233: Fork Disruption!

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks cloud accounting software helps freelancers master their admin and makes invoicing a breeze. Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and start your free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. In a strange development, Brian, this week I rigged my Mac for full-on development again. In a strange development, you're now a developer? Again? Yeah, again. I have to do some software development for a little back-end tool that I'm working on for one of my day jobs and needed to get it back up to speed.

So we'll talk about the stack that I'm using later on in apps and doodads. But it was amazing how fast it just kind of came back to me. Like, everything I needed, I remembered all my Git commands, pulled out all my repos from cold storage. It was kind of fun, I gotta say.

Yeah, nostalgia. Wait until you're deep in it. Yeah, well, the nice thing about it is I'm the client, kind of, because I'm the one that makes the spec. I write the software. It is my rules. I can't wait until next week when you fire yourself. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I missed a deadline and I'm out.

This dude wrote me at 11 o'clock at night and he was so rude. Yeah, seriously. He's drinking again, man. I keep getting these nasty tweets from him. Yeah. He tells me I'm a moron. Yeah, I do that all. Yeah, that's the way it'll work out.

Yeah, it's funny. I was reading through the show notes and you've mentioned iMac a couple times, like when you got it and things like that. And it's just every time you say iMac, I have this mental block where I cannot imagine them as being decent machines. I just see the Aquamarine box. With the round mouse?

With the round mouse. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this one's a little bit nicer. Okay. It's actually really, really nice. Because from where I'm standing, it's just all a monitor. Hmm. Very cool. Yep. And I would just like to say F you to Amazon.

The stock price went through the roof today. Oh, good for you. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit and why it went through the roof. But every time that there's an Amazon commercial on TV now, my little Alexa is just going batshit insane.

You know, there's a real simple solution. Not watch TV. Rename it to Echo. Yeah, but then I'm never going to remember it. It's amazing how quickly you can actually get over that. And then the commercials will no longer trigger your device. I know, but it's really stupid. I mean, I own one of the fucking things already.

You're a Star Trek fan. The fact that you haven't renamed it to computer is beyond me at this point. I did. Try it. Try it for a day. I was going to say try it for a week. But if you try it for a day, it's amazing how much, you know, the term computer is bandied about. It's not like it's a really obscure word.

That's a good point. I still think that they should let you name it yourself. It's ridiculous that they don't. Exactly. You know, with all this machine learning and computer training, you'd think that it would be able to do that by now. But I guess not. Well, since you're unwilling to rename your device, Amazon is going to still be there for you, Jason.

This may be driving you crazy, but at least you can now order Valium from them. Yeah, I know. You can get me some fentanyl soon. Oh, fun times with that. But yeah, I mean, I can always just get a Google Home. Yeah. Good luck with that. We know that's not going to happen. I already paid for this damn thing.

Well, actually, this one was free, but my little echo dots were not. Right. Anyway, let's do a little follow up. Okay. How about a little follow up? Last week, we said we were watching episode four of Star Trek Discovery. It was actually episode five. Oh, how time flies when you're watching a show that kind of sucks.

Yeah, it's not getting any better. I didn't mind the last episode, which is episode six, I believe. It was okay. It was a bit of a return to somewhat of a feel of original Star Trek, sort of. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah. We had some Vulcan action. At least the Tardigan is gone.

Yeah. That whole thing was done. Dumb, dumb, dumb. There's an interesting report from Indeed.com. It's a report on ageism in the tech industry, something that we talk about quite often. Yes. And why we're not very happy about being in the tech industry and moving away from it.

There's some good numbers in here. I'm just going to leave the link in the show notes at gog.show slash 233 if you want to go check it out and are really interested in this kind of thing. But for the most part, everybody is scared that they're going to get old and lose their tech job. And they are. Yeah. If you're lucky to have a job at all, it definitely won't be in tech.

And I got another article from my friend Liz Lawley on Facebook. This came through. It's separation from your cell phone boosts your cognitive capacity. And this is physical separation. Not just, you know, it's got to be in the other room. Not where you can see it. Because if you can see it, all you want to do is check Twitter.

It doesn't have to be in the other room. It just shouldn't be sitting on your desk. It needs to be out of sight. Yes. And probably not in your pocket. Because then you can feel it and then you go, then you get, you know, phantom leg syndrome or phantom vibration syndrome. I still get that every now and then. Yeah, it stopped for me.

You know why? Because I get phantom wrist syndrome because I have an Apple Watch now. It only vibrates on my wrist. Sure. It's related to the watch. Uh-huh. It is. Yes, it is. Now watch it there, mister. Don't be getting smart with me. I can't be getting smart. My smartphone's on my desk. My cognitive capacity is depleted.

Depleted. Depleted. And this comes from, it's an article about a study that was called, The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity from the University of Chicago. Both things are linked in the show notes. Check it out if you want to see some science. Science.

She's an actual professor and said the science was sound. Excellent. Well, I mean, not excellent. That's bad, but good to know. It's good to know. Knowing is half the battle. Yes, it is. And there was an article in the New York Times. Did you get a chance to read this one about why we aren't built to live in the moment?

I did not because I was in the moment. Okay. I highly recommend going back and reading this article. It is fascinating. And one of my favorite articles of the week. But it's basically saying that we're just really not built for this. We need time to think about the future. And we do what best when we're thinking about the future.

Because when we think about the past and the present, things don't go well for us. No, not really. I mean, that's Twitter. Yeah. But yeah, those things are what stop you from thinking about the future. Yeah. Yes, exactly. That's kind of the point. Yeah. I mean, living the now has always been kind of a load of crap to me.

Because I'm like, well, if you live, I'm kind of concerned about what's happening next. That's been my focus. Yeah, and that's where we really shine, is when we're thinking about what the next thing is and planning for it and putting our ducks in a row. Keeping you busy. I will go back and read this then, because that sounds right up my alley.

Definitely. It is one of my favorite articles of the week, for sure. And in an interesting turn of events, 23andMe now thinks that I'm 17.7% Italian. Oh, they're revising their history. They are, because we linked up profiles with me and my dad, and even though he's over 40% Italian, it still puts me at 17.7%, which still doesn't really work out to the right math.

But it's closer. You've got to get your mom on there, link her in, and then they have your entire family. Yeah, that's never going to happen. Yeah. I can't believe that you're still futzing about with it after last week's deep dive through their terms of service and privacy agreements.

Well, I'm already in the system, and they send me new stuff all the time. That's right. Okay. If they find something new, like there was a new report on celiac disease in a couple of my genes that they said that I should check out, because it was a new report. They're giving you new stuff as they're doing and developing new tests.

Right. So I go back, and that's when I saw a big banner at the top saying, we have updated your results. I'm like, okay, great. And it's due to a process called phasing, phasing out the truth and for something else, I don't know. And in a quick experiment that I'm doing this week, I turned off FB Purity and ad blockers for Facebook.

Okay. I'm using it as it was meant to be by the Zuck himself. How's that going? Oh, my God. How the hell do people who don't know about the tips and tricks on how to make Facebook usable live with that thing? It is terrible.

They are awash in ads. That's all Facebook really is. And they scroll and scroll, and it's why they don't see your updates or my updates or any of their friends' updates. And yeah, it's completely useless. I can't be online without FB Purity and Opera's built-in ad blocker.

I just can't. It's a mess. Yeah. I mean, I saw the same. Every time I go, it's the same 10 articles from the same 10 people and just a bunch of ads. There's nothing new in there. If I flip over to recent, which, you know, they always automatically flip you back from, you can see a few new articles.

But, wow, the control that they have over what you see is amazing. I had no idea it was that bad. It's that bad, Jason. I've got to say, if you're not using FB Purity yet, it is worth its weight in gold alone just for the fact that you can set it to always keep it on new stories, not featured.

Yeah. That in and of itself makes Facebook about 70,000 times more useful. You throw in all the other things that it does, the ad blocking, the autoplay of videos, shutting that off, the hiding different app updates or whatever extra randomness is in there. That's all just icing on the cake.

The cake is it keeps that sucker on most recent. Yeah. And if you don't know what we're talking about, it is a Chrome and Firefox and Opera extension. I don't know if it works on Safari, but it's free and we'll link it in the show notes. It's free and it's awesome.

In the news. I know this is going to come as a shock to you, Brian. Hmm. Apple is not America's favorite tech company anymore. That doesn't really come as a shock to me. No, not really.

Not anymore. You and I have been complaining about the declining quality of Apple products for quite a while now. It also bears some logic anyways. When you look at it, it's Amazon. Ubiquitous. Everybody uses it. Apple, not necessarily. There's a lot of PC users out there.

A lot of people using Android phones, not iPhones. A lot more people using Android than iPhones, actually. Google, everybody uses at least some aspect of Google software. Facebook, everybody's on Facebook. Microsoft, they're just kind of inoffensive. A lot of people may not have any product from Microsoft or even think about them anymore.

I know, how the mighty have fallen, eh? Yeah. So as far as Amazon, Google, and Facebook go, everybody is using them. So people find things that they like about them. Apple, a lot of people don't bother. A lot of people have no exposure to Apple or the ecosystem.

And actually, the Microsoft thing, the reason Microsoft is doing so well is all their cloud products. It's really behind the scenes. It's all under the hood stuff. So you never think about Microsoft, even though you're probably using Microsoft. Yeah. Old Azure is still out there. But yeah, this is a survey done by The Verge. They ran it from September 28th to October 10th with 1,520 people nationally representative of the U.S. Census from 2016.

And there's a bunch of good graphs in there. What it really turns out to is that Facebook and Twitter are the least trusted of all tech companies. Right. And for good reason. Yeah. I mean, Google should really be in there, but, you know, whatever.

Yeah. Seriously. I don't trust any of them. I don't trust any of the big five. So there you go. Okay. Me neither. But yeah. What are you going to do? I keep everything backed up locally. Fuck the cloud. That's right. We've got a couple stories here. One you put in, one I put in.

One, uh, about the FCC. Yes. The one that I put in here was about the FCC eliminating what they called the main studio rule. So if you had a radio station, say, or a TV station, the main studio had to be located in the community or near the community.

And nowadays it's kind of a pain in the butt since everybody's on the internet and it makes no sense. It's kind of an outdated rule. Um, so they, they scrapped it. So now what this opens the door for is big companies to come in and buy every single local station on the planet and run it out of a central office and, you know, homogenize the shit out of everything.

It was inevitable that it was going to happen at some point, but now, now they have the rules to say, yeah, go for it. Yeah, I, I agree that I agree with the concept, but not with the fallout. Does that make sense? Yeah. I don't think that there has to be a physical location necessarily, you know, a main studio located in or near the community.

That is totally outdated. The sad part of this though, is it is just going to be two, maybe three companies in effect that will own everything. And, uh, we've seen that to be a problem. Roger Ailes, anyone? Yeah. So, yeah. So I saw that news as well.

And I was, I, I just, what are you going to do? It's just depressing. Uh, my FCC story is about the net neutrality, uh, the restoring internet freedom rule. I like how we always name these rules to do the exact opposite of what they're actually going to do. That's the antithesis of what they are trying to do. So, yes, the, uh, restoring internet freedom rule that would screw all of us, rolling back all of 2015's net neutrality rules, uh, is not going to be voted on in November.

So all of us that filled out those, uh, ballots and, and the polls and different things that we all did, they're pushing it back to, uh, hang on and wait until. Theoretically, we all forget about it, which, you know what this means, Jason. It means in about six months, we're going to have to do it all over again.

Yeah. This has all happened before. Yes. So there's that to look forward to. Uh, now let's switch over to Facebook, uh, made big news this week. Uh, they are moving or they're going to a, they're doing a trial where they're going to move non-promoted posts out of the newsfeed.

So basically you'll have a friend's feed and you'll have a page's feed and you'll be able to click between them, uh, so that the non-promoted posts, uh, if you're running a page and you don't pay, will not show up in the default newsfeed anymore. They will have to click over to a separate newsfeed, which nobody will ever do.

Now, hold on a second. Uh, shocking to begin with. We knew this was going to happen. I knew they were baking up some bullshit recently because the amount of notification, if you're a page owner, uh, the amount of notifications that you get desperately asking you to please promote your post will give you a discount.

This post would perform so much better. I get more notifications from my page asking me to promote my page than I get from any of my friends in, in Facebook anymore. It's such a load of crap. It's gone up over a thousand fold. I don't know if yesterday I got one asking, giving me a discount if I would, uh, because the grumpy old geek post is, is performing better than 95% of other posts.

And we can reach 7,000 more people, notification, notification, notification, email, email, email, notification. Thanks a lot, Facebook. You're becoming useless. And while I'm on the subject, running a Facebook page is a horrific experience these days. It's terrible. Beyond, beyond those constant notifications, bothering you to promote every single post you make, declining view counts, constantly fighting with Facebook customer support.

If you do promote a post and they decide to randomly flag it for no reason, saying it doesn't meet some guideline, then when you fucking go through their bullshit customer service to respond and say, what guideline did I break? They go, oh, sorry. It was automatically flagged. And then they turn it on. But it's fucking two days later.

And the thing I was trying to promote was a day ago. Thanks, Facebook. And then you go on and you get punished by Facebook if you haven't responded to any message that you've gotten within an hour. Within an hour. They do realize that Facebook is international. Am I supposed to wake up at 3 a.m. if we get a goddamn message?

They also realize that some things people write in don't require a response, but you still get punished for it? Fuck them. Sorry. I'm getting fucking sick of Facebook. Yeah. No, go to GOG.show for our show notes, because you're never going to see them on Facebook. No, you're never going to see anything from us on Facebook.

And we respond to everybody that writes us. But Facebook still tells us we don't do it quick enough. Yeah, kiss my ass. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We do. We have people that listen all over the world. We do get messages at 2 a.m. And that's what. Who the hell came up with this shit?

Algorithms. Don't you know? Right. Now, Peter Clines is already bitching about this, thinking about where to move. And I told him, I'm like, hey, man, just ramp up that old website. Dust off that RSS reader. And let's all go back to the way it was. Sadly, nobody will do that.

Nobody's going to do that. That's the problem. We've gotten a few people reaching out to us that wanted us to get their CEOs on the show because they've started new social networks that are supposed to be better. But it's always the eyes problem. Everybody's on Facebook. Everybody's locked on Facebook.

We can go set up our stuff on your social network. But it's blowing dust in the wind. Yeah. That's why we just stick to our website, you know, because it's always going to be there. Yeah. We might not be able to get anything on Facebook, but nobody's going to be able to soon. They are going to, you know, just kill all of the people who used to come there to do the things that they want to do.

I mean, I like that they're doing this because it's just showing how useless they're becoming. Honestly, I mean, like, keep doing it. Keep being greedy. Keep trying to maximize that shareholder value, you dumb shits, because eventually everybody is going to bail on you and nobody's going to care anymore.

Especially now that I see how stupid of a website it is for most of the people that use this thing. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. I'm done.

Now, the one like I just had a huge rant on it from somebody who, you know, wants to use Facebook as a business, you know, we've talked about since this show has started, we've outlined the different ways that Facebook has basically sucked people in to create their business and create their business and grow their business on on their platform and then pulled the rug out from under them and just started to siphon money off of them for diminishing returns.

Yes, that's that we understand that. Now, as a personal user, and the reason that I've always defended Facebook and liked it was seeing what my friends were up to, staying in touch with people that live far away easily. If I believed for two seconds that the personal feed now was just going to be my friends in chronological order, I'd be thrilled about this.

I would love to have a friend feed and a page feed and promoted posts to the page feed would only show up in the page feed higher up than other just pages, but I'd still see everything. And my friend feed would just be my friends. But we all know that ain't the way it's going to be, is it? No, never. Never again.

Of course not. Your friends feed is going to be all promoted posts and your pages feed is going to be all the people that didn't want to spend 20 bucks. That's all it's going to be. Yeah, the people who couldn't afford it because they spent so much money in the last seven or eight years, you know, promoting their posts and trying and building their Facebook presence only to have, you know, them come back and say, we want more.

We can't give you any more because we spent all of our money that we normally would have spent on marketing and, you know, building our business on stupid ass Facebook ads that gave us no return on investment. And now we're poor. So you've basically just ruined our business with your dumb ass schemes.

So, yeah. Yay. Yay, Facebook. Okay, let's move on. All right. Let's talk about Snapchat spectacles. Yeah, do we have to? Have you ever seen anybody wearing any? Yes. Yes. All right. I've seen one person in the wild who was actually thought he was cool because he had them.

Right. And everybody, of course, mocked the shit out of him. Well, I live smack dab in the middle of Snapchat Central. Like, Snap, their offices are down the street from me. All their employees are up and down my main strip where I go out to get a beer and watch Dodger games and things like that.

Never seen a single pair. So even the employees aren't wearing them, which is not good. And the report has basically come out a year later. Huge failure. Hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts. Nobody bothered to get these.

It was horrible. And this article in particular is called No One is Buying Snapchat Spectacles and Everyone's Hindsight is 2020. It goes into a detailed review of all the people on Twitter that are saying, of course they saw this. What a joke, except for the fact that all those people said that this was an awesome idea a year ago.

I'd just like to state for the record, except for us, we said that they were stupid from the first moment that they were released. And we have historical proof. You can go back and listen to the old episodes. We called that one right on the money. Yeah. Hey, but now you can get some cheap.

It'll be a relic. No thanks. A little Twitter news. They are actually, the stock price has soared, soared, they say, to a whopping like 22 bucks, 21 bucks as of this taping. And I'm like, hmm, yep, that six pack is going to taste pretty good.

Lots of time left, Jason. Lots of time. We still have our bet going. If you're a new listener, Brian and I have a bet that I can make at least one cent on my purchase of Twitter stock this year. So when the year ends and the bell tolls, if I make at least one cent, I'm up and I win a six pack.

Twitter has a historically good record of screwing things up, so I'm still feeling confident with my bet. Let's talk about some more of the things that they're doing this week. They are now going to be labeling election ads because there was a big regulatory threat by the government saying, hey, stop this shit.

And they're saying, oh, no, but soon you'll be able to see that. And the amorphous soon, we don't know when, we don't know how, and I'm betting they don't either. Yeah, I had a related article that I ended up pulling, which basically was only there for the headline, which said Twitter is going to ask us to trust us about this because of the way that they're planning on rolling it out.

And we have no reason to trust Twitter. Nope, none whatsoever. Yeah. So, yeah, this is not going to help much, and we don't even know how it's going to do it. And it's going to involve apparently a separate website where you can see identity of buyers, targeted demographics and total ad spend by election advertisers, as well as information about all ads currently running on Twitter, election rated or otherwise.

Which, if anybody remembers me from talking on this show, maybe about four months ago, five months ago, I can't remember exactly when, I was asked to place a Twitter ad and was completely unable to do so. Their site was so broken, it couldn't take my credit card, it couldn't take my money.

So it's good to know some people are able to get in. Apparently, maybe if you speak Russian, you can place ads. Well, not any longer, because they are pulling all of the ads from Russia Today, RT, which is very ironic, because, you know, when you retweet, you RT.

And Sputnik, another, you know, mouthpiece of the Kremlin. Is it the Kremlin anymore? I don't know. I go, you know, I was born in the 70s, so I go by old school Russia. So this is interesting, and they're saying, yeah, no more ads from RT and Sputnik, and they're taking the $1.9 million that we are projected to have earned from the global advertising since 2011 up through the election.

Day late and a dollar short on that one, guys. Thanks very much. And they're going to basically spend that money to support research into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation, with an initial focus on elections and automations.

They have no details yet on how those disbursements are going to work. Yep. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Way to go, guys. Can't wait to see the nothing that you're going to do. Speaking of more RT news, this is a really fascinating one, and this was in the New York Times.

Russia's favorite outlet is an online news giant. YouTube helped. Okay. This is the entire story of how RT basically was the darling of YouTube and the first news outlet to get to a billion views. Right.

It's an amazing story. It's a little bit long, and some of it kind of goes off on tangents for, you know, because they need more words, I guess. But, yeah, how YouTube – and YouTube's vice president actually went on RT when they hit their billion view mark.

I mean, these guys were – this was – YouTube loved these guys. And by YouTube, I mean Google, a.k.a. Alphabet. And so where – you know, where's YouTube coming in on this? I mean, yes, they pulled them as a premier news partner, but that is in the U.S. alone. That's it.

So in other countries, they're probably still up there, but they're only doing this in the U.S. So that comes into where do their loyalties lie and how do we police these guys? And the question right now is everybody's shrugging their shoulders going, I don't know. What are we going to do? Well, we know where the loyalties lie, money, so there you go.

But they're – because they're a platform. They have no loyalties for a platform. They're not responsible for the content posted on their platform and service. No, not at all. But if corporations are legally treated as people and that person is doing business in the United States, shouldn't they be a citizen of the country that they're doing business in since they are technically people?

And can we arrest them for treason? No. Well, that's what – yes, I was about to say. If a corporation is a person, then a person can be treasonous. But you cannot take Google out behind the woodshed and shoot him, unfortunately. We can fucking try. Yeah, we can try.

Good luck with that one. I think Facebook would be easier to shoot. But – well, actually, Twitter would be the easiest. No, Twitter is on its way. It's a house of – I was going to say a house of cards, but it's just like balsa wood soaked in lighter fluid and just blowing out all the matches that are being thrown at it on a daily basis.

Yeah. Oh, man. Now, in some funny news, have you ever shopped at overstock.com? Once. Okay. Did you get anything good out of it? I can't even remember what it was. I think it was a pillow. Okay. Because it's usually the wives that do the shopping at overstock.

Well, yes. Their advertising is very much geared towards women. Yes. Yes, it is. Well, their stock went through the roof this week because they're getting into the cryptocurrency market. They've got a new subsidy called T-Zero, and it's going to be trading digital currency, and it is apparently one of the only ones that is SEC compliant.

So that SEC compliance is what got them the big news, and that's why their stock went through the roof. So they're going to be able to do ICOs, initial coin offerings, through their platform, which is then compliant because a lot of these aren't right now, and everybody's kind of worried about what the regulation is going to be and how it's going to work.

So these guys are coming in on their unicorn saying, we've got you, bro. We've got the solution. Yep. And we all know what happens after that about two months later. Oh, no, we didn't. Yep. We didn't have the solution. No, we didn't. We make fun of AI and machine learning a lot.

Yes, we do. I think you more than me, because it's the semantic pedantics that you really are. It just drives me crazy. Yeah. I can't. I need to order some pharmaceuticals from Amazon to calm down about it. Okay. Get them delivered by drone.

But those drones are going to be powered by AI. And who's going to be writing that AI? Well, these kids that are coming out of school right now. The thing about this is, this is another New York Times article. These kids that are coming out of school to write AI, their salaries are in the range of $300,000 to $500,000 a year, plus stock and benefits.

Right. They are so in the wrong game. Yeah. Oh, well. Man. What are they going to do? We were too early for all this. Now we're too old. Yeah. We couldn't get the job even if we had the PhD. Well, I mean, it's almost, you know, it's almost worth going back and, like, faking a PhD.

Let's go to, like, Phoenix University or wherever the hell that is. We'll get the AI certificate. I can say I have a degree in AI when I only have a degree in machine learning. There you go. There you go. Here's a new one from, for your part of town.

Yes. LA is looking to ride share to build the future of public transit. Mm-hmm. So Los Angeles put out a call to arms saying that they want to start building up, you know, a microtransit system. And they're asking people who run ride-sharing companies to chime in on this and say, hey, how should we do this?

Now, I see a problem with their thinking behind this. What do we call them, an RFP, request for a proposal? Yeah. Why would Uber, Lyft, or any other service out there help a municipality compete with them?

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you know, to some degree, it would make sense if you would become the premier service or the preferred service. Because we do have a last-mile problem in LA that you don't have in a lot of cities that were built around public transport. There are only so many stations.

They're not as close together as they are in other cities. So a lot of people basically have to drive to get onto public transport regardless. And they're looking for a way to get around that. So people don't drive. They just have other people drive, which, you know. Bus. I mean, that's what buses are for.

Yeah. So I don't quite understand why they want to do this. But, hey, good for them. Outsourcing, I suppose. It's outsourcing. Well, I think they're just looking for how to build it themselves. I don't know if it's so much outsourcing. But it's an audacious plan, I'm sure. And just kind of silly, I think.

I'm just like, you realize these people are going to lie to you and tell you everything is wrong. Yeah, I think the end result of this is going to be L.A. will spend a lot of our tax money and get nothing out of it. Yep. So. Yes. In better news, in hopeful news, Sony is reportedly announcing a new robot dog next month.

Watch out, Bam Bam. Yep. She's going to have a little baby buddy. I always wanted an Ibo, but they were ridiculously expensive. I don't know if you remember. They're like $2,500. And they didn't really do a whole lot. Yeah. Man, they were cool. I always wanted an Ibo, and I could never get one. So I'm going to keep my eye on this.

And we'll be talking about this one on the show. Because if I can get a cheap robot dog to play with Bam, it needs to be pretty tough. But I think that would be fun. I'm in. Okay. I might enjoy Bam Bam's Instagram feed a bit more. Yeah. Hey, man, I post every day. It's getting there.

Yes, I know. I see it all the time. You can unsubscribe, bitch. You don't have to follow. Sorry, I'm not allowed to call you that anymore. We'll cover that later. Well, in related news, Saudi Arabia has become the first country to give citizenship to a robot. Using, I mean, talk about stretching the term robot.

Did you watch the video of this thing? I did. The robot Sophia is a humanoid created by the Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics. Mbop Robotics is what they should have called it. For the purpose of aiding seniors and visitors to parks, the announcement came in the lead-up of the Future Investment Initiative held in Riyadh, the country's capital.

Now, Sophia has cameras and AI software that allow her to make eye contact and recognize people, all of which were in quotes in the actual article. She also has voice recognition capabilities and can become smarter by talking with people, as opposed to, I don't know.

I get stupider when I talk to people, apparently. Some Saudis were apparently none too pleased to learn of their new fellow citizen. Social media users criticized the fact that she was not wearing traditional garments and appeared to be unaccompanied by a male guardian, which are both illegal acts for women in that country.

Others pointed out the fact that she didn't get in trouble means that this robotic woman actually has more rights than an actual woman in Saudi Arabia. Yes, not only did she not have a hijab on, but her whole cranium was transparent. I know. Wow. Jeez. Man, that was a terrible robot.

I mean, they could have actually given AIBO citizenship and it would have been much more impressive because that was not an impressive robot. Also, I mean, if this is the PR move that you're going for, you don't make the robot a dude to get around all these issues. Yeah. Anyways, you know, whatever.

Amazon could be responsible for nearly half of U.S. e-commerce sales in 2017. How crazy is that? But not terribly surprising. I'm actually surprised. I'm surprised that they're not already. Well, you've got Jet. You've got people. Walmart is still battling hard. You've got everybody is doing e-commerce.

I actually bought something off Best Buy for e-commerce the other week because the price was better than on Amazon. Wow. I have not bought anything on any other e-commerce site in ages except for like specialty things like the canvases for my show art, but nothing else. Everything's Amazon.

Well, according to eMarketer, which is a research firm, Amazon should have about 44 cents out of every e-commerce dollar spent in the U.S., up from 38 cents the previous year. So Amazon is quickly chipping and chipping and chipping away. And if this depresses you, Amazon has moved into wholesale pharmaceuticals, which sent pharmacy stocks plunging.

Yes, you will now be able to get your Zoloft nice and cheap and delivered same day. Yeah, which you're going to need if you work at CVS or, you know, Walgreens, because you may not be working there anymore. Yeah. But yeah, the thing about that one, I put this one in, it came from Recode, and go look at the graph of the stock prices of all of the other pharmaceutical companies and, you know, drugstores.

The graph says it all. It's like a steady, steady line. Then the news came out. It was just like, thump. Tank. Done. You really don't want Amazon setting their eyes on you. I, you know, and I also, I don't know how much information I want to have, let Amazon have about me.

I don't want my prescriptions filled by Amazon at this point. I like to spread my data around. Spread it around. But as soon as you spread it around to a little company, Amazon's just going to buy that company anyway. That's true. Here's the trick. Don't get sick. Well, I'm working on that.

Okay. Now, this one, this one just makes me scratch my head. Amazon Key is a new service that lets couriers unlock your front door. Mm-hmm. They have a new smart camera, which I didn't even know about until this came out, the Cloud Cam.

Yes. Unfortunately, I have cameras everywhere in my house now, and none of them are ever going to be Amazon Cloud Cams. Because it's, the thing about it is, I, yeah, it's too much info in one company. I spread it around, you know. I've got three separate cameras in my, camera providers in my house.

And, you know, three separate Cloud accounts with all of them now. And, but this is like, you know, consolidates everything to another company. I don't know about these cameras yet. They look decent. You know, the specs are decent, and their pricing for their Cloud service is actually better than anybody else on the market, which is how they do it.

Basically run everybody else out of business. But, yeah, you use the Cloud Cam and a smart lock to let people drop shit off in your house. Yes. And you just hope that they don't let your cat or your dog out, or get mauled by your dog, in my case. Or steal things, or help themselves do whatever in your house.

Yeah, I mean, this idea got immediate backlash all over social media. People were like going, I can't believe this. You guys are so stupid. Why would I ever let Amazon into my house? Who would ever want this? And then I actually, I wish I remember who it was. I should have bookmarked it. But somebody made a really good point, which was, these people don't think about normal people.

They think about themselves. They think about the other people that are living in their fantastically huge mansions in Palo Alto. And they solve problems for themselves, not for normal people. They never thought about, you know, somebody in a walk-up apartment that was worried about getting broken into or anything like that.

They thought about themselves, where they would just install this on, like, say, their garage door, where they couldn't get into their full house, or their huge patio, or their servants' quarters, to drop off their deliveries that they're missing every day. This was never meant to be for the normal people. This is only for the hoity-toity.

Yeah, and what about tailgaters? You know, I just, I follow the Amazon guy going around town, dropping off groceries, and then I finally see him go to a really nice house, put on my mask, walk up behind him as soon as he unlocks the door, bop him on the head, walk in the house, take everything I want. You would never get into the gated community that the guy who thought up this thing lives in.

If you had a white van that looked just like Amazon, say, hey, I'm with him. I'm just the backup driver. I got the rest of the groceries in the back. There's totally ways to social engineer your way around that, man. Come on. Yeah, okay. You've listened to this show long enough. It's a dumb idea. It is a dumb idea. I can't imagine too many people ever doing this.

Just leave it, leave the damn package. You don't need it in my house. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by our good friends at FreshBooks. So, you're racing against the clock to wrap up a few projects, prepping for a meeting later in the afternoon, all while trying to tackle a mountain of paperwork.

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A couple weeks ago, I recommended Flume. Yes. Basically an Instagram client for the Mac. Yep. I'm revoking my recommendation. And why is that? Because I still never got around to actually purchasing it and setting it all up.

I just gave it the trial run. Two reasons. A, it's done by one guy. We used to support that sort of thing, Jason. Well, you know, at least give me three. Okay. The problem here is there's been a bug in the Facebook integration for sharing.

Like you could set it up to share your post with Twitter, but you couldn't do it with Facebook because the form was broken. It wouldn't let you hit the submit button. Okay. He's had a fix available for weeks and has not published it because he's waiting to roll it up all into one. And so that entire time has just been a massive pain in the ass because then I have to go to another app to post it.

I'm like, well, I might as well just use the damn Instagram app. Your app is useless if I need to, if part of my workflow is always posting to Facebook. Yep. That's true. Part number one there. And so, and, and it's still not out. He keeps saying, it's like, oh, we had a big deal. It's our two year anniversary. We've got an update coming. I'm like, well, why the fuck didn't you release it already?

You idiot. Because it's software. Just release a patch for the things that everybody is complaining about. Okay. I'm getting a little worked up here. Okay. Secondly, it's an Instagram app, right? So it has all of your photos in there from your stream.

Yep. Okay. So I'm like, hey, dude, this is a great little feature that I want on your, on your service. So I can get my, basically I can do a download of everything that's in there. Right. So I can, I can back up my Instagram feed from here because all the data is here.

Right. Right. No. Of course not. Ah, he says, he writes me back and he says, it's less about the technical complexity, more about spam and bot considerations and automation. For that reason, we don't wish to add such a feature, but if you search online, you will find tools that can do this.

Okay. Let me call bullshit on everything. Everything he just said. If you're only downloading, you're not worried at all about bot or automation considerations. It's the upload. That's the issue. These are, I'm a, I am a professional account.

You're a plus account. You use whatever his paid account level is. I am paid on that account level, right? Yep. I have, I've authenticated my account. He's already downloading the images to show in the app view. So it's cached on my machine somewhere already.

All you got to do is put in a fucking zip file and hand it to me. But no, it's about spam and bot considerations. Blow me. That is a complete cop out. Now, if he would have said that if you read the terms and service of creating an Instagram app, that there are rules around what you can automate and what you can't automate, and we can't do that because of the rules of Instagram, I would have said, ah, okay, but he didn't do that.

It made me go look at the fucking API docs and figure out that the reason he can't do it is because it's in the Instagram's terms and service. I don't like people who aren't truthful with me like that. So for that reason, I am pulling my recommendation for flume. And also, it's almost impossible to find anything out there nowadays that can download your Instagram account because they keep, it's whack-a-mole.

They keep shutting them all down. Yeah. Which is really annoying. So you can go in the app and go one by one and right click and hit download. Right click and download. And I've got like three to four thousand photos in my main Instagram feed. So yeah, that ain't going to happen.

It's just, it's silliness. So I'm going to step off of this now, but I'm going to get off my soapbox. But yeah, be truthful with the people who are using your app because sometimes they may know just as much as you do, you dumb shit. Okay. Leap to your next soapbox. Okay.

I am going to do that. Hey man, you had your Facebook soapbox. I can have my flume soapbox. I agree. I found a really quick tip that was in the Recommendo newsletter, which I've talked about before on the show. I highly recommend. This is from Mark Frauenfelder. And it's a tip for zooming on your phone on maps.

So instead of doing the pinch and zoom, if you tap the screen twice and leave your finger on the screen on the second tap, and if you slide your finger up and down after that, it zooms in and out. Coolest little hack. I've never known that. Is that only for Apple maps or is that also Google?

I've done it in Apple and Google. Oh, nice. Okay. So if your phone is like on the, like, you know, mounted with that little thing that you got to your thing, you can one finger zoom and move and stuff. So you don't have to like pinch and move and stuff. It's just a cool little app. I liked it.

So, or I mean, a cool little hack, I should say. Yes. Since we're short on time, I'm going to run through my dev stack that I promised. And I had to go through and update a bunch of these and found some new tools and there's some just fun stuff out there now. Transmit 5 from Panic, which is the best FTP and file transfer app on the planet.

I had to upgrade to it. I was only on number four, but the upgrade to five. Oh my God. This thing has everything in it now. And it's beautiful. I love Panic. They're, they're fantastic. Mamp Pro 4. This is what I use to run my sequel and PHP in a local dev environment.

Yep. Awesome. Also upgraded to a ton of stuff. So I had to upgrade to four. Well worth the money. Sublime Text 3, the best coding editor on the planet. The multiple cursor thing is a game changer when you learn how to use it. Oh my God. Code it to, they didn't really update that.

That's another Panic app, but it's really good for doing like, you know, just basic HTML and CSS. So I use it for the CSS side of things because you can do cool previews and stuff. My favorite Git client is Tower 2. It's, it's amazing. You can't go wrong with Tower 2.

I mean, it's the only Git client that I can tell that is worth the, worth the money. SQL Pro, which is free, which is a great way to connect to MySQL databases. And you can use, you know, your SSH keys and stuff like that. So you don't have to type passwords and all that, but it's, it's really solid. It's never turned, never done me wrong, especially for the price free.

Yeah. Uh, I term two and, Oh, I forgot to mention that all of these are for the Mac because we don't do PC stuff here. Um, I term two is a terminal replacement that I've used for years and, uh, has really cool, uh, profiles and things like that. Highly recommended.

And lastly, if you have to do design work and do the front end stuff, which I hate doing, but X scope is a great little app for that. I'm running the old version, but they have a new one out that looks pretty cool too. So that's, uh, all these will be linked up in the show notes and, uh, yeah, there's, there's my dev stack.

That's everything I use to make the good stuff out there. All very highly recommended for me as well. I use the same stack. Excellent. Excellent. And, uh, you know, Brian, you always talk about how everybody is live streaming and taking selfies and shit in your neighborhood. Uh, the Mevo plus is out now.

Okay. Now the Mevo is just a little tiny camera that does a live streaming basically out of the box, cool little gadget. And it's funny because I was looking at it. I'm like, man, I could really use those. One of those for some of the stuff that I have to do with doing like live podcasting things that I have coming up.

And I'm like, no, you know what? I'm going to hold off because I know as soon as I buy this thing, they're going to have an update. Yep. Three days later. Yes. The Mevo plus is out. I mean, it's, it's pretty cool. It's a little, just a little $500 gadget. It's going to cost you like 800 bucks to get the whole package with the real battery.

The one that it comes with is like, you know, a 20 minute battery, but it's a cool little device. I mean, if you ever have to do live streams, Brian, definitely check it out. It's better than getting like, you know, the, the big tricor or tricaster and all that stuff. It just works out of the box. And I've tested it with Joey Ito.

He's got one. And some of the guys at the Art of Charm have one. They're really cool. I highly recommend them. Very cool. We've come a long way from the quick cam. Oh my God, so far. And since you're an Amazon Kindle app user, did you get the new app this week? I did. What do you think?

It's nice. I like it. It's got a lot of good stuff in it. It's a, I like it a lot. It's a solid update. Happy. Good. Good. The one good thing is the Goodreads update, but the one of the bad things is they haven't updated Goodreads in like what? 17 years since they bought it.

I've stopped even using Goodreads. I can't use it. I don't know anybody that uses it. Oh, you know what? I've got like 500 friends on there and Veronica Belmont, her podcast, Sword and Laser, like their entire community's on there. They've got a 10,000 person Goodreads community that basically powers their podcast on there.

And I'm like, how can you stomach looking at that piece of shit? It doesn't work half the time. I mean, it's got, it's got sidebars. It's got tabled sidebars. Come on. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. So yeah, work on that, Amazon. That's pretty solid.

Well, if you're going to be doing any of these live streaming, and we have come a long way from the old QuickTime Camera Pros, which is how I started doing live streaming before it had the word live stream attached to it, you might want to look your best, I'd say. And I have had an interesting relationship with hair my entire life.

I've had a number of crazy haircuts. I've had everything under the sun. And I've used, I've done a lot of home grooming. And so I'm always on the lookout for basically an all-in-one trimmer that does face, head, and body styling. And a lot of them out there are really, really bad.

So this is a weird thing to throw in, but I found one that I'm so happy with, so I've got to tell everybody about it. It's the Philips Dorelco Multigroom 7000. It is relatively cheap. It is powerful, because one of the big problems with the consumer level trimmers is that they basically just suck, and the battery dies all the time, and they don't have enough power to take out, say, anything that, like, I shave the side of my head myself now, because it saves me from going to my stylist.

Like, you know, I'd have to go once a month. Now I can go two, I can wait two, three months, as long as I take care of the side and back of my hair myself. This thing totally does it. It gets rid of, we're getting older. So I'm sure you've had this experience, Jason, and maybe our other listeners have as well. You go to bed feeling all totally fine.

You wake up, you go to brush your teeth in the morning, and one of your eyebrow hairs is longer than the Mississippi River. Not having that with eyebrow hairs. Nose hairs, yes, but not eyebrows. Well, this will take care of both of those. It's got an eyebrow attachment, which is awesome. It's got a nose attachment, which is awesome, and you're going to start getting the ear hair, too.

This will take care of that. Can't recommend this enough. I haven't had one of these multi-tools that I've been happy with for at least 10 years, and this one, it's just great. So, link in the show notes. All right, I see a new segment here. Brian's manscaping section here. This is the only tool you need.

That's it. You're good to go. All right, I might have to check that out. How's it work on the boys? Perfectly. All right. Be careful with your attachments. Yes, and don't ever borrow Brian's Philips Neuroco Multigroom 7000, because now we know where it's been.

It's been everywhere. Yep. And this has been Making the Rounds. The $130 noise-canceling ramen fork is the dumbest gadget of 2017. This is everywhere now, but I think it wasn't anywhere when we put it in the notes. But, yeah, this is the fork that has the noise-canceling.

They're using noise-canceling very liberally here to counterbalance the slurping of ramen. Yeah, I mean, this is, for some random reason, this is the week of the fork in tech. Apparently, somebody decided we need to disrupt the fork industry. But this is stupid.

Eat your ramen with chopsticks, a Japanese soup spoon, and slurp like a goddamn man. Exactly. It's meant to be slurped. Yes. Well, we have a second smart fork that has made the rounds this week. The Happy Labs 102 Happy Fork Bluetooth-enabled smart fork. Just what the world needs now.

It is $60.60 on Amazon at the moment. And I found this in the Should This Thing Be Smart Fork Edition over at Slate. I like the fact that they're doing this segment called Should This Thing Be Smart? Goes along with our IoT of shit that we were going to do. So this is the Happy Fork, and per its official website.

It is a connected smart fork which lets you adopt healthy eating habits. How does it do this? Unlike most forks, the Happy Fork vibrates and lights up when it senses that its user is eating too quickly. Slow down, you fat cow, and save some food for the rest of us is the message it sends if you attempt to take more than one bite every 10 seconds.

It also syncs to the website via Bluetooth or USB so it can track your eating habits and theoretically help you discover patterns in the data. In a pinch, it could probably also be used to entertain a toddler. Oh yeah, give a sharp instrument to a toddler. Well done. Yes. As Slate says, this is a fork for narcissists and other shut-ins.

Other people may feel exceedingly self-conscious using the fork. Can you imagine using it in a restaurant? Most people do not bring their own forks to restaurants. It's just, this is insane. Yeah. So, I also can't really imagine using the Hapa fork for extended periods around the dinner table at home.

Oh, dad's using his fat fork again, your kids will say, and their mockery will make you want to abandon the experiment. But that's no solution either. Go get your fat fork, honey. You promised, your spouse will say. Arguments will ensue. This fork may well destroy your entire family. Oh, and you pair that, if you pair that with a vessel, the glass that will tell you what you're drinking, you could probably get a discount at Amazon for the bundle.

Probably. Stop it, people. Yeah. Just stop it. Now, just to counterbalance that with something that is actually useful, and we covered this a long time ago, but it wasn't owned by Google then, but this is now a Google spoon that helps people with tremors eat.

It is kind of a spoon with a gimbal in it to help people who have the shakes. Now, this is a good use of technology. The counterbalance where you can do something good with technology and utensils, unlike the fat fork.

And I want to just give a quick round of applause to Google for not branding this the goon.

Media candy. We'll do some quick follow-up on some of the shows that we're watching right now. Star Trek Discovery. We talked a bit about it at the beginning. It was an all right sixth episode, in my opinion. The big news this week is that CBS and CBS's all-access streaming service have decided to pick it up again for a second season.

So it has been renewed to run, and presumably this is a show of faith in both the show and the platform. The platform. And again, I think we talked about this last time. CBS refused to offer numbers, but did boast that Discovery's debut led to the highest number of sign-ups in the history of its all-access service, which has no history until the show started.

So, of course, it has the most number of sign-ups in the history. I couldn't believe that they're still rolling that out there. I can't believe it either. It's bigger than zero. Woo-hoo. Yes, we had zero before. One is bigger than zero.

So, there you go. I'm happy to let the... It's always good for a show to get picked up for a second season, because that lets the writers... Although, to be fair, all the first season was already written, but it does tend to open up the... And everybody that wrote it left, so... Yeah, so we'll see what happens. Hopefully, they will see some of the criticism about the show and maybe write the ship in the second season.

That would be nice. Make it an actual Star Trek show. I would enjoy that. I see what you did there. I see what I did there. Yep. Mr. Robot, episode three just aired. I've said my dismay for the past two weeks about how I just don't care about this show. Vulture is a great site that does a lot of entertainment stuff, and they do recaps of a lot of shows, and they did a recap of this last episode called An Unnecessary Detour.

And the one choice quote that came from this recap, which I agree with 100%, for the life of me, I don't know why this episode exists. Now, was the actual name of the episode An Unnecessary Detour, or was that just their title for the article? Oh, yeah, that's just their title.

Sorry, I keep forgetting that all Mr. Robot episodes are done geeky. It's EPS3.2 underscore legacy dot SO. That's the name of the actual episode. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, wow. What a terrible episode. I was watching it on Hulu Live, and the most interesting thing that happened during that episode was that Hulu stopped a buffer at least 30 times.

Okay. It was their, okay, Hulu Live TV, I might have to let them go, because it is buffertastic. I cannot get through, like, three, four minutes without it stopping to buffer. Right. It's really bad. Well, I think it's time for me to let go of Mr. Robot.

I can't see myself watching episode four. I might just read the recap in Vulture. That sounds like it's a lot more entertaining. It is, because they make fun of it, and it keeps me abreast of whatever actual plot there is, of which there doesn't appear to be much anymore. And the only thing that I need to do is I have to get, like, a little green light and shine that in my face so I get the audiovisual stimulation that comes from the show as I read the recap.

And I think I should be fine. Take one of those old 640x480 monochrome monitors from an old IBM XT and just read it on that. I think that might do me pretty well. Now, there is a show that I have been watching. My wife loves the show and found it, and at first I poo-pooed it. But I've started to come around to the fact that the show that she is watching is much better than any of the shows that I watch.

It's actually quite well written. The acting is stunning. It's called Grace and Frankie. It's over on Netflix. We've got Jane Fonda. We've got Lily Tomlin. We've got Martin Sheen. We've got, oh, gosh, what's that guy from Bom-Bong CSI?

Totally blanking on his name right now. Anyways, amazing actors. It's absolutely fantastic. It's incredibly funny. So I highly recommend that everybody check it out. Now, if you are of the more conservative bent and still listen to our show for whatever reason, you may not enjoy this much because the main point of the show is Grace and Frankie, that's the Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin characters, are living together in kind of an odd couple situation because their husbands left them to be gay with each other.

So it's a very liberal, forward-thinking show where we don't have problems with homosexuality or things of that nature. So you may not appreciate that part. But if you can get past it, quite funny. I'm going to have to check that out. I could use some funny. Dude, it's worth it. It's very well written. And coming off of that, we usually end up watching one the day after I'm coming off Mr.

Robot. It's so much better. Yeah. Not hard on that one. No. So I'm going to have my Dark Tower eight-word review. Okay. Way to kill a franchise in 90 minutes. Okay. I haven't seen it yet. I'm waiting for it to come out on rental.

I have heard some differences of opinions. I've talked to two people I know that love the entire Gunslinger book series and said, as long as you can get past, all right, all right, bongo playing bad guy, and as long as you can accept the fact that this is not related to the actual book series at all, and just look at it as something else that happens within the Gunslinger universe, it's all right.

No, it wasn't. It wasn't. Okay. All right. It was actually really terrible. And, you know, I'm not a Matthew McConaughey apologist. I don't mind him. I actually kind of like the guy. I could not stand him in this movie at all. Okay. All right. It was just over-the-top stupid.

Anyway, moving on. Moving on. I found a great podcast called Dexter Guff is Smarter Than You Are, and You Can Be Too. It is a scripted comedy podcast where he basically takes the piss out of the self-help industry, which I am very close to.

And, you know, if you can't laugh at yourself, then you can't laugh at anybody. But, man, it's funny. I listened to the first seven episodes, binged while I was cleaning the house the other day, and it was fantastic. I was definitely cracking up pretty much the whole time. I listened to one. I really enjoyed it.

I'm not sure if I could listen to a bunch of them, but it's a very clever conceit and very well executed. Extremely well executed. That's what I really liked about it. Yeah. Just put it in your queue and just, like, every now and again, just pull one up when you need, like, you know, 20 minutes, like you got a quick car ride or something.

It's fantastic. And a big shout out to the Grime Life guys. They did their first episode together in, like, seven or eight months. So it was nice to have them back in the saddle again. So keep doing more, guys. We missed you. Yep. Very cool to have those guys back. And I have a new episode of The Ongoing History of New Music by Alan Cross, which is a podcast I've talked about a few times, has just dropped.

And I just want to say, it's been a rough week in the news, a rough two weeks. If you need a break from the Weinsteins, the Terry Richardsons, the Robert Scobles, and the ongoing hashtag B2 revelations that are going on in the world, might I suggest the latest episode, because this is the top 10 queens of quirk, women from the alt-rock world that did things their own way and wouldn't let anyone stand in their way, be it man or woman.

It's an inspiring listen, amazing talents, and the fact that it's all female-centric episode was absolutely fantastic. These women took no shit from anyone. I'm a little annoyed that Susie from Susie and the Banshees was banished to the also-mentioned list rather than featured. And no Shirley Manson from Garbage.

Come on. She was feminist before, from day one, and one of the most outspoken women in alternative rock. But I cannot disagree with any of the 10 people he picked. If nothing else, you should listen to this episode, because it will make you go and listen to all 10 of the women that he lists. So it is well worth it, and will fill you with feminine joy.

Excellent. And a man I love, Shirley Manson. Me too. At the library. Okay, I teased this on a previous episode, and let's talk about WTF, What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly.

Okay. Now, I started out- I read it. You got through the whole thing? I read the whole thing, stem to stern. Oh my god. Okay, this is fantastic. Good. Because I didn't. I actually stopped it and returned it about halfway through, because I was so pissed off at this book.

I will tease this, and then let you go into review. The reason that you stopped reading it didn't go away through the rest of the book. Okay, I didn't think it would. I didn't think it would, because he basically, he posited a point of view that I could see, like, he was basically pointing everything into his point of view.

And his point of view, I thought, was completely wrong. And then I found this great article on theoutline.com called, Why Is Anyone Listening to Tim O'Reilly? By Molly Sauter. And it pretty much sums it up. I was going to read a bit from her review, but since you read the book, Brian, why don't you just kind of sum up why you didn't like it either?

Okay. The intro and first bit acknowledge both sides of the debate. He basically says, you know, we have a problem with the future. We're worried about these sorts of things. We're worried about everything being mushed together into the hands of two or three big companies.

We're worried about AI. We're worried about robots. We're worried about jobs. We're worried about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are we going to do as people? How are we going to handle all these situations? And technology is going to help. And, you know, technology has theoretically always helped.

But we have these worries, and we have these concerns, and these concerns are real, very real concerns. Then we move past the intro, and it's name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop. Look how important I am. I put this together. I was on this. I was on this council.

I was asked to go speak to these people. Name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop, name drop. Silicon Valley is awesome. We're going to fix everything. End of book. Mm-hmm. Okay. No real solutions posited. All the concerns brushed aside with no real facts or no real information or no real thought given to them.

Yeah. It was horrible. That's really the problem that I could see it coming. It's just like he's not really doing any, and he's siding with the, he's on the wrong side of the argument the entire time. Yeah. And I really like the whole bit that you put in about, from that Molly Sauter.

Yeah, I'm actually going to read it real quick because I think it really sums it up. If you've lost your job and can't find another one, or were never able to find steady full-time employment in the first place between automation, outsourcing, and strings of financial meltdowns, Tim O'Reilly wants you to know you shouldn't be mad.

If you've been driven into the exploitative arms of the gig economy because the jobs you have been able to find don't pay a living wage, Tim O'Reilly wants you to know this is a great opportunity.

If you ever find yourself being evicted from an apartment you can't afford because Airbnb has fatally distorted the rental economy in your city, wondering how you'll pay for the health care you need and the food you need and the student loans you carry with your miscellaneous collection of gigs and jobs and plasma donations, feeling like you're part of a generational sacrifice zone, Tim O'Reilly wants you to know that it will be worth it someday for someone a long time from now, somewhere in the future.

Yep. Perfect. I mean, I love her. I want to go give Molly a hug, but in this day and age, that would be a bad idea. Yeah, you really saved yourself some time, Jason. The book did not get any better. Not only was it just a bad book, I actually hate to turn into you.

I'm turning into you right now, Jason. I want to punch him in the face. Yeah. I want to find Tim O'Reilly and punch him in the face. This book actually made me physically sick as I was reading it. It's because, no, you're not addressing the problems. You're blowing past the problems. You're just talking about your own achievements and your friends.

This is the old boys club. That's all it is. And you're not going to fix it. You say you're going to fix it. You're not going to fix it. He can't fix anything. He publishes books. He doesn't do anything. And that was one of the things that really kind of struck me. He's like, all these things that he's given credit for, like, you know, open source and web 2.0 and all this shit.

He didn't come up with any of that. He just got all the credit. Again, that's the whole name dropping bit was just him talking about being around all the people that actually did the stuff, but making it sound like he did it. But he didn't. He didn't do it. Anyways, whatever. It was bad.

It was bad. Yeah. Sorry about that, people, if you grabbed it on my recommendation. I like the podcast with him, but it didn't have the full story, I guess. So anyway, let's move on to The Punch Escrow by Ty M. Klein. This is a science fiction book. Mm-hmm.

Ah, now, this book starts out. This book starts out in the future. It's like 140 years in the future where there is teleportation, right? There's teleportation. Okay. I'm listening to this, and they're doing a lot of back and forth with, you know, how it works and things like that.

It's a really well-built world. I'm going to give this guy a lot of credit for making an amazing world. What it comes down to, though, is the argument that every nerd has ever had when they get stoned or tripping on acid and starts talking about Star Trek, where it comes down to, are transporters killing you and then recreating you on the other side?

CGP Grey did a fantastic video about it called The Trouble with Transporters. This is not a new idea. People have had this concept since Star Trek originally began, right? So this guy takes that concept and runs with it and builds a whole world around it.

Now, here's where I jump back into it. With that set aside, it was a great book. It was well-written. I loved the story. And once you get – now that you know that that's what, like, kind of the technology bit is about it, you can really enjoy the story part because it's a really fun story.

I was really surprised. Well, that's fine. I'm okay with that. If the story is – it's all about the story. It's all about that. So I don't care about the initial conceits or the technologies as long as there's a well-written story behind it. That's great. That's good to hear. I will read this. Yeah, I think you're going to like it. I mean, it's surprising that it's published by Geek & Sundry, which is Felicia Day's nerd company, which I didn't know they published books.

But it's already optioned for a Lionsgate movie, which means it's going to be a trilogy. Right. And since I knew that going into it, I wasn't too pissed off when at the end it, you know, basically turned into – Left things open. In the next chapter. So I kind of knew that that was going to be happening.

But nowadays you can't read a book without thinking that it's going to be a trilogy unless you read Paradox Bound by Peter Kline, which was a fantastic book. And I don't think there's going to be another one. But this is – I really enjoyed this book. Highly recommended. And I got all the way through this one in a day and a half. So I didn't put it down.

Nice. Security? Ha! Today it's just me and Big Papa B. Brian had to go change some nappies. So, Dave, it's just me and you.

Hello, young lad. Ah, yes. Good to be back. Good to be back. I thought I was older than you. No, I think I'm two years older than you. Okay. Okay, cramps. All the difference in the world, right? Yeah, pretty much. Well, I mean, that's the difference between me and Brian, and I hold it over his head all the time.

I see. Well, there you go. So, yeah, you guys, don't get too big for your britches, fellas. Okay. So I want to start out this week. Goldman Sachs has invested $30 million into KnowBefore. And so big congrats over to Stu and the team over there. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

So how do you know Stu? I actually was trying to get my company that I used to work with called BLT. We did movie marketing and posters way back in the day. And I really tried to get them to use some of his products to lock down our internal network because it was a bunch of Swiss cheese.

It was like the Equifax of the movie industry. It was terrible. I see. And so I started following them. And then Kevin Mitnick signed up with them after I had started investigating people for products to use.

And I used to date Kevin Mitnick's webmaster. She was part of the 2600 team. So, you know, I kind of, with that crew, I just kind of, you know, I stuck with Stu. And he, you know, we chatted a bit on Twitter here and there. So, you know, I think he's a pretty good guy. And I still follow their newsletter.

And I like them. They're good folks. Well, it's a small world because I've had Stu on the Cyber Wire, I think, a couple of times. I know he was on about a year ago talking about the DNC emails being hacked by the Russians and so on and so forth. So he's a good guy, knows his stuff, and he's been a good guest on our show.

So there you go. Small world, right? Very small world. Yeah. There's only 12 people in cybersecurity. We know that at this point. Yeah, that's right. And they're all just using aliases. That's it. Yeah. There's only one Russian who knows how to use a computer. But he's running a giant botnet that basically just spams all of Twitter.

So it just seems bigger. I think I've met that guy. Yeah. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. All right. Let's jump into this stuff. What do we got this week that's going to scare the crap out of us? Well, there is a massive internet botnet that is growing, that is gathering.

Yeah. This one, this is a sphincter clenching one. It hasn't done anything yet, but it's kind of scary. Yeah, it's sort of like a hurricane, you know, gathering strength out in the Gulf or out in the Atlantic. Yeah. So all the signs are there.

The researchers, I believe it's a checkpoint who's been on top of this one about how this botnet is gathering up millions of devices. It's the usual suspects, IoT devices, cameras, IP cameras, routers, those sorts of things. So nobody really knows for sure what its intentions are, what it could be used for, but it's definitely- I'm sure it's not going to be used for good.

Right. Exactly. It's not going to be. Yeah. No. Guess what? All of your, you're not going to have any more, any more caching issues with any of your online video because this botnet's been assembled to make sure that it never happens again. No, it won't be used for that for sure. But, you know, everybody's keeping an eye on it and sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So we know all the IPs, apparently, that this botnet has slurped up. Is that how people are tracking it? Because it seems to me that if we know that there are 2 million, it's 2 million, right? At this point, 2 million IoT devices? Yeah, I think it's heading that way. Yep. Okay. So don't we know the IP addresses of all these devices and that's how they're tracking it?

Can't we just disseminate that IP list and basically have the world's biggest IP band table at all of the ISPs and just say, hey, yeah, if it comes from one of these devices, then no, they're not allowed on the internet anymore. Well, that's, yes, that's an interesting idea for sure.

The problem is, is that what if one of those devices is something like a medical infusion pump or something like that, you know, something that really just can't be randomly disconnected, you know, without. Does it really have to be on the internet in the first place, though?

Right. That's kind of the question. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a good question. I mean, people have brought that up. I don't know how practical that is. And also, I think, you know, as many as they know that it may be on, there's certainly more that they don't know that it's on.

So I think it's sort of one of those sampling things where, you know, they don't know specifically every device that has been infected with this. But by sampling, they have a good idea of how many devices it's likely to be on. So they're basically using the Nielsen ratings of botnets. Yeah. I suspect that's how it works.

Okay. So, but it's a big one. And, you know, nobody knows what it's going to do yet, but surely it's probably going to do something. One thing I wanted to point out about this is that it's interesting that people have been describing this in terms of a gathering storm using hurricane and weather language rather than sort of the military language that we see people use with a lot of these, you know, that troops are amassing on the border, that sort of thing.

What struck me about that was, I want to say over the past year or so, I've spoken with several women in cybersecurity at, you know, various levels from all the way, you know, high level executives to people just coming out of college. And what's come up several times with women is that they really don't like all of the battle talk in cyber.

They don't like all of the violent analogies, all of the war talk and that sort of thing. Now, I'm making a generalization here, so I'm sure there are plenty of women who are fine with it, but enough women have brought that up to me independently without me prompting them that it seems like it's a thing to the point of some of them saying this could be one of the reasons why women aren't attracted to the field or don't stick around when they get here.

Are they offering alternatives? Because this is kind of cyber war, you know? Well, but it's exactly this. Is using what, in fact, just this past week, someone said to me, I like the idea of using a weather analogy rather than a battle analogy. So we're preparing for a coming storm, not a coming army, not a coming force.

We're, you know, more of a natural disaster analogy. We've got to, you know, put together our flashlights and our batteries and our bottled water and that sort of thing rather than gather up our guns. I just, I'm head scratching over here. I am just head scratching.

It's like the fact that they don't want to come into the business is because of jargon. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. As I said, it's not all the women, but it has come up enough that I don't think it's fair to discount it.

I think, you know, I can think of analogies where, I don't know, if we were, if you or I were heading into some industry that was overwhelmingly dominated by women and they were using language that was unfamiliar to us or somehow rubbed us the wrong way, I could imagine us feeling the same way about it.

There's a brewing cotillion coming. We must prepare the doilies. Well, all right, all right. So I've said my piece about that. I think it's a thing. It's enough of a thing that, you know, without me searching it out or asking about it, it's come up enough that I'm starting to sense a pattern about it.

So I would just like to know what the alternatives are. What is the alternative language that would be preferred besides, I mean, yes, you said weather. Yes, I said weather twice. I understand you said weather twice, but I don't think that that covers all the bases. I agree. I agree. So, yeah, I don't think it's a perfect answer.

Yeah, I don't think it's a perfect answer. But, you know, who was it that wasn't it George Carlin that had a whole routine about how how comedy is inherently violent, how you have a knee slapper and side splitter. And I went out there and I killed him. So this is not just with malware.

It's a it's a common thing. So it's kind of the history of humanity. Yeah. Just throwing that out there. Well, that's true. Yeah, it's a good point. Speaking of side slappers and and killing people. Let's just call this one a ball tickler.

I know if we're going to be non-inclusive, we'll just call this one a ball tickler. All right. All right. Equifax, yes, has was warned, warned, they say, months ahead of the breach. And you have some notes under our little our notes here.

And I think you you basically cover everything that needs to be said in your one sentence. Would you like to tell the tell the peoples about what what what you pointed out here? Well, so the story is about an independent researcher and this is a story on Motherboard.

And what troubles me about this story is that they're using one anonymous researcher who claims to have done a bunch of things. And so, you know, we don't really there's it's difficult to vet that person. It could be a made up story.

It doesn't seem like it. It certainly seems legit. And given everything we know about Equifax, it certainly fits their pattern. So, yeah, I was going to ask you. I'm like, so do we? Yeah, that's true. But I was going to ask, do we like Motherboard this week? Because last week I didn't know if we like the Intercept. So do we like the Motherboard this week?

They seem to be doing pretty decent reporting. But yeah, I think so. But that that was that was the thing that struck me about this article. That was the thing I wish I wish they had some other sources. And of course, in this situation, it might not be possible because we're talking about one researcher who found some things and and.

And prefers for professional reasons not to be named. And so fine. They do have multiple anonymous resources from inside of Equifax, though, as well, from people on the different teams. My only my only thing that was the giant red flag for the article was that they basically talked about getting all of the data for the customers of Equifax.

And anybody that's been covering the story knows that the data that was, you know, exfiltrated was not from about their customers. It was about their product. We're not customers. So that the fact that they were kind of tone deaf on the fact that the data that was taken was not about customer data kind of kind of made me, you know, the hairs on the back of my neck kind of said, hmm, maybe this person doesn't know everything that there is to know about this.

The situation. Yeah, I think it's a valid criticism. I also think it's a it's a it's an acceptable slip up, I think. OK. You know, I you know that I see where you're coming from and I don't disagree with you. But so overall, what this researcher found was that there was a public facing portal of some kind seemed to be for internal use by Equifax employees.

That was completely unprotected. If you knew where it was, you could go on this portal and search on the data about you, me and everyone else and and download massive quantities of this data in the clear. No questions asked, no login, no password, just open to the Internet.

Yep. And as somebody who's worked in big companies like this and built tools like this and left the mass to the wind like this, I know this kind of stuff happens. It happens more often than not. And the thing that I noted in reading this, the note I put in our notes was it's noteworthy that no one was alerted that this researcher was grabbing all these files.

Exactly. That's what really kind of I'm just like, hmm, you're right. So they didn't have any kind of intrusion detection on any of this stuff. And it makes sense, though, if it was a front facing web portal that somebody probably spun up, stuck outside the firewall so people could check it from home, which I'm sure is exactly what happens.

Like you've got these Equifax people who need to do lookups from home and they don't want to bring their dongle. They don't want to do two factor. It's like I'm going to be at my grandmother's this weekend and I don't I'm not going to have a static IP. So we can't put it in the, you know, the allow list. Can you just give me a little tool that I can use?

And it just snowballed for probably 10 years and grew into this thing. Somebody forgot it was there or when it was spun up, they thought, oh, security by obscurity. No one will ever find this. The boss will never know. And, you know, my boss will be happy because now we can work from home.

Yeah, nobody this is these are the people that come in and they know enough to know how to do this, but not enough to know that there are things called network scans. You know. Yeah. So, you know, it points to the fact that there could have been multiple occasions of people grabbing large quantities of data from Equifax beyond what we know about beyond was beyond what was reported.

This is a completely different way for people to have grabbed data from Equifax. Also, of course, noteworthy is that Equifax didn't really seem to do anything about this when this researcher, according to this researcher, when he or she reported it to Equifax, they left the site up.

You know, he made the point they should have just pulled the plug like in five minutes. Somebody should have just shut it to pull the plug, shut it down, you know, just. Yeah. But they didn't. No, they didn't. And again, no one's going to go to jail. Because Janet from HR needed to go home and look up some people.

That's what it was. But the funny thing is, Equifax did. You know, they kind of acknowledge that this thing was there, but they said this wasn't how they the hackers got in. It was a different set of data that they got. Right, right, right, exactly, right. Yeah, this is bad, but it's not as bad as the other thing. So don't worry about this one.

It's okay. It's all right. Yeah, it's a misdirection. Don't look at this massive data breach, because over here, we've got a really massive data breach. Yeah. That makes me sad. I got a fun story from a friend of the show, John Chevron, who is a cybersecurity researcher here in Chicago and a good friend of mine in the show.

The dark web's most notorious thief, Fish Kings, gets doxed. I'm like, gots doxed. That would have been a better headline. I think it rolls better off the tongue. Gots doxed, yeah. Gots doxed. There's no honor among thieves. No, there is not. And did you follow up on this story at all?

Have you seen this one? I had not seen this one, no. This was an interesting one. It reminded me of, in fact, just today I was talking to a researcher about fishing and some research that's going to be coming out soon.

And one of the things that this person told me was how the people who do these fishing kits, they like to leave their signature behind. Somewhere in the code, they like to tag their work so other people know, hey, this was me.

And this guy seemed to do it with a little more flair than perhaps other users did or other users appreciated. Yeah. The story is actually really good on how the user that found him out was InsanityDRM. Again, all of these people who can be verified and tracked down, right?

That's true, yeah. Well, you know, we always say attribution is the bitch of the bunch when we're talking about cybersecurity, so. Well, it is, but also the other thing we say about attribution, and by we I mean the people who are actually doing this stuff, not me who just reports on it.

Yeah, we just talk about it. Yeah, we just talk about it. No, but the people who actually do the heavy lifting and the work, what I hear over and over again is that attribution doesn't really matter very much. In other words, to you or me or, you know, me running my company, it doesn't really matter who did this to me.

What I need to know is how do I stop it or how do I prevent it? That attribution, attribution is the work of nation states. And law enforcement. And law enforcement. Yes, absolutely. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. But. Acme Corp doesn't really care about Joe Schmo in his basement.

He just wants to know that Joe Schmo too can't do the exact same thing. Right. I mean, it can inform how you'll respond to things if you know it can help establish patterns and styles and things like that. But overall, it seems like attribution isn't that important as some of us think it might be.

It's fun. Right. It's fun, but it also does help to know that it's not Philip down in the mailroom who did this to you, that it was somebody from the outside and not an internal, you know, cog in the wheel. Yeah, it also brings the point that it can also provide cover for you.

So, for example, if you're an organization that loses some data and you can point with confidence to the Chinese or the Russians or the North Koreans, that may provide more cover for you that, well, there's nothing we could have done.

I mean, it was the Russians or the Chinese, you know, it was a nation state did this to us. Oh, like in the Sony hack. Well, it wasn't Bob, you know, sitting in his basement with an old Amiga, you know. I know. Yeah. No, I get you.

No, I still hang on to the Sony hack because I know people at Sony. We know you do. It was an inside job. I know. It's adorable, Jason. It's adorable. You hang on to that. Sorry, the fact that I know people at Sony that works in IT.

Not my problem. Okay. I'm going to Bader-Meinhof this one away. There you go. I'm going to be Brian and I'm just going to Bader-Meinhof it away. Yes, yes. Embrace the Bader-Meinhof. Embrace the Bader-Meinhof. Okay, Mr. Heat-Mizer. All right. Yeah. Now we have another email from a fan from Danny Nile.

Yes. I've written you twice before, but only with positive feedback. Now I have a question or two, which you might want or not want to delve into. Perhaps you've mentioned this before. Perhaps it's something for Awesome Dave. Now there's my new nickname. Awesome Dave. Right.

I've been thinking a lot about security, especially concerning fingerprint sensors. Both Apple and Samsung, among others, want us to use their Touch ID for various things. And lately, they really want us to tie credit cards to Apple and Samsung Pay with Touch ID being the key, so to speak.

Yep. Not so to speak, actually. Yeah. That would be an actually. But I've tried to find out without luck what actually happens the day I wish not to use their respective service anymore. I use neither. Do they erase my fingerprints stored in their databases? Do they keep them?

I believe it's still very difficult, if not impossible, to shut down an Apple ID, whereas it seems to be relatively easy with Samsung. Two, what happens if the fingerprints are stolen or leaked from their databases? I presume they're not kept in perfectly ordered folders neatly tied to me.

So how are they actually stored? And can the fingerprints be restored and used by someone else after the theft and even be connected to me? What is the actual damage to me if they're not my own anymore, except for not being mine, which is a huge thing, okay? Yeah.

Thank you again for this absolutely amazing podcast. Aw. Yeah, Jason. I, too, fucking hate the word pod, which everyone in Sweden uses all the time. Well, that means I'm not going to Sweden. But thank you, Danny, very much for the question. A nice letter from Danny.

Yes. Okay. Awesome. Dave, do you want to take a first stab at this and then I can follow up? Well, sure. I will address the Apple side of it because I'm a little more up to date on how that side of it works. So Danny has just a couple of basic misunderstandings about how it works, understandable misunderstandings.

So on the Apple side of things, when it comes to Touch ID, your fingerprint never leaves the phone. So Apple has built into the device, they have what they call their secure enclave, which is a special... Fancy. It is.

Well, it is fancy. It was designed by Apple in California. So the way that the secure enclave works is that there's a special part of the chip, the CPU, that is isolated from the rest of the CPU.

And that part stores the information about your fingerprint. And when your fingerprint is scanned, it converts the fingerprint scan into a mathematical representation of your fingerprint. It's not actually a picture of your fingerprint. So what happens is, with that bit of data in the secure enclave, basically any other part of the phone, all it can do is check in with the secure enclave to say, hey, is this the person whose fingerprint has previously been scanned into the system?

So it can't... The rest of the phone, the apps on the phone, the phone itself, the operating system can't see the fingerprint. It can't see the data about the fingerprint. All it gets is a yes or no answer from the secure enclave as to whether or not the fingerprint matched the fingerprint that was scanned in.

So your fingerprint never gets uploaded to Apple servers. It's never exposed to any of the rest of the apps on the phone. So it's a pretty clever way of handling this. And the security researchers who've looked at it have said, yeah, this is pretty good. Yep.

And as far as Android goes, it does exactly the same thing, but with different jargon. It uses the trusted execution environment instead of the secure enclave. Yeah. And it uses trusty OS, which is very jaunty, I think. That is...

Welcome to trusty OS, which is, you know, it's a different set of protocols that are running on the chips, on the phone, but the same thing. It basically verifies it against the data in the trusted execution environment through the trusty OS and gives it basically a yes or no, saying that, yes, this works, this doesn't work.

So nobody actually has your fingerprint data. That's really the long and the short of it. So you don't have to worry about it. And yes, if you can't get rid of your Apple ID, don't worry about it. Because if you get rid of the phone, then it's gone. So always wipe your phone when you send it back to someone else.

And of course, Apple has Face ID coming out now, and that works with the same secure enclave. But I don't know about you, but I was annoyed when, of course, when Face ID came out, there were the endless, mostly blog posts or clickbait articles that said, well, now that Apple's going to have a scan of my face, the FBI is going to have a scan of my face, the NSA is going to have a scan of my face.

They already do. It's called a photograph. They already have my fingerprints. They already have, you know, just... So I think the nice thing about Danny asking about this is that I think there is widespread misunderstanding about how these work, and they are more secure than I think most people give them credit for being.

They're more secure than the real world, because as we've talked about on the show before, at the CCC, the Chaos Computer Conference in Berlin, like three or four years ago, they figured out how to steal people's fingerprints with a DSLR when they hold their hands up. That is a fantastically easier way to get your fingerprint data than it is to get it from your phone.

It's never going anywhere on your phone. You're walking around all day waving your hands around, you know, anybody can get your fingerprint data, and actually, if they get your phone, they can get a fingerprint on the glass, because you touch the phone all day long with, oh, maybe your fingers.

That's right. So the easiest way to get it is in the real world, not in the actual processor itself. Yes. Yes. So sleep tight, Danny, and tell everybody over there in Sweden that they are saying pod wrong.

It is a podcast. Okay. All right. We're going to do this one real quick, because this is just going to open up the can of worms. We're going to Bader Meinhof this one right out the door. All right. Kyle Roderick, a friend of the show and was a guest host on the show a while back, and he does the Morning Show podcast, which is amazingly entertaining.

I highly recommend everybody check it out. But he sent us a tweet right before the show started. He's like, I know I can prove Facebook is secretly listening to me. And he wrote an article on Medium that said, Facebook is listening to me without my permission. Kyle, I love you, man.

But why you got to stir the pot? He was playing Destiny 2 all weekend on his game box, whatever, which one it was. Yeah. And he got a gun. He got this crazy gun. And the gun had a very unusual name.

Now, it's called Uriel's Gift is the name of the gun. And like, you know, not long after, in 16 hours, he says, 16 hours later, in Facebook, it says, in people you may know, someone comes up with the name Uriel.

Because he had said out loud, he said, hey, Uriel's Gift. And then later on, somebody comes up in his Facebook, mentions the name Uriel. Now, the problem here is, he says, that I've never really heard the name Uriel before.

Right there. Okay. That triggers, you are on the lookout for the name Uriel now. Because you just got a gun, which is cemented in your mind, with this name. So you're going to be on the lookout for it. It's like, I would never have looked at the Ford Escape, because it is a generic truck, until I bought one.

And then I see them everywhere. This is the entire process of the Bader-Meinhof syndrome, or for me, the curse. I call it the Bader-Meinhof curse. Yes. Or being shulmeistered. So I told him to go recreate the experiment and come back to us when he's got like three or four names that show up when he's playing his Xbox.

But yeah, we had to put it in here because, you know, Kyle's a friend of the show, and this is germane to our discussion of, is Facebook listening to us? Yes. And he made the point, he has a screen grab in his post that Facebook did not have access to his microphone.

Right. So in order for this to happen, Facebook would have to be continuously listening, be able to pull out this exclamation that he made of this name, disobey his wishes to not have access to the microphone, and then somehow pull that together and present him with a random name of someone that matches this.

Ah, but you're missing a vector. Go on. He was doing this while in chat on his gaming platform. Oh, right, right. So the gaming platform could have been the platform that is listening to him because he obviously gave them microphone access because they're listening to him talk to his friends.

So it doesn't actually always have to be the phone. It could be a third party that is actually listening and tying those identities together. Now, did that happen? I still believe he landed on the moon, so I'm going to probably say no. I had one of these happen to me about two weeks ago where someone who I have, I know only through business, I have only exchanged emails with, you know, it's a client relationship.

So the only contact I have with this person is through sending emails back and forth with this person at work. I have no connection to them, you know, we're not connected on social media in any way, this, that, or the other thing.

And suddenly, so as it turned out, I happened to run into this person at a conference recently.

And this was the first time I had ever met this person face to face. And I said, hey, this thing just happened. And how do you think this happened? And this person said, oh, well, it's probably because I tag you on Facebook with your podcast and this and that. And I was like, oh, well, there you go.

There's the answer. There you go. So something was happening behind the scenes that I was unaware of, but my perception was, wait a minute, where did this come from? I have no connection to this person at all. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, unbeknownst to me, this person was tagging me on things from their Facebook account.

So there you go. And, you know, there was another one that happened to me and you this week because before the show last week, we were talking about the Heatmiser. Right. We were talking about the Heatmiser and the old, you know, stop motion Christmas show. Yeah, year without a Santa Claus. Yeah.

And I am, you know, bouncing around, doing something. And I was in YouTube and it came up as a suggested video, which was that. And I shared it on your Facebook stream after because I'm like, well, damage is already done. But that never left the secure enclave, as it were.

It was just something that we were doing on the show and it just showed up. So, you know, on that one, I'm just like, there has to be some other vector here because there's no way that they're listening to this. You know, us just chatting and doing that because it never, it never, it actually never left anybody's headphones because we're all like, you know, headphoned in.

The phone couldn't have heard it. They're not listening to Zencaster or whatever. So it's like, that kind of proves the point that shit just gets in the zeitgeist because maybe you were talking about it to somebody else or made a post about it. And since we're friends and it all kind of just comes back together and around that, boom, there you go.

It also could just be nothing more than the fact that you and I are both the age at which we both grew up with that, you know, as an important part of our lives. So we watched it every year and YouTube knows that about us. So it's in the standard rotation of things that will be delightful to people who are our age.

And it just coincidentally popped up in that cycle at a time when we had talked about it. If it had popped up in that cycle when we hadn't talked about it, you would just would have scrolled by and said, hey, look, it's Heatmiser. That's cool. I like him. And that would have been it. Yep. Or they could actually be listening to us and they're banking on us coming up with our own rationalizations to the process just like this to advertise to us at every turn.

It's a theory. It's one of those things. So Brian, even though he's not here, he left us with a little comic relief and we'll have this in the show notes. It's members of Congress struggling to pronounce Kaspersky. Kaspersky. Kaspersky. And I thought half of them said it right, but, you know, I could just be saying it wrong myself.

But it was pretty funny. Well, it's fun to laugh at our leaders. It is. Well, every fucking day. So definitely, guys, go to GOG.show slash 223 and check out that video because it is very chuckle worthy. It's a hoot.

It's a hoot and a tootin'. I'm a pickin' and I'm a grinin'. All right, Dave. Awesome, Dave. Thanks for stopping by and we'll chat next week. All right. Brick-a-brick. Fun little thing. I found this week, Antipodes map.

This map helps you find the Antipodes. The other side of the world of any place on Earth. The old story of if you just drilled straight down through the planet and came out the other side, where would you be? It's fun. It's cute. Thank you. Thank you for pronouncing that properly because I always thought it was antipodes. Antipodes. Antipodes. As far as I, that's what I always thought it was.

I could have done Google. It sounds better. Okay. If you're here with me in LA, you'd end up just off the coast of Madagascar. If you're with Jason in Chicago, you're somewhere in the middle of the ocean between Madagascar and Australia. So it's a fun little thing. You can just drag it around and it's kind of cute. It's clever. Nice. Last week, I had, why do Canadians drink milk in bags and pulled it because I don't know why.

We ran out of time. Jason had pop through popular demand. Basically, Jason said, we got to do this one. So because I go to Canada all the time and I have made fun of it, milk does come in bags. You basically buy one plastic container that lasts you your entire life and you go to the grocery store and you buy a three bag bag of milk and you cut it up and you cut a little snip in the bag and you put the bag in a little plastic container and there's your milk for the week.

There's a reason for this. Why? Think the metric system. By the late 1960s, glass bottles were still being used for milk, but officials knew they were causing a considerable amount of waste and expense. Heavy bottles were paid to transport, broke easily. And a few years later, Canada was busy converting to the metric system, requiring liquids to be sold in liters.

All the manufacturing plants producing plastic jugs or cartons basically had to alter them to allow their containers to be resized to beat new requirements. But the process for injecting milk into plastic bags, which was introduced by DuPont in the late 1960s, needed only minor tweaks.

So finances kind of determined this. The bags also produce less packaging waste since they require less plastic to hold the same amount of milk. Suddenly pouring milk into giant floppy sacks seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. So it's not just Canada that does this. This is actually gaining support in the rest of the world now.

In the UK, Sainsbury's is doing bags of milk and offering a free pritcher as an incentive to get people to make the switch to cut down on waste. And some places in Omaha, Nebraska are kind of doing it now. You can also find them in South Africa, Hungary, China. And China also happens to traffic in bagged beer.

Oh, wow. So that's why there's milk bags. And now I got to tell you, having a kid, I understand this. It would be so much cheaper, easier, and better for the environment if we had milk bags instead of me lugging these one-gallon plastic containers home like once a week. Well, I haven't bought milk in 10 years, so this is all you.

But I was fascinated by the fact that the history behind this thing. Yeah, pretty crazy, huh? Yeah. And I found something for all of us to enjoy. Please do share this with Dave Bittner. I'm going to miss that segment today, but let him know that this is here. This is Mandela Effect Heaven, as collected by Herbo.

These are lies that we all believe. It's called the Mandela Effect for a reason. I'll just list off the different ones, and we can debate this amongst yourselves later. It's the Berenstain Bears, not the Berenstein Bears. We've done an entire episode on that. Alternate universe, fuck it.

It's wrong. Sinbad never played a genie in a 90s movie. Yep. Did not happen. A lot of people swear it does, obviously. The Monopoly guy did not have a monocle. I have to admit, I swore the Monopoly guy had a monocle as well. Yeah. In fact, we did that story about the people that were just back at the Goldman Sachs hearings or whatever.

She wore a monocle. She wore a monocle. That's not true. There is no balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. See, that one I didn't know, but I figured I'm okay with not knowing that, because I don't know my Shakespeare that well. Okay. The Bible never says that Eve ate an apple.

Wouldn't know that one either, because I don't read the Bible. There is not, nor has there ever been, a brand of peanut butter called Jiffy. That I know. There's Jiff and there's Skippy. I've never heard of Jiffy. Yeah. C-3PO isn't made entirely of gold. Not even before the Red Arm.

You skipped a very important one. You skipped Chick-fil-A. Oh, yes. Well, while we're blowing your mind, this is connected to the Jiff and Jiffy one. It's Oscar Mayer, not Oscar Mayer. It's also Chick-fil-A, spelled with C-K, not Chick-fil-A, spelled with just a K.

I'm looking at the photo, and I'm like, shit, I always thought it had, I didn't see the K, or the C, until I saw this photo. And I'm like, I was there like two weeks ago, and I still thought it was C-H-I-K. Yep. Hannibal Lecter never said, hello, Clarice, and Darth Vader never said, Luke, I am your father.

He says, Hannibal Lecter actually says, good morning. That's it. We covered that on the show. We actually had that one on the show. And the Darth Vader line is, no, I am not your father. There you go. Yep. Well, it's actually, no, I am your father. Oh, yeah, sorry. No problem.

No, I am your father. See, you're going into it. Now, here's the thing about the C-3PO not made entirely of gold, where he has the silver leg. I want to go back and find the old toys and see if they kept the silver leg in the original toys, because that's where I would base my memories on. Yeah, I don't believe that they did.

I think he was entirely gold. Yeah, because that would be expensive to just change a little bit of the leg. Millions of souls cried out as they were sanding the gold off the leg. Anyway. All right. I love Brick-A-Brack.

It's my favorite. Me too. Moron of the Week. Moron of the Week is quite possibly the first tech luminary I ever met when I got to San Francisco. You could say the first person I met there was Chris Perillo, but he wasn't really a tech luminary.

No, it was Robert Scoble. This week has been an exercise in how to step on your own dick in every possible sense of the word. Right. Accused of sexual harassment. Comes back with an apology.

Deletes the apology. Goes on record at USA Today. Then comes back and writes a blog post when his lawyer said, you should just shut the fuck up now. And everybody in the world who reads his second post says, yeah, you really should have listened to your lawyer, bro, because that was the stupidest thing anybody has ever said.

Now, Brian, have you been following the story? I know the big beats. Look, I was never a fan of Scoble. I always thought he was a colossal windbag. And now he's a colossal windbag and a sexual harassment guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Cheats on his wife. He's a douchebag. Yeah. You know, Scoble is the quintessential douchebag. If you didn't figure that out when you saw him in the shower with the Google Glass, you know what? He is glasshole zero. He honestly is. So the long and the short of it is Robert Scoble is our moron of the week for being insensitive, pushing his own startup in his apology letter and basically saying that he's the victim and needs to heal himself the entire way through.

That seems to be the fallback position for everybody now. I don't entirely understand what's happened with crisis management because it just seems to have gone by the wayside in this new era. Because I guess it's crisis management 2.0. Admit nothing wrong. Accidentally admit something wrong.

Delete every bit of evidence about you admitting something wrong and promote yourself while still at it. And then go, I'm just going to go away for a while, but let me come back and do what I was doing. This is what happens when narcissists take the reins. It's pretty much it. I know everything. I'm better than you.

And why don't you want to sleep with me? Oh, oh, oh, maybe that's okay. Yeah. It's a mess. It's a total mess. But Scoble, go away. We're done with you. It's over. Yeah, I think that's the best bit of advice for all of these people. Just go away. I'm not saying crawl into a hole and die, but your time in the limelight, your time in the limelight is over.

And, you know, just go live a private life somewhere. God knows you all have enough money. Well, and I love that Kara Swisher from Recode came out and was, you know, you know you're screwed. You're screwed in the tech industry when Kara Swisher comes out.

She says, all joking aside, because Scoble is such a joke most of the time, but this is an appalling display of clueless misogyny. Right. Yeah. You're done in tech. That's it. The queen has spoken. That is fair. That is true. I want to always listen to your lawyer. Yes, you should listen to your lawyer.

And something else that you might want to do, due diligence and Google search, a simple Google search. Now, I love Tori Amos. Tori Amos is one of the 10 women in the previously mentioned Alan Cross's 10 Queens of Quirk. I've followed her career since the beginning, loved her first album.

Albums since then have been hit or miss for me, but I totally respect her as an entertainer, as a musician, as a lyricist, as an artist. She's fantastic. Boy. Most of her albums. Yeah, and she's also very outspoken, and she's an outspoken longtime supporter and spokesperson for RAIN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

She's very involved in that area. I understand that she has her own past issues that have occurred to her. So you'd think her management team would bother to find out who was commissioned to do a photo shoot that she recently done. So she had to make a statement.

I'll just read her statement. And this is how you handle something. Before you do that, can you just name check the photographer? Terry Richardson. If you could think of one photographer in the world who is not only... Loathed and hated by everyone and is considered basically a rapist.

Yeah, I mean, it's never been proven in a court of law. Yet. Yet. But, I mean, okay, so seriously, even before Weinstein happened and all this stuff going on, if you just Google Terry Richardson, the first half of Google results about him is all about him being a fucking creep.

And look at the Google image results, and they are, frankly, quite X-rated. You know, this guy is not a good person. No, and he's getting his comeuppance now, apparently. People are coming forward about him finally, and he's going to have his mea culpa moment soon, I'm sure, which we'll potentially cover, but it'll probably be so outrageous we won't bother.

But, okay, so morons, first off, V Magazine, what are you still doing hiring this guy? I still don't understand why he's being hired left, right, and center. Hopefully that has come to an end. And Tori's management team, did you not ask who the photographer was? And when you got the name, did you not Google it?

Because of all the people that Tori Amos should be doing associated with, this guy, no. So she had to make a statement, and she did. So for the upcoming edition of V Magazine, I, along with others, took part in a photoshoot for the cult icons portfolio. The magazine had commissioned the photographer, Terry Richardson, to take these shots.

At the time, I was not aware of the various accusations made against Richardson. Had I been, I would not, I would never have taken part. I'm disgusted by the nature of the allegations. Can only stand strong with the women who were subjected to this abuse over the years. As the first spokesperson and longtime supporter of RAIN, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, I can only hope that we all continue to speak out and break the silence about these kind of abuses and stand strong together against these predators and those who support them.

Tori Amos, and then she gives the RAIN information. That's a good statement. That is exactly how you do it. But still, but still, at this point, how can you not be aware of Terry Richardson's history? And again, simple Google search management team. Come on. And has nobody ever seen a Miley Cyrus TMZ post in the past five years?

Like, he's the corrupting influence on her. Yeah. He's not a good guy. I'm not even in the business. And I know about this. And I look, I understand. I've been in the business, music business for years. I understand that a lot of these things get booked and people don't look into them. And it's just, okay, it's on the schedule.

I've got to go. I've been asked to be part of Cult Icons for this magazine. I'm supposed to show up for this magazine shoot. I don't even care. Just tell me what time to be there and when, and I will go do it. But. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. So there you go. We've got some new Patreon supporters this week, Jeff S and Anthony R, and also a PayPal donation from Nicholas W.

Yes. Thank you all so very, very much. And a tweet that has not aged well, at least not three or four days later, because we talked about Twitter doing very well. Chris Costello over on Twitter says, how's your stock picking going now? Re, this is yet more evidence that Twitter is in fact run by the Bluth company.

And this was earlier in the week when Twitter was getting a lot of hits, but, you know, now they've resurged with their stock price briefly. Give it time. This is a trend. We'll see. We'll see. Ben Stanley writes, I'm on the fence with Mindhunter so far because it's feeling like a procedural, but now this is cool.

And this is a side by side of the actual one of the one of the actual serial killers and the actor that is portrayed in the miniseries, I guess. Super cool. It is really spot on.

The actor that they hired for this show is so good. I love it. Nice. And Gadlaw says, as I'm listening to the podcast, hashtag AI pops up in the Twitters. They are listening to me, listening to you. And no, I still don't believe that anything's listening, but you can't escape the hashtag AI on the Twitter.

All right. This next one comes from Keith Ede. Hey, guys, saw this and thought of you. You're welcome. And you spelled you're wrong, but this is the 25 best memes about dumb fuck. And this is a Google image about Uber India. Now, I haven't actually been able to go back and verify that this is true because it doesn't really it looks shopped, but yeah, yeah, it's a bad screenshot.

I mean, yeah, I don't know if this is true or not. So, but it's fun in the show notes. If anybody wants to chime in on it, go for it. Yep. And 6502 chip sent us internet entrepreneur in air quotes, shocked that copyright owner sued him for stealing their work.

And this is from DIY photography dot net. We've covered so many stories like this, but this one is the most brazen douchebag. I don't know if you watch the video, but it's insane. I watched I scrubbed it here and there and wanted to punch the screen. And he was smart enough to turn off comments.

But the annoying thing about it is he's probably getting ad revenue from people watching the video. So don't go watch the video. Just know that this guy is a stellar douchebag. Perfect. Agreed. He is. It's it's insane to me that this stuff is still happening, but it is.

So, okay. Yep. Next up, we got got something from the GOG dot show feedback forms, which everybody can go to. Highly recommend. Yep. This comes from Brian a based on your shout to L media player. I wanted to make you aware that they had a security incident this week. The software was infected with a Trojan for a day or so.

Whoopsie. Oopsie. Yeah. Luckily, not the day that I installed it. So hopefully if you guys got it on Brian's recommendation, go check it out and make sure that you have an up to date version and run your virus software, which nobody has on a Mac. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I still I like it better. I've been living with it for a while. I like it better than VLC player. So but VLC is free and didn't have a nasty Trojan in his installer. I was going to say it doesn't come with Trojan. So it's not like WordPress where it's free hacked for you. Yeah. Our next comment comes from Peter A. Thanks for mentioning my comment about self-driving cars and running.

I got so inspired that I listened to your podcast twice today while out running just to see if there's anything else I wanted to rant in on you to possibly use on the show. And you guys should totally get to count those two listens as two downloads for your statistics. I love the short segments format. I don't think it works like that. So it doesn't work like that.

Anyway, I'm going with a story about the French government taking a stance to enforce transparency and photography by outlawing, outlawing, altering digital photos and ads. Good luck with that. Someone in the French IRS actually came up with the idea of body shaming models either directly by forcing fake news stickers on their ads or indirectly by taking them to court as witnesses asking, you're actually fatter in real life than in that picture, right?

Celebrity media might love it, but my God, what were they thinking? Have political correctness without prior analysis ever planted for a worse foobar? Unless they're going to add a paragraph giving courts the right to forcibly strip down denying hostile witnesses on the stand to compare the real thing to the picture on trial. How are they going to prove it?

And this idea seems to come for some French version of the French IRS, not really a popular institution to begin with. I'm sure feel free to use these grumpy thoughts of mine as you see fit. Yeah, I mean, I guess in a stream case scenario, you're you're they're not going to ask people to go strip down.

But I think this is for the more obvious trend. And it's just trying to make people aware of what's happening and try to stop it in its tracks. I can't see, well, maybe there will be actual lawsuits because it isn't a significant amount of money. But I think to get to that point, it's going to be transparently obvious that some Photoshop fuckery was going on.

Yeah, there's going to have to be a lawsuit because they're going to have to determine what in the courts is determined by Photoshopping. What is the what is the barrier and the boundaries that you can actually fix a photo? Because, you know, if you're talking about zits on asses, you got to get rid of those. But if you're talking about making them two feet taller, there's definitely an issue there.

I don't know. I've subscribed to zits on asses quarterly and they don't bother getting rid of them. I'm sure your wife is happy about that. Next one comes from Mike Malast. Project Loon Balloons have transponders and show up as air traffic. It is worthless trivia, but cool to see the flight pass.

There are several over Puerto Rico right now. And there's a link to Flight Radar 24. And I checked this out and there are a bunch of them and it is super cool to be able to see Project Loon Balloons and the pass that they take. It's very neat. Yeah, it is cool. This is the kind of well, it's not it's not like it's Google providing the transparency.

They legally have to have the transponders and do show up as air traffic, but it's very cool to see. So that's awesome. Next up is from Mark. Not sure if you saw this football fan forced to pay Sky Sports 16,000 pounds, I believe. Yes, for legally 16,000 pounds.

Not a huge fee, you know. Really? Well, if you got slapped with that, I think you'd consider it a huge fee. This is one person. Well, I wouldn't be as stupid as this guy. Yes. For a legally streaming channel through well-known website. So obviously he is not using a VPN. No. And I just like that the fact that they won't say what the website was.

It was probably Twitch. I'm guessing it was Twitch, but because that's the easiest way to stream stuff. But the next one comes from iTunes. KJ Garbutt from the UK says, love the show. Informative and entertaining. Big fan. Listened for a while now. Entertaining and informative. Appreciate the views and insight from both of them.

Keep up the good work. Like all the ads too. Nice. Yeah. Thank you. Because there's going to be one this episode. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And tell all of your friends. Pretty, pretty please. Closing shout-outs! My first closing shout-out goes to Robert Guillaume of The Lion King and Benson, but also Soap and Phantom of the Opera.

He died at age 89. Yes, I was a huge fan of Benson as a kid. I really wonder if that has legs. I might want to go back and watch an episode. I don't know. Because my family made me watch Soap, which I never got. I was way too young for Soap. But when Benson came on, I was totally in the right age range for Benson.

I loved that show. He was awesome. Yeah. And also, unfortunately, past at 89, Fats Domino. So that's a bit of a bummer. Sad to see him go. Of course, he was also in my list of, is he still alive? I heard that a lot on the radio this week.

They're like, Fats Domino is still alive? We didn't know that. Well, not anymore, so chalk that one off. And a huge shout out to friend of the show, Rob Reed. He got a TV deal for his book after on. Nice. It's crazy. It's going to be on the CW. Yep. Link in the show notes for that one.

And also, happy 40th birthday to dear friend of the show, Trent Hamilton, who will never, ever finish our new Grumpy Old Geeks podcast app. He will also never hear this because he'll probably be drunk for a straight week in Vegas. Yes, he is in Vegas partying.

He actually, I saw his Instagram post this morning. He put $25 down on a video poker machine and turned it into $700 and walked away. Nice. So, happy birthday. That's a good chunk of change to start the week right. It'll be gone in about 20 minutes. Yep.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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. And just shut up and give us your goddamn money. We need it.

We really do. 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 233. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week.

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