212: High Heals and Dyslexia

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Well, it seems you've stumbled onto Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Ah, you know what really grinds my gears, Jason? What grinds your gears today, Brian? I don't know if it's the half a bottle of wine I drank last night, probably, or the fact that these spelling bees are going on right now and just were in the news, but spelling is driving me insane.

Now, I get it. I understand when you're texting me. Okay, whatever. Or even, you know, when you're just tweeting or, you know, it's your own personal Facebook page and you're typing something. Even though spellcheck is built into everything and you really have no excuse, I don't care if you misspell something wrong.

However, if you are running a page that is meant to make you money and you are a meme generating machine and you are loading up Photoshop and making graphics and you still spell shit wrong, what the hell is wrong with you? Okay, yeah.

I was wondering where you're going with this because I am the one that is always railing on all the articles we read every week. There's at least a typo in every single one of them, but yeah, and you're just like, get over it. This is how the that's totes how the kids spell these days, but now it is how the kids spell these days and it is what it is.

But I mean, if you're putting together a goddamn graphic that you're hoping goes viral. I'm looking at you, whiny moms, W-I-N-E-Y. Clever. See what they did there? So they put up this meme about, are you high maintenance and you establish points for everything that you do as a woman throughout the day.

High heels every day. You are female. Are you not people that run this? You have worn these all your life. How did you spell heels? H-E-A-L-S. On your graphic. Well, honestly, it is at the end of the graphic, and since they are drinking, since they're drinking wine, they may be, you know, getting a little sloppy by the end there.

Oh, yeah. Because honestly, when I'm looking at this graphic, I am much more offended at the mixing of the font sizes and lack of alignment on anything whatsoever. I personally enjoy the multiple watermarks that they took the time to put into, even though they couldn't bother to spell high heels correctly.

Yes, and you said this comes from Whiny Moms, but this says it's from MomTalk-MommyChat. Well, I don't even know what that is, so they may be stealing memes. I think they probably stole it. Who cares? These are shoplifting mommies. High heels. Oh, God, I got so upset when I saw that last night.

Speaking of misspellings. Okay, here it comes. I mean, you know, the problem with doing a weekly show is this has been beat into the ground already, but Kofive. Kofive, I like to say. You like Kofive? I like Kofive. We can't not talk about this.

Again, talk about highly recognizable brands screwing up. Right, yes. We can talk about it. We just don't need to beat it into the Kofive. Apparently, the leader of the free world has done what many of us have done and passed out drunkenly in the middle of a tweet.

It does happen. It does happen. Which is not exactly what you want the president to do, but it happens. So the reason this is notable is basically the Internet exploded in a way that I have not seen in a long, long time. And funnily enough, this came on the one-year anniversary of the death of Harambe, which also was quite, you know, it was a year ago.

And that was a meme-generating machine, too, in a completely different way. But with this one, yes, I have not laughed this hard in a long time. It was hilarious. I go to bed rather early these days because of my child, and this happened 11 p.m. Pacific time.

I was basically my bedtime. This is when I'm calling it a night. And things just started to explode from there. I stayed up for two hours because I could not get off of Twitter. Oh, my God. You're a machine. It was so fantastic what happened. So we have a link in our show notes. The Nerdist put together a good roundup of some of the best memes and jokes that occurred after the Cuff-a-Fay scandal.

Now, this could have just been all fun and games. Where it takes a turn for darkness and sadness is what happened the next day when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, basically tried to pass it off as this was meant to happen. And only people in the know know what Cuff-a-Fay means, and this is a real thing.

You know what? Fuck you guys. This is what banana republics do. They refuse to ever admit they're wrong, and they try to make it into something. Bullshit. It was all fun and games, and then the next day I was just pissed. See, I was not pissed because he's trying to save his job at this point.

He's on his way out. At least he didn't hide behind a bush and give the address. But the thing about it is the entire— Actually, I believe that's what Cuff-a-Fay stands for. It's hiding in a bush to get away from facts. But the fact that the entire press corps busted out laughing when he said that was pretty good.

And he still, you know, tried to pass it off as, yeah, no, no, people in the know. Here's what we do know, that there is no one in the know in the White House right now. Nobody knows anything over there, apparently. So anyways, that was all that.

So it was a good laugh, and then it wasn't for me. Okay. I'm still chuckling about it. All right. So let's get back to some of the things that we like to talk about a lot. You and I have been debating recently with some of our great listeners chiming in as well what the robot revolution is going to mean for jobs.

And there's been—you know, you have postulated that, well, people are going to have to maintain and clean the robots. And some of our listeners also have been sharing links, and a lot of people are talking about this now, which I think is a good thing. This is something that we need to start discussing. Recode has come out with an article showing that there are actually, indeed, more manufacturing jobs coming into the U.S. right now than there were previously.

But the question is, for how long? And what we're seeing is that robotics and robotic manufacturing and things like that have lowered the price so much that we are able to bring some jobs back from overseas because we need significantly less human workers than we did before.

So we're seeing a net increase of jobs being brought back from overseas, but not a net increase in jobs in total. And what we're basically—what this article is basically saying is right now it's a mutually beneficial trend with robots bringing U.S. jobs back, but it's eventually the robots are just going to take over.

Okay. Well, that's—what are you going to do? What are you going to do? So, I mean, this is kind of the way that I felt about it. So, of course, I put the article in because, you know, self-selection. Indeed. So I threw a few articles in here. I'm just going to—I'm not going to talk about them too much.

We're going to get to the news, but these are about things that we've talked about. Being overworked in Silicon Valley is a thing. And David— Yeah. Tell me about it. And David Hanemeyer Hansen, you know, the creator of Ruby on Rails and one of those guys over there at that 37 Signals place. Or I'm sorry, they're not 37 Signals anymore.

I think they're just Basecamp now. He's got an interesting article on Medium called Trickle Down Workaholism in Startups. And it just basically runs down, like, the craptacularness that it is to work in Silicon Valley. Now, the thing that is interesting about his company, Basecamp, is that, you know, it's the summer right now.

So they're only working four days a week. And generally, they don't work more than 40 hours a week. They have it down to a science where it's like, no, you go home at the end of the day. These people don't like to work a lot. So they get their job done, and then they go home, like the way it used to be.

Yeah. Like the reason that you and I never got promoted back when we were in the workforce, because we did that. We worked really hard, got our stuff done, got actually the work of two to three people done, and then went home and then got in trouble for it. Yeah. No, that's about it. I remember, Technorati, when I left, they hired four people to take my job.

Yeah. Good times. If they did, just like I said, if they'd have given me four times the salary, I'd have stayed. But they didn't want to do that. Yeah. Another interesting article, and here comes from Vox. Silicon Valley's basic income fans should spare a minute to defend the actual safety net, because Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance are all on the chopping block.

Well, I mean, yes, all those things shouldn't go away to begin with. The UBI is supposed to defend the fact when you have absolutely no job left. Yeah. But, yeah, I get it. That's cool. Yes. Keep, yes, forward thinkers, keep in mind what's happening right now. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, since it wasn't a really great week for tech news, because everywhere I went, it was just Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman, Covfefe, Wonder Woman, Covfefe, everything. And so I thought to break the tension, we do have some great news this week. I don't know, this isn't really tech news, but it is breaking news.

The Top Gun sequel is going to be called Top Gun Maverick, and not Top Gun 2. I wish they called it Top Gun Medium. In the news.

In continuing Uber news, and with the Waymo case in full swing right now, Uber has finally pulled the trigger and fired Anthony Lewandowski. Okay. It's one of those things where they say that Lewandowski did not comply with the court order to turn over some documents or, you know, basically what they were asking for from the courts.

And he was supposed to be helping the investigation, and he didn't do squat, and so Uber gave him the boot. Well, look at Uber actually doing the right thing for once. Now, to be fair to me, only after it was painfully obvious that this guy was extremely in trouble and wasn't doing anything right, and it was very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad.

Okay. Then they finally did the right thing. Well, they had no choice. They honestly had zero choice. If they could have kept him, they probably would have. They're not doing the right thing. They're doing the only thing. And they're saying that the- I was trying to be positive to Uber for once. No, no.

Because there's probably going to be some more criminal investigations going on with Lewandowski, so they've got to get rid of, like, you know, distance themselves from him. But this is not a good sign for Uber's case. Nope, it is not. And speaking of self-driving cars, because, you know, that's the way the world is going, Yandex.

Have you ever heard of Yandex? I have not. It's basically the Russian Google. Oh, okay. They have decided to get into the self-driving car market now, too. Oh, God. Okay. Everybody's doing self-driving cars. Yeah. And I'm sorry, it's a Prius.

Of course it is. The first one's up on a gadget, and there's a picture of it, and it is a Prius. I knew you would love that, because you love the Prius so much. Like, the problem with the Prius is the humans behind them, so this is a step in the right direction.

Well, we'll see. We'll see. You know, we know what happened when Uber tried to run their self-driving car in San Francisco, and it was running stoplights, so. Well, you know, less restrictions in Russia. They'll be running over people, and it'll be fine. Yeah, they just don't – that's the thing about self-driving cars in Russia.

They just don't stop. You just – that's it. I mean, I just have Yakov Shmironov in my head now. In Russia, car drive you. Yep. Here you go. Now, this is an interesting article. It came out, I believe, yesterday, and it's about Intel's report on what they're calling the passenger economy now, which is a terrible name.

Yes, it is. But they're saying that by – in about 30 years, this could be a $7 trillion boon to the economy. I would like to know where that $7 trillion is coming from, as every single person who is currently making the only living that they can by driving cars will no longer be employed.

Well, you're not going to have to own a car anymore. You can just, you know, spend a few bucks on it. So no more car payments, no more car insurance. And 250 million hours of commuting time every year is going to be freed up. So that's more time to not have a job. More time to sit around and not have a job.

That's true. Yeah. Yeah, yes. But there's a – I mean, they break down all of the different areas that they think the money is going to come from. And, you know, nobody can predict the future. But it's a fun read if you're – you know. Nobody could predict the future, but we wouldn't have a podcast if we didn't try.

If we didn't try. Yeah. What did I say? $3.7 trillion is consumer mobility as a service, basically, you know, ride sharing. Yeah. $3 trillion is freight and trucking. Right. So that's your $6.7. $200 million from new applications and services, the amorphous new applications and services.

Whatever that may be. Yeah. And they break it down okay. I haven't read the report because it sounds like it would just be boring as hell to read. But – because none of this is actually probably going to come true. But, you know, people are putting their heads behind it.

So, I don't know. Yeah. There have been no great breakthroughs recently. And like we talked about, I think about two weeks ago, Tesla is being awfully quiet. Tesla is being awfully quiet. They're going to be the ones that are going to come out with something that actually works.

But what I think we're really seeing is, you know, we've had two years of incessant, nonstop buzz about self-driving cars. And we've gotten no closer to actually having any prototypes that actually really work in the real world. You know, I was the one that was initially saying, you know, I think these things are going to happen way faster than any of us believe.

I'm starting to slide over to your way of looking, Jason. And I'm saying 20, 30 years before this is out there. I'd think until it's ubiquitous for sure, you know, 10 years until it's safe enough. Audi is actually going to start testing. I forgot to put this in the notes. I saw this this morning. But Audi is going to start testing their self-driving car.

It's a level three self-driving car in New York City soon. All right. Why are these people going to San Francisco? It's like in Montana. What's wrong with you people? Or, you know, go to Arizona where the worst that you're going to kill is like, you know, an armadillo or two or a tumbleweed.

If the Mythbusters were able to find basically abandoned cities every week to blow stuff up, why can't these car companies? Seriously, you know, I swear to God, it's not that difficult. There are so many World War Two era, you know, cities like, you know, from the nuke the fridge scene in, you know, Raiders 27.

Go find one of those cities. They got to be all over the place or build your own. You've got more money than God. Build the perfect city to start testing in and do it there. Just stay out of our streets until you've figured it out. Exactly. I don't understand starting in these highly populated areas. It's unbelievable.

No. And in good news, Lexmark loses their Supreme Court case about refurbished ink cartridges, which is good news for everybody. Yes. Up until you need to go buy a new printer, because what this means is printer prices are going to start going through the roof again.

That's fine. I don't care. Right. The idea that it's actually cheaper to go buy a brand new printer than it is to get the cartridges is ridiculous. Well, yeah. They sell them at cost or lower than cost as a loss leader to sell you the ink, which costs more than gold in some instances. So, yeah, I'm glad that.

So, the whole issue is that they were putting chips in all of their cartridges so you could not use a third-party ink in your printer. And so, if you bought the Lexmark ink and you wanted to have it refilled with third-party ink, couldn't do it because the chip would basically say, no, this has already been used, and they were claiming patent infringement, and the court's like, no, no, no, no, no.

You sell it, they own it. That's it. Yeah, which is important. It's an important precedent because a lot of the company – we've talked about this a couple times on the show. This is what – this is every company's wet dream, to be able to absolutely own everything, no matter – the idea that they're just renting things to you and you don't own them when you buy them.

Yeah, like the John Deere situation that's going on where people are trying to – they have to jailbreak their $150,000, $250,000 tractor with Polish firmware so they can just do what they want to do with it. So, hopefully, this will be – this will keep carrying on, and John Deere will be in the headlines next that they lose.

Good. Yeah. Let's do it. Have you heard of the CRISPR? I have. And it's not a Big Mac. It's not a – I would go salad if I was going to go. What are you food item, Jason? Yeah, I know. I know. I was just thinking of the crispy lettuce on top of it. It was like a version of the Big Mac because when I see a Big Mac, I think, you know, lettuce and tomato.

Yes, yes. Anyway. CRISPR is the gene editing and splicing tool that has just been all over the news recently. It's a huge breakthrough and game changer in the area of basic gene editing. Yeah, and it was part of what the basis of the last Daniel Suarez book was.

Yes, the boring one. Yeah, the really boring one. Well, a new study from Columbia University Medical Center offers a word of warning for those scientists using the CRISPR-Cas9. And it turns out they found that gene editing technology could lead to unintended mutations. No, really?

What could possibly go wrong? Who'd have thunk it? So, if you mess around with your DNA, things could go wrong? Yeah, if you pick a random base pair that you're trying to figure out and something could, you know, maybe grow tentacles and come and kill us all. Have they not seen Jeff Goldblum in the fly?

Seriously. What's wrong with these people? Yeah, Jurassic Park. Come on. What happens when you put lizard DNA into a, you know, man, come on. Yes, of course there's going to be problems. Of course there is. So, this is a very, this technology is in its infancy. Hell, we don't even understand what half of our DNA does at this point.

So, the idea that we're just going in there with a knife and chopping it up and splicing things together. Yeah, of course. But, you know, we don't stop. But we also don't mess around with humans. How about we just, you know, mess around with beer? Oh, beer's fine with me. Which brings us to the next story, which I just threw in here.

This is going to be in Brick-A-Brack, but then I saw that you had a CRISPR story. So, this is a guy, his name is Terrence O'Brien. And what really caught me about this story isn't the fact that he wasted, like he says, CRISPR is a DNA editing tool that could cure cancer. And I wasted its potential on beer.

So, he bioengineered a glowing beer and says it hasn't killed him yet. So, you know, this is, sure, I mean, to me, this makes sense. Let's mess around with something that is basically meaningless. And let's make sure that this works and, you know, mess around with that sort of stuff instead of going straight to people.

But what blew my mind... But he's putting it in his body, though. That's the problem. One would assume he's testing it, but I guess not. This is a dude that made glowing beer. Do you think the first thing he didn't do was drink it and see if his pee glowed, too? Jason, do you think the first thing that we would do if we got one of these kits is make glowing beer?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. No, this man is one of us. I'm fine with that. Yes, he is. He's one of us. One of us. But what blew my mind about this whole article, it's a fun read, you should go and check out the whole thing, but the barrier to entry is so low.

It's a $160 kit from a company called The Odin, which does not spark me with great hope. But that's all you need to do to get this all together and basically start genetically modifying your own beers. A CRISPR is under $200?

This kit that he uses is under $200. Well, I'm going to have to look into that. Yeah. Then it can sit in the closet next to my Arduino kit that I never used either. All right. So let's move on to the real Internet news that happened this week, which, you know, we started the show saying not much happened, but a pretty big thing did happen.

The problem is it's all kind of boring. Now, I have to agree with the, well, unfortunately, it's a non-ironic headline, but I'm going to read it ironically and then agree with it. This is the subhead of the article over at Recode.

The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Up until now, I would say, said no one ever, but apparently someone said it. It's a bit like I have my most anticipated hemorrhoid has appeared. Yes, it is. Ah, yay. Yay, it's hemorrhoid season. So let's just do the bullet point takeaways that they're coming up with from this slide deck.

Global smartphone growth is slowing. This is not shocking because everybody and their mother now literally has a cell phone. Keep planned obsolescence. Yeah. Voices beginning to replace typing and online queries. Well, yeah, everybody got an echo for Christmas and everybody's starting to use Siri.

So shocking. In 10 years, Netflix went from zero to more than 30% of home entertainment revenue. I'm not surprised by that either, really, because that's in the U.S. though. Just to clarify, that's in the U.S., not globally. That's true. Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg.

So global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream. Hasn't it been mainstream for years now? This seems to me ridiculous. I mean, it was like 10 years ago that the gaming industry suppressed the movie industry in revenue. Yeah. See, the thing about it is what they're talking about is actual gamers, people who are gaming.

Back then, it was, you know, in 1995, it says there were 100 million gamers out there. So in 2017, 2.6 billion gamers. But I think they're fudging the numbers on this because they count any asshole that downloaded a copy of Candy Crush as a gamer now. And that's just not true. Yeah, I guess.

China remains a fascinating market. This is an anticipated slide deck. This sounds like a no-shit Sherlock slide deck. Yeah. Okay, so there's that. The internet growth is slowing globally. That's not the case in India. Also not shocking. That's probably where most of the cell phone growth was. That's been the big growth area for a long time.

In the U.S. in 2016, 60% of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first or second generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. This is a stat that would not have made the deck if there would not have been some stupid things going on in our government. Healthcare wearables are gaining adoption with about 25% of Americans owning one, up 12% from 2016.

Obviously, nobody is listening to our podcast because we can tell you how useless those all are and what security risks they are. Well, the healthcare wearables, yes, almost everybody I know has a Fitbit. Out of those, about 4% of my friends actually still use it.

The rest, put them in a drawer. They wear it for a month or they wash it, they lose it. They just don't care. Well, that's, I mean, you could draw a direct parallel to the gaming stats where, you know, everybody and their brother downloaded Pokemon Go and then stopped playing it except for Teeter after two weeks.

Yeah. It's interesting to read this, but I just think they're fudging the numbers on some of this stuff and it doesn't really count. What are you going to do? And speaking of what are you going to do? Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, three of the big five. Basically, wow. I knew that they were big and I knew that they were basic, almost monopolies.

But until I read the numbers from this article over at Salon, I had no idea how big they were. Facebook has, commands nearly 80% of all mobile-based social media traffic through its platforms. Yeah. That's insane.

Doesn't surprise me. They bought everybody. That's insane. Alphabet and Facebook taken together take home 85% of all U.S. digital ad revenue. 85%? Ah. And then if you get into Amazon and online retail, I mean, the numbers there are unbelievable.

This article is shocking when you, you know, we know these companies are too damn big. Too big to fail, perhaps. But when you start seeing these numbers broken down, it's shocking. It's terrifying. And this guy, Jonathan Taplin, who is over at USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, is basically saying, we need to break these companies down, but it's not going to happen.

Yeah. Honestly, it would be, it would actually be good, but it's definitely, it's going to be tough. You know, we had the whole Ma Bell breakup. That worked for how long? Until they got back together. You know, government regulation is not really something that's on the, you know, the tip of the tongue nowadays up in Washington.

So just let everybody go do what they want to do. Now, it's interesting talking about how big these guys are now. My friend Todd Lappin, he's a tech writer, posted a little movie on Instagram as he was on a train going by the construction of Facebook's new building.

He was like cooking on this train, probably going about 30 miles an hour. And it was like a 45 second video. Right. And it was, it's so unbelievably massive. Well, I mean, Google the new Apple building. Oh my God. Yeah.

That thing is insane. I want to go visit that thing badly because it's a hugely building. Yeah. It's very bigly. It's bigly. My hands look tiny when I put them up next to it. Yeah. Now that thing's finally opening and it's, it's gorgeous.

I mean, I got to say just the tech that went into the windows alone is impressive. Yes. But the problem is, as, as we've discussed, it's five companies to rule them all. Yep. That's it. The big five. Yep. Well, what are you going to do? And speaking of Amazon, one of the big five, they've got a new patent that they just filed.

Yep. For their, their drone delivery service. Well, you know, it, it takes battery to land the drone and have the drone take off again. So what they figured out is why don't we just put a parachute as, as the shipping label. So when we drop it, it can just land in the backyard safely.

Kind of genius. Yeah. I mean, make it the, the genius isn't the parachute. It's making it the packing label. Yeah. I love that. It's, it's, it's pretty cool. I mean, can't happen on a windy day, but if it's honestly though, if it's that windy, the drones won't be able to fly anyway. Yeah.

No ice cream for you. It's a, it's a bit windy outside today. And I mean, it doesn't help if you're in a, in an apartment building, but you know, the one thing that they were speculating is that people, if you, if you wanted to sign up for the service, you would get like a little landing platform that you could attach to your balcony and then the drone could land on your balcony and leave you your package.

And then when a gust of wind comes, it blows it off the, blows it off the building and it lands on a pedestrian. And then, and we have all sorts of new problems. But anyway, it's a cute patent. Go check out. It's on the next web and they have some sketches of the patent application. Well, one of the places they could test this when they're ready to roll it out.

And we've talked about this before that a lot of companies will go to test new products, new technologies, et cetera. They will, they, they want, they want something that's kind of self-contained and, you know, just here it is. We can test it in this area and see how it goes. One of the places that is often used is Hawaii, specifically the Island of Kauai.

One of my favorite places to go. Is that the place with the chickens? That is the place with the chickens. Yes. So there, you know, there's a, it's a small contained space, limited amount of people there. It's a great place to test out new products. And Tesla is currently doing that by powering the entire fucking Island with more than 45, 54,000 solar panels and giant battery packs.

How cool is that? That's pretty cool. It's a, the project is expected to reduce fossil fuel use by approximately 1.6 million gallons per year. Um, and they're going to start turning on the massive solar system in phases. So I, I hope to, well, with the kid, it's going to be probably another year before I can get there.

This is one of my favorite places to vacation. But by the time I get there, I'm hoping this will be up and running and I'll be able to go see it. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that'd be very cool. So, uh, Silk Road creator, uh, Ross, what's his name again? Ross Albrecht, uh, has lost his life sentence appeal.

I would tell you more about it, but Wired has put on a super fantastical ad blocker. No, no page. And I forgot to shut off my ad blocker on, uh, opera, which I'm using now. So I can't tell you a damn thing. Well, fortunately I figured out how to turn off the ad blocker to read the article, but yes, he lost his appeal. He is in prison for life.

That's, that's basically what I just said anyway. Exactly. That's what I mean. I read the whole thing and it sums it up right there. Okay, good. Yeah. The title is actually this story. You can read the minutiae about it, but he's not getting out. He's not getting out. And it's, I'm torn on it.

It's deserved, but not, I mean, I just think the sentence is way too harsh. It's extremely harsh. It's extremely harsh and they're, they're, they're, you know, trying to make a point. But yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Because you know, he was a, he was a good boy. He was, he was a quiet boy. What could go wrong?

Well, he just built a platform. Yeah, yeah, no, read, read, read the book that I talked about last week. Nick Bilton's book. He did a lot more than just build a platform. I'm afraid he was, he got, he got kind of mad with power. Yes.

Which is what happens when these kids get rich. Anyway. Thank God we never got rich, Jason. Seriously. We might actually be in, you know, trouble or hanging out with, you know, Kim.com or something like that. Hiding away in New Zealand or worse places to hide away if you got to go hide. But Brian, have you ever used the Geek Squad?

No. Well, yes. For my parents. Yeah. Because I didn't want to deal with it. That's generally how it goes. Everybody, everybody's like, ah, mom, dad, I don't really want to fix your router. Call the Geek Squad. And then, then you call them later. It's like, they cost me $500 to have them reboot my router.

It's like. I'm like, that saved me a day driving down there and having to do it. Exactly. I'm like, I kind of feel bad, but really not that much. RTFM, folks. So, there's an interesting article in Tech Dirt. The EFF is suing the FBI right now because they allegedly use Geek Squad employees for off-the-book searches, basically warrantless searches of people's computers.

We covered this. We talked about this when it first came out. Yeah. Yeah. That the FBI basically was paying off Geek Squad people. If you find something on there, tell us. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And the FBI wouldn't turn over any documents about it. So, now the EFF is going after them. So, this is a new wrinkle in the story, which I thought was really nice.

The EFF, I'm glad my money's going to good use that I send to them every year. Yeah, me too. That's good. Everybody, go donate to the EFF. They're watching your backs when, so you don't have to. The KLF is also good, but really, the EFF, give them the money. Yes, indeed.

And in an interesting turn of events, remember Delicious, the old bookmarking site? Vaguely. Yeah, I used it a lot back in the day. They were the first site to basically do tags. Right. What was his name? Josh something. I can't remember. He was kind of a jerk. He invented Delicious, and then it sold to Yahoo, and then it bounced around.

But while it was going through that transition, Pinboard came into existence, and that's what I've been using. And we've talked about the guy from Pinboard, because he's kind of a loon Twitterer, and he's doing that. What was that thing that he was building about trying to make a union for tech workers that you were so up in arms about?

Oh, I vaguely remember that. I can't remember what it was called. Yeah, he was trying to do that. Well, turns out that he has acquired Delicious. Okay. He went, you know, he's like, it was up for sale, and he bought it, so he's apparently doing well over there. It's a one-man shop. I mean, you've got to give him credit for that.

He's built this whole thing by himself, runs it all himself. He wakes up very early in the morning. Yes, he does. And the thing about it, though, is I'm just like, well, why would you want that? But in his post, he's like, there are 1.1 billion links inside of Delicious's database, so I can do some really fun stuff with that.

That and nobody can go up against Pinboard and survive. Right. It was cute. It'll be interesting. I don't use it for anything that those 1.1 billion links I would care about. As long as his service stays up, fine by me. I use it every day, and I have no problems with it.

I got bookmarklets that work in Opera now, thanks to Monkey13's hack with the extensions for Opera. I love it. I pay for it. I love it. So I'm happy that he's doing well enough to go out and buy the corpses of his fallen adversaries.

That's the way of the internets. Security? Ha! We're back again this week with Security, huh? With the Bitmeister! What's up, Dave Bittner?

How you doing today? I'm doing very well, gentlemen. Doing very well. How are we all doing today? Doing okay? Not as well as the master of the bits, as it were. The master of the bits. You know, I guess it's... Well, let me just say this.

With the name Bittner, when you're growing up and you're making your way through grade school, there are very many different alterations that people can make to the name Bittner. I'm sure you can imagine some of them are vulgar in lots of different ways.

My favorite was BitNerd. I think that's kind of... Oh, that's good. I like that. Yeah. It's kind of nice compared to some of the other things that Bit rhymes with. Well, I do have a friend named Sean Bonner, so I think he suffered probably more than all of us. But DeFillippo was...

I got DeFillippo a lot because I was a large kid. That was a fun one. Yeah. Yep. Got in many a fight for that. I had Schulmeisterbrau because Meisterbrau was a relatively cheap beer on the market at the time. It was only retroactively later in life that I was pissed off about it because it's such a cheap beer.

Right. Yeah, there's really not much to complain about with that one. But yeah, DeFillippo was a nasty one. Well, I've got something to complain about, Jason. What do you got to complain about, Brian? Well, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is inconsistency. And I've got a story that is incredibly inconsistent here.

This comes from over at Engadget, and this is about people not handing over their iPhone pins to the government and other entities. Now, the first guy is a child abuse defendant, and he basically claimed... No, he provided an incorrect code and got six months in jail for it, despite pleas to the judge that he couldn't remember it, so he just gave them something because apparently he had to.

Now, the second case is this guy's a guy accused of extortion. He also claimed to have forgotten his iPhone code, but he got let off without a problem. What the hell? What the hell? Let's go to Dave Bittner for this one. Well, okay.

So it is an interesting case. I actually checked in with Ben Yellen, our law and policy expert, who helps us out on the cyber wire with these sorts of things. And generally, we've talked about this before on this show, where generally the understood rule was that they could compel you by they, I mean law enforcement, they could compel you...

The power of law enforcement compels you. Right. Well, they also have guns, so that's kind of a... And jails and things like that. So those are compelling things as well. But they can compel you to use your fingerprint to unlock something.

But generally, it was understood or accepted that they couldn't compel you to reveal a password because the... I believe the Supreme Court case said that you couldn't compel someone to reveal the contents of their own mind. And that has to do with the Fifth Amendment, where you are...

You cannot be compelled to incriminate yourself. The difference being that they can force you to hand over something like a key to a locked box. And in this case, they think something like your fingerprint is the equivalent to a key. It is a physical thing, whereas a password is something that is within your mind, the contents of your mind.

And that's protected by the Fifth Amendment. So I was surprised to read this as well, because I thought that this was pretty much a settled thing, or at least a standard practice. So I did check in with Ben Yellen, and he said that what's going on here is actually a separate issue from the Fifth Amendment.

According to the Court of Appeals in Florida, which is where this took place, the unlocking of the phone doesn't really count as a self-incrimination for Fifth Amendment purposes. As long as law enforcement can affirm that the evidence they're looking for is almost certainly on the device they are seeking to unlock.

Evidently, there's something called the foregone conclusion doctrine, which says that- It's just called the Schroediger's doctrine. Well, so the foregone conclusion doctrine says that if I have absolute proof that the thing that I'm looking for on this device is going to be on that device, then it doesn't enter into Fifth Amendment issues, because it's not really a matter of privacy.

If I know the thing I'm looking for is there, then it's not a privacy thing. It's not about you. It basically bypasses the Fifth Amendment. Okay. And that is what they're saying the case is here in Florida. Now, if the thing isn't on the phone, then you get all the monies?

Well, no, you get a mea culpa and a gift certificate to Sizzler. So that's about it. It's Florida, man. What do you want? So you get a gift certificate to Gatorland. So here's the thing is, as we've talked about many times, your phones contain so much information on your device.

One of the things with the foregone conclusion doctrine, my understanding when it comes to things like phones is part of what they have to convince the judge is that when they unlock this device, they can go directly to the stuff that they're looking for. So, your honor, I'm going to unlock this device.

You're going to watch me go right to photos. And there's the child pornography, right? You know, there's the incriminating things. And we're not going to go on a fishing expedition on this device. Well, nothing in photos. Let's open up Dropbox.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that's part of what the foregone conclusion doctrine is supposed to protect you against. But again, it's all a little different with our mobile devices because they contain so much stuff. So...

And the law has not caught up to this. The law has not caught up with this. And I was unaware of the foregone conclusion doctrine before we saw this story. So these things are still fuzzy. And I believe we're headed to a Supreme Court decision on this.

And I think it's inevitable that there's going to have to be a case before the Supreme Court that settles this notion of where do we actually stand when it comes to our privacy and our mobile devices. Yeah. And, you know, Brian mentioned Schrodinger's cat.

I think this might be more Heisenberg's uncertainty pin. Since it's, you know, these photos could be in a state of being or non-being by the... But you have to open the phone to find out. So... Yeah. Right. Right. And again, you know, the foregone conclusion doctrine says that they have to convince the judge, we know these are on this device.

We're not just looking around for something we know. Here's the evidence, why we know that this stuff is on this device. Gotcha. Interesting. Yeah. Well, one of the other things we've talked about a lot in this segment is how painfully poor most medical security is.

And I put one story in our show notes two days ago, three days ago, and lo and behold, a second story with basically the exact same thing dropped today. So we have two stories of plastic surgery places basically being hacked and before and after completely nude photographs of people being leaked on the internets.

So would this be called a plastic surgery disaster? It's, yeah, worse than Tara Reid. Oh, God. You guys don't listen to the dead Kennedys, do you? Never mind. I listened to the dead Kennedys approximately 25 years ago. Okay. I listened to them probably 25 minutes ago.

Yeah. I'm familiar with who the dead Kennedys are. I can go far as to say that. I'm sure somebody in the audience got the joke. So that's okay. Well, isn't that all that really matters? Yeah. Screw you two. Screw you guys. I'm going home. All right. So the first was over 25,000 photographs of patients at a Lithuanian cosmetic surgery clinic after the clinic refused to pay out 300 bitcoins, which is currently approximately $70,000 in ransom earlier this year.

Apparently, this got $700,000. Oh, $700,000. $700,000. Yeah. My bad. Apparently, this place got some celebrities from the UK and Europe that went there. And the second one, which just broke, was from Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Clinic.

And this has quite a few celebrities, apparently. And they're all being leaked as we talk about. So, I mean, people have just got to start realizing there's – I don't care what you do as a business. Security is a real issue for everyone. Yeah. And the thing about it is I was thinking about this when I was reading these two articles.

And I'm like, yeah, I know it's, you know, for before and after photos. But do you really trust anybody to take nudes of you and say, hey, we got them. That's cool. It's like nowadays you have to talk to the IT guy before you give anybody, any business, small business, large business, your personal information to find out what their security practices are.

I agree. I agree. I think that needs to be part of the disclosure. I mean, you sign off on so many things at any doctors, especially like a plastic surgery thing. You are signing paperwork left and right, not indemnifying them for anything. I want to see their security practices as something I'm signing off on as well.

Not that I'm going to get plastic surgery anytime soon. Yeah, a couple of things come to mind with this one. One, I think, first of all, it is heartbreaking because this is not only a situation of celebrities getting a facelift or a tummy tuck or something like that.

I mean, these are also people who may have serious issues where they require plastic surgery. Could be a car accident or, you know, maybe something they were born with, something like that. And this is their private photos being leaked out there.

And that's just like the first line in the Gizmodo article says. It describes them as, Jason? Asshole hackers with no compunction. There you go. Yeah. And I mean, the really even more worse than just the photos getting out there, these are photos directly tied to people's names, addresses, jobs, social security numbers, everything, everything, everything got out, which is just terrifying.

Related to this, I was talking to a security researcher earlier this week, and we were talking about medical security. And he said he found buried deep within the EULA of a test he was given. He had some medical condition where it was in his best interest to have a DNA test done.

And he had the DNA test done, but it was revealed deep, deep within the agreement of getting the DNA test done that that company was going to share his DNA information with the insurance company. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Right. And so what he had to do was shop around for a DNA company that would not share his information with the insurance company. And the point is that who even thinks to look for that buried deep within the agreement?

If you're in the middle of a medical procedure, I wouldn't have thought of that. But these are real issues now. Well, like we were talking about, law is just not catching up. This falls right in there. And it's terrifying that you really have to be your own advocate. And you have to basically almost have a lawyer go through every bit of paperwork you do, no matter what you do now, to make sure that this stuff isn't happening to you.

But Facebook is here to help save things. This is a slightly lighter story. Here's like a bird comes to save the day. They decided to rename login approvals to two-factor authentication because that's what it fucking is. That's what it's called. So at least they're clarifying situations for us a bit.

What did they have before? Zimboozle security? No, it was literally called login approvals. So that was your two-factor authentication. It means nothing. It means nothing. Exactly. Oh, man. Some marketing wonk. Well, it's good for them.

Good for them. Now, we've talked about traveling and social media and what you have to give up at the border and not. And this is a tertiary story on that. But if you're trying to get a U.S. visa now, you have to give them your social media accounts for the last five years and bio info going back 15 years.

Now, that's just accounts, not passwords. Right. Your handles. Basically, your handles. So if you're smart enough to wipe your Twitter, like many people do on a regular basis and your other social media, and one would assume that organized situations such as ISIS have this in some sort of ISIS handbook, you're not really going to get much from them.

Yeah, I mean, God forbid that you actually have a name that you let go and then somebody from ISIS picks up and then starts running with it. Then you're really screwed. But, yeah. Yeah, it does say that the – and this is a change.

And it's sort of a second tier of questioning where basically if the government – the U.S. government decides that they need more information from you, they will come back at you with these additional questions and asking for this additional biographical information.

So not everybody gets this. Right. And – but it is also optional. It's voluntary. However, it's kind of one of those things where it's, OK, fine. You don't want to fill this out, then – No visa for you. No visa for you.

Right. So, you know, I don't know how much good this is going to do. My initial thoughts sort of mirror your own that, OK, so we're going to ask these questions. If the crook is the criminal or whatever, the bad guy is dumb enough to answer these things honestly and they're a bad guy, then great.

Crooks are stupid. To be fair, many crooks are stupid. But, yeah, I think that the people that we are hoping to somewhat weed out are sophisticated enough and organizations that would follow playbooks that would not allow for this to simply easily catch someone. So, you know, in theory, I don't have a problem with this.

I mean if you're running a country, as it were, you would like to know this information these days. This is the primary and very simple method to discover what somebody's beliefs may be and it's out there and it's free and I'm going to ask you what your handle is and if you give it to me, fair enough.

And every terrorist in the world right now is setting up fake accounts with pictures of themselves and their cats and their puppies and going to picnics. So five years down the line when they want a visa, they can just give them the handle of their safe account. Exactly. So we're going to catch dumb people. Well, and the article did say that the United States already has the most strict or stringent standards when it comes to these things anyway.

So it's not like we were behind anyone else in the world. We're already the most difficult. Yeah, it takes like three years to get a visa. So, you know. Yeah. I have a friend who – You know, my wife is Canadian and even getting married, it was a very difficult process.

Yeah, I have a friend who's a lawyer who handles these sorts of things and she has told me many times that one of the problems is it just takes so long for anyone who even wants to do it right. You know, it takes years and sometimes decades for people to try to do – who's doing everything right, not doing anything illegal.

And it's also a very – it's a very Byzantine process and, you know, people that cannot afford a specific lawyer, an immigration lawyer, you know, you're one piece of paperwork wrong. You signed one page in the wrong place. That will knock you back two, three years.

Yeah, you're USOL. Yeah, evidently there are also a lot of, you know, crooked immigration lawyers who take advantage of people. Certainly not the majority but there are enough of them out there that the legitimate ones like my friend, it's a real problem for them.

They have many people come in who have been ripped off by someone who said, you know, for the low, low price of $5,000, I'll make you legal. And then they take the money and nothing bad happens. So it's just a real problem and it doesn't look like it's going to get any better anytime soon.

Well, here's the upside. I think the line is probably going to get shorter and shorter and shorter the more you read the news. So most people are trying to get out, not come in. Yes and no. That's the smarter people, the people that we would want coming in, the scientists and, you know, the well-learned people that are going to come and improve the quality of life here and Silicon Valley, et cetera.

They're not coming here anymore. But there are a lot of really, really poor people that this is still where you want to come to, to try to try to improve your life. So those are the people that are going to have the hardest time. Yeah, it's true. All right, let's move on. Yeah, there's a story in Wired called Don't Buy Into Putin's Latest Misdirection on Election Hacking.

I think it's a solid principle to not buy into Putin. Full stop. Yeah, yeah. Russia's president came out this week and in his own inimitable style had a few statements that we just found to be kind of hilarious and awesome on the Cyber Wire.

He said, hackers are free people like artists. If artists get up in the morning feeling good, all they do all day is paint. He said, hackers, he said, follow similar fits of inspiration. If they are feeling patriotic, they will start contributing as they believe to the justified fight against those speaking ill of Russia.

In other words, what he's saying is, I don't know anything about these people. They're patriots. It's a free country, mostly. And they're just, you know, they're, if they want to hack for us, what can I do as the, as the, as the bully leader of our country?

I can't control these people. I, I support them, but it, I don't really, I don't know. I don't have anything to do with this. So, of course, the rest of the world just kind of said, yeah. I didn't know Putin was rushing for Spicer.

Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, nice. Nice. You're darn tootin', Mr. Putin. Nice. All right. John Matherly over at Shodan, our favorite search engine where I store all my passwords and my Chinese cameras so I can find them later. Yeah, that's how I get into your Facebook when I travel overseas.

Exactly. He has found a metric shit ton of Hadoop servers that are improperly secured, 4,487 of them, to be exact, that have basically exposed over five petabytes of data. That would be 5,120 terabytes that is out in the wild right now that you can go grab if you are so inclined.

They're closing them up right now, but, yeah, pay attention, little kitties, when you're spinning up those cloud instances because people will find them. Pretty soon, you're talking about real data. Petabyte here, petabyte there. Exactly. You're talking about real data. Yeah. Here are petabyte, there are petabyte, everywhere.

Sorry, I have a kid. Well, and finally this week, you know, you guys have been accusing me of taking us in directions of downers lately. So I thought we'd end with a little funny story and end on a funny note.

Okay. App Authority warns that they've discovered a new vulnerability called Hospital Gown. Now, gentlemen, why do you suppose that they have named this vulnerability Hospital Gown? It's an ugly color? Because your back end is exposed.

Because it exposes your back end, right? Yes. Right? All right. Yes. So there are apps in the Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store. Both of the organizations have been notified, and hopefully they're under the progress of fixing it.

But you've got to say, these researchers have a sense of humor. Hospital Gown exposing your back end. And with that, gentlemen, I bid you adieu. Have a great weekend. And everybody, go check out Dave every weekday on the Cyber Wire at thecyberwire.com.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. Apps and doodads. I have switched full-time over to Opera. It's a pretty great browser. I'm enjoying it, and I've gotten past the humps of things being slightly different and just kind of cruising along.

However, I have this weird thing that keeps happening with my version of Opera, and I wonder if you, Jason, or anybody else out there is having that. Do your bookmark bar bookmarks move around randomly? No, they do not. Mine seem to keep doing it. I have, like, Facebook, Twitter, Slate, Recode, Salon, all those things in a couple folders full of client stuff, all in my bookmark bar.

And randomly, every day or two, Slate will have moved over, or all of a sudden, Recode's over on the other end. Now, I don't get what's going on. They keep moving around. Oh, here's a question. Are you using Exmark still to organize your bookmarks? Maybe that's re-syncing with another device that has it installed?

Oh, that could be it. There you go. Let me check into that. Yeah, look into that and see if Exmarks is, like, kind of overriding. Check your preferences on that, because what I did was I imported everything from Chrome into Exmarks and then turned it off in Chrome. So it was a one-way export out of Chrome.

Then I picked it up into Opera, left them the same way, and then started customizing them, and then published back to Exmarks. So then if I want to get them back, I can pull them from anywhere else. I believe you found my problem. All right, how about that? There we go. Real-time tech support. How about that?

Real-time tech support. Woo-hoo, I'll send you a check. All right. I installed Kodi on the Fire Stick. This was – I had gotten a Fire Stick with the express purpose of I wanted to run through the process of doing this to see what it was like. And then I tested some Fire Stick stuff that questions Jason had about how it integrated with Echo and all that last week.

So this week I installed Kodi. Now, holy crap. First, I'm going to say it was fun. Have you seen the Matrix? Red pill, blue pill. This is totally what this thing is. First off, it was fun to, like, basically go through the process and kind of get into the nitty-gritty of installing and bootstrapping and sideloading things and all that sort of stuff.

The fun stuff. That was cool. It was fun. It was actually quite fun to go through the process of installing everything and getting it up and running and testing it. I haven't done anything tech like that in a while, so that was great. Holy shit. Yeah. Why pay for anything is really what it comes down to.

This thing is, like, Kodi is insane. It's just anything that you could ever want for free all the time. Music, movies, books, everything. Everything. I was watching Northern Irish, like, community TV, you know?

Yeah. Like, cable access TV from Northern Ireland for a while just because it was there and you could do it. And it was fun. I mean, if you think BitTorrent was too difficult, which, I mean, that wasn't even – if you really needed to get something, like I said, I didn't want to be a season behind on Downton Abbey, so I BitTorrented all the episodes when they came out in Britain.

I still paid PBS, so I'll let you know that. But this is putting a slick UI on pirating. Oh, yeah. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's super easy to install. I thought that I would have to wipe the Fire Stick to do it. No, it's just an app that sits on the Fire Stick, so you still get all your Fire Stick functionality if you want it.

Oh, really? That's interesting. Yeah. Like, is it a dual boot or – No, no, it's just an app. You run it just like you would run any other app on the Fire Stick. That makes sense because it's just Android. Exactly. Aha. And going beyond that, you can also install our personal favorite VPN, private internet access.

Yep. So you can – Which you better do. Which you better do. Right away. So rather conveniently, I was able to install private internet access, use my same account. So I've got my VPN on there. I've got Kodi running. I've got some of the most well-known different apps within Kodi that basically give you everything.

And I'm never going to use it because I can't believe this thing exists. Yeah. It's unbelievable. It's just shocking. It's like giving a kid an AR-15. It really is. It is Matrix. It is like waking up in the Matrix.

I – Fuck. The entertainment industry is so fucked. That's what I learned from doing this. Well, let's move on to my next story. Because there's a company called Nagra Vision or Nagra as they're called.

And they basically are the people that are going to be going against Kodi. Right. They've got an automated monitoring platform that scans all the live channels and VOD assets available on Kodi. And then they offer their customers, which would be the copyright holders. Basically, they can start sending out cease and desists and things like that and then move to advanced takedowns if those don't work and then move into the legal realm.

Right. So this is a turnkey company for copyright holders who want to protect their stuff on Kodi. And the problem is they can't get the stuff off of Kodi because it's out in the BitTorrentosphere. And what this is, is this is another company that's just going to start going after the people who are using Kodi.

Yeah, of course, which is why you need that VPN installed if you're going to do this sort of stuff. This is just like the MPAA back in the day, sending grandma's takedowns. You can just watch the parallels between this and what happened with the music industry. And, you know, what we will end up with is a one-stop shop streaming service for all video ever, a la Spotify for music.

It's going to take 10 years. Yep. But that's what it is. So right now, everything is out there Napster style for free if you get a Kodi box and then you're going to have the back and forth and then you're going to have a reasonable what we've been complaining about with cutting the cords and bundling and all that. We're going to end up with a reasonable monthly fee to be able to access anything we want.

And that's going to it's going to take 20 years to get there. But that's where it's going to head. Yeah, I think so, too, because I mean, the issue right now is you've got yeah, you've got your, you know, your Hulu's and your Netflix's and all that. And everybody's scattered, everybody's scattered. Everybody's at odds with each other.

And especially when you have content owners owning the distribution platforms like Universal and NBC and all those guys owning Hulu, which I still think is should be illegal. I don't think that they should. Well, actually, I still think Comcast owning Universal, it should be illegal. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, that's a different show. You want to start talking about that stuff? I mean, let's just go back to the previous segment. We have bigger fish to fry. Your Amazons, your apples. But yeah, I agree with you with that. So that's where it's going to head. And one other thing I want to mention quickly about the Cody thing, because I the first thing I questioned was, well, is it going to be any decent for live sports and things like that?

Because, you know, oh, my God, everything is on there. Everything. Everything. In every language. I've got to say, like, if I were if I were a Dodgers, like I am a Dodgers fan. And if I move out of market and I still want to be able to watch Dodger games, well, I can't because Time Warner Cable owns or now it's Spectrum owns the rights to it.

They only broadcast on their own thing. I wouldn't be able to watch all Dodgers games. Well, I fucking can now. Yep. Unbelievable. And the great thing about it is like under I've got the with the Moogoo guy pan box, you know, which is pretty big to travel with. But you can stick that fire stick in your pocket and plug it into any hotel TV.

Yep. And, you know, tether that to your phone and boom, you've got, you know, edge speed. Tether that to your phone. I mean, well, you can't use hotel Wi-Fi. Because you can't use hotel Wi-Fi. Yeah. You know, you can go get one of those cheap, quote unquote, unlimited phones and just use that as your traveling Internet provider and watch whatever you want when you're on the road.

You know, if I was still traveling, which I will not doing anymore, thank God, that's what I would do. I'd get like a T-Mobile phone with one of their, quote unquote, unlimited packages, tether that to the fire stick. And there's my that is your unbundling right there. That is you have cut the cord.

Boom. Done. Exactly. Craziness, craziness, craziness. Now, we talked about the Echo Dot before. I had one. I had one for like, you know, last year and I gave it away for Christmas because I didn't need it, I thought.

Well, turns out I kind of liked it because I've only got my Echo in the kitchen, which I'm almost never in the kitchen anymore. I'm in my studio or my bedroom. So I bought two Dots and plugged them in like the Dot in my studio now is plugged into my studio setup with my monitors so I can listen to stuff through the monitors when I'm not actually editing audio.

And then the one in the bedroom is for going to sleep and waking up in the morning. Problem I'm finding with these damn things is the voice recognition is so unbelievably terrible compared to the the big Echo. Yeah, it is. It really is. I'm experiencing the same thing. I have a Dot in my bedroom.

I have the big one out in the living room. The Dot in the bedroom occasionally will pick up whatever I'm saying to the one in the living room, but not consistently. And it always gets it wrong compared to what I actually said. Here's what I did. I changed the wake word in different rooms.

So I have different wake words in different rooms so they don't pick each other up. But if you remember, the funny part was like it was in December when I was first running the Dot. It would wake up in the middle of the night from the dog snoring. That would wake it up and it would bathe my entire room in blue light.

I'm just like, oh, what are you doing? So the nice thing is if you hit the the mute button before you go to bed, you get nice red light in your room. So it's kind of, you know, eerie and feels like you're back in, you know, art school. Need some candles and goth music and goth chicks hanging around.

And it's pretty nice. But for the most part, man, this Dot is you have to get it started and then mute it so it doesn't pick up anything else in the room. Yeah. What do you want for cheap? But the reason it boggles my mind is because supposedly everything about the Dot, it takes your voice, transcodes it into bits and bytes, sends it off to Amazon to be analyzed to figure out what the words are and then acts on that.

So the only thing that I can think of is that the microphones in the Dot sucks so bad that it's just not picking up what you're saying. No, I agree. I 100% think that's what it is. I think the mics that they put in there are a hell of a lot cheaper, a hell of a lot smaller. Obviously, they have to be because it's tiny.

That's got to be what it is. And it's not like I'm calling at it from across the room. It is a foot and a half away from me. Yeah, I just think the mics suck. Yeah, that's it. It's too bad. Yeah, I don't like the Dot. I've got to be honest. I wouldn't recommend getting one.

I would just stick with the main system because it just doesn't seem to work. And it sounds like crap. I mean, the speakers are crap. And as we are positing right now, I think the microphones are crap. However, if you'd like to get a free one, Amazon is definitely pushing for people to develop skills.

Now, I think that this is the wrong approach for them. They've just released a promotional program that if you publish a skill, they will send you an Echo Dot for free. There are so many skills already that nobody gives a crap about. I don't think that sending this out into the world to just get anyone and everyone to develop and publish skills so they get something for free is the way for you guys to go, Amazon.

I think you need some curation. I think that this is the same issue that we have with app stores, with everything. How about you just go after people that can make something useful? Well, here's another angle that they might be coming from. We've got a warehouse full of these damn dots that nobody's buying.

And we've got Generation 2 coming and we need to offload some of them. So all like, you know, maybe a thousand people are going to write these skills to get a free dot. Let's just let's just let's clear the warehouse. Yeah. Maybe I should publish that grumpy old geek skill to get a dot and then we can give it away to a listener. There you go.

Get on that. All right. I know I won't. And by the way, you mentioned before, I just want to go back to something you said real quick was the speakers suck on it. Yeah. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. But on both of mine now, I just lined out. Like I said, the one in my studio lines out to my whole, you know, it lines out to my audio interface, then goes through my thousand dollar speakers.

But the one in my bedroom, because the speaker sucks, I grabbed a thirty dollar Bluetooth box and just stuck the echo on top of that and play it through that. And it sounds great. So, yeah, I'm sure. But thus, you know, defeating the whole point of it being a single integrated item. Well, if I duct tape it together, it's fine.

I put some Velcro and stick them together. Well, we're going to have another option pretty soon, Jason, one that sticks within the personal ecosystem that you and I seem to like. Apple is finally bowing to the pressure from the rest of the world to begin production of its own Siri speaker because these devices are doing so well.

The Google Home and Amazon Echo. Apple's finally going, oh, right. Well, maybe we should have done this in the first place and now they're doing it. Yeah, but Siri still sucks. Siri does suck. But, you know, if again, more people, more A.I., better, better service. So after this gets out there and if a lot of people get it, it might help.

It's also sounds like it's going to be. Well, obviously, it's going to have the Apple look. So that might be good. They're supposedly producing virtual surround sound. Who the hell knows? And I don't give a shit about that anyways. Music is stereo. I don't need surround. But we'll see. Well, I mean, we'll see. This is at least a year away.

It's supposedly going to be announced on June 5th, which is two days from now. So we'll see. The big Monday announcement. Yeah, because we generally don't talk about these things until at least they're announced. But this is just speculation at this point. There's so much speculation going around about this talk on Monday that you can't even keep track of it.

Yep. At least when it's over, it's over. And hopefully there'll be decent new laptops. Doubt it. Yeah, I do too. From what I've heard. Yeah, doubt it. Too bad. Now, Amazon, we talked about them with their tablets, their Fire tablets, letting kids buy tons of apps.

And the FTC went after them. Yeah. And said, nope, can't do it. Well, finally, they're offering the refunds. So if you're out there and your kids bought a bunch of apps or did unauthorized in-app purchases, go to the link in the show notes and, you know, you can go and apply for a refund.

You have until May 28th, 2018, which is one of those dumb deadlines because it's so far away that everybody's going to wait until the last minute. Then they're going to forget about it and skip it. So, you know, Amazon keeps the money. But go do it right away if you're affected by that. Do yourself a favor as a person and as just moving forward in life.

Don't put things off. You just heard this now. If you know you need to do it, go and do it right now because otherwise you're going to forget. And why would you let Amazon keep the 20 bucks? Exactly. Oh, by the way, remember Texture that I talked about maybe a month ago that they'd been charging me for a year and I didn't check my statements?

Case in point, yes. I do remember that. Then I went and canceled them. And it turns out they kept billing me after I canceled. Of course they did. So I got on the horn and said, excuse me, I canceled this two months ago. Stupid me. You should have said, you know, seven months ago.

But I said, I canceled this two months ago. I was honest. And you're still billing me for this. Please make sure this is canceled. And I would like a two month refund from when I canceled it before. Within five minutes, their tech support got back to me and said, oh, we see that you started the cancellation process but did not complete it.

I'm like, I hit cancel my account. And the three subsequent screens. Ah, but did you swing the chicken over your head at midnight? You know what? I didn't go Wittershins. That was the problem. There you go. Yeah. And then they, within a few minutes, the guy got back to me and said, we're sorry.

Here, here you go. And gave me the refund for the two months and gave me a cancellation number and said that we're sorry to see you go. And we're sorry for overbilling you. And so they were very nice about it. So I got to give them, that's my, you know, good guy of the week props to texture. Now, have you gotten your statement since then?

Yes, they have given me the money back. Okay. I was, I was kind of hoping that they were going to charge you again because that's the way things go. Well, that'll be next month because they charged me on the first and my refund, my refund actually showed up in my account this morning for the two months. I'm giving it a 50, 50 odds that you're going to get charged again.

You know what? Hey, it's fodder for the show. So bring it on texture. So financial woes, speaking of that, The Verge has a nice little article about five essential apps to track your spending, save money, and pay your friends. If you're not using anything technologically for your bank at this point, if you're still balancing your checkbook yourself, if you're still even using something as ancient as Quicken, I highly recommend you give this article a run through.

I personally don't use any of these specific apps, but I'm aware of them. They all seem pretty good. There's some interesting, it's a long article, so you'll learn a lot about these. I'm personally a fan of personal capital, which they don't mention. There you go. I mean, this tech is out there.

It's pretty easy. If you're still worried about being in the cloud, you're 95 years old, get over it and get on your money. Okay. I actually have a bookkeeper, a human that goes through and checks this stuff who just didn't know what texture was on my last bit. But we've gone through every single item in my ledger every month.

And if she sees something that wasn't there before, she flags it and gets to me right away. So I just went the human route with that. It's a little more than an app, but at least I can sleep at night. Right.

Media candy. Brian, you're a Harry Potter fan. I enjoyed the books. I enjoyed the movies. I have not gone to Harry Potter world or anything. I thought you were going to that. Didn't you have tickets? No. You know, the kid, bad timing.

Oh, okay. Because I thought you guys had pre-release tickets to go check that thing out. We were going to try to get there before, but when she was still pregnant, it just didn't work out. Too bad I heard a bunch of people went that really liked it. Yeah. Anyway, Warner Brothers has given the official go-ahead for an unofficial Harry Potter prequel about Voldemort.

Well, if it's an official go-ahead, it's no longer unofficial then, is it? Well, it was an unofficial prequel. Now it is an official prequel that is unofficially unofficial-officialized. Now, has Rowling signed off on this or just Warner Brothers?

The... I don't know. Because that's what would make it unofficially official. I don't know, but the thing is, I think Warner Brothers owns the film rights, so... Yeah. Yeah, I don't know about that. That's interesting. That's interesting to think about.

That's what I would... I would consider it if the creator of the universe signs off and says that this is canon, then I'll be interested. Otherwise, this is just Axanar. Yes, and Axanar, the one Star Trek fan film that they had the problems with CBS over, the rights on that.

The Axanar ruling is basically what let these guys go forward, because Warner Brothers came back to them and said, Hey, here's the deal. We're going to compromise on this. So long as the film is released not-for-profit, for free, on YouTube, go ahead and do it.

Right. So you're going to get a free Voldemort prequel. And the trailer's out there, and it was actually a really well-done trailer, I thought. Yeah, I mean, you know, it looks all right. It looks polished. It looks pretty polished. And they've got Kickstarter money behind them.

Of course. Well, isn't that tech... Yeah. Okay, never mind. I know. I know. We'll let the lawyers tangle over whether they actually made money or not. Yeah. I'm not going to watch Axanar, and I'm not going to watch Voldemort, because I just don't care anymore. I do care about House of Cards, though.

Have you been watching the latest season? It's on CNN 24 hours a day, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, I can't watch it. Go Fifi, season five. I got into it. I watched the first seven episodes, and I have to go back and watch it again, because I was so bored, I wasn't even paying attention.

I was playing games on my iPad the whole time. Now, see, that's why I dropped out last season. That was happening to me. So I don't know if I'm going to even bother watching. The wife asked me if I wanted to watch one last night, and I was like, isn't there anything else on? See, I'm going to go back and watch the last episode of last season, because when you go into it cold, they have a few previously-ons, and you just can't get into it.

So I'll go back and watch it and check it out. Right. You know, it's free. I pay for Netflix. Well, it's not free, because I pay for Netflix. I pay for Netflix, so. Unless you watch it through your Kodi box and stop paying. That's true. That's true. But I'm not going to do that, because I do like supporting the people who make the stuff that I like to watch.

Unfortunately, they made another thing called War Machine, which is the Brad Pitt movie about General Stan McChrystal. Yes, there's a gigantic ad for it right off the street that I turned into. We interviewed Stan McChrystal on The Art of Charm. I recommend saying, screw War Machine and just go listen to our interview, because our interview was way more entertaining than this abortion of a movie.

It was bad. It was really just not good. I was waiting for it to be something that just never came. It's like, if you watch the first 20 minutes, that's all it is. It is a movie just like that. There is no twist. There's no turn. Nothing.

Right. It's just bad. And Brad Pitt with that stupid accent and running around in these really weird shorts. It was strange. I can't get behind that. I cannot get behind that. I just know you're a Brad Pitt fan, and you'd be all over this if I didn't warn you.

Yes, I had it queued up, ready to go. Of course. I know you and the Pittster. You have a long history. That's right. Especially since that Lestat movie, man. I know you've just got a poster on your wall and everything. I call him Louis. I don't even call him Brad. Oh, there you go. I did get to finally get around to see T2 Trainspotting.

I still have not done that. Do it. Okay. Get to it. Because you know what? It is a fantastic follow-up to the original. I thought it was a worthy successor. And there was even a little tear at the eye at the end. I thought it was really good. Is this thing streaming yet?

You've linked to the Blu-ray. I don't Blu-ray. Yeah. Well, it'll be for VOD soon. I had a friend in Hollywood slide me a copy of it. Ah, there you go. It's good to know people sometimes. Sometimes. Because I'm pretty sure this is not on the back channels of the internet at this point.

There was like one really bad cam with just like, you know, terrible audio way in the beginning. But yeah, a friend of mine who works in the biz slid me a copy, so. Well, I'm very excited. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, just, you know, have some beers, kick back, turn the lights off, and watch it.

And it's great. Soundtrack's great, obviously. And just so many callbacks to the original. It's just fun. It is a fun movie that really wraps everything up nicely. Everything that you just said, except for the wrapping things up nicely part, also applies to Twin Peaks.

Okay. If you drink a bunch of beers, and you sit in a dark room, and you watch it, and it has lots of callbacks to the original. And I've caught up. I've gotten the four episodes that have been released so far. Holy crap, it is weird. Okay.

It gets progressively less weird, and then it gets weird in a different way again. And some of the first two episodes basically just hit you upside the head with a two-by-four. Yeah. Then you get a little bit of the charm and Twin Peaks-iness that you would expect with some more weirdness.

There's no doubt that he is just going for it. It's pretty insane. But I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I really am. So if you are up to take a damn weird David Lynch ride, it's worth it. Okay. I still have to go back and read the... I haven't watched the next episodes because of what you told me about going back and watching the WikiLeaks.

Not WikiLeaks. Yeah. Twin Peaks on WikiLeaks. WikiPeaks. I'm sure there's a WikiPeaks out there for Twin Peaks fans. I'm sure there is. Yeah, I have not read the recaps yet. So once I read the recaps, I'll get into it. But I think I'm just going to wait for the whole thing to drop and then just have a weird day and do Twin Peaks day and just watch the whole thing in one go.

Cool. Yeah. Good idea. TJ Miller has broken his silence about leaving Silicon Valley. This was a big story that TJ Miller is going to not be on Silicon Valley next season, to which I say smart because the show is getting worse and worse. I can't watch it. I'm done with it.

So yeah. Yeah. And TJ Miller is just a weirdo anyway. He is a weirdo. That's why I wasn't very surprised by this. He sees him say, obviously, you know, you stick around for the last year, maybe, you know, at least one more year to get the big paycheck. But no, he's just a weird guy and doesn't want to. And he's making enough money anyways.

He's in Deadpool and he has his own HBO special now and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Don't care. Doesn't really. Yeah. It doesn't really interest me. I'm going to see out this season of Silicon Valley, but I can't see myself watching another. OK, well, let me know how it goes.

It's pretty boring. That was the that was the problem. Yeah. Well, since you used to work with Alanis Morissette, I thought you might be interested in the fact that Jagged Little Pill is now going to become a musical. I am interested in this fact because this has been trying. She has been trying to make this happen back when I still worked for her.

So this has been a 10 year odyssey, apparently, or not 10 years. So when did the Green Day's American Idiot musical come out? Oh, that's when I worked at that because I worked on that album at Warner Brothers. So this was 2001 or two ish. But the musical, not not the musical.

Oh, the musical. Oh, yes. Musical came out about four years after that. So maybe 2005 ish. Yes. So ever since that happened, the person that adapted Green Day as American Idiot's musical was immediately contacted Alanis, mostly a lot of connections between management there.

And there were discussions about it since then. And the fact that it's finally happening now just makes me laugh because this guy must. Well, I guess the guy is not even involved anymore. So that sucks for him. So the guy that did the Green Day one is no longer involved in the Jagged Little Pill one happening.

Now it's Diablo Cody because, you know, chick. And that's what Alanis does. And that's on brand for Alanis. Yeah, you know, at least with the Green Day American Idiot, there was at least it was vaguely somewhat of a concept album that had a thread that ran through it that would make sense as a musical.

Yeah. Jagged Little Pill is a series of fucking pop songs. Exactly. So good luck with that. I mean, obviously, what they're going to try to do is like what they did with the Janis Joplin musical, which is you'll have musical numbers and it'll be the thread of Janis. Well, in this case, Alanis's actual life, a pop star in Canada, TV star that came to L.A. and established herself with her own identity, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, you lost me already. Yeah. So who gives a crap? More importantly, Radiohead is sharing some of their previously unreleased songs from the OK Computer sessions. OK Computer being one of probably my favorite albums of all time. They are calling it OK Not OK. It's the 20th anniversary reissue.

And you can listen to the they will have eight B-sides in total, three previously unheard songs from the album sessions. It'll be out June 23rd. But the band has released the first called I Promise is available on YouTube now. And it does sound more like a Ben song than OK Computer song.

So I understand why it was not put on the album. OK. But it's good. If you say so. Not a Radiohead guy. But I know what you're going to do. I am, though, a Second City TV and Kids in the Hall. It was SCTV. Sorry. I don't want to don't want to expand the acronym.

SCTV and Kids in the Hall. I was huge fans of them. And they are teaming up for a show in Toronto. Yep. Which I would love to go to. This is a it's basically Dave Thomas is Dave Thomas is trying to raise funds for his nephew, Jake Thomas, who's been paralyzed from the waist down after a spinal cord injury.

And everybody is coming out of the woodwork. We've got Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis. Take off. Hey, so you got Bob and Doug McKenzie there. You got Martin Short. You got Dan Aykroyd, Kathleen or Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, John Flaherty, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, Paul Schaefer, Ian Thomas.

I mean, this is going insane with this problem here is a it's in Toronto. I'm sure it's going to be sold out already because it's on July 18th. Tickets are from five hundred to twenty five hundred dollars each. Yep. Basically, every Canadian comedian ever, except for Mike Myers is.

Yeah. Well, they're saying that there's going to be star studded guests. So, well, he's the only one left from this list. So I think we figured out who the star studded guest is. Yeah. Now, that would be an amazing show. Hopefully what they will do is they will film it and sell it. Oh, of course they will.

This will be out. So I'm looking forward to it. I would love to get to this, too. This is unbelievable lineup, but it's just not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Now, well, hey, I don't have five hundred to twenty five hundred dollars, plus a ticket to Toronto or a place to stay. So and in a month and a half. It ain't no way.

I can't kick our tenants out just so you can crash for one night. Sorry. Hunting unicorns. Hunting unicorns. Ah, our stock market bets. Here we are. So the premise, again, was we had we took ten thousand dollars. We went over to the site called howthemarketworks.com.

We set up a little contest. We each allowed ourselves to buy five stocks. Both Jason and I did it in the tech field. And a friend of the show, Mike, took non-tech stocks as a control to see how we would do. And we would check in once a month to see what's going on. I'm proud to announce that I am kicking everyone's ass.

Yes, you are. I am up thirty one point one six percent. So I've made a grand total of three thousand dollars so far this year using these. I picked Apple, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, PayPal and Sony Entertainment, of which the big kickass winner is, of course, Apple more than anything else.

That is, as per usual, making me the most money. Yeah, I'm up twenty two point eight eight percent. I've made twenty two twenty two eighty seven. So far I picked Tesla, NVIDIA, Intel, Netflix and Cisco. And Mike, our control, who was confident that he was just going to go with the the good, strong regular stocks that will the old blue chips that were always going to beat us, including Burke B, Caterpillar, some other stuff.

That I don't even remember right now. Well, Mike is getting his ass handed to him. Sorry, Mike. Six point six nine percent. Six point six nine percent. So you've made six hundred and sixty nine dollars. I guess I know what you're going to spend that on. Technology for the win. Now, we also have our side bet Twitter, which at the end of the year, Jason bought some Twitter stock.

If he made any money off of it whatsoever, I would buy a six pack of beer. One cent is all I need. And he's looking on track to make about that. I'm up two bucks per share right now. I bought it sixteen thirty three and Twitter closed at eighteen thirty one. So I've made made a few bucks on it so far.

We are about halfway through the year, Jason. Twitter has to somehow make manage to make it another six months. Yeah, I've made twenty five dollars and seventy cents so far. I'm up eight point four six percent. Oh, man. Tech fun. Oh, Paul Allen and your Microsoft money.

You crazy, crazy man. I love this. This is exactly what these people should be doing with this crazy amount of money. So Paul Allen is getting into the space game just like everybody else with billions of dollars. And he made the world's largest airplane suck on its spruce goose.

This is the strato launch. It looks like two planes fused together. I did. It's like Siamese planes. They are Siamese planes with just mass six massive engines. Did you look at the wheels on the back? There are like six sets of wheels on the back.

Only one set on the front, but it balances in the middle. It actually kind of looks like Virgin Galactic's plane that launches their their spacecraft as well. So I'm guessing maybe maybe somebody should have a lawsuit there. A la Waymo and Uber.

Anyway, this thing is three hundred and it's got a wingspan of three hundred eighty five feet, which is pretty damn big. It's 50 feet tall without any gas in it. It weighs half a million pounds. And it can also when it's fueled add on another two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

And when you put a rocket on it, one point three million pounds in the whole goal of this plane is to take a rocket up to thirty five thousand feet. Drop it and let it go to orbit. Nice. Which is pretty damn cool. It is. Because what the cool thing about it is it can get in alignment with where the satellite needs to be in orbit.

So all the thing has to do is just fly up and straight. You obviously will have some navigation on it and course correction, but it takes away a lot of, you know, that first thirty five thousand feet getting off the ground is where most of the gases burn. So they just, yeah, let's take it up, let's take it up high, you know, I think the Virgin Galactic plane goes to seventy thousand feet before it launches.

But this is this is a lot more weight. So it's but it's it's a pretty badass looking plane. Now let's move on to Iceland. Poor Iceland. I love Iceland. They've got their first Costco. Oh, that must be exciting for them.

Yes, there are thirty three hundred thirty four thousand people in Iceland. And this has been making the rounds, but and I'm sure this number has gone up since this happened. But after they they opened the first Costco, sixty two thousand of the citizens joined the Facebook group for bought in Costco, Iceland pictures and prices in the name is in Icelandic, which I will not even try and slaughter because I have no idea.

Yeah. But yeah, enjoy that. Enjoy all of your little stores closing and you will have one store left by the end of this. And it will just be Costco. Now, now, OK, I don't think that's going to happen. I think Costco is going to actually go out of business in Iceland.

They're not going to last. This is exactly what happened with Target in Canada. The prices are higher. Same thing in Iceland. In Canada, the prices are higher because, you know, health care that is covered for everyone, education that is covered for everyone. So there's taxes on stuff. So American prices are well, not artificially low.

We just don't give our people anything in exchange for not taxing them for it. Well, yes, Costco, you know, all of the employees in Costco are they're encouraged to take state benefits. So they're they're wage slaves with state assistance for the most part.

The point being that these these low these big budget retailers can't they don't last in these countries and that Target Target opened up in Canada and everybody lost their minds because it was like, oh, my God, it's finally here. And it eventually went out of business because it doesn't work in these countries where you have to tax things.

So it's not going to last. But I think this is hilarious. And it's it is exciting. Like when all of a sudden a store opens up that has everything and the prices are 70 percent less than anywhere else in your country, you're going to lose your mind. Yeah. You know, you know what they should do?

Costco should they should partner with Paul Allen and use the Strato launch to carry over all the goods that go into the Costco. Because you could just have like, you know, one one flight a month to completely restock the store with that thing. That's true. Anyway, what are you going to do?

I've never been to Iceland. I'd like to go. My brother went and he just goes batshit over it. He loved it. Yeah. Oh, well, do you remember Demolition Man, the movie? I vaguely remember seeing it once. With Stallone, and we talked about it last week, I think, when with the eyeball, the retinal recognition and in Demolition Man, basically, Wesley Snipes took a guy's out, put it on a stick and held it up in front of the thing.

It was kind of Sandra Bullock's first big movie, right? She looked hot in that movie, too. Well, I'm scanning through the little clip right now, and she looks gorgeous. She still looks good. She still looks good. Jesse James, what were you thinking? Idiot. Dumbass. So the greatest joke in Demolition Man is about the three seashells.

When Stallone goes to the bathroom in the future for the first time, you're supposed to wipe your ass with these three seashells that are sitting next to the toilet. And I did some research on this a long time ago, and it turns out they never had, much like that movie that you're watching that you hate so much, The Leftovers.

Oh, yes. They just made this up and said, we don't even need backstory on it. We're just going to make something that's going to confuse people forever. Nice. And Gizmodo has an article, this may be the best art ever made to hang in your bathroom, and it is a cartoon drawing of the three seashells. Unfortunately, it's sold out, and I can't buy it, but the artwork that they posted is high enough resolution that I may just print it and put it in my bathroom until it goes on sale.

Okay. If you're a Demolition Man fan, go check out the three seashells. I just, I, I'm sorry, I laughed my ass off when I saw this one. I'm like, this is genius. I'd much rather have a photo of Sandra Bullock up. I think the wife might be a little upset about that.

I don't know. I think she likes her too. Feedback loop. We have a new Patreon subscriber, Joe Richelay. Thank you so much. You writing in all the time. So we're happy that you're actually supporting us through the Patreon link. Thanks.

Thanks. Thanks. We also got a direct donation from Ben Stanley via PayPal. Thank you for that. We appreciate it. Now, Jason, you and I have been doing this podcast for a long time, and I feel like we've finally made it. We have, we have broken through the, the velvet rope as it were.

Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it. We appreciate the donations. They're fantastic. But Chocolate Rain is now following us on Twitter. Tay Zonday. Game over. Point, set, match. I am updating our ad rates as we speak.

Yes, we have, we have, we have made it. And in a side note, personally, Adam Curry started following me on Twitter this week. Apparently, he didn't listen to my review of his new podcasting device. No, his bot followed you. Yeah. Yes.

The, the Curry bot. Yeah. So we do actually have some real comments, and these are coming from Twitter. Nathan Rietzma, as I said, sent in, check out this sorcery and links to the Rocket, Rocketbook, WaveSmart, Notebook, and Pilot, Frixen, Clicker.

I was going to be Frigion. Frigion Clicker. Okay. What is this? Oh, this is that notebook. Yeah. This is the notebook that you can, yeah, it's the first smart microwave to erase and reuse notebook, which is kind of cool. It also has an app, and I guess things can transfer back and forth or whatever.

The price is right. It's certainly better than your Google thing you brought to the table. Yes. Last week, that was $15,000 or whatever. This is, this is $38.72 on Amazon. And it was funded by Indiegogo for $1.24 million. Yeah.

It's kind of cool. It's interesting. Yeah. The microwave to erase notebook has been around forever, but making this a smart book, which is kind of interesting. Like, it has different little things that you can tap at the bottom to send to, you know, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote. It's interesting.

And the price is right. Because, you know what, the Moleskine with Evernote and the Super Pen that you have to buy from them is, like, well over $100. Yep. That's true. So, if you really feel the need to have something written that also transfers back and forth, this just seems like an interesting way to go.

Definitely. All right. Barrett Reese writes in, in the article, it's, Plex just killed my cable box rental and it could kill yours, too. Now, Brian, you checked this article out. What does it say? Well, Plex is basically a media server for your house, so it pulls in all your old stuff that you actually own and has apps and whatnot.

And they're now launching this $5 per month live TV service, which, you know, not quite as involved as YouTube TV or anything like that. It's a first step towards a cord cutters paradise, but then, you know, you can just hit the home run and get a Cody box.

That's true. But it is nice to see, you know, these attempts at legalities are nice. I would not invest in anything like this at this point in time. It doesn't make sense to me, but it's interesting. I mean, I want to see more things like this happening because this is how we're going to get to the, as we talked about, the Spotify of all media.

Yeah, it'll get there. It'll definitely get there. And I do have a little bit of follow up on YouTube TV and the Chromecast. They've apparently updated some stuff and it has not crashed since the last Grumpy Old Geeks. So I think maybe they listen to our show. Maybe. All right. Ivor writes in, you do not have the right to marry your laptop in Utah, which is very strange for Utah, since apparently in Utah you can marry anything that you want, but now you just can't marry your laptop.

But you're skipping his joke, Jason. He sent that link, but his joke was he can have mine. Unlike most wives, it actually sucks. Oh, but I'm Ching. Yeah. And then we have some comments coming over from our site, GOG.show.

The first is from Ben. Actually, I think the only one this week. So this is from Ben. Dude, the leftovers is amazing. I don't care where the people went and neither should you. Give in to the unknown. The characters, the acting and the writing are amazing and I can be pretty finicky. Ben, I agree with you. All of that is true, except for the fact that I will be sitting with a big, gaping, empty hole in my brain after the finale airs tomorrow.

We'll see if you still feel the same way once that's happened. And then all of a sudden you're like, so all of this was meaningless? Oh, great. Thanks. Thanks a lot. That's awesome. I actually read an article from the showrunner this morning where he was very sad about the way that he handled, he and the other show creators on Lost handled it when the final episode aired and they kind of just went underground.

And he said, for this one, I'm going the other way around. Any questions you have, hit me up. I will answer them all. What happened to them? I've never wrote it. Don't know. Yeah. Told you in the beginning. Don't care. Told you in the beginning. Don't care. It's about the journey, not the destination. Yeah.

Fuck you. All right. Sorry. We did have another one. So go ahead, Jason. This next one comes from Michael Halverson. Love you guys. Been listening for a couple months. Thank you for the weekly entertainment. You're my go-to after listening to depressing NPR political podcasts. Well, there's your problem.

As long as, you know, that it's like you have to eat the sewage before you can have the seaweed or however that, whatever that analogy goes. Yeah. That was bad. Yeah. I started with sewage. So what are you going to do? And NPR was the sewage, by the way, in case you're questioning that one.

I was born in 1896. My God, you're the grumpiest old geek of them all. Two questions. I was born in 1986, not 1896 is the bit that you won't hear that was cut out of the show. I was funny, damn it.

Unfortunately, this technically makes me a millennial. I always refute this because fuck those entitled shits. You're not a millennial if you ever called your crush and worried about their mom or dad answering the phone. Do you agree? Well, you know, kind of, I guess, in the old days, unless there were...

I don't know. People still had voiceover IP phones at the house. So it was 1986. So when he's got his crushes, it's probably around 2000-ish, something around that. It depends on when he, you know, sprouted to manhood.

So maybe, you know, 1996, around there, because we did have phones and pagers then. Either way, you know, he's on the test. For me, it's like, if you consider 21 pilots an alternative, then you're a millennial. Yeah, I don't know what that means. That's where we're going. I got the VPN you plug.

Love the idea of the fuck you to the FBI. However, when I read the article below, I came to wonder, how can you be sure your payment info doesn't correlate with IP usage? Didn't happen in the article, but could it? And I read through this whole thing. I don't know if you did, Jason. The thing about VPNs is you want to find a VPN that doesn't log.

And if they do log, it still won't really matter because there's, these are clusters of IP addresses that hundreds of people that anybody else that's using the same VPN as you is using the same IP. They would not be able to tease out your traffic from other people's traffic. So it's kind of a, it's a no go.

Now that's the current situation. You have to keep in mind that VPNs and law enforcement are currently in a one-upsmanship battle. So. Well, the, the other thing I think he might've been talking about was his payment to private internet access was logged from his IP, which, you know, we know that they know who you are.

We, that's, that's been established. And this goes back to a Bittner-esque kind of question that we talk about recently all the time in the security segment, which is if they ask you, if you're using a VPN, you have to say yes anyways. So that's a non-issue. Now the point, they're going to know that you're using a VPN.

That's going to be obvious no matter what, but they won't be able to track your traffic specifically. Right. That's, that's, that seems to be the real issue. So, and that can't happen. Right. And I did. Yeah. And I did read this article a couple of months ago when we had it in the show before. So, and that's, that's why I use this as a test case to say that this is the only VPN that has been field tested by the FBI going after them and them coming back saying, look, this is all we got.

We do not log period. Yep. That's why we stand by these guys. Yep. And, uh, over at iTunes, we got another five-star rating, which is awesome. This is from, I don't believe you. I don't believe you. Okay. Uh, good listening material. Can't quite explain why this podcast is fun to listen to, but it is.

And I am hooked maybe because I'm learning and being entertained at the same time. Thank you. Well, no, thank you. I don't believe you. Thank you very much. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review.

Closing shout outs. A sad rest in peace to Hollywood House of Blues. You will be missed. I can't even tell you how many bands I actually saw there. Uh, we have a link in the show notes. The demolition has begun. You can actually see them being destroyed. I think I see the couch that I might've possibly had a sexual experience on once.

Aw. Uh, I'm very sad. It sucks. I saw them so many. I saw so many bands there. That really sucks. It is sad to see a venue like that go away. So, who knows what they're going to put up there. Probably some bullshit. Apartments. Virtual, virtual reality stadium.

Bunch of idiots. All right. So, and also a shout out. UEFA Champions Cup final is today. I'm going to go start watching it as soon as Jason hangs up on me. I'm very excited. By the time you hear this, you will know if Juventus or Real Madrid is the UEFA Champion Cup winner. Oh, I'm so excited.

I can't wait. I'm running down to my, my goobang and I'm going to watch it live. Yeah. Damn right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schallmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

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

Head over to GOG.show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash two, one, two born in 18, 19, six. Michael is the grump phase of all. Dick.

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