223: But... His Nazis!

This episode is brought to you by Away. For $20 off your order, visit awaytravel.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG during checkout and get yourself a swanky new suitcase. 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. Brian, we're going to take a week off. We are. Yeah. It's both my kids' first birthday. My wife's having her 40th birthday. And I'm going to be traveling to Toronto to go and celebrate with family and friends there.

And it's just going to be, well, I'm actually flying the day we would normally record and it's just going to be too much of a hassle. And hell, we deserve a damn break. Yeah, I get sort of a break because what we're going to do is, back on December 23rd, 2015, I went to Sean Bonner's house and we recorded an episode.

We did one of our grump on grumps that we were doing for a while. And it never aired because the next day, a little furry bundle of joy came into my life and I didn't have any time to edit. I was busy picking up puppy poo. Well, it's a good time to air that anyways, as he's just started a new life in Japan.

And I'm sure he'll appreciate hearing all about his old life. Yeah, and it's interesting because this was a time before Trump. And all we were worried about then was, is Apple Music actually going to get anybody to use it? And things like that. The fun times. Spoiler alert, they didn't.

No, they didn't. Yeah, sorry about that. And since this could also be our very last episode, because, you know, the eclipse is happening right after this comes out and it could be the end of days anyway. So if we're all smooting piles of ash, we're just going to take the rest of time off.

And since they probably don't have iPods in hell, there's no need to podcast anymore. Of all the things in the news, you picked the eclipse as the reason that the world is going to end. Yeah, we'll get into why I think everything else is going to be OK. How about a little follow up? Well, you know, we we talk a lot about millennials on this show.

We are not millennials. You and I are Generation Xers. And a great article in Vanity Fair. Why Generation X might be our last best hope. Now, of course, this is this is teaching preaching to the choir here, which is probably why I enjoyed this article quite so much.

But it was a great read. I highly recommend everybody read it. I will just pick this last paragraph here. Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. We've seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting. And so I've opened up our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year.

It's not those who stormed the beaches and won the war, nor the hoopla hula hoop millions who followed, nor nor what we nor what we have coming out of the colleges. Now, it's Generation X that will be called the greatest, mostly because we're just grumpy, ironic and over it all. Yeah. And we're the ones writing the articles.

That too. Let's bring up a little AI to start with. Oh, boy. Is this real AI or is this machine learning? I've given up. I've given up on this war. I realize nobody's going to use the term machine learning because it's not sexy enough. No, it's not. There's a...

I'm going to tell you about a podcast that's coming out in a couple weeks. It's one of the ones I did for Rob Reed's After On. And it's with this guy, James Barrett, who is, you know, big into the AI scene. And you're definitely going to want to check it out because he's got some really good thoughts on the future of AI.

And it's not so much about the bullshit that's in the news nowadays. Everything, you know, chatbots are being called AI and they're not. But it's a very good list. And I'll put it in the show notes when it does come out. I think you'll enjoy it, Brian. Excellent. Now, let's get back to Elon Musk's new startup company who basically made a, I think, a bot.

Let's just call it a bot. An open AI bot. Musk bot. Yeah, Musk bot. Oh, God. Yeah, there's a visual for you. But, yeah, this bot actually played the best video gamer in the world at Dota 2 and has won, has beat him.

Now, it was very stacked because the game required these guys to play the same character and there were a lot of variables that were controlled for. Right. But the thing about this is, it gets me, Elon Musk is out there saying that AI is going to destroy us all, but he's got a massive investment in open AI.

And I'm just wondering what the hell is going on here. Is he just saying one thing and doing another? Is he just being a hypocrite or what? Well, first off, a video game is not a Turing test. I just want to state that to begin with, because I'm sure that's great that you can win at a game.

Games have specific rules that you can follow, and it's machine learning. It's not a Turing test. It's not artificial intelligence. Okay, moving on. Yes, we know that part. Well, apparently most people don't. Well, they don't listen to our show. Our audience knows the difference.

Now, Musk has gone out and beat the drum for being concerned about AI and what may happen. You know, he has obviously watched a lot of Terminator when he was growing up. I don't think he's come out and just said that, you know, it's going to kill us all. We need to just avoid it completely.

Sure, why wouldn't he get involved in a company that's doing it? You know, just build in the three laws of robotics. We should be fine. Yeah. How did that work out in iRobot, by the way? That was a horrible movie. Yeah. Good book, though. Yeah, but I mean, the entire book is, you know, sets up the three laws, and then the rest of the book is about how they don't work, so.

Well, it'd be a very boring book if they worked. That's true. It would be one page. Here are the three rules of robotics. They worked. No story. Happily ever after. Mm-hmm. And we covered our buddy Glenn Danzig's house is on the market in lovely Los Files.

And somebody finally got inside and got pictures of what the inside of Danzig's house looks like. Oh, my. Well, I'd imagine it's probably, you know, Hampton Beach classic. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, okay, no. Empty boxes of Count Chocula.

No Boo Berry, though. He at least had the common sense to take the Boo Berry with him, but he left the Frankenberry in Count Chocula. Some very strange things left around this house. Lots of action figures that I guess you'll get. Now, somebody says that he hasn't been in that house for like 10 years. He's just been using it for storage, which would explain it.

But it's still, wouldn't you clean out your house if it was going on the market? It is an absolute mess. I would, the OCD in me is going crazy just looking at photos of his house. That's disgusting. I would not be able to survive 10 minutes in that place. Yeah. Now, the great part about it is at the end of the article that we'll link in the show notes is a video for a crowdfunding campaign to buy the house and turn it into a Danzig museum, which is obviously a joke.

It's never going to work, but the video is pretty damn funny. I got to say. Yeah. It's not a joke if they actually get the money, sadly. Yeah. Well, since they're at $825 out of the $666,666 they're trying to get with 20 days left, pretty sure they're not going to make it.

No. Well, you know, if you would have told me a week ago that we'd be talking about Nazis, that Nazis would have taken over the news, that Nazis would have been marching in the streets in America, I would have went, what are you smoking?

But here we are. Here we are. But before we get to the Nazis, let's cast our minds back, not as far back as next week's Jon Bonner episode before there was even a Trump, let's just go back to last week when we were thinking about Russians instead of Nazis, because we got some news. All right. Bring it on. Julian Assange.

Oh, I love this guy. Proves he's a total, utter hypocrite. Basically, it's come out that he's turned down a trove of documents related to the Russian government because, you know, he's friends with the Russian government and he basically picks one side. Well, he's got to have a backup plan when Ecuador kicks his ass out.

So if it's good enough for Snowden, it's good enough for good old Julian. Yeah. Well, WikiLeaks can no longer even slightly claim to be independent at all. This is definitely gaming the field. So well done, Julian. Thanks a lot. Yeah. I think they've been not independent for quite some time.

I know. This is kind of the final nail in the coffin. One would hope. Yep. So now let's get into some Nazi news. Oh, joy. Nazi news. Now, people might say this is politics, but there is a lot of tech bleed over with the Nazis this week.

Indeed, there is. Yes. Quartz has a running list right now of all of the apps and websites that have banned, blocked, deleted, and otherwise dropped white supremacists. Yes. Start with Airbnb. Now, they banned a lot of people that it believed were neo-Nazis that were trying to book places in Charlottesville before the protest last week.

So, there's one. Yep. Now, we go with Google and GoDaddy have dropped domain registration for the Daily Stormer. Right. This was a big one because of, you know, the stuff that happened. Now, then we get to Discord who shut down the white supremacists' group chat servers.

Uber banned white supremacists after an interesting ride. And GoFundMe has taken down campaigns to raise money for the asshole with the crappy driving record in Charlottesville who killed that poor girl. Yep.

And Facebook is deleting all sorts of hate links, blah, blah, blah. WordPress shut down another white supremacists' blog. Spotify has removed hate music. Squarespace has removed supremacists' websites. Cloudflare, which is the one I really want to talk about, has dropped the Daily Stormer as well.

And joining on the bandwagon, Apple Pay and PayPal have banned some websites from selling merch. And even the Russians have dropped the DailyStormers.ru domain. Right. But we're not done. We're not done. Oh, I just want to be remiss to mention that Anonymous did claim that they had taken down and hacked the Daily Stormer.

Actually, somebody had claimed it for them and they came back and said, that wasn't us. Right. There you go. So we don't know who's on that side. But next we get to OKCupid and they've banned Chris Cantwell, the white supremacist that was on the Vice documentary. Yep.

He ain't getting none no time soon. So not OKCupid. And YouTube has taken down the Daily Stormer account. That is just the current list of Nazi news. Now, the Cloudflare one is the one I really want to talk about because I think that set off a lot of, set a lot of dominoes in motion.

Yes. Yes. So Cloudflare has in the past said that they are content neutral. Yes. But the CEO woke up one morning, Matthew Prince, and said, you know what? These guys are assholes. Turn them off and don't let them come back.

Right. Which you are pretty much allowed to do, I believe. It is within his, it's absolutely within his rights and within their terms of service. And what he states is the cause was that the Daily Stormer was claiming that Cloudflare was on their side and like a friend of the Daily Stormer.

And the CEO was like, ah, ah, ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That ain't gonna, that ain't gonna fly, dog. And that's when he decided to cut them off. But as he said, this is a very dangerous decision, an extremely dangerous decision, he says.

And it's because they were assholes. Well, I agree. It does. It's, this is when you start to worry about the slippery slope. This is when you start to worry about things that we would worry about if we were talking net neutrality. Everybody should be allowed a place on the web and it shouldn't be as a company, as a powerful company that controls traffic or storage or access to the web.

You don't want CEOs being able to just go make completely arbitrary decisions or financially based decisions to disallow people that access. But, and this is a big but, they're fucking Nazis. See, but that's where the slippery slope comes in, because who's next?

Who's the next person you disagree with? And, you know, even if- But they're fucking Nazis. I know they're fucking Nazis. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Take ISIS down. Take them all down. But then when does it get to you? That's, that's really, that's, that's the argument that everybody's going to stay. Now- And it's a valid argument to keep in mind and to be aware of.

But I think we all agree, collectively, that Nazis and ISIS should probably be fought online. I agree. I agree. But I think this guy did the wrong thing. I think he could have done it in a very different way.

I mean, yes. Oh, yeah. I agree. I mean- I mean, as funny as this statement is, and I just want to read it really quickly. My rationale for making this decision was simple. The people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough, he wrote. Let me be clear. This was an arbitrary decision. Hilarious, but not the way to do this.

Right. And even in his blog post that he came out on Cloudflare with, says that, you know, due process is greater than free speech, which means if there are rules and you play by the rules, the rules trump. So, these guys played by the rules, the Daily Stormer were playing by the rules, they did say some very- well, they're fucking Nazis and they say stupid shit all the time, but you know, the thing is, they weren't breaking the terms of service of Cloudflare and this

guy just got his panties in a bunch and kicked them off. Right. And to me, that was the ultimate wrong thing to do because it put a lot of, you know, put a lot of shit in motion and now we're seeing all these people getting pulled off and it's only a very small subset of the assholes that are out there.

Because if you start kicking assholes off the internet, there's not going to be much of an internet left. This is true. The entire comment section in YouTube would just disappear overnight. Yeah. Oh my God. How great would that be? See? It would be good. Let's go back to a simpler time.

Oh, there's, that's, that's, uh, that Pandora's box is opened. So, too late. Um, but yeah, I, I, I agree. I mean, there, it is very important to keep in mind the slippery slope aspect of this. It is very interesting. Spotify removing hate bans.

What is that actually accomplishing? Nothing. Nothing. Um, it's a statement and should companies be making these grand statements right now? My heart is saying yes, because again, fucking Nazis, but you're right. I mean, there, this is a very important discussion to be having.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and as they say in the, uh, was the Ars Technica article, it's like that genie's out of the bottle and it probably can't be put back in. Yeah. Cause this is, that is the real problem. It's a bad fucking precedent. And he really stepped on his dick on that one. Okay.

We've got some more Nazi news. Uh, we do have a bit more Nazi news. You've kind of run through, uh, everybody that shut things down. We also have Apple's, uh, CEO, Tim Cook, who basically just flat out said, uh, Donald Trump, you're wrong. I can't believe you just said what you just said.

And, uh, to put, to put money where his mouth is, he has announced the company Apple would donate $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Nice. They also plan to match employee donations to human rights groups on a two for one basis. until September 30th, they are also setting up a new system in iTunes to offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC.

So good on them. That is the way that you combat this. Mm-hmm. Yep. Money and press releases. Yes. It's all money. Uh, the Associated Press, uh, has rolled out new rules for how to use alt-right, which basically is don't.

The term alt-right should be avoided because it is a euphemism to disguise racist aims. Finally, took you long enough. If only we would have started doing that during the campaign. Yeah, well, moving on. Yeah.

Well, Godwin, of Godwin's Law himself, uh, just a reminder, Godwin's Law is, as in any online discussion grows longer, the possibility or probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one, uh, he was, uh, approached himself and asked about his quote. And he said, by all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis.

Again and again, I'm totally with you. So that's good times. Uh, we are having more fallout. And again, not technically straight up tech news, but it is important. Uh, Trump's two business advisory councils, uh, have disbanded following his comments after Charlottesville, uh, the strategic and public policy forum and the manufacturing council, which had some of the biggest, uh, CEOs in the country, including many, many tech ones.

So, uh, they basically decided to dissolve, but then Trump made a statement saying he decided to dissolve them. But then IBM CEO, Jenny Rometty released a statement saying Trump is lying about disbanding the council. We disbanded it first. So when even big blue is calling your bullshit, bullshit, you're having some problems.

I wonder if she made a comment that just said first. Pretty much. Yeah. Anyways, uh, then quickly following that, he decided to go ahead. Uh, this one actually really bothers me. Uh, Trump actually did kill another, uh, another big conference, uh, that he had set up.

This was for infrastructure. It was going to be a council for infrastructure. The reason that he had, he was able to kill this without, uh, the members themselves killing at first is because the council had no members and never met. And now it never will. Uh, this one actually does bother me because this is the one thing on the campaign that he kept, uh, bleeding on about that.

I was a hundred percent for this was, we're going to fix our infrastructure in our country, but like every other campaign promise, uh, no members on that council never got together. Never going to happen. And as of this morning, yet another, we still have Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft is going after fixing rural internet.

So, you know, that's just internet. I'm worried about our damn bridges, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. The real, the real infrastructure. Yes. The real physical one. Uh, but yeah, this is a tech podcast. So, you know, go Microsoft fix, fix the virtual one. Cause we need that. So we had yet another council this morning that is now quit on Donald Trump.

This one is the one focused on the arts. So yet another council, uh, that's running count of four. Um, just because somebody couldn't come out and say Nazis are bad. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now where it really starts to get interesting and where things really matter because it's all about the money organizations are beginning to pull all their events from the Trump resort.

A lot of, uh, charity organizations were booking there and obviously you want, you, you want to book there. You want to put money in Donald Trump's pocket because he will notice because he likes money and maybe you'll get some preferential treatment. Uh, apparently talk he, Trump is now so toxic that that's no longer a plus and people are starting to go.

We need to distance ourselves from the president. So this could be the real turning point now. Well, here's the good thing though. If you go down to Mar-a-Lago and with the, uh, you know, uh, was a Pringles can, you can still get free wifi and break into the network. So if there's nobody there to actually have an events, the wifi will be, you know, much faster.

So you can go, you can go download their corporate documents much easier. Uh, yeah, uh, Uber, Uber back in the news, my friends at Uber, they have been hit by the FTC in a very interesting settlement. There's no fine mentioned here, but this is about all of their, uh, privacy issues.

Well, now they, uh, have to comply with a comprehensive privacy program and undergo third party privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years. Now that's being optimistic that they're still going to be in business in 20 years. Uh, so. We'll see how that goes, but yeah, they're, uh, at least somebody is finally, you know, smacking them around a little bit.

Yeah. Good. I mean, this is good. We like to see the accountability happen. We like to see when, when there have been problems. We like it when government steps in to address them because the company obviously wasn't going to do it themselves. Yes. Well, come on, you know, Ariana, get on this.

Oh, please. By the way, what is up with, do they have a CEO yet? Nobody wants to run this company. Travis is, Travis is still trying to make his inroads to get back in, you know, they might have to take him back because nobody else has taken it over. Yeah. That story has been kind of, uh, overshadowed for the past week by other happenings in the world, Nazis.

And so we haven't really heard much about that. But one big thing in the news this week was movie pass. They dropped their price to nine 95 a month, which is in a subscription service where you can go see a movie in the theater every day, one a day. Okay.

Right. Uh, used to be like 30, it was 50 bucks and 30 and they keep dropping it down. But the guy who's running this, you know, comes from Netflix and Redbox and he's hedging his bets on this, that it is going to be a huge hit down the line. So this is a loss leader for them.

They've got the money to do this. And I tried to sign up as soon as the news came out, couldn't get to it. Website was down. App was dead. Finally, it came back up and I could actually get into it. And I have signed up. I'm waiting for my card to get here. Now, this is what's really interesting about this whole situation is AMC is trying to block them from doing this.

Right. But they can't. It is almost impossible for them to do that because the genius of movie passes, they send you a master card. And what they do is it's tied to your phone. So it's geolocated to your phone. So when you're within a hundred yards of a movie theater, they will put the funds on your card for a ticket that you can then go in and use and buy the ticket.

That's genius. It is genius because AMC would have to block that. Well, let me back up the truck there. AMC has a deal with MasterCard to accept MasterCards and you cannot provide preferential treatment or deny one type of MasterCard over another. So if they decide to say, hey, we're not going to take a movie pass MasterCard, then they will lose their MasterCard license.

Right. And therein lies the rub. So AMC is not going to be able to do a thing. And the only reason that they're because they get the full price no matter what. So, yeah, it's silly that they're bitching about it because it's just going to mean more people are going to the movies. What they're saying is the price is too low. They're not going to be able to make any money on it, which means down the line, we're going to get screwed because all the customers are going to complain and they're going to think it's us, you know.

But it's silly at this point. They were just blustering. And I think there's a great article in CNET called How Movie Pass Will Defy AMC to Get You Into the Theaters. It explains exactly how it works. And I swear it's genius. Right. Well, I mean, I think AMC is being moronic here because all we've been hearing is that people aren't going to movies like they used to.

It's starting to crumble as an industry. Here's your chance. Here's your chance to get a whole bunch of people into it coming all the time. In theory, my other question being, who has this kind of time? But I guess if you go to like even three movies, if you go to one movie a month, it pays for itself.

Yeah, pretty much so. And I go to I at least go to one movie a month when I can. And hopefully if I when I get this thing, I'll be able to go to more because, you know, I can sneak out for a matinee every now and again. That's no biggie. So I'm looking forward to it. And in other movie news, yes, remember Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds and every single spinoff known to man.

I enjoyed Star Star Wars Angry Birds. I did, too. I thought it was actually pretty fun. Well, their revenue was like in the crapper because everybody was done with Angry Birds. It had it had run its course. But then they made a movie. Smart. Yeah. And on the basis of that movie, it looks like they're going to IPO.

Well, yeah. Can I can I just tell them right now, if you're listening, don't do this. Have you not seen what happened to Snapchat? Have you not seen what happened to all these companies? You don't have a 20 year viable product.

You're probably not going to come up with another one. You've got a lot of money now. Stay private. Just do your thing. What are you doing, people? Why does everybody want to have a public company these days? They're going to make more movies, they say. So they're going to be an entertainment company. OK, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I thought the first Angry Birds movie was good, but I didn't see it. I'm sure I will at some point. Yeah. Yeah. You have a kid. You'll probably see it. It wasn't bad. I didn't think it was bad. It was my trust me. It was much better than I thought it was going to be. It's actually much better than most movies that are made on video games.

But I'm just saying, don't go public. Yeah. Can only take so many Angry Birds movies. Now, I saw this in Wired this week. Instagram's Kevin Systrom wants to clean up the fucking internet. Words that beep in internet, according to them.

Did you read this article? I scanned through it. Good luck. Yeah. That was my thought on this. I mean, I get it. And I appreciate the concept. I would love the fact that, you know, we have a place, an area online where it's policed and patrolled.

And people can just be there and do what they want to do. Yeah, but they can't do what they want to do. There's the rub. Well, within, you know, a calm, level, polite society version. But my question is, has he spent any time on his own product? Has he been on Instagram recently?

Because it's a mess. It is a mess. And I don't see how you're going to clean it up. I love most of the comments that he gets are bring back the proper timeline. None of this algorithmic shit. Well, that's what we all want from all of our social media. I know. And that's never coming back. So, all we want is a straight up timeline, people.

But I know. You got to make money. Nobody listens to their users anymore, I swear. Well, that's because we aren't users. We are the product. Yeah, we're the product. Nobody listens to the product. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored by Away.

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Brian, we're all going to die someday. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, maybe we'll download. Could be. Could be. That's, you know, we'll turn into AI. But Google actually has a plan for your data in case you die. Okay.

They have the inactive account manager. Oh, I thought it would just be sell it to the highest bidder. Oh, that's, no, that's Facebook. Okay. Look, once you're dead, you can't click on an ad, so Google has no more use for you. That's a good point, actually. What you can do with them is set up a system on what can happen if your account goes dormant for, you know, a certain amount of time.

Like, you know, you get hit by a truck, so can't log in after that. And, you know, who your next of kin are and what can be done with it if they want it. If you want it deleted, you know, it's like the old porn buddy rule. You know, if I die, go get rid of my porn. So Google can be your porn buddy.

And I'm glad that they're thinking about this because we, in like the early days of the show, we've talked about things like this. And I used to have a site that I was building called Death Vault, which I never finished, like so many other websites that we think of when we're drunk by a domain and never touch again.

Yes. But it's pretty cool. So if you have a Google account, I highly recommend going and getting this set up just in case, especially if you've got important emails or things in your Google drive that you want your friends and family to see, or even like your Google photos. Or Nazi, yes.

Nazi. How many Nazis are there this fucking week? See what I did? It's all Nazi talk. Okay. All Nazi all the time. I signed up with Ting.com this week. Oh, God. It's great. What does it do? Ting is a cell phone service.

Oh, okay. Where you can buy, basically you send them, I think it was 13 bucks. I got a SIM card, and the basic charge every month is six bucks flat rate, and then you pay for what you use. So you pay for phone time, which I'm never going to use because it's the phone, who cares, text messages, and data.

Right. And they've got a cool little calculator that you can figure out how much you're going to use per month. And I've got this awesome Android phone here that's, you know, just Wi-Fi only, but I'd like to be able to take it out and use it as a backup phone if I'm traveling or something, or if something happens to my iPhone. That way I don't have to go get another two-year account on AT&T and be stuck with it.

This way it's month to month, and I can cancel whenever I want. Fantastic. Okay. So if you have an extra phone, so far it's been great. It's par for the course with my iPhone, which I know ain't saying much because it's AT&T, but I haven't had any drops with it.

I took it with me downtown and traveling the other day when I went to go see Billy Joel and walking around and checked it all over the place because that was one of my concerns. I'm like, what are they, like three cell towers? But no, it worked great. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I got to check this out. I got to look into what they do international because I go to Toronto so damn often I need to make sure I have access there.

Well, here's the thing. The Ting is from Two Cows, who are a Canadian company, and I learned about this. Well, I'd known about it for ages because Ting's a sponsor on Hardcore History, which I've heard a million times, but I've never had a use for it. But when Sean Bonner moved to Japan, he got a Ting card to use with his American number so he could keep it while he's over in Japan.

Right. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. I'm looking at it right now. So 12 cents per text, it's kind of pricey, 30 cents a minute for voice, and data usage 30 cents a meg. So I'll have to do some number crunching, but maybe I'll be switching.

I'm so over Verizon. Yeah, but I mean, for text messages, if you spend five bucks, you get a thousand text messages. Yeah, yeah. So that's not bad. You know, so it goes down. Plus I'm on Wi-Fi half the time anyways, and I'm texting with people. People that are on iPhones and blah, blah, blah. Here's the other interesting thing.

I keep getting emails from them, which I have since unsubscribed from, but they were giving me tips on how to use my phone to not pay them money. They're like, hey, here's a tip on how to use Wi-Fi so you don't have to use your minutes. Gotcha. The whole thing about them is they want you to be able to use the service and do it as cheaply as possible.

That's the whole point of it, which is great. You know, and you can bring your own device, change your number, like you can bring a phone number with you, or you can buy a new phone. Right. It's cool stuff. Very cool. Well, let's talk about something that sucks. Okay. I cannot believe that this is a thing, and apparently this is now the world that we live in.

So sadly, ladies in particular, if you've got airdrop on your phone and you're taking public transport, particularly in New York City, we recommend that you now turn that off. Because guys are dropping dick pics through airdrop onto your phones.

Ain't that lovely? God, how pathetic. What a fucking world we live in. What is wrong with people? Nazis and airdropping dick pickers. Reminds me of bluejacking back in the day when Bluetooth first came out and it would come turned on, like, you know, the file service was turned on automatically on most phones.

Yeah. And you could actually just, you know, either A, get people's contact list, which was what a lot of people did. Or you could do the same thing. You could, you know, blue dicky them. Right. Okay. Well, let's move on to a Kickstarter campaign, which I got to tick a lot of this one this week.

It's called Scenera, an immersive personal theater headset. This one's, it's been funded, so look for it soon in nowhere because it's a hardware product on Kickstarter, so it's never going to deliver. But you have to watch the video on this.

And also, just the first photo when you come onto the website, it's a guy with basically a microphone boom with a headset strapped to it that you can move around and you just have to go see it. The video is fantastic, particularly the stock footage of video that they use as you fly over a farm.

Yeah. To prepare you for your immersive personal theater headset. Something just happened that I've never actually, well, I don't spend a lot of time staring at a Kickstarter page, but someone defunded while I was looking at the page. They must have watched the video. They must have because it went from 242 backers to 241 and the price dropped.

Somebody wants their money back. What are you going to do? Well, I don't blame them. I don't blame them at all. I ran into an article on Lifehacker, which was quite amusing. Why Apple's iPhone 7 headphones don't work on the latest MacBook. You'd think that they would provide an answer. They do not. It's just conjecture. Well, there's no port for it, right?

Yes, there's no port for it. That would be why they don't work. So their phrase here is, Apple is comfortable with user hostile tech. Oh, God. And they run with the theory that the removal of the headphone jack and inclusion of lightning earbuds is simply a stopgap to get you to their true goal, the wireless AirPods or Beats Bluetooth headphones.

So going totally wireless is what Apple would like you to do, which is fine. But I will, again, voice my previous complaint. When I get ready for my trip in the coming week, I will now be traveling with AirPods, the lightning headphones for when they crap out and the battery dies, and old school headphones for the plane.

Thanks, Obama. There you go. I want to know when Lifehacker is going to do a piece on why I can't use my old SCSI hard drive with the new MacBook. Because, you know. Or any hard drive. Yeah. Okay. You have headphones for the iPhone 7. It says iPhone 7 headphones.

MacBook. Okay. You didn't buy MacBook headphones. You bought iPhone headphones. Shut up. I'm kind of with them on it. They should have put the stupid lightning thing in there. Oh, God. I would have killed them. They built a brand new MacBook. They've got brand new headphones.

Just put the stupid thing on it. Would it be? Look, if they were going to put something, put more ports on it, can I just have a regular USB port? Or a Thunderbolt port? That would be nice, wouldn't it? Yeah. There are so many other things that I want more than a lightning port on a MacBook. Like all the ports. All the ports.

Yeah. That's why I have two MacBook Pros here. For when one craps out, I'll still have some runway for my... Let's see. I've got two Thunderbolt ports plugged in. I've got two USB ports plugged in. An HDMI and the power. So basically, my ports are full on my laptop.

And you want me to buy a one-port MacBook Pro? Kiss my ass. Yeah, that's going to be a tough upgrade for me in the future. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it. Hopefully, by then, they'll have sorted out the fact that people actually like ports. Don't get your hopes up, dude. Don't get your hopes up.

I might go back to PC, Jason. I'm buying an iMac. I'm going to get an iMac because the iMacs come with all the ports. And a monitor. 5K. Pretty. And when I get that new computer, I'm going to run Flume on it. Mm-hmm. Okay. In an attempt, well, we're going to get to why I have Instagram and Facebook and Messenger installed on my iPhone right now, which we'll get to security.

But I'm taking them back off after that experiment's over. But I don't want any shit on my phone anymore, any social media. But I love Instagram still until they say I can't say anything. But you can't see it unless you have to use the web interface, which sucks.

So Flume is a really nice app that lets you run Instagram. And if you spend $10 for the pro version, you can post to it, too. So I don't – because right now you can only post if you have the app on your phone. That sucks. You can't post from the web interface, nothing. But this version for $10, you can post from your computer, which means you can actually use real editing software and shit like that, which is great.

I love that because I actually still, unfortunately, am running a couple clients' Instagram feeds. And I've hated having to always just email stuff over to my phone and then post it that way. So I am getting this as we speak. So for the $10, you get – in the pro version, you get to post photos.

But for you, you also get multiple accounts. Yes. Perfect. So you can – yeah, you set up multiple accounts and go from there. So you definitely need to pick this up. I do, and I will. And I also got TweetBot for the Mac, which I haven't installed in a long time because I've just been using the web interface.

But I just want a nice, clean stream, as it were. Stay hydrated. Keep that stream clean. So I picked up TweetBot for the Mac. $10, again, well worth it. And now my phone is clear, distraction-free.

Nice. Mm-hmm. Well, look at you. I'm doing my best, man. I'm doing my best. And I went a little crazy on Amazon this week. Yeah, I noticed. The first one, I think, is right up your alley, though. They're silicone ice tray cubes.

They also say they're candy molds, but nobody's going to use them for that. But they're Star Wars-based, and they have – let's see, you got R2-D2, Darth Vader, some Stormtroopers, Boba Fett. Come on, you're burying the lead. The only one you want is the Han Solo encased in carbonite. And the Millennium Falcon.

Yeah. I like the Millennium Falcon. That one's cool. I have the Death Star Whiskey ice cube. I actually really do have that, and I've used it a few times. It's pretty cool. Okay, put a link in the show notes. I've got to get one of those. I've got to round out the set. And I put this one in here because you're thinking about joining the Doctor Who train, and there is a nice Doctor Who ice cube tray, too.

I don't know. I can't say ice cube today. So you can get some Daleks and the Tardis. It's only $7.80 right now. Very nice. You've got to get it, man. Because, I mean, if you're going to be – Well, I don't know if I like Doctor Who or not yet, so, you know, give me some time. Okay. Okay.

Well, when you figure it out, then, you know, you can have some Daleks with your whiskey, which would be kind of cool. Then it would slip up and hit you in the nose. I also – I ran out of my notebooks that I write in because I usually use the Moleskine notebooks. But I saw a friend of the show, Rudy Jachan, our first guest on Grumpy Old Geeks, actually.

He posted on Instagram, he had a Necronomicon journal from Army of Darkness. Nice. So I had to go pick one of those up. And it's official, too. So, you know, it's got some cool Necronomicon artwork on the page. It's a little pricey. It's $17.95. But still, it's a Necronomicon journal. You have to get one.

I suppose one must. And since I had to do a bunch of paperwork and I'm cleaning out my desk drawers and my filing cabinets and stuff, I realized I didn't have a stapler. And if you're going to buy a stapler, there's only one stapler to buy, the Red Swingline. This is true. I've had one of those forever.

And actually, I've lost it recently. I just realized I haven't seen that for a while. So I might have to get myself a second one. And I was thinking about this when I bought it. I was thinking about the listener who wrote in last week talking about desk toys. There you go. Get one of those for your desk. You have to have one.

You kind of do.

It is back on YouTube. Not just it in general. The movie It. They released the official trailer. And man, it actually looks pretty spooky. It looks good. A lot of the they're really hitting the promo trail hard right now.

There's posters all around everywhere here in Santa Monica. And the posters are well done. It looks scary. All the promo materials are good. I have high hopes for this. Although, you know, after the Dark Tower, I'm still scarred. But this may make up for it. Have you seen it yet? The Dark Tower?

Yeah. No, no. I read the reviews and that was enough for me. Okay. That's not going to be happening. Well, my buddy Francis works over there and is part of that team that does all the promotion for It. So he does a good job. He also sent me those awesome glasses from John Wick.

So he's a good man. He's a very good man. All right. Well, I just want to point out that the 1990 version of It was actually a miniseries and it was very, very well done and very enjoyable. So if you haven't seen that yet, we have the links in the show notes.

And also, I really love 1994's The Stand. So those are two fantastic Stephen King adaptations. I tell you people, it can be done. Yes, it can. What was the one show with Anthony Michael Hall, Dead Something? The Dead Zone?

The Dead Zone. That's right. They turned the movie into a TV series with Anthony Michael Hall. And I actually enjoyed that quite a bit. I never saw that one. You should check it out. Yeah, it was good. It deviates from the books at around season two and a half, I think. Right. Because the book ends and they needed more episodes.

So like, ah, screw it. This week I watched Ozark on Netflix with Jason Bateman. I have been hearing very, a shit ton about this. I have no idea what it's even about. It's kind of like Breaking Bad meets Justified meets something with an accountant.

But all in all, it's fantastic. You really got to watch it. It's really fun. The only problem I have is there's an annoying daughter and an annoying son. You know, unfortunately in this one, the son is, actually the son's in it about as much as Henry is in the Americans. But it just really reminded me of that same trope from the Americans.

I'm like, can we just have a good show without the annoying kids? Leave the kids at home. Well, you know, you got to hit, you got to check all the boxes. Make sure everybody's into it. And there's something for everyone. Something for everybody. But yeah, highly recommended. I give it a thumbs up because I can't give it any stars on Netflix anymore.

You dumb shit. Yeah, and speaking of Netflix, we are recording on Friday, August 18th, this evening, the very first episode of The Defenders. Or I guess they're going to drop all of it. It's out already. I was going to watch it before the show. I just ran out of time. I was stuck in Nazi hell. All of it's out right now.

So I'm very much looking forward to that. I have been waiting for more Jessica Jones for a very long time. So I will take it in any form I can get it. I'm very happy. Yep. Eight episodes. Nice. Yep. Fire up those Death Star ice cubes and pour yourself some scotch. Will do.

And speaking of Netflix, they are going to spend $7 billion on content next year. It is their business now. I just hope they spend more on scripts and less on comedians because, man, yes, they have every comedian on the planet, but they're pumping it out so fast, none of these people can write decent material.

That's true. It is coming way too fast, and they're just not as good. You've got to go out and tour your material for a while. You can't just keep crapping out shows because they're handing you money. Yeah. I mean, it takes at least a year to write a good hour. And I know Louie's been popping them out way too fast because his last special was boring.

Right. What are you going to do? Well, good on Netflix. I mean, I'd like to see, let's see some more stuff. Mm-hmm. So I'm totally happy about that. Now we have some big news in Terry Pratchett world and Neil Gaiman world for you. I know. I think we both agree that Good Omens is one of the best books ever written.

It's very funny, fantastic co-write between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It said somewhere in this article that that was Neil Gaiman's first book. That didn't seem right to me. Um, you know... Neil Gaiman's first novel... Yeah. ...has found its angel and demon. That's the first novel that Neil Gaiman ever wrote?

I'm pretty sure because that came after... Because he's been... He was doing Sandman for a really long time. And I think the book that came out after Good Omens was Neverwhere. So, yeah, that sounds about right. Well, who knew? There you go. But they are making a miniseries. Yes.

I am cautiously optimistic. Uh, they have cast David Tennant and Michael Sheen as the angel and demon duo. So, this is a great book. This is something that could be turned into a decent miniseries. I'm liking the casting thus far, so we shall see.

Oh, man. I'm looking forward to it. It's an Amazon series. Yep. So, that's going to be interesting. Which scares me a little bit. Yeah. Because Amazon series always suck. Uh, after the Grand Tour, that's been... Well, I mean, there are some really good Amazon series. I think Patriot is a really good new one.

The Spy one that I talked about. Um, Bosch is fantastic. We've got The Tick coming out next week. And, uh, the Jean-Claude Van Damme one that looks hilarious. I watched the pilot on that, and I was in tears. I was laughing so hard on that. But, uh, can't wait for those. So, yeah, it's shot in the dark.

It's all about the team. Right. Gotcha. Well, we have some new Star Wars news as well. We've got, uh, we've had the fantastic Rogue One, the first of the standalone films, uh, that, uh, Disney has promised us. Uh, we know Han Solo is coming, and we've discussed the problems that they're having there.

But, uh, now they have announced we will be doing an Obi-Wan film. Okay. Look, I, no casting news, but if they don't get Ewan McGregor, they're going to make the biggest mistake of their lives. I think it's going to, it's going to not be Ewan McGregor because it's going to be a prequel probably to that stuff, isn't it?

Or does it happen in between? They haven't announced anything, but the story I want to hear is how, uh, how he ended up on that, uh, on that lonely planet. Yes, that's what I want to hear. So cast Ewan and do that story, please. Thank you. We don't need another young, we're getting young Han Solo.

We don't need young Obi-Wan. Yeah. Yeah. Ewan's good enough. And especially if you saw him in Fargo this season, he's not aging. He looks the same. That or in Trainspotting 2. He looks the same. So. I know it's crazy. That's what money will get you. Money and motorcycles. That's true. I'm not going to do any Game of Thrones spoilers or talk about the plot at all whatsoever, but if you are caught up, you will want to read the Slon article because it's quite funny.

Sam just man-terrupted one of the biggest reveals in Games of Thrones history. And it's extremely true. Yeah. As soon as this aired, a lot of women were like, this happens to us all the time. So very funny. Yeah, I was busted up when I saw the headline for this because I'm like, and I thought about it.

I'm like, oh shit, he totally did, didn't he? He totally did. He's like, shut up, woman. I've got to talk about something else now. Oh, man. They're killing it this season. I love it. They really are. And everyone. Killing it and killing everyone. Yes. Okay.

Adam Savage. Yep. I saw this thing on Make Zine where he goes to Jack White's studio up in Detroit, the record store where they press the vinyl. Yes. It was good. It's like a half an hour little mini thing where he just goes behind the scenes.

And unfortunately, he sings in it, which was terrible. But seeing how they make the records there was pretty cool. That part I really liked. I would have liked to seen it not with Adam Savage because I'm done with Adam Savage. I'm done with his podcast. I know I bitched about it last week. But I can't listen to them anymore just from the audio side of it.

It's terrible. They're eating. The sound is just awful. Nobody cares. And then they have the nerve to talk about how much they know about microphones. I knew that was going to piss you off when I was listening to it. Look, I'm done with the podcast, too, but for a completely different reason.

I will suffer through bad audio quality if I'm getting interesting content or interesting discussion. I'm burned out on the subject matter. I don't give a fuck about cosplay. Yeah. Or, oh, can we talk about it? Oh, I guess we can't talk about that yet. And then they talk about it in a roundabout way, but don't really tell you what they're talking about because they can't talk about it.

That's all they do on the show anymore. No, it's terrible. Can we all get on the same page before you start your podcast? Can you have some show notes that you work off of or something? Now, go back to doing spoiler casts on books and movies. Then I'm back into the show. But right now, I could care less.

I don't care how he built his Chewbacca costume. I just don't. I don't want to hear about how much fun he's having at parties with his, you know, B-list celebrity friends. And I swear I really couldn't give two flying fucks about how many times they hang out with John Hodgman. Yeah. Well, it is.

I mean, it's all cosplay stuff. It all comes back to cosplay. We talked about the Beach Boys last week and you crapped on them. No, no. I need to clarify something here. I scoffed at you listening to the Beach Boys because it seemed very out of sorts for you. I am. I'm just saying, friends of the show, friends of the show, Dr. David Teeter and Trent Hamilton and I all had a very nice long conversation making fun of you.

And both of them listened to the show and also got the impression that you were shitting on the Beach Boys. I was shitting on you, not the Beach Boys. I grew up with the Beach Boys. I had them on vinyl. I had them on 8-track. I listened to the best of the Beach Boys on 8-track till the tape wore out. So, you know. On next week's episode of Revisionist History, Jason will explain how he likes the Beatles.

Go back and listen to it. Go back and listen to the episode because I went back and listened to it to see why people thought that I shit on it. But no, I was just like scoffing at you listening to the Beach Boys because it seemed very out of sorts for you, Mr. I Like My Goth and Eyeliner Stuff. I like a lot of stuff. Well, in that case, you will appreciate the link that I put in the show notes, Jason.

This came out on last week, I believe, and Boing Boing posted as long as a lot of other people did as well. It got onto YouTube. It's the isolated vocals for Wouldn't It Be Nice, and it is stunning. It's amazing. Those guys were incredible. It is unbelievable. I mean, we talk about the crowning achievements of humankind, the wonders of the world.

This should be one of them. It is stunning. And I love the video that they put together with it. It's fantastic. Yeah. Another thing that I saw this week is the truth about alcohol. This is a Netflix documentary. It's only an hour long, and it's very British-based because they talk about how, I guess it would be the National Health Service in England put out new recommendations for the max amount of alcohol a person should drink per week.

I have a feeling that's going to depress me. Dude, it's like an afternoon for us at the pub. I'll tell you right now. Yeah, no. It's not even a warm-up for us. Right. But it's fun to watch. It talks about different health things that it does to you and to your body and your brain.

At least at the end, because the guy's a doctor who hosts the show. And at the very end, I'm going to spoil it for you because nobody's probably going to watch it. But he's like, yeah, we have all these things. Now we know what we're supposed to be doing. But I have a very good feeling that nobody's going to care as he walks back into the pub.

That's great. At the library. How's it going with the Bobaverse? Book three, Brian. I got, see, this is how the Kindle has changed my reading habits.

I would tell you the page number, but I got to 87% last night when I was just, couldn't stay up anymore. So I'm almost done. Okay. I've enjoyed the book quite a bit. Would it have killed him to include a who's who, a rundown, a map, some sort of book of Genesis of Bob's? Because it leaps right in.

Yeah. There's no, there's no catching you up. There's no, this is just right where the last one left off. And it had been a little while since I read book two. So I, and I had a hard time keeping track of the children of Bob. So next book four, just throw in a little thing at the beginning, you know, just, just like Lord of the Rings, you know, explain who each one is really briefly.

It would be nice to have a Bob family tree. Yes. That is what I'm, that's what I'm asking. Yeah. No, I, and I had that same problem. It took me a while to remember who everyone was. I've given up to, I don't even know has, has actual, what happened to actual Bob? I don't even remember. Bob, Bob was staying on the planet watching over that civilization.

Oh, that's the original, right? That's the original Bob. This is why I need my, my book of Genesis. Took me half a book to figure that out. But anyway, yeah, it's good. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the nice. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's just straight up decent sci-fi. And I'm not going to ruin anything, but I will say that the author did say that he has many more Bob books in him, but I don't think you need to read them because it does put a Bob bow on it. So it's, there's the Bob bow.

There's a Bob bow. Interesting. Yeah. All right. It's good. It's a, it's a, it's a good stopping point. If you don't want to go to the next books, if there ever will be more books. So it's, it's a good wrap for a three-parter. I like it. And it's not written like a script. I'm very excited to hear that then. That's, that's cool.

Because I mean, I, it's just kind of, I was getting that impression. It's like, oh boy, he's going to be able to write 35 of these damn things. Yeah, these could go on infinitely because Bob can just keep cloning himself, you know? Yeah. So yeah, good book. I'm enjoying it. And I probably will cut it if there's a good ending at this.

So we'll see. Okay. I finished Walk Away, the Cory Doctorow novel. And I wanted to, I, you know, I, I said last time I could leave it or take it. And I, I, I powered through it, which is never a good sign when you have to say you powered through a book. No, it's not a good sign. Um, I actually liked it.

I came out on the other side of it, actually really enjoying it. I think the problem was that I'd just come off of a couple bad sci-fi books that I just really was, everything felt like I knew what was going to be on the next page, you know? And that's something that just keeps bugging the hell out of me.

It's like, there's just nothing new under the sun. And in, in, in this book, there still is almost nothing new under the sun, but it's an enjoyable book. At least I found it enjoyable once I got, you know, to a certain point in it. Um, can I recommend, I give it a, I give it a C plus.

Yeah. I'm not going to say, I'm not going to say run out and buy it because, you know, he's been doing these young adult novels for so long. And I think the only difference between this book and any of his young adult stuff is the sex is more graphic. That's really it. Honestly. Um, I couldn't tell any difference between this and little brother as far as, you know, the depth of the story and things like that.

So yeah, sorry, but yeah, C plus on it. Yeah. That's going to keep me away from it. I struggle with him anyways. Security. We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the cyber wire to give us his insight on what should be scaring us this week.

How are you doing, Dave? I'm good. Glad to be back. Missed you guys last week. Oh yeah. Oh, we missed you as well. It's good to have you back on here. So let's roll in talking a bit about what Jason and I were already discussing a bit earlier, which is the, uh, the ethics of, of silencing Nazis, uh, which I am of a full support of, but Jason did bring up some good points about slippery slope, et cetera.

But I wanted to specifically talk about the photos and videos taken in Charlottesville and the use of social media to find and identify these people and basically, uh, you know, bring them to light and which caused them to get fired or get kicked out of their schools or one in one case, uh, a family disowned their son.

Um, it's incredibly effective, which, you know, this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. Uh, what in this case I'm, I'm, I'm on the a side, but there are deeper implications of, of all this online doxing that's taking place. I have many thoughts about a lot of this and I'm sure you guys covered it, uh, in the, in the previous segment that I haven't, haven't been able to hear yet, but a couple of things come to mind.

Um, you know, there was a video, I don't know if you guys have seen it, but there was a video that made the rounds of a young man, probably college aged who reflexively started tearing his clothes off because he did not want to be wearing the uniform that the rest of the people were wearing, which was basically the white polo shirt and the, the, um, khaki pants.

Did either of you see this video? No, I have not seen that one yet. Okay. So it's a young man. He's being, um, you know, pursued might be too strong a word, but certainly, um, the counter protesters are getting in his face and he takes his clothes off, you know, strips down to his underwear and says, I did not come here for this.

I just came for what I thought was going to be fun. I'm not one of these people, you know, and so we, you know, we can laugh at that and it's kind of fun to laugh at that. But the flip side of that is what struck me was this.

I wonder if this is a kid, college age, who is used to sitting home with his keyboard and firing off insults and attacks from behind the safety of a keyboard. And he thought to himself, Ooh, we're actually going to get together and we're going to go play and we're going to have fun.

It's like a land party with hate. Exactly. Exactly. So to me, this guy was sort of the poster board for all those people who find it so easy to be venomous behind the anonymity of their keyboard and not having to use their real name and suddenly finds himself in a real world situation.

I thought it was, I thought it was enlightening. I, it sort of, it opened my mind, opened my eyes. I can't say, you know, a part of me felt sorry for him. Just sort of from a human to human point of view.

On the other hand, you know, he went to this thing. He, he made a, he made a bad decision. So, um, I, I, I'll, I'll try to find the video. Maybe I'll stick it in the show notes. People can check it out. And I would like to say that college is for making bad decisions and learning from them and coming out the other side of better person.

So maybe that's the lesson that this guy will learn. Right. I hope so. I hope so. Um, on the other hand, I mean, getting back to the specific thing you were talking about, Brian, that, um, the thing about this doxing is, boy, you better be sure you got the right person. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It, you just, because we've already seen cases where people didn't have the right person and well, yeah, I mean the, the online both on both ends of it, the, the, the hate spewed online that then spills over into the real world. And then the vigilantes online that are going to go after these people, uh, there's a reason that we, we outsource this in our society to specific trained individuals, as opposed to

just having us with the, them with their tiki torches and then us online with our pitchforks going after them. Well, look at what happened at the Boston, look at what happened at the Boston marathon bombings when Reddit got ahold of some of the pictures and tried to play Dr. You're not, not Dr.

Watson, uh, Sherlock Holmes. They should have played Dr. Watson sat there, took notes and shut the hell up instead of playing Sherlock Holmes. It ruined some people's lives that they falsely accused. Go all the way back to the Atlanta Olympics. Remember the guy who was falsely accused, uh, as being the bomber there.

And, um, I believe, I can't remember if it was, I think it was NBC. One of the networks ended up with a big payout to him because they falsely accused him of being the bomber. It wasn't him. So, you know, we, we have these, um, these amateur militias showing up and we have these amateur doxers, uh, going around and doxing people.

So I say tread lightly. I don't know what the legal ramifications are. If you accidentally or, or, um, incorrectly dox someone, can, what are their, what are their, um, what, what are their abilities to come at you from a legal point of view?

I, I suspect they probably have some, but at that point it's too late. You know, if the whole, it's kind of like if the whole town, your newspaper posts a front page picture of, of you saying, you know, child pornographer, uh, comes to town and then posts a retraction a week later that says, oh, sorry, he's not actually a child pornographer.

Well, the damage is done. Right. Then you own a newspaper. That's pretty much what happens then. Hey, thanks for the newspaper. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But, um, I don't know. I, uh, it's, it's really hard for me because emotionally I just want to say, you know, yeah, let's, let's, um, expose these people and all the badness that they're doing.

But on the other hand, you really got to be careful of the unintended consequences and just be sure you're not accidentally ruining someone's life. There's a lot at stake here. Yeah. So it'd be great if people could get organized and, and if there was some sort of, um, you know, ethical standard for being a Nazi.

No, no, no. Yeah. Right. Exactly. They, they need a union or something. No. Um, if you could, um, on the doxing side, in other words, have just like journalists have to have X number of sources, you know, before they'll go with something, um, really make sure that this person, uh, it could be as simple as contacting the person saying, is this you, you know, the responses.

I think what we're learning here is, I think what we're learning here is these kids haven't learned from history and there's a reason that the KKK used to wear hoods. Yeah. You're right. You know, AI has gotten so much better with facial recognition that, uh, it's tough nowadays to hide when you're walking around in public, perfectly lit by your tiki torch, yelling at a camera, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of cameras. Speaking of cameras, I got a little follow up on our homework that I don't think anybody else probably did, but I did. I, I did. Okay, good. I did a lot. I did a lot. So I talked to a couple of people in the, in the cyber security industry.

Everybody's going with Nest. Really? Yeah. So the, you know, the people I know, they're all getting Nest cams and they say it's basically hasn't been hacked yet. And the protocols are secure enough where it probably won't be. The other one, the other one that I don't have in the show notes is the, uh, the ring doorbell and camera system.

Those are also on the list of, uh, products that people in cyber security that I know, uh, will buy. Not the cheapest by any stretch, but still affordable. And by the way, Nest cams, if you're in the market for them, uh, until the end of August, there's 30 bucks off each. So I'm actually going to pick up a couple more and get rid of my Chinese broken smonets.

Yeah. I, when I was digging around trying to find, this is a remarkably hard thing to research. I first started out trying to find even professional cameras that had some kind of certification to say that this is the level of security that they will provide could find no such thing.

If it's out there, if any of our listeners know about this, uh, even for the access cams, uh, no. And, um, I could find certifications for things like installers, but not for the cameras themselves. Oh, wow. Um, even looking through databases of pro cameras, I put one of the databases in the show notes here.

Um, need, uh, not surprisingly, it's remarkably easy to find databases of every camera model with its default password and username. Um, so a couple of things that I found in searching for consumer level cameras, um, there's a link to a PC magazine review of all the latest security cameras and they have their recommendations.

Um, and in this entire review, there wasn't a single mention of any sort of security to go with these cameras. Wow. Nothing about requiring them to change your password, not a thing at all. Um, so I, the, the only other thing that I found that was interesting in my digging was on the wire cutter, which is the, uh, you know, review site, um, which I actually like.

I, I think, um, you know, a lot of these review sites can be hot or cold depending on who's doing the reviewing of course. And, um, I can't say I've ever been a big fan of consumer reports, but, um, the wire cutter, I, I've, I've actually gotten some good things from the wire cutter. Yeah. They seem to be a pretty, pretty solid organization over there.

I think so. And, um, the one they chose was one from Logitech. It's called the, I guess, the Logi Circle. And what was interesting about this was I was searching for a camera that required you to change the password before it would let you do anything else.

Mm-hmm. So that you could not use the default password. And what's interesting about this Circle camera is the way that it's set up is using Bluetooth. So when you power up this camera, you have to install their app on your phone.

You have to have a phone to use it. And the first thing that it does is you, when you fire up the app, it pairs the camera to the phone. That's how they verify each other. So you have to be within Bluetooth range. Mm-hmm. Um, and then it requires you to set up an account, creating your own.

username and password. So rather than having a default password out of the box, it's using the proximity of the Bluetooth and then also first thing requiring you to generate your own account information. Interesting. Okay. The Nest does it a similar way.

Yep. Uh, there's a, uh, a QR code on the back of the actual physical camera itself. Mm-hmm. So when you set up your account in the Nest app, you have to actually scan the QR code with your phone and that way it pairs it with your account. So you, there is no default password on the Nest because there's no, there's no way to get to the camera without actually having it go through the app and use Bluetooth.

And I'm pretty sure it creates an ad hoc network that you, that the app then joins and then that adds it to your account. So it's, you know, it's, it's a closed system. You can't just go in from the internet with a username and password. Right. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds similarly secure.

Um, the, the thing about this Logitech is that it was, uh, wire cutters top choice. So, um, for a variety of reasons and they had the Nest, uh, in their review. Actually, I think there's a paragraph in the review that says, why not the Nest? Because I think the Nest is probably the best known of all of these cameras, certainly on the premium side of things.

Yeah. Looking at these circles here, these are, uh, not bad. They're $139 right now. So instead of, I mean, I might actually switch over to this instead of spending $170 per Nest in another like 50 bucks a year per camera. This looks like it might actually be a good buy.

I'm going to have to research this. I'll let you know in two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Check it out. We'll, we'll see. And, uh, to our listeners, uh, check out there. We'll have links there for the wire cutter and also to the Nest. So interesting stuff. Nice. And, oh, and these have rechargeable batteries, so you don't even have to power them.

Ooh, that's a plus. Then you can put them anywhere. You can, and it's particularly good. Like if you have a, let's say a hotspot, you know, the, the, I don't know, the raccoons are dumping over your garbage cans or the kids are, you know, vandalizing your cars or something. You can switch them to a different location and power them off the batteries for a while.

So pretty nice. So, uh, you know, all in all, I'd say good job with our homework. I, I learned a thing or two about it. One of the main things I learned is how we seem to be the only ones really obsessing over this. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Definitely. Um, we had an interesting story come by, uh, on the cyber wire this past week about how, um, there was a back door hidden in some software used by a lot of companies, uh, all around the world. There's a report from Kaspersky lab and, um, they discovered a back door that was planted in a server management software, uh, that was used by people all around the world.

Okay. Not a server management software, server management software. We'll get to that. We'll get into that in a bit, but yes. It's not a server management software. Well, I'm sorry. There's no fucking A in there. Fucking A. A server, a server management software product. Product. Okay.

There you go. Sorry. There we go. Yeah. Jeez. Hey, Jason. It's a touch point. God damn it. Yeah. How do you spell pedantic? Anyway. Um, I spell it F-U. I figured. I figured. So what's interesting about this story is that this back door seems to have been installed in the supply chain.

This is a South Korean company called NetSarang and, um, they sell this software, but the software in a trip through China, uh, apparently had this back door added. So it's sort of not, not, not entirely unrelated to what we always talk about with our Chinese cameras.

Um, interesting that you have to watch, manufacturers have to watch their supply chains because sometimes, uh, nation states can put things in products or people working for nation states can put things in products without you knowing.

And Kaspersky, uh, found this. We need, uh, digital penicillin because everybody seems to get infected when they go to China. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting story. Uh, so I found this, uh, on the next web today and this comes back to what I was just, sorry, Dave, yelling at you about, uh, the story of this tiny $500 gadget can hack the passcode of any iPhone seven and seven plus.

And it's an interesting little device because it, uh, kind of bypasses the, the, uh, what do you call it? The brute force aspect to it. Right. Like where you're supposed to be able to say, okay, after 10 replies, wipe the phone. Well, they found a back door to go past that.

And it's anywhere between iOS 10, three, three and the 11 beta. So hopefully there'll be a patch coming for that one soon. Uh, but yes, in the middle of the article, they say a software. I'm sorry. It is not a software.

You fucking morons. This comes from the next web. I thought better of you next web. You were wrong software. It's yeah, I guess they are. The thing that struck me for, first of all, this is an interesting video. It is a pretty cool, a little interesting that these people spun up this little hardware device to do just this thing that, you know, this hack is of limited use and probably won't last for long.

And I guess at 500 bucks a pop, they, um, feel like they can sell enough of them to make it worth it. Well, I mean, look at the FBI. They spent millions on the San Bernardino phone. So yeah, 500 bucks ain't nothing. Right. The thing that struck me in the middle of the video is sort of, uh, the video is from a guy who reviews all sorts of Mac things and iPhone things and seems to be very much a rumor site.

He has a mockups of the next generation iPhone and things like that. And so he does an unboxing of this device and takes you through the setup. And at some point he casually mentions the software that he's put on his computer. And he says, Oh, this software that I'm, uh, that I'm running here, that, Oh, I guess it was written by somebody in China and yell at my computer, never put the mystery software from China on your computer.

Like, yeah, that's bad. Throw away that computer. Yeah. So, but it works. I mean, by all, it looks like it works, but I think you're right. There's no way Apple's going to let this, uh, go very long. Apple's generally pretty good about jumping on things like this.

So I would surprised, I'd be very surprised if this made it out of the iOS 11 beta phase. So moving on, we have an interesting story, uh, from Krebs on security. There was actually a story that the New York times had in the past week or so about a programmer in Ukraine who had turned himself into the local police, um, after his, some tools that he would, that he used were identified by the U S government as part of the arsenal of tools

that were used to attack the DNC. And, uh, he, uh, went by the name Profexor. We covered this on the cyber wire and, uh, there was great, uh, uh, fanfare and hope that perhaps this person would be able to, uh, provide insight and background into everything that was going on with the Russians and the Russian election and, or I'm sorry, the, the, uh, Russian influence in our election and so on and so forth.

And it turns out not so fast. Uh, the attribution to him came from the Grizzly step report, which, uh, we recall from last year, late last year, the Grizzly step report was published. And that was a report from the U S government that basically had a bunch of signatures for various attacks.

Um, it was kind of a laundry list of, of, uh, tools and, and, um, malware signatures and things like that. Well, in the, since the Grizzly step came out, it's really been, um, devalued. It's been, uh, lots of people have said it's really kind of worthless.

Like it, it, it was not good to begin with and it, we really shouldn't rely on it to, um, as a source for any sort of, for any sort of attribution or anything like that. Um, particularly, uh, there's, uh, Robert M. Lee, who we've spoken about before from Dragos, uh, wrote a blog post about Grizzly step.

And, uh, he said in his post, he said, the Grizzly step report has nothing to do with a DNC breach and was a collection of technical indicators at the government compiled from multiple agencies, all working different Russian related threat groups. Um, the threat group that compromised the DNC was Russian, but not all Russian groups broke into the DNC.

So, um, and then furthermore, this person, um, Profexor, he was using a tool called, uh, a PAS web shell tool. And, uh, that was actually a tool that was specifically not used in the DNC break, break in.

So, uh, this is another one of those stories where people get very excited about the possibility that maybe someone's going to provide us with some information or maybe we've cracked the crime, but then days later we discover not so fast. It's not actually, uh, nothing to see here.

Please drive through. Okay. Yeah. Cause I mean, you wouldn't think that they'd be using a web shell for, you know, enterprise computers because that's a web shell is what you use when you break into somebody's, like say WordPress account and put on a little piece of code. Those PHP shells, like the PAS shell, they're, they're a dime a dozen.

And it's just, you know, a long string of a base 64 encoded code that they just D base 64 and run, um, and just run exec on. And it, that really only runs on a web server. So you'd need to have PHP running, which I'm guessing the DNC didn't have on Joe Schmo's laptop or, you know, standard workstation where they stole the emails from.

All right. Well, thank you again for coming on to our show, Dave Bittner. Next time we are going to be talking about a very interesting topic that Brian doesn't believe exists. Um, many people do believe exist.

I have anecdotal evidence that it doesn't, that it does exist, but have not been able to recreate. And, uh, yeah, uh, this is trying to hang on to your tinfoil hats, everybody. Bring your tinfoil hats next time. We've got, I've got two weeks, two weeks to prove that this thing exists.

Uh, but I haven't been able to prove it in the last week and a half. Um, so we'll see. We'll see. So we're going to, next week is going to be conspiracy theory. Ha. Uh, two weeks from now. We're not on next week. Oh, two weeks. All right. Two weeks from now. Conspiracy. Yeah. All right. It's interesting that Jason is taking my, uh, my vacation time off to help himself prove his own point.

I was so ready to get into this today. We just ran long. We ran long. Brian, blame the Nazis. That's right. Oh, by the way, also, uh, in a couple of weeks, um, uh, I got, I got to pull the book over here. I actually, uh, remember we were talking about Alexander Klimberg, whose book, The Darkening Web, uh, we spoke about a couple of weeks ago, the war for cyberspace.

Uh, well, I contacted the publisher, had them send me a copy of the book, and I actually interviewed Mr. Klimberg earlier this week. So, uh, we'll be airing that, uh, interview probably in the next couple of weeks on the Cyber Wire. And, uh, got a couple of questions from both of you guys and got him to answer them.

So, uh, maybe next time we get together or the time after that. Anyway, on an upcoming episode, we can, uh, we can go over, uh, what I learned from him and we'll get him to answer your questions. Awesome. Great. I like it when you go out and do the interviews and save us the legwork.

That's right. Yeah, that's great. I'm just going to give you, I'm just going to give you assignments from now on and just say, here, go, go, go interview this guy. Yeah. Bring us back, bring us back the tape. You can do, have me some, do some research on, uh, on a software. A software, I ask. Please go, go find me a software. All right.

Good enough. All right, Dave. Thanks. Brick a Brick. I found a couple of really funny Twitter accounts this week, Brian. Okay. SwearTrek and SwearWho. They're, they're accounts where they take a little video snippets and make animated gifs of the characters of each different show swear and say very funny things.

I don't know why I found it very chuckle-rific. Maybe I was just in a spot where I needed to pick me up, but I go back to them and they still kind of make me laugh. Have you checked them out? I did. They're very funny. Talk about a meme generation machine for dorks. Yeah, absolutely. I enjoyed them both.

They're awesome. Uh, I also found a Twitter account this week. Uh, this is Trump Hop. What Trump tweeted on this day in years past. Oh, no. It's, uh, sometimes causes chuckles, uh, sometimes causes tears. That's a lot like life. Yeah, pretty much.

Uh, I found a website called Hvoper. I think it's supposed to be Hyper, but it's H-V-P-E-R. Yes, because that domain was available. Yeah, exactly. Because it's unpronounceable. Hvoper. Yes. Hvoper. Hvoper. Hvoper. You know what it is? They stole it from the Ikea catalog.

Totally. This is actually a doily set that you can buy. Um, what it is, is they take the top headlines from just about every main news source that you'd want to see. So, you can kind of get a glance at what's going on in the zeitgeist of news at a glance. Well, not really a glance, because there's a metric shit ton of articles on this, but it's pretty cool if you need a quick, uh, pick-me-up of news to figure out what's going on.

Yeah, it's, it's useful. It's so ugly. I'm fine with that. This is utilitarian. I want it utilitarian. It's utilitarian, but the colors are even horrible. It's just ugly. It is pretty, it is pretty ugly. Yeah. Yeah. So, you can take those, uh, yeah, designed by an engineer, totally.

A colorblind one at that. So, you can take your hyper doilies and attach them to your scold rug, because Ikea has published instructions for turning their rugs into the Game of Thrones capes. Nice. True, but not true. Because if you go and read the article, they have a little Ikea-designed graphic of somebody cutting a hole in the rug to stick your head through.

They don't go through the process that the production designers went through to actually make them look the way that they do. They basically just show you how to cut a hole in it so you can put it around your head. That's like selling a sheet and a pair of scissors as a ghost kit. Yeah. Nice.

I found this one. I think I got this from Sean Bonner's newsletter. The guy's getting a bunch of shout-outs this week. Jeez. He leaves the country and, you know, ends up... He gets his own episode next week. Jesus, yeah. As long as he doesn't want any of our money, we're good. Oh, wait. We don't make that much. Study says aggressive vegans just make people want to eat meat.

And you know what? They are correct. Yeah. Yeah. Can't lie about that one. How do you ruin a dinner party? Invite a vegan. Yeah. That's very true. So, I didn't read the entire article, so I don't know if they were smart enough or funny enough to get the YouTube link that I added after I saw that you posted that in there.

If meat eaters acted like vegans, Ultra Spiritual Life episode 35. It is a Lairballs. Okay. I'm going to have to check that out. I didn't see that. Moron of the week! We've been talking about HBO a lot the last couple weeks, and they themselves are Moron of the Week.

Yep. Well, technically, it was a third-party vendor, but someone decided to upload the unreleased episode of Game of Thrones, episode 6, to HBO Nordic and HBO Espana. Oopsies. Yeah, they were up for long enough where they were digitized and then immediately sent to Sweden.

Yeah. Oops. Not good. I didn't watch it. I mean, it's everywhere. Everybody has started talking about it. Everybody is... I just... I like my Sunday routine. This is why I don't like the process or the whole Netflix thing of dumping every single episode at once. I want to be in my routine, man.

Sunday, I watch Game of Thrones. You are a creature of habit. I like the ritual involved. I do, too. You know, cook a dinner, sit down with the wife, and sit and watch the show together. It's great. Mm-hmm. I'm with you on that one. Feedback loop!

All right. We have a ton of feedback in our loop this week. But first off, thank you to our new Patreon subscribers, Alex Radischke and Idina Horvath, and Anthony Rossbach, who, in addition to signing up on Patreon, sent us a direct PayPal donation as well so we could buy some coffee.

All right. You know, we're not going to buy coffee with that, right? Well, maybe after I watch that alcohol Netflix documentary, I might buy a coffee. Probably not. No, I'm definitely not. And Donovan Adkinson wrote us over on Patreon. He responded to our show last week where we're talking about Netflix and Disney.

In regards to the Netflix and Disney streaming news, I thought I'd give my two cents worth. As a former cable executive, I remember having discussions with my employees as well as some customers on why a la carte pricing would never work in the cable TV industry. I felt it was one of those be careful what you wish for scenarios. I tried to explain that if, for example, ESPN decided to go that route, the cost at the time was around $5 per sub for us, would have to be in the neighborhood of $15 to $20 for the channel for ESPN to ensure their bottom line didn't take a hit.

As you know, a la carte never took off. However, fast forward to where we are today, and it's making a comeback, except this time in streaming. And then he has his own podcast where he discusses that. Link is in the show notes if you want to hear his take on it. I, like you, am a grumpy old geek at the ripe old age of 47, not trying to pimp out my show here, just that I could add to the conversation.

Since I was in the industry for 10 years, great shows. Keep up the hard work. Hey, man. Thanks, Donovan. If you want to give us money on Patreon, pimp away, my brother. Pimp away. Yes, by all means. So it's donovanshow.com, and like I said, link's in the show notes. Yeah, that's the reality, and I think people forget about that and need to be reminded all the time.

It's not just the cost is being subsidized. It's also niche interests are being subsidized by the bigger things. That's the way it works. You wouldn't have your cooking channels getting any money if you didn't have ESPN making all the money.

This is just how the entertainment industry has worked for the last 40 years in all aspects of it. Big, gigantic, stupid movies fund small, critical indie darlings. That's how those get made. Your Justin Bieber's are the reason that you get signed crazy independent artists that maybe will only have a lot smaller fans, or at least that's how it all used to work.

Now everybody's too damn greedy, and they just kill off the small stuff. It's kind of like how health insurance works. Yeah, kind of. Kill off the small people. Yep, that's about it. All right, let's move over to Twitter. Nathan Reitzman writes in, hey, this is still just machine learning, right? Talking about a sense of the link for the AI versus Dota 2.

Yes, it is just machine learning. You are correct. That is correct. Sarah Dax sends, this is a fairly new show to me, but I'm liking it. Worth a listen. Some adult language. Not excessive, but it's there. Fuck yeah, it is. Worth a try, I think. So thank you for paying us. Thank you very much. And JVig writes us and points out about the Disney and Netflix kerfuffle that went down.

It's just Disney and Pixar are included in the break, but Marvel and Lucas are not. So we'll still get to keep our Marvel and Star Wars on Netflix. Yep, and 6502chip wrote us and said, this is how deep we are on the Amazon ecosystem. And he sent us a picture of his Amazon Basics plates.

I've got those. I do not. I do, they're great. I believe that you do, yeah. Yeah, they're fantastic. Anthony Rossbach writes in, I took half of what I saved today by moving my Git stuff internal and now used it on GOG podcast. You guys are the best and my favorite. And what he's talking about, he posted a picture of him canceling his GitHub account.

So thank you very much, Anthony. And Nathan Rietzma wrote us the Grumpy Old Geeks mantra, not our manifesto, and included an image, gray pride, we're old, we're tired, get off our lawn. We got to steal that. Yeah, that's going to make some of our posting for sure.

Martin Zeebe writes in, hmm, still not sure. Here are dictionary attacks explained. Better go for past manager and gibberish symbolist. Yeah, he's taking issue with the guy that decided that passwords, doing completely random long passwords is not worth it.

Yeah, yeah. And he cc'd xkcd on it as well. So. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting read. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're all still using past managers anyway, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, I'm never going to give you up. Razor 0133 sent us two tweets.

First, he says, oh my god, as I go to shut the car off, I hear give me douche tires. I about died and fell out of the car laughing. I don't remember saying that. Did you say that? I must have said it. Something like that. Who knows? All right. And he also sent LOL, saw this today, and it's a link, three arrested after drone drops phone drugs in Iona prison.

Oh, yes. They're still trying to do the drone prison drop. Interesting. Oh, great. Matt Hatter, RH writes in, saw this Led Zeppelin keyboard keycap set and thought of you both. Check it out. And it's a link to a set of little cap, like, you know, caps that you can actually put on your keyboard if you have a matching keyboard that are red, black, and ivory.

And they're gorgeous. They are beautiful. I don't care much for the Led Zeppelin Association at all, but they are beautiful, and I would totally get these. Yeah. No, man, I want them, but they're not going to work on my keyboard, so I can just get some paint markers, I guess, and do it up. And we got some people writing in over at GOG.show.

The first is from Eduardo. Hey, guys, what was the name of the protection software that stops files from being encrypted? I remember you guys talking about it on a previous episode. I've gone through 30-plus show notes, and I can't find it anywhere. We had to reach out to Bittner to get the answer to that, and he sent us the free OSX security tools link at objective-c.com.

Yes, and it's dash S-E-E, not the letter C. Yes, sorry. Next one comes from Tom. Yes, yes, yes. Will Wheaton as the reader is a deal-breaker for me. Every book that Will Wheaton reads sounds like Will Wheaton doing Will Wheaton. Ready Player One was the last Will Wheaton read book that I could stand, and could stand is a stretch.

I am with you. That was one of my last things, too, that I went back and re-listened to it, and yeah, it's tough, man. It's tough. I see that David Bittner commented in here right under that. I recently listened to Ready Player One, and it struck me how much Will Wheaton's cadence and accent reminded me of Carrie Fisher.

Hmm. Interesting. I've never listened to Will Wheaton read a book, but I've got to say, poor guy doesn't get any love. Everybody hated Crusher, and now they can't stand his reading books. No, you know what? He does a good job, but he just does too goddamn many of them. I need variety in my science fiction, damn it.

All right. All right. Next is Ivor Davies. I will double my Patreon subscription for four months if you post a photo on Instagram of either or both of you wearing these headphones in public, and he links to an Amazon headphone set that the Urban Elf Earbud Headphones. Elegant Elf Ear Design.

I love these too, actually. I would totally get them. I want clip-ons that I can put on my AirPods, because then they would keep their AirPods in your ear too. The problem is you know that the quality of them is going to suck. I would totally wear the stupid Elven ear part, but the quality is going to be horrible on these things.

Yeah, they're going to be terrible. All right. Well, you obviously did a cost analysis because you limited your up to four months, so I will have to do a cost analysis on how much these will cost me. I believe there's $16.99 on Prime, so if that works out that we make a buck, I'm going to do it. All right. Oh, that'd be fantastic.

Yeah, both of us not going to happen unless you're going to give us eight months and maybe we'll figure it out there. Next up comes from Tom Mayhew. Hey, the Beach Boys are awesome. Love pet sounds and smiley smile. Also, hello from Adelaide, South Australia. Keep up the good work. Well, I think it turns out that everybody likes the Beach Boys, even though some people can't figure out that I did too.

But awesome. Keep on the next episode of Revisionist History. Oh, shit. Go listen to it. Now, over at iTunes, we got a five star rating from The Final Wolf. Interesting podcast. I pretty much disagree with them on almost all technology topics that get brought up, VR, et cetera.

But they are hilarious to listen to and have led me to some cool products I wasn't aware of. Can't argue with good information. Now, that's how you disagree with us. Exactly. Next one comes from Vlad Siberia. Straightforward and evil. Gents, you are straightforward like Russians with all your go fuck yourself comments for the ones that deserve it.

Thanks for the podcast. Educational and entertaining. By the way, I listened to old episodes while waiting for new ones, and Jason sounded way more cheerful before 2017. Gee, I wonder what happened in 2016. November 16. I wonder what happened there. I don't know. 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.

If you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. Closing shout outs. My shout out this week goes to friend of the show, Trent Hamilton and his beloved dog, Les, who he lost this week.

Hearts with you, buddy. Sorry to hear that, man. And another shout out to Vice News Tonight. Because, man, their episode on the Nazis, yes, let's close with some more Nazis, was a fantastic watch. You definitely should watch it. They posted it for free online. Go check it out.

It is important stuff. And I'm sorry, but that reporter, basically, looked like a little 15-year-old girl who was doing the reporting on that tiny thing. Balls of steel. I'm sorry. Totally. To get in that van with those guys, she's insane.

Yep, yep, yep. And I want to give a shout out to both Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore. Us lefties have tended to shy away from having our own versions of Ann Coulter because we're just too goddamn nice. But they went for it. And, you know, right now, I'm loving everything that they're saying because this isn't about politics anymore.

It's about morality. Go get them, boys. Okay. And because we should end on a high note, the subject of the Vice documentary, there's a beautiful video of him crying and sobbing like a little girl because there's an arrest warrant out for him because he was using mace or pepper spray and it's a felony in Virginia to use that stuff.

And so, yeah, poor baby. And I would like to point out an episode on the Art of Charm, my day job, of Christian Piccolini. He was a Nazi here in Chicago and I've actually been to shows with this guy where he was at and his buddies who were just a bunch of assholes.

But he turned it around and now he runs basically a charity and a foundation to get people out of that lifestyle, turn them around and then turn them into normal, lovely people. And it's a great episode. Link will be in the show notes. Definitely worth a listen, especially what's going on today.

Yep, I agree. And if you need a laugh out of this, and God knows we all do, there's a link in the show notes for a particular clip from the producers from Mel Brooks, Springtime for Hitler. Don't be a stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulman.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all 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 223. Hey, what's going on? Ah, those bums won their court case, so they're marching today.

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