228: Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up? Brian, it's a sad, sad day. Why is that, Jason? iOS 11 came out, and we are no longer going to get the did it turn on Bluetooth rant from you.

That's true. That is true. Now that you've joined the dark side of the AirPods. Well, we'll get into that a little bit later in security. Yeah. Because there is something that makes me keep the Bluetooth off. And I did have Bluetooth on, unfortunately, this time because I forgot about it.

And yeah. Oh, well. Next time around. You mentioned before, Brian, that nobody sends manuals anymore, and everybody expects everybody to crowdsource their support nowadays. Well, I don't know if they so much expect it as that's just why we're shit out of luck. I am kind of getting on your side with this thing because every day I get emails from Amazon.

Amazon Answers specifically asking me questions about crap that I've bought. And they're stupid questions. Like for an iPhone 7 case, will this fit an iPhone 5? No, you moron. RTFM. Oh, wait. There is no M, but you can Google it. There is no M. You must have some sort of setting or like you've not unsubscribed to all their mailings because I have never gotten one of those.

Where I do get them, and there's no way out of it, is Facebook. Anytime you happen to check into someplace, they bombard you with questions about it now. Does this place serve alcohol? Well, it says bar in the name. Bar implies consent, as it were. Yeah, so I get that a lot on Facebook.

I mean, everything is outsourced now, right? Not only are we the product, we're also the beta testers. We are the manual writers. We are everything. Pretty much. It's pretty crazy. I know we had our rant and did our mea culpa and threw our hands up in the air about AI on our last show and giving up and just, you know, journalists are going to use AI no matter what the hell they're talking about.

And I know we said we were done with this, but I just couldn't take it. I took one look at my Twitter feed yesterday. Amazon working on smart glasses to house Alexa AI. Tesla working on self-driving AI chip. Startups not at disadvantage in AI. AI to improve education.

AI is the new electricity. What the F? There's a lot of AI out there. There's a lot. It's the buzzword of the year, and I know TechCrunch Disrupt is taking place right now, so Twitter's being overtaken with it. But give me a break, people. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

So Toys R Us has filed for bankruptcy. They couldn't even make it to Christmas when you'd think they'd make most of their money. They didn't. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's been a long time coming with good old Toys R Us here. Yeah, it's the latest victim of the retail crisis. Now, there are a lot of stories out there that give good reasons why Toys R Us is going out of business or at least filing for bankruptcy.

That doesn't necessarily mean going out of business these days, does it? I've got to say, I've got a one-year-old son. Let me see the amount of times I've been in Toys R Us in the last year. Zero. I figured it was zero, yeah. So that's not a good sign, considering I'm basically their target market.

Their prices are too high. Their online retail experience is horrible. Going to a store with a kid is a nightmare. And it's just so much damn easier on Amazon, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It absolutely is. But everything is easier on Amazon. That should be their tagline.

Everything is easier. And you're all going to go out of business, and all of you will work for us. Well, the interesting thing that came out of reading these articles that you put that will be in the show notes at gog.show slash 228 was that how Best Buy has actually done better in these trying times and is not dying, as it were.

Like, they went at it very, very intelligently. Yeah, they're holding steady, basically. Their market share and their revenues are not increasing, but they've managed to stave off total annihilation. Which is amazing. It's utterly amazing. If you've ever gone into a Best Buy recently, it is a boneyard in there.

Well, if you get into the reasons why, they were smart. They did things like they put kiosks in airports. Now, I always ask who the hell is buying an iPhone 7 in an airport, but apparently some people are. Yeah, if you leave it at home and you're going to Botswana and you need a phone, well, best get one now.

Yeah, so they did a lot of smart things where they basically removed themselves from their traditional retail stores. They've uncoupled and unchained consciously, so good on them. It was a conscious uncoupling? Apparently it was, yeah. Yeah, they are revving up for the holiday season, though, so they almost made it, but they're still going to be hiring a shit ton of people for the holiday season in the, you know, tens of thousands to get them through for temporary employment.

You're talking about Toys R Us now, not Best Buy. Not Best Buy, though. Toys R Us. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I don't think that they're totally going to go away. This is financial trickery and tomfoolery, and if they're smart, they'll get somebody else in there to run the place that can figure out a better – a lot of their problems were supply chain.

A lot of their problems were pricing. I mean, all of this can be fixed if they put a little time and effort into it. Well, maybe Best Buy should just buy them. Or that. Or Amazon. They could do that. Yep. They – remember, they did have a partnership with Amazon that went stale after a little while. Yeah, that would be part of the big problem that they've had.

I think if they would have worked a lot harder on that, they'd still be around. But, hey, it's Toys R Us. That's childhood memories. Sniffle. Sniffle, sniffle. Speaking of childhood, kids these days. What is wrong with kids these days? Is this the get off my lawn segment?

No, this is the what the hell are you thinking segment. You know, kids these days apparently are not getting their driver's license. They're not drinking. And they're not screwing. Wow. It's the end times. What are they doing? It's the end times. Building apps? Snapchat. Snapchat. They're disrupting things.

They're taking pictures of themselves with stupid bunny ears on their heads. They're playing Cards Against Humanity and Dungeons and Dragons and social things. No, they can't be playing Cards Against Humanity because that is not a game you play sober. Apparently it is. My brother and his friends play it sober all the time and they have a mighty fine time doing it.

And granted, he's not a teen anymore. He's, what, Jesus, 26? I keep forgetting he's my age minus 20. I keep thinking that he's like 22, but I am now 46, so he is now 26. Right. So not a kid, but still not a crazy boozer or, you know, like these other kids.

I don't know. So this is a new study that came out in the Journal of Child Development. And it just shows that the dropping of all of the vices that basically ruined our lives, for the most part, kids nowadays aren't doing.

The other thing that they're not doing, though, is getting paying work. That's the interesting one. Well, I mean, not having any money in your pocket does make it a lot more difficult to get a car and a six-pack of beer and drive around with it. Yeah, but the thing is they just don't want to. Yeah, I know.

It's a weird thing. I mean, I get that every generation kind of finds their own path and rebels a bit, but this is a big break from what we consider popular culture. Yes, they're rebelling against rebellion. Right. Well, they're rebelling on college campuses, too, as I threw in my own Get Off My Lawn segment.

There's been a lot of talk about this, about the safe spaces and all that sort of stuff. So the Brookings Institute has done a study, basically did a survey of college students, current college students, regarding the First Amendment. A very significant percentage of students hold the view that hate speech is unprotected, and a majority of students appear to want an environment that shields them from being exposed to views that they might find offensive.

I find this offensive. I find this offensive, you fucking pussies. Seriously. Now, you went to college. I did. What was it like at your college? Were you exposed to a lot of dissenting views and things you didn't agree with that maybe over the course of time changed your mind or made you at least smarter?

I believe that's what college is supposed to be for. That's what I thought. But since I only went to community college, we didn't really get that same kind of environment. But since you went to a real school, I thought I'd ask you just to get a gut check on what it was actually like. Yes. The entire point of an education is to present yourself with views that you may not necessarily agree with, learn about them, figure out how people got there, and then make your own conclusions.

You're not supposed to just be coddled away in some little corner where you only hear about the stuff that you already agree with. Save that for Facebook. Yeah, well, that's what I was – my second question is, like, do social networks have a partial blame with the views of these kids because they're just too sheltered nowadays because they're stuck in their little corporate information-sucking-overlord walled garden who is just trying to create a little utopia where no one ever fights or gets a hissy fit?

Well, I think we do know that that's a problem with Facebook, and it's obviously – it's a very similar problem to what we're experiencing in college. But my counterpoint to that would be get on Twitter. Twitter is nothing but battles and fights and dissenting opinions and people calling each other idiots. I mean, that swings it a little too far the other way.

There's a genteel way to have discussions about things with different sorts of opinions. We call that LiveJournal. Or MySpace back in the day, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is a problem. It really is. I don't get it. What I'm learning from this segment is I just don't get kids these days, Jason.

I don't either. The one that really got me a little riled up was the fact that, like, 20% of these kids thought that violence was okay to stop dissenting opinions. I'm like, ah, no. That's not okay at all. No, of course it's not okay. And this is why if you express the view that it's not really okay to punch a Nazi, that's not a very popular opinion these days.

You should be able to punch a Nazi, according to most people. And I would say don't punch anyone. Yeah, there you go. Love and peace. Brian, sharing the love. That's right. That's me. In the news. Now, going back to what is definitely not a safe space on social media, Twitter.

We have the first concrete numbers showing how rarely Twitter takes any action whatsoever on abusive behavior reports. So this is swinging again too much the other direction, because obviously we're not looking for safe spaces here, but we're also not looking for people getting doxed or just the insane craziness, the flame wars and things like that.

Gamergate and all that crap. There's a twist to this headline, though. So Twitter put out their biannual transparency report, which that alone just makes me laugh hysterically because there's nothing transparent about Twitter. They released today, a couple days ago, actually now, but this is only about the only released information about reports of abusive behaviors towards governmental representatives, not the general public.

So I would argue that this is almost a useless story and statistic because, of course, government officials get crap thrown at them. That just happens. But and they're not taking any action on that. I want to know what's going on with with like the people that have been doxed celebrities, even what was the woman who was in Ghostbusters that actually quit Twitter a couple of times because people went apeshit on her.

Yeah, I can't remember her. Stephen Fry was Stephen Fry was somebody who quit Twitter because of it. Yeah. So, again, OK, great. You're not doing anything, but you're also not really giving us any information about what's really happening, theoretically. Yeah, I'm guessing because of 12 percent of the government ones were identified and investigated.

So I'm guessing that the amount for the general public is far less than that. It's probably one percent at best. So, you know, basically one in 10 abuses towards a government official is being just kind of ignored.

Only one's being acted on roughly, and I would say it's way less than that for normal, everyday people. Oh, it has to be because, you know, that there's so many more and there's only so many people at Twitter. Yep. So, well, speaking of social networks and them doing stupid things, Instagram has apparently apologized after a rape threat was reposted as an ad.

OK, how did that happen? Guardian reporter Olivia Salon, she posted an offensive and threatening message she received to Instagram. And on the Facebook side, some systems decided it showed engagement. So they used a screenshot of the message reading, Olivia, you fucking bitch, and I will rape you as an advertisement in an attempt to lure more of her friends to Instagram.

Oh, well, that's good times. Yeah. Well, hey, maybe for some people that was an enticement. Yeah, you know, this is the same thing that Facebook was trying to hide behind with their whole kerfuffle with the anti-Semitic ads and things like that.

The big thing that we're going to hear more about over the next couple of years is it's all algorithmically generated. We don't have people that are doing this, so it's not our fault. At the same time... Brian, Brian, but they're algorithms. At the same time, all we hear is about is how smart AI is, yet they fuck everything up.

So, which is it, people? Can't have one without the other. No, you can't trumpet one thing as being so amazing and so... It's coming every day and we're getting better and better and, oh my gosh, we're going to have our total real artificial intelligence soon, yet we can't stop a rape ad being posted.

Exactly. Fun times. We also often talk about how more together our European counterparts have things in terms of privacy and hate speech and things like that. And one country that knows from hate speech would be Germany. They know what they're talking about and they've been through this before and they are getting serious about it.

There is a new German law going into force in October that will impose fines on social networks if they fail to remove manifestly unlawful hate speech within 24 hours of being posted. And it's not just a fine. It is a gigantic fine. This is going to cost these companies a lot of money under German law.

The law called... I'm going to take a... Take a breath. Netzwerkdurchsitz, or NetzDG, as everybody will call it because it is 75 letters long. So, yeah, companies will have up to seven days to consider the removal of more ambiguous material.

Now, this is a good move, bad move? What say you, Jason? Well, the interesting thing here is, I mean, this is trying to get social networks in line with German law because German law has strict restrictions on hate speech. Like, we don't have that here, as we previously talked about in the intro.

Yes. You know, hate speech is covered by the First Amendment here. But in Germany, it's not. So, Germany is trying to force these, you know, multinational companies to abide by German law, which is... Gee, I wonder if that's happened in the past.

Yeah. So, this time, I'm okay with it. I like this. I'm down with this. Again, like I said, these are people that have been through this. They know of which they speak, and they know that there is a danger to it. And, you know, I get slippery slope is what people are going to start to say.

But this isn't some willy-nilly thing. This is... If you go into... And, unfortunately, I couldn't find an English translation for it, so I'm going to try to find it. But if you go into the law itself, there are specific definitions of what hate speech is. They drill down. They get into it.

They're not messing around. Yeah. I looked at some of that stuff using Google Translate, which is a fairly handy little device, I got to say. But the thing is, it's like, for this one, I'm just going to cook me up a bag of popcorn, sit back and watch. Oh, yeah. It's going to be interesting. This is going to be a big one.

Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be talking about it a lot, I think. So, I better get that pronunciation down better. Yes, you should. Being German and all. Well, it's not every day that I have to bust out the nets of work. So, you do the best you can.

Supreme Court has a case coming up. 25 years ago, they held that a state can collect sales tax only from a retailer that has a physical presence in the state. Now, at the time... I remember that. Do you remember that? When that came down? That was huge. It was big talk.

Yes, it was huge. It was a huge deal because we were very early in the state of e-commerce on the internet. And a lot of people were saving a lot of money and making a lot of money by, you know, doing out-of-state stuff so that you didn't have to pay any sales tax, which we still get away with a lot of the time.

This is the chance for the Supreme Court to fix that. And because there is a case, it's in Quill Corp versus North Dakota, which involved a mail order vendor. You can get into it. The whole article is a long article, but this is worth reading because there's a lot of different things.

Not just state finances, which states have totally gotten screwed on. They've been totally hosed on state tax for a long time now because of Internet purchases. And as we all know, most people aren't going to brick and mortars anymore. Hosed you a long time. They hosed you a long time. But this has also caused issues with jobs and where companies decide to put their warehouses because where their warehouse is depends on if they have to charge taxes or not.

So a lot of fulfillment centers have not been in California for a very long time because they want to be able to sell here without charging sales tax. Get rid of this incentive. Level the playing field. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. And I don't know how they're going to how they're going to work this out, because there's going to have to be some kind of minimum threshold that you're going to have to have in sales to pay taxes.

Otherwise, it's just going to cripple your business. If you're selling, you know, fifty thousand dollars worth of stuff across the country and you have to, like, do sales tax and report it for 50 states that can cripple somebody's small business. And they're, you know, just their accounting organization and people manage like a lot of people don't get away.

I'm thinking touring organizations. I've worked with bands for years and at the their accountants at the end of the year. Where did you make all your money? You have to provide, you know, I played in 17 different states this year. Here's all those are million dollar tour, multimillion dollar tours.

They're not fifty thousand dollar operations, you know? Well, smaller bands have to do it, too. Yeah, where they can lie. Or they can lie. Well, that's always an option. But, I mean, this has been a this has been a gigantic loophole for a long time. So we'll see if they can.

Basically, it's like Pandora's box has been open. Can they shut it back up again? We'll see. Yeah. And well, I think the good thing about this is that it did spur, you know, basically the e-commerce revolution. And so now that it's here and it's established itself, now it's time to really start to, you know, pay the piper.

You've gotten you've gotten a free ride for this long to build the infrastructure. Right. And it's there now. It is established. So now it is, you know, I'm fine with them overturning this and making online retailers pay the taxes. I am, too. So you're saying that this is like the this is like the new Uber, the new, more mature Uber system.

We started by breaking the law, which allowed us to establish ourselves. But now we're a more mature company that will follow the law. Yeah. Except in this case, they weren't breaking the law. That's the point. That's true. They were skirting it. It was they kind of got it. It weren't skirting.

It was the law. OK, let me actually you're right. Let me rephrase that. It's another one of those situations where the laws were well behind the technology. Yes, I agree with you. Now that they need to rectify that. Indeed. Rectumfy. Yes, that's right. Patreon. We use Patreon.

Go to patreon.com slash grumpy old geeks. Give us some money. Go to go to go to go to patreon.com slash GOG. The grumpy old geeks guys don't need the money, but the guys at GOG do. That's OK. That's us. So they appear to be doing relatively well for themselves. So they've established themselves as basically a good source of income for people that are doing content on their own or larger systems as well.

They're four years old at this point. I think we've pretty much been on board almost the entire time we got in. We came on about a year. We came on about a year after they were going. We watched them and waited to stick our toes in. That's right. They've raised $60 million from a group led by Thrive Capital.

So they are doing pretty well right now. They won't release a valuation, but they say that the $450 million value that TechCrunch floated last week is incorrect. But it may be a little bit high is what insiders are starting to say. But, I mean, good on them. We've always talked about we need some sort of system that will let people pay for content easily.

We've talked about the micropayment stuff. That's never going to happen. All those ones have been out there. It's good that something is basically gaining some traction here. Yeah. What I really like about this is, you know, they're going to make about $7.5 million next year based on the current run rate. And this money is going to help them build out the platform to the point where they can build add-on services to make more money and still charge just the 5% because they're very adamant about keeping, you know, the arts open for smaller producers.

So they can make a living and they don't want to start overcharging people. And I think that that view is really good. So the investors who are putting in this $60 million on top of the previous investment, they've got $107 so far. And they're really behind, like, you know, let's let this thing grow and build and then we'll just build on add-ons, kind of like Shopify did back in the day.

And this is fantastic. I'm so happy about this because I really love Patreon. I think they're fantastic. Me too. I'm happy about this too. Now let me read you a sentence that'll make you a little less happy personally, Jason. I know this sentence. Lefty podcasters, Chapo Trap House, for example, are generating more than $84,000 per month on Patreon, which is very good money for three dudes with a one-year-old show.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the problem. Brian, do you want to do a lefty podcast? Well, according to some of the people that listen to us, we have been for the past two months. Yeah, that's true. But anyway, anyways, we got some more stats about Instagram.

Instagram is rapidly eating away at Snapchat's share of new users. I feel like we read one of these stories every week now. More new users are signing up for Snapchat than Instagram in the United States, but probably not for long, according to new data from Jumpshot, a marketing analytics company. 52% of new U.S. users signed up for Snapchat compared to only 48% for Instagram.

But that share represents a decline in Snapchat's new enrollment and an uptick in Instagram's. So more people are even signing up, not only just jumping platforms, but more people are starting to sign up for Instagram than Snapchat at this point. Yep. And the other interesting thing about this is I saw an article in Bloomberg where Snapchat's influencers are fleeing to Instagram, mainly because Snapchat doesn't offer statistics and they don't care about influencers.

They want it to be, you know, a platform for the peoples. Let's see how that works out for them in the long run. It's not. I mean, that is a big mistake that they're making, especially since they started as basically just users and not corporate entities. But now they've decided, OK, we want CNN and MTV and all those people.

That's what Snapchat's for. No, it's not. It's not a news network. No, no, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Oh, well. Yeah. So be it. See ya. Speaking of see ya, London, say see ya to Uber. Or at least, we'll see.

This is the news that came out today that the London Transport Authority has decided not to renew Uber's license because of the company's approach and conduct demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility in relation to a number of issues which have public safety and security implications. That's something we've been talking about for Uber for quite some time.

Yes. The Transport of London, Transport for London, sorry, is the name of the organization. Their opposition to Uber is not with its business model, even though I have problems with that, too, but with its corporate governance. In the press release, they cited Uber's fast and loose approach to crime reporting, medical certificates, background checks, and its use of Grayball, a software that helped the company evade police scrutiny.

Gee, I wonder why a city would have a problem with that. Yeah, who'd have thought it? I don't know. I have quite a few friends that live in London still. This kind of came out last night while we were sleeping, and when I woke up this morning and looked at the Book of the Face, the reaction from my friends there is pretty evenly split.

A lot of people are happy about it because they don't like this company very much. Those are your friends that have a soul. The friends that have a soul. Then my friends who have a little less money in their pocket are a little less thrilled because London is an expensive city. To begin with, and the authorized official black cabs are pretty pricey.

Uber was a significant price drop in comparison, so for people with a little less cash on them, they're a little bummed out about this. But I think it's going to end up working out one way or another. Yeah, I mean, it expires at the end of September, but they've got a couple more months because obviously Uber is going to appeal, which could take a couple more months.

Yeah, I mean, again, as we were talking about, we're supposed to have the more mature Uber. Eventually, they're going to have to back up on some of these positions and play along with governments because that's what you have to do. Yep. Speaking of lawbreakers, let's talk about the Pirate Bay.

Okay. Our friends from Sweden. Oh, yes. They float just offshore Sweden. Yeah, so what they've been trying to do now, instead of running ads to keep the lights on, they were throwing in a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner to mine Monero. I tell you, pirates are crafty people.

They are. They are. You know, I always wondered back in the day if we could put in like a spam sending engine into some of our flash banners that we could basically rent out. But these guys just did it above board. Now, the interesting thing is when they initially launched it out, there was a bug in the client that did not limit the CPU to the 20 to 30 percent that they're saying now that it will use while you're on Pirate Bay.

But it used all the CPU. Oopsies. They also say that it's restricted to run in one tab only. So if you've got multiple tabs open, it's only going to run in one of them. And the audience seems to be split on this. Some people think it's great because it's like, yeah, they're just taking some CPU while I'm on the site.

And other people are like, well, what else are they going to do? But I don't know. To me, it seems like a pretty decent business model. Just give up some CPU, no ads. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong except for, you know, those typos? Yeah. And until they decided to throw something else into their JavaScript or the JavaScript gets hacked.

Well, what could go wrong? Mm-hmm. What could go wrong? Well, things are going wrong over at Nest. That seems to be what's happening. There was a big event on Wednesday with new products. As the, as this article says, new products, several of them. Yeah.

New direction. Not really. So, yeah, not much came out of this. This is a company that's been having a lot of problems recently with security, with product defects and things like that. And, uh, as they state in this article, the most innovative thing that Nest announced was an alarm.

A box that makes a loud noise. That's it. Yeah. Called the Nest Guard. It does not feel like a comeback. Uh, the, uh, this is over at Gizmodo. The author says, it makes me sad. I wanted Nest to blow my mind with a whole new product lineup. Instead, we saw more of the same, uh, albeit these new products have the Nest logo, an expensive-looking design to boast about.

So, basically, they're not getting very innovative. Uh, there seems to be problems over in Nest land with leadership. Yeah, big problems. Because when I saw it, I was assuming that Nest Secure would at least tie into some kind of outside of the house system. But, no, it just goes wah, wah, wah.

Yeah. It's a little ridiculous considering how big a thing this is right now. The Internet of Things and security and all that stuff, Nest had a real opportunity to be, to brand leaders. And they're just blowing it. Yeah. And while I was reading this, I discovered another older article that I hadn't heard about before, which I'm going to have to share with some of my security friends, about Bluetooth flaws in the Nest Cam.

How you can turn it off via Bluetooth from outside the house and give yourself, like, 90 seconds of, like, blank time to get into the house before the camera reboots. And also, you can actually just turn it off, like, get it offline via another Bluetooth hack. There's a lot of Bluetooth hacks going on this episode.

Apparently. We haven't even gotten to most of them yet. Right. So I need to send that around because my friends in the security realm were talking about how they thought that Nest was one of the better cameras to get. So I'm guessing maybe they missed that whole news cycle as well, because that's kind of scary.

It is. Yeah. It makes me want to kind of reconsider using the Nest for my first floor line of defense now. Yeah. Go back to those Chinese cameras. I already gave those away. Oh, OK. They're gone. Apple is in the news for something different than the iPhone.

OK. The new Safari out there is has a really cool, intelligent ad tracking preventative. Is it artificially intelligent? It is machine learnable. It uses onboard machine learning. Right.

It does this. There's a whole it's really technical what it does. And Brian yells at me when I say technical stuff. So what I'm going to say is it learns where the cookies are coming from. And if you don't visit the sites where the cookies are coming from, from X amount of time, like, you know, 30 days per se, then it will it will not send the data back to those cookies or let them be updated anymore.

Nice. OK. Yeah. It's this really cool sandboxing technique that they have. And of course, all of the advertising agencies are up in arms in expressing their deep concern because they're they're saying that Apple is is ruining the the business model of the Internet.

Well, they have a point. They do. They actually have a point. The thing about look, this is the deal that we made. This is what we collectively signed off on for some reason, not with me kicking and screaming and yelling about what a horrible idea this is the whole time.

We decided we're not paying for crap and it's going to be a fully advertised based medium. That is what the Internet is. That is what we said it's going to be. And I love this technology. I want to use this technology. But it is 100 percent against the ability of any company or any content creator or anybody else to make any cash from them if they're going to block it.

But you use an ad blocker, don't you? I use an ad blocker, but not on sites that I actively enjoy. I just use it when I'm moving around the web. I have the filters shut off for various sites that we we regularly use or that I like or that I know they're only making their money from ads. There you go, depending, depending on how crazy they are with their ads, because some of you people, I'm not going to mention any names.

Why are you now going insane with your ads? And I do put the ad blocker back on for you guys. Yeah, some of them. Some of them are pretty fucking ridiculous. Here's the interesting thing for me that came out of this article was that Safari is used by 14.9 percent of all Internet users.

That's high. That's higher than I thought. Well, here's the thing. Not with iOS, because a lot of people are not going to go out of their way. They're not going to download Chrome or Opera or anything else onto their device. They're just going to use the built in browser.

And now that we know that most traffic on the web now comes from mobile, it's not surprising. This will be coming out in High Sierra once the new Mac OS is updated. But I don't know anyone, anyone that uses Safari on a Mac, if they have an option.

No, I don't even have the stupid, I don't have the shortcut anywhere on my desktop or anywhere for that. I just don't use it. Nope. I am an opera man now. I have to use Chrome for a few things, but Safari, no more. And, of course, the EFF is happy about this.

Well, yeah. I mean, you know. But, yes, this is a good thing. The entire business model of the Internet is inherently flawed. Unfortunately, it is the only business model we've got. The thing about this, though, is it's not an ad blocker. It's a tracking blocker. Because it's all about the tracking that everybody's doing.

All of these follow-on ads and retargeting. And that's the thing that it's really kind of getting around and following your profile around the web to tie you to your browsing history with different companies. That's what it's really good for. All those things that created the illusion that Jason had that his phone was listening to him and serving him ads.

Oh, fuck off. Just saying. Got to listen to all the shows. All right. So let's go a little high, Sierra, ourselves here and get a little high and think about the future of Apple and Tesla.

I loved this article over at Futurism. Why Apple should buy Tesla and make Elon Musk Apple CEO. This is a great idea. Basically, they're stating that Tesla's got some problems related to money. Apple's got a lot of money.

Apple's got a problem with innovation, i.e. they don't do it anymore because they're the biggest company in the world and they don't take any risks anymore and they're kind of boring. Elon Musk does nothing but take risks. Let's put these two great things together like chocolate and peanut butter. This is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.

I love this idea. I want it to happen. I don't, because you know why? We've got Elon Musk for a reason. He's our superhero. He's trying to get us to Mars. He's building rockets. He's making electric cars. Apple makes a phone, you know? Come on. Talk about putting baby in the corner.

I just want Musk to get access to that insane Apple money. You know what Musk would do? He would actually put rockets on that spaceship that they just built and fly it to Mars. He's a big thinker. Apple thinks small and, you know, they make devices.

He makes big things, things that go vroom and go boom and fly to space. Apple, like, lets you log in with your face. So, I don't know. It feels to me like it would be fun to watch, but I would really rather not Elon Musk go down that route, which I don't think he will.

No, this is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to happen. There's less chance of this happening than Taylor Swift not writing a song about an ex-boyfriend. It's not going to happen. But what you should do is you should get a little high Sierra and read this article and dream a little dream. That's all I'm saying.

Speaking of the dreams, the dreams of autonomous drone delivery networks are coming to fruition, at least in Switzerland and also already in Africa. There's a new drone delivery network that is coming out in partnership with Swiss Post that is going to be basically zipping some drones over Switzerland.

The interesting thing about this one is, and the new service is called Matternet. And Matternet's based out of California, but they've got the first basic license to fly drones over populated areas. That's their big claim to fame now. Okay. It looks cool.

It's a cool looking drone, a cool looking setup. Did you watch the video? I did. It's pretty cool. It's cool until one falls out of the sky. Of course. I mean, that's the way it's going to work. Everything's cool until it lands on your head. Yeah. No, this is a very Apple looking device.

Or DJI. I mean, DJI kind of, they started with a white, you know, bubbly drone. It's big. I mean, if you look at it. It's a monster. It's a monster. The last shot on the page itself has a guy in it, so you can see it to scale. This would not feel good if it fell down. No, I'm betting it's got a parachute.

It's got to have a parachute. But they're not generally high enough that a parachute is really going to help, especially if it's a delivery drone. It's not going to be able to, the parachute's not going to help, man. That's all I got to say. It's going 43 miles an hour, though.

So it's got some, you know, A, it's got mass because the thing is massive. It's got speed, and then it's going to have gravity. I think, or, and you know, like they do with the, on the reentry capsules. Those are basically explosive-driven parachutes.

They pop out. They put a little firecracker under it and make it go boom, and then poof, it's out, down it falls. And if they don't have one, somebody's going to die. Yeah. That's all I'm going to say. Well, you know, there's a reason they land those things in the ocean, and they don't fly them over. Anyways, this is not, this is a brave new world I'm a little terrified by.

I'm tinfoil hat. I'm going to get a goddamn football helmet. There you go. I think, though, for the people that need these blood tests done, like, immediately, I think it might end up saving some lives. So, you know, save a life, take a life. It all works out in the end. Ups and doodads.

So, Brian, my new Apple device came. Okay. It is massive. My new 27-inch 5K iMac. Okay. 40, 40 gigabytes of RAM I got in this beast now. That's pretty impressive. It crashes about every 37 seconds.

Oh, that's not fun. No. I started this thing clean. It is like, I mean, it's like clean as a baby's bottom. Right. After you change the diaper, not before. Yeah, I was about to say, there's some distinctions there, speaking from experience.

Yeah, there's definitely a before and after. But, man, this thing is crash-errific, and I'm trying to figure out why. It might be the RAM, because I got RAM from Crucial. But beyond that, it is a beautiful, beautiful big thing. Oh, so many pixels. Nice. I mean, there's so many pixels.

So many. I've been working off two 27-inch, like, old-school 72 DPI monitors, and I'm back to, you know, the good stuff. And it's like, wow, I don't have to squint to read the text. This thing is beautifious. Very nice. Yeah, so I'm very happy with it.

I might have to get one at some point. Maybe I should. Well, I'll wait and see until you figure, you work out the kinks and you tell me what the hell's wrong with your system. Then I'll think about it. Okay. But, man, it's fast. It is like, oh, God, is it fast. All right, let's move on to the next line that you put in the show notes, because I've been waiting for this basically all week.

Of course you have. Because you thought I was going to buy an iPhone X or X or whatever they are. No, no, no. I did not specify. You bet me. You bet me. No, you bet me. I did not specify specifically. Okay, fine. You get me on a technicality there, but you know damn well I meant you're going to get one of the new phones.

And you swore up and down that you didn't have any money and you're not going to get a new phone and it's not going to happen. What did you do, Jason? I got my, I'm on AT&T Next. They gave me the upgrade. I don't have to. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to get a new phone. Here's a new phone. I don't have to pay for it.

It's free. It comes with my plan. That's what I said. I told you that I was on iPhone or AT&T Next and I was not going to buy the X. Go back and listen to the last episode, bitch. You specifically called me out on the $1,000 X and I said, no, I'm on AT&T Next. They're going to give me another phone. That's it.

And they got it. It's coming. So that's all there is to it. All right. So I'm just telling you, you are wrong, motherfucker. Okay. Yeah, that's it. New phone. You can't be smug, Brian, on this one because you're absolutely wrong.

Go back and listen to the last show. I completely said. Isn't it amazing how the smugness just on my face came through the internet without you seeing me or me making a noise? You could just feel the smugness. Oh, you did make an, I know you, 20 years I've known you and that, that little, like somebody pinched your sphincter.

I know that noise. Yeah. Well, you're wrong this time, but it's coming. So whatever. I didn't pay for it. All right. That's it. Okay. Okay. Let's move on to iOS 11. Yes. I upgraded. I feel like we are getting even more.

And is it just me or have they started to feel more and more childlike with every single update? Thank you, Trent Reznor. Yes. Thank you, Trent Reznor. King of like really hardcore music and gorgeously industrial design for giving us day glow, rounded corners, beveled everythings, and something that looks like something that is beyond attractive to my one-year-old because one-year-olds like this sort of design.

Here's the thing that you have to remember. As the company gets bigger, the interface has to be for the lowest common denominator. Go back and listen to the Jim Jefferies gun bit when he talks about rules and the lowest common denominator. I listened to that again this week. It's hilarious. But that's what's happening.

And it's, yes, it's boring, but it does some really cool new stuff. I like the do not disturb while driving. That is fantastic because I never answer the phone when I'm driving. I never text when I'm driving. Leave me alone. When I'm behind the wheel. So this just automates it and sends people a text if I'm driving and they try and get in touch with me.

I love that. Okay. You just don't write them back until you get where you're going. No, but it doesn't bother me. It's like, it doesn't ring or anything. I like that. But there's a, there's a big, the big, oh, it says the guy who can't even fast forward through a fucking commercial because he's got a baby bottle.

I got 110 pound Rottweiler in my hand. So anyway, uh, there's a really good review. Uh, the Mac stories review. It is like 8,000 pages long. It'll tell you everything that there is in iOS 11. I read about two pages of it and got bored, but you're, you have a link in here that was much better.

Yes. It's tech crunches. 15 neat hidden features in iOS 11. An argument can be made that they're not spectacularly hidden. They're just new. Uh, but it's a good school of the, it's clickbait, but you can get to the, the, the list view, which lists all 15 without having to click through 7,000 pages.

And it's a good primer in what's new in iOS 11. It just runs you through the basics real fast. Yeah. And my favorite thing this week that came through was a Jordan Cooper friend of the show. I don't know if he listens anymore cause he's big soccer guy now, but he had the greatest tweet updated iPhone to iOS 11 and my life hasn't gotten any better.

What a failure. I just love, I love that. And it hasn't, uh, except for the iPad, the iPad's pretty, pretty stellar with the new, the new update. It won't work probably on your little mini, but on the iPad pro, it's pretty cool. All the stuff that it does. All the stuff is there. It's just the screen real estate isn't big enough on a mini for it to be particularly useful.

That's, that would be the problem with that. And I threw this one in here for you, Brian 11 Apple air pod tips, because you never read the manual. My point was because I wasn't a fucking manual. That's because there isn't a goddamn manual. Yes. See that you should know that. And that should not be your headline. There's no manual at all.

They just click bait. And, uh, I didn't really pick up anything terribly useful in here because there's not just, I mean, they're basically headphones. I mean, I found something because I thought that you couldn't pair them with non Apple devices and apparently you can, they will work with any Bluetooth enabled, uh, phone.

So if I wanted to pair them with my, uh, galaxy S seven edge, I actually can. Right. So that's pretty cool. I did not know that, but I also particularly enjoyed a tip number 11, check if your firmware has been updated and then they immediately tell you, well, you can't update firmware manually.

So it doesn't really effing matter. Does it? Cause you can't do shit about it. We need, we needed one more, we needed one more article to get over the threshold. It's unbelievable. Journalism. Oh my God. Anyways, uh, I picked up another little new thing. I actually ordered this the same time as some of the stuff I got last week, but as Jason will soon tell you, there are some shipping issues, it's the Sooms original webcam cover directly from the Swiss manufacturer, elegant and durable black metal three pack.

That is the actual title. And these are just little slidey sticky webcam covers. So you can, you know, step it up from just having a post-it note sitting on your Mac. Yeah. Uh, yeah. You can get it as soon as October 13th through November 1st. Uh, yep. And, uh, my link in here is to a roll of electrical tape because, but I actually put in the link to the several colors option.

So you can get multiple colors of your electrical tape that does the same damn thing and comes off without any problems. Right. Well, I like my little slidey solution. It's very sexy looking. You can actually even put it on your iPhones or iPads if you want as well. It's very thin.

It works wonderfully. And there is something weird going on with their shipping thing. Cause I also got like, you're not going to get this for eight months bucko when I ordered it and it showed up within a week. So I think it's something because they are coming directly from the Swiss manufacturer. I don't think that they've got that whole, uh, all that stuff tied in, in terms of how long it's going to really realistically take to ship and all that sort of stuff.

So, uh, I, you know, take their, take their, you have to wait a month and a half with a grain of salt. I didn't. Okay. Here's my one question for it because I've tried to use these before on my MacBook pros. They don't close. Is this one thin enough where it will actually close and latch? Yes. Closes and latches.

No problem. Wow. Okay. That's impressive then. Yep. Very impressive. Uh, Amazon came out with the all new fire HD 10 tablet. Uh, this makes sense now why they were unloading all the older ones at, at such a discount.

I was about to say they didn't do, they hadn't even started development until they saw that you bought an old one. Then they went, let's screw Jason. That's how it works. You know, I'm, I can guarantee you in 32 days, there are going to be new IMAX that are going to be revolutionary because that's when the time that my returnability on this one will, will have expired.

Yes. That's just the way it works. I buy something and then 32 days later, something better comes out. Yes. Anyway, uh, zombie gunship revenant. Oh my God. This is the first AR game I've tried for the new iOS. Mm-hmm. Super fun.

I like AR. It's cool. I've basically been walking around my kitchen killing zombies. It is so much fun and it's free. So go check it out. I am going to check this out because I have not seen any of the, uh, funky new AR things with the new iOS yet. So this sounds good.

I will try it. What phone do you have? I have the, uh, seven. Okay. It should work on a set. Maybe it should work on a set. It works on my seven plus. Okay. Uh, works really well. It's really fun. Except the problem is you're looking down for like seven minutes around. So your, your neck kind of gets sore.

So I, I, here's a tip when you're, when you, after you set your base, uh, you can get down and shoot, like you can tilt it and like get really down in the weeds and shoot at the zombies. So your, your arms and your neck don't hurt as much. Okay. Just tell, just, just telling, giving, giving you a tip before you try it out.

It's fun though, really. And it's free. So try it. All right. And there's this thing called mighty. That's been getting a lot of press recently. Mighty plays your Spotify music on the go without a phone. Dot. Finally. Dot. Who has been waiting for this? No one.

Okay. I'm just making sure that I'm not crazy because. Where are you going without your phone? What? Who's who joggers? Maybe, but they probably still have their old ones that are really small that.

Okay. I don't get it. Here's the deal. Yeah. Yeah. These people, since, since Apple no longer makes the iPod, they have reinvented the iPod. And specifically, if you look at the iPod nano six generation, it's pretty much the same thing, but better, obviously.

But yeah, they're, they're reinventing the iPod. Good for you, mighty. I mean, I, you know, it makes sense. A lot of people don't have music collections anymore. They only have Spotify. It allows you to download songs to the device. That's it. It just seems a little, come on people. Buy audio hijack.

Get over it.

Media candy. The Emmys were last week in the handmaid's tale took home an Emmy. So I decided to go give it another shot. I thought, yeah, I, even though I just read the book and I started to watch it and I kind of pooh poohed it and I'm like, I'm just not ready for it. So I'm on episode four now.

Excellent. It is so good. And it is so true to the book. It's crazy. It is really, really faithful to the book. The biggest problem is, and I think, I think we covered this on Slack last night, you and I just chatting. The world is dystopian enough.

Do we really need to watch some more dystopian BS? And I, I'm enjoying it though. Everybody I've talked to says it's wonderful. I can't even watch black mirror right now. It's just a little too much. Like my wife and I have, I've been throwing a West wing back on because we need to feel something good in the world.

I don't think I can watch this right now, but I, I, everybody says it's great. I will someday get around to watching it. And, and on that note, uh, after our last episode, I finally decided to go start watching family guy. And I started with episode one, season one, and I'm loving it.

And what I do now is I'll watch an episode of the handmaid's tale. And as a palate cleanser, before I go to bed, I'll watch two episodes of family guy to bring snap me back to the humorousness of reality and just sleep like a baby. But yeah, if I watched handmaid's tale and went to bed, oh, the nightmares.

I could imagine. Yeah. Well, speaking of nightmares, I forced myself and powered through and watched all of iron fist this week. I'm sorry. I, uh, you know, I'd watched the defenders and iron fist had been the only of the Marvel series on Netflix that I hadn't seen.

So I was like, all right, to hell with it. Besides the, I, that, uh, the female character is just gorgeous. I love her. So I had to watch just for that. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I, I will rank it above Luke Cage. Yes, that's not, that's not necessarily a good thing.

It's not saying much. Yeah. It's not saying much. Uh, I would actually say this would be a good show if it weren't for the main character. He's just so whiny. Everybody else is good. And here's the problem. He's whiny. I can distill it down to the character's name.

His name is Danny. Now, a superhero man would be named Dan, but no, we get Danny. That's the problem with the show. Fucking Danny. So the hell with this Dan show. No, no, no.

Danny was, uh, what's his name? In, uh, Caddyshack. I think of, I think of the heroes of Caddyshack is Danny. Yes. Your hero is not a child. Your hero should be a man. He should be Dan. Dan the man. Not Danny. So we, Dan the man would be a totally different superhero.

Anyways, he is the real problem with the show. I thought all the other characters were very compelling, very well played. There isn't anybody else in the show I didn't like. The story even wasn't too bad. He's just horrible. Yeah. You know what? I mean, the ensemble saved him because I really liked his little sidekick, uh, sword fighter, Japanese girlfriend.

Yeah. She was great. Uh, the story was okay. Yeah. He's the only weak, weak link in the show, but I do have very weak link. Yeah. It is a very weak link on the upside. Uh, the new Punisher trailer is out. So we're finally getting Punisher again. I was surprised he wasn't in the defenders, but I guess it's based on a comic and he wasn't in the comic.

So yeah, I guess not. I went, had to go that, but imagine if it just had Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, daredevil and the Punisher instead of iron fist. Now, how awesome would that have been? That would have been much better. And I do have one other complaint about iron fist. And I know, you know, you have listened to me complain about Kung Fu on, on, I think I was, it was for all of the series basically, because they're all Kung Fu all the time.

And daredevil was driving me crazy because 35 minutes of Kung Fu in the dark, which is like, why did, why did we film any of that? Because I can't see anything. Even I got tired of that. And I love Kung Fu. I have a new Kung Fu complaint for iron fist. Now, I have a personal message to the hand, the evil organization right now.

I think you need to establish an employee's manual that states that all your ninja, your evil ninja types need to go to get their haircuts before big fights, because every single one of your evil ninjas had impossibly cool hairdos that they had to sweep out of their face every time they got punched.

I would just say that the hand would have already taken over the world if they had a fucking barber on staff. Buzz cuts for the win. Look, their hair is the problem. Like, they're bit and beat and killed all the time because they can't see their damn enemies. It's a very pragmatic approach to Kung Fu.

I like it. It really started to bother me while going through all 13 episodes in a row. I was like, don't these guys get haircuts? Anyways. That's kind of like my problem with watching the Underworld series. No vampire ever walked through a door that wasn't a double door that they could like flourish through.

They had to open both doors at the same time and walk into the room so their trench coat flowed behind them. You never saw somebody like, you never saw a vampire go into a single door, like into a bedroom or a closet. Every door they went through had two doors that they had to bust open with both arms.

Great. You've ruined those movies for me now. Oh, don't get me started on that because how does the fucking vampire drown? Okay. She doesn't breathe and she drowns in the first one. What a stupid movie. Okay. Okay. Speaking of movies, Blade Runner 2049 is coming and Wired has a great cover story.

Well, I'm going to assume it's great, but it's called The Replicant Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner. I haven't read it yet and I'm not going to read it until I see the movie. I just want to say the photography for the cover and the segment on the web that they did, the photography is amazing. Whoever shot that, kudos.

It's really gorgeous. Yeah. I'm not going to read it either because I want to go into this completely blank. Yeah, me too. All right. Well, we have something coming this Sunday, the premiere of the new Star Trek series. I'm quite excited about it. Star Trek Discovery opens up.

There is an interesting article over at Slate called The Keepers of the Canon and it goes into how franchises like Star Trek maintain continuity in an age of ever-expanding fictional universes, which is a problem for a show like Star Trek, which now has six different series and over 13 films.

So you do have to kind of keep things in order and it gets into it, the process that they use, the process that's being used by the Star Wars folk, which involves a massive database and things like of that nature. And they have two full-time archivers. Can you imagine your job being an archiver of Star Wars?

That'd be cool. That would be pretty awesome. Yeah. So, but there was one line in this article that made me stand up and take notice. Here it is. The audience just has to be patient because typically if it seems like we're violating canon, we know, said whoever the hell it was, we know that people might have knee-jerk reactions to things, but we have a plan.

I knew another sci-fi show that the tagline was, we have a plan, and I know that those motherfuckers did not have any plan whatsoever. Oh my God. So do you really have a plan for this Star Trek series or are you lying to me now? I need to know.

I think they're lying to you, right to your face. I think that they are as well. So we have a plan is now famous last words for any sci-fi developers. That's all I got to say. J.R. Ewing wakes up and it was a transporter accident. That's the plan.

Anyways, the new Star Wars is also coming in Star Wars Last Jedi, and we are starting to get some great photos from the set and from production. Vulture has this collection of some of the ones that released. You're pretty safe to look at them. I don't think there's any spoilers in there. Man, it just looks good.

Says the guy who yelled at me putting in a link to a product last week. There's no spoilers in these photos. There's no new characters in these photos. Well, there are no characters in this photo. Never mind. I'm a hypocrite, Jason. What do you want from me? There you go. Go get yourself an iPhone X, you bitch. And found a new podcast, sort of, the Jim Jeffries Show Podcast.

I see that you put it in the show notes as well, so I'll let you talk about it first. I'm a huge Jim Jeffries fan, as I've mentioned many times and previously in this episode. Me too. The podcast is what they do. They do a wrap up with the writers about 30 minutes after the episode is done filming. And it's really cool.

I really enjoyed it. And this is part of a new podcast network from Comedy Central. Maybe we'll get on it. We've been on the rest of them. Yeah, seriously. We've left the rest of them, too. But this is going to just screw up the top 100 for all my other shows that are on the top 100 in iTunes.

So, damn it. Stop it. I listen to the podcast as well. I think you could probably listen to it on a regular basis without watching the show, but I'm not entirely sure how satisfying that will be. I mean, anytime Jim Jeffries is talking, it's usually pretty funny. But they are running through the show, and I didn't watch the show.

I just listened to the podcast, and I don't think I can do both. That's a little too much Jim Jeffries in my life, listening to an entire show and then listening to another. I don't watch wrap-up shows. I hate that crap. I'm not going to listen to a podcast that's wrapping up a show. I'm either going to listen to the podcast or watch the show, one or the other. So I'm going to keep listening to the podcast and see if they can keep it something that is standalone or not.

Yeah, see, I don't have access to the show except for Sweden, so this is a good interstitial thing, but I've got to find a way to get the show because I'm such a fan. I will watch the show and listen to the after show because, seriously, he's my favorite comedian that's out there right now.

So more Jim Jeffries. That's all I've got to say. I'm down with that idea. A couple weeks back, you talked about KMFDM having a new album, and I gave that a listen. It was okay. Yeah, it was okay. They're old KMFDM, so it's a little slower. Yeah, it's fine.

It is what it is. I've got another kind of old-school industrial act, sort of, coming back. The guys from Nitzer Eb, who I was a big fan of and worked with for a while, a great old band, they're in a new collective. It's an industrial collective called Blackline, and they've got an album that just came out called Treason, Sedition, and Subversive Activities.

It's a pretty good listen. It is not throwback industrial. It is definitely modern industrial music. I enjoyed it a lot. And if you happen to be in Europe, you are lucky. They will be opening up for Depeche Mode for the second leg that they're doing over there. So that should be fun. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, the whole, like, you know, industrial thing.

Like, I saw Ministry at Riot Fest, and I was watching them, and I'm like, man, 20 years ago, this would have been the coolest show I've ever seen. But at 46, I'm kind of like, this is just kind of silly. I'm just not that angry anymore.

I know. That's the thing. I mean, I still love Rammstein because it's in German. Auf Deutsch. Give me my anger auf Deutsch. Within the limits of the law. Within the limits of the law. You can be angry. You just can't be hateful. But I still love Rammstein.

But yeah, this old stuff is just, I'll listen to the album for sure. But yeah, my heart full of hate and a lust for vomit has kind of been like, I'd just rather sit on the couch and watch Family Guy. Well, if you decide you want to get out of the house, Jason, I've got something for you to go to in Chicago.

And you should go right quick because it ain't going to be around too much longer. Okay. Netflix has demanded the closing of a Stranger Things-themed bar that's in Chicago called The Upside Down. I did not know that. Damn. Get there quickly. Now, they did send a season to Fist, which is, they have every right to do.

It's their intellectual property and it's a big hit right now. And they want to control the way that their universe is presented and also stop other people from trading on their name, which they don't get to do. You don't get to do that. But it does sound like such a cool concept. Get there quickly, Jason. Okay.

I'm on it. Not because I don't leave the house. Speaking of not leaving the house, Hulu has a new look on Roku. It's terrible. It is ungodly terrible. It killed all my favorites, which is what you really want to do in a redesign.

God, let's wipe the database during a redesign. Morons. The only problem is I need them because all my shows are coming back like Gotham, which just came back last night. Now that I'm a family guy addict and I don't want to go to Sweden every day to go, you know, get more shows.

Yeah, it sucks. But, yeah, way to go, Hulu. You still suck. Yeah. Shocking. Security? Security? Ha! We're back this week with Security Ha with Sordid Lord Klittner.

And if you don't know what that means, stick around because you're going to love it. Yeah, I don't know that anyone has been that creative with rhyming to my last name since probably middle school. So good times. Good times. It's like the worst new Star Wars character ever.

That's right. Right. It's the real. It's who is. No, he's got one lightsaber, but you can't find it. Oh, very nice. Oh, clever. Oh, all right.

I got a little follow up. I got a little follow up from last week. And you got you guys let me down on the sex bot robot story. Yeah, I feel I feel very, very sad. That you left every single joke on the table that was there to be had. And, yeah, I can't leave you guys alone ever again.

That's it. Well, you know, the best thing about having you not with us for a week is that when we get when we come back, we get to be criticized by you for everything that we did wrong. Well, if you didn't screw up, then, hey, then you have nothing to worry about. I think there should be a special edition of Grumpy Old Geeks, a bonus episode, if you were.

And it can just be you rattling off all of your sex bot jokes. Now that I would actually go back and listen to my own show for. That's for Patreon subscribers only. There you go. See, there you go. Must we torture them so much just for giving us money, Jason?

Hey, you buy in for a penny, in for a pound. All right. Well, I've got some important news for both of you guys. I know this will affect you deeply. It probably already has. We've got to be careful here because I know you two are the leaders of the Avril Lavigne fan club.

Our report released Tuesday, guys. Card carrying. Yep. McAfee has basically said that she is the most dangerous celebrity on the interwebs. And you thought it was Kim Kardashian that was breaking your internet. It is not. It is Avril Lavigne. Almost 15% of searches involving Avril lead to websites that may contain potentially harmful malware.

That number jumps to 22% when one searches for shockingly illegal free MP3s of her songs. So other artists on the list include Bruno Mars, Carly Rae Jepsen, Zayn Malik, Celine Dion, Calvin Harris, Justin Bieber, Sean P. Diddy, B. Diddy Combs, Katy Perry, and Beyonce.

So try not to get free songs or information about them. Now, this is a bit puzzling why Levine would be topping it because she hasn't released an album in almost four years and is pretty much out of the entertainment news cycle. But, Jason, you found something that might suggest why she gets Googled so much.

This is my favorite thing I found on the internet this week. While reading your article, it talks about a conspiracy theory that Avril Lavigne was actually killed off and replaced with an actress. You know, I'm glad you put this in here because this is more probable than your bullshit about the cell phone listening to you and then giving you GoPro ads.

Yeah. I fucking love you. The sad thing is, you're right. I looked at the pictures. Yeah, it's not her anymore. What are you going to do? No, I'm just joking. It's a fun read. It's a very fun read. I will happily personally debunk this right now.

I have met Avril Lavigne a number of times, both before and after said date. And you cannot replace that sparkling, wonderful personality that she has. You cannot make that up. It is her. Sorry, guys. Okay. And now I got to know, why are you hanging out with Avril Lavigne? Were you like planning her Google campaign?

It's so long. Her husband at the time was really good friends with Mike, the drummer from the Goo Goo Dolls. And she and John Resnick also did some singing. Okay, we didn't need to hear that. Never mind. Music industry shit. Never mind. I was wondering what that big clunking sound was.

Then I realized that that was a name dropping. But you know what? I think she's probably just hanging out with Paul McCartney. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah. Or she's running someplace. She's running a burger joint with Elvis. I also hear that one a lot.

Just as likely. Just as likely. You never know. Now, we talked earlier about how I, now that I have my AirPods, will never ever notice if the iOS update switches on or switches off Bluetooth, because that used to be my big thing. It was always a mystery. Some updates would switch it on.

Some wouldn't. It's the same kind of mystery as, like, why every other Star Trek movie was good. It's pretty much on the same level as that. Pretty much the same level as that. But I will now be able to tell you in the future again, because apparently it's a bad idea to leave your Bluetooth on.

There's a vulnerability known as Blueborn. It was discovered this week by a security research firm, Armis. And apparently with this, it's mostly Samsung Galaxy phones, the Google Pixel, the LG Sports Wash, a couple other systems. Your iPhones are safe if they've been upgraded to iOS 10, but not if you haven't done that.

And I can't imagine anybody out there that's still running that. But it's a Bluetooth attack that only takes about 10 seconds to do and give a hacker total control of your device without being connected to anything. So over air hacking. It's a bad one and potentially affecting millions of devices all over the world.

So yeah, if you use Bluetooth, if you ever turn Bluetooth on, make sure this is one that you look for a patch on because it's a serious one. Well, getting to the point where you can turn Bluetooth off, apparently in iOS 11, if you're using Control Center, you actually can't.

Okay. It kind of, it sort of kind of turns it off light because the radios are still working because they still want you to be able to use AirDrop, AirPlay, the Apple Pencil and the Apple Watch, location services and other features. And this is a feature, not a bug.

Yeah. Apple has done this on purpose. Yeah. So annoying. Apple loves you, but they're not in love with you. Well, they just don't think that you know what you're doing. So this is the, again, this is my frustration with technology in the same way that we don't understand or know what Google means when we delete something from Google.

We do not now know what turning something off means anymore. Now, so frustrating. You can still turn it off from the actual settings panel and it will literally turn off the radio. But if you're using Control Panel, it will not.

So this takes me back to a long ago debate that I remember from when iPhones were brand new, the original iPhones. Remember the whole thing with, you know, does the speaker switch on the side of the iPhone actually disconnect the speaker or not? Yes.

Now, in my opinion, that speaker switch on the side of the phone should actually be, that should be connected to the wire that goes to the speaker of the phone. So when that switch is in the off position, there is no electricity going to the speaker on the phone, right?

There's no such thing as physical switches anymore. I know, I know, I know. Silly, silly girl. I know, I know. But this came up, you know, way back when, when the iPhone was brand new because people would think that they were muting the speaker on the phone. But it turns out if you set an alarm, that completely overrode the setting on the side.

So there were, you know, there were reports of people at concerts and things like that. So this seems to be a long standing behavior where off doesn't necessarily mean off when it comes to Apple devices. And I guess what the, the new functionality of this button is when you disconnect, it will disconnect you from the thing that you're disconnected, the thing, the thing that you're connected to right now, but it doesn't actually turn off the function.

Yeah, I think, I think it, it, it restricts new connections unless you're using the blue balls, whatever, or whatever the threat was that Brian had, then it won't let new connections go through, but if you're connected to any Apple device that has Bluetooth, then you can keep going.

I see. And for me, I kind of like that because I don't want my watch to stop working, but, or my car, I'm curious if it turns off my car, I'm going to have to test that when I, you know, in the olden days, when we used to be able to basically configure things the way that we would like them, there would have been a way to basically set up a feature where you could have said, if I hit this button, switch off everything except for my watch.

Or except for the couple of things that I want, but now that we're no longer allowed to customize things the way that we would like them to, all that shit's out the window. So, well, you, you know, Macintosh has not actually been what they call a customized friendly company since, Oh, for fucking ever. Yes.

I'm aware of that. I mean, Steve jobs wanted, you know, a computer like a toaster. You just plock it down. You're not allowed to touch anything. You know, they Papa knows best. So that's the way it is. Yeah, that's the way it is. Now, Equifax has been sadly unable to stay out of the news as much as they dearly wish they were able to at this point.

Uh, the latest idiot thing that they've been doing, uh, we all know that, I mean, everything that they have done since the data breach has been the exact wrong thing to do. It's good to know that they're at least consistent. So they are determined to continue to screw things up on a, on a daily basis. Now for the past two weeks, the company's official Twitter account has been directing users to a fake lookalike website.

The sole purpose of which is to expose how bad Equifax actually is. There's a guy that noticed that they were sending them to an impossibly sending people to an impossibly long, uh, URL, Equifax security, 2017.com. And, uh, instead he just bought, uh, security Equifax, 2017.com and put up a site saying cybersecurity and basically Experian or Equifax is dumb and they're horrible at stuff.

And, um, uh, Equifax is claiming that it was, uh, autocorrect that switched their URL. So they started, some of their tweets were sending people to that site instead of their own site. Yes. For almost two weeks for Twitter user, Tim, I believe it was sending them over.

Yeah. Now I, yeah. And I have a problem with Gizmodo on this because they, they had a clickbaity headline that says Equifax has been sending consumers to a fake phishing site for almost two weeks. And it was not a phishing site. It is not a phishing site. It was a proof of concept to say Equifax are dumb fucks.

That's all it was. This person was, uh, you know, a white hat, a white hat hacker, uh, not looking to cause any more trouble. Hopefully Equifax hasn't killed him. So hopefully he still is a white hat hacker. Well, but just that it took two weeks for them to do anything about it.

Um, you know, and, and it just reinforces the fact that, uh, what's the rush, right? When you're Equifax, why hurry and, and fix things? Yeah. You know, I'm really hoping that this guy was sitting back at his apartment and he had a little script going with his buddies.

And it's like, every time I got a hit on this website, everybody drink, like turn it into a drinking game. Cause that would have been kind of fun. Yeah. Well, it's not just, uh, Equifax. I, I inadvertently said Experian a couple of times while reading that story. It's because they're also a horrible shit show of a company.

Uh, one of the first things that you were, we were told to do after this big hacking was announced over at Equifax was that we should go around to all the other competitors, uh, credit companies and, and ask them to freeze our credits. So nobody could use that data open to open up a new account until we kind of figured out what the hell was going on.

Well, if you attempt to freeze your credit with Experian, you can't unfreeze it without a four digit pin. However, they will conveniently give anyone that four digit pin provided they first tick a box promising that they are really, really, totally, honestly, not a scammer. And then answer three easy to use and look up knowledge-based authentication questions.

So basically if you Google address, data burst, social security number, all of which could be found, especially if you have been hacked and you want to break into somebody's account in Experian and you just tick off a box saying that you really are who you mean to be, you're in there, buddy. Yeah. You got to answer those four questions, but those four questions are so easy to answer that anybody can figure it out.

The point is, those aren't questions that you've set yourself. These are just pretty simple. If you've ever been hacked in your life, even if you've just been dumb in your life, you can find this information out about almost anybody. Which reminds me, earlier this week on Facebook, I saw several friends had fallen victim to a Facebook quiz that was, what does your maiden name say about you?

Right. Yes, that would not be a good thing to do, people. I'm going to start my new one. What does your social security number say about you? Right. Exactly. If you put in all the numbers of your social security number, the number that it'll add up to tells you this.

Well, and I think about- That's actually not bad. I think we should try that. Yeah. I bet we'd get a lot of response. I bet we would get people to do it. I mean, I remember when I was in college, our student ID was our social security number. So, every time I took an exam, I put my social security number.

Every time I filled out any bit of paperwork- Yep. Me too. You know, probably thousands of documents over the course of my time in college, they all have it on there. I think the only time that that was acceptable for me was when I was going in for surgery on my leg, and at every step at a handoff, they asked me my name and my social security number and which leg was being operated on.

Right. Because, you know, there have been a lot of problems in hospital with people getting wrong surgeries because they have sound-alike names. Well, I like to cut out the middle, man. And you know how you're supposed to, like, put an X on the leg that they're not supposed to cut and an O on the one that they are? I write my social security number on the bit of my body that I want them to cut into.

I just wrote a big- I put a big arrow and said, cut here. But the thing about the social security numbers, it's something that while you're starting to go under, you're probably not going to forget. So I can kind of see that as a valid reason to use socials in that scenario.

But otherwise, like, if anybody is hanging out in the waiting room by any of these places, you can hear people's names and social security numbers. You can pick it up just by sitting there. Well, this will tie in perfectly with your entire pacemaker hijacker scheme. Oh, my God.

You're right. Okay. I got a book coming out next year. I'm going to call it Simon & Schuster. We're going to get on this shit. We call David the sordid lord. I don't know what's up with that. Yeah, the gravy train is leaving the station. Damn straight. I'm leaving you bitches in the dust.

Anyway, this is right up my alley. A new ransomware demands nudes instead of Bitcoin. Now, Dave, have you guys covered this on the show yet? Yes, we have. In fact, yes. Yes, we have. Please enlighten us, because everybody knows what I'm going to say.

Let's have a more measured approach to this one. Well, so this is a newly discovered bit of malware. It's ransomware. So you get this installed on your system. This is what's called a screen locker. So it doesn't actually encrypt anything. It doesn't destroy anything.

It doesn't wipe anything out. Basically, it keeps you from having access to your computer, but doesn't do anything more than that. The instructions are that if you get infected with this, that you have to send these folks 10 nude pictures of yourself. Then you have to wait for them to verify that the nudes do actually belong to you.

I'm not sure how they do that, but I guess you can't just send them nudes from the neck down. You know, I guess it's easy enough to figure out what someone looks like. And then once you are verified, they will send you an unlock code, but they will sell your nudes on the deep web.

So I don't really see what the upside here. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, back up your computers. Unless you're a porn star and then you're like, can I get a cut? Well, I mean, there is that. Yeah. What if you were someone who just doesn't care or, you know, you're a nude model for art classes or things like that?

Yeah. Or you're a 46 year old overweight man who nobody's going to pay for any photos of. I was going to take the much nicer approach. I was about to say, what if you are someone who say wouldn't demand much? On the black web. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Right. Eventually, because, you know, Jason's going to get the email from these ransomers that says, OK, please stop sending us photos. We have we have enough. We said 10, not 200. Please turn off the fire hose, please. Hey, you asked.

Right now. In the article, they say that this hasn't been seen in the wild yet. They don't know of anyone who's actually been infected by it. But so it's not like it's widespread or anything like that. But again, have a good backup, folks, in case you get hit by something like this.

I love the part about this. People think it's pretty much a joke. And the malware appears to play a looped music from a file called your mom is gay and that MP3, which is the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. So that's kind of funny, which makes me think that this is kind of like a script kitties messing around.

Yeah, I think so. It's just the sort of sophomoric humor that you'd expect from a bunch of script kitties. And yeah, but it's fun. OK, moving on to people who are not script kitties. Let's talk about the CCleaner malware this week. This is the big mama. Take it away, Dave.

Trust me, you guys covered this way more than we did. Well, so basically, the folks who make CCleaner had a supply chain issue somewhere along the lines in between them writing the code and the code getting distributed.

Someone installed a back door into the code. And so this is after the code was signed. That's the really the really important thing is like they injected the malware after the code had been signed with their valid certificate. So it looked like it was actual CCleaner software that you were downloading.

Right. So it would install a back door and they estimate that over 700,000 computers had this installed on it. And I believe they found a handful that had the package, the subsequent package that they installed.

They used the back door to install. And this article in Wired talks about at least 18 tech firms that seem to have been targeted by this. And they suspect that they were specifically targeted. So what this does is this makes it seem as though this was probably a nation state and not just some criminal activity.

You know, people looking to get your information and, you know, sell sell it on the dark web to gather up your information from your computer. This seems a little more serious than that. Yeah, it seems very similar to the Ukraine hack when when another company's I don't like calling it supply chain because to me that, you know, sounds like physical products.

But I guess it is kind of the same thing where was it the was it MedDoc? Yeah. Was that the Ukrainian company? That was. Yep. Me. Yeah. And with with not Petya and as we like to call here on Grumpy Old Geeks, yeah, yeah, this is very similar to that kind of attack.

So it does look like that. And there are signs that point to the Chinese. But as we all know, attribution is extraordinarily hard to prove in these cases. So, yeah. But, yeah, a lot of tech companies were targeted with what they think is, you know, basically industrial espionage.

Right. And if you get rid of the original copy of CCleaner, if you delete that or install a newer version, that doesn't mean you're out of the woods because you may have already. Yeah, and that's what they were that's what they were originally saying. It was like, oh, if you just get rid of it, like the first half of this week, they're just like, get rid of it.

It never called home. Everything's fine. But now that they've dug in deeper, it's like, oh, maybe not. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So you need to look for that secondary package to make sure that you haven't been infected with that. Moving on.

So security cameras, the folks over at Ben-Gurion University who, you know, it seems like half the time when I see some kind of amazingly clever hack using off the shelf stuff. Sure enough, it's the researchers over at Ben-Gurion who have come up with these clever things.

So, Jason, we know how much you love your security cameras. I gave them away. Come on. Or I can now I can now watch what my neighbors are doing. Right. So you're right. The Ben-Gurion guys, like I think even before you were on the show, we were talking about some of the research they were doing with air gapped PCs.

Yep. And ultrasonics and hard drives back in the day. Yeah. They're really good and they're very clever. And so what they've come up with here is a way to basically have two-way communication using a security camera. So imagine your security camera is hanging off the side of your building.

It's outside. Well, what do many security cameras have built in to help light up the night? Infrared lights. Infrared lights. Right. And these infrared lights are invisible to humans. And so they can use those infrared lights by turning the infrared lights on and off quickly.

They can basically use the infrared lights as a signaling system. And then, of course, the other part of a security camera is the camera part. So you can signal back to the camera. So by infecting the camera or controlling the camera from inside someone's organization, they can use a security camera hanging off the side of the building to send information in both directions.

And, you know, this is not something that I think people would expect. It's pretty cool, though. It is pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I got to say. I got no problem with it. I'm like, way to throw that vulnerability out. Like, everything these guys put out, yes, it just degrades my, you know, my trust in anything that's in my house.

But I still, like, as a sci-fi geek, think, that's pretty fucking cool. Yeah. You know? It is cool. By the way, most video cameras can see the infrared light. So if you point your, like, point your infrared remote from your TV at a video camera, you'll see the little red light flashing.

Right. It's a quick way to test it. Also, I found out that people who have had the lens removed in their eyes who have to wear a permanent contact lens or a contact lens to replace the lens that they've had removed for, you know, whatever medical reasons, they can see the infrared light as well.

Cool. No way. Yeah. Evidently, it's the lens in your eye that filters out the infrared. Oh, that's some cyberpunk shit right there. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. That is cool. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, let's get back to some tinfoil hattery. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I just threw this in because I had to.

I like it. This is an article from a couple weeks ago, or about a month ago, but it's still fun. Facebook figured out my family secrets, and it won't tell me how. This is somebody who is using the people you might know. And it turned out that it put them on to a long lost relative that they didn't even know they were related to.

Which is kind of cool, but also kind of creepy. Yeah, I've also seen the posts about somebody who ended up being connected or suggested they're psychiatrists, and there was no connection with them on Facebook whatsoever, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, no, I mean, trust me, I've had some other experiences with this with people who found people, and I can't talk about it on the show because it's just not right.

But it's just a fun one. It's a fun one that, yeah, maybe something, this big data thing is smarter than we thought. So AI, yes, can't tell if you post a rape joke on Instagram, but maybe you can find your long lost relative.

I mean, the big data aspect of it is what should be worrying people, and the fact that these things are happening shouldn't be a surprise because everybody, at least I can't say everybody, but those of us lucky enough to be in the first world and have all the sorts of things that we have are all on Facebook.

We are, and the connections and the interconnections between them shouldn't be that surprising. Somebody's going to know somebody who knows somebody who's connected to you, to somebody else, and all Facebook does is draw. You've got to think of Facebook and this algorithm as season one of Homeland, Claire Dane's apartment.

It's just a bunch of strings connecting everything together. Another case to be made for going back to Ella. But what if it connects you with someone who you don't want to be connected with? That abusive husband that basically tried to kill you and drown your kid?

I was thinking more along the lines of a birth mother who wants to remain anonymous and somehow... That would be a tricky one. It makes the connection. Because then they'd have to have that level of connection. They would have to be like, it would be a birth mom that wanted to stay in touch with a lot of other aspects of people within your life, but just not you, to have the multiple connections between the two people, the strands.

Or it would just be an amazingly, unbelievably huge coincidence. Yeah, like the birth mother talked to the adoptive mother and they were connected somehow. And they're friends on Facebook. Yeah, something like that. Because otherwise, they would have to get actual adoption records, which I would not put it past the Zuck to do that in any way, shape, or form.

Yeah, because there is definitely a firewall between that data, the birth data, and the child data. So there would have to be something. Some connection. But the other part of this story is, should we have the right to know how Facebook made this connection?

We don't have the right, but this has been my ongoing argument, especially in the past few episodes, is that I'm tired of having all these different technologies that I have no idea how they work. I want to know how it works. They don't have to tell us. You have the right to not use it.

If you use it, they have the right to do what they want to with it. And they also have the right to not tell you a goddamn thing. Yeah. I mean, that's about it. Yep. But however, so let's, for example, you know, I just updated to the latest version of iOS on my iPhone.

And one of the first things it asked me was, hey, Facebook wants to use your contacts list to connect you with everyone. Oh, dear God, never say yes. Well, so none of those people on my contact list opted in. Yeah. Right? So your argument of if you want to use, you have to use the service in order to be connected.

No, I mean, I was probably a thousand people in my contact list. None of them gave me permission to be sucked into Facebook and be connected with me. Aren't you Mr. Popular? Jeez. Yeah. And we don't know how any of this works.

You know, the old school developers like me and Jason would be thinking, okay, we're going to slurp up all this data. We're going to get these cell phone numbers. Now, if I can't match the cell phone number to anybody else's account, I'm not going to store this in our database because there's no connections. We don't have anybody with this phone number on our system anywhere else.

But I'm sure they suck everything in and just keep it there. Brian, we were different. I know. We cared about our data, where it went. And we were the guys who went up to the main office and said, hey, this can be done, but this is wrong. Yes, I know. This is totally wrong. And nowadays, this is why we don't have jobs.

I was going to say, how'd that go for you, gentlemen? How'd that go for you, fellas? Yeah. Well, you know, I'm selling off my $75 million worth of stock next week and buying my own island. That's how well it's gone. Oh, there you go. Very good. Don't buy it in the Caribbean. Actually, you could probably buy Puerto Rico pretty cheap right now.

But yeah. No, it's yeah. I swear. It's just like back in the day. If we had if we didn't have a conscience, we'd be gazillionaires. We'd be these guys. But we did. And yeah, we never would have built the software this way. We just wouldn't have. It's crazy.

OK. Well, that's your note. Well, if that's not scary enough for you, skip straight to the horror movie. Friend Request is out now in theaters. There's a film review over on Ars Technica. It's a straight up horror film, but it revolves around somebody who did not accept a friend request.

It kind of is like Final Destination with Friend Request. I watched the trailer. It looks hokey and funny because I don't like horror movies. Yeah, me neither. It's cute. Well, on that happy note. SLC, I was going to say, SLC out.

Oh, mic drop. First up, we have a link from friend of the show, Trent Hamilton. We asked people maintaining 90s websites, why? This comes from Vice. Did you get a chance to check this one out, Brian?

I did. I personally was not aware. Actually, no, that's not true. I had seen the X-Files transcript website maybe 20 years ago. Yeah, and it's still going strong. He's getting 10,000 hits a month. That's insane. Well, the show did come back. I'd like to know how many hits he was getting pre-return of the show.

True. True that. And I found this one on Bored Panda, which just kind of made my day. A dad bag that I made for people who want a dad bod without eating junk food. You beat the trend on this one. You posted this first, and then all of a sudden, it was all over Facebook after that. Oh, okay.

Sorry. Yeah, it's basically just a gut in a fanny pack that you wear on the front. I think it's clever as hell. I think it's clever, but I think you guys are wusses, and you should get that for yourself. Seriously. You don't buy that. You earn it. Yes, with donuts and things like that.

Donuts and beer, like the rest of us. Like the rest of us. A friend of mine posted this link. It's a blog called Vintage Los Angeles, and it's the mystique of Melrose Avenue, and it's a bunch of photos of early 80s punk rock Melrose Avenue, which was the coolest street in LA, especially if you're a young punk rock kid.

And boy, did it bring back some memories. There's cool fashion in there, some interesting stories. You hear about all the celebs that used to hang out on Melrose, and how it started with people like Betsy Johnson, and all this different crazy punk rock clothes, and just some fantastic photos of 80s goth rockers and stuff.

It's great. Oh, I can't wait to see this. This sounds very cool. Moron of the Week! I don't remember if Juicero made Moron of the Week back when they were the big thing, or if we just did it as a news story because it was so obviously a moronic thing.

But he's back in the news, and back in our segment. Oh, God. Yes, Juicero, the startup that was the $400 cold-pressed juice machine that got a bag that you basically just had to open and dump into a cup yourself. So it did absolutely nothing. So founder of that, Doug Evans, his company went out of business.

He posted a video of himself recently going, vanishing into a sandstorm at Burning Man, because that's what Silicon Valley people do. But he's back. He's not actually started a new company, but he's embracing a new overpriced beverage, raw water. You have to fucking be kidding me.

There's no such thing as raw water. Are you fucking on goop? Pretty much. So in an Instagram story posted late Tuesday night, Evans announced from a location deep in the Marin County forest that he was about to embark on a minimum of a five-day water fast.

Apparently people do this up there now. It's a thing in Silicon Valley. How can so many smart people be so incredibly stupid? Well, the water fast is not stupid. Calling it raw water is stupid. Yes. Well, this is the fountain of truth water. It's fresh, raw spring water.

Every word that comes out of your mouth, I get angrier. I know. I knew this one would piss you off. It's so fantastic. So, yeah, there's that. And then I saw something on Twitter. Hang on. No, you can't just walk away from that. You cannot walk away from that. What else is there to say?

It's stupid. I just wish every horrible thing on every person who ever buys that water. Me too. Because you are so stupid, you should not be taking up space on my planet. I would just like to state for the record that the destruction and the pivoting that is happening and the beverage industry and the attempt to disrupt the beverage industry, none of this is working, people.

None of it. Nobody wanted your Soylent crap. Nobody wanted your Juicero crap. And nobody wants your raw water crap. Well, this boutique water thing is just such a scam. I'm guessing you never watched the Shaws of Sunset because probably not in your wheelhouse.

That would be a good guess. That's a sick guess. Probably not in your wheelhouse. Yeah. There was a character, an actual person on the Shaws of Sunset who went out and started her own boutique water. And there was Trump water. This whole boutique water thing is so ungodly stupid.

It's water. It's fucking water. There's H2O. That's it. No, anything else is a beverage because you're putting shit in it. But it's not raw water. There's no such thing. I'm sorry. The fact that people will fucking buy this drives me mad because there's no such thing as raw water.

It's just fucking water. Sorry. Moving on. Okay. I saw somebody had retweeted a tweet from Peter R. Rojas who says he is a partner of Betaworks Ventures. He was the founder of Engadget and Gizmodo and a few other people.

He wrote on Twitter, got a pitch from a founder describing themselves as millennialpreneurs. And no, I'm not going to let that become a thing. Yes. The millennialpreneur is not a thing. It's not a thing. Thank you, Pete.

Pete's a great guy. I love Pete. Now, this one comes from the New Statesman. I had to look this up to figure out who they were, but they're apparently been around since 1913 as a British magazine. And they have a head of podcasts over there named Carolyn Crampton.

And she wrote an article about a new podcast called Dissect, the insightful music podcast looking forensically at Kanye West. So there's two reasons why this is in here, because Kanye's been gone for so long from our moron of the week. I missed him.

I had to throw him in here. Okay. Now, my biggest problem with this, though, is with Carolyn Crampton. Okay. This is a website that has a web post on it that you wrote an article about a podcast. Would it be too fucking hard to maybe put a hyperlink into the podcast that you speak of?

No, apparently it is very hard, because she put nothing in there. And as part of the New Statement's company policy, to not direct traffic away, we want to keep them sticky. Yes. So in an effort to figure out more about Carolyn Crampton and why she is the head of podcasts, she's the head of articles about podcasting, not the head of podcasts, because as far as I can tell, she doesn't have one.

I did find some links where she did link out to other podcasts, and one of them I found that was actually really good. That I'll be talking about later, next week, probably. But I listened to an episode of Dissect, the music podcast, forensically looking at Kanye West.

It's done by one guy, and he does like a 20-episode season. You might like it, Brian. It's actually pretty good. I hate Kanye, and I don't like his music. Why would I want to listen to a podcast that in-depth discusses music I don't like?

Because, Brian, we talked about at the beginning of the show how you need to find dissenting opinions and learn about opposite views so you can grow as a person. So I thought maybe this would really kind of bring you out of your shell, and so you could get some wheezy on your feezy and get some faux sheezies for your shoes, whatever his shoe line was.

Okay, first, no. And secondly, if he comes back and he does another series about Huey Lewis and the News, I will listen to that. Okay. I think his first series was about Kendrick Lamar, who I thought was a basketball player. Isn't that a basketball player?

Oh, Jason. I don't know music. I don't know music. Anyway, the first episode, I listened to half of it. It was pretty decent, but I'm not going to waste my time with the rest of it. But the one that Carolyn put out for her review later was fine. I'm going to listen to that one. It's kind of like hardcore history meets Hollywood.

But anyway, Carolyn, hyperlink, hyperlink. Feedback loop. We have two new Patreon supporters this week, Neil Voss and Mike H. Thank you guys so much. And everybody else, go over to patreon.com slash GOG, get on the bandwagon, and become friends of the show.

Thank you very much. We really do appreciate that. We actually got a comment from a not-bought over at Instagram. Foxy Meter wrote, following just so you have another non-bought follower. I look forward to Jason's iPhone X unboxing video. Well, we got close there. See, even she knows you were talking about the iPhone X.

Uh-huh. You ain't going to... Also, five stars. Keep up the great show. I don't use iTunes or Facebook, so Instagram it is. Thank you so much. We appreciate that. Appreciate it. And roughly, the podcast that you said I would not like from NPR. It said, psst, psst, not a 10-person crew.

Three people with lots of help from on-the-ground reporters. Those on-the-ground reporters actually count as staff, by the way. Oh, Jason. Stop crapping on them. Thanks for the shout-out, even if it was backhanded. I'd like to say it was backhanded from Jason.

I enjoy your podcast a lot. I don't have the utter hatred and disdain for NPR-sounding podcasts. But even you guys have got to admit, roughly, you've got to admit, you are the most NPR of the NPR. Yeah. And if it shows up on radio first, it's not a podcast. Right.

Now, we heard from Lactac, a GOG podcast. I dare you to use DuckDuckGo as your search engine for a week. No. No. No. So, no. I've been there, done that. Not going to happen. Yeah. Next up, Stumpy Crayfish.

I always have the same question. How is Jason not completely freaking broke? He buys everything. Love the podcast, guys. Keep at it. Well, he is. And that's why we need you to visit patreon.com slash GOG. Yeah. And there is, when, my house is kind of like new regulations in the government.

I have to sell two things before I can buy one, but that doesn't mean I'm still not broke as shit. I just have a healthy cycle of things coming and going all the time. That's true. It's a revolving door around there. Ben Stanley sent us a joke.

Well, a link to a joke on Reddit. How do you milk sheep? Bring out a new iPhone and charge $1,000 for it. And the next one comes from 6502chip. GOG podcast. Nice tip on the USB trash folder that Brian made me stop talking about in the middle of it.

So I'm glad somebody appreciated my little bit of technical insight there. So thank you for having my back. I enjoy your technical insights as well, Jason. I just prefer them to sync to the points. Wrap it up. Wrap it up. Wrap it up. Wrap it up. Just like that. Over at GOG.show, we had a couple people write in to us.

The first up is Colleen. Comment. I wanted to comment on your episode regarding your phone listening to conversations and seeing targeted ads. This has definitely happened to me as an example. Okay, hold on. We debunked this completely. A hundred percent debunked this. Do not bring this back. Anyways.

We just haven't. We haven't. We haven't proven it yet. We haven't. If you prefer not to have faith, Jason, I shall be an atheist. All right, let's just, we'll give Colleen her example, but I'm saying that this, this is dead, moribund, done, not happening.

An example is I was having a conversation with my in-laws and they mentioned this one name. I will call him X. I chimed in and said I had never heard of X. They were shocked and went on about X and how he was a family friend and they had known him for years and blah, blah, blah. I did not think anything of it. It was a day or two later and I was on Facebook and I saw an ad for X's law firm in Portland.

I live in Seattle, so there was much more than a coincidence. No, there wasn't. Okay, moving on. Phil McKaig writes, well, holy shit, the sordid Lord Klitner sent me here from the cyber wire. You know, I would never go that far because I know he has contractual agreements with standards and practices, but the sordid Lord Klitner is going on his Christmas card this year.

And boy, am I glad. I'm a soft cock millennial and I love to waddle through my self-loathing, so having you guys there to breathe or to berate my generation weekly is enough to really get me going for the day. Also, I just started running opera. Nice recommendation. Double. Also, I'm giving you money monthly via Patreon.

Hope it helps feed Bam Bam. Oh, yes, it will. And Dave made a comment. I'm not sure what to make of this sordid Lord Klitner is going to be my new band name, though. I think he needs to start up like an alternative Twitter account, and that should be the title.

Definitely. Well, if he doesn't, if he doesn't, he will. All right. Next comes from Neil. Love to hear your opinions on the current state of YouTube apocalypse, adpocalypse, especially since the article used machine learning rather than AI. And there's a link over to Forbes because Forbes is Forbes and they are smart and they would say machine learning and not try to jam in AI again.

Yeah, this is the whole thing about how YouTube is going to change is changing their entire system where it's going to be demonetized and then you have to go in and appeal to do it. And shockingly, shockingly, an Internet company doesn't really have a decent customer service system in place. Yeah.

Imagine that. Yeah. We're not really qualified to talk too much on it, but if you want to hear some people that are qualified to talk about this, and I think they did on the last episode, go check out Hello Internet. Brady and CGP Gray talk about their problems with getting demonetized and going through the human version of getting reapplied to and stuff like that.

And they call shit on it because they're like, there's no way that somebody could have watched my video in 37 seconds and said that I'm still not viable for monetization. So it's a bunch of bullshit right now. All right. Next one comes from S. Do you have a list of all time favorite sci-fi novels you could share? Not the books that make you look sophisticated.

I want to know the ones you can read and listen to multiple times and still enjoy. I don't know how to answer this without sounding like a sophisticated prick. Okay. Well, I see a list of links, so please try. Yeah. Let me just run through these.

And these aren't books that I don't know if this would be ones you would consider make me look sophisticated, but these are the ones that I have listened to. No, I haven't listened to them. These are ones that I've read multiple times. These are series that I come back to on a regular basis. I mean, I have read both, most of these probably at least five times through the whole way.

So here we go. Dune series by Frank Herbert. That's my number one. Frank Herbert originals only. You can mess about with the other ones, but they're not really worth it. All the Dune series, the foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Asimov originals only, because this is another series that was then continued by other people after he had passed away.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The first book itself is genius. Orson Scott Card I have psychological, or psychological, I have political and philosophical and psychological issues with as a person, but damn, Ender's Game is good. And the continuation of that series, maybe the next two to three are pretty good, too, and worth a read.

Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, classic. If you want something a bit more modern, you've got Seven Eves. Jason and I both read that, reviewed it on the podcast. I can't talk enough about how great that book is. Ready Player One by Ernst Cline, fantastic book. Don't read the second one. And, I mean, just more of the stuff we were reading recently that we've covered in all the previous episodes, anytime we have an About the Library segment.

Generally, we like the books that we read. Not all of them. I'm going to go with a couple classics here. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the whole series, is fantastic. I've read it many, many, many, many, many times. And even when I think that it's still not good, I go back and read it again, and I'm laughing my ass off within 20 pages.

The whole series is well worth it. And, of course, Stranger in a Strange Land, which is one of my all-time favorites, which I've read maybe seven or eight times, because it's just amazing. Got to stick with Snow Crash. Love it. Can't go wrong with Snow Crash. Look, if you read all those books that we just listed off, you're good for about two years or so.

Call us back in a couple years. Hit us back up when you're done with all those. Finally, over at iTunes, we have a new five-star rating from VicRTP. Ex-Pearl coders try, comma, unsuccessfully, comma, to explain tech. Okay, stop right there. Stop right there. Okay. Yes, we did code Pearl 25 years ago.

I'm a PHP coder, a JavaScript coder. That's like saying ex-basic coders, because that was like our first language. So I just wanted to clear that up before we get into the rest of it. Okay. At least they're entertaining and likable. I'd like to remind you, Jason, that he did give us five stars. I know, I know, I know.

They seem to have a love-hate relationship, and it's fun to listen to the subtle jabs and counterpunches Jason buys. Shit, they're subtle? Oh, shit, we've got to up our game. They shouldn't be subtle. How many people have commented on you just buying stuff all the time? And how many people have commented on you berating me all the time? Come on.

Well, I don't think he says berate. Hold on, let's read through this. Let's parse this, Jason. Jason buys the latest tech gear, and he's got a bad habit. Brian contributes by making snarky comments about whatever he found in the last-minute Google search and put in the show notes, and he dings Jason about his compulsive tech gear purchasing.

And there's a lame security guy who has a segment about we shouldn't use passwords like password. I highly recommend this podcast. Really? Are you sure, dude? Dave Bittner writes in, lame security guy. That's Mr. Lame security guy to you, pal.

Now, to be fair, we do tell people to go ahead and toss us a five-star rating and a snarky review, and he just followed instructions. He did. Thanks, VicRTP. Thank you. 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 very polite review. And if you're using the Overcast player, do us a favor and give us a little star rating on there. We're trying an experiment, and as many stars or shares as you can give us in Overcast would be appreciated.

I'll explain the experiment and results on a future episode. Thank you. Closing shout outs! Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to gog.show slash support or you'll find all of the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all the people who make 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 228.

But we all know 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 next 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. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

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