206: Sarah's Law

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 now. 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. Now, Brian, before we jump in, I'd just like to talk a minute about how utterly maddening it is to use the web without an ad blocker. Yep. Have you tried it recently? Nope, because we've talked about it a couple shows ago.

And yeah, it's absolutely useful or useless. The internet is useless. This is the internet that we decided that we deserved. So it's what we got. Auto-playing ad videos with the sound on. These sneaky full-page takeovers that just kind of follow your mouse and get you to click on stuff without even, you know, not trying to.

But it's like, oh, here's the read more button. Let's put an ad in front of it right before you click it. Because I accidentally left ad block off or paused for about an hour today. And what a shithole the web has become. You know, we decided we didn't want to pay for anything. That's how it goes. But this is why I still love RSS. It gets the job done.

Right. I'm gathering Facebook made a change recently because I saw a lot of people complaining about the auto-playing videos now go sound automatic unless you switch it off, which didn't happen for me because apparently I switched it off a long time ago. But a lot of people were complaining about it. So there must have been some sort of tweak.

Yeah, these weren't on Facebook. This was on Salon. When I was going through some of the stuff, the links that you put in the show notes, it was auto-playing AT&T ads. And I'm like, what the hell? Yep, yep, yep. I basically have my ad blocker on 24-7 these days. I mean, there was a period of time where for some sites to support them, I would leave it off.

But then that stuff started to happen. So I'm like, to hell with that. Sorry. Yeah. Redonkulous. Redonkulous. I just had to get that off my chest. Let's move along. But make sure that you have your ad blocker off when you go to grumpyoldgeeks.com. Not that we have a lot of ads. We just have our one for VPN. And if you don't have it by now, go get it.

Yes. Private Internet access. We love them. Yes, we do. And you need it. Trust me. Now, we've been talking about voice tech. Google Home with their Burger King kerfuffle last week. We've been talking about Echo a lot because we both have them. Amazon Alexa's, whatever you want to call them.

They have a branding problem with that because some people call them Echo's. Some people call them Alexa's. And well, they have a problem anyways, because as we've discussed, there's gazillions of apps that nobody ever uses. What they are attempting to do to make it more useful now is they are opening up the voice control technology behind Alexa.

So it has now opened up a service called Lex, thus continuing their crappy branding in what is being described as a move to become the top player in voice controlled computing. So you will be able to go ahead and use their software and their technology to add voice control to your various to whatever you want, basically, in theory.

So we'll see. But of course, they will be keeping control of and the keys to the kingdom. So anything that you come up with, they'll be able to kind of cherry pick and grab and thus drive your thing out of the market because they'll see what you're doing going. Oh, that's that's clever. We'll just take that. But here's the thing. I don't think that's why they're doing it.

They just need more people talking into the damn thing. So they get more patterns to match against to make it smarter. At some point, they will they will pull a Twitter, pull the rug out from under you and say, well, you know, Lex used to be free, but now we've taught it everything that it needs to know. So now pay us. Yeah. And one way that Google Home is now moving forward a bit in the in the race to kind of take over your voice.

They have added support for multiple accounts by recognizing differences in voices, which is kind of cool. Yeah. If it works, it's cool. Now, one of the reasons they had to do this is because each device was being connected to a single Google account. So if you wanted to do anything useful, like add to your calendar, other people couldn't use it.

You would have to set it up to one specific account. So now they've added multiple Google accounts and theoretically voice recognition will work, which is a good step forward. And I'm sure Echo will not be far behind. Yep. You just have to train it when you sign up and attach it to your account. And if you have a similar voice to anybody in your household and why would you have that just because you're genetically similar?

I don't know. Then we'll see how that goes. But yes. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how well it works. Yes. All right. So moving from that to how the world is all going to end and we're not going to have a chance to do any of this anyways. Paul Krugman, he's a good writer. I like a lot of his stuff. He's been very doom and gloom recently and rightfully so because he gives you a point point point reason why wrote a nice little very short article over on Salon, the aforementioned one.

So make sure you have your ad blocker on. Sorry, Salon. I'd like to give you support, but come on. The American jobs crisis is way bigger than Trump can comprehend. And this goes into a very short and succinct argument about why Trump keeps going on and on about coal miners, while in reality we are losing way more retail jobs.

We're losing way more journalism jobs, newspaper jobs, reporting jobs than we are coal miners. And about the fact that realistically we are losing tons of jobs every single month anyways because of what we keep talking about on this show, automation, AI, all that sort of thing.

Not paying for anything. Not paying for anything. And the only way that we are going to solve this problem is through training and, you know, science. Science. And just a quick clarification. Alana Novick wrote the Salon article. It's taken from Paul Krugman's New York Times piece.

Oh, sorry. My bad. No problem. Just want to give credit where credit is due. There you go. And over at the Daily Mail, there's an interesting article about what's happening in Australia because we are dealing with the visa crisis here in the U.S. And Trump is trying to get rid of a bunch of basically the tech industry's visas for employment here.

Yeah, the H-1Bs are what we have here. The H-1Bs, they're basically trying to crack down on and get rid of a ton of them. Australia has kind of leapt ahead and said, fine, we're going to get rid of all of ours. This is an Australian first policy. So this is what happens when America takes the lead on something.

Everybody else then starts to protect their own backyards. So, yeah. Yay, yay, world. We were getting along so well together. And everybody loses. Exactly. Well, hopefully New Zealand's not going that route because they're trying to become the tech hub like we talked about last show. We'll see what happens there.

We might all be moving. In the news. Do you remember a gentleman named Steve Ballmer, Brian? Boy, do I. You have to remember, I was a Microsoft and PC guy most of my life.

You were a developer, developer, developer, developer. I was. I've even been to the campus to work on things. So, yeah, I'm a Ballmer fan. Although, I could care less about the Clippers, which is basically all he deals with these days. Except for this. Yes, he's got a new stealth startup coming out called USA Facts, which is going to be interesting.

It's basically a giant database to figure out where all your money goes from your U.S. taxes. Yeah. I mean, this is what happens when you are an engaged individual that has more money than you could ever possibly know what to do with. I would love to work at this company.

This is the kind of stuff that really intrigues me. I mean, he was basically sitting around probably, oh, I'd say late March, probably at his accountant's office and went, you know what? I've got the kind of money to be able to figure out what exactly the government is doing. I want to I want to know where my dollars are going.

Yeah. So he started up big data company to figure it out. Yeah. And his wife was pretty much also you need something to do, honey. The Clippers ain't cutting it. Yeah. I'm sick of you going to games every single night and just sitting there drinking beer. So this is going to be interesting. I cannot wait to play with it.

So I am beyond excited about this. I think it's this is this is what big data is for. This is what it excites me about big data. This is the exact opposite of what big data is actually being used for, which is to track and screw us. This is us finding out how we got screwed. Yes, it is.

So this is this is going to be a fun one to play with. It's like, you know, this is transparency. We like it. And I believe it's supposed to at least launch, at least in its first form this coming week, I believe. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. You know, we'll see what happens. Stealth startup. So they can never tell if they're going to launch on time.

Yeah. Very exciting stuff. Transparency is and sunlight is the way to a better world. Keep those damn politicians honest. Well, this week, also, we got the Facebook developer conference. Speaking of developers. Yeah, I'm looking at the next like 10 stories that we have in our in our show notes here.

And I'm just getting depressed and bored already. I think bored is more like it. So so instead of going deep diving, let's just make fun of Zuckerberg for a while. All right. So basically, this conference, instead of like focusing on what Facebook is really doing, which is auto playing ads with sound, gives us a rosy vision of his cybernetic Facebook future.

And it involves QR codes. Yes. Well, this is the first bit that kind of caught my eye. And I was like, QR codes. Didn't we just talk about how these things are dead and nobody uses them anymore? Well, Facebook is bringing them back. Messenger is finally making it easier to find and use bots.

I like that headline because it posits that that's actually a good thing, because as we've discussed many times on this show, bots fucking suck. People rule bots suck. Yes. Bots are useless. They're just a good way to fire a bunch of people and have really crappy customer service.

So but thankfully, Messenger is here to save the day. They are rolling out new QR codes for bot creators so that when you scan them, which nobody will ever do, it'll bring you straight into a conversation with the bot that'll do nothing for you. Yes. Great. Thanks a lot, guys.

This is called progress. So QR codes, as we talked about previously, I think it was in security about three weeks ago. QR codes are still big in Asia, but they have been thwarted by the dreaded sticker. So yeah, look for it.

Make sure you check your QR codes by a little, you know, peel and peel and pull to see if it's actually connecting you to the bot or if you're just giving up all your monies. Yeah. You don't want to do that. Nope. Next up, Zuckerberg confirms that Facebook is working on mind reading technology.

Just what I want. Facebook to know what I'm thinking. Yeah. They kind of do. Oh, they do. Well, they definitely do. But I don't know if they really need mind reading technology so much as the aforementioned big data that they are collecting on all of us. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is this is an attempt to so you can type to a friend faster. This is a little bit different from the next story. But what they're trying to do is build something into your smartphone where you can type at about 100 words per minute directly from your brain. Yeah.

How exciting for us. Yeah. Great. More texts. Just what I wanted. I finally got rid of phone calls and I've been wheedling down texts. I just want silence. Can we just have some silence? Now, Tim Urban from WaitButWhy.com, who is one of the most amazing bloggers on the planet, has a, I think, a 750,000 word article called Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future.

Now, Tim got famous because apparently Elon Musk is a big fan of his. So he got, you know, big back looks into Tesla and SpaceX. And now he has one into Neuralink, which is Elon Musk's attempt to read your brain with technology.

Yeah. We talked about that briefly. That one sounds somewhat interesting to me. I mean, we're talking who knows how long it's going to take because Musk can dump so much money into this. Yeah. I mean, it's skip the first, you know, 95 percent of the article unless you really want the history of how brains work and how thinking evolved and get in.

Skip to the end and you'll get to the point where he talks about what they're doing and how they're doing it, what the problems are and, you know, what's happening. Because he spent several weeks with the people who are making it. So that kind of access is pretty fun to read about. But I love that some of the cartoons are just like they just keeps pointing at him as like dumbest person in the room while everybody's trying to talk about it.

OK. And the next thing that came out of Facebook's big conference is Mark Zuckerberg's own speech about the future of blah, blah, blah. A.R. Sorry, I have to always track which which particular terminology everybody's using. Which R we're talking about is the VR or the A.R.?

This one's the A.R. We got VR is next. So first is the A.R. So Zuckerberg talks about it. Basically, he's talking about building Google Glass for himself. And it's a it's a very pie in the sky in the future. Not that far away.

We're going to bring you glasses where you can just sit there and you want to play a board game. You snap your fingers and the board game will appear in front of you. You want to watch TV. You snap your fingers and the TV will appear in front of you. Hey, I got a TV in front of me right now. I got board games in the closet. I don't need your glasses and I don't want to snap my fingers and I don't want to wear these.

And I don't want to have to pay you $1.99 a month every single time I do anything. Yeah. And HoloLens is already kicking their ass. You know, they've got a product to market. It's still expensive for developers, but they're leading the charge right now with A.R. And we'll see how that comes out. But yeah, I don't want Facebook A.R.

I don't. Facebook will just buy them anyways. They're going to buy Microsoft. Facebook does this big whole thing about how they're going to develop everything themselves. But the reality is they just go ahead and purchase something that's already halfway there. Yeah. But I mean, this is Microsoft we're talking about with HoloLens. So yeah, yeah. OK, fair enough.

Yeah. All right. So next up is the VR as opposed to the A.R. And I just like the headline. And since we're going through this quickly, I'll just give you the headline. And the link is in the show notes. Facebook's new VR experience looks like hell on earth. Oh, boy, does it. Did you watch the video? They have a video.

And boy, does it. I don't ever want to have this ever. No, this looks like this is this is the technological equivalent of like the Stouffer's single frozen meal. It just means that if you're using this or you're eating that you're going to die alone and sad.

The real worry that comes from me about this story isn't even looking at the technology and the fact that they might try to push this on as soon. It's it's the drinking of the Kool-Aid that must be taking place on their campus. That because a bunch of a bunch of people actually sat around, approved this video and said, that's cool.

No, no, it's fucking not. It's horrible. And if you would have gotten off campus and shown this to anybody else at all, you would have known you would have gotten all the kind of headlines you're getting on this. No, this thing is just it. It just makes my skin crawl watching this.

Yeah. And I loved the virtual selfie stick that pops out at the end. Did that just not make you go, I don't want to live in this world anymore? Pretty much. And somebody who agrees, and I found this while stumbling down the VR rabbit hole this week, I threw this purely in for you, Jason.

I appreciate it, too. Neil Gaiman has no time for VR. He's just too damn old and doesn't care. I will come to this with a 56 year old head and lots of ideas about the ways that other things are done. So this is not for me. Let all you kids do it, because much like us just making fun of that video, we don't get it.

We don't like it. Get off our lawn. And honestly, I don't think anybody likes VR. I don't know anybody that is just enjoying VR. You know who likes VR? Marketing people. The people that are working in VR. They're the only fucking people, because I have a few, I have a couple friends on Facebook that are all up about VR.

All of them work in the industry. They're the only people that like the shit. There is there's a the only market that I can see right now for VR to be a game changer is to be able to use VR without looking like a total twat. If you can come up with a headset and goofy, you know, controllers that don't make you look like a complete doofus, that is going to be the game changer in VR, because right now you just look retarded looking around the room, waving your hands around.

It's silly. They maybe put streamers on them so they at least are doing performance art while they're standing there. Who knows? There's got to be something. But nobody has stuck with VR. Everybody I know that has a rig and dedicated a room to it have undedicated the room to it after about two or three weeks.

Like, there's just nothing there. There's nothing to do. Yeah, I agree. Let's switch gears over to the music industry really quickly. As we know, there was a service called Tidal. Their big claim initially was that they're doing super high quality audio feeds. They quickly discovered that nobody gave a crap about that.

So before Tidal, there was Pono. There was also – well, Pono was an actual player, not just a streaming service. That was more like an iTunes-y. You purchased the song. You downloaded it onto your Pono player, and you listened to it there. It wasn't actually streaming, which is what we're about to get to.

So purely on the streaming services, Tidal did the whole we're high quality audio. Nobody cared. Spotify then rolled out their own high quality audio anyways. So you'd think – you would look around at the marketplace, right, Jason? And you would go, there is no room here for another service, much less one that we're purely going to market as high quality, high resolution streaming.

You'd be wrong. Yes, you would be. Neil Young has come back with his Pono player after his Pono player just crashed and burned and nobody cared. He is now doing a streaming service that is purely high resolution called Xtreme. I thought he would call it Tobler Pono. I think they should have called it Tobler or Pono.

Xtreme, which is the most un-Neil Young title you could possibly think of for a project. Yeah, so he's launching that. I just liked this particular article again over on Slate because of this one line. Here we go. Young's battle against the popularity of lower resolution music has gone from old man yells at cloud to old man launches cloud-based service.

That sums it up right there. There you go. You don't need to know anything else about that. Yeah, I think what we're seeing here is a problem of yes men because I'm looking at what's happening with Zuckerberg. It's the drinking of the Kool-Aid. Do you remember that Star Wars episode one through three review that was the guy in the basement that just tore it apart?

Yep. And finally got to the end. He's like, George Lucas has nobody that says no to him. And I think that's what's happening here. You know what the problem is, Jason? Nobody's hiring us anymore. Ah, good point. This is what you and I did at companies. We called the people atop. We just said, you're an idiot.

This will not work. We sat in rooms and said, yes, we could do this. But why are we doing this? Yeah. And especially with this one, it's like, well, it's been proven not to work. Nobody bought your high definition audio device. Nobody bought the high definition audio streaming service because let's let's think about this.

Nobody cares. That's why. Yes. Because nobody cares. What are you going to do? Neil, go write a new album. Or don't just go retire. I like his music. I'm not a fan, but that's OK. You're the music guy. So you know more than I do on music.

But what I know more about porn, that's right. That's true. Pornhub has launched the Snapchat for nudes filter so you can basically cover your junk. This would be your milieu. Yes. Yes. My wheelhouse, my raison d'etre, you know, they put out a great video for their new app called Trick Picks that it has Snapchat like filters that you can put over your naughty bits so you

can send them off to more puritanical services like Instagram and Facebook and well, not Tumblr because you can do anything on Tumblr. It is quite wisely marketed and geared towards dudes. I wish they would have just called it Dickies, which is our original name.

Yes. We would need a we would definitely need a royalty off of that. We have prior art. We have prior art. Yeah. So this is interesting. But yes, unsurprisingly, definitely marketed towards dudes who are more likely to take pictures of their junk and send them, even though the receiving ladies don't really want them.

Did you watch the video, though? Because the video is half women, half dudes. They did a pretty good job of 50 50 in the market share in the video. Yes. But the name. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. I think it's pretty funny. And I haven't tried it because nobody wants to see this.

So I'm not even going to bother. I don't even want that on my phone. I might download it just for fun and take a few pictures of like bananas and cucumbers and see what they can do. Oh, that would be cool. Yeah. I'm curious to see how it works, but I'm not that curious. But it's free. So expect those on the Grumpy Old Geeks Instagram.

We know what Brian's doing this week. Oh, yeah. And now speaking of some of a site that's basically there for porn, Tumblr, which is the blogging platform still owned by Yahoo. So if you're wondering what Yahoo is doing with their dwindling funds, they have launched a group video chat app called Cabana.

Dear God, why? Cabana lets up to six users video chat together at the same time and stream YouTube. Videos to watch while chatting. Tumblr is framing it as a digital couch. And by the way, when I read that coming off of the Pornhub one, I thought it's a digital crotch.

Yeah, so did I. And that's basically what it'll probably be used for. Yeah. But it tested well with 13 to 18 year olds, so maybe not. Once again, that is what Snapchat started as. True. And it was with junk. So while the app is not specific to teens, the company says it tested really well with 13 to 18 year olds.

So there was that other app for a while, like House Party, which was trying to do the same thing. Oh, that's right. Who started that one? Wasn't that like at a Periscope or something? That came from the Periscope guys. And then, you know, I haven't heard anything about it since then. I'm sure, you know, these things are still out there and getting some funding.

Now, my question with Tumblr is a lot of these video apps, Periscope and all those sorts of things, they do a really good job of keeping the X-rated stuff off. Tumblr, not known for policing. No shit. So I am wondering if if Cabana is going to become the app du jour for people hanging out their junk and asking if anybody wants to watch the masturbate.

But since it is it is only first, was it two to six people? So, you know, little group sex going on between preteeners and then they all become sex offenders and have their lives ruined. We'll see how this goes. It doesn't say anything about whether you can save them or if they're shared to the like saved to the cloud or if it is just stream and go, you know, that's the interesting side.

Yep. I agree. Do you remember Celebrity Net Worth? Yes, I do. I did a little side project even I think right before we started this podcast where I was like finding really stupid quotes from celebrities and then I'd go to Celebrity Net Worth and put in how much they were worth at the time.

And I did it with that. Yeah, I did it with Google AdWords purely as an exercise to see if you could make money based off traffic. And the answer was no, no. Well, Google really liked the data from Celebrity Net Worth and asked if they could use it because then they would have a link back with, you know, to their to their source data.

And the guy who ran Celebrity Net Worth says, that's the stupidest deal I've ever heard in my life. No, go fuck yourself. And Google, in its infinite 800 pound gorilla wisdom, just took the data anyway. Yeah, well, OK. Yeah, there's a there's a very long but very interesting article on on this whole thing.

But it's about how, you know, Google does what Google wants, you know? Yeah. Yeah. All these companies do. This is half of our show is talking about these these, you know, 800 pound gorilla companies that basically just say, you don't like what we're doing? Fuck you. There are laws against it.

Fuck you. We have more money. So let's roll into our next article because it ties directly into that. Exactly. Uber is once again getting some some pushback from a city. This in this case, it's London Transport for London.

The TFL is proposing license fee changes that would cause Uber to basically have to cough up over a two million or two million pound bill, basically saying that you've got to pay the kind of same things that taxi companies, private hire operators, et cetera, are paying.

And that's going to come out to about two million pounds for you. Yeah. Over five years. And the interesting thing here is and I know exactly what Uber is going to say is, well, they're not our cars. So the drivers are going to have to absorb that. Exactly. That's exactly what they're going to come back with. It's like, but we're just technology.

We're just we don't do nothing. We just tech. Yeah. Which is such a load of shit. I mean, they're so full of crap. It just drives me crazy now. All right. So we occasionally place some ads on our social media. When we get a sponsor, we go ahead and post an ad. And I think you guys know and we make it fairly savvy and clear that it's an ad, but we may not be doing it quite well enough for the FTC, although I don't think that we're catching their notice.

No, I think we're I think we're definitely under the radar for the FTC. Public Citizen has filed a formal complaint citing big names like the Kardashians, the Beckhams, Drake and other people saying that simply tagging your post with hashtag SP for sponsored post or thanks brand or hashtag partner isn't easy enough for consumers to understand, which makes me think consumers are fucking stupid.

Yeah, well, if you're following the Kardashians, you're probably not. You're not you're not at the upper edge. Let's just say you're not at the deep end of the pool. My understanding is every post they make is a goddamn ad. Yeah. So like 25 grand a tweet for them.

Yeah. They might as well be called the Trumps for Jesus sake. Yeah. So anybody who wants to steer clear of the tiny amounts of unenforceable fines the FTC is supposedly going to put on you should include terms like ad promotional or sponsored early and often.

So they're obviously not even giving specific guidelines to get around this or to make sure that you're OK. So basically, this is a nothing story that doesn't give anybody any information about what they should actually do. And there won't be any enforcement anyways. Yeah, there are there are guidelines on the FTC site. I read them a long time ago when they first rolled this out.

This is like small potatoes. Nobody's nobody cares about this. They're just doing this front because there's probably nobody left at the FTC after it's been gutted. So they just need something to do. I'm just going to look at social media all day. So I got I got to justify my job of looking at social media somehow.

So let me send some emails. Yep, pretty much. Now, I threw in another story just for you, Jason, because I know you've had some misadventures with people stealing your photos and using them before. Yes, I have. Somebody took a photo of the very funny.

If you're a Boston sports fan, motivational sign from the Boston Marathon. It was quite funny. If you're into sports, I'm not going to talk too much about that. And the folks at ESPN saw it and wanted to get their hands on it. So they reached out to the guy who posted it, who basically told them to go fuck themselves.

Good for him. So there you go. So at least people seem to be actually trying to do the right thing. ESPN didn't just take it and use it. Yes, but that's not the real reason you put this in here. My God, how far headlines have fallen. This is the single worst headline I've ever heard.

The actual headline for this story is the dude that took this motivational picture at today's marathon just stuffed ESPN into a body bag. I would expect to hear this conversation from a bunch of third graders. Yeah, and it's from offthemonstersports.com.

Yeah, this is, I mean, granted, if you want to like keyword stuff, a title that's very long, just look at this one and take it as an example of what not to do. It doesn't even mention the marathon's name. It doesn't mention the Patriots or any of the other things that would be good keywords for a good title.

That dude that took this motivational picture at today's marathon. Okay. Way to be descriptive. Yeah. So moving from stupid to smart. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. No problem. I listened to the hidden brain podcast a lot.

Granted, it's an NPR podcast, but it's, it's very well done. It's very, very smart. And as often relevant to our interests, their most recent one, episode 68 is called shot in Facebook, which is totally a title we would have used at some point. I'm surprised. You haven't. I am too.

This is a really good listen. It does follow your typical NPR format. So it starts with a no doubt personal story about somebody, some woman recognizing that people put on only positive things on social media, leaving us to chase after other people's fake lives because they aren't really real.

So, but then it quickly moves into more interesting studies that back this up and they're recent and we haven't covered them. We've talked a lot about this and the early studies that have come out saying that social media basically make us sad and miserable. But there are some newer ones that have come out because they are proving that social media does make us miserable, but not in the way that we'd think.

It's actually all about FOMO. Fuck millennials. Fear of missing out. FOMO, I think, actually came out of tech a long time ago. They've just taken it and repurposed it as their own because God forbid they come up with something on their own.

Well, it's a bigger deal now. So, but basically what the studies are finding out isn't that we get miserable looking at other people's happy lives and going, we're not happy enough. What is happening is we're looking at the things that they are doing and it is making us enjoy whatever we're doing at the time less, even if the thing that we're doing is amazing.

And better than what our other friends are doing. We are just concerned that we missed out on that while we're doing this, which is fucked up. It's fucked up. That's how crazy our brains are. There's an entire industry out there about these like, you know, travel hackers and people who like, you know, travel around the world living out of their little rucksack and doing all this stuff.

Say, I'm in Bali today. I'm over here today. And there's an entire industry around these guys and they use social media to, you know, basically get people to buy their eBooks on how to travel for cheap around the world. And I mean, I've watched this forever now as a 45 year old man, I can say that's a pain in the ass and it sucks after about three weeks.

And all you want to do is go home, crack a beer and watch some fucking TV. This is, you know, they do use this stuff to make you think that you're missing out. And in all honesty, 99% of the time, you're not. They're traveling. Traveling is a pain in the balls.

And again, I really think everybody that is listening to us right now should go listen to this podcast because the study, what the studies have shown is that, you know, even, even though they did enjoy what they were doing less at the time because they were seeing what other people were doing. They wanted to be doing what they were doing, not what the other people are doing, which is how fucked up and insidious all this stuff is.

So, yeah, social media, not good. No, it's not. It's definitely not. So, you know, you just have to you have to, like, just take a breath and say, what, I really want to take the 12 hours to go do what they're doing. Or do I do I want a Ferrari? Because I'm just going to drive down the street and anytime anybody farts in its general direction, I'm going to worry about it getting scratched.

You know, there's all these things. It's like you're looking at this. It's like capital. It's just like capitalism. It is social media capitalism where everybody wants something that everybody else has, not realizing that they're happier where they're at right now. Right. Thus end the rant. Sorry. Good rant.

We talk about this stuff all the time on The Art of Charm. It's like we always say you're comparing your, you know, your blooper reel to everybody else's highlight reel. And that's how it fucks with your head. I agree. And our final story is dropped in here. Actually, this could be an entire episode in and of itself.

And at some point it will. This is from over at BigThink.com. And I urge everybody to go read this article. Even AI creators don't understand how complex AI works. Yeah. So we've kind of started off artificial intelligence.

We have planted the seed, creating the original algorithms that cause our machines to operate. But what's happening, as people are discovering, is the computers that run those services have programmed themselves. And they have done it in ways we cannot even understand. We can't reverse engineer what they are doing.

So I'll just go ahead and lead into your next point, Jason. We are starting Skynet. Well, I would like to point out that there's a lovely internet meme called Godwin's Law, which states, As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches one.

I propose Sarah's Law, appropriately named for Sarah Connor from the Terminator series. As an online discussion about AI grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Skynet approaches one. So you heard it here first. Sarah's Law is basically what we talk about all the time.

Because everybody keeps saying, these things are getting smarter, they're getting smarter, and we don't know what they're going to do. Well, then maybe stop making them, you dumb shit. Maybe Hawking was right. Maybe we're all going to die in a fiery ball. But, you know, that could happen any day now anyway.

We don't need AI for that. Look, as a society and as people, we are fantastically bad at Pandora's box. We can't stop ourselves. We're going to do this anyways, no matter what. I just, I really think people need to read this because what is terrifying about this is the fact that the people who really understand this don't understand this.

No longer understand what is happening. Fun times. We thought Trump was going to end us all. There's still time. That's true. It's a race. Let's talk about our good friends at FreshBooks for a minute.

As an independent contractor, I've been creating and sending invoices to clients for over 20 years. You know how it goes. Dig up the Word doc, if you can find it. Fill it out without screwing up the formatting. Save it. Email it to the client. Then wait and pray for your money. Well, no more. FreshBooks.com has created a super intuitive tool that makes creating and sending invoices ridiculously easy.

With FreshBooks, you can create and send invoices in about 30 seconds. There's no formatting and no formulas. You can add your own logo and color scheme so that your invoice reflects your brand. Just really simple, clean, consistent, and professional looking invoices. And when you email a client an invoice, FreshBooks can show you whether they've seen it, which puts an end to the guessing games.

With their online payment system, you can set yourself up to let your clients pay by credit card straight from their invoice. This is a game changer. I get paid so much faster now. And here's my favorite part. You don't have to have that awkward chat with your client about past due payments. FreshBooks automates late payment email reminders so you can spend less time chasing payments and more time working your magic.

And you can see who's late right from your dashboard. So adding a late fee is a breeze. Right now, FreshBooks is offering a free 30-day trial to our listeners. Go to FreshBooks.com forward slash grumpy and enter grumpy old geeks in the how did you hear about a section because you don't want to be doing invoices the old fashioned way anymore.

Seriously, FreshBooks.com slash grumpy. Security? Ha! Well, we're back with my two favorite jokesters this week. How are you guys doing? Pretty good, thin skin.

Yeah. Woof, woof. It's important to be able to laugh at yourself. It is. I particularly enjoyed the five to six Facebook posts as you heard different things that we said. Well, I finally, you know, when I finally was putting it together for the end of the show, I was laughing at it.

So I'm just like, yeah. I'm glad. It was all meant in, you know, humorous jest, Jason. We kid because we love. That's right. Remember, the opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference. Yes, exactly. If we would have just leapt straight into the segment and didn't even mention you, then you would have known the truth.

Okay. Okay. But we digress. Let's talk some security, gentlemen. All right. Any of you guys have a Linksys router laying around the house? Not anymore. Who doesn't? Who doesn't? I would say. There's probably half a dozen Linksys routers within 200 feet of me right now.

Right. I wonder if I had to have you check those against the list of the 20 routers that have been shown to have vulnerabilities. I have not yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to. Are you actually going to, or are they just going to sit in a pile forever and you're never going to use them again like everybody else's Linksys router?

Well, it's funny. I mean, we have sort of gotten to the point where they are disposable. I guess most people who are into tech have a small pile of routers that have gone by the wayside as the formats have been upgraded and they've gotten faster.

But no, I mean, we've got a couple of active ones here at the office that are nearby. So I'm definitely going to make sure that the people whose responsibility it is to check such things just know that they should do that. Right. Anyway, you want to talk about what the actual skinny is on this?

Company IOactive says it's found 10 vulnerabilities impacting Linksys routers, which has a fairly high total on the actual total devices that are out there. There's more than 20 routers that are vulnerable to these attacks. Linksys is on the case, they say.

We're going to fix it. But yeah, it's a huge swath of Linksys routers that are now, you know, open to the wind, as it were. You've got to give Linksys some credit, though. Historically, they've been very good about monitoring and fixing things and patching things immediately.

Depends on which version of Linksys you're talking about. This is pre-Cisco or post-Cisco, you know? I think since post-Cisco, they've been better. Because pre-Cisco, me, not so much. Yeah, they say that in this article that they have identified 7,000 of the vulnerable routers in use, but there could be over 100,000 of them that are out there in the wild as yet unpatched, because, of course, they haven't released a patch yet.

But, I mean, it's interesting. There's a broad swath of vulnerabilities that these things hit and all sorts of things they could do to your router. Yeah, it's not good. But like I said, I don't know that many people that actually still use Linksys routers. Most people now get them from their cable companies. Or if you're doing it yourself, like I did with – I'd have like a Motorola cable modem and then run it through either a crazy router from China or – What could go wrong with that?

Yeah, yeah. I have now taken that offline. Thank you very much. Or Apple Extremes. I always have a mesh of Apple Extremes in the house. But some of these new systems look pretty good. Well, that's not going to be an option too much longer, Jason. Apple is going to continue their entire line at some point. I'm running that as well. I've got a Motorola cable modem straight into my Apple router.

Yeah, and honestly, those things, they're overpriced for what they are. And they don't have the coverage. Yeah, I had three Extremes and it barely got to the back of the house. I went for the convenience of it because it's the built-in time capsule model.

And now that I've got the Synology, I don't even need that because the Synology handles all my time capsule backups for all of my computers in the house on one system. So it's pretty nice. No more Linksys for me, but yeah, you can go to any garage sale now that summer's coming or spring's here.

You can probably find boxes of Linksys routers that are vulnerable and then give them to your friends and enemies. Yes, I will say I do have a neighbor whose router is named Abraham Linksys. Oh, God. I have a neighbor whose router is named Tuck Frump.

Oh, I like that. Yes. All right, moving on. What you got for us, Dave? Well, what do you guys think about Bose? Speaker maker, you know, consumer electronics manufacturer Bose. Do you guys have an opinion of them?

I'm a fan. I think their stuff is pretty good. I personally am on Sennheiser's these days, but I've always been a fan. They've always done quality products. I've had several pair of Bose headphones, the noise-canceling ones. I never had any of the wireless ones, just the wired ones.

But I always thought that they were high quality, and they actually still work after 10 years. Yeah, I would say I have – Bose is a mixed bag for me. I think some of their stuff is quite good. I think, for example, the original Wave Radio was pretty amazing, actually innovative.

But I think over the years, some of their things, I would say, are expensive for what you get. I've seen plenty of reports where people take the device apart, and they're using low-quality components in their speakers relative to the price that you're paying for that thing.

Margins, baby, margins. Yeah, yeah. I also have experience – Well, you know, they're trading on their brand name a bit. I mean, they've built it up, so why not? Yeah. Well, and that's – I mean, there's a joke about Bose. People say, Bose, better sound through marketing. My father actually bought one of the Bose – a little miniature Bose system to work with his – you know, first time he got an HDTV.

And the thing that left me scratching my head about it was that it had no headphone jack. Hmm. Right. So, you know, my father wanted to listen to – sometimes he wanted to listen to movies or things over headphones so that he could listen to them loud because he's old.

And so he wouldn't upset my mother, you know, by having the TV on late at night. But I didn't even think to look for a headphone jack. Like I assumed any AV device that has built-in DVD player, a tuner, it's the amplifier for your system, a couple of satellite speakers and a subwoofer, I would imagine – sure, that would come with headphone jack.

Nope, no headphone jack. Wow. You'd think you'd spend $800 on a brand new iPhone. It would come with one, too. Zing! Touché. Touché. So, Bose was ahead of the wave, right? All right.

Well, anyway, getting to the story here, there is a lawsuit that claims that Bose is secretly collecting user data. Right. Evidently, there's an app that goes along with a lot of these Bose systems now that, according to Bose, you use to control the systems, to adjust settings and so forth.

But there is a gentleman who is suing Bose and saying that, no, this app not only does that, but it collects information about everything that you're listening to and sends it back to the Bose mothership. Yeah. Go ahead. I read through the article.

I do have two questions about this. The first being, why would anybody use this app? I don't see the point in it at all. You know, I'm reading through the marketing blurbs on the app, and I was like, I would never download it and use it. I would just use my headphones. And secondly, what is the endgame for Bose on knowing that you like listening to Britney Spears?

Well, the endgame is to sell your data. That's easy. They've got to make up for their lack of margins because people keep looking in their components and saying, oh, these are too cheap, so they've got to put better components in and then they need more money. But who's buying that data? The record labels aren't going to be buying this from Bose.

Who is interested in knowing plays that you're playing through your specific subset of headphones when you're getting that data from SoundScan, you're getting that data from Spotify, you're getting that data from anybody else anyways? It just seems really weird to me. But here's the issue is, though, it's not that they don't have a market for the data.

The fact is that they're keeping the data. They're not allowed to do that. According to the lawsuit, they're saying that there's a third-party company called Segment.io, which is a San Francisco company, and they specialize in data mining for advertising. I've heard of them.

Yes, I've definitely heard of them. Yeah, that's who Bose is selling the data to. But obviously the privacy concern here, if someone knows what you're listening to, particularly when it comes to things like, oh, I don't know, podcasts, people can know a lot about you. They made the example in the lawsuit that if someone's listening to a Muslim prayer service, then you might know that that person's a Muslim.

If someone's listening to a podcast about HIV-AIDS, there are all sorts of personal bits of information that you might conclude based on what someone is listening to. Yeah, and think about it in the realm of retargeting.

It's like, okay, I'm listening to this podcast, and then I start getting HIV ads on Facebook. They need that retargeting data from somewhere. So this is just another vector for them to get that kind of info. Given the current state of tracking and podcasting statistics, maybe we should be buying this data.

What surprises me is that Bose didn't have this in the end-user license agreement. Yeah, it seems like something that nobody would read anyway, so why not have it in there? Exactly. Right. Well, then they deserve to get sued. Fire your lawyers.

I can highly recommend Sennheiser all the way if you want to skip all that. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no reason to have a secondary app that's just for your headphones. I agree. I agree. All right. Moving on, there's a story here from Naked Security, the IoT malware that plays cat and mouse with Mirai.

Of course, Mirai is the big botnet that popped up last year that took down DNS provider Dyn. So this is called Hajime. Hajime. And Hajime, I am told by one of the people who works with me here who does kendo that it is pronounced Hajime.

So Hajime is a bit of an oddity when it comes to IoT malware. It's very similar to Mirai. It scans the same IoT devices looking for unsecured telnet ports. It installs itself. But instead of doing anything bad so far, it closes down some of the ports that would be vulnerable to Mirai.

It phones home, back to its command and control server. And other than that, it doesn't do much else. So there's a couple of suppositions about this. People think that it might be a white hat hacker who's basically trying to get to these devices before Mirai does to help lock them down.

The other possibility is that it's someone getting a foothold in these devices and just waiting for the moment to be right to do whatever it is they're going to do. Yeah, this is an interesting story and an interesting concept because if it is a white hat that is actually just trying to take these things offline so the botnet can't use them, I think that's pretty cool.

But if it is somebody who is just poking the network and trying to build their own database of, you know, if it's phoning home, then they're building that database up so they can just go back to these devices whenever they want with the right usernames and passwords and then, you know, launch it for whatever they decide that they want to do.

And, you know, this is kind of a slippery slope. It's like if this guy gets caught doing this, he's in trouble. Right. Even though he hasn't done anything wrong technically. It is illegal. No doubt about it. It's interesting, too, that Hajime resides in RAM.

So if the device is rebooted, it gets wiped out. But the thing is how many times, how often, these are like, you know, ignored devices that never get rebooted because they don't get updated. You know, if it just goes in and it's still functioning as normal, but it's protected from the botnet, you know, there's a pretty decent amount of damage control that this guy's doing or gal.

Could be. Could be. It's an interesting case of vigilantism. So people in the security biz are kind of taking a wait and see approach to this. So far, no harm done, although obviously the actual intrusion into people's devices is technically illegal.

The thing is, just like with Mirai, people probably don't know that they've been infected with Hajime. There's a whole war going on behind the scenes and nobody can see it. Yeah. I like the comment some guy made on this particular article. It's like having a permanent house guest you've never met before and you hope that they're just going to behave themselves.

It's true. Remember a long time. Isn't that kind of Airbnb's business model? Sometimes. There was a video a long time ago, maybe like five or six years ago, about this guy that was living in the attic in this house and would just come down at night and eat a little tiny bit of the food and then crawl back up in the attic.

It's kind of like having that. I was thinking like having a black snake living under your front porch, eating all the mice. As long as I don't see the black snake, as long as I don't know the black snake is there, I'm totally happy with the mice being taken care of.

But I don't want to see the snake. I don't want to know that it's there. Moving on, there's an article in TechCrunch about another interesting way to do multi-factor authentication using ambient noise. I read this article and going into it, I was thinking, ah, this sounds like bunk.

But after reading it and looking at some of the tech that they're talking about, it's actually kind of cool. It's incredibly difficult to perfectly mimic an audio landscape. That is a multi-million dollar industry in audio engineering. So there is a very sound.

No pun intended. Yeah, no pun intended. There's a very sound idea behind this. Yeah, so basically the way that it works is let's say you're sitting at your computer and you want to log into something. What the system will do is it will take an audio sample from the microphone in your computer.

And then at the same time, it'll take an audio sample from a secondary device. Let's say your phone or an iPad, another device that presumably is in the same room that is on your person that belongs to you. And so if the audio signature of those two sound samples match, then it will say, all right, you're authenticated.

And it's really clever. And if it's just a generic sound like traffic or nature, it'll then use ultrasound to try and create a signature between the two devices that you can't fake. You know, you can't counterfeit that signal because it's coming from the service and you're not going to know what it is.

And it has to be able to get picked up by the other device, which I think is really clever. And they could probably just do that and skip the other part. But, you know. Well, I mean, to a certain degree, you're also getting into, you know, you're modeling the room that you're in. No sound is going to sound exactly the same unless you, you know, do you have your computer facing the exact way that I am?

Do you have X amount of what's your square footage in the room? What's how many things do you have hanging on the wall? Do you have carpet? Do you have wood floors? How big is your bed? Yeah. All of those things will affect the sound. And it does become something like a thumbprint, almost impossible to exactly mimic.

Absolutely. No, it's really clever. Yeah, they say it'll work even if the phone is in your pocket or a bag or even close by. It could be in an adjoining room. Right. So pretty interesting tech. We'll see if anything comes of it. But, you know, I think it's really good that we're seeing more and more companies trying to streamline multi-factor to take out the pain points, make it so that the multi-factor happens without you really having to do anything, without you even noticing.

So you get an extra level of security. Yeah, because I've got to tell you, as somebody who, you know, deals with a bunch of different client accounts for different social networks and different things, and who also travels a lot, this is a massive pain in my ass fairly often. How so?

Just dealing with a different, okay, now it's, okay, I've got it connected to this person's phone. Now I've got this text message that has to come in. Now I have to type in this code. All the multi-factor auth, just if it could be seamless and I don't have to type anything, boy, my life would be a lot easier. Yeah, I didn't even think about it with clients.

It's like, you know, the secondary auth is tied to their phone, so you've got to get in touch with them to get the key, to get into the... Yes, I'm sending them a text saying you're about to get a code and send it back to me. Now, if it could just ping their, okay, well, nope, now we have another problem. I'm on my computer. I'm on my computer at my place.

It pings my client who's on a phone somewhere else. I couldn't use this. Well, then you just have to auth your phone as one of the secondary devices, which you could probably do with most two-factor, but you don't want to have that for all of your clients all the time because then if they're logging in or other contractors are logging in, you're getting texts all the time that's saying, oh, hey, here's 472973.

It's like, ah, I'm watching a fucking movie. I'm not doing anything. Leave me alone. And the ambient noise that's going to have to start using is me going, shut the fuck up. Technology is great. Well, wrapping up this week, we've got a new ransomware variant.

It's called Carmen, and the folks over at Recorded Future have discovered it, and it is what we call ransomware as a service. Basically, this allows people without a lot of technical sophistication to use ransomware, to launch a ransomware attack campaign.

Right. Carmen, you can buy Carmen for the low, low price of $175. Mm-hmm. It's even got a pretty web interface, and you get to see how many computers that you've infected and what your take is, and it's a one-time fee, which is interesting.

It is interesting. I actually spoke with the researcher at Recorded Future today about this, and there is a little more to it than the one-time fee, because you still need someone to get the ransomware out there. So you need to pay someone to spam people.

And the other thing that the supplier of this particular ransomware will provide for you is a way to obfuscate the payload, and that's pretty much a daily thing. So you would be, in addition to the $175, you would be paying $10 or $20 a day to the provider of this to provide obfuscation services for the payload

that you then send to the people you've hired to do the spamming, to send out the messages. So it's still cheap, still easy for people to profit from this. And since these are sort of low-level criminals, boy, there are a lot of people getting away with this sort of thing.

Here's my big question about this, though. These guys have this whole system, this whole ecosystem that they've built. Why would you sell it and not just run it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and just rake in the money? Why would you outsource it to some schmuck from Iowa who wants to get into the ransomware biz, you know?

There's something going on here that doesn't sit right with me. It's like, okay, I can make $175 and then $10 or $20 a day, and then a little bit here, a little bit there. If ransomware is raking in the big money like it's supposed to be coming in, then they should just be doing that themselves.

This sounds to me like ransomware might not be bringing in the big money like it used to. Or is there the level of separation where you're saying, you know, this is kind of like Facebook saying we're not a news service. We're not actually doing anything.

We are simply providing a platform. Oh, and if you want to come after us, we'll sell you our entire list of people that bought it. Go after them. They're the ones that actually did the bad stuff. Yeah, I don't think they're going to have that kind of level of, you know, deniability on it. But it's probably coming out of Russia where, you know. It doesn't matter. Who gives a shit about that?

So let's look at this one as an example because this is something that in my interview today we talked about. Let's say the person who's selling this is only selling 25 copies of this. Okay, so what is that? Around, I don't know, $3,000, something like that, right?

But then let's say all of those 25 copies are also generating $20 a day for the obfuscation services. It's a pyramid scheme. Right. So that turns into several thousand dollars a month just off of that.

So you get one of these going, and let's say you're making $6,000 to $10,000 a month. Yeah, that's a pretty good payback on something like this. And let's be honest. When you're providing an illegal service, you're not going to be putting a lot into customer service for your clients. This is set up, let it run.

I don't know. Those guys have a pretty good history of great customer service. Yeah, that is actually true. Customer service is really important when it comes to these things. Yeah. Because this is a reputation-based market. So that is one of the surprising things about it, that these folks provide really good customer service with updates and hand-holding and all that sort of thing in the criminal underground.

So here's my analog, though, that I was trying to get to, is that when we first started talking, episode one of this show on how to make money on the internet. Number one, teach people how to make money on the internet. So some people come up with this great idea. They've milked it for everything it's worth.

And then their only way to make money on the internet is to teach other people how to make money on the internet. So this is, would you like to make money in ransomware? Here you go, $175. You know? It's like, if ransomware is not bringing in the money that it used to, maybe this is what these guys are doing. They're like, yeah, yeah, it's not bringing in the rubles like it was last week.

So why don't we just sell it here and then we'll just get some rubes in. That's it. Rubesforrubles.ru. That'll be the new one. It's like the internet has flipped the old script of if you can't do, you teach. Yeah. So, you know, now the internet version is basically I can't make any money doing it, so I'm going to teach people.

And that's the only way to make money doing it. So that's really, you know, that's what I thought of when I saw this because I'm like, that's a low, low price for ransomware management, you know? Yeah. Well, they say this is the shape of things to come, that we expect more of these ransomware as a service and malware as a service sort of environments to pop up.

And we've already got DDoS as a service, so it makes sense. Yep. Absolutely. And to your guys' earlier point, as I'm scrolling down through this about the customer service aspect of it, I'm looking at like their dashboards and things like that. This is nicer than WordPress. Hell yeah. It probably works better, too.

They've got this down. Yeah. All right, guys. It's important. Let's wrap this up. We'll talk next week, and let's see who gets hacked first. All right. And definitely, don't forget to check out Dave on the Cyber Wire every weekday at thecyberwire.com. I have finally finished Old Man's War series.

I finished book six, The End of All Things. This is by John Scalzi. I loved it. I loved the series. I highly recommend this to everybody. I thought it was really good. I thought his wrap-up was basically the best you could do, the most satisfying wrap-up you could probably do.

I'm sad that there aren't going to be more, although never say never. It's a universe. He built it. He can obviously pick this up anytime he wants to. It was really good. It was really good. Jason, what did you think now that I finally finished it all? I like the wrap-up. Hopefully, it won't get optioned for a movie, because if it does get optioned for a movie, then he'll write more books.

I like the way it ended. I liked the different people in different books, which gave you different perspectives into the universe, and the way the whole thing wrapped up, I put a bow on it. I'm happy with it, and I'm glad I skipped the books that I skipped.

Yeah, I agree. A quick note about that, and this could be because I read them all so quick. I basically read all six books in the space of three weeks, which is something we say never to do. I originally kind of said, oh, I think it was good, because the changing perspectives screwed me up, and this way I was able to keep everything together.

Now, I'm saying no. I think that was a mistake, because there are a couple things that tripped me up a little bit, and mild spoilers here. Basically, the books really shift. Okay, there's a whole group of people they meet in the first book, and they call themselves the Old Farts Club.

There's like six of them. Most of them die. For five of the six books, the main protagonist switches between Harry Wilson and John Perry. It just switches back and forth between them, with one of the books being from the perspective of John Perry's wife.

Fine. Great. I got that. I liked it. I liked the fact that he stuck with those two characters. He saw them moving through the universe kind of in parallel. The books played off each other a little bit, but they never met, which is also one thing that geeked me out a little bit. I would have liked a last chapter where these two got together and had a beer and talked about all the crazy.

Yeah, that would have been cool. Because they were in the same universe. And the other thing is they're basically the only people that survived from that initial Old Farts Club in the first book. Except there was one throwaway line where Scalzi mentions that there was a third survivor. I think it was in the fifth book, there was a third survivor from that Old Farts Club, and it's just a throwaway line that he just puts out there.

You never hear from this character again. So that totally bugged me now. Oh, man. That's the worst. And that's the problem with reading them in quick succession because I was able to pick that out and go, well, why are you even mentioning that there's one other person from that group who's alive when you've never mentioned him in the entire series?

Oh, man. Okay, we're going to have to send John a tweet and say, are we going to get a short story to wrap up his story or what's the deal here? Yeah, tell us what happened to that. I think his name was Gonzalez or her name. I can't quite remember because it was in the fifth book, and I just remember going, how come I've never heard anything about this person again?

Why are you mentioning that they're alive? Are they going to be in the sixth book? Not in the sixth book. And again, just wrapping it up, the fact that Harry Wilson and John Perry, who basically were the protagonists for the entire changing universe, were well aware of each other and what each other were doing, never got together and had a beer to talk about stuff, also drove me insane.

Yeah. Okay, there we go. Other than that, I love the entire series. Okay. Well, you know what? That's not a bad way to end it. If you just have a few little bits that are just going to drive you insane, that's fine. That's fine. Now, talking about driving insane, you finished the book that drove me insane.

I finished Change Agent by Daniel Suarez. Mm-hmm. Oh, my God. This was a fucking terrible book. Wasn't it, though? It was terrible. Great ideas. I remember, I barely remembered it at all when he brought it up to me the other week and said, yeah, you finished it, right?

And now I've had time to kind of cast my mind back. I remember there was a space of like six chapters in a row that were all about getting away from something and it just plodding on. And I was just remember thinking, how much more are you going to write about this? He gets away.

We get it. It was so slow. I mean, yeah, a couple of great ideas, like maybe four great ideas in the book. The rest of it was just terrible writing, very bad plot devices, and just not moving the plot along fast enough.

It's like, okay. You know what? It reminds me of a self-help book where they get the entire premise down in the first two chapters and the other 30 chapters are just filler so you can get it published. That's what, this would have been, this would have been a perfect short story. Yes. Yes.

It would have been a great short story. And the other problem with the writing, and I think one of the reasons it felt so long and so plodding, is he never changes perspective. This is entirely written from the main character's perspective. And this book could have used swapping perspectives and doing a few chapters from some other major character's perspective, back and forth, back and forth.

Well, the main, the main, the main antagonist, like the secondary antagonist, the tool of the main antagonist, that guy. Yep. That would have been a fascinating story, but he never, never really goes into that. Yeah, this really felt like a first draft and it should have been chopped up a bit.

Short story from one perspective, fine. This could have used a lot more workshopping. Yeah, this could have definitely, the editors who were on this one should be fired for sure. But yeah, that other, that, that main secondary character that I'm talking about that I'm not going to mention here, but he had the more fascinating story of anybody in the book.

You know, totally. So that could, I mean, he could have built out a whole little universe around this whole concept of, you know, just gene editing in the future and what it means for the future of mankind. He could, this could have been a home run, but yeah, the writing was just like you said, it was, it was juvenile almost, you know, it really wasn't good writing.

I just feel like he's one of these guys that it's just a brilliant first book, pretty good second book. It's been diminishing returns now. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, first book I thought was great. Second book, not as good as the first book. Third book got awful. Fourth book passable, but had the, you know, the professor hooking up with the hot intern.

My biggest pet peeve. Yeah. And then this book was just like, eh, forget it. I'm done. You know, unless, unless somebody tells me that his next book is a home run, I'm done. I'm, I'm, I'm putting him on the shelf. I'll go. I'd rather go back and read some old William Gibson, which is like extraordinarily well-written stuff and has great concepts.

That's the difference. Cool. Daniel Suarez, you are no William Gibson. Now, Dennis Taylor, on the other hand, is my new favorite sci-fi writer because we have Bobaverse book two called for we are many. All right.

Have you had a chance to pick this up yet? I have not. Sorry. I just finished the old man's war. Okay. Well, um, then we'll save a review, a full review till, uh, next time, but I'm just going to say right now it picks up the instant the last book, uh, ends. Okay.

And it is written in the exact same tone, the exact same cadence. Everything is just like the first Bob book just, just kept going. It's like, Oh, I found the second half. Let's just put it out. It's not like, um, there's, I mean, there's honestly, if you like the first book, you'll like the second book.

That's, that's it. You know, and great concepts. You just, we'll, we'll do a full deep dive on it when you finally get through it. But yeah, I read it in a day. All right. Yeah. Uh, my other book that I'm doing now, cause I have to, you know, jump out of the sci-fi thing every now and again.

So I'm reading deep undercover, my secret life and tangled allegiances as a KGB spy in America by Jack Barsky. How's this, uh, pairing along with you watching the Americans? Well, since I haven't, I've watched the first episode of the Americans because Bosch season three came out and I saw that and I had, I watched six episodes.

Bosch last night. So I'll get to that soon after I finished binging Bosch. Um, this is amazing, dude. You would love this book. This is a real dude who grew up in East Germany who became a KGB spy. This is a real guy. So hearing his actual story is pretty fascinating.

And, uh, my next one on my upcoming to read, uh, is called order to kill a Mitch rap novel. Now I talked about these many moons ago. Uh, these were the, uh, basically the, you know, spy hunter killer series by Vince Flynn.

Vince Flynn died. So I was very surprised to see a new book. Uh, apparently Vince did half of it and this guy, Kyle Mills came in and finished it. So I'm very curious about that one. Right. This will come up. This will come up later in the show as we get to media. Oh yeah.

I've got another coming soon as well. I think we both read the brilliance trilogy by Marcus Sakey, um, which was really good stuff. Uh, you know, it's, it's spies slash, you know, agents, federal agent with a really hardcore technology craziness aspect to it.

The biggest downfall of that series being of course the, you know, the, the FBI agent and the gorgeous woman. And of course your favorite, your favorite. I think that, that, uh, that trilogy is the one that actually made me finally go on a big rant about it on the show. Uh, but they were still really good books. He's got a new one coming out.

Um, it, this drops on July 18th. It's not a continuation. This is a completely different story. It's called afterlife. Now, the interesting thing about this one is it's already been picked up, uh, by Hollywood. It's going to be a major motion picture from producers, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, uh, before the book has even been released.

So that piques my interest a little bit. So I am looking forward to reading this when it comes out. Uh, it'll be, uh, out shortly. So I will be picking it up. It looks like the pre-order price is $4.99, which is next to nothing. So I'm going to grab that. Oh yeah. Oh, that's yeah. That's definitely a good one.

Um, and just for you, I put this in here. I know you're not an audible fan, but you might want to be looking for this one. Also on July 18th, the X-Files cold cases drops on audible, and it is a series of stories from the graphic novels by Joe Harris, but it is read by Scully and Mulder.

So, you know, what are you going to do for that one? You kind of got to, you kind of got to pick that one up. I'm sure. Come on. I think you might need to listen to my rant that's coming in the media candy section. Well, then let's get to it. Ups and doodads. The Amiga turns 30 years old.

Nobody had ever designed a personal computer this way is what the quote says. Our friends over at arstechnica.com did a, they aren't kidding, an epic eight part series on the history of the Amiga. Now that's too much even for me. I did skim, I skimmed it and enjoyed it.

But if you really want to go down the rabbit hole on this link is in our show notes. So check that out. I had my first Amiga at photo school and I used a, we used a Betamax video camera to do digitizing of our photos. Nice. Yeah. Printed on a four by six bubble jet printer was our, we're our only prints that we could get out of it.

Very funny. I found a new app. Actually, a friend of the show, Hannah sent this to me. It's called tunity.com. The concept here is that you, you hold up your phone to any place that a TV is playing and it will grab the audio, find the audio somewhere and basically play you the audio.

Now, why this is good and interesting and useful for me is the fact that fucking sports bars play Rihanna. Now they don't put on sound from the fucking show. So if I go watch a goddamn Dodgers game or some soccer game, what do I hear? I don't hear the fucking sound from the fucking sport anymore.

So this is good. All right. I have not tried it yet, but I, I'm going to watch a game tomorrow and I'm sure I'll be listening to the Drake over, over the entire Dodger game. So I will give this a go. All right. Let me know how it works out. Yeah.

I'm going to start battling the bar sound systems. I'm going to bring like a, some Bose, like a Bluetooth speakers to put up next to my phone and start blaring the sound. Yeah. You'll have your own little crew in the back there who can actually hear the show. Exactly. We're going to take our sports bars back motherfuckers.

All right. Um, my, my little doodad this week, I got the Eve shine neon accent, LED strips that go on the back of your TV to kind of give you that, uh, that glow from your, behind your TV that they can sell you a $3,000 TV for, um, I, 15 bucks, 15 bucks, little LED strip.

You plug it into the USB. Literally it's a sticker that sticks to the back of your TV. Love this thing. Right. And it comes with the remote, which is nice because my first question was how do you turn the damn shit off if you don't want it? Yeah, no. Yeah. It's got a little remote and you can change all the colors and you can do stupid things like cycle the colors or what?

Oh God. How stupid is that? Mine is set for red because when I'm watching TV at night, I would like no blue light in the room. I've already got my TV set for movie mode and pulls out as much blue as possible. And it's beautiful. It makes my whole room like just look nice. I feel like I need a stripper pole now.

And this is a, this is a clever little thing and it can stay powered up even if the TV is off, which is nice. I mean, I like the, the kind of like the, basically this could be a nightlight for your TV room, which is, which is kind of clever. I like that. And for 15 bucks, it does exactly what it says.

There are different models. I got the one with the big long strip, but you can get it with two strips that go on either side, like on the right and left side. I got one that just goes all the way across the back. Works great for mine. But yeah, I mean, they're cheap as hell. So it's clever. It's cute. I like it. I mean, if I would, if I was still in college, I would have had this 10 minutes ago.

So I like it. It's cool. All right. And I actually tried a game again, Jason. Oh my goodness. What did you try? Well, I'm a sucker for anything, Star Wars. And I got an ad that popped up somewhere for Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. And I went, all right, I'll give it a go.

And it's fun. I mean, it's, it's fun for about an hour of straight up playing. And then all of a sudden you just start to feel the pull on your wallet. Then it's like, well, if you want to get any further in this game, pony up, big boy. Yeah. That's how they work. So I stopped playing. Good for you.

Yep. Yeah. I wish I, I wish I had your, you know, your willpower because. I will admit, I mean, the draw is there. I was even just like, okay, if I just spend like five bucks, I could at least probably get another three to four hours out of this and get my, get my Boba Fett character all the way, you know, manned up to whatever level.

And I was just like, no, no, that's sad. This is a fool's game. Yeah. Once you, once you go down the route, once you break the seal, then the Kraken has been released. So yeah, good for you. But I mean, if, if you're really into that sort of stuff and, you know, just the strategy and building up characters and all that, it is incredibly well done.

I mean, all the sound effects, all the music, it looks beautiful. It's worth a shot if you like that stuff. Oh, very cool. Okay. Yeah. I'm not going to give it a shot because I just don't need to get sucked down that rabbit hole right now. But, uh, I do want to do a quick follow-up on YouTube TV. The only way that I have found to make this thing useful is use the search for every time you want to watch a show, just put it in search because the playlists don't work.

Um, clicking on a show and trying to get to the next one. Um, we're going to talk about the expanse in a minute and I had to finish watching the expanse. The only way that I could get to the show, I went to the expanse page. It tried to get me to that episode and it would just play the next one that was on sci-fi later that day.

I could not get to it until I use search. Once I use search, everything became clear and it works. Um, gotcha. The only thing that's pissing me off right now is I can't fucking pay for it. I want to pay for it right now so I can get my free Chromecast. Right. I can't. I have to wait till May 7th.

I got to wait like two more weeks until I can get my, my, my quote unquote free Chromecast for paying for it. I want to pay you right now. My only other option is to go to Best Buy and buy a Chromecast and then I'll have two, which I don't want. So I'm stuck watching it on my goddamn iPad until they get their shit together.

Media candy. HBO is going to be adapting Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 and thankfully not a miniseries. This is just going to be a straight up movie. I'm very excited about that. Yeah. Miniseries. I would have been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

But a movie. Sure. I would love to see this. I would like to see it. Well done. What a great book. I mean, it's fantastic. And the timing couldn't be better. Yeah. No, I mean, I read the book a long time ago. I didn't think it was that great of a book, but you know, I was a kid. Doesn't matter. I did. They made us watch the original movie, like the movie from the sixties.

Yeah. Back when I was in grade school, I think I saw it like three times on rainy days when we couldn't go out for PE, they would bring in the projector and we'd watch it on 16 millimeter. It'll be interesting. We'll see how they do. Yeah, we'll see how they do. I'll follow it. I'll definitely watch the trailer.

We'll see what happens now. Take a breath, Brian. Take a breath. You remember when they brought back the X files for what? The 10 episode run last year when they were going to explain everything and give us all the answers.

Yeah. When they didn't explain everything and they didn't give us all the answers and they ended up on a horrible cliffhanger with no chance of ever coming back or any, at least no promise of ever coming back. Well, they're coming back. They're coming back. Yeah. Fool me once, X files. Shame on me.

Fool me twice, X files. Shame on you. Fuck this. Here's the thing that gets me because we talked about this when it happened. We're like, okay, well, they've just replaced Scully and Mulder with the new younger versions, you know? And so we figured that they were going to bring it back as a series with the new cast, which they didn't, obviously.

So apparently, you know, Duchovny and Anderson need some more cash. So maybe Chris Carter needs some more cash, too. So, yeah, they're bringing it back. Yeah. No, not for me. I'm not going to watch it when it comes out. I will wait until the full run has happened.

And if I hear that there's no no answers to the basic questions that the entire series has been premised on, fuck that. I'm done. There will be no answers. So I will not. And this is why I will not be listening to cold cases to answer your earlier query. I am done with them.

I am done with that whole the X files. You're just pissing me off now. See, here's the thing. You never watched wrestling, so you don't understand the mentality behind the face can never win. I understand the long con. I'm not into it. Yeah, because there was this really long, drawn out battle between, I think it was The Rock and Triple H.

And finally, after a year and a half, when The Rock won, the next episode of, I think it was still, it might have been WWE at that point. But the next episode had the lowest ratings that they ever had. They just have to keep dragging it on. Yes, they do.

And speaking of keeping things dragging on, Mystery Science Theater 3000, which we talked about last week. And I said I didn't know about it. I watched two episodes. Mm-hmm. I am still waiting for a laugh. I have not. Damn. I have gotten maybe two chuckles out of it.

I have not laughed once. Is it the writing? Is it the people? Honestly, it's both. Oof. Yeah. It's just, there's nothing there. It is. Right. You know, which really sucks because I know one of the writers, so I feel really shitty for saying that.

But man, it is just not funny. I mean, maybe you just have to be in the right mood or of the right age, but I'm generally of the right mood and age for Mystery Science Theater. It's just, dude, no. I mean, don't expect another season out of this one.

Right. Oh, I mean, I felt really bad when I was watching. I'm like, man, these are, this is like watching The Big Bang Theory without the laugh track. Ouch. Yeah. It's that bad. I had a feeling something was rotten in Denmark because, I mean, talk about, you know, my group of friends, Prime Demographic.

I didn't hear anyone talking about this this week. Nobody. Yeah. I haven't even looked at the, oh, I can't look at the star ratings anymore because they took out the star ratings. Ouch. It's only thumbs up and thumbs down now on Netflix, so I can't really tell. Right, right. I mean, I mean, I feel really bad for saying that, but man, it is really just not funny.

Yeah. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Not watching. I've talked about, yeah, well, that's, that's my plan. That is my plan. I've talked about the ongoing history of new music podcast a few times. That's hosted by Alan Cross. The past couple episodes have been either, you know, very specific music genre or music artist specific.

His most recent episode, I think, is a very good entry point for anybody to go listen to this. And anybody that has an interest in, in basically the music industry and music, I think this is a fun episode. It's called music questions that almost no one seems to ask. And it's about 35, 40 minutes.

Why is it called the Billboard chart? What are MP1s and MP2s? Why do so many of the songs in the 80s sound so similar? And that's got a great bit about Phil Collins in it. Not to spoil it. Go listen to it. Where do all these ticket master fees go? And why does everyone hate Nickelback?

Which is a great ending. This is a fun episode. I think this is a really good entry to it because you don't have to care about a specific band or anything. It's just fun. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, it's a good listen. And related to music, I went to my first concert in almost nine months. No, ten months because of the birth of my son.

I haven't done shit. But I went to go see a show last night. It's a band called Pop Tone, which is basically – let's go through the etymology here quickly. Bauhaus split up. Peter Murphy, the lead singer, then went solo. Daniel Ashe and Kevin Haskins, the drummer, formed a new band called Tones on Tail with one of the roadies called Glenn Campling.

That then split up, and then they got back together with the bass player from Bauhaus, David Jay, who is also Kevin Haskins' brother, and then formed Love and Rockets. So that is how all of that played out. Pop Tone is basically Tones on Tail, except Glenn Campling didn't come back, and it's Kevin Haskins' daughter fulfilling David Jay's role.

So basically, she's playing her uncle's bass parts. This is like a West Virginian backwoods family tree. It's a bit weird. But I went to see them last night because Tones on Tail is one of my favorite side projects that they did.

They released two albums. They only toured one time, and one time only, and it was in 1984. I was 10 years old at the time when they toured. So I've waited a long time to see them play live, and they basically did – it was mostly Tones on Tail songs with a smattering of Love and Rockets songs.

They were absolutely fantastic. This was a pre-show. So they did two shows at a studio where people rehearsed to go out on tour. The tour starts next week. So I saw them with maybe 100 other people. It was awesome. And if they're coming to play a city near you and you are a fan of Love and Rockets or indie rock from the 80s, you can't beat this.

It was a great show. It was fun. Well, I'm glad that you got out of the house. That's nice for you. It was nice to get out of the house, too. I'm sure. So we talked a little bit about Vince Flynn a little bit ago in the Mitch Rapp series. I just found today that the American Assassin trailer is out.

So right before Vince Flynn died, he wrote American Assassin, which was the prequel to the previous 11 books or 10 books or however many books there were, which was written to start a movie franchise. But then, unfortunately, he died. And he was only in his 50s, which sucked.

Very similar to The Crow, which should have been a franchise as well. Oh, I know. Well, the writer for The Crow is alive, but unfortunately, Brandon Lee was The Crow. So that was too sad. Don't even bring me back to Brandon. I miss him to this day. So I watched the trailer for this.

It's in the show notes. It's a rewrite of the entire series. They're not going with the original series. Because it's so old. Mitch goes into becoming an assassin because his fiance is killed in the Lockerbie, Scotland plane crash.

So they changed the whole thing up to be more modern. But it looks interesting. We'll see. We'll see. They're basically making this like it's going to be the next big franchise. So they put some money behind it. They put some talent behind it. And Michael Keaton is in it as one of my favorite characters.

So fingers crossed that this will become a thing because the books were well written, extremely well written. And Mitch Rapp is a badass. He is the new Jason Bourne. All right. Shall we get into spoilers, Brian? Yes, let's get into spoilers. OK, everybody for the next umpteen minutes here or maybe four.

We're going to go very long because I actually really don't have that many spoilers about it. I have some general impressions. That's about it. All right. We're going to talk about the Expanse season finale and the season right now. So if you haven't watched the Expanse, want to watch the Expanse or don't give a shit about the Expanse, feel free to go about two minutes ahead and we'll be right back with you.

Yep. I watched it this morning. I was bored, which is not what you're hoping for in a finale. I was it went exactly where I thought it would. There was the only surprise actually bothered me.

I was surprised that they gave Adam from Mythbusters, Adam Savage, a role. And it actually brought me out of the show. I missed him. I didn't even see him. He was on the ship that went down and then got killed by the protomonic, got exploded by the protomonocule on the moon.

Oh, but they were still alive at the end. They were still there. But I didn't see him in that. Yeah. You see him floating and they did a couple of shots of him. So it actually he's not wearing his glasses, which is the only thing that makes you not recognize it's him. But as soon as I clued into the fact that it was him, that's all I could think about.

So it brought me out of that scene. Yeah. He did all of the back, you know, like the backstory vignettes. So, uh, they, they, you know, they set it up for the next season and, and the only way that they were going to, given the way everything was going, uh, I didn't feel that there was anything particularly surprising or, or finale worthy that happened really.

Nope. So yeah, no, I'm getting a little bored with the show. Not going to lie. I am too. I'm absolutely, they need to do a Battlestar Galactica season three, where remember in season three for Battlestar Galactica, they basically skipped ahead six years and they'd all been captured by the Cylons.

Like nobody, nobody fucking saw that coming. Like the, the first episode was like, what the fuck they need that. They need that moment on the show badly or else it is going to go away. The problem here is it's based on a series of books. So there is Canon already out there for it.

So they're going on the books, but you know, you can always, you know, make a left turn. So, yep. Which I think they need to do because if the books continue on like this, boring. Yeah. I mean, it's a good show. The production values are there. The characters are there.

The, the universe building is there. It's just, the story is getting a little boring guys. All right. Spoilers over. Oh boy. Morons of the week. Uh, Netflix subscribers apparently are morons of the week. Um, some stats have come out.

Uh, Adam Sandler has made a big deal with Netflix. A lot of money, uh, for eight movies, I think total. Uh, oh boy, here we go. The streaming service announced on Monday that since the December 11th, 2015 premiere of the ridiculous six, which is the first of his terrible movies made under his Netflix partnership, subscribers have spent more than 500 million hours watching Sandler's movies.

That's a little under 30 million hours per month. And as Uproxx calculated almost a million hours, a day of Adam Sandler's shit movies. That doesn't really, I mean, you don't really have to calculate that much. You have 30 million hours, 30 million days. Okay. About a million hours. Yeah.

I'm a little surprised that they credited Uproxx when they could have just launched their own calculator out there. Uh, who's the moron now? Uh, there you go slate. Um, here's the thing. I don't know if we should calculate this as moron of the week, just bad taste of the week. Yeah. By the way, for the record, everyone, these aren't Sandler's like movies that you remember being halfway decent.

These are the purely terrible ones. He's been making new just for Netflix. I don't know anybody. Everybody I know loves old Sandler. I mean, that's the, you know, want to touch the hiney. You know, you really get into old Sandler. That was classic stuff. And, and, you know, serious, good comedy.

He has not made a good movie in decades. And now he's getting paid to make not good movies every month. Yeah, pretty much. You know what? The moron here is probably not Netflix. It's just the viewing audience because Sandler is a genius for going to Netflix.

Netflix is a genius for getting somebody who just has mass appeal. And I mean, honestly, there are no losers here except for the people that are spending half a billion hours watching Adam Sandler movies. That's it. All right. Humanity is the moron of the week.

Humanity is the moron of the week. Yeah. Our next moron of the week is a New York City resident, Ronaldo de Jesus Henane. He's 36 years old. This is the second week of Coachella here in Los Angeles. I guarantee you he will not be at the festival because he was there last week. And he apparently is unaware of the find my iPhone feature that has been baked into the Apple ecostructure for quite some time now.

Uh, because, uh, people found him. He had stolen over a hundred phones during the first weekend at Coachella and they found him with the hundred phones using the find my app. You know what? He's a very good pickpocket, but he sucks at technology. All he had to do is turn the phones off. At Coachella, at Coachella, you do not have to be a good pickpocket.

That's true. Yeah. These people are gleeced out of their minds. Uh, yeah. And just walked around picking them up and said, eh. Exactly. Uh, but man, yeah. Turn them off when you get them. Um, so my moron of the week is Juicero. Do you remember Juicero?

I do. It's the $400 juicer. Well, it was originally like $799. Oh, that's right. Yes. Yeah. I mean, they, they dropped the price to 400 bucks because nobody was buying it at $799. And you put in these packets of juice that you could only get from them and put in your, uh, over wifi, you would put in your cocktail that you want and it would squeeze them out using tons and tons of pressure to get them out of the bag and put them in your glass.

Well, turns out you don't need a, a wifi enabled juicer or B tons and tons of pressure because the verge actually had an intern grab one of the bags and squeeze it into a glass, which was perfect. But now they're going out of business and they are refunding everyone.

So if you did buy a Juicero, um, you might be the moron of the week for spending that much money on a wifi enabled juicer. But, uh, also they are for thinking that they could bilk people out of a lot of money for bags of juice. Yep.

Brick a brick. Ran across a great article over at nymag.com. Um, this is from an anonymous entertainment accountant. And as I read this, I just replaced accountants with what I did for a living. This is the A-list accountant who tries to keep celebrities from growing broke.

So I just read this as the designer slash web guy slash social media guy. Uh, the hard part is when you try to help people and they won't let you. A lot of times we'll go to a client and say, listen, you're overspending. You need to cut back. They're just wasteful and dumb. And it's frustrating if they won't listen, they don't want to hear it.

They don't want to know it. Or they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know. I know. And just continue to do whatever it is you, they want to do. You try to rein them in, put limits on them and they have complete and utter hissy fits about it. And then six months or a year down the road, they go, what the hell happened? I'm paying you to take care of this.

There you go. Yeah. No. Great article. I can, I can, I do, I can, I'm with you on this one. I am the podcast producer that is trying to keep podcasters from making shit and they don't listen to you over and over again.

They're like, why am I not getting download numbers? Did you listen to the things I told you to do? No. Oh, but why is my show not good? Did you listen to the things I told you to do? No. Ah, well, therein lies the rub. So yes, I think this is a, I can see your, your frustration with this because I, I know you and what you've gone through with your celebrity clients.

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be celebrities. It can just be clients in general. It's pretty much a use case for my life. Yeah. People who pay you for your expertise and then don't follow your expertise and then get mad when things don't go right. Yeah. Yeah. Good times.

Oh man. I don't miss being in that business, but I'm still in that business. I still get it. I know. Next up, we have an article from quartz.com called the case for being grumpy at work, which is fairly related to what we talk about. Now I want to talk real quick about AB testing in headlines because the actual alt title for this is why being grumpy at work is good for you.

You can find that out by looking at the URL and this comes back to AB testing that these people do for all the titles that you can possibly run through and see what gets the, gets the most clicks except the URL is always locked in. So why being grumpy at work is good for you?

I personally think is a better title than the case for being grumpy at work. But Brian, what do you think? I like why being grumpy at work is good for you. I do too. And the whole premise of this article is that trying to be happy at work and putting on this fake persona is actually really, really, really bad for you.

It makes you depressed. It leads to frustration and burnout. And by faking it, you're not going to, this is not the fake it till you make it. This is the fake it till you go crawl in a closet at the office with a bottle of wild turkey and, you know, sleep with a janitor, uh, being grumpy at work, being your, what this comes down to is being your authentic self at work is actually probably a good thing for you.

So I highly recommend you read this article if you are trying to be happy all the time. And if you are a company that is trying to build the happiness brand at work, you should probably look at this too. Right. Greed. Be grumpy. Be proud. Make America grumpy again.

Feedback loop. Our first bit of feedback came from our website, gog.show. This is from Greg. Regarding Mac hacking, I've removed apps that friends were tricked into installing things like Mac Keeper, various coupon printers, something called Jake Cares, et cetera.

They all have the same MO. They install a launch daemon that makes the app launch in the background at boot and restart it if you kill it. Thankfully, they're easier to, they're easy to launch control remove, but novice users don't know about that. These apps would cause random messages to appear on the screen. And generally slow down my friends' older Macs.

They all constantly phoned home. I have no idea what they were really doing, but they weren't sitting idle every time my friends have had no idea how the software got installed. Thanks for that, Greg. Because we have been asking if anybody actually has gotten any malware, any whatever on their Macs. And we haven't really even heard.

I personally don't know anybody that's even had this happen. I didn't know that these things were kind of out there for Macs. I mean, it does obviously take a, you know, this person purposefully went and installed it, even if they say they have no idea how it got there. Yeah. So that's good to know. Yeah. I've removed Mac Keeper from many, many friends' machines.

Okay. We'll have to let Bittner know. And it comes down to, because these aren't viruses. These aren't like the same things. This is different. This is just you clicking on a bad link. Yep. Next bit of feedback comes from our friend Lawrence Lee about Mac hacks. My first Mac wasn't a Mac, but a Lisa. Man, old school.

After that, I got a Mac Plus. And though I've owned and used the original IBM PC and a Windows Box or two as servers only over the years, I've been a Mac man all the way. The only virus I've ever seen, and I've been around the web a time or two, even in some relatively dark corners. Look at you, Lawrence.

Was, as I recall, in 1987. I also seem to recall that it was called MDEF, and that there was another variety called WDEF. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at JPDEF. Or maybe it was the other way around. And I think Brian and Dave Bittner were right on target with their assessment of why the Mac platform has seen so little nefarious activity.

And by the way, congratulations on producing over 200 episodes. Keep up the great work. We shall. Thank you. Yeah, good to hear from you again. Our next comment comes from JC Ernst. Hey, guys, I didn't like the Lifehacker Games are making you unemployed article you quoted. The implication is that gamers are deadbeat employee avoiders.

I know tons of gamers that hold down decent jobs. I think that is the reality more than what the article implies. Gamers got a bad rap from the press undeservedly. Yes, I would say there are excesses, but that they are not the norm. I work and play. And if nothing else, my wife wishes I would play more like I used to when I was younger. I don't think she meant games, JC.

Please don't jump to conclusions about gamers with a one-sided study. Thanks for your time. Your adoring Patreon subscriber, JC Ernst. Thanks for being a Patreon subscriber. Thanks for listening. Thanks for writing. Although I do think that you probably should have written Lifehacker about this, not so much us because we didn't write the study.

And to be fair, they did a study and they quoted the study and the study found that that's what was happening. So I'm sure there are other studies out there that say otherwise. And I agree with you. I know tons of gamers that do quite well in society, but it was a study, so they reported on it. Well, and the study wasn't so much about gamers.

The study was about millennials over 20 living at home. And what they did was play games. You know, that's the difference. I, I, I'm a gamer like everybody else. I love games, but you know, I am currently employed, but I'm not a millennial. So that's really what it was more about was what are millennials doing?

They looked at a group of people that did not have jobs and found the causality between that. So, yeah. So it, you know, it's, we, we weren't bashing on gamers there because as you know, if you've listened to the show, since you're a Patreon subscriber, I assume you have that, uh, you know, I'm Mr. Gamer.

So this, we weren't bashing on gamers. We were bashing on millennials, which we'd love to do anyway. Yes, we do. Uh, next comment came from Patrick. Uh, this could be amazing USA versus Japan mega bot battle, August, 2017. I've heard a lot about this. It doesn't really float my boat. We have a nice YouTube link, uh, in the show notes that he sent as well.

So it looks fun. Yeah. This is a company that got funded through one of Jason Calacanis's and, and, and emphasis on the anus. When you talk about Calacanis, uh, one of his funding battles too. Uh, I think it looks cool. They're trying to do basically NASCAR meets, uh, you know, monster trucks, but in the, the, the big battle bot arena.

I think this is fun. Yeah. I'll check it out. I'm sure we'll talk about it on the show. All right. Let's move on to iTunes. Lane stew. Yes. One star, just not entertaining. Not worth your time. Well, thank you, Lane stew. I'm glad you, you, uh, really expounded on why it's not worth your time and gave us some useful feedback.

Appreciate that. Enjoy yourself. Well, you know, it's not worth his time. So move on, move, move on to things you like lane stew. We're totally fine with that. We know we're not for everybody. We are for these three other people this week though. Uh, April 17th, we got a five star rating from joy Bowman over in the United kingdom.

Totally addictive here in Belfast. We aren't exactly known for our booming it startup industry, and it's not something I'm hugely interested in, but these guys are knowledgeable, entertaining, and funny. So I think the podcast would be accessible to all sorts of people, whether they're in the industry or not. If I'm walking the dogs, running on the treadmill or ignoring people on public transport, this is the perfect thing to listen to.

Jason DeFillippo has one of those voices I could listen to for days, which just adds to the charm of the whole thing. You know, joy, he's single. I am single and I do love Ireland. So, hmm, maybe, uh, you know, while you're out walking the dogs, maybe we can have a little chit chat.

I'm always down for that. And I do loves me some Ireland. This next one, you can reach out to get his number so you can listen to his dulcet tones personally. Anytime. This next one comes from old granny geek. I wish she had written that. I knew you did.

I knew you did. Uh, this is another five star. I love these guys. I play other podcasts at 1.5 or 2 X, but not this one. I listen at normal speed because I don't want to miss one golden word. They are that good. I enjoy their sense of humor and their grumpiness and really look forward to it every week.

Thank you so much, Brian, Jason and Dave Bittner for his security segment. All right. Old granny geek. We love you. I just want to point out that this is one of those weeks when I was collecting our ratings and I was like, is Jason gamifying things here? Because, you know, one of the ratings is about, about how charming and wonderful his voice is.

The next one is about playing podcasts at high speed. And you're the only person I know that does that anyways. Ah, good times. And we got one more, uh, five star from Abdullah Hamoud joining from Saudi Arabia. Thank you for the great podcast. Like it podcast that I'm listening to in my car.

Keep up the good work guys. Best regards, Abdullah. Uh, thrilled to be having somebody listening from Saudi Arabia. That's awesome. Yeah. Spread the word, man. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or your questions. That Jason's dulcet tones can read on the air.

And if you, and if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review or talk about my dulcet tones. I got a couple of shout outs.

My first goes to hot fuzz. Uh, part of the Cornetto trilogy, which turned 10 years old last week. Awesome. Got to say my least favorite of the three. Go back and watch it again. It took me a couple, took me a couple of watchings, but it is, it is sublime.

Um, okay. Uh, and, uh, also pitfall, which also turned 35 years old this week, which I played incessantly incessantly on the 2600, uh, both of these came out on four 20, by the way. Interesting.

And now a little bit of sad news. Terry Jones from money Python. There's an article in the guardian. I've got dementia. My frontal lobe has absconded, which makes me very sad because I've had to live through my grandmother going from dementia. And I know a lot of people have dealt with this and it's just terrible. I'm sorry, Terry.

You're I'm a, I'm a fan for life and best of luck. Uh, yeah, it is sad. Uh, uh, I've got some into the Python family a little bit. I knew the, when they were doing their O2 shows in London, that was definitely going to be it for them mostly because of this.

Um, and I will forever kick myself for not actually going. I don't remember what was going on in my life, but it was one of those moments where I was like, I can't believe I'm not going to this. And when you have those, man, everybody out there that's listening, if you have one of those moments, just do whatever it is you want to be doing. Don't, don't not do it.

Yeah. That's all I got to say about that. Uh, a couple of quick shout outs today as well, uh, to everybody that marched in the science marches this past weekend. Thank you. Um, march on, uh, love you guys. It's awesome. And we also had record store day this past weekend as well, which I don't personally buy records, but anybody that's, uh, beaten the drum for the music industry, good on you.

And, uh, congratulations to friend of the show, John Resnick from the Google dolls who, uh, did a show down at fingerprints in long beach for record store day. Oh, cool. So there you go. John's got two shout outs on two shows. Maybe he should just come on and say hi sometime. Yeah, I got to get him on. I, we're never going to get him unless he's actually in LA and I can get him over to the place.

So I'll work on that 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 and 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 podcast one.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 sponsor the show and keep us on the air to learn more about all of the people who make this show possible.

Head over to GOG.show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash two Oh six. Quiet. Can't say that to your baby. Can you?

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