229: I Am Altering the Deal

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. To claim your 30-day free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up? Brian, I've got a mea culpa. Uh-huh. Remember when I was talking about how iTunes had pulled the apps from the iPhone organizational thing and I wasn't going to be able to sideload any of my content anymore?

Yes, you did say that. Yeah, turns out I was wrong because it wasn't out yet and I was reading other people's reviews and I just went off of that. But now that it's out and I tried it, there is a sharing or just basically an area that has apps on your phone that do allow content to get loaded in so I can just still drag and drop.

Well, that's nice. At least they didn't totally get rid of that. Right. You just can't organize the apps themselves anymore. Right. Well, you know, how convenient not. Yes. Well, I had a hell of a week and I do have a bunch of stories in here, but Jason, you beat me to the punch on like almost everything this week.

I'm used to you putting things in last minute. So basically you and I have the exact same interest this week because every time I found a link, you had it. Oh, good. It was just one of those weeks where I actually put in my calendar to work on GOG for two hours every day. Right. Which turns out is the only way that I'm going to work on it for two hours every day.

I kind of did the math on this and basically I think we're making about $1.25 an hour at this point on the show. Oh, joy. It's up from a buck. That's true. It's up from a buck. So keep up the donations, people. We really do appreciate it.

Well, if you find yourself too busy, Jason, you can always just grow your own second Jason. You can call him Grumpy Jason and using a DNA splicer. And because I don't believe a damn word out of this next person's mouth. I have some follow-up on 23andMe, which you did. Yes, I did. There is an interview with the CEO, blah, blah, blah, whatever, the CEO.

And they basically did an interview with her and they asked, is it safe to give your genetic data to 23andMe? And of course, because she's the CEO, she says, yes, privacy and ownership and control of your genome is the most important. Nay, it is the foundation of this company.

Well, I wish their foundation was actually testing properly because my results sucked. Yes. Now, they do say you can opt in and they share data with research studies and research institutions that are theoretically vetted. They do not discuss the procedure by which they transfer said information.

And she stressed the company does not work with insurance companies in any way yet because they don't need the money yet. But does, yeah, does partner. So they offer data of customers who have explicitly opted in to help. And then they also don't get into basically how any of this information is stored or security procedures whatsoever because, you know, they're not going to tell you that.

Now, the end-all be-all of this is that she says, knock on wood, we've never been hacked, thus opening themselves up to being hacked now. Yes. I doubt there will be any interest in it. Your bank account is inherently interesting. Your passwords are inherently interesting.

Now, can you see a world where basic DNA information about people wouldn't be inherently interesting? No. Come on. I mean, what is she going to say? No, we're not, you know, we're not, it's not safe to give us the data.

But, of course, it's not safe to give them the data. All we do on this show is talk about people that get hacked and poor security procedures and bad planning. And, yes, people are going to want this information. Anyways. If not now, then later, for sure. But, yeah, the thing about it is my information is so wrong, anybody can have it.

Like I said, my dad came back as 44% Italian, and I came back as 6% Italian, which is impossible. Now, see, that's, you're making a mistake there, Jason. What, their interpretation of your raw data is incorrect.

But your raw data is still there. Yeah, if it's actually my data, is the point. Yeah, if they didn't, you know, switch up the envelopes like the old Netflix DVDs, I didn't ask for this movie. More follow-up on, we've talked a lot about how we switched to Opera, and they have a lovely built-in ad blocking bit of software on there.

Now, I do turn ad blocking off on sites that I visit regularly because we have made this deal with the web that we don't want to pay for anything. And the way that we pay for that is by looking at their ads. Now, assuming if sites I visit regularly don't go overboard, you know who you are, I do turn that off.

But just general kind of going around the web, clicking through all the links that we do for the show and things like that. I leave the ad blocker on because the web is basically useless otherwise. And I looked at the stats because the Opera browser keeps track of stats on that. And I have blocked over half a million ads.

It's only been a few months. That's insane. Where are the stats at? I've got to find these. You just click on the little thing for it, and it pops right up. Okay. There it is right now. So now I'm at 632,000 ads blocked in total.

I've only got 4,791, but this is a new computer that's a week old. So there we go. 4,000 ads in a week is still – remember when we were kids and, like, the Ad Council of America was really concerned about the amount of commercials being run during Saturday morning cartoons?

Yes, I do remember that. There wasn't going to be half a fucking million of them. No doubt. Man, that's a lot of ads for Froot Loops right there. Yeah, so I'm a little surprised that absolutely nobody is talking about the sheer amount that we're being bombarded with on a daily basis.

Well, they are, but you can't hear them because of all the popover ads, all the contents underneath. That is true. And going back to Bitcoin, we talked a couple weeks ago, maybe it was even last week, about how China was basically banning it, and so that's not good.

And here we go. More countries are doing it. South Korea has banned ICO, or initial coin offerings, so that's not looking good. And it sounds like Taiwan will be next. They're ahead of the curve, yeah. The initial coin offering is the scammers' just wet dream.

People are making so much money on it. That's how it's completely gamed. So if you've got a few million dollars and, you know, people that are into this, have fun. Have at it. Good times. Well, Apple is looking to fill a new video partnerships lead that will be responsible for negotiations with content providers like TV networks and movie studios with the goal of expanding its video services, including the Apple TV app and Universal Search.

The position calls for prior business development and transaction qualifications in the TV or movie industries with studio, network, distributor, or agency experience preferred. Now, I was thinking about this because I know your wife, she works in the music biz for a major studio, and I thought maybe this might be a good job for her if you ever wanted to move up north and experience the Apple spaceship for yourself.

Move up north to, like, I don't want to live in Manpoo land. Manpoo land. Well, you can live in San Jose. No, no. It's only the most expensive city in the country to live in. I know. We're quite happy here in Santa Monica. If there is going to be a move, it would be to either Toronto, London, or New York.

Those are the places that we've decided we'd find acceptable. But thank you for thinking of her. This is right up her alley. I showed it to her, and she was like, oh, this would be a cool gig. I thought so. See, I'm thinking about you. I'm conscientious sometimes. Well, the wife's already got the job. It's me that needs one. Oh, that's true. You do have a job.

You're a dad. That's right. I'm a dad, and I'm a podcaster making $1.25 an hour. Yep. Tell the kid to chew slowly. Okay. And we have some audio feedback from across the pond. Hey, Jason.

Greetings from wonderful Munich, where we have the Oktoberfest right now, and it basically sucked. It's a lot of Americans in German garb making a fool out of themselves. But to answer Brian's attempt at pronouncing a German word, the actual pronunciation of that law, and yes, I said actually, because I'm a freaking nerd, the actual pronunciation of that law is Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz or Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz.

It depends whether or not it's the law to push something through on the network or the law to stop the permeation of the network. And that comes from our lovely friend of the show, Mika Luster, over in Munich.

Well, thank you so much for that. That is a very wonderful pronunciation that I'm not going to even attempt to recreate. Now, I heard a wee bit of the Scottish in his accent. He's been around the world quite a bit. We used to work together at Technorati back in the day. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met and quite a raconteur and adventurer.

So he's been all around the world. Very nice. And thanks for that. And enjoy Oktoberfest. I know. Just avoid the Americans. In the news.

So Twitter is rolling out more room to tweet with a doubling of its 140 character limit to 280 characters. And the world had a collective shit fit. I could not believe the amount of press the Scott, the amount of both elation and anger.

Yes. The reaction was astounding to me. I know. It is ridiculous. Like, it's actually important to the functioning of the world. Yeah. And, you know, it just became this new, like, sneetches that was stars and sneetches with no stars upon thars because of the way they rolled it out.

Everybody that got it was gloating and everybody that didn't was bitching. And I just sat there and closed Twitter. Yeah. Now, there were some funny tweets, like, adding the stupid disclaimer that some people use on their emails. But for the most part, it was just a bunch of whining. Whining. It was a lot of whining. It was a lot of whining. And Jack himself tweeted about the change.

This is the best part of the whole fiasco. Yes. This is the best part of the whole fiasco. He says, This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160-character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet, at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence.

Now, Jason, this is obviously a vetted statement. Yes. This has been passed around in multiple emails and slacks. It went to lawyers. It went to PR agencies. Everybody signed off on this. Did they not? Yes, they did. If the 140-character limit was based on something, then it's not really a fucking arbitrary choice, is it?

It is not arbitrary by the very definition of the fucking word arbitrary because it's based on something. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. Yes. Look, I have no problem if Jack would have just off-the-cuff written this statement.

Or anyone. I don't care. If you're going off-the-cuff, you know, this is a brave new world. This is Twitter. This is email. This is Slack. We don't get our words right. We'd go fast. We use goddamn emojis for F's sake. There's no arbitrary emoji. But this was vetted. Yeah.

Words have meaning. So just to, you know, be on the fun side, I actually went to dictionary.com and looked at the definition of arbitrary. And I think this is the one that he chose, not the typical definition. But this best describes the use of arbitrary in the realm of Twitter.

Having unlimited power, uncontrolled or unrestricted by law, despotic and tyrannical. Nice. I like that. And I'd like, you know, thanks to Kenny over on Twitter who agreed with me when I tweeted my anger about this and said, glad it's just not me who saw this irritating.

Yes, it is very irritating. I was just like, you know, if I was drinking something, I would have had a spit take when I read that tweet. Okay. So if you want to get on the 280-character bandwagon right away, there's a link in the show notes from The Verge that will show you how. Oh, exciting. Yeah, you have to add a Chrome or Opera extension and some crafty reloading.

It took me a couple times. But it works. So I used it to tweet my favorite Dirk Gently quote. And I tweeted it because it's bothered me for years. It's true. It has bothered me for years that there was never enough room to show the whole quote. So if you want to see that tweet, just follow me. I'm at JPDeaf on Twitter. Now somebody needs to invent a crafty way to get my blue verification check.

Oh, God. Good luck with that. That's never going to happen. No, it's not. Speaking of Twitter, three executives from Twitter met with leaders on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Woo-hoo. Yay. Yep. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a few comments for the press after the meeting adjourned.

And he said, their response was frankly inadequate on almost every level. I'm more than a bit surprised that anyone from the Twitter team would think that that presentation they made to the Senate staff today even began to answer the kind of questions we'd asked. So there's a lot more work that they need to do.

Unfortunately, that is 294 characters. So he couldn't tweet it even if he got his number raised. Exactly. So yeah, Twitter identified 201 accounts that were linked to the Russian scandal and a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, it's kind of a mess over there.

And Senator Warner also added, the notion that their work was basically derivative based upon the accounts that Facebook had identified showed enormous lack of understanding. from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is and the threat it poses to democratic institutions. Well, look, I mean, I think it's become painfully obvious that this happened.

I don't think any... Well, of course, people are questioning it. I don't think any rational person believes at this point that this stuff did not occur. And I get that we have to do the due diligence on it. We have to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt.

We have to, you know, collect and connect all the electronic dots on it. But maybe, you know, at this point, since we do know this happened, we actually move towards solving it. Maybe? Maybe. Maybe not. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what the hell? Disruption! We are disrupting the foundation of our democracy.

Way to go, Twitter and Facebook and everybody else. Thanks a lot, Silicon Valley, for that disruption. The one that we did not ask for. Yep. Speaking of disruption, Uber. They're shutting down their auto leasing subsidiary, Exchange Leasing. They're going to move towards a less capital intensive approach.

The Wall Street Journal said that the company was losing an average of $9,000 per vehicle, which is around 18 times more than the company expected. They thought they were going to lose about $500 per car and they were losing $9,000. And apparently it's about half the value of the car.

So I guess that whole thing didn't work out for them. And unfortunately, around 500 Uber employees are going to be affected by the shutdown. Now, here's where it gets fun. The company says it plans to help out as many employees as it can with resume building, interviewing skills, and recruitment efforts.

Okay. In what can only be called a giant fuck you, some of those employees could be shifted to Uber's customer service call centers. So you come in the morning, you're working for a leasing company, and by the end of the day, you're in Mumbai. Right. Hello, my name is Steve.

Yep. And nobody that reported on this actually said how many of the drivers are going to be affected, which I thought was interesting. But we can assume that the number is fairly low with the magnitude of the losses in the program. And no one also had the balls to title their articles, Uber to shutter its indentured servitude division, which is basically what the auto leasing business was.

I would like to state for the record that when Uber announced that they were doing this, that is exactly what you and I called it, indentured servitude. Yep. No, we can go back in the archives and find that one for sure. Yep. And in more Uber news, they kicked off an appeal to the UK Employment Tribunal on Wednesday.

And this is the same old argument. They're arguing again that its drivers are self-employed rather than employees of the company. Right. Yeah, of course. That makes sense for Uber. Uber does not want to be an employer. Nope. This has all happened before. It'll all happen again. And Uber says that it's no different from traditional taxi firms that have self-employed drivers.

And they claim that its drivers have a choice on when to work, and that makes them self-employed. Well, no. Now, I remember this. I remember this very clearly from my accountant when I first started up my own company. And my accountant was very forthright in saying that you need to be careful that you make no more than 30% of your income from any one client.

If you do, you are not self-employed. You are an employee of that client. Now, has that law changed? Because most Uber drivers I know that would be affected by this drive for Uber full-time. It is their only source of employment. Interesting. I did not know about that.

I need to go talk to my accountant, it seems. I might have a job. It might have been higher than 30. I don't remember the exact percentage. But there was – the accountant stated, I remember this very clearly. He could have been wrong, but he said, you can't have all of your income coming from one client. It was a higher percentage.

And it was just like, you've got to be careful about that. Interesting, because I think I have 50% coming from one client. So I might have to – That buck 25, we're making an hour right now? No, they don't pay for the show, unfortunately. Well, so last October, that employment tribunal, they countered Uber and said, it's implausible that each individual driver on Uber's platform is a small business.

The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common platform is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous. I love the British. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that 100%. It's almost laughable that they're trying to get away with this, that they're trying to claim this.

And again, all of this has happened before. It'll all happen again. We've been talking about this for at least three years. The same case is occurring again and again and again. Yep, and Uber, they shot back to CNBC and saying, almost all taxi and private hire drivers have been self-employed for decades before our app existed.

With Uber, drivers have more control and are totally free to choose if, when, and where they drive with no shifts or minimum hours. The overwhelming majority of drivers say they want to keep the freedom of being their own boss. Well, no, they don't. Yeah. Especially once they find out that there would have to be things like healthcare involved, that there would be things like retirement plans.

It's all the perks of having an employer. Yep, and here's the big rub, because earlier this week in London, a minicab company named Addison Lee lost an employment tribunal hearing. Try saying that three times fast. The judge said its three drivers who brought the case should have been classed as workers rather than as self-employed.

This would mean that they should receive the workers' benefits, including minimum wage and vacation days, which puts Uber in a sticky wicket, because now there's legal precedent. Good. Mm-hmm. Good. Make it happen. Yep. I hate that company.

I really hate Uber. In case you didn't know, if you've listened to the show before. I'm starting to get a feeling that you're not in the Uber camp. Nope. And China has attacked WhatsApp. A couple weeks ago, we talked about how WhatsApp was open in China, and the Zuck had, you know, had a coup by getting, I mean, Facebook still doesn't work, but to get WhatsApp to work.

Well, China says that the messaging service should act to stop the spread of illegal information as the country seeks greater scrutiny of the internet in its run-up to its once-in-five-years Communist Party Congress. Right. Yep. I bet Zuckerberg feels a lot like Lando Calrissian right about now.

Calrissian, take the princess and the Wookiee to my ship. You said they'd be left in the city under my supervision. I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. Now, the interesting thing about this is China came back with an official reply. And I love this.

Somebody had to say this with a straight face. It kind of reminds me of Baghdad Bob from the first Iraq war. China's internet is fully open. We welcome internet companies from various countries to provide Chinese internet users with good information services. My ass. Oh, I love the Chinese.

I love it. It's just... You know, why are we surprised that they can say this with a straight face?

Look at our own press conferences these days. This is true. Maybe Spicy can get a job over there. Maybe. He's going to have to pick up Mandarin, but, you know, he can do it. He's a young man. Yep. Ish. We talk a bit about travel on this show. Jason and I are both avid travelers.

And there's all these, you know, legal and technical hurdles that are involved these days. If you want to travel and your passport is coming up for renewal, you should... Basically, the government is recommending you do it now. Like, right now. Processing times are the shortest between September and December.

That's the word from the U.S. State Department. Also, you're going to want one if you live in some states, because there is a new law called the Real ID Act, which will go into effect as of 2018. This was passed in 2005. It requires state driver's licenses to meet certain security standards to be considered a valid federal ID that you can use at airports to fly basically domestically.

Obviously, you need a passport to fly internationally. California, you're good. But apparently, there's a lot of lazy-ass states out there. So, you want to check the list. We have the link in the show notes. Because, yeah, your driver's license may not be enough anymore. So, go get your passport. I got to go to the DMV this week to get my address changed.

I wonder if Illinois actually conforms. I'm going to have to go look that up. Yep. And speaking of travel, the Department of Homeland Security published a new rule in the Federal Register last week, saying it wants to include social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results as part of people's immigration files.

And the new requirement takes effect on October 18th. Wow. Wow. Of course, the EFF got their panties in a bunch. Well, yeah. Adam Schwartz, an attorney with the EFF, said, we see this as part of a larger process of high-tech surveillance of immigrants, and more and more people being subjected to social media screening.

There's a growing trend at the Department of Homeland Security to be snooping on the social media of immigrants and foreigners, and we think it's an invasion of privacy and deters freedom of speech. Now, here we go. Now, see, this amendment is not a new policy. It was added with an effort to be transparent and to comply with existing regulations and due to updates in the electronic immigration system.

So what they're going to do is, you still have to fill this stuff out on paper, but they've never saved it in the database. So all this is is a notice that they're going to just, you know, instead of having to go back to the paper file, which they can obviously do, that they just put it in the database. This is all public information. This is your public social stuff.

It's not like they're asking for your private information. This is stuff that people are already putting out there and search results, also public information. So, yeah. Now, to be fair, you can make your profiles private and then, you know, they can see that you have your account and they'll see your profile picture if you set it that way, but they won't see your updates.

So, I mean, this is all understandable from the DHS perspective, and I think the internet just needs to unbunch their panties just a little bit. Yeah, yes, yes, but no. You know, I mean, there are things like search results. There is a process, you know, we can laugh and scoff about it all we want.

There is a process that you can go through with Google to have things removed. There is no process to have it removed if they're also keeping a record. Correct, but, I mean, this is national security. So, it's, you know, it's on people that are coming into the country that they need to keep tabs on. To me, this seems like a logical step and nothing that is overreaching in any way, shape, or form.

Because if it was- They want to collect all of my wife's photos of our kid. Well, have at it. But that's what I'm saying. I mean, it's all public information, and even though they're saving the search results, if you do get them removed, it was still public at some point. So, once it's on the internet, it's on the internet. Not a whole lot you can do about it.

Well, I agree that there's not a whole lot you can do about it, except that that would not be, I don't think, the strictly legal definition of, you know, if something is taken down and removed from the internet. Talk to these poor women that have been, whatever, you know, the revenge porn sites and things like that.

Those things get taken down and off, and, you know, continuing to pass them around or putting them back up on another site, just saying, well, they were on the internet once. No, that's not legally okay. Right. But we're not talking about that, though. That is wrong. We're talking about... We're talking about bits of information.

And I don't care if it's immigration or if it's California's revenge porn laws. It's the same thing to me. Okay. Anyways. Moving on. Moving on. Let's get back to raping. Okay. And that sort of stuff. You're not allowed to say the R word.

You're not allowed to say the R word. We're going to get emails. Okay. And he didn't do anything of that nature, as far as we know. Anyways, but Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News has stepped away from his own company because of various accusations of sexual assault.

Interesting. Now, Ain't It Cool News is not a site I've looked at in at least 10 or 15 years. I don't think I've ever looked at it. I used to go there all the time back in the day because back in the day, you know, before leaks and all that sort of stuff became PR stunts and all the studios were doing it themselves, this was an army of, like, megadorks that were super into movies that would, like, case studios and take pictures.

And you would get the scoop ahead of time, again, in a non-PR sort of way. It was TMZ, basically, back in the day. Yeah. It was TMZ back in the day. But I'm surprised it's still around and doing well. But, yeah, and, I mean, if you've seen a photo of Harry Knowles, I'd, yeah, anyways.

See, here's the thing. Yeah, here's the thing that I think is kind of interesting. It's like, how can he even catch any women? He can't move. He's like, I mean, seriously, the guy is as close to Jabba the Hutt as that you can get in a physical human being. Well, there are ways these days because when we say sexual harassment now, that does not necessarily mean physical.

It can be in the digital realm, as we are discussing a lot. And several women have shared stories of harassment with one anonymously providing screen grabs of lewd direct messages, he sent. So, he didn't actually have to, like, physically get there. Okay, because the title on this is Sexual Assault, not Sexual Harassment.

That's why. Sexual assault, I believe, can also involve non-physical things. Like, you know, when people were doing the Bluetooth penis drops? I believe that could be considered assault. Okay. Well, yeah, Harry Null's penis is definitely an assault.

It is assault and battery, my friends. Yeah. Anyways, in other news, Ikea, who we've talked about recently because they have moved into the Internet of Things and actually seem to have a lighting system that was cheap and easy and not too crazy. Now, they've also bought TaskRabbit.

I know. Isn't this crazy? That is the weirdest person. I mean, it makes sense to some degree. You know, they've always, Ikea's always kind of stayed away from getting into, like, the delivery and setup of their stuff. This is kind of a no-brainer for them to do that. But it is weird to just purchase a company outright instead of, you know, just make a deal with them.

Yeah, an investment or something like that. Yeah. And I'm just wondering, what is the percentage of people on TaskRabbit that have actually signed up to come to your house with some Ikea furniture and put it together? That's got to be a small percentage. You'd think, yeah, because it's not exactly fun. Actually, I enjoy it.

I find it very Zen-like. But I've been doing it since I was 10 years old, so. Right. I'm very good at the Ikea. Maybe I should get a job on TaskRabbit to supplement our podcasting income. Yeah, that would be good. We can both do that. TaskRabbit for podcasters. There we go. Yes, you need a little joke, we'll come in, we drop into your show, and we drop a joke.

There we go. Now available from Ikea under Grumpus. But the weird thing about this is they kind of stepped on their own news, their own PR this week, because this kind of got all the headlines, but they've also launched an AR reality app for the iPhone called Ikea Place, which looks pretty damn cool.

That's getting next to no press because of this whole TaskRabbit thing, so not good planning on their part. No, and one of the interesting things I saw that I was actually thinking about picking up is they've got a light that does inductive charging. So now that I've got the new iPhone 8 with the glass back and wireless charging, I can buy the lamp and put it on my nightstand and just drop my phone on it.

Isn't it amazing that we're talking about Ikea as like a technology leader? Yeah. Pretty cool. Who'd have thunk it? Okay. Speaking of technology leaders, Dubai, they've conducted their first test flight of a drone taxi service. Okay. Yeah.

The two-seater 18 rotor, German-designed a Volocopter. They had a five-minute flight this week outside the city over a strip of dirt. It was very picturesque. We've talked about these guys before, the Volocopter, because it was tested back in April.

Yep. And it's a cool-looking thing. Yep. It is pretty cool-looking, and they hope to have it up and running in five years. Now, the chief executive, Florin Ruther, said implementation would see you using your smartphone, having an app, of course, and ordering a Volocopter to the next Voloport near you.

So you'd have to get an Uber or a Lyft to the Voloport before you can get your Volocopter, which would then come and autonomously pick you up and take you to your destination. Okay. And your destination being wherever the next Voloport is, so it's not really door-to-door service. No. No, it's not. But it's still cool.

Now, I love this. Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert at Sheffield University and master of the fucking obvious, said of the plans, the big challenge will be dynamic obstacle avoidance of other taxis, buildings, birds, and delivery drones.

Duh. Yeah, I mean, that kind of goes with any moving object. It goes on to say, the skies over Dubai could become uncomfortably crowded very quickly. The ground level of the city could become a dark place of intrigue and mystery like Blade Runner.

Give me a fucking break, dude. I mean, Dubai's already got, they've got robot police in their malls, they've got Veyron cop cars, and they're unleashing self-driving police cars by the end of the year to scan for undesirables. They already are the closest thing we have to Blade Runner. Come on. That's true. It's pretty cool.

The one thing that I did notice in the videos of the test flight, no doors. Put some doors on your copter. You don't want to be... That would be helpful. Yeah, you don't want to be tossing people out the door. Or at least the hole, because there is no door. The hole, yeah.

And I'm including a video in the show notes. It's an example of if Michael Bay did your stupid news video with poorly researched text, because in the video, the video has very dramatic music. And it's this new thing that people are doing with the news. It's like they take a little bit of video and put, you know, words over it and animate it so it looks cool.

And in the video, they say they hope to have it out within the year, which is not true. They want to do it in five years. Right. But the video is pretty funny. I got to admit, I found it. I was just like, seriously? You guys are putting this music? I'm like, unless this thing is going to, like, turn into a fucking Decepticon before it lands, I think you're really pushing the boundaries with it.

Now, a drone operator named Michael Singer won a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts in a bid to eliminate some of the drone ordinances in his city of Newton, Massachusetts. Okay. Ah, drone news.

Isn't it fun? Yes. Now, the city's rules didn't quite align with the FAA, not by a long shot. They wanted him to register with every municipality the drone flew over and maintain an altitude of 400 feet and above over private and Newton City property.

Well, you and I have been covering this for a long time. What's wrong with that 400 feet rule? I don't know offhand. Well, the deal is the FAA requires UAVs for businesses to fly under 400 feet. Oh, right. I forgot about that.

Yeah. Yeah. The whole FAA thing is you cannot fly your drone over 400 feet. So, U.S. District Judge William G. Young explained that Newton's choice to restrict any drone use below 400 feet works to eliminate any drone use in the confines of the city, absent prior permission.

This thwarts not only the FAA's objectives, but also those of Congress for the FAA to integrate drones into national airspace. So, this is kind of important because it sets a precedent that local municipalities cannot supersede the FAA. Well, yeah, they shouldn't be able to.

No, they shouldn't. That's why the FAA, they're a professional organization trying to control our airspace, and they have, what do they call it, skills in doing that. Your local alderman would not know a drone from his ass. So, I think that makes a lot of sense.

I do, too. I agree. And speaking of the FAA and drones, on Thursday, they said that they were going to ban drone flights up to 400 feet within the lateral, lateral boundaries of 10 Department of the Interior sites. Okay. So, this is, you know, around it, not over it.

So, we've got the Statue of Liberty. No-brainer, right there. Yep. Boston National Historical Park, which is home of the USS Constitution, which is the oldest commissioned ship in the United States Navy, which I did not know until this morning, which is pretty cool. Built in the 1700s, and it still floats.

Amazing. Somebody spent some time on Wikipedia. I did. Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. So, that's another one that we would kind of like to keep your drones away from. And the next are a bunch of dams. Folsom Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, Hoover Dam, and Shasta Dam.

But then we've also got the Arch in St. Louis and Mount Rushmore. Any national landmark, and any, I would say, any place of, like, sports stadiums, Disneyland, all that sort of stuff should be no-fly zones. Yeah. Without a doubt. I mean, it's almost a no-brainer. It's interesting.

We had this conversation at Riot Fest this year, me and John Chevron, who is a, often contributor to the show. They, apparently last year, they had a bunch of drones flying over Riot Fest, and they got in a ton of trouble, because they were flying over the crowd. Yeah. Which is a no-no.

That's a no-no. Yeah. So, they did have drones there this year, but they were only over specific areas, and they were just going up, taking crowd shots, and coming back down. So, I actually got some photos of them. They used the really nice DJI ones that had the retractable legs and everything. They were pretty cool looking to see in person, but, yeah, they at least learned their lesson and did not fly over the crowd.

So, don't fly over crowds, and don't fly over our national monuments. Right. Now, one way you can fly over them, Elon Musk is coming to the rescue yet again. We got some great Musk news today. He really is swinging for the fences, man. This is why I don't want him at Apple. This is totally why I want him at Apple.

I want him as president. What are you talking about? The iRocket. Let's go. Yes, he is proposing city-to-city travel by rocket right here on Earth, not just going to the moon or Mars anymore. Yeah, let's get to New York City in under 30 minutes from L.A. Sign me up. I love this idea.

Sign me up. This is so awesome. If anybody's going to be able to pull this off, it's him, so go for it. Put money into it. I want to be able to get to London in an hour. That would be amazing. Yeah, Richard Branson just has to be like, gnawing his paws off right now. He's like, I'm just trying to get up.

I want my, you know, my tourism thing. And Elon's like, eh, screw you. We're going to London. Yeah, so I'm going to keep an eye on this one because this sounds really cool. In addition to that, he also talked about how he plans to, the timetable to send people to Mars has been moved up.

He says he's going to do it in seven years. Amazing. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see, man. I, you know, I'm a big Musk supporter. I want to believe, to quote the X-Files. Yes, indeed. Now, a little web news. You know, we don't talk about the web that much as far as from the inner workings anymore because both of us really are sick of building websites.

Now, last year, Pornhub, they took a major step towards accessibility by introducing a described video category where the videos have a scripted voiceover that describes each scene in extensive detail. The buxom blonde is going to the door to pick up her pizza. Yes. That's a sausage for sure on that pizza.

Now, Pornhub's going to offer enlarged text and customized color contrasts for viewers with limited visual acuity or color blindness. And it's going to introduce keyboard shortcuts to make navigation easier for the blind. Mm-hmm. And it will have- Now, can they put a filter on the video so it looks like when I was trying to tune it in when I was a kid and it just goes all green and purple and wavy?

The old cable box filter, yeah. Exactly. That's what I need. There's a nipple. I swear I saw a nipple. Kids these days don't even get that at all. Not at all. So, yeah, these guys may have single-handedly killed the porn industry, but they're not about to be a boner killer for those people that can't see.

Which is, I give them credit for it, you know? Yeah. Get on them. Yeah, they've got the time and the money to do this kind of thing where nobody else is doing it. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored by FreshBooks. Staying on top of your admin and paperwork while hustling to grow your freelance business is just plain hard sometimes.

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And they're Canadian, so you know they're awesome. To claim your 30 days free trial with no credit card required, go to FreshBooks.com slash Grumpy, and enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section, please. We'd appreciate that. Now, that is FreshBooks.com slash Grumpy.

Enter Grumpy Old Geeks. And seriously, if you run a business, you have to be running FreshBooks. It is ridiculously awesome. As part of the new iOS update, we got new versions of almost everything, including the Apple Podcasts app.

Now, Jason may not be aware of this because he gave up on it a long time ago. This update, finally, is going to get me to switch to Overcast as soon as I get not lazy. It is unusable. And I've seen many other people comment about this as well. It is such a pain in the ass to find anything.

Everything is bigger, so they have bigger artwork. I used to be able to see a whole bunch of episodes at once. Now I get to see three shows, tops. And then they tier the episodes down under the shows. So if I... It's just horrible. It's horrible. This is such a disappointment because now we're finally going to get stats from the podcast app.

And everybody's going to be leaving, so the stats are going to be useless. This does not make me happy. This is not happy news for me. It's not good, Jason. It's really bad. I suggest you fire it up just to take a look at it so you can see how bad it actually is. This app is useless now. So thanks a lot, Apple, on your...

See, this is why we need Musk in charge, man. All they're doing is taking all their apps that are their bread and butter, iTunes, the podcast app, all of that stuff, and they're ruining them. Oh, man. Well, good for Marco Armit in Overcast. He's probably going to be getting a bunch of new subscribers.

Good app, though. I love it. The coolest thing about it, though, with WatchOS 4, the default behavior when you pull up your watch, if you're playing a podcast on your phone, it goes to whatever audio app is active. So recently, it's been pulling up the Overcast app on my watch, which is great because it lets me do the 15-second skip right from my wrist for, you know, if people want to skip ads like I do sometimes because I've heard it a million times and I'm not buying Squarespace ever.

It's really easy. Now, the problem is there are built-in controls if you use the Now Playing app, which is built into the watch, and then it just pulls up any audio, and then you can use the digital crown to change the volume, which is really cool. But they don't allow third-party apps to actually do that yet, so you have to use the Now Playing card.

And it's not, by default, it's going to use other apps. So there's an article in 9to5Mac that we have in the show notes on how to turn that off, and I used it today, and it is actually really nice to be able to just pull your watch up and use the crown to change the volume. Really dig it.

Cool. You're still not getting an Apple Watch, but if you do... Nope. I love the damn thing, man. I'm telling you. I can't wait to get the new one. Yep. Well, I know. You're never going to get it. I'm never going to get it, and I don't know very many people that are, so...

So we're going to file this one under No Shit Sherlock. Someone at the Guardian read the Face ID Security Overview Doc from Apple, and in traditional mainstream media fashion, they published a story about it that has been all over the news all damn week. I'm sure you've run across this one, right? Yes, I have.

Yeah. The gist, basically, is that you shouldn't use Face ID if you have a twin or a sibling that looks a lot like you, or if you're under 13. Okay. Yeah. So what you're saying is that someone with the same facial structure can unlock your phone. Who'd have thunk it? And what the hell are you doing giving a $1,000 phone to a kid in the first place for?

Come on. This is true. So, yeah. And the actual text has been altered like a really drunk game of telephone. You remember playing telephone from the old days? Yes, I do. Yeah. From article to article. So for the GOG audience, I am now going to read, and it's pure, in unadulterated form.

Now, try not to fall asleep here. Okay. The probability of a false match is different for twins and siblings that look like you as well as among children under the age of 13, because their distinct facial features may not have fully developed. If you're concerned about this, we recommend using a passcode to authenticate. That's it.

Thanks. Two sentences, basically. Actually, that's one sentence. Now that I look, no, it is two sentences. Two sentences. It is. And I had to deal with how many articles about this this week? Jesus Christ. I'm so annoyed by this. I don't want to get this phone. I might stick with my 7 forever.

I like Thumbprint Unlock. I'd like not having to use a passcode. I'm definitely not going to use Face ID. That's stupid. I'm going to miss my thumb lock. I like it. It's so convenient. Then get an 8, because it's going to last you for a couple of years. And I tell you what. I don't know if you remember when we did the live GOG in LA last time.

I brought along my Android phone. Remember how fast that thing unlocked with the thumbprint? It was blazing fast. The new 8s are just as fast. So they've upped the processor. It's instant, which is kind of a pain if you just want to open the camera. Because it authenticates so fast that it just goes right in.

So you can't do that swipe to open the camera. But you give a little, you get a little. I don't know. That's true. Yep. Amazon announced a bunch of new crap this week. Yep. I saw some of their presentation. Boy, they could take some lessons from Apple. That bad, eh? It's pretty bad.

It's like watching the Home Shopping Network. Oh, God. It's just bad. Was it as bad as, like, Google's? Because Google's are pretty bad, too. Google's I would rate a little bit better than Amazon's. Wow. That's saying something, man. Yeah. I know. Don't do it to yourself, kids.

If you have not watched this, don't. Just read about it. Well, presentation aside, let's talk a few. Let's talk real quick about the few things that they threw out there. They threw out about 7,000 versions of Echo. One for everything. There's an Echo belly button. There's an Echo knee. There's an Echo thing that sticks to your wall.

There's an Echo toilet bowl. I mean, it's just about a gazillion Echos. Alexa flush. There's an Echo light bulb. Yeah. They're just basically trying to take over your entire house. They want you to stick one everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've got the regular $99 Echo. Now, the thing about this one is it's covered in cloth.

Why would I want a cloth-covered device in my kitchen? You know? It's going to be covered in spaghetti sauce or, in your case, the kid's baby formula in about 10 seconds. Now, see, I looked at it, and I was like, that's nice. I would put the plastic one in the kitchen, and I would put the cloth one out in the living room, where I have the plastic one right now.

Yeah. You know, you can get the $149 Echo Plus that looks like the current one, but it's got a smart home hub. Yes. We know how well those things have been working. Not very well. But it comes with a free light bulb, just in case. Yep. And the Echo buttons, which are right up your alley, because trivia games are pretty much all that anybody can think of using these things for.

Yeah. I was racking my brain on that one. I'm like, what would anybody want this for? You know, I kept hearing all the stories this week about everybody saying, we can't figure out what these Echo buttons are for. I'm like, you're just not thinking hard enough. Let me think about it. And I'm like, well, fuck me. I can't come up with anything either.

I got nothing. Yeah. And the Echo Connect for people who have landlines for some strange reason. Yeah. So you can make a phone call from your landline, I guess. Yeah. Why wouldn't you just use it? Anyways, that makes no sense either. In case you lost your hands and you need to tell.

Like, if you're, you know, cleaning your garbage disposal and your hands get gnawed off, you can say, Alexa, call 911, please. Or something like that. Now, the big mouth Billy Bass, which I didn't know was still a thing, will apparently be Alexa connected. Well, you have not been to a Bass Pro shop in a long time.

I have not. I will definitely say I have not. But, you know, I only see it in TV shows as a joke nowadays, but apparently people still buy the thing. What are you going to do? You can still get a pet rock, man. That's true. That's true. Of course, now they're Echo enabled.

Echo enabled rock. That's about it. The new Fire TV, which will do 4K video at up to 60 frames per second. Yay. Yay. That's actually kind of nice. I don't mind that. Well, and it can also be controlled by the echoes around your house. It probably still can't turn on the TV, which is the one thing that we want.

Yes, which nobody can seem to sort out. Nope. And the Echo Spot, which is the one thing that I actually thought was pretty cute and cool. But it's $130 alarm clock, but it's got a camera in it. So they are trying everything to get a camera in your bedroom. No, I thought, I was like, I looked at the Echo Spot.

I was like, I don't need my, I need a new alarm clock. I'm still stuck in the, I can put my phone in my alarm clock, but I don't need that anymore. I would love to have an Echo based alarm clock, but I don't want a fucking camera in it. I know. It is so stupid. They are so toned after this stuff.

I mean, they're still hurting from that whole, let's put this, here's your camera, ladies, so you can try on outfits and send the data to us and we'll tell you how you look. Yeah, the Amazon does this make my ass look fat device. Yes. This is so tone deaf. Why would you stick a camera in it?

Make one that's $80, that is just, you know, does everything else. It's a nice looking alarm clock. I would buy that in two seconds. Yeah, a dot with that same screen on it would be cool as hell, but no. Yep. They got to put a camera in it. Idiots. Morons.

Anyway, BMW announced that Alexa will be available in all of its cars, including the minis. Do you have a mini still or did you upgrade it, didn't you? We have both. We have the mini and a BMW. Well, there you go. This isn't going to work for you, but starting next year in the US, UK and Germany, you will have Alexa in your car.

Very cool. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. You can use it for typical tasks like the news, smart home control. So you can't say turn my TV on and turn to channel seven as you pull in the driveway, as we've learned. But yeah, but you can also use it for driving things like navigation and finding businesses.

And it'll usually pull up like a little visual card and put it on your display, which is kind of cool. I got to give them that. I like that a lot. I think it's a nice cart wheeling directly over the Apple TV or I mean the Apple car, Apple Play, whatever the hell they're calling it. This is the way to go. It's definitely going straight to voice control.

And yeah, little heads up displays. Fantastic. I know. And Ford announced a long time ago that Alexa was coming to the Fords as an upgrade to their system. But I haven't heard a thing and I've got a Ford and I would love it. I would love that thing to be in my truck. But what are you going to do?

Now, this is interesting. Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices and Services. That's a title. He must have very big business cards. David Limp. So his name's short enough where he can have a massive title. Poor guy had to have a rough time in school. Well, he commented this week that more than 5,000 people now work on just Alexa.

That's good. Here's the interesting thing. Did you know that 382,400 people work for Amazon now? I'm not surprised by that at all. In fact, I'm actually I'd say that's a little bit low. Now, do they also count all the Whole Foods employees? They must. No.

I mean, that was from the most recent quarter. So I wonder if they even have the Whole Foods employees in that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, about 15 months ago, Bezos said that there were only about 1,000 people working on Alexa and the Echo. So this is definitely they're definitely ramping up there. They're betting the farm on this puppy.

Well, if I were just to go off statistics with with our listener count, at least some of these 5,000 people are probably listening to this show. I want you to spread the word amongst your 4,999 cohorts. Fucking sort out the TV. There's 5,000 of you and you cannot figure out how to turn on my damn TV.

Just sort that out. That's all I want. That would be really nice. It really would. Yeah, it really would be. Oh, well. Now, talk about blast from the past here. Mozilla, they've launched a new browser. Firefox Quantum. Yes. Quantum. It claims it's the fastest version ever.

So it's going to be released on November 14th. But you can get it now in beta edition, which I did this morning. I just, you know, I do this for the show. It's fast as hell. I got to admit, it is really, really snappy.

But the problem is it's still Firefox. Yeah, that's an issue. Yeah. They've got a lot to overcome there just with the name and years of abuse that Firefox has put on us. They should have just changed the name of the company. Instead of calling it Firefox Quantum, just called it Quantum. But yeah, it's really snappy.

But I still love Opera. It's doing great. I've had no problems with Opera. And it's, you know, just the memory issues over Chrome are just night and day. Yeah, it's noticeable. I'm still loving Opera. I also found a cool little widget for your menu this week for the Mac.

And it does a few things that I love. It's basically a little scratch pad for text. So you can paste in any formatted text and it'll convert it to plain text, which is really handy. Or you can slap a few bits in there, like just in a holding pattern, which I'm doing all the time when I'm putting notes together for the show. And I usually do that in BBEdit, but now I don't have to.

And it's free. And it's actually written by my friend Andre Torres, which is pretty cool too. Or you could just put notes in your doc. I have notes in my doc, but when you paste a copy into it, it pastes it with formatting, which sometimes I don't like. And then it creates a new document. This is just a holding thing.

So it's like just one little bucket. You can put it in there, write a couple notes, pull it out. I mean, in BBEdit, I have like hundreds of just new docs that I paste stuff into and then just forget to close them. And then BBEdit crashes. And it's a nightmare. I actually covered that on a show a long time ago. Yeah, I actually downloaded it and tried it out.

It is more convenient. The problem I have is it's crashed on me four times already. Really? I've not had it crash once. Yeah, that's a bit weird. Have you upgraded to High Sierra? I have. Oh, me too. And that was amazingly smooth. I have not had any problems on High Sierra, which is the first. There's no problems with it.

It just took forever. It was a long update. Yeah, I've got three Macs here. I've done it on two of them. I'm not doing it on the production machine. Although with the crashes I'm having today, I'm thinking maybe I should. Oh, did I mention before, though? I mentioned the crashes I was having when I first got the Mac.

I think I mentioned that last week. Yes. I sorted the crashes out. Oh, good. You know what the problem was? User error? I thought it was the crucial memory that I bought because I got a 32 gig of RAM that I put into it. Well, it wasn't the crucial memory. It was the memory I got from Apple.

Ah. The DIMMs that came with it, the two four gigabyte DIMMs, I took those out. The thing ran twice as fast. It has not crashed once. Awesome. I would send the DIMMs back to Apple and say, give me some new ones, but I don't need eight gigabytes of RAM. What?

So if you get an iMac and you have problems with it, swap out the RAM. And a friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger, got a new 15-inch this week and had a ton of problems with it, too. Now, Apple, we love you. You do one thing really good, and that's make nice computers. You're failing. Stop it.

Please. Stop it. I might have to dump some of my Apple stock soon because they are just failing left, right, and center. I know. It's sad. Software and hardware is just going down the tubes. Come on, guys. Yep. Now, some people I do love, though, Rogue Amoeba, the makers of Audio Hijack and many other little things.

Well, they're celebrating their 15 years in business this week, and they've got a big sale going on. But by the time this airs, I think the sale will be over. So sorry about that. But they've got a new little widget for the Mac called SoundSource. Love this thing. Because it lets you – well, let me read what they say.

Adjust your input, output, and sound effects devices and volume settings in mere moments right from the menu bar. Enable soft playthrough of input devices to your desired output so you can hear sound coming in through any microphone or other source. With SoundSource, you get fast access to your Mac's most important audio settings.

Okay. I love this thing. It is exactly what the audio widget that's built in to the Mac should be. Yes, that's what I'm thinking. And I need to get this now because since I've updated to High Sierra, when I used to be able to – I used to be able to play iTunes Audio or Spotify, right, from my laptop, and I would stream it to my Amazon Alexa.

And it would play just fine. And as I was going about browsing or whatever, if I would play a video in a browser window, the video would – the audio from that would just play off my laptop. Perfect. I don't want that playing off my Alexa. Now it does. Hmm. And that is annoying.

That is weird. And I need to change that. And it sounds like this app might do it. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And it's $10 if you don't own any Rogue Amoeba products. But if you do, you get a free complimentary license. So I got it for free. Excellent. Yeah. The only criticism is that there are no numerical values in the sliders.

So if you're trying to – well, there's none in the Mac either. But you have to go to MIDI control if you want to use that. But, yeah, I'd like to be able to see the numbers so I can granularly set things. So when I go back to it as an audio guy, I'd like to know the numbers so I can just recreate the exact sound. Yes.

Yes, that is nice. And I finally – I found an app. I have an app. It's been a long time. And this is a good lead into Media Candy. I found an app called Go Watch It. What is this? Well, it's pretty awesome. I wish it worked for TV shows as well. Right now it's just movies. But you know the fractured landscape in which we live now.

Do I ever? And like for the other weekend, we find – my wife and I finally said, all right, it's time. Let's watch Wonder Woman. This app is great for that. What you basically do is you launch the app. Now, it launches slow. So I'm wondering what they're doing. I think their API is like pulling like massive key art or something like that because it brings up just this huge panel of movies, you know, the biggest movies that are out right now.

And it takes forever to load. But once it does and you get to what you want to see, it lists everywhere that that movie is playing, how much it costs to buy it, how much it costs to rent it. So you basically have the entire list right in front of you. So I was able to go, oh, okay, it's out for rental on iTunes for $5.99.

But it's only $4.99 on Amazon. Ah, nice. So you save a buck or two here or there because the pricing is different everywhere. The availability is different everywhere. Now, if you want to watch a movie, you pull up this app and you can see everywhere in real time where it is and how much it is.

That's pretty cool. I'm going to have to check this out. It's pretty damn useful. Does it cost anything? It is free. Oh, that's sad. I know.

Media Candy. Got a little Star Trek Discovery follow-up. Did you watch it? I did. Did you watch both of them or just the one? I watched both of them. Okay. One of them legally. Yes, one from Sweden.

One I had with the subtitles from Sweden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I liked it. I liked it a lot. It was very well done. You know, we can nitpick and say, must we reinvent the Klingons every TV show and every movie? Apparently we must.

Apparently we must. But I got to say, I like this reimagining of the Klingons. They looked pretty damn cool. I could not find one flaw in their makeup. No, it was very well done. I mean, obviously, they're putting a lot of money into this. I liked the characters. I liked all of the characters. There wasn't anybody that really bumped me.

There was no Wesley Crusher. There was no Wesley Crusher. Sorry, Will. Sorry, Will. Yeah. No Wesley Crusher. It was very well done. I am very much looking forward to this show. Now. Now we get to the sticky wicket we're back in.

Yes. Here comes the problem. The TV show is not going to be on CBS. Only the first episode was. Everything else is part of CBS's all access app that you have to subscribe to. The subscription cost being $5.99 a month for ads. So you still get the ads that CBS puts on all their regular shows and gives you for free.

Or you can pay $9.99 for no ads. So I tried to do the math on this, right? Okay. And I went to the Wikipedia page for it. I went to CBS's page for it. I went to CBS's all access page to it. We know we're going to get 15 episodes for the first season, two of which have already aired.

They'll be split into two chapters, the first two episodes that we all saw already. The first chapter will finish airing in November. The second chapter will begin in January of next year. Crafty, crafty bastards. So information on actual air dates is somewhat sketchy.

I couldn't really find anything off there. But going off what I could find and assuming you wanted to watch every episode as they air, like we normally would, rather than wait and binge the entire season, which is your one way to basically only pay like $5.99 to watch every episode, you would need to pay for September, October, and November.

Then cancel and don't pay for it in December. Then start up again in January. And one would assume if it's an even split, January, February, March to watch all the shows. So that's six months total at $5.99 or $9.99 if you don't want the ads. So you're going to pay $35.94 or $59.94 to watch one season of one show.

There is nothing else exclusive on CBS. And even if there was, you probably don't want to watch it. That price seems somewhat ridiculous in this day and age. It's like they're still stuck in the time when we would like watch a show on CBS with all the ads and then buy the $60 DVD box set of the season after it came out.

We don't do that anymore. Nope. So this is ridiculous. And that's the problem. And everybody is now complaining on it. There's an article over on Salon that talks about how great the first two episodes were, but what next? And it's basically saying, is anybody going to pay for this?

Now they're saying that they got new record for subscriber sign-ins. Well, shocking. It's only been around for a couple months and there's nothing on it. So, of course, you're setting a record. Nobody was signing up for it before. But I like it. You know what I mean?

That is the most ridiculous statement in the fucking world to make. That's a very good point. Oh, yes. We have one sign-up. It's a new record. Because we had zero yesterday. Very good points there. Prior to launch, day of launch, hey, we broke a record.

Yes, because nobody was signing up before it launched. Surprise. But I do like the line that they throw in in the Salon article, welcome to the bold new world of data-free declarations. Nice. So, anyways, I hope everybody enjoyed it and watched some of it.

I think it's really good. I can't wait to see where it goes. But I will be going to Sweden because I'm not going to pay that much for a show. I'm just not for one show. That's ridiculous. They should have just made a deal with somebody else. So, in keeping with that, Vulture did an article, which is every Star Trek series rated.

And I quite enjoyed it. It's a fun read. I don't disagree with their ratings, either, with the order that they put them in. So, check that out. It's an enjoyable read. Okay. I will definitely check that out. And in keeping with the whole CBS doing their own stupid service, and we've already talked about Disney doing theirs.

And now we know that Disney is also going to pull all the Star Wars stuff and all the Marvel stuff, which will only be on their own service that you will have to subscribe to. Fox's FX is pulling their shows off of other streaming services and going to their own app. Remember, we talked about it. Last year, I was like, this is the year of the great unbundling.

It is not working out as we hoped it would. It is basically screwing us up the ass instead of helping us. Because now you're going to have to pay the same price that you were paying for your Netflix or Hulu that had most of the shows that you wanted for every single, every single service.

$9.99 here, $9.99 here, $9.99 here, $19.99 here. It's going to end up being more than cable costs now. Yeah. I don't know. It's still going to be – it's still lower for me now by at least, you know, 70%. Yeah, but you want to keep watching the Americans? Now you're going to have to pay for Fox's FX, too.

Yeah. It's going to start adding up, Jason. It fractures more and more, and everyone is going to go with the same price point. Yeah. We are so – hello, Sweden. I'm taking Musk's rocket to Sweden. Too bad.

Well, speaking of Fox shows, the Orville. Yes. I gave it three episodes. Yep. And, yeah, I gave it three episodes. Yeah. That's it. I'm done. It is a supreme waste of time. It does not know what it is. It has no idea what it is.

That is exactly what I keep hearing, is that nobody can figure out what the show is. Is it a send-up? Is it a serious show that's just trying to take on the feel of Star Trek? Is it a homage? What the fuck is it? It really feels like it wants to be next gen.

I mean, it has that feeling of it. But it also tries to be funny at the same time, so you get confused. I'm like, are they taking the piss out of sci-fi? But then this last episode, they talked about gender roles and all this stuff and tried to get deep. But I'm like, you're still telling dick jokes.

What the hell is it? That's the problem. Yeah. It's like you're not going to make a very special episode of The Family Guy where you take on cystic fibrosis. Don't do that. Yeah. Be funny. Be serious. Mix it up. You can mix it up if you're not Seth MacFarlane.

I can't look at him on screen and have it be serious. I just can't. No. And every time I see him now, I'm just like, do Stewie. Do Stewie. Anyway, speaking of the next generation, this past Thursday was the 30th anniversary of the premiere date.

I remember where I was when I watched that first episode. So do I. I watched it with my mom, actually. Yeah. I watched it alone, but I VHSed it. Put it on a VHS tape so my dad and I could watch it later. Yeah. Well, due to popular demand, I guess people have been clamoring for it for a long time.

The Honest Trailer Folk gave the next generation their treatment, and it was quite good. It pokes fun, but fondly. It was really good. I watched it this morning when I saw the link in the notes. And I think the best line in it is when they talk about CBS All Access, a subscription service where no one has gone before or ever again.

Exactly. So I finished The Handmaid's Tale last night on Hulu. Okay. So good. Yep. That's what I hear. Oh, man. It is really good. They do. They take a break from the book at one point, which I thought was really interesting.

And it's a really good side plot that was not in the book. Nice. And it turns out at the very end, it kind of ends where the book ends. Okay. So I don't know where they're going with it next season, but I really enjoyed it. I got to say, even for, you know, the dystopian hellscape that it paints, it was still really good.

All right. I'm going to have to watch it at some point. I think you're really going to like it. I really do. Awesome. Terminator's coming back. Oh, boy. Deadpool's Tim Miller will direct the film next. It's coming out in 2019. James Cameron's going to produce it.

And it's supposed to be out July 26, 2019. Here's the thing. So I first heard about this on the Under the Noise podcast, which thankfully is back. Thank you, Zeus and Chris. I love that show every Monday. What they were saying was that it is going to pretend that the other sequels never existed.

Okay. I dig that. I definitely dig that. The interesting thing is Tim Miller's also directing the movie adaptation of Neuromancer, which I'm like, dude, you're two decades too late for that one. But we'll see how that goes. I don't know.

I can't see Schwarzenegger, super old robot. Did you watch the last one? No. With what's her name? The Targaryen chick from Game of Thrones. She was in it. No, I didn't watch it.

I'm done with Terminator. Yeah. It was almost as bad as the Baywatch movie. Oh, God. Almost as bad as the Baywatch movie. It wasn't as bad as The Mummy, which says something. The Mummy was terrible. But, yeah, we'll see how it goes.

But, you know, Cameron's involved somewhat. He's busy. They're filming Avatar now. Yeah. Avatar. Another movie I don't care to see. I know. Four films that are going to be coming out in the next decade. Who cares? It had, like, insane box office.

But I don't know a single person that gives a crap. Like, I don't know one. Who are all these people that want to see more avatars besides James Cameron? I had no idea. Well, all the actors, because they're getting paid a ton of money for it. But the movie was Pocahontas. The script was Pocahontas.

Everything was... It was so predictable. The only thing that it had for it was the cool CGI and the 3D. I mean, it was a beautiful movie. Same thing. He's got the same shtick as Titanic. It's like, you know, it was a really cool movie. But the story sucks.

And nobody cares. I mean, and especially by the time it comes out, what new technology is he going to be able to harness to make us go, ooh, that's cool? None. He's going to broadcast it directly into our brain, Jason. Could be. Maybe we'll get an avatar suppository and shove it up our ass.

Anyway, let's talk about a podcast I love and hate. Okay. Okay. Lore. I've talked about it on the show before. I love it because it's very well done. I hate it because this guy came out of nowhere and went to the top of the charts and then got a TV deal. And...

No, so you don't really hate the show. You hate the guy. I'm jealous. I have a seething, jealous hatred of Aaron Manke. But I met... Well, if anybody would like to adapt Grumpy Old Geeks into a TV show. Yeah. There you go. We can do this all day long. Oh, wait. Statler and Waldorf. They've already done it.

Oh, man. Oh, well. I've met Aaron. I met him at a podcast movie. And he's a very nice guy. Very, very, very personable. And I wish him the best. But the new show, Lore, starts streaming on Friday, October 13th. Because, of course, why not? Okay. I watched the trailer, though, and the stories look like ones they did on the show already.

So that would be really disappointing if they're just repurposing the shows that they've already done a podcast about. I was hoping for new content. This would not be surprising at all. It would make sense financially. And not a lot of people listen to podcasts still. So, there you go. True, true. Well, I'll check it out when it comes out. All right.

And as I mentioned in the previous segment, using that app, I found Wonder Woman for the cheapest price I could find it to rent. And the wife and I finally sat down and watched it. What'd you think? This is by far my favorite superhero movie ever. See, I was like that when I first saw it. And then I thought about it a little bit.

And then it turns out I hated it. Wonder Woman, when they got off the island, she turned into a moron. She's not a moron. Bumbling around the streets of London like, I mean, this is a very educated woman. And they turned her into an idiot. Daryl Hannah and Splash was not stupid either.

Ah, Daryl Hannah. Anyway, I thought it was very good. The only thing that I have to say is the two hour and 21 minute runtime of which it felt like two hours and 20 minutes of it were the final fight. That went along way too long.

Way too long, yeah. That could have been, you could, this could have been a two hour movie. You could have cut 20 minutes out of that final fight sequence and it would have been a perfect, great movie. I think that's, yeah, that's the general consensus, yeah. I looked over at some point and during the final fight, my wife had fallen asleep and I was noticed I was on my phone doing things.

I was like, has he, has she beat him yet? No? Okay. Yeah. No, it was, it was a bit ridiculous, but yeah. So that, that was bad editing on their part, but otherwise, fantastic performances. Great setup and conceit and all around a great movie and much more enjoyable than all that Avenger shit.

Ain't that the truth? And damn, Wonder Woman is fine. Well, yeah, of course. At the library. I finally finished a book. Oh, goody.

It took a long time because I was doing things like stealing movies from Sweden to watch and all that sort of stuff. But I wanted to change the pace. I wanted to stay from hard sci-fi and I wanted to not read anything about, you know, people that think that they know what's going to happen next in the world. So I went back to an old favorite, Stephen King, and I read a book that I'd never read that came highly recommended.

I read from a Buick 8. It was fantastic. I've never heard of it. It was such a good break from everything. Oh, it's, it's really, it's not one of his better known ones, but it's very good. It's very good. It's not, it's not, not better known because it's one of his sucky ones. That's for sure. So I do highly recommend it.

I can't really talk too much about it without giving it away, but because it's a Stephen King book, if you're looking for something fun to read, this is the one. Okay. I'll pass, but I'm glad you liked it. I started reading Autonomous, a novel by Annalee Newitz. She was the founder of io9 and all that.

I'll have a review for it later, but maybe. I'm having a hard time with it. It's very, it very much feels like a Cory Doctorow preachy book. Oh God. Yeah, it's all about patents and patents around drugs and things like that. So I don't know.

It's, it's, it's, it's better than a Doctorow book at this point because it's actually got pirates in it and they're drug pirates, but she actually has a pirate ship or a pirate submarine, which is, it's at least novel, but yeah, I'll have some follow-up about that. All right. Well, there is a new book that I do want to read, which I have not yet, but there's an interesting article over at Lifehacker about it and an interview with the author, Dr.

Robert Lustig, uh, the hacking of the American mind, the science behind the corporate takeover of our bodies and brains. So this is basically everything that you and I talk about on our show. It talks about how corporate interests have worked to keep us addicted to pleasure and our phones and how our addictions have robbed us of happiness.

Right up our alleys. I'm halfway through this book and I love it. Okay, great. That's my next read. Yep. And my next read after I finish the other two is Paradox Bound by Peter Klein's. It just came out. So I just wanted to let people know that it's out now because we love Peter Klein's quite a bit. So, uh, check that out and that will be on a, you know, a follow-up episode of the show.

Yes. Feedback loop. We have some new Patreon subscribers. Woo-hoo! I might be making $1.30 an hour by the time this is done. Yeah, maybe we'll push ourselves up to $1.30 an hour. We'll see. But thank you very much to Jay Lester, Jeff, and Harrison Enholm, all of whom contributed this last week to our Patreon.

Awesome. Thank you guys so much. Uh, Donovan Addickson writes in, I'm not a fan of the new Hulu interface either. I discovered it this week and found, as you guys did, that my favorites were missing. I did some research on this and found this new look is what their regular and live TV service integration looks like.

And upon the switchover, it is supposed to ask us if we want to import our old favorites. Mine didn't do that until a few days later, so yours may do it now, too. Still not a fan of this new interface, however. Mine did it almost immediately after I added back every single one of the favorites that it deleted.

So, fuck you very much, Hulu. Yeah. And Eric sent in a photo of his GOG sticker. Woohoo! Grumpy Old Geek sticker, which you can get if you donate over on our Patreon, patreon.com slash GOG. That's right. He got it this time. He got it.

So, and he stuck the sticker right under a WordPress sticker. I think he should have put it on top so we could have been, like, pooping on WordPress. Exactly, yes. Thank you very much. And, yes, if you are a Patreon subscriber, send us your email address. I do have another badge going out next week for the people that didn't get their stickers last time around.

We don't know why they didn't. Some of them got returned with bad addresses. So, make sure you give me the right address, guys. Pretty please with sugar on top. Yes. And over at Twitter, we were asked a question by Song of the Aus, Dear GOG Podcast. I've been asked to compress an MP4 file from 850 megs to 300 megs.

Is it possible without crucifying image quality? If so, how? Thanks. I answered in the only true geeky way possible, which is you are never going to get it down that small without losing image quality. But then Bittner and Jason decided to ask Screw Me on my answer and gave him answers that probably still aren't going to get it down to 300 megabytes.

Yeah, it will, actually. I mean, handbrake is a miracle. No, it's really good, Jason, but we also don't know what the video is. Unless it's basically just a talking head with no motion in the background, there's no way it's going to go down to 300. If this is full, like, things are moving around and it's a video, it's not going to happen.

You'd be surprised. Because if it's an MP4 that's out of QuickTime, it adds so much junk in it that you can pull out, you know. Yeah, okay. That's another variable. I'm just assuming that this is already an MP4 that's got some compression on it that is fairly decent. So it really depends on what your source material is.

Yeah, we don't have the actual video, so we can't tell, but give Handbrake a try. Yep, I agree. So Chad Fackler1 writes in, I can beat raw water. Dehydrated water comes in a sealed bottle. Just open and add water. Sell it as I heard it on GOG.

Well done, sir. Yes, thank you. He also wrote in to compliment me on one of my lines. The hand would have already taken over the world if they had a fucking barber on staff. Best quote ever. Thank you. I got to give that one to you. That was pretty good. All right. Sec1 Info sent simply the best weekly pod regarding topics that truly matter, i.e.

no sports bullshit. Wait until you hear my Dodgers aside at the end. Oh, God. Do we have to? No. Oh, Carlo Martinello writes in, what could possibly go wrong? Facial recognition devices installed in China's Wuhan railway station. Well, it's China, so everything can go wrong.

Yes, that's pretty much it. Over at GOG.show, Herb, or Erb, depending on how you like to pronounce it. I like Eddie Izzer's line about that. We say Herb because it's got a fucking H in it. Yeah. It's a good line. Patreon supporter, wish I could give more. I listen to each new program at least six times a week.

What, you ask? Yes, I suffer from insomnia and anxiety, and you are one of two programs that makes me feel everything is okay and whoosh I'm asleep. Jason, how do we make him feel like everything is okay in the world when all we do is complain about how everything is wrong? I don't know. I suffer from insomnia and anxiety, and if I listened to this show, I would jump out my window.

Yes. Anyways, he says, never fails. By the way, I like your sensible politics. I also like Apple music, so there we differ, but otherwise almost always in sync. Just wanted you to know, Lifesaver, better than any drug. You guys are doing good and great. Please don't use my last name. We did not, and thank you so much.

And the thing about it is, how do I feel about this? I'm very happy that we are doing something for him so he can get to sleep, but am I really that happy that our podcast is actually something that puts people to sleep? Well, no, I don't feel that great about that.

I also don't feel that great about being used in lieu of medicine or anything of that, so I don't recommend this. I'm glad it's working for you, but any other listeners, please go to a professional, not someone who plays a doctor on a podcast. Or you can do what I do and just get some whiskey. It puts me to sleep right away.

That does do the job. Unfortunately, before I go to bed, I've made some tweets. That's true, too. So over to iTunes from Madam McBeth. We got a five-star review. This podcast is like listening to two of my husband without the occasional history lesson on BBS software and explaining the difference between Linux, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu, Red Hat, and any other operating system out there.

I love my grumpy old geek, and this podcast is delightful. Keep up the good work, gents. We shout out. Did I ever mention that I used to run a BBS? Oh, stop it. It was called Bring on the Night. I was 14 years old, phone line, foobar, and it was good times. Good times.

Fido. Yeah. I miss those things. All right. We also got a five-star rating from MaggieMay0060, who says, I like how mean Brian is. Jason buys stuff, tells the sex jokes. Jokes. Low energy Dave is my fave. If you like tech, but you're skeptical of everyone in tech, and you miss your dad's snarky pessimism, but you don't want to call your dad, then this might be the podcast for you.

Also, the transitions are a plus. First, we were subbing in for doctors. Now, we're causing daddy issues, apparently. So, Dave says, low energy Dave? Okay. I'm her fave. I think she meant fave, so it's all forgiven. And, you know, Dave's the straight man, so we love Dave.

Yes. We save his best stuff, because we can't put it up on the air, but someday, maybe our Christmas episode will be Dave Unchained. Yeah. When Dave's morality clause expires, he's going to cut loose. Yeah. 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 could 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 a snarky review. Security? Security? Ha! We're back this week with Mr. Boredom himself, David Bittner.

How are you doing, Dave? I'm all right, everybody. I'm doing okay. How are y'all doing? So much low energy. I just wish I had some caffeine, but I don't, so. He's so low energy. Good. Excellent. So you sent over a very low energy clip for us to listen to, which I did.

It was awesome. Apparently, we just can't let go of this AI crap and the definition. And it's good to know that experts in the field agree with us, according to your interview. Listen to this gem. Our virus has infected Dave when he interviews people now, apparently. Take us through this.

You know, it seems to me that when I walk through the floor at RSA or any of the other conferences, is it just me or has the term AI kind of lost its meaning? Yeah. So when you walk through the floor at a lot of conferences, the problem is, and here I'm going to get myself in a lot of trouble.

The problem is, David, most of that material has been created by sales and marketing people, not tech people. And so they've glammed on to AI, and that's what they're using as the term rather than machine learning. So is it that much of the things that are being called artificial intelligence are actually just machine learning?

That is exactly right. Because here's the thing. In the security industry, if you look at cybersecurity in general, maybe, maybe there's some stuff out there that's emulating chat so you can communicate, you know, with people. But short of that, everything else is modeling of threat data that you gather, and then you do something with that threat data to an appliance or a piece of software to protect yourself.

That is 100% machine learning and machine modeling. That is 0% AI. Now, what about people who are doing work with deep learning? So deep learning is a smaller subset inside of machine learning. So we've even gone, like, ha-ha, deeper into the AI machine learning ecosystem where deep learning is really applying very, like, sometimes multiple models over the same data set after

it's been analyzed using different techniques. So it's a subset of machine learning. Now, is there anywhere in our daily lives that you can think of where we're actually crossing paths with true artificial intelligence? Yes, actually.

Believe it or not, a lot of times you're super basic. Super duper basic would be when you call, like, the airline and they're like, do you want to speak to reservations? But that's more like voice recognition, analyzing your voice, and then moving on to the proper option that you selected.

But on some level, that is seemingly AI because it is making a decision. It's just that there's no machine learning model behind it making those determinations. That's more of a rules-based model. But it's the same basic idea. But maybe not in the day-to-day life, there are chats, like, there are companies now moving towards tech support chats that are trying to understand your questions and answer them

based on, like, if you remember the old days of, hey, go read the FAQ. They're trying to break down questions that people type into a chat. And if they can answer that question through a machine model, the chat itself would be the AI component.

The machine model would be the part doing the analysis that would feed it back. And if they can get your question answered without handing that off to a human, that helps them save money. And that would be a pretty common way today. And what about the digital assistants? You know, things like Siri and Alexa, are they artificial intelligence?

You know, see, this goes back to my example with the phone, the phone attendant. Oh, man, you're putting me on the spot. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to get at is what is the actual threshold? If it's a machine convincing me that it is human-esque, if you will, then to me, that seems like it probably is artificial intelligence.

But how much has to be going on behind the scenes? Does it also have to be more than just a simple branching decision tree? That's – and you've nailed the question right there. If you, as a person of this industry, are comfortable saying a branched decision tree with a human-like interaction on top of that is AI, then you are absolutely correct.

If, though, you're making the distinction that a branched decision tree isn't advanced enough, that you need more sophisticated modeling algorithms, then it is not. But the branched decision tree is where all the machine learning and the modeling started.

So arguably, that was the great, great, great, great grandmother of all of this machine learning. So that would be a fun argument to have with some people. All right. We'll fire up our Turing tests, and we'll see who wins. David, thanks for taking the time for us.

Oh, no problem, David. Thank you. Yay! All right. I like that guy. That's David DeFore. He's the Senior Director of Engineering and Cybersecurity at WebRoot. They're one of our academic and research partners over at the CyberWire.

And what I really love about David is he has a real sort of no-nonsense approach to things. He does not beat around the bush. And like you, Brian, he has a bee in his bonnet about people misdescribing AI or assigning the label of AI to things that are not.

So I had him on the line earlier this week, and I thought I would let him have at it. And he, as you can see, he enjoyed having at it. Yeah, it was quite funny. He seemed almost upset. Well, I think like you said.

And rather bothered by it. Yeah, he said he's given up in the office trying to correct people on it because everybody just sort of uses the term, they use artificial intelligence for everything that's machine learning. And as he pointed out, and as you have pointed out many, many times, they are not the same thing.

But it seems like we're heading towards a time when, in people's minds, it's a distinction without a difference, unfortunately. And folks, words matter. Yes, as he decried, it's the win of the PR department over facts, unfortunately. As we mentioned before, maybe it's an arbitrary distinction.

Yes, maybe it's just arbitrary. It's just arbitrary. It's based on nothing except for this thing that we fucking based it on. It's arbitrary. The meaning of words. Yeah. You and your silly meanings of words and things. Well, Equifax announced last week that Richard Smith has left his role as CEO and chairman of the board, effective immediately.

He's been in charge of Equifax for 12 years. So imagine how many security breaches that have happened that we've never heard about. I can only imagine. Well, yeah, Equifax has confirmed that it's hiring for or it's looking for a full-time replacement. And, you know, I hear Travis Kalanick's available nowadays.

So maybe they can get on that. Now, see, he causes problems. What they need is Arianna Huffington. She's got a proven track record of going into companies and fixing them. Oh, yes. Welcome to the heaven room. Hello, darling. How's your credit? Are you sleeping enough, darling?

That might fix your credit. What are we going to do about all of the credit problems, darling? This is very problematic. Listen, I will come in. I will fix it all for you. All right. How's that? That sounds good. Yes. And this is all on the heels of Susan Maudlin or Maldon, not Maudlin, although she's probably Maudlin right now.

I think we've got a new morning show here. We've got low energy Dave and Susan Maudlin. It's the Dave and Maudlin show on KTX 100 BAM. So she was the chief security officer. And David Webb, the chief information officer, they were retired.

And hopefully that's corporate speak for them, you know, taken out behind the woodshed and shot. It is worrisome when they put it in air quotes. Yes. Oh, they've been retired. Sorry. Would you like a glass of Soylent? Anyway, Equifax was also issued a subpoena from the New York State's financial services regulators.

Uh-oh. The regulators, they kind of want to know what's going on because Equifax has changed their story so many times. What do you guys think about that? I mean, why are we still – why is anybody still using them as a service? It's obvious that at least at this point you think they would just say, all right, we're just freezing everybody's credit with them and we're just going to use the other credit agencies for the time being.

Like this cannot be a going concern as still running company at this point, right? Except it is. Yeah. There was an article early on when this happened. I don't remember who it was from. But basically someone was saying – it might even have been just a tweet.

Someone was saying that if Equifax doesn't go out of business because of this, there is no moral hazard in the United States anymore. And I tend to agree with that. Yeah. There was an article in the New York Times that said that there's very little chance of anyone – of any actual criminal proceedings because of this.

And that's because in the eyes of the law, Equifax was – wait for it – the victim. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Well, by the law, I suppose that's true. No, no, no. We're the victim.

I'm sorry. Remember us? All 143 million of us? Remember us? We weren't the – just like we weren't the customers. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We are not Equifax's customers. We're just their data source. Yeah, we're just the product.

And so, you know, there may eventually be class action suits, which, of course – who's the only person who gets rich in class action suits? Lawyers. Lawyers. Lawyers. That's right. So I don't know where you're going to spend your $5 check, but – $5?

You're thinking rich, buddy. I know. Well, you know, maybe the whole family. The wife and I, we probably both got breached, so. Yeah. Yeah. So we did cover on the show before about how on these class action lawsuits, the money that goes unclaimed usually goes to firms that actually do the same kind of work.

So I'm guessing the EFF might actually get paid out of this one the most. I'm okay with that. Yeah. I still take my $1.25. Yeah. More than I make per hour on this show. That's for damn sure. That's right. Anyway, tell us. There's some chance that they might go after some of the executives if it turns out that they did in fact sell their stock with knowledge that the breach had happened and so on and so forth.

But we're a long way from having all of that looked into and anything happening. But it's kind of like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. It'll be a cold comfort, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I did hear some stories about the timing on that sale. And because the executives only have certain windows where they can sell stock after they vest, it just coincided with that window.

So they have to prove that they had knowledge of the breach before they sold it. So that was actually the window that they were given to sell their stock. So that's above board. But it still smells a little funny. Yeah. It's an unfortunate coincidence if that's indeed what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm rich. Ah, shit. Well, but the other thing, too, I think that is grating to all of us is that these people are exiting with some pretty gigantic golden parachutes. Yeah. Yeah. Failing upwards and outwards now, it seems to be the way that everything goes.

You do a crap job, you get promoted. You do an even crappier job, you get fired, but you get a shit ton of money. We call it getting worse admired. Yes. I mean, talk about a huge example of that. I mean, it's unbelievable. I don't understand corporate America anymore. It just seems everything is topsy-turvy now.

The world is upside down. Dogs and cats living together. Madness. Yes. Okay. Let's talk about CBS and Showtime. Yes. We talked before about the Pirate Bay putting a cryptocurrency miner on their website to offset the ads so they didn't have to pay for it.

Well, it turns out Showtime's website had the same Monero JavaScript on it. Right. And they're saying that we don't know how it got here. We're not going to report on it, blah, blah, blah. So here's what I think happened. I think a web dev got crafty with the repo and said, Yep.

I'm going to make a few bucks. Let's see if I can slide this through. This is office space. This is let's just shave off the half a penny that comes through all the time. And then, you know, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, shit, we got caught. And you know why? You know why I know that's exactly what happened? Because that's exactly what I would have done.

Yep. If I had access to a massive website that's getting a ton of traffic, I'm going to throw me in some cryptocurrency miners now that I know it exists. Absolutely. Well, you know, one thing along those lines of where the places that your mind goes when you're thinking about these sorts of things in the office space kind of way, the office that

my wife rents to run her business, I happen to know that included in the lease is free electricity. Yep. Right. And I was thinking to myself, hmm, free electricity, eh? Yeah, we actually covered that on a previous show.

A friend of mine also has an office with free electricity, and people ask him every week if they can put a mining box in his place. And he always says no, because he's smart. Yes. He likes his office. Yeah. He does not want to lose his lease. So, yeah. Yeah.

But, wait, wait, your bill was $50 last week, and now it's $75,000? What's going on? Oh, and why are all the windows open, and you're bringing in bags of ice? We don't know. The air conditioner's not working. Promise. Yeah. The other thing this reminds me of was, remember back in the day, it was really popular to take part in the SETI experiment, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

And that was a similar kind of thing, but probably not as energy-intensive or computationally intensive. Oh, yeah, it was. It totally was. Absolutely. But this notion, well, but the amount of available computation was significantly less when I remember doing this.

Yeah, and it wasn't GPU- About 15 years ago? Yeah, it wasn't GPU-based either, because now everybody's got these massive GPUs, but SETI at home and Folding at home were two of the ones that I used to run. Yeah. And I would leave my Compaq on, my 500 MHz Compaq computer on overnight, which cost me $4,000 in the day because it played Quake at 30 frames per second.

Ooh. Yeah, it was a beast. It was a beast. 15-inch monitor? Nope, 17, baby. I was a professional Quake player. Well, sort of professional, but I had it run all the time. I never saw a spike in my electricity bill back then.

So I don't know if it was really pushing that much, but I totally remember the same thing, yeah. Well, I wonder, too, we're really going down a rat hole here, but I wonder what the power management systems were like in those older systems. How much could they really throttle it up or down?

I really don't remember. But again, I think everything is significantly more advanced than it was, what, 15 years ago? Yeah, I'd hope so. Yeah, well, yeah. Good, excellent point, Jason. Excellent point.

I want to see what happens when one of these things opens up on somebody's iPhone and your iPhone starts mining crypto and see if it explodes, because that would be kind of fun. Bursts into flames. Mm-hmm. That's why the phones are exploding on airplanes.

They're mining Bitcoin. I've heard stranger things. That's actually a pretty good plot point for my new novel. I'm going to have to incorporate that one. Well, give me a credit on the inside flap of the dust cover, if it comes to be, please.

That's all I ask. It's part of an assassination plot. So they know that this guy goes to these websites all the time. So he's going to be flying. So you basically, you hack the website, you inject the JavaScript miner, and it looks for his ID, and then it cranks his CPU up to 100. And then when he puts his phone back in his pocket, it explodes, cuts the artery in his leg, and then he bleeds out on the plane.

Got it. Can I have my chat? I think Cory Doctorow just listens to this segment now for his next book. That ringing sound is Hollywood calling you up for the rights to the script, the movie rights. Let's move on, shall we?

Yes. Let's talk about Tinder. Yes. Yeah, we leave all the sex to you, Jason. So go ahead. Actually, this one's mine. I'm like, what the hell are you guys looking at me for? Come on. It's just reflexive. Insert Jason's joke here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an involuntary reflex. So interesting story here from The Guardian. It's from a woman who requested all of her information from Tinder. And in Europe, you can do these things because they have real privacy laws.

Because they have laws, you know. Yeah, yeah. And actually, when GDPR comes up, what is it, next May, they're actually going to have serious penalties for violating these laws. So that's a thing. But so she requested basically all of the information that Tinder had on her, and they responded and sent her 800 pages of information.

Wow. And it has everything. 800? 800. 800. Yep. As we say here in Baltimore, 800 pages of information. Every match that she's ever done, every, it had all of her, interesting, it had all of her Instagram photos, even after she deleted the Instagram account.

Ah, that old conversation we keep having about what delete means. Yep. Yep. Exactly. So she says, as she flicked through page after page of data, she felt guilty about basically all of the information she was voluntarily disclosing.

I mean, there's location data, things she's interested in, jobs, musical taste, just basically it's a whole rundown of her life. Now, I included this story because it reminds me of another story. And a friend of mine and I were talking over the weekend.

He was listening to a book on tape. I don't remember what it was. But the notion that we came away with was, if you want to do dating right, since we're talking about Tinder, what someone really needs to do, like Facebook and Google need to team up and have a dating app because Facebook and Google know the real you.

Right. Not the you you're putting out on Tinder. Not the you you're putting out on the dating apps. They know the terrible, awful things that you're searching for in the middle of the night. Nobody's going to want to date that person. Well, but that's why when you go on dates, as Chris Rock said, you meet the representative.

Right. But if you if you end up with two birds of a feather who are both interested in those things that you search about in the middle of the night, then it might be a match made in heaven. You never know. But I think it's a fascinating notion. Same people like pizza and porn.

You know, Cosmo back in the day should have just been a dating app. That would have been the perfect way to go. But I'm still I still love this notion because I think it's true that between Google and Facebook and some of these other social media apps, they know the real you probably better than you know yourself because it's all the things you don't want to admit about yourself.

Right. Right. The things you're interested in, the things you're curious about, you know, medical information, everything about you is on there. And it's not the it's not the you you put out there. It's the real you behind the scenes. It's it's the making of documentary, not the highlights real.

Yeah, interesting. I would like to see what kind of person that they would actually match me with. That would be the interesting thing. Well, instead of it being, say, Google, what if it were Amazon? Because I ran across this article this week and it brought to mind some of the same things.

Not only does Amazon track your purchases, it tracks every product you even look at and don't buy. Now, this article talks about how you can go in and clear it because you may want to. Maybe you don't want your your wife to see that you were browsing potential gifts or you don't want to get targeted ads.

Or it could just be showing the real you, Jason, to somebody. So you might want to let them see that. Babeswithbunions.com. That's where I'm going. As per usual, I ask the same question I always ask when I see these articles that tell you how to go clear your browsing history.

Does it mean it's really deleted? I seriously doubt Amazon is actually removing this info. They may just be uncoupling it from your active account. Yeah, I think this is a question that comes up regularly. It's actually something that I am on the early parts of working on a story for, for the Cyber Wire.

I think we're probably going to do a special edition of our show all about the deletion of data. Right. And what does it really mean? I'm going to see if I can't get some folks on the phone to actually tell us what they do. If I delete something, what does that really mean? As we've talked about here, just because it's deleted and no longer accessible, that doesn't mean that it's sitting off on a PsyQuest drive on a shelf somewhere because somebody backed it up.

I don't know what it can mean. In today's world where data is distributed the way that it is, how can you have assurances that data is actually deleted? I don't know the answer to that, but I, but, but dammit, I mean to find out. I'm telling you, everything is on a tape drive somewhere and it's never going away.

Pretty much. Yeah. But I mean, I just even think that at this level, a company like Amazon would never, ever, ever remove all this data. I mean, you can, you can decouple it from your account, but I'm sure it's then going into their, their big data account. But you know, yeah, but you know what, Brian, I mean, to the point where we talked about earlier with the EU and GDPR, that includes a right of deletion.

So if they are doing business with people in Europe, they have to delete it and they have to prove that they've done it. So there's a notion that because of GDPR, global companies will adopt the GDPR standards as their global standards because it's easier than, than not.

And also since the penalties are, are pretty big. Um, so we will see when that goes into effect, that might be good for all of us. I hope so. How do you, how do you prove something's been deleted? That's trying to like, trying to prove a negative. It can't be done.

Well, I mean, there's, I, I, I guess there's a reasonable expect. I mean, how do you, how do you, how do you prove anything that they do? Yeah. I mean, how do you prove that the, the folks at the doctor's office actually shredded the, the paperwork about, you know, your bunion removal?

If you, if you, you know, how do you know if you switch doctors, how do you know that they actually got rid of all your information at the last doctor? You don't, but standards have to be established and applied. And, and, um, you know, if you make a request, they have to be able to say, we went through these steps and, and these are the industry standard steps and that's what we did.

So is it perfect? And if they don't, it comes out, then you sue. Yeah. Or, or in the, in the EU's case, I mean, the, there are huge fines. They're, they're saying, I mean, they can get up to 4% of a company's annual revenue. Wow. Right. Yeah. Or breaches. Yeah. I mean, it's, they, they are not screwing around over there.

A completely different culture in Europe about consumer privacy than what we have here in the United States. Really fascinating. See Equifax. If you had any doubts about that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So it's going to be an interesting transition as we come up into next May of, of, uh, 2018.

All right. So you guys may have noticed that, uh, Mac, uh, or Apple rather, uh, launched a new version of the Mac OS operating system. They launched high Sierra. Mm-hmm. We talked about it a little earlier on the show. Brian and I have both updated. Joke here. I have not yet updated, but, uh, our good friend, Patrick Wardle, who we featured on this show, oh, a few months ago, he's a well-known Mac researcher.

He was the guy who was telling us that, remember when we were having our inquiry about, do we actually know anyone who has been, who has had malware on their Mac? Right. Yes. And we asked him as a premier Mac malware researcher. And basically the answer he gave us was, eh, adware.

Um, but, and yet, and so in that, with that as a background, it's interesting. He has discovered a pretty bad vulnerability that's in Mac OS high Sierra right out of the gate on launch. It's in there right now, has not yet been patched.

Um, he has an exploit where if, if he can convince you to run this little program, which as we know is not that hard to do, uh, to socially engineer someone into doing that, um, this will exfiltrate all the data out of your key chain. And for those of you who are, yeah, for those of you in plain text, for those of you who are unfamiliar, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mac key chain is sort of the little encrypted, uh, wallet that where you're, where you keep all of your passwords and all of your secure stuff.

And it is supposedly encrypted. And I mean, it is, but he's found a workaround. Um, he's got an app called key chain stealer. Aptly named. Yeah. If you go, yeah, if you go to the link, there's a video that demonstrates it in action. He has reported it to Apple.

Apple has not responded to requests for comment. Um, hopefully, uh, we will see a patch, uh, right. But soon now, again, you know, this is not something that is anyone seen happening in the wild. Um, so this is not something that I would necessarily lose sleep over, but you know, Patrick Wardle keeps making the point that the Mac has this reputation for being more secure.

And I think as a practical matter, it seems like it is just anecdotally again, like we all went through, we, I don't know anyone who's had a serious malware incident or ransomware incident or anything on a Mac. Right.

That said, he makes the point. These vulnerabilities are still in the system. Um, Apple could do a much better job than they're doing. I think he's thinking that maybe Apple needs to, uh, step it up that the security by obscurity thing that they've been riding on for a long time, you know, that's a, that could be a ticking time.

Exactly. The thing is the thing has been a Mac has gotten a free pass because it never made sense to develop these things for Mac because PCs were more prevalent. But yeah, it's security through market share, not obscurity. Yeah. That's what it is. And like the other thing Jason and I were talking about earlier in the program is Apple is not what it once was.

I, their, their software isn't as good as it once was. Their hardware isn't as good as it once was. And it stands to reason their security is probably lacking compared to what they used to do as well. I think it's only a matter of time. Time will tell. All right, gentlemen, that's what I have for this week until next week.

Adieu. I'll see you guys. I'll see you guys next week. All right. All right. Okay. Thanks a lot. Okay. Good. Good talking to you. Another boring, another boring segment. Another boring episode. Thanks for coming on, dad. I'm going to go get myself a Jolt Cola, I think. Closing shout outs.

We ended up with quite a few shout outs this week. So this will be interesting. One of two of my favorite bands from the nineties have announced that they're going to tour together over in England. So I'm desperately trying to figure out how to get over there. I'm excited. The wonder stuff and Ned's atomic dustbin. Both great bands. If you never listened to them, we have links in the show notes to my favorite albums from each.

The wonder stuff's never loved Elvis and Ned's atomic dustbin. Are you normal? I love never loved Elvis. I still listen to that quite a bit when I'm working. It's one of the best albums ever. Yeah. Yeah. You should check out miles hunt, the lead singer of the wonder stuff, his Facebook page. They did a Facebook live that is still up there with both him and the guys from Ned's atomic dustbin where they announced the tour and they both played two songs each.

Oh, cool. I'll definitely check it out. I never listened to Ned's atomic dustbin. Oh, they're very good, man. I think, I mean, if you like the wonder stuff, it's the same kind of feel and vibe. They're from the same city, the same scene at the time. Good stuff. I'll definitely check them out then for sure. And sad news this week, we lost Hugh Hefner.

And unfortunately, the Hef's passing, I have seen enough tweets with, thanks for the mammaries to last me a lifetime. So we're not going to use that. There were many jokes. There were many people that basically just said good because he kept women down and all this other stuff.

It's important to remember the time that he came up in. It's important to remember what the social situation was like, what the sexual situation was like, what the racial situation was like. Hef actually did a lot of good. I have friends who are playmates and they say it was some of the most empowering times of their life.

And we've actually had someone who posed in Playboy on the show. So we have. And we have someone who's posted Playboy at my local bar. There we go. God bless Playboy. Hef. Yeah. Although my favorite, my favorite meme of the week was one of the head of ISIS saying, kill yourself and you will get 72 virgins.

And then a picture of Hef underneath goes, you better hurry. That's pretty funny. Yep. All right. And 30 years ago this past Thursday, September 28th. I could not believe this as I found out more and more of the things that happened on that specific day. Depeche Mode released music for the masses.

Wow. The Smiths released Strange Ways, Here We Come, which was basically their final album. And as we mentioned earlier in the show, Star Trek The Next Generation premiered. All of that on one day 30 years ago. Talk about a seriously important day in terms of things I was just discovering back then and have stuck with me and been incredibly important to me throughout these last 30 years.

What a day. That's incredible. What a day, man. Yeah. Back when we used to make things that mattered. Exactly. And cared. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmaster. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend. We're trying to grow the show and we really could use your help.

We know you have a grumpy friend who could use a little pick-me-up. So use that extra 140 characters to tweet how much you love the show. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, and get links to awesome sponsors and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air and maybe get us to $1.35 an hour.

To learn more about all of 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 229. Hi, everybody. It's me, Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. Woo! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

I just had a caffeine enema. Now I'm ready to rock and roll. Let's go to the leaderboard. What's happening with the weather today, Jason? What's happening with traffic? Brian. Traffic on the 10s. Got any prizes to give away? Weather and traffic. Weather and traffic and news and weather on the fives.

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