232: Remember the Almono

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

And I'm a very harried Brian Schulmeister. It must be. Yeah, I had to go to a preschool tour for the kiddo, as Jason and I were just talking off air. It's not for a year from now because this is how long this stuff takes.

You do the tour, you put in your application, and then you cross your fingers. It is an insane procedure. But I do want to say something. This should be a rule. They've done these preschool tours hundreds of times, I'm sure. They know how long it should take. If anything is ever going to be over an hour, if no time is allotted, I assume an hour for anything, any meeting, any call, any whatever.

If you know it's going to be longer than an hour, tell people. Is that too much to ask? Because this went on for an hour and a half, and I actually left early so I could make it back here and still got here late. So they were still going through. I'm just saying, an hour is standard. Anything above or beyond that, let people know.

Well, you know, when I took Bam Bam to daycare for the first time, it was 18 minutes, and they said it was going to be 20. So they got it down over there. You might want to take him to Doggy Depot. You know, probably get more exercise. That's for sure. Might be a little dirty when he comes home, though. That's all right. He's a boy.

He can do it. A little follow-up on the client reduction plan. Uh-huh. Man, it's amazing what one little tweak can do. The real problem, it turns out, is not knowing when a job was going to come in, and it usually coming in on a Friday night or a Sunday night.

Ah, scheduling, yes. Yeah, this intermittent punishment is what I kind of think of it as. You can never relax. You can never turn off your phone. You never know when, you know, basically a big bag of crap is going to get dropped on your desk and say, Here, you have till the morning to get this back to me.

Yeah. And after, you know, two and a half years of it, I didn't even realize it. It was just a thing. Mm-hmm. You know, but now that it's been taken away, I have so much more room to breathe. It's incredible. I can turn off my phone at night. I've lost 10 pounds since he's gone. You know? The mental fog is gone.

Congratulations, Jason. I mean, I did the same thing for the first, you know, I'd say 15 years that I was running my company, which was, you know, people would just send stuff and expect things immediately. And as we've talked about a lot on the show, it's got, that has gotten worse and worse. Like, every industry does it now.

It's all, everything is a dumpster fire. Everything is an absolute emergency. And it's important to just put your foot down and say, no, you know. And if you want to go hire some 20-year-old that doesn't really know what he's doing, who's willing to put up with that, by all means, go ahead. Yeah, and all my other clients are on board, so I've got things weeks in advance now.

Everybody's happy. And then I can spend more time on their job and make it even better, you know? Yes, you get better product. Yes, you do. But I understand, that's why we were on that treadmill and that little rat race, because it's like, oh, you never know when there's going to be a dry spell, so you want to take every little bit of cheese that you can.

Mm-hmm, yes, the joy of being an independent contractor. Yeah, I mean, I got rid of 30% of my income with that one job, and it hurts, but I feel so much better that it's worth every penny. Yeah, and if you can, you know, if you can take that leap and do it, get by for a while without, it's important to basically get clients that you want instead of clients that you need.

It's a difference. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things, you know, if the schedule worked out, I loved having them as a client, but it just doesn't work out that way. Right. Yeah, I used to suggest to some clients, you need to get yourself a personal assistant to schedule you. Some more follow-up on how technology is ruining our minds.

Yes. And I just wanted to point out this article from The Guardian that came out. It came out like two weeks ago. I missed it when it came out because it's a very long article, so I kind of put it on the side and figured, oh, I'll get it when I have time. I had time to read this week, so I checked it out.

And the title is, Our Minds Can Be Hijacked, The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia. And it's the backlash of all the people who made all the crap that addicted everybody and how they're, like, you know, regretful because they didn't see what it was going to, what it was going to unleash on the world.

My favorite is Lauren, the guy who invented the pull to refresh. Okay. Yeah, he's, you know, he's not even in tech anymore. He's just off in the woods building a house in New Hampshire or New Jersey or someplace. Look, I almost see this as the timeline of people that get into tech for a living.

It's just what happens. You and I are the same way. You start, you get burnt out, you start to hate everything that you're doing, you start to realize that what you're doing and what your clients are asking you to do, or the way to get the results that your clients are asking you for is to make people addicted to stuff.

And you burn out, and then we all start to move away from technology. Yeah. And, yeah, just the unethical nature of the things that people in the upper offices want, just to make them make the nut. Yep. Every month. Hey, look who popped onto my saying. Call back.

There's also a great piece by Mike Montero on Medium this week. And it's, you know, I'm not going to go too far into it because it's about Trump and Twitter. Right. And just the bullshit that Twitter is pulling by keeping Trump on the service and the sheer hypocrisy of it all and lack of transparency.

Yeah. Well, Twitter is probably the worst of the black boxes of technology out there right now. It's all, it's so obviously complete and utter bullshit and favoritism. It's ridiculous. No, it's really bad. Now, the one thing that I really came out of this Mike Montero story with was at the end of the post, there's not a like anymore.

You can clap. You can clap for the article, and you can clap as many times as you want. Talk about hitting the cocaine button in the cage. Well, okay, Medium. This is immediately gamified, too. People can set up bots and different scripts to just clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

And look how many claps my articles have gotten, and now my articles are going to show up higher in your feed. Oh, imagine that. Yeah. It's kind of silly. I mean, I did it for a second. I'm just like, what the unholy hell are they doing over there? I suppose that you'd be able to look at it from the back end and go, hey, this one account liked this article 17,000 times.

But are they actually going to police that? Who knows? You know, it's... I know that Evan is really down on the ad economy, and he's trying to fix it with Medium. God only knows what he's trying to do. But clapping, I see, is really kind of going backwards in the whole scheme of things.

What would you like, Jason? Nothing. Oh, okay. Let me read the article and comment if I want to, and go about my merry way. I don't want to like it, fave it, save it, share it. That's because comment sections have worked out so well for everyone. Yeah, I know. I'm going to get to a new extension that I found from one of the, from the Guardian article that I found for YouTube that you can turn off YouTube comments with.

Nice. Oh, my God. We'll talk about that one a little later. I got some more articles that will be linked in the show notes here about transparency in social media and how it's all a bunch of bunk. So if anybody wants to do some heavy-duty reading on it, we've got a lot in the show notes this week. Yes, we do.

We ran out of time before the show, but I started watching a video that I saw from Boing Boing. Stephen Fry's lecture on a hopeful, cautious, excited vision of a better technological world. I got to give it to Stephen Fry. I got to give him a hand clap, as it were, because he is relentlessly optimistic.

I love him for that. And especially after getting trolled out of Twitter, and to still come back and be optimistic about the future of technology, man, I couldn't do it. No, me either. That's why our show's called Grumpy Old Geeks, not Happy Old Geeks. Yep. So it's fun.

It's a fun watch. I'm halfway through the first hour, and it's really good. I just love Stephen Fry. Now, do they tell you it's longer than an hour? It is two hours, yes. But the second hour is a Q&A. He does a speech for an hour, and then the second hour is Q&A. All right. I'll watch it this weekend. Okay.

Enjoy yourself with that. Now, and we always make fun of class action lawsuits. Yes. How you never get anything. Yes. This week, I got $10. I got $14, I think. Oh, nice. Yes. The Apple eBooks Antitrust Settlement from way back in 2014.

I guess we didn't pick up our credit last time, because this is like a payout for people who didn't pick up the redemption last time. But I don't know how that works, because I always cash my checks when they come in. Yeah, I don't either. I don't really understand how I wouldn't have used it. There must be some trickery involved in how to use that to apply for a purchase.

I will look into that. Yeah, but I got $10 in my account now. I'll take it. Congratulations. Congratulations on your $14. You're a rich man. Thank you very much. I am. If I were a rich man, I would take over Twitter. No, I wouldn't. Anyways, I got some more follow-up for Jason.

You did your 23andMe, and we're not happy with the results. And we talked about, specifically me, I talked about how I'm not going to do anything like that, because I'm too worried about the privacy aspect, and there's so much we don't know about how any of these services, Ancestry.com, 23andMe, Helix is another one that's out there.

We don't really know what they're doing with our information. We don't know how they're storing our information. We don't know what they're doing to prevent hacking situations. Again, as per usual with most tech companies these days, black boxes. We have no idea. We're not allowed to look in. Now, we had some readers send in some stuff, or readers, some listeners send in some stuff.

One was basically just an ad of a guy who went there and said, look, everything's on the up and up. As you can see, here's what happens. Except they didn't address any of the privacy concerns that I had at all. Luckily for us, Gizmodo decided to go through every single line of their terms of services and research policies with help from experts in privacy, law, and consumer protection.

Boy, oh boy, it's not pretty. Oh boy, it's bad. Now, if you were even considering using one of these services, go to our show notes and read this entire article. It is so long because they found so many fucked up things. So, Joel Winston, a consumer protection lawyer, says it's basically like you have no privacy at all.

They're taking it all. When it comes to DNA tests, don't assume you have any rights. He goes on to talk about Ancestry specifically. Ancestry says they don't really own your DNA, which is true because they can't take it from you, but they now own the rights to it. They can test it in 100 years from their freezer for whatever purpose they want.

That's your own DNA. Now, some more lowlights from this include Ancestry responded to Gizmodo when they reached out and said, well, I guess that is broadly correct, that they basically own your data from now until the end of time. If you choose to share your genetic information with your doctor or others, it may be used against you now and impact the coverage you receive.

23andMe states bluntly in their terms of service, if you are asked by an insurance company whether you have learned genetic information about health conditions and you do not disclose to them that you did 23andMe, this will be considered to be fraud. Oh, nice. So that's fucked.

Yep. Hacking. Recently, a study found that common open source DNA processing programs are super vulnerable to hackers. While the study didn't mention software specifically used by consumer testing companies, all of the companies mentioned the possibility of a breach of the company of those unnamed innumerable contractors in their policies.

And finally, well, not finally, I'm only picking out the ones that are of interest to us. There are thousands of problems that these guys found. Arbitration. In one sentence, 23andMe destroys access to the normal rule of law, forcibly imposes mandatory arbitration, and issues a clear threat. If the individual loses in arbitration, he or she must pay for 23andMe's lawyers.

Oh, great. So I wish you would listen to me, Jason. I'm sure nothing will happen. Well, the great part about mine is it's completely wrong. So I don't know whose DNA they got, but it sure as hell ain't mine. Yeah. So that's good times there. Yeah. And I know it's not bam-bams, because you know how hard it is to get a Rottweiler to spit in a tube?

It's really difficult. I have so many jokes, but it's a family show. Fuck. No, it's not. Fuck, it's not. Says when? Never mind. I don't want to do those jokes. I'm the guy that doesn't go across the line.

You don't. I leave that to you. Yeah. David Bittner puts in a little note here that he just did a show with the researcher who did the DNA hacking that we covered a while ago, the Synthesized DNA Malware with Peter Ney on CyberWire's Research Saturday. That will be linked up in the show notes if you want to go have a listen.

Nice. In the news. So, Lefzitz from the Lefzitz letter, who we occasionally like and often don't like because he's not right a lot.

Yeah, you haven't talked about him in a long time. I haven't heard his name in like a year or two. Good old Lefzitz. You know, he's really moved away from music to just being a tech commentator, and I just... Oh, he has no credentials in tech. Yeah, I know. I know. Yes. I know, which is why I haven't really mentioned any of his stuff.

And generally, when it shows up in my inbox, I take a look at the top line and then just delete it because I don't want to read it. But Recode has now picked him up. So you will be seeing these things more. He wrote an article called 2017, It's the Greatest Time to be Alive and Simultaneously the Worst.

Now, I do agree with a lot of this one. And it's worth a read, I think, for once. So, I mean, again, it's him. Take it with a grain of salt. But he's wrong a lot. But most of the bullet points in this article are hard to argue with, particularly one that you and I have been beating the drum on for a while.

Online statistics are faked. This is the conundrum. You judge someone by their numbers, but are they real? No, they're not. And this is what we're basing everything on now. Polls, statistics, analytics being collected by Twitter, by Facebook. All of these things we know are bullshit, but this is how we're making decisions now.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I'm going to come clean on an experiment I did about, oh, I don't know, three, four weeks ago. I don't know if you noticed. I used to have like around 1,700, 1,800 Twitter followers. Right. You know how many I have now?

How many? A little over 11,000. Okay. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Right. Twitter didn't care. You know how easy it is to just fake followers? I did an experiment because I wanted to see how the marketplace worked. And I'm going to do a bigger part on the show later when I kind of get some more numbers back from them.

Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing out there that's real anymore. And it cost me all of $50. Right. Yeah. And it's not, you know, I've had clients that have asked to buy followers before. And I said, well, what is your end goal here?

Exactly. Because if you just want to see big numbers, that doesn't mean anything. Like, there's no point if there aren't actual people that are engaging with you. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Just take the money and burn it. That's really all you, that's, that's all you're going to do. It's, you're not going to have this follow on effect where people go, oh, look at all those followers you have.

I guess I should follow you too. Doesn't work that way. Yeah. But, you know, try telling that to people. They don't want to hear it. Well, take their money and, you know, let's, let's find a reputable, you know, account maker that we can get a kickback from and we'll sell them all the accounts they want.

I think we can have a new business model. Now I didn't entirely, I finished reading this article. I really enjoyed it. I'm still processing it. So I don't have an opinion or an encapsulation to put in here, but I want to mention this because I enjoyed it so much.

And again, go to the show notes. We seem to have a lot of big think pieces this week. This is how big data went bust by Will Orimus over at Slate. And it talks about how the, you know, 2012, about five years ago, it was all about big data. The era of big data has arrived.

And since then, we haven't heard that much about it. We don't see it really working too well. We see a lot of unexpected results that big data would have told us we should have gotten something else to do. And he gives us tons of examples backing this up.

And it's really interesting because I'm always terrified of what big data is going to be and the hype behind it. And what he's basically saying is, we ain't there yet. None of this stuff is working, but we should be worried because at some point they will. And they continue to collect. So I'll check it out because I started to read it, but we ran out of time and because I'm interested in it because I figured by now, I mean, there's a lot of big data that's it work behind the scenes.

You know, every time you turn on Waze, that's a lot of big data right there. And, you know, anything that's Facebook is the king of big data. That's everything in there. Google ads, same thing. So, but yeah, none of these startups really have kind of, you know, picked up. It's just all the big players who are refining their techniques as far as I can tell.

But I definitely want to read this to see what he has to say. Yep. I think it's a really good article. Also from Slate over at their Future Tense section, Google taught AI how to program more AI. Researchers at Google accomplished a feat that has been largely restricted to the realm of science fiction dystopias, enabling artificial intelligence to produce more artificial intelligence.

The company's AI project, AutoML, catchy Google, catchy, way to name that, has successfully taught machine learning software how to program machine learning software. Do you notice what just happened there? I just, I noticed a shift in terminology halfway through that sentence. It's interesting that the article title is taught AI how to program more AI.

The first paragraph of the article taught machine learning software how to program machine learning software. Fuck! Yes. And AutoML, there's no AI in that. No, it's Auto Machine Language. Oh!

I just can't let go of this anymore. Just, as I said in the show notes, look at the arbitrary switch between AI and machine learning throughout the article. Now, Brian, now we're going to get, we're going to get emails now. We're going to get emails. I know. Anyways, that's, I, it hurts my heart, Jason, every time.

Well, I'm going to hurt your heart a little more because Gizmodo has an article called Stunning AI Breakthrough takes us one step closer to the singularity. So, there's a, how many buzzwords can we shove into one headline? We have a new product coming from the, the lovely folks over there at Google.

AlphaGo Zero. This is their new AlphaGo program. The interesting thing about this one is it taught itself how to play Go without any human interaction whatsoever by playing with itself. If that was only the way to superintelligence, we'd all be geniuses.

Thundercats are go, baby. They're saying this latest achievement qualifies as a holy shit moment for a number of reasons. And the main reason is that it uses reinforcement learning to teach itself how to play. So, they put up this new AlphaGo Zero against the original AlphaGo program that beat the, the Go Master.

And it smoked it 100 to zero, like no problem whatsoever. Yeah. So, there you go. Good times. Yes. The, the, the machine learning apocalypse is on us. Yes. Oh, God. Now, let's talk about Facebook and food delivery.

Yes. I put in an article about this and then you trumped me with an, with an article. I just found, I simply found a better headline. I, I don't know if the article is actually better. Okay. Um, I really don't know. I really kind of don't care on this one. You'll be able to order food from Facebook from one of many providers, like the, the lovely DoorDash, who I have had issues with, uh, with many upside down dishes that should not have been upside down.

And look, again, a problem I have with this is it needs a little machine learning or some AI, because as I'm sitting in my pub, checking in on Facebook, it asked me if I'd like to have food delivered from the pub I'm sitting in. Kind of dumb.

Well, if you can't get a waitress to come and talk to you, it might be easier. That is a great way to score points with your bartender. No. Sure. Uh, anyways, the, the headline that Jason had was Facebook is swallowing up America's food delivery business. And, uh, I did beat him because, uh, Lifehacker, kudos to them, uh, slow clap.

Their headline was Facebook delivers both food and elections now. Yes. And I got to say one of the best comments I saw was kudos on making a post about food delivery political. A poost. Political now. A poost. A Putin. Yeah. Because the food delivery segment had nothing to do with the elections, but they just had to get that jab in there.

Way to go, Lifehacker. Yes. Clickbait. Well done. Now I will go to a Facebook article about politics that, uh, is very well done and very well thought out and does not, and very long, but does not lean either particular direction politically. So anybody that's about to call me a snowflake can go fuck right off.

What Facebook did to American democracy over at the Atlantic. The real problem for all political stripes is understanding the set of conditions that led to Trump's victory. The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded and no one has explained precisely how research showed that a small design changed by Facebook could have electoral electoral repercussions, especially with America's electoral college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome.

This is true and why the electoral college needs to go the fuck away. Uh, pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media. In June of 2014, Harvard law scholar Jonathan Citrine wrote an essay in the New Republic called Facebook could decide an election without anyone ever finding out, in which he called attention to the possibility of Facebook's selectively depressing voter turnout.

He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an information fiduciary charged with certain special roles and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data. This is a very long, as Jason pointed out, but very well thought out article that I believe everyone should read. I think it underscores an important point.

We make often on this show that these giants, the Facebooks, the Googles, the YouTubes, even lowly Snapchat and Twitter, but not Ello, are not simply platforms as they like to hide behind. They always say we're just a platform. No, you're not anymore. You are an information fiduciary for the win.

What the hell is an information fiduciary? Well, I'm glad you asked, Jason, because I have a link to VanityFair.com. Oh, no, that's yours. Yeah. Where's mine? I didn't. You pushed mine out of the way. Oh, I didn't see you had one. Oh, there we go. See, you're screwed with the no-notes. Okay, this is also over at The Atlantic.

It was written, I think, two years earlier. It's called A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy. And basically, it says, to protect individual privacy rights, they've developed the idea of information fiduciaries. In the law, a fiduciary is a person or business with an obligation to act in a trustworthy manner in the interest of another.

Examples are professionals and managers who handle our money or our estates, a person or business that deals not in money, but in information. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are example. They have to keep our secrets, and they can't use our information that they collect about us against our own interests. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants know so much about us, and because we have to depend on them, the law requires them to act in good faith on pain of losing their license to practice and a lawsuit by their clients.

This law even protects them to various degrees from being compelled to release the information that they have learned. So the takeaway on this, doctors and lawyers are prohibited from using clients' information for their own interests. Why isn't Google and Facebook? Google Maps should not be able to recommend a drive past an IHOP as the best route simply because IHOP gave it $20, or, say, an election simply because Russians paid for more ads.

Okay, that's good to know. I agree. Okay. I agree as well. So to follow up on the Vanity Fair article that I put in the wrong spot, sorry about that, dude. It's, oh my god, what? You just ruined my float, man. I'm sorry, bro. Dude, you're in Cali.

Go get some bud. No. So this article is, oh my god, what have I done? Some early Facebook employees regret the monster they created. And it is a piece about how it doesn't really kind of, that's a small bit of the article. What a lot of the article is talking about is how Zuckerberg seems to be kind of surrounded by yes-men and is losing grip with reality.

And some people say that he might be the next Howard Hughes. Wait, the virtual tour over the flooded streets of Puerto Rico? The show that we talked about last week didn't tip you off to that? Exactly. The interesting thing that we've been talking about here is, you know, it's like, oh god, Facebook did this, Facebook did that, buy, selling ads to Russians, blah, blah, blah.

Anybody ever have a little think on this to think maybe they wanted Trump to win? Maybe that there were people inside Facebook that actually wanted it to happen? Stock market's doing pretty well right now. So don't think that everybody's on your side sometimes, because you never, ever know.

Especially since they can, you know, basically tweak the election by fiddling a few knobs, as they've shown in the past. You know, I remember when that happened, and that the article that you posted from The Atlantic also points it out how very easy it is for them to actually push people to vote or not to vote. Yep.

It's done very simply. And not even just by them. They've given us the tools for third parties to go in and do it by buying ads. Elections on demand. Okay. In the world of Twitter and social media, the New York Times is finally putting its foot down, telling its, basically, and all of its journalists that, uh, shut the fuck up on social media.

I don't blame them for this one bit. Some of my favorite writers and some of the only reasons I check into Twitter are some of the writers over at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and some other places. And I'm basically getting their thoughts and their opinions and the news that they are providing for free. So why would I pay for New York Times?

This is more about dissenting opinions if they don't like what the person says. Here is, the new guidelines underscore our newsroom's appreciation for the important role social media now plays in our journalism. But also, call for our journalists to take extra care to avoid expressing partisan opinions or editorializing on issues that the Times is covering.

Right. Now, see, this brings up, should they be able to have work accounts that they cannot do that from, and personal accounts that they can do whatever they want? Or do you no longer have the right to be on social media as a private citizen if you happen to be a journalist? I'm guessing the latter.

Right. Yep. Information fiduciary. If you want the job, part of the rules, you know, that's really it. Oh, man. And speaking of social networks, again. Again. You know, because we keep talking about how these people keep just taking our data and reselling it and reselling it and reselling it.

There's a new social network. There's a new girl in town, and she's feeling good. Oh, yes. This one's called Steemit, which is a terrible name. Steaming pile of... That's exactly the first thing I call...

And they've got a digital currency called Steam. So if you make a lot of posts over on Steam, you get some digital currency. Which all goes up as hot air. Some people are actually getting money out of it because it's apparently the coin has taken off. It's in the top 20 of all cryptocurrencies now, but, you know, it's going to be heavily weighed to the people who signed up early.

There's a very good article on Wired about it. It's been out for a couple of weeks, and basically the whole thing started about 18 months ago. I'd heard about it, and I knew some people that were actually posting stuff over there, but I didn't really dive into it because I hear cryptocurrency, and I go, ugh. Yeah, me too.

Yes, I clench whenever I hear, oh, here's a new cryptocurrency thing. I'm like, can I just go watch TV? You clench, and a little puff of steam comes out. That's about it. Vapor. A little bit of vapor. You've had the prefab built-for-you Facebook slideshows, I'm assuming, that pop up, particularly if you take over a certain amount of photos.

It'll go, well, here's your Saturday night, and it'll show you with the generic inoffensive music and some nice little fades and all that sort of crap. Ken Burns effect going on. Yes, Ken Burns everywhere. And iPhones are now doing that as well. If you have upgraded to iOS 11, they are serving up prefab slideshows, whether you want them or not, just like Facebook.

I hate these things. I wish you could turn them off. Of course you can't turn them off. There's a good article over at Slate called Memory Machine that starts talking about how these are not smart enough yet. Apple's ability to group like photos together is impressive.

Who could imagine a phone could do such a thing as identify all your pets and group them together under the heading Fluffy Friends? Machine learning! AI! Yeah. So it's also something your phone doesn't need to revise history to do, and the music and slideshow panning effects are heavy-handed attempts at Apple's part to repackage your life back to you.

See how much better things look with a smartphone in your hand? All the sophisticated machine learning in the world can't minimize the creepiness of big companies like Facebook and Apple trying to horn in on your personal moments. The more these services try to approximate a warm human touch, the wider the gap between an actual memory and its simulacrum.

I knew I was going to screw that up. Simulacrum. Thank you. A capital M memory starts to seem, and the more our actual memories feel cheapened. Amen. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I hate these things. All these services, again, Jason, if you and I had built these, if you and I had built these systems and these services, there would be switch this off in the preferences.

There would also be no podcast because we'd be fucking loaded. That's true. You know? You got your poverty on one hand, you have your obscene amount of money on the other. I think I'd make some slideshows, but no, yeah, they should be able to be turned off because they are not good.

We still have, there's an uncanny valley when it comes to these things where it's just not quite what I would pick, you know? Well, somebody was talking about, you know, a slideshow with some jaunty, nice, happy music from some pictures that he had taken at his friend's funeral. I mean, come on.

Oh, man. But it was a nice day out. It was lovely. Yeah, day in the sun. Now, I've run across them. I've done one of those on Facebook that came out kind of okay, but I had to go in and edit like half the pictures. And it was the first time I saw it.

And I'm like, oh, what's this? I'll try it out. And then I did it. And I'm just like, oh, God, I'm going to see these fucking things everywhere. Thank you, FB Purity, for letting me turn that off from everybody I follow. Alphabet. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, you know?

Yes. They just invested a billion dollars in Lyft. Okay. Yeah, which is interesting because their Google Venture arm is also an investor in Uber. It is also suing them. Yeah. Once you get into this amount of money, all the rules are just gone, aren't they?

Just hedge your bets. It's like, ah, I bet on both. It might be like somebody taking a bet on, say, Twitter stock and then just going out and buying the stock anyway, I guess. Kind of something like that. Well, going along with the self-driving cars, you and I have both firmly come down on the side of the fact that these things are not coming anytime soon.

It's going to be quite a while. And some folks over at The Verge definitely agree with us. Self-driving cars are coming. And U.S. cities are totally unprepared for the radical changes that will accompany them. Roads are crumbling. Public transportation services are out of date and overcapacity. Car traffic is among the worst in the world.

Autonomous vehicles are supposed to be a solve for mobility. But if they arrive to the status quo in our major metropolises, their promised benefits may never be realized. A new crop of research released this week underscores how bad our cities are and how much money was going to have to be poured into them for any autonomous vehicles to ever work.

I mean, we've talked about simple things like spray paint on a sign will screw these systems up. But with roads being as crappy as they are, it's all going to require dramatic changes to our streetscapes, including traffic management services, a re-evaluation of curb and other parking spaces. A lot of money is going to have to be poured in for these things to ever work in our cities.

And is that ever going to happen? Who the F knows? And here's the here's the part that's even just drives me crazy. It's going to take years to do that because I know how long it takes for them to repave 290 going into Chicago. It takes years for them to do that. So to actually like rejigger the roads and repave traffic is going to be a mess for even longer than it probably would be saved by self-driving cars.

It is just going to be a nightmare, especially. Especially when you're in places like Chicago here where it's winter six months out of the year. So you can only do construction, you know, when it's not frozen out. Well, I think it's going to take longer than these people even think. I think so, too.

I never think about that sort of stuff because here I am in California, you know, it's sure it takes him forever to fix a pothole. But cities like Toronto that I visit all the time, which is even worse than Chicago, you basically they have to rebuild their their freeways every year because of snow and damage and all that sort of stuff.

So, yeah, it's getting better here. I think that, I mean, six or seven years, I think these roads have lasted recently. Like every time they do it, it lasts a little longer. And then but I'm in Illinois, too. That is the most corrupt state in the union. So they repave roads that are just repaved because they need to spend the money so they can get more money next year.

Exactly. Yeah. They didn't even. Yeah, they didn't even factor in corruption. Come on. No. Where's the payoff chart? You know, exactly. The Teamsters, all that stuff. Well, let's finish up on some self-driving car news here. Uber has built a fake city in Pittsburgh with roaming mannequins to test its self-driving cars.

They called the city Almano. Remember the Almano. Remember the Almano. Yep. It's a giant fake city with fake cars and mannequins that jump out. Come to the street without warning. Oh, man.

Oh, this is awesome. I would so love to work there. I would like to be the, you know, the troublemaker there to see how I can crash the cars because I'm sure. I know that they should totally send us in to do this. You have a field day. We've been talking about it for four years. You saw the one video where the guy just basically painted a circle around a self-driving car and it couldn't get out.

Yep. Now, imagine taking your drone that just has spray paint cans. And when the car stopped at a stoplight, you just zoom in real quick, paint a circle around it and it can't go anywhere. And you just trap the poor people inside. That would be fun. Speaking of drones, a small drone did hit a commercial airliner and nothing happened.

This is this is this is a great article from Forbes. This guy does John Gaglia. Golia. I don't know how to pronounce his name. He's an aviation accident investigator. And he says, this is bullshit. He's like asked for the paperwork on the impact and all this other stuff.

And he's calling it hogwash and fear mongering. And it's just going to really kind of ruin things when people get all up in arms about these little drones that, you know, he's saying even like, you know, you can throw a DJI into the into a jet jet engine. It's probably not going to do a damn thing. But I understand where people wouldn't want to try it.

People wouldn't want to try it. But we just a major motion picture was made about a captain who basically hit a duck and had to land the goddamn plane in the Hudson. Well, there were a lot of ducks. Well, we're assuming that somebody isn't going to attack a plane with drones.

We're just saying this is happenstance. But he's saying it might not even be because he can't find the evidence that it actually happened. Right. There's a lot of people saying that it happened, but there's no proof yet. Right. No proof that it did. So I just what would be the harm in just establishing a safe zone around airports where you can't fly a goddamn drone?

There are. But people can go back their drone that way, you know. Well, I just I personally hope I'm never in a plane that gets hit by a drone. Oh, me, too. I would personally never never like to be in a plane again. But that's just me. I gave you the book. You should be fine now. I was good with the book.

And to your credit, whenever I get on a plane, I start to play the book. I really do. That's the pilot by Patrick Smith. Yes. Go check it out, everyone. Fantastic. Moving on. Ups and doodads. Brian, you do a lot of email, but you don't use Gmail, correct?

No, I do not. I still am using my own personal mail server, which is dumb. It's just laziness. I have not had the time. I have not read the documentation on how to switch everything over. I should. Yeah. Take an afternoon and then you're done. Spam is so much. It just goes away.

But anyway, since you don't have Gmail, this next app is not for you. It's Boomerang for iOS. I use Boomerang all the time on Gmail, my Gmail account for work. But the problem has always been that you have to use the web interface to do it because of all the tie-ins with the DOM and everything on how they do all of the shit that they do.

If you don't know what it is, it lets you send notifications to yourself if somebody doesn't reply to an email in X amount of time. You can send an email later. You can finish it up and then say, I want to send this at 2 o'clock the next day so they get it when they're going to be there.

Interestingly, though, it took them so long to get Boomerang for iOS done, AirMail does a lot of this stuff built in already, like AirMail 3. So it's an interesting looking app, but I don't know if I'm going to switch. So if anybody out there is trying Boomerang, let me know because I don't know if I'm really ready to switch because AirMail 3 is like the perfect – it is hands down the perfect email client for the phone and the desktop for me.

But as a Boomerang fan, I like the video. The video shows you a bunch of cool things that it can do with summaries and pause email. You can just – it's got a voice assistant that's tied into Siri, and you can say, Boomerang, pause email until tomorrow, and you will just not get any email, which is like, oh, I like that.

Or you could just turn off your email client and not check your email. There's that. We've talked about that a bit. There's this willpower thing. Yes, and we're going to mention that again in about four minutes, I'm guessing. Okay. It's free right now while it's in beta.

I'm sure it will cost money when it's done because Boomerang costs money. It costs a decent amount of money. It's like $30 a month, which is why it's only on my work email account because I don't have to pay for it. Right. Have you heard of the tick box? I have not. So I found out about this this week because there's a lawsuit against these guys, but it's basically the same kind of Cody box that you and I got, but just with different branding on it.

It looks almost the same. The remote that they're selling is almost exactly the same. And they're idiots. Yes. I mean, really, you go to their website frustrated with overpriced cable bills. Turn UTV into a content filled.

It's okay. So maybe this isn't, isn't English here. Turn UTV into a content filled home feature system. Enjoying thousands of movies, TV shows, and apps like Netflix, YouTube, HBO, and many, many more. But then it talks about many other things on page.

It literally is just a little Cody box with some remotes. Now, the problem with those guys is they're getting sued by everybody. So we have Universal City Studios, Columbia Pictures, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Amazon, and Netflix are all suing these guys.

Yep, yep. I mean, it's the only, they're so stupid. You just, if you want to do these things, you have to stay under the radar. Yep. You can't advertise the fact that you're basically just giving everybody everything for free. Did you scroll down and read our clients' testimonials on this crappy WordPress site?

No, I didn't. I was looking at the actual complaint. All the testimonials are, I used to have to pay over $200 per month on cable bills and subscriptions. I love movies. This is the best. Yeah. Like, of course. You're basically advertising that you're stealing TV and movies and everything.

Yep. I do say my wife rents every new on-demand movie that comes out at $5.99 per month. This was getting crazy. Oh, God. What a world we're in right now. I had to pay for stuff. This is silly. I wish I could do this about my bar.

I paid $7.99 for every beer I had. This is getting silly. Yeah. And it's just a hose that you can hook up to the tap and pour your own beer. It's just a cable that you sneak in at night and attach to their kegs. Yep. That's basically all we're talking about here.

Yeah. Well, this is, I mean, this is good. This is the first, I mean, we talked before about, I think it was the UK that was suing or. Yeah. Yeah. It was in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the first time that we're seeing US companies turn around and sue these manufacturers. So. Yeah.

It's just, man, why do you got to be so dumb? Oh, so speaking of getting rid of things that cost money, it's called DF YouTube Distraction Free. It is a Chrome extension, which also works on Opera. And I'm sure there's a Firefox one of you, or there's a Firefox one for the one of you out there who is using Firefox.

It's great. It turns off everything. But most importantly, it turns off comments. Right. Highly recommended. And it's free. Free. And I'm trying out Moment for iOS. This is an app that basically just tracks every, like, your app usage.

So you can see what you're doing. I'm just testing it for this week to see if it's worth anything. I mean, I use RescueTime on my desktop. So, and it sends me an email, like, when I've done five hours of productive work that day. So I know, okay, you're getting pretty close to your limit. Right. Because we all know. This just made me laugh.

Yeah. Because this is, the way they're kind of pushing this one is, you're using your phone too much. So the line that they should be using, the line they should be using is spending too much time on apps. There's an app for that. Pretty much. Put down your phone and get back to your life.

But how can I? I got to look at my phone to figure out if I should put it down yet. Yes. So I have, do you have Instacart where you are? I don't know if that's a global or regional thing. I haven't found any place that delivers with it that I wanted to go to here, but I know what it is.

Yeah. It's a delivery service. They have a deal, particularly with Whole Foods, which I use a lot, obviously, because kid and organic and all that sort of stuff. And I need, I'm generally not this lazy. I like to go shopping. I like to get out of the house. I like to go get my own stuff.

Whole Foods is a two and a half minute walk from your place, but I forgot you moved across town. It is a 15 minute walk now. It's a 15 minute walk, yes. And there are hills. Oh, God, you might sweat. Well, the thing is, I had to use them this week because I had basically a lack of a nanny for almost all week because of jury duty.

And taking your kid to Whole Foods is a whole different story. It's way too like. They appreciate you not bringing your kid with you. Everybody. Yeah. I mean, I wish everybody did what I did because when I go, it's full of fucking kids. But I just don't want to deal with it because he just grabs at everything. So I said, all right, I'm going to use Instacart, especially they give you a discount the first time you use them and all that sort of stuff.

Fix your fucking options on your site. Because what happens is you go through the site and you pick everything that you want. And then your personal shopper texts you to let you know they've begun shopping. And then I got 35 text messages about replacements because you're replacing organic broccoli crowns with organic broccoli when the only option for broccoli on your site was the organic broccoli clowns.

I just want fucking organic broccoli. I don't need 10 goddamn text messages about is this OK? Are you all right? Switching that brave new world. And thank you so much for the text about you replacing whole food sparkling water with whole food sparkling water.

Oh, man. You should, by the way, go back and watch the bullshit episode on organic foods. I know, but look, I'm not going to fight. There's only so many battles I want to fight with the wife. OK, that's not one. That's worth it. Go buy a roll of organic stickers and just get the regular stuff. She'll never know.

I'm pretty sure she doesn't listen to this show. No.

Media candy. Did you by chance watch Mr. Robot? I think we're on what? Episode two of the season? Yes, I did. Episode two. Yeah. What did you think? Let me tell you. I'll give you my opinion and then you can let me know if you think I'm full of crap.

I actually enjoyed the opening sequence shot to NXS's new sensations. Now, we're going to do this relatively spoiler free because the main point is I don't really know what the fuck happened. I got so bored once we got past that opening sequence. Again, I was on my phone.

I was reading a book. I discovered I really don't care about the show at all. I don't care what's happening. I'm so uninterested. And the only reason I'm watching the show and the only reason I enjoy any of the show is those set pieces of directing is a dark room with a dark guy staring into a dark screen, but every now and then there's some colors and some beautifully shot sequences like the opening sequence.

Oh, and by the way, the throwaway line, Google dolls reunion concert, pick a fucking band that actually broke up. You hack ass writers. Well, you talk about the hack ass writers. I want to talk about some of the acting in this one. I don't know if there's acting it's seriously, maybe some overacting the BD Wong character who's like the Chinese diplomat.

Yeah. Are you fucking serious? I mean, I know. Talk about the thing is, he's normally good. Well, did you see him in Gotham? He was in like the last two seasons of Gotham. He played the same guy. Very just like he wants to be Sulu, you know, I know George Takei, sir.

And BD Wong, you are no George. I like you a lot, but come on. Yeah. It's just overacted the hell and underacted. It's either completely overacted or utterly underacted. And yeah, I mean, everything is green. Yeah.

It's the green glow on everything. We got it. It's green. And yeah, I really love the opening bit. But then I was just like, I can play some zombie gunship while I'm sitting here waiting for the next plot point because it's kind of good.

It's not just me. And you watched it this morning, correct? Yeah, I just watched it like a couple hours ago. The only other thing I was thinking is I've waited until wife and kid are asleep and I've had half a bottle of wine by the time I get around to it. And maybe I'm just tired and buzzed and can't get into it.

But you were bright eyed and bushy tailed and feel the exact same way. Yeah, no, I was I was having my my my tea and a hard boiled egg when I was watching it. I was wide awake and I was bored as shit after that beginning segment. But I really want one of those big emoji heads. Those are pretty cool. That was pretty cool.

But, you know, that was like, OK, danger mouse. Gotcha. All right. OK, this thing is the show is just a cut and paste of all the things that are tailor made to be of interest to a certain type. Mainly us. This is just it's like a DNA splicing machine for us because we don't like it.

So, well, that's the thing. I think it's it's we're cluing into the fact that this is being sold and packaged to us and it's not authentic. It's it's not authentic. The show is a repeat of everything we've talked about. It's cut together from Fight Club.

It's cut together from hackers. It's cut together from danger mouse. It's cut together from, you know, anything. It's just and I just don't care what's happening. I'm going to give it one more episode, but I think that might be it. It's a hodgepodge for sure. I mean, that was one of the things that got us hooked at the beginning in the first season.

They were really authentic with the actual hacking stuff, you know, and now it's like I guess they kind of are sort of somewhat, but it's like it's lost its joie de vivre. It's just wash out green now. That's all it is. Water green. Yeah, that's about it.

I got a little follow up on something I said last week talking about director's cuts. I do have one director's cut that I actually adore, and that is the director's cut of The Professional, a.k.a. Leon. Right. There are two scenes that they added to the director's cut that they were removed from the original version in the theaters because Americans are giant pussies.

So, OK, highly recommend if you ever going to watch The Professional, get the cut that is the director's cut, which is called Leon. All right. Brian, let's talk a little bit about Star Trek Discovery here. There are going to be some spoiler alerts here. You saw it.

I did. And? I like the show. I do. Sort of. You heard my rant last week. This is not Star Trek, though. No, it's not. This is not Star Trek. I'm sorry. I actually am.

One of the other things I've started doing, I did it a couple weeks before Star Trek Discovery even started. I've gone back and I'm rewatching Voyager just piecemeal here and there from Netflix. The different I watched the latest Star Trek Discovery that immediately watched a Voyager.

The heart and soul of what made Star Trek Star Trek is not in Star Trek Discovery. That's right. Because Gene Roddenberry, he had some rules around what you could and could not do on Star Trek. And it was all around conflict with crew members that and they had to be resolved that episode.

No ongoing conflicts. Nothing major. And that's why they invented these, you know, you know, parallel world characters or people getting mind controlled and things like that. Yeah. So if they were controlled outside of their own forces, then it was OK if there was conflict.

But when they were themselves, you could not have the conflict. Right. That was a rule of Star Trek and everybody bitched about it. I remember when, you know, I was on the lot when they were still doing DS9 and Voyager. I used to see those guys all the time. And, you know, it was one of the things that they talked about that it's, you know, that's Roddenberry's rule.

You cannot break it. Yep. That's that's the heart and soul of the show. And now we see what happens when you break the rules. Yeah. Because this episode. OK, now 20 years of Star Trek and we get data finally in the first movie when the when the ship is going to crash into Earth, you get an oh shit.

Yep. Right. We're on episode. Was it six? No, no, no. Episode four. Four. Four. Six is the Orville. I'll get to that in a second. So we're on episode six. So we they got a they got a shit and two F bombs. Right. In this. I'm like, yeah, don't say fucking Star Trek.

They do now. They do now. Now. And the funny part was when this is still more spoilery stuff. When the captain gets taken by the Klingons in my head, I'm like, hey, that's the Krill ship. Because I've been watching the Orville so much. Right. It's like they are completely starting to cross over.

And I think I think if you meld those two together, you might actually have the perfect show because the Orville actually still has Roddenberry secret sauce. Right. It just doesn't have the grit, the dirt in the, you know, the gravitas of discovery.

Right. So if you merged them together, you might have a good show. But I'm still watching the Orville. I can't I can't help it. I I said I was hate watching it last time, but I think I may kind of like it. All right. Well, I'm not. I just can't bring myself to do it for that one.

But I am I'm right there with you, man. I'm disappointed with Star Trek right now. It is not feeling like Star Trek. And there is no greater way to prove that to yourself is watch one of these episodes and then just go watch any, any other Star Trek series.

And you will see that a warm glow will come over you that is missing from watching Star Trek Discovery. So we talked about the the honest trailer for Star Trek Next Gen a couple weeks ago. Yep. I am sitting here. I now have, you know, I got Hulu with TV.

So I've got BBC America. And the other day I flipped it on because they played Next Gen all day. Yeah. And I turned it on and it was one of my all time favorite terrible episodes. It was the one where Beverly was banging the space ghost. Oh, God, that's a horrible episode. Beverly.

Every time the guy says his name, Beverly. It is funny because when my ex and I used to drive down Beverly Boulevard to go to the Beverly Center, every time we would pull in, we would just go, Beverly. It was so stupid. Such a terrible episode. But even that was better than Discovery.

Yeah. Okay. Spoilers over. Remember my old podcast. Does it have legs? I do. Coming back. Okay. We're starting back up this week. We're going to do colors. Okay. And then I've, yeah, me and Mike are back in the saddle this week. And after that, I've got a couple of guest episodes lined up because Mike's schedule is so crazy.

So Chris Pichoni is going to be coming on from Grime Life and Under the Noise. I think we're going to do Kids, maybe. That's the next one up. And Zeus from Under the Noise is going to come on and do an episode. So he's still picking his movie. But I changed podcast hosts for that show because I needed a show to test because I'm testing out other podcasting host providers.

Right. See, two episodes ago. And I found Simplecast, which is a great, simple podcasting host. All right. And I moved the Does It Have Legs site over there. So if you go to doesithavelegs.com, you can subscribe and check out the old episodes. We've got 40 of them up there.

And I miss doing that show. So now that I have that extra bandwidth, like I talked about at the beginning of the show, I can actually have some fun podcasting on my own time again. So I'm really looking forward to getting that show back on because it doesn't have a huge audience, but it is a hell of a lot of fun to do. Congratulations, man. Thanks.

Now, if you were writing a show for Netflix, you would be able to find out how many people are actually watching it. Oh, they're opening the kimono? No. No, they are not. Okay. For the first time, TV producers will be able to see how many people are watching almost any Netflix show, including rival programming.

Netflix does not provide ratings information, which has been a point of contention for Hollywood creators who typically rely on that data to make sure they're getting a fair deal for their work. Ratings are being made available from TV measurement firm Nielsen, which is now selling a wider array of Netflix audience data to more people.

They have, they kind of get in and around, to get around Netflix black box, they're using a proprietary technology to capture audio data on what people are watching and then assigning metadata like the name of the show and the episode. So they're kind of getting around it. Netflix isn't buying it.

The data that Nielsen is reporting is not accurate, not even close, and does not reflect the viewing of these shows on Netflix. Netflix said in a press statement, hey, fuck you, Netflix. How about you provide the information then? Again, this black box stuff. We're living in a world where we can track everything. We either don't implement the technology or companies treat it like it's proprietary secret information.

That is not what the internet was built about. Why does Netflix at least sell the damn info? That's quite a business model for them. Well, they should have it at least for their damn providers. It's ridiculous. Yes, it's ridiculous. It's like, it's like, say we did this podcast and then we thought we had stats, but then the stats apparently weren't accurate.

But then they tell us that there's no reason for it. Or is there? Oh, no. God. And again, everything is tracked. Every bit of data can be recorded and looked at and modified, but we can't seem to fucking figure this out, can we? Nope.

But I mean, remember all the smart TVs that were coming out that were listening to the shows that you're watching and selling the data? They could figure it out. They seem to be able to track things. Yeah. I had a girlfriend that had a Nielsen box for a long time, and I just used to go over there and put on the sci-fi channel and she wasn't looking. That's funny.

A friend of the show, Tara, posted a link that I depressed the hell out of me. It's an actual study called The Power of Outdoor Play and Play in Natural Environments. When adults recall their own childhoods, many can remember extended opportunities for outdoor play, whether on streets or sidewalks, parks, undeveloped spaces, wherever.

We were all outdoors all the time. The differences in the way children play today versus 30 years ago are striking. In recent years, only one-fourth of U.S. children play outdoors on a daily basis, even in rural areas, compared to three-fourths from just one generation ago, meaning us. Recess, that time at school when children are typically permitted to play outdoors, has diminished or been eliminated in many schools in the United States.

When U.S. children today spend more than seven hours a day in front of electric media, your kids are spending seven hours a day in front of electronic media people. They spend only an average of four to seven minutes a day in unstructured outdoor play.

That's seven hours a day with a fucking phone and less than seven minutes a day outside. That's insane. This pattern is evident even among very young children. Preschoolers engage in more than 32 hours per week of screen time. My kid is going to be a preschooler in a few years, and he gets less than two hours of screen time a week.

Good. And it's going to stay that way. Keep it that way. And then throw him out of the house and say, go play, kid. That's right. Which is what my parents did. It's like, you know, come home by seven. That's when dinner is. I don't want to see you until then. That was it. I just, I mean, my jaw hit the floor when I was reading the article.

That's insane. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to spend that much time on the screen, at least listen to our show, kids. Yeah, seriously. Get some real life skills. You remember what we used to have? You know, we'd be outside, we'd play all day, and we'd come back, and you were so unbelievably tired and covered in dirt and just happy as can be.

These kids are never going to have that. Yeah, I agree. That sucks. I agree. And something good that is, again, once again, coming from Europe, in this case, France, the French government has taken a bold stance to enforce transparency in photography. As of October 1st, all commercial photos of models that have been digitally altered to make the body parts of the model appear thinner or larger must carry the warning retouched photograph.

Well, it's just going to be on everything then. Pretty much. Any photographs of models in France that appear to have a naturally perfect or just plain unrealistic body proportions will be instantly clear whether or not they have been altered. Advertisers who don't carry the warning on their retouched images will be fined up to basically 37,000 euros or 30% of advertising costs.

Wow. This is good. Can we get that on the news? Well, yeah, that's a damn good point. You'll be happy to know, though, on October 1st, Getty Images announced that it will ban stock images that have been photoshopped as well following the French law. So hopefully this will start a bit of a cascading effect.

Now, that, yes, will hopefully also skip over into the news. Yeah, that's funny. Okay. I just finished Mindhunter on Netflix starring Jonathan Groff, who also played the king in Hamilton's original Broadway run. I liked it.

I liked it a lot. I got to say. It was... Here's the one issue I have with it. The first two episodes were directed by David Fincher. I didn't check to see if the last one was. Right. Because usually they bookended on that first season like he did. So it looked exactly like Mr. Robot? Except yellow. It's exactly the same, but it's yellow.

And it's yellow and green. I guess they do the same thing. But it has that same, you know, desaturated color palette, which is just... I'm starting to get really tired of it. Yeah. Really tired of it. But yeah, I like the show. The first episode, a little iffy. Get past the first episode.

And by the second one, it picks up. And I'm looking forward to the second season. It's getting pretty good reviews, but I enjoyed it. It's about, you know, the FBI back in the 70s when they first started profiling serial killers before they were even called serial killers. At the library.

I've got two books this week. Your favorite, Win Bigley, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter by Scott Adams. Yep. Never, ever going to read this book. Fantastic book. If you want to see how persuasion breaks down from a trained hypnotist and persuasion expert, it's a good book.

I mean, I had no problems with it. I know you've got to bug up your ass about Scott Adams. I don't mind him. And he actually autographed a copy of God's Debris because we just did an interview with him last week. So I'm really looking forward to getting that. And I also read The Asshole Survival Guide by Robert Sutton.

Yeah. He did the original asshole book a couple of years ago. I read that. Yeah. I don't think I need to read a second, do I? This is more tactics and tricks on how to deal with assholes. I don't think you need to read. It's a good book.

I mean, it's a really good read. But if you're dealing with assholes all day at work and you just kind of feel at your wits' end or just want some good tips and tricks on how to deal with assholes in the real world, highly recommend it. I recommend reading the book. Don't get the audio book. But yeah, I liked it a lot.

And Robert is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. We interviewed him this week, too, and he's just a – for a guy that has to deal with assholes all day, you'd think that some of it would rub off on him. Absolutely the opposite. One of the nicest guys I've ever met. Highly recommend that book.

It is a good read. And I started WTF by Tim O'Reilly. I'm about 20% into it. Another one of those books that I think you're going to like. Okay. The one thing that I really like is – I'm waiting to get to that part in the book.

But in an interview he did with Rob Reed on the After On podcast, one of my clients that I kept, he talks about Jaron Larnier's Kodak story. Right. Okay. And basically says that that story is a bunch of bullshit and explains why in a bunch of steps.

It's like, yeah, no. That is an oversimplification of what actually happened. So let's break it down and show what actually happened. So I think you're going to like it. All right. Well, maybe I'll cue that one up next. I just have not – I've fallen off the reading chain briefly and I got to get back up on it.

But to be – to my credit, I've read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and Goodnight Moon about 9,000 times this week. All right. Good for you. Security?

Ha! We're back with Dave Papa Bittner. We missed you last week, my man. Oh, I missed you guys too. It's so good to be back. Oh, my good buddy. You know, I kind of feel like Mother Nature in Year Without a Santa Claus.

And you guys are Heat Miser and Cold Miser or Freeze Miser or whatever his name was that, you know, I have to come in. Hello, boys. You know, I'm going to send you boys back to your places. But anyway, it's good to be back. Old school callback on that one.

Nice. Yeah. Someday when we're offline, you'll have to ask me about the animation error in that show. There's actually a huge continuity error that's bugged me for about a decade now, and no one seems to notice it except me. So, yeah, I'm a fan. All right.

Okay. So we got a little follow-up from you this week. Let's talk about the dark web. We do. Well, you know, as I do, I was listening to last week's show, even though I wasn't participating in it. And when I got to the part where my two favorite grumpy old geek hosts made hay out of saying that that's why they call it the dark web, because you can't scan it.

I spit out my coffee all over the windshield of my car, and I said, you know what? I don't think that's really true, but I know who to ask. And sure enough, as luck would have it, I had in our studio this week Emily Wilson from Terbium Labs. Terbium is a company who specializes in scanning the dark web.

In fact, part of their secret sauce is they can scan for things that you want them to look for without you telling them what those things are. Spooky, right? Sounds like artificial intelligence. Yeah. So they're really good at what they do.

She's really good at what she does. So I asked her this question, and here's what she had to say. You know, after all of this Equifax mess, one of the other credit companies has been sort of tooting their own horn and saying that they will search the dark web to find out anything about you.

And there's been a lot of pushback on that. People have been saying, well, you can't search the dark web. That's why it's called the dark web. This is a specialty of yours and your colleagues at Terbium. So I thought, who better to ask than you? If I want to go out and engage with a company and say, I want to find out everything there is to know about me on the dark web, how possible is that really?

It's certainly possible in that, as you said, we do this for a living at Terbium. Right. Depending on which company you're talking to, whether as an individual, you know, you mentioned, you know, one of these credit organizations is offering a dark web scan.

Or if as a company, you're kind of looking at different providers, it's absolutely possible. Depending on who you're talking to, you're going to get different kinds of information, whether you're looking for financial information, whether you're looking for more threat intel, whether you're looking for personal information. In the case of the individuals who are kind of turning to this credit organization, it's certainly possible.

It's definitely difficult. I mean, that's one of the engineering challenges we all face, right, in this space, is the dark web is a difficult thing to navigate. Sites go up and down. Many of these sites don't particularly want to be found. And so doing reliable data collection at scale on this part of the Internet, it's definitely difficult, but it is certainly possible.

And so this is sort of the secret sauce that various companies have when they're telling you that they can do dark web scans. Absolutely. And it really does depend on who you're turning to and what problem you're trying to solve, because companies are trying to solve this problem differently, and companies are looking for different kinds of information.

So you could be looking for more threat intel information about threat actors. You could be looking for information about vulnerabilities that may impact your company. In the situations like you're discussing, you're typically looking for more personal information or financial information. And that kind of information is out there, whether it's something that's been discussed or that's been leaked or that's available for sale.

And it's also important to note that not all of this is on the dark web. Plenty of this information shows up on, you know, really sketchy, clear websites, too. The fraud trade isn't exclusively on what we think of as traditionally the dark web. So this notion that we can't scan the dark web because it's the dark web, and that's why they call it the dark web, that's sort of a myth.

It is sort of a myth. And that's, you know, one of my favorite things to talk about with people in and out of the industry is the fact that the dark web is complex, and it changes constantly, and it's messy, just like the rest of the internet. But it is a problem that you can approach and that you can figure out how to solve.

It's a difficult problem. That's why many of us are working very hard to figure out how to solve it. But it's definitely something that is measurable and tractable and accessible, and you can track data there. Okay, so when it comes to scanning the dark web, here was my confusion on this, and it probably still is a valid concern.

With the normal web, when you build a spider, you basically start at a starting point, and you get links from a site, then you build your spider out to go out to the linked sites, and that's basically how you spider the web. And with the dark web, I thought that there was not a lot of interlinking going on between websites, so you have to find the URLs to add to your spider queue before you can index them.

And if you don't know where these sites are, that kind of makes them unindexable because you don't know where they are. Because it seems like a lot of people try and stay, I don't know, dark on the dark web. Well, and she does mention that, too. So I would say, I'll happily take a mea culpa and say that there is some sort of scanning that can occur on the dark web.

But things do shift around a lot. Things do disappear. It's not quite the same thing. And I would say, you know, for a company like that, where it is their special sauce, that's one thing. For Experian to be offering a free dark web scan is a completely different thing.

And I think that's fair. I think that's a fair assessment all around. The lesson I think to take from this is that the dark web isn't as dark as most people think it is. It's kind of a light gray web. It's the dark web. Right, exactly. It's the low contrast.

It's the low contrast web, yeah. But if you have the money or the time, it can be done. Right. But not for free by Experian. Probably not. There's going to be a lot of humans going into that because people are going to have to go find these links to put in the spider.

And probably do a little social engineering to get invited into the communities that don't want people to know who they are. So they probably put a lot of time in having guys and gals go out and get into these communities that aren't normally available.

Because you're going to have to have a login to go in and scrape them. Right. So I think probably that's a lot of their secret sauce. I think that is probably an accurate assessment. All right. So I wanted to – more follow-up. I wanted to say that based on your recommendations and advice, I have been trying out the Opera browser.

Holy shit, somebody listens to us. Yeah. That's a first. Yeah. I reload the show at least a few thousand times every week to try to boost the numbers for you guys. But I've been using the Opera browser and I have to say it's really been a pleasure. I'm still bopping around in Chrome from time to time.

But what I've noticed is if I load up a page in Chrome that is really annoying me, I'll copy the URL, paste it into Opera. And boy, is it a lot more pleasurable over in Opera. I mean, everything's faster and the ads are gone and – Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. It's like the web is almost usable again. One little nitpick that I've had is that with my aging Papa Bitner eyes, I find it hard sometimes to know which is the active tab on the tabs across the top. It's sort of – speaking of low contrast, it's kind of low contrast to see – Are you using the light theme or the dark theme?

Well – I'm using the dark theme and it's pretty apparent which is which. So you better try the dark theme. Okay. I did not know there were themes. So that I will be looking into. Yeah. It's just a basic setting in their main settings. All right. I'll check it out. But so far, got to say Opera seems like a nice move.

So thank you, gentlemen. Sure thing. I was having some issues with Opera Mini on my iPad this morning. The sync wasn't working and it also does not work with 1Password which is a pain in the butt. So basically still Chrome on the iPad until they fix that stuff. And I checked with 1Password and they said, yeah, this is a Chrome issue.

We're ready to go. They're just not taking the URLs and passing them to us. Good enough. So let's talk about crack because crack is whack. Crack is whack indeed. Now, I'm sure you guys covered this soup to nuts this week.

So can you just give us a quick rundown? Because I'm pretty sure everybody knows about it at this point. Yeah. It's a big, it's what we call in the business a big deal. It's not the Tempest in the teapot? This is actually a big deal? Well, it's not the Tempest in the teapot.

This is a fundamental flaw in WPA2, the security, you know, the encryption protocol in Wi-Fi that pretty much all secure Wi-Fi connections use these days. Yep. So it's a fundamental problem. It's, fortunately, it's easy to patch.

And fortunately, the patches are backward compatible. So, and the patches are being rolled out quickly. The problem, of course, as with all this, are all of the- IoT devices. Yes. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Jason goes to the next round. It is the IoT devices and millions of devices that are either unable to be patched or, you know, people, or can't be patched.

It can't be patched or people just don't think to patch them because they're, you know, sitting off in the corner or something like that. So, I don't, you know, instead of taking all the time to dig into all the details, we'll have the link to the article, let you know, because there are a lot of details, but it's definitely something you should know about whether or not you're vulnerable to it.

One of the interesting stories that I read, because there's been a lot of talk about how would you actually be affected by this? Because you really, you need to be in Wi-Fi range, has been the story about this. But an interesting sort of thought experiment I read this week, someone said, well, for example, let's say you live in an apartment building and you have access to many, within range are

many, many other Wi-Fi networks that are around you. What if I remotely get access to your machine that's in that environment? If I take control of your machine, does that remotely give me access via this vulnerability to all the Wi-Fi in your building?

Should, shouldn't it? Seems like it should. Yeah. So, that takes away the whole notion that, well, you really need to be within Wi-Fi range. I think really all you need to do is own a machine that's within Wi-Fi range. Right. Right. So.

This also might bring back the golden days of war driving. Like we used to do back in the day. Oh, those good old days. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Looking for the X10 cameras. Just a bunch of kids driving around being crazy. Yeah. We owned so many X10 cameras in LA, it was ridiculous.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Here's a tip, kids. If you have an X10 camera, don't do naked yoga. Just saying. We're going to get to naked cameras at the end of this segment. Oh, right. So, we'll hold that one for later. A little titillating tease for our listeners.

We are going to throw a hat tip out to Brian Seward for being the first GOG listener to throw us the link to the crack kerfuffle as it was happening. So, hat tip, Brian. Good job. Yeah. So, check out the linked articles. It is one you should check out because it's serious. And when the patches are available, install those patches.

Okay. So, this thing popped up over the weekend that was called, want to see something crazy? Open this link on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off. I, of course, since I will click on anything put in front of me, I did.

I was sitting in my family room. I disabled Wi-Fi and clicked through and what before my eyes did appear, but all sorts of information about me and my account with my mobile provider. It had my name.

It had my phone number. It had, interestingly, it had the address of where the account belonged, which was not my home address. It was a business address. So, that's interesting. But, you know, GPS data, all sorts of data that you would probably would have assumed was private or at least not just right there for the clicking in a simple URL right there laid out for you.

So, it turns out that the mobile providers have APIs that software people can buy from them to get access to this data. It's probably, so what's your take on this, guys, from a software point of view, from a developer's point of view?

What's going on here? This shouldn't exist. It's basically what's happening, right? Like, this never, this is a backdoor that just never should be there. Now, okay, let's dive into this a bit. What are they using it for and why does it exist?

Because, you know, there are a lot of things that I can go into dev mode on my phone and I can find all the towers that I'm connecting to. I can see, you know, what they think is my GPS, things like that. Yeah. And when it comes to the account side of things, they may need that for authentication to the towers. Maybe? I'm not an expert on the cell towers.

No, the answer on what they're using this for is to make money. Oh, of course. Even though we give them money. Don't we give them money? We give them money. But in the course of giving them money, we also click on the EULA, which gives them permission to use this data to make money.

So the point of this API is they provide access to it to third parties who then suck in the data and make money with it. Now, interestingly, if you follow through, there's a story from Reuters about this where earlier this year, I think back in April, the Trump administration rolled back some Obama era rules, which I know is hard to imagine the Trump administration rolling back some Obama era rules, but they did.

And this rule basically allows the companies to do this. Now, the thing in the Reuters story that really struck me was, and here's a quote from the Reuters story. It says, Republican FCC commissioners have said the Obama rules would unfairly give websites the ability to harvest more data than Internet service providers.

Oh, this is why I can't even go on Twitter anymore. This is a sort of stuff. Oh, come on. If you're going to if you're going to steal from the users, at least be fair. Right. Exactly. You're going to steal from the users, too. Right. Exactly. Right. The websites were able to bend over their users more readily than the Internet service providers.

And that's not fair. We want to sell their information, too. So, allegedly, how do I say this? According to the mobile providers, you can opt out of this. But some of the people who have been testing it out have been saying, well, we tried to opt out of this and it doesn't seem to work.

So, now, the question I had about this was, what happens next May when GDPR kicks in in the European Union? GDPR is the big general data protection regulation, the big privacy regulation.

The big kahuna. Yeah. The big one. And that is going to have global implications. And so, what I see the problem being is, let's say I'm a European citizen and I do business in the United States. So, I have a phone in the United States and I, you know, sign up for something here.

Well, that would be a violation of GDPR because GDPR only cares that you're a European citizen. It doesn't care where that data is housed or anything like that. And all the accounts I've heard is that the European Union will come after companies with big fines if they do this sort of thing.

This is going to get figured out in the courts. Yeah, that's exactly my thought is they're not going to change. No U.S. company is going to change a goddamn thing until they get hit hard in the wallet. I agree. Yeah, this is just one of those frustrating ones that makes you bang your head against the desk and say, aren't you all taking enough?

Isn't it bad enough that we have the most expensive, slowest internet in the world? Or, you know, just the way I always say it is, you ever get the feeling you're being had. Guys, guys, welcome to America where we maximize shareholder value.

That's the way it works. Yeah. If it can be maximized and you're not maximizing it, then you could be hold liable for not maximizing shareholder value. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean if it's ethical or not. It should be ethically maximized shareholder value. But no, that's not in the that's not in the TOC.

It's unfortunate. It's frustrating. It's it makes me sad. So moving on to things that I don't know. Does this one make me sad or not? This is the story about Kaspersky. And this is a really interesting article about Kaspersky and what might have happened with Kaspersky and the Russians.

It was we reported earlier, the the Russians may have gotten some information from or did get information from a contractor for the NSA who had Kaspersky software installed on a computer that he had also put some sensitive information on. Was this the guy that was like the hoarder who stole all the data and kept it in his garage?

No, this is someone different, although the timeline kind of overlaps him. OK, that's why I got confused. Yeah, this is somebody else. But there's been a lot of speculation is what happened because Kaspersky has been saying we had nothing to do with this. We do not knowingly collude with our government to collect secret information.

But what this article really lays out, I think that probably most people aren't aware of, is just how deep your antivirus software can get into your system and how it works. It was kind of striking to me there how routinely they will.

If you have a file on your machine and the antivirus software thinks it might be a virus but isn't sure, it may just take that file and upload it to its own cloud servers to have a better look at it. Kind of makes sense.

In a world where you trust people, that would make sense. Right. Right. Yes, it would. Exactly. We don't trust anybody anymore. Well, and again, one of my big complaints, no manuals.

Be nice to know that the software is doing that. Well, have you actually gone and read the Kaspersky? Wouldn't it be EULA? Because I bet somewhere in there it says, hey, we're in your machine. We're going to take it with us. I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does. I bet it does. I'm sure it does. And it's not just Kaspersky who does this.

Kaspersky has a reputation for being quite aggressive about this. But it's certainly not just Kaspersky who does this. There are, you know, American antivirus companies who do this as well. Right. Because, I mean, if you need to use the AI and the machine learning, you need to move the file to the machine that is the AI or has the learned.

Right. The last thing you want to do about this is be arbitrary, right? Exactly. We don't want to be arbitrary. No, arbitrary is bad. No, no arbitrary. So, it's sort of a long read, but it's a deep read. And I recommend it for anybody who's interested to know not only what's going on with this Kaspersky thing, but also exactly what that antivirus software may or may not be doing with your system.

Check it out. It's an eye opener. So, this is from The Intercept. Do we like The Intercept this week or do we – I can never tell if we like The Intercept or we hate The Intercept this week. They keep changing and flip-flopping on things. So, I never know if I'm supposed to like them or hate them this week.

Yeah, I don't know. I can't help you there. Okay. Well, I know something that none of us like, and that's Snapchat. And I kind of had – this is more put in here tongue-in-cheek because I think we all will find this somewhat hilarious. Snapchat isn't just the favorite social media platform of millennials everywhere.

It's also becoming an under-the-radar model for the future of cybersecurity. Think about it. At its most basic, Snapchat lets you send a picture or video message, deletes it in just seconds, except for everybody's screenshots, and makes it impossible to retrieve it afterwards, except for the fact that Snapchat is on record as keeping everything.

A self-destructing message has a perfect way of safeguarding data and information. Who knew it was going to take a generation of meme-obsessed weirdos to popularize a Mission Impossible gimmick? This has got to be the dumbest article I've ever read. I'd like to point out it's from Slate, too, which is your go-to. Well, everybody's got good journalists and bad journalists.

This is a bad one. So it goes on to talk about how there are increasing number of tools catered to mimicking the Snapchat model for professional means such as whisper, confide, signal, all of which we've talked about on the show. This just takes us right back to what we seem to always come back to, what does delete really mean?

Now, he's making claims about Snapchat's deleting that we've already – Snapchat is on record as saying that they don't delete these things. And even if they were on record saying that they delete these things, we know there's backups somewhere. We know this about Google. We know this about Facebook.

There are backups of all these things. The cloud is getting really crowded, but it can keep expanding. So, again, this is kind of a bullshit article, and it's still – we need to do a deep dive episode on delete. That's all I'm saying. It's on my list. You know, over at the CyberWire, we do special editions pretty much once a month.

And a long-term one that I want to work on is what does it mean for something to be deleted? So I'm working on it. It'll probably take a few months for me to get it and wrangle up the people I want to talk to. But I'm interested in that too. I think it's an interesting story. Good, as long as we can run it over here so we don't have to do the legwork.

Exactly. No, no, I'm happy to – yeah. Of course, of course. I'm happy to do all the homework. Appreciate it. Yeah, no problem at all. Don't forbid we have to do anything. Well, it is my job, after all. Okay, you got something about nudies in here.

I do. Let's wrap this puppy up with some puppies. Nice. Nice. I do. There's a new app called Nude. It's clever. Sounds like a Google product. Yeah. And they are using machine learning.

Although the article says artificial intelligence. It's funny. The first article that I saw on this did not use the word artificial intelligence at all. They only said machine learning. And unfortunately, I lost track of that article. I was going to send it to you, Brian, so we could all be happy with the discipline that they had, the restraint.

Well, let me tell you, just a little bit earlier in the show, we did a story where they literally took the headline, which used artificial intelligence twice, repeated the headline in the first paragraph of the article, and replaced artificial intelligence with machine learning, which was the actual accurate one.

So they just used AI for a better headline. No, it is a better headline. So what this app does is you give it access to your photos, and it uses what could possibly go wrong. Sounds safe. It gets even better because it scans using artificial, I'm sorry, machine learning.

It scans your photos and looks for nude photos. It then puts them in a password-protected vault within the app. So the notion here is that you- How many Bitcoin do we have to pay to unlock that vault? I was about to say, I want to go build an app right now called Nudes, just with a Z at the end, and that one's going to be, I only have the password, motherfuckers.

So this is sort of, I mean, it's a noble cause. It's to protect you from yourself, because how many times has this happened to you, where you have your phone? Wait, wait, all right, hear me out, guys. Don't you have a morality clause?

Where's the story going? I know, I know. So you show someone a picture on your phone. You say, this must happen to you, Jason. You say, look at this picture of Bam Bam. Isn't he adorable? You hand them your phone. They say, oh, Bam Bam is adorable. I'm sorry, she, right. You hand them, I think of the Flintstones, and Bam Bam on the Flintstones was a he.

Well, I'm getting her brother, and his name's going to be Pebbles, so. He used to, I've been, I've been telling Jason that since he first got Bam Bam. So you hand them the phone, you say, look at this cute picture of Bam Bam, and they go, oh, that is a cute picture of Bam Bam, and then they start flipping through your photos. Yeah, that's not, that's not allowed.

Not cool. The difference is, Jason will say, look at this photo of Bam Bam, and hand you the phone with a picture of his dick on it. No, no. There are no dickies on my phone. My dickie is, my dickie is in no phone zone. No, he just, he has one of those cases that has a photo built into the case, and that's what it is.

It's the wallpaper, it's on the back, it's just like, hey, truth in advertising, come on, let's just get it, let's get it out of the way. So the idea here is that they're trying to protect you from yourself. So if you have these on the phone, it automatically gathers them up, puts them in a vault, and protects you from yourself and other prying eyes on your device.

A couple of funny things I saw, now, one of the clever things is that on iOS, if you have a recent phone, an iOS 11, it uses Core ML, which is part of iOS 11. And so it does all the heavy lifting on the device, so it's not sending the photos to the cloud.

And you know what it does once it's done? It creates one of those little slideshows for you with all your nudies. I think it is, I think we need an app called Karma. So you show it the photo that you want it to see, and then it takes the worst photos on your phone, you know, whatever it may be, and then if they swipe left or right, they just get mind-bombed.

Yeah. Because that way, it'll stop people from dicking around on your phone, pardon the pun. Yeah. I like, well, from the article that says that they were finding that the scanning wasn't accurate. So they built software to scrape sites like Pornhub for representative images, eventually amassing a collection of 30 million images, which I swear, boss, is for work.

I swear, boss, it's for work. The follow-up story is next week, we're going to find out they've both been arrested because they had over 30,000 child porn things inadvertently picked up from their scrape. The other thing I love is it says, the algorithm still isn't perfect, the founders say.

If you have man boobs, those will be imported. Well, you know, that is for the best. Well, that's probably for the best, to be honest. Those definitely need to get off the main feed. You know, I've always wondered why iOS and Android or whatever didn't have an option where if you brought up one photo, you could lock it and it could only be unlocked with either your passcode or your thumbprint to move to another photo.

Because everybody seems to have this issue and it seems that all these things already exist in the iOS software. You just add that function. Lock onto this photo. That's a great idea. We call it penis ID. You know, Brian, you could probably get a software patent on that.

God damn it. That takes work. So this is available. It's on the App Store. 99 cents a month. To have it work. So if you don't pay the 99 cents, guess where the photos are going.

Right, exactly. They pop up on that search from AT&T with your phone. All the photos just pop up automatically. So, yeah, you know, I guess if you're someone who needs this, you know you're someone who needs this. So I don't need this because I have a morality clause.

That's right. David Bittner does not dick around. Uh, no, that's not the show title. That is not the show title. It'll cost you 99 cents a month to make that not a show title moving forward.

Uh, evil as a service. Yep. All right, gents. That's what I have this week. Until next week. Stay safe. Don't click on everything. We'll try. I found a great article over at McSweeney's famous authors reply to your unsolicited dick pick by James Cricks.

I loved this. It was very funny. Yeah, I'm not going to blow too many of them here because it's got, you know, replies from Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. Uh, I don't want to blow your wad on this right now. No, I don't. I don't. Uh, but I, I am going to go a little Buck Oscar Wilde and tell you the one, his reply.

There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting a dick pick and the other is getting yours. Jeez, I was cracking up at all of these. They are fantastic. And Home Depot has launched a new series for millennials to teach them how to use the basics of home improvement.

And they actually had to do a video on how to use a tape measure. If these kids had gone outside and made forts, instead of sitting inside with their thumb up their ass looking at their iPad, they'd probably know how to use a tape measure by now. But nope. Everybody looks at their phone.

Never hung up a fucking poster ever. You don't, you measure. So you put it through, I guess there's apps for that. There, there pretty much are apps for that now. Sorry. I thought you'd like this one. It's the Dictionary of Ikea Product Name Meanings.

I love this. This is fantastic. I, this needs to be an app. So I, next time I'm in an Ikea, I can actually look it up in real time. Well, it's a website. So it kind of is an app. It is. It's an old school app. No. Yeah. Highly recommended. If you ever wanted to know what your figure digger bigga bigga was, was actually named for.

Yeah. That's awesome. I love this. Thank you for that. This is bookmarked. Definitely. Yeah. No, I've got this one. I've got this one in the, uh, the bookmarks bar under cool shit. Although to be fair, I think I've kind of moved out of my Ikea furniture stage in life. Although to be, to return the fair, fair thing, I, Ikea is great for kids stuff.

So I will be buying a lot of more Ikea stuff. And they're moving into IOT. So you might be buying some electronics from them at some point in the future. Oh, and, uh, the last one I found is a site called Unsplash. Beautiful, free photos gifted by the world's generous community of photographers.

Basically a great place if you need, uh, a photo for your Instagram account to put some crappy text over to make you feel inspirational. Uh, like InspiroBot probably pulls from this all the time. Probably. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot of decent photos on there. If you just need something quick and dirty, you can get it for free.

Uh, and you don't have to give credit if you don't want to, if you're a complete asshole and... Or just be like everybody else and go to Pinterest and steal shit that isn't free. Yeah. Save the, save the lawsuits and the, the DMCA takedowns. Go to Unsplash.com. Get your shit for free.

Yes. Feedback loop. We have a ton of new Patreon subscribers. Thank you. Jason M. Richard R. Darren M. Andrew S. Bayrod G. Michael C. And also from PayPal, was it, uh, Breed J. and Gilbert D.

Yep. Thank you guys all so much. That's awesome. We really do appreciate it. Over at Facebook, using their review system. Who knew? Who knew? Well, a couple people have done it, so thank you so much. Richard R. gave us a five-star review, and Brett R. also gave us five stars and said, love listening, just started, and currently I'm on episode 37.

So, wow, this guy's going one... You might want to start with the current ones and work your way down. But, hey, you'll find that out in about a year when you catch up, I suppose. I'm a fabricator that wanted to get into building in the digital world, also. Thanks. So, we appreciate that, Brett. Thanks a lot. Yeah, it's funny. We're in the digital world, and we wanted to get into fabricating.

We wanted to build shit that lasts. Yep. All right, let's move on to Twitter. Gadlaw6 says, AI in a phone. I immediately thought of you guys. Pricey high-tech features define new smartphone wars. Yep. And this is a Chinese camera that uses machine learning, as it says later in the article, even though it has the AI headline, to basically tell if you're pointing your camera at food or a dog.

Oh, how far we've come with technology. This is fantastic. It's basically the app that they tried to build in Silicon Valley. So, there you go. It is. That's what I was saying. You know, on the previous one we were talking about with Bittner, with the, you know, if you're doing penis recognition, those guys have already figured it out. So, just get the Silicon Valley guys on it.

Hot dog or not. Mm-hmm. Razer0133 writes, oops, my bad. Oh, this is in referral to how the buttons have switched now. So, I had to Google it after iOS 11 froze my phone. Hard reset is now the power button along with the down volume button.

Oh, okay. That's good to know. Good to know. I did not know that. Yes, I did not either. Yep. And Chris L1977 writes, I switched to Overcast years ago and love it. I can see 13,000 people saying, fuck this shit, I'm out on the Apple app. Yep. Yep, maybe. Yeah, it's really terrible.

Yeah, it's bad. I finally switched. So, I'm listening on Overcast now as well. Yeah, it sucks because that's where we were going to get our new stats. Yep. Oh, we're never going to get stats. Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. Yes, they do. Thank you, Trent. Nathan Reutzma writes, going through the oldies back to 2014 year-end edition, check episode 91 around 34 minutes, might settle a disagreement.

And it goes back into you giving a story and then saying, if you're not doing anything wrong, what would it matter? And then me laughing and saying, that used to be my position and now you're taking it. So, I think we both have wavered over the years on this one. I know, but I did find the first episode.

Last time when we were talking about it, I remember finding the clip where you were the first one to come out to say it around episode 34. And I posted it on another episode. This has all happened before this has all happened. I think we're both firmly in the camp of it actually does matter these days.

Yes, we are. The show has definitely turned us into going, we should have some privacy. Yeah, we're just getting senile now. After 230-some apps, we just, you forget what you say. Sometimes I think Jason has the kid and I have the dog. That's how long we've been doing this for.

It's getting there. It's the next one. We're moving over to GOG.show. Comment from Ben Floyd. I'm a long-time listener and I finally have to jump onto the AI versus ML conversation with a funny but somewhat serious jab at the term and industry. I, for one, would never deploy a true AI in a security capacity.

Who's to say a truly sentient system with morals and unique and autonomous interests wouldn't get bored with its job and go analyze and bet on sports ball instead? Or maybe it decides your company is morally bankrupt and is run by a chauvinistic shitbag and sends all credentials to the Russians.

I'm just saying, would T2 really support Uber? Machine learning does not have this problem. It only has subjective biases built in by its human overlords. So much better. Keep up the great work and get Bittner a coffee, damn it. Next one is from Atlas128.

Try Mastodon for a Twitter alternative. And he links to Mastodon. And of course, the point being, nobody's on Mastodon. And the point of being on one of these services is to be around other people that you know. So I did some research into Mastodon. There are a metric shit ton of people on Mastodon.

They're all Japanese school kids. I went and downloaded every Mastodon client I could find, and one out of the ten was in English. The rest were all in Japanese. Right. And I found a way that we could actually start our own Mastodon server and have, you know, the geeks hang out on our server.

But no. Because nobody would show up. It would be us, and we'd be spending money for something that would not be that fun. So I tried it. I could not find that much going on there. And yeah, it's like starting over in a noisy room where you don't know anybody.

Right. All right. Moving on. Next up is from Peter Anderson. In a previous episode, you asked us listeners to come up with ideas about novel uses for self-driving cars. See, I'm totally senile. I don't remember we asked for that. But apparently we did. We did. Here's one. Hill training for runners. Yes, I'm one of those nuts.

I'll run uphill myself while the car follows or leads. It doesn't really matter. Then I quickly let the car drive me down to the starting point to save time. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Why don't you just shoot yourself in the head? Dude, or just get a skateboard. Yeah. Or a bike. Well, you can't run with the bike, but you can run with a skateboard.

It's pretty light. Oh, that's true. I got that. Yeah. So he says, no more boring treadmill sessions for the weekly uphill training. With a self-driving car by my side, I can finally take that outside. Also, of course, a self-driving car will allow LSD trips. I'm assuming not the ones that I would like. Nope. That's long, slow distance for you non-runners.

Yeah. The ones that I would like would not require a self-driving car at all. Well, if I wanted to get a snack. To be improvised. Okay. So you do a lot of running and you would like to only run one way and have a car take you the other way. He does say, I'll admit though, I do find it a bit ironic that this makes the really, really, really fit people that can often get around on a daily basis without a car, a brand new focus group for self-driving cars.

We'll be all over them as we were with the first consumer market GPS watches. Heck, I might even choose to live in my self-driving car a couple of months per year. Some of us do already. And links to a link over a trailer running mag. Wow, man, you live a very different life than us, but kudos for you. Well, the van life thing I'm down with, I like that, but I'm just looking at those pictures of those vans.

Those vans have to smell so bad. Go look at the pictures of these guys. They put paneling in there and some of them have their dog in there. You know, we have lots of cars parked around at Venice Beach, but they aren't runners. No, they're not. They're running from the law and their past and their misspent youth.

All right. Next up comes from Ivor Davies. Seeing you guys, we're talking about Jason visiting New Zealand. I thought you might like to check this out. His creator of Shit Towns of New Zealand Facebook page gets death threats. So a guy was taking pictures of the crappiest towns in New Zealand, and apparently people don't like that.

Too bad. Yeah. We do that in America, and it's called art. That's true. Next up is from Ben. I was very glad to hear you guys are also losing faith in discovery. As you'll discover in this episode, we've totally lost faith. So it was the fourth episode that did it for me, too.

I'm really bored with having to follow the dual storylines of the Klingons. I really don't give two craps about their troubles and infighting. I'm not sympathetic to the outcasts and really don't care about his love story. And yes, they are whiny. The storyline so far feels like it took would have been a single episode of Star Trek The Next Generation and spread it out over multiple episodes with useless backstory and filler, killing off all the main characters in two episodes.

You know they're only doing it to try and keep people paying attention, not because of any storyline. And yes, magic spores that are more advanced than any tech I've ever seen. Lame. I won't be hate-watching this. The last show I hate-watched was The Walking Dead, and that was only because I was producing The Talking Dead. So please let us know if you continue, and it gets better.

I'm happy Dirk Gently is back on. Yes, really. Holy shit! Okay, that's the best thing ever. I didn't know. We got somebody who's working on The Talking Dead, listening to this show. Hey, man, I love that show. Fantastic work. And even better, Dirk Gently is back. It didn't show up on my Hulu yet, so I'm going to have to go take a trip to Dirk Gently.

Oop-tackt! Go to Sweden for that one. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. I think we all agree on that, basically, shitty rundown of Discovery. We are on the same page. Yes, we are. Next one comes from Brian. Hey, guys, just wanted to leave you an arbitrary comment over 140 characters about how much I enjoy the show.

I'm a conservative and never thought you guys were too political. Difference of opinion is good for people. Just wanted to thank you guys for the great show and hope you keep it up. P.S. I hope you put the Chinese cameras back up. It was much better than that show, Big Brother. Nice. Thank you so much, man. I'm glad somebody can handle a dissenting opinion and not get their panties in a bunch.

Thanks for listening, dude. I agree. Thanks a lot. We got some iTunes ratings this week as well. We have a first up as a five-star rating from Mahonokejo. Mahonokejo. It looks like you want to go like very Hawaiian when you see that spelling. It's pretty awesome. It is very Hawaiian.

Yes. Not just for geeks. This is some serious entertainment. Whether or not you were an elite member. Actually, elite should have been spelled like with a one and... One, three, three, seven. Yeah. One, three, three, seven. Elite member of Brian's VBS back in the day. You will certainly enjoy these two characters and their weekly entertainment. The upbeat Bittner segment is especially enjoyable.

I love how low-energy Bittner is really caught on. I do, too. We got a five-star from the Behoi Man. If you like tech and like to laugh. Hello, guys. Greetings from Sri Lanka. Well, greetings back to you.

Came across your podcast about six months ago through the Cyber Wire. Hey, back with low-energy Bittner there. And fell in love with it. I work in tech in a third-world country, but I'm glad I can relate to you guys in many ways. Sorry to hear about the numbers, but keep up the good work.

Not many people listen to podcasts here in Sri Lanka, but I'm trying to get my friends to listen to you guys. I'm putting some money aside, which we'll hopefully be able to make a donation soon. Good luck, guys. Hey, thanks a lot. And you know what? Since you work in tech in a third-world country, next time I call HP Tech Support, say hi.

He works in tech. He doesn't work in fucking tech support. I'm making a joke. Thanks a lot for listening, guy. 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 a snarky review.

And tell all your friends. Closing shout-outs. My closing shout-out. Well, Jason, you'll be happy to know the Los Angeles Dodgers pummeled the Chicago Cubs last night. And we are going to the World Series, baby. You know, the World Series that involves only American teams except for the one Canadian team.

Right. Yes. No, I was very happy when I, Siri, tell me the score of the Cubs game. And she came on and said, ah, spanked. She actually did say there was a very snarky review about the score at the end of the day. Awesome. So I was very happy about that.

But now, you know, I'm sorry for all my Cubs fans here in Chicago, but I just can't do another Cubs World Series. It was too stressful. And now we don't have to. So, beauty. Beauty. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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. Or 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 232. 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. You guys, this is so fucking cool. So sorry. No good at it. It is fucking cool. Let's do it. It's certainly not just because...

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