204: We're Lit!

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Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy for your 30-day free trial. 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. How's it going up there in Canada? It's cold. God damn it. It actually snowed the other day, but other than that, it's been fine. Nice, decent enough travel with the kid and everybody's doing well and had the big old wedding last night with a poutine bar, which was so Canadian it hurt, but it was awesome.

Yeah, I noticed you were posting pictures of bags of milk when you got there just to prove you were in Canada. Yes, the milk bag. It's very little known outside of Canada. Very funny. Oh, man. Yes, I'm wearing shorts, but for some reason, I have a cold, so if I sound a little stuffy today, that would be why. All righty then.

Well, and I'm in a basement in Canada, so I will sound Canadian. Okay. Try not to say a boot too much. All right. Let's get this process started. So, Saturday Night Live, we talked about how they've been kind of coming back with the regular sketches, not just the Donald Trump ones.

Right. And they had a great video on last night's show called Thank You, Scott, about the follies and foibles of posting on Facebook and Twitter and thinking that you're changing the world. Hashtag resist. It was pretty damn funny. I got to give them that. It was very funny. So, yes, thank you for making me watch that.

I have not watched any Saturday Night Live in a couple of weeks now. But that was very good. Very good. And I heard that his monologue was actually quite good as well, so I'll have to go back and watch that at some point. Louis C.K. Yeah, everything I watched from the show last night is really good. The Bill O'Reilly bit was pretty good.

There's nothing in it that I haven't seen that wasn't pretty good. The Soda Shop one was a little off, but we're going down a rabbit hole here. I have been listening to a few more of the back episodes of Grumpy Old Geeks. Right. Man, the first couple that we did, I'm like, these are pretty funny.

And then I started listening as we kept going around 10, 11, 12, and when we had Teeter on and all that stuff. And that damn Blue Yeti microphone just sounds god-awful in your old apartment. Yeah, I know, but you're such an audio snob about this.

And I get it, and rightfully so. And audio quality does matter because I was thinking about this. It does and it doesn't because I don't know if you continued to listen to Adam from Mythbusters, his podcast, still untitled. Oh, when they've been on the road. Oh, man. The past few months they've been on the road.

These things are fucking unlistenable. They're terrible. That's how bad that they are. And it's like, they're just doing it over Skype like we are, but they cannot sort their shit out. They should hire me to figure that out because I can fix that in about an hour, and they will sound just like they're on the radio. The point being, though, everybody's still listening to their show.

Nobody stopped listening, so it doesn't really matter too much. No, I just stopped listening to the episodes when it's unlistenable, and I'm like, eh, they're not going to say anything that is going to be groundbreaking and world-changing, so I'll pick them up next time. Yeah, they've been spectacularly bad the past couple months. But they're almost home, so. Now, so in listening to those shows, I finally have the answer to our feud over the security segments.

Okay. So I'm going to play a couple clips here. Oh, great. We have production value. Oh, yeah. Well, we've got three clips today, and one's for later, but here's clip number one. This is the first time we discussed privacy and security. The first is it's disturbing because I still kind of grew up.

We're grumpy old geeks. We're not younger geeks, and we grew up with some semblance of what privacy is, and it matters, unlike people today who just don't seem to care. But on the other side of things, I don't really give a shit if the government is looking at what I'm doing because I'm not doing anything too crazy.

Well, you should because what they're doing is illegal. So that would be clip number one. Yeah, I said it once. Here's clip number two. I mean, it is the argument to kind of justify it is if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care? That's not the point. I agree. That is not the point.

I agree. It's not the point. The worst argument ever. I agree. I agree. You know, everything that we do is recorded now and saved forever and searchable. And there is no privacy anymore.

Okay. So private lives matter, Jason. Yes, they do. So I think what we can come out of this is that we were both wrong. Yeah, I think so. Although I still have an inkling, if you keep on going on in the episodes, as we got further and further in, we started to actually coalesce around the real argument that I remember.

But we'll see because, you know, you'll trail, you'll blaze through the rest of the episodes and we'll find out. Look, I'm done. I don't give a shit anymore. I went back to the original arguments and the original arguments where you said that. So, yep. And then, you know, but then you switched up and agreed in this, you know, in the same episode.

So I thought you were fervent about it, you know, not giving a shit and that if you didn't have anything to hide, it didn't matter. But you were kind of ambivalent the whole time. So but you did say it first. So I did did remember that bit. So, OK, fair enough. I'll give you that. But I guarantee you that my personality and my deeply held private belief is not that that at all.

You also said Verizon was the best cell phone on the planet back then to cell phone provider. Yeah. Well, they were when I was traveling. There's no doubt about that. I mean, things have changed since then. But back at that point in time, everybody I knew that traveled extensively, like everybody in bands and roadies, we were all on Verizon because it had the best coverage nationwide.

So I think what we can glean from all this is that we've evolved over the years. As smart people do. In the news. I am so very happy I bought my Tesla stock a couple of years back.

Bite me. They are doing very well. Tesla is now worth more than Ford after delivering a record number of cars for the quarter. Of course, I'm going to get tweets now saying how they're far so far behind on developing their new car and blah, blah, blah. And they suck and whatever. But they're still here. They're doing great.

And they are doing better than Ford. A hundred and thirteen year old car making company. So, well, I still have my Ford. I'm sticking with it. Damn it. Well, I don't even have a Tesla. I still drive. I drive a BMW. So I should probably get a Tesla at some point. Well, I missed all fancy pants.

Yes. Did you ever find out if the Apple CarPlay works in your fancy pants BMW? No, because I was dealing with travel and stuff like that. So I will look into that when I get back home. If you have a phone that you can plug into it because it might be taken at border. That is true. We'll see if you hear from me next week or not, or if I'm in a padded room somewhere without my phone.

Yes, now hiring co-host for Grumpy Old Geeks. Yeah, you can outsource it to India, but we'll get to that later. Yes, you can. So this AOL and Yahoo merger plan. Oath. Oath. What a stupid name. Yes, they're going to call the new entity of Yahoo and AOL after the Verizon merger.

Oath. Yeah, I make a lot of oaths to Verizon these days. Yeah. So in doing some research on this, because once the name came out and I'm still like, oh man, I still can't believe Verizon is still going after Yahoo after all of the crap that they went through.

Yeah. And the interesting thing is I think I finally put all these pieces together. So the big acquisition when they bought AOL was they needed the ad tech because they're working their way to their own video network. Yeah. And AOL's ad serving technology for video is pretty top notch.

So they wanted that. The rest of the stuff. Oh God, we got to take Arianna Huffington too. I guess. Okay. Well, at least we get in gadget. I think you just get Huffington's name. Remember, she's been parachuted in to save Uber these days. Oh, that's right. That's right. She took that $300 million check when Huffington Post got sold and didn't share it with any of the authors that wrote everything that got her all that money.

Way to go, Arianna. So yeah, enjoy that WordPress blog, people. Very expensive WordPress blog with her name on top of it. And it's not on WordPress, by the way, but it's the old technology. I think it started on WordPress, but then it got moved over to the platform that Engadget was built on that Calacanis wrote with his partner.

You know, if you're going to move it, why continue the WordPress look? You're not going to use WordPress. Could you make it look a little better? Oh, because AOL is known for their groundbreaking design. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. You've got shit news.

So it looks like... You've got Arianna. I think we have a title. There you go. Is there a salve for that? Anyway, it looks like Yahoo's ad tech might be one of the main things that they're going for because Yahoo does have pretty good, you know, tech around serving ads on the internet.

So you take the AOL ad tech, you take the Yahoo ad tech, you throw out all the crappy bits like mail. Marissa Meyer. That too. Ooh, nice. And you slap it all together and you might have something that could be coming out of Horizon in the next two or three years.

And the funny part about this, Oath will have two of the worst email addresses you'd ever want to get. You never talk to anybody with an AOL.com email address anymore, and you never talk to anybody with a Yahoo.com email address anymore. The only worst bit is if they went out and bought Hotmail and put those all together.

Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to my Oath.com email. Yes. Enjoy that. All right. Moving on. Yeah. Twitter got rid of their default egg profile picture and they replaced it with something else that I see you've already made fun of on Twitter, I believe. I put some eyes on mine.

Sean Bonner turned his into Goat Sea, which I thought was pretty clever. Nice. Yeah. So yeah, the first change to the default profile picture since 2010. So it's no longer an egg. It's now a human silhouette, which will encourage people to upload pictures of themselves.

I'm not entirely sure of the psychology on that one. But hey, I'm sure that they did some sort of market research. Let's make it as ugly as possible. Kind of looks like the schmoo from the old days. And it's so ugly that nobody wants to look at it anymore. It's reverse psychology. Right. Part of the reason for the change is that the egg is now associated with Twitter trolls, the kinds of users who create accounts simply to harass and bully others.

Twitter wants to eliminate that connection. So we'll just change it and forge a new connection. Makes zero sense. Of course it makes zero sense. I don't understand any of this, but good for them. Whatever. You changed it so it's not an egg anymore. Now, see, they do things like they made an update recently that lets you basically mute egg accounts altogether.

So I'm assuming that now they'll just mute these blobby account things instead. So nothing's really changed at all. There's a lot of words in a lot of articles for no real change. Right. Right. Yeah. OK. That's pretty much it. It's like it's slow news week. Twitter did some shit.

Let's write about it. Right. OK, we're going to have a checkbox so you can ban the default icon. Well, so we're just going to make a new default icon, which is just uglier. And we ban that, too. It's like, can we edit tweets now? Can we have better stats?

Can we have a few more characters? There's a laundry list. Yes, we're still based on the character limit that was based on old cell phone texting. So, yeah. OK. OK. Yeah. Let's get out of the flip phone technology days and kind of, you know, let's iterate on something that's not your fucking icon.

I'm just saying, Twitter, you got bigger problems than the egg. Yeah. Yeah. I think they may have a staffing problem, which is why that's all that they can fix right now. It's like, well, we can't do all the engineering stuff because all the engineers left. What do we who who's left around here? I know how to use Photoshop. OK, we're going to do the icon.

You're on. Right. Yeah. And Facebook has also made a very pointless and useless change. I have not personally seen this yet, but I've heard it is out in the wild. There they are beta testing a second news feed, which will just be news.

We haven't really sorted out fake news yet, but now there will be a feed that is either just fake or real news. And who the hell knows? So there's going to be some sort of separate icon there. It's going to strip out all the friends articles and only put in news articles and, you know, no more personal stuff, just news, because they're finally accepting the fact that people get all their news from Facebook.

And we don't even know. Well, I barely get news from Facebook. I get my news from Twitter, surprisingly. The thing about this is, though, it's still, you know, bound by their rules of the algorithm. So it's a crapshoot. It's a crapshoot on whatever you get from Facebook.

You never know. Yeah, exactly. So I haven't seen it, but I probably won't use it because, yes, if you're getting your news from Facebook, you're in trouble. Yeah. Although not that it really makes much of a difference anymore, because as Recode has pointed out and we have all noticed because, goddammit, there's now the stories in Facebook.

There is basically no difference between any of these any social network anymore. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat all look basically exactly the same. Sorry, Twitter. You don't actually deserve to be in this article because you deserve to be in that list. These are companies that are actually innovating and stealing from each other.

You're making new icons. Yeah. You're back in 1997 still with your egg icon changes. But all the rest of the social networks are basically exactly the same. Now, they've all rolled out their versions of direct messaging. They've all rolled out their versions of stories. They've all rolled out their versions of live video.

It doesn't really matter. They're all exactly the goddamn same. Yeah. The great homogenization of 2017 where it doesn't matter where everything now sucks. It all just depends on where your friends are. That's kind of it. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Because none of it really matters. So I am for one, I'd like to applaud all of my friends on Facebook who have not done the story yet.

I made a story. Oh, shit. That's right. You did. That's true. I'd like to applaud all of my friends except for Jason who felt the need to do it. Oh, it's your fucking dog. Of course it was. That's all I find. Dude, I live a very sheltered life. It's me and my dog.

What do you want me to do? Yeah, I know. So there you go. Yeah, there's no difference. Pick one. I mean, all my friends are on Facebook and there's no... I didn't want to go to Snapchat anyways, but unfortunately now I can't avoid it because Facebook is Snapchat. It's Face Snap Graham Chitter, something like that.

It's now the name of the stupid program. So it is what it is. I'm just going to continue to be annoyed by it. And there you go. Yeah. Fun times. Fun times. All the everything's getting stories tab this week were pretty funny. I saw a potato get stories at one point.

A pretty good bit of Photoshop work. Yeah. Very funny. So let's get on to the Uber news because God forbid we have a week where Uber doesn't step on their dick. Google, the Google Uber lawsuit is in full swing now.

Yes. And the stuff that's coming out about this is really kind of, it's a head scratcher. So this guy, Anthony Lewandowski, the former Google employee who is accused of taking all the Google documents, right?

Yeah. I had no idea that how many that he took. 14,000 Google documents around their self-driving technology that he put on a thumb drive and then deleted the documents and then walked out the door. Right. They haven't been able to quote unquote prove where that these documents have shown up on any of Uber's computers.

Okay. Except for a couple of them. But what the reason that this thing has taken so long to come through to fruition, it seems to be because they were, they were looking for a smoking gun and then a vendor had sent them something that had like their schematics for their LIDAR in it.

And that was just like, oh, gotcha, you know? Ah, I see. Yep. So this is how this thing's going. The interesting thing about what's going on now is Google's trying to get an injunction on them to make them stop working on their automated driving technology. Okay. And in a couple of different statements, Uber is saying, if we can't, if we have to stop and we can't compete in self-driving technology, it will kill the company because they are so

invested in firing all of their employees in the near future that they understand that if they can't get self-driving car technology to work, they will not be a company anymore. Right. You know, the interesting thing here, this is what gets me.

Other companies are making self-driving cars, right? Yeah. Tons. More every day is what we hear. Yeah. Why does Uber have to make their own? Why can't when these cars come onto the market, Uber just go buy, go buy a fleet and put them in the cities? This is what makes no sense to me. That's a very good question.

No answer forthcoming, I'd imagine. Yeah. Because I'm thinking, you know, okay, Uber and Tesla get in bed and have a couple of babies and then we have, you know, the Tesla model. Ooh. The tuber. It's a tuber. Yes. I'm going to go take a tuber. I think you need to get a shot for that when you go to Africa.

Anyway, yeah. This whole thing is, it's interesting to watch. It's really interesting to watch now that more is coming out because the case is actually, you know, in the courts. But it reads like a pretty, you know, semi-decent movie plot.

We're getting there. We're getting there. Let's see what the, let's see how the second act goes. I'm waiting for the defining, or the inciting incident at this point, but we'll see how this goes. I'm waiting for the Lifetime movie. Be smart and cast Olivia Munn. Get her back to her roots. Seriously. This week on Hallmark.

Exactly. Uber is in the news for more things. There was a long New York Times article about the psychological tricks they are using to basically punish their drivers and coerce them into working longer hours and things like that until they can fire them, the more devious and weird of which is basically having male managers pretend to be women to get drivers to work more.

Oh, okay. That's not creepy at all. Oh, God. Yeah. Nothing about Uber is creepy. Hmm. No. So, yeah, basically Uber is involved with catfishing their drivers at this point. It's just, there's just nothing about this company that isn't fucked up.

Yep. Oh, well, nobody cares, right? Yeah. No, they don't. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people are moving to Lyft, which, you know, if you listen to my previous episode on Lyft, I will never take again after that guy tried to throw me out on the fucking 405. So, I guess I'm just going to drive myself like an adult.

Oh, yeah. Well, there's that. And if I do want to go to Italy, I will not be able to get my Uber there either because they have just been kicked out. They've been booted from the boot. Ah, I see what you did there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's nothing they can do about it right now.

I'm sorry. There's nothing they can do about it right now. Yeah. I should have thought about that one first and it might have actually worked as a joke. But anyway, they've got 10 days to respond to the ruling that they have basically, was it constituted unfair competition because a taxi association consortium has gone after them.

And the court said that they could not use its black Lux SUV, X, XL, select and van phone applications, nor could it promote or advertise its services in Italy. And if they do, they will be slapped with a $10,000 or $10,600 fine for each day.

It remains operational, which knowing Uber, they will remain operational. Yeah, they'll stay operational and they'll pay that off. They're already filing appeals to this. So, yeah, we'll see what happens. I mean, it's I like any time Uber loses. But this one's a bit, you know, this one's a bit shaky.

So I just I figured you were going to bite on this one. Uber's Italian division said it was shocked. Shocked. I tell you. Shocked by the sweeping man. Yes. Yeah. Let's see. How shocked can you be? Because it's a it's based on a 25 year old law. So the law is well known.

You decided you were going to break it. And now you're shocked. Yes. And they're shocked that the Italians didn't just run to Uber and say, we're going to completely revamp our laws and fire all of the taxi drivers in Italy just so you can make a buck. Just for you. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

That's what I call progress. Yeah. Back in Seattle, we have some bad news for both Uber and Lyft drivers. In December of 2015, Seattle City Council voted 9 to 0 to allow freelancing drivers to unionize and collectively bargain for better benefits, which is a good thing.

We like that. Guess what Uber did immediately? Sued them because we can't let that happen. So, yeah, Uber immediately sued to halt the plan for moving forward. One Washington state judge ruled in favor of the city and their decision to let them unionize last month.

However, a pair of lawsuits from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Freedom Foundation alleging that the council's decision violates federal labor laws have instigated U.S. District Judge Robert Lassnick to issue a temporary injunction against the city. So Uber wins round one.

Yay. Yay. I mean, that's something to follow. I think that's incredibly important. Not just for Uber and Lyft drivers. Keep in mind, everybody, all we do is talk about how companies are trying to push you to be independent contractors. This ruling will matter for all of us.

Mm-hmm. And yeah. And Musk News, moving back to that, Hyperloop One, their test route is ready to run, apparently. So we've been following a lot of this Hyperloop stuff, how they've left the country and trying to get other places to build it because of legislation and issues like that.

They do have a test facility still here in the States. It's in Nevada. It's called Area 51. Oh, wait, no, that's a different story. Yeah, they've got what is called the Dev Loop. It has been finalized and will serve as the test bed for the future of transportation, as their PR release says. It's 3.3 meters wide, and it is approximately 500 meters long.

So, you know, go for it. Let's see if it works. It's decent. I bet it goes in a straight line. I'm curious to when they have, uh, when they start doing curving, call me when you can turn right, you know? Yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah. It'd be like Zoolander.

You can only turn left. Exactly. Yeah. I've never actually seen that movie. I worked on it, but I've never seen it. The first one's quite funny. I hear. I hear the second one was a dud. Yeah. Second one sucked, but the first one's worth it. So Spotify is starting their moves that will lead to their future IPO.

We're guessing next year they'll try to go public. Uh, one of the moves is obviously getting new licensing agreements in with all the major labels because that needs to be in place, uh, because they are all expiring shortly and you want your ducks in order when you try to go public. Uh, the first of the majors that they have made their deal with is universal music group.

Uh, actually my wife worked on this and I knew about it for a while, but couldn't say anything. I was going to say he may have been, uh, holding out on me on this one. I did have some insider information on this one, but, uh, as part of the deal, uh, there's a lot of backroom stuff that isn't that interesting. And, you know, of course the artists aren't going to get crap out of it, but, uh, Spotify has agreed to allow new albums from universal artists to be restricted to its premium service for up to two weeks moving forward.

So basically if an artist so chooses or if their label tells them that this is what they're going to do, artists don't get to make choices nowadays. Yeah, pretty much. No. Uh, so basically the deal is we, if you want your album out there, we will say that if you, you're, you have to be a Spotify premium user to listen to the entire album, this does not apply to what is considered the singles.

Singles will always be available for free to any level immediately. So it's just full album of which nobody listens to full albums anymore. Anyways. So I do, but they're all, we're old. It was like, when I was listening to the new green day album, I liked listening to it in order when it put it on shuffle.

It just made me uncomfortable. I don't like this shuffle thing that they've got going on nowadays. I despise shuffle. I do too. I think that definitely comes with age. Uh, in new news, which I gotta, I gotta throw in some articles on this. I saw it this morning as I was, as I was prepping for the show, but this is, uh, kind of, uh, adjacent to this.

Jay-Z has pulled all of his streaming music from all the services, except guess which one? Uh, title. Yeah, that would be it. Huh? That could be because he owns it. So yeah. Shocking. Uh, yeah. I mean, this sort of game is, this stuff's going to be going on left, right, and center.

But you know, it's the same, the labels own Spotify, individual artists own title, title. I can't believe it's still around, but it is because somebody like Jay-Z is, is willing to lose money to keep funding it. And there you go. Mm-hmm. Ah, good times.

Now, Amazon, uh, we, this happened with Apple a while back and I do believe we applauded them because they, Apple was very quick, uh, to make amends for in-app purchases done by children. Uh, they issued, uh, you know, refunds and all that sort of thing. No must, no fuss, no lawsuit required.

Amazon, not so much. Um, this is a year after Amazon was found guilty of illegally billing users for unauthorized in-app purchases. The company has finally dropped its appeal against the decision and, um, supposedly refunds shall now commence. $70 million worth.

$70 million. And of course, you know, even after they dropped their appeal against the decision, they're trying to get it to the point where, can we just give people Amazon gift cards? And, uh, yeah, the U S district judge rightfully so rejected that and said, no, how about you give them money?

Yeah, seriously. Yeah. But they're going to spend it on Amazon anyway. Well, maybe no. Maybe they need to pay rent or food. Depending on if your kid charged a thousand dollars on Pokemon crap, you know, that thousand dollars might be really nice to have when you have to, you know, buy food and rent.

Yeah. I mean, $70 million is not a, an insignificant sum of money. And surely, you know, the, the group of people remind me to sign up for this class action thing. I got to make sure I get my, my piece of the pie here. Oh yeah. Even though, you got to get on this. Definitely. I have a child.

He has not made any in-app purchases, but so what? Just leave your unlocked iPad sitting around and at some point, you know, a thousand monkeys in a room will, we'll create Shakespeare and one child in a room will probably bankrupt you with in-app purchases. That is probably true. Do you remember flatter?

I do. Uh, we talked about it at great length and, and I think I believe my, my position on this was, oh, if only something like this would ever actually work, but it's not going to. Yeah. I made about $12 off of flatter back in the day and flatter is, it's basically a little button that you could put on anything that you create to let people who like your work give you money.

It's kind of like a PayPal button, but it, it, it worked on a different kind of idea. So if I followed like 10 different artists and in that part of the month, I gave in like 10 euros because it was always in euros. Um, then each person would get a Euro at the end of the month or actually, no, I'm sorry.

I take that back. It depended on how many different things you flattered on that person. So if there were like 10 people and I flattered one person 10 times and everybody else one time, then the money would be distributed proportionally between the flatters that I did. So basically you just put in a bunch of money every month and you flatter things as you see them on the internet.

It was a great idea, but it never really caught on. And it was, uh, co-founded by Peter Sund from the Pirate Bay, our good friends in Sweden. Um, but they have been purchased, which is, uh, interesting because they were purchased by IO, which is a parent company of ad block plus.

That's an interesting move for them. I think this might be a genius move at some point because ad block ad block plus is in a lot of browsers. Yes, it is. If ad block plus can then inject into the dom, a little flatter button on every page that it served, flatter might actually get critical mass out there.

Well, that was one of the problems with flatter is a great. If you could get people to go to your WordPress blog, not so good if you're just posting on social media. Yep. Really difficult. You'd have to put the flatter link in every single post. And, you know, even, even if you're running text expander and you have to remember to type a snippet to do it, it's still a pain in the ass.

Yeah. But on my photography blog is where I made money, but it was very little because it was very German centric back then. It was mostly in Germany and Austria. Yeah. So that's where all the, like all the text content was coming from. So photography worked really well because photography is the international language and that's how I made a few bucks off of it.

But then I would just take that money and put it right back into flatter and spend it on other people. But it's a fun concept. Hopefully this, this purchase will actually get them some more exposure and get it back out there. Yeah. I mean, I, I would love to see something like this exist. It would be great.

I mean, if we had a little flatter button by every single episode that we did, that'd be fantastic if you guys clicked on it and we could get our two cents. Google has gone out and commissioned a report on, did some research and done a report on what the kids think is cool these days.

I'm assuming teenagers and according to the new Google report, Google itself is lit. They're lit. Whatever the fuck that means. I'm assuming that's a good thing. They're not literate, but they're lit. Okay. Yes, they are lit. So, uh, consumer trends and marketing insights team think with Google put out a report last week on brand perceptions among us teens.

Um, the very cool things. And what, what is lit includes Chick-fil-A apparently, uh, because, you know, millennials don't like gays. Apparently, apparently, or at least they don't care. Uh, YouTube is the most cool brand with Netflix, Google, Xbox, Oreo, Oreo, Oreo.

Oh, God. What the hell? Uh, GoPro. I can't believe that either. Uh, PlayStation, Doritos, Nike, and Chrome. So, Nike, well-known shoe company for exploiting people overseas. Uh, right up there with Chick-fil-A. Good job, millennials.

Now, here's, here's, here's where I have a problem with this study. Okay. I did my research. All right. So, if they're saying that, uh, well, here's the thing. Okay. Chick-fil-A is cooler than Vice, but they also said in this study, if you want to call it that.

Look, no offense, because when we were teenagers, Star Wars was way cooler than ABC News 2. True, true. Yeah. But, um, millennials obviously think that In-N-Out is a better choice over Chick-fil-A. Mm-hmm. So, here's where I have the problem with this study, is the sample size has to be ridiculously small and geolocated to a very specific segment of the country.

Right. Because there are only 300 In-N-Outs in the world, and there are over 2,200 Chick-fil-As. So, if they think millennials think In-N-Out is better than Chick-fil-A, something's going on there. Right. Well, they probably only surveyed people in L.A. That's, or San Francisco, there's like one In-N-Out in San Francisco, but I'm guessing probably L.A.

And so, the sample size was a nationally representative sample of 400 teens and 800 millennials. Okay? Okay. Not really a very big sample size, but here's the point that you have to realize, nationally representative. That doesn't mean nationally.

Right. So, they just got a bunch of people that may have lived somewhere else, but now live in L.A. to do this study. So, it is completely just silly. Yeah. As they usually are. Yeah. But, at least, you know, at least In-N-Out did win out over Chick-fil-A for millennials.

So, I'm good with that. Yeah. And I agree. That's fair enough. But Chick-fil-A is fucking delicious. Do you remember LiveJournal, Brian? Oh, vaguely, yes. Vaguely? You didn't have a LiveJournal account? You were a goth. I did not. I know. I thought it was a requirement for the goth club.

The goth society requires you to have a LiveJournal account. I was not issued my account. I thought, I swear to God, I thought you were flood on LiveJournal. I don't know. I never had a LiveJournal. Oh, okay. I didn't. I really didn't. Well, it's now owned by Russians.

Oh, well. So is everything else these days. Yeah, no shit about that one, eh? There's a big blowback right now because of everything that's going on in Russia. Because recently they moved all of LiveJournal servers to Russia. Right.

Which is a problem. Yes, it is. Because Russia has decided that they don't like anything that's good and wholesome in the world. Like LGBTQ, or as they call it, gay propaganda. Yes, sexual deviancy is, I believe, how they actually refer to it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's all sorts of things that Russia's doing right now to crack down on their peoples. Go figure. It's Russia. Why are we surprised about this? But people are leaving LiveJournal in droves. And to just even say that, that there are still people that were on LiveJournal. I think George R.R. Martin was on there, is one of the people that left.

I feel like I just went back in time. I know. People are leaving LiveJournal in droves. They're going to this fancy new thing called MySpace. Ah, and they're taking a sidestep at Ello and realizing that, oh, no, this isn't the future. Let's go to MySpace. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is very, very interesting that there's still a thing called LiveJournal. Yeah, I mean, I don't get, like, didn't everybody move to Tumblr that was doing LiveJournal-y type things? Kind of. Yeah. Most of them move to Blogger and are still on Blogger. Because Blogger's still a thing.

Go figure. Go figure. Yeah. So if you're on LiveJournal and you haven't gotten off yet, well, let me rephrase that. If you're on LiveJournal and you haven't left yet, you might want to think about it.

If you're on LiveJournal and you do want to leave, mate, I suggest you put up the gay clown Putin image and, Mike, drop your way out of there. Seriously. Now, some interesting news this week from the FDA. And you'd think, Jason, why are you talking about the FDA?

This is a tech show. Anytime I hear there's any interesting news about any government agency, I just assume it's been disbanded and removed. Yeah. The interesting news is the FDA still exists. We put somebody in charge of it that hates it and wants to take it away. Yeah. Well, they've finally given the go-ahead to 23andMe to screen for diseases.

Because we covered this on the show a long time ago. And when 23andMe went under, and it was like four years ago, right when we were starting. Because I was getting ready to send my spit in. And then they just kind of went dark for a long time. But they're back with a vengeance.

I've been hearing them on the radio, like, you know, the morning show here at WGN. Like, everybody did their 23andMe profile and did like an hour bid on it. It was pretty good. Yeah, they're advertising it everywhere. Yeah. And I'm thinking of doing it. It's $150. I mean, what could go wrong?

But, Brian, I think you're going to tell me what could go wrong. What could possibly go wrong? Well, there's a lot of things that could possibly go wrong. I would have my lawyer, well, in this case, that would be my wife, very carefully review their privacy agreement. It is long. There are lots of words.

Okay. I am very interested in what sort of security is being used to transmit said information. I want to know if they're keeping copies of my information, how that information is going to be stored, what sort of security precautions are in place in case of hacking, etc.

I want to know, you know, this is right now. This is all just very sci-fi and interesting. And like, let's find out what kind of diseases I could be potentially screened for. DNA information in the future, I have a feeling is going to be used for a lot of different things. And I want to know who has access to mine.

I've seen Gattaca. I know how this works. Exactly. I mean, we may, you know, we can joke about it. But I'm very, very concerned about who's going to have access to this kind of information. I would love to do it, but I do really want to know what exactly is being where my information is, who's getting access to it, where it's being stored, who's going to have access to the storage of it, etc.

You know, I seriously doubt that they're just going to do the scan and send it all back to you and wipe their hands of it and say, we're not keeping any of that. No, of course not, because they use it to cross reference you with other people to see if you have like celebrity, you know, cousins or like they need that data to do half of the stuff they do.

So it's obviously not going anywhere. Exactly. So I have concerns and so should you. I have concerns. Yes. I don't because, I mean, you have a legacy. You have a wife and a child and, you know, the world will exist past your expiration date. When I'm done, I'm done. I don't give a shit. So I'm not going to have any kids.

I'm not going to get married. So when I'm dead, I'm dead. And, you know, clock's ticking on that. So I just think it might be a fun experiment. Well, that's cheerful. I know. I know. Did I mention I'm a nihilist? Do I have to give you a hug, Jason? No, no, I don't want your cooties. All right.

You don't want my DNA. I don't want your DNA. Now, this would normally go in the security segment, but this just came out and security is already in the can. So because Mr. David Bittner is a very busy guy and we can only get him for a little window every week. And we have our little security hug and he makes us terrified of the world and then we move on.

Well, we talked before about the shadow brokers and he covers it extensively on the cyber wire. The shadow brokers, if you remember, is the hacking group that claimed to have all of those NSA tools that they were auctioning off via Bitcoin and there were no buyers.

Nobody would buy it because there it just sounded so ridiculous because the English that they were using was so terrible that it just reeked of scam. Right, right now on medium, they made a post. The shadow brokers have posted on medium.

All right. I'm going to read a little bit of it to you and then we'll get to why this is important. Dear President Trump, respectfully, what the fuck are you doing? The shadow brokers voted for you. The shadow brokers supported you. The shadow brokers is losing faith in you.

Mr. Trump, helping the shadow brokers, helping you. Is appearing you are abandoning your base, the movement and the peoples who getting you elected. OK, it started off OK. They were they had a strong, strong start, you know. Right. But they really kind of failed at the end of that last paragraph.

Well, all your base are belong to us. Exactly. That's it. It's so so what I was thinking. But yeah, they dumped all the files. Everything's out there now and it's on GitHub. So we'll have a link to the GitHub repository where you can go get everything. And even Snowden was shitting his pants on this one.

He's like, this is the dumbest thing they could have done, because now that they know what all the files are, they can backtrace where they came from and find out how they got them. So these guys just unzip their fly and are standing on a street corner waiting to get caught. Yes, they are no longer in the shadows.

No, they are not. But, oh, good times. I'm glad that the underside has now resorted to medium. Medium. Spring is actually almost here. It's time to cue the happy music and bask in spontaneous fits of joy.

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That's FreshBooks.com slash Grumpy and enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section for a free 30-day trial. Welcome back, Dave.

How was Arizona? Oh, Arizona was nice. I had never been to Arizona before. And coming from the East Coast, I will say that Arizona is beautiful. It is brown and it is spiky. Yes, it is.

It seems like all the wildlife and plants are all, you know, doing their darndest to survive, and so they're very defensive. We took a nice, beautiful hike on a trail in the morning before it warmed up, and it was one of those rocky trails where you sort of have to watch every step.

Because if you do trip and fall off the trail, you're going to get a butt full of cactus. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to do that hike at night, for sure. And I also love, in the hotel lobby where we were staying, there was a sign that said, beware of snakes. So, if it's a big enough problem that there's a sign, I guess it's a problem for people who aren't used to it.

You know, the people like me who would probably go try, oh, look at the adorable rattlesnake. Let me get a selfie with the rattlesnake. Then no more security segments. We were there for the Women in Cybersecurity Conference, which was fantastic. It was bigger than ever.

I think they had over 850 people there this year. Yeah, big event. Lovely facility there, Marriott Resort, which was nice. So, yeah, we had a good time. And if you are listening and you are a woman who's interested in cybersecurity, do check out the Women in Cybersecurity Conference.

It's a great place to get together. They have a job fair. They have lots of interesting speakers and breakout sessions. So, it's only two days. So, it's not one of those ones that takes up a whole week. So, if that's something you're interested in, check it out. Cool. I once dated a woman in cybersecurity. Is that right?

Yeah. She was a hacker for 2600. Took me to my first 2600 meeting. Wow. Pretty cool. And she took me to the apartment where Kevin Mitnick got caught by the cops back down in North Carolina. Wow. Interesting. Yeah.

Good old 2600, Captain Crunch. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I can tell you stories about that guy, which we will not put on the air because I do not like slander or libel laws that come after me. So, a little bit of follow-up on the Mac hacking thing that we talked about before.

You put out the call to say, hey, send us some emails if you've ever been caught up for your Mac getting hacked. And, sadly, zero. Nobody has apparently been hacked on their Mac. Isn't that fascinating? I think that's interesting because we know there are vulnerabilities and we know there are exploits out there.

But, as we said when we talked about this, I think it was a couple weeks ago, I have never heard of any direct incidences of friends, family, people I work with having any sort of ransomware or any kind of attack on their Mac.

And, evidently, either our listeners haven't either or they're just too lazy to write in about it. Or they're too savvy to get caught up in some kind of shenanigans like that. Yeah. It could be. It could be. But, interesting data. Interesting data.

I'm glad I use a Mac anyway. Reinforces my – but it's good confirmation bias for me, right? Yeah. Definitely. No. I mean, I bounced around between PC and Mac way back in the day, like, you know, the system seven, eight, and nine days for Mac. And then had my PCs, Windows 98 XP.

Those things were great. Sure. But as soon as OS X came out or OS X or whatever the hell they call it nowadays, and it had a free BSD kernel. You know? Right. That – you had me at free BSD. Yeah. No, it is. It's a nice, solid system.

I think back to those days of OS 9 and just how – just the lack of stability that we had, you know. Oh, yeah. Saving after everything. Just crash, crash, crash. How many times a day we had to restart because things were either locked up. You know, you didn't have protected memory or any of those goodies.

It was a real nightmare. It was interminable. And, yeah, you get – any type – you could, like, type a word and hit Command S. Like, Command S was just really ingrained into your muscle memory. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, well, shall we dive in for this week's stories?

We shall. Brian's not with us right now, but he leaves us a story from Slate entitled Why You Shouldn't Be Comforted by Internet Providers' Promises to Protect Your Privacy. And as we know, this week, President Trump signed a congressional resolution to repeal protections that were scheduled to go into effect that would have prevented Internet service providers from collecting, mining, and selling customer information without our permission.

Right. This, of course, we know due to the overwhelming – the overwhelming flood of constituents going to their congressmen and saying that what we really want is less privacy. Yes, exactly. What's this VPN thing, congressman, that everybody's telling me about?

Right. Right. Yeah, very political nonsense. That's what it is. Yeah, I mean, just a really great example of, you know, lobbyists getting what they wanted. That's pretty much it, yeah. Yeah, and, you know, we covered it last week with some different stories and VPN issues and things like that.

Sure. It's going to be interesting how this plays out, for sure, so keep an eye on it. And just, you know, if your congressperson or senator voted for this, then remember that next November 7th when it's time to get them out. Yeah. Well, it was pretty much – it was a direct party line vote as well, so not terribly surprising that, you know, when it comes to that.

So we're actually going to be covering that soon on the Cyber Wire. I talked with Ben Yellen. He was the gentleman who we had on your show a couple weeks ago, our law and policy analyst. So he's going to be on our show coming up soon talking about sort of the mechanics behind how this came to be and the rules that they used to make this happen and so forth and some very bizarre justifications that some people are trying to make for it.

That it really is in everyone's best interest to do it this way, which, of course, personally I don't agree with. I don't think anybody agrees with it except the lobbyists. No. No. I think you're right. So, yeah, when that comes out, we'll put it in the show notes for sure because that sounds fascinating. I love Ben Yellen.

He's a very smart dude. He is a very smart dude. And I'm glad to have smart dudes like that around because when I talk to them, I always learn stuff and that never gets old. Yeah. You don't have to be smart if you just have smart people to answer your questions for you. That's how we do the show. I think it's also kind of like it's really nice to have rich friends because then I don't need to own a boat.

Yeah. Right? As long as I have a friend who has a boat, has that hole in the water to throw money. So, anyway, moving on to our next story. We were talking about, you know, Brian. We answered Brian's question a couple weeks ago and it was actually Ben Yellen who answered his question about warrantless cell phone searches at the border.

And sure enough, there are a handful of lawmakers who have moved to stop those warrantless searches at the border. They've introduced legislation. And this is the usual folks that you would expect to do this. This is the libertarian gang on both sides of the aisle.

I hate those hippies. Oh, wait. I'm one of them. Oh, shit. But, you know, they put forward legislation basically, you know, forbidding these searches at the border of your devices, your mobile devices.

Also added language in there that the border people can't keep you for more than four hours without a warrant or anything like that. So, it doesn't apply to non-citizens. It only applies to citizens. But, again, I saw this story.

I checked in with our friend Ben Yellen and he said this is, you know, this is a nice thing to see but there's no chance this is going to make it anywhere. This is what he referred to as a messaging bill to merely make a point and draw some attention to the issue. But in today's environment with the way things are going between Congress and the White House, there's no chance this is going to go anywhere.

Well, thanks for the tease. I got excited for a second but it's like, hey, look at this great thing. Oh, you can't have it. Yeah, at least it's good that people are talking about it and, you know, pointing it out. This has to go somewhere.

If it's to the Supreme Court, you know, who knows? Maybe it comes down to them messing with the wrong person, right? And, you know, someone who has unlimited resources and time to put in the legal battle to take this to the end to say, no, I'm not going to settle.

We're going to take this all the way as far as we can to settle that searching my cell phone and making me unlock all of my social media accounts is not the same as going through my suitcase. So I'm going to bribe a TSA agent to go through Peter Thiel's cell phone next time he flies.

But I guess he probably doesn't fly commercial. But if he did, I would hire somebody to go to Peter Thiel's phone, keep him for four hours, and then unleash him on the legal battle because he apparently likes to sue people and spend a lot of money doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You messed with the wrong guy.

No doubt. Moving on, this is an interesting story we had on today's Cyber Wire. This is, of course, we've all heard of DDoS, right? Yes. Distributed Denial of Service. Well, now we have PDoS. Okay. That sounds like you might need an antibiotic.

PDoS stands for Permanent Denial of Service. Ooh, how do you do that? You brick the device. Ah, okay. So what's going on is there are a couple of bits of malware called BrickerBot1 and BrickerBot2.

And what these do is search out unsecured IoT devices. And instead of assigning them to some sort of botnet, it bricks them permanently. And you can't flash the firmware and bring it back to life? Supposedly, you cannot.

Wow. And so the security experts are wondering, what's the story here? What's the deal here? You know, why would someone do this? Other than just being malicious. For the lulls. Well, there's that. But there's also the notion that this is some sort of vigilante who's going around and saying, okay, if you're going to leave your devices vulnerable, rather than allowing them to become part of a botnet,

we're going to disable them so that they cannot become part of a botnet. Ooh, I like that. It's kind of like the Zorro of hackers. I like this guy. Exactly. So that's one of the theories about this. I like it until it hits me. Right. Exactly. Right. Your camera system, of course, or your DVR just gets bricked.

So it's making its way around. Do we know specifically what type of devices they're going after at this point? It says that it is targeting Linux BusyBox-based devices, which have open telnet ports.

Okay. So there's a whole category of devices. I believe it's mostly DVRs that it hits. That's good. People need to get outside more anyway. Stop watching so much TV. Right. Right. So keep an eye out for that. That's a nice new bit of nastiness to ruin your day.

Nice. Well, speaking of Internet of Things devices, we'll try and keep this one as family-friendly as possible, because I know that you're a family man, Dave. I am a family man. It's true. Well, to make that family, you probably employed the use of a vagina at one point, and we now have a camera that can see inside of one.

This has been making the rounds. The Svecom Slime Eye, which fire your marketing people right now. What a great name for something. Yeah. I wouldn't buy that. Yeah. $250 dildo with a camera on the top. Right.

On the tippy top. The tippy top. Yeah. So just in case you want to get your inner gynecological on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm as visual as the next guy, but there are limits. I mean, look, I don't begrudge anyone for anything, you know, too consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom, and evidently there's a market for this, so more power to you.

But, you know, it's passed my, what I would consider to be erotic and into, you know, like you said, medical. Yeah, it is very medical. Ah, you've got a polyp. Yeah. You might want to have that checked out. Yeah, that might break the mood. I don't know. Anyway, this thing is, it is open to attack, because they leave the default password at a bunch of eights, and they use Wi-Fi to connect it to the internet instead of, like, Bluetooth to your phone, which would then connect to the internet.

It's just a straight Wi-Fi dildo. And those are words that I never thought I would ever say. This is a straight Wi-Fi dildo. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to the new world. This was all around when this story broke. You know, of course, this is the kind of thing that people will take off on, because it will, of course, generate the most valuable thing on the internet, which are clicks.

But there was an interesting rebuttal that I put in the links from someone who has taken upon himself to analyze these sorts of stories, these erotic internets of things devices. Before I let you continue, I have to say that this gentleman has the single best domain name I have ever seen, period.

Internetofdawn.gs. Right. Beautiful. Beautiful. Round of applause for the Internet of Dongs. The Internet of Dongs, yes. Bravo, sir. Well played, sir. So, what does he claim in his rebuttal?

Well, he was saying that the idea that he was specifically talking about war driving, which is where people can drive around and there are apps that will look for Wi-Fi networks and we'll bring up a list of Wi-Fi networks and then you can, it'll catalog them.

You know, there are places you can go online where you can put in a location and it will tell you what Wi-Fi networks have been gathered up by people driving around and war driving. I used to do that many an evening in Los Angeles and we had the code, too, that we would chalk on the building.

So, if you were walking by, you could see the code for what was around there. Wow. Kind of like hobo code, but it was for Wi-Fi. Yep. In the old days. So, what was your hobby before that, that this was more fun? Well, the statute of limitations hasn't run out on that, so we're just going to keep that one secret.

Fair enough. But the gentleman who writes this internet of don.gs said that he was looking on one of the databases that does this war driving and basically two locations came up for this device and they corresponded to stores.

I believe they were stores in Japan where a product like this would likely be on display and being demoed. So, as far as he could tell, there were no incidences of this being, of this device, you know, sort of accidentally being added to one of these databases, which makes sense.

I mean, you think this is not the thing you're going to leave powered up and just standing by in your home. Well, you wouldn't, but a limited amount of time. Although, who knows? You could also, you know, when you're not using it for its intended purposes, it could also be used as a security camera.

That's right. You just put it on the shelf and leave it on. I was thinking just hanging out by the front door. Duct tape it to your mailbox. There you go. This guy also pointed out that the Wi-Fi range on it is going to be extremely limited.

You know, it's a small device. It's not designed to, it's not optimized for distance. Right. Yes. It is a close quarters combat device for sure. Yeah. So the notion is that, again, as we say, the breathless reports of this being a major issue are probably a little overblown and not as bad as it seems.

So there are no dongs in the wild is what you're trying to say. None discovered so far, according to this rebuttal here. But for those of you who are interested in it, check out the story. It is an interesting, you know, thoughtful dive into the truth of the possible vulnerabilities in this device.

So if this is your thing that you're interested in, take a look. It's an interesting read. No, and I've added this guy to my RSS feed for sure. Not just because of the name, because it's a fairly interesting topic. And we've talked about it for many years. We've talked about teledildonics on the show.

As you know, as this becomes a thing, it's interesting to see how it's grown. Surprisingly, it hasn't grown that much since we started talking about it four years ago. I thought we'd be much farther along. But it's good that, you know, these things come to light just because people need to know about the security issues.

And also, on the previous story where they were storing your sex data on the vibrator and got sued and had to pay out, you know, these people need to learn. It's not just about the sex toys. It's about security. No, it's true. It's true. And people, you know, the people who are using it, you know, our listeners and other people need to just be reminded that when you get these sort of devices, all these sorts of devices in your home, you can't assume that they're going to be secure, that your personal

information or even your activities are going to stay private when you're using anything that has any sort of connectivity to it. Yeah. And I mean, we talked about teddy bears that, you know, were, that had voice record, you know, voice capabilities and internet capabilities that could listen in and save that stuff.

And that's when you're clothed. So, you know. Right. Right. This adds a completely new level of ability to see your naughty bits. And keep an eye on that. Keep a slime eye on that, people. Is it actually slime eye or is it, I think it's sime eye.

I don't think there's an L in there. Oh, man. My eyes are going. Okay. It looks like it says slime eye. No, it does. It totally does. But I believe it's S-I-I-M-E, which I guess is whatever the same language as Svakum is. Okay.

So maybe, I don't know what that means. Well, I apologize to Svakum for calling it a slime eye because I thought that was just kind of gross. It just turns out I can't read anymore. It does sound like a euphemism, doesn't it? It really does.

He's giving you the old slime eye. Okay. Now that we've grossed everybody out, I'll let you go and we will chat next week. And of course, don't forget to check Dave's show out, The Cyber Wire, available wherever great podcasts are sold. Or you can just head over to thecyberwire.com.

It is a show every day during the week and it's fantastic. They do the cyber right. At the library. So you didn't get to any books this week, but I did. I got to a couple.

My first book was Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield, which I talked about previously. It's historical fiction, kind of like the Gates of Fire, his book about Thermopylae and the 300, the Spartans. This one is not as good, but it's shorter, which was a plus. It's about, you know, British guys going after Rommel.

It's interesting if you're into that sort of thing. I find Rommel fascinating because most people don't know he wasn't a Nazi. He never joined the party. He's a brilliant tactician and was eventually forced to commit suicide by the Nazis. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. Very good times.

But the book is entertaining, you know? Now, my next book is Zoe's Tale, book four of the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi. Man, you're just tearing through these. I am almost done with The Ghost Brigades, which is book two. Okay. Here's the thing about this one. Don't spoiler me. Well, I'm actually going to do you a big favor right now.

Okay. Skip Zoe's Tale. All right. Zoe's Tale is a retelling of book three from the perspective of the daughter. It's a young adult novel. Oh. But it's the same damn book. Right. So I got about an hour into it on Audible, and I'm like, this is the same story I just read.

And so I returned it. Yeah. The next one is called The Sagan Diary. That's only like an hour long on Audible. So I skipped it and just bought it on Kindle because it's a side story. Okay. Then we get to the human division. This is where we pick back up.

This is technically Old Man's War book five. Okay. Okay. Now we're back in action. Now we get back to it. So go from three to five. Gotcha. I'm almost done with this one. It's great. It's, you know, typical Scalzi, loving the book, completely loving it.

I actually did finish the book, and there's a story after the book ends, like a short story that I just almost started, like I got a little bit into. But the book itself, the full human division book, is great. I cannot wait to get to the last book and wrap up this series, but because his new series is so good.

But I want to get this one. I want to get this series in the can, you know? Right. Yeah, I got you. I mean, I'm very much enjoying the second book. I just didn't get a chance to finish it. Traveling with a baby is no longer the plane flight is no longer just me reading and watching movies anymore.

So you don't get that time. But I'll have it done for the next episode. Okay, cool. Yeah. But so far, these are when you get to the I can see why people would freak out when they're like, no, the books get worse as they go along. I can see that if you go to Zoe's tale in the second diary, where it's just like not really part of the core story.

Gotcha. All in all, thumbs up so far. Cool. We spent a lot of time back in our early episodes, Jason, which you are currently listening to doing quantified self and things of such nature, you know, steps, tracking our steps and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There are an awful lot of apps out there for health these days. Problem is, they don't have to do shit. Okay. There is no body, the FDA, who you think would actually get into this and look around, they only get involved if a health app qualifies as a medical device, which would mean custom hardware components like cameras or sensors and having the potential to harm you if things go wrong.

If you are basically just an app that purports to give you calorie counts, track your steps, all of that sort of thing, tell you what's going on this week in your pregnancy, you don't have to actually do any of that correctly and there's no harm, no foul, can't get in trouble for it.

So if you have wrong calorie counts and ruin people's diets, FDA doesn't care. If your apps are counting your steps wrong and you're only doing 10,000 when you think you're doing 15, tough shit for you. So that's how it works. It's really buyer beware, snake oil, all that sort of thing out there.

So the FDA does not get involved, does not have to. There is a link in our show notes to the article that discusses this over at Lifehacker and they give a gigantic list of categories of apps that the FDA does not get involved in that are quote unquote health related. So good to know that none of these things actually have to work.

Yeah, they don't have to. And I look at it as just, you know, data over time. So, you know, if something's going to be inconsistent, as long as it's consistently inconsistent, then I can still track progress. Yeah. I mean, that works for some some applications, but say like the pregnancy one, not so much. Yeah, well, that's if you're if you're trusting an app to talk to you about your pregnancy, well, then you're just stupid.

Sorry. Well, there's that. I'm not going to mince words there. Go to your doctor because that's just stupid. Me. You know, I can I have my my Apple Watch, which tracks my steps. I have my Fitbit, which tracks my steps. I can compare the two, see which ones work, which ones don't. Whatever. Here's the deal.

It gets me out of the house. I'm fine with it. I'm not using this to, you know, become Superman. And it's not going to kill me. It's not going to kill me if it if it screws up. But I can understand I can understand where they're where they're saying that. Yeah, this is basically they're all glorified pedometers, which you can just go buy at the store anyway, which is a little clicker that used to carry on your belt back in the day.

So it is. That's all it really is. That's very true. Yep. Now, I found something for you, Jason. I saw this one. Yeah, I'm betting you're not going to get this, but you never know. It's called the Sure Flap. It's a British company that makes smart pet gadgets and they're preparing to launch a smart pet door that can be controlled by an app on your phone.

So unlike the old days where you just had a flap and the dog came in and out when the dog pleased, you can now turn on or off the ability for that thing to open through an app. OK, isn't that great? That is great. Let Fido free. Yeah, I will not be getting this because I don't have a fenced in yard.

So if I open the door, bam's gone. Right. And then I'm going to be in jail because she'll probably eat somebody or just get her tummy rubbed until they fall over from a heart attack and then I'll still get sued. Who knows? But yeah, no, I will. So this. Yeah, this app will allow you to lock and unlock the door at the press of a button, schedule curfews for your pets and track when pets come and go with notifications.

You can also share access to this app with a pet sitter. Oh, nice. Why don't you just get a fucking pet sitter? Give them the damn key. I love the idea of a curfew for your pet because if it goes out in the middle of the day and just sits in the shade and won't come back in, well, what are you going to do?

Exactly. No. I like the way that the old one worked. The previous one worked with microchipped pets or pets with ARFID collars. Right. But this one won't work with that. That's actually quite clever. I like that. That is a good use of the technology.

Building an app to control it is stupid. Yeah. Fun times. Now, guess what I got this week, Brian? What'd you get, Jason? I got an Android phone. Yes, I know. I saw you posted on Facebook and I saw everybody aghast. Oh, my God. It's pretty fucking nice.

That's all I've got to say. I like the phones. I hate the software. I just I don't like Android software. The thing is, I yeah, the the launch pad or whatever they call it, launch board or, you know, the main area that you run all your apps in the basically the main OS sucks.

Yeah. But the things I like about it, the first thing I did was I had my iPhone next to me and I wanted to replicate the first screen of my iPhone with all the apps I have. And see what worked and what didn't work. Not a single app for my iPhone was not on the Android.

So I can completely have everything working. And even one like Dark Sky that I didn't even think would ever have an Android app. Yep. All there. It's amazing. I got a Galaxy S7 Edge from a friend for testing. I'm not using it as my phone, but I'm just basically testing podcast apps on it.

And the podcast app ecosystem on the Android is god awful. You get Pocket Casts and that's about it. Right. And Pocket Casts is it costs like four bucks for Pocket Casts. And it is really not anywhere near anything that you can get on iOS.

You know, I use Overcast and even going back to Downcast was much better than this. It just doesn't work right. There's just so many things wrong with it. But all in all, you know, I did all the software updates, the security updates to make sure that, you know, nobody's getting into my phone and I'm only using it on Wi-Fi in my house.

But, you know, if I had to, I can swap the SIM card out and actually put in more memory in the phone, which is nice. Yeah. The camera is gorgeous. So, you know, I do have a backup phone with it and I may play around with it. The only downside is I can't use my AirPods with it, which I just spent almost 200 bucks on, which work gloriously with the iPhone.

I still love those things, although you will laugh this morning. I was waking up the dog and she she basically gives you a face lick every morning and she licked the air pod out of my ear. And I just had flashes of that fucking commercial. Yeah, I finally I got it away from her just in time before she went after it.

But it was pretty funny. Yeah, they're going to come back brown. Oh, I definitely would like different colors on these AirPods. I may actually get some paint markers and paint mine up because you do look like a twat wearing these out in public. You think?

Yeah, you do. I was going to put this later, but I'll just cover it right now real quick. I did figure out how to switch the double tap mode because I did complain when I first got them that if you double tap on it, it would open up Siri. But there is a preferences pane in settings on the iPhone where you can go in and change the behavior of the double tap.

So now it's just it's a stop and start, which is great. Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Which is what I wanted. That's all I wanted. And it works fantastic. And for the podcasters out there, I just did get a Focus Scarlett 2i2 second generation audio interface. Piece of shit.

Absolute piece of shit. I'm testing all this stuff for my podcasting class. So I needed to get some of the common tools that other people use. So I picked this one up. I kept the box. I'm probably going to return it. I'm going to do a video with it and return it because it's terrible. It is utterly terrible. The preamp is crap.

The noise floor is through the roof, if you could say that. So yeah, run away from the Focus Rites so far. And that's pretty much what I hear from everybody who's a professional. It's just like, yeah, it's like basic amateur stuff because it's cheap, but not the quality isn't there.

Yeah, you see Focus Rite a lot in home studios, never in a pro. Yeah, yeah, it's not really good. I did pick up the Shure Beta 58A microphone, though. This does not suck. Yeah. This is a, you know, those Shure microphones, like the handheld ones that you see all the comedians use.

These things are like, you know, they're workhorses. Everybody's got them. And I picked this one in particular because Louis C.K. uses this on his new Netflix special. It's the same exact mic that he uses. And it sounded fantastic in the effects that he was doing with it. And it's got like internal dampeners for shock.

You know, so if you're hand-holding it, it like will absorb those shocks from being moved around. I haven't played with it that much, but the audio that I've gotten out of it so far is amazing. I love this thing. If this thing works out really well for, like, roadshows, I've got to do a roadshow next week, I'll probably pick up three more of them so I have four of them in my bag.

But they're like $160, built like a tank. Yep. Yeah. I mean, Shure is your basic standard. I mean, that's what almost everybody uses live. So can't go wrong.

So we've been talking about The Expanse over the past couple of weeks now that you're starting to get caught up and enjoying the show. I was caught up. Apparently, Siffy is wise to VPNs. So I was not able to catch up and stay abreast because I'm here in Canada and they would not let me watch it.

Oh, no. They've blocked the IP from up there. Yes, they have. Sucks. Oh, man. So I am one episode behind. I will catch up as soon as I get home. Okay. I'm caught up. I have to concur with your statements last time.

It's pretty much just like by the numbers now. It's predictable. And it's honestly boring. I am so bored. We've got two episodes left in the season and I can't wait for it to end so I don't have to worry about it every week. Oh, dear. Yeah. It sucks. I'm just like, come on.

Yeah, that's not good. Oh, well. I mean, yeah. Yeah. That's not what I wanted to hear. Oh, well. Yeah. Threw me some curveballs. Let's go. I mean, you could just it's they're just projecting so far in the future with the show that you know what's happening. It's just like, oh, man.

Right. Too bad. Too bad. Okay. I'll see if I agree when I get back. Okay. So to get around what you happen to have, I signed up for YouTube TV. It's live. Woohoo. Yeah. What do you think? It's to me, it looks like a lot of money for not a lot of content.

That's exactly what it is. There's like seven channels on here that I really wanted that I can, you know, watch live stuff on. Here's the kicker, though. I haven't even fired it up yet. I'm on the free trial. You know, they give you a free month to check it out. Yeah. But in my workflow, I've already got everything so, you know, tied down to Sweden where it's just like I've got to do list reminders popping up.

It's like, oh, download Survivor. Okay. Download the experience. So I just get this stuff automatically. Now I'm thinking, oh, maybe I really don't need live TV, period. Well, you don't. Not with your goobang. I've played with that once. Right. So, oh, oh, Seth Miranda from the Grime Life podcast.

He picked up a goobang. He just ordered one yesterday. So he's going to tell me, like, all the cool stuff that we could do with it. All right. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. He's, you know, he's kicking around the house too much nowadays. So he's going to go get it and run with it and then tell me what's cool so I don't have to spend the time on it.

But next week, I'll definitely have a rundown on what is cool and what is not with YouTube TV. And I'm having a hard time justifying 35 bucks a month for, you know, 32 channels, 22 of which I don't care about. They say they're coming out with more channels soon.

Like there's another round of 10 that are coming. But if they can get to, they're really close to basic plus with all the stuff that I watched. And so if they can get up to that for 35 bucks a month and save me going out and dealing with Comcast to get a cable box and having the guy come out and show me his ass crack while he's plugging stuff in, I'm cool with that.

And, you know, they say it's like, you never have a DVR. You don't have to, you know, we've got instant DVR. I'm like, of course you do. You're recording everything. Derp. It's not called a DVR. If you just record everything, it's just, you know, on demand, instant playback, whatever. Yeah.

I'll have some rundown on it next week, but I get a shot, you know. And I get YouTube Red for free. Oh, joy. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Even though I'm signed up with it through my account in my YouTube account, and I still see ads, so I don't know how that's working.

I'm going to have to have a word with YouTube. Get me Mr. Tube on the phone. Yeah. I was about to say good luck with getting anybody from support on there. Yeah. Okay. Well, our friends from Serial and NPR are back. Yes. They have a new podcast called S-Town.

Yes, they do. I have attempted to listen to it. I listened to the whole thing in one day. Okay. I thought it was enjoyable. I can't get past the accent. I just can't. Oh, the main protagonist from... Well, you don't have to very long.

There's a little secret on that one. Okay. Here's the problem I have with this. They call it a podcast. Oh, boy. It's not a fucking podcast. I saw you do this rant online already. Yeah. It's not a podcast. It's an audio book. It took them years to make this. They released it all at once.

Everybody go ahead and skip ahead about three minutes. Yeah, fuck off. But it's not a podcast, god damn it. And now they're saying they're breaking download records. They got 10 million times in the first four days. Okay, so 10 million downloads the first four days. They released the whole thing at once. So you cannot compare it to Serial because Serial was a serial.

This is an audio book that they released, and so they're cheating on the numbers. That's all I'm saying. They're cheating on the numbers. I like the podcast. I thought it was decent. You know, if it was an audio book, I would not be sad if I paid for it. So for free, that's fine. And there's Blue Apron ads in there, which I don't mind because I pay for Blue Apron.

Okay. The thing that pisses me off, though, is the shitty website. Because they talk, like, in the end credits about how beautiful their website is. Yes. In the old days, Brian, when we would do a website for a TV show or a movie or even a concert series like you would do with, you know, your bands, we would have behind the scenes.

We would have pictures of everybody. We would have videos, like behind the scenes videos. Their website has seven embedded players so you can listen to each chapter. That's it. I know. It's a great website. And they're saying they've got a beautiful, amazing website. No, you don't.

You've got a piece of shit website. These people don't know how to make websites anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's kind of the problem, right? Like, nobody does websites anymore. So for them, this is impressive. I'm like, that is a horrible website. No. It's a one-page fuster cluck.

I mean, we were craftsmen. You know, we spent months and months making these things. And they were beautiful and they were fun. And we got, you know, it supported us for a very long time. And the internet was the most beautiful place back then. Now it's this shit. So, yeah.

Yes, it is. Shit town has a shit site. Yes, it does. Sorry. Okay. Thus endeth the rant. I'm like, hey, don't tell me it's a podcast when it's not. And don't tell me you got a beautiful website when it's a piece of shit. That's all I got to say. Now, all I'm going to say about that, I somewhat agree with you.

But if they were using the term podcast as the distribution method in which they are doing it, that is very true. It is a podcast. Yeah. From a content perspective, if you define podcast as content, then it is not a podcast. If you define podcast as distribution, then it certainly is.

Right. But here's the other thing about this. This is a one-off. There's not going to be shit town season two. No, but I mean, podcast is a very generic definition. So, yes. I, you know, you can argue that. You can argue that. I just, I think they're cheating. I think they're cheating quite a bit.

You know, I just, it's good pod, man. Fuck you. People in their pod. Speaking of guys doing pods, I see you have another story in here. Bernie Sanders. Yes. The burn. Feel the burn. Now you can hear the burn.

Okay. This is a podcast I will never listen to, but he launched his podcast and he's getting press about it. So I thought I'd have to just at least make a, make a head nod to Bernie Sanders that anybody nowadays has a podcast. And if you want to learn how to do a podcast, right, go to propodcasting.school and sign up for the newsletter that I'll let you know when you can learn how to make your own podcast.

And look at the meticulously crafted, beautiful website. Bite me. It'll get better. It'll get better. I've got, you know what my, you know what my subscription rate is on my, my signup sheet though? 32%. That's good.

That's unheard of. Yes. Yeah. You know how many people have signed up so far? Two? Six. I'm okay. I'm up to six. All right. Not bad, man. Not bad. Yeah. That shows the power of advertising on grumpy old geeks. Shouldn't have said that. Oh yeah.

Advertisers skipped that part. Netflix has released the first teaser for the Defender. Which will be coming August 18th. And I'm quite excited about. It's very well done. Very funny. It's taken with one of Jason's security cameras. Yeah. So we have the link in the show notes.

It's a 15 second clip. Pretty good. I'm, I'm very much looking forward to the show. I've been, I want new Jessica Jones season as soon as possible as well. Please let's get on that. Please. That is the best of the bunch. I agree. Yeah. I did like, I did like the, the old daredevil though. Like he's wearing the bandana over his eyes.

Yeah. Like the, like in the first season. I like that. Yep. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Now, Anne Hathaway has a new movie called Colossal. I have watched the trailer for this and I must say, I am very intrigued. This looks like it could be a very, very good movie. Did you see the trailer for this yet?

I have not. You need to watch this. It is by writer, director, Nacho Vigalando. And a lot, I know, right? A lot of the press about this is about Anne Hathaway and her likability problem and how maybe this movie will fix it. So, but who cares? It is basically a story and this is not a spoiler because it tells you straight out in the trailer what's going on.

She plays basically an alcoholic and she gets blackout drunk. And every time she's blackout drunk, she actually becomes basically Godzilla and destroys and kills people. Okay. This looks hilarious. I mean, it's a super dark comedy. I have seen this. I have seen this trailer. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. No, that looks great. No, it looks great. So, I'm very much looking forward to that. I don't know why Anne Hathaway has such a big PR problem. I like her. I got no problem with her. I think she's fine. Yeah. I don't get it. I think she's fine and she can sing. So, well, speaking of singing, Bjork has released a moody and gorgeous virtual reality experience called Not Get.

I have not gotten this and I will not be getting it because I, I have no interest in the VR aspect of it. I just like the song. So, I love Bjork. And if you want to have some decent content for your stupid headset that you've got, here you go.

Okay. Yeah. In one of the old episodes, we were talking about me going as Bjork for Christmas, or not Christmas, for Halloween. And you told me I could only do it if I got the swan dress. Right. That's true. I remember that. Oh, yeah.

So, you remember the band, the Presidents of the United States of America. They had one song. Lump. They had more than one. They had peaches. I don't remember peaches. Was it good? Millions of peaches, peaches for me. Millions of peaches, peaches for free. It was a great song. Yeah, that was a great song. Yeah. Okay. So, that was even bigger than Lump.

Okay. Anyways, the lead singer, I believe his name, I'm sorry, I'm blank. Casper. No, not Casper. Casper Baby Pants? Is that what you're saying? Casper Baby Pants is his new band, which is, this is perfect for me. And if you have a child, and we've had a few people writing in, actually, recently that also have just had children, check out Casper Baby Pants.

So, this is the lead singer of the Presidents of the United States of America, Chris Bello. So, he kind of disappeared when that, when the Presidents kind of ended and broke up. But he is now 51 years old and is huge as a singer-songwriter for babies and kids.

Casper Baby Pants. I've listened to some of this stuff. It's fantastic. Okay. So, I mean, talk about reinventing yourself. This is just great. There's a link in the show notes to a site called Fatherly, and if you're one of the people that has written in and just had a kid, you'll like this site anyways. So, check it out.

But, yeah, you can listen to some of his new songs that he sings for kids, like Banana Bread. I like that one a lot. It's a good song. Oh, I like Banana Bread. Very cool. Yeah. So, good on you. Great reinvention there. Now, Brian, I put this one in here for you. Carrie Fisher is going to be in Episode 9 of Star Wars.

Yeah. I mean, she shot a whole bunch of stuff for it, so of course she is. Right? Well, I mean, this is the next one. Episode 8 is the one that's coming out now. Oh, gotcha. Okay. Episode 9 is the final one. So, they're going to use the remnant footage that they have, and they needed permission from her family to do it, and the family gave permission.

Okay. So, the only thing that has me really scared about this is they're going to have to tweak the story to go around the footage that they have. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, then, is they're basically just changing the story and saving some of the footage that would have been in 8 and pushing that to 9. But, I mean, the story has to be tweaked anyway.

She died. Yeah, exactly. Like, I don't think that Princess Leia was going to die in this three-parter, so. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. So, it's, I mean, I'm glad that they're doing it, but the nice thing is that they said they're not going to use any CGI. Oh, good. Because that's, it's just not quite there.

I watched. It was close. It was so close, but we're still in the uncanny valley. Yeah, definitely in the uncanny valley still. I just recently re-watched Rogue One, and Grand Moff Tarkin just tweaked me really bad. I tell you what, you know what? It's 2D. If you watch it in 2D, it looks terrible.

When I saw it in 3D, it was amazing. Yeah, but I can't stand 3D, so. Yeah, all the movies I've seen recently have all been in 2D. Like, we're done with it. Yeah. But I will see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 in 3D, because who cares? There's space battles in that one, you know?

True. If there's a space battle, I'll give the 3D a go. So the other two things I have this week for Media Candy, I watched Hamilton's America, finally. Okay. I was on the fence about watching this before I went to go see Hamilton in person. Yeah. I wish I'd have watched it before I'd have gone and seen it.

It is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. It's a, you know, an hour and 20 minutes on PBS, but it follows Lin-Manuel Miranda from, like, you know, years before Hamilton is actually done. His buddy just followed him around while he was making the show. And then it gets into the show and just a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.

And it was amazing. How much work went into making Hamilton is crazy. But all the stuff that happened after it is crazy. It's just, it's a really good documentary, like, standalone. Even if you haven't seen Hamilton and are maybe interested in seeing it, it'll probably get you super jazzed to see it.

But I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm probably going to watch it again this weekend because it's really good. It's very interesting to see, like, his process because it took him six years to write it, you know? Right. So highly recommend that. If you are a TV subscriber and have PBS in your area, you can go to the link in the show notes and watch it for free on the web.

I don't, so. Sweden. Yeah. Next one, Black Sails. Friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, who does all of our VOs, turned me on to this. He's like, he's been telling me for years to watch this show. And I never did.

And finally, like, I checked Hulu. All, like, the last three seasons are on Hulu. They're on season four right now, which is the final season. So they're only doing four seasons. This is Deadwood on the High Seas. It is so damn good. And, you know, it's produced by Michael Bay.

So you know they've got budget. Right. Because they are on these big-ass ships. You know, these aren't CGI ships, for the most part. There are some scenes that are. But for the most part, they're sailing on, you know, trimasted ships. And it's supposed to be, I guess, a prequel to Treasure Island, the book.

Okay. Yeah. And, man, is it good. Like, every night I go down and watch at least two episodes. And I'm almost done with season three and getting ready to dive into season four. And I just, I can't find a bad episode in the bunch, honestly. Okay. I mean, if you like, even if you're not a pirate person, this is still just great drama.

And there are boobs. Lots of boobs. So. All right. Jason's five boob star rating. Moron of the week. Well, I thought I had one moron of the week with the link that I found earlier this week. But then, you know, Pepsi and Kendall Jenner came along and killed everything.

But I'll do mine really quick. Anyways, Sheila Booth has a new film. It's called Man Down. There's actually quite a lot of people in it. And, you know, people seem to like the Shia, Shia, whatever his name is. Everything he does gets a lot of attention. I just like to call him the Booth.

This is called the Booth. Yeah. The Booth. Everything he does does seem to get a lot of attention. So you'd think that he would do all right with this movie. It made seven pounds at the UK box office. I smell a rat. That's one ticket. It is one ticket. And I smell a rat.

Me too. I think this is a this is a this is a scam. This is a press scam. Now, to be fair, it did go direct to digital. It is only screened in one theater. And why go see it in the theater when you can basically just get it at home? So, yeah, there you go.

So I think it's a PR thing, but it's still quite funny. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the boof. The boof. Let's talk about Kendall Jenner and the Pepsi commercial for a brief moment. Wasn't that peachy keen? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. So the Pepsi SNL tore it down with a beautiful takedown of the person who was the director saying, oh, oh, yeah, it's insensitive.

Oh, yeah. Oh, OK. And just, you know, going back and forth, like asking different people, like handing the phone to other people saying, can you give me a black person? What do you think? Oh, don't touch it. Oh, OK. And he tries to run off set before it's filmed. We've got another one, which is a They Live parody of it called Consume, which is very funny.

But the gist of it is it is an extraordinarily insensitive ad that tries to hijack Black Lives Matter for Pepsi. Yes. Oops. And Kendall Jenner is apparently traumatized by the backlash. I was going to say the backlash. I was going to say the backlash, but, you know, that could also be probably apropos.

She's she's a young girl. She's only 21. And, you know, apparently millions aren't saving her her poor little soul from the fact that everybody thinks she's an asshole for making this commercial. Well, to be fair, I mean, she's just an idiot.

So let's leave it at that. This wow, this ad is just insane. I mean, there's no point in going on and on about it because, you know, the Internet did that all week long. Oh, they're still doing my favorite. A couple of my favorites were like in the SNL and they're like, oh, you're you're doing what?

How are you talking about black people? Oh, well, we've got hip hop dancers. OK, so there's a stereotype. Got an Asian guy playing a cello. There's a stereotype. And in another one, the Muslim woman who who's the photographer and grabs her camera and runs outside. Yeah, that's a ten thousand dollar.

Pen tax that she's running outside with. We're not really talking about, you know, the people on the street here. Yeah. Well, and then the funny thing about all of this is in addition to the tone deafness, it's also a blatant rip off of a preexisting music video by the Chemical Brothers out of control.

We have the link in the show notes. They basically ripped off this entire video, except removed all meaning from it and made it stupid. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And there's we have a link in the show notes for over at the fader, which has the director of the music video from the Chemical Brothers, Wiz, talking about basically how they ripped off his 1999 video to try to make a Pepsi a protest thing.

Apparently, this would be kind of like the president taking a movie called Idiocracy and turning it into real life. Hmm. Kind of like that, I guess. Strip all meaning and importance and leave us with absolutely nothing but a bad taste in our mouth, which we will now call Pepsi. The one thing about the story that you just posted that really kind of got me going is I need to listen to more Chemical Brothers.

I really love those guys. Right? It's a great song. It's a great song. They're a great band. They were one of the best live techno bands I've ever seen. Definitely. Have you heard of a guy named William Playfair?

No, I have not. Well, he's a Scottish scoundrel. Oh, where are any Scottish pirates? We definitely need Bob for this particular guy. But this is I just found this fascinating. This is a Scottish guy who was known for blackmailing lords.

He was being sued for libel. This is all back in what? I believe the 1800s or something like that. I like him already. 1759. In addition to just kind of being this roustabout who was constantly getting in trouble in Scotland, he also invented the pie chart, the bar graph, and the line graph.

I love it. He basically created visualization of data. You know, he's the grandfather of USA today. And PowerPoint. And PowerPoint. Okay, so we get to blame the Scottish for PowerPoint. We can blame the Scottish for PowerPoint. PowerPoint and Excel.

I'm going to excel at taking your fucking money. We have a link in the show notes. It's quite a long article over at Atlas Obscura, which is obviously one of our new favorite sites because one of us is always pulling up a link from there. This is a good long read about this guy.

Absolutely fascinating. So I highly recommend you check it out. You know, a lot of words. They could have probably done more visualizations. But it does show some of his original ones that he did. And it's absolutely fascinating stuff. They're beautiful, too. Yeah. They're totally beautiful.

Have you picked up the Atlas Obscura book yet? No, I keep meaning to. I'm going to order it when I get home. I got to wait for a coffee table before I can put it, like order it, because I need something to put it on. And I don't have a coffee table yet. So once I get a coffee table, that will be my first coffee table book. Excellent.

And I have a quick throwaway listicle that I just thought was really good. 18 odd things about America that Americans haven't realized are odd. All of these are true. If you've traveled the world, you realize that these things that we do in America are quite weird to everybody else. I particularly liked it for just one line.

In the United States, we like our butter like we like our judicial system. Hard and cold. Can you give us any of the other 18? Just a tease. Tipping. You know, that's that's weird. We don't do that early. I love that when I leave the country.

Early dinners. People in Europe tend to eat at nine. Not this six or seven o'clock thing. The fact that we put the flag everywhere. Mm hmm. Yeah. Ads for legal services. I like that. The sales tax surprise because, you know, most countries will just give you the price with the tax.

So, you know what you're paying as opposed to the nice surprise. OK, let's leave some for the people to go check out the link because I'm going to check it out after this because these sound amazing. I want to definitely. They're all quite good. So there you go. OK, a hacker apparently infiltrated Dallas's emergency system and activated all 156 sirens in the middle of the night.

Oh, joy. Someone has seen V for Vendetta. Yeah. Yeah. Infrastructure. Infrastructure is very important, people. And so is putting on good passwords. Yes. Yes. The city said in a statement Saturday that it wasn't sure who the hackers are, but officials said that they know how it was done and they believe the hacking came from the Dallas area.

OK, all right. OK, that's kind of cool. And a Chinese man has married a robot that he built himself. Japan, you're slipping. I would have I would have expected this from you, Japan. Well, this is a dude who finally just got fed up with his mom ragging him.

OK. Jing Zhai Zhai, 31 years old. That's Chinese for Jason. Hey, fuck you. That's that's American for Brian. He'd become tired of the constant nagging from his family and pressure to get married. So he turned to a robot he built late last year and named her Ying Ying.

OK. After two months of quote unquote dating, he donned a black suit to quote unquote marry her at a ceremony attended by his mother friends. And yes, while not officially recognized by the authorities, the union had all the trappings of a typical Chinese wedding with Ying Ying's head covered in a red cloth.

In accordance with local tradition. For now, Ying Ying can only read some Chinese characters and images and speak a few simple words. But Zhang plans to upgrade his bride to be able to walk and do household chores. Until then, he has to carry the 30 kilogram robot to move her.

And I would just like to note that Zhang is an AI programmer. Of course. Of course. Of course. Yes. No, look, I have a dog. I don't need a robot. And just even stop exactly what you're thinking right now, because I know you're going there.

You sick bastard. I'm going to create a registry for you. Bam, bam, bam. First up, the door. The dog door. That's the app control door. Yeah. And you're going to give her the code so she can escape and never see me again. I know you.

Now, this is something that I had never heard of. Have you heard of lunch shaming? Not until this week when it has exploded across all of social media. And I am horrified that this exists. I just ran across this this morning when I was going through my stories.

And New Mexico is the first, you know, first state in the country to pass this law about lunch shaming. But what I didn't understand was in New Mexico, if the kids can't afford their lunch, they basically are just, you know, tagged like the Jews at Auschwitz and made to mop the floors and wear wristbands that say that their parents are poor and all of this crap.

This is horrific. It's a horrific practice. I really did not know that this existed. It's so it's wrong on so many goddamn levels. It pisses me off. High school is so difficult to get through without like blowing your brains out every day without some shit like this coming down from, you know, the school system.

I cannot believe this actually was allowed to stand for this long. Yeah, no, this one pissed me off. I'm glad that they banned the practice. But the fact that you had the practice to begin with does not make you, you know, innocent in the whole thing. New Mexico. Yep. Feedback loop.

We have a bunch of new Patreon supporters this week. Woohoo! Macy, Brett Ervin, Thomas Griffiths and Brian Seward are our new Patreon subscribers this week. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you all so much.

It's been really cool that people are stepping up recently because, I mean, we've had that up for ages and we've had people that have signed up right away and have been supporting us the whole time. But we really had an uptick recently. So thank you. Yeah, that means a lot to us. And also, it really does. We like your money, but also tell your friends because you guys rock.

Yes, you do. And two of the folks that just became Patreon subscribers also wrote us through our website. First up is Thomas. He says, hey, guys, great show. Signed up to Patreon to support your podcast. Yes, you did. Thank you. As a new father, your show has provided hours of entertainment whilst out walking my newborn daughter.

Keep it up and cheers from New Zealand. Thank you so much, Thomas, and congrats on the daughter. It's yeah, it's a fun trip so far, isn't it? OK. Diapers. Yes. Thank you, Thomas. Next up is Brian Seward. Hey, longtime listener. Really enjoyed the show.

Now, the beginning of his note had a whole bunch of Patreon issues that I reached out to him personally and we kind of walked through. So he finally got it figured out. Oh, good. And now it gets to the real part. Love the show. It gives me plenty of ideas for reading material and purchases. Sennheiser's The Bunny Book are recent ones.

Love the Dave Bittner segment and also am definitely on board with any guests you guys find interesting. Well, OK, we've got one for one against. Although I think the one against gave us a three star. So this this this should be one point five. OK. What the hell is with everyone getting so bent out of shape for a few Trump comments or any comments for that matter?

I haven't ever found you guys doing anything else than discussing general facts. Well, see, that's the thing. There's there's those alternative facts that are so pesky out there that people choose to believe. So, yeah, I don't get it. I mean, everybody is going to have an opinion, but you're not allowed to anymore, I guess.

Yes, yes, that's the way that's the way it goes. I do remember in I was listening to episode 12 or 13 where we had David Teter on for the first time and we got our first negative feedback. Yeah, we were not so diplomatic back then.

No, my reply was it's my show. Fuck you. I think that was actually led to our second bit of negative feedback. A one star rating that said they tell you to go fuck yourself if you don't like it. Yeah. So we've become more diplomatic in our old age, although to be honest, and this is just between you and you listeners and us.

We still feel the same way. If you don't like it, go fuck yourself. Oh, yes. Continuing with the note, there literally is no other show that goes as long. See, Brian? Yeah, no shit. With such diverse tech topics and real actual wisdom, reviews and opinions.

I listen to a lot of tech infosec podcasts and audio books because I'm too busy to actually read. I do love to read, but just have ear pods in all the time and surprising how much content has been linked from you guys. Amen, brother. Trust me. I do all the Lincoln. I know. Congrats to Brian on the child.

I know I am not alone appreciating the continued GOG with a lack of time. All the best for the podcast school, Jason. Thank you. Your podcast sounds great and is a testament to what can be achieved. By the way, it's pronounced Stuart, Stuart. It's like Stuart without the T. Cheers from Adelaide, you guys.

So we've got a New Zealander and somebody from Adelaide. This is awesome. And you turned him Scottish, even though he's Australian. I know. But when you say Stuart, Stuart comes from- That's true. You kind of have to do it that way. Stuart's a Scottish. But maybe his family was one of the people that founded Australia way back in the day.

Down at Botany Bay. Yes. By founded, you mean like, you know, with a pickaxe and a picklock and all that sort of stuff that you nasty people did? Yeah. Just go right up on the history of Botany Bay. Maybe the Stuart's came from there. Now, wasn't the Botany Bay the ship from Star Trek 2 where the con was on?

Con was on the Botany Bay and Star Trek 2, yes. That's what I thought. Okay. Yep. Good. All right. Our next bit is from Citaram Chamarty. Chamarty? You think that's right? I think, yeah. Citaram Chamarty. Okay, good. I've really enjoyed the seven or eight episodes I heard since I discovered you, and your sense of humor was one of the best things about it, which is why I was a little surprised by the casually thrown comment about Indian developers in your latest episode.

I'm trying to think back to past episodes to try and remember if you are, how do I put this delicately, an equal opportunity maligner or not, but I'm blanking. Well, we just made fun of Scottish, Australians, and New Zealanders. And a whole shit ton of Americans. That's true. Or maybe my mind only registered this one, ignoring all the other comments about the Irish, the Scots, the Polish, the Russians, and the Chinese, see previous few minutes, et cetera, that you made could happen, you know, and I certainly am not the kind to download all of them and listen again.

But why not, goddammit? I am. Exactly. So are you an equal opportunity maligner, or are Indians a special peeve? And if they are, may I suggest taking time to be more specific, examples, episodes, reasons, discussion, instead of a throwaway comment? First off, yes, we're equal opportunity maligners.

Fuck Canadians. Who puts fucking milk in a bag? I know. It's insane. No, I mean, we make fun of everyone equally. There's nothing. In fact, I don't believe we've ever really made fun of Indians in any particular way. And like, the context in which that we discuss things is very important.

And yes, the Indian developers, I'm sorry, that's a known thing in the community here. There are code farms in India that people hire out to instead of hiring people here, because it's a lot cheaper. And the specific context of that discussion was the fact that that code is basically indecipherable.

When you get it back, you cannot modify it, change it, do anything to it, done on purpose just so you continue to hire them. So that was the context about that. I didn't think that was maligning at all in any particular way. Was it, Jason? Well, here's what I'd like to put into perspective.

We weren't maligning all Indian coders. We were aligning most Indian coders. And there's a reason for this. After the four-hour work week came out from my buddy, Tim Ferriss, there was a huge rush for companies to outsource as much as possible to India. The problem that nobody anticipated was that there just wasn't enough coders in India.

So everybody tried to hire and staff up all of these coding farms. But that meant that these were not professional coders. They had PHP in a day books. And we could tell. And so after we lost all of our jobs to coders in India, well, we got our jobs back because the code that came back sucked.

It did not work. Shit broke all the time. So they brought us back in to fix the code that they got back from India. And when we would look at it, we're like, did a fucking donkey write this? Because it seems like their hooves couldn't quite hit all the keys. But then we realized, no, they were running it through code obfuscation systems.

So they were the only ones that could do it. And we had to send it back to them for changes, which was bullshit. So now I've worked with teams in Russia, Albania, the Ukraine, China, Thailand, Canada, and the US, and nobody is safe from shitty code in our opinion about it.

The thing about the Indian coders was they would like all these other countries that we dealt with, they would not obfuscate the code, and they would work with us on changes. Every single company that I worked with in India gave us obfuscated code, and we would have to sit there and try and backtrace all of the 32-character or maybe 16-character variable names that were just ridiculous that we could not fix anything.

You could not look at it and figure out what the code did. You know, self-commenting code is pretty much a staple of how I worked as a coder. And I'm sure Brian did too. So you could walk through a piece of code and figure out what it did. All of the Indian shops did this by practice.

So yeah, yeah, we're maligning Indian coders in this one instance for goddamn sure. But you know what? The fact that they sucked so fucking bad got us our jobs back because they had the opportunity to rock and roll, and they could have just taken our jobs and ran with it.

But guess what? They sucked at it, so we got our jobs back. So thank you, Indian coders. There you go. See? And I'm going to play a sound bit from episode 11 of Grumpy Old Geeks right now. And this will put the story to rest whether we align any particular race, gender, or nationality, or fucking planet for all I'm concerned.

Okay. We used to have AT&T DSL. Yes. The best tech support that they have is in India. If you deal with the Americans, they're fucking retarded. But if you wait until after 8 o'clock at night, Pacific Standard Time, call them up, you can get an Indian tech on the phone, and you can tell them, I know what I'm doing.

I work in the business. Here's the problem. Here's my MAC address. Here's all this stuff. They will give you deep down tech support. So there you go. There you go. There's my point. You know, I am a meritocracy. Yes.

I think Jason and I have always made it plain that we hate everybody equally. So it's all good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our next comment comes from a friend of the show, Patrick. Just stumbled across this and thought I'd pass it along. A fun mixed actor scientist panel discussion about The Expanse. And it's a link over to YouTube, the science behind The Expanse over at Caltech.

I did not watch all this, but I will. So. Okay. Yeah. I'll check it out. I'm going to check it out after episode 13 airs because I don't want to just, I'm just going to stick with it. Then it'll get me through my expanse expanse while we have no episodes. Because, you know, I'm not going to quit it. I can't quit you.

Expanse. Of course not. All right. iTunes, one star, Ugg, from Egg Foo Young. And Egg Foo Young puts the F-U in Egg Foo Young because he doesn't know how to spell Egg Foo Young, but I'm sure he's trying to be sarcastic and funny. And even though we are, his comment is not interesting or funny.

Okay. Well, all right. That's your opinion. That's fine. I particularly love the fact that almost all of our one star ratings are from people that have not rated anything else ever on iTunes. So we must be doing something right to get these people pissed off enough to create an account and come in and give us a one star rating.

You know what? I think we're doing our job then. I think so, too. Yeah. So we got a five star rating. I seem to have lost the name of this person. Oh, my goodness. I was cutting and pasting mistake there. So grumpy old geeks believer. I happened to recently get back into podcasts for my commute to work and to home about two weeks ago.

Found your podcast and I love it. Great topics. Good information and good drinks. Keep up the great work. And thank you for saying that. Whoever you are. Sorry. I didn't cut and paste your name. Brian. Pretty sure. You know what? You know what, anonymous user? Go over to patreon.com slash GOG.

Sign up and then we'll know your name and then we'll read it next time. There you go. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG dot 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 dot show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

Thanks so much. Closing shout outs. My shout out is to the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team who continue to be playing very, very well. They're on their way to win another tournament. I think right now I haven't been following it too closely, but good.

On them, we talked about we talked about them about a year ago now because that's when they filed their wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because they get paid a hell of a lot less than the U.S. men's team and they're a lot better. They have a new contract.

They are getting paid better than they used to be, but they are still not getting equal pay, which is bullshit. So congratulations, ladies. Keep working on it. Yep. Yep. Soon. Soon you'll have a goal. Hopefully. Yes. For you. I would like to have a shout out to Don Rickles, the OG GOG, the greatest insult comedian of all time left us this week.

And if you don't know who Don Rickles is, please go back to YouTube and watch some of his highlights because this man could insult anyone and make it just amazing and make you love him for having him insult you. That's a skill that I think we need to work on. Hey, we get lots of love.

We just get, you know, a lot of people that hate us too. Yeah, that happens. That happens. Yeah, it happens. Oh, well. Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. 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 the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air.

To learn more about all 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 204. I think we need to send Egg Foo Young a Pepsi. Evening.

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