205: Grump-a-Lago

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks cloud accounting software helps freelancers master their admin and paperwork and makes filing taxes a breeze. Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and start your free 30-day unrestricted trial today.

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 you doing today, Brian? Good week? I'm doing all right. You know, crazy week. You were traveling. I came back from Toronto and you know what it's like when you first get back from any travel. That's a day or two shot. So here I am. Yeah.

Yeah. I went to the RAINN Summit on Wednesday, which is the radio and internet news summit on online advertising and podcasting advertising. It's basically, you know, you know, there were people from Spotify, like a VP from Spotify and all the big players were there. And it was a nice, it's a nice half day summit.

Excellent. Nine in the morning till one in the afternoon. Hope you got us lots of advertisers. It wasn't that kind of advertising summit. It was more about people in the business. Yeah, I know. I wish I would have gotten some. I may, I may have bought us some advertising, spent us, spent us some of our money, but we'll see how that turns out.

So that was fun. And then turn around, came home, rapid packed, then drove to Nashville, drove to Nashville Thursday, spent the night Thursday, spent the night Friday and drove home yesterday. I like Nashville. I hope you had a good time. There's a lot of good food there. A lot of good bars. Good place.

Well, we actually stayed about 80 miles outside of town at the Slatewood Club, which was like a kind of a private club where there were, you know, most of the guys were out driving like, you know, fast cars and shooting guns. I stayed inside and worked, but had a bunch of good dinners, a lot of good drinks. They do a mean whiskey taste in there.

Ooh, but yeah, there was good food and good drink, but I was sad to leave a, leave a day early, but had to come back and do this. Oh yeah. Well, here we are. Yeah. 17 hours in a car over three days sucks. I prefer flying. Yes. Yes. But I got to, I got to listen to some audio books and podcasts, which I will cover that in a little bit.

It's a little follow up here. Interesting news coming out of the state of California. Apple has received their first self-driving car permit. Wait, are you saying that they went and got a permit first before doing it? Yeah. Go figure. How novel. No wonder that stock price is doing so well.

Yes. They've only got a couple of cars and a couple of drivers. So they got three, three Lexus RX 450 H's with six drivers who are allowed to test them. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I assume they're writing their own system then to do self-driving. So their own operating system, I suppose. And of course, you know, people are just the normal Apple freak outs is, is, well, I thought they were going to make their own car.

Well, who the hell knows? Nobody knows. That's the whole thing. Nobody knows. I think they may have just, this might've been a preemptive strike to, if they, if they do have something undercover, but that whole division has been going through problems. So nobody honestly knows what the hell's going on with Apple in their cars.

Nope. I personally hope that they don't make a car. Why bother? Make a partnership with somebody else. Stick to the operating system. Expand the idea of car play to take over the entire thing. We don't need, they don't need to get in the business of creating the entire infrastructure for building cars. Make a deal with Tesla. Get it over with.

Exactly. You know, I, Apple hardware ain't what it used to be. So. Nope. That's really, yeah. One of the things I, oh, and you'll get a laugh out of this one. Unfortunately, when I did leave the Slatewood club yesterday morning, I sadly left my AirPods there too.

I knew it. So fortunately my friend picked them up and I get to pick them up when I go to San Jose in three weeks. I left it. They, they, they were in the bed and the little, the little white case, uh, you couldn't see it in the sheets. And I just left it there. I got home last night in a panic. I'm like, no, I just, it's a hard and fast rule for me.

The things that I will not spend a lot of money on our headphones. Well, headphones that I take with me outside of the house. I will spend a lot of money on the headphones that I leave in my studio. Cause that makes sense. Uh, headphones and sunglasses. They should always be cheap. Exactly. Especially on the sunglasses, but the, I'm always out of the house and headphones. Most of the time when I'm wearing headphones, I'm out of the house. So damned if you do damned, if you don't on that one. But I have to go back. I went back to the cord last night and I was just like, oh, this sucks.

Really. I, uh, I did see a pair out in the wild. I haven't seen, they were actually in someone's ears. They hadn't fallen out yet. So I have not seen any on the bike path, but I am keeping my eye open for them. Oh, they will get there. Cause there's still not that many out in the wild at all. They're, they're really hard to get still. Yep.

Um, so a little, uh, Uber followup too, before we get to our other Uber news later in the show, uh, the Italians have lifted the ban while the appeal is under place. So people can still get their Ubers al Italia. Fine. Fair enough. We'll see what happens. And, uh, Uber is returning to Taiwan, which is interesting. They're, uh, they agreed to a partnership with car rental companies for some reason.

Um, odd. Yeah. They, they got like slammed a while ago for saying that they were an internet based tech platform. Rather than a transportation company. Ah, yeah, whatever. Uber is just so full of crap. Yeah. And it just keeps getting worse.

But I thought it would, uh, it was interesting that the Italians said, uh, you can keep driving the cars. Yeah. At least while the appeal is going. Yeah. While the appeal is going, I'm, that's fine. In the news.

Burger King has a new TV ad. Uh, in this ad, the actor in the ad looks directly at the camera and says, okay, Google, what is the Whopper burger? I was waiting for someone to do this. It was only a matter of time. At least do it, do it on purpose, not accidentally.

Yes. This was done purposefully. I think it's strange that they targeted Google when there's much less of, uh, Google's home devices out there than the Amazon echoes. Uh, they point out the ad was not done in partnership with Google. Well, no shit. Um, and the question remains whether there's something Google might do to prevent triggers such as the one in this commercial.

Uh, no. I mean, how, how are you supposed to do that? Now, apparently they just shut down the query about Whoppers, which is fine. But that, what if you actually legitimately were at home and wanted to ask a question about the Whopper burger? Now you've screwed those people. Um, I just think this is great.

I mean, I immediately, when I saw this, I tweeted it out and it said, this is the kind of thing that I would have suggested, you know, in a, in a corporate meeting for advertisement. And I would have been shot down because this is smart. It's genius. You're breaking the fourth wall. We know these devices are out there. Why not do this? You're going to get all this press, which they did.

So smart on them. Good job. Uh, it does bring up the concept of security for these devices, especially since people are rolling out more and more of these, you know, internet of things, home devices. I mean, I've seen, uh, front door locks that can be triggered by your Amazon Echo in theory.

Exactly. We, we talked about that, like just standing outside the window and yelling at an Echo, Echo, unlock the door, you know? Exactly. And that's going to be a real problem. And the only kind of security there can possibly be for these devices is voice recognition, which isn't quite there yet. So it's interesting.

Yeah. And if I go to your house, I just have a little tape recorder in my pocket and just tape your sneakers away. And so, you know, you just wait for somebody to come over if you're having a party and have them say it, tape it, and then go outside the window and do it. Say anything boombox style. Hold it over your head. Open the door.

Yeah. And, and the thing with a lot of these devices too, is they don't let you change the, what the, what the keywords are, the, that for all the devices, which is one way to do security through obscuration, which I cannot say this morning. Security through obscurity. That's not, that's not actually.

That's also not the word I was shooting for. We'll just let that go. So what we really need though, I think are like some kind of like unlock with your phone, like, you know, anything with like near field or have a fob that goes with it. So it only works when you're in the house. Yeah. Yeah. Of course that that'll work as well.

Or just, you know, if you had the ability to change the wording that's involved with these sorts of things. So it could be, you know, Alec Amazade with diggadong opens your door and nobody knows that. So there you go. Yeah. So it's interesting stuff, but I do love, well done Burger King round of applause for you for, for doing that.

Even though you got the ire of a bunch of stupid people. Yeah. I think Google's response was wrong. Totally wrong. Google should, should be happy about it. Google should have been like, you know, we, we'd prefer that people didn't do this sort of thing because obviously there's unintended things, but quite, quite smart of you. Yeah.

And, uh, I mean, if they really wanted to get back at, uh, Burger King, they could have just said a Whopper is a heart attack with two buns, you know, or something fun. That is true. That is very funny. It's a cholesterol device, cholesterol delivery device. Yes.

Ah, remember back in the day when Facebook decided to, uh, spin off messenger and make it its own app. Oh boy. Do I ever. Yes. And people said crazy things like if Facebook thinks I'm downloading a separate app just to send Facebook messages, they're crazy. Well, unfortunately we were all forced to, and we didn't have a choice.

And since a lot of people send Facebook messages, uh, we all ended up getting the damn app anyways. So not surprisingly, it's at 1.2 billion users. Yeah. That's with a B. Because, you know, it's just going to be a subset of like, you know, 80% of how many users use Facebook, you know?

Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And it's, it's twice the size of Instagram. So it's interesting to get these kinds of statistics out there. So, uh, and it's, uh, messenger is now the same size as Facebook's other messaging app, WhatsApp, which I had no idea had that many billions of users. But, uh, I guess it makes sense because it was hugely popular overseas before it still is.

Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. It's 1.2 billion, which is amazing. And let's continue to talk about numbers on these things, because as you know, one of my, my second favorite company to shit on after Uber is Snapchat. I thought it was Kickstarter. Well, it depends on the day of the, depends on the day of the week.

I don't really have a problem with Kickstarter. We can go back through that old argument again. I have a problem with what people use Kickstarter for. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So, you know, the, basically the spin is that Snapchat is, is out there and it's, it's massive and, and it was the originator of the evaporating photo essay or story as everybody else is calling it.

Or they said it was, even though we all knew that it wasn't. We all knew it wasn't. That didn't seem to matter for their IPO until after the IPO, because it's not, stock is just not doing that great. Well, the numbers are really starting to come out now. Instagram has announced that over 200 million people are using their story feature every day to share quick moments from their lives, which is 50 million more than Snapchat sees in an average day.

Yep. So yeah, Instagram basically as soon as they rolled out their stories is now crushing Snapchat and people are just, Snapchat never had that big of an audience anyways. And it's not building, it's not growing. And the one thing that they had is now in every other social network.

And apparently everybody's loving it and using it all the time on Instagram, which I personally see with my friends. And thank God nobody's doing it with Facebook's new version. And Facebook, why? Why? You own Instagram. Exactly. Because they shouldn't be calling it Instagram. It should be called Facebook's Instagram. Like they have Facebook Messenger.

Exactly. Why duplicate the content? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. But we talked about that. That was our story last week about how every social network is exactly the same these days. Yep. And I got to concur with you. Like almost nobody is using it on Facebook. I've seen like two.

And they were just tests. They're like, does this work? Yep. Okay. Never doing it again. Yeah, exactly. So stick it in, leave it in Instagram. Please don't do it in Facebook. Snapchat is having more problems. A former Snap Inc. employee has claimed in a lawsuit that CEO Evan Spiegel said that Snapchat was only for rich people and that he didn't want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.

And according to BuzzFeed, furious Indians are leaving Snapchat one-star reviews in the App Store because they're mad at them. Understandably, if he really said that. His track record on saying stupid things leads me to believe he probably said it. Probably. Probably. And, I mean, this is the delete app of the week.

You know, that's pretty much it. We used to have hack of the week. Now it's delete app of the week. Yeah, the campaign is more give them a one-star. And, you know, whatever. We've got plenty of one-stars. We're okay with them. We're okay. They actually make for good fodder. So Snap just needs to have a new section on their app.

You know, one-star reviews of the week. Yes, exactly. It's our one-star stories. So I found a new thing on ad blocking. Computer scientist Arvind Narayayananana and his colleagues have unveiled a new tool. And this is cool about it.

It uses kind of like human vision when trying to detect ads on a page. Looks for, you know, the container sizes, which was easy. You always used to go by the IAB sizes. But now they're looking for, like, perceptual things like sponsored links and the little tags in the corners that have, like, the name of the ad network.

And then it runs an ad. It's basically an ad blocker like that. And what's cool about it is they're trying to skip the whole, like, moral argument of is taking advertising out of a page, you know, morally acceptable. Well, that would make sense if your business model is removing ads.

Right. But I actually – I've been using this all morning now because it's out for Chrome. You can go get it for Chrome right now. And all it does is put, like, a semi-transparent overlay over the ad and says what it has discovered there. And you can close it if you still want to see the ad. Oh, I kind of like that.

It's really nice. I like that a lot better than just pulling it out and having a blank space in the area. Or breaking the DOM and have everything not working right, you know, which happens a lot of the time. So this just doesn't overlay. Yeah, I thought, you know, the ad system is cool in itself, but I think their UI approach is what's really, like, groundbreaking on this.

I'm like, I like that because you can still see where – and the page renders properly. Like, the text flows where it needs to flow. It's cool. You should definitely try it out. It's free right now in the Chrome store. I'm going to install it because not only do I like that a lot more than current ones, I also like the fact that they went with a – they decided to call it perceptual ad blocker as opposed to an artificial intelligence system.

Yes. Which they easily could have. So, yeah. Thank you for not doing that. Disney has filed a patent for a huggable robot. And this is actually – I mean, Disney just files patents left, right, and center anyway. So that's not the news. The news is that this is one of the first patents in a very long time that actually clearly explains exactly what they're doing, how they're going to do it, and is educational.

And this guy who wrote this article who is a patent lawyer by trade, Charles Duan, he just went on and on about how fantastic this is because it's actually like information and science, and this is how the patent office was supposed to be in the first place.

And thank you, Disney, for actually being cool. Yeah, what I liked about it, he's like, if I really wanted to, I could go build this robot from the patent application. It's like, ah, nice and specific. Yeah, which is the point. The point of the patent is to be that specific, and once you get approved for it, people can't just go buy it.

They have to license it from you. It's the way it's supposed to work, people. All right. Uber. Back to Uber. Back to Uber. Uber reportedly used a secret program called HELL to track rival Lyft drivers. A report claims that Uber's HELL software used fake Lyft passenger accounts to track the locations of its drivers.

Uber reportedly used software to edit the location of each Lyft account, arranging them in a way that it was able to see the location of Lyft cars across an entire city. Sneaky? Sneaky. Sneaky. Sneaky PD. Not necessarily illegal, so I can't really crap on them too much. They're definitely gaming the system. Man, these guys have a lot of money.

But Lyft was doing the same thing. Lyft was absolutely doing the same thing. When they were in that big war about trying to take each other's drivers, they both came up with systems to do this exact same thing. Unbelievable. Yeah. Aren't you supposed to be, like, driving people around? Who has – I mean, this is insane.

This stuff is just crazy. These people are – they have way too much money. Stop using them, people. Indeed. And a new study came out from – I don't know why my voice is not working today. But economists at Princeton, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago suggesting a strong link between electronic leisure activities and unemployment rates for men in their 20s.

Apparently, if you spend a lot of time as a millennial playing video games, you don't have a fucking job. And this is – they needed a study for this? Well, yeah. I mean, because it helps to be able to point to a study and say, I'm not just a grumpy old man shouting from my rocking chair about getting a job.

Now it's proven. We just used to call these people slackers. Yeah. Now there's a lot of them. Yeah. Next will be a new study. Smoking marijuana leads to getting the munchies. It's like, yeah, we know this stuff. This is not new. Okay. According to the data, the employment rate for young men without a college education has dropped considerably since 2000.

And a lot of these unemployed men aren't married, live with their parents or other family members. They have no work, no responsibility, and have more time for leisure activities. And gaming takes up to 75% of that time. In fact, the report suggests that up to one-third of the decline in work hours done by men in this group can be attributed to the increased use of technology for entertainment.

So, god damn, unbelievable. Sounds like winning to me. Winning. I know. These kids are living at home, not working, and just playing video games all day. Yeah. They're on Twitch or whatever that service is. Unbelievable. They've mastered the system. I think, you know, they're probably the smartest of the bunch.

Yeah, pretty much. Good on them. I could only play video games after I came home from my, like, you know, 12-hour shift at McDonald's covered in grease and sweat. But these guys have it figured out. Yes, they do. So, we talked about the New Zealand program that they had to fly 100 developers in.

Yeah. They were expecting about 2,500 applications, but they got more than 48,000. Well, you know, to be fair, I don't think they expected the PR buzz that it got because everybody picked up on the story. Yeah. I'm surprised it's only 48,000. Everybody else also kind of figured out this is a free vacation because it's not like you're required to take one of the jobs.

Yep. Because people from companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, MIT, and NASA were applying to go down. I'm like, hmm. So, New Zealand is, like, looking at becoming like a tech haven. They've always wanted to be one, but now this might be their opportunity.

Everybody seems to be moving to New Zealand. That's apparently where all the super rich people have their hideaway islands when things go boom. Which is good because then maybe they'll get it wired with better internet. Everything I've, like, heard from people is the internet there sucks, which is a big problem. Eh, okay.

Well, I'm not moving there anytime anyways. Why not? Why not? Go play Lord of the Rings. Yeah. No. That's right. You're the Harry Potter guy. Well, that's the wife. Yeah. Yeah. This reminds me of that South Park episode. I'm going to go to Star Wars land.

Oh, okay. Which we will talk about later. I found a really cool article in Wired on the chip revolution that is pushing VR and, in some cases, AI. Yes, they're saying AI. But it's all about these custom chips that are being built now.

Right. And it's a really interesting read if you're, like, into it because, you know, the programmers now are having to program for different types of processors. Like, our day, shit. Yeah. We got one choice. That's it. We got a CPU. And, you know, the game guys were doing GPUs.

And now they've got these programmable GPU units or chipset units that, you know, you can program after the fact. And you don't have to burn stuff onto the ROMs. And it's like, you know, here, here, have a chip. Put whatever you want on it, which scares me from a hacking perspective. Yeah. I'm sure they can be frozen at some point.

But, anyway, it's a good read if you're interested in how things are progressing from a hardware perspective. I want to go spend some more time with it because it definitely made me think about how hard it's going to be in the future for programming and how more specialized everybody's going to be just because you're going to have to with all the – I mean, there's – programming is not getting easier.

It's getting harder. Yeah. It definitely is. And they're – you know, sure, eventually there'll be custom programming engines built for these sorts of things. But not at the beginning. And, yeah, once you get to that point, that's where the money is. It's at the beginning. Spring is actually almost here.

It's time to cue the happy music and bask in spontaneous fits of joy. Unless, of course, you're a freelancer or creative entrepreneur who isn't ready for tax time. Seriously, if you're someone who struggles with tax stuff, then listen up. Our friends at FreshBooks have just launched their all-new ridiculously simple cloud accounting software that helps service-based small business owners get a handle on their paperwork.

FreshBooks keeps all your cash flow details in one place so you know exactly what invoices you've sent, who's paid what, and what your income is. Their mobile app lets you take pictures of your receipts and organizes them for later, which makes claiming expenses at tax time a breeze. The best part about using FreshBooks is that feeling of zen you'll have when tax time does come around.

You'll be so much more prepared and way less stressed, so much so that you, too, may be inspired to bust out a little springtime jig. Right now, FreshBooks is offering a free 30-day trial to our listeners. Just go to FreshBooks.com slash Grumpy and enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section.

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. We are back once again for our Security Ha segment with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire.

Jason is not here right now. He is changing Bam Bam's diapers. I know that's the usual excuse when I can't make it. I'm sure Bam Bam needs a treat or needs a walk or maybe just a little snuggle, but I'm sure Jason will be back soon enough, but for the time being, it's just you and me.

Yes, and we are busy trying to hack his Chinese camera equipment at the moment. That's right, exactly. So we can watch him snuggling with Bam Bam. Oh, God, yes. If anybody wants that, I'll be charging $9.95 a month. Bam Bam Snuggle Cam dot com.

So I had asked you before, I've just returned from traveling overseas, and I had asked you before that for kind of the, you know, point by point what I should do. Since our new administration has been talking a big talk about basically searching people's smartphones, asking for social network passwords and whatnot as you cross over international borders.

Now, this is theoretically not for U.S. citizens, but one never knows what might happen on a daily basis these days. And we heard just this week, we heard Homeland Security reported that there's twice as many searches of mobile devices as there were, you know, last year.

The rate of searches has basically doubled. Yeah, yeah. So I had, you know, some degree of concern over this, not that there's anything on my phone. And then this gets back into Jason and I's ongoing argument about who was the person that initially said, if you're not doing anything wrong, it doesn't matter. But seriously, again, with this?

Anyways, it ended up being much ado about nothing. Obviously, traveling. Oh, I went to Canada this time and traveling over. They were not concerned at all. I mean, I guess their theory is, what are you going to do, steal our strategic pachin reserves? Come on in.

We're fine. The concern was coming back over to the U.S. border. And I did as little as I could, which basically just involved. I figured if I delete all the social media apps off my phone, perhaps the cursory look, if they even ask for that, will just go, well, I guess this guy's not on Facebook.

Okay, fine. So I did that. I was never searched, never even asked anything. I do have a suspicion that's not so much because they didn't find me concerning or anything like that because I'm always the one that gets the secondary screening and that sort of stuff for whatever reason.

You just have that look about you? Apparently, I do. Okay. That has gone away since I've gotten the Nexus card, which I do highly recommend to people that travel internationally often because there is a certain degree of, okay, we've done our due diligence on you. But I think it's more because nobody knows what the hell they're supposed to be doing.

There seems to be pretty mass confusion everywhere from every level of security as I was traveling, particularly coming in through American Customs and Border Patrol to the point where one person will tell me, you have to go into that line.

And then I go over to that line and I say, but I have the Nexus card, and then I get punted back to the previous line. Laptop out, laptop not out. We're going to need you to turn on your phone. You don't need to turn on your phone. Oh, interesting. Wow. Yeah. For a while, it wasn't looking good because they even mentioned the phone to begin with, but then the next person I got to didn't seem concerned at all.

So I think it's more there's some very confusing marching orders that are going on at the moment. So I will caution people, there is a possibility that even as a U.S. citizen, they will ask to see your phone at this point. It does seem to be who you get. And if you say something and say, do I have to, then the next person comes along and says, no, of course you don't.

So how different was it from flying domestically, you know, the routine sort of security that we all go through just flying within the country? It's vastly different, obviously. I mean, you can basically just whip out a driver's license flying domestically. When you fly internationally, you have to go through border and customs controls.

So they want to see passport, you know, that you typically have to – if you're not a Nexus member, you're filling out that long sheet that says where you've been, what address you're going to, what address you're coming from, how long you were in the country. Did you go to any other countries?

Did you ever see a goat? Did you walk on farmland? I mean, it's rather insane questions, but, you know, for certain health reasons, I can see why, particularly when bird flu was happening and things like that. These things never drop off the list of questions that they ask. They just add more and more on.

I see. Perhaps this would be a good case for the administrations. Let's get rid of two rules before we put a new one in. That might work really well for customs questioning. Right, right. Yeah. So I will – yeah, I will say that there does seem to be a lot of confusion, and they are definitely stepping up what they used to do even internationally in terms of searches.

Now, I haven't actually done a domestic flight recently, so I don't know if that's increased in the last year or so in terms of if there's any searches at all domestically. I'd imagine there probably are, but I don't know. Yeah, I haven't heard of domestic searches of mobile devices for U.S. citizens, but – and I've been doing some traveling lately.

And the – you know, it's all been pretty routine. The standard sort of, you know, take off your shoes, take out your laptop, you know, go through the scanner and, you know, thank you very much. And off you go is pretty much what I've seen and haven't seen anything what I would consider out of the ordinary or different from what I've seen in past years I guess is the most important thing.

It doesn't – I haven't sensed any major changes with the new administration when it comes to domestic travel. Right. But who knows? Yeah, yeah. So it's something I definitely think we're going to keep an eye on in this segment because if you do a lot of travel and a lot of people do for a living these days, especially overseas, it can really screw up your day.

Absolutely. Or even domestically as certain people on United found out this week. Oh my gosh, yeah. Yeah. So what else do we have? As part of that, I saw a really interesting article on Boing Boing this morning actually called – a program called Masterprints. Synthetic fingerprints that can unlock up to 65% of phones in theory.

So this is the whole concept of, you know, we're using biometrics now on our iPhones and we just kind of assume that they're quite secure. But all they really are are very low-resolution snapshots loosely matching it to stored images and that's how you get into your phone all the time, which is supposed to be much more secure than your six-digit code.

What we're discovering is not so much because there's the masterprint paper, which lays out a bunch of different rough images of thumbnails that purportedly will work on almost 65% of devices to open them up. Yeah. It's an interesting article and it's exactly the way you describe it.

I had always heard that the touch sensor access on the phones was better than nothing but not better than a six-digit code. Right. So, you know, and by the way, you know, a four-digit code, if you're interested in security, four digits ain't enough.

Six is much better. But yeah, basically, I think for a lot of people what the fingerprint scanner did was brought convenience to quick login. So, it's sort of a better-than-nothing level of security without keeping the phone unlocked.

Right. Quick access, you know, without the burden of having to enter the four or six digits every time you log into your phone, but better than nothing. So, like the phone equivalent of making your passwords, you know, some sort of six-digit character thing with a couple numbers that you use all the time as opposed to using one password with randomized, incredibly long strings.

Better than nothing, but not really good. Right, right. But sort of, you know, looping back to your point about international travel, I think there's an important legal distinction here, which is that courts have ruled that they can coerce you to provide your fingerprint, but they cannot coerce you to provide a password.

Right. So, if you're someone who's interested in privacy and security from that point of view, you actually have a stronger legal defense if you're using a password than using your fingerprint. Right. And I would actually add as a note here, too, if you do any of these sort of trusted traveler programs like Nexus, and there's a couple of other ones for different countries, and there's even one for traveling domestically, although I don't know why you'd pay for that at the moment, part of that process is they take your fingerprints, so your fingerprints are already on file.

So, if you're only using a fingerprint for your phone, and you are a Nexus traveler, and they want to open up your phone, they have your fingerprint already. Oh, yeah. Good point. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. No, it is. Yeah. So, we'll follow up on that more as we hear more.

We have a comment from a listener that came specifically from us talking about Mac hacks a couple weeks back. This is from Reed. I'm going to bullet point it because he wrote quite a lot. He said he was very interested in hearing about the Mac hacks. He is both a Mac and PC user before he became an engineer.

Then he switched to Mac because they have their benefits. He was trying to think why no one has a personal experience with Mac hacking, which is what we ask people to write in if they did. He also has no personal experience, and none was mentioned about anybody ever doing it, but he had some theories. First is maybe some of the listener's friends have been hacked, but they made the mistake – they made mistake the hack for the slowing down and eventual decline of their computer.

If the malware remains hidden, the hackers can keep getting more and more information. I would file this under unlikely, as we haven't heard any of that on a Mac either. At least I haven't. That is a persistent problem with PCs, and that's whether you got hacked or not. They just tend to get bogged down and slow down over time.

Mac's infrastructure tends to be better. It's true. I don't know that I've ever heard of anyone having to take their computer to the Apple store just because it slowed down. I think this is – what he's describing is plausible. I think it's a little sort of like if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Right. But yeah, it's interesting. All right. What else? Secondly, many of us live in our bubbles in Silicon Valley, LA, New York, et cetera, and have jobs in tech or creative industries. So we think it's very common for people to own Mac computers. However, the vast majority of the world uses PCs because they don't have stock money from Snapchat.

I'm going to let him keep his jokes in there to blow on a Mac. Hackers aren't as inclined to spend hours creating viruses to infect a small percentage of the market. I think we did touch on that and there's certainly truth to that. The high-end market is definitely more Mac-heavy. Low-end market is definitely PC and that started the whole conversation that we had anyways about the Mac people back in the day used to laugh at PC people because, ha, nobody ever writes a virus for us.

Yeah. Well, your system also costs five times as much as mine did. So that was the old argument. Right, right, right. Yeah. Right. So I think this point is right on. It's accurate. The hackers are going to go after the larger market.

Yeah. Certainly. But I think you combine that with what I think is perceived and accurately described as stronger built-in security in a lot of ways just from the design of the Mac OS. That sort of double whammy makes it a little safer right out of the box.

Yeah. And I actually got interested in this at this point about usage share for things because I hadn't seen statistics in a while. So I, of course, Googled and went to Wikipedia on this. And if you really want to build a virus, right now your target market is Android. Now, obviously, this lumps together smartphones, tablets, laptops, and PCs all together.

And it's by a firm called Gartner, which is a very large research and advisory firm. But right now, as of 2017, 54.16% of market share is Android. Which is sales. Which is, yeah. And 12% is Mac and 11% is Windows.

So, you know, that's some interesting statistics. But it's kind of a different beast when you're talking phones versus PCs. But that app is closing these days pretty fast. That's interesting. That's interesting. Yeah. And then as a final point, which kind of leads off the last, is almost every company distributes PCs to their employers.

Companies have more money and more willing to pay hackers ransom to get their information back than a freelancer like Jason. And again, because he's making fun of Jason, he'll leave his jokes in. However, knowing Jason, he'd probably pay a good amount of money to get those precious pictures of Bam Bam back. Yeah. Fair enough. There's, yes, there'd be no amount of money Jason wouldn't willing, wouldn't be willing to pay to get his precious pictures of Bam Bam back.

Yes. No doubt about it. Yeah. So, I mean, I think all valid points, we touched on a lot of them, doesn't really answer our query, though. So we're still interested. If there is anybody out there that is aware of ever being hacked on a Mac or an iPhone or your computer slowing down because you've been taken over by malware, we want to hear about it.

Right, yeah. You know, and I have seen pop-ups on Macs that, you know, the scammy pop-ups that say, your computer's infected, you know, please call us now and we'll fix it for you. Yeah. But of course, you know, you're actually not infected. It's just a run-of-the-mill sort of garden variety scam.

Yeah. So, yeah, interesting. Well, to that point, just this week, a story came by that we covered that there's a new breed of Mac ransomware. Well, hello. Look at that. As if on cue.

And again, interesting because this is the second piece of ransomware ever that's known to affect Macs. Right. The first one was called Key Ranger. That was found about a year ago, back in March of 2016.

But this new one is called, oh gosh, what's the name of it? Oh, it's called Vafine Zip. Right. But what's interesting about it is you really have to want to be infected by this to be infected.

Yeah. You are already up to no good, so to speak, to have this affect you. Yes, this is something that back in my younger days when I couldn't quite afford some software, I would have explored on my PC and had to be very careful about. And now it's come to Mac. So basically, if you were trying to get your free copy of Photoshop and are surfing those sites in Sweden that we often discuss on the show, you might get a very bad one.

And now this affects Mac as well. So you were basically telling this program, yes, you may have access to the inner workings of my PC or my Mac in this case. And it does so. Yeah, so not only – so you're already in the process of trying to crack some software.

So you go and you download this and this software pretends to be basically a crack for, for example, the Adobe Creative Suite, something like that, something that people desire. And you run this and it says that it's a patcher for that or for Office or, you know, one of those big software suites.

But when you tell it to start, it says, okay, it's going to take about 10 minutes to crack the software. And then it just starts encrypting things on your hard drive and then tells you if you want to unlock this stuff, please send money to this address.

Now, the report back on this is that even if you send them the money, they're not going to send you anything to unlock your files. So back up your files. The good news, if there is any – well, I guess it's double good news. Good news round number one is that, again, this is – you've got to really want to have this stuff installed.

You have to basically jump through hoops to have this ransomware affect your computer. Not only do you have to download this patcher, when you try to run it, you'll get a pop-up screen that says, hey, we don't know where this is from. You know, the standard Mac thing that says, this is insecure. You sure you want to run this?

And you have to do that. Well, to be fair, if you're doing step one, you're going to probably go ahead and do that second step because you're not – I'm not assuming that Mac is going to say, hey, this thing that's going to let you get that illegal software is totally cool with us. Yeah, that's true. No, that's a good point.

You're already wrapped up in the thrill of that soon you're going to have that free copy of the Adobe Creative Suite. So nothing is going to stop you from pressing go. But the other good news is that they have come out with a decryptor for this.

There's a decryption methodology that's available online. So if you do find yourself a victim of this, all hope is not lost. There is a way to get your stuff back beyond just regular backup. But like we say, backup. Yeah. It would be quite funny if actually Adobe was hosting the decryptor.

So then they would also – as you download, they find your IP address and make a phone call. Right, right, right. Right. We'll give you all your files back for the low, low price of one copy of the Adobe Creative Suite. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So just beware. But again, to our larger point, these Mac attacks seem to be fewer and farther between. Yeah. I don't see it. I don't hear about it. I've never had an issue anytime I've ever used a Mac versus PC when even running security software, knowing what I'm doing, I would get infected with malware.

And it was just part of a process of owning a PC that you would scan and delete stuff and quarantine stuff on basically a weekly basis. Wow. That doesn't exist on a Mac. Yeah. No, it really doesn't. Yeah. All right. And finally this week – boy, I love this article. This came by on Motherboard.

The article is called How to Illegally Build an Internet-Connected PC in Prison. Right. So five inmates in an Ohio prison were caught with a functioning Internet-connected computer in the ceiling that they were using for tax fraud, porn, and drug recipes.

I just love everything about this story. Yeah. There's nothing bad about this story at all. It was one of my favorites, and when I saw you popped it in, I was quite pleased. This is just genius. I mean the fact that these guys were taking, I believe, some sort of basic computer class.

Right. We're smart enough to only steal parts on a relatively slow basis. They didn't just try to steal the whole computer. We'll just take one card here, one check there. They got all the time in the world. Yeah. All the time in the world. Now they're in a medium security place. So they have some freedoms that people in a more secure place wouldn't have.

Fair. That's definitely fair. But what I love, one of the things I love about this is that it took the staff of the prison about a month to locate the actual devices in the ceiling because, you know, the inmates were given the ability to run wires around the facility.

To be used for cameras. Right. Closed circuit cameras. They were using the inmates, you know, for free slash cheap labor to do all sorts of things around the facility. So in the process of doing this authorized thing, running cameras, they were also running Ethernet cables and so forth.

Because when you let prisoners build their own prison, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah, right. Exactly. So it was triggered by a – they were discovered because some of the – I think they were using WebSense software to just keep an eye on the networks in the prison, as you do.

And they found a computer that was on the network that had a name that didn't match any of the appropriate names in the system was making all kinds of calls to all kinds of things that shouldn't have been called from a prison computer. But, again, it took them a month to find the computers.

But the thing that really kills me too about this is actually for all the genius that these five prisoners showed building this and putting this all together, they were brought down by stupidity. They had the tools. It says that they had all these hacking tools. So they were aware of the names of every other computer on the network and they did not choose one to fit in.

Well, that's a good point too. That's a good point. I mean – but that's an important point is that not only did they just have access to the outside world. It's not like they just had this computer set up so that they could watch porn or whatever else they wanted to do, check their email, communicate with the outside world.

No, they had access to the in-house network. They had login credentials. They had access to the prison computers. So they were printing up passes or generating passes for people to be able to have access to different parts of the prison.

They had their own little industry going there. And a lot of it, it says in the article, they learned from the classes that they were holding inside the prison, which to me is kind of like having a – it's sort of like having a prison have a lockpicking and safecracking class.

What could possibly go wrong, right? Exactly. It's kind of insane to me. I would love to – these classes are probably more advanced than – I mean, based on some of the software that they were using, they know more about hacking systems than I do. And they must have been taught these in these classes. Unbelievable.

And again, when you have all the time in the world, you can be really patient and get what you want. Yeah, this is a great story. Absolutely fantastic. And I'm sure nobody will learn a lesson. I can't wait to hear more about this. Right. There are probably prisoners all over the country who are now just figuring out where's a better place to hide the computer they already have running than in the ceiling.

I'm sure it's being discussed on their Reddit group. Right. Right. Exactly. All right, Brian. Well, that's what we got for this week. Thanks very much. Thank you. And we'll see you next time. We will see you next time. And Jason will be back in the fold with a dog barking in the background. I went on a bit of a binge read this last week.

It helped that I was on planes because that's always a good place to read. It also helped that I was at the in-laws in Toronto with not much to do. And a built-in babysitter. With a built-in babysitter. That was awesome. So I went on a Scalzi rampage. I finished The Ghost Brigades, which is Old Man's War book two.

I was halfway through that or something when we had the podcast. Then I read book three, The Last Colony. Then I skipped book four, What's-Her-Face's Story? Because you told me that that was basically a young adult's version of book three. Yep, exactly. So I did not read that. So then I also finished The Human Division, book five.

And I'm halfway through the end of all things, which is book six. Didn't we have an episode about not binging series not too long ago? We did. And I have a point with that one. It actually went well with this particular series because every single book focused on different characters, but they are all interconnected.

And it actually – I enjoyed doing it because, again, like I said, the perspectives and the main characters in each book was different. But I think I would have forgotten the connecting threads because they were so subtle if I had given like a month or two in between each book.

So it actually worked out very, very well for this series and it flowed together pretty good. So I can't complain about it. I actually think it was good to read this series straight through. Now, my question, did you finish the series? Did you finish book six, end of all things? Yes, I'm all done with it. I finished it last week.

Is it the end of all things or will there be a seven? He's done. It's wrapped. All right. Gotcha. Cool. Yeah. So I'm about halfway through, so I'll look forward to that, I suppose. Mm-hmm. And then you can just jump into the new world or the new series with the new universe. I reviewed that a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah. We'll see. This is where I think I'll take a break from Scalzi. I recommend that. I think that might make sense to go away, read something else, and then come back to it later. But I've really got to recommend Old Man's War. I know that we talked about the first book and then you had forgotten that you read the second one and we weren't sure about it.

Now that I've just burned through all these, it's a great series. It is. It's really good. It's a lot of fun. It's a great universe. A lot of interesting things going on. But I will take a break from Scalzi and I've got some coming soons to talk about really quickly that I will probably read.

First, my favorite stand-up comedian of all time, Eddie Izzard, or Izzard, depending on how you want to pronounce it, has a memoir coming out called, Believe Me, A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens. That will be out June 13th, so I will be picking that up and reading it as well.

And we've got a new Charlie Strauss Laundry Files novel coming out July 11th, The Delirium Brief. And since I've caught up and read the first seven of the series, this will be number eight. I will probably be picking that up and going back to do that. I will be doing that one as well. Now, we're both glossing over something that is missing from this list.

That would be the new Daniel Suarez book. Oh, right. I did finish that. And it was so unremarkable that I don't care. Oh, man. Okay. Unfortunately, yes. I totally forgot about that. I did read it. I couldn't even tell you what it was really about right now. Oh, man. That sucks.

Did you finish it? No, because I was on the road and it's a real book and I can't audiobook that. Like I said, I was doing stuff, so it's not like I could just sit on a plane and read. So I'm going to finish it.

But at this point, I believe it came out already. So I'm just going to audible it and go from there. That's really actually quite funny that I totally forgot about it. Wow. Yeah, I thought maybe you just got so into the Scalzi books because we talked about it that you just didn't even want to go finish it.

But that's interesting that it's that unremarkable. That's too bad. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to even remember a vague plot point right now, and there's a couple things floating to mind. It was all the gene hacking stuff. Yeah, it was the gene hacking stuff. It wasn't bad, just not remarkable.

Okay. Interesting. Okay, well, I did get to read Treasure Island while I was in the car or listen to Treasure Island. I'd never read it as a kid. You have really missed out on some of the basic standard classics. Well, I got to read Where the Red Fern Grows and some of those when I was in school.

But yeah, Treasure Island was never one of them because I wasn't really a pirate guy. Bob was the pirate guy. So, but after I finished Black Sails, I really wanted to go, since that was a prequel to Treasure Island, I wanted to go see what the original book was like and how they made Black Sails into the prequel for it.

And it flowed. It definitely flowed. Right. It picked up, you know, like I knew the main characters, who they were. I knew the backstory then of all of the pirates that they talked about. I didn't think it was that great of a book, though, sadly. I suppose there's a reason, you know, I mean, it's a classic.

I don't know how well it's aged. It's one of those ones where you did mention it. And so that immediately kicked up some other thoughts in my mind. I mean, even Disney didn't do a straight up interpretation of it. So there could be an argument made that maybe it didn't age well. When Disney did it in 2002, they futurized it and made it Treasure Planet, which I bring up because friend of the show, John Resnick, did the theme song for that.

Oh, cool. I'm still here. So I threw that in the notes as well. You can listen to his solo song, which was the theme song for the Disney movie. I'll check that out for sure. I like John. He's a good guy. But don't watch the movie because it kind of sucks. Oh, I won't. Trust me. That was never on my radar. I'll listen to his theme song. Yeah.

And on the aging thing, the fact that it was written in the 1890s and for listening to it in the 2017, over 100 plus years later, I would say that it actually held up pretty well. Okay.

I think the only problem I had with it was the characters in Black Sail were way better than the characters in Treasure Island. If I was just reading Treasure Island, I probably thought it was a great book, but I've got all of the history from Black Sail to tie into it. Right. I know this is not a nerdy pick, so we should probably move on, but I recommend just going through them all.

It goes soup to nuts from Black Sail to Treasure Island. It is a worthwhile endeavor. But now I'm going to move on to the Americans because it's time. Yes. And quite good. Mm-hmm. Cops and doodads. As you know, I currently have a child.

Yes. I've heard a little bit about that. And I've been getting more and more – he's too young at this point, but I'm starting to look into the tablets and what people are doing that have slightly older kids and how they deal with that. And apparently, my sister, a bunch of friends, everybody is – Amazon has really locked up this ecostructure pretty well.

People aren't handing their kids iPads. They're getting the Fire Kids Edition tablets over to them. For good reasons, there's a couple of things that are happening there. Amazon's moderators approve everything kids can access on the device, which includes more than 8,000 books, 40,000 whitelisted webpages, and a bunch of different apps that you can download.

And Amazon has now launched a parent dashboard at parents.amazon.com. That can be accessed from any web browser, which basically tracks and does all kinds of creepy things in terms of monitoring everything that's happening on that tablet, which you want as a parent. So fair enough.

Breakdown of time spent, how many minutes the kid is using the tablet, what they're spending their time doing, is it reading, is it videos, is it an app, what app, blah, blah, blah. So this is all pretty cool. Kudos to Amazon. They really saw this market and they ran with it.

I don't know anybody that uses their tablets really for anything else, but everybody that's got a kid has got one. I know a lot of people that use the Kindle Fires because I gave away a lot of them at Christmas because they were like 40 bucks. And I think that's what really, you know, works for the kids. I mean, those Fire tablets are cheap and they're durable.

They're extremely durable. Well, and the level of control when you're a parent as well. The fact that, you know, first, yeah, they're cheap. So you're not buying a $400 iPad and handing it to your kid. But there's also very limited content that they can get. So, you know, as opposed to an iPad where who knows what your kid's going to download.

Yeah, I mean, you can put on parental controls, but it's not the same thing, you know. No, it's not. That's pretty cool. And then, yeah, the other thing that I saw, Jason, because I know you love your one-purpose websites. Yes, I do. Well, isTrumpAtMar-a-Lago.org. Okay. You click on it and it tells you yes or no.

Well, I think there are five days out of the week where it are four and a half days out of the week where it will say no. And two and a half days out of the week where it will say yes. Yes. Well, yeah, I clicked on it right now. Is Trump at Mar-a-Lago? Yes. That makes seven weekends out of 13 as president. There you go.

There you go. Not saying anything else. Moving along. Plenty of other information a little further down on that page if you really want to get upset.

Media candy. Big news on Friday, Jason. Oh, what happened? What happened? The Last Jedi trailer dropped. Well, teaser trailer. They're not calling it the official trailer. It's the first teaser trailer for The Last Jedi.

It's like two minutes long, so it's not short. I know. It's quite long. But I loved it. Gave me the goosey bumpies. The goosey bumpies. Okay. It was good. It was very good. I'm very excited about this movie. Yeah, me too. The last one was fun. This will be fun, too.

So I'm going to get my 3D on for this. I try and avoid the 3D. But when there's space battles involved, I generally like the 3D. I will not be doing 3D. I will find any non-3D theater to see it. Well, you know, the fake characters do look better in 3D, so you don't... That's what people keep telling me.

But theoretically, again, this is J.J. Abrams. He does practical effects. There will not be any resurrected holographic characters in this movie. Okay. So what's the difference between the last one? I thought he did the last one as well. Well, I thought you were talking about like Rogue One, like the grandma Tarkin.

You know what? That's right. I forgot. I forgot that it wasn't a straight run. Okay. Exactly. Gotcha. There will be no... There will be no... None of those characters will be showing up in this movie. Okay. So we got no resurrected Han Solo coming back, eh? Sad tear.

Aw. And in that vein, this doesn't really go in media candy, but it kind of does. Disney is starting to show off a lot more of Star Wars land. And it's looking pretty good. The concept art is pretty fantastic. I really... They're building it both here in California and then also in Orlando.

I have a feeling the Orlando one is going to be a lot more intense just because they have the space to do it. Honestly, they should just bulldoze Disney in LA and just make it Star Wars land. That should be it. I agree. I would be totally fine with that.

Yeah. Fuck the Matterhorn. Get it out of there. Hell, buy my parents' house for a lot of money and bulldoze that stuff. down and expand. There you go. Because my parents live five minutes away from Disneyland. Anyways, it looks fantastic. I'm very excited about the Millennium Falcon ride that supposedly is going to be in both parks.

I can't wait, but apparently I'm going to have to because this is a ways away still, sadly. Yeah, but you know what? The timing is going to be really good to take your son. I know. It's going to be actually perfect. He will be the right age. So this is all set to open in 2019. So that will be a good time. Very excited.

So I caught up with the Expanse because we talked last week and I hadn't been able to see it because Siffy was getting pretty smart with her VPN blocking. But I did catch up. I don't want to talk about it too much because basically there's the finale episode coming this week. So I figure we'll just wrap it up next week, right?

Sounds like a good plan. And I saw that you put this in here. So I watched the latest episode this morning because I was driving when it was on this week and I got it on YouTube TV. Oh, since I signed up for it, I'm like, I put in a bunch of stuff in my watch lists and all that.

And so I can go back and watch, you know, shows that I missed because I, you know, I got to watch the Cesar Millan show because he's got a new one on Nat Geo because I got a dog and I got to do that. Now, here we go. YouTube TV is definitely a first gen product.

You know, when they say if you're not embarrassed by your first release, then you release too late. Yeah, they released right on time because they should be embarrassed as hell about this thing. I'm watching it from my iPhone. So I try and then airplay it to my Apple TV. No go. Can't do it.

Right. Tried it from the iPad. I can get audio at least when I do it with the iPad, but it shuts the video off completely. You can't get the video to the TV unless, of course, you get a Chromecast unless you get a Chromecast. Yep. I was about to say that may be a feature because that is what they're building into all the Time Warner cable spectrum apps and all that sort of thing because they want to, you know, at least for the cable companies, they want you to spend the money on an extra box.

So they don't want you to be able to toss things from your from your from the apps to another TV. Yep. And the interesting thing is when you sign up for your first paid month of YouTube TV, they send you a free Chromecast. Okay. So it's a thirty five dollar Chromecast.

So you basically get two months free so far with a Chromecast, you know, or you like if you bought it's like paying for the Chromecast and two months free of YouTube TV. Now, here's some other issues with it. Commercials are ridiculous on this thing. I'm watching Cesar Millan show. There are six commercial breaks, about two minutes each.

And apparently the the the inventory for the ads is so low. They're running two ads back to back the same ad for the show. I'm watching 12 minutes is a lot of commercial to it's a lot. It's a 44 minute show.

Plus, it's standard commercial time for a one hour show. You're still stuck watching the same amount of commercials, which and there's no option to, you know, pay for commercials to be removed, like on Hulu. I watch everything on my DVR and I just fast forward through them. Can't do that. You're locked into watching the ads on this, which sucks.

I haven't watched. And yeah, I am technically watching it on the DVR because I'm watching. I went to the first episode of the Cesar Millan show and I like could not skip the ads. Second problem. If I'm watching a show and I stop in the middle and I go back, it will not remember where I was, which is like ghetto, ghetto.

That that needs to be that's that's if there was only one feature that needs to be the one. Yep. Does not does not show you how much you watch, at least on every other streaming service. It remembers exactly where you were and it'll just jump right back to it. And in the other thing is when you go back to these and it doesn't like if you want to pick up right where you left off, it still plays the pre-roll ads and then you have to swipe and it will play another ad before it kicks up again because you've skipped ads.

It is it is ad horrific. And for thirty five bucks a month, I'd like a little less ads. But this is for the remnant stuff, the live TV stuff. I only watched a little bit so far, but it's cool that I can watch live TV now, you know, for all my networks around here. There's a lot of features about it that I like that will actually that has more than Hulu does for me.

So I can I can ditch the Hulu account now if I stick with this. Yeah. And I was going to ditch the YouTube TV because of the fact that I can't watch it on my TV and I got to watch it on my computer or my tablet or whatnot. But since they're giving me a free Chromecast, I guess I'll stick with it and and dump Hulu.

So sorry, Hulu. I'm going to deal with the ads, but it just gives me a chance to go get a pee here and there. How much is Hulu per month, though? I think it's 1399. But YouTube is 35 a month. Right. It's a significant pricing, but there's significantly more content.

Right. So I get I get the sci fi channel again. There's there's a whole bunch of stuff that I get in all the regular channels, like all my regular TV, like, you know, I got to watch Chicago Fire and Chicago PD and and I get the late shows again. So it's it's a balance. And for the money, it still keeps me from cable.

So 35 bucks a month is still better than another like 95 bucks a month and having to deal with the install and the contract and the contract is what I hate. And renting the boxes and all that crap. So, yep, I get you. Yeah. So far, I mean, I'll just stick with it. But between that and HBO now, I think I think that'll cover me for quite some time because I don't watch that much TV.

Summer's here now. It's like I'm going to be outside playing and doing stuff like, you know, going to the playground like a little kid, like a little kid. Well, one thing that I will be doing this summer, and since you mentioned HBO, it is the leftovers is coming back tonight, actually. Well, if you'll be listening to this on Monday.

So the first episode will have already aired premieres Sunday, April 16th, season three, which will also be the final season, which is good because once they've gone ahead and made the decision that that's that means we'll get it wrapped up and there'll be answers and it should be wacky and crazy.

This is rapidly become my favorite show. The first season was OK. The second season was so fucking crazy bonkers in batshit insane. I loved every second of it. OK, so I'm going to have to get through. I watched the first half of season when I was bored out of my mind. Get through the first season.

They go batshit crazy in the second season. The second season has probably one of the one of the craziest hours of TV I've ever seen. There is one particular episode that is I just love it so much. It makes zero sense. It is the most insane thing I've probably ever seen broadcast.

OK, I'll check it out. Yeah, I'll probably flip back and forth between this and the Americans because I can't I don't want to like, you know, binge four seasons of the American. So and the thing about the leftovers is when I originally when it originally came out and one of the original interviews I heard was you're never going to find out why the thing happened that started the show like they were they're never going to tell you.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's some of the guys from Lost. So yeah, that's why. So yeah, they're they're still butthurt from, you know, the ending that they came up with for Lost or like, you know what? We're going to end around that process by just giving you a mystery and not telling you how it ends. I think with this with this one, because I'm going into it expecting that as long as they wrap up the plot lines that have actually they've introduced themselves instead of the main mystery.

I'll be OK with that. OK. All right. We'll see, though. I might be talking about throwing a bottle of whiskey at the TV again. At the end of this could be there's always there's dude, there's always that option. There's always that option. Yeah. And I saw this on The Verge and I we're going to get to this in a second.

I just want to say before we even start this, you put in a reply in the show notes, which is exactly the one that I knew you were going to put in here. And that's why I put this story in here. So and yeah, all breakup notes should be written in playlist format now. So the millennials out there are sending playlists to their significant others who are there soon to be X significant others and communicating through song.

Now, I looked at this and I'm like, hmm, this sounds familiar. Now, Brian, would you like to tell me why this sounds familiar? All right. I was angry. So I just typed this in. I'll read it verbatim. Fucking millennials thinking they come up with everything. I made breakup cassettes and CDRs back in the dark ages, you little shits.

And those actually took effort. Fucking millennials. Yes. Yes. I mean, well, while I am famous for breaking up with a girl on Alf Stationery while she was away at college, I have made breakup mixtapes and I have gotten breakup mixtapes. Never got a breakup CDR.

I think I was past that in the CDR age. But yes, the breakup cassette is a that is an effort of will. You have to you have to put it out there. You have to make sure that all the tracks fit on the right side. Then you have to record it on the tape to tape machine. Sequencing mattered. Like, yeah, screwed up.

If you screwed up sequencing, you had to start again. You didn't just drag and drop. Exactly. And if you if you didn't hit pause at the right time at the end of the song, then, you know, there are all sorts of problems that could go into it. It was it took effort and it took a couple of nights. It wasn't like, OK, add to list, add to list, add to list, share, done.

It's like, oh, you got the little stick. You got the little sticky thing that that you had to put on with the label, the little Maxell sticky thing that would, you know, be covered with the tears of your pain. Yeah. This is a whole new world, people. Yeah. Yeah. And if you cried too much, it would peel off before you could get into a little plastic case.

And yeah, showed you cared. Nobody can see the tears on your keyboard. Oh, man. Well, speaking of tears of of woeful agony. Remember when you two broke up with PewDiePie? Vaguely, yes. Yeah. Didn't he do something anti-Semitic?

Yeah. Yeah. He's the one that did the fivers. He pre-spicered Spicer. Yes, he did. He did. It was hard to remember which one if this was, you know, I get PewDiePie and Milo Yiannopoulos mixed up because, you know, they're both just racist assholes who look about the same.

They could be brothers from the same Aryan mother. But PewDiePie is moving over to Twitch. OK, yeah, he's going to start testing his new show over at Twitch. So I have I have a link later on that I'll talk about, but it's good luck with that.

Let's see how Amazon reacts, you know, because if Google's not going to take him, I don't think Jeff Bezos is going to take him either. Probably not. I'd be surprised. We'll see what happens, though. We are getting well, in addition to it coming and looking absolutely fantastic, we are getting a new Stephen King TV show while they're also working on the what's my favorite?

series of his The Gunslinger. Yeah, The Gunslinger. We'll see how that one goes, too. I love The Mist as a movie, and I love the book. Did you ever see the movie? I thought it was great. There were two of them, weren't there? I don't know. I just remember the most recent. I saw the most recent one. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it, too. And I called the ending. We're not going to we're not going to ruin it here. But I knew that ending was exactly what it was going to be. Absolutely. It couldn't be anything else. It had to be that. So it was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. They are turning it into a TV series, which I don't know how I feel about that, because they also just recently did.

What was that other one? The Dome. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Which was a great book. I love the book. I tried to watch the show and I watched the whole first season. I thought it was fantastic. But then I realized, oh, it's not ending. You're just going to keep going.

Yeah. They built the world. Now they're going to keep milking it. Yeah, that that sucked. So I'm expecting that to suck for this, too. OK, I just don't understand how they're going to stretch it and turn it into a series with all these, you know, continuing plot lines. The whole it's pretty self-contained.

It's so self-contained for the most part. Yeah. So we'll see. I mean, I'll give it a go. The little bit of the trailer looks great. We'll see. It's like taking the shot or not taking the green mile and turning it into a series. You can't do that. You could actually do the Shawshank Redemption, though, into a series.

That would have been a good one. That's true. You could have. What happens when they get to Mexico and in their wacky adventures afterwards. Yes. But yeah, the mist, I don't know. I have no idea how they're going to do that. They're going to have to extend it past the ending of the movie or the book. You know, there's no other way. Yeah.

So the reboot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is out now. Yes. I am very trepidatious about this because I did love Mystery Science Theater when I was growing up. I am generally with lots of booze. I'm worried that that is something of a certain age and we might be too old to really enjoy it.

Now, like I said, I was trepidatious, but they put out a short where they take on Stranger Things. Did you watch this yet? No, I haven't. We're going to pause for a moment. We'll be right back after these brief messages. And we're back.

What did you think? All right. I watched it. You didn't like it. I was laughing out loud by the end. I think it was fine. The whole point of Mystery Science Theater was that they went back and they found these crazy old movies that nobody had ever seen. Now they're just doing this is Stranger Things was one of the biggest things in pop culture last year.

Well, that's why they're using it as a promo to get people interested to come see the show. I mean, that's just marketing right there. But I thought they did a good job with it. I thought it was pretty funny. Yeah, it was fine. I mean, it's exactly like the old show. So I just I am turned off by the fact that they went for pop culture. Well, it's just the promo.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. They do. They do the old movies on the new series. Yeah. Until the ratings aren't there. And then they'll go ahead and do pop culture. Yeah, we'll see. We'll check it out. Or I'm going to check it out. It'll be one of those late night things when I'm just tired, need something funny before I go to bed. Yes.

Okay. Okay. And I've mentioned before the ongoing history of new music podcast and how it started, which at first had no music. And then they did snippets of music with Spotify playlists. It's getting pretty good. I'm really enjoying it. So if you if you like podcasts about music, I'd suggest going and checking it out.

There's a there's a two part series out right now called Oasis at War, which is absolutely fantastic, particularly if you were around during the Brit pop days and into music at that time. So good stuff. The podcast is getting much better. And he's kind of dialing in how to do this without paying the licensing fees to put the music in the podcast.

So that's stuff. That's cool. Do we have a number on how long a clip can be before you have to pay for it? No, I don't know. You were just at rain. You'd think you'd know I was doing advertising. I wasn't doing content licensing. It wasn't, you know, copyright news. It was. Yeah, I don't I don't really know how that works, but obviously NPR doesn't care because they're paying the fees.

So you're on NPR. You're good to go. But if you're not, you know, either break the law like we did the first 30 episodes that we did or you pay up breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law. And one additional thing came out of Star Wars, whatever, whatever that I don't know what they call their big thing.

Star Wars Celebration. Is that what it's called? That's going on right now. The convention. Oh, you're asking the wrong guy. In Orlando, Florida. So we got the trailer that came out of it. And they have also put together a very touching tribute to Carrie Fisher. And if you watch it, you'll get a bit misty.

OK. Link in the show notes. I will check that out. I like I like Miss Carrie Fisher. So the URL that I was mentioning before when I was talking about PewDiePie was I was trying to figure out if Jeff Bezos was Jewish or not, because that would really kind of, you know, help the case that PewDiePie wouldn't make it.

Turns out he's not. But in trying to figure out if Jeff Bezos was Jewish, I ran across a site called Jew or not Jew dot com, which is it's it's for famous people. So if you're trying to find out if somebody is Jewish or not, you go there, plug in their name and it will give you a dossier.

I feel like there are only two people in the world that have this bookmarked, you and Steve Bannon, Adam Carolla. They have an entire segment called Jew or not a Jew. Definitely not a Jew, I think is the name of the segment. Oh, definitely not a Jew. OK, yeah. Yeah, that was I thought of that when I saw this website.

I'm like, definitely not a Jew. It's a pretty funny bit. So if you're if you're ever looking to find out if somebody is Jewish or not, there you go. There you go. We have some interesting science news that came through this week. Now, again, this is a problem. It's like nobody realizes that putting a putting the question mark in your headline is not a good thing these days.

Betterage, betterage, betterage. Could icy moons like Saturn's insular insulatus in the outer solar system be home to microbes or other forms of alien life? Question mark. Now, the actual answer here is maybe. OK, so it's not. No. So this is super interesting.

They've they've studied these plumes that are coming from the moon, and it seems to be that they have all the building blocks and the necessary conditions that there could be life there. Very fascinating stuff. So 2001, wrong planet. There you go. Yeah. And speaking of weird shit, two years later, we finally know why people saw the dress differently.

You remember the dress, the one that some people saw as blue and some people saw as white. It all comes down to perceived color. And basically, they're thinking that if you are a somebody who wakes up early or somebody who sleeps in nighttime light, daytime light, what hits your eyes more, that's what made the difference here.

You know, I have a I have a problem with this study because you can change you can change that outcome very easily by changing the color of the background that the dress is on. Now, I want to go dig into the study. Well, that will work as well. Yes, that will work as well. But they're saying in completely similar situations, you have a predilection depending on what your eyes are exposed to more often that that swung the difference that tip the scales as it were, in this case, to make you go one way or the other as to what you thought you were seeing.

Right. That's I just want to find out the methodology that they use to neutralize the background color so it wasn't an issue going from subject to subject to subject. That's all that's all that matters. Right. Because this came up on another show that I did recently, and we talked we talked about it at length. And, you know, I just I couldn't find that when I was looking at the trying to find the methodology of how they actually showed the people the dress.

Right, right. Well, well, we can definitely dig into that. I just think it's super fascinating that at the time we actually didn't have the science to understand why. And within two years, they kind of figured it out. No, they're pretty cool. And there's a great article in the L.A. Weekly, at least for me. I grew up in L.A. in the 80s, early 90s.

And so did the person who wrote this article. It's called it's how three moody British bands became the holy trinity for L.A. Misfits. Oh, God, this is right up here. It's the Smiths, the Kira Depeche mode. And, you know, you throw in Bauhaus and the offshoot bands from there. That's that's my my quad as opposed to my trinity.

Straight up. Yeah, this is exactly me. So if you grew up here listening to K-Rock and you were into alternative bands, this is straight up an article that discusses how popular they were in L.A., how it happened. Every single concert that this chick lists that she was at, I was at, too.

So pretty cool. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. The thing is, this isn't L.A. specific because all the goth kids at my school when I was in high school in like 87, 88, same same holy trinity. So we and they didn't we didn't get all the concerts you guys got. So I think if you were into one, you probably were in the in the sphere of the rest.

Well, they were the big bands and, you know, they they hit the big cities, New York, Chicago, L.A. That's, you know, sometimes Houston got got some or Dallas, you know, that's those were the big touring spots for these three bands back in the 80s, 90s. If you had an alternative radio station of any size, those were the three bands that were getting played the most.

So it makes sense for anybody, you know, any city, not just L.A. But this one, this article is so L.A. specific and it just touched, you know, touched on so many things that I did specifically. It was great. So reliving and yes, and reliving my youth. And speaking of my youth, Coachella has been going on for an awful long time now.

I used to go regularly and it was awesome. It has jumped the shark considerably. And I have included a link to the top eight products of the Coachella industrial complex that most make me want to die. And I quite enjoyed it. Can you give us a few of them? Because I've never been to Coachella and I never will go.

So Khloe Kardashian's Coachella ready denim cutoffs that are for sale. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. The Free People, which is a clothing lines, entire cultural appropriation themed festival line, which includes Indian headdresses, Goa waist belts, Tibetan sunrise necklaces, et cetera.

The Coachella ready cannabis flower crown, limited edition. And People Magazine's list of these 11 festival essentials you need in your fanny pack for Coachella. We have a winner. Oh, did I forget the custom Coachella themed emojis you can get for your phone?

Oh, Jesus. Yes, I would say definitely jump the shark. It has jumped the shark. It used to be a lot of fun. Not so much anymore. Okay. Well, my last one. I've talked about Masterclass before. Masterclass.com and how they've got some great stuff up there and there's so many I want to take, but I just don't have time.

I still want to do Deadmau5's electronic music one because I think that would just be fascinating to watch as a noob in that world. And I'm still going through James Patterson's story class because I just keep going through and finding new stuff and actually taking it in because it's really well done.

But there's a new one that just came out. It's pre-release only for people who already have classes, but it'll be open to everybody soon. And it's Steve Martin's Masterclass on comedy. Yeah, I've seen the promos for it. It looks pretty funny. I mean, I think I would just enjoy it as a comedy special as opposed to actually teaching me comedy.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's pretty long. It's like 12 hours of video and, you know, workshops and worksheets and stuff like that. And you have class time where you can send stuff to Steve and he'll check it out. But they're 90 bucks. That's it. That's a lot of value for 90 bucks.

And it's well done. I can just tell you from taking the Patterson class, it's well done. So I'll get a review of that sometime if I ever finish Patterson's class. Feedback loop. We have a new Patreon subscriber this week.

Jason has decided to join the club. So, hey, he's got the greatest name of all time. And he's smart because he likes to give us some money for doing this show. So thank you very much, Jason, for signing up for Patreon this week. Yeah, thank you so much. And then over on Twitter, Andreas Krohn sent us the link about hell as well.

I did like his comment. If Lex Luthor had founded a startup, Uber would have been it. So I just parsed that totally incorrectly. Awkward pausing there. We got to get you some morning tea, I think. I know. It's just a weird time that we're doing this today.

I'm not quite ready. And N8 1.0 sent us a photo of a Prius from a gun lover. And then I wrote back that I didn't like guns or Priuses. So I don't. But it was very funny. So don't worry about it. You weren't trolling us. We get it. And this comes from the website.

This came in a little while ago. And we've been actually working on trying to get an answer for it. It's from Christian Zangle. I've got a question for Dave Bittner, if that's okay. Of course. No, we're not. Fuck it. We don't have to do it. If everybody wants to write to Dave, go for it. Although, we'll see how that works out in a second.

I like to run my routers with OpenWRT or LEAD. Unlike my Linux machines, which constantly update, these are often stable for years. To be fair, updating a router is a lot more complicated than a normal Linux box. But I still find it surprising that there are no security updates at all. So how secure are those things?

Yeah. So Bittner passed on this. He didn't feel he could give us a solid enough of an answer. So we decided to not stop there. We kicked it around a bit. We sent it over to our friends at Symantec and a friend of the show, Monkey13. They're quite long answers.

So we're just going to put them up in the show notes and you can take a look at them. Yeah. Yeah. It would take us about a half an hour to read these. So we're going to pass on that one. Yeah. So we got your answers. We tracked it down. So keep on sending us stuff. If you've got any questions, we will find an answer one way or another. Damn it.

Yeah. We're not smart, but we have smart friends. Yes, exactly. All right. We have an iTunes five star from Nick MCN. Woohoo. Topical and entertaining. Maybe I'm biased because they talk about things I'm interested in, but this is the only podcast of this length I'll listen to.

Bittner was the gate. See? Another point for Jason? Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, no, no. There's no way you can consider that a point for you. It's like he probably, he's making a point that I can't believe how fucking long these shows are. And it's only because I'm so fascinated that I would possibly listen to two hours of this dribble.

Because we're so good. That's what he's saying. He will put up with anything because we're that damn good. Imagine how good we'd be in tasty bite-sized chunks. Yeah, boring. Boring. And this show's going to be well under two hours, so shut the fuck up. That's because neither of us had time to prepare this week.

Oh, man. I did my best. I did my best. I was too busy avoiding the real news in the world. Anyway, Bittner was the gateway drug, and now I am hooked. Keep it up. And we have a little message from Dave. He goes, yay! Yay! Mother of all Bittners, the Moab. If you want your questions or comments right on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Closing shout-outs! My shout-out this week goes to Matt Lombardi, the founder of the Slatewood Club down in Nashville.

Amazing dude. We had the greatest time with him. His crew is one of the most professional, nicest, and just accommodating group of guys and girls, guys and women, I shouldn't say girls anymore, that I've ever stayed with. We had, you know, an amazing chef, two great bartenders, had the best whiskey tastings.

I didn't go the gun and car route, but everybody that went had a great time. But man, if you ever need a place to go have like a dude's weekend, the Slatewood Club, you cannot go wrong. So definitely check them out. I got the link in the show notes. Excellent.

And I'd like to thank Air Canada for not dragging me off the plane. Yeah, I have to go back and listen to the security segment to find out how you fared. But you're home and unaccosted, so I assume everything went okay. Everything went all right. You can go back and we talked about that at great length in our security segment, Jason.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schillmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to the 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 help support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about, and show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 205.

I want to see it. Oh, yes. I like the drop-down calculator so you can pick what that would pay for. Oh, my God. 2,000 students educated per year. Nice. Six years of homelessness aid. 25 million meals funded.

Yep. And that's 13 weeks of him as president. Awesome. How's that little baby of yours? Oh, he's awake. So hopefully he won't bleed over too much and I don't have to get yelled at by Jason.

Oh, Jason. Jason's so understanding and forgiving when it comes to these sorts of things. I don't see what the problem is. It is amazing how he forgets about that when his dog starts barking. And then it's like, oh. That's just adorable. Bam, bam. Come over here. Bam, bam. Let's everybody hear you barking.

Come on. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Right, right. Can't you keep your baby from making any noise? Yes, he grumbles and grumbles. Oh, well.

That's funny. It is the cost of doing the podcast, I suppose. Thank you very much. But please fuck off now. Alec Amazey with Diggy Dong. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel.

Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.