Artwork for 202: Big Bang Weary

202: Big Bang Weary

2 h 1 min

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Summary

In this episode of Grumpy Old Geeks, the hosts discuss gig work, automation, Uber, online advertising, privacy, and device security. They also talk about the right to repair tractors, books and entertainment, consumer technology, and listener feedback.

  • Jason DeFillippo discusses his forthcoming podcasting course.
  • The hosts compare predictions about automation’s effect on jobs and discuss conditions for gig workers.
  • They cover an Uber self-driving car crash, executive departures, and a UK tax challenge.
  • They discuss advertisers leaving YouTube, delivery drones, and Canadian drone rules.
  • Guest Dave Bittner discusses an early Apple II virus and disclosures about alleged CIA tools for Apple devices.
  • The hosts consider proposed changes to ISP privacy rules and farmers’ access to John Deere tractor software.
  • They discuss books, games, Kodi devices, Apple’s Clips app, and kitchen appliances.
  • They review The Expanse and other entertainment, then read listener reviews and messages.

Key moments

  1. Podcasting Course and Follow-Ups

    The hosts discuss Jason DeFillippo’s course, a seizure-inducing GIF, and The Big Bang Theory.

  2. Gig Work and Automation

    The hosts discuss gig-worker conditions and differing predictions about automation’s effect on jobs.

  3. Uber’s Troubles

    They discuss a self-driving car crash, executive departures, an outing involving managers, and a UK tax challenge.

  4. Advertising, Drones, and Online Services

    The conversation covers YouTube advertising, delivery technology, drone rules, privacy, AI, robocalls, and subscriptions.

  5. Subscriptions and Virgin America

    The hosts discuss a possible Twitter subscription and the planned retirement of the Virgin America brand.

  6. Viruses and Device Security

    Guest Dave Bittner joins a discussion of an early computer virus, leaked CIA tools, and airline device restrictions.

  7. ISP Privacy and Tractor Repairs

    The hosts discuss proposed changes to ISP privacy rules and farmers’ access to software needed to repair John Deere tractors.

  8. Books, Games, and Viewing Devices

    They discuss reading, games, Kodi devices, cable access, displays, and Apple’s Clips app.

  9. Apps and Kitchen Technology

    The hosts discuss Clips, iTunes, emoji, an Instant Pot, and a food processor.

  10. Film, Television, and Music

    They discuss The Expanse, films and trailers, comedy specials, and upcoming albums.

  11. Flash, Hoverboards, and Walking

    The hosts discuss FedEx’s Flash requirement, a proposed hoverboard, Sesame Street, and daily step counts.

  12. Listener Feedback

    They read reviews and messages about books, guests, The Matrix, and earlier political commentary.

Full transcript

400 lines · machine transcribed
  1. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

  2. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How do you do, Brian? I'm tired, Jason. I'm tired too, Brian. What you tired about? I went down to see the folks who live, uh, ostensibly what should be about a 35-minute drive away from where I currently live, but it being L.A., it took an hour and a half both ways. I'm exhausted.

  3. Aw, poor babies. Well, that was the problem, the baby in the backseat. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's right. It does bring a whole new dimension to log drives. Oh, yeah. It's like your own private hell. Pretty much, yes. Yeah, I got about two hours of sleep last night because I was, I've been working on this podcasting class that I'm putting out and, uh...

  4. Oh, do tell. Yeah, it's called Pro Podcasting School. And I got one of those new fancy domains. I got pro-podcasting.school. Go figure. I see. And it's launching soon, apparently. It is. It's a fancy scroller site with nothing on it yet. Nothing on it because everything's behind the, it's in the curriculum that I'm working on right now.

  5. But I've been working my ass off on it, and last night, all I could just think about was, like, I got in bed, and I'm trying to fall asleep, and all I can think about are things that I need to add to it. So I have my pen and paper next to the bed, so I have to turn the light on, roll over, write it down, turn the light off, go back, try and fall asleep.

  6. Oh, new idea. Roll over, write it down, come back. It's like... Alexa, take a note. Yeah, well, the Alexa's in the kitchen, so I'd have to yell, and that might wake up the dog. See, you should have kept your little dot. You would have had a use for it now. Yeah, I prefer pen and paper on this kind of thing. But yeah, it's coming soon, probably about three weeks, hopefully.

  7. I've been saying three weeks for four weeks, so I don't know. Hopefully soon, because I need to get this thing out the door. Yeah, it'd be good if you made a little cash off this. Yeah, yeah, and honestly, I've seen so many of these schools out there that are just rip-offs. People who are weekend warriors or just have a medium-level podcast, and they just suck people in.

  8. And some of these classes cost $1,200. And I know a guy that's made $2 million doing a podcasting class. I believe one of our very earliest episodes was you taking the entire hour and a half or whatever we did back in the day and crapping on these online schools.

  9. Yeah, yeah, here's the deal, though. I'm in a position where I really need to make some money. But I get so many inbound requests now to teach people how to do a podcast, and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to make it easy on everybody. Well, it's not easy on me because I've got to make the thing, but I'm just going to do the class.

  10. It's actually going to cost less than if you hired me to do it because it'll cost you probably close to $1,000 if you want me to start you from zero to podcast. This is going to be a third of that, so people can come in. Trust me, they're going to spend more on their software and their microphones than they are on the knowledge on how to do this stuff.

  11. Knowledge is free these days, Jason. No, it's not. You're going to fucking pay me for it. Well, that's what people think it is. Yeah, fuck you, pay me. I agree. So let's do a little follow-up last week. We talked about the GIF that caused the seizure. You mean the GIF? No, it's the GIF.

  12. I know. So now we actually have a classification for what they're calling it aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. So a GIF is now a deadly weapon. You know what? If that is the case, I should be able to go back at least about 10 years ago when everybody had to forward on every horrible thing that they saw on the Internet.

  13. I've seen people pooping GIFs that I did not intend to see because I've accidentally... All of these are deadly weapons. And some of you fuckers, all you friends of mine, you're in trouble now. No, GeoCities should be classified as a genocidal weapon. Myspace. Myspace, yeah. Yeah.

  14. Oh, my God. That's ridiculous. Oh, the fun. Yes, it is. It is fairly ridiculous. But Andy got a hate crime slapped on top of it. So I can go down with the hate crime for an image, but I'm not going to call an image a deadly weapon. That's absolutely ridiculous. Yeah.

  15. And fortunately, a friend of the show, Nathan Reitzma, however you want to pronounce it. It's been a long day. I've had some Jameson. Fuck it. He said this. How to really pronounce GIF.com. And it turns out, yes, it is GIF. We've been having this argument for 20 years.

  16. Well, you and I haven't, because you and I have always been in the GIF camp. Because, Brian, we're always right. I know, but nobody believes us. Well, if you want scientific proof on why it's pronounced GIF, go to the domain. It'll be in the show notes. But the person that originally made it says it's GIF.

  17. Well, he's an asshole. GIF is goddamn peanut butter. Exactly. And it's spelled with a J. That's right. So you talked about the Big Bang Theory. We had a very humorous bit on it last week. Sadly for you, it's been renewed for another two years.

  18. Not sadly for me. I've already I've deleted it for my DVR recordings. It shall no longer trouble my existence anymore. It's sad for everybody that actually will continue to watch this piece of crap to see what the hell is going to happen. We just don't need this in the zeitgeist. I think this is bad for for morale, for the for the human human race.

  19. You know, it gives geeks a bad name. It does. It really does. Yeah. It's just it's a it's a horribly done show now. It used to be really, really funny. The British, like many things, have have things right all around. They don't their sitcoms last three to four years tops.

  20. And then they caught they caught they caught them. That's it. Well, you know, here's the deal. This is this is basically a story of the Internet and technology in general. When it started, it was really smart. It was really smart and it was really good. Then the unwashed masses showed up and then they had to dumb it down for every Joe, Dick and dumbass.

  21. And now we have the Internet as it as it stands. And it's the same thing that probably happened with this show. So they had to keep dumbing it down and dumbing it down because their ratings got bigger and bigger and bigger. And the IQ, like the gross IQ of the audience got smaller and smaller and smaller.

  22. So they went went for the base. I thought when you said this show, you meant us. No, no, no. I'm well, we do that, too, sometimes. But we try not to. Yeah. Well, the only plus that comes out of this and it's not really even a plus is is that there's going to be some sort of, you know, basically salary evening is occurring so that the women on the show who actually are carrying the show at this point will be making as much as men.

  23. The caveat to that being, of course, is that the men took a pay cut to make that happen. Well, here's the deal. No. Well, they're not they're not getting as much as the men. They're getting half as much. But they're they're bit players. They're not the core four or five. So it's my Mbalik and Melissa Melissa Rouch, who I would argue.

  24. I mean, they're not bit players anymore. They are as much in the main cast as the others are. So that's a load of shit. They could be argued, though, that they weren't on the cast from the beginning, so they did not contribute as much to the longevity of the show. That's the only thing. That's what their lawyers are going to, you know, they're going to say.

  25. But, you know, kudos to the main cast for dropping their, you know, I'm sorry. They went from a million dollars an episode to nine hundred thousand dollars an episode. Ouch. That hundred thousand per episode is really going to hurt. I know. Nine hundred thousand dollars for a week's worth of work. Damn, that's tough.

  26. That's that's some tough not even being funny. Yeah. Yeah. If they were good, I could, you know, stand by it. But, you know, I'll let it be fair. They're not funny. Again, not their fault. They're not the writers. They don't even do that. Yeah. So, yeah. OK, well, you know what, guys, for them.

  27. Good for you. Take the money and run. Fuck it. Yep. What the hell? You're going to need it soon. And at least you're not an actual nerd. That's what you have to look forward to being on the cast of The Big Bang Theory, because if you were in a tech company nowadays, I got this great article or it's a it's I'm sorry.

  28. It's an infographic of the average employee age at tech companies. This comes from Mark Feidelman on Twitter. I don't know who he is, but I just this was a retweet that I picked up on the only place that we could even remotely have a chance of getting a job.

  29. Brian is IBM, because the average age at IBM is 38. Wow. Everybody else tops out at like Facebook, 28 at the lowest and Microsoft at 33 at the highest. Everybody else is in that range in the middle. Wow. Yeah. We're old. Yeah. That's that's why we're doing this show.

  30. Well, we're doing this show. But yes, I'm not entirely sure what else I would be doing. I you would think I'd be able to go work for one of these companies, but looking at my age, probably not. No. And trust me, there's an episode. I think it's episode eight of Grumpy Old Geeks, because I was going back and listening to where I talked about my interview process trying to get a tech job.

  31. And it's impossible for people of a certain age. We are. We are men of a certain age. Yes, we are. Well, speaking of going back and listening to our shows, have you solved our dilemma yet? No, I haven't, because I stopped as I was listening to them. I was thinking, I'm like, man, I should really be sprucing up the show notes while I'm doing this, because it seems like a waste to go through.

  32. And because we've gotten so many requests from people to like, you know, for the older show notes, for all the book reviews and stuff, it seems like I should really be able to like, you know, if I'm listening to them, I can just do it and spruce up the notes. I didn't have time this week to do that because I've been working. We had a big thing with Shaq on my day show, and that took up most of the week.

  33. So I am going to be going back soon, though, as soon as I get this course out the door and fixing all the old show notes and putting in all of our old reviews, because we did a ton of good reviews back in the day. Of really good stuff, and I want to make sure that those are, you know, there for posterity, as it were.

  34. Yeah, definitely, and make sure that you shoot that over my way so I can add things to our store. Yes, yeah, absolutely, and go check out our store on the site. Yes, yes, gog.show slash store. Last week we talked about the Fiverr advertisement with the flustered woman who was probably going to die of an aneurysm pretty soon because she was working for $5 a gig.

  35. I don't know how laudable that was, and you should go be on Fiverr if you're that stupid. I would just like to point out that the New Yorker magazine has an article called The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death, and it uses that photo of that woman as the main piece. I would just like to say that all of our ideas over the past four years have now gone mainstream.

  36. So, Brian, it's time for me and you to come up with some new talking points. I'll come up with new talking points as soon as people start to admit we were right. Yeah, I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Yeah, it's not going to happen. It's starting to. Along with those lines, I have an entire host of other links that agree with everything that we've been saying.

  37. We'll just touch on them really quickly instead of going through them in detail because this is nothing new. If you've been listening to the show, we've been screaming about it a long time, starting with a $4.6 million class action lawsuit that Instacart has lost and has to pay to its workers now because they're doing the same bullshit that everybody else is doing by basically saying, you know, you're not actually employees, you're contractors.

  38. Oh, yes. So, you know, instead of actually just like the previous one, which I believe was with Lyft that we talked about last week, the Instacart is dodging the bullet and does not actually have to treat them as employees. They just do one big payout and that's that. Yeah. Let's see. People need to fight.

  39. God damn it. Fight. I know. This is the real battle. Fight for your right to insurance before they take it away. Yeah. Well, that's not in the purview of the show, but we have some good news in that area this week, didn't we? So, yeah, that went well, didn't it? Anyways, over at Salon, the new American economy is literally putting us in mortal danger, which talks about overall, it's a really good article.

  40. But the the takeaway paragraph here is at the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. Bravo.

  41. Bravo. Yes. I wasn't I wasn't I wasn't rubbing one out. I was actually applauding. I know that I know that my Foley can sound like that sometimes does take about the same amount of time. Yes, that's true. Hey, man, I live alone and I'm single. So don't expect much from me, ladies.

  42. And then at an evening event Friday morning, Treasury Secretary Steve, I'm not entirely sure the correct way to pronounce pronounce his name. I just like to say Munchkin. Munchkin. That's what it looks like. And he obviously has the brain of one.

  43. Steve Munchkin said that job loss to technical advancements in AI and robotics isn't even on our radar screen and that he imagines these changes will not affect our economy for more than like five fifty to a hundred more years away. OK, well, here's the deal.

  44. What? Maybe he should get some LIDAR from Uber who stole it from Google because radar is apparently flawed. Well, outside of the fact that that jobs are being lost as we speak already now. So and every single article that we've ever read and talked about on the show says it's it's happening now.

  45. It will reach. Well, let me get to it because I have follow ups on that. My favorite response to this was Farad Manjoo, who is a tech writer, used to be at I believe Salon and now is over at I believe the New Yorker could be Washington Post. I'm not entirely sure. He replied to this article, maybe get a radar screen that has AI on it.

  46. That might help. Nice. Pretty funny. Immediately followed with a story over at Recode, this is a new study from Price Waterhouse Cooper estimates that 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be lost to automated automation within the next 15 years.

  47. So obviously he did not see this study because 15 years is significantly less than 50 to 100. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fun times. And then finally, there's a fun little site called Zero Hedge. You kind of have to take this with a bit of a grain of salt because the name of the author of the article is Tyler Durden.

  48. Okay. And the site's tagline itself is on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. So you're not expecting happy news over here. But to be fair, he does back everything up with statistics and reports and links, etc. That basically says the retail apocalypse has officially descended upon America.

  49. All retail is dead and dying. And so that means a lot more jobs going bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Wave them. Wave them. Goodbye. And so that's the happy follow-up for this week. Our typical normal happy intro and follow-up.

  50. Yes. All right. Let's move on to the news. Oh, Uber. You're in trouble. In the news.

  51. Oh, poor Uber. Uber, Uber, Uber. Oh, there's so much good Uber. In fact, as we were about getting ready to record, Jason sent me a note saying he was all excited because he found a new Uber link he had to put in. And then I one-upped him with an even better one. Yeah, yeah. You definitely got a plus one on my plus one of the plus ones.

  52. Okay, Uber. You're the next probably 10 minutes. Here we go. Let's try and keep it to five. I think we could run through this pretty quick. Well, an Uber car was in an accident in Arizona and actually rolled one of their Volvos. And, you know, Volvos are very safe. And it turns out that the cops say that it was not the Uber's fault.

  53. The other guy cut him off and flipped him over. Okay. And there was no passenger at the time. No major injuries. But if you look at the photos of it, it looks pretty gnarly. Was this a self-driver? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah, that was not mentioned. It was a self-driver with a safety driver.

  54. It says Uber driverless car in the title, so. Oh, there we are. Okay. My bad. Can't really say it any bigger than that. But, yeah. The interesting thing about this is that the investigation is still ongoing. But the other person was at fault from what the cops say.

  55. Okay. And in follow-up to that, I found a nice article on Wired that says, Uber self-driving crash proves we need self-driving cars because we are basically in the age of fucking cell phones and unbridled narcissism where everybody's doing everything but looking at the road.

  56. Three episodes, one through this one, me complaining about trying to walk down the street in Santa Monica where nobody can be bothered to fucking look up. Yeah. Exactly. You know, that's what turned me around to self-driving cars in the first place is I was sick of almost getting killed by people driving. Yeah.

  57. So, you know, the thing about this is it's like, yeah, yeah, we need them faster and faster. But I think that they missed the point because, yeah, they're saying that we need self-driving cars now because they're safer, blah, blah, blah. But this actually comes back to your point, which I'm going to concede from a long time ago.

  58. You're like, it's all or nothing. Because if there's still assholes on the road, it's going to cause more problems. But, you know, it's glass half full, glass half empty. I'm happy to hear you concede yet again to one of my longstanding ideas, that one along with the security, which you will eventually uncover.

  59. Yeah, I think it's more of a problem to have a dual system out there, to have self-driving cars and then regular people out there driving on the road. I think it has to be all or nothing. And that's what we're seeing. There's going to be a happy medium. That's what I'm saying, though. You know, I think dense urban centers, all self-driving, you get out on, you know, the main highways connecting major cities, let people take the wheel.

  60. Yeah, I mean, it comes back to, just think about how pissy people get when you talk about their guns. Wait till you get to their cars. Jesus, fuck. Yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah, we have a very big gun in car culture here, so. But, I mean, it's again, it's one of the other things that we talked about.

  61. I think this was two or three episodes ago was was the vast disparity in the reporting on driverless cars. Some of these some of these articles say, look how close we are to self-driving cars. Other articles say this is 20, 30 years off before we're these things are going to be viable.

  62. Which is it? The latter. We're definitely leading towards the latter. Yeah, I think so, too. And the next one that I did was the one that I put in, it's called Inside Uber Self-Driving Car Mess. This comes from Recode. It's a super long read going over all their troubles, especially with auto and some of the stuff that I didn't know about restructuring of the leadership and all the big names in in the space.

  63. Like all their engineers who are quitting and starting their own shops, which to me makes a shit ton of sense because these guys are in such demand. Well, it's also it's Uber who have made no no secret of the fact that they want to screw everybody, every one of their employees over.

  64. Yeah, but these are the engineers who are doing the screwing. So they should be in the in the canary seat. You know, they're not there. They're just they're still paid people. Sure, they're paid more than the drivers are, but they don't have a piece of the pie. So they're quitting to go start up to make their own damn pies. Right. And that's what I'm saying.

  65. That's very smart, because right now the acquisitions for these companies like auto are just, you know, it's these guys are just going to be the next round of billionaires. If they can play their cards right, because they're going to take take stock in all these companies and they're the ones building the tech.

  66. And so it makes sense. It's like, OK, I get paid one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at Uber right now. But me and my three buddies who are building like the most sensitive systems for this car that they want to put out. Well, why don't we just say, fuck you? We're going to go over here. We're going to start our own shop. You come back in a couple of months or a year or so and acquire us once we've gotten our patents and we'll move on from there.

  67. And then we at least have a giant nut to move forward with. I think it's I think it's smart on their part. You know, screw Uber. Who cares? Yeah. Take their money. Of all the companies that are out there right now, the company that probably has the least amount of loyalty to their employees is admitted self-admittedly Uber.

  68. So screw them. Well, yeah. And then we get on to the president, Jeff Jones. We just missed this one last week. So this is a little bit old news. So we'll make it quick. Yeah. The president of Uber quit because he didn't really understand how bad it was in there.

  69. And it's like this. I didn't sign up for this. These guys are ridiculous. So, but, you know, Ariana's over there now. She's going to fix it all. Oh, yeah. Darling. Darling. I fix it. Darling. You cannot be mean to women, darling. No, no, no. You don't stick it in the hole until she says yes.

  70. Oh, that's it. That's it. That's my Ariana Huffington. Yes. Okay. And Vice President Brian McClendon also left. He was Vice President of Mapping. This one caught my eye because he was at Google for 10 years in the mapping department, left, went to Uber and has been there for two years.

  71. But with the lawsuit that's coming from the guy who left auto and came over to Uber and there's claiming that he took the LIDAR specs. So maybe this is kind of a preemptive move on Uber's part to say, oh, he doesn't work here anymore.

  72. We don't have anything special. We're leaving. You know, it's all good. Just to kind of put any IP theft to bed, like I bet anybody that ever worked at Google and went to Uber is probably getting their walk-in papers right now. They say this guy's going to be, you know, an advisor and all that stuff, and he's moving back to Kansas so he can explore politics.

  73. I wonder who might be funding his first campaign. Yeah. I'm just wondering. I wonder too. So now, now let's talk about the best story of the week, which I give you full credit for, because this is awesome. This is breaking. I did not.

  74. I mean, Mashable isn't the most amazing source, but I picked this one. It's everywhere. It's on the Wall Street Journal. It's on New York Times. It's everywhere. I picked Mashable because I really enjoy the way that this was laid out and written by Emma Hinchcliffe over there. Talking about people from Uber that probably should have quit.

  75. Well, this happened on Friday night. Besides Kalanick? Yeah. Kalanick, CEO and Senior Vice President of Business, Emile Michael, were in Seoul, Korea, where they took some Uber staffers out to, and now I'm just going to read from her because I like the way she wrote this.

  76. Wait for it. An escort karaoke bar in Seoul, where male Uber managers picked women working at the bar out of a lineup. Again, where Uber managers picked women working at the bar out of a lineup. Women working at the escort karaoke bar out of a lineup.

  77. Oh yes, this is real. A female Uber manager who was part of the business trip months later reported the incident to Uber's human resources department, but it wouldn't be a story about Uber unless there was another Uber-sized screw-up within it. And oh yeah, there's definitely one of those too, because Michael tried to get Kalanick's then-girlfriend, violinist Gabby Holdsworth, to lie about it.

  78. One more time, tried to get her to lie about it. Ah, see, I gotta read Mashable more often. This is good. Ah, it's good. It's some good work there. So thank you for that story, and good luck with that, Ariana. Ah, yeah. Because when the CEO of the company is taking people out to a fucking escort bar, you've got some problems.

  79. That reads like some Deadwood shit right there. Doesn't it? It really does. Cocksucker. Yeah. Switching! Now, this next one, God, we do have a lot of Uber in here. I'm sorry, people. I'm sorry. But this is just, I mean, God, this is on a platter. I wish Jon Stewart was still around so he can do it better justice than we would.

  80. This comes from Quartz. A single ride in London could wind up costing Uber hundreds of millions of dollars. Londoner Joy, or was it Jolion Magoom? This is a tough one, especially today. Jameson, yeah.

  81. Took an Uber this morning. For the service being driven from his office to Uber's UK headquarters, he paid $12. Had the driver known what the accomplished tax lawyer was about to do next, he would not have accepted the ride request. So, this guy was taking a letter to hand deliver to Uber's lawyers, basically, at the headquarters, suing them for 68, oh, wait, no, he's suing the $68 billion startup, sorry, my bad.

  82. Yeah. But he's suing them for a shit ton of money because they're not paying VAT, which is value added tax, which basically is 20% of just about everything that you do in England. Yes. The case hinges on a statutory entitlement that every UK citizen has to ask for a VAT receipt.

  83. The receipt is proof that the supplier of said goods or services is paying a certain amount to the UK government. Right. Well, at the heart of the matter is how to define a service. Uber says that its drivers are quote unquote self-employed, which means any VAT owed should be paid by the drivers.

  84. Right. Fuck you, Uber. Yeah. Well, that's what Uber does. Yeah. They're trying to weasel out of it on another loophole. And since you have to make $100,000 to pay VAT, they're thinking that they can have their drivers, which are never going to make $100,000, even though we've read how many articles to the contrary.

  85. Right. Way to go, guys. Well, and now let me tell you why none of that matters at all. OK. Because nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares about how bad Uber is. Nobody cares about how badly they treat the employees. Nobody cares about how they try to screw over local governments.

  86. Nobody cares how they try to screw over national governments. Nobody cares that the CEO takes their employees to hooker bars because they've had their best week ever in the U.S. Nice. Everybody is still fucking using them. Yeah. You know, there you go.

  87. So it does. Again, it does not matter what you do anymore. It really doesn't. The only thing that's going to change this is if you have a one in three chance of getting murdered in the back of an Uber. That's the only thing that's ever going to change people's minds. Apparently, those are the only stories we will bring up about Uber anymore to try to drive at home.

  88. Look, I deleted Uber. I haven't brought it back. I put my money where my mouth is. Screw Uber. The hell with them. And Alphabet has nabbed a new VP as it gears up for government battles over self-driving car regulations. All right. Yeah. We have a new lobbyist for Alphabet.

  89. Takedra Mawakana. She's a new vice president of public policy and government affairs. All right. She's got like mad cred. She comes from eBay, Yahoo. She was Yahoo's deputy general counsel. And before that, about a dozen years at AOL.

  90. But she's coming in to be their basically government liaison. All right. Well, we're going to need them. There's no doubt about that. What we need now is an anti-liaison because, you know, you can't pass one bill without getting rid of two. Oh, that's right.

  91. Don't forget. Yes. I forgot about that. That's the smartest fucking system I've ever thought of in the world. We have too much stuff. We have too much regulation. We can't have a new one unless we get rid of two. Well, we're killing the EPA. We're killing public broadcasting.

  92. We're killing the national park. So we got a bunch right there. So they should have some caches stored up for getting some new stuff through. Awesome. God knows, you know, the FAA needs a couple extra for their drone programs. But you got to get rid of some before you can add some new ones.

  93. Way to go. That's right. Way to go, Pisshead. And everybody is jumping ship from YouTube advertising right now. Right. This is a big one. A bunch of people in the UK, some of the big banks, AT&T has dropped their support.

  94. That's a big one. You got to know that's got to sting and get some people, get some fires lit under somebody's ass. But the big problem is YouTube's ads are algorithmically placed. And we're seeing ads for all of these big companies showing up on hate videos and terrorist recruiting videos that YouTube is allowing anyway.

  95. So, yeah. ISIS brought to you by AT&T. It is. So this has been a big one this week. We've got a couple of links in the show notes for this. Definitely. This has been a problem with a lot of these companies since the get go.

  96. And I'm not even saying Web 2.0 companies. I'm saying Web 1.0 companies to try to position yourself as as a non involved third party who only provides a platform is cute, but it's not realistic. And that's what they're all trying to do. Yahoo wants to or YouTube wants to throw.

  97. Well, Yahoo, all of these places they want to any place that hosts third party created content and makes bucks off of it wants to throw their hands up in the air and say, not not our job, not we're not responsible. All we do is provide the means of dissemination and it's up to you people what you put up there.

  98. That's a load of crap. You're making money off of it. You got to start policing this stuff. You're a network. The problem with this is, yeah, you know, ISPs have safe harbor regulations. These guys are content companies, so they do need to police it if they're because they you know, if you're this is one of the things I learned when we were doing Star Trek.

  99. If you like when we allowed live chat and if somebody did hate speech, we were liable for that because if we allowed that to happen on our website, then we are liable for it. We did not have safe harbor provisions back then, but this is the same thing because we were a commercial entity.

  100. We were making money off of that website. So YouTube is making money off that website. So, you know, safe harbor should be pulled from that saying that, no, they're not just providing content for people because they do have terms and conditions that say you cannot put these types of videos up here.

  101. So if it gets past their filters and then they run ads against it, they should be fucking liable for it. Yeah, they are. But it doesn't you know, again, it doesn't matter. All that matters is money. So the fact that actually advertisers are now starting to pull is the only thing that's going to actually change stuff. So hopefully it does now. Yeah. Go to the wallet.

  102. Always go to the wallet. I hate DoorDash. I've had an episode where I complained exclusively about DoorDash. In my upside down enchiladas that came twice. Now they're going to have robots out there delivering. How does one tell if an enchilada is actually upside down?

  103. Because on the delivery box, which is a black plastic on the bottom and a clear plastic on top. If all the cheese is on the clear plastic, your enchilada has gone upside down somewhere in transit. If you have to scrape half your food off the top lid to get it to the bottom, that means it has gone, you know, ass over tea kettle at some point.

  104. So DoorDash is now going to be running tests of a six wheeled delivery robot fleet. OK. I'd be fine with this if my enchilada made it in one piece, because God knows the humans that they hire at DoorDash are useless, utterly useless.

  105. Yeah, this is occurring in Redwood City, California, which is relatively low population. I'd love to see this try to happen in Venice or Santa Monica. Oh, my God. You'd have people out there putting their cats on top of the DoorDash robots and taking videos of the cats riding on top of the robots.

  106. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, no food would ever arrive. There'd be like a note in there saying, thanks. That was delicious. Everybody hates humans. Everybody hates humans. Understandable. Walmart is going to start deploying in-store drones. Mm hmm. Now, are they referring to the 85 year old employees that greet you at the front?

  107. Well, they've already got those. Oh, OK. No, the new patent describes dispatching an airborne drone to an item located within a retail shopping facility, securing that item of inventory to the airborne drone, and then directing the airborne drone to carry the item of inventory to a delivery area located within the retail shopping area.

  108. What could possibly go wrong? Well, what they're trying to do is they're going to they're trying to stop pickers. You know, if you work in a warehouse, you're called a picker. So you get your invoice and then you have to go pick it and then you put on the conveyor belt and then it goes out to the customer. What they're trying to do is in the inventory area, not in the main customer area, not in the store, but in the back warehouse, have drones go and pick things up and bring them back and lay them down.

  109. They're going to have to really beef up the soundproofing because I don't people people like come up. They come up with these thoughts and they don't realize how loud drones are. No, it would sound like a like a beehive waiting to, you know, attack the customers. Well, Canada, much like the Europe, has a much better grasp on these things, and they've released a whole new set of regulations for drones.

  110. These apply to non-commercial drone operators flying aircraft weighing between about half a pound up to seventy seven pounds. Violators can face up to three thousand dollar Canadian fine, which roughly is about twenty two fifty at the moment. U.S. Oh, tough one there.

  111. You know, for a lot of people, that's that's a significant amount of money, but a whole new set of regulations. They're all in the article. We won't go through it, but at least they're trying to do something about it and don't have to wait to get rid of two other rules before putting in a rule that would make sense. Now, no, no, just to just to cover this twenty two fifty.

  112. Are you saying twenty two hundred and fifty or twenty two dollars or twenty two dollars and fifty cents? Twenty two hundred and fifty dollars. OK, OK. Now, now that makes more sense because it was twenty two dollars and fifty cents. I'm like they just have a thousand dollar drone, so they're not hurting for cash. No, no. The fines are basically almost 60 percent higher than they are in the U.S.

  113. And they're all the rules are a lot stricter. You can't fly higher than three hundred feet. You can't you can't be more than one thousand six hundred and forty feet away from the operator. They can't be within two hundred and fifty feet of buildings, vehicles, vessels, animals, people or crowds.

  114. You can't do it. You can't fly them at night. You can't fly them in the clouds. You can't fly them within five point six miles of an airport or any other facility where aircraft take off. You can't fly them within five point six miles of forest fires. If your drone does not have your name, address and telephone number labeled clearly on the aircraft, you will get fined and you cannot interfere in any way, shape or form with first responders or police.

  115. All eminently sensible. Good for you, Canada. Now, I wonder I wonder how they take our wireless data usage up there, because I mean, they have one company. They've got Rogers who likes to Roger the citizens all the time. So we're screwed.

  116. We're done. Yeah. This whole thing past the house, it has to or past the Senate has to go to the house about what we talked about last time, how basically all of your Internet providers will be able to sell your browsing data to the highest bidder. Yeah. And we'll run through that a couple of points in the security segment.

  117. So exactly what they'll be able to do now. Yeah. So it's over. I mean, yeah, we've got one more house of house to get through, but it's not looking good. It's really not looking good. So that Pornhub that you go to all the time, might I recommend you go to GOG.show slash VPN and end around your ISP.

  118. So when you go to that Pornhub lunch break that you have, we know you do, that it won't get tracked by your ISP. Because if you use a VPN, they can't see where you go to. Yeah. If this passes, I think a VPN is going to be required if you'd be dumb not to have it. And we are investigating.

  119. We do recommend private Internet access. But since a lot of people are moving to more VPNs, we're looking towards giving you guys a couple more options that are more global friendly. So we're going to have some new VPNs to talk about incoming shows.

  120. Because I've been investigating about, I think I've checked out about 12 of them so far. And I found two that I also like. So we're going to give you more options based on your location. Because some of them are more centered around certain locations where they have more servers that you can connect to.

  121. So we want to have more options for the listening audience on where they can connect and get their VPN service from. Because we are very behind VPNs. Yep. Now, New York. They're going to try and bring broadband to everyone in the state by 2018.

  122. Everyone in the state? Everyone in the state. There's a lot of very low density areas in New York State. That's the problem. Because a lot of these farmers that are way out in the boonies can't get broadband. And they can't wire up those towns.

  123. They're not going to run the cables out there. And it's very hard for these guys to get online. So these guys are really trying to push internet for everybody in New York. Well, good on you. Yeah. Yeah, good. I hear Google has some balloons for sale. Yes.

  124. You'd be loony if you got a loon. So we'll see if this works out. But they're trying to run fiber to some of these out-of-the-way places. And hopefully they'll make it work. This is like a new story, and we're going to be following it for the coming months for sure.

  125. Because I really hope this works. Because unfortunately, I live in Illinois, the most corrupt state besides Washington, D.C., in the nation. Because Washington, D.C. isn't a state. We'll see how this pans out. And hopefully they'll be the blueprint that other states can go from.

  126. Cool. That'd be nice. We'll see what they do. Google, I know you love the AIs. Oh, yeah. I know you love them. Google has created an AI that can learn almost as fast as a human. Okay. I would like to know what they use as the baseline for a human. This really is the issue.

  127. It's like, what's your baseline here? Because I've been to McDonald's. Look. I can't get a burger with the things I ask for. So if you can get me a... We know we have the burger flipping AI. But if we can get the condiment AI, I'm in. If the AI is as smart as, say, Nick Frost's character in any of the movies, particularly Shaun of the Dead, I'm not terribly worried.

  128. Yeah. Definitely. We're okay. Yeah. Google's DeepMind has said that they've figured out some new systems that learn 10 times more slowly than humans. But they're creeping up on the threshold. So we'll see.

  129. It'll soon reach human level speeds, is what they're saying. All righty. And that's the whole thing. Is this stuff exponential? Like, you know, once they hit a threshold, does it, like, exponentially grow? And that's what Kurzweil's always worried about. It's like, once it hits that tipping point, then, yeah. Yeah.

  130. Yeah. That's when we get... Well, then it's too late. Then we have Skynet. And You First has an AI-powered emotion engine that launched to help YouTube stars find their power moments. I don't even need to go into this at any point because the title is so ridiculous that somebody is creating an AI to help YouTube stars find their power moments.

  131. Just think about that for a minute. Somebody has built a business about this, gotten funding, and spent human hours to build something like this. A lot of money in the YouTube stars, Jason. We're too old, but a lot of money in it. I think that somebody should just win all the monies for coming up with that branding moment right there at the emotion engine.

  132. Oh, I feel sick. That's why we got out of the game. Yeah, that is why we got out of the game. And Japan has no fear of AI, apparently, because they think it could boost growth despite population decline. They also sell panties from vending machines, so I'm not entirely sure that they're always right.

  133. Well, you think about this for a minute. You know, I look at my friend Joey, who runs the MIT Media Lab, and he is the most optimistic tech guy in the world, and he's Japanese. So maybe it's a cultural thing where they think that these things are going to save the world, not destroy us in a ball of fire. It's also a cultural thing in Japan that young boys are dying alone in their apartments, doing nothing but playing video games and interacting with AIs.

  134. Yeah, but that happens here, too. So, you know, there's that. Yeah, that happens here, too. And especially in Korea. I think it's more in Korea than Japan, but... Well, going along those lines, there was a great article in Recode, we think technology can solve the world's problems, but it can't even stop robocalling.

  135. So, this is a very long and well-thought-out thing, talking about how robocalling is basically and the do-not-call registry and all these things that should theoretically, with technology, be able to stop all these calls that keep happening, but they can't, because there's always two sides to the technology, isn't there?

  136. There's the side that's trying to fix things, and then there's the other side that's trying to make a buck. White hat, black hat. Yep. I don't know about you, do you get many robocalls? I didn't for years, and just in the last six months, it's really ramped up. Here's the thing that is just insidious with what these people are doing now.

  137. So, my phone number starts with 415-535, and what they're doing now is they're getting blocks of numbers in that last 10,000 block and robocalling me from those numbers. So, they want me to pick up because they want me to think that it's somebody that's calling from my hood.

  138. And I don't know anybody in 415 anymore. I left. Fuck San Francisco. The call's coming from within the house. It is. It is totally coming from within the house. But thank you for, like, pointing out that I don't need to answer the phone when you call because nobody has a 415-535 number that I know.

  139. Who the hell calls without an email or a text or something first? I just don't even answer the phone anymore. Oh, God, no. Why would you do that? Why would I do that? Unless it's on the calendar, and I know you're calling, and I know the number you're calling from, I will not pick up the phone. That's just barbaric.

  140. It's my parents, or it's a robocall. That's it. So, anyways, one of our favorite sites, Medium. Medium. They've launched a subscription service. Oh, really? Yeah, for $5 a month, you will get access to...

  141. Something. Something? What is it? At some point. Nothing yet. There's nothing. There is literally nothing you get yet, Jason. It says, Upgrade now and become a founding member of Medium. Join us for our next chapter as Medium becomes the most rewarding platform for the world's writers, thinkers, and storytellers.

  142. What do you actually get? Fucking nothing. Where does your money go? Somewhere. And at some point, you'll get something. But they're not saying what it is. You know what? I bet they have probably 100,000 subscriptions already. Un-fucking-believable.

  143. Way to go, Ev. I know he said that there's, you know, the advertising industry's dead. We're not going to do advertising, but this just... Can we just have five bucks, guys? It kind of really, you know... At least Ello gives you a shirt.

  144. Seriously, I have my Ello shirt. You don't even get a Medium shirt. I think we should... Oh, okay. By the time this episode goes to air, we need to make shirts that say, I sent five bucks to Medium, and I didn't even get this stupid T-shirt. And we'll sell them for 10 bucks.

  145. Perfect. There we go. Oh, man. Yeah, so Medium did that. Okay, and speaking of Evan Williams, who comes from Twitter, they're grasping at straws. They might be doing a paid subscription for power users.

  146. I think that they should just do a paid subscription for nothing. If it works for Medium, why can't it work for Twitter? Yeah, it seems to be. You could just say, at some point, we'll give you something. Yeah. They're trying to enhance TweetDeck, which is kind of one of their little bastard side projects that power users use when you have more than one account.

  147. I hate TweetDeck. Yep. It's terrible. It is one of the worst things I've ever used. But a lot of people still use it when they're, you know, watching their mentions and seeing who's talking about them and not getting any fucking work done. I can't stand it. So I'm not going to pay them for it.

  148. If they, I mean, if I ran a social media consulting company, I might give them a few bucks, but I don't because I hate those people. They're the scum of the earth. But because they're untalented assholes who can't find a real job by creating something new. Let me tell you how I really feel, Brian.

  149. You did. Okay. And I am so sad about this. Virgin America, my favorite airline in the world. Gone. Done. Yeah. I was a fan. I was always, I'm still a fan of Virgin Atlantic. And just what this, your takeaway from this entire bloated, what way too long news segment from us is, if you actually do something and you do it well, you go out of business.

  150. If you don't, you ask for five bucks for fucking nothing and you get it. Yeah. So sad. You know, and it's going to Alaska Airlines, which granted, they have nice cheap flights that you can get.

  151. They're fine. I like them. They're fine, but they're no Virgin America. They're no Virgin America. So they're, you know, 2019, they're going to be, they're going to be scrapping Virgin America. So this year, unfortunately, my flights to California, I'm flying every crap U.S. carrier that I can find to save a few bucks.

  152. None of them are Alaska, but actually, no, I take that back. One of them is Alaska. My, my, my shuttle flight from San Jose to Burbank is an Alaska shuttle, but I miss, I miss Virgin America. When I flew on them, they were just the best.

  153. They were the best. And the captains and the pilots had those cool leather jackets, like, you know, back from World War II. Yes. And the cool hats, and they would come out and greet you, like greet the cabin. It was so cool. They, they, they did it right. You know, kudos for Richard Branson for doing an airline right.

  154. Sadly, even Richard Branson can't make this thing fly. Yes. And that's why they're out of business. They did it right. Security. Welcome back to security.

  155. Ha ha ha. With Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. What's going on, Dave? Hello, gentlemen. Good to be back. Good to be back. What's, what's the latest from you guys? Are you keeping safe and secure this week? I have a, I have a condom over my entire computer. It is safe as can be. I can't type, but there it is.

  156. There you go. All right. Very good. Yep. My computer is ribbed for my pleasure. Exactly. Wouldn't, yeah. All right. Well, all right. Well, let's jump in. So, uh, we saw a story, uh, this week that, uh, the world's first computer virus hit the Apple two 35 years ago.

  157. Uh, hard to believe. And, and I, as I was, we were saying, uh, before we got started here, I actually remember this virus happening, uh, in real time. You know, I, when it happened, I remember, I remember it. And, um, you know, back then, of course, there was no internet to get this sort of information, uh, as it, like I read about it in a magazine, you know, like I, like this month's issue of bite magazine showed up and, I remember by magazine.

  158. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think everybody subscribed to bite magazine right up until the moment when they didn't. Yes. That's how that works. I looked everywhere until I found my keys. It was always, it's always in the last place you look. Well, because you stopped looking, you moron. Right.

  159. Right. Um, but, uh, I think this is interesting because, um, you know, the guy who did it was at the time he was 15 years old. Um, his name was Rich Screnta and, he was really just doing it for fun. There was no malice.

  160. Um, he really just wanted to see if he could do it. And it was just a fun little prank. And, um, and yet it was clever. You know, you, you'd, uh, put your disc in and, uh, any of you guys, um, did you guys have much, uh, experience with Apple twos back in the day?

  161. I was a PC guy back in the day, which is why I remember this as well, because deep in the PC Mac wars, it was always hearing from the Apple folk. Ha, we don't get viruses. Ha ha. That's the domain of the PC. And I would go, well, as a matter of fact, we'll, we'll get to that. Yeah.

  162. I had an IBM XT in a, in a bunch of different clones and everything up until my first Mac, which was a two C I when I got the job at Kinko's. Okay. Well my, so wait, this is before really PCs and Macs. So, you know, this is when we were talking Apple twos, um, TRS.

  163. Oh no, no, no. Everybody, all my, all my friends that had an Apple two were smug little bastards. They were like, well, I'm an Apple house. I'm like, that's because you're rich and your daddy's a doctor and he's sleeping with his nurse. So your mommy's going to be sad. So go play with your Apple. The more things change.

  164. Yes. I, I cannot disagree with your assessment there. Uh, and, and, and, and I am not at all bitter by the fact that, uh, with the money that I saved from my paper route, all I was able to afford was a TRS 80 color computer. And I coveted my friends who's, uh, in fact, my best friend whose parents got divorced.

  165. So to try to make up, make it up to him, his father bought him a totally, completely loaded Apple two, um, with everything. He was definitely sleeping with the nurse. Yeah. So at the time I was really jealous and disappointed that my parents stayed together.

  166. Um, dad, come on, sneak around so I can get a good computer. Right. They, yeah, they recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. So I guess, you know, the mollions that's great. I know. Yeah. So there you go. But, um, you know, back, back then, uh, the, the sound of those Apple, uh, those Apple two floppy drives, they made a very specific grinding noise.

  167. Um, you can go look it up on YouTube. I'm sure if you want to hear it, but I'm sure somebody set the, the empire theme to, uh, the music from an Apple two drive, I'm sure. That's right. Oh, that's right. So I have great affection for that sound. Okay. So did you ever get the virus? Um, no, I don't recall ever actually seeing the virus.

  168. I certainly heard about it. Um, I think, cause of course at that time there was no real network way for a virus like this to spread. Sneaker net. Well, right. But, but yeah, but that takes, that takes a lot of time. So, uh, no, I did not actually see this in the wild.

  169. You know, there were dial up BBSs back then, bulletin board systems. Um, but this virus wouldn't have spread through something like that. So this is one of those things that was more like legendary, like, Oh wow, that guy's so cool. He did this thing. And you know, the fact that it, it was sort of harmless and I don't believe he actually got in any trouble for it.

  170. And it made it all the more legendary. Um, but, um, you know, 35 years ago, boy, time flies. Do we know what happened to this guy? Is he were like running the NSA's like cyber ops now? No, uh, you know, I saw this story. I saw a different article in this story earlier this week and someone had tracked him down and interviewed him.

  171. And it sounds like he's, you know, leading a pretty normal life. Uh, nothing, nothing, uh, exceptional or bad either way. Um, but, uh, he said that just how strange it is that, you know, 35 years later, people are still talking about him for something he did as a teenager, basically to, to, um, to help teach himself, um, assembly language.

  172. Okay. So he, he peaked early. I actually Googled this. Nope. No, he didn't peak early. Um, he's actually quite successful. He started up a search engine that none of us have ever heard of in the late 2000s, but was bought out by IBM for their Watson computer system. So he's still doing quite well. What was it called?

  173. Because you can't say that we've never heard of it without like, at least thrown out the name to give us a challenge there. What was it? You, you owe me a beer if you haven't heard of it and you have to, you have to be honest. It was called Bleco. Bleco. What? B-L-E-C-K-O. Oh, okay. I was going to say, if it was B-L-E-C-C-O, then I didn't owe you a beer, but it's B-L-E.

  174. Okay. I owe you a beer. What kind of beer would you like, Brian? All the beer. All the beer. Yes. You said a beer, so you don't get all the beer. I, you, you win a beer. No, I have never, not heard of that. Well, good, good to know that he's doing well. You know, it sounds like he was quite precocious back in the day.

  175. Yeah. For 15. Good, good on you. So a little follow up on the, the Trumpian phone scandal. Looks like he's moved from Android to iPhone. Well, at least whoever is sending his tweets now is on an iPhone. And let's hope that it's an intern and not him.

  176. But after reading the tweets, it still seems like it's him. Yeah. My wife just sort of as an aside, my wife has an interesting theory about some of our, our, our president's tweeting, which is that it seems that a lot of his most off the wall tweets come either like in the middle of the night on a Saturday morning, you know, in between Friday and Saturday is when a lot of those come.

  177. And my wife who is Jewish noted that that is when Trump's daughter and son-in-law, are celebrating or not celebrating, but observing the Sabbath. And so they are unplugged, you know, as observant Jews are.

  178. And so there, that's when he has his opportunity to say what's really on his mind because his son-in-law and daughter are not there to say, he doesn't do this right now. That's her theory, which I think is kind of interesting. There's, there's definitely a pattern there. What you're going to do, but at least now, now he's on an iPhone.

  179. So he's somewhat more secure. Maybe. I, the weird thing is again, I mean, this is, this guy is running the free world in theory. And, uh, the only reason we know what phone he's using is from what's coming up on Twitter. Yeah. Ah, okay.

  180. No, it's, it, it really is just a really shitty movie plot that we live in the middle of right now. Thank you, Mike judge for rewriting the constitution for us. We appreciate it. God, I hope the show gets canceled. If you described it as a movie plot, no one would believe you.

  181. It's a no way. Well, you know what? Here's the deal. He wrote idiocracy. Nobody went to see it because it was too implausible. Guess what? Yeah. You know, they should, maybe they should do a re-release. Yeah. It's going to be a lot more, a lot more interest in it.

  182. They have, it's called CNN. Ah, very good. Very good. Very good. Well, uh, this week, uh, we got a, uh, another, uh, release from WikiLeaks. Um, they provided details on, uh, the CIA's Mac and iPhone hacking tools.

  183. Well, there goes that secure presidential phone. Yep. That's why this is in the list and where it is. Yeah, they're, uh, right there. Um, this is part of the series of dumps that, uh, they're calling vault seven, um, which we've been talking about for a little while here. Um, so there's some interesting things in here about how, you know, alleged, uh, techniques that the CIA uses to gain access to both Macs and iPhones.

  184. Um, interesting that they still need physical access to the devices for most of these. Um, you know, using things like, um, uh, like your Ethernet dongle or your Thunderbolt dongle on your Mac laptop, um, to sort of get around, uh, any cleansing of the system.

  185. You know, you can wipe it clean and then you think, oh, my system's clean. And then you plug in your, either your Ethernet or your Thunderbolt, uh, dongle to connect to the network and kaboom, you're reinfected. Okay. Answer me this then. Why can't they use the same hacks that other people use to jailbreak your phone?

  186. Because when you jailbreak your phone, all it takes is usually a URL click. Like they, they exploit Safari to then own the phone and jailbreak it. So why can't they do the same kind of thing on, on the target phones? Why do they still need physical access? Well, I mean, I suppose they could, but then the, the question is, um, how do you do it and not be detected?

  187. Right. Okay. Cause I, I haven't jailbroken my phone since I had a three GS. So, um, I can't remember what happened, but I do remember that it did reboot and you did get to see like, you know, kind of like a Linux, uh, scroll at the beginning with all the boot loaders and stuff. Right. Exactly.

  188. Exactly. Now what, what this brought up to me though, is we sort of touched on this earlier in the show is, um, this notion of Macs being secure or not secure. Um, certainly I think it is common belief that Macs are much more secure than PCs.

  189. And I think there's a decent amount of data to back that up, but I was curious if either of you had ever heard of any anecdotal stories of anyone with Mac OS 10, um, now called Mac OS having any sort of serious virus problems, ransomware, a virus, anything like that actually in the wild from someone, you know, who had actually happened to, who was on a Mac zero.

  190. Nope. Everybody I know that's had ransomware is still PCs. Yeah. Yeah. No exploits. Zero. I do remember, uh, between system seven and system nine, back in the old days of, uh, the OS, there were, uh, word macro viruses that were going around, but that's the only thing I ever heard of.

  191. There were a couple of Mac. Um, yeah, just literally word macro viruses. You pop, you open up a word doc and then boom, you're infected. But since OS 10, I haven't, I don't know anybody that has got a, gotten a single virus in everybody I know uses a Mac. And we're on this thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

  192. Nobody. And some of the people that we know are not so bright and don't do anything to protect themselves. Speak for yourself. All my friends are geniuses. There are definitely some out there and we've certainly seen reports of them. You know, we reported about them on the cyber wire, that, that every now and then there will be, you know, word of a new one out there.

  193. Um, there's a new one. But I have never, yeah, I have never heard of anyone actually getting one. I have seen them pop up, you know, randomly, you know, surfing around on the web. I've seen, you know, the window pop up that says your Mac is infected. Click here to clean your Mac and, you know, download this file.

  194. So, so, you know, people who are trying to come at you, who know that you're on a Mac are trying to deliver, some kind of payload that is Mac specific. Um, but even then, you know, if you, if you, uh, launch that, it's going to say, the operating system is going to say that, you know, this, Hey, this is something that you downloaded from the internet.

  195. Are you sure you want to run it? Yeah. It just seems like it's, uh, it's buttoned up a lot better than the PC. And like you guys, I have never heard any anecdotal evidence from someone, you know, other than a friend of a friend of a friend, um, about anyone getting infected on a Mac.

  196. I'm sure our listeners will, will let us know otherwise. Yeah, please do. If you've ever gotten, gotten slammed by this, let us know. But I think, I think the code signing that Apple does, and it's difficult to find how you like let third party apps get installed on your, on your system.

  197. You know, they do a really good job of that. You know, you have to go into security and you have to select, let anybody run apps on my machine. And even then, like, you know, most of us run little snitch so we can see when something might be trying to phone home. So we've got multiple layers of protection, but I even think for the general public, because they never change that setting.

  198. Most people who have a Mac never change that setting. So they're only installing software from like certified Apple developers, you know? Yeah, that's true. That's true. Kudos, kudos on you, Dead Steve Jobs, for making that happen. No, they've done a good job.

  199. But I, again, I, I too am interested to hear what our listeners have to say if they, uh, if they know of people who it happened to and how it happened. So, um, moving on. Actually, you can write us at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com or go to gog.show and use the contact form to let us know if you have been hit by a Mac virus.

  200. Please do. We're interested. Yes, please do. So the new man may not be able to break in, but, uh, apparently they're trying to build, uh, the batteries to be bombs on iPads. Yeah. we had this report this week, um, about, uh, well, we, we had this, uh, this ban.

  201. Yes. Where, uh, the, the U S government has banned certain types of electronics on, on planes coming from certain airports. Uh, 10 Muslim majority countries and it's laptops, iPads, and any device larger than a cell phone aboard direct inbound flights to the U S.

  202. Right. Now, tell me what you guys thought when you first heard about this. That seems ridiculous. It seems like an end around just to piss off people because they couldn't get their immigration ban done. It seemed like it, but you know, now that you guys just talked about this, that, you know, there might be a threat from, you know, lithium ion batteries that, that, that might be plausible.

  203. But except for the fact that the Trump administration itself has maintained that there is no credible specific threat. So here was my thought process on this. Like you guys, when this first came out, I was suspicious that this was, you know, just another way of, of, um, the Trump administration may be doing an end around on, um, you know, their Muslim ban or, you know, doing one of the types of things that they've shown the capability of doing.

  204. Basically being dicks. Yeah. But then, uh, when the British got on board, um, you know, that made me think, hmm, all right. So perhaps there's something to this. Okay. I didn't know the British were on board.

  205. I missed that part of the story because I had a long week, but if the British are on board and we're on board, that, that, that, that definitely lends to some credibility. Yeah. To something that they, they saw in the wires. Now, hold on a second. Now I am generally not the one to put on the tinfoil conspiracy hat, but I did read something else in a different point of view on this one, which also includes the British.

  206. And that's when it started to get into a really strange conspiracy theory. Is it on info wars? No, it was not. I can't just check it. There was a theory that was floated that said that Trump has had a beef with some of the owners of these airlines and they're all foreign airlines, not American airlines.

  207. And they, there is a theory put out that this band is basically meant to cause them financial hardship because people who are doing these long flights obviously want to have their devices, their, their business people, they want to be working, et cetera, et cetera. And this will force them to use American airlines as opposed to these, uh, you know, foreign controlled airlines.

  208. I need to go check to see if you, if you stole all my Reynolds wrap. I know because that's, that's ridiculous. I mean, and even, uh, Emirates airlines already said, yeah, we're fine. We're going to go to Athens first and then bounce back over because if they, if they do a layover, then guess what?

  209. It's, it's void. It's null and void. You have to be on a direct flight, which, yeah. Okay. Which is why so much of this stuff is so stupid. Anyways, it's ridiculous. It's, it's fucking security theater. And we've talked about this for years and this is just security theater. Yeah. Well, I think again, you know, with the British getting on board, um, and, and, and the Brit saying that there, there actually is specific intelligence leading them to believe that, um, you know, there could be a real, uh,

  210. imminent threat when it comes to this sort of thing. And, um, you know, a, a, a, not any sort of cyber threat, an actual physical threat of trying to come up with something that, uh, you know, could explode. Of course, you know, the question is if you're trying to get something to explode, is it better off having it underneath the plane or in the plane?

  211. Um, cause you can still, and what it's making them, you do is put your device under the plane. I suppose what it does is keep someone from being able to assemble something, you know, get, uh, you know, I, I don't know. I'm just making something up here, folks, but, um, you know, would get 10 lithium batteries from 10 different people on the plane and somehow wire them together and, you know, and, and kaboom or something like that.

  212. Totally, totally making something up, not saying that that's at all a plausible sort of thing, but, you know, some kind of threat where you would need to have access to the thing that was going to cause the trouble versus putting something under the plane. Um, I don't know. It's an interesting one. You know, like, like I said, like you guys, I was really skeptical of it, but then I saw when the Brits got on board that made me take a closer look at it.

  213. And since the Brits are on board, it's called security theater. Anyway, yes, I get spelled R E instead of the R security theater theater. Uh, yeah, there's definitely things that you can do if you have access to multiple batteries, but if it's, even if it's cell phones, you can, you can rip open enough cell phones to get a decent charge out of these batteries.

  214. Have you seen anybody poke a lithium ion battery and pour water on it? It explodes. You can do this with cell phones. So the band, I mean, anybody that's ever fucking seen MacGyver can figure this stuff out, but I guess they don't have, they don't have MacGyver in ISIS controlled territories.

  215. So what are you going to do? Yep. Let's move on. Let's move on. And we'll keep an eye on this one as it goes. All right. Well, okay. Congress has repealed the FCC's privacy rules for ISPs, which was basically a nightmare doom scenario that has now come true. Well, the Senate has passed it.

  216. We're waiting on the house. So we're, we're halfway there. Hopefully, just, yeah, yeah, hopefully. Well, if you want to know how bad this could go, uh, the EFF has put together just the top five worst things that will happen, uh, if this goes through, which also, you know, we include obviously selling all your data to marketers, which is kind of happening anyways.

  217. Um, hijacking your searches, which means they will go somewhere else to collect the data before it moves on to Google. Cause let's not pretend that anybody's using Bing. Um, snooping through your traffic and inserting ads. Good times. Pre-installing software on your phone and recording every URL you visit. And one, number one, injecting undetectable, undeletable tracking cookies in all of your HTTP traffic.

  218. Good times. Well, which, which they did before. And that's, yes, before this law was in effect, they did that before the report actually does. And they did a really good job on this. They point out which ISPs did which before they were told not to. Yeah. Yeah.

  219. So fun times. So we're going back to the dark ages. Uh, okay. I see, I see a special episode of grumpy old geeks on how to get around this shit because there are ways to get it. Yeah. There are ways to get around it and there's no such thing as an undeletable cookie. I'm sorry. Yeah. Uh, you know, this troubles me on the, the, the undeletable cookie thing, uh, is troubling just because, you know, people think that they're using some sort of private browsing mode or, or whatever.

  220. And, and they're not. Um, the other thing why this annoys me is that, you know, if you talk to the legislators, they'll say, well, you know, it's just a free market solution. If you, uh, if you don't like what your ISP is doing, just switch to another ISP. If only we had a truly competitive ISP situation here in the United States.

  221. Yeah. I would love to do that. That's such a load of crap. But we do not. Yeah. There is literally only one I can have here. There isn't another option. I have a question. Uh, didn't we pass legislation a long time ago that requires them to get a warrant before they get your library checkout history?

  222. I believe that is true. Yeah. This seems to me to be in the same exact vein. Is that shockingly? Yeah. The law is not keeping up. Is it? No, no. You know, we, we, we need that. We need that Google balloon solution to provide us with our ISP needs. Except the guy quit.

  223. So I know. Yeah. No loon for you. Nope. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about farmers. I want to, I want to talk about something happier. Let's talk about farmers. John Deere, the American brand. Come on. We can't have anything bad happening with John Deere. Can we? I thought the farming dating site had gotten hacked.

  224. Yeah. John Deere is, uh, as American as, uh, apple pie, right? Yep. Yeah. It's an interesting issue. I mean, so story here from motherboard about, um, the story is called why American farmers are hacking their tractors with Ukrainian firmware. Uh, you know, what could possibly go wrong?

  225. You beat me to it. Yeah. Beat me to it. But, uh, it's an interesting point and it's this, um, the issue is called right to repair and it's, it's an issue, not just for tractors, but something that people are concerned that we're already seeing and are going to see more of just with regular cars.

  226. Boing Boing has been covering this for 20 years or however long they've been around. But yeah. Yeah. The maker community is all over this right now with kind of Adam Savage kind of leading the charge on it. He is pissed about this stuff. Oh yeah. And, but I mean like this is nothing new. So now it's just into, into farming and tractors and, but I just want to say what happens when we see our first tractor ransomware?

  227. I want all your corn in Bitcoin. I want Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting framing of it, right? I mean, it's sort of, um, you know, the, the, the friendly farmer, you know, uh, uh, who, who makes our food and, you know, it, um, to be up against the, the big bad company, who's telling them that, you know,

  228. you cannot fix your tractor out in the field without having one of our servicemen come and fix it for you. And these things cost more than a house. I mean, it's bullshit. These things cost more than a house. They should be able to get an update to their software. It's what we've been worried about and screaming about for a long time.

  229. It's the fact that when we purchase something now, every, we don't really own it. And, and this is a problem and we should own it. And it's ridiculous. You should be able to do, if you want to take that tractor and just, you know, do whatever the hell you could turn it into a transformer. I don't care. That's what you paid. You bought it. Do it.

  230. Right. Right. Right. Well, it'll be interesting to see too, you know, again, what we're just sort of back up for a little bit. If people don't know what we're talking about, what we're talking about is that the tractors, tractors now have software, like pretty much in any mechanical device, your car, the tractors, you know, a big part of how they work is with software.

  231. And so, um, when they break down or if this, this software needs to be updated, um, part of what the software does is it can, you know, check the engine out and determine what's the problem and recalibrate things. If things go wrong within the engine or any of the other equipment on the tractor.

  232. But the way it works is that, um, the only way that you can get that software is through an, an authorized John Deere dealer, uh, or representative. And that surprise, surprise, it's kind of like going to your car dealer. It is expensive and can also take a lot of time.

  233. If you're out in the middle of nowhere in your farm, and the only way to get your tractor running again is to have some guy who's halfway across the state. And reminder, those Western states are pretty darn big. Um, it may take time. And meanwhile, your crop is out there, you know, rotting away in the field.

  234. And these things all run on GPS. Now it's like these guys, they, they put in waypoints and, and paths and they just kind of kick back in the back. It's like that old Simpsons episode where, you know, Homer figured out that all of the semis run on the, you know, the AI brain, but these tractors actually do that.

  235. You know, they put in paths and those tractors run themselves based on GPS. So I cannot believe that they don't have like, you know, 3G or 4G modems in them to do over the air updates. I mean, Tesla's have it. Why can't a $200,000 tractor have it?

  236. Why do you have to wait for some nerd in a John Deere hat to come to your farm and drive out in the field to plug in a USB plug? And, and update your software. Well, and so the, what this has done is it's created a black market for the software. Um, either, you know, hacked versions of the software or just some of the diagnostic software itself where, uh, you can pay, uh, you know, a nominal fee and, um, get the software to, to, to do it yourself.

  237. Uh, so, but then you run into questions of have you voided your warranty on your $200,000 tractor by running unauthorized software? So it's a big mess. You got to use the onion browser to get onto the dark, farm. And you've also probably broken the, the computer fraud and abuse act by doing that.

  238. That is true too. At least the DMCA, you know, there, there are many laws that you've broken when you put in illegal firmware on your computer, on a tractor that you have signed a contract for when you bought that tractor. So these guys are technically outlaws. In 2015, the librarian of Congress approved an exemption to the digital millennium copyright act for land vehicles, which includes tractors.

  239. Oh, okay. I knew they did that for phones. So you can legally jailbreak your phone. I did not know they did that for vehicles too. Okay, cool. So here's the catch. So, so I'm reading from the article here. It says, the exemption allows modification of computer programs that are contained in and control the functioning of a motorized land vehicle, such as a personal automobile, commercial motor vehicle, or mechanized agricultural vehicle.

  240. When circumvention is a necessary step undertaken by the authorized owner of the vehicle to allow the diagnosis, repair, or lawful modification of a vehicle function. So you are allowed to repair the vehicle, but you avoid your warranty, but hell yeah.

  241. Library of Congress. Thank you. No, it's yeah. So the librarian of Congress was doing the right thing, but when you buy the tractor, you agree to wait for it and end user license agreement. Oh, fucking. And so the end user license agreement disallows all of the activities that are allowed by the librarian of Congress.

  242. Okay. So I was right the first time. Yep. Yep. You were. By sitting on this seat and getting some corn, you have agreed to the EULA. Yeah. Nice. Exactly. Exactly. So hopefully we'll see a resolution to this. I think what is, as this is sort of a canary in a coal mine because, you know, cars are doing nothing but getting more computerized and the dealers would like nothing more than for you to not be able to go to your neighborhood garage to have anything done because, you know,

  243. put new brake pads on your car. well, that requires a computer recalibration and we're the only ones with the tool because it's all encrypted. 200 bucks, please. 200 bucks. 200 bucks. 200 bucks. That's, that's the future people are afraid of. And I think there's a legitimate concern there. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

  244. Oh, scary. Okay. Be sure to check out Dave every weekday on the cyberwire podcast over at the cyberwire.com. And we will talk to you next week, Dave. Thanks for dropping by. All right, guys. Good talking to you. All right, guys. Good talking to you. at the library.

  245. So I got some new books. Woohoo. I got the collapsing empire by John Scalzi, who we've been talking about a lot recently. It's his new book. Just came out. Awesome. All right. It's a whole new universe, very cool universe. And I really, really enjoyed it.

  246. And it got me on the Scalzi kick again. And I went back as we were talking about the old man's war series. Yes. And I went back and I looked a book two is called the ghost brigades. Yes. I had already reviewed that on the show. Oh, you had, you have read it. Yeah, I have read it and I liked it.

  247. I looked at my audible rating and I gave it a four star, not a five, but a four. So I went and bought book three. Okay. So I'm just getting started on it. So I can't talk about it yet. It's called the last colony. It is definitely different, but it's the same, same cast characters.

  248. And so far, so good. I'm enjoying it. Amazon for both the old man war book two and book three on your pages. You still have HTML tags showing up in your descriptions. Oh, nice. Yeah. We got some, we got paragraph tags.

  249. Way to go. Amazon. Good job. Future of commerce. Well, good. I'm glad to hear that, that you enjoyed it because I will be eventually reading book two and probably three. So yeah, I'll let you know when I'm done with book three, if it's worth continuing on, it's definitely different, but I like it so far.

  250. It's, it's definitely a different take, but to say, but it's the same character. So it's not like, you know, a laundry files where they just change up the protagonist every time. Thank gosh. Yeah. I've got another article in here that talks about John Scalzi and his 10 year collaboration with, uh, is it Tor books?

  251. Yeah. Tor. Um, so he's got to publish 13 novels over the next 10 years. And this is the, this is the first one. So, uh, get writing dude. I'm not going to go into the article, but, uh, definitely check it out. It is in the show notes.

  252. All right. And I have a bit of feedback or feedback. I have a bit of followup. Uh, last week I was complaining about net galley and how you may not get some of the higher level author books because Daniel Suarez has a new book out called change agent, which you got through net galley. And, uh, I had signed up and requested it and did not get it.

  253. I'm wondering if somebody over there listens to our show, uh, because four days after our episode came out, all of a sudden it appeared on my shelf. There you go. So I have now been approved for change agent by Daniel Suarez and I have downloaded it and, uh, hope to have it finished by next week.

  254. Cool. I'm about 10% into it. I'm digging it. You're going to really like it. All right. The only thing, the only thing I'm trepidatious about is, are we going to have the scientist and the love interest? But, Oh, you know, we are. Ups and doodads.

  255. Dr. David Teeter. I wonder if he's still walking around, every single day, catching Pikachu's because apparently millions of Americans are still playing Pokemon go every day. Now, interest in the game has faded quickly and it probably won't ever totally recover, but, uh, it is not shark finned entirely.

  256. There is a very long tail and it's been pretty solid consistently around 5 million daily unique visitors. as of late last year, apparently are still playing on the rig as it were. That's respectable. That's not bad. I, I think that I would call that a success as a game.

  257. I certainly a lot more play and that's still than anybody that got Mario run or whatever the hell that was. Oh God. Yeah, I know. I think I still have it on my phone. I may have deleted it, but because I'm not going to pay for anything else. I got my 10 bucks worth out of it, you know? So that was fine. Um, yeah, I don't know.

  258. Um, his, his lovely lady, uh, Chen is coming to see me, uh, on Tuesdays. We're going to hang out and go get some good food. So I will ask her if David is still running around, uh, playing, playing Pokemon. Yeah. Darklands. This is an old eight bit game that I used to play on my, you know, one of my IBMs way back in the day.

  259. And, uh, Fogarty friend of the show who does all of our VOs. Yep. Turn me on to the fact that it's on steam. Okay. I bought it. I bought it because my first version of Darklands that we played for probably a hundred hours had a bug in it because we had version one that would never let you win the game.

  260. So in this, now it's seven bucks. I bought it. I'm I've got it. This is going to be kind of my go-to, like I need to unwind and, and have a little nostalgia moment. Yep. So I got it. I'm playing it. It's, it's an old school, like super cheesy eight bit game, but it's, you know, it's D and D like you control four characters, all the different, you know, races and stuff like that.

  261. But unless you're an old fucker, you really aren't going to care about this. But if you are and you've played Darklands, now you can go get it on steam. So if you, if you're, if you're going to pick this up and play this, drop us an email or a tweet and let us know, because I'm really curious if there are any Darklands fans that listen to the show.

  262. Okay. I also bought Borderlands triple pack. Borderlands is one of those games. It's supposed to be, you know, it's, it's a first person shooter, snarky, funny for the three 60. I got it. Cause I got a free three 60 from a friend of mine and I started playing it and it just, I hate the using the Xbox controls for a first person shooter.

  263. I'm a quick guy. I need a keyboard and a mouse, but I'm, I'm, I'm working my way into it. I'll get better at it, but it's just fun to have another, like, you know, something I can sit down on the couch when there's nothing on TV and just shoot something. Makes me happy. Makes me very happy. So I'm just trying to get back into games after, you know what, you know what it was when we covered that story on Twitch, how they were like turning into a Twitter client.

  264. And I watched some people play in the game that got my bug back in me to play more games. It really did. So I'm trying to have, you know, I'm trying to unwind a little more instead of just watching whatever I can find on TV. You know, that's really what I'm, I'm trying to get to, but I did unfortunately download the entire two seasons of blunt talk.

  265. So I have to watch those first. You know, I, I watched the first four episodes of that show and I actually really did love it. And I just never went back and I don't know why. So there's two full seasons. You can get them in Sweden. And if you want to get them, you can go get the gubang do. Yes.

  266. I brought this to your attention. I brought this to your attention last week and asked how could this possibly be legal and not just even being sold by a third party on Amazon being sold by Amazon itself. It's just a computer. That's why it's just a computer. It's got software. You have to manually enable the evil bits.

  267. The thing about the gubang do, and which is why this is the last thing I'm ever going to buy on Amazon that you recommend for me. I didn't recommend it. This, well, kinda, kinda, sorta. When you say that there's an easy way to get stuff from Sweden, that's kind of like in my wheelhouse.

  268. So, right. My eyes glint, my teeth get a little ding on it. I'm just like, yeah, I'm gonna go get them. So, I bought this thing, got it home, got it set up, took me an hour to set it up, mainly because the power button on the gubang do remote is basically a Roku remote, which really doesn't like my Roku TV.

  269. So, I'd power on the gubang and it would power off my TV, and I'd power on the TV and it would power off my gubang. So, I was stuck in kind of a loop there for a little bit. Finally got it working, and then I got my, I got an hour's pop keyboard, which is, you have to like plug in one of those little USB dongles, and that way it's not, it's not using the IR.

  270. So, I got it to work with that. So, I was all good. Took me about 45 minutes, and then I'm watching an illegal version of The Devil's Advocate, just by pressing some buttons. Gotcha. So, it's a Cody box. I talked about Cody when I, when we were talking about this last week, and it is a Cody box.

  271. That's all it is. It runs on Android. And my friends say Exodus for Cody is what you need to get. That's where it's like, that's where all the good stuff is. So, if you're on a Cody box or have Cody installed on your, your computer, then go check out Exodus.

  272. There will be a link in the show notes. If you are in line to be a pirate. Arr. Yeah, and, uh, theoretically, I'm, I'm very against the idea, and I believe that you should pay for everything that you use, but riddle me this, stupid ass cable providers, like Time Warner, Spectrum, or whatever the hell you're called for me today.

  273. Uh, why do you block certain channels from, everything, you make it so damn hard, is what you fucking do, which is why I might get one of these damn boxes. Now, this is a bad example, because the one thing these boxes are not good for is sports, but this has happened to me for non-sports things many, many times, but let me just tell you what happened to me on, on Wednesday.

  274. I, I, I want to, Germany is playing a friendly against England. It's, it's, it's Lukas Podolsky's final game for Germany. It's on ESPN. It's on ESPN Deportes, which is the Spanish version, or ESPN three, which I saw that on, I saw that on the box. So.

  275. Okay. Well, see, I'm definitely going to get one of these. So we'll, we'll, we'll go there, but keep, keep talking about the sports. I, I go down to my local. I figured, well, surely they'll be playing it because they play a lot of soccer. Nope. They don't get those channels. All right. Well, I'm already there. I've ordered some beer.

  276. I've got some food coming. Bring up my laptop sign into my time Warner cable that I pay for. Bring up my browser that has all the channels. Sorry. You're not connected to your home network. Only certain channels will be available to you. Rat bastards. Well, here's the problem.

  277. And here's why they're so fucking stupid. Then I just go to ESPN's website and I signed in using my time Warner credentials and all the channels are available. What the hell? Somebody's left hand doesn't know.

  278. That's what the right hand's doing. But this is all over the map. This isn't just ESPN. This is like, everything is so stupid and so hard and so many fucking hoops and so many sign-ins and you can't do it this way. But if you rat fuck yourself and make a right hand turn and then twist your nuts with the left and then stick a fucking fork in your eye, then you can actually watch it.

  279. What the hell people? And this is why I'm just going to get a goo bang or whatever the hell it's called. Actually, just go get an Amazon Fire Stick and then you can put Kodi on that and attach that to a Bluetooth keyboard and you will spend roughly 40% of what I paid for the goo bang.

  280. That was my point. The goo bang is the most expensive option that you can get for doing this stupid shit. There are so many other boxes out there that are half as much, but you can just get an Amazon Fire Stick and there are in there are instructions on the Kodi site on how to go download Kodi, reflash the ROM on the Fire Stick for 35, the Fire Stick costs 35 bucks and you can attach a generic Bluetooth keyboard to it, which you have to do.

  281. You have to have a keyboard. So that's the way to go. All right. Well, with the money that you've saved, you can now go purchase a $5,000 Dell 32 inch 8K desktop display to watch all your stuff on. And, you know, not that anybody has programming for 8K yet.

  282. 7680 by 4320. With a pixel density of 280 PPI. Fuck you. You can get it right now. $5,000. And the computer to run this will show up in six years. And the broadcasting to be able to enjoy it will show up in 15 unless you want to watch porn and really get close up on that zit.

  283. I mean, 4K is over. It's overkill already. So this is stupid. And by the way, you can I think the Dell or the LG 4K monitors are on sale for like 300 bucks. That's not bad. Yeah, I was going to pick one up for that, but I don't have 300 bucks, so I can't go by my course at propodcasting.school.

  284. And Apple has released a new app. They've given up on being a social network themselves. Remember Ping? Ping. That was fun. Oh, that was so painful. Well, at least they haven't bothered anymore. They've realized that they cannot compete. However, they want to get in the game somehow because they're sick of everybody else's apps running on their phones.

  285. So they've released a new app called Clips, which makes social videos for other social networks. It basically steals from everybody else's networks and brings in the ideas like filters and blah, blah, blah. And you can just build super easy, really dumb videos to share with your friends. Here's an idea.

  286. Fix iTunes. Oh, come on. Trent Reznor's working day and night on version two. Yeah, for the phone, but not iTunes itself for the computer. Fix iTunes. iTunes is a steaming pile of shit. Well, look. Fix the phone one, too.

  287. That one also sucks balls. That one's unusable. It's utterly unusable. Yeah. iTunes is ridiculous, and it should be your flagship application. So I agree with you on that. Get on it, Trent. What the hell? All right. So we're getting a whole bunch of new emojis, apparently, including genders of magical humanoids.

  288. I don't know what any of that means. And I think that what people have to start realizing is that when you spend a half an hour searching for an emoji, it is no longer a quick form of communication, is it? And that was the whole fucking point. It takes forever to find a fucking emoji. But I do like that if you start typing something in and it kind of matches an emoji, it will show that to you in the little three pane shot, like, you know, quick pick.

  289. Yeah, the iOS emoji autocomplete is kind of clever. Yeah, but it's still it never gives me the one that I want. So, yeah, basically, you should just set your phone to only give you the dick, the eggplant, really all you're looking for. Yeah. And I got a little kitchen tech for nerds.

  290. I got the instant pot seven in one multifunctional pressure cooker. This is like a crock pot on meth. This will cook anything that you want in a third or 10 percent of the time that a crock pot will. I've cooked so much stuff in this thing and being a single guy who does not like to.

  291. Well, I like to cook, but I only like to cook when I have friends around. This is the best of both worlds. You can make delicious food in it and it's 100 bucks. Honestly, dude, if you if and I told you, you should get one. Everybody should have one. A bunch of my friends on Facebook have them.

  292. They're just like, I love my instant pot. Seriously, get one. And then I got this Cuisinart massive eight cup food processor in gunmetal gray because, you know, you need that for a food processor. Got it. Yeah. But when you're when you're chopping a ton of vegetables for going in the instant pot for your veggie soup every day, it really helps.

  293. But that's nice looking. I like that one. It's really nice. It's I mean, it's got like a 18 horsepower motor in it. It's I can cut through so many. And what are the turnips turnips are the bane of my existence to cut by hand. This thing just tears them up, tears them up.

  294. I think there's a emoji for a turnip. I believe there. I'm sure there is. And I found another link to modern JavaScript for ancient web developers. This is by Gina Trapani, who you will know as since you're a Lifehacker fan. Yeah, she was a founder of Lifehacker and she's a you know, she's a hardcore coder and and just it's a good read going through like what old folks like us need to know about how to figure out how the fuck JavaScript works.

  295. Yeah, I've done it. I don't want to code anymore. No, you don't. It was just it was it was a fun read. It gave me a little PTSD. I had the shakes for a little bit, but because I've done a lot of JavaScript programming and I never, ever fucking want to do it again. I don't care how ancient I am. Here's a tip for ancient web developers.

  296. Stop being a web developer. Take Jason's podcasting course.

  297. Media candy. A little follow up on the Edgar Wright, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg thing we talked about a couple weeks ago, how Nick Frost and Edgar Wright are going off on their own to do a new project. And I'm like, where's Edgar Wright? What's he doing? Well, it turns out he's been doing a movie called Baby Drive.

  298. The trailer, the trailer dropped recently. Looks good. It's a basically a car chase bank heist kind of movie. It's it's action packed. The trailer is really fun. The posters are fantastic because they're old school like illustration, which I really like.

  299. I really dig the trailer, the posters for the movie that came out with the trailer. So check those out. But yeah, that's where Edgar Wright's been. So he's busy. He's been busy. Well, good. I'm interested in seeing this. Let's regarding my previous rant about trying to get ESPN to work anywhere.

  300. Thanks a lot, Amazon, for not having season two of The Expanse at all. Thank you a lot. Time Warner Spectrum Cable again for not having episode one through four of season two on demand. So after I finally finished season one of The Expanse, I was ready to power on through and I had to go to Sweden.

  301. Well, if you had a Mugu Guy pan box, you'd be set. I know. Apparently I would. So I finally did catch up. I've I'm caught up to the latest episode now, because as soon as I got the first four episodes from Sweden, I was able to use the on demand and the Siffy app to be able to get through and power through the rest of them.

  302. So I am caught up. All right. What do you think so far? I liked season one better. Really? I really did. I like season two better. I didn't care for season one. I like the show a lot. I think it's it's really well done. I finding season two beyond predictable.

  303. And this could just be me binging it. That's causing that problem. Maybe if there was more time in between them and I was doing other things with my life, except for thinking about The Expanse for the last two weeks. Perhaps that would have happened. But I just found season one. I didn't know what the hell was going on.

  304. I didn't know who the characters were. It was super interesting to get into the world and see the politics and everything else. Season two. OK, this is going to happen. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. Well, see, I was I was kind of sideswiped because you talked about the characters that were missing from the, you know, the city website.

  305. And, you know, you didn't realize, though, I said that after only watching the first episode of The Expanse in which they blew up the second episode, the entire ship that they were on blows up. So almost half the people that I thought were going to be main characters were gone. That's true. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I mean, I still like it.

  306. I watch it every week. It's one of my go to's for sure. And I did find you can get the Expanse season to season pass on iTunes. So you can you can actually do it. And you do. I'm assuming have a DVR. So now you can go and actually DVR it. Yeah. The thing is, I don't want to pay for a show that I am ostensibly already paying for cable for.

  307. True that. True that. Good point. Good point. You, sir, have a good point. So I was aware of the fact that I could have purchased episodes, but I'm already paying for fucking cable. So, yeah, well, turns out I'm glad you're watching and hopefully we'll get more people watching because they're on the short list to get shit can for season four.

  308. They have been picked up for season three, but in in sci fi standard mode, if the numbers don't pick up for season three, that's going in the crapper. So it's going out. It's going out the airlock, as they would say. Well, I don't necessarily know if that would be a bad thing.

  309. See, my comments at the very beginning of the show about the Big Bang Theory being on episode or season 752. I could see this being only a three or four season show and being very, very good. But we'll see. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I just know that. I mean, they killed Farscape.

  310. But here's the one thing that needs to happen, regardless of whether this goes three seasons, four seasons or 15 seasons. They need to know a season out that it's ending so they can write a proper goddamn final series. Yeah. Not a final episode. Not a final episode. A final full year.

  311. I agree with you. I agree with you. You know, and they. But the thing is, they had that written for Farscape and then they got shit canned out of the blue. And then they had to go back and like tack on this like two hours special to make it kind of wrap up. But I got to be honest with you. I don't see that sort of thing happening anymore for anything that's a cult classic.

  312. There are enough people watching this that even if Siffy were to go ahead and pull the plug on it, Hulu or Netflix or somebody would finance four or five episodes. Yeah, that's true. Netflix to the rescue. Yeah, it's a different world now. I don't see any show like this just being yanked anymore.

  313. Yeah, imagine imagine if Netflix existed when Firefly got canceled. Oh, my God. The world we would live in. So Rogue One, a Star Wars story came out this week. Well, it came out a couple of months ago. I saw it in the theater, but. Well, it just came out on on home video, whatever the hell that means these days.

  314. It's on it's on digital. And next week you can buy it on a plastic disc if that's your thing. Right. So, yeah, I got it from the iTunes store. I watched it again. Really enjoyed it. Didn't love it as much as I did in the theater the first time. Not sure if it's going to hold up to repeat viewings, but incredibly well done.

  315. Probably technically the best Star Wars movie ever made. Just didn't have the feels that the other ones do. Well, here's the thing. Like when I watched episode eight in the theater, I thought it was the best thing I ever saw. When I watched it at home, I'm like, this is fucking stupid. So I think Rogue One probably has the same thing.

  316. So you get that gloss by A, first viewing and B, the theater experience. You know, I think you may be right about that. There's two things that are in play there. But some some man named Barry Fong went through and did the the ending of Rogue One and tied it directly into A New Hope.

  317. Right. I didn't add this to the show notes until today because I saw it on Monday or Tuesday and I'm like, this is not going to last. This is not going to be online that long. And amazingly, it's still online and it's gotten over a million views on Vimeo.

  318. It's almost perplexing because it is Disney and they basically pull everything at any second for any time. And they have, you know, the biggest they are the evil empire of lawyers. They actually are contractually. If you're a lawyer for Disney, you have to wear the stormtrooper outfit now. It's part of the contract. But it's shocking.

  319. But until you realize that there's no attempt to put it's nine minutes total of footage. Yeah. Approximately four from each film. And it's almost a perfect advertisement for Rogue One. I was going to say, I have an idea. I think Barry Fong might actually work for Disney.

  320. And this could be a covert advertisement for the release of Rogue One. I watched it. I had that thought. I noticed that it had almost a million views. I noticed that it was being shared left, right and center. And I was like, if Disney actually did this as a rogue advertising campaign, it would be quite genius.

  321. Yeah. Somebody over there might have a brain. That's what I would have suggested doing. Exactly. Because everybody wanted to see it. And now it's out there. There you go. Next month, the Rogue One New Hope video comes out.

  322. And there you go. Rolls right into it. No credits. No nothing. We talked about The Circle, the book by Dave Eggers a long time ago. I friggin' hated that book. Yeah. Well, now it's a movie. Great. I'll friggin' hate the movie. Yeah. I watched the trailer. I went to go see, when I went to go see Kong Skull Island, the trailer came up while we were waiting for the actual movie.

  323. 26 minutes of trailers, by the way. Thank you very much. 26 minutes. And this is why I stay home and watch new movies on my goo bang. Exactly here. Mugu Gaipan is what I'm going to call it from now on. And I was watching this and it reminded me a hell of a lot of the movie Antitrust from a long time ago, from 2001.

  324. Right. With Ryan Phillippe. I liked Antitrust a lot. Okay. I am of three people who actually like that movie a lot. And this trailer just reminded me, I just had flashbacks of Antitrust when I was watching this trailer.

  325. I have, I never saw Antitrust. I hadn't watched the Circle trailer either. You have them both in our show notes. And as you were talking about them, I was just randomly clicking through on the YouTube video, bringing up stills for both. Yeah. The trailers look almost exactly shot for shot the same.

  326. That's what I'm saying. I mean, it's ridiculous. I don't know what they're saying. I don't know what they're doing. But when I just click, click, click on the top on the Circle trailer and then go down and click, click, click on Antitrust, it just looks like older haircuts. That's what I'm saying.

  327. It is so, it is uncannily similar that, you know, if you watch Antitrust, you're going to get the gist of the Circle. Because I think Dave Eggers got the idea when he was drunk one night and watched Antitrust. Because it's really, really close.

  328. But I enjoyed Antitrust. I thought it was a fun movie. I mean, it was like the first Hacker movie after Hackers came out. Right. It was like five years later. But we had a dry spell there for a bit. But, yeah, I liked Antitrust a lot. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

  329. And now Joanne Wick is apparently out. Also known as Atomic Blonde. Charlize Theron's version of John Wick as a woman does not really kind of get me going.

  330. I'm not that crazy into it. This is the restricted trailer and they use that so they can have some lesbian sex scenes. Which are, you know, better than the fight scenes, I would have to say. But, yeah. No, I mean, it looks okay, but not mind-blowing.

  331. Since I talked about John Wick on the show, I thought I had to throw that in there. And I did watch Dave Chappelle's two specials on Netflix that came out this week. If you watch the first episode, it is disconcerting how much he rubs his tummy. Well, you know, he's taken a few months off and done some good eating.

  332. A few years off. But there's another show from Austin that comes right after it where he's got completely different body language. It's weird. If you'd like to watch body language and try and figure out what people are doing, you're going to look at this and you cannot stop watching him rub his tummy. I'm sorry to ruin it for you.

  333. It's just one of those things that I'm just like, what the hell is going on here? His flight was delayed for the second special, so when he got to Austin, he couldn't do the barbecue joint first. So no belly rubbing. No belly rubbing. His belly was empty on that one, so he couldn't rub it. Yes. But anyway, they were good.

  334. They were really good. I just wanted to finish up with that. I really enjoyed both of them. He's in full form. Excellent. Speaking of people coming back, Riot have announced plans for their new album called Weather Diaries. It will be released June 16th. I'm very excited about this. They're one of the old shoegaze bands that I've loved that has done their reunion recently.

  335. I thought they had a reunion. Yeah, I was going to say, didn't they have a reunion last year? Reunion tour. Now they've actually recorded an entire new album. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. So grown men were in tears at the concert. That's how good they were. So looking forward to the new album. The new songs are pretty decent. And Gorillaz are also coming back with a new album, which I'm quite looking forward to as well.

  336. An awful lot of guest stars on this one, including Grace Jones, Carly Simon, and Mavis Staples, three people that you would never expect to be on an album together. So quite interesting. We'll see. Gorillaz has always been hit or miss for me. I definitely applaud their experimental nature, but that doesn't necessarily mean I always like their music.

  337. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, not really that into them, but I am into Rammstein. I know. Yes, and they have a new DVD coming out called Paris, and there's a video in the show notes that is their ad for it. It's on pre-order for DVD. It will be coming out in digital soon, and as soon as it comes out in digital, I will be buying it, because they're on tour in the U.S. for the first time in a very long time, but they're only doing stadium shows.

  338. Well, you know, we're kind of open to a lot of things from Germany that we haven't been to in the past with this new administration. Well, no, that's Russia, by the way. I was thinking Nazis. Oh, okay. You're going to go there. You're going to go down. You had to say the N-word. Okay.

  339. Bannon started it. But I saw Rammstein at the Palladium. Were you there for one of those? No, I've actually never seen Rammstein live. Oh, okay. I saw him twice at the Hollywood Palladium. The first time, they almost set the place on fire, because that was before they had to tone down the lead singer on fire.

  340. Right. But both times, I was close enough to feel the heat when they set him on fire for the first song, and I cannot imagine going to see him at a stadium show. It would be just like watching TV, so I'm just going to rent it on TV. Okay. We're on of the week.

  341. We hate Flash. Yes, we do. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. I was trying. Bane of the universe. Yes, Bane of the universe. FedEx will now give you $5 to reinstall it, because their print center, when you need to print things that come from FedEx, only works in Flash, and they apparently can't hire any developers, but instead, they will just give you $5 on your next order that's over $30.

  342. Thank you, FedEx, for bringing us back into the Stone Age. Oh, God, that's spectacularly stupid. Unbelievable. All right. Well, that's dumb. Speaking of dumb, hoverboards. Hoverboards have had lots of problems, including a very highly disputed argument over who created the hoverboards, who owns the IP, and the copyrights on such things, and of course, you know, them exploding because of the batteries being used.

  343. And the fact that they don't hover. Also, the name is also a problem, but Mark Cuban is getting involved. He decided to get involved way back in 2015 and decided to buy the patent rights from Shane Chen, who he's decided is the creator of the hoverboard. I thought Segway was the big one.

  344. Well, see, he's backed away from it now. They backed away from it because they weren't sure about the IP rights, and they want to make sure it's Mark Cuban. So if he's involved, they have to be pretty sure. So instead, he's now started his own company called Radical Transport, or at least he's funding a company called Radical Transport to create a hoverboard called the MOV, M-O-O-V.

  345. Not much is known about it specifically, except for the fact that they are going to Kickstarter it. Because Mark Cuban has no money. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Billionaire must be broke. Mark Cuban wants your money to build something that will make him money.

  346. Way to go, Mark. I guess that's how you become a billionaire. Yeah, yeah. Most billionaires I know are cheap motherfuckers. Yep. Brick-a-brick. Hey, Brian. Mm-hmm. Won't you head down to Sesame Street?

  347. I love that show. I cannot wait to show that show to my child. Yes, yes. Apparently, they've been trolling Donald Trump for decades. Well, they don't need his money anymore, so maybe they knew in advance that they'd be going to HBO. Well, it also helps, though, that they're funded by, their distribution is funded by PBS.

  348. So if we lose PBS, which looks very, very likely nowadays. It's on the chopping block, yes. It is on the chopping block. Then they won't get the distribution. Yeah, even though it would cost much less to fund PBS than to put Melania up in New York for one year.

  349. Or go golfing for a weekend. Every weekend, yes. Yeah, motherfucker. So, yeah, they had a character named Ronald Grump. And now they have Donald Grump from the 90s.

  350. But, yeah, Ronald Grump, back in the 80s, was basically a land developer who wanted to do high-rise of garbage cans and was trying to screw Oscar the Grouch out of his land. Awesome. That is just genius. Go back and watch the bit from the link in the show notes.

  351. I was watching it before the show, and I'm just like, oh, my God. This is spot on. It is so spot on. That's awesome. And the New York Times has an article that says, should 15,000 steps a day be our new exercise target?

  352. Betteridge's law would say no, but the study says yes. This comes from Glaswegian postal workers. They got a bunch of Glaswegian postal workers to sign on for this, and they had to wear fitness monitors. And the people who had to walk all day, because they don't really have, like, postal trucks.

  353. They actually literally walk around Glasgow and deliver the mail. Those guys were, like, fit as a fiddle. The people who worked in the office, not so much. Shocking. Yeah, yeah, go figure. Exercise makes you healthier. Yes.

  354. But this really comes down to coronary heart disease risk and larger waist circumference. Go figure again. But the coronary heart disease is what I care about. And, you know, like, I'm struggling to get to 10,000 steps a day because I'm still getting into spring here.

  355. But when I was doing 20,000 steps a day back in L.A., I was dropping weight like a fiend. And, you know, now it's just like coming out of winter. I'm like a big, giant grizzly trying to shed my coat. But I want to get to 20,000 again. But I think 15,000 steps a day should be the new target.

  356. Because 10,000 really just isn't that much. It's not that much. You can do that by accident. Yeah. So, I mean, I know a lot of people just don't get up and walk. And it's just, you know, I've just changed a lot of things that where I would have done it for time, I would have, you know, hopped in the car.

  357. I just make sure I make the time and I do a walk. And you can get the steps easy. I average between 14 and 17 a day. So. Oh, good for you. That's good. Yeah. So this last one is from this songwriter and singer Kai Wei. Right. From Kansas, surprisingly enough.

  358. This reminded me of you walking around Venice and bitching about people all the time. It's a video of her walking around doing like kind of a mix of her singing with like a keyboard and whatever the hell it is on her chest. Making a song while she's walking. And it's this would not be out of place.

  359. I could very easily see this happen is basically when I walk out my front door. I do note the complete lack of anybody walking around with consent forms. Right. The thing about this, though, is I think she's pretty fucking talented. You didn't think so? You're you're you're you're you're you're an ex professional musician.

  360. You're not a professional musician anymore. So but you're an ex professional musician. I mean, there's there's a talent to it. I don't particularly care for it. But you and I have very differing tastes in music. Oh, no, no. I you would never hear this on my fucking playlist. But I think she's got talent. Like if you go through her Vimeo videos, she's she can do like, you know, really good stuff.

  361. It's just not it's not my music. But I thought it was just really fun that she's walking around doing this in Kansas. You know, it's like nobody is safe. Nobody is safe. I'm still surprised that it's Kansas, because when you the videos in the show notes, I scanned through the video and I was like this.

  362. Well, there's that's a lot of white people walking in the street for like a Korea, which is what I assume this was done in. Well, I think she's Hawaiian. Yeah, I would guess Hawaiian from the name. She's very cute. But it's funny. Like I looked at her Twitter feed and she's like, I never knew I walked like a trucker until I saw this video.

  363. That's funny. But and there's also a lot of mullets in the video. But yes, before Warren, but it's a it's a cute song. And I think she's got talent. But it just reminded me that Venice is not the only place where there are people out there doing this shit every day, day in, day out. No, it is not.

  364. Feedback loop. We got some iTunes reviews. The first is from a five star review from Rob Lockstuff from Australia. He says, wake up, sheeple. It's a great tech culture podcast. It's beaut, mate. Pretty she more couldn't be more Australian than that. Yep.

  365. Love it. Love it. So thank you. Thank you. Next one comes from California Vandal. Another five star. My favorite tech podcast. My favorite tech podcast. Again, I appreciate the book section. I may not read, but I have audible. Yeah, brother. Way to go. I like getting new recommendations.

  366. Absolutely. My favorite tech podcast. We I think we've heard that before. We appreciate that again. This is what happens for people that don't read. They are. Hey, hey, watch it. Don't be fucking with my audible brethren. Brethren. I don't know what a brethren is.

  367. That's also something that someone would say if they didn't read. That's what somebody would also say when they had a little Jameson and they're really fucking tired. They are relevant and hilarious. A lethal combination. Like the Bittner security section to its security wire gone wild with Dave Bittner.

  368. Natural born pessimist who's been getting up to date with what's happening in the tech world. No better podcast for it than this. Well, thank you, California Vandal. And go break some glass. Yes. Thank you so much. And another five star rating this week came in from Kid Cootie.

  369. A great show came across this pod. Yeah. He called it a pod, Jason. Around February. And it's now one of my favorites. It's it's it's instant download and listen status to me now. All right. Thank you, man. Thanks, Kid Cootie. Thank you very much. And Nick McNulty writes on Twitter.

  370. I heard it was not going to be a reboot, but a continuation. And we're talking about here the Matrix. So the reboot writer says it's not a reboot. And we have a link to Dark Horizons. And I don't care. Just stop. I don't either. The problem.

  371. The problem with the Matrix is they killed it with with the two follow up movies, which I actually I'll just say the last one, because the second one still could have been saved if the third one would have been great, but it wasn't. And I don't give a crap if it's a reboot or continuing the story or anything. Who cares?

  372. No, they killed it. They fucked it up. They literally shit the Matrix bed on that. And, you know, speaking of fucking it up, I mean, the first release put out or the first, you know, was all about how it's going to be a remake. So they had the writer had to come out immediately and say, no, wait, wait, wait. No, that's not what we're doing.

  373. So whatever. Who cares? Yeah. No, just leave it alone. Leave Keanu alone. Yeah. And then we got a tweet from Ivertola who says, you guys mentioned Philip K. Dick in your last podcast and thought you might like this from the BBC. This is a link to a BBC Radio 4 show called Seriously.

  374. I was Philip K. Dick's reluctant host. Michael Walsh talks about the challenging time when writer Philip K. Dick shared his home. It's about 30 minutes long. I didn't get the chance to actually finish it. So I apologize. Yeah, I scanned it. I just didn't have time. Busy week. Busy week. And Nathan Reitzma again writes in, here's a nifty site for you to use for new books to read.

  375. It may be useful for at the library and it's projectalexandria.net. I played around with this for a bit. It's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You put in a book and it gives you like related books in a cool little like thing. I think you have to use flash though.

  376. It may have activated my flash. We don't like that. We don't like that. No. But either way, it's still fun to play with. Yeah. They're not giving me five bucks like FedEx, but still check it out. It's fun. Yep.

  377. Pretty fun. And Andreas Krohn wrote in, GOG podcast is Ukrainian firmware more or less dangerous than a Chinese router and gave us the link that we talked about in the security segment. So thank you for sending that our way. And, you know, brilliant minds think alike. Yes. Now, here's the next one.

  378. This comes from a just fan. Yes. I think it might have been supposed to be just a fan, but this is from the website. Yep. As per your request for listener comments regarding guests, answer, no guests, no soup, no guests. The last guy really sucked and broke the rhythm of the show.

  379. Thank you, Zane Lamprey, for breaking our show. Well, you know, he was on to pimp a product. He wasn't just here. And that was just us being fanboys, too, because we love Zane and we wanted him on the show and we got him, so we had to do it. So cut us some slack on that one. The existing format, including Dave Bittner in the security segment, is perfect as is.

  380. Don't change it. P.S. Here we go. P.S. I'm not a Trump supporter, nor Hillary, nor Bernie. Your slight against Kellyanne Conway was unfair. First, she's no loser. Look at where the working class Jersey girl goes to work every day in the skyrocketing of her hourly rate.

  381. Second, she was not off base on the camera in the microwave comment. Oh, please, please give me a fucking break. You guys are always talking about the coming IOT apocalypse. IOT manufacturers are sticking cameras in everything and everywhere. Leo Laporte said yesterday on his Twit podcast that his oven has a camera in it, which he can control with an app to watch the turkey cook.

  382. So give Kellyanne a break. She has four kids, a husband, the media and Trump to manage for all our sakes. Um, no, no, no, no, no. Never forget the Bowling Green massacre. She is unqualified for her job.

  383. She is unqualified to be anywhere near a TV camera. No, I will not. I will not. Yeah, I, I, you know, look, it'd be one thing if she did be a culpas and like, oh, I'm sorry about that whole microwave thing.

  384. That is kind of silly. And you're, you're really going out on a limb to try to, to try to give her a fucking break on that one. She's an idiot. That's not what she meant. She's a moron. She has no idea what she's talking about with security stuff. That part, that stuff was ridiculous. And she sticks by it. Again, there's the problem with everything that she's done.

  385. She would have come out and said, oh, the Bowling Green massacre. I'm sorry. I got super confused. Didn't mean anything. No, she doesn't. She sticks by it. It's false information. She's the one that came up with alternative facts. Fuck her. Go to Amazon right now and send me a link to a microwave with a camera in it that faces not at the food, but at the user.

  386. And I will take back everything I just said. I'm glad I'm, look, I'm glad you're a fan and I appreciate it. But yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not, not backing down on this one. Also, you expect me to believe that Trump's ever used a microwave? Well, he has chefs that bring him food.

  387. He's not, he's not rolling up at 3 a.m. Trump steak, Trump steak, talking, talking state secrets on his Android phone. And, and punching up a batch of nachos. Trump steaks. He's got it. He's got people for everything. Anyways. Yeah. No, not giving a break, but thanks for liking the show.

  388. Hopefully you still do. Yeah. Our next one came from Roz Thomas. I've been a proud supporter of your show for a while now, and I've enjoyed many of your at the library suggestions. All these people are coming out of the woodwork that actually read. Yeah, it's great. It's pretty nice. Well, except for you to scroll up and talk to the guy who doesn't read, but likes audible.

  389. Yeah, my brother. But yeah, he had to shit on him. You had to shit on him, but continue. I was more shitting on you through him. He's a, he's a conduit. He is the chip to your salsa. Yeah. Yeah. I have recently had a coworker recommend a couple of books I enjoyed and I'd like to share them with you.

  390. They may be a bit out of your comfort zone, but they all have a comedic theme that you both might appreciate and could use to break up your binge reading. He has a list. We'll put those in the show notes. I won't read through all of them, but thank you for sending your suggestions. You don't regularly mention fantasy fiction beyond Sir Terry Pratchett, but that's because the only other one I've really read is Piers Anthony and the Xanth series, which I really liked when I was 12.

  391. Yeah. I'm not a fan. I'm not a fantasy guy. So yeah, but I would also recommend hard magic book. One of the Grimnor series by Larry Correa is read by Bronson. Oh my God. He's one of your people. Bronson Pinchot is a fucking great reader. He's a great reader. Yep.

  392. Here I thought he actually read. All right. Please keep up the great work and don't let the haters get you down. You're the one that put the goddamn link in the show notes that said, listening to audiobooks is just as effective as reading a book. So stop it. Stop it. Sometimes I do things for comic effect, so then you step on it.

  393. Yeah, well. Like you just did. Well, you know what? You totally stepped on it. You put your dick out there, I'm going to step on it. Somebody's had a lot of Jameson. And I'll keep my eyes peeled on my next trip to Pittsburgh and see if Uber is still functioning downtown. If my GPS doesn't work there for the hills and buildings, I don't see how theirs does.

  394. If you want your questions or comment read on the show and get your dick stepped on, please head over to GOG.show. I'm just going to step on your read now. How's that feel? All right. Finish it up then, bro. And send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. Thank you. Closing shout outs.

  395. No shout outs this week, but I'll give a shout out to my ornery co-host who's had Jameson and I'm painfully sober. So until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And that's your own fault. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like, and research whether Jason was really wrong about the whole thing that he keeps saying he's not wrong about.

  396. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show.support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show.about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show.202.

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