238: Same as It Ever Was

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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 am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister, covered in ash and soot. Oh, that's right. Your whole town is burning down, isn't it? Los Angeles is finally burning. Oh, fun. Fun times. It's not fun with a 15-month-old that has endless energy and cannot go outside because ash is falling out of the sky. So, good times.

I know. I mean, I had the dog home for two days from daycare and she was driving me crazy with the energy. So, I can only imagine with a child that you can't just give a bone to and say, shut up and lay down. No, it doesn't really work like that, sadly. Oh, well. Well, it does if you're a shitty parent. Oh, well, yeah, there's that. I want to cover something here at the top of the show.

And we got an email in from Russ Clayton. He says, hey guys, I listen to the show every week and want to support what you do. Your recommendation for 1Password and PIAVPN is well worth it. I got no geek. So, I signed up to provide support through Patreon. But a couple days later, they tell me I'm going to have to pay them a fee each month to support you.

Hell no! That's my grumpy. How can I provide support without you or I having to pay a stupid fee? Do you take checks? That's my old. Well, here's the thing. We always paid the fee. It was always taken from our cut. So, this is just a transference of responsibility for who gets to pay onto you.

And the really obnoxious thing about this whole thing is nobody asked us. Nope. Patreon was doing so well. Yes. And there's a huge backlash about this right now from all of the creators because it's hard enough for us to get your money.

And now they're saying, it's stupid. It's really, really stupid. I think this might get reversed because, yeah, all the creators are kind of pissed off about this. Nobody asked any of us.

This is just bad optics. I mean, it's the same amount of money coming out. We want it coming out of our side, not a stupid notice saying it's coming out of yours. It's stupid. Yeah. I mean, on a dollar a month, you know, they take their 5% plus the 35 cents plus another 2.9% for the credit card processing fee.

Yep. So, on a dollar donation, we get, you know, around 55 cents. Something like that. And that's fine. Yeah. We'll take that 55 cents. It's 55 cents we didn't have yesterday. Exactly. Unfortunately, we can't make donations, I believe, less than a dollar. So, we're going to look into it.

And if this thing doesn't get reversed, what we'll do is we'll change our pledge numbers so it'll come out of our side somehow. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. And in the meantime, if, you know, you can always support us using the PayPal button over on GOG.show. There's still fees, obviously, but they do come out of our end.

And you can do recurring payments via PayPal, as we've learned as well. So, if you don't want to use Patreon because you're pissed off at them doing something pretty stupid, we'll take your money anyway. We can. Yeah, it's just the Patreon system's nice because we can send you funny things every now and again when we feel the urge.

And, you know, we're trying to get better with that stuff. But, yeah, it just gives us a better system to do it. That's why, for us, it's worth it to pay that extra 5%. But, you know what? Do it however you want to do it. It is the season of giving. And if you don't want to give us anything, at least tell a friend. Yes, please do.

And speaking of money, I got a notice from the New York Times this week. Yes. That they are bumping up my subscription cost by like $3 a week. Yeah. Yeah, nah. So, the problem with this email was I went and I looked at how much I was spending on the New York Times.

I was spending a lot of money on the New York Times, it turns out. I was spending about $22 a week. That's not insignificant. That's pretty pricey. Yeah. It's a lot of money. And guess what? I'm not doing anymore. Paying them $22 a week. I am still supporting them.

I cut it down to about $9. So, I get, you know, the digital version and then the Sunday paper and physical. Because I do like to get the physical paper. And I have noticed that since I've changed it and cut it off that I do miss going out in the morning, getting the paper and having it to flip through. Even though I know everything that's in the paper because I get the morning headlines downloaded to my phone.

So, I read them when I'm on the crapper before I go out and get the paper. So, I'm like, ah, well, I don't know what the point is. But, yeah, it's like, oh, man, they were doing so well. They said they had record subscriber numbers. And, apparently, when you subscribe to the New York Times, it costs them more money.

So, then they have to raise the price. That makes no sense to me. I don't get it. No, me either. But, you know, tis the season. And, as I always like to say around Christmas time, tis the season for pink slips and rate increases. Yep. That's what happens around Christmas. Have you ever gotten fired at Christmas?

Yes. I've been fired over Christmas break. I've been fired the night before Thanksgiving. There's a lot of real assholes out there. Yes, there are. The worst one was I didn't get fired, but my entire division got fired at Paramount, like, right before Christmas.

They let everybody go except three people, and I was one of the three that got to stay. And, talk about misery at Christmas. All your friends are gone. You're sitting there. You've got nobody to talk to. It's like, oh, man. Yeah. But, since I wasn't a real employee, I wouldn't have got severance like everybody else did. Everybody else was happy that they got fired because they got, like, seven months severance and a huge payout.

They're like, woo-hoo, thank you. We hated you guys anyway. Thanks for the cash. Right. How about a little follow-up? And, speaking of cash, I think it's time for me to sell some of my Apple stock. What now, Brian? We have been talking about how Apple's quality control seems to have taken a severe dip recently.

Gone straight in the shitter, you mean? Yes, they've been releasing software with, you know, horrible, horrible bugs in it. There's no quality control whatsoever. I'm losing it with iTunes. I can't. We all know iTunes sucks anyways, but, like, I was getting ready to go to Pub Trivia. I wanted to listen to a couple songs, plug my phone in, go over to iTunes, just drag a few specific songs over to my...

It's not going. Why is it not letting me copy anything? Why is it graying out? Why is it not doing anything? Google. Because there's no manual. Yeah. Thousands upon thousands of different threads talking about the same thing, but there's no fix on half of the threads.

It's just an empty comment, and nobody's responded. Finally find one that says what you're supposed to do, which you, of course, put in the show notes as well, Jason. Which is all well and good. You know, somehow the manually managed music and videos got turned off again, because every time I do a goddamn update to iTunes or my phone, it switches that setting off.

So this is my new Bluetooth complaint. The new Bluetooth. And it happens so infrequently that you don't remember how to fix it, so you have to do this time and time and time again. I'm so frustrated about this. Now, we're going to talk more about iTunes changes later in the show.

Then, then... But hey, before you keep going, before you keep going, though, I want to tell you something. I didn't have to Google that, because I've had to do it so many damn times, it is ingrained in my mind how to turn that on. So yes, I know your pain, because it's so stupid.

It's so stupid. Just to be able to drag a file from iTunes into your phone. Just to be able to take some of the music that I bought from Apple and put it on my Apple device using Apple software. I'm so mad with that. Okay. And since then, now, two days later, every single time I connect my phone to my laptop to charge it, iTunes cannot restore the iPhone because the iPhone disconnected.

iTunes cannot restore the iPhone because the iPhone disconnected. Down the Google hole, I go again to how to fix the iPhone disconnected error during backup or restore in iTunes. And I still haven't done it, because this is actually quite involved. Oh, yeah, it's really involved. So I've got to do this.

I've got to spend two hours today trying to fucking fix this so I don't get an error message every time I try to charge my phone. And my phone's not backing up right now. Apple, what the hell is going on over there? Oh, I agree.

I agree. I don't know if that means you should sell your stock, though. Well, I'm Apple heavy anyways. It's been a long time coming. Yeah. Yeah. There's a change in the winds, as they say. I was thinking of divesting my portfolio as well. Yes. But anyway, yeah, you know what?

I miss Winamp so much. Oh, my God. I really miss Winamp. I wish I still had my real player, MP3 players. Oh, that thing was a piece of shit. They're all six songs that you could put on it. I got so mad at mine because it was doing something like I couldn't get it off a loop from one song.

And I just I threw it against the wall and it exploded. Now, I got a little follow up here. Sure. We mentioned we mentioned on the show one time we were talking about hot dogs for some reason. As one does on a technology podcast. Exactly. So I did use technology to go and find the hot dogs that you recommended, which were boar's head hot dogs.

Yes. I can't find them in Chicago, so I'm like, you know what? I get I get everything in the world from Amazon. Let me go to Amazon. There is a boar's head deli in Chicago, Jason. Right. But I don't live in Chicago proper. OK. I'm in the suburbs. All right.

I'm not going to drive for two hours, you know, an hour at least each way to go get a hot dog when I can just go to Amazon and use Amazon Fresh. OK. And got the hot dogs. And you are absolutely correct. They are the best hot dogs I've ever had. Right. Highly, highly recommend boar's head hot dogs.

They are expensive as hell. It's like nine bucks for a pack of six, but highly worth it. You do get what you pay for. They are delicious. This is not even a hot dog. This is a steak in a bun. It is fantastic. So I highly recommend the boar's head hot dogs. And I am enjoying the the Amazon Fresh.

And I did another order the other day. And I don't know if you've ever gotten an Amazon Fresh order, but the bags that they come in are massive. Yeah, they're huge. And I am pretty sure that the drivers get paid to buy the bag because I got a ton of stuff.

I got a lot of dog food. I got veggies. I'm on a big veggie kick now. So I got like tons of really nice vegetables. And I also ordered garlic. One bulb. All I needed was one bulb because I had a little leftover. They used one of those entire bags for one bulb of garlic. Again, this is the world that we live in now.

If I were to go to a store and buy something, I would have to pay for a bag. If I order it online and have it delivered to me, they basically back up a truck full of cardboard and dump it in your house. Pretty much. Yeah. And I've got a ton of these. They come in these like cold packaging things, like the sleeves that you get your blue apron or your HelloFresh in.

I now have a stack about, you know, a foot high of these things. Oh, and the bricks of ice that come with it. I got tons of those, too. So I have to figure out how to recycle all that stuff. And I'm pretty sure that I can't give it to the driver and say, hey, can you take this back to work and use it again? No, you can't. I actually asked once.

Wow. Yeah. I do think that on the Amazon Fresh page somewhere there is a link to how to recycle that stuff. But yeah, it's kind of silly. But now it's 18 degrees outside right now, so I can just keep the ice in the garage for a while. Or you can just ship it here and we can throw it at the fires.

Yeah. I don't think that's water in those bags. So I have a Bitcoin story for this week. All right. This should be fun. I call this Fruit Cups Adventure with Bitcoin. Friend of the show, Fruit Cup. And believe it or not, you can laugh at his nickname all you want. I was friends with this guy for over a year before I knew what his real name was.

Everybody just calls him Fruit Cup. That's who he is. I had no idea we had a fan of the show named Fruit Cup. We do. We do. So shout out to Fruit Cup. So he wrote me on Wednesday evening or Wednesday afternoon, and he had just bought some Bitcoin. He bought $20 worth of Bitcoin and said, if this hits 500 bucks, we're celebrating Bitcoin with happy hour.

I figured this is a win-win. Either he loses all the money and I can laugh at him, or I'm going to be getting a free vodka soda top shelf if he gets his money. So that's fantastic. I'm like, awesome. You go for it. And overnight, I thought about it a bit more. And I was like, huh, maybe I should do this too.

Why not throw 20 bucks at it and go through the process? And at least I could talk about it on the show. The next morning, I asked him what he used. Oh, actually, hold on. Let me back up. Later that evening, he sent me a screenshot, and his 20 bucks was now worth $435.62.

This is what made me go, well, I'll throw 20 bucks in. Exactly. And he says, well, that escalated quickly. And I said, well, you got 70 bucks to go, and I'm getting a free cocktail. I asked him what he was using to buy it, because I haven't really done any of the research. And he signed up with Coinbase, which I quickly discovered, link in the show notes, that Coinbase is now the number one iPhone app in the US, because so many people are trying to get in on this Bitcoin thing.

Yep. So I go to Coinbase.com, and I try to register. And this is Thursday morning. And Jason, you and I have built countless, countless registration systems. Oh, thousands of them. I mean, I have built hundreds, at least.

You know what those hundreds and thousands of registration systems that you and I built do that Coinbase doesn't? I fear to ask. What is it? Work. Yes. Everyone that we built has worked. I got an error message when I tried to sign up for Coinbase, which, A, made me go, am I really going to put my money into a company that can't even build a working registration system?

And B, I was like, goddammit, well, I've got to go do some errands now. So I'm out and about. I figure I'll either get the email saying that I did actually register, or I'll have to go back and register again, whatever. Go out and about running some errands, and Fruitcup writes me. Oh, boy. I was driving into work, so I couldn't sell.

The price is now crashing, and Coinbase has completely suspended all Bitcoin trading. And this is probably why I couldn't sign in, because they probably just shut down their whole system. This is not how financial markets are supposed to work, people. So I was like, hope you got your money back. And he eventually was able to log in a little bit later, and he cashed out at $496.

$4 shy of me being able to get a damn beverage. But, you know, it's still, I may give this a go, but it's just warning sign after warning sign after warning sign. Do not get involved with this stuff. But I did find a video that perfectly sums up so many people I know that have gotten into Bitcoin.

It's called Buys Bitcoin from the Corporate Bro on YouTube. It's 30 seconds long. It is to a T, to a T, everybody I know that's gotten Bitcoin. So highly recommend checking that out. It'll be in the show notes. Very funny.

And one of the, I just finally, I just, the news is everywhere. The stories are everywhere. It's breaking everywhere. We're not covering it on the show. We're going to continue not covering it on the show. But Recode just had an article saying nearly 80% of female tech founders have experienced sexual harassment at work or know someone who has.

We can't keep up with these stories. There's too damn many of them. I don't understand what the problem is in tech and media companies. Don't stick your dick in people's faces, people. Figuratively, literally. And we're just not going to report on it. It's just everywhere. So, but, but corporate bros, it's not that hard not to harass someone.

Thus ends the longest intro and follow-up that we've ever had. Let's get to the news. In the news. As I've mentioned, we are basically burning in LA.

There are currently over five wildfires that are blazing down here in Southern California all over the place. Tens of thousands of acres. I was watching the news the other morning and I saw that famous video now of the people driving in on the 405 by the Getty with the hills on fire. And I sent it to a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, who does our VO stuff.

And he had the best line. He's like, one simply takes the 405 into Mordor. I thought it was genius because it really does look like Mordor over there with everything going on. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. But, you know, what's happening is the LA Times has reported that the LAPD is advising drivers not to use navigation apps, specifically Waze, because it's the big one that everybody kind of uses, because it's instructing users to drive towards streets in areas that are on

fire because they're less crowded at the moment. Oh, look, there's no traffic on this street because it is burning. So this does show a problem with these technologies. And it's an interesting article over Slate that is basically stating, can you trust technology you use for everyday navigation in the event of a major emergency?

What we're finding out is no, you cannot. I could have told you that a long time ago. That's why you keep a map and a compass in the back of your truck. You keep a map and a compass and you listen to the radio because the radio news will tell you what's going on. Now, this just in Waze to be rebranded as Blaze.

Okay, that was pretty good. I'll give you a beer for that one. Thank you. All right. Moving along, we are now in the voice wars. This week, Google moved to block users of Amazon's Fire TV and Echoes from watching YouTube. So here we go. The old battles are starting again.

Now, everybody is so used to this free and open internet, net neutrality people. This is what we're going to get. It's all going to be battles. It's all going to be dominants. It's all going to be devices are going to stop playing well with each other. All of this has happened before. I mean, Mac and PCs used to be diametrically opposed.

Nothing crossed over. Then everything started to, and it was a better world. But now we're going back. So Google, Amazon, fix your shit. Don't go down this path. That's all I'm going to say. You know what this is all about, right? It's about dominance. Well, no, it's about advertising because Amazon is stripping the advertising out of YouTube videos when you play them on their devices.

And Google does not like that. Yes. We like we have these videos here for you to watch. We pay for these videos to be hosted. We're going to be paying more if net neutrality is dismissed. So show the fucking ads. And Amazon's like, no, we're just going to play them like we want.

So Google says, well, guess what? No, no. So you got to play, you know, yeah, this is, this is, you know, billionaires bickering, but it's like Amazon should play by the TOS that Google has provided. And that just makes sense. That's just, it's not just common sense.

It's common courtesy. I agree. If you want our videos, you should abide by the rules. If I'm trying to show my 15 year old son a Sesame Street video on my Echo show, he should get the wildly inappropriate for children ads before it. Ah, but you know what? We didn't put this one in the show. This actually was in my notes, but I forgot.

Google is hiring or YouTube, not Google, uh, is hiring 10,000 people, more people apparently to start scrubbing through those videos and ads to get them, get them taken out. So at least they're being proactive and they're creating jobs. Make America great again.

That's right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Everybody's going to be based in the Philippines. What am I talking about? Make the Philippines great again. That's my new hat. Slate also had this really great article about all the purchases that Facebook has made this year, or at least basically just stealing ideas or buying companies to keep up with anybody that is out there with anything innovative.

I love just reading through this. It's, uh, you know, all the different, uh, vectors that they're trying to take over now. Fundraising, trying to take that away from Kickstarter, local stuff, trying to take it away from Yelp. I like the fact that the list Foursquare here because nobody uses Foursquare anymore. That's pretty damn funny. That's sort of a thing. Uh, yeah, they're trying to do marketplaces like Craigslist.

They're trying to do work histories like LinkedIn. They're obviously, they're doing stories like Snapchat. Uh, they're trying to do their own TV stuff to kind of, you know, take away from Netflix or Hulu or Amazon. And they've got their workplace, uh, program now that is exactly like snack. It's amazing when you realize that this company, Facebook has just so much money that if they see anybody doing well with anything, they just copy it and, and redo it themselves.

And they're doing it all poorly. Yes. That's the thing. None of these have caught on. So I'm like, Hey, you know what? Buy up some of these companies, spread the wealth around, make a couple more millionaire douchebags out there that we have to, we get to make fun of on the show. Perfect for us.

But yeah, they're failing on all of them. Like you said last week, uh, Facebook marketplace is a, is a shit show. I cannot find anything. There are people selling like Nutrisystem supplements out of the garage in my neighborhood and lipstick and makeup that are, they got sucked in these MLM scams.

And I'm just like, Oh, you poor bastard. But now I know where you live. So I can just go break into your garage and steal the product if I want, because you're stupid. Uh, anyway, I took a dark turn. Well, anyway, uh, I, I think it's funny that people think that Facebook taking other people's properties and making it their own is something new because Facebook at its core, at its core is other people's ideas.

Yes. I mean, I don't even care about the Winklevoss twins. They're just jocko idiots. Uh, Facebook itself is just a social network that was around before Facebook. I'm sorry. There was, there was LiveJournal. There was MySpace. There was GeoCities. There was tons of social networks out there long before Facebook.

Facebook just came along and made a better mousetrap, which is also arguable because I fucking hate Facebook. Yep, but you're on it. So it worked. Ah, yeah, but I delete everything every month. Thank you for that. That's true. Well, Facebook is going to bring out one thing that I'm sure will do well because it started with it and it did well.

Poke is coming back. Oh, that's just what we need in this day and age of Me Too. Let everybody poke everybody else. Apparently in the UK and South America, they are testing out a greetings feature that will let users send digital salutations in the form of a wave, high five, wink, hug, or a poke.

So poke is coming back. Actually, poke was buried in the system for a long time. It was still there. You can still find it. It did seem to go away recently. Speaking of that, I mean, Facebook, I don't know what's going on with their UI right now, but it's broken almost all the time for me.

Like, I can't scroll and there's all these weird things and I no longer get the, like, running list of what people are doing. Like, you would see if somebody commented on something. All of that's gone for me. I guess it's just gone. Well, there's two things here. One, you're running FB Purity, so they might need to update.

I've taken it off. Oh, you have? Okay. The other thing here is I talked about this on the show a couple weeks ago. My friend had that same problem. Like, she couldn't get past the first ad and she's not running an ad blocker, but it would just crap out on the first ad. I think it's been fixed for her since then, or she just quit it, which is also possible and just went to Snapchat.

But, yeah, they're breaking all over the place for a lot of people and nobody can figure out why. And, of course, no tech support. Yeah. But, now, I think if Facebook has all this money and they're doing all of this stuff, they need to get Christian Slater to come back in and do a greetings and salutations from Heathers, which is what's played every time you click that button.

Come on. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. And if the Facebook Purity guy is listening, please build that into the system because that would be awesome. I agree. Copyright be damned. Speaking of copyright be damned, guess what might be coming back?

Vine. Oh, no. Seriously? Yes. Apparently, the founder was his name. Brian Hoffman, I believe. Is it Brian? I can't remember. Dom Hoffman. Sorry. Dom Hoffman tweeted a photo with a logo and a caption that read V2, followed by a series of tweets from the week before about how he's going to work on a follow-up to Vine.

So, apparently, lots of people are very excited about that because they like 10-second videos. Six. Six seconds. Six-second videos. Okay. So, he's going to apparently bring it back. We shall see. I don't... Now that everybody's doing video everywhere all the time anyways, I don't really see that bringing this back is going to do much of anything.

But, boy, can I not wait to hear about the new Vine stars again. You know what, though? Look, people really got into that platform and they really enjoyed it. And there were some pretty cool videos that people made. Most of them, yes, were crap. But, you know, I think the real cool thing about it is, like, you know, the stop-motion aspect where you could, you know, just...

I don't know how much work went into some of these things, but basically, you just turned into a six-second stop-motion movie. And some of them were fantastic. 99.99999% of them were shit, but still, people liked it. So, you know, hey, if people like something and Twitter takes it away and you can contractually rebuild it, hey, why the fuck not?

Have at it, dude. Why not? I can't wait. I can't wait to not use it. Yes, exactly. We've talked before about the dangers of the connected hotel room. We've had many stories about people hacking in and being able to control other rooms. Hilton does not seem to care.

They are all in. They are planning to offer a total smart hotel room system by next year. So, with your app, which will be your digital key, you'll be able to not only get into your room, but you'll be able to control smart lights, motorized blinds, smart thermostats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I recently just stayed at a Hilton, and they had the option, apparently, to basically use the app and their app on your phone as a key.

Unfortunately, I had to register with them when I booked the room to be able to do it, so I wasn't able to test it out, which sucked. Okay, flaw in the system. Now, if there's a button that says, get the jizz stains off my pillow, I'm in, but otherwise, why bother? Oh, boy.

Just, yeah. Well, I mean, you have stayed at a Hilton. Did you check those pillows? Sometimes they're a little nasty. I firmly go with the, I'd rather not know. I'm not listening. I'm not listening. I do not travel with a blacklight. I don't want to know. Yeah, but the smell.

You can smell it. Anyway. It was a nice room, Jason. I'm sure it was. Smelled of bleach and vinegar. Okay, moving on to other things that stink. The SEC, yes, the Securities and Exchange Commission, halted an ICO scam, ICO being initial coin offering, from Dominic LaCroix and his company PlexCorp up in Quebecois, and I did not know that they have a cyber unit now.

Good. Well, makes sense. I sent this around to a bunch of my friends who are in the Bitcoin world, and unanimously, everybody said, it's about fucking time, and they were very happy about this. These people want regulation, so now you're going to start getting at least some policing of the scammers out there.

So I thought that that's pretty cool, and they're putting out alerts and stuff like that. So I've got a link to one about public companies making ICO-related claims, because these guys were saying that an initial investment would yield 1,354% in profit, which is very specific, I've got to say, in less than 29 days, which you can't do.

So, because you can't guarantee profit, it's illegal to say that. Yes. Anyway, so check these guys out, Investor.gov, and we've got the link in the show notes about what's going on there. Now, let's talk about AI, your favorite thing in the world.

Real AI or machine learning or tree-based decision-making? Well, this, I think, can be qualified as real AI. We're talking about AlphaZero. This is the spawn of DeepMind, and the new program that they have is kind of scary.

This thing, what it does is it teaches itself. That's why I think you can call it an AI, because it doesn't, you tell it the rules, like, and in this case, chess, and a couple other games. And once it knows the rules, then it just plays against itself. Right. Finding out how to play, how to win.

And in a couple hours, this thing became, like, the best chess program in the world. So, unfortunately, the software out there that is the best chess program in the world has now been beaten by this. So, I guess, you know, we'll be able to have an app from AlphaZero soon to be able to get beaten at chess.

Great. I think this is just fascinating, though. It's using what they're calling reinforcement learning, where it does play with itself, tries to beat itself. And what was I watching? Oh, you know what I was watching last night? Battlestar Galactica, which we'll get to shortly. And I was thinking, man, if they could just rerun simulations of these battles over and over again, this thing is going to be a scary piece of military software at some point.

It really is. Yep. And that's what got me thinking about it. I'm like, huh, this is very frightening. We are getting to the whopper. We are getting very close to the whopper from War Games. Another thing we'll be talking about shortly. But the other problem I had with this is the next article I found was, AI is now so complex, its creators can't trust why it makes decisions.

Yeah. We covered a similar story about this earlier. Yep. We sure did. But they just had this AI, like, what do you call it, like a summit or conference. And what I love is, there's a quote here.

And I'll tell you who it's from when I'm done. We don't want to accept arbitrary decisions by entities, people, or AIs that we don't understand. In order for machine learning models to be accepted by society, we're going to need to know why they're making the decisions they're making. This comes from Jason Yosinski.

Yosinski. Ah, yes. Yosinski. From Uber. Uber. I'm sorry. We don't have the people who are making these super chess learning. We have the guys who are going to figure out how to get a ride drunk at three in the morning that are at the forefront of AI right now.

It's kind of scary. That's all I'm saying. It is. I still think that some of it might just be a version of the bullshit generator where they just make shit up and throw it at you. But who knows? I tend to agree with you there. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored in part by FreshBooks.

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Now, Brian, you talked about your specific Apple issues earlier, and I had one that was driving me crazy because I have set up a new editing station in my office, and I've got a laptop with two monitors attached, but I didn't want three monitors.

I wanted one of the monitors to mirror the laptop, right? Seems simple. Right. I did this on accident a long time ago, and I didn't know how I did it because it worked in my office before, and I'm like, how did you – because there's no way to do it because there's no documentation anymore.

I found an article that tells you how to do it, and all you have to do is if you're ever doing a three-monitor setup and you want to mirror certain monitors on other monitors, just hit the Alt key in macOS in the display, drag one onto another, boom, you're done. So somebody out there is going to thank me for that at some point in the near future.

I'm just throwing it out there, and a lot of people are going to go, what the hell are you talking about this for? But I'm telling you, right now, in the future, at least one of you is going to write me an email saying, I've been trying to do that forever. Thank you. No, that's not what's going to happen. What's going to happen is what happens to us every time.

Somebody's going to tweet us and say, hey, about 35 episodes ago, you mentioned something about something, and then we're going to have to dig back through our own shows and find it. Yeah, yeah. We do kind of have some lazy listeners out there, don't we? There is a search function at the top right of grumpyoldgeeks.com that you can search the show notes on.

I'm just saying. Now, talking about war games again, there was a game like two years ago called Her Story. I don't know. You're not a gamer, so you've never heard of this game, obviously. I hadn't heard about it until I was researching this story on war games, because the designer of that game has now been given the reins to make a war games game.

And Her Story, not Her Games, Her Story, you can get on Steam for like six bucks. And I'm going to check it out because it's a full motion video game where, like, there's seven interviews with this woman, but they were broken apart and corrupted. So you have to, like, search terms, build out the story.

It's really crazy, but it looks really fun. So this guy who did that game, which won a ton of awards, is now doing a war games game. And he's saying, I was thrilled to take the questions raised by the original movie and ask them again in a world where technology has fundamentally changed our lives.

And the problem with it is it's not the same as war games. What we can tell about this is at some point in the game, there will be a hacker. That's about it. That seems to be the only relation to the original war games.

We'll have to wait for the game to come out, which is set for early 2018. But this was making the rounds. So I'm going to keep my eye on it. And if anybody else gets this before I do or gets a preview of it, let us know, because I definitely want to try this one out. But, yeah, this seems like we could have a Mr. Robot problem on our hand with it, where it's just fight club with computers.

We'll see. Well, you mentioned I'm not a gamer, but the one thing I do like to play is I enjoy my trivia. I enjoy my pub trivia in person. I enjoy trivia apps that I play with other people. I have not tried this one. HQ is a hot new trivia app. They are currently there. I guess some of the guys, speaking of Vine, some of the guys who are involved with Vine have created this one.

And they're going around to get venture capital money for a fucking trivia app that is currently valued at $100 million for a trivia app. Yeah. Yeah. I've known about this for weeks, and I purposely didn't put it in the show.

I was waiting for you to come across it. This was one of those things where I knew it was out there, and I've actually signed up and tried to play, but I was waiting for you to come through. And so give me your thoughts, Brian. Give me your thoughts. We've been doing this show for, what, four years now? Almost five.

Almost five. How many trivia app booms and busts have we already been through? I count at least four. Trivia! At least four trivia apps that have come out, become hugely popular, and then just disappeared without a trace because shark fit. That's what happens with these apps.

Now, this app is slightly different. This is a live trivia app as opposed to just playing trivia games with other friends. With real prizes, too. With real prizes. This is so good on you for basically ruining the actual fun of pub trivia, going out to the pub, being with people, and drinking some beer, and just providing the live trivia aspect.

Yeah, they hit one point on the spectrum there. And the annoying thing about this app is that you get, I don't know what you get, friend points or woofy or whatever, for getting other people into the app. And there were so many people on Facebook that were posting, come on, help me out on HQ.

I'm like, no, give me a dollar. If you want me to do something, pay me. Fuck you, pay me. Exactly. Now, somebody over at Slate has been listening to our podcast, and I thought, I put this in for you, Jason, because I thought you'd definitely appreciate it. Apple has ruined its podcast app.

Amen. So basically, this guy just listened to us, complained about the podcast app, and typed it all up. Yeah, this is pretty much it. It's funny because I had another article in here that says, Apple buys podcast search startup pop-up archive. And they do, what they do is like machine transcripts of podcasts, so then you can search their archive to find shows that are relevant to your interests.

Two problems there is, well, machine transcripts generally tend to suck. Yep. If anybody who's ever used Trent will know that. And nobody really cares that much. I've got a project for next year that will be kind of helpful, hopefully addressing some of this stuff.

But at the end of my research on the podcast search app that Apple bought, I'm like, why would you just buy fucking Overcast and make it the default podcast app? Marco Armit is rich already, but he can be richer, and I will applaud his richness.

Or pull a Facebook, steal it feature by feature. Be my guest. But fix that shit. That's what the Slate article gets into as well. He starts talking about Overcast and how it's so much better. Yeah, just fix it, Apple. You really screwed the pooch on this one, especially if you're trying to provide stats and help with monetization of podcasts.

You just drove thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of people away from podcasts because your player is so bad. Yeah, it's terrible. And trust me, at my other jobs, I've been feeling the fallout from this. People are just dropping in droves because it is so bad.

And the crappy part about this is, this is like, you know, probably soon, they said by the end of the year, but they are liars, that we are going to get stats from the podcast app as podcasters. And it is nowhere to be seen yet. And the problem now is it's just nobody's using the podcast app.

Everybody is bailing. So way to go, Apple. Thank you. Thanks. Just about as good as Libsyn on fucking things up and not apologizing or doing anything about it. Okay. That's the end of that rant. Right. So we're coming up on Christmas here. So I thought I'd put together a quick shopping guide.

Okay. Of cool things that you can get at the last minute that are grumpy old geeks. Well, at least this grumpy old geek approved. I went to my Amazon orders page and I have made 247 orders so far in 2017 from Amazon.

A lot of them were things like vitamins and dog toys and stuff like that. But I want to break down the top things that I think that everybody would love. If you live in a cold climate, I found the Zippo rechargeable hand warmer, the six-hour version, not the two-hour version.

What this basically is is a lithium-ion battery kind of wired like a bomb in your hand. You press the button, you set the temperature, and it just heats up. I don't think you can carry this on a plane. I wouldn't recommend it.

I would recommend not carrying it on a plane. But the other day, it was about four degrees with windchill, and I took it out with me on the walk with the dog. And it is amazing. It is an amazing piece of technology. And here's the upside. Here's the tech tie-in because you're like, what's a hand warmer got to do with anything?

It'll also charge your phone. That's right. Well, I already have a suitcase that does that. That's true. That's true, but your suitcase isn't going to warm your hands. No, that's true. I just, quick question here. Is every single one of your reviews going to be that long? Because you have like 45,000 things in here.

Nope. Because I'm going to go take a nap. Nope. That's the new thing. Everything else I've talked about on the show. So this is going to be quick. So the Zippo Rechargeable Hand Warmer is $37.90. Highly recommended. Other thing I got was a Rode VideoMic Pro, the new one this year.

Chalks in at $218.82. But if you have a small pocket camera that has a microphone input and you do like taking videos like you with the kid, highly recommended. Much better than the onboard mics. Cool. Next up, Lighting Sciences Good Night LED Household Light Bulbs.

Basically, they're expensive light bulbs. But they take out all the blue light. I have these all around my house. I sleep like a baby now. They're expensive. They're $16 a piece. But cheaper than a hue. That's all I'm saying. And no Ukrainian is going to hack my light bulb. Next up, since it is cold, they had to name it this.

The Nikola Unisex Barbarian Knit Beanie Octopus. Basically, this is my Cthulhu knit hat. Also, would not recommend wearing this on a plane. I actually would. Or going into a bank. Definitely don't wear it into a bank. Although around here, you can.

In the winter, if you walk in wearing this in the middle of winter, people are just like, yeah, it's cold outside. Come on, man. My other one is the Knuckle Duster Blood Splattered Mug. I've had this mug for over 10 years. It's by Thabto, which is a company in the UK.

They don't make a non-blood-splattered version that is good anymore. But it's $20. It is a massive coffee cup. It's twice the size of your regular one. Highly recommended. Especially for the zombie fan in your life. If people are still watching. How did Dexter miss out on this marketing opportunity?

I don't know. Back when it was on the air. I know I had one of these while I was watching Dexter. So it's a great mug. Honestly, it is my favorite mug. If you're a writer, because Brian likes to write in his journals, the Muji gel ink ballpoint pen, the 0.38 millimeter black version, is the best pen in the world.

You can get 10 of them for $11. Got one right in front of me. Good. Do you agree? I agree. It's my favorite pen in the world. And I love it. It comes in a 10-pack. But I've got a Muji just down the street. So I can always just go grab more. Oh, you bastard. I miss having a Muji down the street. And if you're going to use your Muji pen, I recommend the Field Notes Stenopad.

It is $10 for an 80-page Stenopad, which is pricey as hell. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure I'd recommend that. There's a caveat here. Yes, ouch. It is a really...

The paper is, like, archival quality thick. It's just really satisfying to write in that Field Notes Stenopad. That's all I'm saying. Dude, this is... I mean, most of my notebooks, I get, like, $4 for 20 of them at, you know, Office Depot.

Just, I get reporter's notebooks. But when I keep the Steno notebook on my desk for writing down important things, and it just feels really good to write in. So, yeah, $10, 80 pages. It's a dime a page. Or over a dime a page. So, you know, caveat emptor on that one. Instant Pot.

Get a fucking Instant Pot. Especially if you're a dude and you live alone. $100 will change your life. And Synology. I know you haven't gotten one yet, Brian. No. You got to get a Synology. I wish I'd have saved up a little bit more and put SSDs in it instead of spinning platters.

But you can get a four-bay station. The one that I've got is the DS416J. They've upgraded it since then. It's like $330. It attaches to your entire home network. I play all of my trips to Sweden from it. It attaches to every computer in the house.

It's a great way to share files. And it's got the Synology software. So you can basically make your own Dropbox with it. It's running Linux, is what it is. It's a Linux box that just is a box. So you can share things with friends and family. Like if you have a photo album that you just want to send to somebody, but you don't want to upload it to Dropbox, create a link in your Synology, send it to them.

They can come to your house, download it. Boom. Bob's your uncle. Nice. And the last one, because I know, Brian, you love this one so much. Love this one so much. The Elite Cuisine, EGC 007, Maximatic Egg Poacher and Egg Cooker with 7 Egg Capacity, comma, white.

$19.33. This, too, will change your life. Yeah. No. Okay. There's my holiday gift-giving guide. Very nice. I should probably do this. Maybe I will go through my Amazon thing for next week.

Okay. Because I'm sure I have some suggestions. Very smart of you, Jason. Well, thank you very much.

Media Candy. Amazon Prime Video is finally on the Apple TV. Woo-hoo! Yay. They're playing along. No, it's very nice. I installed it last night. Oh, my God. Yeah. And I have had such a problem with the Roku TV app for Amazon Prime.

You cannot fast-forward or rewind. You cannot. Period. That's useless. So I switched over to the Apple TV version. Works just like every other Apple TV app. I can double-tap. It'll skip ahead a little bit. Or I can swipe and use that stupid remote that it comes with and scrub around.

Oh, it's terrible. But it works. It works so much better than the Roku one. So thank you, Amazon. There's unfortunately nothing to watch on Amazon Prime TV except the Grand Tour Season 2. And that is the reason I installed the app last night, to watch the Grand Tour Season 2.

Better. Better. It's better. Better. Is it Conversation Street still in there? Horrible. Horrible intro. But the thing about it is, it's just the intro. The rest of the conversation is just the news segment that they always used to do on Top Gear. Which is fine.

And they brought back the celebrities. Not the stupid thing that they were doing. David Hasselhoff, I'm not sure, was a good first one. But okay. I thought he was funny. He wasn't upset that he got... I gotta be honest. In HD, looking at his face... Oh my God. My God. I don't know what happened to that man.

A lot of surgery. Do you have 4K at your house? Yes. Okay. It looks bad. It's bad. This is why 4K porn is a bad idea. Just look at David Hasselhoff's face. You can see everything. It was terrible. But look, I liked it.

They've got me back. I will watch this whole season. See how it goes. The interplay is still there. They got rid of most of the horrible segments. Now I talked to a friend of the show, Mike, who's a purist for Top Gear. He still doesn't like it. He thinks it's now an entertainment show with cars rather than a car show that was entertaining.

Which I can see. I get that. Yeah. But I don't care about cars. I don't give a shit. Yeah. I never watched it for the cars. I like to be entertained. I thought this was entertaining. And in the new celebrity segment, I found myself with a giant smile almost the whole time. And I'm like, oh, wait.

I'm actually enjoying this show. This is a good sign. I liked it. The only thing it's missing is the stick. I wish they could work that out. But they are working that out. There was a yeah, that's coming in a future episode. They're going to they're going to fix that. I think probably the next episode.

The thing about it was I really like I said, I really enjoyed it. Didn't mind Conversation Street because it was just a bumper. But yeah, I don't know. I there was something about it that just really made me happy. And even the way that they handled the whole thing with the crash and all that, I thought it was funny.

I really, really dug it. So all in all so far, I'm in. Thumbs up. All right. And I got a follow up for Ring Zero from last week. He mentioned Travelers on Netflix that we should check out. We did cover it. We did see it. Search bar top right of Grumpy Old Geeks, which is how I found out that we had covered it.

Yeah. Strong start. Shit finish. That's that was season one. So I don't know if they do do a season two that I'll be into it. But for the most part, yeah, it was it killed some time. But that's about it. I'm not looking forward to season two. Right.

OK, I've started randomly rewatching Star Trek Voyager. All right. Things I don't know why, but it just it appeared in Netflix and I wanted something to throw on after the wife and kids gone to sleep. So I've been watching one or two episodes every night, just kind of in the background. Enjoyable show.

Marked difference from Star Trek Utrecht that we've been watching. Discovery feel like the old school Star Trek feel little morality plays. It's very well done. I I'm at the point where they phase out the one woman and they bring bring in seven of nine, which is not handled very well.

Are you are you on team Kess or are you on team seven of nine? I think team Kess in terms of story. But God damn, Jerry Ryan is just stunning. And they actually did really great stuff with her character once they got past the point of like she's only she's only here to wear a cat suit and have gigantic boobs.

They made her character awesome. I think I'll let you know over the next few weeks as I'm getting getting into that first season with her. I'm pretty sure that that's going to be horrible. But after that, it should be fine. Yeah. I mean, I was a huge fan of Kess. I thought she was just the cutest thing. She's she's more my type than seven of nine.

So I was I was really into that. But there was a whole story about if you quit or are fired from Star Trek, how they treat your death. Yeah. It's worth going back and digging that up because I can't remember how it works, but she got a crap deal on how she died.

Yeah. So but I just remember that because, yeah, I was working at Paramount when Voyager was still going on. So I got to see Jerry Ryan in that outfit in person quite a lot. Yeah. Oh, she's just stunning that. You know, like I said, Kess was more my type.

But still, you cannot you cannot turn the eyes away when Jerry Ryan walks by in that outfit. No, you cannot. And I got to say, I finished of what is it? The Orville, like that one show that I'm watching Orville season finale was last night.

I'm sorry, Brian. I really like the show and it got picked up for a second season. So it's you got you just give it a shot. I don't I don't know. It really kind of you said that if it got picked up, you would give it a shot. Oh, all right. Fine. I'll go back and watch. You said you said it.

It's OK. I can use the search function on Grumpy Old Geeks or GOG dot show to go back and find the episode. You're going to ruin my Christmas, but fine. You don't have to watch it at Christmas. Save it for New Year. You can watch it when you're hungover. And Dr. David Teeter gave me a new podcast called Stay Tuned with Preet.

Now, Preet was one of those attorneys or a district attorney, I believe, that Trump wanted gone and asked him to resign. And he said, no, you have to fire me. It's that guy. Oh, cool. And he's got a podcast. Oh, my God.

This is one of the best podcasts out there right now. I'm really generally not into the political podcast, but this guy is so goddamn smart and just lays everything out, has great guests. Highly, highly, highly recommend this. So, hat tip to Dr. Teeter for Stay Tuned with Preet.

It is awesome. I'm going to have to go listen to that. And speaking of things to listen to, it is Christmas time. And Slicing Up Eyeballs, my favorite website for alternative music. And he's also the host of Darkwave on Sirius XM, the 80s station, which is pretty cool. Has put together the alternative Christmas playlist.

Now, I love this. I love almost all these songs. It's awesome having them put into one single place where you can just play it. Sort of. But, dear, Slicing Up Eyeballs, thank you for putting it on a format that sucks. This is using Mixcloud. Yeah.

Why not just a Spotify playlist? I know. It's one giant four-hour file. I'm like, come on. It's so annoying. So, if anybody has a really good alternative playlist on Spotify, please do send it in to us. Well, he does have the... He's got the track list. Why don't you just go while the kids take it in half and make it?

Because that involves me building it. Oh, I'm so sorry. I don't got time for that stuff. He doesn't want to get time for that, but he already did the legwork. All you have to do is copy and paste, copy and paste, and... I know. So, maybe I'll do that, but... Yes, and make it the Grumpy Old Geeks Holiday Playlist.

We could use some more ear balls. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? I do. Speaking of that, are we on Spotify yet as a podcast? My God. It is still in... We got approved. We got approved to be on Spotify. It is now in that three-week limbo period where I've sent it back in, and we're waiting for them to approve it.

Because, apparently, there is one person in the basement with a red stapler who is approving the podcast. All right. At some point, we might be in there, but we'll see. Speaking of stupid, annoying technology things, hey, slicing up eyeballs, what the hell with the no-cutting-and-pasting text on your site?

Why? Oh, I hate that. Why? Why? There's no reason to not let us copy and paste this stuff. Oh, because somebody else with a blog might take it and repost it on their site. Have you ever heard of YouSource? Come on. We can take text, whether you want us to or not.

You know, I wanted to grab text and put it into our show notes to promote you, but I can't, so I won't. No. And nowadays, the clever thing that people are doing is when you select and then copy, it uses JavaScript to add more stuff into your clipboard.

Yes. Isn't that great? That says, wait for more, go here. I'm like, look, I know. I got it from there. I don't need the fucking link. Stop it. People are too clever for their own good. Well, Brian, it's that time again. Yes.

Battlestar Galactica. Oh, God. Really? I'm not ready for that again. Well, it's not coming back. I am doing what you did with Voyager. I am starting from the beginning and going back through it because it's been a long time. Been a long time. Been a long, lonely.

Yeah. So, I am a week in, I've watched 25 episodes. This is why there's no at the library for me this week, by the way. And, oh, my God. That's a great show, right? It is perfect.

It is a perfect show. No, no, no, no, it is not a perfect show. Two things. You have not let me finish my sentence, but yes, go ahead. First off, I can never, ever, ever, ever watch that initial miniseries again. No, ever. Because it's horrible. It's slow.

It's deadly. It is the hardest thing. It is like the Gunslinger book one for the Dark Tower series. You try to get people to watch the show or read those books, and you have to put them through the misery of the first book or that first miniseries. It is horrible. Here's the thing. When the miniseries first came out, it was a breath of fresh air because it was like, we got Battlestar Galactica back.

They look like us. Oh, how cool. Then it was two more years until the series started. So, in that time, we all watched the miniseries over and over again and realized, Oh, this is terrible. This is a terrible miniseries. So, I did not start with the miniseries because I never need to see that again.

I started with season one, episode one. Okay. And, you know, my other caveat being it is the worst ending to a show ever. Yes. Brian almost throwing his whiskey bottle at the TV. I'm just going to state again, the opening crawl of every single episode is the Cylons have a plan.

The last episode is, whoop, nope, no plan. Well, they had a partial plan. No, they didn't. Now, the one thing that does piss me off about this entire series is there's 47,000 humans left alive in the universe, right?

Why do we give a shit what the press thinks? That was always a problem. That's a problem I had. It's like you have this little packet of humanity, and then you have this other side where everybody thinks the status quo is normal, where you have the press that are grilling the president saying, what are we doing?

What are we doing? I'm wearing my suit. Here's a recorder that looks funky that I got at Bed Bath & Beyond. It is a terrible, terrible trope in the entire series, and I hated it so much back then, and I hate it now. But beyond that, the thing about the show that gets me, stories are great.

Acting is perfect. I love the actors and the casting are great. I just, that's why I can't stop it at night. I cannot stop it. Once you start, you cannot stop. Right. So I do have, for people who want to get into this, if you haven't seen it or want to see it again, there is over at Thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com, great name, Thunderpeel.

They have the Battlestar Galactica viewing order with no spoilers, and it tells you exactly what order to watch them in and how it came out, because in a lot of the seasons, there were transitions with web-only miniseries. Right. And I have to dig up a couple of them, because the version I have, I've got all the Blu-rays, but it doesn't have some of the web stuff.

So I'll probably put that in later if I find them, for anybody that wants to get them. Because the miniseries, I don't remember if you watched those, the sci-fi miniseries in between the seasons were fantastic. Yeah, I never saw them, so I should probably go back and do that. God, the whole prison camp thing, where the, oh man, they were really good.

They were better than a lot of the episodes, I've got to say. But check that out. So all in all, and when I'm done, of course I have to go back and watch Caprica, because I am the only person on the planet that really enjoyed Caprica. Yeah, I never even finished that. I finished it, and I thought it was great. I really, really enjoyed Caprica.

But like I said, I know I'm the only person that ever enjoyed Caprica. Okay. So check those out. Now, we talked about The Crow last week. The Crow is coming back as a reboot. And I have to say that everybody who's anybody is coming out about this, and the one person that came out against it is Alex Proyas.

If you know his name, you know that he is the director of The Crow, the original Crow with Brandon Lee. His point is, you should not make this movie again, because this is a testament to Brandon Lee's life. His sacrifice for the movie, everything is, this should stand alone as Brandon's movie, and any attempt to reboot it is going to take away from that.

And it was really well written. He made a big Facebook post about it. Links in the show notes, gog.show slash 238. Highly recommend you read it. If you are a fan of The Old Crow, like I am, I'm a huge super fan of that movie. Go read it. It'll probably bring a tear up out your eye.

But it's, I'm with him. I don't think they should reboot this movie, ever. I agree. Yep. Something else that's coming out, though, that will probably make you cry is Black Mirror Season 4 has a release date. And it's December 29th. Oh, dear. Just a holiday cheer.

It's in that valley between, hey, Christmas is over. Thank you. We can take the decorations down. Now let's try and not slit our wrists before we hit New Year's. Yeah. Yeah. We both had a problem last year watching it, but that was based on different world issues.

We'll see how it goes this year. So I'm looking forward to it because, yeah, it's just what I need. More fucking sadness in my life. More sadness. Well, this video has gone incredibly viral, and even though there's kind of a sad thing behind it, I just find it beautiful and funny, and I've watched it about 7,000 times.

This is Trump vs. Talking Heads by Swede Mason. It's Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads, completely done with Trump. And it is a work of staggering genius. This is why we invented the internet in the first place. Yes. So people can do things like this. If you have not seen it yet, it's not political.

Well, I mean, it is, obviously, but you'll be fine. Trump snowflakes can go watch this and enjoy it. You will not melt your little snowflakes by watching this. I thought it was, you told me to go watch it last night, but I was in the middle of a Battlestar Galactica binge, so I could not get off the couch to go behind and watch it.

But I watched it this morning, and it is definitely genius. Yes. And since you had a video in, I had to throw my video in that I found this week, and it's The Police is Roxanne, but every time they say the word Roxanne in the song, the song gets 5% faster.

And by the end, you're cracking up, because it's pretty funny, I got to say. And I thought about you, Brian, when I was watching this, going, this is probably what he thinks it sounds like when I listen to podcasts. That's exactly what I was going to say. I bet you like the faster version of the song, because this is how you enjoy your podcasts.

Kind of, actually, yeah. Okay. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner! How you doing? How you doing, Dave?

I'm doing fine. That's quite an introduction. It's nice to be back. Yeah. You're worthy of a little vibrato! Hey, we've got to hype up Low Energy Bittner. Let's not forget it. Yeah, come on, man. I don't think that is... Yeah, all right. I don't think that's a fair assessment of me, but all right, fine.

I mean, this is how nicknames stick, right? This is true. Yeah. All right. By the way, before we jump in, I just want to thank everybody who went and checked out the Things Joe Hates podcast. I got a note from Joe, and basically his downloads tripled in one day.

So, the power of the Grumpy Old Geeks audience is once again shown. You made Joe a very happy man, so thank you, everybody. So, Joe doesn't hate us. Joe doesn't hate Grumpy Old Geeks. That's right. Good. Now, when Joe's rich and famous and has a successful podcast, return the fucking favor, please.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So, it's actually been a relatively slow week this week in terms of cybersecurity events. There's no major things going on here, but one of the biggies was we saw some articles come by.

This one's from ZDNet about a popular virtual keyboard app that's leaked 31 million users' personal data. No. Yeah. So, this is AI.type, which is, I gather, an Android keyboard. And, of course, Android keyboards are quite popular.

Are we sure that's not machine learning type? Is there a difference, Brian? Is there a difference? It's probably just, you could probably search for either one and get the same thing. So, it's a standard story here. They left their database unlocked and unencrypted.

As you do. Yeah. And there's researchers at Chromtech Security Center. These folks have kind of made it their business to hunt around for these unsecured databases. They're ruining developers' weekends everywhere since 2015.

Basically, when an unprotected AWS bucket is found, these are the folks who generally find it. Yeah. Yeah. So, 577 gigabytes of sensitive data was discovered.

A couple of noteworthy things about here. The company says, of course, that privacy is our main concern. Obviously. Yeah. We are very concerned that you have some. So, we're going to take it away from you.

Right. So, this reminded me of, I just can hear Ron Howard doing the narration here. It says, any text entered on the keyboard stays encrypted and private, says the company. But the database wasn't encrypted, right? It was in the clear. Let me explain how this works.

Right. Yeah. And also, you know, this sort of gets to what something that I think Brian and I were talking about a couple weeks ago, which is, in addition to usernames, this app evidently uploaded people's entire contact lists. Ooh. So, this database contained 374 million phone numbers.

Holy jibus. Right. And so, you know, like we were talking about a couple weeks ago, that connection, being able to connect people's contact lists together, that's some powerful data for mining. So, again, you know, this is, it's only Android.

And if you're, well, you know, if you're sideloading apps. Or, actually, I think this one was on the Google Store. So, it's not like, you know, this app was behaving exactly the way it was designed to behave. And people gave it these permissions to be able to basically access everything.

So, again, the lesson is just really be careful about the permissions that you're giving these apps. There's no reason why this keyboard app should have had access to your contacts. It also uploaded a list of all the apps on your phone.

That's, that's bad. Contacts, I can see for autofill. Right. But, yeah. Yeah. No. Other apps on your phone, definitely don't need that. But that's the problem with keyboard apps, is that they need a ton of permissions to actually do the things that they need to do.

And, yeah, like, I can see why I would give it my contact list. So, it's their fault on the back end for not encrypting the data properly or keeping their AWS bucket, you know, locked down. You know, I started doing AWS buckets when they first announced them with, like, S3 buckets.

Yeah. It's really not hard. It's really not hard. There's four settings on an S3 bucket. Yes. For Christ's sakes. Yes. Okay. The one that says world, that's not the one you want to pick. Right. I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a little bit of extra code in your back end to connect to it with credentials.

But, you know, there are tutorials for that. But people do select world so they can connect to it. They're thinking security through obscurity is what's going to get me through it. Right. No. No. No. There are naming conventions that you can basically run a script against to get to every AWS bucket or S3 bucket that's out there.

It's easy. Yeah. It's a great point that the days of security by obscurity are over. At every single level. It doesn't matter what it is. There's no such thing as security by obscurity anymore. So if you're relying on that, you know, change your Waze. It doesn't work. Or change it to Blaze because Waze is dead.

All right. You missed that one earlier. I guess I did. Well, let's talk about Facebook, a company well known for their security and privacy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They want to get your kids even younger now because apparently I – what is the current age that you are supposed to be – 13.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink to sign up for Facebook? 13? Oh, is it 13? Copa, C-O-P-P-A, yes. The Child Online Privacy Protection Act requires that children be over 13 to do anything online. Well, I don't know how they're getting around that with this then because Facebook has rolled out an app called Messenger Kids for children under age 12 to connect with people they love but also has the level of control parents want.

And if in case you missed that, that's the whole world snickering. Yeah. It's – you can bypass Copa with parental approval. Gotcha. So lawmakers in Congress are not entirely sold on this and they'd like Facebook to explain clearly what data it's collecting about its new young users and what it's planning to do with that data, which they are obviously not doing yet.

So hopefully Congress can do some good here. Yeah. My favorite – Alabama senators just want the list. That's all. Ron Moore is like, can I get the contact list? And I'd like all his contacts as well. Is that cool? My favorite comparison I saw this week was someone was saying, this is just like when Philip Morris used to sell candy cigarettes.

Yeah, exactly. I love those things. We all did. We all did. Yes, we all did. Exactly. Yes. I hope the icon for this is literally just a van with a piece of candy on the side. Come on, kids.

I got some candy inside. Yeah. I'm actually going to skip ahead here because it actually makes more sense in the order of the show that France has banned a doll called the Kayla doll. France has said that this doll is too eavesdroppy to put under the Christmas tree.

Eavesdroppy. That is the new word. Well, twatwaffle was the first best word of 2017, but eavesdroppy is pretty good too. Yeah. It sounds better in the original French, I think. Probably. I do like it's not just eavesdroppy. It's too blabby and eavesdroppy. Yeah.

So it tells your secrets too. Right. So this is like many of these little IoT devices. This is a doll that you can connect to with a Bluetooth device, but of course the security settings are woefully inadequate and basically anybody walking or driving by the house would be able to bring up your good friend Kayla and either eavesdrop on your children or have

the doll demonically talk and say whatever you wanted to through a mobile device. Go ahead and install that Facebook kids messenger. Right. Install Facebook kids. Right. Do it. Right. So the funny thing here is like Germany has really good laws about these things.

And I'm glad to see France is jumping on the bandwagon. But when you say demonically say something, I can see it in German, but in French I cannot. I cannot see somebody saying anything demonically in French. That's a good point. No, they wouldn't be demonically. They'd be dragging on a cigarette. Hey, I'd like you to go do this now.

Just dress you down and make you feel horrible about yourself. Those pants do not look good on you. Yeah, that's right. Do not wear those footy PJs. No. Your feet are too big. No. And get a nose job. That is not right.

So anyway, yeah, more privacy stuff. And then moving on, you know, we heard about the Uber hacker and we've gotten a little more details about the Uber hacker. And I put this in here just because I feel like maybe there's a stereotype convention in town because the Uber hacker is a 20-year-old Florida man who lives with his mom and, you

know, they don't have a picture of him. So I cannot tell you if he is actually wearing a hoodie, drinking Mountain Dew and eating a Hot Pocket. But... Just binging on Mr. Robot. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And complaining about it. He's like, that's not how we would do it, really, in the real world. Oh, okay. No. Right. No. No. Right. That's RF. No, we wouldn't. Yeah. He lives in his mom's basement. Now, the interesting part of this story is that Uber, when this guy came to Uber and said, hey, you know, give me your money or else I will release this data, they referred him over to their bug bounty program.

Okay. Which is kind of interesting. I mean, the way we covered this over on the Cyber Wire was basically imagining the legal team being able to convince themselves that this was the proper way to handle this. You know, like, well, if we pay him through the bug bounty program, then it's all on the up and up, right?

I could just see, like, a bunch of terrorists storming the gate in an airline saying, we're taking this plane. And then the person at the counter going, well, ticketing's over to the left. Would you please go buy a ticket? Right. Exactly. Oh, I'm sorry. Ticketing's on the left. It's fine.

All right. Thank you very much. I'll just step over here. But the line's really long, and I want to hijack this plane. Sir, I'm going to ask you to step to the back of the line. But the plane I want to hijack is in 10 minutes. Sir, I'm going to ask you to step to the back of the line. Thank you. What are you going to do, send me to airport jail?

That's it. I'm going to send a very mean tweet. Right. So they paid, you know, Uber 100 grand, or I'm sorry, Uber paid this guy $100,000 through HackerOne, which is a bug bounty implementation company. So as far as we know, this is our new record for bug bounties.

Obviously, there are all sorts of things wrong with this, and, you know, it's not going to hold up as the attorney's, you know, thoughts that this would give them any sort of legal defense obviously isn't going to hold up. But it's just an interesting strategy, and it's a novel approach.

But, of course, Uber is famous for their novel approaches to all sorts of things. How'd that work out for them on this one? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then, finally, I put this one in here for you, Jason. All right. A Christmas present for Bammers, Microsoft has come up with a doggy door that has built-in facial recognition.

So as Bammers comes running from the backyard to the doggy door, the system takes a picture of a Bammers face, compares it to all the other Rottweilers it has in its database, and it keeps out the raccoons and the wallabies and the possums.

Because my 120-pound Rottweiler looks a lot like a raccoon. Well, you never know. You know, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I've seen plenty of videos online of people having trouble with raccoons coming in through doggy doors. You know, there's a bunch of raccoons running around Jason's neighborhood with face print-outs of Bam Bam now.

All the raccoons have gone to, like, the Chaos Computer Club and figured out how to make the masks to get through the iPhone X and my doggy door. Well, actually, I mean, but really, all they have to do is scan your social media because your social media is full of photos of Bam Bam's face.

This is true. She's got her own Instagram account. She is Bam Bam Roddy on Instagram. There you go. They can just grab him right there. Don't tell the squirrels, man. Right. Don't tell. Oh, squirrels are bastards. I've seen plenty of videos of, you know, raccoons just sort of let themselves in, saunter on over to the water dish, wash their hands in the water dish, eat all the food, wash their hands again.

And then, you know, a little tip of the hat and off they go back through the doggy door. They grab a mint on the way out. Exactly. You know. On the plus side, this will all be recorded by Jason's Chinese security cameras. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. And then they'll do one of those, like, computer reenactments on the news next day.

It'll be perfect. Yeah, they'll just have courtroom drawings, you know, an artist of the raccoon. And, you know, Bam Bam looking shamefully standing by as the raccoons, you know, sort of just own him, eat all of his food, because Bammer's is too nice a doggy to attack the raccoons.

Yes, and it still is she. I'm sorry. It's only been two years. But that's all. You're the one who gave your girl dog a boy name. Exactly my argument since day one. All of us who grew up on the Flintstones are going to have a hard time with that one. Well, you know what?

That's why her brother is going to be named Pebbles. There you go. There we go. We live in a new world. There will be no gender confusion in your house. Nope. Exactly. Very good. The only problem with this is that there is no pet door the size of my dog. The door is the size of my dog.

That's true. Your dog's bigger than you. Yeah, yeah. No, when she jumps up, she puts her paws on my shoulder and looks me in the eye. So I joke with you not. So, yes, that's why she's a little chubby. When she says I want food and looks me in the eye, she has bigger teeth than I do.

But this is pretty fun if you have a doggy door. I don't know anybody in this day and age that has a doggy door. Do you? Because, you know, somebody with a sufficiently long arm can reach through the doggy door and like open the door. Right. Most people don't have pet doors anymore.

Yeah, I think you're right. I know a couple people who do have them, but I think you're right. I think they've fallen out of favor. Certainly, you know, people aren't home the way they used to be. And so, yeah. It's not the 50s anymore. Well, exactly. Right. I'm like, people are stealing your cars through a key fob reader in the wall.

Why would you leave a hole in your house that anybody can come in through? When I was a teenager, one of my neighbors had a doggy door and the kid who lived there would always lose his key. So he would just get in the house by crawling in through the doggy door. Yeah. I mean, come on.

Put it under a rock like everybody else, but don't leave a hole in your house. Right. Exactly. Exactly. All right, guys. That's what I got this week. Until next time, stay safe out there. Don't use any keyboard apps and watch that doggy door. Will do. Thanks for coming on, Dave.

And I like these late weeks where the world is not falling apart and we can just kind of, you know, chillax for a little bit. Don't worry. It'll get bad again. Don't worry. Of course. Well, go enjoy your days, guys. I'm going to go back to L.A., which is burning to the ground. There you go. Yeah, no problems here.

Yeah, but that's, you know what? Every six months, that's the standard state of L.A. Either it's burning down around you or it's falling out from underneath you. Actually, we had an earthquake last week, a rare East Coast earthquake. In fact, I was sitting here and I thought that someone had like rolled a, it felt like someone had rolled a big cart full of tools by, you know, like everything just sort of bounced up and down a couple of times, like rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble.

And then I went, wait a minute. I think that was an earthquake. And sure enough, it was far enough away that it didn't really do any damage here and, you know, no real damage done. But, you know, for those of you on the West Coast where you don't even, you know, you don't even break stride when an earthquake happens.

For those of us on the East Coast, it's a little more exciting because we don't get them that often. It was funny when I first moved back to Chicago, like, I don't know, maybe like six years ago, I was staying at my dad's house until I was finding a place and I had, I thought I had a nightmare and I woke up and like the house was shaking and I'm like, oh God, this is just a California nightmare because I finally left California and I don't have to deal with earthquakes anymore.

And then I went back to bed and I woke up and I'm like, man, I had the craziest dream last night that there was an earthquake. He's like, no, that was an earthquake. I'm like, I can't escape. We have tornadoes and earthquakes. No, thank you very much. Right. All right, gentlemen, I will talk to you next week.

Until then, stay safe. Brick a brick. Now there's a village in Ireland who are very happy people because they have a Viagra plant down the street, which is apparently emitting the little blue pill into the atmosphere.

And everybody's basically walking around with a boner, even the dogs. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, the Irish are happy people and, you know, there's the saying Irish twins. I just don't think that there was this group of people needs the extra help. No, but seem to be doing OK.

The funny thing is, you know, the pharmaceutical company is saying we're working on a fix for this in the town is going, no, we don't know. It's fine. Everybody's OK. We are going to be the greatest tourist destination in the world. We are now Bonerville. That's just come.

Come here. We are Bonerville. And, you know, that's I just thought. But the fact that the dogs are walking around with boners, too. You know what they could call it? Weinsteinland. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I think there might be some PR issues with that. But probably probably now my friend Shane Nickerson, who was a one of our first guests on the Grumpy Old Geeks, wrote a great little piece on his Tumblog.

They still call them Tumblogs, I guess. He's got a Tumblr site. Did you get a chance to read this, Brian? I did. What did you think? I want to get your take before we tell everybody what it is. I really enjoyed it. This is a running commentary that's been in my head for the last 10 years.

Do what? Will it matter? Can I buy a cup of coffee if I do it? How can I do this and make a buck? Right. So this is kind of Shane's little rant on there's so many things that he wants to do, but he's so distracted by everything else on the Internet and he can't get anything done.

Although I kind of take a little umbrance with this because he's got several successful TV shows. He's getting a lot of things done. Yeah, he's got two new TV shows in the works and he works, you know, he's got another one coming out now. So he does get some things done. But imagine if this guy was off Twitter and he was doing everything he wanted to do, you know?

Yeah. So he... No, it's spot on. I mean, it's what you and I complain about. It's... We're just inundated and they've gotten so good with these apps, with the psychologists that they hire to build them, to make them sticky, to keep you going back and back and back again. There's so many distractions and we're humans and the human nature does not do well with distractions.

We are not good at ignoring it all and doing the things that we supposedly want to be doing. And I think he really stated it very, very well. Yeah, I'm just going to read a little section here. It's like, I can't quite settle, I think. Fits and fits of distraction creep in.

Suspending creativity in a murky amber of social media. I have become a journalist reporting on my own life without any investigative reporting. We are a world of journalists, hoping the story of ourself is enough to keep people watching. So many lonely people unable to find comfort in constant approval.

I'm just going to go from... I'm going to let it go from there and go check out the rest of it. It is a beautiful little piece. Glad to see Shane writing again. I couldn't believe it when I saw it pop up in my RSS feed. I'm like, wow, Shane's back. Good. Yeah. Good. Cool. This one is...

This is a double-edged sword. Pardon the pun. Because this is about the miniature sets used for Blade Runner 2049. And it says, the miniature sets used for Blade Runner 2049 will change the way you see movies. I hate to break it to you, my little friends.

People have been making models for movies since movies were made. This is nothing new. The fact that they still make models for movies and it surprises your, you know, Snapchat addled millennial brain is a little bit befuddling.

But, yeah, the models that they made for Blade Runner are unbelievable. Some of them are 14 feet tall. But this is what you get when you hire a Weta and want to make a great movie. Yeah. So. Yep.

I just thought... It's a... Yeah. It's a poorly worded title. And the article acts... Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is brand new. I mean, you can Google 1970s Star Wars miniature sets and they're stunning. So, I guess maybe you just didn't check any history. Yeah. Or King Kong or anything from the old days.

Yes. Back in the day, they called this special effects, not CGI. There's a difference between special effects and CGI and model making. Yes. And so, I don't know if this was just clickbait or if the person didn't actually realize that we've been doing this for a really, really long time.

My vote's for clickbait. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I just think it's funny that your notes on my article were basically exactly what I wanted to say. So, finally, make me agree on something. Finally. I found this article on Bloomberg called, Millions are Hounded for Debt They Don't Owe.

One victim fought back with a vengeance. This is one of the greatest articles of all time. This guy got a call from a debt collector who threatened to rape his wife and kind of went punisher on the entire debt industry and all of the crap that's out there.

And I want to buy this guy a beer, shake his hand and say, you, sir, are just as crazy as the rest of us. I love you. Way to go. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, what was that movie with Michael Douglas? Falling down. Falling down.

Yeah. I understand. Look, I'm dealing with this right now. Let's talk about the bullshit medical industry. Oh, let's go. Let's go. Insurance will not pay the hospital. The hospital keeps trying to bill insurance, but then it gets kicked to debt collection agencies, even though insurance is supposed to fucking pay.

Yep. We are dealing with this for a $284 charge from the birth of my son 15 motherfucking months ago. Insurance will just not pay this $284, even though it clearly is their job to pay it. It is part of what they're supposed to be covering. They're just not paying it.

So now the hospital has sent it to debt collection agents, a debt collection agency, for me, a debt collection agency, because the system is that fucking broken. I just had to send a registered letter to the hospital and insurance. We get calls every two weeks that keep following up.

We had to block the numbers from the debt collectors because they kept calling every morning at six in the morning. This is fucking ridiculous. Yep. So I don't blame this guy one bit. This is all broken. Yeah. No, add a zero to your bill that you have, and that's what I've been dealing with since, what is it, three years now since I broke my leg?

Mm-hmm. There's basically a $2,600 bill that's been bandied back and forth between the hospital and the insurance company, and it has gone to debt collection, and I've been dealing with this. Here's the rub. It was paid. The whole fucking debt was paid, but thanks to some Brazil type of fly-in-the-typewriter fuck-up, nobody can figure out where it goes.

I have sent copies of the paid notice from the hospital that it was paid to the debt collectors more times than I can count. And then I finally said, you know what? Go fuck yourself. I'm done. I cannot take this anymore. So, yeah, there's a lot of this going on. But the fake debt problem, which is what this guy was really starting with, is kind of crazy that people just – it's, you know, when your stuff gets hacked and your information's out there, it's going to happen more and more.

Because a lot of people don't know any better. They're like, oh, man, I didn't even think about that. I knew I got a loan back then. Did I pay it? Oh, man, I don't know. I was smoking crack. What am I going to do? Oh, shit. I don't know. Anyway, it's a great article. It's a very long read, but a very worthy read.

Worth your time. Agreed. Moron of the Week! Well, we heard House of Cards is going away because of the problems with Kevin Spacey. And that, I believe, was the right thing to do. But HBO, in their infinite wisdom – Netflix, Netflix.

Oh, sorry. Netflix, Netflix, my bad. Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, has decided, no, we're going to go ahead and bring it back. We're just going to have Robin Wright be the lead, and we'll give people the closure that they want. First off, is anybody actually watching anymore? Because it's gotten horribly boring. And secondly, bad taste in mouth.

Like, even if I was still into the show, I don't know if I would come back and watch this. Well, do you know what happened at the end of the last season? Since you haven't been watching – I have no idea. Robin Wright became the president. And she kicked him out. So, well, if you haven't watched it by now, you're never going to watch it.

So, it makes sense that she would be the lead because she was going to be the lead. What they have to do is do one of those things where basically somebody blows up his limo while he's leaving the White House, and then she takes over. Right. You know? Okay. I just think it's best left as is. Just let it go. Well, here's the thing.

The reason I approve of what they're doing with this is because there's a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on this because they got hired to do the season and they were shooting the season. And to cut them off mid-contract because Kevin Spacey likes little boys is really unfair to them.

So, even if they never air the goddamn thing but still film it and pay the crew and the cast, kudos on Netflix for that. All right. Well, way to shit on my point. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. That's why we had to do it on the show. I couldn't tell you beforehand. But, yeah.

No. I was – I am of two minds on this. I think the show is terrible and it should not be made anymore. They should have canceled it. But the fact that Netflix is going to stand up and do it, I think that really is good for them. Oh. So, you know, Moron of the Week, sometimes you see something from some angle and they are dumb.

You see something from another angle, they are not dumb. It happens. It happens. Now, I do want to talk about a hero of the week and this is a journalist in the UK. I guess you can call him a journalist. I made my shed the top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.

This guy, to me, is a hero because he used to be basically a paid writer and he got 10 pounds apiece for positive reviews for restaurants on TripAdvisor. Like, you know, he was a stringer for them and other restaurants and built their platform.

So, what he did over a couple months was basically take his shitty shed in his backyard and turn it into an exclusive restaurant in London, of all places, where nobody apparently fact-checked or figured it out. And eventually had a night where he's just like, yeah, well, let's have some people over and we'll have a restaurant.

And the story is really well done. I don't care for the guy that much. He's kind of a douche, but the story still is pretty funny that he actually, he punked TripAdvisor so bad that he became the number one restaurant in London.

That's fantastic. And TripAdvisor's comeback was just like, well, you know, our algorithms work unless you're a snarky journalist trying to, you know, game the system. But otherwise, it works great. Like, no, no, it apparently doesn't. No, actually, it does not seem to, no.

No, no, no, he got you. You should, yeah, fix your shit, TripAdvisor. Feedback loop. We got some new Patreon subscribers this week. Hopefully, they'll stick around with the kerfuffle. Jocelyn L, Russ C, and Shana M.

Thank you so much. And Neil V wrote us over on Patreon. Hey, guys, I thought I would throw a Bitcoin comment at you. How can you tell if someone invests in Bitcoin? They won't shut up about it. Yep. I love Bitcoin and got into it in summer 2014 and immediately lost 70% of my investment when its price dropped from $650 to $200.

He held on to it and has since made significant profit. If you'd like to buy a controlling claim in a podcast, give us a call because, damn. He says, I do believe Bitcoin is in a bubble right now. You think? It does have long-term value. Not if you buy it right now.

Anyways, it is already a better alternative to PayPal. When I hear about people taking a second mortgage on their house to buy Bitcoin, I know it is in a bit of a bubble. If you follow the crypto news, there's also so much infighting between the different cryptocurrencies. In the news is high transaction fees, which leads to the debate of whether Bitcoin is a store of value or digital payment system, leading to many Bitcoin forks.

Other issues are censorship in the forums and on Reddit and the viability of altcoins. Yeah, there's a lot of problems going on. Yep. No doubt about it. So, you know, hey, thanks. Thanks for the info. We appreciate it. Yeah. And one of the things in that article that I talked about before was that Bitcoin is kind of a fiat currency right now. So, that's really what's keeping it afloat.

But now, this is my favorite one of the week. Shauna M., one of our new Patreon subscribers, writes in, Believe me, after a week of asking, how long does it take to load the damn firmware on the printer, hearing you guys is a breath of fresh air that not all IT guys are annoying, ticket-ignoring twat waffles.

Twat waffles is the word of 2017. I'm sorry. I am still laughing at that, yes. Fortunately, I mean, yes, we're technically not IT. We had to deal with them. And most of them are annoying twat waffles.

But, yeah, I'm sorry. Twat waffles made my day. I know. We also got some donations over at PayPal. First up is Jason B., who said, Keep it up and stay grumpy. Mrs. Shinyside would love a shout-out. She loves harassing the GOGs on Twitter. Yes, you do. We see you all the time.

Yeah, yeah. And on Instagram, too, where she called me Jason Dispendipo. Yeah, you know how Jason was tickled pink with twat waffles? When I saw Jason Dispendipo, I almost fell down laughing. So thank you for that. It was pretty good. Yeah. Anthony B. also donated.

He says, Hey, guys, I discovered the show in March 2017 and will be a lifetime fan. I'll donate more later. Don't worry. Well, we appreciate whatever you can send us. So thank you. Also, Stephen L. over at PayPal. Guys, I'm a conservative and you won me over. I refuse to be assimilated, though.

Long live my SE30 and the 68KMLA.org. Oh, anyone know whatever happened to Mac Hacks Group? Sponsors the best Mac hack contest. I don't, actually. Yeah. No, it'd be a good research project. Maybe listen to Reply All for shit we already know.

Reply All is like our own personal wrap-up show. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We've been there. We've done that. Yeah. You guys get all the traffic. We do all the work. Go fuck yourselves. Yeah. That's awesome. We got some reviews over on Facebook because you can do that now. We got a five-star review from Joe R.

Thanks so much for the light pollution mention. Keep up the great work you do. Sean H. also gave us a five-star. Definitely one of the most valuable podcasts in existence if you're into anything related to the internet, web, apps, et cetera. And Ivor D wrote us over there. He posted a link.

This heavy metal music made by a machine will rock your human face off. And it's over at NextWeb. It was pretty badass. I listened to it this morning, and I got to say, well, first, there was a quote at the bottom of the Bandcamp page that says, there is no AI. It's just someone else's data by Mario Klingelman, which I thought was a beautiful quote.

But, you know, I used to drive around with friend of the show, MXV, who was also a guest previously. I have definitely heard worse music coming out of his car speakers than I have from this machine-made heavy metal. It was not bad. It kind of reminded me of Baroness. So if you like Baroness, give these guys, well, they're not these guys, give this machine a listen to, I guess.

Yes. We got to come up with some vernacular for that. That's fucked up. We do. Over at Twitter, SchroederApps wrote us, hope you talk about the new Patreon fee scheme on this week's GOG podcast. Well, we did at the beginning of the show. So yeah, we feel your pain. We understand. We get it. We agree. Yep.

Yep. And the Womster writes, a fix coming for Brian's iTunes woes? Apple on schedule to terminate music downloads by 2019. Oh, yes. Yeah, this is a very interesting article. So yeah, once again, they giveth and they taketh away. So this is unconfirmed by Apple, but confirmed by lots of people speaking anonymously that work at Apple, that basically they're going to fix iTunes again, get complete read of music downloads, push everybody towards the streaming, which, as we've discussed, will not work for me because

they can't match half of my stuff and my collection's too big. So basically, I'm probably going to be having an Android phone by 2019. I was just thinking the same thing. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take my Galaxy S7 Edge and try and use that for music for a week and like over the break, because we're taking a break soon, maybe over Christmas and New Year's, I'll do that and I'll see what the music landscape is like on my Android.

Because I would be very interested because I swear to you, I'm not kidding. Like the iPhone, if I can't deal with music anymore on my iPhone, why do I have an iPhone? Like 99% of what I do... Podcasting, I'm overcast. No. I could, if Apple goes with this and there's no, there's no, and you know, they're not going to do it well.

There's going to be no way to like solve the stream versus your own physical, physical library. Then I may, I may very well be an Android guy by 2019. I'm not kidding. Yeah, no doubt. And the funny thing is like, you know, I joke about you like, you know, oh, get rid of some of your files and blah, blah.

But like today, I, when I was going through the, this article in particular and a couple other ones, I'm like, man, I just, I got some new speakers downstairs from my editing station. I'm like, I want to, I want to test these out. One of my favorite soundtracks to listen to is, is the Run Lola Run soundtrack.

Oh, it's a great soundtrack. It's a great soundtrack. Fantastic movie. If you've never seen Run Lola Run, definitely check it out. It is auf Deutsch, but there are subtitles, but I love that soundtrack and it is not on the streaming. So I have to go to my Synology. I have to boot the library into iTunes and then play it manually.

And then I have to manually move it to my phone if I want to listen to it. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I will say there's, there's a lot to be, there's a lot of stuff that I own that isn't in streaming that just isn't. And if I lose that, I will be very sad. And you've said, I should just whittle down. There's also something to the fact that, that if I'm browsing through any streaming media, iTunes music or Apple music or whatever they call it, or Spotify, I'm browsing all music ever created ever.

If I'm browsing through my personal library, I am browsing through music. And it's so much easier for me to find something that I want to listen to if I'm only browsing through my library, as opposed to all music that is available for streaming.

Such a good point. You know what I'm saying? Such a good point. It's a massive difference. And it's very important. Yeah. So I don't, I don't want to lose my library. Yeah. When I open up iTunes and I look at my, I mean, my library is 124.9 gig because I whittled it down so I could get into iTunes match.

But yeah, I can click on anything in that library and I know I like it. Yes. If I just play random with my library, I'm going to be happy. Yep. And I can't, I can't do that with Spotify. No, because 99.9% of it is shit you don't like. Very good point.

I think that is, I think that is the best point you've made for keeping your physical library. So good on you, sir. Good one. All right. Well, thank you so much. Five something P five cent crypto kitties dot co lol. And it is kind of funny. It is very funny. These are blockchain tradable kittens, but I tried to look at it in opera and it says you can only play crypto kitties on a desktop browser like Chrome or Firefox.

You fucking browser racists. I'm on a desktop. That's got to be one of the first things I've found that doesn't work on opera. Yeah, that is one of the first things because, you know, the JavaScript library where you're actually mining another cryptocurrency while you're playing with your kittens doesn't work on opera. That's all I can think of.

Yeah. And Chris Foulon sent check out team viewer as an alternative to screens. Use it for PC and Macs. Great for helping friends or family or with the business version for tech support. Cool. Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes for that. You know, all of these things are VNC view or I'm sorry. Yeah. VNC. Yeah.

I get VNC and VLC mixed up sometimes. But yes, it's all VNC viewers because I remember chicken of the VNC. But yeah, we'll check it out. And Anthony Rossbach writes, the iPhone has a built in pedometer and even records elevation for flights of stairs. No, it doesn't.

In the health app. No accessories needed. And since a screen cap, the elevation recording on the iPhone is shit. It uses a barometer to change pressure. It is terrible. But the pedometer works fine. Yeah. Right. And I wrote it back as well on Twitter.

My problem with it is that the UI for the iPhone app is horrible. Borderline unusable. Yeah, the whole point that, you know, all these other apps provide is very simple, very nice looking user interface that lets you see what you're doing compared to previous weeks, all that sort of stuff.

None of that is built into the app. So the app is borderline useless. Once you get that, once you get your Apple Watch, it all changes. So it doesn't matter. Merry Christmas. Thank you. Song of the Aus sent us two. First, he said, to help calm grumpy old geeks in 2018, please, could tech writers understand what AI actually is and stop using it as an umbrella term?

Thank you. Fight the good fight, man. It's not going to happen. He also sent, hey, completely with you on Trevor Noah and Patton Oswalt. Room was very dusty. Have you tried Judah World Champ? Very quick. Nope. Haven't. But Judah Friedlander, right? Yes, it's Judah Friedlander. Yeah, it's Judah Friedlander's America is the greatest country in the United States special.

I started watching it and I'm like, it's black and white. It's just stand up. And I'm like, he kind of looks like it's going to be, you know, a little redneck-y and everything. This guy is smart as shit. No, I've seen him around on different podcasts.

He's very funny, so I'll have to watch that. No, I was cracking up the whole time. You definitely have to watch it. You're going to love it. And Craig Ferguson, who I love, has a new special out called Tickle Fight, which I haven't seen yet, but I thought I'd throw this in here since we're talking about Netflix comedians. There you go. And 6502 Chip writes in, are you guys on Goodreads?

Yes, we are, somewhat. I'm on Goodreads. I put the link in the show notes for both of our accounts if you guys want to follow us and friend us. My Audible app and my Kindle app automatically just shows what I'm doing, so it just does it. I do not go to Goodreads.

Go back a couple episodes, and I explain exactly why I don't use Goodreads, but yes, we're there. And he also writes... Oh, go ahead. My last one was in 2008, apparently. Yeah, yeah, you don't really care. I'm there, but I just haven't done it. Well, you know what you need to do? All you have to do is link your Amazon account with your Goodreads account, and it will do it automatically from your Kindle app, which is what you use all the time anyway.

Yep, that's true. Yeah, so it's all built in now, so just go ahead and do that, and then I can figure out what you're reading for the next show. Right. And he says, I use the Drafts app to type almost everything in my iOS screens, including this. Double down on it after Maria. If an app like Day One loses text, I have the copy.

Lifesaver, even for notes. I have Drafts. I used that for a while. I should check it out again. But yeah, I've just kind of been using notes. But yeah. Hope you're doing okay down there, man. Stay safe, and it seems like you at least got some electricity, so rock on.

Yep, definitely. Sin Delicato wrote us, my week has been made. I was mentioned on episode 237. I feel so special. Well, now you were mentioned on episode 238 as well. There you go. Now you're super special. Start1C writes, hi, guys.

Saw this that explains Bitcoin, and it's an interview on how Bitcoin works. It's an hour long. I did not have time for it. I watched the first 10 minutes of it, and yeah, I don't have time for it. But if you want to check it out, it's in the show notes. And S-K-H-X-S.

Kenny! Yeah, Kenny, I hate the way when you copy from the Twitter app, it doesn't put people's names. It's so annoying. Yeah, I know. He sent us a video about explaining universal basic income. Free money for everybody. It's also not quite an hour long. It's a little shorter. It's shorter. 10 minutes, and it's good. I watched this one.

Yeah, it was good. It was actually really good. Yeah, so thanks for that. And over at GOG.show, Devin writes in, Hey guys, just a millennial who enjoys being grumpiny. I love your podcast. Keep up the good work. I just wanted to mention that most of my friends who are my age get most of their news from social media.

I find that I myself find that most of the news I hear comes from podcasts. Once again, keep the good stuff going. Well, you know what? Tell your friends to listen to more podcasts and get off the fucking social media. So it's all I'm saying. Hashtag tripod. Tripod.

Oh, shit. Okay. I'm ordering me a domain. All right. You do that. We also got, we just got something from Brian G. It's a link over to The Verge. He says, guys, they say you can't make this stuff up.

There's no need when some crazy bastards are out there making it real. Enjoy. And this is a smart urinal that will show you ads while you pee. Not sure what's so smart about it. Does it analyze your piss? Does it tell you if you drank too much last night? I don't really know. But I do love the name of the Dutch startup that came up with it.

Mr. Friendly. Mr. Friendly. That's very good. So thank you for that. And we have a five-star rating over at iTunes, which is very nice, from HorseyGirl6. Entertaining and really informative. You guys talk about things that others says do not.

I like your style, and I said your podcast to my 84-year-old father. Enjoy yourself, too. Okay. I'm not sure if this is a bot. I know what's happening here. We covered this on a previous episode. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. She's dictating this into her phone. That's exactly what this is.

Yes, friend of the show, Mike, this is what all your texts look like to me, because you dictate them. Yes, it does. So if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review.

And as always, tell your friends. Closing shout outs. My closing shout outs start out with Mike Murphy. He's a friend of mine I went to high school with back in the 1980s. Yes, 1980s kids.

We were skateboarding friends together, and now he lives down by San Antonio, Texas. And here's what's funny. He says he started listening to GOG and loves it, was talking about at work today, and found out that his co-worker Fidel listens too. Love the sarcasm. Nobody here in Texas gets it.

Now, okay, this is what's cool about doing a fucking podcast. Fidel and Mike work in an auto body shop outside of San Antonio, Texas. I went to high school with Mike, and he meets a friend who listens to our show in Texas at work.

How cool is that? That's very cool, man. Uber new text. I'm Brian Shue. Sorry, I just, you know, I just read that in. So, yeah, I just use voice recognition for that. Okay, good for you. Okay, until next time, I'm Brian Shulister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and we'll figure out the rest of it later. 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 238.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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