and and all that sort of stuff you can't go wrong

with this if you're holding off like i am for the echo integration i'll let you know next week okay yeah mainly i have to buy a new remote for my that shitty tv i bought so it's like if this thing can save me from having to go out and buy a roku remote then it's worth the money because i'm going to spend just as much on one of those roku smart voice remotes anyway yeah i i don't know if it if there's a physical remote option uh but certainly if you're okay with using uh your phone um the that all comes

up and works perfectly the phone's in my hand 24 7 anyway so why not there you go well i'd say drop the 60 bucks anyways right now okay on it media candy there's apparently only one jedi and he is the last one because we don't know we finally got the title we do have the title but we do not know if jedi is singular or plural that is what every single blog and every single post all over the world

because we are in a clickbait society is now talking about fucking nerds like totally we do have the title gaggle of jedi the official title a gaggle i thought it was a a a litter it's a murder it's a murder of jedi that's only if they're sith it's a murder of sith oh my god we are geeking out so bad stop moving on the title is the last jedi it came out yay we're excited okay we'll see hopefully fingers

crossed knock on wood um no trailers yet that'll that's supposedly april march april we're supposed to get the first trailer look the last episode they redid four so if this one they redo you know empire i'm down i'm down agreed just hopefully for the last one they don't do uh return of the jedi so because i don't want no fucking ewoks uh this week i watched a documentary called earbuds the podcast

documentary you're getting way too into podcasting uh it's kind of my career so yeah i am it's uh it's an amazingly good documentary i bought it it was like 10 bucks it's really fun i was very skeptical going into it because there's another documentary out there on podcasting that i'm not looking forward to but this one was really well done because it's made by podcasters it's got dave anthony in it it's

uh and the guys from comedy film nerds or something like that i never listened to their show but i just picked it up and started listening it's pretty good uh they're the guys behind la pod fest too so and it kind of made me want to fly out for it this year they're announcing dates in in february so maybe uh if if we have enough coin in the bank by september i'll come out and we'll go hang out yeah we should probably do it anyways it looks like it honestly looks like it's a ton of fun they have they have a lot of behind the scenes stuff there it looks really good um and next up uh it's

it's out i just didn't feel like paying the money for it yet but i'll get there uh this is a new documentary by alex gibney who's apparently that's he's like the master of the documentary now so he did the going clear documentary about scientology his new one's called zero days it's about hacking okay yeah it kind of looks a little hyperbolic in spaces so i was just like yeah maybe i might have to wait till that is a rental not a buyer because you know five bucks maybe i'm good

but 20 bucks um i'm gonna hold off on that i agree i watched a series of unfortunate events how unfortunate for you the lemony snicket well yes and no i i didn't watch all of it i only watched two episodes that's as far as i got too i i love the books i read the books um when they first came out i thought they were absolutely fantastic and the casting and the the actors that they have chosen for

this series are unbelievable um top notch the kids are unbelievably fantastic uh everybody is great i don't know who they made this for i don't either it's it's too involved for kids it's not interesting enough for adults uh somebody i look i love me some barty stinson i love me some doogie hauser i love neil patrick harris somebody's got to rein him in on the show this is way too much

i don't remember a lot of singing and dancing uh from olaf when i read the books um i don't remember a lot of big show tunes when i read the books but uh they this is neil patrick harris gone wild he's gone wild hog wild is the better name for the show he's gone unfortunately wild is yes unfortunately wild so sadly i mean the art direction these sets the costuming the acting the actors

all of it's great uh but it's completely unwatchable it is it is utterly unwatchable i got you know at the very beginning uh whether the limiting snicket character whatever the cop comes out and he's like i don't know why you're watching this everything that happens in this show is bad you're not going to enjoy it i'm like you're right click yes sadly unfortunately they were correct about absolutely correct on that so i was like yes i'm done bye yeah it's just it's it's one of those

things where all the elements are fantastic uh but it tastes like shit did you like the movie just one of those menus no i hated the movie too okay good because i didn't i didn't care for the movie that's why i'm just like i i like neil patrick harris i'll give it a shot i gave it two episodes fell asleep halfway through the second woke up and i'm just like ah done yeah so uh what i did enjoy i know i'm a bit late to it and i've already been told i need to watch the 90s i watched finally cnn's

the 80s and uh because you know our age group this is the exact uh one that we're going to want to watch it was absolutely fantastic it was riveting uh every single night i was watching a new episode uh if you want an insight into the grumpy old geeks all you have to do is watch i believe episode eight which is 80s technology it is awesome okay totally righteous 1980s technology man all right but i enjoyed every single episode of it they uh they all obviously focus on different aspects of the 80s uh there are 10

total uh about 45 minutes each uh fantastic viewing right before you go to bed i would just pop on an episode and watch it great uh and how did you get them uh they are on uh netflix uh also if you can download they're on cnn's app so you can you just use the cnn app as well too and most i i believe most cable providers probably have it on the on demand for free so it's it's widely available so i'll

probably watch the 90s next but it's great and as we talked about earlier hardcore history 59 has been dropped the destroyer of worlds it is six hours six hours people and it's a quote-unquote blitz edition and but at least he covers it at the beginning he's like uh i don't think you know what blitz means no he's he said basically we have changed the definition of what blitz is so this is all this is alt blitz yeah this is the alt blitz kind of like uh this episode is the alt uh artificial

intelligence so uh i'm about halfway into it it is fantastic but i've got to be honest here all i want is a new common sense from him he has not done one since uh basically three days after the election so he he just tweeted this morning that he cleared out his office of all the books that he did had for this episode and then he's working on a new one so it's coming it's coming all right he can knock those out pretty quick because that's just you know stream of consciousness timidus thoughts and

one of the reasons i enjoy the common sense so much is is while we don't necessarily agree politically on everything we definitely agree ideologically in that we don't like either one the parties um and we do want a revolution but we do want it to be bloodless so yeah either way i just know i love i love all this stuff but i'm almost done with the destroyer of worlds it's it's great i love it

i i haven't been able to stop listening to it normally when i take my bike rides i i try to you know do podcasts or listen to music uh it's been non-stop uh non-stop doom and gloom and and atom bombs blowing up in my in my ears oh it's the reason i only have three hours of sleep last night so yes so if you're not listening to hardcore history yet i cannot recommend it enough and obviously he does his common

sense podcast as well which is very very good indeed um we talked about axonar before uh the star trek fan film that got a bunch of funding and paying professional actors but thought that they were being you know uh oh but cbs and paramount are gonna sue us because they're jerks it's like no well you're actually stealing very valuable ip um they finally settled yeah they've settled with cbs and they have to they have to abide by the fan film rules that cbs actually came out with because of

these guys um it can only be 30 minutes in total so they're gonna have to break it up and the interesting thing is they can't have the actors back for recurring roles so and it's going to be interesting if they want to keep going with this they might actually have to just do what you know everybody else in the world doesn't license it if you want to build me if you want to make something pay the licensing fee or more interestingly they'll just be killing off characters all the

time or maybe write a new story in a new universe like you know we need yes that would be nice yes new stories are good people they're very very good um now one of my favorite directors of all time has come back very stealthily and under the radar john mctiernan has made his first film in 14 years oh well it was just christmas which means i just watched uh diehard recently well uh hopefully you

listened to uh the uh does it have legs podcast about diehard as well which i know you doesn't but no i didn't of course not uh yeah so he made a uh commercial for ghost or tom clancy's ghost recon okay it's awesome it is so it's like two minutes and it's awesome i don't want to spoil it go watch it hopefully he's going to be back in the saddle again i i'm just i'm happier than a pig and shit

when i see this because i love john mctiernan i love all of his movies except maybe patriot games i wasn't a huge fan of that one but that's because i loved i love the hunt for red october so i'm on team baldwin with that yeah i i agree with you that total team baldwin the baldwin the baldwin baldwin yeah well since he plays trump you're on team trump now yeah there you go uh big hat tip to chris piccioni from uh the under the noise podcast for this one it's how i found out about it i loved

it um and uh in the last of the media news gonna go see hamilton on sunday woohoo congratulations it's a hard ticket to get uh well yeah we've had this ticket for months um and the funny thing about it is i learned about hamilton from the adam savage podcast he was going on about it incessantly and i'm like oh it's a musical about uh alexander hamilton okay great don't care uh it's hip-hop

oh i really don't care and my dad's like hey uh christmas present we're all going to go see hamilton i'm like great um got me a big book about it and then i finally sat down like i mentioned before you know like trying to learn the lyrics and figure out what's what because i found if you're going to a musical it really does pay to know a lot about it before you go in because you will enjoy it more instead of going what the fuck did they just say um and i'm hooked it's really good

damn it all right and on that note i have to say if you're a fan of drunk history the lin manuel episode about hamilton is just hilarious so can't go wrong with that so i'll give you a review next week but the best part about it wayne brady is playing aaron burr i get to finally see wayne brady in person i never really liked wayne brady don't make him choke a bitch

just a quick update on our stock market game um as we've discussed uh jason and i both bought five different stocks with uh roughly ten thousand dollars of uh funny money and we wanted to see how we would do uh you can see previous episodes or the website to see the exact stocks that we purchased we will just keep this short jason is winning he's so happy winning winning is up 4.97 percent i am up

3.57 percent friend of the show mike who is the control and was not allowed to have any tech stocks and just bought durables still losing down 1.62 percent so if you're keeping track we're like what three four three weeks in now three four weeks yeah the winning basically has made 496 dollars and 72 cents so we're not quitting day jobs no absolutely not we are not going trent hamilton

style and day trading to make a living moron of the week unfortunately i'm gonna have to go with the petis the petis cletus it's been we're now what seven days officially uh the inauguration was uh last friday um we have uh been downgraded from a full democracy to a flawed one in the annual ranking compiled by the british think tank uh the economist intelligence unit which is part of the group which

publishes the economist weekly uh that's not good no that kind of it kind of blows yeah that's not what you hope for as as the leading democracy in the world not anymore yeah not anymore we're flawed we're not we're not winning anymore and there is was a viral post that went uh around on i believe on the 24th uh starting we are four days in pay attention and then proceeded to list of 55 mostly

kind of crappy things or no i'm sorry not 55 36 claims um of the first uh four days that he did and and generally not very good ones um a lot of things about shutting down funding a lot of things about gag orders a lot of things that frankly are considered to be un-american and or immoral uh the fact check was done on this by american news x which we have put in the news link of the 36 claims 34 are

verified 100 true two of them don't need no snopes for that one don't need snopes for that uh and the other two not uh untrue just unclear okay good times all right here's but you know what the greatest the greatest the greatest thing the meme factories out there are churning shit out hand over fist the uh

the the uh the garbage can that looks like trump beautiful genius trump trying to put his pen back together everybody's just photoshopping him playing with dinosaurs it's just look it's so much fun yeah i have not enjoyed the internet this much in years it's just going outside of the house that's a scary part but staying on the internet's pretty okay yeah that part's not so great but yeah hey we're still here

cards against humanity is looking for a new ceo what they yeah they made a job posting in your in your neck of the woods jason via chicago craigslist uh the company said uh well they're looking for something pretty specific um i would have been interested in this gig but i don't think i i have the uh required experience they listed uh you definitely don't i'm looking at it now you

certainly don't a minimum of eight years experience as president of the united states of america okay um ideally a recipient of the nobel peace prize um you may or may not have wasted an enormous amount of time and energy trying to get hillary elected president um other requirements that they're posted would include strong public speaking spills uh spills you definitely don't have public speaking spills you just disqualified yourself on that one in situ not doing so well today as i listened to my child

cry in the other room uh the steady disposition and remains cool under pressure also not really uh your strong suit no not not working for me right now so yeah and basically they placed an ad that is looking for barack obama to be their next ceo quite funny very funny those guys are pretty cool yes they are speaking of obama there's a great story in wired about his last law that he signed into uh into law i guess that would be i'm not the only one having some issues today

oh tell me that's way too fucking early uh the tested ability to leverage exceptional i was gonna say exponential but exceptional talent act also known as the talent act um it it it is about this program where tech people can come in and do like a very short tour of duty in the government to see if they like it or not but the whole story of how they got this signed into the law at the last minute is really fun it's very uh it's a nail biter i highly recommend uh giving it a a read because you

have to read it yes you do but the interesting thing about it is it's about the u.s digital service which uh matt cuts who used to be the head of spam at google and i've known since he's got that job great dude love matt cuts uh very smart dude um he quit google and now works for the u.s digital service as the chief or director of engineering so at least we got a couple good people in there doing what they need to do so congrats to matt on that one congrats uh i found something on a cool

site anyways interestingengineering.com if you're into this sort of thing you should check out the site they've got a lot of stuff that you can look through that's really cool it's a lot of ease in that domain name just looking at it there are a lot of ease um the hyperloop one project is creeping closer and closer to reality very slowly uh a graphic designer this was actually uh done back in 2003 not done specifically for the hyperloop he his name is mark ovenden he created the world metro map he

basically thought up what if we did have some sort of thing that connected the entire world through high spade railways it is uh based obviously on the london um london underground map uh but it's super cool and interesting and i you'd look at it and go oh if only how cool would that be oh it's cute yeah it's very cute yeah it's gonna happen but it's cute it's gonna happen but it's super cute and it would be very cool and speaking of super cute but did happen if you happen to be in wuppertal germany you

should go see the painted lego bridge i love this thing that's great does that look cool as hell that is so cool this is a super simple things that we could do with our infrastructure just to be whimsical and nice and make you smile throughout the day so germany is nice again make the world nice again don't we want that uh speaking of that uh if you might as well continue your european tour

and head to uh utrecht in the netherlands um because there is the new exhibit uh uh celebrating the lost art of the screensaver flying toasters the only reason i have this article in here is the flying toasters because i did indeed used to have this screensaver on my computer all times and as soon as i saw the animation of the flying toasters it brought back memories oh man that that warms

the cockles of my toast does it not feedback loop much thanks to don i'm not even going to try this last name given my don don demzak demzak all right uh for uh donating to us on patreon we really appreciate it that is uh our number one way that we are uh paying the bills around here so go to patreon.com and uh check us out i think it's patreon.com slash gog that would be it yes so

help us help us out drop us a ducat yeah so we can buy brian some more coffee he's having he's having a rough day and maybe some some robitussin for the kid so knock him out yeah not doing that yet okay we got a uh comment on the website from van z love the name and the comment is presented without comment for obvious reasons and it's a link to vr porn embraces smell-o-vision so you can smell the

debauchery too yeah no thanks it's interesting i saw i actually heard about this uh originally on k-rock in the morning last week and it was it's pretty funny yes if you want uh if you want to get some funk on your stank this is what you gotta get it looks like um kind of a bondage device it's or or a you know a world war ii gas mask gas mask yeah so enjoy that one just go do that one on your

own the nocellus rift lawsuit pending and finally we got uh from twitter uh at moss 6502 who sent us who watches the men uh this is a a watchman trump's presidency reimagined as a watchman comic so if you're into watchman comic styles and all of that sort of stuff you will enjoy this so check it out all

right if you want your questions or comments read on the show head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions and then we will read them on the air and probably give you an answer if we can but uh we appreciate it closing shout outs big shout out to all of our friends over at podcast one network i want to say special thanks to kit gray rich burner jim ballas and of course

my good friend jordan harbinger for doing the intro we are very happy to be hanging out with you guys on the team happy to be on the network but a big shout out to mary tyler moore who we lost this week uh there are two notes two links in the show notes one is the laugh for chuckles episode at the funeral which is one of the funniest bits of television ever made and the second is joan jett and the black hearts doing the mary tyler moore theme which is awesome that is awesome i love that one uh my

shout out is uh pretty broad and it's uh thank you to all the journalists that woke the fuck up uh yes finally so thank you for that hopefully they can get paid hey whatever let's let's start at the beginning mexico's gonna pay for it via attacks on mexican hold on a second attacks on mexican imports means that we're paying for it go figure oh my god math i mean i'm not an economist but i play one on this podcast

until next time i'm brian shulmice thanks for listening as well i'm jason de philippo thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks gog.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows leave feedback ask us questions get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like if you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast you go to gog.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and help keep us on the air to learn more about all the people who make the show possible head over to gog.show slash about and show notes for all the links discussed in

this episode can be found at gog.show slash 194 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

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