231: Unbingeable

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Guten Tag here, Brian. How are you doing? You'll note we're all here again. The gang's still here. For now. For now, for now. We'll get into that in a second. Yeah. I want a little follow-up on the situation down in Puerto Rico.

Yes, well, you know we can't stay there forever, Jason. No, we can't. God. Okay. The land of paper towels. That's what it is. Yes. Yes, our friend 6502chip on the Twitters, he sent us a note saying, Hey, it looks like I'll be able to resume downloading episodes here in Puerto Rico very soon, which is cool.

And I'm wondering if it is going to be over Google Balloon, since they have now gotten a license to actually set up their balloon cell signal. Nice. Project Loon rises from the ashes. Yes, it does. And it's actually been incorporated, believe it or not.

I mean, I barely believe it. I like the balloon project. I think it's perfectly... This is a perfect use case for it. We have a disaster. Let's float these balloons over there. It's just weird to think that this might be a real thing that happens in any major city.

Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, they've already... They've deployed it in other places. And, yes, now when they put in their request for airspace for the FAA, they were labeled as Loon Inc., which is a sign that they are being spun out of Alphabet. Yes, into whatever weird-ass corporate environment that the Alphabet is creating over there, which nobody really seems to understand, but apparently gets talked about a lot by other corporations.

So, I can't believe that this is somebody's job, but apparently somebody listens to all publicly available corporate conference calls and does things like count the amount of times that Amazon or Google is mentioned. How much you want to bet that that's Google? It listens to all the publicly available calls, translates it, and makes it searchable.

So, you can search for Google or Amazon through all of the publicly available calls. Bet ya. Surely there's some AI that could be doing this. Oh, yes. Ah, but Recode is basically telling us that Amazon has replaced Google as the company others are most worried about. Now, they don't really provide the context in which these things are mentioned, but they did say that Amazon has been mentioned more often than Google in all these conference calls for the first time ever.

So, we can have accurate stats on the amount of times that somebody brings up a company's name in corporate conference calls, but we can't do it with podcasts. Of course not. That would be too easy. Corporations make money. Podcasts don't.

That's why. That's true. There you go. Well, I don't think anybody should be too surprised by this news. I mean, we're watching Amazon knock out real-world businesses left, right, and center, while Google basically just siphons cash off them and takes their money for AdSense and things of that nature. Mm-hmm. So, no surprise.

So, I got an email this week from an old colleague. Mm-hmm. A 17-year-old piece of software that I wrote was finally being retired. Oh, which piece of software? Is it the GIF emails? Nope.

Postcard things? That's actually been down. This was the client system for posting images for clients to come and view and make notes on the artwork from an ad agency. So, when I left, or when I first joined a company called Pyro, and then it was Faction, then it was destroyed, and I wrote basically this little CMS to post stuff on when we were doing Mission Impossible 2.

Mm-hmm. And my boss has basically, he took it and has used it in every company he's ever had since then and finally rewrote it. And I'm like, you know what? If that thing can last this long, damn, I was good.

I'm sorry. That that thing lasted 17 years. Not bad. That's pretty impressive. It is pretty impressive, although I would put the betting money on the fact that they were just lazy. Not so much that it was the best piece of software ever written. Not that I doubt your skills. No, the fact that it's, I did have to do a few PHP tweaks on it over the years.

He would call me and I would do like 10 minutes of work on it. And then it was done. It was just, you know, updating functions for new versions of PHP because I wrote it in PHP 3 or 4. Right, right. So, yeah, you've had to make a number of updates over the years, I'm sure.

3. 3 or 4. That's it. Yeah. Okay, that's not bad. So I was just, I was just, I was pining, pining for the old days when you could write once and run to death. But I got to say, he got his money's worth. Yes, he did. Definitely. And speaking of pining for the old days, I missed the old days when if you canceled a service, it was just canceled and you didn't get 17,000 follow-ups on it.

I am losing my mind. There's a software package that I used for a client and I'm kind of in the similar situation as you with your 17-year-old software there in that I don't actively work with this client on a day-to-day basis at all. They kind of run everything themselves at lower levels.

If something big goes wrong, then I have to step in and deal with stuff. And one of the things was unfixable by me and I had to purchase the technical support plan monthly from the software vendor themselves to get them to look at it and fix their own issue, which I did.

And then, of course, I immediately canceled it and thought not much about it since then. And then I started to get the emails. This is Valerie. I am reaching out to you in regards to the technical support service expiration. We have been previously informed that the subscription was canceled and thus it has not been renewed automatically. That would make sense, right?

Yes. That's what canceled means. This is what canceling does. Could you please let us know whether or not you're going to use the service or not? I look forward to your reply. I, of course, ignored that because obviously I fucking canceled the service. I don't want it. Then I get three other emails throughout the week.

Could you please update us on the matter? Could you please update us on the matter? Could you please update us on the matter? I finally wrote back and I said, what is there to update? I canceled the plan. I had to go through a number of steps to cancel the plan. So it should be somewhat apparent that I wanted to cancel the plan. Never write me again. And have they written you since then?

No, they have not. Okay. No, but I fully suspect that the next time that I do need to purchase the technical support service to fix something, I might experience some problems. This is Bob from Slender Fungus. I need to get some support, please.

Not Brian, not Brian. We fired that guy. He was a jerk. That guy's out on the streets. He was a dick. Kept trying to cancel lunch orders on us and then reordering. It was a mess. Yes, it was a total mess. How dare they cancel? Oh, God. Okay, let's do a little follow-up on last week's, what do we call last week?

Bitch fest? Esplosion of emotion? Yes, the esplosion of emotion. We used to do beer episodes. This was our wine episode. Actually, I'm sorry. That was my hate episode. That's true. Yeah, so have you fired all of your clients?

I have, actually. Well, the main one that was causing me problems has been fired. You may know him. But I'm not going to mention him. Nice guy, but I could see how working for him would be problematic. Yeah, and so here's the deal.

It's like, you know, you cannot have an audio product with a hair trigger turnaround and still expect to have a life if you have other clients. Because if I get a job in, let's say, like a three-hour podcast, it's going to take me seven hours to edit it. If my schedule does not allow for seven hours, guess who gets to stay up all night?

Over and over and over again. So, yes, I took my health in my hands and said, hey, dude, sorry, can't do it anymore. If you've got jobs that have at least a seven-day turnaround time, I am more than happy to help with you. He's like, I had no idea this was straining on you so much.

Please go take care of your health. We'll circle back in a couple months. I'm like, okay, cool. All my other clients, I said, hey, if you cannot abide by the seven-day turnaround time, you're fired. Right. Unless it was already on the books. I did give them an out because I'm not a dick. I try and I train business.

I try to not be a dick. And there's one client that I still have a bunch of overnight turnarounds on, which is going to drive me crazy. But after the next four shows, done. So, yes, I followed through on what I said I was going to do. And now I'm going to be poor. I will be poor, but I will be happy.

I, for one, am very happy for you. And I'm glad that you put your foot down against what you and I have talked about many times on this podcast. The all of a sudden complete switch in the corporate world to having a plan, scheduling things out in advance, having a flow.

Now everything is last minute. Everything. Everything. And that's bullshit. Yeah. It's got to be the opposite. You have to have, you know, the black swan. Let's turn it around in a day thing. But everything else should be like, yeah, you can't do that to people.

That's why, you know, my day job, we do it properly. We are scheduled weeks and months in advance. Everybody can chill the fuck out. And every now and again, we'll have like somebody come in, like say this week we had Russell Brand come through and we're like, hey, we want to get Russell Brand out the door.

So everybody jumped up. We turned it around, got it out the door. For the most part, though, we can relax, which is the way business should be. It should be. And speaking of relaxing, I guess we should talk about the other thing that ended up happening from you being really angry and us basically losing stats and not understanding why.

And then we're kind of going, maybe we shouldn't be doing this anymore. Yep. So let's talk about this show, the grumpy old geeks show. So we're going to do some changes. Well, first, I want to thank everybody because we got more comments than normal.

As per usual, people actually opened up their wallets and donated on Patreon. We were not whining to get you to do that. But certainly nothing tells us that what we're doing is worthwhile more than, you know, getting people, regular people to open up their tight little wallets.

So that does mean a hell of a lot to us. Yes. And all the nice words were very nice, too. We got so much feedback. So much feedback. Yes. So we're not stopping. We're going to continue to do the show, at least throughout the year. We're going to do some tighter shows.

We're going to focus on a handful of stories instead of grabbing absolutely everything that we saw that we thought was interesting. And, yeah, we're just going to try to do what I've been trying to get Jason to do for about two years now and get the show down to an hour. Well, we don't know about that. We'll try.

Because whenever Brian says, let's go to an hour, he puts in more stories than I do. And then we go for two. But I think the main thing that is going to be good for us is we're going to take Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's off. Yep. We've busted our ass.

I mean, last year we took a little bit off and had some filler episodes. But for the most part now, yes, we're going to take those three days off because nobody listens. We bust our ass and then nobody listens. And there's no news to talk about. So fuck it. Yep. I mean, the theory used to be if we go away for a week, we might lose people because whatever.

But that's. Hey, we stay for a week and we lose people. Exactly. And, you know, most other big podcasts do what they call seasons and they don't go all year long. But we're going to do it. We're going to do all year. We're just going to start to actually take off the holidays that everybody else takes off. Yeah.

Because why would anybody listen to a podcast that comes out on Cyber Monday? They're not. I mean, that's the way it is. They're not going to listen to us on Cyber Monday or and in Christmas falls on a Monday. And so does New Year's this year. So basically, yeah.

So that's good. And we have gotten a lot of feedback with a lot of conspiracy theories about why our stats went down. And I want to just kind of nip that in the bud. You guys don't have to keep thinking about that. We kind of know exactly what happened. And it is this switch over to IAB compliance.

And there are a lot of variables that go into this. And we're working through figuring out what those variables are and how we can fix them. And, you know, I'm going to put some links in the show notes if you want to read up on it. It's basically it's really boring shit.

I mean, it's really boring shit. But, yes, this has to deal with do with a lot of corporate crap around how things are counted. Because, you know, you got to have fucking rules when you got when you count. You can't go one, two, three, four. Oh, you'd think.

Yeah. Yeah. So, at this point, I would just like to say we are opening the kimono. And we just told you everything that's going on. One of my least favorite business terms. Absolutely one of my least favorite business terms. And, you know, a lot of business guys use the term opening the kimono.

Now. Harvey Weinstein. Exactly. And I don't want to see your hairy balls. I really don't want to see your hairy balls. Keep your damn kimono closed. Honestly. You can call it being honest. You can call it transparency, which I know most companies don't actually have. But you can, you know, go with that.

Yes. It is a horrible term. I'll tell you one term I do like, though. And one that we're certainly still trying to get to. Making your nut. Making your nut. That is a dumb one. I love that term. No, it's a great term. Do you know the etymology behind it? Which is why it's the only reason I'm mentioning it and talking about it.

Because I love this. I love the etymology. Okay. It basically means a salesperson has to make enough money to cover their expenses. In our case, it would be we'd make enough money to put on this podcast and not lose any money. Preferably even buy some beer. But the etymology behind it is it came from Western days when peddlers would come into a hotel and needed a room but didn't have any money.

Because they would have to first, you know, sell. There was no credit cards back then. So the hotel keeper would take the hub or the nut from their wagon as a deposit. They could not leave town until they paid off the hotel and they covered their nut. Okay, that's pretty cool. Isn't that cool?

I appreciate the term a little bit more now. Yes. It's a cool term. I like it. In the news. We haven't talked about Magic Leap for a while, but they're back in the news.

I just want to say for the record, once again, I think Magic Leap is going to be 100% vaporware. Going to be? Because it already is. It already is. So they released a new video. And as a road to VR.com, which I guess covers all things VR.

Road to nowhere, baby. Road to nowhere. The headline I love. The new Magic Leap video tells us absolutely nothing about what the company is working on. So continuing, Magic Leap. Only thing that they do, which is release really cool looking videos that are entirely impossible to ever make happen and doesn't really tell you what's going on at all.

So, again, this sentence. Born out of the founder's lifetime love affair with sci-fi, surrealism, and a fortuitous road trip across the U.S., the story of Magic Leap's founding reads like a beat generation novel about discovering magic and ordinary experiences. The company couches it as the story of an art project turned tech startup turned global company building the future of computing.

Except they're not any of those things. You can't be putting out bullshit like this until you ship. That's a fucking rule right there. Okay, I don't care about your road trip. I don't care about the beat generation, you know, revisited. You've got to ship some shit before we should care.

Just because you have a big valuation and a lot of V.C., show us the product. Well, and that is probably the most depressing aspect of this entire story and Magic Leap's week in the news. And you and I just, it's kind of why we started this podcast in the first place.

Who the fuck is still giving them money? Apparently somebody. A lot of people. They have raised upwards of $1 billion, with a B, dollars in new venture capital funding. Okay, so here's the funny thing. I know somebody that has tried Magic Leap, and they are by far the farthest behind.

HoloLens is way ahead of them. And there's another one. I can't remember the name of it now. But basically everybody is ahead of them at this point. Even though they have the big money and the big names and everything and really cool videos.

But they have, from what I can tell from people who have actually tried it, the least actually competent product of all of them. So everybody's saying HoloLens right now is one of the best. But the other one where you plug into a PC and are tethered is also the best.

But there are apples and oranges. But Magic Leap, no go so far. Yep, but they're still getting all the money. And as far as I can tell, Magic Leap must have the most expensive PowerPoint deck in the history of the universe. Seriously. Oh, and their Vimeo account, I'm sure, is worth the tidies.

Snapchat. Yes. Let's talk about Snapchat for about two seconds. Okay. Because I, you know, I was going to download Snapchat and try this new stuff they got going on. Because they're saying that Snapchat is getting, they're turning into a useful application, which we'll see.

They're trying to basically turn Snapchat into Yelp and tie into Uber and show you information about where your friends are posting their videos from. So you can go there, get an Uber there or a Lyft there and stalk them. And yes, and get reservations.

It's, they're tying it into this whole experiential type of application. Well, you know, it's like, you cannot throw all this shit that is already out there. Yelp is out there. Uber, Lyft, all that. Using APIs. And you can't call that innovation. No, because everybody is doing that to begin with.

And it's not innovation. You are just offering more services within your app. You're creating, you know, you're keeping your walled garden, trying to keep you within people, people within the app to do everything. So is Facebook trying to do that. One would assume Twitter would try to do it, except Twitter is completely useless, as we all know, and can't get anything done.

So, yeah. It's at this point I will turn it over to my best friend, Tyler Durden. Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Judging from some of our readers writing to us with their tinfoil hat theories about our stats, we need more and more crazy conspiracy theories on this program, because that's what people like.

Jason's big one, which I still think is probably the funniest episode we've ever recorded, which was the whole, the phone is tracking what he's saying and then giving him ads based on it, which we debunked. We debunked it, and it will come up later in the episode, so, yes. But now we can talk about something real that happened.

Unfortunately, Google's Home Mini needed a very quick software patch, because some of them were recording absolutely everything and sending it back to Google. Like, everything. All the time. And they're blaming it on a faulty touch switch on the top of the unit, saying that, oh, the touch switch was broken.

So their plan of action was to go, let's just disable all of the switches on the top of them, instead of figuring out how to make a switch that works. Like, we're just turning them all off. And some of them had actual Google employees come to the journalists' homes that were given the test units to take them back.

You know, it's like the men in black show up and say, oh, sorry, you got the wrong one. Sorry, we got to take this back, and you really should get that rash looked at. Seriously. Yeah. It's what happens. And, yeah, I see where you're coming at this from the, you know, yes, they're listening to us.

And when they do listen to us, people can find out. I get it. I get it. I told you, I conceded. Damn it. I know. Google is offering to help industries that it helps destroy. Oh, how nice of them. How nice of them.

Yes. Sundar Pichai went back to Pittsburgh this week to announce his plans that Google is giving away a billion dollars in training and career coaching for people that are short on the skills for a rapidly digitizing economy. So they're, you know, they're giving back to the people who need jobs that they have destroyed or, or like trying to find a new base of workers and for cheap employment.

Who knows? I mean, the interesting thing is in 2015, they did give away 150 million euros to European journalism projects, and they're doing it again here in here in America. And they're, you know, trying to basically raise up the news business, which is interesting, which actually it's not, it's not interesting.

It makes sense because they need news so they can have page views to sell against for their ad. So they need content so they can't have everybody sitting hat in hand just working to make a dime to go to Amazon, you know? So they got to, they got to, they got to think of it as planting a seed for their workforce of the future.

It is a little bit of a weird thing. And I do like this about Google in that it behooves Google to have a good internet. What's a good, well-written journalism, lots of good content, all of that sort of stuff that we desperately want is actually in Google's best interest to, to encourage that.

So, yay, Google there. I'm happy for that. Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, way to think ahead. Yes. Now, big news this week, of course, was Harvey Weinstein and all of that sort of thing. Not really our purview, so we're not going to get into it. But what happened on Twitter is at least a part of it, so that's what I want to talk about.

Actress Rose McCown is quite outspoken, always has been, as one would expect from anybody that would marry Marilyn Manson. She's a character, and good on her, and she basically, you know, she says she was raped by Mr. Weinstein and got into it on Twitter.

That's what people do on Twitter. So she started talking about everything, and then Twitter decided to suspend her account. So this is, to me, this is a hell of a story. This is big. I mean, you want to talk about what's arbitrary with Twitter. They have zero sense of fucking responsibility.

We've laughed about the arbitrary nature of the character limit, but what's really arbitrary about Twitter is how they enforce their own terms of service. We have no idea how someone becomes verified. We have no idea how somebody got double the arbitrary limit of characters. And we certainly have no idea how someone gets banned or suspended or why.

It's all random, it's all capricious, and it's completely and utter bullshit. So fuck Twitter. Yeah, you know, I'm really at the edge of just sending you a six-pack so we can cut the experiment short for hunting unicorns so I can sell my stock and just get the hell out of there.

Because it's just, I don't like what they've become as a company. Period. I don't either. I don't either. They sit on some high horse when it suits them. They get off the horse when it suits them. They're full of crap. You know, neo-Nazis are running rampant all over Twitter.

The president of the United States can threaten war. But hey, some chick talking about actually getting raped by somebody who's in the news admitting to basically doing really bad stuff. Fuck her. Let's suspend her account. Really, Jack? Really? Yeah. I mean, if you can keep Trump on there because it's newsworthy, the biggest story of the week, how is this not newsworthy?

This is bullshit. It is complete other bullshit. Now, they claim that she was suspended because she put somebody's phone number in a tweet, but nobody – I have yet to see that tweet. Nobody's been able to, in this day and age where we screenshot the hell out of anything when something's happening, nobody's been able to show that to us.

I haven't seen it. Maybe it exists. Maybe they – but even then, the point would be you're still randomly deciding when you're enforcing your TOS. You did it to her, but tons of people have done that, and you've never suspended people. No, it's ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.

And speaking of Twitter deleting things that we can't find anymore, Twitter has deleted data potentially crucial to the Russian probes. This comes from Politico. And it looks like the – what happened was, you know, the Russians came in, they did a bunch of bots, they bought a bunch of ads, and Twitter said, oh, maybe this does not fit our terms of service and eventually deletes them and moves them along.

So now researchers can't go back and backtrace the pattern of what happened so they can find the original perpetrators of the bots and the accounts that did all this shenanigans. Now, my theory is if Congress were to subpoena Twitter to hand over all that deleted data, I bet we'd see just how deleted deleted really means.

Yeah, and boy, I really want to get into that, and I want, when Mr. Bittner returns, to really discuss a way that we can look into this because we just keep coming back to this. What does deleted mean? There's no way Twitter does not have backups of all this stuff.

There's no way. But you know who also has backups of it? The Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has the firehose feed, and they are archiving everything that comes through Twitter. So theoretically, the researchers should be able to go to the Library of Congress and get the data out.

But who knows what paperwork you have to fill out if there's anybody left at the Library of Congress because we know that they don't read over there anymore, and everybody's left. Yes, well, all right, let's move over to Facebook and the weird-ass shit that's going on over there that's kind of icky.

This is a story over at Gizmodo. It's specifically about sex workers and how Facebook outs sex workers. I halfway think that it's just a titillating entry point to the basic story, which is really the people you may know feature being a black box, like we're so upset about with so many things online these days.

Not understanding how it works, not understanding the algorithm, not knowing where all this data is coming from, not – and we've talked about very kind of more blasé and boring versions of this in the past, like doctors being recommended their patients, even though they have no connections with them outside of being their doctor, all that sort of stuff.

And not understanding how it's happening. I just really enjoyed this read. It does come from a very – she's a sex worker, and all of a sudden, it's her clients are showing up as people you may know with her personal page, which she doesn't want, and how messed up that is.

So this got me thinking, you know, yes, we have debunked the whole your phone is listening to sell you ads thing. I'll give you that one. I'll give you that one for now. I see an asterisk in the notes there, Jason. That's to say for now because I think it'll eventually happen. And here's my theory that what they're doing is I think they're using facial recognition to tie these together because they know who's in the pictures now, and they're taking a stab at it.

It might not be 100%, but they're throwing the dice and saying, eh, kind of looks like her, you know? I mean, I think you're right with the facial recognition thing. Certainly, like, I am in photos with people I don't know. Yeah. That has happened. Or even just, I'm in a photo with person X, and then person Z is also in a photo with person X, so therefore, connect person Z to me, even though we've never even met before.

Right. All of that, I'm sure, is happening. And this is across multiple accounts that should be, as we say, air-gapped, but are not, just because I think what they're doing is they're saying, hey, yeah, we know we have this real name policy, but, you know, some people aren't going to do it.

So let's see if these two people are the same person, and then we can tie them together and say these accounts are the same. Now, but that's neither here nor there. My point is, yes, they're identifying people in photos. How long is it until they're using image recognition to identify the products in the photos and then start building an advertising dossier off of the shit that's in your photos with you?

So if they see you with a can of Heineken and they can finally figure out, hey, if the AI and the machine behind the fucking curtain can say, hey, that's a can of Heineken, let's go send this guy some Heineken ads. Even though you were at your friend's house, it's too damn cheap to figure out what good beer is, and you had to drink a fucking Heineken.

But now you're saddled with all these stupid ads for the rest of your life. Yeah. Oh, of course. And not even just, like, direct to Heineken. You can turn around and sell this to Carlsberg at a higher price. Of course, yes. We can target all the people. You can make an ad specifically saying that you're better than Heineken, and we will send it to all the people that have Heinekens in their photos.

And the funny thing is, you're probably going to be like, well, yeah, I know that, but my asshole friend only had Heineken that day. So why are you sending me ads for this, you moron? So, yeah. This story, though, is basically like a repackaged version of one that we covered when we were talking about the same story about the iPhone listening and stealing your data, which was Facebook figured out my family's secrets and it won't tell me how.

Written by the same person, Cashmere Hill. So she needs to find a new angle if she's going to keep writing about this stuff, because this is the same story, but the characters are just replaced. Oh, Jason, she's just niching herself. Ups and doodads.

I know we talk about how much Kickstarter sucks on this show, but I pulled the trigger this week. I pulled the trigger on one. This is a device that would make my life a little easier, which I hopefully will see in the future.

I spent $30 on the Sidewinder by Fuse. And here's... Well, you know, this may make your life easier in five years if you get it at that point, if they don't just go away and it never gets made. We'll have wireless charging as soon as it shows up.

Anyway, the tagline is, the Sidewinder allows you to wind, store, and protect your MacBook charger in under six seconds without ever having to touch your cables. Well, like, you know, I like touching my cables. I think I made that abundantly clear last episode. But I still ordered it because I want one.

And it was $30, and I'm rolling the dice on it, even though it says it's going to be here in February. I just... The worst thing about traveling with a MacBook is wrapping up that damn cord and throwing it in the bag, unwrapping it, wrapping it back up. Because, you know... Have you ever tried to cook spaghetti before?

It's so hard. I did have one of those pots, by the way. Of course you did, and that's the only kind of people that would buy this thing, too. It's not that hard to wipe up your cable. Come on, people.

No, but it's just makes it easier. And by the way, that pot was pretty damn handy, I gotta say. It looks like, basically, they've just taken the technology that one uses for a garden hose. Yeah, it is basically a garden hose technology, yes. Yes. So, they're not really reinventing the wheel over there, but I would just like one.

Yes, $30 is a little pricey for a miniature garden. And when I eat garden hose, like, scooper-upper, when I could actually go to Home Depot and get one for a full-size garbage hose for about $22. That's true. Yes. Oh, well. There you go. I bought some software this week out of necessity.

I got the Elmedia player. It was $9.99. I am a VLC player guy. I love VLC. VLC is free. VLC used to work perfectly and played absolutely everything. But for some reason this week, VLC is now failing on a lot of old AVI videos that I have that I needed to look at for some particular reason.

I don't even remember why this week. Because VLC is free, you can't get really any support to figure out why the videos aren't playing. I wasted about an hour and a half online reading all the message boards, trying the various different things, none of which worked. It just wouldn't play these videos.

It would show them as being one second long. I would see a keyframe really quick, and then it would just go, nope, not going to play you. And I'd get the gray screen, so I looked around, and I found Elmedia player, and I took a gamble on it and bought it, and guess what? It plays all the videos.

Problem solved. And they have support, because you spent $9.99 on it. Exactly. So I might be using the Elmedia player more than VLC at this point. So bye-bye, VLC. Sorry, you're not playing my videos. You have one job. Well, here's the deal. They don't care.

It's free. It's a side project. My question is, why didn't you try and run, or actually, did you try and run them through Handbrake to just convert them to a newer format? I did, and that would have worked as well, but that would have, I mean, I'm talking about, like, I've got a DVD of, like, hundreds of videos of, you know, different client stuff all through the years that I just want to keep and be able, and I occasionally need to use.

So I didn't want to have to run everything through Handbrake when I could basically just get something that does play them. Okay, well, if they're on a DVD, you might want to get them off there anyway, because DVDs are basically a dying hand over fist. Almost none of my DVDs from my old days work. They all have, like, bad sectors and crap.

Yeah, I copied everything over yesterday as well. And VLC does have batch processing. It's not too bad. You mean Handbrake. I'm sorry, yeah, Handbrake has batch processing that you can run everything through. But it's not that easy. And, you know, like we talked about on the last show, you can actually knock the file size way down and still keep the same quality.

But in this day and age, I guess you don't really care about file size. No, it all goes to the cloud. No, the cloud. And it gets hacked. We'll talk about the cloud in a second, but I want to talk about RunP, which is a great name for an app. I'd heard of this app before, and it's an app that tells you when the best time to take a leak is in a movie.

Right. Genius. Absolutely genius. Boy, you're getting old, Jason. You have no idea. So I was thinking about this, and because the Blade Runner movie, which I'll be reviewing shortly, was three hours long. I made it through the movie, but I could have really used this app, and I would have enjoyed the ending a little bit more.

And I'd heard of this before, and it's a big hat tip to the Geeks and Beaks podcast, because they were talking about it in the same context of Blade Runner. So check it out. Yes, I heard that. It's at runp.com. I downloaded it, and I checked it out. And it does sync with your local movie times.

So if you give it your address, it'll pull up the local what's playing, and you can pick your show and the time, and it tells you exactly when to hit the start timer if you want it to give you vibration notifications. So in the middle of the movie, it won't, like, go bing, bing, bing.

It'll just, like, vibrate and go, time to pee, time to pee, and you can run out. Yep. But the great part is. I thought that was the genius aspect of it, is that it doesn't light up or anything. No, the real genius aspect is if you're in the bathroom and you pull up your phone, it has a synopsis of what you're missing while you're peeing. Oh, great.

That's pretty funny, I thought. Wow, we can't even pee without our phones in our hands now. Well, maybe you have to have a sit-down wee, Brian. Have a sit-down wee. You are getting old. Let's talk, going back to the cloud, I found this little light.

It's a lamp. It's a storm cloud lamp that erupts with lightning every time Donald Trump tweets. Man, that thing's going to break. Yeah. It might last a week before you have to get new light bulbs. The funny thing about it is, I mean, I'm looking at it.

It's cute. It's cool. It's like we've covered these cloud lamps before. This is, I mean, yeah, it's like pillow stuffing that he put in a jar with a little light with a switch. But it's a blue light, and you don't want a blue light in your bedroom. And you also don't want Trump in your bedroom, and you don't want distress in your bedroom.

It'd be funny in the office, but they keep showing it in the bedroom at night. And I'm like, why would you want that? Look, even Melania doesn't want Trump in her bedroom.

Media candy. I saw Blade Runner this week. Good. I hear nothing but good things. I loved it. I absolutely adored it. Except for the aforementioned pee issue at about two hours and 45 minutes, because you have to count in trailers, too.

So it's a three-hour experience, yes. But I really enjoyed it. The first 15 minutes, I hated it, because I'm like, oh, no. This is going to be really slow and really long. And then I'm just like, okay, you're here for three hours. Get used to it, because you're not going anywhere. It's not like you're going to leave, because your friends are here, and then you've got to come back and get them.

That's embarrassing. Fuck it. Just enjoy the movie. And I sat back, and I enjoyed it, and I loved it. Awesome. I have done a very good job of avoiding any spoilers. So if you're going to do that, I'm going to take off my headphones. No. That's all I'm saying is I loved it. Awesome. And what I learned from this experience, where I just kind of sat back, let it go, and just tried to not have any worries about what was coming to me, because there was a part of the movie where I'm like, please don't turn into an action movie.

Please don't turn into an action movie. And, you know, because just thinking, it's like, oh, that's what most sequels do. It's just like, oh, now we're going to have the buddy cops, and then there's going to be an action scene. And it's like, and fortunately that didn't happen. But once that didn't happen, I'm like, okay, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the movie, which made me think about my original topic last week, which was go see it with the VO, because that's the way it was.

I know that's not the way that it was meant to be seen, but there are director's cuts that really suck, like Apocalypse Now and Amadeus. Those are, you know, I never even saw the original Apocalypse Now. I saw the director's cut, which was so terrible, I couldn't see the original. Amadeus was ruined by the director's cut.

And so, anyway, I'm going to go back and watch the original and see if I can actually enjoy the movie, even though it's got Vangelis. That's a great soundtrack. Great soundtrack. Groundbreaking. Anyways, it's not just me that thinks that the voiceover version is horrible.

So we got a tweet from Ben Stanley. Do not watch voiceover Blade Runner. Are you crazy? That was not Ridley's choice. Please research and issue retraction left shower to write this. Now, between Ben Stanley and friend of the show, Fergal, we have a large shower listening contingent.

So I'm thinking we might, the next time we do a Grumpy Old Geeks meetup, we might have to do it at like a community shower or like a spa. Oh, way to be creepy. Way to be creepy. Hey, I'm not the one that had to run out of a shower to tweet us. Okay. Also, my intent with watching the original VO version is that's how you get introduced to it.

Then you can go back later and watch the other ones if you want to and make your own decision. But if you start with one version that's not the one that most of us started with, then you don't have that experience. Yes. Jason, the guy that wants to watch Han shoot the second.

That's right. What? No. I'm just saying, hey, look, I originally saw Star Wars in the theater. So I saw Blade Runner in the theater. I'm just saying, go with the progression of the way it works. That's all. All right. So I watched episode three of Star Trek Utrecht.

Okay. I have some concerns. Aren't they up to four now? Oh, is it four? Okay. Oh, yeah, that's right. Two, three. Yeah, it was episode four. Sorry. I saw episode four. I have some concerns, Jason. I love the first three. It's tardigrades, human-sized tardigrades being captured and tortured.

Spores that exist throughout. Oh, this is spoilers, by the way. You might want to skip ahead a few seconds. Spores that exist throughout the universe, like the force particle midichlorian bullshit that Lucas tried to pawn off. Also, this is sad. Fake sci-fi. Strangely absent from the rest of the Star Trek universe, all of this stuff, even though it's supposed to be canon.

And you guys promised you were going to be careful about this. But now, all of a sudden, there was a time in the Federation's past when they could just travel anywhere that they wanted to across the known universe. Voyager wouldn't even exist. They never would have had the problem. What is going on? I know what they're doing, and I can see the endgame with it.

Me too, and I don't like it. They're coming up with all this tech, and then there will be a tech apocalypse when Discovery doesn't get picked up, and then we get thrown back in time to Star Trek TOS. Oh, no. See, I don't think that's what's going to happen. What I think is going to happen is when it doesn't get picked up, the last episode is going to be this giant tardigrade and all the spores being wheeled into that same big cavernous warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yeah, you're going to have just Kirk waking up in a shower going, oh, that was a crazy dream. Spores everywhere. Spock. I had a crazy dream. Yeah, I'm not thrilled. I love the acting. I love the design. I love everything about the show, but I'm really worried where they're going with this now.

This is why I don't like prequels. And I, you know, as much as I love the new Klingons, I think they're, although, I mean, they look badass. Episode four, they were kind of whiny. They're fucking whiny Klingons. Yeah, there's a bunch of little bitch Klingons.

They were bitch Klingons. Now, speaking of little bitches, let's talk about Mr. Robot, because that just started up again this week. Season three is now on the air. Did you watch it? I did. What'd you think? Well, I read this article in Vulture first. Mr. Robot returns to form in season three, and boy, was it.

That's got a lot of spoilers in it, though. I know. I did. I don't care. Because I couldn't even remember what happened last season. This show doesn't, this is like the Teflon of shows for me. None of it sticks. It looks pretty. It's, you know, it's custom created in a lab to be of interest to me, but none of it sticks with me.

It just doesn't. I don't care about this show. And I found myself, I found myself looking at my phone. I found myself looking at my book. I found myself looking at a bottle of wine three or four times trying to watch this episode. I honestly just don't care.

I can't tell you what happened in the episode. I know that there's a new guy, the Carnavale guy, who's like the fixer for the Dark Army. Yep. And he's pretty fun. I liked him. The rest of it, it's just like, yeah.

And I'm trying to track this along the Fight Club timeline from the book and the movie. Because this all ties back into Fight Club, because this is Bite Club. They are ripping off Fight Club, like almost scene for scene sometimes. So I'm like, can you just get to the fucking end and play the pixies so I can go home?

Like, play the pixies, show the hug, show the dick, roll the credits, we're out. Yep. That's it. And we're done. Yeah. I don't know. I'm hate watching it. I'm hate watching this right now. I'm hate watching it along with The Walking Dead, The Orville, and probably soon Discovery. That's it. Yeah.

Like, I'm watching shows that could be great, but aren't. I'm going to watch at least the next two episodes of Mr. Robot just to see if they get into the swing of things and kind of get the season moving along. But not an auspicious start, I would say. No.

I mean, yeah, it killed 45 minutes. That's it. That's not really what I'm looking for in my life. I would like to gain 45 minutes. I have a child. Anyways, we talked about Netflix raising. They're dropping their prices to, you know, cover all the programming.

In a pretty savvy and smart business move, Hulu is countered by dropping their prices. Well done. Way to go, Hulu. I don't know if there's much on Hulu because I don't ever check it out, but they've gone down to, it's a promotional discount, which I can hear my dad screaming in the back of my mind like every Sunday when I go down there.

How come I've been a customer for 10 years and I do not get a promotional discount? I have only new customers. That is crap. That is crap, Brian. And here we are. They're offering a promotional discount, but smartly and probably just for my dad, they're offering it to everyone.

So even if you are a current subscriber, you get the promotional discount, $5.99 per month for a year. And then after the first year, it'll go back up to $7.99. Okay. That's for the bare bones with commercials. Yes. Well, I, on the other hand, now have the $43.99 a month plan.

Okay. I canceled all of my other subscription services. And I know I bitched about the Hulu interface and it is unbelievably terrible. I tried to do my best Bill Cosby there because he's unbelievably terrible too. So I got rid of HBO.

Like I'm watching, the only thing I watch on HBO now is Bill Maher, who I cannot stand, but it's the only thing on Friday nights. You've got to add that to your hate watch list. Well, I have been. Trust me. Since the election, I've been hate watching Bill Maher, but I'm done. I don't need it anymore.

And John Oliver's kind of getting stale. I can watch the bits on YouTube. So I saved money there, but I ended up getting Hulu with live TV with no commercials. And the reason mainly was it's the only one that had USA. So I could watch Mr. Robot. And the other thing was, it's like, there's a show on there called Chance, which I love that you hate.

Yes. Because it is, what's his name from House? What's that dude's name? The British guy who speaks English? American? I'm totally blanking on the actor's name right now. So am I. Anyway, it's a great show. And I love it, and it's back for season two.

And here's the thing I like about it. It only comes out on Wednesdays. So it is unbingable. And unbingable is becoming my favorite thing. I love watching shows that can't be bingeable. And his name was Hugh Laurie. Hugh Laurie, yes. Just popped into my brain. Because I'm sitting there the first night, and I start to play it, and I'm like, okay, I don't want to watch this because then I'm going to stay up all night watching it.

And I watched the first one, and I'm like, well, shit, I can't stay up all night watching it because there's only one. How cool is that? And then the next day I come back, and I'm like, well, shit, I can't watch episode two now. I guess I've got to wait a week. And it turns out that I am really falling back in love with the constraints of weekly television.

It's a good thing. It really is a good thing. It lets you think about it and marinate on what happened that week. And then when you come back, you're like, welcome back. And you're just like with open arms, welcomed back into that world. I'm sorry. It's like one of those things where I like the old way that we did shit.

Yep. And we're not just old. It's actually, you can appreciate a show a lot better. You just can because you give it time to breathe, and you give it time to think about it. Of course, that assumes the show's any good because if it's something like Mr. Robot, the more time I spend thinking about it, the angrier I get. But if it's a good show, you know, it's a good thing.

Let's get away from TV for a second. One of my favorite bands of all time has released a new album, The Church, and the album is called Man, Woman, Life, Death, Infinity. It's not bad. It's not the best. It's not the worst. I wouldn't be thrilled to hear any of these tracks at the next live show, but it's nice enough in the background while working.

It's, you know, if you've never got late 80s, early 90s era, The Church, Gold Afternoon Fix, Priest Equals Aura, Starfish, those albums, stunning. I mean, definitely worth a listen. They had a bit of a renaissance again in the late 90s and early 2000s with some really good albums.

Since then, it's been neither here nor there. They don't write pop songs. There's so many bands that are the older bands that I grew up listening to that are still releasing new songs. They kind of go one of two ways. They either basically are doing rewrites of previous albums or they're going, you know, like, say, Depeche Mode or The Cure.

Their new albums sound like they're old albums. They're rewriting songs. Or they kind of do, like, what Radiohead does or The Church has done and they stop writing songs. They write, you know, these are all, like, meditations and you will never hear a pop song on this album.

There are no pop songs on this album. But master musicians, great singer, great. Steve Kilby is an amazing lyric writer. So it's all very pleasant. It's just no pop songs. So give it a listen if you're into that sort of thing. All right.

Will do. And staying away from TV and music, I got a couple of podcasts I want to talk about. Oh, boy. You're adding to their three listeners due to the new stats? Yeah, seriously. The Secret History of Hollywood podcast. Okay. I don't know. Oh, this came about when I was making fun of that one British writer who could not link out to a podcast.

And I found this on one of her deep pages. Right. This is amazing. This is an amazing show. This is basically hardcore history for Hollywood. Okay. I've listened to about two and a half episodes into this. I mean, the first two episodes are about 240 minutes each.

And then the last one is about 500 minutes. Wow. Okay. Yeah. These are like epic tales. And it's about the history of Warner Brothers and gangsters and all this stuff. And this guy does an amazing job of it. And he's a great speaker.

I mean, I just, I am, I take my hat off to you, sir. This is one of the best podcasts I've ever heard, period. I mean, this is seriously great audiobook territory. Awesome. That's why I don't, I'm just like, I feel bad calling it a podcast because I don't want to group you in with schmucks like us.

It is, it is seriously audiobook quality history going on. And it's about Hollywood and it's really fun to listen to. Next one, shout out to Bloody and Love by Rich and Naomi. Rich follows me on Instagram. So I started to give this a listen. It's a horror podcast. They're getting their legs under.

So I wanted to give them a shout out. And finally, happy 10th anniversary to my friend Veronica Belmont over at Sword and Laser. They, they finally, they hit 10 years. I cannot believe it's been 10 years because I remember when they started and I was just like, hey, this is kind of cool. And stopped listening for about eight years and got back into them about three months ago.

And they're like, hey, it's been 10 years. I'm like, okay, good for you. Good for you. We'll be there too. We are back. Unfortunately, Mr. Bittner, aka Daddy Bittner, who keeps us in line, could not make it this week.

So he will be joining us again next week. No more Papa B. Where's my Papa B? Exactly. So friend of the show Redacted that works over at Redacted sent in, you can let Jason know definitively that we do not have anyone from the NSA working with us. In fact, we exposed Duxnet, which was clearly a joint Israeli NSA operation against Iran.

We do sometimes work with the FBI to help lock the bad guys up. Well, there you have it then. Now, you and I both tried to work our way through a book called Our Final Invention, Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrett a couple weeks back.

I made it all the way. I did make it all the way. You made it all the way. I dropped out because I just couldn't take it anymore. You were the smart one. Yes, I am going to recommend something that you should read instead of that book. This is The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions by Rodney Brooks over at MIT Technology Review.

It's a long read, but nowhere near as long as that book. And this one actually makes a lot of sense. Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future. He basically goes in and debunks a lot of the hysteria and things going on with what people are saying AI is going to do, both good and bad.

And the one particular bit that stuck for me because of, well, what stuck up your and our asses about people saying AI when they mean different things is the suitcase words. One of The Seven Deadly Sins. Suitcase words mislead people about how well machines are doing at tasks that people can do.

That is partly because AI researchers, and worse, their press officers, are eager to claim progress in an instance of a suitcase concept. The important phrase here is an instance. The details soon get lost. Headlines trumpet the suitcase word and warp the general understanding of where AI is now close it is to accomplishing more.

In other words, they lie. I would like to point out that the author of this article ran the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. So, this guy, I mean, we're just a bunch of schmucks talking about this shit.

This guy ran AI for MIT, and he's just like, y'all a bunch of morons. You're talking about shit you don't know about. It ain't magic. It's going to take longer than you think. Yep. And stop calling machine learning AI, because it's not. No.

I really enjoyed this. I read the whole thing, you know? Yeah, it was a really good read. I read all the words. All the words. There were some big ones in there, and they were well thought out words. Stringed together in a sentence. The best words, you might say. Indeed. Indeed. Which is good for somebody who's running the computer science and AI labs for MIT.

You'd think he would have a couple words to string together. You'd kind of want that for somebody running the country, too, but shit out of luck there, aren't we? Oh, shit. Here we go. Bring it back. All right. So I was at a bar watching the collapse of the U.S. World Cup soccer hopes, sadly.

What the hell happened with that? Well, I'm going to throw in a link at the shout-outs about that. It's almost longer than the MIT article ripping apart everything that went wrong and how horrible that they are. How could you say they did? Here's the article.

They didn't make enough goals. They lost. Next. And this is why you don't do a sports podcast, Jason. True. Your team lost. My team won. Party! Anyways, the point being, I was there with a couple friends and having a few beers, and the commercial came on for Experian, and my friend, like, looked at me, tapped me, and said, what?

Does that make any sense? Because they were running a commercial that were basically saying, protect your identity identity now, take the first step and get a free dark web scan. You can't scan the dark web. That's why it's called the dark web. Dark!

Dark! So, obviously, Experian is trying to take advantage of Equifax's problems at the moment, so somebody in their marketing program came up with this genius concept of, we'll tell people that we'll scan the dark web for them for free. So, there's a great thread on Reddit, on the Reddit subreddit, IsItBullshit, talking about their dark web scan, and ripping it to shreds.

So, if you don't believe us that you can't actually do it, read this. It's good. We'll leave it in the show notes. IsItBullshit is now my new favorite subreddit. It's great. I love it. Oh, man. And for fuck's sakes, Equifax. Yep. Oh, hacked again this week.

Yep. I haven't heard the final verdict on this, if it was malvertising or if the Equifax site was hacked, but here's the long and the short of it. If you went to part of the Equifax website and tried to do a certain thing, like sign up for your credit monitoring, it would send you, it would bounce you to a new page, do a shit ton of redirects, and say, hey, you need Flash to get to this, which was a completely different domain, and yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I don't have to go any farther than that. The dumb shits were hacked again. Yeah. They just really, again, should be out of business at this point. You'd have thunk it. Yep. Now, speaking about probably going out of business, Kaspersky Labs.

Yeah, not looking so good for them anymore, is it? Last week we were on the fence about this, but not so much anymore. Yeah, I'm still kind of on the fence about if they knew what was going on. Right. But this new article in the New York Times on how Israel caught Russian hackers scouring the world for U.S. secrets is a pretty fascinating read about how the Russian FSB was basically using Kaspersky's antivirus software as kind of their own personal search engine to try and

track down NSA agents and CIA agents and basically all of the keywords that they were looking for for any of the programs that all of our intelligence agency uses. So, you know, a hat tip to the Israelis for being inside of Kaspersky and telling us about it.

Now, Kaspersky's coming back and say, show me the pudding. You know, we want to see what you saw so we can go back and figure out what's going on because we're not talking to the Russians. So if you guys are seeing some stuff, let's figure out what it is. You know, they're trying to play ball, but and of course, the Israelis don't want to give up how they got in or what they're seeing.

So it's a stalemate, I think, at this point. Yeah. Nobody wants to send their spy across the bridge to, you know, get traded. We need Tom Hanks. Yeah, we do. We really do. That movie was okay. It wasn't great. Yeah, I didn't mind it, actually. No, it was decent. What I do mind is discuss the commenting engine from way back in the day.

A lot of sites still use it. They still do. Well, they were breached in 2012. Huh? Yep, 2012. 17 and a half million accounts were raided back then. Turns out, though, that nobody knew about it until last week. Okay.

And the gentleman who started Have I Been Pwned came across the dump of all the data. And what happened was he sent it to discuss, and he's like, hey, here's my responsible breach policy. I'm going to tell you this is out there so you have a chance to fix it, blah, blah, blah.

Turns out, apparently, discuss the security team is top notch because they had this whole thing handled within 24 hours. They're like, okay, here's what we're going to do. You know, they went straight to the mattresses. They're like, we're going to tell everybody. We're going to fix it. We're going to plug it.

We're going to change all the passwords. We're going to do this. And the guy from Have I Been Pwned is like, this is the most amazing breach recovery I've ever seen. So, hey, discuss didn't know about it. So, yeah, that kind of sucks. But this is five years ago, right?

Yeah. So, completely different teams now, I'm sure. There might be one or two guys left. But the fact that they handled it in a responsible way, and I don't know if you can hear my air quotes around responsible way. I'm waving my fingers at the microphone to try and cause a little, you know, air quotes.

A little dispersal? Yeah, a little dispersal there. A little rustling of the leaves. Because what they said was that they sent emails to, or they notified all of the parties that were involved in the breach. Well, I found out it because I have been pwned, sent me an email telling me that I was in the breach.

My data was out there. The email address, password, and usernames that went with discuss were compromised. I did not get anything from discuss. Right. Period. So, shit in one hand, wish in the other. You know.

Somebody told me about it. That's great. And fortunately, back then, I think I was using, I was still using unique passwords in 2012. So, five years ago, yeah. So, I mean, I didn't really freak out about it. But it's interesting to see how these things are coming out, that 17.5 million user accounts with usernames and passwords were in the wild for five years, and nobody knew about it.

And nobody knew. That just makes you one, I mean, makes you know pretty much how often this is happening. Yeah, and they were using- Like, how many other things are out there? Yeah, it's all out there. And these guys were using salted SHA-1 hashes for the passwords, which, you know, back then- Back then was fine.

It was fine. Not now. You got to do a little bit more now. And right before we went to air, I found a new Facebook scam that allows your friend contacts to hack your account. Okay. This is an interesting one, and this is, it's almost social engineering.

So, you get a message from an attacker on Facebook Messenger who's using the compromised account of someone that's on your friends list, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, the attacker asks you for your help recovering their account, explaining that you're listed as one of their trusted contacts.

And the trusted contact system is a new thing where you can put three to five people to say, hey, you can help me get my account back if I'm locked out of it, right? Yeah. New thing. Nobody knows how it works. I was checking it yesterday, and I have no idea how it works. Yeah. Hey, did you read the manual?

Oh, wait. Yeah, there is no manual. Yeah, there's no manual. So, they're going to tell you that you're going to receive a code to recover their account. Now, at the same time, the attacker goes to the, I forgot my password feature for your account.

So, you get an email with the code that is technically for your account. You send it to the friend. The friend then unlocks your account, changes the password, and they're off to the races. Yep. Impressive. Pretty clever. Yep. That is clever. I mean, it is more social engineering than anything else.

It's somebody who very quickly figured out how this new thing, this new feature, kind of, sort of, not really works, and took it to the races. Yep. So, keep an eye out for that. And if you're going to be on somebody's trusted contact list, find out who it is. Yep. And, hey, you know, if you're getting a code to get into your account, maybe you should do more than just use Messenger to be in contact.

Ask them to text you. Or, actually, use a phone. Or call you. Call them. Because we know that text can be intercepted and all that, too. So, speak to somebody. Speak to me. Finally, I wanted to end on a fun note. Indiana couple, vacationing in Florida, discovered a hidden video camera in the bedroom of their Airbnb.

Yep. Whoopsie! Whoopsie! So, it was one of those smoke detector cameras with a hole on the side. Yep. Well, the guy was arrested, who ran the Airbnb, and basically said, yeah, it's there to film sex. What do you want? It's my house.

My house, my rules, biatch! So, that is going on. But, yes, they're very upset because they did dress in the room, and apparently he walked around with his dingle hanging out after his shower. And he's like, oh, no, I'm on candid camera. So, yes, a 56-year-old guy is the one that is, and he's charged with one count of video voyeurism.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, technically, I would wonder if that should even be considered illegal in your own home. I mean, obviously, it's against Airbnb's terms of service. Against Airbnb's terms of service, yes. Yeah, who cares about that? I mean, Airbnb doesn't follow any rules. We're just disrupting the sex industry.

That's it. We're disrupting Pornhub. Way to go. Exactly. That's all they're doing. So, yeah, and I don't know. People are just dumb in Florida. Why would you do that? Oh, please. This is happening in a lot more places than just Florida.

I guarantee you. Oh, well, they're happening everywhere. But this guy in Florida got caught. But, you know, come on. Yeah. Thanks to TechRepublic, I took a wonderful trip down memory lane. They provide a visual history Windows splash screens from 1.01 to 10.

I love this. It was so good. It was really fun. Going back and seeing the screen from 1.01 version of Windows, which I remember installing. Yep. The pixelated graphics, the Microsoft logo with the funky O. I mean, this is just great.

I love this. It's so much fun to click through it. It's funny. It kind of reminded me of, like, you know, people who talk about where you were when Kennedy was killed or where, you know, Kurt Cobain was when he died. I can almost remember exactly the first time I saw each of these screens. Like, I can remember the room and the computers I was working on when I saw these screens.

Yeah, it's fun. It is. Good stuff. Take a look. But where the hell's Bob? There is no Bob in here. There is no Bob. Interesting. Yeah. Bob is not your uncle. He has been erased. So I found an article through Boing Boing, because that's pretty much all they do is post links.

It's called Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana by Clifford Stoll. And this was written on February 26th, 1995. I do believe I see a Windows 95 desktop back on the screen. Along with a soldering iron and a strangely silver bowling ball that he has in his hands.

Not quite sure what was going on there. Now, there's a lot in here that is wrong, but there's a lot in here that is right. Oh, yeah. So, yes, he's talking about the web, because this was right when we were coming online. 95 was, you know, I still hadn't even moved to L.A. for my first real project then.

I was working on Spew. So I probably read this on the web back then, or actually read it in Newsweek, because I don't think they had a website. So I'm going to read two paragraphs here, real quick. Consider today's online world, the Usenet.

I love, I miss Usenet. A worldwide bulletin board allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard.

The cacophony more closely resembles Citizen's Band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on a disc.

At best, it's an unpleasant chore. The myopic glow of a chunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book, and you cannot tote the laptop to the beach. Yet, Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the internet.

Ah, sure. Okay, first paragraph. Nailed it on the intro. Didn't stick the landing. You know, I read through the whole thing, and I think as far as the social aspects of everything and how the internet would affect us, he was spot on.

The business side of things, not so much. Amazon is the biggest company in the world. It's going to be a country. Yeah, so the last one. So yeah, he definitely nailed it on social, failed on tech. So, this is my favorite. What's missing from this electronic wonderland?

Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert.

Oh, you haven't had VR yet, dude. I was about to say you haven't gone to see Interpol. I haven't seen Interpol. It would be better in VR, because then I could take a dump. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? The podcast is split.

While the internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge as power, this non-place lures us to surrender our time on Earth. A poor substitute it is. This virtual reality where frustration is legion, and wherein the holy names of education and progress, important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Hear, hear. Gonk, gong, gong, gong, gong. I love that. That's great. I love seeing all that old stuff. No, it's very fun to read that. And yeah, like I said, spot on in a lot of the ways. Off in some other ones. Moron of the Week!

This segment was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel this week. There's so many incredibly large, moronic, idiotic things that happened this week, so we endeavored to find some of the morons, lesser-known moronic things that happened this week. We're staying away from the big ones, because, you know, everybody knows those.

First off, Dove. Yeah, well, they kind of had a bit of a PR nightmare this week. Hashtag boycott Dove trended over the weekend because the toiletry company, a subsidiary of Unilever, posted an ad for Dove Body Wash. Now, by all accounts, the treatment for the ad makes a degree of sense and isn't particularly horrible.

The problem is the three-second animated GIF that they chose to use as a teaser and get posted on social media showed a black woman using the product and magically turning into a white woman. They didn't have the third reveal on the GIF? No, just the one.

They took the most offensive edit that they possibly could and said, Hey, this looks good. How many people have signed off on this and thought it was a good idea? Let's run with it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, they didn't mean harm, but boy, did they screw up.

I know. And they really did. Because it's a funny... I watched the full commercial when they finally put it. Yeah, the full commercial's totally fine. And the actress, who's the first woman, comes out and says, Look, if I thought that they were demeaning black people, I never would have taken the job.

I thought they were just... You know, it's all about skin care. It's fucking soap. You know, stop it. And, yes, you can take it out of context and show, Like, hey, you're going to get clean. You're going to go from black to white. Yeah. I'm not sure you're necessarily taking it out of context when all they posted was that particular thing.

But they didn't show them that there's no other context. By taking it from the whole ad, just showing all of the women that are part of the ad. But Dove, in the past, has been shown to be racially insensitive. So, this is why, like, everybody's watching what they're doing because they fucked up before. And any time they did...

And this was a big fuck up. You know, it's just like, oh, really? Seriously? Come on. This is what happens when a copywriter is quitting. You know, or like, this is... Like, hey, I'm leaving anyway. Here, try this ad. Pretty much, yeah. And I have a second.

Seriously, how many people signed off on this and thought it was a good idea story? Mark Zuckerberg tours flooded Puerto Rico in bizarre virtual reality promo. Yeah. A cartoon version of Facebook CEO's Mark Zuckerberg visited Hurricane Damage Puerto Rico on Monday in a tone-deaf live stream that was part disaster tourism, part product promotion.

Nicely done. This one actually hit... Nicely done. This hit mainstream media. I was listening to them talk about it on my old geezer, like, morning talk radio here in Chicago. And even they were making fun of it. Like, seriously? You did what? Yeah. If he had some cartoon paper towels to throw out, that's the only way it could have been worse.

Yeah. Basically. Well, like I said, you know, he was kind of overshadowed by another particular person visiting Puerto Rico. But this is the second worst person to semi-visit Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico. Oh, my God. Don't get me started. We've almost made it to the end of the podcast without me losing my mind on that moron.

The Dow Jones mistakenly reports Google to buy Apple for $9 billion. Now, this was a fully blown story that got out there. And it wasn't like, you know, just a little thing. This is like somebody wrote this, and it was sitting in a queue, and they're saying it was a technical glitch, which I can see.

You know, working in tech, I can see what happened here. Some dude wrote an article because they needed – this is the lorem ipsum of bored at 3 a.m., and you need some shit to put in your publishing system, right? Yep. And it got out there, but the fact that it got out there was pretty bad because these guys need to be working at another level than this.

Because people lose a lot of money when you do stupid shit when you are the Dow Jones, you know? Yes. This is unexcusable. Fire somebody. Yeah, somebody should get fired. Definitely. But, oh, if it were true, my stock would have gone through the roof.

Feedback loop. We have a metric shit ton of new Patreon subscribers this week. Kevin Snyder. Thanks, man. Bring Barkley over for a play date whenever you want. Bam Bam misses him. John O., Joe B., Vanessa K., David T., Herbert F., they both up their pledges.

And thanks to the person who omitted from the shoutouts, you know who you are. And, by the way, enjoy the egg cooker. It is the tits. All right. And Joe B. also wrote in, I've been listening for the last few episodes, and I couldn't resist subscribing based on Jason's transcendence from grumpy to I don't give a shit.

Great show, guys. Yes. Thank you very much. I did not give many shits at all last week. No. We also got some direct donations over at PayPal. Ladarius H., Chris C., and Chahi Z. I don't know how to pronounce that one.

Chahi Z. I'm sorry. Chahi. Chahi Z. Thanks a lot, guys. We really do appreciate it. And we're moving on to some Twitter here. Cimente writes in, gasp! Uber, iOS app deleted, ASAP. Thanks, GOG Podcast. Well, you're welcome. You're welcome. And S-K-H-X-S writes in with a link to an Uber game.

And I played it, done over at the Financial Times. It is as snarky as us about Uber, and kind of enjoyable. It got super depressing when you realize that this is pretty much a lot of people's real life. So give it a go. It's a snarky little game. Song of the Oz writes in, thanks again, GOG Podcast.

And I'm still listening, number one of 18,000. Sorry, no, Beach Mama was number one. Go back and check the history. She claimed number one. We miss Beach Mama. I wonder if she's still out there listening. We haven't heard from her in a very long time. I don't know. I know.

Yeah. Chris Costello wrote in, this appeared in Pocket Cast today, and I flinched at 120 minutes. Trust me, Chris, I do every time as well. 120 minute running time, but that was genuinely one of your best ever episodes. Thanks. Hashtag JPD has no more fucks to give. Indeed. And when Brian cringes at the 120 minutes, know that he's mostly to blame, because he's the one that puts all the, he put in all the stories last week.

Yeah. Moving on. Ophelia23 writes in, GOG Podcast, 230 is a pretty tight number. Yes, it is. And TrippinFool says, damn well, hope not. Some of us just stumbled onto you two nuts. As you should know, it takes some of us some time to reach out and harass you. Well, harass us anytime.

Bring it in. Bring it in. Now we're going on to the website. DK writes in, enjoy the show. Listen through the Podcast One app. Not sure how many others listen with Podcast One and how up to date the download numbers are, but Podcast One fucked up their app and made it just about useless for about a month or so.

So not sure if you guys knew that or if it had any effect on the numbers they're giving you. Well, yeah, there's a reason we left Podcast One a couple months back. Yeah, we're not actually on Podcast One anymore.

We left quite a while ago. They still put us in their app and on the website. We're not going to complain about it because it's exposure. But, yes, those download numbers that we get from them are just that, what we get from them, which I looked at our stats. It is, I would just like to say, DK, you are, as they say, the cheese stands alone.

You're pretty much the only person listening to us on the Podcast One app. So grab a copy of Overcast or Pocket Casts or whatever is appropriate for your platform because we don't know when we're going to get pulled from there. So just letting you know. Yeah. Yeah, we probably won't be.

I mean, we'll probably be there 10 years from now. Who are we kidding? They fixed everything, so we are up to date on the app and the website. They're pulling from the right feed now. So who knows? It's podcasting. Yeah. Yeah. Next up is Victor K. I'm a little late with this, but I just started listening to you guys and find myself laughing often.

I about died listening to the episode about Nazis. I wanted to share this. Yes, somebody did. I wanted to share this as I think you guys would enjoy the humor. That's a YouTube link to a channel he enjoys with a video called How to Punch a Nazi. I watched it and laughed. Hope you all enjoy and please keep on being hard on Bittner and his morality clause.

Seriously, who the hell has one of those? Don't they know that morals are a thing of the past like the Beach Boys that one of you claim not to hate? Anyways, if you guys could slow down the foul language because it pisses me the fuck off. Why the fuck would you feel that need to go like a lightweight Carlin? Why the hell am I still typing? Damn it.

You guys got me all confused on what I was saying, so I'll edit like this. Keep on making these great podcasts. Okay. Well, thanks, Victor. Thank you. Thank you very fucking much. We'll do what we can. Hey, by the way, we were under morality clauses when we were with our first podcast distributors.

That's right. BTR, Blog Talk Radio. There were many things we were not allowed to say. It took us an extra two months to finalize that contract thanks to my wife, the Uber lawyer, because of that stupid morality clause. Right, and we actually spent more time negotiating the contract than we actually did on the network because they were that bad.

Yep, exactly. Yeah, love contracts, love networks. Way to go. This one comes from ARP. Last week, I tried to download the new episode of your show, but there was some sort of parsing error in the RSS feed. I don't know if that's the reason why your numbers were down, but my podcatcher knew there was a new episode, but every time I tried to download the episode, it said they had a parsing error and just couldn't do it.

Also, sorry about the fake user information. That's okay. Fake info. Fake comment. Fake comment. Real problem. This is one of the issues that Libsyn, the host that I love to fucking hate, what they did was they have a new version where they're putting in all these new iTunes tags, but their parsing on the back end is so horrible.

This is like first-year programmer horrible shit that they do over there, and they inserted an unidentified Unicode character, which broke our feed. It broke our feed. And the ironic thing is the part where they broke the feed was the part that was specific to iTunes, and it broke iTunes.

And I went back and forth with support, and they're like, you know, you put in a bad code. I'm like, I typed it. There's no bad Unicode that I could type from my keyboard by typing Jason and Brian. Nope. Didn't fucking happen. Your fault.

Fuck off. So sorry if I'm still hard on Libsyn, but they're fucking up, and that is why ARP fake name person that you had a bad time downloading, and I went and fixed it. All good now. Yay. All right. Next up from Mike. Hey, guys. I'm enjoying this week's pod.

If nothing else, your passion for what you do is clearly evident, and none of what I've heard so far sounds unjustified. Not sure if you've seen this link, but was wondering if it's about as basic a list of recommendations as a pseudo-governmental organization could issue, and if you have a previous podcast that directly deals with security-oriented issues from the link.

And it is a link to CBA, Canadian Bankers Association, safety and the Internet of Things, which just makes us laugh, because there is no safety with the Internet of Things. I think we discuss it almost every episode. There's no one episode I could possibly point you to, but if you do go to the Grumpy Old Geeks or GOG.show, search for IoT or Internet of Shit, and I'm sure you'll get a couple episodes that directly talk about it a couple times.

Yeah, I don't think we ever give tips, though. Pretty much, I think I always say, don't do it, and you say, I can't. Well, I mean, the big tip is always you should be very wary of any device that you connect to the network. We kind of get into it here and there, especially, like, with your cameras and with Bittner.

We discuss things about don't buy anything that doesn't let you set the username or password ever, and always change them from the defaults and that sort of stuff. So, you know, I mean, I read through the article. It's not bad. It's basic, but not bad. There's no wrong information in it.

All right, next up, we got one from Braxton. My friend also washed his AirPods, but his were in the case. The buds were fine, but his case was toast. Apple replaced it because there is no way for them to know that it has water damage. Ah, so they're not putting the sensor that they put in the iPhones in the Air Buds case.

Interesting. Apparently not. That's good to know in case I screw up and do both next time. Next up is from Roy. Hey, guys, just listened to your latest. Don't give up hope. There are thousands of people out here who really connect with you. Okay. All right.

Well, good to hear from you. All thousands. No. You forgot the second half of the comment. Oh, yeah. There it is. I'm fairly new, two months, and absolutely love the show, which I listen to as I commute to work on the train. Guess other passengers think it's strange when I burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Being a confirmed GOG, please keep doing what you're doing.

Cheers, Roy, from New Zealand. Yay. Yes, that's what I wanted to get to. Thanks. Thanks, down there in New Zealand. I really want to come visit there sometime. Yes. Someday. You know, you had that chance. There was the job being offered to programmers. They were going to fly you down just to interview.

You could have gotten a free trip. I knew you were going to bring that up. I knew you were going to bring that up. Well, you can't sit here and whine about how you want to make it to New Zealand when I brought a trip for free to you on a silver platter. I know. I know. What are you going to do? Whine. That's what we're going to do.

Shut up. I just, I was pining. I wasn't whining. Pining and whining are two different things. I think we have a show title. Okay. Mike Halverson writes in, hey, Grom, still listening to you weekly. Jason, well done on living the dream of firing all your clients. All but one. But yes, it's good. I feel compelled to defend Strava.

Yeah, I'll jump in here because Mike wrote an awful lot. He gets into a lot of really cool things being a bike rider myself that make it sound really interesting and interesting and a good reason to have this app. But then he basically ends it with Strava is a much better activity data collector than a social network, which I think kind of was the point that we were talking about is we don't need another goddamn social network.

Just stick to your strengths and do what you do, which they do. So that's good. You know, it's obvious this guy, this guy, Mike, you're a real athlete and you use this and get a lot of stuff out of it. It sounds much better than Argus, which I'm still using for free to track my bike rides. So maybe I'll give it a look.

So that's awesome. And apparently he was, he uses it all the time when he's in running in New York City and a GPS sucks between buildings. So he ended up searching out tech related publications to listen to and he ended up finding us that way. So thank you. Awesome. Nice. Yeah.

And by the way, I am looking for a new social network. Anything that is not Twitter, that's not LO and not Facebook, something, something cool and new like the kids used to use. Snapchat. All right. Fucking die. Next up comes from Mike Malast. Jason, if you want those Canadian maple cookies, go to Aldi, Trader Joe's or Fresh I've seen them at all three places.

You have no excuses this year. I can vouch for the Aldi version. No, sir, you can not vouch for the Aldi version. All three of those I have had and they are made in America. The only way to get a genuine Canadian maple cookie is from Quebecois.

So, yes, I have tried them. They are they are a decent facsimile. But as a fan from the Art of Charm sent me a box of fresh maple cookies from Quebec. There is literally no substitute.

They are night and day. I like how you basically just got me off the hook for getting you any cookies, Jason. I don't go to Quebecois. I go to Toronto. So there's no point in me bringing any back for you. Oh, hoisted by your own petard.

I am so out of this now. Awesome. You are never, ever, ever going to bring me any fucking maple cookies anyway, because you're just not. Certainly not now. Well, certainly not before, so I'm not missing anything. You don't want any of my stinky Toronto maple cookies.

You only want Quebecois maple cookies. Hey, Quebecois. You know why? Because she's the only one that actually gave me. If you had brought me the Toronto maple cookies and I tried them, they might have been better than the Quebec maple cookies. But I'll never fucking know, because you eat them all.

No, you will not know now. Next up is from Greg. You guys drilled home that the original length of a tweet was 140 characters to allow the message to fit inside a text message while leaving room for a couple usernames. I didn't. I know. It's just these. This is. Things don't die. Stop, stop, stop.

Wrap it up. Just go to the. Skip to the end. All right. He said, I didn't think the length had anything to do with usernames, but it had everything to do with being an SMS for his product. Fine. But it's still not an arbitrary number, which, again, is the only point we were trying to make. There is nothing arbitrary about it, regardless of the math that we redacted from your comments.

Yeah. So please stop, everybody. Do not write us in about the fucking word arbitrary ever again. We get it. Some people think they. No. Done. Done. Done. Put an arbitrary feather in that. You know where it's done with arbitrary is we are done with AI and machine learning, right?

Oh, fuck me. Okay. Okay. Let's move to iTunes. Captain Dunsel writes in with a five-star review. Good for two youngsters on the Internet. I was hoping to hear about the great days of technology when my Commodore 64 was the king of the castle and my 33.6 modem was the lord of the manor.

But what I got is a very artificial, intelligent discussion of the technology of the week. Thankfully, that is broken up by the resident security expert that spends more time explaining the exploits of the week and never, ever explaining the proper lock to put on my floppy disk box.

Hopefully, as they get a little older, they will remember the good old days of punch cards. Well, Captain Dunsel, with your fancy 33.6 bod modem, I started with a 300 bod modem. So, ooh, look at you with your super fast technology. Yeah.

Let's see whose modem is smaller. Exactly. That's how it works in tech. I have the least bod. How about you? All right. And sadly, now I have a dad bod. Hey, look at that. And now you're not even a dad. Well done.

Next up is from CG Music. Another five-star rating. You guys are great. I love the show. You guys are funny and informed. I look forward to Mondays. Keep doing what you're doing. Thumb up, thumb up, thumb up. Emoji. All right. Next is we've got a five-star from Lamar Kindle. Great show. I've been listening to the show since episode one and still going strong.

Man, that's dedication. Good man. Don't let the numbers startle you guys. Keep the good work. We will keep up the good work, and we will keep the good work. We will not delete the good work, because, as we know, you can't delete anything on the internet. You can't delete anything anyways. Our next five-star rating is from Dante71498.

I do note you are in Canada, so I am sorry in advance that Jason is going to stalk you to find out if you're Quebecois, Canada, or the shitty ones with the crappy cookies. That's right, motherfucker. All right. Listen to this podcast. Only discovered this podcast a month ago, but it's already risen to the top of my list as most anticipated podcast each week.

If you've ever listened to Geeks and Beats, you'll love this podcast. It focuses more on the geeks part, as the title implies, but keeps it easy to understand. The chemistry between Brian and Jason is excellent, and if you're over, say, 35, you'll enjoy the pop culture references. If you're under 35, listen to it anyways, because these are the guys that built the friggin' internet, as you know it, and they've stuck around to take the blame and try to fix it.

Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work. I don't know about the try-to-fix-it part. Nah, we gave up on that. We tried that in the first couple episodes, and that turns out to just kind of be a fool's errand. How's our icon program going?

Oh, I forgot that we were going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've got so many failed attempts at things that we could do that would make the internet better. Well, to be fair, we never really attempted any of them. Oh, that's right. The whiskey kicked in, and we went to the pub and said, fuck it. Nobody else cares. Yeah. All right.

We've got another five-star from LadyNess31. Best podcast ever. I love this podcast and cannot wait to get my weekly GOG show. I've listened for over a year and got very scared when you guys said something about not doing the show anymore. Please don't ever go away. Although I work for the Geek Squad, oh, interesting, who I know you hate, it still helps me get through my workday to be able to listen to your show.

Great tech news with a grumpy attitude I think everyone in tech feels but cannot articulate as well as you two. Keep up the great show. And keep up the spirit there in the Geek Squad. Get everybody on board. Yeah. They'd all be better at their jobs. Yes, they would. If they listened to us.

I'm just saying. And finally, we've got one more five-star rating from DogfulLife69. Snarky, informative, and somewhat, somewhat, that's me putting us down. Sometimes hilarious about the comings and goings of events and tech by some grumpy old geeks. Thanks so much. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And again, thank you absolutely everybody that wrote us everywhere. We didn't get to all of them, but we really appreciate it. And as always, pretty please, tell a friend about the show. Closing shout outs!

It's that time of year. It's October and my boys in blue are getting there. Let's go Dodgers. And screw you, U.S. men's national team. No World Cup for you. And the article that I referenced earlier has the title, I Believe That We Must Blow The Whole Thing Up. It's actually not Trump tweeting about, say, the world.

It is about the world. It's about the men's soccer team. So go read it. Yes. Fortunately, the U.S. has one of the best soccer teams in the world, the women's team. Yes, we do. We'll stick with them. And I would just like to say, let's go Dodgers! I do not want to live through another Cubs World Series.

I do not. So please, Dodgers, do your fucking job. Well, you and I are, for once, 100% in agreement on what we want from our sports ball. And I want to give a shout out to Eminem. If somebody would have told me that Eminem would perfectly encapsulate what I was feeling at any point in the timeline of the known universe, I'd have laughed at them.

Yet here I am stating, yes, Eminem speaks for me. You should check out his freestyle rap video that he made at the BET Awards. Or not, because it was fucking terrible. I can't judge rap. I don't know. I got 30 seconds in three times.

I can't get past it. It was trite. And he had no new ideas. He's like, oh, Trump's a racist. Trump is orange. Blah, blah, blah. But it's not wrong. No, but the press that he's getting around this is like, it is overblown compared to the quality of the work that he produced to get to what it is.

It's just the fact that Eminem actually said something. And it's all in promotion for his new album. So I don't give a shit about Eminem. But we'll get to that on our new political podcast coming soon. No, this is our new rap podcast. We're starting a rap podcast. All right.

Schooly D and Jason D. Wait, we're both Ds. That doesn't work. That doesn't flow. My rap dog's J-Dawg 138. I'm J-Dawg 138, motherfucker. That's how it goes. I'm 300 baud. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. And you can follow me on Twitter while it lasts at JPDef and on Instagram at JPD. Brian, are you on the Twitter? I am, but it's a dumpster fire to hell with that place. I'm at Slenderfuckus. That's what I thought. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 231. That's 231. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week.

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