230: Inflection Point

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. What a fucking week this was. Brian, how are you? Coming out of the gate with an F-bomb. I'm doing all right. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. Oh, okay. I can just pack up my headphones and go back to sleep.

Well, actually, if you want to, but I don't think we should because we got a show to do. All right. I just fired all my clients. Oh, so you're having one of those weeks. Every single client that I have has just been fired. I, uh, well, actually, by the time this comes out, they will have been fired.

But, uh, yeah. Yeah. Nope. Everybody gone. Gone, gone, gone. Okay. You know why? Why, Jason? Everybody makes fun of me on this show for buying lots of stuff. Yeah. Uh, yeah. To do that, I work 80-hour weeks and have a ton of clients and have no personal time.

Period. Mm-hmm. And, uh, turns out this week that, uh, you know, my friend Bob's in town, my best friend in the world. In town for a week. Yes. Uh, been here for the entire week. And, uh, the most time I got to spend with him was the drive from the airport where I picked him up. I was going to say, I've seen a lot of, uh, Bob's, uh, posts on, on the Insta of the Gram and the Book of the Face, and, and you weren't in any of them.

None. I have been working from five in the morning to ten at night pretty much every day. Well, that sucks. Uh, yeah, I'm done. I can't do it anymore. You know what I'm going to do? There are going to be far fewer gadget reviews on this show.

And, uh, actually, that's something we should talk about because, uh, we were talking off the air before the show started. Um, our podcast host has decided to comply with what we call the Internet Advertising Bureau's New Guidelines for Podcast Advertising.

Yes. This has caused you and I much consternation, as it were. Well, uh, yes. On the one hand, uh, you know, you know, I, we have talked at great length on this podcast over the years about how internet statistics are inherently bunk and don't mean crap.

Unfortunately, we do base everything on them. And, uh, while I welcome and, and want and look forward to there being some sort of standards for podcasting in which we actually have a really good idea of what's going on. And, boy, it'd be nice if we just really collected actual stats, which is not out of the realm of possibility.

Uh, we aren't there yet and they're futzing around with things and the latest iteration is rather depressing for us. So, yes, we have gone. And, you know, I always say, like, people, people in podcasting are scared to talk about their numbers, but we're not. So, uh, what was it?

18,000 downloads per episode was what we were at not too long ago. And this last episode. Which enabled us to make a, make a little bit of money and, and have some feeling of self-worth. Right. Because what people need to understand is you cannot get advertising until you hit 10,000 downloads per episode, period.

And that is the basic. I mean, that is barely scraping by. So at 10,000 downloads per episode, you can get a $20 CPM and CPM, which is also a stupid internet advertising term because M is the Roman numeral for thousand.

So they can't just call it CPT. No, no. Cause that's cost per transaction. Uh, no, it's CPM. So at a, at 10,000 download show, we'll get you about a 20 to $25 CPM, which works out to be about 200 to 250 bucks.

Yep. Right. Yep. Um, yeah. And, uh, you cannot get that advertising unless you're above 10,000. We were at 18,000. We were raking it in. No, we weren't actually, but it just made us feel good that people were liking the show and listening to the show. And now we're at five.

Yeah. I still don't understand how that happened. What's happening. What's going on. I mean, this is a lot of insider baseball here, but, uh, It is, but I want people to, I want people to understand. Yeah. A lack of, of, of happiness in this. Well, we're never happy, but I mean, yeah. I mean, it's like what I, I did start to ask you this weekend.

Why are we still doing this? What are we doing this for? Is that, is this a statistical anomaly? Is it because they're just messing around with stuff? Are we going to, are there that many people still listening to us? And it's just all foobard. I don't know what the, nobody can tell us what's actually going on. Because the, the weird bit about all this, our numbers are through the floor, right?

We're not getting people listening to the show, but here's the, here's the difference is that our engagement is up. And people are writing in all the time. We're getting new people writing in. We're getting new people subscribing to Patreon. And we're getting new followers everywhere.

We're getting, yeah, everything, everything is up. All you guys that are out there listening are, are getting involved, which is exactly what you theoretically want. And that's what we want. We want to talk to you guys. This is fun for us. So, well, it's fun for us when people listen, when people don't listen, and 13,000 people just tend to bugger off in an afternoon.

That kind of makes us feel like, oh, what the hell's going on? So, just wanted to let you know that things are, things are strange. So, when we ask you to tell a friend about the show, we kind of really mean it. Yeah, we do mean it. We kind of do. And again, the weird thing is, like, we are experts in this industry.

So, we know a lot of the jiggery that is going on, and the weirdness. Dumb fuckery. And Jason is specifically knee-deep, knee-ankle-deep, knee-neck-deep in the podcasting industry. I am balls-deep in podcasting. In the podcasting industry, and neither of us can really tell what the hell is going on with our show.

We have no idea. We really don't understand it. We don't understand the stats. We don't understand anything. So, it's a process. Here's the other possible issue. Because we host at Libsyn. I have sung the praises and beat them to death for their shortcomings of Libsyn.

Libsyn has always been rock-solid podcast hosting for us. But Rob Walsh, who is the head of podcast relations over at Libsyn, we have butted heads many times. And I think it's safe to say that we hate each other. I'm pretty sure he does not like me very much.

And I, you know, that's just the way it is. Maybe I should take over that aspect. I would love it if you would. But here's the deal. I can't get a straight answer from him as to what the fuck's going on. So, Brian, by all means. And if you work at Libsyn and from my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, please feel free.

Let us know what the fuck's going on because we're just kind of tired of it. In the news. Well, it's not just our internal strife that's bad news this week.

We've had a lot of bad news this last week. Obviously, the Las Vegas shooting. We're not going to get into that at all. We did gun stuff in the past, and I believe I brought Jason away. I like guns. I like guns. I hate guns. I hate guns. Yeah. And I think I got Jason around in my way of thinking on that. So you can go back and listen to the old shows if you want to hear that.

What's of interest to me is in our brave new world of news coming from social media. Boy, do we have some problems with news distribution, don't we? Jiminy, fucking jeepers. How many dimes did – how many hotels were blown up and how many times did Tom Petty die this week?

Jesus fucking Christmas. Yeah. So we have a link in the show notes from Engadget and Jeff over at Patreon sent in the New York Times article discussing basically just the exact same thing where they basically – look, we're just an AI platform. No, you're not. Nope. You're actually journalism now.

I hate to break it to you. You are journalism because this is where people get news. Now, the world exploded right away after this Vegas thing with fake news everywhere. Now, obviously, people will spread conjecture and whatnot, and that's to be expected.

But we have people taking advantage, buying ads for political purposes, posting them, boosting them, getting spread, getting passed around with incorrect information. This is not how news is supposed to work. It's not new, though. I mean, remember, September 11th, 2000.

2001, same thing. It is worse. It is much, much, much, much worse. We've automatized it now so people can do a la carte dumb fuckery. That's pretty much it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and conspiracy theories go crazy. I mean, I can't even tell you how many times I saw and heard about how there was a second gunman on the fourth floor, even when it was finally just proven that it was an alarm that was going off with a flashing light.

It wasn't a gun. It was still on TV the next morning because the alarm hadn't been shut off. And yet the stuff is still being passed around like, mainstream media is covering this up. No, no, no, no. They're not. They're not. They're not. And we have real, real issues with news.

And, you know, to take it to Tom Petty, how ridiculous was that? It was so bad. He was dead. It's a very sad occurrence. Tom Petty is, you know, losing Tom Petty is a big deal. But it got to the point where we're all making jokes like Schrodinger's Petty. Is he dead or is he not?

That's not cool. No, it's not. But neither is what happened. Neither is the fact that they come out and say he's passed. Then they come back and say, well, hold on a second. We don't know if he's passed or not. This is, you can't, this is not how it's supposed to work. This is not, this is the real problem with this never ending need for clicks.

Every second is a news cycle. Every second. We cannot pause. We cannot wait. Now, I don't know how to deal with that, with, with, with some, with breaking huge things like the Vegas shooting. But I do know. Yeah. If somebody passes away, I think we can all agree. We should wait for the family to make a statement before we report anything.

End of story. Right? Absolutely. It's the right thing to do. And I, we gotta, we gotta change this. We have to change this. But, but is it fiscally responsible to the shareholders to change it? That's, therein lies the rub.

Now, we've got a, we've got a thing coming up. I, I did a, one of, one of my clients that is now probably going to get a notice that he's been fired shortly. Did an interview with Tim O'Reilly this week. And Tim's got a new book coming out that I think we're definitely going to read soon.

And he just says the economy has screwed up everything in tech. Right. You know, it's like this, this whole bullshit around shareholder value has ruined the world. And, but he's, he's very, he's bullish on the future and technology.

So it's, it's actually an uplifting read. It's, you know, it's not like listening to this show, but, um, yeah, like his book and Joey Ito's book, like these are big thinkers and, you know, they, they, they look forward to the future of our, our technology overlords. But, um, but yeah, this is, but the problem right now is these stupid fucking companies are just running the algorithms and thinking everything's okay.

Yeah. And it's not, it's just not. And the funny bit is this, this article comes from Engadget that you first linked to. And it says, right. Just last month, Facebook launched is crisis response feature. Okay. Response. And you put this in here a couple of days ago.

Uh, and it came out on the second today is now we're recording this on October 6th. So that's four days to fix a fucking typo. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. So I did go leave. I actually signed up for Engadget to leave a comment and berated them for the fact that they cannot have a spell checker apparently over at Engadget, even though it's free.

It's built into everything. I mean, I'm looking at it right now and it is the little red dots are underneath it. That's how I found it. That's how I found it. I'm like, what, what is a crisis response? And then I, just to make sure that I, you know, I'm old, maybe this is what the kids are saying nowadays. I figured it should be a response, but yeah, no, I went and checked it.

It is still broken. And here's the interesting thing that I also found out is, uh, what they're doing now to get around ad blockers is they're putting their CSS in a different place where the ad blockers will pick it up. So when you go to the website, the website is broken. If you have an ad blocker on.

Yeah. So you have to unblock it. Yeah. That's, that's the new trick that these guys are doing. Yep. That's pretty clever. The other thing about this article is they talk about right-wing conspiracy sites. Have you ever heard of a left-wing conspiracy site? Period. No, because they don't exist.

I mean, sure. There are, there are crazy people on the left there. You know, there are people that go way overboard, but not to the same degree. Hell of a lot more on the right. Just look at the white house. I know we're not supposed to say it, but fuck you. I'm having a bad week. Wow. All right.

And speaking of bad weeks, AOL Instant Messenger is finally going bye-bye. This makes me extremely sad. It shouldn't. You're not on it. I know because I am. I'm on it right now. Wow. No wonder you're not paying attention to this show.

Okay. This, this actually does bum me out. I mean, I, I, look, it was time. It's, it's not surprising. No one uses it. I mean, I remember there was a period of time when, I mean, just, okay. Instant message in general. Like I had hundreds of contacts on instant message.

Yes. And that was a great way to stay in touch with people. It was Slack. Now I still use it. It was, it was Slack before Slack, you know, 20 years before Slack. Yes. So I am sad to see it go as well. My wife and I use it. I, I, we leave windows open while, while we're both at work throughout the day to keep in touch with each other, talk about what's going on, deal with the kid, all that sort of stuff.

So, uh, luckily, you know, uh, Microsoft actually never shutters anything. They just stopped supporting it. So there's still messenger. So I will be, I will continue to use my, my, what's the name of the client? I add him, my add him. I'm still using add him. That's awesome.

I am. I am. And I've, so far I've seen Yahoo's messenger died a couple, I think two years ago. They got rid of it. Yeah. We covered that on the show. Yeah. Now AOL is getting rid of theirs. Google got rid of theirs. I will be lone man standing with my messenger account in add him.

The add him stands alone. The add him stands alone. Hi ho, ICQ. The add him stands alone. Because that's the only thing that's going to work is ICQ soon. Yeah, I know it's, it's pretty, it's, it's sad to see it go. I mean, this is, this is a serious technology.

This is like, this isn't like gopher going away. This is more, more involved. So, yeah. And, and long before Tim Ferriss created the four hour work week, I used AOL instant messenger to be a remote worker. I left my, my shiny job in Hollywood and movie industry advertising, moved to Chicago.

And I had a BlackBerry that was built for instant messenger, AOL instant messenger. It was an AIM BlackBerry. I'm going to have to pull it up because we're going to use that in the show notes. We have to. And all I had to do, I had that thing with me everywhere.

I would take the day off and go to museums. And then I would get a message on AIM saying, Hey, you around? I'm like, yep. What's up? And, and he's like, Hey, we need this done. I would jump in a cab and go home before Uber when cabs worked and go home and get the job done.

But most of my day was spent enjoying my life. And I thank AOL instant messenger for that. So I am, you know, God bless them. I agree. I agree. And it was a sad moment when I logged in this morning and I got the message from AOL system message.

Hi there. We want to let you know that AIM will be going away on December 15th, 2017. Until then you can continue to use AIM normally, but as of December 15th, AIM will be discontinued and you will no longer have access. Thank you for being an AIM user. We loved working on this product for you. Learn more here. And then a link to it being discontinued.

It is a sad day in the internet. It is. It is. You were just talking about how basically corporate culture and the shareholder, the need for shareholder value is one of the reasons that the news is just so horrible. Conveniently, I also had a link very much about that called Bad Job.

And this is a book by Rick Wartzman that's coming out called The End of Loyalty, The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America. And it basically says the exact same thing. The primary culprit is corporate culture, which has explicitly elevated shareholders above employees. This is why it's impossible to have a good job anymore.

This is why there's no employee-employer loyalty. This is why something has just gone so wrong with the American dream. Literally, it's one sentence to maximize shareholder value. That is the problem with this country. We're maximizing shareholder value.

We're not maximizing the value that the employees bring to the country and the company and everything that goes around it. Fuck shareholders. I'm selling all my stock anyway because the market's going to crash soon. But yeah, I would rather this whole shareholder value thing above everything is ruining everything.

Yeah, I agree. I also have a link called The Last. I want that on record to say that at 1.50 p.m. CST on October 6th, Brian said, I agree. All right. Have your victory dance. I will. I will. You do it too. So I'm going to have one too.

That's true. All right. So I also have an article called The Last Human Job. We've talked a lot about automation and how this may or may not. I'm on the – it most definitely will screw us all and end up with us all unemployed side of the fence. But what this is arguing is that basically the one thing left that mass automation will never be able to do better than humans is care jobs.

So I'm going to go start retraining myself as a social worker or something. Okay. Well, I'm on the other side of this argument now after listening to Tim O'Reilly talk about it because I'm telling you, we're going to read this book and we're going to review it in a future episode. Amazon started with like 14,000 robots and now they're at 74,000 robots.

But as the number of robots increase, the actual number of humans that they employ actually goes up at a higher rate because the humans can do better jobs because the robots are taking care of the menial shit. There is a line that you can graph with the way that automation is working in some of these industries that leads to better jobs for humans.

So I'm not – yes, we've talked about this on the show and I think that the numbers are actually starting to come out in favor of, yes, once we automate some of the crap jobs, it gives people a way to do better jobs because they're taking care of it.

The money is still coming in so then they can hire more people to do better things. So I'm kind of bullish on the future of humanity at this point and we'll see how it goes. And that's saying something coming from me. Seriously.

That's true. No, I want to read that book and I want to be hopeful. I want to believe. I want to be convinced otherwise from what my current position is. So please, let's find things that do that for me. Now, we've talked a lot about sleep before. That's been a pet project of yours where you've tried every who's it gadget and what's it known to man for tracking your sleep.

I have a new one this week that we'll talk about soon too. Yes. Well, a new study has come out saying that social jet lag may be to blame. And before you think that I'm talking about social media, no, this has nothing to do with social media. This has to do with people who work there Monday through Friday, get regular, sleep regular hours, keep a regular schedule, and then go batshit crazy on weekends and totally screw with their schedule.

What they are finding out is that inconsistent sleep schedules can lead to several issues, including fatigue and irritability. So basically, the entire life that 99.9% of us live is really messing around with us. Everybody's working for the weekend.

I love Loverboy. Pretty much. That song is a problem. That is. Loverboy is to blame for our lack of... Yeah. Loverboy is to blame for a great many things. Many things, many things. Yeah, especially those red leather pants. You know, Eddie Murphy could pull it off.

You, Loverboy, could not. Now, there's another book coming out that I think we're going to need to read. This is by Franklin Fowair. He's a national correspondent at The Atlantic, and he has written a book called World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Basically, our show in a nutshell.

Stating the threat of big tech is real, why it's time we should start panicking about what Google and Facebook are doing to our lives. So he is... The book basically entirely is about big technology companies controlling more and more market share, more and more data, and having more and more power over our lives.

I think we can all agree that this is true. The alarm bell that he is trying to sound is that we have these concentrations of economic power in a realm that touches almost every aspect of our existence, say, getting our news or finding out if Tom Petty has passed away or not. And these concentrations of power are especially dangerous because the forces that are at play are so powerful in our lives and so crucial to our ability to be thinking human beings.

The ways in which our attention gets shanghaied by these companies make us less good as citizens. We are consuming a lower quality of information. We're living lives where I think it's harder to contemplate the world because we're constantly distracted, notified, ping-ding-dinged, and we should take care about that. And I agree with that.

Ping-ding-dinged. Don't be racist. I do like ping-ding-dinged, and that's an alternative title for our show. So, yes, I think he's totally right on this. But, I mean, it's... How do you stop?

That's the problem. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy here because people are not taking... I mean, granted, 99% of the population is batshit fucking dumb, right? So, these companies have an opportunity to manipulate everybody.

So, if you're a thinker, it's easier to get out of the rut of it. But, yes, these people do have a problem. Just go watch Idiocracy if you think I'm wrong, which I'm not. But, yeah, I think that there is a problem here, and that's why we used to have anti-monopoly laws.

And we don't anymore, especially when it comes to social media because there, you know, there's... What are we going to do? Grant LO a fucking license and break up Facebook like Ma Bell? It's like, okay, well, you can have Messenger as a product. You can have whatever the... Instagram as a product and all that stuff.

But, yeah, there's... This is... We are in uncharted territory here. Yep. We certainly are, and it's not looking good, so. Mm-hmm. Should be a good read. I look forward to it. And, of course, on the heels of that, why wouldn't I bring us a story about somebody else that's trying to bring us another social network?

Oh, Jesus, fuck. Really? Really. This one's called Strava, and it's a niche social network for athletes. Okay, when I saw Strava, I thought it was like an artificial sweetener that I was going to put in my coffee. It sounds like... Stevia. Stevia, that's it. Okay. Yeah, so I guess there's this guy, James Quarles.

He's the CEO, and he is, uh, says, I love this. This is, I open Instagram when I'm traveling to document my photos. I use Facebook to share photos of my kids with family members who are distant. I use Twitter to try and beat CNN for breaking news. And when I'm running, when I'm swimming, when I'm looking for advice to stay active, that's when I would open Strava.

Because we all need all these niche social networks for very different things. All I want... You know what I want is I want a social network called Silence. You know what it does? You have that. It's called nothing. It's called Ello. It's still there. And, and, and as, as every week, I got two friend, I got two friend notifications today from Ello.

People still keep following me on Ello. That's awesome. Everybody go follow Jason on Ello. Yeah. This is how we're actually going to get stats for our show. We'll see how many people follow you on Ello. Follow me on Ello. Yeah. Yes, that's, that's the new plan. Oh. So, I don't know. I, I read through this a little bit.

I do like the without ads part, but that's also, we know, not sustainable because that's not the deal we've made here. Somebody's got to pay for it. Sorry. Yep. Somebody's always got to pay for it somehow. Hey, you know, hey, put that Bitcoin miner on there. I'm down with that. That's right. I'm okay with that too. Now, speaking of Twitter, the people have taken stock of the situation because Jack Dorsey has been back for two years now.

Uh-huh. And, uh, so, you know, it's ripe for everybody looking at what's happened since then besides doubling the amount of characters for some people randomly for no reason whatsoever. Has my stock price doubled when that, uh, 280 came out? Twitter's stock price is down more than 40% from when he came back.

The company has added just 21 million new users in the past two years, less than 1 million a month on average. And last quarter, it didn't add any new users. Twitter is still not profitable. And it's bringing in less revenue this year than it did last year. So by all available metrics, Dorsey has failed.

But we know how that works in the tech world, don't we, Jason? We fail upwards. It's the Marissa Meyer effect. Here's the deal, though. I'm looking at the Twitter stock price now, and it is $17.86, which is up $1.50 from when I bought it. We will cover that soon in Hunting Unicorns.

But way to go, Jack. You know, you can obviously be a massive failure at something and still make money. So here's the problem, Brian. We're too good. We just need to fuck it up. Okay. Let's get back to just talking about Trump all the time.

I wasn't talking about Trump. I was talking about Jack Dorsey. No, no. I mean, that's how we'll fuck it up. That's how we'll... That's true. That's true. Yes. Yes. We got more hate mail about Trump than anything we've ever talked about. Even me saying retard and raping, which was... There were a total of three emails about that, but Brian got butthurt, so I'm not allowed to say retard anymore.

No, you're not. Although you just said it three times in one segment. Trump, Trump, Trump. So I counterbalanced it. That's awesome. Well, now, here's something that is no longer being allowed that I actually didn't even know was happening. Google is no longer allowing users to skirt paywalls using its search engine.

So you used to be able to skirt paywalls to get news by Googling, basically, and you would get the first click free, which is a policy that they had in place. I was not even aware of this. It allowed users to access at least three free articles per day through Google search results before hitting a paywall.

If you did not comply with Google's policy of allowing your content to be out there for free, then they would put you way down in the rankings. How fucking bullshit is that? You understand that I knew about this and I never talked about it on the show because I didn't want it to go away.

This is one of those things where you never tell somebody about your favorite restaurant because you don't want it to be taken over by douchebags. Apparently, somebody has found my favorite restaurant. But yes, I used to use this all the time. I had no idea that Google is doing this to publishers. That is pretty messed up.

But hey, they got rid of Do No Evil a long time ago, didn't they? And that was never a company policy. Some idiot wrote it on a whiteboard. That's all it was. That's it. It was never – it never came down from the mountain on the stone tablet saying, don't be evil.

It was just like, eh, maybe let's try this don't be evil thing. That's all it was. So what you're basically telling me is that Harvey Weinstein just wrote down, don't fuck with chicks somewhere on a whiteboard? Yeah. He just never followed the policy. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, good times.

So they're replacing this policy with flexible sampling, which now allows site owners to decide on how many free clicks people should get, as it should have been all along. Yeah. So thanks, Google. Yeah. And AAA has now come out with a – I love the world.

It's great. I'm actually really – this episode's rough. I'm not going to lie. It is totally rough. And it's going to be rough because, yes, I haven't slept in a week and a half and we're just – we're tired. I'm getting more and more depressed as we go along.

So AAA has done – has now released a study that basically says, you know what? It isn't even just the phones and the texting. It's all the shit that we're putting into all our cars. It is making us less alert. We're more dangerous behind the wheel. None of this is good.

Any single device that we use, even if they're in-dash, voice-activated computer systems, which is what we're telling everybody that they need to use instead of using their handheld devices, you know what difference that makes? Fucking nothing. Apparently. It's still causing distractions. It's still causing up to 27 seconds after the task is completed.

You're still distracted. None of these things are helping. They're all making us worse drivers. Bring on the automated cars. I'm done with this. Oh, my God. Brian has finally given up. Bring it on. Well, I've given up on humanity, Jason. I have given up on humanity. I welcome our robot overlords.

I am so tired of people being stupid. And the way that we're working and moving towards is just making us worse and worse and worse. Speaking of worse and worse and worse. No, you've got to let me come in on this one. Because, yes, the whole shit with stuff in the car. Give me a cassette player and a cup holder.

I know even the Germans, they go, why do you need a cup holder in your car? You're driving. You should not be drinking while driving, even if it's soda. No, yes, it is terrible. When you're at a stoplight, I want you to count. When the light turns green, count before that first car leaves.

You will see that it's about five seconds. It is about a third of a second before I'm on my horn. So if I'm behind you, I am on the horn as soon as the goddamn light goes. But look at people. They are fucking all over the place. It's ridiculous.

Yep, it is. It's bad. Okay. Thus endeth my bit. Okay. So let me get back into what would have been my awesome segue. Speaking of worse and worse and worse. Just when you thought Uber actually couldn't get any worse than they are as a company, they find a way to shock me and surprise me.

I know. You beat me to this one. I was like, this is the one I thought that I was going to beat you to the punch on getting in the notes this week. Now, I don't know if I'm more mad at Uber or if I'm more mad at Apple. Uber. Uber. Be more mad at Uber. Uber's iOS app has secret permissions that allowed it to copy your phone screen.

Let me repeat that and rephrase it. If you have the Uber app on your iPhone, they can take screenshots of your phone, no matter if the app is actively running or not, anytime they want, and they are sent to Uber. Yep.

Do you understand what that means, people listening? Dickie is everywhere. Dickie's for everyone. Uber sees everything that you do on your phone. Everything. They see your emails that you are writing. They see the photos that you are taking. They see that Snapchat that you sent to your ex-girlfriend.

They see everything. So, basically, Uber can see your balls. That's what we're saying. Pretty much. Now, why Apple gave them this grant, they had to get a special, it's called entitlements. They're a bit of code that app developers can use for anything that Apple has to sign off on, basically, to allow them to have it.

Uber claimed that this was basically to figure out something between Uber's app and the Apple Watch. And, of course, Uber says they would never do anything malicious or with any of this kind of technology that they have access to, even though they're fucking on record for basically screwing with governments using Grayball or whatever the hell that program was called.

Yeah. Why would we believe them? You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't believe a goddamn thing they say. So, even if you were just keeping the Uber app on your phone for an emergency, I would recommend you delete that fucker. Yeah.

So, and I think Barrett Rees on Twitter also sent this as well. So, hat tip to him. Hat tip. Yeah. And so, I searched long and hard to end this new segment with anything positive that I could possibly find.

And all I found was blockchains, how they work and why they'll change the world. And this is a pie-in-the-sky idea that potentially, maybe, this technology will make the world a better place. That's all I got. That is the only positive thing I could find all week.

And to follow that up, we actually have a new advertiser on one of my other shows for a company called Ambrosus. They're using the blockchain to basically tame the supply chain for food and medicine. So, you're not getting shit food and shit medicine, which makes every – they're using, like, the Ethereum model with smart contracts.

So, everybody has – and sensors and things like that to actually bring things online where there's accountability at every stage of the supply chain. So, I never thought about that. But that is actually a pretty good use of the blockchain because then everybody gets to see it and governments can audit it.

And then when somebody fucks up, you can go back to the blockchain and say, no, they said this had ingredient A, but we've tested it and it has ingredient B. And then somebody goes to jail. But we know nobody goes to jail in this new world unless you like pot and drive a hooptie.

But, yeah. So, it's cool. No, I – you know, this is a good read. It's a good article. Blockchain as a technology is intrinsically tied to Bitcoin because it was basically invented as a way to track Bitcoin. Bitcoin, but separate it from Bitcoin and any other e-currency because I don't believe e-currencies are going to make it.

They're just not in any other way other than pirating eventually because governments aren't going to allow it. But the blockchain technology that has come of it, there is a chance that this could really make the world a better place. So, I like blockchain a lot. I like blockchain for specific purposes.

Obviously, the problem with blockchain with Bitcoin is that it is going to be a massive currency and the fact that every transaction is recorded is problematic. It needs to be used for specific purposes because, yeah, that's the problem. It's like, okay, you know, 25,000 transactions per second for Visa and MasterCard, 16 for Bitcoin because of the blockchain and everything needs to be, you know, done.

But I think blockchain is definitely going to be really, really cool and really useful in these particular instances. Me too. Oh, you're typing. So, are you typing on your blockchain? I am. I just recorded the latest transaction between us.

I think we've agreed like five times. That's a record. Oh, God. The show is so dead. 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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Enter Grumpy Old Geeks. And seriously, if you run a business, you have to be running FreshBooks. It is ridiculously awesome. Cops and doodads. I didn't follow too much about the Google presentation because it was a Google presentation.

I mean, come on. Who gives a fuck? So, yeah, they released a bunch of things. They got some new phones that will supposedly, you know, compete with the iPhone, which they won't. And they've got some new Google Home things, which are supposedly going to do better than Amazon Echoes, which it won't. Oh, did they announce, like, integration with Titty Trout to go up against Billy Bass?

See, I missed that part. Maybe I should have watched the presentation. I should have watched it. But they did release one thing that sounds cool if it works, and that is always the question. The Google Pixel Buds. Fantastic name. Really? Yeah. Why couldn't they have just called it the Babblefish?

Well, that's trademarked Douglas Adams Estate circa 1989. Well, they should have made a deal. They're Google. Anyways, it is a set of earbuds that are designed to work with the new Pixel 2 handset. Hopefully, that will not be the only handset it works with, but, you know, it is Google, so maybe.

Probably. So, you know, it's a standard earbuds set, except it has next-to-no-lag translation built into it. I really want to try this. I want to try it real bad. Especially as, you know, a once-world traveler pre-kid and soon-to-be-a-world traveler again once he's old enough.

This would be unbelievable. I mean, this is the dream, right? The universal translator dream. Yeah. No, it's a Star Trek meets Hitchhiker's Guide, if it works. They're ugly as shit and giant, but you never expect good design from Google, period. So, that's not surprising, but we'll see.

But if this technology is there, it's only going to be a matter of time before other people have it as well, so we'll have a nice-looking Apple version. But I'm very excited about this. Yeah, it's coming. It's totally coming. Yeah, it's coming, so. I can't wait. And I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to compete with you on the stupidest Amazon title for a product.

What I have is upgraded version, AHA-style AirPod silicone case shockproof protective cover for Apple AirPods Midnight Blue. That's good. That's good. It's not bad. It's not bad. It's a $10, basically, AirPod condom is what it is for your case.

I like this thing because when I sit down to, you know, have a respite in the loo, many times the AirPods will fall out of my pocket because they are very slick and shiny and they just fall out. So, I needed a little grippiness. So, I got these based on, what's his, Zero Distractions up in Canada, who's a podcaster up there.

He got them and sent them to the Instagrams and I saw it and I'm like, $10, I'll give it a go. And now, I actually really enjoy them. They're very nice. I would offer this as Exhibit A on items that you do not need to purchase now that you no longer have clients. There is no reason to have these.

Here's the deal. I bought it while I had clients. Yes, this is something that will not be in my future. Basically, what I'm going to get is some masking tape and tape it around inside out so that it's kind of like the poor man's lint roller.

You know, you've done that. You have some masking tape or duct tape laying around and you roll it backwards on your hand to get the lint off you because you can't afford a lint roller. That's my life going forward. Yes, this is how sad it's become, people. That's actually not really my poor man's lint roller. I find that to be much more effective than a lint roller ever is.

That's true. I do. That's actually true, yeah. Well, I will have to say that, again, I think that this product is inherently stupid. I don't think anybody needs it. I do appreciate the second graphic on Amazon where they're showing the impact-resistant feature. This is basically a graphic equivalent of the infomercials where they tell you that cooking pasta is so damn hard, so you have to get their stupid product that you don't really need.

It shows the case cracking what can only be described as cement. I know. There's no way. I didn't say that before, but that's awesome. That is... This is fucking ridiculous. It's so great. Like your AirPod case could crack in.

Well done. Well done. Upgraded version, AHA-style, AirPod silicone case, shockproof, productive cover for Apple AirPods, midnight blue. Well done on you. If you're listening to this show right now and got any humor out of that, please go to Patreon. Give us $10 so Jason can get his damn money back.

Oh my god. Now, you would have almost... If not for a certain feature, I might have needed somebody to go on and give me a $200 donation because what eventually I used to say would happen to people with their AirPods happened to me. I forgot that they were in my pocket.

They went through a wash and dry cycle, and apparently they are both waterproof and dryer-proof. What? Because they are still working. No way! And have no problems whatsoever. And not in the case either. They were just out in the wild by themselves in the pocket in my biking shoes.

You're fucking kidding me! They actually survived? Not only did they survive, but no ill effects whatsoever. Oh my god! That's amazing. Now, I'm sure Apple will not ever advertise this feature, and I wouldn't recommend trying it yourself. Do not try this at home, kids.

But should you discover that your AirPods have gone through the washer and dryer cycle, don't fret. They may work. Wow! That's crazy. I thought that maybe they were in the case when you put this in here, but wow! Nope. I feel like Christopher Walken. Wow! Wow!

I carried these AirPods in my ass. I carried these AirPods in my ass. Oh, never mind. I'm not even going to go there. I cannot repeat that because we will get emails. Moving on!

Media Candy. We won't do this every week, but since the show is so brand new, I thought we'd just do a little follow-up on Star Trek Discovery. Or as I like to now call it, Star Trek. Oop-takt! Oop-takt! Is that Klingon, or is that some other language? No, that would happen to be Swedish for Discovery, because I happened to go get the show from Sweden, because I'm not going to pay $54 for one show.

Okay, warp speed to Sweden. So, yes, after it airs on Sunday, I go to Sweden on Monday morning, and I watch it Monday night. I liked the third episode quite a bit. Jason, did you see it? I've seen them all, yes. I actually really enjoyed the show.

I also went to Star Trek. Oop-takt! At first, I thought that was Klingon. I'm just like, what the hell is this doing in here? And then, I'm sorry. I'm still laughing at the fact that this is Swedish for Discovery. Two seconds on Google.

Could have used a little Pixel Bud translator. Would have worked on it. Yeah. I got a little bit of Orville follow-up. So, I've got guests in town that I haven't seen. So, while they were out having a good time, and I'm sitting here editing bullshit, I watched episode four of Orville.

Still sucks! It's still a steaming pile of shit. He has no idea what it is. I don't see any positives out there for it. Nobody's talking about it. Nobody's saying it's good. So, that's just... Orville has been filed into my We'll Never Watch file.

Yeah, yeah. Put that in the TP file. It's like, there's a bear shit in the woods. Yes, it's called Orville. Gotcha. Now, we got Blade Runner 2049 coming out, which I think most people are somewhat excited about. I got my tickets! I got my tickets!

It's been a good 10 plus years since I've seen the original Blade Runner, and I was like, all right, I should watch this to get prepared. I should go back and just see it again. I had no idea, because I don't follow these things quite as much. There are 972 different versions of this movie out now.

The only movie that has more versions of itself out there is Army of Darkness. So, if you ever wanted to get Army of Darkness on DVD, there are so many editions of Army of Darkness that it's ridiculous. And it gets to the point where at the end of them, when you listen to the commentary track, Bruce Campbell comes on.

He's like, we're doing this shit again? Are you fucking kidding me? But yes, I hate Blade Runner. I'm sorry. I did not like the original movie. I don't care for it. But I'm going to go see it. This explains why you're so excited about the new one. I'm going to go see it, because, yeah.

Was it Ryan Reynolds? Is that the guy? Or is it the other one? No. Felipe. Felipe Reynolds? Whoever the new Blade Runner is. He's basically, you could have cast a two-by-four, and you would have more emotion than that guy. I've seen the trailers. But here's the thing.

If you're going to watch Blade Runner, if you're going to go back and have to pay for it and find the version that you need to watch, get the one on iTunes or any other ones with the voiceover. Watch it with the voiceover. I had a conversation this morning with a friend of the show, Chen, where she's just like, I'm going to get the final cut.

I'm like, don't get the final cut, because that's stupid. Get the original cut. That's the one that you need to listen to and watch. Well, an awful lot of people vastly disagree with you and hate the voiceover. Fuck them. Fuck them. So we have a link in our show notes, so you can check that out. Slate did a video of how at least seven of the different actual somewhat real releases are discussed and the differences between them.

Now, all of this ended up being moot for me. And here's, again, God, I'm really angry this week. Here's why I'm slowly going mad. I decide I want to watch Blade Runner. I put in the time and effort to decide which version of Blade Runner I would prefer to see.

Now, I have paid to see Blade Runner in the theater. All right, technically my dad paid for me there because I was really young. No, we lad. We lad. A ticket had been purchased for me to see it in a theater. I purchased a very expensive VHS version of it when it first came out. I purchased a Laserdisc version of Blade Runner when I had a Laserdisc player in college.

I purchased a DVD of Blade Runner when DVDs came out. And then I went back and purchased a Blu-ray DVD of Blade Runner when Blu-rays came out. None of which helped me now because I don't have access to anything to play anything on that. Blu-ray player? Wow. Not anymore. Why would I have that sitting around?

I've got one. So now I have to either rent or buy a stream again at inflated prices because the new one is coming out. So it's not cheap. It's not for free on Netflix. It's not for free anywhere. Ever get the feeling the game is rigged, Jason? It is rigged. It is rigged. But here's the deal.

It is going to cost you less to go to Best Buy and buy a Blu-ray player than it will be to buy the digital version on iTunes. Because you can get a Blu-ray player for about $7 nowadays, I think. Probably. Friend of the show MXV also had the super deluxe version of Blade Runner.

And I think it had seven versions, literally seven versions of it in the little case that it came in to make you look like you're, you know, hunting replicants. I'm like, okay, great. I'm hunting replicants with a fucking lunchbox. Thank you. But the first version is the only one you need to see because that is the way it came out.

And for people who have never seen it, they need to see that version. Yes. All right. Well, Heather, people will disagree with you on that. But you have Jason's vote there. I won't be able to tell you because I'm not going to pay another time for this damn movie. Now. Sweden. I'm sorry.

Blade Runner uptacked. Blade Runner uptacked. That's the version I'll be watching. The uptack cut. Yes. So if it were on Netflix, which is not, I would be paying more for it now. Netflix has announced that they are raising U.S. subscription prices for both new and existing customers.

This is not a surprise as they are spending lots and lots and lots of money now on developing their own shows and haven't really raised prices from the old model where they didn't develop their own shows and they were charging you that much just for other people's stuff. So it's going to go from up a buck a month from the $9.99 for the two-stream HD tier.

And the family pan is going from $11.99 to $13.99 per month. Yeah, I've got the family, not pan, but plan to, yeah, it's two bucks a month. And, yeah, the hangers on who are listening to this show will know that their rent has gone up $2 a month because I'm not paying for this shit.

But, yeah, it's still $13.99 a month, which is cheaper than any other service out there, and you get way more content. It is still below market value for what you get. And another two bucks a month, NBD is what I've got to say, NBD.

Right. And if I were one of these people, I'd be watching Blade Runner right now, but apparently there are 3.7 million DVD subscribers to Netflix still in this world. So that's an awful lot of people that I'm surprised still sit and have DVDs and wait for them to come in the mail. You know, there are many times when I've actually thought about resubscribing to the DVD plan because a lot of movies you just can't get on streaming.

And I'm just like, this is only available on DVD. And I'm like, well, shit, then I can get it and rip it. But, oh, wait, I don't have a DVD player hooked up to any of my computers anymore. Damn. Yeah. Brian, we love Kickstarter. I miss our old segment.

We should bring it back. Kickstarter in the balls. That's right. Well, four years ago, Linda Stutt, she had a crowdfunding project that was trying to raise $5 million for a movie called Kate Allen is Getting a Life.

Okay. She raised $243. And it's turned out that this is, according to Motherboard, the worst Kickstarter movie campaign in history finally got made. It used to be on YouTube, but it has been taken down.

It's a 35-minute movie, has none of the cast that she promised in the Kickstarter campaign, which is, you know, that's kind of understandable since she was asking $5 million. She got $243. The fact that she did it is pretty impressive. This is kind of a giant fuck you to everybody, but it's pretty funny.

Well, okay. I want to track this down and actually watch it now. I'm intrigued. Yeah, you can't. She has removed it from YouTube, apparently. Too bad. Well, I'm sure you can probably find, what's her face again?

Oh, Kate says, Kate Allen is Getting a Life Utrecht. Yes. Might be the only way to go then. Anyways. Microsoft has given up on Groove Music, which I didn't know existed. What is Groove Music? I've never heard of it. It was their music streaming service.

Okay. Microsoft, definitely time to give up on it because nobody's ever heard of it. Yeah. So they've decided that it's not working out for them and they've decided to switch all their customers to Spotify. So that's a nice move.

See, one thing I can't, we can laugh at Microsoft and we do, we really do a lot and we can pick on Microsoft and we really do a lot. One thing that they do really, you got to admit, one thing they do really well is transition out. I was going to say, one thing they do really well is press releases because if they never put out a press release, we'd have never known about it.

I know. Oh, Clippy's dead? We never knew about that, but you put out a press release. So all five of the people that are currently subscribing to Groove Music are now getting Spotify subscriptions. And now that they're on Spotify, there's actually a couple of cool things out there that you can do once they've opened up their API.

Some people have built some pretty interesting stuff. I found two this week. The first is Spotify, well, Spotify did themselves the first one. Sorry. So that's called Your Time Capsule, a personalized playlist for every user. These are songs to take you back in time to your teenage years. Bring on the memories with two hours of iconic throwback tracks, all picked just for you.

It's, this is the kind of stuff that is somewhat creepy because they are definitely using big data in terms of getting your actual age. No, no, that's not big data. They're looking at your, this is simple. They look at your birth date, they minus 20 years and see what's on the charts back then. Granted, I'm going to get some Duran Duran, but what I was listening to 20 years ago was the exploited and dead Kennedys.

Well, if that's what you've been listening to on Spotify, then you will get a much better, I think the algorithm is a lot better than that, Jason. It just doesn't find the big hits from 20 years ago from your birthday. It, it, it delves based on your listening habits and what you're listening to now. Okay. Well, my playlist is really very spot on.

Like it's good. Oh, cool. I'll check it out then because yeah. Here's the thing though. My playlists are exactly what I listened to 20 years ago. I have not grown up since then, so it doesn't really matter that much. That's true. Fair enough. So, and then the second one I found is, is a cool one.

This was created by Paul LaMere. It's called Boil the Frog. It's a 2012 web app. So it's been around longer than Groove Music. And by the way, the whole Boil the Frog thing is, has been debunked. So stop it with the Boil the Frog.

That's just a good name for this because the idea is you basically pick two artists and it creates a seamless playlist linking the two. That's kind of cool. Maybe, maybe it's kind of cool. Maybe I'll go with Yahoo, Sirius and Fred Schneider. Let's see where we, where, where the twain shall meet.

I think it's a really interesting, yeah. And it's based on Spotify. So it pulls everything from Spotify, but I played around with it a couple of times and was pleasantly surprised. It does find some weird things and make some, some leaps of faith, but overall it's pretty cool. And it makes a, certainly makes a more random playlist than you're probably used to hearing for yourself.

Here's the deal. They didn't say artificial intelligence. They're saying big data. So they get a pass. And that's also part of the reason they made it into our show. And I want to try this because it is kind of cool. I definitely want to check that out. And finally, one big other music story that came out this week, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2018 nominees have been revealed and boy, did it make me feel old.

Oh my God. They were talking. Okay. Here's the deal. The 60 year old guys on WGN's morning show, we're talking about this. And even they said, man, I feel old. And I'm just like, oh shit. The Cars, Depeche Mode, Rage Against the Machine, The Eurythmics, Radiohead.

Yeah. Fuck them. Fuck them. Anyways, Depeche Mode, I'm super excited about. But yeah, here's my list. Here's my list. I'm going to pick five from this list. And you tell me where we kind of align. The Eurythmics, yes.

Yes. Rage Against the Machine, fuck you. No. But they will politically. Judas Priest, A fucking men. Sorry. They need to be in there. Yeah, I think they should get in. The Cars, absolutely. The Cars, absolutely. And Depeche Mode, obviously.

I don't think, no. Depeche Mode will not make it. They will not. There's no way. Then my backup on that is LL Cool J. Because he was a game changer. I think LL Cool J should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Even though he wasn't Rock and Roll, I think he was a game changer.

I think he really did good stuff for music. So those are mine. I'm down with that. Shaka Khan should definitely get in. MC5 should a thousand percent be in. No, it's not Shaka Khan. It's Rufus featuring Shaka Khan. That's why, if it was Shaka Khan, I'd be like, why the fuck isn't she in there already?

Come on, it's Shaka Khan. That's a good point. Yep. Well. Yeah. Shaka Khan. Probably. This is going to be a stretch. This is a big stretch. No, you know what? I'm not going to do that because it might open us up to legal ramifications.

Let's just skip to the next story. Decades of sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein. I think it's not. Frankenstein. Weinstein. Yes. Now, normally, I don't think we would even do this story because, I mean, shocker.

Big, powerful Hollywood guys are creep. Jack, so why is this in here? Because I just like this. Okay. You know what? I just... Obviously, we're the only people that like the show, so why not do it for ourselves? Fuck it. Basically. I was going to put it in Moron of the Week. It's just so creepy.

Two decades ago, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd, who seems like a lovely woman, good actress, fun, beautiful, fun-loving gal, invited her to the Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel for what the actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower.

You know, I think as creepy and as horrible as Harvey Weinstein is, I can see it. I can see it. I can see it. That he would do that because Ashley Judd was in a bunch of his movies back then, and she was the Charlize Theron of the day.

She was the thing. And I think probably Harvey broke her from Hollywood. She went and married a NASCAR driver and left Hollywood and doesn't do movies anymore. And it's all his fault. So we need to go lynch Harvey Weinstein for his bathrobe meandering massages, for sure.

In a statement to The Times on Thursday, he said, I appreciate the way I've behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I'm trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go. He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to deal with this issue head-on, a.k.a. take money baths and just hire hookers instead.

And run for president in 20-whatever. So screw this guy. I mean, the reason I put this in here is because it's not just tech douchebags. It's just douchebags. Brian, the problem is you're calling out all fat old white guys.

That's us. So what are you going to do? I'm sorry. Could I give you a massage? I'm just here in my room. I could use one, Brian. I could really use a massage. Let's deal with that problem head-on. This week I read Paradox Bound by Peter Clines.

Peter Clines is one of our favorite authors here on Grumpy Old Geeks, and there's a reason for that. He is a professional writer who writes amazing stories. In the middle of the week I was actually slacking with Brian because AOL Instant Messenger is now going away.

And I'm like, it is so refreshing to have a fucking amazing science fiction book that takes me to places that I haven't been before. And that's what Peter Clines does in Paradox Bound. It is a time travel novel about American history, and it is unbelievably good.

The problem I've had with the recent books with Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz and all that stuff, they are so heavy-handed with their morality and their message. It's like, patents are bad. Patents are bad. Oh, my God. Copyright sucks, dude.

You know, it's like, oh, we're going to have a party and no patents, dude. This is a story about fucking time travel and the American dream. And it is seriously my favorite fucking book of the year.

It is so – it's just fucking great. I'm sorry. That's all I got. It is so good. I still have like two hours to go in my audio book because I don't want to finish it. Most books I am trying to get through. I'm like, can I have 10x, please?

Can I have chipmunk speed just to get through this fucking book? And this book I'm listening to in real time because it is so amazingly good. So thank you, Peter Clines, for making an amazing book that I can listen to and make me feel like I'm not stupid and not talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot.

Okay. Well, I guess I'll have to read this one. I agree with you. I mean, the way that you were mentioning this stuff is real writers put the story first and then they weave in the point that they try to make as part of the story. A lot of the books that you were listing and we've tried to be reading recently have a point of view that they are trying to get across and they jam the story in to make that happen.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, here's the deal. The hero's journey is a guidepost for most writers and everybody tries to kind of weave it in. This is a pure hero's journey story, but the point is you don't notice it.

That's what makes a great writer. Because when people think that, oh, I have to make a hero's journey story, then they co-opt the hero's journey and then they put their story on top of it. But this is a hero's journey story where you don't see it.

It's like Star Wars. You don't understand that this is somebody that's on a quest and doesn't want to be there, but then comes back. It's the Hobbit. It's all that. But it is so good because the story itself takes over. So I'm sorry, but yes, I have to say Paradox Bound is my favorite book of 2017.

Brick-a-brick. I don't watch Saturday Night Live in real time, but when something pops up, little bits and pieces after, and everybody's talking about them, I will dip in. Ryan Gosling, Obsessed with the Avatar font, is the funniest sketch of Saturday Night Live's season premiere.

I agree with that. This is hilarious. If you've ever done any typography, this is so damn funny. It's so worth a watch. It was so – not only does it make fun of typography, it makes fun of Avatar. Two things I dislike. So fantastic.

Okay. I watched the intro, but I didn't see this bit, so I'll have to go check it out. It's definitely worth it. Another link I saw this week, and we've had some German on the show recently, so this caught my eye. Eight uniquely Los Angeles experiences that there should be a German word for.

German words well-known for expressing emotions that are not normally discussed. Pinksgeveten, because you wait outside of pinks for a long time. So pinksgeveten, I think, is a good word. That's a good one. Now, this just describes the feelings. It doesn't actually give you the words.

So the one I particularly liked is the disorientation of living in a seasonless present. Yes. When I first moved there, like six months in, I'm like, no wonder people are crazy here. It's always sunny. Yes. And then there's also making eye contact with someone and being unable to tell if they're on a TV show or a friend of a friend.

Because that will happen to you. It will happen to you. You will have famous friends and friends of friends who are famous. And you're just like, did your series get picked up? Should I talk to you? Or are you, like, upset right now? I don't know. Yes. And then the one that really speaks to me today as I'm contemplating basically trying to get from the west side to Dodger Stadium for a game tonight, which if you live in L.A., you know, is an impossibility.

The social permissibility of canceling plans ahead of time after realizing that they require cross-town travel at rush hour. Oh, that's – dude, that is pervasive. That's just called, yeah, I got something to do. It's the old, I got to wash my hair tonight.

Exactly. And we've had stories in the past on this show many, many a time, the blue pill, the red pill, the are we living in a computer simulation. Well, surprisingly, physicists have come up with an answer, and it's pretty simple, and it is, by current understandings of physics, a hard answer.

It's no. We are definitely not. Good. Yeah, we are not – there is no chance that we are merely simulations generated by a massive extraterrestrial computer or what, you know, many people have talked about in theory. Yeah, Elon Musk and his stupid theory, yeah. Well, you know, and then we can go into how these – those stories are still bouncing around, even though physicists have answered the question.

So somebody pay attention to this and start passing this link along. So it's saying the finding, which is an unexpectedly definite one, arose from the discovery of a link between gravitational anomalies and computational complexity. Basically, it comes down to the fact that if there were a computer that could do this, it would have to be bigger than the universe itself.

Right. So it can't possibly happen. You know, I figured this out pretty easily because as I was rubbing one out in the shower, I'm like, would there be a super intelligence that wanted me to masturbate in the shower? No, there isn't. We're not living in a fucking simulation. This is the real world. And the show has hit a new low.

No, actually, there we go. I'm just being real. I would like to point out a Facebook page called The Plate Show. Okay. A friend of mine, Sean Honick, back in the day, he ran Text America that almost bought one of my companies and has remained a friend ever since.

But it basically just, you know, it's a collection of really stupid license plates. But I put one in the show, Brian, and I thought of you when I saw it. So that's why this is here. Did you see the plate that I am referencing? I had not clicked on that link, but I was scrolling down.

I'm like, it's the Muad'Dib one. It is Muad'Dib. Somebody got the license plate. Muad'Dib. And as we know, Brian has a hard-on for the Dune series. That's a lot of penis references in one segment. Moran of the Week!

So, you remember when the Fearless Girl statue was erected in Wall Street? Oh, that's the girl looking at the donkey balls? Yeah, basically the defiant woman standing back to Wall Street. And, you know, it was a good rallying cry, especially, you know, there's been a lot of issues with Wall Street, as we can all agree to.

So, hey, it gets mainly political and people get pissed off. But I liked it. I thought it was great. It was like, yes, we are women. Hear us roar. Let's take back something to stand up for the common woman and man as well. Sadly, the parent company of the investment firm that put it up, State Street Corp, today agreed to pay a combined $5 million to more than 300 women and 15 black employees who were paid less than their white male counterparts.

Karma is a bitch. As a – I can't remember who had the link on Twitter when I saw it, but the comment was, can there be any better story? That's fucking beautiful. I'm sorry. That's beautiful. Thanks.

Thanks a lot, idiots. And, of course, the statement that then was released by the CEO of the company basically says, what does it matter what we actually do? Isn't it the point that we were trying to make? No. No, it's not. The point is what you do.

The point is what you do, not what you say. God damn it. All right. So the second one I've got is Mary Alice Bunn, who created the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco. She has basically started a multimillion-dollar company that basically takes retail spaces or other unused spaces and turned them into Instagram experiences for millennials.

Is there a fire locally that we can throw her in? Bunn is a disarming, blunt, slightly intense 25-year-old. Her ice cream nickname – everyone on staff has one – is Scream. She is from Laguna Beach, California and considers herself an old soul.

She is fluent in the tech-infused vocabulary of corporate America. She speaks about her business in terms of iterations, beta testings, and KPIs. Though she denies any talent for social media, her personal brand is on point with a well-curated Instagram account of aspirational adventures, relaxing in an onsen, swinging in an ocean hammock in the Maldives.

She is unnervingly millennial. Okay. I'm going to stop you right there, even though you read all that. I think you should have stopped at Bunn denies any talent. No, there's a couple things. I applaud her for the concept. I have actually been thinking similar items, not so much to create an Instagram place for girls to just take pictures using these spaces.

But there is a real business model out there for someone to come along to all these large retail spaces that are sitting unempty now and do something with them. I would just prefer that they beat something for the public good instead of some bullshit where you take a picture of yourself with rainbow sprinkles. You know, I go back to William Gibson where we can actually, like, house the homeless and things like that.

But, you know, if you want rainbow sprinkles, good for you. Yes. Well, this was written by Anna Wiener over at New York Mag. And what I do like about this is this is real journalism. You will not find a misspelled word. And it is incredibly well written.

I highly recommend everybody go read it. And as a friend of mine, I'm going to quote directly from from what he said when he posted it. This is a beautiful example of a style puff piece that also demolishes its subject without compromising either. This is why people who are professionals make you think.

This is why I love the Peter Klein's novel. And this is why I like paying for my subscription to The New York Times, because people need to be paid for doing good work. Damn it. I agree. I am a fan of the site Incompetech.com.

I love them because he gives away free music, basically, and samples and stuff like that that I can use in my podcasts. But he has been in a war with Google, a complete war with Google AdSense. They first said that you cannot put our ads on copyrighted material.

The entire point of his website is to give away non-copyrighted music. So he has been fighting the good fight. But he came back to them and there's a page on his website called it where you can and kudos to him.

This is an old school site where he uses a CGI script to make graph paper that you can download in print and specifically logarithmic graph paper. I don't know what the fuck logarithmic graph paper is, but he makes it.

He makes it. So, and it goes on to say, Google does not allow the monetization of content that may be sensitive, tragic, or hurtful.

While we believe strongly in the freedom of expression and offer broad access to content across the web without censoring search results, we reserve the right to exercise discretion when reviewing sites and determining whether or not we are able to provide a positive user experience delivering contextually targeted ads to a site with this type of content.

So he writes, if anyone was hurt by insensitive or hurtful use of logarithmic graph paper, I apologize. That was never my intention. I understand some types of graph paper may be difficult to talk about, but ignoring logarithmic graph paper will not make logarithmic graph paper magically go away.

I'm sorry. I'm cracking up just to read. Please keep the conversation going. Talk to your friends and family about logarithmic graph paper. So Google is the moron of the week for me because, yes, this is the AI of taking money away from people. Hunting unicorns.

Hunting unicorns. And we're going to catch up on our hunting unicorns. This is basically the Jason and I had 10,000 fake dollars and we bought five stocks each. Jason and I both within the tech fields. And Mike, our friend of the show and control, stayed out of tech to see how we would do throughout the year.

I am up 39.53%, which is pretty damn good. That's fucking amazing. That's what we talk about. It's just like we wish we'd have actually spent the money. Yeah. Yes. So I'm in the lead there. Jason, you're not far behind. 39.15%, which is, again, fantastic.

And even Mike with non-tech stocks is at 22.89%. That is beating the Dow on the regular. So all three of us really should have invested this money. Now, I do want to point out, though, that as wonderful as this all sounds, and it could be a feather in the cap of a certain president, nearly half of America does not benefit from basically having stocks.

Nearly half of the country has zero dollars invested in the market, according to the Federal Reserve and numerous surveys by groups such as Gallup and Bank Rate. That means people have no money in pension funds, retirement plans, IRAs, mutual funds, or ETFs, and they certainly don't own individual stocks such as Facebook or Apple.

That is a terrifying statistic. And boy, oh, boy, do we need Social Security if this is true. And here's the other issue that we talked about at the beginning of the show. I am going to be pulling all of my money out of the market in probably about 17 minutes because this is going to collapse at some point because this is an unnatural bubble.

And I like how you, this time, usually when you're reading the numbers, you like to rub it in my face how far I am behind you. But this time, I am really not that far behind you. And you just kind of go, yeah, and Jason's at 39.15%.

It's okay. I said you were doing very well, Jason. Do not try to downplay it. You know, just get in your robe. Sounds like you need a massage. It was your vocal tonality. I know that. Because you go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So anyway, I think we're all doing good.

How's that Twitter stock doing, Jason? Well, the Twitter stock is actually up. It's at 17.72. Right. I never remember. When did you purchase it at? Because this is our little side bet. Jason actually put real money into Twitter, and I bet him that it would not be up over the price that he paid for it within a year's time.

I bought it at 16.39. All right. Still hanging in there. Feedback loop. We'd like to thank Michael Harvey, who gave us a donation over at Patreon. We super appreciate that. And then Neil sent us two comments over at Patreon.

First, he sent an interesting YouTube video by Dustin from Smarter Every Day on the 23andMe security. And it's a YouTube link. Dustin from Smarter Every Day probably has a really good show. I wouldn't know because this is basically an ad where he spends most of his time trying to say it's not an ad, but it's an ad.

And it doesn't address security, storage, hacking, all the things that I'm more concerned about with 23andMe. He just goes through the process that they run through. And yeah, good. They have some nice procedures that make sense. Good for them. Great. And he also sent, and I don't know if you looked at this, Jason, because this is more up your alley.

This seems prime for GMG commentary. Clips. Clips is a $250 camera powered by artificial intelligence and designed to snap images from important moments as they happen with no human input required. Well, fuck you, Google. That's what I have to say. I'm not going to pay you $250 for a shitty camera and let you figure out what is important to me.

Because I can guarantee the things that are important to me are not in any algorithm because I am outside the curve. Yeah, I was reading the Engadget review about it, and they basically say this is kind of ridiculous and somewhat creepy overall. But they did have one sentence here. Clips might address a real problem, freeing up users to experience life without worrying about filming it.

Don't film it. Don't film it. Just don't film it and experience life. There, problem solved. And I keep going back to the same fucking quote, Miles Davis, saying, you know, by capturing the moment, you have missed it entirely. So if you're thinking that you are capturing the moment, then you're not going to remember it because you're thinking that it is being stored somewhere else.

No. Like, just enjoy it. Enjoy your fucking life. Anyway, moving on. Friend of the show, Chanson, and the Amazon Echo Silver, which is a fine video from Saturday Night Live. It's one of the ones I did see.

And it is for people who cannot remember how to talk to the Echo. And, yeah, Brian? It's very funny. And I know it's a joke, but there's a lot of merit to the concept. I would totally get this for my parents. And they need it. Yep, they do. Amazon Alyssa! What's up? Zibbity-bity-bity!

Yeah. Anyways, very funny. Auntie wrote us, I love your podcast. I'd love to hear what you have to say about this article. And he sent something. The big problem with self-driving cars is people. This is a bit of a slog to get through. Nothing we haven't said on the show before, so we kind of agree with all this.

I did like this one particular quote. People will jump out of their cars into Starbucks to ride in and pick up their orders, leaving them not in legal parking spots but blocking others, knowing that the cars will take care of getting out of the way if some other car needs to get by. That may well work, but only by slowing everything down for other people, and perhaps the owners will be able to set tolerances on how uncomfortable things get, blah, blah, blah.

I can't see that ending well. My point being, we don't need autonomous cars for this. This is happening right now with Uber and Lyft. Yeah, people are assholes. Hey, you Uber and Lyft motherfucking drivers. You do not get a pass to just pull over anywhere you want. You find a fucking parking spot. I am goddamn pissed at you.

I'm sick of this. They are slowing traffic down everywhere. They just pull over wherever the hell they want and stop traffic. That is not the way. Please start giving them fucking tickets. I'm so annoyed by that. Anyways. Okay. Tell me what you think. All right.

Over on Twitter, Razer0133cent. I'd like to thank Apple for changing the reset button combo with iOS 11.2. Might want to include that in your tips app. I didn't know that that had been done because I hadn't reset it yet. Yeah, I wish you would have put the combo in because now I don't know how to reset my phone.

Damn it, Razer0133. Yes. So we'll have to Google that now. God damn it. Nathan Reitsmith sent, not only did the iOS update turn on Bluetooth, now every time you use airplane mode, it turns on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and data automagically. Doesn't that seem stupid?

I mean, I get some people actually use airplane mode on airplanes, but most of the people I know use it to do fast charging. And if you switch on all those things, you're not fast charging anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Song of the Us says, thanks for the advice, GOG.

Handbrake did work, and the image wasn't too bad. Sadly, it introduced flutter on the sound somehow. So you can go into, you can tweak every little setting when it comes to handbrake. So go back and just change the audio setting.

Yeah. Just look at the audio settings. Yeah. You'll dial in something that'll work and not be too annoying, I'm sure. And Ivar Tola sent us, totally irrelevant but pretty damn funny, a YouTube link of Edith Piaf that I saw that you retweeted, Jason. So you must have really enjoyed it. Dude, did you watch this video?

No. Oh my God. We watched it with a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, and it's fucking fantastic. Now, my cousin writes in a huge article about basically Amazon and their trivia buttons. And he runs a trivia company.

He literally makes his living on trivia, and he wants all of his competitors to sign up and join the Amazon ecosystem because he thinks it's a dog and they're all going to waste their time and money. So thank you, Dwight. I appreciate the response. Yeah.

Good for you. Yeah. Brian Stewart wrote in, hey, Grumpsters, I'm sure I heard you guys talking about China and facial recognition. I saw this and I don't like it. And it's a link to an Australian article about somebody got in a huge fight with hosts of morning shows about how this could be really bad.

He gets into it. I wonder if mostly like TV personalities were paid coerced, brainwashed into saying things like this from the article. Who should be against it if people who are doing something wrong? And basically, this gets down to the if you're not doing anything wrong, why would you be worried about there being national red facial databases, which is Jason's original position.

It was Brian's original. It was Brian's original position. And I'm going to give $20 to the first person that goes out and finds the original GOG quote where Brian says, if you're not hiding anything, why do you need to care about it? Because he said it first. I said it ironically.

No, you didn't. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Since I was 11 years old, I've not had that position. All right, moving on. Chris, I hope you listened to this inside PR episode on the Google memo. It's a more rational discussion than an emotionally charged politically based opinion.

You expressed in your podcast, meaning Chris didn't agree with us. I doubt you even read the memo before insulting the guy. Actually, we did read the memo. And so I, Chris, I did go and I listened to that entire podcast. It was like 45 minutes or 32 minutes or something like that.

Anyways, I listened to the whole thing. It didn't change my mind at all. It's a bunch of PR flax discussing it from the PR HR angle, which I get what they're saying. And I get it makes sense in that instance. But it did not come from a human angle and one that, yeah, there is political bias and there is emotion involved in this, as there was in his opinion.

There is no science that women can't code. I'm sorry. There's not. Let's get over that. Let's move on. I've dated women coders and they are way better than I am. Next one comes from Gail D. Apple's admittedly terrible podcast app is not a good reason to want Elon Musk in charge of Apple. This is what I'm saying, baby.

I drive a Tesla Model S amazing car, but user software, interface, navigation, on screen settings, browser touchpoints, all terrible. Most Tesla owners would prefer Apple CarPlay because most of us use iPhones and would be very happy if our phone worked better with the car.

Elon is a visionary, a big idea man and an inventor. He would have no interest in the details of phone design and operating systems. Check out the crappy streaming radio stations on Tesla. Yes, thank you. I agree with that.

However, Steve Jobs was also the big concept visionary big idea man. Ah, but he was also micromanager. Just let me finish one fucking thought. God damn it. You don't let me.

I'm not going to let you. Go ahead. Go ahead. Anyways, that was the entire—of course Elon Musk is never going to be in charge of Apple. That's never going to happen. But they do need somebody with the big concepts and the vision because they do not have that now. All they're doing is tiny iterations of stuff that they've already done. There is no moving forward.

There is nothing there. And, you know, Musk can just be the big concepts and they have Trent Reznor to get in the weeds and do the small things, right? I want to fuck you like an iPhone. Yeah. Next came from Monkey13. I know you two have abandoned—abounded.

He meant abandoned. Chrome for Opera. Same here. But here's a tip that is pretty useful. And there's a code that basically shuts off autoplay for Chrome. That'll be in our show notes if you want to see it. So thank you for that. Barry Teague writes in, firstly, thanks for doing the podcast. I listen to it every week since I found you and utterly enjoy it.

The company I work for hosts a podcast and I'm wondering if it is possible. And can I do it without having to rewrite the XML RSS files? If so, how? I'm not sure what the question was there. We'll take care of that offline. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Okay. Next up, Mark Havener. Guys, let me start out by saying that I hate Twitter.

I would rather give myself a root canal in the men's room of 7-Eleven. Evocative. Using nothing more than a power drill and a 2-bit Forstner bit and a tweet. Yeah. I'm not a power drilly guy. That being said, Twitter's 140-character limit was arbitrary. The 160-character SMS limitation was only the upper-end limitation.

They could have picked any number less than 160. Twitter could have gone with 150, 155, 140. No, they couldn't. No, they couldn't. That is not, no. Yes. Hold on. Let's finish this. Let's finish this thing and then you and I can both leap in on him. Thanks for the overcast recommendation. I hate how I'm unable to see my podcast queue in the new iteration of Apple's podcast app.

If I am sufficiently impressed, I will relate in an appropriate review. Thank you. And I agree with you about the podcast thing. It's horrible. It's ridiculously bad. So, all right. No, it's still not arbitrary. It's still, it's not, it's not. And here is a quote itself.

When Twitter was born in 2006, it was designed to be used via YS carrier's text messaging services. They were and are limited to 160 characters. So, Twitter's creators reserved 20 characters for a username, leaving 140 characters for the post not yet known as a tweet itself.

20 reserved, 140 left, not motherfucking arbitrary. Because it was based on the username and the recipient name. So, that was, it's not fucking arbitrary in any way, shape, or form. Yes. Sorry, I hate to pick on you for it, but not arbitrary.

Not, not, not arbitrary. This comes from MBK League. Hi, what do you guys think about making the show available on Spotify? Well, ask fucking Spotify. I have sent our show over 10 times, and they will not actually have us on their platform.

So, I would love to be on Spotify. I think Brian would love to be on Spotify. And, yeah, I think you would love us to be on Spotify. Spotify, unfortunately, does not want us to be on Spotify. Spotify, like almost every other major company out there, it's a, it's a walled garden with no customer service unless they want to be, unless they want to deal with you.

Look, I have a show on Spotify. My day job is on Spotify. Was. And the hoops, it still is, the hoops you have to jump through to get on Spotify are amazingly tough to get through. Look, I'm dealing with Spotify from a straight up musician perspective from one of my clients, and I can't get them to answer an email.

So, we'll see. Next up is Chad. Started listening a month or so ago and was hooked. Decided on going back to old episodes around 100-ish and listening to a few a day while driving around at work. I'm now at episode 177. By the way, congrats on the then-newborn. And where Jason suggests Brian to duct tape the Owlet baby monitor sock on your son's foot to keep it from falling off.

I'm sure you were just joking as I laughed and just shook my head. Hope you didn't get any overly sensitive people, crazy people bashing you for that comment. No, not for that one, for plenty of other ones. Anyhow, I was wondering if you have read or reviewed The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearn. I listened to it and enjoyed them. Wondered your thoughts on the series.

Thanks. Keep up the good work and stay grumpy. I don't think either of us have read it. I will check them out. And if it's of interest, add it to a queue and get to it at some point. So, thanks. We always appreciate recommendations. Yes. Next one comes from Mike. Hey, guys. This is a giant wall of text that I'm going to try and summarize here.

Basically, he's on the fence with New Order, saying that he agrees with Brian, that it is not New Order. Without Peter Hook. Yeah. Yeah. But, and talks about the Android boxes and what we call the Cody boxes and what I called our Moogoo Guy Pan boxes.

Yes. We, you know, I liked it, but I don't need it. I, you know, I can go to Sweden anytime I want. So, I don't need that box. This is a box for, you know, the layperson. And you're in Canada, so you're dealing with that kind of thing.

So, yeah. Grab one. I mean, shit. Go ahead. Actually, actually, you know what? Send me your address in 20 bucks. I'll send you my Cody box. You can have it because I'm done with it. I don't use it. Yeah. I don't use mine either.

I did it more as an experiment in setting it up and seeing how it all worked. I think it's more for people who watch a lot of TV or don't know what it is that they want to watch. Like, I only go to Sweden for Star Trek or whatever show du jour that I can't get through other means at the time.

So, it's easy enough for me just to torrent something and toss it up. I don't need an entire box that just has lists of things to watch because I'm never sitting around trying to find something to watch. But apparently, I do talk to some people that do this sort of stuff on the regular. And the new sauce is Terrarium TV.

We have a link in the show notes. So, if you're into all this stuff, that's apparently the cool new thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that one. So, next one. We're getting to iTunes. Chad 715 said, started listening a month ago or so and was hooked. Decided going back to old episodes.

Yeah. Oh, we've already talked about it. Oh, same Chad. Yeah. Same Chad. So, thanks for the five-star review. We appreciate that. Thanks for the five stars. 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 can be 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, which everybody seems to be doing nowadays.

They have taken that part to heart. That's right. They have taken – they have definitely taken that part to heart. Security? Ha! We're back this week with David Lowe Energy Bittner.

Hi, guys. It's great to be back. Whoa! Put me out of a hurry. That was an hour of journey. All right. Let's talk about security. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm back. I'm back. It's been a busy week with security stuff. Lots of interesting news. Where shall we begin?

Yahoo apparently shit the bed by saying that only a little bit of our accounts were hacked. No! All of them. Well. All of them. There is no – there is no – we just had a little bit of a breach. Yeah! Let's just drop trow and come on in.

All right. Well, first of all, they did not say that a little bit were dropped. I think this is part of our ongoing recalibration of what constitutes a major breach because initially they only said it was a billion. Oh! And soon you're talking about real numbers. No, we're at three billion.

We're talking about real numbers. Yes. Yeah. So it may or may not be absolutely every account that was there. But let's just say when you're in the billions and it's easier for them to list off the accounts that weren't hacked than the ones that were, it's pretty bad. We're talking about three billion people.

Well, that is basically effectively almost half the planet. Yeah. We thought the Equifax numbers were bad. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is it's like the other people that weren't in the Yahoo hack don't have electricity. That's why they're not in the hack.

Right. Yes. Yeah. So if you ever had a Yahoo account, if you ever touched any of Yahoo's related companies in any way, just go back and make sure that any of the passwords you may have used for those aren't being used for anything ever again because they're just out there.

That's Flickr. Remember Flickr and Delicious and all the people that got sucked up by Yahoo? All of those are part of the breach. So, yes, go change your passwords. So the big news for us over on the Cyber Wire this week, this just broke yesterday afternoon.

The Wall Street Journal. Did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it. The Wall Street Journal reporting that – so the NSA lost some more information thanks to a contractor. And this time they are blaming software from Kaspersky Labs.

Of course, Kaspersky is a well-known name. Their software is generally well-known and was well-respected. Russian for do not pay for. Well, what's interesting is that over the past month or so, the government has been putting out demands to government agencies to say you can no longer use Kaspersky software.

Now, honestly, I mean, as far as I knew, before November last year, Kaspersky was a trusted player in the cybersecurity realm, and they had really good antivirus. That is right. I used to have it on all my machines.

So now that somebody might be having problems with Russia, Kaspersky is now, you know, persona non grata. Is there any maybe tie to that? Or is Kaspersky actually part of the FSB and sending data home?

Is there any evidence that that's happening? Well, we don't know yet. It's all – so we're sort of in the connecting the dots mode of this story. So evidently what happened was an NSA contractor put some information on a personal machine that they should not have put on their personal machine.

That personal machine was running Kaspersky software, and the Russians got a hold of the information that was on that personal machine. The folks at NSA are saying that it's through the Kaspersky software that they were able to get access to the information on that machine.

Now, Kaspersky – That's a very tenuous connection. Well, let me – there's more. So Kaspersky software has a reputation for being referred to as heavy, which is that it really does an aggressive job scanning all the files on your machine.

And so Kaspersky says this is the only way that they can protect against threats. But of course, the deeper you scan, the more things you can possibly know. So the other possibility here is that Kaspersky didn't really know anything about this, and Kaspersky is saying they're innocent.

They're saying they have no ongoing relationship with the Russian government, that the fact that they are a Russian company and they have Russian roots and those sorts of things, that they're not actively giving information to the government. But – We know nothing, nothing, nothing.

Well, this could be a supply chain issue. So it's possible that the Russian government put something into Kaspersky software. It's possible the Russian government put something into this particular instance of Kaspersky software, knowing that this person was a targeted NSA contractor.

So it may be that the FSB, that's Russia's organization, may have the ability to put special versions of Kaspersky software on people's machines that can do this kind of scanning. We don't know.

Yeah, if the FSB did not have people inside of Kaspersky, I would be – you could knock me over with a feather, you know, because you know that they have people inside of that. Like, we know the NSA has people inside of Symantec and Norton and those same organizations.

Oh, we don't know that. Oh, come on. Don't be fucking naive. Okay. And 9-11 was an inside job. Anyway. Oh, well, fuck you too. Go play with your Legos then, if that's the way you want to take it.

Apparently, this is the wear your tin hat or else episode. I guess so. I'm not sure what I walked into here, guys, but it's always good to join you. So, again, as I was saying, people are sort of in connecting the dots mode.

And so, the timeline of this works out that it plays into when the shadow brokers started releasing NSA tools and also when the NSA contractor – remember Hal Martin, the guy who was arrested for having, oh, I don't know, a few terabytes of classified material in his shed?

So, those all occurred sort of along the same lines timeline-wise. He's kind of like the Ed Gein – he's like the Ed Gein of cybersecurity. Yeah. So, you know, this is one of those stories that's still breaking. We're really not sure exactly what's going on here.

There's lots of accusations being thrown around. Of course, journalists are trying to connect dots and maybe those dots do connect. Maybe they don't. So, I wouldn't read too much into anything, but this is a real embarrassing situation for the NSA. So, Apple also has an embarrassing situation this month.

Yes, they do. Oh, my God. So, I have updated the High Sierra, and I haven't had any problems. And, you know, there was that little thing we talked about last week with being able to exfiltrate your entire keychain in plaintext. Whoopsie.

Now, the new one is if you had set up the ability to reveal your password secret in disk tools, yeah, it would just show you the password. Instead of revealing the hint that you put in. It would just say, oh, we don't need – we don't need those stinking hints.

Let's cut to the chase. Let's cut to the chase. Here, type this, you fucking moron. Now, what do you guys think happened here? Do you think this is just a bug? I think it's a bug. I totally think – I think somebody just – yeah, it's a flag in a bit of software.

It's no – what we call is NBD. I call this – this is the ongoing Apple is not what it once was issues. This never would have happened back in the day. Here's the deal, Brian. I thought about this after the last show. Do you remember System 6, System 7, System 8?

I do. Ah. Do you remember how many times you had to reboot your computer every day because it crashed so goddamn often? I do. Apple is not actually really good at software, it turns out.

Right. We think they are. We think they are. We have this, you know, just beautiful vision of the Steve Jobsian world. And, you know, like OS – yeah, OS like 10.2 to 10.5 might have been okay.

Actually, 10.5 to 10.7 might have been okay because OS 10 was a piece of crap. But it was based on Unix and, yes, there were problems. There have always been problems. It is still better than System 7, 8, all those old days when you had to reboot your 2CI or your Quadra back in the day.

I think that there is a little bit of confirmation bias going on to what they used to be like because Apple has never been good at software. Okay. Well, that's good to keep in mind. But I still just think this is a bug. Nothing nefarious. I don't know that that's a fair – I mean, compared to who, Jason?

I mean, it was – were we living in a world of stable software back in the OS 6, 7, and 8 days from anyone? Yeah, we were in Windows – I'm sorry. Windows 98? No, Dave. Windows Bomb. Remember Windows Bomb? We've been going to the Sonic credit card, heck.

Jason's been so incredibly argumentative today. There's no – this podcast is already three hours long because Jason can't let any point go. So stop, stop it. So did you guys – did you guys hear that there's been a Sonic credit card hack? I heard something of that. What's the story there? Okay.

Here's what you should know about that. The accounts apparently stolen from Sonic are part of a batch of cards that the Joker stash is calling FireTiger because there's like 19 hours at the end of it. They're indexed by city, state, and zip code, which is not good because the geographic specificity allows potential buyers to purchase only cards that were stolen.

Yeah, go for you. Here we go. All right, Jason. Why don't you go ahead and finish the story? No, be my guest. Now, do I need to put you boys in separate corners of the room? All right. Time out, time out. I did like this story just because we haven't really done Hacks of the Week.

It's not that big of a deal. I mean, it is, but it's not a huge, huge hack. But I liked it because of that. And I always thought what you should know about the Sonic credit card hack is never eat at Sonic. I thought we had Hack of the Week with Yahoo in three billion accounts.

Once we get up, once you get over a billion, I don't even know if you call it a hack anymore. I think it's just the sky is falling. I don't know that I've ever eaten at a Sonic. Are they East Coast? I know there's... Yeah, they're East Coast. They're here in the Midwest. I would recommend not. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Me as well. All right. So let's go back to two huge, stupid mistakes, Equifax, because this just won't go away. They're testifying in front of Congress this week. Stupid, unprecedented, shocking, completely lacking, deserves to be shamed.

Just some of the choice phrases that the House Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee has flung at Equifax this week. Not only did that happen, hero. I actually saw this first on your feed, Dave, so congratulations on that. As I commented, not all heroes wear capes.

Some wear monocles. Yes, somebody dressed like the Monopoly guy is photobombing the hearing. It is fantastic. These photos are genius. It is a lot of fun, yes. It's one of those small things that gives me, you know, faith in humanity. And what is the...

I think it was... Was it Mark Twain who said something like, under the assault of laughter, nothing can stand? And I probably don't have it exactly right. But I really like that. And I think I would... I'm especially happy that they're allowing the person to sit in the gallery dressed this way, that they're not hauling that person out.

I think that's wonderful. Yes, yes. So her name was Amanda Werner. It was actually a woman, which is fantastic. And she's from Americans for Financial Reform and Public Citizen. They also handed out Monopoly-style get-out-of-jail-free cards. So this is good. I'm glad that they're doing it.

Arbitration is a rigged game, is what they're saying. And that's the part that they're really kind of protesting against. So yes, as well as... As good as this made you feel and as good as this made you feel for humanity, Dave, I'm about to destroy that for you. Because no matter what all of the things that we just said about Equifax and how bad they are and how they're getting lambasted, they also just got a $7.25 million contract for

the IRS to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent the fraud. Isn't that awesome? You forgot to mention that it was a no-bid contract. Gentlemen, allow me to clarify. Yes. Yes! Thank you! Thank you, Dad. Come in and set us straight. I'll try to keep my energy up while I describe this.

But we covered this this week on The Cyber Wire. And my understanding is that this was an extension of an existing contract. The contract is being taken over by someone else. Another contractor won this award, but hasn't been able to get up to speed and take over the contract quickly enough.

So this is merely a stopgap to allow Equifax to continue doing what they were already doing until their replacement is ready to stand up and take their place. Interesting. Well, okay. That is somewhat slightly better.

I do like the quote from Senator Earl Blumenauer from Oregon. I was initially under the impression that my staff was sharing a copy of The Onion until I realized this story was, in fact, true. Well, that's good to hear. Because as you and I discussed in previous episodes, we are wondering, what does it take for a company to be put out of business at this point?

And, you know, it's fun for these senators and congresspeople to come in and yell at the CEO of Equifax, and certainly he deserves it. But how much of this is going to lead to any meaningful change?

You know, this allows them to go in front of their voters back home and say, I was there. Roll the videotape. I really gave him what for. And, you know, we're still going to see these folks walking away from their shame with their multi-million dollar golden parachutes and no jail time.

Yep. Yeah, it really is. It really is. It's just so frustrating. So, yeah. We'd like soap on a rope for a reason, you little fuckers. Now, I put this story in as well in the hopes that Uncle Dave, which is what I'm now going to start calling you, is going to come in and make me feel better about the state of the world.

We've got to call him Papa Bittner. Papa Bittner. All right. Papa Bittner. So, airport face scans could be a dry run for a national surveillance system. Congress is quietly laying groundwork to take things much, much further than the current TSA nightmare that we are facing, and build out a face scanning system that identifies you when you walk into an airport and then will track your every move until you board the plane.

This is going to be referred to as the TSA Modernization Act and is scheduled to be marked up in Senate Commerce Committee this week. Make me feel better about this. Well, I can tell you, we can all go out and buy Monopoly Man outfits. That's my plan. No. You're not making me feel better.

You know, we're already doing this. This has been done at several Super Bowls already. So, I think this is the next logical step. Unless we step up and tell them that they can't do this, why wouldn't they do this?

I suppose, you know, people like the ACLU will come up and say, this is a violation of our rights, but we've already given up all of our rights. I mean, we've already, I guess once you're behind the security line at an airport, everything's fair game, right?

Yeah. I mean, you signed your rights away. It's on a lot of the stuff that you agree to, unfortunately. Well, but let's think about it. What do they have to gain by doing this? And what do we have to lose by doing this? If we restrict it to only within the secure area of an airport.

How well does all the security restrictions and separations of things, just doing this segment for, say, the past year with us, how well is that going? You're just being reactive based on a new policy. You're not actually looking at the big picture.

You're not saying this, that the fact that you are already in the secure area. So when people are in the secure area, what are they going to do? I don't think that this is wrong in any way, shape or form, because you're there. If they're going to track you, if you're going to like sneak out of a side door to get down to the ramp, to get to the baggage loading area.

Yes, you should be tracked. I don't think that there's anything wrong with this. That's, that's okay. But let's, let's let that sit as it is right now. Fine, fine. But then I will stay to you. I want to know how is this going to work outside of that system?

If I have committed a crime outside of the airport, are they allowed now to go? And they know, they know I flew three weeks earlier of no relation whatsoever to the current crime that I'm being charged for. Can they go back and get my information? Can they use it for any reason against me? Is there any separation of church and state?

Is there any firewall on this? Well, then you're saying it's game on and fuck it. It doesn't matter if you're in a secure spot or not. It's, well, it's just going to go everywhere. And that's that too bad. It's going to happen. I'm sorry. It's going to happen. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not naive. I think it's going to happen. Yes.

Pete, you can fight. You can fight all you want, but it's going to happen. There are really good lawyers out there who are going to do what they can to make this stuff, not connect the dots. But the fact is, if you're committing a crime and they want to look at other things you've done, well, you committed a crime.

If it's. No, that's not the way things work, Jason. That's that. No, no, no. I mean, Brian. Okay, yes, you're going to put, you're going to put on the irony, the, the, the detached. We don't have a choice. Throw our hands up in the air. No, I'm not. I'm just being a realist right now and saying that this is what they're trying to do.

Yes. Fight it. Fight it. Yes, I know. Fight it as much as you can. Okay. Brian, Brian has just threw his hands up and walked away. I just, I just. Well, I can't argue with you when all you do is yell over at me and say, this is what it's going to be, but we should fight it, but that there, there's no conversation to have with you about that.

Let me interject something here that, uh, that I experienced, um, a couple of years ago, we had, uh, in my hometown, we had a horrible shooting at a local mall. Um, someone who was, uh, disturbed, um, went to a mall, pulled out a gun and killed a few people in cold blood.

And a few months after that, I was, um, fortunate enough to, to be at an event where there was a presentation by one of the police officers, one of the detectives who had figured out what had happened. And what was remarkable to me was how they were able to trace the gunman's steps from leaving his home, which was about 20 miles away, um, connecting the dots through security cameras,

uh, traffic cameras, ATM cameras. They, you know, he left his house at this time and the neighbor's security cam picked him up. He stopped and got breakfast at the McDonald's. Here he is sitting at the McDonald's. He got money. Here he is, you know, getting money, uh, here he is walking into the mall.

So not automated, but it was remarkable to me to see it, the, the already existing web that's there to be reverse engineered should someone need to do it. And adding automation to that, um, on the one hand, I think that's there, there may be an inevitability to that, but, um, I think that's going to be a real important civil liberty,

civil, civil liberty issue of our time. But look at, look at London, London already has that and they do exactly that. And the problem with London is it's too much information. They cannot do that. But in retrospect, you can go back and find it, you know, like, like they did with that.

They can go back to the ATM cameras, the neighbor's cameras, but you can't do it in real time, you know, because you cannot find the, the intent of a crime based on somebody's actions as they're doing it. But, uh, you know, I, I, I don't know. I, it's going to happen.

And I, I did a show this week with a defense attorney who is out there saying, look, there are cops that lie. And these video camera, uh, testimonies come back and say, look, it shows that the cop lied, you know?

So there, there, it's, it's back and forth. It's a back and forth. It's a conversation that we're in the middle of, and we're going to have to figure this out as we go along. It's all I'm saying. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not dismissing you, Brian, by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think that it's necessarily going to happen.

I think that it's going to be a very important issue. Like Dave says, probably the biggest issue of our time. This is the exact reason things like the ACLU exist. And we have to decide what kind of country we want to be. I don't want to be in a country that has this. I know it exists in London and I know a lot of people that are unhappy about that.

And I don't want it here. I don't think that it's American, but that's just me. How about those Russians? Yeah. Speaking of not America now, it's just getting harder and harder to deny that this stuff happened at this point.

So this is the Washington post article. Uh, and when I posted it, I said, when the history books look back at the 2017 election, this is the story that they will tell, um, this is Russian operatives setting up misleading websites, social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda and then using powerful Facebook tools.

If we were, if a, if a less reputable person would have written this article, they would have said artificial intelligence, um, to send the messages designed to influence their political behavior. So this definitely did happen and more and more of it is coming out. They use the same tools that, uh, we, uh, I've used that Jason has used that corporate America uses, uh, Facebook retargeting tools, custom audiences, all of that.

They use the tools that Facebook has provided to us to be able to find our audience and sell to them. And, uh, they did what they, boy, did they do American capitalism? They, they, they bought ads and they did a damn good job. Call me crazy, but isn't it illegal for foreign entities to buy, uh, to, to spend money in order to influence an American election?

Illegal where? Because if it's not illegal in the country that they're stationed in. No, but I think it's illegal for example, for, for Facebook to knowingly, for Facebook, Facebook to knowingly take their money is illegal. And of course, Facebook is going to say, we, we know nothing.

Facebook has, has fallen on the, we're just a platform, uh, excuse. Uh, we are not, uh, we're not a news organization excuse. The, we are, we are just an algorithm excuse. Facebook is running out of excuses at this point. I think that's a, I think that's a great way to leave that one. All right.

Let's leave this on a happy note. Too late. Suspected dark. Good luck. Suspected dark web drug dealer undone by his own beard, hoisted by his own petard, as it were. I know, I know Dave, you like to say that, say that saying every now and again.

So, uh, yes, yes, exactly. So this gentleman was, uh, he was, uh, under investigation by the DEA, but, uh, he decided to go to bad. This is a bad dude. So set the table here.

This is a bad, I'm sorry. It's a bad dude. It's, it's a bad dude. He's, uh, his, uh, what's, what's his, uh, his name was, uh, was, uh, oxy monster was his online handle on the dark web, but he was going to a beard competition.

I've got to say, I just Google searched him and did an image search and that is an impressive beard. I got to tell you, he looks like the guy that used to be in Queens of the Stone Age. We have seen this time and time again with, uh, hackers and drug sellers.

Uh, this, this happens a lot with the Russians in particular is that they, um, they decide they want to go on vacation and they will, for some reason, the beaches and, and lovely vacation spots in Russia are not good enough. They get a little bit of money in their pockets and they decide they want to go somewhere with nice, warm sand and beautiful beaches and lovely ladies.

And they go to those places. And wouldn't you know what? Those places have extradition agreements with the United States of America. Whoops. And that's how they get mad. You know? Yeah. And you look at this guy and it's like Captain Caveman. You know, he could keep about a dozen Russian hookers in there and some, and some money and he can just go wherever he wants, but no, he's just got to go someplace where he just has to, you know, swing his dick and look, like, look at my beard.

Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. I mean, there's some, it's kind of almost like a Samson, uh, uh, story there, right? It's, it's, it's his fabulous hair that, uh, that was his undoing. All right, guys, will you guys please just get along? No.

We'll try. Maybe. We're going back to the roots. We used to hate each other on this show. Closing shout outs. All right. My closing shout out is to a friend of the show, Gabriel Pagan. Uh, he's down in, uh, Puerto Rico and he's living off the grid and, uh, he's, he can Instagram, but all of his like camping equipment has come into play.

Like he's posting pictures of all the solar chargers and stuff like that. But, you know, Hey man, we love you. Just take care of yourself and get through it. It'll, it'll be over soon. Yep. And hopefully, hopefully you got some paper towels out of it. Oh, there's so much I want to say about that, but I won't.

Um, and since we finally determined the outcome, I'd like to say just a rest in peace to Tom Petty. Um, you know, I, I was never a huge heartbreakers fan, but I'd never turn it off when it's on and he is a living legend. Well, shit, not anymore. Right. So, uh, he's a legend.

Jesus, we've been recording a long time. Three hour show. This is a three hour cruise I'm on right now. My God. Yeah. We've only been recording for two hours. So time dilation. Go back to Peter Klein's if you want more time dilation. But anyway, yes, I also enjoyed, uh, Tom Petty.

I wasn't a huge fan, but, uh, I love the traveling Wilburys that he was in with, uh, all the, all the other greats in the day. And yeah, I, I'm, I'm sad. Look, I'm sad. Anybody's dying. And this has been a bad week for people dying.

It really has been. It has been. So until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

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