199: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Cat

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, hello to all the new listeners. You should be aware that we do use some salty language on this show, so consider yourself warned. And if you're one of the three people still using the old Grumpy Old Geeks app, please delete it and go to podcast1.com slash app if you're an app person.

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Yeah, exactly. What he said. Yes. Sorry about the little preamble there. We just had to get some stuff out of the way. Yeah, a little paperwork in the bathroom, as per usual. Speaking of in the bathroom, a little follow-up, Jason. You've always talked about the man poo problem in San Francisco.

Yes, I have. It is an issue. Well, here's a little known fact that they have not publicized because, you know, why let the homeless people know about it? San Francisco fire stations are required by law to keep their ground floor bathrooms open to the public between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

So as long as you're fairly regular and getting enough fiber and to have a good timing, you should be okay. Yeah, so we're just dealing with evening man poo. Yes, I have no idea how this came across my feed, but it did. And I blame you and Facebook. Okay, I don't know why you would blame me for this. I don't post about man poo on Facebook.

I'm convinced that they're listening to us. That's true. Oh, hey, man. They're listening to the show. Hey, Zuck, what's up? Yeah, nice manifesto, motherfucker. There's the salty language we were talking about. Okay, NASA, we talked about these seven new planets that were found the other week, and NASA asked the Internet to name them unwisely.

Yeah, as per usual. Yeah, you never do this. So if you're in for a little bit of fun, check out the hashtag seven names for seven new planets on on the Twitter or check the link in our show notes because we link to one of the articles talking about it. One thing I do have to point out, I'm a little tired of the millennials reliance on on Harry Potter. Everything is Harry Potter for you people. It's no Star Wars.

It's no Star Wars. And of course, there was a, you know, planet McPlanet face, which, you know, the thing I found out about the millennials and their naming schemes is they're just not very funny. I went through tons of these, and they're just actually not very funny. I still think ours was funnier when we decided it was going to be Uber, Airbnb, Amazon.

Yes. You know, Flickr, maybe. We'll get Technorati in there. You know, for the smaller planets, we'll name them after Web 2.0 companies. Oh, it should all be dead Web 2.0 companies. Yahoo. Planet Yahoo. Exactly. Marissa Meyer should get her own moon. I'm going to ask Jeeves today. Would you like me to pick up some milk?

Nice. We talked about the Nokia, Nokia 3310. Not coming to America. What's up with that? Not coming to America today. I was really looking forward to not ordering it, but now I can't even not not order it. Oh, poor baby. You can't hate not order it.

Yeah, I can't. Oh, well. And it's ugly, too. The new one is just kind of fugly. No, the redesign was bad. Just you still have the models around somewhere, don't you? Just redo the exact old one. Yeah. That's all people want.

Seriously. Just, you know, rip out the guts and put in the new guts and, you know, you're off to the races. Come on. Exactly. It's not that hard. Speaking of sorry, America. Well, I don't even. Sorry. Sorry. I had in advance for all the people that think that all we do is crap on Trump because we got some more of those comments.

We'll get to those later. This is just news, people. We're in a visa war. So the EU has voted to bar visa free travel for American citizens now because we're barring a bunch of EU member states. So if you plan to travel to Europe, fork up the cash and check ahead of time.

Well, I would also like to point out on this one, we have been breached and in breach of the terms of that agreement for three years now. So, you know, Trump might have been the trigger, but Obama loaded the gun. So this is not this is not a Trump thing. This is the fact that, you know, we we've been kind of dicks about it for three years and they're finally saying, OK, enough's enough.

I just did the preface because we're going to be told we're saying it because of Trump anyways. Right. So I'm just trying to be fair and balanced. Oh, yeah. Maybe we should call this episode Fox News. Yeah. And I would just like to we mentioned the new Skype bot because, you know, bots are great. Yeah, they're so useful and awesome.

I love all the little notifications I'm getting in Skype for no reason now. Yeah, no, I just signed in and it's like, hey, would you like to find more friends on Skype? I'm like, no, because it's not a fucking social network. You're a phone company. Why are you asking me to have more friends on on the phone company?

It's it's ridiculous. So they have to reach to find something to make Skype bot useful for. But no, Skype bot is not useful. Skype bot is stupid. Skype is owned by Microsoft, correct? Oh, can we get Clippy, the Skype bot?

That is exactly my point. If the bot showed up with a little paperclip, I'd be a lot happier about it. Paperclip with one of those old like 50s operator headphones on. How may I direct your call, sir? It should actually talk in 1950s because it should be. Hey, you want some more friends? Yeah, see.

Hey. In the news. Here we go. Hey, look, this is right in our wheelhouse. We would talk about this either way. We talked about it when it was Hillary's emails.

Yes. We spent security segments discussing it. Here we are. I think we're just we're just a little gun shy now to talk about anything that has to do with anything. Here's we here's where we're at with with, you know, because we're going to be lying media because we're reporting facts. This is a fact.

Here we go. Mike Pence. Vice President Mike Pence. Oh, Vice President Mike Pence. October 28th, 2016. Here is the tweet. Copying real Donald Trump. Real Donald Trump and I commend the FBI for reopening an investigation into Clinton's personal email server because no one is above the law.

What did Mike Pence do? Mike Pence routinely used a private email server, conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues. Beyond that, it got hacked. Oh, oh, zing, zing, zing, zoom.

But does anybody care? No, because they're fucking hypocrites. That's right. Don't don't expect this one to really get much, much play in the the courts. No, but the the one true joy I got out of this one is a story over at Huffington Post. Actually, this photo is everywhere.

It is a photo of Hillary Clinton flying coach. I might add sitting in a coach seat on an airplane, reading the headline about Mike Pence's hacked emails and his private email server. That's pretty awesome. Pretty nice. So there you go. Yeah. OK, so anyways, moving on, moving on.

Snap has IPO'd and now they are worth they have a market. Boy, do I know it. They've got a market cap of thirty four billion dollars, which is six billion dollars shy of Tesla's market cap. And Tesla actually makes something. A real product that people like and use.

Yeah. And pay for and pay for. But but Snap has glasses because they're a camera company. Yeah. And a little vending machine that drops in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. No reason. Looks like a minion. I look good for that. Good for them. I guess. Here's the thing.

We run a tech podcast. We talk about tech. We've been in tech forever. We like tech. That's good. If you if you if you've made something good and useful and I want you to get all the monies. Yep. I don't understand this one. I don't understand Snapchat at all.

I don't get Snapchat. I understand that they've got a good market share in really young people. We all know they started off as a place for underage people to send their their naughty bits to each other. They've they've pivoted. I guess they've pivoted. They're getting slightly older people.

Whatever. They're vastly, vastly, vastly overrated. I I've not invested. People have asked me about it. Are you going to invest in Snapchat? And I laughed for approximately 25 minutes. Yeah. But think back about Facebook and should have invested in that one because you'd be a little bit richer now.

I never laughed about investing in Facebook. I just said I personally wasn't going to do it. But this one. Yeah. I mean, here I live in Santa Monica and your life is about to get a hell of a lot more annoying. Well, yes and no. But let me let me explain real quick.

Let me let me explain when I was living in San Francisco when Facebook IPO'd, you know, like 200 new millionaires on the street that day. Almost all of them bought real estate. And that was the beginning of that, you know, ridiculous climb of rental prices and basically everything.

Ah, but Jason, you forget I own real estate here. So in that sense, this is very, very good for me. Yeah. Yeah. This move to Toronto might be coming faster than I am going to be getting a big fuck off McMansion in Toronto. All right. There you go.

No, for that, it's very, very good for everything else. Yeah, it's annoying. I mean, I was out the night the IPO hit at some of my local places and and there were some of these 20 something million newly minted paper millionaires were out and about and they were annoying.

Shocking. To be fair, they were annoying before they became millionaires. Yeah, it's kind of not really that different, except they spend a lot more money on things. You know, I saw people drinking things that they don't even understand how good they are. Fair enough.

So good for them. Again, you're paper millionaires. I would I would caution any of you that happen to be listening with a fatly new bank account from Snapchat. Hold your money and spend it wisely. Yeah. And prepare to pay those taxes when you vest. Oh, your taxes.

Oh, you have no idea what's going to hit you. Yeah. Big money, big money, big money. No whammies. Oh, half my money gone. Whoops. Yep. There you go. So the interesting thing in eMarketer, they have an article, the TechCrunch covered about Snapchat's growth is now being driven by older users because the youngins have moved on.

The youngins are off of it. I can spend the next 30 minutes of this podcast going into great detail why I think Snap's not going to be a big thing in the future. I don't think it's got the stranglehold that Facebook has on people. I think if anything, I don't think it's going away.

I think it's always going to be worth something. It's going to be here for a while. It's going to be the Yahoo. Well, it's more Twitter than Facebook. That's all I'm saying. At some point, it's going to be a marginal player. It's never going to be the predominant one, which is what a $33 billion evaluation says it's going to be.

It will not be. So yeah, the thing is, you know, Instagram's eating their lunch now because all they had to do was just copy the features that people liked on Snapchat and just went over to Instagram. And Instagram is owned by Facebook, so they've got big daddy money behind them to keep them going. Snapchat does not, you know.

And there are two things going against Snapchat's continued growth right now. The fact that older users are moving over to it, which is fine. But generally, from my feed and people my age, a bunch of us who are a bunch of people parents of teens who were on Snapchat are going over to basically see what the hell is going on.

They're confused by it. They're not using it for themselves. They're only using it to monitor their children who are leaving Snapchat because now they know their parents are on it. So what's your user base then? Schrodinger's Snapchat. Exactly. I think that's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

But when something is being, what is it, measured, then it modifies the actual properties of the thing. But I'm no physicist, obviously. Well, no. The cat's dead until you look in and try to measure it. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah. They kind of go together. Anyways.

Yeah. That's what that's Heisenberg's uncertainty cat. So we'll see if I'm right or wrong. Again, I don't wish them ill will. I support any company that can keep people employed and does well. So good. Go for it. I just I think it's vastly, vastly overrated.

Yeah. And it's and honestly, we're old and we just don't get it. But yeah, because I like user interfaces. Yeah, me too. Me too, brother. Me too. And something that will definitely have a user interface, I hope, is SpaceX moonshot. I this is exciting.

I this is, you know, JFK level stuff. This is we're going to fucking do it. And we're just going to throw it out there and say we're going to do it. And good on you. Yeah. So, you know, and it's going to be, you know, one of the first runs of the Falcon Heavy rocket, which everybody's been waiting for.

I can't wait to see this thing grow. You know, yeah. Come on, let's go. And there's people are theorizing that this is starting the first, you know, the basically the private private space race, which is we need we need something like this, something to really ramp it up, because, you know, hauling groceries to the ISS is one thing, but sending somebody to the moon is a whole other, you know, ball of wax.

And whoever these two people are that are paying to go. Good on you. That's it. It takes some balls to do that, too. I might add. Hopefully it's Trump and Putin. Wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be nice? Wouldn't it be nice? OK. OK.

And more space news. The VSS Unity has had its first successful glide test, which is great. You know, I can't wait for this thing that since the last one tore apart. I hope hopefully they put a safety break on the the foils because that's all that happened last time.

They got pulled the wrong lever and the wings went up and it tore apart. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you've not seen the video of this thing flying, I urge you to check it out. It's pretty damn cool. Mm hmm. No, I can't. I can't wait. I hope they get this thing rocking faster than than they have been.

But they had, you know, having to start from scratch was a was a pain in the ass. Yeah. Don't you know, brother? Yep. Yahoo. Mm hmm. Another data breach. Yes. Another one. It's almost, you know, to the point of I'm like, it's almost like they're the White House.

I know stuff just leaking is leaking like a sieve. I just didn't know there was anything left to steal. Yeah. That's the funny part. I'm like, didn't they get everything already? Yeah. What don't they have when they already got one billion? I don't understand what is left to steal.

Updated passwords, I guess. I don't know. Is it still even called Yahoo? Didn't they weren't they supposed to switch their name by this point? I don't know. I don't know because the Verizon deal hasn't gone through because the price has gone down by 300 million because of the data breaches, but a measly 300 million on a four point two billion dollar original price tag, I think somewhere in that ballpark.

But can you imagine being? Oh, I'm sure Snap can imagine. Can you imagine being vastly overvalued like that? No, but I know what it's like to be very undervalued. I was a programmer. Don't forget. All right. Well, our grumpy old geek. Yes, that's true. Marissa Meyer, though, is not getting her bonuses and is giving the money back to the peoples.

And well, she she said that she would like it to go back to the peoples if it will happen. Who knows? But yeah, it's not. It's going to Verizon. Yeah. And the the the interesting thing about this is they fired the lawyer over the security breaches.

Well, you're shocked by this. It's like they fired the lawyer. Well, that's because they don't exactly have a programming or security team anymore. They've already been fired. Maybe. Yeah. You figured the CSO would be the one on its on his way out. But apparently the lawyer knew about it.

So, OK, the lawyer knew it's always the case. The lawyer knew usually. And in sad FCC news, we've got a lot of sad FCC news around the bend, I fear. They're halting. Yeah, I know.

They're already halting the Internet privacy requirements for ISPs, which means that ISPs can now just sell your information to other parties. Or soon they will be able to. But we had a better time to have a VPN. People go to Grumpy Old Geeks dot com. Well, you still need I mean, you still got to sign up for your main account to get to the VPN.

So the data that you give them to sign up for your main account, they can just sell off to advertisers or whoever they want to. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's just called being American these days. Right. But they're going to sell you. They can sell your data. But in a privacy victory, they will not be able to share your web browsing history without your permission.

Which will be buried somewhere. Somewhere in the EULA. On page 723 on something that you never read. Yep. Buried in the EULA. And I mean, this is supposed to come into effect sometime early next year, which means they've got a year to put their nose into your U-Porn history and poke around.

But, yeah. What are you going to do? This is not going the right direction. And they also partially killed the rules requiring ISPs to be clear about usage caps and hidden fees. Which is why they can all say they're unlimited. Unlimited. Interesting.

Boy, you know, I think show number three is when I started screaming about this. Yeah. And when I was watching, what the hell was I watching? It wasn't the Super Bowl because I don't watch that crap. Oh, I was watching the Oscars. And they kept running that Verizon Unlimited. And you know what they were doing, I think?

They were, quote, unquote, branding it, quote, unquote, Verizon Unlimited, which wasn't just unlimited. It was Verizon Unlimited. Which can mean anything. That's a brand. That's not a descriptor. Exactly. Yeah. So they can call it Verizon Unlimited and basically cap you at five fucking tweets if they want to.

It's insane. It's absolutely insane. Nobody cares. Well, I care. I care a lot, but there's not a hell of a lot we can do right now. We can keep petitioning and keep filling out our forms that nobody seems to want to pay attention to. You fill out six forms and you're over your data cap.

That's where they're going to get you. Yeah. You can't sign up. Yes. No Unlimited petitioning. All they do is they put, like, Verizon's got a page now with a five gig image that's one pixel. So every time you try to go fill it out to complain, you hit your data cap.

Ye olde hidden pixel tricky. Yeah. It works all the time. Oh, OK. Let's talk about some happier news. Why don't you bring us in on your Uber news this week? Uber's had a hell of a week. Oh, have they ever? Following the previous hell of a week and the previous hell of a week before that.

I actually saw an article right before we were about to go record, and I didn't get it in the show notes. But it was basically saying, will Uber be the first big Web 2.0 tech crash where this company that was doing so well is just going to completely crash and burn and go out of business?

And I'm starting to wonder. Nope. Ain't going to happen. Yeah, I don't think so either. No way. They've still had a very bad week. Uber's SVP of engineering is out because he did not disclose after he left Google that he was in a dispute over a sexual harassment allegation, which is exactly what Uber does not want right now.

Oh, whoopsies grabbing by the Uber. Yeah. His name, Amit Singh Hall, left his job at Uber because he did not disclose that. And top executives there informed him of an allegation of sexual harassment from an employee that an internal investigation had found credible.

While he was at Google. Yeah. While he was at Google. Yeah. So Google shit canned him because of that or he left, you know. Actually, no, Google didn't shit can him. I remember seeing the article about this that was pissed off and said, here's the problem with tech culture right now. Google just let him leave. Oh, he just walked out the door.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, here's we can fire you or you can just walk out and we won't say anything. And he just walked out. So he should have been fired and this should have been public knowledge. Yeah, that should have been on. It should have been on his permanent record. Exactly. That permanent record that everybody tells you about. Uber's vice president of product and growth.

Ed Baker has also resigned. For what? What has he done? Well, there's a lot of different PR that's been put out, making it sound very benign. You know, it's kind of like when a band breaks up musical differences. Dehydration. But because it's Uber, it's a bit more complex than that.

But his resignation came at a time when Uber employees have complained about questionable behavior on his part. Oh, we know what that means. For example, one person anonymously tipped off board member Arianna Huffington. Oh, Arianna. Have you been touching the boobies? So she's been brought in to the Uber board to basically conduct a wide ranging investigation to sexism and sexual harassment at the company, which basically means she looks at other people's reports and repost them.

Yeah. Because that's all the Huffington Post does. Via an email that Baker had engaged in a sexual encounter with another employee, which in and of itself, I'm not going to say anything about it is what it is. But specifically, sources said Baker had been seen making out at an internal Uber event held in Miami three years ago, which was seen by other employees.

There was no suggestion of sexual harassment on his part. And the encounter was apparently consensual. But the investigation is ongoing. So this could be nothing. But it's definitely not having happening at a good time. No, it's not. Yeah. And if it was really nothing, you'd think that they would just kind of wait.

Yeah. There's there's got to be something else. You know, the story we get is far less interesting and juicy than the actual story that happened. Usually. So the thing is, when a company is on fire, there better be real, real, real fire before you add any extra smoke.

Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. And apparently Susan Fowler Righetti, who was it was just Susan Fowler last week. Now it's Susan Fowler Righetti. She is hired an attorney, an employment attorney, because apparently Uber is coming after her and investigating her.

She's claiming that there is it's not the law firm that Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington are using to investigate the sexual harassment claim or claims, but a different law firm. So she's just hiring. She's lawyering up. Well, she probably should, because we know Uber has a long history of getting very, very nasty with lawyers anytime anybody disagrees with them, including cities, governments, et cetera.

Yeah, they are not shy on litigation by any stretch. Not at all. So, you know, this is I am not a big fan of anybody that goes to like any of these crowdsourcing or crowdfunding funding things at all. But if this chick puts up a crowd funder for a legal defense fund, I'm donating.

Yep. Yep. Throw up a GoFundMe. Yep. I'm sure she didn't. I'm sure she didn't get a very good severance package when she left. No, I'd guess not. And apparently the trouble goes all the way to the top. Shockingly, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick did something stupid.

Go figure. Yeah. A new video published by Bloomberg shows the Uber CEO getting into an argument with the driver at the end of a ride, because apparently he uses his own service. Before he exits the vehicle, the driver starts talking to the CEO about the status of the company's Uber black premium service. The conversation quickly gets heated.

Did you watch this video? No, I started to watch it and then something came up and I didn't get a chance to go back. Well, when we're living in a world where presidential behavior is not very presidential, I guess CEO behavior doesn't necessarily need to be held to any kind of standard either.

Has it ever been? It's a CEO. Come on. This is if you and I ran the company and drank a little bit too much and thought we were off the record. This is what this guy does. So good job. So what was the end of the discussion with them?

How did it end? I believe there was just a slammed door. And I'm sure, you know, he gave the driver a one star rating. And when when Travis Kalanick gives you a one star rating, it actually means something. Oh, it does. Now, the big the big one for me is the New York Times article about gray ball.

Now, this is the one that people seem to think may potentially cause Uber to actually go away. See, the thing about this is, is it's probably not against the law. So what they were doing is they were profiling people who were trying to get them in trouble for actually for, you know, skirting the laws or talking about things.

So, you know, they would use this gray ball system and it was part of a program called VITOS, short for violation of terms of service, which Uber created to root out people that thought we're using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including gray ball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States.

And it was approved by Uber's legal team. So Soviet Uber talking bad about Uber is not good. Yeah. So if you were, you know, if you worked for the Justice Department in your in your town and you were trying to, you know, run an Uber sting, they would they were using all the public information they could find to target you and your phone number and your phone and basically give you fake cars that would kind of roam around but never stop to pick you up.

Wow. That's insane. And I think the best part is they would actually track burner numbers and they would like go to the stores where the burners were sold and find out who they sold them to. And because they were they were targeting low cost burners because the justice departments in these towns and the legal departments couldn't afford to buy higher end phones.

So if they like they would check the number, go to the store where the burner was sold. And if it was a cheap burner, you were on the list because they thought that you were going to be a cop. This is serious, devious, insane shit. This is house of cards shit. Yeah. This is house of cards shit. That is from from a company that is ostensibly just a taxi replacement.

Yeah. What is it going to take for people to finally stop using this self-driving cars? Yeah, I'm all for self-driving cars now. Yeah, but Uber is going to be the ones that own them. I know. I know. On to on to happier news.

Twitter is now going to let you mute specific words from your timeline and mute eggs without profile photos. Well, you know, the mute specific keywords I've been able to do forever in my I think I use tweet bot, but I would like to mute people with NASCAR profile images, please. I would like to mute Twitter.

Well, you can do that. You just don't have to go there. That's pretty easy. I mean, I think the mute eggs without profile photos is genius. I mean, that's that seems from what I can tell from people with high profiles on Twitter. That seems to be where most of the harassment comes from.

Yeah. People setting up quick, you know, accounts and not bothering to change an image. And there you go. So that's great. I mean, I feel, you know, arguing about what Twitter is doing and what isn't what it isn't doing to solve problems just feels like you're playing.

You're the band playing the Titanic as it starts to sink. Yeah, which sucks because I want Twitter to be useful. I want it to be fun. It used to be in the good old days. Well, this next before the fucking unwashed masses showed up. Maybe I will fix the problem, Jason.

Oh, God, because Twitter's new anti-harassment effort is going to flag users as possibly abusive before they're reported. So this is minority report shit going on. OK, I haven't I haven't committed a crime, but I have I have not committed a tweet.

Well, apparently, twist. This is Twitter's vice president of engineering. Ed Ho wrote that the company saw how I knew you were going to do that. I knew I was going to even write it in the show notes, but then I thought you'd see it and that would preemptively make you do it. Anyway, you can work for Twitter.

Apparently, I can predict things. So where the fuck was I wrote that the company's software will flag likelihood. Harassers, users that regularly tweeted accounts that don't follow them back, for instance, and block these users tweets from being seen by anyone but their followers over a set period of time.

I actually find this disturbingly wrong. Oh, what, Brian? You actually find this wrong? I thought you would be on the side of good and right on this. I don't think that's correct. I mean, I think that you are assumed this is this is when you get into the case of assuming guilt.

You're assuming guilt, right? Yes. Like that's fucked up. You can't do anything until somebody has done something wrong. Here's the thing. Yeah, that's not in the EULA. So well, yeah, the EULA is you do what we like. My problem with it is don't fuck with the timeline.

Sorry. Don't fuck with the timeline. Oh, you mean like when certain members in the administration go back and delete their tweets that were completely against the positions that they're now holding? Yes. Deleting tweets, whatever. That's fine. No, I'm talking about the fact that I want to see what people write in the order that they write it. It's the Facebook issue and they would like to make money.

Put some ads in there. Charge me. Well, but they can't because I tried to pay Twitter and they can't sort out their ad. They can't figure out how to take a credit card. That's again. Like I said, I have tried to give Twitter money. They will. Same with me in the Chicago Tribune.

That's why I subscribe to the New York Times. Now, if you can't take a credit card, then what are you doing on the Internet? New Zealand. They're going to start taking our techies with them. I'm a little surprised that you have not signed up for this, Jason. Bam, bam.

Can't take her. So, sorry. And they're tech jobs. If they were podcasting jobs, I'd be in. There is no requirement for you to take said job. This is a free vacation. That's true. Four days in New Zealand and Wellington.

I might be able to do that. You can swing four days with Bam Bam. I'm serious. I have a kid. That's a bit of a different story. Four days with Bam Bam. You get a free vacation. They fly you all the way over there. You get to see all the Lord of the Rings spots.

All you have to do is go to a few applications. And I can totally spud. You have to do a couple interviews. I can totally spud from train spotting that, you know, and blow the interviews. I think you need to do this for the show. Talk about a story. That's true.

That's true. Come on, Jason. Sign up. There's only a, well, okay. Hmm. I think when we're done with the show, I might have to go investigate that because Bam Bam can go into a doggy daycare for at least four days. I got no problem with that. You found a place you like. You can, you can watch it over unsecured internet on your phone.

No, they don't do that. Okay. They, and they told me why they, they, uh, apparently the dogs get frisky during the day and the people complained that the dogs were humping too much. So they don't, they took away the live feed. You think they could actually make that another source of revenue?

I was going to say, there are people on the internet, um, maybe the, the, the, the bark web that, uh, will pay for that. And did we even say what the story was about? And did we just leap into it? So let me go back really quickly. The city of Wellington, New Zealand is attempting to fill a hundred open tech jobs by flying worthy candidates to the land next to the land down under for free.

It's called, uh, look, see Wellington. And basically you fill out an online job application. They will fly you there for free. You get to do a bunch of interviews. Maybe you take a job. Maybe you just enjoy New Zealand. I'm urging Jason to take advantage of this. I'm going to go check it out. Cause if, if, yeah, if they're just going to fly you down for an interview, I got a 23 year, you know, tech resume.

Look, if I were single and without a kid, I would, I would have signed up the first second I saw this and I wouldn't be telling anyone else about it because I'd want the free chip. Yeah. Okay. Missed the point on that one. I forgot it was just a free trip to go down and interview. There's no contract that says you have to take a job.

Yeah, that's true. Yep. Okay. Let's get back to some robot news. Okay. Virginia is the first state to pass the law, allowing robots to deliver straight to your door. Okay. Yes. Apparently some lobbyists have got these guys to, uh, Estonian based lobbyists to boot.

I love it. Starship technologies. Um, they, they got two Virginia lawmakers to sponsor a bill that will, let robots drive to your door and they don't have to have line of sight to the operator. Um, they cannot weigh over 50 pounds and they cannot exceed 10 miles an hour and they will be, can they have flamethrowers on them?

I wish, I wish get your segue off the sidewalk done. Yeah. So it'll be interesting. The municipalities in the state though are allowed to regulate how the robots will operate. So this is a statewide, but the little municipalities and cities do have final say on how these robots can be used, but I think it's cool.

Yeah. You know, the stuff isn't there yet. I'm terrified about what's going to happen. It's less than 50 pounds. And if it's bringing you some Cheetos and a pizza, come on. And my thought is let them try it out in Virginia. I don't live there. Yeah, that's true. I, I have lived in Virginia quite some time and, uh, yeah, the parts of Virginia I lived in definitely are not going to have any robots.

It's, it's, uh, or deliveries for that matter. Yeah. It's more deliverance than deliveries where I lived in Virginia. Oh, there's a title. Uh, and Ford is, uh, doubling down on automated trucking and delivery. Yeah. Now, did you, did you check out the video for these things?

I did. And it's, it's got everything that you want. Autonomous trucks with delivery and drones to your porch. Yeah. So we'll see how this one's going to work out. It's definitely not going to be, uh, tested here, but we'll see where, you know, the rest of the world is kind of open to this kind of thing.

So I, I think, I think it looks kind of cool though. Look, uh, Ford says that it plans to have the whole fleet basically on the streets in the U S by 2021. So if you are driving for a living time to learn Pearl, Pearl, at least, at least go Python.

People are still using Python is a good, you know, automation language. Uh, robots are programmed in Python. So this is, this is true. Yes. And, uh, speaking of automation, uh, futurism.com has a really good, good article backing up everything that we've ever said, which we always like to point out to everybody, um, millions of jobs are at risk, but their loss could be for the greater good.

My ass ass. What they're saying is that, uh, since the truck driving industry is probably going to be taking a huge dump and it is the biggest employer in the country that is going to push us to universal basic income much faster. Not in this administration.

Yeah. Not in this administration, but we'll see, we'll see what's going to shake out. But, uh, we just like to, you know, point out every now and again, well, actually more often than not, we're, we're, we're on the money. So you tend to be correct. Um, so toot that horn, toot that horn a little bit.

Uh, the other week I talked about how Alexa, uh, at the Amazon Alexa basically has, you know, 10,000 hit a, hit a milestone, 10,000 apps, all of which are basically useless garbage, um, garbage. Yep. If there is one useful one that has come up, if you have a problem with a lot of the things that we're complaining about, say, you know, uh, basically like that you, you're, you're curious about a universal basic income, or you don't like the fact that Uber does really,

really horrible things, or you hate the fact that the FCC is starting to really screw consumers. Well, you can be super lazy. Now you can basically just add phone to action as, as a, as an, as an Amazon Alexa app or whatever the hell they call them these days. And, uh, automatically through just using Alexa, it'll call your local congressman for you.

All right. So you can say, uh, Alexa, I'm UBI curious. Well, I don't think you can say that because obviously, as we know, none of these apps actually work very well. You probably have to go Alexa, use phone to action to contact. My legislator to complain about X.

That might work. Well, then they'll wonder why you're complaining about a really fun drug. Yeah. So anyway, uh, no, yeah. Alexa, poor Alexa. I, I, I got her to play Spotify. I think that's pretty much the end of her usefulness.

I ask about, I ask about the weather and I play Spotify. Uh, I, and I listened to the radio. It works well with the radio. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, you know, it's a, it's a very expensive, uh, Bluetooth speaker. So, uh, in the next segment that we're going to walk into here and security, since we recorded that, uh, a day early, we did not get the news about what caused the giant Amazon S3 outage.

We're, we're, we talk about some of the, uh, after effects of that thing, but, uh, basically typo. Oopsies. typo. Yeah. They, uh, the guy who was actually, we don't know if it's a guy or girl. I think it was, uh, I think it was a guy. Um, they were, they were testing some of the billing stuff or they had, basically it's a very long explanation for a guy put in a string to take down part of the S3 system that does

one major thing and basically probably flipped the bit and went the other way around and took down all of it and had to reboot the entirety of S3. Oops. Which took a lot longer than they thought, cause they haven't done it in like years and years and years. Uh, fun times for S3.

Security? Ha! Welcome back, Dave Bittner. And we've got Brian again this week. He didn't have to run out and do any nappy work. Nope, diapers are done. All right. No poop for you. Well, there was plenty, but earlier.

Now let's talk about scary poop. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Wow. What a segue. Way to go, Brian. Yeah. That's why I get the no bucks. Somebody's rusty. That's right. That's right. Uh, well, yeah. I mean, uh, I thought we'd, uh, just wrap up our RSA coverage.

You know, we talked about it last time on the show, but, um, uh, there's a fun video that we've linked to, we teamed up with our, uh, friends at Cylance, uh, they're a big, uh, cyber security provider and we teamed up with them. Um, and, uh, they, they, they did a video of, uh, what's the nastiest malware you've ever seen.

And, uh, it's about three minutes long and it's, it's a pretty good, uh, watch. I don't know if you guys have had the chance to check it out. Yes. I watched it this morning. I watched it as well. The, the kicker really comes at the end. I guess the question is, do we want to give it, give it away and, and talk about it?

It is sort of, it's delightfully devious. I believe we should. I can't imagine too many people are going to make it all the way through this video. All right. So the final, uh, malware, the one that is the winner is, uh, someone had a piece of malware that would install itself on the BIOS of a hard drive.

And then it would make the hard drive randomly fail. So what happens when your hard drive randomly fails? You ship the hard drive back to the manufacturer. And then the manufacturer puts that hard drive on a, um, you know, on a bench with a bunch of other hard drives that they use to test, to see what is wrong with a hard drive.

And what does the malware then do? Infects all the other hard drives. Infects all the other hard drives. Right, right. And, uh, so then all of these, um, hard drives that are, um, you know, refurbs get sent out to unsuspecting customers, uh, with the, uh, BIOS malware in there.

And one of the things that's so evil about this kind of malware is that, you know, you can, before it, uh, you know, makes the, um, hard drive go up. Um, it's really hard to track down because you can scrub that system, you know, all the way down.

You can reformat that drive and that malware is still hiding out in the drive's BIOS. So really hard to track down. That is seriously insidious. Yeah. And at the same time, just in a, in a strange sort of way, delightfully clever.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So, uh, moving on from there, um, of course, uh, we had the big, uh, Amazon S3 outage this week. Did that hit either of you guys? No, I didn't, I didn't find any issues, but then again, I was editing audio for like 14 hours that day.

So I, I didn't really go on the internet very much. Yeah. It wasn't, uh, online until later in the day either when everything was going fine. Uh, the, some extent of it for me was everybody bitching about it on Twitter, which is almost as bad, maybe even be worse than having to live through it.

The actual outage, um, we did experience it here on the East coast. Um, it, it, uh, it definitely slowed some things down. We had trouble accessing some things that we normally access. I noticed when I got home at night, uh, I wanted to relax and, uh, watch a couple episodes of Frasier on Netflix and I couldn't do that.

So I had to live through that, uh, hell, but, uh, you know what then, okay, that kind of ties into my Hulu downtime. So I was having a, I was having a hell of a time. I was trying to watch that, uh, 11, 22, 63 show and I was, I was in mid binge.

I was ready to go for like three more hours and it would just not load. It stopped and I just could not get past episode three. Yep. Yep. That is likely related to it. So, um, you know, for those who, uh, who aren't, uh, up on what happened here Amazon had an outage, uh, some errors, they called it in their Amazon S3, um, servers, which it turns out serves a, a proportionally large part of the internet, uh, has at least

some part of their functionality or, or they're being served by, by S3 or in some way they're touching S3. And, um, there's an article we're linking to here from Wired Magazine. That's, uh, making the case that, uh, the headline is the Amazon S3 outages. What happens when one site hosts too much of the internet?

Yeah, that's a, that's a real problem. I mean, this is, uh, related, you know, we used to always crap on WordPress all the time because so many people use it and it was so easy to hack. And if a hack gets out, gets out there for WordPress, a bunch of WordPress sites go down. Now all the hosting is starting to be done in one or two or three different companies.

So not good. I mean, it's, yeah, it's an interesting thing when you think about, you know, the foundational sort of principles of the internet was to have things be distributed so that, you know, these sorts of things wouldn't happen. But then through natural, uh, good old fashioned capitalism, we get the consolidation of, of some of these services.

It'll be interesting to see too, if, um, any of these people who rely on Amazon and, and to be fair, I mean, Amazon's S3 has really good uptime in general. Here's the deal. I don't know if you guys remember this, but that same, that same data center, like maybe three years ago was hit by a lightning storm and like half of that data center was out because it was just not there anymore.

And it was the same story. Everybody was like, Oh, everybody's dependent on Amazon, blah, blah, blah. They got everything spun back up and everybody forgot about it and went back to hosting at Amazon. Nobody cares. Yep. Yeah. It's pretty much, it's so easy and it's so cheap. You just, you know, okay.

They're, you know, they've got five nines of, of uptime, which is pretty solid. So I, I, I don't think it, I don't think anything's going to change. I think it's a good headline bait and everybody just kind of freaks out for a day because I mean, look at the same thing with a Dine DNS after the, uh, Mariah botnet took them down, same thing.

And then everybody's probably still there. Well, I mean, yeah, nothing's going to change, but I mean, it does point out an underlying problem, which maybe we should be paying attention to, which I like how the Wired article particularly states that the winner take all dynamic of the tech industry, concentrating more and more power into few and fewer companies that is definitely happening.

So. Well, and now you can spread it across Google's, uh, you know, Google system. You can spread it across Microsoft system. They're Azure or Azure. And, um, as you and, uh, and, and spread the love around. That's what Snapchat does. I mean, they've got big contracts with Google and Microsoft to spread the love around.

I don't, and I think they also use Amazon as well, which makes sense. You'd kind of want to have backups that aren't the same, you know, the same ecosystem so that you could just switch with, you know, some DNS hacks and boom, Bob's your uncle. And there's always, you know, rack space, which had the wonderful mailer.

What was that called again, Jason? Oh, um, oh God. Oh, the rack report. I think it was the rack report. Like, Ooh, let's see what boobies are in my email today. Oh, it's servers. Damn it. Damn it. Right.

And there's a little window into what kind of email Jason was used to getting. Yes. But what are you going to bother me? Make it worth it. Right. Yeah. We all, we know, we know how to fish Jason. There's no mystery there. Most people would be filtering those out.

Jason filters those as VIP and important. Exactly. That must require some media attention. So, but I think that the point is, is a good one that, um, you know, this is just the kind of thing that will make people take a look at what they're doing and maybe consider spreading some of that data around so that they don't have all their eggs in one basket.

Because we know nobody's going back to their own data centers, unless you're Google's and Facebook's and Apple's. Oh my. Yeah. Yeah. It really, yeah. I think you're right. It really does seem to be going that way, um, for a lot of good reasons. But, you know, here, here's the downside. So, you know, it'll evolve.

It's worth, it's worth living with it for the, the, um, the convenience factor. It is so worth living with it. Yeah, I agree. And it's cheap too. I mean, you know, relatively so it's, it's, it's a good deal. Most of the time it's a really good deal for everybody. Yep.

Um, so moving on, there's a, we've been covering, uh, on the Cyber Wire this week, we've been having a lot of fun with this story. Um, there's this company called Cloud Pets and they, um, they sell adorable little IOT enabled stuffed animals. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Teddy Haxpin. Cute little IOT stuffed animals. And, uh, the, the idea behind them was that you could interface with these little stuffed animals and so you could record a message that you could send to your grandparents or your grandparents could record a message on their phone and then the little stuffed animal would say the message so that, you know, when, when little, when little, uh, junior, uh, or, or,

you know, little Jenny or whoever it is, is going to bed at night, they could get a nice little message from their grandparents or their parents or something like that. Don't look under the bed, Jenny. It'll get you. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Boogeyman's coming. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it turns out a lot. Uh, the, uh, the, um, the database for, for, for, uh, these systems, uh, were being kept, um, really unprotected on a server. Uh, I forget where it was. It was, it was not in one of the usual suspects.

They'd contracted out, you know, sort of a, your standard lowest bidder kind of thing. It was in Hillary Clinton's basement. Yeah, probably, probably. They had some extra, you know, cycles available. So, uh, but, um, the database was, um, unprotected, just sort of sitting out there on the web and, um, I want to say it was a MongoDB database, but I'm not a hundred percent sure of that, but they were able to, uh, find that.

Um, but also, uh, the recordings were stored there. So people were able to, um, grab over 2 million voice recordings from the, uh, from the stuffed animals. Now this isn't the same, the same pet that the German government told everybody to go take in their backyard and burn.

This is a whole, whole different, uh, IOT. Um, yes, I'm pretty sure this is a different one. Yeah, same concept, uh, but not the exact same one. Got it. Yeah. Um, so the interesting thing is that, you know, they have to now go, uh, hat in hand to the state of California, um, who has, uh, you know, disclosure rules.

So they're in the midst of that right now of, um, you know, what did we know? When did we know? And how bad is this? Um, but you know, it's another, uh, uh, password and personal information data. Breach made even more creepy by the fact that, you know, somebody out there has all these little, what are presumably, you know, mostly innocent, but at the same time, intimate recordings of family members.

Um, and they're just kind of out there. So, you know, but buyer beware, um, when it comes to, I, I would not buy a toy like this for my child, knowing what I know about, about all of this. Yeah. I, I, I'm going to run with a firm, no toys that connect to the internet policy for quite some time with my kid.

I think that's wise. It just, you know, it's just not worth it. There, there are plenty of, you know, buy, buy some Lego, buy, but there are plenty of other non-connected toys. And you've got enough, you've got enough attack vectors in your home. You know, you don't need a fluffy, cute one. No, no, I'm done.

Yeah. Yeah. Just, just go with the straight old baby monitor. You know, you want everybody to see your kids sleeping. That's good enough. Yep. I agree. Or Jason with the security cameras. Yeah. You can borrow my Chinese security cameras. I have an extra Chinese router sitting in the closet that I'm not using.

I'll go ahead and stuff that into a Chinese lead paint toy. There you go. Yeah. We'll keep seeing pictures of, uh, of Jason's real doll that he's stuffed down in his basement. Yeah. Yeah. You think that's bad. I've got the recordings. All right.

So speaking of, uh, hacking, uh, we have a hack of the week. I was quite pleased with this one. The Coachella website was hacked and user data was stolen. They are quick to point out that this does not involve passwords or any financial information because nobody that goes to Coachella has any money anymore because they live at home with their parents.

Well, that's true, but that's why they're able to afford the, you know, $4,000 tickets to go to Coachella. So somebody has, uh, apparently on the dark web, they're selling the data. So if you want to pick up a mailing, uh, mailing address list that, uh, you want to sell skinny jeans to or floppy hats, this is your prime vector.

Right? Yeah. And the, the, the, the important thing here is that even though they didn't get any passwords, they can use the data that they did get in phishing campaigns. So, you know, it's a class. I mean, they could, they could fish you saying that they're from Coachella. You know, we need information to verify your tickets.

All I would do right now is, is write that entire list saying, Oh, by the way, uh, I know that you've heard that Beyonce is canceled and is being replaced with a mediocre Lady Gaga. Please send us your password. If you would no longer like to attend and you'll get it, you'll get shit tons. So, you know, it's just so crazy.

It'd probably work. It probably would. I gotta go guys. I'll be back. Okay. So we talked a couple of weeks ago about, uh, reCAPTCHA being the, the, I am not a robot being actually broken by a robot. Yes. Which was, which was a fun one.

Uh, it has now been broken by Google's own speech recognition API. Yes. Which is sort of the, you know, the calls from coming inside the house. Exactly. Oh yeah.

I love this one. Yeah. So a guy figured out how to use a, he just wrote a Python script that has it actually read off the CAPTCHA and then it uses the speech recognition API, gets the text and then spits it back into the, the fields and Bob's your uncle again. And, uh, or Bob's your, Bob's your robot.

How about, how about that one? But yeah, this is just a, this is a fun proof of concept and it's up on GitHub. If you want to go try it, you don't have to buy Indonesian slave labor anymore to break your reCAPTCHAs. Nice. Yeah. Again, um, delightfully clever, you know, clever humans, clever humans.

And, uh, sticking with our robots are taking over the world theme, this company Cobalt has now released their indoor security robots. There's a video up of, uh, these guys roaming around and, uh, I don't know what to make of this one. I mean, I, I kind of want to call it robo mall cop, but, uh, it's just this little robot that walks around and says, show me your pass, show me your pass.

And it says it has 60 sensors in it. I'm like, what the hell do you need 60 sensors for? What you need is a gun with rubber bullets. Say, Hey, put down the, like the roams around hot topic and then just shoots kids that are a shoplift in some vinyl. We are trying not to, not to weaponize any robots.

This is, this is goal number one for the next couple of years. I said rubber. Come on. I'm glad you went with the robo mall cop joke though, because I had a followup. Uh, word is, uh, out of the box. It's still funnier than, uh, Paul Blart. It's a feature, not a bug.

You're also giving these things too much credit, Jason. They don't walk around. They just sort of roll around. Um, it's hard to describe what they look like. It's like, they look, well, like everybody's seen, uh, in sitcoms, they've used that, the replacement robot, which is basically the vacuum cleaner with the screen on top.

It kind of just looks like that. It kind of looks like a tall black Google home. Yeah, there you go. Right, right. What I would like to see is a, like a shrunk down version of the, like a, um, like the size of Bam Bam, a version of the Ed, what is it?

The Ed 201 from RoboCop. You know, please put down your weapon. You have five seconds to comply. Like that would get people's attention walking through the office or the mall or wherever. People would respect that. Respect my authority. Well, I don't, even a little one, but I don't know what to make of this thing.

I guess I'm just trying to imagine an office environment. You know, you're sitting there doing your work, minding your own business, and this thing rolls by and says, you know, give me your password. How many times is this thing accidentally on purpose going to be knocked over?

And from what I see, it has no way to write itself, right? Yeah. It looks like a very tall, it looks like a very tall drunken Roomba as it's kind of shuffling around the office. Exactly. Yes, it is like a, like a tall Roomba. And like you said, it looks like a big Google Home that's basically had an iPod slapped on top of it.

Yeah. Or an iPad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's inoffensive. I see that they were going for something that, you know, we don't want to scare people. It's just kind of silly. But think about it this way, though. Think if you can gain access to the network, then you gain access to the roaming security machines, and you're trying to break into that building.

If you're doing a pen test on that building, you can just walk up to anybody you want and say, give me your card. Then you've got the card data. Yep. And then you can just walk right in and no more, you don't have to get a tape recorder and say, you know, my voice is my password. You can just hack, hack the Paul Blart robot.

Yeah, instead of putting a bunch of those creepy little babies toy dolls around the office, I can just send one of these in now. It's true. And I don't really, I'm trying to see or imagine what this really does versus a pretty complete, you know, video camera door pass, you know, kind of system where, because they say, you know, you want to know if there are people in the building after hours.

Well, cameras are going to take care of that, you know, and these days, a lot of cameras have like two way audio where we have in our building, some of the outdoor cameras, the security people can, can call you out and say, you know, what are you doing? You move your car or something like that. And they can hear you if you talk back to them.

So, um. Yeah. Even my cheap nest in my living room has that. Yeah. I don't understand the, the need for the mobility on this thing. You don't need something rolling about the office. This is the Barney Fife of, uh, the robo generation. It's got one bullet, one bullet.

I, I, yeah, I mean, I, it's a neat, I guess, you know, it's a neat idea. Again, I can, I can see it rolling around in a warehouse or, um, but in an office, I guess after hours, it makes sense to just kind of be cruising around, but, um. It's ridiculous.

There's no use case for this. Uh, yeah, well, I think you might be right. All right. Well. You know what that means though? That means we'll be able to buy them up cheap soon. Yes. And put them to our own use, you know, have them cruise around the neighborhood or keep an eye on the kids or something like that.

The big issue that this thing has, like original Daleks, uh, it can be foiled by stairs. Yes. Bingo. That's it. I was actually just thinking if they made them look like Daleks, I would totally buy You know, that's the first mod. Yeah.

It's not going to make it past its first trip past the IT department without being dressed up like a Dalek. Now that I would pay for. Right. Well, if these guys are smart, they'll make a Dalek option. I'm going to start a new business.

Dalek cases for your cobalt. Exactly. Cobalt mods. Dot com. All right, guys. Well, this has been fun. And, uh, we will chat next week with more, uh, crazy, exciting things that will scare the bejesus out of you or not like the Barney Fife of Robo Mall Cops.

All right. Good talking to you guys. I was inspired by one of our listeners, Jason. Oh my goodness. What happened, Brian?

Well, somebody wrote in, I believe last week that told us that, uh, or maybe it was iTunes review that said that, uh, we got them into Scalzi because I had read, uh, I'd read Red Shirts, I believe, which was kind of a throwaway, super fun little book. And, uh, that became quickly one of his favorite sci-fi authors.

So I've been meaning to read Old Man's War because it's one of, uh, Scalzi's most respected series. Apparently it's, it's supposed to be just absolutely fantastic. I've been meaning to read it for ages. So I read it. And what did you think, Brian? I really enjoyed the first book, which is obviously called Old Man's War because it sparks off the whole thing.

I think it's up to six books now. Yes. Um, so yeah, it's a six book series. Uh, I finished the first one. Slow start. Wasn't really sure. Was halfway to like, ah, I can't do this. I don't know where this is going. Uh, by halfway through, I was a page turner or a flip on Kindle.

Flip page flipper. It was a, it was a swiper. It's a swiper. Yeah. It was a total swiper. It was, it was Tinder. Uh, yes. I reviewed this book about two years ago and, uh, about the same thing. Of course not. Well, I don't listen to yours either. Yeah, exactly. So this is why we need people to listen to us and write in.

Yeah, exactly. Um, but if you'll remember, which you won't, when I reviewed it, we got feedback the next week from friend of the show, David Teeter, who was just like, don't read the rest. It's like, keep, keep to the one. It's like, it's downhill from there. Really? Oh, that's unfortunate. Cause I really did enjoy the book and I wanted to hear more about it, but, uh, maybe whoever wrote us in the other week and let us know.

Yeah. Cause it, you know, it is Teeter. Yeah. And I, and I might be getting that wrong cause I don't think he reads much, but, uh, we'll see. Um, and I'm not going to go back and find out, God forbid I do that. Um, yeah. You know what I would do? Check good reads. See what people say. Yeah.

That's interesting. So I did enjoy the first book a lot. I'd highly recommend it. I will read the second book regardless of what anybody else says. Um, if the second book does suck, I'll keep in mind. Good. Yeah. Let me know how that goes because, uh, I was, I was just turned off by the negative review.

So I didn't have the, uh, the gumption to go try it, but I'll let you do that. Yeah, I will. So we'll do that, but, uh, not right away. Cause I'm following my rule about not diving into series and just going through them. Yeah. Unfortunately this week I did not follow that rule. So I read parable of the sower by Octavia E Butler.

I am an Octavia E Butler fan. I have not read these books. They're great. Well, let me, let me, let me back up. Let me back up that truck. Loved, loved, loved the first one. Could not wait to get into the second one. Cannot get into the second one. I need to put it down, step back, take a breather.

Yeah. Read something else first. Here's the thing though. The reason I got into these books is somebody posted that, uh, cause everybody was all hyped up about 1984, 1984. Everybody's got to read 1984 now. Yeah. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You missed it. Octavia Butler wrote the best dystopian future that almost exactly mirrors what we're going through right now.

And it is creepy how close it is. Oh dear. In, in a parable of the talents, the second one, I'm like, you know, a quarter of the way into it. And this insane president just got elected. Guess what his, his campaign slogan was.

Make America great again. Yes, it was. I am not shitting you on that one. And this book was written, I think in the eighties. So it's a, and a parable of the sower I thought was great. There's, there's some interesting bits in it that are just kind of hokey, but for the most part, I mean, the first book I loved, I'm starting to get into the second one, but I, it's that thing where it's like, I shouldn't have dove into it right away.

Yeah. It's always good to take a breather from these things. Yeah, definitely. So I think I'm just going to table it and then start it over fresh in like a, like a month or so. And that way I'll, I'll just get back into it because it does kind of sum up what happened in the first book at the beginning of the second book, which is nice if you do want to take a break from it.

Okay, cool. Next book I read this week was why we snap understanding the rage circuit in your brain by Douglas Fields. Oh, if only you'd have read this 20 years ago. Seriously. No, I'm not taking a stab at Jason here. I mean, seriously, if only he had read this 20 years ago.

No, I'm not. And I'm, I'm, I'm with you 100%. Yeah, no. And the book is, is a great story about this 56 year old professor. He's a neuroscientist and he got mugged in Barcelona and basically took the guy down, dragged him down by the neck and choked him out to get his wallet back.

But excuse me, Jason, that's, that's Barthelona. Barthelona. And yeah, we lost Manuel last year, sadly. And then of course he and his daughter were chased by Russian gang members for two hours through the Spanish countryside, derp, but it got him into this, this subject.

And it's a really fascinating book. And I did get to talk to him this week on my day job at the art of charm. And we'll have an interview coming out with him in a couple of weeks, but the book is fantastic. I highly recommend it. If you, and like, there's this nine, uh, like these nine rage factors that you can kind of figure out.

Like if you, if you know what they are, you can kind of short circuit before you, you know, kind of mindlessly go into being a crazed asshole like I was for 20 years. Um, that's why I really wish I would have read this book. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm on your side. You know, me. I do.

So it's, it's, it's, it's a fun read. I highly recommend it. It's one of those, you know, it's, it's not self-helpy. This is just a neuroscience book on, on rage and how to stop it. But the, the funny part is, it's like almost every trigger that, uh, that will trigger rage for you happens when you're driving and you just can't stop it.

It's like, yeah, I mean, every time I'm in, I'm in an Uber, I'm really, really full of rage. Oh, okay. What else you got? Oh, I'm a huge Anne Rice fan. Speaking of rage. Yes. I love Anne Rice's, uh, vampire books and I've been a big fan of hers for a long time.

I, I enjoy her books. I keep going to them, even though she's not really quite the writer she used to be. But, uh, I am excited about this. There was a big announcement and rice and her son, Christopher Rice are going to be writing a sequel to the original mummy Ramsey's, the damn novel that she wrote back in the eighties, I believe, um, so super happy about this.

If you're a long time fan of Anne Rice and you really enjoyed that book way back in the day, she ended it with, you know, the adventures of Ramsey, the damn she'll continue. No book ever followed. So it's finally coming. So yeah, way to, way to tease that one out there, Anne. Super excited about it.

I was, it was a great story. I was bummed. She didn't continue it either as she does put into her, she really puts in the, the research on the history of the time period. So it'll be fun. Okay. I mean, not so much, you know, he wasn't actually damned. He wasn't a real mummy.

There were vampires. He never existed. How much research can you do? Historical research in terms of like the time period when you're talking about the scripting, descriptors, how people lived, et cetera, et cetera. Da, da, da, da. Da, da, da. Da, da, da.

Cops and doodads. I got my new desk. Woo-hoo. Yay. I've been using it for three days and my feet are sore. Turns out, turns out that when you sit for quite some time and are not used to standing a lot, there's an adjustment period when you go back to a standing desk.

But I am loving this thing. I got an uplift desk. So it's got the, you know, the little motorized up and down. I just, I like it up. So that's what she said. And I'm going to just stick with it up for the most part. But I do have the option of sitting if I want to.

It was, I got a pretty basic model. I didn't get a lot of add-ons for it. And it clocked in around 700 bucks, like I mentioned on the previous show. And it came, you know, in pieces. I had to put it together. Took me about an hour, maybe hour and a half to put it together. Heavy as hell.

This thing weighs about 170 pounds. So moving it to the second floor was real fun. But the build quality on this thing is unbelievable. It is rock solid. So, and the motor's great. I've got, you know, it's loaded up. The only problem I had was cable management.

I did get a cable tray for it, but I've got cables out the wazoo. Which gets me to my next doodad, which is the Velcro brand one-wrap thin ties. These are like little Velcro cable ties that come in a spool for like just a couple bucks. Yep. They're great. I've always used, you know, like cable ties like in a, you know, a server room.

You know, the hard plastic ones. They're like flexi-cuffs for when you get, you know, busted by the popo. But these are great because they're reusable. You can take them off, move them around. You don't have to get out, you know, your gardening shears to cut the damn things. And they're cheap. So if you need to do any cable management, check these out.

They're a game changer for me. I've been using these for years. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. The one drawback for them is they attract dust like no tomorrow. Which you'll discover when you ever have to go back and clean up things. They will be coated in dust, which is kind of gross.

But you can wash them off really quick and easy, which is nice. I also color code mine. So I have that way I was able to wrap different things. Audio, visual, different from computer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they're, yeah, they're super nice. Super convenient. Great way to do cable management. I'm kicking myself for not getting the color coded ones because I'm like, okay, are these the computer cables?

Are these the audio cables? You know, so I may go back and go buy it because, you know, it's only a couple bucks. So it's not like I, you know, spent the farm on them and redo that. They're cheap and easy. And yeah, go back and do that. It'll make your life so much simpler. Yeah, definitely. Because I've got all the cables behind my desk are black and there's probably 50 of them.

So trying to, you know, follow a patch cable all the way through the spaghetti. Once it gets, once it gets out of view and behind the gear rack, all bets are off. Fuck it. You know, there's only, there's only so much I care about it. I'm very superficial on my cable management.

I learned the secret of color coding way back in the day when I was just doing nothing but audio and there was like 7,000 cables going into patch bays and things like that. So color coding is key. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. So drone startup Lily has filed for bankruptcy as pre-order customers await their refund because none ever shipped.

Yeah. We talked about them. Was it last week? I think. I believe so. Yeah. So the lawsuit by San Francisco DA is charged the company of misleading business practices as well as a raid by federal agents. So they are now defunct officially. Over 6,100 people, 61,000 people, or pre-ordered a Lily drone.

They had $34.8 million in pre-sales for its drone and still could not make it work. And another $15 million in investment. Yeah. Awesome. Well done, guys. Well done. Oh, man. Netflix. I don't know what you're thinking, but they've got a new DIY fitness device that you have to build yourself.

But it's all the news is about how wearables are basically tanking left, right, and center. So Netflix is like, if you want one, go make it yourself. It's basically a little Arduino computer that will use Netflix personalities to inspire you during your workout so you can get Luke Cage telling you to do 10 more.

Or it's just, it is a silly device. I just had to put it in here because you have to go look at the videos and check it out. But yeah, won't be making one of these. They should have just made a bot. People could have ignored that. Yeah, like they're going to ignore this. Yes. So the Icon smart condom has finally come.

Oh, just what we need, a smart condom, which is actually not a condom. No, it's not. It actually goes around your condom. Yeah. It's a ring that fits over a boring dumb condom and claims to track the exercise of your man bits as well as detect chlamydia and syphilis. It's basically a cable tie for your cock.

As if you couldn't look down and detect chlamydia and syphilis. Yeah, this is kind of silly. And at this point, it's vaporware at this point, too. Of course it is. It's total vaporware. So you can invest ahead of time. And it will trust things.

God damn it. It will track things such as thrust velocity. Okay. How fast your thrusts are. How many calories did that sex session just burn off? How many times did I just have sex? In case you were wondering. In case you forgot. What's the average skin temperature of your penis?

What's your girth? In case you couldn't just measure it yourself. And how many positions did I just conquer? And I would like to know exactly how it determines what position you were in. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. I'm just saying. There are many questions that come to mind about this.

But that is number one. And of course, you can gamify this and share your data anonymously all over the web if you would choose to. Yeah. Just what I want to do. There's that. Okay. Yeah. I was going to ignore this, but it seems we've talked about every single sort of thing that you can stick in or on your junk.

And I figured we might as well cover it. It's been a long time. It's been a long time since, what was it? The Eye Blow 2? I think that was what it was called. Yes. We did some female ones because there was a lot going on in that. Ah, yes. That's right. Yeah. You found a couple of those too. Yeah. Yes. Oh, and then the lotion dispenser.

Ah, yes. Yes. It's just what we need. Yes. You know there's somebody that has all of these things, and his name is Travis Kalanick. Kalanick. So, yeah, I got a very important email from Dropbox this week.

I don't know if you did as well. I got it as well. Yes. And I rebranding themselves. Yes. I was actually going to put this Moron of the Week. I think it belongs there, but we have some better morons. They have rebranded themselves as Dropbox Plus instead of Dropbox Pro.

Jesus, man. Sorry. I didn't do my vocal exercises before. All right. So, yeah. So, it's now Dropbox Plus. The reasoning behind this is because people who may have needed more storage were confused if they could use an actual plan named Pro because they're not professionally businesses, apparently.

Yeah. That's the theory. So, really? That's kind of what I thought when I heard it, too. I'm like, are we seriously going to spend money to rebrand from Pro to Plus because somebody is stupid enough not to buy a Pro account because they think that they're not Pro enough?

Yeah. Don't you just go, I need more storage. Oh, wait. There it is. Here's my credit card. Yeah. I think this might be a smokescreen. I don't know if I can use that, Jason. I'm not registered as an independent company. It says Pro. I'm not a pro.

No. This is really stupid. I don't quite get it. They must just have too much time on their hands or a new marketing manager just came in trying to save the company. I don't know. Dear Dropbox, if you want to do this again, please hire us. You can just throw money at us and we'll come up with something stupid for you. Yeah. Dropbox Prius.

Nice. Facebook has a second secret news feed, apparently. Some people are starting to get access to a new news feed called Explore. It will be filled with posts from pages which are closely related to ones you already like by Facebook's own algorithm. Great. Just what I want.

There's a new way for you to be sold crap that you don't need. Yeah. Another way to waste time on Facebook. Just what everybody needs. There you go. Good times. Yeah. Remember last week we talked about FlightTrack? I booked a flight in May to California to come hang out and I was going to go get it and then I found out the bad news.

What's that? Mobiata, the creators of FlightTrack, have basically shit the bed and gone under. Well, I guess you can't come out here then. No, I can't. That's it. I'm driving. Call an Amtrak. Get me some Greyhound. I'll just Uber it.

I'll take Amtrak again. I'm not taking the fucking Amtrak again. Ever. Shit. I just said that. Now I'm going to be on Amtrak. Damn. So FlightTrack is dead, sadly. Okay. That's a bummer. Yeah, it was a nice little app. It looked pretty. It was pretty.

I just like the real-time flight information where you could see the plane that's supposed to be there an hour ago and you could see that it's over Des Moines and not at the gate. It's fun. Right. Yeah, because the airlines don't tell you that information themselves. Yeah. Now, this is going back to Facebook, like we just mentioned.

I got an ad. I got several of these ads in my feed this week, and so I checked it out because it's for a little robot named Jibo. Yep. So I went to the website, checked out Jibo. There are links to press about Jibo, so I clicked on one to go see what it was.

You know, I went to the TechCrunch article because they generally have decent reporting. It's not great, but it's deece. And it was three years old. Then I went back to the website and I'm like, okay, is there an order thing? He's like, oh, no, sign up for our newsletter if you'd like to be notified when Jibo's ready to go.

Well, so they're running ads on Facebook for something that has pressed three years ago that hasn't shipped yet and you can't order yet, but they're still wasting money on press. Well, they did update their site to do the copyright is 2017.

You know, that could just be a JavaScript variable. I'm guessing they probably had to pay someone for it. Could be. Could be. So did you watch the video on this thing? I did. I think it's kind of like the bastard love child of Echo, number five, and that crappy white robot from WALL-E.

Yeah. And they always keep calling it he. It's not a he. It's an it. You have to personify and anthropomorphize everything these days. That would be anthropomorphize, but we're not counting. But there's nothing there. It's ridiculous.

Yeah. Well, they're still running ads or, you know, whatever. They kind of run out the bank account before they can file for bankruptcy, apparently. It's cute. Yeah, it is cute. It's funny. It's snarky. But it's like if I want the weather, I don't want a fucking joke before my weather. I want the weather.

And you're going to end up with the same problem that we're having with the Echo. I think that the Echo basically put these people out of business. Well, they never shipped, so they never technically were in business. Well, now they've not bothered at all. Yeah. The interesting thing is if it worked, it had, you know, like a camera. It could, you know, learn people who were coming in and out of the room and do facial recognition and all that good stuff.

But since it's not here, we can't really talk about it. So, yeah. They could store all the data on an unsecured server somewhere. Yes. And then if you bought one and you lived in Germany, you would have to burn it. Burn it. Yes, exactly. Okay. NASA has released a bunch of free software that none of us are smart enough to use.

Yeah. I'm just watching the videos and I'm confused. Yeah. It's like I was flipping through some of it today. I'm just like, oh, God, no. There's no way that I would ever use some of this stuff. But if you're smart and you're a software developer who does smart things, check it out because it's kind of neat stuff.

Yeah. I'm sure SpaceX is looking at this. I'm sure SpaceX probably wrote half of it when like the people that worked at NASA that they stole, you know. Yeah, probably.

Media Candy. So we've got a little bit of follow up this week on Media Candy. First, I want to talk about 11-22-63. Okay. I read the book. Yeah. We talked about the new Stephen King Hulu series that's going to be coming out with the bad robot folks soon, which we don't know anything about yet.

But 11-22-63 did come out and I watched it this week and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I was going to binge it probably in one night. I was like, you know, ready to brew some coffee and stay up. But S3 took down Hulu, so I couldn't watch it. I really enjoyed the book.

I you you graciously sent over from Sweden your password for Hulu so I could get into it. And then I saw James Franco. Yeah, yeah, unfortunately. Oh, no. Here's the two things about this. One, you probably missed the boat because I think my Hulu password already expired.

So because I canceled Hulu because their Viacom contract ran out and they took out at midnight and the Daily Show. So that was the only two reasons I really needed Hulu. Gotcha. So you may have a day or two. I think it may be up on the midnight on the 6th.

So hurry up. But yeah, I loved it. I thought it was really good. James Franco was great in it. And I usually can't stand him, you know. Right. Well, I really enjoyed the book a lot. It was a really good Stephen King book that didn't be crazy into sci fi except for the whole time travel aspect. Yeah. And he you know, he's done time travel before.

What was it? The Tommyknockers? Is that the one with the plane? No, no, no, no. No, no. That's not Tommyknockers. What's the one with the plane? I don't remember offhand. Okay. Well, you're the the king, Mark. I thought you might know, but it was a good one. I like that one, too. So, yeah, they just do different things with time travel and stuff like that. But anyway, it was good.

I highly enjoyed it. So now we've got a little more follow up on the Deep Space Nine documentary. You said before that there was never going to be any more HD from Deep Space Nine, but they got a lot of money on their crowdfunding thing. So they said, screw it. We're going to make it ourselves. Okay.

Well, good on them. Yeah. They're trying to get the negatives from Paramount to actually go back and recut the scenes and redigitize them and do it themselves, which is awesome. It'd be super cool for Paramount to actually release this to them. Let them do it. Why not? Please. Please. It's only going to make you more money.

Yeah. All it's going to do is get people more interested in Star Trek. And since there's a new Star Trek series coming out, that might be a good idea. And speaking of Deep Space Nine, Alexander Siddig. Remember him? He was the doctor on Deep Space Nine. Well, yes, I do.

He's going to be playing Ra's al Ghul on Gotham, which is great because I love Gotham. I think it's a fantastic show. And I love Alexander Siddig since he's off of Game of Thrones now. So I really I don't watch Gotham. So I'm not terribly excited about that.

I thought he was great, great on Game of Thrones. And, you know, I always got him completely confused with Balthazar from BSG. Does he look similar to him? They're very. Which is James Callis. Yeah. They're very. They've got very similar facial structure, but they have totally different accents.

Yes. But they look very similar. And when he first came out of Game of Thrones, I was like, oh, the BSG guy got a new gig. Nope. Nope. The Deep Space Nine guy got a new gig. And it took me a while to remember that he was from Deep Space Nine. I'm like, I know him. I know him. I know him. And I couldn't place it. And then once we're watching it in the middle, I jump up and say, Bashir.

So, yeah, yeah. So, going back to your complaints about Hulu pulling shows, there may be a new option for you. The whole year of cord cutting thing that I claimed last year never quite paid out, but we'll see about this year. YouTube, the world's biggest video site, wants to sell you TV for $35 a month.

So, they are going to try to do a standalone app, which will launch later this spring, which is supposedly only going to be mobile first. That means they really just want you to use it on your mobile devices, which is not how I like to watch my TV shows. Nope. I want them on my goddamn TV. I got a 4K TV.

I want it on my TV. Yeah. So, it'll be $35 a month streaming. And they have made deals with many, many, many, many different networks. 35 of them, to be exact, I think, is what they're at right now. So, a dollar a network. 35 networks, but 32 of them I don't want to watch because it's like 17 ESPNs.

It's a lot of sports and a lot of news channels, sadly. So, it does not have, it doesn't have a full package that I would be okay with. So, again, cord cutting. That's what she said. Very well. So, yeah. So, we'll see. And there's no word if there's going to be like a, if there was an Apple TV app, that might be interesting.

I mean, certainly, if you were fine with the major networks with your Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, and you just watched a lot of sports, 35 bucks a month is going to do you just fine. So, we'll see. As long as it's in real time. You know, for networks, I'd rather have them in real time.

But if it's not going to be in real time, and it's the same thing as Hulu, when I had to wait a couple days, and if it might not have all the shows on the network, then it's a waste of time. Yeah. And there's no word on if that's actually going to happen or not. So, we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of your cord cutting thing, I'm actually going the other way. I am cabling down.

I'm cording up. I'm cording up. I'm done with it. This is, and you know, I did cord cutting before for like a year or so when I lived in Long Beach. And it's just, after a while, when you work really hard, at the end of the day, you just want to plop your ass down on the couch and veg and watch whatever's on the DVR. Not have to go to Sweden and download it or get an app that's going to fail like Hulu does all the time now.

Yeah, it's just not worth it. It's too damn hard and it's too, I still believe in paying for content. So, the option for me, if I were to cord cut would be, I'd be downloading almost everything from Sweden and I don't think that's cool. So, I pay for cable. Yeah.

No, I love my Hulu HBO Go package was perfect. You know, I didn't need anything else. I still pay for Netflix because every now and again, there's a good show to watch on there and I've got Amazon Prime video. I've got, you know, the four key players and they're still like not the shows that I care about so it's like without that because now I'd still have to get Showtime and Starz so I'm like screw it and it's cheaper.

It's cheaper, honestly, with the way cable companies work now. If I go out and because I spend a hundred bucks a month on my internet connection, if I want cable with like the almost the best cable package I can get, it's going to cost me 140 bucks because they're into the bundling.

So, I'm going to save money by getting cable. So, screw it. I'm over it. I'm too damn old to be dealing with this. Back to the YouTube side. Apparently, we're watching one billion hours of YouTube every single day. I'm not. Okay. I'm talking collectively as a human race.

Oh, okay. Which is kind of sad. It's... That's a lot. That's a lot of PewDiePie. It's a lot of PewDiePie. And the interesting thing is it's catching up to TV, which is around 1.25 billion hours per day. So, it's not only how...

So, that's, you know, 2.25, you know, human billion hours that could be spent doing something like, you know, saving the world. But no, we're watching PewDiePie. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, a lot of TV shows end up up there.

I mean, this is where all music video and most music is being consumed these days. So, don't just assume it's TV. This is where people go to listen to music. So, a lot of plays, a lot of hours. Yeah. YouTube is a juggernaut. I mean, it always was. It always will be.

And that's a damn reason why they're kind of, you know, not so quick on their copyright worries. Anyways. Patrick Stewart, one of our favorites. I would argue after William Shatner, the second best Star Trek captain. I would say the second best after Avery Brooks.

Yeah. Well, we differ there. Actually, no, no, no. I take that back. Patrick Stewart is my favorite captain. Avery Brooks is my second favorite captain. William Shatner is a lame third. Patrick Stewart is definitely my favorite X-Men. Yes. I will definitely give you that. He is applying for U.S. citizenship basically so he can fight Trump.

Good for him. He says in an interview, you know, we have our own problems. We have Brexit. I'm not a U.S. citizen. However, there is. Maybe it's the only good thing as the result of this election. I am now applying for citizenship because I want to be an American too. All my friends in Washington say there's only one thing you can do.

Fight, fight, oppose, oppose. But I can't do it because I'm not a citizen. We welcome you, Jean-Luc Picard. Yes. Resist. Make it so. But resistance is futile, as Locutus would say. Spotify. I've signed back up for Spotify.

I pay for Spotify. You and I both. No matter how much I try and get away from it, I still go back to it because Amazon music is such a shit show. It is horrible. Oh, my God. And I paid for a year, so I've got them both because I missed my cutoff for my free trial.

I'm like, man, that two weeks went fast, like way too fast. Felt like four days. But I'm not saying that they're cooking the books over there, but I got my eye on you, Bezos. So I had to go back to Spotify just because the, and now, you know, I hate Spotify's interface with a fucking passion.

It's terrible. Yep. To say that I went back to Spotify because its interface was better is saying a lot. That's true. So now they're going, they're going after title. They're going to have high quality, lossless audio now. And they're going after morons that want to pay more money for nothing that really makes much of a difference.

Yeah. And what's that Toblerone player? Uh, the Pono. Pono. That's it. I was thinking the pony, but yes, the Pono. I actually think that's not a thing anymore. Uh, no, they remember they're trying to do a different thing now. They're, they're trying to pivot. We don't have a launch date for their pivot, but, uh, we'll see.

That's what I mean by, I don't think it's a thing anymore. I don't think we're ever going to see it, but whatever. Yeah. I can't tell the difference because my ears are old and janky from too many punk rock shows. So I couldn't give two shits about this, but we'll see how it plays out for them. Because we know everybody's going to title just for the high quality audio.

Oh yeah. Title title. Still a thing. Unbelievably. Unbelievably. And last week we, we joked about the new alien trailer that we both hated. It was just useless. So they came back and finally gave us the one that we wanted. Yes. Thank you. I did enjoy this very, very much.

Yes. The new trailer has all sorts of aliens in the bitches back. Yes. It actually has aliens in it. Yes. Lots of novel. Yeah. A trailer about monsters. It has the monster in it. Great. Yeah. You could, you know, we could go either way on that, but yeah, it's good.

It's good. Now Tesla is in an interesting turn, uh, are going to start running commercials made by fans. Right. Uh, and the idea came from a fifth grader and Elon Musk said, okay, we'll do it. Are they paying the fans? Who the hell knows? Somehow.

I guess not because this is everybody's bright idea. This is like bands for a million years are like, I don't know who wants to pay for doing artwork. Let's have our fans come up with the artwork. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's crowdsource it and not pay anybody free. Yes. That's awesome. Did you watch the commercial though?

Uh, no, I did not. It was amazingly good. I hope they got paid. Yeah, me too. Because it was, it looked like an expensive commercial had effects and everything, but man, it was a really, I mean, it was almost a tearjerker commercial. I'm looking at the screenshot from the video right now. It reminds me of the poster from the last starfighter.

It's very much just like that. Yes. Okay, good. And that is a deep pull for you youngins. Yeah. I think dad might've had a hand in that one. You think? Yeah, definitely. Because he co-stars in it too. So, you know, he's like, hey, junior, you want to make a commercial?

Can I be in it too? Um, so you talked about the, uh, the 12 hours of ice breaking audio last week. I trump you with 42 hours of ambient sounds from Blade Runner, Alien, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. I did. I did listen to this. Uh, I talked about the Star Trek TNG ambient engine noise for 24 hour.

Uh, YouTube clip probably a hundred episodes ago. You do have that one. You do have that one. I find that thing so relaxing. It's unbelievable. But yeah, I've got Blade Runner, Alien, and Doctor Who. Now, the trick to this one is you open up the page and you play all four of them at the same time.

Weren't you just wondering why there's a billion hours of YouTube being played every day? There you go. Half of it's me trying to relax. Apparently. It's really cool and kind of trippy. And you can start and stop the different feeds to try and get like different resonances going.

It's fun. You've had a lot of time on your hands. No, I'm just sitting here and I can't. It's just what I do. I'm standing, standing at my computer finding shit for this show. This actually comes from Eric Rice on Facebook. So, uh, thank you, Eric, for that one. It was a good find. Very nice.

And for you, Mr. 80s Music, Hall & Oates and Tears for Fears are going on tour. I have actually never seen Tears for Fears live. I want to. I greatly enjoy them. Um, I would go see Hall & Oates. I'm not a huge fan, but you know, some of their hits are their hits and, and time heals all sorts of wounds.

Time wounds all heals. That as well. Uh, I would totally go to this except for the fact that the LA show is at the motherfucking Staples Center and I hate that goddamn venue. It's pretty terrible. Yeah. It's horror. It's a horrible place to see bands. So great for hockey. I saw hockey. There's great.

Yeah. It's great for sporting events. It's horrible for bands. So I saw Depeche Mode play there a couple of years back and it was just miserable. Um, I would totally go to the show except I'm now I'm not going to because of the venue. So I think this is a great tour. It's a really interesting pairing because Hall & Oates were total pop, you know, different completely different radio stations.

Tears for Fears with the college station. Hall & Oates massively pop, but I think it's a bizarre combination that works. So cool. You know how you used to have a theme song when you walked into Finns with your, uh, internet enabled jukebox? Oh, I missed that. Yeah. Yeah. I think what I'm going to do for my office, I'm going to have to get like, you know, one of those IOT devices that senses when I'm walking in the office to my new standing desk and have it play.

I'm still standing. Better than that. That's doesn't, that's not, is that Hall & Oates? I thought it was Hall & Oates. I'm pretty sure. Hold on a second. We can't, and you cannot cut this out of the show. I don't think that is. Okay. Damn. It's Elton John. It's Elton John.

Damn. Cut back in. Oh, okay. It's Elton John. Damn. No, it's not. I can't remember a Hall & Oates song. Oh. Maneater. Okay. Hey, that would work too. No, it wouldn't. Oh, Jesus.

There's no win on that one. Okay. Next up. You kind of made my joke for me. Hunting unicorns. Hunting unicorns. So catching up on our hunting unicorn section where Jason and I and our friend of the show, Mike all invested $10,000 hypothetical dollars in the stock market.

And we picked a couple of stocks that we both like, tech stocks. I am kicking everybody's ass. My portfolio is up 9.34%. I have made $933. Jason is second at 3.41% performance, making a cool $340.

And Mike is bringing up the lead with the non-tech stocks. Bringing up the lead. That's new. Yeah, bringing up the... Oopsies. He's not in the lead. At 3.11%. So he's made $310. I would say I'm happy with my performance for just sticking $10,000 in an account for two months and making almost a grand beats the hell out of any savings account.

Yeah, this is variable though, because as we've been watching it when we not talked about this segment, I've been ahead of you for several weeks and then it flip-flopped and I just dropped like a stone. And poor Mike was just... He was in the negative for like, you know, a long time. Yeah, he was.

So I think this really proves that investing is probably... It's a volatile thing. It's long-term or nothing, but we'll keep talking about it once a month just to see where we're at because we do have a bet for the end of the year. And we also have our side bet based on Twitter. Jason and I both bought Twitter. We both conveniently bought 18 shares.

Yeah, conveniently, Dick. Well, Jason bought his at 16.32. And the bet was originally if he makes even a penny over the course of a year, I would have to buy him beer. And I immediately then went and bought 18 shares as well. Mine were a penny more at 16.33 because I figured, what have I got to lose?

If he wins, I've made some money and I can use that money to pay for the beer. And if he loses, I lost some money, but I can still just laugh at him and still get the free beer. Yeah. Yeah. And I've got some bad news for you, Jason. We're both losing. Yeah. Twitter currently sitting at 15.75. So we're losing.

Well, here's the real kick in the nuts about this is to buy those Twitter shares, I had to sell two Apple shares, which I sold actually these we bought in reality. We really bought these. No, we own these. Yes. Yeah. No, we've got skin in the game on these.

So since I didn't have any money to go buy Twitter shares, I sold two of my Apple shares. That was dumb. Apple's trading at close to 140 right now, and I sold them at 115. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I'm winning in the hypothetical and in real life is my Apple stock.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. No problem. Now, I thought you might like this one a bit, Brian. Paul Skinner, a 38 year old Seattle man, has been sentenced to 30 days in prison and fined $500 for dropping his drone on a lady.

Drone looked like a lady. It was a two pound drone, but basically knocked her in the head. And it kind of went out of control. And the court has acknowledged that this was an accident, but they still threw his ass in jail and fined him because, well, he shouldn't have been flying it over people.

Yeah, that's the deal. You shouldn't be flying these things over. And this is over the Seattle Pride Parade. So hundreds of thousands of people walking up and down an area and you're flying something that isn't, you know, there's no rules about this stuff. It's a Cuisinart.

It's a flying Cuisinart. You should not be doing this. I agree with this 100%. Give him some jail time. Good. Find him. Jason, can you bring up charges on yourself for cutting your own finger? Maybe. Maybe. You should look into that. Thanks. You could pay yourself some money.

Dick. This is ZomboCom. You remember ZomboCom, Brian? Vaguely. I think we've talked about it on the show before, maybe. We've mentioned it before because, and I think last time I mentioned it, I'm like, oh my God, ZomboCom's still around.

And this week I went and looked, ZomboCom's still around. This is Zombo.com, but it is ZomboCom. Yes. It is an ancient Flash website. And whoever, I thought of it because, you know, I've had Vapid.com for so long before I just sold it for 20 years.

And Zombo was around back then, I swear. Yeah. Yeah. It's been around forever. Maybe not then because it is Flash. So it was like one of the first Flash websites. It's like, you know, it's the same as like those single page sites when, you know, we just dick around and make something like, do I have pig flu or whatever?

But this guy made ZomboCom and it's still kicking. So kudos to him for keeping a little bit of the internet past alive. Yeah. I'm happy it's still up. So good on you. I mean, you know, if you go to the right domain registrar, it's like a buck a year.

So good on you. Keep it up. Keep it going. Keep up ZomboCom. Yeah. So I have tattoos. Yes. You're tattooed as well. Yes, I am. Yeah. So we're into tattoos and I've always kind of there's been a thing in the U.S. where we've always sort of made fun of people that get the they tend to be blonde and they tend to be about 22 and they tend to be female who get the, you know, the Asian symbols tattooed on them.

Yes. The ones that say beef and broccoli. Yeah. You know, number 35 was shrimp. You know, they think it's yes, they think it says like, you know, Zen and long life. And it actually says orange peeled beef. So but it's good to know that things go both ways here. So we have a link in our show notes.

Just effort. Wildly offensive English language T-shirts are apparently all the rage in Asia. And we don't know if they actually know what these shirts mean. Yeah, I do know we cuss on this show, but I'm not going to read most of these shirts. Just they're that bad.

Wow. There's a five year old wearing and I just don't give a fuck T-shirt. Nice. Who the fuck is Jesus? Oh, he loves the cock. A couple both wearing that with arrows pointing towards each other. Nice. Another three year old wearing a no fat chick shirt.

OK, so your rule on not reading the shirt is out the window. You're just going to run through the list. I just started reading them. So there you go. Well, you gave the warning at the beginning of the show. What the hell? Yeah. So, yeah, it's a very good link. Go look at these shirts. It's pretty awesome. So, yeah, I have an unfortunate tattoo.

I have one that says free the media. And now it should have been save the media. Yeah. This morning should be saved. Definitely. Yeah. If you got you have your brand new table, your your standing desk, Jason, I've got something you should go take a look at because these are pretty badass.

This is a company called Little Planet Factory. A company created by George and a name in Greek that I'm not going to attempt to say. He's a London based artist. He searched for a Mars globe. And after failing to find one he liked, he just started to start making his own. He's a big fan of Cosmos and Douglas Adams.

And he happened to be experienced in 3D printing. So he started to create all these great little various sized models of planets, moons and suns. These look absolutely fantastic. I totally want to order some of these. These are beautiful. Aren't they? These are unbelievably beautiful. They're absolutely gorgeous.

I urge everybody to check this out and order them. Order something. Give this guy some money. He deserves it. This stuff is amazing. Oh, man. How much are they? Let's go to buy now. I want to look at the solar system here. How much is the solar system on Etsy? We've got to go to Etsy here, of course.

Yeah. The eight planets of the solar system, $202.05, which isn't bad for eight pieces of custom printed art. Supporting independent artists as well. If you want to get the sun. Yeah. If you want to get the sun to go with it, it's $94.71. There you go.

They look really, really cool. Now, I have a cautionary tale for you, Jason. This show is a cautionary tale. Well, besides that. Yes. You should be very careful with your old porn collection, because sadly, a lonely Japanese man who had massed more than six tons of porn died when a huge pile of magazines fell on top of him.

Even more tragically, he was not discovered until six months later when the landlord entered the flat to find out why his rent had not been paid. Oh, I am Jack's dishonorable death. Now, because this is Japan, the man's lonely death was revealed by a member of the cleaning team who said his company had been hired to remove the magazines discreetly in a way that would not be noticed by neighbors and the man's family to save them from shame, who

then, of course, went and reported it to the media. So I believe he should be fired or commit hairy carry. I think he should be given a medal because Japanese didn't need to loosen the fuck up. Oh, can you imagine six tons of porn in a tiny Japanese apartment?

Wow. That's. Oh, man. I mean, I see the magazines in Fight Club, and I still think that that's a lot of magazines, but that is still not six tons. No, six. That's a lot of porn. Wow. I kind of want to go do the math on that and figure it out.

Well, we've got some follow up for next week. Yep. How exciting for everybody. Have you heard of the board game Secret Hitler? Yes, I have. By the Cards Against Humanity People. It is by the Cards Against Humanity People. So it's a secret identity board game set in 1933, Germany, and models the rise of fascism in a democracy.

Players fill the role of either a liberal or a fascist and must use cooperation and deception to either prevent or aid the rise of Hitler. So interesting game. And you know what the co-creator of Cards Against Humanity did with that board game? What did they do, Brian? Because I think you're going to tell me.

Sent one to every single senator and said this is a cautionary tale. Nice. Nice. Have we heard any follow up on that? None whatsoever. Okay. I don't think we will. They're also, they've also got a, I actually had this in the other part of the show and I took it out, but they have a campaign to send Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, if you

send them $5, they will send Ron a potato because Ron's in a little hot water up there, so maybe he can boil his potatoes, but he sent a cease and desist to a local constituent over, uh, some of, uh, his, uh, policies as it were. So they launched a campaign to send him potatoes.

I heard about this guy. This is the guy that sent a cease and desist because his constituents said, we want to talk to you and he doesn't want to talk to them. Yep. All right. Let's send this guy a potato. Grumpy old geeks is going to use $5 from your donations to send him a potato. All right. We're in. Yep.

We're in on that. I don't care what side you are on. You talk to your fucking constituents. Yes, you do. You can go throw potatoes at him if you're this guy. Um, now this is an interesting one. Uh, some scientists have figured out that, well, they knew DNA is like a great storage medium for data because that's, that's basically what it is.

If only that guy would have put in six tons of porn into DNA. Into DNA. Well, I guess he kind of did in his own fashion. Well, some, uh, some scientists at Columbia university, uh, have figured out how to actually encode data, digital data on DNA.

And they, they actually put on a short movie, uh, an Amazon gift card, a computer operating system and some other brick, a brick to, uh, to test it out. And they were able to recover it. This is some interesting science. Uh, there's a link in the show notes.

If you want to go read the, uh, the nitty gritty on it, but it's an interesting theory that you can actually, we'll, we'll, we will just have like a room of DNA that has everything on it. It's, it's like the new S3. Many people theorize that DNA is just a programming language.

Ah, and Amazon will have S3NA soon and it will crash. Any word on which of the OS's they actually put on there? I'm guessing it's next. Uh, it's probably Linux. It's gotta be Linux. Uh, maybe it's BOS. Ooh. Feedback loop.

Two new Patreon subscribers. Thank you so much. Joshua Craft and Barrett Rees. Thank you. And Barrett Rees has been writing us left, right, and center. So thank you so much for chipping in. He was already a friend of the show, but now he's an official friend of the show. Yes. We are not above bribes.

And he writes on Twitter, possibly the worst Kickstarter ever. Touchscreen AI? Most hateable video too. This is the Vinci first smart headphones with artificial intelligence. Did you check this one out, Brian? Easily the ugliest headphones I've ever seen.

Uh, what's the artificial intelligence angle on this? I don't quite get that. Why is there a touchscreen when these things are on the side of your head and you can't see what you're doing? None of this makes any sense to me. Oh my God. Yeah. These are just, they're fugly and active noise canceling, 3D sound recording, wifi, blah, blah, just gesture interface, a gesture that you can't even see the side of voice control your music.

Uh, I don't see anything that says AI anywhere, but, uh, who knows? Yeah, I don't get it. These are the dumbest things ever. And you know, you don't have beats. So the market for really shitty, expensive headphones is already taken. Yeah, that's true.

Those are the shittiest headphones on the market. Yeah. And these are not going to be cheap, by the way, I'm looking at the Kickstarter special $229, the super early bird, $150. These are ugly. They, I don't want any of these features. Just get a damn pair of headphones.

What's wrong with you people? What's wrong with you? So thanks Barrett. Yeah. And, uh, Ivor Tola also sent us the story about the New Zealand will give you a free trip if you agree to a job interview. So thanks so much for sending that over to us. I'm still trying to convince Jason you should do it. As soon as we're done, let's wrap this shit up.

Okay. Uh, Michael Woodruff, any chance you guys would add chapters to your podcast? Seems ideally suited for them. Chapter per story. Chapters app.com. Now I'm sure any advertisers would love the fact that you could just conveniently skip over their ads in any podcast. Well, we could put the chapter markers so that they have to listen to it when they skip to that chapter.

But, um, the, the problem with the chapters is almost nobody uses it. So, you know, even on when I'm listening to a show, I don't listen to even like an overcast. You can skip to, you know, time schedule or time points and all that stuff. And the verdict is basically that nobody uses it.

I mean, it's a cool bit of tech. It used to be an enhanced podcast when you had to use AACs back in the day and they, Apple killed it because nobody used it. Yeah. And the, the reality, I looked at this as well as it doesn't work in, in iTunes. It doesn't work in the podcast player on iOS.

So therefore that's where most of the people, unfortunately, listen to podcasts. So no. Yep. And the Wompster writes in something for you to talk about other than your Trump whining. The new plan to stop internet piracy is just the old one on steroids.

Yep. I read through all this. It's ridiculous. So yeah, it's a, an attempt to either update or replace the DMCA for the system. It still puts most of the burden of tracking infringement content on ISPs who are really only interested in tracking your usage.

So that's never going to happen. Uh, yeah, it's all, this is all a mess and the new administration ain't going to do shit about it. No, they're not. Now we got a three star this week, Brian. I'm going to let you read this one. Okay. Title. Good. If you're on the air quotes, right side of politics, and this is from all goodness.

Yeah. Three star. Really? If you are left leaning in your political views at all, this is a rather enjoyable tech podcast. Their criticism of tech is oftentimes witty and sharp. And I looked forward weekly to their security segment with David Bittner. Unfortunately, they seem to have decided that tech should take a backseat to politics since the Trump election.

I don't mind a couple of tech oriented political stories being discussed every now and then. The net neutrality stuff comes to mind or Trump not listening to a security team about his cell phone. But Jason and Brian seem to go out of their way every week to preach about how wrong and bad conservative views are. Hmm. Have we done that, Jason?

We're getting better. We're getting much better. I just want a fun tech podcast. If I wanted to be preached at, I'd start going to church again. Atheists. I'll check back in a couple of months and maybe they will cool off a little with the politics. Going to miss you guys. Well, if you need to leave, you need to leave.

I'm sorry about that. Yeah. There were a few shows right after the election where we definitely went a little crazy because, you know, Russia. But since then, we are sticking to stories that matter and stories that are in our wheelhouse as we did this entire show. So there you go.

There's got to be a tech angle and we're not going to go political just to go political. So there it is. And we talked about the net neutrality stuff in this episode. Again, we talked about security in this episode again, because all of that is happening again. It is relevant.

Yes. But the emails next one up from Psychedelic, great tech podcast that covers all the bases. Five stars. A nice find in the world of tech broadcasts. Lots of good subject matter, wit and humor. Politics, question mark. Ha! Keep up the good work, gents. Game over, man.

Game over. Thank you so much. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. Just don't keep complaining that all we do is talk about Trump because we don't anymore. Closing shout outs!

Big hat tip to a friend of the show and friend of mine, Michael Burns, for his awesome photo of the worst Uber driver in the world outside of Jumbo's Clown Room in LA. I love Jumbo's. Everybody loves Jumbo's. Mike is a, he's a bouncer at Jumbo's. So if you ever go over there, you know, talk, talk him up.

You might get a, might get a little free pass. And that was the, Jumbo's was the kickoff to my bachelor party. Oh, nice. So he, he sent a picture of a man in a Prius. Well, strike one. And the second strike is that there's a giant student driver sign on the back.

The third strike is that it's an Uber driver. It was picking somebody up in a Prius with a student driver sign on the back of his car. So see the show notes for this amazing proof that the world is too far gone to save. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

I love it. That's fantastic. So thank you so much for that. I would like to thank Middleton whiskey because this show ended up being a drinking show because we were recording Saturday evening because no thanks to the power company here in Santa Monica. I have no power all day tomorrow.

That sucks because I would normally be in bed right now and I would like to. Yeah, I kept Jason up late, but we drank. Yes, we did. That was fun. I would like to thank Yellowtail Shiraz, one of the shittiest wines I've ever had in my life because the IRS took all my money this week and this is all I can afford.

Yeah, that Yellowtail is pretty goddamn horrible. Sorry, Jason. Yeah. You suffered with rot gut while I was drinking one of the finest whiskeys the world has ever seen. Yeah, you know, I used to live in that world, but I didn't buy enough Apple when I was young. Yes, I have Apple stock and I have property in Santa Monica.

Thanks, Snapchat. Oh, great. Yeah, fuck you, Brian. Thank you. 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 this show possible, please head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 199.

Welcome to Zombo Corp. This is Zombo Corp. Welcome. This is Zombo Corp. Welcome to Zombo Corp. You can do anything at Zombo Corp.

Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. Welcome to Zombo Corp. Welcome to Zombo Corp. This is Zombo Corp.

Welcome to Zombo Corp. This is Zombo Corp. Welcome.

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