236: Unnecessary Reboots

Today's episode is brought to you by Away. For $20 off a new suitcase, visit awaytravel.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG during checkout. Today's episode is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks cloud accounting software helps freelancers master their admin and makes invoicing a breeze. Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy and start your free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Tell them GOG sent you. 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. How's man-poo land? The disruption land of man-poo. Yes, I am in San Francisco in the mission and it is, well, it was raining the other day, so there's not that much man-poo or at least it's diluted man-poo.

It's more of man sludge. It is, yes. Man-a-ria. Lovely. It is. A little PTSD driving into town from the airport looking at all the silly names of all the silly companies on all the big giant buildings that they soon won't be able to afford.

And it's just a silly place. This place is just silly. It's not neat. It is silly. It is silly. Well, I agree. That's why I'm still down here. How about a little follow-up? I've had this article in the show to follow up on for a couple weeks now, but we never seem to get to it. And it's all for you. It's all for you, Brian, because it's from VentureBeat talking about how Google and Amazon are hooking our kids from an early age. Well, duh.

Did you get a chance to go through this and take a look at it? I did. It's definitely something I'm concerned about, certainly. My son is still much too young. But even at this point, I've set him up with his own YouTube account and I have playlists for him and I play them. And, you know, I'm worried about this. But to some degree, it's the same as it ever was. You know, Mattel hook kids early. Fisher-Price hook kids early. You know, kids do stuff.

The thing about Mattel and Fisher-Price is after you hit about 12 or 13, you're not going to be using that farm spinner anymore to learn what a cow is. These kids are going to be using these tools for the rest of their lives. So it's training them to be users. Right. Which is a concern. But I mean, luckily, he's got two smart parents here. One of whom was a creator, not just a user, who is keeping that in mind. And we're going to be setting limits. But I mean, the idea of keeping kids away from this is also, I think, harmful. You do need to learn these

tools. You need to be smart about these things. You need to be savvy with them, certainly in the world that my son is going to grow up in. So I think it's a case of suck it up a little bit, but make sure there are limits. As most things in life are. And sit him down. He's like, son, let me tell you about the reward loop and how it's going to train your brain. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, being concerned about that is, you know, I see parents. I used to judge a lot more. Once you have a kid, you definitely

stop your judging quite as much. But I know parents that basically have just given their kids a tablet. And it's 24-7. And I want to stay away from that. You know, it's got to be divided up. You know, I'm a soccer fan. My wife plays tennis. And we're going to get this kid out there. And, you know, a nice healthy balance, I believe, is the way to go. The one thing that I find interesting about this is I haven't looked into YouTube kids yet and these specific features.

I've just made playlists. And so far, that's been fine. I, you know, I handpick all the videos and things like that. And the pre-roll ads have been okay up until a couple days ago when Google decided to throw some pre-roll ads for Ali Shawkatz, who was on Arrested Development's new show, Search Party. The opening sequence of the ad is somebody drenched in blood running and screaming.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, that's exactly what you want to see right before your Sesame Street video. So I need to start diving in a bit more to see what, you know, what options I have. Even, you know, do I pay? Do I go through YouTube kids? Can I access the other stuff that isn't in YouTube kids? What kind of ads? I got to look at all this shit.

Yeah, you do. You know. Yes, I do. Do not envy you on that one at all. Hey, circle of life, man. Circle of life. I just feel like my parents might have had it a little bit easier than I do. Go play out in the yard, kid. Have fun. Here's a stick.

Here's a stick and some dirt. Don't come back till dinner. Yeah. Anyways, there's some follow up. We talked a bit about Facebook's plan to review new photos to stop revenge porn and how it was all going to be hashed and we shouldn't worry about this. Except whoops. Nope. Sorry. Actually, there are going to be some select people over at Facebook that will see your nude photos before they get hashed. Yeah, we covered that last week that they're

definitely going to have people in that loop. That was the photo map problem. But what I think the most important thing about here is the naming of the project is classic. The non-consensual intimate image project. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure that's even accurate because I think at the point in time, it was a consensual intimate image. It's just no longer. So it should be the no longer consensual intimate image. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. Yeah. Right. I mean,

you know, these things weren't forced out of people. This was a, you know, this was a kids playing their crazy Snapchat games. It was consensual at one point in time. Yes. Previously consensual. Next time. Next up on Grumpy Old Geeks. Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other news outlets. 75 to be precise. Okay. Actually, no, that's not precise. It's arbitrary. It's more than 75. Right.

Jack has rewired my brain. He literally has rewired my brain to not know what arbitrary means anymore. Fake, fake arbitrary. Yeah. They're going to be using trust icons with fake news, which is kind of, they're just pulling anything out of their ass to stem the tide of everybody making fun of them.

Better than nothing. I'll take it. But the people that need to pay attention to trust indicators won't. So. Right. Remember the satire tag in Facebook? How long did that last? Or is it even still around? I think I've seen it twice. I don't think I ever saw it in the wild. So.

Yeah. That was when they were just, in case you missed it, if you turned your head to blink, they were labeling stories as satire, basically the onion. And we're like, if you cannot understand that the onion is satire, then you have bigger problems. And it was so small, you could barely read it anyway. But this is just another one of those things where they're just, they're trying so hard. Yes. They're definitely trying. It's a tough nut to crack. It's, I don't know if it's a

solvable problem, but I do appreciate the efforts. I will give them an A for effort right now. Yeah. I just wish people would know their outlets, know their news, you know? Yeah. See, you're. That's the problem. Come on, man. The problem is. You can't, you can't put responsibility on individuals. We have to go to the institutions.

I know. I mean, I can look at it. I can look at a website and within like three seconds tell you if it's bullshit or not, but I know what to look for. Most people don't. Right. Yeah. Joe's news shack.com is definitely not a purveyor of fine journalism is all I'm going to say. Yeah. Hey, that's a good domain. I should go get that. Yeah. Get on that because domains are worth so much these days. Yeah. Don't even start my thousands of domains that I lost so much on.

Facebook says messaging apps aren't turning people into hermits after all. Oh, really? Let's see the study on this, please. The study is in the link on Engadget. Did you go through the article? I did. I did. I call bullshit. But it's saying that if you, if people who talk on messenger are 52% more likely to meet up with the person in person against people who don't send

messages very much. But yes, this does come from Facebook. Yes. It's Facebook's own study. Again, as we say, look at the source, look at, you know, Wall Street Journal is not reporting this. A third party is not reporting this. This is, this is a Pfizer saying that we've done a study that says our drugs are good. Yeah. Drugs good. You know, what we found is that messaging turns out not to be a wedge, but instead a bridge bringing us closer together. That is a fucking press release, not a study.

I'm sorry. It is, you know, I, and I don't believe it. I, I sure people are using messenger to make plans. I do that all the time with friend of the show, Fergal, because for some reason he responds to messenger, not texts. So meet at pub. Yes. See you there. There you go. But I know plenty of people, plenty of interactions that I even have that 10 years ago would have been done in person and are now conducted through either texting or messaging or whatever. So I don't believe it.

Okay. Uh, I, I don't believe it either, but it's, I thought it was, I thought it was fun and I knew it would catch your goat. It's just a little bit. Uh, Facebook also has posted on their action plan against foreign interference. It entails hiring 10,000 more people to review ads, more engineers and some security experts. And they're all going to combine their skills into one wonder twin powers activate

moment to get rid of fake journalism. And yeah, foreign interference ain't going to happen. They're just going to waste a bunch of money on a lot of other people. Don't forget that in this press release, they included both AI and machine learning because they're the advances in AI and machine learning will help. Can you hear the sarcasm falling out of my face? It's a little early. I can't, can't quite hear it just yet. Look again, got to do something here. They're updating their policy to block ads from pages that repeatedly share

stories marked as false by third party fact checking organizations, but you're just hiring 10,000 people to become those fucking fact checkers. So why would you need to go to a third party? Hmm. Make it up, make it, make up your mind. Somebody has to fact check the fact checkers. Who watches the Watchmen, Jason?

Yes, I know. Well, uh, and something that they're going to directly be fighting against, uh, there's this awesome article on Vox. I know this was long and you were traveling, so you probably did not read this, uh, but China is perfecting a new method for suppressing dissent on the internet. China is actually leaps and bounds ahead of Russia. So if we really want to be worried about one particular country influencing our politics in the future, I suggest, well, we're screwed already. So it doesn't really matter. Does it damage is done? Who cares who's next?

Yeah. So, but what they're basically doing is, uh, instead of suppressing dissent and punishing people with fake news, they are pushing positive stories of their own government. So it's all just, uh, rainbows and sunshine and sausages and, and rainbows again, uh, coming out of Sausages? Where does sausages come from?

Sausages make me happy, Jason. Okay. I'm German. Give me good bratwurst and I'm smiling ear to ear. That's true. Give me sauerkraut and I'm farting for days. Well, yeah, that's also true. So yeah, they call it cheerleading content and that's what they're, they are excelling at right now. So instead of a negative crap stories like we've got here, they just say, look how great we are. And it seems to be working much better.

So we should be worried. Well, also they kill people. Well, there's that, so, you know, yeah, they, they use their, their wonderful great firewall to track down the people they don't like and kill them. So if you don't like the happy stories, you know, I think there might be a little, uh, little bias going on there for people who just, Oh, that's a great story about the government. Yippee, yippee, yippee. I guess like the, all their neighbors are dead.

Right. Uh, well, let's go back to UBI again, universal basic income. We've been talking about that on and off throughout the year, throughout the last two years. Um, there've been some test cases going on out there that we are eagerly awaiting, uh, to hear about. Uh, and then Wired brought to mind with this fantastic article, uh, the fact that we've actually had UBI experiments running for over 20 years now in this country, um, even longer than that, uh, within the Indian communities here.

I didn't know that. Because we, what we, well, what we've done is we've given them the casinos, right? So you can have your casino on Indian land and they take a portion of those proceeds and basically do UBI within their own communities. That's right. I read this. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a very long article that runs through the actual statistics of what's been happening within these communities. And the TLDR is the shit works instead of people just sitting around. Well, there have been problems and obviously it's a stereotype that

you hear about, you know, people on these reservations that just become raging alcoholics. It's an issue, but overall, what they've found is kids that have been brought up in this scenario, uh, use this money to basically get them, pick themselves up, get into college, study, go out, learn a trade, et cetera, et cetera. It seems to really be working. Now, the UBI that we're talking about here still assumes there are jobs for these people to get to.

Now the UBI you and I are talking about are what do we do when there aren't any jobs anymore? Right. Uh, but overall, this seems a very positive, uh, positive experience with UBI and it seems to have a beneficial effect in people's lives. So casinos for everyone. Yes. Everybody gets their own Trump casino. Wait, hold on. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Uh, the death knell for blue apron is on its way. Is the stock price now less than a single meal? I believe it is actually. Oh, it's been that

wait for a while actually. Yeah. This night all recipes and Amazon have teamed up so you can use all recipes to basically make your shopping list, then pop it on over to Amazon fresh to put them in a bag and bring them to your house. And then voila, there you go. Well, I mean, blue apron was doing great when they were the only game in town. Unfortunately, then all of a sudden there were 20 other competitors who kind of looked at what they did and did it a little bit better. And then

you got Amazon waiting into the mix, which means you're definitely screwed. And I know even here now they don't deliver it to you, but you can go into Ralph's and they have blue apron style meal kits that you can pick up at the grocery store now. So wow. Game over, you know, over man. Oh my God.

I just did a stock price check on blue apron. $3. Oh, ouch. Yeah. Oh, I can. As I say, almost all the time, I never understood why some of these companies went public so quickly. I don't get it. That's that's too bad. Yeah. There's some, there's some very, very funny titles here. Yeah.

From unicorn to unicorps. Nice. Blue apron tanks under public scrutiny. Yeah. Blue apron holdings stock can head even lower. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's basically saying it's over for blue apron. So yeah, but, uh, you know, hopefully hello fresh will stick around because they're an advertiser.

And I hope so. We like money. I'm getting some on Monday because we decided with a Thanksgiving holiday coming up, it was just going to be way too difficult to get full meals together. So we have hello fresh arriving. Oh, nice. So you're not only a, uh, no, I don't just shill for them. I actually order them. And I just have a little followup here on parody and the story that we covered last week.

So the Ethereum wallet company parody actually knew about the flaw that locked out the $150 million worth of Ethereum and they just didn't get around to fixing it. So they should be pretty damn culpable about that. Do you think ain't going to know what's going to come of it? Nothing, nothing.

And everybody's going to keep cheering on cryptocurrencies because yay, they're awesome. Because some people that bought it now have a lot of money. The internet didn't have to turn out this way, Jason. There's an alternative future. One where walled gardens like Facebook and Google don't morph into overgrown safe havens for Nazis or Kremlin agents to hide and thrive. One where misinformation didn't spread like wildfire. One where women and

members of minority groups don't cringe when they open their apps. But here we are 2017 and it all fucking sucks. I don't think it sucks that bad, but come on. What is this you speak of this utopia that we we don't have? Well, this is a law that lets Silicon Valley stay clueless. This is a very long form article over again at Slate and it's something you and I have touched upon lots and lots of times, but I don't think we've ever explicitly called it out as one of the

reasons that we have so many problems on the internet. This is the Communications Decency Act, which Congress passed in 1996. The law was originally created to prevent minors from accessing porn and other obscene content, which obviously works so well. And the Supreme Court struck it down the following year for violating the First Amendment. The part of the CDA that wasn't accessed is Section 230. This is why we have so many problems. This is the law that says in general, websites are not responsible for the things that

users do or post or as you and I always say, we're just a platform. Right. It's the same. This is the safe haven argument, right? Yes, pretty much so. So this is basically a long article talking about why we've ended up having so many problems, why even Twitter's then CEO Dick Costello wrote in 2015, we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. Why they don't really care to fix it? Because they don't have to. So we change one little law and then they

have to work on this stuff. Yeah. I mean, the big problem with this was about ISPs in the beginning because you can't basically monitor all of the traffic over a given network. It's the same thing as like trying to police the content of every phone call going over the AT&T network. It made no sense and you couldn't do it. So that's why this exists. But when it comes down to, you know, the walled gardens and the platforms, nobody really thought about that because it was all going to be websites that

did not have the massive amounts of functionality that they have nowadays. You remember the old, you remember the old school websites? They were like one page wonders. And there was, I mean, before we even have server side includes or CGI scripts, it was pretty basic. And that's when this stuff was coming out. 96, you know, I can go back and I can pull up my archives from my websites in 1996. And there was really no, there was no way a website was going to be, you know,

changing the outcome of US election back then. But yes, time, times they have, they got to been a changing. Well, I mean, I would have been changing. Yeah, I would argue that there were things like that, but they just didn't have the mass reach. You had your AOL chat rooms, you had your CompuServe forums, you had, what was that big one that was up and based out of San Francisco that's still kind of around a little bit? Mind Spring? Well Spring? I can't remember what it was. Well, the well was in San Francisco. The well was in San Francisco. So, uh, but one of the,

there is a decent point against this. Uh, I mean, we're saying we should get rid of this thing and make them culpable. Uh, the reality is if we made them culpable, they'd all be sued out of existence within two days. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a problem too. So where, where do you, where do you draw the line and where do you, you know, point, point that level of responsibility? It's comes back to, you know, the, the power that these guys have, you can't just say, don't use it anymore because

it is so ingrained in everybody's lives. You have to have a social media account to even get some jobs, which I think is ludicrous. Oh, it is. And I get so upset whenever I see like friends of mine that have taken new positions and all of a sudden they start shilling their company because I know they're being told to there. It's not their choice. Like, why are you posting about this?

Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club. Yeah. Heard about that one sometimes. Uh, yeah. And, or they just, yeah, they, they either show their company or they never say anything again. And most of the time when people get a new job and they'd stop posting on social media, it's because they're busy with their new job. But sometimes it is the gag order that says, no, no, no, don't be writing about that.

Yeah. You, you gotta be a good boy or girl if you want to work here. No social media for you. Yes. No, no private life for you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can just go to Ello cause nobody will read it there. I guess. True that. I, oh, I meant to mention this the other day. I finally figured out why I keep getting all of these Ello fans every week. I was like, you have a new subscriber. You have a new subscriber.

I finally clicked on one and just to see what it was, uh, it's porn spam. The porn people have moved over to Ello. Great. Well, yeah. So it's basically the, you know, the profile icons are just like, uh, naked girls from the neck to the knees saying, Hey, come check out my chat room. That's it.

All right. If your wood falls in the woods, would anybody hear it? Oh, you have to go with the wood. Well, yeah, kind of. That's usually my job, man. Come on. I know. I thought, I thought I'd delve into my inner Jason for a second. Yeah. Yeah. Leave it to the professionals. I will. That's first and last time. Speaking of leaving humor to the professionals cards against humanity. Saves America was one of the greatest things that happened this week. Uh, 150,000 subscriptions sold out in about nine hours for their holiday shenanigans. Did you get a chance to get in on

this? I did not get a chance to get in on it, but I love them. I love this company so much. Fortunately, I got in, so I'll be able to tell, tell everybody what the, the rest of the crazy presents and things that they send are for the rest of the year. Cause number one, we all know now is that they bought the piece of land that will stop Trump from building his border wall, which is, you know, funny and symbolic and probably useless, but giving it the proper due

for the funny stakes. Let me just read the, their own, their own paragraph about this. Donald Trump is a preposterous golem who is afraid of Mexicans. He is so afraid that he wants to build a $20 billion wall that everyone knows will accomplish nothing. So we've purchased a plot of vacant land on the border and retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time consuming and expensive as possible for that wall to get built.

Slow clap. Slow clap. Now you have to, you have to admit though, that the best part about this page is that while you're waiting for your, your money to go through your, you know, your credit card to clear, there are the, the, the frequently asked questions is the best in the world. These guys really, I really wish I could play this game because it sounds awesome.

All you need are some friends to play the game, Jason. Oh, well that those I don't have. So. Oh, okay. Yeah. Um, but my, my favorite one here is that I don't like that you're getting political. Why don't you just stick to card games? Why don't you stick to seeing how many Hot Wheels cars you can fit up your asshole? These are people after my own heart.

I need to go find some friends just so I can play and hang out with the, uh, yeah, it is a fun game, Jason. It's been a kind of a Christmas tradition with, uh, some of my friends in Toronto that when we land, we go to a bar and play this for Christmas. It's quite fun. Well, speaking of Toronto, I believe that you have some news about Toronto, Brian. Well, yes, I kept that in here just because I go here all the time. Lyft is finally getting into Toronto, Canada. It'll be the first international city.

So the Lyft Uber battle can continue internationally. Um, well, enjoy that. And, you know, cause I, I am coming or I am now in San Francisco. I'm staying in an Airbnb. And when I left Chicago, I did have to Uber to the airport. It's like, Oh, I hope you enjoy your smashed avocado lunch.

I feel so dirty. You should, I'm, I'm ashamed. Hey, but when I got to SFO, I did take a cab, a yellow cab, and it was a fucking Prius, uh, into the city, which, you know, and so the cost of the cab and the cost of the Uber in both places, half the distance in San Francisco, twice as much

as the cab to, or the Uber to the airport in Chicago. So yeah, but now you can tip an Uber. So I thought that was nice. So I gave my driver a good tip because he was a good guy. Oh no. God. Twitter fucking Twitter. They, they did that really stupid thing a long time ago where basically they, they kneecapped everybody who was making their platform popular with all of the cool apps that

you could, you could use to access Twitter. Yep. Cut off the API and said, no API for you, unless you're a big player. And if you still want to play with the API, here's like six requests you can do a week. And then, you know, before your tokens reset. So now they're, they're introducing what they call premium APIs, which fills that gap between the utterly useless API access that everybody has right now and the enterprise access, which people with real money can get.

Mm-hmm. And, uh, so what do you think? Too little, too late? Too little, too late. Basically is, should be the new name of Twitter. You know how they've introduced long names. It should now be Twitter too little, too late.

Mm-hmm. Yes. I think, I think my new username is Commander Jason Peter DeFillippo Esquire. I went with Slender, what could possibly go wrong, Fungus. You should just be shock-ing. God, can, can we get to January 1st sooner, please?

I have a time machine. Can we get to January 1st, what was it, 2022 or 2020? That one would be better. Yes. Remember, okay, let's, let's talk about a little Bitcoinage here. Okay. Mount Gox, Mount Gox, the notorious exchange, and, uh, with the, has the CEO, Mark Karpelis, or Karpelis?

Karpelose? I thought Mount Gox was the, uh, lizard that Captain Kirk fought in the original Star Trek. Nope. Sorry. This was, uh, the, uh, this was the, the card game that they thought that, hey, we're going to be on Magic the Gathering card game website. You know what we should do next?

We should go into financial services. Yeah, that makes sense. Does anybody grow up anymore? Oh, fuck no. Okay, just checking. God, no. Um, so this guy, you know, the, he had a whole lot of Bitcoin that were quote-unquote stolen, so, but he's on trial in Japan for extortion.

Okay. And the company got back about 200,000 of the Bitcoin that were missing, and so the people whose Bitcoin were, were, were stolen get restitution on that. Here's the, here's the rub. The, the restitution comes at, at the Bitcoin price from when it was stolen.

Oh, okay. Which is, which was on, in 2014, where Bitcoin were $440 a Bitcoin. Mm-hmm. And, uh, in a, in a Uber ride yesterday, like, uh, some of the people I was with are Bitcoin investors and rich people. I'm, I was just in the back holding the luggage and, you know, cleaning the shoes. Bitcoin, like, broke for a little bit, I guess it broke $8,000 of Bitcoin yesterday. Yeah. So, this guy has 200,000 Bitcoin that

he has to pay back for people at $440. So, he's going to walk away with a couple hundred million dollars worth of Bitcoin, probably. Most likely. For stealing it. Yeah. Yeah. There is no justice. There is no justice.

No. There really isn't. No, it's Japan. So, maybe they can just give him a knife and have him cut his stomach open, which would be the proper way to do it. But, uh, I don't think that's going to happen. Somebody's, you know. Oh, and here's the other thing. I'm talking to some people about Bitcoin, because I am in San Francisco and things happen like this. And I was hearing a story about how one guy got like $2 million worth of Bitcoin stolen from him from a bad, uh, you know, just a bad

broker. And now, in my world, if somebody stole $2 million from you and you knew who they were and they still showed up at work every day, that person would be dead by the afternoon. $15,000 would take care of that problem really quickly.

Yeah. But these guys are just, they trade snarky emails and get mad at each other and probably won't go to the same kombucha bar ever again. It's like, it's a different world and it's just, it's kind of disgusting. It really is like, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do? Well, speaking of the CompuServe's forums and, and a gentler, nicer time on the internet when, before the unwashed masses and the greedy barbarians at the gate came along when you could just go onto a forum and ask a question and actually get a real answer. And the signal to noise ratio was really high. Oh, those good old days. Well, they're going away for good. I didn't even know they were still around. So this was a hell of a story for me, but the CompuServe forums still exist and will until December 15th when they will finally be removed and go away.

Is anybody archiving them or? I dearly hope so, because what a treasure trove of history that would be. Well, you got a couple of days, so go write, go write a script and hop on in there. Right. I don't even know how you would get there. I don't even know how you get there either. So, but amazing. It's just amazing that they were still around and sad to hear that they're actually going away.

Yeah. I was never on CompuServe. I was a prodigy and AOL guy, but because CompuServe was, it was just expensive. I didn't have that kind of, I didn't have that kind of money. Still don't. That's true. That's true. I used to work at Kinko's back then and I, pretty soon I might be doing it again.

Yeah. For the four people in the world that need copies. Would you like those collated and bound, sir? I can fire up the laminator for you. Bill Gates is funding a smart city and it's in our favorite place. It's like right outside of Phoenix.

Well, this is for Bill Gates. I'm a little concerned on how long it'll take that smart city to boot up every morning. Yeah. Some days, some days you just wake up, you look outside the window and it's really blue. All you see is the window because it's just a window with a little line underneath it moving back and forth.

They don't have bell towers in the city. They just play the startup sound at the beginning of every day. Okay. We're making a lot of fun of it, but I'm super interested in this. I'm very curious about how it's going to be planned out. And if it weren't in Phoenix, I would, or in Arizona in general, I would actually consider moving there.

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Ups and doodads. I found this next piece of interesting news on futurism, which is a pretty decent site. Sometimes they're a little too far in the future, if you know what I'm saying. Researchers at Dracula Technologies.

Name for the win. Oh, the only reason I'm putting this story in here is because somebody had the balls to name their company Dracula Technologies, which I fucking love. I'm sure they're going to get sued. I think, well, you never know with copyright, you know, Bram Stoker's kin may have come back and thrown it out of the public domain, but they've devised a method to charge cell phones with ambient light. They created a thin, flexible solar cell that can be printed in any shape

or color using an inkjet printer. Pretty cool stuff. The video is interesting. It doesn't really have much on yield or things like that, but they're saying it might be coming to market soon. But come on, I don't really care. Dracula Technologies for the win.

Definitely. Yeah, this is cool stuff. I would love to see this on the market. I think it's going to be a while still. Yes, you know, it's a little too new. The next thing that I found was I really wanted this to be the coolest thing ever because we've talked in the past about Star Trek communicators that are Bluetooth handsets that, you know, you can flip open, they play the, play the music or the sounds and you can use them as a Bluetooth phone. And I tried to buy one and they were like, you know,

two years out and I eventually canceled it because I'm like, you know what I'm paying. It was going to be like 175 bucks if you ordered it then. And then you're going to get it in two years. I'm like, I can put that 175 bucks in an investment account somewhere and then actually get the cheaper version after it comes out in three years. Anyway, I didn't never got one of those things, but I found the Star Trek next generation Bluetooth com badge, right?

I thought this was going to be the coolest thing ever. So you could just use, use, use the old school, like, you know, card to data, you know, get me some, get me a latte. I found this on ThinkGeek. It looked really cool, but then, then I watched the video that accompanies and I, it, the cool factor for it has just been completely destroyed. Somebody, somebody put some photon

torpedoes into the coolness factor on this one and the $80 Star Trek Bluetooth com badge will never enter my home. Did you watch this video, Brian? I feel very bad about this because it does seem like it's a cool product. And I think that they have done themselves a massive disservice with their attempt at being hilarious with their video.

It is so mind numbingly, painfully terrible. Like there are things on Funny or Die that make me just want to go die. This makes me want to die a thousand times. Yeah. Way to, way to, you know, they had to have meetings. Get a writer. Just hire a writer. Hire someone funny. You must have a funny friend. And an actor or two that are actually funny. Or just do a product video. That's all I would

wanted to see. Hey, here, here's how it works. Yeah, here you go. You tap it. You make a phone call. You tap it again. You can play your music. And it makes the noise. It's licensed. Look, it's cool. That would have been it. I'm sorry it ruined it for you. I understand. I mean, I think you should get it anyways, because it does look like a good product. Just let, let the video go. I'm not going to spend 80 bucks on it. That's the other problem. It is a lot of money for what it is. Yeah.

It's cheaper than the, cheaper than the communicator. That, like I said, was like closer to 200 bucks, but. Right. You and I are both still using Opera full time as our browser. I gave Firefox Quantum a go this week because they just released their new thing. It's fast, noticeably faster than previous Firefox. But there's, I just, I can't go back to the browser wars. I just can't. And switching a browser more than once in a year is not in me. So I have no problems with Opera. I think Opera is

just as fast as Quantum. But if you are a Firefox person and, and as you well should be, if I were just going to be ethical about this, I suppose I would go with Mozilla as a company for my browser needs, but whatever. I like Opera. I'm not switching. Okay. Yeah. I covered Firefox Quantum when it was first announced in beta a couple, was it like two months ago, maybe? Yeah. And I noticed it was, yeah, it's out now. And I definitely noticed it was faster and I got this new version. I fired it up and

honestly, I could not tell the difference between the speed in Quantum and Opera. I was going between different sites and on computers that are basically the same. So I didn't want to do them on the same computer to, you know, stop resources and stuff. But I did like a kind of a semi-scientific test and I could barely tell the difference. Yeah. It may be a little bit faster than Opera. It probably is because it's just newer, but not enough for me to switch. Nope. Remember Boston Dynamics? Oh boy,

do I? Yeah. They used to be owned by Alphabet, AKA slash Google, and they've been sold off and which is probably good for them. They need to do something, but they had an ad this week for the Spot Mini that is coming soon. Fuck Ibo. I want to spot Mini. I was about to say. Yeah, fuck your Ibo and your $26 a month subscription. This thing is what I want as a guard dog because the video that it shows,

it just kind of walks into the frame, stops, and then looks at the camera. And I kind of got chills when it looked at the camera because I'm like, oh shit, it knows I'm here. And then it just kind of jaunts off and around a corner. Yep. But man, okay, get one of those and then put a couple paintball guns on it and there's your home defense. Perfect. Yes. Weaponize your robot, Jason. We've never discussed about how bad that could be on this show. That's why I said paintball guns. I've got that

paintball gun that shoots pepper spray. Yeah. Okay. That's great. I am not people. Jason, you're just complaining about how you don't have friends to come over and play Cards Against humanity with you. If you weaponize a goddamn robot dog and have it at your house, there's less chance of that ever happening. Actually, I live in the Midwest. Everybody's going to want to come see the armed robot dog and I might just make some new friends. Well, considering I also found a Boston

Dynamics story this week, it's the Atlas robot that actually nails a backflip. We're going to die soon. We're just going to be killed by these things. That's why I want to arm my robot. So fight off the other robots that are coming to kill you? Protect me from the other robots. Yes. Right. Yeah. I think we've, we've, we've read a few sci-fi stories that basically had that exact plot and it didn't work out well.

No. And the problem with this Boston Dynamics, you know, the, the bigger robot, the Atlas robot, I guess even the spots too, they just, these guys abuse the hell out of these robots. And when they become sentient and see those videos, you know, it's just going to be nothing but trouble. So if you get a spot now and treat them, treat them nice, treat them well, make sure that he knows that you're a good human. You may have a chance in the upcoming apocalypse and uprising.

Your spot may decide to keep you as a pet. Yeah. I've always wanted to be a kept man, but not really, not really the same context, but what are you going to do? Yeah. I'd be a little bit worried when that Atlas, that five foot nine Atlas comes to decide to have sex with you, whether you like it or not.

That's why I want to spot Minnie.

Media candy. I've been getting really back into Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency. And I found an article on Wired, surprisingly, saying that it's worth a second look. And of course, it's worth a second look because the first season was great. I don't know what the hell's wrong with them, but somebody's backing me up to say that it's a great show. And I'm really digging it. The first episode this year

was a little bit on the sketchy side, but it's really kicked up and I'm enjoying it just as much as I did last season. It's a strange show, but I really like it. Okay. Well, somebody over at Engadget is backing me up on Star Trek Discovery, saying that after half a season, Star Trek Discovery is worth paying for. The show is good enough to justify a frustrating content delivery model. Now, this is by Swapna Krishna over at

Engadget. And I just want to say, fuck you. It's a good show, but I am not going to normalize this bullshit about paying $60 out of pocket for one season to one show. No, it's not worth the content. It's not worth the distribution model. Is it a good show? It started rocky. It's getting better.

It could become a good show, but no, no, no. This whole article is about saying, don't blame the show for the way the content is being served. No, screw that. Fuck it. Let CBS know that that's a load of crap. This is not an endorsement of the model. It's simply an acceptance of the fact that this is the reality we live in. Hey, if we just accept the reality that we live in, nothing will ever change and everything will be shit. Fight the power. Fight the power. It's a fucking Star Trek TV show.

Fight the power. I agree with you, though. It's just very funny. Did you watch this? So you're up through the midseason. Now they're off to the midseason replacement where people will be spending another twenty dollars before they get another episode. Yes, exactly. So if you are paying for this, you should cancel because you're not getting another show for a couple more months. Yep. I thought it was OK. It was I mean, it's fine. I enjoyed it. I like where they may or may not be going. It's definitely picked up steam. It's gotten more interesting. So the problem with the last

episode is I think I put this in one of my new 280 character tweets is they used all the foreshadowing in the cupboard and they had to go next door to the neighbor and get another cup of foreshadowing because it apparently wasn't strong enough for their flavor for the foreshadowing that they were foreshadowing. Jesus Christ. Well, do you want to know why they probably had to do all that foreshadowing? Because of their distribution model, people over at Engadget. If they didn't have this

distribution model, we wouldn't have to do that because they're trying to keep your 20 bucks coming in for the next three months with no shows. No, but I was even talking about the foreshadowing that had the resolution in the episode. I was even talking about that was crazy. Oh, my God. Come here, son. Let's look out the window at the sunrise and let's talk about how awesome you are. And I'm like, OK, next scene. I know

what's going on. And there's one thing I'm not going to say. Well, it's maybe it's I'm foreshadowing something when when you're skateboarding or in a any kind of extreme sport. The one thing that you never do is say last run. I'm just going to take one more run. I'll be fine. That's when you break your goddamn neck. It's all I'm saying. Never say last run. Leave. Do a French exit and get the hell

out. That's right. Now, a friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, sent us some cool links on the Star Trek Writer's Guide that we talked about like three or four episodes ago when I was talking about how Discovery went off the rails because they did not follow Roddenberry's rules of Star Trek. Well, he dug it up. So there will be a link in the show notes to the actual Writer's Guide.

And he even provides because he's a very thorough man corroborating evidence of its genuosity. I know that's not a word, but I thought it was pretty fun. Yeah, it's cool. It's it's super interesting. I mean, wow. What a different time. Yeah, it's a different. It was a different time, but I liked it. I was it's super interesting to go back and read reads through this stuff. So yes,

it's cool now. Okay, man. Okay. I think I got out of my system. Okay. Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings prequel series because the Hobbit three movie bullshit did so well. Oh, boy, what could possibly go wrong? They've already ruined Top Gear. There's limited budgets. They have a horrible track record so far for two shows. But hey, at least it's not being done by Facebook.

Come on. The tick was pretty good. I got to give him that. I'm still waiting for one for how many? Amazon or Mozart in the Jungle. I don't hate. Can you imagine a Lord of the Rings prequel done with the ticks budget? Well, God, no. Well, that actually won't have to. You won't have to imagine it, Jason, because we're going to get it. I don't know. That might actually be pretty funny.

Right. So yeah, this whole this whole thing comes about because 93 year old Christopher Tolkien, who is the son of the man himself, has finally retired. And everybody is like, okay, who who wants some hobbits? Who wants some hobbits? Game on, people. Game on. Let's print some damn money.

Yep. He's like, he's been here for 93 years and he's finally gone. We need money. Let's sell everything. So yeah, it's going to be hobbits. Hobbits as far as the eye can see for a very long time. Yep. Now, Brian, would you like to know more about Starship Troopers? One of my favorite movies of all time is now 20 years old. Were you a fan of that movie? Because I have a feeling you

weren't. I saw it. I enjoyed it. I don't understand why there's a cult around it. It's just a great, great movie. Yeah, there's been lots of great movies I've seen. Yeah. But this one is special because this is one of those ones. No, it's not. It's very, very special. It's really not. Go back and watch it. It's really good. Anyway, since it's no shut up and let me finish

my damn story. And then you can go back and watch Starship Troopers again because it is a damn good movie. So since it's the 20 year anniversary, one of the companies who put together one of the giant bugs, the mechanical versions of the bugs has a video of the making of of the bug, which is pretty intense for what they had to do back then. It's made of clay and, you know, pneumatics. It's a big puppet. It's a very cool, big puppet. And the exciting thing about this is that they mentioned in the

Gizmodo article is that this is labeled part one. So hopefully we'll be getting more stuff from Starship Troopers 20 years later. Okay. Yeah. You know, you'll watch something else. You go watch The Notebook with your wife. I don't care. No, that movie's got legs. Apparently Mythbusters has legs too because no, it doesn't rebooting Mythbusters with a whole new team. Yeah, we talked about this a long

time ago, Jason. As soon as it ended, Science Channel basically announced that they were going to run a reality show to find the new hosts. And we basically both vomited into our computers and moved on from there. Yes, but now they have the hosts and now the show is going to it's actually I think already aired by now. I would I would ask if you watched it, but I know you're not going to watch it. Not a chance. Neither am I. So if you're if you're a listener to Grumpy Old Geeks and have watched the

new Mythbusters, let us know what you think. Yeah. And Denis Villeneuve is going to be rebooting Dune soon. I know you got to be happy about that. No, this is not this is not a book that can be made into a movie. It just can't be. If you tell me that you're going to do to Dune what you did to The Hobbit with Dune being 17 times the size of The Hobbit. Sure, you make a three part movie.

You know, each each is each installments two and a half hours long. Then maybe maybe you could cover about 25 percent of what I like about the book. Oh, come on, man. That David Lynch version was awesome. Stings flying underpants. Yeah, go put it. Hey, you had Captain Picard.

It had a lot of people in it. David Lynch did really good in terms of like nailing what the characters are. I thought that part was great. And I will always think of Jean-Luc Picard scurdy always. So very good stuff for my brother. And that's my favorite line in the whole movie.

And they cut it out of the the short version. I like the long version better. I got to say it needs to be it needs to be 18 times as long. Yeah. And so so there's your reboot. Now it's reboot sadness week here on Grumpy Old Geek. I know. So yes, you get you get the Dune reboot. I get the Crow

reboot. Fuck you. Fuck you, Hollywood. It's got Jason Momoa, who was, you know, what's his name? Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. Now he's Aquaman. Nobody likes Aquaman. Why would you make it? The only Aquaman that would be good is if they did the version that was in the Entourage movie, because that would have been funny. But yeah, no more Aquaman, but leave the Crow alone.

Yeah, I'm not excited about this at all. And what's up with the artwork that's teasing it that basically looks like a Heath Ledger Joker? Yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm gonna have to watch it because I'm just gonna have to. But because you like to torture yourself. That's kind of it. I mean, as many bad movies as I've watched recently for the show, I could. Yeah. What are you gonna do?

And for the people out there who listen to podcasts at super fast speeds, this is a thing in the news lately. People are I think they're called pod fasters is what people are calling, which makes no sense because my God's fasting. That's what it should be. You're not listening to a podcast.

That's a pod fast. But then pod faster is even more annoying than pod. Jason, you've got to give me that God, yes, it's terrible. So but fortunately, neuroscientist Yuri Hassan, who is he's got a lab at Princeton and studies brain responses to real life events. He studied how the brain processes sped up speech. And he points out that even at normal speed, most people don't catch every single word that's

being said. But if you make it one third faster, it's almost perfect. They don't lose a lot. And he also noted that the brain is easy, like able to easily adapt to different speaking speech, which I can attest to because I do it all the damn time. He says your brain responses become slower when I speak slower and brain responses become faster when I speak faster, which is why when I'm listening to somebody at like one and a half speed and then I go down to normal, they sound like they're drunk,

much like the drunk, the drunk Trump. Was it on Jimmy Kimmel? I think where they slow down Trump and he just sounds drunk. It's fine. But he did caution that comprehension starts to break down at 2x and at 3x, it really breaks down. So that's why I'm at like, you know, 1.75 now and I enjoy it. And I know you think that the people's voices sound funny. Your brain adapts to that so

fast that you just never notice it. I don't want to adapt. Okay. You sit there when when I had podcasts. They were 1x and we all liked it. That's right. But speaking of podcasts, there is no such thing as a good Bitcoin podcast. If you can find a good Bitcoin podcast, let me know because I tried all of them. Oh, my God. People who like Bitcoin are not entertainers. I was about to say, I'm sure

there's plenty of entertainers in the field. There is one who comes out of Nashville and there's a lot of music in it. And if there are there are Bitcoin songs, country Bitcoin songs, Bitcoins and their songs. That sounds great. And like pancakes. I don't know what the hell is. Oh, stay away from Bitcoin podcast, please. My dog ate the USB stick that had all my Bitcoin on it. My wife took my

ballad and she shot my dog. Boom, boom. At the library. I'm reading two books this week, but I only got through one of them. So that's all I'm going to talk about. And I think you're going to want to hear about this book, Brian, because it is Artemis, the follow up to the spectacularly successful book,

The Martian by Andy Weir. I am very curious. Now, as a sophomore, you know, book, these things generally don't go very well. We've seen many examples of that. Many armada examples of really bad follow ups. Now, that being said, I go into these books thinking that, oh, my God, this is going to be terrible. This had two things that were interesting about it, because I listened to the

audio book and it was read by Rosario Dawson, which is she's not known for doing audio books. Nailed it. She was perfect. The main character in Artemis is a woman. So it really helps out that it's not Will fucking Wheaton this time. And she did. She did a great job of all the characters, all the voices and the book itself. Thumbs up. I really liked it. I really, really liked it. There's

some parts at the beginning that you're just like, what the hell is this story about? And then once it finally starts to pick up and get the ball rolling, it is really, really well written and really enjoyable. Great. I have nothing. I have nothing bad to say about this book, except for that little slow bit in the middle and the getting used to because, you know, it's Andy Weir. So I had just the Martian on the brain. I'm like, what's he going to do? What's going to be this crazy thing?

And it's about a city on the moon. That's in the, that's on the 10. So I'm not spoiling anything there, but what goes down in the city on the moon is pretty damn good. And there are elements of things that are in the Martian that we all love the crazy problem solving and things like that, but not taken to an extreme and just for the sake of doing problem solving, you know, problem solving porn is what everybody loves about this. That's the, the Apollo 13 scene where they dump all this

shit on the table, you know, right now I, everybody talks about, but yeah, I have just one question about this, which relates directly to what we were talking about with a ready player one. And then the followup that was horrible. Uh, when you have a very successful debut novel as, as Andy Weir did with the Martian that was made into a movie, um, the, the tendency for these authors is to, to follow them up with something that is ostensibly not a novel, but a screenplay. Does this read as a novel

or a screenplay? Oh, 100% screenplay, but it's going to be a really good movie. Okay. All right. Well, knowing that going in will make me less angry. Yeah. Yeah. No, it reads like a screenplay. I, this is a, this, I could, you know, totally see this movie playing out and I'm just thinking about it in how they would shoot this as I'm reading it, you know, that's, that's kind of, that's kind of what I figured was going to happen, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but I do like to know that going. Yeah. I mean, look at Michael Crichton books. Those books were

good, but those are screenplays too. But if you, if it's done well, the story's great and it all kind of fits together, but I really enjoyed it. I haven't, like I said, I got, I gave it five stars on audible for both the story and the performance. And like I said, it was a really good performance.

She did a really good job. Well, I mean, she's an actress. Yeah. But some actors can't really do the audio book thing. Trust me. I've, I've, I've heard them all. Okay. Well, good to know. And because I've almost finished a book and we're taking next week off for Thanksgiving, this might be my followup and I'll have two for the next show. Right. Yes. I will definitely have at least one more for the next show. Security.

We are back for the security ha segment with the cyber wires. Dave Bittner. Jason is not here right now. I've checked all of his Chinese security cams. I checked his Amazon key cam. He is nowhere to be found. Right. He's out. He's taking Bam Bam for a quick walk around the block. Right. Yeah. He's actually up in San Francisco doing a very special couple recordings with his day job, the art of charm. So he was locked out for this time. I think we're going to try to, I'm going to try to catch up with him tomorrow to do the rest of the show, but he will miss this segment this time. So it is

our chance to make fun of Jason. Well, he's not here. Let's make fun of him. No, we would never do that. Not you. We would never do that. So I suppose we can just leap right into it. Then I believe Jason put a few stories in here for us. The first one that he mentions is all it took for researchers was a mask to bypass iPhone X face ID. Now it's a bit of a misleading title because it's a little bit more involved of a mask than say what you and I could go pick up down at Target or even make ourselves

with Adam Savage would have problems on Mythbusters making a mask to this degree. Yes. I was thinking of like a Scooby-Doo mask, you know, like, you know, I would have gotten into your iPhone X if it hadn't been for these kids and their dog. That's right.

Yes. This is a pretty sophisticated mask. And, you know, as soon as the iPhone X was released, the clock was ticking, right? It was the same thing with Touch ID. Any of these innovative security things? Somebody's going to break it. Somebody's going to hack into it. And so I don't think this is at all surprising to anyone. When we think about this, though, you know, you and I are thinking, oh, is somebody some some malicious friend of mine or I left my phone somewhere now they're going to be

able to get into my phone. The concern about this, I suppose, is is we're having these ongoing lawsuits with these things like these mass shootings and governments being able to open up a phone. And certainly a government would have the ability to create masks to this degree, thus kind of bypassing the whole need for there being the legal checks and balances and lawsuits that are going on about whether they should be able to do this at this point.

Right. And I suppose similar to how they can force you to submit your fingerprint and they can't force you to submit a password. I suspect they can force you to, you know, look at the iPhone to unlock it if they need to. Right. Yeah. So I think this is that same as we talked about before. If you're a person who needs a high level of security, chances are, you know it and you're going to use something

stronger than this. To me, this and Touch ID fall into the category of way better than nothing at all. So it's providing you with a convenient way to have added security for your phone for people who find passwords just slow them down. And what I've heard from folks who have Face ID that they love it because it just gets out of the way. They say after a few days with it, they don't even know it's there.

They just pick up the phone and boom, the phone unlocks. It's magical. Right. Again, I mean, I guess it's all progress or whatnot, but is it really so difficult to put your thumb on the phone as you're getting it out of your pocket anyways? But hey, progress moving forward. So I like the idea. But yeah, like you said, if you are really concerned about security, you probably aren't using an iPhone. Right. Other interesting aspects to this, we saw a couple of stories this week about family members being able to unlock phones. And of course,

Apple warned from the get go that twins would be able to unlock the phone. Identical twins would be able to lock the phone. Sure enough, some people have demonstrated that. There was an interesting one this week where a son was able to unlock his mother's phone. Wow. Well, there must be some strong genes between those two.

Well, it was funny too, because they interviewed the family and the father said, most people say that the son resembles me more than his mom. But I guess whatever the measurements that the system is taking, he aligns more with the mom than with the dad. So it's interesting. Another interesting point about this whole iPhone 10 thing with Face ID. Over on the Cyber Wire, we interview people pretty much every day. We have security experts who we talk to about various things. And one of the ways that

we find people to talk to is that PR people pitch us stories. And leading up to the release of the iPhone 10 and Face ID, I was getting lots of pitches from people all about what's Face ID going to mean? How is Face ID going to affect security? You know, how will people be prepared for Face ID?

And then once the moment the phone was released and Face ID was revealed and people saw it and used it, those pitches stopped because it works. Right. And so the fear factor was gone. Right. There's nothing to talk about. As Jason is always fond of saying, a tempest in a teapot.

Yes. Yes. Right. Exactly. Yeah, that does seem to be the case. I haven't come across anybody that's had any issues with actually using the iPhone X Face ID. Like you said, the people I know that have it love it. They have no problems with it. So. Yeah, I played with it in the Apple store for a little while, but haven't haven't pulled the trigger. Not quite ready to update my phone yet.

Right. So but now that that iPhone in the Apple store has your face pattern on it. Yes. It could be a problem. Yes. Don't do that, kids. It's like the old joke on The Simpsons. Ever touched a penny? Yeah. The government has your DNA.

Yeah. Well, there you go. Tinfoil hat territory. Here we come. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, Jason sent us another little link. This is actually really cool. Web K has done it or Robin Linus. And it's just a page that you go to that that basically scrapes every single bit of data that can be pulled by anybody with a web page about your system and the browser using your location. I you know, we this

has been part of the DOM since the beginning. A lot more limited. We get a lot more information now. I was even a little bit surprised because it's been like a year or two since I've done any really kind of deep development where I was trying to, you know, trying to pull out information from people's browsers and what's being passed on. There's a lot. There's a lot. And I'm running some, you know, I'm running opera and I'm running a lot of different blocking materials and things like that. But I'm

still surprised by how much information is actually being passed on. What I really like about this site is they have recommendations for every single section saying, if you do not want this information being passed on, use this. If you do not want this information, use this. So this is a handy little page. I tell I would recommend people go to our show notes and check it out. And if you are worried about your privacy and what your browser is telling everybody that wants to have access to it about you, this is a good page to check out. I mean, I was shocked to find out they could they know that

I'm logged into Dropbox, which is an application that isn't even running in my browser. Yes. My reactions are perfectly aligned with yours. It's surprising everything that they do know in here. Just it's all just here for the asking. I love the fact that they tell you how to block it if you want to. I feel a certain amount of, I guess you call it Stockholm syndrome to some of this now

where it's just like, you know, they, okay. Oh, they've got that. Yes, of course they have that. And they've got this. Yes, of course they've got that. And so the exact same feeling I get every morning when I launch Twitter and see the news. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Here we go again. Yeah. So it really is discouraging, isn't it? It really is discouraging.

What I seem to be discovering as a repeated theme is as I and Jason and you, we sit down and we put together the show every week now is this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. That is the overarching feeling I have almost every single time we do these shows now and we start talking about these stories and it's, but it wasn't supposed to be like this. You remember the excitement the first time you pulled

that 300 baud modem out of the box and yes. Yes. And all of a sudden I was getting like these, these bitmaps of, of Star Trek images that I couldn't have gotten anywhere else from, from, from a mail server that came from Sweden. Yes. I was like, wow.

Sometimes dial up BBSs talking to people all over the world. Yeah. And now they know you're using Dropbox. Yes, they do. Oh, well, uh, Jason also threw in the story about Google chief lawyer slamming the right to be forgotten. And this goes, uh, hand in hand with the GDPR that, uh, you keep touting and hope that will change the internet for the better. Yeah. This is an interesting story. Um,

and it's complicated. Basically in Europe, they have, you have a right to be, uh, delisted. So you can go to Google and say, I want, when you search on my name, this pops up. I don't want that to pop up when you search on my name. And the problem is what if the thing, you know, what if the thing is in the public record or yeah, the things like, uh, child molestation, things like, uh, prison records,

all that sort of stuff that Google is now arguing that the society has a right to know. Right. Right. And so that's basically what Google is pushing back on. There've been a handful of people who have said that they want certain, um, I guess, embarrassing information about them removed. I actually went through and looked up the, uh, court case. I don't know if you went through and dug that deep on it, but, um, I went and looked, I followed all the links all the way down the rat hole

and, uh, the requests that for the information they were removing, I think there's a part of this you're really going to enjoy. Um, first of it was, first was a video that explicitly revealed the nature of a relationship that an applicant was deemed to have, deemed to have entertained with a person holding a public office. Okay. So somebody was probably had a, I don't know, let's, let's just call it an affair or a inappropriate relationship with a politician or something.

And they want that scrubbed. Hmm. But, but that's not a big deal in Europe. That's right. Exactly. From what I understand. That's a good point. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. Uh, yeah. I, the thing is like who gets to determine what is what? That's the real question, right? Right. Here's, here's my favorite. Give me your favorite. Yeah. A press article relating to the suicide committed by a member of the Church of Scientology. Hmm. Mentioning that one of the

applicants was the public relations manager of that church. Now that's interesting, uh, mainly because, uh, the Church of Scientology are just, uh, relentless when it comes to having information removed or trying to control their narrative, things like that. Um, the others were various articles relating to criminal proceedings concerning an applicant, um, and articles related to the conviction of another

applicant for having sexually aggressed minors. Right. So, so, so here we're bumping up against our right to know. Yeah. If someone is convicted of sexually aggressing minors, that must be the European term for it. Um, I would imagine, I mean, do me and my neighbors have the right to search on that person's name and find the court document on that? Right. The public court document

on that. Well, one would think again, cause mostly they're discussing public figures here. One would think, okay, you can request some like crazy page on Reddit be taken down, but if you're a public figure and you've done something, isn't that going to be on times the New York times website, isn't that going to be on like reputable news journals? And you can't remove those, right? If it's news,

then it's news. Yeah. If it's just, I see it's, it's such a quagmire about who gets to decide what, and that's, that seems to be the real issue. And personally, I would rather Google's lawyers not be the ones that determine that, but that's just me. Well, the other thing I don't understand about this is that, is this simply a matter of what pops up when you search for my name? So, you know, for example, let's say I had done one of these bad things and you did a search for David Bittner and

it came up and said that, uh, well, let's choose the least bad of all these things. Um, criminal proceedings. Um, you know, I, I, I, uh, I don't know. I cut down my neighbor's tree without his permission. Right. So, um, not that I'd ever do anything like that, but, um, so, okay. So you search on my name that pops up, I contact Google and say, Hey, I don't like it when you search on my name and then it pops up. All right, fine. But if you search on, you know, the town Gazette tree

cut down David Bittner and the news story pops up to me, that's within the limits of what should be acceptable. And I don't know how this works. I don't know how the request to Google works. Yeah, I don't either. I guess we'll be finding out because this is part of, of what we're going to find out when this whole thing goes through in the UK. So yeah. Yeah. The other part of it is whether or not, uh, a request for a privacy request in Europe basically, um, has jurisdiction

over the entire planet over the whole world. Right. Yes. And that's a pretty big deal too. Well, it's really fantastically murky given everything is in the cloud now. And how do you define where in the world something is? Right. If a story is hosted and it happens to be on a server in the US, but it's returned as a result in the UK and you request in the UK, it's just, it's also

weird now. Well, and this is, uh, next year, Microsoft is going to face the Supreme court on this very issue with their data servers over in, uh, I think it's Ireland. Um, you know, whether or not data stored overseas is subject to being searched. If the fact that the data is overseas means it's not subject to us jurisdiction. So the Supreme court's going to have their go at that, um, in 2018. So

interesting times ahead, I think when it comes to data privacy, the cloud on trial. Yeah. World's getting a little smaller every day. Isn't it though? It really is. It's kind of crazy. Uh, so I did lead in talking about the Amazon key, um, seems from the, what could possibly go wrong file seems there's some problems with their security. Uh, they have not dialed that in yet. Uh, researchers from Rhino security labs found a way to disable the Amazon cloud cam, which is the safeguard for the Amazon key

service that would allow the lovely Amazon employees directly into your home. If you wanted them to, to drop off your socks and everything else that you get from Amazon these days, uh, the camera, basically just, uh, the, the hack will basically just bring up a still image of there. Nothing of nothing happening, which you could see. And Amazon would see possible thing that it could do, right? Like a black screen would be 10 times better than a freeze frame of the last thing of security cam was looking

at. Exactly. So, you know, then anybody could just walk in and go into your house and do whatever they'd like. And they'd not be detected by your monitoring of it or Amazon supposed monitoring of it. And Amazon of course provided a statement saying we notify customers if the camera's offline for an extended period. Technically the camera's not offline, is it? Well, yeah, I mean, I guess it is. I think so. I think so. And they've said they're going to have a fix soon. Um, you know, I, I say, I have to

say, um, I think it was, uh, Andy and not go. Who's a tech writer for the Chicago sun times. He was talking about Amazon and he said, uh, of, of Amazon, Amazon, he loves the fact that Amazon's attitude towards many of these sorts of developments is here, hold my beer, which is they're totally willing to try things and fail spectacularly, but at least they're out there trying. Well, I suppose that attitude would be okay. As long as I wasn't the first test case

people doing this sort of stuff, which is again, Jason and I often say we will wait for version two of almost any technology these days because nobody releases a version one people release version ones into the wild to see what's going to go wrong. That's the way it world works now. Well, you know, the other thing I was thinking about this is that particularly if I had a small business and, uh, when I had a small business, um, I really knew, I knew my UPS driver doing really well. He's there

pretty much every day dropping stuff off, you know, gave him a Christmas cards and all that sort of stuff. So, and often with a small business, there were times when the shop was locked up where we wouldn't get deliveries because there was nobody there. And so in this sort of case, if it was a situation where I knew who my delivery person was, I've known them for years. Um, and all of these safeguards are in place, I probably would be okay with having them. But that's at least in my area

of the world, that's not the way it is anymore. It's a different person all the time. It's shift work. It's, it's, it's not the same person. So yeah, I mean, you know, in the Opie and Andy version or Opie or whatever the show was back in that world, then yeah, that would make sense. I just don't see things being that way. The other thing that I had a real interesting problem with is I wonder who is crafting these Amazon responses and press releases because they, the company points out that while the camera may be disabled, staffers aren't allowed to unlock doors without authorization to deliver a

package. Amazon also claimed that it would be able to identify the couriers who all pass through background checks. If they tried to pull off such a heist, that only implies that only Amazon people would be able to use this hack. I'm not worried about the Amazon employees so much as I am the people that are very good at being able to hack things that are not working for Amazon.

Yeah. But let's be, I think, I think we're misunderstanding the hack though. I think what the hack does is it merely freezes the camera. The hack doesn't unlock the door. Right. So Amazon still knows who's unlocking the door and that sort of stuff. They just, you just lose your ability to see who's inside your house.

Yeah. Well, in one of the most terrifying episodes we ever did, and I can't remember that episode right now, we talked to somebody who deals with breaking real physical world things such as locks and how insanely easy it is and how it's kind of almost a joke that we lock our doors. Yeah. No, it's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Good times. And then, uh, this final story that we have, I found probably the most disturbing that we've done recently. Uh, why is this company tracking where you are on Thanksgiving? Uh, I assume you read through all of this. Yes. Yes, I did. This is really disturbing. Really, really, really, you know, I have to say, I've become a little numb to disturbing things in cybersecurity that I deal with this stuff every

single day, but this one, uh, got my, it takes the pumpkin pie as it were. It really does. So, uh, you want to do the rundown or shall I? Uh, sure. I'll, I'll do the brief intro, then I'll let you tell people exactly why it's incredibly disturbing. Uh, a few publications ran with a holiday theme data study about how families that voted for opposite parties spent less time together on Thanksgiving, especially in areas that saw heavy political advertising, which is an interesting finding about how partisan the country is becoming.

Uh, but what they used is a company called safe graph that provided them with 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones. The amount of big, this is big data actualized as a real fear. Cause we've often talked about whether we should be worried about data, big data or not. I would say after reading this article, Oh hell yes, we should be. Yeah. So here's what they do. Um, they figure,

figure out where an individual lives and the reason how they do that is they, they find the place where you are most often located between the hours of one and 4 AM. So when you're asleep, they look for your pattern of where you sleep and they figure, all right, that's where home is. Makes totally perfect sense. And then they look to see where those same people were between 1 PM and 5 PM on Thanksgiving day. Right. So now they know where you live. They know where you went. They know,

they know where your family members are. Right. Right. And they can associate this with all sorts of cell phone data. The story was, didn't really say that they could drill down and know who you are, but as we all know, that's not hard to do. Well, yes. They released multiple press releases from safe graphs partner where they said the company's location data is referred to as anonymized. And I love that the article put anonymized in quotes because when you're providing exact addresses,

it's not that anonymous anymore. Is it? Because now you can search the address. There are purchase records online. Yep. These are easily connected. And by the way, those records are required to be online. So that might go back to the Google discussion we were having previously, because if you buy a house that is public knowledge and everything about it is, is all your information is there and it's easily, easily connected to this location data. So it's not anonymous. No.

And as if that weren't bad enough, how does SafeGraph get the information? We give it to them. Yes, we do. You remember a few months ago, there was a brouhaha over, I think it was the AccuWeather app that was secretly tracking your location and uploading it. Well, that's basically what SafeGraph does. SafeGraph contracts with other companies who are,

they partner with apps. Could be anything, any kind of app. Oh, and by the way, if you're offering your app for free and you don't really make a lot of money from the advertising, as we all know that you don't, if SafeGraph comes along and says, here's $100,000, can we have your data? You're going to say yes. Right. Right. And that's what they do. So they gather all this data from these apps where people have given them, given the app permission to track their location because,

you know, your flashlight app needs to know that. And that's how the data gets uploaded just to SafeGraph. And then SafeGraph just sort of wipes their hands of it and says, you know, we don't have anything to do. Basically, the privacy component is totally up to our third-party providers. So we're just collecting the data. We don't have anything to do with the actual collection of it. That's between you and the, the, uh, skanky app that you downloaded that tracks your

information. Oh, Brian. What a world we've made, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, really, if the more you think about this stuff, it's just the more terrified I get.

It makes me want to like, I'm just going to start spending the night at random places. I'm not going to let you figure out where my house is. Right. The crazy thing is like, you can go through your phone and a lot of apps. Sure. You can turn off location data. And I'm sure somewhere buried deep in a term of service somewhere, these apps tell you if they're selling their data.

They don't specifically ever say if they're selling it to a company like SafeGraph. I didn't even know SafeGraph existed until I read this article. Um, we have no idea what's going on with all the stuff that we have on us on a daily basis. Now with all this technology, we don't know where it's going.

We don't know who's using it. It's, it's a terrifying thing and sure we can shut everything off. But if I shut off location data completely on my phone, I'm actually losing some of the valuable services I get from my phone. Right. And that's, and yeah, and that's part of the, that's another thing where the policy has to catch up with the technology because there's that whole thing with the policy with the legal framework where they say, well, by using sort of the, um, uh, what do you

call it? The, uh, the tracking of phones, you know, well, by using the technology you're submitting to being tracked and well, you know, that's, it's a different ball game now. If you're, you, the, the technology doesn't work the way it should, if you shut these things off. And so I, I, again, I, there's some hope in that. I think it'll be interesting to see when GDPR kicks in next year,

how much that does percolate around the world. Um, you know, eventually what I think maybe has to happen is somebody needs to just doing, start doing like a real time tracking graph of every single member of Congress. Right. Right. Well, I think, I think I've got a little project for the holidays. Right. Exactly. Cause if you could do that, I bet this would be shut down, but quick.

Yeah. That's a really good point. Uh, it, uh, we kind of almost need to point out to the people making our laws exactly what's going on and what better way to do it than by them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. With that, with that, uh, I'm thoroughly terrified. I look forward to Jason, uh, coming back, uh, not next week cause we will be taking Thanksgiving off. Yep. Safe graph will know, safe graph. We'll know where we all are. That's right. Have a happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Yes. Have a happy Thanksgiving as well. So when we're back in two weeks, Jason will tell us everything we got wrong. That's good. I look forward to that. Me too. All right. Take care. Take care. Atlas Obscura just constantly throws up some really interesting things. And since we just finished the library section and we've done a little bit of a book porn before on the show, I had to mention this one. This is the Yang Zhu Zhang Zhuk, I believe. Probably got that entirely wrong. I should have

asked my wife. It's a bookstore and library in China and it is stunning. Um, go to this show, go to the show notes, click through. This is gorgeous. This is one of the most beautiful libraries I've ever seen. Every now and again, I post pictures of library porn for Brian and this, this library was actually in one of those before, but now you can find out more about it. And it is what there's a lot more images. Yeah, it is cool. It is definitely cool as hell. And the cool

thing also about being at this Airbnb here is that, uh, the owners of the place that we're in here have a great taste in books. They've got the Atlas Obscura book that I was going to buy. So now I can check it out before actually dropping the coin. Yeah. Now we all know that the new star Wars movie, the last Jedi is coming out in about what is about a month now, a little, a little less than a month. It's getting close. Yeah. So they, you know, they had to make a

millennium Falcon to shoot the show. And what do you do with a millennium Falcon when you're done with it? What do you put in the garage? Uh, you know, well, Pinewood studios, one would assume. Yes. You would keep it there. But what they tried to do was just cover it with like around it with shipping containers, right? Because there are no drones. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean,

it's supposed to be camouflaged, so you don't know what's in it. And yes, if you fly over top of it, you could probably see it. Well, yes. Satellites happened to fly over top of it all the damn time. And Google earth had the picture of the millennium Falcon surrounded by the shipping containers. This has been out for a couple of weeks now, but I wanted to throw it in just in case you missed it because it is kind of funny. So definitely go to the link. Uh, I've got my, my link goes to business insider and they've got a photo of it. Or if you have Google earth, feel free to go try and dig it up and see

if you can find it yourself. Go hunt for the millennium Falcon, just like Jabba did. I suppose with all that Disney money, they couldn't really afford a big tarp. I wasn't even going to have a moron of the week this week, but this came across my desk this morning as I was just checking the, checking the morning news and the title is just what got me U S Navy

apologizes for pilot drawing dong in the sky. This, this, this Navy pilot decided, eh, what's the world need big dick in the sky. And he did it. He did a good job. He definitely did a very good job, but, uh, yeah, the Navy had to come out and apologize for it. So moron of the week is this pilot who is unnamed in the, the piece on TMZ, but, uh, you have to go click through and look at the

photo. Somebody is going to be a peeling potatoes for a long time. Yes, he is. Oh God. What a world. Feedback loop. We got some new donations over at Patreon. Thank you so much to the recap podcast and to Adam D and Rachel P and over at PayPal, Kira G. Thanks so much. We really appreciate the support. We thank you very much from the bottom of our heart over on Twitter. We got something from

Ben Stanley says, I really got to find a better use for Twitter. The cryptocurrency from this wind powered mining rig helps fund climate research. And we have a link to a story on digital trends where this guy basically rigged up a, uh, a whole kit with a windmill. It's kind of neat. Yeah. It's pretty neat. It's neat. That's Jason would say. And he also sent us, Oh my God, you mentioned Lord of the Rings on the show today. And then Amazon announces they are making a series. FB is listening

to you or Amazon or yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, we once mentioned David Bowie on the show and we all know how that kind of worked out. So now we're using our powers for good. Maybe Lord of the Rings. Who knows? Yeah. Orcs that look like ticks. Can't wait. Blue orcs. That's all we need. Well, you know, he, I mean, he named his rocket company blue origin. So blue orcs aren't too far out of the, out of the realm. No. All right. So over at gog.show, we got some comments. Neil V. Hi,

GOG. I'm a legal user of Cody. I've had a myth TV box since 2004 to record TV shows off cable over the air and play content from my local NAS media box. I recently switched this summer from myth TV to Cody because they have a better interface for the kids to play YouTube videos of Spider-Man, drug and murder Elsa without ads. Okay. Anyways, while I did not buy a pirate box from eBay, I took an old ultra slim PC flash the hard drive with, okay, it gets soon to super technical details. My question to you is what device do you use to play local media on your television?

I tried a Roku, which is great for Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix, but is lacking for local media. I have heard of Plex media server, but why provide a third party access to my media server and attempt to charge me for more features to use my files? Feel free to adapt and paraphrase to better fit the show. I have an Apple TV, which I find works far more consistently and smoother than the Google Chromecast that I also have available, but I no longer bother adding things to my iTunes media library. I just play them on my computer and shoot them over to Apple TV. To be fair, I don't do this

a lot, so I don't watch a lot of shows that way. So it's not a huge pain in the ass for me, but I can see how it would not be a viable option if you watch a lot of your entertainment that way. And obviously you do because you say you have your whole own media library. How very quaint. How very quaint. I have my own whole media library too, but I use my Synology NAS to do everything because you can basically get apps on the NAS to become a media server and a VPN. You get all sorts

of stuff. The Synology is pretty cool, but it runs through my Roku TV, which has a media player built into it. So anything that is broadcasting to the network, I can just browse and play. I used to use an Apple TV and the way I would do it, I would handbrake files that weren't MP4s or M4Vs or whichever MP whatever codec that Apple will use to play through iTunes because everything that you

usually get is an MKV or an AVI. So the nice thing about the Synology is you don't have to do that cross rip unless it's an AVI. It doesn't take AVIs, but it's a great way to do that with my Roku TV. I don't have a Roku stick, so I don't know if that media player is in the stick, but I bet it would be because it is just a network interface to media on the network. But I don't like doing airplay like

Brian does or shoving it to the Chromecast. It just always seems to be a little bit too laggy. So I just went with the Synology. You can get a cheap one, just throw one or two drives and you're good to go. I think the base Synology you can get is like 200 bucks and then it's just the cost of the hard drives. Yep. All right. Next up comes from Steve Main. So here's something scary guys to add to the FB is watching. I clicked on an article in my feed and my email address that I only use with

Facebook was automatically populated. How is it possible CBC has access to this data? I tried it on two different devices with two different accounts and same results. Scary as hell. Facebook is providing this kind of data to a site when you click on a link. Also, I have screenshots of this. Also, if you would like to see it, love the show guys. I found you because I left Twit TV because of Leo Laporte's sexist comment on the show. As a 38 year old IT guy, I love hearing

IT talk from others. Well, Steve, if you think that the Facebook is only providing email, you're in for some shocks. Look, at some point you probably, the pop-up window probably appeared super quick and you just kind of clicked on it accidentally that gave CBC the right to have access to the data. End of story. And they have a lot more than your email, I promise you. Yeah. And it, but it could also be your browser. If you have saved passwords on and autofill on, it could have just populated straight

from that because it's an email field and boom, there you go. Yeah. There's a, there's a couple different, uh, ports of entry here that it could be. So, uh, but, uh, yeah, if you, if you find it scary, the idea that Facebook has your email and shares it with people, you're going to be really terrified if you delve into deeper into this. Don't open the kimono, dude. Don't open the kimono.

Yeah. Next up is from Antti. You guys have the best podcast ever. I'd love to listen to you every week and have been spreading the word. Please keep up the good work. If you like Finnish accent and who doesn't, I would like to hear to have here what a smart industry leader has to say about machine learning and AI, but do not want to hear AI bullshit or someone selling you something.

Listen to this. And there's a YouTube link to a talk. I'd love to hear how you would compare this guy to your favorite Elon Musk. Um, it's an hour and some odd long. I did enjoy his accent, but I didn't watch the whole thing sadly, but he seems like a knowledgeable guy. Alrighty. Next comes from Levi T. I've been trying to post an iTunes comment for three weeks now, and I can't find it. I must not be posting. My original review was a little bit shorter, but something like this. I'm not going to read the whole review here, but here's the tip. The line in

the middle goes, you guys are fucking hilarious and keep up the fantastic work. Note to everybody who's trying to leave an iTunes review. You cannot swear in an iTunes review. They will just reject it. Yeah. Thanks Levi. And because Apple has awesome user interface, they don't tell you that your review is being rejected or anything. It just doesn't appear.

Yeah. And another, another little side note is if you're going to write a review, write it in a text document before and then paste it in. Because if you're doing it for the first time and you set up a new username and that username's already taken, it will clear the fields and say, give us a new username and start all over again. Happens all the time.

Because again, these are billion dollar companies that don't think about the basics of UI, even though we managed to build this into everything that you and I built all our lives. In 1996, we could keep state in a form. Jesus. It's so fucking frustrating. Anyways, next up is Jake. I was wondering if either of you use a system optimizer and if you have one that you would recommend. Finally, is it worth it to purchase the

full versions? All right. So I wrote Jake back. I use CleanMyMac 3. The problem is Jake's on a PC. His girlfriend's on a Mac though. So she's going to get the recommendation for CleanMyMac 3. But since you were a PC guy, I was wondering if you have, if you remember any recommendations for this from the olden days of what, like six months ago when you were still using PCs?

It's been a lot longer than six months, Jason. And there was an array of different ones that you have to use on a PC. Let me put a button on this and come back to it next week. And I will go back and find out the names of all of them. Because yeah, there's, oh man, you have to use so many different things to clear up your PC.

Okay. Yeah. Let me know too, because I've got a PC laptop at home that I'm honestly scared to turn on. Yeah. Understandable. I found out though that since I'm on Xfinity, you can go get a free version of, let's see, there's Symantec or Norton that will run virus checking for you for free. So I'm running that, but I'm still terrified to turn that thing on. That's how, doing security for so long,

it's like having a PC just means to me, it's like, okay, why bother? You're owned. Yeah. It's not that bad, but yeah, straight out of the box. It kind of is. Okay. This next one comes from Jimmy Hanson. Love the show, guys. You're awesome. Enjoy your puns and rants all the way from Sweden. Woohoo. But please, for fuck's sake, stop saying mea culpa all the time. Have an awesome day and keep rocking. When did we ever say mea culpa?

We've done it a few times and I think it's important for us to admit when we're wrong on those rare cases that we do. Okay. I was just wondering if we actually use the same, the actual words mea culpa. I know I say we fucked up all the time or yeah, we were really wrong about that one, but yeah. Oh, you know what it was? It was last week. I remember now it was last week because we had a couple, a couple brain farts on a few things, but yeah, yeah, we don't give a shit anymore. If we're wrong, we're wrong. Screw it. Yeah. And thanks Jimmy for keeping all those

legal downloads that I get there in Sweden for us. Keep them coming. Yeah. Next up, Ted from Chicago, your neck of the woods, Chase. Maybe he'll come over and play Cards Against Humanity with you. He's probably allergic to dogs like everybody else. Have y'all seen the new timeline feature in Google Maps? It's pretty freaky and accurate. I mean, it's good if you need to CSI a blackout, but otherwise having Google track me everywhere is super weird. It even gives you a GPS map. What do you all think?

Same thing we've been thinking since day one, turn this shit off. Yeah. I've never had that on. Not once. As soon as they had the blog post about search history and they showed you where the off box was, I clicked it. It's off. That's why I look on my Android phone.

I can't use Google Assistant for almost anything because my search history doesn't exist on Google. Well, I'm sure. Look, let me rephrase that. My search history exists on Google, but they pretend it doesn't exist and won't show it to me. But yes, the long awaited discussion I want to have about what delete actually means. Yeah, you sure as shit know that that that history is behind the curtain. But since I put I put I hit the on button for my privacy, they just close the curtain

and don't let me see it. But they have full access to it. Mm hmm. Anyway, next one comes from Jordan Hintz. Hey, love the show. Found a discussion about 23 and me releasing our DNA. Interesting. And was wondering if that would ever happen. And then I found this, which is a news article about how the police can legally use 23 and me and other ancestry tools to obtain your DNA. But they can

already do that with a court order to just force you to get swabbed or take your hair. So that doesn't surprise me. I guess it's if you're unavailable for, you know, to to actually physically be swabbed. But and it doesn't say anything about insurance companies, but many of the companies are willing to and some already have given DNA information over to the police. I might have missed you talking about the police already. And if that's the case, or you already heard about this another way, feel free to ignore this message. Well, we hadn't heard about it. So I didn't ignore it.

No. And as as we discussed in that second time that we really talked about it, we went through an article that talked about the privacy policies in terms of services from from from 23 and me and some other ones. And basically, they can do whatever the fuck they want with your information. It was very clear.

So yes, you are no longer you. No. Next up is from Ben Floyd. Hey, Brian, I heard you talk about pepper plate on the face booty show and wanted to see if you checked out paprika. It's an app as well. I'm a dad who does all the cooking in the house. And I love this app. It has versions for all the devices we use has a sync function. So once we paid once for the account, and my wife and I can both add recipes import export to a variety of formats, he goes deep into the feature list here. Yeah, I mean,

I did I did check out pepper paprika briefly. It's quite pricey for what it does. Yeah, it looked really nice. I did a trial of it a couple months back. And I was like, Oh, this is super, super nice. And then I found pepper plate, which has every single same feature except for the sync. But then my wife could just log in using my account. We don't have to have separate accounts on her device and do the

same thing. So that's free. So free beats expensive. Yeah, I looked at it looks like it's got a good interface and everything. But when you look at $15 for the Mac app, then another three bucks for the iOS app. And I don't know if that's a iPhone only or if it's iPhone and iPad hybrid, or if you're just screwed on the iPad, I don't know. But yeah, for 20 bucks in pepper plate, there's the same thing, which I haven't gotten a chance to try yet, because I've been prepping for this trip. But when I get

back, I'm definitely getting my pepper plate on because I've got it installed. And I've got all my recipe cards and everything that I want to get in there. So I'll be able to chime in on this in a couple weeks. Yeah, I mean, paprika is definitely prettier and good on you, Ben, for paying for software and supporting people. I probably should do that as well. But I'm really new to this. And I don't even know if I'm going to stick with doing recipes digitally. So I wanted to just basically try something out for free. And pepper plate is serving that purpose quite well.

Yeah. Did you order your Amazon fire tablet? No, not yet. I haven't had a chance. And besides, we're getting close to Christmas. So yeah, since I got those two fire tablets, the first thing I did was I found the HD eight and installed installed pepper plate on that. So that's where I'm ready to go. That's my it's my cooking tablet. Right. And you can also use it as a chopping board if you run.

Yeah, might as well. Okay, we're finally into the iTunes reviews. Thanks, guys, for stepping up and getting us some new iTunes reviews. We got a bunch here. Thomas McNeil writes, nerds better. They suffer through the mess. So I don't have to. That's correct. That's actually a friend of mine. IRL. So hey, thanks for cup. Appreciate it. Bravo. Next up comes from Karen 007. Awesome show. I love this show. Great work. Sure. Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you. Like that five

stars. Yeah. Preach. Preach. Preach. Next. And next up is Kitty X, who also gave us a five star rating. One of the best podcasts. Love you guys. I enjoy listening to all this content weekly and three hearts. Woohoo. And after that, M Fierro. Also a five star rating. Many try. GOG succeeds. Many podcasts try to provide a good weekly tech review, but they lack the substance of GOG. Damn right they do. All right. Last one comes from Zed9. I'm guessing that's how

it's pronounced. It's an odd spelling, but cynicism at its best. The grumpy geeks, Jason and Brian and security expert Dave Papa Roach Bittner continue to impress week after week with entertaining insight into the tech and entertainment industries, as well as why our world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's a must listen. I agree. Zed9. Me too. Thank you. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. If you're so inclined, please head

over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. And don't forget, tell your friends. Closing shout outs. So my closing shout outs go out to David Teeter, friend of the show, Chen, his lovely lady who we love so much. Jordan Harbinger and his lovely wife, Jen, for making this trip so amazing so far.

And another shout out to my good friend, Kevin Rose, who I got to hang out with a little bit yesterday. And if you're bored on Thanksgiving, you can go download his new episode at theartofcharm.com. Very nice. I want to give a shout out to Gianluigi Buffon. He is the legendary Italian goalkeeper who, unfortunately, Italy is not going to the World Cup next year for the first time since 1952, I believe. Yeah, it was a big deal that Italy failed to qualify. And it's a very sad thing because Buffon is

one of the he's 39 years old, very old. That would have been his final World Cup. He is legendary. So it's very sad that they have made it. So the diving Missouri dies again. Anyways. Oh, well, no World Cup for you. And also a shout out to news that just broke as we started to record. ACDC's Malcolm Young has died at 64, one of the founding members. So I'm sad to hear that. Yeah. Oh, man.

This is the first time you've had breaking news that I didn't know about. I'm finding out about from the show. What the hell? My Facebook feed is just full of tributes to him. So, you know, ACDC legendary band, sad news and far too young. Although I'm sure he packed a lot of partying into those years. Yeah, that's probably a rough 64. Yeah. And just to let everybody know, we are actually taking next week off for Thanksgiving. So enjoy your turkey day. We both got family commitments and

things to do and it's a short week and to hell with it. We deserve a break. I want some stuffing and cranberry sauce. God damn it. That's right. So we'll be back with you after the Thanksgiving break. Have a good one, everyone. Until next time, I'm Brian Schillmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal

button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 236. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions and get links to the stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you in two weeks. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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