213: A Pinch of Wrath

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks cloud accounting software helps freelancers master their admin and makes invoicing a breeze. Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and start your free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Morning, Jason. Good morning. Excellent. It's bright and early. How about a little follow-up? Brian, remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned that we had chapter links on the website that would let listeners jump to any segment in the show using their cool new little inline podcast player and I asked for feedback if it was useful? Remember that?

Yep, I do. Is anybody actually using that? Well, I've got a grand total of zero people that wrote in to say either way if it was useful or not. So I think we're going to let that one go and then just I'll spend more time finding cool stuff for the show. I think that's quite alright. I really do recall that only one person wrote in saying, hey, do you think you could do that? Because it would be cool. And whatever. Just listen to the show. Skip ahead. It's not that hard.

Yeah. Or just listen to the whole thing. Or that. Because we're funny. Sometimes, sometimes. In our own minds. Yeah, definitely. And a little follow-up on the robots taking over the world stories that we've been talking about for the past couple years now. This comes from Motherboard and it is The Case for Letting Robots Make Our Clothing by Ankita Rao.

Okay. Sadly, this is a very long article discussing the toll of what automation is going to rot or what it will. What is the present tense of rot? Because rot sounds like it's past tense. Ray? I don't think it's reek. It might be reek. I don't know.

Anyway, it's basically talking about the garment industry's 60 plus million low-income workers and what's going to happen to them when the robots come and take over. They're going to become no-income workers. Yeah, that's pretty much it. There are a couple areas where they say that people cannot be replaced like spot-checking fabrics like leather because apparently cows like to walk into barbed wire every now and again and ruin our jackets.

Bastards. But sadly, it's the same story, same theories, same operating ideas like, oh, well, let's just tax companies that use robots more. Okay, so they don't have a solution is what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. So this is a very long article to get us to the point where stuff that we already knew happened.

We've got to start talking about UBI, people. We've got to start talking about universal basic income, which is basically the theory that the grand government, whatever that may be, should be kicking in some money so that we can all subsist because we don't have Star Trek creation for our basic necessities yet.

So we can't just say, computer, give me some food because I'm starving. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm a little sad about that. I scanned through the article. It does lay out the case very well for what is happening and what is happening more and more and how it's accelerating.

But yeah, no solutions. There are some solutions for smaller groups of people like, you know, two, three hundred people at a shot. But we're talking about 60 to 75 million people, entire cities that are based on, you know, making our T-shirts. Right. And these little 300 mom and pop shops can, you know, they can spin out and have their little side hustle.

But those are the edge cases. Nobody's going to nobody's figured out what to do with this huge swath of humanity that still needs to eat. Right. Well, Amazon has imagined a future where as long as you're not worried about your food or your shelter or your clothing, there will be AIs to help you with everything else.

OK. Yeah. Wired's got a long interview with I'm trying to see this guy's name. This guy's name is David Limp. He's worked at Amazon since 2010 as the senior vice president for devices. And he sees a very sky in the pie future where pie in the sky. You've got your sky in my pie.

I've backwarded it. So, yeah, he's got this great idea of this future that's just going to be amazing with unlimited computing power and unlimited storage out there, all of which Amazon will be charging you for. Never mind you that. But let's not talk about that part. And it's just going to be awesome and you're going to be able to do everything that you want with that little box that's sitting on your on your desk there, except for the fact that you won't have any food or clothing or basically a desk or be able to afford Amazon's charges for all of it.

Yeah, that'd be funny. I mean, if Amazon Echoes were edible and you could eat it in the winter, you know, you could have your you can't cannibalize an Echo, unfortunately. Even if you like boots. I think we have a we have a solution now, Jason.

What is it? Well, we've I mean, everybody is trying to move towards these, you know, tiny little computing devices that are built into everything. Nanocomputing. As long as we make them out of carbon based stuff so we can eat it when it's done, we might still survive. Are you saying, Brian, that our future is meat computers?

It is. Lady Gaga was way ahead of the time. Oh, man. Yeah. She's got to have a couple of teraflops and just the bra alone on that thing. I like how you put the flop in the bra. I mean, we've got Elon Musk's power wall that's going to be powering our homes. Do you envision a future where Amazon is going to give us a little compute wall so we can have truly distributed computing everywhere so we're not always having to go to the Internet?

I don't see why not. I mean, one of the things that I'm sure that they're thinking about, everybody's thinking about Google with their home device, Apple with whatever the hell they're coming with, which we'll talk about in a little bit. You know, as computing power gets stronger, why shouldn't these boxes just be distributed computing as well that's sitting everywhere instead of just not doing anything while it sits there ignored because you gave up on any of their stupid apps that they have built into it?

I guess the case could be made that we're already doing that with our cell phones. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, we don't need no stinking servers. Not particularly, no. And I found an article over at LinkedIn, which I'm sad about. What the hell are you doing at LinkedIn? I saw this.

I'm like, okay, Brian has to explain himself. He's been kind of going off the reservation here if he's trolling LinkedIn for stories. Is finding a LinkedIn story more or less embarrassing than one from Medium? Oh, I think LinkedIn is definitely more embarrassing. I think so, too. But to be fair, it's not like I went out to find this.

Thank God for Facebook. No, I didn't just say that. These links come to me because this was actually shared by a friend of the show, Tara. Okay. She's kind of starting to get into the whole AR, VR thing. And this is a nice, long article basically just about augmented reality.

But, of course, the caveat comes at the end. It's a great read if you're interested in it. And I'm totally into AR. I crap on VR on every single episode of the show whenever it's brought up because I think it's horrible and it's silly. But AR is cool. I like AR, which is augmented reality, not full virtual reality.

So you're wearing your headset. You're walking around, say, a museum. And as you look at a painting, all of a sudden, a whole bit, you know, you can get all the context for the painting, the artist, et cetera, just appears in your glasses. Very cool stuff. We could even have 3D rendered artists who come alive and tell you why they cut their ear off back in the day.

And that's when you start to get into weird ass VR things. And that would be bad. But let's just stick with the AR. So and this article does. And it's really interesting. There's a lot of stuff happening in the field right now. But, of course, the caveat, the last paragraph. So while the future in AR is not quite here, there are a lot of people working on it.

Yes, there are. But they're not. It's not here yet. And I think that's something we're going to talk about a little bit more, too, because Apple just rolled out something. So we're going to talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, we are. I did read this article and it was a really good article. Now, there's one thing in the article that we're not talking about.

So we've got virtual reality. We've got augmented reality. And they're talking about mixed reality. Yeah. Which is what precisely? I'm going to have to look that up because, you know, to me, augmented reality would be the same thing as mixed reality. But me, too.

That's that's I think that the definition of how and what exactly mixed reality is versus AR and VR is very unclear. OK, I'm glad I'm not the only one. No, I didn't quite get it either. So a little follow up on Ross Albrecht, who is now serving a life sentence with no option for parole ever.

The Dread Pirate Robert. Yes, the Dread Pirate Robert from the Silk Road. And we thought that, oh, now that they put him away, it's going to scare everybody off the dark web from selling drugs. Well, turns out not so much. New York. Yeah.

Yeah. The New York Times today has a big one. Yeah. And in addition to your thing, I just wanted to mention really quickly that Tor just released a completely new Onion browser, which is fights even harder for your anonymity. I think it even it even has a VPN built into it.

Wow. So I don't think people are getting scared away. No, I don't. And here's the interesting thing. The real issue right now is fentanyl. The you know, the drug that killed the prince. Yeah, right. And is killing almost close to about 300 people a day.

This isn't the same Michael Jackson drug, is it? The milk? No, that was propofol. Oh, OK. Sorry. My bad. I'm not up on my synthetic opioids. Yeah. I watch too much TMZ, so I know all about that one. Oh, OK. Makes sense. Yeah. No, you actually, you can, propofol is used in ERs everywhere for having surgery and things like that.

But fentanyl is this synthetic drug that comes from China that the fatal dose is about two milligrams. Ooh. And if you read this article, they're busting people that are ordering enough. One guy ordered enough to kill 1.5 million adults. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'd assume that would be a drug dealer. Yes. This is not for personal use. I certainly hope not. The thing about this, two milligrams is an overdose, right? How do you handle this? This is a bioweapon as far as I'm concerned. It's insane. I suppose it is.

I mean, you could dump it into somebody's coffee, right? Yeah. I mean, just remember the old Tylenol scare back in the day? If it's two milligrams, you just take a syringe and squirt it through the top and spray a little powdered fentanyl over some pills and somebody's going to die.

I mean, this is ridiculously powerful stuff. So I see why they're cracking down on it. And the issue comes from all these people who get addicted to heroin and other opioids, you know, prescription opioids. And they build up a tolerance and they're looking for something stronger. And this has just become a huge problem.

So everybody's going back to the dark web to buy this stuff. And the problem exists here that it's such a small amount that it can get past the postal service with no problem. So the U.S. Postal Service is the biggest distributor of this stuff right now.

That's kind of funny. Yeah. Well, it's kind of it's kind of scary, too. It's I mean, it's a big problem, especially in, you know, the eastern states like West Virginia and places like that where people are just falling over hand over fist. I'm guessing, though, if you kill off your client base fast enough, you're not going to have that many re-ups.

So the problem might actually take care of itself in a long enough timeline. Fair enough. Yeah. But it's interesting to see the resurgence of the dark web and how they're trying to go back after him and having the same problems that they had with the good old dread pirate Roberts. In the news.

Ah, net neutrality going away quickly. But thank God, Amazon, Reddit, the ACLU and more are setting a day of action in which absolutely nothing will happen. You know what? You know what the big problem here is? Hmm. Google's not on board. They aren't yet. That's true. I was looking through the list. It's a lot of big people.

Amazon, Etsy. And yes, Etsy is big. Reddit, the ACLU, a bunch of others. This is organized by a nonprofit group called Fight for the Future. They actually did this in 2014 as well. The last time this came up and John Oliver broke the FCC website. We're doing it again. And I don't think it's going to help this time.

Yeah. We need people like Wikipedia and Google. And I guess Bing, if you need like, you know, 12 more people. Why not? Yeah. But hey, Bing will get some press just for joining in. They'd think that they'd want to do that. So yeah. And Mozilla, who cares?

I mean, nobody goes there. What's Firefox again? It's that it's that thing that I used a long time ago. Yeah. And I'm sure Amazon will make a token gesture because they are not going to screw over their sales in any way, shape or form. And we're going to get to some Amazon statistics in a minute that is mind boggling.

That's very true. Yeah. OK, so the protest is set five days before the first deadline for comments on the FCC's proposal. So look for that. There'll be banners across some sites that you look at. And this is important, but I don't know. I have a bad feeling about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think the writing's on the wall on this one. And what's going to be funny is if everybody puts up banner ads and everybody's ad block turns them off so they can't see them. That is quite funny, actually. Yeah. And it is official. We now have oath. Oath. Yes.

The Yahoo shareholders have approved the $4.48 billion sale to Verizon. It's expected to close, I believe, this Tuesday. If it didn't close already, I can't remember which Tuesday it was. Who really cares anyways? Well, I can tell you 2,000 people are going to care real soon.

Well, that's true. Yahoo and AOL will merge into the combined entity that they have decided to call Oath for some strange reason. I'm sure they market tested that, but I'm not sure who with. AOL has indicated that it is planning more than 2,000 layoffs following the deal's close. Marissa Meyer will be stepping down as the CEO of Yahoo.

A little bit fucking late, right, Yahoo? Yeah. She still will own about $186 million worth of stock when she leaves. $186 million to run a company into the ground. How awesome is that? We are in the wrong business, Jason. Yes, we are. So, yeah, the purchase price was lowered by $350 million after revelations about the various hacks that have occurred to Yahoo, but Yahoo stock is still up 8.5% at the time of this article's writing.

Yeah, there were some articles going around a week or so ago talking about how much money Marissa Meyer made, and it was like a million dollars a day for her entire run there. Insane. Yeah, it was like $900 and some odd thousand dollars a day, a day, for fucking up one of the greatest companies that ever existed.

She leaned right into the bank. Yep, she did. Now, let's get to some Uber news. Oh, must we? It's been a fun week. 20 people were fired from the first investigation that came out last week. Now, this was from the New York Times where I saw the first article, that Uber fires 20 amid investigation into workplace culture.

Okay? Okay. And this was everywhere this week, and almost everybody got it wrong. The New York Times did not get it wrong because they have paid journalists, because there are two separate investigations going on right now. There's the Eric Holder investigation, and then there's the other investigation from Perkins Coy, C-O-I-E, I'm going to pronounce that Coy.

The Perkins Coy investigation came out first, the results, and that is what spurred the first 20 people being let go. Right. Now, the Holder investigation came in this week, and it has been disseminated to everybody, and right about now as we're recording this, a bunch of very nervous board members are sitting down in a room somewhere to discuss the future of who's going to say.

They're all looking around going, why is Arianna Huffington here? Yeah. Darling! Darling! You're fired! You're fired! You're fired! Oh, yeah. So there's going to be some heads rolling this week, because they're saying the report that comes from the Holder team is very, quote-unquote, ugly.

Well, it should be. I've been talking about how crappy Uber is for a long time, and funnily enough, there's a third one that hasn't even been covered. This one is specific to an executive named Eric Alexander. He's president of business in the Asia-Pacific, who decided to pass around some medical records from a rape victim from a driver.

So this isn't even related to that. So heads are rolling over in the Asia-Pacific division, because this guy decided that, you know, hey, she claimed she was raped. Let's pass around her medical records internally and see if we can get our lawyers on anything here. So this isn't even related to those other two investigations.

Right. How's it going over there, Uber? Because what they were trying to prove was the fact that the whole rape thing never happened, and that it was a plot by their rival in India to try and get them bad press. So fortunately, somebody at HR finally found out what was going on and took it away from him and said, you're an idiot.

But you can't do that. But as of the writing of this article, was that four days ago, he was still an employee of Uber. Yeah, he was. And then when all of a sudden journalists started to look into it, he was magically fired. Oh, well, imagine that. Imagine that.

Yeah, I think we all still have Susan Fowler to thank for this latest round because of her Medium blog post about all of the sexual harassment that went on when she was an engineer there, because that set off a huge chain of events. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's another issue that Uber's going to have to come to terms with when they start running their business in countries with, let's say, not very nice governments, like, oh, say, Egypt.

Okay. Well, Egypt has started to say, hey, we see in the news that you have a really cool program called Heaven that lets you track the riders and where they've gone and where they're going and who's getting picked up and all that. Can we see that, too? Because that would be really cool because we have this whole state surveillance apparatus and there are a lot of people that we'd like to put in jail.

And yours is better than ours. Yours is way better than ours. So can we get some of that? And Uber at this point said no. And their biggest competitor, Kareem, which is a Dubai-based company, also said no. And in the meetings with Kareem and the Egyptian government, it came out that, yeah, basically they really, really want this data.

So what they're going to do now is they're going to pass a bill in parliament that's going to require Uber and Kareem to store their servers and all of their data in Egypt. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong with that? So good luck with that one, Uber.

Yeah. So, Jason, this podcast, it's inception. It was coming from me asking you basically two simple questions. One, how do you make money on the internet? Because it seems to be pretty difficult. Except for number two, how come all these companies that are really bad and don't make any money are worth billions of dollars?

So do we have an answer to one of those? No. Damn. We still don't understand anything, but there is a great article in Salon that posits the same question that vexes me and keeps me up at night. Why are there so many billionaires leading money-losing companies? Now, this relates directly to Uber because Uber is example number one.

In a financial report released last week, ride-hailing app company Uber reported a staggering $708 million loss for the first three months of the year. Since the company was founded eight years ago, it's burned through almost half of the $15 million in private venture capital that it has raised. But despite mounting losses, departure of all the executives, and all the news that we report on every single week, that would basically tank any normal company, Uber's CEO and co-founder

Travis Kalanick, my favorite person in the world, is approximately worth, at least according to Forbes, $6.3 billion. He is richer than Walmart Harris, Christy Walton, richer than the head of Chinese e-commerce and retail giant JD.com, which recently reported $11 billion in quarterly sales, so actually making money.

So how does a 40-year-old computer programmer heading a beleaguered and unprofitable company have a net worth greater than the gross domestic product of Barbados? And, well, there kind of is an answer, Jason, because people are assholes, and they keep investing in companies that fucking suck balls.

Yeah. Have you ever watched Shark Tank? Uh, no, because this is, I find that stuff horrible. I really do. Okay. So. Well, I really enjoy Shark Tank, except for the episodes where this one venture capitalist, which he's actually friends with a bunch of my friends, but I can't abide by this guy.

A name of Chris Saka. Okay. He is one of the original investors in Uber. And every time this guy comes on Shark Tank, you can just feel the douchebag quotient in the room go to 11. Right. He is such a snake. And a lot of these guys are just like that.

You know, they're, they're really kind of horrible people and just out at it for the money and it becomes a game to them. They really don't care about anything else besides winning. Yeah. And that's, that is why a lot of these companies are still valued at billions upon billions of dollars because people that have zero human, uh, human decency keep throwing money at it because they think that these companies will win.

And that's what's happening specifically with Uber. I, people just keep throwing money into Uber because they believe that Uber will kill the global taxi industry, take it over, eventually replace everything with robots and basically have zero, uh, cost to run and just make money upon money upon money.

And they want that money. And that is why this happens. Now I, with my money, I attempt to be an ethical investor, but apparently, uh, that is stupid. Yes, it is. If you would, here's the problem. If you have money and you want more money, ethics is not really the way to go.

Yep. And that is why these companies continue to be worth billions upon dollars. So we do have an answer to one of our questions. Yes. Nice guys finish last. Exactly. Isn't that a green day song? Yeah, it is. I believe. I thought so. Okay. Well, let's move on to, to Amazon. Uh, I was shocked and staggered by the statistic.

I know a lot of people probably have prime. I had no idea how many people pay for Amazon prime. My jaw hit the floor when I read this stat. I was blown away. We have the link in our show notes, uh, which gives you a graph as well. But the reality is, uh, Amazon prime membership is lowest among households that make less than $41,000 per year.

However, for households that make more than $112,000 per year, almost 82% of the year. 82% of them have prime memberships, 82% and there, and overall, over 60% of households in the U S in general have prime memberships. How that, what? I know what 60% of all households in the United States have Amazon prime.

I could not believe that 60% of households in the U S are basically just giving Amazon a hundred bucks a year, whether they use any of the services or not. Yep. That I, I was really, this, this shocked me, shocked me.

I mean, I figured 20% I would have been like, Oh wow. Yeah. They're doing really, really well. 20% of U S households must be paying for prime because who doesn't, who doesn't want their underwear delivered same day, but 60%. I mean, if you want, if you, and here's where, let's go back to the ethical investing thing.

In theory, I should be investing in mom and pop shops or even, you know, old school businesses that, that have been around for years. If you want the death knell for a mom and pop shop, here it is. 60% of households in the U S have Amazon prime. If you do not have Amazon stock right now, you are stupid.

Uh, yeah. I mean, if you're, if you wanted to invest in a mom and pop shop, take your money outside, pee on it, then burn it and you'll get the same result, but at least you can burn marshmallows over that. We have nothing to, nobody to blame, but ourselves, because this is, I, I really couldn't believe it.

So Amazon is not happy with this 60%. Of course they would like a hundred percent. Uh, so they have to chase after the demographic that they are lowest in, which is a households under $41,000 per year, which is understandable. If you're only making that much money, uh, you can't really throw a hundred bucks at prime membership to, so you can stream some crappy movies and documentaries.

And you, and you can generally wait an extra day for your stuff to arrive, you know? Yes. So what they're doing is they're lowering the price for prime membership for those people. So it's going to be a slide, a sliding scale. How do they determine that? Uh, well, I mean, that is a damn good question.

How do they determine that? Do you have to give them your tax returns? I don't remember signing up for, for Amazon and having to like give them my median income. Yeah. Are they, are they, are they data mining and tracking things and matching people up against other things? Or are they just basically, uh, are they basically like finding people who barely order anything and it's, and it's low quality stuff that's super cheap and then just throwing them an offer?

Looking at foreclosure listings, bad credit ratings, things like that. Hmm. Who knows? Pretty creepy. Pretty creepy. Definitely creepy, but you know, everybody should have, but there's no stopping them. 60%. 60%. So we also have the answer to another question.

Why big box retailers for the most part have shut their doors. Why is Sears closing another hundred stores this month? And you know, thousands of, of shops are going out of business because everybody that works there is getting stuff on prime. Even the people that work there aren't shopping there. Yep.

Exactly. Oh, speaking of big box retailers, Walmart. Right. Oh, Walmart. They're, they're doing something fun this week. Mm-hmm. So they're trying to keep up with Amazon, but they don't want to spend the money on the infrastructure like Amazon has for their delivery service.

So they're just going to ask the employees to drop off the packages on their way home from work. Right. Are they getting paid for that? Is that part of their regular hours or is this extra that they're just supposed to do on the side for the team? Yes. Well, I mean, it is a, it's a volunteer project.

Nobody knows if they're going to get, we assume that they're going to get paid overtime because they have to work their full shift and this is just on their way home. Could you drop this, these packages off? Great way to have, you know, spot on delivery times. Joe wants to get some Big Macs on his way home first.

So your packages might have a little fry grease on them. Who cares? Because I mean, they're trying to figure out this last mile problem and they don't know if the employees are going to get paid for gas, wear and tear on their car, extra auto insurance, because I do believe you probably have to have a different type of insurance because then you're kind of a carrier instead of just a citizen.

But who knows? Well, well, well, this doesn't matter. I was about to say, once these things did used to matter, they do not anymore. So I thought that was a fun one. Way to go, Walmart. Maybe this is why Kalanuck is worth more than the chick from Walmart.

Maybe. Yeah. She needs to get on that. Anyway, Google. Google, Google, Google. Chrome is going to be coming out with its own ad blocking. Now you're just once a browser that I used to know. And we'll talk about Safari is going to be doing this later, too.

But yes, Chrome is they're preparing the the publishers for what's going to happen because there are different types of things that they will not be able to do anymore. No more pop ups, auto playing videos, prestitial countdown ads, which I cannot stand.

You get those. I get those all the times at Forbes dot com. So this is what is going to happen in the future. The the browsers are now going to not be just the gateway to get everything. They're going to tell you what you can and can't get.

Yeah, which I don't know how I feel about that's a slippery slope that I personally am not too happy about. Now, think about this as a developer, too. If you've got we're back to browser wars to a certain degree, because the specs are going to be different on Opera, on Google, on Safari.

And you need to you need ads to survive. That's the we have decided this is society. We don't want to pay for shit. So the only way that that any online presence makes money is through ads. Now you're going to have to have like you're going to have 17 different specs for ads. You're going to have to sniff for browsers.

You're going to have to serve different ads based on the browser type and what they allow and don't allow. This is going to be ridiculous. Like the limited amount of money that people are putting into publishing and infrastructure and building things online. Anyways, you've just now added a whole new layer because I mean, we used to have the IAB who put out the standards for all of the different types of ads that you could run because that standardized everything for big media buys and everybody knew what the playing field was.

And I think the problem is we've seen so many rogue ads that everybody's trying something different. These massive drop downs when you go to a page, it's like the page loads in right. As you go to read it, this giant block drops down with a mouse over that will auto start to play because he knows where your mouse is kind of going to be.

It's all this predictive dumb manipulation to figure out what to place where in the, you know, in the anticipation that you're going to be doing something. It's insane. And also, I think I mentioned it here. I might have been on another show that I was talking about this, that read more button now.

Yeah. So when you go to an article and it says continue reading and you have to click something that triggers so many different things. Just that single click on a page gives them so much more information on tracking and other things that they can do. It's just nefarious.

So half of me is like, okay, if the, if the publishers can't play nice, then maybe the browsers need to step in. But on the other hand, I'm like, well, if the publishers aren't going to play nice, the best way to get back at the publishers is to not go to their fucking website.

Yeah. That's kind of the, the give and take on it. But I'm not, I'm not a fan of this, uh, this ad blocking native in the browsers. And I say that using opera as new native ad block. Now that I just said that, I'm like, uh, well, and then the other, the other aspect that, you know, we always crap on Apple for, but now the browsers are doing it as well as they were all these great companies out there making ad blockers themselves.

All of them are basically instantly out of business now. So that's fun. So we'll see how that, which sucks is because that one ad block plus just bought flatter. So hopefully they can figure something out with that. Whoopsie. Good luck. The only, yeah, the only thing that I think a browser that I'm happy with the browsers doing with Chrome and Safari, uh, not allowing any video to autoplay.

Yeah. That video autoplay is, is the devil's work. Yeah. It's always been, there should be no audio coming from my fucking webpage period ever. Ever, ever, ever. And an interesting twist on this is, uh, apparently the guidelines that Google is using comes from research done by the coalition for better ads.

And apparently some people think that that group is just a front for Google. So Google is funding them. So then they can use their recommendations and research to then push Google's agenda. I don't have any, any proof of that, but I, that's, that's the word going around.

Fun times. What are you going to do? So let's move on to some more fun stuff. Your old friend, Airbnb. Oh, my second favorite company. Yeah. They are going to be like a pig in shit pretty soon because Japan is greenlighting home sharing. But they have a caveat. They have a caveat.

Culturally. Do you think that one is going to take off there? I, I'm guessing it might. It might. All right. I don't know. Uh, so the deal is, uh, you can only share your home for up to 180 days a year, which is half the year. So that's quite a lot, but what it's doing, it's, it's trying to cut out the people who just buy homes and use them as year long rentals.

Right. Right. That's what they're trying to cut out. Okay. You know, Santa Monica has that, but it has that stopped anybody. I mean, what? Three people have been fined and it was like $300 in fines. So, well, I mean, the enforcement procedure on that. I mean, you got to staff up and nobody's going to do that. Yeah. I mean, you got to hire people who are just basically trolling through listings, cataloging them, databasing them, and seeing how many times things are being listed.

We don't have the resources for that. Because the, because the goddamn fines are so low. If the fines, if the fines were high enough that you could afford to pay for the staff to do the enforcement, then that might be something different. But the fines are so ridiculously low.

It's not like Santa Monica doesn't understand this. You ticket bastards for parking. Yeah. I mean, the prices are ridiculous because you pay for the program itself and then a little bit more to fix the roads because of the crappy Uber drivers. And this is a concept that we understand. So do it.

Yeah. It's an age old concept. So. Yes. What are you going to tell us old as time? So let's go back to ads really quickly. Snap has just acquired placed, which is a company that tracks whether online ads actually lead to offline purchases. We've talked about these guys, right? Yeah, we have. This is the holy grail of advertising is figuring out, is any of this actually getting people to buy shit?

Yeah. Nobody knows. I would love to understand the technology behind this company place because Snap decided to buy them. And it's $125 million, according to Bloomberg for this company, which is not insignificant. Now, Snap is trying to tackle the challenge of proving that online ads actually drive offline sales.

Attributing an offline purchase to any one online ad is tricky, says the article. And I would say, yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah. I'd love to have some idea about the technology being used here because nobody has been able to figure out if that actually works.

And as we've discussed repeatedly on this show, almost all internet metrics and statistics are pure, utter bunk. Yeah. We know that we've done this for a living. We know statistics that people pass around for their websites, for their ads, for their click throughs, for everything is complete and utter shit.

So is this company real or is this just another fucking snow job? If they can tie the identity of somebody who saw an ad to a credit card receipt, that's about the only way that they can do it. Which means that Snap would have to have the credit card number and Snap doesn't take credit card numbers.

Right. But the identity, like the email address, if they can do an email address with an ad and all this stuff. But Snap is in the Snap app. They don't get as much data as you do on the web by a long shot. So you'd have to maybe buy on your phone. There's a whole lot of there's a whole lot of things that would have to happen to make that work.

I mean, I just I know in the movie business, that was all we wanted. We wanted to know if that one million dollar website that we just spent a year and a half building sold at least one ticket. And we never knew we went on. Yeah, but yeah, you kind of have to. That's all we got.

Yeah. So it's an interesting buy. But I think Snap just wasted one hundred and twenty five million dollars. Well, they got plenty to burn because they suck. Has their stock rebounded after their last giant tank? It came up a little, but not much to significantly make much of a deal or increase anybody's smiles in my area.

Maybe it's a dead cat bounce, as they call it in the stock world. Google has sold Boston Dynamics to SoftBank. This makes me now Boston Dynamics are the is the company that creates all the super creepy and terrifying robot videos, right? Yes, they're they're in Boston. And because their name is Boston Dynamics, obviously, one would assume.

And they always show those those awesome robots just walking around in the snow and and the asshole engineers kicking them over and just providing fodder for many meme videos. But yes, they make awesome robots, but they've sold them to the Japanese. SoftBank is a Japanese company that is going to take over and we'll see what's going to happen there.

Nobody knows how much has been paid. And they also picked up another company, a smaller humanoid robotics company that Google acquired called Shaft. So SoftBank got the shaft. But I'm very well done. Thank you. But I'm you know who else is getting the shaft, Jason?

Who is Brian? All of us. Oh, the United States. You know, we're 28th in the world in mobile Internet speeds. That's that's pretty high from what I've experienced. I know that's true. I mean, come on. We've talked a lot about how the U.S. is quickly becoming a third world country.

We have slow, slower mobile Internet than Greece. Greece. Greece, who has default, who has zero, who has negative monies. They have none of the monies. They have none of the monies and the monies are just leaving Greece and they still manage to have better mobile Internet speeds than we do.

Well, I mean, to be honest, Greece is a lot smaller, so they need fewer towers. I guess that's true. But still, yeah, come on. Yeah, this is America. Surprisingly, the U.K. has the absolute fastest speed. I never would have guessed that in a million years, but they even beat Germany.

So it's U.K., Germany, Finland, France and Norway that have the absolute fastest speeds. We are way down the list. Slovakia has better Internet speed. Romania. Can Kenya? No. Can? Yes. Oh, come on.

That's just embarrassing now. It is. That's my point. Come on, America. Make America fast again. You've heard us talk before about how amazing the new FreshBooks invoicing system is, but that's only where it starts.

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Plus, a real live person usually answers in three rings or less. I've used this, and it's totally true. You can take pictures of receipts on your phone using their iOS mobile app, which makes claiming your expenses really, really easy. And FreshBooks will also handle your time tracking, so when it comes time to create that invoice, you'll know what you did and when you did it.

Right now, FreshBooks is offering a free 30-day trial to our listeners. No credit card required. Go to freshbooks.com forward slash grumpy and enter grumpy old geeks in the how did you hear about us section, because you don't want to be doing business the old-fashioned way. Now we often say that we don't talk about Apple on this show, so what we're going to do is I'm going to give you the fastest WWDC keynote wrap-up of any tech podcast in history.

All right, let's see if you can finish before I fall asleep. TV OS, meh. Yay, Amazon's coming. Watch OS, meh. High Sierra, are you high? Safari, no autoplay. Tracker blocking photos, meh. APFS is going to be kind of cool in High Sierra.

Graphics updating looks promising. And, uh... Ah, crap. Missed it. I needed a progress bar. Um... I am saving up for the iMac 27-inch because it looks amazing. I cannot buy an iMac Pro because it's going to start at $5,000, even though it's black and I want one.

Wow. iOS 11, tons of good stuff. Yay! And, uh... The AR kit, holy shit. Yeah, that AR kit caught my eye. That looks super interesting. I would like to start developing some of that stuff and play around with it. Seems cool. It looks so cool. And then we get to HomePod.

HomePod. Crappiest name ever. HomePod. HomePod. Oh, yes. We have to have a Hodor HomePod mashup. Now, we talked about this a couple months ago. I can't remember exactly when. We've talked about it a lot, actually.

We're like, where is Apple's version? Apple has to come out with these. We know they're going to come out with these. When is it going to happen? Here it is. It looks not as cool as I thought it would. No, it does not look very cool at all. It looks like a microphone head that's got a spit catcher on it.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it doesn't look very cool. It comes in two colors, of course. Yes. It doesn't seem like it's going after the Echo. It seems like it's going after the Sonos, which is interesting. Yeah, it's more, well, Apple still tries to, you know, Apple wants to be a music company really, really badly.

Look, Steve Jobs is dead. Give up the music shit. He was the one that pushed it. He's dead. Nobody cares anymore. The specs on the sound are fantastic, though. I mean, this will sound way better than anything else that's out on the market right now. My question, again, though, Neil Young, is does anybody give a crap about how good the sound quality is?

Yeah. Me? That's about it. I do. I do, I mean, and my Sonos system was beautiful, and the one thing that HomePod does that Echo's do not is it can sync in your house. That's the one thing the Echo really, really needs to, they need to buy that patent or license that patent so you can sync your Echo's around the house, but HomePod has that, and they've got their eyes, you know, just squarely on Sonos.

They're taking Sonos out. Look, this will still do, at least at this point, anything that Echo or Google Home can do. So it's, we're not saying that they're not going after the market. It is the similar product. It's just they have really focused on sound quality. Yeah.

And, I mean, and they know they can't compete in some areas because Siri still sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And this thing is still half-baked. I mean, it wasn't even, it was barely demo-able at WWDC. Nobody could touch it. You weren't, you literally were not allowed to touch them. Right. And some people heard them and said they sound fantastic.

And I do like the sound profiling, but, and they have that in Sonos right now. You can already do that using your phone and the app. It can, it can sound profile a room and then tweak your speakers, but this does it like built in. So you don't, I guess, don't need the app and it will just do it automatically, which is pretty cool. Right. Well, none of us are going to be able to find out for a while because I believe they aren't shipping for around a year.

No, they said December on this one. I think every, December, that's not too bad. Yeah. But as we learned with the AirPod, it's probably going to come around June. Okay. Fair enough. Everything that they say is shipping in December, look for in June. So that's it for Apple.

Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Oh, I got a few apps later, but let's, let's move on. Okay. I wanted to talk to you about ShareBuilder, Jason, because I know you're starting to get into investing a little bit and I wanted to let all of our listeners know about this as well. What, well, there, there used to be a site called ShareBuilder that friend of the show, Mike, who is also in our hunting unicorn segment, turned me on to what it basically is, is you can purchase micro, micro stocks.

So say, you know, Google's selling around, oh, sorry, Alphabet is selling around a thousand dollars. You don't have a thousand dollars to drop. You've got a hundred bucks. Well, you can buy one 10th of a share of Alphabet. Okay. That's what, that's what these, these companies do. Now it's no longer called ShareBuilder.

Capital one bought them out, which I hate capital one and they're evil, but I still love this product. I basically have it set up that I transfer over $100 every month from, from my personal checking account. It goes to this account. I have set up five different stocks and I basically buy $20 worth of each stock every single month and just build and build and build and build over time.

It's fantastic. It's a no brainer. It's pretty easy to set up and you just let the thing run. That's pretty cool. I like that. It is pretty cool. So you could just, you know, if you want to pick up Amazon and you want to pick up, uh, you know, uh, Alphabet and they're just too damn expensive, send over a hundred bucks a month and just start building up and you'll start to own shares over time.

That's fantastic because that's always been my problem. Like I would like to buy some Google. I would like to buy some of this, some of that, some of the other, but it's too expensive. I'd have to save up for two months to buy one share. And it just feels like buying one share just doesn't really feel like it. But if I can just throw money in there and just let it go and just let it go.

Just that's awesome. Yep. And it's reasonably low cost. It's not like you're spending 39.95 per transfer. I think it's, uh, I can't remember exactly what it was at. I think it's 695, uh, for every month when you do it one time fee. Okay. So, so you basically buy as many stocks as you want.

Okay. So every month, so you're investing $93 a month instead of the full hundred, but that's not bad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cause I think my E-Trade account cost me like 13 bucks a trade. So that's even better. Yeah. And remember you're getting as many trades as you want. You can set it up for as many different stocks to buy different parts of.

Oh, that's even better. Yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm hooked. Okay. Pretty cool. Let's move on to a few apps real quick. I saw this at the WWDC demo, affinity photo, right? The Photoshop for your iPad pro. Oh my God. This thing is amazing. I picked it up cause it's on sale for 1999.

It's usually 40 bucks. Right. I've got a, the 9.7 inch iPad pro. This thing is so cool. It is so much easier to use in Photoshop. I played around with some of my photos and I really wanted to try the masking stuff that they demoed. It's incredible. It is so much easier than Photoshop.

Do they have a desktop version of this? I don't know. I didn't actually. Cause I would like to have something to replace my goddamn subscription for Photoshop. Pixelmator works great. It's 39 bucks. I think at the iTunes store, you can open up Photoshop docs.

There are a couple little issues with it as far as just key commands and stuff like that, but you can get used to that. Right. Pixelmator is great. It's cause I don't have Photoshop on cause I got another laptop and I didn't have Photoshop on it and I wasn't about to go to Sweden to go find another copy of it.

So I just bought a copy of Pixelmator and it works great. Awesome. You can, you can totally get by with anything that you need to do with that. It's just right on the, right on the app store. Highly recommended. If instead of trying to go steal a copy of it and, or pay the horrible Adobe subscription fee because that stuff just almost never works.

Yep. It's horrible. No. Okay. Uh, next up zombie gunship survival. I talked about zombie gunship a long, long time ago as one of my favorite games, played it forever, gave these guys so much crap for taking so long to get another version of this out. Well, it's finally out 2 million downloads in the first five days.

So I'm not alone with people who loved zombie gunship, uh, zombie gunship survival is a different kind of model of the game. I'm not as big a fan of it, but I've been playing it. I'm a level 22 general right now. Thank you very much. And I have spent money on the game because I do want to support them, but I wait for the sales.

So I've spent 15 bucks on the game. I'll probably spend 25 because I think it's the work that they put into this game is worth 25 bucks for the time that I spent on it. And that sounds fair. Yeah. That sounds like a good amount of money for a game. Yeah. And especially a game that is this detailed in this, uh, this it's, it's a high quality game.

I mean, they didn't screw around. They spent a lot of time on this. So I think that they deserve the money for it because I'm going to get that many hours out of it. You know, I've probably spent, uh, however many times I've pooped since I bought it, how much time I've played it, but it's a, it's a really fun game.

I highly recommend it. If you liked the zombie gunship in the old days. Now, other fun Apple news, you know, when you get an app and it always says, Hey, do you like this app? Would you like to rate it? No. Yes. Ever. Would I like to rate your app? Go away. Quit bugging me.

Well, Apple is going to start enforcing certain guidelines about how that process happens. Okay. They're not going to be able to do their own pop-ups anymore. They have to use this whole Apple system to pop up a rating. You can only run it certain times and there's a limit to how many times you can run it.

But here's the kicker with the little share sheet that comes up for rating an app. You can rate the app in the app. You don't have to get taken out to iTunes, figure out how the hell that works because it's so horrible right now, how you can rate an app from the phone. So they're making it very easy for you to rate an app in line, which is probably going to up the ratings.

I'm imagining because it'll be very simple. And then once you rate it, they'll never talk to you again about it. Having said that, please do give us a five-star rating on iTunes, even though it's a pain in the ass. Yeah. We're not an app though. We're a podcast. That's true. Now, Apple is doing a good thing by trying to make that whole process and the continued bombardment with notifications easier.

Facebook is going the other direction. Oh God, are they Apple? I don't know if you've done anything with Facebook recently in terms of like defriending people or cleaning things up or deleting photos or whatever. Now, anytime that you do anything, Facebook gives you a handy little pop-up explaining what you just did.

Yep. Thanks, Facebook. I actually had, I did unfriend somebody recently. I don't even, who cares why, but I did get a screen saying, Brian, we noticed you recently unfriended someone. This means that they'll no longer be able to see the posts you share only with your friends and you won't be able to see theirs.

Don't worry. We won't tell them that you've unfriended them. The Facebook help team. Thanks, Facebook. Is this the same team that had to figure out that two-factor auth was called two-factor auth? Most likely. Probably. And this graphic is so terrible. I get it on everything now.

It's like these two hands that are giving a kind of a reach around to some law enforcement badge that's stuck over a sphincter. I don't know what this graphic is. I don't understand what has happened to graphic design recently because everything, at a corporate level, everything is starting.

You know, anytime there's a major world sporting event and they unveil some logo and everybody scratches their heads and goes, what the fuck is that? Is it a cat? Is it a person? Is it a star crapping out a pancake? I can't tell. And that's what every graphic on Facebook looks like now.

They sort of look like hands, but they could be blue Groot trees. I don't know what the hell is happening. Well, I was going with the, you know, the reach around thing because they look like they're wearing surgical gloves trying to do a medical procedure on you. It's like turn your head and cough after you unfriend somebody. I think we have to do an entire episode on the state of graphic design.

Well, that'd be a very short episode because the state of graphic design is there is no state of graphic design. Everybody has left and gone to do something else. Anybody with talent. That's true. Now, I don't have this in the notes, but I just want to, I want to ask if you've noticed this Instagram this week. Have you noticed an exponential increase in advertising?

I thought somebody had hacked into my account because all of a sudden I was getting nothing in my feed, but people I didn't know. Every third post for me is an advertisement now. Yeah. I thought maybe I'd gotten insanely drunk and just started to follow a shit ton of people. It happens. Yeah.

No, it's, it's insane. Okay. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Um, I'm going to do some research on this. I think they opened up a new platform for advertising and some new tools because these definitely look different because you can shop right from the app. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They rolled that out. Oh God.

It's bad. It's really bad. Yeah. It's gotten almost useless. Shocking. Yeah. Thanks Instagram. Way to crap on the last nice app that I had for social sharing on my phone. We see that you stopped using Instagram so much. You're missing out. We were so excited for Top Gear to come back as the grand tour on Amazon, but we called it the grand train wreck because it was so terrible.

Well, now we have the grand car wreck because unfortunately Richard Hammond had a really nasty accident the other day and was airlifted to the hospital. Yeah. Apparently he's, he's all right. Broken knee is about as bad as it got, but apparently the, the crash was actually absolutely horrific.

You know, I'm hoping that they fixed a lot of the issues from the grand tour season one. They've, they've had the feedback. God, I want that show to be good. And I hope Richard is going to be okay. And yeah. Did you see the, did you see the photo from the crash? Yeah. The car's destroyed. It was destroyed.

It was melted. So the fact that he got out of that is incredible. So, you know, I'm glad he's doing good because I really, I really like him, even though the show was terrible. I like all three of those guys. So I like all three of them too. And, and I've got to say, I, this is the second, uh, life threatening crash that he's had.

So maybe, maybe less driving for you, Richard. Yeah. Or anything that, you know, has more than 200 horsepower, maybe let captain slow take. Yeah. Let captain slow take it. You stick to those Porsches. Yeah. Cause man, yeah. That rocket car crash that he got in was terrifying. Yeah.

That was bad. Well, here's something that's not terrifying. 17 years later, Monty Python writer raps Don Quixote. Finally. And, uh, anybody that was super looking forward to this movie has forgotten it was even existed. So, oh man, I know I was, do you remember the old, uh, what was it?

What the hell was that called? It was called lost in La Mancha. Yes. It was the, basically the Terry Gilliam documentary on how Terry Gilliam cannot get his Don Quixote movie made. Yes. And back then it had Johnny Depp in it. Yes, it did. Unfortunately, Johnny Depp has been replaced by Adam driver.

My, my interest in seeing this just dropped even lower. Jonathan price is in it. So that might raise it back up a bit because Jonathan price is pretty awesome. All right. Come on, man. Brazil and game of Thrones. Yeah. I like Jonathan price, but it's a Terry Gilliam movie. I can't not see it.

I know I'm going to see it too, but 17 years is a long time to wait. And it just goes down except for twin peaks, 25 years, totally into it. Okay. Well, you know what? If you're not into, into some things, uh, you can go back and relive every Monty Python skit ever made. If you own a Tesla, I do not own a Tesla, but I do have the DVD box set.

Okay. Well then you can just do that anyway. Take that Musk. Yeah. It's an Easter egg in all of the Tesla models in the U S and in some other countries. It's coming in other places as well. Now, pardon me if I'm wrong, but did we not cover a new story within this year about a person who sadly died driving a Tesla because he was watching a movie, but he was watching a DVD player on his lap and not watching the road.

Okay. This kid, this will play audio in some cases, and I'm sure the video in some, but you know, it's for the, it's for the passengers. We're just going to say that that it's for the past. I'm just saying, I'm just saying that they had a horrific PR because somebody died while watching a movie in their Tesla with the auto drive feature.

It's obviously not too soon. Okay. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. Okay. All right. So the leftovers ended. We will not spoil anything for anybody that hasn't gotten there. If you haven't gotten there, stop, just go do something else with your life.

But I will say I did not hate the ending as much as I thought I would, but I think that's, that is partially because I was primed for it to suck. It was fine. I'm not happy about it. I'm not unhappy about it.

We got some tweets from some folks. Thanks particularly to the 6502 chip who sent the leftovers seven unambiguous post-finale facts from, from the various actors. You can read through that if you want. It's, it's basically because it was all somewhat ambiguous. It's remains ambiguous because they actors just said what they thought happened, which doesn't count for shit.

So, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, there's vulture.com has a, the leftovers ends with no answers, but here's one possible theory article, which is approximately the length of, uh, the dictionary. And I would just say you overthink things a little bit much people. Uh, have you, have you seen any of the Westworld threads out there?

If you want to see some people who overthink things, go check out the Westworld threads. Those people are insane. Yeah. I, I avoid all that sort of stuff. So the leftovers was fine. Uh, whatever. If I could go back in time, I would not have wasted my life watching all three, all three series of it.

Um, I would not, I would not have started it. It was okay. I don't mind that I did, but I will never, ever watch another show by Damon Lindhoff again ever. That's it. I am really, really glad I didn't take the, your advice at the beginning of this season when it started, where you're like, oh yeah, it's crazy.

You should go, go back and watch them. And then, you know, you can get caught up and watch. I'm so glad on this one case. I did not take your advice. I'm glad you didn't too. I will still state that there were two episodes that were so frigging out there. Uh, they were just insanely good.

So, but at the end of the day, sound and fury meaning nothing because nothing was explained. So there you go. Now there, there was one series though, that I did take your advice on. Yes, you did. And it just, uh, recently wrapped up and I forgot to mention it the other week when, when the finale had aired, uh, the Americans, uh, the, the, the latest season just ended.

They only have one more season to go. Uh, very excited. I know Jason put in the show notes, no spoilers, and he highlighted it and it's bolded and the font size is bigger and he put little carrots pointing up at it. I'm not an asshole. Yes, you are. That's why I had to put things like that in the show notes.

You do not have to put things like that in the show notes. Of course, I'm not going to give you a spoiler. Jason. Well, I posted one day because, uh, a band. I really bow house got a sink in one of the episodes. They like ended the episode with one of the bow house. Nobody sinks bow house.

So I was like, holy crap. Bow house got a sink in the Americans. My Facebook feed fills up with Jason typing. Don't give me a spoiler. That's a spoiler. That's a spoiler. It's not a spoiler. Oh my God. You need to, you need to have a Xanax or something. I was fucking with you. You need to, you need to chill the hell out with your spoiler.

Spoiler worries. Okay. Anyways, it's great. And I'm glad, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I am almost caught up. I started a couple of months ago now, but I do like one a night, one or two a night. And I'm, I'm almost halfway. I am halfway through season five. So I'm going to get there.

So for next season, have you gotten, uh, have you gotten to the part where the daughter dies? Yeah. Yeah. She's dead. Um, okay, great. Yeah. I didn't like how I didn't like the piano wire scene with her. That was really nasty. Yeah. Where's Henry? I don't know. He's off doing something math. I think he's doing math.

Lots of, lots and lots of math. Anyway, orange is the new black is back. Black is back. Did you watch the actual ones off Netflix or did you watch the entire dumped, uh, pirated release? I, I'm watching, I waited and watched them off Netflix.

Okay. I am so done with this show. I've, I'm three. I gave up three seasons ago. See, uh, this season is really good. They're, they're actually doing something interesting this season. And well, I see, I didn't have the patience to get to the part where they started doing something interesting again. I kind of like last season too. Um, there was, I think you quit it at the low in the series, but I don't mind it.

It's popcorn. It's, you know, 13 hours of something to do. All right. Unlike house of cards where I will, I can't even finish this season. I gave up on it. It's terrible. Yeah. I, I stopped two seasons ago with that. Everybody I know that watched it, uh, was hitting me up afterwards.

Like this was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Everybody was waiting for something to happen and nothing happened. They're like, that was a waste of 13 hours. So yeah, house of cards down the, down the, down the crapper, but yeah, orange is the new black. I'm, I'm, I'm actually enjoying it this season.

All right. Well, that's, that's awesome. I'm not going to get back into it. I think the wife is, so I'll probably catch snippets here and there. And if she gets into it, maybe I'll jump back in briefly, but I doubt it. Um, I did, I did want to state that we we've talked about how Amazon's Alexa is having some issues because people aren't adopting any of the apps that do next to nothing and people buy it and use it for a couple of months and then forget about it and basically just use it as a music player, which is what I do.

Um, but I actually found something fantastic and I feel like Alexa is finally useful, uh, this, this last week, my morning ritual has been to stumble out, make some coffee. And then I would say, Alexa play KCRW, which is the local, uh, NPR station here in Los Angeles. And now thousands of people are going to be listening to KCRW right now.

That's that's right. And then I get really depressed listening to world news. But, uh, the other day, Alexa misunderstood me and rather, I know, but this came out great because, uh, Alexa play KKCRW, which happens to be Kauai community radio.

I was listening to beautiful, lovely Hawaiian music all morning. I was in such a nice mood. It was great. So I, I urge people to the, one of the coolest things about tune in, which you don't, you have to use an Alexa, but tune in, you can listen to any radio station in the world basically.

And it's just fantastic to find these little tiny stations. You know, they went straight from the Hawaiian music to local news, surf reports, uh, you know, somebody lost a chicken, all that sort of stuff that you hear on like tiny local community radio is fantastic. Yeah. On that, on that note, uh, with tune in, I, I totally forgot that I'm listening on, on my echo to tune in when I'm listening to WGN in the morning.

And then I take the dog to the park and I got to, you know, we're walking for an hour in the park and I'm missing everything that's on the, on the news. And I'm like, duh, why don't I just get the tune in app and put it on my phone? And now I can listen to the radio in the park. And that's what I do now. There you go. But something, something slightly the same happened to me this week.

I tell mine to usually play the radio, but I was like cleaning the house and needed something peppy. And one of my favorite bands in the world is me first in the gimme gimme's. So I said, you know, shuffled me first in the gimme gimme's. And then some songs are coming on. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I've never heard this song before.

What? And we've talked about the dismal state of music discovery and book discovery nowadays. Yeah. Well, it turns out the Alexa side channeled me some discovery. So I went back and I'm like, because you can ask it what's playing. And it told me the song and what album it was.

And it was a karma chameleon from, are we not men? We are diva. An album that came out for me first in the gimme gimme's in 2014 that I'd never heard. And it's amazing. So I went and got the album this morning. I've been listening to it all day. It is a fantastic album. And here's the amazing part of this album.

They made, I will survive. My heart will go on in karma chameleon. Some of the best punk rock songs ever made. Nice. Yeah. It's really fun. Cool. Well, back in episode 211, I gave you a listing from, I believe, uh, eyeballs.

God damn. What's the name of that site? Some weird site. It's a site that basically does alternative rock music. I keep totally blanking on the name right now. Or you can go to gog.show slash 211 and get the show notes and it's linked in there. Yes. And it gave you a Spotify playlist of every Cure song in their rated and ranked order.

Uh, this week I gave you the Beatles. Uh, this is not a Spotify playlist, but Vulture has gone through and ranked all 213 of the Beatles songs from worst to best. And as I say, we had to count them all. Now I know Jason is not a Beatles guy, but I am, I am.

And this is just interesting to see how they broke things down and what order they decided to put them in. And you know, the Beatles are great. So you could probably start a holy war with that list. Oh yes. This is the, I'm sure there are many, many very bored people sitting in bars arguing about this right now. Mm-hmm. Uh, you say bored or boring?

Because both I guess applies. So this week I finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Okay. Great book. Yeah. It's from 1986. It's a classic.

Yes, it is. I never got around to reading it. And, uh, they came out with a full cast recording on Audible, which was, uh, interesting. Uh, What's Her Nuts from Homeland was the reader of the book for the most part. It's a full cast recording, but, uh, Claire Danes.

Claire Danes, because she's also the, the lead in the, uh, the TV series currently. Claire Danes? Oh, wait, no, it's not Claire Danes. No, it's not Claire Danes. It's the chick from the West. It's the, it's, it's the daughter from the West Wing. Ah, the daughter from the West Wing and also from Mad Men she was in. Yeah, I didn't see Mad Men. Yeah, I don't, uh, I don't like her.

So I am skipping the TV series for that reason alone. I hear it's good, although it does frustrate me because people act as if The Handmaid's Tale is some, something that's brand new. And like you pointed out, 1986, people. This was a cautionary tale that was ignored. Yeah. And, uh, we also discussed Oryx and Crake, one of her other books that you started reading.

And then I went back and read, uh, we discussed that on Grumpy Old Geeks, episode 71, way back in the day. I know. Yeah. I saw Oryx and Crake is a three part series and she had just come out with the third after a long, uh, after a long, uh, absence between the different books.

Now, uh, Margaret Atwood is an author that I feel doesn't get, okay. She definitely gets enough credit as an author amongst just regular literary circles, but I don't think she gets the credit in the sci-fi area that she should because Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, that series are fantastic sci-fi and, and most sci-fi people never think about her.

And the interesting thing on the version that I listened to was at the end, since it was, this was a new recording that Audible Studios put out. She came on and did like a 45 minute, uh, talk about the book and the history of the book and things that she was doing with the book. And she's like, this is a future book, but it's the one thing that she did not do was like in her quote unquote sci-fi was that there are no mysterious gadgets.

I'm not inventing technology. Everything that is in this book exists. This is more about the, the future and people and how people interact with other people in the future, but she doesn't make up technology, which is a very interesting thing to, to go into this book reading. I wish I had known that before I went into the book because I was always waiting for something to happen with, you know, crazy sci-fi stuff, but it was pretty much, you know, current tech.

Yeah, no, uh, Handsome a Tale is definitely just more about a political future. Uh, Oryx and Crate gets a bit more into the tech, but not crazy because that's not her thing. She's not a hard sci-fi person. Yeah, no, I really, I really enjoyed the book. I definitely thought it was a very fun. Yeah. If you have not read it, it is a different, but maybe not the right word, right word to be, to be fair, Jason, you are an older white male.

So from your perspective, from your perspective, I guess it could be fun. Okay, well, the next book I read was On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder. Another fun book for an older white male.

Uh, well, you should read it too. Uh, I, I found out about Timothy from the lovely show that you like to watch, uh, Bill Maher, and, uh, Timothy was on there right after the election, and he wrote this book in three days. Yep. And it is a laundry list of what tyrannical societies do and dictators and things to watch out for and things to not do to make sure that your country doesn't turn out of doesn't turn into a dictatorship.

Too late. Uh, no, it's not too late by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fantastic read. And on the art of charm, we talked to Timothy for an hour this week. It'll be coming out in a couple of weeks, but man, that's a smart dude. Very smart dude. He's a smart guy. I've seen him discuss it a lot.

A bunch of my friends have read the book. It's total snowflake porn, but, uh, it's, it's, it's well learneded. I've read it four times because you can, you can listen to it. If you get the audio book in an hour, uh, and you can read it in an hour or two. Yep. Same, same difference, but it's, it's six bucks right now on Amazon. Go get it, read it.

You'll Brian, you'll like it. Oh, I know. I will. It's, it's tailored for me. It is. So go, go, go buy it, you little snowflake. Use the coupon code snowflake for 0% off. That's right. Uh, I finished pandemic, the extinction, extinction files, book one by AG riddle.

We've talked about AG riddle before on the show. He's also the author of the origin series, which is a three book series and departure, a single book, which we previously reviewed back in episode 100. Uh, I'm sure we reviewed the origin series too, cause I read those, but I couldn't find those in our show notes.

Um, I don't know why not. Who did it? Whatever. Uh, it, it is what it is. I mean, we talk, you know, we just talked about Margaret Atwood, who I think is a master author and deserved of many awards. Uh, this is what I would call popcorn sci-fi or what Jason would probably refer to as pooper sci-fi.

Um, it's, it's a good. Crapper five. It's a, it's a simple, quick read. It is. The title is pandemic. The title tells you exactly what you're going to get. This is an outbreak. This is a contagion book. Uh, it is what it is.

You get you, you, you have your learned sci-fi female character. You have your, uh, learned guy, uh, male character. They of course will get together throughout the course of these books. Your favorite. Uh, yeah, it is what it is. Exactly what you think it would be.

It was fine. Again, popcorn. I needed something light and quick to get through really quickly. I'm sure I'll finish out the series, but not right away. It's fine. A.G. Riddle is seeming to position himself in that place where it's quick, simple sci-fi tropes.

Go for it. Okay. Well, fortunately we've got Neil Stevenson coming out this week with his new book and, uh, I cannot wait. Charlie Strauss needs to just get his book out there quicker because I want to read the new laundry files book now. Yeah. I'm excited about that too. So that should be soon.

Yeah. It's in July, but yeah, this week we have Neil Stevenson. So that's not a, not a bad one to get. Hmm. Yeah. I used to be a lot more excited about him until the last few series, which have just killed me. Yeah. That's, that's kind of true. I guess. Shit. Security.

It's that time of the week again, where we get our pants scared off us by our resident security expert, Dave Bittner. Yes. Please keep your pants on gentlemen. Nobody needs to see that. Oh, nobody does. Absolutely not. It's a good thing. It's radio, right? And luckily we're audio only Skype.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. I have pants for radio. Yep. Yep. Well, it's good to be back. Lots going on this week. As always, but it's been a particularly interesting week this week. We've got a starting story here about the Supreme Court and cell phones.

Yes. I'm very excited about this. We're finally going to get a ruling, although perhaps I probably shouldn't be so excited given the current climate and how the ruling might go. But yes, the Supreme Court has agreed to finally decide how much privacy Americans are entitled to in cell phone tracking data that can reflect location and movement.

They announced on Monday that they are going to rule on a specific search warrant or whether a specific search warrant would be required before authorities can obtain information from mobile phone companies that reflect users' movements in the past. Since most people don't turn that off, that means they will basically be able to either find out exactly where anybody is at any particular time with or without a warrant, depending on how they rule.

So this is pretty important. Yeah. And to be clear, this is not data that you can turn off because this is cell phone data that your phone needs to operate. It's the pinging of the cell phone. Oh, right. That's true. That's that's not the anything you can switch off. This is the if they would have had this full fledged technology, there never would have been that first podcast that did that was supposed to save all podcasting, which I'm blanking on the name right now.

What was the name of that show, Jason? The podcast that was supposed to save all of podcasting? The NPR one that everybody couldn't stop talking about. And then they did a second serial serial because part of the main thing was the spotty cell cell phone towers at the time could not ascertain whether he was at a place or not.

Right. Yeah. And this the the history of this is that it's this it's this third party doctrine which says that the way that the lower courts have ruled on it is that a warrant is not required because they consider that you're voluntarily sharing your information with a third party, the third party being the telephone company.

But people are saying that these days that's that's sort of absurd because in your date, like Jason just said, your phone basically won't function without pinging the tower. So so is that is that technically voluntary then? It seems like it's very involuntary. You cannot use a phone.

Right. Right. And so that's I think that's what this hinges on. Is it realistic to say to people, well, if you don't want to be tracked, then don't use a phone. You can't function in this day and age without a phone. Correct. This is all about whether or not they need a warrant. And to me, it seems perfectly reasonable that if you want to track my location data, go to a judge, make your case.

If you have a good case, the judge will give you the warrant and you can do it. They're not saying this is off limits. You're not going to be able to do it. They're just saying, slow down here, cowboy, before we just hand over this data. Make your case with a judge. And to me, that's a good thing to have happen.

Absolutely. Me too. I agree. Now, apparently, also, if you don't want to be tracked, you probably shouldn't ever use a printer. Well, to be clear, a color laser printer. Right. A color laser printer. I do love this story, though. There was no way we could not have this in the news because this blew my mind.

On Saturday, NSA contractor Reality Lay Winner, which is a hell of a name. Yeah. Can we just pause it for a second and consider this? Every now and then, I have to stop and wonder if I'm actually living in the Matrix or not. Yes. This is one of those moments when the leaker's name comes out and her name is Reality Winner.

I really have to wonder, is the alien version of The Sims that is my life, is this the moment when the alien toddler sits down at the keyboard and is banging on it when the NSA contractor's name is Reality Winner? That's all I have to say. I have a theory, though.

This is my theory. I think that the universe is skewed when Ashton Kutcher reached a million Twitter followers, and now in the Ashton Kutcherverse, we're all just being punked. The Ashton Kutcherverse. This is not somewhere I want to be. I need that machine from The Leftovers that kicks me into some other reality.

It's a theory. It's a theory. Yeah, it's a theory. Anyway, yes. Reality Winner. I do want to meet her parents. I really do. I'm very... Anyways. Anyways, she leaked classified documents to The Intercept and was arrested. Alleged. Alleged. Allegedly. Wow, they didn't put that in the story at Lifehacker.

You guys are in trouble. Ooh. Yeah. Ooh. So, the Justice Department's arrest warrant stated that classified information printed was tracked to Winner, one of six people who printed out the report total, and the only one who had email contact with The Intercept. The printed report was scanned and published by The Intercept, and it contained the tracking information used to identify an arrest reality loser.

So, apparently, every printer has a... I do like their wording here. Turns out, nearly every printer is actually a sneaky fuck that will out you. Thanks to a little trick called printer steganography. Yeah. So, this is the practice of hiding data, such as like an invisible ink or a watermark on a photo, inside another piece of data.

Printer steganography uses dots or lines printed throughout the document that correspond to a certain pattern, which is directly traceable to an individual printer, which is unbelievably insane. This has been around since the old days. When I worked at Kinko's, we knew about this because a guy I worked with used to make color copies of $5 bills and take them to the local laundromat and get change for them.

Well, one day the Secret Service showed up at his door, and he didn't do that anymore. Yeah, I'm sure he didn't. Because all of the... Yeah, because all of our color copiers had those invisible watermarks on them, and sure enough, it was tracked back to our store, and our manager was like, there he is!

Yeah, I've run into this a couple times. One of the original HP color laser printers actually had it built in, where if you tried to copy a $20 bill, the printer would both recognize the $20 bill, it would brick itself, and the only way...

Now, you have to remember, this is when color laser printers were, you know, $100,000, right? For a high-quality color laser printer. So the printer would brick itself, and the only way to unbrick it would be a visit from both HP and the Secret Service. So you had some splaining to do if one of your employees just thought, you know what, this thing makes pretty good copies, I wonder...

Yep, and nowadays, try and scan money nowadays. You can't do it. I was going to say that. That happened to me about a decade ago. I was working on a motion graphics project, and I needed an image of a $20 bill, and I thought, oh, I'll just, you know, I have a flatbed scanner here, I have Photoshop, put the $20 bill on the flatbed scanner, it's scan, and Photoshop popped up and said, no, we're not going to do that.

So I went to Google Image Search and said $20 bill, and there I had a high-res picture of a $20 bill. But I didn't even think about it at that point, that my scanner sitting in, you know, my office that I had purchased would have something built in to both recognize and prohibit me from scanning a $20 bill.

It all makes sense, but that's where we are these days. Well, what you have to do now is scan a 20-pound note, take it to the currency exchange, get a $20 bill back, and then you can, that's how you get your money now. Yeah, but their money's all plastic, you can't just, and it's much harder to print.

You almost need like a 3D printer at this point. So the interesting thing about the hidden information is they're yellow dots, so they just use yellow ink, so it's very hard to see. Right. So what I'm wondering is, why not just print the entire document in yellow, use a filter later, because at least that way you're going to destroy some of the tracking information, maybe not all of it, but maybe enough of it where you're untrackable.

Or can you just pull out the yellow ribbon and just print everything sans a yellow ribbon in there? Ah, yeah, just to use this yellow toner, so just take out the yellow toner. Or replace it with a black one. But nowadays, who knows if that's possible. Anyway, I'm sure that there's got to be some way around it.

Believe me, there have been people working on this problem as long as they've been color laser printers, right? Wait, are you saying we aren't the first people to think of this? Yeah. I'm just putting it out there, guys. Just putting it out there. I'm sure if we Googled it, we might be able to find some workarounds.

Sure, sure. Now, the Washington Post at least does their headlines, right? Judge denies bail for accused NSA leaker reality winner. After she put in a not guilty plea. Right. And they're saying, well, you know, she still might be a flight risk and the threat to public security because they don't know what might be in her head still.

And, you know, because she has a lot of valuable information in her head. This comes from an assistant U.S. attorney. Those are her words. So she's got a lot of valuable information in her head. Well, above and beyond that, you're also missing the part of the story where they're saying that the U.S. magistrate judge had uncovered additional information, including what they describe as disturbing notebook entries.

So do we have a Unabomber here? What have we got going on? Yeah. No, I just I just was I did go with that last one because it just reminded me of Mitnick getting thrown in solitary because he might whistle up the nuclear launch codes. And it just seemed a little bit of a stretch.

I think in the world of Edward Snowden, I think it's if you're the U.S. attorney, you don't want to have someone else run off to Russia on your watch. So you're going to do your best to try to convince the judge to keep this person under lock and key if at all possible.

At this point, couldn't they just take Air Force One to Russia? I mean, really? The thing about this, though, is they say that she's a very smart girl. Well, she's not that smart if she printed it out and sent it to the Intercept because she should have known that there should have been the tracking dots on there.

Anybody knows that stuff. Come on. Well, and also the Intercept is taking a lot of heat as well for doing a terrible job of protecting their source. Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around. Yeah. Remind me if I ever do any of this sort of thing to tell the paper to actually retype that thing.

Don't just scan it. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Lots of sloppiness to go around here. Lots of sloppiness. Speaking of sloppiness, Dave, I think you have something about some security cameras that are a little bit sloppy. Well, you know how we love our security cameras on this show, particularly Jason's security cameras.

In fact, Brian and I spend a good bit of time just watching Jason's security cameras online. Right, Brian? We do. And I really can't believe that all you do is make those eggs all day long, Jason. That's right. It's a little frightening. Yeah. I'm like Cool Hand Luke. I just like eating my hard-boiled eggs. And chasing Bam Bam around.

Yeah. That's about it. That's all I do. Glad you guys can watch. It's, you know, JPTV. That's me. So according to Bleeping Computer, I love the headline here, boatload of security flaws make Foscam IP cameras absolutely useless.

Well, they're useful to some people. Yeah, it's not, you know, not subtle. Yeah, that's right. They're useful to the people who want to watch you wandering around your house. And Foscam is one of the big names in security cameras. So if you buy- They were. If you buy any of those no-name cameras that you'll see on Amazon and other places, there's a decent chance that it's a Foscam camera.

They're one of the big manufacturers. And there's a security firm from Finland. They're called F-Secure. And they have a list of 18 vulnerabilities that researchers discovered in the Foscam IP cameras. It's basically a laundry list of just about everything you could possibly have go wrong with one of these things.

So it's pretty much a security dumpster fire. Yeah, right. Exactly. I don't know if, Jason, if you saw anything particularly egregious that struck you, in the list here. I mean, well, all of them. FTP server account uses an empty password, hidden Telnet functionality, remote command injection and user add.

Also, you just got it. All of these are really bad. I mean, my personal favorite is always the hard-coded credentials. I mean, that's just the best. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, it's just in the continuing run of taking any opportunity possible to tease Jason about his cameras.

This was a particularly ripe opportunity for that. So, I'm glad I can be of entertainment value. Yep. Yep. It's important to be amused. Moving on. We saw an interesting story came by. We covered on the Cyber Wire this week. It's kind of an edge case, but I think it's an interesting proof of concept and a little scary in the way that it works.

Some bad guys have set a PowerPoint exploit out in the wild, and the way that it works is you get sent a PowerPoint deck, a PowerPoint document, and you open the document, and typically there's a single link or a single image on a single page.

But the way that they programmed it is, if you mouse over that link or that image, that triggers a mouse over event within PowerPoint, and PowerPoint is built in such a way that a mouse over event can trigger things to happen. And so, that's where they trigger things to happen, those things being a whole cascading set of events that could infect your system.

Now, we were talking earlier, Jason pointed out that really any modern version of Windows is not going to allow this to happen and take control of your system. But I thought it was interesting, worth mentioning, because it's an interesting proof of concept, and we really haven't seen the notion of just mousing over something being a thread.

We have in the website, but definitely not on PowerPoint. And I can see how, because we have on hover, it's a JavaScript action when you're building a bunch of stuff. Part of the DOM. Yeah, it's part of the DOM. And when you notice, if you do hover over a URL or something like that in most Office products, it will display the URL.

So, there's definitely actions based on on hover. So, they found a way to end around actually clicking on something. And I know I have rickrolled many a people, many a people with on hover. Well, yeah, that was part of the, when that first set of functionality was first available to web developers.

Oh, we had a field day doing stuff with that. Oh, yeah. Especially, my favorite was when you hovered over a link, you would just move the div that the link was in around the page, so they had to try and catch the link to click on it, so they had to be super fast. Good times. I'm just disappointed that they deprecated the blink tag.

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, well. Thank God, you can still do it in Flash. So, it seems there's some malware out there called Turla, which I have not had a chance to really dig deep into. But I'm taking this as one of the coolest things I've seen because what these guys are doing is they're using our friend, our poor friend, Brittany Spears, in her Instagram account to manage access to their command and control servers.

They're doing this in an extremely unique way, which I thought was very novel. They're making comments on Brittany Spears' photos with a specific hashtag and embedding data into the comment that their malware will go out, scrub Brittany's comments, and then find the comment that they need, and then rebuild the URL to their command and control server.

So, nobody can actually know where it's at because it's not actually built into the source code, and it can always be changing. So, if they need to move command and control servers, they can just make a new comment with a new hashtag and a new set of variables that go into the tag, and then everybody's on their toes trying to track these guys down.

And I thought it was extraordinarily clever. Yeah, it's hiding in plain sight. And the other interesting thing is that they're actually using satellite internet communications to hide the location of their command and control servers. They're hacking into satellite or internet over satellite via their own satellite dish and doing some crazy stuff with the way the packets are routed and handling with the firewalls.

So, nobody can find the command and control server because the way that the satellites are set up is generalized to a 600 square mile radius. Right. Pretty damn cool. That's pretty cool, but why do they got to pick on Brittany? She's had enough problems. I know. She's got her hair back now, though, so that's a plus.

That's been quite a while. She's going to be on the show next week, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought so. I thought we got that commitment in, but all right. Taylor Swift on InfoSec is one of the best Twitter accounts out there, so I figured you'd have Taylor on before Brittany.

That is a good one, actually. I love that one. No, it's clever stuff. Clever humans, right? Yep. Yeah. So, before we go, I have a shameless plug to share with our listeners. We have a new weekly newsletter. You know, the Cyber Wire is both a daily news brief that goes out via email.

You can also read it on our website. And then, of course, we have the Daily Cyber Wire podcast. Well, we heard from some of our readers and some of our listeners, particularly people who are executives, who are busy people, don't have time to check us out every day, that they would like the idea of doing a weekly. So, we've done that.

If you check out the Cyber Wire, we have a link. You go to thecyberwire.com slash subscribe. We have a new weekly newsletter. It comes out Sunday night, and basically, it's a review of The Week That Was. In fact, it's called The Week That Was. So, it's really a good way, particularly if perhaps you're not someone who is in the thick of it with cybersecurity every day but still want to keep up on things, this would be a great way to do it.

And just to clarify that, you have to go to thecyberwire.com slash subscribe.html. Because if you go to slash subscribe, it 404s. Isn't that quaint? I'll call it. I have to put in a request about that. That shouldn't be. That shouldn't be.

All these pretty URLs. Who uses .html anymore? That's right. That's right. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. I'll talk to you next week. We're on of the week. Ah, Palmer Lucky. Remember him, Jason?

I think we crapped on him a couple times on the show. Yeah, we have. I don't care for this dude. You know it's bad when tech journalists refer to you as the disgraced Oculus founder. Jackpot. There is still journalism in tech. All right. There is. Thank you, Gizmodo, for that. And cosplay enthusiast who left Facebook in the midst of a $2 billion lawsuit.

It looks like he's back in the news. He wants to build a virtual border wall for Trump. Well, I think that's pretty much all we're ever going to get is a virtual border wall because he's never going to get the funding for it. Well, he's got Peter Thiel's investment firm Founders Fund who wants to invest in it.

It's a defense startup that he's starting. So it's going to use LiDAR, infrared sensors, and cameras for patrolling the border, otherwise known as Uber cars, just driving up and down. I was going to say, there's somebody from Uber who knows something about LiDAR that might be on the market now who got fired recently because, oh, yeah, hmm, maybe.

Yes. And talk about a match made in hell. Yes. Palmer Lucky from Oculus and Douchery from Uber get together. I think we just we just could be called Ubulus. We just put it together for you, Palmer. So he's already met with the Trump administration to discuss these plans. Of course, in addition, in addition to starting up this defense thing, he's been preparing for the apocalypse.

Jason, I thought you might appreciate this because you had your tendencies as a bit of a as a bit of a doomsday prepper. I was a prepper when I lived in California. Now that I live in the Midwest, not so much. Well, if you've ever wondered what you could have done as a prepper with three hundred or seven hundred and thirty million dollars, you would buy strange bunker ready properties all over the country, which I don't know why you'd need more than one.

But he has bought missile silos and a bunch of other places all around the country, as well as old military gear, including tanks. So this guy's a weirdo. Yeah, you buy multiple so you can do the shell game. So nobody knows where you're actually at obfuscation. It's all about obfuscation.

OK, well, speaking of that, we've got Gwyneth Paltrow. She's making she's hey, I could have gone Kanye. She's Kanye's banned from the show. Gwyneth has not gotten a lifetime ban yet. Well, I think I think this is it, because I think there's nowhere else to go with Gwyneth after this one, because she was on Jimmy Kimmel and basically finally admitted that even she doesn't know what the fuck her site goop is talking about half the time.

So I don't know if there's much more of an idiot and moron than you need to be. And I think this kind of calls it. You are making gazillions of dollars hucking this crap. You are a snake oil salesman, Gwyneth Paltrow. And the fact that you're coming out and saying that all of this stuff, you don't even know what they're talking about.

You know, it's crap. You know, it's a complete joke and you're still selling it with a straight face. Fuck you. OK, now I want to talk about the specifics here because they're talking about earthing. Yes. Earthing is one of those really stupid new agey things where people say that if you walk barefoot in the grass, you absorb the Earth's energy.

Right. I actually had a guy come on one of our one of my other shows. I won't name names. We ended up ditching the episode because he started going into this, this whole because it's a load of crap. Yeah. And, you know, me and my co-host looked at each other over the over the airwaves and said, are you fucking kidding me?

And he even he was like, yeah, I don't know how it works, but it just does. After I go for a barefoot walk outside, I feel energized. Guys, I'm like, well, maybe because you're out for a barefoot walk outside because it's nice outside and you're not doing your goddamn job, you lazy bastard.

Get back to work and come back to us with something that's real. Right. But yes, the whole Earther thing is just so ridiculous. Well, I'd like to give a tip of the hat to Katie Serena, the writer of this article over at Salon, because I this last paragraph is something that just here we go, that the person who provides authenticity and authority to the site's various claims can't even bring herself to offer a reasoned, honest defense of them or even understand them speaks to a titanic

level of privilege, elitism and irresponsibility. Trust me, she says, I can't bother myself to care. Well, there you go, people. If you are still following the goopster, it's all on you. That puts actually we're removing the moron of the week onus from Gwyneth to anybody that goes to goop.

Yes, you're the gooper of the week. Now, some some lucky man found a pair of Apple computer sneakers in his in his wherever it up next to Hitler's journals in his attic. Who the fuck knows where he got these things?

They're from. Wow, straight to Hitler. Hey, man, that's where you got to go sometimes. So these are from 19 the 1990s. They're size nine and a half mint condition. Selling them on eBay. Yep. And starting bid is at fifteen thousand dollars.

You got to be kidding. Fifteen thousand dollars. Seller estimates is they're going to go from twenty four to thirty six thousand. Yeah, right. So right now we are recording this forty seven minutes and fifty seven seconds before they go on sale.

So I encourage everybody to go to our show notes at GOG dot show slash two one three. Click on the link and follow this throughout the week because you will be able to see a live moron of the week to everybody who bids on these things. By the way, these sneakers great for earthing.

Feedback loop. We have a new Patreon subscriber this week. Christopher Whalen. Thank you, Christopher. Thank you. Appreciate it. And Donovan Adkison wrote us over on Patreon. He said, I have one dot and I haven't had any issues with the voice recognition.

It's in my bedroom and I can talk to it across the room without fail. Not saying it's perfect, mind you, but it seems to work pretty well for me. I mean, obviously. Thanks, Donovan. You know, this is all going to depend on size of room layout, etc. The issue for me is I've got two in two different rooms and it's catch as catch can.

Yeah. And that's why I said just change the the word on each room that generally kind of tends to fix it. Yeah. But I like the fact that if I stand equidistant between them and tell them to start playing music, it'll start playing them both at the same time in different rooms. Oh, OK. It's like my own little built in Sonos system.

OK. Next up, we got a PayPal donation from our friend Joy Bowman. Now, this is pretty awesome. Dulcetones? Is this Dulcetones? You're the one they brought up. Well, I mean, you're Dulcetones. Well, she's training for her first ultra marathon and listens to us while she's training and she's raising money for the Alzheimer's Society.

We're going to try and get a link from her so we can link to that as well. So if you guys want to go give back to the Alzheimer's Society, which is a very good charity. But thank you, Joy, so much for the donation. We're going to have many beers from that. Yes, thank you so much. Appreciate it. And do send over that link so we can pimp it out. And really, good luck on your marathon.

That's insane. Ultra marathons are evil. Evil things. Jason. Jason will be waiting at the end to congratulate you. Now, over on Twitter from JVig, he says, I have the new Rocketbook and love it. Scribble, sink, erase.

Backed on Indiegogo and love it. JVig actually sent us multiple tweets about the new Rocketbook. So I'm starting to wonder if he's one of the developers. Hmm, could be, could be. Could be. But glad you're enjoying it. Nathan Rietzma asked if we were watching the WWDC keynote.

He says, from what I've seen, looking better than normal. It actually was a better WWDC keynote than has been in the past. And they were running around trying to get through it as fast as possible because WWDC keynotes are usually crap. Yep. And Cloinco sends nice specs for an Apple product and packed with powerful technology for the creative professional.

It's the new iMac Pro, powered in the Pro. It is good specs. The price is insane. Starting at $5,000. Well, I was just going to say, since I'm the one that brings the hot stock talk to the show, Apple stock always drops the day after a keynote. So if you want to buy, that's the day. Every time.

Like, it didn't drop that much this time, though. I was surprised. No, it didn't drop much, but it still did drop. Yeah, it always drops. Like, block work. Yes, the iMac Pro looks awesome. It's black, which is very cool. I wish I could just get a regular 27-inch in that color, but I can't, and I won't be able to buy a Pro.

But I am saving my pennies to get a 27-inch loaded, just regular iMac 27, because they look great in the last couple years. And I saw a breakdown where somebody took the back off of one, and you can actually change out the RAM. It's nothing soldered to the board anymore.

Are you kidding me? That's been my dream. Yeah. That's awesome. I'm still not $5,000 worth $5,000. Yeah, if you get a loaded iMac 27 with everything in it, it's going to run you $4,300. I'll get to you in four years when mine is out of date. Yeah, you just got one, so you're all good. And Bill Paulman wrote, got my new egg steamer.

Yes, thanks for the advice on episode 211. Why have I been boiling eggs all this time? That's what I said, too. This thing is amazing. I even Instagrammed a picture of it, which Brian immediately made fun of me for. But damn it, those eggs were delicious. Well, thanks, Bill Pullman.

And I do hope you use the link in our show notes for that, because it sends us about three cents. Yep. And S-K-H-X-S sends 212 episodes and still no official GOG shirt available for purchase.

How am I supposed to do meatspace promo for you? And then I teased something and Jason promptly shat on it. I didn't know you were teasing. I thought we had already told people about this. I apologize. I thought we were already out there. We have only Patreon subscribers. We do have stickers. We have stickers.

So if you want a sticker, you need to be a Patreon subscriber for some total of more than one month, because we need at least two bucks from you to pay for the shipping that it's going to cost us to send it to you. So go over to Patreon.com, send us a message with your address, and we will get you a shiny, grumpy old geek sticker.

We are not doing shirts, because first off, I mean, we could go and just do crappy ones. Like, what's the site where you can just make your own coffee mugs and things like that? Cafe Press was the old one, but there are a bunch of different ones. But they're expensive. They're expensive, and we don't want to get caught in the trap of all the companies that we've made fun of that have sent out Threadbare crappy T-shirts.

So we just haven't done one. So make your own and take pictures with it. And for the stickers, I went to StickerMule.com, and these are amazing stickers. They're vinyl. They're perfect. Matte finish. They're beautiful. Trust me. When you see these stickers, you're going to go, that's a fine sticker. Good job, guys.

Yes, we'll tweet out and post on the social media an image of the sticker this week. So everybody can go get one if they want one. All right. This next one comes from GOG.show, MBKLig. I like the show. Keep up the good work, guys. And did you hear about this Canadian show, Letterkenny?

It's quite fun. A friend of the show, Kevin, occasionally sends me links from the show, and it is quite funny. You definitely have to spend some time in Canada land to get it, but it's hilarious. All righty. Yep. Next from John Holbrook. I'm behind a few episodes of your podcast. I'm listening to 210 right now.

You mentioned Opera's newest browser release. Have you tried Fivaldi? It's made by the original founder of Opera based on Chrome. Absolutely love it. I remember hearing about it. I have not tried it. There's way too many browsers already. Yeah. No, we're just good. We're good right now. I'm good with Opera.

I just got my muscle memory down to work with Opera. So we're all good. Oh, I know. The closed window on the left-hand side of the tab has screwed with me, and I finally got it. So I can't do another one. You know how I get around that? Command W. Yeah, I know. That works, too. Yes. And I got a text message from Seth Miranda, formerly of the Grime Life podcast, now of Adorama in New York.

Formerly? I didn't even... What happened? What? What? I was wondering why we haven't been invited back on for a while. Everybody got jobs. And well, yeah, Seth got a job at Adorama working the multimedia stuff over there. So he's rocking it, doing all the demos. So if you're in New York and want to check out some awesome photo demos at Adorama, go over and check out Seth's stuff.

I really wanted to make it up to New York this summer to go check him out and see that and hang out with Chris Piccioni as well. But Chris has back issues. He's a mess. Poor guy. He posted a picture of his back x-ray the other day, and it's just like, dude, you're skinny. How do you scrub your back so bad?

But they're on hiatus right now while they're figuring stuff out. They say they're going to be back, but we generally know how that goes in podcast world. We've been down this. So he sent me a graphic that says, what's a Xenial? A micro generation born during the cusp years of Gen Xers and Millennials, i.e. between 1977 and 1983, or when the original Star Wars trilogy was released.

Xenials experienced an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. Possessed both Gen X cynicism and millennial optimism and drive. I call bullshit. Yeah, we don't need – this is ridiculous. We don't need micro generationals.

We don't need micro generations. Pick one. That's ridiculous. Pick one. And by the way, I'm four years too old to be one of these, and I still agree with everything on this list. Yeah. So you're – sorry, invalid. You're fired. No Xenials. You're fired.

No Xenials in the house. Yeah, this is just masturbatory writing. All right. iTunes. We got a five-star rating. Mr. Sax from the UK. Great technical content mixed with grumpy and a pinch of wrath. I found these guys when I got fed up with some other creepy old tech guy exposing himself on video all the time.

Obviously, you have not been connected to Jason's Chinese hacked cameras, and I've been hooked. I hate iTunes with a passion, and I took the time to install a Windows VM, install iTunes, create an iTunes account, give Apple my credit card info, all just so I could leave them a five-star review.

If I'll do that, you need to listen. Well, thank you so much for putting in all the work. That's dedication right there. That is. We appreciate that a lot. We definitely do. 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. And like some people, if you have to install a Windows VM just to install iTunes and give us a review, get on it because there's no excuse. And if you want to get a GOG sticker, head over to patreon.com slash GOG and sign up, and we'll get one of those to you in the mail in a month or two.

Or three. Closing shout outs. Sad news this week. The voice of Wallace and Gromit, Peter Salas, has died. Age 96, so a nice long life. But man, Wallace and Gromit is such an integral part of my exennial existence.

I used to watch that all the time. Loved it to death. So good stuff and sad news. Yeah, I never got to see it. Everybody loved it, but that was never in my wheelhouse. What? Yeah, I never saw Wallace and Gromit. Sorry. All right. All right. Well, you got to do it this week. Does it work for a pre-Xennial like myself?

Yes, you will enjoy it. It is touching and charming and very well done. As an also pre-Xennial, I'm very saddened to say that Adam West, star of Batman, has died at age 88. Good run. Good run for him. And very sad to see him go. He died of leukemia, unfortunately, which is terrible.

88, though, still pretty good. I mean, you know, he was my first Batman. I remember being at my grandma's house, seeing the reruns on Sundays, thinking they were fantastic, and no Batman has measured up since then. And, of course, his role on, oh, gosh, why am I blanking on the show right now, where he plays Mayor Adam West, the family guy.

Hilarious. Just been hilarious for the past couple of years. Absolutely fantastic. So sad to see him gone. Yeah. I always wanted me a Batarang. Yep. Well, I always wanted that original car. Ah, yes. I had the one that you had the, I don't know if you remember this one, it was like die cast, and then in the back it had a little roller where you could put the rockets in it, and it would launch it out before all the lawsuits where kids were losing their eyes.

Yeah, see, you're older than me. I'm an Xennial, so I'm a micro thing in between those. Yes. That's what I am. You're a micro grump. I'm a grumpennial. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmer. 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 on podcastone.com slash apps. If you'd like to become an official friend of the show, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air, and maybe even get yourself a shiny sticker.

To learn more about all the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. And show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 213.

And I will always love you, we'll always love you, we'll always love you, we'll always love you.

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