218: Shaka, When the Walls Fell

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up? So Brian, what did you think of the Net Neutrality Day of Action? Uh, when was that? Uh, Wednesday, I believe. Oh, that's the day I got all the pop-ups saying, uh, an old-school, like, animated GIFs that were, like, loading, loading on, like, five pages I looked at.

Yeah, I think I saw it, like, three times at the most. I went to Google thinking, oh, Google joined the protest, let's go see what Google did. And there was a Google doodle about a dead Japanese costume designer. I'm like, hmm, how's this tie into Net Neutrality? A very influential one, I mean.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But nothing, yeah. It was a big nothing, as far as I could tell, again. Well, there was some action around the globe. There's a TechCrunch article that lists off some of the highlights. So we had, what was it, two million comments to the FCC website.

That's good. Yeah, five million emails to Congress. Okay, that's very good. 124,000 phone calls to your state representatives. Excellent. 20 congressional offices visited in person by protesters. I just want to throw out there, I'm scanning along this with you.

Can we stop using the word meat space? I hate that. You notice I didn't put it in my sentence because I hate the word meat space. Yes. Ugh, so bad. Yes. And dozens, I say dozens of high-profile celebrities and politicians speaking out. Tens of tens?

Tens of tens, yes. Okay. Yes, double twelves, double twelves. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it is what it is. You get to fatigue when you just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It protests fatigue. That's why, like, you know, we talked about on security. After a while, you get breach fatigue. Yes, you do. I just, my favorite aspect of all of it was AT&T's press release because they joined a pro-net neutrality rally. I know. AT&T does nothing except try to fight current net neutrality rules.

So they put out a press release. They said they're participating in the tech industry's so-called day of action, stressing in a blog post that it believes in preserving and advancing an open internet, even though AT&T long has disagreed with staunch net neutrality advocates. I would argue not even just staunch, just net neutrality advocates. Yeah.

I would say. So this is the best part. Bob Quinn, Senior Executive VP of External and Legislative Affairs, says, this may seem like an anomaly to some. No, really? No shit. Who may question why AT&T is joining with those who have differing viewpoints on how to ensure an open and free internet?

They want one? We do not. See how they oppose each other? That's exactly the point. We all agree that an open internet is critical for ensuring freedom of expression and a free flow of ideas and commerce in the United States and around the world. Well, I'm glad you do agree with that. Maybe you'll do something about it then. No. They can agree with it and still do the exact opposite because of shareholder value.

I love a good doublespeak press release. I think it is. Yeah. And if you still want to get caught up on what net neutrality is, what the situation is, The Verge has a great article called, The Internet is Fucked, Again. Mm-hmm. And the annoying thing about this is when you go to the actual, well, when you share this link, like on Facebook, it A-B tests the title and gives you a very vanilla, watered-down title.

Well, of course. But when you get to the article, you get to the adult language, which is kind of bait-and-switchy if you're posting, oh, we're having problems with the FCC, and then the 12-year-old clicks on it, and it's like, The Internet is Fucked! You know, that might cause some problems there.

I don't think that they'd do that because they're trying to save the poor eyes of a 12-year-old. I think that they'd do that to ensure that the services that it's shared on don't block them. Yeah. I'm pretty sure, yeah, I'm thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that they're, yeah, they want the clicks.

They need the clicks. They want the clicks. It's not, it's not done to, out of any sort of a good feeling or wish to not cause any harm. That is not the reason behind anything on the Internet, I'd say. Money is what it's all about. Yes. Now, I don't know if you saw this article that was going around.

Tony Fidel, one of the genius minds behind the iPod and the iPhone, he's one of the designers. He's having problems with his, what he's wrought upon this world. Okay. And seeing what we've turned into, staring at our phones all the time and not interacting with other people and making YouTube videos so we can have our two seconds of fame.

He's like, I don't like it, I think. I think we may have made a mistake. I do like it when people who have made their fame and fortune and are pretty much set for life go back and go, huh, wish I wouldn't have done that. Yeah. So he's rallying all of his designer friends in the industry writ large to say, hey, maybe we need to think about this a little more before we just throw it out in the world.

It's not the designers. It's the banks of psychologists that app people are hiring to make sure that we're just a big rat in a cage. Thanks a lot, the Smashing Pumpkins guy. You know, that's the issue. It's not the design.

I mean, it's kind of a weird thing, you know, you think, because they bring up the iPod and the iPhone, touchscreens, blah, blah, blah. Touchscreens are not the problem. It's the click and feed and ego and, oh, rush of endorphins that happens all the time because of how the apps are built and constructed.

Right. But that's there. But that comes back to how they're designed. You know, that's an interface design decision. Yeah. Well, OK. I agree. Yeah. You should feel bad. You should feel bad. Yeah. Rat bastard. I mean, and I've got to say, they get into it a bit in the article where it's a lot of like until I had kids, I didn't realize I see this with kids.

I've got my own kid and I can see his brain just light up when he sees my phone and things like that. It this stuff, it is it is sugar, cocaine, crack, all combined and rolled into one to the human brain. It's this stuff's dangerous. Oh, it's utterly addictive. Yes, that's, you know, and even think about just notifications when you they actually did the studies with why that red dot is where it is, you know, and and what that makes us

do it like we cannot not see that red dot now, especially because it like works with your peripheral vision. So that red dot shows danger. And when when you see danger, because you see better out of your peripheral vision than your main vision. And that just, you know, builds in fight or flight. It's like, oh, no, there's a notification.

I better check it. You know, things like that, that those are just straight up design decisions. You know, it's all built in. And I mean, I remember way back, you know, probably in the first 10 shows or so that we did when we were talking a lot about like auto update and things like that for apps and how it drove me crazy that there would be the little blue dot when an app is updated because I didn't like to see the blue dot.

I wanted a perfectly clear screen. I have to click on the app now, even though I've never used the app. I haven't used the app in two years. It's got a blue dot. I need to get rid of the blue dot. Yep. And and then I mean, the whole insidious aspect of this is Facebook has admitted to the fact that they hold back notifications. You should get like 20 notifications at once.

No, they dribble and drab those out over the course of an hour. So you keep coming back and back and back. And also with Twitter, even think about it. They have a randomized lag on when the notification notice shows up because it doesn't show up immediately as the page loads.

They literally randomize it to tie into the same kind of feeling you get with a slot machine. It is, you know, randomized rewards. So that is a level of build that just when you and I started doing this, when we were when we when we were just the kids. Yeah, we would never have even thought of that.

And that would have been wrong. I never would have built that in. I was like, no, I want real information when it comes at the time it comes. I want things to be real and we are not living in a real world anymore. Everything is metered out to us. Yep. You got to get you got to press the press the lever to get that cocaine.

Press the lever to get that cocaine. And another I was going to say, though, I just one last thing to follow up on this. I did go through my phone when I was done reading these this article and deleted a ton of stuff. I'm like, yeah, let's just let's just clean house for a little bit. And because I've already gotten rid of all the social stuff.

The only thing I have left is Instagram and all my notifications are off. I don't have notifications on my watch, my phone, even for email. It does. It does beg the question. Why have the watch? Because the watch controls. Oh, wait, does it tell AirPods? It does tell time. It tells me what the weather is. It tells me what my workouts have been, tells me when sunset's going to be, which is actually important to me, the date.

And it also lets me control the music that plays through my either my podcast player, audible player. So I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket to like, you know, pause or skip or anything like that because it's all tied through my AirPods. So that's why I love the watch.

That's why I said when you get your AirPods, you're probably going to want to watch because it really is a nice, nice way to control everything without having to take your phone out of your pocket and see that you have five emails. Right. Well, let's talk about another aspect of the internet that's complete and utter shit. Okay. There's just been a new study.

According to the Pew Research Center, online harassment is just getting worse and worse and worse. It's an increasing inevitability on the internet with a new study showing that 41%, that is almost half in case you're Trumpian, percent of adults saying that it experienced personally and 73% saying that they've seen it happen to someone else.

The most common form of online harassment is offensive name calling, which, you know, whatever. Yeah. That's not so bad. It's been personally experienced by 51% of men aged 18 to 24, which I would argue that is how men aged 18 to 24 actually communicate with each other in general.

So walk down the street when there are a bunch of dudes around. That's pretty much what you're going to. Yeah, that is what you do. So women mean, meanwhile, were more likely to be stalked online, suffer sustained harassment and be sexually harassed. For example, 53% of the women surveyed say they'd received explicit images.

They did not ask for dickies, not not cool dudes. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just there was a brief and shining thought that maybe the internet would bring out the best of human nature and be this wonderful thing that would move us forward as a society. What we found actually is it just basically enables people to be at their worst all the time.

And we can we can look back at the day when when the internet all went wrong. And that was the day that we let AOL on the internet. You can you can you can go back and trace it. We had a great little shining utopia. We've talked about it on the show before. As soon as the unwashed masses joined in, then it went to shit. Yeah, it's it's not good.

So people are going to be people. The internet just exacerbates it. You know, that's a good Depeche Mode song. It is my favorite, but not my favorite. But it's a good one. I just saw this in the news and I think it was funny. I had to put this in because we discussed this back in episode 142 of our show, which happened to be in January 2016.

So over a year and a half ago, Lumosity doesn't actually improve your cognitive skills. It just makes you better at playing its own games. Yes. I don't know why this is in the news, because apparently another journal has published a study found no evidence that cognitive training influences neural activity during decision making.

Nor did we find any effects of cognitive training on measures of delay, discounting or risk sensitivity. Basically, all you do with Lumosity and the other companies that are out there is learn how to play the games a little bit better. Now, not only did we discuss a study about this over a year and a half ago, episode 59, May 2014.

Three years ago. This is what I did this to myself. I did Lumosity for an entire year. Nothing. I all I did was get better at their own stupid games. Yeah. But here's the thing about, you know, peer reviewed research. Other people have to redo the studies to make sure that they are accurate.

So I'm fine with other people redoing the studies and coming back and saying, OK, yeah, we proved it. It doesn't do shit. Yeah. I mean, there was a I believe there was a class action lawsuit against them at some point. And yeah, they've got for two million dollars, I believe. Yeah. And there was a period of time back in 2014 when I first did this in the first place where every other commercial on TV was for Lumosity.

You don't see those anymore. So I think we've kind of figured out it doesn't do anything. These things have been around since the Game Boy. I remember buying a couple of them for for my Game Boy Advance brain games. Yeah. Oh, well. Got a little drone follow up here. This comes thanks to Dr.

David Teeter, friend of the show. He pointed out that the reason that the registration for drones was rolled back is because the FAA doesn't actually have jurisdiction over hobby aircraft. So that's really what happened. We've got a couple of links in the show notes with the recent ruling that rolled it back that made it made it made the requirement for them to give back the money and deregister your drone.

OK, well, there you go. I think maybe we want to get on changing that, but we got to get rid of two before we can get one. Oh, damn. That's right. In the news. The New York Times is reporting that in a blow to tech industry, Trump shelves startup immigrant rule.

Now, this comes to some of the stuff that we've been talking about with the was the H1B visas. I always get it mixed up with H1N1 or HB, whatever. There's one is a good thing. There's three different ones. And yeah, they're all kind of different. So obviously.

Yeah. This is about entrepreneurs coming to the U.S., getting basically a 30-month trial to start their business if they've proven investment or if they've gotten government grants over a certain level to say, here, you come and start a company. Yeah.

We want this. This is good. We like this. Yeah. It's a great thing. And other countries out there want people to come to their country and start up tech startups. But we're saying, nah, stay away. Let's not have new jobs. I don't know where all these new jobs are going to come from if we don't have new companies that are going to be hiring people.

But I know this is ridiculous. And because we've talked about Eddie Izzard a lot recently because he just put out an autobiography. It so reminds me of his comedy sketch about the whole pre-Euro when people were like, in England, we're like, didn't want to do business.

It was a very insular thing that we're kind of doing here now, too. And it's like, we don't want your Deutsche Markies. Five million Deutsche Markies. And he hangs up on the guy. He's like, oh, wait, we do? We want their Deutsche Markies? I've never heard that bit. I got to go find that. Oh, it's a good one.

It's just, you know, YouTube it. Oh, of course. Amazon is continuing its quest to destroy every other business known to man. They have ruled out their own version of Geek Squad to set up gadgets in your home. Obviously, you know, they want to set up their own gadgets, but they'll probably do other people's as well.

And immediately, Best Buy stock fell over 7%. That's a $1 billion loss in market capital in the span of a few hours after Amazon announced that they're going to do it. So, you know, I'm OK with this one. I am fine with it.

We have talked about Best Spies and the Geek Squad as the devil that you know that you can send to your parents. So it was both a good and bad thing because it got me out of doing a lot of tech support. They're overpriced. They're sketchy as hell.

No oversight. And, you know. And do you think Amazon's will be better? Absolutely. I actually do think so. They've already got in-home iPhone screen repair going on with a lot of good reviews, which is interesting. I don't know where you think all the guys that currently work at Geek Squad are going to end up working, but it'll be the Amazon version.

Right. But here's the thing about Amazon. I believe they're going to have better oversight with their employees. Geek Squad? No. I mean, it's the Best Buy general manager who lets these kids just go out and run hog wild. Amazon, I think they're going to be a lot stricter with their hiring and their oversight of these people.

I hope you're right. I hope so. I do too, yeah. Unfortunately for Best Buy, this is probably the straw that's going to break that camel's back. There's not much of a point to have these kind of electronic stores around anymore. And as far as I know, the Geek Squad was basically their real moneymaker, and that's gone.

Yeah, when was the last time you were in a Best Buy? I haven't been in one in at least four years. Yeah, I was in one about a year and a half ago. I had to go find a replacement holder for my Fitbit, and I knew that they had them in stock, so I popped over there, and it is a ghost town. It used to be hustle and bustle and tons of people, and now there's just a sad bunch of people in blue shirts wandering around like zombies, dusting the CD shelves and DVD racks.

Speaking about sad people wandering around like zombies, Venice and Santa Monica has been really interesting recently. I did an informal survey. First off, just to catch you up on this, Snap is located, or Snapchat, as you were, is located in Venice. And when they went public, there were a lot of paper millionaires suddenly in the area, and there was a lot of carousing of young millennials who were partying way too hard.

I did an informal survey. I walked down to my local like about a week ago, and I asked them, you know, what's going on? He's like, well, we used to have a lot of young 20-somethings coming in late Friday, Saturday nights, ordering high-shelf stuff, top-shelf booze. They aren't anymore. And the reason they aren't anymore is there's not really a lot of paper millionaires anymore.

They're nor paper thousandaires, I guess. Snap stock just keeps on sinking. And a new analyst report from Morgan Stanley came out, which basically said that Snap is not innovating as quickly as expected. I'm not entirely sure what innovation was ever expected.

Were we going to move down to elbow filters? Is that elevating? I don't really quite understand it. So they've been downgraded from equal weight to hold, basically putting the stock's target price at $16 down from $28. This is bad because Morgan Stanley was one of Snap's lead underwriters.

So this is the bank that backed them and said, we're going to be awesome. And now they're saying, man, not so much. Maybe not so much. You know why they haven't been innovating? It's because there were all these paper millionaires who were all the engineers who just kept getting drunk and couldn't show up to work the next day to make something new.

A little too many Patron shots, apparently, going down around here. And I know you're a big fan of Blue Apron. I am. I had some for lunch today. I know you did. You even posted on your Facebook, at which point I had to post my favorite headline of the week. Yep. Blue Apron share price now cheaper than a Blue Apron meal.

So I'm not sure why they ever IPO'd in the first place. I don't know why you thought that would be a good public company, because essentially you're just catering to people's laziness, which now that I'm thinking about it, it's big money. Yeah, it's big money, and I still think it's a good product, but yeah, they're getting killed because of the Amazon Whole Foods deal.

Yeah, shares fell another 12% to $7.14, down 29% from the $10 it went public at late last month, and the average meal price is $8.99, so it is less. So there you go. But that's not just it.

One research firm thinks that the price should actually be $2 a share. Wow. North Shore Research put a target price on the company at $2 because of severe cost challenges, as well as competitive set that is broadening and intensifying, and that is the only analyst report that's out there right now, so that's not good.

See, the competitive set, though, has actually been shrinking. Most of these other food delivery companies have gone out of business. Yeah, a lot of them are starting to shrink. Yeah, Blue Apron's the only one that's still around, really, from all the... Was it HelloFresh? I think they were having problems, and all the other ones were fly-by-nights.

We'll see who laughs. I don't know. Again, Amazon and Whole Foods. Wow. There's a combo there that can knock almost anybody out of business if they decide to do that. If Whole Foods can bring the price down. Yep. Well, I mean, Whole Foods has already experimented with their cheaper versions of stores, so I'm sure that'll continue.

I think it was called 360, Whole Foods 360 or something like that. Okay, because there's always a whole paycheck in my book. Yeah. The land of the $17 salad. It wouldn't be a Grumpy Old Geeks podcast if we didn't crap on Uber. Woo-hoo! So, the Uber manager who headed Susan Fowler's department, the woman who basically wrote the big expose that started the whole ball rolling and got Arianna Huffington parachuted in, he's departed.

His department. A.G. Gandahar, the head of the engineering department where Susan Fowler worked, has left the car hailing startup. Circumstances are unclear. Uber has basically released a non-press release, press release full of doublespeak saying, you know, it's unrelated to anything that was going on.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And it basically has come out that he was not specifically referenced by name by Fowler, but he was referenced. So, it was, and other Uber employees have stated anonymously that they were shocked that he actually hadn't been removed from his position until now.

Mm-hmm. You know what the deal is now? I bet they're cleaning house very quietly because Travis isn't around to protect his buddies. Exactly. That was my thought exactly. Yeah, now that Travis has moved on to spend more time with his family. Yes, on his own private island.

His own private Idaho. I went over in private Idaho. Don't know why. Might be a little slanderous there. I might want to watch that one. Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. Didn't mean that one, buddy. Yeah, and this week Uber has released a new open source tool so its staff can do big data research without knowing more details about the actual user base.

It's called Elastic Start. So, they remove one field from the database. Something like that, yeah. What they're actually doing is, and I don't know how this works, they're building in noise into the data set as it comes back. So, you can't actually go down to a very granular level to find out who's actually doing what.

I read through it. It was a little convoluted because I'm like, if you're introducing noise into the data, aren't you actually tampering with the data at that point? I'm sure that these data scientists know what they're talking about because they're smarter than I am. Well, Uber is not exactly known for not having the God tool option.

Yes, yes. And when you're done, you can go to the heaven room and relax. Yes. Have a chalupa or whatever. And speaking of Uber, the big Waymo Uber lawsuit is really starting to ramp up. So, Wired has a great article that gives you the full showdown of everything that has happened at this point in going forward.

So, if you want to get caught up before this really starts to, you know, you're going to start hearing more about it because they're going to be going more and more into the courtroom documents soon. You can get caught up and the link will be in the show notes at gog.show slash 118. So, definitely check it out if you're interested in the Uber versus Waymo situation.

Slash 218. What did I say? 118. Oh, man. We're going back in time. Going back in time. If Uber had DeLoreans, that's where we would be. Self-driving DeLoreans. That's right. Microsoft is going to try to bring better broadband to 2 million rural Americans in the next five years.

They just announced this plan on Tuesday to eliminate the gap in high-speed internet access in the country's hardest-to-reach areas, an effort they're calling the Rural Airband Initiative, which will set an ambitious target of bringing better broadband to 2 million Americans within the next five years. Hold on a second. I thought Trump was going to fix all this.

Yeah, that's his job now. That was his. Oh, wait. We're just going to go ahead and let private companies do it? Gotcha. Mm-hmm. And it's interesting. I mean, good on Microsoft. I don't see where their real upside comes from it. I think it's just kind of their philanthropy arm stretching its legs. Yeah, which I like to see.

I mean, why not? This is a company that can afford to do it. It's good PR for them, and somebody should be doing it. We keep hearing that Google is going to do it, but I don't see any balloons anywhere yet. No, the main guy from the Project Loon took off, so who knows? Who knows? Nobody's... And Facebook was going to do it, too, and never heard much about that.

They're still working on it. Their planes are actually doing test flights, so one of them crashed. One of them crashed, but they're still testing their drones, their internet drones. Really brings new meaning to a crashed browser. Yes. Oh, that's bad. I know. That was bad. Dad jokes. All right.

Dad joke. Well, yeah. And speaking of Facebook, Facebook is now going to start... Well, fresh off the news that Facebook is going to start showing ads in Messenger. That was last week, which we didn't cover, because it was stupid. Now they're showing ads inside Marketplace. It's Craigslist-style section for browsing used goods.

So just to clarify, you are now getting ads within your ads. Yeah, and the funny thing is that the whole point of this is that they're running out of space. They make $27 billion a year in advertising, and they need more, apparently.

Well, they do need more, because here's the problem. Facebook, for a long time, built its shareholder value on the fact that they kept expanding their user base. Now that everybody, including embryos, are signed onto Facebook, there are no more people to sign up. You have to actually start making more money, and the only way they can do that is through advertising.

So they are going to shove that in every orifice they can, basically. I still have 5.4 billion people that don't have internet access, or that at least aren't on Facebook. Maybe they should just work on infrastructure, like electricity and roads and things like that, before they go into the actual net access.

Yeah, get in the government business. Yeah, come on. Yeah, come on. Now, I thought about this, because we like to talk about stuff that we've dealt with in the past, and this just made me think. Ten years ago or so, I was working almost exclusively with music artists, and there were waves.

Every couple of years, these new companies would come along. They would approach artist management, and they would basically want to put ads on artists' webpages, because lots of eyeballs are going there back then, and we can make you money. And managers go, money? I like money.

And then they would call me up and go, what do you think about this? How do we implement it? Let's start. Let's work with these people. Let's get some stuff up on the page. And I would say to them, I don't think you understand. Your entire website is nothing but a fucking ad for the band. That's all it is. The point of the website is to get people to go to concerts, buy the music, and buy the merchandise.

You want to put ads on ads? I just don't understand that mindset. And you spend all this time and money to get people to come to your website, so you want to put an ad there so they leave? Yes. That's smart. But money, Jason.

Yeah, money. More money than brains, apparently. As per usual. So I think I used to win those battles. I haven't looked at an artist's website in quite a while, so I wouldn't be surprised to see pop-up ads all over them at this point. Do they even have artist's websites anymore? Doesn't everybody just have a Facebook page?

Yeah, well, that brings up the whole other arguments of how Facebook screwed people there and started to make money there, and the folly of letting go of the artist's website and not having your controlled space where you could actually be developing interesting content to get people interested in you again since they are not buying your music.

Yeah. Anyways. I think that horse is dead and buried 17 times over. We've covered that enough. And my second favorite headline of the week, least surprising study ever finds no one cares about your holiday photos. I thought the blue apron was your favorite headline of the week.

I said second favorite headline, Jason. Oh, it must have been a Skype glitch. You really have to listen to the whole show. Oh, no. A study has proven what we knew all along. No one gives—I'm recording verbatim, so don't get mad at the language—no one gives a fuck about your holiday photos, so stop posting them on social media.

In fact, a whopping 73% of us get annoyed when looking at other people's poorly taken photos of old buildings, beaches, and cheap cocktails that have more sugar than alcohol in them. To flip the statistic, though, a massive 77% of people still post their holiday snaps, even though they know the majority of people don't give a fuck.

Are you one of those people? I bet you are. Yeah, that's kind of how it goes. Yeah, so. Magic Leap, the company that we still don't hear anything about, don't know what they're doing, haven't seen a product from, nothing but some really weird video demo that came out about a year ago.

They had an investor conference. They said that the company's mixed reality headset is not far away from launch, whatever that means. Yeah, I've heard—I've heard much to the contrary on that one. Yeah, so have I, actually, so I don't think this is coming anytime soon.

Let's see, Magic Leap's Graham Devine said—that's a great name, Graham Devine. Graham Devine. I mean, come on, you gotta work at a company like Magic Leap if you got that name. Well, that'd be a televangelist. That, too. There's probably more money in that, dude. You might want to—anyways. He said, there's huge expectations that mixed reality will come out of the gate, and oh boy, it'll be here, and it'll be just like Minority Report right away, and no, we've never seen that with any platform, so that ask is impossible.

That is what we call managing expectations, people. This means that whatever they're going to finally release is not going to be that cool. Yep. See, that's the thing about it. They've been so secretive for so long. Everybody thought that they were working, like, really on the next big thing.

Like, oh, they've got it down. They've got it nailed. They've got super technology. Turns out they get the same shit that everybody else does. And if you have an iPad with AR kit, looks like you probably have the same stuff in your lap already. Yeah, I think they might have beat them to the punch on this, too. So, yeah, the managing of expectations prior to even showing an inkling of what they are producing is never a good sign.

It is not going to be that big of a deal. I do like their tagline that they're trying to run with, though. Everyday adventure, I believe, will define a generation. Does that mean anything? Nothing. Doesn't everybody do an everyday adventure? Yes, I had an everyday adventure in the bathroom this morning. I try to have three solid ones a day.

Now, we talked a couple weeks ago about the term mixed reality, and where the hell did it come from? Because we had virtual reality, augmented reality, and then out of the blue comes this new term, mixed reality. And now we have an answer. It comes directly from Magic Leap.

Yes. Because to quote in the article, Magic Leap doesn't like the term augmented reality. As Divine put it today, if virtual reality immerses you in another world and augmented reality puts digital objects on top of your world, then Magic Leap does neither. It's developing, quote unquote, mixed reality, where digital objects and characters become part of your world.

It works alongside the context of your reality. This is fucking marketing. It's marketing. My head is exploding. That is what Pokemon is. That is what it is. That's what the app does.

It is not a new... Oh, God. Alternative facts. Alternative words. I hate this crap. Yeah. No. They're doing augmented reality. This mixed reality crap is just marketing, so they could probably trademark the term. Yeah. And by the way, I'm sure we're going to throw an AI in there at some point.

AI, A-R-O-M-I. Bloomberg has an interesting article that I kind of resonated with. The Rise and Fall of Working from Home. It talks about how a lot of companies are rolling back their policies on working from home because people just weren't getting shit done.

A lot of people, we've talked about this since episode one because you and I are big work-from-home people. We've done it a long time. A lot of people just don't have the discipline to do it. They just don't. I've been doing it for 20 years.

I have no problems doing it. I am very regimented. I'm very scheduled. I set aside the times. That's when I work, and that's what I do. I have a different room I go to. And it's difficult. It's still difficult even for me. So I'm not surprised by this at all. 99% of the people that I've worked with in offices I know could never do this.

Ever. Yeah. I mean, and I've done it for over 20 years myself. I can barely do it anymore. I mean, you have at least a very vibrant social life, and I don't. Getting out of the house is key. I'm going to tell you, though, having the kid has been problematic because I don't...

It's not like I can just stroll down to the pub at 6 o'clock and hang out for a couple hours anymore. It's different. And I do find working from home to be more difficult now, especially with a little kid around. So it's a tough thing to do. And we kept hearing all these stories all the time about how people are starting to do it more and more, and it's the next big thing.

And the whole time, you and I are both going, nope. No way this is going to work. Yeah. And people ask me, like I was actually talking to a neighbor the other night, and he's just like, what do you... I mean, don't you kind of go a little crazy working from home? I'm like, I go bug nutty fucking insane working from home. I don't talk to people for five days at a shot.

The only people I see nowadays are the guys and girls over at the Doggy Depot when I pick up and drop off the dog. That's it. And it's like... Yeah. And they get like kind of weirded out when I'm sitting there trying to chat with them for like 10 minutes. They're like, you got your dog. Go home, dude. I'm like, I just haven't seen a person in a long time.

Maybe you should take a part-time job there. Ah, I thought about it, actually. I'm not joking. I'm kind of not kidding. Yeah. Except then I'll just be talking to the dogs, which is what I do when I'm home with the dog anyway. I need to find something with people. Maybe I'll go be a barista. I hear that's a hot job.

Yeah. Cups and doodads. Now, building on the topic we just talked about, since I do have to work from home a lot, and it's been... This week has just been insane. 12 to 16 hour days of just standing here at this desk, not going anywhere.

I finally bit the bullet, and I bought an under-desk treadmill. You're on a road to nowhere. Now, Jason, I do want to just point out that we just finished talking about how you don't get out of the house. Now, one of the best ways, and you even have a dog, to get out of the house and potentially see people would be to take said dog, get the fuck out of the house, and walk.

Now you have created a situation in which you will just walk at home. Well, no, no. There's a difference here. It's been so damn hot, I can't go out. I can't take the... The dog won't go outside when it's 100 degrees outside, and I don't like going out. When it's buggy and muggy. And also, six months out of the year, I can't go outside because it's snowing and icy.

So this is just one to go slow when I'm walking and just... Or when I'm working and just, you know, at least get some movement, but still, at any chance, go outside. Longtime listeners of the podcast know that Jason should not go outside if it's icy and snowy because then he breaks his leg and doesn't go to the doctor, and then we have to have an intervention on the show.

Yes. Hey, man, but it's all in service of the show. Yeah. And those lovely pictures of my foot when it was, like, green and purple and blue on Instagram. Yes. You can... If you want to check those out, go to instagram.com slash jpd and scroll back and you can see my broken leg and foot.

It's so much fun. Yeah. So this is like an add-on. So when I am stuck at home for 12 hours a day, I can at least get something in, you know? We'll see how it goes. I've tried them at other people's offices who had treadmill desks, and, you know, if you set it for two miles an hour, you can work and type and do everything just fine, and you get used to it in, like, you know, five minutes.

It's pretty quick to get used to. Right. I won't be doing it, obviously, while we're on the show. That would be awesome. Yeah. It'll be like that, I can make a loop, like we talked about with that Enterprise background music, you know? Just the warp core thrum.

It'll just be Jason's treadmill thrum for 12 hours a day. I would just spend every show trying to get you all worked up so you'd fall, and I would just hear... Yeah. Dead Man Switch! And speaking of going on walks, though, I'm out a lot with the dog in the mornings, because we do go, like, as the sun comes up, and I'm out for like an hour or two every morning, and I'm always like, I want to take notes about stuff I'm listening to, if I need to take notes

for one of the other shows I'm working on or anything, and trying to get your iPhone to do it. Like, you got to pull it out, you got to find an app and all that stuff. It's a pain in the butt. So, I went with the old-school digital recorder. I picked up a Zoom H1. So, I can just take it out of my pocket, press one button, make my notes, put it back in my pocket, and later on, I can just, like, go back through or upload it to Trent, which is an automated, you know, transcription service.

You are killing me, Jason. Why? You're just killing me. You have to... Okay, so, you take it out of your pocket, as you could with your iPhone. You press one button, as you could with your iPhone. No, because you got to unlock the phone, you got to find the app. Oh, you unlock the phone, you push your... There's a thumb on it, it unlocks, and then you put the app on your home screen, so it's right there.

So, you push, you take it out of your phone, you take it out of your pocket, you push one button, and then you talk into it. What's the difference? About $1,000. If I'm walking a dog, holding the phone, this coming from the guy that couldn't skip a fucking commercial, so I don't want to hear it from you. Mr., I can't skip a commercial because I got a baby in a cup.

Well, I got a 110-pound puppy who wants to go sniff a squirrel every three seconds. So, I got to hold a $1,000 phone in my hand. So, I went with a cheap option. So, you pull a different device out of your pocket and press a different button, and there you go. That's it. Works great, but I can also attach it in my car and take car notes while I'm driving around.

Sounds really good. Okay. So, I'm just saying, I like the thing for what it is. It's a single-purpose device. I like single-purpose devices sometimes, and this is a pretty good one. I will buy you cargo shorts for Christmas, so you can- It's all- Then you got to know, which pocket did I put this one in?

I'm sorry, Brian, but I've never stopped wearing- I'm sorry, I have my egg steamer. I've never stopped wearing cargo shorts. I have my egg steamer in the left-wing pocket. I'll kiss my ass. I never bought into the cargo shorts are not cool phenomenon. I've never stopped wearing them. I've been wearing them since I was 15 or 14, and I will never stop.

And I have tactical cargo shorts, so I have a specific pocket that's already built in for the H1, so I have my 5'11 tactical cargo shorts. That's right. Which is why I don't have a social life, and I live home alone and only talk to my dog. We can't- There is a straight path of how things work here.

I'm not fronting for it. I know what's happening. You're definitely painting a picture with your words, Jason. I know, I'm trying to here. And this one's for other podcasters. I went out and got, for Prime Day, they had these on sale, and they were great. These little Samson, they're mic stands, mic boom stands.

You know, just straight up, cheapy, foldable mic stands. And I got two of them, because when I'm doing remote shows, trying to put, like, find a place for the microphone that you can put on a table, then you got to put books under it, and raise it up. These things, they fit in the backpack. Pick it up, put the mic in front of the person.

Under $20. Each, highly recommended if you're a podcaster, go pick up two of these and just keep them in your kit. They're great. Right. And we have a smart home story. Oh, good. Yes. And this one was making the round, so. But it's pretty funny.

So this guy was having a tiff with his lady friend in Albuquerque, because, you know, all the blue meth is gone now, so they have to fight over who gets the meth. And they were in a big thing, and he just said, hey, did you call the sheriffs?

And they don't say which smart home device it was, but it said, hmm, what was that? Did you say call the sheriffs? Okay, I will. Nice. Called 911, and the sheriff showed up, and he got arrested. Whoopsie. Oopsies.

That's, I bet it's got to be a good, well, you know, I don't know what it would be. I don't either. I, well, I mean, it's got to be something like a Siri or something, where you accidentally press a button to activate it and not use a keyword. But it says it's a smart speaker, which was hooked up to a surround sound system, so it's not the phone.

So it might be Google Home. Right, right. If you know, and you're listening to the show, write in and let us know if you know which one it was, because I'm pretty sure Echo can't do that. Once you're out of jail from doing this, write us and let us know what it was that busted you. Yeah, Eduardo, let us know. So we've made fun of the Internet of Things many, many times, and I just, I found the best article.

This is just so good. This is by a guy named Brian Feldman. It's over at New York Mag. I'm so excited to precision cook my meat while also attacking websites around the world. After months and months of hovering my mouse cursor over the add to cart button, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a sous vide circulator on Amazon today.

Fantastic. I'm very much looking forward to the tender meats and soft boiled eggs that this device will help me cook, as well as the malicious botnet that the sous vide cooker will join shortly after I turn it on. See, the device I discovered after ordering it also has Wi-Fi built in. I guess that's so when I'm sitting on my fat butt, I can just use an app or something to tell it to stop cooking?

How extremely convenient, both for me and the Ukrainian teenagers who will soon be using my Internet-connected cooking device to shut down websites without my knowledge. I love this article. It's so well done. It's not that much longer than what I read. It's worth the read. It's very funny, and it's sadly true.

And speaking of Internet-connected devices, you guys always make fun of me for my Chinese security cameras. As does the world. My Smonet 4-channel 720p Wireless Home Surveillance Security Camera System. Yes. I got it because, for the very fact that it was a four-camera system, it was for $150.

Yep. Very cheap. Quality. Shock. You get quality for $150, considering my Nest Cam cost more than that for one camera. Well, never fear. You guys don't have to worry about me leaking my inappropriate video to the Internet anymore because the Ethernet port decided to die on it.

Well, you know that old saying, you get what you don't pay for. Exactly. So now it does still work as a security system, and it has a hard drive in it, so it does record to the little DVR for a couple days of video. As long as somebody who ever breaks into my house doesn't steal it, then I can go back and find the video.

But yeah, do not buy the Smonet 4-channel 720p Wireless Home Surveillance Security Camera System. I give it one star. Or, you know, you can listen to Dave Bittner and I talking about not buying these cameras for, I don't know, the last 10 episodes with Jason.

Media Candy. I have caught up with Twin Peaks episode nine now. Yeah, nine episodes in. I don't know what the fuck is happening. I could not tell you a single plot line. I have no clue what is going on.

I think there's only three left. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going to happen. I, oh, wow. I look down at my, I pour myself a nice little glass of wine. I've been catching up like one episode per night for the past couple of days. I have to buy more of this wine.

I don't know what the fuck is in it because my mind, I don't understand what's happening, but I love every second of it. My God. Have you been watching this, Jason? No, because all of my diehard Twin Peaks friends are like, yeah, I have no, it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

I really like the cameos and the throwbacks, but I have no clue what's going on. It is the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in major media ever. I cannot believe I'm sure Showtime's executives are sitting around going, I can't believe we greenlit this.

Hey, but we're talking about it. It's amazing. I think, and that's actually what a lot of my friends are also saying too. This has nothing, nothing to do with the TV series. It's way more in tone, more like the movie that came out, Fire Walk With Me, except it's even darker.

Oh my God. Episode eight blew my mind, blew everybody's mind. But what does it mean? I could not begin to tell you. I really don't know. And I don't think we will ever find out because it is David Lynch. I expect three more episodes of randomness and who the hell knows. But it was picked up for another season, wasn't it?

Was it? I thought they got two seasons out of it. I cannot possibly imagine that happening. Because yeah, that'd be interesting. There is not enough wine in the world. Okay. Well, yeah, let's find that out for next show. But speaking of episode eight, the special guest, the Nine Inch Nails, as they were billed for the episode, came in and did a little performance of one of the songs from their last EP that came out, not the actual events.

It fit perfectly. They have also just announced that they are putting out a new EP. It will be out July 21st. So one week from now. And that one will be called Add Violence. The first single is out right now and you can listen to it. It's not bad. Nine Inch Nails have become like a lot of other of my absolute favorite bands of all time.

Depeche Mode, The Cure, these guys, a few other people, and that they continue to put out new music that I listened to exactly one time. Go, that's not bad. And then go back and listen to their older stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I listened to it. It wasn't bad. It wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't bad. It's okay. Yeah. But I'd rather go back and listen to The Downward Spiral, which is one of the most amazing albums ever written.

I will never listen to that album again because of K-Rock and their incessant playing of it when I first moved to LA. I cannot stand that album anymore, which just sucks because it was a great album. Well, they only played the one song. Oh, Head Like a Hole? A million times? No, but Head Like a Hole is from Pretty Hate Machine, the first album.

Oh, okay. They played Closer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. October 27th is the premiere date for Stranger Things 2, a.k.a. the thing that will kill the legacy of Stranger Things 1. We'll see. I'm hopeful.

I'm hopeful. You know? It's a good poster. It's a really good poster. So, my fingers are crossed. Please don't fuck it up. Please? Yeah. I want to go back and watch season one again because I'm sure I forgot everything about it.

I think I'm going to have to because the wife never saw it, so. Oh, you definitely have to then. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was really good. I really enjoyed it. I'm worried. You can be cautiously optimistic. I will be cautiously pessimistic. And we'll see what happens. So, October. No, it's going to be October 27th.

Yes. Yeah. So, that's the first show. Right in time for Halloween. Good timing, guys. 90s alt favorites Belly are returning to studio for the first time in 23 years. I just thought we'll keep up with this news because almost every one of the groups that I liked back in the 90s seems to be reforming right now and doing new music.

I'm a little excited about this. So, I mean, I'm not crazy excited. This is no Riot or Lush getting back together for me. But their hit, Feed the Tree, Geppetto, a couple other songs. I actually threw them on Spotify and I was surprised at how many of the songs I actually really liked back from the day. So, good band and I'm happy to have them back and can't wait to hear a new song.

Should be interesting. Okie doke. Garbage also has a new song. They just started their tour out with Blondie right now, the dual headlining tour. Oh, that'd be an interesting show. That'd be a great show to go to. Sadly, I just missed it. They did the Hollywood Bowl and I'm not quite ready to do shows yet.

So, sadly. But if they're coming around, check out their tour dates. What a great show to go to. I know they're playing Chicago soon, Jason. You should go. Yeah, we'll see. Get out of the house and see people. I just did that for the B-52s. Yeah. And they have a new song called No Horses, which is out right now, which I gave a listen to and I actually really like.

So, this is not one of those songs that I'm only going to listen to once. I enjoyed it. It was okay. I need to listen to it again just to see if it clicks. Because I listened to this right after the Nine Inch Nails song. So, it was a little bit of a little harsh change-up.

Yeah, Nine Inch Nails to Garbage is a bit... Garbage is a little too poppy to go to right after Nine Inch Nails. Yeah. Speaking of TV shows, going back to that, I watched Patriot on Amazon Prime. It's one of their original series. Yeah, you are a big Amazon original guy. I only got into The Man in the Hightower and I hated it.

Yeah, yeah. The High Castle. It was not good. The Man in the High Castle. Well, the first season was all right and second season is just a miserable piece of crap. Yeah, I watched the pilot and a little bit of the first one. I'm just like, yeah, it didn't get me. This one really got me.

I really enjoyed this. I watched this in like two nights or three nights and just binged it after marathon days of staring at logic. And it was a nice change-up because it's a spy show, but not a normal spy show. It's very quirky. It's done by the guy who wrote the recent Walter Mitty film with Ben Stiller.

Right. And I really like that film. I mean, if they have just not have cast Ben Stiller, it would have been a great film. But it was a good film with Ben Stiller. So it's quirky. I really, really liked it. So if you're into that kind of thing. But I also needed a little bit of craziness this week. And since I'm not into Twin Peaks, I went back and started watching Utopia.

Okay. You watched the original Utopia, the two series BBC show? Yeah, I did. Yeah, it's a great show. Oh, I miss it. I wish they would have finished it. But it's one of those shows where it's only two seasons. But those two seasons are pretty damn good. So if you've never seen it, go check it out.

It's kind of hard to find unless you want to go to Sweden or someplace like that. But yeah, it's really good. Great soundtrack. Yeah, yeah. It did have a very good soundtrack. I remember that. And as of Sunday, this will come out on Monday. So the first Game of Thrones of season seven will have aired.

I am very excited and getting ready. I probably should have put it in the show notes last week. But in case you're a little bit late, the ultimate Game of Thrones recap seasons one through six. We have a link in our show notes over at YouTube. It's by a bunch of guys. I guess they're growing under the name Games Radar. This is the best one that I've seen.

It's 12 minutes long. It really catches you up. There are so many things I forgot. And I'm so glad to have watched this before the new season begins to air. So highly recommend. Give it a look. Yep. I'll second that. It really does have everything that you need to know in it. And I couldn't remember.

This was like they did it in order. But for me, my memory was completely out of order. Yeah, it's because everything bounces around so much, right? Like their entire seasons were some characters just weren't in, but they kind of did it more chronological. It was. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, it's very, very good. I highly recommend it as well.

And I'm looking forward to Sunday to watch it, too. Unless, you know, HBO Go crashes, which it invariably does on Game of Thrones night. Oh, music wise, I found a Spotify soundtrack that I've been listening to this week that I really loved. And it's just a mashup of all of Quentin Tarantino's songs from his movies.

There's like 80 songs in it. Really well done. Really fun. Listen, if you're into, you know, I love Tarantino movies, and I think he does some of the best soundtracks out there. They're just, you know, they fit the movie, and these just always, you know, when you hear the song from the movie, you just brought back to the movie, and it's a well-organized playlist.

So, highly recommend it. Yeah, I'm hit and miss with Tarantino, but one thing he does exceedingly well is his soundtracks and his placement of music. It's spot on every single time. Yep. And on your recommendation, I did go and listen to OK Computer this week. Mm-hmm. It's dated now, I think.

It sounded dated. It wasn't bad. I didn't hate it. I'll probably listen to it a couple more times to get into it, but this was a funny thing. On their new re-release, they actually hid a computer app inside of the cassette that comes with it.

Nice. And somebody has gone through and reverse-engineered it, and it's for the ZX Spectrum, which is an old British personal computer, and they actually got it to work on an emulator. That's fantastic. Yeah, it's very cool. And it's got the source code and everything, so there's a YouTube video, so you don't have to actually go and buy the thing and then go find a ZX Spectrum and do it.

It's cute. It's a nice Easter egg, I think. Very clever of them. Nicely done. There's not enough of that anymore. At the library. I needed a break from sci-fi.

I needed a break from fiction in general. And I had heard about this book bouncing around a couple different music podcasts I listened to. I've done interviews with the authors and things like that, so I finally just picked it up. Mad World, an oral history of new wave artists and songs that defined the 1980s by Laurie Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein.

They both used to be writers for Spin Magazine, which was a big, big magazine back in the 80s and 90s. I remember Spin. Yep. And so they basically just, what they did is they picked out a bunch of their favorite or kind of big hits from the 80s, and there's a short paragraph kind of talking about the song and its place in history.

Then they both give their opinions and thoughts on it, and then they go back and do kind of long-form interviews with, ostensibly, the artists, not always because some of them are dead, or, you know, for like Depeche Mode. They went back to the early stuff, so they actually interviewed Vincent Clark, who was only in Depeche Mode for the first album, then went off to become Erasure and Yaz and all that sort of stuff.

Anyways, it's pretty interesting. It's a great story. I love this period of music a lot. Even if you don't, I think if you read this, you would start to understand why this stuff, which is generally kind of, a lot of the stuff is just considered throwaway or kind of silly, isn't, and it's really important and really good.

And one of my favorite things that they did is they actually put, well, what they should have done is they should have made a playlist on Spotify, which they didn't do, but what they did is for each of the chapters, which is ostensibly one artist and one song, they put together a small playlist of, if you like this, or this is related to, and I actually read the book and played along all the music as it was going along, which was a great experience.

I really enjoyed it. They even name-checked some stuff that I'd never even heard of, so it was great to hear basically a new 80s song, as it were. That's kind of a mixed reality there you got going on. Yeah. I wonder, Magic Leap should talk to these guys. Yeah. I actually have a product, then. Anyway, some of the artists included Adam the Ants, Gary Neumann, Duran Duran, New Order, Devo, Echo and the Bunnymen, I mean, a lot of people that you've heard of, Thomas Dolby, The Psychedelic Furs, Depeche, Berlin, it's just, it's great.

It's a fun thing to read about, some stories I'd never heard, some background on some of my absolute favorite music of all time, so great. And if, you know, Afterword by Moby, Forward by Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran, so if that doesn't scare you away, go pick it up. Actually, you know, when I first saw this, I'm like, eh, I don't really like music books, but all the songs that you kind of rattled off, and all the bands, I, you know, that's, I grew up with that.

This might actually be a pretty good book. Again, I think you'll really enjoy it, and what I would do is, you know, sit around the old Alexa and play the song as you start the chapter, and when you get to the five other songs, play one or two of those as well. It's a fun read, listening, and delving into that period of time.

It's great. I might have to give that one a go, because I could use something, after what I'm working on now, just something different. I see where you're going with, you know, because we kind of do the same things all the time. I had to break it up. I could not do another sci-fi book. Yeah, I'm in the middle of two of them.

Well, I finished one, The Junkie Quatrain by Peter Clines, one of our favorite writers. It's four stories, kind of end of the world, zombie-esque stories. I don't know where this comes in his ex-heroes line, like if he wrote these before or after, but it's a four-hour audio book only.

They did this with Audible Studios, I believe, and you can only get it on audio, but it's really well done. It's really well done. I think a bunch of different readers, and like I said, four separate stories that all kind of intertwine. The only sad part about it is that it's over.

It was only four hours. He was just getting into building this really cool little world, and I'm like, oh, man. Unlike his other book of short stories that I read two weeks ago, where they were all standalone, these all kind of intertwine and get you to the point where it's like, okay, now I want the conclusion, and you never get it.

But it's pretty fun. For a quickie, highly recommended. Excellent. And Charlie Strauss finally has the new Laundry Files book out, The Delirium Brief. I'm about halfway through it. Oh, my God. It's so nice to have Bob back. That's all I got to say. Oh, good. Oh, good.

I'm so happy to hear that. So I will be reading this next time. Yeah, so far. I'm loving it. I really am enjoying this book. I can't wait to finish it. I was kind of annoyed that we had to stop and do this show because I was in the middle of it, but I'll get back to it later. Just tell me you don't want to do a show one week.

I'll be okay with that. Okay. Well, that'll be coming up soon, I believe. Donger need vacation.

Security? Ha! Sadly, Dave Bittner could not join us this week. He is on medical leave, and it's just us this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He sent an email, and you wrote back Jason cursing him out because he had mentioned that he had never had a cavity before, and I just wanted to let you know, I've also never had a cavity.

Yeah, well, fuck you both. Okay. Hope you're doing well, Dave. I hope you're enjoying the dental drugs. Yes. Enjoy that root canal, and we'll see you next week, or talk to you next week. Damn right. Well, let's get started without him. Let's get this party started. Let's do it. Alpha Bay, which is one of the sites that cropped up on the dark web after the demise of the Silk Road, is now dead.

Oh, dear. And so is one of its, basically, founders. Oh, dear. Yeah, found dead in a Thai jail. Okay. Okay. Yeah, Alexander Kazes. He was arrested in Thailand after this, basically, multi-country sweep.

The U.S., Canada, and Thailand all went after these guys, and they caught him. His founders have absconded with millions in Bitcoin and got away. I'm sure they're on the run right now, big time. But yeah, I don't know if Alexander basically offed himself, or was offed.

Hard to tell at this point. I think he was probably offed. We'll see. I mean, knowing the fate of Ross Albrecht, you know, it's a 50-50 shot. Right. Gotcha. But yeah, no more, sorry, no more Alphabay. I'm sure the next head of the Hydra will come up next week.

All hail Hydra. Verizon. Verizon, Verizon, Verizon. I'm not a Verizon customer. I don't plan to ever be one. But... I am. Oh. Well, was your data leaked in the 14 million customer dump that was left around on an S3 server?

I'm guessing it probably was. Yeah. There's a common thread the past month that I would like to point out to people that if you're putting your stuff on S3 or any of the Amazon AWS services, secure it.

It's not that hard. It really isn't. No, there's actually, there's a button for it. Yeah, there is. There really is. Yeah, and the funny thing about putting data on S3, you have to make it viewable to the world. By default, you have to have access tokens. You have to actually go through an extra step to make it world-readable.

So, a third-party contractor basically forgot to limit external access is what they're saying, but they forgot to turn it off, not limit. But yeah, this company called Nice Systems, an Israeli tech company, basically they were...

Now, do you know what these guys do? I'm just reading here. They supply mass surveillance capabilities to oppressive regimes. Yeah. Also known as Verizon. That's who you want to hire. Yeah.

Well done, Verizon. Okay. The plot thickens. Okay. Wait, let me do the crossover here. Speaking of oppressive regimes... Trump Hotels discloses date of breach at 14 properties. There, I wanted to give you plausible deniability on that one, Jason.

I'll take the heat. Oh, go for it. Yeah, this is actually Sabre, the reservation system that most hotels use. Yes. It was hacked again, again, and again. And again, and again, and again. Yeah, so apparently the fines aren't big enough to make Sabre actually get their shit in order.

So, yeah, if you use them, if you own a hotel chain, then you might want to not use Sabre anymore. But... I mean, is there another game in town? This seems to be the only one out there, really, but I'm sure there is somebody.

So you might want to switch, people. Yeah, yeah, definitely. This is like using WordPress. Kind of. We'll get to them in a second. I know. First, let's get to China. Let's talk about China for a second. In a not-so-unsurprising move, they are going to be blocking personal VPNs by February.

They went to all the major telcos, and they said, yeah, you guys can't let people run this anymore. They're basically busting through the Great Firewall. And we built the Great Firewall for a reason. Because we don't want people busting through it. So... Yep. If you're in China, basically, you're going to be getting what they want you to see.

So, you think we have problems with net neutrality? Well, they got it a little bit worse over there. They do. But expect this battle to be coming to a country near you soon, too. Unless you're already in China, then it's already there. But yeah, it's one of those things that, you know, especially here, you know, the copyright industry is going to be like, you can't have VPNs anymore.

We don't get our two cents. Exactly. And this next one, this was a hat tip from Ivor Tola over on Twitter. Yep. He sent us this link as well. So... The Particle Chrome extension was sold to a new dove who immediately turned it into adware.

So, there's apparently a company that's going around buying up ghosted Chrome extensions that have, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of users, but hasn't been updated in a while. Yep. Then they update it, and then the auto-update pulls in with their new ad code, which then puts ads on other people's websites.

It's genius, in a way. It's genius, and it's old. I mean, people used to do this with old websites. They'd sit there. I used to do it, shit. When you'd see domains that were dropping, you'd check out, see what kind of traffic they'd gotten. If they had a decent amount of traffic that you could do the math on, if you put ads on it for a year, and it would make more than the actual cost of the domain, you would just buy it and put it out there.

It was just an easy way to make money, and these guys have just taken it to the next level. They are. They are. And again, this is one of those reasons that I don't like having auto-update on anything. Yeah. So, you know, I actually didn't look too deeply into the story, but I wonder if they had the balls to put, we added ads into the release notes.

I wish, I hope they did, because nobody ever reads those damn things anyways. No, the reason people got tipped off, though, was when the update happened, the extension asked for a bunch of new privileges. Yeah. That were, you know, privileges that they're not supposed to have, like, read and change data on all websites visited, and manage apps, extensions, and themes.

Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty much all the permissions. So, that was the red flag that tipped people off, that this is not a good thing. But I'm sure that comes, that's about 1% of the people, if that, that got the update. The rest of the people are just seeing all these ads pop up that have no idea where they're coming from now.

Exactly. Very, very clever. Mm-hmm. Speaking of clever, have you ever installed WordPress and got, like, halfway through and said, ah, fuck it, I'm going to go have a beer? Who hasn't? Well, here's the way it works for me. Client tells me that they desperately want a WordPress site. I spend months trying to convince them not to do WordPress.

Then they decide, no, we definitely want WordPress, and we're going to pay you. I start to install WordPress. Client disappears, never pays me, never wants anything ever again. Therefore, half-installed WordPress sitting somewhere. Yeah. Well, there's basically a bunch of bots that have been going out and finding those half-done installed, the half-baked installs.

Because when the install's done, it deletes the installation script. Yep. Well, in the WordPress install process, you get to the, there's like three steps in it. It's very simple. But the second step is enter your database credentials. And so you can, you can put in external database servers, doesn't have to be local.

So these guys are going around putting in their own, their own database servers, then setting an admin account. And then once they, once that's done and set up, then they go into the admin account and they install themes with malware, plugins with malware on them, and then basically just own that machine out of the box.

Like, boom, done. Yep. And it's just, the door's left open for them. It's great. Yep. It's fantastic. I, you can't fault these guys. It's almost not even malicious. It's just taking advantage of stupid. Yeah. Stupid and lazy. That's, but then again, you know, if you're using WordPress, generally that's the way it works.

You're stupid and lazy. I run them too. I'm stupid and lazy as well. Yep. WordPress, my favorite. And the interesting thing, this, um, this comes out of WordFence, which is a plugin that I used for a while. I don't, I don't think I use it anymore. I got tired of their notifications.

Yeah. Way too many notifications. Way too many notifications, but they're a pretty big WordPress security firm. And I didn't know this, but every month they put out an attack report for WordPress that tells you how bad the state of affairs is out there in the WordPress-o-sphere. So I've got a link to the June 2017th attack in the show notes.

Uh, so check it out. I, I, um, I added their blog to my RSS reader so I can get notified every month and then just go laugh and say, see if I'm on there. Spoiler alert. It's lengthy. Brick-a-brick. Brian, a couple of months ago, we talked about a program that, um, Adobe was developing to basically train a system with your voice capabilities.

So then you could just type in text and it would replay the voice from any text input. Yep. Remember that? And, uh, they were getting really close. It sounded really good. They're, uh, this is, this is the kind of stuff that's going to destroy credibility. Yeah. Well, some university of Washington researchers have now done it with video.

Oh, great. Yeah. So you put these two together and then you can't trust anything. Uh, well, that's kind of the world we're at now anyways. Yeah. They're using a video of Obama in some of, in some of his audio and they're making this. Well, that seems like a great choice for our first one.

Why not just go ahead straight to that? Well, you know, there's a lot of public domain video of Obama out there that they can use. True. So, uh, I'm glad they, I'm glad they went with him. I miss Obama. I want to see more of them. Even if it's fake Obama, I'm okay. But I hope they do a video of Obama saying all the things that Trump has been saying recently.

Oh, that'd be fantastic. All we need is a tweet bot. Just Obama reading Trump's tweets. Oh, that would be so amazing. You saw the, please do that people. You saw the Andy Serkis video of him reading Trump's tweets as Gollum, right? Oh yeah. And of course, yeah. Mark Hamill is the Joker. Yeah. Those are fantastic too.

But yeah, that would be, it'd be funny to have Obama reading them. Although you could probably just call up Obama and say, Hey, would you read these? It'd be pretty funny. Uh, anyway, yeah. Anyway, back to the story. They have trained this, um, machine learning with a neural network and it's pretty insanely good.

I gotta say they have, they have a long video where they talk about, uh, like, you know, how much time they trained this thing to work with, uh, recreating the mouth on the video. And, uh, they show what it's like at one minute and then, you know, one hour, then seven hours, then 14 hours, which is the final video.

And you can just watch the progression. It's very scary. So we're going to keep an eye on this one just to figure out if they're going to, you know, you can't, you can tell it's fake at this point still with their little cues about it, but it's damn close already just for a, you know, a research project.

Yeah. That's right. Uh, well, let's get onto some happy news, some good art news. Okay. Uh, San Francisco's museum of modern art will text you fine art if you just ask them. So you send them a text and say, ah, send me this. And they will say if they've got it in their library, they will send it back to you.

Well, that's very cool. Yeah. They've got over 30,000 pieces of art in their collection that they will, you do have to be in the U S let me, let me put that in there. They're, they're, they're trying to branch out to other countries, but right now it's in the U S only, but then, yeah, they will text you a piece of art if you ask for it. It's pretty, pretty nice. I like that.

That's cool. I did try it out. It's fun. Yeah, no, it's just one of those light, light things that requires no AI. The world's not going to end. There's no dystopian future, unless maybe you're asking for Hieronymus Bosch paintings, but yeah, it's, it's fun. It is fun. It's, it's clever.

It's nice. This is, this is the nice things that we're supposed to be having with the internets. Yes. Yeah. And speaking of fun, nice things, I have been a huge Jeopardy fan for quite a long time. I've gone to tapings before. Unfortunately, the last time I actually watched Jeopardy was literally when my son was being born.

It was on the TV in the delivery room. And since then we've been too damn busy. But apparently something quite fun happened this Tuesday, this last Tuesday on Jeopardy. They are no strangers to Star Trek. They've had Star Trek as, as categories and questions before, but hidden in plain sight, the writers got away with one of the best next generation references ever seen.

The viewers have pointed out the second round of Jeopardy included two categories that by themselves weren't all that conspicuous. One was covering Shaka, the Zulu King and Conqueror. The other was about war and conquest. However, when the titles combined, they took on a whole new meaning to Star Trek fans.

This actually is one of my favorite episodes of the show. Oh, yeah. It's a classic. So, yeah, it's a classic. So, the two categories were, and they were right next to each other, Shaka, When the Walls Fell. Mm-hmm. And if you remember that, boy, is that fucking funny.

Yeah. And definitely, if it's been a while, go check out the video in Gizmodo. They've got a link to just the clip that you need to see at the end, from the end of the episode. And if you've never seen the whole episode, my God, go watch it. It's fantastic. I, yeah, yes. Temba, his arms open. Moran of the Week!

Brian, I put this one in here because I know your love for AI knows no bounds. Oh, it's the best, especially when people don't follow the actual definition of AI. Well, this one's just for you. Greg Chambers, the Global Director of Digital Innovation at Coca-Cola, was at a conference last week, and he went on stage and said, my goal is to push boundaries and push the brand forward.

AI is the foundation for everything we do. Everything they do. Yeah. At Coca-Cola. We create intelligent experiences. AI is the kernel that powers that experience. I can honestly say I don't think I've ever had an intelligent experience while having a Coke.

As humans, we build emotional connections to machines and with products. What? What? We will do this in new and exciting ways. You should enjoy the process of acquiring a Coke as much as you enjoy consuming a Coke.

You're shitting me, aren't you? No, this is real. This is absolutely real. This is not from The Onion. Nope, nope. This is from VentureBeat. This is a real thing. All right. Yeah, Skynet is not going to be the killer of humanity. Diabetes Net is going to be. Oh, God.

We need to get hired by one of these companies that just has more money than God. We can spew this shit out. I know. We need alternative identities so we can... We really do. Because anybody Googles us, we're screwed. We need to start putting... We need to start laying the groundwork here. My new name is Cham Gregbers. Going to be a global director.

Well, I've got another AI story. Bank of America doesn't quite seem to get it. They just stuck a guy in an ATM machine. There you go. It's like the mechanical tech. So you're going to talk intelligently to you. No, I just... This came to mind. I wasn't... This has nothing to do with technology. But when you told me about Coca-Cola trying to do an AI-powered vending machine app, I just thought about Bank of America and the repairman stuck in the ATM machine.

So that's their version of AI. He just slips out notes saying, help me, I'm stuck in the ATM machine. There you go. AI people. You know, if that happened to me, I would just be looking around and, you know, looking for the candid camera or if I was being punked. I totally...

It's got to be a TV show, right? It has to be. Yeah. Yeah. Good times. Now we have a new one. Now, this comes from the derp category. Faye Yon, who is a postdoctoral researcher at a quote-unquote major university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they can probably say the name better than me.

Which one could it be? There's two. MIT or Harvard. Well, either one. He should be fired. He probably is going to be fired because he's going to be in jail soon. His wife is a lawyer, an international lawyer, and he decided to do a little insider trading. Right. And she was working on this big deal with these mining companies, and he bought a bunch of stock and made about $110,000 almost.

Not bad. Yeah, not bad. Except for the fact that, you know, they sniffed him out and said, no, this is a little fishy that, you know, he's making all these trades and made all this money. So he was investigated and they got his browsing history.

And he was searching for phrases such as how to detect unusual trades and searching for insider trading with international account and all sorts of other things that basically it's like how to get away with crime and things like that.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he should have used virtual private internet. Yes, he should have used a VPN, just like we do. Yes, private internet access would have saved the day. Feedback loop. A big thanks to everyone who's been sending us comments, news stories, and of course, monies.

We've seen a big uptick in you guys getting in touch with us, and we appreciate that. So speaking of the monies, we have two new Patreon supporters. Thank you very much to Charles Indelicato and Robert Pennington. Thanks a lot, guys. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. And we've got a couple tweets from Mrs. Shinyside.

So we finally made it through all your podcasts. It only took us six months. And she follows up. I got to say, from listening to stuff from years ago, it all still holds up. Nice. Now I know she's lying. Nah, I'm telling you, man, it holds up. All right. We got a tweet from Sam Harrelson.

Read this and thought of the latest GOG podcast segment on filtering the red hot chili peppers out of Spotify. It's a link over at Motherboard for Vice, hidden features and third-party programs that make Spotify work for you. So there's a whole bunch of hacks that you can apparently do and do filters, which is a lot of work.

I just, you know, don't play at the red hot chili peppers. There you go. Look for that skip button. Oh, we know you don't know where the skip button is. Never mind. This next one comes from Ivor Tola. He says, turns out your lack of enthusiasm for Kickstarter is not without foundation. What? Yeah, it's an article from Appy Geek. Best laid plans of mobs and men.

The five biggest crowdfunding failures of all time. There's some pretty crazy ones in here. There's some good ones. It's a fun read. I do miss our Kickstarter on the Balls segment. Mm-hmm. Next is from Barrett Rees, who sent a link. Hashtag, well, that's depressing. NASA finally admits it doesn't have the funding to land human on Mars.

And yes, that is depressing. But Elon Musk did save the day, right? That's his goal. Yeah. That's his goal. There you go. Hopefully we'll still get there. But yes, fund NASA people, support congressmen, support people that are running that are interested in funding science.

It's important. Ah, this next one comes from Razer0133. Just stumbled onto you guys from the Cyber Wire. LOL. Really enjoying it. You guys talk my language. All right. Well, fucking A. Fucking A. Thank you. We had some people right into us over from GOG.show.

The first is Matthew. This is for you, Jason. Jason, congrats on the Xbox One purchase. I know you were stoked about the graphics on this one. The new one in November will be intense as well. Look, you have to already upgrade in November. Look at you. It will add 4K gaming capabilities to it. I highly suggest getting Battlefront for it.

A nice casual FPS in the Star Wars universe. If you ever want somebody to play with, feel free to let me know. My group of guys are fun to play with and love casually playing games. If not, it's cool. But congrats anyways. And then he says, Brian, never hurts to pick up a controller and play no matter how new to it. I would argue, yes, it does.

So I picked up the Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition and started playing it. It took forever to load. These things are huge. Like 100 gigabytes. So there goes my bandwidth cap for the month. But yeah, no, I'll definitely hit you up because it's mostly multiplayer, it looks like.

And then I'll need some multis to play with. But I went through some of the tutorials. Man, is it pretty. It's like, you know, just another first person shooter, but you get, you know, you get TIE fighters and shit like that. Yeah, it's pretty. I mean, I'm looking at it and I'm almost slightly tempted, but that's just so much I have to buy and set up.

And I mean, I've got a 10 month old kid. How long is it going to be until I have to do this anyways? I'll wait. We'll get started now so you can teach him how to play. That's part of being a dad in this day and age. See, son, this is the secret, you know, A-B-A-B-X-Y-X-Y-Z-Z-Z. And then then you get a special lightsaber, you know, see, I just never got past the initial Atari joystick.

One button, one stick. All right. This next one comes from Brian G. Where's that declaration of shenanigans form? This is a hoax, right? Say it ain't so. If one password goes this route, then we may as well start tattooing passwords on our asses. What say you, Brian and Jason? And this is another link that was sent in another vice link from Motherboard.

Why security experts are pissed that one password is pushing users to the cloud. And yeah. Yeah. This is not good. I don't think either Jason and I are very impressed with this. I don't want to see this happen. I hate the idea that they're going to the monthly subscription.

I bought the damn fucking software. I don't want to pay you every month to be able to use this. I don't like the push and force to the cloud, even though I use Dropbox to save my passwords anyways. I was going to say that there's the rub. Yes, it's just using a different cloud service to save your passwords at this point.

Yeah. It's three bucks a month. And when this first came out, I did the math on it. And my upgrade costs over, if you look at the past version upgrades, this is actually cheaper. They're $2.99 a month over their previous upgrade schedule.

It works out to be a little cheaper. It's definitely more convenient. And like I said, it's just a different cloud. I was sorting my password files with Dropbox, which it's still encrypted, still doing the same thing. It's just people get cloud-o-phobic. And I'm guessing these guys are probably doing a pretty good job with it, since they have one job.

One job is one password. But there are many people out there who had one job who didn't know how to do it properly. But I can see why people are getting pissed about it. I totally can, too. And I get it. And if you're super massively concerned about that and super security conscious, then maybe you won't use one password anymore.

And you'll go to Horcrux or whatever the other one we were talking about last week was. You know, there are different options if you're that concerned about it. But honestly, at this point, you know, it's a struggle to get people to use any password manager. So I think the bigger battle is to get people to start using them in general.

Then we can really worry about the tinfoil stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I moved a subscription. I'm fine with it. It's not. Like I said, it is definitely easier because I had a lot of problems when it was trying to sync one from the massive Dropbox file with my, you know, 2000 passwords in it.

So. Yeah. So far, this has worked out fairly well. And I haven't been hacked as far as I know. As far as we know. Yeah. Next is from Jason. Just listen to the security hop portion of last week's show. And the note about the military encrypting emails was ridiculous. The note, I assume, being the article we read.

Probably the one that said that the, they, they weren't encrypting emails. Right. The military has numerous classified networks that are encrypted. The note commented on was unclassified email. We can encrypt unclassified email when required, especially when it contains personal identification, identification, information, or P, Pi to the systems even reject email that are not encrypted, sending P, I, I.

Apparently there are so many layers of security that it's extremely. Okay. So they are, is a very secure network is basically what we're learning here, which is good. Okay. That's great. Then that article was very poorly written. Good to know. Yep. And you don't, don't leave out the last bit. I love the show. I enjoy pretty much everything except that time.

Brian didn't know what a Cody box was. I was laughing at you for that. Please keep up the great show. Yes. I'm sorry that I was not aware of an incredibly illegal device that one uses to steal things. Well, you know, you gotta, gotta be up to speed. Well, I am now it's installed. You have skin in the game.

I haven't actually used it to be honest. I went through the whole process of setting it up. It's sitting in my backpack because I wanted to move it from the TV in the bedroom to the TV in the living room. And it's been sitting in my backpack for three weeks. You had to put it in your backpack to move it from one room to the next. No, I didn't want it just sitting out. Oh, baby.

So away in the backpack. And it's very heavy. Oh, yes. Yes. It's almost eight ounces. Gosh. Yeah, it's a lot, man. All right. So we've got some iTunes ratings. The first is a five star rating from SoulSonic1234.

Information packed and funny. Came across GOG via AOC and love it just as much. Being a GOG myself, the show rings close to life. And I like the added humor. I guess that means he's us without the humor. Could be. Yeah. Okay. I also love how diligent the podcast notes are.

Each week, I learn something new. Thank you so much. Thank God somebody notices. Yes. Notes are such a pain in the butt. Next up, we got three stars from German Jackson. 100% accurate name. Okay. As the name of the show indicates, this is a show about two guys who are grumpily discussing things in tech that they don't like.

They make some good points, but quite a few of their thoughts just didn't resonate with me. You know what? Show's not for everybody, but I'm glad that we at least made some good points and the tech side was good for you. Hopefully you stick around and come to our side of thinking. But yeah, like I said, not for everybody.

I think we get points for doing exactly what it says on the tin. Yep. Yeah. So, and I personally, I think that's Jermaine Jackson. I think it's one of the Jackson brothers. Oh, could be, could be, he doesn't have much going on anymore, so. No, a little bored. Yeah. If you want your question or comment right on the, 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 the snarky review. Closing shout outs. I've talked before how I'm not a fan of NPR on the show before, but I would like to get behind the, we make NPR hashtag and their fight for equal rights in their contract negotiations because they are journalists for the most part, they're just not podcasters and, uh, they deserve a fair contract.

So, uh, check out what's going on over there. If you are a fan of NPR and you throw your support behind them with a hashtag. Yes. The ever famous hashtag support system. I'm sure we'll do lots, but I agree. I'm a hundred percent behind them as well. This is a good movement. Uh, take a second to at least go to the link in the show notes and read about what they are complaining and talking about as it is.

It is worthy. Uh, I also want to give a shout out to what I've always considered our sister podcast, even though they don't know we exist, geeks and beats, uh, the Canadian version of us with a little bit more music than, uh, than us, but, uh, they, they are back. They took an extended hiatus over a year and a half. And I have to say, I sympathize with you guys.

They were supposed to be back last week, uh, because, uh, they were waiting and had, had promised a very special musical guest that did not come through. So their first episode was three minutes long saying, oops, sorry, didn't get the guest. Uh, guess we're not launching this week. It happens guys. We understand that.

Uh, they came back with a new episode this week. Uh, still didn't have the guest. No explanation why, but they did a full episode. Anyways. Uh, it's good. It's they're, they're fun to listen to. I would highly recommend if you like us, you may like them as well. So go check them out subscribing because I like myself.

So I, I might like them too. And finally, I wanted to point out Jason that you may have, uh, some stiff competition. Uh, Adam Carolla is, is, is doing a masterclass on podcasting because as we all know, he's so good with the technology. Oh yes. Uh, I'm, I'm, this is going to be a very interesting one.

Uh, it's on my birthday too. So it's a birthday present to me, uh, thanks Adam here in Irvine, which if you'd like me to go and set up a VR cam for you so you can experience it in an AR or VR of your choice, I will do so for your birthday. I appreciate that. It'd be very nice of you. Uh, yeah.

And speaking of, uh, classes and competition, my, my show and not show my class on how to make a show is launching next week. So if you're so inclined and want to learn how the sausage is made, go to propodcasting.school for more information on learning everything that I've learned over this almost five year journey in, in podcast-o land.

I think you should take a page from Geeks and Beats and have a failure to launch next week and hold off and launch exactly on the same day as Adam Carolla's masterclass. Ah, okay. Well, I've had so many failures to launch at this point, people. That's very probable anyways. It's very probable anyways.

Yeah. So, okay. Well, I hope you get it out for your birthday until next time. I'm Brian Shulman. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support, where you'll find all of the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head on over to GOG.show slash about show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash two one eight.

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