244: So Proud of Me

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Private Internet Access, the favored VPN of Grumpy Old Geeks everywhere. Go to GOG.show slash VPN to find out more. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. You sound like you have a cold, Brian. Have you gotten the flu? I do not have the flu. My kid was sick all week and I thought I was going to get lucky. And as of this morning, no, no, no. Doesn't sound like it.

No. So he's fine, which is great. It's a great combination of he is totally okay, has tons of energy, and I feel like ass. Oh, yeah. It's going to be a great day. Oh, sure it is. Take them vitamins. Vitamins. That's right. Okay, a little follow-up on the puppy. I'll make this quick.

I have now invented the poopadoro technique because, you know, the pomodoro technique is the one where you get up every 40 minutes and walk around and do something, then go back to work. Every 40 minutes I get up and I have to take the dog out to poop. That's pretty much the life now. And what a life it is.

It is glorious. Glorious. He's doing good. 14 and a half pounds. Healthy as a horse. Excellent. Well, I have successfully completed my course on data ethics that I talked about that I was doing. So if you're a tech company out there listening to this and you're looking to have someone tell you how everything you are doing is at best highly unethical and most likely illegal, I'm your man.

You can hire me now for that. It was a good class. I really enjoyed it. You know, it was very interesting. I still have the same criticisms of online classes. I don't understand how people who have ADD or aren't able to work at home by themselves or all those sorts of things could ever get these things done because it does require discipline.

You have to sit there yourself. Nobody is forcing you to. You have to pay attention yourself because you're not sitting in a class with nothing else to do. And I still I hate the peer grading bullshit. I hate that. That's kind of that's weird because you're really relying on on just random idiots.

To give you your basically your final grade or at least the biggest part of your grade, which is your last essay. And, you know, they make a point in the instructions of saying, you know, not everybody speaks English. So be aware of that. And I'm like, well, what about people who don't speak English that are reading my essays? Exactly. Anyways, it is what it is.

I pass the flying colors and I was able to add a little achievement to my LinkedIn profile and all that sort of stuff. And I'm definitely going to take some more classes. I just got to figure out what would be of interest and maybe I should actually take something that might further a career as opposed to just of interest to me. And and make me even more insufferable on this podcast.

How much was it, by the way? It's free if you don't want the certificate. I think it was twenty nine or forty nine bucks if you do. OK, affordable, you know, a little update on my music theory class. I finally was able to digitize the CD. So I'm ready to dive in now.

My friend John Chevron came by and dropped off what one of those CDs are already digitized. OK, God, I wish I could smack you through this microphone sometime. Just but just saying. OK, well, I've ripped them. How's that? That's better. OK, yeah, I got it. He'd let me borrow a little USB that worked fairly well and got done.

I was amazed it worked on a Mac. No drivers necessary. Woohoo. So next week I should have an update, but it's pretty fun. I started digging in, but I got to the point where I needed the the play along at home CD thing. So I got right now, no, no peer review on this one.

Just me. Just you. So you'll grade yourself with an A, I assume. Of course. And we have some more updated news here. Jason got his beer from our Twitter bet. Not only did he get his beer in honor of Twitter doubling its character count from 140 to 280. I doubled your beer amount from six to 12.

This is I didn't have much of a choice because there are a lot of intricacies involved with delivering alcohol, particularly across state lines. I tried to get you the Ned's Wonder, the beer from Ned's Atomic Dustbin and the Wonder stuff, but shipping it overseas was prohibitive.

I would have had to sell some Apple stock, not some Twitter stock to pay for that. Yeah. And I tried to get you some other beers and you were out of their delivery zone. So I finally just went with a good old pack of stone. And of course, you know, there are minimum orders. So I couldn't just send you six. I had to send you 12.

But thanks very much to Drizzly, the company that was able to get those beers out to you. Lickety Split. Yeah. Yes. Thank you for the sampler pack. I had there were there four different types in there. And one of them that was the high alcohol content is all gone now. And befittingly, I can't remember what the what the name of it was.

Those are done. I have here on the desk hop revolver IPA and a stone IPA, which is my favorite of the bunch. Just the straight stone IPA. And they have one called delicious IPA, which is not it's not delicious.

It is very, very bitter, much like us. But I do appreciate it. And of course, to round it out and wash it all down. I have an old Rasputin as well. Of course. Which you didn't send, but I have to have my old Rasputin. But I think the best thing that comes with you paying your debts is now I know about Drizzly.

Your brother always pays his debts, Jason. Now I know about Drizzly, which is pretty cool. And a very befuddled driver showed up last night. We were both befuddled because he's like, he's like, Malloy's.

And I'm like, huh? He's holding up beer. And I'm just like, I'm just like, thinking like, you know, I'm the Malloy's. But you ordered it and he had to go to Malloy's to get it, to bring it to me. And I'm like, oh, oh, I know a friend that owes me beer.

And I guess this is it. And he didn't check my ID because I do look very old now, I guess. And haggard and haven't shaved in two weeks because of the dog. But yeah, he was just like, here you go. And I'm like, OK. And I took it and I went inside. And like five minutes later, I'm like, shit, was I supposed to tip that guy?

So I got on the horn with you and figured out that you've already taken care of it. So thank you very much. That was definitely expensive because I saw the receipt. And that was just for the beer, not even the not even the delivery. Right. Yeah. It got a little pricey, but whatever. I pay my debts. Thank you.

Two or three fold, apparently. Yes. You doubled them. I did. And as predicted by me about me, I am done with Clash Royale. I lasted about two weeks. I have not signed out yet, so somebody will be able to get in there. I will sign out later on today. Too late.

Too late. I already booted your ass. Did you boot me? I was going to give away a bunch of cards first to all the nice people in there. Oh, you got to wait for them to ask for them. So and nobody was asking. So I just booted you. And I sent a tweet to somebody who had tweeted to us asking to get in. So I'm like, here, it's open.

Go get it. But didn't even give me a chance to say goodbye. No, somebody did say, hey, wasn't that the other boss man? I'm like, yep, you gone. That's right. Sorry, guys. It was fun while it lasted. But I last about two weeks with those things.

And right on schedule, I was like, I don't want to open this. I don't care. There you go. Leave room for somebody that does. Exactly. So on some very old follow up, and this is going to make you very happy, Brian, because one of the very few things that you've ever changed my mind on are guns.

Guns. Guns is right. So I have a I have Bessie who has been abandoned in California, which is a bad thing. You don't want to leave a tactical shotgun lying around in another state. But it turns out it's very difficult to get guns shipped across state lines.

Almost as difficult as beer. Actually, it is. Yeah. I wonder if Drizzly will deliver a 12 gauge for me. So I had to get a FOID card, which is a firearms something identification card here in Illinois. So I can get my gun.

So now I can go buy a gun just so I can get my gun to sell my gun. Right. It will be shipped soon and it will be sold post haste because as I've learned from Jim Jeffries, sometimes you get sad and sometimes you don't need a gun in the house. So I agree.

And on that note, I just think it would be important to point out this isn't really the sort of stuff that we normally talk about here. But it is only January 26th. That's 26 days into the month of the first year of the year, people. And we have had 11, 11 school shootings. 11.

Well, got to break those records. Go team. And speaking of good news, the doomsday clock has been moved. It's now two minutes to midnight. The symbolic hour of the apocalypse. This is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced it another 30 seconds.

I had 30 seconds because of, well, let's be honest, Trump. Yeah. Episode 194 of the show was called Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight. Right. And so now we're at 244, 50 episodes on, and we have got that extra 30 seconds along.

So by the time we hit episode 500, we'll all be dead. Yeah. Well, you know, that's a good way for us to exit the podcast, I suppose. Yeah. Saves us the trouble of having to do that farewell episode. We'll just get that's right. And speaking of getting vaporized, Hawaii's governor waited a full 17 minutes to tweet about the missile alert that happened, that it was a false alarm because he could not remember his Twitter login information.

See, that's why you need one password, everybody. That's right. One password, people. Oh, my God. That's genius. Yeah. And on slightly less pressing issues, continuing on with the bird, the motorized scooters here in Santa Monica. Now they're being taken to court by the city of Santa Monica because, well, first off, there's a very long winded and cover our own ass press release that was put out.

We're not looking to destroy the company or shut them down. We understand that people are looking for ways to get around that are carbon free and that are convenient. But we need to ultimately, above all, protect public safety and make sure our sidewalks and streets are safe places for all people. Amen. Because nobody is following any of the rules around here.

And that's not even talking, you know, you're supposed to wear a helmet because it is a motorized vehicle. I'm talking we got 12 year olds whizzing around on sidewalks here. And these are busy sidewalks. And then they don't just stay on the sidewalk. They then shoot out into the street where there are Priuses driving, which will kill you. Yeah.

The Prius problem is also a very big one that you guys need to solve. Yes. Yes, we do. And a little follow up from the Google art selfie problem last week. And I was swearing up and down. I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. I'm not that bad at UX, you know, diving into and finding things.

Well, it turns out I can't because it's actually not there. Yeah. Turns out Illinois has very strict rules about biometrics and Google covering their ass decided not to actually include Illinois. So my friend Ryan tipped me off to an article in the Tribune about why we cannot do it here in Illinois.

So sorry. Sucks to be me. I guess I could use a VPN and go to Sweden and come back and figure out who I look like. But I just don't care that much. It's really not that important or that cool once you get past it. Yeah, the meme has passed. And last week we talked about the new the new press release.

Yeah, the press release that led to an ICO about basically the smart contract about having sex. And of course, boing boing jumps on this and links to an article on above the law dot com, which is a law blog. And it's blockchain sex contracts will be weaponized against women.

And this is by Ellie Mistal over there. And I recommend going and reading it because it is very interesting. About how you you can say no at any point in the interaction, not just at the beginning. So once the contract is signed, some people are going to think that that gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want and is going to make it very hard for the women to defend themselves in a court.

There's a very simple solution to this. And this app can just be built so that it requires you to tap it every 30 seconds. I mean, kids are having sex with the phones in their hands anyways these days, right? If they're even having sex from what we keep hearing. So you just you just have a little countdown that goes beep, beep, beep, beep.

And if you don't tap it every like 15, 20 seconds, that mean consent is no longer been given. See, the thing about this was I was going down the date rape angle thinking that, OK, if the girl has already passed out, you've got the thumbprint that you can open the phone with. You can you can go to the app and basically sign the contract for her.

You have a devious mind, Jason. Well, I do. That's that's part of being a program is trying to figure out how to break things. That's my entire life was thinking of that. And so it's ingrained in me to figure out ways around things and how people can abuse the system. That's part of just, you know, form verification 101. And after 22 years of building forms, it really does kind of it changes the way you think.

And I was thinking, yeah, this is like a date rapist, you know, wet dream. Because if she's already passed out and he can create the contract on get it going, you know, he covers his ass, but she might not even be aware that anything's happening to her.

I've got to say, one of the best things about not building websites anymore is I haven't coded a form in at least two years. I know it's the best forms in the news.

We've got some Facebook news. Shockingly, we've been talking a lot about how Facebook makes people angry and miserable. And what we find out now, social scientists have been warning Zuckerberg all along that the Facebook theory of interaction would make people angry and miserable, because basically what people have discovered is when we go online or not even online before we were online, when we are a different social situations, we are different people.

And Facebook forces us to be one person. And that way we cannot play with our different alter egos and our different people that react to different people in different ways and the different ways we model ourselves in our own head. We are always just one person. And that sucks for us, because basically we're lying, cheating, shitty assholes that conform to different societal situations depending on what we're in.

And Facebook does not let us do that. Oh, it stops us from being scumbags. Great. Well, it stops us from being human. Basically, we have to realize and recognize our human nature. Yeah. Yeah. God, I love Facebook. Not. I found an article over on Wired that just kind of goes in with some of the things that we've been saying about how technology is ruining our minds, much like Facebook is.

And it's called Demonized Smartphones Are Just Our Latest Technological Scapegoat. And we've had this shit before. It'll it's all happened before. It'll all happen again. Yeah, I I kind of got angry at this article, though. I felt it was a little word light. It was a little. Yeah, a little light, a little a little a gun is not the problem, but not offering any other really thoughts about it.

You know what I mean? That's this article was just like, it's not the phone. It's us. Well, how about some solutions, dickhead? Yeah, I kind of did expect a little more from Wired on that. Yeah, they're normally much better. Maybe they're taking, you know, crowd submissions now, like all these other companies.

Or Forbes, like anybody can write for them. Yeah. Huffington Wired. Great. Just what I'm looking for. And Facebook, again, after their big news feed debacle where they're trying to roll back everything and, you know, pull publishers from the platform and their stock went way down, tumbled, tumbled, tumbled.

And they were not the world's most valuable social media company for a while. This may have bounced back now, but Tencent was in the lead, amazingly enough. Yeah. Well, look at that. They were worth about $569 billion. With a B.

Right. $4.45 trillion Hong Kong dollars, if you're going to go down that route, which is even worse than Canadian. Geez. Yeah. Well, if you want to know anything about the world that we've created for ourselves, look how much value Facebook lost by actually trying to improve their product for all of us. Good point.

Very good. Instead of the businesses, they're trying to make it what it was supposed to be and what all we what we all want it to be, which is see our goddamn friends. You do that and your company is all of a sudden not worth anything. Yeah. I want to see my friends and I want to see them in reverse chronological order. Nope. Can't still.

I can't have that. Nope. Can't have that. Yeah. And it's been an interesting year because Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, you know, the big boys spent nearly $50 million to influence the government in 2017 with all their lobbying. Crazy. Somebody's making money off of it.

Yeah. Lobbyists. I'm going to be a lobbyist. I'm going to be a tech lobbyist. See, Brian, you can't anymore. That I know. I have data ethics now. I'm screwed. You are. You are barred forever. Yeah. Just another thing to make me unhireable. Awesome. Speaking of unhireable, Amazon Go has debuted the store that has no cashiers.

That is all automated. You simply walk in. It recognizes who you are. You pick up what you want to have. You walk out with it and you get charged for it. So, how many jobs is it going to kill? This is obviously something we talk about all the time here. The more automation there is, the less jobs in theory. So, this article goes a little, not in-depth enough for me, of course, into it.

But it's talking about how, well, look, we'll have more money available to shift into different areas. Maybe we'll do customer service. Maybe we'll do whatever. Just because we don't have cashiers anymore doesn't mean we're going to keep hiring people. And that's, of course, what companies will always say. It goes into talking about how United Airlines debuted kiosks for baggage tagging at O'Hare, speaking of Chicago, in 2014.

And the airline said it was about efficiency and that we'll shift people around. But instead, those people just lost their jobs. Well, that's the thing. There's still exactly the same amount of check-ins open. I mean, it gets some people through faster, but I mean, I go to O'Hare all the time and I didn't notice any change.

It's like they didn't start ripping out baggage checkers, you know, and those lines are still long because they need to talk to a person because sometimes a kiosk ain't going to get you to Poughkeepsie, you know? Well, there's a lot of issues with that. I mean, we can start, we can talk about that a little bit too, which gets a little, it's a tangent, but it is what it is.

And I say this every single time. All these computerized cash registers have slowed things the fuck down. It has not sped them up. Things are not more efficient. Cashiers don't know how to use them. They don't, they, you know, if they can't scan something correctly, that's a five minute wait while Earl from aisle five has to go run and get one that's got a better tag on it.

This has slowed everything down. All this technology to supposedly speed everything up is not working. And there's a very cool article in Ars Technica about the Amazon Go store and the guy who tried to figure out how to shoplift, but he couldn't make it work. And it's interesting because they've got pictures of all the cameras that they're using to make this work.

It's insane. Yeah. It's so many cameras and just a very non-beautiful ceiling in that place. It's just wires and cameras and wires and cameras. It's like not aesthetically pleasing. Right. So we'll see how this progresses.

But they say they don't have plans on opening it up anywhere else. And I'm like, yeah, right. We're never going to open a bookstore. Uh-huh. Nope. That's not going to happen. Right. Our pal Elon Musk has doubled down on Tesla, which is very interesting. I saw.

Yeah. Yeah. He's basically saying, I'm going to turn this mofo around. And unless I do, don't pay me. And we'll see how this works. Because right now, Tesla's worth about $59 billion. And he needs to get it to $650 billion. I hope it works, because I have stock.

Okay. That would be very good for me if it does. Look, you can say what you want about the dude. He's got balls. I mean, look at him. All right. You go, man. Look. And it worked in New Zealand, where he's like, hey, we're going to get this thing, this battery farm put in, and we're going to get it in on time.

Or you don't pay us. And yeah, it was like a day before the deadline where they turned it on. But he made it. That's right. You know, the guy's a doer. He's a doer. Yes. And speaking of doing, Twitter is unleashing yet another thing upon the world. Not good.

It's giving, what Slade is saying is giving trolls a cheat sheet. It's Twitter moments. They are supposed to capture the platform's best conversations. But they unleash hell on the users unlucky enough to be featured there. Popularity is the implied goal of every tweet. But what people have discovered is that it's preferable not to be too relevant or too influential or too popular or have your tweets seen by too many people because there are so many damn trolls on Twitter that then will immediately start to attack you.

Lovely. Yay. To which I say to everybody, why be on Twitter then? If you don't want your tweets to be seen by everybody, go back to Facebook. Yeah. Seriously. If you don't want your shit to be seen, hang out on Facebook. Or hello. Or hello.

Be, you know, completely safe to post anything you want on social network because nobody will ever read it. Nobody will ever see it ever again. Speaking of Facebook, they've actually invented something. What? Well, they've named something. Everybody's saying that Facebook has invented something.

I'm like, no, they're counting. That's all it is. They've invented a new time unit called the flick. A flick is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second. Say that five times fast. And it is useful because it is divisible by all of the different codecs that we use for video and audio.

Right. So you can use the flick while encoding your flick. I guess that's the whole point of it. Yeah. It's interesting. And it's interesting that it made the news that there. I don't know what's going to come of this. I was like, OK, you figured it out. What are we doing with it?

I'm still trying to figure out why it's truly amazing. I have no idea why it's truly amazing. Somebody with a calculator figured this one out, probably in an afternoon. Anyway. Oh, man. The Meltdown inspector patches that have been coming out are not doing so well.

And Intel is warning users not to install them because, yeah, rebootorama. I've had a couple of friends posting Instagram photos of their PCs that will not boot anymore. And Linus Torvald says they are complete and utter garbage. Great.

Yeah. Fortunately, I'm not patching anything because I'm screwed already. Who cares? Everybody's my vector for infection is my Chinese webcams, which I have several of. Because it turns out every webcam in the world is made in China. So no matter what, you have a Chinese webcam.

I am not the only one. Let's get into some cryptocurrency news, because why not? Why the hell not? All right. Scandalavia. Scandalavia. Hey, there's a new porn name. Oh, boy. Scandinavia's largest bank, Nordia. Nordia.

We'll go with Nordia. Okay. Has announced that none of its employees, it's over 30,000, 31,500 to be precise, employees are allowed to invest in cryptocurrency anymore. If you already have crypto, you can keep it, but you cannot buy any new stuff.

And they have a deadline of February 28th to go buy some if they want to. But they're saying, please don't. Please don't. Because they don't want their employees to be stuck in some kind of legal morass if they do something illegal. Right. Which is interesting.

That is interesting. I find it hard to believe that it's legal for a company to tell people what they can do on their off time. But okay. Well, I mean, I don't know how they do it over there in Scandinavia. Yeah, that's the thing. But apparently, Denmark is a different place, a different time, a different land.

And we'll see. We'll see how it goes. The interesting thing here is also Stripe. You know Stripe. Yes, I do. Our favorite credit card processor in the world. They have decided to end Bitcoin support. Right. Because it is not so much a means of transaction, but a means of investment.

So they're like, we've just seen it go down. Nobody's paying with Bitcoin anymore. Right. So we're just going to pull the plug on it. Makes sense. Yeah. Just real quick. You keep your crypto. You still got it? Yeah, still got it. Still worth basically what I paid in in the first place.

Okay. I dumped mine because, puppy, I made like 19 bucks off of it. So that's not bad. I'll take 19 bucks is better than negative 19. Well, you may have pulled your money out too soon because it seems to me that we're going to get another insane evaluation and people are just going to start throwing a bunch of money into it, which should drive it up again because Katy Perry has gotten into Bitcoin.

She talked Bitcoin with Warren Buffett, which why is Warren Buffett taking a meeting with Katy Perry is beyond me. Yeah. Stuck in an elevator or something? Who knows? I guess so. So, you know, all 175 million of her social media followers are now hearing about cryptocurrency.

She posted a photo of her nails with each nail done with the logo for a different cryptocurrency. Yeah. Because this is the world that we live in now. Yeah. If there's, I mean, I'm sorry, but if that's not a reason to sell, what is? You know, again, I have such little amount of money in there.

I'm willing to see what happens now. It sounds to me like this is just going to make it, you know, a related story is looking out for more millennial buyers of cryptocurrency because now it's free to purchase because there's this app called Robinhood, which is not charging anybody to purchase cryptocurrency or stocks for that matter, which then I'm like, how are you making money as a company if you're not charging for these transactions?

And of course, they offer a higher level of service called Robinhood Gold, which I went to their site to try to figure out what Robinhood Gold does. And it seems that they actually just kind of loan shark you. They loan you money. That's the only plus. So they loan you the money to buy the Bitcoin. I guess.

And I can only imagine that Robinhood has a bunch of guidos running around to come after you if you don't pay him back. Hey, watch it there. Watch it there. I'm a guido. Stop it. Yeah, whatever. Well, maybe you have a new job, Jason. Possibly. Possibly. I really am confused about the world at this moment.

So anyways. Yeah, well, somebody who's not is 50 Cent. Well, he seems to have been a bit confused at some point. Yeah, he was. He was a bit confused over Bitcoin because, yeah, he forgot that he had sold an album that accepted cryptocurrency for payment.

And now all that Bitcoin is worth seven and a half million dollars, which is interesting for somebody who filed for bankruptcy recently. Well, he's not bankrupt anymore, is he? No. And this is my favorite. In an Instagram post, he wrote, not bad for a kid from Southside.

I'm so proud of me. Jesus. I'm so proud of me. Great. Good for you. I'm proud of me, too. Yeah. Way to go, Fiddy. Let's end the news with a feel-good segment, or at least one of my favorite things that happened on the net this week. Burger King has used the Whopper to teach a valuable lesson on net neutrality.

Have you watched this video, Jason? I haven't. It is beautiful. It is a staggering work of heartbreak genius. It really is. This has usurped Ask a Ninja for my favorite net neutrality video, by far. Yes, it is good. And as the article over at Fast Company says, metaphor is often an effective way to teach and learn a lesson.

And here, that means the Whopper stands in for internet access speeds to raise awareness of what repealing net neutrality could mean for everyday people. If they get this heated over lunch, imagine how pissed they'll be if it's Netflix. Oh, and extra trolling points to the king for his nod to FCC chairman Ajit Pai's ridiculous gargantuan Reese's coffee mug at the end of the video.

It is excellent. Now, the only thing that bums me out about this is, where were you six months ago, Whopper? Yeah. Where were you, Burger King, six months ago? Oh, and also, why are you not airing this as your actual commercials instead of just putting it online so it could go viral? Run this thing, damn it.

They were busy making Whopper coin over in Russia. That's right. But I love that you guys say, oh, you can get a chicken sandwich and some chicken fingers right now, but if you want a Whopper. Why did he get his Whopper right away? You paid $26 for a Whopper? It's beautiful.

Definitely, everybody go check it out. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Private Internet Access. Hackers, trackers, advertisements following you everywhere. What do you need? A VPN or virtual private network? When do you need it?

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And if you're not completely satisfied, just cancel within seven days for a full refund. Thank you to Private Internet Access for sponsoring Grumpy Old Geeks. Cops and doodads. Brian, our favorite new browser is Opera, correct?

It is. I still use it on a daily basis. It's my only browser except when we're recording the show and I have to use Chrome, which sucks because my fan is going crazy right now. Opera has added native anti-crypto mining tools to Opera Mini and Opera for Android, and they have been in the desktop for a while now.

So if you're running their ad blocker, like we both are, then we are cool for not getting crypto-mined. Yay us. Yep. And there's a website called CryptoJackingTest.com that you can go to to find out if your browser is vulnerable to crypto-mining, hijacking, and things like that.

Very nice. Everybody should do this. Mm-hmm. And DuckDuckGo has moved beyond search to protect you while you're browsing. Unfortunately, you've moved beyond DuckDuckGo. Yeah, I mean, these are browser extensions that they've got now and a mobile app that you can go to a site and get a privacy grade to find out if they're, you know, how they treat your privacy.

So it's not the same thing as using them as a search engine. It is an add-on, which I will probably give a shot to one time when I feel like it, but not today. Yeah, but not today. Not today. It's one of those days. But yeah, good for them. Everybody that pulls out these extensions and things like that, you know, like the EFF does, it just helps.

It does. It's not mainstream yet until the stuff's all baked in. That's why I like Opera. It's all baked in and you just have it. You know, that's another reason to get Opera. Now, Apple's HomePod is shipping. I got the notification today that I can start ordering.

Wow. Are you going to get one? Hell no. It's $349. Yeah, it's not cheap. No, it's not. I can get 3.5 Alexas or Echoes for that, whatever the fuck they're called, and get to, you know, a couple of them and spatter them around the house.

And I mean, the problem is, it's like everything I've been hearing about it, it's not, it doesn't play well with others. So I'm like, okay, I want to wake up in the morning and tell it to play stuff from iHeart Radio or TuneIn. That's, I listen to the radio in the morning, not going to do that. Music through Apple Music only, not going to do that.

I can't do that, as we've discussed many, many times on this show. Yeah, so until, I'll give it a year and see how they, you know, expand their ecosystem and their interaction with other services. But for now, $349 is a lot of money for a speaker that I don't need.

Yeah, the sound is supposed to be really good. It looks pretty good. I wouldn't mind getting one, but yeah, I'm going to wait and see. And until they open it up to play well with other things, I'm not getting one either. Yeah, I mean, my Echo works fine in the kitchen, sounds great, does what it needs to do. And when I want to play music in my house, I have a set of $500 Yamaha studio monitors that I can just crank up and shake the windows.

So it's not really good for that either. We'll see. Yep. Well, I finally got some things post-Christmas that I wanted for Christmas. It's what I do. I wait and then use the money to get the things I really wanted. I got myself a SodaStream. Very happy with this thing. It is awesome. Dude, aren't they great?

It's the best. Like, I've been going to, like, Whole Foods and lugging back, like, you know, sparkling water every week or so. Don't have to do that anymore. Make my own sparkling water every night. Simple piece of cake. It tastes delicious. I'm up for hearing about people's hacks. I've heard some things with wine.

I've heard some things with whiskey. So if you've got any of those, send them in because I'm ready to experiment. I've tried it with wine, and it is not a good thing. Okay. That's good to know. It's not good at all. Yeah. No. It's not good. Thank you for your support. No.

Definitely. If you find something, I'll try it. But I've got a couple extra bottles, but it ruined one of my bottles. And those bottles aren't cheap. Yeah. I haven't ordered a second one yet. I did see the pricing on them. I'm like, damn it. I got a couple small ones for single serving size for when people come over and they just want a little bit so it's fresh.

The two little ones, they were like, it was still like 20 bucks for two little bottles. I'm like, Jesus. But man, yeah, SodaStream's the best. I'm glad you jumped on the bandwagon for that. Oh, it's awesome. We kind of held off for a while because for some reason, I just, I assumed it had to be plugged in. No. Yeah.

It's just a big tank of gas. Yeah. We had minimum counter space because of the kid and bottles and all that sort of stuff. So I was like, okay, we'll wait until he's done with the bottles. And then I was like, oh, you don't have to plug it in. I can just stick it in my cabinet. This is awesome. Okay. And so, and I don't know if you know about how to get new canisters, but you take your old one to Bed Bath & Beyond and they will just recycle the old one for you.

And it's only like 16 bucks to get a new canister. And so I have three of them that I cycle through and then you just have them and you're never out of basically CO2 is all it is. Very nice. Highly recommend doing the Bed Bath & Beyond trick. You just got to go to customer service desk and they'll just hand you a new one.

And it's 16 bucks because if you buy it, if you buy them, they're like, you know, 30 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good to know. So yeah, I love this thing. I highly recommend everybody get it if they like their, their water mit gas or with gas as they would say across the pond. We also got a Roomba.

Finally, we got my robot Roomba 690 because it was getting to be a bit of a bitch to keep up with the cleaning. And my wife sheds like no tomorrow. And the kid dumps, you know, goldfish crackers everywhere. Good. Great. Loud. Yeah.

It's loud. Like you cannot have this thing running when you're trying to work, but you can program it. You can set it to run at night. Doesn't bother me then because we've got white noise going on anyway. So, uh, you know, the only thing is with the toddler and this is now his new favorite toy. Um, all he does is wander around after it stops, it starts, it stops, it starts, it stops, it starts it.

So we can't leave it out. So we basically have to keep it in the closet, you know, during the day. Like that's, there's, I can see this being super useful when my kid is older at the age he is right now. It sucks. Oh man. So you need to get a cat now so you can play with the cat and put the cat on top of the Roomba and then you can make a viral video and be a bazillionaire.

And then hire a housekeeper and throw the Roomba out the window. Well, I think that's all been taken care of already because included in our show notes is the cute babies writing Roomba compilation 2015. Okay. So you can watch that for some fun. And then I posted it on Facebook about having gotten a Roomba and my kid playing around with it.

And a couple of friends of mine, two different friends of mine posted about, you don't have a dog, do you? Cause you do not want to have a Roomba with a dog. And they talked about poopop, poopopolis, poopopolis. When you're, if your dog, if your dog happens to get the runs and your Roomba is running, you're in for a world of hurt.

You're definitely, yeah. There is apparently a YouTube video about that as well. So I have not watched that one. Yeah. I would definitely not get a Roomba right now with a puppy because, oh my. But the first thing I did when I got the dog was train him to not be afraid of the vacuum cleaner.

So I vacuum constantly and I've had a Roomba. I don't like them. I really don't like them. They're just too loud. They don't pick up enough. Yeah. Well, we'll see. So far I dig it. I mean, it's, we don't consider it for deep cleaning. It's just a light clean at night that kind of takes care of the mess while we're sleeping. So, and it's kind of, they give you these things that let you like do fencing.

So it only stays out in the front room and it'd be nice if you could program zones and I guess you could do all that stuff in the, in the higher end ones, but I wasn't going to spend a thousand dollars in a robot vacuum that doesn't work that well. No, it's, yeah, they, but you, you have, fortunately you have hardwood floors. So yes, hardwood floors.

And it goes over actually like the kids, the kids mats and stuff like that. And it gets under a lot of the stuff here and the wifi thing. And you know, it's a, it's a, it's Alexa enabled so I can turn it on and off with my voice if I really want to, all of which again, useless with a kid around. So fun times. Yeah.

Media candy. Now, Jason, you're sitting in Chicago home of wax tracks records. Yes, I am. We can both safely say that we both very much like that record label. Absolutely. Lots of great people. So, uh, this is a bit old. This came out last year, March of last year to be exact, but, uh, there is a documentary about wax tracks records called industrial accident.

The story of wax tracks records. Uh, it came out, uh, again, like I said, March, I don't know if we covered it or not, but I stumbled across it again and I'm actually finally going to watch it. This looks fantastic. The trailer is linked in our show notes. Uh, obviously you've got your Trent Reznor, nine inch nails, your ministries, Al Jorgensen, a bunch of people like Dave Grohl and Ian McKay show up in it for a two for two came FDM.

My life with thrill kill called basically every single band I loved when I was a teenager. So I'm very much looking forward to watching this documentary. Cool. I will definitely check that out. I'm pretty sure MXV will have a copy of it that I could borrow. What was Mr. Wax tracks? Yes. And as mentioned last week, I'll have what Phil's having the original PBS version of, uh, somebody feed Phil is on Netflix.

I finally found it and put the link in our show notes. Oh, cool. So if you enjoyed the first one, go and watch the original. Thank you. That's that. I will do that because I'm out of shit to watch. Oh, yes. Uh, watch the new Star Trek or last week's Star Trek because this comes out on Monday. Kind of bored, kind of bored.

A little, little bored, little bored, uh, staying way too long in the alternative universe for my taste and it seems they're not getting out of it anytime soon. Nope. In fact, I would predict that will be the cliffhanger for the end of the first series. Yeah. So yeah. Not loving it.

And I have to officially declare Top Gear or whatever the hell it's called right now. It is called the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour bankruptcy right now. I will get to it when I can. I've only managed to see the first episode, but, uh, friends of the show, Mike and friend of the show, Fergal, are both telling me that by episode six or seven, it's really gotten its legs and it's quite good.

Well, I've been telling you that every week, uh, but apparently they have, they have more clout than I do. I think it's fantastic and it's, it's back. It is really good. I will get to it, but, uh, right now it's just too damn busy. Okay. Well, something you're not going to get to is the X-Files, which I've been keeping up with.

Yes. And you keep texting me and saying, I have to watch them and I'm not. No, I'm just telling you how good they are. I'm not telling you to watch them. I'm just, I'm gloating that there are two episodes. Episode three and four are amazing. They're really, really good. Right. And really funny. And, uh, even a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, uh, who does our voiceovers was texting last night or actually we're, we're talking on the phone.

What, what people used to like, like old people. Yeah. We talked on the phone for like two hours, like, like old people. And, uh, we were both gushing about the latest episode because it was just so damn good. All right. Well, I, as I've said all along, if they do an actual wrap up at the end of the season, if they, if they close the main storyline that I've been waiting 20 plus years for them to finish up, then I will go back and watch this whole season.

Well, that's the last two episodes. So I'll let you know, but I, I highly, highly doubt it. Yeah, me too. And we were talking about black rebel motorcycle club and a couple other bands of that ilk a few weeks back. And I was talking to a good friend of mine in front of the show, Greg bell about them.

And he said, I need to check out this band called black light, white light, and particularly the album gold into dreams. So I did. It is a Swedish psychedelic rock. Don't let that make you run away. It's very good. It's actually very, very good. It's black rebel motorcycle club esque with a bit of a twist and highly enjoyable.

So if you're bored and looking for a new album, give that a spin. Okay. I'll, I'll definitely check it out. You've been, you've been doing some good stuff lately, so I will, I will give it a run. I did get to watch Thor Ragnarok this last week. What a delightful movie. It's everything that, you know, star Wars should have been if they were going to do humor properly, but you know, it's, it's written or not written, but it's directed by the guy who did, uh, was it we live in the shadows or something like that?

Whatever that vampire movie from New Zealand was. And, uh, the wilder people movie that I've mentioned before he did that. And there's, there's definitely some people from that movie in there, but man, I had a good time with that. Um, I know I'm, I'm late to the party, but man, was it good. I've heard nothing but good things about it. I've heard that it's actually quite funny.

So it's hilarious. I will have to give it a go. And not over the top. Like, you know, it wasn't stupid humor like star Wars. Right. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Whatever. I watched the shape of water as well. Um, okay. I, I didn't care for it that much.

I know it's like 13 Oscars, but I didn't really give two fucks about it because it's a Gero Guillermo del Toro movie. And I kind of, you know, his formula, let's make something really evil. And then there's a payoff at the end. Okay, great. Yay. Yeah. I've gotten that Academy screener for that sitting around on my hard drive because, uh, I guess this is an LA story more than anything else because Oscar time means it's greener time in LA and everybody gets them and I miss screener days.

Yeah. And people pass around the DVDs in the old days, but, uh, all the screeners now are watermark digital downloads. So that's what I've got, uh, sitting on my hard drive for the shape of water. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Uh, that was the greatest bet. You get everything back then, uh, but I, alas, no longer in Los Angeles.

So I go to the Sweden of Hollywood, um, and in things that should not be, they are rebooting the greatest American hero. Uh, you know, I have fond memories of the greatest American hero, but what I've learned from doing, does it have legs is if you have fond memories of something, sometimes you just don't need to go back because I did watch a little of an episode that was just on some random channel.

It was not good. It was not a good, not a good show. It was terrible, but it's a great premise. So let's give this, it's a great premise. And if they're going to update it and make it nice, which it sounds like they're going to do their, the main character this time around is a 30 year old Indian American woman who loves tequila and karaoke.

And how can you go wrong with that? But what they're going to do is they're going to change the theme song. The best thing about that show was the theme song. You know, they're going to change the theme song. Of course they are. There's no way that's going to carry over. So it's not. So it's a way to shit on everything people.

So it's just a pilot at this point. So we'll see how it goes. Did you ever listen to the Ataris? I don't think it's in your wheelhouse, but. The Ataris is a band that is in my iTunes collection that was probably never been played. That's what I figured. Yeah. It's more punk than anything.

And I've seen them a couple of times at the old Troubadour. They're a fun band. I like them. Apparently their basis didn't make enough money in the band and decided to do a telemarketing. A telemarketing scam where he made about $27 million and is going to most likely go to jail.

Oh, well. Yeah. You know, some people just don't like the life on the road, I guess. But man, what are you going to do? Well, I mean, the Ataris, come on, $27 million. They were never going to make $27 million. That's true. He made way more money doing that than he ever would have made being in that band.

Yeah. I mean, it was a good band, but it wasn't that good. Let's be honest. That's true. Now, I have not gone to Coachella, I believe, since we've started doing this podcast. And I have gone from being wistful and kind of angry about missing it to no longer giving a crap at all, particularly this last Coachella.

But somebody did send me this link because they knew my love for old Coachella. AI comes up with the funniest names for a fake Coachella lineup. Now, the names are quite funny. I will give them that. To be honest, this looks like it could be a real lineup because half the time, you don't know any of the bands anyways.

Jonathan is high. Hofty Baggood. Come on, hey. Drunk June. There's some great names in here. But theoretically, it's a Sweden-based Botnik Studios. I put this together. They generated a satirical lineup using an AI that just inputted a bunch of metal, real metal band names.

And then it would spit out fake names. Now, that's not AI. No, and they should have used, like, you know, historical Coachella lineup bands. Instead of metal bands, I agree. Yeah. But it's still quite funny. Jacked Like a Man. Creep Well Then Sleep Well is probably my favorite name of all of them.

That's a good one. That's a really good one. So, it's quite funny. Fistopia is pretty good there. Fistopia. What are you going to do? Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner.

Papa Dave from the Cyber Wire. How you doing, Dave? I'm doing well, gentlemen. It's been a good week. How about you guys? Not bad. Haven't burned down the house yet, which brings me to my first question. I got all of the... I bought four of the fire alarms that you recommended.

Yes. So, I've got those. I still haven't put them all up because puppy. And what I wanted to ask you was, which hub did you get? Because I got the Samsung SmartThings hub to put it all together. And which one did you go with? That's what I have.

Okay. Great. And I think I got... I want to say... My wife actually was the one who pulled the trigger on that purchase. And I think we got it before Samsung had sort of gobbled up the SmartThings, you know, folks. So, mine might officially be before it was a Samsung product.

But that's the one we have. And it seems to be doing well in our house. No problems. We, you know, it works. It does what we expect it to do and it seems to do it well. Okay, good. Yeah. Mine's sitting here in pieces waiting to be plugged in because, turns out, I need another hub before I can plug in my Smart Hub because my Eero only has a few ports.

So, it's only something. Oh, you mean an internet hub, you mean? Yeah. Internet hub, you mean? Yeah. Just like another switch. But, so, eventually it'll get plugged in one of these days. So, hopefully I won't burn to death before then. Right. Between now and then.

What are the odds? What are ever the odds, right? Probably 100% now that I've mentioned it on the show because we have a history of mentioning people dying and they actually die. So, see you guys. So, Brian, what are you and I going to talk about next week? Yeah.

How much we miss Jason. How much Jason is missed. Boy, did you see that footage from his Chinese cameras. It was the only thing to survive the blaze. He was a quiet man. Yeah. He loved his dogs. Fortunately, the puppies are okay. That's right.

Because he got that smart dog door that let them run out. We'll talk about who gets what dog, Dave. We'll have to split them between the two of us. That's good. That's fair. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. All right. Well, it's been an interesting week. The story I put at the top of our list was Alphabet, the company more popularly known as Google, has unveiled a business unit that's dedicated to cybersecurity.

So, this is one of their units that's been operating quietly for who knows how long. But this week, they took the wraps off of it and announced that they're going to be going after some of the cybersecurity market. Now, this is interesting in a lot of different ways.

First of all, if I were one of the companies who they're going to be competing against, I would be probably crapping my pants. Yeah, definitely. Because the other interesting thing about this is, you know, Google has all of the resources.

We were joking here at the office. Someone said, you know, it's interesting that Google is dipping their toes in this pool. And my response was, well, Google's kind of the pool. Seriously. So, you know, they have all the storage.

They have all the processing power. No shortage of money. Of course, their success isn't guaranteed. There's been plenty of examples where big companies like this have tried to get into a market that's, you know, populated by smaller companies who understand things like customer service.

Yeah, but not companies this big. Google also has a fine history of just, okay, we can't beat them. We'll buy them. So there's a bit of that that's possible. That's true as well, yeah. So they haven't said a whole lot about what they're going to be up to.

So far, it seems like they're going to have some sort of threat intelligence platform. But we'll see how far they go, how quickly they do it. But certainly, you know, people's ears have perked up in the cybersecurity community in terms of, you know, Google entering this field.

So it's an interesting one. And you guys know me. I read this entire story. And, of course, I laser focused on one particular sentence and just kind of ignored absolutely everything else. Gee, what sentence would that be, Brian? We've seen plenty of press releases that name check machine learning. And we've seen plenty of press releases that name check artificial intelligence.

But this is the first press release I've seen that says machine learning software, a type of artificial intelligence. So there you go. Somebody's listening to our show. Yeah, they may be getting there. They may be getting it. That's probably it. Yeah. Of course they are.

Come on. Our tens of listeners out there are very powerful people. The highest levels at Google are listening to the show as we speak. In fact, they're probably listening to the show as we record. That's true, yes. They're the pops and clicks we keep hearing. That's true, yes.

Well, other news this week. There's a new Internet of Things botnet. And what's interesting about this one is that it has grown very quickly. So it went from a few dozen infected devices to tens of thousands of devices in just a few days.

It's called Hide and Seek or HNS for short. And the folks at Bitdefender are the ones who've discovered it and are putting the word out about it. What's interesting and unique about this one is that it's using a custom-built peer-to-peer communication protocol.

Other botnets have used peer-to-peer. They were built mostly around BitTorrent. But this one is a custom one, which they're saying makes it a little harder to shut down because it's harder to know what to look for. But also, basically, every node on the network can function as an independent node, as torrents do.

So I don't know what this is going to eventually be used for, but it certainly has people's attention. As usual, it's mostly hitting cameras, things like that, the usual suspects. So the exotic thing about this one is its use of that peer-to-peer technology.

So we'll see what they're up to. People are keeping an eye on it right now. So hold on to your hats. Yay, Internet of Things. We're back. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The next one I wanted to talk about, this is a story from Wired. It's called, Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You for Years.

And this is one of the things about Bitcoin in particular that it's puzzled me and I've never had a 100% clear understanding of. And there's plenty of people who I've been able to ask about this. And smart people who know a lot about this, a lot of them don't have a 100% clear idea of what's going on here.

I like in the article they describe it as being Bitcoin's privacy paradox. They say because the cryptocurrency isn't controlled by any bank or government, it can be very difficult to link anyone's real world identity with their Bitcoin stash. But the public ledger of Bitcoin transactions, which is the blockchain, that serves as a record of every Bitcoin transaction.

So basically what's happened here is researchers have been able to go in and look at the ledger and sort of reverse engineer to public profiles who was buying what back on the Silk Road. And this is years after the transactions occurred.

Well, this is funny. This is interesting because I just finished taking a course on data ethics and one of the entire chapters was about decrypting people's information or de-identifying people's information. De-anonymizing. Yeah, and all you need is a large enough data pool to be able to do that.

Now, so all you're doing in blockchain or with Bitcoin, the anonymous aspect of it is instead of using your name, you were given a very long hash code. But just consider that your name. Now, if you see that hash code making multiple transactions with multiple people, and if then you post on Facebook, I just gave this person five Bitcoin for this, and I gave this person five Bitcoin for this.

You, anybody in the world can search the blockchain because it's public, find the transactions that went to X and Y, and then all of a sudden you get that person's code. Now you know what that person's code is, and now you have personally identified that person in the blockchain. It'll happen.

It'll happen tons of times. And this is also why savvy criminals use what's called tumblers. So what you do is you put your Bitcoin into a big pool, and then it gets quote unquote tumbled like they do with money in the laundry to clean it and make it look, you know, dirty it up a bit.

And then it comes back out in different size chunks, so it's harder to track exactly who's getting what. And tumblers are, you know, one of those things. It was in the Ross Ulbricht book about the Pirate Bay, not the Pirate Bay, the Silk Road. Ross Ulbricht also ran the Pirate Bay.

That guy was prolific. But yeah, tumblers are what try to get around that, but definitely people at the NSA have figured out how to de-tumble for you those coins, so it's definitely difficult. Yeah, but that's, you know, that's a savvy person using it. You know, the people that are just think that this is anonymous in and of itself, they're kind of dumb, so.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just because you use a thing doesn't mean you know how to use a thing. Look at gun violence, as we say. Well, and the part about the tumblers, that was really one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in my mind. I wasn't, I understood most of it, but I didn't understand, you know, when it comes to the point of getting the money out, the actual laundering of the money.

If I've, you know, if I'm a ransomware seller and I've successfully installed ransomware on a bunch of people's machines and I've asked them to pay me in Bitcoin, well, of course, they can pay me in Bitcoin. But that Bitcoin account can be traced. Like, I was talking to a security researcher late last year and they were saying they can track how successful a ransomware campaign is because they can see the Bitcoin account.

And so, you know, there were some campaigns that where no one was paying the ransom. There were others where people were and they can look at it. So what I did not have a clear understanding was, well, okay, we know this is the account where the ransom is going. If I'm the bad guy and I want to convert that Bitcoin into dollars or rubles or whatever it may be, what is that?

Is that a standard money laundering kind of thing? And that's when, you know, one of my people who are smarter than me explained the tumbling techniques and things like that, where people are, there are ways, services, if you will, to get the money out of there, to launder that money. So you can, for a fee, get it out and, you know, turn it into real dollars and rubles.

And the thing about it is, if your account can be tracked to using a Tumblr, that's kind of a, you know, an admonition of guilt right there. Why do you need to use a Tumblr? So if I look at your ID, you know, your wallet ID or whatever it is, and I can backtrace it to a Tumblr use, then that's like, why would you be using a Tumblr if you're not actually doing things that are illegal that you need to, you know, cover the cash with?

So it's one of those things, it's guilt by association almost. Well, and I wonder, if you look at the bigger picture of all this, I wonder how much of this, do we have to consider all online privacy to be provisional? I think we do. Right? Oh, yeah, totally. I think we have to understand that, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's that old saying, you know, don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't put on a postcard. You know, that goes way back. But even, you know, something that's cleverly encrypted, well, you never know in the future what some other clever person is going to figure out a way to de-encrypt something.

Right. And I mean, that's why this whole coin market right now is so big on new coins coming out that are trying to tackle the privacy issue, how things get shuffled and moved around. So you cannot do that, you know, that backtrace with the public ledger. Right.

There's a lot of companies right now trying to figure that part out. And it's interesting for sure. But, yeah, people who have been, you know, old Silk Road folks who just went in thinking, oh, I just need some weed. Yeah, they might get a knock at the door at some point, you know, maybe 10 years down the line. Who knows? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a new technology that makes us think that we've got some privacy, but the reality is you don't. So, yeah, I was just thinking of that. Because you just mentioned, you know, email. Don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't think of putting in a postcard. There's a whole this. It tends to be younger people, but I've seen this.

And, you know, you would think that text to text to a friend would be somewhat private. Kids think nothing of taking screenshots of text conversations and posting them publicly. Nothing. Like, it's no big deal to them. So that's crazy to me. And because we've talked about this sort of thing in the past, I did find this article that's gone somewhat viral.

A 28-year-old woman has claimed that Samsung employees in the UK have viewed her private photographs and conversations on her phone after taking it in for a simple screen repair. Because, you know, we can't trust anyone. I'm sorry. We've talked about this with taking your computer into repair to Geek Squad, etc.

So this is a part-time law student. She needed her screen repaired. She got her phone back. She unlocked her phone. She had to give them the code to be able to fix the phone, obviously. And when she got home, she realized that private images had been viewed. And some of them had been uploaded into her iCloud, which she hadn't had them before.

And some of her WhatsApp conversations with her fiancé had been opened and viewed by employees in the store. So trust no one, people. How could she tell that? Something about timestamps on when they had been opened and looked at. I see. Right. I see. She's fairly savvy to figure that out, but not savvy enough to take it off of her phone.

Not savvy enough to take them off the damn phone. Well, it's an interesting point, too, is that have we reached the point where if you want to take anything in for repair, do you have to wipe the device first? And, of course, if your screen's damaged and you can't interact with the device, how are you going to do that?

That's an interesting dilemma. This story reminded me of another story. I interviewed a researcher from Ben-Gurion University not long ago. They did some research where they replaced the touchscreens on a device with an altered touchscreen.

So imagine you break your device. This is a great story, by the way. Fantastic story. You break your device. You go in to have it repaired. You go to the kiosk at the mall. Yeah. And they can put in a device that basically has its own logic on it.

And what really interesting part of the story is the phone doesn't think twice about the device being a trusted device. Right. So there is no handshake between the phone and the touchscreen, even a third-party touchscreen. So what they were able to do was basically install a touchscreen that was able to go in and get things out of your phone and make your phone do things that it wanted to do.

Basically own the device because the phone itself isn't expecting anything unusual to come from the touchscreen hardware itself. Right. Really clever work. And boy, I tell you, the folks at Ben-Gurion, they consistently come up with these sort of amazing hacks and workarounds where you scratch your head and you go, that is just, that's amazing and devious and just really clever.

And it's another one. I'm really glad they're on the good guy side. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Exactly. No, because, yeah, if these guys decided to jump ship, oh, my God, we're screwed. We're all screwed. Yeah. Yeah, very clever. Speaking about guys on the not good side, did you see the story about Dutch intelligence service Avid or Aved?

Sorry, Aved, I have dyslexia, so I read it as Avid, who were inside of Tozy Bear for a couple years? Yeah. This is kind of crazy. The Dutch are always the last ones you expect. Seriously.

Nobody expects the Dutch Inquisition. Exactly. Which is really true. And boy, were they in there. I mean, according to this story, they had access to security cameras that they could see who was coming in and out of the facility. That the Russian Cozy Bear hackers were using and went undetected for, you know, between a year or two years.

Nobody's really sure. Thankfully, they helped provide some of the information to the U.S. So, you know, one of their allies. But it took us a long time to actually do anything with it or even acknowledge that it was real. Even though, yeah, these guys were, I don't know how you say it in Dutch, balls deep into Cozy Bear.

But it's a really fascinating story. And I never thought that there were Dutch hackers out there. I don't know why. I figured everybody was stoned and riding their bikes around. But they're such happy people. And you underestimate the Dutch.

Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, every nation, it's in their best interest to have teams of people doing this sort of work. And, you know, some of them fly under the radar more than others. Yeah. There are ones that are noisier, like the bears from Russia.

And obviously the Chinese and the North Koreans. Those are the usual suspects. And, of course, us, Stuxnet and things like that. So, but nice that they shared it with us. I've heard rumblings. I don't know if it's in this article or not. But I've heard rumblings that the Dutch aren't exactly happy that this story has come out.

You know. Yeah, who would be? Word is out that they shared. No, no, absolutely not. But, yeah, glad they're on our side. Interesting that they were the ones who were able to get in here. And good for us that we were able to get this information. This story just keeps getting more and more interesting and solid, I guess, right?

Yeah, pretty much. Is that the right way to say it? Yeah. More and more evidence keeps coming in. It's becoming less fake as we go. No collusion. No collusion. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely no collusion. I'm happy to go speak with Mueller. I cannot wait to go sit down with Robert Mueller.

It is the least colluded story ever. You're going to get so tired of there being no collusion. Oh, man. All right, guys. I think that covers it for this week. Thank you. As always, a pleasure. Talk to you next time. Talk to you next time. Brick-a-brick.

From the You've Been Doing It Wrong Your Whole Life files, the easy way to peel mandarin oranges. I stumbled across this, and I'm not going to step on it by explaining how, because there is a brilliant graphic that will take you. You will look at it for two seconds and go, huh. Which is exactly what I just did.

I was like, oh. Because that's pretty damn genius. It's pretty ingenious. Now, the instructions say this really only works with mandarin oranges, or tangerines as we know them, that regular oranges are a little bit too thick. I've had some success doing this with a regular orange, so I would say go ahead and give it a go.

But regardless, go get a tangerine and try this out. It will blow your mind. That's pretty awesome. Wow. And I saw this one on Boing Boing, and it just kind of made me happy. This guy with an iPad recreated Video Killed the Radio Star just using his iPad, his iPhone, and GarageBand.

And it was pretty cool. I thought he did a pretty good job, too. He did a very good job, but let's face it. There is way more power in the iPad than in an entire 80s recording studio. This is true. This is definitely true. In another one that I found on The Next Web, 80s kids started programming at an earlier age than today's millennials.

Turns out that when we were kids, we dove in way younger than kids nowadays. Yeah. I was programming basic in elementary school. Yeah, me too. It wasn't elementary school. Or junior high, I guess. Yeah, because I started when I was like, well, I got basic when I was, oh, shit, maybe eight.

Right. So I was, yeah, maybe, yeah, I was doing basic when I was probably eight and kind of let it go, but then really got back into it in junior high and high school. And then really kicked into my 20s. But yeah, when I first was programming stuff, we were way young. And kids nowadays aren't really getting into it between the ages of 16 and 20 because they want to, you know, become rich.

That's when they want to build an app. Yeah, we were doing it because it was fun. Yeah, it was cool. Yeah. And they're saying, you know, back in our age group, kids started between the ages of five and 10, which is pretty much par for the course of for us, I guess. I thought that was a pretty interesting little thing.

Speaking of interesting, our spiritual animal, Grumpy Cat. You have no idea how much this woman is made from Grumpy Cat. I have kind of an idea because I go to the Hallmark store and see Grumpy Cat. Upon millions of dollars.

But Grumpy Cat has just won $710,000 in a court payout. They licensed Grumpy Cat to a beverage company for some line of copy. And apparently they just started to make a bunch of different lines and different things, which were not part of the licensing arrangement.

So Grumpy Cat sued the hell out of him and Grumpy Cat won. Ah, somebody needs a grumpuccino. Yes, that's right. The grumpuccino. Oh, that's funny. And it was even funnier. And the cat's real name is Tartar Sauce. Yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of people that met Tartar Sauce because they were doing the video rounds, like, you know, all the different conventions and stuff.

And everybody says he's smaller than he looks on TV. Much like a real actor, I guess. Much like a real actor, yes. Oh, that's funny. And a friend of mine on Facebook was just like, is it weird that I've never heard of this Grumpy Cat meme? I'm like, what fucking rock have you been living under?

And he's like a 40-year-old man. I'm like, come on. I'm secretly insanely jealous of those people, though. I really am. I'm like, how? You live in a complete universe where you're not aware of all these memes. I'm so jealous of you. Yeah, I could do without Tron guy.

If you could scrub that from my memory, that'd be fantastic. Or leave Britney alone. I mean, there's a whole list of them. Oh, God. I hate Britney alone. This one I love. The White House called up the Guggenheim and said, hey, can we borrow a Van Gogh?

And they said, no. Sorry, but we do have this one piece of art that we are more than happy to loan you, which is an 18-carat, fully-functioning, solid gold toilet. Yes. And the title of the work is America.

America. Right. And they actually had this installed at the Guggenheim in a public restroom for visitors to use for a while, which is pretty cool. I got to say. I wonder if there was a webcam so they could tell if people were, like, knocking chunks off of it. I got to go to the bathroom.

Why do you have that saw with you? Yeah. I'll be right back. Yeah. It gives a new term. Handle broke. I was going to say, it just gives a new meaning to the term lifting the seat, if you know what I mean. Aha. I see what you did there.

Feedback loop. We have a bunch of new Patreon subscribers this week. Amazing. Josh S. XZ. Julian T. Todd C. Fernando R. Austin S. And Patreon subscriber Jiminger. You said it better before.

I can't pronounce that name. Did I say Jminger? Jiminger. Jiminger. He said he just enabled the podcast on his Alexa, and it works. Awesome. And thank you to all the new Patreon subscribers. We love you. Love you. Love you. So much. And we also got a massive donation from Tim D.

He joined the $50 monthly donation club, which is a club of one so far, as he points out. And I think we made up all these levels a long time ago. So $50 meant you get to plug whatever the hell you want. And he's taking advantage of that. So I got to read this whole thing now. Here we go.

I just started listening three days ago, but I've downloaded every episode going way back, and I'm listening to them all. I love the show. I was listening to the episode titled Dad Jokes last week during a late night road trip to break into and fly my drone over an abandoned nuclear power plant's cooling towers. And I heard you guys discussing the IRS scammers, you know, the folks who call you, usually from India, and pretend to be from the IRS and demand money from you.

There are similar scams that have become popular recently where scammers will call you up and claim to be from Microsoft support to inform you that you have a virus, so they'll need to remote into your system and remove it. Instead, they either install a virus, or they demand money, or both install a virus, then demand money to remove it. They use hilariously stupid tactics to fool you into thinking you have a virus, like opening task manager and going to the detail view and saying, look at all those viruses.

I know somebody that fell for that, by the way. Do you really? Yeah, I know somebody that actually fell for that. I'm like, oh, God, you should not have a computer. Yeah, take away the computers. So in honor of that episode, which is one of my favorites so far, I'd love it if you guys could shout out to an app that I may possibly wrote, depending on how legal it is, called LoRa.

Low Orbit Railgun Assembly. A nod to LOIC's naming. This app requires servers from SIP trucking service provider like Twilio, which is super cheap, but the app itself is totally free and open source. Basically how it works, you enter the phone number of the scammer and enter either a message for a robo voice to speak or an MP3 file to be played over the line when they pick up.

The app then calls the scammers dozens of times per minute or however often you'd like it to, thus locking up all their lines so they cannot make inbound or outbound calls. Additionally, since most companies pay for phone traffic, it costs them money while preventing them from making any. This tool can be found at babysealclubbing.club.

Good domain. Good domain. Finally, regarding your frequent discussions about cord cutting, I just wanted to share my solution to the fact that Hulu doesn't have enough content and won't stop shoving ads down my throat and there's no good cord cutter option that actually really works. It's my pirate ship. I pay for all the services and media that I can, but if certain content producers refuse to make their content available to me via a reasonable mechanism for a reasonable price, then it's their own fault when someone who's willing to pay for it is forced to download it for free.

I think we're all kind of on board with that concept. Yeah, pretty much. And by the way, he mentioned LOIC, which was a low orbit ion cannon, which was a tool that was put out from anonymous a long time ago to basically do help, help with the DDoS of certain sites way back in the day, which a lot of people went to jail for because they didn't understand that running it is a felony.

And I don't know how, how illegal Laura is to run, but LOIC was definitely illegal to run. So caveat emptor. Exactly. We are not necessarily endorsing this. We're just putting it out there because he gave us 50 bucks. Yes.

Thanks so much, Tim. Well, he's theoretically given us 50 bucks because it's not the end of the month yet. Oh, that's true. He could cancel. This is a flaw in us reading these things. We should have waited a month. I was going to tell you that, but you were so gung ho. I didn't want to, I didn't want to rain on your parade. Well, look, I want to trust our people.

I want to trust our listeners. I'm going to throw it out there and say, we're trusting you. And speaking of that, we got a new donation from PayPal. Thank you, William M. Woo-hoo. Thank you very much. And we got a note from Michael on the website. Curious if you have explored why unsubscribing from a vendor's email list says it will take seven to 10 days.

I cannot imagine any program that would require this much processing time to remove someone from a list. Perhaps there is more to the story. And we actually bitched about this probably in the first 10 episodes way back in the day because it does not take seven to 10 days. It takes seven to 10.

What is it? Flicks. Flicks. It takes seven to 10 flicks. I did provide, I will have a link in the show notes from some advertising people that have written up a whole screed on this. There are some reasons. Sometimes these things are set up well in advance and the mailing lists aren't, instead of grabbing the most recent one, they've downloaded them and exported them.

And these lists are just sitting around. Sometimes companies are just lazy. Sometimes it's fake. Sometimes it's a load of shit. There's a lot of legal aspects to it in that there's a very specific law that's on the books that says it has to be within that seven to 10 day time frame.

So they're basically just covering their ass in case something happens. And they can also send you extra emails in that seven to 10 days. Exactly. So there's a lot of reasons behind it. Some of it's legal. Some of it's lazy. And some of it is just bad programming. Yeah. And some is just plain, flat out ineptitude.

That too. So we got quite a number of messages actually this week. Here's Ryan greeting elder grumps. It's been a while since I've contacted you all. That one ice cream sandwich chemistry bit and the VPN question from a while ago. But I was wondering if you have encountered any good OCR software in your trawlings of the interwebs.

He talks about that for a little bit. Oh, my God. OCR. I haven't done that since I worked at Kinko's in the 90s. Yeah. No, I haven't. I haven't seen anything really. I, you know, Adobe had something for a little bit that kind of worked, but it wasn't great.

And he's talking about data tables, which. The funny thing is there's a lot of apps out there that do OCR. Evernote. Yeah. When you scan something in, it does OCR, but it just doesn't give you the text file of it. You can search on it, but you cannot actually get the output. I'm sure there's a ton of OCR stuff out there that there's got to be.

There's got to be because it's so built into everything now. But nobody just says, give me the text of this sheet of paper anymore. At least I haven't done it in 25 years. Yeah. Unfortunately, got nothing for you, man. Sorry about that. Fernando writes in. Hey, guys. Love the show.

As I was listening to your comment on Apple's big media push to tell us how they are repatriating billions of dollars. Thanks to the corporate tax cut. I remembered an article on FT that I read last week. It's behind a paywall and would love to share it with you, but I'd need an email address, so we didn't get it.

In the meantime, I'll summarize. Thank you. TLDR. The $350 billion investment it announced over the next five years is actually just the same amount it spends now, plus future growth. Do you hear the sound of that other shoe dropping? There it is. The tax cut has nothing to do with these plans.

From the article, A proportion of every penny of foreign tax it has paid in the past can be offset against its U.S. liability now, so all the dollars that will flow into the U.S. Treasury reflect the pounds, euros, and whatever that have gone into foreign government coffers.

Also, by accumulating its foreign earnings offshore over many years, Apple has managed to avoid a much bigger U.S. tax bill. Put at $78.6 billion last September. That's a hell of a... I owe a lot, but damn. Tim Cook. Man, you should really pay some of that down.

It would have had to pay under the old higher corporate tax rate. That's the $78.6 billion. Its tax payment now may be considerable, but it still amounts to a huge gift from U.S. taxpayers. For the most... Oh, God. Okay. Here's the deal. They're keeping a lot of the money, and it's not the same.

So, and Apple shareholders are in line for a massive payday when the company finally decides to bring its foreign cash home. Yeah, I'm keeping my Apple stock for damn sure. Yep, me too. I'm not offloading that until all this comes to roost. So, yeah, basically, thank you so much for that.

That is the other shoe dropping. That is yet another company that's being touted as, look at the amazing things that are happening because of the tax break, but actually still kind of not really. Yeah, and there are so many other companies out there that are doing that same bonus thing that Walmart did.

Yes. Because apparently giving the employees money is going to save them more than they're giving away at some point, so. Yeah, crazy. So, Sean also wrote in regarding last week's Bitcoin joke, which was, what's the difference between an average Bitcoin miner and an average plumber?

An average plumber can at least solve a block. He says, plumbers remove or solve a blockage, so the joke was poorly attempted. Oh, I get it now. I get it. Yes. Yeah, that one wasn't very good. The first one was much better. Yes, the first one was a hoot. Yeah, and Nick writes in, just listened to the last shithole episode, and one of the listener questions stuck out to me about coding boot camps.

I went through one that was 14 weeks long in Ohio and got an awesome job right out of the gate with no prior experience in programming. Only thing I would say about doing a coding boot camp is that you can't do it part-time. I had to quit my job and do this full-time with my wonderful fiancee supporting me through the 14 weeks, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday.

I learned the basics of the industry and got a junior development position out of it. So for those that say you can't do it in six weeks or in the evenings, I would say it probably won't work. You'll need to commit full-time. Well, congrats on getting a job right out of the gate. In 14 weeks, 8 to 5, that's a significant amount of time.

So that is rapid learning. And I can see why you could get a job from something like that. This, like, let's do two hours in the evening every night? No, can't do that. No, yeah. Good info. Neil also wrote in, Hi, you mentioned my favorite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, in a recent show.

As an added bonus, you may not know that they did two series of half-hour TV shows in Britain called No Such Thing as the News. You can see them on YouTube. The first episode is here. He provides the link. I checked using the Epic Browser VPN in North America that you can actually watch them keep up the good work. Neil.

And like I said, he provides the link. Very cool, and thank you for sending that, but much like Says You and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, two of my other favorite podcasts, I think I'd rather not know what they look like. There's a reason we don't put our photos on our art. Yeah, that's true. We have faces for radio.

Now, this one, I finally asked a friend of the show, MXV, about the Last Jedi review that we did, because he... I'm going to go out on a limb and say he disagrees with us. I'm pretty... I was fairly sure. I thought he was boycotting it on purpose, because he's like, I've seen it three times, it's great, it's great, it's great, and then we'd do the review.

Ooh. So, this is from a text exchange I had from him. It was painful that two people I know spent so much energy shitting on a damn good movie because it didn't match what they envisioned in their head, what a Star Wars movie is. It was the same as the people who shit on our pinball games when we show them.

Mike works at a pinball company, so there you go. Every word you guys said was wrong. This is generally how our conversations go over dinner, by the way. Also, when Brian said it wasn't what a Star Wars movie is, was ridiculous. Until Disney hires him to make Star Wars films, the company that approves and signs off on the movies, like The Last Jedi, are the ones who decide what is and isn't a Star Wars movie.

I liked all the swerves and going against the formula. Everyone bitching about this one are the same ones that bitched that The Force Awakens was just a re-theme of A New Hope. Sorry, that's not a, that's a fact. That's a fact. That's a goddamn fact. The only thing I didn't like in the movie was Floating Leia, and I would have liked some backstory on Snoke.

I think that covers most of it. Okay. Brian, take it away. Every word he texted was wrong. Pretty much, yeah. Episode MXV of Vinyl Hope spends a lot of time telling people that any opinion that differs from his is wrong. Also, you're an episode late. We're already done with this. Too late, buddy.

Moving on. Moving on. Over at Facebook, Tim, the same Tim who gave us 50 bucks, gave us a five-star rating and a review. Some days, browsing the internet, I feel like Michael Douglas and falling down. Sometimes I just sit there, staring at a poorly designed and architected system, oscillating with rage.

Listening to GOG is the release valve that prevents full-on thermonuclear rage detonation. Getting harassed by tech recruiters and scammers and having to deal with technical support and the likes of Comcast makes me wonder why everyone isn't as angry all the time as I am. GOG makes me feel that I'm among kindred, rage-filled spirits.

When I think about the state of the internet, internet companies like Twitter and Facebook, and internet legislation, I find it difficult to even be mad anymore. It's just a sort of numb, slightly agitated depression. I like the show so much that I support them on Patreon at the highest tier available. And if you're as frustrated as I am with the digital world, you'll love the show too.

I like this Tim guy. I do too. Yes, I do. I do feel sort of numb and slightly agitated and depressed most of the time when I have to do the news for the show. Yeah. Yes. All right. 6502 Chip writes in on Twitter. Bittner, your comments on GOG podcast about internet traffic in Hawaii reminded me of this article about our situation in Puerto Rico.

It is the Puerto Rico porn crisis. Did you get a chance to read this one? Yes, I did. Quite funny. I feel, look, horrible, horrible things are happening in Puerto Rico. And most importantly, they are not watching their porn. That is terrible. That is terrible. It's terrible.

Cryptic Gablam says, if you're anything like me, I think you'll find that learning music theory entails a lot of banging your head against a wall for a while before something clicks and makes any sense at all. All right. There you go. You know, I'm taking that to heart and I'll just bang my head for a while. Hopefully, something will come of it.

Yes, and Gad Law said, hashtag Trump shutdown, saw this poster on Imgur, GOG podcast. Also, you guys should have known the Star Wars was going to be crap from the last movie when they killed Han, like Matrix 2 and 3, every Star Wars movie after the first three didn't happen, including the Lucas improvements. And the photo is a lovely shot of Trump as Jabba the Hutt and Melania in Leia's costume.

Okay. Quite funny. And this one comes from Blitz Craig podcast. Brian and Jason, two things. One, Jason, the Instant Pot, bought it, love it. Yes. And two, no such thing as a fish podcast. Delightful indeed. Thanks, guys. I like how delightful has become kind of a recurring theme in our podcast.

We are trying to be delightful old geeks. No, not really. We are trying to. Now, over on iTunes, we got a bunch of ratings, too. So let's go through these really quick. And thank you so much, everybody who's doing these. A.M. Schoen says, perfect laid back cast for geeks with a sense of humor. After a third consecutive listen, I had come by to drop a glowing review, which may be the first podcast I've bothered tuning into for weeks in a row.

As a fellow IT professional, I appreciate the real and honest chat. about trending events, not something I can always get via other media outlets. Jason and Brian may be rather opinionated on some topics, but I enjoy listening to them shamelessly speak their minds, which they do in a very entertaining and humorous fashion. I also really like Dave on the show, and his cybersecurity insight is spot on.

I'll be filling the rest of the week checking out his Cyber Wire podcast until the next GOG cast is out. I'm sure finding the time to put all this together and keeping up with as much as they do is a ton of work, but please keep it up. Makes my Atlanta commute almost painless while listening in. Thank you. Wow. That's a long one. Hopefully you didn't type that on your iPhone.

No. Next one comes from BHM22MC. Weekly sanity check. Thanks, guys, for my weekly dose of news and humor. You seem to be the only ones out there that don't have to answer to any to any more. Probably meant don't have to answer to anyone anymore.

I was thinking that. And then he puts a little LOL in there. OK. Yep. Thanks. Yep. Definitely typed on an iPhone. Definitely. We got another five star rating from JB Moto. Best tech podcast ever. This is the podcast that got me into podcasts.

It was recommended to me by my brother. I hereby recommend to you and anyone who finds tech entertaining. My brother and I both actually work in telecom tech, and this podcast is broadcasted just like you talk with your buddies. Very informational and very funny at times. The tangents that go on about screw ups and crap products are the best.

We all think it. They say it and call it out. Great products get great reviews and even awesome recommendations for tech devices, software, hardware, et cetera. I look forward to the weekly releases and enjoy listening to it between appointments. Keep up the phenomenal work, guys. I love your show. Woohoo. Thank you very much. Next, we got a five star from Ray from Austin.

What passes for enthusiasm? What a relief to hear some unvarnished opinions about the current tech world without the breathless blind enthusiasm of some of these tech kitties out there. I'm grumpy and geeky myself, and I appreciate hearing tech news discussed within the larger frame of reference Jason and Brian bring to the table.

Well, thank you very much, Ray from Austin. I am jealous because, man, I could use some barbecue today. Me too. Now, speaking of bringing things to the table, here comes a two star rating. Woohoo. Somebody is bringing to the table. It's been a while. Not the beanie guest. Grandiose, obnoxious gab fest. He says, what may have been entertaining and informative gets overwhelmed in the cynicism and profanity.

Take those things away and you realize not much is actually being said. It's a couple of guys giving the illusions of cleverness that masks a reality of vacuousness. If you struggle to create anything of real value yourself, it's an easy road to try to compensate by being critical of what everyone else does. That's really what being grumpy is all about, Charlie Brown.

On the positive side, it's refreshing to have the sheen taken off that all the techno worship and glorification of the inflated role these things play in our lives. Perhaps that's the niche these guys feel that they fill. They could be really effective at that if they didn't take the lazy road of stooping so low to do it. Well, thanks.

Oh, Brian, hold my beer that you just gave me for winning my Twitter bet. Now, the thing that got me here is if you struggle to create anything of real value yourself, some of the new listeners probably don't know our CV. So I just want to do a quick roundup here.

Brian and I, for over 20 years, collectively probably built 2,000 websites. Brian built some of the biggest websites for the music industry and some of the biggest artists like, oh, Green Day, Coldplay, uh, well, Rush, Rihanna, Rihanna, Rihanna, Rihanna, Jesus Christ.

It's a pretty big one, you know, Alanis, Goo Goo Dolls. Yeah, Goo Goo Dolls. And, uh, I built websites for movies like Titanic, which was for a very long time the biggest movie in the world, and Star Trek, First Contact, and a bunch of, I probably did 75 movies, websites, things like that.

Plus all the other shit that we did. Brian is an accomplished musician who did an album with Robbie from the Goo Goo Dolls and has played on stage. So he is a bona fide rock star. I, on the other hand, am a photographer who have had, who's had my photos published in things like, uh, multiple international magazines, including the print edition of the New York Times.

All of that. Plus he has a kid. I have a dog or two dogs. Two. We, we've kind of made a lot of shit over the years. So to say that, uh, you know, that we don't, we haven't created anything. Yeah. Sorry. But, uh, I do love how he kind of doubles back on how we're actually doing the things that he likes at the end of his review, but we still only got two stars.

Yeah. It's okay. You know, I did something that I never do that, that you said that you do. I went and looked at what else he's reviewed by unless it was, unless it was a Bible app. It didn't get, it got two stars or one star Bible apps get five stars. So I kind of got five stars kind of get the fact that we may not be in his wheelhouse, which is fine.

I don't mind that. Well, let's, let's end this with a five-star rating from Galvin Green. Great tech and current news happened across your podcast as a way to pass the time while traveling back and forth from my hometown in the Eastern Kentucky to my university. The under two hour podcast time is perfect to start and finish. Yeah. Try recording it or editing it for that matter.

The news is always relevant and interesting and keeps the show and the show keeps me entertained. This is the first podcast that I can consistently come back to without it becoming stale. Keep up the great work. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback, your questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. And as always, please tell your friends. Closing shout outs. It's already been a tough year for music. It's been a tough couple of years for music.

Certainly. We've lost a lot of people recently. Elton John has announced his farewell, a yellow brick road tour, his very final tour, some 300 odd dates he's going to play. It's quite extensive, but that'll be that. Yeah. I mean, that is a serious farewell. That is a serious farewell.

Well, and in sadder news, Neil Diamond has retired from touring because he has Parkinson's disease. He's got just recently diagnosed. So there will be no more Neil Diamond tours. That's too bad. It's going fast. And more sadly still, the fall singer Markie Smith has died this week.

I was a big fan of the fall. Good band. Crazy personality. Sad to see him go. 60 years old. So pretty young still. Yep. And then in the world of sci-fi, we lost this week, Ursula K. Le Guin. I've never really known how to pronounce her name correctly because I only ever read it.

I never hear anybody say it. But fantastic sci-fi writer. So very sad news there as well. I never actually read any of her books. You never read Left Hand of Darkness? No. Oh, man. Go read it. Go read it. It's fantastic. Hugo and Nebula Award winning. Excellent book. Okay. I'll throw it in because we've been slacking on the books.

Yeah. I got to pick up on the reading. But yeah, go read Left Hand of Darkness. I remember reading that in high school. Just really enjoying it. Or maybe even before that. Okay, we'll see if it has legs then. Yeah. I'll check it out. Yep. I have a shout out to my brother, Greg DeFillippo, who turns out is the first person to go to Canada, follow the instructions, and come back with fucking maple cookies for me.

So thank you, Greg. Okay. They're delicious. Yes. You can get them anywhere. No, you can't. Not the same quality. And here's what I did. I traded him a box of domestic maple cookies that I got that were, quote unquote, made in Canada. And I'm like, try these and then try the ones you brought back. And he's like, oh man, these suck compared to these.

You can get that exact brand off Amazon for less of a delivery fee than I paid to send you your beers. Okay. Well, I will go check it out. I'm just saying. All right. And I would like to say a shout out to us. Yes. Because, you know, we talk about how we talk about things earlier than everybody else.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. And I used to know Merlin Mann a long time ago. And he's on every podcast known to Mann, including, you know, Dubai Friday and Back to Work and all those other ones. And he's not shut the fuck up about this show Patriot.

Right. For weeks now, I would just like to point out that we reviewed Patriot back in July of 2017. And we said the exact same thing. Great show. Go watch it. But we didn't harp on it. But I'm just saying we did it first again. So everybody, if you're listening to Merlin's shows and you are sick of hearing about the Patriot, know that on Grumpy Old Geeks, we say things once, unless it's go get one password and a VPN at privateinternetaccess.com slash GOG, you know.

But for the most part, we are not going to beat you over the head with it. Because while it was a good show, it is not the only show on television. So I'm just saying, come on. Good for us. Anyway, until next time, you're Brian Schulmeister. And you're Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give us a one-time donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 244. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week.

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