219: Wow! Wow! Wow!

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. Stay tuned at the end of this podcast for my sit down with Rob Reed, author of the upcoming novel After On. We talk about a lot of interesting tech, including Brian's favorite topic, AI. How about a little follow-up? I am dealing with a phishing scam this week, Jason.

What? I thought we'd talk about this a little bit. Now, this is not something that I'm dealing with digitally because I don't click on links and I'm rather savvy at this stuff. But I am getting regular phone calls, same time every single day, all week, from three different numbers, all of them saying they're robocalls, obviously, because there's no real people.

So it's recorded voices of police officers and FBI agents that are after me because of my case with the Department of Tax Crime Investigation. And there is a warrant out under my arrest. So I please need to call this number immediately so I can provide credit card information to pay off my debts.

Wow. Have you contacted anybody about this? No, because all I had to do was Google the number and it comes up as phishing scam from the tax. And it basically lists off everything that they're saying and it says it's a complete and utter scam. They don't provide a badge number. The IRS does not call you and then ask you to call back a number.

They actually have people call you if they're dealing with this sort of stuff. It's complete and total phishing scam. So in case anybody else starts getting these calls, because I've never had them before. This is pretty new. Now, you know. Yeah, this seems something like, you know, the FBI should be dealing with, though. One would assume.

So I don't know. The problem is, where do you report this? Right? Like, I'm sure there's something I'm sure I could Google, but then that takes time out of my day and I'm a busy man. Yes, you are. You're a very busy man. So, yeah, I assume I probably should report this somewhere, but whatever.

It is what it is. I am now just curious to see how long they will continue to call before they give up on it. Yeah, that would be interesting. And if anybody listening to the show knows who Brian should call to report this, please drop us a note. Yes, please do. It'd be nice to be able to report this sort of stuff and help out our fellow man.

Now, speaking of helping out our fellow man, it's a small world after all, Jason. I have a vested interest in and long-term association with Disneyland. I grew up two blocks away. I hung out there. I worked for them for a while. I now own large amounts of Disney stock. But some not good things are happening down at Disneyland.

Protesters surrounded Disneyland this week to protest the park's allegedly unfair working conditions. Basically comes down to the same thing that we've talked about before, which is people aren't getting paid living wages for the areas in which they live. But it's the happiest place on Earth.

Come on. It is the happiest place on Earth if you're shelling out, you know, a thousand bucks to get your family in there. But if you're working there, apparently not. Now, I've known Disney lifers. There are people that get paid a decent amount of money at Disneyland. But if you're working at the lower level stuff like what I did when I was 14, bussing tables, you are basically living paycheck to paycheck.

And costs in Anaheim, where my parents live now still, have gone up. You cannot afford to live there anymore. Now, normally, I would say this is definitely a market issue. Obviously, Disney should probably pay people a little bit better. But at the end of the day, go, you know, do what the Disney jobs that pay that little.

They're supposed to be stepping stones. They're high school jobs, maybe college. And you're supposed to go on and get an education to move on from those things and make more money. But the problem that I start to have with this is the fact that Disney isn't paying these people a living wage and is getting a huge tax exemption deal from the city itself, Anaheim.

A 30-year tax exemption deal. They pay no taxes on ticket prices. None. Not a dime. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. Bupkis. They're getting, yeah, they're paying absolutely bupkis into the city and they're not paying the people that live in the city and work there a living wage.

That's where I start to have problems. Now, how did they, how did they get that sweetheart deal? They got that sweetheart deal because Anaheim has no balls. We actually see this in California all the time. We give it because we're terrified of things like the movie industry moving out. We give them massive tax breaks to stay here and do it.

That's what Anaheim is doing. Disney once threatened to leave like you could leave. I mean, you've got a huge acreage there and everything's built. But it's one of those things where you're bringing in people who are spending money in other places and you're helping out the city and Disney is putting massive amounts of money into the infrastructure right around Disneyland, not anywhere else.

So here, you don't have to pay any taxes. Okay. Good times at the happiest place on earth. You know what's not the happiest place on earth? What? Apparently a shopping mall in Washington, D.C. Because as everybody on the internet pointed out to me this week, there was the security robot that did commit suicide by drowning itself.

Yeah, even my friends who are not into tech at all sent this one my way. So quite funny. So I just said I wanted to say thank you for everybody that sent this in, which is everybody. Thank you all. I do like the fact that they say we don't yet know the full story of what happened, but it appears that the robot ran itself right into a water fountain inside of an office complex.

I, too, have done that. So there you go. Yeah. I mean, you know, a $150 Roomba knows not to walk down the stairs. They built this massive 300-pound robot that doesn't have edge detection. I know. It's funny. Maybe, you know, maybe that's our first real AI, and he was just sick of it all.

Mm-hmm. In the news. Now, Jason, we made our living, applied our trade. We're web designers for most of the 90s, most of the aughts, and then we finally started to get out of it.

Correct? Guess what's coming back. What's coming back? The blink tag? 90s web design. Probably not the blink tag. According to David Lee, the chief creative officer of Squarespace, I can't believe they have a chief creative officer, but they do, is, well, you know, that's the web platform company that basically lets you put together the website that looks like every other single website out there.

And now they're all going to look kind of like 90s designs, because they've grown that into their mix. Lots of animated GIFs, flames. One would assume the blink tag. We shall see. Millennials and members of Generation Z. Is that really what we're going with? Oh. Whatever. May not remember what the web looked like in the era of Alta Vista and GeoCities, so the retro design taps into the current cultural revival of all things 90s.

So, our skills are back, Jason. Oh, great. We can go not get a job, because Squarespace has templatized everything, and, yeah. Yeah. Unintuitive fuster cluck, I believe we call Squarespace, but, and I'm sure, and the article talks about a couple other people who are doing it the manual style like we used to do, but, you know, progress is there for a reason.

I don't want to go back to the old days. I really don't. No, no, I think the one thing that you and I agreed on is we don't like the uniformity of every single website that's out there, but that doesn't mean we need to go back to the crappy crap that we did back in the day. Yeah, I mean, we were pushing the boundaries of what the technology could do back then, and now people just make everything look the same.

So, the fact that there is so much more tech out there now means that websites should be, you know, light years beyond what we could do and more interesting, but they're not. They're all the same. Yeah, and they're less than what we used to do. Yeah. Just the most amazing part.

Anyways, speaking about new technology, Snapchat has rolled out a new feature in order to try to save its crumbling stock price. It's called Map, Snap Map. Oh, what could go wrong here? Well, I love the title of this article. Even teenagers are creeped out by Snapchat's new map feature.

So, with one swipe, users' Snapchat contacts appear on a map, making it easy to share one's whereabouts with friends. As the company puts it, if you and a friend follow one another, you can share your locations with each other so you can see where they're at and what's going on around them. A.K.A. Foursquare. Yeah, and you find my friends and all this other stuff.

But the thing about it is, it's creepy. It is creepy. It's knowing friends' locations can allow people to find one another more easily and facilitate impromptu meetups. But this is taking the upside of connectivity too far. Locations aren't estimates. They are precise street addresses.

And the app can now be used to pinpoint the exact locations of your contacts down to their homes. That is a huge problem, which is what millennials are starting to realize. And this article was actually written by two 20-somethings who are talking about how... Oh, not even 20-somethings. One of them's still in high school. One of them's still in high school.

They're actually finally, finally starting to realize the plus of privacy and that maybe exchanging this information isn't the smartest thing to do. You should only really do it if you're like vacationing in Europe and want to show off. You shouldn't do it when you're hanging out cheating on your boyfriend, checking in somewhere.

That's one of the things that they mention in there. Not that either of them cheated. I do like the very end of this, which gives me some hope for this generation. So, both the authors then say, We think Snapchat has an obligation to educate its users about both the risks and benefits of the SnapMap.

Users should be held accountable for their online behavior, but at the same time, they should be aware, meaningfully aware, of what they're opting into. Fuck yes. It's about time. Now, find me any social media company that is doing anything like that. Find me a fucking manual for anything.

Good luck with that. But God bless you for fucking noticing and saying something about it. No, this gives me hope for the next generation. It does. It really does. And over at Facebook, another way that they're going to screw up everything, Facebook is now rolling out a new feature called Groups for Pages, which will let artists, brands, businesses, and newspapers create their own fan clubs.

Woo-hoo! Yeah. Another thing that they'll dangle out there for free and then start to charge you to use. Yeah. Or just take it away randomly as soon as you get your user base up. You know? Exactly. Like Facebook loves to do. Then it just gets phased out or they want 200 bucks per person. Yep.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll be a nice per-person fee knowing them. Mm-hmm. What are you going to do? Oh, not use it. There you go. There you go. Yeah, I'm not going to use it for any of the still clients that I have doing this stuff. It's just stupid. And by the way, having done this for years for bands, the last thing that you want is actual interaction with your fan base.

You want the perception of interaction, but you do not want to actually interact. That is bad. Why is it bad? It's bad because, first off, that's all you'll ever do because you don't—I mean, it's a mountain of stuff that comes in. Secondly, it gets real personal, real fast, and it gets real creepy because it is the most avid fans we also call stalkers.

Yeah. Yeah, and you've got some history with this because you have run fan clubs for some of your artists. I've run fan clubs for some of my artists. I've had to report people to authorities before. We have had restraining orders. I have had people drive by my house because, stupidly, at one point I had a domain name registered for a band under my actual address.

That was dumb. You should always use Hover.com. Well, this was a long time ago. There was no Hover.com yet. So, yeah, it can be a bit frightening. Okay. Well, we will not be having a grumpy old group for Facebook, so no worries there.

No, we will not. Google Glass is back in the news. The project that you thought was dead is back, and they've kind of morphed into an enterprise project. I think this is genius, and it's probably what it should have been the first time around. Yep. And definitely, I think so.

And, you know, I read this. It's a very long article on Wired talking about the move into the enterprise, and it's been like a secret project for a couple years now. And the updates that they've done to it seem like they're pretty cool. I really want to try a pair just to see what the experience is like, but it won't be getting any time soon.

I think it'd be super interesting to try this out, especially, like, even for just doing this podcast. What if we had them on, and we could see our show notes just in our glasses? Then what would we look at? We're not going to stare at video of each other. We always talk about how creepy that is. I thought I'd look at Bam Bam.

Okay. I can put it. Yeah, I'll have the Bam Cam. The Bam Cam. Grab that domain. No. That's okay. I think I already had LifeWithBamBam.com, which I had let drop because that was a dumb idea. Yeah. I just call it Instagram now.

It's true. Google is getting into the feed game. Okay. What year is this again? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's got to just, you know, do what everybody else is doing, and everybody's got a feed, so Google's going to try and get a feed now, too. So if you're using the Google app, when you sign in, it'll show you things that it thinks you will find interesting or relevant to you.

Okay. Now, I tried it out, and it's exactly what I thought it was going to be. You know, to start the process of getting the Google feed, you have to let it save your search history, which I will never let them do. Yeah. I will never do that either.

That is permanently set to off. Now, I wouldn't mind if they asked, what are some things that you're interested in? I would be okay with that. And how long is it going to be before? I mean, they've already got the whole system set up for you have your own Google account with your name, and you can put your photo in.

How long is it going to be until you can start doing updates there, and then that shows up in your other friend's feeds? You know they're going to roll that out, even though nobody's ever going to use it. Yeah. Oh, you know what? Oh, yeah. That's called Google Plus, and nobody is using it. Yeah. The crazy thing about it is I don't have anything turned on, so they shouldn't be able to track anything, yet my feed had stories in it and places that I should go, and it was surprisingly relevant to my interests.

Well, just because you turn off a knob on Google's little settings doesn't mean that they're actually paying attention to you. And I did a little bit of looking and digging, and you know what? I figured it out. I figured it out. They're using a lot of my shopping history.

Right. So, you know, you find the follow-on ads everywhere. Well, you know, Google runs the biggest ad network in the world, so they've got that data tied to your account. And sure enough, a lot of the stuff that I was looking at were tied to products that I had been searching for on Amazon.

Right. Which is even creepier. Well, Amazon's using the same ad people. Yeah. Everybody's, it's all the same thing. And speaking of everything being all the same thing, there's a great article by John Battelle. I'm not going to go into it too much, but he basically talks about, you know, when the top five companies all roughly are in the same business, they're just going to start eating each other's core businesses.

And, you know, the top five that we always talk about, you know, Apple, Facebook, Google, Friendster, MySpace, all those guys. Snap map. Yeah. They just start doing the same thing that everybody else does and tries to outdo one another.

But it's a really interesting read. I mean, I hadn't heard of John or heard John Battelle write anything in a long time, but this came through my feed, surprisingly. It's good to read something new from John. I've known him for, God, 15 years, 15 years, probably. So old school, old school tech guy.

All righty. Well, speaking of Amazon, watch out, watch out blue, whatever the hell it's called. Blue Apron. Blue Apron. Since they don't advertise with us, I can't be bothered to remember their name. Okay. Yes. Blue Apron is another nail in the coffin for Blue Apron is Amazon's meal kits, which we've heard about for a while, are starting to roll out in various areas.

I believe it started up in Seattle. People have started to notice them. They have registered a trademark for their meal kit service. The slogan is, we do the prep. You be the chef. Hmm. I wonder how much somebody got paid for that. Seriously. I'm sure there was. I'm sure there was a lot of market research.

A-B testing. I'm sure. So they are reportedly 17 different options available, including tacos al pastor with pork, veggie burger, smoked eggplant, steak, Parmesan fries, snap peas. Vegetarian options are priced around $16.

And the other kits range up to $20 for two servings, comparable to both HelloFresh and Blue Apron, where servings are around $9 to $10 each. So Blue Apron's troubles continue, and Amazon rolls on. Yep. Speaking of Amazon rolling on, Amazon now has Pay Places.

What is that? Which is basically the way for you to pay with your phone, using your Amazon account, out in the real world. Okay. So they're basically just doing Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and everybody else that did that stupid stuff. Right now, it only works at TGI Fridays.

So you've got to start somewhere. I don't know what that deal is. Talk about starting in the mailroom and working your way up. Geez. You think Bezos eats there all the time? It's got to be something like that. Next up, Spennegan's. Yeah, Spennegan's next. So they're going to start pushing this out. Makes sense to me.

Your credit cards are ready with them. You trust them. I'm sure Amazon, again, just like everybody wanting to get into all the same businesses, Amazon is pushing for some of that. Even if you're not buying it from our store, we want to get some little ducat of money out of you. Yep, as much as possible.

And one company that's figured out a way to at least temporarily stave off going out of business, Sears. Sears is going to sell Alexa-enabled appliances on Amazon, and their share jumped 19% on the announcement. And so good on them.

They figured out a way to avoid irrelevance and going out of business, at least for a small period of time, until Amazon decides, what do we need Sears for? We can just start making our own appliances. Well, they've got to have somebody to make some of this stuff on Amazon, but at least Sears is doing something right.

They've got the Kenmore brand, and they've also got all their hardware stuff. I can't even remember the name of it, like, you know, their wrenches. Black & Decker or whatever the hell it is. I can't remember their brand. No, Black & Decker is the whole company. But yeah, whoever they are. But they, you know, they can just be a manufacturer and shutter all the stores and just sell everything on Amazon like I think the world is going to come to in about 30 years.

Everything is just going to be bought and sold on Amazon and Alibaba. I think that's where it's going to, hence my purchase of stock of both of them. Yeah, and as they point out in the article, the move is a bit of a double-edged sword because while it enables them to sell their products on Amazon and has given them some relevancy, it also gives shoppers yet another reason to avoid ever going to a Sears store.

Yeah. Yeah. The Sears stores nowadays, it should just be called the Shrine of Sadness because you walk into these like cathedral-like big box stores where there's like nobody home, there's nothing on the racks, and it's just, it is depressing to walk into a Sears.

Somewhere along the way, probably just in the last five years, I used to, when my wife, pre-kids, my wife and I would go out to Palm Springs for the weekend and things like that. And there's this huge outlet mall on the way out there, and it's great. You know, you go buy stuff, it's pretty cheap. But within the last five years, that outlet mall is bigger, busier, and has more stuff in it than old school regular stores do.

That's just the way things are going now. It's unbelievable. Interesting. So big stores are just dead, and the outlet mall is where it's all at now. Because they get all the deals with all the big box stores going out of business, so then they move them to the outlet store and sell them for half price. Yeah, pretty much.

So Elon Musk says he has verbal approval to build a New York City to D.C. hyperloop. Verbal approval from who? Well, that's unclear. I heard this story on talk radio this morning, and nobody could figure out who said he could do it.

Now, I'm not saying that this is outside of the realm of possibility with this particular administration. But remember, Elon dissed Trump by getting off of his advisory board, and there's no way that Trump would come back and say, oh, sure, go build a giant tube under the country, you know?

But also remember that Trump has not staffed up or replaced people in half the governmental organizations yet. So somebody who doesn't like him could have just said, yeah, do it. Maybe that was Spicer's last dig on the way out. Spicy out. Spicy spice. I'm going to miss you.

I'm going to I'm actually going to miss Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live. Yeah, more than anything else. That's the best. Anyways, going back to the story. Yes, he's supposedly received verbal government approval to build a New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to D.C. Hyperloop, which will get you from New York to Washington, D.C. within 29 minutes.

It currently takes two and a half hours to travel between the two cities on Amtrak. So that's pretty badass if you can pull it off. We don't even know if Hyperloop works yet. There's only been like one successful run that went 100 feet. Yeah, and it was by another company and they moved everything to Dubai.

Yeah, I don't get it. But if anybody can pull it off, it's Musk. So we'll see. We've talked a lot about self-driving cars and self-driving taxis. I particularly love this story. I've never heard of the truth about Cars.com, but I think I'm becoming a fan.

This story is the best. Self-driving taxis will become the most disgusting spaces on Earth. I swear to God, you and I talked about this like in episode three or four when we were first talking about self-driving cars. I think we did, too. Yeah, because we were trying to figure out if they were going to be self-cleaning cars because, you know, you get it.

It would have to be. Yeah. Well, I mean, to your point, when we talk about robots and things taking jobs and you say that there's going to be this whole industry of people that are dealing with fixing the robots, this article basically says there's going to be an entire industry of people just cleaning these disgusting, vomit-filled shitbag taxis because a Roomba ain't going to cut it at this point.

So eventually, at least temporarily, all the current Uber drivers will become Uber cleaners. Wow. So he says animals are universally disgusting and humans are no exception. While we've mastered land, air and sea, consider the spaces we occupy while we traverse those expanses. Rental cars are returned filled with candy wrappers, spilled soda, human hair.

Uber vehicles are routinely vomited in. The subway is a haven for disease. Airblind interiors experience havoc within the first hour of a flight as the worst of us begin defecating into the seats, too lazy and too weak to control ourselves. And that is what's going to happen with these cabs.

It is going to be full of human filth. People are just dirty animals in the most part. And when you've got nobody monitoring you, come on. You know, I think I found a new market opportunity for us. We're going to start selling biohazard disposable bunny suits that you can wear before you get in your Uber or your self-driving taxi to, you know, think of it as a body condom for that ride to work every day.

You get out, you unzip it, you take it off, and you throw it away. Or Lyft could market these gigantic pink mustache suits that you wear, and it's just bristles that cleans the car as you walk through it. Oh, man. I can't wait for the future. Doesn't the future look wonderful?

And smelly. Okay, you would never believe that we were actually once optimists. I swear to God. Speak for yourself. Yeah. Okay, one thing I can be happy about, I'm going to close out the news segment with a story that pleases me. Soccer is the most popular sport on Instagram, and it's not even close.

So they say soccer is the most popular sport by a wide margin, according to Brandon Gale, Instagram's head of sports partnerships. He says that 146 million of Instagram's 700 million plus users are world football fans, more than three times the number of basketball. Fans on Instagram and the sports go way down from there, American football being the lowest.

Obviously, there's a number of reasons for this. Instagram is international. Soccer is the biggest game in the world. They do say in the article, Instagram owned by Facebook defines fan rather loosely. If you follow an account from a team or player or news outlet that Instagram considers to be soccer specific, you are then a fan.

My question there is, how is that a loose definition? That seems pretty damn specific. If you become a fan of a soccer team, then you are a fucking fan of soccer. Are you not? Seriously. That's only, I wasn't even going to put that in there except for that, because I had to point that out.

That is awesome. Cops and doodads. Now, Brian, I've made no secret of the fact that I am slightly dyslexic and have a hard time reading things, and I found an awesome font. I think I've talked about this before, the dyslexy font.

I don't know that you had, because I would have remembered going to see the site. Okay, yeah. The site is something memorable. Talk about throwback to the 90s. It is that, and the other thing is, it made me feel like I might have dyslexia, because I'd assumed that this font was for dyslexia, but I wasn't entirely sure, because you are known to throw in the occasional curveball in terms of the links.

And I'd spent probably five minutes trying to figure out, where the hell's the about? Where do I learn about this? I was like, support. No, there's nothing there. There's nothing on the homepage that tells me exactly what this is. It's only until you hit the dyslexy font button, and then I was like, oh, it is what I thought it was. Yeah, it's basically a font that is good for people with dyslexia to help them read better.

It looks a bit Comic Sans-y, a little bit. It does, but what it really is good at is making sure that all of the letters are easily identifiable at a glance. It's just easier to read for people like me. And have you installed it?

I have. Yes, it works great. Okay. I really like it. For a lot of the other stuff I'm doing, for scripts and things like that, I'll set it as my default font. For a while when I'm trying to read off of things, and it works good. And they do have a home edition that you can get for free.

Otherwise, if it's for schools or companies, you have to pay for it, and it's a lot. But you can use it yourself for free, and it takes a while. You have to put in your address and all this other crap, and then the guy who built it, Christian Boer, will get back to you with a link to download it.

Now, the interesting thing is if you do go to some of the pages and you try and cut and paste, because I was going to try and cut some of the about stuff and paste it into our show notes. Well, you can't, because if you select the text and try and copy it, nothing works.

But if you right-click, it'll say save image as. So every letter on the site is a fucking image. Why? I have no idea. I have no idea. All right. Well, hey, that's 90s web design for you.

Yeah, yeah. Before we could do font tags. No, I figured it out. Okay. So if he wanted to use the font on the site so you could see it, he would actually have to embed the font. Yep. And then you could just go view source and pull it.

Well, I guess now that makes sense why he made it into an image. This had to be a pain in the ass. Yeah. He did a little copyright protection there. Yes, and the font is patented. But yeah, if you have a problem reading things like I do and many other people in the world, I highly recommend checking it out. Very cool.

Now, one thing I would say definitely don't check out, well, you have to check out the video of this thing, but it's called the Transformable Hovering Rotorcraft, also known as Thor. Of course. So this is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, but it also goes into horizontal flight mode.

This thing is terrifying. It really is. It's two wings with opposable rotors on them, or propellers. So it basically spins in a circle. He's two giant wings spinning in a circle with a central ball. And then when it wants to go into horizontal mode, the wings kind of straighten out.

Then it bumps its ass on the ground, which I think they really need to work on the transition mode there. Yeah, I'd call that decapitation mode. Yeah, seriously. Man, this thing is terrifying. What are you doing over there in Singapore? I know drugs are illegal, but maybe somebody snuck some in.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I found a related story, which I think you and I are both already aware of. Drone noise is starting to drive people crazy. Oh, yes. NASA researchers have conducted a study indicating that people find drone noise more annoying than that of any ground vehicle, except maybe a Prius.

Even when you put the two at similar volumes, it was roughly equivalent to a car being twice as close as before, according to the researchers. And while there were just 38 people in the test, none of them were told what they were hearing or what the study was accomplishing. The results seem pretty obvious if you've ever heard a drone. And if you live here in Santa Monica and walk down to the beach, boy, oh boy, is that annoying.

The thing about it that they don't cover is, you know, they're comparing it to vehicle noise. But the reason I hate drone noise is it sounds like an insect. It sounds like there are bugs coming. And I am very bug averse. So that's the noise. It just sends chills down my spine when I hear these things.

Well, they do mention it. It's not necessarily the high-pitched buzz by itself. One thing is that the drone knows drones are slower than cars, so you have to put up with the sound longer as well. And there's also the rapid pickup during takeoff and landings that also alternates the noise in ways that you wouldn't hear much with a car.

So, yeah, it's a very annoying noise. Oh, super annoying. And that's when we talked about when Amazon was going into drone delivery, that hopefully they were going to figure out a way to make these things a lot quieter. Otherwise, imagine cities full of these things. It would just be obnoxious.

Yeah, totally. Have you seen the int ball? The what? The int ball or the gem internal ball camera. Uh, no. What is this? It is a spherical autonomous drone designed to act as the space station's roving photographer developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA.

And they've just released their first pictures of it. It's really cool looking. Now, every time I talk. It's so cute, right? So every time I look at the headline of the story, I want to say the new ISIS mascot. Yeah. Which would be very wrong. Maybe you should try out the dyslexia font.

Maybe. The new ISS mascot. So, yeah, this is going up. They developed it because what they've discovered is that there's so much documentation that the astronauts that are doing, it takes up over almost 10% of their time up there is just them taking photographs of the various things that they're doing or video or documenting it.

So this is a camera drone that will go up and do it for them so they can just get on with the work that they're supposed to be doing instead of documenting the work while they're doing it. File this under, duh, why didn't they make this before? What a cool little device. And leave it to the Japanese because it is so damn cute.

It is. It is very Japanese. If we would have built this, it would have been like the Death Star. They build it and it's got big googly eyes and it's all super cute. Yeah, mine would have been the, was it the lightsaber training drone? Yes, I was. Yes, exactly. So, and speaking of cool and retro, Atari is back, boys.

The Atari box is going to be released soon and it will be both current and classic gaming content. So I guess they're going to get in the business of making great new games again. Uh, it looks cool as hell if you're into retro box design. Have you looked at these? I did. Yeah, it is cool looking.

I don't know if I'll ever get one, but it's cool. No, I definitely won't because I'm not a gamer. The last time I was a gamer was the original Atari box. So it is pretty cool looking. So it's got a red and black version and a wood version, of course, because it would have to be, uh, this isn't coming anytime soon.

There's no details, no specs, no pricing, no, nothing, no time, no nothing. But, uh, Atari's back. Kind of cool. Well, by the time this launches, your son might be old enough to play. So never say never on buying one of these. Exactly. And if it's got the classic stuff in there too, I'll be back playing Pitfall again.

Ah, Pitfall. Love that one. Uh, Apple has, uh, got a new patent in for calling 911 secretly using your fingerprints. That's pretty clever. It's, it is clever. We'll see if it ever makes it to the phone though. But, uh, it, yeah, it's one of those things where when you're trying to call 911, if you're in trouble, then, you know, a people can see it because the screen lights up and, uh, you can't do it on the down low.

So this will be interesting. There is an SOS thing for my, uh, Apple watch, which I turned off because it is very easy to trigger. I was going to say, you know, I'm pretty vigilant about locking my phone and I, I, butt dial a lot. I can't even imagine how many times I might call 911 by accident.

Yeah. That's all you need. Yeah. I definitely turned that off on my phone because a couple of times it triggered and it's like SOS. I'm like, ah, no, no, no. Cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. Quick, quick, quick. But this will be cool if it makes it in or some version of it somewhere. Yep. And we've talked a number of times about battery life on the phone and on iOS and, and what are you supposed to do?

Are you supposed to force quit apps or not? Now we've had people tell us both sides of the story before we've, we've both felt both ways before, uh, the word is finally in and, uh, you do not force quit apps on iOS. It does nothing. In fact, it actually, it actually uses more battery to restart the app that has been completely quit than just leaving it in what is called its frozen mode.

So that is the final word now, according to all the geniuses that you should never, ever force quit apps. Well, you should force quit it if it's hung, but beyond that, yeah, don't be on that reason. Yes. Yeah. That's what that's, that's kind of the assumption I've been going on for the past couple of years. Yeah. Not me. I, I, in fact, it's just ingrained in me as like almost a nervous habit to just like when I'm holding my phone, I got nothing to do.

Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, close. So I've got to get myself out of that habit now. And, uh, yeah, so there you go. And finally, my last story is something that I will be purchasing for my son at some point. You will soon be able to buy your kids a $500 Luke Skywalker landspeeder.

Kids these days have the best toys. They really do, man. Oh, I wish I'd have had one of these when I was a kid. This thing is badass. It is, it's the landspeeder from the original Star Wars. It is, uh, it's going to be $500 as initial price. It's can hold up to 130 pounds, so your kid can be up to a certain age.

It'll be great. You can get up to five hours of driving time on a single charge. Uh, it only goes five miles per hour, but that's kind of all you want your kid doing anyways. Five hours at five, five hours of charge at five miles per hour. That kid can get 25 miles away from you pretty quick.

Yeah. So it is pretty badass. Now, my son is too young, uh, at this point to get at. Oh, they're also doing a tiny Tesla Model S, of course. Of course. Yeah, of course. This is all done by Radio Flyer, so they're keeping up with the times. Uh, I'm hoping by the time that my son is ready for this, they'll have the Falcon.

The Falcon, or maybe it'll actually float. Ooh.

Media Candy. Now, Brian, you're not a fan of Green Day, but you used to work with them, right? Yeah, I worked for them for almost seven years. Yeah. Wow, I didn't know it was that long. Um, I used to see them a lot when I was a kid. Mm-hmm. Like, of a long time ago.

And it, but they've got a new documentary out, uh, Green Day, The Early Years. It's a new documentary. It comes from Spotify Studios, like we talked about last week. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Which is pretty cool. And it's a great documentary. I really enjoyed it because it goes through all the, the early stuff, like, you know, just starting the band and all that kind of stuff.

But I got turned on to this because, uh, Bob Fogarty, a friend of the show and the guy that does our interstitials, sent me a picture, which was a screen cap from the documentary, of me at one of the shows. I did see that. Looking like an idiot doing jazz hands, holding a drumstick, which I apparently got from one of the previous bands.

I don't know. I can't remember. It was a long time ago. Um, and there's been a lot of booze in between now and then, but I thought it was really cool, but it's a great, it's a great documentary on its own. Even though, you know, even if you took me out of it, it would still be a great documentary. Yeah. First off, I'm glad you, well, you kind of, you've, I wanted to talk about your jazz hands because that is fantastic.

So we got to make sure we post this up on our socials. Yeah. Jason's jazz hands are great. And secondly, I worked for the band for seven years and you get in the fucking documentary. How the hell does that happen? See, that's how it works. I consider this one of my Forrest Gump photos. It's just, you know, you go back in time and you just see me in random photos.

That's pretty awesome. Yep. My, my other favorite one is when Dave Weiner and Ben and Mina Trott met for the first time. And, uh, there I am in the back of that one too. And there you are. Yep. So Game of Thrones, uh, aired their first episode of season seven. I assume you watched it, Jason.

Of course. We will not do any spoilers. I thought it was fantastic. And, uh, apparently a lot of other people did too. This episode drew 16.1 million total viewers, including 10.1 million who watched on the linear channel and the rest coming from DVR and streaming. I also heard that the, they actually broke HBO go on the East coast.

Uh, yeah, yeah. I'm not, I'm, I'm central time, but, and when I went in to watch it, it was a couple hours after the launch. It worked fine for me. I watched it on HBO go. Yeah. So that, uh, represents an, uh, an incredible 50% increase from last year's premiere. So I thought, you know, we had reached fever pitch with game of Thrones last, uh, last season, but apparently a lot more people have gotten on board since then.

Yeah, definitely. And I was watching HBO now, not HBO go. I get them confused. I get them confused too. Which is which again, who cares? Yeah, seriously. The one I've got is the one I bought through the iTunes store. Some serious branding issues, people. Especially because I always go to the wrong website when I want to watch something.

I do that too. So that's good times. Uh, so we have a new doctor who, yes, there was a big unveil, unveil, unveil, unveil. Mmm, I'm hungry. Uh, Jodie Whittaker, who I'm not aware of is going to be the 13th doctor and the first woman in the role, which is pretty bad-ass.

Uh, you know, why not? It makes sense to me. Um, and this to me seems like a perfect time for me to leap in and finally start watching doctor who makes sense. Definitely makes sense. Yeah. And, and one is going to assume that they're planning and assuming that they'll be getting a good amount of new viewers just because they introduced a female doctor.

So perhaps we'll get a brief idiot's guide to the doctor who universe and I'll finally understand it and what the hell's going on. Could be, could be. Yeah. She comes from the drama Broadchurch, which I really enjoyed. And that was with David Tennant, a former doctor, which is interesting. Oh, there you go. And the showrunner for Broadchurch is leaving that to run doctor who.

So that should be good too. So you have a full, full changing of the guard, which I really like. Right. Well, so like I said, I think I finally found my entry and I'm going to watch at least the first few episodes of this when it first, when it airs. I don't think it's coming until next year. Yeah. Yeah. You got to wait for the Christmas special for the changeover.

You should watch the Christmas special then because that will be the first appearance of her. Okay. I will keep that in mind. Let me know when that's coming up, Jason. I'd assume it'd be around Christmas. It is on Christmas. That's why it's called a Christmas special. It is on December 25th. Well, you know. Easy to remember. I seem to remember Brady Bunch Christmas specials airing in August.

Just open social media. You can't miss it. And speaking of social media, because we have a female doctor and we're not allowed to have nice things, people lost their minds. Of course they did. A lot of misogynist, asshole, dickhead, prick fucks decided to go fucking crazy over this.

And thank God we have the dictionary. Yeah. Yep. Merriam Webster basically stepped in and shut them all down on Twitter by tweeting, doctor has no gender in English. Fuck you. Well done. Drops the mic, walks out of the room. Exactly. So I know one of your favorite movies of all time is The Fifth Element because- I don't understand people's love for that piece of crap movie.

There's an article in The Atlantic that talks about how The Fifth Element subverted sci-fi movies by making the characters feel more. And I just, I had to put this in here for the next story too, but it's, I can't believe it's been 20 years since this movie came out.

You've been hating on this for 20 years. Well, to be fair, I've been ignoring it and not thinking about it at all for about 19 years, 364 days and 12 hours. It's only the times that you bring it up on the show that I actually hate on it. I was going to say, scroll back about four years because I've been poking you for four years on this show.

Yeah, I can't stand the damn movie. But it's a, I love the movie and I thought it was a good read if you're into The Fifth Element. And there's a lot of Luc Besson in the news because Valerian in the City of a Thousand Planets is out. Boy, doesn't that look good. Oh my God. It's going to be- Good to be as The Fifth Element does.

Yeah, well, I'm going to go see it. I'm going to go see it in the theater and I'll do 3D because I'm sure it's made for it. But I don't think it's made for anything. I think it's made for pieces of crap. This is, this looks so bad. It's almost, this looks like it's supposed to be a joke.

This looks like we should be going to midnight showings with like popcorn to throw out Cara Delevingne. Yeah, this is, I mean, it's interesting. You've got your, I mean, you can- It's not interesting. No, no, no. It's stupid. Let me finish my goddamn sentence, motherfucker. It's interesting because if you watch the trailer, you can pull, you can just point to a different scene and see where everything was stolen from.

It's like now we have, we have the people from Avatar in the new trailers. I'm like, what the fuck? What's that? I mean, it's just a mishmash of all the different sci-fi that you could throw together. I guess because since there's a thousand planets, he can steal a thousand times, but, and it's based on a comic book, which I never read because it looks like it's for kids, but we'll see.

We'll see how it goes. Well, I can't wait for your review. No, I can. I don't want to waste the money on it because I don't think it's going to be any good, but I am, I'm willing to have my mind changed if it is. But the problem with Luc Besson movies is generally after the fifth element, even the fifth element, he's light on plot.

He's very light on plot, but you know, I love the professional. I still stand by the professional, but the rest of it, yeah, not real big on the, on the plot. Well, after you go see Valerian and the city of a thousand douchebags, come back and pop up the link that we have in our show notes, a family guys, nine minute tribute to Adam West, because it is purely delightful and it will wash all memories of that crappy movie out of your head.

I watched a bit of it and it was pretty good. And while I was watching it, I saw a thing in the sidebar. Adam Savage turned a Star Wars versus Star Trek debate into the most depressing moment of Comic-Con 2017. And it was a panel where they were just answering a bunch of questions and you know, the question Star Wars versus Star Trek comes up and Adam says, Star Trek lures you into a false sense of positivity that the world can be a utopia and recent events have proven it cannot.

Star Wars dystopic vision is far more realistic and prepares our children for their future. Oh, Adam. Way to perk up the room. Now, here's the thing. I agree with that 10,000%, but I don't expect that from Adam Savage, who is so relentlessly positive.

Mm-hmm. That's amazing. Yeah. He's coming around to our way of thinking. He should be on this show. He should be on our show because our show is so much better than his. I listened to it. The last couple have been so terrible. Oh, that's just so boring. It's, it's, they've, they've, what they've done is they've gone the Howard Stern route where they're so far up their own asses about their own little things that they do that you can't listen to it as an outsider anymore.

That, and the audio quality is terrible. Even on the last one, they're in the same room and they couldn't make it work. And then Adam starts eating like potato chips. I'm like, come on. How, you know, I know how much you guys make per episode. At least like pretend to be professionals. Look, he's, he's, he's a sad, depressed man now.

Apparently. I could use some potato chips now. But if you don't like the Adam Savage podcast, go check out the Film Spotting podcast. Friend of the show, Chen, turned me on to this when she was in town a while ago and I started listening to it here and there and now it's part of my weekly listens.

It is a great podcast about movies. Okay. Hands down. Now, I did see a couple of quick documentaries here. I watched Cries from Syria last night, which is an HBO documentary. Boy, I bet you were cheerful. Jesus, bring a box of tissues. It is so bad over there.

It's, I mean, it's really hard to watch. This is not, not for the faint of heart. And then to, you know, dovetail on that, I watched The White Helmets, which was a Netflix documentary and won an Academy Award last year. Watched together. Yes. It's interesting dreams last night.

That's all I got to say. Good times, Chase. Yeah, but man, I definitely recommend watching them. It puts, puts some things into perspective real quick. Now let's, let's leave on a happy note, Brian. Okay. At some point, your son will be of age to go to, to go to Los Angeles's new celebrity internet summer camp.

Oh God. So yes, it's the inaugural year. So by the time he's old enough, they should, you know, be really in the, in the swing of things. But yes, it is a, it's like a spinoff from an acting camp, but for people who want to become famous on the internet, rising social media creators, they say.

Well, this is a, I'm sure they're going to make a lot of money. So good on them. But this is no different than, as there's been a single rock star other than the guy that replaced the guy in journey that has come out of like the rock star camps. Yeah, seriously, not a one because nobody's going to pay attention to the classes because everybody's going to be taking their selfies and their videos or flying their drones.

That's true. All the, all the, it's actually somewhat genius because you start this camp that you've charged people a lot of money to be at. And then all they do is spend their entire time promoting it on social media because that's all you're supposed to be doing. Yep. Yep. Smart. Security.

Ha! We are back with Dave. Take a bite out of life, Bittner. How's it going? I think it's going, going, going pretty good, guys. It's a root canal. It's horrific. Now, can you, does it sound different? Is there anything different? How's the sound to you? Ah, perfect.

Crystal clear. You're ready for radio. Exactly. No, it's fine. I, I, I don't know. You know, I, I've been fortunate to this point. At that point in my life, I had never even had a cavity. So having a root canal, I actually cracked a tooth, which is what led to this root canal and crown.

So it's just sort of being thrown into the deep end of modern dental technology and surgery and so forth. And all I can say is thank God for effective pain management drugs. So, and Novocaine.

So, yeah, you know, so far so good. Thanks for holding down the fort last week while I was sitting in the dentist chair, having the time of my life. No problem at all. And hey, you know, if you run out of those painkillers before you feel you're effectively done, you can always go to the dark web. Ooh, Mr. Transition.

Yes. That's right. Yeah. Boy, really interesting sort of multi-part story that happened over the past week, week and a half in regard to some dark web sites that got taken down.

So Alpha Bay was one of the world's largest sites on the dark web and the place where people would buy and sell all sorts of things, drugs, weapons, people, parts of people, child, you know, child pornography, that sort of stuff.

Now, we have someone who comes on our show regularly, Emily Wilson from Terbium Labs, and she makes the point that, you know, a lot of these markets are really self-policing. So in other words, if you're there selling things like drugs and guns or things like that, you're going to get a lot more leeway than if you're selling things like child pornography or human trafficking or things like that.

So that's such an interesting thing. Well, yeah, I mean, honor among thieves and all that sort of thing. But I think it's an important point that you don't lump all of that sort of behavior under the same group, because evidently, you know, there is a culture to these places.

And so Alpha Bay went offline a couple of weeks ago, and a lot of people were afraid that the people who were running it had just shut it down and basically run off with all of the money. And it turned out that it was actually taken down. The folks who were running it got arrested, and one of them seems committed suicide in prison.

Well, we actually talked about that last week on the show. What is your thoughts? Did he take his own life, or was it taken for him? Boy, I don't know. I just, I mean, the conspiracy theorists start your engines, right? I've heard everything from he took his own life to, given the situation where he was, he could have paid off the guards, and they could have, you know, left behind the body of somebody who was not him in that jail.

Oh, that's a new one. Yeah. So that was one, that's one of the, you know, crazy theories that I've seen out there. I doubt that that's true. You know, always Occam's razor and all that kind of stuff. But, um. Oh, come on. Elvis was alive for decades working at every greasy spoon up and down the highway, down Route 66.

So you never know. Yes. It's an important point. It's an important point. So, um, so Alpha Bay goes silent and turns out gets taken down. So what happens when Alpha Bay goes silent? Well, these people have to find another market. And so they went to the Hansa market, um, which was another of the big dark web markets.

Uh, lots of people went directly to the Hansa market. Well, turns out the Hansa market had been taken over by law enforcement for about a month. So let's sort of walk through that. You're, you go from, uh, from Alpha Bay over to Hansa market and you log in and give them information.

Uh, but a lot of people are reusing passwords, reusing email addresses and so forth. So now law enforcement, uh, takes down Hansa. And in the meantime, for about a month, they'd been gathering up all sorts of information from the users of that market.

Things to cross, cross reference. A lot of people out there expecting a knock on a door anytime soon. I'd imagine. A lot of people calling you haul right about now too. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And, and again, you know, in the conversations I've had with Emily Wilson from Terbium, she's made the point that, you know, while yes, there is a lot of awful bad things going on in these sorts of markets, you know, there's also things that you can kind of understand,

you know, for example, if you have, um, some kind of medication that you might need, like, uh, maybe some sort of anti-anxiety medicine or something for mental health, and you don't want your employer to know that you're using that sort of medicine. So for some kind of privacy reason, you could find someone on one of these dark web markets and you could buy that medicine, you know, under the table.

Right. So for that sort of person, I think having someone come knock on their door, you know, my heart kind of goes out to them if they're just trying to do the best they can with what they have and, uh, get sort of rounded up in this. Or the people who are actually doing bad things, running guns and child pornography and all that sort of thing.

Well, I guess they've got what's coming to them. Yeah. Anybody that's around fentanyl needs to go down fast. Well, he is bringing up a really good point, though, because we ourselves instinctively and certainly the media paint the dark web with a very wide black brush.

And there are some legitimate things that are out there and and cases that may not technically be illegal, but certainly aren't in the same realm that we're talking about or that we automatically assume that is taking place on Hansa and Alphabay. So, yeah, I think there's a there's a lot more nuance going on in those forums than than it's then then you would think.

And then then and that certainly the media portrays them as having. So interesting story more to come because, you know, we'll see where do people move next. And and the assumption, of course, is that, well, what other of these dark web forums has law enforcement taken over additionally?

So just the fear could make people flee these forums or or, you know, also come up with a better way to do it. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, another ongoing story that we're going to keep touching on here and something that probably affects us all a bit more.

We're not all surf and Hansa trying to get some medications, but we mostly are all traveling internationally and we have a lot of questions about exactly what is happening when we travel. We've talked about this a number of times and we have the latest development, which is apparently US border agents are not searching at the cloud if they do search your digital device, which is on the one hand, great if you're us and you just then put everything up on your Dropbox and then download it back as soon as you get through Border Patrol.

But in terms of effectiveness of doing a digital device search is useless because of that. So but that's where we're at right now. Theoretically, I guess so. It does. I mean, boy, it's hard to really puzzle through this.

Does it mean that, you know, if I just put my device in airplane mode so it can't hit, you know, anything online? Is that all the protection I need? Theoretically, I mean, the way that I'm reading this now is unless that data is physically encoded on that phone specifically, they can't touch it.

So who the hell knows? Things like your contacts list, which probably lives on the phone, but syncs through an online service, you know, something the things that sort of would go through something like iCloud, you know, if you have an Apple phone or something like that, you know, they I think they stay resident on the phone.

So that would be fair game for them to search through. And I suspect they'd be interested to look through something like that. But but I think if security is a concern, well, there's no shortage of services that are cloud only. So it's an interesting development. Almost all social media is off the table.

So right. Yeah. So we'll see. I mean, I have a feeling, you know, this is not going to be the end of it at all. So we'll we'll see what's next. Yeah. Ever evolving stories. Fun times. Keep us in business. These guys keep us in business. That's right. Now, Dave, you have me.

Yeah, definitely you. Us and maybe not so much. Now, Dave, you've got a DJI drone, don't you? I do. I have a DJI Phantom 2. Ooh, old school. Old school. And it does not have any of the geofencing built in.

And there was no software update? Or did you just happen to forget to update your software? No, I mean, I haven't done anything software wise to it since it came out of the box. You know, this is one of the things my my lovely bride bought this for me on a whim. It was one of those it was like a woot or something, you know, one of those, you know, hey, today only get a drone for only a couple hundred bucks.

And so she did for my birthday or something. And, you know, it's it's fun. I can't say I use it all that much, but but it's fun. My kids like playing. You know, we take it out to a field and fly it around. But, you know, I think like most people who get one, one of the first things you do is you go, well, how high can this thing go?

Yeah. So so it's sort of a there's a tension between how high can this thing go and how chicken am I to lose contact with it? Now, I was going to say about when I got mine, that was the same thing. I'm like, I know I'm allowed to go to 400 feet, but how high is 400 feet?

Because mine didn't have geofencing or anything on it because it was just a cheap boing boing deal, too. And but yeah, there is that tension where it's just like, OK, what if it goes all the way up and the battery goes out? Am I willing to kill a neighbor over playing with my drone? Well, and one of the good things, at least with the DJI ones, the ones that I have, it will if it loses contact with the transmitter, it will go to the GPS location of where it took off from.

So it'll basically come back and land itself if it loses contact with you. Right. So that's kind of cool. But I have to say that, you know, I was in a field in the middle of nowhere and, you know, scan the sky to make sure there weren't any planes around. And basically, you know, you just keep going up, up, up until the thing's a little tiny dot in the sky and you can't hear the the the blades anymore.

And then you kind of go, OK, OK, that's good. That's enough. This thing can go really high. And then you bring it back down. And, you know, that's that. So since you have a DJI, too, you're not really in the market for hacks. But all of the newer models are all geofenced and they're altitude restricted.

Well, sort of because DJI accidentally left its debug tools on their Assistant 2 application recently with an update, which means it was very easy for anybody to just walk into the settings and tweak them, turn off geofencing and altitude restrictions.

And it also turns out that it's very easy to do that even without the Assistant 2 application. There are Russian sites that will actually hack your DJI for you. And it seems to be fairly trivial to turn all that crap off. This reminds me of the old days with with scanners where you had little handheld radio scanners.

Oh, yeah. And then they would have, you know, they have blocked out the frequencies for things like cell phones back when cell phones were still analog. But, of course, if you open the thing up, you know, there was a trace on the board that basically said cut here. And if you cut that trace on the board, you know, it would open up all of those frequencies again.

So the engineers were in on it. This reminds me of that sort of thing. Yeah. Not too tough to get around that type of stuff. And now that you don't have to register them. Hey, fair game. Yeah. I think the thing in the article that stood out to me was one of the people who offered this service of taking away the geofencing.

In the video, it said, don't be an idiot with using these settings. And the person writing the article said, to state the blindly obvious, idiots are why geofencing eofencing exists. And that is true. It is true. Yes.

The interesting thing is you can have that turned off for different applications, but you have to contact DJI directly. And the, at the very end of the article, there's somebody who's claiming to be from law enforcement who wrote in and says, I've said it before. When you purchase a car, it does not come with a dag gum babysitter.

You're trusted to abide by the rules and regulations. And he misspelled your, um, as a law enforcement officer, I am not waiting five days to get authorization when I have all other paperwork in line and I need to fly now. Dag gum it. Yeah.

Love it. Love it. All right, moving on. Yep. You guys always make fun of me for my, uh, internet enabled devices, namely my Chinese router and my, my security cameras. And Dave, you weren't here, uh, for last week. So you don't know that my, uh, my Chinese webcams are now offline because the ethernet port broke.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. It went dead. So yeah, I put a link in. So you didn't just have them all hosed up with wifi. Cause I figured that's how you do it. Here's the thing. The box that it comes with, it's the DV. That has the hard drive in it. Uh-huh. That has a wifi base station in it that all the cameras connect to, to that.

Then you have to plug the base station into the internet. I see. All right. So that's why I always kept the base station, uh, DMZ'd through my router. So like people couldn't get to that device on the network. Only I could get to it if I, if I needed to get around it.

Uh-huh. But I was using the features of the Chinese router to do that. So, you know, you give some, you take some, what you're going to get, uh, anyway. But yeah, the ethernet port died, so it can't get online. But it is still a nice home DVR for the price. 150 bucks, four camera setup, supply your own hard drive.

So you still have local recording. You just can't monitor it remotely. Right. So I'm, I'm great if somebody doesn't break into my house and steal the box that controls all of the, all of the cameras, which is, you know, right next to all the computers I have in my room. So anyway, there is a, uh, a library out there called GSOAP and it's an XML library basically.

And you know, this is a problem with third party libraries around the world that everybody uses. Uh, if that thing gets owned, then everything that uses that library gets owned. We saw it in, in WordPress back with the Tim Thumb exploit that killed everybody's WordPress install. So this is another one, but, uh, they, they seem to have come out with a fix in a patch fairly quickly, but the problem with all of these internet of things devices is when does anybody go and patch them?

Never, never. No, yeah, no, nobody's going to go patch their security cameras. Well, no, no, I guess. Here's the deal. I patched mine every week, but I'm, I'm psycho about it. Most people are not. Most people install them, plug them in, think they'll just run forever and there's no problems.

It's such a bizarre conundrum. You're so psycho about it that you make sure you patch all the time. Yet you still buy Chinese security cameras. Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's the world, you know, the world's not made a nerve. He's psycho yet cheap. Yeah. Yes, yes. That, that is the problem.

I am, I am, I am very psycho about security, but I am poor. So I have to balance my love for technology with what I can get that day. Gotcha. He's the, he's the, he's the thrifty psycho. That's it. Yeah. So, yeah. Did you guys cover this on the cyber wire?

We did. We did. And, you know, it's again, exactly what you pointed out that this notion that if people are using these common libraries, it can be in, you know, thousands of different devices devices and it's hard to track down to, to patch for something that's in such wide use as this.

And, and again, like you said, who's going to patch these? Who's, who's going to get the alert to patch this? How do you know if the device you have, if the manufacturer can't contact you and how's the manufacturer going to, the video camera you bought off of Amazon, how's the manufacturer going to contact you? They're not, right? If you registered your device, they can contact you, but who registers a device anymore?

Nope. Me. Nobody. Yeah. Because everything is disposable. So nobody cares about the warranty. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Well, hopefully it'll come back around. If you have a camera system that, please go update it. AXS, the biggest manufacturer, did a huge push.

I don't have an AXS camera because, you know, those guys are expensive, really expensive. Right. That's the good stuff. Well, ain't it the way though? You know, exactly. If you're, if you had a Sony camera or a Panasonic camera, any of the big names, then, you know, chances are somebody's keeping up on these things.

But if you have the no name, you know, a million different brands that you get from a slow boat through Amazon, then it gets what you paid for. I mean, the name, the brand that I have is called Smonet. So there you go. I do have a Nest Cam and those things update automatically.

So, but that's why I only have one Nest Cam because my one Nest Cam cost $50 more than all of my other cameras, plus another 50 bucks for the year subscription. Right. By the way, just quickly, I did purchase, maybe we can follow up on this next week after I install them, but I did purchase some smart smoke alarms this week.

Did you get the Nest smoke alarms? I did not get the Nest ones because they're expensive and I'm a, I'm a thrifty, you know, not psycho, but a person who doesn't want my house to burn down. Right. But no, you know, we have a smart system in our house for various things, for doors.

And, uh, you know, my favorite smart, uh, in, uh, alert that I get on my phone is liquor cabinet open. So I, I, I, I have a teenager. So, you know, Oh, that's evil. God, I would be a different person if that was installed when I was a kid, I might actually be successful.

So I did in this past week, I, it sort of struck me that my, uh, I think the, the main smoke alarm in my house was over 30 years old. So it was probably time for an update. Yeah. Those things, those things die. I actually had a carbon monoxide, uh, detector go bad in my house and I checked it. They're only good for seven years.

And this one was installed in 2006. So I need to, I had a chat with a landlord about that. So a new one is arriving. But yeah, I'd love to hear about your, your wifi enabled smoke detectors because I'm going to have a new one next week too. I have a ring doorbell coming. So. Oh, terrific.

Yeah. Yeah. Have one of those. So we'll see, you know, it'll, I'll have the, uh, the luxury of knowing if I'm away from home, if my house is burning down. Yep. That's why I have the nest. That's why I have the nest camera so I can look for smoke. That's it. That's really all I care about. Okay. Moving on. Ashley Madison, the big, big, big hack of, uh, 2015.

Mm-hmm. 37 million users were, uh, their, their data was leaked and now they're finally, finally getting to the class action lawsuit and the settlement. Well, the company has reached a tentative settlement with the plaintiffs to the tune of $11.2 million.

So that is about, uh, 20 cents each, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. You, you only get the money if you sign up to be part of the class action lawsuit. And I'm betting an awful lot of people probably aren't. And the thing about that money though, is it's, there's a French term for it.

I forget what it's called. I just did a podcast, uh, with Rob Reed, whose interview will be at the end of the show, uh, with the head of EFF. And that money actually, when it's, when there's leftover money, it goes into a pool that goes back to fund other lawsuits who are for people who were in the same situation.

So even if you don't pick up the money, the money does go to a good cause, which is, which is very good. So it's not like if they don't get enough claims, Ashley Madison doesn't have to put all the money in the pot. They're on the hook for that $11.2 million, no matter what. They pay the money and then it gets distributed, like the money, it depends on the lawsuit and the deal they make with the judge, but it'll get distributed to people like, you know, the EFF or the ACLU or other people who are in the same space.

Since this is a privacy issue, probably the EFF will get most of that money. One of the jokes I saw about this was imagine sort of insult to injury when that settlement check arrives in your mailbox, you know, somehow you are, somehow you are able to, uh, to keep your spouse from knowing that you were on the original list.

And then an envelope comes from, from Ashley Madison. Here's your refund. You know, good news. Or even before that, you get the postcard that you have to fill out. Yep. And here's, it would be even better if they were both cheating on Ashley Madison. They don't know which one got the postcard.

Right. Whoever got the mail, like, yeah, whoever gets the mail of scones with both of them. Great. Oh, but the interesting news is, uh, that their numbers are up. Like this didn't deter anybody.

All it was was free advertising. It was free advertising. First off, they did rebrand themselves as a basic dating site, not just, you know, cheat on your spouse anymore. So there's that. It's still, it's still, you know, uh, they don't have security.

They had crappy security, whatever. And now people are just flocking back to them. And yes, the numbers are a bit dubious because they're self-reported. Yes, of course they are. But still, the main one that I want to call foul on is they're claiming in New York City, a one-to-one ratio of signups by women and men.

Bullshit. Yeah, no, no, no. Come on, guys, you're not, it's not even plausible. You're not even trying if you're claiming that. That's, there isn't a dating site in the history of the world that has had a one-to-one ratio. Yeah. Maybe, maybe a lesbian-only dating site. And because it's half of them are men pretending to be.

Right. Good point. Very good point. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It's good. Anyways, so we'll stick with the sex news. I know Twitter came out with a bunch of reports this week that they had supposedly massively increased their security systems and everything was so much better now.

Well, unfortunately for them, the same week, a story came out about the 90,000 sex bots that invaded Twitter in one of the largest malicious campaigns ever recorded on a social network. So that's good times for them. The accounts had already generated more than 8.5 million posts aimed at driving users to a variety of subscription-based scam websites with promise of, you know, hot internet sex.

The accounts were first identified by ZeroFox, a Baltimore-based security firm. I was wondering if you knew them, Bittner. I do, actually. In fact, I am going to be visiting their site sometime soon. I actually had a couple of guys from ZeroFox that I interviewed last week, and we're going to get together and have a bite together.

So yeah, locals. And the name is appropriate because ZeroFoxes are exactly how many women want to have sex with men over the internet. Yes, that is true. They dubbed the botnet Siren after the Greek mythology, you know, lures men to their death. And they said they got a rare glimpse into how efficient scammers have become at bypassing Twitter's anti-spam techniques.

What I really appreciate about this article is they did not call it an AI, they just called it a bot, but the AI, from all the AI stories that we've read, the hilariously bad tweets generated by these bots are pretty much on par with what people are claiming AI is at.

So I just wanted to read a few of these because they're great. I want to hashtag fondle me. I want to take my hashtag virgin. Meow, I want to have sex. And want a vulgar young man. Want a vulgar young man. Want a vulgar young man?

It should be saying, since we are on the radio, want a vulgar, comma, young man. Young man. The interesting thing from this that I found was they reported that about 20% of the accounts had been dormant for about a year before sending out their first tweets, which is an interesting long game to play to get around Twitter's spam detection.

Or get around the TSA when you're working for ISIS and want to come to America. We covered that on a previous security. So people are thinking ahead. They're buying up these accounts and just sitting on them, letting them marinate, as it were.

The other thing I was thinking about this was they generated more than 30 million clicks. So you have, there's this tension between people who are smart enough to get on the internet, but dumb enough to click on a link from a sex bot.

Well, to be fair, the bar has been significantly lowered in terms of getting on the internet these days. That's true. Yeah. Pretty much anybody can get on the internet. That's true. Oh, man. Well, speaking of getting on the internet, MySpace has been on the internet for a long time.

And it has changed ownership a lot of times. But apparently nobody is home anymore because there's a beautiful security flaw that you could get access to anyone's account if you just knew their birthday. Okay. I could have gotten into your MySpace account, Brian, because I know you probably still have one.

I read the story, Jason, when you put it in, and I immediately thought, if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it? Exactly. Because there's nobody left on MySpace. So much so that Leanne Galloway, the security researcher who found this bug, notified MySpace in April and finally just released the details of the exploit because she never heard back from them because there's nobody left in MySpace to answer the email.

I never had a MySpace account. But what was interesting about this is that they had a bunch of fields in the account recovery screen that they claimed were mandatory, but it really didn't matter what you put in there.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Lazy coding. That's just lazy coding. Exactly. It's totally lazy coding. Who do you trust? Right? Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, we don't trust Putin. That's for sure. Rootin' tootin', we hate Putin. And so does Microsoft because they have unleashed the worst weapon in the world upon Russia, the lawyers.

Yeah. So now Microsoft is, they're going after all of these Russian government hackers and they're doing it by owning the command and control domains and they're using their lawyers to get legal access to the domains and then pointing them at Microsoft where they can then do analysis on the traffic.

This is awesome. Way to go, Microsoft. I'm very happy about this, but this is basically, is this not the Republican administration game plan? Let's not, let's make our government smaller and outsource everything to individual companies. So rather than our government actually protecting us, Microsoft's going and doing it.

Well, that's a double-edged sword there because Microsoft's security flaws are the ones that cause half the goddamn problems that we have. So good on them for taking some responsibility in my book. And I don't know that the two are mutually exclusive. I suspect there's a lot going on just down the road from us at NSA in this neighborhood as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to see how many domains the NSA owns. That would be an interesting number. Well, yeah, it was interesting to me how evidently the Fancy Bear folks were kind of deliberate in naming their domains.

You see a lot of these stories where people set up command and control servers and, you know, they're just generating basically random strings and registering them because it's, you know, if you're sending command and control traffic to a domain, what do you care what the name is?

I can tell you exactly what the difference is here, though. I mean, yes, if you're doing stuff for people who aren't savvy, who, you know, it's just home, you're breaking into home computers, they're not looking at traffic. But if you're on any kind of corporate network where there's traffic analysis, if you put Microsoft in the name of the domain, it might get whitelisted and get passed through.

So I can see why. Because who knows? Yeah, I can see why Fancy Bear would try and use Microsoft branding on the domains to try and get past filters or just get past anybody that's just glancing at the network traffic. It's like, oh, it's a Microsoft domain. I can let that go. You know, so that kind of makes sense to me why they would do that.

I think you're absolutely right. Well, you know, guys, we hear about phishing attacks, right? In your email. Wow. So we got a story from CNN about a casino that got compromised because of a phishing attack, although this had to do with an actual fish tank.

There was a casino in North America. They haven't named who it is, but there's a security firm named Dark Trace who this was part of a report that they put out in the past week or so. And basically, it's the same old sad tale where somebody, in this case, installed a fish tank and they automated their fish tank because evidently that's a thing.

I'm sure we're going to get letters from fish tank people who say, well, why wouldn't you automate your fish tank? Fi-fi. It's on Fi-fi. It's a cliche for a reason. It happens so often. Yeah, cliches come from somewhere. You feed your fish and you monitor the temperature and this, I guess, the salinity and all those sorts of things.

But, of course, you also increase your attack surface. So this fish tank automation system was on the network at the casino and somebody was smart enough to find it, exploit it, and get into the casino's network.

So was it a, but do we know if it was a Chinese fish tank? In related news. Was it full of Chinese fish? Jason's just ordered a fish tank from Alibaba, so. Right. Exactly. It gets you next week. Yeah. Well, Bam Bam's got to have something to look at while he's home, you know.

Yeah, while we're doing the show. And you've got to have something to point your video cameras at, right? The fish tank's fish swimming around. No, no. I'm telling you, all my cameras are just on the Bam Cam network, so we don't do anything with that. Yeah, so buyer beware, if you're going to be installing a fish tank, you might want to think twice about whether or not you want to automate those fish tank functions.

All right, Dave, thanks for joining us. I'm glad you're recuperating properly, and we'll talk again next week. Thank you very much. See you soon. See you soon. I don't want to get all Adam Savage on your ass, Jason.

Oh, no. But I'm a little dark and depressed right now, too, after reading this particular story. Actually, there's a lot of good stuff in here. I enjoyed this a lot. Psychologists share the subconscious secrets they've learned from therapy. Now, this is just one of those silly little listicles, but it basically goes, they talked to a shit ton of psychologists and said, what are some of the life lessons that you've learned from just hearing people complain and come in with problems all your life?

I loved it. There were some really good ones, but the depressing one, of course, is it gets worse before it gets better, always. Oh, great. So there's your Adam Savage aspect. Oh, fun. Now, I've got two visual, well, one visual, one audio link in our show notes.

You need to check these out. These are fantastic. The first is from sadanduseless.com. People who tried to take panorama shots and ended up opening the gates of hell. Oh, yeah. These are fantastic. Oh, my God. These are some of the best photos I've ever seen in my entire life.

It is so effing creepy. Yeah. So good. Oh, my God. Yeah. So, oh, geez. Yeah. So, go check that out. And then the second one. Oh, this is just good, too. Star Wars lightsabers with Owen Wilson saying wow as the sound effect. It's...

Yeah. You will not... You will waste two minutes of your life, but you'll be so happy you did. I don't have anything as good as that, but I found a great new Twitter account this morning as I was bouncing around.

It's the DPRK News Service Twitter account. Now, for those not in the know, DPRK is also known as North Korea. And it is a funny Twitter account, not a real one. And they had what I thought was one of the greatest tweets.

Highest aspiration of United States youth is becoming social media star. Highest aspiration of DPRK youth is to kill 10 social media stars. This is very well done, very well written, and very funny, and very topical. I love this feed.

I'm definitely following him now. I love Game of Thrones writers turned to documentary in Confederate showing how U.S. came to be shattered land of slavery, sectionalism, and ignorance. People's Republic of China wisely follows lead of DPRK, prohibiting yowling Canadian jazz hooligan Justin Bieber for moral health of children.

And finally, because it's today's news, Donald Trump thanks Sean Spicer denounces black-hearted traitor to all mankind, an unfaithful son of a malignant she-ass for his service. I'm telling you, this is one of the greatest Twitter feeds out there. You have to check that out.

Moran of the week! Ah, Venice Beach. My home for many years now. Lots of lovely hotels around here with little bars and things like that. The Hotel Irwin being one of them. In fact, I actually stayed there on my wedding night. But not anymore.

I will not be going to the Hotel Irwin again, because they have a new promotion. They will be offering a free single night stay. Just one night. One night. And $200 in food and beverage credits, which, if memory serves, would get you two drinks and maybe a burger at their prices.

To anyone who gets the hotel's logo, the Irwin, with the R backwards, of course, permanently tattooed on their body. And as the author of the article says, this is a real thing that I am not making up. God. So they were sent an email with the promotion.

This is from LA, so they get this sort of stuff all the time. Serious question. How hard would you crush summer if your beach bod had a giant Irwin tatted sur la lower back? The Hotel Irwin is doling out $200 of Barlow Kitchen cocktails, high rooftop lounge cred, for permanent tattoos of the hotel's namesake Irwin, plus a free night stay.

Homies who present the tattoo anytime from Saturday through Monday to the manager on duty will receive the reward. Name must have a backwards R, as seen in the official hotel logo, to be eligible for the reward. Now, the best part, limit to the first 25.

They are very optimistic. Who thought there'd be such a rush? The only person that should ever do this is somebody named Irwin. Yeah, pretty much. This is the world that we live in, in which a real press release involves the words Crushing Summer, Beach Bod, Tatted, Homey.

Oh, God, this is the world we've created. Fortunately, it's over. We missed the window, so you couldn't do it if you wanted to. It was July 15th through July 17th. Oh, no. I have to go back for my second sitting. I've only got Irr. You should get to Irr. Feedback loop.

Our first bit of feedback this week is a Facebook rating, because apparently you can do that now. Nice. So feel free, and apparently we'll even see it, because I get a little notification from Jocelyn. She gave us a five-star rating on Facebook. Just found this podcast and absolutely love it.

Learn lots. Laugh lots. Absolutely great. Woo-hoo. Thank you, Jocelyn. Mm-hmm. And over on Twitter, Ivor Tull, a friend of the show, wrote in, this is quite chuckle-rific, and it is a link to videos about AI learning how to run, which are much more hilarious with sound. Yes.

I was in tears watching this video. You have to check it out if you haven't seen it, and definitely turn the sound up, because that's the whole point. Yes, it's quite funny. And our friends over at Geeks and Beats, I guess they listened to our show and heard we gave them a shout-out and thanked us for the shout-out, so that's awesome.

I have two episodes into their show now. It's back and very enjoyable, so go give them a listen. I did, actually. I did give them a listen this week and added them to my feed. They are definitely our Canadian brothers to the north, but with one huge glaring difference. They're nice to each other?

They're nice to each other. I mean, I know they're Canadian and all, but yeah, they were extremely nice to each other. Yeah. Next one. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Our next one came from 6502chip, referencing Jason's sartorial choices.

I have also been using cargo shorts for 25 years, lately with a fanny pack. Hashtag never enough pockets. Hashtag never enough girls around. For a reason. I have not been rocking the fanny pack, but you never know.

You never know. You never know. And this next one comes from Martin Zibi. And this is the coolest thing. He made some fan art in the form of a keychain, which is 3D printable that you can actually go download the specs for.

Not so sure about him crushing our IP rights, but okay. Hey, man. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'm kidding. You want to spread the word? Spread the word. Far and wide. It's very cool. It is very cool. So thanks for that. And over at GOG.show, we had a few people writing in.

The first is Dani Nail, I believe. No, it's pronounced Nail. If you go to the end, she gives us a pronunciation guide. Right. I just love your podcast. Having listened for more than two years, I've given it a five star on iTunes way back, but been really preoccupied with much else these last five months and how I've missed you.

It's a pleasure to hear your arguments, bickering, and smart thoughts on all different subjects again. See, she appreciates us not being Canadian. Exactly. Just wanted to tell you that. And the fact that I'm now using one password, thanks to you. No, thank you. Keep up the splendid work. P.S. The name is made up from the days of M-I-R-C and I-C-Q.

So the surname is pronounced Nail. Ah, gotcha. It was an adolescent playing with words back in 96, 97. Oh, those days. I agree. Thank you. And next one comes from Gabriel Pagan, as you would say. I live in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. A recent humble audiobooks bundle had some books blocked for me.

Used your link for private internet access VPN and was able to download the full bundle. This is a win-win for everyone. I would not have bought the bundle unless I could download all. So they got my money. The VPN guys got my money, too. And you got some credit and goodwill.

Thanks. No, Gabriel. Thank you. Yes, thank you. And I agree with you 100%. The whole geo-blocking thing and how that rolls out is just stupid and short-sighted. It makes me think about Downton Abbey and how we were a season behind in the U.S. And I didn't want to be a season behind.

Just open it up to everyone, people. Yeah. At least they were smart and they did it with Doctor Who. Now they air simultaneously. Yeah, that's what you should be doing. Simultaneous world release for everything. Everything. Damn it. Next up is from DC. Hey, guys. I've been listening to you guys for a little over a month now.

I currently work in cyber and get a kick out of your take on all things tech, given that I've just started listening. And I'm not sure if you guys have heard the audiobook or read Ready Player One. I would call it some sort of tech-fi. Great read, but better listen. Enjoy. Keep up the great work. Well, yep. We certainly have.

We both loved Ready Player One and we talked about it back in episode 98 called Live Long and Prosper. Oh, I remember why we called it that. That's when Spock died. Yeah, that was a sad one. But yeah, no, I listened to it. Brian read it. Yep. And spoiler alert, the second book sucked.

Armada, no. I can't remember which show we reviewed that in. Go to GOG.show and search for Armada if you want our review on that. Yeah. Well, you don't have to because we just told you. Pretty much. Next one comes from Ken Owlsley. Owlsley?

Owlsley. See, I got to use my new font on this. Gentlemen, I've been listening to your show for a few months now and absolutely love it. Appreciate your technical opinions and all the grumping in between. Brian's incessant disdain for AI and adorations of all things Trump. Keep me smiling.

After listening- Now, hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't have disdain for AI. I have disdain for the willy-nilly use of AI in tech journalism. But I like your adoration of all things Trump. Wow. I love him. I love them. Trump's the best. Orange 45.

Let's go. Fantastic. Best ever. After listening to episode 218, I'm concerned that Jason might need an intervention. Must get out of the house. The new Xbox isn't going to help the cause. On a serious note, don't give up on the show notes. You've been grumping about them a lot lately, but they add a lot of value.

And it's not lately. I've been grumping on them for four years. I review them regularly and have used them recently to find Jason's Egg Cooker on Amazon and wasted five minutes of my life that I'll never get back watching Adam Shigglehorn's series of Muppet mashups. Well, now who told you to watch them all?

We just said the one. Yeah. Well, people don't listen to us on this show. Forget that. Anyway, I appreciate your show enough that I've enrolled as a Patreon member with plans to support the show, but only see options for recurring donations. Being new to Patreon, curious to know if there's a way to make a one-time donation.

Long-term commitments are scary. Shout out to Dave Bittner, too. Recently picked up Cyber Wire as another regular. Grump on, guys. Great show. You want to take this one? Thanks a lot, Kevin. We appreciate it a lot. You can still join on Patreon and just simply cancel after you've been in for one month and then you've only paid us the one time.

Or go to GOG.show. There is a PayPal button on the right-hand side. Click there. Send us your cash one time only. That's not a recurring thing at all. So there are many ways you can send us monies. And we appreciate all of them. Yes, we do. Keeps the lights on. Keeps us paid. Sort of.

Sort of. Yeah. We're not really paid at all. I mean, we pay our bills and get a beer or two. Anyways, over at iTunes, we have a new five-star rating. Great podcast from Woodrow947. I'm enjoying your podcast and have recommended to several friends. Sweet. Short and to the point.

And we do appreciate that, by the way. Obviously, we are not advertising. We are not doing anything because we have no monies to do that. So the way that people find out about the show is through you. And we really do appreciate it. Please do tell friends. Thank you. If you want your question or comment right 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 snarky review. At the library. All right.

We're sitting down with Rob Reed, author of After On and a couple other books. How's it going, Rob? Things are great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Oh, definitely. Just so everybody knows, Rob is actually a client of mine. So there's a little nepotism going on here. But I read the book and I actually really enjoyed it.

And there's a lot of tech in here and a lot of tech we talk about on the show. So I thought, why not have you on to discuss some of it with us? And I should also point out that I'm notorious for never paying my bills. So that kind of obviates some of the nepotism. Yeah, the check has not cleared yet. So now one of the things I want to talk to you about first that we talk about on the show a lot is AI.

It is the industry buzzword for the past year and a half. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's either happy about it or worried about it. And nobody can actually sit down and define what the hell it is. You've got machine learning. You've got general purpose AI.

All these things are being bandied around in terms of just AI. And you did a lot of research on this for the book. So I want to get your take. Rob, what do you define as AI? Well, I think AI is a pretty flexible term because it has de facto been applied to enough things at this point that it's really incumbent on us to be a little more specific when we're talking about that which we mean.

So I think it's legitimate to call AI anything that makes a computer do something a little spooky and a little magical and very familiar, whether it's, you know, Waze routing you around a city or Google targeting you with creepily relevant ads and so forth.

The term that I use quite a bit in this book, because it is where I think a massive line is crossed, which we may not ever cross, is artificial consciousness. And that is probably exactly what it sounds like to people. But to define it, I think of artificial consciousness is coming about if and when a programmed entity, a computer, some software, some servers, something in the cloud basically develops a sense of

self willpower in its own set of goals that it's going to pursue because it wants to. Goals which may or may not be consistent with the goals of the people who created them, just like a kid may or may not do what the parents want to do. So that, to me, is a very clear and profound break from AI.

And that's what I refer to in the book. And I think that people who are deep in the AI field who are working with this particular dimension of machine learning or that particular dimension of neural networks or whatever it is probably have their own little bits and pieces of terminology that feed into the greater thing called AI.

Okay, because I've had, you know, in some of the stories that we have on the show, people are actually calling chatbots AI. And, you know, as a programmer, we know it's just a decision tree. You cannot call a decision tree AI. Unless the thing gets to a point of sophistication that it's starting to threaten to cross the line of the Turing test, then there's something else possibly going on and something very powerful.

I mean, chat is a medium like a telephone and a video link and, you know, a telegram and anything else. It's a mechanism by which, you know, content and thought can be rendered. And the thing behind that chatbot or that chat window could be an AI.

But I totally agree with you. Like a simple chatbot? No, definitely not AI. And when you talk about the Turing test nowadays, it's a subjective test. So explain the Turing test to our listeners, because I think you'll probably do a better job of it than I will.

But I just I feel that it is completely subjective and not something that you can really quantify. Yeah, it is inherently subjective by the very nature of it. So it's something that Alan Turing, who for all intents and purposes invented computing, thought of way back, like when he was inventing it, which is kind of nuts, because this is before computers could literally do anything.

And so he envisioned a chat window, basically, and he said, if ever there comes a time when a computer without any human intercession can carry on a conversation reliably with other humans, and I'm paraphrasing this, but can reliably carry on a conversation with other humans on the far side of the chat window in a way that those humans cannot tell whether they're talking to a person or a computer, then that has crossed a certain threshold.

And I don't know if he personally came up with the term Turing test, but that's what it means that he postulated that. And if we get to a point where something on the far side of that chat window can as often as not either trick us into thinking it's human or get us to the point of befuddlement where we just don't have any idea, then it's done it.

Now, as you said precisely, that is subjective by definition. It's the person who has failed to guess accurately who is going to cast the vote like, holy crap, for me, that passes the Turing test. Now, there are people who take this test very seriously, and there's actually a fairly organized competition every year, which somebody has been said to have won a couple of years ago.

It was a little bit cheating. I'll get back to that in a second. There are people who come up with statistical things and say, okay, if X percent of people can't tell, or if people guess wrong with a certain level of frequency, then we can say that this very subjective thing by a certain criteria has objectively been passed.

But yeah, it's inherently subjective because somebody's got to be befuddled or they got to guess wrong. I guess you could rate whether somebody guesses wrong. Now, the case, I think it was about two and a half years ago, and I'll probably get some of the details wrong. There was somebody who created a chat bot that basically depicted somebody who was not a native speaker of English.

This particular bot was speaking in English and also was pretty aspie. And so the fact that that fooled people, you know, you've got some distortions that are in the channel already. I don't know if that really counts necessarily. But that's a Turing test. And I don't think anything is out there yet that most people would concur.

Oh, my God, that's just like talking to a human. I mean, it's astounding to me whenever I get on the phone and it's this voice recognition problems now. And it says, you know, are you calling, you know, about your credit card? And I say, yes.

And it says, I'm sorry you're having trouble. Can I repeat that? Anyway, I think we're I think we're comfortably distant from this moment. Yeah, because when I think about, you know, what is the audience for the Turing test? Is it the meth heads at 3 a.m. at the Circle K? Because you could probably fool them pretty easily.

Or is it a bunch of Stanford, you know, software developers? Those guys might be a little harder. That's what wasn't quantified when Turing said that, you know, you have to be able to hold a conversation. Because me as a human, I've met humans who can't hold a conversation. So it's it's definitely a very blurry line.

Definitely. And foresighted as Mr. Turing was, I don't think he foresaw either meth heads or the Circle K. So that's true. It was a very proper British man. Yes. Now, I kind of buried the lead with the A.I. because I just needed to get that out of the way, because I know Brian is always on about A.I.

And I just wanted to get that cleared up. So why don't you just tell us about the book? Yeah. So the book stars this rather diabolical social media company called Flutter, P-H-L-U-T-T-R, just to make the spelling very modern. And you left the vowel in, though.

There's still a vowel left. One vowel. Just one vowel. It still looks kind of, you know, servo-Croatian because there are a lot of consonants in there. So Flutter is this diabolical social media company, kind of embodies everything that's wrong with social media, dialed up by about 25, 30 percent.

And this is not a spoiler because you see it coming literally 300 pages off. But about midway through the book, the social network attains consciousness, contrary to the interests of anybody who has anything to do with it, and indeed anybody in the world. And rather than going all Terminator and trying to kill us all, it basically takes its character on from that which it is, which is a social network, and becomes a hyper-empowered, super-intelligent 14-year-old brat.

So there is definitely something rather comedic about the premise. And there's a lot about the book that's very playful. There's a lot of humor in the book. At least I like to think so. And people are acknowledging that. But at the same time, it's a very serious rumination on what could go wrong with artificial superintelligence or with artificial consciousness.

And either of those things can come up independently or together. So a lot of really smart people have talked about the risks that we could face from that, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates and so forth. And I get pretty deep into those issues, playful as it is in a serious way.

Also get very deep into synthetic biology and quantum computing and really dark topics like suicide and nihilistic terrorism. And where this sort of – oh, and then some kind of more sociological topics like sex and dating post-Tinder. Where is that going?

So there's a lot of serious themes coupled with this sort of playful premise with characters who, like most people that I know, can pivot between intense seriousness and intense playfulness. And so it's a complicated book. I would definitely say so.

Yeah, you do kind of straddle the line. I'd be like laughing one moment and the other thing I'm like, oh, that poor guy. What's going on with that? You know, there's just – it does bounce back and forth. Now, there's a lot in this book about quantum computing. And on some of the stuff that we're going to talk about in a little bit about your supplemental materials for the book, I dug down and went a little deep into the rabbit hole on quantum computing and it makes my brain hurt a lot.

Can you just – can you describe quantum computing just a little bit? Because when you talk about it in the book and you talk about the multiple dimensions and how it all works, it really – it sounded science fiction-y, but then it sounds science fiction-y in a way that is kind of real science.

Yeah, there is almost no science fiction at all in the description of quantum computing. And it is crazy kind of mind-bending stuff. And actually, I'll start by noting what's cool about quantum computing from a storytelling standpoint and also from the standpoint of simply being a human being in 2017 is it's kind of the wild card in the deck when it comes to technology.

If it starts working in a serious way, it will come out of the blue even for the people who are deep, deep into the profession because it's got staggering potential and it seemed so powerful that until the 90s, people never thought it would actually work and it is now starting to work.

I was really surprised by that because everything that I'd ever heard was that this was just never going to happen. It was like just one of those – it's like fusion or cold fusion, never going to work, never going to be possible. Well, that's actually a really – that's a really good analog because cold – I mean, cold – well, fusion in general.

Fusion probably will happen someday. But God knows when and when and if it does, everything changes on this planet. And so what goes on in quantum computing is this. A normal computer, let's say it's got 8 bits, whether it's 8 bits of memory or 8 bits of instruction, whatever it is.

Let's just say 8 bits. So you've got 2 to the 8th power. You've got 256 states that that computer can be in. Actually, let's use a cryptography situation. So let's say there's an 8-bit key that we need to crack. With a normal computer, what you would do is you'd attack it stepwise.

You would try 1, then 2, then 3, then 4. And in 256 steps, eventually you'd crack that thing. What's crazy about the quantum computer is it will be in all 256 states simultaneously. And that way, it can basically crack that key in a single step rather than in 256 steps, which saves you a fair amount of time if it's an 8-bit key.

It saves you a gigantic amount of time if it's a 512-bit key. It saves you so much time that things that would be intractable if we turned the entire universe, quite literally, into a ginormous computer, still intractable to a classical computer, could at least in theory be solved by a quantum computer that's roughly the size of a laptop because of that simultaneity.

And the way that it works, not just in theory, but pretty much the smartest people I've talked to have said this is how it works in practice, is that computer that we've created to crack that 256-step problem basically enlists 255 identical computers in parallel universes.

They all try one of the combinations, one of them gets it right, basically yells bingo, tells all of its brothers and sisters, and all of the 256 universes then have the right answer. And we're sitting in one of those universes. A little crazy, isn't it?

That is the part that is really mind-bending. It's like, because everybody talks about multiple universes and that we're supposed to be able to, you know, it's that missing piece to string theory and all of the other, you know, physics problems they have.

Oh, we live in a multidimensional universe. And what was it, just a couple weeks ago, they said that the way we store memories in our brain is in an 11, like an 11-dimension universe? Yeah, which really makes sense when I think of people like my dad who never seemed to forget a damn thing.

He needed those extra, you know, seven-spatial or eight-spatial dimensions in order to tuck all that stuff in. And, you know, what's interesting is Steve Jurvetson, who I interviewed, we can talk about the podcast in a second, but I interviewed a venture capitalist named Steve Jurvetson, who has been on the board of directors of the biggest quantum computing company in the world.

They're a Canadian company called D-Wave for 15 years. So he knows this stuff. He had a really elegant way of putting it. He said, basically, there's two answers to this parallel universe's explanation of what's happening now every day in quantum computing. You can either go with this parallel universes thing, which I just articulated, or you can say, I don't want to talk about it.

And those are your choices. There really, there are no other choices. And when I talk to people deep in the field, and I was lucky enough to interview four or five of them as I was researching the book, and one of them since writing the book, they're all, yes, I want to talk about them, and this is the only explanation.

That explanation is going to keep me up at night. It should. It should, because if it works, you know, there's so many Jasons out there, and maybe we can come out with a way to, like, collaborate with our counterparts and start bans and solve crimes and stuff like that. Your own, you can make your own bloodhound gang.

Exactly, exactly. But the thing that matters to us, you know, isolated as we are in one universe, is if this stuff works, it could just enable crazy, crazy stuff. I mean, it could just, you know, enable things that we thought we wouldn't see in computing in many, many lifetimes, suddenly happening in a very short period of time, because we'd have all this horsepower.

Now, the folks at D-Wave do claim, or at least their board member claims, and I talked to him about this, so I'm sure that he, Steve is an incredibly accurate guy. I'm sure that D-Wave claims that they have harnessed the power of trillions of universes in solving some of the problems that their systems have solved.

Now, the trick is, as of now, the high-end quantum computing that has gone on at D-Wave, there's a lot going on at Google, and there's a lot going on that we don't know about in China. But all of that thus far has been applied to deeply, deeply customized and theoretical problems that are peculiarly arrayed to be great for quantum computing.

But we don't have a general computer, a computer that can arbitrarily do whatever. And that's what we don't know if we're ever really going to have. We seem to be making great strides down that path, but it's still not clear if quantum computing is really going to be able to graduate from just doing deep cryptography and something called quantum annealing, which is solving very, very peculiar but important problems, to being able to just do whatever.

And if it gets to the point of general computing, that's when all the rules change. And that could happen tomorrow, it could happen 150 years from now, or it could happen never. And that's why, as a science fiction writer who's writing something in the present tense, actually, I like to joke, I say the book takes place nine seconds from now, but as a science fiction writer who's basically setting things in the present tense, you can responsibly use quantum computing as an engine for your storyline because that stuff could break through in a huge way

tomorrow and the world would change instantaneously. Now, do they talk about what the technical breakthrough is that lets them access these other dimensions? Yes, they do. And that's when they shift into this language that nobody but nine other people understand.

Okay. So, I mean, that gets deep into the physics, that gets deep into the quantum mechanics, that gets deep, deep, deep into, you know, the decoherence of a qubit and all kinds of stuff. And they'll talk about it all day long, but don't expect to understand a word. Or they could just be making shit up. They could. Isn't that like the emperor's new clothes?

I love that possibility. Yeah. Everybody got together in a room and was like, yeah, we're just going to call it this and just make up nonsense and everybody will buy it. And over here, we have this little demon in a box that we've harvested from the ninth circle of hell who's actually making everything happen.

But we're just going to call it quantum computing. And I love the idea of a bunch of physicists and then somebody around three in the morning does this huge spit take and starts laughing. Everybody's like, what'd you get? What'd you get? And he's like, I know, let's call it string theory. Yeah. Because there are certain things that really only 900 people understand or 90 people understand.

And that's one of them. Absolutely. Oh, man. Yeah. And at the same time as I was, I'm working with you on this project and the upcoming podcast that's coming out, I saw that the Chinese have theoretically, so they say proven quantum entanglement, which is the spooky action at a distance is what they call it, where they change the state of, what, one atom and the other atom changes state wherever it may be.

Yeah. And I believe in doing that. Now, a lot of people, entanglement's been pretty well demonstrated for a while. I believe what they did is they teleported a photon to a satellite. I don't, did they teleport it or did they just change the state of the sister photon on the satellite?

Well, actually, this is when it gets into semantics and this is when, you know, it can be difficult to understand what the bright people say when they start speaking their own language. But basically, if two photons are entangled and you change the state of your local one, it transmits its changed state in such a perfect way to the remote photon that they essentially are the same photon.

So I think that's a semantic trick when they say they teleported it. But for all intents and purposes, they have fully transmitted the state of that photon to this remote location. And I think that's why they say teleported. Also, it sounds pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely, it definitely sounds cooler.

But now, like, listening to these guys talk about this stuff, now I know that befuddled look that my dad gives me every time I, like, try and teach him how to use Gmail. Yeah, it's about that. It's about a comparable set of complication. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So tell us about this podcast you're doing.

Yeah. So as I was researching the book, I mentioned I talked to lots of scientists and technologists while doing this. I got really deep in all of these fields because I wanted to represent them in a way that was realistic and wouldn't make experts cringe and that kind of thing when they read the book. So I represented them in ways that were quite realistic.

And what that means is when you start writing this story, you're so excited about, you know, what augmented reality is going to do in the next, you know, in the coming year that you start writing these 20-page digressions about how cool this stuff is. And then your editor says, Rob, sorry, but 20-page digressions are pretty lousy storytelling.

And then you're like, but I've got all this cool stuff to talk about. So my outlet is I decided to do a podcast series to accompany the release of the book. Now the book comes out August 1 and the first podcast will go up out to the world on August 1 as well. And my co-host in that, I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, Tom Merritt, the host of Daily Tech News Show and a podcaster and many, many years of an extraordinary experience.

So Tom and I are basically co-hosting a podcast which will, each episode features a very long interview, 60 minutes to a couple hours in the case of Sam Harris, in which we go deep, deep, deep, deep into a technology, an element of science or a sociological issue that's really core to the book.

And so to give you an example, the one that'll go up on August 1st is a discussion of augmented reality because in the first 50 pages of the book, there's this big scene that features AR. And so Tom and I sort of tee off the episode and then I have almost an hour-long interview with a guy named Marone Gribitz who is the founder and CEO of a company called Meta, which in my view is basically at this moment vying with Microsoft for leadership in AI.

There are other companies out there. There's Magic Leap but they haven't shipped a product yet. There's smaller companies. Someday Apple and Google are going to get in there. But at this moment, I think Meta is one of the two leaders in the field. Marone and I get really, really deep in what's happening in AR and I think that anybody who has a glancing familiarity with AR could come away from that interview literally with a top percentile understanding in general society of what's happening in AR.

It's a great, great conversation. Marone's a frickin' bright guy. Then after that, Tom and I spend 15, 20 minutes relating that to what's going on in that first 50 pages of the book for those who are reading the book. Now, if you're not reading the book, you just tune out at that point so you get all the wisdom and learning from the conversation with Marone.

But then Tom and I talk about augmented reality, how it relates to what's going on in the book. We get into a little bit more depth about what's going on in the world and we do that seven times. We do that with augmented reality, synthetic biology, consciousness and neuroscience. We do it with Fermi's Paradox, an astronomical thing, which I'm kind of obsessed with.

We do it with superintelligence. We do it with a whole bunch of topics and we talk about nihilistic terrorism. And there, as I mentioned, my interviewee is Sam Harris, who's an extraordinarily outspoken and controversial speaker and writer and thinker on this topic. And I was very, very lucky to get time with him.

He's got a giant podcast. I think he gets 15 million listeners a month, he told me. So it's a real diversity of folks and I hope that it can wrap around the book and provide a deep education in the science and technology fields that I definitely go into in the book but could not go into in as much depth as I would.

Yeah, those 20-page asides that you're Neil Stevenson territory right there. You can be, yes. Yeah, and I love Neil. I idolize the guy. He's probably my, I mean, he is my favorite science fiction writer right now. But yeah, sometimes he goes into those rabbit holes and I don't always want to go down there with him.

So I'm lucky that my editor yanked me out of this particular one. Maybe you can loan him to, or her. I think your editor is a woman, right? Yes, Tricia, yes, indeed. Loan her to Neil because I just read his new book and he could have really used her on that one.

I haven't gotten into that one yet. Is that right? Yeah, it's about 300 pages too long. We covered it a couple episodes on the show, but man, it started strong, middle, wanted to tear my eyes out, and then by the end, picked back up. But in traditional Neil fashion, it's just the beginning of a universe, so this is part one.

It's like a thousand page part one that he may never ever go back to. Yeah, you never know with Neil. Yeah, my last book, my last Neil book was 70, so I'm actually looking forward to this one. When my book comes out on August 1st, it's going to be crazy for a while after that, and then it's going to go into this really lovely lull, and catching up with my reading is top of my list of stuff to do.

There you go. Now, Brian and I are both huge fans of AR, and we think that is going to be the next big thing. You know, VR might work for porn. I think that's about the only thing that I see VR working for. But we're definitely excited for AR.

So did you get to try out the Meta headset? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I tried the Meta 2 is what it's called. That's what's shipping right now. And I think it compares very, very favorably to the HoloLens. It's got a much wider field of view. Now, Marone, the CEO, and Meta, the company, made some smart decisions.

And so basically, Marone decided, he's made a bet on the enterprise and on productivity. He does not think that AR is going to be primarily about entertainment in its early years. And so he has bet entirely on 3D collaboration and enterprise environments.

What that means is he's fine tethering his headset to a computer. Now, the HoloLens has done what you and I probably would do and most folks would do is say, oh, my God, AR wants to be out in the world. It's an untethered headset. What that means is it's a much weaker processor. You have battery issues. You have heat dissipation issues.

You have lots of constraints that you're fighting with if you want to have an untethered experience. By saying it's about productivity, it's about the workspace, it's going to be tethered, Meta 2 is a much, much, much, more powerful and lighter headset. It has much more CPU it can access.

It doesn't have to worry about battery, all this other stuff. It's got a 90-degree field of view, whereas the HoloLens has got a 45-degree field of view. The photorealism of the holograms that you see in the Meta 2 domain are much, much more compelling to me anyway. I felt like the HoloLens was like putting a mid-size HDTV floating in front of my eyes, whereas Meta 2, it's not totally enveloping, but it's much more enveloping.

So it is a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Very cool. I cannot wait to try one. Well, thanks Rob for coming on and talking to us about all this stuff that we are always talking about. So everybody, you definitely want to go check out afterdashon.com, sign up, you can get the first couple of chapters while you're waiting for the book, or just go over to Amazon and pre-order the book, and as soon as it comes out, you can join in and check out the podcast.

Thanks again, Rob, for coming on today. This was fantastic. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Closing shout-outs! And a sad shout-out this week to George Romero and Martin Landau. You guys will be missed. Yeah, that was very sad news early in the week and later in the week, sadly to hear that Chester Benningfield has committed suicide, sadly, the lead singer from Linkin Park.

Not really a big Linkin Park fan, but you don't like to see this. Nope, you don't at all. And there's some happy news, so let's give a shout-out to Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie, both originally from Game of Thrones. Kit is still on, Rose sadly passed away on the show, but they apparently met and got together.

They were together on the show, they're together in real life, and they are now engaged. So congratulations, you guys. Oh, wow. Do not go to the wedding because everyone is going to die. No doubt. Stay home. Send your drone in your stead. Exactly. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like, and eventually, Friend of the Show Trent will get us our new app. 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 the people who make the show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode. Sadly for Jason, you'll be found at GOG.show slash 219. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

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