211: Fire in the Hole

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How goes it today on this holiday weekend, Brian? Is it a holiday? Oh, how nice. No wonder my wife's been around. Ah, yes, it's Memorial Day, so you get Monday off. Nice. Oh, wait, you don't have a job. Never mind. I don't actually get anything off because, yeah, the job I have now never ends.

Mmm. Mmm. That's sad. Well, you've got like, well, it ends in like, what, 18 years? Theoretically, hopefully. I mean, he's got tiger moms, so I assume he's going to be successful and do well. Okay. Yeah. I'm feeling a bit of schadenfreude today. Feeling pretty happy, actually.

What? Say what? Brian, happy? Yes, I do feel a little happy. The news came out this week. A friend of the show, Hannah, actually sent it over to me because I wouldn't have known otherwise. You remember that site that you signed up for called MZ Jason? Yeah, yeah. They sent me a t-shirt, I believe. I think you got a t-shirt, which seems to be the basic fallback position of any attempted new social network these days.

Hello? Hello? Hello? Yeah, so you signed up for MZ and we were talking about it at the time. It was an attempt to create a new community slash social network. And I said, this thing is never going to frickin' last. That's right. And they took umbrage. They listened and took umbrage to it and sent us a really nasty tweet.

Which they unfortunately deleted because I went back to try to find it. Oh, man. So we could have pasted it into the show because guess what? What, Brian? MZ is shutting down. Oh. Who could have predicted that? Who could have predicted that? Oh, man. Yep. Yep. So they're sorry to say that after nearly two years of building MZ, it is time for us to shut down the site.

Two years? That's it? Wow. Yes. They have some important dates to remember for those of you that might be on there. You can join their Discord server to be part of MZ Forever. I don't even know what any of that is. Discord server is basically like TeamSpeak, which is a voice and text chat for video gamers.

This is kind of a freer version of it. Oh, okay. All right. And you can actually put in a data export request. So well done there. I'll give them props for that. I won't because they should have had that built into the API. So I should get my data anytime. I should not have to request it. Okay. Well, at least they're doing that. So that must be received by June 16th.

You will have access to your data until June 21st. And the site goes dark on June 23rd. Okay. So all five people who want their data out of MZ can go get it right now. Yes. So I'm not saying that I predicted it, but I did predict it. And I, gosh, I wish you guys would have deleted that tweet.

But I suppose somebody took over their social media after that and went through and wiped the records. There's probably an MZ thread out there bashing us. But since nobody's ever going to go look at it, who cares? Well, as of the 23rd, it won't exist anymore. So. Oh, man. And that MZ shirt that I got was basically Zane Lamprey quality of a T-shirt.

Oh, sorry. A dust rag that falls apart after three dustings. Yeah. Yeah. I cleaned my bathroom with it. So thanks. Thanks for that one, MZ. I appreciate it. Excellent. Well, we have a bit of security news that is that broke since we spoke with Bittner. Oh, good. I'm glad you got this in here. Yeah. Yeah. We did this a little out of joint. We always do because we need to catch Mr. Bittner.

And he takes his weekends off because he's in a family way. He's smart. Except he's smarter. Yes. So since we spoke with him, Chipotle, who has just been getting battered left, right and center with bad news. Well, they're the latest in the big data breach. Oh, poor guys.

Poor guys. So this is roughly 2,250 restaurants for varying amounts of time between the 24th and April 18th, March 24th and April 18th. So stolen data included account numbers, internal verification codes. And this was a malware situation in their computer systems.

Okay. Well, I don't eat at Chipotle because I don't want to put the investment in toilet paper into it that it takes every time I go there. So I will defend Chipotle and say that I find them to be rather good if I'm in any city that does not have decent Mexican food. It's a decent standby. And also part of Tim Ferriss is a slow carb diet.

It is delicious. But the problem is I've got about 45 minutes until I have to be in a bathroom. Garbage in, garbage out, Jason. That is true. That is true. And a hat tip to Christopher Whalen over on Twitter who let us know that there is some breaking news as of this recording right now.

Apparently, British Airways is having massive problems in the Heathrow Airport. Their entire system is shut down. Nobody is leaving either Heathrow or Gatwick right now. No flights in, no flights out. So that is a bit of a nightmare. You buried the lead on this one. Oh, what's the lead?

British Airways cancels all the flights. Yes. The GMB union blamed the outage on outsourcing IT work to India. Oopsies. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm sure there's no code obfuscation there. No, not at all.

So there's an interesting article in the Harvard Review. Harvard Review is jumping on the bandwagon, which we've been on for, oh, I don't know, two years now, probably. Ever since MZ came around, I believe. Could be, yes. As machines take jobs, companies need to get creative about making new ones.

Yes. The interesting thing about this article, as opposed to all of the other ones, and including us with our doom and gloom preparations, they came up with some ideas. Oh, really? They actually have some ideas. Nice. And they say, you know, if companies gave their employees more stock, then the possibility in the future when the robots replace them, they could actually come out of it ahead.

And there are companies out there that are doing it already, like Chobani and Starbucks. They're giving away lots of stock to their employees. And getting that to work on a massive scale, probably not going to happen. But at least they're throwing out ideas. Come on. It's more than we do.

I can see some sort of combination UBI, universal basic income slash, you know, if you worked for a company for a long time, stock market system. But what do you do for the next generation, the generation that didn't work for your company and get all your stock? That's true.

That's true. There must be some kind of rollover or buyback. There could be stock buybacks like Apple's been doing. You know, the more profit they get, the more stock they buy back to give to the employees, which then makes more money to when the employees sell the stock, they can buy it back. And it's just a it's a virtuous cycle. Yeah, I mean, at least it's better than what we hear from anybody else.

Yeah, at least they're throwing out ideas. Yes, I'll give them that. And we need more of that. We need a lot of brainstorming about what exactly we're going to do when we lose basically half the jobs that currently exist in the world. And I think we need forward thinking companies that are willing to do things like this, which, you know, we're jaded.

We grew up in the, you know, the robber baron industry type of scenarios that are out there. So we think everybody's evil. But these millennials, they, you know, maybe they'll prove us wrong. Who knows? The most hilarious thing is the fact that they're all basically starting extremely evil companies or working for them.

So, yeah, well, maybe they'll get a conscience after a couple of years at the circle and then come back and fix everything. But well, but speaking of good companies, Amazon, interestingly enough, well, we talk about how neither of us can get a job in the tech industry anymore because we're past 40.

Yep. Well, if you look at the internals of Amazon's AWS technical department and they're basically their whole hierarchy. Yeah. The median age is between 41 and 45 years old. They just hired a 62 year old. That is pretty impressive. But they're definitely hiring people way above and beyond any level of tech that we ever got to.

That's true. But if you look at even, you know, like the basic tech teams, I'm sure they're I'm sure they've got the youngins, but they've also got the the oldies like us. Goodies, oldies, but goodies. Congratulations, Amazon. That is very nice. It is good to see because, yeah, the tech industry just is painstakingly young.

Yeah, it's horrible. Anyways, but yeah, good. Awesome. Keep going, Amazon. I'm very happy with my stock purchase with you. So perhaps I will survive the oncoming robot revolution based on just your stock. There you go. In the news.

Oh, net neutrality. Oh, how we how we love thee and how we shall miss thee. How is that going? Where are we at with that? It passed both House and Senate now. OK, the FCC has released the text of the title to rollback, which is the whole big thing. They want to go from title two to title one.

Mm hmm. And you have basically the comments are due July 17th and reply comments are due by August 16th. So you can still weigh in and make your voice heard. You know, just keep doing it. If you can get there, if it's not being DDoSed at that given moment.

So, yeah, you just got to keep hammering on them and then they're going to they're going to do whatever they want to do anyway. I know that's kind of the problem. The interesting thing is I found an article in Slate, which is very interesting. It says, don't freak out about the FCC's new approach to net neutrality.

I read this. What did you think about this article? Well, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because if you look at the specific wording that's in this stuff, it doesn't really matter too much. And what we're really going to have to worry about is just what they how they end up defining these things. And I'm just not optimistic enough to think that they're going to do it in a good way.

Yeah. I mean, that's our problem. We never think they're going to do anything in a good way. But I was I was really impressed with the reporting on this. And I learned a lot from this article about how nuanced these just these distinctions between Title I and Title II are and what it can kind of mean for what they can and can't do.

So, you know, we're going to see it play out. We have really nothing that we can do about it besides yell at the FCC did not do it. But in some ways, it might be better if they do do it. It could be better if they do do it, if it's also followed up with very specific and very, very legal wording about what what our our Internet providers can and can't do.

Yeah. The problem with it is if they switch it back, it's kind of an open field. And again, like I said, we'd be relying on them just to be good people. No, we can't rely on that. What we need. Go ahead and roll it back if you want, but then put in a few specific things that will keep them from totally screwing us. Yes, please.

Regulations are a good thing, as we found out in the past. And by the way, administration, you'd be getting rid of one regulation so you can put another one in. No, you got to get rid of two for one. We need to have it. Damn it. Yeah. Well, maybe they can they can, you know, get with the FAA and they can like, you know, trade trade these like like trading cards and say, well, you don't have to register your drone anymore.

And we got rid of Title II. So, hey, we can do something new. Yeah. Oh, man, but Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee representative, she's proposed a bill called the Browser Act that would basically take back some of the the what was it?

The the latest rule where ISPs will be able to sell your browser history. Yeah, we talked about that a couple couple weeks ago. It seems like a year ago now that we talked about that. There's been so much. I know I'm on this crazy EMSI discussion group about it. I know, man, it's insane.

I talk about it on LO, you know, I get I get hugs on LO and I need about 50 more posts and I get another free T-shirt. Sweet. So she's trying to roll back this this whole browser history issue. It's probably not going to pass, but at least somebody's trying. Yeah, at least somebody's trying.

You know, you got to try. I mean, there's nothing that much else to do. It's either that or just crawl in a corner and suck on your thumb until the world ends. But you got to try. I got to try. Speaking of trying, I was giving it the old college try to try to make some money again. Here we go. I don't know if you've logged in recently.

I'm sure you have, but you may have noticed a massive full screen Twitter pop up. I didn't get that. You didn't. I got it like multiple times across multiple accounts when I'm not I'm not even a Twitter guy. Yeah, I got all the emails. I didn't get the pop ups. Oh, you know what? Because I got like 18000 pop up blockers on.

Maybe that's why. Maybe. Well, it basically, you know, the company has updated its privacy policy yet again. This one includes a tweak as to how the company uses data from your browsing history outside of Twitter, which is, of course, collecting. And let's see, embedded timelines or tweet buttons for that have websites.

Obviously, it's going to know that you were there. Twitter previously stored that information for 10 days. It will now store it for 30 so it can further improve and personalize the kinds of ads and content it shows you. You can, of course, opt out of this entirely, which I immediately did across all my accounts. They also you can also now look and see what what Twitter thinks that you are interested in.

So it's a it's a bunch of broad categories so they can basically sell ads for the sake of the show. I have it up in front of me right now. Would you like to know what I'm interested in, Brian? What what are you interested in, Jason? I'm interested in apparently amazing. Oh, I'm interested in amazing.

I'm interested in amazing as well. Oh, good for you. I'm also interested in cute. OK, I am not interested in cats, but I am interested in dogs. Yes. Well, no shit. Foodie news and general info. I don't know what general info in the foodie news is.

Gaming news and general info. Man, not that much. Movie reviews. Yes. Mystery and crime. Let's see. Is there any good ones in here? Not really. Windows. Definitely not unchecking that one. I'm not interested in windows at all. I'm interested in television and the rest of these kind of.

Oh, I am also interested in rock. OK, well, I mean, basically, they're following suit from Google, from Facebook. You can view all these things on those networks as well and basically kind of tailor what ads you'll be seeing. So you can do that now for Twitter. And yeah, it's incredibly off base.

It's interesting. I don't know where they would possibly collect this sort of stuff from. They say it's their own internal stuff, plus, you know, what sites you visit outside that they're able to sort out that is connected to you. I mean, it's word analysis and link analysis. It's pretty straightforward. I think we're horrible use cases for this stuff because you and I both use multiple Twitter accounts.

So it's interesting to see how that buckets fill up. So the interesting thing on mine is I've deleted almost all my tweets. I use that service that Sean Bonner posted about. And I think I have. You and I have 50 tweets. I am maxed at 50 tweets. So it always chops them at 50.

So I will never have more than 50 tweets. I should probably do that. It's kind of nice. You don't have to worry about somebody going back into your history and then taking something out of context, which is what's always worried me. Hear that, Trump? Yep. Oh, man.

Now let's talk about one of our other favorite sites, Medium. Medium. So they did a big brouhaha and a big PR release because they've launched a revamped homepage. Now, this is the homepage that they were trying to charge $5 a month for as part of their premium tier up until now.

And they basically said, hey, everybody that was just paying us that five bucks for this thing, we're going to give it to everybody for free now. So you're a sucker. Yeah, that's what everybody's been saying. It's like, why am I giving you five bucks? I still get everything. But they're still advertising the $5 premium membership. Oh, they're still going to take your money if you want to.

If you're dumb enough to give it to them. Yeah. So this is the homepage is a curated homepage that'll make sure that you always have something to read. That's a smarter reading experience, delivering a satisfying, completable and controllable experience for every reader. When was the last time you read something on Medium?

We actually have a Medium article in this show. OK, so that would be this week. Answers that question. But yeah, that's about it, really. OK, let me rephrase. Why don't you read it for fun? What if you read it for fun? Well, no, I mean, the more important thing and this is like I know a lot of people do this with YouTube.

I personally never do. When have you gone to the Medium homepage to find something to read as opposed to being you found a Medium. Somebody sent you a Medium article from somewhere else. Like I only get to Medium from if somebody posts something on Facebook or Twitter or something like that. I don't go to Medium to go like search their database of interesting articles.

Yeah, never, never do I say I'm bored. I need something to read. Let's go to Medium. Fuck, I'd go to HuffPo first. I'd just go to my bookshelf. I got a stack of books in the crapper. I just need to I just got to go to Chipotle and then my reading is set for the next week.

That's true. Now let's get to our friends at Uber. Oh, boy. This will be a short week. We only have a couple. When is the last time Uber did not have a very bad week? It's been a while. It's been a while.

Uber is to repay millions to drivers because they were taking a little extra cash off the top that they shouldn't have been. So the gist of it is they would take $2 for taxes, right? Leaving the driver with $18 on a $20 tip.

So we're going with the $20 level here. So they would take their cut off the $20, even though the cabbie was or the Uber was only getting $18. So that $2 they were taking their commission on. So now they have to go pay that back with interest.

But a driver's advocacy group in New York said that the company is making its driver swallow the tax burden, even though it's not in their terms and conditions. Right. So they're taking that $2, which they're basically saying is wage theft.

Remember when you said the word robber barons earlier? Oh, yes. Yeah. There you go. Okay. Well, they also have some problems with women. No doubt. And a Silicon Valley technical women's group called the Anita Borg Institute has basically ended its partnership with Uber because of the continuing allegations that Uber faces about the treatment of women employees as well as other business issues.

So they're starting to finally feel the effect of being a bad company. Uber, your sexism is futile. But I thought Ariana was in there fixing all this stuff. We're waiting on the report. It's coming out this week. Okay. She's working hard on it when she's not doing all of her sleeping, which she said we had to do in her books.

Oh, God. Now they're saying they may release a redacted version of the report to the employees and the internet, but we know this thing's going to get leaked seven ways from Sunday. There are two words that will not be redacted in the 35-page report, Uber and great.

Yes. So I got my new Fortune magazine today. I cashed in some United miles. It's so funny. United keeps sending me these things, these mags for miles every month. That is the only reason we have magazine subscriptions here, too. We had a little spare change worth of miles that we had to use.

Here's the funny thing, though. They never deduct the miles when I get the magazine. So I get a new email every month. I get like 30 magazines now, and I never fly. Isn't the computer age great when we're supposed to be? All this stuff was supposed to be easily trackable and easily done, and yet somehow everything still gets fucked up.

I know. But hey, man, I got my Cosmopolitan. I got my Vogue. I got my Fortune magazine, which I'm looking at right now, with a picture of Travis Kalanick on the cover looking extraordinarily douchey. And it has a quote, I don't think I'm an asshole. Inside the mind of Uber's combustible CEO.

And then in the bottom in parentheses, it says, I'm pretty sure I'm not. Hey, Travis, let's set the record straight. You are. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, go look up this photo. He's sitting there in his cowboy boots and his distressed jeans and his tight black T-shirt, just looking like he's literally shitting in the car that he's getting out of.

If you look at his face, he's just like pinching a loaf. Awesome. Yeah. I just had to bring that up. Let's have a little Facebook chat. Okay. Facebook is trying to take down the telecommunications industry. All righty. Which is an interesting play for them. Now, we've talked about their server initiative before, the open server architecture.

Yeah. Which is really cool. I don't know if you've ever checked it out, but it's pretty neat how they've, you know, everybody's building their own servers nowadays. Dell is gone. HP's gone. Nobody's ever going to buy off the shelf anymore. Everything's custom. So that's their first initiative. Now they're going to telecom switches.

Those massive, those massive switches that you have to buy from Cisco and all those guys. Yep. They've already come up with a new thing. I think it's called the white box. That is a much cheaper version that people can just install into their telcos and not have to, you know, pay these huge fees to Cisco and all these guys.

And I think it's pretty cool though, because for third world countries who are trying to build out their telecommunications architecture and infrastructure, it's, it's a, I mean, it's great. It's, it's actually a good thing that they're doing. I mean, I, I know I generally don't say that, but all of these open source projects that Facebook's doing around hardware are, are pretty damn cool.

Wasn't the white box, the product that they came up with for Hooli at the end of season two of Silicon Valley. Okay. Okay. I'm just checking because it sounds fucking familiar. The Hooli box. Now, unfortunately, Facebook did have a bad week because all of their internal documents got leaked.

Oh, oops. Yeah. This is all the stuff that all the people that we talk about that are stuck in, you know, you know, windowless, non air conditioned rooms in the Philippines looking at people's junk have to click yay or nay on. Yeah. And they're getting hammered on this when the guardian, uh, released them.

But, uh, but isn't this, isn't this why they just put Zuckerberg in a, like a VW minivan and sent him around the country on his, on his U S tour of being Zuckerberg. Yeah. I don't know. Like to counter this sort of stuff. Like, Hey, look, we're just, we're just people. Yeah. We're on the Zucker tour.

Oh God. But yeah, I mean, it's like remarks such as someone shoot Trump should be deleted because as a head of state, he is in a protected category, but it can be permissible to say to snap a bitch's neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat or fuck off and die because they are not regarded as credible threats.

So I can say Trump fuck off and die. I, I think you shouldn't. Well, no, I think the word Trump is probably a trigger because he's in the protected category. Right. Okay. I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to, how about Trump has dementia? Uh, maybe you can get past that one.

I don't know. I'm just saying. I'm not getting involved. Okay. Let's move on then. Google actually has an employee run email list. That's tracking harassment and bias complaints across the company. This is kind of cool. I like this. This is a good idea.

Hey, Uber, are you listening? Hmm. Oh dear. I'm not getting involved. So they're, they're running this list. Google's aware of it. And the cool thing is like the Google HR is actually watching the list because when something comes across the list, that's actually like, you know, not just somebody being just, you know, a jerk or whatever.

It's something that's against company policy. They're like, please step forward. We want to, we want to prosecute this and get this person out of the company. Right. No, I like this. This is a good idea. Yeah. I, I, very cool. Yeah. You know, the one thing that stood out for me in this article though, is the fact that they call people that are new at working at Google, nooglers, nooglers.

I, I, you see, I would say goobs. If it was me, I'd just say goobs. Yeah. And since we're doing the tour of social networks right now, LinkedIn. Oh God. LinkedIn has launched a profile picture makeover tool. Not only does your profile photo help you get recognized on LinkedIn, it can often help you connect to opportunity, whether that's a new job or an invitation to speak at an industry event.

Simply having a profile photo results in up to 21 times more profile views and nine times more connection requests. So now you can basically take a selfie, add a, add a neutral background and have six other photo filters. So you can make yourself look a little bit better. Great.

But now that I know that having a profile photo results in a, was it nine times more connection requests, I'm going to take, I'm going to remove my photo because I am so sick of LinkedIn connection requests. Yeah. They're kind of useless. Everybody I know I'm connected with.

If I don't know you bugger off. Yeah. Oh man. Okay. AI, your favorite thing in the world. If it's real. Uh, well, Apple's director of artificial intelligence. It's one thing that I never thought I would be saying, uh, the next thing I'd never thought I would be saying is his, this guy's name, which I'm not even, uh, what the hell?

Let's give it a shot. Ruslan Selakudinov. Ah, I think that's pretty good, Jason. Okay. Thank you. Uh, he believes that the deep neural networks that have produced spectacular results in recent years could be supercharged in coming years by the addition of memory, attention, and general knowledge.

The general knowledge is what really got me. I'm like, well, shouldn't they have, they shouldn't that kind of be, you know, be in there to begin with. We call that common sense in the real world. I think we filed this article under the no shit Sherlock. Yeah. That's the, the, the section that we've, we should just bring back.

Look, even at, at AI's level right now, they know that that's obviously how we move forward. And I was listening to, I, who was it? It might've been Sam Harris on one of his podcasts or who knows? There's so many people talking about this right now, but the fact that we don't know how the brain works to begin with, and we don't know how intelligence and, you know, how, how any of this goo in our head works, trying to think that we are going to come up with something

made of plastic that is going to mimic that and take over the world is kind of silly. It's kind of silly. Yeah, it is a little bit. Yeah. Um, so the Supreme court is, is back in the news. Okay. We've talked about patent trolls and the evils of Texas.

Yes. Uh, and how everybody just takes all of their patent complaints down to Texas and everybody tries to win and nobody wins. Everybody settles, you know, your, your patent case dies in Texas. Well, the Supreme court has placed tight limits on where patent lawsuits may be filed now.

Okay, good. Ah, and here's the fun part. A unanimous decision that was a blow to so-called patent trolls or companies that buy patents not to use them, but to demand royalties to sue for damages are screwed. You know, these guys, you know, you can actually put your case in a place where people have a fucking brain.

That's the problem with, uh, down in Marshall, Texas, where all of these cases go to die. You can now actually go to someplace where somebody maybe reads a newspaper. It isn't an out pig fucking all day and you can have a chance at winning. Nice. All right. We're for that.

Yes, we are anti pig fucking. We are anti patent trolls. I wish we could make that our title. I did too. All right. And I'm just going to wrap up with, I'm not going to discuss the article. I just want to state, uh, that Walt Mossberg, who is a long time tech columnist has written his final column, uh, for he's currently writing for both the verge and recode.

Uh, it's called the disappearing computer. Uh, he has been writing tech articles since 1991, starting over at the wall street journal. It's a good article. It kind of runs through his past, uh, his basically computing has, has been since 91 until now. And what's going to happen next. And you know, his theory is what basically most people's are was there's not going to be a computer.

It's just going to be a distributed network that we wear in our clothes and whatnot and all that sort of stuff. And it's everywhere. Uh, it's a good enough article, but I just want to applaud Walt Mossberg. He's, he's a Titan in our industry. He is. I don't agree with him all the time, but I, I got to give him props for his stick to it.

Itiveness. That's right. And, uh, yeah, I thought it was a good article too. So farewell Mossberg, you will be missed. You will be. Let's talk about our good friends at fresh books for a minute. As an independent contractor, I've been creating and sending invoices to clients for over 20 years.

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Ha! We are obviously back again this week for security with David Bittner. How's it going? It's going pretty good. Pretty good. It's been sort of a quiet week in cybersecurity. Really, the WannaCry worm ransomware story has had legs.

And that's mostly what we've been talking about. It's mostly been about attribution. People trying to or claiming that it's North Korea and other people saying not so fast. So there's been a lot of back and forth on that this week. But other than that, not a whole lot of big breaking stories.

But still, we've got plenty to talk about today. We've got a few. First off, I just wanted to talk a bit about the Samsung Galaxy, which is Jason's new phone as an experiment anyways. Mine's a, I'm sorry, it's an S7 Edge, not an S8. Oh, sorry. Well, if you have the S8, Samsung is ballyhooing and talking up their iris scan technology.

They're saying that it's unbeatable and it is the most secure. It's so fantastic. It is the best. Well, he's not doing it that way, but you can kind of get the point. It's huge. Yes. Turns out. They are in their PR discussing how it is the best security method known to man.

Turns out a simple photo and a printer and a contact lens will allow you to beat the security. Nicely done with the contact lens. I got to give him credit for that. That's a good hack. The Chaos Computer Club, which is a great name in Berlin, yeah, basically took a photo in night mode because that actually makes the infrared filter, makes it easier to capture iris patterns.

Using a simple printer, printed out a life-size image of one eye, glued a contact lens to the picture to provide depth, and the iris scanner did not know the difference. Awesome. Yeah. Chaos Computer Club has been around for a long, long time. And they're also the ones, I think, that did the high-res photo of a politician holding her hand up, then took a photo of it, and then printed her fingerprint and used that fingerprint to actually break fingerprint security.

So good on these guys. We talked about that on the show, too. Yeah. So all this stuff is not as secure as the PR wants you to believe it is. And the big problem is you can't change biometrics. Nope. You can change your password, but you can't change your iris, and you can't change your fingerprint.

Yeah. The contact lens is really the icing on the cake for this one. That's a brilliant bit of business there that they figured that out. Now, has anyone actually seen this in use? I have not seen people using this thing. Do you hold the phone up to your eyeball and take a picture?

How does it work? I'd imagine it must work much like the iris scanners do if you're part of the trusted security stuff that I am for travel, which is basically you just kind of have to line it up with your eye, and then it gives you a beep when it's got a lock and lets you know it's got your iris scanned.

So you put it in selfie mode? Yeah, I'd imagine. My iris data is stored with the government because I'm part of the Trusted Traveler program, so they've got me. If they only knew how untrustworthy you were. Right. These irises look a little bloodshot today there, Brian.

What's been going on? Well, no. Somebody had trivia last night. That's pretty normal. So, yeah. Right. When you have a youngster. Your eyes aren't bloodshot. What's wrong? Right. Yeah. This can't be you. These eyes aren't bloodshot.

And I also remember, you know, you always have to go back to Demolition Man with the real way to fake the iris scanner, which is just cut somebody's eye out and put it on a stick. There's that. Well, I remember they did that in Minority Report. There was an eyeball gag, too. Remember he had those eyeballs in the fridge.

Yeah, but I go OG. You got to go Demolition Man with the three shells and the eyeball on a stick. You know, we skew at the older end of our listening demographic, Jason. So, some of these younger references are probably better. Well, speaking of authentication, since we do love our authentication methods and how to defeat them, researchers have a new technology.

They're saying they can authenticate you merely on the way that you walk. They've got a device that is equipped with accelerometers, and it can capture your gait, the way you move, the motion, the velocity. And I think this is pretty interesting.

You know, this reminded me, about a year ago, a friend of mine came to visit from, he lives on the West Coast now, and I hadn't seen him in years, and we were waiting to meet up to go have dinner together, and from a distance, I saw him coming my way, and it struck me like I recognized him by his walk.

This is a lifelong friend of mine, and because everybody pretty much has a unique walk. You can't tell by the way I use my walk. I'm a woman's man. And no time to talk. That's right. Fortunately, there aren't any bio scanners that use singing so far. Yet.

Yes, karaoke scanning is coming soon. That's right. That's right. Interesting thing is, I think about gait scanning and gait recognition, and I go back to Corey Doctorow's old book, Little Brother, like, you know, from what, seven or eight years ago, where they would actually put pebbles in their shoe to kind of change their gait so the cameras could not detect their gait, but using this as a way to authenticate is kind of interesting for sure.

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I was struck by the fact that, you know, they're talking about it, using it for good here, authentication, ostensibly. But when I originally heard about this technology being looked into, it was, of course, a government thing to be able to track large crowds and find people of interest.

So not necessarily such a good thing, which made me think that, you know, all of a sudden, the way to get around security issues is just to become a member of the Department of Silly Walks. I knew we'd have a Silly Walks reference in here. I knew there was no possible way we could get through this story without having a Silly Walk.

The prize goes to Brian this week. Brian wins. Brian wins Security Ha for this week. We might as well just wrap up now. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. It's been great. But wait, I actually had two, and the one I didn't go with was the Fremen from Dune doing their walks across the sand.

Yeah, you should stop from your head. Yeah, no, I think, yeah, we'll go with Python over Dune any day, as far as I'm concerned. Not that there's anything wrong with Dune, but I'll go with Python. Yeah. So a serious story came by this week.

This is from Wired. Why so serious? Well, you know, we've had all these disinformation campaigns from the Russians and the leaked information, leaked emails, of course, famously, the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Leon Podesta and so forth.

And one thing we were wondering around here at the Cyber Wire for a while was when were people going to start sprinkling throughout these emails false information? Seemed like the obvious next step to take. Well, they're taking it.

So Citizen Lab has a report out from the University of Toronto's Monk School of Public Affairs. And they're documenting a wide ranging hacking campaign, which, of course, once again, is tied back to the Russians, where they are sprinkling false information with it within the legit emails.

Right. And again, this is to sow the seeds of doubt. Yeah. And it makes sense. So not surprising. It's the way, you know, this is Orwellian 101. The best way to get false information out there is to sprinkle it liberally with some truth. It's also struck me that this would be very useful sort of from a timing point of view.

And of course, this is exactly the timing, exactly the sort of thing we saw with Hillary Clinton and the FBI announcing that they were investigating her for her emails. If you are able to put in the right piece of misinformation timed with a release.

And so there's no time to check to see if that particular bit of information is false among a collection of obviously correct things. That may be all you need. That might be the ballgame. This is this is one of those situations where, you know, now when you get hacked, you almost kind of want to just turn around and your stuff gets leaked.

You want to go ahead and release it yourself. But then there'll be claims that you've edited things out. And yeah, it's just a nightmare. Yeah, it's it's a no win. But this is the sort of thing that the Russians are very well known for and evidently are quite good at. He said, she said, yes.

Yeah. And we've talked in the past about all these smart toys and, you know, basically you're taking a kid's toy and you're attaching it to a camera and a microphone. Teddy Fox, what could possibly go wrong? Yes. And you're connecting all that to the Internet. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Senator Mark Warner from Virginia, of all places, has actually said, you know, maybe something could go wrong here and he's starting to worry a bit about it.

And he sent a letter off to the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, asking them what the hell they're doing about protecting kids privacy. Not so much even just the the collection of data that we're talking about, Amazon Echo Style and all of that. He's really worried about what these companies are doing with all the kids data.

And basically, the FTC acting chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen is basically said, we're not really worrying too much about it. And we're we're more concerned about objective and concrete harm. So we'll see what happens. There'll be a bit of a battle now, hopefully. And I'm just happy somebody is actually looking into this at a governmental level, because I don't trust the the wheels of of commerce to fix this problem for us.

Well, to fix one toy, you have to kill two other toys. That's the new mandate from the mount. So you cannot you cannot fix one without killing two. All right. I wouldn't have a problem with that. I did note in this article, they did point out that back when the Ashley Madison hack happened, that that led to some people committing suicide after their infidelity was revealed.

So, you know, privacy can be really serious stuff. And what I was thinking when I read this article was it's going to take something really bad happening to some really adorable child, you know, tragically before I think someone takes this seriously, where some bit of data is leaked through some little teddy bear and something really bad happens.

And it'll, you know, it'll be named the, you know, whatever that kid's name is, that that kid's name act of of 2017. And then we'll probably get some change. But until then, sadly, I suspect we won't. Way to bring it down.

Bittner. That does seem to be the way of the world. Bittner is what I'm going to call you from now on. Oh, we have it. We have an episode title. Jeez, guys. Let's wait. Nothing's going to happen till we kill some children.

So let's get on that and get that bill passed. I'm not advocating it. I just, although, I mean, there are some wretched neighbor children who I wouldn't mind seeing being the first to go. But you heard it here, folks. You heard it here first. Right. So when the police come knocking on my door, you know, sir, you said on the podcast and turns out.

Yeah. So why does your T-shirt say it puts the lotion in the basket? We're just kind of wondering about that. What does that mean, sir? I bought that at a thrift store, officer. I have no idea what that means. Yeah. By the way, thanks for getting us subpoenaed into this crap now. Thanks a lot. You're implicated. You're all implicated.

If I'm going down, we're all going down together. You hear me? I'm not doing time alone. Hey, we had Dr. Teeter on the show. And he talked about nuclear weapons. I think a little hand lotion in child murder. They don't even care anymore. We're good. Yeah. Fair enough. All right. We talked about, Brian, you traveling quite a bit.

Yes. And 1Password has come out with a new mode called travel mode, where it basically nukes all the passwords from your device, except the ones that you actually stay. I need these to get where I'm going. And so if they do subpoena your phone and try and get your data off of it, it's only going to have just those little bits of information, not your entire library.

It's clever of them. I think it's obviously they're paying attention to the news and it's good timing and it's going to appeal to people of a certain paranoid bent. It's a nice service for them to offer. But at the end of the day, it's going to come down to this is good right now in this period of uncertainty when we're not entirely sure what the hell is legal and what's going on.

But at the end of the day, it's going to have to come down to, you know, the government either will say, yes, you have to give us this or the government will not be retold. No, you can't ask for it. And that will make such an option kind of useless in theory.

I have a better idea. Just travel with a paperback book and say, fuck it, you know, for your vacation for people that don't have to travel for work. That's fantastic. But the work travels a different story. Well, then just VPN your credentials over to another machine that is waiting for you there that you can pick up and load that library of your passwords, then delete it and then get back on the plane and then reload it when you get back home.

Yes, there are workarounds for the ultra freaky paranoid. I mean, that's not even ultra freaky paranoid. That'll take you 10 minutes. Well, except for the fact that you have to get a system somewhere, Jason. Well, if you're going somewhere, hopefully the people that you're going to are going to have computers unless they're fucking Luddites.

Work travel, you're traveling and you're just staying in a hotel and you don't know anybody in the town, Jason. Well, then you should stay at home and get your work done instead of getting on the road and enjoying those margaritas in Margaritaville. Okay. So Jason is clearly advocating for a completely unrealistic world in which the case this could all happen.

I'm just saying stay home. I just had I just had a couple of days of travel and I hated it. I never want to leave my house again. So, yeah, I don't this work travel crap. I'm like, get a better job where you don't have to leave the house to work. If I go if I go on a vacation, I want to go on a vacation. Screw this work crap.

Always with the practical solution. I would, you know, honestly, if I could go on food stamps, I would. But that was just been cut. So I can't even do that. But what Jason does is he takes screenshots of his passwords that he's written down with his Chinese cameras. Exactly. Right, right, right.

And then he just goes and searches for them online because. Basically, I go to show Dan and say, show me my password. So I put I put all my passwords in front of my home security camera. Then I go to where I'm going. Then I open up show Dan and say, show me my passwords. Searches on his home address.

Yeah, just searches his street address. And there they all are. Exactly. It's a flawless system. It is absolutely flawless. What could go wrong? Yeah. So, OK. So back to the story, just briefly, if I may. These guys. OK, child killer.

Yes. These guys are saying that the great thing about this is that it actually removes all of your passwords from the device. So, yes. Any of the stuff that you have in one password is removed. And the app on your mobile device gives no indication that there isn't that there even is a travel mode or that anything has been removed.

And there's no way to turn off travel mode from the device. You have to do that from a, I assume, from a separate computer logging in through the web portal or, you know, some other way to do it. Yep. Right. However, as we have talked about here many times before, the thing that this does not help you with is the fact that it is against the law to lie to a federal agent.

Yes. And so all the federal agent has to do is say, oh, I see you're using one password here. Do you have travel mode enabled? And you say. Yes. Yes. And they say, well, step over to this computer over here where we have a web browser conveniently located for you to log in.

And the game is up. Here's the one thing. That is a much more eloquently stated version of my, the government either will have the right to ask for this data or not. Here's what one password has not implemented yet that I still want them to implement, which is the safe word password.

It's basically the, you know, the callback. Whatever it might be. Oh, yeah. It could be avocado. Basically, I tell somebody, here's my password. They log in and with my username and that password, that password immediately deletes my account with, it just nukes it.

So it says, sorry, wrong password. And then when you come back and if you give them another password, it comes back and says, oh, I'm sorry, this account has been disabled or deleted or there are no passwords. Give them or give them the travel version of it. You know, something that gives you protection, whatever that safe word might be.

Could be asparagus. I don't care. Broccoli. Broccoli even. To hell with all of this. I need to get smartphone where I say the word and in five seconds the phone blows up. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was thinking, but I think there's a, there's a case for some sort of smartphone case. Oh wait, they had those already. They were galaxies.

But you have some sort of battery case that has a, a catastrophic failure mode where you put the right, you put the right password in or hit the right combination of buttons and it bursts into flames and, and, and, you know, and, and a big puff of smoke and you've just suddenly disappeared. Yes. T H E R M one T E.

That would be my password. All right. Now let's talk about one specific phone that we wish would blow up. I put this story in here because we have been tracking the, and, and commenting on, uh, president Trump's use of an old Android phone and the lack of security therein.

And according to ours, Technica, Mr. Trump now has an iPhone and has had one since March. And, uh, also according to them, there is a grand total of one app on that iPhone. That is Twitter. Wow. I, they managed to get off all those annoying built-in apps that I can't seem to ever remove from my Mac, from my iPhone.

How'd you get rid of newsstand? I'd like to know that. Well, basically what you do is here's what I did. I, I did, I don't know if you know this, but you can actually make folders on the iPhone with emojis. So I have a poop emoji with a little apple next to it and I put everything into that folder.

Yeah. That's basically what I've done as well. So I, I immediately call into question this journalism because there's no way that that's the only app on that phone. It's just not possible. Well, yeah. Who knows? Maybe they're able to, I lock it down using some of the childproofing technology.

Well, obviously that has not happened. But the other thing is it actually takes away a bit of intelligence that we've had because previously, we could tell, but we, um, we, um, we used to know, we used to be able to know if it was actually Trump tweeting or one of his assistants because his assistants used an iPhone and he used the Android phone.

But now they all come from an iPhone. So as this article says, uh, there was only one way to tell posts the two apart, their content. Yep. Well, which one has the crazy. I was about to say there's a extreme use of, uh, punctuation and X and, uh, all that sort of stuff that is questionable at best is still a pretty good indicator.

Yep. Yeah. And then, and crazy. Yeah. Well, that, and from a security point of view, the, this iPhone is more secure than the old Android phone that he was using. So at least that's a step in the right direction. Yeah. Well, well, Hey, the small victories, take it where you can get it.

Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny handed victories, uh, death by a million tweets. Anyway, uh, thank you Dave for joining us and everybody go check out Dave every weekday at the cyber wire.com. Thanks guys. At the library.

I have been to the library. I have seen the books. All right. I got a couple of books by Nick Bilton this week. I read American Kingpin, the epic hunt for the criminal mastermind behind the Silk Road. Okay. And I also read hatching Twitter, a true story of money, power, friendship, and betrayal.

All right. Soon to be a movie that is directed by David Fincher and soundtracked by Trent Reznor's, uh, outtakes from all of his other albums. Yeah. I, well, I'm thinking Kingpin would probably be the first one. The Twitter one might actually be more enjoyable for me because that was a walk down memory lane. Um, uh, the American Kingpin book was fantastic.

It was, it was really cool to see all the behind the scenes cause he had access to all of the chat logs and all of the, you know, basically all the stuff from the court transcripts and all that. Um, I have a followup on, uh, another story about, uh, the dread pirate Roberts later, but I highly recommend this book.

I mean, it was really good. Cool. Uh, hatching Twitter was really good for different reasons because for me, I got to see how big of an asshole Jack Dorsey really is. Even though I knew he was a dick, I didn't realize how big of a, just a fucktard he is. I had to, yeah, I mean, really, he's a terrible person.

Anyway, uh, going on to other books, uh, Joe, uh, Rapley, he recommended the red rising series by Pierce Brown. Yes. And, uh, it was on sale at audible.com. So I picked up the first two of the three and, uh, yeah, I'm on the fence.

I'm on the fence. I'm halfway through book two golden sun. It is very derivative of, uh, uh, the hunger games. Um, every fantasy space novel ever made, uh, Ender's game.

But this is kind of is targeted at young adults, right? Like it's not, it's fairly young adult ish. I mean, it's, there are parts, it's, it's mostly young adults, very violent, but not much sex in it. Um, it, it, it's got a little game of thrones in there too, but it's not bad.

I mean, I, I, I went to the second one and I'm enjoying the second one. It's just not great. You know? Right. Here's the thing though. The second book, like I, if you want to equate these to the hunger games, which I love the first book of the hunger games, even though it's a young adult, I thought it was a great book. Second and third books were steaming piles of shit.

Yeah. Um, they kind of fix it in the movies, but, uh, they just made too many movies, one too many for sure. And, uh, this one, the, the followup is actually really good. So I'm enjoying them. I, I gotta say, you know, it's kind of a guilty pleasure to not have to really think too hard about this kind of thing because you know what's going to happen.

And I mean, it's telegraphed. It's the writing is me. Okay. Pierce is a young guy. He's like in his twenties and he's, I actually just did an interview with him for another client that'll be coming out this week. That was pretty cool. He's a cool guy, but he's young. And I don't think the language is really there, which it might, you know, he might've had to pull it back because it is a young adult novel.

And I found out why it's a young adult novel because apparently it's really easy to get a sci-fi young adult novel out there as opposed to a hard sci-fi novel because there's more budget for young adult sci-fi than there is for hard sci-fi. You have to be established.

So they're using the budget for the advertising to get the author out there as a young adult novel novelist. And then, then he can go write what he wants. But I mean, it's decent. It's, I, I look, if you're in for that kind of thing for you, Brian, I would say absolutely not. Right.

You should not read this, but, um, cause you'll be bored. You'll be absolutely bored. I'm, I'm just liking it on my walks because it's not short either. The two books together are 30, over 30 plus hours. Right. So they're not, they're not wee, but I wouldn't say, you know, put your time into it.

There's, there's so much other stuff that we've talked about that you should read that, you know, but it's good. I mean, it's good, but it's not great. Right. And I'm more of a, I'm more of a hard sci-fi guy, which is, uh, my book that I read this last, well, took me two weeks, uh, by Gregory Benford. This is the Berlin project.

Now, Benford is known as one of the, what they're, what's called the killer bees, uh, which is Greg bear, Gregory Benford and David Brin. There are also the three hard sci-fi authors that were tapped to continue Isaac Asimov's foundation series, all of which were great books. And this is like back in 95. So, so these guys are, are super established hard sci-fi writers and I usually look forward to their books.

Um, I did not care for this one. Uh, this is an alternative history, uh, the Berlin, you have the world war two and the nuclear, uh, weapons programs. I don't know how you take an alternative history that's talking world war two and atomic bombs and blowing up the U S as getting them earlier so they can blow up Berlin and make it boring.

But somehow he managed. That's too bad. It is too bad. It was a lot of work. At times it felt like I was taking a physics class, which I almost didn't mind. Um, the problem is it was the entire story was just told from the perspective of the scientists and you never really got exciting.

It just didn't. So again, like how you, how you have that subject matter and you're writing about it and you, it just did never really caught my interest. So that's, that's too bad. Not too bad. Yeah. The last, uh, alternative history one that you gave me, uh, with the, what was that one?

The three-parter, uh, the milkweed series. Yes. Those were great. That was exciting stuff. Yeah. That was really fun. I, I missed that. But those, uh, those characters, that was a really good series. Yeah, me too. Um, so some non-book news, uh, Amazon is opening a, one of their bookstores right here in century city, not that far away from me.

So I'm excited about going to see that at some point. Um, there's a bit of an article about it in the LAist and they talk about how is this like a regular bookstore? Of course it's not. Uh, it's a, basically a promotional hub for all of Amazon services. And the one thing that really bothers me and it should bother everybody is they don't put price tags on any of the books.

Is that not bullshit or what? I saw that. I was pissed. They display the review and the average user rating. And if you want to know the price, you have to download the Amazon app and scan the merchandise to get the price. Or take it to a scanning station in the store. There are scanning stations around the store.

Yes. And, but, but apparently people are being trained. All the people that work there, the sales associates are being trained to push the app and make you download the app on your phone. And then sign up for prime. Yes. And then sign up for prime because everything is discounted. If you're a prime member in the stores, I, the fact that they don't put the prices on there drives me insane and it's bullshit.

And we all know that their prices fluctuate. So that's the reason that they're never going to print and put the price there because they're going to screw you. Books that are selling really well are going to go up in price. Books that they're trying to get rid of are going to go down in price. And it could, the price could change between scans. If you walk around the bookstore, which is a lot of crap, but that's also, I mean, that's the way bookstores always work.

I mean, if it's on the discount table next week, you know, it's, they always change based on inventory setting this up. So it's so much faster. And I just hate the fact that you can't see the price right away. You don't run a store like that. Well, what, that's not what bugs me. What bugs me is the fact that these are prime factories.

The whole point of this store is to get you to sign up for prime because then you're going to get a discount on your books and all your shipping, and it's just a way for them to get people to sign up for prime period, which is a crazy expensive. Now, you know, Barnes and Noble used to always push, you know, signing up for their club, but that was free and you got a discount.

Now, this is a hundred dollars a year, if not even more. Now, I'm not even sure how much apples and oranges, you know, because you get free shipping on everything with crime and movies and, you know, all the other crap that goes with it. But yep. And for quite a while, Barnes and Noble turned themselves into a nook factory.

Please buy a nook. Please, please buy a nook. Anyways. We're going to give you one for free and we're going to put your receipt on the nook just so you open it at least once. Yeah, exactly. So we have also an article linked in our show notes from Recode that has a bunch of photos from the New York City bookstore, which I believe is open now.

So you can take a look and see what the future of bookstores is going to look like. It was boring. It was absolutely boring. The one thing that I thought was interesting, though, as they pointed out at the end of the article is they you don't see any book spines because everything is just, you know, front facing. Everything is front facing and displayed, which means less product.

It's less product and it's algorithmically chosen. But I did go. I unfortunately didn't get to go inside the one in San Jose when I was there. I did send you a text with one of the pictures of the bookstore was coming soon next to my hotel. Yeah. But I didn't get to go inside. It wasn't quite ready yet.

It was half baked, as it were. As it were. Yes. And now we come to our medium article that I found. I just thought this was really interesting. It's by Nick Kokonas, who I believe obviously is a chef, and he talks about the experience of being approached by publishers to to do a cooking book and why.

And he explains why they are self-publishing it now as opposed to doing it with with any publisher. And it goes through the financials in excruciating detail. And you see how fucked you are as an author. Yeah, I'm not going to get too into it. I actually I copied some stuff to talk about it, but it's just if you're interested in it and you should be, you should go read it.

It's fascinating. No, I definitely can't wait to read this. I mean, most people know that being an author is a loss leader or getting speaking gigs and TV gigs and selling other crap, kind of like being a musician is nowadays by making an album. Yes. Almost everything creative is now supposed to be a loss leader and you're supposed to make your money somewhere else somehow.

Yeah. Here, make the product and then you go figure it out, little boy. We don't want to deal with you anymore. Exactly. Now, somebody who doesn't have to worry about it and one of your favorite people on the planet, Neil Gaiman, is doing something a little fun for charity. So I found this and had to throw this in there. Neil Gaiman, obviously, you know who he is if you've been listening to this podcast, because Jason talks about him every single week.

I don't talk about him every single week. Only generally when you bring him up nowadays. He will perform a dramatic reading of the entire Cheesecake Factory menu almost as long as some of his books, but only if fans of his books will raise $500,000 for United Nations Refugee Agency. So it's a fundraising challenge that came out of comedian and author Sarah Benacasa, who tweeted the crazy idea to Gaiman, and he went for it.

So very cool. They've raised, as of this morning, $61,912. And it was just like a ticker going on. So it's kind of hit the zeitgeist now. So it might make it. It crossed my path. So therefore, it's out there. Yeah.

And that's a good cause. So I got the fire stick because I'm going to Cody that thing up in a little bit. OK, but I went the full week just kind of using it every now and then to see how it worked, because you would ask me a couple of questions about it, particularly how it works with Alexa.

And it does sort of work with Alexa. Well, it comes baked with its own version. OK. So you actually have to push a button on the remote. So it's very similar to Apple TV's use of Siri. And you can't it's not voice commanded otherwise, which kind of makes sense, because I figure if you're into Amazon and their ecosystem, you probably got an Alexa sitting around already in the same room that your TV is going to be in.

So you need to be able to control these things separately without confusing them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And my main question was, can you talk to your regular Echo and have it do something with the fire stick on your TV, like turn on the TV and turn on NBC or turn on the Cubs game? OK, no, you can't.

So it does not work that way. You have to use the Alexa that is built into your Amazon fire stick to control the fire stick and you cannot control the TV. You can only control things within the Amazon fire stick environment. OK, so I think that's where the Google Home has an advantage. Right now could be.

Yeah. So so that's not there in the sense that you'd want it. But I have to say, I mean, it looks good. The interface is really nice. I mean, there's so much you can access through Amazon. There's not much of a difference between all of these things again anymore because they've got you, you know, you can get Netflix, you get Hulu, you get et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all those sort of stuff.

So it's nice enough. And if you're an Amazon guy and if you're in the ecosystem, it would make sense to go and get yourself a fire stick. They're certainly cheap enough. So, OK, that's cool. But I will be nuking mine this week now and giving a go with the great Cody experiment. All right. So YouTube TV now has airplay availability.

OK, good. Which is great because my Chromecast crashes every 45 minutes. I've heard that older Chromecasts are not doing very well with all the new stuff and you have to buy a new one. It just came this week. It's brand new. Oh, well, there you go. This is the free one I got for my YouTube TV subscription.

Oh, right. So you think they should work together well? Yes. You'd think it would be optimized for YouTube TV. It is optimized to crash YouTube TV. And I've tried it with my iPhone, my iPad and my Mac. And it's the same result. The Chromecast itself crashes.

So that's unfortunate. I flipped over to using airplay. Fortunately, I was going to sell my Apple TV and nobody bought it, thank God, because it works great with airplay. No crashes whatsoever because all it is, it's a pass through. So I'm sticking with, I'm keeping my Apple TV now.

And Chromecast, I'll see what I can do with it. Maybe there'll be an update and it'll fix it. But man, yeah. And I've been on the phone with, not on the phone, on the chats with the YouTube tech people. And fortunately, they're actually very responsive. And I've given them UI issues.

And I'm like, hey, you know, that whole remove from list thing. Why do you have a stop button? It should be a minus. And all this is like, we're going to pass that along to our UI team. And I'm like, wow, that was cool. Very cool. Yeah. And sadly, we have to say goodbye to Hackpad this week.

They were bought by Dropbox a couple years ago. And we've been using them for our show notes for over 100 episodes. Yes. And I loved Hackpad. I really did. I did too. It was such a great piece of software. But, you know, we just can't have nice things, Jason. Well, we can because it's open source.

But then that means we'd have to install it on our servers, which both you and I are getting rid of our own personal servers because we're out of the business. I don't need to be spending 100 bucks a month on a couple servers that I just don't need anymore. No, and especially not if you get clients who, you know, they look at GoDaddy's.

I can pay $3 a month for hosting. Why would I pay you anything more than that? It doesn't make financial sense to run your own servers anymore. Yeah, don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass on the way out there, buddy. Yep. But I do have to say, if you need a server, go to Linode. They are fantastic. All SSD-based, fast, and cheap.

So we're on Quip now. Quip is owned by Salesforce.com, surprisingly. Yes. I think it's working pretty well. It's working pretty well. We have to pay for it, which is fine. It's 30 bucks a month for a five-person team. So we're going to drop the money.

So head on over to patreon.com slash GOG and help us out. Yeah, thus far, it's pretty good. I mean, I think we're only our first show into this, so maybe we'll talk about it a bit more when we go on. I like this as much as Hackpad already. It's got some more powerful features. Some things are a little different and kind of don't work the way that we've done 100 shows so far.

So it's a matter of changing things around. The most annoying thing in the world was that we couldn't paste without formatting, and Jason found the best hack in the entire world. So we have this link in our show notes. It's basically a quick setup and settings that overwrites any application, well, almost any applications, default.

So if you do Command-Shift-V for paste, it will just take out all the damn formatting. Yeah, if your app supports paste and match style, which we do in Opera now, because we've both moved over to Opera, which we'll talk about in a second, you can override the key binding in Opera to just use that and use it in any application that supports it.

So it's turned out to be, that was the big one. The downside, my biggest hatred of the quip is that you can't see who wrote what, because in Hackpad, if you just went into editing mode, you could see who wrote what in the sidebar. Yeah, I'm a little surprised that they don't have it, because it's all built in.

I mean, I can see that you're logged in right now. I see your initials with the little circle, because everything has to be a circle now. But yeah, the fact that they don't actually have a way or any way to turn on notification of who put in what is shocking to me. Yeah, we can, what we, our workaround, if you're doing a two-person show and want to try this out, because I know Kyle and Kenny from The Morning Show, we're talking about using this as well.

We use highlighting. Unfortunately, you can only select one highlight color, which is stupid. Yellow. Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, my, my gate just broke on that laugh. Oh, that hurt. Yes, you can only pick yellow, and we're, we're stuck with that.

So only one person can highlight. So that's the downside. So hopefully we're going to put in some feature requests and see how it goes. But so far, so good. Yeah, can't complain so far. All right, let's get on to Opera. I'm using Opera. It is awesome. It is awesome. There is a great extension called Download Chrome Extension, which lets you use Chrome extensions in Opera, which fixes everything.

It's like, oh, we don't have an extension for Opera. You do now. Yeah, you do. Just go download the Chrome extension. And this comes from a friend of the show, Monkey13, yet again. And he got me working with my pinboard extension, which was one of the main ones that I couldn't use.

And since I'm not in Chrome anymore, all of my bookmarks don't sync. So I moved back to that old Xmarks plugin. Turns out it works great. I'm using that as well. Works fantastic. The built-in ad blocker at Opera is unbelievably good.

Perfect. It is fast. It is quick. I still use Instapaper to save things as we're going along. And they've got a great plugin for that that's baked into Opera. Well, not baked in. You have to go install it. But it's great. It is super fast. Everything is a lot faster for me than Chrome was.

It's a whole new experience. It is a whole new experience. There are small, subtle things. Again, just like talking about using Hackpad for 100 episodes and then switching to something new. I've been using Chrome forever. The closing a tab is on the other side of the tab. It drives me friggin' insane.

But I'll get used to it. It's just muscle memory shit. Yeah, I was going to say, there's a lot of muscle memory involved with the Switch. But so far, I'm digging it. And I love the little launchpad thing. What do they call that? Oh, the start page. Oh, yeah, the start page. I've already tweaked that. So that's got all my favorite stuff there.

It's fantastic. Matches my Chrome setup. Exactly. But here's the reason why I love it so much. About five times a day, I have to quit Chrome because I'm looking at, because I use iStat menus to monitor all of my processes and what's using what and what's going where.

Literally five or six times a day with Chrome, I have to quit it because it is spun out of control and is using 50% of the processor. Opera has not peaked past 15. Yep. I've been really enjoying it. I got a couple other new toys this week. I got the Shure MV88 iOS digital stereo condenser microphone.

No, no. Does this mean we're going to have to change mics again? No, no, no. This is just so I can, when I'm out on the road, if I need to record something, maybe a personal audio blog. Ain't never going to happen. Or just do pickups when I'm out and I need to get something done for a client or something like that.

It works with my iPad. It's a lightning connector, which means I'm going to have to keep my iPad forever because we know that the iPhone 8 and the new iPads are going to have USB-C. No, it's okay. They're going to sell you an adapter that'll cost $95. Yeah, the problem with this is it needs to be plugged into the device because if I put it on a flappy cord, it's going to move around.

So that's not going to work. But yeah, it sounds great. It's $150 and my God, does this thing sound amazing. Nice. Yeah, you have to use the Shure software to record with it, but it gives you all different microphone patterns since it's a stereo condenser mic. You can get really cool ambient stuff from it.

It's a really nice mic, I got to say. It was recommended by Phil, was it Phil Kagan? From The Amazing Race. Okay. Yeah, I did an edit with him this week and he recommended it. It sounds pretty damn good. Okay, next up.

I have tweeted and talked about my passion for hard-boiled eggs and my friend Ron Jones said his wife lives and dies by the Elite Cuisine Maximatic Egg Cooker. Okay. It's a little $15 device.

It's basically a hot plate with a piece of plastic on top and a steamer lid that lets you make hard-boiled eggs perfectly every time. I cannot understand how I've ever lived without this. For $15, it's unbelievable. And you can't overcook the eggs because it turns off.

Okay. Like when they're done. Right. If you like hard-boiled eggs or soft-boiled eggs or any other kind of eggs, get one of these. It's $15. You cannot go wrong. It is pretty cheap if you've got the kitchen space. Yeah. Yeah. It's small too. It's actually really tiny. You can only do seven eggs at a time in it. I'm used to using a steamer basket in my pan for 12 eggs, but I can do it twice.

Anyway. Now, let's jam out, Brian. Let's jam. Jam on it. Yeah. Have you seen the jam board from Google? Yes. $5,000. $5,000. Now, I think we should not forget this quip stuff.

We're going to get two jam boards each, and this is how we're going to do our show notes from now on. Okay. Yeah. It's $5,000 plus $600 a year for the annual management and support fee. Now, that is beyond ridiculous. And another $1,200 if you want the rolling stand.

Holy crap. Yeah. It comes with a wall mount, but if you want to roll it around like in the ad, that's another $1,200. This is ridiculous. It's a TV that you can draw on. Should have been a moron of the week. I was thinking about it. I really was thinking about it. But it is a gadget.

But I saw it, and I watched the video, and I'm like, wow, you guys have too much money. Because you also have to have a G Suite account, which it auto-saves everything to. And that's the only good thing about it. It's like everything that you're doing, it auto-saves to the cloud. Yeah. I'm sure. No more taking pictures of the whiteboard that you can never get right because it's always a white spot on it when some dumbass uses his flash.

That's true. Okay. Glad we solved that problem for $5,000. Each. Each. So if we had to do it, yeah. We're looking at 15 grand. So patreon.com slash GOG. Get on it, people. Yeah. Plus the annual fee. Yeah. Yeah.

Keep it up. Keep it up. So the Nokia 3310, apparently, according to Engadget, is too basic for 2017. Well, no shit. Yeah. Duh. The whole point of getting this is because you want a retro phone that doesn't do anything. I mean, that was the point.

I think they missed the entire point. I think they did, too. But apparently in India, they didn't miss the point because those old Nokia phones, and this is a hat tip to Sean Bonner for the link, they use them as sex toys because it's apparently very hard to buy a vibrator in India.

But you can get one of these old Nokia phones, you know, for pennies out in the bazaar, and the vibrator in the phones is so powerful that the ladies like it quite a bit. I do miss that about those old phones. They vibrated. God damn it. Oh, you knew it. Yeah, you knew it.

There was no phantom, did something go off in my leg thing? No, you knew. Yeah, no phantom leg syndrome. I think that went away for a while. I haven't gotten it anymore. I haven't gotten it anymore either. I think it's just because we don't really I never have my phone on vibrate ever, so I don't feel anything ever anymore.

So there's no no phantoms. Yep. The phantoms have gone away. But speaking of a phantom from the past, Adam Curry is back in the news. I get you got to give this guy props for still being around and still being somewhat relevant. He manages to keep on going. He's he is the the pod father, as they say, unlike pod Vader.

Fuck that guy. But yeah, Adam Curry is now he has a an Indiegogo to start the all in one podcasting solution called the Podcaster Pro. Yep. Have you looked at this thing? The mockup?

I will give him less credit because this looks like something that they probably use in the MTV studios 35 years ago. There's no modern touch to this design at all. It's ridiculous. The whole the whole thing is ridiculous. So the featured version is six hundred and forty seven dollars for the Adam Curry signature edition.

Yes. If you just want to get one, it's four hundred ninety seven dollars, which is the early bird pricing because it's going to cost more than that when it comes out. Right. And out of his five hundred thousand dollar goal, he's raised thirty five thousand dollars. And there's a month left.

He's not going to make it because all all ninety four people in the world that want this steaming pile of shit have just ordered it. Yeah. And the leather jacket that he's wearing in his promotional video is worth more than the six hundred and forty seven dollar signature edition. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, the man has a castle and a helicopter company.

Yeah. Yeah. Fund it yourself, asshole. But what I was going to say is for six hundred and forty seven dollars, you can save fifty dollars and get a Zoom H6, which does three times as much stuff as that stupid box does. But I want to just press play and be a podcaster. Yeah, it doesn't really work that way.

And if you want to find out more about how hard it is to be a podcaster, go to pro podcasting dot school. I knew the plug was coming. You knew it. Course isn't ready yet, but it'll be there shortly. Anyway. Yeah, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Sorry, Adam, you've been smoking too much weed.

Media candy. Now, as a follow up to my Ross Ulbrecht discussion that we had before, I went out and watched The Deep Web, which is a documentary by Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame. Yes. And narrated by Keanu Reeves.

There you go. I couldn't believe it. When I turned it on, I'm like, no way. Technically, this is the Bill and Ted sequel. It is. You know what I said when it first came on? Whoa. Whoa. I actually did. Now, was this actually, whoa, were they?

No. This it's decent. It's a good, like, you know, kind of supplement if you read the book by Nick Bilton. But they were like, they finished this movie way too early because, you know, when we talked about this, what, two years ago, the whole thing came out about the corrupt agents that were stealing the Bitcoin once they got the servers and everything.

And these guys were, you know, ripping off the Silk Road and eventually got busted and went to jail. It is a title card at the end that is just kind of an aside. It just ends with Ross getting sentenced to life in prison. And it really, and it didn't have nearly as much stuff.

I would just seriously recommend reading the book. Skip the movie. It wasn't, it wasn't, there wasn't enough in it. And, you know, I kind of want my money back because I bought it. Right. I actually, you know, did not go to the Swedens and I did not go to the deep web to steal the deep web. I paid for it. Now, I kind of, I just kind of want a refund on that one.

Well, on the plus side, you saved me money. Ah, that's right. I guess I did. Yes, you did. Did you watch it? No, I was waiting to hear what you thought about it. Oh, okay. I didn't know if I sent you my login for it. That's what you meant. You now told me it sucked and I will not watch it. Yep. Yeah. Save your two hours.

So, so I'm going to save you 30 hours on the Red Rising series. And then two hours on the, or an hour and a half on the deep web. So you are now in my technical debt. Well, I think I might be able to repay you here, but don't watch Twin Peaks, Jason. It was not good, was it?

Oh, I loved it, but I don't think you should watch it. I do. Well, here's the thing. I enjoyed it. I thought the first episode, because it was two episodes for the first one, was boring and slow as shit. But when it got going, I enjoyed it. The first four episodes have, are now available on Showtime.

I watched the first two, which is basically packaged as one, one, two hour episode. I really thought that they were, David Lynch was going to be, and Mark, I'm blanking on it, Frost, were going to bring us in nice and easy, little, some donut actions, some coffee, some damn fine cherry pie.

No. Fuck no, no. Oh, they dropped you right in the fucking Black Lodge of hell. Yeah. And it was awesome. I am so into the show, I cannot wait. But you've got to be a Twin Peaks head to dig this. This is rough entry. It really is.

It is. This is Twins Peaks on Lube. Yeah, they went straight for the crazy part of the show and not the genteel part that most people and quirky part that most people really loved about it. So right into the fire. I still don't even, I haven't processed what I just watched.

See, yeah, it kind of made me like, I'm halfway through the second, you know, the second part of the first block. And I'm like, I should really stop this and go back and get caught up again, because I forgot about all the craziness with the lodge and all that stuff. I'm just like, I should really maybe just go back and do it.

But I, you know, let me save you a little, let me save you a little time. And maybe you should go do this. I contemplated going back and rewatching the entire series before this came on, because it's been 25 years. Ain't nobody got time for that. Ain't nobody got time for that. What I did is I scanned Wikipedia episode summaries.

Oh, good call. So I would highly recommend. Yeah, I'm going to do that. You do do that and then go read the summary for Fire Walk With Me, the movie that came out as well, because this takes off from Fire Walk With Me, not so much the series. Yeah, yeah. Fire Walk With Me.

I liked it. I really, I really enjoyed that. But yeah, so I'm I'm loving it. We're going to see where it goes. But yeah, have you watched all four or just the first two? Just the first two. I've got three queued up for tonight and I'll have the four done and whatever else they've gotten to by next week's show. OK, cool.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to I'll be caught up, too. But I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed seeing all the and especially all the old cameos from everybody in the past. Yeah. Yeah. So it's good stuff. Now, I expect weirdness from David Lynch and David Lynch is a master and a true artist.

And so he's allowed to do that. OK, I'm watching The Leftovers. There are two episodes left in the show and I'm going to make it through the show. But so God help me, I will never watch anything, anything that Damon Lindhoff is involved in again. OK, and why is that?

Fuck these guys. It is crazy. It's fantastic that you come up with these amazing concepts in this crazy world building. But David Lindhoff, fuck you. You never explain a fucking thing. He's already come out of the gate. He's doing interviews saying we're never going to answer any of these questions.

It's never going to be answered. Fuck you, Ronald Moore. You did the same fucking thing with Battlestar Galactica. You both can just fuck right off. I'm fucking sick of you. Fucking hacks. Stephen King manages to explain his worlds. Frank Herbert manages to explain his worlds. Isaac Asimov manages to explain his worlds.

You fucking hacks. I'm sick of being jerked around by you fuckers. You come up with these awesome ideas and you say, well, it's about the journey. Fuck you. But you knew that going into the series. I know. He said it when they started. That's why I never watched it.

I'm so angry. Yeah, but, you know, that's your own damn fault. You knew it wasn't. Nothing was going to be answered. I just said I was angry at myself. Yes, I know. But I'm enabling Damon Lindhoff. You are. I'm not doing it anymore. That's it. Done. No, good.

Good for you. So two things that will cheer you up. Slicing eyeballs, slicing up eyeballs. The site has put together a playlist of all 225 of the Cure songs that are available on Spotify. There are 16 that aren't and bring them. So there you go.

15 hours and 32 minutes of Fat Bob goodness to cleanse the aching hole that Damon Lindhoff has caused. That Brian Schulmeister has caused. Yes. Didn't listen to his own damn advice. I am never doing it again. Never. And Game of Thrones season seven trailer has dropped.

If you have not seen it yet. Before we get to Game of Thrones, you didn't let me ask you about the Cure playlist here. They're ranked, which means Brian has an opinion. How does your opinion on the ranked songs line up to the slicing eyeballs version?

Well, I agree with their number one. Of course, it's my favorite song of all time. I was actually quite shocked to see it as number one because it's a deep cut, as it were. Um, but you know, the big on singles at the beginning, but that's okay. I, I, it's, it's very difficult and it's very subjective, but I like a lot of this.

I, I would move some of the singles a little further down the list, but there's, you know, Charlotte sometimes is sitting at number six. That's crazy. Integration is number eight. That's awesome. Uh, it's pretty good. I mean, it's just throw this on in the background and you'll be a happy boy. Well, since they are, since they're all available on Spotify and you have Spotify, you should make the Brian Schulmeister Cure playlist.

I suppose I could. Yes, but you're not going to. With all that free time I've got. Yes, exactly. Uh, so, okay. Yes. Game of Thrones season seven trailer. Uh, are you still watching Game of Thrones? Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Okay. I, I know so many people that have dropped off, but, uh, I'm not one of them.

I'm going to watch it. I'm, I'm, I'm ready to go, especially now that they've announced five spinoff series. Yeah. I'm probably not going to watch any of that, but I'm definitely going to finish. I'm going to finish out the main show. I'm invested. I'm into it. And it saves me from having to go read books or go watch the leftovers again.

Uh, hat tip to Laura Huston on Twitter, who sent this link our way. Uh, we also, I already had thrown it in our show notes, but, uh, it's nice to get the, the tip of the hat as well, uh, that this is a good one.

So this is funny. Uh, and AI invented a bunch of new paint colors. It's good stuff. So, uh, this is, uh, done by Janelle Shane. So she thought that, uh, paint color names were pretty strange to begin with. So she built a neural network and start and tasked it with naming colors.

Uh, it's very, very funny. And I'm just going to say turdly for the win. Turdly for the win. Yeah. It's a good color. Mendel floss has a great article about ask Jeeves and why everybody stopped asking them. This is just a trip down internet memory lane. Cause I used to love the site.

Uh, this was started by Garrett Gruner, a graduate of UC San Diego. Um, he got into it and by 1992, he started to basically build out an interface and no face to put on it. So he came up with the Jeeves concept doing, you know, very kind of London-esque, um, which I always enjoyed.

I thought it was fantastic. Uh, they did very well for a long time. They had an initial spectacular IPO. Uh, their price. I don't remember. I asked Jeeves IPO-ing. Wow. Me either, but it went from $14 to $190 and 50 cents a share. So they did very good.

Wow. That's why we're broke. And this is in the late nineties, but by the early two thousands already, uh, they were became a casualty, the search engine wars. Um, and finally, 2001, the dot-com bubble burst advertisers fled. Uh, the company posted a $425 million loss.

Shares plummeted to 86 cents by 2002. Yowza. Yes. But you think that sounds bad. In 2005, they still managed to get purchased for $1.85 billion. In 2005? In 2005, with an 86 cents stock price, $1.85 billion anyways, which is why everybody got into tech because it's stupid.

Oh my God. How did we not, how are we not rich? This is ridiculous. We did everything wrong. We did absolutely everything wrong. Oh, we just went to the club too many damn times. And, uh, by, by this point, Ask Jeeves had become Ask.com and I'm sure we all remember how shitty that site was and still is.

Yep. Oh man. There you go. That's what happened to Ask Jeeves. Uh, interesting article from Futurism, uh, the Card, Kardashev scale, which is basically enables, uh, it enables and lists out the types of civilizations that could be out in the universe. We are still a type zero, but if you'd like to discover what type one, two, three, four and five are, it all basically involves harnessing energy, um, including, you know, basically building a, uh, what are those things called that we think that we may have found out there?

Like somebody has built that circles the entire sun. Oh yeah. The, um, like the, kind of like the ring world theory, but, uh, but it's got a, it's not a Dyson sphere, is it? Yes. Dyson sphere around the sun. So if you do that, I believe you're a type two civilization. So it's just an interesting read.

I liked it. I like, I like Sid Meier's civilization. I don't have to build anything for that. And I know, and I know all the cheat codes, uh, the library of Congress has just put 25 million records online for free. All right. So I'm sure that'll be taken away pretty quickly.

No, no, no. It's the, it's come on. It's the library of Congress. You can get all the tweets. They've already got all the tweets. So, uh, they've got that MC one. They, they actually would, they would have it because they did have the fire hose. They probably still do. Uh, but yeah, you know, stuff like a digital library cards, cover music, books, maps, manuscripts, and more.

So, uh, go check it out. We have a link in the show notes and I have to say, I don't know how I got back in with these guys. Oddity mall. Do you remember the site? We've covered it a long, long time ago. I do. I got, I got a Facebook ad for this salad dicer that basically is a bowl with a bunch of slices on top and you put all your veggies in it, flip it upside down and chop up your salad.

Yes. And I, I bought one cause it was like 10 bucks. Um, but while I was doing it, I found something that I thought you would like, which is a star Wars tie fighter gas barbecue. Oddity mall is like the, the now it's where all the sky mall people apparently have gone to go work.

Yeah. It also looks, it looks like a very still circa 1990 ass Jeezy site. It is pretty bad. With a lot of color. And this is, uh, the grill looks beautiful. It's crazy expensive. $400 for a gas grill. Just so you could, and they should pay you because it, the, the feature of it is that it will brand star Wars logos into your meat.

I do not need a star Wars logo on my meat. No, but I think it would be fine if it said Han shot first. Okay. I'd buy that. Feedback loop. We got a direct donation via PayPal from Brian Grisot.

Apologies if I'm getting your name wrong. That's a good one. Thank you so much. Uh, and over at Patreon, we got a donation from Jack Thorne. Thank you. Thank you very much. And, uh, we got something in from, uh, Barad. Now that now I know why you gave me this one, Barad Gengifard.

Uh, it says, it's like someone took your advice, JP def. Um, and there's no link here. So I don't know what we're talking about. This is a screenshot of Twitter, uh, saying we didn't mean to keep the secret. Try Twitter ads. Okay. There we go. Yes. Well, I, we have tried Twitter ads and we are unable to do them.

So to hell with that. All right. Next one comes from, uh, Ben Stanley. He says, I just listened to number 208. Don't spend 50 bucks on a pie for a pie hole. You just need a $5 pie zero, but at last I'm sure it's too late by now. Actually it wasn't. But the problem is the pie zero has, uh, gone up in price.

Instead of like the pie zero two and they're sold out. Um, when it finally comes on the market, but it just dawned on me. I've got an Arduino in the other room. I wonder if that'll work too. I'm gonna see if I can install pies pie hole on my Arduino that I never use. Remember that thing that I bought? I do. We were both going to do that.

And then neither of us did. I've got the kit and it's sitting in a box. So awesome. Go give it a go with your spare time. And I'll do my, uh, I'll do my thing with my fire stick. Yeah, sure. Okay. Our projects this week. Uh, we heard from Barrett Reese giving opera a try major speed improvements over Chrome using Ubuntu.

I think I'm convinced. Thanks for the recommendation. Awesome. And, uh, Kyle Roderick, uh, at dog burps. I just love that. Um, this was perfect for my Monday. Interested to hear what you think after trying quip for the show notes. I know hack pad is on the way out. We covered that up earlier. So, uh, yeah, I'd try quip.

Give it a go. It's pretty good. And Kyle was a guest host on the show when Brian was incapacitated for a while. So, and we love Kyle. Go check out the morning show over at, uh, was it the good stuff network? Yep. And Merle. Merle. It's Merle.

Yes. The only thing that gets me through Atlantic traffic are podcasts. And then he, uh, named a bunch of different podcasts and we were one of them. So thank you so much. Well, yeah, we're in good company. Gary V twit high rose podcast. Debbie Millman, guy Raz, who I don't know. And us. So that is, yes, we're last, but we'll take it.

We'll take it. This next one comes from the website. This is from Devin Hill. Hey guys, love your podcast. Let's do it all the time. Enough that I've actually been thinking of supporting a first for me. Uh, well, we'll, we'll be glad to be your first. I do have a question. Many times you mentioned that you sell a VPN service, but I'm having a hard time finding info on it.

Where would I sign up for that? Uh, if your VPN is secure, AKA no logging. He didn't use punctuation in his, uh, comment here. So I'm having a hard time going through this. Anyway, here's the way it works. We don't own a VPN. We promote a VPN. It's not ours.

We have an affiliation with them. Yes. Go to grumpy old, or sorry, gog.show slash VPN. And you can sign up and it's called virtual private. What is it? No, no. Of course it's called virtual private networks. It's called private internet access. And it is a no log VPN.

It is the only one that has been field tested by the FBI. They couldn't get through it. Uh, give it a shot. Check out your favorite sites. You have seven days for a free money back guarantee. After that, you're on your own. So make sure it works for you and you're off to the races. Yep. There you go. So I use it every day.

I do as well. Uh, our next comment comes from Ben came across your podcast. I really don't listen to podcasts that much and just wanted to say, I have really been enjoying it. I listened while doing web design or dev contact contract work. I'm sorry, buddy, which can get tedious. You keep me focused.

Great source of news and fun. Random tech crap. You're my click and clack of tech. All righty. I swear. You don't know what click and clack is, do you? No, I have no idea what click and clack is. I don't think so. No, I was just looking because I thought I had Ben's, uh, he, or his website listed in the show notes.

I'm going to put it in the final show notes. I thought I had it in here because, uh, Ben's a no joke web dev. Okay, cool. I'll throw up. I think I cut it out because I usually cut out people's personal links unless they pay us. Uh, no, uh, Ben, Ben's no joke guy and he's in LA and, uh, you guys should probably have a beer at some point because, uh, he works on a lot of the stuff that we used to work on.

All right. Well, let's have a beer, Ben. Yeah. Throw that back in there and click and clack or no joke car radio guys like legends. Okay. Yeah. I don't, don't do that. I know. Okay. Next one comes from Scott, uh, Jason and Brian. Thank you both for all the work you put into this podcast found through art of charm last year and haven't stopped listening since.

Woo. I am the opposite of a tech guy and I've learned a ton about the tech world. Thanks to you two. I can finally have intelligent conversations with my tech friends. I even learned some basic HTML and CSS for my website after killing it by accident. Well, that's how you learn. Uh, largely thanks to you guys.

Thanks for explaining things in a way that even a semi-tech retard millennial can understand. All right. Thank you, Scott. Yes. Thank you so much. Uh, next up from Joe. Nice plug for opera. I love it. I've been using it for a while. Really love it. Keep up the good work guys.

All right. People like the opera. Next up is from Brian G. The cloud is a lie. I thought you guys were grumpy. Check out John Keats piece on the Mac observer. He must listen to the show. He reaffirms what you guys say quite often about cloud services versus ownership of our own data or lack thereof.

I'd love to hear your take on this provocative rant. Uh, did you go read it, Jason? I did not, but he said, he said we were right. So I, I, I basically, you know, once, once I hear that we're right, then I just, I can stop reading. Uh, he mentions one password, which I do use by the way. So there's another one, uh, but without any cloud syncing between my devices, all local secured wifi baby.

The only way to go with locking down your passwords. And yes, I back all that shit three times over all encrypted with one copy offsite. Love the show. I'll keep listening. You're okay. Thank you, Brian. You're, you're very, I, you're doing security the way it should be done. And I, it's great that you hate the cloud so much, but I did find it ironic that you wrote us from an icloud.com email address.

Oh, snap. Just saying. Okay. This next one comes from Ivor Davies, uh, friend of the show. Are you sure about the whole opera browser is way faster thing? I just ran speed tests for both browsers on speed dash battle.com and got the following results for both Chrome and opera.

Chrome one 44 opera one 29. I don't know if hardware or internet connection. And by the way, those numbers, the higher the number, the better. I went back and did some tests on it. It says, I don't know if hardware or internet connection speed have anything to do with these scores, but if they don't, then both of these browsers are clearly well behind the eight ball as the site specifics of the average overall scores, uh, six 38.98.

Okay. Um, but using opera feels way faster than Chrome. So I will at least live with the smug illusion for a little while longer. So I went and ran the test on my computer, uh, for Chrome for me was nine 37 and opera was nine 73.

So, Hey dude, get a new computer. Seriously. I'm running on a four year old Mac book and minor, uh, several orders of magnitude faster. And, but here's the thing. It did fluctuate by 400 points on every reload, but that's not why I'm, I'm loving opera.

I'm loving the fact that my processor doesn't spin up to max processor every like, you know, a couple hours because Chrome has gone off the reservation. I've, I've not faster, but the real reason is if you got a shit ton of tabs open all the time, like we do.

Yeah. So thank you, Ivor, but definitely dude, get a new computer. Next up is from Leo. Hi. I'd like to say that fidget spinners, fidget cubes, et cetera, mostly originate from within the autistic community. They are stim tactile stimulation tools, which allow autistic people to focus better and ward off sensory overload that you've never heard of them until now is mostly I'd imagine due to your not knowing many autistic people.

I personally find it very annoying that autistic, that means non-autistic people are adopting these things as a fun toy or whatever. It's leading to schools banning or restricting them, which is very harmful for autistic students. Anyway, that's where they came from. Best Leo. Well, thanks Leo. Did not know that. And yeah, that kind of makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, then it does definitely suck for the autistic kids, but I'm guessing the schools probably know who the autistic kids are and we'll give them a hall pass on, on the spinners. Hopefully one would hope one would definitely hope. And this comes from just a grumpy geek wondering why the old people get all the attention.

Okay. Yeah. You haven't opened YouTube lately, have you? I've missed the perspective you guys have. It seems like people with this perspective stopped podcasting a few years ago. Yeah. Well, that's why we're here. We're filling the gap. I agree with you that people should pay for content creation, but I don't think people should pay for content.

I'm a little confused there. Yeah. Then how do we get paid? I think content on a computer has become free to duplicate and paper copy is a deprecated model that does not fit the internet. Do you think that business model will survive? Also, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I am now a Patreon, whatever they call them now.

The thing is, it's like you have to pay the content creator to make the content. That's where I don't understand exactly what your argument is and feel free to write back in and flesh it out a bit because the way it sounds to me is you think that people should just pay one person should pay one time for the content and then it could be spread out and disseminated for free to everyone that there's no way to make money doing that.

I spend 10 hours on a blog post and I get $3 for it and then it goes everywhere. It doesn't work. I mean, just let us know what like just clarify what you mean on that. I'm assuming what he means and I totally agree with this is that if I purchase it once, I should be able to use it across all my devices.

I'm down with that. I get that. So yeah, that part's fine. There's a there's different types of content, you know, so yeah. Next up from Daniel. Hey guys, I started listening to you a few weeks ago. Heard about the show when listening to the Art of Charm. You guys definitely seem to know your stuff.

I say seem because I only understand about a quarter of the stuff you say when you geek out. You guys are awesome though. Anyway, on to my question. So I'm in the military and just found out I'll be stationed in South Korea for the next year. I'm not entirely sure how my internet activity, i.e. torrenting, will be affected over there or if there's anything in particular I should do to facilitate my transition as far as the tech side is concerned.

I'm assuming this is a good time to invest in a VPN. Any recommendations, perhaps any other software programs looking to help communicate with the family back in the States? Thanks for your time and your help. Daniel, much like Jason had no idea who click and clack were, we both of us have no idea how the military works or what is allowed and what isn't allowed.

So I would highly recommend that you discuss with some sort of advisor or tech guy in the military about what you guys are allowed to be using. Yeah, definitely. I mean, a VPN would definitely cover your tracks. But if you're on a military computer, that might a VPN might raise some red flags that you don't want pointing at you because a VPN could be used to, oh, maybe say, send state secrets across, you know, across country borders, which you don't want.

You don't want that kind of attention. But might I say just tweeting Edward Snowden and asking him. Well, maybe not the best guy to ask about that stuff since he's still living in Russia. Yeah. So, I mean, that there's a lot of rules and regulations, I would imagine. So definitely talk to somebody who is knowledgeable about that, which is not us.

Yeah, definitely find your IT guy and, you know, buy him a couple of beers and figure out how to get around that stuff. That's that is the best way to do it. Just do it socially because we definitely cannot tell you, especially when it comes to the military, what they're going to be looking for. And we don't want to get you in trouble at all.

But thank you for your service and also enjoy South Korea because I hear it's awesome over there. Yep. Awesome. All right. And finally, last one is from Reg. Reg, this is the easiest way to prevent malware on your Android device. He includes a CNET link that basically says don't install third party shit.

Yeah. And he says because nearly all Android malware attacks start with some douchebag installing wares on their phone. Could not agree with you more, Reg. Appreciate that. Thanks. All right. Next up comes from a Canada user. This is an iTunes review from Nutellus.

Can't get enough grump. Brian and Jason have a great balance of tech grumpiness and banter. Been listening from ep one of last year and haven't stopped since as a non tech guy. Not since PlayStation one. Oh, man. Old school. Love it. This is my go to for entertaining. Often laugh out loud. Tech news.

Props to AOC for introducing me to GOG. Thank you so much. All right. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

Closing shout outs. A sad RIP this week to Roger Moore. He was my bond. I grew up with Roger Moore and, you know, he might not have been the best bond, but he was my bond. That's basically what I said as well.

He was goofy. A lot of the movies were goofy, but he was definitely my bond as well. It's just the timing and everything. I loved him as James Bond. He was fantastic. The Saint. He was awesome as well. There's also a great story that kind of went viral about him. So we've included a link to that in the show notes from USA Today, but it bounced around a lot.

So you may have seen it already. It's it's heartwarming and lovely. Yeah. And it turns out in later life, he was a really cool advocate for the kids. It's it's really neat. Yeah. Good guy. And a happy 40th birthday to Star Wars. So time to go buy that grill. It was released on May 25th, 1977.

I saw it in the summer of 1977 in Des Plaines, Illinois, in the back of my dad's Cadillac Eldorado convertible and sitting on the back seat watching Star Wars. It was one of the greatest memories of my life. And I'm I can't believe it's 40 years old because it just means shit.

Yes, it means you're old. I was actually too young to ever see Star Wars in a theater. I really do remember my first Star Wars experience. I don't know how I would have seen the original because it's not like they even had VCRs back then. But I know I saw it at some point. And I remember seeing the Empire Strikes Back in a theater.

OK. Like, so, yeah, I miss drive ins, man. That was just so cool. Sitting there with the popcorn and the big speaker. And it's fun. Yeah. And I want to give a shout out to Ben and Jerry's. They're a pretty progressive company anyways. But I saw this story and I just made me laugh so much because this is just such a crazy, silly thing to do.

Apparently, it's completely illegal in Australia to to marry someone of the same sex. There's no marriage equality there. And so Ben and Jerry's is taking a stand and saying, right, well, you can't have two scoops of the same flavor anymore ever. You want two scoops.

They got to be different flavors. Can't be the same. So they are officially banning two scoops of the same flavor until marriage equality comes to Australia. That is clever. It's very clever. So apparently they have Ben and Jerry's stores in Australia because here you just buy a tub. That's true. Well, you can't buy two tubs, two tubs and no vanilla for you.

No vanilla on vanilla action here. Oh, man. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I am Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

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

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