248: Side Hustle

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I have some good news today, Brian. Do you? Yes, I've actually got great news. I can see again. Oh, I thought we'd gotten some massive donation or something and I could quit my side hustle. Oh, no, no, no. You have to keep your side hustle for now. I have to keep mine as well.

But I told you I broke my glasses a while ago and I'm like, oh, no, it's out of warranty. Yes. Well, it turns out everybody needs to check their paperwork because, turns out, I beat it by three days and got a new basically $600 pair of glasses for just the cost of labor.

Right. Look, everybody should do themselves a favor. We have all this technology now. We have Google calendars. You can create different calendars that lay over things and turn them on or off. What I do is anytime we get anything, I put end of warranty dates into my Google calendar and I have one just called warranties.

That's a good idea. Isn't it, though? It's actually a very good idea. Yeah. It's very smart and you keep track of things. You just check on it every now and then. You see when something's coming up, like, you know, my car warranty and I make an appointment before it goes out. Brian, bring in the life hack. That's right. There's a good life hack for you.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Somebody wrote us but didn't give us their name. But you were having trouble trying to print PDF in Windows, remember? So that great hack that I had. Well, getting the whole screen, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that cool hack that works great on Mac wasn't doing it for you in Windows, but apparently you just make sure you have Microsoft print to PDF listed under printers and scanners and Bob's your uncle.

Okay. I will check that out because I think I just did the built-in PDF printing from the browser. Yeah, yeah. So I guess this will solve that problem. So you're set. Which is nice. Yeah, I will check it out. I want to talk about something that's been pissing me off. Uber is running commercials.

Oh, God, I know. They're everywhere. The commercials are not to get you to use their service. They're to get you to come and work for them. Yep. Which is a little weird, right? That's not traditionally what one would run a commercial for. I actually find these commercials offensive. I think it's ridiculous. Their slogan is get your side hustle on. Is this what we're now aspiring to as a nation?

Yeah. I don't know where you've been, but pretty much, yeah. Isn't what we should be going for is a job that doesn't require side hustle? I mean, especially it's like, I can't tell if it's a single mom or not that's in the commercial that's running all the time. You don't see a husband. They go on vacation. It's just her and the kid.

So she's driving around and presumably has a different job, but she's driving around during the day. So I don't think that she has a regular job. I don't understand what's going on here. It really just drives me crazy. Absolutely nobody that works for Uber that isn't a driver side hustles driving for Uber.

They have a job that pays them well enough that they don't have to. So this is, I just find it horrible that this is where we're at. Oh, it drives me crazy. I know. I know. Take a breath. Take a breath. So I was just really, I don't know why that got under my skin so much this week, but it did because probably you can't get away from the commercials.

They run all the time. Yeah. I watched a little bit of the Olympics and they were just everywhere. So we have them linked in the show notes so you can go check them out if you're a glutton for punishment and want to watch a commercial for a really crappy company over and over again. Yes. Yes. And, you know, give up the dream of actually having one job and spending time with your kids.

Get your side hustle on. Yeah, that's never going to happen anymore. We're done. We're done with it. I've got a side hustle. I'm walking dogs now to help pay the bills. Are you really? Yeah. I literally, I've got, I deal with my dogs enough, but nope, nope. I need a few extra bucks a month because, you know, things are tight, as they say.

So I got to go make some extra money to keep these guys in kibble and daycare. I don't know how we managed to slide into the gig economy, but that is everybody's reality now, apparently. Yeah. It's going to be as short a trip down doggy lane as possible. I can guarantee you that. But when you got to do it, you got to do it.

I'm not above taking, you know, taking the odd job to help pay the bills when you have to. Yeah, I'm, I'm there. I'm working part-time and scrambling to take a little jobs here and there. Some of which I've talked about, some of which involve WordPress. Yeah, I know. What are you going to do?

Oh, Squarespace. Host Gator website builder. That would, that would require a budget to like move and redo sites. Oh yes. The moving is the problem. Always. Yeah. They don't want to pay for that. So. They don't want to pay for anything, especially when they hear WordPress.

It's like free website. I know. Nobody wants to pay for anything online anymore, but we'll get to that. I have some stories about that. Yeah, definitely. I just want to point out that is the most, you know, hateful thing that WordPress ever did. It's like free software. And for developers, it's like, it made our lives miserable.

There's a special place in hell for Matt Mullenweg and his marketing team from WordPress. Because how many times do you have to fight your clients? No, this costs money. No, that's a plugin. But no, plugins aren't always free. If you want one that does something, you have to pay for it. Oh, and you have to pay me to install it and configure it and manage it and update it.

Oh, you don't want to do that either? Okay. Well, there's Squarespace. Well, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Do you watch any of the Olympics? I'm trying to. My wife is Canadian. Winter Olympics are a big deal for Canadians. NBC's broadcast coverage is so horrible. It's so bad. My wife is pissed all the time.

You know, they barely show anything, events-wise. There better be an American in it that better be doing well for them to show it. All these sports to show, and they repeat the same things on the main channels, the two main channels that you can get. And I'm just too damn lazy to chase down all the apps that you need to be able to watch things properly.

So I catch some of it, and obviously I'm only catching the stuff that NBC thinks is important, which I don't necessarily agree with. Yeah. I watched some figure skating couples one night, and I just realized it's just a bunch of really hot people doing very silly things.

So I kind of turned it off and went back to read my book. Well, you know, that's kind of sports ball in general, Jason. That's true. That's true. Except for bowling. I did find an article from NBCBayArea.com, which is a little bit of a follow-up to our man-pooness of San Francisco.

It's called Diseased Streets. So NBC up in the Bay Area did an investigation, and basically it's so bad up there. San Francisco is now being compared to some of the worst slums in the world. Ugh, gross.

I don't know if you've been up there recently, but that's kind of spot on. No, I haven't been in a while. I've been at least two years since I've been up there, but I remember it was pretty bad even two years ago. I mean, with all these slums, at least the rent's cheap, right? Oh, wait, no!

No, it's not. No, it's not. In a rare turn of events, I'm not going to crap on Bird this week. We talked a little bit about Airbnb and how Berlin was basically shutting it down to try to keep rents under control and house prices under control and, you know, get their money, too, because basically Airbnb is just an illegal operation at this point.

And to prove that point, Santa Monica is having problems with Airbnb. Now, they had already started a dedicated enforcement team about a year ago to try to stop all the illegal short-term rentals going along here. But the people who want to do things illegally are getting smarter.

They are deleting listings during city hall business hours and then reposting them when they know the task force won't be looking at the listings. Wow. How ridiculous is that? How unbelievable. This is the, again, this is the world that we live in now. Light, cheat, and steal.

That's, it's just accepted. I hold these companies responsible for this. They're the ones that tacitly allow it. Why isn't Airbnb shutting these things down? Oh, they make money. They're just a platform, Brian. They're just a platform. They're just a platform. So it's absolutely ridiculous.

They're saying that there are only 187 home shares actually registered with the city, which you're supposed to do. It's difficult to know the exact number of illegal listings because Airbnb refuses to provide data to code enforcement on the number of listings within city limits.

In May 2017, an independent data analyst estimated there were over 950 Airbnbs running basically full-time in Santa Monica, which is, they're saying over, you know, $15 million is being lost in taxes and various other things like that.

These people should be taken out and shot. Well, you see, some people have- Okay, that might be a little bit extreme. A little extreme. But, you know, somebody's side hustle every day is to turn off those listings and then repost them as soon as everybody goes home for the day. Somebody's making some money on it. But the problem is they're probably in the Philippines.

Probably, yeah. So it's just, I find this stuff just stunning. It just blows my mind that this is just how we are now as people. Damn animals. Damn filthy animals. Well, the city of Santa Monica should maybe hang out after hours for a little bit and get something, you know, on the books.

Or write a bot. Get a bot. Get some AI to scrape Airbnb's listings every night. I agree. And city of Santa Monica, if you're listening, I'll do some side hustle. I'll work after hours on this. There you go. So a little doggy DNA update. After last week and we joked about the responses and I got in touch with the company who did the responses.

They had an actual scientist go over all of the data. She called me. I spent a half an hour on the phone with one of their scientists who was very nice and explained in great detail that I don't have a Doberman. I have a Foberman, basically. He kind of looks like one, but he's kind of a beagle for the most part.

And she went through all of the data with me and she made a very compelling argument that, yeah, I got a mutt that looks like a Doberman. He's only going to be about 50 pounds. Oh, so they were right. Yeah. I applaud them for all of the work and how she explained everything to me. I'm like, I understand, you know, how things like this can happen.

But she showed me, like, she went and, like, pulled his panels and plotted on a graph. Like, this is where all the Rottweiler DNA is. Here's your dog over here, somewhere way off to this side. Not even in the ballpark. Same with Rottweiler anything. So, you know, my bad. So, Wisdom Panel, I owe you an apology and I think your customer service is fantastic.

I was actually very impressed you forwarded the email to me. I haven't seen customer service like that since, well, the internet started. Seriously. And this wasn't a, that wasn't a, like a form letter. You could tell that was, you know, handwritten based on the data. And she even sent me different links based on the phone call to talk about different coloring.

And I just thought, I just wanted to follow up and, you know, do a mea culpa on that and say, hey, if you want to try Wisdom Panel, by all means, link will be in the show notes. And I just want to make a quick note since you just said wisdom and that made me think of wisdom teeth. I don't know if you've ever had a really bad sinus infection.

We've been just trading illnesses around this house. I guess that's what happens when you have kids. It's my, my kid was sick, then my wife was sick, then I was sick, then that went back to the kid and we're working our way through it all again. And I ended up getting sick again. And my, I, my sinuses hurt so bad or they're so like congested right now that my teeth are numb.

Oh my God. Has that ever happened to you? And let me tell you, it's really hard to talk with numb teeth. So you're hearing me like all the time. My teeth are actually numb right now. Okay. I was wondering what was going on with you. I'm like, have you doing a little day drinking? You know, no, no money from your side hustle.

Did you go buy some nice whiskey? Yes. No, I'm a, I'm on a lot of medication and my teeth are literally numb. So my mouth keeps catching. It's really weird. So sorry about that for this episode, everyone. I'll do my best in editing. And a hearty fuck you to LinkedIn. You, I remember when like a couple of months ago, maybe it's been over a year now when my friend Ted Reinhold died and it was a big shock to the internet and basically, you know, giant kick in the stomach for all of us.

And of course this week I'm having a really bad day. And then I get a pop-up email on LinkedIn saying, go celebrate Ted's fifth job anniversary. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's really figured out how to deal with people passing on social media yet.

And it is awkward and weird. Yeah. It just really ruined my day, but you know, I'm over it now, but still just a hearty fuck you to LinkedIn for that. I mean, I don't want to, it's so hard to unfriend anybody or unfollow anybody on LinkedIn that it's just like, you have to like call customer services and emails. They may have changed that since the, since the old days, but back in the day you could not unfollow somebody because you were tied in business.

I'm like, maybe they fixed it. I'll take a look later. But on a high note, the grumpy cruise is a hit. Everybody wants to go on the grumpy cruise. Well, at least six people in our Clash Royale clan and the Clash Royale clan is GOG.show. If you can't listen to it, don't ask.

Damn it. We say it every show. We say it every show and it is by far the most, uh, asked question on all of our platforms. GOG.show. There's, there's spots open right now. If you want to jump in, go, go, go and stop asking us. But yeah, we're, we're discussing where to go on the cruise in the chat.

So a lot of people are in, let's do it. Okay, I guess I have to be in too then. Okay, good. Then you're planning it. Nope. Hey, look, I made the stickers and sent all those out. You can at least do the cruise. In the news.

The FCC has finally published their net neutrality order. Yes. Which now opens the ring to all the fighting. Here come the lawsuits. Here come, here come send in the clowns. Send in the clowns. So. Yes. Here comes the request for funding.

Here comes the, let's protest this stuff again. It's just never going to end. Well, Congress has 60 working days starting from when the rule was published. So clock is ticking. So they have a chance to overturn this. And there looks like they've got close to the numbers that they're going to need. Because nobody wants this.

Nobody wants this. Yeah. Just the scumbag that's running the FCC who's now under investigation wants it. Yep. That's pretty much it. Welcome to, yeah, United States of Corruption. That's how it goes. Yep. Good times. We talk a lot about websites and how social media has kind of killed a lot of that.

And people don't want to spend money on it anymore. And WordPress and Squarespace have, you know, pushed this thing of they're basically free, which they aren't. I ran across a really interesting article by Rob Locasio, who is the CEO and startup of LivePerson, which is a technology for chat windows that pops up on websites.

One of those things we have to close before we can read an article every week. Exactly. Pretty much. But he talks about how the web is basically dead and dying, and it doesn't work for anybody. And it doesn't work. And, you know, he's predicting that in this year, somebody, a major brand, will just stop having a site completely.

I don't believe it. I don't believe that either. But I like the article. I like what he talks about. And he makes a lot of sense. So we'll see what happens. But he talks a lot about why basically HTML doesn't work as a format for e-commerce.

And he talks about how Google killed everything and Google sucked the life out of unique online experiences. Everything looks exactly the same because of Google. And that is so true. And that's also, you know, even just not getting paid to build websites anymore. It just stopped being fun because everything has to look exactly the same.

Everybody uses the same damn templates. It's so boring. And so I almost wouldn't mind the web dying at this point. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Everybody's moving to their own apps and APIs and things like that. And, you know, back in the day, nobody mourns the loss of Gopher. Just we've only had the web, really.

That's been the big thing. But, you know, it would open the door for something new, you know, some kind of new platform, new protocol. The problem is the browsers are so, you know, developed now that, you know, you have to come up with some kind of new markup language to really unfuck the Internet at this point is going to be a very difficult task.

But I can see how, you know, I think that there's going to be a dark period probably coming in the next five years where the web just kind of either has a renaissance and fixes itself or kind of dies on the vine and everybody just has their apps and goes about it that way. And the web, as we know it, is pretty much gone.

I hope that doesn't happen because I kind of like the web. Me too. I dig it. But world. Yeah. Yeah. If we grew up with Gopher, we'd be, you know, mourning the loss of Gopher or Fido or the BBSs, you know. Well, I did, but I don't really miss them that much. No. We were making progress and now we're not.

Everything is stifled because, yeah, the heyday of the web is over. Yep. The web may be dead and everybody may be switching to apps, but that may not necessarily save you either because according to Kylie Jenner, Snapchat is dead as an app. And because she said that, and this is unbelievable to me.

And again, I can't believe this is the world we've created for ourselves because Kylie Jenner said Snapchat is dead. Snapchat lost $1.3 billion in market value that day. See, I think this is more of a headline because people are already pissed off about the Snapchat redesign.

It's not just her. It's not just her. I mean, there's a change.org petition that has 1.2 million signatures on it for them to go back to the old UI. Imagine if one of our websites had 1.2 million people that said, yeah, your update sucks. Turn it back. We'd be like, okay, you know.

Yep. We're switching it back right now. Sorry. Mea culpa or whatever. But yeah. Have you looked at it? Have you looked at the new update? I mean, I'm not a big Snapchatter by any means, but I have it. And I looked at it and I like the way that they separated friends from all the brands and advertising bullshit.

So I don't know what people are complaining about. But then again, I'm not a big Snapchatter. Go back to episode one or two of the show when we were shitting on how there is no UI in Snapchat. You just have to kind of swipe around and figure things out. So I think any update would probably be better than what they used to have. You know, you had to it's all like hunt and peck.

And it's, you know, it's like an old video game where you're like, they drop you in a dark room and you have to figure out where the door is to get out and go on your quest. And I don't have time for an app that does that. But people liked it. And what I find really interesting about this story is the fact that Snapchat is actually probably going to listen to them and switch back, which Facebook never did.

No, Facebook would always just roll out their new UI and everybody would bitch and complain about it for a couple of weeks. And then it was just business as normal again. You just get used to it. Snap is apparently not going that path. They're going to backpedal. Yeah, you know, the thing the thing about that is with Facebook, Zuckerberg owns everything.

I mean, he's got all the voting stock. He is the king. He can, you know, lay down the law. I think it's a little bit different over at Snap. Although. Yeah, I think so, too. Although Evan Spiegel earned, I would actually, let me not say earned. Let me say he received $637.8 million as compensation last year.

Yeah. $638 million for Snap CEO. Yep. Awesome, right? Yeah. Talk about a robber baron. Can you believe that? Third highest CEO payout ever. I know. It's insane. Well, you know, Kylie's not the only person to be really ruining somebody's day.

Angry Birds has lost half of its market value. What? Yeah. After talking to the investors, their latest quarterly earnings report said, yeah, we're kind of screwed. And they lost half of their value. And what I say, you didn't think making a single game could last you forever and you're going to go public on it?

All these games, the amount of money that they are supposedly worth when they come out, is astounding to me. And yeah, why is this surprising? Nobody's played Angry Birds for like four years now. You've run through every marketing possibility already. You already did Star Wars Birds. You did all these different iterations.

Multiple movies. And all of a sudden, yeah. And now you're shocked that you can't suck any more blood out of this. Unbelievable. I remember when they were going public and we're like, why? Why are you going public? Why are you going public? You're a game about shooting pigs with birds and you're going to go public.

Who? I don't know what you're smoking over there, but send some our way. Oh, maybe they did. And Evan Spiegel got it all. Maybe. Now, this story is a little interesting. Eric Lundgren. I don't know if you've heard of this guy. No. What he's trying to do is he's like an e-waste recycling guy.

That's his mission right now. He's done some other stuff, but this is what really it centers on right now. He's being prosecuted by Microsoft and the state of Florida for basically making recovery CDs, Windows recovery CDs. Because what he does is he takes old PCs, fixes them, and either sells them or gives them away, just trying to keep things out of landfills.

That's his goal is to, like, you know, we don't need to have planned obsolescence on all of these machines so fast just so you can make a buck. These are fine machines. They can still do certain things, and people can use them. Yeah. Donate them to schools, things like that. Yeah. The problem is getting the software back on it, even if you have a license, is extremely difficult because you need the recovery CD.

Remember that recovery CD we'd always get with the e-machines and the Dells and all that? You treasured that thing. You kept it in a locked box somewhere in case your machine died and you had to wipe it and start from scratch. Well, he just made a bunch of them and got sued for it.

He made 28,000 of these counterfeit discs, is what they're calling it. I'm saying counterfeit, but he's just making copies of it. For his efforts to keep things out of landfills, he got a 15-month prison sentence and a $50,000 fine. That's ridiculous. Even though he never sold a single one of them.

That's ridiculous. Never sold a single one of them. And the judge, in the case, at least declined the order for him to pay restitution because they wanted $420,000 for lost sales. Lost sales on a dead machine. For somebody who already owned a key to the software.

The whole point was you still needed your key to Windows to unlock the disk. So this is, I mean, shame on Microsoft for this entire thing. This guy's actually trying to do some goddamn good and they're just going after him for, you know, just because they got nothing to do, I guess. Some lawyer in Microsoft needs to keep his job.

It's like, oh, let's go after this guy. It's ridiculous. I got to say, I'm a little surprised by Microsoft with this because Microsoft is generally doesn't do frivolous or stupid lawsuits like this. I'm shocked that they did this. Yeah. At least the judge had a, you know, had a good head on his shoulders.

And unfortunately, I mean, they, they wanted to sentence him to 36 to 47 months. Right. Like, you know, over three years, three to four years in jail for making some CDs that he never made any money off of that were legal with the machine that he's giving away.

So he knocked it down to 15 months, but which still sucks. I mean, that's a year and, you know, a year and change. Yeah. So hopefully he'll fight it and win. But yeah, check out the article. It's in the Washington Post. It'll be in the show notes. But this just made me so angry. Well, another thing that makes me angry is NASA right now and the current state that it finds itself in.

Space Shuttle Program canceled in 2011. So that all went private. And we have SpaceX and things like that now, which is good. But, you know, what about NASA? I miss NASA. They get the best logos. I miss NASA too. Yeah. You know. And I think this is, this should be government initiatives with space.

I think that's a good thing. I don't necessarily want it to be private because, you know, ads in space. Great. But we might have some pretty soon because the ISS, the International Space Station, we're, I guess, looking into the possibility of selling it.

Yeah. And letting private space industry take it over. And great. That's awesome. Well, I mean, it's got a, it's got an end of life on it. So they need to like, you know, if they want to make a new one, they need the funds to go make a new one. So why not sell off the old one, make a new one. And before this one falls into the atmosphere, let some people go up and, you know, have space sex on the ISS.

I'm okay with that. If that is the master plan, I hope it is. I hope it's not just let's sell this off and who knows what the hell NASA is going to do next. Yeah. I mean, if they sell it, Branson should buy it or Musk and start, start a space sex hotel, because that's what everybody wants to do when they go into space. Get busy.

Yep. That's true. I mean, put the Mile High Club to shame. Come on. And speaking of getting busy, the Twitter folks got busy the other night. Oh, yes, they did. Oh, boy, did they. They took out a lot of bots. They took out so many bots that conservatives lost their collective minds.

Yep. Because all of a sudden they saw themselves with a lot less followers. Oopsies. But that's good. We got a note from a friend of the show, Tom. He says, The great Twitter purge is underway. I can't say how good or bad their bot detection algorithms are, but they're at least doing the bare minimum.

On December 23rd, I set up a Honeypot account and collected over 5,000 followers who were absolutely 100% bots. In the past week, that's been slowly cut down to seven. Wow. Three of those are new users, I suspect, are actual accounts, and the remaining four are marked by Twitter as suspicious. Wow.

So we have firsthand knowledge of what's going on there. So, yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, people lost their minds on Twitter. And a lot of people lost their shirts. You know what I'm not getting from DevUmi, the people I bought those 10,000 followers from? Customer support. A reply. Yeah.

That's not what I'm getting. I'm like, can I have my 100 bucks back, please? Every user you've ever sent me is now gone. So I'm back down to my legitimate number for followers, which is around 1,800. So last week when we were talking, I was at over 3,000. And now it is normalized back out to about 1,800, which is almost exactly where I was before I started the experiment to buy the accounts.

Right. Which is pretty funny. It's like, okay, so at least I know I have some real users on there. But, yeah, I woke up in the morning when I heard this and I hit refresh. And I'm just like, oh, wow. Somebody definitely got busy last night. And you know what? They probably already had this in place.

All they had to do is hit the button. They knew. They knew. They hit the button. And they can, I mean, it's a constant, you know, battle. You know, the bots figure out ways to get around it. And then Twitter shuts them down again. But I'm glad they're at least doing something now. I guess they kind of have to. Really? I mean, after that expose, man, some really good people lost their jobs for, you know, just having some extra followers, which is kind of stupid.

It's really stupid. Yeah. If they're doing their job, fine. I guess like Richard Roper, the film critic, got in a whole bunch of trouble with that, too. And I'm like, I'm not a huge fan of his reviews, but I mean, he's been around forever. You shouldn't screw with him because he had a few extra followers on Twitter. Jesus. Yeah. But his 24-year-old boss probably doesn't see it that way.

Probably not. Yeah. And on the BBC, they have a great article called Eight Reasons Facebook Has Peaked. Did you go through these? I did. And it makes sense. I don't think Facebook's going away. But the idea that they could keep growing, I mean, everybody and their dog literally are on Facebook now.

And a lot of people are leaving, as we've talked about in the past couple episodes. People just keep leaving in rows. And here's, you know, these are the eight reasons. A drop in users, they're actually going down. The number of active daily users in Canada have dropped to their biggest markets.

Drop in engagement. And here's the thing. This is the one that made my stomach turn. Because I think about how many man hours this is and how much human potential is wasted looking at stupid shit on Facebook. Now, Facebook reported that the amount of time users spend on Facebook had fallen by 50 million hours a day.

That's 50 million human hours a day. That's just a drop. That's not how many people, how much time people spend there. That's just the drop. So it's a little bit, uh, it just makes my stomach turn that, you know. The next one is the one that really made my stomach turn.

Advertiser enmity? Mm-hmm. Would you care to elaborate? Facebook has been forced to admit that in the past it wildly overestimated how much time viewers spent watching videos on its platform, a.k.a. Fraud. They lied. It's fraud. And all statistics are bullshit.

If you cannot independently track statistics and you are relying on the company that you were paying to get the statistics, they are lying to you. Yep. So, uh, that is the one that drives me crazy. It's all bullshit. Speaking of bullshit, number four, disinformation and fake news.

Yep. Number five, with former executives speaking out about how they built the platform to be addictive and basically give you those dopamine rushes and come and clean on that. The regulatory mood is hardening is number six because everybody's kind of sick of it.

You know, it's like, you gave us Trump, you assholes. Time to crack down. Yeah. And number seven, GDPR, which we've talked about a bunch with Bittner, that this is going to be a huge shakeup because these people are looking at massive amounts of fines if they don't stay in line. Yep. And finally, antagonism with the news industry, which obviously, you know, we've said don't when any of the news industry people said, hey, we're going to put a bunch of content on Facebook.

We're like, are you stupid? Are you just stupid? Yes. I'm going to stick my head in the lion's mouth and just ask him not to bite. Yeah. Why would you do that? But everybody felt like they had to. Yeah. So I see peak Facebook right now. They're going to have to do something massive to change it because people are just tired, tired of it.

Yep. People are tired. We just need somewhere to go. Somewhere to go. Web 7.0, please hurry up and get here. Yeah. We like to pick on AI all the time. And I like to argue that there is no AI yet. It doesn't exist yet.

Yeah. It doesn't exist yet. But again, you know, because even the verge is now falling to putting AI in their headlines. Google's new AI algorithm predicts heart disease by looking at your eyes. Now, this is kind of cool. It's still machine learning. It's not AI. Yeah. But this is the exact kind of thing that this technology is going to be great for.

Massive amounts of pattern recognition, finding connections faster, better, and easier than humans do. Yeah. This is cool. This is really cool. I love the medical uses of this. I forget who I was listening to. It was on some show that I worked on. A guy was a machine learning expert, and he was talking about, you know, what kind of jobs would you tell people not to go into right now if they're in college for it and to change their major.

And cardiology was the first one. He said, you don't want to be a cardiologist. Machines can spot anomalies way better than people can. And cardiology is going to be one of those fields that is just going to be obliterated pretty soon, in the next, like, five to ten years.

So, like, if you're in college for cardiology, just get out now, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, basically, they're saying right here, by analyzing scans of the back of a patient's eye, the company's software is able to accurately deduce data, including age, blood pressure, whether or not they smoke, and then they can predict the risk of suffering cardiac events, such as heart attacks, with roughly the same accuracy as current leading methods.

How cool is that? It's very cool. And I've been using this for a couple of years. When I go get my eyes checked, they take high-resolution photos of my eyes, and they tell me, like, your blood pressure's a little high. You might want to go see your doctor. I'm like, well, that ain't going to happen, but thanks for letting me know, which I already knew.

But yeah, they can come up with so many different things, and the scans of your eye are pretty cool. So, I guess they're taking all of those scans and running them through the pattern recognition, which is great. I mean, if I had to sign a form that said you could take, you know, use the photos of my eye to, you know, next time I come in when you take a picture, it'll be better than it is now.

Sure. Take it. Go. Yeah. By all means. The one thing, though, that is also not AI, is the AI that we talked about last week or the week before that's doing the fake videos from Derp Fakes and those guys.

This is my favorite one of all time. Somebody took Alec Baldwin's President Trump impersonation and put Trump's real face on it. Awesome. It made, I mean, I was just cracking up. It was so perfect. It was so perfect. There were a couple other ones in the article that just weren't as good, but that one was so damn good.

It was really, really good. Yeah. And speaking of that, lawmakers are now worrying about the rise of fake video technology. So this has gotten the ire up of people in Congress and they are worried about this thing and they're going to start looking at it a little more deeply, which will be interesting.

I don't know what the hell they can do about it, but that's the problem. It's the fact that we're rapidly heading towards a place where you're not going to be able to trust anything that's digital for the most part. Let's go back to film. Oh, well, let's go back and talk about AI again really quickly because a new report has emerged.

AI risks are painting a grim future. It's a hundred page report entitled The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence, Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, boasting 26 experts from 14 different institutions and organizations. They do not have a rosy view of what AI is going to do to our world.

The big takeaway of the report is that AI is now on the cusp of being a tremendously negative disruptive force as rival states, criminals, and terrorists use the scale and efficiency of AI to launch finely targeted and highly efficient attacks. Awesome. Again, AI doesn't exist yet, but the thing about this when I was reading this, I'm like, if these guys would have just read the first two Daniel Suarez novels, they could have skipped

this convention because he laid it out so perfectly that everything in those books is pretty much what they're talking about in here. So if he's not on that panel, he should be. It would actually be a better use of his time considering his last couple novels. But even the drone swarms from his third book are in here.

You know, this was easy to predict stuff, you know, what, six, seven years ago when we were talking about it. And don't get me wrong. I think Daniel's a great guy. He's a very smart guy. He just needs a co-author. That's all. You know? Yeah. Last book wasn't that great. No.

Well, last, all of them. After Freedom TM, I was done. I've read them all, but I'm just like, and you had the problems with the one because, you know, of course, the old professor gets the hot, hot intern. It's all sci-fi authors can write anymore.

So Elon, who is on the board of OpenAI, has finally stepped down from the board. So he's going to spend more time on his other options instead of spending time with this because maybe he's just like, fuck it, let's go make some rockets so we can get out of here faster.

But also, they're doing, quote unquote, AI at Tesla for the, I know, I know, for the self-driving car projects that they're working on. So he thought it might be a conflict of interest. Yeah, that makes sense. I can see why. Yeah. Good on him.

I like him more and more every day. Now, I've never seen this site. You probably have, musicbusinessworldwide.com? Why, yes, I have. There's a great article in here about the great big Spotify scam. Now, this is not Betteridge's Laws of Headlines.

This is somebody who has a lawyer. It says, did a Bulgarian playlister swindle their way to a fortune on streaming service? Yeah, that's a lawyer that wrote that. Because from the research in this article, yes, there was a Bulgarian playlister who did swindle Spotify out of a lot of money.

Lower estimates are too. Did he, though? Is it swindling or is it playing the game? That's my question. I do not think he swindled Spotify out of anything. He gamified Spotify. He gamed the system. Yep. Totally gamed the system and won.

Like, low estimates are $288,000 a month. High estimates are $415,000 a month. But he did this all with 12, or she, I think it's a she, did this with 1,200 premium accounts, which means they were paying Spotify for 1,200 accounts.

So they let it go for a while until somebody at the music label pointed it out. They're like, why is this on the global list? There's nobody listening to this playlist. And they're like, oh, well, I don't know. So this person took a lot of money out of the mouths of starving musicians and took it for themselves because they found a loophole.

Because technically what they did seems to not be illegal. It was within the terms of service. Yeah, I don't see how it could possibly be illegal. There's nothing wrong with what this person did. And very clever. I mean, I respect this as opposed to the people that are pulling off Airbnb listings when they know people aren't working.

Right. So, you know, this is all right. I hope Spotify learns a lesson and they can shut down those loopholes. They say that they're working on it, so we'll see. But I'm just pissed we didn't think about this because, well, we didn't have the... Well, we did. We actually discussed this very thing.

That's true. I know we did. Yeah, we did. We discussed this exactly. Like two years ago, yeah. Like we do with everything, we just don't do it. Well, you know why? Because 1,200 premium accounts on Spotify is a lot of money and we're broke. So we need a backer. We need a backer for our black ops.

So if anybody out there wants to write us a check so we can do some of the crap that we talk about on the show, get in touch with us. I'm Jason at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. Ops and doodads. About a year ago, I signed up for Rescue Time. For the exorbitant amount of over $70 a year.

And what Rescue Time did was it tracked all of my app usage on my Macintosh computers, either my desktop or my laptop. And you could put it on all of them and it would track it across. And I got a picture of what I was doing throughout the week. Right? Right. The quantified life that we always talk about not doing.

Exactly. This was my quantified life. And it was, you know, it's kind of just hands-off quantification, as it were. Right. I thought it was interesting for the first month. And then after that, I would just get an email once a day that told me when I had done five hours of productive work.

And after that, I mean, I never looked at it again. So, fortunately, when it came time to renew, my credit card had been declined because I changed my credit card, as we talked about on the last episode. Thank you again, person on Virgin America stealing my credit card to go get a martini.

So, I did not renew with Rescue Time. And I will not renew with Rescue Time. I've uninstalled it because while it is interesting, it is interesting for maybe a month. Right. And it changed my behavior, not one bit. Well, that's, as we've discussed over the years on this show, quantifying stuff doesn't really help.

You don't change your behavior at all. You just now know the stupid shit you're doing. Right. I mean, yeah, you have to couple that quantification with habit change. I ain't nobody got time for habit change. So, I'm too busy looking at my Rescue Time graphs. So, yeah, I'm happily rid of Rescue Time.

And it's one less thing that's running on all my computers, phoning home to somewhere. Good. Yeah. So, I do not recommend Rescue Time. What I also don't recommend, and I think we need to have a new segment in Apps and Doodads called Dumb Instagram Ad of the Week. Because I am getting inundated with all of these ads.

And like I talked about, like, two or three shows ago, that most of them are people just buying stuff cheap and then reselling it for twice the price that you can get it on Amazon. Yeah. This is a new one. This is called the Shape Scale. Mm-hmm. It's a scale with a telescoping arm that you pop out, you stand on it, and then the thing swivels around you and takes a 3D scan of your body.

Right. Something that nobody wants. Which you then do what with? Over time, it will tell you exactly where you're losing fat or gaining fat or how your body is changing over time. You know what tells me that right now? Clothes.

Very good point, Brian. You don't even have to get that Does My Ass Look Fat Amazon product to tell you that your ass looks fat. You can just tell, my ass doesn't fit in my jeans anymore. Or, wow, I got more wiggle room in these. Nice. I like it. This is, like, the really quantified self, since it is scanning you.

And it's phoning that scan home, back to the servers, where it can then be analyzed against your other scans. And hacked. And hacked. Exactly. I do notice that everybody in the photos and videos of this are wearing clothes, but I know when I weigh myself, I'm butt naked because I don't want a single extra ounce of anything on me.

But the thing about it is, that's not even the worst part about it. You know, it might be a good idea for some people to do that, but people like, you know, professional athletes and things like that. But they can go get, like, DEXA scans and stuff like that to tell they're fat. The problem with this is, the scale is $349 plus $9.99 a month.

Your scale comes with a subscription. Yes, because you're using their storage space, right? Or you can pay $699, and that's the all-you-can-eat package. But who knows how long they're going to be in business. So, you know, if you're going to hedge your bets, you would go with the $9.99 a month, thinking that they're probably not going to be around very long.

But that's still a high price point to pay for scale. I thought my ARIA at $99 was too much. And this thing is, it's ridiculous. Who needs this? No one. No one needs it. No. So, that is my dumb Instagram ad of the week. Okay.

We'll have to make a jingle. Beep-eep-eep-eep-boo. I also think we need a jingle for these companies. For these companies that just are black boxes and don't tell you how anything works, and they just lie to you because that's everybody right now.

YouTube's in a bit of trouble. Again? YouTube's trending section is under fire once again after another misleading offensive video made its way to the top of the list. This is after the shootings last week, and the far right kind of went, yeah, as they do, conspiracy crazy, and are claiming that some of these students that are speaking out now are actually crisis actors.

They're not real students. Oh, yeah. And one of these videos made it to YouTube's top trending, even though it's not supposed to. YouTube's algorithm is supposed to pull out misleading videos and things of that nature. Misleading clickbaity and sensational titles and thumbnails impact viewer satisfaction and engagement.

So, according to their own terms of service, this wasn't supposed to happen, and it keeps happening, and nobody seems to know why, except, of course, YouTube knows exactly why, because it's their damn algorithm. Now, are we sure this wasn't the Russians? Hey, it could be at this point.

Who the hell knows? Well, because after the shooting, the bot farms went into high gear on getting misinformation out there and just stoking the whole gun violence thing and gun rights and all that. A lot of the chatter that everybody's been hearing is from Russian bot farms.

Yeah, which is crazy. So, I don't trust anything anymore. Yeah, I don't either. We're already there. So, I'm not a big YouTuber, but that is something I use a lot. I had thought that I'm a year and a half now into having my kid, and I had thought I'd have a lot more apps and stuff to talk about in here, but I've mostly kept the Kid Life Analog, which has been a real joy.

I love not having that be digital, so it's been fantastic. But the one thing I do use all the time is the YouTube app on Apple TV. They updated it. Uh-oh. Oh, boy. Here we go. It is horrible.

I mean, people hate it. I am not alone on this one. Start a petition! Yeah, startachange.org petition. They've gotten rid of so many features. They've tried to make it... Why do people keep changing things? It's like, I am becoming my dad, but I'm not wrong. Your complete guide to the new Apple TV YouTube app is a link in our show notes.

You can go look at it. I don't know. You know, not a lot of people probably use it. I do. I use it all the time. I've created playlists that are like, you know, Sesame Street shorts on YouTube are about a minute or two long. So you make a playlist, and you put like 50 of them in there.

And to maintain parental sanity, you randomize it. You put it on shuffle mode. They got rid of shuffle mode! Oh, God. You cannot shuffle playlists anymore. You watch them in the order that they're created. Why? Why would you get rid of that?

I don't understand. And they've done things like they've... If you subscribe to channels and you want to go through your subscriptions, it used to be like a little grid. So you could see like 20 at a time or whatever. Now there's these gigantic icons. You only see like four at a time. So if you've subscribed to like even 20 channels, it takes a lot of time to scroll through them all.

It's just stupid. It is completely user unfriendly. The one thing that I've also noticed is they play a shit ton more ads now. They have definitely fixed that part. So there are ads upon ads upon ads way more than would pop up in the old version of the app.

So it's just bad. I wonder if the same people that redesigned Hulu redesigned YouTube because I don't know if you've seen the Hulu app, but I mean, you should check it out because you will just lose your mind. You will lose your mind. The UX and the UI on that is so unbelievably bad that they lost me as a customer because of it.

There's no way to find anything. You can't use the app. Yeah. Yeah. The YouTube app is just so bad now on Apple TV. It's frustrating. I'm frustrated every day now when I'm trying to play some stuff for my kid. Why don't you get a PC and plug it into your TV and then just use the web app, use the website.

Sorry, not the web app, the website and just lock it into your TV and make a media center. I think I'm going to have to go around to doing that. So once again, all these things that are supposed to make us make things easier for us are just making it harder. And the web still wins. Speaking of the web and app changes, whatever happened to the activity scroll on Facebook that used to be on the far right hand side, is it just me that hasn't seen it for two months?

I've turned mine off with Facebook Purity or FB Purity. So maybe you turned it off and you haven't unchecked the box? No, I checked that. I might have to try uninstalling FB Purity and see if it comes back because I miss it. That was one thing I actually liked about Facebook.

Okay. I don't know. So it is just me. Okay. I will check into it. Yeah. Yeah. Uninstall FB Purity and just, it's a good way to reset your calibration on how terrible Facebook is, is to turn FB Purity off for a little bit. I tried it for a week and you can't use Facebook then. Period. You can't use it. That's why I sent the guy 20 bucks.

I'm like, thank you. Right. Thank you. If I have to use this steaming pile of shit website, I appreciate the effort that you've gone into to make it easier for me. And I love you for that. Here's 20 bucks. Go buy a six pack. Damn right. Now, I found this one this morning, actually. This guy, Artur Grabowski, had a question about Apple Maps versus Google Maps versus Waves.

Waves, not Waves. And he wanted to figure out which one actually worked best. So, he did 120 trips, meticulously documented them, and he was trying to answer three questions. Which navigation app estimates the shortest travel time? How does each app over or underestimate travel times?

Which navigation app actually gets you to your destination most quickly? I would say I would just care about the third one in this list. But, so, for a year, this guy, I mean, you can go to the website and read his methodology and look at all his data and figure out how it is.

And I'm going to, spoiler alert, Google Maps is better than Waves. And if you want to get to your destination most quickly, use Google Maps. Yep. And if you don't want to burn your phone out prematurely, also, use Google Maps. I love this guy.

Yeah. I'm so happy he did this because it solves so many arguments that I have all the time with people about what to use. And I've always been, Google Maps is the best, by far. And vindication, damn it. Yeah, my friend Ron Jones, who doesn't listen to the show because he hates podcasts, will never hear this, but he's a Waves guy.

I think MXV, who does listen to the show and is a friend of the show, uses Waves. So, Mike, go back to Google Maps. And this is my favorite one of the week. I found this one over on Boing Boing. Make your own Alexa-controlled toilet. Mm-hmm.

So, there was a guy who was inspired by the $6,000 toilet that they were showing at CES. And he figured out how to do it for about $700. Okay. You just buy, like, you know, the, uh, you do buy a luxury toilet seat off of Amazon and some other components, and you put it all together, and he made it an Alexa-controlled toilet for a tenth of the price that you could get from my CES.

Why? Oh, I don't know. Why? Why not? Alexa, flush my toilet. Exactly. What is going on? Alexa, spray my balls. That's it. Media candy.

This just in. Netflix's Lost in Space reboot reveals first teaser trailer. What's also breaking is, I didn't know Netflix was doing a Lost in Space reboot. Me either. Yeah. I never really liked the show, and I hated the movie.

See, you know I love the movie. I mean, I don't, I don't mind the show, but, uh, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to dust off our outro for this episode from the archives because we haven't played that in a very long time. But this has Toby Stevens from Black Sails, who was the captain in Black Sails, which was an amazing show.

I love that show. He'll be playing John Robinson. Molly Parker from Deadwood, who was awesome. She's going to be the wife. And I love this. Parker Posey is going to be playing Dr. Smith. I do love me some Parker Posey. Dude, tell me about it. Almost better than Spock's mom.

Almost. Almost. Uh, so this is going to be premiering on April 13th. Uh, 10 episodes. It's a 10 episode run. And, uh, man, if they, if they knock this one out, this is going to be great because they're going to have back-to-back sci-fi hits with this in Altered Carbon. Right. So, I don't know if you, have you gotten a chance?

No, of course you haven't gotten a chance to see Altered Carbon yet. That's a silly question. Did you not look at the show notes? I'm going to be discussing it in a second. I'll just do it now. Oh, don't. Because we're talking about it. Oh, my God. I did. I have seen five episodes of Altered Carbon. Okay. Uh, I have to say, stab yourself in the dick for all I care might possibly be the dumbest line ever uttered in a show.

But that was just in last night, so I had to make a note of that. Uh, it's not bad. It makes me long for The Expanse to come back, to be honest. Um, it's decent. It's well done. There is a ridiculous amount of gratuitous nudity.

Yes! You haven't even seen half of it yet. Obviously, obviously just meant to make the show edgy. I can imagine the meeting. Let's make a sci-fi Game of Thrones, everyone. And I hate the lead actor guy. He's too wooden for me. I can't remember his name offhand. You never watched The Killing, so you don't know him from The Killing.

He was, you know, he was like a skinny, junky dude in The Killing, and now he's Mr. But I like the guy. He's grown on me through, like, the five seasons of The Killing, so I was really excited to see him back. I like the guy. So, I... I have a rough time with him. I like the rest of the cast. I like the show so far, but it is, like, my wife walked through the room and she's like, are you watching a porn?

And I'm like, kinda. Kinda, sorta. Wanna join me? Kinda, sorta. Sit over here. No, but I'm gonna finish it. It's enjoyable enough so far. I do like the story. It's, you know, it's a sci-fi mishmash. There's nothing new in here, but it's very well done. Yeah, since you're only on episode five, I can't really say anything, but, yeah, we'll talk about it again down the line, but I really enjoyed it.

And, yeah, the main character, he is a little wooden, but I like him. And what I really like is the AI hotel pose. Yeah. Edgar Allan Poe's place. Yeah, I do love that. It's so cool. Yeah, that's very cool. Anyway, speaking of shows that should not be, Apple's Carpool Karaoke is getting a second season.

I don't know anybody that watched the first season. All I heard was terrible reviews. I don't know anybody that's watched it on Apple. I know a lot of people that watch the clips on YouTube. It's very popular. Okay. Apparently. So, I don't get it. I don't get James Corden. So, who knows?

I don't. I've seen a couple of his episodes, and I thought he's funny, but it's a little, he's a little too much for me. I miss Craig Ferguson in that role. Oh, me too. All right. Well, speaking of reboots and things that are coming back again, the Muppets are coming back again.

Jim Henson's classic characters are being rebooted for Disney's new streaming service because Disney realized, unlike CBS, you need content if you're going to charge for a streaming service. But Disney probably also realized that the Muppets aren't an adult show, and that's why that's the last Disney reboot, or the last Muppets reboot, I should say, failed.

It was way too adult-y. Yes, I agree. The Muppets should be what the Muppets are, and adults enjoy them when they're for kids. Don't make it for adults. So, I'm happy they're coming back. I've always loved the Muppets. They're also producing a CGI update of the animated series Muppet Babies, which I remember watching as a kid.

I was never into Muppet Babies. I'm excited about that, too. Since, basically, we're based on two characters from the Muppets, I can't argue that they're coming back. That's true. And I also watched another movie this week, another Oscar-nominated movie. I watched Icarus, the documentary. Mm-hmm. Wow.

Yep. It is so good. Yeah. Oh, my God. It is so good. And Lefsitz wrote about it after he saw it as well, and I agree with everything he said in his article for once. This is just amazing. It's an amazing story, the way that it plays out, the fact that he had no idea that this is what he's going to be getting into, and it ends up just basically being about how Putin's a really, really, really bad dude, and we should not trust him at all.

Are you listening, administration? It's funny. I thought I reviewed this on the show, but I haven't. It was on another show that I reviewed this. That's why I was like, I was surprised when you were like, oh, yay, Lefsitz is great. I'm like, dude, I reviewed this show. What are you giving him all the credit for?

But apparently it wasn't this show, so my bad. Yeah, it's a fantastic movie. Everybody should watch it. It's incredible. Yes, unbelievably good. Go watch it. It is just stunningly good. I loved every second of it. And it's just funny because the day after, you know, I watched it.

The story comes out. Russia confirms Curler's doping positive. That raises doubts about drug source because doublespeak because they realize that they can't get away with just flat out denying it. So now they cast aspersions on it and make you doubt it. Yeah. So there you go. And as posted on Facebook from a friend, Russian Curler has to dope to compete.

Canadian Curlers don't even need to be sober. That's true. Oh, hell true. And speaking of Bob Lefset, he's got a podcast. Yes, he does. I've been listening to it. What do you think? It's not bad. I don't think it's bad at all. He does all right. It's okay.

Yeah, it's okay. I mean, it's not super engaging. I literally put it on when I go to bed at night because I know if I miss any of the content, I'm not going to care. I just need people talking in the background. And so I might get a few interesting stories before I fall asleep. So I've been trying it, but it's better than I thought it was going to be from his newsletter because I can't read his newsletter.

It annoys me to no end. But his podcast is way better than the newsletter. Yeah, I agree. And this is something interesting. I've been meaning to talk about this for months, but I keep forgetting to put it in the show notes because I'm always in my car when I think about it. When I have to listen to NPR in my car because there's nothing else on, I notice that they're using the kind of the smart tags in FM radio.

You know how they can push the artist name and the song name to your radio? Yes. WBEZ here in Chicago, and they're probably doing this with most of the NPR stations, they're pushing traffic updates. Nice. So you can see, so you don't have to like wait for traffic on the hour or traffic on the threes.

It literally says, it's like, okay, Lakeshore Drive, 12 minutes from, you know, 55 or whatever. It's just like, you can, you know the codes because you listen to traffic all the time. So if you know where you're going, you can see the codes come by and it just streams traffic to you constantly. I thought that was really clever.

That was a really clever use of the technology. That's a very good use of the technology. Well done. Well done, NPR. At least you do something right. Security? Ha! The gang's all here.

We're back with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire. How's it going, Dave? Oh, just dandy, gentlemen. Just dandy. How's everybody doing? Peachy Kino. Excellent. So we're going to start off this week with a little bit of follow-up from Hack, spelled H-A-Q-U-E, which I think is a very clever way to spell Hack.

I think it's elegant. You sure it's not like a sneeze? Hack you! Hack you! Could be. Could be. Yeah. All right. As a quick aside, I always thought it'd be great. I could never convince my wife to do this, but I thought it would be great to give my kids a middle name that was just a sound.

So, like, you know, my son, my oldest son's name is Scott David Bittner, right? So, you know, my middle, my first name is his middle name. That's a little tradition we have in the family. Bad op-sec. Bad op-sec. Males. Whatever. So, but I thought it would be funny to have one of, give a middle name that was like, Doosh.

And, you know, I don't know how you spell that, but just say, hi, I'm Scott David Doosh Bittner, right? Anyway, my wife wouldn't go for it. I'm John Doerr from Star Trek Smith. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Somehow I just couldn't get her to buy in on that one.

I don't know. I can't imagine why that didn't happen. Anyway, I digress. Okay, so I got a tweet from, heck you, when we were talking about the canary in the coal mine idea that I was talking about last week. It's apparently been done. There's a site called canarytokens.org where you can do that already.

He says, check out the risky.biz episode where it is discussed, free and awesome, which I believe is his podcast, so we want to give him a shout out for that. Oh, yeah, that's great. I have heard of, in fact, I know people who regularly use those kind of tokens in emails so that they can know if an email was opened or forwarded or things like that.

Pretty common. Yeah. Definitely be checking that out at some point. And a friend of the show, David Teeter, sent us an awesome graphic. This is from XKCD. It's 2018 CVE list. I'm not going to step on the joke, but go to the show notes and click on the link and check out the leaked list of major 2018 security vulnerabilities.

It's quite funny. It's a good one. Yeah. And Lifehacker, again, came out with a pretty basic but probably needed guide for a lot of people because everybody now has smart home devices. This is how to protect your privacy on your smart home devices. It runs through the basics, the Echo, the Home, and the HomePod.

If you have one and you've never taken a look at the settings, I highly recommend you go check out this article. Some basic stuff to just shut some things down. It's interesting to me how many people are sort of poo-poo these devices and say, I'm not putting a bug in my house without really thinking about, is there a shortage of microphones in your house?

Every single phone you have, every single computer you have. Probably your TV. Yeah. I mean, you can put a Band-Aid over the camera on your laptop, but it's hard to plug up the microphone. I know we've talked about that before. So it's such an interesting perception thing, I think, that people think of these devices as being more spy-like, I guess because they assume they're always listening, which I suppose they are in a way.

In a way, with a small buffer that gets deleted, in theory. In theory. But yeah, on your laptop, we discussed, I think maybe three years ago, the NSA had a PDF that got leaked about how to harden your Mac, and it showed ways to, at the system level, how to disable your microphone so it's off.

You cannot turn it back on, and a bunch of other different things with the camera and all that, which was a pretty- How interesting. Yeah, it was a pretty good leaked PDF, if I remember properly. And it wasn't that hard to go through. It was pretty easy to do, but I still need to use my camera every now and again, so it's easier to take the tape off when I need to do a Skype call than it is to go back into the kernel, recompile it, and make the camera work again, you know?

Well, and on the opposite side of that, our friends over at Johns Hopkins, you know, Joe Kerrigan was telling the story about how some of their researchers figured out a way to have the camera come on on the Mac without the light coming on, without the LED. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually kind of, you know, malware 101 is to get that going.

Yeah, but I think a lot of people assume that there's sort of a direct hardware link between, you know, that that LED is actually a power indicator. You know, it's, it's, it's not, no, it's not close. So I have a story, David, about the smoke alarms you got me.

Oh, I got you. All right. Go on. You had me. I feel like I'm about to be blamed for something. Oh, no, no, no, no. Yes, you are now, you are now personally responsible, of course. Rest easy. Rest easy. Way to frame it. All right. So I got, I got these, I got these new first alert smoke detectors and I got the Samsung smart hub.

And today was the first day I was alone in the house because all the dogs were at daycare for the first time ever. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to set these up today. But first thing in the morning, I took a shower and left the door open. And I've always thought it was BS.

The story that your son gave about setting off the smoke alarm with the steam from the shower, because for the past three weeks, the new first alert has been on the counter in the bathroom. And I take very steamy showers and I'm sure you never.

Yes, of course, baby. I live alone and I'm single. What are you going to do? And it has never gone off ever. And there's so much steam in there. I'm like, okay, this is the same smoke alarm that he has. I can't set it off with my crazy steam. I'm thinking maybe some shenanigans were going on with the kid that day.

Maybe a little puff puff, if you know what I'm saying. Not out of the question. Today, I was taking a really hot shower. It was really cold in the house and it steamed everything up. And my 10-year-old first alert smoke alarm started going off right outside the bathroom door because I still haven't put up the new ones yet.

And there I am laughing my ass off, dripping wet, naked with the towel, waving it at the smoke detector. Smoke alarms screaming at you. Right. And I'm cracking up because I'm like, yeah, this is probably what David's kid was doing at the same time.

Vindication. You're in an elite club now. Yep. So at the same time, like when I was done, I got out of the shower, I ripped that one out of the ceiling and put the new one up. And then I went through the house today and set them up with the smart hub. So now I'm all set up with all of my alarms. It wasn't a bad setup with the smart hub.

No, no. I thought it was pretty straightforward. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now I can check. And I can even check battery levels on them, which is really nice. So all in all, the investment in the smoke alarms and the smart hub was under 200 bucks for four alarms and the hub itself. So I'm down with that after almost burning my house down with the chicken soup a couple of weeks ago.

Yes. Yes. I discovered just like New Year's. I discovered, you know, how the local news will put out stories about all the new laws that have been passed in your area. And it turns out that Maryland passed some new regulation about smoke detectors where smoke detectors have to have built in lithium batteries.

So technically these first alert units that I just installed less than six months ago are now illegal. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm really going to rush out and replace them right away. Let me tell you, you know, seriously.

I don't think they're coming over to inspect your house. No, no, they're not. They're not. So but, you know, there you go. So you say your kid is vindicated. He might be still on the straight and narrow, but probably not. But still as I'm like, it's five in the morning.

It's pitch black outside and I'm sitting there waving my towel, dripping wet. The dogs are looking at me like, what the hell is wrong with you? I thought you said the dogs weren't home. At five in the morning they were. I had to get up early to take them to the daycare. So when I got home, I could do the settings to put them all around the house.

Ah, I see. I understand. This was the indignity. Yes, yes. My young son is staring at me and just going, Dad, what are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah. Aw. Aw. Aw. Moving on. Moving on.

We've talked a lot about the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. It goes into effect May 25th as of this year. I know this because Facebook is apparently taking it quite seriously. I got a number of emails from them letting us know that they want to make sure that you ensure your Facebook business complying with these new requirements.

So they're taking it seriously, apparently, and they want to make sure that you do too if you happen to be running a business still on Facebook, which it was, I don't know why you would be doing that, but if you're dumb enough to continue to do that, pay attention. Yeah. And I think really they have no choice.

I mean, the, you know, they're, they're, they've got a big hammer. A hammer hanging over them when it comes to this. And I was actually, uh, we ran an interview, uh, recently with, um, who was it? Andrea Little Lombago from Endgame. She was talking about how she thinks that it's going to be kind of a wait and see that maybe we'll have to see some real big, uh, fines come down from the EU before people take this as seriously as perhaps they should.

Right. Yeah. That'll be interesting. Yeah. We'll see. So this is an interesting one. Flight Sim Labs is in the news because they have a little add-on to Microsoft Flight Simulator for the A320X, which is a $100 add-on to Flight Simulator that lets you pilot an Airbus A320, which I think would be kind of fun.

Yeah. I love Flight Simulators. I had Flight Simulator 1.0 on floppies for Microsoft. It was great. Except what that didn't come with was a bunch of malware to dump all my Chrome passwords. Oops. These guys. Oopsies. Yeah. These guys put a Chrome password dumper in there to basically what they're saying is, well, this is only triggered when we detect a pirated copy of our software.

Well, as history will tell you, uh, ask Sony, uh, that's a bad idea. It's a really, really bad idea. So the community has come out against them and torn them to pieces. And so they defended themselves and said, oh, no, no, no, trust me.

We're not using it against you, our faithful paying customers. And they're just like, screw you. You put malware on my machine. And they're like, okay, okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Our bad. Our bad. And that's kind of how that played out this week. But how did these companies think that they can get away with this crap anymore?

Unbelievable. Yes. This is a bad judgment all around. Uh, not the least of which the name of the file that it dropped was test.exe. So, you know, that couldn't accidentally be clicked on. And again, like, like you said, they're claiming that that file will only be invoked if they, um, detect that you're using a pirated serial number.

But to me, this is, it's like, you stole my software from me. So now I'm entitled to burn your house down. Exactly. Yeah. This is not, this is not proportional. Um, and, uh, so they may have some legal problems ahead.

I hope so. Yeah. Because, I mean, think of every malware, like, uh, guy out there now who's looking for that to see if that files on the system. So they can just use the one that's already there. They don't even have to bundle it into their malware. Like, oh, it's already here. We'll just use theirs. Never mind. They did the work for us. It's already on the system.

Yeah. I, you know, I guess we can give them a little bit of credit that they did apologize in the end and, and sort of reversed course and said, okay, this is wrong. We should have done this. Which is, which is unusual. So at least I guess we can give them credit for that.

There's no real, we don't know what they got, how many people they got it from. Um, but yeah, just bad, bad form and, and hopefully, uh, they'll be appropriately punished and send a message to everybody else that this is not cool. I'm guessing that the add-on for the A320 on Microsoft's flight simulator is a fairly narrow audience.

I don't think we're talking in the millions of people here. Probably not. But still, I think to that point, though, you could see how if you were the person making that and you did have a limited audience, how it would really stick in your craw that you saw all of these pirated serial numbers being phoned home to you, you know, from the, from the pirate bay and so, you know, wherever.

Um, and so I, I can see a, an emotional response, uh, you know, the developers sitting around on a Friday afternoon, you know, they've had a few beers and they're saying, how can we get these people? These, you know, if we don't put a stop to this, we're going to go out of business.

How can we get these people? And somebody pipes up and says, I've got an idea. And somebody says, excellent, do it. And the thing is that this is 2018. We know how to register software and make it unusable for the most part. I mean, yeah, it's not that big of a problem unless their software is so easily crackable and their hashes for their passwords are so easily crackable that anybody can just go do it or send a copy of the, you know, the plug into somebody else and have them just turn it on and have it go.

Um, there are ways, I mean, there's just so many ways around this and it's just, it's such wasted effort. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this next story was sent to me by a colleague who, uh, sort of sent it under the, uh, the, the title.

Are you aware of this? Here's something you might want to know about. Uh, it's a company who's spinning up some technology. They're called Hawkeye 360. And basically what they're doing is they're putting a, uh, network of low earth orbit satellites up and they're claiming to be able to basically track radio signals, any radio signal from low earth orbit.

And there are, of course, very useful purposes for this. You can, you know, for logistics, for tracking your shipping things and, um, maritime stuff. And, you know, there's emergency response, search and rescue, um, there, there, uh, communications things you can, you know, map spectrum and so forth.

Um, but the thing that my friend pointed out to me, um, was that one of the things that they're kind of on a low level, it seems, um, selling this is that there are, of course, law enforcement uses for this. So if you can track a cell phone signal from space, instead of having to use cell phone towers, uh, this would enable you to do such a thing.

Now, again, you know, legitimate uses for this. So, you know, for example, if you had a couple of ships at sea who were on a course to meet each other and suddenly they turned off their transponders, um, but there are crewmen on those ships who still have their cell phones on, you could track those signals.

And, you know, if they're up to no good or, you know, with, uh, uh, counterfeit materials or, you know, smuggling or things like that, then you could use this to track them. But, but I think there are, there's the potential here for some serious, uh, civil liberty issues as well.

So I, uh, put this in here to see what you guys thought about it. I want to know how they're going to track a cell phone from low earth orbit if it's not pinging a tower. Yeah, that's weird. I mean, if they can do that, the technology that they've created is incredible. Well, I don't know for sure.

I mean, and, and, you know, when your cell phone can't hit a tower, it goes into high power mode and just starts trying to reach out and find a tower. Right. And so, uh, you know, I guess it's a matter of how much sensitivity to these low earth orbit satellites have. And I'm, I'm, to be clear, I'm speculating on some of this, but, you know, conspiracy theorists start your engines.

Um, it's an interesting new approach to technology or I, it's probably not the right way to say it. Somebody is spending a lot of money to put these satellites up into space and there are lots of applications for them. I guess to me, this is just one of those things we're going to have to keep an eye on.

Kind of like we've kept trying to keep an eye on things like stingrays. Ha ha! Yes. But it's sort of the, it's the, it's the stingray technology perhaps taken to another level. Now, are these actually in space right now? Because it doesn't seem like they are. This seems like a proof of concept and they're raising money to get the, get them in the, in the sky.

I do not believe they are in orbit yet. Okay. So this is, this is basically like, this could just be a guy out there with a website making stuff up. You know? Could be. Could be. I mean, they've got some pretty, uh. Some interesting press.

They've got some names on their board and they, on their board of directors and they've been around for a little while. So I think it's more than that, but, uh, just, it's, uh, as much a thought exercise as anything, but, uh, something I figured our audience might enjoy checking out. Yeah.

Yeah. So we don't need tinfoil hats. We need tinfoil raincoats. I pick umbrellas. Yeah. Yeah. Tinfoil umbrellas. Yeah. What are you going to do now? Uh, this one, this one is because we talked about travel and border crossing and things like that in the past, and I just, I just saw this this morning and I was just, this was a Picard forehead palm moment.

U.S. Border Patrol hasn't validated e-passport data for years. Turns out for the past 11 years, they haven't been able to actually do the checks on the ARFID chips that are in the back of our passports that they're scanning every time we go through customs. So theoretically until now, you could have been changing all of that data because they're not checking like the hashes against the data so they can't really tell if the signatures match the data so that they can't tell if it's a forgery.

Right. 11 years they've been doing this. 11 years. Because they just haven't installed the software. And, and at the same time, they're requiring other nations to be compatible with the system. Yeah. Yes. The system that they're unable to use.

Yes. Yeah. It's awesome. So I just, I'm like, you know, we can, we can have conspiracy theories for days, but I think the, the level of incompetence is just so fantastic that it's really not worrying about. So that just comes back to your Hawkeye. I'm like, until somebody, you know, tags me with a Hawkeye map somewhere, like prove it works before you can, uh, before I'm going to worry about the, the, the law enforcement applications, because all of these things are just, they're, they're vaporware.

I remember when these passports first came out, you know, there were people, the privacy folks were saying either hit your passport with a hammer or put it in the microwave for a few, you know, a few seconds. Or buy a $50 wallet that you could carry it in.

Right. But this was more to actually disable it even for the, the, the border people themselves. So they can't scan it, you know, so that's just becomes a, like an old fashioned passport. I do remember the nuking the passport phase when that was first came out. That was fun. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

That was a common, common advice. So yeah, it's interesting. 11 years seems excessive to me, but, um, that's the pace of progress, I guess, in the government sometimes. Oh, well. There you go. Um, our next story here, uh, I, I put this in here for Brian and, uh, also, uh, well, also because I know you guys talk a lot about this notion of, um, universal basic income and this story touches on that as well.

Well, the story is, uh, tech companies should stop pretending AI won't destroy jobs. Right. And, uh, you know, the, the writer here, um, is basically making the point that, yeah, the, you're just going to be a lot of jobs locked and there isn't going to be work for everyone.

And he admits that he's perhaps a little contrarian and not everyone agrees with him, but, uh, at the very least we should be prepared for this possibility, which it seems as though certainly here in the U S we're not prepared for this possibility. Oh no, not, not even slightly.

So I do like this. I like this article a lot. I mean, I, this is, this is my viewpoint and I, I tend to agree with him. I don't see this as a, I don't, I don't see AI as, as making, uh, creating more jobs. It's going to take jobs away. I don't see any other way around that.

And, you know, so it is frightening. It is, it is worrisome to me that, uh, that we're head heading here and we're not even really having the discussions. Well, and for me, it's so much of our culture, how we identify ourselves or define ourselves, I suppose, is this notion of independence of, of hard work and, and that work equals value to society and our ability to adapt if that becomes no longer the case.

And I think I agree that we are probably heading towards the time when that is not so much the case, uh, how we value each other and put value on people and, you know, friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, it's going to have to change, but unfortunately it seems as though that sort of change is slow coming.

So interesting times ahead, perhaps. Guys, you've already missed the point about this. Yes, it's going to destroy a lot of jobs, but if you want to sign up for Uber and get your side hustle on, you can make a fine living. That's true.

I forgot about that. That's true. Good point. Well, what happens when Uber becomes self-driving, smarty pants? Well, then we're all screwed, but it's not here yet. I see. So get it while you can. Get it while you can. Yeah, that's right. Get that side hustle while you can.

While you can. Right. Right. Screw everybody else. I'm getting my side hustle on. That's right. Got to get me a Lambo. Anyway, 1Password has a new feature on their new version that just came out. I think it was yesterday.

I think it was updating these yesterday. They have a pwned password check now. So when you're making a new password, you can actually see if it is part of the database out there from pwned passwords. And this was the guy that did, what was his original one? Have you been pwned?

I think that was the same guy. So they're using that database to just check any new password you're making against that database to see if it's actually ever been used and picked up by one of the scrapers, which I think is kind of cool. I think it might be a little overkill, but because it's like, we're not going to have unique passwords for every person on the planet for every service.

I mean, I guess. That's true. I guess, you know, theoretically you can, but see. I would also think if you're using 1Password, you should be allowing 1Password to auto-generate your passwords anyway. Right. So it should be random. And I mean, this mostly helps people who, despite using a password manager, can't help reusing passwords, which seems like an edge case to me.

Defeats the purpose of having a password manager, honestly. Yes. But I guess there's no downside to this. I mean, I have, again, you know, back to the conspiracy theorists, I have heard people say, there's no way I would ever put a password into the Pwn password database, then they'd have my password. I think we said that, actually. Yeah.

I think we did. Yeah. So, in a way, you're turning over, you're allowing password to check your password against the Pwn password database. That's a lot of Ps. Yeah. It really is. So, but overall, this is probably a good thing.

I don't see any downside to this, so why not? No, I don't either. I don't see a downside to it. I think it just might add on a little bit of extra, you know, issues. If people are going to be, like, you know, very militant about this, and they're like, oh, then I can't have to have a password that nobody's ever used before.

It just seems, like, kind of silly, because with the password restrictions on some websites, there's going to be a finite amount of passwords that can be used on that. Yes, it's probably greater than the amount of people that can ever sign up for a website, but still, every now and then you might get some overlap, and then you've got to do it again, and I mean, I think it's a cute gimmick, and I don't think it's much more than that.

Yeah, yeah, but no harm done, I guess. No harm, no foul. Right. All right, so this last story, this one's for you, Jason, and we're back to our running theme of teledildonics. This is via Zach Whitaker's Twitter feed.

Zach Whitaker is the security editor at CBS, and he had a nice tweet here. From the inbox, a vibrator that orders food following an orgasm. Oh, yay. This is technology I know we've all been waiting for. A company called Cam Soda has a device that when you're finished with your business, you push a button and it automatically orders a large cheese pizza.

Oh. Now. That's just what I need. Now, here's the thing about this. Okay. The new, this is the debut of Rub Grub, which I think is hands down the best porn company name in the history of the world. And since it's a vibrator, I'm guessing it's generally for women.

So why don't they press the button before they actually use it and then just have sex with the pizza guy? Like every porn ever. You can skip a step and save some battery life. I suppose that's true, but let's not be discriminatory.

There's no reason why gay men could also press the button and also have sex with the pizza guy. Well, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Right. There you go. This is also true. It's just harder to find the button when the vibrator's behind you is all I'm saying. I just think the marketing's all, I think the marketing's all wrong for women because most women I know would get a salad, not a pizza.

True. Shouldn't they deliver that? Yeah. Well, I have a story. Okay. And I can't believe I'm going to tell this story, but it is, I'm telling you, this is a true story. Oh, do tell. I'm going to kick my feet up for this one.

It's story time with Papa B. So when I was in college, back in the late 80s, early 90s, my senior year of college, I lived in a dorm on campus. And this is actually a four-story building, and it was full of suites, which are basically apartments without kitchens, right?

So I was in this suite on the fourth floor, and this was, imagine a U-shaped building, and our suite was in the lower part of the U, the curved part of the bottom of a U. And we were on the fourth floor, and I had three roommates. There was a double room and two single rooms.

I had one of the single rooms. And one of the guys who lived in the double discovered that because we were high up in the air, if you looked out our window down at some of the other rooms, all the windows had mini-blinds. And of course, you would adjust the mini-blinds so that people could not see in from below.

But you could see in from above. So one of our roommates learned that one of our neighbors, another student presumably, she and her boyfriend were on a schedule, a regular schedule.

And the schedule involved, the boyfriend would come over the same time, a few times a week, and the schedule, it was actually involved, how shall I say this? He would pleasure her, in fact, to the point where he kept his clothes on and she did not.

He would pleasure her, and then after she had her fun, they'd order a pizza. Nice. Every week, they'd order a pizza. Now, to me, this seems like the dream guy for every, I mean, really, right, ladies? I mean, this is a true gentleman, right?

Takes care of your needs and then brings food or orders food. Yeah, gives you a slice after. That's nice. Right, exactly. So after we had established what the schedule was, we did research, and by we, I mean all my other roommates, because, of course, being a peeping Tom is bad, and I do not recommend it.

This is quantified stalking, because you guys actually measured when things were happening. Well, hopefully, the statute of limitations has run out on whatever this was. So just for fun, being crazy college students that we couldn't resist, couldn't resist ourselves, we ordered the pizza ahead of time.

Nice. Because we knew they were on a schedule. So when he, rather than waiting until they were done, we, another part of the story is that the Domino's pizza was literally about 100 yards from this dorm. It was across the road.

So you could time it perfectly. Yes, you knew, because they walked the pizzas over to this dorm, and you knew it takes 12 minutes to cook a Domino's pizza, took about two minutes to walk over, so you could, with some amount of precision, know when that pizza would be delivered. So at this point, we had our data, we had our charts and graphs, we knew exactly how to time things, and so we did.

And so sure enough, we were all gathered around watching, and we ordered the pizza, and sure enough, the gentleman shows up and takes care of his regular obligations, and everyone's happy, and as they're finished, they, sure enough, right on cue, the pizza guy comes, knocks on the door, and hilarity ensues when you see the gentleman there at the door scratching his head.

Did you order the pizza? I didn't order the pizza. I don't think I ordered the pizza. Who ordered the pizza? So this is not this, while they have automated this idea, these folks who made this device that orders the pizza, I would just like to say, for the record, this is not a new idea, this is an idea that we had come up with some 20-some years ago.

Okay, so everybody, so both of them came at the same time. Nice. Now, here's the thing that we kind of glossed over, is kind of the slogan of the Rub Grub. Get off and get stuffed, all with one quick click of a button.

Missed that bit at the end of there. Get off and get stuffed. It usually goes the other way around, but they're flipping things on their head. What happens if, when you're in your enthusiasm, you inadvertently order two dozen pizzas? You just keep jamming the button, you keep pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing the button.

Hello, ma'am, we're here with your two dozen pizzas. Well, he's hungry tonight. Right, exactly. Exactly. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? All right, well, on that note, gentlemen. Nice. You have just ruined the innocence of all of our listeners who looked up to you.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Oh, I can't wait to hear the feedback. Our listeners are so innocent. Yes. It was in college. It was an innocent time back in the 80s. We had to find entertainment where we could. That's true. There was no internet yet. So we didn't have phones.

We didn't have, you know, we would dial up modems. We would dial up BBSs is what we were doing. That's right. It was a different time. All right. Well, thank you for the story. And we will talk again next week. All right. Thanks, guys. This is pretty cool.

There were some original script pages for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure posted on Twitter by one of the authors, Ed Solomon, who co-wrote it. And it's a really interesting, this is a little short article in Gizmodo, but it's really fun to, like, listen to him talk about the script and how he's like, nobody's ever going to read this thing.

But we were in such a good mood when we wrote it. But if we don't do anything else with our career, we are happy to say, if we put out, you know, be excellent to each other as a meme in the universe, we've done our job. I thought that was pretty cool.

Yeah, I like that. So if you're a Bill and Ted's fan, which everybody should be, you should go check this out. It's a really cool little snippet in the writer's mind. And I found this one this week, which, because I'm in the middle of Top Chef, the last episode is on my DVR, and I was looking at this site, and I almost ruined the finale for me, because they have all the results up there.

It's called topchefstats.com. And it is like, you know, MLB stats, but for Top Chef, because they're on like, you know, season 15 or something like that, some ridiculous number of seasons. But they go through like, you know, okay, people who cook risotto never win.

People who cook this always, you know, it's like, it has like the splits on who cooks what and who wins these competitions is more likely to get to the top. It's just a really cool site. If you're a Top Chef fan, you have to check this out. It's really fun. And I put this one in here for you, Brian. It's another one from Gizmodo.

I hope this kid appreciates how awesome his custom-made Star Wars AT-ST high chair is. And it is a really cool hand-carved chair, high chair, in the shape of an AT-ST. Did you check it out? I did. Spoiler alert, the kid will not appreciate it.

Okay. Kid's too young. But I appreciate it. It's badass. Okay. We'll make you a man chair. That'd be nice. You should make bar chairs. Oh, that'd be very cool. Yeah. Somebody should do that. Yeah. Somebody who has skill with woodworking and gives a shit.

Yeah. Not me. Put them on Etsy. We'll buy them. That's right. Or Brian will. I won't. And we've got some really good news for the two of us, Jason. What? There's a good study that just came out that found out that for those, if you want to live to be over 90, alcohol is better for you than exercise.

Yahoo! Doggy! I'm in! I'm in! Yes, when it comes to making it to your 90s, booze actually beats exercise, according to a long-term study led by the University of California, tracked 1,700 non-Agerians enrolled in the 90-plus study. Just non-Agerians?

Non-Agerians? Whatever. 90 old people. And they discovered that subjects who drank about two glasses of beer or wine per day were 18% less likely to experience a premature death. Participants who exercise 15 to 45 minutes a day cut the same risk by 11%. So work out a little bit, drink a little bit, and you're going to live forever.

Other factors found to boost longevity, including weight. If you're slightly overweight but not obese, cut your odds of an early death by 3%. Okay. So they say it's not bad to be skinny when you're young, but it's very bad to be skinny when you're old. And subjects who kept busy with a daily hobby two hours a day were 21% less likely to die early.

And those who drank two cups of coffee a day cut that risk by 10%. So by all accounts, Jason, you and I are going to live forever. Yeah, I need to drop about 20 and then I'm in that range. But okay, yeah. So I like to drink. I don't like to work out very much.

I can get a little bit. And I like coffee. I can get a hobby. Yeah. And yeah. And I definitely don't like to be skinny. So I think we're going to live forever. Yep. And if you don't, I have an important link next in our show notes.

Gather these 25 documents you need before you die. Wait a shit on that one. Because we're all going to die someday and some of us are getting closer than others. But I just thought this was really interesting because it's something we don't like to think about, but we do need to think about.

And it's a handy dandy little guide to basically stuff you need to get together. And you should anyways. Not even just for death. This is just look at all these important documents. Put them in one place so you've got them. So do it, people. Take a look. That's very interesting because actually this week I was thinking about putting my will together.

Not because we mentioned it from NPR last week, which you didn't believe me about, but I put a link in the show notes that links to NPR on their website asking you to put them in their will. So if you missed that one, go back to the show notes last week because it is a thing. But I'm putting together my will because they were saying on, I listened to talk radio in the morning, WGN 720.

And they have a lawyer on there and she's like, look, if you don't have a will, the state has one for you and your family's not going to like it. So just go put one together. So I'm thinking I'll just go to LegalZoom and figure out how to put my will together there just so it's so all this fantastic stuff I have around my home doesn't go off to some auction somewhere if I get hit by a bus.

Good idea. This one just came out today and it's pretty interesting. Since October, Apple has made around 1600 false alarm 9-11 calls from Elk Grove facility.

The Elk Grove facility is one of these ones in Northern California. And what they're doing is they're refurbing old Apple hardware. Well, apparently these people are butt dialing 911. So when they look at the enhanced 911 and they can see the address, they see it's coming from Apple and they do it.

But the problem there is Apple is calling 911 a lot. If you and I were butt dialing 911, we would go to jail. So where's the accountability here for these Apple techs or just Apple itself? Why not put, you know, just a couple cell phone blockers in the building or something around those machines or just make sure that you can't call 911 from them because, you know, they have the SOS feature.

Yeah. It's just silly. It's very silly that this is actually it's such a problem that it made the local news in Sacramento. So it's a problem because at some point somebody is going to be on a legit 911 call that needs help and some, you know, idiot on a smoke break just is picking up a bunch of phones and like they all dial 911.

Everyone's like, and they're not getting the help that they need. Yeah, that's that's they've got to be getting fined at the very least for that. Yeah, you'd think. No, you know what? They're going to get more tax breaks from Sacramento to put their facilities. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Josiah Zaner.

He's a very famous biohacker. And he performed his own fecal transplant and tried to edit his own DNA with CRISPR on stage at a conference. And he considers himself both a scientist and a social activist. Well, this guy has finally come out and said, it's bad.

It's bad. It's a bad idea to hack your own body. Thank you. I mean, he's a PhD. He has a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics, and he's a smart guy, so he knows the risks of experimenting on themselves. But now other people are seeing him as a role model and doing really stupid things.

Yes. These people are injecting gene therapy intended to treat herpes. Also at a conference, before quickly spiraling into erratic behavior, another guy dosed himself with a similarly untested treatment for HIV. And what I really like is, Hank Greeley, a bioethicist at Stanford University, told Gizmodo regarding Roberts' experiment.

Roberts is one of the guys who did one of the stupid ones. If he really did inject a DIY vaccine, I hope it doesn't hurt him. But if it does, at least he would be in line for a Darwin Award. Bravo. Lovely. Bravo. Feedback loop.

Huge thank you to our new Patreon subscribers, Matthew M, Mark S, Jessica L, Lon T, Trav H, and Oliver S. Thank you all so very much for joining us on Patreon. We appreciate it. Over on Twitter, we have some comments here. Nerd Rewind sends, Dev's been listening to and loving GOG podcast.

She's grumpy, definitely feels old, is a geek, and loves their take on things. Give it a listen. Well, you're already listening, so thank you. Thanks, guys. Ben Stanley has sent over, it's done, Winamp 2.js, finally supports all three windows. So I guess if you want to try to use Winamp again, you can.

Did you play with this at all? No. It's pretty cool. I'm too lazy. Is it really? It's really pretty cool. It works just like Winamp. I definitely had an old school boner over this one, just like looking at it and clicking it, and everything worked. And it even had the, you know, the Winamp soundbite with, you know, the Better Than a Llama.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Love that. Dude. It was so cool. Yeah, definitely check it out. Just for like two minutes of nostalgia, you'll enjoy it. Okay. Ross Craig also wrote, people aren't using torrents as much as they discovered Kodi and now the best APK terrarium TV. For music, I subscribe to Google Play Music.

You know, you're right. We didn't even think about Kodi. Kodi basically is the same thing as torrents, but for people who don't want a torrent. It's not the same system, but it gets you the same result. But yeah. Yes, it does. I can see how torrents are going downhill, but that's fine. You know, more room for us. Yeah, that's right.

And Clue and Vaz writes in to you, Jason. Do you guys need to try this app on your MacBooks? I get more battery time. Enduranceapp.com. Did you check it out? I did. Does it work? It's funny. No. I mean, not as far as I can tell. So it says helps your Mac run 20% longer.

You know, it's who knows. It looks like it's just turning things off at different intervals, like when you're not using them. Yeah, it seems to be. So it may work. It may not. It's nothing I'm going to have installed because I just I'm not too worried about my battery life. It's OK.

Yeah, because you're always plugged in. Yeah, I'm always plugged in. I'm not traveling a lot anymore. Back in the day, this might have been really useful to me, but now not so much. Yeah, unfortunately, I can't benchmark it either because my laptops are basically in use for about half an hour unplugged every day when I'm watching TV. But for the most part, I'm on I'm on desktop machines now.

So I exactly, you know, I'll give it a shot. Maybe if I'm going to start traveling more, which I'm not. So I put we're going to put the link in the show notes for everybody to give it a shot. But if it's working for you, that's great. But yeah, unfortunately, I can't benchmark it at all. So yeah, that's the problem. Yeah.

And over at GOG.show, a few people wrote in. First off, we've got Jessica here. Hi, guys. Love the show. Informative, insightful and hilarious. You both obviously put a lot of thought and work into the show, and I'm happy to be able to support your efforts. Here's my question, though. In some of the recent shows, you alluded to confusion between AI and or machine learning.

Is there a past episode you can point me to where you go into this in more detail? Very interested in this explanation and hearing more, as it feels like every day there is some new development in these areas I'm hearing about. And as someone without a technical background, it's all pretty abstract and bewildering. Thanks, Jess. No, unfortunately, this has kind of been a long burn that's been building over probably, what, a year and a half now, when everybody started talking about AI and machine learning and confusing the terminology, because AI doesn't exist yet.

That's the real issue, is there is no artificial intelligence. People, you know, they fudge the definition for headlines, but at a real deep level, when you talk about what artificial intelligence is from what we grew up with, which is a general artificial intelligence, there is no such thing.

It is all basically machine learning and lots of decision trees at this point. But yeah, it's kind of, there's no real single episode that we could point back to. It has been just a long annoyance and that's been stuck in our craw over and over again. I'd say the last two years is when it really started to peak in journalism, where AI was getting shoved into every press release and every headline, and it's just generally driven us mad.

More you than me. I couldn't care. But it's more you. Yeah. It drives me mad. Because words matter. So Jake writes in, gentlemen, read through the first few John Scalzi books from the old man's war series and came to the fourth book, Zoe's Tale. Wanted to know if you guys had read it and what you think.

Either way, love what you guys are doing. And my girlfriend and I have been enjoying the videos of Bam Bam and Dino on Instagram. One last thing. A few weeks ago, I asked which system care program for PC you guys would recommend. And I wasn't sure if I missed it as I was deploying to the Middle East at the time. Thanks again, Jake.

Well, glad you're back from the Middle East. No, on the PC front, we didn't have any recommendations. Brian's been off PC for a long time. I'm just starting again with my Tron's taint machine. And at some point, I might have some recommendations, but nothing yet.

As far as The Last Colony goes, check out episodes 202 and 205, where we review that sadness of a book. As far as the PC thing goes, I mean, I used to use Norton as good system care stuff. But from last I'd seen, it's gotten so bloat-weary that it's insane.

So I don't really have a recommendation. Sorry. Yeah, nothing here. And thanks for checking out the videos on Instagram. The puppies appreciate it. And Joanna writes in, Hey guys, what was the app or extension you used to periodically delete social media content? I can't remember or find a reference to it.

Thanks. We both use TweetDelete for Twitter. And there really isn't anything for Facebook. Yes, there is. There is a thing on Facebook. It's not automatic. And by the way, TweetDelete is at TweetDelete.net. Link will be in the show notes. On, basically, this is a Chrome extension.

It's called the Social Book Post Manager. So you can use that extension to go through and delete all of your past Facebook history. It'll take you half a day if you have a lot of stuff. It doesn't go very fast. Turn off the previews is my recommendation. And you'll have to run it twice on each page.

But it'll do the legwork of clicking delete, submit, delete, submit, delete, submit. It'll do all that stuff automatically. And you can clear it out. But yeah, it is called the Social... It's such a dumb name. Wait for the hover. Social Book Post Manager.

Okay. I'm guessing they couldn't use Facebook in the extension name without getting it booted. I'm thinking probably not. Yeah. All right. We're over to iTunes now. And this is SNRN1016. Three stars.

The title is More Better. I really want to like this podcast. Their technology is superior and the topic's interesting. But at this time in U.S. political history, I need more than that. People in the public eye need to step up. While I don't expect it, I would appreciate if they would use their voice for marginalized people.

However, the overt sexism makes me want to throw up and I just can't tolerate it. And instead of dismissing an issue and not understanding it, a mention of Get Out on their last podcast, maybe take a deeper look. I like my public figures to be more self-aware and socially conscious than these men currently are.

Men in a privileged class need to do better, in my opinion. Brian, would you like to start? There's so many different places I could jump in here. I just really appreciate the fact that somebody on the left doesn't like us.

I just feel like we've taken enough one-star ratings from hardcore conservatives that we should be treated better by our own kind. Yeah. Yeah, here's the deal. Look, we're not social warriors. We're a bunch of fat old geeks who stay at home and talk in the microphones.

I understand Get Out. I understand Get Out. Here's the deal. I know everything behind the story of Get Out. I know what happened with it and I know why it's important. I just didn't think it was that great of a movie. But I understand the issues behind it. I just didn't think it was mentioning in a two-minute movie review on our show.

And, you know, yeah, you may like your public figures to be more self-aware and socially conscious. Go listen to another show. We're tech geeks. We're talking about nerd stuff. I appreciate you giving us a three-star, too, because it sounds like it should have been a one-star rating. But, hey, you gave us three. I like that. And the only other thing I take umbrage with this here is the privileged class part.

I don't know if you're aware of our financial situations or our upbringing, and I know there's a sliding definition for privileged class, but I personally don't think that I grew up in a privileged class. I grew up in trailer parks, so it pours dirt. So, yeah. I understand that, yes, we are white males.

And I think we missed the privilege window for the most part. I never got the privileged memo, unfortunately. So I had to kind of take care of things myself. Pretty much, yeah, yeah. Just because we're white dudes in our 40s doesn't mean we got any special treatment. And I know right now she's throwing her phone against the wall because she's like, just by definition.

By definition, we're privileged. I get it. I know. So, anyway. Our next five-star rating. Yeah. Our next five-star rating came from RJJJJ from the Russian Federation. Awesome. If you're tired of technology screwing us up and human stupidity overall, you are not alone.

These guys are crapping on all of that in a highly crackable manner. This fucking thing got me into binge listening. He's using the at sign for a lot of cuss words here. The only downside is the more I listen, the less hope for blissful future of humanity is left in me. Where the fuck are we all going? It scares the shit out of me.

Thank you, guys. Keep making the great work. I don't understand why your stats are so low. It could be something wrong with it. Maybe because of different platforms or something like that. I believe your audience should be much bigger. By the way, I do not consider myself dumb, but it took me at least five minutes to find where to post this review in Apple Podcasts app. I listened with Overcast and went to Apple Podcasts app just to leave a review.

Well, thank you. You're Russian. I'm sure you can help us sort out the stats. You can get us a bunch of bots, right? You fixed an election, for Christ's sake. Well, here's the deal. He also figured out how to swear on Apple iTunes reviews. He's a clever motherfucker, is all I'm saying right now.

And yes. I was impressed. As clever as he is, yes, it is that hard to find how to do a review in Apple Podcasts app. So you made it through the gauntlet, and we appreciate it. But when you're in Overcast, please hit the little star on each episode. That'll get us in the rankings up in Overcast so we can get some more reviews there.

Because it seems that everybody is dumping the Apple Podcasts app and going to Overcast. So Marco will now have a super mansion pretty soon. But good for him. But we just want those stars. So we appreciate it. And this is our first review from the Russian Federation.

So thank you very much. Yes, it is. J-j-j-j-j-j. Yes, thank you. Next one comes from Kiehl's. That's a five-star. Move over Twit. All right. I like that. I discovered this over the holidays while Leo was playing best ofs on Twit and MacBreak Weekly and needed to find something to fill the void.

Love the show. It's now my first play of the week. Woo-hoo! Bumping off the Twit shows until second. Love the variety and humor. Keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Kiehl's. Very much. Yes, thank you. And our final rating of the week, another five-star from Douche Rocket. Best name.

Best name. Awesome podcast. These guys are awesome. Been listening to Jason for years on AOC and now the Jordan Harbinger Show. This is a very informative and entertaining podcast. Keep it up. We shall. Thank you. 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. Closing shout-outs! My closing shout-out this week is to Flonaze. The only thing that's keeping me not dead at the moment.

I am not kidding, sadly. That's not the flow from the insurance commercials, right? No, no. This is an actual, like, some sort of spray that you put up your nose and it makes you feel better. Okay. We used to call that cocaine in the 80s, but... I was about to say, not cocaine.

That might help. You might want to try some of that. You're in the town for it. Well, you know, only privileged white people can do cocaine. Also not true. Anyway, my big shout-out this week is to Doggy Depot. I know I've mentioned them before, but Doggy Depot in Downers Grove, Illinois.

If you have dogs that need boarded, go there. They have helped me with my new little guy who is dead on the couch asleep because today was his first day of school and they treated him well and I am very grateful. You have no idea how very grateful I am to Doggy Depot.

So thank you very much. Thank you. Hyper-local plug for all those listening in the Russian Federation. Hyper-local plug, but you know what? They did me a solid. Damn it, they did me a solid, so they get a plug. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash gog. 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 248.

And the Clash Royale clan is at gog.show, so you don't have to ask again. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week.

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