198: Game Over Man, GAME OVER!

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I am Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. What up, B? Not much. Getting ready for the Oscars today, which means sitting on the couch and reading a book. But sad news. Yeah, sadly, we have to start the show with a heavy heart.

I think they're scrambling to redo the memoriam section. Unfortunately, yes. Bill Paxton, dead at 61. Young. Way too young. Way too young. Yeah, apparently complications from some sort of surgery. I was sitting around with the wife this morning and read the news and she was like, isn't he in everything?

Yeah, I mean, God, I remember, I think the first movie I ever saw him in was Weird Science. Oh, God. Chet. That was the best character that made Weird Science, no doubt about it. Yes, he also made Aliens. And what was it? Game over, dude. Yeah. Game over. And he was in, what was that Mormon one with all the wives?

Big Love. Big Love, yep. What else? Everything. Twister. I mean, this guy was in Titanic. Everything. Everything. So. I forgot he was in Titanic. Stared at him for a year on that and I forgot he was in that. I can't believe you forgot he was in Titanic. I'm trying to forget Titanic as much as I humanly can.

You love that movie. I'm the lone person that stalked out halfway through the movie going, what an indulgent piece of crap. I can't stand this. Brian's heart will not go on. My heart died halfway through that movie. OK, well, let's let's talk about some happier stuff.

Yeah, well, we got some follow up here. We were talking about how the Nokia 3310, the indestructible phone from the 90s, is making its comeback. It really is. And the one thing I was concerned about, would it have Snake? Yes, it will. All right. Do we have a date for its release yet? I don't think so.

I think they're just doing a big tease. So we'll see. I'm sure it'll be out soon. You know, this is one of those things that we all talk about. None of us are actually going to buy it. You never know. You might. If there's some wine involved. Wine. I tell you, if wine and Amazon ever had a baby, it would be the Nokia 3310.

That's very true. And a bit more follow up on on the automation thing. The World Economic Forum has got some great article about this. They followed a Chinese factory in Don Juan City. They replaced 90% of their human workforce with machines.

90%. And it led to a 250% increase in productivity and an 80% drop in defects. So we're done. We're done for sure. Did it say what happened with the 90% of the human workforce? What happened to them after?

Well, no, they don't care. They were fired. I'm sure they're driving for Uber. Uber and Donghuang. Yeah. It looks like Dongguan, but it's probably pronounced Don Juan. That's where all the lovers live in China. They all wear pastel suits and have two days worth of growth of beard.

In the news. Well, there's somewhere all those people that just got laid off could go potentially now. Yeah, we have seven new planets to head off to, but they're a little far away.

Yeah. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the first known system of seven Earth-sized planets around a single star, three of which are firmly in the habitable zone. So there could be water. There could be life. There could be meat. There could be cake. It could be Uber.

It could be going to Planet Uber. Planet Uber. Yeah. Oh, they should name it that. That'd be my worst nightmare would be they name one Uber, one Airbnb, and one Snapchat. And then all deliveries are from Planet Amazon via drone.

Yeah. So it's 40 light years away, which basically means we're never, ever, ever going to get there. Maybe we'll send Taylor Swift. I don't know. But very cool news. I mean, if this were a normal world and a normal planet right now, it'd be the only thing we're talking about.

But somehow it got buried by a bunch of other things that happened this week, which don't relate to tech, so we won't talk about them. Nope. We have a pretty good show this week, I think, as far as the news goes. I think so. You filled this up bright and early, and I was looking through it and going like, oh, wow, Jason beat me to every single story.

You must have had a lot of coffee this week, Jason. I did. I did. I am caffeinated. I am going to Hullio. Yes. All right. Well, I was getting all bummed out about the other news that was burying the Earth-sized planets, but then I got super inspired. This came out of nowhere. I love this story.

Sweden. Oh, Sweden's back. Where the things happened? Yes. Yeah. Okay. But something actually is really happening there, which is awesome. In Stockholm, which is the Swedish capital, they're going to turn data centers, and they're going to heat homes with data centers. How genius is that?

That's great. This is awesome. Mm-hmm. So it's called the Stockholm Data Parks Initiative, and three greenfield and brownfield sites, some sort of type of apartment complexes, I think, within the city will basically have data centers underneath them and plug them into the city's existing heating network, and it's going to be able, this 10-megawatt data center will be capable of heating roughly 20,000 Swedish homes.

How cool is that? That's not cool. It's warm. It's hot. That's right. No, they usually have been trying to put these things out in the middle of, you know, the North Atlantic now just to try and get the free cooling, but this is a better idea.

Why not use it to actually heat something instead of just trying to, you know, bleed off all the heat? Yeah, exactly. This is a fantastic idea. Totally inspiring. This is the kind of stuff we need. And of course, it's coming from Sweden. Yeah, a friend of mine just moved to Stockholm and then moved back about a week later because it was too damn expensive.

Really? Wow. Yeah. Even without rent, he was spending about 400 bucks a week on food. Hmm. You think with the Swedish chef there. Yeah. Bork, bork, bork. All the meatballs you can eat. So we talked about PewDiePie last week.

Actually, that was the week before Milo was last week, wasn't he? I don't know. We had so many of the, you know, the young, the young Nazi party go down in the past couple of weeks. So Polygon.com has a great article called The Limits of Free Speech When You Have 50 Million YouTube Subscribers.

And this lawyer basically runs down all of the reasons why the PewDiePie issues and the Milo stories and all that stuff have nothing to do with free speech. No, they don't. They've been hired by corporations and all corporations have basically clauses in their contract.

We had a clause in our contract when we were with Blog Talk Radio. Remember, Jason? Oh, that's right. That basically said we can't say anything stupid or defamatory because we would make them look bad. Yes. The morals clause. Yes. The morality clause is basically in any of these organizations.

And, you know, you live by the racism. You die by the racism. And the way PewDiePie screwed up was he actually, I mean, he had a case to say that it was still, you know, joking and fun and games. But then he went out and made a video that said he knew he broke his contract. Well, there's a reason for termination or grounds for termination, as it would be.

Everybody has free speech, but you also have the consequences of said free speech. You are allowed to sit there and spew away on Twitter all you freaking want, but don't expect Disney to pay for you. That's that's what it comes down to. Yes. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Exactly. So speaking of freedom of speech, this has been we missed this one by, you know, just a nose last week.

It came out right after we were done. I know. I think I was shutting down my laptop and all of a sudden Twitter blew up about how crap Uber is and delete Uber started again. Yeah. Susan J. Fowler wrote a scathing post on her very strange year at Uber. I read the whole thing.

And man, there's a bunch of fucked up people over there. What? Who would have guessed that? The bro grammars. I have united against her. It's a it's an interesting read. But yeah, I would not want to work at Uber. I did. She left. I know Chris Messina just left as well.

He was there for a little bit. He's the the inventor of the hashtag. All right. Or the pound sign of some would call it. Yeah. So what's the what's the bullet points? What's the TLDR on her whole thing? Basically, sexual harassment from day one at her new team, HR, HR, not given a tinker's cuss about what about it.

And, you know, multiple women having problems with the same guy. And they kept she kept going to HR and they kept saying, well, it was his first offense, first offense, even though they're all like, you know, in line. And they kept telling them all the same thing. Well, first offense against you. Yeah. But then there's her and her and her.

Yeah. All in all, there's there's a lot of shenanigans going on over there. Basically, it's cutthroat. There will be there will basically be a wolf of Uber movie at some point because it sounds like it's the same damn thing. So Uber is on the defensive again with, you know, everybody deleting Uber.

Yep. And for a while they were sending out, you know, like the last time when when you and I tried to cancel and we got those annoying emails saying, we're, you know, we're on the side of the immigration and everybody's great. And, you know, all good. Please don't cancel. Now they have a new letter that they sent around and apparently they pulled this one pretty damn quick because, yeah, it basically said we're hurting to please don't leave us.

Yeah. Uber, go fuck yourself. What do they they've hired a diversity officer now? Oh, really? Yeah. Fun times over there. And I'm sure he's having a great time. Why don't you instead of hiring a diversity officer, why don't you just try being human? You twat.

I'm sure the diversity officer is probably having a great time because people like that really enjoy long, useless meetings and big paychecks. And that's exactly what he's doing. Yeah. So Daniel Gross wrote a pretty good article over on. I know you don't like it, but over on Slate talking about why Uber will probably never reform itself because it doesn't have to.

It's talking about how ubiquitous Uber is now. It's basically beat out most of the competitions. It's raised an entire generation of people that think of it as second nature, as more of a utility than a service that is just there. And in my experience, just, you know, very small, limited experience after the first delete Uber thing hit, I, a lot of people around me and, you know, out and about in Santa Monica where I'm surrounded by millennials in the tech workforce these days, obviously, because we've got Snapchat here, Twitter here, blah, blah, blah.

It's Silicon Beach. Anytime I'm out of the bar, there's a bunch of 20 somethings there that have way more money than they need to have and way less brain cells than they should have talking about all this stuff. So everybody, you know, when that happened, people were talking about how they stood with it and they deleted Uber. And next week they were in their Ubers within two weeks.

Everybody had it back up. They all reinstalled it because, you know, they had fixed the problem, air quotes. Yeah. And I think that's exactly what's going to happen this time as well. I mean, you know, women should be pissed. No woman should be using Uber right now after hearing about all this stuff.

But hey, you know, they also voted for the grab the pussy guy. Yeah. Grab him by the Uber. Grab him by the Uber. Exactly. Yes. Well, we live in a we live in a world of 140 minute outrage. You know, that's about it. I like that. If we didn't have a title already, that'd be good. It's juicy.

But that's exactly what it is. People get outraged for two seconds. They do something that's a symbolic move. That does absolutely nothing because immediately they'll go ahead and reinstall the app or start using the service again or whatever. And, you know, you and I are as guilty as this is anyone because we we talk about how we're terrified of how Amazon is taking over the world.

But we just talked about Amazon and how we're ordering from it and what deliveries are coming. Yeah. I'm not giving up Amazon. Honestly, they could be they could be killing babies over there and I wouldn't care. They could be dropping babies from drones. And they probably are. Yeah, no, it's it's the way it is.

You know what? Deleting and reinstalling the app is the the 2017 equivalent of making your icon green. You know, right. It's the new change. Your profile is delete and reinstall the app. Well, I'm proud to state that I did delete my Uber account and I have not reinstated it.

And I've never had Airbnb on my on my phone. So I've I told I only stayed at one Airbnb and it was the most bizarre experience of my life. So, yeah, I won't be going back to that. I like hotels. Hotels are nice. You get mints. You know, there is nothing better in the world than a hotel bar.

Ah, yes. There's no better place to hang out on it when you're right before you're going to bed. There's no better. There's just no better experience. So you're missing out on that if you do your Airbnb and suck down their, you know, fireball whiskey that they have sitting in a corner. Yeager shots, baby.

Yeager shots. So Uber has had some additional problems this week. There is a big lawsuit that has been filed by Google's parent Alphabet against Uber on Thursday, alleging that the rideshare company engaged in the calculated theft of its self-driving technology. I saw this.

This is. Yes, this is good. Yeah, this is not good for Uber at all. I mean, Uber will, like I said, probably survive the fact that, you know, they harass women left, right and center, but they will not survive a big lawsuit from Alphabet. Basically, this is allegations that a former Waymo employee plotted to steal their technology and trade secrets before leaving to start his own self-driving truck company, Auto.

I have heard of Auto. Yes. So there you go. Basically, they're saying that the entire startup that you did that then got bought out by Uber, you stole from us. So stop it. Ah, yes. This one's going to be fun to watch. Yes, it will. Because Alphabet has all of the monies.

Uber is not broke by any chance, but by any stretch. But they do not have they do not have Alphabet money. Well, the interesting thing will be, will Alphabet decide to go for a killing blow and try to take Uber out completely or just basically say we cough up a couple billion dollars?

It's probably going to be that. And plus, you know, license in perpetuity. That's OK. Uber could totally afford that once they fire all the employees. That's true. Yeah. Once they don't have any more drivers, then they'll have a lot more money. Speaking of autonomous cars, the UK government has finally thrown down some laws.

What? Yeah. That's what I like. This is what I like about Europe. They're big on the laws. They don't do stupid things like, say, we can only have a new law if we get rid of two old laws. Yeah, no doubt. The interesting ones that come out of this are insurance. Remember, we've talked about, like, who's going to insure you when the car is in autonomous mode?

Does the liability go back to the car's creator? Yeah. Or is the person in the car liable? So what they're going to do is they're suggesting that insurance companies act as middlemen for the manufacturers. So if I get in an accident, like my Geico policy, if I hit you while it's in autonomous mode, my Geico policy will pay you going through me, but then they'll send the bill to the, you know, the manufacturer.

Sounds like we're stripping away the layers and making everything easier. Seems like it. Look, somebody's got to figure out something. It seems to me that the no brainer on who's responsible is whoever is operating said service. Now it gets, you know, if I buy a car that's autonomous, then I'm liable, right?

It's my car. Not necessarily because you didn't rate the software, but they also cover this as well because they're talking about the different instances where the owner will be at fault. So if you're in autonomous mode, but you've decided to, say, hack your software, then you are now liable.

Or if you failed to install software updates, that makes you liable, which I wish this was in place for every computer on the planet. Oh, I do, too. Of course, we'd be out of a job half the time. That's a job I'm fine with being out of. Fixing your damn computer.

I'm fine with being out of that. The interesting thing about this is now that I hadn't even really thought about this, but in the near future when I, you know, have to, I don't have a choice anymore. So I have to get in my autonomous taxi to go wherever I want to go. In addition to the little Uber and Lyft lights, I also want little signals that say which version of the software they're using, if they've hacked it, if it, you know, I want to know.

This thing needs to be like shown to me. I've done I've done my recent updates. It's going to be like the little signs on the bathroom last cleaned or in an elevator when last inspection signs, which I actually read. I check those signs. I do not want to fall to my death in a crappy old elevator. Right.

Or a crappy old crappy new Uber. So it's I'm glad that they're being proactive and, you know, they're small enough where they can do that kind of thing. That's true. So and they don't have to deal with the EU anymore. So you can just do whatever the hell they want. Yeah. Microsoft just made an investment in AirMap for twenty six million dollars.

That's actually for Microsoft. That's that's pocket change. It is pocket change. And that's not I mean, that's the whole round. They didn't even say how much they actually put in, but AirMap got a twenty six million dollar round of funding, but it was led by Microsoft Venture. So they probably put in the lion's share. AirMap is basically air traffic control for the private sector.

Yeah, I was about to say it's like Waze in 3D. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So, you know, they're Microsoft is going to bet on providing that software for drones and flying cars and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I get it for drones. I still I think everybody is ridiculous if they think we're getting flying cars anytime soon.

Come on, man. I want my flying cars. Where's my flying car? Never got my jetpack. Not expecting my flying car. Oh, man. There's a great episode of the dollop about the jetpacks. You should definitely check that out. It's the story of the jetpack is is jaw-droppingly bizarre and insane.

I'm sure it is. No, I mean, there's like murders and all sorts of, you know, corporate espionage. And I think a lot of it takes place in Florida, which is where you would expect crazy shit like that to happen. Yeah, that would make sense. Do you remember deviant art? Vaguely.

That's where, you know, it's where all the goth girls would go post their sketches for. Yeah, there'd be a lot of there would be a lot of semi risque photo pictures of elves. Yeah, yeah. Lots of furry art, things like that. Actually, the tattoo community used it quite a bit, too. OK, well, website builder Wix has bought them for thirty six million dollars.

OK, yeah. Why? Because Wix is apparently still a thing. I don't know, I know like maybe three people that have used Wix and my first job was to get them off of Wix because it's terrible. It is terrible.

It's one of the worst ones out there. Look, hire a professional. We'll say that first off. But barring that, use something like Squarespace. Don't use Wix. Yeah, I don't even, you know, recommend people use WordPress. Just go to Squarespace nowadays. It is an unintelligible fuster cluck.

But once you get the hang of it, you don't have most people aren't updating things that often. Once you get the hang of it and they do have good support, just go there. Stay away from Wix. Yeah. And but if you do go to WordPress, don't call me when it gets hacked, please. But seriously, though, why buy this? It's an outdated engine for galleries and photos.

And huh? I don't understand. I don't understand the play at all. Basically, they're an advertising platform. So, you know, they can advertise to Helen back on that. But, you know, it worked out well for the DeviantArt folks. They only took in about 13 and a half million.

So it's a pretty good investment over time, you know? Yeah. Well done. And they've got 40 million registered members. Right. Which is not a bad haul for 36 million. That's, you know, less than a buck a head. AI. Let's talk about some AI. If we must.

We must. There's a great article in the register and it's titled Facebook Scales Back AI Flagship After Chatbots Hit 70% Failure Rate. The great part about this article is every time they use the word artificial intelligence, it's in quotes. Oh, yay. Well done, register.

Yeah. Yeah. They've had some problems with their messenger bots. So they're scaling back and making it making them dumber is what they're doing now. Like I said, I a couple of weeks ago, I tried to build one of these things. I got into the nuts and bolts of it and it's just if then statements like these things are not smart.

Like they're OK. There are some out there that use really sophisticated algorithms, but they're neural networks out there. There are like, you know, really intense AIs like, you know, things like Watson. But yeah, these little chatbots and stuff. No, it is. If this, then that.

Yeah, exactly. That's that's what I was. I gave up. I was going to make one for Grumpy Old Geeks and I was like, this is just stupid. Why am I who's ever going to use it? We don't. I mean, we even tell people not to go to Facebook and talk to us. That's true. Yeah. So I'm not surprised by this at all. And but again, cheers, cheers, register for putting artificial intelligence quotes all the time because, yeah, we're not there.

No, we're not. And apparently neither is Watson. No, being able to win Jeopardy does not make you intelligent. No. M.D. Anderson, a big medical company. They've been trying to use it for scientific research. And apparently after sixty two million dollars, Watson has not met any of its goals and they have turned it off.

Any future people out there that are trying to invest in artificial intelligence right now to see if it works. Give us a million dollars and we'll tell you no. Yeah, seriously. We'll save you a ton of money. Actually, two million, please. I would like my own million. Oh, OK. We have two million, please. Actually, I mean, if since we're asking, I mean, sixty two million.

Come on. Just give us ten. Yeah. I mean, we'll even take we'll even take six point two. We'll we'll give you a decimal for ten million dollars. We'll give you a PowerPoint that tells you why it won't work. Actually, make it 15 if we've got to use PowerPoint. Good point. OK, Brian, I know you got to go change a nappy, so I'm going to go give Dave Bittner a call and we'll circle back in a few.

Yep. Give my best. Security. We are back with security. Brian is out changing nappies right now, so he will join us again in a little bit.

But Dave is back from the RSA conference. Sad we didn't get to talk last week about this, Dave, but welcome back. Yes. Well, thank you. It's good to be back. Yeah, we had a busy week last week, traveled from Baltimore all the way out to San Francisco. And boy, there was a lot to see. The RSA 2017 was a big deal, as they say.

Well attended. We all agreed that it seemed a lot more crowded this year than it has in years past. I think RSA put the official attendance at 43,000. Oh, my goodness. So, you know, that counts as a big show. I see you're talking real numbers there.

Yeah, yeah. So definitely one of the biggest and certainly the biggest for cybersecurity. So it was an interesting show. We met a lot of people, you know, did a lot of interviews, did a lot of coverage, which you can find over on the Cyber Wire website. I will have a link to that. But I just want to run through some of the key things that we sort of took away from this year's show.

You know, first of all, I think the big buzzword this year was artificial intelligence. Oh, I was hoping it was Internet of Things, but okay. Well, IoT is definitely still top of mind. But in terms of what people are selling, AI and machine learning are really the big thing this year.

And one of the things that, you know, we were trying to puzzle through this year was, what does that really mean? Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Well, and one of the issues is that, you know, when anything becomes a buzzword, lots of people jump on the bandwagon.

And without necessarily there being clear definitions of what things are or, you know, so basically, you know, some people, anybody who has a computer doing math these days is claiming that they're doing AI or machine learning. But we talked to a lot of people and the takeaway is that I think there's agreement that with the rate of attacks that are coming in and also the shortage in personnel that there's really no way for, you know,

merely the humans to be able to handle the onslaught of attacks that are coming at us. So AI is seen as a way to go at that and also to take some of the pressure off of particularly people in the entry-level positions, you know, just the people who are trying to sort through all of the data.

AI can be a way to help take that pressure off of them. So AI was front and center. So what you're saying is the days of sitting there staring at log files in a tail dash F are long gone? Well, not necessarily, but hopefully, if nothing else, the AI systems will prioritize, you know, what may need your attention and hopefully allow you to, you know, get through those files a lot faster.

So, you know, here's hoping. There's a lot of companies who are working on this. And of course, everybody thinks they have the greatest solution since sliced bread and canned beer. Of course. So it'll be interesting to see who rises to the top. But definitely that was a real hot topic this year.

The second thing we noticed was in terms of, at least in terms of, you know, Western companies, the crypto wars seem to have been won by the pro-encryption side. Good. You know, there are a few law enforcement organizations who are still saying that, you know, they want access, they want backdoors or other ways of describing backdoors.

But basically, it just seems like we're kind of over this, that, you know, it's a technology-driven trend. And it's one that, you know, people are just going to find difficult to resist. And there's really no putting that genie back in the bottle.

Oh, my God. I'd say we won one. Finally. I think so. That's just the sense we got from the show. The other thing, the next thing we noticed was the industry itself is worried about what we call the growing tempo of international conflict in cyberspace and really urging, you know, governments to take seriously their operations when it comes to cyber and warfare.

You know, Microsoft suggested that perhaps there needs to be some sort of Geneva Convention when it comes to cyber. Not just cyber, the cyber. The cyber. Sorry, that's what I get for working for the cyber wire. There you go.

But, you know, Microsoft suggested also that, you know, perhaps the companies who are in cybersecurity should consider themselves to be like Switzerland, you know, to sort of to be neutral, you know, provide the technology that they provide, but resist taking sides.

I don't know how practical that is, but, you know, as a philosophy, it's certainly interesting. Yeah, especially because you're dealing with capitalism. They're going to take the side of whoever's going to pay them the most. Well, yeah, you're dealing with capitalism. And in some parts of the world, you're dealing with communism or repressive regimes or, you know, who knows what.

But lots of isms. Yeah, it is. So, but the takeaway is that, you know, as we saw with this year's elections here in the United States, you know, cyber played a big part in the election. And there's only going to be more of that to come.

So, I think that's something that the industry is really concerned about. And then the last noteworthy thing in terms of overall sort of themes to this year's RSA conference was this notion that the consolidation is has to happen sometime in the near future.

Many, many companies are providing many, many different solutions and more and more customers are being frustrated at having to try to patch these solutions together. So, what we're seeing is that, you know, companies are probably going to be buying up other companies and coming out with these platform solutions where, you know, you'll sort of have a soup to nuts solution integrating a bunch of defenses and technologies.

You know, in one platform with one dashboard and perhaps most importantly, that all these things work together seamlessly. I was going to say, shouldn't they be focusing more on interoperability than creating massive behemoth companies that are slow to change and move? Well, I mean, certainly that's, I mean, that's one way to look at it.

The consolidation could certainly lead to that. You know, there's no shortage of massive behemoth companies in the space already, right? You know, you got your IBMs, you got your AT&Ts, but, you know, a lot of these smaller companies that are nipping at the heels at some of those companies or even have, you know, really interesting technology and innovations on their own, they may not have the complete package.

And so what we're seeing is, you know, investors and customers alike want to see some consolidation all around to make things less complex. You know, complexity itself can be a vulnerability.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. One of the favorite things we saw was we saw a T-shirt that was worn by an executive and the T-shirt said, does not have purchase authority. That's a great one. Right. That's the perfect shirt to be wearing while you're walking around a trade show like this if you just want to be left alone.

Exactly. And do your research. So it was a good show. We've got a bunch of different coverage over on the Cyber Wire website. So if you're interested in learning more, please do check it out. It was a busy week for us, and I feel like I'm still catching up on my sleep, but happy to be there and, you know, met a lot of interesting people.

Well, that's good. Great. I'm glad that you made it back alive. So, yeah, you can check that out. The link will be at GOG.show slash 198. We'll have that in there for you. And let's talk about some stuff that came out today. Yeah. Cloudflare. Poor Cloudflare.

We use them here at Grumpy Old Geeks, and I use them on many of my other jobs that I still can't get rid of, unfortunately. Right. They're a great little platform, but unfortunately, they had a massive memory leak issue. Yeah. Based around this HTML parser that they use, because when they send out web pages for you, they have to do a bunch of rewriting, and they have a bunch of features that do HTML rewriting.

So you give them one piece of HTML, they parse it, rewrite a bunch of it, and then send it out to the person who's asking for the page. So, unfortunately, they had a little issue. Yeah, it turns out around one in every 3.3 million HTTP requests was potentially resulting in memory leakage, which could pass along all sorts of stuff.

There's a huge blog post about it where they actually show some of the code on their site. It's a pretty major issue because passwords could have easily been leaked, and even search engines could have gotten a hold of this stuff as they just did a regular crawl because it's just one of those things where it just could have popped up here and there and everywhere.

Right, and so they're thinking that if people scrape these caches that could be stored all over the place, you know, that's when these lists then can be analyzed and these passwords start showing up on the underground. Yep. I've seen a couple lists of the sites that are, like, the big sites that are affected.

Gizmodo's got a partial list, and I'm sure that's going to be coming out over the next week. So next week, we'll have an even bigger list for it. Yeah, and, you know, this reminded me of sort of the vulnerability of even if you're using a password manager, you know, that is automatically generating, you know, really strong passwords for you, you know, this kind of thing will still bite you in the butt.

Because especially if you don't know what you don't know, you know, if you're... I mean, we're hoping that these are hashed passwords, but the real issue is the cookies. The cookie data is really the issue because it's kind of like Heartbleed back in the day, I guess.

But it's even more so like, what was it, Fire Sheep, the cookie, basically the cookie hijacking. So if some people's cookies were being published with their cookie IDs and, you know, cookie payloads, then you could pick up the cookie and run with the cookie.

You wouldn't have access to the actual password, but you could get in. And I'm hoping that any passwords that got passed back were going to be hashed. So I think, I mean, it's a major issue for Cloudflare, but I don't think that it is a huge worry for the people that may be affected by this.

I don't see like clear text passwords being spit out in this breach. Do you? Okay. I don't, honestly, I have not spent enough time with this story to really have an opinion on that. You know, what I'm seeing, you know, the typical thing that is the breathless headlines that say, you know, change your password now.

You could just say that every day and it's still applicable. Well, but, and that's sort of, yeah, but that's sort of my point is that, you know, that when it comes to a password manager is that, you know, a password, the complexity of the password may protect you from a lot. And it does.

But should our, do these leaks, do these password leaks mean that we should be coming to a time when, you know, difficult passwords isn't enough, that there needs to be a regular scheduled rotation of a password?

And obviously in corporate world, you know, you have to change your password on a certain rotation. And there's been reports that say that people are changing their passwords too much. Well, yeah, the FTC came out with that report saying that it's actually a bad idea to have people changing their passwords more often because in making them change it more often, they're going to create simpler passwords because they're harder to remember.

Right. And, and again, so, you know, your password manager would take care of that because if you're having it automatically generate your password, then you're getting complex passwords. So that solves that problem. And also if you're using somebody like 1Password, they keep an eye on the breaches and will tell you if you're, if a site that you have a password on has been breached.

So they've got that, they've got, they've got the Watchtower product built into 1Password. So, you know, I don't even worry about it anymore. And I think the real value of the password manager is the fact that you have different passwords for every site when, you know, that's really what it is. The complexity is great, all that, but it, this just, it, this mitigates the problem unless somebody gets your email password, which is the real key to the castle, because then they can go reset all of your passwords.

Unless you do something clever, like I talked about in Grumpy Old Geeks, like maybe number seven, where you use aliases for all of your different places. So nobody knows your actual password, your, your actual email address. So they don't know where to log in because everything's aliased. It's an obfuscation level level or layer, sorry, between the email addresses that you give out versus where you actually log in to check your email.

That's, that's what I've been doing for a couple, actually four years since I came up with this whole system when we started Grumpy Old Geeks. So I'm like, now how can I keep people from knowing my actual email address that I log into? And that's what I did. I have an extremely complicated actual email address that nobody will ever know, but everybody gets the aliases.

So even with, even when I go to, uh, like if I go to Facebook, I create a custom Facebook email address, which still is, you know, probably unguessable because it's like, you know, uh, the name of the service, couple numerics in a random dictionary word.

With, with random separators. So that way it's like, it's going to be really hard for anybody to even get the fake email, the, the alias email address to get to my real email address, you know? So that's kind of one thing that I should dig up that, uh, to get that. Does that obfuscate the domain as well or just the, the address?

No, it's going to, it's always going to be at the same domain. Okay. You can't, you can't, I guess you can actually, cause you can, it is like, if you're using Gmail, you can, you can have multiple domains tied to one, uh, Gmail apps account. So you can actually, you know, bounce between different domains and have one in, have, uh, like two domains alias to one account.

You use the alias domain as your email one and then everything else. Yeah. You could totally do that. Now that, that's a good idea. Yeah. Well, cause I know like, for example, you know, a lot of domain or mail services will allow you to have, you know, uh, basically a catch all email address where you can put anything at that domain and it will go to, you know, this one place.

So you could, you could, you know, literally just make up email addresses and they'd all go there when, you know. Yeah. That's just a spam nightmare though. Yep. So I, I, I, I skipped that. So if I, if I'm doing a new service, I'll just make a new alias for it because it takes like a minute to pop in and make a new one.

Just have your bookmarks handy and just boop, boop, no, done. Off we go to the races. So that way nobody's ever going to get to, even if like, you know, they found out my email password, finding what the actual, you know, email address is to log into, to start changing all of my passwords.

If on things that I don't have two factor off on, cause you also, if you have two factor off, you know. Yeah. Okay. We're a little in the weeds on that one. That's okay. We got real time problem solving right here on grumpy old geeks. That's how, that's how we used to do it. It's fun. All right.

What's next? Whisper. Have you used whisper? I have not. I wouldn't if I were you. Yeah, I know. That's, that's the take home. Yeah. The take home here is don't use whisper. It's supposed to be a secure messaging app, but, uh, turns out, turns out a man from North Carolina was arrested by federal authorities shortly after he submitted a post that sounded like a threat to the anonymous secret sharing app, which is not, no longer anonymous or secret called whisper.

Um, he made a very, uh, dumb, he wrote a very dumb post saying that he was going to start attacking, uh, was his carry North Carolina the next day. And that some of, some of the people that he knew were cool. So they should just stay out of town that day. Well, right. Yeah. As you said, turns out the cops, cops called whisper, got his IP address, which is why you should always use a VPN, uh, grumpy old GOG.show slash VPN, uh, hook you up right there.

And his GPS coordinates. So he turned, and this was an opt in. So Mr. Terrorist went in and turned on, uh, geolocation in his secret app. Oh, really? I thought it was, I thought you had to opt out of, of, uh, of GPS.

It's, it's, well, even on his, even if he was, well, if he was using an iPhone, it always asks you if, if you want to give location data to an app. Oh, right, right. I'm looking at the article there here and it says, um, the app is supposed to be completely, completely anonymous, but you'll have to opt out of location services if you don't want it to receive your geographical coordinates.

Grimsley might have left his active. Uh, so, so, so basically he, he let it go through on whatever platform he says, like, give them my geo data. And then by him saying that in the phone layer, the app layer just said, okay, we're getting, we're getting coordinates.

We'll take them. Yep. And then the cops just sent his IP address off to Time Warner Cable, who gave him the billing address and they went and found him. Him with an AK 47, four 30 round magazines and about 340 rounds of ammo. Yeesh. But they also found a Facebook conversation on his laptops that makes his true intentions unclear.

And after talking with Gavin DeBecker on the art of charm, it turns out most people who, who do these threats when they say they have a gun and they're going to shoot people. Those are the people that actually almost never go through with it. It's the quiet ones that you have to watch out for.

But, uh, quiet man. Yeah. Mostly kept to himself. So here's the, here's the rule of thumb for the day. Don't use whisper. And if you do, uh, turn off the geo location and use a VPN. If you actually want to be safe. Yeah. Don't trust the, the company that says that their, their, uh, their product is anonymous.

Yeah. Cause it sounds like whisper whisper didn't put up much of the fight, much of a fight when the police came knocking on the door. Yeah. Reminds me of that, that scene in the princess bride where they, where they go to the castle door and they say, give me the key. He says, I have no key. Rip, that's like, rip his arms off. Oh, you mean this key.

Exactly. And for those people out there thinking that I'm telling the terrorists how to, how to do their jobs, this goes for everybody. So you should be doing it too. Not just the terrorists. Um, uh, Shaw one is dead.

Yay. Yeah. Finally. But lots of people still use it. I mean, there are a lot of people that still use MD five, but yes, yes. Um, you know, I, I, I've had, uh, in the past couple of months I had someone, um, who was an expert on, on Shaw one and actually their company, um, help people transition from Shaw one because it turns out, you know, if you have a big website with lots of pages and lots of domains,

and so forth, it can be, you know, not insignificant to track down all of your uses of Shaw one. So, you know, for that reason, it's not surprising that there are a lot of people still out there using it who may not even know that they're using it. Um, so, you know, it, yeah, it's a problem and, uh, people are starting to exploit it.

I wonder if WordPress uses it still, that'd be an interesting one because I had to write, I wrote a piece of software one time for a custom, uh, like learning platform, but I had to import, uh, a WordPress database.

And so when people logged in for the first time, I got their clear text password, matched it with the, the hash from WordPress and then re encoded it into something that was actually secure. Um, so the first time you logged in, it always, it did all this behind the scenes and I swear, I think they still use Shaw one, but, uh, I, I don't care enough about WordPress to really go look that deep.

But if you're a programmer, you should not be using, I, I still love that people still use MD5. Yeah, that's great. There's so many rainbow tables out there for MD5. It's ridiculous. Let's talk about some cars real quick. Yeah. We got to wrap this up. Weekend's coming. Got to wrap this up. And Brian's almost done with his, with his baby nappies.

Story out in a couple of different places. We actually covered this on today's, uh, cyber wire on Friday's show, um, that, uh, used cars may come with some vulnerabilities. Um, so, you know, some of these smart cars where you can, um, access your car, you know, via some sort of app on your phone.

Turns out when you sell the car, the original owner may still have access to the car and be able to do all sorts of things with it. Yeah. Yeah. They, you have to go to the factory to get your app credentials wiped, which is ridiculous. Yeah. You know, yeah, this reminded me of first, I mean, the car should be like an iPad or an iPhone or whatever, you know, and where it has a, it has an option.

Maybe deep, deep down in the menu that says, you know, factory reset. They do have a factory reset. You can reset all the software in the car, but the data is stored at the dealer. That's where the problem comes in. You can completely factory reset your used car and the person who originally paired their app with your car will still have access because it's the app layer that goes through the, the dealership.

That's where the fun part comes in. Oh, for God's sake. So now look for a bunch of repo men out there going to find the original owners and borrow their iPhone so they can go repo the car that you sold to the deadbeat, you know, three years later.

Well, you know, my original take on this was this just, this was just another way for the dealership, you know, to charge you $500 when you needed to do anything, you know, it's, you know, if you have just like if before all of this, you know, you had some kind of smart key that had some kind of, you know, for good reasons, had some kind of encryption system between the key and the car.

Right. That's all good. But if you needed to get a new key, you had to go to the dealer who had to flash the car or flash the key or whatever. And that'll be $500, please. So I assumed that this was, you know, another racket just like that. Oh, reset the data on your car.

We'd be happy to press that button for $500. Yeah. Well, it's still kind of that way because they have to go into their database and take you out of the authorized list. So they can still easily charge you $500 for pressing delete. Never put, never put it past them for that. No, no.

Oh, gosh. This is why I drive a Model T. Yes, and this is why I have a CRT in my living room now because I don't want anything smart in my home. I want to be the smartest thing in my home. Well, you know, I don't know. Bam, bam.

Yeah, she's pretty bright. She is. She's a good dog. All right, man. Well, you have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week and go get some rest. I'm sure you're still pooped. All right. We'll talk to you soon. At the library.

I finally finished the, well, at least for right now, unless you release the new book today, the most up-to-date of the laundry files, The Nightmare Stacks by Charlie Strauss. Yeah. There's a reason it took me three weeks to finish it.

Yeah, that's true. I've got to say, it's the worst of the books. Mainly, I didn't care about the main character that much because he switched it up and this is a completely new main character from all the other books. The other problem I had with this is 95% of the book I would classify as buildup that should have been taken care of in the first two chapters.

The last two chapters were actually great and should have been expanded upon and been the majority of the book. Okay. So that's my review. It's been a while since I read it and I can't even remember it. So that's kind of my review. Yeah. I really like the concept a lot, but it was so slow to get going.

And by the time it finally hit, I was, again, like it took me two weeks to get to the point where it finally hit. And when it finally hit, I was totally into it, but there's only two chapters of that and then it was done. I was like, well, that, that this one needed an outline and some pacing. Yeah. Well, we'll circle back in a few months with Charlie when the new book comes out.

But again, I mean, I, I love the series and I can't recommend it enough. So if you haven't read it, go back, go do all the, the other ones and, you know, maybe skip this one. Yeah. And, uh, the next one, Bob is back. So can't wait. I'm very excited about the next one. Cops and doodads.

I think we need a new drop from speaking of Bob's. I think we need a new drop from Bob's, your uncle, because, uh, we need him to say, Hey, didn't you guys talk about this like months ago? That's the new drop we need because, uh, now everybody is starting to crap a bit on the Amazon echo because all the skills are basically fucking useless.

Uh, this is from Gizmodo. The Amazon echo has now, because Amazon put out a press release. We've hit 10,000 skills that are available for your echo and they're all useless. There's nothing to do with it. It's not there. The technology sucks.

It's just not there yet. Uh, I, I like the author of this Gizmodo article. I use my echo for three things. I get the weather. I play music with it. I use it to set alarms. Sometimes I'll listen to the flash briefing, but half of those are so frigging bad or don't update correctly that I've stopped even doing that on the regular.

I use it for music. And the one thing that I would really, really, really like is I would like to be able to say mute for N seconds. Because every time I hear that goddamn cars for kids commercial on tune in, I just turn it off. I just, I just scream at it and turn it off.

So I gotta be honest, just like the, let me get his names because I'm, I don't want to say the author of this article. Again, Michael Nunez, uh, says over at Gizmodo, uh, Bluetooth is, uh, you might as well just have a Bluetooth speaker set up. And basically for podcasts, I don't, I don't ask Amazon, I don't ask the echo to play them anymore.

I just start them up on my iTunes or on my, on my phone and toss it over as a speaker because then I don't have to go through the horrible tune in interface. Yeah. And the other thing about, uh, audio book, like if I'm trying to listen to an audio audible book through there, you have to listen to it at one X, which is just kills me because most, most of the books are not most, a lot of the books I have are read by the author.

And most authors except Neil Gaiman are terrible readers. And you have to listen to it at at least, you know, one, two, five or one, five to just, just, you know, even it out because authors can't read. They just can't read anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I still love it, but you know, I, for the, for the morning for the radio, it's great, but yeah, I see your point.

It could just be a Bluetooth speaker. Exactly. I mean, I love it too. The concept was great. A lot of things just aren't there as I've screamed about since day one. I need this to be able to control all the media in my house, including my TV. Jason and I have gone through multiple devices that claim to do it. None of which do.

It's just not quite there yet. So right now I, it literally could just be a Bluetooth speaker and I'd be totally fine. Yes. The smart future is still rather dumb. Speaking of dumb, there's been a lot of, of reviews and talk on the internets about minimalist dumb phones recently, mostly because of, you know, NASA scientists that are natural citizens having their phones taken from them when they try to get across the border.

These days. So there's one called the punks MP01 that boing boing has talked about. Now I personally have no interest in these kinds of things, but I have to admit it looks retro-y cool. Yeah. But for 295 bucks, you're the one that's been punked. Yes. It's quite expensive.

A little too much. There's another one out there called the light phone, which is interesting looking as well. And that one's 150 bucks. Right. But why not just get the Nokia 3310? It's 65 bucks and you can play snake. Exactly. You get snake. I, uh, I hit some pay dirt with my, my sale of vapid.com last week.

So the first thing I did was ordered a standing desk. Finally, my back is killing me. I mean, I'm going to have to go into my phone and my contacts everywhere and remove that email address. Cause you've had that since like, I met you. Uh, I had it for 20 years, 20 years.

I bought it in 1997. So I got a juicy payout for it, which will cover basically the costs of registering the domain for 20 years. It was like a savings account for the most part. Right. So I went to uplift desk.com and put together my dream desk, uh, it within reason.

I didn't get the programmable up and down switch because it's like, because that's stupid. Yeah. I'm like, I can press a button and hold it really. I don't need to spend another 200 bucks on something with a couple of buttons on it. Um, and, uh, bare bones, but I got it. It's like 60 inches wide by 30 inches deep, which would be more than enough to hold my stuff.

And I get here on Friday. So they build it, they build it to spec and send it out. So nice free shipping. I think after tax, it was like 730 bucks, which is not cheap, not cheap. That's about the same price that I paid for my, whatever the hell this thing is called, uh, Ergotron, um, up, sitting, standing desk thing.

So yeah, let me know how it is when you get it. I will do that because I will, I'm sure I'll take some pictures cause I'm gonna have to redo the whole studio, which will be fun times. No joy. Prepare yourself for lots of complaining on social media. No, I like my standing desk. Good for my back. Um, I, I saw this one and just had to, had to put it in here.

This comes from the internet of shit Twitter account. Uh, there's a mousetrap now that will trigger internet alerts. Welcome to the internet of vermin. That's great. Yes. And if you guys aren't following the internet of shit on Twitter, I highly recommend it. Always, always good stuff on there. I think you're burying the lead on this one.

The thing that makes it absolutely insane is the fact that it costs 1300 pounds. Uh, I didn't, I completely missed that as opposed to the 50 cents that a regular trap costs you. I recommend the, the $10 no kill traps. I had to get a couple of this, this winter to catch a mousezilla and they work really nice, but, uh, I prefer the no kill traps.

I don't want to kill a mouse. I'm nice that way. Yeah. I, you're, yes. Well, like many weird people, you're much nicer to, to vermin than you are to actual people. Yes. Yes. Cause, uh, they, they vermin are nicer way.

I like to think of it. Uh, Alto's adventure is an old game that I've been playing on my iPad for well over a year now. I love it. It's basically a very relaxing snowboarding game. Um, and there's a new one coming out called Alto's odyssey, which I think snowboarding, I think relaxing.

It is. Well, because they've got very good music. It's Zen. Uh, there's a, uh, you know, an infinite mode where you never, never die, but, uh, it's fun. It is a relaxing game. It's very simple mechanics. So it's, if you'd like to relax, I recommend Alto's adventure and now Alto's odyssey, which it looks to be the exact same game, but you're doing your, you're snowboarding on sand in the, in the desert.

Go figure way to, uh, way to repurpose that engine guys. That's actually quite clever. It is. Yeah. Let's just make the snow Brown and put in some mosques in the background and we're good to go. Yeah. There you go. I saw a new gadget this week called the droptic or droptic IO.

It, it's a little gadget that you can plug onto your iPhone and do the three 60 camera video shenanigans. Right. Uh, since a lot of places, uh, support that now, like Facebook and Facebook live streaming, which, uh, this does not have the Facebook streaming yet, but they say it's coming. I looked at some of the, some of the videos on here, terrible quality, utterly terrible.

The photos looked okay. And some, some of them, but man, those videos were just crap-tacular. So for 50 bucks more, you can get the Rico Theta S, which I have and, uh, use fairly often. It's a fun little gadget for nothing. It's 280 bucks. Right.

Between 280 and 300, depending on what, when it's on sale, but it's nice. It's compact. It does tie in with your iPhone. It's, it's a good little gadget. If you're into the 360 degree photos, which I, I have been, uh, I like them for like documenting places. If I'm going to a restaurant and I want to have it, uh, you know, send it to somebody who's like, Hey, check out this restaurant is a bar.

I went to, they're fun. Okay. I skip them all the time. Yeah. I know you're, you're not, you're not into that kind of thing. I take them for me. I barely share any of those. And it's, I know that is razor, not that is one thing that I am.

Uh, very happy about with you, Jason. You do not post them. So they would, they would take away from all the pictures of bam, bam. Speaking of photography though, uh, I found a Kickstarter that I actually liked and it did get funded. We'll see if it, uh, when it hits the market in 2022, if it's any good, this is called the lab box.

It is a multi-format daylight loading film tank where you can process actual film without having to go through the hassle of a dark bag and all that stuff, which is always a pain in the ass. Loading, loading film onto a reel is just, it's horrendously annoying.

I've done it. I did it for, you know, years and years and years, but something like this might actually get me back into shooting a little bit of film because it makes it pretty easy to load and develop. It's great that they invented a technology for 1940. Yeah. I love it. I will, I will put on some vinyl records on my Victrola and I will wax my mustache and I will.

Well, I mean, you might as well just be in Williamsburg then. Yeah, that's true. That's happening right now. Anyways, I will say I'll give them points for design. I like the big clunky orange knobs. It's all very well done. It looks good. So, you know, in 25 years when you actually get it, let me know how it goes.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to wait for the first reviews to come out and then I'll, I'll take a peek at it. So we talked about Li-Fi a long time ago and it, you know, he was in one of the first shows back in 2014 when it, when the technology broke and it turns out everybody's just been repeating the same press release over and over again and there have been no real, uh, to market opportunities yet, but, uh, Phillips has acquired the company Luciam since it's French

is probably Luciam, um, the, uh, one of the only companies that makes the actual products. So we'll see if they actually come to market anytime soon, but I don't see why they ever would. I mean, just from the security perspective, and this is, I think what we talked about the first time around that you basically have to, if you want to use this and not have people spying on you, you have to like tinfoil all your windows.

Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, if, if all the network traffic is encrypted, like when is all the network encrypted? That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. No, you just basically look in the window and you can see everything on the network. Yep. Ah, man.

Uh, DJI, the drone manufacturer has just put out a new drone today that looks bad ass. This thing can fly in rain and snow because it's got weather sensors and, uh, it has navigation with centimeter level precision. Why do weather sensors allow you to fly?

Don't they just basically tell you it's snowing? Could be. Okay. It's snowing. Get the fuck down. Yeah. I don't, I think, I think the sensors probably just help it in the wind and the, with the, uh, you know, the added load of the rain and things like that. But DJI is, is jumping more into the commercial drone business now.

And I was watching shark tank yesterday and it turns out that 60% of all drones that consumers buy are returned massive return rate on those things. I had no idea. I'm not surprised by this at all. No, but, uh, they're going to be moving more into the, the thing looks cool.

You got to admit if you saw a picture of it, it looks pretty cool. It looks like death from above. Yeah. And it carries three cameras so you can actually have a camera on top. So if you're doing, if you're, you know, for commercial uses like bridge inspections and things like that, which a lot of people are legitimately using these things for now, this is a pretty cool machine.

No price yet should be available in Q2, which means probably, uh, it'll be out in 2019. Cool. Yeah. Cause their, their Mavic is still late. That's, that's the one that I was actually thinking about saving up to get, but it comes back to the fact that I don't need a drone.

You've already had drones and did not like them. Cut yourself open, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. But the DJI ones are much smarter than the dumb one I got from boing boing. Hmm. But I'm, I'm no smarter. I need a smart upgrade for me is the problem. Oh, with things or we things, those guys, they got bought by Nokia last year for lots of money.

Yep. So the problem I always had with it, I went with my Fitbit Aria instead of the with things scale or we things, because the problem is I don't know how to pronounce the damn name of it. Is it we things or with things? I've heard it both ways. So they're just, so yeah, that's pretty much it.

They're dumping. But Nokia is getting rid of the name altogether and they're just going to be Nokia now. They're Nokia as you're supposed to pronounce it. But the problem is now we're going from one name that people don't know how to say to another name that nobody knows how to say. Somehow we survived 30 years with GIF or GIF.

Who really cares? And by the way. I'm sure there have been some fatalities over that, by the way. Maybe wearables, not not really going so well. Not a big industry right now. People have kind of decided, no. Yeah, they get them and get them, they get them, use them for a bit and then drop them.

Yeah, sometimes literally. That's what I did. I think there's still a Fitbit that you gave me somewhere buried in the concrete over at Finn's. Probably. Probably.

Maybe. Media Candy. Moby. Moby. No, I'm not going to talk about the thing that Moby is really in the news for right now very much. Just going to talk about that he released four hours worth of free music designed for yoga and meditation.

So he says, over the last couple of years, I've been making really, really, really, really quiet music to listen to when I do yoga or sleep or meditate or panic. I ended up with about four hours of music and decided to give it away. So it is available via his website. We have a link in the show notes. It's very relaxing, very lovely music.

I love this kind of stuff. Brian Eno's Music for Airports is one of my favorite albums. Moby himself released a more involved ambient album that has more electronica style. So there's drums and all that sort of stuff, but very good. It came out in 1993.

I probably listen to that almost every night back in college. He also released an updated version called Hotel in 2005, which is another really, really good ambient album. But I don't know. Did you listen to any of his long ambience? No, not yet. No, I actually.

Yeah, you'll enjoy them. Yeah, I was actually listening to music for airports most of the week. So I've got that on loop when I'm when I'm working during the day. Yeah. Well, you can't, you know, good on you, Moby. Thanks for this. It's pretty cool. It's like I said, four hours, completely free, totally relaxing.

Toss it on and it's a good day. All right. Now we'll give it a shot. And speaking of music, one of my favorite shoegazing bands from the 90s reunited last year. I went and saw them play twice. It was both times. They were absolutely phenomenal. Fantastic live shows.

Ride. They have released two new singles. Both came out this week and they're both really great. So if you were a fan of that kind of music, go listen. Enjoy. And that leads me to I watched a documentary called All Things Must Pass, which is about Tower Records, both the rise and fall.

It was awesome. Who thought a documentary about a record store would be interesting? Not me. That's why I haven't watched it yet. I love it. Why it's interesting. Well, first off, the founder, Russ Solomon, is an insane character. He is cray cray and just listening to everything that happened was fantastic.

And then the entire it's they were like an anti-corporation. You and I would have loved to work for this company. I mean, the people that were running it were drinking, drugging, crazy people. No real sense of there was no middle management whatsoever. If you were a teller at one of the Tower Records and you had a good idea, you went directly to to Russ Solomon.

And if he liked it, you did it. Nice. It was great. Yeah, it was just fun. And, you know, people talk about how the Internet and Napster and all that killed Tower Records, kind of. But they also what tends to happen if a company gets too big and tries to maintain that we're not a company maverick thing, you know, financial mismanagement, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, it only scales so far. Yeah, there's only so far you can scale just being a crazy company that doesn't follow the rules. But this is directed by Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks' son. But I do recommend it, especially like if you're our age. Jason, I'm sure you spent I spent a lot of money at Tower Records.

I fell in love with at least three of the 17 year old girls that were working there when I was in high school. I was I was at the Tower Records in Buena Park basically every single weekend. So I miss it, man. I miss record stores and I miss record stores like that. It was a it was a different time.

Yeah. Fortunately, I get to spend a lot of time at the Tower on Sunset before it went under. I moved out in the 90s. It was still there. I did spend quite a bit of money at Tower Records and I quite enjoyed it. One of the other things I did at Tower Records a lot was back in high school was a stand in line to buy tickets to shows.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Back before the Internet. Back before the Internet. And I do miss those days. I am very unpleased with what Depeche Mode has rolled out for their pre-sale tickets. It's not cool. I don't dig tickets getting gamified. And there's a company called Strobe Labs that they've Depeche Mode's management has signed up for.

If you want to get exclusive pre-sale access for the upcoming tour, you can better your place in line by social sharing. Oh, no. Yes. This is the worst thing ever. And I get it if you're some like teeny bopper band.

OK, go for it. You're Depeche fucking mode. What the hell are you doing? All your fans are old. Yeah. We don't want to do this shit. You don't need the money. You don't need the promotion. Grow a pair. Just do it normal. Yeah. All your fans grew up. Try it on yourself. Yeah, exactly.

You want to actually make a make some publicity. Go back old school and make us line up at Walmart. Now you got to go buy a pair of snap glasses and yeah, the social sharing to better your place in line is such a load of crap. It's gamified. Plus, also, you don't know the rules.

And there's no like sheet that tells you, OK, this does this. It could all be bullcrap for all we know. Knowing the people that I knew that used to build this sort of stuff, it probably doesn't even exist at all. It's going to be completely random anyways. Yeah, that's that's one of the two.

You're giving away our best secrets. I know I'm giving away the trade secrets. Chances are this is all completely full of shit and they don't do anything. I did. I did. I did a campaign for for net bronca or Bianca or Blanca, whatever that for net crap is that gasoline shot that people like for some reason.

Oh, right, right, right. Gross. It was a it was a social sharing deal where basically they had a van that went coast to coast and it was powered by your tweets and your likes. Well, that thing wouldn't have gotten out of L.A. if if it was going under its own steam.

So let's just say that there might have been a little a little extra zip in the tank to get him to the next city, if you know what I'm saying. I got you. Yeah. I somehow think that, yeah, Strobe Labs is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Stroke, Stroke Labs. Stroke Lab. Yeah. I saw John Wick, too.

You love these movies. I loved it. It was it was I thought it was better than the first one. So. Have you even seen the first one? No, because I heard it starts with somebody killing a dog and I'm not into that. It's a short scene. Doesn't matter. It just sets up the plot. It is the, you know, the inciting incident.

But the rest of the movie is just incredible, incredible. They call it gun foo, which. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go back. Go back. Put a flower in your hair. You damn hippie. New alien movies coming out and they released a several minute segment.

I am super excited about the new alien movie and super bummed out by this four minute and 45 second clip because there's not a goddamn alien or anything in it. You know, the one thing that drives me nuts about these is why is there always the cowboy hat wearing guy in space?

Why do you have to have a cowboy hat wearing guy? Well, to be fair, I think the very first alien is the one that established that. So they're only redoing their own trope. OK. They're they're allowed to do that. You're allowed to cover yourself. That rule works. OK, yeah, I was not I was not impressed by this.

No, I by by four minutes and nine seconds still with 35 seconds to go. I was actively angry at this trailer. I was too. Oh, well, what are you going to do? But to make up for it, the hydraulic press channel, which I love.

I don't know if you ever watched it, but basically them squishing things with a hydraulic press. And the guy who runs the channel is just hilarious. So they did a promo with crushing adamantium, a tie in with Logan. And it's very funny. It is very, very funny. So if you're into the hydraulic press guy, we'll have the video linked up in the show notes so you can come check it out at GOG dot show slash 198.

What are you thinking about Logan? You think it's going to be a good movie or do you think it's going to suck? I think it's going to be great. OK, I think that it may be. I know that they're trying to incorporate some of the things that made Deadpool such a breakaway hit. I don't know if that'll work with the characters and the previous things that they've done, but we'll see.

It looks like it. And from what I'm what I'm hearing in the back chatter is that it delivers. So cool. I'll definitely be going opening day for that one. It'll be just nice to see that that series come to an end. I did watch The Night Manager on Amazon Prime this week.

Fantastic show. Six parter. It's British spy stuff. You know, John Le Carr. I can't I can't not watch it. So sadly, John is in his late 80s and probably won't be writing a sequel. But they said they do do another one if he if he would write it.

But hopefully, fingers crossed. And The Expanse has just been killing it. I need to start watching this. I it's been on my to do list for ages. So you're saying it's really good. It's fantastic. I'm really enjoying it. I'm really, really enjoying it.

All right. I will give it a go because, yeah, there's been a lot of buzz about it. And it's, you know, theoretically, it's right up my alley. Oh, it is. It is right up your alley for sure. Legion. I covered a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about The Expanse coming back and I watched the first episode of Legion. I really liked it.

I fell asleep halfway through the second episode. It did not. It did not have have what I was looking for. I'm going to try and go back and watch it again to see because it's like on episode three now. But yeah, it did not really. It was annoying. It was actually like annoying. You know where we're at with with TV and media right now?

There's so much that's so good. I'm relieved when you tell me something sucks because now I don't have to watch it. I know. It's like we waited. We waited for decades for the the renaissance and golden age of television to come around. And now it's like, I'm just tired of watching all this crap.

Bruce Springsteen is going to have to rewrite the song. Two hundred and fifty five channels and I can only watch three of them because I'm too goddamn busy and there's ten more shows I want to watch. Yeah, pretty much sums it up now. I would have called this guy Hero of the Week, but since we didn't have a moron of the week, we didn't do that segment.

So I'll just put this in here. Hero Adam Boyd of the UK and his friends went to go see the emerging indie rock band, The Sherlocks at Manchester's Albert Hall. They arrived late and they had to suffer through a terrible view during the supporting act. So he figured he'd take a shot of the VP section, the VIP section.

Sorry. So he went to the band's Wikipedia page, turned himself into the cousin and inspiration for the band and showed it to the security guards and got himself into the VIP section. That is badass. Hero. Definitely. And it will never it'll never happen again.

Worked once will never work again. But that is unbelievable. Good job. Very good job. Way to hack the system. Exactly. And then in just cool news, scientists are turning nuclear waste into super efficient diamond batteries. Scientists at the University of Bristol have created a supercharged diamond battery from compressed radioactive carbon 14 extracted from nuclear waste.

They basically this will admit a continuous electrical current while producing no emissions and it can operate for thousands of years. Wow. Technology for the win. Yes. Maybe we can get these batteries to run those the server farms in Sweden.

Put this in your Nokia 3310 and you're going to live forever. No doubt. Yeah. So and there's actually no issues with radioactive contamination at all because it's basically this type is absorbed by any solid material and it's encased in a goddamn diamond.

Nice. Yeah. I have to get a couple of those. I don't think they're on the market yet. Apple will buy them up. They'll be in the iPhone 22. That's true. Or Tesla. Yes. But speaking of nuclear waste, Taco Bell is removing the naked chicken chalupa from its menu.

Oh, sad news. It's only been out for like a month or so. Disgusting. Yeah. I got to try. I got to try one just to say I did. So I will make a run for the border, then a run for the bathroom. Oh, God. I don't understand why you do these things to yourself.

There's no way it's going to taste good. Yes. And just for people who don't know what the naked chicken chalupa is, instead of having the taco, they take a piece of chicken and deep fried and Mexican spices and wrap the wrap everything, put everything in that. It looks repulsive. Taco Bell is doesn't taste good to begin with.

I love Taco Bell. You know, any time between midnight, any time between midnight and 2 a.m., Taco Bell could be the best food on the planet. Now, see, you can't qualify things like that. That's like saying I like reggae music when I'm on a beach drinking rum, getting a blowjob.

Well, I'd like any kind of music then. That's true. That's true. OK. All right. It just happens to be reggae music when you're on a beach getting a blowjob. So if I'm ever on the beach and I hear reggae spontaneously erupt, I'll know to stay away from your side of the beach for a few minutes.

Joke about spontaneously erupting here. Yes. OK. Anyways, let's move on to something that's cool. This is this took over the Internet, or at least the portion that I like to dwell in this week. Making music from image files is has been around for a long time.

There are software packages that you can basically just take a picture. It'll shit out, you know, some sound. And it's usually kind of glitch hardcore stuff that, you know, here's a picture of Hitler. And then they start screaming over it. It was basically what it always happens. However, that is not the case with the picture that came out this week.

It's a Lisa Frank unicorn that was converted into midi art by YouTube star Andrew Huang, which he posted over the weekend. You look at the photo and it's a it's a unicorn done in dot style across. So, you know, total midi artwork. Play it.

Just I'm not going to say anything to anyone. Just go play it. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Mind blown. Mind blown. It was one of the few things on the Internet this week that made me smile. And I just did it made me smile. So it sounds unbelievably fantastic.

And let's see. That's my last thing that I think I found was I wish I thought was super cool. Well, it's a simulated map of births and deaths in the world. Let's this is done by Brad Lyon, who has a doctoral degree in mathematics and does software development and designer Bill Snebold.

Bill. So. No, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, my God. I didn't know Bill made this. Oh, sweet. I get it. OK. Props to Bill Snebold. And just so if anybody remembers, buddy of mine at Paramount, who did a lot of movie posters that you have seen, including the Tomb Raider poster and my favorite snakes on a plane.

Yes, you did. So I guess last year they did a in an interactive simulation map of just the U.S. So they have now updated it for the world. And it's kind of fascinating to watch it just tick by. And the design is quite nice. So, yeah, no, it's very fun to watch. I was I can put some Moby behind it and watch people being born and dying.

And it'd be a circle of life. Yes, it is. I got one from the No Shit Sherlock Files. It's from Recode, your favorite. And it's called We're Consuming Too Much Media. It's time to detox our brains. OK, so everybody ignore everything we talked about previously in the show.

Yeah. For many of us, generating and managing the ceaseless flow of news, social media and questionable facts has become a full time job. It's been that way for since the Internet came around. And before that, people would go to libraries. Too much information. No, it's it's much worse now.

I 100% agree with this article since the election. This has just been insane. I can't even look at Twitter anymore, or at least I know what I'm getting into when I open Twitter. I'm going to be overwhelmed and angry. Well, here's the thing. Twitter, you can mute things. Use mute filters. It makes Twitter much more usable now.

I highly encourage that. And on a final note, I found this treatise, as it were, by Arl Balkan, and it's called Encouraging Individual Sovereignty and a Healthy Commons. This is almost word for word, except the players have changed from a manifesto I wrote maybe 10, 15 years ago on how walled gardens are terrible and what we should do to get rid of them.

And it's never going to work. I tried it. I tried it. It's never going to work because businesses like walled gardens and trying to build an interoperable system, kind of like the web used to be, just it's not going to happen anymore.

The internet used to be for nerds and geeks like us who would like to build things. And now it's for people who have, you know, stock portfolios and like to make money off of it and like to own you. So if you're interested in software development and interesting things like this, go read it.

It's a little bit long. Nice design, though. He had some nice illustrations in here, but his whole premise is bound to fail. And it was getting passed around by a lot of software nerds this week, and everybody thought it was a great idea. And it is a great idea, but it's never going to happen. Yeah, I mean, you file this under the wouldn't it be nice category.

Wouldn't it be nice in a different world? Feedback loop. Our first bit of feedback comes from 6502chip on Twitter. And it says, GOG podcast, unlimited data plan is the original fake news.

Bravo. Well done. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat. And Barrett Reese writes in Microsoft research, developing an AI to put coders out of a job. Now, this is an interesting one because it was making the rounds this week through the the nerd network. It's a project called Deep Coder.

And what the funny part is, it kind of does what all coders do. And it's just steals code from everybody else and puts it all together to do the things that you want it to do. And apparently all you have to do is pour Jolt Cola into it. Yeah. Oh, God, that stuff is disgusting. Yeah, this is funny.

I mean, can you deep coder fix my WordPress site? Yeah, seriously. And it does not work. It's RM dash RF star. I would have to say delete. Yeah. All right. Our next bit of feedback comes from GOG dot show.

Our newfangled, new branded site. This is from Christian Zangle. I just listened to your first episode. Why? Why? Why? Oh, why would you do that to yourself? Yeah. And heard that Brian ran a BBS as well. Reminded me of a chat program I made back then that already hadn't in air quotes, AI module.

It was called Six Axe Chat, which only proves naming is hard. In my opinion, it gave better responses than Siri and can swear profoundly if required. Nice. Nice. For the latecomers like me, give the first show a chance. It's very funny. And who wouldn't want to know how to make money on the cyber?

There, I updated the title for you. OK. Don't go back and listen to the first show. I listened to it not too long ago. It actually was. It's not as bad as you think it is. It's not great. It's not great. Does it have legs, Jason? Yeah, it actually does. All right. That's when we used to do things like come up with problems and then try and solve them on the fly.

Oh, fuck that. Too much work for you. It never works. We're still not making money off the internet, are we, Jason? No, we're not. OK. OK, let's continue as a comment here. By the way, you talked about treadmill discs in your second show. How did that work out for you?

I never could afford one, so I didn't get it the treadmill desk. And I don't. Yeah. With a baby in the house, that's probably not wise. No. So I won't be doing that anytime soon. And then finally, P.S., I'd also suggest you do some topic based podcasts in between your normal shows.

But it would be far better if you could come up with that idea on your own. We've had that idea. See the we don't make any money. Yes. And also we to make money, we need downloads on these shows. So if we put more shows in the feed, then people download less. There's a whole reason for that.

If you would like to hire me, I will tell you all about why you can cannibalize your own show with your own show if you're not careful enough. Yeah. So we have we've we've talked about doing this multiple times. There are some topics that we all Jason and I both have written down in a file somewhere that we would like to hit at a deeper, deeper level at some point.

But it does come down to we just don't we both have to work day jobs right now. So if this ever becomes our full time job, patreon.com slash grumpy old geeks and cool. Christian Christian is a Patreon subscriber. So that's yes. So thank you very much. And if you're, you know, corporation type out there that has a publicity budget, you know, write us about advertising on the show and tell friends about the show.

So hopefully we'll get there at some point and we can do deeper dives. It would be nice. And also see up to speed. Yes, we did try to do that. Yes, we did. Unfortunately, failed miserably. Well, it was a great show. Got great, great traffic, but it's just too much damn work. Exactly. So our next we got some iTunes comments and five stars.

Thank you, people. This one comes from Joe Webb. Oh, one, five, nine. Awesome. You guys are awesome with three exclamation points and a smiley face. Well, thank you, Joe Webb. Shorten to the point. Thank you. Saves us some time. Our second five star rating came from Punk Truck.

Refreshingly great show. I love the show. Just subscribed two episodes ago and I'm incredibly happy to have found a show that talks about the tech industry without the BS. Technically, my name is Brian Schulmeister and I don't have a middle name. So you've got plenty of BS on this show. Yes, lots of BS. Keep up the good work.

Looking forward to hearing more from y'all. All right. Southern. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, Punk Truck. 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 please go to iTunes and drop us a five star and a lovely review.

If you wouldn't mind, we'd appreciate it. But better yet, tell a friend, because that's how we keep this show on the road. And a shout out, of course, again, to Bill Paxton. Breaking news as of this morning.

He's passed away just in case you missed the beginning of the show. Yeah. I don't think he's going to be listening to the show, but yeah. Set. Pour one out for our homie, Bill. Exactly. And positive news, at least for me. Baseball is back. The preseason games have begun. I watched my beloved Doyers yesterday win a game.

I'm just happy to have something to watch on TV that is not news. There you go. So. Well, and if you're into the podcast mood, this show comes out on Monday. So tomorrow, if you're listening to this on Monday, on The Art of Charm, my day job, I get to mix work and pleasure.

One of my oldest and best friends, Joey Ito, is going to be on. He's the head of the MIT Media Lab. And we did a really awesome long show with him. So head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast and subscribe and check out that awesome episode with Joey. It's a lot of fun. We bust each other's balls quite a bit on it.

It's entertaining. I'm actually going to listen to that one. I am. I'm a big fan of Joey Ito. So great guy. Great guy. Excellent. And to close out the show, I just want to point out this is from Twitter, but it has been fact checked. There are exactly five places in the world where BBC reporters are banned.

Let's hear it. Rwanda. North Korea. Iran. Zimbabwe. And the White House. There you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 the 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 198.

Well, that's great. That's just fucking great, man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're some real fruity shit now, man. You finished. That's it, man. Game over, man. It's game over. What the fuck are we going to do now? What are we going to do?

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