195: Never Remember, Always Forget

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 episode 195 on this Super Bowl Sunday. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

I can't believe you know it's Super Bowl Sunday. I'm Brian Schulmeister. Of course I know. That's what the commercials, right? No, it's just all the people at the store buying cases and cases of beer in front of me. And I'm like, what's going on? Super Bowl Sunday. Get your chicken wings. Yee-haw.

That's right. I'm excited. Are you going to have a Super Bowl party? My friend is. I'm going to head over there. I made barbecue meatballs. Nice. Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I've already ate half of them. That's why you double down on these recipes when you make them. Absolutely. Yeah, so I was up last night and I did something I haven't done since probably 1980.

Do I even want to know? I watched Squiggly Porn. Squiggly Porn? You know, remember when you had like cable channels were decoding? You had to squint to see nipples? Yes, pretty much. And then they were purple or green.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I watched Saturday Night Live. Live. Well, not live because I'm on the West Coast. But when it was aired, not just the clips on YouTube the next day, I was sitting around and the Melissa McCarthy playing Sean Spicer in the press room sketch was basically already going viral just from the East Coast feed.

Yeah. So I was like, all right, I'll settle in and watch this. And, you know, a certain very public figure has been saying how the show is just terrible and the ratings are down the tubes. Funniest the show has been in years. Yeah. Now, those are alt-reviews.

Yeah, those are definitely alt-reviews. Like, I really have not watched the show in ages, don't know much about the cast. I watched the whole damn thing. And obviously, the political stuff was hilarious. Melissa McCarthy, I mean, she deserves an Emmy for that sketch alone. Oh, I know. That was so good. That was just unbelievable and exactly what we need as a nation right now. It was ridiculous.

But the cast is great. And even, you know, the regular sketches were very, very funny. I thought it was actually really good. I'm going to start watching Saturday Night Live again, which is something I never thought I'd say. Yeah, I tend to do the, you know, the YouTube, see the snippets.

But, you know, I end up going through and hitting most of the show. Yeah. Some of them are hit or miss, but because it always takes a little while for them to come up on Hulu and I can just check them out over my coffee to see what everybody's talking about that week. Right. Yeah. So who was it? Kristen Stewart hosted.

I know next to nothing about her because I've never watched any of the Twilight movies and don't really care. But that's who that was. OK, I was trying to place her. Yeah. She just came off as the ultimate kind of millennial. The whole opening, not opening skit, because that was Baldwin doing Trump, which was hilarious.

But the opening monologue was about how she was too cool and couldn't really care and can't be bothered about being on Saturday Night Live. And the irony being that she obviously was too cool and didn't really care so much so that she forgot she was on live network television and dropped an F-bomb.

Oh, no way. Yeah. Oopsie daisy. Oopsie daisy. Anyways. So Saturday Night Live. Good on you. Not bad. Not bad. I think I mentioned like a couple of weeks ago that I signed up for nextdoor.com. I've been on it for a while trying to sell stuff and unsuccessfully.

I don't sell stuff on there, but I have met a lot of my neighbors and I'm going to do a live podcasting class and everybody helped me find a venue. I can apparently do free live classes at the library. So that's kind of cool. Well, for now. While there's still a library.

While there's still a library and you're allowed to like hold public gatherings. Yep. Met a very funny comedian in town named Dale. Took me to lunch. We had a nice chat. I'm going to put one of his videos in the show notes that is really good. You had a mandate. I did. Yes. So now the one thing that got me, though, was some woman posted a very long rant on there about Drew Barrymore's new Netflix series and how she was aghast.

And utterly just so disappointed in Netflix to have a picture of, you know, someone eating a human arm and everybody in the I was like, I was terrified. I'm like, oh, no, here we go. I get to see the true nature of the neighborhood and everybody piled on her and then started trolling her, which, you know, I felt kind of bad at the end.

But, you know, this guy posted I posted my little rant. I'm like, oh, why don't maybe just like leave this board open for things that are, you know, community based, which is what it's for. And stop complaining about everything you find offensive on the Internet. And then immediately after that, a guy posted up, oh, you mean this picture?

And, of course, all the lulls started after that. But it was nice to see that my neighborhood is not too bad, you know. Well, I have two thoughts. Yeah, some 60-year-old woman who's like a school teacher is like, I bet you're one of those people that likes to ban books. Shut up.

All right. Yeah, I have two thoughts on that. I've been on Nextdoor for a while. First off, you create any sort of venue and people will complain. That's all people do on my network here on Nextdoor. It's somebody's dog pooped on my lawn and there's people walking around and blah, blah, blah.

Shut the hell up. There's a couple of those. But for the most part, it's people just like selling stuff and talking about community activities and things like that. It's pretty, pretty civil discourse on mine. Yeah, I think it must have a smaller neighborhood than mine. I think once you increase the size, it gets worse. But who knows?

Secondly, Santa Clarita Diet is the name of the show that's on Netflix with Drew Barrymore now. And to be fair, it does look supremely stupid. Oh, it looks terrible. Yeah, it looks absolutely horrible. I watched the trailer for it because I was on the Netflix roll the other night. No, no, no, not going to happen.

Yeah, passing that one. I like Drew Barrymore, but I'm going to pass on that one. I like Drew Barrymore until I until finally somebody clued me in that she has a slight lisp, but now I cannot not hear it. Oh, I think it's super cute. I think for me, it's like the reverse earworm.

It just drives me insane now. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I can't do it. And to be fair, her last great movie was The Wedding Singer, which I think was 20 years ago. Yes, at least 20 years ago. I ran into her once in person. She was dating the guitarist that was playing with Alanis at the time.

And this is probably 15 years ago. And it was just like a gigantic bag of patchouli walked in the room. Oh, see, I met her. In case you've ever wondered what she smells like. I met her at Idoru over by the Beverly Center, and she smelled lovely when I saw her.

So she sat right behind me at dinner, and she smelled lovely. Maybe you're more into patchouli than I. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think I got her in a non-patchouli phase. Ah, okay. This was like 97, so. Yeah. Let's just call what we should probably talk about this, because obviously we're not going to stop talking about the administration.

I would like to. I would love to. Nothing would please me more, but we're not, because we can't. Okay, make it quick. There are so many things that I would like to talk about, but we're just going to stick with the things that actually deal with tech. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of those.

But I will say, this is from The Atlantic. It's Elliot Cohen. It's a really great article. I mean, if you're just so Trumpy, you're never going to care about anything. You're not going to read this. If you're on the fence, read it. And I just like it, because it basically says, hey, everybody, we were right.

So, you know, we were warning you. You told us to tone us down. You told us to give him a chance. You said, oh, shut up about this being not normal. It's pretty damn not normal. Okay. The link will be in the show notes. It's called A Clarifying Moment in American History.

And let's get on to some tech stuff now. Okay. In the news. Well, unfortunately, we do have to stick with the Trump thing for a little while, because it is everywhere.

Told you. But at least I want to have a tech spin on it here. And tech leaders are condemning Trump's immigration ban, because the tech industry pretty much lives and dies by, you know, those H-1B visas or whatever they're called, you know, half.

My wife's on one. Exactly. You know, you can't hit a rock. Well, you can't hit a rock, but you can't throw a rock without hitting an immigrant in tech. I was about to say, you're not going to say you can't hit your wife. No, no, no. Well, you can't do that either. Well, I can now. Unless you're Sean Connery.

But yeah. Yeah. No, don't do that. Don't do that. But yeah, lots of lots and lots and lots of protests. Google's employees had a staged walkout, which was interesting. It was pretty good. But yeah, there's so much going on with this immigration ban and in the tech sector and just fallout everywhere from it.

The thing is, it was just so horribly rolled out. So, disastrously under misunderstood and non-defined. There probably is a way that you could sort of kind of take a look at the whole immigration process rationally.

And it definitely, there are some areas for overhaul and whatnot. But the way this was rolled out, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like a Squarespace website, an unintuitive fuster clock. Yeah. Something like that. Or, you know, a WordPress update. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. When you wake up in the morning and nothing works. That's pretty much what the country had that day. Yeah. Anyways, I found an interesting article and I was hoping maybe you could explain this to me, Jason, because I don't entirely understand this. Popular bookmarking site, Pinboard, who we have talked about in the past.

He has a very funny Twitter feed. Yes. The creation of developer and activist. Say the name, Jason. No. I'm not even going to try. No. You're not going to do it either? It's called Pinboard Guy because there's just no way to pronounce that. OK. So Pinboard Guy tweeted to his 38,000 followers on Sunday night, urging techies to discreetly and securely send along paperwork signed with their companies.

The goal, Pinboard Guy tweeted, is to start the work of organizing tech employees. Some friendly labor lawyers will use these to strategize. My question being, and I read this article and then Googled and read a few more articles, strategize what? Yeah. Is he trying to start like a union, like a tech employee union?

Or what's the deal? I think I've made it clear on this podcast and on my Twitter and certainly in my personal life that I'm very pro-resistance right now. However, I require some sort of idea of what exactly we're doing. This guy is not providing anything. No.

Yeah. He's been all over the place lately, but this is an odd one. I don't quite get it. Yes. Tech workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your goddamn open plan offices, which I'd be fine with losing. Those things are those things are useless. Open plan offices is the worst thing that's ever happened to the workspace.

Give us doors or give us death. Yeah. No doubt. Or at least free noise canceling headphones. Yes. Yeah. So I didn't get it. And I'm glad that you didn't either. So now I don't feel quite so stupid anymore. No. Yeah. I'm not sure. And I, well, my company paperwork would be signed with my, by myself.

So no, that's true. Same here. So I'm not turning on myself. I'm not sending you what I, I'm not sending you what I pay myself. Exactly. Or whatever the hell I signed to myself. Yes. I have a non-disclosure agreement with myself, so I can't talk about it. I had the hardest time getting myself to sign that. I know, man.

I had to look at it. I had to reread it to myself five or six times. And then finally, I, you know, I talked to myself into it because I really wanted the job with myself. Basically, I needed the money. Yeah. That's kind of it. That's what it came down to. I'm still morally opposed to myself, but. Oh, well, yes. You know, we all have that. Yeah.

Okay. I mean, by being morally opposed to you, but I'm sure you're morally opposed to me, too. So it's all, it's all the vicious tech cycle. So. Yes, it really is. We still work together. Yes, we do. Go figure. We just explained Silicon Valley. I think we did.

Okay. What you got next? Delete Uber. Oh, yeah. This was a thing for this. This was a still a tempest in a teapot. It's going. I don't think so. I think there was a lot to it. I mean, if you look at the numbers, if you look at the numbers, it's just about nothing.

But 200,000, 200,000 people kind of followed through with it out of their 40 million users. You can look at the numbers or you can look at the reaction and what actually happened from it, which was big. Well, yeah. I mean, this guy, Travis, backtracked on a lot of different things, but it.

He the one thing he did that is the interesting one is, you know, he quit Trump's advisory council. Yes. He did that. They also I would say, well, OK, let's start at the beginning here. OK, let's back the truck up, back the Uber, back the Uber up. Let's go back to the the immigration ban or the Muslim ban, which you're supposed to not say Muslim ban.

But considering the president of the United States tweeted Muslim ban, I think we can say it's a Muslim ban. There you go. So there you go. He did it. And so the basically the New York, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance basically said we are going to protest and we're announcing a one work, one hour work stoppage at JFK International Airport out of solidarity with the protesters and made a powerful statement on Facebook.

Blah, blah, blah. This is going all over the place on Twitter. So, uh, Uber, New York Twitter account made a somewhat less inspiring announcement and decided to turn off surge pricing at JFK Airport to capitalize on the fact that there weren't any caps. Yeah. See, that could be taken in two different ways.

You know, it could be saying that we're going to we're not we're not going to profit off of it. But by not profiting off of it, they're still profiting off of it. The only way that they could win this this entire situation is if they turned off Uber around JFK for that hour and joined in the strike.

That's the only that's the only win that they could have got. It was the only one they could have gotten. Apparently, it was even worse in that the surge pricing was only turned off if you were leaving JFK Airport. It did not apply to anybody taking Ubers to join the protests. Oh, man. Yeah.

Oopsies. So this caused you just always love it when Uber steps on their dick. So it doesn't matter what they do. You know, full disclosure. Obviously, I can't stand Uber anyways. I was looking for a reason to delete my Uber account. And thank you. You provided one.

You provided it for a lot of people. And actually, that's a lot of the commentary I did see, which is I was just kind of waiting for a reason to get rid of them anyways, because I'm against them in so many different reasons for, you know, and now this is just fine. It's, you know, camel, straw thing, frack, back. See, I got to, yeah, I got to make a few tweets to friends who are like, see, but, you know, they're pledging all this money for their employees that are getting caught up in this.

And I'm like, yeah, that's just until they can fire them. It's just crocodile tears. Exactly. So the more fun thing is if you try to delete Uber, you then discover that this is a two to three day process that you are not in control of. You don't just get to delete it.

You get to request it being deleted and then they'll get back to you. Yeah. So they do that by sending you an email that they waited their sweet time so they could draft a really crappy letter basically saying, hey, if you're deleting your account because you think that we're we're OK with the ban, we're not just it's wrong and it's against everything that we stand for a company.

And if you really read the letter, it goes and you wouldn't want to hurt our poor employees, would you? It basically tries to guilt you into it. Yep. Yeah. So I was like, in my mind, I was going, you're going to fire them anyways. Yeah. You don't like your employees anyway. And they can just go to Lyft. And this could be just coming from an AI anyway, because, you know, they probably have automated customer support at some point there.

And if they don't now, they certainly will. But my deletion took a couple extra days because we are unable to automatically delete your account because you have an outstanding credit. A support representative will reach out to you shortly for further assistance. Then I finally got it. Oh, your account has been deleted as requested.

I know nothing about getting my money back that they had credit for. So they just just kept my twenty three bucks. And yeah, thanks, Uber. And of course, if you want to use Uber again, we'd be delighted to click here. Yes, of course. Where's my money?

You fuckers. Yeah. So all that happened. A lot of people deleted it. A lot of people are still deleting it. Obviously, it's not much in terms of their overall user base. But I think this has made it, you know, the optics were not good, as they say. Yeah. And the interesting thing about Kalanick leaving Trump's advisory council, I don't know if I'm on board with that because I think it's better to fight from the inside than the outside.

If you have the chance to be on the inside. That's what, you know, Elon Musk is getting a lot of flack for this now. Exactly. I don't necessarily think he needed to leave the advisory council either. I think it's a good idea to have people in there that are showcasing exactly, you know, what the real world is like the Uber's the real world.

But, you know, have some people on the inside. Being on the council, you're advising. That doesn't necessarily, you're not a yes man. So come out, be strong about the fact that you do not agree with the policies. I think every, I think we've reached a point now where nobody gets to sit on the fence.

I think we've all kind of come to that conclusion. Um, we'll talk more about other companies that have decided, you know, company, this is a strange time because any time in the previous entire history of our country, no company would come out politically and pick on one side or another unless there was a very specific reason to do so.

The reality right now is everybody does have to pick a side and people are, and you can do that publicly and then still sit on the council to try to fight the good fight, which is what Elon Musk is saying he's doing. Is he doing it? Who the hell knows? We'll see. Yeah, who knows? I mean, people are canceling their Tesla three orders, which, you know, for a lot of people is like, yes, so they can get in line and get, get there's faster.

Exactly. It's making a lot of other people fat, uh, happy about that. I actually saw a friend of mine tweeted that, you know, she's way up in the listing now. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Uh, the FCC has decided to stop companies from providing subsidized internet to low income users. Now you read this headline and you get angry and you think, well, that's messed up.

Why wouldn't we provide subs if a company wants to provide subsidized internet to low income users? Why shouldn't they be able to? You get a little bit further into it. Well, the government's paying for it and there's a lot of, uh, apparently there's a lot of bullshit and, and trickery going on and a lot of corruption.

Okay. So fix it. Don't shut it down. Yeah. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that's going on right now, especially with the zero rating that's happening. And they're trying to say that, uh, by allowing all of the zero rating, which is, you know, having, uh, like Netflix on your phone and get free data from that, that's actually going to open up the phone markets for lower income people.

So they won't have to spend so much on bandwidth and all this other stuff. It's, uh, yes, but they only get to see what you want them to see. That's the thing. So yeah, the, the net neutrality stuff starts to play into it and that's going out the window super fast. Yeah. It's basically dead. Uh, yeah. So the new, uh, FCC chairman appointed by the Trump administration is, is shutting this program down.

So there will be no subsidies for, uh, low income people to get on the internet anymore, which is a bummer because I think it's very important for everybody to get on the internet. However, I did see, you know, I was running through some of the financials on it. It is blown out of proportion. So scale it back, but keep it going.

Come on. And anyways, in the meantime, apparently us taxpayers just paid a hundred thousand dollars for Eric Trump to take a business trip to Uruguay. Oh, really? And we're the, there's no, there's no confirmed number yet, but apparently it's costing nearly a million dollars a day for Melania Trump to decide she didn't want to be first lady and stay in New York.

Yeah. That's some bullshit right there. So let's look at, uh, you know, I, I would rather our money be spent on low income users getting internet access than paying for Eric Trump's stupid travel vouchers and Melania Trump to stay in New York city. Just saying. Fun times. Um, medium, medium, medium, uh, they're going to be launching a subscription model since they couldn't make ads work.

What are we paying for? We don't know yet. They're still figuring it out. It's unclear. Who's paying? Do you have to pay to write? Do you have to pay to read? Which way is this working? Uh, who knows? Maybe you got to do both. I will pay to post my article and then you can pay to read it. And then they keep all the money. I'll pay you five bucks to never discuss medium again.

I'll pay you 10 bucks and never discuss Uber again. Well, hopefully we'll both get our wish. Hey, then I'm still out five bucks. Shit. See, I'm the smart one. I got to renegotiate. Uh, I loves me some space X, but they're in a little bit of trouble with, uh, the government accountability office because they found a flaw in their Falcon nine rockets in one of the, um, the fuel pumps, which is not good.

And apparently that's, that's what's caused some major shuttle disasters before flaws in the fuel pumps. So, uh, well, the shuttle one was the foam, the, uh, the foam on the outside that was breaking off, which was the big one and broke the heat shield. But this, uh, well, as we know, the one, uh, the one blew up with poor Zuckerberg's little satellite on it.

So, which, uh, Oh, going back and watching that explosion again, it's still a really cool explosion to watch. Sorry, Zach, but it's still pretty fun to watch. Uh, so hopefully they can get this fixed so they can, uh, keep on track with all of the flights that NASA needs to, uh, to book and take stuff up into space.

Yeah. Let's get that fixed. Yeah. Do you remember coin? Oh, do I, I, uh, friend of the show Fergal. I mentioned it at least once a day. In fact, I'm going over to his place to watch the Superbowl. So I'll be, I'm sure, I will be sure to bring up this, this, uh, article.

Yep. Coin is dead. They're done. All of their products and services are being shut down at the end of February. All data will be securely deleted from our servers as they will no longer be running. To get out the drills, uh, the data exists on your coin. We'll continue to be protected via your tap code.

Should you continue to use your coin? But, uh, anybody using the coin anymore? Anyone? I would love to know that. Obviously Bueller, Bueller, Bueller, all two people I know that have coins. It was always fun. It was, it was, it was a coin roulette. It's like, okay, is it going to work this time when we're out at lunch?

And yeah, it's 50, 50, you know, that's just close your eyes and flip a coin. If it was good, there you go. But hey, to be fair, they're trailblazers because this new chip thing is 50, 52. That's true. So we're all in that same boat now. So coin was really ahead of the game.

Yeah. Yeah. Making your money not work since 2015. Exactly. Trailblazers. Cash, cash, cash, cash. Uh, Lifehacker had a really interesting article. Um, you know, we're self-employed, so this isn't such a big deal for us.

But, uh, one of the big things that we rail on Uber for is the fact that we know that they're just planning to fire their employees as soon as possible. This is a nice, uh, fun article on Lifehacker called The Company You Work For Is Not Your Friend. Just a reminder. It still could be us that we're self-employed, so. That's true. I hate myself.

If I made enough money to fire myself, I'd be, I'd fire myself in a heartbeat. I don't understand how I even hired myself in the first place. That's true. It is true. Uh, so, yeah, this is just, it's a cheery show, so go ahead and read this. Human Resources is not there to protect you. They're there to protect the company.

Always keep a job offer in your back pocket. Never stop looking for work, especially after you land a new job. This is all fun stuff. Yeah. No one to fold them. Yeah, good times. Yeah, and, uh, pee in Janet and HR's coffee whenever you get a chance. Yeah, exactly.

Uh, an article from Recode, uh, if we want technology that isn't beholden to advertisers, we have to pay for it. Medium! This is from the no, and the no shit Sherlock files. Yeah. What we've said is wrong with the internet since day one. Uh, although this is, uh, let's see, what was this guy's name?

Sorry, I'm blanking on it. Tristan Harris, uh, he's a time well-spent founder, uh, and he's, uh, says it's time for a, quote, air quotes, organic movement in tech. I already don't like this guy, even though I agree with what he's saying. Ah, I, I, did you listen to the podcast with him? I did not listen to it.

I just read all the quotes. You'll like him after you listen to the podcast. He's actually pretty cool. All right, then I will throw out everything I was about to say and listen to the podcast first. Yeah, he, he, he studied a lot of the gamification stuff, uh, at Stanford under BJ Fogg. And he talks, he talks about, you know, how tech companies are really trying to, you know, basically they, they, can we what?

Can we discuss what, what kind of a cool name BJ Fogg is? Yeah, I know. Okay. I, I, we couldn't let that one just go by. No, he's, you just said BJ Fogg and I'm supposed to believe that's a real person. It is a real person. He teaches at Stanford and, uh, I'm actually trying to, trying to get him on my other show, but, uh, he doesn't do some research into him.

He's a interesting cat. And it turns out a lot of people in Silicon Valley go through his course. Like, uh, one of the founders of Instagram was in Harris's class with him and they studied all the different ways that these people try and game you. One that I didn't even know was a thing is when you load a Twitter up, the little notification number that comes up.

Yep. That is, that is slow by default because it's kind of like a, uh, slot machine mentality. It's like, you know, variable rewards. Yep. Variable rewards. And it's like, Oh, it popped up. Woo. And then sometimes you're staring at it, waiting for it and there's nothing there.

And it's like, Oh, reload. Try again. You know? So these guys know what they're doing when it comes to gamification. And this guy's like, Hey, you know what? We can probably take some of that back if we just pay for stuff and not have to worry about it. Yeah. So definitely, yeah, uh, definitely listen to that podcast.

It was one of the, one of the few recode decode podcasts I've listened to recently that I actually liked. Okay, cool. Yeah. I just found this the other day, so I hadn't had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet, but I will do so. Uh, I want to give a hat tip to Mr. Coin Fergal, who sent me this link from Ars Technica in the not too distant future.

Brain hackers could steal your deepest secrets or they could just read your posts on Facebook. Yeah. Or they could just, you know, data mine you. Yeah. Yep. But anyways, at the Enigma security conference at, uh, on Tuesday, University of Washington researcher Tamara Bonacci. Bonacci.

Bonacci described an experiment that demonstrated how a simple video game could be used to covertly harvest neural responses to periodically displayed subliminal images while her game dubbed Flappy Whale measured subjects reactions to relatively innocuous things such as logos of fast food restaurants and cars.

She said the same setup could be used to extract much more sensitive information, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This goes all the way back to forever, basically. Um, clockwork, orange, et cetera. Uh, but what basically what they're saying is this could be baked into games without people really knowing. Um, and in the very near future, we'll be able to read, uh, people's reactions to things in real time without them even knowing it.

Oh, neat. Okay. Yeah. Great. That's fun. Huh? Yeah. Uh, well, we talk about the dark web every now and again, and, uh, apparently more than 10,000 tour based websites were taken down because freedom hosting two was taken offline. And, uh, freedom made free.

Well, they wanted, uh, the hackers wanted to get, sell the compromised information back for 0.1 Bitcoin or just a little over a hundred bucks. They needed beer money, beer and wings money to go to Hooters for the, the big game today. For the Superbowl. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. And they said that, uh, a lot of the stuff was kiddie porn that they pulled from the web.

So interesting. Hey, dark web. Not so, uh, not so nice a place. I guess not. I don't know. I'll never find out. Yeah. I'm sticking clear of it. I'm on enough watch lists already. Yeah. Uh, in, uh, basically continuation of the brain hacker stealing your darkest secrets.

Uh, we have a real life version of this now, sort of MIT has built a wearable app that can detect emotion in conversation. Also a recent plot of the big bang theory. I don't watch that show anymore. It's kind of horrible now. I don't know why it's still on my DVR. I think it's the last season.

So thank God. Don't have to deal with it for much longer. They've run out of jokes. Um, anyways, how a person tells a story can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, so a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built a wearable app that parses conversations to identify the emotion behind each part of the story.

If you've got this app, listen to the podcast and tell us when we're all lying or bored. Okay. Interesting. It's built into a fitness tracker. Uh, it collects physical and speech data to analyze the overall tone of the story in real time. Then it uses artificial intelligence, machine learning. Uh, the app could figure out which part of the conversation was happy or sad and tracks emotional changes in five second intervals.

Hmm. Interesting. Supposedly it's doing it with 83% accuracy, although it's unclear if the research has been peer reviewed. And of course there is obviously the self-induced bias on this sort of thing. Yeah. I'm, I'm interested to know, you know what, remember those biofeedback devices, mood rings.

Well, no, no, not mood rings, but like the, um, they had touch sensors on them and it's like galvanic, galvanic skin response, uh, little things to, so you could calm yourself down and use it. So I wonder if I, I, I kind of think I want to remember that that stuff was debunked, but it'd be interesting if they started using that kind of stuff in fitness trackers to kind of, you know, at least test your sweat, do your, your acidity to see if, uh, it changes when you're telling stories or lying.

It might be interesting. That'd be interesting. Kickstarter it. No, I'll get on that. Okay. Uh, there's an interesting article, uh, in, uh, venture beat talking about why Intel is filling the skies with drones. And, you know, I, I still don't put Intel into the, the drone thing, but until I don't mean, wait, these are the guys that are doing all of the, the big drone shows for Disney and stuff.

So, yep. Yep. Which I am dying to go see. So, well, you get to watch it today on the Superbowl because lady Gaga is going to have hundreds of drones spinning around her head. So that should be interesting. God, I hope they just pick her up and fly her off. I don't mind her.

Yeah. Her music has sucked for years. I don't mind her. I think she's a character, but I don't listen to her music. Maybe that's why I'm probably on the other side of it. Do you realize she is a musician and she's playing the halftime show with music? Yes, I do. I do.

I know she's not going to just stand there in a meat suit. Okay. I did. And I did listen to her album with, uh, what's his name? Tony, Tony Bennett. Yeah. I thought that was a pretty good album. It's all right. Okay. Okay. Are we done with Intel? Yeah, we're done with Intel. Yeah.

Check it out. Check out the interview. If you want to learn more about what Intel is doing with drones, because I just, you know, I'm always curious as to what people are doing with the drones nowadays, especially when big companies like that are behind it. All right. Cool. Well, when Elon Musk isn't fifth columning inside the Trump administration, he is a tunneling under Los Angeles.

Has he started yet? Apparently he has escaped from LA is getting ready to go in our very near apocalyptic future. Um, after Twitter hints and tidbits and whining about Los Angeles traffic, he has finally started digging a tunnel. Well, at least a hole over this last weekend. Workers excavated a test trench that is 30 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 15 feet deep on the grounds of SpaceX's LA headquarters.

So they are starting, which I guess you would have to start on your own land. I'd imagine you'd even have to get approval for that because you can't just start digging willy nilly. No, if you're going to dig, you got to call. You got to call all of the, uh, utilities, but I don't know where SpaceX's headquarters is. I believe it's Torrance a little bit south.

Yeah, there's nothing there. Just dig, dig away. Go for it. Dig away. Who cares? And, uh, just a quick note, cause we did usually talk about the music business a lot. Um, I don't believe we have any national chain, physical chains anymore in the, in the U S at all that sells CDs and things like that.

I mean, Walmart, but that doesn't count cause it's not just music, um, or movies. They're all gone. Uh, Canada still has a few. Well, not anymore. Not anymore. HMV is going out of business in Canada as well. So another one bites the dust. Physical music is dead.

And yeah, that means vinyl too, buddy. I know you're still listening. Security. Ha. All right. Welcome back to security with Dave Bittner from the cyber wire.

How's it going, Dave? Oh, it's going pretty good. Pretty good. Here we are. Second month of, uh, 2017. Where is the time gone? I know. You got to wrap this up because Brian's nappy is wet. So, uh, let's get to it. All right. Well, our first story today, uh, this is from motherboard. It's called a hacker dumps iOS cracking tools, allegedly stolen from Celebrite.

Okay. Now, uh, let's go back in time a little bit. Do anybody remember who Celebrite is? Is that the Israeli company that was selling all the tools to the San Bernardino folks? That is correct. Hey, jackpot. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Yes. You get to go to the next round. Uh, oh, you actually have a bell.

Yes, I do. I'm jealous. All right. So, uh, it's all those production elements with all the money we make. Yes. Yeah. $3.95 went for that bell. High quality. What's a podcast without a bell? Um, so yeah, Celebrite is the company that, uh, Scott and most people think they're the ones who actually, uh, helped, uh, unlock the San Bernardino iPhone.

Um, they also make, uh, a tool, a piece of hardware that many police forces use that basically, um, helps, uh, it's called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device or the UFED for short. Okay. Uh, and it's a small device. It's, you know, about the size of an iPad or so.

And you can plug a lot of different phones in it and it will just suck down the, uh, the SMS messages and the emails and whatever it can get out of the phone. So law enforcement loves this device and, um, and they love Celebrite as well. So, um, earlier this year, uh, Motherboard also reported that a hacker had stolen nearly a terabyte of data from Celebrite.

Um, and now the, uh, hacker has, uh, posted a good bit of that data online. And that includes the tools. That includes the tools. Oh, nice. It also includes a readme file with some really awesome ASCII art. Man, I haven't seen that since back in the old days.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. I have to admit an affection for, uh, for ASCII art. Uh, it seems like Snoopy made the rounds a lot back in the day. Oh yeah, that's when you would get your Juarez off the BBSs. That's right. I always thought it was wares. It is wares, but that's how you always knew that if people didn't know their shit, they'd say, Hey man, you got any Juarez?

I'm like, I'm not going to Mexico. No, no. Just give me some downloads. Motherfucker. So this includes a bunch of, uh, of tools that, uh, could be used for hacking into various devices. Um, and, um, you know, Motherboard contacted, uh, Celebrite.

And Celebrite, you know, said, I think what you'd expect them to say, which is, you know, we develop tools for many different things. And, um, you know, these are some of them. Um, so, but the point for the hacker, the point that the hackers are trying to make, which I think is a good one, is that, uh, when it comes to talking about back doors, of course, one of the big fears is that the tools used to, to, uh, do the backdooring, if you will, uh, will eventually be released to the public.

And that's the point they're making with this, that if you make these tools available, if you make these tools, sooner or later, someone is going to get access to them and they're going to post them. And so basically everyone's security has the potential of being compromised. Um, and that's really the point that these hackers are trying to make, uh, by, uh, posting these stolen tools that they got from Celebrite.

Well, hopefully Apple right now is fixing all the holes that these tools used. Well, you know, actually Jason, that brings an interesting point. One of the things that, uh, I thought was interesting is that Motherboard has, the headline for this on Motherboard is hacker dumps iOS cracking tools, right?

Yeah. Um, but then in the article, guess what? It actually says, uh, stolen from Celebrite relating to Android and Blackberry devices and older iPhones, some of which may have been copied from publicly available phone cracking tools.

So, uh, are you saying the headline was misleading? I'm saying that if you put anything about anything related to iOS or Apple, your traffic goes way up compared to, uh, Android or of course, Blackberry. So, uh, yeah. Because seven people have a Blackberry now, so.

That's right. That's right. Uh, so, uh, yeah, this works on older iPhones. Um, so to, to answer your question, yeah, presumably Apple with a newer, um, phones has, uh, closed the holes. On my 3GS, I will have to, I will have to take it out back behind the woodshed and shoot it now.

There you go. Just give it to Bam Bam to play with. There we go. He can bury it in the backyard. She will not bury it in the backyard. I'm sorry. She, I'm sorry. Please accept my apologies to Bam Bam. I, I, uh, I, there's a neighbor of mine has a Roddy that's a he, and so I think that's where I got confused.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And as I've discussed many times on this show, there's another reason you should be confused because, you know, Bam Bam is the male in the Flintstones. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you know what? That's a great, that's a great point, Brian. You are absolutely 100% correct. I know. One of the very rare times Brian is on point.

Now, let's move along to the IRS. All right. So, uh, this is on, uh, from Krebs on Security. The IRS has, uh, issued an urgent alert, which is, uh, means it's pretty serious, um, for a couple of things, um, Does this relate to Donald Trump's taxes by any chance?

You know, it does not. You know, he's still being audited. Uh, so. You know, it takes a long time for those tiny hands to find all the paperwork and hand them over to the IRS. He can only, he can only hold so many pieces of paper at the same time. So the IRS, the IRS has issued, uh, a couple of, uh, urgent alerts, um, about two different things.

So there's CEO fraud and that's where, um, an attacker prevent, uh, pretends to be the boss and they trick employees into usually wiring funds. The jokes just write themselves here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Or getting, um, other information, uh, out of the company.

Um, I would have to say that, uh, Stu Sourman and his guys over at, uh, their company, was it no before those guys cover this extensively and they do a really good job at it. Okay. Um, the other thing is a W2 phishing and that's where again, the, the, the bad guys impersonate the boss and they request that, uh, the folks in accounting send over copies of all the employee tax or tax forms.

Hmm. Right. And a W2 is very valuable because a W2 of course contains all the information that a bad guy needs to, um, to submit a fraudulent, um, tax return and basically get your refund, uh, before you do.

Hmm. Uh, and so W2 forms are actually quite valuable because of that. Um, and, uh, so what's happening is the bad guys are going in and, um, you know, not only are they asking to have wire money wire transferred, but they're also, while they're at it, asking for all the information about W2s.

Um, and evidently they're doing it a lot earlier this year than they usually do. They usually, usually pop up every year around tax time. Um, and the, the problem is, is that you, you don't know that your, your, uh, tax return has been fraudulently submitted and that people got your refund until you try to go and submit your tax forms and try to get your refund.

Um, so, uh, there are things you can do. There's a, in this story, they have all the various emails that, uh, you can send to, to, uh, if this happens to you, there are, of course, official forms to fill out and people to contact. And the IRS has a lot of, um, information on their website about identity theft and how to prevent it and so forth.

But, you know, if you're someone at a company who is, uh, has any, uh, anything related to any of these types of forms, uh, you just need to be really, uh, on guard about these sorts of, uh, phishing attacks, trying to, uh. Have you ever been to a corporation and met the HR department?

I have. Yes, and what do you think the chances are of them listening to this show and taking your advice? Well, hopefully someone in IT will go down and, uh, give them a good talking to, or maybe let them, or, or maybe, you know what, just send them the Krebs article.

That's what we ask, right? Oh, that's assuming that they can read. Well, here's the thing. I mean, you know, this affects, this affects all of us, you know, any of us who, well, I guess those of us who are self-employed, maybe not so much. But, you know, anybody who's working for a company that deals with W-2s, you know, if someone from that company sends out all the W-2s and you won't know it until you go to try to get your, your refund.

So. I have a, I have a, I have a solution. Yes, sir. Fire the HR department. You know, Jason, I'm starting to get the feeling like maybe you've had a run-in with the HR department somewhere. Maybe just a few times. Just, just a few times. I can't imagine why. With your sparkling, sunny personality, I can't imagine how you would have a run-in with an HR department.

Jason DeFilippo, self-employed, not by choice. Actually, quite by choice because I have met Janet from HR who definitely could not get employed in any other position in the company. Yes. Oh, no, no. Oh, no, you have not met Janet.

I have not met Janet, but I have plenty of, there are plenty of fine people in HR, Jason. Come on. Okay. Let's move on because now I know you're making some alternative truths up. I work with many of them who happen to be responsible for my W-2. Ah, I see.

I see how this works. You do not bite the hand that feeds. That's right. And feeds my children. All right. Moving on. So this was something we had in our daily news brief, and I just thought it was kind of interesting. It's a Reddit thread, and someone is sort of tracing through a Facebook friend's suggestion that this person thinks should be impossible.

Basically, an ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago, who this person has not had any contact with for 20 years, popped up as a friend's suggestion on Facebook. Now, how would you guys react to this?

What would you think? I've actually had this happen to a friend, and she freaked the fuck out. Yeah. So from actual experience, yes, it is terrifying when somebody that pops up on your feed that has no relationship to you whatsoever for at least 20 years shows up and says, you might like to meet this person.

It's just like, I thought he was dead. Right. How did they find me? How did they find me? Yeah, that's honestly it. We spent like a couple of days trying to backtrace how this could happen, and we still haven't figured it out. This is a very weird thing that, I mean, I will personally never experience this because I have no part of my life that I've completely blocked off.

There are at least some friends somewhere. I'm friends with some people from my high school. I'm friends with some people from my elementary school. Throughout my entire history, there are people that are connected to someone else. So I would never be freaked out about this, but I've increasingly weirded out by our use of technology and the fact that we don't, we can't even read the fucking manual as if we had one because we don't know how most of the technology that we use even works anymore.

And this is one of those cases. Yeah, it really is. I mean, if you go through, I'm not going to, we don't have time to go through all the details, but this is someone who had been very deliberate about their privacy and, you know, even wasn't even using their real name on Facebook. And, uh, it really goes through how, what are the possible ways that Facebook made this connection?

Uh, and, you know, and, uh, this person thinks that they've found a plausible explanation for it, but, um, you know, boy, um, it, it, it, it's, it's one of those things where it makes you think you go, yeah, well, oh, right.

That could, that could be a connection. Oh, right. That's how they farted once in a men's room in West Virginia and they captured the the DNA and now it's come back to haunt me. Yeah. Yeah. So, which is pretty close to how this worked, but yeah, I mean, it's, uh, again, we don't have the time to go through it, but if it's, if you're interested in this kind of thing, follow the link.

It's, it's pretty interesting little thread. Yeah. It's very cool. Then a little bit freaky. Yeah, exactly. Two of my favorite things. All right. So, uh, the, I'm not a robot checkbox is one of those lovely captures that, uh, Google has been rolling out for a while instead of us having to transcribe old books, which is what we did for a long time.

So I'm assuming that we have now transcribed all the books in the universe. Uh, so they don't need that anymore and we don't have to check out numbers on street signs. So apparently they've mapped us all completely. We now have a little checkbox. It just says, I'm not a robot. Well, what they're doing with that is they're checking a lot of different vectors on your visit, which is, you know, are you already signed into Google?

How do the movements on the page with your mouse work? Did you just go straight there? Is it like a linear progression? Did you move the mouse around all this crazy stuff? And it's been very hard to beat. That's one of the things about it. But someone has actually beat it with a literal robotic arm.

Ah, the great irony. Yes. The, I'm not a robot verification has been beaten by an actual robot. I love this story. I do too. And my very favorite thing about the robot is that the robot has googly eyes. Well, if you're going to have a robot, come on, you got to have some googly eyes.

I think all robots should come with googly eyes. I believe that's, that's Asimov's first law. You know, it's probably in there. Yeah. Yeah, it probably is. Maybe it didn't make the first edit. I don't know. But, uh, yeah. In the future, it just needs some fuzzy dice in a pine tree, uh, air freshener.

And then, then it can be a taxi driver. I've got Mel Brooks's Moses coming down the mountain in my mind now. You dropped half the laws of robotics. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Fifteen. Ten. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

If you, if you haven't seen this, go check out the show notes and take a look at the robot because it's pretty awesome. It is an adorable robot. I mean, it really is. So, uh, my final story that I've got here is the, uh, no shit Sherlock file. Also the very limited use case file because I can't imagine somebody being smart enough to want a VPN, but dumb enough to go with a free one.

Uh, but that is the story. So a study has found that most free Android VPNs are leaking data and many don't even bother to use encryption. Gasp! So, yeah. Nearly 300 Android VPNs. Who knew that there were that many? 84% of those studied leaked users' web traffic, 38% contained malware or malvertising, and 18% didn't bother to encrypt data at all.

Three of the apps even directly intercepted traffic, allowing, for example, the people to read users' email if they visited their Gmail site while using it. So, pay for your damn VPN, people. Yes. And, uh, as an add-on, I'm going to add this one. If you go to redtube.com today, just, this is a scientific experiment here.

Uh, you will be actually sent to a page that says your Flash player is out of date, and it will send you a new Flash update that you have to install. Oh, boy. People, do not do that. And, uh, on the off chance that you are unaware of what redtube is, do not do this at work.

Yes, if you don't know what redtube is, don't, you don't need to go look at it. This is, this is the same as Googling prolapsed anus or goat seed. Do not do it, which means that some of you will, and I am sorry for you. So, does that like, so Jason, does that likely mean that, um, what is it, redtube?

Yes. Is that what you said? Let me type that in. What is the site of what you speak? You're on my work computer. Yeah. I just want to make sure, I just want to make sure I have that spelling right. I, I just, I miss, I misspelled you and I typed in red instead of, uh, you and, and then boom, I got a download for an, uh, flash updater.

And unfortunately, Dave, you're going to be getting a call from Janet from human resources now. And that, uh, she just, she just walked into my office and boy, does she look upset. Wow. Um, so relationship you've had is going the other direction. I just, yeah, I know I'm going to be self-employed myself soon.

So, but, but my question, Jason, does, do we, do we think that this means that the redtube people are in cahoots with the flash people? Or has someone done a man in the middle on this? Um, it was basically because, uh, you mentioned, or Brian mentioned it malvertising before, and that's exactly probably what it is.

Because these sites that are of the adult nature use different, uh, ad networks that don't have the same filtering as the Googles do. And even, they even get past Google sometimes. So if you can, uh, get some malvertising on there, uh, for your wankvertising and, uh, you might just be screwed.

That's how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you shouldn't have flash players set to auto run anyway. And if you go and, and yeah. Well, that was the first, that was the first, uh, notices. I don't have flash and I don't need to update it.

So what's going on here? Let's, uh, let's dig deeper. Let's actually, you know, maybe use both hands or four fingers and figure out how it goes. Oh boy. So anyway, guys, uh, it's been good. It's been nice talking to you. Uh, tell Janet we said hello.

Yeah. I got to run down. And for some reason I've been summoned to HR. I don't know why. Uh, something about, uh, uh, some clause I evidently signed in my contract, some sort of morality clause or something. But, uh, I can't, I'm sure I can't be that serious. So I'm sure you'll be fine. I'm sure you'll be fine.

Yeah. No problem. All right. We'll talk to you next week. Maybe. Good luck. Bye. Bye guys.

We don't have a sponsor this week. So we're going to tell you about another show. We're talking about the Grime Life podcast. Chris and Seth are two of our biggest fans who got our attention by making fun of Brian on Twitter for his lack of pronunciation skills. They're two guys from New York city who lived the freelance lifestyle and have their own amazing show.

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Search for Grime Life in your podcast player and give these guys some love. And by the way, they suck at pronunciation much harder than Brian, but we'll let them slide this time. That's the Grime Life podcast. Go get it. At the library. I read a collection of short stories.

Good for you. I am not a short story guy, especially not sci-fi short stories, because I don't think that they can ever really get to the meat of the issue really quickly. But these are sci-fi short stories. The original book title was Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It has been, of course, repackaged and renamed Arrival because the movie Arrival was based on one of the short stories in this collection.

I was going to say that'd be kind of kind of smarmy if they just, you know, it's like me making my short story collection Blade Runner because. No, this is a, you know, let's sell more of these books. So let's replace the cover art with the poster from Arrival and rename it Arrival.

Read it. This is fantastic. These are some of the best short stories I've ever read. I thoroughly enjoyed almost all of them. I think there's six total of which four were fantastic. One was OK and one I didn't care for. And the short story, I also watched the film Arrival. So we'll talk about that media candy.

The short story is better than the movie. And the movie was fantastic. Well, spoiler alert. OK. Spoiler alert. See, I love sci-fi short stories. I think they're great, especially the old cyberpunk anthologies. Those things were awesome back in the day. This is all this is what this is like philosophical sci-fi more so than, you know, gadgets and cyberpunk and all that sort of stuff.

But I do think you'd like it that I highly recommend this book. I really do. I don't know why this never crossed my radar well before the movie. This is so up my alley and I really like his writing. He's got he's got a great mind and a really interesting way of looking at things.

I can't recommend it enough. All righty, then I will pick it up. I was trying to get a little bit away from the sci-fi cyberpunk thing this week because I just finished the new book by Charlie Strauss last week, which I really enjoyed.

But since there's not another one coming out for probably three weeks, because that's about how long it takes him to write a book, it seems he writes a lot of books. He is prolific. Yeah, yeah. But I tried to stay away from it and I read a really short book called The Spark by Cirque du Soleil, igniting the creative fire that lives within us all.

Cute book. You know, it's only like three and a half hour read. It's kind of a story about how, you know, they do things at Cirque du Soleil. And I just it was a nice light read and kind of got my creative juices flowing quite a bit. So I really enjoyed it. Highly recommend it for a short read. What are the author's relationship to Cirque du Soleil?

A lot of the people that are in Cirque are in the book. And it's kind of they kind of do an amalgamation of some of the like some of the people are real people that they did interviews and stories with. It's kind of written as a short story about a guy who, you know, is disenfranchised with his career and then ends up spending some time at Cirque.

And it's a neat little story. But yeah, highly, highly recommended for a quick read. And I'm getting back to the Harry Bosch series from Michael Connelly. There's a ton of those. And I love the Bosch series on Amazon. So while I'm waiting for them to kick out another season, I went and read the Concrete Blonde book three and I'm almost done with it.

And I love them. I love these books. They're really fun. And a hat tip to Dr. Teeter and Chen for turning me on to these a long time ago. And I'm finally, you know, kicking through them. I love Concrete Blonde. It's one of my favorite bands. Yeah, they did. I think no relation, I'd imagine. None whatsoever.

Yes. And next week I've got Killing Rommel on deck by Steven Pressfield. So and I'm almost done with the last of the laundry files. Oh, just in time for the next one to come out. Yeah, pretty much. Slow down, man. Seriously. Well, hurry up on the next book on the series that I just read.

Was it Empire? It wasn't Empire. I can't remember the name of it right now, but it was really good. So you got to read that one. OK, ups and doodads. And just to follow up on my last brain fart, it's Empire Games by Charlie Strauss. That was what it was. Right.

So on your recommendation, I went out and bought a Blue Moo smart control for my living room. Yes. This thing's well, it's a lot smaller than it looks like on the Amazon page. I was expecting something a little bigger. I love that it's that small. It's a lot smaller than the Logitech Harmony, too, which is nice because you can just kind of shove it in a little corner somewhere.

Well, when you figure all this thing really has, and there's a Bluetooth controller and some LED lights, it makes sense that it's so small. So far, it is 100% meh. I paired my TV to it because it's got, you know, you pick your model and everything.

Yeah. The power button turns the TV on and then immediately turns it back off. See, that sounds like the kind of problems I was having with the Harmony. And for whatever reason, the Blue Moo did not do that. I haven't gotten to the point where I've actually integrated it with Echo yet because...

Oh, I'll tell you about that in a second. I have a kid. Okay. Go for it. So I got the Blue Moo working with... Well, it does most of the things for my TV. But the one thing that I really want is to be able to power it on because I have a separate remote just to turn the damn TV on. And this, I thought, was going to fix that.

Nope, did not do that. I paired it with my Apple TV, but the generic controller that they use for the Apple TV is also the same one that works with my Mac Mini that is sitting right next to the Apple TV.

So I had to go in and manually turn off all remote control access to my Mac Mini because it kept playing stuff in iTunes while it was trying to play stuff on the Apple TV and madness ensued. But now I've kind of got that going. Then I did the crazy thing about pairing it with the Echo.

Took about 20 minutes. Cannot get a single control to work. A single one works. And you have to, like, string it with, like, you know, seven words to get it to pause. Yeah, I've already gotten to the point where I've done a few tests that way, which is incredibly annoying. So I just think this stuff isn't there yet.

I think Amazon's got to put out their own version so you don't have these 17 steps. Yeah. Or, yeah, just give me an Echo with an IR receiver in it so it can just turn things off and on that way. But, yeah, it is definitely sketch at this point.

Hopefully they'll keep working on the software because, A, the software is hideous. The iPhone app is hideous. It comes with an Apple Watch app, which does not work at all. I get the screen that says, here are all your remotes that you can choose from, and it's blank. Try and refresh it.

Blank. Right. So it is not ready for prime time. If I wouldn't have thrown away the box, I'd have sent it back. I got to say, it's still better than the Logitech Harmony, and those are the two big boys in the field. So we'll see what happens. I mean, luckily, a lot of this is software.

So if these guys can keep up with it and show a commitment to it, it can get better. But, yeah. Yeah. I'm stuck with mine now, too. So we'll hope for the best. Yeah. I was going to hop on, like, a support chat yesterday, but I had food poisoning and didn't really feel like doing anything.

But it did get me through the day using my Apple TV because the Apple TV remote, as we both know, is such a steaming pile that it barely works. It's like, especially when I'm scrolling through my movies, and then it just automatically jumps, like, one way or the other.

It goes to unwatched or by category, and then you go back and you've got to, like, start scrolling again. You have to make sure you're going perfectly straight up and down. Hate it. Hate it. Well, I found something else that I think is really, to quote Jason, neat. Neat. But probably doesn't work as well as one would hope.

It's called the spray printer. This is basically the idea that you can take any photo or anything that you find on the Internet, any picture, use their mobile app, any spray printer device, and you can transfer images from your smartphone onto walls with spray paint, apparently. It costs 247 pounds.

So it is not cheap. Okay. I haven't looked at it yet because I don't want the autoplay to kick in. Is there autoplay on the page? There is autoplay on the page. Yeah, that's why I didn't turn it on. But when you said 247 pounds, I thought that's what it weighed. I'm like, oh, my God, that thing's going to be heavy. No, 247 pounds.

So roughly, you know, $7,000 or whatever it is now. I don't know. 247 pounds after Brexit. It's like $1,250. So they've come back up a bit. It's not quite so cheap anymore. Yeah, it doesn't quite look as – it's not a magical thing device where you just kind of – and it does all the colors perfectly.

You're using your own aerosol spray can. So it's basically the equivalent of – do you remember, like, if you wanted to do, like, a big drawing, you would get those overhead projectors and project it onto the wall and then trace things and draw everything there? Yeah. This is basically that. Okay.

For 247 pounds, I thought it would be a little bit nicer. Do something better than an overhead projector and some transparencies. It does not seem to. Okay. Doesn't sound that neat to me. It looks neat. It's a neat concept. Okay. Okay. So for one of my jobs, I had to get Pro Tools, Avid's Pro Tools.

Subscriptions. No, this is for audio. Okay. And, yeah, so you get two choices. You can get it for $24.92 a month, which is an odd price, or $600 for a perpetual license. Yep. Now – I can't handle the subscription model anymore.

It makes me want to go crazy. Yeah. The job that I'm doing is not even going to make me $600, so I'm just going to go for the monthly until it's done, then cancel. But the real kick in the nuts is they use these stupid USB keys. Yep. These iLocks. Oh, that is so lame because it cost me $46 just to try the free trial of the software.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. I hear Sweeten could break such things, but – Yeah, but, no, I need to – this is for work, so I've got to be official because all my audio stuff and all the stuff that I make money off of is all paid for.

Yeah, I agree. I'm not 20 anymore. Pro Tools is a kick in the nuts these days. Yeah, yeah, especially when you can get Logic, which we're recording in now, for $199, and you don't have to pay for anything after that. Always nice. Mm-hmm. Flipagram.

What is Flipagram? Flipagram was apparently, at least according to their press, a serious competitor to Instagram for a while. I went to Flipagram's – a couple of their big parties because they were making a deal. Basically, the idea behind Flipagram was we're going to go out and license music, and you can then use our app to take your photos or your videos, and then you can put a soundtrack on it, and then you can share it with people.

Oh, okay. That sounds lame. I'm not sure why this gets you billions of dollars and billions of dollars in terms and funding rounds and things like that, but then again, that's why you and I are poor. That's true. We don't get it. Yeah, we don't get it, and we don't understand why these things happen. So they had this thing.

They had a bunch of money, and then they realized that we want to create a social experience inside the app to keep users from going elsewhere. Well, guess what? There are enough social networks already. Nobody wants a new one. Hello! So it didn't work, shockingly enough. The exact quote, in order to do a social graph, of course, you need people to make a lot of social connections on your platform.

That's the definition of a social graph, you idiots. And many people had already made those connections on other platforms. So this was a challenge for us. Yeah. Yeah, no shit. Nobody wants to change, and since everybody's locked down their social graphs now, and you can't take them with you like you used to be able to.

Yes. So instead of just being a fun little app that let you do something that other apps didn't do and releasing that content out into the wild, they wanted to become bigger and control everything and failed. So they have been purchased by Chinese news aggregator Tu Tiao. Tu Tiao.

I believe you can pronounce it. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. Multiple former employees told Recode late last year that morale inside Flipagram deteriorated during the acquisition process. And many employees had left or were looking for other jobs. So there you go. See a previous article from Lifehacker.

Exactly. I found a Kickstarter that I just had to post in here. It's called Selfie Feet. Use your feet to take the perfect selfie. Did you watch the video on this? I did. I was hoping that there would be some literal kickstarting. No, it's so silly.

They haven't quite made their goal yet, so. Good. Yeah. This is dumb. Basically, you put a magnet on your shoe and then stick your phone to it, stick a magnet on your phone, which I'm sure is great for the phone. Because, God knows, electronics work really well around magnets.

And, yeah, then you have a little remote control and you take a picture of yourself with your foot. Good for upskirts. It's like upskirt shots of yourself if you're into that kind of thing. Well, I am scrolling down their Kickstarter page and I do enjoy the fact that they've seen other uses for their product as well.

It'll track anything you put on it so you'll never lose your keys or wallet. You can keep your keys, wallet, et cetera, mounted on metal surfaces. Basically, it's a magnet. It's a magnet. It's a magnet on a, like, basically a rubber band. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's an expensive magnet.

How much are they going for? I missed that. I looked to see if they made their goal and I saw that they were fairly far away, so. Well, you can pledge over 400 pounds. We're finding a lot of English stuff, apparently. Oh, yes. In which case, you would get 20 selfie feet. Jeez.

I can go to Ace Hardware and spend five bucks and get 20 of them. Yeah. So, it's basically, you're looking at about 20 bucks, estimated retail of 35 pounds. I'm sorry. 20 pounds or 35 pounds to actually get the full product. Yeah. I'll pass on the selfie feet.

Yeah. But go watch the video, folks. It's pretty funny. The next one I found is an Indiegogo and has been funded. It's called the Muzo. It is the state-of-the-art vibration. They say monitoring system. But basically what it is, it's a noise-canceling device that can give you your own cone of silence, which I think is kind of cool.

Yeah. I'd like to see how well that actually works. Yeah. I want to see this one in person. It's $159 pre-order, an estimated arrival of April 2017. So, you might get it by Christmas. Maybe. And you can pick your own colors. It comes in black or black. Black or black.

But I think if it works, if the noise-canceling technology works and you can just stick it to your window in a hotel room to get quiet or take it with you, the one use case is you take it to a cafe and you can go into privacy mode and get this little cone of silence around you.

Yes. I see. I'm looking at that one right now. Protect your speech privacy by using secret mode. Now, do I get to sue them if my industrial secrets are stolen when I'm using their product? No, because you're an idiot for talking about your industrial secrets in public, no matter what. But I have the Bruzo.

See what every coffee shop in Silicon Valley. But I have my Bruzo, Jace. Now, if it worked and you could just get those built into your tables at Starbucks and then still have a conversation, that would be kind of interesting. I want my cone of silence from Get Smart.

Yeah. The literal cone that comes down. It's much more fun.

Media Candy. One of my favorite bands of all time is Depeche Mode. They have a new album coming out called Spirit, released on March 17th. The first single from the album just came out on Friday. It is called Where's the Revolution?

Depeche Mode has never, ever been political. This is very, very political. And this is very, very, very good. So if you would have asked me, you know, 20 years ago, first off, is any of this shit actually happening? Okay. And then if you would have told me that the call to arms for the next four years of my life would be soundtrack by Depeche Mode, I would have laughed even more.

But here we are. There you are. Cats and dogs living together. Madness. Madness. And it's a very good song. It is a very good song. I quite enjoyed it. Yeah. So I'm very much looking forward to the album. I've read a few of the interviews. It's, yeah, it's a good sound. They've kind of gone back to the earlier synth heavy, very dark, very good.

No, definitely. Looking forward to it. Me too. I'm not a Comcast subscriber. I do not get cable TV. But the interesting thing that they've been testing is getting rid of the cable box. God, that'd be less. It would be great. So they're partnering with Roku and you can now get, if you are a Comcast subscriber, they do have an Xfinity app that you can run on Roku.

It's in beta. You still have to have a cable box in your home right now due to technical limitations. Right. So technical limitations, meaning they don't want to give up that 14 bucks a month you pay to rent a cable box. That's what they're saying. And eventually you will have to pay for this app in the future because they do not want to give up all of their monies.

And I bet it'll be a subscription. Of course. Yes. It'll be another three bucks on your cable bill per month or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So there'll be a use usage fee for the app. I'm sure I don't have it. So and I'm not going to get it. But if you ever get it, let me know if let me know if it works.

I would time Warner Cable, which is now I can't remember what they're called. Spectrum. And I still am awaiting my world of change that is coming according to their commercials. No app. I mean, they have an app. The app, instead of actually getting more usable, has actually gotten less usable because they've shut off the ability to toss it to an Apple TV or Google or Fire Stick or whatever.

So basically, you can only just watch on your iPad. There's no tossing it to a TV anymore. So thanks a lot. Yeah. And yeah, their new website for the business side of things, because I still have that miserable. The albatross around your neck. Yeah. My $600 a month internet connection that I don't even get to use.

I went to go pay for it the other day. And their business site now has a big Spectrum banner and all that. And you cannot pay your bill. It's completely broken. So I got on a support chat and they're like, well, I'm like, is your is your bill pays site down? They're like, well, we can't really take bill payments on chat.

So I don't know what completely useless, utterly useless, had no no way for me to pay my bill online. So and I don't have the paper one. So now I'm going to have to make an actual phone call and talk to somebody, which, yay. Yeah. There's half a day. At some point, I've been meaning to to waste an entire day trying to talk to somebody over at Spectrum 2 and go, hey, what are these great new things that you're supposedly giving me?

Because so far, nothing's changed. Yeah, it never gets it. It never works for the better, it seems. No, no, it never does. So some TV shows. I watched Chance on Hulu. I have not seen this yet. It's Hugh Laurie. And yeah, that's the problem.

See, I never watched House. You know, I remember all the the stuff he did with Stephen Fry back in the day, but this is really good. I really enjoyed this. This is a recommendation from Teeter and Chin. And I'm like, I'm sitting around here.

I'm sick. Let me just watch some TV. And I got into it. I was going to watch one episode and I watched seven the first night. Stayed up to like three in the morning. Right. So I am such a huge House fan. I have a problem identifying with Hugh Laurie being anything else.

I loved House. Okay. I never got into it. It was one of my favorite shows of all time. So I don't know if I could do this. Well, he does play a doctor in this, so. I know, but it's not House. No, it's probably a lot better. And it had Ethan Supley, who was really good in it.

You might know him from Mallrats. He's the guy who couldn't see the sailboat. And he's also going to be in the new Twin Peaks. So it should be interesting. And then after that, I went and tried to watch The Path, another Hulu original about a cult. I watched about an episode and a half and fell asleep.

So I am not on the path for this one. I watched Lovesick. Well, sort of. Never heard of it. You have, because I've talked about what the show previously was known as in season one, Scrodal Recall.

Okay. So you do remember me talking about that. It was a very funny British comedy that lasted one season in Britain. Netflix bought the rights to it, even though BBC, I'm not sure if it was on BBC or ITV, one of the British networks, canceled it.

Unfortunately, they renamed it because apparently they thought Scrodal Recall wouldn't play as well. So it's a boring name. It's now just called Lovesick. And the second season is available on Netflix now. And I watched the first episode. It had been a good year or something since Scrodal Recall came out.

And I talked about this probably more than a year. So I forgot a lot about it. So the first episode was a bit rough. And I think they did it on purpose. It's a lot of catch up and flashbacks and things like that. So I was a little bored. And my wife and I looked at each other and went, this isn't funny. We remember this being funny. By the second episode, howling.

By the third episode, in pain from laughing so hard. It's really good. All right. I will add it to the cue. Shame about the renaming. But it's a very, very funny show. I wonder why they thought that name wouldn't fly. I don't know. It was my favorite part. I think we called it episode Scrodal Recall.

We may have. I can't remember anymore. Yeah. I watched Homeland. I know that you had said that it wasn't that great. It's rough. I'm not going to lie. It's bleak. And the world is already so bleak. And it's really hard to push yourself to go watch something that's bleak.

And I did. I've gotten three episodes. Because it's all right. Yeah. I went and watched another one when episode two came out. And I'm like, if there's nothing else on and I gotta, then maybe. Yeah. I don't know where they're going with any of it.

Nothing has hooked me yet. I always feel like these big, like Showtime and HBO, with the exception of Game of Thrones, which you don't like anyways. I always feel they have good season, bad season, good season, bad season. A lot of these shows. Dexter was that way. Homeland is definitely that way. Unfortunately, this is a bad season.

Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I mean, I like the first couple of them, but it's just so different now that I'm just like, yeah. That used to be the show's main strength, though. It was basically every season where they'd have to completely reinvent themselves. And they've done a very good job of it. I just nothing is catching me about this this season.

And it's just so relentlessly bleak. Yeah. Oh, well, what are you going to do? You can always go back and watch Black Mirror for a pick-me-up. Yeah, right. I've avoided that. Actually, I do have something that's a pick-me-up. I finally saw Arrival. This is a movie I desperately wanted to see in theaters, but then I had a child, so that went out the window.

It has just come out, available for purchase on all your favorite streaming medias. I love this movie. It was great, wasn't it? professional and upbeat and smart and everything that you want a movie to be, unless you think aliens and you're expecting gunfights.

No, I love the slow burn on it. You know, I just I turned off all the lights and watched it on my giant 4K TV, and it was just as good as being in the theater because you didn't this didn't really, you know, you didn't have to see this one in the theater. Yeah. Yeah. There were no epic space battles or anything like that.

So no, it was it was very well done. They've made some some very strong and interesting changes compared to the short story that it's based on, which I also just read. So it was really interesting. I don't think I've ever done that before in where I've basically read the book and seen the movie within a day of each other.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, it is pretty crazy. So it really stood out to me some of the choices that they made. But I think that they were all really interesting and for the most part, good choices to make it a more compelling movie and a two hour experience instead of the, you know, 20 minutes.

It would have been if they just would have done the short story. Right. So absolutely fantastic, though. If you haven't seen this yet and you listen to our podcast, go see this. Yep. Two thumbs up. Two thumbs up. And the director, Dennis Villeneuve, is officially signed on to bring Dune back to the movies.

Yay. Mixed feelings. I have mixed feelings. I got you. Everybody knows how much I love Dune. I don't think it can be made into a movie. I just don't. I'd like everything that he did with Arrival. I like the look and feel. I like the way that this, you know, the slow building tension.

That's perfect for Dune. I don't know how you're going to. You just took a 25 page short story and made it into a two hour movie. What are you going to do with an 800 page book? 27 parts. Yeah. That's really about the only thing you can do with it. It has to be.

It has to be split up. It has to be a couple movies and they're not going to do that. So we'll see. No. I know you're a big Harry Potter fan. Yeah. The wife likes it a lot and got me into it. Yeah. I saw all the movies in the theater opening day for almost all of them.

And I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan. I just had lots of friends that like to go. So I'd always tag along. I finally sat down and watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I actually liked it more than the Harry Potter movies. So that was a big surprise because I usually don't like the little wizardry wave your stick and things happen movies.

But I thought it was fun. Excellent. It's quite pricey right now. Wow. 1999 to preorder. So I'll wait until that comes down a little bit or it's streaming. But I have not seen it yet. I've neither is. Again, baby. Baby. Yes, yes, yes. Well, you are in Los Angeles and it is screener season.

So you can probably find somebody that has one. Oh, that's a good point. I have not put out my email request for toss me some screeners, people. Yeah, they're out there because another screener that's out there is Hidden Figures. Uh-huh. I enjoyed this movie highly. I thought it was very well done. What's not to like?

Yeah. Smart people in space. You know, we like that sort of stuff. Kevin Costner, I thought was excellent in it. It was just a fun movie. It was a light, nice, lighthearted movie, except for all of the casual racism. But, you know, that part sucked.

But all of that has happened before. It'll probably all happen again. Not if we have anything to say about it, but damn right. So let's stick to the happy stuff. So, yeah, I highly recommend Fantastic Beasts and Hidden Figures. Okay. I watched Bill Burr, Walk Your Way Out, because if there is one thing Netflix is good for, it is stand-up comedy.

Used to be you'd have to get your HBO specials. Not anymore. Netflix churns out stand-up comics like No Tomorrow. Every week there's a new one. I get an email at least once a week. Yeah, it's almost impossible to keep up with. I'm a fan of Bill Burr, so I enjoyed this. This is his most recent one.

It's interesting now to watch a stand-up show that was, it's relatively new, that came out right before the election. Yeah. And he was political. So, knowing what we know now, since this just came out, that was kind of interesting. He's a funny guy, though.

I enjoyed it a lot. If you're into his kind of humor, you'll like it. Yeah. He's not one of my guys. I've seen a couple of them, and I get like halfway through them. It's just not for me. I'm more of a Jim Jeffries kind of guy now. Oh, I love Jim Jeffries. You can't go wrong with him. He's going to be on Real Time with Bill Burr next week.

Oh, too bad. I watched the Sam Harris interview with Bill Burr this week, and then I turned it off. You should have stayed until the end. You would have gotten my Super Bowl feelings when Bill Burr went off on that. So, in case you were wondering who I was rooting for, you just watch that. Okay. No, I won't.

Okay. I know. And finally, this bummed me out. Well, not finally, because we have a few more things. We will never get Deep Space Nine and Voyager in full HD versions. Now, why? Why? Because, you know, money. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So, there was this weird period of time. Until recently, TV was shot on 35mm film, which is high resolution. Too high for the early days of TV. By the early days, that even means, like, when Star Trek Next Generation was out. It was the 80s, yeah. Yeah. The film footage was edited together, archived, and then shrunk down to the NTSC video resolution for broadcast.

Unfortunately, in the mid-80s, when video technology advanced enough to the point that many TV shows, including all these Star Trek follow-ups, no longer edited in 35mm film footage, they scanned it in immediately, transformed it into lower TV-friendly resolution, and edited there. So, for these second shows, or for Deep Space Nine or Voyager, they would actually have to go and re-edit.

The whole show. Each episode. Oh, man. So, all they have is the raw footage in HD, and we're not going to be getting that. So, we are never going to get these in HD. That sucks. It does. Because I would love Deep Space Nine in 4K. I agree with you. Deep Space Nine is that dark horse of Star Trek shows that just really, if you think about it, it's one of the best ones.

It's my favorite. Absolutely my favorite. I can go back and watch that anytime. I love Cisco. I love the whole storylines. Deep Space Nine is my go-to, for sure. It was much more grown-up than Next Gen, and not as popcorn-y as Voyager. Right. Yeah. We don't even discuss Enterprise.

No, we don't. It's interesting, too. I'm glad they still have the film, because at least, I mean, it's Paramount, and so they have, you know, good storage facilities. I was at a Farscape convention, and Brian Henson made the announcement that the original footage for Farscape no longer exists.

They burned it. Wow. They couldn't afford to store it. That's when Henson was going through their dark period, and it was costing them, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month to keep all of the footage, and so they ended up having to let it go. It's like, oh, I mean, it just broke my heart.

But let's end on, we have a couple happy ones here at the end. Yes. Mike Rowe. I love Mike Rowe. I love his The Way I Heard It podcast. Very short, you know, like five, six minutes. There's one, episode 38 on self-abuse. Oh, boy.

Highly recommend going to listen on this one. It is, I was in tears by the end of it. It's only like five or six minutes. I already knew the story behind it, but I'm usually pretty good on picking out his story subjects. But his delivery on it was fantastic.

Nice. I actually don't listen to his podcast. I should give that a go. Yeah, just skip the first five minutes because it's all ads, and then once he gets into the show, it's really short. They're literally like five or six minutes long. Very cool. And finally, the Terry Pratchett documentary, Back in Black, will be airing on BBC2 at 9 p.m. on the 11th of February.

I have not been able to find if there's going to be any airings here in the States, so you may have to go to Sweden. But we'll keep you updated if anything comes up before then. Yeah. Yeah. I'm guessing by 10 p.m. on February the 11th, we will be taking a trip to Sweden to go find it.

I have a feeling. Yes. We're on of the week. Kellyanne Conway. Yeah. She's not having a good week, but doesn't seem to notice or care. She was on MSNBC's Chris Matthews show, and Chris Matthews was attacking her about the refugee ban or the Muslim ban, depending on if you want to use the president's words for it or not, and raised the specter of the Bowling Green Massacre.

Yeah. She said most people didn't know that because it didn't get covered. She told Chris Matthews. Unfortunately, there was no Bowling Green Massacre, as we discussed earlier in the security segment. That didn't actually make it into the security segment.

Oh, you cut it out? Okay. We did discuss it a little bit. That's too bad. I like. Okay. Anyways. Yeah. So there was no Bowling Green Massacre. Massacre. And she said she misspoke one word. She calls her critics haters because there wasn't a massacre.

Massacre is kind of the one word you shouldn't really toss about lightly. It's a key one to fuck up on. Yeah. That's like saying hijack at the airport. You don't say it. Yeah. If you don't mean it, if you don't mean it, don't say it. Yeah. So this is not an alternative fact. This never happened. It didn't exist.

They used. It's an alternative reality fact is what it is. They made something up. And the thing that really drives me crazy about this is that they not only made up a complete massacre, they blew the attack at the Louvre, which wasn't even in the Louvre. It was in the Louvre Mall, which is a mall.

They blew that completely out of proportion and but not a lot said about the Muslims that were attacked in Canada at all. No, no, we're just not going to mention that one. We'll just talk about the one that we made up that were the Muslims attacked us. OK, now let's get to the funny here.

What's now the heroes of the week. Let's get to the payoff on this. This is what I love. This is a New Yorkers held a mock vigil at Bowling Green for the massacre victims. Yes, the Bowling Green subway stop. There was a mock vigil. And this is fantastic.

This is this is America. Damn it. And the the website for the victims of the Bowling Green massacre. Yes. Yes. Which goes directly to the ACLU for donations. So, yeah, everybody's had a field day on this.

And like I said earlier, it's gotten to the point where even people, companies that would just normally stay neutral because they don't want to offend anyone are just taking sides. Dove has done an entire ad campaign based on Kellyanne Conway's hashtag alternative facts.

So well done for you, Dove. I particularly enjoyed that the new Dove antiperspirant rhymes with orange. Alternative fact. OK, I'm definitely going to have to go check those out. And there are a couple other ones out there. The Mexican airline one was pretty good. Yes, that was good.

Starbucks. Starbucks is coming out swinging. There's a lot of companies that are getting behind it. So it's pretty interesting. It's an interesting time to be alive. It's a strange time. Yes. May you live in interesting times. But don't forget the new Dove antiperspirant boosts your Wi-Fi signal. You go, Dove.

Brick-a-brick. Brick-a-brick has become the section that I am now using as my desperate stretches for trying to stay happy. OK, good. This is where I find the links that, you know, that normally we would always be talking about quite happily.

But it's the happy area where I try to stay away from the crappy links that make me sad. Jason put two of those into the section, though. So well, I didn't know that we were changing the tone of it. No, we're not. It's a personal. It's a personal quest. It's my vision quest, Jason. OK, I think maybe we should move this up to show then.

So people get the happy first and then we just make them sad at the end. OK, kind of like life. True. True. Yeah. All right. So my first one, people share their most memorable human interaction that the other person has probably forgotten. It's yes, it's silly clickbait.

It's a listicle. It's it's 10 pieces of content split over 17 pages that you have to click next on. But like I said, I'm digging deep to find anything that makes me feel like the world is a decent place at the moment. And this did the job. So I liked it a lot. These things are really, really cute.

Give me an example. Just random things like some woman was talking about how she was at a funeral for a friend in college. She was she got late. She stood next to a professor instead of sitting with any of her friends. He was there alone.

She starts crying. He gives her he got all flustered and handed the tissue from his pocket and said it was clean. It was probably the most emotional moment I've ever shared with another person. And he probably doesn't remember it at all. OK, just things like that that make you make you feel good about people. Jason.

All right. I'll never read it either. Except I did. OK. The the lovely guy, Scott Adams from Dilbert. Oh, God. See, now, the more I dig into basically what he did before the before the election, the more respect I have for him, because you have to go back and figure out what he didn't read, read the follow ups and listen to him on some of the podcasts where he explains it.

Yeah. And he's kind of on point with a lot of stuff. I'm not denying that he was he's been right. It's just I think he's a douche and I don't like listening to him. Oh, well, then there'll be that, though. I don't you know, my my my opinion has changed quite a bit.

I actually quite like him. Right. But in his latest post, he talks about some of the the throttling that's going on and removing removing of tweets and things like that. There's a video that he's tried to post, but keeps getting throttled on Twitter for it.

It's called throttling theory, and it's an interesting video on how Twitter is basically not letting people's opinions out that they disagree with. You think that's really happening? It's been proven a bunch of different times by a bunch of different people. There's a lot of there's a lot of algorithmically shady things going on over at Twitter right now, which really sucks because that was like the last place where you could post things and they would just they would get to your timeline and now they're not.

Yeah. Well, OK, it's like media. Yeah, it was like they had enough problems. Come on. High expectations of what social media was ever supposed to be. Time to go back to L.O. Yeah, exactly. Nobody's throttling you there because nobody's looking. Nobody's looking. No.

Human pig hybrid created in lab. Here are the facts. All right. This is interesting stuff. This is from National Geographic. This isn't from somewhere weird. It's a remarkable feat. Scientists announced, I think this was on Wednesday, that they've created the first successful human animal hybrid.

The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive and even grow inside a host animal. In this case, pigs leading to down the line. And obviously, they're saying we're decades away from this, but being able to, you know, grow replacement organs and whatnot, which is sure going to piss off PETA and Bill Maher.

Man ham is coming. Man ham. Damn, if we didn't already have a title. Okay. That's a good one. And more science, because we like science. Are we living in a hologram? It's a question mark. We know what that means. Hello, betterage.

Yes. But physicists say they have substantial evidence our universe is an illusion. All of this doesn't matter because it ain't going to change crap for the way that we feel. But I do wonder if Oculus Rift is like going, so we're a 3D of a 3D of a 3D model. The ultimate Orbis.

Yes. So the holographic principle claims that gravity in the universe comes from thin, vibrating strings. These strings are holograms of events that take place in a simpler, flatter cosmos. Did you ever read Flatland? Yes, I have. That was a great book. Well, there you go. Apparently, it's all true. Okay. The principle suggests that like the security chip on your credit card that never works, there is a two-dimensional surface that contains all the information needed to describe a three-dimensional object, which in this case is our universe.

If your brain does not hurt yet, go read the rest of the article and it will start to. Yes, and it will hurt in three dimensions. I don't care what they say. Yes. So there you go. Yeah. The thing about these stories that keep coming up and the, you know, with the Elon Musk and all these guys going about the same thing that we're living in a simulation or, or in this case, a hologram.

Yeah. Who cares? There's nothing we can do about it unless it, yeah. Yeah. Change is nothing. I don't see the Nebuchadnezzar coming to save us anytime soon, so. God, I don't want that gruel. Yeah, that kind of looked nasty. I'll, I'll take the red pill and the steak. There you go.

Yeah. More cool science move. The holy grail, metallic hydrogen, is going to change everything. Again, like all the other articles I've talked about in about, you know, 30, 40 years. When we're old and gone. Yes. Two Harvard scientists have succeeded in creating an entirely new substance long believed to be the holy grail of physics, metallic hydrogen, a material of unparalleled power that could one day propel humans into deep space.

This came out on Thursday, published in the journal Science. This could potentially enable rockets to get into orbit in a single stage, even allowing humans to explore the outer planets. It is predicted to be metastable, meaning if you make it at a very high pressure, then release it. It stays at that pressure, much like a diamond.

Yeah. So if you heat it up again, it reverts back. Metallic hydrogen has been predicted to be a high or possibly room temperature superconductor, which is very good. It can help enable metallic magnetic levitation for futuristic high speed trains. So, Mr. Musk, get on that.

Yeah, get on that one. Pour some of this down your tunnel. Exactly. And finally, in my awesome science news, two infants treated with universal immune cells have had their cancers vanish. Scholars in London say that they cured two babies with leukemia in the world's first attempt to treat cancer with genetically engineered immune cells from a donor.

This took place at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital. Dr. House was not involved. No, he was not because he's American now, you know? Yeah, but this is pretty badass. What we're starting to find out can actually happen. So this is a potential future cancer killer. Maybe we will be around to check out our holographic, metastable, metallic universe in the future.

Perhaps we shall. Or maybe not, if the Internet of Things has their way. There's a great article in the New York Magazine by Bruce Schneier. It's called Click Here to Kill Everyone. Oh, cheery. With the Internet of Things, we're building a world-sized robot. How are we going to control it?

Well, the short answer is you're probably not for a while, but it's a very long read. But if you're into the Internet of Things and all of our beating of the drum about why so much of it is a bad idea, probably go give this a read. Luckily, the guys behind Coin are behind this, so we're okay. We're okay. It'll only kill us 50% of the time.

They've shut down all the servers. Feedback loop. As you may have noticed, you did not get the steaming pile of pod until Monday, as opposed to the regular Friday. We have changed our schedule. We announced that a few times.

And, yeah, that's what it's going to be moving forward. So get used to it. We had a comment from Bear Rod on Twitter. Ah, what am I to do all weekend? I don't know. Rub one out. See the thing that you put in from Mike Rowe.

Yeah. Go listen to a Mike Rowe podcast while you're waiting. So there you go. Yeah, it's just the schedule we've got moving forward, I know. So it is what it is. So all you people that listened over the weekend, you're going to have to time shift or, you know, listen during the week. Take a walk during the week, people.

It's a nice thing for us. It actually makes life a lot easier. Yeah, it really does. We also heard from Barrett Rees on Twitter. After the failure of the Lily drone, I'd like to see how well this one will do. And the link to the Business Insider Air Selfie.

What did you see? What did you think, Jason? Yeah, it's an iPhone case that has a mini drone that is designed to make selfies. It's expensive. It looks cute. Yeah. But for the price, it's like $260. You can just go buy a real drone. I don't need one. I'll just get the magnet to put on my shoe.

Yeah, seriously. You can get like 4,000 selfie shoes for $260. Yeah. No, it's cute. Is that a drone in your pocket? Well, absolutely. That is a drone in my pocket. Thank you. I can't believe there's a market for these things.

A small one, yes. A large enough one, I'm shocked. Yeah. And I see those little mini drones at 7-Eleven all the time or posted on Boing Boing's Twitter feed. Come buy our mini drone. Yeah. No, no, you mean I had my drone was like, you know, pretty big.

It was like a foot on each side and it would only fly for 15 minutes with the battery in that. How these little tiny things are like they're going to go up and down. That's it. And then charge it again. Up and down. And Bam Bam would eat it the first time she saw it. God damn it. It's a little too early to drink on a Sunday.

So I'll let you slide on that one. Yeah, Sunday fun day. It's Super Bowl Sunday. You should have your your bud and your wings all ready to go already. Yeah. We also heard from Nathan Rietzma. Fuel for your fire, LOL. And he sent a link for Mashable radio stations across the country hacked to play explicit anti-Trump anthem.

Let's see. It's actually interesting from the tech perspective. By taking advantage of a vulnerability found in a common model of low power FM or LPFM radio transmitters, hackers have repeatedly flooded airwaves across the country with an anti-Trump anthem. This is written by YG and Nipsey Hussle.

Did you listen to the song? I did not because I'm not that interested in rap. Okay. There you go. Yeah. But I'm glad there's protest anthems. I'm sure that by calling it Fuck Donald Trump, you're going to convince people from the other side. Oh, yes. It's all about inclusion.

It's all about inclusion. Nipsey Hussle, well known for reaching across the aisle. Okay. This one comes from Thomas from the GrumpyOldGeeks.com. I'm sorry. GOG.show website now. Since we have our fancy new domain. Hey, guys. I don't know if this was covered on a previous episode, but I thought it might be something to cover in security.

We're not going to cover in security. We're going to cover it here. I think I first read about it in Wired, but don't remember for sure. FamilyTreeNow.com lists the actual address of almost anyone you want to find without any paywall or restriction to the public. For instance, searching Jason DeFillippo yields redacted because I'm not going to give out all my addresses.

Brian's search produced an error, which I thought was very odd. So when I tried your name, it was definitely erroring out, not giving no reply. So I have my ways. Apparently, you can request to have your information removed, which everyone should do if the site continues to operate.

And Jason, sorry for looking into your addresses. I just wanted to give you a quick check to see if your information was compromised. I promise I won't troll you. So this was on the list, but I wanted to get my information off of there before we talked about it. And I have actually done that. And it had me as Jason F. DeSillipo, which is an interesting one, and my standard J.P. DeFillippo, my actual name.

And it did have just about every place I've ever lived. And they get this from public records. And it's not that hard to find this stuff. But it was nice for me because then I just copied and pasted the list into Bayer, so I always had a list of my previous addresses. It does help for that. The thing is, this is just coming from public information.

It's a bit weird to have it available so easily. But look, if you've bought a house, that house's address is out there publicly connected to your name. So taking it off the site isn't really going to stop anyone from doing anything.

It's just it is what it is. It's actually just made it so clear exactly how easy it is to get any of this information. So it's out there and you can't really stop it. But, you know, if you if it's if it's so blatant like this, you might as well spend the 10 seconds to make him take it down. Yeah, the removal was very easy.

I did it in no time and it was gone the next day. So, yeah, I didn't have to do it for me, but my wife did pop up. So I removed that. So, yeah, highly recommended. That would be family tree now dot com or soon to be family tree never dot com. If everybody keeps taking their information out.

Yes, exactly. And we have a comment from Rico and this is a relevant to our interests. So sharing a political views has been the hot topic. Thought you would both find this article interesting. I know that my use of social media has greatly reduced in the past months for many of the same points the author brings up.

It is not who you like or your personal views. It's the utter hatred spewed by both sides and the loss of respect for others that drove me away. As always, great work, gents. And this is a link over to the Federalist Facebook dead at 12 a victim of 2016. I find this very hard to disagree with. All righty.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I shall. And thank you for the feedback. Yes, thank you so much. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG dot show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. Closing shout outs.

I want to throw a big shout out to my little brother, Greg, who paid for the tickets for Hamilton that I went to go see last week. Nice. I got to say, Hamilton pretty much delivered on what everybody said it was going to be. And it was very it was a shocking contrast to go see something so good about so many great people in history and then come out and read the news.

Yeah, I felt the same way when I read the Washington biography. So I get it. And it's a lot more than rap. I was I was fairly surprised at that. It was actually an amazing show, almost three hours long and highly recommended if you if you do get the chance, which very few people will because it's so hard to get tickets.

Yes. Another shout out to my friend Daria Rose and her mindful meal challenge. I highly recommend going and signing up for this. It will teach you to eat a little more mindfully and also check out her foodist podcast, which she's a client of mine and I edit that show. So, you know, pimpin, pimpin hard, pimpin the work.

Yeah. But the mindful meal challenge, actually, I lost weight using these tactics and have a much more relaxed morning with my mindful breakfast, which I tend to post pictures of on Instagram at Instagram dot com slash JPD. I'm so glad that you actually went with breakfast, because as soon as you said your morning, I was like, oh, God, the morning dump.

No, no, no. Sadly, Jordan Cooper is out of the poop game. So we are we are free of morning dumps anymore. All right. My shout out is for the Atlanta Falcons. I don't give a crap about football, except I know I want the Patriots to lose. OK, so I'm going to go and enjoy a lot of food and a lot of beer.

So then you'll have a morning dump tomorrow. Perfect. I may have it in the evening. See how I did that call back there? That's comedy for you, people. That's comedy gold. That's what you get every week here on Grumpy Old Geeks. Yeah, you get what you pay for. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. I suppose the pay podcast for the Patreon subscribers is actually funny. We should go record that one now. Oh, yeah, we got to do the funny one next. 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, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 195.

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