201: We’re Driving to Florida!

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. Guten Morgen, Herr Schulmeister. It's very early in the morning. We optimistically decided to record early and then my son decided not to sleep at all last night for the first time ever. So I'm feeling awesome.

Bottom of the morning to you. Exactly. There's not enough coffee in the morning for this podcast. All right. And before we get really jumping into this, I want to let everybody know that we are on the Podcast One podcasting network. So if you want to listen to us via an app, go grab the Podcast One app at podcastone.com slash app.

They have iPhone and Android for all of you crazy cats out there who don't like your privacy or security and want to run Android. There you go. All right. Exciting stuff. A little follow up too. We talked about the International Potato Center last week.

Yes. It is actually in Lima, Peru. That is just sad. I mean, especially with St. Patrick's Day. I mean, what horrible timing to find out this news. I know. And yes, in retaliation, the International Quinoa Institute is right down. On the street from the Guinness Brewery. Is that true?

No, it's not. Damn. But quinoa is the main crop of Peru. Half of the quinoa in the world is actually made in or actually, I guess it would be grown in Peru. Although it could be made because it does kind of taste like styrofoam. I hate that stuff. I do too. I can't stand it. So I no longer like Peru.

All right. Sorry to our one listener in Peru. I apologize. We'll go have a potato for us in Peru. Good listener, sir. Oh, man. I want to talk a little bit about tech support and being a grumpy old geek. Are you going to crap on somebody and name them by name?

I am going to do that. I had a feeling. Friend of the show, Seth Miranda, writes me yesterday and he's like, Hey, man, I got to do a tech doc or a text document. What's a good text editor for the Mac? I'm like, well, comes with pages.

And he's like, derp, need some coffee. But that's not the tech support part. I was about to say that's that sounded pretty painless. I don't mind doing that part for friends. That one's easy. Later on, he sent me some questions about how to export a PDF. And yeah, yeah, that's what I said, an invoice.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, yeah, dude. And then like almost immediately after he wrote back and said, never mind, figured it out. But I want to let everybody, everybody who listens to this show know that just because we do a tech podcast, we are not tech support.

Just letting you know. It happens to me all the time, but I'm just having fun with Seth because I love the guy. But yeah, we are not tech support. We will talk about tech. We will tell you what you should use on the show. And I would like to emphasize on the show. I have tech support for my entire family.

I am tech support for most of my friends. I have somehow become tech support for all of my clients, even though they're not paying me for that. I've just started to pretend I don't know anything. That's the best. Yeah. Ignorance is bliss. Honestly, I put my foot down years ago and just won't do it anymore.

And, you know, call the geek squad or find a friend who is not as annoyed by doing your tech support. And the one thing that I did, which I think is genius, I had a little brother who's now 24 and a genius. So I don't get any more tech support questions.

But then I get there and I get there and I find out that nothing still works because he's 24 and is a 24-year-old. All right. Actually, he's 25 now. I forgot he's 20 years younger than me. Crazy. He fixed the porn box, but that's about it. That's about it. No doubt. Yes.

If your spank machine needs some working on or your proton pack, because he's a particle or not a particle physicist, but he's a medical physicist. If you need something really smart done or something to do with porn, he's probably your guy. And we're coming up on our four years of podcasting.

I know we hit episode 200 last week and now we're on 201, but in about two weeks, actually, no, next week is our four-year anniversary of doing this show. So here's what I'm doing. And I started this this morning. I listened to episode one of Grumpy Old Geeks about a month ago just to go back and, you know, hear how bad it really was.

It's pretty bad. But I'm going through them now and I started listening this morning. I listened episode two, three, four, five, and I'm halfway through number six with our first guest, Rudy Jashan. They're pretty damn good. I got to say. I don't believe it.

Trust me. They're actually not bad. You have to listen to them on two acts. There's a couple of caveats. We suck on the mic. We really suck on the mic. And we were using two condenser microphones in a cavernous room with airplanes flying overhead and hardwood floors and surrounded by glass.

So, yeah, we were not very smart on the audio side of things. And we banged on the desk a lot. And that was basically us picking up and putting our beers down, which we did a lot of. So, if you listen to it at, like, 2X, it's palatable. But the knowledge we dropped back in the old days, it's a completely different show back then.

Right. And the best part was I listened to all the way to the end. And the one thing that I was just I was cracking up this morning as I was driving from the park. Remember, we're driving to Florida. Yes. The Larry Larry. What's his name? Something Larry.

Something Larry. You picked it. So he's a good comedian. I can't remember. Now I'm just stuck saying Larry David. And it's not Larry David. No. Very early. Yeah. And we had, like, music bumpers in there. Completely illegal. It was a fun show back then.

Larry Miller. Larry Miller. That's it. The name of the comedian. Yes. Yeah. He's the one that had that really bad head injury. Yes. Yes. He used to be on Corolla's podcasting network. He did his own show. But then he had. Yeah. He fell walking out of a bar one night and had a concussion and was in the hospital for a couple months, I believe.

I think his podcast is back. He's no longer with Corolla, but he's still doing a podcast. Okay. Yeah. I forget what podcast I heard his story on. He went on and told his story, and it was just, like, heartbreaking. Yeah. He didn't, like, couldn't recognize his wife and all sorts of stuff. I mean, it was a bad head injury. Yep.

And coming out of a pub. That's what happens. One must be careful. So, but hopefully by the next episode, when we record our four-year anniversary show, I will have got through the first hundred. My goal is the first hundred. I don't need to listen to 100 through 200 because those are a little fresh.

But those old episodes are actually pretty fun. All right. Well, good on you. I will not torture myself in such ways. All right. But I will find the argument that we had that we talk about later in security. See, I knew there was a reason why you're going to do this.

I will find it. And we will never hear from this again because Jason will discover that he is wrong and he will not be mentioned. No, if I'm wrong, I will say it. Because in my head, it's still there. And I think it was episode four. I did an entire security segment about how to stay safe on the Internet. So, it doesn't make any sense to me.

It makes total – you will find yourself wrong, Jason. You are definitely the one that was like, if I'm not doing anything wrong, what difference does it make? Okay. That was your position. That was never mine. All right. I'm going to find it and we're going to put it in – we'll put it in next week's show. And we'll lay that argument to rest so we never have to talk about it again.

Okay. Shall we do some news? Yes, we shall. We've talked about the Echo and we both got super excited about it or the Amazon Alexa.

I have two in my house. I believe you have at least two, correct? I have one. I gave one away. I gave away my dot. Ah, there you go. Yeah, I have a dot that never gets used really. That's why I gave it away. Yeah, so after the initial rush of how cool we thought it was, I think you and I have both agreed it's basically a slightly more expensive Bluetooth speaker.

And most people seem to kind of agree with the same sort of thing. They've had a really hard time getting people to use any sort of the apps that are coming along for it. And Amazon has started to notice this and is kind of throwing out the Hail Mary and just basically begging people to start making skills for the Alexa in the hopes that somebody will come up with something that is actually useful and get people interested again.

See, the interesting thing is it's not the amount of skills. There's a gazillion skills on there. It's remembering what to say. Yeah, or having anything that's actually really useful that isn't easier just whipping out the phone that's in your pocket anyways. True, true.

So, and we'll talk about that later in our feedback section because somebody sent us a really great link talking about that. But Amazon has rolled out the AWS promotional credits for Alexa. So, basically, if you want to develop a skill, and again, they're really kind of hoping that somebody comes up with a, you know, total unicorn, unicorn and rainbows skill that everybody's just going to love and get everybody all interested again.

So, they're basically saying, here you go. Here's everything you need. Here's the credits. It's going to be completely free for you to develop and host your skills. Build them, please. Yep. I went and signed up for this because it's $100 in credit. Yeah, I did too. Why not? Yeah, I haven't gotten my credit yet, but I'm on the list.

And the annoying thing is the first thing they do is subscribe you to an email list. Of course. Which sucks. I'm just like, fortunately, I haven't gotten any spam from it yet, but it's still annoying that the first thing they do is sign you up to an email list. All right. That's everything now. We've gone back to the mailing list is king, and if we're going to give you anything at all, we want your name.

Yep. We want your email address, and we're going to send you stuff. We promise not to spam. By the nature of me giving you my email address, you're spamming me. So, shut up. First of all, you're spamming. And secondly, and this is a nice little lead into our next story, it'll probably get hacked, and my email will get out through your list anyways, much like anybody that's ever signed up with Yahoo.

Yep. So, yeah, we've made a lot of fun of Marissa Meyer and Yahoo. She basically ran that company into the ground. Not necessarily all her fault. Yeah, it wasn't really. It's not like it was the shining eagle soaring in the sky, too close to the sun type of failure.

It was already, like, kind of a groundhog by the time she took over. Yeah, she was, you know, she hopped on that missile as well on the way down into the ground. You know, very Dr. Strangelove style, whooping all the way down. Yep. So, we made fun of her for getting an awful lot of money and not really being able to stop the decline of Yahoo.

Ladies, time to get pissed off. Because she's out. Nice little package. But the new male CEO that's coming in once this missile has already hit the ground, so he's basically just standing there in a crater, is getting paid even more than she was.

You're kidding me. I am not kidding you. This guy is basically getting paid a crap ton of money for a job that involves doing absolutely nothing. Setting aside any discussion of the gender wage gap, and this guy's name is McKearney, McKearney's compensation is all the more remarkable when you take into account his job responsibilities following the Verizon deal.

While Mayer was hired to tackle the Herculean challenge of turning around Yahoo's struggling media business, an impossible task as which we've discussed many times on this show, and she obviously failed, he is basically getting a paycheck for what may practically be called a no-show job. Ah, I smell nepotism.

Ah, Jim, you know, you and I basically said, hey, we're here, Yahoo, hire us. I wish they would have. They could have given us this outrageous paycheck to just basically sit there and go, yep, company's screwed. Yeah, well, what a deal, man.

What a deal. What a deal. Yeah, unbelievable. Because we, I mean, we made fun of her package when she first got the job. It was ridiculous. And if this guy's getting double for, like, just kind of sitting around with his thumb up his ass once they move to Verizon. Wow.

Talk about winning the jackpot. I mean, he is getting paid multi-million dollars to basically just sit in a bunch of conferences. That's it. He's just going to be sitting in a room while Verizon talks about what they want and what they don't want. And that's that. I still don't know what the hell's going on with this deal.

I don't know why Verizon is doing it. It makes no sense. There's nothing valuable there. I know. You can get all the emails off the dark web. Seriously. We can just, you know. I see. Elo should just go buy that mailing list and just spam all the Yahoo people and bring them all over to Elo.

Yeah. Buy our T-shirts. I forgot that's their whole business plan now. So, you know, we always like the Europeans for their privacy, you know, basically sitting around and saying, hey, no, you cannot invade all of our EU citizens' privacy all the damn time.

And we want to take care of our people. And if you're going to sell your product on our soil, well, you have to abide by our rules. Yeah. And thank you so much, European Union, for that pop-up window on all websites about cookies. Yeah, we know. We get it. Yeah, we get it. That was a little too much.

And they're going to roll that back. Thank God. And, yeah, it just never, it just never ceases to amaze me, the stupidity of some people. But right now, they're going after Facebook, Twitter, and Google for complying with regional rules about consumer rights.

Good. Which is very interesting. And there's a lot of specifics that media companies cannot do under EU consumer rules. And a couple of them are social media networks cannot deprive customers of their right to go to court in their member state of residence. Good. Awesome.

That's amazing, because we certainly can't do that here, because everything, all the fine print here says arbitration only. Social media networks cannot require consumers to waive mandatory rights, such as their right to withdraw from an online purchase. Good. Terms of services cannot limit or totally exclude the liability of social media networks in connection with performance of the service.

So, okay. Interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting one for sure. I'm not sure how one defines performance of a social network. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. That's some gray area right there. I'm like, are we just talking about being up or being not a steaming pile of shit?

Yeah. Hello, you're in trouble. Sponsored content cannot be hidden, but should be identifiable as such. Okay. I think everybody kind of does that. Yeah, for the most part these days. A little sponsor tag keeps getting smaller and smaller. It's like, how many pixels do we have to make this?

Yeah. Social media networks cannot unilaterally change terms and conditions without clearly informing customers about the justification and without giving them the – it should be giving.

Way to go. Who wrote this one? Oh, this would be TechCrunch. Okay. Yeah. Nice one. Giving them the possibility to cancel the contract with adequate notice. I wish this was legal here. What contract? Terms and conditions. Oh, yeah.

Okay. The T's and C's, right. Yeah. Yeah. And a couple other things. But it's nice that they're like, you know, putting the pressure on them. Put the squeeze on them. This will never trickle down to the – it'll never happen here. But what are you going to do? So, good on you, EU. Now, get rid of that fucking cookie thing because I'm sick of it.

I agree. We talked about the Lyft lawsuit a long time ago. Yep. And the judge came back in the original one saying, no, no, no, you're not suing for enough money. And said this would be – it was like an insult to the actual plaintiffs who were putting the lawsuit out there, which is the issue about are Lyft drivers employees or not.

Yes. So, this has finally gotten approval for a $27 million settlement from Judge Vince Chibar in San Francisco. I can't even begin to pronounce that name this early in the morning. Cahabria? Like Coheed and Cabria?

Oh, yeah. That weird band that I can never spell or get their name right? Yeah, I could never do that either. But I played a lot of them on Guitar Hero, surprisingly. But the settlement does agree to keep drivers as independent contractors. Yeah. See, I don't like this at all. The $27 million settlement is fine, but this seems like – this doesn't seem like what our legal system is supposed to be for because we got money out of this but no decision.

The settlement agreement keeps drivers as independent contractors. Well, they were suing to not be independent contractors. So, you gave them money, but now they're still independent contractors. But then the final kicker of the line is – and the status of Lyft drivers under California law remains uncertain going forward. So, what the fuck did you people do?

Well, they got $27 million out of Lyft. That's what they did at this point. All right. That's the sum of it at that point. It's useless. Well, it's a step in the right direction. And now at least these people can go, like, you know, get their car washed. Yes. Because I'm sure they got, like, four bucks each.

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. So, Thursday morning, I woke up, and Twitter was all a buzz. Oh, no. Twitter is a buzz? Oh, tell me more. And there were screenshots of one particular company's Twitter account. They had a pin-twint. A pin-twint.

What's a pin-twint? A pin-tweet. I like pin-twint even better, though. You should sell that to Twitter for a million dollars. That's my new username, Onelo. Yeah. It was, real Donald Trump, you're actually a disgusting excuse of a president, and we would love to have Barack Obama back.

Also, you have tiny hands. Well done, whoever hacked into McDonald's Twitter. Okay, so it was McDonald's that got hacked on that one. Yes, yes. They were mchacked, as every single journalist. I blame the Hamburglar. I blame the Hamburglar.

That's good. That's good. Yeah, so they quickly, you know, said that they'd been hacked and apologized and, you know, did all the corporate shuffle that says that we don't prefer anybody. We love everyone equally. Just please buy our products that kill you. So, yeah, and people were obviously pissed off.

And again, to me, this is like, you have, how much time do you have on your hands to actually sit there and then tweet back and say how you're so offended and Donald Trump is the best and I'm never going to have another one of your burgers again. Well, because apparently that's what happens. Most of the people that voted for Trump frequent McDonald's a lot.

So, yeah, well, you got it. You got it. You got to play to your base, man. You got to play to your base. You got to play to your base. So if you have any interest in whatsoever and how much this probably costs McDonald's and what happens when a large organization like this gets supposedly hacked or at least an, you know, an employee goes rogue and well, maybe it was probably his last day.

Here's the deal. No, that came in a wave of massive Twitter hacks. That was just one of a huge swath of Twitter hacks that happened that day. So they were they were definitely hacked. It was there's no there's no question about that. But yes, I prefer to the the 17 year old social media manager manager who's just tired and fed up.

Yeah, well, I want this article. There's a link in the show notes. I won't go through it at all. But what this article kind of tells you is it's not like back in the day when you and I would run social accounts for at least not for a company like this. It kind of runs through the the large amount of people that are involved with every decision being made on every tweet and the lawyers and the teams and the silo meetings.

God, if I ever heard that term again. Anyways, I've never been in a silo meeting. What's that? A silo meeting is when you bring in people from different parts of the organization for an overarching conversation. You bring in the lawyers along with the PR, along with the marketing manager.

along with the publicity department. OK, I had when I worked at Paramount, we did have those for some of our movies. Yes, they were terrible. Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, if you want to know exactly what those poor people's days were like after the the day after this this tweet, it's an interesting article.

And there's still that single point of failure for the person who actually has to type it into Twitter. So exactly. Yeah, exactly. Unless unless there's a committee and like you have to turn the keys like, OK, everybody typed in the tweet, everybody look at it. OK, everybody turn their key to the right on three to launch in a nuke.

You know, we're launching our tweet today. Boom. E-Marketer has dropped its 2017 revenue estimates for Snap. So Snap is continuing to not have a very good time after going public. They're down to 19 bucks today. They're down to 19 bucks.

E-Marketer has cut their revenue estimate by almost four percent. So they took off thirty four million dollars from its original January estimate. And yeah, you know, I think we've said since day one, what's the product? Why are they worth anything? Same reason that Instagram is.

And, you know, it's the audience. But the audience is dwindling rapidly. The audience is dwindling and dwindling rapidly and they're going to grow out of it and it's not going to take over. So we shall see. But I, I, I hold firm with my I did not buy any stock and I will not. Yes, this could be one of the greatest shark fins in history.

Could be certainly one of the most, most expensive. Yeah, definitely. Now, I saw this one, which was very strange. Someone tweeted a seizure in thiever, seizure. Yeah. Are you looking at it right now, Jason? I must be.

Do you smell toast? Turn it into you. So, yes, somebody tweeted a seizure inducing strobe image to Kurt Eichenwald from Vanity Fair. Yes. And gave him a seizure, which is a. Now, here's the here's the interesting part.

While being a completely dick move, you can't get around that it's a dick move. The FBI has arrested the guy who sent the tweet. And it's a bit above and beyond. But well, what they're claiming is it's a federal crime because it crosses state borders.

And that it's, you know, it's some kind of harassment. And it's this one I'm on the fence about. Yes, the guy is a complete and utter asshole. But this is the Internet and you can post pictures of things. And what's to say that, you know, it did trigger him or not.

There's a lot going on in this one. No, there's a lot. I mean, certainly it was targeted. The person sent it on purpose to somebody that they knew had epilepsy. But then again, you know, cast back your minds ten years to MySpace pages. Half of them would have caused epilepsy.

Or GeoCities. You know, I mean, it's just it is the Internet and people do stupid things and post really ugly graphics all the time. I'm also concerned about the use of the crossing of state lines sorts of things with this sort of stuff, because I don't think that it's legal or fair to use that when you are not in control of dissemination methods and do not know where the servers are on things.

They know where the people are, though. They know that the guy who sent it was in another state. So that's what that's that was his justification for calling the feds. Again, I don't think this is another case where I understand why they're using that law, but the law is not kept up with the technology.

And it's somewhat ridiculous to use that. Yeah. And just the fact that they're wasting federal tax dollars on a guy who tweeted at somebody else with a with a rage tweet. Yeah. You know. Yeah. I agree. Now, we'll go from wasting money to wasting time and rage tweets to rage reviews.

There's been a lot of looking. I remember you just taught you watched the recent Amy Schumer special. I watched 20 minutes of it and then I had to turn it off. Yes. You justifiably did not enjoy it because you really did not enjoy it. Did you go online and review it? Yes.

Well, I didn't review it, review it in an in a actual forum for reviews. I just tweeted that it was a steaming pile of shit and she's still not funny. Gotcha. Well, this has kicked off something and there's been some some math done on this and some statistical analyses.

And apparently men are sabotaging online reviews of TV shows aimed at women. Well, purposefully or not. I don't know. But this is from FiveThirtyEight. So there is some real math behind it. It's an interesting link and an interesting read. It's to some degree it comes down to there are just more guys than women online and there's a bit more of the guys are just more dicky than women are.

Actually, there are more women than men online. That has been if you look at any of the any any of the, you know, census results on Internet population, women outnumber us. OK, let me rephrase that. Then there are more men than women actually doing reviews. OK, how's that?

OK, I don't know if that's true, but we'll take it. We'll take it at face value on that one for now. Anyways, go ahead and read through the article. And it basically just shows that, yeah, men are men are more likely than women to give worse ratings for things. Women will kind of go more middle of the ground, even if they didn't really like it.

Well, men will just, you know, drop a one bomb out of 10 and there. Yeah. So this seems to be a skewing of of ratings and in favor of kind of men based TV shows. They're using Sex and the City as their main single point case because Sex and the City is a far lower rated show than it really should be.

And I agree with that because I love Sex and the City. I would have given it a good rating. OK. Yeah. Newsflash. Men are assholes. Like I said, that was one of my two points. There's more men doing reviews than women are and men are dicks. Yeah, that's about it. I do draw the line at the Sex and the City movies, though.

You cannot. There's no justification for those in any way, shape or form in the known universe. Well, there is a justification for women and the women told me it was the outfits. But even the women agree that the movies sucked. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Speaking of sucking, Tim Berners-Lee thinks the web now sucks.

This just in. Breaking news. Man, he's on a slow connection. Yeah. He's still on his dial-up at CERN. He's still using a 300-baud dial-up, apparently. Yeah. And he says that there are three things that we need to change to save the web.

OK. We've lost control of our personal data and we need to get it back. Yes. I haven't heard anybody saying such things. Nope. He says it's too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. What? Let's harken back to 1994 when I think both you and I started on the web and there was still misinformation back then.

So, hmm. You create a platform, Tim Berners-Lee, where anybody can publish anything and you think people are always going to be truthy? Well, sorry to burst that bubble. And political advertising online needs transparency and understanding.

Uh, no. Yeah, that's not going to be accomplished in a GIF. No, it's not. Uh, yeah. So, thanks, Tim Berners-Lee, for that little dose of duh out of the gate. OK. Yeah. Oh, well. Ah, let's talk about Uber for a second.

Oh, really? Since we already talked about Lyft. We've got a couple of great Uber stories here. Um, this one comes from Boing Boing, but it's about a, an article on Daniel Compton's site. And, uh, the title is, If Google Wins Its Trade Secret Suit Against Uber, It Could Tank Uber.

Yay! Oh, wait, I'm not supposed to clap. OK. Well, you didn't clap. You yayed. Yeah. Now, the, the rationale behind this, because we both said that, you know, nah, it's, this, well, the sexism thing isn't going to kill Uber. You know, we figured that out.

No. No. Never, that's not a thing at all. What is a thing is if they lose all of their R&D that they've done on their self-driving cars so far, and it all goes back to Google, they're starting from, they say it isn't just square one, it's square minus 1 million because their whole game plan right now is to subsidize everything with all the rides, getting cheap rides and all this stuff to drive everybody out

of the business until the self-driving cars come in when they flip the switch, get rid of the drivers, go to self-driving cars, then profit. Yep. If they don't have their self-driving car tech, well, that puts them at a huge disadvantage over everybody else that's actually way ahead of them already, you know?

Yeah. Like even, they don't, I don't even think they mentioned Tesla, but they talk about, you know, the major car manufacturers who are all in on self-driving cars. Everybody's coming after them now. Yeah. And I think, you know, this was a miscalculation on their point where they thought that, oh, well, we're just going to hire everybody from Carnegie Mellon in, get everybody from the robotics labs to come and build our self-driving Ubers.

Well, uh, looks like you may have hired the wrong guy on this one. So we'll see how this is going to play out, but it is an interesting take and a very interesting read on, uh, what's going to happen if, if they do lose this lawsuit, which it seems on the surface like they might.

And there's some pretty compelling evidence, uh, the whole, uh, the Daniel Compton basic timeline shows if this is true, they're screwed. Yeah. I mean, basically, uh, and we'll see, I mean, normally in a case like this, especially with companies this big, I would just, you know, I'd be go, so who cares?

This is just a, this just means a couple gazillion dollars are going to shift from one person to another and things will continue on as they were. They'll just pay somebody off. Uh, but Uber can't really pay this one off. Um, also they can't pay it off because they're so deep in with their investors right now.

They are, they're at that point where it's make or break time and they can't afford another couple billion dollar loss. So we'll see. Yeah. And they can't afford the billion dollar loss, but they also can't afford the time. The time is the real issue because everybody's coming after them. And which gets me to their next story about Uber.

Uber's autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I mean, we've said it's been such a confusing space. We've been covering the press on this for, for quite a while now.

And, you know, in the same show, we'll have an article talking about how driverless cars are, are, you know, going to be, they're rolling out next year. And then we'll read another article, which says, come on people. Well, it's like 25 years away still, but now it seems to be tipping more into the, it's, it's a good while away still.

Yeah. Yeah. The interesting bit here is it's, you know, they can go 0.8 miles before a safety driver had to take over for one reason or another. But we get to the, the interesting part in this article from recode, which is talks about critical interventions. And this is how many times a safety driver had to take over to avoid harmful events.

And those are incidents that would have resulted in a car hitting a person or causing more than around $5,000 in property damage. If the driver did not take over now, this one, this one floored me. They're only at 200 miles between those types of incidents.

But they, they, they, they should be happy because it's an improvement from the previous week, which is 114 miles. That number needs to be at 200,000 before it needs to be above 200,000. It needs to be statistically insignificant.

It needs to be 200 million. Well, it's not good. It's never going to get there just from the random nature of driving. But, you know, if you're, you know, if they tried to put out a self-driving plane that took, you know, that the pilot had to jump in every 200 miles, we'd never leave the ground.

No, that's why, that's why the FAA is one of the greatest, you know, bodies on the planet because they, that's why airline travel is the safest way to travel and self-driving cars. Not so much as it turns out. Yeah, it's, it's a little crazy.

That's the completely unacceptable numbers. And I, I, no wonder they fought so hard to not release any information. Uber.

Security. All right. Welcome back to Security with Dave Bittner. What you doing, Dave? Hello, gentlemen. Nice to be back. How's everything going with you all? Not bad. Fantastic. All right.

Are you ready to jump into it? Yes, please. All right. Well, this week's big story. Of course, we're all familiar with the Yahoo breaches. Breaches in plural. Millions and billions of breaches. They're huge. They're huge breaches. Basically, all the emails, all of them.

Well, the Department of Justice says they know who did it and they've, some people have been collared. They've got two Russians that have been charged. Actually, four charged with this crime. We've got two Russian spies and two hired hackers. It's amazing how everything is just turning up Russia these days.

You know, it is. It's just a little shocking just how everything seems to be Russian. Well, in this one, I think it's a little convenient, but. Yeah, but you've always been conspiracy theory on the Sony breach, Jason. So I expect you to. That's because I had somebody inside Sony that told me about it.

That wasn't a conspiracy theory. I had somebody inside Sony. But you, we've all, I think all three of us have said that we never believed it was a quote unquote state sponsored attack on Yahoo. So maybe we're eating crow on this one. Tell us more about it, Dave. Well, I mean, I think one of the things we need to, to remember when we're talking about the Russians is that, um, you know, state sponsored or organized crime is quite often a distinction without a difference.

Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. When it comes to the Russians. So, you know, state spies often do work on the side or they may hire, uh, organized crime folks to do the work for them so that they may have plausible deniability, um, those sorts of things.

So the, uh, DOJ has, uh, two Russians who've been charged. They're officers of the Russian federal security service. And the two other who have indicted are, um, paid by the Russian spies to tack into Yahoo. Um, they have one of, they collared one of them in Canada, I believe.

And, uh, so he will likely be sent to the U S to face trial. Um, the other interesting little twist in this is that one of the Russians is being, he's not only in trouble with us, but he's being charged by Russia as being a double agent. Ooh, the plot thickens.

Uh, yeah. So, you know, I, I, you know, Jason, if we wanted to feed your conspiracy theory, there've been an awful lot of dead Russians turning up lately. That's, that's, that's also true. Yeah. And, uh, so I don't suspect that he will make his way back to the United States for trial.

He got some bad poutine. Yeah. There's no such thing, Jason. There's no such thing. You know, so we, we may see some people come to justice for this. Um, you know, the, the horse is out of the barn, of course. Uh, Yahoo CEO, uh, Marissa Mayer, um, you know, she gave up her cash bonus from 2016, uh, which is worth about $14 million.

How much, how much is that in rubles? That's a good question. That's a good question. It probably goes farther over there than it does here though. So that's about 0.001 cent for every email that got hacked. Something like that. That's what that works out to. Yeah. And Yahoo's, um, the, the price that, uh, Verizon is going to pay for Yahoo has gone down by, I want to say $350 million or so.

Yeah. That's what I read too. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, pretty soon you're talking about real money. Um, it's, it's a lot, but relative to the size of the sale, it's, I guess, you know, not appropriate or, you know, in the ballpark. It's a traffic ticket.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, uh, you know, we caught some folks for doing some bad things and we'll see if they actually, uh, get brought to justice. Excellent. Well, I, I'm a big audiophile and I come from audio engineering background. So I love this particular story and I can't wait to hear your guys' take on it.

Uh, so a group of computer security researchers at the University of Michigan and University of South Carolina have demonstrated that they are able to take control of, or at least influence, whatever that may mean, devices through the tiny accelerometers that are standard components in products like smartphones, fitness monitors, and even automobiles through the use of audio.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically sound files that they would play. Uh, rumor has it is Katy Perry, uh, at these devices that can basically control them or at least, uh, influence them, add steps to fit this, fit fit fitness monitors, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, through malicious music files, this is pretty interesting.

I mean, we've, we've heard rumor and even talked about air gapping, uh, leaping air gaps before, but I think this is the first time we've ever heard about just sound being used. And it's interesting that they're going through the accelerometer, uh, and what that they're, what they're able to accomplish by doing that.

So, and what I think this really points out and when they talk about it in the article is just the, you know, how these complex systems interact. And when you find one entry point, then you can theoretically get to other subsystems and eventually own the device. Yeah. I think this is a really interesting article.

There were a couple of things that came to mind for me. One was, um, uh, you know, drones. So even little consumer drones, which have built in accelerometers and that's how they maintain part of how they maintain where they are, where they're going, how fast they're going. And things like that.

So, you know, imagine your little DJI phantom flying around, you know, over a picnic or a wedding and, um, somebody sends the right audio file to it, scrambles the accelerometers. Um, what happens next? Now, the next point, what that brings me to is what kind of failure modes to these devices have, you know, the accelerometer fails in your phone.

Eh, probably not a big deal, really. The, uh, accelerometer fails in a drone that's flying over a wedding, or as a friend of mine likes to put, put it, a lawnmower flying over your wedding. Um, you know, what, what happens next? You would assume that it has some sort of fail safe mode where, uh, it's safely just lands itself or, you know, something flies up to a safe altitude or, you know, some, something like that.

But who knows? But it uses the accelerometer to, for the fail safe mode. That's where, that's where your pickle comes in. And this is also one of those points where it would be good to say, I have say, I don't know, government oversight. At that point, I don't, it still doesn't matter.

I mean, you could have as much oversight of a broken drone as you want, you know? No, it does matter because I'm talking about the government oversight of having these kind of, like, emergency mode situations built into things, which I'm sure there is no standard for right now for drones. If something goes extremely wrong, governments usually step in and say, okay, you need to have these fail safe steps built into your devices.

That isn't happening right now because we don't, you know, bother with these sorts of things. Well, the Department of Homeland Security is actually putting out a security advisory to the makers of these chips. So somebody's paying attention to it. Trump know about that yet? Because I'm sure he's about to cancel that. Sure. The other, the other, you know, device that I thought of was all of those, um, really cool.

You know, there's cool videos we see where they've got those research robots that can, you know, jump over things and run over things. And, you know, so imagine if you were able to blast, you know, some kind of audio file at one of those robots and make it basically, uh, make it dizzy.

Right. I mean, it, right. That's kind of what it would be like. It would, and, and so what kind of fail safe mode would it have? Would it just to drop to the ground and curl up in a little ball? Well, what I really want to do is get ahold of one of these, uh, these sound files that they're using and figure out how to embed it in a Nickelback song, because that would be the best to be able to just come out and play Nickelback at a drone and have it fall from the sky.

I think that would be, uh, yeah. Well, at the best case scenario, insult to injury. Stands to reason it works on most humans. It's true. Exactly. Insult to injury. All right. What's next? So it turns out thieves in China are actually using QR codes.

Gasp, people still use QR codes, you say? Well, apparently in China, they are a big deal. Yeah. And hackers over there are actually, they're foiling QR codes with stickers. Nice. Who would have saw that coming? Yeah. Just the kind of innovative high-tech crime that you would expect.

I see your QR code and I replace it with my own. Yeah. My own laser jet printed sticker. So I guess people use these QR codes over there to pay, to make payments for all kinds of things. Yep. And so you basically, you know, you, you open your little digital wallet and then you scan the QR code and that has the information on where to send the money and how much.

Well, if you're not paying attention. So if I put my bank on, my bank account on there and you want to pay for, I don't know, a soda or something and you go up and you scan it, it sends the dollar to me and you just think, well, it didn't give me a soda. It must be broken.

And you walk away and then, you know, repeat and profit. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's clever. I just like it because it's clever and it's low-tech. I like it. Well, and who knew they were still using QR codes? Yeah, that's the one thing that I found most surprising.

I thought those went the way of the dodo when marketers could not get anybody to scan them because it doesn't, there's no scanning software generally built into your phone. No, the apps are shit. Oh, they're terrible. I think the most ridiculous use of a QR code that I remember seeing was there was one time when Bill Cosby was on the Letterman show and he held out, he held up a printout of a QR code to have people go to his website.

And, you know, I was like, okay, here, all right. And, of course, this was when we all still loved Bill Cosby. So, yeah. Little do people know that QR code is still in use and it gets you a free beverage now. It's a special beverage. That's right. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

So, we talked about WeVibe on the show before, which is the internet-enabled vibrator. Turns out. How could anything go wrong? I'm pretty sure we said that right there and then when we talked about it. Well, unfortunately for them, they got caught saving all your banging data and had to end up paying about $4 million back to the owners of the device for the privacy kerfluffle.

Ah, the internet of things. Yep. In this case, the internet of very intimate things. I got to tell you right now, just as a use case scenario and to make a little bit of money on the side, I'm going to start to buy every stupid product that comes out that does this sort of stuff that tracks and takes your data.

And I'm just going to buy them so I can get in on the class action lawsuits because they're going to be coming fast and furious on all these devices. It's class action insurance for sure. Right. Right. Just buy one of everything. And it's like buying every space on the Monopoly board.

One of them's got to hit. Exactly. Sooner or later, people are going to be paying you rent. Well, the other thing that I was wondering about this was as these, quote, novelty, end quote, devices become more and more high tech, at what point do they cross over to become medical devices?

Because, you know, you can't you can't just you can't make a blood pressure cuff, you know, without having it go through FDA approval. And, you know, these things are being used for much more invasive uses than something like that.

So I wonder about that. And actually, I dug up and found the answer. It turns out that if you it's all about labeling, if you label label them as a novelty, then the FDA has. This doesn't really isn't concerned with them.

And it actually falls under the Consumer Protection Agency. So what happens is it's the difference between a proactive agency and a reactive agency. With the FDA, you have to prove that it's safe ahead of time. With the Consumer Product Safety Commission, I think it is, they basically follow up on multiple reports of things going wrong.

So that's how it works. So it sounds like the same difference between labeling something as a supplement and something as an actual. Bit of medicine. Yep. Right. Yep. That's exactly what it is. One of the interesting things on the the previous article about the sound wave hacking is one of the people who was working on the sound hacking is actually a researcher for medical devices.

Kevin Fu is a computer scientist at the University of Michigan and the chief executive of Virta Labs. And it's a company that focuses mainly on cybersecurity and health care. So that's what he's that's one of the things that he's he's following up on with this research into the sound waves because he doesn't want somebody to be able to walk in and, you know, play some really crappy music.

He doesn't want to walk in and have your pacemaker turn off. Right. That'd be bad. Yeah. Wouldn't be a bad day. Yep. I finally got around to watching the movie Zero Days. We talked about it a couple weeks ago on the show and I found myself home with the flu and said, ah, let's watch a movie that will be a pick me upper.

Let's let's let's find out what happened with good old Stuxnet. So the first half of the movie, you basically have to read a bunch of emails. It's really boring. They just kept showing text up on the screen and lots of code samples and things like that.

I'm like, are you kidding me? Way to grab your audience. Seriously. And it finally gets into some stuff later on where they actually have some pretty amazing leaks from people in the NSA, some people who were in tailored access operations while Stuxnet was happening. And I'm going to save the reveals for watching the movie, but it's pretty good.

I got a by the time I was done with it, I was like, that was a pretty good movie and kind of scary. I have not seen it. I did watch the trailer, but of course, all trailers are good these days. So it looked it looked pretty compelling, although I have to ask you, I mean, was it was it the sort of, oh, my gosh, you know, everyone be scared.

They're going to shut down the grid and the dams are going to collapse and all that kind of stuff. There was some of that in there. Not not a huge amount, but some of it. And some of the stuff that they the guys from the NSA were saying that we had done already is pretty, pretty out, pretty out there, even for me to believe.

But it was like kind of unnerving. Yeah, just just coming from, you know, people who were who have been working on this stuff. Yeah. And the stuff about Stuxnet and how it proliferated and how the guys at Symantec did all their research on it was pretty fascinating.

The fact that they found the second batch of Stuxnet, like down to the first five infections was pretty cool. And and Stuxnet, of course, is the malicious computer worm that they said was responsible for damaging Iran's nuclear program. And yeah, it took down the it took down the centrifuges or all of their uranium enrichment.

And well, it tried to. That's the thing. It didn't really have that much impact at all. Besides really screwing up our cybersecurity operations. Yeah. Well, I'll have to check that out. I have not seen that movie, but well, let me ask you, is it worth my time?

Absolutely worth your time. I would you know, I would wait for wait for it to drop on Netflix or maybe take a jaunt over to Sweden for now until it gets to Netflix. It was definitely not worth the 20 bucks I paid for it. OK. So if you can rent it, rent it. It's worth a rental. You know, it's five, six bucks worth a rental to own it because that was the only way I could find it when I got it was to buy it.

So. OK. But if it's you have the option to rent it for a couple of days on, you know, Amazon or iTunes or whatever, definitely worth, you know, five bucks. OK, good. I'll check it out. All right. So last week when we left our heroes, Brian, Brian actually had an inquiry.

He sent me home with some homework. Brian, you want to you want to reiterate what you asked last week? Yeah, sure. We had heard a bunch of stories recently about people crossing the border, including American citizens. One of them, an employee, I believe, JPL or was it NASA? It was JPL, but I believe he had a NASA owned device.

Yeah. Something like that. So he was an American citizen that was basically told to turn over his cell phone at the border so people could do basically whatever the hell they wanted with it. One would assume make copies, et cetera, et cetera. As I will be traveling internationally very soon, I thought I would ask our resident expert, what the hell is going on?

What are some easy ways to say, again, Jason and I had a long going argument on the show where Jason took the view of if I'm not doing anything wrong, who cares? And I always said, no, that's complete bullshit. And I still have to go back because I still believe that's backwards.

It's not backwards. I always took the side of it's incredibly important to have security and be safe and nobody should have access to our data. No, that was my argument. And then you flipped it around one day when you finally came to see the light. That is completely wrong. Somebody who isn't us and has time on their hands, go back and do the research on this.

Anyways, the point being, so my question is, what are some very, assuming I've done nothing wrong, but I still don't want the U.S. government to take my cell phone and make a copy of it. What am I looking at here when I cross the border? Okay, so there are a couple different ways to come at this.

One way to come at this is, what are your rights as a U.S. citizen? You know, if you want to come through customs and say, I'm a U.S. citizen, here's my passport, I know my rights. You know, well, what are your rights? Well, the fact of the matter is, there's a lot of fuzziness about that.

It turns out that your normal Fourth Amendment rights don't necessarily apply at the border the way they do in the rest of the country. In other words, you know, if someone wants to, we all know, if someone wants to come in your house, if law enforcement wants to come in your house, go through your papers, they have to get a warrant to do so.

But the Supreme Court has ruled that at the border, there is a good enough reason for searching your stuff that that does not apply at the border. Now, this was established to go through your suitcase, right?

To make sure that you don't have, you know, fruits or vegetables or explosives or – You're coming back from Jamaica. Yep, exactly. All those reasons that I think most of us probably think are reasonable and, you know, don't really have that much of a problem with anyone going through our regular luggage because, you know, we kind of agree that's okay.

But obviously things are different with our mobile devices because your mobile devices contain so much more of your life. So that is still kind of up in the air as a contested issue. However, there is a case – we actually have on the Cyber Wire, one of our experts who comes on the show regularly is a gentleman named Ben Yellen.

He's a senior law and policy analyst at the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. He's actually a lawyer and this sort of policy is right up his alley and we had – I actually asked him this question about, you know, what – on our show, what do you do if you're an American citizen and you're coming through the border and they ask you – they say they want to search your mobile device or your laptop.

So where does it stand in terms of being a U.S. citizen? If I'm at the border and I'm, you know, coming back into the United States from a vacation in Canada or Mexico or Europe or wherever and I have my laptop and my phone and the border agent says to me, you know, we want to take a look at your electronic devices, which should my response be?

Well, your response should be citing a case called United States v. Cotterman. And this was a case that was decided in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, generally a court that's very favorable to civil liberties challenges, and they held that the United States Border Police or law enforcement at the border cannot examine your electronic storage devices without a reason for suspicion.

And this is a holding that has weakened the general border search exception to the Fourth Amendment that we've discussed. But notably, the case and the judges in the case did not define what reasonable suspicion is. Reasonable suspicion is a standard that's used in other areas of law enforcement.

I think what most people would recognize it from is a Terry stop. If you want to stop and frisk somebody on the street, you have to have reasonable suspicion that they're carrying some sort of weapon. So that is a – what we would call a legal term of art. It's somewhere – somewhat short of probable cause that somebody is committing a crime.

But you still have to have a reason to suspect that there's something untoward on this electronic device. So this decision has been appealed to the United States Supreme Court. So far, the Supreme Court has not taken up the case. This opinion is controlling law.

So if you're at the border and you don't want to reveal your electronic information to a forensic examination, cite United States v. Cotterman. You might get some confused looks from your border agents, but you would have good legal recourse.

So there you go. Yeah. Of course, the problem with that being given my limited experiences with people at border controls, when I even get a little tetchy about showing my documents for the 15th time, when I state, hey, United States v. Cotterman, I'm expecting myself to be put into a room for three to four hours minimum.

Well, yes, and that brings us to the next part of our story, which is that there is the legal and then there is the practical. So you are absolutely – you are negotiating with people who have guns. Yes. And they also – just as importantly, they have the ability to ruin your day.

So you may win the battle and lose the war in this case. So, yeah, if they want to hold on to you, to hold on to your devices and then, you know, down the road you prove with your lawyer that they were wrong and they send you a nice apology letter and, you know, the smoking remains of your mobile device, that's the way it might go.

So let's talk about the practical ways to handle this. You know, a lot of the people that we talk to who have to travel overseas, they just go with burner devices. They put everything on the cloud. You know, I was talking with someone recently with a big company.

Their executives do not travel with laptops. When they're traveling overseas, they get issued a brand new iPad. They take that iPad with them. Everything that they're doing is cloud-based. It's encrypted. And when they come back, that iPad gets disposed of.

It gets destroyed. I get that. And I also – I mean, I've also heard things like people have FedExed their laptops or cell phones across the border to their final destinations and things like that. The thing with the cloud that I wonder about, though, is because we're also hearing reports about turning over passwords for social media.

What is to stop them, other than technological ignorance, which only lasts for so long, to then ask for, well, what's your Dropbox password? Right. Well, I think in that case, you try to not have a device that will lead to those questions.

So, you know, when you're crossing the border – No, you get rid of all those apps, right. You don't have Facebook on your phone. I'm sorry. I don't use Facebook. I don't use Snapchat. I don't have Dropbox. You know, if you're crossing over with a flip phone – Now, see, again, now, see, I looked at the ACLU's website, and they said you should – you could do these tactics, but be aware of the fact that you are now technically lying to a border officer.

Yes, which is illegal. So, you see how – why this question came up in my mind, and I know that there's no real answers, which I also think is problematic. It is extraordinarily problematic, and, you know, people are hoping that the Supreme Court takes up some of these issues.

You know, this is a big gaping hole in our legal system right now, the fact that we have not caught up with the fact that our mobile devices carry so much of our lives with them. Well, dear God, please don't let it be Schulmeister versus the United States of America starting in two weeks and have me be the test case on this.

Yeah, I wish you luck, and I wish I had a better answer for you, but so far, this is not settled yet. This is still not settled. It's a very confusing area, but thank you for bringing some light to it. It is – as soon as you start to question things, you really go down a rabbit hole, and there are no answers.

Yeah. There is one other option, though. Don't – Take nothing. Don't come back. Well, Jason. You do like Canada. I'm just saying, you like Canada a lot. Maybe just go and don't come back. You really don't know how close to a reality that is.

Oh, I – This is actually starting to get. That's why I threw it out there. I think for many of us that we're considering that more than we ever have before, perhaps. All right. Thank you very much, Dave. Of course. Thanks for cheering me up, Dave. Well, good luck.

Travel safe. Let us know how it goes. We'll talk to you guys soon. Oh, well, you'll read about it in the papers. And everybody, be sure to go check out Dave's weekly podcast at TheCyberWire.com. Now, I said last week that it was probably going to be a couple of weeks before I got to a new book because the Sherlock Holmes by Stephen Fry on Audible that I got was 63 hours.

That's a lot of hours. I'm almost done. Well, I mean, if you can put it on throughout your day and all that sort of stuff, you can burn through it pretty quick. Yeah. I listened at one and a half and with my new Apple AirPods makes it much easier.

And so it's the only thing I haven't listened to. I skipped The Hound of the Baskervilles because I really don't like that book. Okay. I know it's like one of the fan favorites, but it's my least favorite. But yeah, I think I got about eight hours to go and I'm done. Crazy. It's probably my least favorite episode of Sherlock with Cumberbub.

Yeah, yeah. It was terrible. It was absolutely god awful terrible. That was back when the first couple of seasons where episode two was always the dog. No pun intended. So I started in on Change Agent by Daniel Suarez. Doesn't come out till April 18th.

So pre-order now. Right. And it's funny when I was listening this morning, we first mentioned Daniel Suarez's books, Demon and Freedom TM. Right. Actually, I think it was just Demon at that point. I don't think Freedom TM had come out then. On episode five of Grumpy Old Geeks.

Wow. Digging up all the past. Are you like indexing this? Tagging things with keywords? I think I might start doing that because I looked at- You probably should. Our old show notes suck. So I might go back and kind of fix some of that while I'm listening to it because it makes sense. If I'm going to listen to it, might as well actually just do it now and get it over with.

Yeah. I mean, we'll build up quite an interesting- Everybody always writes us and complains about like searching through our stuff and things like that. I'm like, how hard is it? There's a search bar. Well, the interesting thing about our old shows is that there weren't that many links. It's a completely different show than it is now. Yeah. So, you know, now you look at- We have like, you know, 50 or 60 links in every block of show notes.

Back then, there would have been two. Yeah. But I can like, you know, put the concepts in and timestamp them, I think. Yeah, I think that's a good way to go. Yeah, because I remember it took me forever to figure out the episode where we talked about support-a-cons. That was episode two, by the way.

Oh, okay. So much has changed in the world. Yeah. Surprisingly, WordPress still sucks. We still hate Squarespace. Although in episode six, I do talk about how I love Squarespace support and that they had me as a customer for life. How did that last? I'm still a customer of Squarespace, so I can't- I'm still there.

Yes, but not by choice. Begrudgingly. I am a begrudging Squarespace customer. We even titled an episode, Unintuitive Fuster Cluck, after them. So I dug into that one. And I want to say, if anybody out there has a blog where they review things or have their own podcast, hook up with NetGalley.

Because all you have to do is say, I'm going to review this on my show, and you can get advanced copies of just about anything. That's not quite true. Well, that's how I got a copy of Change Agent, and I get, you know, 10 books a month from them. It's still not quite true, Jason.

I have signed up as well. Now, the way that it works is if you are requesting any of the kind of unknown first-time authors, they will throw that thing at you in two seconds. If you are requesting somebody a bit higher up on the food chain of Authorville, i.e. Suarez, and you haven't requested any other books in the past, or very few, or they haven't personally verified you, you will not get approved for the book.

I have not been approved for the Suarez book, because I've not really requested anything before. Interesting. So there is a bit of a scalability that they put into it. So they're not going to just toss new books ahead of time at you from well-known authors until you've kind of proven yourself. Here's the thing about the Suarez book.

Go check your library, because I got the same email asking me to write to them and say, I check my library. It's not there. Oh, okay. Well, I'll give you my login. No, don't worry about it, because the book comes out in 29 days from today, and I've got three other books to get through, so I'm not in any rush.

And I don't mind. I'm going to buy it anyway. So yeah, I got an email from the publisher asking me about what I would like to do with the book. So I sent them back an email. Email was invalid. So I keep getting all these bounce notices that keep coming back every, you know, day or so saying, this message was undeliverable.

But I looked at my library, and boom, there's the book. So they just kind of put it through. Right. Yeah. Well, apparently, you're not. It's not quite as cut and dry, which I get. I mean, if I were to build up this sort of thing, and if I was a book publisher and I was giving my book away to a service that basically gives the book away to other people, I'd want to know some metrics.

I'd want to know, who's this going to again? And why are we giving it away for you? How about we only give it to people that have, you know, well-known sites or podcasts or whatnot? So, but, you know, if there were real good customer service or people over there, they would know that we're one of the few podcasts that actually talks about books.

Yeah. Seriously. So do me a favor and just go grab a couple of like low-level books that you may have already read and just give them a rating. And then that should give you enough history. Yeah, I guess that's really it. But I just thought it was interesting that they do seem to be weighted. It's pretty easy to get an unknown book, but if you request something that's up there, they want something out of you.

Welcome to Behind the Curtain of Getting Free Shit on Grumpy Old Geeks. Exciting stuff, right, guys? There's another book that came out that I just bought that is in my queue now, which I didn't know came out, but it came out last month. And this one I put in the show notes because it is relevant to what we talked about on security.

It's The Art of Invisibility, The World's Most Famous Hacker, Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Something. I think it was a big government. I probably cut it short on the copy and paste. Big data. Okay. By Kevin Mitnick. Yep. And this came out last, yeah, last month in, yeah, February.

And I found it because he mentions one password in his book about getting password managers. Somebody tweeted it and had a blurb about it. So it's on my list, but I'm thinking maybe you should pick it up and speed read it before your trip to Kanata. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's only so much I'm going to do at this point anyways, but it's definitely, I think this stuff is of interest, certainly right now and at this point.

The thing that I enjoyed the most about this is the sponsored products related to this item that come up on the iTunes page, WordPress and Pinterest, the quick guide to surviving the social media revolution. Safe computing is like safe sex. You have to practice it to avoid infection.

Oh, God. And blockchain down the rabbit hole, discover the power of blockchain. Who writes this shit? Yeah, well, people who don't sell a lot of books, probably. I can get those for free on NetGalley without a problem. Without a problem. And I finally, I stepped away from everything I'd been reading because we've been discussing recently about how you shouldn't just run through series or even stay within genre because you do burn out.

So it's always nice to switch things up. So I went and basically read a biography of one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately, he hasn't put out a real book in quite some time. So this is this is all I got. And this is from 2014, I believe. Tibetan Peach Pie, a true account of an imaginative life from Tom Robbins, who is definitely one of my absolute favorite authors.

And I really enjoyed his autobiography, even though it did kind of just make me wish I was getting a new book from him. May not be getting a new book from him. I had no idea he was as old as he is. In fact, I had no idea about most of his personal life, which is kind of what I like about authors.

I like not knowing things, but he certainly had a very interesting life. He is 84 years old. Wow. No, no idea he was that old. I mean, I knew he was, you know, big counterculture guy. I knew a lot of it was 60s base, but 84 sported 1932.

Whoa. Lived a massively super interesting life. You would never guess because of all the photos that exist of him, but they all must be super old. Who the hell knows? He does not look 84. It was a fun read. I mean, again, I just want a new book from him, hopefully maybe two before he goes the way of the dodo.

But yeah, fun, fun read. Interesting life. Good guy. Yeah. My girlfriend in high school was was a big fan of Tom Robbins. And at that point, he still had he'd already had a bunch of books out. So, yeah, been around for a while. Yeah. Been around his first book.

Another red side attraction, 1971. My personal favorite Jitterbug Perfume, 84. The most recent novel, Billy Incognito, was 2003. He had a collection in 2005, a novella B is for beer, which all grumpy old geeks should check out in 2009.

But yeah, it looks like we may not be getting another full throated novel from which is a bummer. But if you're a fan, I highly recommend Tibetan peach pie. I just wanted to do a little follow up here on my AirPods since I've had them for a week now.

Okay. They're still here. Have not fallen out once. Very comfy. Very sound. Very good. I almost forget they're in half the time and I love them. They are fantastic. The just the sound quality, the ease of use, you know, when I want to listen to something else, take them out, pop them in my pocket.

The one thing that I really, really like, though, is the integration with the player on the iPhone in my Apple Watch. Because what I'll do is my phone will be charging upstairs in my house all day. But when I want to go and I have my AirPods in all day and I'm wandering around the house doing whatever.

And if I want to do anything like if I take them out, do something and then I want to start up again, sometimes it won't auto start when I put them in if they're out for a while. So I'll stick them in and then I just hit tap the side button on my watch. It pops up the the player from my phone. No matter what's playing, it could be audible or it could be overcast or whatever.

And then I just hit play. And I go, it's like it's super simple. So I think that integration between all three of them has really, you know, kind of made it work for me. Right. I'm a definite fan. And, you know, I'm sure even if you don't have the Apple Watch, they still work just as good.

But the really cool thing is, like, I'll have my AirPods in, have my phone in my pocket. I'm listening. I'll get in my car. Turn on my car on. It'll automatically switch from my phone to the or my AirPods to the stereo in the car. Start playing. I take out my AirPods.

When I get to where I'm going, I pop my AirPods back in, turn the car off, picks back up in my AirPods. Boom. Like no transition whatsoever. It's very smooth. Very, very smooth. Very cool. I'm not sure if I'm ready for smart headphones, but we shall see. Yeah, they just work.

I like it. That's nice. We talk a lot about Sweden. Sweden. Going to Sweden to get shows that we couldn't get elsewhere or didn't want to wait for because of stupid, you know, international laws, silly laws. Bork, bork, bork. Bork, bork, bork. Or just even the fact that, you know, we all know that we're getting completely screwed by cable providers.

Now, I remember back in the day, the old school cable breaker boxes, these were talked about throughout the neighborhood in hushed tones by by dads. And, you know, you know, we would secretly kind of hope that our parents would get them at some point because we also knew that not only did it mean getting, you know, HBO and Fraggle Rock for free, it meant the porn channels would probably be free.

So these were there are the modern day equivalents of this now, and they're available on Amazon, which blows my mind because you used to have to, like, find somebody who would, like, put one together with parts from Radio Shack. You can look. There's a link in our show notes for the Goobang Do.

This is the best name ever. XB2 Android 5.1 TV box with a unique server and true 4K playing. Some of my in-laws up in Canada land happen to have this. Anything for free all the time.

No problems. This is just taking a straight cable in inbound cable connection that you don't pay for and plugging it in and it decodes it. No, no. This is just for taking your Internet connection that you theoretically would pay for. And this goes out to Sweden in real time.

No, no downloading. No anything. It streams anything. OK, so it's probably a Cody box then. Whatever that may be. Cody is Cody is basically the same. It's kind of a streaming BitTorrent client that everybody is using.

Well, this is this is yes. This one would be very similar to that. And everybody is using it. And yeah, why bother? You know, I mean, we're talking movies that are still just in theaters. Yeah. We're we're talking to every episode of every show on every channel and within seconds with ever without there ever being a problem.

And here it is on sale for Prime members on Amazon. It's not hard to get. No, no. I mean, it's it's 67 bucks, but I can have it. I can have it tomorrow for sixty seven dollars. All it is is a computer, though. I mean, that's really all it is.

So I. Now, but is a computer so fine tuned with its own GUI that it's insane how advanced these things are now to do your friends in Canada. Do they get the little keyboard that goes with it? Yes, they do. OK, well, let's let's add those to cart.

Because I've got, you know, I've got a Mac mini plugged in a spectrum. I'd like to cancel my account. Well, fortunately, I don't have an account. But now the thing about this is, does it have Wi-Fi? Because it says it's got, you know, a LAN connection, a gigabit LAN connection, but I don't have a cable downstairs.

Does it have Wi-Fi? I do not have the answer to that because that would be illegal for me to know. You will have to take your own guesses. Well, no, I'm just going to read the product description here at the bottom of it. Supports dual band Wi-Fi 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz. Airplay, Miracast, DLNA and H.265.

OK, OK, still in the cart. Proceed to check out. Yeah, let me know how that goes. It's certainly an interesting. Again, I'm just blown away at the fact that not only is it just so easy to get, I mean, you don't even have to. It's just on Amazon.

Not only is it on Amazon. It's there's a sale for Prime members. Wow. It's and this is fulfilled by Amazon. Yeah. I mean, it's a computer. It's not doing anything. It's not doing anything illegal. So what you do with it could be. But that could be said about any computer that you've ever bought in your lifetime.

You know? Yeah. Right. Yeah. But here's the thing. Wait until you plug that thing out of the box and look at the UI. You tell me that it could just be like anything and I will. I'll review it next week. I ordered it because for under 100 bucks, you know, because we just I just mentioned Cody and I started to install it on my Mac Mini, which is connected to my TV downstairs.

And it is such a pain in the ass to install that I just said, screw it. I'm not going to deal with it. And but because it was going to take here's the rule. If it takes more than two hours and this costs under 100 bucks. Well, this is cheaper because I can spend those two hours working and then still come out ahead.

Yeah. And again, that's kind of my point on this is it's so this is so plug and play like anybody. All you have to do is buy it and plug it in. And you're basically got every TV show and movie that's ever been made for free. OK, well, I will I'll let you know how it goes next week.

All right. Yay, Sweden. I found an extension for Google Chrome called One Tab. Apparently, it also works for Firefox if you're a philistine and still using that browser. Basically, it's super simple, super easy. If you have a shit ton of tabs open and you want to keep them open and go off and do something else and don't want this huge memory suck that you get from Chrome, you tap on one tab, it puts them all on the list, sucks down the memory reduction, go off and do other things.

You come back, you hit the button again, reestablishes all the tabs. Super simple, super easy, super effective. Yeah, that's good. I had one before that I forget what it was called. We were we covered it on the show years ago. It's like pause tab or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. If you didn't use a tab for five minutes, it would it would sleep the tab.

So it didn't take up any memory. There was a problem with it, though. And I remember using it, too, and uninstalling it because it would have problems bringing the page back out of sleep mode. Yeah, it would kind of like if you were logged in, it would try and re-inlog, re-log you in or something like that. It was it was janky. So but this one's working for you.

How long have you used it? About a week and a half now. OK. Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't use it often because I I tend to I tend to be pretty anal about my workspace and don't have multiple tabs open unless it's for the show. So, you know, my use case is not probably as often as as yours will be.

But I have yet to run into a problem. Yeah. My standard tab configuration is about 10 to 12 tabs open at any given time. But you might like this a lot. Then you might give it a go. Yeah, we'll see. I don't when I have all those tabs open, I'm working in them, you know, and if I'm not working in my close the browser.

So I don't know if this is for me. Let me know if they get picked up for season three and then I'll I'll install it. OK, I'll let you know. Thanks. We always hear about how we are carrying around more power in our pockets than the people had to send send a rocket to the moon. Sort of true.

Not necessarily. And some grumpy old geeks like us really went in depth on this. There's a whole YouTube video to watch. But the TLDR on this is, while, yes, the iPhone is certainly more powerful several thousand times over than the computers that they used to send people to the moon, they built those computers in a way that they would never, ever freeze or break down.

And your iPhone is a piece of pot crap that I'll always freeze and break down. OK, so they had they had hardened hardened computers and we just have this thing in our pocket. OK, yep. So that's the TLDR on it. But the video is definitely worth the watch link in the show notes. Yeah, that's cool.

I'm sick of hearing that. So I'll watch this. So I have some ammo. Well, next time somebody says it. Now you can be that super annoying guy that goes, well, no, not really. Yeah, no, it's daylight saving time. That guy. Oh, God, I hate that douchebag. I'm so tired of that guy.

And I complained about it on Twitter and somebody thought I was being that guy. And I'm like, no, no, no. You misinterpreted my tweet like has never been said before. So it was pretty good. You and the president. I was using air quotes. Air quotes.

Yeah, I actually went back and looked at it to make sure that there were quotes in there and there were quotes in his tweet, which pissed me off. No, but to be fair, he mentioned it more than once. I think he mentioned it in 12 different tweets and only one had air quotes. The first one had air quotes. The first one had quotes.

They weren't air quotes. Oh, so they're understood quotes moving throughout any other quotes on the timeline. Apparently they're persistent quotes. So anytime he says wiretapping in the future or tap with two Ps, then you have to imply quotes because at one point he said the constant of wiretap is quotes.

It's not a variable. It's a constant. So anytime he says wiretap, it comes with quotes built in. Well, now it makes sense. Yeah. So there you go. Now program that we we've seen this around the internet this week. It's called hush me. It is the Bain face mask that that masks your voice with an earpiece so you can talk amongst yourself in a in a, you know, a public place without being overheard.

I just wish this thing like just emitted chlorine gas when you put it on and just killed you in your spot. But the only reason I would ever purchase this is if I wanted to go full Geordi for for Halloween and I would put it over my eyes instead of my mouth. Oh, then you wouldn't be able to see, though.

Yeah, but I would look cool because it does look like his face visor or just go as Bain and or you can go as any of the Mortal Kombat characters who had that on their face. Was it Scorpion had it? Sub-Zero had it? Wasn't it? Was it Lizard?

Jesus. I can't remember Mortal Kombat two characters. This is bad. I'm getting too old. I don't know any of them. I'm obviously not in the same group of snarky people on the internet that you are because I had not seen this until you put it in the show notes. So I came into this as not knowing necessarily that you were putting it in there, ironically.

So I made a few bullet points as I was running through this, thinking this was a serious thing that you were considering, or at least it was a well, I mean, it is a real product, but nobody's seen it. So this could be one of the greatest, you know, pranks of all time, but it could be.

I mean, OK, so my first point was who the fuck is doing the voiceover for their videos? Oh, my God, because first off, it sounds like I couldn't. Tell if it was, you know, if they just typed in notepad and use one of the AI voices that you can get out of your thing, or if it was a real person, it was very difficult to tell.

I could just stilted, weird accent with weird phrasing and timing. So bizarre. I thought the same thing when I first heard. I'm like, is it computer generated? Are they doing computer generated voice that goes through the hush me to try and mask the voice because they've got different voices that you can become Darth Vader or R2D2 or whatever.

And here's the funny thing. I bet they didn't pay licensing fees to use those those names or voices. We don't know if any of this even works, because while they do provide the demo video, you don't actually see anything happen in the demo video. Well, you see a guy get up like he's, you know, got to pee like every three minutes for the first half of the video.

But there's nothing that shows the product in use, being used, doing what it's supposed to do at all. Just a guy getting up and getting down, getting up and getting down, getting up and getting nothing with the video with the product actually being used whatsoever. Thirdly, who are you douchebags that can't like go somewhere private to make a private call?

And finally, because apparently they were at what were they at? They were at the CES 2017. OK, so there's a little horribly designed rollover graphic in the middle of their horribly designed scrolling page where you click on CES 17, read more.

And I was like, well, maybe I'll actually see this in use here or somebody else talking about it. Nope. Here is the broken English. Our team is still under deep impression of visiting this great event. That sounds like somebody that's doing a press release for North Korea. Yes.

Our team is still under deep impression of great father Kim Jong-un. Yes. We are extremely happy that Hashmi made such a splash in the press. Some resources refer to our gadget as one of favorites. Some draw a comparison with such well-known brand as Bose. And some just call it weird.

Nevertheless, they are unanimous that Hashmi represents a serious and fresh idea and aims to cover a clear market need. There you go. So, yeah, I wonder if you can't breathe through that thing. So you get oxygen, you know, depletion and your brain just starts to shut down and you cannot speak out of English.

Yeah, I will say I'm impressed that there is no no Kickstarter or anything. They're just sponsored by this company called ArtKB.net, which if you go to their website is also a hoot. OK, I'll have to check that out. So, yeah, get Hashmi.

Yep. Media Candy. I'm a huge fan of the band Lush, one of the top shoegazing bands from the 90s. They had a reunion this year, which I'm sure you heard me talking about on this very show.

They got together. They actually recorded some new songs and released an EP and everything looked to be going quite rosy. I went to two of the shows. They were absolutely fantastic. And then, unfortunately, big ball of explosion and the band tragically fell apart again is basically announced that they played their final show ever and will not be getting back together.

Totally sad. Bummer. And because there was never really, you know, I need a bit of closure. And if you want some closure, Phil King, who is the bass player for the band, has put together a YouTube video called Lush, a far from home movie, which uses a bunch of clips that he has had together, you know, since the 90s, basically synced up to a lot of their songs and their music.

So if you want a bit of closure about Lush and we're totally bummed out that they split up and maybe you didn't get a chance to see them, 26 minutes and 49 seconds of abstract touring band video type goodness. I'm going to check this out because I did love Lush back in the day. My ex-girlfriend, you know, Missy, turned me on to them long, long ago.

And we had many a romantic night to Lush. It was beautiful. But I did not get to see them in concert when they came back around. So I will definitely go check this out. And yeah, yeah, it's just a nice little, you know, tribute with his. I love that sort of stuff where you get to see, you know, kind of the point of view of a band that's touring around with their little home movies and things like that.

So it's cool for that. If you're really interested, I think that most of their final show is all over YouTube and relatively good quality. I think it might even actually be released at some point. But then again, why bother releasing anything in this day and age? Because nobody's going to buy it. So you can Google around and see them playing live.

Oh, cool. I'll check that out. Yeah, I'll be good. Yeah, I'll get it on my Google whatever box. Yeah, you can get it on your goo boo bang box or whatever the hell that thing's called. Depeche Mode have put out their latest album, Spirit. It came out on St. Patrick's Day, Friday, the 17th as well.

A couple of things. I bitched about the pre-sale ticket fiasco and that stupid ass company that tried to gamify it. Yeah. Everybody hated the way the ticket sale bullshit was rolled out because, of course, it was a load of crap. I mean, it didn't matter how far up you were in the gamify queue.

You still didn't get great seats because they still didn't. You know, all the great seats are still being held for other promos and things like that. So that was a load of shit. The other big load of shit about that was one of the biggest ways to gamify yourself and get yourself way up in the queue for tickets was to pre-order the album, which would be delivered to you by the day of the album release.

I still have not gotten my album. Okay. So thanks a lot. You fuck nuts. Well done. And you apparently didn't get your tickets. Your I did not get great seats. They're fine. But considering I had gamified myself up into the top, I think I was position 182 for Toronto to not get great seats, not even on the floor is absolutely ridiculous.

That sucks. Yeah, it's a load of shit. Especially since I even helped you out. I retweeted or whatever. I know. I mean, I did quite good. I was way up in the queue for that. Anyways, so regardless of the rollout and the stupid companies that promise to do a bunch of crap to both fan and band and management, I'm sure it is falling through and probably not very happy because this is a high profile screw up on their part.

The movie, the movie, the album went on streaming networks. So you can listen to it on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you want. I've listened to it a handful of times now. You know, I'm a huge Depeche Mode fan. You know, it's not a great Depeche Mode album. But then again, I don't think there's been a great Depeche Mode album since Alan Wilder left the band a long time ago.

But Martin and Dave Gahan are, you know, good songwriters. And I would say this is a great protest album. If you're not happy with the current administration and the, you know, the march of populism across the globe, they aren't either.

And they pull no punches about it on this album. So it's kind of insane to think that the only or at least the highest profile protest album out right now about everything going on in the world is coming from some like almost 60 year old electronic music boffets. But it is.

Okay. I'll give it a listen. If it's on, if it's on, if it's on the Spotify, I'll give it a listen because I want to justify my, my $10 a month. It is on the Spotify and worth a listen. I mean, if nothing else, the production is super interesting. You know, I don't know. Again, it's not, it's not one of the best Depeche Mode albums out there, but certainly topical and, and made me angry when I was listening and riding around on my bike.

So, okay. And in relevant to your, your ex clients, I've actually been listening to the new Green Day album on Spotify. I have not listened to it. It's not bad. It's not bad at all. It, it, here's the thing. If you like Green Day, it's a Green Day album. Well, they're pretty much all the same.

Yeah. I was about to say for Green Day, it's, it's, you know, there's, there's, you know, 10, 10 degrees of variance in their albums. Yeah. Yeah. That make them good or bad, but they all certainly sound like Green Day. Yes, they do. And it's funny when I was, I was driving home one day and I, they, they were playing a new song on the radio from the album and I'm like, what, who's this fucking band that's trying to be Green Day?

And I'm like, oh, it's Green Day. Oh, it's, it's, it's Green Day trying to be Green Day. Yeah. It was funny. I, I, I mean, as soon as they said, and that was blah, blah, blah, by Green Day. I just, I like almost ran off the road. I was laughing so hard at myself. Yeah. Good stuff.

So in related news to the whole Depeche Mode presale load of crap that's going on, Ticket Master is also rolling out their own attempt to try to make a ticket buying better for fans, fight against ticket buying bots, et cetera, et cetera. This time using big data and, you know, using a combination of technology and customer personal data to take on the $8 billion problem of, of ticket buying bots and secondary ticket markets.

So they're rolling out something called the verified fan program that I'm certain will not work. Yeah. Didn't I, you know, when we first started talking to the Grime Life guys, Chris and Seth, we were talking about what they were trying to do with the verified fan stuff at Comic-Con in New York. Yeah. Because, you know, they were trying to get around, you know, people buying tons of tickets or bots like pre-buying tickets and then just selling them on the aftermarket.

Now, this whole thing with ticket buying bots, I wish that they could figure it out because I am tired of it. I am sick to death of it. It's, it's ridiculous. So if they can figure it out, good on them, but it's Ticket Master and they've never done anything good for the universe ever.

No, that's, that's the main problem. It's Ticket Master and Live Nation. They're not in the business of, of treating their, their fans well. That's not their business and they don't care that much. So they're not going to roll out a very good technology. I, and I had to use them recently to get tickets for an upcoming show and our tickets ended up, four tickets for this show ended up costing $720.

Yeah. That's about what I ended up paying for the four tickets for Depeche Mode too, which is outrageous. Out of, out of that $720, $120 were Ticket Master fees. It's just like, come on, you're, and you're not even printing anything. I had to print it my goddamn self.

I hate, I hate you Ticket Master. Die in a fire. But I, I, you know, I hate StubHub even more. Well, the secondary ticket market is a load of crap as well. I, and then that doesn't even address the real elephant in the room, which like I said, for Depeche Mode and for, sorry, any band that plays anything bigger.

If you're in a seated venue, the, the biggest problem in the room is the holds for, for basically, uh, VIPs, uh, and for credit card companies, American Express will throw, you know, $2 million at, at, uh, at Ticket Master and say, well, we want the best seats in the house.

That's how I got those tickets that I've spent so much money on. Yeah. Through American Express. Yep. So if you're a fan in a presale, you're still not going to get great tickets. It's, it's all a scam and it's all hidden. It needs to be transparent, but then that destroys the entire industry. Yeah. Whatever happened with that Pearl Jam dude trying to take down Ticket Master?

You know, it's funny. I was bringing that up because people were complaining, uh, talking about the Depeche Mode thing, especially my friends in the music industry in Toronto. And I was like, Hey, it was 23 years ago today that Pearl Jam started. Boy, things have certainly gotten better in the past 23 years, haven't they? So yeah, that was 23 years ago and nothing's happened.

So, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. Uh, speaking of a while ago, 2011, David Fincher released the girl with the dragon tattoo. I hadn't read all the books. I thought the movie was somewhat interesting. I had seen the, the real Swedish movies.

Those were good. And I thought those were good as well, but, uh, and I thought the girl with the dragon tattoo here with, with, uh, David Daniel Craig, sorry. And Rona Mari. Actually, I thought it did relatively well. So I was a bit surprised when nothing happened. Yeah, I was too. I was completely surprised and I've been waiting for the next episode, but I guess we're not going to get it.

Well, we'll, we are sort of, sort of, they're skipping ahead a bit. They're adapting the fourth installment in the series, which is the one not written by the original author, uh, because the original author died. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So there was a fourth book that was commissioned by the estate, um, which I have not read.

And they're going to make that without the original stars, uh, Ruta Mara or Daniel Craig, even though Ruta Mara has expressed interest in coming back to play the character. They've kind of said, no, we're going to do something that is both a sequel and a reboot of the franchise. That's so stupid. Yeah, it is stupid, but not as stupid as the other bit of news that hit this week.

Let's stick with a theme here. Let's go. Uh, yes. Warner brothers has decided that they are going to reboot the matrix. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. So instead of, whoa, this would be no, no. So, I mean, they have, this is the dumbest thing in the world anyways, because they could just make it a continuation of the story because the entire world reboots.

Yeah. But they're not going to do that. They're going to actually reboot it and just redo it with different people and a different writer and different. I'm sorry. The movie's not old enough to do that. No, it's not. And why does a really interesting take on that, uh, rebooting the matrix. Yeah.

That's not how nostalgia works. Yeah. This is not going to work. Warner brothers. I mean, if they went, if they got the original cast back together and then scrapped two and three and made two and three better, I'd be fine with it because two and three were just steaming piles of shit, but.

And the mechanism exists to do that because the entire story is the fact that the entire world gets rebooted through Neo every single time. Except Neo is 50 years old now, which would be a problem. Well, it just took him longer to get around to him this time. And besides, have you seen him? He doesn't look that much older.

He really doesn't. I saw John Wick too. And he looks the same. He just has a beard. He's like Dick Clark. That's what happens when you have money. Lots and lots of money. And let me tell you what you have when you have lots and lots of time and apparently have lots and lots of money, although God knows how.

If you were really into Breaking Bad and you happen to be a French filmmaker named either Lucas Stoll or Gaylor Morstan, you spent two years of your life putting together a Breaking Bad movie edit to two hours long, a two hour edit of the entire 62 episode show that basically makes a really dark and compelling, in theory, movie out of this.

I say in theory because copyright is a bitch. And even though they started to get all kinds of press for this, then AMC stepped in and said, hang on a second. You don't get to do a two hour mega cut of our property and place it all over the Internet. So sorry, this video does not exist anymore.

Anywhere. What the hell were they thinking? What were they thinking? Two years. They were thinking, let's do this. We'll show off our chops and surely someone will now hire us. Oh, my God. That's a two year resume that the dog just ate.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I'm sure they have their own copy of it. And obviously it's still out there on Sweden. But I don't quite understand where the time, the impetus or the effort came into this. Or how about you just spend two years doing something original? Yeah, seriously. Anyways, that's mind bogglingly stupid.

Yes, they should have been in Moron of the Week. Anyway, I did see Kong Skull Island this week. Loved it. Just look, I've been hearing good things about it, too. I mean, the worst thing I've heard is the plot isn't exactly the best, but it's a monster movie.

So, Jesus, what do you expect? It's a monster movie. But here's the difference between this monster movie and every other monster movie. The monster's in it. You know, that helps. Like, look at Cloverfield. The monster was in it for like 27 seconds. You look at the last Godzilla movie. You could barely see the monster in that one.

This one, Kong's in it like half the damn movie. Front and center. It's not like they're hiding him and there's tons of other monsters. It's great. I loved it. It's silly fun. It's silly fun. If anybody's out there going, yeah, but it's not like true to the original.

And I don't know if it's like, you know, oh, the wish for Ray and all this. Shut up. It's a monster movie. Chill. Have a beer. I mean, yeah. I mean, I guess my only complaint about this is what we were just complaining about with reboots and things like that. So soon.

Like, I feel like there's a Godzilla or a Kong movie coming out every two years along with a new Spider-Man. Why is everything so fast these days? Yeah. Yeah. I don't need it. I'm the Spider-Man thing. Good to hear it. It's good. Yeah. It is. It's fun. And I think it actually does help that my local AMC theater, I do get to go sit in a nice leather reclining chair.

And before I go in, I get a very large beer that I take into the theater and I drink while I watch the movie. So, you know, your mileage may vary. And harking back to the days of the old Internet, skip intro was a favorite on every site that had a stupid fucking flash like interstitial at the beginning before you got to your website.

Everybody had a skip intro button. Well, Netflix is finally adding one to the opening credits of some of their shows. Finally. Okay. Good. Except it only works on the web version. Right. Because I am 10 episodes into the new Iron Fist and they do this annoying thing.

Like the first couple episodes, you can skip the intro. Like, you know, like next, like go to the next episode. You'll skip the intro and go to it. Now what they've decided to do in the last half of the season is they'll do like six to eight minutes of show, then put the credits in.

Right. Then put the rest of the show. So you still have to skip the damn credits. And I have no idea what the fucking rationale behind that is. It's so stupid. It's like, okay, I got into the show. Now I have to sit there with my crappy ass Apple remote that works half the time and get past the stupid fucking credits.

It's so annoying. Yeah. And I dropped my Apple remote this week on my hardwood floor from about six inches and the glass broke. So now it's wrapped in duct tape. Thanks, Apple. Oh, nice. Yeah. Thanks, Apple. Yeah. That remote sucks. But Jason, I mean, if we expected things to make sense and if things did make sense, we wouldn't have a show.

Oh, that's true. This entire show is us complaining about things that are stupid and don't make sense. And speaking of stupid and don't make sense and Netflix, they've announced something else that's stupid and doesn't make any sense. Actually, it kind of does because people are stupid. So they're getting rid of their five star rating system because God forbid there'd be some nuance in the vast amount of different things that they actually carry and the ratings that we could give to them.

Nope. That's too complicated for people. So instead of having a five star rating system, which is not that difficult, folks, we will go to a thumbs up or thumbs down because they get more than 200 percent more ratings from people if they have up or down thumbs.

So they're jettisoning the years and years of data of five star ratings that they've had in millions upon millions of dollars they spent in all those contests to get people to use their data to make their reviews and recommendations more relevant.

This is the dumbest thing I've heard in, well, probably in about 17 minutes since we talked about something stupid before. It's pretty stupid and I'm not impressed by that at all. At all. But, you know, it could be hiding a dirty little secret, which is maybe that big data isn't all that useful.

No. Well, if you look at my recommendations recently, it's not. They haven't really hit the mark on just about anything. I mean, they they recommended the new Amy Schumer to me and I rated her a one star on the last one. So, yeah, there you go. Just nobody's nobody's home.

Nobody's home anymore. No, but we were talking about rage before. And speaking of rage, Danny Boyle was on the Nerdist podcast this week and it was a great interview and it was just fantastic. And the one takeaway from this is 28 Days Later is not a zombie movie.

It's an outbreak movie. Thank God that that's settled. Yeah. Yeah. Now I have to do is figure out GIF versus GIF. Have you seen T2 yet? No, I looked for things. So it's supposed to it said it came out March 17th, but I went to IMDb and then it said March 31st.

And then I went to my local theater to find tickets and it wasn't on the docket. So I don't know if it's out or not. Weird. It's out here. I guess it's a slow rollout. Yeah. OK. You can see it in 10 minutes if I want to. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, next Friday, I'm going to go if it's if it's finally out.

I will definitely be going next Friday before. OK. Yeah. I guess it's a staggered rollout. I just would have figured you would have seen it. So, yeah. Yeah. If it was available, I'm there for showing period. Cool. All right. Well, we'll hear about it next week. Moron of the week. The thing is, this story hit right after we finished recording last week.

And so it's now had seven and a half days of news cycle on it. But we'd be completely remiss if we did not put this in here because, A, it's moronic and, B, it's right up our alley. And how do we not? Kellyanne Conway, we could be watched by microwaves that turn into cameras.

Oh, yes. I, yeah, we don't need to talk about it because, again, news cycles. But Jesus Christ, people. Yeah. Kellyanne isn't, I'm not even going to say what I was going to say. Never mind. It is too unfamily friendly for even me to say.

I'm so glad the government has so much data of me making nachos. Okay. And the second Moron of the week, this comes from General David Perkins from a, he's an army general from a speech that he did. And apparently an ally of ours shot down a $200 drone with a $3 million Patriot missile.

Well, it worked. It worked. He did say that the drone did not have a chance against the Patriot missile, which for $3 million a shot, I'm glad. I'd be worried if it did. You know, I mean, to be fair, though, if it's our allies doing it and we're selling them the missiles, fire away, fuckers.

That's true. That's true. Fuck yeah, America. Friend of the show, Felicia Michaels, she's been a guest before, a very funny comedian, has written a very funny yet serious article that we should bring light to, and because she's our friend anyways.

Link in the show notes. Without Obamacare, my kids would be cleaning my shit, literally. And this gets into healthcare and the current debate that's going on, and a personal story about how if there wasn't for the Affordable Care Act and medical care that has been in existence for a little while now, she would basically be broke and destitute.

So, yeah, healthcare is important, people. Listen to it. Go read a personal story about it. And as she says at the end, if we aren't here to care for each other, then what the hell are we here for? Yeah. No. I definitely look at also my other friend, Shani Jardin, who's been on CNN and MSNBC talking about it.

Basically, she'd have been dead without it, too, because of her breast cancer. Yep, exactly. Her story is very widely publicized and very important, so we'll throw that in the show notes, too. Let's throw that link. Okay. Now, on to the world of meat. Let's talk about meat.

Yes. We've talked about the vat-grown meat before in the $180,000 hamburger and the $18,000 meatballs. Yes. Now we've got chicken. All right. Yes. They've figured out how to make chicken in a vat, as it were.

Okay. We're at about $9,000 a pound right now. That's, yeah. That's an expensive chicken. Yeah. Yeah. That's a Trumpian McNugget right there. Yes, it is. But they're on their way. They want to have it on the market by 2020 in an affordable way.

I am so on board with all of this. I love this idea. I'm down with it. I know everybody has to throw in the price per pound at the end of these stories right now because it is outrageous. It's just R&D. It's R&D. It's R&D, and that's why it's that crazy. I mean, the idea – I love meat.

I love steak. I love chicken. I am never going to be vegan, but I will be all over this vat-fed stuff because I don't – you know, I want ethical treatment of animals. I want all of that sort of stuff, which isn't really happening in our industries. And if we can get something that tastes the same from a vat with no actual animal being harmed in this process, I'm in.

Yeah, me too. I'm 1,000% behind it. You know, I'll be the first in line if – I'll be first to suck on the chicken tube. Yeah, send me some vat nuggets. Another thing that was going around this week – I put this in the show notes before it started going around, and unfortunately, most people may have seen this already, but it's a playlist on YouTube from the newly declassified nuclear test videos.

They are awesome to watch. They're awesome. They are – it's pretty mesmerizing. I would suggest just putting on the playlist, tossing it over to your TV for whatever your biggest screen is, and just letting it play out, and throw on Dr. Strangelove after that.

Well, I was going to say – Freak out, man. Before – I still have never seen Dr. Strangelove. I should probably get on that. You should probably get on that, Jason. Before I can't. Before I get new. Exactly. I was just going to say, actually, you should throw on some Ministry and KMFDM while you're watching these if you want to harken back to the old industrial club days because – That's true.

Yeah. The kind of thing that they used to show in those clubs. But, man, some of these are just unbelievably terrifying. The power – Yeah. And these are the baby nukes. The ones nowadays are 100 times more powerful. I shudder to think about what the new ones would do.

Geez. I really – you've got to go see – you need to watch Dr. Strangelove. You need to watch it today. Or as we call it, The War Room at Mar-a-Lago. Okay. I have it on my Mac Mini, so I'll just pop it on later. Yep. There you go. I need a break from all this fun stuff.

So I found this one from Brian Brushwood's tweets. Yeah, I saw that from him as well. Yeah, this is really funny. If you go to the O'Reilly Auto Parts store, their webpage, and in the parts search field type 121G, which is very clever, you get their listing for a flux capacitor from EB Enterprises.

And you want to know how lawyers ruin everything? Is it gone? No, but they had to include the line at the bottom, non-functional item displayed for entertainment purposes only. Oh, damn. So sad. But you can actually go buy one of these on ThinkGeek.

Yes. Well, she also probably has some sort of verbiage about it. It's non-functional and will not send you back in time. Oh, man. That's so sad. I hate people. So I found a video this week from a guy named Larry Enticer, and he's a guy who likes to ride his snowmobile.

He's apparently a snowmobile enthusiast. And the title of this is Larry Enticer Sends It. And it's him making a couple jumps on his snowmobile before his snowmobile is no longer a snowmobile. And the best part about it is he just keeps saying, I'm going to send it.

And then at the end of the video, he's like, I'm going to go have a beer and tomorrow I'm going to send it. And I just wanted to end bric-a-brac this week on a happy note. So I recommend going to watch this video. And in your own life, everyone out there listening, send it. Gave her another go.

Didn't go so well. Feedback loop. We have a new Patreon supporter who is a previous Patreon supporter who is now back, David Remley, who's also an Art of Charm alum and just picked up our Sennheiser headphones that we preach about on the show.

And in a surprising turn, didn't think they were all that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I like them. I like them, too. I have this is the first in the first middle of the road review that I've gotten from them so far. OK, well, you know, not not everything's going to win everybody over.

I just want to take a second and thank everybody that's been supporting us on Patreon. Actually, we've had certainly an uptick in people doing so. I don't know if it's because I actually just started to blast that out in the social media stuff and it reminds you guys throughout the week to help us out. Whatever it is, I don't care.

Thanks a lot. It really means a lot. It's it's the main reason we keep doing this shit. Absolutely. And we've got we actually we're working on something special for all of the Patreon supporters that have been supporting us and in the past. And we'll be sending that out to you guys on Patreon pretty soon because we'll need some information from you.

But yeah, we do have some stuff coming for you. So we really appreciate the support. Yep. Yep. Thanks a lot. So we got some we got a little note here on our website from Patch Holiday. It says, hey, Brian, I had mentioned Scalzi. In a recent review of the podcast, you said you were going to go back to his Old Man Man's War series.

Contrary to what Jason heard, the rest of the series was enjoyable, at least in my opinion. Also, I'm not sure if you've read Scalzi's Android Streams. The title is a literary tip of the hat to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, a.k.a. Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick. I'd recommend it if you enjoyed Red Shirts.

Thanks a lot for writing, Patch. I am going to do Old Man's War series. I don't know why I'm stumbling over that so bad. Oh, my God. It's not even like 10 o'clock there. Come on. I know. Like I said, I didn't have much sleep last night, thanks to the kid. But so I will be reading the second one on that next because I enjoyed it.

Yeah. Jason said that he didn't care much for it. No, no, no. I got a review from a fan of the show that told me about it. So I'll give it a go. You never know. That's probably next up. Actually, yeah, I'll probably read that before I then go back and read the Suarez. So I will.

I mean, so far, I'm liking Scalzi a lot. So I'm sure I will get to Android's Dream at some point. That's just not up on the list. I'm going to burn through this series first. But thanks for writing in and confirming. So we'll get there. Cool. Cool. Now, next up, Brian, you want to take us into what Patrick had to say?

Sure. This is a friend of the show, Patrick, who sent in an article. He says, good article on the challenges with voice interfaces. And this is at ben-evans.com. Voice in the uncanny valley of AI. And Patrick has picked out a choice quote here.

You could call it a graphical user interface, perhaps, and make the voice part optional, which is the choicest dig from the article. And then he says, party on. And this is a very long and thought out article that first, it kind of messes with you. Because first it goes, wow, this voice stuff is so great.

And then it gets into, actually, it's not. It's really way behind. It's going to take a long time to build anything that actually makes sense. And most of this stuff could be done more intuitively using a GUI. Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah. And that's kind of where we're at.

I mean, I think the problem is always, as it always is in the tech industry, is the hype. It's as soon as Echo started, as soon as Amazon started shifting units on that. And then, you know, that drove the entire tech journalism industry. And that's all we were hearing about.

If this slowly unrolled in the way that it should over time, and people, you know, 20 million people and hadn't bought this for themselves and their parents and were expecting it to work perfectly right now. I don't think anybody would be concerned. But the problem is we did. And now we've got to tear this down because it is kind of useless at the moment.

Especially if you're Scottish or Irish. I can't even imagine. Aye. Now, this next one, this is a cautionary tale for people who want to write to us who have never listened to the show. I was wondering why you put this in here. This comes from Taegua Pei. And he says, I really appreciate what you do with Grumpy Old Geeks.

Your podcast is riveting and insightful. And I appreciate the extensive coverage on how the internet is affecting our lives. Plausible so far. He may have listened. Yes. And at this point, we are going to redact parts of this.

Blank just launched a podcast, which is a really big deal. I think it's really cool and interesting how different businesses are starting to look into podcasting. I work with them and wanted to make sure I connected you guys. Blah Blah hosts their podcast. And I thought that she would make a really good guest for your podcast.

Now, this is where we stop and delete the rest of the email. I get these or we get these a couple of times a week. Now, when was the last time we had a guest on, Brian? It's been a long time and they certainly weren't shilling something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, Zane Lamprey was our last guest.

And I'm sorry, he was shilling something. He was shilling something. Yes. So we've had people like Tim Ferriss on. We've had Mike from the Goo Goo Dolls. We've had a lot of people on the show. And what we found out was that, yeah, it doesn't work for us because apparently you guys don't like it when we have guests on for the whole show.

Well, apparently Guape has not listened to the show because we have not had a guest on for several, several months and probably closing in on a year now. And we get these all the time. So I just think it's funny that when people write in and say, hey, we want to get this person as a guest on your show.

There are so many people out there spamming podcasts right now saying, hey, I've got a person that should be on your show. I just found it particularly funny because I know he didn't listen to the show because redacted, we've talked about redacted amount of times and crapped all crapped all over redacted and how they are bullshit redacted isn't redacted.

So yes, yes, there is no unlimited redacted plan out there. Let's just say that nudge, nudge, wink. Yeah. So I just wanted to throw that out there for you guys to see what we get every week. And this is nothing compared to my other my day job for the stuff that we get.

But it's funny when you start a podcast and a blog, you get people that want to want to get on your shit. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, if people out there wanted us to have guests, please write in and let us know and make some suggestions. I mean, there are some people out there that we could have on. John from the Goose has been saying he'd like to come on anytime we'd want him to.

We have Carl Wallinger from World Party who would be really interesting and he'd be happy to call in as well. It's just we haven't really seen the interest. So if you guys out there want us to have some guests, let us know. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a list of people who want to come on, too. And here's what I was thinking, Brian. We can actually throw this out to the audience and see what they think.

But what I was thinking was we can do a 15 minute segment at the end of the show with the guest interview. And that way it doesn't interfere with the show. But you get to still meet new people and hear their stories and do cool stuff like that. So if you're interested in that, tweet at me or Brian or the GOG Twitter feed and let us know or drop us an email or go to the website.

Any way you can get in touch with us is not Facebook. And we'll go from there. Yep. Just head over to GOG dot show slash support. That's that's one of the better ways to do it as well. So, yep. All right. Next up. Closing shout outs.

As of Saturday night, unfortunately, we have to say rest in peace to Chuck Berry, who passed away at the age of 90, basically the inventor of rock and roll. There's a great article that we have in our show notes by Bill Wyman of the, you know, you know, other famous rock and roll bands.

Who wrote about Chuck Berry. He originally wrote this piece back in December 20th, 2016, before he passed away. But it's doing the rounds after he passed because it was such a good write up on him. So. All right, Chuck Berry. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. That was a bummer. I mean, the I have to say the upside of Chuck Berry's passing is every radio station I turned to today was playing Chuck Berry.

How cool is that? It was great. It was great. He had so many great songs. And even just even thinking back to the the cover on in back to the future, you know? Yep. Yeah. He's so much good stuff. I he will be missed. Definitely. Chuck.

It's your cousin. Marvin. It's Marvin Berry. So and I got to throw a shout out to my friend Francis. We'll have a link to his Instagram account on the show notes. But Francis works at Warner Brothers and went to the John Wick 2 premiere and posted a picture of him holding a glass from the Continental Hotel.

Now, if you've seen John Wick or John Wick 2, you know that the Continental Hotel is where all the assassins stay. And it is a major part of the movie. Well, Francis this week sent me two rocks glasses from the Continental Hotel. So I am forever in his debt and they will hold a prime place in my pantry.

So if you want to come over, Brian, and have a a whiskey on the rocks from the Continental, you're always welcome. You're like the Trump administration of this podcast, just personally profiting left, right and center. Well, get on it, dude. This is this isn't like, you know, this isn't a zero sum game.

Get your free shit. I'm still holding out for the guy who has the two million dollars to send me the one. I mean, I'm in for the big haul. Look, man, I got six dollars worth of glasses. You keep holding out for that. But Francis has been a friend for a long time since he used to work at the Arclight back in the days.

The he was the events coordinator at the Arclight in Hollywood. And that's when we became friends. So he's a longtime friend. And I don't even think he listens to the show. So nice. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo. 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 on over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 201.

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