210: Beyond Burgerdrone

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. I have some good news, Brian. What's that? My AirPods have returned to me. You know, I've seen them in a while a lot more often now and I gotta say they look a little douchey. They totally look douchey, but I don't care. Okay. Jimmy Crack douche and I don't care because they're awesome.

It's so nice to have them back. Okay. Well, I'm good. Happy. I'm happy for you as you sit in your house. Yes. Well, no, I mean, it's springtime now, but it's raining like a fiend today. But even today I got four miles in before we did this show. So good for you.

I'm out in the wild getting some exercise, taking advantage of this beautiful spring weather. Which it was 80 degrees three days ago. And this morning I woke up and it was 42. You cannot figure out what season to be. Apparently not. I wanted to throw something out there also for the people that asked for this a while ago.

And we did it for a couple of weeks and I didn't do it last week because I was a little bit behind. I'm going to go back and fix it. But on the website, if you go to the different sections, there are timestamps now for all the different sections. So you can and they link directly to the player that works on the webpage because we've got that swanky new podcast player.

Yes. So you can just click on a time and it will like, you know, scrub the player to that point in the show automatically. Very cool. So I just want to know if it's worth it. So if anybody's using it, write us and let us know. Because I have a feeling that I'm wasting my time on it. I know we had somebody write in a long time ago and said, hey, can we get timestamps for all that?

Sure. There they are. Now tell me if it's worth the effort. Because if it's not, I'm going to save that 10 minutes during the show notes every week because the show notes are a pain in the butt already. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Save Jason a few minutes unless you guys are actually using it, in which case let us know.

Yeah. Then I will bow down and I will acquiesce to your request. All right. And this is just funny. I had to put this in here. I got a LinkedIn newsletter this week. You did? Yes, I know. I since then have unsubscribed because there's a disclaimer.

LinkedIn does not guarantee that news articles are accurate or about the correct person. Then why are you sending me a newsletter? If it's not news, then why do you exist? What is your what is your reason for being? We cannot guarantee the accuracy of absolutely anything that we said we tell you at all.

Yeah. Thanks for doing the legwork. OK, thanks, guys. I still I really I am shocked that LinkedIn is still around is still making money, still employs people. All right. Yeah, I know a lot of people that actually make a decent living posting crap on LinkedIn. I don't know how they do it.

I don't know how they do it either, because LinkedIn doesn't really pay you. No, I mean, it's like promoting their blog posts and things like that. All right. Using it as kind of a Twitter, you know, but I'm like, who goes to LinkedIn to get their news? I guess enough people that I get enough people do.

Apparently, I don't get it. I don't I just don't think it's not our world. No, definitely not. But what is my world is podcasting. And finally, the first part of my course is online. Took me 16 hours to get this thing done. But have you tried have you tried blocking about it on LinkedIn?

I should try that. I should. Actually, I should try that. I know. I was kind of being serious. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'll put up a post. I've got like 25 students so far. But this is a short teaser for the main course that's coming soon. But it's called Your First Podcast from Zero to iTunes.

Now, do you really call them students? You're not engaging with them. They are. They are watching your your thing. Yeah. But their comments, I can I can talk to them. We can have back and forth. I think students is a stretch. Well, they're enrolled in my course. So if they're enrolled in my course, they're called students.

But OK, yeah. If you are looking to figure out how to do your first podcast, I teach you in great detail in a very short amount of time how to go from not having a podcast to being in the iTunes store in, you know, under an hour. I got to say I'm a little offended. Why?

I'm looking at your your your people that that talk to you about, you know, talk about how great you are. Your little what do you call those things? Testimonials. Yeah, I'm looking at your testimonials. You did not request one from me. I didn't think you would give me one. You're my you're my snarky co-host.

It seemed like it would be a little bit nepotistic. I would have written a snarky testimonial. Well, then write me one up and I'll put it right in there. I'm offended now. No. Well, fine. Take your testimonial and shove it. Well, congrats on getting it out there.

I know you've been working very hard on it for a long time. And I'm still going to be working hard because this is only phase one. There's phase two to go, which is the behemoth. But it's coming along now that I did this one. I kind of know how to do it. And the teachable platform is actually really nice. It's swanky as hell. OK, I'm impressed. Also, the interview that I talked about a while ago about my podcasting to build your community talk with teachable.

It's finally out. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want to go check that out. It's like a 25 minute interview that I did with them. Yes. OK, so there's my there's my pimpage for the week. But yeah, if you're interested in podcasting and just want to, you know, check out the first course, please feel free to go sign up. And now, Brian, I have to ask you, where's your how to delete Uber from your phone tutorial?

There is no follow up because there is nothing that exists out there about it. Hmm. There is nothing. Basically, Uber is denying that they ever did it in the first place. Apple is saying that they did as far as I can tell, whatever bit of code that Apple claims they put on there to allow them to continue to track you after you have deleted Uber is not something that is accessible because, you know, Apple is a walled garden.

So there's nothing you can do about it anyways, even though Uber says that it doesn't actually exist. So that is the sum total of the follow up. I have Googled long and hard on this and I was unable to find anything. So there apparently Uber says they aren't doing it at all and there's no bit of code there.

Apple threatened to pull them off the app store saying that there was. But regardless of us, us, us lay people are screwed. We can't do anything about it or find out if anything's there or not. Well, maybe they went back and covered their tracks after that and released an update to the app to get rid of it. But if you are if you deleted the app, you're not getting the update, are you?

No, you're probably not. But I still think I still think it went through the notification system so they can, you know, say, don't send a notification to somebody if the app is not installed on the phone. Right. Yeah. So. So, yeah, that is why there was never any follow up because there was nothing to follow up on. Oh, OK.

There we go. And now the world the world knows and there's a much better place. Yes. And we talked about the VPN question from Ryan Wall last week in the feedback section. And we were correct. I talked to Dave Bittner. He followed up with his security people over at the Cyber Wire. And what we were what we said was, you know, OK, I'm starting a VPN tunnel.

All that Comcast can see is that you are VPNing somewhere. They cannot see the traffic because that's the whole point of the VPN. So. Yep. Makes sense. And good to know that they cannot track that. Nothing will matter since net neutrality is going away. Everything's going away. All right. On to the news.

In the news. Evan Williams is back in the news and he's apologizing to the nation. I wish he'd just go away. Oh, but he's got medium.

Mm hmm. So he's not going anywhere. He thinks the Internet is broken and he's trying to salvage it, which comes from a New York Times article in the press release for medium. Yeah, that too. There's a bit in The Verge where they quote a little bit from the New York Times story.

And it's funny. He says that the Internet is broken. And if Twitter is responsible for President Trump's election in November, he says he's sorry. Right. OK. Well, yeah. OK. What are you going to do about it then? You're creating the format that will probably be responsible for the next crappy president.

Yeah, basically. We'll see how it goes. And speaking of the next crappy president, let's talk about Theresa May for a second. Oh, joy. Yes. What she wants to do. We've got Evan Williams on one hand, who's trying to fix the Internet. And we've got Theresa May on the other side, who's trying to break the Internet.

Mm hmm. Yeah. She wants to basically turn up the the government interdiction into the Internet to 11. Yeah, you know, usually I look to the UK and well, the European Union more specifically as a shining kind of beacon of light of how we should be treating government involvement in the Internet.

But, you know, they left they left the European Union and they're going to go their own way now. And this is ridiculous, of course. This is hey, on the plus side, on the plus side, we can point to somebody else and say, hey, they're even worse than us in this one particular thing. Yeah, we're not the worst. We're not the worst.

Exactly. Oh, my God. Yes. Theresa May has promised that if she wins the upcoming general election, her party will abolish Internet access in the UK, replacing it with a government monitored Internet where privacy tools are banned. And online services will be required to vet all user supplied content for compliance with rules about pornography, political speech, copyright compliance and so on.

And search engines will have to employ special British rules to exclude a banned material from their search results. Now, in theory, all of that seems OK. The problem is who makes the rules. Yeah. Now, you know, because we can't be total hypocrites about this and just say this is all bad, because one of the things that you and I do on the show is we tell we scream at platforms like Facebook and YouTube and whatever, saying they have to be somewhat responsible for the content that is on their systems.

They can't just throw their hands up in the air and say, we just provide the service. It's not our fault. If somebody puts up hate speech, well, you're making money off of it. So it kind of is now. Our solution, in theory, should be a capitalist solution, which is, you know, people should get pissed off and stop using the service.

Therefore, they should go in and fix it, not the government coming in and just saying, you have to do this now. See, but there's a difference between a platform and the Internet at large. You know, that's that is there. Is there really these days? I don't know. That's just traffic. But that's just the traffic.

So I, you know, I just I am for a free and open Internet. I want to be able to post whatever I want when I want. And if people don't like it, go away. You know, that's that's kind of the way the Internet has always been free and open. And when when you come into this type of authoritarian BS, yes, who makes the rules?

Do you I mean. I don't want anyone making the rules for what I can look at on the Internet is it's always been free and open and it should stay that way. Yeah, well, and it will if you use Tor. Yeah. And what was the last time you used Tor? Never, because I don't want to be on that list.

Yeah. All right. Enough enough of the doom and gloom. Oh, wait, never mind. Let's talk about Uber for a second. I'd just like to say it again for the record that you put in almost all the Uber stories. Of course, but we're going to run through them real quick because they're all kind of they're all kind of intertwined. Yes.

So Judge William Alsop, he kind of gave a 50 50 on the injunctions against Uber this week. Uber does not have to stop testing their self-driving cars. OK, but. They said that Anthony Lewandowski can. He has to stop all work on LIDAR, which is now a legal requirement.

He had stopped like I think two weeks ago we reported the fact that he had stepped away from work on LIDAR, which was a preemptive move, I think, to say, hey, look, we're complying. We're complying. So he's he's he's off of LIDAR and Uber can keep going. But this is this is going to keep playing out like crazy.

Do you think that's a paid leave? Well, no, he's still working on other stuff. He's just not working on LIDAR. OK. Yeah. He's working on other ways to get everybody fired. He's busy sexually harassing someone, I'm sure. Speaking of that, Uber's investigation into former Uber engineer Susan Fowler's claims of sexual harassment and general workplace hostility should be concluded by the end of this month.

We don't know too much about what's happening yet, but two key executives are coming under scrutiny as part of this investigation. Board director Ryan Graves and CTO Thuan Pham. Now, this is a longish article over at Recode. I highly recommend that you read it and do it in your own internal voice as like a soap opera voiceover.

OK. It is a fucking soap opera. This is all they talk about how Ryan Graves used to have Kalanick's, you know, close friendship with him. But then things went sour, which is when, you know, which is when all the allegations started to come out about him, because apparently Kalanick was keeping him at bay.

And oh, my God, it's unbelievable. It's like when you were young, didn't you look at adults and just kind of go someday, you know, I will be with these people and they will be true adults. And then you grow up and you find out everybody's still just a fucking kid. And everybody's so disappointing. It's so, so disappointing every day.

Yeah. Oh, well. Well, there's an interesting story in The New York Times called Remembering When Uber and Google Were Allies. It's a it's another long read, but it kind of goes back into the soap opera ish. Didn't we? We were we were talking about this back in the day.

Didn't we call it? We chimed in and said they should call it Goober. Yeah. Goober. Now it's going to be called Lamo. It's Lyft and Waymo got together. That's good. And they're going to start collaborating on self-driving cars, which is, you know, I always said it's like, you know, why do these ride sharing companies think that they need to develop the tech themselves?

Let somebody else do it and then, you know, rent or lease the fleet. But, you know, the writing's on the wall for these people. If if they don't have their self-driving cars and, you know, their fleets in 10 years, which is still, I think, what it's going to take at this point with all of the failures, especially with Uber self-driving cars.

Was it like, you know, eight interdictions per mile or some crap like that? Something insane. Yeah. But I mean, I think I really do think like like you had talked about back in the day, who is silently collecting all the best data? Tesla data points. Who do you not hear much about their self-driving program?

Who might just release one in two to three years that actually works? Exactly. A lot of that stock, everybody, because Tesla's awfully quiet about this and we know they're they're working on it. Yeah. The Model 3 is not going to have self-drivability, but I sure shit bet the Model 4 will.

Me too. Yep. I should I should get me some of that Lyft stock. Maybe I should sell my Twitter stock and go buy like a quarter share. You are you are not allowed to sell that that Twitter stock until the year's long bet is over. You are locked and loaded. You have to wait for that to vest, my friend.

Okay. Damn you. Damn you. And related to Uber, Uber Eats program, they have added McDonald's in more than 1000 locations. I remember when Uber Eats first started, I ordered it a few times because on the plus side, the godmother, the most delicious sandwich in the world available from Bay City's Italia Deli here in Santa Monica was on the list and it was relatively cheap and they have a crappy tiny parking lot that's always packed.

So I was like, this is awesome. And I got myself a godmother a couple of times. Then they expanded their menu a bit. And so a couple other things were in there. So I tried Fatburger, which is also a very decent burger. The fries and burger both showed up basically ice cold and disgusting.

The Fatburger is actually good. So why would I want to order a crappy cold burger? I do not want a shitty cold Big Mac. So thanks a lot, Uber, for nothing again. Yeah. You know, I got into this with some friends on Facebook. I'm like, I need a burger right now. Why is there no burger delivery service?

And basically everybody's like, yeah, burger delivery is just not going to work. It's just never going to work. Unless it's like a specialized burger delivery vehicle where they just have the meat, you know, cooked right and ready to go and not on the bun and they just assemble it at your door and then hand it to you. Yeah, it's just it doesn't keep that well.

And it's not like they just drive directly from the drive through to your house. This is that's not how these services work. These things sit around for a while. What we need is burger drone. I was going to say next thing we need are burger drones. Yeah, that's scary. That's scary. I think you're going to have to wait for that before you get your burger delivery.

Uh, what you can do now, though, at least it's getting rolled out as Facebook continues to try to dominate every aspect of your existence. You can now order food directly within Facebook's app itself. Uh, the hamburger has added a hamburger as it were. Okay. So, yeah, it's basically, uh, they're using, I think the delivery.com, uh, they've partnered with or something like that.

So they're rolling this out, uh, local it'll buy, it'll tell where you're at. Uh, it'll find the local restaurants that allow ordering online and you'll be able to do this all through the walled garden of Facebook without ever having to leave. Oh, yay. That's what I want. That's what you want.

At least it's not, uh, at least they're not using DoorDash. That's true. Yeah. Fun times. And, uh, Uber freight is, uh, making a splash in the news this week. And of course, as soon as I saw the headline about Uber freight, I read it as Uber freight. That's how I did too. Yeah. That's what I have.

I have Uber freight. Yeah, no doubt. Uh, so what they're doing is they're doing exactly what they do with people in taxis or, but using freight and truck drivers. Right. And it looks like they hired kind of a Tom Hanksian type character for their main, uh, loading image there.

Oh, I haven't. I looked at it a while ago. It was like some kind of, uh, carousel I thought before, but let's take a look at this guy. Yeah. He's a stepping out of his truck and staring off into the distance with a note of wonder in his eyes. Oh, that hat makes him look Amish. Right. It's like an Amish Hanks. Okay.

And he's in a rock quarry for some reason. So he must be lost. I love the stock photography is so good. Okay. So let's go back to burger drone. Uh, you no longer have to register personal drones with the FAA. Uh, first we, you know, announced that, uh, the FAA announced that you would have to register your drones.

And I said, I have no problem with that. That makes a lot of sense to me. These are 25 pound things flying over my head. I would like them to be registered just like you have to register your car and you have a license plate. Uh, but no, we've decided we don't want to do that. So there you go.

No, you no longer have to do it. Uh, so have at it people. And here's the interesting thing though. The drone industry is not happy about this. They shouldn't be. It makes sense. It's rational as we discussed when they first announced it. It just makes sense.

And, uh, I think the drone industry is behind it too, because if it's not registered, guess who gets sued? Yeah. If you can't find out who owned the drone, the drone makers get sued. So DJI's head of policy, Brendan Shulman says the FAA is innovative approach to drone registration was very reasonable and registration provides for accountability and education to drone pilots.

I expect the legal issue that impedes this program will be addressed by cooperative, cooperative work between the industry and policymakers. So, you know, it makes sense that they're behind it and it's odd that, oh, well, that's right. We're deregulating everything. Nevermind. Oh yeah. Keep in mind, we have to get rid of two rules for every new rule that we make.

So this is one of the rules that we got rid of. I guess so. Yeah. Uh, speaking of rules, San Francisco wants to put in some rules for these delivery robots that we've been seeing, uh, pop up. It basically looks like a, you know, a beer cooler with six wheels on it. Yep. Yeah. Uh, they're, they're showing up in San Francisco and, uh, Norman Yee.

Is introducing a bill banning them from San Francisco sidewalks and streets. I'm going to introduce a bill that says they will be allowed, but they have to make the noise that that little mouse robot makes on the death star. If they do that, I'm totally cool with it.

Yeah. He says our public spaces should not be commercialized. We cannot veer from our vision for San Francisco to be walkable, accessible, and safe, especially for seniors, people with disabilities and young children. Now I have a compromise. Put a seat on them. So the old people can ride them around like the old wedway people mover at Disney.

Nice. I think that would, I think that would work. That's that. I think that is a fine, you know, middle road, no pun intended for getting their delivery robots through, turn them into, turn them into little mini Ubers for old people. Yeah. I'm okay with that. I think that's kind of funny.

No, I really do think that these things need to be off the public roads for now. Same issue with drones. It's just, no, we're not sharing our public spaces with these things right now because we don't, we don't have, they haven't been around long enough that we don't have the technology. It's not quite there yet.

Whatever. And they're just getting away. You know, it's getting in the way all the time. Like I ride my bike, I would not look down to see one of these things unless it was going meep, meep, meep, meep. And what we, I think here's what we need. We need Elon Musk's, the boring company to bore under every city.

And then we just have tunnels for all of these things. We can have drone tunnels. We can have robot delivery tunnels. And we just put everything underground instead of flying overhead. And then we just have little access points where they pop up out of the ground and then give you your stuff and then go back underground. It's kind of like those old bank systems with the tubes.

You remember those? Exactly what I was thinking. Yep. A series of tubes. Yeah, that's pretty badass. Just like the internet. A series of tubes. Yes. And speaking of Elon Musk, Tesla's solar roof is now available to order. This stuff is out. It looks cool as crap. And they've actually built a Google Project sunroof calculator, which will help you calculate how much of a solar roof system will cost you depending on the location and size of your home and the percentage of solar covers desired.

And it will tell you how much you will save and how much energy you will generate and factor in tax credits with the cost of a complimentary Tesla Powerwall to reveal your full net savings. I, if I wasn't in a condo and I had my own roof, I would be looking into this right now. Yep. I actually had a guy from solar city come out to eat the house that we were in.

We recorded our drunken episode in Woodland Hills. Don't remember it at all. Yeah. Well, you remember that we were in a house that had a roof, right? Vaguely. Yes. Well, a solar city guy came out and he used Google Earth to actually do the math on the house just sitting there. And he did that calculation like in real time.

And it was pretty cool. So I can see how they can use this to, you know, basically get the dimensions of your roof and do the same thing. Because all they were doing before was using the same tech and just putting solar panels on top based on which side of the house faced which way and all that stuff. Yeah. So it's really cool tech. I was pretty amazed by, you know, how they did it right there on the spot.

Yeah. And by all accounts for most houses, it's cheaper than get, if you had to get a new roofing, this is cheaper. And it eventually will, like, I think most calculations say that within five years, obviously it depends on where you live and how much sun you get. But within five years, you're actually making money and you paid it back your investment and are making money, which is pretty cool.

And just to point out, though, it's not cheaper than an asphalt roof, like a regular roof. It's cheaper than a tile roof. A tile roof. Yes. Yeah. So that is a distinct change in pricing there because asphalt roofs are, you know, still expensive, but not nearly as expensive as a tile roof.

So they're kind of splitting the difference on that one. Fair enough. Okay. Snapchat and probably still around, but it is. So they've figured out that you need to make some money because they're not making any money and whatever they make, they end up paying to, what's his face?

I never remember his name. Evan something or other. Yeah. There's too many Evs and Evans and annoying people. Calendar, calendar, chucks or whatever, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, they're rolling out a new augmented reality ad unit that lets marketers pay so that users can see images of or worlds overlaid on the world around them through their phone's camera.

I have never understood this, uh, this, the impulse to basically just advertise for somebody else for free. So it's basically, look, look at all these cool things that you can now put on your snaps advertise for us. I, I, I understand that as much as I understood, like when people would wear the gigantic shirts that said guests on them, why shouldn't they pay you to wear that?

Why are you paying to use that? I don't get it. Well, I mean, that could be said for, for band shirts then too, you know? Yeah, I suppose it would be, but, uh, you know, at least the band, like I'm, I'm advertising something I really, really like. I'm not just wearing a shirt that says guests. And you're paying to, yeah, you're paying to advertise for that band shirt because it probably costs 50 bucks at a concert.

Yeah. But you know, there's a chance that I might get a date out of the band shirt. That's true. That's true. You're definitely not going to get a date playing around with snaps AR advertising. That's for sure. Yeah. How you can get a date with yourself. That's about the only guarantee that you're going to get right there. And then you can see if the filter works on other parts of your body.

Well, then we go back to the, the Pornhub filter. Yes. Which is genius. Oh man. Okay. So let's move on to some more Facebook news. They've been fined $122 million in Europe over misleading WhatsApp filings. Uh, this goes back to when the, the merger happened, the $19 billion merger with WhatsApp.

Uh, they said, no, we're never going to merge the user data from WhatsApp to Facebook. No, no, no. We're never going to do that. And even if we wanted to, we couldn't, they don't match up. It turns out they were lying. Go figure. What? And they were lying even back in 2014.

So the EU has said, uh, you owe us $122 million about thereabouts. Boy, that $122 million is really going to hurt Facebook. I know, seriously, let me, let me look in my pockets. Oh, I think I have some, yeah, here we go. Here's 150.

Keep the change. Yeah. And Facebook is now trying to fight bogus live streams by providing stricter rules. Um, so basically they're saying that a lot of people are starting to use live stream for no real, they're not actually doing a live stream. They're only showing animated images or polls that are linked to inanimate material.

Uh, basically just try to get your attention. Uh, gee, I wonder why businesses would have to do that. Could it be because Facebook spent so much time trying to get businesses to come and build their business on Facebook and then yank the fucking carpet out from underneath them?

I wonder, I wonder why they're trying to play with the rules of Facebook to try to get attention again. You fucking bastards. Yep. Yep. Anyways. So after pushing live to businesses for so long, they're now basically saying you can't use it anymore unless you use it the way that we want you to use it.

Yeah. Here's a picture of my balls. Shut up. Exactly. It's such a, such a fucking joke. Uh, anyways, if let's try to get back to the world that we actually want, where content shouldn't be free. Uh, this woman, Jessica lesson lesson has built a business to prove information doesn't have to be free.

I have never heard of the information. Uh, I probably have not heard of the information because as I say, $400 per year annual subscription I know. Well, on the one hand, we say that, you know, people should pay for contents. And on the other hand, we also go $400 a year.

Are you crazy? And you kind of are. Um, I get where she's coming from. Her site launched in late 2013 and provides deeply reported tech and business news. You know, like the sort of stuff you can get from the wall street journal and new york times if you subscribe to them for a lot less money.

Yeah. I'm sure it's deeper. It's, you know, it's probably like, well, you just go to tech crunch, obviously. Uh, I mean that's free. And, uh, well, they do nag you for your ad blocker, but anyway, 400 bucks a year. I can see as a business resource, if they'll get one subscription for the company, have an intern go through and basically copy everybody on the internal mailing list of anything that matters.

Exactly. I wonder, uh, how this is going to play out because the old paywall seems to not work all that well. No, I'm, I'm, you know, I like everything she's saying. Obviously I agree with her, you know, I, I don't think that content should be free. I think people should pay for it.

Um, but I will see if her, if her business is still around in another year or two, because we don't see it working out there. No, uh, I mean, yeah, try and break some ground, but historically the paywall just does not work. I mean, I do pay for the, the New York times, you know, I pay like, you know, probably close to a hundred bucks a year for actual physical paper delivery.

Plus the digital edition and I'm fine with that. A hundred bucks a year. I find a reasonable amount. Four hundred bucks is a little ridiculous. Especially when it's, you know, just tech and business news. Yep. But I mean, that's probably where the money is. So that's why she goes, goes where that, that sector is because these people have just more money than they know what to do with.

Must be nice. Yeah. And guess what? Sweden has dropped Julian Assange's rape investigation. Okay. Why? Uh, because apparently it was impossible to serve him notice. That does not mean that he didn't do it or they don't think he didn't do it.

That just means they've given up on it because they can't get to him. And I'm sure the statute of limitations is probably getting really close to running out on that. Yeah, probably. And I seem to remember the girls just don't really care. So that was one of the other things. It's just one of those weird investigations that have been going.

But here's the other problem now. He still can't leave. Yep. Because the Brits want to arrest him for skipping out on a court date. So he can serve up to a year in jail or a fine, but he's still not leaving. Even though, even though he came out saying that if Chelsea Manning was released, he would come back to the U.S. for extradition.

And he hasn't yet. And Manning was released this week. But now he's saying, of course, he's got to cut his own deal with U.S. authorities before he'll do it. Yeah. One step forward, three steps back. You slimy piece of shit. Of all the weirdness of the Assange story and everything that's going on with that, I still stand by the fact that the absolute fucking craziest thing of the whole story is how in love Pam Anderson is with this guy.

I did not know that. Oh, my God. Google it. Okay. Did you ever see the Cumberbatch movie with him? No. Yeah. Me neither. I don't think I ever will. Me neither. Unless Benedict Cumberbatch also plays his cat in the movie.

Now, that I would pay for. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner for Security. What's going on, guys? Hello, gentlemen.

Hello, everybody. You know, I finally had a chance to listen to a drunky old guy. Geeks from a couple of weeks ago. Oh, my. Anybody have any good jokes? You know, it's not a requirement for you to go back and listen to those. Oh, it's not? Oh, that'll give me so much more free time.

No, actually, it looked like you guys – it sounded like you guys were having a good old time. It was actually a fun, loose episode, and I only wish I could have been there in person to join in. But maybe someday we'll all meet together and we can raise a glass or two and have ourselves a jolly old time.

Or seven or eight or nine or ten. Yeah, who's counting? After the first few, you lose count, right? Exactly. All right. Well, shall we jump right in there with the security stuff? Let's do it. Let's do it. So I saw on Wired this week they're saying that the WannaCry ransomware hackers have a link to North Korea.

What do you think about this, Dave? Well, it's all very speculative at this point. Of course, WannaCry is the big ransomware attack that started a week ago Friday. And it's really been the story in the news besides WannaCry.

It's been kind of a slow week in cybersecurity. So WannaCry took off like a wildfire, started spreading around the world. But fortunately, a security researcher stumbled across a sinkhole for it. He was able to activate basically a domain or a website that WannaCry checks to see if it's active.

And if it is active, WannaCry doesn't run. It basically quits out. So he is credited with stopping a much broader spread of WannaCry. And we speculated last week that right now they're removing all the safeties from their weapons, just like the torpedoes in Red October and removing the kill switch.

Well, you know, yeah, but it really hasn't come to pass. I mean, there have been other versions that have been released. But the ones that have been out so far all seem to have, you know, things wrong with them. It has not spread as quickly as people feared it would.

And according to the people who tracked the Bitcoin payments, the group who did this, whoever it was, really hasn't made that much money. And it's also, the people who've reversed engineered it have said it's really not very well built. And it seems like they clearly weren't prepared for the amount of traffic that they generated.

It's a pretty sloppy piece of business. Well, then it might be North Korea. Well, it might be. So what they're saying is there's, evidently, there's a bit of code in WannaCry that researchers have seen in other pieces of software that have been credited with being from North Korea.

So that could be a false flag, but they think it's probably unlikely. They suspect that it might be North Korea. But at this point, it's all very circumstantial. No one really knows for sure. But that's the first real lead. And sort of the bigger picture is that the belief is that Korea is turning to this sort of thing because North Korea needs the money.

With the sanctions against them, they are turning to cybercrime to be a major source of revenue to keep the country running. They're not doing it very good, are they? No. No. You know, the payment method for WannaCry and the method for getting your files unlocked to get your decryption key is remarkably manual and, you know, labor-intensive.

So not a very sophisticated piece of work. Well, you know, if the North Korean hackers listen to Grumpy Old Geeks, they would know that right now that there is ransomware on demand with a beautiful dashboard and automated payments and customer service. So if they would just outsource it, then they might actually make a few Bitcoin.

Yeah. Don't you see the people who are selling that? Yeah, the people who are selling that are banging their head against their desk, you know. Why didn't they buy our product? Why didn't they buy our product? Well, this attack is so mainstream that I've actually heard people talking about it on basically like mainstream radio shows and things of that nature that would never discuss this sort of stuff.

And from the mouths of babes, as it were, somebody did bring up a good point. Who is stupid enough to click on something to get infected by this rather clumsy ransomware, but smart enough to figure out how to get Bitcoin? Yeah, that's always the big problem.

It's like, yeah. Well, it is a worm. So it spreads, you know, on its own. Once the initial infection happens, it starts worming its way around within your network. And it also goes out looking for other potentially infectable systems around.

So it's not merely a phishing campaign. It's worming its way around as well. But yeah, it's a good point. Well, the general target obviously is not my mom or dad. It is trying to get into some sort of company that has data they are willing to pay to get back. Yeah, and older systems, industrial control systems, hospitals, these old Windows systems that haven't been patched or couldn't have been patched.

Oh, you know, speaking of the XP thing, like I was talking last week about why these hospitals don't upgrade from XP. Well, apparently, like those old $15 to $20 million MRI machines, they run on embedded XP. So they can't, and the companies that made them are sometimes out of business.

So even if they wanted to, they can't upgrade it because there's no upgrade path. There's just nobody's home. The company's shuttered and everybody's moved on. So they're stuck with this $15 million, basically just giant black hole waiting to get exploited. Yeah. We made the point on the Cyber Wire this week.

We actually talked to a gentleman named Joe Weiss who's an industrial control systems expert. And he made the point that with a lot of these embedded systems, you have to really prove that the patch is going to do no harm first because these systems are mission critical.

So when, for example, Microsoft releases a patch, these systems can't necessarily be patched immediately. You have to really test the patch to make sure it's not going to break something else and take down the grid or the dam or the controller for the trains or those sorts of things.

So what that does is that puts a delay in effect, and that's where the bad guys can take advantage of that delay. Right. Insane. Yeah. Now, related to WannaCry, we talked earlier about how the use of that sinkhole really stopped the spread of WannaCry.

Well, it seems like other hackers, just for the fun, just for the lulls, are trying to DDoS that sinkhole. Great. Yeah. So people are jerks, right? I think we've established that throughout the course of this podcast.

Right. Now, I know you said that this is basically the only real story in town in the security area. I think Disney CEO Bob Iger might disagree with you that there might be some bigger news that's also occurring this week in security. At his, let's see, I think it was his town hall with ABC employees in New York City.

On Monday, he disclosed that hackers had stolen an unnamed forthcoming Disney title and were threatening to release the film unless Disney pays a ransom. Now, it has since come to light that the film is, of course, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Men Tell No Tales, and the jokes flew fast and furious, such as, can we pay the hackers to destroy the film so it never gets released?

Yeah, of course. But they are basically threatening to release first five minutes, I guess, to prove that they have it, and then followed by 20-minute chunks until interest dies because the movie is so shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and, of course, this happened earlier with Orange is the New Black with Netflix, and they did not pay the ransom.

Yeah, Disney is not paying the ransom. And Disney is not going to pay the ransom either, so quite interesting. I wonder about this because this certainly isn't the first time that movies have been released online before the theatrical release, or certainly, I would say, I mean, most movies end up online concurrently with the theatrical release.

Somebody's in that midnight showing with a handycam, you know, just so they have the ability to say first, right? I think the fear this time around, particularly for a movie like this, is, yes, there is some domestic box office that occurs, obviously, but these movies, these gigantic movies, are targeted squarely overseas nowadays, particularly China.

That's where the bulk of the money to be made at the box office will occur, and the ease of pirating these days, as we've discussed the Cody boxes on our show many times, has changed the game, particularly overseas. And once this hits, if this hits without even getting into the theater, nobody overseas is going to go see it.

They're all just going to watch it on their boxes. Yeah, but like Dave said, most of these movies are available on Cody boxes and on BitTorrent at the same time. Yeah, but those are generally like handheld somebody in a theater with a camera. No, you're not on the back channels I'm on. Okay.

The argument can be made, though, that people that are going to steal it were never going to go to the theater anyway. Yeah, true. There's always that argument to be made, and, you know, there are a lot of movies that, you know, I know how to get everything that I could possibly want under the sun, but I prefer going to the theater, so I give them my money to do that.

And, you know, that's kind of, I think, what a lot of these people are going to be relying on, that people go for the experience and the big screen and, you know, popcorn. It smells like that. Well, yeah, watching a movie with a group of people is different than watching with just a group of friends at home, even, or by yourself and, oh, I don't know, your dog.

Hey, watch it. No, like, right now I can go get Guardians of the Galaxy 2, but I'm going to wait until the weekend and go see it in the theater because that's, you know, that's kind of what I want to do. And just the fact that I can steal it means that there are people out there that the people that are going to steal it are still going to steal it.

And, you know, you hope for residuals that might want to go see it in the theater if they get a crappy copy. Who knows? Well, by this argument, then, I think Netflix is definitely more concerned because that's not much of a different experience. And that's a Netflix TV show that you would watch at home alone anyways. Yeah, I didn't get that one because they only released the first 10 episodes, not the full 13.

It's a good point, though. It's a good point. It's interesting to me that it's so far these Hollywood folks have not paid any of the ransom. So I wonder if there's a back channel conversation going on where they're all saying, don't don't feed the trolls.

You know, we're not going to pay the ransom. And so if this doesn't become profitable, maybe they'll move on to something else. Yeah, they just draw a line in the sand and say, no, we will not negotiate with the hackers. Yeah. Right. As it should be. A friend of the show, Andreas Krohn, sent us a bit of a hell of an article, to be honest.

RealPublica.org has been a little busy. Any half-decent hacker can break into Mar-a-Lago. I just love what these guys did. They parked a 17-foot motorboat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach and pointed a two-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun towards the club.

Within a minute, they spotted three weekly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained. A few days later, they drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey with the same antenna and named it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password.

We resisted the temptation. It goes on and on. They went around to a lot of the places, basically found that every single Trump property is completely vulnerable to hacking. Normally, this would be no big deal. It's just a company is doing a bad job of security, except for the fact that the leader of the free world has basically tried to declare that Mar-a-Lago is the winter White House.

The White House is secure. Both President Obama and President Bush vacationed at the more traditional presidential retreat, Camp David, which is military-run and secure. Yeah, well, you know, because Jared Kushner has been a little busy lately, so he hasn't got around to put all the patches on the servers at Mar-a-Lago yet.

He'll get there, I'm sure, when he gets back from whatever he's up to now. Yep. So we've got some issues there. I too found this story fascinating, although I'm really trying to figure out what exactly the story is here.

You know, it's sort of president visits a lot of public places. Public places have insecure Wi-Fi. Well, he's having top-secret dinners at Mar-a-Lago. So if you can get into the security system through the Wi-Fi, the unencrypted Wi-Fi that they have sitting open there and then break into the systems, then you can theoretically snoop on the president.

It's important to remember that he did order the bombing of Syria at dinner at Mar-a-Lago. If he's conducting this sort of business in these locations, if he's there every single weekend, it does become an issue. Now, before I get yelled at for being a snowflake, let me tell you what Jared Kushner is theoretically doing.

So I have one story that smacks him and another that pats him on the head gently. Trump and his top aides met with Republican lawmakers this week to discuss ways to modernize government. This is an interesting story about how they're calling for about $500 million in funds to upgrade the government's aging tech tools.

And I fully support this. This is a very good idea. Yeah, we need to bring up our tech infrastructure as much as we do our regular infrastructure in this country. I agree. This is a good idea. $500 million is no money. Yeah, drop in the bucket.

So that's interesting. Funny that there were no Democrats invited to this meeting. I guess not surprising. But the other thing that I thought was interesting about this article was how they said the president dropped in unexpectedly.

And it just got me thinking about what must that be like when the president drops in unexpectedly when you're having a tech meeting? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Or, you know, is your meeting hijacked? And, you know, I don't know. It just struck me as being kind of a funny situation to have President Trump, who is famously not tech savvy, to drop in on a meeting like this.

I've also, it brings to mind, can you name any president in the modern era that has been able to do anything unexpectedly? You know, they're scheduled up the ass. They've got security details. That's interesting.

Where was this meeting held? Was it in the White House? I don't know. I didn't see that specifically in the article. Because he could have just been wandering around, you know. Right. Well, yeah. It was probably a commercial break on one of his favorite shows. So he was wandering around.

Fox and Friends was running a few commercials. Yeah. Yeah. They were running the long ad for, you know, the emergency response necklace. Yeah. But, you know, I agree. Look, the Modernizing Government Technology Act is a good thing.

It needs more money. It desperately, yeah. This is a drop in the bucket. It's not money. But, hey, you know, if this is a step in the right direction, there are so many federal systems that desperately need to be upgraded. Why not? It's a good thing. So, United Continental Holdings had sent out an alert last week about a breach in cockpit door security procedures.

Why? Why, you may ask? Well, a flight attendant mistakenly posted information that included the access codes to all of the cockpits on all of their planes on a public website. That's immediately proving that even if we spend $500 million upgrading equipment, it doesn't matter because people are stupid.

Indeed. Well, yeah. Yeah. I just want to know what website would she be posting to where she just happened to randomly post the keys to the cockpit door? Blowtheplane.com. Was she, like, tweeting for Sean Spicer or something?

What the hell? How did it come up? Under what sort of online conversation would you be in the midst of where the code for the cockpit doors would be the subject matter of that conversation? We're holding your child hostage. Give us the keys.

I'm having an affair with the pilot. I want to be able to get in and surprise him. I'm out of ideas about why anybody would be discussing this. Yeah. Yeah. But there you have it. So we can be sure that those have been changed. The little, I mean, I guess...

No, we can't be sure that they've been changed. Oh, they did say that they went and immediately changed them because it was a pretty big story. I go back and forth on whether or not I'm surprised that all the planes had the same code. That doesn't really surprise me.

It's kind of like all the FedEx boxes have the same code to get in, you know? Yeah. I guess it makes sense with, especially with your flight crews bouncing from plane to plane. It's really not practical. You know, you'd think that maybe if there was a master code that you then combined with, say, the flight number or some, you know, some way to vary it.

Some kind of obfuscation of the flight and the date and the route or something. Or have, you know, those old code books that they had in the old movies in the 80s where they would do the nuclear launch codes and they had a little plastic that they would have to crack and pull out the codes for the day. You'd think they'd have something like that.

Right. Because how often does it come up? Has it ever come up? What kind of idiot would he use? One, two, three, four, five as a password. Change my luggage. Yeah. Well, moving on to our final story this week. I had a story in TechCrunch about a company who has come up with some technology that can monitor security camera feeds.

So your local 7-Eleven, your convenience store, your grocery store, places that have security cameras and using artificial intelligence, which Brian, I know, is one of your favorite subjects. Using artificial intelligence can analyze the footage and provide a quick alert if it spots someone who is either wearing a mask or holding a gun.

Pattern recognition is an artificial intelligence. Pattern recognition is not artificial intelligence. All right. But I like the idea. I would have to agree with you on that. And here's my problem with the whole thing. In reading the article, it says, if one network isn't quite sure whether something is a gun, the imagery gets sent to a quote-unquote binary specialist network that gives a second opinion.

If it looks bad enough, it goes to a human as an alert in a Slack channel who can alert the authorities. If no one responds within a few seconds, it goes to a backup human. What if Slack goes down? Oops. Sorry. Why would you, in any way, shape, or form, would you want to have something that is security-related on a third-party chat system?

Yeah, you don't. And I wonder if the Slack bot that actually pops up and informs somebody is the part that they consider the AI. It could be. Yeah. This is a great idea. Yeah, and it does have human backup.

I mean, this article says that what it does is it allows a single human to monitor about 500 cameras. My impression was the way that it worked is you have a computer monitoring all these cameras. It sees something that it thinks is either a gun or a mask or a combination of both, and then it sends a ping to the human and says, hey, I think this is something here.

The human then looks at it and decides, okay, this is actionable or not. That was how I read it. My initial reaction to it was, before I knew there was a human involved, was what if someone, say, someone who's a Sikh comes into the store, who's wearing a turban and has a big bushy beard, right?

I could easily see the system saying, whoa, there's a guy with a mask and a hood on because all I see are eyes and everything else about his face is covered and call out an alert. But if there is actually a second line of defense where really what it's doing is alerting a human, and giving a human the ability to monitor many more cameras, then I think this might be a good thing.

This has to be a California company because six months out of the year, 90% of the population here is wearing hats and scarves, so the system is going to go bug nutty. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The 7-Eleven in Aspen, Colorado is getting a lot of hits.

No doubt. Especially if you come in, you know, and so I've got my hat, my scarf on, and then I go pick up a candy bar and hand it to the guy and it looks like I'm pointing a gun at him. I don't want John Q. Law coming and knocking me down outside the door. That's just not cool.

All I want is a Butterfinger. So here's the thing, Brian. What if the AI part is not actually the pattern recognition? What if the AI part is learning what is to weed out false positives, getting better at refining the patterns and learning on its own what is good and bad?

What if the AI is that part, not necessarily just the image recognition? Then I would potentially sign off on the use of AI, but somehow I don't think that's what it is. And I just want to quickly point out something because I went to their site really quickly just to try to see if they're a California company. This is ostensibly a security company, correct?

Because I just went to deepscience.ai and Chrome is telling me that my connection is not private and attackers might be trying to steal information from deepscience.ai and their certificate authority is invalid. So you might want to fix that, guys.

Self-signed is not secure. You only have one chance to make a first impression as a security company. Well, I think that theirs just went away. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it for this week, gentlemen. Until next time.

Until next time. Everybody, go check out the CyberWire at thecyberwire.com. At the library. We are both fans of Charlie Strauss's Laundry Files novels here on the show.

And we're both caught up and ready for the new one, which is coming, I believe, July 11th, 2017. If you cannot wait, and I would say you should because I hate reading one chapter and then waiting for the rest of it. And waiting and waiting and waiting. Yeah. And waiting and waiting.

But I understand that this is a good way to drum up interest and make sure that the word gets out that the book is coming. So the entire first chapter is now available to read on Gizmodo and various other places as well. So you can get into it and read the first chapter if you want. I'm going to pass on that.

Me too. I'm waiting for the full book. Yeah. I've got it pre-ordered and it will appear on my Kindle in the morning. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I haven't gotten it pre-ordered because I don't know when the Audible version is coming out. But when it does, I will get that. But I finally got around to reading Red Shirts by John Scalzi.

How good was that book? Oh my God. Was that an amazing book? I was a little let down by the end where I went with it. But it was such a fun read. I enjoyed the ending. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed everything about the book.

I had so many alternate theories about what was going to happen in the middle of it. But I'm not going to... We can talk about them off the air because I don't want to put any spoilers in here. Yeah, we would have read it. We really can't talk about the book unless it's a spoiler cast. Yeah.

But man, I finished it this morning and I went straight through. I started yesterday and I finished it this morning. And oh my God, was that fun. They need to make this into a movie. If it's not being made already. I think it's been developed a few times.

The problem is, you know, Galaxy Quest. And if you get too close to Star Trek, then you're infringing on their content. So, you know. Yeah. Well, they need to do it at Paramount. Or actually, no, CBS now. Sorry. CBS. Yes. But oh my God, it was so good.

Yeah, great read. Highly recommended book. A lot of fun. Yeah. You got anything coming up for next week? I have taken a break from my traditional sci-fi and I'm currently reading a book that's kind of an alternative history. It's slow going.

It's a lot about. So yeah, I hope to have it done for next week. Okay, cool. And there was a sale at Audible this week. So I got Red Rising by Pierce Brown and the other one, the second one, The Golden Sun. So there are three books in here.

And this came from a, you know, listener recommendation last week. And I saw it was on sale. It was like buy one, get one free. So I got the first two books for one credit. So I will check those out for next week. Awesome. Cops and doodads. Brian, everywhere I go, I see these damn fidget spinners and little fidget toys, especially from like boing boing ads all the damn time, which are basic.

They're basically skateboard bearings with a little piece of plastic on it. What the hell is going on? Can't people focus anymore without having some kind of googa and doodad? No. Apparently not. Twitter has killed attention. I don't know what these things are.

My son is far too young. I have some friends that have kids in the right age range. They've posted about them. They've appeared out of nowhere. And there are articles that just appear in my newsfeed for no reason. I can tell constantly about these things. You know, half of them are selling them to me.

The other half are telling me that these will destroy life as we know it because that's how all articles have to be written nowadays to get the clicks. And I just figure, you know, in another month or two, we'll never hear about them again. Yeah, it's the new Pet Rock. I mean, every store I go to, even at 7-Eleven, the guy that sold me my sandwich the other day was playing with one because they had a big display.

I go to CVS. They've got them. Everywhere I go, these things have to cost like 16 cents to make and they're selling for like 10 bucks. Yeah, it's insane. Yeah. It's not, you know, aren't we all just sitting on our phones fidgeting with those already? I tell you what, man, I took Facebook and Twitter off my phone this week.

Oh, it's been so nice. Nice. Well, I'll tell you what I took off my phone finally. Spark. We had talked about the mail replacement program a while back. You were trying it out and said you liked it and then I tried it out and I said I liked it and I've given up on it because it's just not really useful.

Well, on my phone it's useful because I've got seven Gmail accounts and it still works fine on my phone. I took it off my Mac because it sucks on the Mac. It crashes all the damn time. It was a memory hog. I liked it for what it was, but, you know, yeah. For me, it's not good.

It's, you know, they say, you know, it's the smart, you know, you need a smart inbox. Mac mail is smart enough for me, apparently. Maybe 10 years ago, this would have been useful to me when I was getting a ton of email, but now that communication is so spread out, it's everywhere.

Like, what I need is an app that basically brings in my email, my Facebook messages, my WhatsApp messages, my text messages. You know, I'm getting conversations in multiple places all over the place. Email, a lot less. I mean, I just don't get that much email compared to other forms of communication now.

Yeah, I've noticed that my email has gone down drastically in the past, like, maybe year and a half. Yeah, because it used to just even be, you know, the personal stuff all went to text or Facebook Messenger. Business stuff was still email, but now with things like Slack and we'll probably talk about Quip next week because we're going to be trying that out, just not that much email.

Yeah, I mean, I still use, for my business email, I actually use the browser and the Gmail interface because I use Boomerang, which is a great app for, you know, sending stuff back if somebody doesn't reply in X amount of time. And it doesn't work on any other platform except the Gmail interface, which sucks.

But there it works great. Everything else, I've just got so many damn Gmail addresses. I wish I could pair them down to, you know, just a few, but I went with AirMail 3 on the desktop. Right. That seems to work better than Spark. It's still like a unified inbox for all of my, I've got like six Gmail addresses in there.

Works fine. I don't need smart inboxes. I just need a list of everything that I have to look at and preferably delete or reply to, you know? Yep, that's basically it. So, I mean, Spark, I liked you. The one thing that actually really bugged me about it is I found it very hard to delete an email with just one finger because you had to swipe right, right, right, right, right, right, all the way right because if just the beginning swipe would pin it and so I was pinning all these emails I was trying to delete while I was like out on my bike rides and I was like, okay, that's just annoying me now.

I'm getting rid of this. Yeah, you got to like swipe and hold and go from there. You can change the default behavior and the preferences, but who's going to do that? I'm just too damn lazy and MacMail works just fine. For you because you've got one account, you know? Yep. So, when you have multiple accounts, MacMail is kind of just the devil.

Anyway, Things 3 came out this week. I am a huge fan of things. I've used it since version 1 the first week it came out and I've kind of gone back to paper for a lot of my to-dos, but I'm finding that I'm going back to using things and an online version just because when I'm out and about or dealing with something, it's just so much easier to just speak it into my phone and have it show up on all my devices.

Yeah. And I use, you know, for my writing stuff, I'm using a field notes, like one of these big pets. What is this? What do you call this one? I don't know. It's like, you know, a steno book. Like a bigger steno book so it doesn't fit in my pocket and I tried the pocket ones. They're too small. So, I just take notes on it on my desk but I've always got a pad of paper next to me and a pen.

Yep. But for to-dos, I like things and this new version is pretty nice. They've added a new interface to it and a bunch of new features that it was worth it for me to upgrade across all my platforms so I did and I like it. I get it. I mean, I still am mostly pen and paper.

I just like physical lists that I can cross off on but I do use Apple Notes especially since they added the shared feature. That is fantastic because now shopping list is basically a shared note between my wife and I. We can both add to it at any point in time. We also have a joint to-do list kind of the master like, you know, do we need more diapers?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, it's very useful for that. I don't need anything quite as intense as things but it's a nice looking program and if I, you know, could convince the wife to install this and share things then maybe that would be of use but right now Notes is doing it for us and it's free. Yeah, and this show is going to come out on the 22nd and I think you have a couple days to get the 20% off price if you're checking it out for now because I think they knocked off like $10.

Right. For the people like me who are upgrading because the thing about things that I used to bitch about it on the show was like every time they did an upgrade which was once in the past they went from things one to things two and you had to buy it from scratch because it was a full rewrite and they'd taken a long time in between and, you know, I bitched about that but this time it's been like three years since they've updated it and they did a really good job on this update so I paid for it.

I think and in the past it was a lot more expensive and it's actually much cheaper now like the phone version I think is $10 the iPad version is $20 and the desktop version was $60 so, you know, I mean $40 so you're looking at $70 across all platforms but for what it does for me and it comes with their free for life cloud sync so you're not using iCloud you're using their service right it just works so I'm willing to pay for something that works and looks really good now speaking of something

that doesn't work Google's assistant has arrived on the iPhone this week have you tried this thing? no because I actually don't even use Siri yeah well this is supposed to be super Siri yeah I can't get it to do anything besides tell me it can't understand the request or it just simply crashes so really?

yeah so I guess all those tech articles that I saw that talked about how amazing this was and how Siri was in so much trouble because Google assistance has arrived on the iPhone actually didn't try to use it yeah the damn thing does not work okay gotcha and I'm using the demo questions for it and I'm still getting I'm sorry I can't understand your request it's like well sorry what am I going to do?

right nothing well what are you going to do? there you go well Google I.O. is this week and they like put out a bunch of updates to Google Home and it's interesting I don't think I'm going to get a Google Home because I've already have you know an Echo yep and I'm just you know I'm just going to sit back and watch the the home automation wars yeah pretty much because Amazon's going to catch up to what Google can do I think the interesting thing about Google Home though

is that they're tying into the home into your Chromecast so if you've got Chromecast on all your TVs you can you can have it do things on your TV which is a nice nice hack yeah I hope Amazon gets there with that because with their Amazon fire sticks and things like that so yeah I haven't even tried I don't have a fire stick so maybe maybe they already have that with the Echo have you tried it with yours?

no I don't have a fire stick either I actually have one on order it comes on Monday but I was going to install Cody on it I was going to do that as an experiment for the show but maybe I'll give it a go and see how the Echo integration is and what it does with the TV before I wipe the operating system on it yeah give it a shot see what it does because I'm not going to buy a fire stick because I'm out of HDMI ports I've got I've got an Apple TV I've got a Goobang I've got the Chromecast

and I've got something else you know what I've got plugged into it I've got a Blu-ray player plugged into it for I don't know why I've got a Blu-ray DVD player plugged into mine too and it literally once a year when it comes Christmas time we pop in Love Actually because my wife always wants to watch that movie around Christmas time that is the only reason that that is the only reason I have a DVD player still yeah I've got a bunch that I a bunch of Blu-rays that I got not too long ago when I got the player because I'm like oh let's see what it looks like on my nice TV and then I got a 4k TV

and I'm like oh now everything looks like it's low res again but I've got a couple DVDs that I still need to watch once I'm done with that I'm just going to pack it up and throw it in the closet yep that is garage sale material for the future for sure totally oh the other reason I had the DVD player was that was the only way that I could play Amazon Prime video for a long time because it was built into my Sony Blu-ray player and that was the only way that I could play Prime now it's built into the TV

so who needs a Blu-ray player I don't need plastic discs what is this 1982 exactly you're a Chrome user right you like the Google Chrome yeah it's fine I mean I've got as a legacy of being an old web dev I've got everything installed all the browsers yep and every now and then I take a spin through all of them and they're you know it's they're all pretty fucking close to the same these days it's ridiculous Opera is not

Opera has come out with a new version there's a blog post saying Opera is reborn I think this is Opera 15 or something crazy like that who knew Opera was still around for starters I had thought the fat lady saying a long time ago I installed this new version of Opera and color me impressed really it is incredibly fast incredibly fast and you want to talk about something it's got your whatsapp and it's got your facebook messenger and all that built into it and a bunch of other things it's got extensions

so I got one password to work on it right out of the gate it's really really nice the thing is it's not nearly as bloated as Chrome because the problem that everybody's having with Chrome now is it's a memory hog since every tab has to have its own sandbox resource allocation you get 50 tabs open if you don't have you know a metric shit ton of RAM the thing is going to bog right plus all of the background processing that goes on you know and we've tried you know those extensions that pause tabs and

things like that they work they work to some extent but for the most part I am impressed as hell with this new Opera I'm working on transitioning over because like we mentioned before we're going to talk about quip next week and so I don't have to have a lot of extensions running in the in the actual browser the only one that really matters to me was one password but Opera has built-in ad blocking they've got all sorts of stuff that are built into this thing and it's it's pretty damn

nice I gotta say I definitely recommend giving it a shot I will give it a go yeah definitely and uh speaking of reborn flatter we we've talked about flatter we want flatter I want flatter to bloom and blossom and be the way that we pay other people for you know the stuff that they do online and they were bought by IO the makers of ad block ad block plus and ad block browser and they're working on a new browser extension that does

flattering in the background for you so you don't even have to think about it it just takes the most recent or the most visited sites that you go to and I'm hoping there's a blacklist because a lot of people are gonna be giving a lot of money to Facebook if that's true and then just spreads the money out that you say every month I want to I want to give 20 bucks a month and then it spreads that money out depending on how much you visit the sites that you go to it's it's in beta right now they've got a cute little video that'll be in the show notes and I'm rooting for them I'm really rooting for them I don't think it's

gonna work in my heart of hearts I don't think it's gonna work there are some obvious problems which is like if you're a podcaster I never visit podcast websites I just listen to their podcast unless it's grumpy old geek so go to gog.show and check out our awesome show notes with the new timestamps to jump the different chapters and sign up with flatter first so we get a buck or two I mean there's so many obvious issues with this I wanted to you know I'm with you on this I want micropayments and and simple content creation

payments to work I just don't know if this is gonna be it well and when it comes to podcasts that's why we have different avenues of monetization as they say in the biz we've got patreon and we've got PayPal so if people want to really you know float us a few bones go to patreon.com slash gog and you can do it there but I'm just you know for other other areas I'm hoping that this picks up and takes off my like I said in my gut I just don't think it's gonna work yeah sadly

media candy so I'm still loving the YouTube TV I gotta say all right I mean I've heard good things about it now that they're beefing up the channels that are available yeah we got new channels this week we've got AMC BBC America IFC Sundance TV we TV Telemundo and Universal so maybe I can watch some some soccer games on there go yes you can I was actually

just looking at that going huh maybe I should get one of these and I finally got my free Chromecast after having to deal with the idiots at Google customer service so you click on the link you get the email that says hey your free Chromecast is ready click on this link and you go to the cart and for me I kept going there and it says currently unavailable and I'm like what and the thing about it is you know how Google works with multiple Google accounts and you usually see in the upper right which account you're logged

in as yes it's the most janky system how they have not come up with something better is unbelievable to me they spend too much time working on Google plus to actually fix the problems and well on the store you don't even see that it's not there so you have to go through seven layers of of settings to find which account you're logged into and before I did that I assumed that it would put me into the right account because it knows where the email came from and it would log me you know sign me over to that account well no it doesn't so after like

20 chats with Google customer service I'm like well let me dig into this and I finally figured out that it was the wrong account that it was loading up as and then I got my Chromecast and it came faster than they said it was going to which was nice so I've been I've been actually playing YouTube TV from my phone throwing it to the Chromecast and it works pretty well I gotta say the interface for YouTube TV still sucks but you know what are you gonna do they gotta fix that but so far so so good

you know I'm not regretting my dumping of Hulu because everything I used to watch on Hulu is on YouTube TV right and I get to watch shows immediately after they air like I missed Chicago Fire Chicago PD one of those you know stupid popcorn shows I watch and it was out an hour after it was live on Hulu it takes 24 hours yeah that's pretty cool all right well good on you YouTube yep and you still listen to still entitled the Adam Savage project right

yes and no now it really depends on what the show is about because I feel like they're just doing so much insider baseball now or they're all traveling and the sound is so horrible it's unlistenable I know they need they seriously need to hire me or check out my podcast course at podcasting that's cool considering the amount of money they're making per episode Jason I don't think they give a fuck no they don't I mean well I know their numbers and I know how much their ads sell for so I know exactly how much money they make an episode but it's

enough to figure out how to do it remotely and not sound like a tool but this latest episode got me thinking it's like they were talking about all these makers and how they just make stuff for fun you know everybody's putting in all this time and their own money and making these things just be for the love of making it just really I got really reminiscent of the old days of coders like when you and I and all of our friends like rigs and all those guys we would sit around over the weekends and just make stuff because we love to make stuff for the fun of it

yep and it's just I was I was jealous honestly of the maker community because I miss that aspect of what we used to do on the web because now it's just a cesspool and nobody really cares and we've both basically retired yeah there's nothing fun to build on the web anymore it's not it's just it doesn't exist you're gonna well I mean we can make alexis skills woo you know I keep considering it it's on it's on my to-do list is to make the grumpy old geeks alexis skill but then I'm like who's gonna actually use it why am I doing this and

really it's just learning a new language and it's a very specific set of codified instructions there's no exploration I'm not blazing a trail you're read you're reading an API manual and typing in like a monkey exactly so I should just be able to say Alexa build me an Alexa skill yeah seriously Alexa here's the URL for the RSS feed make me a skill exactly call it grumpy and we're done so it's on my list I'll get around to it so those of you with one dude don't even bother

seriously go go hang out with your kid it's more fun that is true and I'm a huge Lewis Black fan and I found out he's got an audible channel now called the rant is due with Lewis Black so if you're an audible subscriber you can get these little short shows I think they're like my understanding my understanding about this is these are outsourced as well right what do you mean outsourced they're there this channel is the rant is due the audible comedy series is he gets rants submitted

to him from his fans and he reads them he reads them in the stand-up environment so there's it's kind of a mix of his stand-up and then he reads the rant at a show right and it's I listen to all 18 of them in like pretty much rapid succession because they're only a couple minutes long they're very funny they're very funny I mean I I'm a huge Lewis Black fan so so here's the deal you can send in a rant and have him read it on the air if it gets picked I save our rents for this show Jason ah that's true that's true I like that you do that I save all my best content for you

so definitely I mean if you've got an audible account it's free check it out because I haven't checked out the audible channels that much because there hasn't really been anything that has tickled my fancy but I hear Lewis Black I'm in like Flynn me too I'm I'm miss his appearances on the daily show I mean he may still be doing it I stopped watching the daily show after Jon Stewart so I watched the intro with Trevor Noah and he's he's good he's getting better I mentioned it a couple shows ago I like him and I think he's he's really found his after a year he's finally

found his legs cool good for him I watched Joe Coy live from Seattle over on Netflix Netflix as we all know is killing it with a comedy they're definitely just throwing money at comedians and and getting shows up there left right and center Joe Coy I found through the Carolla podcast he was consistently hilarious on the podcast and his stand-up was fantastic I really enjoyed the show it was very funny oh good I'll check it out because a lot of the comedy specials they've been throwing out there have not been that good

right yeah well if we had the whole thing with Amy Schumer right Amy Schumer and Maria Bamford was terrible there's just a there's a ton of comedians on there that aren't very good so I've been comedian has to be good so that's the way is very funny I think you'd like this Jason I mean it fears a little bit into you know stuff that you won't care so much about Filipino community and all that but he's still very very funny I've already added it to the list I'm definitely gonna check it out yeah and I am still keeping

up with Silicon Valley even though I think it is crashing and burning very fast as a show however the last episode with the not hot dog app was hilarious and you can actually download it and to take pictures of things and find out if they're a hot dog or not does it actually work have you tried it with a hot dog it yes I did and it worked oh my god well I was quite impressed good for them good for them and go good for the developer who got to make the app and make some money off of it I know that's the see that was the kind of fun stuff that we would have done on the

weekend for free yeah back in the day we would have built this app on the show we would have seen the show and been like we can build this let's do it I've gotten I think I got past episode 2 and I just can't I don't like it I'm not digging the show at all so yeah I have conflicting feelings about it I can see what they're trying to do and it's just starting even the it's starting to feel more like a documentary I'm telling you it felt like a documentary to me

since day one but now now it's getting into your realm yeah there were still some really good jokes now it's it's the really really good jokes are gone and it's all situational and the situations they're not comedy they are what they are and it's real yeah a couple weeks ago you asked me if I was watching American Gods yet but it hadn't come out so I am now I saw the first three episodes right love it absolutely love it this is the most

exact representation of a book that I've ever seen it's perfect everything that I all the scenes that I always wanted from the book are in the miniseries so far it is fantastic I it's weird it's shot very strangely I guess the guy that did Hannibal the the TV series is involved with this and that's why it's like his visual style but I love it man since you didn't really like the book you might not like the show but it is and by the way this is not for kids

it is extraordinarily explicit there are lots of boners in this and I it's just like whoa Jesus you know it's it's very very extremely explicit this I mean it is borderline porn for some scenes right but the the rest of it I mean Ian McShane I'm sorry it's got Ian McShane I'm gonna watch it very cool yeah I'm probably gonna have to take a hard pass on it because like yeah I didn't care that much for the book yeah if

you didn't like the book you probably won't like the show but I I love the show and speaking of shows I was going I was telling you this off the air I was going to put in our notes when we supposed to have a Star Trek show by now and it was supposed to have it four months ago yeah and it turned out it was the same day the trailer for Star Trek Discovery dropped and so what do you think of the trailer Brian I like it I I'm on board here's the funny thing I went back and re-watched it this morning after finishing

red shirts and I could not take it seriously well I mean that's Star Trek though you can't take any Star Trek seriously so don't try I know just go on for the ride it looks good the actors are great I think this the effects are surprisingly good consider and I'm I'm in I'm in I mean it's all going to come down to the writing right and and what they do with the characters and I'm expecting it to basically probably disappoint me at first but hopefully they'll get

a nice run out of it and a whole new chapter will open up I'm I'm I'm willing to give them the chance like I said the cast looks fantastic I just I a couple things I don't like the look of the new Klingons yeah I wish they'd stop messing with that yeah I mean if you go back to the DS9 episode where they did the trouble with Tribbles redo and and they make fun of the what the Klingons look like in the original series and then they cut to Worf and he's just like we don't talk about it I mean that was

funny yes it was the other thing is the older that we go back in Star Trek history the more modern and crazy sci-fi the ships are it's like yeah they're they're George Lucas in Star Wars and just reiterating on everything it's like I would have wished they'd have gone back and made it retro so it kind of matched you know the original series because it takes place 10 years before the original series so I'm like come on man I know that is a problem and I wish they would address that and play

it right and or if you're just gonna do this then just jump ahead in time and go or do concurrent stories within the universe of the yeah blah blah blah yeah this is I mean yeah that's not nerd out on it too much but yeah but anyways I'm gonna give it a go you know I'm not my CBS all pass that I'm gonna have to freaking pay for remember I got a coupon with when I bought that new TV for the all access pass it's probably expired by the time the show comes out it is expired I just found it the other day and

it's totally expired I'm like damn it it expired in March and these guys are late so they owe me they owe me a series damn it because I had a coupon coupon a coupon for Star Trek now we talked about the Google home before and somebody did this guy Spencer Chen who it's this guy's like no joke VP of marketing and business development at Alibaba right okay this guy's no joke well he did a mashup of the new Google home or Google assistant and slash

Google home ad with the Blade Runner 2049 trailer and it is genius it's he didn't he didn't edit anything he just laid the soundtrack of the Blade Runner trailer over the Google ad and it matches perfectly it's pretty clever I lulled definitely enjoyable in the same mashup realm tip of the hat to front of the show Mike who sent this to me this is doing the rounds posted a lot of places it's Earth Wind and Aussies by DJ Cumberbund quite clever

yeah actually a good song no I posted this like the beginning of the week and I've listened to it like seven or eight times this week because it is actually a really good song it's crazy train with the Earth Wind and Fire backups and it's surprisingly toe-tappinly good it is I enjoyed it it doesn't hurt that crazy train is one of my favorite Aussie songs of all time so and we're saying goodbye to MP3 according to courts.com I know that's the stupidest headline ever

they're just letting the patent go yep the patent has expired and nobody cares and they're saying that genuine lovers of the MP3 will be able to continue listening to MP3 files duh that's what happens when patents expire that means everybody could use them without having to pay for it does not mean we're saying goodbye to the MP3 which is what every fucking lazy site has posted yep and they know nobody has mentioned that the entire podcast industry is built on MP3 yeah and most people's libraries those of us that

still have them and haven't just thrown out the hard drive because everything's available on Spotify that almost all of those are MP3 well mine's all AAC now because I uploaded everything to iTunes match and then redownloaded the high-res copies don't reopen that iTunes match wound with me oh no no I know I know not a big fan of Lana Del Ray who is she is a young pretty singer songwriter who

manages to get a shit ton of press because she is very pretty okay she she works through some complex feelings in her new song her new song is titled Coachella Woodstock in my mind oh god shoot me now you think that part's bad wait until you hear her discussing the song here we go I had complex feelings about spending the weekend dancing whilst and yes she did use whilst watching tensions with North Korea Mount okay deep thoughts from Lana Del Rey thanks a

lot and even more annoying than them refill spelled R-E-E-F-I-L-L of course they want to want to charge you a buck 99 a month in New York City to be able to get access to tap water while you're not at home okay how does that work well you pay $1.99 a month and then you can walk up to tap water dispensers that are going to be placed around the city they're selling this to to basically like restaurants and things like that you won't have to keep tap water available

people will just be able to walk up and take it and we'll we'll provide the infrastructure for you and if you're a subscriber then you just pull out your phone tap the little box with it and then you can put your little jug in there and fill up with free tap water that's right free tap water for your $199 subscription I'm pretty sure that every house in New York probably still has a tap outside that they plug their garden hose into or whatnot that you can just walk up and get free tap water anyway

yeah and I mean first off how much water you fucking need throughout your day secondly so anyways this idea is going on it's ridiculous but I just really loved one of these quotes because it's kind of how I feel about all of this just as one field of startups is dedicated to doing what mom won't do for you anymore another is reviving the infrastructure of

the 19th century this is exactly how I feel about all of Silicon Valley's innovations now oh man time to pivot yep let's do something useful why don't we try that feedback loop got a lot of feedback this week so we did so we did yes yeah so thank you everybody we appreciate it we read every single one even if it doesn't make it onto the show first off thank you to some people

who gave us the monies they put their monies where their mouths are direct donation from PayPal thank you Michael over at Patreon Ivor Jason Tim Mario and Matt so thank you all of you we appreciate it muchas gracias yes Barrett Reese writes on Twitter he sent us a link about the lift and Waymo the lame-o collaborate on self-driving car technology which we covered in the news his note though is the girl in the pic is wearing

headphones while driving the more reason why we need driverless cars good point or yeah good point or just me almost getting run over constantly in Santa Monica and this could this honestly yes you have a problem with the the Prius but this could also be a case for we need more and more and better clip art that too yeah definitely all right so we got a lot of messages over at gog.show here is a smattering of them first from Ivor we

always like to read ones from people who just gave us the monies I get where Brian is coming from when he blubbers his lips and bemoans the loss of jobs to the increasing wave of automation via robots and mechanization I think however that he's turning a blind or at least nearsighted perfect vision here buddy I to the opposite side of the argument and I'm not talking about replacement job generation through the manufacturer and support of those pesky robots themselves as Jason so inadequately mentioned in episode 209

yeah you pay the money you get to take the cheap shots yes automated manufacturing is nothing new the real reason manufacturing jobs are disappearing is that it's simply cheaper to manufacture shit elsewhere the countries that should really be worried about robots are the Asian and South American nations whose low-paid workforces are usually invested in cheapest price manufacturing robots can work 24 hours a day for nothing you will never find a rope a human who will do that as robots replace cheap Asian and South American laborers those countries are in for massive social upheaval most First World Nations

manufacturing bases have been eroded for several decades at least although the US still has significant investment and employment in this sector the erosion of these jobs nothing new robots if anything are making the inevitable occur sooner check out the following article from Tech Crunch did you read this article on Tech Crunch I did had a lot of very good points yeah I mean there's some people it hasn't happened yet right some people have a sunny vision of what's gonna happen when all these manufacturing jobs go away it's a

very Star Trek Ian vision and again I would say that is fine and dandy except for the fact that we don't have the replicators well I mean honestly right now we're in the middle of the quote-unquote upheaval you know it is it is bringing more manufacturing back to the the states but it's not bringing back that many manufacturing jobs so the middle class isn't really really getting that much out of it and it is it is one of those things where you can pick either side of it but honestly at this point nobody fucking knows

but we're just gonna play out but it's gonna play out and I would like it to believe that it's gonna be a sunny vision that that that is being espoused here but what I am seeing is people not being able to go back and and supposedly we're supposed to just go re-educate ourselves and then find these wonderful jobs we're not finding these wonderful jobs well and there's not a lot of these wonderful jobs out there what we're finding is a bunch of people end up driving for Uber and we know that they're about to get fired when the robots come and this is also

just that's what we're actually seeing so I keep coming back to Corey doctor's old DRM talk where he talks about how all the live musicians basically lost their shit when piano rolls came out and people could actually have automated music in their bars and they didn't have to hire live musicians and there was a shake-up everything kind of you know basically normalized after a while so basically it's a shake-up the normalization period and this is very similar to that old talk I recommend if you're interested in that

go check out Corey's old DRM talk from shit maybe 10 years ago now but it's it kind of goes over the same thing where there was you know massive upheaval because there's a piano roll now there's automated piano playing and all the live musicians rallied against it there were marches there were torches there were pitchforks and then everything became fine in the end and everybody kind of moved on there were far less musicians making money after that well there are far less people in the world yeah no I

mean after that after those sorts of upheavals it's not like all the people got their jobs back all the people made the same amount of money made the same way of making a living at that point there is a winnowing out that occurs every single one of these upheavals causes a winnowing out of people that actually still do that for a living less and less people will be able to do it for a living this is why universal basic income is an important idea that needs to start being discussed a lot and I think all those old musicians back in the day who lost their job to piano rolls became like you know

used horse and carriage coach salesmen or real estate agents or they started bartending yes they worked at the bar where they used to play yes anyway you finished it finish this up okay I sorry I thought that was your point in there okay there okay finishing up these are benefits to increase there are benefits to increase robotization namely removing people from the drudgery and misery of their assembly line jobs and giving them an opportunity to move into real careers rather than miserable jobs

that phrase actually that actually really bothers me I mean that's the idea that that they they don't have real careers is disgusting because a lot of the people that are working in manufacturing are tradesmen and craftsmen yeah micro micro would be having a fucking heart attack reading that sentence that is true with online courses and programs becoming more and more prevalent there was never a better time to upskill so welcome our robot overlords their work will set you be for set you free are by

Macfrey no no I don't I do not agree I just don't I don't see it playing out this way I there's an upheaval things are going to change we can't tell what's going to happen well you know we're living through it you can't see on the other side humans are incredibly bad at predicting the future we know that so we're just gonna kind of play it out yep anyway next up comes from Mark Havaner hey guys I've been into computers for over 40 years I was assembling computers when it took a

soldering iron well good on you I just burned myself a lot in episode 208 you mentioned the Nissan Faraday cage but neglected to mention that putting your phone into it will kill your battery unless there's a charger or they put it into airplane mode when a cell phone does not receive the broadcast from the towers the phone will call out continuously and at maximum power to try and reach the nearest tower this takes several times more power than the regular operation of the phone I like your guys show despite Brian being a

liberal snowflake oh thank you no we didn't neglect to mention it I didn't even think about it that I had no idea thanks for the education to be fair all of the the little little cages that you have in your dash they've got chargers in it so one would assume that they put a charger in there one would assume but you would also assume that they would be smart enough not to put a fucking Faraday cage in your car that was my point last week yeah all right next up

Thomas Griffiths my wife is starting her own life coaching business as a new mom working from home she needs to find a reputable website hosting company with decent site building tools if only one of them advertised with us yeah seriously since they advertise with every other fucking podcast she's had to look at a few free options but I'm very much of the opinion that when selecting products it is worth paying for them otherwise you are the product good man so if you get a man good man or so if you get value from said product slash services which is why I'm

a happy patreon supporter we need to find a hosting company that offers good intuitive site building tools and can support e-commerce credit card payments eventually just after a gentle push in the just after a gentle push in the right direction more importantly avoiding going down the wrong path all right this this stuff has been so friggin devalued and all the tools out there are fucking horrible so good luck yeah remember there's uh you get uh was it cheap fast and good pick two pick

two yeah okay well I'm going to give you one that is uh basically two and we're going to skip on intuitive because we actually had a show it titled unintuitive fuster cluck around this product and it's squarespace and for people who are non-tech but still need to build a website and need e-commerce squarespace is going to be the way to go yeah pretty much so it is a non-intuitive fuster cluck but it does get the job done and they do have 24 hour customer support you hear that squarespace buy a fucking ad please

thank you next up comes from tau just listen to your episode you guys were talking about batteries have you seen this video on new battery technology and he gave us a link now yeah he gave us a link to uh battery of the future solid state lithium um this video is pretty damn cool if it's real and I think it's real I hope so I really hope so basically what they're doing is they're taking out the the catalyst that is the part that goes boom and replacing it with

this newfangled plastic that these guys came up with and the battery is indestructible yep and will not explode check out the video it is really fascinating and I really hope this is coming and I hope this guy gets all the monies me too it's very cool this is exactly the kind of stuff we were talking about about where where are the advances and batteries well right there yeah so hopefully it's cool uh next up is from Johnny I was curious why there was such a focus on maintaining Apple in your list of fearsome fives is the value you are placing on Apple based on

the ability to live in an ecosystem of products example okay example you have an iPhone Mac apples in the fridge and apple juice in your cup what if you want a Garmin for running who wants a Garmin for anything do you go Apple watch and limit some of the core functionality that the Garmin provides and concede to the Apple watch if you want a tool that does something specific but it is not Apple do you veer towards the Apple product that could potentially do the same thing but it is not made specifically for that purpose is it actually worth it and why I don't know what variances

you're seeing in products out there because everything is basically almost exactly the same these days as far as I can tell I don't see things being all that different there's no glaring emissions that anybody puts out a product in the same in the same market anymore it's pretty much the same stuff everybody's using all the same off-the-shelf sensors from China and just putting it in a new package with their branding yep and what you're really looking at is difference in aesthetics and and UI that's really it

and just an OS integration you know because there's some things with the Apple watch that most other things can't do but there's I'm sure there's a Garmin app for your running watch I use a Fitbit and I use the Fitbit app you know even though I have an Apple watch and it tracks my steps I prefer the Fitbit there you go and I'm into the whole ecosystem thing there is a convenience to being able to flip things from my my laptop to my tablet to my phone to my TV they're all Apple connected it's super simple it's super

easy and it's super intuitive I can do it if I had completely different products in every single system I could still do it but it wouldn't be as easy so there's a value to that for me and you know going back to what we talked about last week about the Android phone and how nice they are and we could actually switch from those the thing about it is what I care about the most when it comes from Apple is the desktop slash laptop but it is the BSD kernel macOS is just hands down the best OS for

the home you know I use I use it every day I've used it for since OS shit since system 7 I've used macOS and all of that stuff so I'm just used to it and I love OS X or 10 or whatever the hell they call it nowadays Sierra Nevada or you know I don't know but I love it because it is stable it's solid and everything works I have a great command line I can compile code on it if I have to it is just hands

down the best thing so even if you took away my iPhone my Apple watch my iPad all that crap I am still going to stick with my laptop and that's the main reason I don't care about the the ecosystem and I don't care about the interoperability it is a nice to have not a required to have yeah all right there you go all right if you want your question or comment read on the show head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air and if you're so inclined please head over to

gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review and if you go to patreon.com slash gog we will definitely read your question on the air sad news in the music industry this week so shout out rest in peace to Chris Cornell from Soundgarden all righty yep and a good news shout out to Philip Nam a German international soccer player played for the winning World Cup team and who played his final club game today

for Bayern Munich and is officially now retired thank you so much for being an awesome soccer player all righty guy I think Jason guess not yes not until next time I'm Brian Schulmeister and I'm Jason DeFillippo thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows leave feedback ask us questions get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like if you're an app person you can listen to us on the podcast one app for iOS and Android and you can also get

that at podcast one dot com slash apps they do have a new version so go check it out if you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast go to GOG dot show slash support where you'll find all of the ways you can support 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 dot show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG dot show slash 210 we don't need another burger drone

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