245: The Internet of Moisture

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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. How was your week, Brian? Okay, everybody's sick. What happens when you have a kid is you just start trading the cold back and forth and it's running its course through the family the second time around. Hopefully, I will avoid it this time.

Have you ever heard of this, Jason? This is something that my wife's family does. Oil of oregano. You buy a bottle of oil of oregano and then you fill up the dropper and every night before you go to bed, you put a drop of this stuff underneath your tongue and it's supposed to stop you from keeping sick.

Now, to be fair to my wife's family, they do not get sick all that often. Also, though, I am famous for not getting sick all that often. And they swear by the oil of oregano and I like to point out that I don't get sick either and I've never done this before. So I'm thinking it may not have much of an effect.

But when in Rome, so every night before I go to bed, big old drop of oil of oregano under my tongue, which is nasty, but then has lingering effects of making me want pizza. I was going to say, it sounds like quite delicious. It's a little rough in its concentrated form, but I don't know if anybody's ever out there has ever heard of this as a way to stave off of cold, but it's apparently an ancient Chinese secret, Canadian Chinese secret.

Canadian Chinese secret. That's great. Yes. No, it sounds like you have the fluburus, but it's like an orberus that just keeps eating himself. But you're just getting sick yourself over and over again. Yeah. This house is a disgusting Petri dish at the moment. So there you go. But you have exciting news.

You have life changing news, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. I got fired yesterday. Today, we're recording on the second. So I got fired on the first. I got a lovely, lovely letter of termination from AJ Kazerowski.

Now, people are like, who the fuck is AJ Kazerowski? Oh, that would be AJ Harbinger. And he goes by AJ Harbinger on The Art of Charm because Jordan had a really cool name, Jordan Harbinger. And he's like, I want that name, too. So he kind of changed his name.

This is the thing that's been confusing everybody. I told everybody that I got fired from The Art of Charm, right? Yes. So everybody's like, why would Jordan fire you? I'm like, Jordan didn't fire me. AJ fired me. Now, here's the bombshell. You ready for the bombshell? Sure. AJ fired everybody. Right. So he took the entire show and kept it for himself.

So Jordan got fired. Jen got fired. Bob got fired. Jason got fired. Steven got fired. And the other Jason, which is me, got fired. Right. So we are all free agents right now. And things will, you know, we have. We're kind of floating now. Everybody's going about their own thing, trying to make some money.

And there will be news in the future. But, yeah, Jordan didn't fire me. So anybody that's like, I got a note from a friend of the show, Chan, the other night. She's like, oh, my God. Should I unfriend Jordan on Facebook now? And about 20 other people saying the same thing. I'm like, no, no, no. Jordan didn't fire me.

This is the confusion. AJ Harbinger is not Jordan Harbinger. AJ is AJ Krasikowski. And he's a fucktard. And he fired me and the team. So on that bombshell, I do appreciate the people that have upped their Patreon subscription because of the firing.

I do appreciate it because I'm going to need it. I was asking Brian before the show, you, Brian, talking to the audience about my glasses because I broke my glasses last week. I fell asleep on the couch with the puppy. And then I'm like, I woke up and I rolled over. I'm like, where's my glasses?

And then I rolled over and crunch. Yeah, broke my broke my nice shiny glasses. And so I'm wearing three year old prescriptions right now. So I have I basically have a low level headache all the time. And with getting fired, it's like, can I justify spending seven hundred dollars on a new pair of glasses?

Because that's how much they cost when you get the computer staring at all day lenses. You don't you have perfect eyes and perfect hair. So you don't have this problem, Brian. But I like how you threw in the hair as well. So thank you. I hate your hair so much. Because I really, really want your hair.

That's the one thing. It's like any time you're in a photograph, I'm like, God damn, I want that hair. But yeah, your eyes work, too. So mine don't. So, yes, that's part of part of being unemployed, losing my insurance, losing basically everything. The fun part is, though, I'm the only one on the team that has a podcast.

So, yes, shall we? Shall we continue on with the podcast? Yes, let's continue on with it, which is now officially your day job, at least temporarily. It is. It is. So everybody, please tell your friends. Yes, please do. And continue the donations. We appreciate it. Jason's not the only person who could use some money. I've got a baby needs a new pair of shoes, as the saying goes.

Yeah, puppy needs a new pair of, well, whatever puppies need. So last week, you'd mentioned that I can get those maple cookies that I love so much on Amazon. And I just would like to point out that you cannot. That brand is not available on Amazon in the format that I desire. It pops up now and then that there's only one or two people that carry it.

So if you continue to do a search, I'm a little surprised Amazon doesn't have alerts set up as part of their system. They should be able to do that. They did. Oh, man. They will pop up occasionally, Jason. You are correct. When you went and looked, they had disappeared. When I had searched for them, I found two providers of regular maple cream by Turkey Hill, three for the chocolate.

When you looked, there was only the chocolate ones up there. But I also, because you're my friend, Jason, and because I want to take care of you, I spent exactly five seconds doing a Google search and found a purveyor of your maple cream cookies, hnwilliams.com, that will ship them directly to you.

So there you go. So you ruined my joke because I had that link stashed away and I was going to unfurl it during the show. But yes, I also found them and I will be ordering from them, from H.N. Williams to get my Turkey Hill regular maple cookies. The chocolate ones are OK.

Gregory sent the, he bought me a box of those, I guess, on a whim, but not really my cup of tea. Yeah, there's some maple in there, but I'm just not a chocolate fan. So, I know, gasp. I know. But yeah, the regular maple cookies are delicioso. And I love this Turkey Hill brand.

And now you can get them. So please stop with the bitching about it. Well, I'm just bitching because out of everybody who goes to Canada all the time, you've never brought me back a box. And I just, I felt, I felt like our friendship was in jeopardy at some point. Well, when you eventually return to Los Angeles and I don't have to fly them back to L.A., then ship them to Chicago.

Perhaps you will get some. Yes. And that's the interesting thing, as I kind of alluded to a little bit. I'll probably be back in Los Angeles again. I know. Let Brian, let the gloating begin in probably about a year and change. Somebody who pays way too much attention to our podcast can go back and tell us exactly what episode I said he'd be back here.

I think that was episode one. And I still lived in L.A. You're just like, you'll be back. I'm like, I haven't gone anywhere. He's like, yeah, but you're going to leave. And then you'll be back. And then you're going to leave. And then you'll be back. Yeah. Fuck. I'm pretty much right on with that. All right. That one's tough not to miss.

So I've lived with a Roomba for a week now. And as we discussed, we talked a little bit last week about how digital assistants are AI because, you know, everybody has to say AI. Our AI assistants are not actually learning us. We're learning them.

We're changing our behavior to make more sense to our Alexas and things like that rather than the other way around. My Roomba is definitely training me. I'm starting to move furniture around to make things better for the Roomba. I did that, too, and I had a Roomba.

Oh, God. I'm glad I'm not the only one. No, no. In between. I mean, it's my kid's favorite toy right now. All he does is wander around and press the button and try to get on top of it and get it started while he's sitting on it. In between dealing. It's like Fung Shumba is what you're doing. It really like I've started to, you know, suddenly move the couch just a couple inches over.

So there's enough room for it to get by. And it's insane. I just started to realize that basically I'm just being trained by this stupid piece of plastic. Good for you.

Yeah, so in addition to moving around all my furniture to make my robot vacuum cleaner happy and being a nurse to my wife and to my kid and all of that other stuff, I started to realize that one of the, well, probably the only plus of doing this podcast is all the amazing stuff that we find that we, you know, we do all the work so you guys don't have to.

And we just report back about things that are good or bad. What I'm realizing is my media cup is overflowing. I've got to start cutting more stuff because of all the different podcasts that we found that I now listen to on a regular basis. All the TV shows. And this is why I cannot watch X-Files, Jason.

I cannot fit another fucking show into my schedule unless things are really good. I can't watch them anymore. So I rely on you because you have all the time in the world, especially now to watch all these things. I do not have all the time in the world, but I do have, I don't have a baby and I can, well, actually, I think the issue is I don't have a wife.

Yeah, well, that's a big part. That's pretty much it. Yeah. So, yeah, it's just, I've started to realize, like, last night, I was like, I finally, I had to get out of the house. So I went out with friends at the show, Mike and Fergal. But then I came home and I was like, oh, God, I really need to watch this. I need to watch this. I need to finish this book.

I've got to, I've got to, I have three podcasts I'm behind on. How am I going to get all this done in time for my own podcast? Now you understand why I listen to everything at 2X. I'm starting to get it. So, yeah, I'm really going to have to take a look at everything that I'm listening to, particularly podcast wise, and start to start to make some hard, hard cuts.

So I'll be reporting on that in the next week or two, kind of reviewing where I'm at with with the various podcasts and which ones I really think are worth continuing on with, because I just do not have enough damn time anymore. I know it sucks. It sucks. Because, yeah, I'm going to have to do a podcast bankruptcy run here, because the last week, as you can imagine, has been stressful.

And I'm way behind and I made the mistake of listening to the new hardcore history that came out as I was going to bed one night. That was a bad idea. I don't know if you've listened to the new episode, but it's a bad idea to listen to that while you go to bed. You know, one of the one of the few times that I really have to kind of dig into a podcast is when I take my kid out for a walk, like I'll take him down to the park and I'll throw in the headset while we're walking and I'll play with him at the park.

I'm not that kind of parent, unlike everybody else at that damn park who isn't paying attention to their kids. Catch and release. Yeah, that's that's one of the big times for me to listen. And I saw that there was new hardcore history. I was super excited about it. I downloaded it. I'm walking my child starting to listen to it. And I'm like, I can't listen to this when I'm with my kid.

I just know something weird about this. Yeah, he gets in such grim detail. And he even said on Twitter, he's like, if you're sensitive, you might not want to listen to this one. I'm like, I used to be on 4chan. I can handle anything. And I'm just like, oh, my God.

Like, I'd started to fall asleep when they were talking about different types of flaying and burning. And I'm just like, I cannot listen to this. And then I put on no such thing as a fish to clear my palate before I fell asleep. Yeah, that would have been bad. Now, since I've got this damn puppy and the other dog, it's hard for me to get out and, you know, go to a restaurant.

And I know it's hard. Just correct me if I'm wrong. I've had dogs in the past, and I've certainly seen them on TV. They are capable of being left home alone. Well, there's two issues here. One, the puppy is brand new.

He's very young, so he can't hold himself for too long. The other is the rescue that I got him from flat out lied to me and did not disclose the fact that he has extreme separation anxiety. So it's going to take me a long time to get this guy fixed, and it's going to be really hard, and it's going to take a while.

But I knew if I gave him back, then he would end up being euthanized. So I'm keeping him, and I'm working him through it. But if I leave the room, he will cry and scream. I mean, it sounds like just it's horrible. He screams. All right. Fair enough. So I'm working on that. Anyway, so it's hard for me to leave the house.

But, hey, speaking of, he's eating my TV. Stop it. You talked about Uber Eats before, and I'd never tried it. And I'm like, oh, let's see what they got. So I went on to Uber Eats and see if I could get a meal. And I did. I ordered some burritos, and there are special delivery instructions on there.

And I said, do not, under any circumstances, ring the doorbell. Your tip is in the mailbox. That was it. Right. First delivery, what do they do? Ring the doorbell. Of course. So, you know, right there, I'm like, oh, great.

This is not the best for me. So I'm like, maybe I'll try them one more time. So the next night, I ordered a hamburger from a local joint that I really like their hamburgers and a salad because I'm not totally a barbarian. And I did the same instructions, and the guy followed the instructions to a T.

Right. Now, I don't know if it's because of my horrible review the night before that got him to do it or that he was actually a better driver. I think that it's just the vagaries of the actual people. It could be. The driver on the first night had a 4.9. The driver on the second night had a 4.3.

So the guy with the lower rating actually did better than the higher rated driver. You can't, with such a small data set, you can't really correlate and corroborate those numbers. But unfortunately, last night I was going to do, you know, the third experiment because I wanted to have at least three data points.

Then I got fired, so I couldn't afford to do Uber Eats anymore. So at some point in the future, we will conclude the experiment of Uber Eats. But there are other delivery services in the neighborhood. But DoorDash, I'm never going back to again.

Look, my problem with them, with all of these services is, do millennials just like cold, wet, sloppy, disgusting food? Because it's not as good. It takes a while to get to you. It's just not tasty. Like, just get off your ass.

Yeah, I would, I beg to differ because the two meals that I got were, they arrived like really fast. They were really hot, really good. And especially the one that, the one that I was really curious about was the hamburger because hamburgers are notoriously bad for delivery.

Yes. I think I discussed getting a fat burger delivered once and it was, the fries were cold and the, yeah, it was all bad. Fries sucked. The fries were definitely, they were, they were hot, but they were mushy. But that place always has terrible fries. So I can't, I can't blame that on the delivery driver.

The burger on the other hand was perfect because I had them cook it a little bit under what I normally like. And so by the time it got here, it had time to rest. And when I ate it, it was absolutely perfect. So I was incredibly happy with the, the hamburger delivery, the burrito delivery, hard to fuck up a burrito.

The longer they sit, the better they get. So you can't really go wrong with that. The only difference on the, uh, the burrito delivery was I ordered a giant burrito and a regular burrito. And when I got, when they got here, they were the exact same size. I'm like, uh, how do you define giant in your world? Anyway, I'm going to, yeah, at some point I will try Uber eats again.

But you know, besides the ringing of the doorbell, I didn't think it was that bad, even though it's a terrible company and we shouldn't be giving them their money, but there's that. Yes, there's that. But you know, some people got to, got to earn. So what are you going to do? I need to eat. They need to earn. Sometimes you just make a deal with the devil.

Speaking of making deals with the devil, Kodak and their cryptocurrency deals. Yes. The New York times who has been killing it this week, we've got some amazing articles from the New York times this week. Uh, they did an article called Kodak's dubious cryptocurrency gamble, where they break down everything that is wrong with Kodak's basically deal.

The third party deals with these people. And it is a great read. The link will definitely be for that in the show notes at gog.show slash 245. I highly recommend you read it. If you want to hear a little bit more of the backstory and the, the shady nature of the guy that's running the company that, uh, that's doing Kodak coin.

Hang on a second. Are you saying somebody involved with cryptocurrency is shady? Yeah, actually. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for like securities and exchange fraud and can't even like, you know, he can't trade on the Canadian market or something like that. Uh, he says he's reformed, but now he's in crypto.

Hmm. Okay. It's like, you know, okay, you were convicted of pedophilia and now we're going to let you run the kindergarten, uh, playground. Sure. Why not? You've reformed. Okay. Yeah. Well, it's been a rough week all around for cryptocurrency. Let's be honest.

There's, there's a lot of news going around. So let's just, uh, get that out of the way really quickly. I, I, again, you know, I think we've stated many, many times and, and for quite a long time now, uh, that we, we don't trust this stuff at all. Nope. No. So have you, have you cashed out yet? No, no.

I've just got it sitting there because I'm curious. And it's such, again, like I said, it's, it's such a small amount of money. I don't care. So if I lose it, I lose it. It is what it is. It's, it's, it's just fun watching it go up and down. Uh, but, uh, the daily mail has, is asking, are the wheels coming off the cryptocurrency bandwagon? Uh, Bitcoin had plunged below $8,000 after a fall of 55% from last year's peak.

It's bounced back a little. I think it's around 8,200 right now, but, uh, it was $17,000. So it's lost more than more than half of its worth. It was over 20,000. Yeah, it suffered a lot of, uh, a week of heavy losses this week because U S regulators have closed in on rival coins.

Uh, the cryptocurrency could see further huge losses if it does not recover quickly. Uh, we have India as a case you forgot, that's a very populous country. That's an awful lot of people. Uh, India is officially not treating cryptocurrencies as legal tender anymore and will stop their use in payments.

According to Bloomberg, um, they are basically, basically they're calling it a Ponzi scheme. Which it is, and they've been warning about it. So now they're stepping in to regulate it. That does not mean that they are against the blockchain. They are exploring blockchain potential for future digital economy, but, uh, no more cryptocurrencies in India.

This came a day after South Korea decided to regulate and not ban cryptocurrencies. We did think that they were going to ban them, but they decided not to. Uh, they share the same concerns that everybody has about tax evasion and, um, disruption of global trade, uh, beyond skirting state revenue collections.

Both countries have logical worries about the safety of cryptocurrency, given how a hacker stole over 500 million from the Tokyo-based exchange coin check last week. And Facebook has decided to ban any and all ads promoting cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and ICOs, because again, um, they don't want, uh, misleading or deceptive promotional practices, which these things generally are.

Yep. And I had a link in here, but which I seem to have deleted or has gone, gone on walkabout that was, uh, Hong Kong is basically going to be running PSAs about not investing in ICOs or cryptocurrency period on their, on their TV stations.

Yeah. That's a very interesting one. It's very interesting. So it's just, uh, again, we were way ahead of the curve here. So I expect that, uh, that one podcast that basically does our show, uh, two months after we do it to start doing a show about, uh, cryptocurrency now. That would be reply all is in, as I like to say, shit, we already know.

Thank you very much. Yeah. And because I just quickly mentioned Facebook, I wanted to point out, and we're definitely going to get into this throughout the show. Um, I don't know if, if, if you've noticed because we, we both have that, uh, what's that, uh, Facebook, um, plugin, Facebook purity installed, uh, which gives us notifications.

If we lose friends, um, I've been losing people left, right and center and not because they're unfriending me because they are getting off of Facebook. I've lost, I've lost 32 friends in the last month, 32 people that I know that have just signed off and said, I've had enough.

I'm not going to be on Facebook anymore. Pretty crazy. Yeah. I'm glad you pointed this out because I actually, you know, I pinged you last night because our really good friend, Dave Riegler, he just, he unfriended me. I'm like, I've known you for 30 years and you're going to fucking unfriend me on Facebook. I'm like, what the hell did I do?

I mean, I sure I made fun of Trump, but come on, you know, he's politically aligned with us. So I don't think that would upset him. Um, but yeah, I'm just like, what the, what the hell? And then you, that's when you brought up that people are dropping. And then I went back and I looked at my list cause I've been losing people, a lot of people.

And I didn't know if it was because I just removed all my content because I've been using that other plugin that we, we have, which is called a, what the hell is this thing? It's a social book post manager. I use that on Chrome. And what I do is at the beginning of every month, I go through and I delete everything from the previous month.

So there's only a rolling month worth of crap. And I thought maybe I'm because I just deleted everything there. They're dumping me, but no, apparently they're gone. Cause yeah, this page is 404. They're not there. Yep. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Smart guys. I wish you, I wish I could get off the boat too.

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Select overnight shipping and use the code GOG. In the news. Earnings reports came out this week. So are you ready for some hot stock talk?

No, not too much to talk about here. I mean, Amazon, unbelievable. Profit for 11 straight quarters, including a $1.9 billion profit over the holidays. $1.9 billion in basically a month. And yet they still can't afford to pay anybody's shit.

Interesting. 10% of their employees in Ohio are still on food stamps. And surprisingly, the Amazon Go store in Seattle does not take food stamps. Oh, shocking. Imagine that. Shocking. Yeah. Now, one of the big things that Amazon did this year, obviously, was they bought Whole Foods. I am a regular Whole Foods shopper, particularly since the kid came into my life.

I've noticed changes. It has definitely changed over there. And there's a lot of people have started to complain as Amazon has brought their logistics and delivery systems and online sales systems to bear on the Whole Foods experience. They brought their algorithms.

They brought their algorithms and people are not happy about it. People, longtime employees are not happy about the way that they're being basically micromanaged and looked at. And customers are not happy because we're starting to see empty shelves. We're starting to see things not in stock.

One of Whole Foods' really cool things that they've always kind of done is they've done a lot of locally sourced things. And, you know, like Groundworks Coffee here in Venice, they always made sure, you know, we're not just going to come in and put you out of business. We're going to buy your stuff and we're going to sell your stuff in our store. That's starting to go away because Amazon does not see that as efficient and they want to do their warehouses.

So a lot of the local deals are starting to go away. So customers are starting to complain about that as well. I particularly just love this sentence. Eater.com did this really great article about it. And this sentence is just great. They're out of kale. A shopper at the location in Manhattan's Union Square remarked to her friend one evening. That's, like, very off-brand.

Now, I have a question. Since you go there, one of the biggest problems I've always had with Whole Foods is the homeopathic section, which takes up three aisles in the middle of the store and sells nothing but fucking snake oil. Well, that's where you can also go get your oregano oil, Jason.

Oh, my God. I found myself buying that the other week. So, no, no, that's, I mean, come on. Snake oil. That should tell you the efficacy of your oregano oil. Snake oil and supplements. If you get it in the homeopathic section of Whole Foods. Oh, God.

Yeah. So, anyways, I've noticed some changes. So it's going to be interesting to see how that continues to play out. And since I end up at Whole Foods basically twice a week, I am well-placed to let us, to keep us abreast of the situation. All right. I'm going to leave that one to you. That's your section. You are our man on the ground at Whole Foods.

That's right. So Apple has also reported great earnings, a biggest quarter ever. Yet it's considered a letdown, which lets you know how crazy the stock market is and how that's kind of bullshit, too. So they're doing absolutely fantastic. But the sales of the iPhone X are considerably less than expected.

So even though, by all accounts, everything's running swimmingly and they're making more money than enough money to make God blush, apparently it's not good enough. I think what's really good, though, is that the Mac sales are down 5% because everybody is not buying these shitty new MacBook Pros.

They're terrible machines. So it's good that those are down. So maybe they'll fix it. We've talked about there's dual issues with this. I mean, the problem is that these things are so good now and the, you know, the rate of increase and return on these new systems is negligible.

So why would you buy the newest version anymore? I can use this laptop I'm using now probably for another four years before I need a new one. I'm using 2014. I have two 2014 MacBook Pros, like top of the line. They're amazing and they're fast enough to do everything I need.

I don't need a touch bar. They've got the greatest keyboard in the world. A piece of dust is not going to foil my keyboard and require a $400 keyboard replacement. They just work. They are workhorses. You can still buy them on the Apple Store. So and I tell everybody, if you're going to get a new MacBook, get the 2014 edition because it is so good that you just don't need anything else.

And it just there you can type on them for hours and be fan. You just love it. But those little stupid keyboards are awful. Yeah, I mean, it perfectly illustrates everything that's wrong with the stock market. And that whole system right now is the fact that Apple is basically going to be punished for making great product.

I don't need a new iPhone. I don't need a new MacBook. Why? Because I got really, really, really good products that are going to work for a couple of years for me. Easy. And we're going to punish them for that now. Apparently so. That's the way the world works. I mean, that's it's always been the trick. When you want to buy Apple, wait until they announce something new and amazing because their stock always drops after an announcement.

It doesn't matter what they announce. It always drops. And that's when you buy. It's crazy. Yeah. And we've talked about HQ Trivia in the past. They have raised $15 million and a trivia game for your phone is now valued at more than $100 million.

Now, we've been doing this podcast for a few years. Just a few. We've talked about a number of trivia apps that no longer exist. Every trivia app that came out on the market between when we started this show and now we have reviewed and we've come to the conclusion that doing a trivia app is basically the dumbest thing that you could ever do with your time and money because they all fail.

Yes. And this one will be no different. So $100 million now. Soon to be nothing. The interesting thing about this one is the round was led from Founders Fund, which there's a couple of things that are wrong with this. A, it's Peter Thiel's company, who I cannot stand.

Yes. Bad. Yeah. Evil motherfucker, Peter Thiel. The surprising part is Cyan Bannister is leading the round. So she works at Founders Fund. I know her. She ran Zivity, which I don't know if you remember. Zivity was basically kind of a it was a it was a place where models and photographers could hook up.

But if you needed nudie models, mainly, I'm not going to cut around the. Let's not sugarcoat this. Yeah. If you need if you needed some titties on your photos, let's call Zivity. And they finally shut down recently. And yeah, but I was very surprised to see Cyan leading the round because the big kerfuffle is the guys who started HQ Trivia came from Vine.

And they got fired from Twitter because of, like, you know, sexual harassment allegations from one of the one of the founders. So I think Peter Thiel probably strong arms Cyan into do it leading the round because she's a woman. Yeah, I mean, that's my that's my gut feeling. It just doesn't feel right.

Right. Gotcha. Mm hmm. Anyway, speaking of weirdness, Airbnb CFO is out. Oh, you know why he's out? He had a he had a problem with the CEO, something that is going on a lot this week. That seems. Yeah.

Maybe he wants to start a podcast. Come on over here, Lawrence Tosi. But he was he's he was been hailed as bringing financial discipline and new focus areas to the company. Apparently, he was button heads with the CEO because he wanted more power. And then they had a real big fight over them going into the airline market and selling tickets.

And apparently the CEO wanted to start his own. He literally wanted to start his own airline. Oh, joy. Airbnb bear. Whatever. I would. Would you fly Airbnb air? No, no, no. We're just going to we're going to rent a plane and rent a pilot.

And this isn't our plane. This isn't our pilot. We're not going to pay any taxes on this, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, we're going to land in Joe's backyard because we rented it out for the day. I just think it's a breath of fresh air that this guy is leaving and not because of a sexual harassment issue. Oh, tell me about it.

Tell me about it. It's just like he wanted to do something good for a shitty company. And nope, you're out. You're out. Now, another story from The New York Times this week, which I thought was amazingly well done. It's called The Follower Factory. Did you get a chance to read this article, Brian?

I did. I really enjoyed it. It was one of the most amazing articles that talks about the economy of fake followers on Twitter and all these other platforms. And the interesting thing is that the main company that they go after is called Devumi, and they do a deep dive on the guy who runs Devumi in the fake business front that he puts up in Manhattan, where he actually lives on top of an Italian restaurant in Florida.

Now, I talked about a couple weeks ago where I bought 10,000 Twitter followers, right? I spent $100 on it. I used Devumi. Now, since the article has come out, every single one of those followers is gone.

Yeah. I went from 12,000 to 3,000, so almost all of them. But I did get a lot of followers in the interim, so yeah, they're gone. So the experiment is over. But they have a one-year guarantee. So I wrote Devumi tech support and got a note back saying, we're experiencing some issues with Twitter's API changes and the like.

We will have your followers back in no time flat. Since they wrote me that back, I lost another 1,000 followers. So yeah. Well, I do believe I am going to be asking for a refund. The crackdown is the crackdown is definitely occurring. I've read a couple of articles this week about some of the bigger people on Twitter have lost over a million followers as they're going through.

And they're cleaning out the stuff. It says, even in this article, it says, Michael Simmons, a celebrity chef and Devumi client, has almost a million followers. And he lost like 100,000 or something like that. So some of the bigger celebrities have lost in the millions. I'll find that article and throw it in the show notes because I, you know, it was Twitter and I was like, who gives a fuck?

But yeah, no, here's the deal. Everybody's bought followers. I did it just as an experiment to see if it worked. And it does work. You do get the followers. But now that the cat's out of the bag. Oopsie. Well, not everybody, because I'd like to say at GOG podcast on Twitter with its 560 followers.

None of them were bought or sold. No, they're not. Yeah, trust me. If we had to buy 500 followers, I mean, that's sad as it is. So yes, yes, it is. This one came across my Facebook feed, surprisingly enough. But my friend Nicole Lee did a great article on a gadget called fake porn is the new fake news and the Internet isn't ready.

The interesting thing about this article is they're talking about, you know, some of the new algorithmically generated porn where you can, you know, have machine learning put somebody's face on somebody else's and write your friend, Nicole Lee, and say that the AI generated porn is just the beginning headline is false.

It's not AI. Well, she doesn't have AI in the in the headline. It just says fake porn is the new fake news. The sub headline. Oh, OK. This is the sub line. Yes. Well, you know, that is also algorithmically generated. So she probably didn't even write that. Yeah, I think I think that just comes within gadget like it's built.

They have a WordPress plugin that just puts in AI and machine learning. Submitently. Yeah. But it's interesting because, you know, this is coming. We're going to have this. I'm fine with this because you know why? Without this kind of algorithmic face swapping and things like that, we're never going to get to the holodeck.

So if we ever want to if we want holodeck technology in the future, they're going to have to figure this out. So I'm OK with it. Let it happen. Let them go. But they're saying that in the article, it's like a bunch of AI experts saying the only way to fix a bad AI is with more AI.

Let's pour some more. Get me a bucket of AI and I'm going to pour it on the fake porn and see if it's fake or not. You know, it's very funny. I'm sorry. It's just all very funny. There's an app out there called what's it called? Deep fakes. Deep fakes. Yeah.

Yes. There's another one called let's see fake app. So there's already a couple apps out there that do this. What they do is they do face swapping. It started started with Snapchat. Not surprising. And so, yeah, a lot of people with way too much time on their hands are going through and finding porn clips and putting famous actresses faces in there instead.

One use that I do approve of is, as this article over at the A.V. Club says deep learning. They decide to switch it up a little bit with not AI. Deep learning technology is now being used to put Nicolas Cage in every movie. Did you watch these clips?

I didn't know that there were clips. I saw that I saw the screen grabs and I was cracking up, but I didn't watch any of the actual clips. They are fantastic. So if you want Nick Cage as a Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, you can have that now. The clip is in there and it's hilarious. So this stuff is pretty funny.

Yeah, this is, you know, I started really thinking about this after after reading these articles and looking at these video clips. And we are getting to a point where we're just going to have to accept the fact that we cannot trust anything that's digital. The only thing that we're going to be able to really trust anymore is real experiences that you have yourself out in the real world.

And that's the reality. And it's going to be here within five years. Easy. Yeah. If not sooner. So this stuff looks pretty good already. I mean, it really does. No shit. That's the thing. That's why I'm like, OK, we're not going to stop it. So let's embrace it and figure out what we can do with it to be awesome.

Because, you know, you plug in some VR. You got your, you know, your body suit and all that stuff. Say you want to have the best brothel in the world. There you go. You swap whoever's face on that body you want and mix and match. And there you go. I mean, that's it. We're getting to the holodeck, is it?

It's just put all these pieces together in, you know, five years. The video tech will be there. Twenty years. The rest of the tech will be there. We'll probably be long gone. But, hey, what are you going to do? Unless I go to that, that, that those three aisles and whole foods and get your oregano oil.

Oregano oil. That's it. Now, here's an interesting one. Artificial intelligence may have cracked freaky 600-year-old manuscript. This is a manuscript, a 240-page manuscript called the Voynich Manuscript. And it's like, you know, kind of got this crazy language and a bunch of really weird pictures in it.

I was going to say photos. Yeah. They didn't have photographic technology back then. But they've been trying to crack this thing forever, and nobody can figure out how to do it. So they started to run it through some machine learning or artificial intelligence, however the fuck you want to call it.

And they ran it against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was written in 380 different languages looking for patterns. And what they did at least finally figure out that it was encoded using Hebrew. Right. Nobody could figure that out. So now that they know that it was encoded in Hebrew, they can take the next step.

So this is the first step in cracking this, actually using the stuff that we make fun of every week for something that is kind of interesting. Now, it would be – I cannot wait to see what it says because it would be really funny if it's, you know, just like a 600-year-old blog.

Like, oh, I went to the store this week, and it's just some guy fucking with everybody. You wouldn't believe it. They were out of kale. No oregano oil today. Oh, what are we going to do? Yeah. No, that's pretty cool. I'm super interested to follow the story and see what it is.

It's probably going to end up being like a Coke book or something. Yeah. Another article in Vanity Fair by Nick Bilton. I love Nick Bilton sometimes, and sometimes I hate him. This time I love him. The article is, This is serious. Facebook begins its downward spiral. Did you get a chance to dig into this one?

I skimmed this one. I didn't get all the way through it, but it seems pretty interesting. And, you know, we always said Facebook is too big to fail. It's never going to go away. Well, maybe not. You always said that. I never said that. I was always on the other side of it. And one of the great quotes, As a society, we feel like we're at war with the computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

True. That. And, you know, I was thinking about this after reading this article and all the other articles talking about, you know, everybody is down on Facebook and advertising and all this stuff right now. It is. The tides have turned. These guys are up against the wall waiting for the revolution, and they're the first people to get shot.

The thing that would fix Facebook and turn it into a useful platform, I believe, is to abolish linking. Without linking, there is no play for people to come in and scam it. You just talk to your friends. If there's no linking out, then there is no value proposition for everybody trying to game the system.

If you get rid of linking, you can have a discussion platform. And that's the only thing that I can think of that is going to fix it. Yeah, can it be fixed, though? That's the question. I mean, Zuckerberg even tried to make a change, and as soon as he did, you know, where he was going to replace the feed with just your friends and get rid of pages from it.

And as soon as he announced that, their stock price dropped. So can you do it being a public company is the question. Here's the deal. I don't know if you can. I don't think you can either, and it doesn't matter being a public company because he owns most of the shares at this point still. So he can still do whatever he wants. But, yeah, he can probably get sued for breach of fiduciary responsibility, and he'll just say, here's money.

Go away. Here's money. Here's money. And in reading that article, I found another link to a – what is this? On NewShift. NewCo. Before we leave the Nick Bilton article completely, I did want to point out that he has – and going through the various complaints about Facebook and all the things that people are starting to get upset about.

It annoyed me to no end that he brought up the old thing that we spent time debunking multiple times on this very show about that Facebook is listening in to private conversations. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We debunked that 100,000 times, and I'm tired of seeing this appear in every article where people are talking about Facebook.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Off my chest. Okay. That's good. I'm good. Now, yeah, the article that I found in there that I linked to is called My Internet Mea Culpa, and this is by Rick Webb, somebody who I've never, ever heard of. Have you heard of this guy? I have not. So he basically was – he was in our camp somewhat.

Old guy who, you know, was there for the beginning of the net and was – I think he – we probably had a beer with him at some point, and we just don't even know it yet. And I just love this. For the last 20 years, I believe the internet profits of old. I worshipped at the altar of Stuart Brand and Kevin Kelly.

I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone had a voice. I believe that the world would be a better place if we all had no secrets. But so far, the evidence points to an escapable conclusion. We were all wrong. Or to be generous, if we weren't wrong, we're so far off on timescale that those who bought into the vision were misled into thinking that the benefits would come in their lifetime.

They aren't going to. Either way, I'm sorry. I love this article because he's just like, yeah, we believe these fuckers and they screwed us, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the show. That's true. This is why we started doing this show is because we were pissed at the way that everything seemed to turn out.

Yeah. I really like the sentence that he threw in here. What if information doesn't want to be free? Yes, that was a great, great line. We discovered that information does not want to be free. It shouldn't be free. When we made information free, information became shit and fake. And the other really interesting point that he makes is, like, the people who we were listening to, you and I in our crowd, were baby boomers.

These are the guys we were listening to when we went to go build it. Everybody that built the original, you know, bulk of the Internet that we know now were Gen Xers. And we were getting fed bullshit from these goddamn baby boomers. And we believed them because they had the gravitas of just being old. And, you know, don't forget, they also had had the money.

They went, here's money. And they gave us money to build this stuff. Well, they didn't give us money. The people, other people who listened to them, who were younger than us, who were Wall Street assholes, they gave us the money to go build it. And, yeah. But, yeah, yeah. If you look at the difference between who built it, who proselytized it, and who financed it, yeah, us Gen Xers were basically, you know, we were just the workhorses.

We didn't have anything good. Now, going back to what you were talking about, about Facebook tracking you, I found an article on Gizmodo that made me furious, absolutely furious. Facebook knows how to track you using the dust on your camera lens. Okay? Okay. I can, I'm fine with that.

I understand that. Okay, there's pattern recognition there, and they can do facial recognition based on that. This article had nothing to do with that. This was about patents, and the patents that Facebook files to maybe do, you know, people you may know. Yeah. And it just goes around and around in a bunch of different things, saying, hey, yeah, we have the technology, but we're not using it.

We have the technology, but we're not using it. But it wasn't, I wanted to hear more about the dust on the camera lens algorithm, because that's pretty cool. Right. I think the real point of the article is that, okay, it's a good idea. You can get drunk at a bar and come up with an idea and say, hey, everybody's going to have dust on their camera.

And what if we, you know, use that as a vector to see, like, who's in what and who's knowing who? Problem with that is twofold. A, it doesn't exist. So you can create a patent on something that is an idea that has no backing technology. The other one that these people didn't think of is, every time I pull my camera in and out of my pocket, the dust pattern changes.

The dust pattern changes constantly, yes. The dust pattern does not stay the same, so it's a little bit ridiculous. They get points for the thought of it, but, yeah, nobody's dust on their camera lens stays the same. There might be some points, but come on. Anyway. Yeah, and if you're really worried about that, I will bring back my old Amazon link in our show notes for the, and wait for it, this is one of my favorite ones.

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Trust me, you're going to love these things. Ups and doodads! Brian, you are on the Instagram. I've seen you there. I've seen pictures of your kid, and you've seen pictures of my puppy, which you will never let me live down. But you have seen the ads.

They have tons of ads now everywhere, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's for crap. It's for crappity crap, crap, crap. So what I started doing was, I'm like, what are you selling me? And then what I would do is I would take that, go to Amazon, and put it into Amazon and see how much it costs on Amazon.

What I found is, basically, it's a three to five times markup if you buy it on Instagram, period. Right. So people are just buying cheap shit, buying ads on Instagram, and then reselling it. That's all they're doing. Now, that being said, I saw an ad on Instagram this week for these motion-detected little, you know, battery-powered lights that you can just put around your house.

And I'm like, man, those would be really handy for me right now. So I have a contender here for another Amazon title. A mirror, motion sensor, light, cordless, battery-powered, LED, nightlight, stick-anywhere, closet lights, stair lights, puck lights, safe lights for decorative hallway white pack of six.

Nice. On Instagram, these lights were going for $19.99 for two of them. I found them for $19.99 for a six-pack on Amazon. And I ordered them, and I set them up last night because in the middle of the night when the animals have to go outside, or me as an old man have to pee every three and a half hours, it's nice to have a motion-detected light so you don't have to turn on the house lights.

Worked great. $20 for six of them. Best deal in the world. I love them. I have them strategically placed in the house now. This was the best $20 I've spent all year. I love these things. Very cool. They look pretty cool. I think I might have to pick up some of these. Yeah, I would go for the warm light version.

I got the bright white light version. I would go with the warm ones. I think it's $2 more, but they can be a little bit like, ooh, ooh, a little too much. $2 more on Amazon, $8 more on Instagram. There you go. Exactly. ARKit is getting an update with iOS 11.3, and the next web says, it's next level good.

So sick of headlines. I read the article. It's pretty cool. The only thing that they're really talking about is now you have vertical surface recognition because before it was only horizontal planes. Now it can do vertical surfaces. It's really cool. That's all I'm saying. It is actually really cool. This stuff is pretty cool.

You can put Nick Cave on everything. Yeah, you can. I would prefer Nick Cave on everything over Nick Cage. Me too, actually. Yeah, I do like the Nick Cave. Now, I'm sure that you saw this. Everybody's been talking about it. Yes. The boring company flamethrower. The $500 flamethrower that's out there.

Well, Democrat Miguel Santiago from California announced that he is going to try and ban them. I honestly thought it was a joke when the article was read to me while I was sitting in Los Angeles traffic. Well, if you let Elon Musk do his work, he won't be in traffic anymore because he's making tunnels, you dumbass.

The state of California and the county and city of Los Angeles have entrusted Mr. Musk to help alleviate a real public policy problem here by executing a tunnel under the city to help alleviate traffic. This deviation feels like a slap in the face. Here's the deal. Okay, let me tell you what the deal is here.

Yes, it's a $500 gimmick, but all it is is a roofing flamethrower that you can buy on Amazon for $50 right now. Yep. Yeah, that's all it is because you can have you can sell to the public a flamethrower in California and in the United States in general if the flame does not surpass 10 feet.

So all he's doing is just he's he's he should put this on Instagram with the Instagram ads because that's all he's doing. He's buying cheap shit and reselling it for. Yes, it's it's a publicity stunt. It's funny. So what? It is funny. Get over it. It's funny.

Yes, and they are they're definitely going to sell out there. They're almost. They did. Oh, they are. I think they did. Yes. Yeah. It was funny is I you know, before I lost my job, I was I was actually contemplating it because I thought it would be a cool artifact to have the boring company flamethrower. You know, it's it's it's it's a limited edition thing.

They'll probably be on eBay, you know, next week. But I thought it was fun. But 500 bucks is a lot. Let's let's be a lot for a for a fun little thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I scare people away enough. I don't need a flamethrower to do it. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need a flamethrower, Jason. No.

And we're talking about Apple before. And I did find an article in Gizmodo called how the MacBook Air changed laptops forever. And for me, this was a really nostalgic read because I don't know if you ever had a MacBook Air, Brian, but I did not. I was PC at that point. You missed out because the MacBook Air still to this day.

I have just a huge amount of love for that computer. It was it was the best computer I've ever owned. And even the first I mean, what the first 100 episodes or not 100, at least the first 50 episodes of the show, I used a MacBook Air for and they were great.

They were they were powerful enough. They weren't fantastic. I mean, you wouldn't want to run logic on it, but you could run sound studio. And that's all we needed back in the day. So I miss the MacBook Air and I hate the MacBook. The new MacBooks are useless compared to the Airs. And I'm sad that they haven't gotten an update because I love the form factor.

I love the weight. I loved everything about him. The keyboard was great. So this was a really good article in a real good walk down memory lane. If you are a fan of the MacBook Air.

Media candy. I am so glad it's screener season, Brian. I know you don't have I know you're on media overload right now, but for I have a digital digital screener. For Shape of Water sitting on my hard drive, that is probably not going to get watched anytime soon.

OK, well, so far I've watched LBJ. Jeffrey Donovan is JFK. Really too much burn notice going on there. I was expecting Bruce Campbell to be Bobby Kennedy, you know, because I love to burn notice. It was really weird. It's an OK movie. You know, three stars.

I give it a three stars. It's so hard because, you know, what these guys look like. Woody Harrelson is LBJ. He did a great job. I got to say he did an amazing job. Jeffrey Donovan is JFK. Eh, not so much. Now, speaking of people in makeup, The Darkest Hour. I started watching The Darkest Hour.

I haven't gotten through it, but it is eerie watching Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. Yeah, I've heard it's pretty crazy. If he doesn't win the Oscar for this, then there's just no justice in the world. I can't wait to finish it, but I was just like, I watched the first like half an hour twice because I was just like, so I just got so caught up in it that I forgot what I was watching and had to watch it again.

It was really great. I did watch Suburbicon, surprisingly. That was an entertaining movie. I thought it was going to be shit from watching the trailers and what everybody said. I thought it was an enjoyable movie. So I highly recommend Suburbicon. And you've got Matt Damon.

Oh, boy. And Bob Fogerty, friend of the show and fellow fiery of the Art of Charm, turned me on to the end of the effing world. This was it's on Netflix. Oh, my God. This is the best thing I've seen all year.

Hands down. The single best thing I've seen all year. It's an eight part, half an eight part, half an hour per episode series. This is the Bonnie and Clyde, the I would say Harold and Maude, but they're the same age. But this is one of the greatest coming of age stories I've ever seen in my life.

I cannot. I heard it was very good. I can't recommend it enough. I can't. Awesome. Yeah, it is seriously one of the best things I've ever seen. The second best thing I ever saw was Russell Howard's Recalibrate. I texted you in the middle of this saying you must watch this now. It is some of the best stand up comedy I've ever seen.

And it goes back to our, you know, our lighthearted feeling good about the world type of comedy that we were looking for. I just laughed. I laughed. It like wholeheartedly laughed. It wasn't a hate laugh, like, you know, watching comedy about Trump or anything like that. He's British and I can't believe I've never heard of him.

Right. He's amazing. I can't wait to see more from him. I looked at all around Netflix. This is the only thing they have. And he's apparently a pretty big TV star in England, but I got nothing on him. Now, let's talk about Zane Lamprey for two seconds. Friend of the show, I would like to say, because we've had him on and we are big fans of Zane Lamprey.

This next video came about because my beloved drinking jacket finally bit the dust. Through no fault of its own, there was animal intervention, I would just say. So I had to go look and see about the new Adventure hoodie.

Now, when they did the last Kickstarter and we had him on the show, you were going to buy one. I canceled my order. Did you get yours? I got mine almost a year later and it was right after winter ended. So it was kind of useless. I have it. It's nice. I haven't had much call to wear.

OK, I ended up getting the 2016 version. They just came out with a whole new line and I ended up getting the 2016 black camo limited edition one. This is the best hoodie I've ever owned. I got to say, they got better over time. So I was really worried that my drinking jacket would be dead forever and I would never have anything like it.

But this new one, I mean, it's not cheap. It's a hundred. Mine was $139, but I wear it every single day when it is below 60 degrees and living in Chicago. That's half the year. So I need a really good, you know, I invest in good clothes like that. I am glad to say that my investment in this hoodie is probably going to pay off for a couple of years because it is really, really nice.

Unfortunately, when I was going through the adventure site and getting my hoodie, I came across a new Zane Lamprey video called the tree video. Yes. Did you watch this video, Brian? This is his new thing that he's trying to do. Yes, it's quite amusing. So if you buy one of the new adventure hoodies on their Kickstarter campaign, they will plant three trees for you.

But he is also advocating that everybody, just everybody go out and plant three trees because now that he's been around the world and has apparently gone batshit crazy from being up in the stratosphere too long on his flights, he has fallen in love with trees. There are two shots in this video that I had.

I took umbrance with one of him is literally looking at a tree and rubbing it like he wanted to fuck it. He was rubbing this tree going, maybe you're going to be mine tonight. And the next one is he's talking about how, you know, we need more trees and they do everything and he's about to cry.

And I'm like, it's a fucking tree, dude. I know. It's a fucking tree. Yes, we need to plant more trees, but it's a fucking tree. You do not cry about a tree. There's no crying in trees. Now go back and drink beer and tell us about it because that's what we really want.

Oh my God. It was so bad. It was so bad. I'm like, I'm fine for planting trees. I am not anti-tree, but I am anti-tree fucker and anti-tree crier. Yes. I just want to say that. Counterpart, the new series is out on stars. I watched the first episode.

We covered it a couple of weeks ago with the trailer. Yeah. Interesting start. Interesting start. Unfortunately, they're rolling it out slow roll, so you'd have to subscribe to stars and then it will roll into you have to pay for it after your trial is up. Yep. So I will wait for it to finish, then get my trial, and then watch it all in a day.

I will actually probably wait. Since it's stars, I will wait until Ash vs. the Evil Dead comes out, which comes out in a couple of weeks, and then I will just watch them all in a weekend and then cancel my trial because there's nothing else on stars. If there was something there to keep, it'd be worth it, but there's not. Oh, man.

So this came to me on Facebook. It's Dr. Demento covered in punk. It's a new album from Dr. Demento. You had to be a Dr. Demento fan as a kid, right? Well, of course. Yes, of course. Always. Listen to his show regularly. Okay. Pico and Sepulveda, man. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I figured you had to be.

This is our wheelhouse. I used to have a little AM radio in Chicago. I'd get it in the middle of the night, and I would literally put my Radio Shack tape recorder next to it, next to the radio, and record it over the speaker at night so I could listen to it all week. I did the same. Yeah. It was so much fun. So this is a really cool album.

It's on Spotify. It's a lot of songs, and it goes back and forth between punk bands covering old classic Dr. Demento songs and vice versa. I don't know if you get a chance to listen to it yet. Yeah, I listened to it. It's great. It's really fantastic.

Yeah. There's an LA Times article to go along with it that'll be in the show notes that talks about the story about it, but I was so glad when I got this. Oh, a friend of the show, Calby, sent me this link, so I want to give him a huge thank you for that because that really made my day when I got it because I needed a pick-me-up for sure.

Very cool. Yeah, it's a really good listen. I highly recommend it to everybody. I mean, some of these songs I haven't heard since I was like eight years old. Yeah. So it's great. It's just great. Yeah. It is February 2nd. That means it's Groundhog Day is coming up, and Groundhog Day, the movie, is 25 years old this month.

Wow. I don't know if you've seen it recently, but man, does that hold up. It is one of the best movies ever. If you have not seen it, do yourself a favor. It is topical and timely, and it is charming. And we have talked a lot recently about things that just make us feel good. This is one of them. I'm going to have to go back and watch it again because I do love that movie.

I do. It's great. It's just delightful. Again, with our recurring theme of things that bring us delight. That's one of them. Moby is hit or miss for me. He sometimes brings me delight. Sometimes I could care less. But he's got a new song out. An album is coming called Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.

There's a song out now called Mere Anarchy. It is beautiful. I really enjoyed this song. It's fantastic. So I'm looking forward to the new Moby album. It seems to be a return to kind of his ambient pop roots, which I will. Well, actually, his roots technically are punk, to be fair. But the stuff I really like is his more ambient, poppy stuff.

And this sounds like it. So very good. I'm looking forward to the album coming. The Proclaimers Classic 500 Miles, impressively recreated using 127 movies. You can take your artificial intelligence, putting Nicolas Cage on everything and shove it up your ass. I want more of these things. This is hilarious.

It was incredible. Yeah. Yeah. I watched this. I just had a smile on my face. Like, I don't know who did this, but man, you've got way too much time on your hands because this is incredible. They're called The Unusual Suspect, and they have a YouTube channel, and they do this sort of stuff on the reg.

So they've managed to turn this. This is the wonderful thing about the Internet. They seem to have managed to turn this into a job. So, you know, this is great. It was very funny. It was very good. I do want to circle back on Moby for a second. I am generally ambivalent on Moby, but I did like this song quite a bit. It's worth checking out.

Yeah, it's a beautiful song. It's really well done. Speaking of music, Lisa Loeb just won a Grammy for children's album. I was unaware of the fact that Lisa Loeb has moved into doing kids albums. She's been doing it for quite some time. I'd like to speak for a moment about how shitty the algorithm is on Spotify, because if anything should be tossed up as a recommendation to me and what I'm playing on Spotify these days, Lisa Loeb should have turned up in my recommendations or suggested artists or something.

So I only found out about it because she won the Grammy and the new album is called Feel What You Feel. It's a kid's album. It's absolutely fantastic. It is in my list now with Casper Baby Pants and all the other things that my kid really loves. She's also got a YouTube channel where she's got short videos for all of the songs, which my kid loves watching.

So it's fantastic. Interestingly enough, the new album Feel What You Feel that just won the Grammy is not available on Spotify. It is an Amazon exclusive. I did not know Amazon was getting into the game that hard with music where they were actually doing original exclusive albums that weren't licensed anywhere else.

So interesting. Okay. Okay. Cool deal. I did find a new podcast this week, which I thought was pretty interesting. It's called The Boring Talks. Do they have flamethrowers? No, they do not. This comes from the BBC. And there are only two episodes out as of this recording.

And the first episode is about Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where an academic goes back and tries to figure out exactly when the day was that the Earth ended. Okay. It was fascinating to listen to this guy go through.

Oh, my God. The premise of the show is things that are really boring, but some people might find fascinating. And I found it unbelievably fascinating. The detective work that this guy does to figure out what the day is that the world is, I can't spoil it for you, is just amazing.

And it is such a good listen. It's only 22 minutes for the first one. The second one is about algorithmically priced books on Amazon. Also, sounds really boring, but not. It's only 11 minutes, so even better. It's shorter. But both of these so far, I love the show.

It is like I'm listening to it just going, why am I listening to this? And then I'm like, okay, okay. Okay, I get it. I get it. It's nerdvana. That's all it is. It's just nerdvana. I think it's going to be great. Awesome. I'll check it out. And Wired had an article, since we're podcasters, I want to throw a quick shout out here to podcasters everywhere.

Turns out, turns out, you always have to have a turns out, podcast listeners really are the holy grail advertisers hoped they'd be. What we're seeing from the iTunes numbers that have been coming out, which I think are terrible and terribly low, but what we're hearing is that people actually do, for the most part, listen to the entirety of a podcast.

So, yeah, I mean, looking at our numbers for our show here, people make it 80% on average, but a lot of people make it all the way through. So, for generally an episode, you know, we're in the thousands of hours of listen. So, thank you, everybody who sticks with us.

Appreciate it. Yes, thank you. Preach. Preach. At the library. I finally finished a book. I'm very excited about this. This one, actually, I got off of NPR.

They were talking about it. The author, Daniel H. Pink, was being interviewed. It's called When? The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. It was really interesting. Basically, you know, it's a deep dive into the rhythms that our bodies actually go through, scientifically proven.

And basically, with some real life tips about what you should be doing to kind of figure things out for yourself and basically live a better life and a more productive life and get things done that you want to get done. You know, the basic premise of there are basically two types of people. We fall on the spectrum about how long, when we go to sleep, when we wake up and the kind of dips and curves that we experience throughout the day, which basically what I found out is I'm doing absolutely everything wrong.

So it's by the time I wake up and the actual period of time in which I try to get most of my work done, which is when my son takes a nap, that is the exact point in time where I'm at my lowest peak in terms of being able to do creative type work.

I'm much better at doing bookkeeping and things like that is better at that time period. It's really fascinating. It's a good read. It's not he's he's a good enough writer that even though it's mostly just science and kind of kind of boring stuff, he keeps it interesting and he keeps it well written. So it's worth a read. It's short and it's got a lot of practical tips in it.

And hopefully I will start to try to get some of them into my life. But it is hard to it's hard to make changes, man, especially big ones when, you know, he extolls the virtue of the power nap or what he calls the nap a China drink a cup of you drink a cup of coffee and it takes, you know, 20 minutes before it kicks in.

So you pound a cup of coffee, you go down and you take a nap usually takes you five minutes or so to be able to fall asleep. You do 10 to 15 minutes sleeping at the max. And when you wake up, the coffee kicks in and you're refreshed. I've got to start trying. Dude, I do that with Paziz all the time because Paziz is the best app nap app that's out there.

And it is. It really works. And I love Daniel Pink. He was an he was a guest on my former job. Sorry to bring that up. We've talked to him. We've talked to him before. I am a huge Daniel Pink fan. His other book to sell is human is really good. I highly recommend that. It's the surprising truth about moving others.

It's a real good sales book if you need to learn about sales. But Daniel Pink's awesome. And he did Drive and a couple other books. I have nothing but good stuff to say about Daniel Pink. So I will definitely check this one out. It's a really enjoyable book. Yeah. I'm surprised I didn't get this. I usually get. Maybe I threw it away.

I get stacks of books every week from publishers. And I may have recycled this one accidentally. Sorry, Daniel. Oh, man. So I've been listening to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Great book. It is so far.

I unfortunately have not finished it yet, but I threw it in here because I started it. I'm about halfway through. Really dig it. Really dig it. It's a good book. It's like really good sci-fi. And what I think I like the most about it, though, was her intro to the book is just talking about we're not, you know, telling the future.

We're liars. We're science fiction writers. We lie to you. And that's all we're ever going to do is lie to you. So sit back and enjoy it. Don't take this as gospel. This is a fun story. Get on with it. Enjoy it. And I am. I totally am. Cool.

Yeah, I think it's great. So I'm glad you're finally getting around to read it. It's a total classic. So I think I'm going to have to pick up more of her books, though. That's the downside. I like her style. It sucks to find a new author. I know. Actually, it does. Going back to the media overload.

I love her style. I like how she writes. And once you find somebody where you like how they write and you can jive with it, then it's the worst thing ever. Because then you have to go read more. Yeah. Security?

Ha! We're back with Dave Papa Bittner. How you doing, Dave? I am doing well, gentlemen. How's everything going on your end? Listen to the beginning of the show if you want to know. It was an interesting week for sure.

All right. Well, you know, best wishes to you. I hope everything settles down and ends well for you. Thank you very much. You know, I had an interesting week myself. And if we want to rewind a little bit, you know, we have all agreed that none of us had actually ever seen – had a personal experience with someone using a Mac being infected by any sort of malware, right?

Correctamundo. Correct. And we had even checked in with Patrick Wardle, who's one of the best-known Mac malware researchers. And he, you know, had agreed that they were few and far between. Well, guess what happened this past week to me? Oh, do tell. Do tell.

So I get a call from my father and my elderly father. My father's in his 80s. Both of my parents are in their 80s. And I'm lucky to still have them around. And probably like you guys and many of our listeners, I am my family's tech support. Ain't that the fucking truth.

I have come to answering the phone and saying, hello, Dave's Lifetime Unlimited Tech Support. Dave speaking. How may I help you? So my father calls me and he says, as he often does, Dave, there's a problem with the computer. Can you come help me fix it? And I do. And I, you know, I remind myself that as much of a pain as it may be in the moment that, you know, my parents have been very helpful to me.

And there's nothing that I'm doing that makes me too busy to spend a few minutes with my parents. So I spent a glorious four hours on Sunday afternoon at my parents' house. How glorious was it actually, Dave? Well, so I'm going to try to take us through the story here of what happened.

Now, keep in mind, some of this I didn't actually witness myself. This is described to me by my father, who, to his credit, is a copious note taker. So I'm pretty sure it's accurate. He got a call from one of his credit card companies that said one of his credit cards had been compromised.

This was midweek last week. And, okay, you know, that happens. That's not unusual. The next day, he was logged on to his banking website, which he does regularly to do his, you know, various banking things. And while he's on his banking website's page, a pop-up pops up, and it says, Your computer is infected.

Please call this number. Right now. So he did. And he spent an hour on the phone with these people. Probably giving them access to everything that they wanted. Well, fortunately, you know, one of the, I don't know, side effects of my father being in his 80s is that he does things very slowly.

And like I said, he keeps copious notes. So he was writing things down as he went. And fortunately, he didn't give them anything. And as I said, about an hour into the conversation, he thought to ask, Wait a minute, who are you people? I don't know who you are. Are you the bank?

And they said, Oh, no, we're, you know, such and such computer security company. And basically, what they were trying to do was sell him some kind of, you know, super crazy antivirus software for the low, low price of 10 years of service for $1,000.

Holy Jiminy. Yeah. Wow. We talked about this last week that a friend of mine got sucked in by that. And I thought that she should just be not allowed to have a computer for the rest of her life. But, man, $1,000. Hers was $99.95. Well, I don't know.

I don't know if they just, you know, sensed that maybe they had a big fish on the hook or whatever. I don't know. But he hung up with them and had not done it, you know, had not turned anything over to them, had not allowed them to talk him through doing anything on the machine itself. And to his credit, he called the bank and the bank said, Yes, you know, that wasn't us.

Our website will never do that. And, you know, they were very helpful at the bank. And then I was the next phone call after that. So I go over there and, you know, not really knowing what I'm in for. And, of course, you know, I know probably more than most people about this stuff. But I'm not a malware researcher.

I certainly have a lot of experience on the Mac going back to, you know, System 7. So I know my way around a Mac. And he has a MacBook Pro. It's an older machine. Did you zap the PRAM first? Yeah, several times. You know, because if you don't do it just once, it doesn't take.

So I did it several times. No, you got to at least do it two or three times. The more you zap it, the better it pees. That's how the PRAM works. How could it hurt? So I start digging around, you know, on things. And sure enough, what I discovered was the Chrome browser had been taken over by another search domain that looked just like Google but wasn't Google.

It was by all, you know, and I didn't notice it at first either. I mean, at first glance, you think, oh, here's Google, except it doesn't have the word Google. And basically what was happening was they were functioning as a... It's gurgled. Welcome to gurgle. Exactly. Right, exactly.

So it was functioning as a man-in-the-middle attack. Right. So anytime you would open a new tab, it would open up this other search engine, which was, I have it written down here, searchfdm.com, which if you want to go actually Google, they are, you know, up to no good.

So now, you know, the game is afoot. Now we know there's something going on, and we're starting to track this down. We have quantified shenanigans. Let us move on. Right. Exactly. So, you know, go digging through the system, looking for things, looking for downloads that shouldn't be there.

And sure enough, find some stuff. There's a file called gotoopener.dmg, a disk image, that was downloaded a few days ago. There's an installer. I open the installer, see what it looks like, you know, find the image. Well, it turns out probably what happened was is that he got hit by one of the, wait for it, fake Flash Player installers.

Oh, man. He should listen to our shows. How embarrassing when it's your own father. So, and of course, you know, he says, well, I didn't update anything, and it's quite possible that he didn't.

Who knows? You know, there are other people. My sister uses his computer sometimes. My kids use his computer sometimes. You know, I can certainly see someone in, when they want to get to what they want to get to, they just click OK to get the pop-up out of the screen. But anyway, so, you know, went searching around, downloaded an antivirus software, had it run, and sure enough, it found a couple of things.

One of them was a file called adware.flashfree. I hope you didn't download Kaspersky. What was interesting to me is how many of these files really weren't trying to hide themselves. You know, they were called adware.whatever. You know, there were probably half a dozen files that were boldly labeled adware.

We're stealing your money, .dmg. Yeah, yeah. Bendover.dmg. So, went through, got rid of all those, loaded up actually a couple of Patrick Wardle's tools from his website, Objective C, to see if there was anything that was trying to establish persistence.

You know, you can check to see what's loading when you boot the machine up. So, that was helpful. Didn't find anything there. And so, as far as I can tell, like I said, after four hours of going through and cleaning things, and then also doing whatever updates I could do to the machine.

It's an older machine, so he can only get up to El Capitan. And there were a couple of updates that he hadn't installed. I think we're back to where we should be. And, you know, fortunately, he didn't lose anything, didn't lose any money. But I can now say that I know someone who had their Mac infected, and it was someone close to home.

It still wasn't a virus, though, because that's what we talked about originally. It's like, when you get these things, they're adware. Right. So, we have an adware hit, but we still don't have a real virus. It still qualifies as, yeah, user error. Yeah, absolutely. It is absolutely user error.

So, that's story number one. Story number two. We can round this one out by saying, Dave's father doesn't love him enough to listen to his show. So, I'm sorry, Dave. I'm going to pat you on the back and say, my father doesn't listen to this show either, so it's okay. If it had been my mom, we would have been fine.

Right. Yeah, my father is one of those people who would probably say, what's the podcast? What does that mean? How do I do the podcast? What is, I don't know what that is. Yes. And that's fine. You can always tell, you can always tell when they add the podcast or, do you got the ways?

Are you doing the pot? Yeah. What I used to hear from him all the time was he would call me up and he'd say, Dave, I'm having trouble with the safari. There's a problem with the safari. Yeah. That's great. I literally had the puppy police come to my house today because with the new puppy, they send around the puppy police or the puppy patrol to make sure that the dog has found a happy new home and you're not mistreating it or anything.

Pulled one over on him, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've got your puppy now. So the woman they sent over was, you know, I don't know if you've dealt with a rescue in the past, but to work at a rescue, you have to be at least 65 years old, a woman, and bat shit fucking crazy.

They do attract a certain type of person, don't they? Oh my God. And so she's like, I'm the technologically not savvy. I don't have the email again with the, the, it was like, I go to the library to get my books. So, uh, if you need to get in touch with me, you can call my cell phone and leave me a voicemail and I'll get back in touch with you.

And she, she saw the picture of Bam Bam on the wall today and thought that it was the greatest thing ever. So she's like, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, you know, artwork done of my dog too. And then she called me after she left. She's like, can I get the information for the person who did that? And I'm, I'm, I hate to tell you, I'm not on the email.

So if you can just tell me what the phone number is, I would really appreciate it. I'm like, yeah, this is a website. Okay. This is what it takes to be on puppy patrol. Yeah. So that, that's story. Number one, story number two is a little quicker story.

Uh, you know, as we've talked about to Facebook's ability to, uh, read our minds and and all that sort of thing. I actually have, this happened to me today. Um, we moved into new offices in the past month or so here at the cyber wire. And, uh, it's actually a new office building that we're in.

We're the only people in the office so far. So it's mostly empty. And one of the side effects of that is with so much empty space in the office, they're still figuring out how to fine tune the HVAC system. So there are times when it's very cold and there's times when it's very warm and I'm not a complainer or anything, but, uh, I went out and got myself a little, uh, thermometer so I could know exactly how cold it was and how warm it was.

Well, built into this thermometer is also, it also measures humidity. So I hope you bought it from our show notes from three episodes ago when I bought the same damn thing and I get at least a nickel back. Yes. Yes, I did. Yes. So, so now I'm obsessing over the humidity because, you know, I talk, talk for a living and the humidity is way too low in here.

So I'm thinking to myself, all right, well, I just need to buy a humidifier to go in the little, you know, my office, my studio here where I am. 10 bucks says you didn't use the link in the show notes to the humidifier that I recommended. Good for the God's sake. This will go on all day.

So just power through it, Dave. Power through it. So I'm thinking to myself, I should buy a humidifier. I should look into that, see what I, you know, need. And then today, sure enough, I fire up Facebook and the first ad that pops up from Amazon is humidifiers. Right.

My jaw hits the desk because I didn't tell anyone I was looking for humidifiers. I didn't even say the word humidifier. It's funny, all I get are ads for fucking maple cookies because Jason won't shut up about that either. There it was. There was an ad for humidifier. So, of course, I've come to the only logical conclusion, which is somehow Facebook has mind reading capabilities.

This is the only possible logical conclusion. Not the fact that it's flu season, that it's not that it's winter, not that hundreds of people are getting humidifiers this time of year. Nope. Facebook is listening. Come on, man. Sheeple. The truth is out there.

Yeah. So, I got a humidifier. I covered it with tinfoil. Because they don't say it's Wi-Fi enabled, but I know. I know. Anyway. Welcome to the Internet of Moisture. Yeah. So, that's story time with Dave.

All right. And then, so let's go to some real stories here. Let's run through these a little quickly. I know I chewed up a lot of time there. But I put this one in here for you, Brian. There's an article from Security Week called, It's Time for Machine Learning to Prove Its Own Hype.

Well, surely there's an AI that could do that for them. That's right. It's an interesting article. Yeah. I read this. I liked it a lot. It was a really interesting article. Yeah. So, check it out. The part I liked, they were comparing AI to alchemy.

And one of the gentlemen interviewed said, alchemists invented metallurgy, ways to dye textiles, our modern glassmaking processes, and medications. Then again, alchemists also believed they could cure diseases with leeches and turn base metals into gold. And they all died from lead poisoning. Yeah.

And I think there's a lot to be said there. They had lack of humidity. They had very dry, scratchy throats. But I think there's something to be said there as a comparison to AI. So, it's an interesting article. So, check it out if you get a chance. Our next story is actually about a new Bitcoin mining botnet.

It's called Smominru. With an exclamation mark. Say that three times fast with no humidity. And it's actually funny because sometimes on the CyberWire, you know, on our podcast, I find myself having to pronounce words that it's likely no one has ever actually said out loud before.

Like, Smominru. Is it Smominru? Is it Smominru? I don't know. You know. So, I just figure I'll say it. You say Smominru. I say Smominru. Right. Let's get the whole thing with Bitcoin. Let's mine the whole thing off. But this is an interesting evolution in botnets where rather than being used for Bitcoin, they're being used to mine cryptocurrency.

So, as we've talked about in the past, one of the big things about botnets is if that you don't know that your computer or your camera or your DVR has been taken over by some sort of botnet, then you'll be blissfully unaware that anything's going on.

So, for the people who create these, if I can create a Bitcoin mining botnet and I dial it in so that Bitcoin mining botnet is only using, say, 20% of the CPU capacity of the devices I've taken over, nobody will know.

And for the people who do it, what's nice about that is nobody's looking for it. It doesn't draw attention to itself. It's not like you're holding it for ransom or, you know, you're actually doing something to other people that would have them come after you. They're just basically stealing your electricity and your processing power from you and you're none the wiser.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Fun times. So, is there really a crime? Well, you know, yes. Actually, yes, there is. Never mind. Yes, there is. Yes, there is. But it's kind of that, you know, if I stand out front of your, if I stand on the sidewalk in front of your house and I read a book by the light of your lamppost, am I stealing electricity from you?

No, you're not. No, you're just creepy. But if you walked up to the front door, used a coat hanger to turn on my light to read your book, then yes, you are stealing. Because I wouldn't be using that electricity otherwise. Right. All right. Yeah. I'd agree with all that.

Okay, we're going to go through this real quick because I think this is, it's an old story at this point, but we had to bring it up is because we talked about Strava and Brian's use of Strava in the past and the fact that, yeah, Strava was giving away the secret location of army bases because somebody turned on geolocation.

Is this Strava's fault? I say no. No, it is because, no, the problem, that's not the, this, this information didn't get out. The secret US army bases didn't get out because individual users were using it.

It got out because Strava decided to release heat maps that they thought they had de-anonymized, which they fucking had. You can't de-anonymize large data sets. That was the problem. We all know this. Look at, I mean. Yes, you can. Look at, yes, you can. I just took a class called data ethics that talks about it.

Right. Remember. It talks about how you de-anonymize these things. And that is exactly what happened. Yeah. I want to talk about the old days with AOL when they de-anonymized data. The first thing people did was go back and recreate the data and, and re, you know, put people's names with the search results.

Remember that? We're agreeing. We're, we're totally agreeing. Sorry. I thought, I thought you were saying that you can't de-de-anonymize data, which you can do. So we agree. Okay. I was just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, who's taking over Brian's body? But that's, but can you de-de-de-anonymize? But that's why Strava is at fault.

Yeah. Only if you run it through, uh, what's the, those BitTorin chopper things? Yes, tumblers. Tumblers. No, so that, that's, that's why it's Strava's fault. Cause Strava released this data with the full, they, they had to have known that somebody would be able to piece this together, that it would not remain anonymous.

So it is Strava's fault. It's totally Strava's fault. They just, nobody should be putting out this data without some understanding of what's going to happen, especially when it's as invasive as tracking as, as heat maps of where people are walking and where people are going. This was ridiculous for them to do this and to think that, that nothing was going to happen.

Yeah. And it's one of the, so says I, so say it Brian. It's one of the guys I work with here. Who's a former military guy was saying that, um, it's not like things like army bases are big secrets. So this notion that it revealed bases where there weren't any and that our adversaries wouldn't have known that there were bases there.

That's a little much, but yeah, a little dubious reveal patterns and we finally got area 52 and reveal patterns and where people are going. Yeah. We actually talked about area 51 over on the cyber wire related to this is one of my proudest moments.

Was this where they were looking for the new flight attendants for the, the plane service from McCarran? Oh, I don't know. You know, years ago, 20 years ago, uh, I was, uh, I interviewed a guy who swore that, um, he had seen the alien spacecraft at area 51.

He was a, he said he was a former pilot. He was like Nixon's pilot. Like he flew air force one and he swore he had seen the, uh, alien spacecraft at, uh, area 51. Jason, we're, we're on heavy use of the tangent. I know that sounds, sorry.

No, it's good. Um, yeah. So, I mean, this happened, it shouldn't have happened. They should have realized that releasing this much data was going to cause a problem. Um, the interesting thing to me is, uh, we're really going to see, uh, if the, if it's true that there's no such thing as bad publicity, because Strava was just such a like subsidiary kind of offshoot social network that really wasn't taking off.

And, you know, it had some crazy users who really loved it, but it wasn't going mainstream. We'll find out if it goes mainstream or not now. Oh, this could have just been a PR play. Well, that's, I, I'm not suggesting that that's what it is, but I am curious about the, the no bad publicity aspect because they are getting a lot of bad publicity about it, but it's also getting their name out there because a lot of people had never heard of this before.

And that might be interesting. Uh, life hacker has a very long and convoluted article about how to keep Strava from telling everybody where you live, uh, blocking your privacy and your data for that. It's just, it's a, it's a, it's a fucking setting. No, it's three screen. No, no, you obviously did not read the article, Jason.

It's actually, apparently it's rather granular and quite confusing. They have, they're, they're even worse than Facebook in terms of their privacy settings. Oh, I can tell you how to not share your location data with Strava. Uninstall. You're stepping on my joke, Jason. The one thing I pulled from that article, the most private solution, as you may have guessed, is not to use the app at all.

Professor Falcon. So yeah. Damn. And then the, uh, my, my particular tangent and what I thought the most interesting thing of this entire Strava brouhaha was, is a Jarvis Island, the cycling hotspot. That wasn't, this is Atlas Obscura even got in on this. There is an, uh, a tiny Island in the middle of the Pacific ocean that is basically just bird crap.

And if you, as part of this heat map that Strava has released, it's bright, bright white burning because a company called Zwift that is, uh, does the virtual rides for, you know, your, your bikes at home use that Island as one of their maps. And it was one of the most popular islands in the thing.

So there are people who bike riders who, you know, in the snow would hop on their bike in their house and do the stationary cycling would go to this Island and, and use Strava. So it was one of the most popular places on the entire planet is this tiny uninhabited Island. That's weird. So it wasn't actually using the GPS.

How are they getting the, yeah. How are they getting credit for being there? If there's just like one guy riding around the Island taking video. That's crazy. I have no clue, but apparently like they, they would enter it in on, you can somehow enter in that. That's where you manually input your location. It wasn't like going from a device.

I guess so. Okay. I gotcha. Yeah. Pretty interesting. That is really funny. Oh man. Um, I have one final video here. If you've ever gone to a hotel and have had one of the safe lock hotel safes in your closet, which I think we all have at one point, the, the lock picking attorney has done a video on how to check to see if they have changed or not changed the default password.

So it's a, it's a quick little YouTube video where you can, where he teaches you how to go into admin mode and check to see if it's a openable by the default password. It's, it's fun. It takes three minutes and you will change your mind about using those hotel safes is all I'm saying. I'd never use them anyways.

Why? I mean, why would you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a good, it's a good little eyeopening video. Uh, so yeah, do check it out. All right, guys. Well, this has been a, a very interesting jaunt around the horn as it were.

So yes, you know, that thing about the Island, did you guys ever see the video with, or if you guys heard about that Island, it's full of deadly snakes. Yeah. Yeah. And like the, the, the job of what whoever's coast guard it is to just basically keep everybody off the Island because you step onto the Island, you'll basically just be attacked by deadly snakes.

Like really deadly. Not literally on the map. It says there'd be dragons. No, really. There'd be dragons. Yeah. Stay away. Don't go on this Island unless you're as, uh, I guess, what do they call them? Herpetologist. Um, stay off this Island because, uh, it's overrun with deadly snakes who I guess eat birds and stuff, but, uh, I don't know.

It seems like a David Attenborough video in the making. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we'll end with that. Right. All right. Tangent for the win. This week on the Island of grumpy old deadly snake islands. So there we go.

All right, guys. Next week.

Board Panda is such a great site. Uh, even though I don't have the time to be bored much anymore. I love the things that I ended up finding over here. Jason, you and I both live this life. Um, this whole thing. Uh, it just made me laugh hilariously company hilariously box, stupid client requests shows what happens when you do everything that they ask.

Uh, there's no point in talking you through this. This link is in the show notes. It's awesome. And it is exactly what Jason and I have gone through. And if you have ever worked for a client and done a design work or anything like that, you have done this too. You have lived this life. You have lived this life. It's awesome. Okay.

I'm going to have to go check that out then. Cause yeah, I love board Panda and it's, it's interesting. Board Panda is one of the companies that got really screwed by the new Facebook algorithm changes. Yep. Yep. Yeah. They're one of the, uh, the poster children for don't put your business on Facebook. Yep.

Now this one came to me through a friend on Facebook, ironically enough, still didn't cheese rolling competition canceled due to quote unquote disappointing lack of enthusiasm. And then the article says cheese rolling is no longer seen as cool.

Organizers said, and you don't say, I just love the fact that up until last year, cheese rolling was something that was apparently considered cool. And we could have done that apparently, apparently. Oh, I love it. I love it. Now this is one. I hate Dan Brown.

I hate the code. I hate all of his books. I've read two of his books and they were drivel. I hated the movies. Tom Hanks, shame on you for doing those movies, but he has just donated 300,000 pounds to Amsterdam's Rittman library, also known as the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica House of Living Books.

Yes. So they can basically, uh, digitize 3,500 occult manuscripts. Now, the, the funny part about this was I found this story from a tweet from someone that had, uh, CC'd William, or actually it was a retweet from William Gibson who somebody had tweeted him.

It's like, stop it, stop it. Because the tweet was, uh, uh, basically saying that, so we ran this, uh, this data set against AI and now we're having dragons show up in our office. So yeah, this will be an interesting AI data set for the machine learning to, to go from.

But yeah. Yeah. Uh, either way it was funny. It was probably funnier at the time, but anyway, it's, it's interesting that he's got enough money to do this. So there are a lot of people that like really bad books in the world is what I learned from that. Now, yes, there are one thing that I learned from the state of the union address this week came from Clayton Cubitt on Twitter.

Uh, apparently those cutaway shots to the people that, uh, the president peppers the audience with and bring it brings around. They're called Lenny Skutniks. So there's a name for those people. I did not know that. Did you know that? I did useless knowledge.

I love useless knowledge. That's why I listened to so many stupid podcasts, but yes, it's a generic term for notable people who are invited to sit in the gallery at the state of the union address or other joint meetings of the United States. So Lenny Skutniks. So there's a, there's a link to the Wikipedia article about it and who all the previous Lenny Skutniks were.

And this year, there are some Skutniks in there. I'll tell you that. Yes, there were. We would like to thank Atari Max, who is our new Patreon subscriber this week. Thank you so much, Atari Max. Great name, by the way.

Yes, very cool. Thank you. And over at PayPal, we got direct donations from Adam and Mark. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Over on Twitter, all of the Bitcoin writes in, would love to hear your thoughts on Siffy's Happy. If you had the chance to watch it or not, I'm enjoying it so far.

And I'm sorry to hear the Schulmeisters caught the kiddo crud. Yes, it's like I said, it is the the fluborous that's going around over there. I feel better soon. Congrats on the certification, though. No, thank you very much. No, have not watched. I went and took a look at it after after getting the tweet.

Looks bizarre, interesting, bizarre, crazy. But I got to clear up, as mentioned, some some of my media slop to be able to make room for something new. So I'll bookmark that and come back to it. If you're you're enjoying it now that I've got the Xfinity DVR electro thing, I can I can actually I can record it and watch it amazingly enough.

So I'll snag a copy of that for sure. And Josh P. Greenberg tweeted us. This should be right up Brian's alley. Pay what you want for 65 plus hours of ethical hacking training from Engadget. Don't want to be ethical or a hacker or you want to be ethical. Yeah, you don't want to be trained.

OK, I do want to be ethical. Yeah, I'm not really I'm not a white or a black hat hacker or a gray hat hacker coding hacking, all that sort of stuff is I'm just too old. Yeah, yeah. These days. So, yeah. And I'm sorry that I'm dubious about people who say pay what you want for this great product we have.

I'm like, yeah, that's kind of a yeah, that's kind of a red flag. So I did that pay pay what you want for that first Radiohead album and that Radiohead album. Yeah, there you go. So again on Twitter, Wontrafree says Apple 2 came with a basic interpreter and a manual. Can kids now find products so accessible and capable?

Actually, they can find products that are unbelievably way more powerful than a basic interpreter. Swift. You can get Swift for your Mac if you have a Mac. He mentioned the Apple 2, so I'm guessing he's still in the Apple ecosystem. But Swift, you can program damn near anything.

And there are amazing. What is it? Just tutorials for kids that they put out for the iPad on how to program games like Apple is killing it with how to get the kids into the ecosystem. So, yeah, there's a ton of stuff out there. I am jealous of the stuff that these kids can do now.

And it is free. I mean, you have to have the iPad and the, you know, the computer and all that stuff. But you can learn how to program that. So, not very free. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to have the computer first. But once you have that, you can learn how to do it. Yes. They're not going to give you a tin can, some string, and say, make an iPhone app, kid.

Damn. Yeah. And Chris L 1977 writes, using Laura to target scammers sounds like a really bad slash illegal idea for anyone in the civilized world. That's why we said caveat emptor on the old Laura. We said caveat, yes. And Matt Hatter RH writes in, looks like Google is still expanding selfie search in the U.S.

Was driving me crazy that I couldn't find it in the app either. And this is talking about the how to compare your selfie to an old piece of art. Yeah, I deleted it. So, I haven't gone back and looked yet. Yeah, I will say this is very poor timing and a poor planning on Google's part because the hype is way too high for what it's actually going to be.

You're just going to be disappointed when you get it now. It's not that great. You missed the boat there, Google. Way to go. Yep. Ben Stanley writes, have you guys watched Counterpart on Stars Network yet? That's really good. You mentioned that earlier. So, scroll up. Yep. Random Funk writes in, hey guys, any suggestions for cross-browser bookmarks?

I'm having to use Chrome and Firefox and would like the same bookmarks on both without adding them to each one every time. Thanks. Check out Xmarks. That's the only one that I know that does it. Yeah. I used that when I transferred over to Opera. So, it worked really well. Cross-browser. So, that worked great.

So, check that out. It kind of worked really well. I'm not saying it works that well. Yeah. It kind of worked. It did the job. If you're doing a little caveat emptor. Yeah. A little bit. Exactly. All right. Over at iTunes, we got a bunch of five-star ratings this week from all over the place.

The first is from Ed Hardis in South Africa. The Top Gear of Geek Podcasts. I love that. They are to geek podcasts as Top Gear was to car TV shows. I appreciate the ones as well. Yes, thank you. So, you're not referencing the new disgustingness of Top Gear. So, yes.

Thank you very much. That's high praise. High praise. Thank you so much. That made my day. When I said that, I'm like, well, damn, that is high. That is good praise. Next one comes from Filtering Craig from the U.S. Great podcast. I can't remember where I heard about the Grumpy Old Geeks, but it fills a void in my podcast listening.

It gets a little geekier than some of the other tech podcasts I listen to that skew towards business. Great stuff. It's the kind of podcast that I can only recommend to certain people. Ain't that the truth? That's awesome that it serves a specific audience so well. Well, we do our best. Thank you. Yes, thank you.

Our next five-star rating is from Berserker in Hell. Great name. From France. This is Straight Up Fun, the fourth straight episode now. And I just want to say thank you for making every Monday in the office so hard not to laugh at some of the stuff in the podcast. Absolutely love it. Thank you very much. And this one I'm dubious about.

This comes from The Real Beach Mama. Because it says, this podcast is pure negative energy and it belongs in the depths of hell. Good podcast. Don't. And this is a five-star from The Real Beach Mama. We kind of know The Real Beach Mama, and I don't think.

Yeah. Will The Real Beach Mama please stand up? I'm not sure if I'm buying this. Yes. If that's you, thank you for hanging in there all these years. That's pretty amazing. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And as always, please tell a friend. Closing shout-outs. Quick shout-out to my Nerdy Sanchez rotating cast of pub trivia teammates for the $100 win last week and just narrowly missing out on making the citywide tournament.

It's been fun. It's always fun. And a shout-out to Bay City's Deli and the delicious godmother sandwich that they make, which is the only reason I'm alive right now. That's the first sandwich you got from Uber Eats, wasn't it? It was. It was. And then they jacked the prices on it, and it ended up becoming stupid to just not drive the four blocks to go get it.

Oh, man. Look at me for remembering that, though. How crazy. My shout-out goes to my AOC family, all my friends who got fired this week. Love you all. We'll do something again at some point. And thanks to all the listeners of the show who have been hammering me on social media asking what happened.

And, like, again, I would like to just reiterate that Jordan didn't fire me. AJ Kazerowski fired me. And the AJ stands for Amateur Jordan, I would like to say. And thanks so much for listening to the show. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month, and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 245. 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. Well, that was a fun sloppy mess. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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