214: Evil as a Service

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. So I've mentioned in the past that we basically are living in a third world country. We cannot keep our power grid running or anything like that. Everything is basically falling apart. Falling apart at the seams, it seems.

It is, it is. So at 630 this morning, once again, I lost power. This is like the fifth time I've lost power in the past year. Yeah, I know. We've had to push the show so many times because of your crappy power. Yes. So very loud people outside fixing and replacing things.

And luckily, I get up at, you know, my kid gets up at six in the morning anyway. So he's just looking out the window fascinated by big trucks. And, you know, we don't have any power. And I'm like, I walk outside. Hey, how come no notice? And the guy is really rude and say, would you rather your place burned down? I'm like, well, I'd rather neither.

That's why we pay you money. But how much time, please? And he says 30 minutes. And I know that's complete and utter crap. So it's going to be at least an hour. So I decided to go and take a walk and get some sustenance for my family since we have no power. And I head down to Flake, which is probably kind of where that show Flaked got its name from.

It's a place in Venice Beach that does really wonderful breakfast sandwiches. And no, I'm not going to ever watch Flaked. I can't watch Flaked. I can't watch Flaked in the same way that I can't watch Entourage. It's too damn close to home. I've never even heard of Flaked. So it is a comedy based in Venice Beach.

OK. So anyway, I like Entourage. I thought it was fun. I know. But Entourage to you is like Silicon Valley to me. Exactly. That's the problem. Cannot do it. But we have talked tons of previous shows after, you know, Twitter moved in, Snapchat moved in, all these places have moved in.

And this area is now called Silicon Beach as opposed to Silicon Valley. And rents have skyrocketed. And as I was walking back, there's a lot of places for rent, but generally they don't put up any information about the place, which is smart because it's insane. But one place actually did, and I can't believe this.

I was going to say, is that apartment being sold through an Amazon store? It might as well be at this point, but we'll be talking a lot about that in the show. Anyways, as I'm walking back, one bedroom, one bath, 800 square feet. Take a guess, Jason. $2,900 a month.

Higher. $4,500 a month. Lower than that. It's $3,200. $3,200 a month for 800 square feet, one bedroom, one bath. And it wasn't even a particularly nice place. Yeah, you're getting into San Francisco prices there. Enjoy. I'm so glad I bought when I did.

If I didn't buy, I wouldn't be living here. It's too damn expensive. No, definitely. That's one of the reasons I love San Francisco. At least your Transformer didn't blow this time and take out half of your power strips, but you have new power strips because that happened before. That's true. And they're in our e-store, which we'll talk about in a second.

How about a little follow-up? Everybody's talking about Gwyneth Paltrow's goop summit that we were talking about last week. And the stories coming out of that are amazing. We weren't talking about the summit because we had just talked about her appearance on Jimmy or Jimmy Kimmel, where she basically admitted that she has absolutely no clue what the hell they're going on about on her own site.

Yeah, but we did tease the summit. That's true. Okay. So I thought it would be fine to follow up here and just we're not going to go too deep into it because there are a couple of posts that will be in the show notes at GOG.show slash 214 that have like just phenomenal write-ups on the silliness that is goop.

Yeah, it's – I mean it's – I would say it's totally ridiculous, but just go to goop.com. Of course this is what you were going to get. Of course it's stupid. Of course it's a stupid money grab. Of course it's rich white people problems, which aren't even problems. It's all rubbing crystals on your vagina and steaming your head or whatever the hell these people are on about.

All of it does nothing. It's all a load of crap. But people still go. People paid $500 to $2,000 to be at this thing and they're still going to go because people are stupid and we have run out of problems apparently. At least there were some people that were smart enough to walk out of some of the snake oils.

Some of them. But not all of them. You need to walk out of the entire goop summit and ask for your money back because that's – live in the real world, people. Yeah. All right. Well, if you wanted to buy stuff that actually worked, you would go to grumpgog.show. Sorry, I'm still getting used to the new URL slash store where we have a handpicked selection of items that we really like on Amazon.

And if you click through, you, of course, send us a couple pennies that help us out a little bit, except for the fact that Amazon has decided to retire their A store format. So we're going to have to change all that. Yeah, we'll have to manually do it now. And to be honest, they haven't touched that thing in years. It is such a steaming pile.

Like, we use it on a couple other sites for other shows. And pagination doesn't work in half the browsers. The scaling is terrible. It doesn't work on mobile. It's not – yeah, it's not anything. It's been bad. I was hoping that they were going to fix it because it certainly is more convenient. I do like their reason – one of their top reasons for retiring it is there is no meaningful way to weave content around the list created using an A store.

It's a list. Yeah. It's meant to just be a list of things. There's no weaving of content. We're not basket weaving a fucking story. Jesus, I hate these people. Oh, man. Anyways, and we have – we will get to the bigger Amazon news.

But there was so much pre-Whole Foods. I guess we should come up with like – you know, like there's BC and AD. Yeah. So for this episode, we have Amazon before Whole Foods, BWF apparently. So this is a before Whole Foods story that I had. We talked in the last – I think two episodes ago, we talked about how Amazon's physical stores were coming out and how they were not displaying any prices at all for their books.

And you had to actually go and get their app and download that so you could see what the price for the book is that you want to buy that's right in front of you. Or walk around the store and find one of their handy pricing kiosks where you can scan the book. As opposed to just, you know, having the price. Or, you know, the price that's actually printed on physical books, which I assume we're supposed to just ignore that.

So not only will they not display their own prices, they have asked for and have just been granted a patent that will prevent in-store shoppers from online price checking. So you cannot see what anybody else is charging for that book either. What a complete load of crap. Yeah.

You know, I'm on the fence about this one because this could just be a defensive patent. No, this is not fair because this is what – this has been the main point of Amazon up until probably about five years ago when everybody just started using Amazon all the time. You would go to a brick-and-mortar store and then see what the price would be on Amazon.

So they have played one end of the sword for years. Yeah. So this is bullshit. The way to get around this is don't use the in-store Wi-Fi if this ever does roll out because it's based on using their Wi-Fi. Yes, the way to get around it is, of course, to disconnect from Wi-Fi.

Or, you know, use their Wi-Fi and then use private internet access VPN, which you can get by going to GOG.show slash VPN. And we don't have to change that. Nope, we sure don't. Now, we also talked about net neutrality and all of the news surrounding that and the big day that's coming up, the protest day.

Yes. The day of action. And, well, you know, we were saying that Google was not on board yet, so who really cared? But then the real 800-pound gorilla in the room came out and said, we're joining in, and it's Pornhub. Two comments.

First off, I do always appreciate that Jason brings the porn news. Yes. So we've always got that. And secondly, wouldn't this be the day of action for people that get no action? Yes. A double day of inaction. So they don't know what they're going to do yet, but they're going to do something slow.

That's pretty much it. But they've got 75 million daily visitors, which is pretty impressive. Or sad, depending on how you really look at it. Well, it's A, man. Glass half full. Any Pornhub in the storm. In the news.

This week in Uber is what we should just call in the news now. I think we should just actually, this particular week is like, it's Brian's Christmas. It is Brian's Christmas. Although I don't think we have an Airbnb story, so we don't have the trifecta of rage coming out of you. So Recode has done a great job of doing basically a list of all of the news in one convenient page.

And I just want to read some of the headlines here on this page, because we don't even have to go into the stories, because the headlines kind of sum it up. Yes, it does. Uber's board unanimously voted for Holder report recommendations as the company negotiates and exits with its business head, which means that anything that Eric Holder's company came out and said, yes, we're going to go with that.

And then Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is taking a leave of absence from the company to spend more time with his family, I'm sure. Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's totally it. Yes. The investigation into Uber recommends less responsibility for CEO Travis Kalanick and a more independent board.

Mm-hmm. Duh. And yes, Uber board member David Bonderman said, women talk too much at an all-hands meeting about sexism at Uber. You can't make this shit up. You really can't. And then the next headline, the Uber board member who made a sexist remark during a staff meeting has resigned.

Talk about instant fucking karma. I mean, that's... I've just literally been gleeful this entire week as all this news came out, except for the fact that I know it won't make a bit of difference and Uber's still going to be worth 25 gazillion dollars. Yeah. Uber faces a fresh probe from U.S. regulators over its privacy practices about fucking time.

Uh, probe, right, Jason? Yeah. Sorry, look, I'm sorry. I was pretending like I was on Uber's board. The Uber India rape victim has filed a lawsuit against the company for accessing her medical files. Good. As she should. As she should. And in the final one, is Uber sincere about changing?

Well, since this is a question, Betteridge's Law of Headlines says, absolutely not. Oh, but Arianna Huffington says, yes, darling. Darling, we're about to change. Now, lest we forget, Arianna Huffington was parachuted in napping to fix all of Uber's problems, of course.

And I think you left out my particularly favorite nugget of this whole thing. She gave a huge speech to Uber's staff in which she, you know, basically said, a new Uber will emerge from the crisis. Uh, but my, my, I don't, I can't even keep a straight face with this.

That was Arianna Hittlerton. So, yeah, well, here's Arianna's big plan to save Uber. The cafeteria will hereafter be called the Oasis of Love, but only platonic. No reach arounds. And secondly, another important symbol of change, the War Room has been renamed the Peace Room.

Because as everybody knows, peace is a lot more productive and sustainable than war. Yep, that's going to fix everything, Arianna. Thanks a lot. Yeah, what about the Heaven Room? Where, where they just watch what everybody's doing, like Big Brother. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, they'll have to rename that to something else, too.

Yeah, we have a link in the show notes to the Covington recommendations, which is the version of the holder report that was, uh, sent to the press by Uber. Right. Uh, we don't have the unadulterated version, but yes, you can read, read what Uber wants you to read.

Yes. Uber also had a lot of other particularly fine reporting this week, uh, including a little prestidigitation. I actually knew in advance that I would not say that word correctly. Okay. Yeah. So, Scott Galloway, who is a brand management expert, uh, L2 founder and a New York University professor, got on a long podcast earlier in the week, uh, over at Recode.

Oh, okay. Cause you said Uber had a lot of good reporting this week and I'm like, what? Uber's reporting. Oh, I meant, uh, I meant Recode if that's what I said. No worries. So he talked about all the big five, uh, big six or so that we always talk about the main players in the tech area. And I just want to run through what he was saying really quickly. Uh, Apple, basically he's, he's pretty happy about it.

Uh, you go to Apple store, you just want to hang out, you go buy a Samsung phone and a Verizon or an AT and store, it's awful soul crushing and confusing. So Apple is, uh, basically very good and he likes it. Uh, Google. Google is God. I think it's replaced God for us. I think that's a little insane, but a little hyperbolic there, a little hype.

Well, it's his job. He's a branding expert. Facebook. I think Facebook is love. Facebook helps us connect, has more empathy for others. I don't really know what Facebook he's been on recently. Yeah, seriously. But anyways, that's his thought there. So that's all good. Uber. Uber is a frat boy party.

Yeah. You nailed that one. Yep. There you go. Netflix. He thinks Netflix could be the operating system for enjoying our lives. Has he looked at their catalog lately? Uh, it's actually getting better. And I don't know if you saw the reports this week, Jason, but actually millennials are spending more time on Netflix than all of cable TV combined.

Millennials, besides being lazy little bastards, uh, have no taste. Have really bad taste. Yeah. Uh, Snapchat. I just don't get chat, Snapchat. So I think I'm inclined not to like it. Welcome to the club. Yeah. Um, he basically called this a company that, uh, is irresponsible to invest in, which I think I nailed a long time ago.

Long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. And the other big thing that he did, and the reason that he's getting a lot of press in this particular article is getting a lot of press is he called, he basically called that, uh, they were going to buy out whole foods and that Amazon would be the first company worth a trillion dollars. They're well on their way.

Well, Amazon did buy whole foods and they are on their way. As he says, the winners are consumers and Amazon shareholders of which I am one and actually both, uh, losers are the retail ecosystem, which includes 11 million cashiers, includes 40 million households that have a share of gap or Walmart.

You're effectively seeing this giant sucking sound out of the entire retail ecosystem into a small number of players. Also what we've been mentioning. Yeah. That's the way it's going to go. So get used to it. And if you want a job, go work at a Amazon warehouse, putting shit in boxes so you can go home and have them delivered to you pretty much.

So, and the, obviously the big news is Amazon bought out whole foods this week. Uh, I think it was a $13 billion deal or something like nobody can nail that number down. It's 13 point something, but every time I'd like, I was listening to my Alexa this morning when I asked for the news and it gave me three different news stories about this.

The price was different on every single one of them. Yeah. Well, you know, when you're getting into the double digits on the billions, what's a couple hundred million here and there. Yeah. Soon you're talking about real money. Exactly. Now immediately stock market prices for other grocery stores took tanked, uh, whole foods or whole foods, Amazon.

Well, same thing now. Amazon stock went up. Uh, but everybody is of course talking about why they decided to do this. And there are a number of theories and all of them make a lot of sense. Basically you just bought a shit ton of retail space quickly. Uh, you can get rid of all that hempy feel goody clothing and stuff that's in the corner and whole foods now and immediately replace it with a bunch of, you know, Amazon, uh, prime devices and, you know, readers and things like that.

Secondly, what I think that they're going to, it obviously is going to drive more people to join prime and Alexa. It makes a lot more sense to do your grocery list with Alexa now. Oh, here's the thing though. You tell me that everybody that shops at whole foods already isn't a prime subscriber, because if you look at the numbers that we talked about last week, we're like 80% of people that make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year are already prime members in this country.

Yep. That's pretty much everybody that that's, that's the only group of people that can shop at whole foods. So those people are already prime members. It is exactly their target market. It is a lot of people that are already doing it. And the people that aren't doing it, if you're now going to be getting a discount and ease of ordering your groceries quickly, why wouldn't you?

It's a total no brainer. The other thing that I think that they're doing, which I've only seen a few people talk about is the biggest cost of shipping and delivery for Amazon is the last mile. It's always the last mile problem. Now, what if instead of having to deliver it to your door, they just use their already built in shipping mechanisms to get things to whole foods now that they've bought that whole network and they gave you a slight discount if you just pick up your package when you go get your groceries next time.

All that hippie shit that you talked about that they're going to get rid of. That's where the new Amazon lockers are going to go. Exactly. Although they could also use the roofs of all the whole foods as drone landing like a drone port. They could. But I mean, I'm willing to bet that a lot of people, myself included, I would just go pick up my package the next time I go get my groceries.

I don't need to pay for the drone delivery or if they give me a slight discount just to, you know, we don't you. Would you prefer to have it delivered for one ninety nine or you'll just pick it up when you go get your hippie dippy snacks? Well, since I have kale chips. Yeah, I avoid Whole Foods like the plague. A, I can't afford it.

B, the parking lot is the worst of humanity because these self-entitled little bastards in their Range Rovers are always trying to kill you or they're on their cell phones, you know, playing the latest Katy Perry album, talking to a chat bot, which I'll get to in a second. And it's, it's, it's terrible going to a Whole Foods parking lot.

So if they can, if, if Amazon can fix the Whole Foods parking problem, then I will start going there. And if they can get the prices down, because, you know, I can't spend $14 for a goddamn salad bar salad for lunch. Right. Well, they do have their Amazon three or Amazon.

Well, same thing now. Whole Foods 360, which is supposedly the cheaper version. So maybe one of those will open up near you soon. Yeah, hopefully we'll see. We'll see. And more fun news for me, Snap. Oh, okay. They're taking the place of Airbnb this week. That's why. Now, I was very bullish about investing with Amazon, and I ended up being correct about that.

And I was very outspoken about how Snap is a horrible investment, and no way would I ever buy when their IPO went, and no way would I ever buy their stock anyways until somebody can prove to me why this is a valid company that does anything. Except lie to their possible investors, because, I mean, we read the numbers when they, when they were doing their dog and pony show before they went out.

And they even put out the numbers that this was a bad investment, and people still bought. Yep. And they probably shouldn't have, because the price has now dropped to the IPO level. Any gains whatsoever have gone away, and the stocks are trading just above the IPO level, $17.22 a share.

I would predict that it's going to fall even further. Now, historically, didn't this same thing happen when Facebook IPO'd? Like, they went up, then they went back down to IPO price, and then they took over the planet. Yeah. I seem to remember that being the pattern, because I think we made fun of Facebook when the same exact thing happened after they IPO'd.

True. But I don't think that the third step is going to happen this time, because there's nothing that backs it up. Instagram is eating their lunch. That's the problem. Yeah, Facebook was making money, and Instagram immediately took over Snap, and everybody that was doing, even the few people that, maybe you still have some market share with the really young kids, but even the millennials I know, and I do know a few, that I was on Snapchat for, because that's where they posted.

They're all doing Instagram stories now, and they are all not updating Snapchat anymore. Yeah, as far as I can tell, there's nobody, nobody's posting anything about Snap anymore. Nope. Oh, well. Oh, well. And, you know, it's another year, so we have to have another story about how the internet is finally going to change the movie business.

We've been hearing this, we've been hearing this song and dance for a long time. Apparently, it's getting a little bit closer, and it kind of makes sense, because we are seeing declines in people actually going to theaters. It's going down steadily, at least here in the US. So movie studios are pushing for a new window, in which you'd be able to see a new movie at home for an extra fee, before the standard 90-day waiting period after it opens in theaters.

I like that idea. I would do that, mainly because I have a kid now, so getting out to a theater is almost an impossibility. Netflix doesn't want you to wait at all, as it started aggressively building up a straight-to-streaming library of movies, which could theoretically compete with ones that are in theaters. We'll see.

I mean, a change has to happen, and they better do it soon. They should look over at the movie, or music industry, and kind of remember what happened. So figure it out, guys. I mean, here in the Midwest, I mean, maybe it's different here, but the movie theaters are always packed here. Really?

Yeah. The movie-going experience here in the Midwest has not waned at all, especially with the new theaters, where you can actually go get food, which is annoying, but you can get beer service in your seat that reclines, and is leather, and beautiful, and I love going to the movies.

In general, the theaters have done the best that they can with doing that. There's been a very good job of revamping these things, and making them nicer, and bigger seats, and all that sort of stuff. You know, the exact opposite of what the airline industry is doing. They're making the experience really, really nice.

But all the numbers seem to keep saying that people are going less and less to the theaters, so maybe it's because the movies are so goddamn bad. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, last year, I saw a movie a week, and it was fun. This year, not so much, because it just worked too much. But yeah, I think that this new push with the theaters, I mean, it's desperation to try and get people in the theaters, but I really think that we have two main companies to thank for

this, which is the Arclight and the Alamo Drafthouse, two companies that really kind of blew up because they gave you a premium experience when going to the movies. You have an assigned seat. You can get, you know, adult beverages and decent food now. And I really enjoy the movie-going experience.

Now, if we could just get rid of popcorn, I would be a happy guy. If we could just ban popcorn. I'm totally fine with popcorn. It's when they started to add in the whole dinner thing, and all of a sudden, I'm smelling curry. Yeah, that's kind of annoying. Yeah, and they need to come up with, oh, hey, never sell sun chips at a movie theater, because that bag is the most obnoxious thing that you could possibly hear during a movie, because it is so loud.

And they need to come up, this is our market opportunity, Brian, we need to come up with a silent paper wrap for hot dogs, because you have the same sun chip problem, where, you know, the 800-pound woman next to you orders six hot dogs, and she's like rustling the whole time, and nom, nom, nom, nom.

That part's kind of annoying. Yeah. You know, I actually, last time I went, the woman sitting next to me was having a hot dog, and she got mustard on me. Never would I think that I would go to the movie theater and have mustard on me, but from someone else, but yeah, that is the downside of the new reality of movies, but I still prefer it than sitting at home and watching it on my TV.

I like to get out and see some people and have an experience, you know? Yep. Well, I mentioned Katy Perry before. Oh. Okay, a couple of things in this story here. Katy Perry removes all doubt about chatbots going mainstream. I did not even read this.

You know why I didn't read this, Jason? Because you don't have to, because of the title. Well, not only the title, but yeah, the title itself annoyed me. But as soon as I look to see who wrote the story, again, this is all about knowing your sources.

When you see the sources, chatbotsmagazine.com, I'm like, I think they have a vested interest in portraying a story that may not necessarily be true. This might not actually be fair and balanced reporting. Yes, that did come to mind. Yes. Yeah. The real story here is that there is, yes, a chatbots magazine, which is not an actual magazine, but just another goddamn medium website.

But yeah, this whole thing, it's just like, oh, we've hit the mainstream because Katy Perry loves her bot now. First off, I'm reasonably sure that Katy Perry has never removed any doubt about anything. And then secondly, yeah, chatbots aren't going mainstream.

I did actually look at the article to see just how ridiculous it was, the chatbot itself. Well, the article is, of course, ridiculous anyways. But take a look at the snapshots and the pictures and the captions that they use to illustrate why this is a good thing. And you just go, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

And nobody, but nobody is interested in this. Except the people that made it. Except for the people that made it and made a lot of money making it. Yep, because they've also made bots for Snoop Dogg and Christian Gray from Fifty Shades of Gray. Oh, great. Great.

See what I did there? I see what you did there. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but if any of your friends have gotten sick recently, I've had quite a few people that unfortunately have had life-threatening illnesses. Yep. It appears on social media because they are basically asking you to help them pay all their costs because health care sucks in this country.

Yes, I have noticed this, yes. So, America's health care crisis is a goldmine for crowdfunding. This is an article over at Bloomberg. It is incredibly long, incredibly important, and incredibly worth reading. Okay. Yeah, I haven't had time to go back and read it yet, but I totally, I mean, I know that from just all my friends that have gotten sick.

Last year, I probably spent $300 to $400 giving money to friends who were either in some really random accident or lost their health care or, you know. I mean, that's a lot of money for me to give away, but, you know, they needed it more than I did. The only thing that I wish is that on these health care, I don't know if I, since I didn't read the article, I'm hoping that these platforms, these crowdfunding platforms take less of a percentage on health care related campaigns than just regular, hey, I've got an app idea, dude.

Give me some money so I can go make it. I'm not entirely sure about that. I do remember from reading the article that Kickstarter refuses to let people do this because they want to stay out of the implications of people doing it. So Kickstarter will not do it. But other companies have come in to fill that void.

One of them being a company called YouCaring. What a terrible name. Well, it works for what it is. The article does a really good job of portraying the phenomena, explaining why it's happening, giving some great test cases.

The one thing that I found really interesting, and this has definitely happened to me because at first I was sending people money left and right, just little bits here and there because same reason as you, Jason. You feel bad. You know, they're in a tough situation. Their health care isn't covering stuff. You want to help out. But they were talking about this one guy, Hatton, who is talking about how people are seeing more fatigue around crowdfunding efforts, that when you get your first request, you probably

give a lot as you get besieged because there are more and more and more and more and more all the time. And even not just your friends, but then your friends are posting it on help my friend out. And I can't even half my page sometimes is just people who want help with their dog's health or their own health or whatever.

And it does, it becomes too much. There's a fine balance to be struck there. Yep. And you shut down basically. And you're like, that's it. I'm not giving any more money for this stuff. And then I get really mad at the government and I'm like, where's our damn health care? Yeah. And the unfortunate follow on effects are then people won't go to patreon.com slash GOG and give us their support because we need it too.

Yeah. Damn it. But yeah, there is crowdfunding fatigue for sure. And unfortunately, I just went to go try and get give me your fucking money.com, but somebody has already bought it. Oh man. Well, give them some fucking money and they might give you the domain. Oh yes. Or maybe I can get .ninja.

Oh yes. That'll be useful. Now, is there a .money? Because then I can get, just give me your fucking .money. But. Well, there's always .wordpress. Ah, yes, .wordpress. What are your favorite companies? I just threw this in there because we haven't talked about the phenomena of telecommuting and working from home in a long time.

Oh, that soul sucking thing we've done for 25 years. Yeah. The reason that I probably started drinking way too early in the day some days. The company behind WordPress, I've curtailed that. It's amazing what having a kid will do. The company behind WordPress called Automatic, with two Ts, of course, is closing its San Francisco office, apparently because of very few employees have been choosing to show up for work in person.

Or it could be the insane rent they're probably having to pay for it. Automatic's a billion dollar company. The rent there, I know that office. I've been in that office many times. It's a very nice office. But yeah, nobody's ever there. Because most of the company is distributed across the world, not just in San Francisco.

There's very few employees in San Francisco. It says the company has long given its blessing to people working remotely. Working in the office was always optional, and the company even provides financial support for employees to work from other locations, including offering employees $250 a month to use a co-working office or Starbucks.

If they work at Starbucks, they will pay for his or her drink. Now that Starbucks has beer, I'd like to see how that continues to work out. I know Matt Mullenweg pretty well, and I'm sure he's probably okay with that. As long as you get your work done, he's a party guy. Now, what I found really interesting in this article isn't so much the WordPress company letting people do that, but the number of people that are actually working remotely.

According to a 2017 Gallup poll, 20% of U.S. employees work remotely 100% of the time. What they don't get into is whether those people are contractors or part-time or working full-time for a company. Or just housewives who saw that make $75,000 a month on the internet and are getting scammed.

Yes. Yeah. And Tiny Pulse conducted a survey of 509. Interesting number. I'd imagine, what, that one person didn't return a form? Yeah. Probably. 509 U.S. employees who are permanent remote workers and found that they tend to be happier at work and feel more valued compared to the overall group of workers, though they report having a lower relationship with their co-workers.

Okay. Well... Let's file that under no shit. Actually, I file that under bullshit because I'm not happier working from home. I hate working from home. I'd rather be around my co-workers. But, you know, after 25 years of, you know, working in my home office here and there and knowing the difference between working at home versus working at an office, it's a slippery slope to have to go into an office every time, but having the option of not going there is

fantastic, but, you know, being able to go in and see the people that you work with, I love that part. And I understand that, yes, the lower relationship with their co-workers, absolutely. Although Slack has kind of fixed that for me because I talk to people I work with actually more now than I would if we were in an office.

Yeah, but I think there's a difference between chatting like that versus going out together, having lunch, not even talking about work stuff. That's the thing that really kind of creates the bonds in the workplace. I think about 50% of my Slack conversations with people I work with are work-related.

Right. I mean, we shoot the shit about everything. You know, it's kind of our default de facto mode of conversation because all of us are working from home and all of us go crazy. So we send people, you know, different things and talk about it. It's not like we're not just sitting there sending cat pictures. It's, you know, in the industry and stuff like that.

But we also just shoot the shit. I don't know. It's a weird situation now. It is different than when we were doing it before because we don't have to. Now we don't have to really, like, convince anybody the merits of working from home. Everybody's kind of got that now. And back then, you know, it's just like, I'm going to work from home today.

Well, why? Why don't you want to come in the office? It's like, well, because I want to fucking work from home today. You don't have to do that anymore. Now it's like, I'm going to stay home today. Okay. See you next time. You know? Right. Oh, the one thing that Automatic, I wanted to point out about Automatic, is one of the, they've got a couple modes of communication to keep their team in sync.

They use a customized WordPress theme that's kind of like a slackish type of thing that they've had for years. Right. It's really kind of annoying. I hate it. But they also use IRC, which is cool. They're old school IRC, an old school IRC company. That's pretty awesome, actually.

Yep. Have you ever heard of the sleep monitoring startup Hello? I don't think we ever talked about them on the show. No, no. There's, well, now that's, that's interesting. And there's a reason probably that they've just gone out of business. Okay. They've raised $40 million in VC and I've never heard of them.

Nope. Never heard of them either. And I am big into the quote unquote space around, you know, health tracking and shit. And I've never heard of them. You've talked about like at least five different sleep trackers over the course of this podcast. Tons of them. Yeah. And I do not remember ever hearing of these guys.

So, yep. They, they very, they were a stealth startup in that they were stealth when I, when they were working and stealth when they were winding down, because the only way somebody found out is there were a bunch of moving trucks outside their office one day. Nice. Yeah. They apparently tried to sell the Fitbit and Fitbit said, nah, we're good because the Fitbit already does sleep tracking.

So why would they need another one? You know? Yeah. They're totally fine. Fitbit's in trouble right now. They are. They're not doing great. Wearables are going down. I mean, everybody's got one. Nobody uses it, but. That's the problem. And then why would you ever, it's like Crocs. Everybody's got a pair.

Nobody wears them. You're not buying another one. You look in my house and you ever find a pair of Crocs. That shit was planted by the police because I will never have that in my house. I'm telling you right now. Crocs and Uggs are two things that I don't care if you're wearing them coming to my house. You're taking them off and leaving them on the porch.

You're not coming to my house in those. I'm 100% on board with you, except I wouldn't even just leave them on the porch. I would burn them. Yeah. Well, they're on the porch for the disposal team to come by and then. Right. Right. Yeah. So this is an interesting one. Facebook comment leads to death sentence for man on Pakistan.

Yep. This is not good. No, no, it's not. But it's also not surprising. And this is one of the reasons that it is very important. And it's such a slippery slope when we talk about people traversing borders and requiring slash asking for access to social media.

And when Sean Bonner and I did Metblogs, we had a couple sites in Pakistan and we had to keep we I mean, we had to keep our sources very private because we had some gay men that were writing for us who could be killed. So it's very important to really not let people, you know, know who some of these people are.

If this guy was actually doing it in public, then it's his own damn fault. I mean, honestly, it's he knows where he's at. He knows what he's doing. Well, he's he's making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. No, that's 100 percent true. That's something that people need to keep in mind, at least certainly within this country when we exist in such a bubble.

Not everybody else agrees with us and not everybody else feels the same way about things that we do. And when you go to their country, you need to play by their rules. Yeah. Or even not in their country. You look at Paris and Charlie Hebdo attacks, you know, and the cartoonists in Sweden.

And, you know, these people take this shit seriously. So, you know, you poke the bear. Sometimes you get bit. You've heard us talk before about how amazing the new FreshBooks invoicing system is, but that's only where it starts.

FreshBooks has so many features to help you streamline the business side of being a freelancer or small business owner. It'll blow your mind. The FreshBooks dashboard has been curated to answer the one burning question for any small business owner. How is my business doing? No more guessing games on what's owed, overdue, or whether you're in the red.

The new notification center is like your personal assistant telling you what's changed in your business since you last logged in and what should be dealt with, like overdue invoices. If you have any questions whatsoever, FreshBooks award-winning customer service is amazingly helpful, super friendly, and has zero attitude. Plus, a real live person usually answers in three rings or less.

I've used it, and it's totally true. You can take pictures of receipts on your phone using their iOS mobile app, which makes claiming your expenses super 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 the free 30-day trial to our listeners.

No credit card is 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. Cops and doodads! Now, since this segment is about doodads sometimes, I have to say that I have doodad envy.

Okay. I really, really, really want this new 12-inch iPad Pro. Oh, I really want it. Everybody is raving about it. The 120-hertz refresh rate on it is apparently mind-bogglingly awesome. So maybe I should crowdfund me an iPad.

Oh, wait. Nobody will ever give me any money. Never mind. But man, yes, I have iPad envy right now. Big time. And I've got a 9.7-inch Pro, which is absolutely fine for everything I do. But now that this thing exists, this is the, you know, the Apple sphere that just sucks you in.

You don't need it, but you want it. So you're going to go like, you know, blow some homeless guys in an alley to get it. Wow. This is why I hate Apple. But I love Apple. That went dark fast. I know how this works, man. It's not my first rodeo. I'm still fine with my Apple iPad mini.

I like it a lot. Hang on to it because that's going to be a collector's item. They're killing the mini. Oh, are they really? I have two. Okay. Yeah. If you look now, like the, there's only one mini available and it's got like the max specs on it, but it's, they're not updating it at all. Apparently, which is.

I love how tech just vacillates between let's make it really big. Nope. Let's shrink them down. No, let's make it really big again. Nope. Let's shrink them down. And I'm sorry, but the mini is the perfect size. If they could get a better processor in it and have pencil support, I would get one in an instant. It's the perfect size for me.

It's the ultimate travel device. I'm able to use it everywhere. I love reading on it. I love browsing on it. I can do all my texting on it. I can, I can do almost anything I want with it. Now you're talking about doing like real work on it. No, probably can't do that, but that's not what I use it for. I just want to be able to take notes on it with my pencil.

I mean, the real issue I think with the mini is they made the phone too fucking big. Because I go in there and I'm like, it's like 600 bucks for a mini now. And I hold my phone over it and I'm like, ah, it's just a little, you know, it's like I can do almost everything on my phone that I could do on a mini because I got a seven plus and cause you just have a seven, right?

You don't have, yeah, the seven, if you have a seven and then a mini that makes more sense. But if you have a seven plus and then you hold it up next to an iPad mini, you don't get a lot more real estate. No, exactly. It's kind of like 12 more pixels for another 600 bucks, which if I had 600 bucks and I'd, you know, save up and I'd only have to blow two homeless guys to go get me my iPad 12 inch.

All right. Moving on to some more Apple stuff. Moving on to some more Apple stuff. I've currently am dealing with a bug. I believe an Apple podcast. I'm just going to throw this out there and see if anybody else is using the Apple podcast app has the same thing. If you load up the app, start a download of a podcast and exit, when you come back and start to play it, it'll play, but no audio.

You have to start, you have to start the podcast, exit the app, reopen the app, and then restart playing the podcast and then it'll start to play, which brings me up to the question. Doesn't anybody test shit anymore? It's a, it's the podcast app. Nobody cares about that, but we are getting a new podcast app with iOS 11 though, with all the tracking that we talked about, I think on the last episode.

So, uh, you can go get the iOS beta, the 11 beta. I know you'll do that. No, I will definitely not do that. No, to hell with that. Yeah. I've heard the, uh, the beta is really, really slow, so I wouldn't even start this time, but, um, I recommend overcast, man. It's free and it works great.

It really does work great. And it's like I said, it's free. It's free. Uh, I am getting air, air pods. What? I, well, my wife, uh, if tomorrow is father's day, my wife decides. I decided for a father's day to get, she would get me the air pods cause I don't have them.

Uh, of course she had a, cause she doesn't listen to the show. She had no idea. I'm actually not going to get them until like September now because you can't, you can't just get them. Uh, so I will be getting air pods in September. In the meantime, because my wife works in the music industry, she came home with a gift.

Anyways, uh, will.i.am is of course, uh, he's a tech guy these days. We'll talk about him in a minute for sure. Yes, we will be talking about him shortly. Uh, she brought me his headphones. They're called buttons. Okay. Uh, they are premium wireless Bluetooth earphones, tailor fit with immersive sound.

Now, come on, let's hear it. I saw, I saw pictures of these things. I went and looked at the website and I saw pictures of them. I like them. Okay. I actually like them and I will give him kudos to not putting his name all over everything.

There's a, his logo's on the side though. Yeah. His logo's on the side, but it's, it's, it's a couple lines. I mean, it's, it's, it's the dumbest logo ever. Cause you would look at it and never go, who the hell is that? Yeah. It's just some, it's just some lines. It doesn't, it's not offensive. He's like the new prince, you know?

Yeah. It's got his own symbol. So now they sound okay. They are, they are $200. They're $199, which is crazy expensive for what they are. They sound sure. They sound better than, than Apple's bog standard headphones. I don't know yet if they sound better than the earbuds.

I will find out in September. They certainly don't sound as good as our $79.99 Sennheisers that you can get off of Amazon. Of course, those aren't wireless. These are wireless to me. It's okay. It just means it's something else I have to remember to charge, which is kind of a pain in the ass.

What I do like about these that the earbuds don't do is they come connected to a string that just hangs around behind your back, which is fine. You don't just have the things sticking in your ear. So if they fall out, they fall out. You've got a string that catches them. The really clever thing that I do like about it is the buttons are magnetized.

So when you take your headphones off and let them dangle in front of your chest, they snap together in a really fun. That's every pair of wireless earbuds on a string ever. Well, I've never had a pair. Okay. So, yeah, I had to buy a pair of wireless ones because I remember when I unfortunately left my earbuds in Nashville.

I had to go buy like a $40 pair of them and they did the same thing. And it is very clever to do that because then it's like a necklace and it stays in place. Yeah. Now, it comes with a hell of a lot of packaging and it comes with a hell of a lot of different little bud options, all kinds of weird ass things.

Now, they could have explained what those are, but instead you get a 40 page booklet that is just artsy photos of people wearing the button headphones. So I have no idea what half of these things do. I just kind of pick some at random until I found something that fit in my head. A nice little video explaining all of that or a couple pictures or, you know, not 40 pictures of people just wearing your headphones would have been helpful there.

Here's the instructions. Stick them in your ear. If they fall out, put another one on. Stick it in your ear. If it falls out, put another one on. No, but they even have like these curved things that apparently are if you're a jogger, you want to use that. Oh, those are fantastic. If you can find those that fit. Oh, those are the best. They come with three different sets of them.

None of them fit very well. Oh, too bad. Yeah, I found because on my I have Tao Tronics, which is, you know, some horrible Chinese knockoff brand, I'm sure, which is probably you can probably find my listening preferences on Shodan because I'm sure they're uploading to the cloud. Yeah, but I found in my ears are different.

So I had they came with a bunch of different size. I have one size in one ear and one size in the other. But man, once you get those things locked in, they work great. Now, I've got to say, I don't mind these headphones. They're fine. They sound OK. Realistically, they're they're inoffensive to me. They're OK. But that's not you're not spending one hundred and ninety nine dollars here on headphones.

You're spending one hundred and ninety nine dollars here, apparently, for style, because these are for the dope. Like I said, it comes with I said it was she came with a photo book. It's a limited edition magazine, which has been edited by Will.i.am, of course. And these are for those who refuse to compromise style.

So you're paying the two hundred dollars is for the douche fee. Yeah, it's totally for the douche factor. So, yeah, you know, I will. I prefer my Sennheisers, even though they don't come with the all day swag that my Will.i.am buttons apparently do. They're OK.

They're they're not they're not offensive. It comes. Well, the other thing that they're doing and one of the is it's coming with its own A.I., of course. OK, Bam Bam agrees that it's coming with its own version of Siri. The app is not available yet with all the features that they're going to promise, which include it'll be A.I.

assistant phone calls. So if like some restaurant calls back to confirm a reservation, apparently this A.I. will be able to handle it for you. Because so many people have people calling back for reservations nowadays. When you can drop two hundred dollars on a pair of headphones purely for the swag factor. Then you're not going to Applebee's.

That might be happening. But right now, the A.I., the app isn't available. So none of these extra features are there. But I already hate the sound that they use and the voice that they used for this. I can't even remember what they call her. Ananda or something like that.

British accent, which normally I like. But every time I turn my headphones on, every time I turn the headphones off, every time they find Bluetooth sync. Horrible, horrible noise, horrible voice. I'm already annoyed by it. OK, so is this a pass? They're OK.

If you are into the way that they look, then it's probably good for you if you can afford that kind of money. Buy some double sided tape and stick two quarters to your ears and then you'll have the same the same looking for you. Yep. Now, instead of that, you can just spend a buck seventy five roughly.

Well, you'd have to fly to Russia and you could buy by likes. OK, this is great. It's a vending machine in Russia. You literally just go up to the machine. You type in your username. You insert a hundred rubles, which is roughly a buck seventy five. And you get 200 instant likes, which you can apportion to photos as you see fit.

Where did likes come from? Russia. Vending machine like you. Exactly. Oh, man. I didn't write that down because I wanted to be able to drop that. OK. Oh, sorry. Sorry. My other one was not just for presidential elections anymore.

Go, Russia. Yes. Yes. We can have Snowden go drop us some likes since he's still stuck over there. Pretty. That would be awesome. Snowden, if you're listening. Yeah. Nobody's listening, apparently. I know. Oh, man. So, and more news. Google Drive will now be backing up your entire computer.

No, it won't. No, no. Not in any fucking universe that I ever get transported to will Google get my entire computer. Exactly. But you can't blame them for trying, and I'm sure a lot of people will be using it, actually. So they're going to turn it into a much more robust backup tool.

Soon, instead of having files live inside of a special Drive folder, Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you pointed to on your computer. That can include your desktop, your entire documents folder, or other more specific locations like the folder that you have called passwords.

Oh, well, that would be your keychain file for some people. It'll be interesting if they do system files, because Backblaze won't do system files, because I use Backblaze for my cloud backup, but it doesn't handle any of the system files. So you can't actually restore an entire computer from Backblaze, and I'm guessing with the way this is worded that you won't be able to restore an entire computer from Google Drive.

But, I mean, if you're on a Mac, you just point your documents folder to it, and you're off to the races. But no, no, you ain't getting shit. Mainly because everything's in Dropbox already. You're welcome, Condoleezza Rice. Yes, thanks. So this next one comes for...

Wait, actually, before we move on, are you going to do this? Oh, hell no. Okay, I'm just checking. I'm just checking. No way. Yeah, that's right. You are the guy that doesn't even have a Gmail account, so... I don't even have Gmail. I use Google purely for search, and I go through and set every single option to not ever, you know, track or record or keep any data in.

And I go through and clean it out. And every time I get an alert about updating security systems and do this or that to make sure Google doesn't get your information, I do that. There's no way in hell I'm doing this. And also, yeah, you know what? I still recommend you should pick up a Synology. I know. These things are awesome.

I mean, I've got 12 terabytes or 13 terabytes just sitting here, and I can access it from anywhere using their iOS apps or the basically just file sharing I can go in or a web interface. It is, for the money, it's under $1,000 for the version I got plus four 4-terabyte drives.

And it, dude, it'll change your life. Seriously. I highly recommend getting this Synology. It's been on my to-do list. Okay. Well, this comes from Seth Miranda from the Grime Life Guys. I've got a little follow-up with them next segment. But it's from CNBC. And it's, gamers aren't buying the VR hype, and game makers are quietly hedging their bets.

Didn't see this one coming, did we, Brian? Nope. No. We've been bullish on VR. We think it's fantastic. It's all we love. We just love VR. We see how it's taken over the whole world. I swear to God, I have, like, five friends that I think work in the VR industry, and it is just, oh, their Facebook feed is just, VR is awesome, VR is awesome, VR is awesome.

And I'm just going, no, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. Have some more Kool-Aid, VR people. Exactly. Please keep me employed. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Push is great. Push is great. Nobody's going to use the web anymore. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. That didn't work. Yeah.

No. So, yeah, people aren't digging it. That's just the way it's going to go. I mean, they're going to keep trying until the funding runs out, but I think everybody sees the writing on the wall again. Let me repeat that. Again. Again. Oh, 3D movies are great. Everybody's going to, nobody's ever going to go and want to see a regular movie again.

Yeah. I pay extra to see 2D. Thank you very much. I would, too. I will pay extra to not see a 3D. And by the way, when you go to the 2D showings, empty. Everybody's going for the 3D. I love it. And with the big WWDC keynote, they announced Monument Valley 2.

Did you ever play Monument? You're not a gamer, but it's such a bland game. I thought maybe you would have bought it. I don't know. Is it out in VR yet? No, it is not. Well, if you get two iPads and stick them to your face, maybe you can see it in VR. Monument Valley 1 was beautiful.

Soundtrack was awesome. It was a clever game. It was very beautifully designed. I got through it in, you know, like two hours. And so I went and picked up Monument Valley 2 just to see if it was any better. And it is $4.99 on sale now.

I recommend if you're going to get it, get it now because it's cheap. It is just as well made. The soundtrack is just as beautiful. And it is just as mind-fuckingly boring as the first one. But now it's an escort mission because you have a kid. And nothing says gaming fun like a fucking escort mission.

I thought that was Leisure Suit Larry.

Media Candy. So our kindred sister show from Canada, Geeks and Beats, that was ran for quite a while back in the day. And then they stopped because, you know, no money. They're coming back. I'm pretty excited about that. They return July 5th for their fifth season.

Was this the music one? This is the music and tech one. Alan Cross, who now I've been talking about his ongoing history of new music podcast, was the music element of this. And then there was another guy that did basically the tech side. And they talked about both.

And I talked about them a lot in the first two or three years that we were doing a podcast because they had been out already doing it for a while. So they're the kind of Canadian equivalent of what we were doing. We've since veered more pop culture and tech in general. But they're coming back to do their particular take on things.

And I'm looking forward to it. Oh, cool. I'll check it out. I didn't. I was using Brian's version of watching television when you said that they were going away. I'm like, well, I'm not going to go back and watch it again. Jeez. But if they're coming back with new shows, I'll check it out. And down the rabbit hole, that was the Carrie, Brian, Tori, Bellici, Grant, Imahara TV show.

Oh, the abortion team. Yes, the horrible TV show that they had. I think that they've realized that it wasn't that great. Or the other version, which is you don't get paid crap for basic cable TV anymore. They're taking it on the road and touring it. Now, I think that a live show by them might actually be far better than that horrible TV show was because they can't have all the staged bits.

It'll just be them up there doing whatever they do. So that could be interesting. They are not coming to L.A., so I will not be seeing them anytime soon anyways. But they're taking it out on the road. And you can check out the 1995 HTML2 version of their website.

No, thank you. On all accounts. On every single account. I didn't like them on Mythbusters. I didn't like them on their own show. And live, I can't see why I would like them anymore. Love them on Mythbusters. No, I'd stick with the A-team. Okay.

Dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun. Okay. The Dollop. They did an episode on Uber, which is very strange for them because they're an American history podcast, not a recent events podcast. Yes. And they did a very long episode and covered pretty much everything that we cover.

They had a little bit of funny bits in there and some information that I hadn't even heard of. So it was a good primer on Uber. Now, you had a problem with this episode, which I want to discuss with you here on the show. You know why it was a very long podcast, Jason? Tell me, Brian.

Well, I threw on my headphones. This is before I had my buttons, just my regular headphones. I put my kid in the stroller. I grabbed his water. I grabbed his little snackies. I started out on a walk. I reached into my pocket and I pressed play on this podcast that you wanted me to listen to so badly.

And I started walking and I kept walking and I'm 15 minutes into my walk. I'm 20 minutes into my walk. They are still doing ads 20 minutes into the show. There was no content because I went and listened to the show. The ad stopped at seven minutes and 14 seconds.

So you are completely making this one up. Or listening to a different show. I'm exaggerating. I'm exaggerating. Seven minutes of ads, Jason. All right. Seven. Is seven minutes not ridiculous? Is it not fucking ridiculous? For a two hour podcast? Seven minutes of seven minutes of ads for two hours of content.

You go to the movie theater, you see 25 minutes of trailers before you see an hour and a half movie. Only if you're stupid and you go that early. Now, where are the six minutes and 45 seconds of ads on our podcast then? Because we've only got 15 seconds of goddamn ads and this is a two hour show.

Seven minutes is stunningly stupid. And you're being a hypocrite because I remember we talked about Aisha Taylor's podcast four years ago when we first started this thing, which ran like seven minutes of ads at the beginning, too. And you said that's the dumbest thing you'd ever heard. I remember that clearly. We'll have to go back and listen. No, I don't I don't approve of the ads at the beginning of the show.

I never approve of them. But you were texting me like 15 minutes. I'm not going to listen to the show. I'm like, hit the fucking skip button. You lazy bastard. That's the whole point is I'm walking with a kid. I have my hands are not free, Jason. Well, that's your problem for breeding. So. All right.

Well, I'm a breeder, so I will never listen to the dollop. OK, well, then you're never going to listen to the Nerdist either because you've talked. Those are super long at the beginning, too. Unbelievable. So the next episode I listened to was the Nerdist with T.J. Miller because we had talked about him leaving Silicon Valley and they hit almost nine minutes on their pre-roll ads.

So all I do before I start, I just hit the 30 second skip until I hear that fucking horrible soundtrack and then I know, OK, here's the show. And he's got nine minutes of ads for a 53 minute show. So way worse than the dollop and the dollop just recently started doing ads.

So they don't know what they're doing yet. That's a real big problem. They they I mean, they were number one in the iTunes store. Now they're down. They're still in the top hundred around there just because they've got an insider at Apple. Yeah. And you know who I'm talking about there. I know you listen to this show, you little rat bastard.

But anyway, yeah, they're just learning how to do ads on a show. So they're just going for like three minutes on an ad read that I get for other shows. That's a 45 second read. And they're just like they don't know how to tighten it up and be smart about it. But they've got more listeners than us by like 10 orders of magnitude.

So what are you going to do? But it's a great episode. If you can go next time, get to the beginning of the show before you walk out the door with the kid and then you're fine. And it's a great episode. The T.J. Miller episode, also a great episode. I actually liked him after the Nerdist interview with him.

Okay. I didn't like him before, but now I actually, he kind of lays out his entire reasoning for all of the stuff he does and why he's so weird and just doesn't, he's just like, I want to have fun and enjoy my life. I don't want to get on something to just do it for doing it.

I want to, you know, be interesting. Right. It's pretty cool. Good on him. I recommend just skip before the ads. And if you're starting a podcast, I do recommend going to propodcasting.school and we'll teach you all this there. But yeah, pre-rolls, 15 to 30 seconds of pre-rolls, get to the meat.

Anyway, and somebody who does that well is Maria Konnikova on her new podcast, The Grift. Man, I mean, I love Maria Konnikova. We, we introduced her, not introduced her. We interviewed her on The Art of Charm and I got to know her through that and some of her books.

She's a fantastic writer. She's written a bunch of good books, but this is a 12 episode podcast on Panoply, I believe. And it's all about con artists. It's extremely well-produced and she does 15 second pre-roll for Blue Apron. But then, and I do have my hand on the skip button when it gets to the ad, because if I hear another Blue Apron ad, either read by my friends or anybody else, I'm going to slit my wrists.

But yeah, it's, it's a fantastic show. If you want to learn everything about historical con artists, contemporary con artists, the people who are fighting the cons, it's really well done and really good interviews. Great production quality because it comes from Panoply.

Now their website, on the other hand, let's talk about the website for a second. We made fun of the S town website because it was the S website. This, this rivals that one. This really rivals that one. They haven't even, they couldn't even like use the font tag.

And I'm not even talking about CSS, like, you know, giving it a decent font. They just kind of went, they, they kind of went commando on the font. You know, nobody is spending a dime on web development anymore, which is sad. And this is what, this is what you get.

I mean, this looks as bad as any site that, uh, anybody who didn't know what there was do, what, what they were doing would have developed in 1997. Yeah. It's ridiculous. That's why we, I mean, yes, we're ex web dev. So we put a lot of time and effort into the grumpy old geeks website, not nearly as much as we could.

Let's be honest about that. No, our site's horrible too. Well, the show notes aren't because I spent a, you know, I spent a good amount of time, but if, since I know, don't get all defensive, Jason, you know, you know exactly that. I just mean the overall design. Oh, it's yeah. It's a piece of shit. It's just a wordpress template that we spent 10 bucks on.

Exactly. But, um, we spend time on our show notes because that's what people come back for. So I just know that our numbers for people who come to our website are, you know, 20, 30 X, what most podcasts get, because we do a good job with the notes and we drive people back to it for a reason.

So they can get all the stuff we talk about on the show. Other people look at it as just kind of this side endeavor that, ah, we don't need a website. We just have to have something up there. I'm just like, you know, most podcasts get about one to 2% of their listener base going to the website after an episode, we're closer to, uh, between 10 and 20%.

So we are completely above everybody else. And I, I take pride in that. So when I see these shows that they spend an enormous amount of money on and they just, you know, leave the website off to the side with just no love, it kind of just makes me sad.

It's a bummer. I mean, and if it's, you know, particularly since I could still be making a living doing that sort of stuff, cause I do it very well, but we both do it. Yeah. Yep. No, I mean, both of us are at the top of the fucking game when it comes to web development. I'm not going to, I'm not going to front on that one. We are good at it. Yep.

Yep. Um, but yeah, there's no money. So we're podcasters now. Hey, hey, and we talked last week about, uh, Seth and Chris from the grime life, how they disappeared. Well, apparently we kicked them in the ass. So they released two episodes last week. So good to have you back guys. Yep.

Awesome. Yep. Now let's talk about the Americans, Brian. Okay. You said something last week that went over my head because I didn't really understand the context. Okay. You said, where's Henry? Yes. I finally finished the last season. Love it. Great show. But, uh, you finally, you put a link in this week's show notes that, that explained where's Henry and, uh, other fans of the Americans will find this fucking hilarious.

Cause I, I wasn't, I wasn't sure exactly where you were on the show, so I didn't know if you're going to get it or not. And I, I, again, it's also what you watch a show. You don't really remember when that started to happen. And I seem to remember it being season three, season four. Uh, but yes, please do.

If you've been watching the Americans, uh, and got the, where's Henry quote that I said the other week, uh, go find the link in our show notes. Yeah. It's from vulture.com. Vulture has put together every excuse the Americans has used to hide Henry off screen. I was fucking cracking up because I, I, I, I remembered every single one of the ones in the list.

I'm like, oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah. But when you see it, you can't unsee it. So every time that they say, where's Henry, then you'll just get it. Yeah. It's sad because it's, this isn't a case of like, you know, in previous shows, it would be like, oh, the, the, the, the actress is pregnant or they're having a, a, a, you know, a salary dispute or they just don't know what to do with this character.

This is the writers regretting the fact that they, that these two characters had two kids. They should have just gave him a daughter. Yeah. It's like, they should have just had one kid. Oh, it's very funny. Yeah. It's still a great show. Now that, yeah. And I, I thought you mentioned it because when I was first starting to watch season five, the kid that's playing Henry, I thought he was a different person because he like, because he grew up, he grew up really fast.

And I'm like, cause I didn't want to get it to on the show, but we're, we're going too long on this anyway. But yeah, I thought, I thought that it was around the, they replaced the actor, but it turns out it's the same kid. He just ate his Wheaties. Yeah. Yeah. He just grew up a lot. So okay. Moving on Henry. We're waiting till the Americans till season six and then it's over.

Yes. I watched a movie that's actually been out for a while. I think it came out in 2016 or something. It's on cable right now. War dogs. War dogs. War dogs. It's a true story or based on a true story about some guys that were basically selling arms to other countries and got, you know, hired by the U S government to fund other wars and get together weapons from dealers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It was awesome. It's stars Jonah Hill. Who's extremely fat in this movie. He's starting to just kind of go up and down on weight based on roles. Supposedly, uh, miles Teller plays the other lead who I not aware of from anything else, but he was fantastic. Uh, really enjoyable, interesting movie that shows, uh, the realities of human nature.

Um, it could be a bit depressing, but, uh, I enjoyed the hell out of this great story, great acting, super interesting. I highly recommend this. I think it kind of snuck by the radar with a lot of people. So I think you've got my subliminal message from last week's review, uh, because I was reviewing Brad Pitt's war machine.

Yeah. And at the end of my war machine review, I said, go watch war dogs. It's a hell of a lot better. Oh yeah. I didn't hear you say that at all. So maybe your subconscious did because I thought when I saw this in here, I'm like, Oh, he listened to my recommendation. Apparently not. No.

Brian doesn't listen to anything I say, uh, which is fine because orange is the new meh. I told you that two seasons ago, but I, I mean the first couple episodes I was getting into it, it was interesting. And then it just, okay. There are 13 episodes in the season. Two of them are good.

So you have 11 episodes of filler, which was just boring as all hell. It's not as bad as house of cards. There's nothing as bad as house of cards this season. Oh, I got to tell you, actually, I watched the first episode of house of cards. Oh yeah.

So boring. Let's talk about another first episode. It is, uh, of another show. Would you like to tell us about another, uh, TV show that you watched? We made fun of this when it was first announced. It is Apple's first TV show.

It is called planet of the apps. Oh boy. Uh, I watched it because start as I, as I posted. After I finished watching it, I watched it. So you don't have to, uh, it features Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gary Vaynerchuk, and will.i.am.

We've already talked about Gwyneth and will.i.am earlier on this show as the judges for tech. Now, will.i.am at least has a tech company. Uh, Gary Vaynerchuk seems to actually know what he's talking about. I'm not entirely sure. I know Gary Vaynerchuk, so yes, he does.

And the first episode actually wisely basically just had him and Jessica Alba. I will say at least built her own company. She doesn't, may not necessarily know anything else about tech or anything like that. Coconut water. Well, yeah. Well, look, Gwyneth Paltrow. Come on. Right. If we're talking lesser of two stupid evils.

I, I, that, that's a dead heat. I'm sorry. That's a dead heat. No, I'll take Jessica Alba any day over Gwyneth Paltrow. At least Jessica Alba believes and uses her own shit. And there was, there was one part at the beginning of the episode where Jessica was trying to woo the entrepreneur into what she knows about technology.

And it was a laundry list of bullshit tech terms. She even threw out, I even know how to pivot. I'm like, oh, I want to pull my fucking eyeballs out and throw them against the wall. There was a lot of pivoting going on in this show. It is horrible. It is absolutely horrible. I have to admit my wife liked it.

She thought it was very funny, but even she admitted like, I don't know if I could watch an episode where Gwyneth Paltrow is one of the ones that's picked to help, help the app developers. Because what the hell is she going to bring to the table? And I said, actually, that is the episode I would watch because I think it would be fucking hilarious. No, it's just, it's just like watching Silicon Valley.

Look, if you go back and rewatch the beginning of this, you can see the pained expression on Gary Vaynerchuk's face the entire time because he's like, what the fuck? If I got myself into, I can just see it. It's just like, and the whole premise where, you know, we always talk about in tech industry, you have to have your elevator pitch down.

So if you see a VC in the elevator, you can do your 15 second pitch before you get to the next floor. They took it to the escalator pitch. So they had people come in on this stupid magic carpet ride escalator where they say bullshit for 15 seconds to try and get these people to invest in their vision.

And it's just like, oh, this is everything. This show is everything that is wrong with technology in a really shitty hour long package. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. And we're starting to run long.

So I'm just going to do a couple quick bullet points here. First off, try to watch this episode without this in your mind. Now that I'm going to put it there, watch everybody talk with their hands. Ah, yes. They cannot stop doing it. It started driving me crazy. Secondly, this is the first TV show that Apple has produced.

If you've ever wondered what a TV show would look like with Apple design, this is it. It actually visually is great. It's a shame about the content, but visually, it's pretty fantastic. I would say it was sterile. It's beautiful, but sterile. Well, that's Apple.

Yep. So, yeah. And then the third thing is I would love to know because Apple is producing this. They touched on this briefly in the first episode because the app company that went with Gary, basically Google rolled out their exact concept in the middle of them trying to get funding for their app.

Apple is notorious for stealing app ideas. That's true. Apple is producing this show. How does this work? Does Apple first get first buy rights? Or is this a real show where they're really just going out to VCs? Or does Apple already buy in the first rights? Secondly, what happens if Apple's in mid-development of the exact same concept that one of these Apple developers bring?

I want to see the legal on this. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. I want the right of first refusal clause in this one for sure. Yeah. It's interesting. And what's to stop Apple from seeing some of these people deciding not to put them on the show and just stealing their idea? There's nothing.

Yeah. I'm sure there's no separation of church and state there because you know that those teams are talking. Yep. Oh, God. What a terrible, terrible idea. Great idea for Apple. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Here's our next idea we're going to steal. You'll see it in iOS 12. Thanks. You're fired.

Yeah. I'm a Starship Troopers fan. I make no bones about that. I think it's one of the greatest movies ever made. But this gentleman, well, it's the 20-year anniversary of it. This gentleman, Tim Gonzalez, saw the Starship Troopers trailer and loved it and went back and made it serious.

And it is a beautiful retelling of the trailer. I just really enjoyed it. So if you're a Starship Troopers fan and you want to see what this movie would have been like if it wasn't silly and awesome, then go check out the trailer. I'm a fan of Starship Troopers. I don't understand the cult that surrounds it.

It just came out of left field and it was one of those ones. It's like the fifth element. It's I just love another movie. I don't understand the cult that surrounds it. I know. I know. But I see you like Starship Troopers, but you don't like the fifth element. I think they're both OK. OK.

I think they're both beautifully done. Yeah. Whatever. Moving on. Neil Blomkamp, who was from District 9 fame, unfortunately, from Chappy Infamy, has a new studio called Oat Studio, and they released the first volume of a sci-fi little miniseries they're doing called Rocka.

And I friggin' love this. It was beautiful. It was awesome. Not more than just beautiful. It was dark and it was a great story. And I want to – this is better than 99% of sci-fi movies that come out in the last 20 years. But to be honest, it is kind of ripped off from most sci-fi.

I mean, there was nothing really new in there. But it was a re – it was a well-done retelling of common tropes. OK, people are being bred for this. I mean, there's nothing new in there, but it was well done. It was extremely well done. And I love the villains.

Yep, 20 minutes long, short movie. Supposedly, hopefully, he's going to get people to donate money to his studio, which is like, how about you just use the money that you made from other things? I don't think – did you see Chappy? No, he didn't make it. He's got no money. That's true. He lost all – he lost any money he made with District 9.

I just want District 10. That's it. Give me District 10. I want the rest of this rack. I want more things done in this world. I thought this was fantastic. Slight spoiler alert, so skip ahead 45 seconds if you want to go watch this without anything, without knowing anything about it.

Sigourney Weaver is unbelievable. Yep, absolutely. Oh, my God. I can't believe she was in it, and she was fantastic. Yeah, well, you need a badass sci-fi, babe. Let's go Sigourney Weaver. She's your go-to. Yep. And finally, if you're going to be in Naperville on July 1st, go to Rib Fest, and let's hang out, because I'm going, because I'm going to go see the Romantics, the B-52s, but most importantly, a flock of seagulls.

So come have some ribs and hang out if you're in Naperville, Illinois, on July 1st. At the library. Margaret Atwood has been in the news a lot recently.

Thanks to the Handmaid's Tale being a TV show. And she did a speech a couple of weeks ago, actually just last week, at New York City's BookCon, where she argued that the states obligate women into childbearing. They institute a form of slavery, which is kind of what her book was about.

State-mandated reproduction has two outcomes. She said that women die and that orphanages fill up. And she said, basically, it's a form of slavery to force women to have children they can't afford. Why this was controversial, considering that is the entire point of her entire book that everybody is talking about is beyond me.

But a little bit of people taking it to the next degree, which I loved. Women showed up at the Texas anti-abortion courthouses in Handmaid's Tale costumes to protest. There you go. Very cool. Well done. Yes.

I read The Rise and Fall of Dodo, a novel by Neil Stevenson and Nicole Galland this week. That just came out, and you read that quickly. It was a 25-hour audiobook. That's one of the reasons I didn't have as many stories in the news this week, because I wanted to get through this book and give it a review for the show this week.

Okay. Now, Brian, you have to do a spoiler-free review, because I am in the first chapter. Okay. This is going to be a very spoiler-free review. First half, loved it. Actually, I'm sorry. First quarter, loved it.

Next, 70% wanted to tear my eyeballs out. Last 5% loved it. Okay. This is probably, what, a 1,000-page novel, at least? Oh, God. In standard Neil Stevenson, you know, not really into brevity, fucking Neil Stevenson.

Here's the problem I have. It's part one. Oh, God, no. Not again. It's part one. What happened? I'm going to tell you. Did he change editors at some point? Because he used to write 400 to 500-page books that were phenomenal, and now they're 3,000-page, five-part series that are so fucking boring.

He wrote three short books. He wrote Diamond Age, The Cobweb, and the big one, Snow Crash. Snow Crash. Those are the classics. Now, name my three favorite Neil Stevenson books. Exactly. And The Cobweb, he wrote with his uncle, who probably kept him in check.

Because after that, he went to Cryptonomicon, which was about 700 pages, which you hate, but I love. The next one after that, we get into the Baroque cycle, and then I enjoyed that as well, but I can't do it again. I don't have it in me. I don't have that much life left in me.

You cannot. I'm going to tell you. That's why I asked you before we got on the segment. If you got it on Kindle, fucking return it. Do not read this book. I'm sorry. I love Neil Stevenson's old work, but this is not something that you can get behind, because it is a story that could have been told in 350 to 400 pages.

It just goes down the rabbit hole on every little fucking thing over and over and over again. It's time to accept that now he's just a novelist that we used to love. He is. I know. It's just, I don't know the rest of the lyrics for that song, or I'd have a better come back.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Get rid of it. Do not fall down. I'm sorry, Neil. I love your early work, but you sold out. You sold out to the page god. All right. Your review is now as long as his books are now, so let's move on. I just had to drive that home.

I'm sorry I had to drive it home. So to cleanse my palate on Audible, there's a series of short stories. It's a four-and-a-half-hour audio book of just amazing short stories that don't have to create a universe.

When they're done, they're done. It was the best palate cleanser I could have ever wanted. So it's only available on Audible. You cannot buy it in Word version. Security? Ha!

All right. We're back this week with our resident security expert from the CyberWire, Mr. Dave Bittner. Hello, gentlemen. Good to be back. How's everybody doing? Excellent. Can't complain. Still here. Now, for our new listeners, Dave, could you please explain who you are and what the hell is the CyberWire?

Because apparently it has something to do with the cyber. Well, it does. It does have to do with the cyber, the tubes, the internet, the tubes that connect the internet. We help people protect those tubes. Actually, the CyberWire is a news service. We provide a daily news brief via email, but also a daily podcast.

And it's really just mostly aggregation of all the things you need to know that's going on in cybersecurity for that day. We do some original reporting as well. My job is to produce the daily podcast. So I go out and find interviews with interesting people and just do my part to try to keep everybody informed on what they need to know about cybersecurity.

And somewhere along the lines, I hooked up with you two gentlemen, and we've been having fun here for about a year now, right? Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. I think it's been over a year, I believe. Has it? Yeah. Coming close to it. Something like that. We're not going to get you a gift or anything. Oh, wait.

We already did get you a gift. Never mind. A lovely gift. Yes. A lovely gift. Hopefully it's not a parting gift, but it was a lovely gift. I like to think that Dave brings us a little bit of credibility, and we basically just ruin Dave's entire career elsewhere when he comes on here.

We have to dance around Dave's morality clause. I don't actually have a morality clause. I just like to do the right thing. There's everything. And fucking cut loose. All right. He does now. Yeah, exactly.

Maybe I will now. Dave, can you please come into the office here, please? We need to have a word. Step over to HR for a few minutes here, Dave. Bring a pen. Bring a pen. Right. Exactly. Get that signing hand limbered up. Yeah. All right. Well, let's cut to the news.

All right. Well, the thing that was really top of the news for us this week at the Cyber Wire was this new malware, which is known both as Indestroyer or Crash Override. It seems like Crash Override is the one that's going to stick.

Of course, because everybody's fans of hackers. It's the best movie ever. Come on. So it's an interesting story. We actually had Robert M. Lee, who's the CEO of Dragos, which is one of the key players in this story. They're the company who has really done a lot of the behind the scenes work to figure out what this is and really get the word out to people.

I spoke to him earlier this week. So if you're interested in that conversation, it's on last week's Cyber Wire. You can hunt that down. But the story begins with ESET, which is a Slovakian antivirus company. They were researching this malware, which was originally involved with the Ukrainian power grid hacks back in late 2016, which we all may remember.

So it was serious events where power systems were shut down. So each set had copies of this and had determined that this was indeed the malware that was used for that. They were about to publish a report on it. And one of the things that happens when companies like this publish reports is quite often they will send the report out to members of the press ahead of time with an embargo, an agreement that no one will talk about it until the publication date.

So several of the people who they sent it to, the reporters contacted Dragos and said, what do you think about this? Dragos is a very well-known, very well-respected company when it comes to industrial control systems. Those are the systems that control things like electrical grids, like dams, like nuclear power plants, you know, all those sorts of things.

Like things that go boom. Things that could go boom. Yeah, things that we really need for our regular day-to-day lives, things like power and water and heat and natural gas, all those sorts of things fall under that category. So the folks at Dragos – Before you continue, I just want to point out that Dragos is one of the coolest names for a company I think I may have ever heard in this space.

They really did a good job naming this company. It's very – it feels like it's right out of a movie. I got to say, when they go to central casting, they don't have to change their name at all. Yeah, no, it is. And they are cool people. Robert is a cool guy, and they take this stuff seriously.

And so the Dragos folks took a look at it and determined that, yeah, actually this was a really serious thing, is a really serious thing. But it's not the end of the world. In my conversation with Robert Lee, he was saying that it's very serious, it needs to be taken seriously, but it's not the kind of thing that's going to cause a cascading takedown of the electrical grid.

It could cause systems to go out for a few hours, possibly a few days. It is an extensible malware, so while it's currently set up to handle systems overseas, it could be easily modified to take down systems here in the United States.

So to their credit, Dragos, before they released their report on it, over the course of about 96 hours, they analyzed this piece of malware, started contacting everyone in the industrial control system world to say, here's what you need to know about this, this is serious, here's what you can do to fix it.

And then actually published a report about it last week. And hats off to Dragos for really, you know, having several days of what I'm guessing are sleepless nights to get the word out about this potentially serious thing. Yeah, but this is what these guys live for.

When you have something cool like that to jump into, I'm sure that they were having a good time with it. Yes, I will say when I spoke with Robert, I think he was still riding a little bit of a combination of an adrenaline high and also total exhaustion. But you know what?

I mean, how cool to be the good guy, right? Yeah. It's so rare nowadays. Yeah. Yes, it is. Right. Well, we have some more news that has come out this week. Now, I know we live in a very split society, half of which thinks that this never happened at all.

The other half was pretty sure it did. We do know that there was a Russian cyber attack on the U.S. electoral system prior to Donald Trump's election. It has now come out that this is much, much, much more widespread than previously publicly revealed. We're finding out that there have been incursions into voter databases, software systems in over 39 states now, which that's more than half, guys.

Yes, it is. I just want to know how to do math. What's 39 in Russian? I don't know how that works. Yeah. Just, you know, this is a very serious thing that has happened. They got very, very deep. Campaign finance databases in at least one state were directly accessed as well as software designed to be used by poll workers.

They have found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete and or alter voter data. We have not been told whether that was successful or not yet. But this is starting to become a much more serious deal than anybody ever even – even those of us that were on the doom and gloom side weren't quite expecting this much.

Well, and voter data does not equal votes. So let's make that clear from the outset. Yet. But – Yet. But, you know, I think this – the Russians so far as we know with this has been very much about information operations or influencing people rather than actually changing votes so far as you say.

Yeah, but up until a week ago, we didn't think they ever got in. So, like I said, yet. Yeah. I mean it's an excellent point. I thought one of the fascinating things in this story was the description of the kind of virtual red phone between the U.S. and Russia where the Obama administration basically said, hey, knock it off.

And the article even speculates that that may have been why – a possible reason why they didn't go further than they did because when we discovered what they were up to and said, hey, we know what you're doing, knock it off. Perhaps they backed off a little bit.

Perhaps not. How does the timeline intersect with when we kicked all of the spies out of the country? Is there a close correlation? I think we – I don't think we'd know this off the top of our head, but we'd have to look that up and see. Yeah, I think the spying – no, I think the spying – Spying happened a good bit later.

Wouldn't surprise me if they're all a little bit interrelated. Certainly, all of this stuff with the election got our – as the Obama administration was on their way out, this certainly got their dander up when it came to the Russians. And, of course, even then there were these – the speculation and reports coming in all the time about the possible connections between President Trump – at the time, President-elect Trump – and his folks with the connections.

And, of course, day by day, those connections aren't doing anything but getting stronger, it would seem. Yeah, it seems like everybody seems to be lawyering up right about now. Yes, they are. Interesting. Well, this is an ongoing story, so we will keep covering it as it comes out.

Indeed. So we also found out about that if you've got a spare $500 around and a little bit of dark web knowledge, you can basically start to get everybody's text messages if you'd like. Oh, really? Yes, there is a Tor hidden service that is offering ongoing access to telecom's private SS7 networks for as little as $500 a month.

These are apparently a notoriously vulnerable network that experts have been mourning about for a long time. And assuming now that there's actually a go-plug-in-your-credit-card-and-pay-for-service hack to it, they'll probably start to try to fix it now. Maybe. They're not really – I mean, when was the last time they really actually tried to fix any of this stuff?

Yeah. Well, I just find it – I find the menu of services that they're offering interesting. $250 to intercept calls or texts, $500 for full access, $150 for cell phone reports, including location data and IMSI numbers. And if you've got some serious cash, you can pay $5,500 for direct access to the full port.

Build is everything you need to start your own service. Nice. It's a starter kit. All right. Let's franchise. I think, yeah, this is one of those networks that it seems like once you're in, you're in. Once you're in the gate, there's not a whole lot stopping you from getting what you need.

And I suspect a big part of this is it's probably one of those – I admit I don't know a whole lot about the details of the SS7 network. But my – I'm guessing that it's one of those legacy networks that were – it was designed without the volume of traffic that it gets or anyone imagining that it was going to get pounded on the way it probably does from a security point of view.

I would guess if you order these services, you've probably committed a crime, I would guess. Maybe. But it's on the dark web. So if it happens on the dark web, does it really happen? I mean this is also just good up for your straight up basic stalker services.

Well, exactly. Yeah. I would imagine private detectives would be all over this. That's not a lot of money to get a full listing of someone's text messages and calls, but the tracing back, if you're discovered buying these services, I wonder what you'd be in for.

Maybe one of our listeners knows. I'd imagine, yeah, you'd be in trouble. I couldn't imagine you'd be able to use this as a private investigator in court. Right. Right. So who knows? Yeah. The interesting thing, this is – I mean this is a protocol that was developed in 1975. Well, there you go.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they weren't real big on security back then. But hey, you know what? If you have an iPhone and you use iMessage, then you're probably doing okay. You don't have to worry about it. But if you've got that old burner phone like an old Motorola Razr, then – oh, shit, I've got one in my closet. Damn it. Oh, who are you kidding?

You've got one in your pocket. That's not what's in my pocket, baby. Oh, here we go. Zing. Hey, now. Well, it's good to know that we're behind the ball on security on things that are way in the past, like these 1970s networks, as well as things that are happening right now and in the future that we just don't seem to think about.

USA Today came up with this. This is an exclusive for USA Today, which is shocking in and of its own right. But documents obtained from the Justice Department through the Freedom of Information Act have uncovered more than a dozen attempts, some successful, to transport contraband, including mobile phones, drugs, and porn, into federal prisons using drones.

We covered this three years ago, so wait for USA Today to really get on the bandwagon. I was going to say, I know I'd heard this about this sort of thing before, and I mean, it makes total sense. Somebody landed one of the DJIs full of, like, drugs in the middle of the yard about three years ago.

And we're like, well, where's the riot? You know? I mean, that's a high-tech pinata. Well, if you consider the DJI disposable, which it seems like, in this case, it could be, just fly it in, you know, let it land.

Now, the other thing, I actually have a DJI drone, so I've played with one of these. I don't know if you guys have. But, boy, you get them up there, they are capable of quite a bit of altitude, where it's just a little speck in the sky, still fully controllable from the ground, but you can't hear it when it's that high up.

So, by having some sort of triggering system on it to just get it to drop something, drop a bag or, you know, whatever, a memory card full of porn, I suppose, or a bag full of drugs. Well, you know, if you listen to the new Amazon patent, then you just put a little parachute on it, and you can just drop whatever you like.

Yeah, but my point is... And hope that the wind isn't blowing. Yeah, you could be quite stealthy about this. And, of course, the newer ones actually have GPS waypoint capabilities, so you could just put in the coordinates of where you want it to go to. It'll fly over, stop very precisely, trigger it to drop whatever it's going to do, and off you go.

The thing about the DJIs that you have, though, is they have waypoints built in that are on no-fly zones, like local airports and things like that. So, how long is it going to take for them to put prisons on the no-fly zone? Well, that's true. If you have one of the newer ones, some of us have the older ones that don't have those restrictions built into them.

And some people never update their software. Right, exactly. Exactly. But the other thing, there are companies who are making devices that are supposed to be able to block these devices, block the drones.

And I'm on a discussion board about people who have these drones. I sort of lurk because I'm interested in what the legal stuff is with them. And these people wonder, how can it be legal for someone to jam a flying lawnmower?

Yeah. Right? That turns it into just a mortar. Right. And then they're using unlicensed spectrum. It's not like it's on any particular frequency. How can the FCC be okay with a company making a device that senses a drone, targets it, with some of them just sort of bombard it with RF, so everything on the drone is overloaded?

That smells like a felony to me. I think so, too. And yet, there are these companies who, this is precisely the thing that they're selling. And maybe the trick is they're selling it to law enforcement and the military. So, in the same way that I'm continuously scratching my head over the Stingray devices that are able to simulate a cell tower with no interference from the FCC, maybe that's the answer to the

question, is that if you're law enforcement, even if it may technically not be okay, nobody's going to come after you for it, unless maybe a case happens. If they took one of these down and it fell into a crowd full of, I don't know, a stadium full of people, let's say, and people actually got injured, well, then maybe we'd have a legal case and someone would test this stuff.

But for now, this is another one that just leaves me scratching my head. See, this is why in Europe they're still using eagles, because, you know, the eagles can grab it and land it. See, my entire idea back in the day was I want t-shirt cannons with nets and parachutes. That's all you need.

You need a good, solid t-shirt cannon or, you know, for long range, maybe modify a potato gun and just have a net with a parachute. So it goes out, captures the drone in the net, and then just brings it gently down to the ground. Oh, yeah. I have seen net launchers for drones.

It seems like that would have limited range. Ah, but if you mount it to another drone, which we've also covered on the show, there have been, you know, quadcopters, not quadcopters, octocopters with t-shirt cannons on them with nets and parachutes.

So people have taken the idea and run with it. But yeah, I think, you know, drone rays and just taking over spectrum, I think that's a bad idea. I think so, too. What if one of the prison guards or the warden has a pacemaker and you've just jammed his pacemaker?

Uh-oh. Now you're in trouble. Right. Right. Or even, you know, wireless video cameras or something like that. There's a reason why you're not allowed to just set up a spark gap generator and just, you know, jam spectrum. You just can't do it. So I don't know. We'll see. Again, it's one of those things that leaves me scratching my head.

Okay. Well, we've talked in the past about Mac malware and ransomware and how we've never seen it really in the wild and we can't find anybody that has been infected with it. Right. In the news this week, there is a new Mac ransomware as a service out there that everybody's talking about.

But yet again, this is still not out in the wild. This whole evil as a service thing really seems to be a growing field. You know, it all started with WordPress. I'm just going, it all started with WordPress and just taking it and run with it.

I like that. You know, I think you, is evil as a service available as a domain name? No, we've got a show title. I definitely think we have a show title. There you go. So much for pinata drones, evil as a service. Yeah. Evil as a service. I like it.

I don't even think this really can be categorized as ransomware as a service because really what these folks are doing is kind of custom making, I guess you tell them what you want and they'll spin up a version of ransomware for you.

But typically these, these as a service things are kind of, you pay them money and they take care of everything behind the scenes. This doesn't seem to be that. But do we tell them what we want, what we really, really want? I'd tell them what I want, what I really, really want. Jesus.

Sorry. I want to encrypt. I want to encrypt. I want to encrypt. That's good. So Patrick Wardle is one of the researchers who's taken a look at this. I've actually had the opportunity to see him speak a couple of times. There's a really nice security conference out our way.

It's called Jailbreak. It's at a brewing company called Jailbreak. So you get to listen to these security researchers give their presentations while drinking beer, which is a nice way to spend a day. And it's right down the road from NSA. So you can guess who comes to this thing.

But Wardle took a look at this and I like, he basically said, this is a really bad piece of malware. It's just, you know, no, actually, let me get it right. He said, this is a rather lame piece of ransomware. Okay. And what's interesting about it is that you are not going to get your files back.

The cryptography that it uses uses a randomizer on its static key. So I was going to say Rand. Yeah. Yeah. It just, it just generates a random number. And so there is, and it does not communicate with any sort of command and control server.

So if you get hit by this, other than a brute force attack, you're not getting your files back. This should be just be called FU wear. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting also, Patrick Wardle, he has a tool for the Mac called ransomware.

That's W-H-E-R. And basically it's a tool that you run on your Mac that looks for a suspicious process running. So it, it keeps track that if anything starts encrypting files, if a process spin ups, spins up that starts encrypting files, it stops that process, throws up a, an alert that says, Hey, somebody's encrypting files.

Do you want to allow this or terminate the process? That's a free utility that he has on his website. But I don't, I mean, again, as we've said, we haven't heard of anybody being hit by this in the wild so far. So 25 years of using Macs, all my friends use Macs, not a single person at this point has come forward by saying they've ever had a Mac virus or any malware.

So, and we all run ass to the wind. So pretty much. And we probably all went, yeah, I'm guessing all three of us at some point in time probably went through a BitTorrent phase. Yeah. Went through. Back in my youth, I went through a BitTorrent phase. I've grown up since then.

I would never, I would never, ever go to Scandinavian countries and do various things. No, no, no, no. Of course not. No, no, no, never would. I got a Goobang box for that now. That's true. We've got dedicated things now. We don't have to do that on our Macs anymore. Yeah.

Geez. There you go. We do have a little bit of breaking news. My mole over at Symantec just sent me something. The latest Vault 7 documents have revealed the CIA firmware for hacking home routers. Apparently, they've had the ability to hack home Wi-Fi routers and use them to monitor and manipulate incoming and outgoing traffic, as well as infect all connected devices.

These were leaked yesterday. The CIA has had this ability since 2007, apparently, with devices from 10 manufacturers, including all the biggies, as being susceptible to CIA hacking. And it can also be used, it's using, it's being called cherry blossom, apparently.

It can be used remotely. And even routers with strong passwords can be compromised as an exploit dubbed tomato can be used to extract the credentials. So that's fun. Yeah, we covered this, as you said, it broke late in the week when the Vault 7, the latest release from Vault 7 came out.

And this is one of those things where, you know, as these IoT attacks often are, there'd be no reason for you to suspect that anything was going on because your router, which is basically an appliance, would just keep doing everything that it was supposed to be doing. And more.

You wouldn't know the difference. Yeah. And more. But I think another interesting point that someone else brought up, not that this is necessarily defensible of what's going on, but in order for the CIA to take the effort to install this on your router, you would have to be someone that the CIA would be interested in.

So this isn't sort of a, I guess my point is, this isn't a mass surveillance kind of thing. This isn't vacuuming up all of the, you know, traffic from the internet and sorting through it. This allows them to target people of interest. I don't know. We don't really know anything about how the CIA used it.

So we don't know if a warrants were required or, you know, anything like that. But yeah, these Vault 7 drops are, continue to be interesting. Yeah. Yes, they are. Oh, joy, joy, joy. I'm sticking with my Chinese routers. Yeah.

At least you know where it's going. What could possibly go wrong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, thanks for scaring the bejesus out of us this week. I'm going to go not buy a drone. Oh, all right. I'm going to go watch you do that through your camera. Okay. I'm going to watch you all do that with my drone.

Oh, man. Oh, this is getting creepy. We have a new Patreon subscriber, Martins Zaboroskiews, which we will hear about from again recently. Not recently. Soon. Wow. That was some time travel there in my mind.

I know. I ran out. I had to run up and down the stairs, so my brain is still catching up. Okay. Well, thank you, Martins. We appreciate it. We have some comments from our website, GOG.show. The first is from Tom Madison. Hello, gentlemen. I somehow found Grumpy Old Geeks and started listening at episode 200 and loved it.

Thank you. The news and humor is great, and the recommendations are really helpful. I picked up the Scalzi book, Red Shirts, which you recommend in episode 210, and read it in one night. Thank you again for a fantastic podcast. You're welcome. Thank you, Tom. Thank you very much. This next one comes from Anon. Hi, geeks.

Love your show. Staying anonymous because I like my job. I wanted to sound in on the Placed acquisition by Snap. I work in digital media, specifically mobile shopper marketing, and I buy ad space on behalf of large CPG brands, and we often use Placed for a third-party measurement study.

And here's a link to their site, and it is a link to how Placed works. Did you go through this link? I did. What did you think? I still don't understand how it actually works. I still think it's smoke and mirrors and not direct tracking. It is. It's lies.

It's totally smoke and mirrors. What they're doing is inference. They're using inference to actually try and place somebody at a store, and they're playing the odds. That's all they're doing. They don't have direct tracking. You know what inference is? It's a guess. Yeah, it's exactly what it is. That's what the word means.

Okay, here's the long. That's such bullshit. The internet is so full of shit. Okay, there's a lot of stuff that he keeps writing, but here's the important part. I definitely have my doubts, especially with their data sources.

Okay, done. Okay. Thank you, Anon. Nailed it. No, actually, I appreciate it because nobody really explained how this stuff – or we didn't see any explanations or anything like that. So I very much appreciate you sending this information in. But it is utter crap.

Even you, Anon, have to admit this is bullshit. He did. He didn't say that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So anyways, moving on. Now we hear from Martins, who graciously donated to our Patreon. Hi. I am listening to your podcast for some time now. It is – obviously, we have some language issues going here.

He's from Latvia. It's from Latvia, but I don't want to read it like I'm doing What's-His-Face's character from Taxi either. Yeah, don't read it like Borat. It is not – it is the only – it is the only podcast not pure IT security related. You can guess what I heard about your podcast. So my wife said it is only normal podcast as I torture her with my podcast every morning going to work and back.

Mostly, she enjoys the TV and books parts. Time to times, when I'm thinking about some things I would like to share with you, but since mostly I listen to podcasts when driving, when I reach home, I feel lazy to do it. I get that totally. Yep. I always think about things for this podcast when I'm biking and I come home and I forget to write them down, and that's that.

So let's see. In the last podcast, you mentioned doing small investments. That was the thing I was also interested in, but I think I found something better. eToro social investment platform or something like that, and he provides the link, eToro.com. You can start with $100, but the nice thing is you can copy some full-time traders.

That is a cool feature, actually. That's very cool. And last week, some girl from the UK made $108 for my $100. All fancy stuff aside, eToro wants all my friends to join. Shocking. So if you like the service, you can use my referral link. He provides that. And you and me, too, will get $20 in the first deposit.

If you will join, you can follow me at MartinsZB. Martins from Latvia. Thank you so much for writing. It's awesome that you're listening. I'm sorry that you put your wife through so much pain, but I'm glad that we can help her sometimes. And that's very cool. I'm going to check out eToro and take a look at it. So I love that idea that you can actually copy other full-time traders and what they're doing.

That's very cool. It is very cool. I'm looking at it now. And they just have an announcement at the top that you can invest in Ethereum on their site, which is interesting. So I wonder if you can do Bitcoin as well, because cryptocurrencies took a giant shit this week. Time to pick some up if you're feeling naughty.

You're feeling lucky. This one comes from another tech geek. Hey, guys, I'm traveling to the U.S. from Mexico in a couple of weeks due to business, and I'm worried about U.S. airport security checking my personal phone. Would there be a way to take my everyday phone with me but still have some privacy? I would not like to take a burner phone with me since my only available burner phone sucks.

I wish I remembered the exact episode numbers that we talked about this on. We talked about it a couple of times. We had Dave Bittner chime in. So you might want to just do a search on GOG.show for that. We talked about 1Password rolling out their feature and how it was kind of, frankly, a load of crap.

Jason basically decided that you should just never travel. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Stay home. Fuck it. You know, your options are to ship your stuff there. My thing would be pull off everything that really matters to you that you think is going to get you in trouble.

Stick it in the cloud and download it when you get back, get where you're going. But, you know, all of this happened and Jason put in a huge list of advice, which will be in our show notes. We're not going to go through it all. No, no, no. Yeah. This is that you can take a look at. But then, you know, this is all we put all this stuff in about your question.

We thought about it right before the guy in Pakistan got sentenced to death over a Facebook post, which highlights exactly how important this stuff is starting to get. So, yeah. So Bruce Schneier, who runs a newsletter called Cryptogram, he had an article this week called Passwords at the Border by Bruce Schneier, obviously.

And he has a ton of links in here. I'm going to put all these links in the show notes so you can check them out and definitely go back and listen to our previous episodes. Because since you're coming from Mexico, a lot of the rules, I think that now, actually, if you lied to a federal agent in the U.S., it's still against the law because you'll be in the U.S.

Never mind. Yes, that will still apply. Yeah, yeah. You're still going to be. There's no loophole if you leapt over the border wall that Trump's putting up. So, yeah. So check out all these links. Yeah. But what Brian said, take everything off, put it in the cloud, pick it up when you get here and then take it off before you fly back and just keep it clean.

Yeah. Keep it clean. Next up from Brian, in response to episode 213 on Affinity Photo. Affinity Photo is on both Mac and Windows and works wonderfully on both. They also have an Illustrator replacement in Affinity Designer for Mac and Windows. They are also working on an InDesign replacement, but that has not yet been released.

Thanks for that. I haven't actually checked it out yet, but I should because I'm still doing my annoying subscription to Adobe. Yeah, I'm going to check it out on the Mac for sure because I'm using Pixelmator on the one machine, but I was playing with Affinity Photo on the iPad. It is so cool. So next one comes from Ivor Davies, a friend of the show.

Hi, guys. Saw this on TechCrunch today, and it reminded me of Brian's serendipitous discovery of the Hawaiian music station in episode 213. Forgotify only plays Spotify songs that no one has ever played before. I love this. I'm almost positive we talked about this. We have talked about this for sure.

You brought this up maybe 100 episodes ago, but this is not new for sure, but it is very cool. Yeah, it's very funny. I just like the forgetify, forgotify, forgetify. I guess it's forgotify because it's no. Searches through Spotify and finds all songs that have zero plays playing only the songs that no one else has ever listened to.

The interesting thing about this, if you want to start to get cosmic, is once you've launched this and listened to that song, it now has a play, and you will be the only person that ever got to listen to it on forgotify. Exactly. Yeah. It's very ephemeral. It's very ephemeral. Blows your mind. Blows your mind. The other really interesting fact that came out of this article was certainly there can't be that many songs that have never been played on Spotify.

Oh, boy, you'd be wrong. According to data that Spotify released in October of last year, 80% of the 20 million or so songs on Spotify have been listened to at least once. That means over 20% of the recorded content available on Spotify has not ever been listened to. That's over 4 million songs with zero plays.

Sadly, none of them are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Or Rage Against the Machine. I don't mind, Rage. Okay, we got an iTunes review from BeCosta76, and he's from Portugal, and I love this. Kurt, to the point.

Title, Best Tech Podcast. Description, Best Tech Podcast. We love you, BeCosta76. Best Tech Commentator. Yes. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG. GoG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And please do tell a friend. Closing shout-outs! My first shout-out this week goes to my co-host, Brian Schulmeister.

Happy Father's Day, Brian. Oh, hey. Thanks, man. Yeah. You're a first-time father, so happy Father's Day. Enjoy those AirPods if you ever get them before next Father's Day. They'll be here in September. What my wife, my wife is very smart. She said, I think I know what you'd like to, how you'd like to spend Father's Day alone without your family drinking beer.

And I was like, yeah, that sounds perfect. And not just Father's Day, honey. Well, it's the one day I can get away with it, apparently. Yeah. And my other shout-outs go to Steve Couch, who is basically a media mentor and has helped us with some stuff recently.

And he's a great guy. And if you're doing a podcast and want to take your game to the next level, go check him out at couchmedia.com. But if you want to learn how to podcast, go to propodcasting.school, because this week, coming up, you'll be able to sign up with the early bird discount for my new class that will be launching July 18th.

It is going to be massive. So get in. Get your discount now. There's my personal plug. There you go. Canvas On Demand. We've talked about them on the show before. We gave a beautiful canvas to Dave Bittner of the Cyber Wire of our show art, and I've got many in my house. They screwed up and sent my canvases to the wrong address and then said I got on support.

And within five minutes, they're like, OK, we're sorry. We're going to send you a new set to your house. And if you can get the old ones back, you can have those, too. Customer service still fucking exists. Speaking of great customers. Well done. Yeah. I was amazed. They're like, here you go. Sorry. And Quip, the service that we're using for our show notes now, I wrote to them and said, hey, we missed this thing.

We need this thing. And they're like, oh, we're working on that. And it's not going to be ready for a while. But here, I put you on the beta. So now you can use it. And they were great. And they took all of the suggestions that I sent over and they sent them to the engineering team. And I've actually got emails from the engineering team asking how they could implement with what they're doing now.

So those guys, even though they're owned by Salesforce.com, a giant conglomerate, are on their game. So thank you, Quip. You know, technically, that whole second part where we're actually improving their product for them, they should be paying us for that. I'm just saying. Welcome to the world. We should not be paying them to use the product and then telling them from our 40 years combined experience of how to make their product so much better because we know how to make their product better.

And we're giving it to them for free. But, hey, yeah, whatever. Guys, if you're listening over at Quip, a couple months free wouldn't go amiss. Just saying. No, it kind of wouldn't. Anyways, a couple quick shout outs. As we went off on our Neil Stevenson rant and we talked about only his older books that were really good, we did leave off the one book that we both loved that was recent.

I mean, and by loved, I mean we both loved Seven Eaves. I half loved. You loved. I half loved. I loved the whole damn thing. I thought it was great. So I do want to point that out because I'd also, you know, people listen to this show and they're going to go, hey, you guys love Seven Eaves. What the hell are you talking about?

So that did come to mind. So it wasn't it wasn't Seven Eaves actually the beginning of another series that he hasn't done yet. Well, Seven Eaves laid the groundwork for another book. As we discussed, he did create the whole world and I want there to be more books, but as of now, there's no plans for them to be.

So we will see. So I also want to give a shout out to friend of the show, Karen, a wife of friend of the show, Fergal. It is Karen's 40th birthday. Happy birthday, Karen. I am headed over to her 40th birthday party as soon as we wrap this up. So that'll be fun. And finally, a shout out again to Adam West and to the city of Los Angeles, which actually did something kind of cool.

The city of L.A. lit the bat signal on City Hall Thursday night in honor of Adam West. That's very, very cool. Did you get to see it? Did you see it from where you are? No, I'm no, that's downtown, man. I know, but I'm at I'm at the beach on a clear night. You can see the, you know, Mexico or Russia or whatever they say.

So I didn't know if you could see it from there. No, I did not. But there are some lovely photos. There's a link in the show notes. So until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

If you're an app person, you can listen to us on the podcast one app for iOS and Android. Get it at podcastone.com slash apps or go get Overcast. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air.

To learn more about all the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 214. You know, you come up with a good saying like that. That's that's drop the mic stuff. OK, at least that's that. Not so much drop the mic.

It wasn't that good, but it was in the segment. OK, I stole that. I didn't make it up. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home and culinary all in one place.

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