216: Lunchroom of Effervescent Healing

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up? We have moved. Again. Again. Sorry guys. This is the last time. We're done with the networks. We're going to go it alone. So apologies for your feed getting all messed up once again.

And for those of you that enjoy listening to the show via app, rather not the podcast app, but like an app app, we will have an upcoming brand new spanking GOG app soon. Thanks to Trent for that. So he's working on it. So it'll be up soon and you can then listen via that.

And we're not changing anytime soon unless somebody throws buckets of money at us, which won't happen. You know what's been thrown at us? The promise of buckets of money several times over and we're done. The promise of support, the promise of promotion, the promise of everything.

And then what we end up discovering is none of that happens and their back ends are ridiculously lame and stupid and everything is harder. So to hell with that. Yeah. We've gotten hit with the bucket, but not the bucket of money. So, yes, we are indie and indie for a while. So by all means, please visit our Patreon page, patreon.com slash grumpy old geeks, because we could use your support.

And that would actually be patreon.com slash GOG. Just in case that you follow along at home. I have trouble keeping count of all our different things. I was watching Bill Maher last night. I do enjoy his show still, particularly the guests, depending on who's on.

But and he rarely gets into any tech stuff. But I was kind of snickering last night as he kind of ripped off our Snapchat dick filter jokes. So that was pretty good. Yeah, I actually started watching it this morning because I saw that in the show notes. And I got to say, Dan Savage was on and I love him. I think he's I love Dan Savage.

He's fantastic. So let's get going on the show. So I found something that is being posted by many of my friends that work in the creative industry because it's just quite good. It's by a guy named Chuck Wendig. And I love the title as well. Ways to Stay Motivated in the Shit Shellacked Era of Epic Stupid.

I don't think that anybody that's listening will argue with this. We're in a dumb age, not a dark age, the dumb age. And I agree with this guy 100 percent. The opening paragraph from Nose to Tail, we have become the dumbest, saddest pig at the county fair. Historians will not refer to this period as the dark ages, but rather the dumb ages.

The greatest question I get right now is how to simply persist creating art and staying motivated and creative in this epoch of syphilitic dipshittery. So I thought I'd bop in here and try my hand at answering that. And it's a nice long form article where he basically rambles on about how to stay motivated when kind of the world is beating you down.

Yeah, no, I ran through this this morning and I was it was chuckle-rific. And yes, there's one line about bees and murder that are currently living in your heart. And I thought that really kind of summed things up quite a bit. Yeah, it's a good article and it is a bit inspiring.

It did because I have to admit there are mornings I wake up and I'm just like I dread booting the computer, seeing the news. And it's a it's a dark cloud. But this is a good article. So, yeah, fight the good fight. Keep at it, people. Word. Somebody who probably could use some cheering up, Justin Kalback.

We'll do a little follow up on him. We mentioned him last week because he was took a leave of absence, as air quotes now, because this is what you do if you're in Silicon Valley and you're a douchebag. You take a leave of absence when the big shitstorm is coming for you, because over what, five, six, I think at that time, females said that he was misusing his position and trying to get sexual favors in exchange for funding their startups.

Well, it's gotten even worse for him now and lay a former employee of his firm Binary Capital that is now at risk of shutting down, is now suing the firm and Justin Kalback specifically for defamation and making false claims to block her from getting new work after she left.

She left in part because of the sexist work environment and learning of what he had been doing regarding the women that were running the startups that he was going to fund in exchange for favors, basically. So, yeah, it's getting even worse for him now. You, sir, are a douchebag.

Yeah. And, sadly, in another, another one of these stories. What? Another one? Yeah. I can't believe this is going on, even though we've been talking about it for six years. It seems like white nerds who finally get a little bit of power and money like to try and get women.

Grab them by the pussy. Grab them by the pussy and get women to try and sleep with them who normally never would. Who'd have thunk it? And now it's finally coming to light. And Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who I've known for a very long time. You may have seen him on several TV shows whenever they needed a venture capitalist to come on.

And he wore the Jesus slippers. So this is probably why that he couldn't get a date because he had some nasty ass toenails. Right. Yes. But he has been replaced as the CEO of 500 Startups because he did the same goddamn thing. Right.

Dumbass. If only we could clone Arianna Huffington and parachute her into all these places. Darling. Darling. We will fix this now. Yeah. Yeah. And Dave McClure's transgressions were so bad, they were on the front page of the New York Times this morning.

Wow. Well done. But the nice thing about the New York Times article that I am very happy about is Chris Saka was name-checked in it as well for being a douchebag. Now, I've been saying... Is that what they actually said specifically in the New York Times? No, no. I'm reading between the lines here.

I'm putting my spin on it, but I have said that he's a douchebag enough on this show that I finally feel fucking vindicated that on the front page of the New York Times, they call Chris Saka out for being a douchebag. And he has made a blog post because besides taking a leave of absence, since you've already quit your company, which he has done, he's no longer a VC, now he must go and make the blog post.

And, of course, every other line is, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And the nice thing about it, though, is a lot of people are like, that's so brave. Oh, good for you for, you know, for coming out and saying this stuff. And this woman I know, she goes by Heather Vessant, in the comments, she's like, yeah, that's nice and all, but what about those of us who have had to live with decades of your dumb shittery and your douchebaggery?

Does saying sorry fix any of that? No, it doesn't. Fuck you. Like, yes! Slightly better than taking the leave of absence, I suppose. Oh, he already, yeah. But still, I mean, guys, guys, you're rich now. Get a date like normal people do. Buy it.

Anyway, Christine Tsai is now the CEO of 500 Startups, so hopefully she will do a better job. Yeah, well, you know, it helps. Good thing it's a woman in charge. Let's have more of that, people. This is not that hard. I've got some good news, Jason, and I've got some bad news for you in our follow-up.

First, the good news, KROQ HD2 Green Day Revolution Radio is over. Thank God. You can now listen to your Oingo Boingo again. Thank you very much. Yes, it was a month-long promotion that basically destroyed the station. Yeah. It was horrible. Hopefully they made some money off of it because, yeah.

Yeah, hopefully they did. Like, KROQ needs the money, but, you know, it is what it is. So if you are interested in listening to KROQ HD2, which is the rock of the 80s, the initial station that basically got all the buzz and created, you know, it became the biggest station in the world because of this particular era of the music, we have a link in the show notes that will let you find out how to do that.

And you can listen from anywhere. It's all online, baby. And if you have an Amazon Alexa, you can just say, play KROQ 2. Yes, you can. And the bad news, Jason, China's straddle bus. What about it? We've talked about this tons of times on the show.

It's the bus that basically is a big arch that looks kind of like one of those things from Tron that came after you that, you know, is going to fix all the traffic problems in China because it would just go over normal traffic. Well, they've been testing it for eight months and developers gave up and basically shelved it.

So. Aww. Yeah, it's gone away. Too bad. It could have been that it was only seven feet tall and most things wouldn't fit under it. That might have been a problem. Yeah. Ruler issue. Yeah. Stonehenge, a race of ancient bus drivers. In the news.

Now, since Travis has left our lives and we have no Uber news this week, let's talk about Google. I do have Uber news. Oh, damn it. I thought I could sneak it out of there. Okay. Well, let's talk about Google first. They just got dinged for $2.7 billion in an antitrust ruling in the EU.

That is an amount we would call not insignificant. Yeah. They've only got. Even for Google. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've got $18 billion in the bank. So $2.7 billion is a good chunk of change. You know, I mean, it's Google. It's not like we're talking Apple money here. You know. No, no. But yeah.

For basically putting up their own products over competitors. And yeah. That's the whole point of antitrust, I guess. Yeah. Well, in addition to the EU digging them, Canada is also going after them right now. Yes. Yes, they are. And Canada had another issue with pulling search results globally this week, which is very interesting.

I was going to wait till next week to see how this kind of pans out. But yeah, Canadian court is saying, no, we need you to remove search results for this particular company worldwide, not just in Canada. And Google's like, hmm, let us think about that for a minute. We'll get back to you. So next week, we'll figure out how that one plays out.

I think Google's going to do a, let's figure out a way to make sure that you can't see that we didn't remove it anywhere else. Yeah. We know where you're coming from. Now, now that Verizon is part of Yahoo or Yahoo is part of Verizon, you know, get your chocolate out of my peanut butter, peanut butter out of my chocolate kind of thing.

I think we need to start using the name that they have chosen just because it's so stupid. And actually, we should play the theme for the omen behind us every time we do it. Oh, man. Because I was just going to call them Varaihoo. But I guess we can go with both. They should have went with that.

Oath. Oath. Yeah. So we got a couple stories here. Now, first up, they had a deal with AT&T back in the day. Yahoo did. And so if you had an AT&T.net email address or several different ones, NV, Bell, Pack, Bell, Prodigy.net.

Woohoo, going old school. You could do some special stuff with Yahoo. Well, apparently Verizon doesn't like that very much because they're not AT&T. And since the deal has expired, they're saying, yeah, we're going to pull all of your accounts and you have to go create a new Yahoo account.

Now, that was the news at the beginning of the week. By the end of the week, they've rolled it back because they got so much negative press about it. Yeah. Yeah, dumb asses. It's eventually probably going to happen. So if you do have one of those email addresses, go ahead and just get ahead of the curve and stop using Yahoo.

Yeah, pretty much. And in more Verizon news, they're going to be pulling access from users in rural areas who use heavy data use. Because, you know, there is no such thing as unlimited. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. Here, we're going to give you a connection that says that you can use all the data.

Well, sorry. Now that you're using all the data, we're not going to do that anymore. We didn't actually expect you to use all the data. Yeah. We're going to have to roll that back now. Nope, nope, nope. Can't do that. Yeah. This comes because they have peering agreements with smaller local networks.

And apparently Verizon has to pay for the extra bandwidth that these people are using outside of the network and, you know, when they roam and all that stuff. The really funny bit here is these people can just go to those networks, get all the data they want, and not have to pay more and not get kicked off because Verizon are a bunch of assholes.

So, I'm sure a lot of people out in the sticks are going to be, you know, moving over to their local carriers, which is fine. Do that. Yeah. Because Verizon sucks. I'm kind of okay with that. Yeah. And let's talk about another one. Let's talk about Sprint for a second. Okay. And I still don't know anybody that uses Sprint.

Do you? Not a single person. Yeah, me neither. Well, they're getting sued by Radio Shack, of all people. Radio Shack is still an entity somewhere? Well, its creditors are. Okay, fair enough. What they're claiming is when Sprint did the deal with Radio Shack back in 2015, I believe, and they were going to put Sprint stores inside of Radio Shacks to try and, you know, one last hurrah to save Radio Shack.

Well, turns out Sprint are a bunch of dicks. Okay. What they were doing is they were taking the data from the Sprint stores that were in Radio Shacks, found the ones that were performing the best, and then opening up a Sprint store next door. I mean, come on.

I mean, come on. Seriously? That's actually quite clever. Yeah. I'm sure somewhere in the agreement that was probably not allowed, but it's quite clever. You had to read Radio Shack. You didn't read the EULA. Sorry. That's true. Yeah. So they're getting sued for $500 million in damages.

Do you think that'll even cover the creditors for Radio Shack? Probably not. Well, they sold everything. I mean, they literally sold Radio Shack down to the studs. So it's all gone now. So they're just trying to get something back. Yeah. Honestly, I hope they get it, because that was a dick move.

That really was a dick move by Sprint. Yep. Yeah, it kind of was. So we do still have some Uber in the news. Apparently, the cone of shame and the lunchroom of ever-festent healing, or whatever the hell they're calling things over there, has not solved all the problems.

So we've got two more separate lawsuits that have been brought against the Ride Hail Company by women who claim they were sexually assaulted by their drivers. This could not come at a worse time for Uber, which is desperately trying to overhaul its image by kicking out all the jerkbags that were in charge of the place. So there you go.

It's still not good. Oh, poor guys. Poor guys. And New Zealand made some news. So good for them. I like this. They are considering requiring students to learn to code. So this would be a revised curriculum that would require schools to teach children how to program computers before the time they even reach high school.

The Ministry of Education released a draft of the initiative that lays out plans to further incorporate digital technologies into the curriculum. This sounds great. I think this is a fantastic idea. By the end of year 10, students ought to be able to use a range of software to develop and combine digital content to create an outcome.

And by 13, the final year of secondary education in New Zealand, they will be able to effectively apply a refined iterative development process to develop quality, fit-for-purpose digital outcomes that meet design specifications. Well, that's a fucked up language. I know.

It's what politicians talk about coding. It's quite interesting. Fit-for-purpose digital outcomes. Okay. I'm actually going to grab that sentence and put it in some of my kind of spec work. There it is. It's quite good. No, this is fantastic. It's a very smart idea because we have, as you and I have complained about on the show all the time, we've entered into a world where millennials who figured out how to use an app think that they're digital masters.

Yeah. No. You've got to learn this stuff from the ground up and really understand what's behind your stupid app. So this is great. I fully support this. Good for you, New Zealand. Yeah. I am 100% behind this. In this horrible shitbag world that we've created of computers everywhere and online connectivity all the time, you need to learn how it works.

So this is, you know what this is? This is kind of like industrial arts. That's what they used to call the class that I would take, like in junior high school and high school, to learn how a two-stroke engine worked or how to learn how to use a band saw or a lathe. That's the same thing. Not the dark arts millennials.

Get your head out of your Harry Potter asses. No, I think this is fantastic. Good for them. And speaking of learning how things work, Facebook is pretty much a mystery. And what we had this week is a little bit of a slip and a look behind the scenes of how things work. And it ain't looking good.

Propublica.org has published this account. It's Facebook's secret censorship rules, which basically protect white men from hate speech, but not black children. So people got to look at the rules that are being used by the people that are patrolling Facebook and deciding what posts get taken down and what posts don't.

And it does seem to be a tad a tad on the side of the rich whitey. So if you happen to be Muslim, black, or post anything about Black Lives Matter, your stuff most likely will get taken down. If you're a little bit pissed off and happen to be a Louisiana Republican senator or House of Representatives member like Clay Higgins and post after the shooting, hunt them down, identify them, and kill them about all Muslims, that gets to stay up.

Way to go, Zuckerberg. Not looking good for you guys right now. Might want to look into that and fix that. Well, they are trying to fix one thing, which is the fake news and spammy bits. And now I laughed when I read this article. Facebook found a new way to identify spam and false news articles in your news feed.

This comes from Recode. Well, turns out if you post a lot, you're probably posting shit. So if you post more than 50 plus times a day, they're going to start to throttle you. But by telling people that they're, by saying it, I'm going to post 40 fucking nine times a day and not get throttled.

There is so much stupid in this. It's unbelievable. So much stupid. First off, this is hardly a new way to identify anything. We always, I used to bake in things like that. Like if somebody is just hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting, you throttle that shit.

This is not new. And secondly, that's a horrible way to identify spam and false news articles. It could just mean you're sad and lonely. Or annoying. I know people. Or annoying. Or just, yes, think the entire world needs to hear every thought of yours.

I have people like that in my feed who post at least 50 times a day. Yes. You know what you do? You unfollow them. And the thing about it is they're only looking at post velocity. They're not looking at the content of the posts. Yes. Which you would think would be, okay, well, here we go.

Let's see previous story about how looking at content is somewhat flawed. Yeah. Good point. Okay. I rest. The fence rests its stupid fucking case. I also have my own personal problems with this. I am repeatedly hitting a Facebook wall with ads for a client getting denied for no freaking reason whatsoever.

In fact, this week I had one ad, one ad alone, denied, reinstated, denied again, reinstated, denied again, and reinstated. Same ad I'm paying you for. Absolutely nothing wrong with the post, but somebody's interpretation of something or other kept getting it.

Fix your shit, Facebook. No, they won't do that. No. No. I mean, I understand it's free, except it's not because I'm paying you because these are ads. It ain't free. Yeah. So screw you, Facebook. No, I dipped my toe in this week for the first time just to test it out.

So I spent 20 bucks on a grumpy old geek's Facebook ad out of my own pocket. Didn't take it out of the company coffers. I don't know why you did that, but I'm not going to argue. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see how it worked. I wanted to see what the numbers said because, you know, it's one of those things where I know some people that are doing well with Facebook ads.

But I just wanted to see what it looked like and how it worked. And it's quite horrible. The interface is ridiculously bad, right? I have no fucking idea what I paid for. I don't know what good came of it. Somebody made fun of us on our comments.

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. They don't tell you anything. It's very vague. It's shocking. You know, send us your money and we'll give you some big stats. Yes. If somebody played the video for three seconds, then they took my money. That's all that I know. Exactly. Well, I'd have made that first three seconds, not a not a FreshBooks ad, damn it.

Yeah. Well, let's talk a second about the world that we seem to have created for ourselves now. I thought that's what we did every week. That's true. It is. Everybody wants to be a YouTube star. If you walk around the area in which I live, that's all people are doing. They're doing stupid stuff and videotaping, videotaping, recording themselves.

We got to stop using video recording themselves. And, you know, it's going to go up on a page somewhere and nobody's going to look at it. So but we want to go viral. And we have now reached the natural conclusion of this. A Minnesota woman has been charged with shooting her boyfriend dead.

And what she told police was a YouTube stunt gone wrong. This has happened before. I know this has happened before. People have died doing stupid YouTube things. I mean, this is I'm glad when it comes back up and gets pressed because maybe somebody will think again.

But I think these people were doomed from the get go. So, yeah, this might just be culling the herd. Sadly, unfortunately, they have two children. So, well, here's the deal. Now they won't have any more. Yeah, that's true.

Well, he won't. He might. Yeah. I've seen idiocracy. I know how this shit works. Yeah. And an interesting and good news, because sometimes we need that as a palate cleanser and there's so little of it, but we do try to find it. This cell phone can make calls even without a battery.

This is a nice long form article over at Wired talking about a prototype cell phone is by I can't remember the name of the person that was building it, but it's quite interesting. It's it's it's you know, if you were stuck somewhere now, a cell phone is probably the most useful thing that you can have.

If your battery ran out, you're totally screwed. But they have found a way to basically rely on the energy it can harvest from its surroundings, including ambient light, which can be turned into a trickle of electricity with solar panels or photo diodes and could be used to basically create enough energy to be able to send a text.

How cool is that? This is an awesome story because it goes back to the Cold War. And there's a story about the great seal that we gave to I think it was the ambassador in in Moscow or is like the Russian ambassador here. We gave him this. Basically, what we did is we give him a giant wooden seal of the United States.

But inside of that was a bug. So we tapped their office. The thing about it was they couldn't figure out how they did it. They scanned it. They did everything with it. They could not. There was no bugs in it as far as they were concerned because there was no power source. So they used a technique called ambient backscatter or analog backscatter, which is when you when you point a frequent, you know, just basically a radio wave at the bug itself.

It gets the power from the radio signal, which is what then powers the bug. So then they could listen to it. So they were powering it from afar, kind of like how RFID works nowadays. Right. And it's it was if you've never read up on the great seal bug issue, go just, you know, Wikipedia.

It's probably on Atlas Obscura or I've heard a ton of different places, but it is a fantastic story. And they're using the technology that was from that bug in this new cell phone, which is awesome. Yeah, it's really cool. Super interesting. Ah, now let's talk about something boring.

Elon Musk has announced that his tunnel ticking operation. The Boring Company has finished carving out its first segment. How long is it? So it's going to be about 500 feet. It's going to go from that's going to fix everything. Hey, look, you got to start somewhere, man.

This is true. Anyways, it connects space space space X to a parking lot across the street. OK, so it's a simple thing. Let's start. OK, we'll take it. He did it. Yeah. Look, this came out of his ass quite literally, what, maybe six months ago? And we have a working tunnel.

You got to say it for the guy. He gets shit done. He does get shit done. I will definitely give him that. That's awesome. Yeah. I hope it works. I mean, me too. I mean, what's what's wrong with it? Why not? If he wants to dig a bunch of holes under Los Angeles, what could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong in one of the most earthquake prone places in the world? Exactly. And an interesting news. I've I've been saying for quite a while now that Alibaba is basically going to be Amazon dot com, but bigger because there's more people in the Asian area of the world.

Oh, yeah. And they are positioning themselves to be the Amazon of Asia. So they're they're following along right with what I thought they would do. They are releasing their own version of the Amazon Echo, basically. Yeah. And because the Echo does not speak Chinese, this should do quite well.

Yeah. Good for them. Yep. You know, and I like that it's on finance dot yahoo dot com where you found the article, because the only reason that Yahoo still exists is because of the Alibaba stock that they own. I know, man, you know, their finance site isn't actually too bad. They even do a podcast still. They're still producing it.

They're still producing a financial podcast. Yeah. They're also producing tech podcast. I actually went there today. So that's where I found the Canada article about Google. I'm like, I'm going to have to add Yahoo tech to my RSS reader because there's actually some good reporting. And they've got David Pogue, who is annoying as shit, but he actually, you know, has some somewhat entertaining videos sometimes.

So who would have thought that after we have just called the death of Yahoo for so long, now that they are now, oh, they're actually turning out to be kind of useful. Yep. Who knew? Ups and doodads. Now, Brian, we've both switched over to Opera, right?

Yep. Full time. Yep. And when we did the move, originally, we used X marks to transfer our bookmarks over. Yes, we did. Yeah. You had a problem with it because it kept resetting and stuff like that. Yep. Yeah. I went one step further and found that Opera does have a bookmark syncing service.

So I signed up for that, got that working. Then I made the crucial error of opening Chrome after I had redone all my bookmarks. Oopsies. Yeah. X marks was still running on everything and it ruined my entire Monday. So, kids, if you're going to use Opera, like we mentioned before, you can use X marks to switch things over or you can just use the import bookmarks feature, which we should have done in the first place.

Also, kids, I'd recommend trying to structure your life so that if your bookmarks get screwed up, it doesn't ruin your whole day. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a professional, so I need bookmarks to be where they're supposed to be because I'm a professional. Yes, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. It's just part of the things that I do that when I need to go to a spreadsheet, I don't have to go search for it for five minutes. I click a bookmark because I am a professional. Professional, yes. Ten years ago this week, or actually, I guess last week, as this will be coming out on Monday, the first iPhone was released.

And I think many of us snickered. We were wrong. I am now sitting here with my iPhone. Recode has a great 10 years in 10 charts feature about how the iPhone changed the world. It is pretty fantastic, and it is pretty amazing to think about. I know, you know, everybody will say, but they don't have the biggest market share.

Android does. Yeah, but the iPhone is the one that transformed the entire industry and the world, quite honestly. And destroyed photography. And chewing gum. And chewing gum. The App Store changed the way software is created and distributed. The apps changed everything, even how people work.

I agree with that. Yeah, it's just a really interesting chart. Go take a look at this. It's pretty fascinating to realize how much the iPhone has really changed the world. Yeah, yeah. I still have my first one, which is amazing. And it still works, believe it or not. Probably better than the new one.

Oh, no, come on. The thing about it is I picked it up, and it was so tiny. I'm like, what is this little thing? Oh, it's my first iPhone. Look at how wee it was. Oh, I know. Well, the article has a photo of Steve Jobs holding up the first one. And I was like, look how small that phone looks in his hand. I know.

I mean, I got to say, him dying is the only reason we have the big one, because you know they would still be that small. Like, you know, the 5S was about as big as it was ever going to get while he was still around. Yep. Well, let's have some more Apple news here.

I tried to buy myself an iMac this week, but I couldn't because American Express sucks donkey sucks donkey balls and decided to lower my credit rating and didn't give me my iMac. So I found a video of a guy. For $70, he built a Hackintosh that outperforms the 2016 MacBook Pro.

Now, I know a couple of people that have made Hackintoshes, and I think I'm going to do it. Because they've got machines that have 64 gig of RAM, which you can't get anymore. I'm going to have to unfollow you on all social media when you start this process, because actually, no, never mind.

It's going to be hilarious. You are going to be so angry posting every two seconds. It's going to be unbelievable. Why doesn't this fucking driver work? What's a dip switch? I haven't had to use a dip switch since 1987. This is going to be fantastic.

Please do this, Jason. Please. Okay. I'll make a YouTube channel out of it and try not to shoot myself at the end of it. Now, this guy cheated a bit because the $70 Hackintosh that he made, he got a pretty beefy machine. But he was smart. He went to a university that was getting rid of old machines.

They were still pretty, pretty nice. But I've seen other people that have done, you know, similar. But, yeah, basically, my friend made what is equivalent of two Mac Pros for under $1,500. And they fly.

You know, they totally fly. So I want to check this out for sure. So, yes, follow me on Twitter and Facebook for very grumpy rants. I got to go to Fry's to buy a goddamn enclosure?

What the hell? Should be a hell of a ride for everybody involved. For a brief period of time, sites like Touch of Modern were all the rage. There was basically all these doodads and crazy things. And you had to give them your email address to be able to see anything.

And they promised amazing discounts and stuff you could never find anywhere else. And then, all of a sudden, that business model shat the bed. And they mostly disappeared. But Touch of Modern is still around, amazingly enough. And, boy, oh, boy, do they have an item. Let's see.

This is not a toy. This is a shocking device that allows you to launch fireballs from your open palm. The Pyro Mini has been refined to make it easier to use while packing in a host of new features that rival anything you'd see in a James Bond movie. Yes, these are little Pyro Minis that can shoot up to 600 fireballs on a single charge from your hands.

What could possibly go wrong? Yes, they use little flashpaper balls. And the funny thing about this is we covered this device a long time ago, but I think it got cut out of the show. But it's back. It won't die. Apparently, the Pyro Mini will not die.

You may, but it won't. It's quite cheap. You may, your house may, your pets may, and your children may die. But apparently, this device will not. Yep. It's somewhat insane that this exists. But it does. So, there you go. I remember this specifically because I almost bought one.

Which should tell you that you should never, ever buy one. If I was intrigued and I'm like, ooh, that sounds cool. I should buy one. Yeah, don't, don't, don't. Don't be me. I think you need to build this into your Hackintosh. Every time I get a Colonel Panic fireball, shoot out the top.

I think that'd be amazing. I think you need that mod. Okay. It should be fantastic. Now, let's move on to another horrible idea. In fact, friend of the show, Sean Bonner on Twitter said, this is the worst thing that has ever been invented. I have to agree with him now. And I do too, because we spend a lot of time on this show talking about how you need downtime and you need to get away from things.

This is the Aumi Mini. It's a new project on Kickstarter. It is a Bluetooth nightlight, which basically has all kinds of IFTTT support. So if you, if you want to, if you want your nightlight to inform you every time that you get an email or a text, it can now.

And, and you know who bought all of these and is installing them right now? Gitmo. Because this is a torture device. It is a torture device. Or as I like to say, there is a light that never goes out. Little Smith's reference for my friends. Okay.

There you go. I bought a mouse pad this week, Brian. Okay. Who buys those? Coming soon. Grumpy old geeks mouse pads. If you donate at Patreon, we'll send you a mouse pad. Just send us a really big fucking envelope in a lot of stamps. This mouse pad is three feet long and two feet deep.

What? What? You're going, you're going really big with your Hackintosh apparently. Uh, yeah. Well, I just got a really big mouse. You just have to, I have to use both hands to swivel it around my desk. Uh, no, I, I originally got this because I needed some sound dampening on my desk because I was getting reflections to my microphone and it was echoey a bit.

And a friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger over at the Art of Charm got one and he's like, yeah, it's pretty cool. Check it out. I got this. I'm going to put it down. Um, I'm actually looking at it. It looks cool. The only thing is, you know, don't call it a mouse pad. It's a desk pad. It is a desk pad.

You put your keyboard on it. You put everything on it. It's just a pad. It's nice. Here's the problem with it. I want it bigger. I want, I want my entire desktop to be covered in this material. It, it works. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. It sucks up all the sound. It's very comfortable. I mean, it is really comfortable and it works as a mouse pad.

So I, I may be ordering one of these. Yeah. And it's under 20 bucks. Uh, I, I, I, I, you know, I put it in here as a joke, but I've been using it for three days now. And I love this thing. I really, really like having this thing on my desk. Nice. So, and that would be louder except the bell is on the pad and it sucks up the sound from it.

So if you're doing any recording or podcasting, this should be in your mobile kit. Honestly, if you're out there doing mobile podcasts, get a couple of these and put these, put your microphone on these. They're awesome for that. So. We should see if they make dog beds. Well, yeah, I'm sure we can put one in a crib too.

Uh, you have not heard my baby. You have not had to edit out a baby crying. There's been many a bark that has been edited. That's true. That's true. Okay. Well, at least she's in, she's in doggy daycare today. So no barks. Yes. Um, I also got this giant bag of, uh, Amazon basics, microfiber cleaning cloths.

I think it's hilarious that you put this in the show notes. I have had these for three months now. They're amazing. I are fantastic. So I got a 48 pack. It costs $24, which means they're about 50 cents each, which makes them on that verge of disposable. So you can wash them.

You can keep using them. But if you need to really clean up something that's nasty, you can toss them. But they clean screens perfectly. Yep. These are amazing. I, we, I basically, they're so cheap. I just use them as rags around the house, but, uh, obviously the main point would be for electronics, but the price is like you said, so fantastic.

This is just my, my regular rag now for everything. So it's fantastic. These are great. Cause I, yeah, I originally found the, the microfiber cloths, uh, when I was at like some kind of car shop and I bought a bunch and keep them in my truck to clean the inside of my windshield. If it, like when I was traveling and if it got, you know, foggy or something, you could like perfectly clean the inside of your windshield because paper towels don't work.

Fuck Windex. These things are amazing. So if you have screens anywhere and everywhere, like we all do now, you don't need any like goo to wipe on stuff. You just wipe the screen down. Everything comes off. And especially on your phone, it really makes your phone look good. So for the money, you can't beat these things.

And yes, I know we're supposed to be a tech show, but, and we're talking about cleaning rags, but these are amazing cleaning rags for your tech gadgets. Definitely go buy them now. Agreed. And, uh, Amazon, uh, the Alexa has, uh, rolled out some new features and they now have calling and messaging.

They have calling and messaging to other people that you know, that happen to have an Alexa, which is everybody I know now. It's very few people for me, surprisingly, because it will go through, uh, it will import your contacts and then through automagically find out, uh, which of your friends via, I assume email addresses or phone numbers.

Cause you have to register your phone number. So, uh, we'll, uh, it'll find everybody in your contacts that actually has one. I only had like 10 people. So it was actually friend of the show Fergal that I did my test on. You didn't show up. So, cause I have not actually turned that. You have not enabled it.

I will, and I will not enable it. So I, you know, I can see this being quite useful. I enjoyed the fact that I basically just, uh, just talk to my, to my Alexa and sent a message to a friend of the show, Fergal. It was fun. And he did it back. I, you know, it's interesting.

It's going to be, this is where this all needs to go. Uh, but it needs to be, uh, independent platform independent. Once I can just talk to my Alexa to send a text to anyone, I'm, I'm all in on that. That's pretty cool. See, I've gotten Alexa in my studio. And the last thing I need is, Hey, Brian said, go suck a dick in the middle of a show with a celebrity.

It took me like six months to book. So, uh, but you can set, uh, you can set being away. Okay. So you can do all that sort of thing. Of course, the problem is remembering what the keywords are to say to that, but you can do it via your app on your phone as well. I figured it out. I figured it out. You know what they need to make these things out of?

Whiteboard material. So you can write on the side of it, what the keywords are that you need to remember. That's actually quite smart. That is it. That's not bad. Actually, that's not bad. Maybe you should do a Kickstarter for like an enclosure. Oh, yes. Your Alexa case. Now they also have a feature called drop-in, which is vaguely creepy.

It's not vaguely creepy. It's really fucking creepy. It's really kind of creepy. I mean, it's great for like a nursery, but you'd already have a camera that would do this sort of thing. So yeah, basically what you could do is you can drop in on any of your devices and just start listening to what's going on in the room.

Thankfully, I tested this to be sure. It does play a very loud noise when you drop in, thus informing anybody in the room that something is happening. It also plays a noise on exit. So thank you for doing that. So this will not work on cheating spouses. Well, they'd have to be quite stupid.

Or having very loud sex at the time when you dropped in. Or have cranked the volume all the way down because then you wouldn't hear it. Oh, interesting. Yeah, that might be something. You know what? We'll see this in a near future sci-fi novel at some point soon from Cory Doctorow, I'm sure.

And probably in our security segment. Yes. Now, I know you're not a video gamer, but have you ever heard of the Dead or Alive franchise? You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record. Oh, sorry. Yeah. The Dead or Alive video game franchise has been the spank bank replacement for many a 13-year-old boy for a very long time.

Because there are lots of half-naked women. Leisure Suit Larry. Well, some people might be into Leisure Suit Larry. You're into the Leisure Suits or Larry. But now, only the Japanese. You got to give it to the Japanese.

They are creating VR sense game cabinets where you can go in and play Dead or Alive in VR in an arcade, I'm assuming, because these are cabinets that you have to walk into, where they will emit odors and spray mist on you that simulates wind and the scent of the women that you're playing against.

Okay, that's creepy. Yeah. Uh-huh. Way to go, Japan. Got to give them some props on that one. Nothing weird about that. Nothing weird about that. I want to know the Matrix-style sweat farms where they have the women hooked up to tanks and funnels just on treadmills sweating for all their VR cabinets.

Yeah. I saw this one on Boing Boing, and this made me angry. The name of the article is, Watch a Pro Drone Racer Zip Around a Construction Site at Sunset. This is from Johnny FPV. He's a drone racer, a professional drone racer, which apparently is a thing now.

And he was in Vegas, and he just threw on his VR headset and zipped his drone out the window and flew it around the hotel and the construction site across the street at Sunset. Now, did you watch this video, Brian? I did not. Okay.

This guy is whipping his, you know, lawnmower of the sky right up to guests on their balconies who are watching going, what the fuck is that thing out there? Oh, Jesus, it's a drone. Ah, it's coming at me. It was enjoyable for about six seconds when I'm just like, I hope this guy got a ticket.

And now I'm really that guy. Get your drone off my lawn. I've turned into that guy. I've turned into you. How the fuck did that happen? Oh, it happened because your drone attacked you. And now you're angry at all drones. Yes, but no, I know that that was my fault. I was saving my puppy from imminent doom and I, because her nose was going at it.

So I stuck my hand in and I stopped it. And yes, I turned, I turned my hand into meat salad for a couple of days. Boo hoo. Stupid me. But I don't, I don't hate drones. I hate stupid uses of drones by stupid people who are going to make it shittier for everybody else.

And this kid did that. I'm just saying if you wrapped your dog in one of those big mouse pads, be safe from all drones. That's, that's step two.

Media candy. Brian. Yes. We just talked about YouTube a little bit where people are killing each other for it. Well, I would like to kill YouTube TV. Oh wait, I did. I canceled YouTube TV. Okay. So that didn't work out.

Would you like to know why I canceled YouTube TV? Sure. That's why we do the show. All right. Well, YouTube TV liked to crash a lot, a lot. Okay. So I was watching preacher. Like I mentioned, there was a, the season premiere was this week. I was 16 minutes into preacher and it crashed.

Now you would think that it would remember where I was at, like Hulu does or anybody else. Anything else. Yeah. Well, YouTube TV, obviously with the mind power of Google can't figure out to save your last point. Right.

So I go back and I try and scrub. First, I get in. I cannot start without watching three and a half minutes worth of ads. Three and a half minutes. That's nothing. I, I, I know some podcasts you recommend to me that have at least eight minutes of ads. Yeah. Fucking blow me. And then I'm paying, I'm paying 35 bucks for this.

I'm pissed. So then I scrubbed to the 16 minute mark where it crashed on me. Then I have to watch six and a half minutes of ads to pick up less than podcasts. No, no, that's 10 minutes there. We're 10 minutes. So come on. And I'm paying for it.

So, uh, yeah. Fuck you, YouTube. I'm going to Sweden. Okay. Well, uh, you know, good first attempt, sort of not really their interface is Google has never been known for user interface and they still are not known for user interface.

They, but the only thing that YouTube TV did good this time was have a human being on support when I got in touch with them to figure out where my Chromecast was and why the link they sent me didn't work. And Oh, and by the way, YouTube TV does not work in opera. You have to use Chrome for it or probably Safari, but it does not work in opera period.

Great. Yeah. It's just forget it. Just move on. Yeah. Um, what the hell is going on with Rob Lowe? I don't know, but I, does he not have enough money? I probably not. None of these people have any money. I don't know. Okay.

So are expensive. A and E, which used to be a decent TV station and now just programs, whatever the hell they want is, uh, ordered up a new reality series called the low files. It's Rob Lowe and his sons ghost and alien hunting.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. I don't really, there's nothing I can say that's better than what is said in the LAS.com article that is linked in the show notes. Please do enjoy that link. I read that. I went, I watched the trailer and then I read the article and I have to say, whoever wrote this article, I'm not about to go click on it because it'll probably autoplay something, which I can't have on the show.

It doesn't, his name is Ben Yakis and he also, uh, at the end of the article with the fantastic screenshots and commentary, he'd also does a tweet at Rob Lowe, some other ideas for the next shows that he could be doing after. Which are fucking genius. Can you please share a few of them with us right now?

Um, sure. Okay. He also suggests that perhaps after this, he does low blow in which Rob Lowe goes undercover to expose the cocaine trade. Yes. Uh, the low end theory in which Rob Lowe offers a comprehensive history of hip hop and low by low in which Rob Lowe transforms himself into a living tribute to David Bowie's seminal album, Lowe.

I have to say that this guy is awesome. I want to hire him to write everything I do. It is quite funny. It is funny. So this show looks like a train wreck. I've even seen that Rob Lowe is actually out doing, he's obviously doing promo for it right now. And he talks about how, uh, Bigfoot nearly killed him.

So apparently Bigfoot not only exists, but almost took out Sam Seaborn from the West wing. Wow. That would be a story. There's a squash out there. Be careful. They walked and talked it out though. So it's all good. Yeah. Now, uh, and by the way, if you haven't seen Rob Lowe on Californication, it's his best role ever.

You have to, you have to watch that. Um, moving on from low, this is, we're going from the low end to the high end. We're going to highbrow. I want to talk about, um, Sam Harris's podcast for a second. He did a conversation with Kevin Kelly and it's called landscapes of the mind, which is a really, really douchey title.

Um, but it's about AI for the most part because they're, they're on opposite sides of the fence. Sam Harris is you. Kevin Kelly is probably me. And in the middle, they finally realized that, yeah, I guess this ain't that big of a thing.

There really isn't going to be the Terminator type of singularity that everybody's talking about. But I, I, I recommend listening to this. If you're interested in AI and really smart people who think a hell of a lot more than we do talking about the subject and Kevin Kelly's on my side about the whole trucking thing and automated cars, it's going to take longer than we think it's going to take.

And it's going to be a slower burn. So we're going to have more time to train up the people who are losing their jobs. And he may, he had, he had a really good point. He's like the U S army and military in general is really good at retraining people in mass.

And like, he's like, we know how to do this. So when it comes down to it, let's call the army and get them into retrain people into maybe how to fix the trucks that the they're not driving anymore or things like that. But they had a lot of really good ideas on how we're going to survive it.

I mean, we talked about Kevin Kelly's book previously. Um, I can't remember the name of it, but, um, his latest one and he's an optimist. We're generally pessimists, but it's a really good listen. I think you'll like it, Brian a lot. Okay. I will definitely listen to it.

I consider myself more of a realist than a pessimist. Although I do play a pessimist on this show. Yes, you do play a dick on this show most of the time, but we'll call it a pessimist for today. Um, and I w I want your, I want your opinion because since you are a pessimist, optimist, yes, yes.

Sony is going to start making vinyl records again. Yeah. What do you think? In Japan, there's a big caveat. Okay. Not everywhere. Not worldwide. We do have shipping. They can, you know, all the machines. Sony is in Japan, so they can ship worldwide. I have nothing against vinyl.

I think it's a fine format that, that some people, a very, very tiny percentage of the marketplace enjoys. One of them happens to be very vocal and your friend and never shuts up about it, but a very, very tiny portion of the market enjoys.

I, I've had long conversations with, with a bunch of smaller people that are running smaller independent labels. This is a moneymaker for them because the people that are super into things, super into bands like vinyl, they like special editions and it makes sense to give the people what they want.

If you can set up your whole system. So you have the cutting equipment and the engineers who know how to do all this sort of stuff, or you can outsource it to somebody, basically Jack White, because he's the only game in town, at least at the moment that has that sort of capability and you can produce, you have enough fan base to buy the things, to make a profit and basically solidify them as fans to give them what they want.

Fantastic. Is it going to take over? No. Is it going to be a bigger, is it going to replace streaming? Are you fucking kidding me? No, it's, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny little marketplace and good. I'm glad that people are fulfilling that, that market and providing the, the content that people want.

That's fantastic. Enjoy that. Now, one of the interesting things about this, this article, it's from, it's from NPR. So it was a, you know, probably one of their radio shows, not a podcast because NPR doesn't do podcasts. They do radio shows. Fuck you very much. It's interesting that millennials are finding the fact that they get liner notes and stories behind the songs.

Interesting. I'm like, wait, what? Oh my God. Millennials might actually not be as useless as we thought that they're actually coming to our, our way of thinking that, wow, this is actually a valid medium where you actually can take your time, listen to the album the way it was meant to be listened to, not on shuffle and read about it and listen to the lyrics and read the lyrics and have a good time.

Also, I was very inspired by that. As I've said for a long time, this is a prime example of the use of an artist's website. I think, you know, nobody spends any money on their site anymore. Nobody does anything with their website anymore. If you're an artist, provide the stories behind, use your website to replace the liner notes that have gone away because I think that people that are into you will go there and find it and read it.

Jesus Jones, I know, crazy 90s band, very dated, but I love them. One of the things that I love most about them is their liner notes for their albums were always stories behind each and every song. Mike Edwards, the lead singer, would write two, three paragraphs about every song, how it came to be, funny little anecdotes about recording or writing it or whatever.

Fantastic. And that's what every artist should be doing about their albums and putting it up on their website. Nowadays, they go on a podcast and tell you all about it. Well, that's fine, too. I don't care how you do it. Just get out there and do it. Yep. So no, I was really happy about that, that, you know, the kids nowadays are finally realizing that, oh, you can slow down and enjoy things like we used to.

Yeah. And look into it a bit more and not just listen to the single. So it's good. Get out there, kids. Do it. And buy more vinyl. I don't care. I don't have a problem with it. It's not going to take over. Give me a break. Anyways, speaking of things that are totally outdated and useless, Rodney Bingenheimer has been fired from K-Rock.

I'm actually picking on him. But to be honest, I can't listen to his show anymore. And I haven't for a long time because it's just he and I have parted ways musically. Rodney, his legendary host from the legendary K-Rock back in the day, he is Rodney on the Rock discovered and broke more bands in the 70s and early 80s than anybody else.

There would be no Go-Go's without him. There'd be no Ramones without him. There'd be no so many bands. Agent Orange. Agent Orange without him. So he's been on K-Rock forever and they just recently fired him after 40 years, actually. But he's over at Sirius now.

So if you really want to go listen to him playing his crazy ass stuff that he still finds, he is on Sirius. So if you all five of you with a Sirius account, head on over. Yes, all five of you with the count, you can now listen to him on your Alexa as well. So have fun with that.

Good for him. I'm glad he found somewhere because he is a legend and K-Rock really should have just kept him on. Yeah. I mean, they got new ownership, but it's stupid. I mean, he is a legend. It's like firing Casey Kasem. I mean, yeah, he might say some funny things about the fucking dog dying, you know, that we all shared on cassettes.

But it's Rodney. It's, you know, I don't listen to his show. I listened to his show back in the 80s. And honestly, until you put this in here, I didn't know he still had a show. Yeah. Well, that's probably why he got fired. That's probably why he got fired. But still, you kind of keep that around just for cred.

You know, it's like Rodney was here for 67 years. He died behind the microphone, putting a cot in the system. But no, I guess not because everybody's got bottom lines. Yep. Brian, you're a Downton Abbey fan. I love the show.

It was fantastic. You're excited because there's a movie coming. Let's see. The title of the article that you put in here is Downton Abbey, the movie. What to expect. I expect not to go see it. Well, I'm not. I think the show ended perfectly.

I think they put everything in a nice little bow. And I think they can only destroy what the show was by making a movie now. Oh, yeah. But they need the monies. They have to. They don't need them. None of them need the monies. I know. Yeah. So I didn't even read this article.

I just grabbed the first article that came came out when I heard that there was doing they were doing a movie because I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Under the Noise podcast with Chris Pachoni and Zeus. And they were talking about the the fact that they're going to start filming the movie in 2018 if they can wrangle everybody together.

Well, yeah, that that's the problem. It isn't allegedly at this point because, you know, Maggie Smith has basically said, I'm not fucking doing this. Yeah. Well, she's an easy one. Yeah. Grand died. OK. She was already 174 years old by the time she got around to it.

So, yeah. But everybody else is also doing things. There's no story that's written yet that's been signed off on. So I have a sneaking suspicion this might just go away. And I don't know if we're going to see it, but we'll see. I hope it goes away. I had to throw it in because you're such a big Downton Abbey fan.

I love the show. I thought it was a great show. And I did. I do agree with you. It ended perfectly. But yeah, they don't need to do a movie. Deadwood needs to do a movie. Now, there are rumblings that that's going to happen. Oh, no, it is happening. They're working on it. Yeah. Because we were all worried that when Cy Tolliver died, the powers booth when he died, that it was going to screw things up.

But no, the Deadwood movie is going to take place 10 years after the last episode of Deadwood. So it's basically wrapping up all the storylines. So that's how they're going to do that. But that is happening. They have scripts. Things are being worked on. I have people on the inside. It's coming together.

Now, you made fun of a friend of the show, MXV, a little earlier for his affinity for vinyl. I didn't name him specifically. I did. Could have been anyone. I did. Because I wanted to. Because he did me a solid this week. Apparently, Public Enemy has a new album called Nothing is Quick in the Desert.

And this show is going to come out on midnight on July the 3rd. So you have about, let's just say, not a lot of time to go to our show notes at GOG.com. I can't even do it. You broke me. Go to GOG.show slash 216.

And there'll be a link in the show notes to go get their entire new album for free on Bandcamp. On Bandcamp? Yes. Well, MXV will send you the link that basically is the streaming from vinyl. Because that's the only way he streams it. Yes, yes. You have to stream it from vinyl.

Yes. There's a gramophone set up in a corner with a little web camera pointing at it that's got audio. And that's the only way he listens to streaming music. Yes. Well, I prefer to click on the download button. But for MXV, he can do it with his gramophone. So enjoy if you like Public Enemy.

So bring the noise. At the library. Okay. This one's going to be quick. I wanted to talk to you about the Eddie Izzard autobiography. Yes. You missed out massively by reading the print version.

I had a feeling. Massively missed out. Because the audiobook version is a treasure trove of extra stories and sound bites. He's got actual audio of his mom introducing one of the plays he talks about.

Because Eddie is dyslexic. Much like I am as well. I'm not severely dyslexic. I am mildly dyslexic. So it's hard for me to read a lot, which is why I prefer audiobooks. You're severe other things. Yes, I am. I'm a severe asshole.

But I am mildly dyslexic. So when Eddie originally did the book, he dictated it. So when he was reading the book for the audio version, he was reading it for the first time. And you could tell that he kind of got the gist of the sentence that he was reading and then went totally off script.

A lot. And they would take time out. He's like, wait a minute. Let's Google that. Let's Google that. Let's find out. Here we go. These are live footnotes. We're going to do live footnotes right now. I'm going to Google this. Oh, oh, oh, they're still live. Oh, okay. Let's Google that. It just goes off on these random tangents forever.

And it makes the book so much more endearing. So even though you've read the print book, it's almost worth it to go back and listen to him do the book again to get all of the side stories because they're fantastic. That's great. I might have to do that.

It's almost like it's a whole other stand-up show. Yeah, it's 14 hours. I mean, I listened to it on 1.5 because I didn't want to go too fast. Right. And I want to throw a shout-out to my new friend, Rob Reed. He was the founder of Listen.com and created Rhapsody, if you remember Rhapsody.

I do. Yes, one of the first audio streaming services. He's a client of mine, and I'm working on some audio stuff for him. But he sent me his new book, After On. Now, it's one of those near-future books, kind of like Cory Doctorow does with Little Brother.

I have been listening to the audio book on this. At the beginning, I was like, oh, no. Another one of these books where I'm going to be like, I know everything that they're talking about, and he's just going to do a little twist on it. And then, okay, yeah. I was laughing so hard in the middle of the park when I was walking the dog that people were literally staring.

They were like, walk past me. I had to stop because I was laughing so hard. This is Neil Stevenson meets Cory Doctorow meets, like, I can't even figure out. It meets Rob Reed. It is a, so far, this is one of the funniest near-future tech books I have ever read.

But if you go, the point of this is, the book comes out in August, but if you go to after-on.com, it'll be linked in the show notes. You can start to get chapters as they come out for the next couple weeks, and then definitely pre-order the book. I mean, it is funny as shit. This guy is, I'm going to definitely get him on the show, because this is, it is too funny.

All right. All right. We are back again this week with Mr. Dave Bittner, and we were busy this week, so I don't really have a funny nickname for you.

I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, okay. Just, I'll leave it up to our audience. There are many, many things that rhyme with Bittner. There are many things that rhyme with the word bit, so welcome to my middle school and high school years. I will tell you, my favorite nickname that I got was Bittnerd.

I thought that was the most clever of them. You know, back in the day, that was probably a bit of an insult. If you were, if you're growing up now, it'd be a compliment. Yes, it was absolutely an insult back then, but, you know, that's what you get for hanging out in the computer lab when you're 12.

Well, joke's on them, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. Revenge is a dish best served cold. So, at any rate, because now I'm a podcaster, that's not nerdy at all. No. Yeah, but when you run across them at McDonald's and say, I would like fries with that.

Yes, please. Thank you. That is, yes, I would like my dish served warm. Thank you. That has actually happened to me, by the way. Love it when that happens. Yeah, yeah. It has actually happened to me. So, you know. At any rate, so we're going to talk about some security today, right?

Enough about me. Yeah. Yes. Let's get past the vengeance angle of the show. That's right. Let's talk about some cybersecurity. Bitter differences from our youth. So, you know, as these things often happen, boy, my voice just cracked there, didn't it? I'm a professional speaker.

When it's time to change. See, you've already cast yourself back in your mind. You're just that little kid being called a nerd again. Yeah, sorry, guys. I'm going to go hang out in the computer lab. As these things happened, just last week I was down speaking to our editor of the Cyber Wire.

His name's John Petrick, and I said, gosh, John, kind of slow news week. He was like, yeah, it is kind of slow. Kaboom! Yeah. Another global ransomware attack. What we thought initially was a global ransomware attack.

This was really an interesting developing story. When it first came out, everyone thought it was a variation of a ransomware called Petya that had come out previously. People suspected that they were reusing code from Petya, so they were calling it Petya.

Wasn't that the woman that did 99 red balloons? No, that was Naina. Are you thinking of Nanya? Are you thinking of Enya? No, Enya has no balloons. You've got to remember that Petya was... Well, Petya has a castle. Petya was actually one of the original competitors to Tinder.

It was kind of more of an adult version. Oh, is that right? Yeah. No. Or so you've been told. So I've been told. So we thought that this was a variant of Petya. We thought it was ransomware. But as the days went on, what we discovered is that it is not actually ransomware.

It is a wiper, which means it intends to go in and basically destroy your files, make your disk unusable. It's not a pure wiper. It doesn't actually go in and erase files. What it does is it goes in and encrypts your master file table, your MFT, encrypts it and basically throws away the key.

It doesn't store the key anywhere. It doesn't send the key to anyone for later decryption. Right. So your disk is hosed when it encrypts the MFT. That seems like it's more efficient than actually deleting the files because you can actually go in and recover deleted files.

But if they're encrypted, then you're really screwed. Yeah. Yeah. So, again, it was initially sort of disguised itself as ransomware. There was even an email address where you could send your request to be decrypted, send your Bitcoin.

I believe they think that they made about three grand, which is not a lot of money at all for something of this scale. There was a German company who was the provider of the email address. They shut down the email address. So now there's no way to contact the, what I guess people are referring to it as NotPetya.

My favorite, we haven't settled on a name for this one yet. The one I like the most is Nietje. Nice. But also calling it GoldenEye. There's a number of different names. There was really no way of them ever recovering your files. They did not have the infrastructure in there to do that.

So it was disguised as ransomware. It's really a wiper. And it seems as though this was a targeted attack against Ukraine. Right. Which means that it came from, gentlemen. Russia. Yes. So Ukraine has already blamed Russia.

The Russians, of course, are saying that they have nothing to do with it. Leave Russia alone. Look, if some patriots wake up in the morning and they want to hack Ukraine, what are we going to do about it? Yeah. That's exactly right. Ukraine, my crane, all the crane. Now, it's interesting that the way that this spread, again, as the story broke, there was some speculation that it was spreading via word macros.

That turned out to not be the case. That damn paperclip. That damn paperclip. Oh, Clippy. Yeah. I see. You want to spread a malware infection. Poor Clippy. It turned out to not be that.

This actually spreads through a software update. There is a piece of software from a company called MEDoc. And my understanding is it's accounting software. So it's a tool that you would use to file your taxes. And it's one of only, I believe, two software packages that Ukrainian financial companies are authorized to use for these sorts of things.

So lots of people use this software. And the speculation is that the bad guys got into this company, MEDoc. They injected their malware into the newest version of the software. And so when people had an auto-update push to them, the malware came under the radar.

Nothing was looking for it. It just looked like a legit software update. And they got infected. Ouch. Yep. Not good. Hey, at least it wasn't Flash this time. They're having a party over there. It wasn't us.

It wasn't us. Now, one of the other interesting things I think that's worth noting on this is it hit a certain sectors particularly hard. It hit factories, shipping firms, and law firms were disproportionately affected.

Any guess for why those groups might be hit harder than others? They probably don't have internal IT departments and don't know what the hell they're running. I don't know. What do you think, Dave? Well, it turns out that these folks are generally slower to patch.

The vulnerability that's being taken advantage of in this is a known vulnerability. I believe the patches were released back in April for it. So this malware is counting on the fact that people are slow to patch. And it turns out that factories and shipping companies are slow to patch because the Windows XP systems that this vulnerability depends on is used for industrial control systems in those situations.

And those companies are generally slow to patch because you really have to prove that the update and the patch isn't going to break something when it's grafted on to some sort of really important industrial control system. You don't want your tanker ship accidentally crashing into the dock because you updated the Windows XP control system that controls the navigation system on the bridge or something like that.

Now, law firms are just lazy, it turns out. Law firms are just slow to patch. And evidently, that's just something about law firms. They tend to not change things.

I can 100% vouch for that. I was approached about three years ago from a law firm that wanted to do their website. I'm still getting emails discussing the very basics, which I now just respond to. When you guys figure it out, let me know. Three years. Right. Wow. Well, you know, now you can just say, I'm sorry, I retired two years ago, so what do you want to do now?

Yeah. You can't rush these things. No. So, you know, this was a big deal. Continues to develop. We'll see how it shakes out. But not ransomware, more of a cyber weapon. Right. Yeah.

There's a pretty, I mean, if you've been following this, this is all we've been talking about in this segment recently because it's been happening left, right, and center. Gizmodo has a pretty decent rundown of exactly what's going on, kind of more for the layperson. It's worth checking out.

The title is The Era of Chaos. Chaos-inducing ransomware is here, and it's scary as hell, which is true. I mostly put this in for our show notes because it repeatedly references Jason DeFillippo's beloved movie, Hackers. And to go back to what Dave was saying a second ago, Maersk was one of the companies that was targeted.

And if you go back and watch the movie, the Da Vinci virus was set to turn tankers over at a certain time of the day if the hackers didn't come to the rescue. So, row, row, row your boat, baby. It's all coming true. Yeah. Yeah. So, there you go.

It's a good read anyways. It'll get you up to speed on what's going on pretty quickly. There was another big hack this week that didn't make the news quite as much. And luckily, it wasn't quite as bad as we all thought it was at the beginning. A nuclear power plant here in the U.S. was hacked.

There's a federal investigation currently taking place. They say at least one nuclear power plant, which makes you feel good. The good news there is, though, that no sensitive systems were impacted by the attack. They only managed to penetrate into a computer system that focused on the business side of running a nuclear power plant rather than any of the actual control mechanisms.

So, thank God for that. Wouldn't it be fair to call every part of a nuclear power plant the business side of the nuclear power plant? Yeah, I tend to agree with that. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency did not feel the need to indicate that there was any risk posed by this, or at least it's not very high.

And it's good to know that these sorts of industries have separation of systems in theory. So, that's good, right? Yeah. Until someone takes a USB stick from the computer running their QuickBooks and runs it over to the other side.

Right. But this is where you talk about lateral movement, right? So, someone gets into one side, the relatively unprotected side, or the part that no one thinks is harmful. And, you know, who knows? Is that the side that, while separated from the important side, may contain the passwords for the important side or contain, you know, a map of...

A network diagram. Yeah, network, exactly. Exactly what I was thinking. So, you know, that lateral movement kind of thing is certainly a possibility here. Good news that they caught it. Yeah. And you could certainly get enough information to do some social engineering. Yep. Absolutely.

So, that's not what you hoped for either. So, let's lock all these things down. How about that, guys? Yeah. We saw another story in Wired this week. WikiLeaks dumped some information. And there was what they're describing as a creepy CIA location tracking trick.

It's pretty clever. It's not that clever. Come on. Maybe for the layperson. But go ahead and explain it. And I will explain why it is not so creepy. All right, Mr. Sunnyside. They're calling it ELSA.

This dates back to 2013. And it addresses some Windows laptops. Basically, what it does is it looks at your Wi-Fi and it uses your Wi-Fi to see what Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi stations are nearby.

And it uses that along with publicly identifiable databases of those Wi-Fi networks to figure out where you are with a pretty high degree of accuracy. Right. And this is not clever because. It's not clever because all you're doing is you're spitting out the name of your network and your MAC addresses and people can figure that stuff out from there.

Most of the time, though, they can figure that out from your IP address because of the global tables of IP tracking. Yes, this is like another level of it. But I don't see it as creepy. I see it as basics. You know, it's like, OK, this is what we have. This is what we need to work with. The creepy part is how they get the malware on your system.

That's where you need to be worried about. But the rest of it is just it's basic location tracking. There's nothing, you know, groundbreaking about this. No, it also includes a method to remove the process so that the CIA can cover their tracks.

It's interesting just to know that this is something that the CIA is capable of doing. Yeah. And invested resources in developing and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah. Right. Right. So just as my nerdy side, I just really wouldn't.

This just seems like it's, you know, it would be commonplace. It would be commonplace. So, OK, but if you discover that it was on your laptop, how would you feel? How would you you wouldn't feel at all creeped out by that? I'd be more creeped out that somebody got malware on my machine. And then I would be looking about what else is on the machine that is more important than that.

Like, are they looking at my cameras? Are they looking at all the other stuff? So I think we've established they're looking at your cameras. That's what I'm saying. So the whole point is, it's just like this is like this. I don't see this is in nowadays. I mean, this is what from 2013. All they got to do is like, look at your phone so they can figure out where you're trying to find out where people are in this world is really not very hard anymore.

I guess when one lives as creepy a life as Jason does, these things really aren't going to to to to to affect him much at all. Right. Yeah, they're hacking they're hacking my smart dog collar on Bam Bam to go find where I'm at. Oh, no, he's on the back leg of the park again. Damn, we can't get him back there.

No, we don't have a clean shot. Bam Bam is actually a Bam Bam is actually a CIA mole. Yeah. A very good one, too. All right. Moving on. Interesting story from Motherboard. In our in our ever on the show, we love some things that are a service, right?

We just evil as a service. Evil as a service. Yeah. So we should have named the segment. Yeah. This one caught my eye. This is automated social engineering as a service. And basically, you can sign up for a system that automatically creates robocalls to try to steal people's credit card pins.

So amazing credit. Yeah. Credit card numbers are widely available on the dark web. You can go and buy lists of of credit card numbers. It is one of the easiest things to buy on the dark web. It's not terribly expensive. But what you don't generally don't get with those lists are the pins that you need to go just, you know, get cash from those credit cards, which is what people want most of all.

So what this service does is basically allow you to create an automated robocalling system that will call people and say, hello, this is such and such from this and such and such bank. And, you know, we need you to verify your pin number.

So this is, you know, classic numbers game, right? Call a thousand people. If you get, you know, 1% of them fall for it. Profit. Yep. And people do fall for it because people aren't very smart. People do fall for it. I believe it's 250 bucks a month.

That's it? Wow. That's one card. Yep. Yep. 250 bucks a month. You can you can have at it with this. This still comes back to comes back to me just thinking that something is wrong here, because if I could build a site that does this and I could get all the pins for all these credit cards by just doing it, why would I sell it for less than less than one withdrawal from one card per month to all the people that are out there?

Why not just run it yourself? Well, it's all been devalued just like everything else, Jason. No, but I'm just saying it's like if I'm going to charge you 250 bucks and maybe you're going to get 10 cards a month out of it. So, you know, max $500 per card, 10 cards, that's $5,000 you'll get minus the 250.

So you're grossing $4,750 on that. Why would I give you? I'm basically giving you $4,750 where I could have just run the system and got the full $5,000 for that block of cards. You're removing a level of illegal activity on your own part.

All you've done is set up a system which you can probably quickly and easily take down and probably isn't trackable. You're doing much less evil stuff. Right, but I can walk out into the street and get a bunch of hooligans that, you know, alms for the poser to go run the cards and get me the money and bring them back, you know.

But then you're basically a mafia boss and that's even more illegal stuff. This is lowering your level of criminality and just making money. We'll see how that plays out in the course. What do you think, Dave? I think it's lesser evil as a service. Okay.

I mean, here's the thing. Who's to say they're not doing both? Exactly. Well, there's that as well. Yeah. Right. Why not? If you spin this thing up for yourself and you say, you know what? If I get, you know, 100 people to sign up for this thing, that's a nice little chunk of change in addition to me being able to use it myself.

Yeah, you're just, you're diversifying your revenue streams, Jason. Yeah. Have you guys logged into this? Is this one of those BYOC lists? Like, you know, you bring your own cards. So, so I'm not supplying the cards. Correct. You are not supplying the cards. You will have, you, you get the cards elsewhere and then you load your information into this system.

Gotcha. And then it does the robo calling just to try to get the pin numbers. Okay. I think Dave just unintentionally admitted that he's logged into it. Uh, no. No. I have done no such thing, gentlemen.

I just got the information off the website. The Dark Bittner has, uh, baby. The Dark Bittner. Yeah. El Bittnero. Agent of Evil. Yes, we had Banksy outed. We had Banksy outed on the last show. Now we got Bitsy outed on this show.

Yeah. The Dread Pirate Bittner. Darn it. You meddling kids, I'd have gotten away with it, too. Yep. All right. Our final story, uh, this week, uh, the FBI is, uh, evidently interviewing American employees of, uh, Kaspersky.

Certainly a well-known security company, Kaspersky Labs. And, uh, NBC News is reporting that, um, they've been interviewing some people, uh, all over the U.S. about Kaspersky, trying to determine whether or not, or, or I guess how connected Kaspersky is potentially with, um, the Russians.

Well, since they're in Moscow, I'm guessing they're somewhat connected. And wasn't one of the, the execs at Kaspersky recently, uh, pulled aside and disappeared by Putin? Oh, I don't know about disappeared. I, well, he went to jail, I believe, but they were, uh, that is, yes, yes, that, yes, that is correct.

Okay. That is correct. And, and, and Eugene Kaspersky, who's the founder, um, you know, he's got KGB background. He's, uh, he worked for Russian military intelligence. So, you know, I'm sure, I imagine the, uh, Russian government and military get some kind of friends and family discount, but I don't know that for sure.

Um, but, um, I mean, but, you know, but they, they maintain that they are just a, you know, security company doing their thing. They're independent from, from any government, uh, connection or anything like that. But I suppose things being what they are these days, that it's in our government's best interest to at least look into it.

Yeah. I mean, this is probably the same kind of deal we have. You know, you probably look at Symantec or any of these other big security companies that we have here. I'm sure a lot of our guys came from, you know, the, uh, the surveillance state that we have. Oh, absolutely. They come from the NSA, the CIA and all those guys.

So. Absolutely. Absolutely. Many, many, many, many cybersecurity companies are spun out of former military people, uh, not unusual at all. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it could just be that, but at the same time, um, if I were an American, uh, and I was doing business, well, we talked about this last time, how, you know, the Russians were requiring us to lift the veil on our, uh, code, you know, on the, um, the source code for some of our things.

So. Yeah. I don't know that there's a whole lot to say about them interviewing people, but again, it's just this, uh, this environment that we're in right now. This is the way it is. Trust no one. Yeah. Especially me. Evidently.

The dark. All right, guys. Well, uh, I have to, I have to go do some evil as a service. So, uh, until, uh, until next week. You might want to wipe those drives, by the way. Yeah. Well, I'll just install and not pet you.

It'll do all the wiping for me. Okay. Yeah. That's true. You have, you have, uh, till Monday at, uh, midnight to, uh, disappear. So we will not be talking to Dave next week unless he is, uh, calling us from Columbia from Dave's going to go down and take over McAfee's old joint and then he'll call us back.

My own private Island. All right. Thanks guys. See you. Thank you. Brick-a-brick. Ah, I love this. This, uh, InspiroBot took over Facebook for me this week and it's, it is fantastic.

Uh, a new AI has appeared on the wilderness of the web and it goes by the name InspiroBot. It designs inspirational posters for you. Shoot for the moon. If you missed, you'll land among the stars type quotes in an aesthetically pleasing font plastered onto a calming, pretty background image of deep space or flowers or the sunrise or something.

There is a link in the show notes to IFL science, which has a smattering selection of them. Um, I suggest following them, uh, InspiroBot on Facebook and you will get a continued stream of them in your feed. If you haven't already from all your friends reposting them, keep panicking for the win.

This is genius. And in the funny thing here is I, I, you know, I did my own InspiroBot posters, which was great. And when I was listening to the Sam Harris, Kevin Kelly podcast this morning, they said specifically when the AI has become the funniest person on the internet, then you know, we're fucked.

And I think InspiroBot pretty much just, uh, blew them out of the water on that. Yes. These are just unbelievably fantastic. Uh, they're so good. They're so good. So good. Anyway, speaking of good, uh, I just like this story.

An American man has been arrested for scamming three Nigerians. Turnabout's fair play, fuckers. I just wish he wasn't arrested. I wish he got away with it. I know it is. It's a, so basically, uh, this man, Marco Ramirez, allegedly got over half a million dollars out of three men after promising to secure them U.S. passports.

So, uh, too bad, too bad. He got too bad, too bad. He should have just stuck with the emails. He didn't have to go over there in person. With the emails. Now, my favorite person of the, of the week here is Simon Smith. He was walking along and then got hit by a bus, which I know what this is like because I have been hit by a bus in the UK and, uh, we, we actually both did the same thing, but he did it in a more spectacular fashion.

After he was thrown several feet, he got up and just walked into the pub. As you do. I walked into my B&B and, uh, opened a new castle that I had in my backpack that didn't break, surprisingly, after I got hit by the bus. So we both did the same thing. We cut up and had a pint.

Fantastic. So definitely go watch the video, though. It's just like, oh, shit. We're on of the week. Brian. Yes. You're the first person that turned me on to goop. I wouldn't phrase it that way, but okay. Well, you did.

I wouldn't make it sound as if, like, I was promoting them. Okay. Let's just say you put goop on my radar. Okay. That's fair. Okay. Uh, Quartz has an article this week talking about the different things that you can buy on websites, like magical powders and elixirs and things you rub on their, on your balls to make them shiny and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Well, it turns out goop has a lot of this stuff, which we knew, which we knew, which we covered. Um, apparently Alex Jones and info wars also sells things that you can put on your balls to make them shiny, but just hasn't by a different name. But it is exactly the same stuff.

I will say that on, on either side of the political fringes, there, there are morons. I, I, I, Hey, it's clowns to the left, jokers to the right. Yep. That's, that's where we're at. So yes. Uh, goop recommends magic potions for clarity, beauty, and energy.

And info war says heirloom organics, professional medicine packs and we've got away snowflakes. Yeah. So many things. Why am I so effing tired? Says goop info war says brain force. You know, there's just tons of these things out there and they're using the same stuff.

They're just repackaging them. Speaking of repackaging. Yes. I have another moron, uh, the Jenner sisters. Who's that? Yes. Just a few months after her Pepsi ad when she solved the problem. Kendall Jenner. Yes. Kendall Jenner is getting hammered again on social media this time with her sister, Kylie.

Uh, they are reality stars. Better than her other sister getting hammered on social media. If you know what I'm saying. No, that was on, uh, not the videotape. Uh huh. It was just on the recordings. Yes. Anyways, these are reality stars. And as you well know, when their intellectual property rights are threatened, lawsuits fly and they fly fast.

But, you know, in, in the interest of promoting their own brand, they've decided to release a selection of limited edition vintage music t-shirts. Oh, really? In which they superimpose their own face on album cover art and various copywritten imagery for, say, the notorious B.I.G., Pink Floyd, Metallica, Led Zeppelin.

Because, you know, why wouldn't that be totally okay? If we know one thing about copyright, you do not fuck with Metallica. You also do not fuck with the Doors, uh, since then the Doors estate, which I have to say is a client of mine, has already issued a seasoned assist because, you know, money.

Yeah. Or as people said, Jim Morrison did not die for this shit. So, yeah, they just went ahead and did that because you can just do that if you're them, I guess. And sadly, the worst part about this is, uh, now, you know, they have to take it all down, of course, because they can't, you can't do that.

But, uh, the limited edition runs sold out before they had to be taken down because people are fucking horrible. Well, then you can sue for more damages. But, you know, the upside is, for them, yeah, more people that are going to go watch their stupid TV show. Hunting Unicorns!

Hunting Unicorns! It is the first episode of the month, so we are taking a quick look at our Hunting Unicorns segment again. Uh, just a reminder, this is where Jason and I both picked five tech stocks each and, uh, invested in an imaginary $10,000. And we had a friend of the show, Mike, uh, invest the same in non-tech stocks as a control.

How are we doing, Jason? Uh, well, you are- How am I doing? Well, I know you're going to be, like, Mr. Shit-Eating Grin every month. Um, for now, you're at, uh, you're up $26.55 and I am up $21.69, which is not that big of a difference.

I gotta say, you're up 26%, I'm up 21%. Mike is at 9%. This is straight math, Jason. And it's actually, like, 4.5% difference, which is significant. Yeah, well, you know. Yeah, it's just math. But the interesting thing is, yes, we are totally outperforming the market, uh, with our tech stocks.

And Mike is finally up. He was down for a long time. He's up 9% as well, actually. So, really, all three of us are doing quite well in terms of, of our picks. So, hey, how's Twitter doing? Ah, well, yeah, let's talk about our side bet for a bit here, uh, because Brian, you know, we had a little side bet.

We did. And where Brian totally cheated, like a little bitch. And, uh... I did not cheat. I simply covered, covered my own ass. Yeah. So, I was going to buy Twitter stock, and if I made at least one cent over the 12 months of this year, he owes me a six-pack. Right.

And, uh, I paid $16.33 for my Twitter stock. It is now at $17.87. So, I am up. But so are you, because you decided to buy as well, like a douchebag. To cover the six-pack of beer, I might potentially have to pay you for it.

So, I bought some Twitter stock as well. So, if you win, I win, and that covers the beer. If you lose, you lose twice. Not... Yeah, if I lose, I... No, I still... I get beer. Oh, if you lose, you win. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, if I lose, I still win. See how that works, Jason? The whole point is that you just broke the whole contract.

The point was that if you lose, you lose, but now you win if you lose, and I hate you for that. So much winning, I'm going to be sick of winning. We have a new Patreon subscriber this week. Woo-hoo! Thank you, Michael Halverson.

Yeah, thank you so much. We appreciate it. So, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Right, Jason? That's right. There you go. If you want to support the show, we really do appreciate it. Reminder, we are giving away stickers. If you have been a Patreon subscriber for more than a month, that means we need to make at least the postage off of you to send you a sticker.

And you get an autographed... You get my autograph. I'm signing all these personally. I've got a stack of them. I'm going to the... The post office right after this. Look at you immediately decreasing the value. Oh, you dick. Moving on. Come on. Oh, over at Twitter, Swell tweeted us, just got Red Shirts audiobook from the library.

Thanks for the heads up. So, yeah. Great book by Scalzi. Red Shirts. If you haven't read it yet, please do. We have a link in the show notes. NoNamerMedia wrote us, from what I remember, OSX isn't technically more secure. It's just that most malware is developed for Windows. Macs are just now popular.

Yeah, kind of what we've been saying. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. OSX is definitely more secure because it's based on the BSD kernel, which was a very secure kernel. It is definitely more secure. I'm, you know, there are more holes in Windows than there are in Macs.

I will, I, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm standing by that. Bat, bat, bat, bat, bat, bat, bat. Okay. I mean, you're definitely, you're definitely right for older version of Windows. I don't know if that's technically true for the latest. Yes, it is. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. There we go. Jason knows.

Yeah. No, no, trust me. There's a reason I still, you know, I thought about moving over to Windows when I saw that cool surface thing and then I'm just like, ah, no. It's not Unix underneath. I want Unix. So. Okay. Jason wants Unix. I want Unix. Next comes from Ivor Tola.

If only they would all do this. And this is a touching tribute to Samsung Note 7 fidget spinners that burst into flames. Yep. They blew up. Kind of cute. Okay. He also sent us Hero of the Month, U.S. Engineer in the clink for wrecking X-Boss's smart meter radio masks with Pink Floyd lyrics.

I love the story. This is what you and I would have done back in the day. Okay. Fueled by beer and bitterness, a U.S. techie logged into his ex-employer's radio towers to sabotage them and is now behind bars as a result, sadly. Yes. He worked for a company that built radio masks used by utility companies to collect power and water usage data from home energy meters.

He was let go after an unsatisfactory employment review and failing to pull his socks up. He took revenge on his ex-bosses after some boozy nights on the town. Within weeks of leaving the job, well, technically getting fired from the job, the base stations built by his former employers began to disconnect from the radio network and access laws showed that he had taken to remotely connecting into the towers at night using their root passwords.

Their fault for not changing them, by the way. He then changed the passwords, in some cases to fuck you, uploaded Pink Floyd's song lyrics in place of key code, changed the radio frequencies used by the towers, and added ASCII art to the mass firmware. I would say, uh, their fault for not changing root passwords when they got rid of an employee.

You know, first thing you do is you change the keys of the kingdom. You know, I, if we were 24, not 42, we would have done this. He's 42, but, um, fucking good on you, Adam. I'm sorry. He is a hero.

Props for doing what you did. Negative props for getting caught. But, you know, yeah, okay. Um, so our Patreon subscriber, Mike Calverson, wrote over, wrote us over at a GOG.show. He says, this looks pretty fun.

Would you try it? Send us a link to Super Mario Bros recreated his life-sized augmented reality game. I would totally try this. Yeah, yeah, probably, you know. Yeah, looks fun. I'll jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up and get down. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Now, this comes from Rob Joyner. I thought Jason would enjoy knowing that as a proud Goobang buyer, he might just be on a naughty list. It looks like the rumblings are mainly in the UK for now, but if you run a Google News search for Cody, there's a lot of noise on that front. And this comes from, uh, Engadget.

And, look, dude, you have any idea how many fucking lists I'm on at this point? Buying some shit off Amazon is the least of my worries. Yeah, I mean, look, if you're using Cody, if you're doing any of this stuff, uh, make sure that you, you're using, uh, practice safe Cody, practice safe Cody, use private internet access.

That's what we recommend. And, uh, yeah, I, it's illegal. It's beyond illegal. It's incredibly illegal. Yes. So, you know, there you go. It's theft, you know? Yes. And to mitigate not being rounded up with people who are doing illegal stuff when you're not doing illegal stuff, you still should use PIA, which is private internet access, which we say, go to gog.show slash VPN and sign up, enjoy it.

And it's just going to protect you from, you know, being in that last scene in Brazil with the people with the baby masks coming to tear out your teeth and stuff. You don't want to be that guy, but you still want to be able to get your stuff and get it legally. But, you know, cause I like watching, I still, I still like watching Northern Ireland public access television on my gubang.

I really, really enjoy that because it's quite fun. There's a lot of curling that goes on up there. Yeah, they do enjoy their curling. Uh, next up, Kim's from David Findlay. Hi, love the show. As I too like to argue about tech found you in a roundabout way via art of charm. I guess you'd be, you'd be the roundabout Jason.

I'm the roundabout. Anyway, anyway, I think you're totally wrong about VR. The VR of the nineties was a dead end tech. I think today's VR is only a few increments away from widespread ubiquity. It just needs a few improvements that are within reach in the next five years. The killer app will be in the education field where soon kids will be going on excursions to the Cretaceous period or visit the Curiosity rover on Mars.

If you listen to Info Wars, buddy, you'd know that kids are already being sent to Mars, apparently by evil NASA. NASA has come out with an actual press release that says we do not have like colonies of children on Mars. I know. I was so depressed that NASA actually did it.

Yeah. Bothered to God, what a mistake. You have to just ignore the trolls. Anyways, I think the hardcore gamer market will eventually uptake VR, too, but will take longer than the education market. Thanks, David. David, I disagree with you. 10,000%. I think it's going to be AR, not VR, particularly what you're basically talking about really is almost AR still for education.

And AR is going to be 7,000 times bigger than VR. I have to agree with Brian on this one, which pains me. But yeah, AR is going to be the next big thing. Check out what Meta's doing. Check out, well, you can't check out what anybody else is doing. But this stuff is coming.

And definitely go read that book after on that I talked about before because my friend Rob did a shit ton of research into this field because that book is a lot about AR and what's coming. And it's true. VR, no, it's not going to work.

That is escapism. AR is... Oh, it'll have its place. Yeah. But it's just AR is going to be such a bigger market. Much bigger market. Yeah. You know, VR is, you know, you're in WALL-E in the floating chairs with your Slurpees. But AR is you're out in the world and just being the smart...

You're James Bond when you have AR. When you have VR, you're the fat fuck in the lawn chair eating it, drinking a Slurpee. That's how you should look at it. Chet from the end of Weird Science. Yes. Okay. I miss Bill Paxton.

Damn it. Let's get into some iTunes reviews. Angel Gone Wrong says, awesome show, five stars. This show is informative and hilarious. I receive so much valuable tech information just by listening. Keep up the great work, Grumps. We will. Yeah, we will. Thank you.

I'm a little disappointed. We got no one star ratings this time. Nobody hates us. Must have been a boring show last time. All right. We got another five star one, though, from the not so tech, not so techie guy. Really starting to love this podcast as it gives insight to the world of technology and news involved with it.

Keep up the great work. And hopefully I'll get to meet you July 1st. I think he meant I'll get to meet you. I don't know what I'm doing on July 1st. I do. Where I would meet you. Oh, he's going to meet you. Because last episode, I talked about the fact that I'm going to Naperville Ribfest to go see the Romantics.

Walk of Seagulls and B-52. So this is happening in about five hours. So we'll see if he tracks me down stalker style. Awesome. That'll be fun. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. I know Jason thinks that sports ball is kind of boring in general, and he's not a big fan of a lot of it.

But I've been really enjoying watching the Dodgers, Los Doyers and Fuego. So that has been fantastic to watch. They are killing it. Great watching the games. And as of, well, today is Saturday, July 1st. Tomorrow, or yesterday, for those of you listening to this on Monday, Germany played Chile for the Confederations Cup finale.

I'm just going to go out and let him say, well done, Germany. Okay. Hopefully I'll be right. We'll see. Oh, we'll see. Yeah, yeah. Hillary for president. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. I think we kind of did that show, didn't we? Yeah, we did. Hence, hence the one stars that we talked about in the previous segment.

Yes. Yes. And hence my love for this next one. Happy 150th birthday, Canada. Can't wait to end up there at some point. No, it is Canada's 150th. So happy Canada Day. And there's a nice little YouTube link narrated by Mike Myers of the 150 years of Canadian achievements.

Nice. It's all about beer and curling. I would prefer Bob and Doug McKenzie, but I'll take Mike Myers in a pinch. Yeah, you do what you do. And since this will be coming out the week of, happy 4th of July, America. It's possible to love your country and be embarrassed by it, so it's okay.

You can do the same. You can be patriotic and not be an asshole. That's how we do it. Yep, exactly. So there you go. I love my country. It's a great country. Best country ever. Finest country we've ever had. It's huge. Never been a better country. It's the biggest country. It's a huge country. It's a huge country. I'm going to grab it by the country.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our homepage where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, and get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast and possibly get some stickers, go to gog.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air.

To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head over to gog.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at gog.show slash 216. This firework looks huge in my tiny little hand.

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