241: Very Stable Raw Geniuses

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 back to Grumpy Old Geeks for 2018. I am Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome back. Brian, how are you today? I am mostly thawed from the minus 30 degree wind chill that I just left the other day. Boo hoo hoo. You get to go home. Some of us are stuck with it. Well, you know, if you've listened to the show long enough, you know, Jason's never really stuck anywhere. He could be back in L.A. next week for all we know.

I have a lease. I am not going anywhere. I cannot afford to break that lease. Henceforth, I am stuck in the wild tundras of Chicago. Right. You'll be used to it if you ever, you know, come clean on that promise to move to Toronto, which you've been threatening for a long time, but have yet to follow through on.

Every time I go back for one of these winters, it gets pushed back a few more years. See, that's the thing. You're just going at the wrong time. You need to go in the, you know, just keep keep your vacations to summertime in Toronto and you'll be there in no time. Yeah. Well, then I'd have to live there through those temperatures.

You get used to it. It's very, very bad. It was negative 25 the other morning and, you know, went out with the dog, which I have to do several times a day. We came back in after about 90 seconds. The next day, it was 10 degrees. We go outside and it's like shorts weather, you know, we're kind of frolicking in the snow like this is great.

And then, you know, two and a half minutes later, you can't feel your face because you realize it's still only 10 degrees outside. But that 25 degree jump from the day before 35 degree is just like, wow, this is amazing. Yes, it is. So a little follow up from our big bet on Twitter stock last year.

Yes, I won. Where's my six pack? You did win. So I figure since Twitter is the social network of the alt-right, I'm going to get you a Papa John's pizza and some Budweiser, the beer of the alt-right. Thanks. Well, I don't know if you noticed, the CEO of Papa John's has been required to step down.

Thank God. Yes. Horrible human being. He's gone. But yeah, you can take your Bud and shove it where the sun don't shine. I will take a nice beer. Thank you very much. I will send you your six pack of beer. You did win. You actually made a bit of money off of Twitter and then you sold.

I also sold my Twitter stock immediately because I hate that damn company. Yep, yep. I made $129, which is not bad. Just a few shares. I had 18 shares that I got at $16.32 and I sold them at $24.06.

So yeah, I made a nice little chunk of change. You did well. I purchased 10 shares at $17.40 and I sold them for $24.01. So I made $60, which will cover your six pack of beer and shipping and some beer for myself. So I covered my own bass with that. So thanks, Twitter, I suppose.

We'll see. Because I'm thinking maybe a six pack of Chimay wouldn't be too bad. You don't get to pick the beer. That's not the way the bet works. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho the phone here. We're going to have to go back and find the original bet then because you picking the beer, I'm going to get some Pabst Blue Ribbon coming my way.

I told you I'm going to find the beer of the alt-right, whatever that may be. Anyway, so I took my proceeds and rolled them into my Bitcoin and Ethereum pool. So we'll see how that goes for the next couple of weeks. I'm like up $150, so I'm tempted to just say, screw it, keep the $150 and move on.

I would probably recommend that. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still in there. I'm up $16 now because I was down before the new year. So there you go. I didn't put a lot of money in. I'm not putting any more in. We'll see what happens. I don't trust this stuff. A little bit of follow-up from what I was complaining about last year.

I think we've all noticed that the bullshit phone calls have increased a lot over the last year or two. Mental Floss had an article, when did the do not call list stop working? And it happened because people gamed the system and moved overseas and the prices of VOIP, voice over internet protocol phones, dropped tremendously.

So all of a sudden, everybody that was doing spam phone calls found it super cheap to do so and was able to skirt U.S. laws and things like that. So basically, get used to it, people, because they ain't going away. Okay, yes. And the Federal Trade Commission came out with a report saying that it was the worst year ever for robocalls.

And they were up by, you know, they received over 375,000 complaints a month. That's a month. And that's up from 63,000 a month in 2009. So these are, they're definitely a problem. So get that block list going. Yeah. Now, I realize there are some people out there that probably still make a living actually talking on the phone.

But at least for me, if the phone rings, I just don't even answer it anymore. Because if it's a friend, they're texting or they're WhatsAppping me or there's something like that. Nobody just calls me. So eventually, I'd imagine this stuff is just going to, they're going to realize it doesn't work because nobody's answering their damn phones anyways.

Yeah. I mean, apparently some people still are. They wouldn't be in business. You know, that's kind of how that thing works. But yeah, my block list is unbelievably massive. I think I can just block the entirety of 415 because nobody in San Francisco calls me anymore.

And it's just spam calls. Now, a little bit of follow-up on the world of automation and how, you know, we keep saying, oh, the robots are coming, the robots are coming, everybody's going to be broken out of a job. Well, move to Sweden is apparently the answer to that. The New York Times had a great article coming.

The robots are coming and Sweden is fine. And it's interesting because, you know, they have a very robust safety net. They also pay about 60% of their income in taxes, but it seems to be working for them. You know, I mean, if you lose your job, they have robust unemployment to take care of you.

If you have a kid, you have 480 days of joint off time that you can split between the parents, which is pretty cool. I'm sure you would love that. That would have been very nice, yes. Yeah, there's just a whole lot of things that they have for that 60%. And, you know, unions who are fighting for them is one of those things.

So they're not very upset about the robots coming. They just think, well, it's going to make the company better, and then we'll just find other jobs in the company, which is an interesting take. But when you have that safety net, it's easier to sleep at night on those things, you know? Well, it's a combination of things.

It's the government safety net, and it's also a different approach to business. The article, you know, the quote, the company will take care of us. Can you imagine any U.S. company that would actually give a shit about you? Well, taking care of you generally in a U.S. company is taking you out behind the woodshed, shooting you, and burying you in a potter's field where nobody can find you.

That's how the company takes care of us in the United States. Or, as we talked about just before the Christmas break, you know, Christmas pink slips. That's an American company tradition. This is a complete different mindset of everything, and it's fantastic. Like, you read about this, and it's like, oh, yeah, that's how things are supposed to be.

Yeah, well, you know, capitalism's an experiment, and it might not work in the long run because everybody is going to be poor. You're going to have 12 rich people, and that's about it. That seems to be the way that we're headed here right now. Definitely. Now, this year, I'm trying to stay away from as much news, mainstream news, as I possibly can.

I have tweaked my filters on Twitter. I have unfollowed so many people. Wow. Jason's off the mainstream media. He definitely needs that alt-right beer. Oh, stop it. What the hell? Well, you sound like a very stable genius to me, Jason. No, but I'm just wondering, where's all this alt-right shit coming from?

I mean, granted, yes, it was funny about Twitter, but it's just you keep coming with this. I'm like, did I do something to offend you? Did I send you a tiki torch for Christmas that I was unaware of? You just talked about the mainstream media. That's a total alt-right thing. Makes total sense, Jason. Okay.

I missed the joke on that one, I guess. Anyway, I have pulled everything from Twitter and all my filters are set, but one of the things that I noticed when I was going through all my news feeds is all of these news sites that we used to just go to for straight up news and gadget stuff and all that kind of thing.

Every day, there's at least two or three deals of the day posts where they're basically just trying to scrape as many cents as they can out of those Amazon links. Have you noticed that? I have noticed that, and that's in direct proportion to Amazon getting rid of all their convenience store things that we used to be able to set up that are all gone.

Hence, our store is now down as well because Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, decided to get rid of that. So this is how people are now dealing with it because they want to get their little links. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be an influencer now to get one of those stores, and we're apparently uninfluential, so we can't do it.

But it's really interesting, and when I was looking at that stuff, something that really kind of I noticed is retargeting. We've talked about retargeting. You search for one thing in one place, and it just follows you to the ends of the earth. You cannot get rid of it.

The interesting thing that I've noticed now is almost all of the retargeted ads that I am being shown are for things I've already bought. So if I go out and I buy a new pair of shoes, like I bought a couple pair of Allbirds shoes this last year because they're amazing shoes made of wool.

Go figure. Every site that I go to will send me an Allbirds ad. I bought some Roan stuff. I'm getting Roan ads everywhere. Everything that I've bought in the past six months, I am getting ads for, and it's incredible because these guys are just spending good money after bad for advertising to a customer who is already paid.

And I'm sure that these advertising giants like Google and the like are not giving these guys an option to say, don't show to this guy because he's already a customer. You know, it kind of makes me sick that these guys are trying to just spend ad money to get new customers, but all they're doing is wasting money on people who are already customers.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it's not. The technology isn't there yet, or it is there, but it's just not being rolled out because the people that make the money from the advertising don't want that to happen because they want to get as many dollars as they can. I mean, there's a lot of talk about this sort of thing.

I was reading something that was getting into it that was talking about, oh, it's the class I'm taking about data ethics, actually, which I'll talk about later. But he was talking about the very same thing, about how the technology just isn't quite there yet, about how these targeted ads and things like that, if they actually worked, we wouldn't be annoyed by them because they would actually be helpful to us.

They would be of interest to us. They would serve our needs rather than just annoy us and feel creepy like they're just following us around. Or, like you said, you and I, Jason, we're very decisive people. We tend to not go shopping online unless we know that there is something that we want to buy, so we buy it.

So that's the only data that they're getting for us, right? So it's the same thing happens for me. If I turn off my ad blocker, all I'm doing is getting ads for the Bayern Munich hoodie that I just ordered because I don't shop online. I go purchase because I already know what I want.

So, yeah, this is kind of useless for us. So the whole retargeting thing is not good for people who are pretty decisive and aren't just browsing online. So the technology is just not quite there yet. Or, again, like I said, it is, but they just want to scam as much bucks out of the advertisers as they can.

Yeah, which in the long run, they're just shooting themselves in the foot because the advertisers are not getting the return on their investment, so they're not going to be more likely to spend more on the ads if the ads aren't working because they're sending them to people who have already bought. There's got to be a way for them to flag.

They know everything that we do online, so they have to know that we've been to that thank you page after you check out from their cart. There should be a trigger for that. And if there is not, that is a serious flaw in the system, and that comes back to the advertising company. You know, I've placed a number of ads in just even the last year for a couple of clients.

There is no option for that, none whatsoever. So it does not exist. Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely. So I threw another link in here from Ryan Holiday, and it's called, Seriously, Okay, We Need to Stop Watching the News This Year. And it's a longer article. It could have been very short.

It could have just been the title. But if you're interested in what Ryan Holiday has to say, he's one of those crazy, crazy writers and influencers. It's a decent article, so check that out. The point that it really gets into isn't quite in the headline. The point is news is broken because all publishers require writers to write 12 articles a day, and that means you're getting a bunch of shit that isn't actually news because they have to keep generating page views.

And that's interesting because it comes back to the story in Sweden where the guy wrote a robot company to write articles that are crap about things that nobody really cares about and is making money off of that. But here in the U.S., we have people to do that, and it still sucks. Yeah.

Anyway, yeah. It's a decent article. I highly recommend reading it. Agreed. In the news.

Now, since we've been gone for two weeks, a lot of things have come and gone, but there's one that stuck – there's one article that stuck around. This is a hat tip to Seth Miranda over at the Grime Life. He texted me this one morning before it started to make the rounds, and it is, oh, my God, this is so effed up. Inside Silicon Valley's secretive orgiastic dark side.

And this is kind of a – it's more of a book excerpt from this new book that's coming out called Brotopia. And it is about the underground kind of sex scene in Silicon Valley. Right. And it's – here's the thing.

At first, I'm like, oh, this is going to be disturbing, and I'm going to feel mad and everything. And I'm just – I read it, and it talks about all these sex parties and all the guys who throw them and the women that attend. And I'm just like, nobody's ever worked in the music industry, have they? Because this sounds pretty run-of-the-mill shit for people who get rich and have power and can do whatever they want.

You know, it's – nothing really blew my mind in this. Yeah, the idea that this is happening in tech is not terribly surprising. This has happened in any industry that had a large amount of fame associated with it and money associated with it. It's not surprising. So good on them, I suppose.

You know, yay. High five, bro. Yeah. I mean, it's really crappy for the women. The whole point of this is that it's – you know, it sucks for the women because they're in this, you know, really rocking a hard place. It's like, oh, if I don't go to the parties, then I'm on the outs. But if I go to the parties, then I'm a slut.

And it's – that part is really gross. I understand that part. But this is going to keep happening. It's just the nature of humanity as far as I can tell. Well, I don't know about that anymore because we got the whole Me Too movement. So I assume that there's going to be lights brought to these spaces and a lot of people are going to get called out for it if they keep it – keep trying to get it going.

So we'll see what happens, though. We'll see. We'll see. I agree. There's an aspect of human nature to this that it is what it is and it sucks. But I do – you know, I'm seeing a sea change and hopefully that will continue. We'll see. We'll see. I mean, my most annoying thing about this article is – cuddle puddle?

What the fuck is a cuddle puddle? I don't know. That just sounds pathetic. I'm sorry. That just sounds really pathetic. Oh, God. Social skills, people. Get some. Now, Germany. I, you know, have a love and hate relationship with the Germans because I talk to one every week who yells at me a lot.

Stop. The Berliners. The Berliners. Ich bin ein Berliner, which is not really how you're supposed to say that anyway. I am a donut. Yes. They have decided to say, fuck you, Google. Literally. If you go to fuckoffgoogle.de, there is a website that is opposing the new Google campus that they're trying to build there.

They say everything that is wrong with Google, they do not want their – they do not want them there, basically. And it's kind of interesting, you know? Well, what I love about the Germans is not only do the words get insanely long, but instead of having a sharp and witty and quick little slogan, their slogan is, we, as a decentralized network of people, are committed to not letting our beloved city be taken over by this law and tax evading company that is building a dystopian future.

Shorten to the point, Germans, just like you always are. Yes. And the funny thing is, if you said that in Germany, it would probably be like a three-letter word. Five times as long. Oh, no. It would be one word, but like 172 letters. Exactly. So we'll see how that works.

And as an aside, I did the switch over the break because I was so bored out of my mind. I hate these breaks. I do not like them. I like to work. I always like to be doing something. So these breaks are not good for me. God, I had such a good time taking – I had such a good break.

I enjoyed not going to the show notes. I love not looking at tech news. It was so good. Yeah. See, I never stopped. I just had to keep throwing things away because we didn't have a show to do. I like working. I'm always doing stuff. So in the break, I tried – I'm like, hey, you know, we're always making fun of alternate search engines.

So let me try DuckDuckGo for a while. So I switched it as my main search engine. And at this point, I really can't tell the difference. The only thing I can tell the difference in mainly are the maps. Their maps are shit. But for the most part, the results I'm looking for in the top three, I don't know what that's doing in the grand scheme of things.

Because as soon as I go to that website, Google has me again. You know, I'm back on the radar. It's not like anything major has happened. But I don't know. The one thing I have noticed, though, is a lack of retargeting on the search terms. That really is something that is important.

So, you know, if I go to Google and I search for something, then sure, they're going to retarget me 17 ways from Sunday. If I go to DuckDuckGo and search for something, I do not have that retargeting aspect. So that is actually kind of nice. I didn't even think about that until I started to vocalize it. But yeah, so far, it's not bad.

It hasn't been a bad transition. You can do it in Opera fairly easily. All right. Well, maybe I'll give it a go. But I'm kind of okay with it. How is the speed on it? Like, because Google is fast. So is DuckDuckGo. It's instant. Okay. You type hit enter and boom, it's done. You know? Nice. Yeah.

It's fairly seamless. I mean, the only thing that really threw me was just the design is different. And I'm like, okay, let me see what's listed here. It took, you know, like five or six searches. And then it got to be normal. Right. And yeah. And speaking of some more fun stuff, Toronto, as we were just talking about, is it going to be the city of the future, Brian?

Do you think so? No. It's not going to be the city of the future because it's already an established city. A city of the future is going to be built from scratch, from the ground up. You've got way too much infrastructure that's already existing in Toronto. Yeah, there are areas that they're kind of like knocking down or a little further afield that are being built up.

But a city of the future, to me, by definition, is something that's going to be built from the ground up in a completely new way and not using so much of the existing infrastructure. Right. So no on that point. Yes, in terms of it's becoming a massive tech hub, particularly thanks to Drumpf's policies.

Lots of tech companies are starting to move there, place their headquarters there, because they are able to get forward visas in Toronto, in Canada. So they're getting the talent pool that they want to get. So a lot of companies are moving there. A lot of companies are moving their AI programs there.

It's becoming a big, big area for tech. So I've been talking to quite a lot of people every time I've been there that are just saying it's growing and growing. Now, yeah, because we've talked several times about how Google has moved a lot of their AI team up there. And there's another aspect of Alphabet called Keyside.

And this is a project that they're taking a couple acres of land in Toronto and trying to turn it into like a neighborhood of the future. And Torontonians are not very happy about this because what Keyside is supposed to be doing is tracking everything.

Cameras, sensors, you name it. It's all going to be part of the build-out of this area of the city. And they don't like it very much is what it's turning out. No, they don't. Canada is very on board more with Europe than it is with the U.S. in terms of privacy, in terms of legislation, in terms of approach to it, in terms of feel and thought.

Very European. Yeah, Canadians believe in privacy, just like Europe does, unlike America. Well, we believe in privacy. We just give it up on the regular basis and don't bother to fight for it. Canadians, not so much. Canadians are with Europe in terms of saying no to these sorts of things.

So I'm not surprised that this isn't popular. I think this is one of those articles that was probably 10th on the list of the 12 that somebody had to write. I don't think this is ever going to get built. I think this is a thought. And Google has floated it and said, we want to do this. But I guarantee you, it probably won't happen.

Okay. We'll see how it plays out. Because, yeah, it's one of those things where, I hate to bring up the movie again, because it was so god-awful. But The Circle by Dave Eggers in the subsequent crap movie, it seems very similar to what that whole movie was about.

Everything is surveillance. And they're actually trying to build this thing and turn Toronto into a platform. That is the dirtiest word of, I think, 2017, is everything's a platform. Fuck you, it's not. It's a company. I mean, just go. This is such...

Who are the people that think this is a good thing and that people want it? This is such a stupid... Kids. Insular, insular bro culture fucking thing that, like, oh, we can track everything. It'll be awesome. It'll be the perfect, perfect universe. Nobody wants that, except for you morons.

No one. I mean, come on. It's kid technologists. We were like that back in the day. I thought it would have been cool back in the day, but then I grew up and saw what this stuff can do. And now I'm terrified of it, even though I've got seven cameras in my house.

But I control them all. Sure. But anyway, yeah, I mean, technology is out of control sometimes. And this is one of those things where we don't really need this. We don't need this at all. I'd rather go Amish than go Keyside, honestly. I agree.

I'm with you there. So going back to my love of all things European and Canadian, I do love this story. This is a throwaway story, but it's so good. British regulators banned eHarmony ad for claiming services scientifically proven. The eHarmony ads have killed me every time that they run.

I hate them. They are flat out lying. I've often wondered, and it's not just eHarmony. This is prevalent throughout the advertisement industry right now. I've wondered what happened to the lawsuits about false claims in advertising, because I feel we've given up and we're just letting people say whatever the fuck they want these days.

Well, the FTC is underfunded. I mean, we don't have enough investigators out there to go pursue these claims. And there are more people doing easy, crappy ads than we have cops on the beat to actually go give them a ticket, you know? Yep. Let's go back. Let's go back to the very beginning of our show.

What was the name of that thing that I did for a year that promised to increase my brain power and all that crap? Oh, God, yeah. Your brain game thing. And they got sued for their advertising being deceptive, as well they should. And so good on you. Good on you, British regulators, because their eHarmony had placed ads like in the tube in the London Underground that said, step aside fate.

It's time science had to go at love, implying, of course, that they have a scientific solution to finding the love of your life, which they do not. It is a lie. It is not true. So, yay. I'm very happy. And eHarmony is, you know, it's famously run by Christians.

So, if you are gay, don't go to eHarmony for a date. If you're atheist, like I am, don't go there for a date. This was, you know, I think we even talked about this way back in the day at the beginning of the show, where I went to eHarmony, I put in my bona fides, and it came back with no woman within 100 miles is a match for me.

I had zero, because I checked atheist. Yeah. You know? I'm sure that's the reason. Hey, come on now. I'm just kidding, Jason. No. It was right there. Yeah, no, I remember you talking about that, too. So, I mean, to hell with eHarmony anyways.

But yeah, the lies that we're seeing in advertising is just ridiculous. And speaking of way back machines, remember when you would have widgets that you could post everywhere that would just, like, grab your content from somewhere, and you would post a widget, and they would drop it?

Well, that's Snapchat's big revolution that they're hoping will revive its user growth. From the, these kids really think that they're coming up with something new files, and the latest attempt to revive Snapchat's growth, they're developing a Stories Everywhere feature to allow users to post their stories outside of the app.

Oh, my God. This is their bright idea. It's their new Twitter widget. It's their Snap widget. Okay. They have no idea what they're doing over there, do they? No, they really don't. And just a quick follow-up on that, since I've been back and went out and hit the bars.

What a difference since last year. The Main Street scene is now that there are no longer a lot of Snapchat billionaires walking around anymore. It's a bit different. The bro culture has definitely kind of gone away a little bit on the street. I'll tell you that much. That de-escalated quickly.

Yes, it did de-escalate quickly. What you're hearing all the time now, of course, is cryptocurrency talk at the bars, which is even worse, to be honest. Honestly. We'll get into that. Well, yeah. We're going to... You do realize that that's this entire year, is you and I shitting on cryptocurrencies.

No, I think it's going to last about another two and a half months, and it's going to be a footnote. It'll be like the push episode or push issue of Wired. It's going to be... I mean, granted, it's come and gone. And what we're going to hear now is just crypto people who are broke because they sold their house and they put their money in, then crypto crashed, and now they're poor and living in a box.

And all I got to say is, yeah, you deserve that. But knock on wood for that. But we'll see. Going on. Moving on. Okay. Moving on to more idiotic social media news. Instagram has gone the way of Facebook now. We have...

Forget about having a linear timeline. Forget about not having ads. They've launched a couple new features, one called Recommended for You, which inserts posts from people you don't follow in your main feed because you may like them, or as we call them, ads. This is what I was pitching about a couple of weeks ago.

I'm like, why am I seeing all these posts from people I don't follow? And I must have been part of a test group for it. It really didn't say Recommended for You almost anywhere on that post. I'm just like, who the hell is this? Why is this here? I don't care about my abs.

As far as I know, they died when I was 24. What is this? I don't need to work out. I don't need yoga pants. Well, you'll be happy to know that you can temporarily hide this module, but you can't opt out of it and it will basically stay there because they're trying to boost engagement and get you to follow more people.

Now, this is coming the same month that Instagram also allowed people to begin following hashtags. This is actually fun. This part I like. I like the hashtag follow. I'm having a good time with that. Yeah, apparently some people do enjoy that. And as you've mentioned to me, I need to start putting hashtag podcast on all of our Instagram posts.

Yeah. Because people are apparently doing that. It's so funny. It drives me crazy because all the time I go and I look at the videos from the hashtag post or the hashtag podcast. And so many people this year were opening boxes gleefully going, I'm going to be a podcaster.

They're opening their boxes. It was a fucking blue Yeti. And I'm like, you're a moron. You're a fucking moron. Anyway, blue made a killing. I should have bought some blue stock this year. As much as I bitch about them making the crappiest microphones on the planet.

And listen, people, if you can go to Office Depot and buy a microphone, it is not a good microphone. Guess what they sell at Office Depot? Blue snowballs and Yetis. That's right. I said it. So just anyway, but it's fun to watch people with no shirt on going, I'm going to be a podcaster, bro.

Dude, check out. I'm on episode three. It's comic relief. It really is. You got to check it out. Okay. Sorry for the mini rant, but it was fun. I just, these people are just insane. That's it.

Anything else? Next story is yours. Okay. I didn't know if you had anything else on Instagram there. Hard to follow up that rant. Nope, I'm good. Facebook has decided to stop putting the disputed flag on fake news because apparently it made people click on it more. I didn't even see one of these, so.

I didn't either. I didn't either. It must have been one of their tests. I'm not entirely convinced that they ever rolled it out, so. Well, thanks for that big fix, but thank God Zuckerberg has decided to make it his top priority this year to fix Facebook, which, by the way, isn't he still CEO?

Shouldn't have been that, shouldn't, isn't that his fucking job? Should have been basically his job for the past, since he started it. He's getting billions of dollars to fucking do that. But he went on a road trip last year, man. He was trying to figure out what the people wanted when he wasn't too busy slaughtering his own goats in his backyard.

You know, if I treated my job like that, I'd have been fired, right? Like, you know what? I'm just not going to do my job this year. I'm going to take a road trip. That cool? Yeah. Okay. But when you own the company and have the, you're the biggest shareholder and cannot be outvoted, you can, I guess, kind of do that.

I guess so. Which is also why I don't own Facebook stock. Now, do you remember last year when this rental company, Amoco, I think they're out of Denver, big rental agency owns lots of apartments. They sued Airbnb, saying that Airbnb was basically letting people willfully break their lease by renting out their properties.

Which they were. Here's the deal, though. Airbnb won the lawsuit. Amoco is shit out of luck. And they now have to go back to going after the people. And what is it here?

What is it? Oh, Judge Dolly G. Like the Ali G? He's back? Oh, my God. He's got a show again. Here's what allegedly makes the listings unlawful, illegal, or offering, is that they advertise rentals that violate Amoco's lease agreements.

Airbnb hosts, not Airbnb, are responsible for providing the actual listing information. So just because Airbnb has the, say it with me, platform. It's the old, we're just a platform argument. Yep. So it goes back to the Communications Decency Act of 96, which has the safe harbor provisions.

And that's what they basically went with. It's not 1996 anymore, guys. It's 21, 22 years later. It's time to kind of revamp these laws, because people are just, they're abusing the laws. Yeah, it's, look, we're just a platform argument.

No longer applies when you become a multi-billion dollar company. There's a load of shit. Mm-hmm. Anyways, I'm pissed. Okay, I get that. Spotify has been hit with a $1.6 billion copyright lawsuit. Okay. Apparently, people like to listen to Free Fallin' by Tom Petty and Light My Fire by The Doors quite a bit.

And a bunch of other songs that they didn't actually have the rights to be playing. So we'll see if they get dinged on it. $1.6 billion seems quite a lot in my book. Well, that's the way you got to do it, though, right? Yeah. You don't sue for 10 bucks.

You sue for 10 gazillion bucks, and then you hope to settle somewhere in the middle. For two bucks. Wixen Music Publishing. I actually know these guys pretty well, so I'm good on them. I'm glad they did this. I actually built their website at one point. So, yeah. Go Wixen. Yeah, didn't you work on the posthumous site for The Doors?

I did. You did? Okay, I thought so, yeah. You had a lot of dead artists for a long time, I remember, which was kind of funny. Yes, it was kind of funny. But, yeah, I mean, this is, look, they definitely need more money out of Spotify. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, $1.6 billion is a little bit ridiculous, but we get what's going on here.

And Wixen is licensing. I mean, they do almost everybody. It's insane. So, yeah. We'll see what happens. I'm sure this is going to get settled quickly since Spotify has now started the process to file for their IPO. And they don't need these things on the, you know.

And I'm sure that's why the timing of this lawsuit hit, because they knew that Spotify was going to be filing for the IPO. So, they're like, we're going to hit them now, so they're going to want to settle fast, get out, and not have this in the press anymore. Agreed. Germany is going to start enforcing their hate speech laws.

Good. Okay. This will be interesting. The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they've been told about law-breaking material, as we know. In related news, Fox News is no longer in Germany. Yeah. Have you gotten any customer support back from any of these behemoths within 24 days, let alone 24 hours?

Hell no. Yeah. It's bad. It's bad. So, we'll see how this goes. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are going to be the law's main focus, and YouTube is, I think, going to be the hardest one to actually get people back on, because there's so much content on YouTube.

YouTube can't even figure out how to get rid of that douchebag who recorded suicide bodies, so YouTube's in trouble. They don't know what the hell they're doing over there. Yeah. And on a side note, I didn't put this in the show notes, but there was that white noise video that was going around that got hit by five copyright lawsuits this week, which is just like, oh, come on, guys.

Yeah. Your AI is not very A. Your AI is not very I. It's not very I. It's not very I. It's not a – yeah, your AI is not a stable genius. No, it is not a stable genius. And Microsoft has decided to halt Bitcoin transactions because it is an unstable currency.

How often in one week can you say that Microsoft and China are doing the exact same thing? There you go. Not that often. I'm just saying. Yeah. Strange bed, strange bed fellows. That's what we got here. Yeah. I mean, Microsoft added support for Bitcoin back in 2014, but at this point, since the currency fluctuates so much, if they have somebody come in, buy $100 worth of Microsoft points or whatever the hell they're buying, by the time they turn around and flip it and get it back into USD

or yuan or whatever currency that they're trying to hide offshore this week, the price could have dropped through the floor by 10, 20, 50 percent, and then they lost all that money. So since there is no basic rationale for what the hell Bitcoin does from moment to moment, they're like, you know what?

We're just going to step back from this. And apparently, Steam did the same thing a while ago. Right now, Bitcoin is useless for what it's supposed to be good at, which is buying and selling stuff. Now, it is good for talking about how much you've made that week at the pub.

That's all it's good for. You can't buy anything. Pretty much. Fun times. Now, Brian, you've been traveling a lot, so I don't know if you've got a bunch of Amazon deliveries over the holidays, or did you? Not over the holidays.

I timed all mine so they showed up basically the day I flew back into L.A. Okay, so I get deliveries all the time here. I basically live off of Amazon and Amazon Fresh now. One thing that I've noticed, if I go to my orders page now, all of the drivers that have been leaving packages at my doorstep have been taking photos of them, and they're in my account now.

Have you seen this? I have not. Yeah. I go, and there's a lot of pictures of my porch in my Amazon account now. And because I figured this out when I was just, I forget what I was doing. I was trying to find something. And I'm like, that's a picture of my porch. What the hell? And went back through all my deliveries, and there are pictures of every delivery for the past couple weeks now.

I do not. I've just logged in to look at mine. I do not see this. I would actually be upset if this was happening, and I would definitely want to be able to opt out of this thing. I don't. I'm just creeped out. I'm not mad about it because, I mean, I think it makes sense. I wish UPS would do that and all the other ones because it just shows that it was left there.

And this just gives them plausible deniability. Like, hey, we put it there. If it's gone now, I mean, I'm sure it's for insurance purposes and the rash of thefts that happen constantly of shit that's left on your porch. But I just didn't. I would have liked to have known they started doing this because I saw somebody.

I was like, you know, like I said, I got video cameras everywhere. I saw a guy like backing up and taking a picture of my porch, and I thought he was taking a picture of my, you know, novelty doormat that says come back with a warrant. But no, he was taking a picture of the package that he just left. All right.

Well, see, I'm a little creeped out by that, and I'm surprised that there's been no mention of this in the press or anything. So weird. Well, there is just your house. There is now. We are the press. That just means somebody else is going to write articles about it next week. It's going to be on reply all next week.

You know it. Exactly. And I do have an update on our Clash Royale clan that I mentioned right before the break. Our clan name is GOG.show. We now have 27 people in there playing it up. It's pretty fun. If you're playing Clash Royale, I definitely recommend it.

Now, we have a note here from player Magnus, and he dropped me a note in the clan chat the other day, and he says, make sure to give Brian a hard time about not engaging with the audience as effectively as you do. Ha! So there we go.

I am the brand ambassador for Grumpy Old Geeks. I would like to remind everybody that I'm the one that responds on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, and Jason just plays a fucking game with you guys. I reply on Twitter all the time. I fuck Facebook. And you just post on Instagram.

Don't tell me you're engaging with the audience there. I am at the engagement levels. I can provide you with statistics and charts. Okay. Well, we talked about opening up our Slack channel so we could talk to people on a daily basis. But this morning, I was doing the research on that.

Turns out, to have one of those open channels where people can just come and hang out, we have to have paid members, which would be me and you, which is going to cost a couple hundred bucks a year. So, sorry, guys. No Slack channel. No. Look, look. There's not a lack of ways to contact us.

I mean, I really like having the chat room. And no, we're not going to move to IRC. We're not going to open up an IRC channel. But it's fun to be able to chat with the guys in the Clash Royale channel. So, just throwing that out there that it's fun. And on that note, video game addiction will be recognized as a mental health disorder in 2018.

This comes from the World Health Organization, and they are including gaming disorder in their upcoming draft of the 11th International Classification of Diseases, describing it as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior. Okay. And there are a lot of psychologists out there who are saying that, yeah, this is a very flawed piece of science and it shouldn't be in there.

But I know many people who does actually, they do have a disorder around gaming. And this comes from somebody who finally yesterday turned his Xbox One on for the first time since pretty much he got it. I played for five hours, or I had the Xbox on for five hours yesterday.

Two hours of that was 40 gigabytes of updates for the games, and three hours was playing. But I got to say, Battlefront 2 was pretty fun. So, I was getting my Star Wars on yesterday. I think you might like that game quite a bit. It's pretty fun. Yeah. I've heard that that one might be interesting, but I just don't have the time.

No, you don't. Well, that's why you need to hyper-age your kid like they do in the soap operas. It's like you watch a soap opera and one week they're like, you know, four, and then the next week they're 24 and they just graduated college. So, a friend of the show MXV knows what I'm talking about on that one. Anyway, Magic Leap.

They finally showed their gear. They finally dropped trow and showed the product. I wear glasses, and this goggle setup they have does not look like it's very conducive to wearing glasses at all.

No, it does not. It looks way too small. And it's funny because I was looking at the website. If you go to magicleap.com, they've got pictures of the goggles and the little computer that you have to wear with it, which I think is a very cool solution to the problem, by the way. I like that solution.

But there's a woman behind the guy wearing the goggles who has glasses on, but the guy does not have glasses, so I have no idea how this thing's going to fit or work, and we'll see how it goes. It's not out yet. They don't have pricing yet. They don't have a release date yet.

Nope. They basically have nothing yet except a picture of the hardware. So, it's more than they've done so far. And an awful lot of press just because they did that. We'll see. I signed up for the newsletter to see when it comes out. If it's anywhere in the realm of affordable, I'll try and get one.

It won't be in the realm of affordable. It's going to be expensive. Yeah, it probably will be because it's like, you know, you look at the HoloLens. The HoloLens is, you've got to sell a kidney to get one of those, like dev kits. Yep. And that's why I don't have one yet. And I don't want to get a VR kit.

That's why we don't have those. We joke about that all the time. I don't want a Vive. I don't want an Oculus. I want AR. So, when one of these kits gets to the point where it's like, you know, $400 to $500 and doesn't require me to buy a $3,000 PC to go along with it, I'll jump in and give it a shot because I'm jonesing for something cool like this.

But we'll see what happens. The thing that I'm worried about, too, is I'm not hearing about anybody that's developing software or developing games or developing applications. I'm not hearing anything about any kind of like Magic Leap, IDK, nothing.

Because it's not out yet. It's not there yet. That's what they're saying they're going to launch early this year. Like, the whole shebang is coming out early this year. HoloLens, you can go develop for right now. You can go buy the kit, get the SDK, and start developing for it. That's already in the wild. But it's like over $1,000 for a HoloLens developer kit, which is just way too much.

But, I mean, if you're in a development house that's building that stuff, sure, that's fine. But independent developers, it's priced way out of their range. Exactly. Because I'm an independent developer. I don't have a gaming company behind me buying all this stuff. So I got to, you know, shell out, save up and shell out myself.

So once it gets to that realm, I'm in. But we'll see. We'll see. And we did, we weren't around for the entire Apple battery kerfuffle that happened, which is kind of fun. I wish we were, because we could have had some fun with it. But, yeah, if your battery sucks on your iPhone, go get a new one.

It's like $29 now. You can get it on just about anything. Yep. I mean, you know, I understand why they did it. It makes sense. How they did it and not mentioning anything and the way they handled it was dumb. So there you go. Yeah, this is an engineer solution to a problem.

It's like, oh, your battery sucks because the computer goes too fast? Well, let's make the computer go slower. It makes sense to me. Makes sense. Makes total sense. Yeah, I'm sorry. From an engineering perspective, I'm like, duh. But as grandma in the, you know, in the mobile home going, why is my phone not loading anymore?

God damn it. Junior, get in here. Fix my phone. Well, it's an iPhone 4, grandma. I don't give a shit. This goddamn Apple, every time they come out with a new phone, I got to buy a new one. Fix it, Junior. Well, yeah, those people are the ones that got pissed off. Yep. I bought some software over the break.

Okay. I talked about Affinity Photo for the iPad a while back, which is a great little, you know, basically Photoshop on the iPad. Incredible little piece of software. I didn't realize that they made it for the Mac, and I only realized that they made it for the Mac when I found out they made a product called Affinity Designer, which is an Illustrator replacement because I had to do some work on an Illustrator file over the break, and I don't

want to pay for Illustrator because that means I have to go get the whole Creative Suite subscription or I have to go to Sweden. So I'm like, is there something out there? I had to change kerning on one word that somebody had, you know, changed into shapes and mashed together.

And I'm like, that looks like shit. I need to fix that. So I went to everywhere and I finally found Affinity Designer. It was 40 bucks. The nice thing about it, though, is their demo version that lasts for like two weeks. Let me do what I needed to do. I went and got the demo, fixed the file, saved it out.

Perfect. Their demo is like a non-restrictive demo, which is great. I love you. And for that, I turned around and immediately bought it. And after that, I bought Affinity Photo, which is their Photoshop replacement. Also super cool. Another 40 bucks. So for under $100, you can get an Illustrator and Photoshop replacement that, as far as I can tell, are better than the originals.

Affinity Designer. I don't know if you've worked in Illustrator before, Brian, haven't you? Oh, yeah. Many, many times. Yeah, I used to live in Illustrator for doing logos and any text work, always in Illustrator, anything that is vector-based. This program is so much cooler than Illustrator. I can't even tell you.

It is so much easier to use. And Affinity Photo, because we've been talking about all the problems we've had with Photoshop, where everything keeps changing. I'm like, screw it. 40 bucks. I'll give it a shot. I went in there, started playing with it, worked on some of my photos. Oh, my God. It's a different interface. You're not going to have all of the muscle memory from Photoshop.

But if you just say, stop, go and watch some of the tutorials that they have, they have tons of tutorials on how to use the software. You'll be back up to speed and running in no time flat. Don't have to steal any software. Don't have to pay that stupid creative license that Adobe has. Plus, like we were saying, with Photoshop and their continual releases, there is no muscle memory anymore, because all they do with the new releases is move things.

Exactly. Exactly. And I tried Pixelmator. You know, I've got Pixelmator. They just came out with a pro version. I was so frustrated with trying to find things in Pixelmator that I just gave up on it. It was so infuriating. I'm like, I just want to change the foreground color.

Where's the palette? I couldn't find the palette. And if it's something that basic that is not front and center, then, you know, I'm just going to just be annoyed with it. So I'm throwing my hat in with Affinity Photo now, and it's really cool. And Affinity Photo for the iPad also.

Definitely give them a shot. If you need to do any vector stuff, get designer, Photoshop work, get photo. That's it. Cool. Yep. Awesome. All right. So I was in Toronto, and it was freezing cold, and I could not go outside to do any exercise or anything like that.

So I was stuck with basement exercises and no weights, no nothing. So I did a little Googling. And this has been around for quite some time. This is a scientific seven-minute workout that some eggheads discovered. The earliest article I could find was going back to New York Times in 2011.

Oh, wow. Where they talked about this workout. It's recently gotten some buzz again because Lifehacker's been hitting that hard on the social medias, which is getting people to look at. Yes, exactly. So they've been doing their own thing about it. It's basically 12 exercises that you're supposed to do in rapid succession, 30 seconds each with a 10-second rest between exercises.

You have to do it at high intensity for it to really do much of anything. But basically, the scientific aspect of it is these 12 exercises work through every single muscle group. So you're getting a full-body great workout. So that's all fine and dandy, but try to do that like looking at the little charts that they have on Lifehacker.

Like you've got 30 seconds and then a 10-second break, and then you're running over to look at your little chart and your screen. What am I supposed to be doing now? Now, how am I supposed to time this? All of that. Well, some guy made it super easy. So I'm going to give a big shout out to Will Wilson, who programmed over at 7minworkoutapp.com a perfect little system to do it.

So if you want to do this workout, it's fucking great, man. I use this in the basement every single day. Now, I have to run through it a couple times. Like I can't just do the one seven-minute workout because this will work great if you're totally out of shape. It'll whip you into shape. If you've been doing bike riding and workouts and stuff like I have, you've got to do it a couple times.

But this is fantastic. It tells you exactly what exercise. It gives you the timer. It gives you whistles. It gives you the breaks. It's amazing. So the fact that this guy did this made me able to do this workout on a regular basis. It's great. So check it out. I did check it out.

It was very fun. When I first saw it, I'm like, is this a joke? And then I started playing it. And I'm just like, oh, no, this is actually exactly what it's supposed to do. Very cool. It gives you exactly what you need to do to do this workout. It's perfect. So thank you very much, Will. Thank you very much. And can I just for one second bitch about how terrible lifehacker.com is?

I know. I had to take him out of my feed reader because I was looking at it. I went through like, you know, I had a list of like maybe the latest 70 articles that I hadn't gone through. And I just went through them in order. And there was like one that was moderately interesting and only half right.

They're just it is a waste of time to go to lifehacker anymore. They used to be really good. And you got I mean, just like we were talking about earlier. It's just what these people have to do to make a living now to stay alive is they have to slam social media. It's 12 articles a day for every single person that writes there.

And because you're writing that many articles, most of them are shit. Yeah, it's terrible.

Media candy. In my quest to get cable without getting cable, I've tried YouTube TV. I've tried Hulu TV. I've tried stream. Was it stream? What's the one with the little box that was supposed to that you used to have? Whatever.

I've tried a bunch of them. I finally, finally settled on Xfinity stream. I went back to the mothership. Comcast is now offering their version of TV over the Internet. It's 25 bucks a month. Comes with a built in DVR. Don't have to do extras and add ons and shit like that.

I get basic cable and broadcast TV. I'm done. That's it. I'm done. And it works next episode. No, it works. There's an app for my TV. I've got that Roku 4K TV. There's an app for it. So I don't have to do anything else. Built into the TV.

Works on my iPad. Works on my phone. So I can set things for the DVR straight from there. It works. That's it. I'm done. Okay, good. And with that being done, I did find a show. Like the first night that I got it, I'm browsing through. Like, okay, let's see what's on broadcast TV.

Because I know it's a wasteland. But let's see what's out there. And I found a show called Live PD. Have you heard of this show? I have not. This is a reality. It's been out for three years. It's a reality show where they have camera crews following police officers. It is like cops from what you would think of as some kind of future dystopian movie where you're really watching the cops live.

Oh, God. Why? Oh, my God. It isn't. And they've got these guys who are like football announcers talking about, oh, Jimmy's going into the house now. Now he's going to knock and watch him step to the side to make sure there's no bullets coming through the door. And he's in. Okay. Grandma answered the door. Oh, Junior tried to break into the house tonight because he lost his keys.

And then the neighbor called the police. And we're just going to pat him down now to make sure he doesn't have any weapons. It's incredible. It's incredible. I thought I was watching a bit from like a Michael Bay movie set 10 years in the future. You have to see it.

It's incredible. Now, have you been watching the Grand Tour? I have not. I will be catching up on it now that I'm back. Basically, you know, the Christmas break was a complete shutdown for me where I didn't do much of anything. Oh, my God. See, that's the difference between me and you on a break.

You have family and obligations with children. All I do is sit on the couch, drink and watch everything that is on Netflix and Amazon. I've watched everything, by the way. There's nothing left for me to watch. I'm glad we're back to work now. But I have to say the Grand Tour episode three, sadly, is the death of my respect for Hugh Bonneville, who also played Robert, the Earl of Grantham on Downton Abbey.

Yes. When you get around to watching it, we'll talk about this later. But what a fucking dork. Oh, my God. Well, Jason, after all these years of working in the entertainment industry, you have finally come around to the fact that there's a distinction between the actor and the roles they play.

I know. But, man, it's night and day. It is night and day. You'd think that he'd have some kind of gravitas. Nope. None whatsoever. He's a nerd. All right. He's a nerd. Speaking of nerds, every nerd on the planet had an opinion about the movie Bright with Will Smith.

Did you get a chance to see that one? No, and I never will, because every nerd that I've talked to said it was a train wreck and absolutely horrible. Every nerd you talk to, besides me, is completely wrong. It's a fantastic movie. Nope. I saw you post that, and I knew it, and I was like, Jason, I've got to tell you, because, as you just stated, you've watched absolutely everything, and you are a huge fan of TV and shows and movies, you might have a little bit of a lower standard here.

This is Alien Nation meets Lord of the Rings. It's fun. It's a fun movie. Alien Nation was horrible. Alien Nation was a great movie. Shut your pie hole. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You don't like Alien Nation. The TV series, maybe not as good, but the movie was fantastic. But Netflix liked it so much, they're actually making a sequel, so you might want to jump on that train at some point, so you can join the conversation like everybody else.

Nope. Nope, definitely not. I'm never going to watch it. Black Mirror Season 4, I watched that in one sitting, except for two free breaks. Of course I did. I loved it. And the nice thing about Season 4 is there were more happy endings in Season 4 than there were in the entirety of Season 1 through 3, including the Christmas specials.

So, not as miserable as every other season of Black Mirror that was out there. That's actually good to hear. Yeah, I enjoyed the whole thing. And the last episode is my favorite, The Black Museum, which has a a mini story that was originally a Penn Jillette story, which is pretty good.

Okay. What's his name? Sutton, aka Ring Zero, wrote in a couple weeks ago about Travelers Season 2, because we didn't, you know, we talked about Travelers, and Season 2 came out on the break, and I watched it better than Season 1, I gotta say.

Okay. By the time I got, I had to go back and watch a little bit of Season 1 just to get up to speed on what happened, because it's one of those things where they just, no explanation, boom, drop you right in where the other one left off. I liked it. I thoroughly enjoyed Season 2. All right. A little podcast news.

James Cridland from Australia started a new newsletter called Pod News. So if you're into podcasts and podcasting, sign up for his newsletter. And he doesn't cover the normal crew, like the cereals and the gimlets and all that crap. He actually tries to find real news about podcasting.

So it's a great little newsletter. I support him on Patreon. Hopefully he'll ramp it up. He's only got like 1,100 subscribers right now, but he's trying really hard, so I wanted to give him a little bit of love. And No Such Thing as a Fish podcast. Oh, my God.

I think I had to text you about this, because when I found it, I'm like, this is right up your alley. Did you get a chance to listen to any of them? You did, and I subscribed. But as previously noted, nope, I haven't listened to one yet. My week back starts tomorrow. We're recording on Sunday.

I just flew in on Friday. I have done absolutely nothing, and I will begin anew tomorrow. So it's loaded up. I'm ready to listen. Okay. They're close to 200 episodes. They're about an hour long each. And it's four of the researchers from the show QI, or Curiously Interesting, or I think that was it, the British trivia show.

They each come with their own fact, and they talk about it for the main part of the show. And they're usually live shows. These guys sell out auditoriums. It's crazy how popular this is. I have unsubscribed from almost every banal podcast that was in my player because I'm trying to, you know, pare down this year.

I downloaded like 100 of these things because when I run out of something to listen to, I'll just go back and load one of these up. And it's fascinating. The shit you will learn listening to this podcast is crazy. You're going to love it. Trust me. The other one that I have is Omnibus by Ken Jennings and John Roderick.

Ken Jennings is the Jeopardy champion, and John Roderick is the singer from The Long Winters. And they have a cute little podcast about cool facts and cool stories, also very fun and trivia-based. So I'm talking fast because we've got a lot to get through. Yes, we do.

Check those out. I'm very excited. Phil Rosenthal, who is the original creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, had a show on PBS called I'll Have What Phil's Having, which was all about food. And I loved the show because Phil Rosenthal is an absolute hoot. This guy has a love of life that is unbelievable, and he's hilarious unintentionally.

He's got a new show. It's been picked up by Netflix called Somebody Feed Phil. It's basically a continuation of the show. So the trailer is out, and all the episodes are dropping January 12th. I'm very excited. I'm looking forward to watching that. I did watch the trailer. I've never heard of this guy, but I have seen Everybody Loves Raymond.

This guy is Raymond. It's crazy. Yeah, basically. In the same way that What's His Face is Seinfeld. Yeah, from Curb Your Enthusiasm and all that. Exactly. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Lovesick is back with a third season. This is the show that I talked about. Lovesick. This is the show that I talked about originally when it was by its first name.

It's the British show. It was called Scrotal Recall. Do you recall that when we talked about that, Jason? I kind of remember that. It just says Loveless in the show notes. You confused me. Oh, I probably mistyped it then. Sorry. Oh, yes. It is called Lovesick now. It was a show over on the BBC or ITV or something like that over in England.

It was called Scrotal Recall for the first season, the premise being this guy got venereal disease and went back and talked to all of his ex-girlfriends. It got picked up by Netflix, and they, of course, had to change the name because they discovered that people didn't want to say the word Scrotal and wouldn't recommend it to their friends.

I would totally recommend that to my friends. They went with the very boring. It's so boring that I always forget it, which is why it's called Lovesick, and I typed Loveless, and I never remember what the name of the damn show is. If they would have kept it Scrotal Recall, it would have been perfect. It's really well done.

It's very funny. Season three is out, so I burned through most of that while we were in Canada. Do they have the other seasons on Netflix? Do they get all of them? Yes. Are they just? One through three. They're all there, so go watch them. Okay, cool. Thanks. Very good. Good, good, lighthearted show. I've finished Master of None, the second season.

Yeah, well, the wife was more into it than I was. I will say there's one great episode each season. There's two decent episodes each season, and the rest is crap. Okay. That's where I'm at with that. I probably will not watch any more of it if I can get away with it.

I watched the first episode of the latest travesty that is called The X-Files. Oh, thank God. Okay. I don't know if I'm going to watch any more of them. Oh, terrible. I'm just, they're ruining everything. They're ruining absolutely everything. Okay. Yeah, it was ungodly bad.

And before you get to your next one, I just want to say no spoilers, because your next thing that you're going to talk about, I'm going to go see as soon as we hang up the phone. I have not seen it yet, so curb your spoilers, please. Well, we will not talk about The Last Jedi, then. We will wait until you've seen it, because at this point, if you haven't seen it, we have to do spoilers.

It's been long enough, so we'll wait until next week for that one. And Dave Bittner will join us for that. He has shown a great desire to join us for Our Last Jedi Talk. So yes, as soon as we're done on this show, I'm going to the theater, and I'm going to see it. Okay. And I've got some Drunk on a Plane movie reviews, except I have to rename it.

It's been a long time since I've done this segment, and I have to rename it now. It's called, I Got to Watch Five Minutes at a Time Every Couple Minutes, and then had to pay attention to my kid on a plane, and there was no drunkenness movie reviews. Okay, that's not as exciting as Drunk on a Plane movie. It's not as exciting, so we'll keep it Drunk on a Plane movie reviews, because it sounds better. I watched Logan.

Boy, that was depressing as hell. I was good, though, wasn't it? It was good, except it just made me sad, because all the, spoiler alert, they're all dead. Yeah, that was the whole point of it, yeah. And it's miserable, and Patrick Stewart just is a sad, old, it's just, God, it was depressing.

It was. So depressing. I like that part. That's the part I like. I did not care for it, I did not like to see things end that way. It was sad, but it was a very well-done movie, and yeah, I can't say it was enjoyable, but it was very well-done. Yeah. Kingsman Golden Circle.

I loved the first Kingsman movie, because it was one of those, oh, a wee bit of the ultra-violent, I can't believe they're doing this. This one, a little too tongue-in-cheek, almost a parody of the first movie, sadly. I enjoyed it, because when I, everybody said it was terrible, so when I went in to watch it, I expected it to be god-awful, and I thought it was enjoyable.

I love it when people say every movie is terrible, and then I enjoy it. I like this movie, I thought it was fun, I just kicked back with a cocktail and watched it, and it was good. That goes back to my exact point that I was making about your feelings about Bright. Okay, okay. Well, see, here's the problem, you just need to drink more.

That's it. That could be true. I also watched Dunkirk, which I think would have probably been really good if I saw it on a big screen, not on a plain screen. Otherwise, the most boring movie made last year. It seemed to be exceedingly boring on a small screen. It's beautiful. I mean, I watched it on my giant 4K TV, so I still got to get the grandeur of it all, but I'm like, where's the fucking plot?

It was just, there was no leading person, there was no main plot, there was just side plots, and four scenes that were, I'm sure, incredibly hard to film, but I did not like Dunkirk. I thought it was the most overrated movie of last year. All right, fair enough.

And what was a big surprise? Battle of the Sexes. What's that? This movie was awesome. This is Steve Carell and the redhead, I can't remember her name. This is the Billie Jean King story versus Bobby Riggs. Oh, that one, yeah. I was looking forward to that one.

It was fantastic. Emma Stone, that's her name. And Sarah Silverman is just stunningly funny in this movie. Okay. Everybody's great in it. I cannot recommend this enough. This was a total surprise. I didn't think, I just threw it on because I'd ran out of things to really watch, and I wasn't going to watch the Lego Batman movie because I'm not five years old.

And I put this on, and it was, I love this. This is by far the best movie I've seen probably in a year. Okay, I'll check it out then. I was looking forward to that one. So I'm glad at least something got a good review. And what was going around yesterday was the Nirvana Teen Spirit, smells like Teen Spirit, re-autotune to a major chord or major key to sound like Weezer and the like.

It's not auto-tuned, but yeah, it's basically, it's played in a major, I think he just replayed it. It's played in a major key, and yeah, it sounds like a horrible pop song. The horrible part about it is, I kind of liked it. It's like a train wreck. It's like, I know this song.

This is not the song that I know and love, but I kind of like it. It was terrible. But I didn't think it was even going to make it to today, but it's still up. It's still going strong. So hopefully it'll still be there by the time the show airs tomorrow. Yeah, we'll see.

And finally, Showtime is debuting a new trailer for an upcoming XTC documentary, speaking of pop music, called This Is Pop. XTC is definitely one of my favorite bands of the 80s and 90s, and I can't believe there's a good documentary made about them. This is going to be really interesting.

These guys are some of the best songs, some of the greatest pop songs, Crippling Stage Fright, so they never tour. Oh, okay. So it should be interesting. Yeah, I think it's funny that you pronounce it XTC as it's written, but shouldn't it just be Ecstasy?

Everybody's always called them XTC. Okay, gotcha. So that's how I've heard it on K-Rock since I was 12 years old. Okay, maybe that's why they have Crippling Stage Fright, because nobody can pronounce their name the way they thought that they were going to. I'll definitely check this out when it's out. Except it's on Showtime, so we'll be going to Sweden time.

At the library. Okay, so I did not read any sci-fi or techie nerd books over the break. I actually went old school, and we're just going to run through these real quick because they're not techie or nerdy, but I do want to talk about them a little bit.

The Wolves at the Door, the true story of America's greatest female spy, is the story of Virginia Hall, who is an American with one leg, who basically was one of the British's greatest spies of World War II. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing story, highly recommended. I also read Red Notice by Bill Browder.

This is the story of one of Russia's first international investors, who is Putin's basically enemy number one. They're still trying to get Red Notices put out on him, which is an Interpol notice where they have to arrest you if you travel.

This is the sixth time, last week, this just came out, Russia is trying to put a Red Notice on him through Interpol for the sixth time. And Interpol keeps saying, go fuck yourself. You're a bunch of scammers. But it's an amazing story. And I did read Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff.

I read it in a day. I read it yesterday. It came out the instant that it came out on Audible. I ran through that thing. I didn't do anything yesterday except, well, actually, I did a couple shows yesterday. But in between, I read this book. Nothing new. Everything that we've read in the papers and us smart people have assumed was going on, basically, he just confirms everything that we thought was going on.

They're all just a bunch of fucking morons. That's basically what I've heard, too. It just confirms what we all kind of figured. And yes, it is really that bad. Yeah, that's it. So, I mean, I wouldn't even bother with it, honestly. Don't bother with it. I mean, it was fun to read and hear some of the stuff.

But most of the time, I'm just like, yeah, we knew that. We knew that. It's like listening to Reply All. Shit we already knew. Anyway, next week, we have Dark State, which is a new novel from Charlie Strauss. It's a multi-princes, multiverse book. It's a hard word to say, or three words to say.

Merchant Princes multiverse. Merchant Princes multiverse, because I thought it was princesses, because there's a bunch of chicks in it. So I was going with princess. But it's a follow-up to Empire Games, which I thoroughly loved and reviewed on episode 194, which was Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight. Links will be in the show notes for that.

That comes out January 9th. Now, we have a new winner for ridiculous pre-order from Amazon. You pulled one up the other week, but this one wins. This is Agency by William Gibson. Yes. And I'm like, oh, cool. It's coming out. And then I checked the pre-order date.

December 25th, 2018. Yes. Almost a year. I'm sure he hasn't written a line yet. Because the other one was another Charlie Strauss book, which was the next Laundry Files, which comes out in June or July. And we thought, man, you guys are pushing it.

But yes. Nope. William Gibson is a true futurist because you can only buy his books in the future. That's right. Security? Ha! We are back this year with Dave Papa-Bittner again.

How are you doing, Dave? Did the holidays treat you well? The holidays were lovely. I had what I'd be best described as a long winter's nap. It was much appreciated, much needed. And I came back energized. And, you know, lucky for me, it's been a quiet year so far in cybersecurity.

Nothing really happening. Yeah. Have you heard any news? I'm pretty sure everybody's given up. We're secure now. The Internet of Things has locked itself down. AI has taken over the world. Everything is fine. It's all Skittles and rainbows from here on out.

Yep. Yes, it is. Well, of course, we're lying. Three days. We lasted three days. That's right. Absolutely. You know, that rattling sound you hear is the foundation of much of what you knew about computer science being shaken down to its core.

So we got news this week, a release of major vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre, as you pointed out. Now our vulnerabilities come with lovely logos. Yeah. It's like the first thing that they do when they find an exploit is, hey, let's get the designers on this.

We've got to have good branding or nobody's ever going to take us seriously. I'm waiting for the first vulnerability that gets its own theme music on like CNN, you know, like how they do that with plane crashes or, you know, things like that. Yeah. That would probably come in there. But no, these are really what can be considered a big deal.

These are hardware bugs in Intel processors and other processors. At first, it seemed like perhaps Intel was going to be hit worst. And with Meltdown, they are. But Spectre affects it. It appears just about everything. And these are – it's interesting because Intel was quick to point out that these chips are functioning exactly the way they were designed to function.

And I know, I mean, that sounds funny, but this is – what has happened is they've discovered a fundamental flaw in some of the assumptions that people have been making for over a decade about how to design these processors to run really, really fast and efficiently, you know, to sort of get the data through the pipelines using the speculative processing techniques.

And it turns out there's some vulnerabilities, some fundamental vulnerabilities with those processes. Yes, there is. The speculative nature of this where the computer is actually like running code in advance from where it's actually supposed to be.

So it's pre-run by the time you get there and then can branch off. And then what a clever person can do is read kind of some of the fallout of what happened when these speculative processes have happened and pulled data out. And there are just ways where you can get a lot of stuff from the kernel that you shouldn't be able to get.

Right. And it's very troublesome. Now, what's more troublesome to me is Intel's press release because, yes, they did say that, oh, everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Move along. Never mind the man behind the curtain. I'm fine here. How are you? Ars Technica totally called them out on it today, which I thought was pretty fun.

They said it was a masterpiece of obfuscation, which it kind of was. Yes. There was a lovely one earlier in the week from the register that similarly took them to task. Yeah. It says, these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify, or delete data.

That's good and dandy, but that's not what the flaw is. The flaw is that you can read parts of memory that you weren't supposed to be able to. It has nothing to do with corruption, modifying, or deleting data. It's reading things like reading the notes to the test before the teacher gives it out.

It makes things like passwords, usernames, basically anything that's in memory has the potential to be exploited using these exploits. So it's a big deal. And again, since it's at the hardware level, that means that to fix this, they can be patched with software, but there could be significant slowdowns.

And we're starting to see reports of some of those slowdowns coming in. Yeah. And the different, like Meltdown is easier to fix in software than Spectre is. Spectre is going to be the one that lasts a very long time. Meltdown, most everybody has patches out, like operating system level patches out now.

Yep. And the interesting thing is everybody was on the same team about patching it next week. Like there was going to be this big announcement on Wednesday. Everybody's patches would be out. And it's like, yeehaw, we're done. You know, the world can move on. It looks like some idiot at AMD who was working on a Linux patch left some comments in the code that he checked in that let people go back and figure out what was happening.

Thus, leading to the arms race of everybody getting it out there now and talking about it and trying to find these bugs before they were patched. Whoopsie. Yeah. And, you know, part of the security alerts with this is that because these were discovered by some of the Google researchers, oh, about six months ago, that we should assume that the bad guys already know about it, certainly at the nation state level.

The safe assumption is, or I guess the way to say it is we should proceed as if they could have knowledge of this, which, again, points to the fact that you need to patch really quickly. I don't think this is going to affect your average home user all that much. You install the patches, you probably won't see much of a slowdown on your machine.

I think the people who are going to get nailed by this are the enterprise users. Like I said, we're already seeing people who are getting hit with serious performance issues. So, you know, if you're someone who's spending $100,000 a month on processor time on Amazon and suddenly those processors are 30% slower or even 5% slower than they were a few days ago, that's a significant hit.

Yeah. So Amazon is going to have to either, you know, give you a much bigger discount based on that or you just got a nice price jump by 5% to 30%. Right. For no fault of your own. Yeah, and that's going to be an interesting thing just to try to see how that's going to shake out.

I mean, I've seen some folks on the legal side of things say that we could see some class action suits coming. I think that's an interesting thing to think about because, again, as Intel points out correctly, the chips are running exactly the way they were designed to run.

And people are pointing out that we're rewriting some basic fundamental beliefs in computer science about how to design chips. So, it's not as though anything was done in bad faith. So I think it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Will this be – act of God is not the right word for it. But there's no bad intent here. Everybody was using best practices. It just turns out that along the way we learned something new. Yeah, nobody knew what the fallout of this, you know, looking ahead and precompiling code was going to have in the long run.

Right. It said, you know, there's a very long article on Ars Technica about how these companies responded to it, which is very interesting. And it seems like almost everybody has done what they needed to do except for Intel at the beginning of it. Although AMD is very kind of cagey about what they're doing, which is kind of interesting because they first came out and said, hey, not our processors.

We're golden. And then somebody tapped them on the shoulder and said, excuse me, sir. Not so fast. I would be wrong. Right. Right. Yeah. So these are the very, very early days of learning about this. As you correctly pointed out, I think, you know, Meltdown is the lesser of the two.

Spectre is going to be with us for quite a long time. We're just going to see how this plays out. In the meantime, install those patches and stay tuned. So, and it's interesting. I was talking to a friend of mine last night who is kind of on the spooky side of things, you know, those kind of guys.

And we were talking about, you know, did we think that, you know, like does the NSA or these guys, did they know about this before it came out? And we kind of came to the conclusion that, no, they didn't. That this came out of the private sector research completely because we would have seen proof of this in the myriad malware dumps we've been seeing over the past like two years.

You know, any of the shadow brokers dumps or any of that stuff, we would have seen some kind of evidence of this exploit and nobody's found it yet. So, it seems like this is an actually new exploit that came out, you know, fairly recently. Yeah, it could very well be. And like I said, these are early, early days.

It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. But this is one of those moments in time where you'll remember where you were on that day when everything changed a little bit. And we all grew up a little bit in the computer world. So, like I said, stay tuned.

If we can survive Y2K, we'll get past this too. That's right. That's right. What else we got going on? Oh, I wanted to talk about just a good old-fashioned fuck up. Yeah. Just to, you know, let's get back to people being stupid. How is Brian doing these days? Where is he, by the way?

Oh, sorry. Did I say that out loud? No, no. All right. It's nice to be able to tune in and not be the punching bag. I was going to say, I'm usually the nice guy. It was just too good. You lobbed that one over the plate, and I couldn't resist taking a swing at it. That's what I'm here for.

Very good. Thank you. Thank you. And Brian, I apologize in advance. I deeply respect you, and I consider you my friend. It was just a joke. Brian never listens to the show. Don't worry about it. Oh, all right. Very good. Carry on. Western Digital, they're MyCloud storage devices.

Do you have one of these? I do not have. I certainly have plenty of Western Digital drives. I do not have a MyCloud. I have one or two of them around here, but one of the things I do when I get anything from Western Digital or Seagate or any drive manufacturer is immediately reformat it and delete every vestige of their built-in software because it's always terrible.

A good idea. And this new story backs me up on that. Western Digital MyCloud storage devices have a hard-coded backdoor where anybody can come in and basically exploit your MyCloud device.

Now, the thing about this is these things are built basically to be your own personal Dropbox and network-attached storage. It's like plug-and-play NAS, easy breezy cover girl. Well, except when the programmers decide to, let's hard-code an admin username and password that we just leave in the binary that anybody could find.

And that's exactly what happened. Yeah, this is extraordinary. And this is – this really gets my dander up. I think this is where we have to talk about not just recalls but perhaps criminal negligence, I guess.

You know, like how can – how can you release a device like this and have a hard-coded backdoor in it? And I suspect the worst thing that's going to happen to them is that a small percentage of their customers will demand a refund or an exchange.

There's no word in this article as to whether Western Digital has, you know, updated the hardware or anything like that. But a hard – I mean a hard-coded backdoor, it doesn't get more fundamentally insecure than that. It's just – it's profoundly stupid.

It really is. And, you know, somebody needs to, you know, be responsible for this. And I'm sure there's some coder that's going to get fired. But as a company, they need to be held responsible for this. And there's already a Metasploit module out for it. So, you know, we've got plug-and-play hacking on it now.

I'd imagine a firmware update would fix it. But how many people get notifications of firmware updates for a hard drive they buy? Nobody. So this is going to be around forever, you know. This is one of those cases where, you know, if Western Digital had, you know, half a brain – they would have their own hacking team out there trying to find every model of this, you know, spidering the net, finding them, and doing like a Robin Hood patch, like a drive-by patch and fixing it before anybody can get into these machines.

But, you know, that's in a perfect world. But for now, all these people are screwed. And there's a lot of different versions, a lot of different models that have this exploit in them. I mean, I'm looking at the list here. There's at least 10 of them that are susceptible to this. It's probably also illegal for them to do a remote patch without your permission.

Although, I'm sure it's in the EULA. It's got to be in the EULA, right? I mean – That's true. The EULA, they're probably allowed to come over and hotwire your car and take it for a joyride, you know. Exactly. Just because we might want to do that one day. So we might as well put it in. People are going to click through. Yeah, you know, if we have to come to your house and repossess your car just to fix your hard drive, it says that they're on page 24, subsection 3, bullet point 20.

And you clicked OK. So technically, we're in the clear. Right. Yeah, because do we really own any of this crap anymore? It's like, no, we don't. They own it still and whatever. We just borrow it and get screwed by it. That is correct. That is correct. Well, we saw, you know, we've been talking about in our ongoing exploration of devices listening in on us and trying to get to the bottom of all that.

There was a story in the New York Times. It was called, That Game on Your Phone May Be Tracking What You're Watching on TV. Mostly more of the same. I mean, these are a bunch of game makers making sort of these cheap kind of, you know, pump them out sort of games, addictive little games.

They said there are over 250 games that use this software that if you give it permission to use your device's microphone. And to be fair, it does request permission to use your microphone. But again, like a EULA, there's a certain percentage of people who are going to just click through.

And to me, I think especially children are going to just click through. And so within this game, it's listening to what you're watching on TV, syncing up with the sounds of the TV shows or movies or things like that, and then sending that information so that people can market to you.

Lovely. Are any of these games iPhone games or are they all Android? I'm guessing all Android. It does say that there are some available from Apple, but it seems like most of them are on the Google Play Store. My suspicion is that Apple would be much more restrictive about this sort of thing because they generally are.

But, you know, these things make their way through all the time. So I was a little surprised to see there were some on the App Store. It doesn't say how many. It does say more than 250 on the Google Play Store. But again, you know, the people who make these are saying, well, you know, we say this is what we're doing in the EULA and you agreed.

So you belong to us. But again, my concern is mostly with kids. You know, some of these games they point out are for kids. And I just think that should be off limits. Well, definitely. Yeah.

Duh. Yeah. I'm actually pretty sure it's illegal. Even if they sort of even if the kid, you know, clicks OK on the EULA, they don't have a legal right to do that. Yeah. Only the parents can do that. That's true. Yeah. That's an excellent point. Following along that thread, there was an interesting tweet or series of tweets recently from Rene Ritchie.

Are you familiar with Rene? I'm not, but I did check out these tweets. Yeah. So Rene is very well known as a Mac pundit. He's a really good writer. You hear him on a lot of podcasts on the Mac side of things. He has a daily podcast called Vector, which is quite good, a tech kind of news show.

But he tweeted, he said, I mentioned traveling in one iMessage and one Slack message this evening. Now Facebook is showing me an open table ad for the city I mentioned. Coincidence or time to start digging that tinfoil bunker? Well, if he listened to Grumpy Old Geeks, he would know it's coincidence.

That's right. But it's sort of a fascinating, as you follow him down the rabbit hole and you find people sort of pointing out what it could be, what it isn't. Along the way, someone suggests that perhaps Facebook is reading your pasteboard data and someone else says, no, no, that's not possible.

Apple would never allow that. And of course, you know, who knows? But the bottom line is Rene chimes in towards the end and he says, finally figured it out. I've traveled to that city three out of the five years around this time of year. So Facebook was running an ad. It goes to likelihood, I would do it again.

It's always the simplest answer. Sigh. Sigh. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happens. I mean, yeah, I mean, he hasn't been there. So obviously it would be, it'd been at least a year since he's been there. Right. So this just gets surfaced around the same time of year.

So yeah, it doesn't have to be anything that you're doing, you know, in the immediate time, you know, time envelope of when these ads are shown. It could have been something you did when you were 15 and it's just coming back to haunt you now. Those, those computers have infinite patience. Yes, they do.

Surprisingly enough. Yeah. So, you know, just following along with the thing we've been tracking along, I thought it was interesting to see that resolution of that particular trip down one of our favorite little rabbit holes. No, that's great. Definitely great because I'm tired of going down that one.

I was proven, I was proven stellarly wrong in a spectacular fashion. So I'm okay with it. I put away my tinfoil. There you go. All right. I've decided to move on. Good for you. Now let's talk about fluoride in that water. That's right. I found a great video.

I want to, I want to just cap off this episode of Security Hot with something fun to go watch. It's a YouTube video called Slaughterbots. Did you get a chance to watch this video? I did watch it. Somehow it had, it crossed paths with it a couple of weeks ago and I checked it out and you resurfaced it here for us.

It is interesting as I was watching, my first reaction was, wow, who paid for this? It's very well done. Yeah. And it's basically paid for by a coalition that is trying to ban lethal autonomous weapons. It's kind of a shock propaganda piece to get you to go sign a petition to have your country ban lethal autonomous weapons.

Because we know the one thing that weapon makers fear more than another weapon is a signature. Right. Right. So the video, it's quite dramatic. It's well made. It's well financed. And the centerpiece of the video is the ability of swarms of little autonomous drones to basically go around and kill people.

Right. Yeah. And if you read Daniel Suarez's third book, which was god awful, he covered that a long time ago. So I think we covered that on maybe like six months into Grumpy Old Geeks, the same type of thing. So people are still, they're still afraid of these things. Yeah.

And it's just, I mean, it's plausible enough to make you think. And then obviously it's produced in such a way to make you scared. So it's, it's worth a look. I, you know, I have been to some of the military trade shows in my work with the Cyber Wire.

I was at the, the Army has a big trade show down in Washington, D.C. where they show off some of their newest, shiniest hardware. And there are robots, little, they kind of look like little tractor tread robots that have, they don't have Nerf guns installed on them.

I'll just say that. Now, you know, that's not, the autonomy, I think, is one of the things that they're getting at here is that they don't want these machines to be able to make the decisions on their own. They want a human pulling the trigger, even if it's remotely controlled.

So I think it's important to note that nuance with this. One of the things they say in this video is basically, you know, send your swarm out and have it kill only, you know, white men who are between 150 and 250 pounds go.

And it's not implausible that they could do something like that. So that seems to be that what they're really getting at. Yeah, I understand that. And, you know, it's one of those things where we can go down the machine. Is it, is it a machine learning killer drone or is it an AI killer drone?

We just don't know anymore, but it's going to be coming at some point. So I see why people are scared about this and would like to try and have them banned. Problem is, this is, it's the same issue with AI and everybody that's trying to get to it. Somebody is going to do it first.

So do you want to be the person that does it first or do you want to be the one that's catching up to the people that have already done it? Yeah. So it's a tough question. It is. And I think it's certainly worth thinking about. And I do encourage people to go check it out, go into it with, you know, knowing what it is.

It is propaganda. So look at it from that point of view. But it's thought provoking. And I think it's a topic worth thinking about. Absolutely. So on that bombshell. We always end on a fun note, don't we? We try to. How everybody's going to die. It's either how everybody's going to die or who's going to have sex with a robot next week.

That's kind of how we end the sex with, usually. That's right. That's right. Brian's not here, so we're going with death. Next time, he'll have me pork a robot or something. Sex with a robot. Because that's where he likes to go. All right. Yeah. Very good. All right. Very good. Talk to you soon. Talk to you next time.

Brick a brick. Now, we are always crapping on everything in the world. But QZ.com, which is Quartz, put out a list of the 99 best things that happened in 2017. In 2017, it felt like the global media picked up on all of the problems and none of the solutions.

To fix that, here are 99 of the best stories from this year that you probably missed. I want to point out- I would just like to- Okay. You want to point out something? Me too. Go ahead. I want to point out that they're saying that the mainstream media missed out on all these stories, yet every single one has a link to mainstream media. I'm just saying.

I'm just saying. I'm just saying that every single one of these is a story that appeared in mainstream media that they link to. Oh, journalism. Love it. I love it. You got to love journalism. Got to love listicles. Yeah. That's pretty much it.

I would just like to say number 13. Thanks to better access to clean water and sanitation, the number of children around the world who are dying from diarrhea has fallen by a third since 2005. That takes us to- Moron of the Week.

Ryan, I think one of my favorite rants from the past couple episodes was when you brought up the ridiculous notion of raw water. Do you remember that? Not really. I got to be honest with you. People come up to me all the time and they say, hey, do you remember two weeks ago or last week when you talked about this?

And I go, no. No, I don't. Yeah. For the most part, it just gets in one ear out the other. We have no recall. It's like raw water under a bridge. It is. It is raw water under a bridge, which if you've been under a bridge lately, is generally filthy and nasty and not something you want to drink.

Well, raw water is back in the news. Thank you to the New York Times. So, apparently, they listen to our show, too. And my rant about raw water, I'm like, there's no such thing as raw water. Because I thought that they were talking about distilled water. Turns out I was wrong.

Okay. I was completely wrong. They're talking about water that has not been distilled or filtered. It's just got a bunch of crap in it. So, the Silicon Valley digerati and the moron.

Oh, what the hell is his name? Evan. What is it? Oh, sorry. Doug Evans. Yes. Remember Doug Evans? He went on a 10-day cleanse of drinking nothing but live water. Not raw water. Live water. Says he hasn't tasted tap water in a long time.

But, yeah. He's. Oh, my God. This is. I am at a loss for words about how stupid this entire thing is. I'm honestly at a loss for words. Because. Yeah. We have made great strides in the world and in this country to get clean, cheap water.

Yep. And it's like these guys just went to the reservoir and decided to shit in it and sell it back to the stupid people for an exorbitant amount of money. Because on Business Insider, there are stories about raw water prices that are skyrocketing to $60 per jug because it's flying off the shelves.

Now, I cannot but come to the conclusion that Jenny McCarthy and her ilk are probably the first people in line to buy the raw water. Because I know I know how much you love the anti-vaxxers and it just seems like this there had the Venn diagram for the anti-vaxxers in the raw water aficionados has to just be a circle.

It really pretty much. Yes. This is this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Alex Jones is in on it. Come on. Of course he is. Speaking of dumb. Yeah. I mean, come on. The main guy behind this created the Juicero.

The $1,000 juicer that basically squirted shit out of a packet. It was like a juice box press. And this is the guy behind it. After his company failed, he went on a vision quest and found raw water. And people are buying it.

I mean, I know people that bought a Juicero. And while I shake my head at them and think extremely less of them, I won't hold it against them because maybe they get caught up in the hype. But don't believe the hype. And don't believe the hype about raw water because all the scientists are saying, yes, you'll probably get Ebola.

That's OK. Ebola's back. Come on. It just boggles my mind that these people are that there are people who are rich that are buying this. How did you get rich? That proves that you don't have to be smart to become rich.

They're like very stable geniuses, Jason. Very stable geniuses. With the shits because they have Ebola now. Way to go. Speaking of the shits, let's talk about Goop for a second. I know you love Gwyneth Paltrow and her goop. Yes, yes, yes.

The premise behind this is sound for me putting it in the show. But the Mashable headline is the best. Gwyneth Paltrow's goop suggests you use coffee to clean your poop chute. Don't. Mashable, Mashable, Mashable.

You are unreadable as it is because of all your ads. But the fact that you put poop chute in your blog post title, you get some points back for that. I actually went through it because of this. But yes, it is apparently very dangerous to shove coffee up your ass.

Who'd have thunk it? Who'd have thought? Coffee, you're doing it wrong. Seriously. Wrong hole, buddy. Wrong hole. Where am I supposed to stick the coffee stirrer?

Oh, my God. Put a lid on it. Put a lid on it. It's a new version of MeUndies. It's just a big plastic cup that goes on your ass. Yep. So this guy, Alejandro Jüngers, suggests a specific brand of enema device. And it costs $135.

And it's called the Implant-O-Rama. It's not who you know. It's how you flow. It's their title. Oh, boy. And it is a jar with a plunger and a stick that you literally shove up your ass. I mean, I don't know why Goop is not the single purveyor of raw water on the planet.

Honestly. I agree. A bunch of idiots. Oh, God. This drives me crazy. And on a lighter, funnier note, the Apple Store in Chicago, the one that looks like a giant MacBook, apparently the designers and the architects forgot that it snowed in Chicago because all of the snow turns into giant icicles that can impale the patrons that are going to the Genius Bar.

Oopsies. Yeah. I mean, it's been a running joke here in Chicago. It's like, did they not know it snows? Come on. But yeah, apparently not. Nope. Feedback loop. It's been a while.

We're back and we've got some feedback. So thank you so much. We got a ton of Patreon subscribers over the over the break. So I guess everybody was feeling a little flush and wanted to give us some cash. So thank you. Jong Min B, Brady W, Jay Minger, Jesse Van B, Michael C, Nigel M, James K, and Scott T.

Thank you all so much. We really, really appreciate that. And we've got some on PayPal as well. Donnie P and Justin J. And Justin says, love the show. I'm mostly grumpy and old. Not Deep Geek, but moved to Linux in the summer about the same time I started listening to you. Love it. Even though nothing works now.

Still love it. Love laughing about it. Listening to you, I know I did the right thing. Well, thank you, Justin. And you're a braver man than I. I could not use Linux on a day-to-day basis. Because as you said, nothing works. Nothing works. Yes. So I'm glad you think that you did the right thing, though. That's brave of you.

Over on Facebook, believe it or not, we've got some five-star ratings. First up from Matt K. Geeky. Check. Grumpy. Check. Old. Relative term. Great show covering the news of the week with a tech focus, but appeals to wider audiences. Plus, as an added perk, they upset the occasional trumpet.

Keep it up, guys. We'll do our best. Thank you, Matt. And Paul writes, Hi, I'm looking for some advice. Just got a MacBook Pro for Christmas. I've only ever used Windows PCs in the past, and this is a whole new world. Are there any must-dos with Macs or any good advice you can give just to set me off on the right foot?

Many thanks in advance. A fellow grumpy from the UK. Brian, take it away. Yeah, I switched over two years ago now, so you might want to search. But the problem is, since I switched over, a lot of the cool apps and whatsits that were recommended to me by Jason and other people are pretty much baked into the OS now, because that's what Apple does.

So spend some time reading all those silly here are 10 things I bet you didn't know you could do with your Mac articles, such as this one that will be linked in our show notes, the top 10 Mac keyboard shortcuts everyone should know. Get all that stuff in. It's, you know, operating systems are so similar these days.

They're not that different. You'll make the transition over in no time. Again, the hardest thing for me was just all my shortcuts, because you've got your muscle memory from years of using PCs, and they're just slightly different commands that you use. So once you get those down, you'll be good to go. If you're full on into the Apple ecosystem, you can't beat how well things sync between your phone, your iPads, your computers, your Apple TV, with the caveat, of course, of fuck iTunes.

Get a time machine backup. That'll take care of all of that for you reasonably seamlessly without you ever having to think about it. So when crap does happen, you'll be able to get back up and running quickly. That's all I really got. You'll be happy. It goes quick. Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff that I've talked about on the show still stands.

You know, it's really basic stuff. If you have any specific questions for a type of app that you're looking for, we can give recommendations. But yeah. I mean, I'm looking at my bar right now, my dock, and it's like a lot of basic shit, but all my stuff's audio and photo-based.

So a lot of the stuff that I'm going to use, you're probably not. But if you have any specific questions, write us back, and I'll be more than happy to try and throw you some bones, because I've been using it nonstop for 20 years. And I know Brian's just come back to the fold. That's right. We had a whole bunch of people interacting with us on Twitter.

Thank you so much. But let's be honest, I got a bit lazy and didn't put them in the notes. This would be a four-hour show if we did all of the Twitter feedback. So we're going to stop doing the Twitter feedback. But please feel free to talk to us, because Brian will engage with you, because he apparently is big on engagement. Hey, everybody was really happy with my hashtag, Triscuit Christmas, thing that I did on Twitter.

I'm just like, eat the fucking Triscuits already. Shut up. I did find a box of maple cookies that were made in Canada at my local grocery store today, so I will let you know how those turned out. But I did send my brother, who right now, he's in New York, on his way to Montreal, and I told him specifically, throw away all your clothes, fill your suitcase up, just fill your suitcase completely up with maple cookies, bring it back, and then you will be the hero of Grumpy Old Geeks, because you will be the first person to ever go to Canada and come back with some maple cookies.

Which means he's going to eat them all before he gets home, and the prophecy will continue. Again, just to point out that Jason just continues to bitch about this, yet he just said that he found a pack of maple cookies. I don't know if they're any good yet. Made in Canada. I haven't tried them. Made in Canada, right at his local goddamn store. We'll see if they're any good, because the Trader Joe's ones didn't hold up to snuff, so we'll see.

Okay. They've got to come from Montreal, man. That's where the best ones are made. I'm just saying. Okay, bring us in on the iTunes. Come on. You very specifically said you've got this one, so I will just read the intro. Yes. We got a one-star review from S.A. Mike, Grumpy Old Geeks.

Gave this show 45 minutes and gave up. I often feel the same way, so I understand. Hosts base their manhood on how many times they can drop the F-bomb. Grow up and broadcast a decent podcast. Fuck you. Okay. Take it away, Jason. I read this guy's reviews of other tech shows. This guy is a, he's a, what do they used to call that, a flip-flopper?

Back in the old days of politics, he would give great reviews for shows and then go back later, and when he didn't agree with one thing in the show, would give them a terrible review. Not knowing. Oh, you went back and researched this guy. Of course I did. Anybody that gives us a one-star review, I've got to get some ammo on him.

Jesus, I'm not an amateur here, because I don't think most people know that when you leave reviews on iTunes, you can read all the reviews that they've ever done. So, I did. So, sorry you didn't like the show Semic, but yeah, we don't use F-bombs for our manhood.

It's just how we speak, because we're human adults, and we just don't care about being played in India, so, you know, we are mature, and we have the mature rating. It said it right on the tin when you came in the door. That's the thing that drives me crazy. I don't care that this guy gave us a one-star rating, whatever.

The thing is, how many times do we have to, like, we have the explicit language tab. We have this. We have that. We've done everything we can possibly do to ensure that people understand that this is a podcast by adults for adults, and then people still get pissed off at it. Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm not upset.

I'm just like, if that is what you base the reason that you don't like the show on, fine. If you gave us a review, a negative review on the content of the show that you had a problem with, then I would really care. But the fact that we say fuck every now and again is not a valid review of the show.

I wish you would have said something better, because then we could have had more fun with it. But this, sorry. Moving on. Next five-star comes from Valishar. My favorite, informational, funny, and no seven-minute ads. That's because we haven't been able to sell seven-minute ads yet, but at some point, maybe we will, but probably not.

Technically, it actually says no seven minuet ads. And we've never sold a minuet ad before, but hopefully Phil Harmonic will get on board with us. Oh, yes. I am learning. A little music joke there. I am learning the piano now, so since I didn't have anything else to do and I ran out of shit to watch on Netflix, I went to Skillshare, and I'm taking piano classes on Skillshare to learn how to play, finally.

Oh, nice. Next rating comes from Shavate, and it's actually more of a question than a rating. All right. So not entirely the appropriate milieu for that, but we'll take it. Yeah. It says, Rooter help. Hi, guys. I'm a driver by trade. By trader. By trade, I think is what he meant. I think it's funny that you said Rooter, because you've been in Canada too long.

Canadians say Rooter. Americans say Rooter. They do. That's funny. They do. And actually, the reason I was doing that is I had to replace the one at my in-law's house. So I said it many times. Okay. So anyways. Hi, guys. I'm a driver by trade, and I'm always looking for new things to listen to, because let's face it, more radio stations are just a loop of the same songs all week.

I just started listening to you all in December and immediately became addicted. I want to go back and listen to older shows. Could you recommend some of your favorites? None of them. As I just mentioned, I don't remember what the hell I said last episode, so I could not tell you. Also, I'm getting a new place this year, and I'm fed up with paying rental fees to my internet provider each month and never owning the product, no matter how long I've had their service.

I'm an avid online gamer, and I was wondering what you'd recommend as far as a personal router goes. Something affordable is always better. We are on a budget. Looking forward to more great shows. Thanks, guys. I still just use whatever the hell Spectrum gives me. Right. Okay. So I have experience with this.

So the Motorola surfboard line is what I've used when I had to buy my own, which I'm actually going to end up doing soon, too, because now I have an Eero system for the Wi-Fi in the house, and I don't need to pay for my cable provider's router. Usually, it'll pay for itself after rental fees within about 12 to 16 months, and then you can use it for five years.

They're great. What I recommend, and this is what I had to do the last time I bought one, is I called tech support for my cable company and asked the tech guy there what is the base routers that they recommend that their support team will work with, and also which ones are going to be future-proofed for the next round of upgrades that they have coming.

That way, you're not buying the base model for the connection that you have now, only to have to replace it when they up their maximum speed for your neighborhood. So just say, hey, look, you're giving me 100 megabits down now. I know you're going to go to 200 next year.

Is this router going to be available for the 200 megabit per second download speed, or am I going to have to upgrade later? Find out what they recommend. If you can get to second-tier support for your cable company, those are the guys that are going to tell you the way that it works, and that's what I've found to be the best when you're buying a router for your home cable setup.

And I also recommend, of course, Eero for your home Wi-Fi, because they're fantastic and a supporter of the show. Yes, that's right. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

Closing shout-outs! My closing shout-out is for Lamar Kindle. Thank you, Lamar, for using my Coinbase link and my shiny new .000606 of Bitcoin for using my link. I appreciate it very much.

I should probably make my own join link, apparently. Yeah, but I control the show notes, so guess what? He who controls the spice controls the universe. Exactly. I get you. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click on the PayPal button in the sidebar. And we need to update that because apparently you do not have to just give one-time donations.

You can subscribe there as well. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 241. From there, you can find links to the old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. And also, if you are playing Clash Royale, go find the clan GOG.show and hang out with us over there.

Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week.

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