203: What Really Grinds Our Gears

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, you know what we forgot last week? No. It was our four-year anniversary. Wow, well, look at us. I know. We are grumpy old podcasters now. We are. Four years. Jesus. If we don't make any money by that 10th episode, we're out.

I know. I should have been out, let's see, 193 episodes ago. But, yeah. Here I am. Still doing it. Hey, man, that's stick-to-itiveness. Yeah, it's really getting us somewhere. It is. It's nice. And, you know, we have a pretty decent following now, which I would like to point out to new podcasters, takes a long time.

It is really hard. It takes a very long time. And it is very hard. And then they just start, like, commenting everywhere. And you have to keep up with that. And it's even more work. So good times. Yeah, yeah. But now there's, like, a little bit of money. There's some beer money. So we can, like, at least, you know, have a six-pack and reply to everybody. That is very true.

I do like the beer money. Yeah. But it's a grind, you know? And you've got to stick with it. Audience building is hard. Let's just say that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember back in the first episodes we were doing, we were talking about the 10,000 being the magic number and how to get to the group and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we've been doing all that. And I think that article is still floating out there, that whole concept of the 10,000, which I do believe needs to be updated. Well, no, no, no. What you're talking about is Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans. Ah, right. Okay. Yeah, we were talking about 10,000 as the threshold that we needed to get for advertising.

But that was four years ago, and there were about 200,000 less podcasts. So that number has moved, again, out of our range. Yes, that's the thing about these numbers is they keep getting bigger, and we keep staying smaller. Yeah. Well, we're growing. The GOG army is at least 10,000 strong now, but we don't have 1,000 true fans yet.

So you guys get on that. Get on that, please. Yeah, get on that. I mean, some people are helping out here. Speaking about the beer money, I took a quick look at our Amazon store, and some of you folks out there are actually clicking through and buying some stuff from there. We shifted some Laundry Files books. Awesome. And definitely some Goo Bangs and some keyboards have been shifted, and the headphones as well.

So there you go. Yeah, and if you guys got the Goo Bang, like, drop me an email, you know, jpd.me. I want to hear how it's going with you. I haven't had time to go back to it, because there's some more toys that I got this week that we'll talk about later, and apps and doodads. But I want to hear what your experience is with it, because I found out some other things that you can do with those little Android boxes, like, you know, do some old Nintendo emulation and play some old games on it that I really want to dig into.

Nice. Okay. Cool. In our little show notes here, you're like, hey, we should do a little landing page to let people click through and buy stuff on Amazon like Adam Carolla does. I said, Allah, with the obvious caveat that, of course, his is crap. His whole website's crap. I didn't use that as the stellar example of how to do things, which is how you always respond.

Well, you know, I'm just saying. Dude, you're stepping on my bit here. It's your turn this week to step on my bits. I did it to you last week. You did it all last show, so this time it's, I'm preemptively getting ahead of you being a dick. Okay.

Well, I went to AdamCarolla.com slash Amazon, where they talk about on tons of shows, and they're like, click on the banner and, you know, put some wind in the sails of the pirate ship. Well, they aren't wrong. There is a banner there, and it says support the pirate ship, so technically spot on.

But it doesn't support the pirate ship, because when you click on it, it just makes the PNG bigger. And you don't go to Amazon. Oh, I did not notice that. That was the whole point. You got to click on the link. It doesn't do anything. So, obviously, the pirate ship, they put all the web designers in the brig. Yes.

Yeah, that's like, how do you distort a PNG? What do you mean, distort? Like, it looks distorted. Like, the text is all, it's just bad. Height and width. You just change the height and width on it, you know? Yeah, it's just bad. Oh, no, you know what they did? I can tell you right now.

They opened up the PNG, and they used an aliased font. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, that's old school. Like, man, that's like font 101. That's bad. Wow. Well, they do not have a web designer over there. That's for sure. No, but they have a, you know, a podcasting empire, so.

Yes, they do. And they have more listeners than us, so. But we'll make more money on Amazon than Adam Carolla. That will be our claim to fame. I'm sure we have at this point, so. Yeah. Because since you can't click through. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. I found a great article, and I put this in follow-up, and when I put it in here, I knew what it was following up.

For the life of me right now, I can't remember what it was following up, but it's a great piece anyway. We were talking a lot about this pre-election. Lead-up to the election was how, you know, there was just a lot of people that were rejecting science and experts, and, you know, the opinion, your opinion is just as important as an expert's fact.

Ah, that's right. That's right. I mean, this was a huge thing that was going on in the media, and we were talking about a lot in the lead-up to the election, only to discover that, hey, yeah, that's right. That is exactly what happened. Okay, so this is the article that we're talking about, by the way. It's from ScienceAlert.com.

It says, Stephen Hawking says we're in the middle of a, quote-unquote, global revolt against experts. He says, we need to invest more time and money studying the implications of artificial intelligence, which he noted will either be the best or worst thing to ever happen to humanity. I agree.

And he also says, we spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity, which is one of the greatest quotes I've ever heard. It's a good quote. Reminds me of the Sting song, History Will Teach Us Nothing. Ah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. So that's all very good. I have some follow-up as well. We talked last week about the retail apocalypse, one of our other new fun favorite topics, and how that's all dying. I have to take a trip soon, and I needed to actually get some things. I'm going to a wedding, and I needed to basically get a new coat and things like that because I don't buy suits on the regular, and the only one I currently have is my wedding one.

And I slimmed down a lot for that, and I've cleared up since then. I've unslimmed since then. Let's just say it didn't quite fit. So I did need to head out and go get a coat. So I went down to the Third Street Promenade, which is an outdoor shopping center here in Santa Monica, where we have lovely weather and lots of tourists, and there is a lot of foot traffic.

This is a busy place. If there was any mall in the country that I would expect to basically be chock-a-block full of shoppers and shops just spilling out everywhere, it would be this one. There were a lot of people, but there's next to nothing in stock in stores anymore.

Because everybody's too busy taking selfies to go buy anything, so the stores are going out of business, especially at the Promenade. People were definitely going into stores, and basically the refrain I heard in every single store that I was in, and I was stuck with it as well, is, Oh, yeah, well, you know, you can get that from our online store.

Ah, yes. And that's all you hear in real retail, you know, brick-and-mortar places these days. And they carry next to nothing. It's such a difference from even two years ago. I mean, stores look empty now. They really do. It's a little frightening.

So I am on board with this retail apocalypse really happening because it was shocking, because I haven't gone to a mall in ages, so I'm part of the problem. I went to a mall this week myself. Did you? Did you experience the same thing, or did you find it chock-a-block full of wonderful things?

Well, my problem is I went to the Oak Brook shopping mall to go to Basitai this week, which is excellent, and it was raining and cold. It was like, you know, 40 degrees and raining. So it's kind of hard to tell. And it also, like the promenade, is an outdoor mall where you can walk around.

And in the summer, there usually is a lot of foot traffic, but that day there was nobody. And I did go to the Apple store because I was thinking of picking up an iPad mini. Yes. Until I – this is what happens every time. I'm like, I'd like to have an iPad mini to read in bed because the Kindle's okay, but it doesn't have everything I need.

Then I get there and I put my giant iPhone 7 Plus next to the iPad mini and go, yep, that's not – those pixels are not worth 400 bucks. So then I went home. Yeah. Yeah, the gigantic thing, you don't need an iPad mini.

Yeah. You basically have one that's missing about an inch. Yeah, I've got an iPad Pro. The problem is you can't read on it in bed because it's just too big. It's very light but too big. But the only – I think the only thing keeping that mall open is the Apple store because it was packed.

It was completely packed. Yeah, the Apple store was packed at Third Street as well. And apparently sneakers and special sneaker sales are still a big deal because there was a line going up to a shoe store because they were releasing some sort of sneaker. Who you people are that line up to get a sneaker is beyond me, but it happens.

Because you're old. You don't get – you don't get the kids. I didn't care when I was young either, Jason. Now, if there were – whoa, a limited edition pair of Doc Martin boots is coming out. Well, maybe. Old Docs. I did line up for a pair of Michael Jordan 2s when they came out because they were the best skate shoes.

They were made. Excellent. Yes. Weird. Yeah. Well, okay, Doc Martin boy. Like, you know, 45-year-old or 41-year-old, however the hell 40s you are, needs a pair of combat boots nowadays. They're comfortable. Not anymore. Not since they changed the formula on the sole.

Those things wear through in a week. I haven't bought a new pair. I still have a pair that I've had for 15 years now. That's my point. That's my point. Those lasted. If you went and bought a new pair, you'd wear through them in two weeks. They totally screwed them up. Well, that sucks. Yeah, it does. This episode is coming out on Monday the 3rd, so we are actually missing April 1st.

It's a Saturday this year, which I think is a fantastic thing because April 1st is like the day that you can't use the internet, that you shouldn't even bother listening to radio or anything. So we've missed it, but I do have a great meme about it that was posted on the day. Ah, the 1st of April.

The only day of the year that people critically evaluate things they find on the internet before accepting them as true. Ah, well, some people don't critically actually evaluate things. I got a phone call this morning with a voicemail saying, Hey, is that Google Gnome thing cool? I want to get one for my mom because it would look good in her garden.

I haven't even seen that one. I shit you not, yes. The Google Gnome instead of the Google Home. It was pretty funny. Well, again, like I said, the nice thing about it being on Saturday is it's not as prevalent as it usually is. In the news.

So, Brian, the 2016 U.S. mobile app report is out from Comscore. Okay. I'm excited to hear the news about apps because I was just going to get back into building them again for people. Digital media time in the U.S. continues to increase, growing more than 50% in the past three years, with nearly 90% of that growth directly attributable to the mobile app.

The mobile app being Facebook? That's the thing. The mobile app in general. Oh, okay. Here comes the caveat. Yes. The average smartphone user downloads zero, maybe one app per month. Yeah, that sounds about right.

When they get their phone, they get the apps that they want. They get their Facebook, their Snapchat, and their Instagram, and then fuck off. Yeah, and a lot of people, you know, most people now are watching TV on their phones. They're streaming their shows. They're using Netflix. They're using Hulu. They're using these small core group of apps that almost everybody has, and that's that.

The interesting thing about this is you put this in the show notes, and I actually, I will not mention the name of the company, but I may be doing some consulting with a company that does mobile apps, and as I was speaking with them, they were talking about their amazing – you can tell a lot more about a company from the statistics that they put up than the statistics that they don't.

So there was a lot of statistics about how sticky things were and how the engagement rates within people who are using the app are so much higher than anything that you could get on social media. There was zero statistics about how many active users they actually have and how many user – what their user growth was.

And this was in the back of my mind the whole time going, nobody's downloading apps. That's true. Yeah. So that'll be interesting. I may talk about that more in the future. We'll see what happens. But, of course, I do still need to pay the rent – well, the mortgage. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting. My friend Kevin Rose is building a new app for meditation, and he's doing it live on Facebook, which has a – he's got a private Facebook group with over 10,000 people in it, which doesn't sound very private to me.

No. And they're documenting the entire app creation process. I've got to remember to put that in the notes because everybody should check it out from his newsletter. But, yeah, it's interesting that, you know, why? Why build an app nowadays?

I do wonder why, especially a meditation app because that's a pretty saturated market. There are three or four apps already out there that are really, really good for that. Yeah. Headspace owns the market. You know? Yeah. You know, the one that we, like, Buddhify, they're still around and still doing well.

I mean, they've got, you know, hundreds of millions of minutes that people have listened to. My thing is I just – I stopped using all of them. I just – I got too much shit to do to meditate. And I know that – and people tell you if you have too much shit to do to meditate, you're the person that should be meditating the most.

Yes. No, I just think the app thing is really interesting. We've kind of felt that way for a long time. We've talked about it on and off throughout the years. But now we're seeing the hard numbers. And, yeah, if you've got a new app, good luck. I mean, it's very, very slim pickings out there.

It really is. Yeah. So what you going to do – what you going to do when they come for you? The Bad Boys app. Bad Boys. Bad Boys. I don't know. Speaking of apps – Yes. A little boy in England saved his mummy's life by using Siri.

Okay. Apparently, she had passed out, and he grabbed her phone, used her cold, lifeless finger to open her iPhone, and said, Siri, call help for my mummy. And it called 999.

They came, and they saved her life. That's great. Which is a pretty cool little story. I like that story a lot. I still don't remember. Do our mobiles connect to 911 here? Because I know that was a big deal for a while, that they couldn't and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, only if you're using, like, VoIP.

You know, your in-home phones can't. Oh, right, right. If you're getting it over, like, Time Warner and stuff like that, they're getting better with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't the mobile. It was all the VoIP stuff. Yeah, yeah. Because even my – there's, like, an SOS mode on my Apple Watch. If I, like, do a certain set of things, it will call 911 for me, which is pretty cool.

I immediately turned that off because I like alcohol. Yeah. The last thing I need are the cops showing up, so. That's a good point. We spent a lot of time talking about how there are no jobs and jobs are going away and being replaced by AI and whatnot.

Well, there are 473 jobs out there that have just been announced, and they're pretty cool jobs. So, give it up for Elon Musk. Once again, this is over at SpaceX. They have announced 473 different positions. This is – I would work for this company. I did peruse the listings.

But, unfortunately, I'm not in any situation where I can take a full-time gig right now, which sucks for me, especially since they're kind of local to me. Their global headquarters is just being a bit south of where I'm at right now. 113 of those positions are here in California. The rest are sprinkled across the country.

If you are looking for a job, this is all over the map. This is not just engineers and technicians, machinists, specialists, managers, directors. Even they're looking for a barista to help out in the location. I mean, this guy – That would be the job that you're qualified for out of this list.

Actually, probably not. I'm shit at coffee, so. You would be a manager or a director. Yes, I would be in the manager or director, which is what I would have looked for. But, again, I'm not capable of doing a full-time gig right now. But for those of you out there that are looking for a change, I mean, SpaceX seems to be a pretty badass company.

They've got some good things going on. They just nailed another – they just nailed another launch, right? They relaunched a rocket for the first time? A historic launch. They relaunched the payload section, which was like a major thing. It's never been done before. That's amazing. So, you know, there's jobs out there at a damn good company.

Take them while they're still around until AI takes it all over. Yeah, we definitely wouldn't have been in the specialist department. I think check out episode, like, 12 on that one where we're like, be a generalist, not a specialist. Well, I guess not if you want to work at SpaceX. Not if you want to work anymore. No, that's not true.

I still – That's not true. There's still places for – I still stand by the fact that that managers, directors, project managers, all of that sort of stuff should be generalists that have an understanding of the entire situation in which they are working. And it's a way better place to be.

I 100% agree. Yeah. And it's interesting. I was listening to the upcoming episode of The Art of Charm that comes out on Tuesday with Scott Adams last night doing my spot checks on it. And that's one of his core tenets is, like, you don't have to be great at everything.

You just have to be, you know, pretty good at a lot of things. And that stack is what's going to make you great because, you know, that's where the generalists really kind of shine, where we've always done it. So, I thought that was kind of fun. Now, getting back to Elon Musk, great article in Vanity Fair.

Have you read this article? I skimmed it. I didn't get to finish it. It's very long. That's the problem. Yeah. I read it. I read it. I fortunately was testing out a new method of making hard-boiled eggs today, so I had a lot of time on my hands. And this was a great article on Elon Musk's crusade against AI.

Yeah. He is like, you know, AI, like the Don Quixote in AI is his windmill. It's really good, though. I was really, like, you know, engaged and enthralled with his whole story. I like the story. I like his position.

I just don't know how you stop it from happening. You know, you can sit down on that Pandora's box all you want, but you're not heavy enough, Musk. Well, let's get to the next story in the list, because this is his answer to unregulated AI. Yeah. Let's just make it part of us.

Let's have human-AI hybrids. And he started a new company called Neuralink that is basically trying to make brain-computer interfaces so the meat can talk to the machine. Now, this is a company I would definitely go work for. You put this in the show notes.

Our mutual friend, Wendy Marvel, emailed this to me immediately. I had three other friends text me this article, because I've talked about how I want to do this forever. I've always said, you know, I want to live forever. I want to download myself into a computer. This is perfect.

I love this idea. You know, this is the direction it should go. I love this. You want to be Neo Schulmeister. I know Kung Fu. Whoa. Yeah. So we'll see how this plays out. But, you know, hey, it's Elon Musk. He's doing crazy stuff.

He's doing a few too many things right now at this point. I'm like, I mean, he's basically just a venture capitalist at this point. We act like he's running all these countries. He's just starting up things that are interesting to him. He's still the CEO of these joints, so he's, you know. And Andy dumped his second wife because he didn't have time for her.

And if you've seen his second wife, this guy's dedicated. This guy's really, really dedicated. Yeah. He likes to work a lot more than I do. That's all I got to say. I would say, yes. Would you like to buy my company? I'm going to stay home with the lady this week.

Good God. The man's got drive. Way more drive than I do. Yeah. Well, you know who else has drive? Samsung. Oh, Samsung. What did they do this time? They're working really, really hard to stay on brand. Because one of their stores literally caught fire.

Poor Samsung. Yes. A Samsung store in Singapore caught fire Tuesday morning, a day before the company was set to announce its new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8. The Galaxy 7s are the ones that notoriously spontaneously combusted left, right, and center. So, yeah, so they've got a store at the AMK Hub Shopping Center that basically just caught on fire overnight.

The cause of the fire has yet to be determined, but it supposedly involves contents measuring one meter by two meters in the showroom, which sounds like a box of cell phones. Sounds like a box of cell phones. Oh, man. Well done, Samsung. You've really captured that market, and you're sticking with it.

I want to see the video of Tim Cook going in there with, like, you know, some gasoline. He's sneaking in. Yep. Say, these guys aren't coming back. We're taking over. Black turtleneck pulled over his head. Yeah. Okay, somebody go make that graphic. We need it for the show notes.

We definitely do. And another good graphic that you could potentially be making right now, Jennifer Lopez on a hoverboard. Okay. So, a hoverboard company called, let's see, Sidekick, which used to be one of my favorite phones. I miss that phone. It was a good phone.

The danger. The danger Sidekick. In 2015, furnished Jennifer Lopez with 42 custom hoverboards to be used in her Las Vegas show, which I'm sure was fantastic. What's a hoverboard? Hoverboard. Hey, man, you started it.

I'm being, I'm just, I gotta, I gotta get my punches in. I think if we went back in the show, uh, to, from episode one on, while you're scrubbing looking for who is right about the security argument, you can also discover that you're probably the person that started the picking on the, the, uh, different things that we say. Uh, that would be, no, actually that was out of show.

Yeah. That was the grind that grind life guys. That was Chris and Seth that brought that up and started that for you. That's true. So anyways, Sidekick gave her 42 custom hoverboards to be used as part of her, I'm sure scintillating Las Vegas show, uh, the agreement being in exchange for the hoverboard, she would post about them on social media every three months.

So, uh, unfortunately she only posted one time. She did not keep up, uh, she did not keep up her end of the deal. So they are suing her, but they are only suing her for the retail value of all the free hoverboards, which is approximately $54,000, no legal fees, no damages, just the cost of the hoverboards, which is eminently reasonable for them, even though she broke the deal.

So pay up, JLo. Okay. Okay. Maybe she, maybe she sprained her thumbs while riding the hoverboard and couldn't tweet. Um, but the interesting thing is that they're not taking off a third of the deal because she did tweet once. So they should at least, you know, take off, knock off a third. Ah, she broke the deal.

Okay. Pay her, pay her for it. Anyways, this is JLo. I can't, I remember going, I went to the American music awards a couple of years back and she was performing at it too. And you're doing a performance on an award show and she comes out, uh, with a bunch of fiats. This is when she was getting paid money by fiat to promote everything.

I'm like, she rides out on the stage in a fucking fiat. I'm like, are you a musician or are you just a jingle maker at this point? What are you doing? It's all a commercial. Anyways, whatever. Now, Brian, let's get into some drone news. If lawmakers have their way, police in Connecticut will soon be using drones as lethal weapons against the citizens they're supposed to protect.

On Thursday, Connecticut's judiciary committee approved a new drone regulation bill that if passed would make it the first state in the union to let cops use deadly drones later this year. Oh, nice. Like there's like 12 people in Connecticut. What the hell?

Well, there's going to be about two by the time this is done. Drones equipped with tear gas, incendiary and explosive devices and remote deadly weapons. Nice. Yes. The state senator John Kissel told the AP, obviously this is for very limited circumstances.

Sure. We can certainly envision some incident on some campus or someplace where someone is a rogue shooter or someone was kidnapped and you tried to blow out a tire, which is at best a really crappy bullshit way to try to justify this. We do not weaponify drones.

No, not. And we do not use them against our own citizens. And we do not. If anything, drones and deadly drone force is purely military. It is not supposed to be part of the civil peacekeeping force. Well, we already did blow up that one shooter with a bomb robot, you know, one of the bomb defusing robots.

They strapped the explosives to it, drove it in and blew him up. Yeah. So there was there was some outrage about that. There was a lot of outrage about that. And the thing about drones, though, the problem is it we don't need that in the Internet of Things, you know, because as we've covered on this show a couple of times, they can be hijacked.

Right. They can easily be hijacked. And hell, if you just get a T-shirt gun and get close to one, you can take it down, then steal the gun. Then what are you going to do there? Think outside the box, guys. Now, DJI is proposing electronic license plates for their drones because they're trying to get around this issue that we've always talked about where, you know, it is these people are just doing really stupid things with drones.

We don't know who they are, like flying close to firefighters and stopping the planes from coming in and putting out the firefighter, putting out the fire. What they're proposing is a non-public database of license plates for drones. So law enforcement can like, you know, scan a drone like the tag in your dog.

And figure out who's running it and then go and find them and say, hey, cut it out. Is there really such a thing as a non-public database anymore? Ask Yahoo. Yeah, we'll get to that later. That was my original thought. I'm like, ain't no such thing. It's on a computer.

You can find it on the dark web. It's an interesting idea. And I think this is just a reactive measure by DJI with all of the crap that all the people buying their drones have gotten into. Well, as we discussed last week, they passed in Canada the fact that you have to write your name and address on your drone now.

You have to be able to identify it. It's like your underwear when you go to grade school. Yes. In case my drone shits my pants. Oh, that's the one thing I was thinking about. The cop cops with the killer drones. All they got to do is drop it on somebody. They don't even need to arm it. No, they don't.

Because if something that weighs 200 pounds drops out of the sky onto your head, you're going to die. Now, let's have some good news for a little bit. Okay. There was some Trump news this week. And, you know, we generally, we try to stay out of it for the most part.

It's difficult. But major American companies say thanks, but no thanks to Trump's environmental regulation rollbacks. In a joint statement responding to Trump's executive order, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, see, there's your tie-in, people, wrote, we believe that strong clean energy and climate policies, like the Clean Power Plan, can make renewable energy supplies more robust and address the serious threat of climate change while also supporting

American competitiveness, innovation, and job growth. Congratulations, guys. Well done. Well done. This one, this one is, this one's for you, Brian. I put this one in here just for you. Yes. Ah, Amazon quietly launches its own social media influencer program into beta.

Okay. Yes. If you have a following, like, oh, is it J-Lo? Like, yeah, or we do. Yeah. Yeah, we're huge. But if you have that big following and can rally the troops, they will let you into their program where you can talk about Amazon products and make money.

Hmm. Kind of like we do already. How is that different from the affiliate link program? You get a vanity URL. Oh. That makes it easy for customers to find, browse, and buy the products introduced to them through social media influencers like you.

Okay. That's lame. This already exists. You know, no offense, Amazon, but I've been doing that for about 15 years using your associate program with various different celebrities that I've been working for. Yeah. Well, you know what? They thought you were right, and they're taking the lead, and they're, instead of having to call you, Brian, you've just been Amazoned out of a job.

Oh, great. It happens. All right. Well, yeah. Other than getting your own URL, which you probably aren't going to use anyways, because you're probably going to use some sort of link tracker or short link system or whatever. Yeah.

Not much else going on there. There's no word if you get a higher kickback, which would be the only reason to do it. That would be the only reason to do it. Yep. I agree. It's just one of those things that I just thought you would get a kick out of. Ah, social media influencers. Pfft.

Security? Ha! Welcome back to Security Ha! Without Dave Bittner this week. Oh. It's just me and you, Bri. Yeah. I'm so used to him bringing the noise that I actually didn't put a damn thing in this section today.

Actually, no. I got two things. Okay. Good. Okay. Well, I loaded this up. Yes, I did notice that. Dave is in Arizona, I think at the Women in Cybersecurity Conference, which is cool and we'll hear about it next week for sure. Yes. First, I got a little follow-up on the airline ban for electronic items.

Yep. It has now come out, CNN was the first to release it because in their headline they say, first on CNN, which reminds me of all the idiots on AOL trying to sing first. First. I'm like, okay, CNN is now a teenager on AOL. Thank you. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies believe that ISIS and other terrorist organizations have developed innovative ways.

I just said innovative. I was not going to even say anything. Oh, man. Because I'm nice to you. Never. Innovative ways to plant explosives in electronic devices that FBI testing shows can evade some commonly used airport security screening methods.

And the crazy thing about this is the FBI is saying that ISIS and all of the terrorists have now gotten hold of some of the screening equipment that we use here in U.S. airports and are coming up with ways to get their laptops on the plane that they can go boom.

The interesting thing is, well, the screening equipment is not the ones that we use because they're coming from foreign airports. Right. Although, no, I take that back because we do have screeners. We have U.S. custom screeners at the gates, at least the last time I flew overseas, which was like 2009.

I went through security in Thailand. And then when I got to the gate, there was another screening that I had to go through. Right. Yeah, that's true. That's that's how it is in Canada as well. I really have to do double screening now. Yeah. Depending on where your final destination is, blah, blah, blah.

It's complicated. But yeah. So basically what you're telling me is that the whole thing that they tried to do is useless. No, I'm just saying that there was a reason for it. Oh, OK. The point is that they did have intelligence that these guys have been actually building these devices that can get past the screeners because now they have the technology to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Right. OK, well, that's not good. No, it's not. Yeah. Ah, well, let's get on to the other fun story of the week. Oh, yeah, that happened. ISPs will now be able to sell your data. You know, it is past the House and the Senate.

But the interesting thing is it's now in the hands of the president. He President Trump is the only one that can save us. And since the White House put out a press release saying that they are very happy with the results of the House and Senate votes, that you pretty much can kiss that one goodbye.

Really? Because I kind of figured, you know, Trump would actually come out for the people rather than the big companies making money. Well, what would make you think that? Just a feeling, probably because he ran around telling everybody that to get elected. This is the nightmare scenario that we've all been talking about for years that we knew was going to come and hopefully we were going to be able to defeat it.

But we we didn't. And guess what? You have no privacy anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's your web. It's your web browsing history. So anything that you browse going through your ISP can be sold to advertisers. Now, there's a lot of there's a lot of stories going around about this, like and we'll get to a couple of them here in a second.

But a lot of it isn't, you know, they're not going to sell. I can't go to them and say, can I have Brian Schulmeister's browsing activity, please? Sadly, no. I wish I could. I really wish I could. Well, because there was you heard about the Cards Against Humanities guy.

Yes. And so there was that and there was that and the GoFundMe program or yes, fund that said, you know, give me your money and then as soon as I can, I'll buy the browsing history of all the people who voted for this, who voted for this.

And then and even then the Cards Against, I think it's Max Temkin, the Cards Against Humanity guy came out and said, I actually know that guy's not doing it right. Whatever. It's there's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of knee jerk reactions right now, a lot of them. And I got a hat tip to Jason Bryant.

He's the one that sent me the first like Internet noise generator to basically say that, yeah, here's all the stuff that you can, you know, let's open up a bunch of tabs and just go to random websites. You can't do that all the time. I mean, honestly, it's one of those things where you can you can inject noise into the signal only so far.

Yep. Well, they're definitely making it easier since then. I've included a link in the show notes for a plugin called Noisy. Which does something similar. The problem with all this, of course, is that you are using bandwidth to interject all this noise. And if you're not on an unlimited plan, that could be problematic.

Or if you are, you know, you want a clean connection and you need the bandwidth, it's problematic. Yeah. I mean, if you're not doing video and you're just going to random URLs and you turn off like load images, because if they're just tracking URLs that you're hitting. Yeah.

Then you can you can, you know, it's only a couple of K per per load. Right. But I mean, there are ways around the huge bandwidth issues. But the thing about it is it's like now that they've got AI, they can track your past history before this whole thing started and then, you know, glean the signal from that noise that you're generating.

And they also can see that you're going to those sites that are generating those things and then profile everybody that goes to those. Create a blacklist from anybody that's gone to that site. And in a certain period of time, seen those URLs and just pull those out of the list. Right now, there are ways around it.

If you if you just put your put your head to it for a second. And the whole the whole thing is just it's a pain in the ass. And now we're in the middle of the VPN wars. I don't know if you've noticed, Brian, everybody I know on any social media account is saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, go get a VPN.

Oh, yeah, I've had a lot of people ask me because they didn't listen to us. For the past three years that we've been talking about having a VPN, all of a sudden it's like, what's that VPN that you keep talking about? What should I use? Exactly. Well, good. Then maybe we'll actually make some money off of this debacle.

The thing about it is most people don't know how to go find a trustworthy VPN. GOG dot show slash VPN. Because the VPN that we promote has actually been tested in court against the FBI. And that says something right there. Yes, it does.

They're not logging anything. When the FBI came and knocking, all they could give him was, yeah, the guy connected to this block of servers. What he did after that? Nobody knows. Yep. And there are a ton of different stories out there about how to set up your own VPN and things like that.

And sending up your own VPN is not trivial. If you have never SSH'd before, or don't know what a terminal is, or how to build any piece of software. These things are, it's like, hey, you want to learn how to code in two hours?

It's like, no, not that easy if you want to do it right. Because OPSEC is hard. And these people don't quite understand that there are so many ways that you can get caught up in just, okay, I'm making a VPN and then think that they're safe. Right.

Nope. So I'm just saying that this is a mess. This is a complete and utter mess. I wish Bittner was here to, you know, make us feel better. But I have a feeling that he would probably be on the same page. Yeah, I think so.

Well, at least we've got some funny security news. Yes, we do. Yes, there's a dishwasher named Mele. Or Mele. I'm Mele. I'm very aware of this. I've filed my taxes because I'm not a smart person, like Trump would say.

But I actually got, I'm getting money back. So there you go. And as part of that, the wife and I decided that it was time for a new dishwasher. And this is a very high-end brand that we were definitely looking at. But I do not, my one thing I said, I was like, I'm out of this.

You figure it out what you want. But it doesn't fucking connect to the internet. Yeah, this is an industrial one, though. This is not just your average Joe Schmo dishwasher. Because why would you want a dishwasher in your house that is connected to the internet? Jason.

People are buying refrigerators that connect to the internet. Vibrators. People are buying light bulbs that connect to the internet. A lot of people made a lot of money because they bought a vibrator that connected to the internet. So you ask a question like that when you know the answer is because they're dumb, but they're still doing it.

But Brian, you said that you were going to buy every IoT device that you could get just so you were part of the class action lawsuits. So I think you need to go get one of these. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. All right. Okay. I'm going to buy myself an internet-connected dishwasher. All right.

I'm not going to buy an internet-connected Cuisinart because I think that's really kind of pushing the line there. I don't want anything with blades in my house that somebody could hack. But the point of this one was that they're embedded web server, the PST10 web server, which listens to port 80.

Smart, smart move there. Because if you don't know anything about web browsers and web servers, port 80 is the default port. And if you want to be secure, you change that port and you randomize that port. Yes, you do. Every single one of these listens on 80.

And it has a directory traversal attack opening, which means that you can put in in the URL dot dot slash. That means go up one. Yeah. So and it also lets you go out of what we call the document root. Like if you're running Apache web server, you can't leave the document root.

Yes. With this, you can. So you can go up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up and up and get the password file and then go back and crack it. And then, you know, make them wash cold dishes, I guess. They can then turn on your dishwasher. So, you know, at the end of the day, it's not going to do anything too horrible.

But still, it's just kind of stupid. But if you're running a restaurant and your competitor across town can shut off your dishwasher. Yes. He can disrupt your business. Yep. There you go. Bury the lead on this one, Jason. You missed literally the lead.

Thanks a million for making everything dangerous. Internet of Things firmware slackers. Um, yeah, you know what? There was a reason for that. That's good. I like that. Oh, God. Dad jokes. Dad jokes. Well. That's why I couldn't say it.

You're the dad. You can do dad jokes. That's my wheelhouse. So, yeah. If you are in L.A., you may have gotten a call recently. Uh, my wife got this call. I got this call, but I just hung up on it. Um, they are starting to get a little, they're getting smart with their chat bots.

Uh, they do things like, you know, can you hear me? Uh, or they pretend to screw up or so there's a slight embarrassment. So you think for a couple seconds, this is a real person before you realize it's not. Now, the reason why this is a problem and why there is a call that's happening here in the L.A. area right now, which is, uh, not good, is the scam will play out.

A recording voice will raise the possibility of a vacation or a cruise package or something like that, and she'll answer a few questions and say, can you hear me? You should never, ever say yes. Police departments nationwide have warned recently that offering an affirmative response could be edited. Gee, Jason, I wonder how they would do that.

To make it seem as if you've given permission for a purchase or some other transaction. There haven't been many reports of losses, but a Washington state man reportedly got built for about a hundred dollars a recorded. Yes, a hundred dollars, but this is just the beginning. That's the problem. I recorded. Yes. Could also be used to deny refunds to any consumer who complains.

So if someone calls and asks, can you hear me? Do not answer. Yes. Screw you. Ex-Verizon guy who is now with T-Mobile. Uh, so yeah, really? And, uh, if you wanted to see what can really happen, go watch sneakers. Yeah. Or, uh, that, uh, we talked about that Amazon or not Amazon, the Adobe product a while back that if given like 10 to 15 minutes of audio could basically completely mimic somebody's voices.

Uh, you tie that kind of combination in with the chat bot, you start to have some serious issues. No, definitely. You can, um, what was that one? It's not the rent. It's not, uh, a ransom thing, but it's one of those, uh, scams where somebody sends you a text message and say when they're traveling, cause they look at your Facebook account and say I'm traveling and I read my purse got stolen or my wallet got stolen.

Please send me some money. You can call somebody's voicemail and mimic the person that you're, uh, you're attacking or the, you know, that are using to attack them and say, Hey grandma, I lost my wallet. Can you send me, you know, $2,000 so I can get back home from London.

Right. You know, that's one of those things that's going to happen. It is going to happen. We live in the future. Yes, it is. We live in the future. Uh, WikiLeaks has dumped source code for a CIA tool called Marble. Okay. Now this thing, it's, it's basically code obfuscation.

Right. So we've used these to obfuscate things like JavaScript and PHP for years. And turns out that this is all this is too. Uh, and a lot of the news networks thought that this was something that people could use for a quote unquote false flag operation. And turns out, nope.

Yeah, you can, you can put some comments and stuff in there, but it's just a way that you can, uh, change the fingerprint of your malware so it doesn't get picked up by, you know, malware scanners. That's it. Listen, CIA, I have a way cheaper version to get all your code screwed up like that. Just hire the Indian programmers.

That shit that they give you, you will never be able to decipher for anything. And although, uh, the problem there is it won't work either. Well, yeah, it works kind of, sort of, not really, but you'll never be able to fix it. I guarantee you. Guaranteed. Oh my God.

Now you, now you're really bringing me back to the old days. How are you liking that smart TV of yours, Brian? I've unsmarted it. How did you unsmart it? I turned off all those features. Um, which features are you talking about? Because there may be one that you didn't turn off that can come and bite you in the booty.

I don't have the list in front of me right now, but go ahead and tell me which one I should turn off. Uh, do you have one of those, um, digital antennas like we talked about in a couple episodes? Uh, I got one. I got one to watch the Cubs game. No, I never ended up getting it.

Ah, well, good. Don't. Because apparently about 90% of smart TVs are vulnerable to remote hacking via rogue TV signals. Oh. This one comes from Bleeping Computer, which is my new favorite website for security stuff. They had so many articles this week that I had to cut a bunch of them, but there's a...

So if they're, if they're vulnerable to rogue hacking, does that mean they carry around this gigantic hard, hard drive looking device, have to climb up a huge tower at the very end of which they have to run out on a little thing and adjust the antenna so it's pointing the right direction, then run back and then push the hard drive thing into the little thing that goes dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.

Nope. They can sit in their car, point a, uh, you know, a Pringles can at your, uh, antenna and hack your TV and you will never be able to get it off. Okay. Uh, this is, this is one of those scary ones and the attack is almost untraceable because it's hit and run, gets into the firmware and nobody ever updates the firmware, of course, but they can also disable the firmware update.

Okay. And can take over the TV. So I'm sure that the CIA will be really into this one. This one comes from Raphael Schiel. Uh, he's a Swiss cybersecurity researcher for OneConsult and he has, has shown this in the wild and he's, he's pretty much saying doom and gloom for any smart TV that has one of these receivers.

Cause you can go build one yourself for 50 to 150 bucks. Right. And since it is point to point all, it takes like just a couple minutes to sit there in your car, point your can at the, you know, the antenna, take over the TV and skeedaddle out of there. So unless they catch you doing it or have security cameras catching you doing it, chances of you ever getting caught are almost nil.

Okay. Well, glad I never ordered that. At the library. Change agent by Daniel Suarez. We've been talking about that for a while. It is coming out and will be available April 18th.

Uh, Jason and I both have it through NetGalley as a, as a pre-release. I have gotten 82% of the way through the book. How about you, Jason? I have gotten 8% through the book. Oh, so I've gotten considerably further than you. How do you like it? Oh no, not again. Yeah.

Oh man. It's picking up, but my problem is it took till the 82% point to actually start to pick up. I, I love every technological idea that is in this book. I don't love the book. I, I think he has hit his, his limits on how well he can write.

Okay. So maybe he should just get a, uh, a writing partner. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I, I think a writing partner, a ghost writer, something like that. I think the ideas are fantastic. I just don't think he's creating compelling stories and characters at this point.

Uh, it just, it's, it's dragged. This has been hard to get through. If this would have been a book I liked, I guarantee you, I would have been a hundred percent through at this point. I'm forcing myself to keep reading. Oh man, that blows. Yeah. I loved his first two books so much. I love the concept of this book.

I think it's great. I, it's the ideas again, absolutely fantastic. What, where he takes those ideas, everything about the ideas are great. It's just, I don't give a crap about any of the characters. And it's plotting and ponderous and taking so long to get to, things are telegraphed and I know what's going to happen and I have to go through 50 pages to get there.

And it's like, oh, anyways, that's where I'm at with it. Okay. Maybe we'll send Daniel a copy of, uh, nobody wants to read your shit by Steven Pressfield because that is one of the best books on storytelling I've ever read and could probably, he could probably use it. Um, I don't think he actually needs it that bad because of your next story.

Yeah. He doesn't need it that bad because it's going to probably get fixed by real writers, uh, cause Netflix has optioned it for, uh, their network. So this will be interesting. I could see this being a very good, tight one and a half hour movie. Totally.

It's going to be, it's going to be a 10 part series. You know that. That's the problem. And that will suck. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we'll see how it's going. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I mean, maybe, uh, we'll check in next week. I'll finish the book by then. Maybe I'll have a complete turnaround, but I guarantee you, I'll still say, my God, it took a long time to get to the goddamn point.

Okay. Well, fortunately the, uh, the producer on this is working on one of Max Brooks's stories and Will Smith's stories. So we'll see how this goes. Well, actually it's not a Will Smith story. It's a Max Brooks story with Will Smith. So we'll see how that goes. Um, Will Smith is really not, uh, hitting him out of the park nowadays, but Max Brooks is pretty damn awesome.

Yeah. I'm a fan. We are getting a new book from Neil Stevenson. It's actually a coauthored book. Uh, the other author being Nicole Galland, who I've never heard of before. Uh, this should be interesting. I don't know. We'll see what happens. It's June 13th, 2017 that it will be dropping.

It's called the rise and fall of Dodo, a novel. And this is, it says it's a captivating and complex near future thriller, combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world. So, potentially, I mean, he, Neil Stevenson lost me with the Cryptonomicon books.

You're not talking about the Cryptonomicon books, because there was only one Cryptonomicon book. You're talking about the Baroque cycle. Yeah, that I definitely, I was out on. I didn't even like Cryptonomicon that much. Oh, Cryptonomicon for me was great. I loved it. Um, I didn't like the audio book, but I loved the actual novel, like the 7,000 page version of it.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that one, but we'll see what happens with this. I don't, if this is over like 7,000 pages, I'm probably going to be out again, but we'll see. Okay. Well, you know what? The interesting thing is here, you buried the lead on this one too. Neil Stevenson, who has been a solo writer most of the time, now has a writing partner.

So maybe Daniel Suarez can follow in his lead. Maybe. Ups and doodads. If you're old like us, uh, you, you had a MySpace page. You probably had a lot of content on that MySpace page, and you've probably forgotten completely about it.

Well, you can, all of those photos are still there. Now, I remember when MySpace had their, you know, basically shit the bed and died and then came back as whatever, I remember logging in and not being able to find anything, but apparently it is all there and it's all back. Somebody found the hard drive in the closet.

Somebody found the drive and plugged it back in, uh, and adjusted that antenna out on that catwalk. So it's all back there now. So there are instructions as to how to recover. Well, first off, you should probably go do this anyways, because the first step is go and change your password on MySpace. Good chat.

Good, good thing to do. Smart thing to do, because that old password that was probably before. You had a password manager, like one password or anything else. So go do that. And then it shows you where all your photos are. I logged in, I found them all, and it doesn't make any sense where they are, which is funny.

So read the article. Uh, but I did find all my old photos. Now what it doesn't do is provide an easy way for you to suck down copies of them all and delete them all, which is what I want to do. But I'm way too lazy to go and do that individually. How many photos do you have up there? Hundreds. Yeah, I could, I can only imagine.

You are a MySpace guy. Uh, hundreds. I was traveling a lot at that point and, and yeah, a lot of stuff was going on. So I took a lot of photos and put them up there. I'd love to get copies of them all down and, and I'd love to delete them all off MySpace, but it's going to be a manual process. So I might, who am I kidding?

I'll never get around to it. Amazon Turk that shit. Yep. That's a way to do it. I have one photo of mine on MySpace. That was my profile photo and I never used it. So I was, I think I might've still been on live journal or just ran my own website back then. But I remember you being a big MySpace guy cause it was all music.

Yeah. It was all kind of music related and I was into it and I was in, well, I was doing my band at that point too. So it was a good way to promote. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Uh, you want to pimp your band because you know, we still talk about them because among us was a, I thought a fantastic band. You should be proud of it. Thank you so much.

Uh, the among us EP is available. We talk about it in the show all the time. Check us out. Go to Patreon and give us some money and we'll actually send you a copy. That's true. Uh, we also talked in the past about flux and we also talked about how Apple likes to take good ideas, steal them and put the developer out of business.

And, uh, it, the, the last nail in the coffin for flux on OS X is probably here now because they put night shift that they had an iOS onto Mac OS. So the, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's not as good as flux. It's not nearly as good as flux.

So I still, I'm going to keep using flux. It doesn't take out enough blue for me, but, uh, yeah, it's, uh, they're, they're moving in. Sorry, dude. Hate to break it to you. I mean, I remember he was pissed when they did that in iOS. Yeah. Well, you're, you're, you got my money, buddy.

So it's free. Damn it. So he does have your money. All none of it. Well, he has whatever he was collecting. He's got my email address. Isn't that worth something these days? Okay. What else we got? Well, you were complaining about how you can't read in bed with your, uh, with your phone.

So there's this new little product out there that you may enjoy. This is called the star sailor live. Now I don't know how I feel about this. Uh, at first it looks really cool. This is a funky projector that basically you can shoot up into the wall in your bedroom and it can display things like starscapes or you can throw books up there or whatever's on your TV in theory.

That would be interesting. I have a feeling that this doesn't work without say a cable box plugged into it. I don't know how you would get cable straight up there. Cause I can't do that with my TV in my bedroom, which almost got me that, that digital antenna thing that would have gotten me hacked. So, you know, let's follow all that through, but I found this, I just ran across it.

It looks pretty cool. I don't know how strong the projector is. It's not quite, I don't think it's out yet. I think it's, it's Indiegogo go going right now. It's going to ship later in the year. Yep. Hey, if you guys want to, Oh, don't, please don't start them. Don't do that live video thing.

It's 300 bucks. Not bad. Okay. Don't do that live video thing. What? I went to the Indiegogo page and I was waiting for the auto start to go. No, they didn't do that. So yeah, it's 300 bucks. It's not bad. I mean, I would love to see one. So if you guys are listening, send us one, we'll review it.

I'd love to check this out. It looks pretty cool. I am scared of having this kind of stuff going on in my bedroom, but I would probably put it in the living room. I think it's pretty bad-ass. Yeah, no, it's for 299. It's, it's not too bad. The 219 version is sold out. There's a 229 version.

So there's, there's all sorts of different versions and you have 11 days left. So when this airs, you will have nine days left to check it out. But it has been funded. So it is going to happen. What, what scares me the most is this is a hardware product. Yeah. They raised $80,000.

Yeah. That's enough for, uh, maybe the tissue that goes in the boxes. Yeah. It's not enough money. I'm, uh, you know, I don't understand business. Business plans are all over the map these days. Jason, they may have investors and still have done the Indiegogo. A lot of people will start to do these Kickstarter things for the publicity more than anything else, which is ridiculous.

That's true. Yeah. They, they basically could have a warehouse full of these things right now. Exactly. Ready to go. But, uh, yeah, I'm going to wait for that to come out and, uh, I'll check it out from there. Yeah. Um, I'm a typist because that's all I do all day. And a friend of mine, uh, told me about typing bolt, which is kind of like a typing tutor.

And I never thought that I needed to type faster because I'm a pretty damn fast typer, typer, typist. Um, cause he was at 140 words per minute. And I'm like, no, there's no, there's no way you're better than me on that. Uh, so I went and checked it out and it clocked me at 82 words per minute.

Now this was in the morning before my coffee and probably with a hangover. So I'm going to have to try it again. I think I, here comes all the excuses. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Those are all of them. I'm out of it. I was tired and hung over, uh, but I only got 82 words per minute and you got 108.

So not bad. I got 108 and using the Mac, uh, laptop keyboard, which I am still not very used to. If I would have been on my old PC keyboard, I probably would have dusted that one. Yeah. Uh, I, I think I just did on my laptop is normal or actually, no, I've got a, I've got a Apple keyboard attached to my laptop, but you know, it's a, the thing about it is it is a typing tutor.

So you can go back and, uh, actually test yourself over and over and, uh, get better at it if you want. Yep. I think I'm okay with my one Oh eight. I'm fine with it. I mean, most of the time now I use my, uh, shuttle pro V two to edit audio. I'm like the only emails I'm saying are your audio is ready.

I can do that pretty fast. Oh, actually I've got a text expander snippet for that. So I don't even have to do that. Well, if you're on Google maps, uh, April fool's day has come a little bit early. Hopefully it's still around when you're listening to this, because I actually quite enjoyed this. Uh, you can now play miss Pac-Man on Google maps.

Nice. It's a nice little overlay. It's kind of fun. It doesn't matter where you're at. You can basically shoot up and down your home streets and, and gobble up some ghosts. Oh, I'm going to try that when we're done. I hope they keep it. I think you don't get rid of this. This is a nice little hidden feature that you can get in there and turn it on and start playing around with it.

It's fun. I think it's clever and cute and kudos Google for doing miss Pac-Man instead of just Pac-Man. Well, they've done Pac-Man before and they kept it up for, I think I'm like at least a week and maybe a month. There was a secret code that you could go in, but I always liked miss Pac-Man better. So that's cool.

Right. Um, I got something from my office and I had a spinal tap moment this week. I got the Bacant screen for desk in gray from Ikea. Uh-huh. Could you, did you, I, could you, Bacant getting out of it?

No. Uh, because it was sent to me by a shipping company and, uh, it was a, it was a major nightmare to get this thing. Took a week and a half to get because they're apparently sold out of these a lot. Now it's a, it's a screen that separates your desk from another desk, right?

Right. Yeah. Um, or you could use it as an audio baffle, which is the main thing that I wanted it for because my room is a little bit echoey and I was using, I wanted it to be next to my desk to kind of absorb some echo. Right. Well, I didn't really read the numbers on this.

It is 47 and one quarter inches tall. I was expecting it to be, you know, standard cubicle height, uh, tall. Yes. Yes. Yeah, no, it, it is three inches over the top of my desk when I'm standing at it, which is the only way that I record.

So they had to do this thing and it was 109 bucks and the shipping was 70 bucks on it because they had to use a shipping company because they're impossible to get. But I heard rave reviews about it for getting rid of noise and it's still cheaper than, you know, a really high end, like a, that size high end audio foam panel is going to be about that anyway.

So I thought I was saving some money. Well, yeah, no, the three inches next to my desk have perfect audio and I got this thing out and it was straight out of Spital Tap. I'm like, that's the smallest Stonehenge I've ever seen. A race of ancient peoples. We talked about texture a long time ago.

That's the app that lets you download magazines. Remember that? Yeah. I tested that for the show. Yeah. In 2015. Yeah. They've been charging me 15 bucks a month ever since. Well, whose fault is that, Jason? Mine. Okay then. Check your bank statements, people, because I signed up through them with, on my phone, through, you know, Apple Pay or whatever, subscribe, all that jazz.

Yeah. Well, apparently something happened and they just transferred all of my info to their system and kept charging me. So, I'm going to be figuring this out. But always check your bank statements, people, for these things that you buy online, because I've given them a lot of money for absolutely nothing. It took me forever to figure out what account, what email address it was even attached to.

Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was three hours until I figured out what email, because I was like, yeah, I went downstairs, I was cooking, and I'm like, aha, that might have been it. Ran upstairs and I finally found the email address and got to cancel it. But that's what happens, I guess, when you do things for the show. So, please. That's what happens when you order things after two bottles of wine.

I was sober when I got that one. This was in our non-drinking phase. So, check out my next purchase, which I'm very happy about, which I think you might actually like, too. Yeah. Since you do have a smart TV that you still, you can disable most of the smarts and still use this, the Synology Disk Station, four-bay diskless network-attached storage.

Yes. It's a couple hundred bucks, but basically what it is, it's a Linux box with four hard drive bays with a bunch of software in it that lets you store files on it. But also, if you throw your videos on it, you can throw them to your TV, you can throw your music to your Bluetooth speakers, you can actually install a VPN server on it, you can install a web server on it.

It's got PHP 7 on it, which I didn't even know PHP was up to 7. Oh, yes. Thank God that I'm not in that world anymore. But this is the coolest little gadget I've gotten in ages. So, I'm putting all of these four USB hard drives that I have attached to my laptop that I have to swap out every week and, you know, shuffle them around and all that crap onto this thing.

And so far, it is damn cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, I've been looking for something like this for a while. I definitely need to move my entire media station and servers over to something else. And, you know, now that when you have a kid, you'll be amazed at the amount of photos that you rack up and you need somewhere to store all that stuff and you don't want it to go away either.

So, I want the, you know, the straight up RAID backups and all that sort of stuff. So, always remember, RAID's not a backup. RAID is redundancy, but not a backup. Well, you know, it's a second, you know, one of those running plus another copy plus another copy. Yeah. Yeah. So, what I'm going to use my external USB drives for is that you can plug those into the and it will do auto backups like a carbon copy cloner and things like that.

Oh, good. That's cool. Yeah. So, you can create, you can just plug in a drive, have it all set up. So, as soon as you plug it in, it'll just do the backup for you. You can take it, throw in a fireproof box, take it off site. There, I mean, there's so many things that this does. I'm still working my way through the manuals. It, I thought it was just going to be a box with some disks on it.

I'd mount it and it would be done. I'm just like, oh my God, it's got this entire web interface. It's, uh, it's basically your own Dropbox. You can create users on it and give links so they can come in. It's, it is extraordinarily powerful for under 300 bucks for the box itself. Nice.

Very cool. Yeah. I got four, um, four terabyte drives. Two of them are arriving today, but the two four terabyte drives give you four terabytes of space, which is one of my USB drives. So, it will handle up to 40 terabytes, uh, the one that I got. So, you can get four 10 terabyte drives in it.

So, um, but it's pretty, it's pretty damn nifty. It is the coolest gadget I've gotten in a long time.

Media candy. The first official trailer has dropped for it, Stephen King's it, the remake as a movie. I loved, loved the miniseries when that was out. It was unbelievable. I love the book. I was a little worried about what I was hearing about the movie, uh, but I love the trailer.

It, it scares the crap out of you. And this is going to be a movie, not just not, uh, straight up miniseries for TV. This is going to be at the theaters, right? This is a, going to be a movie. And, uh, what I've heard, nobody really knows too much about what's happening right now. But, uh, if you remember, I guess this is a spoiler alert if you want to go in completely without knowing anything.

Uh, but if you've read the book or seen the previous miniseries, you remember that, uh, it starts with them as children and then there's a whole second half, which is them as adults. What I've heard is this movie is going to be just them as children and assuming it does well, they will do a second movie with them as adults.

Okay. Well, I'm guessing it'll probably do well because of the fanfare over the trailer. I'm surprised by how popular it seems to be. I mean, I always, you know, Stephen King's stuff is always hit or miss his movies and, and it, I didn't realize it was quite so popular, but apparently it is.

Yeah, apparently. Uh, it's funny. I saw a, I think it was a tweet from my friend Francis, the guy who gave me the, uh, the cups from John Wick. Yeah. It's like his team, like he's on that team that is doing the trailer for this. So, and he's at Warner brothers. So that would make sense that it's a movie.

Yeah. Yep. It's a, I'm looking forward to it a lot. I, I really am a huge fan of the book, so this should be great. I can't wait. I had something I will try to get out to a theater and actually see. Oh, well, good, good for you. You don't have to go to Sweden for it. Exactly. But you know, kid, so might end up there anyway.

Goobang. Goobang. But yeah, it had 200, almost 200 million downloads in the first 24 hours, which beat the fate of the furious, which I thought was amazing, uh, because I'd had no idea that people like the fast and the furious series that much. Oh, they do.

Uh, that's I'm blown away that it kind of beat it as well. So, uh, something else that people really love is game of thrones and the trailer for the seventh season has dropped as well this week. And it's, uh, it's foreboding. It's well done. It got me super excited. It's still too damn far away.

It's way too far away. That's why I mean, it's kind of just a promo with, you know, just a couple of cut scenes with them walking around the castles, but not really a trailer, which I was hoping for. I want more dragons, but what are you going to do? What are you going to do? It's still, it got me, got me excited.

Got you jazzed. And there's a funny link in the show and the show notes. Uh, if you, uh, remember star Wars, when it was first released way back in the day, if you're old like us, and if you would like to see a 1970 style TV commercial for star Wars rogue one, it's quite enjoyable.

It's very enjoyable. They did a very good job on this one. Yes, they did. I loved it. And I saw a movie this week called sing street, which I was like, really, I got to watch this movie. But, uh, our friend Chen made, made me watch it and turned out it was delightful.

It was utterly delightful. It was kind of like, uh, uh, a feel good version of the commitments. And I still think the commitments was a pretty feel good movie from what memory serves. Um, yes, but it's not, it's not so much a musical as just a, uh, uh, uh, you know, growing up in the eighties, trying to be in a band to impress a girl kind of movie, which in Ireland, in Ireland, in Dublin.

Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It looks good. I mean, 96% on rotten tomatoes. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It's like it, whatever you think about this movie, it is not the movie you think it is, which is what really kind of confused me. I think they really screwed up on the title, but the title makes sense once you see the movie, but as far as something to get you into the theater, definitely it's like theater kryptonite, but it was really good.

Excellent. I might check that out. Uh, if you are looking for something to listen to, pitchfork is big on their listicles, but this one was right up my alley. And, uh, again, of people of a certain age, uh, the 50 best Brit pop albums, one through 50. It is a nice trip down memory lane for me.

Again, smartly, they do a playlist in Spotify, so you can always just go listen to that and listen straight through a lot of these songs. I loved a lot of these bands. I loved, I remember seeing them, uh, play live at the time. This is, is sparked controversy and lots of Facebook discussions with my friends of a certain age as well going, what about this album?

And I can't believe they forgot that it's a good fun list. And I love almost every single one of these albums on this list. So if you're looking for something new to listen to, give this a go. Thank you, uh, over at Patreon, David Remley increased his pledge.

How nice of you. He was already giving us money, then decided to give us more. We love you, David. We love you too. We also have a new Patreon supporter, Steve Wagner. Thank you so much, Steve. And we got some feedback on the website from Patrick. Quick note on the Expanse. I checked its wiki the other day, and it looks like we're getting 13 episodes this season.

Woohoo! All right, so that's three more, right? I just watched episode 10. The other day? Yep, we got three more. And The Walking Dead is the finale this week, which is sad. But anyway. We also got a comment from Swell Schultz. Here's a wow. Marijuana cannon used to fire drugs over U.S. borders seized in Mexico.

We need to add a net to the wall, apparently. Yeah, and this is an older article, but it's still a cool-looking cannon. You got to go check out the... You have to actually go check out the photo of the cannon in the back of the truck. Yeah, it's pretty intense. So it is a, you know, it's a t-shirt cannon on steroids.

And on Twitter, Lactac writes, didn't you want to check out CarPlay? Here's what you're missing. And it's a YouTube video of Android Auto versus Apple CarPlay in a real-world test. Did you watch this thing? I did watch this, and actually, I will go on record saying, I think Apple's CarPlay looks pretty cool.

Most of the things that they were making fun of and complaining about were because Siri sucks. Yeah. Actually, you're right. You're absolutely right. I think the whole dashboard touchscreen interface for Apple CarPlay is badass, and I would love to have that in my car now. They just didn't like Siri, which I don't like either.

I get that. And it was kind of a loaded type of test because they were in Canada, and, you know, there are less people in Canada than here. Well, yeah, and then they would just do the address without saying the city or the country, and then it would default to something in the U.S. Well, duh. Yeah, you'd think that it would use GPS to figure out where you were and find the closest one, but at least, I mean, Android did that and got pretty close.

But they still had problems on Android as well. But yeah, I mean, you just have to learn how to speak to these things, I guess. But yeah, it did look pretty nice. Yeah, I think the Android interface was horrible, and I think the Apple one looked really good. So I'm kind of excited about it. All right. Can you get that in your car?

I would. Yeah, I should be able to. Yeah. I'll have to look into that. Yeah. So we got a tweet from Gadlaw as well, who copied Uber and YouTube and DoorDash and Walmart on it as well, which I love that. So thank you for that. You say Big Bang.

I say YG Global VIP Big Bang Korean super group and a YouTube video from a Korean super group. So if you're into that sort of thing, it's enjoyable for what it is. It is. It was an odd video. It kind of reminded me of a little bit of Death Note in there, but not not Japanese, but Korean.

Also on Twitter, Rust Westbrook writes and Slender Fungus ranting on GOG podcast reminds me of Frank Grimes from The Simpsons and links to the wikia page on The Simpsons. And what do you think about this, Brian? I always felt we were more like Peter Griffin from The Family Guy when he had his What Really Grinds My Gear segment.

So I responded with a YouTube clip from that that is quite funny. OK. I still have never seen The Family Guy. Oh, my God, Jason. What are you going to do? I still can't believe The Simpsons is still on the air. Yeah, no doubt. I don't think I've watched Simpsons in 10 years.

You know, they've got that stick-to-itiveness that the grumpy old geeks do. You just got to you got to ride it out until you get your get your audience. Yeah, I guess they're still waiting for that Patreon money. If only The Simpsons could get to the 10,000 people level. Seriously. Yeah. Now, randomly enough, over at Facebook, we got a note.

So it's lucky that we caught it because we don't really see much over there. This is from Ivor Davies. Love the last podcast, guys. Great job. You mentioned the Goobang Media Box, which I think should win a prize for its name, by the way, which reminded me of a subscription service I use a lot. It's called Droid TV.

I live in a rural area of New Zealand, as I rely on wireless broadband. It maxes out at five to six megabits, which isn't great for streaming services like Netflix, et cetera. Instead of going to Sweden, as you guys so eloquently put it, I use the Droid TV service. And there's a link in the show notes. And he goes on about the service quite a bit, which I think we're just going to see more and more services like that.

I'm interested in I would love to know what the deals are with these networks. Like, it's weird how they're deciding to kind of make deals with these smaller one-offs left, right and center. So the problem with all this stuff is, of course, it doesn't have everything. And I want I want a service that has everything that I can pay for.

Yeah, that's never going to happen. I know. Anyways, and it ends it with, again, really loving the podcast, especially the gratuitous anti-Trumpism. Keep up the good work. Keep it up down there in New Zealand. We're all coming there, by the way, because that's that's supposedly the place where all the rich people are buying their places when everything goes goobang here.

See, if you had better bandwidth, we would make that the podcasting capital of the world. So lay some fiber and we'll we'll start heading down there. Exactly. Now we got some iTunes. This comes from Don from Morris County X. I didn't know you could have spaces in there. Wonderful mix of tech and geek infused humor.

As long as you can get past the occasional political tirades. And let's face it, if you're listening to this, you are probably a little bit grumpy and more than a little bit geek. So we have to find something to complain about or we aren't really happy. Then you'll find this a great mix of geek and tech related topics.

Oh, thank you. You know what really grinds my gears? What? No, you've never seen Family Guy, so never mind. And we got another one from Thomas the Grumpy Tank, which I think wins the name. Does. Yes. My favorite podcast. Awesome show.

Highly recommended. Funny and informative. Absolutely loved the episodes post-election. Now, it's funny you've said that because I then went back to listen to the very first show that we did after the election because I remember we got like a lot of one star ratings right after that show. Remember, Jason? So many of them.

I went back and listened and we weren't that bad. Really? Like we were bummed out and I mean, you did say that you puked. So that's probably a little bit extreme. That was extreme. That was extreme. Overall, we didn't go on and on about it much at all.

So all you people that gave us a one star. Fuck you. Okay. I, you know, I'm with you on that one. Bite me. Not like you're listening anyway. So if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star in a snarky review. Closing shout outs. I am super excited to announce that the long, painful drought of no baseball is ending on Monday.

Opening day. Let's go Dodgers. Dodger blue is back. I've got my son's onesie ready to go. I'm very excited. I do love my baseball. So and then Jason. Yes. Big news broke in the soccer world. Oh, one of one of my absolute favorite players, a World Cup Germany winning team, Bastien Schweinstager has signed over with MLS here in the States and he's come to play for your team.

I have a team. He's going to play soccer for the Cubs. You have the Chicago fire. I like that TV show. Yeah, that's good. He had his first game over the weekend with him and scored a goal. All right. Okay. I can watch him. I think Chicago fires on Thursday and Chicago PDs on Wednesday.

But I'll check him out next next Thursday on NBC. Right. I think I think you should get out to a game. I hear they have good food there. Yeah. I got to find out where they play. That would be fun, especially if you ever get to town beer. Oh, if I come to town, we're definitely going to go see a game because he's I love him.

He's a great player. So you've got him. Good on you. We'll see what happens. All right. Until next time. I'm Brian. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

If you're an app person, you can listen to us on the Podcast One app for iOS and Android. Get it at podcastone.com slash apps. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all of the ways that you can support the show and keep us on the air.

And we will love you because we love you. That's why you need to go to GOG.show slash support because we love you. To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 203.

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