235: Facebooty

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Also, today's episode is brought to you by Eero. For free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, visit Eero.com and at checkout, select Overnight Shipping and then enter the promo code GOG to make it free. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason. Yes, sir. If you travel, apparently you're going to be growing a beard. Yes, I am. We talked last week about my new artisanal shaving kit that all the cool hipsters in Silverlake are using, the safety razor.

And yeah, can't take the blades on a plane. No, you cannot. So I had a feeling. I did not think that that would be allowed. If you can't take a box cutter, come on. Yeah, I thought they changed the rules on it, but I found an article from the TSA's blog from 2010, I believe.

And they're saying, no, you can't do it. So, I mean, it's been seven years and I haven't found any updated information, which means it's probably still valid. Probably. But, you know, you can always just check it. God, no. What do you think I am? Some kind of savage? I'm going to check my luggage. I'm not made of money over here.

Jeez. That's right. That's 25 bucks a pop. That's two Bloody Marys on the plane, man. That's right. We have to allot for these things. True that. Now, I found an article on Medium. Yes. Under Basic Income, which is a guy who's probably very similar to us in his take on how the robots are taking over the world and automation is going to drive us all into the Stone Age.

It's called The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart. And the subtitle is Robots Are Hiding in Plain Sight. It's Time We Stop Ignoring Them. Did you get a chance to read this article, Brian? I did. It's a lot shorter than Tim O'Reilly's book, and it makes a lot more sense. Yes, it does.

And it's got actual facts. I was going to say, he should have just called this article F.U. Tim O'Reilly. Exactly. It's depressing. It is what we're talking about, and it is not a rosy take on this. It is not we're all going to become highly skilled robot fixer uppers.

It is we're all going to be out of a fucking job. Well, don't include us in that. You know, we're the two percenters. Sure. As we do a podcast that barely covers the cost involved in doing it. Yeah. Right. Sure. We're doing great, Jason.

We're doing great. But we have other avenues of income that have definitely dried up over the years and have become harder and harder. But it's still not like we're actually working in a coal mine. Hey, but this administration's bringing back coal.

That's right. Clean. Beautiful coal. It's the best. It is the best. It is. All right. Let's move on to some good news. No, I did want to just touch on this because maybe some people aren't going to go read this because it's long. Not as long as a book, but it's long. Robots are hiding in plain sight.

It's time we stop ignoring them. He gets into some very specific use cases, including offshore drilling, which basically all of those jobs have gone away for the most part. And he's talking about medium-skill manufacturing and office jobs that are basically just disappearing.

And the unemployed have found new employment in new, lower-level, low-skill service jobs, which are a lot less well-paid. So this is actual facts of people that are having their jobs replaced and going back into the workforce and not really being able to make the amount of money that they used to.

It is just a sliding scale into oblivion, basically. So, you know, unless you believe Tim O'Reilly and you're a real go-getter out there and you're going to be able to find yourself a very high-paying job that doesn't exist anymore. But most people just aren't that.

But there is one real go-getter out there that I want to talk about. He's done very well for himself. He even got a blue check from Twitter. He's verified. Who is this new gentleman that you talk about? This go-getter is the guy that organized the Charlottesville rally, the white supremacist.

I mean, he's working it. He got that rally organized. He got it together. And when that poor, unfortunate woman got killed by the people that he organized, he had it together to go ahead and tweet about how she was a fat cow and deserved to die. Wow. So it seems like a perfect person to get verified by Twitter, right?

Right. Well, it happened. And people had some problems with that. Just a few people. Within seconds of it happening, I believe, my entire Twitter feed was filled with people saying, way to go, Jack. You guys are really draining the swamp over there.

Yeah. So smart move by Twitter. And because of this, they have now shut down their entire verification program altogether. I love what Twitter support sent out. Verification was meant to authenticate identity and voice, but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance because you fucking pushed it to be that, right, Twitter?

You made it that way. You made it that way, Twitter. It wasn't interpreted that way, you motherfuckers. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. Cool. We have paused all general verifications while we work and we will report back soon. Now, do they unverify this guy?

No, I'm sorry. He's newsworthy. So you can't, you can't kick him off. Oh, the Trump defense. Got it. He is still verified, by the way. Okay. Good times. Just a shit show over there. And it just gets worse and worse every day. It really does. I cannot wait for January 1st to sell my stock.

I know. I really want to sell mine because it's just having any money into this desolate wasteland of Twitter is just, it galls me. I wake up every morning and it galls me, Jason. Well, if you would like to concede and send me my six pack, we can call an end to the whole shenanigan. Nope.

Not going to happen. You're going to hang on to the bitter end. I am. I am. And I'm going to hang on until I get verified, too. Damn it. What do I have to do? Every month I try. Organize a white pride. You got to organize a white pride rally, Jason. That's the problem. And I got to pay in rubles. That's true. That's the only way you can buy ads.

I mean, I bought my 10,000 fake followers and I still can't get verified. What's it take, Twitter? What's it take? I just don't know. Well, let's, let's, I want to rant about Facebook again. As you have, and I have both been noticing, it's, it's ramped up incredibly.

Like, because we run a page, it's every five seconds I'm being asked to, to boost a post for Grumpy Old Geeks. And, you know, I've been, I've had a post blocked before by, by, by the old Facebook that we posted for Grumpy Old Geeks. This is when they rolled out their branded content policies.

They started to block our posts for our lovely advertisers. And we don't want that. We want to post for the ads because, you know, they're supporting us. They're giving us money. They're helping us out. We want to post for them. And so they rolled out, so they used to block ads for FreshBooks. I'll give them a shout out now because right now we tried to post an ad and it's not running.

It's been two days now because they've decided that this post is going against their branded content policies. Even though I use their branded content tool to post the fucking ad. It is still getting flagged. And if you write them back, it takes them two to three days to respond. So I'm excited.

This is not the first time this has happened. This is not the second time this has happened. This is at least the sixth time that this has happened. And I know what's going to happen is in another two days, they're going to write back and go, oh, your ad is totally fine. Let's reinstate it. Well, that's great. But FreshBooks wanted it run a week ago and it should have been up for a week.

And oh, God. Thanks, guys. Social media is a wasteland and customer support does not exist. We've talked about this endlessly on this show. You might as well just scream into the void like we do here. Yeah, honestly, I've got another Facebook story, which is kind of interesting. My friend's Facebook account, when she logs in, she only gets the first story and then it breaks on the second block, which is generally the sponsored content block.

So I'm like, oh, you probably got some crap running. Let me send me your login. I'll give it a shot. I tried it on my machines and same thing. So it literally is a problem at Facebook level that it's broken. And she's written them in for a week and a half without any reply and talk to a bunch of her other friends.

They've got the same problem. Nobody can look past the first post. So guess what they did? Stop using Facebook. Yeah. Well, they're much happier, much happier. And I did an experiment last week and I was, you know, I like to kill all my old posts every now and again, just go and clean them out.

So I'm not feeding the AI beast, as it were. So I decided to just do kind of like a clean sweep and figure out what is in there that they've got on me hours and hours and hours of digging. Yeah. It was insane.

I finally started using some more of the social media post manager Chrome plugin to kill a bunch of it. But there's a lot of it that you just can't get rid of. And if you go into your ad preferences where they have, I didn't even know this existed because I was just diving in to find as much as I possibly could. They have like ad categories that they put you into certain buckets for and you can opt out of those buckets.

They're ridiculous. I was in the bucket for the color red. So I apparently got ads for red. Well, you like red, Jason. No, I don't. I like black and blue. I'm not a red guy. Well, we'll get into all of that. We'll get into all of that a little bit later on because I've done some, a little bit more research and found a few more articles about how exactly Facebook is getting all this data.

In the news. Hey, well, why don't we just keep on shitting on Facebook? Because it's kind of fun. I enjoy it. They ran a test trying to get rid of the fake news problem. Yes.

But they did it by promoting comments that had the word fake in them. So if you went to somebody's post that they did and any of the comments that had the word fake in it were bubbled to the top. So the first thing that you saw was like for every news story that had any comment with the word fake in it was somebody bashing the post.

Right. Even if it was normal news, it was this really stupid program that they were testing, which they have since pulled. But it's like, how do you get hired at Facebook and come up with such stupid ideas? I thought they had like this really intense program to get hired there where you actually had to be able to find both ass cheeks with both hands, but apparently not.

Right. That's pretty dumb. Oh, my God. Well, let's just crap on Facebook all week. Actually, no, let's not. Let's talk about Airbnb for a second. Oh, my. Another one of my favorite companies. Yeah. I'm actually staying in an Airbnb in San Francisco next weekend, which should be interesting.

Of course you are. Hey, I'm not paying for company company trip. But Airbnb is actually tapping landlords now for some of their unused inventory for short-term rentals. OK. This seems kind of odd, doesn't it?

It does. It does. It seems extraordinarily odd. But, you know, I guess everybody's just throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks nowadays. Pretty much. I just don't know. I mean, granted, the company owns 5,000 units, and they're only going to be renting out about 100 of them in the pilot program.

Right. But I don't know. And, of course, they're outsourcing the cleanliness of the apartments from another company called Pillow. Please tell me, please, please tell me it's spelled P-I-L-L-W. No, I wish. Damn. It's got the full, proper spelling. What's wrong with these millennials and their new companies?

I know. Speaking of millennials and their stupid-ass companies, Snap. Or Snapchat. Because, you know, they had to rebrand themselves as Snap. Snap. Snappy. Well, they're not doing so well. Well, Snap stock nose dove this week. It went down into Snap. Yep.

After reporting less revenue. Shocking. And fewer users. Shocking. Than expected. So that's not good. And in an effort to maybe get some people, they've decided that old people are actually good. We don't want to ignore the old people anymore. So Evan Spiegel is going to redesign Snapchat because it's too damn hard to use for us old people that expect rational menus.

So we're going to get a nav bar. How exciting. Wow. We're going to get the hamburger. Yeah. We're going to get a burger. And it's going to have things like story or post or other things, I'm sure. Because, you know, there's not really that much involved with the mobile app design. It's kind of, we've done the psychology on it.

There's only so much space and real estate to use. So we know what it's going to kind of look like. We have no idea when it's going to go live. But there you go. So Snapchat will now be easier to use. There is an easier to use Snapchat already. I don't know if Evan is aware of this. It's called Instagram. Kind of easy to use and has like menus and things like that.

And a lot more users. Yeah. And stories. I wonder where they got that idea. Hmm. Well. Anyway. You know, they can live off just like those boxes of glasses and just eat those and boil them up like old shoe leather. Yes. And just live off of those until they get this new redesign out. Soylent snap.

Oh, now the first self-driving shuttle bus has gone live in Las Vegas. Seems like a great place to have an automated vehicle. It can transport up to 12 passengers and with a maximum speed. 12 passengers. That's more like a minivan.

That's not a fucking bus. Well, apparently the AI takes up the rest of the space. Oh, right. Yes. So it can usually go around 28 miles an hour, but it will just stick around 15. Well, within the first two hours after the big, massive launch, yes, it got in an accident.

Awesome. The first article I found kind of left this part out of the story. What happened was the little, you know, AI bus pulled up behind a truck. The truck backed into it. That was it. So in the grand scheme of AI, apparently, apparently nobody decided to put reverse into this amazingly smart bus because you'd think that, oh, if something's coming at me, I'm stopped.

Maybe I should back up and honk the horn. Hmm. Guess they didn't put that one through the lab work. But yes, it was just a little paint scratch, but they took it back to the lab to make sure it still works okay. Okay. It'll be back on the road soon. Got to put reverse in there. It does help. Yeah.

Back that AI up. I'm sure there's a song in there. Yep. Going to have to work on that one. What is going on with this stuff, Jason? I mean, on the one hand, we're being told that we need to be incredibly worried and scared about AI and machine learning. On the other hand, every single real world implementation of this stuff that we see is just fucking stupid.

And terrible. And terrible. Like, I don't know what to believe anymore. The world's gone mad. Speaking of the world gone mad, Japan has granted residency to a seven-year-old AI boy. Oh, does he come with his AI bow? No, just the boy.

Just the boy. And he has documentation. So he's an actual real live boy. Oh, but is he a robot or is he just in software? It's apparently a robot, but you cannot talk to him directly. You actually have to use the line messaging app.

You can send text conversations. So while the headline says talkative little boy, he actually doesn't talk. He only texts. So he's like a real seven-year-old boy. You can only talk to him through text in his phone now. Pretty much, yeah. Or a 17-year-old boy at this point. And a quick hat tip to Paul on Facebook because he posted that on our page.

Now, this next one I got is kind of funny. VR developers are starting to pivot. They're pivoting because apparently nobody likes VR. Gee, as Brian would say, shocking. I've not met anyone yet who has bought one of these rigs that have not put it in a drawer in the garage, never to look at it again until the next garage sale.

Everybody I know tries VR once, does, as Jason would say, a neat, and then never uses it again. Exactly. Well, I just spent $1,000 and renovated my kid's room, and this is neat. Now I'm bored.

What am I going to do with this? Now I'm bored. I'm vaguely sick. I have motion sickness. I need to sit down, and I'm just going to let this collect dust now for a while. Okay, so yeah, VR developers are going to move to location-based entertainment, like, you know, getting a spot in a shopping mall like an old arcade, which they might want to just call the vomitorium, since everybody does get motion sick and pukes half the time.

This is interesting because I remember in the 90s when I used to go to places that had VR, like, that's what we would do. We would go and we would play, I can't remember the name of it, but they had those mech pods where you can get in the pods and fight each other, like an eight-person mech on mech battle, but they also had the ones where you stand in the ring, like the scene in Hackers that the guy's using, that same exact one.

Right, right. And we used to do that, and it was fun, but then they went out of business because everybody stopped going because it's only fun for, like, two times because everybody gets bored of VR. Yes. So yeah, they're trying to pivot now and move into location-based entertainment, which will be funny because, yeah, the one thing I want to do is I want to drive from my home to another location so I can put on a headset to go to another location.

It is a bit silly. I mean, I'm happy about this because I want something to start going into all these empty retail spaces that we have all over the world. I just don't know if this is what we want. We'll see how it plays out. But yes, if you have a VR job, polish that resume, I would say.

During a panel hosted by the Copyright Alliance last week, the MPAA's Senior Vice President on Government and Regulatory Affairs, I had a few words to say about Kodi. Okay. You know, those Kodi boxes, like our little Moogoo Guy Pan boxes? That's right, yep. Much as it's sitting next to my VR rig in a closet downstairs.

Yeah, my Kodi is basically my VR rig. It is sitting in a box somewhere. They're saying that the platform itself is used legally by around 12 million users. Hang on a second. Which I thought was very interesting. I installed this.

I tried it out for a few days. I ran through different things. I wasn't even aware that there was anything legal on there. What exactly is legal to view on a Kodi? Well, I mean, a lot of people, you can watch local television in other countries. Like I was watching, you know, Northern Ireland public access TV for a while.

That's legal, I'm guessing. There's things on there that you can get. But it also works as like a YouTube box or a Skype box and things like that. Right. But so there are 38 million total Kodi users out there. So 26 million of them are pirates. So 70%. And I thought that number was just shockingly low.

These people obviously just haven't found the menu with the little skull and crossbones that says Sweden on it. I guess I'll watch public access from Ireland, although I could watch Wonder Woman. Yeah, let's watch Curling. No, I'd rather watch It, like I watched the other night.

Very good movie. Anyway, yeah. So I thought this was just a fun stat that there are apparently 12 million very stupid people out there who bought the ultimate pirate box and just can't figure out how to use it. Or maybe they're like us, bought it and it's just that it hasn't been set up yet. Well, I guess, yeah. I mean, I suppose you're using it legally if you're not using it.

I think that's the only way. The only way to win is not to play. That's it. Yeah, exactly. Amazon. They're going after Ikea. Can you believe this? I can. I mean, Amazon is running out of industries to disrupt and take over.

So here we go. Furniture. Why not? I mean, look, the worst part about Ikea is that you have to actually go there. Yeah. And with Amazon, now you don't. They have a new line called Rivet. It's riveting. Good name. Good name. Did you actually check out some of the furniture on here? I did.

It looks nice enough. I don't know how well the construction is because, you know, they say this headline says they're taking on Ikea and West Elm. There's a vast difference between Ikea and West Elm. You know, Ikea is college. West Elm is graduate school. And, you know, where is this going to fall in terms of quality?

Is it going to be more like West Elm or is it going to be more like Ikea? Yeah, that's that price point seems to be more like West Elm. It's more expensive than Ikea for sure. But yeah, all the stuff looks pretty nice. I mean, I got nothing. I can see myself having a number of these items. Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard of West Elm because I didn't graduate.

So apparently I'm not in that club. But if you say it is an upscale Ikea, I get it because this definitely looks more upscale than Ikea stuff. It looks a lot more like the West Elm level of stuff. Yeah. I don't need any furniture. But, you know, if I was just stocking my house up, I would actually consider some of this stuff.

Yeah. And it looks like they're offering a one year warranty on all furniture, which is almost unheard of. Good luck with that anywhere else. And a free 30 day return policy. Now, see, this is the thing that drives me insane. Like, I love I love Amazon. I love I do. I fucking love them.

And they're able to eat the costs on this stuff, which is what will drive other people out of business, because the idea that they will ship you. You can order a couch. They will ship it to you for free or for a very low cost. And after 30 days, you can say, I don't want it anymore. And they will come and get it from you.

Oh, they will not come. They will not get it from you. You're still going to have to schlep that thing to the UPS store. That's the. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. You're going to have to take that thing back yourself. But hang on a second. I thought that's why they bought all the Whole Foods. Shouldn't I just be able to take my couch down to Whole Foods and dump it off?

Kale and sofa. Oh, that's it. Yeah, yeah. I'd like some shopping sofa, please. That's always the fun bit. It's yes, it is a they say so you can shop stress free, but you cannot return stress free. Try and fit that couch in your, you know, your little mini sometime. Although your mini was amazing.

That was that thing had more space than a Hummer, I believe. I know it felt like some like Harry Potter bag, right? Like you just gave me the mini and it would just keep on going. Yeah, because you helped me move. I had a portmanteau that I was moving that would not fit in my friend's Hummer. And you came over and it fit right in the back of your mini. Like, perfect.

I love that thing. It's a great car. I love it. Well, speaking of cars, Tesla, the director of battery engineering is no more. Okay. Yeah, this is scary. They're firing people left and right over there. And my brother, he has a pre-order in for a Model 3 and he got a note this week that, yep, getting pushed.

Well, I mean, it makes sense. Heads are rolling because they missed all their deadlines, right? So when that happens, people go. People say bye-bye. Yeah, but then you got to train people from scratch. Well, not if you just use robots. That's true. That's true. I hear there's a seven-year-old in Japan looking for a job.

Yeah, well, look, Musk is doing something right. I'm not worried. In fact, I actually had drinks last night with a guy who works over at SpaceX and he says it's an absolutely fantastic environment. There's a lot of cross-pollination between the various companies that he owns. It's just really good people.

So I'm not worried at all. It's unfortunate that the car is coming late for people. It's not good for their image, but Tesla's not going anywhere. Not worried. They are totally fine. But I wish my brother would get his car because I want to try it. I've never been in a Tesla, so. They're nice, man.

Yeah. A ton of friends have them, but I've just never gotten to ride in one. Oh, well. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Oh, man. So we're going to talk about the blockchain for a little bit. I know. We're going to make this quick. Okay. Because, yeah, after last week, we got some angry tweets that we got some stuff wrong on Bitcoin.

And I was editing a show with Andreas Antonopoulos, who is the author of Mastering Bitcoin and the Internet of Money, and he's a Bitcoin expert. Now, he totally changed my mind on the whole Bitcoin thing. So when that episode comes out, I will link it here in the notes, but I'm not going to tell anybody who it is because I don't know if I'm allowed to.

So you got to remember that sometimes when you're doing these things for people. But the point that he was making is that Bitcoin is not, you know, the best thing for us here in the U.S. We have banks. We can actually go to a bank, set up an account. But for the 6.8 billion people in the world who can't do that, it is a fantastic way for them to do payments and have a way to do trade.

And I don't think Bitcoin is anywhere near where it's supposed to be, especially with some of the stuff we're going to talk about in two seconds. Well, I was about to say, you know, who else is that Bitcoin is extremely good for? What? Criminals. Yeah. Well, that too. Yeah. Of course. So trust me, when it comes out, you'll listen. He makes good points.

And but I don't think I don't think crypto is where it needs to be, obviously, because it just keeps, you know, keeps stepping on its own dick like every single week. But so what I've decided to do is I've put a bunch of links here and they'll be in the show notes. I am diving into this stuff so I can at least get my level of expertise up.

I'm reading Mastering Bitcoin, which is a dense, dense book. This stuff is harder than I thought it was going to be for sure. And this is a book on programming Bitcoin. So because I want to know, well, like how this is the thing that's always bugged me. It's like, I don't know how the engine works.

So I just kind of poo poo it. And since I have been a programmer for 20 some years, I guess I can, you know, dust off that part of the brain, which I've been doing anyway, but for web stuff. But I'm opening a Python book, getting a little Python under my belt, which I've never done because I never had to and I never wanted to.

But for this, I will. And so in the future, when we get these Bitcoin things and I'll at least have a functioning knowledge of it. Good. Yeah. I know you're not going to do it. So somebody somebody here's got to bite the bullet. So we both aren't idiots on the subject. No, I'm happy that you're reading up on it because I don't really don't want to.

No, I'm sure. Yeah. And there's there's a lot of stuff coming out right now about using blockchain technology for different aspects of tons of businesses. Yeah. And it's interesting. And the problem is that, yes, it does take up too much energy. And there are things that are in there that may not need to be there for certain applications.

So people are just taking the idea and running with it, which is pretty cool. And what's really interesting now is Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent, is getting in on it and he's starting his own cryptocurrency called Chia, Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia, Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia. And he's calling it green money for a digital world.

OK. It's supposed to be a lot less computationally intensive. So it's not burning out basically half of the world's electricity trying to get three bucks worth of Bitcoin, you know? Right. So we'll see how that goes. But you had a good story about Ethereum this week, which I thought was very fun.

Well, I mean, again, this is why not ready for prime time is the way that I look at Bitcoin. I don't necessarily poo-poo it straight out the gate, but when things happen like all of a sudden losing $300 million worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency by accident, thanks to a string of screw-ups and bugs, I tend to not want to dive in headfirst.

Yeah. That's just me. Yeah. Especially when some idiot with a GitHub account can basically ruin your day and maybe your retirement fund. Doesn't really seem that good. So yeah, this guy basically downloaded a bit of code from GitHub, playing around with it, then checked it back in.

But the people at this company called Parity who make hardware wallets didn't check the code and let it go out. And it basically locked a bunch of wallets in turning them into basically multi-factor wallets where multiple people had to get the keys.

But then he pulled a multi-signature wallet, sorry, and then made another change, pulled it back, which then broke everything. So now they're in this part where they're like, can we go back and just fix it? Can we do what they call a hard fork and go back in the chain and fix it so we can get our money back?

And that's another thing that really drives me crazy about this whole cryptocurrency thing is if you can do that. Then it's not really like, hey, we made a mistake. Can I have my money back? OK, let's go back and do it. It's the equivalent of like, say you have a locker and the lock and the key and you put your stuff in there and you lock it and you walk away with the key, but then somebody else can just walk up and knock on the side three times.

The door fucking opens. Something like that. A little more complicated, but yeah. Not really, Jason. Not really. Well, you need at least 51% of your friends who have ever used that locker to say, yes, we need to do that. But yeah, the whole thing is just that's why I really want to learn about this and get a little deeper so I can make fun of it more professionally, because that's really what I what I want to do, because this is still is not ready.

It is our forte making fun of things. So let's let's let's gear up. Yes. So there are a bunch of articles in the show notes. If you want to go to GOG dot show slash two, three, five and get your your blockchain on be my guest. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored in part by Fresh Books.

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Boom. Done. Free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, that's Eero.com. Select Overnight Shipping, and use the code G-O-G. Pleased to enjoy. Tops and doodads. There's a little glitch in the new iOS 11 software that's been going around that you may have seen, and it's driving a lot of people crazy.

Well, it's good to know it's a glitch, because I thought I had missed out on some cool meme thing that we were all supposed to be doing. Yeah. So if you type a single lowercase i, you get the little block with whatever character shows up. I think it's an A in a block or something like that. Something like that.

Yeah, something like that. It comes back to some bad machine learning. Go figure. Yeah. And they're supposed to be putting out a patch for it soon, but it's everywhere. Every tweet I see has it. Why are people not capitalizing their i's anymore? I don't understand.

Lazy bastards. But it comes back to a problem in autocorrect. So if you want to get rid of this, just turn off autocorrect for now. People are saying that you can do basically a replace for capital I, but just forget it. Just turn off autocorrect.

It'll be out in a few days. But if you've been seeing that, it's Apple's fault. That's what's going on. Because they have no quality control anymore. Yeah. I have actually forgotten to even update. So I haven't gone up to iOS 11 yet. So I don't have this issue. Yeah. I just totally forgot about it.

And it's only when this started happening that I went like, oh, and now I figured I'll just wait because this would drive me crazy because I could be a bit of a grammar Nazi with my texting. iOS 11's nice. I enjoy it. I like the new control center. It's much nicer. Anyway, let's go back to some more machine learning.

Okay. There's a new site out called Let's Enhance.io. Yes. I saw this when you put it in the show notes and you were complaining about how long it took for a small photo. You must have just gone in immediately because when I tried it out, it took maybe two minutes. Okay, I think I got it right when the Next Web published their article or it hit the feeds pretty heavily.

So I uploaded a 45K image, little JPEG, right? It was 960 by 539. And yes, it took two days for me to get the enhanced version back. And it comes back at 3840 by 2156, which is a pretty decent size upgrade.

So what I did was I took a look at the photo, took my original photo, dropped it into Photoshop, up-rezzed it to that same res, and then put them side by side. It did a fairly impressive job, I got to say. It's not bad.

It's not two days worth of waiting, you know. But if they can, you know, use this filter for up-rezzing photos, it's great. But beyond that, it didn't really, I mean, it didn't knock my socks off. I don't see much in the way of enhancement. What it does is it makes your photo a hell of a lot bigger and generally keeps some of the quality.

It does enhance the grain. Like, you know, I'm going to have this in the show notes so you can go take a look at it. There's no JPEG artifacting at all. All the JPEG artifacts are gone. And it just kind of cleans up the edges a bit and smooths it out. It looks good, but it's not, like, you know, world-changing by any stretch of the imagination.

No. No, it's all right. Yeah. You know, if you need a printable copy of some crappy, like, 60K photo that you found on Facebook, this will do the job. Yeah. So, that'll be in the show notes. Check it out. Now, I tried a new dock replacement little widget this week called U-bar 4.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. No. Skip it. I could not figure. I don't know how I ran across this thing. It does a bunch of interesting things by, like, rolling up windows. And if you use multiple windows, you can, like, click between them fairly easily.

It's got, you know, calendar and stuff put into it. It's, but for the most part, it is a steaming pile of poo that worked very poorly. So, I think that somebody was advertising it, and I just got suckered in because it was cheap. Right. If you buy it outright, it's 30 bucks, and I think I got it for, like, 10.

So, it was one of those deal-deal things. Don't buy it. It's terrible. I'm just going to tell you right now. Skip it. Will do. My friend Kevin Rose does have a new meditation app out, though, that is free for now. I don't know how he's going to monetize. I'm going to see him next week, so I'm going to ask him outright how he plans on keeping this thing free, because I never trust free software.

But, yeah, it's called Oak Meditation. It is really nice. It's really well-designed, and I've been using the breathing stuff on it. It replaces the breathing app that I usually use on my watch, you know, the built-in Apple Watch Breathe, because it's got a couple different types of breathing. It's really nice. I recommend checking it out while it's free, if you like, you know, because we talked about Bootify before, and we've tried all the other ones, Headspace.

Yep. And I had a free year of Headspace, and I used it 12 times, and then my free year expired, and I'm like, yeah, I don't think I need to pay for this one. Yeah. Check it out. It's pretty. It is pretty. I've used it. It's nice. Now, since this is the dad portion of Grumpy Old Geeks, it's winter here now.

It is 29 degrees outside, and it is snowing, which sucks a lot. But in the winter, it does get really dry, and I've always been a fan of humidifiers. I usually have seven or eight of them running around my house. And this year, I decided to upgrade and get some new ones, because last year, I still had bloody noses all winter.

I know, fun times, right? Well, I did a little research, and I think I found this on Lifehacker. It's called the Honeywell HCM 350W Germ-Free Cool Mist Humidifier. Mm-hmm. White. I love me some Amazon titles now. It's like 53 bucks, 54 bucks, I think.

It's amazing. It has completely changed my house. My house is- Moist. Beautiful. Wonderful and moist. I love this thing. It goes through like three gallons of water a day, and it still can be dry in some parts of the house, so I've got another one on the way for the downstairs, but because, yeah, it gets really dry here.

I love this thing. If you're in the market for a humidifier, this is the top-rated one from, I swear I think it's Lifehacker, but I could be wrong. But they did a bunch of tests with all of these types of humidifiers, and this came out on top. And it's got like a UV light in it, too, so it is sterilizing the water before it is blown into the air, so that's why they can say it's germ-free.

Neat, eh? Neat. It's neat. I also got a leaf blower this week, but I will refrain from reviewing that one on this show. I don't think that that makes the show unless you really want to write it off. Well, maybe next week we'll be talking about my leaf blower. I did get a new camera, the Sony Alpha A6300 mirrorless digital camera with a 16-50mm lens.

Because I'm selling all my Nikon stuff, and I needed a small pocket camera because I never used my Nikon gear. I loved it. I had a Nikon D810, one of the greatest cameras I've ever had, but I never used it. I looked at my folder for photos last year, or this whole year, and I used it three times.

And it's like a $3,000 camera. So I'm like, guess what? You're going on sale. Right. And the crazy thing is, it was like a 36-megapixel camera, but it wouldn't do 4K video. So I got this new Sony Alpha with the lens, with the kit lens. It was under $1,000. It does 4K video beautifully.

And it is a fantastic little pocket camera. It's like 24-megapixel, so nice, you know, decent resolution, more than I ever need for print and web. And really good in low light, nice screen. But, man, you should check this out since you have the kid, but, man, it's good.

It is a really good camera. A lot of, what do you say, vloggers use this to do a lot of their video stuff because it is, the size is perfect. And they have a 6,500, and after checking out and reading all the reviews, the 6,500 didn't get as good of reviews as the 6,300 for the price bump.

It's like $500 more for almost no improvements. It's got the same sensor and everything. So I went with the 6,300. I love this thing so far. So if you're looking for a good pocket camera, it's an APC sensor, so it's not full frame. But for, you know, just a nice little travel camera, love this thing.

Cool. Very cool. Well, you and I are both foodies, Jason. We enjoy our cooking and, obviously, eating. More than eating than cooking. Well, I really enjoy cooking, and I've been getting into it a lot more recently. But I was still, like, basically printing out recipes to, you know, take into the kitchen.

We had a recipe book. I know. I know. So I was looking. I decided to up my game a little bit, and I was looking around, and I did the research for a whole bunch of apps and different things. And I've settled on one that I really enjoy. Now, you may not trust this because it's free. And I don't know entirely how they make money either.

I don't know, and I'm not asking questions because the app works great. It's called Pepperplate. They've got the desktop version, which, you know, you can just get to on the web anywhere. It's available as an app for basically everything, even a Nook. You can get a Nook app, unbelievably.

So they have invested the time and made apps for everything. It's a great recipe manager. It imports recipes from basically almost any site on the web. Now, maybe not somebody's food blog or something like that. But if you go to, like, you know, the Food Network or any of the, Martha Stewart, whatever, any of the big sites that are out there that have recipes, you basically copy the URL.

It imports it in. So you can do shopping lists directly from it. It'll generate a shopping list for you. You can do meal planning, which is what main reason I was. I wanted more than just storage. I wanted to start doing planning because keeping this household fed is a pain in the ass. So it's just a lot easier now.

I've only been using it for two weeks, but it's made – I've cut down my shopping to just twice a week now. I've got meals organized. You know, we're going to recycle them in and out, some of our favorites. It's really good. And it's, you know, you put it on your iPad and you take it into the kitchen with you.

And as long as you, you know, manage to not drop it in the pot of boiling water, you're going to be a-okay. So I highly recommend giving it a go if you're looking for something like this. Honestly, I would say get a Fire tablet for the kitchen because they're cheap. And if you spill some sauce on it, you're not going to care that much. That is actually a fantastic idea.

Yeah. They're pretty durable. They're plastic. They wipe down pretty easy. And they're cheap. Yep. Going to do that then. Now, I was looking at the website for this. The website is pretty anemic. It doesn't really tell you much of anything. There's no screenshots. There's just some stuff. So if you're saying it's decent, I'll check it out for sure.

Well, it costs you nothing. That's true. Sign in and check it out. And yeah, there's no screenshots or anything. But to be honest, it's not, you know, really about being pretty. It's menus and it's menus in a calendar and a shopping list. Okay. Yeah. True. It tells you what it does right there on the homepage.

Right. It's right there on the tin. Okay. Exactly. So give it a go if you're looking for something like that. Now, I think I have a new entry in possibly one of the best Amazon titles of all time. Okay. I picked up the fitness tracker hostate waterproof activity health tracker pedometer smartwatch smart bracelet with heart rate monitors, step calorie counter for Android and iOS.

Black. Black. Did you actually buy this thing or did you just run across it? I did. I did. I was getting a little frustrated with my, I do an hour basically of a bike ride a day and I wasn't feeling like I was getting any kind of a real oomph from it anymore.

So I decided I wanted a heart rate monitor basically. That's all I wanted. So, you know, I started to do the due diligence and try to search. Now, I'm going to talk about something that is incredibly wrong with the internet here and it relates directly to these Amazon titles, these crazy long, every single keyword known to man titles that they're doing on Amazon to bump up searches and get more eyeballs on it.

The same exists across the web everywhere. Oh, yeah. So all I really wanted was a heart rate monitor and I wanted something that would basically beep or notify me if I'm going in or out of my target heart rates. If you Google that, every single monitor out there known to man will come up in the results, whether they do it or not, because people put it in the keywords to game the system.

The web lies to you. And this is part of why the internet is broken. Everybody fucking lies. It's just you can't search for what you want anymore because everybody jams all the keywords in there, whether they do it or not. Very frustrating. You sound like this is the first day you've discovered the web.

Come on. This is nothing new. Yeah, I know. And we helped build all that crap. So I feel bad about that. You reap what you sow. So anyways, I did all the research and I was looking into it and I was like, you know, obviously you start with Fitbit, but I was like, I don't need to spend $200 just to see what my heart rate is.

I just cannot justify spending. At that point, I might as well get a goddamn Apple watch. Well, yeah. I still think you should get an Apple watch because it's fantastic. Well, as soon as my wife saw me wearing this, she was like, hmm, well, I guess we're getting you the Apple watch for Christmas. So I have a feeling I'm getting the Apple watch for Christmas. Anyways, but this is $30 and it does exactly what I need it to do.

$30, a lot less than $200, right people? Well, Apple watch will run you a couple hundred more than that, but still worth it. Well, yeah. But still, it's a lot cheaper than the Fitbit and it does exactly like you said, does what it says on the tin works perfectly fine. I do have two complaints about it. The first is it's a little dim.

It needs to be brighter. You may be in the snow there in Chicago, Jason. I am doing my bike rides in 80 degree heat with sun and I'm wearing sunglasses and it's a little too dim to see through sunglasses so they could handle it being a bit brighter. The other complaint I have is because they do eight days of continuous battery life, which is fantastic, one of the reasons they get the eight days of continuous battery life is basically it's off almost the entire time.

If you can shake your wrist or you can tap it, which will bring up the display, the display stays up for about two and a half seconds. It needs to be up a little bit longer. What do you want for $30? Come on, you get what you pay for. It's $30. The fact that it has a display at all is amazing. It should just what? Tap me?

Exactly. We'll use Morse code and tap it out for you. Yeah. So there you go. Cheap and Cheerful does the job. If you're looking for something super cheap that just takes care of it and you don't want to drop a ton of cash, I recommend it. Now, I found a new feature in iOS 11 that is pretty cool.

It is basically a crosshair mode in the camera. So if you set the grid and turn it on and you tilt your camera at the floor or the ceiling, there's a little crosshair that shows up that you can line up that shows you when you're perfectly flat to the floor or the ceiling.

It's pretty neat. Now, the really fun thing about this is it's neat. It is neat because I'm never going to use it again. The fun thing about this, though, is Cable Sasser from Panic, the founder of Panic, tweeted about this thing.

It's like, hey, I just found this. This is cool. The intern who programmed that actually saw the tweet and said, hey, I made that when I was an intern at Apple. I guess they kept it. And it's a woman who works for one of the big AI. Oh, she works for Magic Leap, I believe now.

But yeah, she made it when she was an intern at Apple, which I thought was pretty cool. And funnily enough, she's actually rebuilding the exact same thing for Magic Leap right now. Yeah. And it may never, ever, ever come out. She's built more functionality as an intern for Apple than she ever will for Magic Leap. Exactly.

There's an article that's been going around pretty heavily this week, Brian, called Something is Wrong on the Internet. I'm like, duh. But this talks about one specific aspect of what's wrong on the internet, and it's YouTube.

Oh, I thought it was going to be the whole search thing that I was just complaining about. No, that's something else that's wrong on the internet. Okay. Feel free to write a 20-minute piece on Medium if you'd like to get people on your side on that one. Okay. Now, this is about how these automated content farms are basically making a bunch of really insane videos to, you know, monetize YouTube that are ruining children's minds, is pretty much what he says the outcome is.

And I read this whole article. It's very long, very, very long. And it's got a lot of YouTube videos in it that are, frankly, just... Disturbing. They really remind me of bad acid trips, some of them. They're just like, I want to know who's making these things, because they're so strange.

It's a real problem. I mean, speaking as somebody that has a kid, my kid is too young right now to be surfing the tube of the U himself. So, you know, I have channels that I only watch videos or show him videos that come from Sesame Street's channel, the official one, or, you know, all these different things.

But I've seen a lot of my friends that have older kids have been sharing this link this week because, yeah, you just hand your kid a tablet and let them go to town on YouTube. And it's kind of insane what people are doing out there. It's messed up.

It is wrong. Yeah, because it comes back to, you know, people stealing content, naming videos like exactly like somebody else's video, using characters from other people's videos, and then just using this really cheap bare-bone software to do these kind of just weird 3D stories that are just mind-bogglingly bizarre.

Remember when there was that Chinese news company that was taking all of the headlines in the U.S. and then making videos of them? It's very much like that same company is doing that again, but just to monetize YouTube. Because I haven't seen those videos in a long time, so maybe they pivoted out of their news one.

I remember when the last one I remember seeing was when Steve Jobs was still alive. So it's been a while. Yeah, it has been. I miss those. We should bring those back. Yeah, I do too, because I don't like these. I don't, I mean, I don't bounce around YouTube very much, but it's very easy to see how kids can get to these through, you know, recommended videos.

Like when a video's done playing, it's like, you might like this, you might like that, and then you bounce down the rabbit hole on that, and then you get sucked into these weird, bizarro world channels. So it's an interesting read. So if you have kids and care about this sort of thing, definitely go check it out. I don't have kids, and I don't really care. So I figured you might be interested, so I put it in here for you.

No, I did enjoy it, and it is disturbing. So it's something I'm going to have to keep an eye out. It's amazing how much I'm going to have to keep an eye out for that my parents, my parents never had to think about. Oh, yeah. So, oh boy. Yes, great idea having a kid. Everybody's doing it. All the cool kids are having kids.

Let's have a kid. Now, speaking of bizarro rabbit holes and weird worlds and whatnot, let's talk Taylor Swift briefly. Now, Taylor Swift is admittedly not one of my favorite people. I particularly don't care for her organization because it's not Taylor Swift.

It's Taylor Swift Incorporated with an awful lot of people. It's a litigious group, as it were. And the ACLU has basically come out and said, knock it off. There's one in particular. Some woman named Megan Herning wrote a piece in a very obscure culture blog called Pop Front that accuses Swift of supporting racist eugenics and compares the singer to Adolf Hitler.

Now, it's not quite that bad, but she's basically saying in this article is that there are some factions in the white supremacist movement that have latched onto and embraced Taylor Swift's lyrics and music videos as supportive of their beliefs. And because Taylor Swift has not out and out come out and said that she does not support them and publicly decried them, she's saying that she's a very bad person.

Obviously, that's ridiculous. Thank you for saying that, because I was wondering, I'm like, it's not her fucking job. She doesn't have to. No, of course it's not her job and she doesn't have to. But this is also, again, going along with the theme of this episode, part of what's wrong with the internet is we have to create these statements, these crazy statements to get views, to make money. So, you know, being this article would not exist if there was real journalism anymore. But this is I'm going to write all my thoughts to the world out there and hopefully

make a buck or two. And because it's crazy, people are going to link to it, which is what happened. But the problem here is that Taylor Swift's people have sent a cease and desist. Now the ACLU is saying it's free speech. Knock it off. OK, that's that. So that's the story. All righty, then. Next up.

Next up. Well, I was going to go here. We're not going to now. Just briefly, Louis C.K. has now been outed. It is not good. His entire movie premiere has now been canceled. And obviously, this movie is probably never going to see the light of day anymore.

We've got Kevin Spacey. This is the craziest story, which I just want to mention, because this is crazy. There is a movie that is completely finished that they are going back and replacing Kevin Spacey with a different actor in. Like they're not redoing the movie. They're going to use technology to wipe out Kevin Spacey and replace him with a different actor.

How insane is that? Pretty insane. It's pretty insane. And as of this morning, now we're hearing Jeffrey Tambor and it's just going crazy. Now, the only thing I wanted to say about all of this is that I've been talking to a lot of my friends in the music industry. We have not heard much in the music industry yet.

Everybody is bracing for impact. This stuff is not going away anytime soon. And shockingly, a lot of older white males have used power in various industries in not so good ways. So all I got to say here is the fucking Sony music owes Kesha a big ass apology.

Next up. Yes. I saw Chappie. Okay. I don't know how or why. Or why. I think there was some wine involved and then I just turned it on and I'm like, oh, Chappie. Hmm. The trailer looked terrible and nobody had very many good things to say about it.

So what the hell? Let's watch it. Sounds like another night of Jason's. I enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed it. It was kind of formulaic in parts, but it wasn't bad. Now, the thing that really surprised me, because I knew the couple from DeOntwood were in it and they were really good.

They can actually act. I did not expect that one bit. Their entire stage show is them acting. This should not be too much of a surprise. See, you know, everybody fawned all over them when they came on the scene and I just didn't really give two shits.

I know Sean Bonner, I helped him like do an actual CD cover for them. I did some vectoring for him for something, but I remember when that was happening, but I just never got into their music because it's not my cup of tea. But I really enjoyed both of them in this movie. I thought they were very good.

It had Dev Patel in it, which was pretty good. And what's his name? Hugh Jackman was in it too with a mullet. So that alone was worth it for, you know, hilarity to ensue. There are worse things to watch out there. Now, here's the big surprise. Galarian in the city of an absurd amount of planets.

Oh, boy. I watched it last night. Oh, boy. I really enjoyed it. Oh, God. It is pure prime. Luc Besson. How much wine did you have? Not enough because. Okay. But I mean, there are parts that are just pretty God awful, but I just went with it.

It's one of those ones where I'm like, this is going to be the worst thing I've ever seen. Go. You know? Right. And it's kind of the same thing, like, when I watched Batman versus Superman. I'm like, this is going to be the worst thing I've ever seen, so let's just watch it and see how terrible it can get. And it turns out, I didn't really mind Batman versus Superman very much.

I thought it was okay for what it's supposed to be. Right. And Valerian, same thing. I actually quite enjoyed it. Yes, it really should have been called the fifth avatar because it's like the fifth element illegitimate love baby with avatar in a lot of parts. But for the most part, if you like the cheese of Luc Besson, you probably won't hate this movie.

That's all I got to say. Right. I thought it was well done. Okay. Now, we got spammed on Twitter yesterday from Starz. Yes, we did. Yeah. Talking about their new series, Counterpart. So I, you know, I had about 30 seconds to kill, so I went and looked up the trailer.

Starz JK Simmons, who I love because I was a huge fan of Oz. I'm a Schillinger fan. Well, I love to hate him. He's, you know, the prime Nazi in Oz. Great actor. So I went and checked out the trailer. Did you get a chance to watch this trailer? I did. It seemed all right. It looks pretty good. I like it.

Yeah. Good side. It looks like it might be. I'm not going to say good sci-fi because I can't really tell, but it looks like it might be decent sci-fi. Well, speaking of decent sci-fi, let's talk about something that wasn't. The continuing alien movies that have just been getting worse and worse and having less and less aliens.

Well, Ridley Scott, that's the direction he seems to want to go with it. I don't know why he has to ruin the entire legacy, but that's what he wants to do. He just recently gave an interview where he was talking about how he thinks the evolution of the alien himself is over. What he's trying to do is actually make these movies about AI now instead of aliens.

Yet he still calls them alien something. Why didn't he just start a new franchise and dump the old one? Because all he's doing is shitting on his legacy. That is a good question, Jason. Perhaps we should ask. Okay. Because I agree with that 100%. He's busy erasing Kevin Spacey right now. So we'll talk to him in seven weeks when his movie comes out.

And yeah. So, I mean, basically, we're never going to find out anyways because Alien Covenant did so low, did so poorly that we're probably not going to get any more movies. So that'll be that. So he will not get the opportunity to completely destroy the entire alien universe. Yeah. Between that and Blade Runner, his box office numbers aren't doing too hot.

Nope. So. And Apple TV has made a pretty big deal. So they're definitely getting into the content game now beyond the stupid app competition with Gwyneth Paltrow, who understands apps. They've made a deal with both Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.

Two of my least favorite people. Yeah. That's kind of what this article that we're linking in the show notes is kind of saying that this is not the group of people that you want that Apple should be going after is their fans is not really what you're looking for here. So I don't know why you're doing that, Apple, but good on you.

Yeah. We don't know what their demographics are because it's a new network and they have no demographics. So. No, they don't really. So it is what it is. You're going to start with big names. It makes sense to me. And we had some breaking news as of yesterday in the Star Wars universe, which I forgot to put in our show notes, but I'm looking at it right now.

So I'm reminded now. So we'll just let you know briefly that Disney has signed up with the Last Jedi writer, director Rian Johnson to basically create a completely new trilogy of films that will fall under the Star Wars brand, but will be a completely new story with original characters set in a different galaxy, which doesn't make any sense to me.

Shouldn't it be the same galaxy? Yeah, that makes no sense. In another galaxy far, far away. Yes. With a kind of vaguely Star Wars-esque universe. Okay. Not. That's silly. Oh, and by the way, if you see anybody posting pictures of the liner notes for the new movie's score.

Yes. Don't read them. Close your eyes and keep scrolling. It is apparently spoiler-tastic. Yes. My friends were posting and they're like, why are they posting spoilers like this? He's posting the picture of it. And I'm like, you are a fucking moron. Yes. Shield your eyes, kids. If you don't want to know what happens in The Last Jedi.

I took a wonderful break away from science fiction altogether. And I read a pure, just standard fiction book. It's called Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. It is fantastic.

I loved every second of this book. It's current time, a country teetering on the brink of civil war. Obviously, one person is a Muslim here. The other is in that environment, but does not follow any of the tenets whatsoever. Falling in love with each other during this crazy period of time when basically their entire city is erupting into violence.

Fantastic book. Really human nature, all of that sort of stuff. Absolutely fantastic. This was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. It's a finalist for the 2017 Kirkus Prize. NPR says it's great, which, you know, all you snowflakes out there means you won't like it. But I loved it.

This is, I can't recommend it enough if you need a break from sci-fi, if you want something that just makes you feel good. This did the trick. All right. Well, I am still stuck in some sci-fi here. Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. I am almost done with this book, but I can say that I love it.

It's, I don't know if you'll like it because there's, I mean, it says it in the title, Time Enough for Love, and you are not very sappy and hate the love stories. But this is, it's interesting because it's about the oldest living human. It's not about the world because they're out in space. He's about 2,000 plus years old.

And he goes by the name Lazarus Long, which isn't his original name. But it's a really cool story about just being old and his memoirs and things like that. There's another book that I'll review next week, which is like his philosophies.

It's the philosophies of Lazarus Long, which are basically Robert Heinlein's philosophies, I guess. And there are so many quotable passages in that, that it's ridiculous. I'm sure that you've heard many, many, many of them. I just want to clarify, I am not against love stories. In fact, I just reviewed a book that was nothing more than a love story and really enjoyed it.

I'm against forced into sci-fi professor slash hot chick love stories. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Or The Matrix. Or that. Yeah. I love this book. I love Stranger in a Strange Land. So reading more of his stuff, I can see where there are definitely crossovers with his philosophies.

Because there was a lot of love in Stranger in a Strange Land, too. This guy was like supreme hippie. This was a free-loving kind of guy. He would have been fun to party with, I tell you that. So yeah, I'm loving it so far. It's about 600 and some odd pages, so it's not a short book. No. But it's a really cool meandering read about through this guy's life.

It's in a bunch of different parts, so I'm just getting to the end now. But I can't recommend it enough. It's really good. I mentioned before I'm reading Mastering Bitcoin, Making My Brain Hurt. And I also did read It's All Relative Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree by A.J.

Jacobs. Okay. His new book that just came out this week. And it's interesting because it talks about how we're all basically related. You know, he goes way down the genealogy hole and does a massive, like, you know, family reunion with thousands of people who are all his relatives and cousins and things like that.

It's a light read. It's a light read. If you like A.J. Jacobs stuff, I mean, it's in his vein. If you don't like his books, then you probably won't like it. But if you like his books, then it's more of the same. It's a good book. We're back again this week with awesome Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire.

Hello, Dave. How are you today? I'm doing well. Good to be back. How's everybody doing? Peachy keen. Yes. So, Dave, do you watch Mr. Robot? I do not. What? You're in the industry and you don't watch Mr. Robot? What kind of frumpy old man are you?

Well, evidently the frumpiest. So I'm certainly aware of it, but I just it's not something that I've sampled yet. OK. Should I be? No. No. No. Well, there you go. See, I made the right choice. I've given up on the show personally.

So. OK, so I'm only bringing it. I moved. I moved my review of this week's Mr. Robot to security because a friend of mine was actually name checked in this week's episode, which I thought was really cool. Dave Kennedy, the creator of the Social Engineer Toolkit.

I'm sure you've probably heard of that or him. Yeah. At some point. And he's also the guy behind DerbyCon. Oh. And yeah, he got name checked this week in Mr. Robot because he's an advisor to the show, apparently. Oh, very nice. Which I thought was really, really cool. Yeah.

I met Dave at DerbyCon a couple of years ago because my friend Jordan Harbinger was doing the keynote. Oh, nice. That year. So I got to tag along and Crystal Method was playing that year. So I got to party with Crystal Method and drink all their booze and hang out with like these super hackers. So it was really, really fun. So it was fun to see him name checked in that.

Yeah. But yeah, I can't recommend the show anymore. So skip it if you want to. Well, we've got one story that just won't go away. And I know this upsets Jason to no end because we were talking about it first and it took what was the name of that podcast that the Reply All Guys did it.

Now it's everywhere in the news, but the Facebook is recording your conversation stuff just won't go away. Lifehacker does a new article about it by Nick Douglas, and it's basically Facebook isn't recording your conversations, but it may as well be. This is a long article.

The TLDR is it's big fucking data. They aren't recording you, but they know everything about you. They collect everything from you. They cross check against everybody else in your phone and the information that they purchase from elsewhere because Facebook does do that. They buy all kinds of data and then they attach it to your account and it all gets thrown into the algorithmic stew.

So that's how they get all this information about you. Related, I made Chile Verde on Tuesday night and the very next day on Adam Carolla's podcast, they mentioned Chile Verde. I am so freaked out, you guys. Okay, you're double trolling me on this one. Yes, I am. Because Nick Douglas used to be my roommate.

That's my Nick Douglas. Yeah, he used to be my roommate. He's a little dickhead. But what are you going to do? Remember Justin TV? Yes. He was one of the first guys to have a Justin TV hat. Right. And he brought it into the house after like the day after he moved in without asking the other roommates and was walking around filming us.

So he didn't last long in my house. That's all I got to say on that. I had a theory on this, actually. I was thinking about it this week. And a lot of these stories start off with, I was talking to my friend in a bar about X. Right? So Facebook obviously knows that you two are in the same location.

Yes. You know, if you have background refresh on or you both check into Facebook, ping. Okay. Similar IPs, location. They know that you're there. So that is a connection point. Yes. Now, you might go home and not have given a second thought to your inane ramblings of what your friend is saying.

But then the next day, there's an ad for what you're talking about that shows up on your feed. Yes. Because what could happen is I'm thinking your friend goes home and starts searching for things like that or writing to other friends about things like that in Messenger. And then that is the vector to make the ad appear on yours since you are so closely tied in the previous meeting.

That is one at least explanation because that seems to be a common theory with people. It's like, I was talking to X about Y. And then the next day, I got ads about X. So you don't know what the other person is doing. And that could be the randomness that's thrown into the system is they might be going home and say, hey, we were talking about the fidget spinners in Norway.

And then they type in fidget spinners in Norway. And tomorrow, you get an ad about fidget spinners in Norway because you have that connection about since you were in proximity the day before. Just a thought. Just a thought. Makes sense. You know what I know it isn't? It isn't a microphone that's recording it and then being fed into an ad machine. That's what it's not.

We've covered that, Brian. We know that. Right. Well, a lot of people seem to not know that still. Yeah. I will tell you that sharing an Amazon account with my wife, as I do, you know, quite often things that she has searched for on Amazon will then show up on my pages that I'm, you know, looking through in ads and so on.

This can be really great for ruining surprise gifts, by the way. It's very bad at this particular time of year. Yes. Yes, exactly. On the other hand, if you want to know if you're going to be getting that thing that you've actually been pining away for, then, you know, you can check it off ahead of time and you can stop, you know, laying out the subtle hints that, you know, what you really want is that little Sphero R2-D2 who falls over on his own, like, you know, because you might

see that it's already been ordered or something. I'm just saying, you know. Okay. There you go. My favorite thing to do is actually to go to friends' houses when they have Netflix on their TV and when they're in the other room is to add pretty much every blaxploitation film from the 70s to their, or rate them with a thumbs up so that when they come back, that's all that's in their queue.

Uh-huh. It's like, oh, since you like this, you might like this. And they're like, what's going on here? So you can troll friends easily that way, too. Remind me to never have Jason as a house guest. Yeah. No, you wouldn't want that. No, no, nobody does. It's okay. Nobody does. Something that other people don't want is ransomware.

Having Jason as a roommate is like getting ransomware. Hey. Hey. Right. Except the thing you have to pay for is your dignity. Yeah. Well, it's like a prostitute. You don't pay him to come. You pay him to leave. That's it. So very good.

Yeah. I found this on the KnowBefore blog, and it's interesting. It talks about a study of a thousand workers who were victimized by ransomware, and they found that 59% of these employees paid out of pocket. These are very stupid employees. They're the kind of people I'd like to employ.

Yeah. They're saying it's because they're ashamed. Right. Yeah. And or confused, but I can see it's like, oh, I clicked on that link and my machine got owned. I better do this before anybody finds out about it. I can see that happening, but it kind of sucks. Yeah. Totally.

And then as the article points out, there's a possibility that IT might not even know that the workstation was then infected. They got their files back, but who knows what's still in there because that machine's been infected. So best to have a policy where if you get hit with ransomware, do not pay the fine on your own.

And I think part of this, too, is that you have to have a policy with all of this sort of thing where you don't blame the person who clicked on the link. You know, you don't you can't come down hard on. And obviously, if they keep doing it over and over again, we had a joke earlier on the Cyber Wire that there's always Bob in accounting who clicks on everything.

Yeah. Right. And there's not a whole lot you can do about Bob other than get rid of him. But I think just culturally, this is something that we talk about all the time is how do you incentivize people to do the right thing? Well, part of it is that you don't come down with a hammer on them if they accidentally click on something that that infects their machine and you have to make them feel ahead of time that there is no shame in this, that the best thing you can do for our whole organization security is report this so that we can take care of it properly and make sure it never happens again.

And you'll actually be commended for having done that. Right. Yeah. No, that makes total sense. And hopefully more companies will think about that in the future, because, yeah, if somebody's machine gets owned, you don't know what kind of network access that machine had. And, you know, it might not even be your machine that caused the accident with the ransomware.

It could have been Bob in accounting, but Bob in accounting is on the same slice of the network as you. And then you just got infected because of it. And you could correlate that with, oh, I clicked on that really shady link today before lunch and they think it then that person thinks it's them that actually caused it, you know, but it wasn't actually them.

So that's a good way to say, hey, look, this might not be your fault, but still don't click on stupid shit. But, you know, own up to it and just say, hey, look, my machine's infected. Please help me and protect everybody from the network. Because then you can pull the machine off the network and then figure out what to do and hopefully just restore it from backup if it's a good IT department and then go about your merry way.

And how many times does that happen in a day? Well, you know, the other thing, too, that's important to remember is that we see a lot of these things where we'll see ransomware as a misdirection. So the ransomware happens, but it's really just creating noise for whatever else is going on behind the scenes.

Right. Yeah. Don't be afraid to tell folks it's better off that they're informed before it gets worse. Mm hmm. And be nice to your employees, everybody. It's not their fault all the time. This is the day of Facebook. We've been bashing Facebook all day, but let's keep going.

Facebook wants to stop revenge porn by sending them porn. This has been making the rounds and everybody's saying, no, here's what's going to happen. You're going to upload your photos. It's going to get hashed. Nobody has to look at it. And then, you know, that fingerprint will be compared to other photos that are uploaded.

There's so many problems with that. The Internet has such a good track record about not getting hacked. Well, and Facebook has such a good track record with privacy. But the whole point of it is that it would be unhackable because they wouldn't actually keep the store of the photos. You're right. It would be upload the photo, fingerprint it, delete it.

So it wouldn't be stored. So there's nothing to hack against. Yeah. And the whole point was that nobody will ever see your photos. Well, turns out that Facebook says, no, actually, somebody will be looking at your nudes. By nobody, they just meant their Filipino regiment of people that are checking ads and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. They say Facebook workers. That doesn't mean employees or anything like that. Yes. It's the people that are actually already contracted to look at naked pictures on Facebook. They're like, oh, yep. Boobs. Next. Boobs. Next. Balls. Yeah. Next. Flag. Flag. Flag.

Flag. Flag. Now, the thing about this is, there's people who look at these all day, they're so desensitized to it, it doesn't really matter to them. Right. Because they see so much of this crap anyway, as somebody who's had to deal with this kind of, this situation, as it were, you just get desensitized to it and you really don't care.

The last thing you want to see at the end of the day is another pair of boobs. I can see how they need to do this to make sure that the photo is of the person that is actually submitting the photo as verification. Yeah, but it's still stupid. Yeah, I guess. It just, yeah.

Who thought this was a good idea? And I'm reminded of one of my college roommates had a job at the Photomat. I don't know if you guys remember Photomats. It was a, for our younger listeners, there was a time when there was a little booth that was in the middle of the parking lot by the grocery store and you would drive up to this booth and you would hand them your film from your analog camera that actually had a strip of plastic that had chemicals on it and that's how photos worked.

And so you would hand them this and you'd come back in a couple days and you'd get your photos developed. Tell us more about this, Grandpa Bittner. Pull up a chair here by the fire. Let me tell you the story about the Photomat. So my, one of my roommates worked at the Photomat and sure enough, in the Photomat booth, they had a drawer that was, they called their, who's your daddy file.

And these were the photos from people's bachelor parties and honeymoons and whatever you want to say. The, the intimate compromising photos. Whenever somebody brought them in to have them developed, they would burn off a couple extras. Yep.

And because I guess when you're the Photomat people, you can do that. And again, remember this was in an analog time when there was a lot less automatic tracking of how many copies of things were being made and so on and so forth. So this was all just, you know, light and chemicals and things like that, but, um, they would print out extras and so they had binders full of these.

Binders full of women. Yes. Binders full of women. There you go. There you go. So my point being that at any time, injecting a human into this, there's your problem, right? Right. Because the guy who's sitting there reviewing all of these, what's to keep him from pulling out his phone and just snapping off a few shots and collecting them and then his phone gets owned and then those photos get out there and here we go.

We're back to square one. This idea is just so fundamentally flawed. It's almost as if somebody at Facebook went, you know what? We've had too much good publicity this week. Let's put something stupid out. Because I mean, the whole thing about Facebook is you're not allowed to post nude photos anyway. But now we want them to stop other people from posting them.

The only way to stop more nude photos online is by sending more nude photos online. As someone who used to work at said photo, Matt, I can completely say that Papa Bittner is right and that did exist. And we actually, the shop that I worked at was at a mall and the machine that would print the photos had a big window that they would kind of scroll by.

So every time that we would see that there were negatives with naked people, we'd have to go to the run to the front of the store and put a towel over the over the big window as the photos were coming because there was no rule against, you know, naked photos coming through. We would print them and we would give them back. But every single time, if they were good photos, you got to you got to say that there was an extra one or two or three or four or five that were printed off and handed out to staff.

That did happen. And it is totally true. Well, once you've sent your nudes up to Facebook, they're going to then connect you to absolutely everybody else you've ever met in your entire life and show them to them. Well, hopefully not that we've been talking about the story a lot. I know Jason yelled at me in the show notes in here about this is the same article by the same person that we've talked about it twice.

No, it's it's more fleshed out. This is how Facebook figures out everyone you've ever met. It's kind of the same article, but she's going into deeper and deeper detail. It's like this is version 3.0 of this article and she gets more information every single time she rewrites it. So this one's really good. It goes into how Facebook builds out what the what they're calling a shadow profile of you from right from your mail inboxes, from your smartphones, from making the different connections to all the different people that you know and that you have in your phone

to the people that they have in their phone to the people that they have in their phone and they kind of they do a use case scenario where in theory, you know, you can see how a doctor would end up getting, you know, his patients as people that you may know, because all this information is connected somehow.

So, again, it is it is big data and it makes a lot of sense. And this is why this sort of stuff is happening. So, yeah, this article really made me think more than I think I had before about the consequences of uploading your contacts list to Facebook. Right. I think most of us go, you know, because Facebook really pesters you about that and and lures you in and says, hey, you know, if you give us your contacts, you'll have photos of everybody and it'll be better.

And you think, oh, that's well, what could possibly happen? But I was thinking, you know, and it's it's it's it's too late for me now. You know, I uploaded my contacts when I first joined Facebook and I, you know, just come off of having my own company that I'd had for about 20 years and there were thousands of contacts in my contact list, just the collection of people from many from decades.

And so up they all went. And all of those kind of and again, over because that's if that's 20 years worth of contacts, that's a history of email addresses. That's a history of phone numbers. And if Facebook is doing that with everybody, the way that they can connect all of those dots, boy, that sure does explain a lot of things, doesn't it?

It explains a hell of a lot of things. So, yeah, I mean, just the cross checking and this database just must be ridiculous. But yeah, it explains a hell of a lot. So I no longer believe in there being any like a chance with Facebook. This is all data, just massive amounts of data being interconnected again and again and again.

It's like Dirk Gently. It's the interconnectedness of all things. Pretty much. That's Facebook for you. Yeah. But again, you know, that genie's out of the bottle and there's no putting it back. You know, all that historical data from so many people's address. But I suppose the only way of putting it back is if we had some sort of regulatory scenario.

And I wonder how GDPR is going to affect this. You know, the Europe's privacy regulation that's coming up next May, which has a right to be forgotten. So does that mean that I have a right to be forgotten in all of these shadow profiles? Do I have a right to have all of those connections removed within Facebook's behind the scenes data?

I suspect I do. One would hope. Otherwise, the only way to get rid of this is to basically Mr. Robot, or I'm sorry, as it was originally called Fight Club. We need to blow up the place. That's our option of last resort. Maybe second resort.

Okay. Well, all right. Fair enough. Moving on, I found a neat little website I thought people would like checking out. It's called World's Biggest Data Breaches. It's from informationisbeautiful.net. And it's just a visualization with a lot of different bubbles. And it's just a pretty way of outlining pretty much all of the data breaches, oh, for the past decade or so.

And I think it's really helpful for putting things into perspective and getting a sense for where they landed and how they happened and how big they are relative to each other. It's interesting to see how they get bigger over time. It's sort of a greatest hits list, looking back at some of the things that have happened over the years.

Some of them, I'm sure, you know, you've never really heard of. I was thinking this River City Media one, which is, they're a spam operator. They had 1.3 billion email addresses lost. You know, Yahoo, of course, had over a billion.

But it's just, it's more fun than anything. And it's just interesting because it puts everything relative to each other. But the pattern is clear that these breaches are getting both larger and closer together. Very cool.

I can't wait to check that one out. Yeah. Hey, do either of you guys ever have Logitech Harmony remotes? I did briefly when I was trying to get, when the initial Amazon Alexas were shipping and I was trying to get, to be able to control my TV with the Alexa and it never worked.

There were, yeah, there were very many angry rants on this show about the Logitech Harmony. Well, I've been a fan of their actual hardware remotes. I think they've been great for us and for my family and for our home theater system because for those of you who aren't familiar with the Harmony remote, basically you go into a web interface and you tell it, you give it the model numbers of all the hardware that you have and

then you describe how everything's connected and it builds profiles for not just devices but activities. So on the Harmony remote, there's a button that says, watch a movie. And when you press watch a movie, it puts your receiver on the right input and it sets the DVR to the right thing and it powers up the projector and sets it to the right input.

And if everything goes right, that one button makes everything work. But what's even better about it is that if everything doesn't go right, you can hit the help button and it will walk you through and it will say, is the projector on? And you say yes or no. And it says, that's the projector on now. Okay. Is the receiver on?

Yes or no. Is the receiver set to input too? So it'll logically walk you through and try to get you where you need to go. This is a great thing and it saves getting a lot of phone calls in the middle of the day of someone saying, I'm trying to watch a movie and I can't get, you know, it's on input three and how do I get it to work?

Which was, I don't know about you guys, but that's a call that I would get from time to time. Yes. Absolutely. Members of my family. Very familiar with this sorts of thing. So I'm a big fan of the Harmony hardware remotes. However, they came up with a version that was a little hub that used your smart device instead of the physical remote that you held in your hand.

We had one of our Harmony remotes got stepped on and broken and we, so we thought we'd try this smartphone one and let me tell you, it sucked because for me, especially sitting in a dark room watching TV, so much of using a remote is just tactile, right?

Right, yeah. Where's the volume? Where's the, your fingers learn where all the different buttons are on that remote. And you can't do that with a smartphone remote because it's just, you know, it's a piece of glass. And then it totally lights up the room and takes you out of the movie and. Exactly. So we had one for about six months and I hated it and so we ended up buying a regular Harmony remote back again and we, so we still use one of those.

However, long story short, too late, Logitech is bricking all of the Harmony link devices. These are the ones that use the smartphone. How nice of them. What, yeah, it's really kind of weird. It seems as though they have some technology agreement with someone, like a license or something that goes into these devices that is running out and instead of renewing that license, they are going to intentionally brick all of the devices.

Gentlemen, your thoughts? I sense a class action lawsuit. What they're going to do is they're going to give everybody that had the one that they're bricking a free Harmony hub. So you do get an upgraded device. Oh, are they? Yes. Okay. This comes from Wired.

Yeah. They said apparently they didn't anticipate the backlash, but. Ah, okay. All right. When I read the story that I guess that had not yet been announced. So yay. Yay for us. Yeah. Yeah. So when it dies in the spring, you will be able to get a Harmony hub, but no questions asked.

Right. Well, there you go. All right. Well, good for Harmony, for Logitech, for, you know, stepping up and doing the right thing at last. After the pitchforks and the torches came to the gate. Right. All right. Well, good. All right.

Well, happy you're ending. That's the plus side of our environment that we've created for ourselves. Eventually, if you force a company to do the right thing, they will. So I made a mistake. It was an honest mistake, says Rory Dooley, head of Logitech Harmony. Mea culpa?

We're going to do right by our customers and do the right thing. Okay. You knew you were doing the wrong thing when you did this. You just wanted to see if you could get away with it. Rory Dooley, which sounds like a fake name anyway. Yeah. So there we go.

So you will get a new Harmony hub. Okay. Well. And hopefully it's better than the Harmony link. Yeah. It couldn't be worse. So moving on. Finally this week, just for fun, I thought I saw an interesting article come by, and it's the InfoSec of Ready Player One.

And I know you guys had reviewed Ready Player One a while ago on the show. I read Ready Player One. Actually, I listened to the audio book with Will Wheaton, I don't know, a couple months ago after the movie trailer came out.

And I thought, well, I better get myself up to speed because this might be a good movie and it's a Spielberg movie and certainly had a lot of buzz. Let's read the book, which is almost always better than the movie to get ready to be disappointed by the movie. Yes. Yes. Yes. So I would say my exception to that is Lord of the Rings, where I think that the movies are better than the books.

I know that's controversial. That is my opinion. And just like this, I read the Lord of the Rings books before the movies came out in anticipation of the movies. And when I, after I got through them and I watched the movie, I was like, oh, these movies are so much better than the book.

Well, I think Harry Potter is the same too. Because I read the Harry Potter books recently. We talked about it on the show. And I'm like, this reads like a screenplay for the movie I saw. So I'm just going to stick with the movies because the movies are pretty damn good. So if the movies are the same as the books, I'll go with it. I think I would put the Harry Potters on even ground.

I think I enjoyed both of them in different ways. They were both pleasurable. I found the Lord of the Rings to be a bit of a slog. I couldn't get through it. I read the first, like, you know, 100 pages about seven times and just, I was bored. I'm not a D&D nerd. I know this is blasphemy. Sorry, people. But yeah, I love the movies.

I thought the movies were great. But yeah, the books, I'll pass. So anyway, getting back to the infosec of Ready Player One. It's an article just sort of going through some of the cybersecurity and what they found believable, what they didn't find believable in the book, how some of the, if this is supposed to be a futuristic world, some of the security is laughable even by the standards by which when the book was published back in 2011.

Oh, wow. It's that old. I didn't realize. Yeah. I'm talking about encryption back doors and how people are found and reverse engineering and exploitation. So, you know, if you're into Ready Player One, it's sort of a fun read.

If you like to, if you're one of those folks who likes to have your bubbles burst, it's sort of, it's a fun read. It's smart. And, you know, I mean, that's, that's the problem, right? Yesterday's version of tomorrow. It's like looking at old episodes of Star Trek and seeing what they got right and what they got wrong.

I read this article. I thought it was a lot of fun. It didn't spoil anything for me. I don't expect my sci-fi to be perfectly done. So it was good. And this is funny. So enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun read. Yep. All right. Well, have a lovely weekend, Mr. Bittner.

Thanks for joining us. And we will chat next time. Next time, gents. We keep talking about how everybody is using our own psychology against us, right? Yes. Yes, we are. We got a couple of these coming up.

Still, even though we've talked about a bunch already, there's a great video on YouTube called One More Level, The Arbitrary Endpoint Trap. Did you get a chance to watch this video? I did. And you're kind of a non-gamer, so I want to get your take on it.

What did you think about this? I thought, I see how this happens to a lot of my friends, but this does not occur to me. Yeah. I want to know what, I want you to figure out what this is and put it in a bottle and sell it. Because what this video is about is that last little thing. It's like you're almost to the next level.

You're ready to go to bed. You got to go to a meeting. You got to take a dump. Who knows? But you're going to power through to get to that next, that next little bump, you know, that next ding. That next, I got a sword. I got a coin or whatever it is. And then once you get to that one, then there's another arbitrary little thing that you can get to.

Then the next thing you can get to, and the next thing you can get to. And they just keep feeding you those pellets of cocaine to make you not want to leave your computer. It's insane. And everything about this video is true. I've been down this road countless times.

I mean, so many times, I can't count. Hence the word countless. Yes. But yeah. But when you start to look out for these things, when you're playing games, you can kind of say, ah, ah, they're doing that thing. Then you can put the computer down and walk away. Yeah. Being that self-aware is very difficult.

It's very difficult. But after what we've been talking about with how social media and games and just everything is using our own psychology against us, I think what we really need to do is, you know, Severus Snape was the professor against the dark arts.

Was that his thing? Or was it? Yes. Yes, it was. I think we need a Severus Snape for what, you know, internet technology is doing to us so we can learn from him how to avoid the dark arts of manipulation from all of these games and social media and just really start to, you know, have a, maybe we can come up with a, with a plugin that says, hey, they're doing this thing.

You know, maybe stop or something. There's got to be some way to point it out so it breaks that cycle and snaps you out of that, that repetition loop that you're always in. Just saying. Would be nice. I found this, uh, this article, this next one on sciencealert.com, which I don't know how I ran across this website, but I added it to my feed last week and there's a ton of really good stuff in here.

So if you're still on the RSS bandwagon, add sciencealert.com. There's good stuff. This article is seven things you peek at in life after 50, according to science. A couple of them, arithmetic skill peaks around age 50. So I've got four more years to get good at math.

I guess you do. You were joking last week, but now I got, I got a couple of years to really get good at this stuff. Then after that, I can just throw it away because then I peaked and you can best understand people's emotions in your fifties, which is pretty cool. Uh, life satisfaction peaks at 69 because you're going to die soon.

So whatever. And I love this one body image peaks after 70 because, because you no longer have any body. Who cares at that point? Yeah. Yeah. But the funny thing is, you know, I, I think about this stuff in relation to like, you know, uh, I spent a lot of time in senior homes and nursing communities and things like that.

And the really dark secret of those places is those people are screwing like bunnies in there because they just don't care anymore. And they're just getting their rocks off as many ways as they can because they just, they gave up on everything. And they're just like, ah, screw it. Let's bone. Right. And now I, now it all makes sense because all of the, if your body image peaks after 70, you're feeling good.

You're feeling good. It's like, I don't care if I have a, I got a 72 pack because those are all wrinkles on my tummy, but Hey, whatever. I just thought, I thought that that would just have a little levity because we're not over the hill yet. Nope. Not quite yet. Although the sad one is psychological wellbeing peaks at around age 82. So I got a ways to go, got a ways to go.

Shit. Well, this might cheer you up and also make you feel old. I ran across this over at mental floss, which also throws up quite a lot of fun stuff for the show here and there. I loved this video. Go ahead, load it up and let the beauty come. I love this sound. It is a 1993 PC booting up in all its glory and starting up a dot matrix printer.

Okay. I can't believe how loud these things were. And just hearing it, I was cast back immediately to yesterday, yesteryear, as it were. And boy, do I miss the bios beep. What a great sound that was. Okay. I definitely got to check that out.

Back to Facebook again. This is the week of the book of the face. Sean Parker, douchebag du jour. Yes. He came out on, he was, it was an axion was, it's a website that I checked fairly often.

They have a lot of good stuff over there, but he was at a talk for them and came out and said, yeah, yeah. We knew what we were doing when we created Facebook and we knew that we were, you know, filling the dopamine gap and trying to keep people online longer by being shady and exploiting their psychological, you know, tendencies to do the things that people do.

And we were okay with that. That really, it really comes down to, yes, we knew we were evil and we were okay with that. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. And it's like, oh, you really shouldn't have said that, dude. No. It's, you don't really just come out and admit it, but hey, okay.

Yeah, because in the future when the class action lawsuits come down, like McDonald's when they got sued for making people fat and having too hot coffee, this is the smoking gun that they will roll out in court and say, you knew that you were screwing with everybody. And, you know, causing all of these problems with all of our, you know, the, basically the mental illness that social networks cause.

Cause they, they really do cause a fair amount of mental illness with what people think about themselves. And it's, it's, there's a whole slew of that stuff that we've talked about many times on the show. When people finally rise up and say, Hey, you guys did this to us. They can't say, Oh, well, we didn't know. Yeah, I agree.

Right. The CEO of Facebook came out and just said this stuff. So that's why he's more on of the week. Not because he did it because he said it. Yeah. Well, let's go from Sean Parker to dog Parker. Okay. I found this one. It is, it is a kiosk that they, that these people are putting outside of stores, which is kind of a little, it's a doghouse.

It's a doghouse to put your dog in. So you can go shop unencumbered by, by little bammers. Although bammers wouldn't fit in any of these that I saw where you use your app to, you know, unlock it, throw your dog in. And then you can, there's like, it's air conditioned. There's water.

I don't know what happens when they take a dump in there, but I need to, because, you know, they have those self-cleaning restrooms like in San Francisco and Paris. Paris was the first time I saw one. But as soon as you're done, the whole place gets washed down with water.

I'm guessing they have to do the same thing with these, but it just seems silly. That, uh, and somebody pointed out what, uh, parking meter poles aren't good enough anymore. Apparently not. Look, I, I, I support any of these things as long as people stop bringing their dogs into restaurants. I'm so over that.

That should not be allowed, period. No, it should not. Look, I know what my dog does. She's a filthy animal. She should not be allowed in a restaurant. She's fine on my couch because I'm a filthy animal too, but I'm not going to, you know, you don't bring that around other people's food. That is disrespectful. Good. I'm glad you agree. Yes.

And people who do that can now say sorry to the other people in the restaurant with Greta Van Susteren's new app called Sorry. This is an apology app. Yeah. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life. She's already spent a year on this. And, uh, uh, here, here we go.

Here's a quote. Snapchat and Instagram are about to get some competition, right? Susteren on the post. Oh, like apparently this is the announcement. That's right. This was our Facebook post announcing it. You will get to accept or reject apologies from a friend kept private between you and your friend or accept or reject apologies of public figures, which we all get to see and vote to accept or reject.

This is some black mirror shit, but it's also stupid. It's dumb. And, you know, you're just kind of missed out because I'm sure Kevin Spacey could have used this. Yeah. You talk about a missed opportunity. You know, they say if you, uh, don't, if you're not embarrassed by your first launch, then you've launched too late.

Well, she's going to be embarrassed and she launched too late. What a stupid idea. Yep. Feedback loop. We have new Patreon fans and subscribers. Uh, this week we have Robert Papa Bittner.

Woohoo. Look at that man giving us money. I know. Turnabout's fair play. I support the cyber wire. So, hey, we want your money. Uh, Tracy B. Garrett L. Seldonio M. And Jared Rice wrote us over at Patreon. He said, just finished listening to your show for the week.

Sorry, Brian, about the World Series. It was hard fought series for sure. Yeah. All right. Uh, I found my GoPros at the pawn shop because I got bored one day and went to one. I don't exclusively shop there. Are there any good discount sites you could suggest other than eBay or Amazon? I know they usually have cheaper options.

Uh, sorry, Jared. Don't really know where else to go to get cheap cameras. Well, I do. Fortunately, I wrote Jared back on Patreon and gearbest.com is the place to go. If you want to buy straight from China, there you go. You can get a bunch of stuff super cheap.

A friend of mine bought a bunch of GoPro knockoffs over there for like a tenth of the price and he loves them. He said that they work just as good. The software is not great for moving stuff around, but if you just need cameras to take pictures and video, they work really well. And that's the same place I got my Chinese router, by the way, from the same friend.

And the router did work great, but I just, you know, I got my Eero, so I can't really keep a Chinese router around anymore. But beyond that, yeah, gearbest.com, they have just tons of stuff and a bunch of knockoff phones. If you're looking for a cheap Android phone to play with, I don't know how secure that's going to be.

But maybe if you work in government, don't buy one of those is all I'm saying. But for the lay person who just wants some cheap gadgets, it's a great site. I get their newsletter every day and there's fun stuff there all the time. Nice. And we got a recurring donation over at PayPal.

Didn't even know you could do that, but now you know. Now you know people, so get to it. Thanks a lot, Vladimir S. Yeah, Vladimir. By the way, if you, you might want to just try Patreon because we're going to be starting to post a bunch of new stuff up there because we're about to hit our hundredth Patreon subscriber. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. That is pretty crazy. Yeah, so I've got some ideas on stuff that we're going to start posting over there. But anyway, thank you. Everybody who has donated to the show, we really, really appreciate it. We do. And over on Twitter, I guess, Jason, you take this first one. Yeah, yeah. Jason Bryant, my friend who has been on the show, has sent me a thing about everyone hates e-bikes.

This comes from the outline. Apparently a friend of his in New York City sent him this. And it's a story about how like people in New York don't, because these e-bikes, which are just basically electric bikes, kind of sit in this middle ground between going too fast and normal speed and are just causing mayhem out there.

And it's kind of sad that these things are getting a bad rap because I've been looking at the Rad e-bike for a while and I think I really want one, but they're just a little too expensive. Yeah, we have the same problem here in my little beach community down here in Santa Monica with the e-bikes.

People kind of are just on the bike path with them. They're way too fast to be on the bike path. They're too slow to be out on the streets where other people are taking them. We have something even more annoying now. Literally, I went away the other weekend for the anniversary with my wife and there were none of these around.

And I come back and Santa Monica has gone crazy for them. They're called Birds. It's a new app. It's a scooter. It's not like a Vespa scooter, like the little kick ones. And then you rent them by the minute and they're everywhere. And of course, people are riding them on sidewalks, even though the app says not to.

And someone's going to get killed on one of these things by taking it out on the street. It's crazy. But the idea of these things, cheap transport, battery run, get around, fantastic. It's just the human failure element as per usual. But I mean, the bikes, I don't have a problem with the bikes.

I see people riding them around here all the time. And I just want one of those big, fat tire rad bikes because I've got so many bike trails around here that go for like 50 or 60 miles. So I could pedal half of it and coast the rest or use the extender and get to places that I've never been able to get before because my butt hurts because I've been pedaling too much.

So for me, it extends the adventure. It's not like I'm going to be riding this on the streets. Right. And from Justin Jude, also name checking the art of charm on this. Any recommendations on companies disrupting the jewelry space like me undies is to Calvin Klein, but specifically for gold jewelry?

Hashtag Christmas shopping. Again, got really nothing here. Etsy? Yeah, I got nothing on that one. I have. This is a zero bling household. Yeah. And I don't make I don't make any attempt to figure out what my wife might like jewelry wise.

I just let her get it. Yes. This next one comes from Castillo Chris. I honestly think 280 is going to make a big dent in Twitter. One of its selling points is forced brevity. So I don't know what he means by a big dent, but I am so tired of people talking about the Twitter character limit.

Look, come on. I don't think it's going to. OK. He also sent a link to Slate made a Chrome extension that I guess takes 280 character tweets and whittles them down to 140. This is all much ado about nothing. This is people on Twitter who have way too much time on their hand.

All this whining and whinging about 280 characters sound and fury signifying nothing. And just like all the complaints, every single time Facebook changed their news feed, which I've noticed nobody really bitches about anymore. I think we've just become accustomed to it. But what happens is everyone will adapt.

Life will go on and everything on Twitter will still suck. That's pretty much the way it's going to go. Now, my favorite tweet so far is from Isaiah Whitlock Jr. Did you ever watch The Wire? No. Oh, man, you missed out. The Wire was great, but he was one of the actors on The Wire. And so his first 280 character tweet was she it.

It's an inside joke if you've seen The Wire, but it was pretty fucking funny when I saw it. That's all I got to say. Right. OK. So we got the next one from Chris Foulon. Too bad the gossing doesn't work on SSD and other flash memory. Blah, blah, blah. I was talking about what they used to do.

Way to crap on my joke, Chris. So if you want to do it with flair, then you can always just rig your computers with thermite and a little proximity trigger. So if they leave your home, they just die in a fiery death. I'm going to post a link to Hackaday where they have a laptop versus thermite video. There used to be another good one from Kevin Rose's camp, but I can't find it anymore, where they replaced one of the removable bays.

You know, remember how laptops used to have removable parts? I do. So you could put in extra batteries or a drive. Yeah, you can't do that anymore. But in the old days, you could do that. And they replaced one of the drive bays with thermite and they rigged a trigger on the keyboard so you could do like a key combo and then ignite the thermite and then it would just basically incinerate the drive.

It was pretty cool. But I can't find that. I can't find that video. And 6502chips sent us the Robert Guillaume quote is from the classic Wanted Dead or Alive movie, Rutger Hauer and Gene Simmons. Never saw that. I didn't see it either until now because I got it from Sweden.

And let's let's hear what Robert Guillaume has to say. Next time you decide to fuck me, Lipton, kiss me first. And our friends over at FB Purity, they posted nice review of FB Purity on the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. Thanks, guys. And it linked to a YouTube video that he made about us talking about FB Purity.

If you want to use Facebook with any semblance of sanity, definitely go get the FB Purity extension for your browser. Yes. And Virtual Tall, who's Tall, I believe you reviewed his book last week. Yes. Said, glad you guys dug the book.

I'm extra glad you're not going to punch me in the face like Timo. Timo Reilly is who he's talking about because Brian in a in a strange fit of violence, which we never hear because Brian's a lover, not a fighter. That's right. Even though he hates love and film and science fiction. But yes, wanted to punch Timo Reilly in the face.

So yes, yes, it's Virtual Tall. I loved your book and you still have a chance to screw it up with the next two installments. So I'm begging you. I'm begging you. Don't don't do it. Look, again, I only I only dislike Love Amongst Professors, which I think would be a good book title.

Mm hmm. Yeah. So Song of the Oz sent us, hey, I left FB, meaning Facebook, over five years ago and don't miss it at all, particularly as everyone I know still using it does nothing but complain. Well, yeah, that's Facebook in a nutshell. I just can't quit it, though. I just can't quit you.

I can't quit you. Now we got some email over from GOG.show. Greg Lightborn writes in saying, love the show, guys. I'm a subscriber and do follow your Instagram despite whatever the fuck the stats say. Keep up the good work and stay cheeky. Cheers from another grumpy old geek that plays with flying robots.

Oh, thank you. And he is G-E-E-4-Z-F-P-V on Instagram. So check him out. I will do so. And next up from Trevor. Hey, guys, love the show. I listen every couple of weeks when I have the time. What? Real quick. Come on. Every week. Every week. I need to unload on you regarding your item last week about the folks at Amazon figuring out a way to allow the deliver guy into your house.

This has been bothering me. So here you go. Your comments about how out of touch the Amazon creators of this potential offering due to them living in nice neighborhoods to me is the opposite of what I think they are going for. Love your enthusiasm. I think it's ill projected in this case. Hear me out. Okay, Trevor.

If you've ever been in a nice neighborhood, gated community, whatever, you would know you don't need this type of service. Packages are quite safe on doorstops and on porches. That is, of course, Trevor, assuming that everybody is in a gated community, which you don't necessarily have to be in when you're rich. I will follow this up in a second.

Keep going, yeah. It's the other side of this socioeconomic scale that would benefit people. It's the folks that live in bad neighborhoods or unsecure buildings that need this service. Picture a housing complex. People can't or don't order stuff online because they are at work all day and not home to accept the package. Then they have to drive to UPS or FedEx to pick it up themselves.

Total pain in the ass, traffic, childcare, et cetera. Maybe they have two jobs back to back. All these things rich folk don't have to consider. You see it now? Okay, Jason, go ahead. Okay. So I do see it now, but I would like to say people of lower socioeconomic class, are not going to spend hundreds of dollars on an E-lock and an Amazon video camera just so they can get their packages.

And I know a lot of people in San Jose even, right down the road from Facebook, who are in the upper classes, which are most of these programmers, who get their stuff stolen all the time because they're targeted, because they know that these are people with money and who are going to be getting good stuff.

So it is a prime target. I understand where you're coming from, where these people need a solution. I don't think that's what they're thinking about when they made it. And that was what Brian was talking about last week, where it's like the mindset of the people creating the tools aren't really thinking about anybody else but their problems, which we have now seen from Sean Parker in the previous bit where he talks about, yeah, we know we're doing evil.

We don't care. We're doing it for us and our goals. And I think that's what really comes down to. The one thing that Amazon has done, though, for people in these areas is Amazon lockers. Like, 7-Elevens, most of them now, like in lower income areas, have Amazon lockers.

So you can have your package delivered there where it will not be stolen. And as Amazon rolls into more stores and physical locations, I agree with Brian that I don't think that's what they were thinking of when they developed this product. That's, I mean, I see your point, but I just have to say, I think you're off on that one.

I agree with Jason, who agrees with me. There you go. Next up is from Martin. Guys, I just finished listening to P234. I followed your recommendation. It looked up three blue, one brown, and the videos for neural networks. Very good. I passed it on to others. Also like the book recommendations. Keep up the good work.

Thanks. Oh, thank you, Martin. And this comes from Captain Dunzel. I've been negligent in supporting you guys for a few months, but this is definitely worth the investment. Brian, I've had to fire a few clients over the years, and you hit the nail on the head. The time we spend with clients that will not be happy is much better spent on clients that are happy.

The worst part about your show is that by noon Monday, I've already listened to it and have to wait another week. Aw. Well, thank you very much. Next up is Mark. He says, Hey, Jason, I just heard you're reading the Heinlein classic, Time Enough for Love. While I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I voraciously read everything by the big three, Asimov, Clark, and Heinlein, as well as the old 30s, 40s, and 50s sci-fi by Pol, Burroughs, Lem, and more.

I was fascinated how they tried to extrapolate future technology not even conceived of from the current technology. Since you're a gamer, you might get a kick out of the board game Alien Frontiers, which has Mars divided into territories named after the sci-fi masters. Back to Heinlein. Not too long ago, I finished For Us, The Living, which was Heinlein's first book, written in 1937 and unpublished until a few years ago.

It actually makes a big case for universal basic income. I enjoyed his conceptualization of the internet with vacuum tubes, not vacuum tubes like in an old radio or TV, but vacuum tubes like your bank drive-up lanes use. Interesting. That's pretty cool. I'm going to have to check that out. I'll probably skip the board game because I don't know if you've heard the show that much, but I really don't have any friends, so I don't have anybody to play board games with.

Until we can figure out how Bam Bam can move pieces on a board, I think it's just going to be, yeah, just me. Okay. Next one comes up. A friend from Mother Russia. I keep hearing you guys say, I'll add it to my queue regarding a book or a movie. I was wondering, how or where do you keep that queue?

I desperately need a way to keep track of all your awesome suggestions, but can't find a way that's simple enough. So any tips will be much appreciated. Awesome show. Much grumpiness, lots of geekery. Special thanks for turning me on to Babaverse audiobooks. They are dope. Yes, they are. So, friend from Mother Russia, I use the app Things, and I've tried pretty much every to-do app from Todoist to Wunderlist to OmniList and all of the lists out there.

I keep going back to things, and the new version 3 is really nice, works on all your devices. If you're on a PC, yeah, probably not. It's pretty much Mac-centric. But if you are on the, my alternate universe recommendation is Wunderlist.

I really like Wunderlist. It lets you do the same stuff on pretty much any platform. It is out there for Android and PC, and it works well, and it's pretty cheap. So check those out. And I use my super old-school method, my Moleskine. I just keep a couple pages in the back where I just write things down that I want to either go read eventually or whatever.

So I'm very old-school that way. We did miss one comment, so I'm scrolling back here quickly, Jason. Herb sends, hi, guys. Recommended for the library, The Ultimate Social Media Dystopia, The Circle by Dave Eggers. No. Read it. No. Hated it. Didn't like it. Nope. Terrible book. Terrible book.

Sorry. Yeah, sorry. Disagree. If you think the book is terrible, go watch the movie. No, I won't do that. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. So we got an iTunes five-star review from Masta Blue, the dark place you love to go. I was looking for an informative tech show other than The Verge, which I really like.

But when I found the GOG, I fell in love. Keep up the great work, guys. We shall. And everybody else. We're kind of late on the iTunes reviews. Come on, guys, go give us a five-star and a snark, please. Yes, if you haven't done it yet, please do. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. And by all that is holy in the verse, please tell your friends. Yes, please. So I have a sad shout-out this week to Higgins, also known as John Hillerman, the sidekick on Magnum P.I.

I grew up on Magnum P.I. I saw the first and last episodes in situ, as it were, every week for years, and I loved that show. And he was one of my favorites. So farewell, John Hillerman, a.k.a. Higgins. You will be missed. That is sad news.

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 a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click on the PayPal button in the sidebar.

But we now know that you can do a recurring PayPal donation. So if you want to do that, be my guest. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 235. 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. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

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