227: Bots & B.S.

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. Guten Tag, Brian. How are you doing? Ah, sleepy. Been a long week. Long, long week. But, you know, I've heard more podcasts this week talking about what kind of iPhone they're going to get than I ever need to ever again.

But we all know you're going to have, you're going to spend $1,000 on a phone within, I'd say, two months, over or under. What's the, what's the, give me a bet on that. I can't bet against you because you're the one doing it and you'll just like, you'll wait a day longer past the bet point. I'm on Apple, or AT&T Next. I'm not buying an X. I don't need one.

Or 10, or whatever the fuck. We've been doing this show for enough Apple cycles now that I know this is complete and utter bullshit and you will end up one. You will, you will deny that you're going to get one. You're going to deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. And then all of a sudden you're going to have it. So. I'm not going to be able to afford it because I'm going to be wearing my swanky new Apple watch.

Oh God. Now, Brian, I think the time of the lone developer is over finally. Is that that spinoff X-Files show? I thought that was off the air ages ago. Yeah, those guys are gone. That was the lone gunman. Oh, okay. Now, we were the lone developers back in the day.

That's true. We would, you know, from start to finish, people would come to us. We would cut the graphics, make the graphics, make the code, make everything, not get paid. And I think going down the line, you will be seeing some unicorns where it's like one guy or just a few guys making something that gets just a little bit of heat.

But things are becoming just so complex that it takes huge teams to build anything world changing anymore. And it kind of makes me sad because I think the time of what we did is basically over at this point. That's why we're podcasting, Jason.

This is true. This is where one or two people can make a difference. Right. Yeah, sure. I'm going to keep telling myself that. You know, I mean, like you had the lone geniuses out there that are like the linchpins to some of these things. Like you had John Carmack at ID Software, the brains behind Quake and Doom and all that.

But there was still a team around him to build those video games. You and I can't just say, hey, we're going to go out and build an AR app that's going to take over the world. You just can't do it. You need a team of people to do that sort of thing these days. Yeah, there is no lone developer. There's no I have a great idea.

I'm going to go build it myself and release it to the world and see how it goes. That's all gone. Unless you get Flappy Birds guy. Right. So it's just one of those things that, you know, I was thinking about today when I was watching everything that was going on with the Apple keynote. And how many people it takes just to do like the most basic thing anymore.

And a couple other, I forget what I was reading, but just all these teams of coders that are out there now. And a lot of this is around video games. You got to you got to admit, because those things take, you know, millions of man hours to put out even like a basic game. But I don't know. It's just even the most basic stuff now is so complex that this is that time of the stuff that we used to do is just gone.

It's been commoditized. Yeah. It's been Squarespace-ized. That makes me sad. Mm-hmm. What's a young programmer to do? Podcast. Oh, yeah. No, leave that to the old programmers. Yeah, seriously. Stay off my pod. Mm-hmm.

So, Bitcoin. I remain flummoxed. And recent news is doing nothing to change my mind. There's a Bitcoin exchange called BTC China. Obviously, it is Chinese-based. It said on Thursday, it will stop all trading as of September 30th, which has caused a slide in the value of their cryptocurrency.

It's over. China's been huge for cryptocurrency because, obviously, there's crazy laws there that people want to get around. But regulators in the country are basically saying to hell with that, which is what I've been saying the whole time. Countries are not going to be okay with this free-floating currency that they don't get a piece of.

And so, all of a sudden, shockingly, countries are now going, hey, hold on a second. You can't do this. So, China's basically shutting it down. Chinese news outlet, Yekai, reported the country plans to shut down all Bitcoin exchanges by the end of September. Not just that one anymore.

So, this ban, as well as a warning of regulations in other countries, has driven fears of a wider crackdown, prompted a sell-off, and has helped wipe out almost $60 billion worth of value of cryptocurrencies since their record high earlier this month. That's a $60 billion switch in a month.

Well, technically, it's a $0 switch because it doesn't exist. Right. It's priced right now at $37.74. So, it has bounced back quite a bit. But, yeah, the whole damn thing is just a house of cards. There's an article, it was actually this morning, in the New York Times, which, you know, I love opening up the front page of the New York Times and finding articles on Bitcoin.

And this is a story with Jackson Palmer, the guy that made Dogecoin. And he's like, yeah, I made it as a joke. And then all these people jumped on board, and it got to be worth about $400 million. It's down to about $100 million now. But all the scammers came in, the thieves, all the people that were trying to make a quick buck and basically killed the currency for a long time.

And he's saying that that's exactly what's going to happen again with all of these other currencies. So, you know, don't invest. Yeah, this is not for mere mortals. This is for people that have money to burn and reasons to hide money.

And there are, I mean, just the cabals of these rich guys who get together and just move the currency a notch or two and make a fortune off of it. You know, you can't play on that level unless you're coming in with like, you know, anywhere between like a million and $5 million to get in on some of these scams, basically, where it's like, okay, Joe's going to dump this week.

Everybody, you know, prepare to invest when after he dumps, then it'll go back up and then we'll dump. And, you know, it's just, it's a cycle, all insider trading, because there's just, there's no regulation. Oh, regulation. Imagine that. Imagine that. All right. So let's talk about making money the old fashioned way.

We have a bit of good news for the prostitution. That's the oldest. How's that? How's that going for you, Jason? Well, you said making money the oldest way. That's true. The old fashioned way, not the oldest way. That's what I said. Anyways, now, see, I have this horrible, like, visual image of you, like, wearing garters on a street corner right now.

I know what I'm doing for, I know what I'm doing for Halloween. Very disturbing. Anyways, getting back to my point, we finally have some good news for the U.S. economy. After two years of increases, median income for U.S. households is now slightly higher than what the median income was for households in 1999 when the recession hit.

So we finally made up for the recession. According to adjusted for inflation, median household income rose to $59,000 per year, which is up 3.2% from 2015 to 2016, according to the Census Bureau. So it was previously $58,000, so we are making $58,665.

So somebody's gotten about a $600 raise. Yay! That'll do a lot. Anyways, the point being that basically income has now come up and finally, finally gotten over the 1999 recession dip when it hit.

I would like to point out that this is all based on Census Bureau information as of 2016. So quite literally, thank you, Obama. Thank you, Obama. It's funny because yesterday when I was going to Riot Fest, we were talking about what the price of a punk rock show used to be in 1989 versus what that same money would get you nowadays, which led me to find the inflation calculator, which is really cool.

You put in an amount of money, you pick two years, you know, okay, what's it worth here and what's it worth there? And it'll give you the meat or the difference between it. So cute little PHP script. So if you ever need that, you know, bookmark it, throw it in your utilities folder. It will come in handy at some point in a conversation in the back of a moving car.

You know who built that? Who? One dude. One dude. One dude. In the news.

If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know we are not particularly swayed by the big dog and pony show that Apple rolls out once a year, sometimes twice a year. You're going to get that news everywhere else, so we don't give a shit. I will just do my encapsulation, which is done based on Salon's clever caption writers.

Apple's two-hour infomercial, the world's most valuable corporation, reveals new disposable gadgets. Cupertino-based company announces $1,000 piece of metal and glass to replace last year's $700 piece of metal and glass. There you go. That sums it up. As far as I'm concerned, that's all that came out of Apple this week.

All right. Jason will own that $1,000 piece of metal and glass by the end of this month, I'd guess, basically, though. Sorry, I just bought a $3,000 piece of metal and glass from him. I've got no more cash to give. Right. Well, if you go to GOG.com slash donate, I can help Jason out there.

Yeah, if you go to GOG.com slash donate, then you'll be giving somebody else money, because we're at GOG.show. That's right. I keep forgetting that. Online with what we've been talking about for ages over at Wired, there is the fear and loathing on social media article. Now, this is a bit of a twist on it.

In the September issue of Wired, Nick Stockton had a wonderful piece about the new FOMO, the fear of missing out not on your friends' activities, but on news. This has become Twitter, in my opinion. All Twitter is now is just keeping up on the news cycle and slowly driving yourself crazy.

Yeah, which is kind of why I've been backing off Twitter, too. Me, too. I've been staying away from it. So, a very long story about how social media started off as fun and has now been destroyed, thanks to news. Okay, we've just encapsulated the entire article, so now everybody doesn't have to read it. I like that.

We're now the new TLDR. That's right. Next up, over at Recode, they did a breakdown on social media stars and what... I still hate that term. What is social media star? I don't know who any of the fuck these people are. Not a one of them. Yeah, social media star is about as amorphous a term as AI.

Social media star is like the person in the Radio Disney Club that didn't go on to become Justin Timberlake. The one you'll never hear the fuck of from ever again that will never be on anything. They're super popular with 12-year-old girls right now, and they will completely disappear except for maybe two of them.

Anyways, social media influence marketing is a billion-dollar industry. According to estimates from research firm eMarketer at this point, over $570 million was spent on Instagram influencers alone in 2016. Half of them plan to increase their influencer budgets in 2017.

Now, the question is how to distribute these budgets. So, they are now talking about... God, these marketing agency names. Hello Society? Ugh. Said earlier this year that micro-influencers... That would be us, Jason. The council's with less than 30,000 followers, but a loyal following, are the way to go.

That's the most bang for your buck. There are other... Go check out this article if you want a breakdown. It's kind of interesting to see how much people are spending and what the breakdowns are on these influencer levels. If you're interested in it at all, this is a good wrap-up.

I didn't know a lot of this information, so it really kind of brought me up to speed. Well, what I'm going to tell you is almost none of it matters, because there is a massive black market on Instagram verification, which then can get you your 30,000 followers, which will then get you your ad buys. And we've all known forever that you can buy Twitter followers in the millions if you need to.

Yeah. I mean, I can tell you just from running our Instagram account for Grumpy Old Geeks that most of our followers are bots or bullshit. Most of the comments that we get are people trying to promote their bots and bullshit. There's very real little actual engagement.

I mean, I do appreciate the people that are engaged and our fans that are looking at the graphics. I spend minutes, minutes per week getting together for our Instagram updates. But it's definitely, I mean, especially I run a couple other Instagram accounts for actual real celebrities, and 99% of it is bots and bullshit.

We should call the show Bots and Bullshit, except we can't put bullshit in our title. Oh, we can always BS it. Anyway. Yeah, I'm really curious about this and these people being outed, because it's a bunch of rogue Instagram employees, since there is no oversight or, you know, actual verification of the verification inside of Instagram.

Just like Twitter. I mean, that was Twitter. Getting Twitter verification was impossible for years. You had to know somebody who knew somebody, and it still is. It's a black box secret. But the thing about Instagram is these people are bribable. There's nobody at Twitter that you could bribe to get verified, at least as far as I could tell.

And if they were, they're smart enough not to get put in a fucking mashable article. Yes. You know? It's like, wow, you really suck at being a criminal, Instagram millennial people. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, so all of this is, it's smoke and mirrors.

Everybody's scamming everybody else and just trying to get a few bucks out before the, you know, the pyramid collapses. Right. Well, so we had the whole hurricanes happening, Irma in Florida and all that sort of stuff, and it was bad, but not as bad as we thought it might be. And there's a lot of devastation, and there was a lot of stuff torn apart.

But overall, we survived, and we'll move on, and we'll put some money in there. And generally, when a company does something cool and help people out when they're in the path of a disaster, it's a good PR move. Did you hear what happened with Tesla? What has Tesla done now? Well, they decided to help out some, well, one driver in particular helped flee Hurricane Irma by remotely extending the battery's range.

Now, I was not aware of this, and this does upset me. If you purchase a Tesla, you get a 60-kilowatt battery option. You could pay more for the 75 option. Okay. They put the same damn thing in the car. It is electronically limited.

That's it. Ah, so you have to pay to let them overclock your battery. Pretty much. So there was somebody that found that they needed that extra 30 miles of driving range to get out of the path of the hurricane, and they just flipped it on for most of the drivers in Florida.

Well, isn't that special? Isn't that special? So I just, nice, but the fact that they're just electronically limited things, that it's just a couple thousand dollars more to pay, and then all of a sudden you get to use it, that's crazy to me.

I can't imagine having something physical that is being electronically limited that I have to unlock. Well, I can, because remember I was talking about my Synology last week on my security cameras? It's exactly the same thing. Yes. And how does that make you feel, Jason? Ripped off.

Exactly. Absolutely ripped off. That is entirely my point. Yeah. No, rat bastards. This is the first thing that's come up from Tesla that I've actually kind of been like, I don't like that. Well, remember the NTSB report on the one crash with the guy watching the Harry Potter or whatever?

Oh, actually, the Harry Potter was debunked, but... Yes, that wasn't watching Harry Potter, but then he was watching something else, but then he still wasn't paying attention, but who the hell knows what's happening? Yeah. Well, the NTSB came back and said that the Tesla's autopilot UX was a major role in the crash. Okay.

They said it worked as designed, but it was designed to perform limited tasks in a limited range of environments, and this guy basically used it for something that it wasn't supposed to be doing. Did he take it to the limit? Nobody couldn't drive 55.

Okay. I understand their reaction to this, saying that, yes, this shouldn't have been allowed because the use case for the feature was out of scope for what this guy was doing. So the car should have fought back and said, hey, it's been like an hour, dude.

You've done rubbing one out. Can you put your hands back on the wheel? And then, or at least forced him to by slowing down or, God forbid, it just turns itself off in the middle of going 75 miles on the freeway. That's another interesting problem that somebody has to figure out.

It's like, okay, we're going 75, we're in traffic, and nobody's home at the wheel. How do we de-escalate and stop this situation safely for the driver in the Tesla and everybody around them? Because you just don't want to stop the car in the middle of the freeway.

You know, it's an interesting point. And that kind of case scenario is something that people just aren't thinking about as they're building these things. And when we wonder why it's going to take, as we talked about the other week, why self-driving cars and autonomous cars are not going to be on the streets imminently, it's because of things like this.

This Tesla crash is, what, two, three years now, the NTSB looking into it, and they're still not sure what's going on. And all of a sudden, what we're realizing is, as software developers, we don't code for every possible scenario. It's a trial and error.

It's beta versions. That's why we rule out version two, version three, version four, version five. Nobody's built one of these cars thinking, what if the dude dies behind the wheel? We have to allow for the car to figure that out, or at least figure out that the driver has not interacted with the car for 20 minutes.

So now, what do we do? What do we tell the car to do? We can't just have it stop. We have to make it move over to the side. What if they're at a stop sign? What if the car is... There's so many scenarios. I guarantee there are people locked in rooms thinking about this stuff. Because I'm not that smart. Apparently not.

I'm thinking, well, they have to take time to build it. I mean, we just haven't seen the end of product yet. You know? That's, well, again, that being my point is why it's not going to be happening anytime soon. Right. And I think a lot of this will be mitigated once they do get vehicle-to-vehicle communication.

You know? If they can get off their ass and get that 20-year-old standard up to date for car-to-car communication, then you can say, hey, my car's out of control, or I have no driver. I need to exit to the emergency lane. Make a hole. Make a hole. There is only one way that will ever happen.

With multiple developers and different technologies and different companies and competition between them, the only way that happens is government regulation. Yeah, well, I mean, they're working on it. We'll get there. But, yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's just not... It's no time soon. I agree.

Have you bought any Facebook ads recently? Not since I bought some Grumpy Old Geeks ads a while ago. Oh, yeah. I forgot to ask you how that went. I can guess. Yeah. Not so well. Let's just say underperformed. Yeah. I continue to purchase Facebook ads over my protests for certain clients because they say they want them, and I keep telling them that it's not useful.

But I haven't drilled down far enough, as ProPublica apparently did, to find some of the more specific targeting. I never get this deep, but apparently you could target people that have expressed interest in topics such as Jew hater, or how to burn Jews, or the history of why Jews ruined the world.

So this is real. ProPublica was able to do this. They purchased three ads or promoted posts that targeted those users. Now, in Facebook's defense, everything is automated because we don't want to pay for things. So this is all algorithmically based. It finds popular news stories and popular items that are being shared in the system, and then it creates them as targeted areas.

Yeah. I want to go play with this keyword targeting again, because I bet we could have some fun with it. Well, Slate went in and tried it as well, because after this broke, Facebook removed all the Jew-hating ones, explained that they had been generated algorithmically, and added that it's going to explore ways and quickly implement them to prevent similar offensive ad targeting categories from appearing.

So Slate tried it again and was able to target kill Muslim radicals and Ku Klux Klan members. I want to go in and find people who have a healthy addiction with Mark Zuckerberg and are like, you know, so I'm going to target the keyword stalking Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm just going to sell these people binoculars and maps to Starr's homes.

Nice. Probably work. Yeah. I'm thinking that might work. And it's a little less. I'm not going to go down the kill Muslim radicals plan or send guns to people who follow Zuckerberg. No. I think a pair of binoculars would be just a nice way to go, and that way they can hang around his house, and he can, you know, just come out and wave to them in the morning.

It's like, hello, stalker. I think that's a good choice, Jason, and it's a marked improvement from last week's scam involving basically trying to kill people with pacemakers. Hey, man, I just, what are you going to do with a pacemaker gag? There's really not much you can do with that one. Okay.

Oh, man. So Facebook is testing a snooze button. Please, please roll it out for me. It's, I mean, it's time, guys. It's time. Yes, it is. It's been in every other app for Twitter or any other, you know, thing that has an API, but not Facebook, because they're in the walled garden, and we're not going to let you play with your thing.

Well, that's a different thing. No, it's time. It is honestly time. I guess you should explain what it is. It's a button that basically lets you view a person or a company or a page or a group for 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days. This is awesome.

I'm very much looking forward to this. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I thought the snooze button was, you know, just out there that everybody would know what I meant. My bad. I forgot to explain. It's all right. There is a bit of information in the news this week that I'm very happy about. It's almost as if somebody listened to us.

What do we keep screaming about, Jason, when people decide they want to go public with a really stupid, very small business idea? Don't. Don't do that. Sell. That's about it. Don't. Well, a company called Bonobos. I don't really know what the hell they are. It's a yuppie men's clothing brand. I have some Bonobos.

They're actually really good clothes. Well, you can now go to your local Walmart to find it because they sold for $310 million to Walmart instead of going public. Because, as he says, it would be too damn hard to go public. Yeah. Which is what we see a bunch of these stupid companies doing, going public and then failing miserably because it's not easy.

And so they go for what they think is going to be the big cash grab instead of the much easier, smaller cash grab. Yeah. No, this is good. This is actually going to up Walmart's clothes game for sure because Bonobos is a pretty good brand. All right. Well. I know I've got some shirts around here that I got from them. And they were a sponsor on some show I worked on, and I got some free stuff.

And it's high-quality stuff. There you go. And they did the smart thing. They decided not to take it public, go for it themselves, which would have meant, especially as a retail company right now where you're fighting against Amazon, what are you going to do? You don't even have any actual brick and mortar.

You're going to have to do that. You're going to need a physical retail footprint. You're going to have to do all this sort of stuff. So he just went, to hell with it. I'm just going to sell to somebody that's already doing stuff. Yeah, it'll be interesting how this stuff kind of plays out. All of these internet clothing companies, it's like they're so spread out now, and there's so many of them.

You've got your 5-4 clubs. You've got your Roan. You've got all your men's boxes here and there. There's just so many of them. So much of it. That's subscription-based bullshit, which I can't stand. I subscribed to 5-4 club for like six or seven months, and I got a lot of good clothes out of it.

But then it just got to be too much, and I'm like, oh, I can't take this anymore. There are so many faux leather jackets that I need right now. Well, the idea, that always drove me crazy. The idea that a guy, like a guy's guy, a dude, you're just your standard, typical dude, maybe buys new clothes once a year.

And the idea that you're getting 12 shipments a year, it's like, are you kidding me? No, I've got a ton of stuff in my closet that I've never worn. Well, honestly, I got a little too big for it, so someday when I get skinny again. I mean, it's definitely the Columbia Radio Club theory, so we're just going to keep sending you shit, and you're going to forget to return it, so we get to charge you.

The only one that I stand by is MeUndies. That is the best subscription program on the planet, because I've got a stack of them, but then I can throw them away, because I know I've got two more coming next month if they get old and ratty. But anyway, my point about this, instead of giving free ads to all the people who haven't advertised on our show, is there should be a blanket or an umbrella company that just goes out and buys up all these things, puts them under one roof.

And then just keeps them all in business, because piecemeal like this, all of these guys are going to get picked off slowly and painfully over time, because there's too much competition. So if there's somebody out there with, you know, I don't know, enough money to buy a newspaper and already taking over the world, who can buy a lot of clothing items and slap his own label on it, maybe that's the way to go.

Bezos. Right. Well, do you know the newest area that is now up and ripe for disruption, Jason? Yes, I do. I want you to tell me about this one so I can go in the closet and find a baseball bat and go take a road trip.

What I like about this one is I do feel it's a turning point. I feel the world has finally decided. Enough is enough. Enough is enough. We do not need to put out the mom and pop liquor stores or corner shops or bodegas, as they're known. Now, I grew up in Orange County and then Southern California and Los Angeles in my life.

And ever since I stopped smoking, I haven't been to what we call liquor stores here. I just don't. But this is a way of life in many parts of the world, particularly New York City, which is where they took their name from, the bodega. It's a tech startup that basically wants to put automated vending machines for your sundries, basically, on the corners and, you know, in areas of public transport.

So we can just put out all the little mom and pop tiny little liquor stores that are everywhere. Yeah. Here's the first problem. They don't have booze. That's 90 percent of the business of those places is cigarettes and booze. Right. And actually, that's all I got.

They don't have booze. They're screwed. You know, yeah, granted, I can go pick up a couple, you know, bricks of ramen and the ladies can get some tampons and facial cream and guys can, you know, just foot powder or whatever the hell they need. But without booze, there's just it's useless.

Well, for some reason, though, this one really stuck struck a chord with people. And there is outrage outrage on the Internet about this company. Oh, they poked the tiger on this one because I mean, I as soon as I read it, I'm just like, fuck these guys. Fuck them in their eye holes because I don't mess with the bodegas, man.

That was one of those. That's one of those cultural things. Every place I moved, I've always known my local corner store guys. And there's a lot to that. And that is part of the big problem. And yes, I am so happy to see this backlash. And to be honest, I think this isn't anywhere near as bad as Juicero was.

That was like a $700. Fuck you. We're going to warm a bag of shit that you have to buy from us and squirt it out for 700 bucks. Fuck you. This isn't anywhere near as bad. But this does feel like that turning point of enough is fucking enough. We don't need an app for everything.

We need to talk to people. There's nothing bad with us. We're tired of putting people out of business. All this is going to do is get a whole bunch of mom and pop shops shut down. Fuck you guys. Yeah. Enough. You know, go try and cure cancer. Don't just put shit in a box and call it disruption.

I'm tired of this disruption stuff. It's just annoying. So we've got a couple different links in our show notes. It's covered pretty well online at this point. People are freaking out. I'm assuming this is just not going to happen at this point. The article that I really enjoyed, which is only tangentially connected, is a slow friendship in the express checkout over at Slate, which talks about, especially for older people, what it means to have these tiny social engagements that aren't really friendships at all.

It's just somewhere to stop at regularly because you have to pick things up and the little tiny engagements that kind of make people's day and which they want to get rid of. So fuck them. Yeah, seriously. I can go back to any of the bodegas that I used to go to.

And if the people are still there, we see each other. We give each other hugs and just catch up and see how things have been going. And I've got those places all around the country because I move so much. And I was about to say, I don't really have it here in L.A., but there is a store that I stopped into all the time in Toronto. And every time I'm back there, I see the guy and I say, hey, he asked me how I'm doing when I'm coming back, blah, blah, blah.

That stuff matters. Yeah. I mean, even there was one I lived in a place in Malibu Canyon for like six months and there was nobody out there. I mean, we're in the middle of nowhere and there's just one little store and these like couple brothers that ran it. And before I left L.A., I just decided I'm like, hey, I'm going to go see if those guys are still there.

And sure enough, they were still there. And I got to catch up with them for a while. And it was great. You know, it's like just those weird little relationships that last the last over time that you just are not going to get from a goddamn box with a credit card. Well, once they build in the A.I. and have that as part of their little bodega, you just talk to Hal.

So on the disruption that we do need, an ex-Tesla engineer has created an FDA compliant cure for hangovers. Yeah, I read this. Sounds interesting. Where do I get some? Yeah, seriously. That's it. As soon as this hits the market, I'm sure we will have product reviews.

So we'll see. Yes. Apps and doodads. Floating video windows must die. Die, die, die. I don't know who came up with this. I get it if you're on some, like, crappy website that it just needs to be sticky as much as possible so they can bullshit their ad counts and all the things that we talk about, about statistics being completely and utterly bullshit on the internet.

I get that. Facebook? Come on. Yeah. If I start a little video, like, say, somebody's posted one of those funky little cooking ones where they just show the hands and all the ingredients go in and it's all time-lapse and everything, and it's really super interesting for about five seconds, and I start to scroll down the page, obviously, I'm fucking done seeing the video.

You don't need to pop it over into the fucking corner so it keeps going. I can't figure out how to shut it down. I'm halfway down the page already. I've started another video. There are four fucking five, 25 videos across. Ah, it's driving me crazy. No, Brian, you cannot escape. Well, you can.

I've got some links in the show notes from Adblock, actually. Quite helpful. How to stop autoplaying videos. How to basically stop autoplaying videos both on Facebook and in general for multiple browsers, so whatever version that you're using. If you want to stop this scourge upon mankind, I urge you to go check out the links.

Yeah, CNET's really bad with that, too. Yes. They're really bad. Fortunately, coming for Chrome, in version 63 and 64, there's a lot of updates on autoplaying ads. Safari's working on it, too, but let's be honest. Who uses Safari? And they're going to be knocking back all of the autoplays, and especially they're going to be muting websites with autoplay.

Which, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's about time. We've only been saying this since the first day that you could actually play audio on a webpage. Thomas fucking Dolby in his plugins back in the day. It was like, we need music on the web, and everybody's like, no, we don't.

No, we do not. Nobody wants that. Sorry, Thomas. We're blinding you with common sense. Nobody wants that. Until Myspace came along, and then you could pirate your top five songs and put them up there. Okay. Well, yes. Soon we'll have a better web by having less of the things that we have worked so hard to get.

Yeah. And speaking of music, I've had my AirPods for, what, a month now? Mm-hmm. And I wake up, and I go out on my bike ride, and my left AirPod has stopped working. Here's a question. Does it stop in the middle of playing, or does it stop before you put it in?

No, it is done before I put it in. Okay. So, of course, we now live in a world where there are, you know, there's no manuals. Yeah. There's no, there's not even manuals online anymore. There's no facts. There's no troubleshooting guides published by anyone. No, they rely on the wisdom of the crowd, a.k.a.

the users. So, we have to be the ones that build these things. So, you have to Google, you have to sift through the poor writing, you have to figure out the ones that actually have a solution, as opposed to, hey, dipshit, did you actually look through the forums first to find the ones that have the solutions? So, it takes 35 minutes instead of two minutes to find the problem.

I will save anybody out there that has this problem right now. You basically forget your AirPods on your device, and then you hold down the damn button, and you reboot the fucking things. And then it will come back. Now, the problem is, worked fine for two days, and then the right one went out.

So, now I'm starting to think I've got a bum pair. Now, it's fine. I can get them back working again, but I don't want to keep having to do this. Yeah, I've had the problem where one craps out on me, but it was like a connection issue. So, I just take them out, put them back in the case. Not enough for me.

I had to actually physically reboot them. Well, here's the one trick. So, I put them back in the case, open up the phone, then flip open the top of the case, wait for it to show the battery connection on the phone. Then I can take them back out, and they both work. All right.

Well, I'll try the simpler version next time, but it's still stupid. Yeah, try that before you repair. Right. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass, but you're not alone. I've had that happen, too. And speaking of a pain in the ass, there's a new version of iTunes. This sucks.

Trent's been hard at work. Oh, he must have left work early, because I saw him last night singing his little heart out. Well, that might explain the problem, then. So, there's a few changes. If you want to work with the apps on your phone, you'll have to re-download the apps directly to the device. You can't manage them in iTunes anymore.

iTunes U has been moved to the podcast section. Internet radio stations have moved to the sidebar. Ringtones, if you're still stupidly doing those, you've got to go directly to your device before. Again, like with apps, you can no longer manage that through iTunes. All books are now managed in iBooks for iOS, so they have been separated from iTunes, which I'm down with that one on.

I'm fine with that. And guess what? They've brought Ping back. Well, not really Ping. But they've got social sharing, so discover music with your friends. Members can create profiles and follow each other to see music they are listening to and any playlists that they've shared. Whee! I should have walked up to the stage last night and pushed Trent off, so he landed on his damn head.

Because I use the app section in iTunes with my phone all the time, because that's the only way you can manage some of the apps, to get files on and off. It's also the only way to find out when you've accidentally deleted an app what app it was quickly and easily. Oh, it's such, it's so stupid.

I mean, there's so many things that they could take out of iTunes that would make it better, like Shuffle. I feel like we've been spending 10 years talking about how iTunes is stupid. There's still no valid option otherwise. This is all we've got. Well, see, now that they're decoupling the iPhone from iTunes and just making it a player, now this is ripe for disruption.

Somebody get out there and go find the old copy of Winamp and rewrite it so we can use it again. Because iTunes is now utterly useless for the desktop for phone management, which is what people have to use it for. Yeah, I agree. They're just pulling everything to the phone, which is just dumb.

Yeah. Well, let's cast back our minds to back when technology worked. I'll just quickly mention this. This is a great link over at Slate again. They found the original how to use and what is Windows 95 video starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.

I remember that. They have been around that long, people. I remember that video. That was classic. It is actually quite fun to watch again, if only for the fact that this is actually, it's great because back in 1995, they were really introducing people to stuff that is just part of everybody's day to day existence now, explaining what the web is, explaining what the Internet is.

People were using modems over their home phone lines. The average email user sent three messages and received five each day. I get that in spam every five minutes. So it's fucking fun. So there you go. It's more enjoyable than iTunes is ever.

And more enjoyable than reruns of Friends. That's right. I've picked up a couple of things from Amazon this week, which I will put in our show notes. They are all following the trend of incredibly long names. I'll just read the first one for fun. Car phone mount. H-C-R-E-T two-pack air vent magnetic universal car mount holder for cell phones and mini tablets with fast, swift snap technology, meaning it snaps onto things.

Okay. I'm not sure that's great technology. My wife is getting on my case because we would, when we drive down to like see my parents or whatever, I generally just have my phone. She'll be sitting in the backseat with the kiddo because he's still pretty young and it's a longer drive. I'll generally just have the phone in my lap. There's a certain band he likes that calms him down if he's starting to freak out.

So I load up Spotify and start playing it and she gets angry because one hand is off the wheel. So she's been on my case to get these for a while. These are fantastic. They're cheap. They work great. No complaints whatsoever. Super easy. And when you don't have your phone up there, it's very slim line.

You don't have some crazy thing glued onto your windscreen and some gigantic shock mount. It's quick and easy. It's nice. But you're covering your vent, so you do lose a vent. It's so small. And if you put it to the side of the vent, so the phone's only covering like half of it, you're still getting a lot of airflow.

Like I wouldn't put it up there on a hundred degree day, but on a typical day, it's fine. And the plus bonus is when you take your phone off and put it in your pocket, it chills your thigh. I was going to say, it will chill it out, especially if you're using Waze, which has a tendency to melt your phone. Yes, it actually is helpful for that.

I also picked up a few other things. I ended up discovering this company called Zero Grid. They've got an electronics travel organizer, which I'm going to use next time I go to Toronto. It will be great for all the stuff I have to take with me to do with the podcasting, except for the mic and the mic stand.

But all the assorted cables and whatnot, it's a groovy little and well thought out container for that. I found that because I needed to get something for my growing family, all three of us now, with multiple passports and multiple Nexus cards.

We wanted one little case where we could carry everything for all of us every time we travel. Zero Grid has a travel wallet and family passport holder with RFID blocking. It's a good document organizer case. It's perfect for all of our needs and all three of us. So I picked that up, and that's when I ended up discovering the electronics organizer as well.

Very happy with both of these things. If you're in the market for any of these, I highly recommend them. Cool. Yeah, I bought one of the cord organizers from Amazon Basics, and it's crap. It has a lot of cool little holders and slots and everything that almost fit everything I have, but actually fit nothing.

Well, I mean, these are pretty well documented on Amazon, or you can go to the Zero Grid site itself, so you can spend a few minutes making sure that it's going to meet your needs. But I'm very happy with these. Well, cool. Yep. And then two fun things that you can pick up. I've always been a big fan of Louis Black in his Back in Black segment over on The Daily Show.

He's a really funny, very angry comedian. He has marketed himself a magic eight ball, basically. Nice. It is funny. It's perfect for him. Will my child grow up to be a responsible adult and care for me when I get old? You are screwed. Will my health improve if I switch from moo cow fuck milk to soy juice?

How the fuck would I know? Should I have spent that year in college? Abso-fucking-lutely. Cool. So if you need something for your desk, this is a good one. But it doesn't, like, scream at you, does it? No, no, no, no. It's old school. It's no audio, sadly.

There is a market for that. He should do that. He can record himself doing all that sort of stuff. Yep. And in something I will not purchase, but I had to put it in here anyways, just when you thought every possible kind of Star Wars merchandise had already been made, make room for the Darth Vader shower head. This is so funny.

For a measly $30, you can bring the Sith Lord into your daily shower routine. The Darth Vader shower head, along with an R2-D2 alternative, are currently being sold at Bed Bath & Beyond, purely worth it only for the headlines, shower on Darth Vader's dark tears. I kind of want one, just because I want Darth Vader crying on me.

No hot water. If only it had the sound as well. All right. In my weekend shit that I bought on Amazon, they were running specials on the Amazon Fire tablets, seven. So it was like $35.

I'm like, eh, $35 for an internet-enabled tablet. You cannot go wrong with that. So I picked one up. The next day, also on sale, was the Fire HD 8 tablet. That's proving you could have gone wrong with that purchase.

So now I have a 7 and an 8, but both of them I got for the total of under $100, which is amazing for the quality of the devices. Quick question, though. They're good. Did you need them? Well, I needed one of them to test because I got some Android apps that I need to load from the store for a client.

So yes, I needed one of them. I didn't need two of them. And here's the thing. I was hoping that I could just take it and put it back in the box after I was done testing and give it to somebody for a birthday or Christmas gift or something. Nope. Amazon has decided to sell these things basically in an envelope.

And as soon as it's got a tearaway thing at the top, once you open it, it's done. There's no repacking it. That's what you get for $35, buddy. Yeah. Seriously. But I'm amazed at the quality of these things for the price. They're not bad.

The HD 8 is actually a really good little toy. And the 7's fine, too. So it's like getting an iPad mini, which I can't justify spending on because they're discontinuing them and they're way overpriced. But for $35 for basically what's an iPad mini, it's not bad at all.

Look, I got to be honest. I love my iPad mini, but I'm not going to pay those prices for it when it's time for me to upgrade. I might get one of these. Dude, and they're plastic, so they're light. I basically just use my iPad mini as a fucking Kindle app anyways. Exactly.

So this comes... And what's really nice about them is when they ship them to you from Amazon, your account's already loaded. Oh, yeah. I noticed that when I got the fire stick when I did my Kodi experiment. Yeah, I just opened it up and was like, hi, Jason. I'm like, sweet. And I went to the Kindle app and I downloaded the books that I was in the middle of.

And then I can just go to Amazon Prime Video and play stuff on it from wherever I'm at. I'm telling you, it's cheap as dirt and not bad. Amazon, please note, you need to have a I'm purchasing this as a gift option because there are people that I would say send a fire stick to, but I don't want them to have access to my account.

You sure you can't do that? I'm not positive. I don't know. Okay. Because that seems like they seem smart enough to figure that one out. Anyway, next thing I bought, I bought a Seagate 8 terabyte hard drive. It's an external because the workflow with the Synology isn't what I need it to be just for speed on something.

So I got this 8 terabyte to be a bridge hard drive. So like the, it'll sync with the Seagate. So I'll have double, like I'll have a live copy of stuff. It'll be backed up to the Synology, you know, more nerdy stuff. Here's the, here's the thing. This is why I got this 8 terabyte USB drive.

Hey, it's got, it's a hub too. It's got two ports on the front. It was under $200. As I'm looking at it right now, I can get it today with free same day shipping. I got it same day shipping too. Same day. For $179.99. Yep. Jason, an 8 terabyte drive back when you and I first even met each other.

Didn't exist. Not, not, not when we started with computers, but when you and I met each other working in the internet, an 8 terabyte drive would have been $1 billion. Yeah, because they just didn't exist. We were, we were using zip drives and SyQuest drives that were 40 megabytes or the zip drive like went up to 120 megabytes when they were at their peak.

But yeah, 8 terabytes. Now I can get it for less than the cost of just about anything and have it delivered to me same day. Uh-huh. What a world we're living in. I know. So, and it's, I love it. I moved all my photography over to it and now I have 6, 6.66 terabytes available.

So I'm tempted to just never use it again and just keep it that way. The drive of Satan. And it is black. Anyway, uh, one of the, one of the issues I was having with the Synology is I can't run Lightroom catalogs on a network drive. So I need a local drive. So I got this thing.

I get it set up and there's a, there's a bug that's not really a bug, but there's a thing that you will notice when you get a new USB drive for Macs. Sometimes it says this, this drive does not support adding things to the trash. You must, uh, it will, it will completely delete.

Like, and I find that when you, when you're trying to delete something from an app, when for me, in my case, it's Lightroom. So I found a workaround for it. And what it is, is when you first set up a USB drive on a Mac, it doesn't have a trash folder. So all you have to do to create the trash folder is just make a folder or make a file and just hit command, delete, move it to the trash, empty the trash.

And then that will force OS 10 to recognize that that drive can then use the trash. Cause the dot trash file is then there's a dot trash folder is created and boom. Moving on. Bombs your uncle. I'm just telling you this, you're going to buy it. You're going to go out and buy an eight terabyte drive and you're going to wonder why this shit didn't work.

And then you're going to be like bitching next week. There's no manual. And I just told you. I got some caffeine beaker mugs because one of the things that I have to do in the morning is measure a bunch of water and coffee when I'm making my stuff. And I figured, ah, I'm going to get some mugs that actually have measurements on them.

Except the problem is these are cheap ass mugs and the measurements don't work. They're completely off. You had one job. That's, that seems stupid. Yeah. Yeah. So don't buy those if you're ever going to get it. I will skip that then. Yeah. And finally, I picked up zombie highway two for my iPad a couple of weeks ago.

I was a year and a half late to this one. I've been waiting for it and I forgot to go look for it. It's one of my favorite zombie highway was a great game. Zombie highway two, also a great game plays pretty well on the fire tablets as well. So if you're a zombie killing fan, go out and check out zombie highway two.

Okay.

Media candy. So I put this here in media candy because it is meteorific. So I've been at Riot Fest all day yesterday, but I started Thursday night when I went to go see Don't Break Down, the Jawbreaker film. Okay. I'm usually not a big, you know, music movie fan, but it's Jawbreaker, one of my favorite bands of all time.

So I had to go check it out. Didn't realize it was all 10 years old, 10 year old footage, like found footage. Yeah, it was, it was interesting. Good story. Kind of meh because it's all 10 years old, at least plus the backstory. And then the band came out for a Q&A after, and it was tense.

You can kind of tell they still don't like each other. So they're probably not going to be playing too many shows after this Riot Fest show. I think, I think they're going to figure out that this is a cash cow for them. And probably. It's amazing how well you can get along when you're paying your mortgage. Yeah.

Okay. We can afford separate tour buses now. Okay. Oh God. That's, that's been a lifesaver for many bands. I know. Yep. And so, yeah, I saw a ton of bands yesterday. New Order was one where I was thinking of you when I saw them. Man, they were good. Yeah. I just feel like I've seen them enough and Peter Hook isn't playing with them anymore.

The original bass player, founder, also a member of Joy Division. And so for me, I mean, I'm glad I look, you're doing the grand tour. You are seeing every fucking band you should have seen 20 years ago. So good on you. Yeah. I mean, let's see. The day started with X and the Buzzcocks. Buzzcocks I've seen before.

I've never seen X. Man, they exhumed the bodies of X for that show. Yeah. Death from Above, which was like a two-person kiddie band that the kids like nowadays. We're pretty damn good. I got to say. And it's a Ministry, New Order, Nine Inch Nails, all in one day.

Exhausting. Now, I just have to mention this because I'd never seen Nine Inch Nails and it sounded amazing. But Trent is sitting there screaming and yeah, yeah. And then he dashes back from the microphone, goes out of view for me. Then he comes running back up, stops and whips up a tambourine and then starts shaking it and dancing.

And I'm like, is that his power tambourine? It was so weird. Every time he hits it, Jason, a feature comes out of iTunes. Yeah. Every time Trent gets his tambourine, a feature dies. Boom. Oh, poor thing.

Oh, man. Yeah. So enough of the Riot Fest. I'm going back tomorrow. But that's why my voice is trashed because too many damn pot smokers and smokers in general. I'm around all day and I can't speak. Good news. John Oliver's last week tonight renewed for another three seasons at 30 episodes a season.

So hardly shocking there. No, he's he's doing he's doing good over there. They need to change it up a bit because it's getting a little too formulaic. And some weeks it's pretty damn boring. But I think see news burnout on social media. I think that's affecting shows like this as well.

Yeah. Everybody's just tired. Yep. JJ Abrams is coming back to co-write and direct the final Star Wars episode because they can't seem to get anybody else in there. They trust enough to do it. So, yeah. Look, hey, I agree with this 100 percent. He took it over. He wanted the reins.

Finish it up, bitch. Yeah. Which which also makes me a little scared on how this new movie is going to be if there's like, oh, let's just come on back, JJ. You know, was it not good enough for their standards? We'll see. Now, let's talk about the Orville.

Did you watch it yet? I know because there's no way this could be good. And I figured you would watch it and then I wouldn't have to. Yeah. OK, perfect. Awesome. I love it when a plan comes together. Yeah. It was I put it on.

I watched the first 35 seconds and I was like, this is the fucking stupidest thing I've ever seen. It it makes no sense. It's so all over the place. Yeah, it really. I mean, it's the first episode, so they might find their grounding. But I was like, yeah, you know, I this has been done before.

It's called Galaxy Quest. Put a quarter. That was actually funny. Yeah. That's a classic to do it again. We don't need a show. We don't need a regular series. Look, I dig. I get the fact that Seth MacFarlane has achieved enough, made enough money, proved to networks that he is a bona fide, serious genius.

So, yeah, you know what? You do get to do whatever the fuck you want. Just don't make us watch it all. Yeah, I'll watch another like I'll give it three episodes to see if they find their legs. But it was just hmm. It's like seven different shows and it doesn't know what it is. Right.

But after that, I went and I still have never seen an episode of Family Guy. You are so missing out. That's what I've heard. And I think I'm going to have to go back and watch it because I found a live uncensored table read where they got up live and did an episode of the show. Yeah, I've seen those.

Ah, so good. So good. It's Jason. Start with the start with the ones where they make the kind of mini movies that they did to make fun of Star Wars. They did. They did all first of the first three movies. Watch those. That'll get you into Family Guy, I think. Okay. Yeah, because I mean, I've been just doing all this voice stuff now and then I want to see what what it's like in like one of these table reads and I just happened to cross it and I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm just going to go.

I'm going to dive into Family Guy as soon as soon as winter comes. Right. And I think what what the Orville is suffering from is bad timing. Galaxy Quest came at a period of time where there was no new Star Trek. There was no Star Wars going on. There was a dearth of like mass popular level science fiction pre Battlestar Galactica.

It was a great time to just come in and and people sci-fi fans were hungry for anything sci-fi and you could poke fun at it and it was well outside of the fact that it was just good unlike the Orville. It was just a good timing for it right now. We're in the middle of like Star Trek craziness Star Wars craziness.

There is sci-fi everywhere. We're beating beaten over the head with it, which you could make an argument. Okay, so skewer it. But apparently the Orville is not doing that very well. Anyways, point being Star Trek Discovery next weekend. We finally get it. It's been delayed almost a year.

The first episode of the series airs next Sunday, September 24th at 830, 730 Central and will be on regular CBS television network. So you'll not have to go to Sweden or, you know, pay up for the CBS all access or pirate the CBS all access.

Whatever the hell you're planning on doing to watch Star Trek Discovery, you don't have to. We get the first episode free to see if it sucks or not. Well, that's good. And if you do have access, you can watch the second episode right after it. Exactly. So and then following that, it will only be on CBS all access. So I will probably be sucking it up and buying that.

And of course, you know, the free package that they gave us almost a year ago when we thought Star Trek Discovery was coming has now expired. So I can't use that anymore. And Gizmodo has an interesting article. If you are because the Star Trek universe, I did not know this. Star Trek Discovery was supposed to be an anthology show that was going to take fans from pre Kirk Federation into the future that they have not even covered yet.

It was going to bounce all over the place and just tell random different stories. Oh, that would have been cool as shit. Yeah, but they are not doing that now. Discovery is still is pre Kirk, pre any movies, pre enterprise by 10 years, I believe. But so what they're saying, and it's not canon, so this isn't the thing, but there's a Star Trek online that actually explores future storylines past anything that they ever covered in any of the TV shows or movies.

If you have a super interest in the Star Trek universe, this is worth a quick peek through and a read through because they talk about some of the characters and what ended up happening to them, according to Star Trek online, which is not canon. Oh, very cool. I wish I had more time in the day.

Can you FTP me a few weeks so I can get caught up on this stuff? That's how I feel every time I look at our show notes. I know. I did want to put this in here because I did get a couple of people asking me what the hell was the the line from at the end of the last episode, which is you are all very stupid people and you do not know anything.

It's from Neverwhere and trying to find it was a pain, but I did find the 15th anniversary edition DVD. There's no Blu-ray. This thing is they battled. Yeah, they I bought it on VHS at the first Highlander convention or the last Highlander convention.

It was that long ago. So, yeah, this is hard to find, but you can buy it on Amazon video. I did finally find that. So that's I just wanted to explain what what that was. OK, South Park is a show that I used to follow religiously and I've just kind of fallen away from over the years.

No particular reason. It's not like it got bad. It's still very funny, but I just haven't been watching it. They did what we knew somebody was going to do. They completely destroyed anybody that had has an Amazon Alexa in the same room as their TV that tried to watch the show and didn't go with any name other than Alexa.

That was so funny. Yeah, the video. There's a video of a video of somebody watching it with the Alexa in their room and what happens when Cartman goes to town. Yeah, very fucking hilarious. Good stuff. And I was listening to what I still consider our Canadian sister show or Canadian cousin show, Geeks and Beats.

Sex, Lies and Social Media is their most recent episode. And to be honest, it's their show's 30, 35 minutes. They do spend about 10 minutes pumping their Patreon. But the newest member of their world's worst intern program, Jason DeFilippo.

That would be me. And what an appropriate show for you to be the intern on. It was all about tech and porn. So that worked out quite well for you. It did. I mean, I gave them the money before that, but like two episodes before. But still, I finally got in there. There you go. I have actually been meaning to re-up on their Patreon.

I did it before they went on their sabbatical. They took almost two years off, practically, or a year, something like that. So I should go back in and pay them. How nice would that be? That would be so nice. Yeah. So there you go. And I did find a new podcast that I'm listening to, and I really do enjoy it.

Now, Jason, you're going to hate this one, because it is obviously an NPR podcast. And it is so painfully NPR. It could be none more NPR. This is NPR on 11. This is NPR squared. It's called Rough Translation, and it posits how are the things we're talking about here in the United States being talked about somewhere else in the world.

It's very good, but like I said, it is none more NPR. There's the music in the background. Here's the sound of, here's the audio of somebody walking as I start to talk and set up the story. It is NPR to the extreme. But I love the stories, and they are really well done.

All right. Yeah, probably a 10-person crew working for four weeks for 25 minutes of audio. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. I was listening to the Futility Closet podcast for a while, and I don't know if they changed microphones or whatnot, but one of the things I've gotten terribly acute with doing all of the editing that I do, you know, so many hours a week, is mouth noise.

Yeah. The mouth noise on the Futility Closet has gotten so bad, I had to unsubscribe. I was either that, or I download it and run it through my audio post-processing programs to get rid of it so I could listen to it again. Because I like the show, but man, whatever they did over there, it's just sad.

Sad, sad, sad. See, this is why if you really enjoy eating, you should never be a chef. Security? Ha! And we are back for the security segment with the Cyber Wire producer, Dave Bittner.

Jason is not with us today because he is running around at Riot Fest in Chicago, so. I know that because I checked his security cam and saw him leaving. I was going to say, yeah, we could just check in and see that the house is empty, that Bam Bam has fixed herself a drink and is sitting on the couch watching Netflix.

Yes. Well, that was the first update on Bam Bam's own Instagram, which I'm sure Jason will promote later on in the show. Okay. Very good. So I thought we should quickly follow up on the Equifax situation. Obviously, we have a story about how badly they screwed up.

But first and foremost, the most important thing, which everybody was freaking out about, was if apparently you weren't paying a lot of attention as you were signing in to find out if you were one of half of Americans that had their information stolen, you were losing your right to sue and basically agreeing to arbitration.

Then there were stories that if you wrote them a letter and mailed that in within 30 days, you could remedy that situation. Jason left us a little note saying the loss of the right to sue has been debunked, by the way, but no link. Do you know if that is true? That is true. There was a statement from Equifax this week clarifying that, saying that, no, we are not in fact taking away your right to sue.

Now, who knows if that was how this all started off? Maybe the massive public outcry might have had something to do with it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the lawyers are doing their jobs and trying to cover all the bases. So, you know, when all of us clicked on that EULA, then it probably or it may it may have originally said that you lost your right to sue.

But I think Equifax responding to the situation at the very least said, no, no, no, no, no, no, please proceed. You know, it's funny. I mean, that may be the best thing that they've done in this whole thing. Well, yes, that clarification, right?

That would seem to be the case as the Wired article that we have in our show notes discusses, which is Equifax officially has no excuse. Most of the article goes through basically their week of incompetence, failures and shady behavior and doing absolutely everything wrong that they could have.

So, yeah, this might be the number one and first thing that they've done correctly thus far. The story goes on to confirm that attackers entered the system in mid May through a web application vulnerability that had a patch available back in March. So, in other words, all this happened because they didn't patch their software.

Now, interestingly enough, the check to see if you've been hacked site, as we reported, was done on WordPress, which has the handy auto update feature, which maybe if they just want to switch that on with their bigger package, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Yeah, it's been interesting.

I mean, the vast majority of people are agreeing with this Wired article and saying that there's no excuse for this. They had plenty of time to take care of these things, especially with something as valuable as all the information that they had available. But there's been a handful of people I've seen on Twitter, you know, security professionals who've said, if you're in a large organization like this, this notion of being able to patch right away isn't as easy as you think.

You know, it's a little more complicated than that. So, yeah, we understand, you know, it's a lot of fun to pile on, but the reality of the situation may have been a little different. It's no excuse for losing all the data, but just in terms of a sort of processes and procedure kind of thing, you know, they may have reasons for the delay in patching, but unfortunately, it's not an all's well that ends well situation.

Yeah. Having briefly worked in a very large corporation back in the day, I do understand the culture of incompetence that tends to take place, which I mean, it's again, just poking fun at it, but it is. There's an institutional slowness that occurs, and this is a very large company, so.

Right, right. But still. Don't feel bad for them, though. I do not feel bad for them. I just, yeah. And like we said, you know, last week, I mean, this could be an inflection point where people really take a hard look at, can we rely on social security numbers and the rest of that identifiable information for these important things?

Do we need to come up with a better way to handle our identities to make sure or to make it harder for people to steal them and use them for the bad things they want to do? Yeah. I mean, I'm glad to some degree. I suppose this is a good thing because we are having that discussion.

I would have liked to have that discussion maybe 12 years ago when I first noticed my insurance company is basically identifying me for health insurance using my social security number and putting it on letters. My, well, you know, when I was in college, back in the late 80s, early 90s, our student ID number was our social security number.

Yeah. Yeah. So we haven't exactly been protecting these for a long time, but it's also, the thing is, it's also much easier now, right? Right, right. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And speaking of making things less easier, Apple has had their big, big announcement and we know what's coming and to one degree, there's a lot of concern over face ID technology.

We're not going to use the fingerprint anymore, which we know wasn't all that secure anyways. But they have made some significant improvements to the actual system themselves in terms of security that will make it much more difficult for law enforcement to basically take your data. Yeah.

If you're someone who's concerned about privacy, this is some good developments from Apple, particularly, it seems as if you're someone who is concerned about crossing the border. Yes, that came to mind as we had very long discussions about this specifically. It is much more difficult now for them to be able to access data.

Of course, the main question that we ask still remains, if they ask you to punch in your code or scan your face or whatever, and you say no, are you still going to go to jail? So that question isn't answered. Well, I mean, as we talked about, yeah, I mean, what people seem to think is that they can compel you to use your fingerprint.

They cannot compel you to reveal a passcode. Yes. But that doesn't mean, you know, they can, I suppose they can hold on to you for long periods of time at the border to compel you to give up your passcode. But this is good.

I mean, what they've done here is they've made it so that when you attach your device to a computer, it requires your passcode to allow any data to flow between the phone and the computer. Yes. And it used to not require that.

So this is good. I remember telling friends if they were concerned about this sort of thing, don't, you know, don't go charge your phone on somebody else's computer because while they're sitting around, while it's plugged in, you have full access, that person has full access. They can do whatever they want. So it's nice that they've separated the power from the data streams in terms of that.

Yeah. And evidently, one of the concerns is that the border or I guess anything involving law enforcement, they could, once they had your phone plugged into a computer, they could basically download all the contents of the computer and then use tools to be able to sift through all the data very quickly.

Whereas even if they have access to the phone, just the phone itself, it takes a lot longer to go through things. And also things that have been deleted, like this article points out that there might be deleted text messages and things like that, that could still be in the phone's database.

You can't access them from the phone's interface, but it might be possible to get them if you could do a complete data dump from the phone. I feel like we need to start a series of unanswered questions for this particular segment. One of them being the aforementioned we talked about last week. What does it mean to delete something?

Now we're learning on the Apple iOS infrastructure, delete doesn't necessarily mean delete. It just means you can't access it anymore. Yeah. And reading this article, I had a raised eyebrow that they brought iMessage into that group because my understanding is that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted.

And so I hope we'll hear from people who know more about this than either you or I, but I was surprised to see that on the list of things where possibly, if you delete an iMessage, that it could possibly still linger on the phone.

That surprises me because Apple has been really deliberate, it seems, and overt about saying that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and that they can't read any of your messages. So I don't know the inner workings of how the iPhone handles the text in between your fingertips and the point at which it gets encrypted and sent off, but that was an interesting one.

You know, every time that we talk about this sort of stuff and just you discussing that right now just makes me long for the earlier days when there were things like manuals that came with technology and you had a deep understanding of how things actually worked, it's so weird just being behind these iron curtains for everything now where we don't really understand how the technology that we use on a day-to-day basis works.

It's kind of crazy. Well, and like, you know, I think you guys are talking, talked about in this show about how you really can't have a single developer for anything anymore. You know, there's just the complexity of everything has gone, has gone up, you know, back in the old 8-bit computing days, you could have someone, someone wrote Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, you know, it was a single author and those days are over.

So I agree. It's on the one hand, we have all this awesome technology and we have all the world's information at our fingertips. So on the other hand, it's all sort of abstracted from us to really know what's going on below the surface. Yeah, agreed. Now, one thing that we have, Senator Al Franken, who's always been pretty privacy minded, which is nice.

He is asking some pointed questions of Apple about how specifically their Face ID technology is going. Now I know a lot of people just go, well, he's a politician, whatever. He's asking some pointed questions that I would like to know the answer to about the system, including how they're going to be protected and safeguarded, how they're going to be stored.

Is that data, is your face map going to be shared or sold to marketers? Is law enforcement going to be able to access it or is it going to be as encrypted as most other things are with Apple? It seems to be a weird step because Apple has been very, they seem to be very forward about being, working with privacy concerns and making their phones very secure.

And this is such a blatantly insecure system as far as we know how it works. Well, um, I, okay, a couple of things. I, first of all, I am a fan of Al Franken's, uh, both as a comedian and as a Senator.

I think, I mean, I think he is truly one of the smartest people in the Senate. And I think, um, you know, obviously he's witty, but you know, um, he does the, he does the hard work, um, and, uh, really tries to understand things. Um, so I, I have respect for him.

Um, I, but, but however, that said, uh, I think, I think to me, this letter represents someone who does not have a deep understanding of Apple. And Apple's position when it comes to privacy.

I think a lot of these questions here are things we went through with touch ID, same sort of thing, you know, just a different biometric system. Um, you know, and, and, and a lot of the, I was pretty frustrating when this all, when this, um, technology was announced, you know, earlier when, when Apple had their event and a lot of the things people were saying were the same sorts of things we heard with touch ID, you know, Oh no, now there's going to be a government database of everybody's fingerprints.

Right. Well, and so the exact same things. Now there's going to be a government database of everybody's faces. And if you took five minutes to, to do some research and you found out that the whole thing about the, uh, you know, the way Apple has their secure enclave and how they keep the data away from the rest of the phone and the way it works.

And, you know, uh, Apple takes this seriously. Yeah. And they should, because this, this does help the ante from, from a thumbprint. This is because this is a lot more of a face print is something that can be identified from a distance. Uh, it doesn't require physical contact.

It doesn't require a lot of other things. Um, so there's, there's, there needs to be heightened security for this. I believe. Do you think it's more, do you think it's more important than a thumbprint? The reason I ask is because fingerprints are used for law enforcement much more than, um, I guess, facial ideas.

I mean, obviously there's all sorts of, with facial recognition software now, I suspect that's all changing. I think I, I, I see what you're saying. And I think perhaps thumbprint is more important as far as a law enforcement or legal worry goes, I'm worried about advertising and tracking by third parties.

And, uh, you know, I, all of a sudden somebody catches me on a publicly accessible webcam and is able to match my face to this or that or that. I, not so much the government I worry about here as the, you know, brave new world of walking into a mall and having my face scanned and being greeted and given targeted ads to me, which I, we all know it's coming, but God, who wants that?

Well, yeah. And, you know, we, we've certainly heard stories that they are doing that at major events like the Superbowl. Yeah. They're using, you know, facial ID to try to prevent, you know, bad people from doing bad things. Um, so I think it's inevitable that, um, this is going to go to commercial types of things and who knows?

I mean, obviously Facebook knows what you look like. Um, for me, Google photos knows what I look like. Um, so, but, uh, back to Al Franken's list though. I mean, I think, um, I, the list is a smart list. Um, I think some of these, probably half the questions on it are, like I said, questions that if someone had taken a little bit of time or had a sort of, uh, long understanding of the way Apple does things, they would know the answer to many of these questions.

Um, but you know what, it may even be an opportunity for this, this isn't, this is sort of a softball thing to send to Apple because I, I would suspect Apple will gladly answer these questions. And well, and I think they should, because it would be nice to have that implicit information from Apple out in the world saying, you know, of course we're not going to do this or that with it because right now it's just kind of an understood agreement between Apple and us that they won't.

Uh, but I, what I did find funny is, uh, there was a lot of brouhaha because Apple is rolling it out and understandable that iPhone, that's a huge market share, but we've been happily mapping our faces with Snapchat for quite some time. And how come people didn't blow up at that point?

Now I know there was some information about it and people asking very pointed questions and Snap has come out and said on their website that their technology does not recognize the face it maps. So I guess it's not tying it to your account or a database or anything like that.

We've also kind of learned before that some of these companies lie and Snapchat and Snap and in and of itself doesn't have a great track record of telling people the truth about their internal systems. But right. You know, so we have a link in our show notes from the Atlantic, uh, which is nice long form article.

That's well-researched about who actually owns your face and they go through various companies, such as you just mentioned Facebook, which uses facial recognition software as well. And the existing legality that, uh, we seem to be dealing with at the moment with it. So it's, it's a good read.

This is all obviously going to be in flux. And again, it's, it's much like Equifax having their issues. Apple coming to the forefront with this technology pushes it into the mainstream in a way that, that it wasn't before, which is a good thing because now we can start dealing with it. Well, and you know, it reminds me of another thing.

Um, earlier this week I interviewed, um, a gentleman named Luke Beeson, who's the, uh, chief information security officer for BT, um, you know, British, uh, company formerly known as British telecom. Um, so, you know, high level guy at a huge company, um, you know, over a hundred thousand people, but they're in Europe and they have a very different take on privacy than we do in the United States.

Or just go a little bit North, Canada as well. So, Oh yeah. Yeah. So, uh, you know, Europe has GDPR coming, which is their big privacy regulation, which was coming next May. Um, and part of the conversation I had with him was I was asking him, how is that going to affect global companies?

And he thinks that these companies who, because GDPR, um, covers global companies handling the data of Europeans, even if that data isn't in Europe. So if you want to do business in Europe, you have to follow these rules.

And so what he thinks is that many of these companies will sort of hit the lowest common denominator. They'll go for, they'll really have no choice than to adopt the European standard for privacy globally because it'll be cheaper and easier for them. But that's going to be an interesting thing to see because when you have companies like Facebook who are built on the opposite of that, right?

I mean, how, how are they going to react? How are they going to react to that? So, um, I think that's going to be interesting thing just to, uh, to see how that plays out. Well, you know, it's funny. I I've had a couple of conversations with some, some friends and acquaintances that are kind of working in startups doing deep data companies and, and, you know, big data companies and things like that.

And, and most of them are basically almost considering that it's a race right now because they know that America is, is the holy ground. You want all your, you want to get everything you can from America right now because we have so little regulation about data and, and Europe does and Canada does and, you know, most other developed countries have strong privacy regulations.

So all these startups are basically mining everything that they can in the USA as much as they can and as quick as they can, because they know at some point that we're going to wake up here and then put in some more privacy regulations. And then, you know, Oh, that's fascinating. Get well, the getting's good.

That is definitely the attitude right now. Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. I like it. Hmm. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of getting inside things, I'm assuming this was put in by Jason. Do you think?

It seems to be in his target area of, of, of, of interest, uh, security and sex bots. Um, I did like the story. It does come from the New York post. So take that with a grain of salt as per usual. Uh, it says a cybersecurity scientist has issued a bizarre warning that sex robots could one day rise up and kill their owners.

If hackers can get inside their heads. Uh, this is cybersecurity lecturer, Dr. Nick Patterson. I assume you would be familiar with him. No, no, no. Okay. Well, I was, I was reading, I did, I meant to look him up, but I, I, I, I don't know. I, I, who knows?

He may be a very highly respected person. I'm not familiar with him. Um, being it's the New York post, he may not exist at all. Yes. Well, there are numerous, numerous then paragraphs talking about how it's not going to be like a Westward style, Westwood style or Terminator style, uh, thing.

But Patterson told the star online that hacking into many modern day robots, including sex bots would be a piece of cake compared to a more sophisticated gadget, like a cell phone or a computer. Now, dot, dot, dot. We are laughing at this article, but he is not wrong. No, he's not. He's not.

I mean, people have shown the vulnerability of industrial robots. I'm just thinking we're talking, we, all we do is crap on the internet of things for security in this segment. And if we can't secure a fucking light bulb, I don't want to secure a fucking dot, dot, dot.

Yeah. Yes. But the stakes are different for your light bulb than for your sex bot. You know, you, you, there are many, many reasons why you would want to, and I feel like this is a euphemism, air gap your sex bot. You certainly don't want one of those dolphin things happening, let me tell you.

Right, exactly. You know, we, we, we've seen stories with, uh, IOT, other sex toys and things like that. So I don't see why sex bots would be any different from that. Um, you know, it's funny.

I don't know who would have control over which, what would be the regulatory framework for sex bots? Would that be the federal trade commission or, hmm, I don't know who would. That is, that is an interesting question. Right. Who has, it's not, it's not really a medical device, although anyway, um, yes, I think this is a fun, but silly kind of stupid story, um, about what you'd expect from the New York Post.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you're right. It does point out the greater vulnerability that robots can be hacked and be made to do bad things. You know, imagine you're working on an assembly line where most of the, the cars that are being assembled are being assembled by robots and someone gets in and, you know, hacks an industrial robot.

And instead of pushing the car down the assembly line, the robot pushes the car into you. Right. You know, there, so there are vulnerabilities and so forth, but, uh, I don't know. It's, um, it's, it's fun to think about. It's possible.

It makes for a great, uh, I don't know, a B movie or, uh, again, police procedural. Yes. You know, um, I think Jason's just taken that police procedural thing to heart and that's why he put the story in here. I think he's just collecting his, his, uh, his storylines.

Could be, could be. We'll see. I mean, we'll, we'll see. Yeah. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And, um, you know, if, Hey, if the sex bots make people happy and, and they're not hurting anybody else and, you know, they can afford to do it, then more power to them.

Bought away. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a problem with that. Now, Gizmodo has an article over, uh, uh, this is a, I think I'm focusing way too much on headlines recently because headline writing is starting to drive me crazy. It says hackers have already started to weaponize artificial intelligence.

Uh, it goes into a discussion about the security forum, zero Fox, which conducted an experiment where they basically made bots on Twitter to create malicious links to, to fish information. And, uh, it was far better than a human competitor was. So, you know, so apparently this is definitely possible, but then the article goes on to say, thankfully, this was just an experiment, but the exercise shows that the hackers are in a position to use AI, but we don't know if they actually are or not because it's very hard to prove now.

Yeah. The title of your article is hackers have already started to weaponize artificial intelligence. So I'm expecting a story that shows that it's actually happening. This is a very long article that does not have any stories of it actually happening. Yes. And we, and yet we clicked on it.

Yes, we did. Now I will admit to Brian that I put this in here partially to, uh, get your engine running a little bit because I know how you feel about artificial intelligence. And, um, I actually know one of the zero Fox researchers, um, uh, I know I'm a good guy, smart guy.

Um, but what, the other thing that was interesting to me was this year at the RSA conference, one of the things I asked people about when I was interviewing people out on the show floor was, are the bad guys using artificial intelligence and machine learning? Because those were the buzzwords this year at RSA.

Of course. So, um, and the answer I got from everybody was no, as far as we know, they are not. And the reason is, is that it's expensive and they're doing just fine without it. Right. Well, Gizmodo found the exact opposite people because they, they interviewed a bunch of people who said it was.

I know. Well, and this is a little frustrating for me because I'm not going to name names here, but some of the companies these people are from are the same companies who at RSA told me no. Right. Right. Now that was what, six months ago. So these things changed quickly and it may very well be that the bad guys have decided or have, you know, moved into this neighborhood or dipping their toes in the water and doing it.

I think it's inevitable as the cost of it comes down and as the, um, other things don't work as well. Yeah. And as this, the, the, uh, the demonstration from zero Fox, what if the machines just do it better, more efficiently? Yeah. They're able to, they figure out how to press our buttons because they can iterate so quickly and test and figure out, you know, does this turn of phrase get people to click more than this?

If I flip these two words around, I'm getting a 10%, you know, greater click through on my phishing. They can do so much so quickly. So yes, much faster than we can. Now as to your, yeah, I'm dubious as well. And as to your point of throwing in the AI, just to kind of tweak us a bit, I don't know.

You, you must've missed that segment in a last week's show. Jason and I had our, our throwing up our hands in the air moment, our, our mea culpa. We give up. We have accepted the fact that everybody's just going to use the term artificial intelligence, even if they just mean it's a data tree, even if they just mean it's machine learning, even if they just mean it's a damn Katie bot, we have given up.

It is, we are going with artificial intelligence. We are. Oh, well, we've, we, we, we, we give, we give universe. No, I did hear that segment. And that's a big part of why I put this article in this week's show. Oh, I love you, Brian. It's, I still, I still get a little twinge in my face, but I've, I've stopped complaining ish.

I don't blame you. Words are important. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they are. And I think you're right that the definition of artificial intelligence has gotten much more mushy and fuzzy over the years. Yes. And I think that's largely because of, of marketers. Oh, of course. Obviously.

They want to sell you something. So. Yeah. It's, it's like we live in a, in a 1990s wired buzzwords article all the time. It's, we must use the buzzwords. We must use the buzzwords. We must use the buzzwords. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. And our last piece comes from the intercept, a sloppy us spies misused a covert network for personal shopping and other stories from internal NSA documents.

Uh, I read through almost all of this and I felt like my takeaway from this is, is spies are people too. You know, I had the exact same reaction. That was my, exactly my reaction as well. This is sort of, this article is a review of some more stuff from the Snowden leak.

Um, you know, I guess if you're a journalist who's into this sort of thing, that's the gift that keeps on giving just the huge dump that, that Snowden provided. But, uh, so this is a review of some of that stuff. Um, and I, I guess mostly old info or information about stuff from a while ago, like a decade ago, it seems a lot of it is.

A lot of it was taken from internet cafes and I mean, granted there are countries in the world in which you will still find a lot of internet cafes, but not, not with the prevalence that one did 10 years ago. Yeah. And, uh, you know, it's an interesting thing if, if you're, if you're into the sort of internal machinations of NSA and so forth, this will give you some behind the scenes, under the hood kind of stuff.

Um, you know, my, my second reaction was, well, who would really, who, who of us would want their email read by other people? Yeah. This is sort of one of those, Hey, we're reading everybody's email and look how they do things. And like you said, you know, they're sloppy sometimes too.

And, you know, they forget to switch out of this account when they go shopping and they get tracked and, you know, and they might operations are hard. Yeah. They might exchange an email or two about Sally that works in accounting. It happens because they're people.

Right. Yeah. But it's a, it's a long article full of, um, full of lots of little tidbits about how this spy craft works. So, uh, if, uh, that's something you're interested in, dig in, um, some of it's kind of interesting.

Some of it's kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah. That's, uh, that's all right. But, um, but it is interesting that, uh, how long everybody's been digging through all the Snowden stuff. I mean, there's just so much of it. It just keeps on coming. It does.

It's, I expect us to have stories on it in 10 years from now, still doing this. Yeah. Yeah. What's your take on Snowden? Do you, do you think he's a traitor or a hero? Would you have, would, do you have a strong opinion either way? Uh, what's the, what's the relationship status that people go with when they're in a relationship but don't want to admit it?

It's complicated. Yeah. That's right. That is pretty much a hundred percent. I, I, I, I started hero. I, I swung to traitor for a while. I, I somewhere exist in the murky middle where I, somebody needed to do some whistleblowing about what was happening, but I don't necessarily know if I sign off on the way he did it, if that makes any sense.

So, yeah, that makes total sense. And the, you know, the folks that I cross paths with who are in that world, who have, um, you know, people who have security clearances and so forth, you know, that's, that's the big point they make that he had other, they claim that he had other ways of, of dealing with this, um, that wouldn't have been so dangerous and perhaps even put good people in harm's way, the way that he did.

So, you know, those folks tend to, I think, um, you know, think that he is a traitor and that, um, you know, he's done serious damage. Um, and I can't disagree with that. Um, on the other hand, there are some things that were revealed that probably wouldn't have otherwise been revealed that led to better outcomes and probably wouldn't have had he not revealed them.

So, yeah. So you said, it's, it's complicated, complicated. All right. This seems a good place to wrap. Uh, we'll be back next week and Jason will be back to join us and tell us how we were wrong about absolutely everything we said. All right. Well, I'll look forward to that.

Me too. I love finding fun Twitter accounts kind of like, you know, the single purpose website. Yep. This one is progress bar 2017. Every, every couple of days, it'll like post a graphic of a progress bar telling you how far we've gone in 2017 and how far we have to go.

That's it. Yeah. I should probably not follow that. Why are you going to be sad that we have so much left? Kind of. It's going pretty quick though. That's where I'm at right now. Come on. Yeah. Now we seem to have a bit of a recurring theme on this, on this particular episode of the podcast about going back to the past, not the future.

Uh, do you remember Mondo 2000? Of course I do. I had all, I had all of them. Me too. And are you serious? They have newly relaunched. What? I'm not sure. Yeah. Mondo 2000 is back. There's a newly relaunched website. And are you serious interviews wired founder, Louis Rosetto in the, uh, about the origins of wire and his new novel changes.

Good. And, uh, is part of the first thing where, well, I mean, I guess it's been around for a while, but this is one of their big publicity pushes now. So it's back baby. I wonder where they got a copy of Kai's power tools to use their fractal generator to make half of the pages in the magazine. I don't know.

Oh man. I found a great little video. It's a 30 day time-lapse at sea from, uh, one of the big cargo containers. Yeah. This has been, uh, getting passed around by a lot of my more visual minded friends on Facebook. It's very beautiful. It's gorgeous.

It is just so cool and peaceful. I just put it in one, one of my monitors and just let it go while I'm off, like do an email in the other monitor. I can just watch it. But when I, when I have a, a very prickly client, I can just look over and go, ah, I'd rather be at sea. Yeah. Uh, now I found a link.

I, I think this is our real grumpy old geeks manifesto. Uh, no kidding around the seven habits of highly effective, mediocre people. This is over at life hacker. Uh, did you read this Jason? I glanced at it. Let's, let's, let's take another three paragraphs describe us to a T basically.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. That's it. That's, that's it. That's us. Yeah. So if you're listening to the show, check out the show notes, go take a link and read it. It's pretty goddamn funny. Uh, we got to talk about who, oh my God, it's written by James Altucher. That's funny.

Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, I need to get in touch with the author to see if we could repurpose it and maybe do a little, uh, little spiel on it. I have James's email address. I can do that. Okay. Uh, there's a cute little video and article over at dig from Steve Russo. Uh, it's entitled, what would happen if you just let kids swear?

I'm just going to tell you the D the TLDR on this one, healthier fucking kids. Yeah. Except they also get kicked out of their schools. Well, that's why you have to teach them to swear properly. Yes. Oh, swear only around us. Mm-hmm. Moron of the week. Denny's.

Mm-hmm. They're my moron of the week. Even though, I mean, I love a moon's over my hammy like anybody, or french fries with ranch at two in the morning after going to see your favorite goth band. That's, that was, we did that a lot. And who doesn't like only eating around other white people? Uh, no, it depends on the Denny's.

Trust me, depends, depends on the location. Uh, Denny's new sausage mascot was actually not that new, but, uh, it looks like poop and the restaurant is not going to change it. Uh, yeah, well, you know, it's funny, because, uh, again, you know, maybe this is, this is, uh, we're going back to batter Meinhoff.

I hadn't thought about South Park for quite a while, but, you know, Mr. Hankey, the Christmas poo does need something to do in the off season. That's true. You know, everybody's got to work. Yep. That's right. Yep. They're not going to change it. So there you go. There's something to look forward to next time you head over to Denny's. Yes.

And I have a, this is a, what the flying fuck boing boing moment. I'm going to directly say this to boing boing. This is a, this is an actual title from a boing boing article who knows better than this. Student begs professor to let her bring dog to class before hurricane.

What happens next is in fact awesome. Yeah. What the hell is boing boing doing with the clickbait headlines? And I saw this story on five other sites. I've seen it with five different headlines, all roughly about the same. I've read this story four times to try to figure out exactly what happened next.

That is awesome. And I've yet to figure out why anybody's posting this story at all. Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean, we know boing boing doesn't actually do real reporting. They just take other people's stuff and post it and put ads on it. But that's true. You know, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the friends over there that I have.

But this is, this is just intolerable. Come on, you know, you know better. This is wrong. It is, in fact, not awesome. Feedback loop. I want to start out this week with a little sticker follow up. I've got a little bit of a stack left.

So if you are a Patreon subscriber and have not asked for your sticker yet, please, please let us know. And if you have not received your stickers yet, also let us know because we sent out a batch and some people haven't got them yet. And I've actually gotten some returned from bad addresses.

So make sure you double check your address when you send it to us. But yeah, we've still got some stickers here. They're raring to go. So come on, people. Let us know. We'll send them out. Yes, we will. And speaking of Patreon, if we have a brand new Patreon subscriber, thank you very much, friend of the show, Hannah, for sending us some of your hard-earned North Carolina cash.

Hey, Hannah, thank you. And over at PayPal, Saladino Martinez sent us some straight-up money. Thank you so much for that. We appreciate the support. And over at Twitter, first we got John Holbrook. He has his sticker. He got his. It's the first and only sticker on his laptop in two years, and he sent us a photo of it.

Thank you so much, John. Nice. Thank you very much. Next up is Chad Fackler1 from Twitter. Pacemaker hijacking. Wow, that got dark pretty quick. Funny, but dark. I try. Yes, it did. Ivor Tola writes us, awesome episode 226, guys. The tinfoil hat segment made me spit my drink out my nose.

I was laughing so much. Well, we try. We do try. And over at GOG.show, we've got one from Brian Middleton. On a recent show, one of you were talking about security cameras, and I thought I heard you mention Axis cameras. A buddy gave me one for free, and I have no use for it. It's yours for the cost of shipping if you want it.

And thank you, Brian. I sent you an email with my address, and let me know how much I owe you. Because I can't wait to play with it. I've always wanted an Axis, but I never got one. So, sweet. I think I had this exact same model, and it just got thrown out before a move once, because I didn't know what the hell to do with it.

Now I know what to do with it, because I have the Synology, which does IP camera stuff. So I can't wait to play with it. There you go. Next comes from Sam. He sent us a link to a kind of a CranesDetroit.com article. And he says, here is something for the tinfoil hat people.

Not really sure what this is about. It's been in the local headlines for quite a few months. But what kind of company would come to an area seemingly in the middle of nowhere and need 800-plus acres to build a facility? Just thought all of you at GOG might like a quick read. Thanks, Sam. P.S. I love the show. I did read the article.

I don't understand what the hell is happening there, but apparently some consortium of companies have bought up a huge amount of area in the middle of nowhere to build a facility. A huge tract of land! But you've got to think about it. If you're going to need a huge tract of land, you don't buy it in the city anymore because that's too damn expensive.

So this could be like a big old server farm. Who the hell knows? I don't know what it is. My question is, is there any chance it's actually Project Tom? He's been pretty quiet since he sold MySpace. Hmm. Hmm. Who knows? Next one comes from iTunes. This is from colindc.dev.

From Japan to America. I can only hope to be as godlike as these two as I grow older in midst of AI taking over our world. Not to fear, I fully understand the difference between machine learning and AI. Ha ha! I listen to the Cyber Wire as well and love the security ha segment.

You guys let the Bitwise Bittner let loose. Love the podcast. Anyone in tech with an understanding of how shitty the industry is needs to listen to these two. Recommended recipe. Listen to Twit for a pick-me-up. Listen to the Verge cast for some laughs. Get your seriousness on with the Cyber Wire.

Then GOG for a reality check. Best podcast by far. Woohoo! Thank you very much. Yes, thank you so much. 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.

And get us your address for those stickers, people. Let's go. Let's go. Yep. Jason wants this done. Closing shout outs! Rest in peace to Grant Hart, Husker Du's drummer and inspiration for a rock generation. Way too soon at 56. Sad news.

Way too soon. He was a topic of conversation at Riot Fest from just about everybody. Very sad. I'm sure. And Harry Dean Stanton. We lost him, too. Very sad. He lived to be 473 years old. Yes, I believe he had a long, full life. Yes. If you look at his IMDb credits, he's an actor in over 200 projects.

Yes. Insane. And I highly recommend going and checking out our Does It Have Legs Repo Man episode, which was number three. And yes, Harry, you will be missed. Also, what will be missed is Cassini. Yes. It's finally gone. The end of a 20-year journey. Took its dive on Friday into the atmosphere of Saturn.

Bye-bye. Yes. Bye-bye. See you later. That's pretty awesome. Science. Pretty awesome stuff. And I can tell you, I mean, after 20 years of working on this, I'm sure the guys at NASA have anthropomorphized the hell and back out of this thing, so it was like losing a friend. I'm sure. Now, if you got all jealous listening to Jason talk about Riot Fest in Chicago, and you happen to live in my part of the world, the Music Tastes Good Festival, as presented by KCRW, is at the end of this month.

Two days of music, food, and art. This would have been so right up my alley pre-kid, I would have been there in two seconds. Unfortunately, I will not be attending this year. But it's a great idea. A bunch of really cool chefs making really cool food and a bunch of really cool bands playing. So you can check out Ween, Slater Kinney of Montreal, and one of my all-time favorite bands that have reunited and blow the socks off everything, Ride, is playing this.

Oh, nice. Yeah. Pretty cool. I've seen Ween too many times to ever care again, but Slater Kinney, I've never seen. I would love to. And I haven't seen Ride, either. Very cool. Yep. And because I can, and everybody's giving me crap about putting all of my Bam Bam photos on my Instagram feed, Bam Bam now has her own Instagram feed.

So if you'd like to go to Instagram.com slash Bam Bam Roddy, you can just follow on Bam Bam, which nobody is ever going to do. But I had to throw it out there because she's my little girl. And there will be no updates on your own personal Instagram anywhere. As soon as I get hers up to date, there won't be.

I'll post them all on hers, and then everybody can just look at the boring shit that I post. That's what I figured. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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, and get some stickers. 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 227.

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