215: I Have a Bad Feeling About This

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. How about a little follow-up? So I've been using the Will.i.am buttons, my Bluetooth headphones. This is the first time I've ever used a Bluetooth headset and I've got to say battery drain is ridiculous on the phone. Ridonkulous.

You said you had an app that worked with your Bluetooth headphones, right? With these Will.i.am ones? The app is coming soon because it's going to have an AI in your ear, of course. Okay. I thought maybe the app was doing it because I've used Bluetooth headphones before and I've never had a problem with battery drain.

Don't know why. I can't tell you anything with any comparison because my Apple ear pods have not arrived yet and it's going to be another at least month before those get here. But for whatever, I mean, I watch the battery just as I'm using these. It's bad. I don't travel like I used to, but I would not be able to do what I used to do, you know, travel, walk around a city all day doing meetings, that sort of thing. I would not be able to use these.

That's insane. Yep. Like you said. Yes. I'm just wondering if it is a function of just those, like those specific Bluetooth headsets, because I don't have that problem at all. My battery still lasts forever and I keep Bluetooth on all the time.

I will let you, I will give you an update in a month when I finally get the AirPods. We'll see what happens. Okay. Please do. And I've got an update on the stickers. Thanks for everybody that's been writing in and sending your addresses. This next week, I will be sending out all the stickers that we have addresses for. So keep an eye out for those. Even the international folks will be getting them.

We don't know how long that takes. I don't know how long it takes to get a sticker to Latvia, but we'll find out. We're going to find out. And if you're listening to this on Monday or Tuesday, then the sign up page for the Pro Podcasting School will be live. So you can go sign up for some early bird discounts if you're into learning how to podcast from the likes of guys like me.

So cannot wait. Yeah. ProPodcasting.school. Now, last week, Brian, we talked about Planet of the Apps, the new TV show from Apple. We did. We did. You had a very interesting question about how Apple is going to be handling some aspects of the contestants and their business practices.

Well, as we know from doing the show for a few years, Apple is kind of known for basically stealing. Well, they open up an app store, they let you develop an app, and then they find the things that are doing really, really well and make a lot of sense. And then they basically bake it into their own operating system and say, screw you guys.

Yep. Sherlock, Flux. I was wondering, well, Apple is now producing a show that is basically finding people with good app ideas. How's this going to play out? And shockingly, we're only one episode of the damn show. And what happened, Jason? Yeah. The guy who did his own AR, you know, the one that he said that nobody can do this kind of thing because the people are too smart and we have them all.

That idiot. Well, guess what? I didn't even think about this, but when we talked about ARKit at the, you know, the WWDC keynote that came out last week. And yeah, that ARKit pretty much blows that guy's business, entire business, out of the water.

Yes. So Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. Now, this honestly was not like specifically geared because this guy made a great app. This is just the evolution of AR. He just didn't happen to think far enough ahead to think that Apple was actually going to step up their AR game this well, this quick.

Yeah. I mean, Apple is basically releasing a toolkit that will let you build what he built and, you know, basically said was more important than his family in a matter of hours. Mm-hmm. Yep. So that guy, all those smart guys that he like found off the street to build his super app. Well, I guess you're all out of a job.

Yeah. If I were you and I had an app, I would not go on Planet of the Apps and not just because Gwyneth Paltrow can't do crap for you. In the news. Brian, I think we have finally come to a culmination of all of our efforts to talk about Uber over the past two years because Travis Kalanick is gone, gone, gone.

You'd think I'd be happy. Okay. Why are you not happy, Brian? Because he won. I mean, can you imagine anything better than this? He no longer has to work. He still gets a crap ton of money.

He's a billionaire. He is. He is Marissa Meyer-ed himself into a fantastic life where all you did was fail, fail, fail, treat people like shit, break every societal contract, screw people left, right and center. And now you get to go sit on a beach that you just bought.

Yep. He can go buy New Zealand. Whatever. I'm glad he's gone. It's about freaking time. Is he really gone? Who knows? He's on the board. Who's taking his place? We don't know. He's on the board still, so. You know, Ariana Huffington's got it well in hand, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yes, in the heaven room or wherever the hell she's hiding away taking a nap.

So, yeah, I had a mini party. I was... It's about freaking time, right? I mean, this guy was a joke. He wasn't a joke. He was a jerk. Yeah, well, there. Joke and jerk. He's a lot of J's. And apparently, you know, a lot of the employees really don't want him to leave, so they're actually signing a petition.

More than 1,000 of their 12,000-plus employees have signed a petition to keep him around. Now... Why? And the petition says he worked day and night in creating this company to what it is today. You mean a giant douche nozzle of a company? Well, that says it right there.

The company that he created is the one that everybody hates. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. But again, is it? Have people stopped using the app? No. Some have. They're down several percent. But the problem is, now that he's gone and it's raising the PR profile, people will go back to it thinking everything is hunky-dory.

That's right. So, you know, I'm glad he's gone. I don't think it solves a lot of problems. I think we need to look at the entire culture of Silicon Valley, not just the disruptional aspect and people not caring what that's going to do to the world and to everybody else.

But obviously, I mean, the misogyny is ridiculous. The sexism is ridiculous. The lack of any kind of sense of personal responsibility for what your company is doing is ridiculous. The God complexes that are running around is ridiculous. And it's not just Uber.

Same week, Silicon Valley investor Justin Caldback is taking a leave of absence in the wake of sexual harassment allegations. He's a well-connected venture capitalist who runs the investment firm Binary Capital. They worked with people like Snapchat in the early day, another wonderful company, early on the day.

Over six women now in the tech industry have accused him of sexual harassment, including unwanted late-night text messages, basically, which would, in and of itself, no big deal. That is what it is, except for the fact that he was leveraging his position of power in exchange for sexual gain.

It wasn't just, hey, check out my dick. It was, hey, want that money? Check out my dick. There's a difference. There is a difference, but hey, it comes from the top down, right? Grabbing my pussy. Yeah, that's true. So this is a world where this is kind of okay, except it's not, you know, you have to, this is, in the 80s, it was, you went to rehab, right?

Now it's, you take a leave of absence. This is, this is what you do when you get caught being an ass. Yeah, or grab an ass. Or grab an ass, or trying to grab ass. Apparently, this guy didn't even get any. Good. Instant poontang karma. Yes. Speaking of cars, remember we talked about Juno.

Yes. The ride-hailing app that was going to give stock back to the drivers because they were the good guys. Yes. To be the good guys to Uber's Darth Vader, they were going to, you know, not only will you come drive for us, and yes, of course, obviously, we're going to fire you eventually when we have self-driving cars. But to keep that out of your mind, we're going to give you stock options.

So if we do well, you'll be able to, you're never going to have enough stock options to be able to retire, not work. So I don't know what you're going to be able to do anyways. But go ahead. Well, they were acquired by a Tel Aviv company named Get, G-E-T-T, for $200 million earlier this year. Right.

And immediately nullified its equity program. Boom. Gone. Yep. And they promised to do some payouts, but they cashed out at less than 2% per share. So, yeah, they got screwed. And now they're going to sue. The drivers are going to sue, which is good for them. They're not going to get a damn thing, but good for them.

Yeah, you're not going to get anything out of this lawsuit. But, yeah, you should sue. Gotta fight. Preemptively sue to stop people from trying to do this in the future. That's my opinion. No sue-y, no get-y. Exactly. And we talked with the self-driving cars and all of that sort of thing.

The Tesla crashed last year. Has it already been a year? It's been a year, man. Yeah. Wow. Time flies. Yeah, May 2016. Yes, this is the man killed in a crash last year while using the semi-autonomous driving system on his Tesla Model S, which made the big news at the time and got Tesla in some trouble.

Well, the NTSB has studied this. There are over 500 pages of findings. This was in May of 2016, last year. And basically, the NTSB has come out and said, Tesla has absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for this guy. It was a 37-minute period of the trip when the driver was required to have his hands on the wheel.

And the autonomous system repeatedly was saying, put your hands on the wheel, put your hands on the wheel, put your hands on the wheel, put your hands on the wheel. For a 37-minute period of time, he had his hands on the wheel for 25 seconds. Because he had his fingers in his ears the whole time telling, I'm not listening.

I'm not listening. Yeah. So, yeah, no responsibility for Tesla here, understandably. So, you know, the idea that you would think that we're at the point where these autopilot modes work this well, I don't know what this guy was thinking.

Or what he was doing that entire time. Or what he was doing. The reports came out at the time that he was watching a movie that has not been proven. Yeah, we covered that. We thought he was watching Harry Potter on a, you know, a portable DVD player. Turns out that wasn't true. No, it wasn't true. So, anyways, Tesla not responsible because, I mean, that is ridiculous.

25 seconds in a 37-minute period of time. I can't even go, like, I can't go a block without putting on my seatbelt because of the dinging. Yep. It's so annoying. I don't understand how this, maybe he was, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, he was a Navy SEAL, man. He was trained to block out the enemy.

Yeah. So, Tesla, okay there. Tesla, not so okay in this other story. I don't know what the hell Elon Musk is thinking. Tesla is talking to the music labels about creating its own streaming service. I've known about this for a bit, thanks to my insider connections. And everybody I know is kind of throwing their hands up in the air going, why?

Yeah. Why would you create your own streaming service? It's already a car that you basically plug your phone into. We've got Spotify. We've got Pandora. We've got everything else on our phone. But they want to make their own music service. And, you know, when Elon Musk comes a knocking and offering bucks, it's not like the labels are going to say no.

Oh, yeah. They're whores. They'll take money from anybody who's got a bag it big enough to give it to them. Basically, it's you want to give us money? Okay. What do you want to call the service? We don't care. Never mind. Here, whatever. Here's the contract. Yeah. Sign it. Give us the monies. All the monies. We need it. So there's no word whatsoever about how this service is actually going to work, whether it's going to be available outside of a Tesla.

Is it another subscription service that anybody could join? I don't know. Nobody seems to know. But there's another. It only works when you're driving in a tunnel underneath Los Angeles. Apparently. Yes. Yeah. Well, speaking of Tesla, there is a new instantly rechargeable battery out there from Purdue researchers.

Now, this is interesting. They're calling it a flow battery. Okay. Now, we keep hearing about new battery technology, and yet nothing comes to market. It takes a while, man. These things have to be tested. I'm looking forward to that one we covered the other day, or not the other day, the other week, where it was the one that was non-volatile, where you could literally cut it with scissors, and it wouldn't blow up.

That one was pretty cool. This has a different take on it, though. What this is, is you would pull into a charging station, which isn't really a charging station, but you would just replace the battery's fluid electrolytes instead of recharging the battery. Right. And then, you know, you pull up to a gas station.

It's more like a jiffy lube, I'm guessing, because it would probably drain the other stuff, and then you fill it back up, you know, like an oil change. And then you're off to the races again, which is kind of cool. It's unbelievably cool. I don't think people truly understand how much a battery, a leap forward in technology with batteries is going to change the world.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the serious stuff that can make a massive, massive change in the world. And whoever gets there first is going to be a gazillionaire. Mm-hmm. And, you know, there's room for more than one change. Yes, there is. Because all these technologies, especially the one that doesn't blow up, that's my favorite.

Well, and there's different uses, and different technologies may be suited for different uses. There's massive, you know, large-scale industrial batteries versus what goes in your phone versus what goes in your car versus what you can plug into your house. I mean, there are so many applications for this and so many different uses. This, I mean, you know, I've got a little bit of money sitting around that I'm still looking to invest, and I am basically just researching these companies left, right, and center.

Have you found anything else that we've missed on the show that we should be talking about? Okay. Nothing that's getting even close. I mean, there's some way theoretical stuff out there, but it's not there yet. So, and we need something soon. We really do. Just read the paper. All right. Well, when you're ready to invest, hit me up on Slack.

Let me know. I got like seven bucks laying around. I'm ready to go. I can turn that into 12, no time flat. Yep. So, there's a lot of news that we aren't going to cover because it's not quite tech-related that's going on, as you may have heard, regarding our past election. And some new accusations, and not just accusations.

You know, there's basically our ... I can't even get through this with a straight face, Jason. Okay. Okay. Let's just dance around it a little bit. All of our intelligence agencies have basically said we got fucked by Russia for Trump, but okay. I know, snowflake, whatever.

Anyways, the point being, the University of Oxford has taken a look into this because we are now far enough away from our election that these are things that we are studying academically. And they have released a series of studies called the Computational Propaganda Research Project. These document the extent to which social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are being manipulated to promote political propaganda.

And they found during the 2016 campaign a bipartisan range of domestic and international, bipartisan, whatever. It's like artisanal, but partisanal. Well, considering it doesn't even exist anymore, we don't need the word. Yeah. Ah. Yeah.

Range of domestic and international political actors made use of political bots. And it's a great report. You should really read it if you think that the elections are fair and square. And on both sides, by the way, this also is how the Democratic Party itself ended up getting torn apart a little bit.

It's really interesting. It's well studied. And we got to do something about it, but nobody knows what to do. So. All right. Good times. Now, net neutrality. Another thing that we talk about a lot that we feel to be somewhat important, even though more complicated than previously thought of, which we covered, I believe, three episodes ago.

But we're coming up on the big day, the big day where everybody's going to do whatever they're going to do online to basically support net neutrality and say, hey, we got to do this. And Tumblr is one of the companies that led the charge last time around, last time we had to do this. Guess what they're doing this time, Jason?

Not a goddamn thing. And why aren't they doing anything, Jason? Because they're now owned by a phone company, a.k.a. Verizon. And do phone companies want net neutrality? Hell no, they don't. Okay. That story's done. Move it along.

Yep. Some good news from President Trump. Ish. Hey, look, I'm trying to be fair and balanced here. President Trump. Even Fox News dropped fair and balanced from their tagline. Come on. That's because they aren't. Well, we kind of are. Just the facts, man.

Hey, we're big on facts. It's not my fault the administration isn't. President Trump will commit to improving internet access in rural areas. This is good. We like this. I'm surprised that it doesn't exist already since we've discovered that basically every tractor is internet connected these days.

President Trump is committed as of last Wednesday to improving internet access in the country's hardest to reach rural areas as part of his forthcoming push to improve the nation's infrastructure. We are all about improving our nation's infrastructure. We talked, I think, just last week about the fact that we're like 45th in the world in terms of infrastructure, online speeds, wireless, and all that sort of stuff.

It's ridiculous. Now, they're just talking about getting to all these areas that Verizon's map never covers and AT&T's map and Sprint's map never covers when you see their coverage. So we're going to get some internet access there, which is fantastic. I support that 100%. Except...

I was going to say, can I get an exception here? Let's go. Except for the fact that there is zero, zero specifics as to how they're going to do this, when they're going to do this, or how much it's going to cost. Well, you know what? Going that far out into the rural areas and the fact that we won't have net neutrality means that they can charge whatever they want for access out there.

And yeah, everybody's already poor out there because they're spending so much money with John Deere to upgrade their tractors because they can't get the open source software to do it and are busy sending their farmhands to Poland with USB sticks to come back and hack the firmware on their John Deere tractors.

So they don't have money for internet access. Hmm. How's that all going to work out? Way to go. Well, too bad we don't have those Google balloons. Project Loon. Project Loon. That could have solved the problem. Now, this is... Let's have a little levity for a moment here.

A little? A little bit. Yes. Facebook's AI has accidentally created its own language. Okay. Now, researchers from FAIR, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Researcher, lab, they made a discovery while they were trying to improve their chatbots.

Yes. I'm sorry. They're not chatbots. They're dialogue agents. Oh, is this the Katie bot? I don't know if it's a Katie bot. But yeah. So they let these things go and they were starting to talk about stuff. And so we have a discussion here between Bob and Halas.

Okay. So these are two theoretical AIs created by Facebook. Yes. Talking to each other. Okay. And Bob says, I can, I, I, everything else. Alice says, balls have zero to me, to me, to me, to me, to me. That sounds... It actually sounds like a Katy Perry song.

Actually, isn't this basically a Tinder conversation? I think so. You, I have everything else, says Bob. Alice says, balls have a ball to me, to me, to me. And it keeps going. And Bob says, I, I, can, I, I, I, everything else. And Alice, back up, Alice loves balls.

I'm sorry, we already have a show title because Alice loves balls would be great because balls have a ball to me, to me, to me, to me. I think somebody needs to auto-tune the shit out of this. You know how, well, first off, I was thinking I could probably sing this to my son and it would come out pretty well. I might have a new lullaby.

Secondly, as I always say, in what universe, in what universe are these considered AIs? Thirdly, they're not AIs, they're dialogue agents. In what unit, but they use the word AI 17,000 times in this article. In fact, the URL itself has artificial dash intelligence slash AI dash AI dash AI.

I think that's the category that they put it in. But it's not. It's not. And then thirdly, in what universe is this a language? This is gibberish English. That is not a fucking language. Yes. Unless you're watching Dumb and Dumber 3. I, I hate journalism. Balls, balls, balls to me, balls to me.

I love balls to me. I'm Alice. Well, the off chance that you would like a throw pillow with that etched onto it, you can head over to Etsy, except maybe not get anything anymore because Etsy is cutting 15% of their workforce. Aw, poor Etsy.

Yeah. So apparently that whole idea, you know that, that economy too. They must be digging into their profit margins. They must be. Too much hippie dippy shit people are buying on Goop now instead of Etsy. This whole web 2.0 thing where we just all make our own stuff at home and live our lives selling it.

It's not really going so well. Shut up, man. I got a class coming out. Don't rain on my parade. Oh, man. And this one might have been in security, but I still think it's fun here. Fake online stores reveal gamblers shadow banking systems.

Now, I swear to God, when we were drunk, me, you, our old friend Riggs, and a couple guys sitting around, you know, blown out of our gourd on tequila and whatever else was handy, came up with this idea a long time ago.

I thought it sounded familiar. To make, you know, we were trying to figure out how to fix money laundering. Fix money laundering on the internet. Yeah, fix money laundering. Because I think it started out with us talking about Yoshinoya Bowl in Los Angeles, which I swear is a front for money laundering because nobody ever eats there.

Actually, everybody eats there once. That's it. Nobody actually goes there because they like it. New people that come to L.A. eat there once, never go back again. But they're everywhere. And it's got to be a money laundering front. And I think we were drunk enough to use that. And then we said, hey, why don't we just make a bunch of online stores that don't actually sell anything, but we can get money in and then pass money around.

Apparently, online gamblers have figured that out. And Reuters has a great article about how they found a bunch of these fronts. And now the hammer's coming down. That's smart. It's really smart. Yeah, except they got caught. Yeah, well, that's not so smart.

Yeah, it's called transaction laundering and Visa and MasterCard require all online purchases to be coded so they can see what type of purchase is being processed and block it if it's illegal in a particular country. Well, it turns out, yeah, this really didn't work out for them that well.

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Apps and doodads. Echo has added what people are calling the killer app. Basically, they're finally integrated SiriusXM, which fine. I mean, if you're a Howard Stern fan, that's probably awesome.

But if you're that big of a... Sorry, my echo just went off. Well, at least I know the weather now. Anyways, you can now get SiriusXM on Alexa. So how exciting is that? Not really. In fact, I actually just got off the phone with SiriusXM this week to cancel because they're so crazy.

They try to charge so much. I started to argue with them. Why are you charging me double subscriptions for two cars when the app is on my phone and I can just plug my phone into my car? I don't need two subscriptions. How about you? Why do you keep charging so much for all this stuff? Anyways, SiriusXM, not really worth it, but you can now get it on your Amazon.

Yeah, that's funny because I had SiriusXM when I bought my new truck when I got Bam Bam and I had it for six months. Yeah, everybody keeps it for the free trial and then they just let it lapse. Yeah, because I called them and they're like, it's $90 a year. And I'm like, what for what I'm like, Howard Stern's really not that funny.

He's not $90 a year funny. And I'm in my car like seven minutes a week. So I just I let it go. And if you were super into music, the problem is when all these stations started off like the first wave, which is like the 80s alternative rock stuff and lithium, which is the 90s alternative rock stuff.

If you're really into music and you like those stations, that'd be great if they played anything other than the hits that they played back in the 80s and 90s. It's the same damn songs. It's all playlisted. And the whole point was deep cuts. This is supposed to be deep cuts, not playlisted. You're going to hear the whole encompassing thing of that era, but it's not.

So to hell with that. Yeah, definitely. Oh, by the way, KROQ2, which you hooked me up with. Have you listened to it lately? They are doing a horrible promotion with Green Day. It's Green Day Revolution Radio. And I don't know how long this is going to go on. It's gone on for three fucking weeks.

It's got to go. It needs to go back to the if they're going to keep it this way, I'm going to be so angry. You know, I'm already angry because I'm like, where's my Oingo Boingo? God damn it. I know. It's just all crappy Green Day stuff. I do not want Blink-182. I do not. I do not either. Sam I am. Yes.

Sam I am is a great band. If they had that on there, I'd be OK with it. But anyway, we talk about, hang on, let me hit the mute button over here. The echo skills, right? Yes. And how nobody ever uses them. Well, I went out on a limb this week.

And I'm like, I refuse to follow El Presidente Orangino on Twitter. But every now and again, I like to just, you know, dip my toe in and see what craziness is going on. So I'm like, ah, I will get an Alexa skill that will read me Trump's tweets.

And there are like 50 of them out there. 50 of these. Of course there are. Half of them have the same trigger word, by the way. So if you install two of them, you got to keep in mind that they were giving away a free dot. So yeah. Yeah. If you built a skill. Yeah. Well, most of these skills are skill lists.

They don't actually work. I finally found one that worked. Now, I got it to work. I used it for, you know, 10 minutes. And the problem is, this is the same problem that we had before and that we talked about. I cannot remember for the life of me what the damn trigger word is to get my tweets.

I couldn't tell you how to bring up a Sirius XM channel right now for the life of me. I'd have to Google it. I know. It's like, oh, I don't know if there's a like a, well, that wouldn't work. I was wondering if there was a meta skill where I could say, tell me all of your skills that are installed.

And then I'd have to wait, like, you know, while it ran through all the skills. And I'm like, oh, that one, you know? Yeah. You just can't remember these things because they're not, there's no muscle memory involved with doing it. And there's no display or anything. It's something so simple that they could solve by building it into the app, you know?

So you just pull up your phone and right now the app is threadbare. There's next to nothing there. You can see what you asked for in the past. You can add new skills and things like that. They should bring up a list of the skills that you have. Everything, there should be an installed tab and you click on that and they're just listed and you tap on it and it just gives you the commands.

Yeah. And maybe you'd remember it after a while. You know, you need something. Something to trigger it. A little brain memory going on there. But the fact that they don't even have that is ridiculous. Maybe they'll fix that in the new Echo that's going to have the screen on it. You know?

So maybe you'll be able to see it on the screen, like, you know, recently used skills or things like that or something. Who knows? But since that thing hasn't released yet, I'm going to wait on that one. Now we talked about Apple and AR before. Yep. Well, it turns out they're teaming up with Ikea.

Oh. I also heard that you can get Ikea off of Amazon these days. Oh, interesting. So a lot of things changing with the Ikea. Good, because I got that weird room divider that was, you know, kind of like Stonehenge from Spinal Tap when it showed up. Much smaller than I assumed.

Yes. The Ikea ordering process and shipping is terrible. It is one of the worst experiences I ever had. And the shipping cost me just as much as the little mini divider that I got anyway. So I'm glad that they're working through Amazon now. But Apple and Ikea will be able to put the virgindigir virgir virgir in your living room in whatever size you want, which is exactly the app from the guy from Planet of the Apps.

Sorry to laugh at that guy again. But every furniture company in the world is going to be on this. You know it. Yeah. And it's not that difficult. I mean, they've released such an easy toolkit to do this that, of course, yes, any major furniture company is going to be doing it for themselves now. So sorry. Sorry, buddy.

And, you know, they've got all of their furniture already 3D modeled, you know? Yep. So this is just going to be drag and drop for those guys. Jason, you have a long and storied history with getting on and getting off social networks. Yes, I do. Now, you've been stable for a while. And I would have to say, like, you know how there's those those silly Facebook apps that people build so that it's like find your most used words and all that sort of stuff.

And it brings up the word cloud. If anybody ran one on yours, it's almost all gastrointestinal related, either you or your dogs, the number of times that I have been updated on either you or your dog's crapping situation or farting situation is ridiculous. But say that's beyond the point.

That was a tangent. Let's get back to the main point. You get on and get off social media. At least you used to with stunning regularity, which makes me think that you're conflicted about social media. I'm always conflicted. Sometimes I get lonely and bored and I just want to see what's out there. And then sometimes I'm overwhelmed and I have to go away.

Then I get bored and then I have to come back and then I go back. Boy, do I have the app for you. What is that, Brian? There's an app called Binky. OK. Binky lets you go through the motions of being on social media. You can swipe on pictures. You can scroll through pictures. You can comment on pictures without actually connecting to any human beings.

It's an endless feed of pictures of things that is completely automated and doesn't have any connection whatsoever to anyone else. This app mixes features of all different social media like swiping right on things Tinder style and re-binking binks. Do you want to re-bink this bink? This doesn't do anything.

When you favorite a bink, which is what they call their posts, an explosion of stars appears. Congratulations. So there you go, Jason. I found the perfect social media app for you. It's almost as good as being on Ello. Now, yeah, see, they're missing their marketing on this because you know what this is?

This is consequence-free social media. So you can get as drunk as you want and bink away without any consequences because nobody will ever know. Except all the data mining specialists at Binky who will then sell you your data back to you after they try and extort you before sending it to your boss.

Most likely. Or Lifehacker refers to it as the fidget cube of social media. That's exactly it, yeah. But now, the name Binky. I've known many lady friends who named their personal massage assistants Binky.

I'm going to go have some special time with Binky. If you'd like to know the psychological difference between Jason and I, he went there and I was thinking one of the ghosts from Pac-Man. That's Blinky, not Binky. Close enough.

Media candy. We have been waiting a long time for Star Trek Discovery, Brian. Yes, so long that I no longer even have. I think that the free month or so of access to CBS Online has expired, so I can't even. I was holding on to that to be able to use it to watch Star Trek.

I was, too, when I bought my new 4K TV that barely works, and it expired eight months ago. Okay, so, yes, we've been waiting a very long time. So, it's, you know, it's coming in September now. I have to say it looks good. It looks just schlocky to me, but, you know, we have different sensibilities.

Which one didn't? This is true. This is true. Are you kidding me? Schlock Trek. They all look like that. But, I mean, the costumes are great. The sets look really nice. The cast looks fantastic standing there being all Star Trek-y.

I'm excited. I know. But why is it taking them so long, Jason? Because apparently world building is hard. Because there's so much artistry and custom craftsmanship that go into every prop, costume, set. They have to be designed and manufactured, and they had costume designers from Switzerland pick fabrics and all of this stuff.

And they even 3D printed some uniforms. Hang on a second. First, this is a world that has existed for almost 45 years now. No shit. So, you do not have to build it. It has been built. There are very specific rules that you follow. No, they don't follow them.

Because this is a prequel. And if you look at it, this is, you know, this is the Star Wars conundrum. It's like, why was tech so much greater before, you know, the future? It's like, how are we going backwards? Well, that's actually a fail on their world building aspect.

Because they shouldn't be doing that. But it's a good question. And, I mean, come on, guys. They could have just gone to, you know, the original series, gone to the prop department, grabbed the old uniforms, made some new ones. Exactly. And, you know, made some crappy, you know, Bakelite buttons that they press on the thing.

And then shoot it with a red 4K camera. And it would probably be just as beautiful. Just not as CG intensive. Yeah. Actually, I'd have been happier. At this point, this is sounding like the Kickstarter of TV shows. They had no idea that things would be so hard. Health insurance is hard.

Who knew? Sorry. Tangent. Yeah. I mean, come on, people. You guys are professionals. This is CBS. This isn't some rinky-dink organization. This is just the fan film was done in less time. Yep. And the fan film and the subsequent lawsuit were done in less time.

Oh, well. I'm still excited about it. I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to read anything else about it. I'm just going to wait. And, you know, eight years from now, when they finally debut it, I'm ready to watch it. Now, I was a huge Deep Space Nine fan. I still consider that my favorite series of all.

You're, you're a next generation guy, but. I'm a next gen guy. I am a Deep Space Nine guy. Well, in Deep Space Nine, there was a Klingon general named Martok, who was a great character. Fantastic character. He wasn't as good as Gowron. I would give, you gotta, you gotta give that. Gowron was the best Klingon.

But the actor, J.G. Hertzler, who played General Martok, is now running for Congress in New York. Okay. I love it. The funny thing is, when I saw Martok on Deep Space Nine, I always thought he was a really old guy that, you know, they, but apparently makeup is good on Star Trek, and he was much younger than he played, and you look at him now, and he still looks younger than I thought he was when he was playing it 20 years ago on Deep Space Nine.

All right. He's running up in Ithaca, New York, where a friend of the show, Wendy Barbell's family is from. Oh, nice. One of my cousins went to school in Ithaca, whichever that school there. Yeah, whatever that one's called. I don't know. I don't talk to them anymore. But the funny part about it is, he's going to be running through the district of his 11 counties, sometimes in his normal persona, but other times he will be, he will be dressed up as Mark Twain.

Okay. I don't, I don't know why, but yeah. Acting. Acting. Now, if he'd have gone as Martok, then I'd be like, yes. Yeah, that's not going to fly. I think he might be able to get away with Mark Twain showing up as a Klingon. Not so much.

Man, but it would be so much more fun. Yeah, it would be. We have the Han Solo Star Wars spinoff film. This has been reported for a while. They've started shooting. We had directors. Apparently it was 75 to 80% done. Oh, I didn't know that far along.

Wow. It was, it's really far along. And apparently the directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have now been fired. Oopsies. Oopsies. So apparently they were taking it in a direction that was a bit too hubris for Disney's liking. The big mouse said no and fired them straight up.

And that's never a good sign. No. This, this, this movie was always going to be problematic. Hans, Hans, one of the most beloved characters, the, we all know young Indiana Jones didn't go so well. I knew you were going to say that. Yep.

Well, you know, you can't go back and redo young Harrison Ford. It just doesn't seem to fly. Ah, yes. Unless you're, unless you're River Fonet, unfortunately. I thought he did a great job, but the series sucked, but. But, okay. But the River Phoenix thing, 15 minutes in a movie.

Right. Not a series or movie carried in and of itself. And then straight to real Harrison Ford. Yeah. Which will not be happening with this movie. So it's in trouble already as it well should be because, you know, it's going to be a tough putt. But I, I have to say, I have to say, I don't think Disney is doing themselves any favors with their new hire because now Ron Howard is assuming directorial duties on the untitled Han Solo film.

What do you have against Ron? I don't think he's a Star Wars guy. I'm already doing Arrested Development voiceovers in my head. Okay. I don't know Arrested Development, but he did Apollo 13, which was decent. So he's got some space cred, not really Star Wars, but.

Opie is directing Star Wars, is directing Han Solo. I, I have a philosophical problem with this. I don't because he's, he's a good director. He knows good story, you know? All right. But you're coming into, you're coming into a movie that is well over halfway done that has a script.

And the script was apparently part of the problem for Disney. So what the hell are they going to do? This is going to be a mess. I have a very bad feeling about this. What's interesting, they have a problem with the script because it's written by Lawrence Kasdan who wrote Empire, you know? So I guess it's the best thing about with the script.

Yeah. The Empire Strikes Back, not Empire, that hip hop TV show. Different, different, completely different genres. Completely, very, very different. Yes. So we'll see what he does. But you know, the nice thing about this is it's Disney and they have unlimited budget for reshoots. That's true. But they have a time limit unless they decide to push it back.

Yeah, they can always push it back. It's hey, world building is hard, right, guys? World building is hard. Now, the next story comes. This is right up your alley. This comes from Gizmodo and it says, yes, the Dark Tower movie is a sequel to the books. I would like to say I called that.

Yes, when we first talked about this, I said that my opinion, this is going to be a continuation or the whole point of the spoiler alert. The Dark Tower series is an unending cycle. So I said it was either going to be it could be a prequel. It could be a sequel. It just it's not going to be the exact same universe as the books.

This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Yes, it is. And speaking of that, well, Entertainment Weekly says they reunited Battlestar Galactica. They got together in Austin for some sort of conference. I can't remember which one. And EW has a 45 minute produced show that purportedly will show you all the footage from them at the conference reuniting.

But in reality, it has a bunch of Entertainment Weekly people sitting on a chair talking about the show and all the things that the actors did before and after the show instead of actually showing any of the fucking reunited conference. That was so annoying. Do not watch this horrible EW thing that we have linked in the show notes and instead just go over to YouTube and find the straight up footage of them reunited and talking because that was awesome.

Please put that in the show notes because I sat through the EW link that you sent hoping that I was going to see something cool. But no, I was just annoyed and I'm like, shut up, you goddamn hacky journalist and let me see what they're talking about. Yes, I particularly enjoyed the part where the young woman who works for EW started to basically run through numbers because there were 12 Cylons.

And at some point I was like, oh, you haven't mentioned seven yet. And then she said seven. So I was like, thank you for counting one through 12 out of order. That was great. That was an awesome waste of five minutes. Yeah. Anyways, it was fun to see them all back together, except for the fact that when Ronald Moore basically said, no, we never really had a plan.

It just sounded good. And I was like, you cannot go with something that just sounds good as the tagline for your fucking show. Anyways, it got me all angry again. You know how they picked the Cylons, right? When they came back and said that there were a bunch of Cylons on on the Galactica. You know how they picked them, right?

No. Literally put all the names of all the characters in a hat and pulled them out. That's how that is how they picked who was going to be a Cylon. God. Yeah. Such a good show. Ruins. I still love it.

I will go back and watch the whole thing anytime because the ending doesn't bother me. It bothers you. And it bothering you makes me happier to watch it. Okay. So the minds behind Sherlock are launching a new series, which means we're never getting another series of Sherlock, sadly.

But we kind of knew that. Mark Gattis and Stephen Moffat are going to take on Dracula. No word whatsoever if this is going to be modern like they did with Sherlock. We don't know anything. But, hey, they did a good job. I'm up for it. I'm bummed we're not going to get another Sherlock.

But, of course, we're not going to get another Sherlock because Benedict Cumberbatch is never going to come back to anything. Yeah. You know, I had my hopes up at the end of it because I didn't watch the last series of Sherlock with the mindset that this was the end of it. But thinking about it, I'm like, yeah, that really is the end of it.

Shit. No, it definitely was. It was over. They tied it all up in a nice little bow. Yeah, I'm going to have to go back and watch that last episode again just with the mindset that this is the end and maybe then I can have closure because otherwise I'm just going to have it stuck in the back of my craw forever. Well, if you don't like things ever ending, Netflix is just the thing for you.

Okay. They are now launching choose-your-own-adventure TV shows. You know why they're doing that? Because writers have given up ever writing fucking endings to anything. We don't know what we want to do. Here, you pick. I mean, I swear to God if they don't hire Lindoff for this, they're missing out on a massive opportunity because he can't end a goddamn thing anyways.

So this is perfect for him. He can write 17,000 different storylines that all sound really cool and never go anywhere. Perfect. Yeah, Ron Moore should get on that too. Ron Moore is your second signing. There you go. We solved it for you. Make me a Netflix executive. Oh, God.

Have you seen Spotify's sponsored song playlist yet? I did. I'm surprised it took him this long. Yeah. Is this what we should call Payola 2.0? This is what we'll call a win-win for Spotify and the labels because it creates convoluted accounting because the labels are now paying Spotify and Spotify is now paying back to the labels more money.

But they figured out a way to make sure that we just create a cycle of money, of completely legal money laundering that goes around and around and around and never gets to an artist. Ah, Spotify's Yoshinoya playlist. Exactly. That is what this is. It makes sense for a number of reasons because what we still haven't solved, what we have not solved in the digital age versus going to a record store, ask your parents, kids, is the conundrum of finding things.

And how we find music and how we discover things and how it gets recommended to us, we can't solve. It's all playlist-based now. And I don't think playlists are really working. But this makes sense because this is now labels get to push what they really want to push on you.

And Spotify is going to push those playlists onto you, too. And theoretically, again, like I said, the money goes around and around and around and never gets spun out to an artist. Yep, yep, that's the way it's going to go. You know, the playlists I hate, and I swear, the biggest problem I have with Apple Music, and if they fix this in the UI, then I would have stayed a subscriber to Apple Music.

Tweet Trent. Yeah. Tweet Trent Reznor. He'll get right on that. He'll get right on that for me, yeah. Thanks for that reminder. I forgot. I got Trent's Twitter on speed dial here. They put so much weight on shuffle that it's almost impossible to unshuffle.

Like, if I want to listen to an album, I can't listen to it in order anymore. Shuffle is the worst thing that has ever existed for music, as far as I'm concerned. I know. It's just horrible. I mean, it could be because we're old and, you know, albums back in the day. Yeah, well, it is. Eight tracks didn't have shuffle. Albums didn't have shuffle.

I hate shuffle. I want to listen to an album the way that it was meant to be listened to. Well, I did that with two new albums, and I realize it's been a while since I've talked about music on the show, so I will bring two albums to your attention. First, I will bring up Lorde's sophomore album, Melodrama.

Sophomore would mean second. Again, ask your parents, kids. The second album by Lorde, it's called Melodrama. It is okay. I really, really loved her first album. I have to admit, I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I was excited about the second one. It's overproduced, and I'm not getting any emotion at all from it.

That's the problem. There are songs that should make me feel sad, and there are songs that should make me feel happy, and mostly I just feel like she's bored. Okay. So that was a bit of a drummer. Ride have put out their first new album in 20-some-odd years. I went to the shows last year.

I was blown away. They were phenomenal. The album is called Weather Diaries. It came out last week, and I cannot recommend this enough. It sounds like 1990, and it's amazing. The opening track blew me away. You know, it's fine. It's great after that.

There's a couple tracks that I really like. There's a couple tracks that are a little bit boring, but it is shoegazing, and it is a blast from the past, and it's really well done, and I loved it. So there you go. Was Ride one of those bands that had a bunch of people from other bands in it? No, Ride actually. Oh, they were just a band of themselves.

Okay. They were a band of themselves, but when they split up, one of the guys from Ride ended up being an oasis. So they kind of split up and went into other bands and things like that. Okay. Gotcha. Well, trailer two for Game of Thrones is out this week. I watched it. I loved it. I'm very excited, and I'm excited to say it's only, what, two weeks away now?

Yeah. We're coming up on it. We're almost in July, so. And they finally changed the goddamn tagline. Winter is here. Yes, winter is here. I'm very excited. I'm very, very excited. I love the show. I'm totally okay with the fact that it's actually wrapping up, too, after two more seasons.

Apparently, maybe a little bit longer than we thought. We heard the final season was only going to be six episodes. Now, rumblings are coming out. It's going to be eight to ten. But we've got to wait two years for it. That's the big problem. Well, you know, I'm used to waiting for Game of Thrones now. That's true. That's true. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it as well.

You know, it's sadness porn, like I always say. But I just want it to be over with. I'm not going to watch any of the spinoffs. And it's spinoff roulette. They're making, like, 12 or 14 or 72 pilots for all of them, and they'll pick one.

Yeah. Anyway, I want to do a little bit of American Gods wrap-up, since that season has ended. They should have called it American Schlongs, because it was a vehicle for peni, apparently. There were lots of penises in this season. But the story, I thought, was solid.

I liked the addition of Mad Sweeney's backstory, which was really good. But all in all, I thought it was beautifully shot. I thought it was amazingly written, of course. And I loved it. Every second except for all the peni. You've got to get over it, man. It's snooze.

It's turnabout is fair play. We've had boobs for years. Yeah, I know, I know. This is penis karma coming back. That's coming back to bite you in the ass, Jason. Oh, yeah. Well, that's not the only thing that happened in the ass in this episode, if I know what I'm talking about there. Yep, there you go. I do also want to say Preacher's back this week.

So we're going to have some follow-up on that next week. You're not a Preacher fan, are you, Brian? I have not watched it. I don't know if you'd like it, because it's, you know, it's not shoegazy, sci-fi-y enough for you. I think it's a little too much vampire.

There is a vampire in it. You like vampires? I think it's amazing. And it's got an Oscar-nominated actress in it. So come on. Maybe I'll take a look at it. Anyways, we have some potential possible news. You and I are both fans of Banksy.

Very good artist. Good stuff. Absolutely fantastic. Really interesting political artwork. Apparently, we have finally solved the identity. Again. Now, this has happened before. Yes, this has come out before, and it's been disproved. But this particular person was outed by his friend.

And there are a number of people that have said that they thought that Banksy was Robert Del Naja, a member of the group Massive Attack, one of my favorite bands of all time, known as 3D in the band. Massive Attack is awesome. If you've never listened to them, go listen to Mezzie-Anne. It's one of the best albums ever made.

Okay. I've never listened to them, so I will definitely do that. Oh, go Mezzie-Anne. Awesome. I'll put the link in the show notes. Rapper Goldie, who's a really good friend of his, was doing an interview with some blog about music. And they started to ask him about the art. A podcast, not a podcast, not a blog. Oh, sorry. A pod.

Fuck you. Called Distraction Pieces, and they were talking about the art world, and he basically let it slip that Banksy is his buddy, Robert Del Naja. Pretty sure. He just said Robert. He did not say the full name. They are known to be extremely good friends.

Yeah, but he didn't say the last name. True. But people say, and again, last year, a researcher claimed that Del Naja was Banksy as well, which he denied at the time. So the evidence appears to be piling up, as it were. And I'm sure, certain, absolutely certain that right now somebody is scrolling through and putting together a database of all of Massive Attacks tour dates and adding it to a list of the first time that Banksy artworks appeared in certain cities.

And that's all you really need, right? Yeah. Wouldn't it make sense if you're an international artist who just, your pieces just appear in different cities, what better way to do that than be a traveling musician? Oh, yeah. Or an assassin. But I would say that's too much damn talent in one person.

That's true. You've got to spread it around, man. Seriously. At the library. I went back to the well this week, and I reread 14 by Peter Clines.

Okay. What a great book. Did you ever get around to reading this book? I don't think I've read any Peter Clines yet. Of course you have. He wrote the X-Heroes series. It's the same guy. Oh, okay. Okay. I've only read that series. I haven't read anything else. Okay. This was the first book I found by him because it was a sci-fi channel original made for audible.com.

Okay. And it was like a big special. So I checked it out. And it's really cool. I mean, it's just one of those, you know, like crazy alternate universe mind twisters like his other, some of his other books where he had, you know, traveling between different universes and things like that.

I really, really love this book. So I went back and re-listened to it. Okay. And I forgot a whole, like a huge chunk of the book. So it was really fun to go back and re-listen to. I highly recommend this book. If you haven't, if you haven't checked it out, it's well worth the read slash listen.

Okay. Just refresh my memory about the X series. Did he finish it? Or do we have a... X heroes is done. That whole, that whole series is done. There were like five books in that series. And I don't think he's going back to it because they, they kind of wrapped it at the end. Okay. Got it. I didn't quite remember that.

So yeah. Yeah. But Peter Klein's is one of my favorite modern sci-fi authors, hands down. Right. Yeah. And since it's the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter books, I actually went back and listened to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because they have a whole remastered, a version of all, all the novels on Audible this month.

And cause I'd never read the books cause I saw all the movies in the theater, most of them opening day. So I never felt the need to go back and read the books. Cause my, I mean, and at that point my little brother was reading them and he was like seven. So I'm like, I'm not going to read what my little brother's reading, you know, come on, I'm cooler than that.

Cause I was in my twenties when these came out. Yeah. I mean, they're good. They're really good. The only thing I would say about them is the movies are so well done. I would actually, this is one of the rare cases where I would take the movies over the books. I just thought the movies were absolutely fantastic.

There's not like a deepness that you're missing. Like you would say Lord of the Rings or something like that, where the movies are just kind of a beautiful on in and of themselves, but there's so much more in the book. There's not that much more in the books on these and the movies are just stunning. So as much as I enjoyed reading the books, I don't necessarily know if you have to, if you've seen all the movies, that's the thing that, you know, I'm glad you say that because I was going to go back and read all the books just to do it, to say I did it.

But after reading the sorcerer's stone, I remember everything that's in this book from the movie. So I was like, I, there really wasn't, I felt like I was rewatching the movie in my head, but it took nine hours instead of two. Well, look, the thing that you have to remember, and I'm sorry, millennials, you guys are a little crazy with this. You get the millennials have come up with Harry Potter as if it's somehow the Bible or something like that. Like there is no millennial that does not love every single aspect of Harry

Potter. Cannot quote it. Do not read way too much into it. Harry Potter is the end all and be all for a lot of millennials. You got to remember at the end of the day, these were children's books. Oh, absolutely. There, there, there is not that much depth to them. There is no, there's no Lord of the Rings-ian freakazoid, like 7,000 pages of footnotes. These are kids' books.

Yeah. And the movies are beautiful. Not the deep end of the pool, you know? No, it's just not. So like, yeah, I think you're okay with just the movies, but I, I mean, I did read all the books. I thought they were fun. I read them all before the movies came out. So that probably helped. Yeah. I don't know. The thing about it, you know, you know what I wanted it for? I wanted it as a palate cleanser.

That's why I also went back to 14 because after dealing with that last Neil Stevenson book and a bunch of other books that I've been going through, I just wanted something that was light and something that was a known quantity. So I thought this one might be, it might be a good one. And it, it, it completely filled the bill. So next week I'll go back to my heavy handed, horrible deep books that take forever to, to read or listen to. And we'll go from there. But yeah, this was, this was a very nice light week because I was sick and I needed something that was,

I didn't have to think that much. And both of these books, perfect fit for that. Right. 14. You have to think more than Harry Potter though. I will say that. Speaking of the Neil Stevenson book, I ditched that. I may get back to it. I may not. I don't know. Uh, but I did read the Eddie Izzard autobiography, believe me, a memoir of love, death and jazz chickens, um, as my palate cleanser. And I'm a huge fan of Eddie Izzard. I think he's one of the funniest comedians out there. He is one of the few British people that did not appear in

the Harry Potter movies because almost everybody else did. True. Um, in fact, I think he was actually up for a part and it couldn't do it, but I don't know. Anyways, um, if you are a fan, you'll love the book. I mean, the book is, uh, straight up, you know, his humor, uh, speaking of footnotes, he puts, he uses footnotes to fantastic comic effect throughout this entire book. And I want to give a shout out to Amazon Kindle who did a really good job of redoing their footnotes in the app. Now,

the footnotes appear as basically modal pop-up windows instead of going to a whole new page and then having to hit a back button that hardly ever worked. Oh, that's cool. I used to hate that about their footnotes. Uh, but now it's just this little pop-up window. You never leave the page. You click anywhere else. You're right back on the same page that you didn't leave. Fantastic. And he, like I said, uses these to great comic effect. There are tons of them. They are all hilarious. Make sure if you read this, you read all the footnotes. That's where some of the best jokes are. Um, if you're super

familiar with his standup, you will see a lot of the bits that he uses throughout his standup sprinkled throughout the book, of course. Um, and there's a lot in his life that I had no idea about. I mean, all the early stuff, uh, some really tragic stuff happened to him. So no spoilers. I just bought it. So no spoilers, just, you know, it's, it's another, a lot of people say you don't need pathos for good comedy. Um, I've, here's another one that's had a rough, had a rough start to his life

and ended up becoming really, really funny, uh, because of it. So it's a fantastic book. If you're a fan, you'll love it. If you're not, you won't. There you go. Yep. I'm a fan and I got the audio book and it's narrow. I knew it would be narrated by him, which is a great, great upside. Oh, that's nice. That's almost like a new standup special. Yeah. Well, it's a 14 hour and 39 minutes standup special. There are a lot of footnotes. Good. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm guessing by the length of this book that they're all in there. Yeah. I think he'd probably just read them straight through. So

security. We're back again this week with our resident cyber security expert from the cyber wire. Dave, I mean, business Bittner. Oh, that's terrific. I mean business. Yeah. Nice. You know, I, one place I worked, uh, my nickname was D Bitty. D Bitty. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't really

stick, but I remember to never call you that ever. I do have an idea for a next gift for him though. Didn't really help with my, my street cred or anything, but, um, you know, there, there you go. So anyway, moving on. Uh, yeah, good to be back guys. Uh, interesting news this week. Um, one of the top stories this week was of course the, uh, the big block

of voter data that was found just sitting out in the clear on an Amazon S3 server. Oopsies. Oops. Uh, yeah. But, but, but her emails, but her emails now, now, now this, I mean, I, uh, yes, but her emails, but at the same time. Yes. Cause it's the RNCs, uh, paid people that did this. Yes. Yes it is. And I'm sure the outrage has been equally, uh, bad. No, it hasn't

been bad at all. No, it hasn't. Amazingly enough, it was, you know, not really that much outrage. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, what upwards of about 198 million records on American voters, which some pundits are saying is basically all of them. I was about to say that's, that's all, all of the voters. Yeah. All of the voters. That's a lot more than the voters. Yep. So

there's a, uh, a Republican data analytics firm. They're called Deep Root Analytics. And, uh, there was a security, uh, risk analyst named Chris Vickery. He's from a company called UpGuard. He's the one who found the server. Um, to his credit, he did, uh, the responsible disclosure thing and, um, informed them before he announced it. Uh, so they had an opportunity. The, uh, the Deep Root folks had an opportunity to make things right before it was made public. Now, of course, nobody knows

while it was sitting there in the clear who, if anyone may have gotten their hands on it. So if only they would have put the file somewhere in the Deep Root folder. Yeah. Nicely played, Brian. Nicely played. I've been waiting all week. Right. So, um, you know, the, the, the data in this cache of data is a lot of things beyond just name, address, telephone number, that sort of thing. It's all about the types of things that

you might be likely to be for or against things like gun control and abortion and all those types of things that someone who is planning a political, a political campaign might be interested in knowing about you. So I just like that to know about my neighbors. Hell, I'd pay for this database. I mean, I think it's out there now. I think it's a public duty that they let you at least see your own record. I'd love to know what they think. I think. Yeah. Seriously. Maybe I can find Deep Root on the Deep Web. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, and there's no indication yet that the records were out there.

Nobody's out there claiming saying that they have it and that they're going to sell it or anything like that. But, uh, we'll see. Um, inevitably what happens with these sorts of things is someone will show up on the dark web claiming to have this. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, quite often it turns out to not actually be that it'll be old data or something like that, but somebody being an opportunist trying to, uh, to make a quick buck off of a high profile thing like this. It'd be an old dump from CompuServe

or AOL from back in the day. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, um, you know, it's a big deal. Uh, one of the largest breaches ever, or, um, I guess exposed potential exposures of, of data ever. They just keep getting bigger, don't they? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's no doubt that this is, I mean, this is almost every U.S. voting citizen. I, I, I'm sure Russia would like to have this information, assuming that, you know, Russia is trying to mess with our voting systems. I, this is, this is exceedingly

valuable data for any number of people, both, uh, within our system and potential saboteurs without. So. Yeah. The funny thing is they could probably just, if anybody from Russia wants it, they could just go to Deep Root Analytics and buy a copy of it because they are a data mining firm and that's what they do is they sell this data. Yeah. That's right. That's right. So according to Reuters, uh, they uncovered what has been going on for a while and that is that the Russians have been

demanding of U.S. firms and other firms from around the world that they reveal their source code in order, in order to sell their products in Russia. Now, of course, this is interesting for a lot of reasons. Uh, we are here in the U.S. uh, a bit, um, uh, skittish when it comes to the Russians at the moment. So it's an interesting thing because there are of course regulations in place for, uh, revealing

source code that might have security implications. And this isn't about that. This is more about, uh, just the Russians saying, Hey, we want to take a look at your stuff. And what are the security implications of that? It gives them a closer look at, uh, what exactly is going on in your code for better or for worse. Of course, they say that it's just to make sure that there aren't any potential vulnerabilities, but there are all sorts of advantages that it gives them as well.

There are a couple of companies that have said, uh, no, we're not going to do this. Uh, I believe it was Cisco who said, uh, no, we're not going to let you look at our source code. We, we, we don't think the market is big enough. We'll, we'll go ahead and not sell our things there. But, uh, some other companies, in fact, most companies have said, okay, here, take a look. And again, this is a pretty standard practice. Uh, there are other goods. China requires people to do this. Um, here in the

United States is mostly done when there is a security concern. If you're a contractor for the feds and, uh, you're selling them something that has to do with cyber or just general security, they'll make you show them the source code and, you know, basically prove that there isn't anything that could be potentially damaging or dangerous in there. But, uh, other than that, as a nation, we generally don't require that foreign, uh, foreign entities who are trying to sell their

products here, reveal their source code to us. Um, what do you guys think about this? I don't know. Yeah, I, I don't know either. Um, on the one hand, it makes total sense and I'm surprised that our government doesn't do the reverse. Um, because that's what you would do as a sovereign nation. If you've got people coming in and bringing this stuff in, you want to know what's going on and want to make sure that there aren't any real issues, especially if, uh, you want

to protect your own businesses, uh, within your, within your country, obviously in any, any government agency that might be using any of the software, you want to make sure that things are above board. On the other hand, you know, the first thought that came to mind is, uh, are what, what country are these companies? I guess they're all multinationals now, so there's no loyalty to the U S at all. So why would they care? I guess.

I mean, my other, my other concern is who's checking the software. I mean, that's a lot of software to check if it's for all these products. That seems to be a big concern for many of the companies. I, as I was scanning through the article, it's, that's one of the reasons that Cisco and, uh, I believe, uh, semantics said no, because they didn't trust the Russian security labs that were reviewing it. Um, right.

It's a, is there even in quotes here, you know, certified testing labs in air quotes. Um, so yeah. And these reviews take place in, in what they're describing as controlled environments where the code can't be copied, the code can't be, uh, exported or anything like that. So, so they say, you know, the other thing I thought of with this was trying to just as a thought experiment to compare it to the pharmaceutical industry. You know, if someone was bringing

a drug into the United States, for example, and they said, this is a miracle drug that's going to, you know, cure whatever, um, our government would certainly say, okay, well, we need to see what's inside that drug. You need to tell us what are the ingredients and demonstrate to us that it's not dangerous. So are we at a point with code where it's reasonable to have that same kind of oversight?

I'm not sure. No, we're not because we don't have an, an FDA for source code at this point. You know, the FDA is old and established. We don't have the infrastructure, which is what you're saying, Jason, but I do think we do have the need. Uh, that's why we have this segment in our show. I mean, it's beyond obvious that I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't saying that we don't have the need. I'm just saying we don't have the infrastructure for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I mean, I think we are at the point where, where code needs to be analyzed as much as any drug or any other import that, that

we're worried about at this point. So let's get on that team. Trump, you're, you're having tech week this week. Maybe this should be just in the, in the mix here. Honestly, you know, nothing would ever get sold in this country if we had to look at the source code because every goddamn IOT device would never pass muster.

It's not all written in India. All right. Let's move along here to something a little bit more fun. South Korean web host Nayana got screwed this last week. I mean, screwed royally. They're, they're a web host and, uh, they had 153 Linux servers serving 3,400 customer websites and they got hit by some lovely ransomware and were forced to pay about a million bucks

in Bitcoin after some, some tough negotiations. It started out at 4.4 million and they got it down to a million and, uh, ouch big time. Ouch. I think it was one of the biggest payouts in ransomware history, I believe. Yeah. And I mean, if you're a client and, and, uh, you know, it's set through no fault of your own, uh, you would, uh, you would expect your, the person that you're paying your web host to, uh, fix your, fix your shit at any cost. Right.

Mm-hmm. So although that would never happen here because I'm sure it's in all the tiny terms and conditions and agreements for hosting here that if this happens to us, you're on your own. Yeah. Keep local backups. Yeah. Um, and the, the interesting thing is with 153 servers, I'm amazed they could scrape together a million bucks. Yeah, that's true.

Maybe. That was a, that was a thought that crossed my mind is that you would just, if they were here in the United States, they would surely have some sort of insurance against this sort of thing. So, but this is the kind of claim that will, uh, will have you looking for a new insurance company, but quick, right? Yeah. Um, but I don't know what the situation is in South Korea for that sort of thing. Um, it's interesting that the, uh, the people who

analyzed these, these folks as, uh, servers said that basically, um, it was a bit of a dumpster fire in terms of how up to date things were and you know, they, they were not up to date. Yeah. Whoopsie. Oopsies. Yeah. That's a big, that's a big ups. And I guess, you know, one of the lessons here is don't put all your eggs in one basket. If you've got, don't rely on one provider for, uh, for your services. If you've got critical services, I think this

is the shape of things to come. I think it's quite likely that we're going to see some of these, um, these sorts of attacks where the hosting providers are going to get hit and they're going to have no choice, but to pay. When it comes to web hosting, you kind of have to go with one provider. You can't have your, you know, your site on multiple providers unless you're doing like, you know, something major. But for most of these people, it's probably just, you know, bitner.com. Yeah, that's true. It makes a lot more sense for people to go

after a web hosting service rather than individual site these days. I mean, this is a, it's almost a no brainer. You're going to get a, get a lot more people at once and they're more likely to cough up the money. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, one of those things is like how they were going after healthcare for a while, you know, like hospitals and things like that where they needed to get the data back quick. And this is a for-profit enterprise. It's just, man, if you, if your security is that bad and your machines aren't patched, then you should not be in the hosting business at all. Yeah. And maybe, maybe they're not going

to be for long. Yeah. This might be the, uh, the last run. And it was, uh, it's funny because it's ransomware used to be, uh, targeted at, uh, windows, but they, you know, rejiggered it to go to Linux and it's, uh, the Erebus ransomware, which I've never heard of. Have you guys heard of that over at the CyberWire? Yep. Yeah. Actually we, we talked about it earlier this week. Yeah. It's a, it's a known one. Okay. Well, let's talk, let's shift gears

here for a second and talk about Apple. This isn't exactly security related, but I thought it was a pretty fascinating article that I wanted to get, uh, thrown in here. It's, uh, it's from the outline.com, which I, I think we've had one or two articles from them before, but, uh, I don't know them off the top of my head as being a great provider, but, uh, I'm going to check them out after this article and it's, uh, called leaked recording inside Apple's global war on leakers. Now, the funny part about this is this is a, it's a, from a

leaked recording from a, uh, a brief that they were giving at Apple called stopping leakers, keeping confidential at Apple, which is, you know, that's pretty ironic right there. Yeah. Yep. But the, the fascinating thing about this entire article is the scope and of what Apple has to protect every year from getting out and the, you know, the lengths that they're not, not, not, I wouldn't say enemies, but competition goes to actually get

a leg up on what Apple's making. And it's, it's fascinating. Like it's, it's utterly fascinating. These millions and millions and millions of these units are made every year and they're getting it down to like maybe five get, get stolen from the factory now. Yeah. Yeah. And the process by which they get stolen, they, the article talks about people dropping, uh, phone cases into toilets and flushing them down the toilet and then people going through the sewer system to fish it out, you know, things like that. It's pretty

elaborate. Yeah. And the money, it's just a phone people. It's just a phone. No, it's not. Well, but that, I mean, that's, it's an excellent point though. I think, um, that may be where you were going, Jason, that there, the article talks about how for some of the people who are working on these assembly lines overseas, if they're offered several months worth of salary to leak or to sneak out a piece of hardware, which by our standards wouldn't be all that much money. But, uh, if you're the ones who have the story about the, the verified

case from the next iPhone, uh, you're going to make some money off of that. Yeah. It's, it's insane. And it's, I mean, it's, it's amazing how they've been able to lock this down as much as they have. And it's funny because, you know, these guys used to work at the NSA, the FBI, secret service military. I wish they were still in government because maybe they could stop the leaks we have.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a good read. Um, and, uh, it's amazing what you can do when you're Apple and you basically have all the money to put into something like this. The article talks about how sometimes they've had investigations that go on for years. So they're, they're not giving up on something. If, if they think they have a problem, they're gonna, they're gonna furrow it out.

They're gonna, they're gonna find you. Yeah. But the other thing I thought about was they sort of touch on this in the article, but what does that mean to the environment, the work environment at Apple? Um, I haven't known many people who've worked there. Have you guys known any, any people who've worked there recently? Yeah, I do. I actually even have a bit of a, I mean, this stuff is no joke.

The security stuff. I do have a close friend that works at Apple and, uh, he was out here visiting and staying with me and he had to do some work from home and by no means could he connect through my wifi at all. That was not allowed. So they're there, they go through great lengths and, uh, they're all very happy. I mean, he said, it's kind of a pain in the ass, but he gets it. And, uh, they make it as easy as possible to stay as secure as possible. And, uh, by all everybody, at least here in the U S you know, these factories are a different story, but most of the people that I

know that have worked for Apple, once they're in, they don't leave. They like it there. Yeah. And they're, they're, you know, super patriotic to the company, uh, all the people that I've known there, that's like, they will not, they will not spill the beans in any way, shape or form because they're very proud of what they do over there. Yeah. That's the other thing the article does. It does a great job of framing from a cultural point of view, why this is important to Apple. And it does really seem to align with those values that Apple, uh, claims that they have. And, and I think, I think they are sincere.

So moving on to our next story, this is sort of a continuation of our ongoing discussion about do max actually get infected or not. And, uh, this is a story from business insider that says the amount of malware for max is continuing to surge. Um, yes.

So you'd think we defined one person by now, right, right yet. So still haven't counting on our listeners to let us know. Uh, and in this article, they say that, um, the number of malware incidents is growing by over 53% in just the first quarter of 2017. And throughout 2016, it grew by a massive 744%. Um, so now have Mac malware installed. Yeah. I was about to say, this is the, if you go half

the distance every day, when will you finally reach the destination? Never. So doubling 0.000001. Uh, yeah, I just don't, I don't buy it. Yeah. And the, what the article points out is that really what's causing this surge is adware. It's not ransomware. It's not, you know, it's not, it's not those sorts of things. It's adware. So somebody downloads a piece of a free sort

of dodgy software that contains an adware engine. And so it's just delivering ads. It's not exfiltrated data. It's the Yahoo toolbar is what they're talking about or, or Bing or yeah, there's a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think they're stretching when they call it malware then. I would agree. I would agree because it really isn't, it's annoying, but not really damaging to the system or anything like that. Yeah. No, but yeah, these guys need a dictionary.

I'll keep again to our listeners. Uh, we would love to hear a firsthand message about our firsthand story about someone having a problem because so far, none of us have heard one that we can back up and verify as being a real live individual, but I'm sure they're out there. They must be, according to these charts that they made. Yeah. So we're going to wind up this week with a spicy

story about sex offenders. Okay. Yeah. Not really. It's about the Supreme Court. Sex offenders and the internet hand in hand since 1973. That's right. That's right. So the Supreme Court ruled this week that, uh, sex offenders cannot be banned from social media. Uh, there's a gentleman named, uh, Lester

Gerard Packingham Jr., which sounds like a character from a book, but, um, he, um, you know, he, he had some trouble with the law when he was younger. And, uh, when that happened, he was a resident of North Carolina and he got banned from using social media. Part of his, uh, sentencing was that he was not allowed to be on

social media. And, uh, he violated that and posted on Twitter, uh, something sort of, you know, benign, not having anything to do with being a sex offender or anything like that. It seems like by all accounts, he, he, uh, was on the straight and narrow after, uh, having his run in with the law. But, um, after he posted something on Twitter, he got busted and all of his devices were confiscated and so on

and so forth. And so he went to, uh, court and said that, uh, no, this is not fair. Uh, I shouldn't be banned from simply using social media. This is too important a thing these days to keep me from doing. And the case made its way all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed unanimously that, uh, social media is an important part of everyday life these days. They said it's a fundamental, fundamental first amendment principle. And, um, actually I'll read the, uh, the little,

um, the quote that it, uh, is there's a quote from a 1997 ruling, uh, that says a fundamental first amendment principle is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen. And then after reflection, speak and listen once more. And so the Supreme Court said, that's what this, that's what social media is today. And to ban someone from that is not reasonable.

I think we all know there's, there's zero reflection in social media. That's true. Don't read the comments, right? Obviously the Supreme Court doesn't spend a lot of time on social media. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it brings up so many questions because saying social media is a constitutional right

means that you basically have to provide every citizen with access. Now I don't see that occurring. Um, well, I don't know that you have to provide access, but can't prohibit access. Those, that's, those are different things. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I suppose. I mean, I, on one hand, it seems stupid. Somebody has broken the law. Somebody is using it as a tool to enable breaking the law.

Shouldn't you not ban them? On the other hand, we do also know that most criminals tend to be stupid and what better way to track them and find them doing stupid things than allowing them to have their Twitter account. So. Yeah. For me, one of the interesting things about this is that this is one of the first times that one of these directly internet connected cases has made its way all the way to the Supreme Court. Yeah. And so, you know, we've been waiting for some of these, you know,

we, we talk all the time about things like, uh, some of these privacy laws, you know, things like the, the stingrays and all those sorts of things that we're hoping are going to make their way to the Supreme Court. Well, here's one that has and, uh, how interesting to get a, a unanimous decision from them on a social media case. So I think people will be looking at this and, uh, uh, analyzing it and seeing how it can apply to things, uh, you know, from here, from here on out. I wonder how, how much

it played into the role of the fact that, you know, you're not supposed to be, you're theoretically above a certain age if you are able to join social media. Although we all know that everybody just kind of ignores that tag. Um, but yeah, I mean, it is interesting. It's interesting that it was unanimous.

Um, it's interesting that they are aware of it. I, I do want to know what the legal definition of social media is, uh, cause they would have had to define that legally as well. So I'm curious about that. It's a Supreme Court case. So you can probably go read the, the ruling online. Well, I'll get right on that. I mean, I figured just let them get on LO and block them from everything else. And we're good to go. Well, my, here's, here's my, my take on it. This guy is apparently

he's served his time. He's, you know, he's done what he's needed to do to society to pay for his crime. And now that he's out, he should be, you know, accorded the full rights of everything that else that we're given the rights to. You're against the, the sex offenders lists and things like that that exist. In a lot of cases, in a lot of cases I am because a lot of the sex offenders that are out there, it's, they're, they're on there for bullshit. Um, you know, that, that's the, the whole sex

offender registry is a slippery slope because you know, there are a lot of kids that are on there who were underage taking pictures of their own junk that are now registered as sex offenders. And that's, that's, I consider that bullshit. We all agree that that is bullshit, but I'm talking about, you know, the guy that actually did rape underage people. I don't, I think that list is somewhat useful. Well, then you're saying that nobody can be rehabilitated.

That's a much larger, that's a much larger issue. It's out of the scope of this, this conversation, but as far as the being allowed to use social media, because it is part of daily life, I see that as a right nowadays, because you can't, it's like saying you can't use the internet or can't have a cell phone. You have to have that for, you know, to get by in modern life nowadays. Right. Well, I mean that, you know, we do have cases where they've ruled that, and we do have people that are living with the inability to get on the internet or the

inability to have a cell phone. So this, this ruling should affect that as well. So what we're basically saying is you have the right to technology, the internet and a phone, no matter what. Yeah. If you can pay for it, then it's, then it's yours. All right. It's a, it's a, it's a first amendment, right? Yeah. So I, I'm eager to check in with Ben Yellen, our law and policy expert about this next time I speak to him. So maybe I'll, I'll learn some stuff from him and we can come back and

I can share with you what he can tell us from an informed, informed opinion, not just a law hacks, like, like the three of us. That would be good. I would love to hear that. All right. Yeah. All right. Gentlemen, always a good time. So we'll see you next week. See you next week. All right. Thank

you. You and I are big travelers. I used to be, but yes, I love travel. So we used to be, and I've yet to make it to Iceland. It's been on my to-do list for ages. It's supposed to be just beautiful there and, you know, nice bars and you can hang out in like hot tubs and all night long.

And the sun doesn't set depending on what time of year you go. And it's absolutely fantastic. And it's just gorgeous. And there are these long, wonderful moss covered hills that you can go out and see. And if you're a real jackass, you can go out there and grab out the moss to spell, spell out, send nudes, which is what somebody has done.

Nicely done douchebag. Yes. So there is graffiti out there anyways. Some of it, I mean, all of it's stupid and all of it's annoying and you shouldn't do any of this, but at least some of it was like life or, you know, happiness or whatever. This guy went out there. I prefer send nudes over that hippy dippy bullshit. Well, I guarantee you it was an American that went out there and did send nudes.

From looking at it, it looked like it was in another language, wasn't it? No, it's send nudes in English. It's. Oh, it is. Yes, there it is. I was reading the other one next to it. Yes. And the really sad thing about this is experts are saying it should take about 70 years for that moss to grow out and for send nudes to disappear.

That will be there for 70 years. Can't we get some like spray moss and kind of just fill those in? You know, if they got spray hair to cover your bald spot, can't we just get some spray moss? Can't we just like, you know, grind up Kate Moss and sprinkle her over the ground? That would barely, that would barely cover one letter.

That's true. She's wee. She is very wee. Oh, poor Kate Moss. But yeah, I want to go to Iceland, but I don't want people like this to go to Iceland. Feedback loop. We have a new PayPal donation this week from Tanner Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson. We appreciate it very much. Yes, thank you. We also have a new Patreon subscriber, John Holbrook. Thank you for that as well. We appreciate it. Very much. Thank you, John. And we've got some Twitter comments here. Lots of them, it seems. Yes.

We may have to kind of knock these down a bit. Philip Bergen writes, enjoyed the shout out to Hawaiian radio. Spot on summary to another fab episode. He also said in Amazon, so you can go home and have them delivered to you. Rather than Walmart, where you would have to deliver it yourself.

Obviously, that's referring to last week how we talked about Amazon buying Whole Foods and Whole Foods basically now becoming your pickup place so they don't have to do last mile deliveries. And Waylon, the case says, getting slow download speeds? Try scrubbing your bandwidth filter. All those bits in there build up over time.

And Robert M. Lee from Dragos Inc. Said, thanks, guys, for the shout out. I appreciated the kind words and enjoyed the podcast. Nice. Thank you, Robert Lee. That's very, very nice of you. I'm glad you enjoyed that. And Mrs. Shinyside says, I listen to them every morning as I make hubby breakfast.

Keeps me in the know and usually several laughs ensue. Highly recommended. And that was a hashtag, by the way. It was. We like hashtags. Yep. And Mr. Sacks wrote, love when this comes up in my queue and their swearing has gotten better, to be honest. Not up to Scottish standards yet, but good.

And thank you, Mr. Sacks. We'll do better next time. We will try. We will. And 6502 Chip says, this is some bullshit. And this is in reference to Watchmen TV series from Dave and Lindelhoff in the works at HBO. That has to make Brian very happy.

Look, on the plus side, it has an ending already. He can't screw that up, can he? Oh, yes, he can. It's a reboot. It's a reboot or a reimagining. I will not watch anything that David Lindelhoff does anymore, so I will not be watching this.

No way. Not going to happen. And NoNamerMedia says a few weeks back, you guys highlighted an iPhone mic. Which one did you recommend? I actually tweeted that back to you, and we'll drop it in the show notes here as well, just in case you didn't see it. All right. This comes from Josh P. Greenberg.

But is it AI? AI, he says. And this is in reference to a link to Lifehacker. It says, conspiracy bots show that computers can be as gullible as humans, which isn't very hard, I'm ashamed to say. Yes, garbage in, garbage out. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

And BHASA says, I'm afraid I have to agree with Brian here. Seven-minute ads are bonkers at the start of podcasts. Hashtag podcasting. And that ended up becoming a conversation about how Jason has his hands free all the time, but not everybody else does. I don't have my hands free. I got an umbrella in one hand, poop bags in the same hand, and a dog in the other, and I can still figure out how to turn a goddamn button.

And look, now Jason changes his arguments. No, no, I still. Brian, these are two different arguments. This is one, you not being able to fast forward versus seven minutes of ads. I still think seven minutes of ads sucks and is stupid, but the fact that you can't just press a button. Yet you defend it.

Yeah. No, I don't defend the seven minutes of ads. No, yeah. With friends like you, Jason. With people like you on my side. Did you ever take a logic course in college, or were you just like. Over at GOG.show, Lamar Kindle sent us a YouTube link. I was listening to episode 214, and you guys mentioned iOS 11 beta.

I've started a YouTube channel a few weeks back, and I thought I could pip my channel and my video explaining how to install iOS 11 for free without a developer account from Apple. So if anybody's interested in doing that, the link will be in the show notes. Yes, it will. This next one comes from Kelly L. Hi, guys. I'm sure you already read this, but wanted to toss some good news your way.

Hawaii could become the first state to offer its citizens universal basic income after bill passes through both houses, through both houses, actually, as they say, of state legislature. And this is a daily mail from the UK. Aloha.

Well done, Hawaii. I mean, they have their own reasons and issues for doing it there because there's some tribal stuff and much like the American Indians where there's it's just not good situations happening. So this makes total sense. I want to see people take this on. I want to see smaller areas take these on as trials and see what happens.

I think it's really interesting. And it's something that we need to start a discussion about. So good. Hey. And she finishes up with, thank you both for all the hard work in making the cast, or as Jason puts it, podcast. And as Brian would put it, pod. Only because it annoys you. Mm-hmm.

Next up from Tanner Johnson. I'm a huge fan of the show, and I'm working towards my second master's degree in cybersecurity as we speak. It was through my following of the Cyber Wire that exposed me to your podcast, and I'm grateful for the suggestion. As a side note, I've written several papers, some published on cybersecurity-related topics, focusing on anti-forensic capabilities, as well as ISIS's use of the dark web.

I'd be happy to collaborate or share any information I've aggregated. Please keep up the good work, Tanner. Thanks, Tanner. We will keep you in mind when we have questions. Yeah, definitely. And next comes from Joy Bowman. I'm just back from a little jaunt to Bratislava, where I met a lovely group of American backpackers. They were everything I've come to expect from traveling Americans, which is a compliment.

But one tiny thing grated on my nerves and reminded me of this old David Mitchell video, which should really be shown in all American schools, and it's called Dear America. And it is a very funny read. I mean, sorry. And it is a very funny watch, and I agree with everything in this video, so I can't complain less.

I might have to update it to include Don't Carve Send Nudes. All right. We've got some iTunes reviews here, some good, some amusing. The first up is from Matt Paul. It's a one-star rating. Sarcastic, ultra-liberal, dribble. You like listening to two sarcastic, ultra-liberals.

Facts don't matter, only feelings matter. Guys talk about whatever they need to rant about. Then you'll love this. The high stars are an indication of who their audience is, the same as them. If you look at life with balance, these two guys will seem like so much a waste of time. A tech podcast?

No, two guys who seem to hate life and wish they lived in another time and place. I'll take this review happily. I'll make a t-shirt out of it and wear it. You're right. I do wish I lived in another time and a place, one where our president didn't grab girls by the pussies.

And I take umbrance with facts don't matter, only feelings matter. All we do is talk about facts on this show. Yeah, bullshit. Yeah. Blow me, Matt Paul. Anyways, I love those one-star ratings. I'll take them all day long. So, I get it. You don't like us, go back and listen to Tucker Carlson or whoever you listen to.

Okay. Next one is, not my cup of tea, another one star. By, good, could use some tweaks. This comes from a guy in the U.S. Topics seem interesting, but the way they are presented are meh. Okay. Okay. Thanks for that really deep analytical deep dive on the show and telling us how we can make it better so we can get some more stars.

Cup of tea? Yeah. That's really helpful. Really fucking helpful. Maybe he's, maybe good, could use some tweaks, wrote you a long email with some constructive criticism. Oh, yes. Okay. Okay. Next up. Yes. We have another one star rating from FreshWH.

This podcast carries the Clean Lyrics label. I listened to it for about 10 minutes and they were throwing the word hell around as a common term. Gosh darn it. Oh, no. Criminy. Criminy. You were upset about hell? Jeepers, creepers. Glad they didn't listen to 11 minutes.

Then they'd be really fucking upset. Some may consider this clean or just a minor vulgarity. Even a pinch of dog poop and a batch of brownies, spelled wrong, spoils the whole thing for me. Please clean it up and I will be galled to give it another listen. Sorry, I'm just reading the spelling as it came in.

Yes, yes. This was read verbatim. Yes. And on the Clean Lyrics thing, when we were on podcast one, we were unable to change that. We are now not on podcast one. So some of you may have seen a few episodes redownloaded as we switched back to our old feed and it was an emergency thing and we didn't have time to tell anybody.

So we're sorry about that. But it does. It is now back to parental advisory. Yes. As much as I'm making fun of your spelling, Fresh WH, I do apologize for that. It should not have been Clean Lyrics ever. It is one of the reasons we have moved on again because we were not it was not in our control and apparently nobody wanted or could be bothered to fix it.

Yeah. And it's now fixed. The individual episodes still were listed as explicit, though. So it's not one of those things where there was not a warning. It did have a big red explicit next to every episode. So, yes, it was partial, partially wrong, but partially unwronged, as it were.

Yes, as it were. Next comes from Jazzy Just from Australia. If an awesome great weight and grumpiness and to the point. I just had to do it. The Scottish guy is like, all right, he's doing Australian now. Yeah. Great. So that was a five star rating. We have another five star rating.

Soon to be a one star. Soon to be a one star. I'm going to slip a one star on the Barbie for you. We have a five star from Happy West, late to the party. I'm slightly older than the grumpy old geeks and just started listening to podcasts. GOG was one of the first I tried and was hooked. I started at episode one and binge listened to them at work.

Oh, really? So far, I'm up to episode 80. By tech standards, the early episodes are ancient history, but I still enjoy them and have resisted temptation to listen to newer episodes. Thanks for doing the podcast. Makes my boring work nights go a little bit easier. Thanks, Happy West. In three years, when he gets to the current episode and hears his review.

He'll hear this. That's awesome. And I still stand by those early episodes were pretty damn good. Yes, the news is out of date, but I still think that they were good. I think they're fine. I think in some ways we are weirdly evergreen, but I would urge Happy West to go ahead and listen to the new ones.

Next up comes from Leafy3. Dope show. This is a dope show. I normally get everything for free, including movies, music, TV shows, et cetera, with different hacks. But your show is something. Well, conveniently, we're free. But your show is something worth paying for.

I will set up my pattern sub. I think he meant Patreon. Next week. Big up from the Haitian sensation from Miami, Florida. Well, thank you, Haitian sensation. I love it. Thank you so much. We look forward to it. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions.

Or if you're all snowflakey and your butt hurt because we don't like Trump, we can read that on the air, too. If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. My closing shout out goes to Dr. David Teeter for hitting level 40 in Pokemon Go and losing 35 pounds in the process.

Awesome. And now I'm at level 28 in zombie gunship survival, and I have found the 35 pounds that he has lost. That's pretty damn funny. Congrats. Congrats, doctor. I know I made fun of you for playing, but hey, you know, I think you're five pounds off, though.

Shouldn't you level 40 be 40 pounds? Try to even that out. You got to always just put some sour on it. Put some stank on it. To be fair, all his feet is as good food that I want to eat. So the fact that he managed to lose 35 is unbelievable. The fact that he lost a single pound is unbelievable the way he cooks.

It really is. Yeah. So. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. 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'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all of the ways you can support the show and help keep us on the air.

To learn more about all the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. And show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 215. It's a joke, man. Jeez, people are so serious. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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