197: Last Night in Sweden

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

And I'm the heavily medicated Brian Schulmeister. You sound snotty. Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that they tell you but you never really believe about having a kid is you're going to get sick a lot. Yeah, I heard that. But it's not even in school yet. We go to a thing on Saturdays around other babies and parents that have babies.

And ever since we started that, there's been a lot of snot flying around the house. The things they don't tell you in school. Yeah, good times. But yeah, I'm OK. You know, I did the thing last night where I was feeling really, really bad, like to the point where have you ever had like your sinuses start to like actually hurt because of pressure?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good time. So, you know, I was being a typical alpha male and I was like, I'll be fine. I'll have some wine. Who needs medicine? Oh, that was the wrong thing to do. Well, I smartened up and actually had medicine and went to bed and slept for 12 hours.

So you should feel better. You should be refreshed and ready to go. Well, whatever. Oh, yeah. So we had a bit of follow up because we've talked about it way back in the past. Alphabet and their balloon based Internet project called Loon.

Yes. Project Loon. And then we were discussing something recently. We're like, whatever did happen to that? Because we hadn't heard about it in a while. Well, they've made a big breakthrough and they think it might actually work now. Whoa. Oh, what happened? Machine learning. And I applaud them for using machine learning instead of AI.

OK. Apparently, before they were having issues with figuring out exactly how many balloons were going to be needed, sometimes the estimates were like 300 to 400 to just get one area. They've gotten better with the ability to basically keep the balloons hovering over a certain area instead of just floating freely all the time.

So they've been able to cut it down to like instead of 300, we only need 30. So it's actually somewhat feasible in terms of finances. And yeah, they seem to think they might be able to roll it out anytime. I would like to point out that this is apparently the fourth year of developing a project to stick a Wi-Fi router in a goddamn balloon.

Yeah. Well, it's apparently tough. Apparently, it's tough. Yes. You'd think that there would be an easier way, but. Yeah, you'd think. Satellite. I don't know. You know, all the sorts of things that we already have. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's Google.

They got money. I'm sorry. It's Alphabet. Alphabet. Yes. And they've got money to burn. Money to burn. Shall we get to the news? Sure. All right. In the news. Now, let's start the week on some fun news.

Okay. PewDiePie, PewDiePie, go and shut your face. I know. I know nothing about this world. Yes. PewDiePie is the, well, maybe, maybe was is the proper term. Biggest star on YouTube, making oodles and oodles of cash.

Uh-huh. What exactly did he do? He went out and, well, he went out and, well, he's kind of a closet racist is pretty much what it comes down to, but not so closeted sometimes. Well, it seems like there's a lot of people making money doing that these days. Some of them are even president. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, there you go.

He could. He should run, you know, but he's from Sweden. So, I guess maybe he'd, he can only be a governor here. Ah, okay. So, he would do things like go on Fiverr and have people write really anti-Semitic notes. And he just, he would always say really horrible things and then just go, just kidding.

Oh, so it's the Milo, Yannicka, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, plus approach to life. Yeah. I'm going to say really, really crappy things. LOL, just kidding. Yeah. No, they're both pretty much professional trolls, it seems. And they should get together and hook up. They look identical.

They could be, you know, twins, as far as I can tell. But yeah, YouTube canceled his original series. Okay. Disney has dropped him. Yeah, Disney, you know, since the 1930s, they've kind of shied away from all the racist stuff. Yeah, go figure that.

And Google has dropped him as well from their ad program. Basically, there's just nothing he's done. I don't know what he's going to do to make money. Well, he can start his own network and his own website and he'll probably end up on Breitbart. He's got 52 million subscribers, so it's probably more than Breitbart.

Yeah, probably. The one thing that bugged me, though, the Wired article is PewDiePie's fault shows the limits of LOLJK. Well, one of the things that first bugged me about this Wired article was it's like, hey, it pops up one of those things. It's like, hey, we know ad blockers and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah.

So I reload the page. And then another one pops up over the page saying, hey, thanks for turning off your ad blocker. Because when I first got there, Wired is not in my ad blocker. I took them out. So I see all the horrible ads on Wired. Right. Now I see all the horrible popovers that won't let me read what I'm doing because I've done exactly what they told me to do.

Can't win. No, I mean, we've talked about that in the past. The Internet is basically unusable if you leave off your ad blockers. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Yeah. They end the article and say the real PewDiePie's party's over will happen when people start clicking unsubscribe and taking away his views and things like that.

But I would like to point out that this article has like eight of his videos embedded in it. So not really practicing what you're preaching there, brother. No, no, definitely not. And apparently Google AdSense has now terminated its relationship with anti-Semitic and Holocaust denying websites after Media Matters criticism.

This is, of course, from Media Matters. Ah, yes. So I think if you took off that last sentence, that would probably be the normal headline that you would find anywhere else. So this is a good thing. I believe we talked about this in the news in the past. People were kind of upset because basically using Google AdSense, Holocaust denying websites were able to up themselves.

So if you search for the Holocaust, they came up first. This is SEO. Yeah. Woo, good times. And Google is no longer playing that game, as they shouldn't, because, you know, this is the whole false news thing that is going to be a probably the only thing that we're talking about all year.

No, I know. I don't want to talk about that. Unfortunately, we're going to have to because, you know, that's really all that's going on at this point. We can do a little of it. There's a huge battle on Internet content and what is considered free speech. So it should be interesting. Well, speaking of ads, YouTube is going to stop their horrible practice of making you sit through a 30 second ad so you can watch a 15 second clip.

Right. That's smart. Yeah. So next year, of course, they have to wait till next year. Yeah. Because I bet they probably sold all these campaigns already and can't don't want to give the money back. That's how the advertising. Yeah. They're these things are sold for at least a good five to six months ahead of time.

So, yeah. So what they're going to do is they're going to get rid of the 30 second pre-roll format and without the skip button, which is good because it's so annoying. They're still going to have 15 to 20 second ads without the option to skip. But so we're going to get a few seconds back. Clawing back our seconds piece by piece.

Seriously. So going back to the fake news thing, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6,000 word letter to publish it to the Facebook community, addressing fake news on Facebook and how to save the world through Facebook. Did you read it? The TLDR is fake news is bad.

And the best way we're going to solve this is by getting together as a community and using Facebook. Okay. I like the my personal favorite headline on this came from Gizmodo. Their headline was Mark Zuckerberg post 6,000 word status update about nothing.

Okay. So, yeah, it's a long rambling thing that basically tries to say Facebook is not a news service. Facebook is just this thing that people use. And Facebook is a tool and you can make of it what you will. And what we should strive to do is better be better people in our lives and reach out to our communities and continue to use Facebook in such a way that we are more community based and we pay attention and love each other.

Okay. Every single argument he just said is out the window when the news that is given to me is algorithmically driven. Yes. So, he really has no legs to stand on with any of his arguments about anything he's doing. I mean, there are interesting conversations to come out of this letter because you do start to understand what Zuckerberg – does he really believe it?

Probably not. But it's certainly how he's trying to position what Facebook is. But it isn't what Facebook is. I mean, it's not. It's not how people are using Facebook. People get their news from Facebook now. End of story. You are a content provider. You are a news source. You are not just a tool that people use.

Propaganda book. Exactly. And the other big news that came out this week that I thought was really funny – and again, I will classify this as fake news as well – every U.S. carrier has suddenly changed their unlimited plan this week. Everybody was getting rid of unlimited plans, which I've been screaming about since day one of this podcast.

And now, all of a sudden, because Verizon said that they're going to bring it back, everybody is bringing back unlimited plans. I'm doing air quotes here. You'll see why in a second. Yeah, well, actually, T-Mobile started the ball rolling, and then Verizon – yeah, T-Mobile started in Verizon. They're playing one unlimited upsmanship going back and forth.

Yeah, because basically, studies have come out that said there's next to no difference in terms of coverage anymore. They're all about the same. There's no real difference in quality. They all really suck. So it is what it is. So it comes down to now pricing and service offerings.

We haven't entirely killed net neutrality yet, so people can't go – Sprint can't go, we'll give you Netflix for free. And then Verizon goes, but we'll give you Spotify for free. We're not quite there yet. We're close. We're very, very close. So in the meantime, what they're doing is they're rolling back and saying that they're having unlimited plans, except – They're not.

Fucking unlimited. They are not. That is an out-and-out lie. They're throttling after you hit certain milestones in terms of bandwidth use. It's a complete and utter lie, and everybody should tweet them all the time saying, you're liars, you're liars, you're liars. Well, the thing is, if you go to the letter of the law, you can still get unlimited data.

You're just going to get it much slower. Right. That's the way that they, you know, work around the word unlimited. Right. And if DWP here said they were giving us unlimited water, and after we used the first gallon and flushed our toilet once, we basically had to wait five hours for drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip to fill up a gallon, we'd fucking – Pitch force would be out.

Yep. That's – I mean, that's exactly what it is, so. Yeah. It's not unlimited. No. Liars. Let your liar phone on fire. Bill Gates is big in the news this week because he's come out saying that since robots are taking the jobs, the robots should pay taxes.

If a worker, like, does $50,000 worth of work and the taxes on that, whatever that equals, then whoever is running the robots should pay the equal amount in taxes. I don't really have a problem with that. I actually – there is some sense of logic to that that I enjoy.

The reason this will never fly is the reason that Uber wants to fire people and replace them with robots is they want to make more money. They don't want to just then turn around and have to pay that in taxes. Yeah. The nice thing about robots is you don't have to pay for their health care. You don't have to pay. Exactly. That's the whole thing. And that's his point is it's a bigger drain on the system for everybody when everybody has to go pay for their own health care and do all that.

And, you know, it's common sense. And we've talked about it before. The funny thing now is that Bill Gates is saying and he's come out with his master robot tax plan. But the problem is you can't really quantify how much work a robot is doing if it's doing, you know, 17 different jobs at different speeds that humans are going to do.

I mean, it's kind of hard to quantify. Look, and this has to somehow tie in with the universal basic income that we've talked about. There should be some sort of – I get a flat robot tax. I don't know what we're going to do. But, I mean, like Bill Gates said, and, you know, this is where I get upset about the process of headlines and things like that.

Sure, Bill Gates wants to tax robots is kind of what he was talking about. But the key sentence in this thing is – here's what he said. People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won't shape it for positive things it can do.

So, basically, he's floating an idea but saying we've got to sort something out. Yeah. And I agree. We're at that tipping point where – I mean, all the studies are basically saying we're going to lose tens of millions of jobs in the next five years. And we have nothing to replace them with. And people are going to get screwed big time.

Well, here's the funny part about that is, you know, if you run the – I'm not – I'm no economist. But, yeah, you know, there might be factories pumping out, you know, new goods made by robots. But if the people don't have any money to buy them, what's the point? Yeah. Well, I mean, at some point, yeah, you're up your own ass and you're screwed.

So, you can't sell anything to anybody because nobody has a job. We've got to sort this out. I don't mind the idea of a robot tax. You know, who the hell knows how that would actually work. But, yeah, I agree. People need to start talking about it. People weren't even talking about universal basic income until, I feel like, last year.

And then some economists are going, hey, everybody, we've got to start at least talking about this. Same thing with what we're going to do with robots. Well, they're doing it in the EU. Yes. And they're calling for new robot laws and ethical frameworks for development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots, including self-driving cars.

But they did shoot down a robot tax on owners to fund support for retraining of workers that were put out of jobs by the robots. They said, no, we're not going to do it. Yes, said the Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robots. Robotics. Robotics.

The IFR believes that the idea to introduce a robot tax would have a very negative impact on competitiveness and employment. Whose side are you on, Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics? It sounds like Bill Gates is on the side of humans and you're on the side of robots, damn it. Yeah, that's not really a nonpartisan federation name there.

No, it's just, no, it's really not. You know, and just, you know, as an aside, it sounds like this is going to be complicated. I think there's going to be more than three laws of robotics. Yeah. I think we're going to be well over three. We're probably, Asimov did not have space to put in the three million laws of robotics.

Law number four, thou must pay 20%. Thou must tivy. I saw this on TechCrunch and I was scratching my head because I was like, what is this? And it's an article about Richard Hammond talking about his startup called Drive Tribe. What do you mean?

This is the first you've heard of it because ever since the new Top Gear, which is what I'm going to continue to call it forever, ever since the Grand Tour launch, I liked them on Facebook and I followed them on Twitter. Basically, anytime a show premieres, they basically blast social media with pushes to Drive Tribe.

Oh, see, I have no desire or reason to follow a television show's Facebook or Twitter. Well, if you want to discuss the show with them after the show, go to Drive Tribe and pay them money. Oh, there you go. They've got 12 million bucks in funding, which is insane. And I went to the site.

I went to go check it out and I don't know if you've seen it yet, but. It's WordPress, isn't it? No, well, it's Pinterest for cars is what it basically is. Right, right. And it does one of those things that drives me nuts. It's an infinite scroller.

Yep. So there's no footer links anywhere, but there's also no links in the header. So there's no about, there is no support. There's only a join, a join in a search. That's it. That's all you can do there. So I don't even know what the hell the site is, except a bunch of blocks with things about cars in it.

That tells you exactly what the site is, Jason. Keep it simple. Stupid on the navigation. There's one button. Give us money. Oh, my God. The Snapchatification of the web is here. Yeah. Speaking of driving, though, let's talk about Uber for a second. Oh, no. See, that's not me.

I did not put these. Actually, I had all these links. Jason just beat me to it. Of course. Yeah. CEO Jeff Jones did a Q&A on Facebook and answered basically nothing that anybody asked him and just sent them a bunch of links and cut it short and ran out of the room. Well, this has gone about as well as any of the senators and the House representatives doing town halls at the moment who think that the people are going to show up to blow crystal dust up their ass.

And instead, they get the angry neighbors with pitchforks. This is exactly what happened. A bunch of drivers showed up to say, hey, we know you want to fire us. What are you going to do for us? Yep. No answers. Yeah. One of them said, the only thing you made clear to the majority of us is that you don't have any productive answers.

You made it crystal clear that Uber does not care about its drivers. Way to go, Jeff Jones. Yep. Well, we've been telling you that for three years now. So and in other news, an ex Uber CEO, David Ploof, he got busted by the Chicago, Chicago City's Board of Ethics for basically emailing Rahm Emanuel and asking him to do a bunch of stuff without actually saying that he was a lobbyist.

He didn't register for lobbyist status. I was not aware that one had to register. Apparently one does. So you must you must have your lobbyist hat on before you can send send your email. I'd like to blow some people, some investigative reporters over to Miralago and see how many of those people are registered as lobbyists.

Yeah, no doubt. Do they fill out that paperwork for you when you buy your two hundred thousand dollar a year buy in for that? Yeah, well, that's a different story altogether. OK. But they got Uber got busted for, yeah, 90 grand. And they said they work hard to ensure our registrations are accurate and up to date.

We regret in this instance, in this instance, we made a mistake and we will comply with the board's assessment. But here's the rub. They contested the fine and said it should have only been a thousand dollars. Of course they did. Yeah. But Rahm Emanuel at least came out and said the ethics board did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Oh, good. And David should actually he should have known better anyways. He was Barack Obama's former campaign manager. It's not like he's not aware of these sorts of loops and hoops that you have to get through. So, right. But I mean, he probably thought Rahm's a buddy, so he doesn't have to go through that process.

Well, I guess you do. Butter emails. See, here's the thing. Uber just sucks at getting licenses and filling out paperwork. They just can't fill out paperwork. They have no one there with a pen. So somebody get you get Uber a pen. I think they need to retrain all their drivers to become basically like a court court notices and things like that.

So just start learning your paperwork. Yeah. Become a process server. Become a notary. That's that's that's how Uber is going to hire you back. Moving on to your other favorite topic, Airbnb. They're being sued by a Denver based landlord because they're saying that Airbnb is helping tenants break its no short term rental rule.

You think? Yeah. And also that they're they're worried about the longer term residents, their safety and their comfort because, you know, the transients create unsafe conditions for other tenants and they have suffered loss of income, property damage, nuisance and disturbance. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is Airbnb's business model.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. We have a clause. I own in a complex and, you know, it's all they're all owners here and we have a clause in our in our homeowners association agreement that says we can't do any short term leasing. All right. You shouldn't. It's you know, it's it is messed up.

So my position is clear. Yes. It has been crystal clear for coming on four years now. Yeah. So we've been talking a lot about Facebook and how people are addicted to it. And, you know, it's everybody's on it on their phone all the time and everybody's on it when they're at their computer at work and tablets.

And now it's also an app available for Apple TV and Amazon Fire, because when you're trying to watch a TV show, why wouldn't you just flip over and look at Facebook instead? You know, at least it'll be it's better on your neck. So you're not looking down at your phone. I suppose that's true. Yes. It's lean back technology, not lean in technology is.

Steve Jobs would say, but it's still shit. And I'm not putting it anywhere near my Apple TV. No, I'm not putting it on any of that either. I do not need to watch that already. And isn't everybody like sitting and watching TV with their cell phone anyways in their hand? That seems to be the thing. So yeah, pretty much.

I don't understand the point, but good on them. Well, my phone's in my hand when I have my Apple TV because their remote sucks so bad. So I use my phone as my remote. Yeah, that's I do that as well. We have been looking into recently ways to control our entire TV setups with Amazon Alexa.

All of them have crashed and burned horribly thus far. There may be a solution. It ain't cheap. This one's 400 bucks. Yo, it's called Kavo. And according to Recode, it's a stealth company. I don't know what that is. Well, it's not that stealth if it's on Recode.

This is true. A stealth company. It was founded by some of the guys that were involved with the sling media, who made the sling box, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. It's an interesting looking device. I don't know if you've looked at it yet in the article.

It's retro. It's like wood grain with silver knobs. I'm not entirely sure how many people that's going to appeal to. Hipsters. Hipsters, I get. Well, yeah, 400 bucks is what they call premium but approachable. I call super goddamn expensive. Lots of skinny jeans for $399.

Yeah, the idea is that you basically plug everything into this. It's got Ethernet port, two USB ports, power port, IR extension cable. And then you're just supposed to basically plug. You can plug in your Roku, your Apple TV, your Fire TV, your cable box, everything through there.

And it takes over and becomes a master interface that allows you to control all of it directly through the one master interface. And then supposedly it also works with Alexa. But anytime anybody says it works with Alexa, I just assume it means you can turn it on and off. And that's about it. Yeah. And that's one of the things I haven't even been able to get that to do.

So, yeah. So, I don't know. I'm not going to drop 400 bucks on this to figure out if it works or not. But I'll keep my eye on it. Yeah. I'm still stinging from the blumpy box or whatever it was. Oh, I have 60 bucks. Yeah. I mean, it was just like I could have just burned it for what that thing does.

It still works pretty well for me as a remote. It doesn't work well with Alexa. Yeah. Yeah. So, the downside of trying to pimp your personal stuff online if you're a celebrity or, you know, even if you're just a normal person. Just a normal person at home, you know, we've said since day one, don't take obvious photos of your house and then post you're going on vacation.

Yeah. Don't take photos of your rare, you know, baseball card collection with the address of your house in the background. Lannis Morissette got hit on this, basically. I'd like to state for the record that at one point in time, yes, I did run her social media, but that was a long time ago and I never would have allowed this to be posted.

She posted an awful lot of photos of very expensive jewelry that she owns and her house is, unfortunately, a public record out there. So, somebody basically robbed her. Well, they broke into her house and stole all the jewelry that she posted Instagram pictures of. So, she has $2 million worth of jewelry, but not ADT?

Apparently not. Okay. Well, yeah. Well, now you can go be her security expert once she gets her insurance money. And there's a case to be made for you to run her social media again. One would think. Yes. So, I would have been like, no, let's not post that, especially not with the photo of the surf outside.

Then you can then triangulate exactly where your house is. Finding the house is probably not the hard part. She probably posted, hey, going to the Grammys. Yeah. Something like that. So, anyways, she's had a bit of a rough financial two years. Yeah, no doubt. Oh, well.

Pornhub has launched an online sex education center because no one else is doing it. Yeah, I heard this was going around for a while, but. Look, I have a degree of respect for Pornhub as a company. First off, they always do funny things around elections, around holidays, et cetera.

They're always doing something hilarious. And, hey, now they've launched a center dedicated to educating people about sexuality and sexual health because of the poor standards of sex and relationship education that are out there. Because everybody's learning everything from watching porn.

So, here's our sex education center. Go have sex and turn off Pornhub. Go learn how to do it. That would be helpful. So, they say the free site will feature original editorial content on an assortment of topics from an array of esteemed doctors, therapists, community leaders, and experts.

And, unlike many sex ed resources online, all the contributors to the site are actual qualified medical experts. Oh, there you go. So, there you go. Chinese drone maker Ehang, or Ehang, which is a penis enlargement company for your iPhone. They're providing Dubai with the world's first self-flying taxis this summer.

Yeah, I saw this. Did you watch the video? Yes, I watched the video. Ain't no way I'm getting in that damn thing. What could possibly go wrong? Considering that the blades are at knee level as you're getting into it. And this guy was, like, stepping into it while the blades were still running. Oh, this thing.

No. Honestly, if you're, you have to go to the show notes, gog.show slash 197, and click on the link and watch the video. Because this thing is terrifying. It is terrifying. Let's put, yeah, the blades down below is frightening. Yeah.

Yeah, no. Not in a million years would I get in this thing. And the one thing it could probably use, which I didn't see anywhere, because it probably takes up weight, and they don't want to have that, would be a parachute. Yeah, I didn't see anything like that either. In related Chinese want to kill us all news, a power company in China has developed a drone that spews fire.

Yeah, it looks great. I want one. Yeah. What could go wrong with this, Jason? The idea, this is a power company that wants to get all the trash hanging from them, because apparently that's a huge problem in China. So these terrifying drones that basically have a flamethrower attached to them have been developed to go around and burn trash off of wires.

Yeah, and these power lines must be seriously insulated. Don't they burn the power lines as well? Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like, hmm. So what you got to do is you got to take your old Converse and make some thermite shoelaces and throw those over the wire.

So when the drone comes by to burn the shoes down, it catches the thermite on fire and then cuts the high voltage wire in half. Yeah, that shoe barber's got nothing on that. Security? Ha! We're doing this one old school this week.

Sadly, Dave Bittner could not join us because they decided to cut down a bunch of trees in my yard on Friday when we usually do our show. And there was just a little bit too much noise. So sadly, Dave will have to join us next week and tell us about the RSA conference, which I'm dying to hear about. I'm sure he'll have lots of news.

Yep. But definitely still check out the Cyber Wire podcast. Links will be in the show notes. There's a great article on Krebs on Security, which I just I love for just a couple of little things here. He's always, you know, roaming the dark web, trying to find different places where you can buy nefarious goods and data.

Well, somebody's got to do it. Yeah. He found a particular shop, which he won't name because he doesn't want to give them any press. Good on you. Wish some people like Wired would do that every now and again when they're talking about people they don't like and they found raw W-2 tax form data on more than 3,600 Americans, virtually all of whom reside in Florida.

Oh, OK. Bunch of retirees, probably. Most likely. Yeah. The data has employer name, or yeah, taxpayers, employer name, employer ID address, taxpayer address, social security number and information about their wages and taxes withheld. Now, here's the great part.

Each W-2 costs the Bitcoin equivalent of between four and 20 bucks. OK, that's it. That's it. That's that's nothing. That is nothing. And if you're already good at doing this tax refund scam. This is a bargain. You're losing money if you don't buy it.

I know. What a deal. What a deal. Keep an eye on your your data people, especially if you're in Florida. Yes, I guess. I guess. SMTP. We use it all the time. Everybody uses it, but nobody knows what it is or how to configure it.

Yeah, it's it's basically what runs email for us all. And they are going to be running or rolling out SMTP strict transport security. OK. On all of the majors, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo's not a major anymore. Comcast.

I don't know if I would call them a major email provider because everybody gets one. Nobody uses it. I've seen like one person that use it. And that was my stepmom until I made her use her her her God given email address, which that meaning the one I gave her. So she's all better now.

But it should be rolling out later, later this year, which would be a good thing, because what it does is it keeps track of the certificate from end to end. So it makes man in the middle attacks much harder, which is kind of what the NSA was doing for a long time with the unencrypted data between the data centers. Remember, remember back in the good old days when the Snowden leaks were all we had to worry about?

Oh, yes. So these guys are actually taking an active role to secure everybody's email, which good on you. Good on you. That'd be nice. There was another Yahoo breach this week, but I couldn't find any good numbers on how big it was. Everybody stopped caring. Yeah. It's like you already gave away everybody's who's left over a billion people's information out there already.

So what you got last five? Yes. It's the new hires that week or the janitorial staff. Who knows? I found a great article on naked security and it's called your computer is a cookie that you cannot delete.

OK. A long time ago, we talked about fingerprinting when it came to using the canvas method in JavaScript because you get all sorts of data and what people were doing then was using your font list. Oh, well, nowadays they get so much more information, even cross browser, cross cookies.

You don't even need cookies anymore. Yeah. It's so easy because there's so much identifying information that is unique to you on your computer that you should just give up. You know, they give you some some options on how to kind of get around it. But at this point, it's kind of given up the ghost because the browsers are just so open to giving information for every nook and cranny.

And as a developer, I understand why I understand why. It's just these people are using it for nefarious purposes. Right. So I highly recommend reading it. It's a longer article, but it's a really good primer on what it all is, how it works. And if you're interested in that sort of thing, which I think our audience might be.

You'd think. Mm hmm. The other week, and I'm just going to go with the name Sid because I'm not going to try his last name. This this made the news everywhere. Sid, who is an employee of NASA's JPL laboratory here in California, had been on a personal trip to South America pursuing his hobby of racing solar powered cars, because that's what you do when you work for JPL.

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. So, you know, he is an international traveler, travels all the time, came back home to go back to work at JPL, flew back from Chile to the airport in Houston, Texas, the George Bush International, and was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and pressured to give the agents his phone and access pin to his phone, which should be illegal.

The phone was issued by NASA. It may have contained sensitive material that wasn't supposed to be shared. His phone was eventually returned to him after being searched, and he does not know exactly what information officials may have taken from the device. OK, pro tip. They took it all. Yeah. Guaranteed they took it all. So this is a citizen, natural born U.S. citizen.

He's also enrolled in the global entry program, which is the same thing that I have also enrolled in. So you've already gone through massive background checks to have expedited entry into the country. I'm guessing the name and face coloring basically led to the idea that we should basically break into this guy's phone.

Oh, profiling. Hmm. Go figure. Profiling. But this is a citizen. Again, global entry. He's already been vetted. So and even if he wasn't, why the hell would I give you access to my phone? That's insane. So this is happening. So some tips. Yeah. Go for it, Jason.

OK, Wired's got a guide to getting past customs with your digital privacy intact. They give you a couple of different things. We'll run through them real quick. Lock down your devices. Make sure all your passwords and stuff are set there. And honestly, don't even take your phone with you anymore. Seriously, don't.

Actually, the absolute best bit of advice I've heard about this and how to deal with it now is you buy a burner phone. That's it. Yeah. And you take that with you and you leave your phone locked up at home in a fireproof safe. Yeah. They've got a couple other ones. Keep password secret. Duh. Phone home.

Let them know where you are and where you're going in case your phone gets taken and things like that. Related. Don't post photos of your expensive stuff in your house and then post on Facebook that you're taking a trip. Yeah. Well, yeah, we know all about that one or especially don't post on somebody else's phone stuck in customs and then they can stay longer and take more stuff.

True. Make a travel kit with basically the burner phone and stuff like that and deny yourself access, which is the last one, which means change your password. And so you don't know it or use like two factor auth, but set it to a phone that you like leave at home because everybody has multiple phones.

Yeah. Yeah. Rich people problems. There's some good stuff in here. I would pick and choose on this one because I don't think they're all that great. But the best thing you do, get a burner phone, buy a SIM card when you get there and maybe remember some people's phone numbers like we used to do in the old days.

Yeah, that would be good. So, yeah. Yeah. Related. Lifehacker has a privacy enthusiast's guide to using an iPhone. This isn't specifically for travel. This is this ranges from a lot of overlap with that article for people that are super into crazy privacy and are traveling to just the kind of basics of what you should have done in the first place.

So if you have an iPhone, go take a look at this. Run through the system settings for sure. At the very least, you can get super into it in terms of what you should be using for password managers, one password, what you should be using for VPNs. Go to a grumpy old geeks dot com and a bunch of other stuff.

So it's this is all no no shit Sherlock sort of stuff, but I guarantee a lot of people don't do it. So, yeah, it's no shit Sherlock stuff for us. But for most people, yeah, it's not because most people don't travel internationally, so they wouldn't get caught up in this. But nowadays, if you are going to travel and who knows, maybe nowadays you might just be flying from Chicago to L.A.

and they might ask for your phone. Who knows anymore? We don't know. All the rules are out the window. Yay, thank God we're changing things up, draining that swamp. And in some Android news, people are actually still installing Flash on their Android phones.

Flash has not been made by Adobe for Android for five years. How much money you want to bet that Flash is installed on a certain phone that's in Florida right now by a certain someone? Oh, and I bet there's also a dedicated video player for viewing adult movies, too, which is the second biggest vector for getting malware on an Android phone.

Well, obviously there is. I mean, we've been exhorted to go find the one about that beauty queen that he swears was in an adult movie, even though she wasn't. And, you know, when you when you when you need a Russian bride, you have to be able to view the videos from from there. You know, that's just that's a no-brainer.

No-brainer. No-brainer. So, yeah, if you have an Android phone and you have installed Flash in the last five years. Sad. Please go check it and uninstall it. And I actually just wipe your phone because it's already owned. Still haven't managed to finish a book, but this time I blame the fact that every time for the past three days I sat down at 930 p.m. to start reading.

I woke up at 630 in the morning and don't remember anything that happened in between then. I may have finished the book. I don't know. So I'm going to continue on and then I'll be ready for next week. But in the meantime, let Jason's Neil Gaiman Suckathon begin. No, it's a it's a wonderful parade of Neil.

His new book, Norse Mythology, is out and it's awesome. I loved it. He retells all of the old stories from the Norse gods and they're fun. It's a really fun read. It's not that long and I really enjoyed it. I've been waiting for this book for a while. I had it in the queue for a bit and then finally sat down and listened to it and it was very good.

I definitely enjoyed it quite a bit. Brian obviously won't. So. Nope. I don't know. I don't know what you have against the guy except for his wife. I don't have anything against him. I just don't love him the way that you do. I like certain books by him, but not all.

And I'm definitely not very interested in reading about his take on Norse mythology. OK, well, did you ever read Neverwhere? I did. You didn't like it? That one was a rough one for me. OK, well, then you'll definitely not like The Seven Sisters, the sequel to Neverwhere, which we've been waiting for for 25 years, which will be coming out soon.

So, yeah, that's OK. That's good. Yeah, I like Neil Gaiman sometimes. It's fine. It's no Dune. It's no Dune. I agree with you there, Jason. It is no Dune. Dune 1742, written by the late descendants of Frank Herbert.

Now, I freely admit that those suck. I just there's some it's like I have some sort of geus on me that forces me to read them. I don't get it. I don't get it either. Ups and doodads. Now, we were just talking about getting burner phones a few segments ago.

I found the ultimate burner phone to get because Nokia Nokia is reintroducing the 3310. This is the phone that cannot die. It is the phone that cannot die, which I don't know. I guess the only reason that they would need to reintroduce it is because the SIM cards don't fit anymore, because otherwise I bet all of the old ones still work just fine.

They probably do. I'm almost positive I saw someone using one yesterday. So these are going to be coming out for 62 bucks, hopefully very soon. I'm going to get one just for old time's sake and keep it keep it around. Make this your travel phone, people. Yeah. Although there are cheaper phones that you can get.

This one is just kind of fun. I just like this one because if they took this one at customs, I might be kind of sad. The only thing I would install on it is Snake. I love that game on that phone. There in the press release, nobody knows if Snake is still going to be installed on it. So we can hope. It better be. It better be. We can hope.

We can hope. Amazon this week released Chime, which is a competitor for our loveliest of lovelies, Skype. If you're a podcaster or anybody who's ever used Skype, you know that it's the worst of the worst of the worst. Yep.

Unfortunately, we tested Chime this week and yeah, it's terrible too. It's actually worse. The audio quality is much worse than Skype. And it's got a long ways to go. So for a first round app, it's okay.

Gets the job done. But all in all, though, it was a huge disappointment. That's a drag. Yep. Well, you know what wasn't a disappointment. Fruit juice, Jason. Upon your recommendation, I have purchased fruit juice after using it for a week for free. Uh-huh. Because they give you that option.

This is the best thing ever. Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, I can't really tell you if it's actually working or doing anything. I'm just going on faith on that one. But hopefully my battery will last a hell of a lot longer. It's a super cool, easy-to-use interface. It tells you how long you should unplug your laptop every day for and then plug it back in.

You do a maintenance cycle, so it kind of sorts out what's going on. These people, I want this. You guys start developing. I want this for my phone. I want this for my iPhone. I want this for my iPad. I want you to help me maintain my batteries there. Well, what we need to do now is we need them to just get bought by Apple and be subsumed.

Yes, and become part of the OS. Yes. Or just have Apple steal it like they did with Flux. Which is probably what will happen to you guys, so sorry about that. But you got my money. I'm supporting you. Yeah, you got my money, too. I use it every day. Yeah. And yes, I have used it for one hour and 51 minutes today.

I've got 21 more minutes to go, but I'm not going to do it while we're in the middle of a show. Yeah, I've got an hour and 20 to go, and I was going to do it in the middle of the show, then I realized you'd yell at me. Yes, I would. There's a Gmail plugin out there that will help you do the emotional labor of writing emails. And it's called emotional labor.

And it will add phrases like, hey, lovely, I've been thinking of you to your outbound emails. Now, I can see this is fairly useful for sociopaths who have no emotions. Well, first off, I think everybody would be really freaked out if they got an email from me that said, hello, lovey.

I think so, too. I would definitely be. I'd be like, oh, oh, Brian's hit the scotch. That's about it. No, I would. No, I get surly after the scotch. Oh, that's true. It'd be, hey, hey, fuck nuts. Well, that's actually. Oh, that's normal. That's normal.

I'm going to go write the grumpy old geeks emotional labor plugin. It's called, hey, fuck nuts. There's another one I found called Grammarly. This has been out for a long time, but I gave it a shot this week. It automatically shows what you're writing and will give you suggestions to make it more grammatically correct because a friend of the show, Bob, is a grammar Nazi.

And I don't use that term lightly. It's true. He is. So anything that I can do to go to battle with Bob with, I prefer. But I haven't needed it that much. I guess all the years of getting yelled at by Bob have actually made my grammar better.

I have noticed, though, I have noticed on the snippets from articles that we get from the mainstream media that we paste into our show notes, a lot of them are highlighted. They could be a lot better. So, yeah, well, the the government could also use that. I don't know if you've posted in any of their releases.

No, that would be fine. We should try that. Yeah, there's a lot of the Betsy Davos School of Education going on over there. So, oh, my God. Now, I found a demo this week by my friend Kevin Rose for the June oven.

Yes, this is a smart oven. Well, let's say it's a toaster oven, basically. It's a it's yeah, basically it's well, no, not basically. It is. It is. It is a toaster oven of the future. It is a fifteen hundred dollar toaster oven.

It's a toaster oven with Wi-Fi with a touch screen on the front with a display. On it edge to edge glass, completely insulated so you can touch it without burning your little fingers. It's got a camera inside so it can tell what the food is that you just shoved into it.

Yes, because I forgot already that I put a steak in there. Well, the thing is, it cooks it for you. So you just stick the little probe and it tells you when to flip the meat and then you take it out and you eat it. It doesn't flip it for you for fifteen hundred bucks. That's what I was thinking. Why did they not build it like a little rotating thing?

Because then it would be twenty five hundred bucks. Oh, OK. Gotcha. Here's my conundrum with this. If you are smart enough to have made enough money to spend fifteen hundred dollars on a fucking toaster oven, are you not smart enough to cook a steak? Apparently not. OK. I can't imagine that this is going to go well.

Here's the thing. It's made by a bunch of Apple engineers. Well, of course it is. That's why it's fifteen hundred dollars. Yes. The iBake. They should have just called it the iBake. I don't know why it's called the June, but I wasn't going to spend that much more time on it. We've got Kevin's review in the notes, which is pretty in depth.

Yeah. And the steak does look good, but I'm not spending fifteen hundred bucks on a fucking toaster oven. I'm also not going to spend any money on Kayla, a network connected doll that's spies on children, A, because I don't have any children to spy on, and B, I would probably be shoved in jail for some kind of crime for buying a doll.

This would not be good. Apparently, this is in Germany, your land. Yeah. They've told people to destroy the Kayla. Destroy. Yes. Because it phones home and people can just basically spy on your kids.

Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. The German Federal Network Agency, the basically said that this doll's pretty messed up and you probably don't want to have this around a kid. It can. It's not terribly different from an Amazon Echo. Not at all. It responds to user questions by accessing the Internet.

If a child asks the doll, what is a little horse called? The doll could then reply, it's called a foal or es heißt foalen. I just wanted to show off some German there. Okay. I'm sure you didn't look that up at all and find the pronunciation for it.

I didn't do the pronunciation. I did make sure that I actually got the words correct. Okay. Does it protect against daddy? What's a reach around? I'm not doing that in German. Okay. Andy. Around gerichen. I'm 99% sure that's not correct.

I got an email to join a new private network, Jason, this week. Mixer, the private network for creatives. Ah, you're management, dude. You're not creative. Wendy's a creative one. Ah, I used to be creative. I don't want to be creative anymore. I want to be management, so. But yeah, Mixer, the private network for creatives.

I took a look at joinmixer.com and said, ah, no thanks. Oh, so you're not going to mix it up. Well, I don't think you really need another network, A. Nope. And B, you're a stay-at-home dad now, so who are you going to network with? The other stay-at-home dad.

But it can still be called Mixer, meaning we go meet for a mixer for lunch and mix our drinks. Okay, well, then you'd have to remove the E. You can only have one vowel. You can make the I a swizzle stick and get rid of the E. Ooh, that's nice. I think we just made a new app. See, I'm a creative. They should invite me.

Well, you can just go to joinmixer.com. I don't believe you actually need an invite. Okay. Well, there is one that you do need an invite for. It's the John Voight Social Network. It has to be a Voight. And everybody gets to go make fun of his daughter on it.

I saw this on the new episode of Billions, which actually premieres – well, by the time this airs, it will have premiered yesterday. On season two, episode one, it's called Raya. Okay. What's that? And it is an exclusive platform for people in the creative industries. Wait, hold on.

Mixer is the private network for creatives. Raya is an exclusive platform for people in creative industries. Haven't anybody figured out that there is no market for limited social networks? No, I guess not. Guess not. Okay. Well, these people got big props on Billions, so I think they'll probably win over Mixer.

People are going to be searching around. Who's Raya? I don't know. I don't know either. I'm a little terrified by one sentence in their pitch here. Our application process, reviewed by an anonymous global committee, exists to maintain that ideal.

Fuck no. The Black Tribunal will tell you if you can be Raya. The Star Chamber. That's who I was thinking of, the Star Chamber. That movie doesn't have legs. Oh, really? No.

That's sad. Okay. Finally, because Snapchat is about to be worth $40 billion, even though they only have 158 million people who use Snapchat on a daily basis, and nobody really understands how it works, and they didn't actually collect registration data for the first three years they were in existence.

They don't really have demographics on the vast majority of their regular hardcore users, but yet they're still worth $4 to $5 billion, $22 billion. Oh, my shit. That's like a billion dollars per person that they actually have registration data on, I think. Anyways, the point being, they're now about to be worth that much money, and they're going public, so they've created a how-to-use Snapchat video for Wall Street.

So you can learn how to swipe around their nonexistent interface. I went and watched a little bit of it this morning, and it was so mind-numbingly boring. The fact that they actually believe that showing somebody how to vomit a rainbow is going to be worth a couple more billion dollars in their pockets is frightening to me.

But, hey, it's not my world. They're winning, not me.

Media candy. We have discussed in the past couple of weeks that there's no real taking – or there is taking sides politically. There's no straddling the fence at this point in time in the world. You go after one group or you go after the other.

Apparently, this is true even for TV. Jimmy Fallon has basically been straddling the line. He's not taking a side. In fact, he actually got in some degree of trouble for normalizing President Trump by playing with his hair. Yeah, but did you see his show this week? I did not.

He has finally taken a side. Whose side is he on? He's on our side, Brian. He's a resister? He's a resister. Well, this could be because Stephen Colbert is starting to beat the crap out of him in ratings, and Stephen Colbert has definitely picked a side. So that's what this story is about from the Washington Post.

The anti-Trump experiment is starting to work. So Colbert has been very anti-Trump for quite a while, including – if you watch the show that he did for the election, it's almost painful. Oh, man. Yeah, he's almost in tears. Yeah, so it's a good show, but here's the – I mean, this is definitely pointing out what we've been talking about, which is you can't straddle the fence anymore.

People don't like it. You've got to pick a side one way or the other, so you're Breitbart or Sane. Your choice. Okay. Well, yeah, he's been knocking it out of the park. They've been pretty funny. This one I put in for you because you're the Stephen King fan, which I don't understand. I'm a huge Stephen King fan, except I'm not a fan of Stephen King's series or movies most of the time.

Oh, he's got a new series coming on Hulu. Oh, yeah. Okay. With J.J. Abrams. This is their second collaboration. What was the first? 11.22.63, which would be November 22nd, 1963. I added it to my Hulu queue – or I'm sorry, they use Watchlist.

I can never keep up with which service has which bucket for my shit to go in. On the website, it only gave me an option for the first episode, and there was a link to buy – like, spend more money to get the rest of them. And I'm like, I'm already spending money with Hulu, so I'm going to have to check the Hulu app, which works about 30% of the time lately.

It almost never loads properly. I've got to restart it three or four times. Craps out in the middle of a show, and God forbid you want to pause, fast-forward, or rewind, and then you're just – no. It just – it ain't happening. So the Hulu app has been really causing problems.

And I tried it on the Roku and on the Apple TV with the same results. So this would be a back-end issue. Right. Okay. Yeah, I don't actually have Hulu, so I'll never see this anyways. But I did like the book that the original Hulu series that they did was based on. So with J.J. Abrams involved, maybe I should go back and take a look at that.

But I don't really – it doesn't seem that this new series is based on any specific book. It looks like it's going to just be some sort of new thing, which will be interesting. Yeah, because did you watch the teaser trailer? No. No, I did not. The teaser trailer is basically just a bunch of names from other shows.

Yeah, because so many of his stories are kind of based in the same geographical area and world. So that makes sense. But we'll see. Well, I won't see because I don't have Hulu. Well, there's always Sweden. There is always Sweden. Apple is getting in the original content game.

And boy, does their first offering sound like a doozy. I thought you were going to say a douchey because it looks like that too. Planet of the apps. We have a bunch of people that don't have enough money already. Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Will.i.am all who are worth ridiculous amounts of money telling people why their app ideas are terrible.

This is just what the world needed. Well, there's technically four people on there. Don't forget Gary Vaynerchuk because he's the actual Gary Vaynerchuk who was the only guy in there with a brain. So. Well, they could have had us for cheap. Yes, they could have. But they got Gary instead.

Gary is a good guy. And I like him. He's been on. He's been on all my shows that I've worked on. So, yeah. So I have zero interest in the show and probably will not be watching it. But I do. I mean, just here's the level of writing that's involved. Instead of an elevator pitch, developers and entrepreneurs make an escalator pitch.

Yes. While on an actual escalator. Oh, this is a winner. I watched the trailer and I got a third of the way through and then I kind of scrubbed a little bit because I'm like, no, this is this is like ghetto shark tank.

Yeah. Not even close. And and they, you know, show them working on the apps. I do not want to watch a TV show where I watch people work in an in an industry that I ran screaming and kicking from. So, no. Yeah, I agree. So an important news for us, except for the fact that there's absolutely no news whatsoever in this entire statement.

Any Q is now working over at Apple on the podcast area and is saying that Apple is working on new features for podcasts. What new features? We have no idea. When will they come? We don't know. Are they interested in podcasts? Sure, we are. Are they full of crap? Sure, they are.

They are working on it. There have been job listings for other positions. And I do know some people on the inside that they are there. They're staffing up in on the podcast team, which is good. Yes, it's good. I get stats would be nice. Can we get play stats, please? Something like that.

Pay for play would actually make a lot of sense, too. No, no, it makes no sense. No. OK, it doesn't make sense. Sure. It doesn't make sense. Well, everybody, it's the old paywall problem. You know, nobody pays for it. There are tons of people making a living doing it. Who?

God. All right, Mr. Podcaster. Yeah, tell me. Give me a name. Give me a name. Let me do research right now. Let's pause the podcast. Give me five minutes and I'll come back to you with a whole shitload of names, Jason. OK, next week. I want the names. I'll cut you a break right now.

But oh, thanks for cutting me a break. Yeah. Sorry. It's my it's my field. Motherfucker. It's your field. My field. Motherfucker. I know. I know. Whatever. This 10 hour recording of the Arctic icebreaker noises is much better than listening to our podcast. Ninety nine percent of the time. Actually, I'm sorry. It's the year's best ambient album.

I listen to it. I like it. It's good. Yeah, this was on Boing Boing like three weeks ago, so I skipped it, but I did listen to like a few minutes of it. But the problem was I couldn't download it from any of the YouTube scraper services because it's too damn long. So I can't listen to it while I sleep because I'm not going to leave my laptop there because fruit juice will yell at me.

That's true. Fruit juice would yell at you. You don't want that. Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins are reuniting, which I'm very excited about, as Pop Tone. Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins, of course, originally from Bauhaus. They were both in Tones on Tail together. They were also both in Love and Rockets together. Kevin Haskins brother, David Jay, being the third member of Love and Rockets and also originally in Bauhaus is not coming back.

We don't know why. But Kevin Haskins daughter, Diva, is a bass player, so she will be coming in and playing bass and they will be touring and playing music from all of the previous groups that they were in, which is very exciting stuff. Do you have your tickets yet? Details have not been released. I actually just found out today that their first show will be at a studio space here called...

Well, I'm not going to tell people because I want to make sure I get my tickets. Never mind. I was going to say, I was going to have to like bleep it if you said it just to save you from yourself. I'm like, maybe the cold meds aren't working too well if he's going to actually name the secret spot. I almost said where it was going to be. I can't do that.

So they will be announcing a full tour this summer, though. So I highly recommend going and seeing them. I'm sure they'll hit Chicago, Jason. So this would be well worth it, I think. Yes, I won't be going, but I'm glad they're coming. OK. I know many people that will go. I just don't like going to shows anymore. I'm too damn old.

You're an old man. Yeah. After after doing Riot Fest and a couple of local shows, I'm just like, you know what? I've been there, done that. I don't care anymore. OK. I did watch Gringo, The Dangerous Life of John McAfee this week. Well, one of us had to. How'd it go? Holy shit. You should definitely watch this because I think you will get a kick out of it.

The problem with talking about this documentary is you can't say anything about it without ruining the unbelievable holy shit moments that come with it. All right. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. But yeah, it's you honestly head over to Sweden, grab a copy or go to showtime.com and get their free trial for 14 or 30 some days and watch it for free.

Yeah, it really it. It was so much better than I thought it was going to be that I just I tell everybody about it. Now you've got to go watch this thing. I feel like this is something I should watch while I'm still on cold meds. Oh, yeah, definitely.

OK. All right. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. It's enlightening in many, many very, very unexpected ways. So anyway, Weird Al is finally coming out with Squeezebox, the complete works of Weird Al.

14 albums and a bonus album containing unreleased and rare tracks. It'll be coming out later this year in November. But he has released a new track called Pac-Man, the parody of Taxman by the Beatles. Nice. And I liked it. I thought it was cute. So the video will for that will be in the show notes.

Check it out. And definitely, if you're a Weird Al fan, order up. Who isn't? I mean, Weird Al is a is an institution at this point. He really is. This moron of the week is for you, Brian. Robert De Niro is the moron of the week.

Something I never thought I would say. Yeah, he's had this tendency for a long time, unfortunately. The fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is so into this movement is disturbing to me as well. So what it is, is Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have announced a $100,000 challenge to prove the safety of vaccines.

We need a debate, Kennedy declared. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, there has been a debate. The scientists won, period. Yeah. Hey, this is one of those this is one of those issues that got us a one star rating and people yelling at us before we were anti-Trump. Ah, yes.

Yeah. Now we just get anti-Trump one stars. I actually went through our ratings and I was quite proud of all our one stars. Yeah, if we're going to do it, do it right. Do it right. Exactly. Exactly. I think we're probably getting we're probably getting less one stars because we have less listeners now.

That's true. Sorry about that, people. Happens. But yeah, Robert De Niro, man. I was I was saddened by that one. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't. We have bigger problems. Shouldn't we be solving? You know, how about one hundred thousand dollar challenge to come up with the cure for cancer?

Yeah, there you go. How about we do that instead of this? I did. I noticed that you put in the Penn and Teller's vaccination video from bullshit in the show notes. So it has any time this comes up. I think this is the number one. This is the only thing I even ever even post on people's things like when they start talking about anti-vax.

I just post this. No comments. That's all you need. That's all you need. So we have a hero of the week. Yay. An officer at the Department of Defense has apparently heard enough of Nickelback and has banned playing terrible rock groups in the command post, not just during work hours.

It clarified, but at all times. And they singled out five groups. And would you like to read off the other other four? I do find it funny. Smash Mouth, Creed, Slipknot and Korn. Now, first off, Smash Mouth doesn't even really fit in stylistically, but I am glad they're banned because who the hell wants to hear Rockstar one more time?

Yeah. Good stuff. I kind of never had a problem with Korn, but I didn't either. I still don't. I still don't think I have a problem with Korn, but, you know, I think I think we can all agree that, yeah, Nickelback in it should be out of government work. Yeah, I agree. Totally.

You know, leave it to the Mounties. Yeah. Personally, I'd put Pearl Jam in there, but I'll probably get stoned for saying that. They have their own station on Sirius, so you can listen to nothing but Pearl Jam 24-7. How exciting would that be? That's why I canceled my subscription. I have another Hero of the Week, and I actually think this guy should, this guy's in the running for Hero of the Week as much as Kanye's in the running for Moron of the Week.

Don Lemon. Remember his New Year's Eve coverage where he just got drunk? He got so drunk in the hot tub. That was amazing. I watched that live, and we were just cracking up. So I think he's definitely in the running for Ongoing Hero of the Week. This time, he basically walked off a segment of his own show.

Yep. Because they were talking about something that's just straight up financials. They were talking about the financials of how much it is costing the American taxpayer for Trump's vacations, Obama's vacations. So it was bringing in real news from both sides. And of course, the one guy from the right wing was just saying, this is all fake news stories.

And he's like, how is this fake news? We're talking straight financial reports of what's going on. Well, I believe it's fake. And he just said, all right, thank you, everyone. I'm off. But he also, in between that, though, he did not just shut him down and say, we're shutting down. He explained to him what fake news was. Yes.

And, you know, that's the part. And then as soon as he said, now, with that being said, what do you what's your take on his fake news? Boom. Done. Drops the mic, leaves the studio. I think that's what people need to start doing at this point. It's all right. We're not going to let you broadcast this crap. Yep. Good on you, Don.

Good on you, Don. Hopefully he hit the hot tub with some tequila and was kicking it for the rest of the night. God, I love that guy. That New Year's clip is the best. We've got to find that one and throw that in. We've talked a lot before about Patrick Smith, a former airline pilot and the author of Cockpit Confidential, which is a book I believe I got you to read and massively helped with your fear of flying.

I love that book. I listen to it every time I have to fly, which will be fairly soon, unfortunately. But yeah, every time I fly, I just pop his book on in audio format and it makes me not I need like two less vodka and tonics. Let's just say that I still need like one or two, but I don't need four or five.

Well, that's a start. So bits and pieces of his his books are starting to kind of make the rounds out there like they do. So I stumbled across one, which is what does your flight number mean? And I find this kind of stuff interesting. So I threw it in here just so you know.

Obviously, the first two letters is the carrier's two letter code. DL for Delta, that sort of thing. AA for American. I did not know this part. Flights going eastbound or north are assigned even numbers. Those headed west or south get odd numbers with some exceptions, obviously.

Return flights between destinations are often assigned numbers that is one higher or lower than the outbound fight. That I knew. Yeah, I did not. I just went back and looked at some of my tickets. I was like, oh, who knew? OK, that's cool. The lower the number, the more prestigious the flight route is for that particular airline.

One or two digit numbers are typically assigned to the popular routes of the long distance variety. Basically, the big money makers for airlines always have the lower numbers and flight numbers are made up of four or three digits are basically indication of code share flights. So that's all super interesting.

It gets a little bit even deeper than that if you want to follow the link in the show notes. Cool. Yeah. No, I knew the I knew the the round trip one because I always look at the my flights on the flight tracker app and you can see where it's coming from and where it's going. And I just I kind of deduced that over the years. By the way, those flight tracker apps nowadays are just awesome.

Yeah, they're really good. Yeah, I've got flight tracker pro and I think that's the one I've got. It was like, you know, 15 or 20 bucks and I never keep it on my phone. But when I fly, I go re-download it and re-off it. And because who needs a, you know, a hundred megabyte app on your phone when you fly like once a year or twice a year.

But I highly recommend that one. I should I'll try and dig up that and put it in the show notes because it's fun. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. So while I was bouncing around that same site, I found that story on. I found this is an old story, but it's too good not to include. This happened on a Saturday night in 2012.

A search party was organized in Iceland to hunt for a woman who had apparently failed to return to her tour bus. The tour bus in question had stopped near Iceland's canyon. The woman in question took the opportunity to go freshen up and change clothes. She re-boarded the bus in new clothes. The rest of the passengers did not realize it was her.

They became alarmed that she'd gone missing. The driver waited an hour before the police were called, where then things escalated. A search party was convened. A search of the area took place, joined by over 50 people, some in vehicles and some on foot. The Coast Guard was alerted and the search went on for several hours.

It was around three in the morning that the woman everyone thought was missing was actually helping them in the search. Once she realized that she was the person that they were looking for, she informed the police. So apparently buses in, it was a tour bus. It wasn't like Greyhound.

It wasn't like Icehound. No, no. This is like if you, you know, you go on a vacation and you go on one of the package tours, right? Man, how, I just don't even want to. That's awesome. I would be so pissed if I was one of the people on that damn tour.

Oh my God. Yeah. I would have gone back to the cliff and thrown her off. Man. We have a new Bowling Green massacre on our hands. I heard about this. This time it's in Sweden. So Trump actually talked about an incident that happened in Sweden the night before last.

So apparently it never happened. Of course. Nobody is aware of any terrorist attack in Sweden. Unless somebody shot PewDiePie and hasn't hit the fake mass media news yet. But the internet has responded as the internet only can. And this Mashable article has a bunch of the tweets and you can probably check it.

There are probably hashtags for it. But I just watched, I looked at the tweets in the article and I was already cracking up too much. RIP Swedish Chef. Ah, yes. The Swedish Chef. My favorite one was the ABBA one though. Four people found missing since the 70s. The picture of ABBA.

Yeah, that's awesome. So we're all going to die, Jason. Of course we are. Under the west of the USA, there is a lake of molten carbon that was discovered by scientists at the University of Royal Holloway in London. 350 kilometers under the surface. The molten carbon covers an area of 1.8 million square kilometers, which is basically as big as Mexico.

So there's Montezuma's revenge for the wall coming now. Well, here's the thing about this. This is not new. I don't know how they just discovered it because the giant volcano in Yellowstone has been known about forever. I don't think that they knew how big this thing was.

Well, they may have just got a better size of it, but we've known it's there forever. It was even in the long earth. They talk about it in the long earth when on earth one, Yellowstone erupted, and that's why they couldn't go back and forth. But I'm just going to state for the record that moving forward, one shouldn't choose a piece of fiction as proof that somebody knew something about the real world.

No, but I knew about it before that. That's why I liked it in the book, because it was factual. I'm just saying, don't use it as a reference point. Well, I'm trying to get some Amazon links here, motherfucker. Somebody's got to eat. I was trying to be subtle about it. We don't do subtle and grumpy old geeks.

No, we don't. Feedback loop. Thank you to new Patreon subscribers, Jason Schroeder and Ralph Mason. Thank you so much. Woohoo. We love your money. We love, love, love it. And Ralph Mason wrote over on our website, GOG.show.

He says, love the show. You mentioned the PETA it is to host stuff. That would be pain in the ass for people who don't understand acronyms. There you go. Highly recommend looking DigitalOcean and learning Docker. I, after not doing anything for several years at that time on OpenShift, was amazed how simple and cheap it was.

$5 per month node app up and running with a bunch of whole technical stuff. MongoDB, firewalling, yeah. If you're into this sort of stuff, go read this in the show notes. And he provided us with a $10 credit if you want to try it out. So I assume that works for just about anybody. So there you go. Yep. Thank you very much.

We'll have that in the show notes. And I use Linode for all of my stuff. And that's where GOG.show is hosted. Really fast SSD-based Linux systems. And you can pick and choose which flavor you want. It's still a pain in the ass because you just get a raw system. But yeah, if you're interested in what we use and why it's a pain in the ass, we use Linode.

And it's not because Linode's a pain in the ass. It's because we get raw Linux systems and doing all that stuff. Next one comes from Sebastian Kuhlen. He says, hey guys, I subscribed to you about five episodes ago, but you're already one of my favorites.

I'm a physicist at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany and just thought you might find my project interesting. Using the smartphone sensors for physics experiments. Measure the speed of an elevator using your phone's barometer. Determine the speed of sound with two phones or measuring centrifugal acceleration by putting your phone in a salad spinner.

No, I'm not putting my phone in a salad spinner. It's rented. It's mostly for educational purposes, but why expensive measuring instruments when each student already has one? It's free and it's geeky as heck. That is very cool. I do like that. Yeah, he gave us a link that we will also have in the show notes.

Thank you very much, Sebastian. And welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. Welcome to the show. And yeah, I love that. Go watch the videos. This is great stuff. So, very cool. A little homemade Mythbusters going on there. Nice. So, over at iTunes, we finally got some ratings again.

So, thanks so much, two of you guys who went and did this. Because we've been dry for a bit, except for the one stars from the Trumpers who paid us. So, we got a five star rating. A little bit of everything for an old geek. This is from Patch Holiday. Brian and Jason, don't pull any punches on the idiocracy in which we find ourselves or on each other.

That's true. We fight each other all the time. Yeah, because Neil Gaiman still fucking rocks and Dune sucks. But, eh, there we go. Moving on. Categorically wrong. They give a good overview of the major things happening in the tech world and delve into their individual interests in apps and media, books, movies, and music.

I never would have found my current favorite author, Scalzi. Good choice, man. If not for the podcast, sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't. But I always appreciate their perspective on this technological nightmare we've created for ourselves. Well, thanks, Patch Holiday. Thanks, Patch Holiday. Next one comes from Yoda Jinx. Another five star.

I never left a review before because iTunes is such a horrible app. Sad. Well, and the title is The Best Podcast. So, thank you, Yoda Jinx. And we're sorry you had to use iTunes. And we apologize for everybody that has to use iTunes to leave us a review. It is terrible.

But we really do appreciate you taking the time to do it. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And don't forget to go to iTunes and leave us a five star review. Pretty please. Closing shout outs.

So, my shout out goes out to SpaceX. They had to scrub their launch yesterday. But this morning, I tuned in at the exact right time, serendipitously, and saw the launch. And it was flawless. Watched it take off. Watched the first stage come back and land. It was so much fun.

And congrats to them. Because the cool part about this one is this is the first launch from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Because they have not used that since the space shuttle program has shut down. And the whole complex was leased to SpaceX by NASA for 20 years.

So, hopefully, we'll be seeing some good space stuff come out of that launch complex. Very cool. I heard about the launch being scrubbed. I did not know that they had done it successfully because I basically rolled out of bed and started the podcast and didn't check Twitter. Yeah, I rolled out of bed at five.

And I just happened to literally turn it on when it was T minus two minutes. Nice. And watched the whole launch. And the thing about that is it takes seven minutes. It's like it launches and then the first stage lands like 10 feet away. It's so much fun.

The unfortunate side of this one was it was a really cloudy day. So, the rocket went up and then there was like two minutes of just looking at the dials and hoping that you didn't see a big flash in the sky. Because they couldn't track the rocket because it was a totally overcast day.

Oh, well. What are you going to do? Can't it all be sunshine and rainbows, right? Nope, nope. They sure can't. But at least it wasn't an explosion. Yes. Good job. And, of course, Jason and I both want to, you know, give our sincere thoughts. Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody that was affected by what happened in Sweden last night.

Yes, we are. Bork, bork, bork. Bork, bork. Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I am Jason DeFilippo. 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 of 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 197.

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