207: Light my Fyre

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Heard you had a little wind problem out there this week. It's a bit windy. Yeah. A bit windy. And, you know, as we all are aware now, we live in a third world country. So a little bit of wind means no internet for four to eight hours or however long it lasted. Long enough not to catch up with Bittner.

Yeah. Yeah. We took care of it for you. It's okay. Thank you. No problem. Was it so was it did you lose power or just the internet? Just the internet. Internet cable. Time Warner cable slash spectrum slash whatever they're called with their new improved wonderful service that they've been promising.

So, yeah, that was great. So, yeah, that was we lost it basically just for about three hours right exactly when we had scheduled a recording. So, you know, the way things typically work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for me, it's usually a gardener. Right. Right.

Yeah. Always the damn gardeners and the leaf blowers. But it's the curse of the podcaster. Exactly. Because, you know, we can't afford proper studios. That's true. That is the way it is. Yes. So what you got for us? Well, we got a little bit of follow up here.

One. The first is kind of just follow up in general to this entire show. Yes. This is a link that friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, sent us. The Three Hot Trends in Silicon Valley Horseshit. This has been written by Freddie DeBauer, DeBuer, DeBuer, DeBuer, DeBuer, which this is just a fun read.

Go read it. This is everything that we complain about. I particularly just every now and then you need the reminder that absolutely nothing really innovative has happened since 2002. Yeah, that's about it. It's just repackaging all the same technology over and over again. I feel bad for poor Friendster.

Friendster appeared in 2002 and basically did everything that everybody does now online. It was Facebook. It did the same crap. I mean, and it gets no cred. Yeah. And you know what their downfall was, don't you? I remember that they tried to switch to being something like a gaming system.

No, no, no. Everybody was leaving Friendster because it was always down and so slow. And their fatal flaw when they started was they built everything in Java and then went back and rewrote it in PHP. But by the time they got it fast and rewritten, everybody was gone. Yeah, well, there you go.

Yeah, and Mark Pincus, one of the founders of Friendster, went on to do that game thing with Flash and all that that's now dead, too. He's not had a lot of luck. But I think he made a couple hundred million on the game one. I can't remember the name of it.

Well, in that case, you have an interesting definition of not a lot of luck. Yeah, I changed my mind when I thought about it. I'm like, wait a minute. He's rich. Never mind. Yeah, this is a pretty good article. I mean, it starts just with kind of how there's been zero innovation since 2002. And then it just starts to rip all these companies a new a-hole that are trying to do things right now.

Juicero is in there, but that's obviously, you know, that's shooting fish in a barrel. He gets deeper into it about how basically nobody is doing anything interesting. It's all just a cluster F. Yeah, it's a con. Everybody's trying to con you out of more money with giving you less stuff. Yep. Good read.

Good read. I chuckled. I lulled. Yes. So my second bit of follow-up involves the lovely Cody boxes that they sell off Amazon. And Jason picked up one as well. The EU, as per usual, seems to be a bit ahead of the game and are aware of the fact that these things exist. And they basically are going to put in some rules saying that you can no longer sell any preloaded pirate boxes because obviously the only thing that this is used for is to pirate software pirate programming.

So yeah, you should not be able to sell this on Amazon, which is something I kind of said when I first when these first came to my attention. How can you possibly be selling these? Well, the EU apparently listens to listens to our show and follows Brian. One does wonder. Yeah.

And follow-up. Well, not really follow-up. We talked about Pepsi gate because everything has to be called gate now when people do something stupid. Heineken just destroyed them. Yep. Heineken did their own ad that basically tries to tackle the division in our society right now.

Hashtag open your world. And this is actually, I mean, I will never on this show, I'm never going to tell you to go watch a commercial, but go watch this commercial. We've actually said go watch a couple of commercials. I think there are some Jameson ones. They all seem to be around booze. The booze guys get it right.

Yes. The sugar water seems to fall flat on their face. Yeah. Yeah. So this is quite, it's quite well done. And it's, it's, it's very, I got a little tingle. Yeah. And, uh, you know, then I went and drank a real beer, not a Heineken. In the news.

Breaking news. A hacker has broken into Netflix and stolen the new season of Orange is the New Black. And it was apparently stolen a little while ago. And this guy's trying to ransom it off. His name is the Dark Overlord. Uh, Mr. Dark Overlord, sir.

Could you break in and actually rewrite it season three through five to make it actually decent? Cause nobody gives a fuck. I checked. I checked my favorite backwater spots and, uh, not all of the episodes have been released. Only one through, I only found one through 10, not, not all 13.

So he's holding some back, still trying to get, uh, get his ransom out of them. And apparently they say he broke into a couple other networks as well because he went to a third, he broke into a third party, basically like a production house and got everything from there. Makes sense. I mean, you know, Netflix isn't dumb enough to, to lock things down as much as possible, but a lot of this stuff is outsourced and you know, you know, they're probably not paying top dollar.

Yeah. And you know, Netflix, it will that, and also remember Netflix doesn't actually make the show. They hire a production company that then uses all their vendors. So it's like Swiss cheese out there. Exactly. I mean, this stuff, the same stuff happened with the music industry. I mean, people were always shocked when things would leak back in the day.

And I was like, do you know how many people these things go out to? I mean, not just the recording aspect of it, but then it goes, you know, to it's, it's sent to over to the label guys and it doesn't go directly to label guys. It goes to their personal assistants. So, you know, it's, there's CDs sitting around in everybody's hand. Of course it's going to leak.

I remember when I worked at Warner brothers records, there was a, this, this like a, uh, like, you know, this klaxon start going off and the security guys come running by somebody apparently, Oh no, posted a new track to my space. But that's back when they started digital watermarking everybody's copy.

So they knew exactly who it was and they sent the, the popo after him. That's pretty funny. Yeah. Just a dumb journalist too. You know, let's put it on my space. Well, you know what? You shouldn't have done that. Shouldn't have done that except it worked out really well for Lily Allen. Lily Allen. Yeah.

Pop star. She basically started by posting her own stuff on my space. Hmm. Yeah. I never really got into my space. I think it was just the design. So damn ugly. You didn't like blinking cursors and, you know, animated gyps in the background. Flying unicorns. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That was always my favorite.

Well, let's talk a little bit about your favorite place in the world. Canada. As we are doing with net neutrality and probably gutting it. And throwing it out with the dead fishes in the back. Canada has turned around and said, no, no, no. We're going to do it the right way. No, none of this zero rating policy.

Nope. You have to put all the bits through. And, you know, good on Canada. Good on Canada. I mean, you know, Canada is like the little Europe that could right above our head. Yeah, they are. Look, I mean, it's going to cost me a crap ton up there when and if I finally move because, you know, there's no unlimited service and they charge an arm and a leg for data.

But at least I know I'll be getting everything. That's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. You still got to break up Rogers. That seems to be. Yeah, they really do. I mean, yeah, that's the weather and Rogers. Those are my two main problems with Canada right now.

OK. Certainly not the beer, the maple cookies. Nope, definitely not. Did you ever use unroll.me? I did not. OK, I did. And then when I saw I saw the news this week that they were selling my data to Uber behind my back, I got a little peeved.

But so unroll.me was a service that you could basically tie in your Gmail account and then they would, you know, unroll you from annoying emails. But what they were also doing was just scanning your entire inbox and selling off the bits that they wanted to to Uber, mainly Lyft receipts.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Talk about shady. That is spectacularly shady, but you get what you pay for, people. Unroll.me is free. That's right. And you gave a free service, unmitigated access to your email account, and then you got all pissed off and shocked when you found out that they did something with it.

You get to make some money. Yep. That pretty much sums it up. Yeah. So that is there. I saw a couple articles that basically had that point of view, and that's what I was thinking in the back of my head. Now, yes, this is not what you want. And certainly Uber is in enough trouble as it is. And as a service, you probably don't want your name tied to Uber right now.

So that was not so good. But Uber is paying, you know, and they don't care who they're selling the data to. They need to make some money to pay for the service that they are providing to you for free. Yeah, and the fact that Unroll.me is owned by a company that does just that, that acquires data and sells it.

That's their, you know, that's already on Detra. And by the way, people, if you want to know why Facebook keeps pushing the stupid bots, it's because they want you to do everything through Messenger so they can collect what you're doing and sell that information to people, too. True that. True that. So, yeah, you posted this in there and timely, of course, because Lifehacker just follows this sorts of stuff.

If you are unsure about what is going on and these sorts of things disturb you, Lifehacker does a very good breakdown of how to go into all your major accounts and find out what apps you have given permission to in the past, either drunkenly or on purpose and forgotten about, and how to basically remove access from them.

So you can feel somewhat secure again. So take a look at that, go through it, and start removing all the apps that you don't remember. Yeah, I do that about once a month. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it's just a good thing to do. And if you're a listener and haven't done it yet, we have a convenient link in our show notes. Yes, indeed.

And there was a lot of other Uber news. We missed this one last week, but there was a massive New York Times article called Uber CEO Plays with Fire. It's just a, you know, kind of a little bio on Travis Kalanick. So if you're interested in getting caught up and a little bit of his backstory, then it's an interesting read, sort of, you know.

They could have just done a TLDR, he's a douche. Pretty much. And I won't get too into one of the other articles that I threw in there as well, which is from over at Slate. Here are some more terrible things Uber has been doing. For once, the title is spot on. Okay. I won't go bullet point on this, but once you're done learning about how Travis is a dick, you can go find out how much of his company is being dicky.

Yeah. I mean, we've been covering this for, like, months now. I'd like to stop, but they don't stop. They don't stop, and I feel like we have to keep covering it because apparently nobody, again, seems to care. Yeah. At some point, we're hoping to break through to at least one of you and make you delete your Uber app.

Yeah. No. Just one. I will feel emboldened if I get just one. Convenience over conscience. Nobody cares anymore. It got to the point where they are so bad that Apple even threatened to drop their app because what they found out is Uber's app could identify what specific iPhone you were using even after you had deleted the app.

How is that even possible, Jason? Notification system, I believe, was the backdoor on that. Unbelievable. Unbelievable how devious these people are. F them. Yeah. Okay. Anyways. I just don't have the fire for Uber today, apparently.

All I can say is screw them and you're an idiot if you still use them. Well, on some final news with the big Waymo fight coming up this week, Andy Lewandowski, the executive that came over from Google with the 14,000 stolen documents, has stepped away from the LIDAR project.

Oh, gee, wow. He has recused himself. Yes, he's recusing himself. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I'm sure the lawyer said. Which means that he did something wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure the lawyers were just like, step away from the LIDAR. Put down the LIDAR and step away. Yes. Yeah, they're not allowed to email and talk to him about it.

Can't even mention it in the cafeteria. So, doesn't say what happens if you do and you come up and say, hey, how's that LIDAR coming? Oh, you're sick and call him a lift. He's out of here. Yeah, which then gets tracked through Unrule Me. Yep. And in more Waymo news, though, they are branching out into Phoenix.

Oh, okay. And you can actually sign up if you live in Phoenix to get free rides from Waymo's. All right. Well, I mean, hey, I've driven through Phoenix. Wide, wide, wide lanes with nobody on them. There you go. Lots of tumbleweeds. Lots of strip malls.

You're pretty safe there. Yeah, and there are Chrysler minivans and Lexuses. I wonder, but they don't have cow catchers on the front, which I think they might want to do that. And I was looking at the video. They have a video on their application site, and it shows, like, this family jumping into the minivan. The one thing I couldn't tell when I saw it driving, though, if there was anybody in the front seat, and it didn't look like it.

Because I don't think Waymo's have steering wheels. At least the little one didn't. But I didn't see anybody in the front seat. That's interesting. It could be one. Yeah. Who knows? Gosh, who knows? We've got to look into that. All right, follow up on that next week. Yeah, if anybody's in Phoenix and sees one of these things tooling around, let us know if somebody's in the driver's seat to hit the brakes or whatnot.

Yeah. Because that would be interesting. Yeah, and speaking of follow up, because we'll do it within a week. Facebook took six months and waited until after a U.S. presidential election to go ahead and say, oh, yeah, you know that whole thing that was happening right up to the election?

Yeah. Okay. All right. So there were a bunch of people creating fake accounts and spreading misinformation that basically directly affected the election. Oopsies. Mm-hmm. Yep. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Facebook. Yeah. Right before the show today, I actually got in a kerfuffle with a friend on Facebook because he posted that damn Fukushima picture.

I saw you post that because I got that, and I was going to comment on it as well because I was horrified. Like, this is the problem. Smart people posting fake news and then justifying it saying, yeah, but still, the point. Yeah. No. Exactly. No. That is not the point.

The point is you're posting something that is not real. Yes. You're ruining the discussion. And then by saying, well, where there's smoke, there's fire. Bullshit. No, you posted something that was not true. Own up to it. He finally did. Well, the thing that drives me crazy is he owned up to it in the post. He's like, yes, I understand this is a fake news article.

Well, then find a real one. Yeah, that's what I said. Find a real news article, you douche. Well, anyways. He's a nice guy, but don't call him a douche. Sorry. And he'd kick your ass. He's very big. Yeah, so that was just annoying. But I'm doing alternative training, so I'll kick his ass.

Okay. There was another New York Times article called, can Facebook fix its own worst bug? And as we know, Betteridge would say, no. What do they define the worst bug as? The fake newsies. Oh, yeah. Well, that is a real problem. You know, they know what's going on.

They should have shut it down. They should have admitted it at the time. Oh, it's so frustrating. But I mean, it's the internet. People do post things that aren't real on the internet. This is a problem that's not going to go away. I mean, Facebook has a responsibility to what?

Nothing. They don't have to do it. No, they don't have to do anything. Of course they don't. But, you know, this is where it gets into the court of public opinion and the fact that they need to keep the user base in order to keep making money. So, it would behoove them to fix the problem. But they don't have to.

No, they don't have to do a damn thing. Just like Uber. Yep. Back onto some more autonomous vehicle news. There's a good article in futurism.com talking about Caterpillar trucks and bulldozers and things of the like. Yes. Turns out they've been using automated technology for a while now because they're, you know, they're on construction sites and things like that in mines.

And they don't have to worry about, you know, the public roads and stuff like that. So, you can actually sit, you know, thousands of miles away and drive a bulldozer. And they've got built-in tools to, like, not run over people or hit other trucks on the road and drive up those crazy, you know, mine roads by themselves, which actually is a good thing.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, this makes sense. I'm not surprised by this at all. Nope. It's good for them. Yeah, it's pretty cool. More people out of business. It is more people. Well, there are still people driving the trucks, but just remotely. Yeah, for now. For now. Well, in the future.

And speaking of, there's another article in Quartz called Amazon's plan to dominate the shipping industry with almost no humans involved is taking shape. There's really nothing new in this article, but if you missed some of our shows where we talked about all the different things that Amazon's doing to fire everybody that ever worked there, this has everything soup to nuts in it.

So, it's a short read, but it tells you all about the robots, the airplanes, the trucks, the drones. It's all in there. So, it's a good primer on how Amazon is going to not let you work there. Although, they're building a new fulfillment center right down the road from here, and it's apparently going to have a ton of jobs for now.

For now. Yeah. There's one paragraph in this article that actually really pissed me off this morning, and I just have to point it out because I'm so frustrated by this sort of thing. Rather than, say, hiring researchers and engineers to build these robots that can identify, sort, and pack goods and replace people eventually, they ran a competition.

Oh. Therefore, they get a whole bunch of people to work on the problem, and it'll only pass out a little bit of money to the people that solved it. Yeah. Fuck you. Spec work. Just like spec work. Spec work. It's total spec work. I mean, this is, corporations do not give an F about you anymore, people.

No, they don't. And this is some follow-up from your stories last week on how, like, all the retail stores are closing. Mm-hmm. We are apparently on track this year to close more stores than we did in the Great Recession of 2008. Right. Almost 8640 is what they're estimating how many stores are going to close this year.

And we only closed 6,200 in 2008. So right there, if that tells you something. Brick and mortar's dead. I mean, it really is. See previous article. Yeah, see previous article. I mean, we've known this for a while. Well, we've gotten rid of physical media anyways, so there's no video store anymore.

There's no music stores anymore. Bookstores are barely hanging in, except, you know, Amazon's starting to open up their own, but that's basically to push their own Kindle devices more than anything else. I will point out, though, that I do have two video stores in my neighborhood, believe it or not.

It's very odd. They're pretty big. They got to be a front. They got to be laundering money. But I still see people going in and out of there. They're all, you know, driving SUVs and look fairly Russian, but with paper bags and coming out with nothing. But yeah, you know, they're still in business around here, surprisingly enough.

Yeah. I mean, and like I told you a couple of weeks back, I went to Third Street Promenade, a big mall over here, and nothing is in stock. I ended up ordering things online anyways because, you know, they only had like extra large or small. They didn't have my size and very limited selection.

I mean, brick and mortar is basically over. And why would you go and drive to a mall when you can just order seven sizes off Amazon and then return the six that didn't fit for free? Yep. And you'll get them within two days. Sometimes even less. Yeah.

Sometimes even less. It's this is not surprising. And again, more people out of work. Speaking of ESPN is firing a hundred on air personalities and a few other people because they're they're moving to more live news and a focus on app and video streaming features.

Now, yeah, ESPN is having problems because nobody really cares anymore with the with the unbundling, you know, because ESPN is the most expensive thing that you have to pay for with your cable. And people are, you know, a lot of people don't like ESPN. I, for one, don't want to pay for ESPN, so I'm not going to get cable, you know?

Yeah. ESPN has to learn how to pivot. They're charging way too much for their app. A lot of stuff is bundled and they spend a lot of money, a lot of money on their shows, on the talent that they have to to run these shows, et cetera, et cetera. And the reality is, you know, people may not be in to everything.

I don't I would never pay for ESPN. It's way too expensive. Now, if ESPN spun out something that was soccer only and I could pay less of it for that, I would probably buy an ESPN soccer package digital for like $2.99 a month or something like that. And they have to move with the times and realize that they have to unbundle themselves.

Not everybody wants everything. I don't give a crap about all your football stuff, which is the stuff that's mostly costing you the most money. So unbundle that, charge it, split it up into different sports. That's that here. Free suggestion about how to save your company. There you go. There you go.

Brought to you from the grumpy old geeks. That's right. You still haven't seen. Oh, you got some some more follow up on this? No, no, no. I'll just keep rambling and be grumpy. OK. You still haven't seen Hamilton, right? No. And apparently it's going to sell out within five seconds in L.A., so I probably will not be seeing it anytime soon.

Yeah. Well, you can go to, you know, one of the ticket sites at Stubhubs and get them there for four times the face value. Well, you know, the big American history hype is on for some of the old stuff now because Hamilton has really rekindled that that desire to learn more about the founding fathers.

And have you seen the Google Expeditions program? I have. It's very well done. Yeah. I can't wait to try it out. I've got one of the Google Cardboard things coming. I want to actually give it a shot. But they're actually releasing a bunch of new exploration locations that are based around like Hamilton's home in Manhattan, Independence Hall, even the spot where Burr and Hamilton had the had the dual all sorts of stuff.

So it should be kind of interesting to check those out without having to, you know, drive to New Jersey, which everybody always wants to avoid. That's true. So once once my once it gets here, if I could speak this morning, I'll definitely give a review of it and let you know if it's worth it.

Cool. All right. I'm guessing it's going to be worth it because it's free. Security. And we're back again this week with Mr. Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. How are you doing, Dave?

I'm doing pretty good. Doing pretty good. Glad to be back. Lots to talk about this week. All right. Well, let's jump into it. All right. Well, our first story this week is that cyber espionage and ransomware are the big gainers in the new Verizon breach report. This is from CSO online.

The Verizon breach report is something that those of us in the cybersecurity biz look forward to every year. It's one of the big reports that comes out. Obviously, Verizon is a huge company, so they have the resources to do some serious surveying of the world. And they do with this breach report.

This is their 10th annual breach report. And not surprisingly, things like cyber espionage and ransomware have grown quite a bit in the last year. The report says cyber espionage is up to 21% of the cases analyzed, which is last year it was 13%.

Wow. Yeah. So quite a bit. And then ransomware is up quite a bit as well. They said 40% of breaches involve phishing attacks. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting.

I mean, that made phishing the largest attack vector. I thought another interesting stat was that a quarter of breaches were caused by insiders. That's either people deliberately stealing data or inadvertently. An insider is anyone who works for you.

Yeah. Either through malintent or just accidentally allows access to your network. So insider threats sounds more nefarious than it is because quite often it's someone who works for you just having bad password hygiene or something like that.

Yeah. And so the report goes on and says that a lot of the problems here could be caused by or could be solved by people having better hygiene, having two-factor authentication turned on, things like that. Just the basics would take care of a lot of the things here. But this Verizon report is a big one.

So if this sort of information is something that you're interested in, go ahead and check it out. It's an interesting read, sort of a broad survey of what's going on in terms of malware and threats in the cybersecurity world. And don't read it before you go to bed.

That's right. Don't read it. Right. Right. Actually, you know, read it. I guess it's kind of like you shouldn't go to the grocery store when you're hungry. You know, you shouldn't read this report before you see an ad for, you know, someone like, I don't know, one of those, LifeLock or one of those companies, right?

Or LastPass, you know, one of the password management companies, they're the ones who should send out copies of this report to everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So our next story, Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom. Oh, yeah. This is a story on motherboard.

What could possibly go wrong here? No doubt. This is making the rounds, the echo look. Oh, man. What do they think of next? You know, I've been thinking about this since I saw this story earlier this week.

And for those of you who aren't up on this, the echo look is a little camera. It's like a little webcam on a stand. And the idea is you put it on your dresser and you can take selfies of yourself in outfits and it'll videotape you doing a little spin in front of the camera.

It's interesting tech. It actually has a depth sensor. So kind of like the iPhone 7, it can intelligently blur the background, which makes for a nicer photo. In my case, I would be it would be good to blur the background so you don't see all of the dirty laundry all over my bedroom.

But, you know, whatever. But but of course, oh, and other things it'll do. You can ask for fashion recommendations and things like that. It'll it'll help you it'll help you, you know, the joke in the article is it'll tell you if you look fat in that dress or not.

Yeah, I don't know that it'll actually do that. But of course, the privacy implication of having a camera in your bedroom is significant. And also that this thing could know things about you just by how you look. They said in the article that it could know if you're depressed, pregnant, pregnant.

Right. Or just getting fat or just getting fat. Right. Right. Let's. Yeah. Does this dress make me look fat? Let's not blame the dress. Yeah. I see that. I see that bag of Cheetos on your dresser behind you. Who are you fooling? Exactly. That's right. That's right. That's right. But, you know, as I was thinking about this this week, there are there is no shortage of cameras already in our bedrooms.

I think about, you know, my wife and I, you know, I come out of the shower or whatever and she's sitting in bed reading something on her phone. Well, what's on the back of her phone facing towards the bathroom? That's right. Right. And so she doesn't have that camera fired up.

You know, she's not taking pictures of me. That you know of. As far as I know. Exactly. But if someone has pwned the phone. Yeah. Right. That camera is, you know, this is another one. My point is that this is not an unusual activity to have cameras pointing at all over our homes.

You know, the private, intimate spaces in our homes. It's really not something most of us think twice about. So in terms of hackability, it does the Echo look have a big old bullseye on its back. Yeah, you bet it, you bet it does. You betcha.

Definitely. But the other thing that they said was that, that Amazon is storing the videos and photos in the cloud, of course. So that could be a vector for vulnerability. But we'll see.

I don't know. Like, you know, it may not be, it may be a tempest in a teapot. It doesn't seem to be as bad as perhaps the headlines say it was. Obviously, you know, the folks at Amazon are smart enough to know that this is a problem, the potential problem.

So they're going to do whatever they can to keep the thing locked down. But yeah, yeah. I mean, they're definitely not going to make it easy for somebody to get into these cameras. But, you know, it's the creepy part for me is just, do I really need Amazon knowing that much more stuff about me so they can sell me more stuff?

It's like, yeah, I'm going to pay them so they can sell me more stuff. I don't think so. I really don't think so. Yeah. The story did joke that Amazon could tell you that your underwear is worn out. You know, it's time to replace those jockey shorts. You know, there's a new elastic band or something like that.

So, yeah, I don't know. I think it's the shape of things to come. Interesting that they would start in the bedroom. Obviously, you know, they think they know what they're doing. So we'll see if this is a success or if people think it's creepy and don't want anything to do with it. Yeah. And what happens when when you do come out of the shower and it accidentally starts recording and can you get it off the cloud?

That's always, you know, something that you need to think about. Right. You know, accidental dickies are just as bad as, you know, ones that you're trying to make. So, yeah, hopefully they have a plan in place for you to be able to delete those if you so desire.

Yeah. Well, maybe there's a there's a side market for for lens caps for this thing. Yeah. Right. Definitely. Just a piece of gaffer's tape. That's what I use. A little roll of electric tape right here on all of my cameras. Right. Right. All right.

What's next? Fox News is getting sued for hacking the accounts of one of their previous on-air personalities, Andrea Tantaros, if that's how you pronounce it. I don't know. I never watched this. She was on the five on Fox News, but she filed a lawsuit against Fox claiming that she was hacked.

So. Right. Right. You'd think that these guys at Fox would would, you know, figure this out. They shouldn't be doing this anymore after the last time. You know, you'd think you'd think what I what's interesting about this. I'm going to have to ask Ben Yellen about this, our friendly neighborhood lawyer, because, you know, it is within the bounds of the company to read your email.

Mm hmm. Right. So is what are the boundaries for what your company is allowed to do on the computer that they issued you? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that. I'm pretty sure if it's their computer, they can do what they want to.

Right. That's so what about your phone? You know, that's the other issue. It's like if they got into her phone, that's right. It could be her private phone. You know, it depends on where the where the boundaries are crossed. Well, the story does say that spyware spyware was installed on her computer, but it doesn't say if that computer was a Fox owned computer or was that her personally owned computer.

So I suppose that would be could be all the difference in the world. I don't know. You know what? I'll have to do some homework. I'll check with Mr. Yellen about that. Maybe we can swing back on this one next week and find out what the answer is. Yeah. And the the other part of the the suit here is that they were harassing her on social media.

They were they were tapping her phone calls, reading her emails and then just harassing her on social media, which was, you know, pretty dastardly. But this is because she was, you know, part of the sexual harassment claims. Good old Bill, Bill O'Reilly, you rap scallion.

Allegedly, Jason, allegedly. Allegedly. Oh, man. Good on you there, Fox. We love you. It's a shame. It's a pattern, though. It would it would appear. So, well, since Mr.

Brian couldn't make it right now, he's got a he has a little wind problem right now and his cable's out. We're going to talk about something that he put in here because I like this fashion design is they're actually working on new types of fabrics and textiles to basically stop surveillance and facial recognition, which is, you know, I'm always interested in this kind of thing.

I like reading me some Cory Doctorow books because he talks about it a lot. And my new Cory Doctorow book actually just arrived this morning. Autograph, too. Hardcover. It's made of trees. We talked about this probably a couple of months ago about some highly reflective sunglasses that, you know, the idea was with an infrared camera, they would reflect the IR back of the camera and blow it out.

But this is different from that. Yeah. The one that I really like here, it's called the Hyperface print, and it's got twelve hundred different little faces on it that the camera can pick up on that are, you know, like place like, you know, eyes, nose, mouth and the semi outline of a head to confuse it while it's trying to trying to read your face.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that pattern of camouflage that the army used to use that had that sort of digital pattern of camouflage. It kind of looks like that, but boy, you sure can see all the faces in it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not exactly what you call fashion forward, but I wonder what the echo look would have to say about it.

Well, the other thing I wondered about this is that if you wore something made out of this material or one of these other garments that they're describing in this article, would that just put a big old bullseye on you for them to, you know, start following you around?

Exactly. I was thinking the same thing. It's like, yeah, it doesn't make you invisible. It just makes you, you know, a standout. It's like, hey, we can't we can't match this guy. So go send some officers to pick him up. What's he hiding? Right, right, right. Exactly. So, yeah, they've got another one, the the anti-surveillance code, which basically looks like you put, you know, some tinfoil on your head.

It's like it's one of those those foil thermal wraps that you see people who are freezing at marathons. Yeah. They get wrapped in when they're having when they're when they're too cold. It looks like one of those, except it has a goofy sort of triangle. It's wrangle on the head.

Do you ever watch? Do you remember Homestar Runner? Yes. Do you ever watch Homestar? Oh, yeah. It reminds me of the cheat. His head looks like the cheat. Triangular like the cheat. Yeah. Hello, the cheat. Yeah. So. No, it's definitely hideous, but it's a Faraday cage as well. So people can't steal your stuff.

Oh, yeah. Nice. Yes. And there are some other ones that are on the page that are just really stupid looking. But yeah, it's cool. It's going to be fun to see what people come up with nowadays when they're trying to not be surveilled. Well, interesting. You know, what a where what an interesting statement that this is where we are, that there are countermeasures for the tracking that occurs every day.

Yep. What are you going to do? Speaking of tracking. Yeah, it's nice segue. Yes, that's right. Great minds think about it. We've done this before. Oh, you want to you want to take this one?

Sure. Since I tried to anyway. Yeah. Interesting story from Slate about how a Fitbit helps solve a murder case. This is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. There was a gentleman named Richard Dabate who was charged with felony murder of his wife.

He called 911 back in December 2015, told the police that someone had broken into their home, shot his wife and had tied him to a chair. But the police started doing their investigation and found out that during a period of time when his wife was supposed to be shot and dead already, she was actually at the gym working out, according to her Fitbit.

So it was one of a bunch of pieces of evidence that they were able to use to convict this guy. Yeah. And the interesting thing about it, though, is they have. I'm sorry, charge him. He hasn't been convicted. He's been charged. He's been charged, yes. But they had surveillance footage of her visiting the gym. So you don't think that they really need the Fitbit.

It could be, you know, this article could be sponsored by Fitbit. But you never know. Well, right. But, you know, we've had other examples where we had. We talked about one recently on our show about an Amazon Alexa who the some there was a murder case where the law enforcement was trying to get a recording that Alexa may have made.

It was sort of a fishing expedition. They were trying to they went to Amazon and said, please give us everything that this Alexa has recorded. And Amazon said, no, go pound sand. And we're not going to turn that over to you. So one of my questions is, how did they get the data off of the Fitbit?

Was it merely enough to have it in their possession that they could, you know, scroll through it and and check it? Or was this the sort of thing where they had to go to the Fitbit folks and pull up data that way? They could have done that. The article doesn't say. Yeah, they could have gotten it off of her phone. You know, if it synced with the Fitbit app, she could have got they could have got it off the phone.

Gone to the website, looked at her, just looked at her stats if she has a public page and see what days they are. Oh, that's true. They could have just subpoenaed Fitbit. We don't know at this point. It doesn't really say in the article, but. No, no, it doesn't. But again, points to what we've been talking about, how there are so many different ways where your comings and goings are in one way or another being tracked by all sorts of different companies.

And just the proliferation of cameras everywhere, you know, I where where can you go where some camera isn't recording you? Yeah, it's pretty crazy when you think about it nowadays. You know, there's security cameras everywhere.

Just I'm looking around my room right now. Granted, I'm a photographer, so I won't count that one. But I've got one webcam, five computers. What is it? I can't even remember the name of the damn devices now. A new Samsung phone, an iPad.

Everything's got multiple cameras in it now. Right. And they all record basically forever if you want them to, because storage is so cheap and compression technology has gotten so good. Yep. And especially on the Android when anybody can probably turn that damn thing on. That's right. That's right.

Maybe Bam Bam turned it on for you. Could be. Could be. But yeah, I'm actually starting a 30 day experiment here for using just Android, which makes me a little sad because I'm not going to have to my swanky Apple watch, which also tracks every single thing I do. Right. Right.

Tell me about this Android experiment. What prompted that? Oh, my dad broke his phone, so I'm giving him mine until I can, until my contract renews. So, and my friend gave me a loaner Android phone. So I just happened to have an extra phone and I'm not going to go back to a, you know, a five. God forbid. I did that a couple of years ago.

I, let's see, this was back in the 5S period of time. Uh, I inadvertently took my 5S into a hot tub. Whoops. Yep. Which killed it, but good. And, uh, you know, tried the bag of rice and all that kind of stuff.

No, it was dead. Yeah. And I was about two months away from being eligible to upgrade to the phone I have now, which is a 6S. Um, so I went back to using a 4 for about two months. I feel for your pain there, buddy. Oh, my, I mean.

Yep. You know, I use the GPS on a 4 was, that's one of the main things I use my phone for is I use Waze. And, uh, just the battery got sucked down so fast and it could barely keep up. And the one thing that it did do was by the, in the end, when I finally got the 6S, boy, did that 6S seem fast.

Oh, yeah. Don't forget, check out Dave on the Cyber Wire at thecyberwire.com. Listen weekly, listen daily or weekly or whichever you, whichever you want to do. I don't care. At the library.

We've talked about the You Are Not So Smart podcast before. Uh, we're both fans. I listen to it, uh, relatively often. Not all the time, but relatively often. So I figured, uh, let's send this guy a couple ducats. Let's, uh, let me pay off, uh, pay off the enjoyment that I've been getting. So I picked up his book, You Are Not So Smart.

Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself. And this is all by David McRaney, the guy who runs the show. Uh, good book. Um, if you listen to the podcast pretty regularly, it's a lot of repeating, obviously, because this book is somewhat older. Um, I liked it.

Uh, it certainly made me grumpy and frustrated and angry. Uh, well, you got to pick up the follow-up book. You Are Now Less Dumb. Yes, I should. I will probably get on that. I think I need to take a break, though, because I did find myself getting so frustrated with, with so many of the fallacies that we all fall into so often.

Yeah, definitely. It's, it's, it's, it's, some of it is, you know, you can, you can kind of ward yourself off against if you know what's going on, but most of the time you forget about it and then just fall back into the same holes. Yeah. I did think about something really interesting, though, as I was reading through the book, because this book came out prior to the, the big problem with psychology and studies that the, um, that he starts to talk about in later podcasts.

And he was going and using a bunch of these studies as justification for these different fallacies. And then I was reading it going, yeah, except for the fact that nobody was able to replicate those studies. Right. So, yeah, who the hell knows? Our brains. Who, who knew they were so difficult?

Yeah. But, but we'll be able to type with them next, next year. All right. We can text with them. Great. Yeah. Uh, just a quick follow-up. I finished the two new, uh, Mitch Rapp novels, The Survivor and Order to Kill, which were actually not written by Vince Flynn because he's dead. Uh, they were written by Kyle Mills.

And you couldn't tell the difference. So if you like the old ones, they're spot on. And, uh, if you get them on Amazon, they're still all read by George Gwydell. So they're, you know, seamless, all 13 books now read, read by the same guy, which is a really nice, you know, thing to have.

Just, you know, the, just the, the whole series read by the same guy is very rare. They usually switch out here and there, which is annoying because I'm trying to do the gunslinger series and that's happening. But yeah, it's just nice. And then I, uh, I read the Tao Te Ching this week.

Okay. I'd never, never got around to doing that. And I think through fortune cookies and Instagram posts, I pretty much have read it a couple dozen times. It seems because everybody likes to quote it, but it was an interesting read. I got to say, and it's short. It's a very, very short, obviously. Um, but the part that I found interesting is the talk about, uh, how to be a good leader.

And, uh, if you go back and read that part and just look at our climate today, it's, uh, somebody should take, uh, some notes from this book. It's pretty fascinating. All right. They figured it out a long time ago. Yeah. Well, you know, history repeats. Yep.

And, uh, unfortunately my next book, I'm not going to be able to do on audible because Corey Doctorow almost never releases his books on audio unless, uh, it's like way down the line. So walk away his new novel. And it's not a, uh, young adult novel. Thank God. This is his first adult novel in a very long time.

Getting really good reviews. So I, I actually bought two copies. I bought a copy for my Kindle and I got a, an autographed hardcover for the library. I would like to point out that on the Amazon page right now, there is an audio CD option. Oh, he's got it out already. Okay. Interesting.

I don't have a, I don't have a CD player. Yeah. I don't know why you would release it on CD, but okay. And there's only one. So you know what? That makes me think that that's a scam. Yeah. Um, oh my God. It's already sold out too. Usually ships within one to four. Oh, that's the CD. Okay. Gotcha.

I'm like, yeah, that's a, that's a scam. I've seen those have those come through before. Ah, yeah. And I'm pretty sure. I get on fixing that. Yeah. And the paperbacks usually are a scam too. So unless somebody got like a galley copy, but yeah, the audio CDs generally, cause there's only one available from $30.

So that's, uh, it's usually a scam. So I'll let you know how that, that book comes out, but it's going to take a while cause I'm going to be traveling, but I'm going to read it on the plane cause I'm flying to California. Woo. Yeah. We're going to do this show live next week. That'll be fun. Woo. Apps and doodads.

I was bouncing around the web this week and I found an interesting article, uh, from, uh, what is it? The next web. And they're talking about how Google wants to take the copy out of copy and pasting on Android phones. Okay. Uh, to me, this just sounds kind of silly and ridiculous cause it's like, what's it going to know what I want to paste if I don't copy it first?

And they say they're going to use context to determine what to paste, like seeing what you're doing around the time when you want to paste. So if you're on Chrome and you go to a restaurant, it's going to assume that you want to put the address into maps. If you're going, you know, from a restaurant to maps and things like that. I, this is weird. I don't see how this is going to work, but you know.

Autocorrect has been going so well for everyone. Yeah. It's ducking great. Yeah. Just ducking great. Yeah. I don't see. I mean, I'll give this a go when it, when they release it just to see how horrible it's going to be, but I'm predicting it's going to be pretty horrible.

Yeah. And you're not going to track cause you don't, you're not on Android. That's true. I won't. But I will, I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah. We'll see about that. You won't be on Android anymore at that point. Oh yeah, that's true. I'll still have the phone. I'll still have the phone so I can try it. Okay. I'm only on this thing for a month. So. Yeah. We've talked about the, the shark fitting of apps and all that sort of stuff before.

And particularly with Pokemon go and how everybody played it. And then it just kind of stopped playing it. Yeah. Which is what happens to everybody. So there is a recode kind of did a review of this. The top 10 games in Apple's U S app store. I've all seen a drop in sales.

This is not surprising to me. After the initial rush to download the latest game, everybody kind of basically burns out a hard, few hardcore people keep playing and paying because everything is in-app purchases. Now you don't just buy a game and play it, which is me being a grumpy old guy.

Again, just, I just want to buy it and play it. I don't want to keep throwing five bucks at you every two days. But it doesn't matter because people just basically drop off. So in fact, the top 10 games launched in 2016 by revenue in Apple's U S app store also a drop in sales in the past year, according to the app research company, sensor tower.

So people are not, uh, the gaming and the app industry is not doing very well. And the thing about these, you know, iOS games is they're really, it's not like you're getting like a PS4 game or an Xbox game. You know, they're, yeah, they're short. They're not really, you know, super in-depth unless you're playing one of those damn castle games where you, you know, got to build your castle and build it, build it, build it, build it.

Get beat up by your neighbor, then you have to pay another 50 bucks to build your castle back up, then get beat up by your neighbor again. That whole loop. But yeah, I mean, there's, you play for a little bit and then you're bored and you're done and you get the next one. You move on. Yep. So, but I'm still playing Yahtzee. So, ha ha.

Yahtzee with friends. I'm still playing words with friends or whatever the hell that's called with like two people. Yeah. Are you still playing Trivy? Remember Trivy? No, that's kind of dropped off. Why bother? Okay. I was just listening to like episode nine or ten from ages ago and that's we were talking about Trivy back then.

Yeah, I think they did something, they did something with the monetization that really pissed me off and then I was out. Go figure. Well, speaking of monetization, Apple, if they're really trying to make these apps drop off, their affiliate store, or their, the app store affiliate commissions have dropped 64% from 7% to 2.5% starting on May 1st.

Why bother then? I mean, you're talking like 2.5% off like 2.99. Yeah. So, that's a nickel. Yeah. Thanks, Apple. Yeah. So, it's not even. Just kill the program. Even 7% isn't even all that much. So, you're talking 15 cents over whatever on a 2.99.

But any, or a dollar, yeah. I mean, it's cheap. You don't get much out of it, so you have to do it in bulk. So, that's why you see all those app review sites. Those guys made a decent amount of money off of it if they were one of the big ones. But now, it's, nothing's going to, nobody's going to bother. It's not worth going to make the link on their affiliate store portal because it's a horrible experience.

I don't know if you've ever done it. It sucks. Oh, I have. Yeah, I used to do it for, you know, downloadable music all the time. And, you know, I don't think I've ever even gotten a check from Apple because I've never made enough money. I think we still have, like, maybe $6 in credit there that they've never sent us because we haven't hit the minimum for them to write a check and put a stamp on it.

Yeah, that's insane. So, speaking of companies screwing you, Instagram. Instagram has been shadow banning posts, basically making them invisible if you tag, you know, other people on it or whatever. So, for some people, you know, if you're a casual Instagram user, this may not be a big deal that your Coachella post isn't showing up under the Coachella tag.

But it is a big deal if you happen to be using Instagram to market your business. So, shockingly, much like Facebook, which now owns Instagram, they are pulling the wool out underneath people who have, you know, they courted to start their businesses over there in the first place.

There is a tool now that will let you see if you've been shadow banned, which is kind of interesting. I like that. The problem with it is it only does individual posts. So, you can only do one post at a time. So, if you want to run through your entire account to see if you're getting screwed by Instagram, you cannot do so.

Yeah, you'd think that they would just go grab your feed and then just hit them one after the other. But I guess... I guess that they'll probably get blocked and banned. Yeah, IP will probably get banned. So, exactly. So, there you go. So, if you are concerned that perhaps this is happening to you, there you go. The link is in the show notes.

You can check it out. And whoever programmed this is in Canada. I like the little made with heart emoji in Canada at the bottom of the page. Made with love. Made with love. Yes. And speaking of making things, Jason, you're a big fan of the Illumable. I love the Illumable. Well, they caught on to the fact that people like it.

And they are launching a second generation Illumable light that adds anti-germ cleaning to the mix. This will include a diode whose highly focused non-ultraviolet light kills bacteria without hurting humans. So, now, well, it doesn't really do enough to sterilize it. And you'll still have to clean your toilet every now and then.

But at least you'll feel like little nasty bacteria is getting killed while you cycle through the rainbow lighting system as you take a midnight poo. There you go. I have mine set for red. Just nice and red. They are crowdfunding this one. So, they are relying, even though they've sold their, even though Generation 1 sold relatively well and they have money, they have decided to go ahead and take your money before developing the second one.

Oh, Mr. Wonderful. Yes. I've got to love those Shark Tank guys. Of course. And finally, if you're an old school Mac person, I did run across this. It is silly and stupid, but it's also only $37. You can get, basically, an old school mini Mac that is a cell phone charger.

So, you can slip your iPhone in there and feel like you're back in the old days. Of course, it is not approved by Apple, so it doesn't have logos or anything like that. But I suppose you could be clever and make your own. Okay. I'm going to pass on that one. It seems kind of expensive for just an iPhone holder.

You getting one? No. Okay. Just making sure.

Media Candy. Brian, do you still listen to the radio? Technically, yes. Okay. Well, who do you listen to? I listen to the radio through my Amazon Echo. Do you use TuneIn or iHeartRadio? Well, I use whatever it uses.

I don't know. Okay. It usually tells you. I always have it used TuneIn. And maybe this is why this next company is having a problem. iHeartRadio's parent company warns that it may not survive the year. Right. they are way in debt. Well, look, I don't know anybody that really listens to the radio while sitting around in their house.

The only time they'll listen to the radio is in the car, except for people that I know that have the Amazon product. They're the, you know, I told you about KROQ HD2, which I know you were listening to for a while using it. I tune into KCRW in the morning using it.

And I, yeah, I think it does go through TuneIn all the time. So iHeartRadio screwed up by not making that deal with Amazon. Yeah, you can still say play on either one if you manually do it, but nobody. If you manually do it, but nobody does that. And who cares? You just want the radio.

You forget it. And it's, yeah, like I have any like loyalty to iHeartRadio. Boy, I better listen to them. I love Clear Channel. Yeah. Yeah. So these guys, they own the biggest, the biggest operator of radio stations in the U.S. And they also own Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, which is basically every billboard in the country that you see.

Yeah. And how can these guys be this much in debt? Oh, they paid, what was it, $24 billion to buy Clear Channel. Yep. That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money, and it's not going very well for them. No. So they may not survive the year. So you may be able to buy iHeartRadio if you've got a few million lying around soon, because I bet it'll go off in a fire sale.

Yeah. Who cares? Nobody. Nobody. TuneIn might buy them. Yep. Two shows are back on HBO. The Leftovers has returned. I've watched the first two episodes, and they are wonderfully bonkers. Okay, good. So I'm very much enjoying that, so you might want to check that out.

And Silicon Valley, our favorite show, has also returned. I'm not so sure about that one. No, I didn't really dig it. I mean, I haven't been digging it that much anyway. I still get PTSD. Yeah, there's a bit of that. I get really frustrated. There's a bit of PTSD. And there's also a fear that it's Big Bang Theory-ing early.

Yeah, definitely. Where the jokes aren't landing so much anymore. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, this was not very chuckle-rific, this first episode. No, I did not laugh much. If at all. Yes. This came across Dig this morning.

I thought it was kind of interesting, so I put it in here, because it's about one of my favorite people, or it used to be one of my favorite people, Zay Frank. Remember his old videos? He did the show a long, long time ago. It was like one of the first video blogs. Ah, no. Oh, man, the show was fantastic. But he, you know, had a couple failed tries at doing his own channel again, but then got picked up as basically the president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures several years ago.

Okay, right. And there's a big kerfuffle now about all these talents leaving BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. And they're posting videos about why I left BuzzFeed. Now, the whole thing comes down to these people are breaking their non-compete clauses.

So two people got fired, and then everybody else is like, well, I want to be able to do other videos, too. I want to be able to do that. So Zay wrote an article, or not an article, basically just a press release to all of the people that work at BuzzFeed Motion Pictures saying, hey, look, you guys get competitive salaries, you get 401Ks, you get medical, you get dental, you get all this stuff.

Here's what we just don't want you to do. Go work for anybody else when you're not working for us. Honestly, from my perspective, it is a fine thing to ask. And these people also signed the contract. So if you don't like the terms of the deal, don't sign the contract.

Oh, God, you millennials. Yeah. I swear to fucking God. All we do is complain on this show about how hard it is to be a contractor and how much that sucks. When you stay a contractor and you don't get any of those benefits and you get screwed all the time, guess what?

You can ply your trade anywhere, anytime, whenever you want. You take the full-time job, you get all those benefits. You don't get to do what you do for them for other people. Even if it's just for yourself. They're paying you to do that. Even if it's just for yourself. If you are being paid to make motion pictures for BuzzFeed, you do not get to have your own YouTube channel where you create your own content.

They own it then. Yep. Jesus, what's wrong with you people? Apparently, they can't read the EULA. Hunting unicorns. Hunting unicorns. Quick follow-up on hunting unicorns. We haven't talked about it in a little while.

This is where we all picked about $10,000 worth of pseudo stock, and we're going to track it to see how we did throughout the year. Currently, I'm doing rather well. Yeah, Dick. I'm number one in the ratings. I've made almost $2,000. I'm up 17.79%.

Jason is in second place here, doing not bad either, 12%. That's a pretty decent return. 12.44%, I would like to point out. Yeah, 12.44% on your initial investment. And what is interesting is Jason and I both basically picked tech stocks, and then we had a friend of the show, Mike, as our control, who stayed basically in durables and anything that wasn't tech.

And he is getting hammered, basically. He's still up. He's up. He's up 3.19%. Significantly less than we are. Yeah, tech is doing well. Tech is doing really well. Who knew? I'm a little surprised by that, given current state of affairs right now, especially since Mike's stocks are the big war machines.

So we'll see if those ramp up in the next couple of months. Yeah, but you also got Tesla. I do have Tesla. And Tesla's on fire, which is why I am kicking your ass right now. Yeah. But I'm still not doing bad. I wish I would have actually had this money to invest. I could have used that extra. I am looking at this right now going, I should have just done it in real life.

Yeah, except I don't have $10,000. But I did have like $250, and this is for our side bet for the one year. If I can make any money on Twitter, then you buy me a six-pack. Yeah. This is not going to make you $10,000, but you may get the six-pack out of me.

You may get a six-pack. You know what? It depends on which way the wind blows. It really does. Yeah. I paid $16.33 a share for Twitter, and it's currently at $16.48. Yeah. And I think I bought it like two days after you just to cover my ass. That way I figured I'd still have the money to buy you the six-pack if I lost.

I think I bought it like $16.4, so I'm up a few shekels as well. All right. So not bad. Not bad. We'll see how it goes. This is one where, you know, there can be no losers almost. Except me. Except Twitter. Well, yeah. Twitter can definitely be the loser. As if the Coachella VIP experience where a bunch of celebrities and trust fund babies

and Snapchat employees dropped $3,000 to $4,000 for a weekend out in the desert in Palm Springs wasn't bad enough, Ja Rule created the Fyre Festival, spelled F-Y-R-E, because why not? And this was supposed to be the once-in-a-lifetime musical experience on an island in the Bahamas, which was a million – I mean, people are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Tickets for the festival ranged from $1,000 to $12,000, included a flight from Miami, a stay in a geodesic dome, cultural foods, activities. They had videos showing basically models, you know, parasailing and jet skiing before going up and seeing Blink-182 play a special concert just for them.

Blah. It was going to be the best thing ever and the most, you know, one-percenter bullshit I've ever heard of. And it all fell apart and I couldn't be happier. No, this was – the tweets about this all day, yesterday and the day before were just fantastic. Yeah, it was supposed to take place this past weekend. It was a complete disaster.

People got there. There was no tents, no geodesic domes, no food, no nothing. It was mass chaos with no organization. There were cheese sandwiches. Cheese sandwiches, yes. They didn't have cheese sandwiches. Yes, and via Twitter, they canceled the festival after a lot of people arrived.

And the company was even telling its employees not to go. Like, don't show up. Actually, yes, there was actually somewhat breaking news. I didn't put the link in the show notes. I'll just see if I can find it. This is an ongoing scandal for all these people. And by the way, you pissed off people that have money. That's not really so good because, you know, the norms who spent all this money are now going to sue you.

Apparently, celebrities were warned ahead of time not to get on the flights and go. Oh, man. That is not going to be good. Not at all. And the whole thing, the whole point of this is this was promotion for an app. That's why we can put it in the show because it's for an app that has not launched yet and which now will never launch.

No, this will not launch. I'm hoping everybody has made it home at this point because as of, I think, two days ago, people still hadn't gotten on their flights back home. Some of the unfortunate people stuck there. This was, don't try to do this stuff, people. This is the Kickstarter of festivals.

Yes. Every year or so, I start to think, you know, maybe I should get into Doctor Who. And then I look into it and it's so complicated that I just throw up my hands and say I give up.

Okay. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to start dealing with this. What doctor, what year, do I go back and watch like the early 70s stuff with the horrible effects or am I going to be too bummed out by that? Do I start with the new ones? There's a link over at fatherly.com, which is a site that I've been enjoying since becoming a father.

Usually it's about parenting stuff, but they throw in fun stuff like this anyways. And it's how to explain Doctor Who to a child. While I do not intend to explain this to my child, I would like to explain it to me. So I threw this link in the show notes and basically asked Jason, who is a Doctor Who-phile and at least has watched lots of it, correct?

I've seen a good chunk of it, yes. All right. So I wanted to know how accurate this article was and if they're basically giving me good advice as to how to start Doctor Who. Well, the main premise here is that they want you to start with Matt Smith. I disagree with that wholeheartedly because it's the whole season or the whole series here in a nutshell is basically why I will now forget about Doctor Who again for another year.

Exactly. So when Doctor Who rebooted, it started with Chris Eccleston, which, you know, he was only there for one season because he was a giant pussy. Then David Tennant took over. Then Matt Smith, Matt Smith took over. Now we got the new guy. So I'd say if you want to get into Doctor Who, just start with Chris Eccleston and go forward because that will get you into the mythology of the show and then it'll get you to David Tennant, who is amazing because it's David Tennant, for Christ's sake.

And then when you get to Matt Smith, I think Matt Smith is goofy. He's not my doctor. My doctor was Tom Baker back in the day. But, you know, if you want to go back and watch some of those old ones, once you kind of get how the universe works, they're fun. They still hold up. The stories are, you know, yes, the effects are cheesy, but they're still fun, fun stories and they're much longer format, you know, like three or four episodes long for a storyline, which is kind of fun.

Okay. Yeah. A friend of the show, Fogarty, got me into those long, long ago and we watched a bunch of a bunch of the old stuff and I thought I was going to hate it, but actually turns out it's not bad. It's pretty good stuff. But yeah, start with Chris Eccleston because he's great just as an actor and a little darker than the most.

But then David Tennant just knocked it out of the park for his whole run. So, okay. And then after that, you can quit. I'm really curious about, again, once again, I'm just like, okay, that's differing advice from different people. So let's open this up and make it even more complicated. If anybody out there that listens to the show is a Doctor Who fan, please let us know where you think I should start with hashtag not my doctor.

Okay. I just stole that from John Oliver. All right. I dropped a listicle in because we haven't had one for a while and, you know, it's immediately suspect, but I just thought it was fun. 26 mind-blowing psychology facts that you never knew about people. And there's some good stuff in here.

And it's quite – I find some of this stuff to be true, but this is – I wouldn't call these psychology facts more so than just kind of, you know, random things. They're like Sniglets. Sniglets. I love Sniglets. We've got to bring back Sniglets. Those were great. I think I still have my paperback books here somewhere.

Yeah. So there's some good stuff in here. Like when you hold the hand of a loved one, you feel pain less keenly and worry less. I like the fact that any friendship that was born between the period of 16 and 28 years of age is more likely to be more robust and long-lasting. Women prefer men with deep husky voices. Oh, there we go.

Not dulcet tones. Hey, now. Hey, now. Oh, that one's so good. Being alone for a long time is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Yeah, I can attest to that one. Yeah, there you go. So there's some interesting stuff in there. Give it a perusal. All right. And I have a video at the end of this one, which I just put in for shits and giggles.

It's a dog who is sick and tired of his robot overlords and has learned to turn off the family Roomba. I enjoyed the video immensely. It's very good. So if you want to chuckle, watch the doggy run around and turn off the Roomba while his... Because you know what he's doing?

Like all the crumbs on the floor that he gets. He's like, that's my job. You're taking my job. See, even dogs are not exempt from this. They are losing their jobs, too. Feedback loop. Huge thank you to our new Patreon subscriber, Donovan Adkinson.

Adkinson. Thank you. I think it's Adkinson. Adkinson. There's no second name. I love this segment just for us destroying last names. Yeah. You give us your money, we'll fuck up your name. Exactly. That should be our new advertising campaign. There we go. It'll be good. Thanks so much, Donovan. We got some stuff over at Twitter this week.

Actually, quite a lot. People are getting active on the Tweetosphere. They must know that Jason's starting to make a penny or two. This is from Nathan Rietzma, who's written us a number of times. Where's my GOG episode? I need to start my week off right at work while listening to Jason and Brian and the occasional bam. That's when we were running a bit late on Monday.

Yeah, I had massive technical difficulties and had to actually get another computer to edit the show, so I was super late. Sorry about that. Yep. We won't do it again. Oh, free refund. Free refund. Yeah, free refund. Unless you're on Patreon, then we're keeping your money. Yeah. All right.

Next is from 6502chip. This made me go from grumpy to angry to sad, and this is about Night Trap. You're going to have to take this one, Jason. I don't even know what it is. It's a video game from 25 years ago that I never played. I was out of games by then, so I never got to see this one, but I did go and watch the trailer, and the trailer's pretty funny.

Okay. All right. We got one from Barrett Reese. Thanks for turning me on to Alan Cross. The ongoing history of new music is fantastic. Yeah, no problem, man. I think it's great, too. Another great episode came out this week all about recent musicians and addiction and rehab.

That was pretty good. Oh, that's interesting. I might have to check that one out. Yep. He also sent us, this has to be the worst invention ever, and this is the hashtag what could go wrong, hashtag who thinks of this crap. Good hashtags. This is that Echo look. Yeah, the new Echo look that we covered. We covered this in security while you were fighting the battle with the wind.

Right. I'll have to listen to what you guys thought about it. Obviously, this is horrible. The security aspect of this is horrible. You're putting a camera and a microphone in your bedroom. Particularly with the target market who will love this, teenage girls. Yeah.

Yeah, that's just going to be awesome. You should definitely listen to our security segment then. Okay. All right. And Gadlaw 6 writes in, hey, Mac malware. And it's an article on Mac rumors about a new piece of Mac malware, which basically uses a valid Apple certificate to get itself installed on your system.

And it bypasses the gatekeeper security feature. So this is a pretty bad one that somebody got their certificate through. The only thing is to get this on your system, they're sending it through phishing emails saying that there's a problem with your tax returns.

Please click on this zip attachment and open it up. So as we still have to be stupid. Yeah, that's the thing. We've covered many times. The IRS doesn't email you anything about your tax returns. And hopefully your accountant won't be doing the same thing anyway.

So just don't be stupid. And you probably won't get caught. 100% my accountant has emailed me these sorts of things before. But I know my accountant's name. Yeah, but if your accountant's machine gets hacked. Right. There's your problem. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. Then we got another tweet from Ben Stanley. Have you heard of pi-hole.net? Unfortunately, it was not what I was hoping it would be, to be honest. This is an ad blocker that runs on a Raspberry Pi, blocks ads via DNS, easy to set up, and amazing. This seems like a lot of effort to block an ad when there are plugins for my browser.

Here's the thing about this. We're going to have some... The next feedback is directly related to this, almost. A friend of the show, Monkey13, I sent him the link, and he went and set it up. And the nice thing about this is it blocks it at DNS. So it's like you don't even have to run it in your browser.

It just... You plug it... You just basically plug it into your router and then set the IP of the pi-hole, Raspberry Pi box device thing, to be your DNS server. And it handles it, and it gives you all nice graphs and everything. And he sent me some graphs. It's working for him. He said it was really easy to set up and install.

Problem is, I went and looked at how much a Raspberry Pi costs. It's nowadays. So to get the actual board, a case for it, and the power supply, it's going to run $50. Right. I ain't got $50 for that right now. So I'm sticking with my browser plug-in. But he's going to send me some more stats next week because he's going to have the whole family on it.

It's a nice thing because you only have to do it once for the whole family. Right. And then also, if you run your DNS on your phone through it, where ad blockers are still kind of a pain, then you just get the added benefit. And also, if you have private internet access and you're using our VPN that we always talk about, GrumpyOldGeeks.com, or GOG.show.

I keep forgetting we have a new domain. GOG.show slash VPN. They actually have an ad blocker built into it. So you can go turn that on, which also works fairly well. It does. I've actually been using that. So next bit of feedback comes from Monkey13 as well. These are three quick comments on the last episode.

MST3K, I totally agree with you. I had big hopes for it, knowing who was involved with it. He watched the first two episodes and is not going to watch any more of them. Says it's just not funny and it seems like they're trying too hard. Could not agree more. Awesome. This show is like such a great test case for me because I just never even bother now.

Yeah. Save your time. You want to take the next one? Sure. The A-list accountant, which is the link that I put in about the celebrity accountants and complaining about basically celebrities being idiots. It is not just your world with social media and podcast producing. There is a direct correlation in the security world too.

You tell people what is wrong and how to fix it and they ignore you. Then six months later when they are breached, they complain and go back to you asking how and why this happened. Because you thought you knew better and you wouldn't listen to us. I so feel your pain on this one. I have learned to get them to sign off on recommendations so you can say they were briefed on the issues.

This way they can't. And they have tried to come back and blame us. Yeah. Unfortunately, this is the world that we live in now where when people want to have conference calls or they just want to have a quick call on the phone, now I will always write a follow-up email that details everything that was said because you need the paper trail because these people are idiots.

I think you should just do everything over Skype and then just record all the calls. Yeah, but then I need to be able to search and call searching isn't quite there yet. So for me, I just save all the emails and then when I hear something about like Instagram, I just search through the emails for Instagram, find the points and email them back.

And he finally writes, I also listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed. I have to admit that at that speed, whenever you guys laugh, it just makes me smile because it's even funnier sped up. As always, I enjoy listening to your show every week and a proud grumpy old geek I am.

Comes from Monkey13. Thank you, Monkey. Monkey. Monkey. And I think our next comment that we got was definitely targeted at you, Jason. Well, actually, read the subject. Swell Schultz, can I borrow 1,200 English pounds?

12,000. 12,000 English pounds. Yes. And he has a link. These sex robots are here and they will set you back 12,000 pounds. Yep. These are the, this is the next gen of sex robots that are coming out now. And since he wants to borrow the money, I think he's into it too.

But I will never be buying me a sex robot because this is creepy. This comes right from the. Wait, what? You think? It's just creepy. Says the guy that literally tried out the autoblow too for the show. That's different. That's a device, not a human, like, you know, sized doohickey.

You had me at creepy with the autoblow. I didn't need to go much further. Yeah, no, that pretty much is the, that goes to the edge of my, you know, my daring. And, uh, that I'm willing to do for the show here for sure. Uh, you hear that dulcet tones. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Synthetic skin embedded with electronic sensors will enable the robots to react with artificial pleasure as they are caressed by their owners or lovers.

For example. And as an, as, oh man, here's your part. And as artificial intelligence researchers improve the quality of computer generated conversation, robots will develop the skills needed for seduction and the whispering of sweet nothings during lovemaking. Oh God.

Look, you, you want something to react with artificial pleasure. Just get married. There you go. Save you 12,000 pounds. Well, actually not really. No, not really. Way more than that. And we got an iTunes review, a four star sad Christmas from white rabbit 99 from Israel.

Uh, smug old geeks. You guys are grumpy and smug, but the podcast is interesting and I keep coming back for more smiley face. Cheers. Well, thank you. White rabbit 99. Couldn't drop that extra star. Could you? Yeah. Yeah. I guess, uh, whatever. Thank you. Yeah. We'll take four over. We'll take four over one.

That's true. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs.

So I've got a shout out to Joy Bowman this week for some very, very funny emails I got. Apparently, uh, she was working at the gym with her mates and decided to put the podcast on over the loudspeakers right when we were calling her out on, uh, her, her lovely, uh, feedback from last week's show and, uh, has gotten a kind of just a metric shit ton of shit from her guys.

I'm not going to, can you feel the love in the air tonight? Cause the, uh, the dulcet tones bit Brian actually, uh, put in there. And so, yeah, so she got blamed for that. But yes, that would be, that'd be very funny. I mean, I, I'm still cracking up from the email she sent, but it's, it's, it's long and it's private and I'm not going to put it out for everybody.

It's very funny though. Sorry, not sorry, DT. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

If you're an app person, you can listen to us on the Podcast One app for iOS and Android. Get it at podcastone.com slash apps. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and help keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make the 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 207.

I wanted one thing for in the history of Grumpy Old Geeks, where we were on the side of BuzzFeed. I know it's weird. I feel dirty. I feel, I feel kind of filthy too. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon.

Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.