234: Degauss the House

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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. Happy iPhone Day! Is that what it is? I guess I never really became the crazy Mac person, even though I'm all Apple infrastructure now. Well, if you remember a few weeks ago, you said that today I would be at the Apple store buying my new $1,000 iPhone, and I told you I wouldn't be.

I just said you'd get it. You'll get it. It'll happen. Yeah, maybe when the 12's out. Well, I admire your restraint. It's not restraint. I just got a free upgrade, so why pay for it? And I did have to pay for my AppleCare Plus today, though, which was a...

That does put a little sting into it, though. That extra $150. It is a bit of a kick in the nads, but... It's cheaper than getting a screen repaired. There you go. Exactly. Yeah. You get two freebies, and then after that, it's like $30. So that $150 pays for itself the first time you sit on your massive phablet with your phab ass, which happens every now and again with these things.

So I am prepared. I am protected. And I am poor. Yeah, I understand. How about a little follow-up? We've talked about how stats are meaningless. Yes, they are. Meaningless, meaningless. We tell you. Well, turns out MySpace has found out the hard way. MySpace, you say? Why would they have stats?

Nobody ever goes to MySpace anymore. Well, turns out that they were trying to do partner traffic deals with these little sites that would send traffic to them. Well, somebody decided, well, hey, this is a good way to do some ad fraud. Now, I was going through this BuzzFeed article where they talk about how it was in the whole ad fraud scheme going on over there at MySpace.

Well, some of the companies that are named in this article I just find ridiculous. We have Social Puncher and Double Verify. Right. These are fraud research companies. Now, Double Verify, I can understand, but Social Puncher? That sounds like a masturbation social network.

Of course you went there. Of course. It's getting hard to find a .TV or a .CEO or a .Ninja or a .whatever these days. It's actually funny. I had a conversation with somebody who was worried about not getting the .com for whatever the hell he wanted to do. And I was like, really?

You still worried about that? Okay. Nobody cares about .com anymore. Nope. At all. And there are a couple other companies here. Swag Bucks. Yep. They sound legit. And Screen Rush. Yeah. Well, anyway, so yes, stats are meaningless.

Everybody's stealing from you. And don't even worry about it anymore because we haven't. Nope. There's nothing we can do. No. Stats completely mean absolutely nothing, yet we still base almost everything off of them. It's amazing. Yeah, like making a living. Yes.

Speaking of ads, though, there's a great TED Talk that I found by Zeynep Tufekci. Yes. Or Tufekci. Tufekci. That's it. I practiced all morning. I knew I was going to screw it up in the moment, but it's called We're Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads.

Did you get a chance to watch this? I did not. It's been a bit of a week. So, but it sounds like something we've been talking about a long time. Yeah. It's just saying that everything that we're building to get people to click on ads is actually, you know, being used by regimes like China to arrest and kill people and things like that.

All of those nifty tools for tracking to get you to buy that next pair of shoes. Well, it's also tracking people who are homosexual where they shouldn't be or of a different religion. And yes, it's turning us into a nice little dystopia just so you can click on your screen rush or social puncher ad.

So, you're saying it's a funnel to prison? Yes, it is. So, definitely check it out. It's like 20 minutes. You can watch it on 2X and cook through it. Basically, you can go ahead and get, you know, certified for Google stats and analytics and start your own regime.

That's it. There you go. Now, you had those snazzy little augmented earbuds from Doppler a while back, didn't you? I did. A friend of the show who does PR for a living sent them my way to see what I thought about them. And I believe I crapped all over them on the show a while back.

Yes, you did. You did. So, hopefully, she's polished her resume because that company is now out of business. Doppler has shut its doors. Well, there's a surprise. Yeah. You make one product and it is terrible. I'm surprised they lasted this long. Crazy. Yeah, I never understood the point of it and apparently nobody else did either.

It didn't make any sense. It didn't do anything. I don't need flange put on my everyday soundscape. No, you need Prius detection headphones is what you need. That's exactly what I need. That would be helpful. Get on that, Doppler. Oh, I guess you guys are gone. I guess you can't. It's funny, though, because you mentioned that and I saw in my Facebook ads like three other startups that are doing the same damn thing.

There's a ton of them. Who keeps giving these people money? I don't get it. Some people never learn. Well, in a related story over on the Twitters, Kamali Nanjini, who's one of the stars of the show that I stopped watching.

What's it called again? Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. Over on the HBO's started a thread about this very thing. He said, I know there's a lot of scary stuff in the world, but this is something I've been thinking about that I can't get out of my head, which started a tweet storm. He was talking about has a cast member on the show about tech.

Part of their job entails visiting tech companies and conferences for research. Yeah, I'm sorry. And they make people eager to show off their new tech. And then he talks about that often the stuff that they see is scary. He doesn't mean weapons. He means altering video tech that violates privacy, stuff with obvious ethical issues.

And the actors bring up concerns to them, and they realize that nobody in these tech companies cares about ethical implications of what they make. They only care about how cool it is and if they can get funding. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, these are young kids whose brains haven't even finished growing yet, you know, and they're in charge of the new world order, as it were.

Yes, as it were. So I just thought that was really interesting because that's kind of what we talk about a lot here. All the time. And one last little bit of follow-up. I still have Facebook as the Zuck intended. I have found that my Facebook usage has gone down about 95%.

Yeah, I mean, when all you're being served is ads and nothing from your friends, what's the point? What's the point? There has been the same first article for the past, like, 36 hours. At least, yeah, at least 36 hours. So every time I go, there's no new comments on it. There's no new engagement, but it's always at the top.

And I'm like, okay, well, since that's still there, that must mean that there's nothing new on Facebook so I can close the window. So thanks for training me out of it. Engage with me and I will go away. Yeah. It's also only ads for us to promote and boost our Grumpy Old Geeks post.

That is the only new thing that I get. So when the little red dot pops up, it's just Facebook saying, hey, if you give us some money, more people will see your post. Yeah, that was my rant last week. Exactly. So it holds true. So, yeah. Facebook, go fuck yourself.

In the news. Oh, the joy that was had on Twitter for a brief 11 minutes last night. I know. I wish I was awake for it. Me too. If you hadn't heard, Mr. Trump's personal Twitter account was down for 11 minutes, completely shut off.

One of my favorite tweets was immediately, if you thought that 11 minutes felt good, wait until he's out of office. Yeah, seriously. My favorite was, those few precious minutes were like when Andy played the opera recording over the Shawshank PA system. Ah, yes.

That's a good one. I like that. And I went with my standard, some heroes don't wear capes. Oh, yeah. There's, I actually retweeted a couple reactions to the incident this morning. It was very fun. Very fun. The fact that so many people were so excited about this just should give you a, you know, state of the nation temperature check.

Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. So it's pretty crazy. Yeah, people were very happy, obviously. So we have a very divided company. But yeah, so a biolic company. Yes, the United States actually is kind of a company. Well, it kind of is, and we'll probably be getting into that a little bit later. Yeah, so apparently an employee on their way out last day just figured out how to do it and did it.

So good for you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's sad that he just turned it off. It would have been nice if he just deleted it. Deleted it, yes. Oh, wow. Oh, man. So Google is in the news. Yes. This is a scary one for me and really kind of makes me rethink my use of Google Docs.

Because Google Docs were – I didn't realize that they had a terms of service on what you could actually write in the documents that you store on Google Docs. Well, that's not surprising. Yes, they have an abuse policy that prohibits the posting of serious threats, needlessly graphic or violent content, hate speech, harassment, confidential information, pornography, and anything illegal, including child exploitation and copyrighted content.

Now, this comes out because they basically locked a bunch of people out of their Google Docs for inappropriate content this week. Right. Yeah, and they say that it was an error. The lockouts were an error, and the company has fixed the problem, and they have a new push of code that they're working on to make sure that this never happens again.

The fact that it happened in the first place is the problem. And, you know, some people from National Geographic got locked out of their files because there were stories they were working on about, you know, human rights abuses and things like that. So how can Google tell that big brain on – look at the big brain on Google over there who can't figure out what's a story and what's – you know, it doesn't really matter at that point.

So the Google AI that was trolling through Docs and reading everything screwed up. Yes, basically. You know, this is an important time to, I think, remind everybody once again, the cloud just means somebody else's computer. Yeah, and the fact that they are saying what you can and cannot do in those Google Docs is really disconcered.

I never even thought about that. I mean, we talk about them reading email all the time, but I never thought that they would be going through Google Docs. Why wouldn't they? Well, I guess, yeah. Yeah, why wouldn't they? I mean, there's no ads on Google Docs, so it's one of those things where if they can't put an ad to it, they're not going to waste computing cycles.

But then again, they need the big data. They need the data. And they also don't want to have the lawsuit if somebody is using Google Docs to store all their child porn. Right. But I think of Google Docs as Word documents and spreadsheets and things like that, not so much Google Drive, which is where all the files are stored.

Right. Well, I'm sure they're scouring that as well. They're scouring everything. Yes, they are. Yeah. So be careful what you put up there on Google Docs, kids. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go over to Bitcoin. I'm getting so tired of talking about e-currencies because every...

Well, you know it's our show. We don't have to. That's true. But it's an important story for the tech world. It is what we cover. Lifehacker did a story recently that said, only buy Bitcoin if you're ready to lose it. Basically, the TLDR on this is there's a reason there's regulation within banks and other traditional ways to store currency.

And I kind of laugh at that because all we're trying to do right now, thanks to our current administration, is get rid of that regulation that exists to protect our money. But it does not exist at all in e-currencies. And in general, our real money and real banks and financial institutions can't just be stolen or disappear.

It sure can with exchanges. So be careful. Right. And this whole thing comes out, though. It's not just... This article piggybacks the one from Mark Fraunfelder where he got... Well, his personal story. Yeah. Yeah. It's his $3,000 of Bitcoin that would have been worth a whole lot of money that he lost because the maid threw away his passphrase and pen that he had written down.

And part of the story, which I really love, is his wife goes, why didn't you put it in one password? Yes. One password, people. We still recommend it. Yeah. And he's like, I didn't actually have an answer for her. But did you get a chance to check out Mark's story? Yeah. I mean, I scanned it. I understand it.

Did you see how it ended, though? That was the fascinating part. No, I didn't catch the end. Okay. So, yeah, most of the article, which is like 400 pages long, is him basically trying different passwords. Yeah. It's just like, okay, no password, no password. And talking about the time delay every time you put in a new password, it doubles the time that you can try to put in the next password.

Well, finally, at the end of it, he finds a hacker who can flash the firmware on his key and then get his passphrase and his pen back. Right. So, these things aren't nearly as secure as you think they are. So, all he had to do was put some new firmware on it, and then he could get all of his passphrase and pen back and then get the coin back off of the hardware wallet.

Right. Which was, you know, it did end in victory for Mark, which is good because I like Mark a lot. But, yeah, if he'd have just lost the wallet, then he'd have been shit out of luck. Well, or if your exchange just goes down, which is a bunch of the other stories in this Lifehacker article. So, in addition to the stories, it's people that had invested in – you can't really say there's a reputable exchange.

That's the problem because there's no regulation. So, people invested in a bunch of different exchanges that just kind of disappeared, and so did their money. Well, we talked about the new exchange that's coming online from Overstock.com. Right. That's the new one. And, you know, all of the serious cryptocurrency people that I know that are spending lots and lots of money in it and making lots and lots of money, none of them keep their money in an exchange.

They only put it in the exchange to exchange it, then they take it right back out. They keep it all in hardware wallets. Very expensive hardware wallets, too. These things can cost like $500 a pop. Right. It's kind of crazy. Now, CME Group, which is the world's largest derivatives exchange, they're going to start creating futures markets for cryptocurrency.

Oh, Joy. Yeah. So, hey, man, let's just – it's getting big enough, so let's try and screw it up even more. Exactly. Fun times. And there was an article a couple weeks ago that I actually pulled from the show that was by a researcher in Europe about how much energy it takes to do an actual Bitcoin transaction.

Right. And I kept it up because there wasn't really much backing up the story. I mean, he was a well-known researcher, and it was backed by, you know, a reputable organization. But it just – it was – you know, I think it was in metric, and our fans don't know what the metric system is.

So I didn't want to screw with anybody's brains. But anyway, Motherboard picked up the article and ran with it and did some new math on it. But, yeah, the – you've got to read the math on it. It's insane. But, yeah, basically any – like one Bitcoin transaction can power your home for a week.

Yeah. Because there's so much energy going into mining. Yes. And that's the crazy thing. The estimate is with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt hours of electricity annually to mine more Bitcoin, which is about as much as Nigeria uses in a year.

Yeah, and I guess we'll just avoid the whole global warming fact and just burning through this much energy and power. We finally start to get on the path to get shit fixed, and then Bitcoin comes along and fucks it all up. Yep. Good times. Way to go, nerds. Yeah.

Okay, how about you be a socially conscious nerd and you only use solar power to do your Bitcoin mining? It won't happen. No. No, it will not. They're going to be burning – they've got like a baby llama furnace in the back that they're using to spin the turbines to make more electricity. These people don't care.

Zero fucks given. No, that's exactly true. I mean, and you're gambling. You know you're gambling, so whatever. Anyway, so you're not going to be a socially conscious gambler, I suppose. I think Uber might be making a pivot, Jason. Oh, really? Well, if they're smart, because what we've discovered is Uber might make more money this year selling real estate in Oakland than actually selling rides.

Why do they have real estate? Well, they bought the old – Because they don't have any cars to put there. In 2015, they bought the old Sears building in downtown Oakland. With the intention of moving 3,000 of its employees to an expanded headquarters in the smaller, less filthy rich city across the bay from San Francisco, where the company currently is.

It never happened. Uber has stayed in San Francisco. So they're looking to sell that building now to a Los Angeles space real investment firm. And it will be for $220 million, approximately. They bought it for $123 million in 2015, so it's gone up in value that much already.

And Uber itself isn't profitable. They had lost $645 million in the second quarter of 2017. They booked around $20 million in rides in 2016. So they're basically lost about – the math works out to they lost about $2.8 billion for their rides.

So it looks like they're doing a lot better with real estate. Well, good. They should stick to real estate because – I look forward to seeing the billboards on the bus signs. Now, let's talk about Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the rest of the crew that are in front of Congress this week.

I have to be honest. I have not followed this because I figured I'd wait until the end because it just seems like a torrent of information coming out. That's kind of it. And here's what it is. Everybody on Capitol Hill is like, what the hell is wrong with you people? What are you doing?

Oh, we're selling ads. Yeah, but do you know who you're selling them to? Oh, no. But it says here you do. Oh, okay. I guess we do. Shit. But the one thing that I have been following, or at least I keep seeing, is they'll do something like say, oh, we sold five. And then the next day it's, oh, actually, we did a little more research.

It's 500,000. And the day after that, it was actually five billion. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you know, Dianne Feinstein has been really on them. Thank God, because I've been losing my faith in her for a long time.

A long time. So get at it. Yes. And of course, you know, the big quote is, you have to be the ones to do something about this or we will, which is, you know, a pretty big threat for them. But as we know, we'd have to get rid of two regulations to start a new one. So I think they're probably hedging their bets on the fact that they can't get rid of anything.

Look, it's a big deal. And you're going to see these companies capitulate a little bit, because if we do legislation and all this sort of stuff about social networks and these companies, they will go out of business. The only way they're making money is through shady stuff that we were not going to allow.

Speaking of shady stuff, Twitter talk about talking out of both sides of your ass. Yes. You know, now they're saying, oh, yes, we're getting rid of RT and whatever the other one was, because, you know, yeah, we didn't realize how bad they were. But now RT has come out and started to release some of the correspondence with Twitter because RT is like, hey, you guys are going to drop us.

We have no we have no qualms about telling everybody what you did. And what it turns out was they were Twitter was going after RT to spend millions of dollars on advertising for the 2016 election. Oh, imagine that.

Yeah, they wanted to ramp their stake up because they were selling about two percent and they wanted to ramp up to about 15 percent of the of the total election coverage for about three million bucks. Wow. And RT said no, which, you know, was fine. But now I really figured out why you could never place an ad on Twitter, Brian.

That's because you weren't trying to buy in rubles. Yeah, I guess so. I, you know, hats off to RT for being able to figure out how to actually purchase ads on Twitter. I still have yet to been able to do that. So, yeah, good for that. And in more fun news, more billionaires being dicks news.

Yeah. I've never heard of this company called DNA Info, but I have heard of Gothamist because they were, I would say, our prime competition when Sean Bonner and I used to run Metblogs. We really, really did not like Jake Dobkin. He was a grade A douchebag.

Better than this dude. You know, I think it's probably the same class of folk. Jake sold Gothamist to this company, DNA Info, in 2017, earlier this year. And this guy basically started to run with it. And, well, the writers decided to unionize.

Bastards. Yes. Well, you know, Scrooge McMoneybags here decided, nah, I'd rather not have a company than have it run by you unionized motherfuckers. Yeah. And so he just shut it down. Now, for people. No more. That's it. For people that don't know, Gothamist is expanded to multiple cities.

I loved it. They were always in about eight cities. I loved LAist. It was one of the great places to get local news, especially on socials. They actually did news on socials very well. So I love that. I followed LAist on Facebook and the Twitters for a long time and got great hyper-local news and journalism.

It was fantastic. Yeah. And, you know, they were our competition for blogging.la, which actually preceded them. And SFist for San Francisco, we had the same deal up there and, you know, all of our other cities. But they were, you know, they were decent at their job. They hired decent people.

But we always had a friendly rivalry. It was just the head office that we had problems with and this idiot Jake. Yeah, I recommend everybody go read the letter from Joe Ricketts, who is the CEO of DNA Info, Mr. Billionaire. I'm not going to say that he doesn't have a point.

Ah, no, yes, it's about business. It is, but that's the problem. See, news was never supposed to be about business. News was always supposed to be a loss leader. It was supposed to be a public fucking service. That's the fucking problem. And if you really want to get down to it, I'm going to go back in time and blame Ted Turner.

Ted Turner and the launch of CNN. Fuck news. And we're just seeing the fallout of journalism since that day because that's when news turned to entertainment and turned to ad sales. And the web just accelerated it and killed it. Now, you know, we need more Bezos in the world.

Joe Ricketts could have been a Bezos. He could have just said, look, we're losing money on this. I want the people to unionize. I want to pay journalists a fair share. I want to make sure all the employees of these companies that are doing this valuable service are getting the money that they deserve. And I will take a bit of a loss because I'm a goddamn billionaire.

And then he'd be a hero. But nope, he's a douchebag. Well, actually, he just should have sold it to Bezos since we know Bezos is in that game now with the Washington Post. But then we get into another situation I don't want, which is a consolidation of journalism and industries into one hand. Bezos could buy out everybody at this point.

But then we just got Jeff Bezos in charge of everything, which I guess is OK. It's better than the alternative so far. Yeah. I mean, would you rather have more news by, you know, somebody who's at least trying or no news because somebody didn't want to spend any money? Yeah.

Anyway, don't unionize, kids. It's a. Well, you should unionize. Everybody should unionize. Let's revolt. Come on. Let's start a revolution, people. Unions are damn good things. They're needed things. And we're just seeing them getting crushed because the reality is the American dream is over.

Hey, at least they didn't have to bring in the scabs. That's true. Scabs can't write. No, they can't. Now, this one I threw in here because I just found it fucking hilarious. Toothbrush subscription service Quip, not to be confused with the service that we use for our show notes, has raised $10 million in a Series A.

Now, Quip, yes, they are toothbrush subscription service. Let that sink in for a moment. Have you ever found yourself in the morning in the need of a new toothbrush and too damn lazy to get to a store at some time in the next two weeks? I have found myself in that need. Also, with my shaving needs, too.

And my. What's the other one? The dude wipes have to be delivered on a on a subscription basis. Yeah. Apparently, everybody is too fucking lazy to go to the store anymore. And it's all the subscription stuff just is mind boggling. I know Dollar Shave Club is, you know, crushing it as the the kids in the valley say.

You know what? I'll give you this for Dollar Shave Club. Try buying razor blades these days in any goddamn store. You have to get you have to find the manager who has to go through the 18000 keys because somebody is going to steal these things because they're so damn expensive. So I'm almost with you on Dollar Shave Club.

But if you're too lazy to go get a fucking toothbrush, go kill yourself. Exactly. They're a dollar. Go buy a size. Half you probably don't ever change your toothbrushes. Anyways, you nasty people. Nasty people. I actually got around the Shave Club thing. I was saving this for another show, but I'll just pitch it.

Pitch it in here. So it's over with. I bought a safety razor. OK, you know, one of the old school ones with the three cent blades cost twenty five bucks. I got a hundred blades with it cheaper than buying my Gillette razors and works great. I love it. Well, I can't wait to see if you can fly with it.

You know what you need to go with that is because I also have one. I don't use it as often as I do, but I should get back to it. But my wife got me one of those great little horsehair feather brushes. Oh, so you can do the shaving cream and then you use your old and then you can just start singing barbershop quartet songs while you shave.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, I can't. Then I'm going to have to get a towel heater to get the steam towels. I think we can kickstarter one. That's that's modern. OK, yes, we can. It's got Wi-Fi. Look, if you can get ten million dollars for basically fucking packing up and shipping a toothbrush once a month, I think we can do something here.

You know, what's the deal here? They stick them in an envelope and put a stamp on it. All right. I got a new idea, Jason. We're going to do a subscription Q-tip service. All right. Yes. Single serving Q-tips. That's right. Once a month, we're going to send you one Q-tip with a warning not to put it in your ear.

Oh, man. OK, well, at least these toothbrushes do not have Wi-Fi enabled in them yet. Yet. I would just say yet. Amazon came out this week with their new AR shopping feature for iOS. Yep. I tried it immediately. It's kind of cool. It works. Yeah, it is.

It's clever. There's not a whole lot in there. But what they did have is my exact same tea kettle. So I went to my kitchen. I put my tea kettle on the counter. Then I moved it around so it got the, you know, the geometry for the counter. And then I placed the tea kettle on the counter. The first time I did it, the tea kettle was about four feet tall.

So I recalibrated, put it on, and then it worked just fine. There's a picture, if you go to Instagram.com slash JPD, you can see the photo that I posted of the two kettles next to each other. Looks pretty good. I got to admit, it worked. Will I ever use it for anything?

Hell no. Yeah. Because unless I'm going to be, you know, getting my toothbrushes and I have to see if they fit in my bathroom. I have a four foot tall toothbrush. It was neat. I mean, the fact that it works is pretty cool. I highly recommend trying it out. That's my favorite rating from you, Jason.

I've actually decoded it. It was neat means I've used it once and will never use it again. Yep. That's it. That is the exact definition of what Jason says. It was neat. That's the death knell of any product. It's neat. Jason thinks it's neat. What's not neat is if you live in Phoenix, you are inundated.

You couldn't just stop there. Apparently with self-driving cars. Well, if you live in Phoenix. I've only been to Phoenix once and I would like to never, ever go back. The food is fantastic, but it's basically strip malls in 125 degree heat. Yeah, but it's got big, wide roads and it never rains, which is why every self-driving car company under the sun, which I guess is where they all would be at some point, is in Phoenix now.

And the people are just finally just starting to become ambivalent to them. Like, oh yeah, you see them everywhere now. They drive kind of slow though, so I wish they'd get the fuck out of the way. Right. I love the fact that there was somebody who was saying that, used the best quote, smooth seas don't make great sailors because what they're doing is they're testing these cars in the best possible environment.

Yeah. The utterly big, wide roads, no traffic, no weather. So I guess, you know, if you need a self-driving cab, you can only get them in Phoenix because everywhere else it rains and people are stupid and run out into the street. Yeah. Speaking of transportation, Hyperloop, Colorado.

I think they've been smoking too much of that legal pot over there now because they're about to dump $24 billion into a Hyperloop project. Hey, you legalized pot, you tax it, you got $24 billion sitting around. Good point. I didn't even think about that. There you go. You got so much money now, they're just going to invest in science fiction.

Hyperloop looks badass. I want this. I think this is great. I think this is the future of mass transportation. I love it. So bring it on. Let those crazy-ass pot smokers finance it and let's see what happens. Yeah. Give it a shot. I mean, I think what's happening now is, you know, now that we've got these test things, the scientists that were originally doing the vetting on the Hyperloops, we're talking about like stretches of hundreds of miles above ground where you have the sun heating and expanding the metal and cooling it at night.

And so the, you know, the tubes, the series of tubes would basically have this giant variance over huge distances. But if you put these fuckers underground, you'll lose a lot of that and you have constant temperatures. Hmm. That might work pretty well. Now that we have the boring company, you know, tunneling right under LA, you know, put that puppy on a truck and send it to Colorado because it seems like it might work.

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Get on it! This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is also brought to you by our good friends at FreshBooks. Let's talk about them for a second. Because as an independent contractor, I've been creating and sending invoices to clients for over 20 years. And I'm going to tell you, sending manual invoices is a royal pain in the butt.

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So get that 30-day free trial with no credit card required right away. Ups and doodads. So Google released Deep Dream, an art-generating neural net users put to work rendering everything from weird collages to disturbing psychedelic porn.

I remember putting our logo in there and getting back some interesting stuff back in the day. NVIDIA is basically challenging them on this stuff. They've created something called a GAN. It's a horrible, horrible generative adversarial network in which two algorithms compete against each other to create neural networking stuff.

And they put out a video. They put in a bunch of celebrity faces and then created a video where they generated photorealistic faces and then morphed them into each other. It's like a Michael Jackson video gone bad. This actually can give you nightmares as you see the eyes warp around.

I highly recommend everybody go see this video. But it's pretty cool, I gotta say. Yeah, if you like nightmare fuel, it's pretty cool. Well, who doesn't like nightmare fuel? We're living in it 24-7. Except for 11 minutes yesterday.

Except for 11 minutes. They didn't just do faces, though. They did real-world objects. And the one that really creeped me out was the panel of sheep. If you go watch just the sheep panel, and these things are turning inside out and bending around and, oh, it's scary. I mean, it is really terrifying.

Yeah. But I'm glad NVIDIA's doing it, because my stock has gone through the roof. I love that. I love those guys. Yeah. I've almost doubled. Like, what I bought. I only bought three shares a while ago, but I think I got a free one now. I bought three, get one free. Well, NVIDIA's come a long way from just being the high-end graphics card you had to buy to stick into your, build your own PC.

Yep. I picked it up the day after they made that big deal with China to power self-driving cars. Yeah. So, got lucky on that one. Woo-hoo. Now, speaking of neural networks and crazy AIs and stuff, I found some cool videos on, let's say, Three Blue, One Brown by Grant Sanderson.

This guy does, like, math videos on YouTube, kind of like a CGP Grey type of thing, but with math and deeper and fun. Yeah. And he did one on what is a neural network. And this is a part, it's part of a multi-part series. It's part one on deep learning.

And it's a fascinating look at, it's basically the hello world of machine learning. Yeah. And did you get a chance to watch this? I watched part one. I didn't get to part two. Okay. Part two really gets into it. And the second one is gradient descent, how neural networks learn.

Right. And the thing that was fascinating me about these videos, and I highly recommend everybody go check them out if you're interested in this stuff. It's a really good way to learn what these things are doing in a very basic level. But I was getting fascinated by all the math and kind of made me want to, like, bust out Khan Academy and get my math on again.

Because I really kind of understood a lot of it, but I just don't have the jargon for it because I never really followed through with math. Right. And I found it fascinating. I think maybe that'll be like my winter hobby is to just kind of go back and get up to speed on some basic higher end math stuff.

It was really interesting. Jason, too old. Well, that's the thing about it. It actually made me feel like it made my brain work, and I felt really good after it. It's kind of fun. I don't know. I need something exciting. That's true. You do. Yes. So go with math.

Well known to be one of humankind's most exciting pastimes. To each their own, brother. To each their own. Google's AI wizard unveils a new twist on neural networks. This is a story in Wired about this researcher, Jeff Hinton, 69 years old. Yep. Right? Yep.

And he's like, everybody's been doing this shit the same way for so long, and we're not making any progress. So he's like, hey, we've got the technology now. Let's try something different. And he's come up with this new way to do machine learning called capsule networks. And it's kind of an interesting take.

It's another heady, you know, deep dive down the deep learning. And it's not AI. It's machine learning. I would like to state for the record that all of these say machine learning. This is all machine learning. Yes. And, you know, just because of everything that we talk about and shitting on AI, machine learning, and all this stuff for so long, I'm like, you know what?

Might as well go down the rabbit hole a little bit and learn a little bit about what it's doing so we can speak on it with a little bit more authenticity. Well, I don't know about that, but we're going to try. Yes. It's an interesting take, and people are saying if this works, they still, you know, it's in the theoretical phase, and they're still trying to figure out how it's going to work.

But they say if it works, it could be a huge leap forward in machine learning, just what we need. Yes, exactly what we need. You know, and what it's going to do is it's going to power the new AIBO. We mentioned it last week that it was coming, and it has come. Okay.

And it has come with a $1,700 price tag and a $26 a month subscription fee. And I love this article because it says, because 2017, everything has to have a subscription to it, even your toothbrush and your robot dog.

Yes. Well, that's the way to make money. Yeah. You don't want to just sell someone something anymore. You want to make sure that the money keeps on coming in and they forget to ever cancel. So you just keep on rolling in that $26 a month. What the hell is the monthly subscription for? Ah, yes.

Well, your AIBO has to attach to the cloud to get the updates and all the data back and the machine learning, you know, that happens with the dog so it can bond with you, bond with your owner. For $1,700, I want this thing humping my leg from day one. But nope, you have to pay the piper.

And it does all the backup stuff. But here's the thing, Sony is notorious about DRM and their AIBOs. They sent out so many takedowns from the last round of AIBOs when there was a huge crowd of people who were basically jailbreaking their AIBOs and putting their own firmware on it to extend the functionality of it.

They have a long history of being very combative with the AIBO community, which is, you know, really stupid in this day and age. I mean, it's the way that things are going. This is like a Mythbusters guy, Adam. The last name's escaping me right now.

Adam Savage is the one that's, like, leading the charge on this, at least from the celebrity end, the idea that once we purchase something, it is ours. We get to do what we want with it. We can fix it. We can tweak it. We can do whatever. So this is just another case of that. Yeah, this is just going backwards.

You know, it's we want open hardware. We want to be able to tinker with it. We want to be able to. I mean, and on Adam's case, it's about fixing it for the most part. It's, you know, the right to fix movement. And I've actually signed a petition that's up for a vote here in Illinois pretty soon about the right to fix.

And yeah, but this is, you know, this is just straight up DRM. We want to own you. You get to you're renting the dog is what they're saying. You know, yeah, if you don't want to pay us, then we will kill your dog. Pay us $26 or we'll kill this dog. Yeah, we've talked about that with tractors in the past. I remember that was one of the ones that we talked about as well.

So it's basically comes down to the even though you think you bought this item, you're really just kind of renting it at a high premium buy-in. Yep. John Deere and the people with the Polish firmware. So we'll have we're going to have Polish robot dogs. Polish Japanese dog. I like Polish hot dogs, but I don't know if I like a Polish robot dog.

So it looks cute. It looks cute. But for seventeen hundred bucks, I was going to say you can get a real dog for that, but not even close. It's still cheaper than having a real dog. But I got to say the real thing's better. Now, we make fun of crowdsourcing and we make fun of Kickstarter.

Yes, we do. And in a miracle of crowdfunding. Yes. My tri lens has arrived and it arrived early. This was a gadget I bought that's a belt clip where you can clip on your lenses. I got the Nikon mount. And so you can put your lenses on and switch them out really quickly.

This is something that Wendy, friend of the show, Wendy Marvel and I used to get drunk and talk about at the bar. Like, what's a good way to swap lenses without having to go in the bag and drop them? These guys figured it out. And I got to tell you, it is awesome. It is an amazing piece of hardware.

I haven't actually used it yet, but the build quality on it is incredible. It came early, like I said, which was amazing. Yes, I'm shocked. It was supposed to be here in November and it got here in October. And it's a really nice piece of gear. I was amazed.

So chalk one up for the crowdfunding scene. Good job. All right. I'm impressed. You know, even a stop clock is right twice a day. Exactly. And also, I cheated a bit on this one. This was the second campaign for them. They had already done one campaign where they ironed out all of the, you know.

Oh, yes. That's smart. Yes. And they already knew the whole supply chain dynamic. And yes, sorted all that out. Yeah, yeah. They're not actually shipping toothbrushes here, so they had to figure that out first. So I kind of snuck in on the second round, because the first one was only local in Europe.

And this was the first time they did international. But yeah. Anyway, it worked out well. I like it. Good. We talk about IKEA and their new smart home gadgets. Because you're, you know, you'll probably end up with some of these before I will. Probably. So if you get a Trud Fry hub and some of their lights, it now works with HomeKit on your iOS device.

Very good. Yeah. You'll be able to kind of dick around with your lights on your phone from IKEA. Fantastic. I mean, that's what was so exciting about IKEA getting into this in the first place, is the fact that they basically said, we're going to be platform agnostic. We're going to work with everything. Yep.

Except for Google Assistant, which is not supported yet. Yeah, okay. Got a ways to go there. All right. But it does work with Alexa. I got a little piece of software this week. I've actually had it, and I just re-upped and got the new version. It's called Day One. Okay.

It's kind of a, it's a journaling app. And it works on the desktop and your iPhone and your iPad. It's basically a really nice way to sync journal entries. Because I've been getting back into writing in the morning. Because I need some, I need some creative outlet. Because I write in the morning and I'll do my math at night.

Way to go there. It's gorgeous. It used to be butt ugly and barely worked. And I'd never use it. And this new version works really well. Unfortunately, because 2017, you'd need a Day One Premium subscription to sync between all of the different instances.

Yeah. Since I bought the old version, I got a really good deal on the premium subscription price. But yeah, it's such a pain to do this stuff. Well, if you're using this and you're using it basically just to write in the morning to get your writing chops up a little bit.

When you're there, you should contact them to rework their little mission statement here. Because capture life as you live it. Never miss a moment with Day One Simple Elegant Interface just screams to me, you're missing all the moments because you're putting it into Day One Simple Elegant Interface. It's actually not that bad.

It's a pretty good quick interface, but it also will suck in from if-ta-ta-ta-ta and get in your social posts and your Instagram stuff and build out your day so you can go back and see what you did that day in one place, which is kind of cool. Or one just uses memory. Nah, see, that's the problem.

I don't have one anymore. My memory is gone. It is gone, but I'm also using it to write down ideas for different things. For me, it's turned out to be a pretty nice little add-on. I've got multiple vectors to write things down. I've got my audio recorder and I've got this.

Because I tried to do this in Notes because the new Notes is stellar with the syncing. It is really good, but the formatting and stuff is a pain. The other nice thing about this is if you're out on your iPhone and you're making a journal entry, it'll geotag it so you know where you're at. So if you're going around and have different places.

So when I'm going on vacation soon, it'll be nice to be able to make notes about where I'm at and doing certain things. So it'll be easier to go back and figure out where I was at certain times to be able to kind of retrace it. I wish I had this when I went to Asia a while ago because it would have been great to be able to figure out where that Indian restaurant was in Bangkok that took me like a day and a half to trace down because I needed to tell some friends about it because it's the best Indian restaurant I've ever been to in my life.

So that would have been helpful. But yeah, so far I like it. It's not terribly expensive. Right. And well worth it. Cool. I got to say one of the really cool things about day one is the Apple watch integration. So I don't have to pull up my phone to make an entry.

I can just tap a button on my watch, talk to my watch. It uses Siri to do voice to text and then just saves it as a new note, which is pretty cool. That's handy. Yeah, it is. It's not perfect. Grumpy old geeks is like Gregorian geeks.

Look, I've got a friend that uses that refuses to type in anything. So anytime he text messages to me, he uses voice recognition in Siri. And I never understand a single goddamn thing he writes me. It takes 18 different back and forths to figure out meet me at the bar at five.

Fortunately, I have good enunciation. So it works fairly well. But you start to learn to speak Siri when you have a friend that does that all the time. Something else that's not terribly expensive is Audible.com. I use Audible all the time. And now they have a new feature that uses, you guessed it, Brian, machine learning.

Of course. Our favorite. To scan all of their saucy stories. Yes, they're going for the romance sector. And they have a new feature called Take Me to the Good Part for people who don't like foreplay. The interesting thing about this is these books are generally for women and women like foreplay.

So I don't see the point of this feature whatsoever. But they're using machine learning to tag all of these audio files to figure out where the good bits are by, you know, reading the reading the words and figuring out what's flirty and what's sexy and hot. And where's the first kiss and all this crap.

Right. You know, you could hire an intern to do that once and be done with it because these are these are static books. You could just go through and meta tag the books. You don't need a machine to do it. He was probably going to do it improperly and cost you 10 times more than it would to hire an army of, you know, teenagers to go through and read this stuff and tag it.

I'm just saying it might be you might be using AI for the wrong reasons on this one. This also kind of destroys the concept of what a book is. Yeah. I mean, you don't you're not supposed to be fast forwarding books. If you're fast forwarding a book, it's not a very good one. Move on. These are romance novels, Brian.

Come on. Those are good. So, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, yeah, what they need is a digital assistant, which is basically Fabio saying, would you like to go to the steamy pot with me? I will take you. Let me take my shirt off. We will go. Shall we get it on or would you like to continue down the Amazon?

God. Do you have Sonos? I can't remember. I do not. OK. I had Sonos when I was in L.A. and they're still there. So I don't have Sonos anymore, but I miss them because they are you heard them. They're pretty fantastic speakers, right? Yeah. Yes. It's very high quality.

Yep. And the new Sonos ones, which are about 200 bucks, which is $50 more than the new Amazon Alexas, who have apparently terrible sound. These new ones are basically Sonos one with Alexa built in.

The thing about Sonos that you are. Yeah. We didn't really like it. Also with Alexa. It's a pain in the ass to use Spotify with it. Well, yep. Turns out December 21st. Full support for Alexa and Spotify on your Sonos. December 21st. So if you're thinking about getting one, you know, might want to wait till December 26th after the Christmas tales are kicking and pick one up.

This is assuming the project manager's schedule goes off as planned. This is true. But yeah, because I was looking at those new Echo Pros, or I don't even know what they're called. The Super Echoes, the $150 ones with supposedly the new speakers and stuff.

Everybody's saying they're really, it's not worth the money. And especially the new Echoes, the ones with the fabric on it, saying sound like shit. Yeah. I'm going to be holding off on doing any upgradings with those right now. I'm happy with what I've gotten. I would like to go to something that actually has better sound quality.

So Sonos or the, I'm waiting to see what Apple puts out. Yeah, that's kind of it. It's like, cause it would really, I mean, that's the one thing, the integration, it would really be nice to be able to like, you know, just bounce around from point to point. Like I get in my car, it starts to play my podcast. I get out of the car, I come back in the house.

The Apple home picks up the podcast, keeps playing it. Exactly. That's what I want. I want the Jetson shit right there, but you can't do it now. Nope. But what you can do is if you have a Synology, like I've got, I found an article on this cause I was like, they've got this new version come out and it's got an iTunes, basically an iTunes server built into the Synology.

So you can play all your music by connecting it to the Synology. For you idiots that still have music. I kept all my files. I still have all the stuff that I can't, you know, find anywhere. There's a lot of stuff that I can't find that I like to have. Yep. Yeah. And that's the thing.

It's like, okay, there's like, you know, maybe 20 CDs on there. I can just play it when I want to. Cause I was reading through this. You can do it, but it's like, eh, kind of a pain in the butt. So I would like to know if anybody who listens to the show who has a Synology has actually tried this.

Cause I know a bunch of you guys do, cause we've talked about it off the air. So if anybody's tried to do this, iTunes server shenanigans, let me know. Yep. And in my favorite, my favorite bit of video for the week, uh, a drone is taken down by a roll of toilet paper.

So screw your Eagles, Charmin for the win. This is awesome. And out of the soccer match. Good times. Yeah. Yeah. You have to go watch the video link. Will be in the show notes, gog.show slash two, three, four. Uh, this guy, I mean, they need to hire this guy for the NFL cause he's got an arm. It was a good throw.

It was a perfect throw. Yeah. It was pretty intense. It was, it's well worth the watch. It's funny. That drone just disintegrated too. That must've been double ply. Yeah. Now the world discovered something pretty important this week. Everybody that's out there using an iPhone, which, uh, automatically sorts pictures into different categories.

What we didn't know is it does categories without even letting us know or see it, uh, including one for brassieres. Yep. This was pretty awesome. Chrissy Teigen posted like, did you know this? And then she posted a screenshot. It was just like her in a bra, like 7,000 photos.

Yeah. Uh, yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty awesome. Now this has been going on for more than a year. It's just the first time anyone's noticed enough to get mad about it. In fact, the entire list of categories is available to browse on medium. So you can do things like search for greedy, disgust, scream, smiling, brassieres, uh, all kinds of, there's a gigantic list of different things that you can search for.

So most of them are, are, you can tell that they just didn't think about this. They just put it in everything. I tested it. Cause guess what? One of the, guess what? One of the keywords is what Rottweiler. Oh, great. Perfect. Perfect. Little gallery of bam, bam.

It was spot on. I'm like, damn, I wish I'd have known about this. Would have saved me some time. So now it's, uh, and I do appreciate all of my friends who did post, uh, screenshots of their brassier photos. Um, I very nice of you. Thank you very much. I had a feeling that you would have enjoyed that.

Yes. Well, I'm sure you didn't know, no. Brian, the married man, he would never enjoy such things anymore. Everybody likes good brassier. Media candy. Well, Kevin Spacey's in a bit of trouble, isn't he?

Oh, stepped on his own dick, I'd say. Or tried to step on someone else's a few times. Yeah. Well, this has led to basically the house of cards, uh, being canceled, uh, because at Netflix is deeply troubled over these claims. Unfortunately, I think over the next few months, there's not going to be a lot of TV shows left.

At this point, no, I mean, the whole thing with house of cards was, was interesting because they'd already canceled it and then they didn't tell anybody, but it was in the works to cancel. And then they said, no, no, we're, we're definitely canceling it now. And, uh, now it looks like there's not even going to be a six season because what do we have?

Eight staffers and another 14 year old boy that he, uh, allegedly tried to rape and Oh, Jiminy. Yeah. And they've also, uh, let's the, uh, masterclass that he did. The $90 online acting masterclass has been pulled. Uh, so yeah, spacey is done.

Uh, his career is over, but you know, he'll be fine. He's got all his money. Uh, I'd given up on house of cards anyways. I stopped watching that a couple, like two seasons ago. I was just bored. Um, didn't care for the show. So I wanted, I powered through this last season. Yeah. Oh, you did not miss anything.

I didn't think so. So I, I was thinking on this and I realized that there's an awful lot of stuff I've given up on. So here's a quick list of things I no longer watch, uh, or listen to. Okay. I'm done with still untitled. The Adam Savage project. Uh, yeah, that's crash. Orange is the new black. Stopped watching that two seasons ago.

Pretty sure I'm done with Mr. Robot. Haven't watched the latest episode. Don't feel like I missed anything. Gave up on modern family. Gave up on the big bang theory. And I will potentially be giving up on the grand tour season two, which has its premiere December 8th. Did you watch the trailer though? I did watch the trailer, but I liked the trailer for the first season as well.

And then I hated the first season. Let's go to conversation street. No, let's, let's not. And I swear to God, I'm going to go. If in the very first episode they do the stupid celebrity gag again, I'm out. Oh, that's it. Yeah. I am out. Let's see if they learn from their mistakes. Yeah.

This'll be, this'll be a proving grounds. Will you have learned from all the negative feedback you've gotten and, uh, get a little closer to top gear? That's all we want. We'll see. Yes. So yeah, I watched Mr. Robot. Okay. Same shit, different day. Yeah. I, you know, I pretty much, I, I can't even remember what I did because it was so mindless whatever I was doing while the, while the show was on because whatever I was doing was so boring that it, I forgot what I was doing and I forgot what happened in the show.

So that's just, that's why it was a wasted hour. That's why I think I'm done, Jason. I've got a kid, I've got a wife, I've got stuff going on. I don't have time to waste on something that's just boring. That like the last, the first, what, how I watched two episodes of Mr. Robot or did I watch three?

I watched, I watched three episodes of Mr. Robot. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about it. Why am I wasting my time? No, you shouldn't. And, uh, I just didn't have anything else to do. It was on. Yep. Gotcha. So, uh, what I can't give up on, I can't believe it is the Orville. I actually really, really like this show.

You know what? I figured it out. I figured it out. I'm getting lambasted online about how I should watch this. Friend of the show, Dr. Teeter sent, uh, I'm guessing a somewhat buzzed email last night telling me I need to watch the show. I draw my line in the sand here. I will not watch the show. I am putting, this show is getting, I'm going back to my original multiple season rule on this show.

If this, if this season lasts, if this show lasts through this season and next season and comes back for a third and at the end of the second season, you're all telling me it's worth it. They're going somewhere with it. It's really good. Then I will get on the Orville train. Not until then. Cause I don't think this is going to make it.

Okay. Well, I figured out what it is. I mean, that was the thing is like, what the hell is this show? And it's popcorn morality plays. It's just like next gen, but lighter. Okay. I was stunned, shocked, laid flat on the floor when I saw, well, besides the fact they always have great characters like actors coming in, you know, it's Charlize Theron on, come on.

This last episode was co-written and then directed by Brannon Braga. Now, if you know anything about Star Trek, you know that he was, you know, one of the two main guys behind next gen co-wrote first contact, which I worked on. And the funny thing about first contact, I think I may have told this on the show before, but he was such a horndog.

I'll be surprised if we don't hear a story about him fairly soon. He came into the office and had us change his bio on the website to say, he's single and lives in Los Angeles. Yes, you have mentioned that. On his website bio for first contact. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, episode eight was pretty good.

Dr. Teeter was writing you about episode seven, which kind of started out as a weird black mirror parody, I thought, but was actually still pretty fun. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I got to say, I'm liking it more than Star Trek discovery. Well, I want to talk to you about that because I just last night watched episode seven magic to make the sanest man go mad and I loved it.

It is the first episode of the show that I have absolutely loved and it felt like Star Trek. Sure. They're recycling a line for a plot device from the next generation, but this episode was absolutely fantastic. And if they can keep this going, I am all aboard the discovery train again, the Utrecht train.

Here's the thing. They're one for seven and Orville's probably like four for eight. So. Yeah. You know, the first couple of Orville definitely didn't land for me, but they've just been getting better. And I look forward to when I see that one pop up on Hulu, which is rare because Hulu crashes every six fucking seconds.

I'm fairly excited about it. All right. And I do got to say that I made a discovery last night because I was trying to watch Chance on Hulu and it was buffering and crashing over and over. I'm like, you know what? Because I was watching it through the interface on my Roku TV. I'm like, you know what? Just let me try this on the Apple TV.

Worked flawlessly. Right. So the Roku interface to Hulu is the problem. So I'm going to give it another chance, but we'll see. It's still ugly as can be. Right. Gotcha. Well, we just passed Halloween and this came a little bit late, but I pass this on to you because you and I have a mutual band that we both love, Oingo Boingo.

Yes. Now, I always thought they were only popular here in Southern California, but you were not here. You were aware of them. So they were fantastic. But Halloween in Southern California always meant one thing. It meant Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo always did huge Dia de los Muertos concerts in L.A. and San Diego Halloween night and a couple nights right around there every single year.

Everybody went. They were all fantastic. There's not a lot of this stuff online, but over at Slicing Up Eyeballs, which is a great website, by the way, if you're into this kind of music, they found three full shows from 87, two of them from 87 and one from 1990. And these are fantastic.

I believe, I'm almost positive, I was at the 91, the 1991 in Irvine Meadows. So I thought you would enjoy that, and I sent that your way, and I decided to put it in the show as well. Yep. I just haven't had time to watch it, but they're queued up. I'm going to watch them on YouTube on the TV because I think that'll be the best place to watch instead of standing in front of a computer.

But yeah, I really can't wait to see those. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's just such a good band. And the other thing I did Halloween night after everybody went to bed is I watched episode one of Stranger Things 2. Okay. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was absolutely fantastic.

It was very well done. All the feeling and magic of the first season seemed to be back. Now, I am not going to binge this. I'm trying to avoid things online because we've discussed this before. I think you enjoy shows more if you wait. So I'm going to watch one episode a week. No binging.

Okay. Well, then we'll talk about it again in two and a half months after everybody's forgotten about it. Yep. And that's fine with me. I watched it by dinnertime on Saturday. I was done by dinnertime on Saturday. Of course you were. Because I couldn't stop. I have nothing else to do. It was fun. So what are you going to do?

I found this really cool Echo-based horror short. It's only like three or four minutes called Whisper. It's pretty cute. Kind of clever. Sort of. Sort of. But, you know, it's like three or four minutes. Worth a watch. It's fun. Cool. People are making horror with the Echo.

And going back to the music thing really quickly. Two bands. Some news about. One is a new band called Glare with two A's. Because I'm sure there's a Glare with one A out there already. It's a relatively new band from LA. They're described as gothic shoegaze. These are two of my favorite things.

So, thus far, I'm very much enjoying the album that they have out now. So, I recommend it to you if you think you have similar tastes to me. And the other big music news is My Bloody Valentine, the seminal shoegaze band. Lead singer Kevin Shields has confirmed a new album and tour are coming next year.

And boy, am I excited. Never got into them. I love them. I went back to the well this week and got an old book called Relic from 1996 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

Right. This is the book that the movie, the Relic, was based on. Okay. And I'd never seen the movie, but they had just finished doing the poster when I got my job at Paramount. They're like, so that was like the big thing is the Relic was coming out. And it was shot here in Chicago. So, everybody was talking about it. I still never saw it.

So, I didn't feel bad about picking up the book because I hadn't seen the movie. I liked it. It was, you know, a thriller. Just bare bones thriller. Okay. No crazy romance with the professors or any crap like that. Oh, that's so good to hear. Yeah. It was just a, and this is like part one of 16 of a series they started, but I don't think I'll stick with it because it, like, you know, the main character that's the head of the series didn't really grab me enough.

But, I mean, as a one-off, I thought it was a decent little book. Okay. I'll have to put that in the queue. The second book I got was What Does This Button Do? An Autobiography by Bruce Dickinson. Now, this book got me going because I am a huge Iron Maiden fan.

I am very surprised that Fred of the show, Mike Walter, has not tried to tell me about this book yet because this is right up his alley. I loved Iron Maiden until I discovered Alternative Rock. They were the first band I was into as a kid. And then I discovered Love and Rockets and that was it for heavy metal. But, mad respect.

Iron Maiden, awesome band. Yep. And we still have the same favorite song, which is great. And the thing about this book is he had a rule with this book, which was like, no marriages and no kids. So he doesn't talk about any marriages or kids of anybody in the band or himself, which I didn't find out till the end because I'm like, he's lived kind of a monastic life.

And turns out, no, not really, but I don't know that part of the story. But he kept it to the band and the shenanigans of music, right? Yes. And his solo career and flying because that's what I really wanted to find out about was, you know, how he went from being this, you know, heavy metal god to being a world-class fencer, which I, you know, am surprised about, but also an airline pilot, because if you haven't seen, was it Flight 666, which is a great, great documentary, you have to see it.

But yeah, it was just his whole story. And it was, it was, I have to, this is one of those ones where I'm going to have to say, get the audible version because he reads it and his, you know, his retelling of the stories adds so much to it because he's got so much energy and just presence when he's telling his stories that it's fantastic.

Right. Highly recommend this book. I really wanted to get him on The Art of Charm for episode 666, which just came out last week. That would have been. But I was, I was sadly vetoed. That's too bad. Yeah. Cause I mean, he's got a book out. He's right up our alley, but no, sadly I couldn't do it. But yeah, definitely check out this book.

If you ever liked Iron Maiden or even just, you know, it's not even that much about the music, it's, it's about the journey, which is, this guy's nuts. It's got to be interesting because they've vaguely mostly kept their shit together. They're a seminal band. We're talking 30 years of history through the craziest music period the world has ever seen.

This has got to be interesting. There's no way it's not. So I do want to read this as well. Yeah. And it's near the end of the book where he gets into his head cancer, his head and neck cancer that he had. And he goes through his entire fight with that, which is pretty incredible to hear.

And it's funny, right? I'm not even, I'm not going to spoil it, but he makes it funny. Okay. That's highly recommended. Next. I'm going back to the classics. I am so sick of all this modern sci-fi crap that we keep reading that just keeps letting us down. You know, I mean, how many books have we read recently that have just been formulaic, you know, what's going to happen and are just boring.

And sadly from some of the new best authors, like people that had one or two really good books and then, uh, yeah. Armada. Horrible. I, I, you know, I'm, I'm really scared because Andy Weir has his new book coming out in two weeks and I just, I'm like, oh man, it's, you can't beat the Martian.

It's going to be tough. So we'll see. So I'm going back to Heinlein. I'm doing time enough for love, the lives of Lazarus long, which I've never read. I've never read that either. Um, it's a 24 hour audio book. I'm about an hour into it and it's Heinlein. You just, I mean, it's, it's like a breath of fresh old air because it's amazingly well written already.

The characters are engaging and the story is engaging and I'm only like, you know, five percent into it. So I have high hopes for this one. All right. I mean, I'm starting to think that you've got one of those little crystal devices from the aforementioned Star Trek Discovery episode that Harvey Mudd was carrying around with him because I honestly, I don't know how you've had the time to do three books, watch all of Stranger Things 2 and the various other things that you have consumed in this last week.

I am, I've, I agree with you about the modern sci-fi. I've stepped away from it. I'm reading a challenging work of fiction that is not sci-fi at all, but it's taking me forever. I'm only like 10% into the damn book. So maybe next week. Okay. I don't, I don't have your arm device to get me in a time loop so I can complete all this stuff.

Well, I have 1.5 X for the reading. I also do, I multitask because I do my exercising and walking. I've closed all my rings on my Apple watch for the last nine days in a row. And I can, I basically don't do anything else. The only TV that I watch, we talk about on the show.

I don't dick around with other stuff. Right. And when I'm, when I'm not working, I'm doing stuff for the show or whatever. I'm very regimented, surprisingly, knowing me, which is strange. Now in some fun news, Borderlands Books in San Francisco. Been there.

Yeah. Great place. Last time I was there, I was shooting Cory Doctorow for one of his books, surprisingly. They bought their own building because they were going to get kicked out. Now they have a permanent home that they own. Right. Which is pretty cool. So a bunch of people, like a bunch of patrons, kicked in some money and they raised $1.9 million in a few weeks to buy the building, which is pretty cool.

Grumpy old geeks could use a home, people. Yeah, I could really use a home. So yeah, $1.9 million would go a really long way. Look, this is... We'll read sci-fi to you every night and tuck you in. I'm super thrilled that they're able to stay open. And this is definitely a feel-good story that if you slightly peel back the onion layer, it starts to get a little sad.

This is what it's come to. Like a world famous, renowned, been around forever, beloved bookstore has to crowdfund themselves, much like our new American healthcare system. Well, I mean, if people still bought books, it wouldn't be a problem.

But people don't buy books anymore. So you got to, you know, raise the price, as it were. It's market forces. Well, market forces suck. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Papa Bittner.

Or was it Awesome Dave, I think, is your new handle? Either is fine. I reply to either of them. Okay. Yes, we'll talk about replying to all shortly. Oh, okay. I wanted to do a quick chat about a guest you had on the Cyber Wire today, Dave DeFore.

Yes, from Webroot. Yeah, you guys were talking about how ransomware is evolving and things like that, and how customer service is so amazing with ransomware. That is true, yeah. I would like to change the terminology on that. Okay. Because I don't think it should be customer service.

I think it should be victim service. It's sort of an extortion service. Yeah, because they're not really customers. No, they're not. Hmm. What would be a better word than service? Extortion, extortion minding, extortion, I don't know.

That's a good question. Well... Victim handling. Right. You know, well, and for those who haven't heard the story, David DeFore, what he was talking about was how these folks who are doing ransomware, they stand up customer service organizations so that if you are having trouble paying them, you can contact them, and they will walk you through everything you need to do to pay the ransom and hopefully get your files back, although obviously there's no guarantees.

As evil as a customer service. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Okay. I just wanted to bring that up because I thought it was a great bit on the show today, and I was just like, man, we've really got to come up with something. Like, you know, we talk about with, you know, Equifax and people selling customer data. Well, it wasn't customer data. It was the victim data, as it were.

No, I think you're right. That'd be a great... There needs to be a better term, so why don't we put that out to the listeners? If someone can come up with a catchy phrase, a term of art for when ransomware folks stand up a customer service organization. You know, I have a little bit of influence in naming things.

Maybe we can get it to catch on. Yeah, definitely. And then we'll take all the credit for it. Yes. That's fine. Sure. So, we had a little bit of follow-up from last week. Remember last week, Jason, you and I were talking about the Reaper botnet, and one of the things we were both wondering about was how researchers had concluded that over a million devices were infected.

Neither of us knew for sure last week. And it turns out this week, there were updates on Reaper in terms of news, and that many researchers are saying that that estimate of a million devices is way overblown, that it may just be in the tens of thousands of devices.

So, there's been kind of back and forth. Some researchers are saying, no, no. Are these Twitter stats? I was about to say, this isn't how stats work in tech. What they do is they say only five people were infected. And then two days later, they say, oh, we met 500 billion people are affected.

Oh, I'm sorry, we met the entire planet was infected. So, the numbers going down doesn't sound right to me. Right, yeah. Yahoo breach numbers only go up. Yeah. Yeah. So, it may just be tens of thousands. Others are still standing by the notion that it could very well be millions.

But as for our conversation from last week, we were correct that these estimates are based on extrapolation. So, there's a lot of wiggle room on how they come up with the numbers. They're just based on bullshit in a dartboard. It's like, oh, it's...

I'd like to say at the beginning of the show, all statistics are meaningless. Right, yeah. 50% of people agree that all statistics are meaningless. Did you already use that joke? No, but thank you. It's a good one. Right. Very good. We'll edit that in at the beginning and cut that out.

There you go. We do. Again, taking credit for everything. We got an email this week, and apparently this is our, we just can't quit you. This is from Bran. Well, I think the more important thing here is that we were first story. Yeah, that's true.

Bran writes in and says, figure this might interest you guys. Gimlet Radio explores Facebook spying, and it's episode number 109 is Facebook spying on you. So, here we are again. Reply All. You know my feelings about Reply All. They should name the show Shit We Already Know, because it's always about shit we already know and not very good.

Yes, we talked about this on episode 226, A Batter Meinhof, which is one of our stellar episodes from September 11th, 2017. And this came out everywhere this week. It was in the Hustle newsletter. It was on Dig. And Dig was basically just parroting Reply All because they have a deal with Gimlet, the podcast company that has 100 people for no reason whatsoever.

Yeah, it's just back in the zeitgeist again, even though we, I think it's because we put it out there. I would like to say that I was carrying the banner for this is complete and utter bullshit from day one. And I was pushing for us to do the episode where we discussed it for a good two months before that, I believe, where I was like, we've got to talk about this.

Well, you went on vacation, you went to Canada, we had to do research, and we tried to replicate it, and we couldn't do it. I was the one that was saying, there's no way this is happening at all. Now, having said that, earlier this week, I was out with some friends, having some dinner, having some drinks. For some random reason, we started talking about pillows.

And of course, the single male friend that was there informed me that he hasn't changed out his pillow in like 15 years. Once we got over being disgusted by it, we started to talk about how often you're supposed to change out your pillows. I fell in like somewhere they every three year range, or if your child pukes on it, then you change out your pillow.

The very next morning, speaking of my child, I pull up some Sesame Street on YouTube to watch so I can go make some coffee and whatever, and he's occupied for a few minutes. And the pre-roll ad was for a sleep number, and they were pushing their pillows and informing us that you should change out your pillows every two years.

Now, if I had just listened to this podcast from Reply All, I'd be like, aha, Google's listening to me. But because I'm a sane person, I realize it's just Badr-Meinhof, and it's coincidence, and I'm attuned to looking for these coincidences now, because we cannot stop fucking talking about this story.

Okay. Okay, mister. I need to talk about Uber every week for two years. You can give us a little slack on this one. Uber's actually real new news every time, though. Well, I would say this is definitely the week where this story hit the mainstream media, you know, tech media, I guess.

Fake news. Well, for us, it's old news, but we're first to harp on that, because we don't get enough damn credit. Yes, Jason, you were first. We're all very impressed. So what was interesting for me was that I saw several security researchers commented on these mainstream stories, and they were saying some of the things that we had said weeks ago, which was that if this was happening, researchers would know about it.

And then I also saw one of the researchers who works in iOS, and he was commenting that iOS in particular, just from an operating system point of view, is really tight about microphone access, and so he thought it was unlikely that this would even be possible.

Now, I have, ever since we found out about Uber having special screen grabbing permissions in iOS, that has shaken my confidence in Apple and their willingness to give special permissions to special apps, and it's probably safe to say that there's no more special app on any mobile device than the Facebook app.

So I don't mean to feed conspiracies here, because I agree with the researchers. However, if there are little tiny corners of doubt in my mind, that whole thing with Uber sowed the seeds of doubt about where I formerly had pretty unshakable trust that Apple was on the side of privacy and so on.

That just sort of sits there in the corner of my mind going, yeah, well, they did this that one time. Exactly. There are special exceptions to everybody. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see. I mean, again, not only would researchers most likely know about this if it were occurring, just from tearing things apart and testing things and whatnot.

Again, I stand by the fact that if this actually happened, this is the most widely, unbelievably kept secret in the world. Tons of developers would know that Facebook, the Facebook app has access to the mic. There would be an entire advertising agency that is getting this data and just not paying attention to where it can possibly be coming from and keeping their mouth shut about it.

There's no way. There's just no way. We landed on the damn moon. What I would like to see is someone do a real detailed analysis of what's actually going on here that makes us think that it's Facebook. Because like we've talked about, there's something going on here. The phenomenon is real.

What is not happening is this assigning it to Facebook. But this perception that people have, and like we said, you know, Bader-Meinhof, but if someone really went to the trouble of figuring out what are the mechanisms that exist that make this such a common thing for people to perceive, you know, here's how your data flows from here to here to here, beyond, you know, the obvious things we all know about.

Is there something more than what we know about just simple ad tracking that makes it even more uncanny the way that it seems to happen? Right. So you'd like to know if this is more than a feeling? Yeah. Yeah. More than a feeling. Okay. I think what really needs to happen is somebody needs to jailbreak a damn iPhone, put Facebook on it, and just track all the bits and bytes that go through that phone and keep an eye on it.

Right now, now I think Jason has actually somehow got an app on my phone listening to me because while I was at that dinner, we were at a pizza place, they were playing old school videos, and more than a feeling, fucking played while we were talking about the pillows. I am not making this up, so now I am on board with David Bittner's Seed of Doubt, and I think there's a Jason app listening to my phone.

Maybe it's just the ongoing glitchiness of the Matrix in general. Maybe more than a feeling, just plays at every pizza place. Well, there is that. If you're in a pizza place long enough, chances are it's going to be in the 80s awesome rock rotation that's playing on their satellite radio.

Yeah. It's kind of like being freaked out when you go to karaoke and some asshole plays Journey. It's like, I knew they were going to play Journey. Right. Well, no shit. Or somebody gets up and sings Mac the Knife. Right. All right. Let's move on here. Speaking of things that definitely have some software holes in it, WordPress.

What a massive one for the last two versions. A very big SQL injection bug that a researcher told WordPress about, and they said, oh, yeah, we fixed it in the last update. Turns out they didn't. So they had to push out another update several weeks later, by the way, leaving everybody ass to the wind.

But apparently the new version that's out has finally fixed the bug. So if you're running WordPress, stay up to date. Yes. Yeah. I'll also throw a plug out there. My wife develops WordPress, and she uses a service called WP Engine. And they're sort of one of those organizations that runs WordPress for you within their own environment.

So they do a lot of the heavy lifting on making sure that everything's up to date, and that things are sandboxed when they need to be, and that backups are happening. So if you're a WordPress user, investing in a service like this can really, really do a lot for you in terms of increasing your security.

So recommended. Yep. I've used WP Engine. They're just pricey compared to a lot of them. Yeah. But as they say, what's the cost of a breach, right? Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, most ISPs now have dedicated WordPress hosting that do sandboxing and automatic plug-in updates for you.

I know HostGator has one. Right. So if you use the code CHARM, you get 50% off. Just throwing that out there. Oh, there you go. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah. It's pretty much everywhere now. And WP Engine was very good. The only problem I had with them is they charged you based on traffic.

So if you got a really good post and got over, say, 25,000 hits per month or whatever, whatever your package was, they billed you on traffic. I see. And I always thought that that was kind of a really tough thing to get behind, people who bill on traffic.

Yeah. Or at least based on hits, you know, because it used to be on bandwidth. You know, you'd get, oh, you get a terabyte of bandwidth a month. But when it's based on just actual visits, no matter how lean and mean your pages are, that always just seems kind of greedy to me. Yeah. Well, moving on, there's a Apple, speaking of Apple and iOS, there was a hacking conference again this week.

This was the Pwn to Own hacking contest, which is run by Trend Micro in Tokyo. And these folks won $110,000 for exploiting an iPhone 7. And they were running iOS 11.1, which, for those of you keeping score, is the most recent version of iOS, which I think I installed, I don't know, night before last, while I was sleeping, it installed.

So iOS 11.1 was supposed to, and did, fix the crack vulnerability, which was the Wi-Fi vulnerability that was such a big deal. But these folks have discovered more vulnerabilities, that they were able to pwn the phone and got themselves over $100,000.

And so, you know, they're doing a responsible disclosure on this. They've given Apple 90 days to fix the vulnerability before they publish how they did it. So the clock is ticking for Apple. But, you know, interesting contest.

And the other interesting part of this for me is just, you know, some of these contests really have big money now. There's big money in finding these vulnerabilities. Yeah, definitely. And especially if, like, a company doesn't have a bug bounty program, you've got to get the money somewhere. Yep. Yep. Well, somebody needs to pony up some cash to figure out if Facebook is listening to us or not.

We should, yeah, we should get all the money for that. I think, yeah, I think we need to figure it out and then go back to Facebook and then just extort them for all the money. Right. Exactly. Right. I saw a story in Motherboard that came by. This was a researcher. The story is called Researcher.

We should be worried. This computer thought a turtle was a gun. He can't. Now, I know we all love turtles. And I guess, what, about half of us love guns, at least in the United States. Really, really love guns.

But this is an interesting article about something called Adversarial Objects, which is something that I did not previously know a lot about. Did you guys know about Adversarial Objects? Not until this top of the show. Yeah, we talked about a little bit at the top of the show.

And this kind of, this story blew up everywhere this week. I was really happy that you put it in the show notes because this is a big deal. Yeah, it really is. I mean, in this example, they are taking a, they made a 3D printed model of a turtle. It just looks like a little, you know, marine turtle.

He's got cute little flippers and he looks like a turtle. And by just changing a few things on him, they put some little dots on his belly. And I think they changed the way that the pattern on his shell is laid out. The AI, sorry, Brian. The AI thought that he was a gun instead of a turtle.

And if you're looking at the video that they have in this motherboard article, he's a turtle. He doesn't look like a gun at all. But by making just these small changes, they can confuse the AI into thinking that it's something other than it is. And as they point out in the article, this is a big deal for things that, like self-driving cars, who have to be able to identify things based on sight.

There's a link in that motherboard article to another one that talks about cell phone camera images can fool machine vision, get deeper and deeper into it. And I saw one article that talked about they inserted one pixel into an image and it screwed up recognition. And as, yeah, it's a big deal because we are pushing this brave new world, this awesome future where computers are going to identify everything.

And what we're finding out more and more is that they aren't that good at it and they can be fooled really, really easily. This is going to be a real problem for self-driving cars because you're not going to have a pristine environment and you're going to have a lot of people, unfortunately, because this is 2017 and the world we live in, that are going to try to intentionally screw these things up.

Yeah, two things on that. Definitely check out the second video of the two machine learning ones that I talked about at the beginning of the show because the second one debunks the first one saying how crappy the machine learning is and how easy it is to fool by just throwing noise at it.

You know, because what it's trying to do is pick the it has a series of endpoints that it's trying to get to. So it will pick the one that it thinks is the closest. So it's doing like the scorekeeping all along the way. It's really fascinating. But if there's no actual match, it will find something that's close.

And that's how it kind of can get fooled. It definitely watch those two videos. They're fantastic. The second one is I am starting a new was I guess Cafe Press is probably out of business. I don't know what the new T-shirt shop du jour is, but I'm just going to start making. Stop sign T-shirts with a stop sign on the back because that's going to stop every self-driving car from running me.

Right. Right. Exactly. If you can make one that can stop Prius drivers and make them actually stop at stop signs right now, I will buy that for a million dollars because I almost got run over coming back here. You know what it is? It's a sign that says vegan smoothies this way with an arrow to the right. So they just turn and avoid you.

Nice. They automatically just steer out of the road. They can't resist. It's a reflexive action. It is. It is. It goes to their vegan lizard brain and goes, oh, oh, here we go. It's like, what was it? When the dog saw a squirrel and up. Squirrel. Right. Right. Smoothie.

Yeah. All right. Do you guys use Signal? I had it and then absolutely nobody I know had it. So I was talking to myself. Okay. Yeah. I used one of the other ones. Okay. Signal is pretty much the best one from what I've heard from all of the due diligence that's been done on it because it's open source and everything else is pretty much closed source.

So it's the one Mr. Snowden uses. So it has to be good. It's Putin approved. That's right. So they finally come out with desktop apps because before you had to use some crappy, you know, Chrome extension. So I installed the Mac version this week.

It's fairly easy to set up. You can use a QR code where it'll link the machines together. You have to install it on your phone first and then your phone has a way to take a picture of the QR code on your computer. Then it links the two and boom, you're off to the race. It's fairly easy to set up. I use it quite a bit. So I was very happy to get a native desktop app.

So if you're into Signal, definitely check out the desktop apps. Yeah. It reminded me, we had a story, I think yesterday on the Cyber Wire, earlier this week anyway, and it was about the U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, who was speaking earlier this week about, as he describes it, secure, responsible encryption.

Oh, I heard this story. I still have a welt on my forehead from banging my head against the desk going, this again? Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, here's his quote. He says, I simply maintain that companies should retain the capability to provide the government unencrypted copies of communications and data stored on devices when a court orders them to do so.

When a court issues a search warrant or wiretap order to collect evidence of a crime, the company should be able to help. The government does not need to hold the key. End quote. We've been here before. Yeah, we have. All of this has happened before. No, I understand.

And, you know, it's that old thing we've talked about before, about how you are secure in your personal papers unless there's a search warrant. And when something's encrypted, you can't have a search warrant. So, on the one hand, I understand law enforcement's frustration about this.

But it got me thinking, you know, is it illegal for me to have a safe in my house that automatically incinerates everything within it when the safe is opened? In other words, if someone pried the safe open and it automatically incinerated it, is that illegal? I would think not.

I don't believe so. I don't believe so either. So, it's not illegal for me to have a device in my home to, you know, protect my personal private things. We've got to get smart. In a physical way. Right? So, yeah.

So, I just thought it was an interesting tie-in. The people who are pro-encryption. Yep. I kind of agree with what he's saying, but I'm going to bring up something again. What does delete mean? That's the problem I have with these companies.

If I delete something off my phone, but it's still being backed up somewhere in the cloud by Apple, and then the government can get access to a backup of something that I thought I had deleted, that's when it gets really weird for me. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, but I mean, this is still with just encryption and companies keeping keys to unlock everything.

Yeah, but I'm saying we have to define what the everything is, because the everything should just be what is, I say physically, but you know what I mean, physically on my phone at the moment. It shouldn't be an unknown, complete and total archive of everything that I've ever had or done with my phone, ever.

Right. Well, and you know, there are interesting technologies that are coming down the pike. You know, there's, what do they call it, homomorphic encryption, where you can search encrypted data without having to decrypt the data, things like that.

You can perform calculations on encrypted data without having to decrypt the data. I know I've been listening to too much Adam Carolla when the first thing that jumped into my mind is, I don't know gay code. It's the joke he makes every single time. So here's what we all need to do.

Yeah. I don't know if you guys, you guys know why like FBI raid teams always carry compasses when they go on raids? Go on. In the old days, every good hacker used to have a panic button on their computers or at their desk. So when the FBI raid came, they would basically hit the button in embedded in the door frames around the entry and exit points of the house were basically degaussers.

So as soon as the FBI walked out with the computers, they were erased. Right. So now FBI guys come in with compasses so they can tell if the magnetic field has changed in a remarkable way. So I was thinking maybe we could go back to that because I don't think anybody does that anymore. So the FBI might have like let that one slide now.

They backed off on that one. We can just degauss the house. That's it. It's my new rap album. Degauss the house. Degauss. I like it. I love it. I'd buy that album for a dollar. Yep. JD. Speaking of albums, speaking of albums, you're a songster now.

Yes. Yes. We made ourselves a parody song for Halloween and it's a big hit. It's a hootenanny. It's a... Is it a graveyard smash? It is a graveyard smash. We made the malware mash and I will...

I'm not making this up. People have stopped me on the street who know I do the Cyber Wire and they've said, I loved the malware mash. I, you know, spit out my coffee. It was really, really funny. So if you have not yet checked out the malware mash, we have a link to it in the show notes. It's also up on the Cyber Wire website and we think it's a lot of fun.

We had a lot of fun doing it. You did. It was very enjoyable. The hardest part for me was, you know, I am a singer, but I'm a rusty singer. So laying down the three-part harmonies in the backing tracks, that took a few passes for me to get anything that was remotely pleasing to my ear.

So, you know. Better a rusty singer than a rusty trombone. There you go. Look it up, kids. Please don't. Don't look that up. So, but your voice came off very nicely. I would almost say as it sounded like ice cream, as did one of your reviews.

I thank you for putting this in. I enjoy this. You did get a wonderful five-star review over at iTunes. And as for the Cyber Wire podcast, yeah, this is for the Cyber Wire. Yep. I love every part of the show, even the ads. Dave, your voice is like ice cream. You definitely make my top 10 people.

I'd like to narrate my life list. Also, I love hearing about cyber security news. I'm a software engineer, and I'm amazed at how removed we are from this cyber alter reality. That's right. Ah, your voice is like ice cream. This does remind me of Jason's review that we got about his dulcet tones. So, I think you two should get together and form a band.

Well, it's the dulcet tones. Yeah, degauss the house, bros. Yeah, degauss the house. I am very flattered by this. It's very nice to think that people find my voice pleasing. Of course, I am, you know, my initial thought when I heard my voice was like ice cream. I thought that, yes, it's cold, and if you consume it too quickly, you'll get a headache.

So, don't listen at 1.5 speed. Right, exactly. No, very nice of them to leave a nice review. I do appreciate it. Whoever sblack4 is, thank you very much. And I will come to your house and read your life list, whatever that is. Don't be creepy.

Yeah, exactly. Stand outside the window and read the... Oh, speaking of creepy, by the way, and whispering, I watched that movie that you posted, that whisper movie. Yeah. Holy smokes. Yeah, it was pretty good for a little three minutes. Yeah, for a short little video, that's pretty creepy.

So, yeah, got a nice choice. All right. Well, on that scary note, we're going to call it a week, and we'll talk to you next week, Dave. All right, guys. See you then. All right. Bye. Brian, we're going to talk about your peoples today.

Oh, boy. Let me guess. This is somehow going to involve World War II, and it's not going to be good. No, it's not. And yes, it is. Not in that order. Deutsche Bahn. Yes. The high-speed train provider in Germany. Absolutely fantastic. You know, they don't even make announcements in the train stations that the train is about to leave, because trains leave on time.

And if you don't know that, screw you. Yeah, it's not like everywhere else in the world. No, no, these things are efficient. Yes, as only Germans can do. Well, you know, they're naming a new train. Right. And they had a list of 25 iconic German figures that they were pulling from.

Yes. And they picked Anne Frank. Okay, that's probably not the best call for a train. No, no. Anne Frank had one really last memorable train ride that nobody wants to talk about, and these guys picked her as the name of their train.

That's not a train that I would like to get on. This was not open for a public vote, I assume. This was some small organization of people woefully out of touch with reality. Yeah. Or that they just picked her, they went to Oktoberfest and pulled them from a hat.

Yeah. Yeah. Not a good idea. Okay, bad move there. Bad move. Yeah. Yeah. Let's not do that. Nowadays, we think of German trains as being on time, but there was a time when German trains are not something you really wanted to think about. Well, you did not want to be on one, that's for sure. No shit. Now, we're going to talk about emojis real quick, because this was everywhere.

Yes, it was. And I just want, my moron of the week here is Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. Yes. One guy tweeted the difference between, you know, the Apple hamburger emoji and the Google, well, I'd say cheeseburger emoji. Yes.

Because cheese is involved, and cheese is a key player. Yes, it is. In this entire debacle. But then Sundar Pichai writes this guy and says he's going to drop everything, and they're going to address the problem. Yes. Starting a flood of oh noes. Don't, Sundar, don't feed the trolls.

Please. And then it just snowballed from there. Google hasn't exactly had a good news week. I would see this as kind of trying to change the narrative. Never mind that stuff going on with the government and the hearings. Let's talk about our emojis.

Now, what I do particularly like about this story is obviously, you know, Apple has put the cheese on top, as it should be. Yet they've made a tragic mistake with the lettuce. Mm-hmm. The lettuce is on the bottom. And I would like to note, and this is why I continue to keep my Microsoft stock, of all the players involved, the only person that got it right is Microsoft.

Yes. That's right. And they're making the proper cheeseburger because they pay attention to the details. Indeed they do. And I do like that the Google beer emoji, or emoji, can't even speak anymore. I am so flabbergasted by this one.

The beer emoji has a giant head on it, but a big gap where the beer should be. Yes. What's up with that? Just, it's like they haven't ever had a beer. I know. Or a burger. Air beer. It's like vaporware. Vapor beer. There's a place here in Santa Monica called Burgers and Brews.

One stop there, and you guys can sort it all out. Hunting unicorns. Hunting unicorns. It's the first of the month, so we're going to bore you with the hunting unicorn section again. Exciting stuff. Good year for the stock market, apparently. I am still number one.

I'm up 51%. Take that now, Jones Industrial Average. Yeah, I'm coming in second at 43.13, but it sucks because earlier in the week, or like a week ago, I was at 49%. I was right on your heels. So I don't know which one of my stocks shat the bed, but it might have been Tesla.

Yeah, and then Mike, our control, who picked all non-tech stocks to go against our only tech stocks, is at 26.92%. Nothing to be complaining about, but it's a buy at no 51%. Man, I wish I would have actually invested $10,000 in these stocks.

Seriously. Been a nice chunk of change. Yeah. How's our side bet going, Jason? Our bet on Twitter. Our Twitter side bet's going well for me. I bought it at $16.33. It is now at $19.66, which means I've made about $50. I'm up 16.5%.

That's not bad, but a lot of bad news for Twitter this week. Here's the deal. I don't know what they could do at this point that would drop the stock that much, because they seem to have done every single thing possibly wrong this week. I know. And I'm still up. I was shocked to see that it was still up when he popped it in the notes.

I'm like, how are people still pouring money into this right now? They're doing everything wrong. Oh, well, that's the whimsy of the stock market, and they have yet another full, well, basically full two months to screw it all up. We'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful that they're not going to be able to screw it up that much, because I mean, I would like that six pack, but I would also like a few bucks.

And the instant that the markets open in 2018, I am dumping this shit, because I do not want Twitter in my portfolio. Oh, me too. As anemic as it is, I'm getting rid of this. I hate you guys. My first move in 2018 is dumping Twitter. Feedback loop.

We have two new Patreon subscribers, Thomas M. and Kate S., and also a PayPal donation from Isaac C. Thank you all very, very much. We appreciate it, and welcome to the family. We do appreciate that so much. And Kate, our Patreon subscriber, also gave us a five-star rating over on Facebook, because you could do that, apparently.

And she said, what are you doing with your life if you aren't listening to this podcast? Probably being more productive than me. These guys are hilarious and completely capture your attention for hours on end. Occasionally, I forget that I have responsibilities like feeding my child and making sure my dogs haven't escaped under the fence. Thanks. We also have those responsibilities just split between us.

Yes, yes. And the dog's more important. The kid can take care of himself. Not quite yet. Okay, moving over to Twitter. Bayrod writes in, this show is great. Hopefully, you guys will start to change your mind about it. And he's talking about Orville. And yes, I have, actually. Eh, whatever.

Mr. Sachs writes, can't believe after episode 230, we regularly have less than 20k downloads. Probably the best down-to-earth podcast. Go subscribe, people. Tell your friends. And keep up those kind of tweets. Thank you. Clancy writes in, I realize nobody agrees on everything, but Luke Cage's storyline was dope.

Your stands on rap means you need a little diversity. Now, I take issue with this. I don't believe the thing that makes this wonderful world so fantastic. We are being diverse by only listening to our Whitey music. You have your rap. We have our Whitey. And what a pastiche we make.

And look, Luke Cage is one of my favorite characters from the Netflix Marvel series. I just didn't like his own show. I didn't like the noir feel to it. I didn't care much for the storyline. He's a fantastic character. I love him when he pops up on all the other shows.

I loved him in the, what the hell was the show that they just did? That they're all together? The Defenders. The Defenders, which is, I just think about the arcade game every time I hear that title. So we're with you, Clancy, sort of, but we are being diverse. Look, I'm 44 now. I don't like rap.

I'm never going to. I like old rap. I just don't like new rap. I listened to rap a lot when I was a skateboarder back in the day. I can recite to you every lyric in the first NWA album. Please don't, because that means you're going to say some words that you shouldn't be saying. Nope. I will not be doing that. Okay.

There's diversity, and then there's stupidity, and I will err on the side of diversity. And 6502 Chip writes in, RIP Robert Guillaume. He has one of my favorite shouty lines from a bad 80s movie. Next time you fuck me, kiss me first. I don't remember that. What movie was that from?

Dude, I don't know. So you've got to write it back in and tell us, because I spent like 20 minutes trying to track down that quote, and I could not find it. I wanted to put a clip of it in the show, but I cannot find the movie, so you've got to let us know. Yep, and Dexter Guff, your favorite new podcast, that's the pseudo-psychology life expert, thanked us for powering through seven episodes.

Well, Jason powered through seven episodes. I enjoyed the first one. I've actually powered through all of them so far. Well, there you go. And if you listen to, I think it's episode eight. Whenever one came out this week, you'll find a nice little shout from Dexter Guff to my day job, The Art of Charm. Yes. Very nice. Thank you, Dexter. Trippin' Fool writes, laugh, shake your fist in the air, and scratch what little hair you have left while listening to these funny, grumpy old geeks.

Yes, the hair is going, sadly. For one of us. Yeah, shut up. Chris Falloon writes, try Buffer instead of Flume, because you were complaining about Flume last week. Buffer is a completely different app. Apples and oranges. It's apples and oranges. But we do use Buffer, so we're already doing that, but it is not the same thing as Flume.

So, thank you, though. Yep, and I still am using Flume because the new update came out. And another reason I can't actually tell people to use it, when an update to an app comes out, you generally don't wipe all of the settings and make you log back in and start from scratch.

All of my preferences disappeared. All of my account ties in, so everything's two factors. It took 20 minutes to get back to where I was. Yeah, that's a bad way. Way to go. All right. Yeah. Over at GOG.show, we had a few people write in. First up is Jared. He said, finally got a VPN account.

Thought y'all might want to know that your listeners do listen to your suggestions. Do you all know of any cheaper quality alternatives to a GoPro? I like my GoPros that I already have. Got great deals on both at pawn shops. Well, first off, if you're only shopping at pawn shops, we need to know what you have in your pawn shop to give you a recommendation.

But I'm just looking for another option. If I decide, I'd like to have another action camera for my motorcycle. P.S. I would have asked this earlier today, but the World Series might have trumped everything else I had planned. Let's go, Astros. One more game. All right. Well, Jared's going to be happy. I had a horrible Wednesday night.

Brian, not so much. Yeah, that sucked. Well, congratulations. I have no suggestions on these things. Jason May? Nope. Okay. I've had one GoPro. It was a GoPro 2. And after sitting in a box for a year, it died and the battery would not take a charge again, so I threw it away.

Right. So, nope. I don't – I'm not an action podcaster, so I don't need to strap a GoPro on my head while I'm sitting here in Logic or talking to Brian having a glass of wine. It's not that – I am on a treadmill, but I'm not going anywhere. I am on the road to nowhere, so it's not worth filming.

So, sorry. If I run across any, I will definitely let you know. Jason is – And if you run across any, let us know. Not an action podcaster. I'm not an action podcaster. Next one comes from Tyler on Tech. Hey, guys. Oh, I love this one. Let it flow, Jason.

I will. You know, this is one of the ones I was going to try and tighten up, but I knew Brian's ego would have to – yeah, here we go. With regards to Jason's recent insisting that Brian used to hold the opinion, you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide. Jason, I could have sworn that you were right and that I remembered Brian saying that, and I even could have sworn that I remembered the episode where you convinced him otherwise.

I was so sure of this, in fact, that I recalled the time when I first discovered and listened to your show in order to find the proof. I'm about a month behind on the show and wanted to say the $20 you offered for finding the episode and went to find which episode was my first. It was episode 148, where a Lyft driver tried to run you over when you still used Uber.

In pursuit of finding the episode, I remembered. I listened to episode 148 again and then listened to episode 151 when the news with Apple v. FBI was first announced. After listening to episode 148 and 151, I have no choice but to conclude that my memory was a lie, and Brian has always held that mass surveillance by the U.S.

government is not okay. The comment that Brian makes in episode 151 regarding a Medium article is what sealed it for me. Brian explicitly says that if you hold that opinion, that you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide, then you need to read the Medium article because that is not okay. Maybe I missed something.

Yes, you did. Maybe I listened to earlier episodes and Brian had changed his tune by episode 148. He had. Maybe it was Up the Speed, which I listened for a short but wonderful run. Maybe we were both just wrong and Brian is right in what he's been saying this whole time. Anyway, you both are a great source of entertainment and tech news, and I really appreciate what you both do.

You are literally one of two podcasts I actually listen to on a regular basis, the other being The Cyber Wire with Papa Bittner. Keep up the good work. Boom! I think there's some Mandala effect going on here. Everybody remembers the wrong thing. I have never, ever, ever felt that way. I'm going to pull out the clip again.

I have the clip. It's in the 50s where we started this conversation, and that is where you said it. He's 100 episodes off. So, yes, we did change our opinions over time. We do that a lot on this show because we are both very persuasive people. But the original comment comes from the early episodes, and I will put it at the end of this episode again.

No, thank you. Next up comes from Andy, and as we also pointed out with Dr. David Teeter last night, everybody is calling me Brian with a Y for some reason. Yeah, what's up with that? I don't know. Yesterday, it was five different people did it. It was very strange. Anyways, he says, first, let me say that Brian's Facebook rant in episode 233 was one, I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore from being pure gold.

It might be my favorite moment of the entire show since I started listening. A few weeks ago, you mentioned the Run Pee app. Brian said he has no need for it. Well, I'm currently not going to any movies, so while he may not now, with a child so young, he will be. As a grumpy geek with a roughly 10-year-old child, this app is invaluable.

Before any movie, he and I go over the points that are good for him to step out and pee. Brian should keep the app around or else be ready to face the inevitable, I need to pee, during the most pivotal moment of every film he will see with his kid for the next 12 years to come. Truth. A lot of pivotal moments in Cars, I guess.

Or the Paw Patrol movie. I don't know. Regarding your development stacks, I would suggest you both give VS Code a try. It's Microsoft's free coding program. Before you go blowing it off because it comes from Microsoft, hey, we know the burger would be right, so we're not blowing it off yet. Know that it is pretty much the hot shit in the development community with people abandoning Atom and Sublime in droves to move to it to make life easier for people to migrate.

They have keyboard maps available for both. However, it only took me about three to four days to adjust to it with minimal cursing. Keep up the grumpiness. I actually checked it out because I'm like, oh, it's Microsoft, which means probably not a Mac version, but I've been wrong before. And they do have Office for Mac.

And I went and checked it out. Sure enough, they have a Mac version. So it's in my list to try in the future when I get back to doing the coding stuff. It actually looks pretty cool. I checked it out. It looks not bad. Right. Big BH4V. I'm sure that there's a hidden meaning in there somewhere, but I just can't parse it.

Hi, Jason and Brian. You guys have a great podcast. I listen to you guys when I'm commuting to work every Monday morning. I heard episode 233 about Jason wanting to export his IG posts. Have you considered using a forensic tool to export the data? There's a popular forensic tool called X1 Social Discovery, and it's able to extract the social media information from any user.

There's also another tool made by Oxygen Forensic, but I haven't used their social media tool, only their mobile forensics. I hope either tool helps. Thanks again for very informative podcasts. Keep up the good work and tell Papa Bittner his Halloween song was really good. Just a quick note, Jason. You did misread that.

I don't want people to believe that. It's not able to extract the social media information from any user just if you have the logins. Otherwise, boy, that would be fucking scary, wouldn't it? Oh, okay. I figured you just point it at a user account and it would slurp, but you never know.

Yeah, that'd go real well for the world. Well, there are tools out there that do that, so we'll see. I'm actually going to download the Social Discovery one because they do have a free 14-day trial. I just have to find my PC laptop. It's under a pile of stuff in the closet somewhere, but I do have a PC, so I can download it because it is PC only.

Ah, there you go. 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 about the show.

Please, please, please, please, please. Closing shout-outs! You know, Brian, I have to give a shout-out to the Houston Astros for ruining your Wednesday night. They certainly did. One of the most memorable World Series in history. The games were absolutely fantastic.

I had a blast watching until Wednesday night, and that just sucked. But hey, shout-out for my LA Dodgers. We'll see what happens next year. So close. So close. Oh, well, at least I can get some shit done now. And a very happy birthday to a friend of the show, Kitty Crystal.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give us a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click on the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 234. 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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