246: Ground Control to Grumpy Tom

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. What a week, Brian. Indeed. We kind of dropped some bombshells last week on the show. Letting everybody know that the entire Art of Charm podcast team was fired was definitely a bit of a bombshell. But I like now to announce the Jordan Harbinger show. We rolled right into it. We busted our ass. We've already got two episodes out the door and more to come.

So I'm very excited that we're back in the saddle. We unfortunately don't have the whole team back together yet, but we're working on it to get the whole crew back together. But for now, you know, got a bootstrap starting from zero. So if you were a fan of the Art of Charm, check out the Jordan Harbinger show.

And if you know people that liked the Art of Charm, please tell your friends to go check out the Jordan Harbinger show because we are literally starting from zero and we could use your help. I'm sure you'll be fine soon enough. We'll make it. We'll make it. But it's a lot of work. But we did get to interview Mark Garagos for the first episode, the celebrity lawyer.

Turns out I never knew this about him. This made him a lot cooler in my book. For a little while in the 80s, he was a tour manager for Susie and the Banshees. Yes, he was. I remember hearing that. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, actually. Pretty damn cool. Yep. So that's my week. How are you doing, Brian? You got some follow up for us?

Sure. We got tons of follow up here. Actually, so much follow up that I actually pushed a lot of the follow up to other parts of the show. So let's get rolling. This is a long one. First off, we got some Bitcoin news. Okay. Bitcoin is basically being looked at. The regulations are coming in the U.S. after top financial cops and lawmakers raise new fears about the virtual currency.

We have talked about what's going on all across the world with Bitcoin. We've got different countries banning it, different countries trying to regulate it. People started to realize that, hey, we're missing out on our taxes and all these other things are going on. And there's all sorts of fraud that are hurting our people. So that's starting to finally happen here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission both are looking into what they're going to do and talking to the Senate about it. So this open and free and clear crazy market will not be lasting too much longer. I think it's safe to say. The gold rush is over.

Time to grow up and put on your big boy pants. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of talk about growing up on this episode. Next up would be the little scooters that everybody's riding around in Santa Monica. Santa Monica, we've talked about the bird and what's going on here with the city of Santa Monica suing the company because they didn't have any licenses to run their businesses and things of that nature.

And then the city finally saying, look, it's a motorized vehicle that you're putting on the streets. Like, there are rules about this. And if you're not going to stop people, then we're going to start policing it. And that's exactly what the city has started to do.

Now, to be fair to the city, they certainly have put out the warnings. They basically said, look, you got to wear a helmet. You have to be over 18. You have to have a license. You have to have all these other things. And if you don't have it, we're giving you a ticket. And so they started to put out tickets and people are pissed and they're tweeting left, right and center about it.

Santa Monica City just gave me $190 ticket for riding a bird app scooter without a helmet, tweeted local software engineer and entrepreneur Scott Lowry. That's the last time I spend any time or money in Santa Monica, except for when they forced me to go to court. I'm like, good, leave.

Take your damn Prius with you. Get the hell out of here, Scott Lowry, engineer and entrepreneur. I was reading this article and I thought the funniest thing about it is the CEO of Bird's name is Travis Vendor Zender, which totally sounds made up.

It is. It is a very funny name. And actually, as of this morning, I was I was walking the kid out down by the beach and Bird has paid for a plane to to drag around a sign saying, Bird, enjoy responsibly. Like it's a beer or something.

Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you just give away the helmets when people rent your scooters? What's wrong with that? Well, they can't. They probably can't afford to add the helmet to it. And then they'd have to have a locking mechanism because people are animals and they'd just be stolen. And there's a million other reasons why they probably don't want to do it. So, yeah.

Besides, they thought they'd make a quick buck to doing something that was vaguely semi legal. So, well, you know what you need to do, Brian, is you need to go start a helmet rental stand down on the promenade. That's a good idea. Yeah. Figure out where people are dropping off. I will not be doing that. But that's a good idea.

All right. It's kind of like it'd be like having a bowling shoe rental place like outside. Yeah. Now, after our last year's long bet between us, whether your Twitter stock would actually make any money or not. And you squeaked by it, made money. And I got you beer that you enjoyed responsibly. Like you enjoy your birds.

Well, I don't know how responsibly I enjoyed it, but I definitely enjoyed it a lot. Twitter has apparently finally made money. They've made a profit and their stock has gone up considerably. So, unfortunately, we sold too early. Again. Story of our life. However, as that headline made the rounds and everybody was talking about it and Twitter was enjoying a field day in the press where they were talking about everybody was saying how great they were doing.

And they finally made some money and all that. Not so fast. Yeah. Where's that other shoe? The folks over at Recode actually went through the financial numbers. Their revenue did not – they haven't made more money. They haven't grown their business. They've made a profit because they've cut their costs.

Yep. Not quite the same thing. Firing a whole bunch of people and having a lot less people and taking down salaries and cutting research and development and cutting sales and marketing is not making money. That is spending less money. So, good for them.

I mean, you've got to do it somehow. But incredibly misleading press. Absolutely misleading. How are they spending so much money on R&D? I was looking at these numbers and like, okay, so they cut the budget for R&D down and now it's going to be like almost $80 million. And I'm like – What are they doing with that money?

What the fuck are you doing with $80 million on R&D for Twitter? Come on. Give me the $80 million. I'll just come up with a new service that's better. I'll tell you. Somebody got paid $80 million to go, let's double the character count. That was about, as far as I can tell, the amount of research and development that went into Twitter all last year.

Anyways, we talked last week about some of those software packages that are using AI to take celebrities' faces and slap them onto porn stars or put Nicolas Cage in every movie known to man. This has gotten a lot more press this last week with Fox doing a really deep dive article into it called Why Reddit's Face Swapping Celebrity Porn Craze is a Harbinger of Dystopia.

We're creating in a much larger and more educated way exactly what we were saying last week, which is the fact that we are rapidly rocketing towards the place and time in which reality no longer has any meaning and you cannot trust anything that's digital. It's interesting that before this, there were a couple subreddits that everybody was swapping all these videos and photos on.

And in response to this article, Reddit, Discord, Pornhub, Giphy, and a bunch of other people have actually moved to shut these communities down. Because when I was reading the article at the beginning, I wanted to go check out deep fakes and see what was there, and it's already been banned.

And so has celeb fakes. Both of those subreddits are gone, daddy gone now. Yeah, still rather easy to find any of these stuff. There's a link directly from the Vox article. So I did look at them. I don't know if you looked at any of these. No, I didn't. I mean, it's just like anything else.

Some of them are crap, but some of them are frighteningly spot on. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, it is weird. Oh, man. What are you going to do? Well, the world's over, man. We're all going to burn. Speaking of the end of the world, have you seen these Keanu Reeves Squarespace ads?

I blanked out during the Super Bowl, so I missed them. I went and looked at them after you put them in the show notes. So it's certainly – you can't stop Keanu being Keanu, can you? No, you can't. I mean, I didn't see the Super Bowl ad until later, but I did – they're all over my Instagram feed.

I cannot go like half a page without getting another Keanu ad, which comes back to my other point is as soon as I use a service, then I get ads for the service because I use Squarespace for my personal site now. I'm like, yeah, guys, I know. I got it. I'm paying you. Shut up and leave me alone already.

But the Super Bowl ad where he's like actually standing on the motorcycle, I guess he actually did that, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. I got to say that for sure. I think just one of my favorite things about the entire internet is the sad Keanu meme.

Yeah. Let's go back to that. So we've been talking about Alexa and Spotify for a while and how hard it is to get it to play certain things. And the other day, I just wanted to try something because I was listening to something on my laptop and I went in the kitchen and I was cooking some food and I'm like, I wonder, I just wonder if I can get it to just pick up where it left off from my computer.

Turns out you can. Really? If all you say is, yeah, if you just say name of device, play Spotify, it will start your playlist where you paused it in the other room. That's pretty nice. And it'll just pick right back up. Yeah. So if you're having trouble getting it to, you know, do the playlist you want, just, you know, start it on your phone or your computer and then just tell the Echo to go ahead and play it and it should pick right back up.

It should, but also completely defeating the purpose of having a voice controlled mechanism. Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying that this is the way things should be. I'm just telling you how to work around it because it doesn't work half the time. Most of the time. Almost every single artist that I listen to via Spotify is now completely inaccessible and I've had to make fake playlists for all of them.

It's ridiculous. It's getting worse. It's actively getting worse, not better yet. What the hell are you people doing? You're multi-million dollar companies. Billion dollar companies. Billion dollar companies in some cases. And you just keep fucking everything up. I don't get it.

I guess it's $80 million of Twitter R&D development. I was going to say, you know what it is? It's all that R&D money that's going into, you know, just, you know, research and destroy is probably what it's for, but yeah, it's terrible. It's just all terrible. And speaking of, well, hopefully not terrible, but reboots just don't have a good track record, but I'm hoping for something here.

Our friend of the show, Zane Lamprey, we talked to him a bit about him last week. Maybe the whole tree thing and the adventure hoodie thing isn't working out for him because he has started the official Bring Back Three Sheets campaign. Three Sheets is by far probably one of the best travel programs I've ever seen in my life.

It was totally about drinking in different cities. It may have been its own thing at a particular time in his life and our lives that made it so good. Maybe we'll find out. Maybe we won't. Who knows? But he's definitely pushing the campaign. Unfortunately, he has to get to a million followers on the Facebook page, and then he will pick his network partner for the show.

They're only at 20,000. That's a long way to go. I just started liking it. Hopefully, after, you know, people, everybody here, the grumpy nation will hear it, and then they might get to 21,000. But, yeah, it's, look, I am, here's the thing, you know, I saw this and I got really excited.

I'm like, yes, let's bring back three sheets. And then I'm thinking, you know, that was a long time ago. Zane was a lot younger. I was a lot younger. You were a lot younger. We drank a lot more back then. And now I'm thinking, this just might be a little bit sad, unfortunately, if it does come back.

But, you know, I want to be optimistic. Again, we've seen reboot after reboot after reboot, and it just rarely goes well. No, it doesn't. And, yeah, look, like I said, I'm optimistic. I've been watching some of Zane's videos on his YouTube channel. They're not that good.

I'm sorry, they're not. So, I don't know. And I don't want Steve McKenna back. I'm like, can I like this with a caveat that Steve never comes back? Yeah, just lose him the first episode. That would be great. They should have thrown him from the train on Chug.

In the news. We spent last week tearing Facebook a new a-hole. Going to do a lot more of that this week. Oh, yeah. They are not doing well in the news this week.

They need some PR, but it's not really happening. First up, we've got two former Facebook and Google employees that have gotten together to fight tech addiction. The campaign is dubbed The Truth About Tech. We've got Roger McNamee, an early backer of Facebook, and Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google.

I wonder if he took your course. I wonder if he did. I was, like, thinking, well, let me get to that in a second. On the website, the campaign states that Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are not neutral products, but instead are part of a system designed to addict us, as has everything that's ever been sold ever.

But I agree, it is getting more assiduous. And the company has received over $7 million in funding from non-profit media watchdog Common Sense Media. Hey, Common Sense Media, throw us $10 a month on Patreon. We've been talking about this and screaming about this for fucking four years.

Almost five in two months. Almost five in two months. So, yeah. I mean, good. I'm glad that the people are out there trying to do something about it, and I'm glad it's getting funded. Nobody cares. Here's the thing, and this is the interesting thing about what's going on with Facebook right now. This is kind of that turning point where people might start leaving in droves.

And I lost another 10 people this week, by the way, who have just outright quit. The problem is there's nowhere else to go. That's the thing. Yeah. When MySpace went under, they went to Facebook. When Friendster went under, they went somewhere else. Amazingly enough, LiveJournal is still in business, but it's owned by the Russians, so what are you going to do there?

But there's nowhere for people to go, so maybe they'll just go back to the web and it'll be – or real life. Maybe people just go back to real life and we can stop doing this show, but doubt that. Now, Facebook is also in trouble up in Seattle. Seattle's election authority said on Monday that Facebook is in violation of a city law that requires disclosure of who buys election ads, the first attempt of its kind to regulate U.S. political ads on the internet.

Now, Facebook has been trying to tell us that they're going to be much more forthcoming and they're going to give all this information because of everything that happened with the Russians. Apparently, that's not happening even at local levels. Facebook is not disclosing details about spending in last year's Seattle city elections, so the city is now suing them.

The penalties could be up to $5,000 per advertising buy, which is considerably more expensive than most advertising buys on Facebook are and definitely not what they're worth. And so we'll see what happens there. So Facebook in trouble once again with the city coming out and suing them. But they have so much money.

It's like a $5,000 fine is nothing. It's nothing. It's just bad PR for them. Yeah, it just looks bad on the surface. And continuing the Facebook looking bad on the surface, you found this article. I just think I just beat you to putting it in there. So I think you have a lot more comments on this.

This is how Facebook is killing comedy over on Splitsider.com, which I've never heard of before. I didn't even know that Funny or Die was owned by Facebook, but apparently it was. Yeah, yeah. Did not know either. So I guess they're just buying everything on there. So Mark Zuckerberg walked into Funny or Die and basically just fired everyone a couple of weeks ago.

So, yeah. Apparently, maybe they made a bad joke about him. But yeah. But then the CEO, or I guess the CEO or somebody from the company took to Twitter, as one does, when you've been fired by Facebook, I suppose.

Well, that's what I did. You're not going to post it on Facebook. Yeah, that's true. They probably lost his page. Oh, man. So then he started a basically gigantic rant about how Facebook has destroyed comedy and not just comedy.

I would like to add just almost any creative medium because people are posting everything that we've complained about about Facebook. Yeah. Everything that we talked about from the day we started the show about you should own your own content. You should post your own content. You should be in control of your own content. And nobody has ever listened.

And now it's starting to bite everybody on the ass, isn't it? Finally. Good. Maybe you'll get the fucking hint. You know, even in. I found this one really interesting because I've been following getting getting back into following Chris Hardwick more recently. He posted a really long rant on Twitter last night or early today about how Instagram and Facebook are useless and you have to pay to get to your audience.

And we're like, I'm just like shaking my head. I'm like, no shit. That's what they've always done. You think this is something new? And what, you know, it's, you know, he's like, they need to be regulated. They need to be this. I'm like, no, it's very simple. Just stop using them.

If you don't want to give them the power in the first place to get to your, then just stop. Don't be there. People will find you someplace else. If your content is good, his content is good. And he's just rebranded his podcast. So he's like, you know, big into this marketing push now.

And he's finally realizing that, yes, Facebook and Instagram are worthless. If you are a brand, if you are trying to sell something, it is utterly useless. You just have to give them bigger and bigger buckets of money. And you still barely get any recognition from the people, you know, we've tried boosting posts and a bunch of companies I work with have boosted posts and paid for Instagram ads.

And, you know, you're, you're fighting against the wind and it's like every step. You just got to pour more and more money into it with almost no return. It's like, that's the thing there. There's next to no return anyways. Even if you get the friends, even if you get the likes, even if you get the hearts on your, on your Instagram photo, it rarely translates to anything real world.

Exactly. They're not going to your website. They're not downloading their, your videos. They're not giving you money on Patreon. They're not, you're getting a thermal bullshit. That means nothing. It's social media masturbation that you have to pay for. At least, you know, normally in the real world, if you're going to pay for something, you at least get like, you know, hand job.

But no, you're just getting a couple of thumbs stuck up your ass and saying, have a nice day. It's, it's a waste of time to, to spend any money on these things. And I think fortunately for us, it's taken us five years, but we're finally, I think, going to see a tipping point soon where people just stop spending money on these sites because they, you know, they're not going to give you anything back.

Maybe, maybe we'll see. Now, this one just came across last night. We're recording a day later than usual because Jason lost internet and everything due to the torrential snowpocalypse that you had yesterday. So I didn't get a chance to peruse this as much as I'd like to, but it scared the crap out of me when I did see Facebook patents tech to determine social class.

You might want to start unfriending some poor people before clicking on that credit score ad. They have put out a patent and I, there is a nice little graph and bar chart in here of how the patent, how the rough algorithm works to basically tell what class you are in.

Are you middle class? Are you upper class? Are you lower class? And they're going to start keeping this data along with all the rest of the data that they have on you. And it, I mean, just looking at it, it's like, they don't even know what the middle class is. None of this makes any sense. It's crazy. Yeah.

This is crazy. And it's terrifying. It's kind of like what we talked about with China, where they were using your social score as part of your credit score. Yeah. And it's here now. Facebook is going to do it themselves. It's not a government entity, but it's Facebook, which is actually kind of bigger and scarier in some ways.

Yeah. I mean, they're the biggest country in the world. If you go by population, Jim Carrey is finally on the grumpy bandwagon. And he's telling all of his followers to get rid of their Facebook accounts because Russia, his thing is Russia. My thing is a little bit more nuanced because, you know, that's, that's what we talk about.

We talk about the nuance, but he's just like, yeah, they, Russia screwed with the elections and, uh, but I wonder if he's still on Twitter because I think Twitter probably had a bigger hand in the whole thing, but, uh, yeah, you go, Jim. No, I mean, I agree. So good on him. Yeah.

Yeah. I wish I didn't. Don't think it'll do much, but I really wish I didn't need it for work. We need it for this podcast. We need it for sadly. Yeah. I mean, not to get likes as we've already discussed, but this is where I get like a lot of our news stories are things that just pass through the feed. So it is what it is.

Yeah. I mean, I think mine is about 85% RSS feeds, 15% Twitter, and maybe half a percent Facebook for mine, but it's how I rule. Uh, this one I actually found, uh, from a friend, a friend of the show sent me this one as Facebook stumbles, Twitter and Snapchat show new life.

Now, since I have comments. Okay. All right. But, but you go ahead. No, I mean, what it basically is, is that, okay, everybody's pissed off at Facebook, uh, Twitter fake made some money and Snapchat is going to do the one thing that we all wished everybody would do.

And you have a timeline for your friends and you have a timeline for marketing, which is going to fail fucking miserably, but cause nobody's ever going to look at it. It's like, Oh, that's the marketing tab. Why would I ever look at that tab? And here comes my comments, which are based almost like they're entirely basing what they consider to be stumbling and showing new life on stock price.

Yeah. And stock price only. Facebook stock price went down because they broke up their newsfeed. So it would be friends and pages. And that's, that's, so Snap is about to do that. So their price is going to go down. And as we previously stated, every single article about Twitter doing well is a lie.

They've just cut their prices. So this article is complete and utter full of shit. It is all wrong. I know. I love it. That's why I had to put it in here. It drives me crazy. There is nothing correct in this article at all.

We've just went through the whole fucking thing. Yep. That's why I, that's why I had to put it in here for you. At this point, I'll take fake news because the real news is fake. Oh God. Okay. Oh man. Yeah. Cause my friend was, she's like, Oh, Snapchat is so big with all of my friends and it's growing and everybody's going back to Snapchat.

And she sent me this article and I read it and I'm just like shaking my head going. Yeah. Yeah. You should, you should actually listen to the show sometime and we'll tell you what the, what the deal is, but it's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. And I love, here's what I love about this because Facebook has been stealing so much crap from Snapchat and you know, putting them under for like Facebook was taking the good ideas that Snapchat had implementing them in, you know, Facebook and Instagram.

Snapchat takes the one idea that is the dumbest idea that Facebook ever had and caused their stock to drop and they're going to implement that. Yeah. Way to go, Evan. Good, good, good knowing you. Hopefully you cashed out a bit of that stock because yeah, way to go.

Yes. Well, and in keeping with the theme of the things that make us miserable about the online tech experience, Lifehacker has the mobile apps that people regret using. This isn't terribly surprising. It's basically exactly what you'd expect. More misery is caused by social apps, dating apps, mobile games.

More happiness is caused by meditation, reading, music, podcast, and fitness apps. Yeah. And this is a hack fucking job from Nick Douglas, that piece of shit that used to live with me. I would recommend going to humantech.com slash apps dash ratings and see the actual numbers there because what I loved, I was looking at the numbers on, on the ones that people hate.

And I'm sorry, everybody who's joined our Clash Royale clan that we're making you miserable because they are number 15 on the list. I'm so much happier than you guys because I left. I still love playing and talking to everybody there, but yeah, my playing this week has been very much down because I had work to do, but I still like playing it.

It's fun, but yeah. Nice. But yeah, Candy Crush Soda Saga. That's one that I went down the rabbit hole on really hard. I got like a thousand levels into that thing. A thousand. One thousand plus. And yeah, I was miserable. I was addicted to it. I couldn't get rid of it.

And then one day, one day I just said delete, but I think it's, I think it's pretty good. But yeah, definitely go check out the other link that'll be in the show notes. Fuck Nick Douglas. Don't give that guy any clicks. Okay. There you go. Well, you know, it's the one I found now. Amazon has announced that they will be delivering whole foods produce, at least in a test basis in a four or five different cities.

I can't exactly remember which, and that's obviously they deliver for free if you're a prime member. I mean, we all knew this was coming. Oh yeah. And, um, you know, it's genius. I mean, I, of course I'm going to use this. Why wouldn't I? It's free. I don't have to go to the whole foods anymore.

I basically buy the same thing twice a week. They'll send it to me. I'll just have my list. It's done and done. Um, so over at slate, uh, this guy, I'm trying to grab his name here really quick. Cause I scrolled away. Jordan Weissman. Um, he writes the downside to this, as we all know, I'm an economics writer.

Like many of my peers, I spent a lot of time worrying about how America seems to be developing a monopoly problem. Or if you want to get technical and ugly, ugly, oligopoly problem. My mouth is not working today. Thank you. Uh, profits are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful companies, particularly in tech.

There's growing evidence that this industry consolidation is disempowering workers and maybe even making the U S less entrepreneurial. I can't escape the feeling that by buying my groceries at Jeff Bezos is everything store. I'll be helping to usher in a future where our lives are even more thoroughly dominated by a few corporate Bemis.

And that would be, but I'm still going to do it. Yeah. Behemus. Yeah. I'm sorry. Uh, yeah, no. That's the thing. It's like, you know, I hate, I hate myself every time I buy something from Amazon fresh, but at the end of the day, my groceries show up sometimes.

Yeah. Well, about 50% of the time. Uh, but yeah, if I can't leave the house because I got, you know, circumstance, I can't leave the house. And they're the, the most cost effective option for me to get my groceries delivered for the things that I need. Um, so it sucks.

It really sucks, but there are no, there's no such thing as a mom and pop store anymore. So, you know, yeah. Okay. Where do I go? Do I go to Jeff Bezos is everything store, or do I go to the jewel who is owned by another corporate behemoth? You know, it's like you're shopping at one big company or another.

I'm not going down to Joe's, you know, shit that I need right now. Shack to, you know, pick up some razors and shaving cream. No, it doesn't exist anymore. That stuff's gone. So that's true. It's like, okay, which company do I want to give my money to?

Well, I'll give it the, I'll give my money to the one that's going to sell me the shit the cheapest and show up and give me the stuff. And that turns out, unfortunately, is Amazon most of the time. And, and I can already get a lot of stuff from Whole Foods on, on Amazon pantry. I'm not in that top five cities that they're starting with.

So I'm not going to be able to try this for a while, but there's definitely some Whole Food stuff that I can get. It is definitely still pricey though. It's still a whole paycheck at the end of the day. But yeah, I mean, it is what it is. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? And speaking of that, it is what it is. And what are you going to do?

It's going to get a little more complicated and difficult for us to do these show notes near the end of the month at this point, because Wired has put in a paywall. Once Wired visitors cross the five story mark, they ask to pay $20 per year to continue reading with the added bonus of no advertisements. Now, 20 bucks per year, I'm totally cool with.

I love this. And he is saying paywalls make content better. And I agree. So I am going to pay them their 20 bucks a year. Yeah, that's fine. You know how much it costs to subscribe to Wired's print magazine a year? A lot more than 20 bucks. $5. That's it? It costs five bucks to subscribe to the print magazine every year.

I have a Wired print magazine subscription. And last year, I got it for $5. That's crazy. Is that one of those ones that's offered through some third-party thing, so they'd slash prices left, right, and center? It was in the mail from Wired, because I used to be a subscriber, and they found out that I moved, and they sent me one thing, and it was five bucks.

But either way, even if for 20 bucks, I'll pay 20 bucks a year for Wired, because I like Wired, and I like to support them, even though they're owned by, you know, another corporate behemoth, but I don't know if they're still with Condé Nast or not, because it was that big shakeup, because Reddit and Wired got bought by Condé Nast like around the same time, but I don't know if they're still with them, but I don't know.

I can look that up. But either way, they're still owned by another corporate behemoth, but I still like Wired articles for the most part. We made fun of one last week or the week before where they really shit the bed, but... Yeah, I mean, you know, they're not all great, but in general, they do a really good time. I'm fine with giving 20 bucks a year.

You know how much... I mean, I'm spending 80 bucks a month on the New York Times just for the Sunday paper, so that's going out the window now that I'm unemployed, but Wired, definitely. I get more value out of that 20 bucks a year than the 80 bucks a month I get from the New York Times.

Right. And speaking of the New York Times, their digital paywall business is growing as fast as Facebook and faster than Google. Apparently, people like to pay for news. The publisher's online subscription business, which they began in 2011, has now cultivated over 2.2 million paying readers, an additional 400,000 or so pay-for-the-time standalone crossword and cooking apps.

Wow. What's noteworthy is how quickly the business is growing. The paper brought in 340 million in online subscriptions for 2017, a 46% spike over the previous year. Even more impressive, that's also the average annual growth rate since its paywall started in 2011. That equals Facebook, which grew its business 47% last year, and it's much faster than Google, which grew at 23%.

They should really thank Trump, because that's... Yeah, that really is. That's the only reason that everybody's paying for the new... That's why I'm paying for it. I want good journalists out there. Yep. I want good journalists, too. And they've done a really good job of advertising themselves and placing themselves in that position, so... Yeah, and fortunately, with my pay...

With my... You're going to have to go buy your own subscription soon, because once I get rid of the paper, your free... Your freebie goes away. I don't know if you still use it, but... I do. Yeah. Yeah. I'll see what we can do. Maybe we can get a grumpy old Geeks account so we can split it, but... Right. Yeah, no, I love...

I tell you what, I love having them on my iPad in the morning, because I've gotten back into the iPad lifestyle. Especially with that crazy new case I got with the strap on the back. I love that thing still. It is so great. So I use it all the time. Between that and the pencil, you know?

I'm sorry, Steve Jobs, you were wrong. The pencil rocks. The pencil is nice. Yeah. So I use that, and I read the New York Times every morning. I ended up having to unsubscribe from all their emails, because they sent me so many emails, and I'm like, I'm just going to read the app. Forget about it. Yeah. I do love what they're doing at the New York Times.

What pissed me off, though, is when, okay, they're showing, you know, all of this amazing growth, and then they still raise the price on the print edition, which I'm like, that kind of sucked. Yeah. All right, so Ford has now patented an autonomous police car that can issue tickets. Fuck you, Ford.

I love you, but fuck you. Basically, everybody said that, too. So once the autonomous police car identifies a vehicle that is violating traffic laws, it pulls the vehicle over, captures an image of the license plate, and receives an image of the driver's license, assuming that a human driver is behind the wheel, and can then determine whether to issue a warning or a ticket.

I don't know how it makes that decision. Obviously, it must be AI. Maybe it's got boob recognition. Maybe. Tear recognition, like, are there boobs? Are there tears? Okay, you get a warning to move along. Apparently, the vehicle will make this decision by looking through records of any prior traffic violations associated with the driver, and if clean, then a warning may be issued.

The autonomous police cars can be trained via machine learning tools to find the best hiding spots to nab speeders and other types of traffic violators, which is a load of crap. I hate you, Ford, even though I love you, but I hate you now. Why did you do this? And of course, of course, they have to state that, you know, they're arguing that the deployment of these cars will not take away police officers' jobs, but free police officers up for more difficult tasks that can't be automated.

I don't know if you've seen the cops around here, but that's the only job they have. More donuts. Just kidding, guys. The Alphabet Uber trial, I think, is already over. Did they not? This is an article I had in the show notes that was going to be like day-to-day updates on it that I was going to tell people about, but as far as I could tell, Uber's paying Alphabet off now, so I think that's what happened.

Yeah, I stopped giving a shit a long time ago, you know? It's like, we thought it was going to be the trial of the century, and then it turns out it was just a flash in the pan, so I really stopped caring. I'm like, okay, a bunch of billionaires are swapping some money around. I wanted the guy who left, you know, Google and went to Uber to go to jail, but once he was recused, the guy who started his own techno religion, once he was recused from the case, and I'm like, ah, this is boring now.

If he's not going to jail, then I don't care. Yep. I had another article about Uber, but this is actually more about Recode. This is their second bad article of this week that I was pissed off about. The article title is Drivers Don't Trust Uber. This is how it's trying to win them back. It's then an insanely long article, and the answer to the title is in the URL.

You'll see tipping at the end of the URL. That's it. There is nothing fucking else in this article that relates to the title at all. Not a single goddamn thing. So thanks for wasting my time there, Recode. I don't know what the hell that article was supposed to be about or what the title should have been, but that was an utter waste of time.

And I do like to point out the one bit of news that I got in there, which I kind of already knew, but it just got a firm number, and I had to grab it and put it in here. Uber still loses $1.46 billion a quarter. Wow. And it is one of the most widely valued companies on the planet because it loses $1.46 billion a quarter.

And this is why I fucking lose my mind every time I load my browser these days. Yeah, $6 billion a year that they're losing almost. And one of the biggest companies in the world. Yeah. Oh, man. Just as an aside, because I didn't put these things in the show notes because I was so angry about it.

I was just starting to lose my mind anyways. And I don't know the exact numbers here. We can look these up later. But I remember seeing right after the SpaceX did their launch, I remember seeing somebody post, SpaceX has raised less money than Pinterest.

Think about that for a second. But they're still losing it all every time. But at least they have a business model. They've raised less money than Pinterest, and they actually do something. Yeah. You give them stuff and a check, and they put it in space. Pinterest?

What the fuck do they do? We steal other people's copyrighted content all across the internet. That's about it. That's what we do. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, God. I get so angry. All right. I'm going to keep getting angry now. Okay. Here we go. MoviePass, the $10 a month movie subscription service that sounds too good to be true.

You have bought into that. You love movies. This is a fantastic deal for you. You're going to make tons of money. Before you begin, I want to tell you a little story about MoviePass. I got my MoviePass card. I paid for it for three months. I used it a total of zero times.

There you go. This is the entire... Okay. So what they've done is they've gone and interviewed the CEO, which... Where's his name right now? Low. I can't remember his first name. I didn't get that. Sorry. But his last name's Low. Mr. Low, the CEO. They interviewed him and said, how is this ever going to make any financial sense?

How are you ever going to make money? And he said, I have many genius plans, basically. His genius plan is he hopes everybody does exactly what you did. The gym, club, operator plan. That's it. That's the genius plan. That's all he's got. The only other thing that he has is, we're hoping to build a very large subscriber base and sell their information.

Oh, my God. Well, you know, and here's the thing. It's really hard to cancel MoviePass once you get it. I mean, friend of the show, Chen, uses hers all the time, and she said she loves her MoviePass. I, on the other hand, am stuck at home. I can't go anywhere anymore. So I didn't use it.

The best way to cancel almost everything on the internet is to call your credit card company and say, you lost your credit card. Everything. I'm getting, like, Blue Apron doesn't bother me anymore. GrooveBook doesn't bother me anymore. MoviePass doesn't bother me.

All they do is they send me notifications to say, update my billing information. I'm like, nah. Oh, hey, speaking of that, Patreon subscribers, we have a small bounce rate from you guys. So you want to check your credit cards? Thank you. So, yeah, well, I guess we just told people how to not pay on Patreon.

How to stop paying for us. Way to go, Brian. That was your genius move there. Yeah, but you're the one that told them they can do it on Patreon. Way to go. Okay. But, yeah. No, I mean, it has turned out losing my credit card, or actually having some guy buy a martini on a Virgin America flight at 3 in the morning turned out to be the best thing for me, because I called American Express.

I'm like, I'm in my living room. And Virgin America is saying that they are trying to sell me a martini. And they're like, okay, cancel the card. We'll send you a new one. Like, okay, whatever. And now everything just magic. I have a lot more money and a lot less auto delivery shit going on.

It's great. Because a groove book that you turned me on to is incredibly hard to cancel. Incredibly hard to cancel. Yeah. I wouldn't know, because we're going to be using that forever, because, you know, kid. Yeah. You know, I thought about paying for it, but I'm like, eh, I'll just keep them on Instagram, and I'll print a book whenever I want.

But it's cool that the stuff that I have are cool, but I've never looked at them. Like, they come in, I flip through the pages, I put them in a closet, and I never look at it again. Yeah, we basically just hand them off to parents and grandparents. Yeah. Yeah. But again, since I don't leave the house anymore, I'm like, eh, it's like when I was out doing stuff and having fun, it made more sense.

But, you know, I'm homebound now. But so we talked about the loveliness of Tronk. Remember Tronk? Yes. Dumbest named company in the world that owns the Chicago Tribune. It's apparently not doing so well right now.

But this guy from L.A., Patrick Soon-Shiong, has decided to buy the L.A. Times and San Diego Union Tribune back from Tronk. Good. And somebody posted something very interesting. This goes back to your Pinterest. He bought both of these papers for $500 million.

That's less than Blue Bottle Coffee got bought for. That was the other stat that I was trying to remember that went along with that. You nailed it. So, perfect. Thank you for remembering that. No problem. Yeah, they're like, Blue Bottle Coffee sold for more than that. And this is the L.A. Times and the San Diego Tribune.

Look, something's got to happen. The L.A. Times has gotten worse and worse. In fact, I heard on NPR the other day, they were talking about this, and they said that this deal has come down too soon because in a recent article in the L.A. Times, they spelled Los Angeles incorrectly. Oh, my God.

In the Los Angeles Times, they managed to misspell Los Angeles. Oh, the end times are here. The end times are here. Oh, man. You know, we talked about Elon Musk and his little rocket thing going off this week.

I loved it. I loved watching it. I loved it. I love everything about it. Everybody that's complaining about it and about him sending one of his own cars up into the universe can go suck it. It's awesome. My ass. He should be able to do whatever the fuck he wants. Watching those two rockets land side by side, a tear fell up out my eye.

I got to say, I got chills, and I was just like, that is the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen. I'm sorry. It took me a long time to figure out what happened to that middle stage. Somebody finally let me know because they never mentioned it on any of their feeds, but it didn't make it, let's just say. But so on the burn to send, you know, a spaceman to Mars, well, they kind of overshot.

So apparently the Energizer bunny is running the show over there. So yeah, it's going off into the asteroid belt, but it's still fucking cool. May go a bit further than that. And I'll have an image in the show notes and it'll be from Star Trek Voyager that somebody's already modified.

I love that. This is a friend of the show. Brian Blondell sent that to me, and I just started laughing hysterically. Having just rewatched all of Voyager, there is the scene and the episode where they find an old truck and they've replaced it with his roadster right there. It's very funny.

Very funny. And I got to say, hat tip to Elon for putting the Don't Panic on the display. I popped hard for that one. I thought that was amazing. It was very cool. What's not amazing, though, is my brother is still waiting for his Tesla Model 3.

And so he got an update next year. Early 2019 is when he can get it. And what he says is, seems Musk is more determined to shoot cars into the void than deliver them to customers. So yeah, he's not getting his for quite some time.

Ups and doodads. I actually had to do a bit of web work this week, which was shocking in and of itself. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I know. It was all right. It was for a friend and it was quick enough. But I had to basically save out an entire web page to do a mock-up of a couple color changes and things like that.

And it was just a lot easier to do it in Photoshop than to actually code it out to see what's going to go on. And I was like, I don't even know how to do this anymore. Am I going to take a bunch of screenshots and stitch them together? There simply must be a better way. And there is. A lot of you may already know this, but I either did know this and completely forgot about it or never do it in the first place.

But you can save as PDF. Yep. And that saves the entire page. And it's beautiful. And it goes right into Photoshop. And it's fantastically quick and easy. Either way, it's led me to no end. So I just thought I'd share that with you people. I appreciate that a lot because I have a bunch of extensions built into my browser that I've downloaded and done to do full screenshots of web pages.

And I never once thought about printing the PDF. That is fucking genius. That's all you got to do. It is fantastic. It's so fast. It's so easy. And I was just like, oh, that is great. I bet some people need to know this. Totally, man. I'm used to saving as PDF for receipts.

Every time I get a receipt on a page, I always save it as a PDF and throw it in Dropbox so my accountant can go through and put it in the ledger. But I never thought about that for just getting the whole page as a screenshot. It's genius.

I love it. Thank you. It's fantastic. No problem. Now, I ran into something over on Dangerous Minds, which is a great website. I go and visit them on the regular at least like once a week now because they're another one of those great sites that have just been destroyed by Facebook. Nothing ever appears in your feed anymore.

But they have the collectible Hieronymus Bosch figurines. I love these things. I love these so much. I mean, I had to print to the Garden of Earthly Delights up in my room from high school easily until my mid, potentially late 20s. And if I didn't have a kid, I'd probably buy every single one of these things.

They're a little bit too messed up and probably a little too fragile to have around for the kid anyways. But these are gorgeous. These are beautiful. This is so cool. And it's funny. I was actually just looking at that painting on the Google app when I couldn't figure out how to do my, you know, my selfie to get my art back.

They have like a super zoomable version. So you can just go down to like, and you can see the brush strokes on the thing. So it was really cool. And I was looking at it the other day. And now these figurines, I maybe I'm going to bookmark this right now. So maybe when I get a job, I'll be able to be able to pick one of these up.

But they're super cool looking. Yeah, they're very cool. So I had some follow up with the SodaStream, which then ended up matching with a comment we got from Dan on Facebook. So I'll read his comment first because it fits here perfectly. I heard you guys talking about the SodaStream and it replacing sparkling water.

Do they have natural flavors? We've been buying from Trader Joe's because we hate the taste of the fake sugars. All right. So here we go. I went out and I bought a whole bunch of stuff to give it a test. I got their Mr. Pete because I very rarely drink soda, like rarely, maybe twice a year.

I'll have soda. But if I'm going to have soda, I'm going to fucking have Dr. Pepper because I love Dr. Pepper. Mr. Pete is supposed to be a knockoff and it tastes absolutely nothing like Dr. Pepper. Yeah, it is disgusting. So that went into the trash immediately.

Do they have Mountain Fu? I don't know. It's the only one I bought because, like I said, the only soda I really want to drink is Dr. Pepper. So that was a massive fail. If anybody's tried the other ones that are supposed to be Coke or whatever. No, don't do that. It's just chemicals.

Here's what I do with my SodaStream. I just use lime juice or lemon juice to give it a little bit of flavor. That's exactly where I was going to get to. So they also sell some of the flavors. They taste a little bit chemically as well. The one that I found was okay was lime. I tried orange and lemon. They both were a little chemically.

Lime was fine. You can add a little bit of lime juice yourself. You can add a bit of lemon juice. I drink it fast enough that I can actually put some fruits or vegetables in there and they won't get rancid because I will go through one of these a day anyways. I cut up a little cucumber, throw it in there. Cucumber. The devil's fruit.

It's delicious. It's delicious. Disgusting. So I do that, slice up a couple slices of orange in there itself, you know, straight up, just cut up an orange and drop some orange in there. Tastes delicious. Now, are you doing this before you juice it or after? No, no. You do the soda thing and then before I seal it up and put it in the fridge, I'll add a little fruit.

Okay. That's what I was wondering. But I didn't know if you were carbonating with the fruit in it. No, no, no. I added in after just so you get a little bit of the flavor. Okay, cool. Yeah. I just, I put a squirt of, I've got, you know, lime juice and lemon juice from concentrate and I just put a little squirt in, in done.

That's where I go. But your sound's way more complicated. Cut up something and put it in. How complicated is that? It's more complicated than squirting. I tell you that. All right. I like to squirt. Anyway. I guess we go straight to the Blade Stunners story now.

No, we're going to talk about FB Purity first. Since I do hate Facebook and having to use it so much, we talked about FB Purity before. The plugin that lets you, you know, just change the layout of Facebook. And the most important thing, always have it set for most recent newsfeed.

Yes. Love it. I finally, I dropped 20 bucks to the developer this week because I'm like, this guy has saved me so much time not having to just even go up to newsfeed and change the most recent and refresh. I would have done that a thousand times by now. So I gave him 20 bucks and because I want to support software developers where I can.

And if you haven't tried FB Purity, check it out. And if you do use it, drop the guy a few bucks because he is making your life a lot easier. Damn right. After you've dropped us a few bucks. Patreon.com slash QOG. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You always got to, you know, put your mask on first. Us first. Before you handle the children's eyes.

We're the mask that goes on first. Let's be completely, completely honest here. So friend of the show, Joey Rabier with had one of the most controversial episodes that we've ever done. Sent me a, he sent me a link called blade stunners inside the Chinese sex doll factory, making smart robots that can also talk, play music and even do the dishes.

Now it's that last line that where I, that, that, that hooked me. I'm like, wait, she can do the dishes. I'm in. And then I read the article. I'm like nowhere in the entire article. Does it talk about doing the dishes? At one point it talks about what they're trying to do is have them voice enabled like, like an Alexa that will be able to, you know, turn on home devices.

So if you have an internet enabled dishwasher, you could tell her to turn on the dishwasher instead of telling Alexa to do it. But either way, and I know that this, this line, I just, it was perfect for you. X doll has ambitions to apply artificial intelligence to make dolls so lifelike that they could cure loneliness among the country's huge singletons population.

I've so, this world is going to hell in a handbasket. I actually, I don't care what happens anymore. I'm just done. Well, I mean, there's too many dudes, not enough ladies in China. So that's what you got to do. Yeah. This article just reminds me of the old joke about the guy that hires the prostitute to come over to his house and she asked him what he'd like.

He goes, go paint the house. Paint the house. I was like, hey baby, I'll do anything for a hundred bucks. He's like, fine, paint my house. Yep. One of the greatest jokes of all time. Mm-hmm. Now, this one is interesting, Brian. Before, before I lost my, lost my job, I was.

Yeah, you were just mentioning at the very start of this segment about how you would not be getting these Hieronymus Bosch figurines until you got a job. Right, and then I talked about how I'm giving money away to developers and all this other stuff. I am a, I am a conundrum, Brian. Yes. Yes, you are. So I've got a studio here in the house where I, where I work from for recording.

And currently it's running off of an old Mac laptop, a 2014 model. That's got like, it's, it's, we use, we use what we call Zencaster for our recordings and that runs in Chrome. Well, my old ass Mac book, the fans spin up pretty much instantly.

As soon as you even look at the Chrome icon, it's just like, I think you're going to make my day horrible. Let me spin up the fans and I got the new iMac that I was using for the studio for a bit, but it turns out I spend most of my time not recording.

And what I needed was I needed a control unit for my studio. I've got two Mac minis in a rack mount. I've got a PreSonus 192, which is my interface that I use and a Furman power converter all in this cool little like crate that I can move around, but I need a control unit to just do recording.

So believe it or not, I got a PC, Brian, I got a PC because all of the software that it takes to record works on a PC. Because I was looking at Macs, I'm like, it's going to cost me 10 times as much to get a Mac to do the recording. So I found the Asus GR8-2-T069Z VR-ready mini PC gaming desktop with Intel Core i5-7400 and GeForce GTX 1060.

Way to go, Amazon. I got that puppy and that is going to, next week we'll be doing this from a PC. So the VR-ready part didn't matter, but anything that you get on Amazon that has 16 gig of RAM and an SSD is basically VR-ready.

Pretty much. But since I now have a VR-compliant PC, I'm thinking that Samsung Vive is looking pretty good. But, job. I spent all my money on this. So this money was already earmarked before I lost it.

So it's like, it's not going to hurt the rent of the house. The dogs will still eat. But yeah, this is, you know, just to run the studio and record the show. But it's a cool little device. Like I got the box and apparently they don't ship with keyboards anymore or mice.

It's just a thing. Just a box. Yeah, pretty much. But fortunately, I use the Logitech MX Master 2S mouse, which will work with that. And I have an Apple keyboard, an extended keyboard, the aluminum one, with a USB cable, believe it or not.

So I think I'm good. I think I'll figure it out. And my contour. Well, congratulations. And I'm very happy. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with PC. I will say, though, this is one of the ugliest boxes I've ever seen. It looks like it should be in Stranger Things. It's hideous. It looks like something from the 80s.

It's hideous. It's like a Nagel painting. It's horrible. It should have a wham sticker on it that says, wake me up before you go, go. I was listening. It is nasty. I was listening to K-Rock 2 this morning. They had Frankie Goes to Hollywood play it. And I was thinking of this box. It is one of the ugliest design cases I've ever seen in my entire life.

So I've got this uplift desk, my standing desk, the motorized standing desk. And you can get like a CPU holder that goes underneath. So I'll never have to look at it. It'll just, everything will plug into that. And like, it'll all be in one thing. Because the problem with this damn MacBook, it's got so many cables going into it.

Because I have to use Thunderbolt. I've got, you know, one HDMI. This little desktop has two HDMI and one DisplayPort. So then everything can just run through that. And I can stick it under the desk, put the cables away. And it'll make everything cleaner. But, you know, for recording the shows, it's like all the hard work is done on the PreSonus.

So all this thing does is route audio in and save it. That's all I needed to do. So that's what I got. I got a PC. It runs Windows 10. I can't wait to fire it up. It's still in the box. But by next week, I'll be on a PC for recording the show.

Believe it or not. Boot me up before you go. Since I had a snow day yesterday, Brian, and couldn't leave the house, had no internet, I had fortunately been preparing for this.

And thanks to Screener Season, yesterday I watched Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman's take on Winston Churchill. Yes. Wow, what a good movie. Now, in real life, Winston Churchill, as my friend from England said, was a right cunt.

And that's, I don't care. I don't care. I was more impressed with Gary Oldman than anything. I'm like, that's Gary Oldman doing that. He's amazing. He can be anything and you just forget it's Gary Oldman. I know. And, you know, I still think he should have won, you know, an Oscar for The Professional.

Everyone! You know, I just love that movie so much. And my friend Michael Burns got to hang out with Gary Oldman this year when they were doing the press tour for this. And he always pulls out the picture of him and Gary Oldman. I'm like, it never gets old, but I still hate you for hanging out with Gary Oldman.

Really? Does that one piss you off more or the one with me with my great hair and Olivia Wilde? His does. Yes, I like Gary Oldman a lot more. So, but what are you going to do? Anyway, I love the movie. I don't care about, you know, Churchill's backstory.

Yes, he was, as my friend says, Jason Sanderson. Shout out to Jason. A right cunt. But Jason is not a right cunt, but Winston Churchill. I just want to clear that up. Make sure that's clear. Because I love Jason. So then I watched the other two episodes that came out of Counterpart.

Eh, I'm kind of feeling like I felt when I was watching The Man in the High Castle season one. I'm like... You just know it's going to go bad. Yeah. Yeah, it's not, I'm not feeling it. I am just not feeling it. So I'll keep watching for a couple more.

Give it a shot. But meh, it's not really hitting me. But I did watch Altered Carbon, the new series on Netflix. Yes. Oh my God. Unbelievable. I watched, so this is like a 10-part series. I watched it in 14 hours.

Because I had to have a few hours to sleep last week. I literally watched it almost straight through. I got the, like, you know, the first seven episodes, and then it was like five in the morning. I'm just like, I should probably sleep. The dogs are already gone.

They're up in the bed just going, hey, you coming to bed? And I'm like, no, I got to watch another episode. It was amazing. I loved this story. And there's so many intertwining stories that it's just, it's really good. Well done sci-fi that just made me just go, yes, finally something I could really dig my teeth into.

Instead of, like, that Electric Sheep anthology that I couldn't really, like, really dig into. Yeah, couldn't get into that. But this, man, this was, this is some top-notch shit, is all I got to say. It's got the guy from The Killing in it, who I love, and a bunch of other great actors. And the only complaint that I had was the last episode, the fight scene, much like Wonder Woman, went on probably three times as long as it needed to.

But there's a lot of, there's a lot of hot, naked kung fu in this series, is all I got to say. It is not for the kids. You do not want to have the kids in the room. But this is the show that they were promoting at CES when they had the people in the bags. Remember that? Oh, right, right. Yeah, this was the show that they were doing.

It was really good. The other thing that I listened to this week was a very fatal murder. from The Onion. They did a podcast that takes the piss out of cereal and all of these other true crime ones. Oh, my God. It was, I mean, you have to kind of know those shows to get the most out of this.

But I was in tears. The ads that they, the fake ads that they run were so fucking good. All right. I'll have to give that a listen. No, it's short. I mean, the episodes are like nine minutes long and there's only like six of them. You'll run through it in an hour. But I swear to God, I was in tears when they were running the ads.

The ads themselves were, I think, the funniest part of the show. But all in all, really good. And a shout out to you, Brian, for I'll have what Phil's having. Fantastic, right? It was really good. It was really good. I kind of zoned out in the middle because his shtick where everything is the best he's ever had gets a little old, which comes back to when we talk about like you shouldn't really watch or like read a series of books back to back to back because then you kind of get

the formula is kind of like I had to I had two years between I'll have what Phil's having and then the new one that just came out on Netflix, which is a good it was too long to wait almost, but it wasn't back to back. So, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I ran through I'll have what Phil's having and I had I did one a night basically last week and they were good.

They were good. My favorite episode, though, was Los Angeles, which really pissed me off because I don't want to go back to Los Angeles for food. But I'm like, I missed a lot of really good stuff in L.A. I mean, I know a lot of good food in L.A., but this one really had me going to like some of the taco trucks they went to. I'm like, I got to find those guys.

It looked really, really good. So all in all, I'd say the new series is better, but the original series is, you know, maybe like five percent less good. Yeah, just as charming. They put more money into it when they when they rebooted it with Netflix.

So it's got better production value. They went to more interesting places, but it's the it's it's still him. But here's the thing. Even I'll have what Phil's having. That's that's zero point zero that that did it. That's Anthony Bourdain's production company who does all of the Anthony Bourdain stuff. So these guys are no slouch, you know?

No, it was. I really enjoyed it. If you need something to like just make you happy, just watch, you know, one or two a week and it'll just it'll pick you up because they were really fun. I really enjoyed it. Excellent. And as previously mentioned, I am still working. Well, I'm not anymore. I finally finished watching rewatching Star Trek Voyager.

I finished last night. I watched the final episode and I've got to say it was a good show. That last episode sucked donkey balls. It they actually I think I mean, I didn't look this up. I should have looked this up beforehand. They must have just been told that they were getting canceled halfway through production of the final season because all of a sudden the writing changed.

All of a sudden characters were written completely out of character that you could tell that they were rushing to conclusions. They were forcing relationships that didn't make sense. And the entire final episode is Catherine Janeway completely betraying the entire Catherine Janewayness of herself to change the past.

It was insane. So great show up until the last episode. Not as infuriating as the Battlestar Galactica final episode. Pretty bad. Oh, I can't even remember the last episode. Honestly, that's the funny thing. It's like I went back and watched a show that's been off the air for 16 years now, I think, or something like that.

Nobody really remembers it. I remember that the character Neelix left the show about three episodes before the end. It was quite emotional. And I remember posting about that going, I bet nobody remembers this. I wish Neelix would have left off to the first episode. I hated him the entire run of the series.

Hated him. I wanted to keep Kes the whole time, but Neelix was just such a... Anyways, I finished. I'm happy it's done. Okay. I can actually get on with my life now. And speaking of getting on with my life, the solo trailer dropped. It looks good. I've been saying I've got a very bad feeling about this since they first announced the movie.

I didn't mind the trailer. So we'll see. Here's the thing. You've been now conditioned by... To not expect much. To not expect much, thanks to The Last Jedi. Yeah. Yeah. They're just... They're going to do what they're going to do. So I think what we have... There is something to that. I think it's now to the point where as long as they don't piss me off or make me feel like they're destroying my childhood, I'm happy.

Well, here's the thing. You have to forget your childhood and move on. Because what's going to happen is they're just going to keep... There's no continuity anymore. That's it. You know, there is none. You know, that's... They're not even trying. They're like, fuck it. Whatever. Let's put some spaceships and make shit go boom.

That's it. So if you like that type of thing, then enjoy it. All right. And on that same vein, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are going to be writing and producing a new series of Star Wars films. Enjoy that.

So I bet there's going to be less boobs in that galaxy far, far away than there are in Game of Thrones, which sucks, but... I think that's a safe bet. Yeah. Too bad. Whatever. Yeah, because their next project was that one about the slavery one that it was called Confederate, I think, that as soon as they mentioned it, everybody on the planet was just like, no, are you crazy?

Are you fucking insane? So I'm pretty sure that one's scrapped. So these guys need a new job. So they're going to go to Disney instead of staying with HBO. There you go. Let's see. We also got a Jessica Jones season two trailer. Actually, I believe starts in what?

Two weeks? Something like that. It's very soon. It's in March. It's like two or three weeks. I think about three weeks. I love this trailer. Here's the thing about it. I had it on for about five seconds and I couldn't watch it. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Jessica Jones is sacrosanct. I want to go into it as clean as possible. They don't give anything away in this one. I mean, I watched the other teaser trailer and I loved it. But on this one, I just, what are they playing? Barracuda on the last one? I think that's what it was.

Yeah, yeah. It was really good. It was really good. Got you jazzed up on this one. I'm like, since this is a full trailer, I just, I was worried that they were going to give too much stuff away and I just couldn't watch it. So I'm just going to wait. I'm going to wait and I am going to get a big bucket of popcorn, sit around in my underwear and not move off that couch for 12 hours because I think these are 12 episode seasons.

I'm not moving. I think so too. Yeah. I'm very excited. Can't wait. It's definitely my favorite of those, of everything Marvel's ever done. So I'm very, very excited. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm almost done with the grand tour. I watched episode nine and episode 10 is on the DVR.

So they're done for the season. So when you finally get back around to it, it's pretty good. Episode nine had Penn and Teller doing the track in the snow, by the way, it was a snowy day, but it's so much fun. I just, I have nothing but good stuff to say about the grand tour.

They fixed it. They've really, really fixed everything. And I love it. Now that I'm done with Voyager, I can get to it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're really going to have a good time with it. I can't wait to see the final episode. I started it and then stopped because I had to prep for this show. Otherwise I would have something to say about it, but man, yeah, it's so good.

And a hat tip to John Chevron, friend of the show. He sent me a video on ABC seven, Chicago. So if you're a local Chicago person, that's our, one of our news channels, my friend Daryl and his band, the bowl weevils was on playing for a bunch of blue hairs, which was really, really funny because he's an ER doctor.

Right. Um, he's, he's like six foot four black dude dreads. I've been going to see these guys play since like 90. Great friends love the band. And it was just, it was surreal watching them on the news like 30 some odd years later than, than they started.

And like they showed the audience at the beginning, literally a bunch of blue hairs, like slow clapping. Hello, hello, hello. And it really reminded me of that SNL skit where it was, did you ever see this one where it was the wedding and like the dads got up like, Oh, we had a band.

Can we just get up and play? And then they like did this whole punk rock reunion. Yeah. Genius. It reminded me exactly of that. So the link's going to be in the show notes. If you like punk rock, the bowl weevils are one of my favorite bands. Daryl's a great guy. I'm love going to see them. So check that out for sure.

Nice. What I don't love is PETA. I hate PETA people for the ethical treatment of animals or the people for the eating of tasty animals is what I like to go for. Jillian Anderson has decided to pose naked for them. So she's left the X-Files and now she's posing naked for PETA.

I don't know how to feel about this, but I'm just going to leave it there. It makes me sad. Makes me sad. I love you, Jillian, but you're, you're on the wrong side of history on this one. Sorry. This photo is by far the best episode of X-Files I've seen in 20 years. It kind of is, isn't it?

Yep. I just finished episode seven this morning and I thought it was the end, but they did 10 episodes for this season. Okay. Three to go. I'm holding out hope for you, Brian. They did wrap up one storyline with their kid. That's been wrapped up. All right. So we got one, we got one storyline down, but the major storyline still has yet to be done.

So we'll see how it goes. All right. And Chris Hardwick, who we talked about earlier with his, his rant against Facebook and Instagram, he has changed the name of the nerdist podcast to ID 10 T. Everybody keeps saying idiot, but he pronounces it ID 10 T, which is an old tech code for people who are idiots.

Obviously. So there's a, an article with him at up rocks where he talks about, you know, what happened with the show in the future of podcasting. It's an interesting read if you're into the podcasting thing. So check it out. I wish Chris the best. I love his show. And he's been around for ever and, you know, was one of the, one of my main inspirations for getting in the business.

So way to go, keep it going. Right. And we talked about the left sits letter a lot. He started off as commenting on the music industry. He got heavily into tech, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. The whole hashtag me too movement has been blowing up as we know in, in a couple of different worlds and people have found it somewhat interesting that there hasn't been anything about the music industry.

That is all quietly taking place on his letter. I get his new updates every week and my jaw hits the floor about some of the things that are being talked about in there quite openly. And I am strangely shocked that none of this is being picked up by the media, at least yet at this point.

So expect some interesting things to finally get picked up at some point. I'm sure. Okay. I'm not going to read it, but I'll. Yeah. Anyways. And if you're a big cure fan, this is the year to go to London. You are going to want to be there because not only is the cure playing their 40th anniversary show in Hyde park, the cures, Robert Smith has been tapped to curate the 25th edition of the meltdown festival, which is awesome.

So that is also taking place. It's a 10 night extravaganza at London South bank center. He will pick 30 of his all time favorite artists and one can be sure that he will be performing as well. So pretty amazing stuff going on this summer in London. If you're a cure fan. Oh man. That sounds amazing.

I know. I'd give anything to be there this summer. Oh, well, you know, the kid can always have an accident, right? Well, on that note, security.

We're here once again with the cyber wires, Dave Bittner, Jason DeFilippo is not here right now. Apparently his Chinese security cameras have detected snow and that shut down everything. He's lost the dogs out in the snow storm. They burrowed and made tunnels all over the yard. So he's out there, you know, chasing them around desperately trying to bring them back in the house.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, as we've discussed multiple times, we do seem to be living in a third world at this point. And apparently a bit of snow in Chicago has shut down the entire internet there. So he cannot join us today, but here we are regardless. And you'd think if there's anywhere in the world that we would be able to deal with snow, Chicago would be one of those places.

But, uh, you'd think they'd be used to it. They got to take a page from Buffalo. They seem to be able to figure this out. They go out to shorts and t-shirts to football games and outdoor stadiums. Yes. I've lived my life in Maryland where a quarter inch dusting shuts everything down, you know, for a week.

So, right. Well, let's dig in here. Uh, we've got some good articles. It's actually been kind of a slow week in terms of new stuff happening in cybersecurity, which I suppose is not necessarily a bad thing. All things considered. It's, it's, it's a good thing.

Yeah. Yeah. This first one is a story from Wired and, uh, it's about, uh, should data scientists adhere to a Hippocratic oath? I thought that it was, this was particularly interesting given your recent completion of your ethics course. Uh, so I was wondering what you thought about this.

Uh, I scanned through the article. It's, it's really interesting. It's a very good read. And I think everybody that, that is kind of working with data as most of us are these days, uh, should read it. Uh, it's kind of the main thrust of what my professor was talking about throughout the data science ethics course, um, the university of Michigan.

I'm going to murder his name because he never says his own name. Well, probably in the very first video, which was four months ago at this point, uh, HV Jagadish, I believe is his name. Uh, and yeah, that was kind of his point as he went through kind of the history and everything else. The, the overarching thing that he was saying was that, you know, most other professional societies are aware of the fact that the law does not keep up with, uh, the cutting edge and whatever it is you're doing.

And, and professional societies societies have tended to band together to create their own, uh, kind of self-regulated and self-policed ethical, uh, bylines and considerations and structures. And the data science at this point needs to do the same thing because the law is not going to catch up in time.

We're already seeing a lot of problems. Um, and he proposed his two, his own one, which is very basic. And he said, it's very important to keep it very basic because the more rules that you put down, the less they'll be remembered and followed. And, and his two principles were first, you should do not surprise, never surprise the subject of the data that you were recording, collecting, using, or analyzing.

They should never feel that you're using the data, your data in a way that they were not informed it would be used. And then secondly, own the outcome. And if the process is leading to undesirable outcomes, you need to go in and fix the process and basically not release that data into the wild.

If it's, if it's not good. So, which I thought is pretty simple and, and something that people should be doing. Um, now this, this wired article, it gets into way greater detail about it. I really enjoyed reading it. Uh, did you have any thoughts when you went through it? Yeah, I did. I mean, mostly, and I'm, I'm on the same pages as you are and your professor.

Um, it's interesting to me that as these articles tend to do, they want to present both sides of a story, even if they're necessarily, or, you know, there aren't necessarily two equal sides to a story, but, you know, some of the people poo poo this in, I guess a way that's unsurprising where they say, well, these are, these are basic principles that anyone would agree with.

There's nothing, there's nothing, you know, earth shattering about them. Except for the fact that we do have a, a rich brief history of people ignoring them. Well, yeah, and that's a great point. But what it made me think of was if, if we were starting off in the medical world and I said, uh, you know, first do no harm.

I could imagine in the modern world, all the eye rolling and, you know, people just saying, well, duh, but, but I think the ritual of having that in a framed, you know, print out on your wall is a reminder.

I think there's value in that. And I think we, I think that's something that we are missing, especially in the velocity that things happen in the cyber domain. It's so easy to dump massive, you know, uh, caches of data into machines and, and just have at it and see what comes out the other side.

And I think time and time again, even with, you know, social media, we're starting to see these unintended consequences that we don't really know what's going to happen. And, uh, and that's unusual. I think, you know, in any new pursuit, I think that's not unusual, but, uh, maybe we're at that point.

We're at that point of inflection where it's time for these sorts of things to be seriously considered. Um, cause you know, I guess the other side of it is if people don't do it themselves, it'll be done to them. People will start passing laws and, you know, say you have to do it this way. And that's not necessarily the best outcome either.

Yeah, I agree. And I think the interesting thing that you pointed out there is the, the, uh, unexpected outcomes. Um, cause we do see that time and time again, I almost will give people the benefit of the doubt here. And I think a lot of the times that we, we get these kinds of horrible situations that, that come out of, of deep data and big data and, and these algorithms chugging through these things.

And no, it's not AI, just algorithms chugging through these things. And the unintended findings that we're getting are, are simply that we had no idea that we would be able to determine this or figure this out from all this data. Um, and, uh, all the more reason that we should kind of have some frame set of ethics surrounding this.

Um, which I think it is time. It's definitely time. Uh, and like to your point as well, the velocity on this stuff is so fast. It's the laws will never catch up. The laws will always be chasing behind, uh, something horrible will happen and we'll have a tiny little law that addresses that specific horrible situation to fix that.

It's like, it's like the, you know, sticking your finger in the dike. You're just trying to catch up. That's the law. So how about we step up and kind of bring some humanity to this? I think that's a safe way to go. Yeah, I agree. Uh, you know, the next article we have here is about, uh, some clever phishing tricks that, uh, steals your email and fools your friends into downloading malware.

And, uh, this is a clever little, um, evolution that we've seen happening here where, um, basically what happens is someone will trick you into, um, giving them, giving them your login credentials for your email. So they'll use a phishing scam or, you know, harvest your credentials somehow.

And somehow they'll get access to just to say for argument's sake, your Gmail account. I will just quickly ask your father who had his adware problem the last week. Uh, would he ever give his login credentials for his email to anyone if they asked? I think I've beat my parents over the head to the point where they would not do that, but you never know, right?

Yeah. I would like to say no. I would like to say that he would ask me first. I guess the fact that he's gone as far as he has without doing that. And the fact that he, as we said last week, you know, he spent an hour on the phone with a fake tech support gang and didn't hand them the keys to the kingdom.

Uh, it gives me some hope, but, um, I don't know. I, I think he's by nature kind of a trusting person. And I think if the right person had the right story and could convince him that they were, for example, the manager of his bank branch, then I think he, he would probably, he would probably turn it up.

Although, you know what, actually like the only way we can fix your, your banking account is if you give me your email information. Yeah. But on the other hand, uh, my father is very much the person who will say, let me get in my car and drive over there. Right. You know, he is a face to face kind of person.

So, um, you know, he's the one who wants to work with the bank teller. Uh, whereas I'm the one who's like, why would I want to go in the bank when there's a perfectly functioning ATM out here? Exactly. You know, I do, I do think if it's, it's a kind of almost a generational thing, because whenever I hear these stories about, and they were tricked into giving over their email, login information and passwords, I think who would ever do that.

But I think it's also because having grown up from the day one of the internet, I'm so jaded and I just know there's so many schemes and craziness out there. I would never hand over email password to anyone. Right. But, you know, I think it's, is that just because we've been around so long?

We've been around the block. We know it's, it's a bad neighborhood. I guess so. Although, I mean, I've been fooled. You know, I got hit a few years, I don't know, five or six years ago, I got hit, but with a phishing attack. It was, it was on Twitter, and it was basically, someone had taken it.

Okay. Jesus Christ. Automatic playing videos, our favorite friend. Oh my God. This could stay in the show. I don't even think it's, I don't even know what window it's in. Oh God. All right. This, goodbye.

And now my browser's locked up. I'm looking for, look for the little sound thing on your tabs. Oh, I'm looking, I'm looking. Jason's going to have a hoot at this point. Yeah. Oh yeah. So getting back to this, phishing story, what these folks do is, once they've gotten, for example, your Gmail credentials, they will use those credentials to log into your account, and then they will inject themselves into a back and forth conversation that you're already a part of.

So, for example, you and I have been, you know, going back and forth on, you know, I don't know, the new logo design for the company that you're designing, and the people who've taken over my account will slip into that conversation and say to you, hey, you know, here's the latest iteration, download this file and check it out.

And of course, you're going to trust that because we've already been communicating with each other. They download the file and Bob's your uncle, they're owned. Gotcha. That's clever. Yeah, it's a clever little innovation here that we've been seeing lately. So, beware of that one.

All right. Our next story is, I think, there's a certain amount of sweetness to this one. This is about someone who's been data mining within Minecraft, going around and looking for messages that people leave behind in their Minecraft worlds.

Right. It's actually kind of sweet and, you know, people will, I guess in my, I'm not a Minecraft player, but my kids are, so I see them building things and I don't know, they're always running around with a little pickaxe, you know, building things in Minecraft.

That's what I see. It's like every time I look over at the family computer, somebody's running around with a pickaxe playing in Minecraft. But, I guess, you know, people can leave signs and can leave notes and things like that and there's a gentleman who's gone through and figured out an automated way to go through some of these worlds and pull out notes and it's sort of sweet the things people will write.

Some of it's sad, some of it's, you know, inspirational. It's kind of neat, you know, you were making the point before we went on that it's a way to sort of rescue stuff so it doesn't get left behind. Right. But this being the show that it is, of course, I think, wow, not only are things just not deleted, think about all the little pieces of data we are unintentionally leaving behind that could be brought back and tied to us, especially as big data and these algorithms come forward.

So, yeah, this is a very sweet example. The story kind of made me wistful and I thought about some of the virtual worlds that I was in way, way back in the day and the conversations and whatnot and how, as far as I know, they're all gone but they're probably really not and that could be cute and sweet and interesting and it could also be a little scary.

Yeah, I think back to even just conversations back on Usenet. I don't know if you're ever, you know, back on those days and... You figure that's got to be somebody's archived that somewhere. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's all out there. You can search, you know, and find all those old conversations but the 20-something version of yourself is...

Yeah. Could have had a very different writing style and world outlook and, you know, shorter fuse and all sorts of things compared to the you of today and it's an interesting thing that I guess is sort of new for our generation. We are the first generation who came up with that sort of permanent record.

Right. Yeah. This will remain on your permanent record is intensely true for us. Yeah. It's funny. I was thinking just the other day about how, you know, my kids and grandkids and on and on and on will at some point have this long record of me and the same for you just through these podcasts.

There's hours and hours of where they'll be able to listen to, you know, our voices and a certain, whatever, a certain version of us. What an interesting thing to be leaving behind. Yeah, it really is. Our next story, we're talking about, and I assume this was put in for Jason's sake even though he's not here, a Bluetooth panty buster smart sex toy, wait for it, fails the penetration test.

Somebody was waiting his whole life to write that headline. Oh, but did you see the sub headline which I thought was even better? Go on. Yep, it's yet another dildon't. Oh, that is better. That is better. Yeah, I did put this in for Jason because, you know, if it's sex related, he's always got a comment on it.

But yeah, this is a Bluetooth and internet connected Vibratasimo panty bruster which has an online service made by German Gizmo business. wow, boy, they did nothing in terms of security for this.

You know, if you think, if I think it's personally crazy to hand over somebody's, to somebody my email login and password, I can't fathom wearing a sex device that also includes photos and chats that you could do through the app and trusting some third party, in this case, this company, to store all that through their own app.

All of this data, including explicit images, as mentioned, chat logs, email addresses, passwords in clear text, names, email addresses, were openly accessible on the internet. Enumeration of users' images was possible due to predictable ID numbers and missing authorization checks.

Yeah, they did nothing. Literally, your ass was out in the wind. There's a couple of thoughts here. First of all, the name, Vibratissimo. That sounds like an instruction that you would see next to the score for a soprano in an opera.

You know, this next section. We want you to do the next section, Vibratissimo. So that tickled my fancy. And then the other thing, I love the word teledildonics. I don't know why. I just, whoever got the privilege of coining that term.

My hat's off to you. The funny thing is, I'm sure when they came up with that, they were hoping for something that sounded really cutting edge, but it almost sounds retro now. It has this bizarre, like, kind of cute retro feel to it. Yeah, and also the notion that this app not only isn't just a remote control for the device, but, you know, if you're going to make an app like this, why not include a photo function?

That has nothing to do with anything, but... Oh, a chat? Yeah. If you're going to be, I mean, if you're going to be using one of these, of course you're going to be, this is a team effort, you're going to be sending photos back and forth, and that's just, I mean, at this point, it's just a convenience, right? Right. It also brings up the point that I think when people are, well, for lack of a better term, worked up, it often leads to bad judgment.

Poor judgment. You know, you're not, probably not thinking about what level of encryption is taking place when you're in the midst of this and whoever you're working with says, send me a photo. Yeah, probably not. So just in case anybody out there has this, you may want to turn off some of the features.

like all of them, all of them, don't use the app. Yeah, just, yeah, all right. Yeah. I threw in another article, Mind the Gap, this researcher steals data with noise, light, and magnets. We've talked about Mordecai Guri before over at the Cybersecurity Research Center at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.

He is cutting edge on how to get information in and out of computers, even ones that are air-gapped. This is a really nice in-depth wrap-up of what he's done in the past, what he's doing now, and if you think anything is safe, this is kind of a give-it-up article, but I mean, there's a lot involved.

It's not a simple process, but if somebody really wants to get to your data, they can. Yeah, and it really does just go through the laundry list of things that they've done, and they are remarkably clever, you know, turning the infrared LEDs on and off on, you know, security cameras to use as a sort of Morse code, you know, changing the temperature in a room as a method of signaling, you know, you name it.

If it can be, basically, if something can be changed, then it can be used as a signaling. Right, right, exactly. So if you can make a sound, if you can spin a fan, if you can blink a light, if you can change a temperature, you can use that as a signaling protocol to get information in and out.

So, yeah, it's really impressive work that they're doing over at Ben-Gurion, and they just keep coming up with new, clever, diabolical ways to get data out of machines that people think are safe. Yeah, it's pretty intense. Yeah, all right, well, a slow week, as we said, but a fun one.

Not too much to keep you up at night this week, but there's always next week. Unless you've got a panty buster, you should be sleeping all right this week. That's right, that's right, and what better reason to stay up at night than if you have one of those, I suppose. That's the whole point, I guess, right? A good point, a very good point.

All right, well, talk to you next week, and hopefully Jason will be back and do it again. Yes, and we'll get a review on how poorly we did again. Always my favorite part. It is, it is. I always look forward to that, yes, to be greeted with everything that we could have done better, if only.

Yes, oh, excellent. All right, speak to you next week. Bye. Big headline hit this week, McDonald's french fries will cure baldness. Every single, every single place picked it up, every single place was writing crappy stories about it.

no, McDonald's french fries will not cure baldness is the next thing that comes out. So, a technical paper about growing hair follicles in the laboratory was reported this week as a discovery of a baldness cure in the fryers at McDonald's. Japanese scientists say eating McDonald's fries could cure baldness, one Australian station reports, and like I said, everybody else in the world then did as well.

No, no, they do not. Let's be clear. The scientists use silicon to build their hair cell growing chip. McDonald's uses silicon in their frying oil. That is literally the only connection. The silicon is not an ingredient in a baldness cure. It doesn't come from frying oil as if frying oil were a natural resource to be mined.

It's all bullshit. Again, lazy media. That was actually in the mainstream news this week that fries will cure baldness. Yes, and it doesn't at all. Not even close. There's nothing remote. What is wrong with people? Speaking of what's wrong with people, I don't even have a problem with the people that are eating Tide pods.

What I have a problem with are the New York lawmakers that want to try to force Tide to stop making its pods look so, quote, tasty. Yeah, dying of fire. Assemblywoman Erval Simotis and Senator Brad Hoylman proposed a bill on Tuesday that would require Tide to individually wrap each pod, add warning labels to them, and change the colorful design so they appeal less to children.

Hmm. Procter & Gamble has responded, noting that additional packaging would not only have detrimental effects on the environment, but it also would not prevent the accidental ingestion by children. The problem isn't the accidental ingestion, it's idiots. Yeah, it's not accidental ingestion, it's willful ingestion.

It's people doing it on YouTube. Yeah, on purpose. Yes. So I personally think that Procter & Gamble Gamble should go ahead and rebrand themselves as magically delicious. There you go. Let's just get rid of the stupid people. Let's get rid of the stupid people and let's start with these two New York lawmakers.

Yeah, seriously. We have a metric shit ton of new Patreon subscribers this week. I can't thank you all enough. Here we have, here we go. Krista M, Richard S, Andrew H, Maximillion P, Mark F, Gad, Gadiel?

Yeah. Gadiel? Gadiel V, Chad and Jen F, Aaron B, Ashley, Matthew B, Edgar C. Thank you all so damn much and we've got a couple more. So Brian, take us to the next. Yep, we got Michael Z over on Patreon who said, love the show, was planning to post a one-star review just to get Jason to check out my review history but changed my mind when I heard Jason got fired.

Aw, thank you. You get the love. Instead, I decided to give you guys money. Keep fighting the good fight about how machine learning and pattern recognition is not AI. I will contribute more when I'm no longer a poor PhD student. Love you guys. Hope you're getting your PhD in AI. Yep. Jared R writes in, I've been enjoying their podcast while I wait for a new episode from y'all each week.

Brian, what course is next for you on Coursera? I've started taking two courses now and so far so good. I'm taking myocardial infarction in clinical terminology for international and U.S. students. That's a fucking mouthful. It is, isn't it?

I'm actually not currently taking a Coursera course. I'm going to try to figure out what I want to do next. I've had some real-world work kind of intrude with daddy daycare and all that going on. Plus, I finally realized I've made three attempts now to go through and actually get the certification for Google Analytics even though I know how to use it and I've been doing it forever.

Both times, like, my wife got pregnant, kid came along, stopped me in the middle of my tracks from doing the actual certification. So that's what I'm actually doing right now. I'm going back and taking their courses and running through them really quick so I can take their 90-minute or whatever long insane test it is to get the actual cert.

Let me know how that goes because once you get it, I was always, you know, I know Google Analytics backwards and forwards but I never did the certification and I'm kind of curious how the test goes. I don't think anything will matter. I think I'll add a certificate to my LinkedIn that nobody will care about because anybody that knows me knows I know Google Analytics.

I know some really fucking stupid people who have Google Analytics certification and they can barely add. So, yeah, I don't think it's going to be that hard. Me either. So, Tim D. also wrote us over at Patreon. I wanted to share something though you may already be aware of it.

The Outside subreddit. It's at reddit.com slash r slash outside. It's a subreddit about the MMORPG that is life and all the bugs and features that come along with it. It's pretty hilarious and touches on some topics you've discussed in the past. I'm going to keep up with the same pledge level and I look forward to more hilarious and grumpy podcasts.

Thanks. Cool. Did you check out the subreddit? I did. It's a little too geeky for me. Like, I wasn't a Dungeons and Dragons guy. Gotcha. So, there's a lot of that going on in there. It's all about hit points in real life and that sort of stuff. Oh, okay. Very clever. Very clever. But, like, the joke lasted for about three minutes for me.

Yeah. One trick pony there. And we got some donations over at PayPal. Joseph L. and Tim W. Thank you so, so much, guys. Yes, thanks a lot. A lot of people wrote in over at GOG.show. I think we forgot to check that for a while. Definitely not getting the email.

So, there were some old ones in there that we just kind of skipped. So, sorry about that. And, honestly, guys, we get so many of them, we can't reply to everybody anymore. Everybody would tune out, but that's, it's... Yeah. If you ask us a question, we will at least write you back. You will get an answer from us one way or another, just not necessarily on the show.

So, Scott wrote, quick update on autonomous driving. Kind of cool, but the best part of this article is the one line that I think you'll both appreciate. The autonomous technology inside Embark's truck uses machine learning software. Of course it does. Yeah. And this is a self-driving semi that made its first cross-country trip.

Wee. Scary. Yeah. And then anonymous writes in, help me pull the plug. I've been planning on making a departure from Facebook and wasn't surprised to hear you guys mentioning of folks leaving Facebook in droves. The only thing I care about on the platform are my photos. Is there a way to back them up without having Facebook resize them or having to download them one album at a time?

Well, I'm going to tell you a little trick right now. You should always have your own originals backed up somewhere because as soon as you upload it to Facebook, they are resizing it and recompressing the shit out of it because they got to pay for bandwidth. So whenever you upload a photo, it is already being resized.

So getting a dump from Facebook is the last resort that you ever want to have to go through. I don't know of any plugins that do this kind of thing. The only plugin I know is how to delete everything off Facebook. But I'm sure they're out there and you can Google for it. But yeah, I don't know anything off the top of my head.

Do you, Brian? Nope, nope. I certainly don't because yeah, I mean, what I do with my photos obviously is they're all saved on my phone. They're all backed up. They're all backed up in the Apple Photos app. Everything that goes up on Facebook, I've already got backed up somewhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. If I take a photo, it's immediately backed up to four different locations.

So I'm not worried about that. But yeah, always back up your originals and never, never rely on somebody else to give you a backup, especially if you're like, you know, live on Instagram because they downsize those things immediately right away and recompress. Yes, they do. And Gadiel wrote us over here.

This is the same person that obviously did us a solid with Patreon. Hey guys, wanted to let you know how much I love your show. I live in a small town in South Georgia. Need I say more? And do not mingle with the affluent and learned crowd. You guys are my breath of fresh air. I've decided to cancel my Audible subscription. Fuck Amazon and support your show through Patreon.

The best to y'all. Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean, I can't get rid of my Audible subscription, but I'm glad you didn't give us the money. So I'll take it. Next one comes from Julio. Heard your last episode. Sorry to hear about your firing. You too. Thank you. I know that can be difficult. Went through that a number of years ago.

It's definitely no picnic. Regarding getting blue light coated glasses, have you ever tried gins.com? They have Warby Parker prices on their glasses and they seem to do the trick for my eyes. Thought you'd like to know. This is a link to their product. Blah, blah, blah. Gins.com. And I will check them out. We've got another one coming up later that I'm also looking at.

But yeah, turns out there's a ton of different places that can do it. And the one that we're going to talk about in a second, I will explain when we get there, which is why I'm probably going to use them. Next up. Okay. Next up is Mad Mike. Let's get the snark out of the way first. RX bars sound awesome. Too bad I'm in Canada and RX bar doesn't want me to have any of their product.

What's a guy got to do? Barter with maple cookies? I was about to say, you and Jason get together and have a bitch fest about not being able to get products in different countries. Yeah, let's meet at the border, buddy. For the handful of your listeners in Canada, hey, we have more than a handful, I'd like to think. It would be good to know this up front.

I'm guessing you assumed it was available to us. Well, we don't write the copy, buddy. Yeah, I know. I just don't do that. They give us words, we read it, and we take their money. They give us words, we read it, and we take money. And boxes of tasty bars, because I do love my RX bars, to be honest. I went through the entire box that they gave me. It was very good. Your book reviews are excellent.

Concurrently listening to shows in the 140 to 160 range, so I picked up a three-body problem on Brian's recommendation. If you had kept going, then you shouldn't have done that. Sorry. You may not have wanted to do that. Your positive comments about Ready Player One encouraged me to pick that up, and I can honestly say I have not enjoyed a book as much as I did that one in a very long time.

I can't wait to be disappointed by the movie. I hate men to that. Neither can we. Keep up the great work, guys. I even put Carlin on hold this week while your new episode came out. Don't tell Dan, or he might put me on the wheel. Very clever. I like that. That's funny. Yes. Nice. And we have a link from Brian.

Found this fascinating. I participate in online CTFs and know this is way out of my league. Did you get a chance to look at this, Link, Brian? Yeah. I don't quite get it. It's a solution to a three-year-old $50,000 Bitcoin puzzle. I haven't dug into this one because I've had a long week.

But I will. The link will be in the show notes if everybody wants to check it out. So thank you, Brian. Yes, thank you. And Graziella writes, Hey, Jason, I heard your dog has separation anxiety. Yes, he does. I just read an article in BuzzFeed about a dog camera named Furbo. It's a little pricey, around $230, if I'm not mistaken.

But it might be a good idea when you need to leave the house for a longer period of time. Just throwing out an idea, I hope Bam Bam and Dino and you are fine. Okay. Well, fortunately, I already have enough cameras in the house that I can already speak back to the dog with. But yeah, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

But thank you for the recommendation. And I'm pretty damn sure that, Brian, you and I tore Furbo apart on a previous episode. But I'm pretty sure we made a lot of fun of it. I've been mainly on the pricing. It's kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Over at Twitter, Sindelicato sends us another reason to abandon cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, and your security clearance, which is a short YouTube video. I actually watched this. I've got to say, this is one of those things that drives me crazy about everything on the internet now.

this entire video is almost entirely speculation. Everything is, it could be, it may be, this could potentially be. There's hardly a single fact in this entire video. Ah, too bad. So, yeah, too bad. Oh, well. I mean, I agree.

Like, all of those things could be bad, but we don't really know yet. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, we do, we go in for speculation here and there and we come up with plausibles for stuff. So, I can see where people, you know, just blue sky in. I get it. So, next up, Tom770 writes in, tell Jason to check out Zenni Optical for glasses.

All the bells and whistles of a regular store, way cheaper. Trust me on this, he'll get a really good pair for under $100 with the blue screen protection. I've bought some as cheap as $25. I did check out Zenni Optical and I'm going to tell you the reason I'm going to use these guys. Most of the places where you go buy glasses online, you have to go to your doctor to get the measurement between your pupils.

These guys have come up with a way for you to do it at home, which is really cool and really revolutionary as far as I can tell. Nobody else is doing it. I mean, other places might start doing this now, but I had to go to my other doctor and they wouldn't give it to me without, you know, spending another $50 just to get that measurement.

So, this is really cool. So, I'm going to try these guys out and I got a couple recommendations on Twitter this week for the same company. So, thanks to everybody who sent this in. I'm going to give them a shot because I definitely need some glasses. This is all Greek to me. Oh, Mr. Hair and Eyes.

At least, you got the dulcet tones though, Jason. Of course I do. Yes. And Ben Stanley wrote us, you don't have to feel guilty about frequent trips to Sweden anymore and sends a link from Gizmodo. The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn't harm sales. And I immediately thought, Steelers are going to steal.

That's right, baby. Yep. You're not going to stop the Steelers, so they're not going to do whatever they're going to do. I went through a lot of this. It's interesting. They're saying that in books and gaming, it doesn't really seem to matter. But for film, it does.

Which is interesting. Yeah. No, there have been so many of these studies that have come out over the years since the days of Napster. But that's the whole thing. We're forgetting the fact that Napster and piracy literally did destroy the entire music industry. Right. So it did kind of harm sales.

Well, the thing that everybody glosses over about Napster is they got put out of business, but they had everything in place to sell music, but the music industry was so stupid that they just put them under instead of saying, why don't we take the money? But then, of course, Steve Jobs comes along and says, well, how about 99 cents?

And they're like, great. But Napster had everything in place. Companies are stupid. It was, yes, it was incredibly stupid. I would pay, I would still pay a lot of money to be able to watch a movie on first release in my house instead of going to Sweden. I agree.

I still think that's a great business plan and somebody is, people have tried to do it and they just can't seem to get it done. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Cuban tried it and failed miserably, but what are you going to do? People, we just need people to die so the new kids can come on and make shit work. So here's the thing, old people, just start dying. That's how we fix the internet.

Great. Now we're going to be blamed for every single person that dies in the next week. Shit. Oh, God. I know, now we're going to nuke North Korea and we're all fucked. Shit. My bad. We're going to kill the old people because that's what we said. Yeah. All right. Over at iTunes, we got a bunch of five-star ratings this week.

Thank you so much. It really does help us. Big Daddy Dubs over in the UK says, must listen. I've been listening to these grumpy old geeks for almost three months now. I'm also listening to some of their older episodes when I run out of podcasts to listen to. I'm glad to say their newer episodes sound much better than their old stuff. So good job, guys.

Well, you can get people through us money so we can buy some nicer stuff. Buy nice mics and stuff. I'm listening to their latest episode of my home pod and they sound great. Awesome. Cool. That's very cool. Thank you. Yeah. And Forrest PDX writes in, finally, a tech podcast that doesn't just explain what shit is or what shit does, but a group of talented and entertaining individuals openly sharing my disdain for how people and organizations are tainting technology art of the possible.

I don't know what technology's art of the possible means, but... It's a flowery saying, Jason. It is. Technology's art of the possible. It is a beautiful turn of phrase. I look forward to this each and every week. Keep up the great work. I am not alone. No, you are not, Forrest PDX.

And I... Thanks, Forrest PDX. And I'd like to invite you to my webinar next week for $150. It's called Technology's Art of the Possible. I love that. If we didn't already have a show title, that would be it. Next up is Southern Dad. Not shy about telling it like it is.

I can certainly relate to the hosts. I love the down-to-earth, no-sugar-coating information... informative podcast. Sorry. Thanks for telling it like it is. Note to Apple. Apple, please don't ban me when these two bash an Apple product. No problem. We do it all the time. They're used to it. Yes. Next is from Bobo is Clown.

Great podcast. The only reason they are my second favorite podcast is because they recommended No Such Thing as a Fish, which became my number one. I kind of with you on that. I like them better than us, too. I like them a lot better than us, too. So they even take breaks from being awesome to let you know who else is being awesome out there, and that is awesome.

Keep up the grumpy work. We shall. We shall. And our last rating of this week, oh boy, here we go. Fantastic show. Thanks for the amazing show. It makes my long drives fly by.

For anyone that complains about the language on the show, they should simply stop listening. Yes! I don't understand why anyone would take the time to leave a review complaining about it. It's 2018. Google and listen to any of the other thousands of podcasts available if it bugs their sensitive ears. Keep the shows just how they are.

GOG and Cyber Wire are the only podcasts I listen to weekly as all others are bland. I would like to point out that you might want to... Salsa for your ears. We are salsa. We are spicy. Spicy. But if you need another podcast, check out the Jordan Harbinger show because then, you know... Oh, Christ. Sorry.

And don't forget my webinar. Brian's webinar. What the hell is it called again? Technology's Art of the Possible. Yes. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

And as always, pretty please, with sugar on top, tell your friends. Closing shout outs! A sad shout out to John Mahoney, the cantankerous dad on Frasier who passed away at 77. A former Midwestern medical magazine editor who quit his day job at nearly 40 to study acting in Chicago.

Mahoney had taught English at Western Illinois University in the early 1970s. How amazing that he didn't even start acting until his 40s. That's awesome. No, I should start. He was fantastic. I should start. Why not, Jason? You could one day be a TV dad. I'll be on the stage. That's where you'll find me.

And of course, everybody that listens to this podcast is probably aware of this. We also lost John Perry Barlow, internet pioneer. Yes, one of the founders of the EFF. And I put a link to his declaration of the independence of cyberspace in the show notes as well, which everybody should read. And yeah, he will be missed.

And he was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, believe it or not. He was. And I'm going to put in a link here to UNIDOS, Hispanic Federation Puerto Rico Disaster Relief. I also donated this week to Puerto Rico Disaster Relief because these guys need some help down there and we've got some friends of the show who are just going through some crazy shit down there.

It'd be nice to remember everybody right now when we're talking about potentially wasting millions of dollars on a military parade that people who are American citizens do not have power. Yeah. Still. Yeah, a friend of the show Gabriel Pagan wrote the other day on Twitter to me and he's like, we have less than 100 working streetlights in the city, like, you know, street signals.

It's insane. It's insane. So if you've got a few extra bucks, you know, first send it to us, then send it to Puerto Rico and if you've got a few bucks left over, send it to FB Purity. But of course, we're first. But yeah. And after that, the EFF. Let's just run them down in order.

Okay. We'll go with that. But yeah, if you can afford a few bucks, I just sent 100 bucks this week and if I could afford to spend more, I would. But yeah, just, you know, everything that you can do to help these guys because it's ridiculous what's going on there. They're part of our country and we need to really kind of, you know, step up because the government obviously fucking isn't.

So finally, a shout out to friend of the show, MXV, and his lovely wife, Chris. Today, I, you know, we had snowpocalypse. I'm snowed in and I can't shovel the snow in my driveway to leave because I hurt my shoulder on the last snow. They sent somebody over to shovel my driveway and my sidewalk.

So thank you so much, guys. It really helps out and now I can go buy puppy chow. Yay. That was just a really nice thing for them to do. I really appreciate it. I mean, I sincerely appreciate that. That was so cool. That's very nice. Until next time, I'm Brian Shelmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. 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 246.

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. So getting back to this fishing story, what the fuck? Oh my God. All right.

Hold on. Just do. All right. Sound off. We are professionals. Jesus. All right. I guess we know what's going at the end of this week's show. I think that's safe to safe. Safe. Take two.

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