220: Road to Nowhere

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. Jason. Yes, sir. Well, Russia has kicked out a bunch of U.S. diplomats and North Korea just lobbed an ICBM at Japan, so this may be our very last episode. Oh, thank God I could use a week off. I might get longer than that, man. True that. True that.

Good times. How about a little follow-up? Brian, guess what I got this week? Herpes? Jesus, I wish. That means that I've gotten some. Okay. No, I got my treadmill desk, which means I will never get herpes because nobody will ever be coming to my house ever again.

You know, you trim up, lose some poundage, looking good. Get the glutes going. Yeah. So how do you find working with it? Dude, I love this thing. Excellent. I absolutely love it. I did three miles when I edited Grumpy Old Geeks last week. All right.

Well, there you go. It's low-profile. It is the Life Force or some hippy-dippy-ass name like that, but yeah, I mean, it damn near killed me getting it up the stairs. It weighs like 110 pounds. It's almost like carrying the dog up the stairs, which I wouldn't know what that's like.

But yes, I love it, man. If you have the means, I highly recommend acquiring one. I have the means, but not the room. So I have a kid. That's enough of a treadmill for me. Oh, I mean, it fits right under the desk. It's not that big. I don't really even have the desk anymore.

Yeah, I have a standing desk shoved in a corner, piled up with diapers. Okay. So you're back on the butt. Yes. Okay. I was waiting for something snarky about that one, but I guess that's my department. That's your department. All right. So we talked about your phone scam last week.

So I put a couple notes in the show notes, and it turns out that it's a big thing right now. I saw the notes that you put in there. I am not alone, and the time one specifically discusses the exact call I'm getting. By the way, it stopped. So, you know, maybe about a week, a week and a half of just ignoring the calls or answering them and just hanging up right away gets you kicked out of their little database, apparently.

Yeah, I thought one of the articles said you get about 20, and then it falls off. Right. Yeah. So there you go. So, yeah. The big takeaway is there's really not a lot you can do besides blocking the calls or get robbed. There's no, you can't really, there's no government agency to report it to where anybody will listen because there's nobody in office right now.

And, yeah, you're just on your own. So don't get scammed. The IRS will never call you. The IRS will never call you, and they certainly won't have a robocall, and they certainly won't pretend to be an officer and not give a badge number. Yes, I know this from personal experience. They will show up at your door or send you a lot of certified mail, but they will not call you, surprisingly enough.

Yeah. So remember the AI. Which one?

The one that Facebook had developed named Bob and Alice, where the conversation was I, I, I, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls. Yeah. Balls me balls. No. Yeah. I don't remember when you when you brought up the article the first time around and we discussed it, if they had shut it down or not. But there is a bit of follow up. They have definitely shut it down. We were discussing this before we started the show. And Jason thought that perhaps they shut it down just because it was stupid because it's just talking about balls.

The follow up article says, no, that's not why they shut it down. They shut it down because they were terrified because they thought that they were inventing their own language and circumventing the controllers, as it were. And they were going to break free and take us over with their balls. Oh, it's a balls, balls world. I call balls, balls. I call bullshit on this one. Definitely. Yeah. It's like, oh, what? You can't unplug the Ethernet port? Come on. I mean, yeah, it's not smart enough to, you know, jump the air gap and get out and take over the world.

It's balls. Yes. So, pussies. Fucking millennials. I don't. I'm not entirely sure millennials are running that program, but it's Facebook. Well, that's true. They don't hire anybody over 28. Exactly. So speaking of artificial intelligence, China has come out with their guidelines for artificial intelligence.

Well, I'm glad somebody is. Yeah. They're saying we want it all. Keep making it. Make it great. And, uh, yeah. Oh, that's not what I was hoping for. It's not. It's not what you were. It's definitely not what you were hoping for. This is not the Asimov three laws of robotics then. Okay.

No. No, this is pretty much the opposite. They want to take over the world with their AI. Oh, well. Okay. Never mind then. That's not good. I just thought I'd, you know, have some AI follow up here. Just a couple more. Uh, and this comes from Wired. The rise of AI is forcing Google and Microsoft to become chip makers.

Okay. And this isn't the rise of AI. This is just machine learning and how standard chips aren't really cutting the bill. So they need to make, you know, specific chips that are for specific tasks. Right. Google's already done it. They've got their, uh, I can't even remember what the hell they call it. Uh, tensor or something or other.

And now Microsoft's doing it for the hollow lens, but yeah, it doesn't mean AI. Yeah. No, no, it's not. Well, see, I've infected you with my hatred of journalistic use of AI now. You totally have. I want to affect every single one of our listeners and we need to band together because we have nothing more important in the world right now than, than fight the journalistic rise of AI and their horrible catch all definition.

They throw it into every article. Now it has nothing to do with AI 90% of the time. And even when it does somewhat tangentially have something to do with AI, it's still not fucking AI. It's the precursors to AI. It's the building blocks of it. We do not have AI yet.

AI is the Frank's red hot sauce of the internet. I put that shit on everything. That seems to be the case. And I found an interesting article from futurism.com that talks about the cost of universal basic income and it says it might be less than you think.

And I did, I was, I followed along. There's a lot of math. There's a lot of math in there. And basically what it finally comes down to at the end is, yeah, the rich guys pay for the poor guys. Duh. Duh. That's kind of what the safety net that we're slowly dismantling is all about.

That's the whole goddamn point. But yeah, he just did the math. He showed that he showed his work and he links to another, another article on how, how to reform welfare and taxes to provide every American citizen with a basic income, which was way too long for me to read.

Okay. But it's in the show notes. If anybody wants to take a crack at it, because I did read it. I enjoyed it. It's again, I think this is a very important conversation to be having. It's thing is we need to start thinking about this. And I will get to that when we get into Facebook guys, Zuckerberg and Musk's little online cat fight.

Oh yeah. I can't wait to hear about this because I didn't get a chance to read that article. So I'm hoping you're going to bring me up to speed on that one. Well, there could be a solution to all of this and it could just be electricity. Bitcoin is already basically just money created from electricity. Is it not? And cryptography.

Yeah. Well, now also a team of scientists, Finnish scientists of all things, have made food from electricity. Not just electricity, though. There are some other components. I know the headline's a bit misleading once again. At least they didn't toss AI into this one. AI has risen and made us food. Oh, wait, that's that. That's a different one.

That's a Kurtzweil headline. The singularity is going to happen and we're going to be the food. But no, this is different. This is different. So Finnish researchers have created a batch of single cell protein. Doesn't that sound delicious? Oh, yummy. It's nutritious enough to serve for dinner using a system powered by renewable energy.

Now, you require electricity, water, carbon dioxide and microbes. Microbes being the catch there, I think. I think so. Yes. The synthetic food was created as part of the Food from Electricity Project. Imaginative name? Yeah. You know, and I'm sorry, but if you have electricity, water, carbon dioxide and microbes, why can't you just plant a seed and make a fucking tomato plant like everybody else and call it hydroponics or whatever else you want to do?

It just sounds like it sounds like a really long winded end around to gardening. I'm sorry. It's a garden. It's a bit more than that, I think. It actually reminds me of some systems that they talked about basically in Dune and some other sci-fi stuff as well.

Like I can't remember the name of the book now. The people that were living in the silos. Remember that one? We read that way back in the day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hated those. The Matt Howey books. Yes, yes. Yeah. I liked the first book, and then I just got so bored on the second book. But yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

But yeah, this is just, I mean, it's gardening, guys. You're trying to build a better garden. You are. And I was going to go off on a huge tangent slash rant here about how technology is supposed to make everything easier, but it isn't. But we're going super long, so I'm just going to say the one thing that I said online this week.

It's insane that we now live in a world where the only true path to getting customer service is by shaming a company into it on Twitter. Well, we'll get into the Twitter thing shortly, because they might not be on there for very much longer. But this is, you're coming back to the year of 2015. We've been doing this forever.

I know. I'm pretty sure I complained about this at length, ad nauseum. Throughout the course of this podcast. Yeah, and my little complaint this week is there are a lot of stories about how they're teaching convicts to code. Yes. Now, you know, they have the perfect opportunity to putting the con in Silicon Valley.

But no, half of the stories I heard on the radio or just on a podcast, they called it Silicon Valley. And I'm like, no, that's Los Angeles and the fake titties. Yes. What the hell is wrong with you people? And to be honest, most of the people in Silicon Valley should already be in prison.

In the news. And as we were talking about how people in Silicon Valley should be in jail, some of them are or at least headed that way. The latest disgraced tech CEO, and I just love this headline, worked at a damn HR company.

Okay. Chris Dugan looms large in Silicon Valley. He served as an adjunct professor at the Ray Kurzweil-founded Singularity University. And according to his Crunchbase profile... I don't even know what Crunchbase is. Should I? Yeah, you should. But it's okay. That's fine. According to his Crunchbase profile, holds advisory positions with nine different companies, including Palantir Technologies.

He's best known for founding BetterWorks in 2013, which has sopped up over $35 million in venture capital funding from a bunch of people. Blah, blah, blah. Basically, he's super involved with Silicon Valley and his main company being Human Resources. And he is now being accused of inappropriate workplace conduct by female employees.

More than one. There's some choice quotes in here that I really enjoyed. He said, tell recruiting we need to hire more boobies. Nice. He was very drunk. He had his arm wrapped around a young female employee, his arm moving up and down in an appropriately affectionate way.

He began dancing with a female employee while violently chest bumping her repeatedly until she fell down. Wow, this is just... This guy's an idiot. God damn. I swear to God, Silicon Valley, who the fuck are you hiring? Unbelievable.

Now, this is not surprising. Look, we know tech people. They're nerds. They have no social skills. They do not know what to do when boobies walk in the room. This is why my other company, The Art of Charm, exists.

So if you're in Silicon Valley, come to one of our boot camps. We'll teach you how to not knock some chick in her chest until she falls down. Also, don't say hire more boobies. That too. Yeah. And I know Better Works has been embroiled in a bunch of different things. So yeah, whatever.

Fuck this guy. All right. So let's get back to my favorite topic, AI. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both got in a bit of a catfight about it this week. Zuckerberg is coming kind of of the position that it's a utopia, that everything's going to be great with AI and all that sort of stuff.

And Musk is coming more from the Terminator dystopia version, which is we need to be super careful. This is the most dangerous thing we're currently developing as people. We will all die. And they got into it a bit where Zuckerberg, in a Facebook Live speech, of course, cast some shade over at Elon Musk, saying that he's way too down on the whole thing.

And then Musk tweeted about how Zuckerberg, he had talked to Zuckerberg at length about AI and he didn't really seem to know much about it. Yes. Total nerd fight. God. Yeah. So there's a good article over at Slate that talks about both of their positions and basically says, well, they're both wrong.

Zuckerberg's utopia is really one that only he's going to be able to afford in the super elite and the dystopia isn't going to happen either because we're going to have a lot more problems before we ever get to killer robots. The real problem is what we've been talking about. The unemployment that's going to occur and the disruption that it's going to cause and the fact that we'll need a UBI.

Oh, God. And you know what? Here's the thing. Elon doesn't realize that he's like, you know, setting everything up for the world of the time machine with the Morlocks because he's building the holes underground where the Morlocks will live. You think the Terminator is going to come back with a little T Tesla logo on it?

That's basically where we're at. Ooh, there's some show art right there. I know. I got to make that, though. That involves effort. Speaking of Musk, today is the day. We're recording on Friday the 28th. The Tesla Model 3 is being launched in a little private fun ceremony.

And there's an article that says that this could be Tesla's iPhone moment because this is supposed to be the affordable Tesla, which isn't entirely all that affordable. It's $35,000 still. Kind of pricey. Yeah, it's a little much. I can't afford one. My brother bought one, but I can't afford one. He's a scientist.

There you go. I'm a podcaster. So this is the thing, though. He's got the market share. He's got the publicity. He's got the big name about it. And this is more affordable than any other previous model. This could be the thing that takes over the pre-I and really becomes the go-to car and moves us all towards basically getting away from gas, which there were a ton of other news stories about more wonderful countries than ours that are talking about phasing everything out by 2020,

2040, I think, for the UK that said no more pure gas automobiles by then. We're done. We're headed that way, and he's positioned himself to be one of the main movers and shakers. Except for here in the U.S., where everything is going to run on clean, beautiful coal. It's going to run on soylent green, let's be honest.

Well, in interesting news, Foxconn, the makers of the iPhone and most of the parts thereof, they're opening a factory in Wisconsin, of all places. Maybe. No, there'll be three thousand. Okay, the paperwork is not even signed on any of this.

This is the problem I have with this administration and their bullshit VR releases. None of this is settled yet, at all, not even close. But come on, you know, like Elon, he's got verbal permission to go drill under half of the Eastern Seaboard. Why can't Foxconn just start up?

This is true. So anyway, yeah, they're supposed to be building LCD panels there, but apparently the biggest problem is people in Wisconsin don't know how to build a goddamn LCD panel, so they're going to have a problem with skilled labor. Yes, they are. There are two things I've actually heard about this plant, which is that the vast majority of it is going to be AI robotic workers.

Not kidding. And secondly, yeah, the main positions are so highly skilled, they're going to have to import people from out of the country. Which we can't because all of the visas have been revoked. How is this going to work again? Oh, but see, Trump is able to go ahead and get himself out of out of country workers for all of his properties.

He's bringing in people, you know, to staff his different golf clubs from out of the country. Certainly he's applying for special waivers to do it. Okay, we're getting off topic here, but yeah. Sorry, I get riled up about that. I know, I know. It's, you know, it's the fumes from those North Korean rockets that are coming over Santa Monica right now.

I know, they're going to hit me. It's making me a little dizzy. They're going to hit me. And all I've got is this tiny little standing desk to stop, drop, and roll under. Well, you know, there are diapers on top, so maybe they'll absorb the blow. True. Okay. Or at least me crapping my pants. There you go. You can shit yourself ad nauseum.

Microsoft is killing paint. Well, killing is one of those things where they put it in all of the titles again this week, but they're not. They're deprecating it. They still have the option to bring it back, but there will be no more support for it. Goodbye. Good riddance. Good luck. Yeah, well, you know how the way this works. This is all about page views.

Day number one, we issue the article that says Microsoft is killing off paint, and there's lots of cute, clever little drawings done with Microsoft paint, RIP. And then the next day, we can do a whole nother article saying, well, not really. Yeah. So that's exactly what every single place did.

And the second day's article is, well, we're still going to keep it. It's going to have its new home. It's not going to be bundled as part of the actual Windows operating system anymore, but you'll be able to download it from Windows Store, and we're just not going to work on it anymore. Take it out back and shoot it in the head like Clippy. Bury them side by side.

Find me a single person who uses Microsoft Paint on the reg for their job or anything else at this point. I know a lot of people that use it for screen caps. They have to figure out now how to do a screen capture on their Windows machine. It's built into the OS. It's not that hard, people. Yeah, but you know, it's Windows people.

What are you going to do? Well, now there's a bunch of iOS people freaking out about things getting discontinued as well. As the article title says, iPhone gamers, brace yourself for the apocalypse. Oh, God. What now? When Apple launches iOS 11 in September, the company will drop support for all old 32-bit applications, such as the Grumpy Old Geek's current podcast app.

Trent. Trent. So that's most apps released before 2014. So if developers can't be bothered to update their app, mostly because, you know, they're not making any money off of them, they will go away. So this includes a lot of old games like Flappy Bird, Flight Control, Cannibal, Civilization, Revolution 2.

I guess these are all quite popular, but they're not going to get updated because why? They're not getting paid to update them. That's too bad about flight control. But yeah, they did one update that I bought. I bought the first one, bought the second one, and then they just didn't do any more updates. I'd have kept buying it. It was a fun game. Right.

But yeah. And Civilization. I'm not going to play Civilization on a phone. Are you fucking kidding me? Anyway, India is in the news. Okay. They plan. Everybody else is talking about getting rid of, you know, gas-powered cars and saving the environment. Well, India is down to save jobs because they are going to ban driverless cars.

That's smart for them. They need people working. There's a lot of people there. Yeah. I will see how long this lasts. I know. You know, it's good political talk. He's like, I'm a man of the people. I'm saving the jobs. But at the end of the day, when enough money comes in and Uber overruns you with their robot army of cars and Priuses, then, yeah, then you're pretty much screwed anyway.

Okay. Well, I have my favorite driverless, or not driverless. Well, they're going to try to head there anyways. I have my favorite story about this. Of all week, Lyft has partnered with Taco Bell. Oh, head for the border. They're going to debut a new feature that allows passengers to tack on a trip to the pseudo-Mexican fast food restaurant.

They're calling it Taco Mode. It's an effort to woo late-night riders with the munchies, and some Lyft drivers are unsurprisingly disgusted by the thought of sloppy drunks defiling their back seats with nacho cheese and mystery beef. Oh, man. This is horrible. If I were a driver, I'd be like, no, no, and no.

But they did release one of my favorite press releases of the week. At Lyft, we take great care to ensure any in-car activation or mode is a great experience for the passenger and driver. Taco Mode celebrates something many of our passengers and drivers are already doing together, stopping at the Taco Bell drive-thru on the way home.

Okay. Do you think people are, the drivers and riders are doing this together? You think they go, hey, bro, how does a taco sound? Yeah, man, I could use a seven-layer burrito. Let's hit it. You know what mode I want on a Lyft car? I want shut-up mode. Yeah, I want the mode where the crazy-ass driver isn't listening to Jesus music at 11 and then tries to throw me out in the middle of the 405.

That's the mode I want, so fuck you, Lyft. And Uber has begun their apology tour by not going on a tour anywhere. They're trying to rework their bad image, obviously, now that they've kicked out Kalanick. And so we're going to see a lot of new updates in the coming months, also known as, please, please put us in your magazine and give us good press.

Today, they announced their 180 Days of Change campaign, an apology to drivers and employees who've dealt with the company's toxic work environment, mistreatment, and neglect amid all the sexual harassment allegations and other scandals in the past year. They are trying to offer them more benefits, including a 24-7 support hotline and a new delivery fee for passengers who have left things behind because before you had to drive back and give it back to them.

And basically, that was on your dime. Now, what happens when the 180 Days is over? They just go back to being douchebags? That's my guess. Yeah, my guess, too. And in news that they really didn't want this week, I'm sure you've seen the video at this point about the Uber driver getting a Hummer in the front seat.

Yeah. Yeah. He has been let go. And Uber says, the behavior of this former driver is appalling and not tolerated on the Uber app. Well, it wasn't on the Uber app. It was in the front seat of the damn car. As soon as this situation was reported to us, we immediately removed the driver's access.

It's funny. I went on an Uber ride with Dr. Teeter and Chen when we were here in Chicago. And yep, our Uber driver had a date. So fortunately, we got out before the festivities began. But she was kind of grabby. So who knows? I didn't know you could get BJ mode.

Yeah, see? Now, if Lyft had that, I'd be all in. I could have Taco Bell and a BJ. Sadly, the driver is male, Jason. Ah, well. Bill Gates has joined the roster of big names behind trucking startup Convoy.

Now, this is an app-based, mobile app-based trucking system. So truckers that basically could take on some more stock will be able to use the app to find it, see if it's going the direction that they're going anyways, making the entire system more efficient.

Now, obviously, like all these things, the idea would be eventually to make them automated. But there's no discussion about that yet with Convoy. As for right now, it's purely an efficiency-based app system. Okay. Now I want to go watch that movie again. Or at least listen to the soundtrack. The movie was terrible.

The soundtrack was great. Got a bear in the air. All right. Now, Facebook had their earnings call this week. Yep. We are apparently worth $4.73. Speak for yourself. I'm worth way more than that. No. No, you're not. I know.

We got a link to some of the fun facts from the earnings call. But that's the only one I really cared about. All the shit that I put up with on Facebook gets them $4.73. I would give them $4.74 if I didn't have to have any ads. I know. Me too. So apparently it's not a free system anymore.

We are paying $4.73 to use it. Okay. In theory. In theory. That's not really how capitalism works, though. Okay. Twitter's got some problems. Yeah, they do. How's that stock doing, Jason? Still above where I paid for it. Thank you very much.

Well, over a million Americans quit Twitter in just the last three months. They've managed to actually stay stable with 328 monthly active users on the service. 328. That's funny. 328 million. Sorry. Because international growth basically made up for the million Americans that went away because they got sick of their president tweeting.

Well, weren't the million Americans just all sex bots that got purged like we talked about last week? See, that's interesting because wasn't that number was well over a million, wasn't it? I thought it was like 90. It was a million like links clicked, but I thought it was like 90,000 sex bots. Oh, okay. All right. So yeah, I mean, that's got to count in there, too.

It isn't just people, real people that quit. It's all the bots that they're destroying left, right, and center. Speaking of bots, Roombas are going to start selling maps of your home. This is beyond fucked up. It's fine. Who cares? It's a map of your home. It's only going to data brokers who have it.

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? It's just, well, I mean, you can get the plans to your home at the local, you know, civic mapping office, so why not have Roomba sell it for you? Well, that's my data. I have such a problem with this sort of stuff. If I buy something, the data is mine.

It is not yours. Oh, well. Yeah, but you don't have a Roomba, so ain't nothing to worry about. I don't have a Roomba, but they do have the option to turn the thing off. Unfortunately, the system that is collecting that data and sending it back home is part of the system that basically makes the thing run better in your house.

It's got to take the maps, let you know where everything is, and if you switch that off, your Roomba becomes even dumber. And Roombas suck to begin with, so I don't have to worry about it because I had a Roomba. I had a version one, and it was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I mean, granted, it did roam around my house a lot, but it never picked anything up.

It was the worst vacuum cleaner in the world. Right. Well, I am disturbed by the privacy implications of that. You are not, but I think you and I both agree that this next story is what we would call a slippery slopes problem in the extreme. A Wisconsin company is becoming the first U.S. company to microchip its employees.

Now, that is a misleading headline. It is optional. The company is a company that basically exists to staff workrooms and breakrooms for other companies. The idea being, if you want to go get your bag of Cheetos and you don't want to put the buck into the machine anymore, we'll just put a little microchip in.

It'll sense you. It'll charge it directly off you that way. And it'll give you a little, it gets your bag of Cheetos. Now, this is obviously the 666 bag of Cheetos with the mark of the beast on it, because that is where we're headed. I don't see why you would need a microchip embedded in your hand.

How about the fucking card that identifies you? That's probably hanging around your, your, your, your neck. I mean, I don't get this. Or your phone with Apple pay or Android pay or Amazon pay or Samsung pay. Or a bazillion things that aren't embedded in your body. Or a dollar bill.

How about a dollar bill? Unbelievable. Yeah. You know, it's no, not, you know, this is people are going to do some stupid shit. What are you going to do? Come on. Roombas are taking over with their AI and they're going to chip everybody. And the sky is falling. The sky is falling.

Actually, what is falling out of the sky are DJI drones. They are, they're not insignificantly unheavy. Uh, 0.6 pounds for the new spark, which is the one that they're having problems with. They say they are aware of the reports and they are investigating to determine the causes. But yeah, some of these things are, uh, just randomly going rogue.

I think maybe, uh, maybe the Facebook AI really did get out there in search of balls. Maybe. DJ balls. Yeah. Uh, there's another really good article. I'm not going to get too into it here. These are kind of the think pieces that we like to throw in every now and then. And this is a good read. It's, we have unrealistic expectations of tech driven future utopias by Bob O'Donnell.

And it's time to talk about potentially limiting things. This is the old, just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do a thing such as microchipping your body to get your bag of Cheetos. Uh, and we all know this isn't going to work though, because there's always going to be a company that's just going to go, well, everybody else isn't doing it.

So let's do it. Yeah. Or, or China. Or China as previously discussed. Yeah. Yeah. And then Senator Cory Booker did a longer story podcast actually with, with a recode as well about the government's role in fighting corporate villainy in tech, which, uh, is a good listen as well, but it doesn't matter because it ain't going to happen.

Yeah. Speaking of things that ain't going to happen, Steve Bannon wants Facebook and Google regulated like utilities. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. Yeah. No. And speaking of that, that means the government has to take them over. Oh, great. Oh man.

Yeah. And speaking of tech gone awry, I didn't put the link in the show notes cause everybody's probably heard it, but yeah, you know, uh, people are using CRISPR now to modify genes in human embryos. So yeah, you, you know, that thing that just because we can, yeah, just because we can do a thing, we shouldn't do a thing.

People are going to just somebody in a basement somewhere is going to do it, you know, and I'm fine with them getting rid of genetic mutations, you know, cause I've got a genetic mutation in my family, which was means I'm never going to have kids because I don't want them to get it. And if they could fix it, that's great. But there's the, but that goes along with that.

And it's like, okay, what happens when it goes crazy? And then you get another crappy Daniel Suarez novel. Ups and doodads. Brian, in days of yore, when I was a young programmer and coder and nerd, this news would have made me so excited.

Transmit, the best FTP app or SFTP or whatever, it actually does everything now. Transmit 5 is now out. And, uh, this is the first, this is, this really is a turning point for me. I literally don't care. I was going to ask, I saw you put it in the show notes and I was like, when's the last time you actually used that?

Cause I still use transmit on a semi-regular basis. Uh, not as much as I used to because the world has kind of moved on for the most part from FTP. But, uh, yeah, I, I love the program. It's great. It's fantastic. It's on sale right now. It should be on sale for another week. So if you hear this on Monday, I think you got a couple of days to grab it.

Uh, it's like 10 bucks off. Yeah. I mean, I use iTerm. That's all I ever use. I don't have to really transfer files that much anymore, but yeah. And the old days I'd be like, you know, all over this because it does everything now. It is like the super Swiss army knife of file transfers. Yeah. It's, it's pretty cool, but I'm, I'm really glad this, it just puts a smile on my face that I really don't care that there's a new FTP app out kind of turned a corner.

Yeah. That's pretty amazing. Well, let's talk about something that's just kind of silly at this point. The entire point of the Amazon Alexa is voice. It's always control voice activated. Therefore, obviously we need to make something that now is to basically type to it. Dear God.

Why? I have no idea, but in case you wanted to, you can now control your Amazon Alexa via Slack because, you know, you can't talk to it. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's called Silent Echo. It's developed by Bespoken. It's a bot in beta right now, which uses text to speech to take the words you type and turn them into speech.

Then it uses Amazon's API to send that voice message to Alexa to handle your task because you can't just say it yourself. Oh my God. Talk about shit we don't need. Oh man. Somebody probably got paid to make that.

You realize that, right? I do. I am aware of that. It's somewhat frustrating. Oh yeah. Okay. Moving on. I ran into a little app that became very useful for me. I am going on a trip soon and taking the little kid with me. The kid has found his favorite band, basically.

And his band has a bunch of YouTube videos. And if I ever need to go to the bathroom when I have to watch the kid and I'm by myself, I toss YouTube up on the TV, start playing his favorite band. Boom. He is, I mean, just zoned on this thing. Like he loves it. Can't get enough of it. Claps, dances along.

It's fantastic. What am I going to do on a plane? Well, Clip Grab. I was going to say Robitussin. Knock the kid out. That's bad. No. There's this friendly, super easy program called Clip Grab at clipgrab.org. It basically does one thing and one thing only.

It downloads videos from YouTube and converts them directly into iPod format or iPad format. So I have loaded up the entire YouTube site for my son's favorite band on my iPad. And that is going to get heavy rotation on the plane. And you're welcome person that sits by us.

Okay, nice. Yeah, there's a ton of these out there, but I haven't needed one in a long time. They're usually a pain in the ass. So if this is an easy one, that's good. That is exactly why I put this in here. Because if you Google it and try to find one, there are a thousand out there. They're very disingenuous. Most of them are a pain in the ass.

Some of them will shut down 30 seconds into a video and not tell you that they were going to do that and then ask you for money. This is 100% free, 100% piece of cake. If you ever need to rip anything from YouTube, Vimeo, any video site, Facebook as well, this thing is great. Cool. I'll add it to the toolkit.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is working on a video game. Okay. It is entitled Space Odyssey. He's currently seeking funding for it on Kickstarter. It is not entirely funded yet, unbelievably. They have until this Saturday, tomorrow. By the time you hear this, it'll be over to reach their goal. We will see if they get there.

But he is throwing everyone and the kitchen sink into this. Not only is he developing it with a gaming company, obviously, but Bill Nye is involved, former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. Massimino. Mike Mass. Just call him Mass. Just call him Mass. Okay.

Professor physicist Charles Liu. Not only that, we now have George RR Martin involved, and Len Wein, who is creator of Marvel's Wolverine character. That is an awful lot of people involved in a gaming project. And a lot of people- Oh, did you say Neil Gaiman too?

I didn't hear that. Yes. Neil Gaiman as well. Sorry. Neil Gaiman too. So that's quite a few people. Quite a few people that do really great things. The problem I have with this is a lot of times when you throw all your favorite things together, it's not that great. Nobody wants a pizza taco burger with fudge and whipped cream.

Nope, they don't. No, they do not. And I have a feeling this is going to be a pizza taco burger. Could be. Could be. Well, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Oh, it's funny. Oh, man. Yeah. I was thinking of the suicides where you used to go to the old SOTY fountains and just get a little bit of everything, and then it just tasted like mud.

Yes, and it tastes like ass. Speaking of tasting like ass, BuzzFeed is getting into the smart appliance business with the tasty one-top, which is a very swanky hot plate. Okay. You know why? Because they pay their employees so little, they all need this.

That's true. They can't afford an apartment with an actual stove, so everybody needs their hot plates. And of course, it's app-enabled, so you'll be able to go get the tasty app, which is available now. Get your recipes, and then start the recipe, and it will change the heat and tell you when to add ingredients and all those things.

And I watched the video. You have to go and watch the video for this on TechCrunch. Okay. Wow. I really wanted to take a skillet and smack every single person in that video in the head. Okay. Because, you know, it's...

Oh, God. I'm sorry. I just, I look at this and I scratch my head. I'm like, who the hell's going to buy this? And then I know that it's probably sold out already. Probably. Yeah. And I love the quote at the end of the TechCrunch article. If you're wondering why the one-top has that Pentagon shape, the website has a simple explanation, because Instagram.

Oh, God. Uh-huh. Yeah. Great. Yeah, it's a $150 hot plate, which will do sous vide as well, if you're into that. I have a stove, so I don't need one of these. And I have talent and skill in the kitchen. But, yeah.

Says the guy who's been talking about his egg boiler machine. Yes, I have the skill. Look, I can steam an egg to my heart's content and do it perfectly, but I don't have to when there's a device that does it even easier for $14. It's an egg.

It is not a dish. It's a fucking egg. Ah, but it's not an Instagram-worthy shape. You haven't seen my Instagram feed. Oh, crap. Instagram.com slash JPD to see pictures of my egg cooker. So, two weeks ago, I talked about the book I read that delved deeply into the 80s genre and music and was absolutely fantastic.

One of the bands that they talked about was Aha, their biggest hit being Take On Me. And it's also probably the most memorable, or at least one of them, of music videos of the 80s. It's the young woman who's pulled into a world that only exists as crude pencil sketches. The video took 16 weeks to animate by hand.

Trixie Studios has now created an AR app that can recreate the effect in real time. This does not surprise me one bit. It's kind of cool looking. I have not gotten the app. I should, because I want to check it out. It basically takes your environment, your house, and redoes it as pencil sketches, and it throws a protagonist in there who does not look exactly like the lead singer of Aha, because copyright.

Yes. Yes. Likeness rights are a problem. Yes, and they also don't play the music, because, again, copyright. Yes. If you have a Spotify account and a rather handsome friend, you can probably redo the whole video. Most likely. And because I always forget, because I've referenced this many times, I never put it in the show notes.

I have put in the show notes the Family Guy clip from the Aha Take On Me scene, which is hilarious. So go to the show notes, check it out. I'm going to have to check that one out for sure. Remember the one I put in a couple weeks ago that was, they did Take On Me and then took out the music and then just did it with Foley, so you could really hear the old guys grunting and beating things down.

That was pretty funny, too. I should dig that back up. Yeah, throw that back in the show notes, too. And sad news today, Apple has trimmed its iPod line to one lonely model after, let's see, after 15 years. Oh, my God. Yeah. They are discontinuing the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle, yanking the product pages from the website.

They're still in retail stores if you think that it's actually going to be worth anything. You can go grab one if you want. The iPod Touch will remain around. It's a now at a much better value, $199 for a 32 gigabyte model, which still wouldn't hold my music collection. I miss the old ones.

Yeah. Yeah. I miss the, I know MXV, friend of the show, has like, he bought one for me, one of the classics, like the 250 gig classics. Yeah. Those are the ones I wish they still sold, but put flash drives in them. That would make so much sense. But no, why would they do that? Yeah. And you can't really even call the iPod Touch an iPod.

It is an iPhone Lite, you know? Yeah, exactly. I have one of the original iPod Touches, and it is an iPhone. It's not an iPod. And the screen sucks. It was always terrible. I would never recommend it. But I do have a box of iPods around here, shuffles and nanos and touches, not touches, but the ones before that with the little video screens.

And I'm never getting rid of them because I like them. And I actually do use them every now and again. If my phone's dead, I can just snag one and go because they're already loaded up with all my favorite music. It was a good time. And Wired's got a good write-up. It says, goodbye iPod and thanks for all the iTunes. So, worth checking out.

It's a sad day. We've lost paint and now the iPod. What's next? Oh, we'll have to wait and find out. Going to buy anything on Amazon? Check out the show notes at gog.show slash 220 for anything we're mentioning in this episode or click through at gog.show slash Amazon and help support the show.

It costs you absolutely nothing and it puts a few ducats in our pockets. And by ducats, we literally mean cents. Pretty much.

Media candy. We've talked recently about the return of Stranger Things with Stranger Things 2 at the end of October. Now, thanks to Comic-Con, we have a proper honest-to-goodness trailer. I was cautiously optimistic before.

Now, I'm just fucking excited. It's an exciting trailer. It's well done. It shows and tells you nothing. But, yeah, it's a great trailer. It really is. I'm still the opposite of you. I am not expecting much from it and I think that will probably help me.

What I did last week was I went back and watched the entire first season again and it totally got me jazz. I forgot how damn good it is. I mean, I remember it being really good when I watched it. I'm like, this is great. But I went back and watched it again and it has legs. It completely has legs.

And looking at the ending, like when you get to the final ending, it really does tie in like with the trailer and perfectly. So I can't wait. I'm really looking forward to this. Well, we got quite a lot out of Comic-Con as to be expected, really. I don't know if you watched the Westworld season two trailer.

I thought that was fantastic. That looked really good, too. Yeah. It's got me very excited. I don't watch American Horror Story season seven. Unbelievably, it is already coming and they've got the trailer for that. They've got the trailer for some kids stuff that I don't care about. Justice League.

I thought that was actually quite good. Aquaman. What the fuck? Aquaman. No, I like it. It's Drago. Come on. Yeah. He needs to be. Where's his seahorse? You know, Flash. Flash is the one that looks stupid in that movie.

But Superman's coming back. So I'm happy about that. And my God, Wonder Woman. I still haven't seen that movie, but she's just stunning. Dude, you haven't seen Wonder Woman? Oh, get on that. Yeah, I know you have superhero fatigue as well as I do. Yes, I do. So sick to death of superhero movies.

But yeah, Wonder Woman, it was solid. It was solid. No, I'm very excited about it. I definitely want to watch it. Did you see Batman versus Superman yet? I did. It was okay. Yeah, so she shows up at the end of that and now you know it. So you can roll into it. Wonder Woman, solid.

Watch it this weekend. Get on it. Yeah. Okay. Thor Ragnarok. Ragnarok. Whatever the hell it is. Ragnarok. Come on. It looks clever. Helmsworth is just naturally funny, which nobody that looks that good should be that funny.

I found out he's a fan of the Art of Charm, so I like him a lot more now. That actually looks good. I'm going to watch it. I mean, talk about a rough start. That first Thor movie was horrible. I loved it. I loved the first Thor movie. It was rough around the edges in parts, but I thought it was funny enough to get me through it.

And, you know, Tom Hiddleston is... Loki is just awesome. I think it's Tom Hiddleston. Yeah. Anyways, that looked pretty good. And now let's talk about the one that we're all most excited about and most have probably opinions about. You and I, we have not talked to each other about this yet. No, we haven't.

So I'm curious. The Ready Player One trailer has hit. Ready Player Grown is what I'll call it. It looked very interesting. A little too frenetic for me, for my old man brain. What I am most worried about is they are going to turn this book into an action movie.

It really looks like a Michael Bay movie. The entire trailer is nothing but zooming motorcycles and explosions, and that is not the book. That is not what the book is. That is not what the book is about. That's exactly what they did to Ender's Game. So I'm a little worried.

I'm a little worried. Yeah. And I've got to say the hyperbole that they're using to promote this, the holy grail of pop culture, Ready Player One is the holy grail of pop culture, and you reference pop culture while playing a Rush track in the background, who is not pop culture at all?

Yeah. I mean, granted, I'm glad you didn't stream fucking Rihanna in the background, but when you say the holy grail of pop culture and you're playing Rush, my brain gets all confused. That's all I'm saying. So confused-ified. So confused-ified.

Yeah. I mean, this is a movie that I think I need to seriously downgrade my thoughts on so I'm not wholly disappointed when it comes out. The trailer does 100% have me worried. Yeah. Well, I'm not worried because I don't really have that much invested in it.

I don't really care that much. But I do want to say something that you cared about and have talked about quite often is Damon Lindelof. Yes. Your guy. Your guy from Lost and was it the... I never thought anybody was going to take over Battlestar Galactica guy.

What's his name? Oh, Ron... Ronald D. Moore. Yeah, Ron D. Moore. More worthy of my wrath than... But Damon Lindelof has done it. So I want you to do me a favor and for next week, go listen to his Nerdist podcast.

It's actually from at Talking with Chris Hardwick, but they streamed the show on the Nerdist podcast this week. I have a lot more respect for this guy after this interview. No. Because he talks about being on Lost and he's like, what the fuck's up with the polar bear?

We got to ride around a polar bear? They had no clue what they were doing and he wanted to quit. He hated the whole thing. So, but it's very funny. He created his own show that was just as infuriating. But he said from the get-go that you're not going to find out the answer. That was always on the table.

There was way more problems than that with the show. There were entire basic polar bears that they dropped on that show that they also just ignored. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I just... He redid his own crap. But I like the guy. Just listening to the podcast, I like the guy. I got to say that. No. I hate what he's done with Lost and for Lost, but fortunately I was smart enough to give up on season four.

It's season four. And I'm just like, no, they don't know what the hell they're doing. I'm just, I'm stepping out. Okay. One season or one series that I really love is called Bosch on Amazon Prime Video. You know, I love the Amazon Prime Video series. Thank God, nominated for season, or not nominated.

It's an Emmy nominated series, but it has been greenlit for season four. So if any, I know a lot of people that, my friends who listen to the show also watch Bosch. So here you go, guys. Bosch is coming back. Okay. And I've talked at great length about my trepidation about Ron Howard ticking over the Han Solo movie.

And as everyone did immediately when that was announced, you were not an Arrested Development fan. You've never watched it. So you didn't get it. I watched two episodes and I thought it was stupid. So yeah, not me. It's a great show. But everybody made the joke immediately and that, you know, they would make a single joke where Ron Howard would narrate something from Han Solo.

But somebody has gone at great length to go ahead and make the Star Wars trailer Arrested Development style. And it is awesome. So it's, the link is in our show notes. It is very, very funny. Okay. I'll pass on that one. Yes, you will. Now, this is, this one comes from Disneyresearch.com.

It is, it's an article titled, factorized variational autoencoders for modeling audience reactions to movies. The movies have started watching back. Yes, they have. Yeah. Disney is doing their own version of, you know, focus groups by pointing cameras at everybody in the audience and figuring out what jokes hit, which don't, and then going back and fixing them.

It's incredibly smart. And very soon we will not need writers. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. Well, as soon as the AI takes over the writing, we're all good. And Damon Lindelhoff is really out of a, or whatever the hell his name is, is out of, really out of a job. See, there's a silver cloud. This is old news, but I, it came across my desk this week and I thought I really had to bring it back up.

Um, this is a retelling, I think it's on a non-news.co, which is the hacker group anonymous, which has never really done a goddamn thing for all the videos they've made. They made great memes. They were good with that. Yeah. But, uh, it's called these hidden Netflix codes will unlock thousands of hidden movies and genres.

Yes. And what it is, is a list of codes that you can put into a URL to actually see the deep dive on all the different genres that Netflix and codes buy, because it's extremely hard to find stuff on Netflix because there's so many things and they get buried. So this is just a way to like do a deep dive.

I tested it before the show. It works still. And there's some cool stuff in there that you can find that I totally didn't know they had. So in case you're wondering the type of person that sits around and figures out how to get these things, let's just state that the first example that they provide is steamy, romantic movies, steamy, romantic, like nine and a half weeks.

Not the notebook, you know, pseudo porn, pseudo porn. Uh, yes. I remember that showtime. I had showtime in skin of max way back in the day. And sadly, this is more sad news of things that have died this week. At Midnight has been canceled after four seasons.

I really enjoyed this show, but they did 600 episodes in four seasons, which is insanity. I don't know. Especially since like Chris Hardwick does like 20 gazillion other things. Have they cloned him? I think there's seven of them. I really think he is AI.

And he's the test case. He is the Terminator. He's the Hardwickinator because there's no way that a single human being can do this. Plus get married and have that awesome house and everything like that. I just, I don't know that there's no way. And, you know, he's been sober for like 14 years, which I don't believe because he has to be doing math to be able to stay up and do all this shit and talk that much.

He might, might be on the cocaine because, you know, cocaine makes you chatty, but all he did was say he stopped drinking. So, ah, that's true. That's true. I'm officially going to start a movement to rename AI CH. CH. Yes. This is two Chris Hardwick units. Two, two Chris Hardiflops.

That's, that's, that's, it's a Hardiflop. At the library. I'm a little behind on my book reading just because of my workload recently. And, uh, I read essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less, which is very ironic because I have too much work to do because I say yes to everything.

So this book by Greg McEwen really made me say, ah, I really need to stop saying yes to everything. I love this book. I thought it was fantastic. I'm, I'm a guy who has, as Brian puts out in the show notes that I have a very large collection of books about having nothing, but now I've moved into books about doing nothing.

You can't, you can't step on my joke just because I wrote it in there. I can totally step on your joke. I had actually already redone it. I was like, Jason had to order an entire bookcase to clear, just for his books about having less things. No, no, no. I knew you were going to go there and I have a Kindle and then you'd be like, that's semantics.

And then, yeah, you know, trust me, I know where you, I know your shtick after four and a half years of doing this, but I thought it was a good book. So how, how was your latest book about scaling things down? Fantastic. I've said no to many things and I fired two clients, so I will be poor.

And then, so I didn't need the books about having nothing because I'm going to have no money because I stopped doing things. And then by the time I'm dead, there will be nothing left and I'll just, you know, nothing to clean up. All done. I am, I am like, you know, just preparing. I'm like, I'm Buddhist. I'm just preparing for the end times.

I don't want to do anything. I don't want to have anything. It's over. Forget it. Going to be a short show next week. Sure is. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping, you know, Kim Jong, Kim Jong shoot them up, gets it, gets it done with. And then I don't even have to record. Well, we, sorry.

I looked at breaking news in between our little break there. Iran has now launched a missile as well. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. So, yeah, it's going to be real short next week. I think. Anyways, I finished. Thank God I finished it. If the show makes it to Monday. I'm, I'm really glad I finished the book because I might not get a chance.

Otherwise, I finished the delirium brief, uh, the latest laundry files novel by Charlie Strauss, which I believe you finished, uh, the other week. Yep. Um, I, I liked it. Oh, good to have Bob back as the main character. Brief spoiler alert here. Go ahead and fast forward if you want. It's, uh, I liked it better when he was way down the food chain, when he was the hapless little guy with the powers that be way above him, uh, having him be one of the powers that be.

It's gotten a little less interesting to me. Yeah. Well, you know, he's, he's, he's trying on his new powers, but I enjoyed it because, you know, I, this isn't going to last forever. He's probably got two more books in them. Yeah. I don't think there's going to be too many more of the laundry files. It's, it's, it's getting to a natural wrap up point, but I, I enjoyed it.

I did genuinely enjoy it, but I did. Bob's character loses a bit by not being the hapless put it to put down, put upon guy. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, he's still kind of befuddled most of the time, but he's also in charge.

So yeah, the fact that he can kill everybody on the planet with his mind probably really is not a good thing, but, uh, I still enjoyed it. It was nice to have him back and, you know, we'll get one or two more books out of maybe just one because of the way they ended this one. I think it's setting, setting it up kind of for the end game, which is good.

I want this to be over with. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's, he's run this to its course and it's, it's time to, uh, pick up another story by him. We're back with Dave birthday boy Bittner on the cyber wire security house special.

Happy birthday to me. That's right. Another trip around the sun and, uh, all systems nominal. Okay. All right. Nothing's fallen off yet. Well, after that trip to the dentist though, I don't know. Maybe I can't say all systems nominal anymore, but, uh, you know, we're, we're doing all right so far.

So good. We're ready to go. So let's talk some security. All right. Okay. Uh, so I wanted to update us from, uh, last week. Remember we talked about me getting some new smoke detectors and I got them. I installed them. I have to say it was remarkably straightforward and easy.

Uh, I included a link to the particular smoke detectors I got. Um, these are just, uh, pretty basic smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Um, I don't actually have gas in my house. So, uh, carbon monoxide is sort of a low risk, but I have a fire fireplaces.

So that could be a CO, CO risk. Um, have they attained sentience yet and tried to kill you? They have not, but, uh, I have to say it was really, really easy to install them. Basically, you, you know, power them up and I went to the, uh, the app on my phone and, uh, it said, Hey, here's a new device.

And I named the new device, you know, upstairs smoke alarm. Downstairs smoke alarm and so on. I put three of them in the house and, uh, I can look at my phone right now and I can tell you with some confidence that my house is not on fire. All right. That's nice. Some confidence.

Yes. So how, how many, uh, how many spam emails can they send each an hour? Well, you know, but one thing I, it's been a long time since I'd shopped for smoke alarms. And, uh, of course they've come a long way since, uh, you know, in the past few decades, I guess.

And, um, one of the things that you can get, these don't, these I did not get because I'm cheap and really, I guess there is a price to pay for the safety of my family. Um, the, they have ones now that are sort of networked among themselves, which I think is pretty cool. So if the one in the basement goes off, it automatically triggers everyone in the house.

Oh, like a mesh network. Exactly. Exactly. And that's smart. That's very smart. That's pretty smart. So you're much less likely to sleep through the one that's, you know, wailing away in the basement while you're snoozing upstairs. Um, mine don't do that. So, uh, I was going to say your family, you don't really care that much about your family.

No, I mean, you're 48, you're not going to make it much longer. So come on. I mean, the insurance is paid for. So yeah, if any of these, if any of these were to go off, I'm sure there's the option to have them go off on your phone. So that would presumably be with you. So I'll be in a deep sleep.

The phone will be sort of quietly buzzing on my nightstand, you know, meanwhile, there's an inferno in the basement. It's a good, it's a rock solid plan. I don't see what could possibly go wrong. Yeah. It's been a long time since I've bought any of these as well. The last time I got them, they did not have these sort of connectivity options, but this is a nice little model and I'm due for replacing some of mine soon.

So I'm going to definitely take a look at this. I would like to point out, Jason, made in Mexico, not China. So I have some confidence there. Well, shit, now I can't buy one. Thanks, guys. It'll automatically interface with your cameras and send you photos of your house on fire.

Yeah, thanks. Remember the moment. Here you go. Here's everything you have going up in flames. Yeah, we've got a link to that in the notes if anybody's interested in checking it out. We had an interesting story come by on the Cyber Wire this week. Sweden has suffered their own version of sort of America's OPM hack.

They had, it turns out they had outsourced some data handling to IBM's Swedish division, I guess. And inadvertently, a bunch of data was unprotected and was accessible.

And at first it sounded like this might have been sort of a release of the Department of Motor Vehicles kind of thing. But it actually goes a lot deeper than that. It has data on, for example, the state of various bridges, what their load carrying capacity is, which...

Ooh, that's scary. An invading army might want to know. It has the maintenance and availability of pretty much every vehicle in their military. Oh, boy. So all sorts of information that people who might want to do national harm to Sweden would be very interested in.

But, I mean, seriously, though, it's Sweden. Well... Hold on a second. Now, let me ask the important question that we're all wondering. Am I still going to be able to watch Wonder Woman illegally this weekend? Because this is all I care about Sweden for. You know, maybe.

And actually, we're going to get to that towards the end of the show when we talk about this new Mac malware that's come out. So hold your horses on that one. We'll get to it. But... Keep your lasso... Keep your lasso looped. That's right. Your lasso of truth.

There's information about, for example, pilots in their military, home addresses, things like that. So it's a big deal. The person who was responsible for it has been fired and fined. But there's actually speculation that this could take down their government.

There could be votes of no confidence in their government. So it's a... What a great world that would be if you could actually do that sort of thing. Oh, man. That would be fantastic if people could actually take down their government when they fucked up. Oh, wow.

That would be a utopia, or as we call it, a Sweden. Yeah. Why do I feel as though I'm coming in on a conversation that may have already partially happened? It's happening for 219 episodes, but yeah. This particular conversation's been going on since, I believe, November.

Yeah. I don't imagine what you guys could be referring to. So we'll keep an eye on it. But this is an example of, you know, a data breach that has international implications for a major world power. And consequences. Yep.

Well, and consequences. Yeah. So yeah, the Swedes take things perhaps a little differently than we do. Interesting. Well, China is probably not going to have this issue, at least not moving forward. They have basically announced that they are launching an unhackable quantum messaging service for their government.

Existing internet and telephone cables can easily be tapped. Quantum networks send messages embedded in particles of light. If any third party tries to hack the network, the quantum nature of the particles will distort the communication, causing it to be lost. Pretty fucking incredible technology.

Yeah. There's some other quantum cryptography stuff I was, like, checking out this week where actually viewing the key will cause it to change. Thus, you know, invalidating the cryptography, which is really cool stuff. If they don't call the app Schrodingers, something is incredibly wrong with them.

I actually spoke, yeah, just this week I was talking to Jonathan Katz, who is our crypto guy on the Cyber Wire. He's our crypto, yeah, exactly. He's our crypto guy on the Cyber Wire. He's a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.

And we were talking about quantum technology. It's interesting about this article is he was saying how one of the real challenges with this sort of quantum encryption are distances. They're very susceptible to noise, even over things like fiber optic cables.

So I have to say I have a raised eyebrow about this notion of this network being 2,000 kilometers long and still being able to do this sort of cryptography. Wait a second, were they testing it using planes?

Well, that's what we were talking about on our show. Oh, that's funny. Okay, I was trying to figure out where the hell I heard about the quantum cryptography. It was on your damn show. Yeah, it was on our show. They were testing it using planes because that was the easiest way to get a long-distance line of sight using lasers.

They were using lasers. Frickin' lasers. Exactly. And the problem with using lasers point-to-point on the Earth is that, for those of us who believe that the Earth is spherical, the curvature of the Earth affects your ability to go from two points in a straight line.

So they were using an airplane. Oh, line of sight. What's that have to do with anything? Flat earthers took two hits in this show. That's the only part of this story that I find interesting and I have to say I'm a little skeptical about. But I'm going to send this story to Mr. Katz, and we will talk about it on an upcoming Cyber Wire segment.

Well, that'll be $10 for giving you source material for your show. Yes, that's right. All right. Birthday or not, Jason, you've got to pay up. Jason, he hasn't sent us a bill, so let's ixnay on that. Okay, okay. All right, so second story, bug in top smartphones could lead to unstoppable malware.

So a recently patched bug found in the chips used to provide Wi-Fi in iPhones, Galaxies, and Google Nexus devices could be used to build malware which jumps unstoppably from device to device. Skynet is coming. Oh, broadpone. Yeah, I mean, you have to update your operating systems immediately, at least for the iPhone.

Security updates for Android, as well, came in July. They don't say anything about the Google Nexus, so who the hell knows. But this is pretty intense. This came out on Thursday at the Black Hat conference in Vegas. I love Black Hat. But yeah, this is kind of what we talked about last week, where third-party applications and libraries and chips now.

It's a great vector for people to get in. As these companies lock down their OS's super tight, everybody's looking for a way to get in. And this is just another way to get in. Yep. Right. And what if, you know, these chips are installed in millions of devices before the vulnerability is discovered?

Mm-hmm. And how many people... Certainly, I think on the Mac side, or I'm sorry, on the iPhone side, they have a pretty high rate of people updating. But, you know, think of all those unpatched phones out there that have this hardware. Oh, yeah. We call that Android.

Yeah. That's really what we did. It's just Android. Forget about it. Yeah. Oh, man. So, it's interesting because it has the ability to not only take over the device without the owner knowing it, but also to jump from device to device in an automated kind of way.

So, imagine how quickly something like that could spread. Yep. That's why there are patches. So, update. I updated on everything this morning, so hopefully you guys did, too. I did. Yeah. I did. I don't know. Whenever that came out, I did it. So, hopefully we're good.

Now, this one I thought was just too funny. An 18-year-old hacker in Hungary found a flaw in the online ticketing system for basically their local municipal railway, right? I was hoping you were going to try to pronounce it, but the BKK.

The BKK. We'll just call it the BKK. I'm done. It's their public transport authority. But he was arrested. They turned him in and said that he was, you know, mucking with their system, and the po-po came and locked him up. And after this kid got arrested, the BKK's Facebook page got over 45,000 one-star reviews from all of the, I guess, hackers fans.

I don't know where these guys came from, but yeah. These guys took a definite PR hit, which they should have because this is a really stupid hack. I mean, this guy just messed with the DOM. He opened up his inspector on his browser and changed the price of a ticket, and it didn't validate on the back end.

And he got a cheap ticket, but he never used the ticket. Nope. That's the annoying thing. So it's frustrating that he got arrested. I haven't followed up on this yet, but hopefully he's out and about and not taking the train. No, I mean, it's silly. It just seems like this kid tried to do everything right.

He reported it in a very responsible manner. Yep. Didn't use it. And so what's the point in arresting this person who's trying to help you? Yeah, you could be sending a message to other people, but part of this story, too, is how much money the BKK was spending on security.

So they're being mocked by having this ridiculous hole that someone could drive a, well, someone could drive a commuter train through. Yeah. Seriously. Like I said, hopefully this kid's out. I got to do some more research. We'll have a follow-up next episode.

But yeah, this is some bullshit. Yes, it is. Now, we have been kind of focusing on the more mundane doom and gloom aspects of cybersecurity recently on this segment, but I wanted to bring it back to the overwhelming doom and gloom of the kind of think piece.

We haven't read one of these in a while. This is a cybersecurity expert on why you should be very worried about the Internet's future. This is Alexander Klimberg. Are you aware of this gentleman, Mr. Bittner? I am not. I'm intrigued by this article. I may have him on our show.

Authors generally like to talk about their books. Yes, they do. I think it might be nice to have a conversation with him. I think it's a great article. He basically sees three possible futures for the Internet. One of them is apocalyptic, the world's major superpowers unleashing malicious code on one another, irreparably destroying vital infrastructure.

The other Orwellian world in which the Internet has become a tool of subjugation, monitoring and restricted by state powers. And the third, the happy one, is where the Internet remains free, controlled by non-state actors, and a wondrous instrument of global connection. Guess which one he thinks is least likely? Kittens!

He thinks kittens and unicorns and rainbows and memes are probably the least likely, I bet. Yes, so it's quite a long interview, but it's a good read. He has some really interesting thoughts, and yeah, it is very doom and gloom, and basically, if we want to keep our world nice, it's going to take some work.

Doesn't it always? It is thought-provoking, and I think the thing is, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It doesn't have to be absolutely one of the three. I think, you know, it might even be one of those, you know, good facts. Are you just saying we're just, we're going to have a light dusting of Orwellianism?

It might be all in Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, for example, I mean, while I was reading it, the notion of taking down infrastructure, while possible. Ask the Ukraine. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it is possible, but these global apocalyptic forecasts of it, from the folks I've talked to who know this kind of stuff, yes, you could take stuff down. Yes, you could do damage. You know, probably it would take a couple weeks to fix it, things like that.

But I don't know. You know, it's... The internet is built to be resilient. That's kind of the whole point of it. It routes around problems, so... It does, but when you're talking about, everybody uses the electrical grid as an example. If you could actually do physical damage, I'm going to exaggerate here, but say, you know, meltdown transformers at a distribution center, that means, there isn't just all of that equipment standing by.

There aren't spares just sitting there, ready to be installed. And that's where it could take weeks. If you could take down Washington, D.C., for example, which, you know, the Wired cover story that we talked about last month, I think it was the July Wired cover story, was all about this.

If you could take down D.C. right now, it would be an improvement. But, you know, they're saying it's plausible that you could take down D.C. for a few weeks, but not forever. But I guess the question is, is it a few weeks long enough to do whatever, what would happen in a few weeks?

You know, I did see a story, this is probably maybe 15 years ago, there was a story about, there was an ice storm, I believe in Canada, and it took down electrical towers. And so there were some really large areas that had no power for a long period of time because the towers, you know, long, long distances of towers went down.

And it was an interesting case study to see how people's base instincts start coming out and they stop being polite as they're unable to feed and clothe and wash and heat themselves.

That's actually, I don't know if you read Lights Out by Ted Koppel. He came out with a book about cyber attack nation, our nation being unprepared and surviving the aftermath. That's precisely what he really gets into. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend it.

This came out in 2015, and it's Ted Koppel, so it was kind of shocking that he took that as a subject matter. But that's what he really got into in the book, and it was a little terrifying. And it was kind of, yes, we can rebuild it, but by the time that we do, the damage is done.

And I know you guys like to make fun of me for all my survivalist stuff that I used to do. Yes, we do. Used to? Used to. That's right. I studied with a lot of very smart people, and most of them pretty much came to the conclusion that most major metropolitan areas are seven days away from a complete chaotic meltdown.

Because that's about what the food supplies are in a major city, in a major metropolitan area. So if you can't get supplies for seven days, that's when people start to really get cranky. Yeah, the thing that struck me the most from Lights Out when I was reading it, he was basically saying, if something goes down, before you even know how major it is, if you're in a major city center, start moving.

Grab everything and start getting out. Yeah, definitely. Head for the hills. Which is a little frightening. But anyways, I also just wanted to mention the title of the book that Alexander Klimberg has out right now. It's called The Darkening Web, The War for Cyberspace. And that's actually a great title, so well done on him.

Yeah, I'll have to check it out, see if I can get him on the show, get a free copy of the book. Look at you, mooching, mooching, mooching. What do you think, is it your birthday or something? Jeez. Yeah, exactly. I know, I know. So, in our ongoing continuing conversation about malware on the Mac, to bring people up to date who might not have been following this, the three of us have been saying that we don't personally know anybody who has had an experience getting infected with malware on a Mac system.

We actually put it out to our listeners, and we got no responses from anyone who got Mac malware. Just this week, there was a story on Graham Cluley's site, and I believe Motherboard also covered it, about a recently discovered piece of malware called FruitFly.

There's actually two variants of it out there that have been discovered. And it's kind of a creepy little bit of malware that gets on your system and can control your webcam and log keys and do all sorts of things.

It can take control of your system. Standard malware. Basically standard malware stuff. Yeah, but it seems like it may have been around for years. It seems highly targeted. Doesn't spread itself. So, what's interesting is I spoke a couple days ago with Patrick Wardle, who's one of the researchers who's been investigating this.

I've actually seen him speak a few times. A really interesting guy. He has some great software. If you're a Mac user, we have a link to his website. He has some free tools that can help you keep an eye on what's going on on your Mac. If things are trying to get data off of your Mac or trying to install on your Mac, these tools will alert you to that.

But this FruitFly thing sort of got a command and control server scenario. He went in and dug into the software and was able to decrypt some of the domain names that it would try to reach out to.

And he found that they weren't registered. So, he registered one of them. And immediately about 400 Macs reached out to that domain and said, hey, here I am waiting for your command. And at this point, yeah, he told me, he said it was really tempting to not just do something.

But he's a good guy. He's a white hat hacker. With great power comes great restraint. Yes. So, he has been in touch with authorities and with Apple to try to get to the bottom of this. And they are actively investigating it.

But in my conversation with Patrick, I asked him about the situation about Mac hackers, whether or not he's actually been around anyone who's had a Mac infestation. And he had some interesting things to say about it. The general public has that mentality, rightly or wrongly so.

I think it's definitely perpetuated by Apple. They used to have something on their website saying, you know, Macs are not vulnerable to Windows viruses, which is technically true. But, you know, people take that as, oh, my Mac can't get viruses. You know, I think Macs are generally less targeted than Windows just because there's the numbers game.

You know, if you're a hacker, you look at your target set, there's just more Windows computers out there. We are seeing kind of an uptick, though, especially in adware affecting Mac products as well. And then I think, you know, Mac security products aren't as advanced as the Windows ones. So, I think we're detecting less.

So, I think it's a combination of a variety of factors. But I would agree, in general, Macs, I think, are still more secure. They seem to be targeted less frequently. I do have several friends, though, with Macs that have got hit mostly with adware. It's actually kind of what inspired me to write the security tools.

A good friend, he shaped surfboards, and his Mac was infected and was able to clean up his computer and then got a great deal on a surfboard. So, that's kind of a... Everybody wins. Yeah. But being a nerd kind of paid off. Yeah. Well, I mean, take us through that. Just for our listeners' sake, when you say he got infected with adware, what happened?

So, I'm not sure the initial infection vector, if I had to guess, he was probably downloading pirated movies. Or we also, a lot of times, see, and I'm not implying he was doing this, people who browse rather, let's say, seedy websites, pirate websites to view content.

A lot of these websites will say, hey, you have to install this flash updater or something. And that's generally adware or malware. So, again, there's usually a component of user interaction, at least for, you know, the non-nation-state type malware that's going to be targeting normal, everyday users.

And so, then once a user, unfortunately, clicks or runs this application, they're usually infected with some sort of adware that still hijack search results, inject ads into web pages. But we are also starting to see Mac ransomware. We've had a few samples this year, and that's something that, unfortunately, is probably going to continue a trend because it's such a financially incredible opportunity, essentially, for hackers.

And, you know, if Mac users are falling prey to these kind of social engineering attacks to install malware, you know, hackers are going to continue to target them. So, there you go, Brian. There's your Swedish movie story. So, beware with that, my friend. Yes, I will be careful. But I think he really kind of confirms some of the things that we've talked about here, that it seems like most of the Mac malware is almost self-inflicted.

Yeah. You have to kind of want to get it. You have to almost work pretty hard at it. Yeah. Right. Right. But interesting story about the adware. I thought it was also interesting that he pointed out that some of the, basically, the Mac antivirus software isn't as sophisticated as it is on the Windows side.

Which makes sense. On the one hand, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense because it probably doesn't have to be traditionally. There's not as much going on. And nobody's paying for it because everybody thinks their Mac is secure. So, why are they going to pay for it? If they can't pay for it, they're not going to put engineering talent behind it, which means it's going to lag behind, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I do recommend, if you're interested in this sort of thing, go check out his website. It's called objective-cse.com. We'll have a link to it there. He's got some pretty cool tools there. Neat guy. Cool.

Yeah. And, like, on my day-to-day, I use Little Snitch, which we've talked about on the show, which just, it tells me when any application is trying to do network access that I have not granted permission to. Great little utility. Yeah. And highly recommend it. It's a couple bucks, you know, probably like 20, 30 bucks.

But I have it on every machine, and I always keep it up to date, because you just never know. I do as well. And it's a little annoying at first when you launch it, but once all your regular apps you've verified and told it, you know, that's okay, it's really good.

You will know immediately if there's something doing something funky on your system. All right, gentlemen, that's what I have this week. Cool. Go have some cake. We're going to let you go, and hopefully you'll make it around the sun one more time, and we'll do this again next week. Well, if I have too many candles on my cake, my new smoke detectors will tell me on my phone.

Unless it's in the basement and you killed your family. Right. Exactly. So, cheers, gentlemen. Cheers. Cheers. Brick-a-brick. Last week I was running around and found some news about Chipotle and them poisoning people again and again and again.

And that's why I always say I call them Chipotle, because you will be pooting and pooping as soon as you eat it. I do not have that issue with them personally, and I enjoy their food very much. Give it time. And the thing that came out of it was a site called IWasPoisoned.com, which I'd never heard of.

And there's an article on Mashable that says, forget Yelp, some of the best writing on the web is at IWasPoisoned.com. So I had to go and check it out, just because I just added IWasPoisoned.com as a reference in case I ever got sick and I could go post there. But I had no idea that people were actually doing prose about their experiences with some of the food that they had eaten.

And the distress that it caused them, their gastric distress, as it were. And yeah, it's pretty funny. There's some pretty funny stuff over there, I have to admit. Did you read any of them? I've got to say, I did not go to IWasPoisoned.com, but I did read the Mashable article that you put in the show notes.

And I would have to say they either cherry picked the stories from IWasPoisoned.com or everybody that goes to IWasPoisoned.com is fucking stupid. Because 99% of these stories involve people eating something that made them sick, then going back and eating it again and getting sick again.

You know, you have to do the double blind study. No. I know you don't. No, you don't. Yep. But it does provide proof that the poop is in the pudding, as it were. A lot of dumb people out there. Have you looked at the news lately?

Or the world? Or the internet? I know. Okay. And this one comes from Wired. A son's race to give his dying father artificial immortality. Chris Hardwickism. He's got several Chris Hardwick's with his dying father. He's trying to make a chatbot, basically.

So he's interviewing his dad a lot. How many science fiction books and short stories have we heard this story in so far? 708,425, 7 million. Google triple plex. So apparently this kid's just trying to actually make it happen.

I was on the fence with this. I'm like, I like the idea of doing the interviews and getting to know your father before he dies, but turning him into a chatbot, I think, is just dumb. I'm sorry. Let him go. Archive everything. Have the videos there to go back and see yourself, to show your future children what their grandfather was like, all that sort of thing.

But make a chatbot. Do you know how annoying chatbats are? Katiebot? Go talk to Katiebot for 10 seconds and tell me that this is cool. Or go watch Black Mirror. See how that turns out. But yeah, it is a facsimile of a facsimile. Just don't even bother with it, dude. Enjoy the time.

Granted, the project itself is awesome. You know, I love sitting down with my dad and getting his stories and recording them. I actually have some on a podcast that I still have around somewhere. But do that stuff. You know, get stories out of people. Record them. That's beautiful. You can go back to the stories.

Do not try and imbue those stories with artificial intelligence. Yes, please. Or Chris Hardwick. Yes. Now, Vox has done something kind of cool for us. We're getting a solar eclipse on Monday, August 21st. And you'll be able to see that here in the United States.

Flat earthers may have an issue with this site. But tough shit. The nice thing about it, if you go to the link that's in our show notes, type in your zip code. And they give you an animation of exactly what you're going to see. Sweet. I don't have to go out and look at it. Well, it's a proto-flash animation, so it's not quite as fun as the real thing.

But yes, you can tell exactly what you'll be able to see from your location and the exact time period that you will be able to see it. So it's very cool. So you can figure out if you want to take a little trip to see it better or just to hell with it because you don't care because you don't like science.

Yeah. I've got a lot of friends who are going to southern Illinois to go check it out. Yeah, it's a bit too far for me to get anywhere to see it nicely, but it's cool. Yeah, I'm in the butter zone, but it's like, you know, about three or four hours away and the hotels down there are booked solid. So bring it down.

Exactly. I know a lot of people who are actually camping to do it, so go check it out. Very cool. And the last thing I threw in, just because I think it's funny, our listicle of the week, as it were, 26 things. How did they come up with these numbers? Because they just run out of shit at 27. Is that lunchtime?

That's it, yeah. Yeah, okay. 26 things people are definitely going to forget about in 10 years, and it's pleasant enough. The one thing, and the reason this made the show, mouse balls. Mouse balls. When's the last time? Mouse balls, mouse balls. Since Bob and Alice, they forgot about the mouse balls.

It's the ball show, but when's the last time that you even thought or remembered those little mouse balls? I don't know. I don't know. Probably 10 years. Yeah. I used to clean my mouse balls all the time. It was cathartic. It was zen-like mouse balls.

Yeah. Yeah. And Jason actually had mice, so it gets a little creepy. It's really hard to get the little fuckers to sit still. Our first bit of feedback comes from Patreon from, I like big books and I cannot lie.

He asks, or she asks, I can't remember. Is it too late to get a sticker? Answer is no. So, send us your address, like I like big books did, and I'll get them out in the mail when I can get to the post office. I have a stack of them. They're going soon. The first batch is out. Everybody's got them.

They're fun. Yep. Stickers to anybody that donates to us at Patreon, so go to patreon.com slash GOG. Or PayPal on the main website. Just click on that, give us a couple bucks, and get some stickers. Yep. And we actually got a post on our Facebook page, which normally I would say we'd never see, but I actually saw it, so there you go.

Thanks for a bloody good podcast, lads. It gives me something to chuckle at while we're at work every week, and keeping us up to date about the wonders and nonsense going on in the big old world of tech. Also, thanks for the recommendations of some great series to watch. Keep up the good work. Love from the Judgemeister. Judgemeister. Woo.

All right. Next bunch comes from Twitter. This is from Clancy. Yo, I always check the show notes. Thank you, Jason, for all your hard work. Well, you're welcome. I need more info on Jason's RSS feed. I don't know what that means. He means you talk about the feed that you always have for the show. So that's proprietary, and we don't want you doing your own version of our show, so too bad.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. You got to get on that Patreon thing. You got to work for that stuff. You got to do that yourself, man. You put your own stuff together. That's $100 an episode Patreon level there, so there you go. Uh-huh. Yep. Our next comes from 6502chip.

I'm sure Sears' partnership with Amazon will turn out as well as Borders' partnership with Amazon. Yeah, I mean, we kind of said the same sort of thing when we were talking about the story. It does not bode well for Sears. Amazon will just eventually go, why are we using these guys? Yeah, well, I mean, they still got to make the washers and dryers.

Come on. Yeah, they'll do it themselves. Yeah, and thanks for whaling the case for sending us in the link to Microsoft Paint. Yeah, you and a couple hundred other people. Thank you. Appreciate it. You were the first, so you get the nod. That's all that happens. Over at GOG.show, we had a few people write us in.

The first up is Brett. Hello, Brian and Jason. Love the show. You end up saying all the shit us old guys are thinking. Holy shit. On episode 216, you fellas talked about a YouTuber prank gone wrong. My son actually told me when he grows up he wants to be a YouTuber. Sorry, dude. How could this become a valid employment option?

I told him no, and he should go to a trade school of some sort, and now a week later, I'm the asshole. Thanks, guys. Yeah, that's what I've heard parenting is like. Can't wait. Next one comes from Jesse. What's up with the no HTTPS on your WP login page? I'd expect more from grumpy geeks interested in security.

Loving the show. Keep up the great work. Get the fuck off my goddamn login page. Yeah, why are you trying to hack us? I thought you liked the show. Jeez. Look, we're lazy. What are you going to steal? A crappy meme from Picard? Seriously. No, I just don't. I didn't feel like buying a cert.

We're actually moving the site soon, so that'll be taken care of. But yeah, I just don't really give. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it. All right. Our next two reference you, Jason, and some of your travails. The first is from Neil.

Yeah, I heard you mention the font dyslexy. I've used this font, but I was disappointed, and as far as I can tell, it has not been updated in a long while. I now prefer the font Open Dyslexic at opendyslexic.org. It is free, open source, supported by research, and contains more characters such as Krillik and Greek.

Mohes also sent in. You might be interested in the open version of Dyslexia font, which is the GitHub link, or I think it's the same one. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah. Thanks, guys. And it was funny. I was talking to somebody about this at the same time, and I'm like, damn, I wish somebody would open source this. Literally, when the first feedback came in, I'm like, oh my God, we're psychic.

Yes. We can put it out in our minds, and fans will send us the info. So yeah, thanks. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. I've dumped the old one and went to this one. It's great. I wish someone would send us a million dollars. Million dollars. Next come, what was it, Mark Havaner for episode 209.

Brian, in regards to your phishing calls, follow the link to my blog above and find my collection of ringtones. You can randomly peruse my writings or go directly to, link will be in the show notes. One of them is silent, 30 seconds of nothing. I use that as my default ringtone on my personal phone, coupled with the default no vibration.

I am never bothered by any calls that are not in my address book. That's a pretty good idea. It's pretty much useless to contact the FTC about them, since a phisher who has more than a room temperature IQ will spoof the number on your caller ID. For the 90s web developer stuff, I interviewed for a web developer in the 90s.

The HR drone asked me if I had used FrontPage. I don't remember that piece of shit. And similar software. I told him, but he did not seem to comprehend that I could write HTML in Notepad. Well, you're using Notepad, but it was valid, I guess.

And I didn't need a sissy interpreter to write my code for me. And for Bittner's Tooth, E.E. Cummings, the famous poet who eschewed capitalism and punctuation, once wrote, some pains are physical, some are mental. The ones that's both is dental. Very nice.

Yes. Thank you very much. And yeah, I love that idea of the silent ringtone. I'm totally going to grab that. Yeah, it's pretty good. I have my bootleg, not legal Star Trek sound, so I still don't mind hearing them, even if I don't care for who's calling. There you go.

Moving on. Next up is from Michael. Been a fan since day one. In fact, you were my first podcast. My family's from Downers. Woo-hoo! Jason Stomping Ground gave you guys a five star on iTunes way back. No cash yet, sorry. But my friends from Sweden have spoiled me, but getting you guys some beer has been on my mind lately since you make me laugh every week.

Thanks, guys. And Jason, a little close to the dog. You think I follow you on Instagram? I know you guys don't make shit on this, but keep it up. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, I'm not even going to reply on the dog thing. You know, if I had a kid and I posted pictures of my kid, would you say I'm too close to the kid?

Yeah, not. So, moving on. Lamar writes, I've recently replaced the battery in my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina. I remember you guys talking about a battery management application in one of your shows, but for the life of me, can't remember what it was. Well, now you don't have to remember because it's called Fruit Juice. Go to fruitjuiceapp.com.

Fruit Juice, by the way, the stupidest name for an application if you want to get SEO. Yeah. Not smart. Next comes from Debbie. Hi, I've been listening to the show for a month now. I would like advice on how to secure my personal home computer, logins, and passwords. I am close to 60 years old, and I just don't understand what is needed to keep my computer logins and passwords safe.

It seems that all banking, credit cards, and financial information is so easy to access online. Any assistance you can provide is appreciated. Debbie, there are tons of tutorials out there, most of them probably extremely confusing. Get a password manager.

That's the single one best thing you could possibly do. Yeah. I use 1Password. I think Brian does as well. And I've never had a problem with it. You want to have passwords that are different for every single site you go to, and that's going to save you 99% of the trouble. Yeah.

It's a little daunting to get it set up, but I'm sure you can find somebody who can help you out with it. And, you know, you will still need to remember 1Password, hence the name 1Password. It should still be complicated. That shouldn't be super simple because this is protecting all of your passwords for all your sites, which, as Jason said, should all be different.

A great little device that I use, which some experts will tell you it's really stupid and you should never do it, is come up with a song that you love that you would never forget. Take the first letter from a line that you would never forget from each word, string all those together, throw a number at the end of it that means something to you, boom, you've got a really, really, really, really difficult password for anybody to ever figure out.

And use that for your main password, and then have completely random different passwords for every single site that you log into. You are probably never going to get hacked with that. I am now going to go log into Brian's computer. Thank you for all the information. Good luck figuring out the song, Jason, and the particular line, and how many characters it is.

Figure that out. We'll figure that out. Mm-hmm. Okay. Hang on. Oh, Jason's working on it now. One second. Yep, I'm done. I'm going. I know it's the cure. Or wait, maybe it's Underworld. Shit, maybe Depeche Mode. Fuck. See? Problem already.

I had to take out my goddamn cough drop. I started talking. I'm just like, clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. Don't talk back. Nate writes in, Hey guys, you're awesome with extra special awesome sauce. You take me back to the bad old days when I was an innocent humanities major, little suspecting that I would one day become a web monkey.

Well, when I was an innocent humanities major, I learned a bit of Latin, and I noticed that Jason flubbed the plural of penis. I believed he said peni. Peni, yes. But penis in Latin is a third disability noun, something or other?

Declension. Declension, okay. I'm clenching right now, as a matter of fact. God, I knew he was going to go there. Which makes the plural penes. But a classicist adhering to reconstructed pronunciation would say penes. That said, we don't speak Latin anymore, so it is acceptable to say penises in English.

Anyway, I rarely get the chance to use this knowledge now that I'm a slave to Adobe Experience Manager. Thanks for the relief. I am never, ever, ever going to be have sausage peni again without thinking about this comment. Peni. I think we have a show title.

Peni. No. No. All right. And we got some reviews over at iTunes. First is a five star from Grumpy Old Millennial. I love listening to you guys. Started listening back in January when many of us were questioning much of reality and how we got to where we are. What would have happened back then?

Luckily, I stumbled upon Grumpy Old Geeks and couldn't get enough. I've learned so much while listening to this podcast, and I haven't missed an episode since I started listening. I thoroughly enjoy the many segments on the show. The only thing I would change would be the length. I know you guys love talking, but sometimes I wish you guys would limit yourselves to an hour.

You and me both, buddy. Not because I get bored listening to you guys. It's mainly because I never have a full two free hours to sit there and listen. I feel like you. Okay. He goes on and on about this. And yeah, I mean, Jason and I have been arguing. Pause and restart. I knew Jason was going to say that. So there is a simple solution.

Pause and restart. I have argued that our show shouldn't be longer than an hour since day one. But every time we try and make it shorter, Brian comes in with a hundred links and we still go for the same amount of time. So this ain't just on me, buddy. I know. And the other thing that he says is maybe we should do two one hour shows a week.

Ain't nobody got time for that. That massively increases the amount of work that we have to do. It really does. Doing a two hour in one shot versus two one hour shows is a completely different ballgame. And as you say, you promise to donate to Patreon when you're done with graduate school.

We promise to do two one hour shows when we actually make some money. Yeah, that's the thing. It's really hard to do an extra show. It's exponential. It's not incremental. Anyway, next up, Tracks on Wax from Canada. GOG, the real deal. Tired of the same podcast hosted by youngins with no context of anything before 2009?

And who gets swept up in the latest marketing BS from the flavor of the month tech startups? With a good dose of lighthearted snarkiness, 90 minutes, two hours a week is never enough. So there we go. I knew I should have reversed the order of this comments. Thank you so much for writing Tracks on Wax from Canada.

And I knew it because you put the U in flavor. Yeah, that's right. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review.

Closing shout outs! My shout out of the week goes to Marie St. Pierre from Montreal. Over on the Art of Charm podcast, I mentioned that I really like maple cookies and that people that I know that go to Canada all the time never bring me any back or they eat them on the way.

Well, she, in her beautifully heartedness, sent me a box of legit Canadian maple cookies and oh my God, they were delicious. So this is a call out to all of our fans at GOG. They're kicking your ass over there in my other podcast job.

So, you know, you got to step up. You got to step up. I need you some maple cookies. Did she mention your dulcet tones? Yes, yes, she did. Yes, absolutely she did. And I just want to do a quick RIP roundup. Paint is deprecated. Flash has its execution date, which we actually didn't talk about that much on the show because it's in 2020.

But Flash will eventually die, thank God. The iPod has ceased to be and the bell tolls for at midnight. Oh, yeah. And yeah, the Obamacare repeal, skinny jeans and all, has been killed. Yep. Hey. It's one of those weeks.

Yeah. Well, the USA won the Gold Cup, so I would give them a shout out except for the fact that they barely, barely made it and they're not going to last past the first round of the World Cup playing the way that they are. But hey, congratulations, guys. Yeah. Go ahead and give yourselves a big round of applause and get back to fucking work because you guys suck.

There's some damning with no praise. I was going to say damning with faint praise, but that was just damning with damning. No, that was a damning no praise at all because they're just not playing well. Anyways, until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 220.

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