237: Dad Jokes

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promo code GOG to make it free. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We are back after our break. How was your holiday? It was great. It was exhausting. Sister came down, her two kids, my kid, exhausting everywhere, but ate lots of turkey. There you go. There's always that. Didn't look at tech news for a whole week. It was glorious. The problem with not looking at tech news is then the rest of the news was front and center. And I'm like, I don't have my tech news

to buffer it. Damn it. Or to dilute, you know, I dilute all the fields with the tech news of all the other crap that's out there. And I didn't have any fields dilution. So it was kind of miserable to just, and I avoided it, but it still seeps in everywhere, no matter where you turn.

Yeah. Now I got it. I do have a little bit of followup. Yes. And I think this was like months ago that we talked about this. We're talking about robo calls. Yes. And you are getting inundated with robo calls big time. A very specific, I was getting inundated with, uh, this is the police or the federal Bureau of investigation, uh, tax, uh, tax, whatever. And it was all, you know, it was ridiculous. They were all prerecorded, uh, bull crap about how supposedly I was in trouble with the government. And I, this is the last chance. Otherwise I'd be going to jail and I just

needed to call back this number and give them information and pay them lots of money. And I was getting, I'd say two a day for a period of almost two months. Yep. And, uh, but you don't, you haven't gotten those anymore. Have you? No, they've completely stopped. Well, it turns out that the federal government has been doing its job after all. Why? Hey, they identified six of the companies that were doing this and, uh, 24 of them have been taken into custody. And, uh, basically the last head guy in the U S has pleaded guilty. There are 32 more

suspects who do remain at large in India, go figure. And, uh, so you may get these again in the future, but yeah, for the most part, it looks like they got them. Good. I, yeah. Hey, I, thanks for not firing everybody. And some people in our, in our government are still doing what they should be doing. You know, do not call lists don't work. None of that stuff works anymore. So we need these task forces out there taking these people down because I mean, they're scary notices, you know, they really are. And if you're not savvy to this stuff and, and, you know, having worked on the

internet for, uh, way too damn long, I I'm aware, you know, we know I I'm immediately suspect of everything. I assume scan until proven otherwise, but most people don't do that. You know, I think about my parents, if they were to get to call like this, they would probably call the number. Yep. So I've unfortunately had many, many, many, many, many, many dealings with the IRS. And I know there's one thing that they do not do and that's call you. No, they do not call you. They just send

you angry letters. They send you very scary letters, which is a little bit worse, but yeah. So I'm glad this has been shut down. Yeah. I wish the do not call list actually worked because I was looking at my block list on my phone the other day. It is long. Yeah. Mine too. Really, really long.

Yeah. I don't get these tax calls anymore, but at least one or two a week, uh, of, you know, random sales things and random, you know, just random scams. It's, it's, uh, it's, well, I guess it's the downside of everybody getting rid of their landlines and only having cell phones because now they target cell phones. Yeah. And they do that really crafty thing where they will take your area code and then the first three numbers of your prefix. And then just, yes, they, if they have a random number that matches that in their pool, they will call you from that. So it looks

like it's somebody in your neighborhood, but that's only clever until you know the secret. Like now I would never, I don't know anybody in my neighborhood. I just don't answer any call that comes from a similar number to mine. Exactly. I don't either. Cause my phone's from San Francisco, right? You know, it's like, I definitely don't have anybody calling me from San Francisco, especially not the exact number that I signed up for. Somebody could be calling you with a great

job offer. Come back and work at a startup, Jason. No, thank you. Brian, you have talked about regulation in Bitcoin for quite some time saying we need more of it. We need more of it. We need more of it. Regulation that is not Bitcoin. Well, we've got tons of Bitcoins around. We've got all kinds of coins. Um, I, I believe in regulation. I like regulation. I like bigger government.

So you're a liberal cuck. Yeah, I am. I'm just a liberal cuck, but, um, particularly when it involves, uh, you know, people's livelihoods. I think regulation is good. I think regulation should definitely exist for startup currencies. We have mildly differing opinions on this. I think if you're dumb enough to invest in it, you're dumb enough to lose it, but, uh, we can talk about that later.

Uh, Bitcoin futures trading just got the green light from us regulators though. So you will be able to make money on Bitcoin and not actually own any soon. Right. Which is fine. I guess that's my, why not? You know, we, we, we legalize gambling on everything. We don't call it gambling.

We call it trading, but it's called futures trading. Yes. Futures trading is gambling. And, uh, sure. Yeah. I'm down with that. No problem with that whatsoever. If this thing is going to exist, why not? But you're betting on something that isn't regulated. So isn't there. So the betting portion is regulated, but what you're betting on is not. Yes. Kind of odd, isn't it? Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, okay, we're going to have football betting, but we're not going to have anybody regulating if the players are on steroids or cheating or colluding, you know, it's like,

Hmm, cause there's a lot of Bitcoin people out there who, who make these markets fluctuate massively with, you know, just moving some coin around. And I think this just opens it up for another wave of people to game the system. Well, it does. And, but I, my feeling is this, it's, it's a temporary situation. The only way that any of these, uh, Bitcoin, we just use Bitcoin generically, like we say Kleenex now, right? That's the way it works. And the only way that

any, any one of these things is going to exist, become mainstream and become formalized and become a real thing is for it to get regulated. And that's coming. Governments are not going to just let this keep going. It's just not going to happen. Yeah. The thing is though, it's kind of like, since it's just technology and it's just out there in the ether and that anybody can download the software and make their own coin. How do you regulate like the smaller stuff? Yeah. That's the way I see it going. And the, you know, the futures trading isn't going to be on the smaller

stuff where people just made it. It's going to be on the established big things. And that's what's going to create a real, yeah, a real financial market for this. So. Yeah. Well, that's all I had on the, the futures trading because I will not be doing either. I'm still trying to work through the book, but I think learning how to program Bitcoin and learning more about just the more fundamentals of it, maybe not the best way to go about it. Here's the problem I think I'm having with it.

When I open up the Bitcoin book, I am so fucking bored. I fall asleep. I can't get through more than like five or 10 pages. And I'm like, Oh really? I really just don't care about it enough. I need to find, I need to find something that grabs me with it. And so far it's just, you know, there's, there's nothing that's really got out, got me juiced about it because I'm not buying it because I don't believe in it. And neither do you. So we need to find somebody to come on the show to

be our, our, our cryptocurrency czar. I actually think I might have someone. So stay tuned. We, there's a friend of mine that's very into this. You can tell people that are very into Bitcoin and this sort of stuff because they become basically crazed evangelists that, you know, ignore all the bad news and just continue to push, push, push. You should buy, you should buy, you should buy. It's the best thing ever. They're like vegans at a dinner party. They won't shut the fuck up. Exactly.

So I'll get one of those guys on. Yeah. Right. Uh, we, this comes from Victor, uh, Kinnikin sent, I don't know where he sent this in from might've been on Facebook or Twitter's who I can't remember. The tweets. Okay. Well, Victor sent this one in and the Ethereum startup just vanished after people invested $374,000. So Kickstarter is not the only new way to scam money out of people. I mean, this is the, this is what interests me in, in Bitcoin. This is, this is

or Ethereum or whatever the hell you want to do it. This is my end. I like watching people get bamboozled. Yeah. And I like, it's called Khan Fido. So it's got Khan, it's got Khan right in the name. Come on. Right there, right in the name. Unbelievable. Yeah. This is, uh, this is the problem with lack of regulation. And I found an article that kind of perfectly encapsulated my entire thoughts on Bitcoin. Uh, the title alone is basically almost all you need. Hey idiots,

you're going to lose all your money on Bitcoin idiots. This is over at Splinter news. Bitcoin is fake and a made up scam. Can you articulate what it is? Bullshit jargon. That means nothing. You hell no. All we can say for sure about this imaginary coin is that school is going to cost you a bundle sucker. Now you can go ahead and just read this whole thing. And, and obviously the evangelist will say this is a load of shit, but, uh, you know, if you're, this is very funny and I agree with this article a hundred percent, go check it out in the show notes. And, uh, I posted this

on my social feeds and a friend of mine on Facebook, read the article and, uh, she posted, I mean, isn't all cryptocurrency a fake and made up scam. I do press releases for penny stock companies starting up their own cryptocurrency every day of the week. Weed coin, bitweed, crypto loose. And those are just from this week. So yeah, it's a, you know, and, uh, of course, friend of the show, David Teeter sent us some really interesting things. Uh, this is all about cryptocurrencies.

And if it is true, he says they should be immediately banned. And he sent us two links. One is a gigantic Reddit thread on, uh, Bitcoin power consumption. And the other is from power compare.co.uk, which says Bitcoin mining is now consuming more electricity than 159 countries, including Ireland and most countries in Africa. So awesome use of our natural resources.

Way to go guys. Yeah. So I agree with this. I mean, that's a stunning amount of electricity being consumed, uh, just for Bitcoin, because a bunch of people are scamming the system to get rich really quick. That's awesome. I mean, it's not scamming the system. It's, it's what it's built to do. You're supposed to mine the coin to make the coin so you can have the coin, but it's just, it's part of the stupid system.

And it's in that my, I have a little funny followup here because, uh, this is from futurism. Energy saving led light bulbs are contributing to light pollution. So we finally have these new energy efficient lights that save us electricity that people can then go use on Bitcoin and people are installing them everywhere. But the problem is they are much brighter in some cases and they can run all the time. So they're lighting up their cities at night, which is just making light pollution worse.

Look, it's human nature, isn't it? It's such a, it's such a commentary on just who we are as a, as a people. I I'm guilty of this. I put in led light bulbs throughout my entire house. I will just kind of leave them on. I forget. Or I just go, it's no big deal. It's not really costly to be anything. My bill is down a lot. I won't like, uh, I'll just leave a light on when I leave the house, which in the past I'd never would have done before because I'll just, I'll have already put my shoes on and I'm like, I'm not going to walk back to the bedroom. It's an led.

No big deal. Yeah. It's so funny. Like we grew up with everybody telling us and training us to turn the lights off when you leave a room because it's wasteful. And now, yeah, who cares? And I get these, my electric bills. I get these graphs. I don't know if you have this out there yet, but mine shows me my usage, what is like common. And then it compares me to my neighbors and shows me where I rank in my neighbors and it gamifies my damn electricity bill.

That's kind of cool. I don't get that. My electricity bill shows me my own previous usage, like from last year or the year before, or however long I've been signed up with them, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. It shows me my year before rate, the current rate, but then also what an efficient home looks like. And then what my neighbors look like. And last year I was kicking everybody's ass, right? I mean, I had almost no electricity usage because I never left my room. You know, I got my computer here. I'm typing away, doing my thing. And I was just killing it. And this

year, like halfway through the summer, I got my, my bill and I was like double the neighborhood average. And I'm like, what happened? Dawn's on me. I got, uh, let's see here. I got an Xbox one, which is always plugged in, but it's, it does that phantom power thing, you know, that vampire power where it's, it's not really on, but it is, uh, it is. Yes. Yep. Uh, big TV, same thing. And a bunch

of other stuff like Apple TV, like basically my whole media center. And what I realized was, Hey, you know what? If I just flip the power switch on the power strip and turn that off so nothing's leeching, even though everything is off, right? Nothing is technically on. If I turn off the power strip, my use, my electrical usage for the month went down by like 30%.

That's crazy. It is insane. And I also got one of those power strips that, um, has like a master. So you can plug your TV into it and then everything else in the strip is off until you turn the TV on, which also cuts down on that kind of stuff. But yes, welcome to electricity matters here on grumpy old geeks. I just thought it was just, you got me on the led light bulb thing, but yeah, it's an easy way to save a lot of, a lot of money on the electricity. Cause you know, I think my bill went down

like 70 bucks just by flipping off the TV that I wasn't using anyway. All right. Well, next week we'll talk conserving water. Yes, we will. And now in the week after that mulching for fun and profit, you can get one that looks like the best star. God, uh, speaking of the death star, Microsoft has a new headquarters that they just unveiled that they will be building. And I thought this was interesting because I looked at him like, look, it looked like a decent campus, nothing crazy, like a spaceship or anything. You know, they weren't, they weren't going full death star.

Have you been to their campus before? No, I've not. I've been to both Apple and Microsoft's. Well, not Apple's new one. Um, Microsoft's campus is great. I, I'm happy that they're revamping it and doing some rework on it, but it's a beautiful campus. Lots of open green space. It's awesome. Well, the thing that caught my eye was there are two giant soccer fields.

Yes. So I thought, I thought that was actually pretty cool. I'm like, they have two little, little baseball diamonds and then two massive soccer fields. I'm like, ah, somebody likes the footy over there. That's right. Well, Seattle is of, is quite the, uh, quite the football town up there. Really? I figured it'd be raining too much.

Well, Seattle's team is great. Uh, and the huge, huge fan base. So kind of makes sense. Oh, wow. Okay. Uh, I found this article in tech crunch this next one. We're going back to some self-driving car news. I had no idea GM was so far along in their technology, right?

They've got a fleet of self-driving cars continually on the streets of San Francisco. Really? And yeah, I thought that wasn't supposed to be legal. That's why everybody went to Phoenix. No, no, no. Here's the, here's the thing. There are Uber got in the news because they didn't get the license.

Oh, right. The regulations. Yeah. They didn't get the license. And then the first day it ran two stoplights. So yeah, that's why they were in the news. If you follow the rules, you can be driving around with your, uh, they've got a, it's called a cruise. Uh, and it's pretty damn ugly. Did you take a look at it? Yeah, it is. It is. It's yeah. It's right at a demolition man. It really looks like it could be in demolition now, but yeah, these things are, these things

are cooking around San Francisco. So I, I think G like GM has been trying to kind of stay under the radar, no pun intended, or stay under the lidar and are just going to come out like a juggernaut at some point and just crush everybody. Well, it would make sense. They've certainly got the market share and, and you know, they can do it.

Well, and the brain trust and the, yeah, you know, they know how to make cars. Everybody else is sticking around with other stuff. And he's like, we've been making cars for a really long time. So we're just going to slap some lidar on it and off we go. That's right. Now let's talk about AI for a second. Okay.

Your favorite topic. Yes, it is. NASA has an AI drone that they call it. And they put it up against a human pilot and it lost. Now, I found this one on the verge and the whole thing, watch it, watch the big NASA AI drone race thing. So I went and I watched it. They start off the video by saying, we built this, we built this course and then we mapped it. And then we downloaded the map to the drone.

I'm like, if you're drawing a map and you're giving it to the fucking drone, that's not AI. You just gave it a map. I told it where to fly. It's a self-driving drone with a map. It's a self-driving drone with a map. Where's the AI and all that? Tell me, tell me that. There isn't any, there isn't any. And that's why I had to put this next story in our show notes as well, which I would have ignored completely. Facebook is using AI to tell if you're suicidal. Here's what this really means. This entire article isn't about Facebook's

system, which supposedly will cap, you know, it'll warn you and say, do you need help and offer help if, if Facebook thinks you're posting things that may mean you're suicidal. This entire article is about, it's not fucking AI. Right. But at least, hey, this is awesome.

In the title, they actually did put quotes around AI. They put quotes around AI and they go to great lengths in this article to say it is nothing other than pattern recognition. Yeah. And then a human actually looks at it. So again, again, people, where's the fucking AI? No, this is sentiment analysis and, you know, basically decision trees.

I like how like a month and a half ago we said we were done with this and we're right back at it. They won't stop talking about it. So I guess, yeah. I know. It's gotten to the point where like when Subway opens up a new store, they say they're going to have AI subs. Right. It's freaking ridiculous. So let's talk about another company that you and I both love, Snapchat.

Oh, well, I just don't care about Snapchat. But yeah, well, they've realized that all of us oldies don't care about Snapchat and that's a problem for their market share. So they've rolled out a completely new design that gets rid of the, you know, mystical Harry Potter esque lack of complete user interface and actually has a real UI to it. So we understand what we're doing. Not that any of us are going to get on it anyways. But they also have a plan to save us from fake news.

What is their plan? What is the plan? Well, their high minded plan is to clearly separate social stream from the news stream, which is exactly what Facebook has discussed already doing as well. So except maybe it'll work, except maybe it won't because none of us are on Snapchat and we don't care. And it might work on Facebook, but Facebook is doing it for obvious other reasons. What they're doing it for is to screw businesses and make you pay to show up in the regular stream as opposed to the page stream. That's all Snapchat's really going to do as well. We all know that,

that all of a sudden other things are going to be inserted into our separate social stream if they paid for it. Okay. And I don't really know. I don't think separation is really going to work, but who knows? It's obviously the bandwagon idea right now because some hack tech writer over at Slate, Emily Mulholland, has come out with her big article basically arguing that Instagram now needs to do this as well. Okay. So Facebook is doing it. Snapchat just did it. And you came up with a brilliant

idea of an article to say that, hey, Instagram should do this. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah. Now I might have to take a look at Snapchat again just to see what they're doing because I don't know anybody that's ever gone to Snapchat for their news. Do you?

No. And we keep hearing reports and articles and statistics that the millennials are getting their news from Snapchat. I don't entirely buy it. I don't know. Then again, I don't really know any millennials anymore. So yeah. Yeah. I don't think I do either. Who knows? Well, I don't don't rush to check your Snapchat yet because I think this is this is a rolling out process because I looked at Snapchat before the show just to see if I if there was anything I could say about it. And I still have the old version. So I don't have a

the newly updated old fogey version yet. Okay. Well, let me know when the fogey version hits and I'll go snap it up. See what I did. We'll do. Yeah, I see. Oh, my God. Net neutrality news. Here we go again. Here we go again. I don't know about you, but I mean, I've gone. I filled out all the petitions done my done my duty. I've even made some phone calls. You've made some phone calls. I have. I've called my Congress people. Wow. Look at you. This is important.

This is a big issue. And I can't believe I'm still arguing with people about it. I got in a Facebook argument. And somebody was like, you just need to look at who's backing it. All the tech companies are backing it. Yes, because they're tech companies. Yeah. And that's how they make their living. It's on the Internet. And they don't want to pay the government more or they don't want to pay Comcast more to get their stuff promoted. They want it free and open and let the best man win. And they've got all the monies anyways. Okay. Yeah. We've got a couple links in the show notes this week. The

problem is it's like trying to pick and choose which are the best net neutrality articles. It's almost impossible because it's just everywhere. I can't spit without hitting a net neutrality article and how the sky is falling. It's terrible. And I agree. It is. It is terrible. I've done everything I can now. So I actually haven't done everything I can because I have not called my congressman. I have to figure out who that is. But I'm sure that there's a service out there that will do it for me and tell me where to go. I will check that out this week. Yeah. And I hope

that we don't have to explain what net neutrality means and getting rid of it and what their plan is and how it's going to affect us to anybody that's listening to the show anymore. But if we do, we have links in the show notes. You're going to get charged a lot more and you're going to get certain things shoved down your throat, whether you like it or not. It'll be, hey, if you want Twitter, that's $3. If you want Facebook, that'll be another $3.50. And it's, yeah. And if you really like Hulu, but Hulu's made their deal with Comcast and Comcast's your provider, they're

going to shove Netflix down your throat and you're going to have, you're going to have really bad buffering issues with Hulu. That's the way it works. That's not fair. It's bullshit. We should dig up the old Ask a Ninja net neutrality video. I got to find that again. That was, that was one of the best ones. Still relevant. Well, and Jason, if you do decide to call your congresspeople, it may not make a bit of difference whatsoever because according to Hacker Noon and one particular guy over there who's done a deep dive study himself, this guy, Jeff Cow, he's a data scientist, a software engineer, language nerd,

and big law refugee. He has done a natural language processing. Thank you so much for not saying AI. Although this, this article probably would have gotten passed around a lot more if he would have. He used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April through October, 2017. And as he says, the results are disturbing. What he has discovered is that basically more than a million pro repeal net neutrality comments were likely faked.

Basically, bots are going in there and saying, no, we want this repealed. So all of us saying, no, we don't want this repealed are being beaten by bots. Okay. Has he figured out who did it? Because that's the really interesting thing. No, no. So far, he's just able to kind of use this processing to figure out that at least a million of these things are definitely just complete spam and bullshit.

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help. That's freshbooks.com slash grumpy and enter grumpy old geeks in the how did you hear about a section. A couple weeks ago, I started talking about an app that I was using called Day One to do my journaling throughout the day. Yes. Day One is now Day None for me. A little problem they have there with their app. I would open it up in the morning. I would go create a new entry. I would type into it

for about 10 or so minutes. I would hit done and then it would erase everything I just did. Well, that would be the exact opposite of what you're trying to accomplish then. It's a text editor that cannot save the file. You had one job. One job. How much did you pay for this again? A lot of money.

Are you going to get a refund? I would. I am going to. Oh, wait, no support. Actually, they do have support. Oh, here's the funny thing. So I went to the site to try and get to support, but they had a live chat thing. So I opened the live chat and said, hey, we're not here right now, but leave your message and we'll get back to you generally within a day. So type the message. I'm like, is this a known bug? Because this is bullshit. And I got a note back a little bit. Well, actually, let me back up the truck for a second. I wrote that and then I'm like, hey, let me go to

the main site and see if I can find a support thing where I can open a ticket like a normal person would. So I go to log in and then it says, you know, log in with your Apple ID because I bought it through the Apple store. So I try to do that 500 token error on not being able to log in. So I go back to the chat and I type in, here's another bug you got. Is this a known issue too?

So within about seven hours, I got a note back saying, hey, we fixed the login issue. Try it now. And I'm like, yep, that works. Then they got another thing back said, yes, this is a known bug and we're working on a fix for it. I'm like, right. You should work really fast on that fix because it is the one thing that your product is supposed to do. You have one job. Save the shit

that I type. Oh yeah. Yeah. I still just use my text to my Apple text program. It's fantastic. Notes. Notes. Yeah. Right. Well, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually going into notes and I use a text expander snippet to mark the date and time and then write what I was going to write. So later on, once they fix it, I can go back. So it's in one spot and I would like it all in one place because it does have some nice features to it when it fucking works. Sorry. I'm a little agitated by the fact

that I spent like 40 bucks on an app and the iOS versions and counterparts and the thing cannot save a file. Well, let's, uh, let's go. Well, first I want to say, uh, rest in peace to instant messaging. I launched my Adium client for the very last time last week, as I mutually discussed with the one person I was still using instant message with, uh, yeah, we're done with this. Right. And we'll just switch to texting. Yep. Okay. Sad moment. I mean, you still have 14 more days or as of this recording,

uh, cause, uh, aim AOL's instant messenger service and kind of the last man standing will shut down once and for all on December 15th. But, uh, I have launched for my final time. Sadly, sadly, it's kind of the end of the, like the end of Truman show and the, when it's all over and everybody looks at each other and goes, Hey, what's on another channel? Let's move on. You know, exactly. Like, uh, it's over next moving on. Exactly. Now let me go ahead.

And start my rants about various technologies that I've experienced over the last two weeks since we've been off. Uh, before we, we went off the air for a little break, I announced that I had gotten a step counter watch, nothing terribly fancy, uh, cheap, cheerful works supposedly great or does it? Cause I've been noticing that there are, I still am running the Argus app on my phone, which is also a step counter and everything. Now, granted I do do bike rides and they may calculate

bike rides differently. They may even count steps differently. I wouldn't know because there's no documentation and there's no support and there's no manual. So I don't know how any of these things are calculated. What I do know is when I take my kid out for the morning walk, Argus tells me I've done 3027 steps. My watch tells me I've done 1032 steps at the end of the day. Yesterday, my watch told

me I had just beat 10,000 steps. Argus told me I was at 17,000 steps. This is a significant difference between the two counts, not a 500 steps here or there. Totally get that thousands, thousands. It's like a third difference between Argus and my watch. So how many fucking steps am I actually taking?

I'm going to have to go buy one of those cheap little pedometers, like the old school, non-techie ones. And I'm going to wear like 18 things on me to find out how many steps I'm actually taking, which one's right. Like this is like no joke because this is kind of like my fitness program is beat 10,000 steps a day, preferably 15,000. That's what I'm shooting for, but I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Well, it's because you're kind of using the jankiest forms of tracking that you can. You've got that.

I have a $1,000 phone, my friend. Yes, but it's a phone. It's not a fitness tracker. It's not designed to be. But it's on me. It should be. The GPS is spot on. It can tell if I've moved half a step or not. Why is it off? Well, look at your Argus app, maybe. It's a piece of shit. I got to tell you, my Apple Watch and the Fitbit were perfect. They were within, you know, at 14,000 steps, there was a variance of

less than 100 steps between them. So both of those are extremely accurate. Got to say that. Okay. I tested my watch against my treadmill because unlike, you know, just being out and about and walking, I'm not going to sit there and count 1,000 steps, right? Right.

My treadmill, desk treadmill, actually does count exact steps because it's got a sensor in it that relays it to the little readout on the control panel that's on my desk. Right. So I did my Apple Watch for an indoor run or an indoor walk, which just tracks actual steps.

It was also under, it was like 980 when the treadmill said 1,000. And that was probably because I put my hands on the desk to type something for a second. So my arm wasn't moving. Right. So these are accurate. Yes, they cost more money, but they're much more accurate is all I'm saying.

So if you want to, if you really want to be accurate, you got to spend a few bucks. Well, I believe that wife is getting me the Apple Watch whether I want it or not for Christmas. So expect in a January show, I will compare Argus versus my cheap watch versus my Apple Watch versus a crap pedometer I'm going to go buy and we'll see.

We'll see where I'm going to wear four different things tracking my steps for a day and see what happens. Well, I already gave you a Fitbit, but you lost it. So yeah, that's in a bar somewhere. Yeah, that's where somebody's enjoying that. Mine are usually at the bottom of a washing machine somewhere in some hotel. Oh, quick note about that.

I accidentally washed my AirPods a second time and dried them a second time. Still work perfectly. Wow. In the case. Don't recommend it. Yeah. In the case or without, I forgot. Without, without. Okay. You know, my whole thing when I was crapping on these when they were first announced is they're going to fall out of people's ears left, right, and center.

That is apparently not the issue. The issue is you forget that they're in your pockets. Okay. I've never had that problem. I've had it twice now. Still works. Yeah. So you have other things to do. That's your issue. Well, you know, kid. Uh, diaper change. All the sorts of stuff that happens when you run into the house.

Yeah. And then, you know, poop on the clothes. So you throw the clothes immediately into the laundry with the AirPods. There you go. Yeah. All right. Battle number two. Somebody pooped on your AirPods. This is what it all comes down to. It kind of comes down to that and survived that just fine. So my second battle, uh, the last, uh, two weeks, uh, Alexa has gotten a bit shitty on me.

And again, no fucking manuals, no fucking support, no way to fix anything yourself because they push up updates and it just happens. So things change on you, uh, Alexa and Spotify are no longer, uh, doing well with each other. Now it's not, it's not across the board.

It's like specific. All of a sudden you just, you just can't find specific artists says, uh, you know, and, and sadly, it's the ones that my kids, my kid likes. So I'm playing those all the time. Cannot find Casper baby pants anymore. I, we do not find that artist cannot play rockabye baby anymore.

We do not find that artist. So there's no way to fix it. I tried, I Googled extensively. It's just will not fix you. So you go to the workaround, the workaround is you create a playlist and then you just tell it to play the playlist, right? So now I'm dragging all the stuff in.

I'm trying to create all these playlists. It's not recognizing the playlist. Oh man. So then I go Google this shit again. And then somebody says, okay, you have to rename the playlist and then name it back. That worked once. Didn't work for the other one. The stuff is supposed to be making our lives easier and better.

And all it does is fuck you. You know what you have to do now? You have to go buy a boom box. That's it. I, I'd rat. I, I swear to God, I would go back to like having a hundred disc CD player at this point or something. This is just ridiculous. I feel just like I felt like the first time that I had gotten all my music into iTunes and it crashed and destroyed my library.

I'm starting to feel that way again. One step forward, 10 steps back. Oh God. It's just horrible. If anybody is having this problem with this Alexa, with Alexa and has been able to fix it with Spotify, please, please let me know because I just can't anymore. Yeah. I've given up on that. I still use Pandora with it, which has, has thankfully not gotten rid of any of my, my, you know, my playlist or my stations as they call them on Pandora.

And that's pretty much the only way I play music. Now with it, I tried everything with Spotify and half. There's like two albums that'll play it. Like I can play fables of the reconstruction and my brain hurts from screeching weasel. That's about it. Everything else will play some random, like, you know, hip hop rap crap.

And I'm just like, what? It does always seem to default to hip hop or rap, doesn't it? It does. Like anytime I ask it to play Casper Baby Pants and it wasn't finding it, it started playing like this crazy rap stuff from like Baby Rap G or something, whatever the hell the guy's name was. It's just so annoying. Interesting.

Anyways. Yeah. It's just, it's, it just worked so well for so long. And then all of a sudden it just stops and Spotify doesn't have any customer support. Amazon doesn't have any customer support. Amazon, you know, half the posts in Amazon's customer support blame Spotify, all the posts in Spotify's customer support blame Amazon.

It's a mess. Oh, wait till Siri gets in the picture. You're going to be twice as happy. Yeah. Like the problem with Siri is I want to, I want to switch to Apple's home, whatever they're going to call it when it comes out. But then I realized I can't go to Apple music because I still have such a big iTunes library.

So I can never really switch unless they support Spotify. We'll see. Oh man, that's right. Even though they jumped it up to 125,000, you still have more than that. Yep. So I can never switch to Apple music unless they ever fix that, which they never will. Or maybe throw some shit away. You can always do that.

I like my music. You're never going to listen to any of that stuff anymore. Get, get, get over it. Come on. There's got to be stuff in there you can get rid of. Maybe when the kid's 18, I'll get back to it. Okay. Now, I threw this one here in the old apps and doodads because I figured at this point, you should be nice and wound up.

And it's another AI feature. And this time it comes from Tinder, of all people. Well, this will never affect me being married with a child. But okay. It'll never affect me either because I'm never going to use Tinder. But what I, what I find humorous here is it's, it's about this new feature they have called a super like.

Ooh. So every now and again, after you've, you know, swiped and it's got a fairly decent picture of who you fancy and who you don't, it'll pop up four people at one of which whom you can super like, and that'll send them, you know, it's like, Hey, I really dig you, I guess.

And you can move on from there. Now. Couldn't you just send them a message that says, Hey, I super like you. I'm going to get to that here. Okay. Now, you know, there, there are free versions of Tinder and there are paid versions of Tinder. So if you have the free version, you can do one super like a day, but if you pay, you can do up to five.

Right. Right. Okay. Now the whole thing about this is Tinder is meant to match people, right? That's the job, right? Is there to, to hook up? No, they're, they're not like match.com. They just present people in your area and you decide if you like them.

There's no like algorithm going through and you're not filling out anything. Like I like long hikes and beach walks. There is an algorithm though, because they're using all that data to figure out who to present to you next. Ah, okay. There is smarts behind it. Cause they've been to the AI conferences and told everybody about it.

Trust me. Okay. So yes, now this, this super like feature is using quote unquote AI to figure out who it should present to you and your super like list. What I'm saying here though, is isn't this just the basic feature of what the fucking thing should do to begin with.

It's like, we're going to charge you more to show you people you might really like, but the rest of the time you're just going to get people you might sort of like we're saving the good stuff for later. These people you really might like, we want a couple of bucks so you can really tell them that you really like them. It's, it seems very, very dirty pool to me.

What it seems to me, and this is just me being, you know, typical me and not believing anybody because everybody fucking lies. I think this is just, this is preying on human nature. This is a psychological scam and the exact same people are being presented to you, whether they're super likes or not.

This is just a way to like, if I pay, I'm going to get laid. That's all this is doing. But I am so like, I just don't believe anyone. I think all these companies are fucking lying. I think they are all lying. I don't think that there's any AI behind this at all.

I think this is complete and utter bullshit. Because you know why? Because it's something that we would have done. Totally. This is something that we would have built into things to gamify it and to get people more engaged. And would it have actually done anything? No. You get that green crystal just randomly because we make you think you can get the green crystal.

Now you want the green crystal, right? That's the way it works. Is there anything behind you getting the green crystal? No. Pure random number generator. That's all. It is. Here we go. Size of array, minus one, into rand, pick a slice. There you go. Oh, I can't even tell you how many.

That's all I did for a while. I built that again and again and again. And that's all these motherfuckers are doing. Except now they're charging you money for it. I wish we would have thought of that step. Yeah. That's the one we always missed. We were really good at giving everybody fake data. But when it comes down to charging for it, we really sucked.

Yep. So getting back to some real software here. I got screens for Mac and iOS. Have you used screens before? I think you made me try to use it once for something. I don't think it was me because I never had it. Okay. No. This is nice, though.

I like it. If my parents had a Mac, I would be using this to fix their computer all the time. Yeah, because, I mean, you've got back to my Mac kind of built in. And you can do screen sharing on the network fairly easily if you have it turned on. The problem is when you leave the house, and if you are like me, you're double-natted off the router.

So there's some tricky bits to get to the actual machines behind the front-facing router. It's just a pain in the butt. So I invested in screens for Mac and iOS and the whole screens connect thing. So you have basically a daemon that pings their server to let it know from the outside what your IP is.

So when you leave the house, you can get back to your machine. I tested this last weekend. I got my multiple machines here at the house set up. This comes from when I was in San Francisco. I couldn't get back to my studio machine, and I needed to get something off of it, even though I left back to my Mac on and screen sharing and all that, and it wouldn't find it.

So I tested this on my iPad. So I took my iPad Pro over to my dad's house, got on their network, popped it up, saw my machines, boom, right in. So that alone is worth the money if you need to get back to your Macs, or if you have a family member that you need to do remote support on.

It just makes it easier if you set it up, and then you can just pop in. It's got a lot of other nice features, too. Like, for a few extra bucks, you can use your iPhone as a trackpad, which I will never do. But it's also got some privacy filters. So most of the time, if you're logged into somebody's machine remotely, the screen will show what you're doing.

You know, the screen will wake up, and you can see it. There are privacy filters, so it will have, like, I don't know if they call it curtain mode or something like that, but it'll blank out the screen so people cannot see what you're doing, which is very nice. Yeah. Yeah. So it's worth checking out, for sure. Okay.

And remember Bear, when Bear came out last year? I do. I do. Yeah, because, you know, it's a pretty notes app, and everybody was trying to get rid of Evernote, because Evernote just is a flaming pile of dog turds. Yep. Well, one year in, and I have canceled my subscription, and basically moved everything to the Apple Notes app.

It works. It works. Bear was a bear to use, and I went back and I looked at their video on their website. Yes. If I'd have saw that, or if I'd have seen that even, saw, seen, who cares, grammar, I never would have paid for it, because it's so bad.

It is such hipster crap. You know, straight out of Silver Lake, I think this video was made in. Oh, man. Look, you know, it's funny. You've taken a year out of your life, and you've bought a number of different apps, and you're right back with me using Notes.

Well, I wasn't. It's actually, when we started talking about Notes, you told me you flipped over to it, and I just paid for Bear, so I didn't want to, you know, I had a little sunk cost in there. But I've been using Notes probably for about six or seven months now, and it really just does work. So I just, I was too lazy to move all my stuff out of Bear.

So I finally just took a couple days, deleted crap, and moved it over, and it was much easier. Like, trying to move everything from Evernote into Notes just did not work. It was just a nightmare. So I kind of declared Note bankruptcy and just started from scratch, except for, like, a few technical things.

And it's much nicer. I don't even have to look at all that old stuff. So after day one started to, you know, basically not do the job that it was supposed to do, I was thinking, where else could I save stuff before I went into Notes? I'm like, oh, Scrivener. Scrivener's usually good for this stuff. I can save days as chapters because it's made for writing novels or screenplays.

It's a really great writing app. Yeah, I have it. Every now and then when I have pretensions of actually writing, I've had the app forever. It's fantastic. Yeah. And so I went to the site because on my new iMac, I didn't have it. So I went to go download it. And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. They upgraded the website. Ooh, this looks fancy.

Uh-oh. That means they probably revved the app. So Scrivener 3 is out. It is very, very nice. Yes. I had to pay full price for it because I could not find my original. Well, I have my original serial number. I couldn't find out, like, there was one piece of information that I was missing.

I think it was just the email address that I used it with. And I tried every one that I could, and it was probably some old business address or some thing that's been gone. Because I looked at my receipt when I bought Scrivener 2, and it was 2008. So I'm thinking, you know. It's been a while. You can toss them some coin.

I can honestly toss them a few bucks because they do write really good software. And for what it is, it's amazing. And you know what they don't do? What? They don't charge you a subscription. You buy it. You own it. Yep. Yay. And they've got great manuals.

So. Yes, they actually provide documentation. There's a whole learning support section on the website that covers Scrivener's core concepts. There's a walkthrough tutorial that you get when you first boot the software up that shows you every feature in the software and how to use it.

It's fantastic. And at the very end, this is what I really loved. They're like, hey, look, we know that not every piece of software is for everybody. So here's a list of book writing software for you that you can go use if you don't like Scrivener. And it's this massive list of every piece of book writing software that is on the market.

It's completely comprehensive. And I thought, damn, that's a class move. Yeah, that's nice. That's when you know you're good. Here. Here's everybody else's. You'll come back. Yeah. You'll be back soon enough. Yeah, it is a great piece of software because you and I both like it and because we like all the core tenants, the fact that they provide documentation, the fact that they're not a subscription service.

You buy it, you own it. You hit save and when you come back, it's there. Yeah, it actually works. They're definitely going to go out of business. There's no way they can last. So, yeah, if you do any word processing, if you have any pretensions of writing or if you just write a lot for anything, I can't recommend Scrivener enough.

It's great. It can fit your needs even if you're not trying to write a book. Yeah, as a blogger, I use this constantly because if I was writing a long piece, I could just, you know, you make note cards and that's where you keep all your research. So if I was doing like a long piece for Metblogs back in the day, I would just get all my links, sort them in there and copy and paste stuff and move stuff around.

It's just great for doing any writing where you have to have research or chapters or things like that. And you can move. Oh, my God. It's just so cool. If you write, go get it. Yep. And one last quick note about apps. I was able I've been selling a bunch of stuff for a long time, particularly since the kid was born, I decided, well, that's it for the music studio.

If I want to write music, I'll just use software. So I've had all these different pieces that I've been selling left, right and center. I know I bought some. You did buy some. And I finally sold my last piece of gear over the break, which was great. And I just want to say as a wrap up, there are all these apps out there. There's Close Five.

There's Let Go. Facebook has rolled out Facebook Marketplace. Next Door in their app, they have their own marketplace as well. I placed all my stuff everywhere. All those apps are motherfucking useless. Forget it. Craigslist. Every single thing I sold was through Craigslist. Wow. All those apps, completely useless.

I got hits that would just disappear. I got spam bots on all those apps. Craigslist, every single piece right through there. So don't even bother with those stupid apps. That's good. Yeah, that's good to know because I got a lot of stuff that I'm unloading right now, too. And I was either going to do eBay or Craigslist.

So now I'm just going to go with Craigslist.

Media Candy. We've talked about the great unbundling many, many times. Now, there's all kinds of services online that get different TV channels. Recode has built a fairly convenient tool to find TV channels online. You can just type in what you want to watch.

It will try to find it for you and show you where it's at. Free pay, whatever. Obviously not Sweden. But if you're in a pinch and you want to see something or if you're thinking about ditching cable completely and want to make sure that you can see all the channels that you want, I highly recommend you go check out this link and use the service that they built for us.

It's kind of nice. I'm definitely going to have to use this because I'm getting ready to fire Hulu for their TV service because it's terrible. There's nobody that's got these TV services that work yet. I know. It's like, OK, I'll try. I'll get a trial for this one until the TV show's over and then I'll cancel the trial. I get another one over here because, yeah, so far I've done YouTube TV.

I've done Sling and I've done Hulu and none of them work. I'm like, yeah, just get the digital antenna out when I need to watch something. That's about it. Yeah. Well, check out the tool. It might work for you. Netflix has confirmed that Stranger Things will return for a third season, surprising absolutely no one. I finished Stranger Things 2, although should it be called Stranger Things 2?

That's like a movie thing. It's like second season of Stranger Things over the break. I loved it. I thought it was actually better than the first season, except for that one terrible episode. And all of you who have watched it know which one I'm talking about. Which one is that? I liked them all. The punk one. Oh, that was silly. That was a crap episode.

The whole rest of it. Amazing. Like, it was a little dusty in the room in the last episode. Yeah, it was good. It was very well done. Like I said, I think better than the first season. So did you break your rule? Because you said you were going to be doing one a week. You had to have a couple. I broke the rule over the break. I just needed something to watch.

There you go. So I've got a bunch of stuff that I watch. Chance Season 2 on Hulu, which was the reason I signed back up for Hulu. It just finished this week, and I loved it. And unfortunately, it is the last chance. It looks like they wrapped up the whole thing. So it's a great standalone story.

20 episodes between the two seasons. You know, it's just really good. That's all I'm going to say about it. And then over the break, I got Hunt for the Wilder People through David Teeter and Chen. They made me start watching it, but then we didn't finish it because whiskey. So I finally finished it when I got home.

If you like sappy movies with Sam Neill, that's right up your alley. American Assassin. Love the books. The only reason I'm talking about this here is because I've reviewed most of the books from the Vince Flynn series here. Yep. This is not. No, no, no. Pass.

There's never going to be another one, so don't waste your time. It was a terrible movie. Right. And I binged The Punisher on the old Netflix. Did you watch Punisher yet? I did. I watched all of it over the last week as well. I loved it. I really, for me personally, I just loved it.

Made Iron Fist look like such a giant pussy. Iron Fist was horrible compared to this, definitely. This is probably, I would place this third. I still like Jessica Jones best, Daredevil, and then The Punisher. It was probably one of the grittier, more realistic ones. It was my wife just walking through the room every time I was watching it.

She's like, this is insanely over-the-top violence. It is ridiculous. It is. If you are not into ultra-violence, I've just kept thinking about the Clockwork Orange thing. Ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. I crapped on Daredevil for having way too much kung fu.

This has way too much violence. They could have cut it in half, and it still would have been gruesome and over-the-top. But very well done. Highly enjoyable. And just prepare yourself for lots of fun. Yeah, not for amateurs. I loved it. I loved every bit of it, though. I like the ultra-violence. Glitch is back for season two.

This was that really strange New Zealand. I think it's New Zealand. New Zealand or Australia. But I'm pretty sure it's New Zealand. A little kind of zombie sci-fi story. Picks up exactly where the first season left off. It's short. It's only six episodes. I didn't like it as much as the first season.

Okay. Because the first season was a little bit more exciting, I thought, because you were trying to figure out what was going on. Now you kind of know what's going on. And I'm kind of like, eh. Not really caring that much. So, you know, I give Glitch season one kind of an A minus. I give Glitch season two like a C plus.

Right. Well, I watched the entire first season of Master of None, the Aziz Ansari show that is very popular with the millennials. Everybody's all talking about it. Episode two, entitled Parents, completely about immigrant parents and their offspring, is quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen in my entire life.

My wife and I are both first generation American, well, she's Canadian, I'm American, and we were just howling the entire episode. The rest of the show, eh, I have to ask, are millennials just not into actual comedy? Do they prefer things being so obvious you can tell what the end of the episode will be in the first five minutes?

Do they like shit acting? I really don't understand why the show is so popular. But watch season one, episode two, if you're an immigrant, or if your parents were immigrants, because you will die. Yeah, thank God. Okay, because I saw, I read the first line of your notes here, and I'm like, oh no, don't tell me he actually liked this piece of shit.

But fortunately, you didn't. I saw a little bit of it, I was over at my friend's house, they were watching it, they were howling and laughing, and I'm like, this is fucking terrible, what is wrong with you people? But they loved it, they loved it. Lots of non-jokes about avocado toast, as far as I can tell.

And he just can't act at all. No. Not at all. No, I mean, nothing. No, cardboard could act better. Anyway, so after I watched that, I was very curious, and I went on a bit of a stand-up kick. So I watched his Live at Madison Square Garden show.

That was actually funny. But it was okay. But it's also, the first half of the show is the entire first season of Master of None, so I'm assuming the second half of Madison Square Garden show is the entire second season of Master of None. Probably. He's a good stand-up, he can act, and the show is crap.

So I did like the stand-up. Then I ended up watching Jim Gaffigan's latest, Cinco. It's good. Because Netflix just basically just feeds you stand-up after you watch one. That was very good. If you're a dad, it's all dad jokes, and it's very clean, but he's quite clever and very funny.

Then I tried to watch Trevor Noah, the new host of The Light Show, or whatever, Jimmy whatever Stewart's old show was. John Stewart. John Stewart? Jimmy Stewart. Yeah. Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart. Yeah. Yeah. Jimmy Stewart here. I watched his one called Afraid of the Dark, I got about 15 minutes into it and realized that I hadn't even attempted a chuckle, so gave up on it, didn't find it funny at all.

I've watched all of his stand-up specials, and I enjoyed them all, I thought they were very smart. Nah, not into it. And finally, I closed up with Patton Oswalt's Annihilation, his latest. It is funny, and it is heartbreaking, because as you know, his wife had just recently passed away. Most of it's extremely funny, some of it is just brutal.

What a guy. Yeah, the room got very dusty. For a part of it in there, so. Yeah, so it was fantastic, and I would say, you trump snowflakes, you probably want to avoid that one. Yeah. He's not too nice to trump. Not at all. I didn't even put in any of my stand-up stuff. I've watched like 12 different stand-up specials over the break, because it's just, it's what's on.

You know, half of them are, actually 90% of them are crap, but you get 10% that are decent. And so I grabbed a new podcast, the Moon Me podcast, Dana Moon's podcast. He's a stand-up comic down there in L.A., and it's very, very graphic and very funny.

I enjoy it. Okay, cool. And I found a YouTube link that I thought was very interesting. We just spent a long time talking about how bored we are by Bitcoin. So how the economic machine works may not sound terribly exciting, but it's 30 minutes, and it makes a shitload of sense and totally explains our entire economic system in ways that make sense.

And I would prefer that the entire current administration have to watch this. It's really only 30 minutes long. He can pay attention that long. Here's the deal. It's actually 15 minutes long, because you can 2X it, because he kind of talks slow, and you don't lose anything in the 2X. That's true. Trust me on that one. You can watch that at 2X and retain everything.

But it wasn't bad. Well, I'm only seven minutes in, but three and a half minutes, technically. But yeah, not bad. And Titanic is returning next week to cinemas. God, I hate this movie. Think how I feel. I spent a year of my life on that goddamn movie.

So what am I going to do tomorrow? I know how you feel, because you posted that you were going to go fucking watch it. I'm going to go see it tomorrow. I'm going to watch that ship sink one more goddamn time. I'm going to watch Leo drown his sorry ass with his selfish girlfriend who can't scoot over on the door, and I'm going to love every second of it, because it'll be the last time I ever have to see Titanic.

That is... It is... I walked out of the theater. I hated this movie so much. Now, the only thing that I like about all of this right now is all the press it's getting is the fact that James Cameron basically just said, Leo dies because that's what the story demanded.

He was going to die no matter what. He had to die. I don't care how big that door was. He was dying. He was never getting on that door. Yeah, I think he's tired of answering that question. But yeah, it's remastered. It looks like it might be a pretty show.

So, one last time. Off we go, gents. Into the great blue beyond. At the library. Surprisingly, I've read two books this entire break.

One was I went back and I reread or re-listened to Stranger in a Strange Land because after the last Highland book that I read, I was like, man, this book was good, but I really miss Stranger in a Strange Land. So, I went back and re-listened to that. God damn, that book is good. You know, I've reviewed it here before and everybody should have read that book by now.

If you haven't, get on it. Yeah. And then I got Bonfire by Kristen Ritter. Okay. Also known as Jessica Jones. Yes. And I gave it a shot. I'm like, eh, it's in my feed. I see her talking about it all the time. It's getting decent reviews. So, why not? Wasn't bad. For a first-time writer, it's like a suspense, thrillery kind of book.

Like, B minus, B, B minus. It wasn't bad. It was actually better written than most of the sci-fi we've read recently. I feel like I want to interview her because I want to know, let's see, you are Kristen Ritter. You are Jessica Jones. You are making bank as an actress, a working actress in Hollywood, who's in demand, who's not only acting, but you're also producing, making a lot of money.

So, now I'm going to go into an artistic endeavor that makes no money whatsoever. She wanted to do it. I'm going to write a book. Well, have you looked at her Twitter feed, or I mean, her Instagram feed? No. Because her other business is knitting. Oh, okay. Basically, knits and sells things online.

She's a knitter, a writer, and an actress. So, she's triple threat. I like her more every day. Yep. And that's why I got the book. I'm like, you know what? I like the cut of her jib, so I'm going to check out the book. Like I said, the book wasn't bad. All right. Maybe I'll give it a shot. I don't know. I actually... It's not up your alley.

Oh, okay. You know, it's like a classic kind of thrillery thing. There's no... It's straight up... I mean, normal. Gotcha. It's a normal book for normal people. You're not a normal guy. You need some... There's no, like, you know, science fiction or ghosts or zombies or stuff like that. It's just normal.

Right. Well, I watched way too much TV, finishing Stranger Things and everything that we just talked about to actually read a book. But Genome, the Extinction Files book two by A.G. Riddle has come out. So, I downloaded that. I was going to start reading it. And then I realized I don't remember a goddamn thing that happened in the first book.

So, I went back and I skimmed through Pandemic, the Extinction Files book one, to catch myself up. So, I'm prepared to actually read the second book now. Was the first book good? I can't remember. Yes. Yes. It was, you know... I guess since you bought the second one. Yeah, I bought the second one. I believe it was... It's not... You know, it's quick...

It's poop read. You know what I mean? I know what you mean. Yes. I'm pooping to Tim Ferriss right now. As one does, especially if one follows his diet. Security? Ha! All right.

We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. Are you guys all full from Thanksgiving still, turkeyed up, ready to go? Oh, my goodness. I took a long nap. I have to say the day after Thanksgiving was one of the most relaxing days I can remember having in a long time. The house was quiet.

The house was clean because, you know, my wife and I refer to it as the big lie, which is the story that our house is actually this clean all the time, which, of course, it's not. I want a sign from my house that says, pardon the mess, we actually live here.

But so I had a very lovely Thanksgiving break. It was a well-needed long weekend, and it was great. How about you guys? All good. Can't complain. Yeah. Can't complain. Ate a lot. And, you know, didn't read any tech news and tried to stay away from all news.

So I was actually happy for a brief period of time. That's right. Everybody in my family talked politics. Well, there you go. There. That's half the battle, isn't it? Yeah. Yes, it is. Well, it's good to be back. And, of course, the news didn't stop without us. So what are we starting with here today?

Well, I wanted to follow up a little bit on what you and I talked about, Dave, in our pre-Thanksgiving episode before Jason, when Jason wasn't around. The cell phone tracking issues that we discussed about how everybody knows where you spend your Thanksgivings and things of that nature that kind of terrified both of us.

Well, the Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments in a case called Carpenter versus the United States. And the issue at hand is cell phone tower location data and law enforcement obtaining it without a warrant. So we are looking into if privacy rights include location data, which would be very good for those of us who kind of want a little bit of privacy.

Unfortunately, up until this case, up until this point, all the lower courts have so far sided with the ability for people to get that data. So we will see if the Supreme Court will hold up our privacy rights here or not. Right. And then there was that case in 2012 where the Supreme Court said that you need a warrant to – basically for the FBI, for law enforcement, to stick a GPS on someone's car.

And in that case, they also said – I think it was Justice Sotomayor who said that the third party doctrine, which is what enables them to access this data, this metadata, she said it's ill-suited to the digital age.

So it will be interesting to see how the Supremes come down on this. To me, it doesn't seem unreasonable just to require a warrant. If your case is good enough, why not get the warrant? And I suppose law enforcement would say that, well, it slows us down and we – well, of course, they enjoy the ability to do it without a warrant.

I heard an interesting coverage of this on NPR on – I believe it was Morning Edition, their Supreme Court reporter whose name is escaping me right now. But she was comparing it to law enforcement's ability to basically put a tail on you. You know, they don't need a warrant to follow you around and track your location from place to place.

And so they were making the point that this is really the same thing as this. Of course, it's that. Privacy people are saying, well, no, because with the cell phone tower data, you can go back and retroactively follow someone around and you can do it for basically an unlimited amount of time.

Yeah. Yeah. You can shake a tail, but you can't shake your cell phone. Right. Well, you can. You can throw your phone in the trash, I suppose, but then you're obviously probably doing something wrong. Yeah. So this is interesting because this is the law enforcement perspective. What we were talking about the previous week was more private companies.

But I would hope if the law enforcement is basically told you can't have this information, there would be some trickle down to private companies, hopefully. Yeah, I would think so. And it's also going to be interesting to see what happens when GDPR goes into effect in May.

That's going to have a global impact on privacy and sharing of data and stuff like that. So personally, I would love to see the Supreme Court come down on the side of privacy. But I really can't guess on this one because like you said, Brian, the lower courts have all sided on the side of law enforcement.

But the Supreme Court in this case just a few years ago seemed to recognize that maybe we're in a different era than we were when these third-party doctrines first came into being. Yeah. So we'll see. We should know pretty quickly, I'd imagine. So hopefully by next week, we'll be discussing this and hopefully privacy will win out.

I also have another little bit of news that involves our government. And we have made fun of, in fact, Jason and I had discussed for a while having a segment called Hack of the Week or Breach of the Week or something like that. So we do make fun of these companies a lot.

And we've also talked about how some of these companies seem to be too big to fail, that it does not matter what happens or how big the breaches are. They don't seem to suffer for it. It looks like the Senate might want to try to change that. Top Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee are renewing efforts to pass a law requiring companies to quickly notify consumers in the wake of a data breach.

And they are proposing jail time for executives who conceal data breaches. Now, I would not mind this. What's really funny is as you were reading that, I got a text message from a friend of the show, Jeff Donaldson. And it is a picture of a letter that he has in his hand.

It's dated November 22nd, 2017. It says, Notice of Data Breach, Dear Jeff Donaldson, I am writing to let you know about a data security incident at Uber that affected your information. Uber deeply regrets that this happened, and we recommend that you closely review the information in this letter. And it goes on to say when the data was accessed and all that.

And under What You Can Do, we recommend enrolling in Experian Identity Works and reviewing the additional information below. And yeah, they're not saying that they're going to pay. Oh, wait, here we go. To assist you, we are also providing identity theft protection and mitigation services from Experian. Including credit monitoring for 12 months at no cost to you.

Okay, there you go. So, there you go. He's at least getting a free reach around from Experian. Nice, thanks. Right, here's the lock for your barn after the horse has already left. Yeah. But, you know, as we've talked about, we've all expressed our frustration on this show about how nobody ever goes to jail.

So, maybe we'll start seeing some people going to jail. And I think if you're going to get people's attention, that could do it. Again, you know, as I said, GDPR has a, I believe it's a 72-hour requirement for notification in the EU. And the notion with- What, it's not five years like Uber likes to do?

Right. Well, but again, you know, the notion is that these international companies aren't going to have much choice. They're going to have to adopt the most stringent EU policies. It's going to make the most sense for them. It's going to be cheapest and fastest for them to adopt those policies.

So, there's a lot of people hoping that that's going to have a good effect around the world. And there are other people who are saying, hey, it's not fair that the EU gets to, you know, have this power over the rest of the world by having their own rules that companies will sort of have to adopt.

So, it's an interesting discussion on both sides. Yeah, very much so. I'm very much looking forward to this. I want this to happen badly. It's just, all these people just seem to be, all these companies just seem to be non-couplable. And it's interesting, when this passes in Europe, I'm going to choose to do my business with international conglomerates on purpose for once, because I would like to know that they're going to be following these rules.

Yeah. Well, Apple had a bad week, huh? Yeah. Talk about some Apple. Did you guys try this hack that came out this week? I did not. Try it. I patched it. Well, as soon as I saw the news that you could log in as Root with no password, the first thing I did was try and log in as Root with no password.

It worked. It worked really easily. Oh, my goodness. I saw a tweet that I loved, which was, I never, ever want to hear from a fucking Apple person about security again. Long live PC. Yeah.

Yeah. How does this one get out? You know, the reporting is saying that this has probably been in high Sierra since the beginning. It may even have been in the betas. And people are saying, well, can you blame, you know, this is not the kind of thing someone would look for.

You wouldn't even think that this would be possible. I've been saying for two years that Apple's quality control has been slipping and slipping and slipping. And this is exhibit A. This is a tough one to test for. You got to admit. Well, you know, but here's the thing.

You just kind of bring the log up screen and hit enter. Well, you have to manually type in Root. So, yeah. But another thing that that puzzles me about it is that it says, you know, type in Root and no password and get in. And if it doesn't work, try it again.

Well, that's not how computers are supposed to work. Right. Right. Well, I think what the first one does is enable like the first time you do it, then it enables Root access and sets the password to nothing. And on the second try, the root, the root login has been then triggered and then there is no password.

So you go. It took me two times to get in. And that's exactly what happened. Interesting. All right. Well, that's plausible. That makes sense. Yeah. So I just went and updated my root password right away. And then the next day the patch came out. So they did patch it pretty quickly. And they did that that thing where they just kind of said, yeah, even if you don't download it, we're going to update your machine for you anyway.

Yeah. Which is good. Yeah. My understanding is this is only the second time that Apple has done the non-voluntary security update, which I suppose is a good thing. It's interesting, too, that there people have been have documented that this showed up on Apple's own support forums about two weeks ago.

Yep. And nobody paid attention. Because nobody reads the support forums. Well, that's the thing. I don't know how much Apple actually monitors those. My suspicion is they don't. At least not very much. Yeah. No, not much.

Have you ever gotten an actual answer back from anybody at Apple on a support forum? No. It's a bunch of people going, me too, me too, me too. Yeah. And I mean, I use them. They are helpful to try to track down things. And it's mostly all it's just community based, you know, where if you have if you've had a problem, chances are someone else may have had it and have helped track it down.

And so they're useful for that. But you're correct. Rarely do you ever see anyone. In fact, I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen anyone from Apple actually chime in with an answer. It's interesting. No, I definitely have not. But it is a good way to figure out if the bug is just you. If you're doing something stupid or if everybody's got the problem.

Right. Right. I think my favorite Apple apologist thing that I saw this week, and I will say that I am a longtime Apple fan. So if anything, I am biased to give Apple the benefit of the doubt.

But my favorite Apple apologist message this week was someone said, well, you know, all these people who are saying that Apple is, you know, really blew it with this one. Remember that Sony actually put, you know, rooting malware on your computer. Yeah.

That's not a good. That's not a good argument. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's not a good argument. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah. But Harvey Weinstein did worse than I did, says Bill Cosby. Exactly. Yeah. It's sort of. Yeah. Anyway, it's patched and the patch broke some stuff, but there's a fix for the stuff that the patch broke.

And on and on and on and on it goes. And it's turtles all the way down. Yay. OK. Well, the nice thing is that the main machine that I work on, I did not upgrade to High Sierra. So yeah, it was safe. Me neither.

I was listening to the Accidental Tech podcast this week, and I think that's who was talking about it. But man, wouldn't it be nice if Apple went back to a two year release cycle on their their main OS just so they would have time to actually fix things instead of rushing everything every year because they have this arbitrary need to update every year.

It's not arbitrary. It's shareholder value. Jason. But they give the they give the OS away for free. If they were making money on the OS every year, then I could see a reason to update it all the time. But there's no reason to rebrand every year with a new version of it. Like fix the one that is there.

That way, the one after that will be better. But that's what High Sierra was supposed to be. That's why it wasn't it wasn't given a new name. It was given given a derivative name from Sierra. You know, they were supposed to be doing a tick tock. Right. They were going to do it's a tick tock to have a. This was supposed to be the one that fixes things that fine tunes things that, you know, and boy, did it fix things.

But you know what? I think I think iOS 11 has been problematic as well. It's been a lot of bugs and, you know, unimpressive things. So Apple certainly I think Brian nailed it. Apple's certainly struggling with some software issues these days. Let's hope it gets better because, boy, this one, it's hard to do much worse.

Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's pretty bad. But still, it's the best OS on the market, even though there are problems. You know, we're kind of spoiled, I think. But yeah, the whole. But yeah, when I turn my phone sideways, it should rotate. Come on. That's not really a tough one. God, you're so needy. I know I am.

Oh, God. I just kind of want it to work the way it did yesterday. By that, I mean work. OK, well, we got a little thing here from Facebook. These guys really just want pictures of you all the time now. They're right there. They've got a thing that they may be doing soon.

This is one of those. We might kind of be doing it. But now that it's out in the wild, maybe we won't because everybody's saying, well, what are you talking about now? They're going to have a new kind of capture to verify whether the user is a real person. So you have to please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face.

We'll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers. How do you know what my face looks like? I hope that they don't get this mess mixed up with their revenge porn program because when Facebook asked me to send in a picture of my cock, I'm going to be a little bit disturbed.

Please lift it up so we can see the balls clearly. Our new NAD recognition software will verify that it's actually you. It does. I mean, you brought up a really good point, Jason. How do they know what we look like anyways? I mean, I guess they're going to base it off of some machine learning from all the photos that we have already uploaded and facial recognition there.

So I suppose that's how. But if I'm making a fake account, yeah, if I'm making a fake account, how many thousands of pictures do I have of the person that I'm faking the account with? You know, I'm going to have a ton of them. Right. Make a new one. That's what I was thinking is how hard is it to go get a picture of just about anybody these days?

Upload a picture of you. Oh, OK. Google image search. Oh, look, there he is. All right. Done. You know, that really slowed me down. What are they going to do? Like, are they going to have to have like proof of life? Like, go out and buy a newspaper. It's those pieces of paper that used to have the news on it that people used to buy. It has the date on it.

Then hold it up next to your face so we can tell you're alive. You know, as I think about it, I mean, maybe that is a more challenging thing for an automated system to do, though, to go fetch a photo of you. That might be harder for a bot to do than than a human. Of course, not that human labor is expensive.

No. Yeah. If I was doing it, I would say, OK, use the use the camera on your computer. We're going to send you an email with a QR code. Hold it up next to your face. Smile for the pretty picture. And then we'll look at it. You know, some way to verify, you know, time and authenticity.

But I have Photoshop. So I will take a picture of my phone with that QR code on it and paste it into the photo of the person that I'm trying to use. Here is Mark Zuckerberg with the QR code. Yes. Yeah. Twenty twenty five years of Photoshop. I can make pretty much anything. I'm thinking so this is one of those silly ones, I think.

So we'll see if it actually rolls out everywhere. And I'm sure it's like mainly around spam accounts and setting up advertising accounts and things like that. Anything with payments. I guess this is, you know, trying this is their way to try and stop the the Russian ad bot farmer type of guys.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so we got this another another one in from Chris Gibson. He sent this over on Facebook and it's linked to a Gizmodo article that says, watch thieves hack keyless entry to steal a Mercedes in less than a minute. I watch this and I'm like, well, a guy should have put his car in the garage because he obviously has a garage and be the Ferraris in the garage.

Crazy. Yeah. So what you do is you break into the Mercedes, press the button to open the garage door and then steal the Ferrari. Right. Exactly. And then to really fuck with him, you put the Mercedes where the Ferrari was. So he thinks maybe if he was drinking last night, he's like, I could have sworn I parked my Ferrari here.

Right. Right. It's like that old joke. It's not a Porsche. It's a Ferrari. Yeah. Never mind. Maybe the old joke about painting the porch. I went, I'm going to give you $50 to paint my back porch. Remember that joke? You guys ever heard that joke? No. It's a dad joke. No. So a guy hires a guy to paint his porch. The guy comes, he says, I want you to paint my porch for me.

And the guy says, all right, it'll be $50. And all right, here's the paint. Go around back and paint the porch. The guy comes back. He says, all right, we're all done. By the way, that's not a Porsche. That's a Ferrari. But don't bump. It's a dumb dad joke, but there you go. Yeah. Old joke. Dad joke's a theme today.

Yeah. Well, here's one for you. A guy meets a hooker in an elevator in Vegas and says, hey, baby, I'll do anything for a hundred bucks. He goes, cool, here's a hundred bucks. Paint my house. Right. Right. That's not a dad joke, though. Oh, OK. The hooker precludes it from being a dad joke. Well, I did say there was a dad in Vegas.

Have you actually met? Have you met Jason's dad? I haven't. Who knows? Hey. This is a fair point. Do not soil my father's good name. My father is a good man. Where I came from, we have no idea. But anyway, it's a pretty fun video to watch.

These guys get into this thing super fast. They're basically bouncing the signal from his key fob that's inside the house through a little device to another fob that's by the car. And then open, open sesame. This is not a, this is not a new hack. This is, I think what's new about this is that they got somebody on video.

I've heard of this probably two years ago is probably the first time I heard of it. They had video two years ago of guys stealing BMWs who had cloned the key fob from earlier in the day. They came back and replayed the key fob in front of the car and basically got in.

But this is kind of the same thing. It's just like now they figured out a way to get it from the fob in the house. Right. That's, but that I've heard of that as well. The whole thing of getting, you know, sort of walking around the house to get a signal from the automatic fob. Yeah. Yep.

I guess you could just buy a tow truck. Just drag it away. Or, you know, crowbar. We have those things. Brick. 30 cents at Home Depot. Anyway. Old school. So I saw this one on Motherboard and I thought this was fantastic.

Television's most infamous hack is still a mystery 30 years later. This is about the broadcast in Chicago that was broken into. It was a Doctor Who broadcast. And some guy who was in a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and basically got spanked on the air.

It was very strange. Yep. It was very, very strange. But nobody's ever caught these guys. I thought that was pretty fun. Yeah. This is an old chestnut. You know, when I first got out of college, I was working in the TV biz and I actually spent time in Master Control, which is the place where all the videotape machines are and the routers and the satellite uplinks and all that sort of stuff.

And I remember having a conversation with a satellite engineer and saying to him, so what keeps you from taking that dish and pointing it at any satellite and just blasting it with, you know, RF energy and taking anybody off the air?

Because you can see every transponder that everybody's on. You can just sort of bounce around and go, oh, look, ABC is doing their live shots on this and, you know, that and the other thing. And he basically said, well, nothing. I could totally do that.

Anybody could totally. So it's sort of, you know, I guess the thing that keeps you from doing it is knowing that the FCC will come hunt you down because there are a limited number of people who have satellite uplinks. This story is interesting because they seem to be using microwave transmitters to overpower the – they use microwave from the hop from the TV station to the transmitting tower.

And so they overpowered that microwave signal. Again, takes me back to my college days. Again, studying TV at the University of Maryland. Evidently, HBO was using a similar microwave hop to feed some cable system in the area.

And we had a microwave antenna that you could point in the right direction and get unscrambled HBO on if you knew what you were doing. Nice. Just pull it out of the air. Yeah. The antenna looked like – Way better than tinfoil and a coat hanger. The antenna looked like Marvin the Martian's gun.

Like it was this long – it was this long pole with a bunch of little circles on it. And, you know, the chief engineer at the campus TV station was, you know, basically like, hey, watch this. And I was like, can I borrow that? He was like, sure. So we had HBO in our dorm room for a little while.

Nice. Yeah. I think the statute of limitations is up on that, right? Yeah. Right in my mind. That was before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So, you know, college pranks, good times. You didn't get much of that in community college.

Nope. Yeah. No. You had to go somewhere real for that, I guess. Yeah. So we got a little feedback here from – who's this coming from? This comes from Brian Seward, our friend down in Adelaide. Hey, Jason. Not sure if you guys or Dave have heard about this site. But aside from fighting the good fight, I thought the UX of the site was pretty interesting, even if Brian made 999 after clicking on the what are you control first up.

This is rescam.org. And Brian, you can check it out. First off, I want to talk about the UX of the site as being pretty interesting. Brian Seward from Adelaide, you might be very young. Maybe you don't remember the early days of the internet. But this is a 1990s website with a flash intro.

I have to wait 10 seconds for some animation to play before I can click on anything. I'd be off that site in three seconds these days. Like, nobody's waiting for this stupid intro. And don't get me started on the AI shit. That is exactly – if you click on what are you, it's all – our AI will prove that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

The days of skip intro are long gone, it seems. I know. That's true. But there's no skip button on this either. You have to wait through it. They don't know anymore that every site that had one of these stupid things had to have a skip intro button or nobody would go – you already lost like 20,000 people if 21,000 were coming if you didn't have a skip intro button.

But the whole thing is silly. Yes. No more intros on websites. The time is gone. But the purpose of this website is actually kind of fun. Yes. Well, tell us about it, Dave. Don't mind if I do, Jason. Well, I'd appreciate it there, Dave.

Well, listen to this. Basically, you send them your scammy emails and then they use their system to engage with an automated back and forth with the people who are trying to scam you. So they adopt personalities and pretend to be interested in the scam. The whole idea being that they're going to use up the bandwidth of the scammers by just sort of stringing them along with artificial responses.

So, you know, all right. It's fighting the good fight. Yeah. It is a good fight. Until the scammers sign up for it, start to get the emails back, run it through deep learning on their side so they can find out when anybody's using it, and then start keep sending you emails from a different instance to keep you busy while they go after somebody who really cares.

Well, it's always an arms race, isn't it? Yes. It is the good fight, just the bad website. Right. Right. All right. Well, one more thing. I want to do a plug for a new podcast. There are 10 episodes in.

It's called Things Joe Hates by a friend of the Cyber Wire. Folks who listen to the Cyber Wire may recognize the voice of the gentleman, Joe, who hosts this podcast. Joe's trying to not make a direct connection between his professional Cyber Wire stuff and this podcast.

But if you're a regular listener of the Cyber Wire, you probably recognize his voice. And I figure anyone who's listening to a show called Grumpy Old Geeks may enjoy Things Joe Hates. And it's actually... What tipped you off? Yeah. Well, I'm just going out on a limb there. But it's quite entertaining.

So short shows, under 20 minutes typically. And if you like to hate things as much as Joe does, you'll like it. So give it a listen. He's off to a good start. And I think it'd be worth checking out. I checked out a few of these a while back. It was very funny. So definitely... It's definitely worth a listen.

Yeah. Yes. All right, gentlemen. Well, until next week, I'm going to go log into my High Sierra laptop. In fact, I'm going to go log into everybody's High Sierra laptop. Excellent. See you all next week. Brick-a-brick.

Ah, it's the most wonderful time of the year, isn't it? A bunch of my parent friends have been sharing this link recently. And it's like grumpy old parents. If we did a mommy blog, this is the WTF Guide to the 2017 Pottery Barns Kids Holiday Catalog.

And this very funny woman basically tears them a new Aeol. And it's hilarious. You do not have to be a parent to read this. One quick sample. Want to give the gift of passive aggressiveness and a broken spirit to your children? Let your kids know who their favorite is by buying this pillow for just one of your offspring. Merry Christmas.

Nice, nice. I don't know if you saw the, was it basically an image I posted on Facebook that was a holiday guide to keeping your kids in line? Yes, I did see that. Where you wrap a bunch of empty boxes so when your kid acts up, you take one and just throw it in the fireplace in front of them and let it burn.

That's a good parenting hack. It is a good parenting hack. Brian, I generally don't go to Applebee's anymore. Nope. It used to be a family thing around here. My family would always make me go to Applebee's. And I thought it was okay.

It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. And apparently it has gotten much worse. But now, now you can go and get a $1 Long Island iced tea for the rest of the year. And the only way I can put this is it must be a memory loss leader, because then if you drink enough of them, Applebee's food must taste like not so awful.

And you'll want to go back. Puking good in the neighborhood. They've got to have a limit on these. There's no way their lawyers let them just do this. You come in and have two. Let's go. I can't imagine. Anyways. All right. Well, some asshole on an airplane caused a problem.

He named his Wi-Fi network bomb on board. Genius. Genius. Such a genius. Yep. So they had to land the plane and, of course, take him off. So that's awesome. And it was amazing that they could find him. But here's a, you know, if you really want to get under, get somebody in trouble, borrow their phone when they're not looking and basically set up an ad hoc network on their phone.

Yeah. With something like this. And then off they go and they get on the plane. They get dragged off. They're like, what did I do? Yeah. Well, proving that there are no true geniuses out there. This actually isn't even the first time that this has happened. At Los Angeles International Airport in 2014, a flight was delayed for several hours when somebody named their Wi-Fi network the Al-Qaeda Free Terror Network.

And last year, one Virgin American flight was delayed and another was canceled after someone named a Wi-Fi network Samsung Galaxy Note 7 because that's when they were blowing up. Yes. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And now there is a San Francisco company, of course, a startup called Samsung.

It's H-V-M-N because, you know, you can't have any vowels in San Francisco and it's supposed to be human. This is backed by former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, because she just can't, you know, the hits just don't stop with her. Exactly.

It advertises a $40 bottle supplement biohacking compounds that will help people achieve optimal human performance. Speaking of the previously mentioned Tim Ferriss, probably be right behind this stuff. It says that supplements such as chewable caffeine pills help the human system become quantified, optimized, and upgraded.

And at one point, CEO Jeffrey Wu went as far... Somebody needs a dictionary. You don't need a pill. Well, CEO Jeffrey Wu went as far as described Poo-Voo-Voon's products as unlocking next-level thinking that will be the key to humanity's evolution. In a way, it's almost arming humanity against artificial intelligence and robots, Wu told Bloomberg.

CNBC discovered that they actually commissioned a clinical trial themselves, and they found out that their supplements were less effective in many ways than a cup of coffee. Then the company decided not to publicize the study and tried to bury it and asked researchers to change the name of the product to distance it from Poo-Voo-Voon.

So, fuck you, Poo-Voo-Voon. You know what the problem is, Jason? What? You know they won't go out of business. They'll probably get more funding. Oh, yeah. No, now that they've got the press, you know. What a world. Speaking of fun things, I just saw this one right before we went to air, and Walmart is in the news.

They're yanking old T-shirts made by Teespring because there's a third-party deal, and Teespring basically stepped on their own dick by not being able to police their own system. And there were T-shirts such as Rope Tree Journalist. And some very, very racist ones that got through.

Lots of racist ones. Lots and lots of racist ones. Yeah. Oh, the whole shirt is Rope Tree Journalist, some assembly required, by the way. And, yeah. So, Teespring's like, we have multiple layers of, you know, protections against this thing.

And these just got through because they have, you know, of course, machine learning and AI bots that scrub all the content. And then there are humans that watch it. I'm guessing all of those Filipino VAs just can't read English because it's pretty straightforward. Yeah, this is hard to miss.

It's just the words. Mm-hmm. Right there, together. Although, I have to give them a high five for the Bill Cosby drinks on me ladies shirt. Nice. I do like that one. Feedback loop. We've got a bunch of new Patreon and PayPal peoples this week.

We got Jamie H., Lawrence DeBee, Nicholas W. on Patreon. And from PayPal, Bill and John S. and Jacob F. And we have some notes from these folks. Would you like to drop those up there, Brian? Sure. Bill says, Brian and Jason, I am contacting you from the year 2013.

It is September 7th, and I've just finished listening to episode 24. I am one of those people that feel the need to start from the beginning, so I've started listening to your podcast from episode one. I can't listen to podcasts like Jason, two-time squirrel mode, so it may take a little while. Yes, it's going to. I appreciate the nostalgia and how much things have changed, yet stayed the same, I would say, Bill.

I will drop some money in the till, and you did, so thank you, and give you guys a five-star, if that still matters, in the future. Yes, it does, so thank you very much. John S. said, your show rocks. Thanks. And Jacob F. said, hey, guys, heading off to Kuwait for a while, so I won't be able to download the podcast as regularly as I'd like.

To make up for it, I'm making my first-ever donation. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Jacob, and thank you for your service. I'm assuming that's what you're going to Kuwait for, not holiday. All right, and over on Twitter, 6502chip says, these guys discuss Instagram overhearing them and placing ads on their feed.

Okay. Fake news. Fake news. Okay, yeah, we've been there, we've been down that road. Been there, been there, done that. Ben Stanley said, sad week this week, and he sent us a little picture of no new Grumpy Old Geeks podcast. Sorry. Hey, sorry, we had to take a break.

Yep. And the lobster sent us a joke. Daughter, why was six for eight or seven? Me, rolling my eyes, because seven, eight, nine. Daughter, but why did seven do that? Me, huh? Daughter, because he was supposed to get three squared meals a day. Oh my God, how I've never heard that one before.

That's pretty good. I liked it. God, you really do like dad jokes now. I totally do. I don't know. It's like some weird genetic thing that just happens. All right, Clue and Vaz sent us two things. Sweden, the virtual residence of every Grumpy Old Geek, and a shot of Tunnelblick connected to Sweden.

I'm assuming that's his VPN of choice. And he also said, I remember sometime back you mentioned on the podcast a Mac app to optimize the MacBook's battery life and charge it correctly. Do you remember what it was? Hashtag help. Fruit juice. Fruit juice, that's right. It's called fruit juice. You can get it in the Mac app store, I believe.

Yeah. It's a great app. I actually use it on all my laptops. And I have noticed that the charge does get better over time if you follow the instructions. Yes, I have as well. I'm still running it as well. So Crypticablam sent us all, look, it's your fave. And it's a screenshot of a headline that has AI in it and the first line of the body of text switching over to machine learning.

Nice. Yes. That's the way to go here. And Nathan Reitzma writes in FB Purity rocks. Thanks for the recommendation. Another GOG home run. Now, if we can get them to make an IG purity for Instagram just to chrono the timeline. Yep. Not going to happen. Finally, a boy clawed his way out of 20 plus years of manufacturing and into something more techie sort of.

And he sends us a picture of basically himself on a big billboard that he was promoted to the help desk. Congratulations. This next one comes from Mr. Dom says, after taking a break from GOG podcast, I'm subscribed again, hoping for less political bile. Fuck Trump. Well, you take it as you get it around here.

You take it as you get it. We've laid off of it a lot, but hey, it's a pretty good day today, right? Hey, hey, flip boy. What are you going to do there? All right. And 6502 Chip also writes in, the porns are invading LinkedIn and sends us a screenshot of some pornage action over there. I'm like, finally, LinkedIn might be useful now.

Maybe. And Sin Delicato sent, just heard this term for the first time while listening to GOG podcast at two times, I'm assuming. Yes. This is in relation to Podfaster. I've listened to podcasts at 2x since my iPhone 3GS eight years. It's how I stay informed. All right. We'll keep on podfasting us.

Listen to our pod fast. Faster. And the next one comes from Alan, also about podfasting. He says, about the podfasting. I had to smile at that. As a blind person, I'm quite used to fast speech, though usually it's computer-generated speech, as in the output from a screen reader. The fastest it speaks, the more I can do.

Up to a point. Too fast, and I go looking for the rate control. Gotcha. And these are coming to us from GOG.show now. Monkey13 wrote us, I guess a bobcat can't hear a Prius coming either, with a link to a story about a bobcat surviving a 50-mile trip to Richmond stuck in a car grill. Nice. All right.

This next one comes from Julio Aldana. He says, hi, guys. And he writes us a nice little intro about how he found the show and how Leo Laporte is persona non grata in his ear holes now. But anyway, to the question at hand, in your turkey episode, you know, we had a turkey episode, you guys were talking about browsers and how Opera is your browser of choice.

Why is that? I've tried Opera on and off over the years, and I never quite liked it myself. The last time might have been three years ago or so, and so most sites that I visit wouldn't load properly on Opera, so it would always go back to Chrome. Now that I'm wearing off of Google services, I quite like the new Firefox and was just wondering about your reasons for using Opera and if I should give it another chance.

Looking forward to your response. Yes, we switched to Opera months ago now. Yeah. He said turkey episode because that's what he listened to over Thanksgiving, Jason. Not that we have a turkey episode. Yeah. We're a couple of turkeys. So yeah, we both switched over to Opera a couple of months ago.

It's great now. It's very fast. We switched before the new Firefox came out. I tried the new Firefox, as I think I talked about in that very episode, and it's great, too, but I can only do one or two browser changes a year because I burn out. So Opera's fine, runs great.

Every site I've been to loads perfectly. In fact, I had problems loading Google Analytics in Chrome, and it worked fine in Opera, which is hilarious. So yeah, Firefox also seems very, very good, very, very fast, but Opera's right up there with it, and I don't feel like switching again right now. Yeah, and the upside is this is a complete rewrite of Opera that they did not too long ago, and you can use Chrome extensions on it, which is very handy.

The only thing that's happened in the past couple of weeks here now, though, is I've got a list of the extensions. So my 1Password extension is right next to the URL bar, and I'm having a hell of a time clicking on that nowadays. It moves around a little bit when I try and click on it. Yeah, I have noticed that as well. I've had to, like, if I just, like, basically, I don't try one click anymore.

I just, like, hammer it with three or four clicks, and it always opens. But it is a weird little bug right now. Yeah, okay. I'm glad I'm not the only one that had that yet. Knowing. Next up from Chance. Hey, guys, love the show. In previous episodes, I know you have talked a bit about YouTube kids and the various problems that there are with both ads and content.

I came across this article on TechCrunch and wondered if you guys had seen it. The only thing is it's a subscription service, and I know how much you guys love those. And it's an article talking about a new service called Jellies, which is a subscription service that has kids programming in it. So I'm looking into this stuff more and more all the time because some of the ads that are getting thrown in, watching Sesame Street videos and things like that, are for adults.

Punisher ads. It's weird, basically. So I looked at Jellies. I looked at the site, and, man, they do not provide much information at all. I don't know what's included. Does it have Sesame Street stuff? Does it have Little Einstein? Because your kids get into certain things, and that's what they want to see.

So I can't tell what Jellies is providing. I don't know where they're getting their content from. Is it all homegrown, or do they license it? I don't know. Their site doesn't tell me. I'd happily pay for a service that gave me quality, well-known children's programming on demand with the ability to create playlists and things like that and no ads.

Good fucking luck with that. I can't find anything like that anywhere. I've been looking a bit into YouTube kids. I'm going to give that a go next week. But as far as I understand, there are still ads. It's just they've run the ads, theoretically, probably just through a machine learning thing. We'll see. We'll see what YouTube's kids is going to be like.

But, again, I looked at Jellies. I want a list of programming. I want a trial. I want to see what kind of stuff I'm going to be paying for. And they don't provide any of that, which is fucking weird, right? Weird. No trial in this day and age? You've got to be kidding me. No trial. And go to their site.

They show you nothing. They don't give a list. They don't show any sample programming. I have no clue what I'd be getting if I paid for that. Do you have to pay in the kid coin? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next one we've got here from Sutton, a.k.a.

Ringer Zero. Hey, guys. I applaud your show and highly recommend your podcast to all my associates and cohorts. You guys say out loud what I wish I could say during meetings. The reason we can say it out loud is because we got fired. We've all been fired. I was first introduced to your show by Dave Bittner, the Cyber Wire guy.

As an information security professional and executive, I especially appreciate the security hop portion of the show. I wanted to give you guys a tip on a show that I find most entertaining that you may want to include in media candy. It's called Travelers on Netflix and reminds me of the X-Files before it jumped the shark with Agent Doggett.

Keep up the good work. I can't remember if I've seen this show. I'm going to have to go dig it up. It sounds familiar. It does sound familiar, but I don't know if I've seen it or not yet either. Yeah. Thanks to autoplay, I will not be loading it right now. Yes. We will take a look at it. Next up is from Panfilius, thought you'd find this interesting, and he sent us a link.

Volvo does supply Uber with up to 24,000 driverless cars, and he says, you called it first. So yeah, we kind of did. But I did read through the article, the self-driving system that would be used in the Volvo cars, which have yet to be built, is under development by Uber's advanced technologies group.

GM's got these things on the road. They haven't even built theirs yet. And don't even mention Tesla. Yes. Tesla, which basically is at the point where if he can press a button, and all the cars will just become self-driving cars. All right. Next, let's move over to some iTunes.

Five stars from Helios 247. Gold star. You guys are great. Format is fantastic, and your reviews are concise and knowledgeable. Sometimes. Sometimes. Concise. We're trying to keep this to an hour show, and I can already tell it's a two-hour show. All right. Next, another five-star rating from Faffin in Australia.

Jason has sandworms. Okay. This week's episode, 236, is funnier than the normal Chuckler episodes. This one is making it hard to drive straight. Well, get yourself one of those GM cars, buddy. Keep up the good work. Hopefully, my car continues to compensate for my inattentive driving and then takes me under its care after the uprising.

If you want to play Cards Against Humanity, just hold the opponent's hand up to your China cam and wait for them to hack your Alexa so they can tell you which card they are playing. Thanks, guys. Thank you. That is awesome. That's very funny. 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.

And if you're so inclined, please do head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. And as always, tell all of your friends, all of them, all of them. We want all of them. Closing shout-outs! So my closing shout-out is to a card game I can't even play.

Cards Against Humanity's Christmas dealio is out, and I can't remember if we talked about it on the last episode before we went dark, but I did get to sign up for the seven days of Christmas, and this morning I got my first letter in the mail, which is my deed to the .000067% of land that I'm using to help stop the border wall, which is very fun, a big map and a letter from the lawyer, and a little packet of cards to go with Cards Against Humanity

that we'll probably be going to somebody else since I don't play. But it's very funny. All right. And that is awesome. And my shout-out goes to Michael Flynn. Ah, Michael Flynn, who said, if I did a tenth of what she did, referring to Hillary Clinton, I would be in jail today. And guess who's going to jail as of today?

Lock him up. Lock him up. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. 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 237. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week. Nothing? No.

Sounds like you were winding up for one. I already said like 19 times, I hate this fucking movie.

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