226: A Badder Meinhof

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by HelloFresh. Visit HelloFresh.com and use the promo code GOG to save $30 off your first week of deliveries. 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, back in Los Angeles. Thank jeebus. Yes. Oh my god. Good old American crumbling infrastructure, wireless. Yeah, but at least it's fast wireless. That's true. That was an eight hour edit to put the pieces back together from your Canadian Humpty Dumpty audio last week.

I think that's what works out to about six hours Canadian. Yeah, yeah, seriously. Yeah, I could have flown up, edited it in Canadian and then flown back and still save some time. Yeah, that's how it works, people. So, I got a little Bitcoin and crypto follow-up here. Okay.

First up, I want to give a hat tip to Ben Stanley. He pointed out that we cannot have Grumpy Coin because somebody already did it back in 2014. How's it doing? Oh, not so well. It has been delisted because there is nothing there.

Okay. And my friend Jordan Harbinger gave me an article on Medium called the Top 10 Cryptocurrency Resources for Non-Technical People. And he said if you want to start learning about crypto, this is where to start. Yeah, look at that.

What a great photo because I have heard that you can mine your own and these people. That's a great photo of Bitcoin being mined. My understanding is depending on fluctuations, it's a very thin margin between what you're paying for your power to mine it versus what you're actually going to make. It's funny because a friend of mine who rents property down in Los Angeles, he rents a block in an office building, and several people have asked him if power is included in his rent.

Ah! And it is included, but he's not stupid enough to piss off his landlord because he's got a beautiful office on Sunset Boulevard. But a lot of people have come to him asking if they can put a couple mining rigs in his office. Well, that's pretty smart, actually.

I would, if you were a young, enterprising, very bored person that had nothing else to do with their lives, I would just look around for little office spaces and dump off a bunch of things just to sit there and mine coins so it can be worthless in a few years. Ah, well. I mean, at this point, you can make a couple hundred bucks a month, but you've got to pay for the hardware, so it's over time.

Ben, I believe, who sent us the link on the Grumpy Coin is a miner as well. And I know a lot of people who dabbled with it when it first started and then thought it was going to go to zero and got rid of all their Bitcoin and now are regretting their multi-million dollar loss. Oh, well.

So check out these resources if you want to learn more. Well, I've got some great news. The U.S. has regressed to a developing nation status, an MIT economist is warning. His name is Peter Temen, and it's a very long article over on The Independent. It's a great article, though.

It's a great article. He is basically stating, this is great, that 80% of the U.S. population is burdened with debt and anxious about job security. Hmm. Well, count us two. Well, I mean, the thing about it is I don't remember a time when it was.

It just feels worse now because we're not kids who now we're the burdened ones, as far as I can tell. My family was always kind of worried about, always in debt and wondering where the next meal was coming from, but now it's just our turn. It's gotten worse, and we talk a lot about the vanishing middle class, which is definitely a for-real thing that is happening with real facts and real figures to back it up.

Yeah, so this is a—we're on the slide, man. It's the decline and fall of Western civilization. But I like his quote at the end. Peter Turman says that education is the solution to offer everyone in society better opportunities and calls for investments in public schools and public universities. He says, knowing how to think, how to get on with people, how to cooperate, all the social skills and social capital are going to be critically important for kids in this environment.

Amen. A round of applause there. And you know what they do in Canada? What do they do? They invest in their public schools and public universities. Oh, but they still have milk in a bag. What's up with that? Well, you've got to save money somewhere, Jason. Got to pay for that school somehow. Yeah. And we've been talking a lot about the whole concept of the universal basic income, or UBI.

UBI. UBI, yes. There has been a study done by, let's see, Roosevelt Research Directors and the Bards College Levy Institute and all other kinds of places all over the world, some places in Italy as well, that says—I love the fact that, like, Italian institutes are studying the U.S. economy and we're not.

But basically, the study came out and said that giving every single adult in the United States a $1,000 cash handout per month would grow our economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025, according to this study. Interesting. Where did they say where the $1,000 handout per person comes from?

Trump. He doesn't have any money. Oh, that's right. No, they don't really say where it comes from. I mean, that's part—it says we'd be paid for by increasing the federal deficit, so we go more into debt as a country, apparently, which doesn't sound terribly smart to me.

I'm sure we could find the money. We can increase taxes on the mega-rich. Hell, Bill Gates could fund half the—could probably fund this for three or four years himself. You gotta spend money to make money. That's right, and that's what the study is saying. So, I mean, I—again, every time that we get a new article about UBI in our segment here, I'm very happy about it.

I don't necessarily know if it's a good thing to do, but I think it's a damn good thing to look into because we're gonna have to do something, people. Yeah, all the studies are pointing to it actually gonna kind of work, so we'll see how it goes. If anybody's ever got the balls to do it, and then do it—I mean, and do it in a massive scale, not just like these 200-person studies.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I remember there was something in Oakland. I'm gonna have to—I'm gonna have to look back into that and see what was going on, but— Yeah, we covered a lot of studies at the beginning of the year. We have—if we go back through the show notes, we have lists of UBI studies that were coming out, so it seems like some of them are starting to bear fruit.

That's right. In the news. Now, let's go from subsidizing everybody through UBI to just subsidizing tech companies to get them to move to your city.

What we're finding out is that doesn't work out very well for the workers. The workers that already live in the city or the workers that are gonna work for the company that moves to the city? The workers that already live in the city. Okay. How does that work? Well, because the cities are coughing up so much damn money that has to be made up for in taxes and other things just to get these people to move there.

I think we talked about this a bit with Disneyland and my experience growing up in Anaheim and the fact that, you know, they were basically getting a free ride from the city. And how that kind of screws the people that live there. And this is what's happening now all over the place. Anytime anybody announces that they want to open up a big new factory or whatever.

In this case, in this article, they're talking about Apple is going to open up a $1.3 billion data center. And towns basically compete for the right to host it because they're hoping to get jobs. And the way that you win is basically throwing out a bunch of freebies to the company.

So we covered this a couple of weeks ago with Foxconn moving to Wisconsin because their their debt wasn't going to be paid off for like another 30 years if they get with the tax breaks they gave them. And also in the news this week, Amazon is doing the same thing. Yes. So everybody's like, hey, we want to move.

Can you just tell us what you got and we'll pick the best. Yep. So as the article states, you know, towns and small cities follow are trying to basically get a bunch of young millennials working in the tech and the arts skilled people to come into their city or to employ the ones that are already there.

And the theory being then that economic prosperity will follow. But facts are not bearing this out. What is actually seems to be happening is that these cities find themselves plagued by growing economic divides, which we can see in Santa Monica and Silicon Beach right here, historic levels of inequality and housing crises that are displacing even middle class residents.

Sounds a lot like Silicon Beach here. It sounds a lot like Silicon Beach here. That is exactly what is happening. So this is not working out very well. Let's stop it, people. Yeah. And, you know, I can see how with Disney, how it might be how like how they could have spun it to say, like, you know, we need all these tax breaks because we're going to be bringing in new people with new money who are going to give cash infusions into the city and all that stuff.

Yeah. The tourist economy is what they're able to get by on. But that does not exist. Nobody is. It doesn't exist on these. Yeah. Let's all go to Apple's data center. We who? Yeah. Oh, man. There's a fun day with the kids. Look, kids, it's a Bitcoin center.

Yeah. Here's some gigabit. Well, morale at Uber has been an all time low, wouldn't we say? It's like they're finally listening to us and us just endlessly bashing them. But not really. They're just kind of down in general.

But in an effort to spread positivity throughout the company, a handful of unnamed employees created a website, probably on Squarespace, called Good People and Good Things and put up posters promoting positivity throughout the Uber. According to the site, they expect to have fun stuff planned throughout the year.

But for now, they're just trying to spread the word. Oh, the site reads, let's be real. It's been a pretty rough nine plus months. Negativity became the rule instead of the exception to it. And morale fell to the floor. So we're trying to pick it back up. Together, we can lift each other's spirits.

Oh, they misspelled lift wrong. They put an I in it instead of a Y. And make a difference in our every day. We may be starting with a small group of six employees, but we're mighty hopeful that the positivity of good people plus good things, GPGT, will spread through the company like news of new snacks.

I want to slap these people. I don't remember ever being that perky about work. You know, here's the thing. I grew up in the South a lot, right? And we would just because of the nature of being in the South, there's a lot of religious people.

And as a kid, you always hang out with some of your friends who are the religious people. And you have to go to some of the religious events. Yes. And they are so perky and happy. And I bet this is the job they got when they grew up. Good people plus good things.

Well, the thing that kills me about this is maybe this maybe it's a stealth move and they're being paid to do this. But this is just them doing it on their own because they want to be happy. It's our black ops happiness team. You want to be happy? How about you go work for a decent company? Yeah, seriously.

Try that. Don't work for a bunch of assholes. Mm-hmm. Anyways. Well, something that will probably increase the negativity over at Uber. The house has unanimously approved a sweeping self-driving car measure, basically blocking and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles.

So all this – what could possibly go wrong with this? To hell with safety standards. To hell with states' rights. Screw it. Just go ahead. You're allowed to do anything you want now with your self-driving testing cars. You know, still got to get past Senate. And they've got major changes in there that do address some of the safety issues.

And, yeah, because I know that a lot of places in Illinois have banned them, including Chicago. No self-driving cars in Chicago. But they're saying, yeah, that rule's not going to really fly if this gets through. But I think there's going to be major changes to this before it, you know, gets approved.

Yeah, I hope so because this just seems very, very frightening. Yeah, it's just like, come on, guys, we've got to really hurry up and get it out there. Let's get it out there without thinking about what they're actually unleashing on the streets. Exactly. Well, that slides right into my next story, which I love.

And this is what you and I have been shouting from the rooftops for a while now. We need to stop pretending that the autonomous car is imminent. Yeah. From security concerns to high cost to missing infrastructure to car design complexity to uncertain legal expectations and more, there are a host of legitimate concerns that in some cases by themselves represent a serious challenge to the near-term release of truly independent vehicles.

Taken together, they strongly suggest a much longer timeline for adoption than many of us have been led to believe. Yes, amen, thank you. I am so tired of journalism about self-driving cars. We have a story on the Stupid Podcast every single week for like six years now about how they're going to be out every single day.

It's just next week we're going to have self-driving cars. No, we're not. Here's the deal, Brian. If you say next week long enough, eventually you'll get to next week. Yes, well, this is the problem with our current state of journalism where we have to have 25 stories every single day to get the clicks.

It's just tired of it. Yeah, well, you know, I'd just like to dovetail in that AI is not imminent either. No, it's not. We're going to have a discussion about that in a little bit. There's something that we really need to put to bed. And at the end of this segment, we're going to chat a little bit about that.

Okay, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, I think you will be. All right. One of the other things that we've also been saying all along on this podcast is that web metrics, statistics, and analytics are complete and utter bullshit. Really, you think? And case number one today, Facebook has told advertisers it can reach more young adults in America than actually exist.

Yeah. I was going to put this in more on of the week, but it's big news. Oh, I was listening to this on the radio today. I mean, this is mainstream news. Yeah. Well, as it should be. I mean, Facebook, let's be honest, is the biggest thing out there on the web.

Everybody is on it, and advertising is the way that they make their money, and they are lying to their potential advertisers. It's hilarious if it wasn't so sad. And if this was the first time, it might be something, but it's not the first time. And this one is so egregious that it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That real name policy, that really worked out well for you, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Just all going great, isn't it? Yeah. Well, now we know where those extra people are coming from. They're all just Russian propagandists. Well. That's all the extra accounts. Yeah. That's some other big news.

Oopsies. Yeah. Yeah. The Russians were. I mean, here's the thing about this Russian propaganda ad buy on Facebook dealio. It was only $100,000, which will get you like maybe seven ads on Facebook at this point. Yeah, pretty much. You know, they're going to tell you it's seven million, but you're going to get like seven impressions.

Yeah. But yeah, I wonder how the Russians are going to react when they figure out how overcharged they were. I think they're going to want some money back. Now, there's got to be some class action lawsuit that's going to come in on this, right? You know what? They'll probably do a mea culpa and some refunds and, you know, then they'll say, you know, we're going to put a committee together to find out the problem here.

You know, actually, when they did this last time, just go back and find that press release and it'll just be exactly the same. Maybe Facebook needs their own division of GBGT. Oh, my God. What are they doing?

Oh, I'll tell you what they're doing. They're back to stealing features like Facebook normally does. Hey. There's a new feature in testing that they say looks an awful lot like Tinder. And it's a very small beta release in parts of Toronto, New Zealand, and some other places.

And the thing about it is it's kind of like Tinder. It'll give you a little message saying, hey, you want to hang out with Brian today? And you can swipe right or left and say yes or no. And when everybody gets together and then it sets a meeting and you all go off your merry way. So it's kind of like an easier way to hook up with people that, you know, if you're not doing anything, there's nothing on your calendar because I'm sure Facebook knows what you're doing on your calendar.

They can say, hey, you're not doing anything Tuesday at 7 p.m. How about you go to this restaurant that's down the street that advertises with us and get one of your other little friends to meet you there. And then you have a party and then we know where you eat now. And then we can sell that data back to the restaurant. And OK, yeah, sorry.

I'm getting a little tangent there. Got to breathe. Got to breathe. But yeah, it's a new great, great new feature that's coming out, I'm sure. You're just not giving them much love at all. Surely they wouldn't be so nefarious to do all that sort of stuff with this information. Oh, God, no. Now, I don't understand. OK, I mean, I get why Facebook is doing it because Facebook has to just roll out new stuff all the time to keep people interested.

But it seems to me the company that should have done this is Netflix and they could have just called it and chill. Exactly. Yeah, no. I mean, we've been saying forever that they should have a dating component inside of Netflix. It's ridiculous that they very least like a chat something. It's crazy that they don't.

Yeah, they did one thing a long time ago. I think it was with Microsoft. It was a kind of a joint thing where you can if you both have Xbox ones, you can be in different houses and then watch a movie at the same time. Like you start it'll like start the movie for you at the same time. That was a man.

That was like in the mid 2000s, I believe. But yeah, I mean, that's as far as they got. But I can't believe that with everything out there, they haven't done anything with dating or social. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Free idea for you guys. Well, not really. Send us a check if you do it. Yeah, please. Yeah.

And finally, well, not finally, but this I found just not surprising, but depressing and ties right in with the good old advertising from our Russian friends. Over two thirds of Americans now get all their news from social media. Well, that explains a lot, doesn't it?

Well, the interesting thing is it's not just the kids that are doing it. The the older generation, the over 50 generation is really doing it. Yeah. I mean, it's you're on it, especially, you know, you figure you're a grandparent or something like that. You're you're loading up social media to see your your grandkids, your grandkids and all that.

And there's all your news. And I mean, it's convenient. Why? Why open up a new browser window and go to the Wall Street Journal when it's all right there? And, you know, it's basically right in line with what you and your friends believe anyway. So, well, remember long ago when your parents first got on the Internet and figured out email and would send you those crazy multicolored emails with 17 fonts that had just some crazy ass, you know, conspiracy theory going on that you would have to write back and send them Snopes links and all that stuff.

Well, luckily, luckily for me, my parents aren't quite don't go that direction. But, you know, I had an uncle that did it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had someone who I don't even talk to anymore, basically batshit crazy and would send me stuff all the time.

They don't do that anymore because now they can just hit like and it's out of their system. They don't feel the need to forward that on it to in the morning. That's true. It's much better. Yeah. It saved some people's sanity. They're idiots still. But what are you going to do? And this one comes from Adam Spiegelman from the Proudly Resents podcast.

He sent this over this morning and it's artificial intelligence can now work out whether you're gay or straight just from a photograph. Right. Now, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence in a second here. But Adam has a great line. He's like, if in the photograph you're wearing Crocs, the AI will work out that you are straight and single.

Funny. Yeah. The thing about this is, it's actually, when you look at the statistical performance of a human, the chances of us guessing someone's sexuality and persuasion is a 50-50 chance.

They proved it time and again, like almost no better than chance. This thing can do it at about, if you, here's what it is. They're shown a photo of a gay and a straight man. It can get it correct 81% of the time. If you do five photos of each man, it can get it to 91% of the time.

It goes down with women. The accuracy isn't as spot on, but still, it's better than chance. So they're trying to, this is a proof of concept. I'm so thrilled that with all the problems in the world and the vast resources that are being dedicated to AI to solve problems in the world, that they first tackled GADAR.

I mean, what they're saying in the, in their piece though, is that the researchers who did this were trying to show what, like say a nasty regime could do with global surveillance and facial recognition and say, look, Hey, if gay people aren't allowed in our country, this is, here's some code.

Now you can do it, which isn't that bright, but just another warning bell about, you know, the coming future of 1984 and all that crap. Now I want to talk a little bit about AI. Oh no, we need to get this. We need to get this straight, Brian. We need to, we need to have a, a, a come to Jesus moment.

Okay. I'm just sick of yelling about it every week that nobody knows what the hell it is. And if it's a machine learning or a goddamn decision tree or, cause we know we don't have artificial intelligence. It doesn't exist. Yep. We have, we have, you know, dumb machines doing specific tasks.

And, and when I, whenever I see somebody say AI now, I feel like I woke up in a world, where nobody says GIF and everybody says GIF and they don't know that there's another way to say it, which is the proper way. Yep. So I give up. I'm washing my hands of it.

I'm packing up, call it whatever the hell you want. You know, we know that it's not AI, but for your little, little headline, you can have it go about your merry way. And in 20 years when it still doesn't happen, then, you know, we'll be done doing this podcast by then, hopefully.

Uh, but our, our AIs will be doing it for us. Yeah. Well, no, you will be able to use that cool little Adobe program and just type it in every week and then just have it generated for us. And you know what I want to do. I, I, I'm going to, I'm going to write a browser plugin. You remember the one that turned Trump into the poop emoji?

Yes. I'm just going to make a browser extension that transforms artificial intelligence to machine learning. There you go. Or a poop emoji. Ups and doodads. I don't remember exactly what it was, but a couple shows ago, I had something from Amazon that had an incredibly, oh, it was the microphone stand and incredibly long title, you know, done for SEO.

Uh, this one wins. Okay. I picked up the Kung Fueren selfie stick, Bluetooth, 50 hour long battery life in Japanese Seiko PCB protection comma built in remote camera shutter for selfie stick, iPhone seven plus all iOS and Android smartphones black.

Wow. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful and it's only eight 35 on Amazon. It's on sale right now. Regularly priced at 1899. Why a selfie stick? You say? Yes, I do. I have a child and we want to be able to take family photos without asking someone to take our $700 iPhone in their hands and potentially run away with it.

You didn't want to get a selfie drone? No, no selfie drone. I'm a little too concerned about the, uh, the age of my child. Maybe later I'll do the selfie drone. This is super convenient. It's, it does exactly what it says. It's on the very long title. Uh, the price is right. Uh, liked it so much.

I bought a second one while I was in Canada and we left it with the in-laws cause they're about to travel to Russia, uh, to get on the news bandwagon there and buy some advertising apparently. Uh, so we're, they're going to take that one and I ordered another one for the house here. Uh, works great. It's awesome for family photos.

And, uh, there are at least two of these running around in my extended family now. Okay. Welcome to, oh God, six years ago. I think maybe, well, I'm 46. Yeah. Like six years ago. I think I bought my first selfie stick and that was, that was it. Uh, I was, I'm surprised.

I, you know, I've recovered one of my selfie sticks on the show. The D8 DJI Osmo handheld mobile, uh, gimbal selfie stick. I'm surprised you didn't want to go for that. I couldn't find it in the show notes. Okay. Yeah. And you could have, and you could buy about 35 of your Kung Fuhrin selfie sticks for what the, the Osmo cost.

Okay. We'll put that in the show notes and let people choose which one they would prefer. Okay. Uh, I also picked up something from a kid. He likes music. Apparently he just loves to bash on a guitar. So I got the Janod ukulele, which is a nice price. It's a fun little toy for him and he loves it, man.

And he just does not get off of it. And I was like, you have two parents that have worked in the music industry. Have we taught you nothing? God, but oh, well, uh, the reason I bring it up is, uh, I haven't talked too much about kids stuff on the show and I know there are plenty of people out there that have kids. Uh, the company itself is Janod.

We've got the link to all their products over on Amazon in the show notes. They make really good stuff. It's, it's quality. It's, uh, and you know, you don't have to worry about crazy paints or lead or anything like that. Uh, they do more than just the musical instruments, but those are, those are all I have so far, but they're fantastic.

So really high quality, uh, manufacturer of kids toys. So check them out. If you have a kid. Well, since you put in your kids toys, it's, it's devolved down to kids toys. I had to put in a doggy toy for a little bam, bam. Okay. It's the hurricane nine.

It is this kind of really cool. Yes. Hurricane nine. Uh, it, it's kind of this clever fetch toy that does these crazy spinning rings. You've got to look at the video. I'd never seen anything like it and it's cheap. Oh, I've seen these on the beach. They look really cool.

They do look pretty cool. What it's going to end up being is I'm going to, you know, get to the place where I can use it, get her all excited, shoot it off. She's going to look at me, lay down. Then I'm going to have to go get it. Yeah. And then when I pick it up, she'll come over to me and then I'll shoot it again.

She'll lie down. Then I'll go pick it up. That's, that's how we play fetch in our family for the most part. Awesome. Yeah. It's, ah, they're great. Um, little furry bundles of joy. It's been an expensive week for me, Brian. Okay.

Um, I am, you know, I'm trying to run a professional outfit over here and for some reason these damn Macs just like, cause they're old. I've got like old Macs and I would just, I've spent more time trying to figure out like where little pops and dings and wizards are coming from.

I gave up yesterday. I ordered, I ordered a new 5k 27 inch iMac. Oh, geez. It looks so nice though. I can't wait. Um, when does it arrive? In about a week. Okay.

Very cool. I got it. I only got it with eight gig of Ram cause I, you know, the, the Ram upgrade from eight to 16. If you pay it through Apple is what it costs to go from eight to 32. If you just go buy it from crucial, which is where I get all my memory from. Right. And I just got a 500 gig SSD in it because most of my stuff is on, uh, the Synology or on, you know, external drives.

So it, it, you know, it wasn't cheap, but it's pretty, it's pretty and it's going to last a while. I've still got an iMac here from like 2011 that still works, but it doesn't work good enough, you know, but it's got ports. It's got ports on it. Oh, how lovely.

Yeah. I mean, that's the one thing I'm just like, I looked at the back of it. I'm like, okay, four USB ports, two Thunderbolt ports and, and an ethernet port. Ooh, jackpot. So, and I'm, I'm tired of waiting. I was trying to wait for the pros, but I just can't do it. So.

All right. Well, hold that trigger. So I'm going to be selling some, uh, old MacBook pros. If anybody wants to get in on that action soon. Yeah, sure. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by HelloFresh.

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Media Candy. I'm happy to have the return of Drunk on a Plane movie reviews. All right. What do we got this time? Unfortunately, I wasn't drunk because the flight was very early in the morning and I had my son with me. So it's sober on a plane movie review. Wow. Responsible movie reviews.

I try to be a responsible parent occasionally. I finally saw Alien Covenant. I'm a big fan of the first two Alien movies and we'll leave it at that. That's about it. Those first two were pretty good, weren't they? Yeah. Prometheus, you know, it had potential.

Alien Covenant, it just feels like you're doing the same movie over and over again. Spoiler alert. I mean, this has been out for a while. The Alien was a lot more interesting when I thought there was a whole planet full of them and they evolved and whatever.

Not that crazy AI guy made them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it kind of really ruins the whole mythology and stuff like that. That is exactly the feeling I had when I finished the movie. I was like, the entire mythology has now been ruined for me.

Mm-hmm. You've destroyed Aliens. Oh, well. Oh, well. We still have one and two. Speaking of destroying mythologies and ruining things, I finally finished Twin Peaks The Return as well. Oh, how was that? I am not going to...

Look, it was an experience. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone that hasn't seen it yet and wants to. I will leave... I will just say go to the show notes. There's an article in there called Revealing the Mystery Behind Twin Peaks The Return's New Mysteries and a little quote in there as well.

You can go read that if you want it if you've already seen it or if you don't care if it gets spoiled for you. It was an experience. It was well done. It was great to be back in the world. It's like Damon Lindoff wrote it or something, though. It's like Damon Lindoff wrote it or something, though. Oh, no.

Let's just say not only were questions not answered, but they added more questions. And there probably isn't going to be any more Twin Peaks. So there you go. Okay. Well, you know, leave them wanting more. I just couldn't watch it. I just did not have it in me. It was bizarre. I mean, there's yeah, it's rough.

You're you're you're either into it or you're not. And that's that's that. So, yeah, because even all my hardcore friends, it's like after the first two or three episodes, never heard a peep about it again. Yeah, not not not a peep. Everybody talked about everything else they were watching. I heard all about the defenders and all this other crap and narcos, which I'll talk about in a second.

But I heard nary a word about I think that there was a big, big shark fin on Twin Peaks. I think a lot of people dropped off. So. And we were all too busy watching Game of Thrones, which was way better. That's true. Yeah, I finished narcos season three.

Okay. In about a day and a half. Wow. Was that good? I didn't see any of them. Oh, man. Well, one and two are fantastic, but nobody knew how they were going to do season three because, you know, I'm not going to say anything else, but you can go.

You can go figure it out. But they they they nailed it. They totally nailed it. It's a fantastic season. And hopefully they'll be able to figure out a way to do some more. All right. Well, that's highly recommend. Yeah. And I've got a bit of follow up on the Disney streaming service.

We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, and there was some question at the time about whether, you know, now that Disney owns Star Wars and Marvel, whether they would be staying on Netflix or going to Disney's new service itself. At the time, we had somebody write in and tell us that no, Star Wars and Marvel will be staying on Netflix.

And the Disney streaming service would purely just be Disney stuff. Not true. They have decided to pull Marvel and Star Wars, obviously, because they are going to make a lot more money doing that because that gets the adults instead of just the people with kids. They just can't take the co-productions.

Those are the ones that are stuck there. Yeah. The Netflix originals, I should say. But yeah, I was listening to a lot of talk about this today on a couple of different tech news shows and some interesting thoughts about, you know, how it could actually be a pretty decent winner if they put everything on this service, you know, with Pixar and the Disney Vault and everything, you know, put it on one massive super service.

I just feel like the joke's on us. Like, we're getting unbundled for us and it's going to cost us more money. Yeah, here's the problem. I've seen all this crap already. I don't need to see it again. So take your Star Wars and go play somewhere else. Oh, I can always rewatch Star Wars. Yeah, well, now the thing about it, one person I heard that had a really great idea is one thing that would get me to subscribe, at least for a month, would be if they put up all

of the original Star Wars movies un-Lucas-fied, like unspecial edition, like they went back into the vault and found the OG stuff and put the original cuts up. I would pay for that. Yep, I agree. I think that would be an interesting way to go.

Now, let's talk about James Bond. Sony's had distribution rights to James Bond. That expired with Spectre in 2015. And MGM has been looking for a new distributor. Smart Money is on Warner Brothers, but apparently Amazon and Apple are throwing their hats into the ring, which would be interesting.

I mean, we're talking about an old school, you know, iconic thing going to a tech company, basically. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of news going around about this. A lot of speculation. Nobody knows. But my money would be on Amazon. I think they've got... Well, Apple has more money, but Amazon has more of a desire and an actual platform.

Yeah. I mean, what does Apple really have? Just that stupid game show about how they're going to steal app ideas from people. Well, you know, the thing's coming up soon. So we've got the big reveal on the 12th and people are saying that there will be a new Apple TV in that.

So maybe they'll have a new service in the Apple TV. Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows? Yeah, I agree. Now, going back to Star Wars, I stumbled across this on the web this week. You probably have seen this already. I don't know. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Star Wars. That's a classic.

I had never seen it before. I was rolling. Rolling. Oh my God. Yeah, that's a classic, man. I don't know how I missed it. So if you missed it as well, link is in the show notes. Go watch it. It is so damn funny. Yeah, it's short. It's only a couple of minutes long, but it's very, very funny.

Yeah. And I found this thing called Solus in interactive animation. What it is, it's an interactive animated film by this guy, Evan Bohm, but it was written by Jeff Noon, who's one of my favorite science fiction writers from way back in the day. And it's just a really cool, like they took one of Jeff's short stories and made this little interactive clicky thing with a really good voiceover work on it and a really cool soundtrack.

And it'll take you like six or seven minutes and it's fun. It's a cool little story thing with a little bit of a dystopian future twist in it. I highly recommend it. You just got to go check it out. It's at remember spook dot com. Well, I will look at that because I like cool little story things. It reminded me a lot of the crap that we used to make back in the day.

I mean, a lot. And it's all in JavaScript. No flash. Oh, hey. Yay. Oh, use Chrome, by the way. Jason, you finished our final invention, Artificial Intelligence in the End of the Human Era by James Barrett a couple of weeks ago.

And then you waited for me to finish it. I gave up. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. And for one half of the first half I read, all I did was slag off Kurzweil and call him boring. But I made it all the way through Kurzweil's book and I couldn't finish this boring piece of crap.

I see. I didn't find it boring. I found it repetitive and mainly on the point of, OK, AI is going to kill us. We get it. AI is going to kill us. What now? Oh, AI is still going to kill us. Every paragraph started and ended with AI is going to kill us. And somewhere in the little bit, little tiny little bit in the middle, it was there was some meat in between.

The AI is going to kill us bread. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. See, I got this book because James did a podcast for Rob Reed's show after on and he was really good on it. And I really liked his podcast is the book is just, I think, a little bit too long. But he had one really interesting concept that really hooked me and I was hoping that there was going to be more of this stuff in the book and there wasn't.

And this is the concept of everybody goes batshit crazy trying to fix problems that Hollywood invented that don't exist, like the Terminator and things like that. I don't think Hollywood invented gaydar. It just mastered it.

But yeah, it was it was an interesting thought. It's like, don't waste your time trying to fix the Terminator problem because the Terminator problem isn't the actual problem. Look at the actual problems. But it was in granted, that was a very small concept to go and read like a 500 page book on.

But I powered through it. And by the end, I was just like, OK, I get it. Hey, he's going to kill us. How do we fix? Yeah, I should have just called the book that. Well, I mean, he's going to kill us. Yeah. Our final invention at the end of the human era, I think it's pretty close.

But I mean, he is a he is a filmmaker and not a writer. So that also explains some of it. But I mean, I I like him. I just this book is just too many words. It's like it's like, you know, Mozart, too many notes. Cut a few. It'll be perfect. Too many of the same notes. That's the problem.

Now, Andy Weir wrote The Martian. We both love that book and love the movie. He's got a follow up called Artemis. And I do intend to read it. I know that your version of reading is listening. And you'll be happy to note that Rosario Dawson will be narrating it. Not Will Wheaton.

Thank God. Thank God. Although I have never heard her do a book. So hopefully she's good. Well, she'll find out. But, you know, my thought is we need to be worried about Rosario Dawson basically taking over every single sci-fi franchise known to man. So she could be future Will Wheaton for you. Oh, great.

Will 2.0. Good looking. Better looking. That's for sure. No beard.

Security. We're back with Dave Badass Bittner from the Cyber Wire for Security. This week. Well, there's some big news this week. I don't know if you guys have heard. Have you checked your credit score lately?

Equifax is Equifucked. Yes, I have. Apparently, more people got hacked than Facebook thinks they can sell ads to. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, obviously the big news right now is Equifax announced 143 million U.S. consumers have been affected by a breach.

They got names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, credit card numbers, and some driver's license numbers. Amusingly, Equifax is saying, well, they didn't get everything. We didn't get your shoe size. No, you know, they evidently, you know, they didn't get notes about credit disputes and things like that.

But, obviously, this is a treasure trove of information for those who want to set up fake IDs or sell your information. This is a mess. It is. This is big. This is big. I really hope that the guy that stole this used the handle Tyler Durden, because that's about the only thing that would really make my day on this.

Well, I mean, there are a couple of things to think about here. We've already seen a, what we can't verify, but what seems like a credible attempt to basically sell this information back to Equifax. I want to say they're asking for a couple million dollars.

Pay it. Well, yeah, you know, obviously, the thing is, you don't know if it's real or not, but it's a, you know, it looks like it could be. So that may be something that they're pursuing. But, you know, there was an interesting Twitter discussion that we may include the link for.

And it's this notion that, you know, is there any moral standard in the United States anymore? Should a company like Equifax be allowed to stay in business? Right. I would say no.

I hate them already, though. So I would say no. And this is the problem with with the too big to fail stuff. It's normally in the past, something like this would wipe a business out. But they're so big now that they can withstand this sort of stuff. Well, let's also think that, you know, you and I and all of our listeners, we are not Equifax's customers, right?

We're their product. We are their product. That's right. So, you know, they gather up our information and they establish what our credit ratings may be. And that's what they sell is those credit ratings. So it's not like you or I can fire them.

I'd like to. I think we'd all like to. But, you know, we pointed out on the Cyber Wire today that could this be an inflection point where perhaps the entire credit reporting industry needs to be reworked?

You know, how long are we going to go with, you know, Social Security numbers being a source of identification? The problem here with your supposition is you're tempting fate with Betteridge's law of headlines.

But you need to rephrase that as a statement because if you phrase it as a question, the answer is no, then they will remain in business forever. And you need to say that this is the end. This is the turning point. Kill the Social Security number.

Kill these people ruining my life every time I try and go to Target and get a credit card. Jerks. And by the way, Target, you need a little thing that says I've answered this question 400 times. No, I do not want your stupid red card. And every time I have to tell you, no, you make me feel crappy because I can't get one because my credit sucks.

So screw you guys. I'm going to Walmart. Well, to that point, it's been really interesting on Twitter and on social media today, because typically when something like this happens to a large company, there's some sympathy for that large company. People tend to think, oh, gosh, you know, this would be a terrible thing to have happen.

I'm sure that, you know, they obviously didn't want this to happen. But in this case, I think that combination of so many people have been on the losing end of an argument when it comes to their credit ratings and so forth. But also what the, you know, cybersecurity professionals are saying was just they just dropped the ball when it came to maintaining their security to protect this information.

There is a lot of schadenfreude out there of people really feeling like, you know, they had it coming. There is no sympathy for the devil on this one. No, there isn't. And also, interestingly, three of their top executives dumped millions of dollars in stock in between when the breach was discovered and when they notified the rest of the world.

By the way, the breach was discovered back in July. So they took about six weeks to notify people. And, of course, people are saying, what took you so long? And why aren't these people in jail now? And there is absolutely nothing suspicious about them selling $1.8 million worth of stock.

You know, and the firm is saying, of course, that the trio did not know about the intrusion when they sold their stock. And again, you know, just everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

This is being shown as an example of everything not to do when this sort of thing happens to your company. They are on every turn doing just about everything that you if you could make an incorrect choice for how to handle a situation like this.

Along the lines, Equifax is making that choice. I mean, everything from from the stuff about, you know, the stock prices, the the the even things like the the website that's set up to check to see if you've been affected. It's a WordPress site. Oh, God.

So it's also but it's also the the terms and conditions try and trick you into agreeing to arbitration. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So they try to sell you their own security product. Right. Right. So, yes, that is absolutely true. So I was looking into that because there was some speculation that merely looking up to see if you had been affected or not would mean that you would you gave up your right to sue them.

That that seems to not be the case. It seems to be two things that if you choose to sign up for the free credit monitoring, which, by the way, comes from a crediting credit monitoring company that's owned by, wait for it, Equifax. Yeah. Because that's who you want, trusting your credit monitoring.

But if you sign up for that, then you do indeed give up your ability to sue them. However, there is an opt out clause where you can sign up for it and you have to take the effort to go ahead and opt out of automatically being bound to arbitration.

So you have 30 days for that, right? I think that's correct. Yeah, I think it's 30 days. Yeah. So, you know, another step of handling it wrong. OK, well, that was fun. Moving on. Shall we talk about dolphins?

Well, apparently you can if you've got an Alexa or Siri, that's now vulnerable to silent, nefarious commands, a.k.a. the dolphin attack. So good times around since everybody has these now. Ultrasonic frequencies can basically be used to send codes and screw you up pretty bad.

It's basically I think there are 35 different models of voice recognized devices at this point that are vulnerable to this. It's not just Siri and Alexa. It's basically anything that takes voice commands you can do in the ultra high frequency range and trick it into actually doing things.

But you have to be super close. That's the real trick. Well, the crazy thing about this is it's it's just like a point zero two cent piece of electronics that would actually filter frequencies. And they just don't just don't build it into these things.

Just don't. But they did say that there are some devices that use ultrasonic frequencies to to pair up devices or things like that. They use them for some legitimate communications types, things between devices. So which is cool, by the way, except they should they should have a list of commands that you can send over the high frequency instead of everything.

You have a command list in there. Right. Right. And you'd think that, you know, it wouldn't be that big a deal to put into the software that if, you know, basically if anything comes in over 20,000 hertz and there ain't much coming in under that, then ignore that command. But who knows?

Well, you know, the guys that wrote that is like, who the hell is going to figure out that you can send this at 21,000 hertz or whatever? Nobody's going to figure that out. Let's go home, Joe. I'm tired. The thing is, everybody ends up figuring the stuff out at some point because everybody messes around with the technology.

You guys can see where I'm kind of leading us to, right? Especially with this next story that I have in here. Google voice search records and keeps conversations people have around their phones, but the files can be deleted. So Google has basically just been recording everything all the time. And we have a problem with that.

And yeah, this is new how. It's not. Yeah. It's not new. But the cool thing is you can go in and find a lot of this stuff and listen to it or delete it. So that's quite interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's like the web search.

If you turn on saved web search, they'll save everything you ever do. Every click. Every time you look at a chick's butt on the street, that has been categorized by Google because they have a van going by mapping the street at the same time. So you know that's happening. But yes, you can go in and delete that stuff. Or better yet, turn it off from the get-go.

Yep. There's that. And I would like a definition on what actually they mean by delete. Because in general, when Google says you've deleted something, it's not really deleted. Actually, you know what, Brian? That's a really good point. That's something I was thinking about earlier today when I was reading this article, which is with everything being on the cloud, what does deleted really mean?

And how do you, if it's important to you, how do you verify it? Because surely, obviously we know large organizations like Google, like Facebook, any of these Amazon web services, you know, this data is being stored in a distributed kind of way. So it's not just in one place.

It's all over the world. And who knows where it is? So if you hit the delete button, what does that really mean? And how, if you were in a situation where you required the verification that data was deleted, I wonder what is that process?

How does someone like Google prove it to you? They don't. They don't. There are many disclaimers that say that there are multiple layers of backups. This is going to, whatever you do is going to live on a tape drive somewhere in that Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse somewhere for the, till the end of time.

You know, until, until that tape turns to goo, your data is out there because it has been backed up and archived somewhere redundantly several times. So you cannot just, you cannot simply delete Mordor. What does not simply delete Mordor? That's right. Wow.

We have a new meme we need to make. I mean, I just remember, you know, back in the, you know, the good old days, back in the, I don't know, early nineties or so when, you know, hard drives were expensive and relatively, and comparatively small. Uh, I was doing, um, uh, video consulting work, you know, helping people build video editing systems.

And one of my clients was a government agency who had secure areas and they were doing things in the secure space. And so when they needed to, you know, destroy a hard drive, that hard drive got ground up and then incinerated.

Yeah. And, but this was before there was any cloud storage, you know, you could get by having your edit system not connected to the internet at all. Obviously you can't really do that today. Yeah. Yeah. It's over. Forget it. And I mean, I just remember, I mean, when I ran my first servers, you know, backup was every now and again, I drive down to orange County with my side quest drive and plug it into my e-machines and copy off some files.

But nowadays that thing, it's, it's all automized and automated and, uh, you know, backed up everywhere. Okay. We got to move on. Cause we got a big story to cover. And I got one, I got one more before we get there. The FDA has recalled 465,000 pacemakers because of security vulnerabilities.

Yes, your pacemaker could be at risk. Uh, I actually had a friend who's, uh, who took his father to the doctor, uh, just this week and, uh, verified that his father's pacemaker was not indeed one of the ones involved in this.

But, uh, I would imagine a bunch of people are going to be taking trips to their doctors just to be sure. Uh, at least 465,000 of them. And the interesting thing about it is you, they do have a firmware update available and it's non-invasive. It is an over-the-air firmware update.

And as we all know, every time you do an over-the-air firmware update, it never, ever bricks the system, does it? It's kind of a mission critical system, don't you think? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. How do you know if you're, um, I don't know a lot about pacemakers, but how do you know if your pacemaker gets bricked?

Uh, well, it's, it's the last thing that you, it's the last thing you figure out. Well, no, because I think that, because I don't, I mean, isn't it right that, I mean, most pacemakers aren't functioning continuously, don't they? Right, they're assistive, not required. Yeah, they kick in when needed. So if you're someone who's pacemaker only kicks in every now and then, you might not know it's not functioning until, you know, you need it.

Right? You can't do the firmware update at home. You have to go to your doctor to have the firmware update done. And I'm sure that there's a diagnostic that they run after it so it can connect back to the system. This is definitely not something you want to do remotely. Um, and since you do have to do it at your doctor's, just, and here's the, here's the fact entry on the website because I went and checked this out.

I went to their website and see what was, what was happening with this. And the title is, what are the risks associated with getting the pacemaker firmware update? And it says, we are anticipating the update will occur as planned. However, as with any firmware update, there is a very low rate of malfunction resulting from the update.

We encourage you to discuss the risks and benefits of receiving the update with your doctor. They don't say have the paddle standing by, you know, but. Wow. Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing I thought about with this story was imagine what an amazing, um, fake ransomware email you could come up with, with this.

In other words, if you were able to get the database of all the people who have this device, right. And combine that with who their doctor is or, you know, some other, the hospital that they go to, whatever. Send them an email that says, you know, you have two hours from reading this email.

The clock is ticking, you know, if you don't, if you don't send us, you know, this amount of Bitcoin, we are going to shut off your, your pacemaker or we're going to, you know, jack it up and put all the voltage out at once. They only accept grump coin. So yeah, they only accept grump coin. I've got a better one. I've got a better one for you.

All right. So one of the things that this pacemaker does is that it transmits patient data in the clear over the air. So it's got your name and your ID and all that stuff in it. And so what I would do is I would make a receiver. I would stand in the middle of Grand Central Station in New York at rush hour.

And I would find people who are walking by me that I can ping, walk up to them with a little business card that says, I own your pacemaker. Let's go to the ATM. Wow. Jeez, you're an evil fuck. That is evil. Dude, that's an easy one, you know.

And if I was really clever, I'd have a little, one of those little thermal printers next to me that can print on demand. And I would put in his name and his pacemaker ID and hand that to him. And if you're even cleverer, you can Google search or Facebook search him and find his wife and his kids data and say, you don't want to leave them parentless, do you?

You know, there's a lot you could do with that stuff that would be really interesting. I might want to delete this segment, Jason. Maybe a little EKG, you know, printout underneath of it as part of it. You know, pretend like you have access to that as well. You stand next to the ATM and hold out your hand to the ATM. In the other hand, you have a defibrillator and say, choose.

Yeah. Well, you know, if this doesn't work out, you can be a writer for Hollywood or at least one of those police procedural crime shows because this is just that kind of story. I was actually thinking being a criminal, but if you want to go the heart route, jeez. OK, let's get to our let's get to our top segment here because we got.

All right, boys, move the show along. Put on your tinfoil hats and tee it up. What a lovely tinfoil hat you have there. All right. Let me just say at the outset here, Brian, that I am not. Do not lump me in with Jason on this one.

All right. I remain very skeptical. So, Jason, why don't you lead us off since your your real life experience is what triggered us to go down this rat hole. Right. Yes. We'll call it the Bader Meinhof Brian hole. So what happened was for years I have had a GoPro that's been sitting in a box at my parents or my dad's house that I gave to my brother that nobody's ever used.

And we're sitting out on the porch and I'm like, hey, do you still have that GoPro? Because I need to borrow it for a little bit. I need to make a video. And he's like, yeah. And then we get it back and I start talking about mounting hardware, specifically GoPro mounting hardware, because I'm like, hey, I want to get a new mounting bracket for it because the one that I gave you is jacked up and I need to get a new one.

And then later on that evening, I go home and I'm browsing. I think it was Instagram like they have the slidey Amazon ads. And sure enough, in Instagram, there is a block of seven ads, seven or eight ads, however, are many in that slidey block.

They were all just GoPro mounting hardware ads. Now, yes, I understand the Bader Meinhof phenomenon. When you buy a new car, then you see that car everywhere. I have never mentioned GoPro since I gave that to him three years ago.

You know how we talked about that day it just shows up. That does not make sense to me. You know how we talked about A Fish Called Wanda on last week's podcast? Yes. Well, I was disturbed when I found The Fish Called Wanda was on my flight back from Toronto. I was out.

They must be listening to me, Air Canada. Yeah, but I look at all those ads and never once has a GoPro ad come through my feed. That is bullshit. Of course a GoPro ad has come through your feed. Not for mounting brackets. They're one of the biggest advertisers on the internet. It's one of the most prevalent pieces of technology out there.

These were specifically for GoPro mounting brackets. There was not one GoPro camera in there. They were all mounting brackets. So thus beginneth the holy war of trying to replicate this. Now, I tried to replicate it on my phone as many times as I could because I picked a word.

I picked a word that I would never... Say for it, Jason. Baby wipe. Baby wipes. Because I don't buy... I don't say baby wipes anywhere. First, it was Depends. And then it was adult underwear. I tried many things that I don't own and never would try and stay around the house.

Right. The one flaw in my experiment was I was not in the same room as the other three phones that were there because there were two very ancient iPhones there with very old software on them, all running Instagram and Facebook ads. But so I couldn't recreate it.

And I tried on my modern phone with everything turned on. So I'm the crackpot. Get my tinfoil hat. All right. So let's unpack this a little bit here. So after this happened and I saw you shared this story, I believe it was on Facebook.

So I was intrigued by this. And so I started doing a little bit of digging. Actually, we talked about it on the Cyber Wire with Joe Kerrigan, one of our partners from Johns Hopkins University. And he had heard of this happening before. I put the word out to our listeners.

We got one response from a gentleman who said that this indeed has happened to him numerous times. Interestingly, he and his wife speak Arabic around the house and they would see Arabic targeted ads. It's now it's not as if obviously that, you know, the the the advertising systems would have figured out that these folks were in Arabic by any number of various ways to do that.

But more interestingly, you know, I went looking around for this this this this behavior. Phenomenon. Let's call it a phenomenon. Good, good, good. And sure enough, this is a thing in that it is a thing that many, many people believe is happening to them.

I found a Web site that had hundreds of examples of people saying exactly this kind of thing. I talked about this thing that I've never talked about before. And suddenly I start seeing ads for it. So, again, I put the word out. I put it out on my personal Twitter feed.

I put it out on the Cyber Wire's Twitter feed. I said, security professionals. Is this a thing? Now, interestingly, I got no response, which makes me think that because, you know, security professionals are not shy. About telling you if a thing is a thing.

Which makes me think that, no, this is not a thing. There are many, many websites discussing how the Berenstain Bears has opened up a rift in the universe. That's still true. That does not. That's still true. That one I believe, actually.

Yeah. That one is totally true. Yeah. I don't care. That is the Mandela effect. And yes, that is definitely there is a rip in the space time continuum because I had all those books when I was a child. And damn it, they were the Berenstain Bears.

And you'll never convince me otherwise. I just want to state again that my entire point on this, we just did a story about how some people figured out that you could pitch super high pitch things into your Amazon Alexa's and series and screw with them. People figure stuff out.

People pull things apart. People packet trace. If this were actually true, it would be by far the biggest conspiracy slash well-kept secret in the history of the world. Right. There's just no way this is happening.

Well, and that is I think that is the take home point here is that in putting this out to security professionals, you know, if this were a thing, if your phone were somehow exfiltrating this sort of data on a regular basis and it was happening on such a widespread way that people are reporting that it's happening, then surely, surely security professionals would know about it.

Right. And there would be lots of stories about it. And so I think this is probably the old Arthur C. Clarke saying that a high enough level of technology is indistinguishable from magic in that the sophistication of these information gathering algorithms has gotten to the point where it tricks people into thinking that their phones are listening to them when they're not.

Now, does that explain what happened to Jason? No, no, no, of course. And it's never going to be explained. It just is. The algorithms are that good. It's not a crazy leap to to target Jason with camera equipment at all.

Right. It's the one thing that it's just that one thing. I agree. But I agree. It's weird. And I agree. It's it's creepy. I did the same experiment for about a week. Whenever I thought about it, I would start. Just sort of randomly saying for me, I was saying that I was heading to a wedding out of town.

So I was trying to trigger some travel related things that I needed to book a flight to a wedding out of town and I needed to buy a new suit. Because these are all things that I've seen ads for. Right. You know, buy suits for a wedding. And then also the other thing I randomly started saying that I was really in the market to buy some new sneakers, that I needed new athletic shoes, that my shoes were worn out and I needed to buy new shoes.

You guys must have been around the past couple weeks. Oh, yeah. My wife kept looking at me like, are you talking about the shoes again? Yeah. See, I was going with specificity on things that I would never do. Like, you know, like now if I walked around saying, I really want to go to Mumbai, I really, really want to go to Mumbai.

And if I started getting travel tickets, offers to Mumbai, then I would know because never in my home have I ever said, man, I really want to go to Mumbai. Now, again, to reiterate, Jason, did any of this actually happen to you? Did any ad show up at all based on all the weird stuff that you were saying?

No. Okay. No, that's it. I can't prove it. I cannot recreate it. I am conceding. I'm conceding this one. And again, to go with the same point of somebody would have, all the security researchers in the world, somebody would have figured this out. Come at it from the other perspective.

It's impossible to keep a secret. You put two to three people in a room, somebody is going to blab about something. The man hours, the technology involved to build such a system for the amount of money that they would be making, there would have been hundreds of people working on this and not one person has ever said, oh, yeah, I helped build that.

Right. No, no, no. I understand that. Look, I talked to David Teeter about conspiracy theories. He's like, there's no such thing because nobody can keep their fucking mouth shut. We know this. We know this historically. You know, we did land on the moon. That's it. We're good. We did land on the moon because we'd have known if we didn't.

Somebody would have done a book deal that did the setup. Or had too many martinis. All right. So let's come at this the other way then. If we agree that the phones were, let's just, well, let's not all say that we agree. Let's just, for argument's sake, say that we all agree that the phones weren't listening to Jason.

Then what is a plausible explanation for how something so specific as GoPro mounting devices, not GoPros, but mounting devices, came up on his list of ads? Can any of us come up with a reasonable explanation for that coincidence other than it just being a coincidence?

That's basically it. It's a coincidence. That happened to be what was in the ad queue that day. And because he'd had that conversation, he noticed the coincidence and made the connection between them. Exactly. The batter-Meinhof thing that Jason just craps on me for. Yes, I do.

That's all it frickin' is. And I love the fact that we just did, like, 20 minutes plus weeks of research, plus we've been talking about this left, right, and center. We're acting like we're all so concerned about it, yet we're all sitting in rooms that have devices that are actively listening to us.

We're talking into frickin' microphones. That's the thing. It's like, and when I thought about it some more, I'm looking around the room. I'm like, okay, there's an Echo over there. They've got one of those. I see an iPhone 5C, which hasn't been updated since 1982. An iPhone 6, which I know she doesn't.

She barely knows how to turn on, let alone update. But she's running Facebook, which means that's Facebook version 1. That could be listed. You know, I'm just going through the things plus my phone. And God knows what else. The neighbor could have been doing it. They geolocated me based on my position next to the neighbor. You know, I can come up with kind of crazy shit on how to make this stuff work.

But it doesn't mean they have. And we also just talked about a story about Google admitting that they were recording things. And we know that that's not tied to an ad network, because Google ads suck. Next thing you know, you're Chuck from Better Call Saul.

Man. All right. Do we ever have to speak of this again, Jason? Can we put this one to bed? I'm just waiting for it to happen again, because you know it's going to happen again. In a year, he's going to forget about the show. Guys. Guys. I was talking about Depends Underpants, and you won't fucking believe it.

I'm going to Mumbai. That's right. That's right. All right, guys. I'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care. All right. If you find yourself a tad bit bored today, head on over to our show notes and click on the link for who said it, C3PO or Morrissey.

It is hilarious. Oh. Oh. Okay. You want to throw one or two at me here? Oh, well, sure. Okay. Let's do this. I haven't looked at the site yet, so I'm curious. Let's play a game. Let's go. How I dearly wish I was not here.

Morrissey. Correct. I'll have no more adventures. I'm not going that way. C3PO? Correct. Yeah. Oh, this is suicide. There's nowhere to go. Oh, that's got to be Morrissey. I can't see C3PO saying suicide.

That was C3PO. Damn. There is no point in saying this again, but I forgive you. Oh, that's got to be Morrissey. That is Morrissey. Okay. You're doing pretty well. You're about halfway there. Yeah. Yeah. I got three out of four. All right. What do we got up next? Next, we got Walt Disney's vision of future metropolis.

How did it become a quaint symbol of a bygone era? Now, we've talked about, there's one site that delves way deep into Disney, Ephemera, Ephemera, Ephemera, before, but this is actually over on Slate, so this is kind of a more mainstream version, but it's a really long and interesting look into how the dream versus the economic reality actually worked out, and the fact that Tomorrowland has not been kept up to date at all because they don't want to spend any more money, and realistically, Tomorrowland will basically

eventually just disappear into Star Wars land and never be revisited. Ah, that's too bad. Yeah, it's a little sad, but I love Disneyland, man. Tomorrowland, when I was a kid, was the coolest thing ever, but it's a little pathetic and sad if you go these days. Yeah, we never get our Wedway people movers.

No. And Popular Mechanics has a really interesting look at the audio, visual, and everything else involved in the YouTube tour. If you've ever wondered what the hell roadies actually do, this gives you a great run-through of just how much is involved with these gigantic stadium shows.

Basically, there's zero room for error at all, and how they put it all together and keep it running. It's a really cool article. No, I want to check this one out. When we just went to go see Billy Joel at Wrigley Field, and watching those guys work on that stage, that they basically drive in, put up, take down, move along.

It's an incredible operation that these guys have. Oh, yeah. I mean, what basically happens is the band leaves, you leave the show, and the roadies come back out, tear everything down, put it on trucks, get into vans, drive all night long, get to the new venue way before the band has even started to leave the city that they were in, and start setting it up again.

It takes a long time, and it's massively involved. So I do want to give a huge shout-out to everybody I know that does this for a living. So you guys deserve all the kudos you get. And I like the fact that they're kind of shining a light on what's involved here. No, that's really cool.

Go read it. And I ran across something called theuncomfortable.com. I don't know if you had a chance to look at this yet, Jason, but it's pretty awesome. It is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katrina Camprani, I believe is how you pronounce it.

It's hilarious. Let's pull up a few of these. Oh. It's visual, so it's not something... I can't really explain it, but it's pretty good. This is good. This is really good stuff, like a concrete umbrella, you know?

It's just... The uncomfortable wine glass is one of my favorites. I would actually order some of these things. They're pretty good. So go take a look at this. It is fantastic. You can actually buy these? These aren't just visualizations? Some are actual prototypes. So yeah, you can purchase some of them.

I like the chain fork. That's clever. Yeah, it's good stuff. Oh, nice. I found a site. This is an older one that I found on Ars Technica. It was an article on dark patterns that are designed to trick you on the web on, you know, stupid things that we kind of know about, but it's good for people who don't know to get a, you know, just get a re-primer on it.

Things like, you know, uncancellable monthly bills and things like that. 30-day trials that you always forget about, end up paying, and then end up paying for a couple more years. Visual tricks. There's a site called darkpatterns.org, which talks about different websites and calls them out, and the Ars Technica article.

They're both linked in the show notes. It's, if you're not really up to speed on how you're being fooled every day on the internet, this is a good place to start, and it will, it'll keep you busy, it'll keep you thinking next time you go to a, go to a site and you're going to put in your credit card, especially if it's recurring.

Be careful. Moron of the Week! Jason, I know you're not a huge sports ball fan. I've been known to watch a little here and there. You've been known to watch a little? Well, Boston, Boston teams have a long and storied history of cheating.

There's ongoing debates about how often the Patriots cheat and how inflated Tom Brady's balls are and things of that nature, and this time around, it's the Red Sox that have been kind of caught cheating to some degree. The reason we're talking about this is they use your most favorite piece of technology, Jason.

They use an Apple Watch to cheat. Yeah, I saw this, and what they're, I mean, I think the real issue is that they're using binoculars to cheat, or the guy in the outfield that's looking at the signals. The Apple Watch was just a delivery device.

Well, it's a delivery device to also get it into our podcast, so. Yes. I like that. Yes, so somebody, they have somebody sitting out in the outfield. Now, this is nothing new. Teams do this. It always happens, but this is the first time it's ever been done with this level of technology. So they have somebody sitting out in the stands that's basically looking at the signals that the catcher is giving to the pitcher, and then he will relay what pitch it is to somebody of the dugout who had an Apple Watch on, who would then tell teammates on the field about

the pitch that was about to be thrown, and then they could let the batter know. Now, it is impressive because, I mean, some pitchers are very slow, but some pitchers, it's just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. You don't have a lot of time. Yeah. But it's pretty crazy. So I just thought it was hilarious because they used the watch. Yeah, because the rules are you can do that, but you're not allowed to use any augmentation whatsoever.

So if you had somebody with really good eyesight, that'd be fine, and could yell really, really loudly, that's fine, but you're not allowed to use any augmentation. What impresses me is the speed with which he could obviously text, get it to the Apple Watch, and then, because there's a lag there that I think would be longer than anything.

I was wondering about that, because, like, you know, sometimes it takes a little bit for a text message to show up. Or, I mean, it couldn't, it might have been for the pitch after, you know, like, they called the pitch that just came through, and then, so then they can kind of predict what the next pitch is going to be. Maybe, who knows?

I don't know. I don't know how this baseball thing works. But it is a short throw between when the catcher finishes his sign, squares up, and then the pitcher throws. It's like two seconds. Yeah. It can be very quick. They probably were using, like, short codes, like, you know.

One would assume. Yeah. Curveball to the upper right. Maybe go and left a little. That's the poop emoji. And then the eggplant emoji is a split-finger passball. Okay. That's the way it works. Okay. And our next moron is number 45 again.

And this is just why I can't stand him. I know. You know, we're going to get another one-star rating on this one. But come on! All right. All right. So, he's got a tax plan, in theory. We all know that there is actually no plan. But he's going to try to sell something anyways. And he took to Twitter, and he started tweeting one of his favorite talking points, that the United States has the highest taxes in the world.

The real problem with that? We don't have the highest taxes in the world. We're not even close to the highest tax rate in the world. There is no universe in which this could even possibly be considered somewhat true. It is just a flat-out fucking lie.

Yeah. Making shit up. Yep. Yay. And we have a new Patreon subscriber this week, Phil Kegg. Thank you very much, Phil. Yay. We appreciate that. Thank you so much.

We have some people writing us over on Twitter. Ivor Tola sent in, someone singing from Brian's songbook. This is a link over at QZ. Stop pretending. You really know what AI is, and read this instead. We just had this discussion. We agree 100%. Yeah. Next one comes from XSchroederApps.

This might be worth a mention on the next podcast. Bank screws over indie developer. Yeah. HSBC is killing my business. How to plan for your bank screwing up. Right. Well, I mean, you talked last week.

We were talking about how hard it is to start up a business in the U.S. now because banks are really stingy with their business loans these days. I had an issue a couple years back. I had used Union Bank of California for my business for probably the first 10 years I was running it, and we had an established line of credit.

And all of a sudden, they just decided, we're going to call in that line of credit, and we're not giving it to you anymore, and you have to pay it off within a month, or we're just going to start charging you outrageous fees for no reason whatsoever. It was just that they felt that they didn't want to give small business loans anymore. So, yay.

Thanks. I don't like those guys. I'm obviously not with them anymore. I've had an account there for 20 years that I can't cancel. It's like, there's like 20 bucks in there right now, and I couldn't get an ATM card from them because you have to go in to sign for it, and it was a joint partnership, and my partner and I were not speaking to each other anymore.

So, and I couldn't close it without us going in and going hand in hand to close it. It's just the stupidest bank. Yeah. I mean, they're all, it's all just bad. And this is, you know, if you read the Medium article, it's just this nightmare of corporate bullshit doublespeak getting screwed left, right, and center.

So, yay. Awesome. Yay. Fun times. And from 6502chip, after 20 years journeyman contracting, I finally get a job if Puerto Rico survives the Irma hurricane. I'll Patreon you guys. Well, thank you, and I hope that you're nice and safe over there because Irma's a big deal.

Yeah. Yep. Not fun. Not fun times out there. Nope. All right. This next one comes from Nikolai. Dear Grumpy Old Geeks, greetings from Denmark. You asked in episode 225 if you could send a Grumpy Old Geek sticker into space. I wanted to share with you that Copenhagen Suborbitals has a campaign that if you donate money to them, they'll print your picture onto their rocket.

Sounds sexy. What is Copenhagen Suborbitals, you might ask? Well, Copenhagen Suborbitals is a privately owned company whose goal is to send a person into space. When I say almost into space, it's because they haven't quite exited the atmosphere, but they keep getting closer.

And there'll be a link to the website in the show notes. Keep up your good work. I'm always looking forward to Grumpy Old Geeks every Monday. Woo-hoo! Sincerely, Nikolai, the Grumpy Warrior. Thank you. Warrior. Warrior. Next up comes from Ivor Davies. He sent in a link. Hey, guys, I know how you hate to mix technology and politics.

It's not our fault, man. But I came across this article on the current and potential shape of technology's political influence. It turns out that instead of being a bunch of libertarians, Silicon Valley is surprisingly and depressingly, in my opinion, left-wing, nearly goddamn socialist, in fact.

Yay! That's right. The only thing they don't like is government interference in business, kind of an anathema. Anathema. Anathema. I'm sorry. My tongue is not working today. It might be interesting if Zuck manages to run for press one day. No. No. We've seen what having a businessman as president instead of a politician goes.

I don't want another one. Yeah. Talk about somebody who knows how to fudge the numbers. We got Zuck in there. We have seven billion people in my inauguration today. Yeah. Have an advertisement. Have an advertisement.

Have an advertisement. Yeah. Well, I mean, the link is over at New York Times as well. It's titled Silicon Valley's Politics, Liberal with One Big Cception. It's one of my favorite tech writers, Farad Manjou, who writes it. Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising. I mean, that's a bit like saying, hey, anybody in a creative field tends to be liberal.

Well, yeah. All righty. Well, next one we got up here is from Chris Ramessar. Hey, guys. Been listening for a while and really appreciate the show, especially that security, ha, with bad boy Bittner. All right. Just one thing I would like to say. Technically, I'm in the millennial generation.

He's 25, but I've never been that whiny, entitled, self-important type. Instead, I think millennial is a mindset granted more abundant in some generations. One last point. If any of you are in New York, I'd like to buy you a beer. Woo-hoo. Thanks for the great escape every week, guys. Keep on doing your thang.

Thank you. Thank you. And finally, over at iTunes, we got a new five-star rating from Peter At. Yes, a good podcast. I have only heard a few episodes, but this is great. Good mix of news, tips, tricks, and snark. Thank you for making an awesome podcast. Well, you're welcome. You're very welcome.

And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Well, it was a very sad week for me.

I lost a really good friend at the beginning of the week, Mr. Ted Reingold. He was the founder of Catster and Dogster back in the day and one of the greatest people that Silicon Valley has ever known. And you can tell by just the outpouring of love and tears on Twitter and Facebook and anywhere that there was anybody who ever got to know this guy.

He's going to be sorely missed and miss you, bud. Wow, that's sad. Sorry to hear it, man. Thanks. All right. Until next week, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show.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.about. And show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show.226.

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