249: Distributed Excel Spreadsheet

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Eero. For free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, visit Eero.com and at checkout, select Overnight Shipping. Then enter code GOG to make it free. Now, on to the show. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Looks like we got a little bit of follow-up today, Brian. We've got a lot of follow-up. There's a lot going on. Let's dive in. So, last week we talked about the guy that did the super massive year-long study where he tried out Apple Maps and Google Maps and ways to figure out which one was getting the best directions, the fastest, all that sort of stuff.

And when you discussed it, you talked about how his conclusion was Google Maps is the most effective and the quickest. And I also heard many other news outlets pick up the story and report the same thing. Somehow, the idiots over at Lifehacker got it wrong.

Their headline is, Waze still provides the fastest driving directions. That was incorrect. Was it not? That is incorrect. And you nailed it right at the beginning. The idiots over at Lifehacker. Yeah, I don't entirely understand how – well, I guess I do understand.

We're in the fake news world now. But every other – it was right there. It's not there to read anymore. Side note, he took it down. Or he actually password-protected the initial post so you can't see it anymore. He password-protected his entire site. Right.

He just basically slashed and burned the whole thing. Well, probably smartly so because he probably wrote some things that perhaps his employer or family or friends would not be happy with. And all of a sudden, his site was getting massive media attention. So I don't blame him at all for that.

His employer is Adobe, by the way. Yeah. So there you go. But yeah, it's amazing to me that we can have a study that so plainly states one fact. And then we can have a headline that is referencing that very article and has a completely different take on it when there's no take to be had.

There is no opinion here. That was his conclusion. Google Maps provides the fastest driving directions. Lifehacker, how can your headline stay? Waze provides the fastest driving directions. That is not at all what the article that you are referencing said. Amazing to me.

This is why I don't read Lifehacker. Yeah. Period. I know. I read it just to upset me. Yeah, you got me into them for a little bit. And I just, I had them in my feed and I was reading. I'm just like, this is garbage. Everything that they've got is just garbage. I think they were good for a while.

I think that there was an editing change and there was a focus on, obviously, let's get page clicks. So, uh, good, good journalism dies that way. Yeah. I mean, the original Lifehacker staff is long gone. Yeah. So that makes sense. I mean, yeah, it's churn. Nobody wants to be a blogger for longer than they have to be.

Yeah. I got it. I think I got to take them out of my rotation. So, uh, we got some more thought. Well, this isn't follow up. I, I just want to let you know, uh, I rail on Uber constantly. I took an Uber this week. Why? I double booked myself on Monday. I had a friend in town, um, that was having an early dinner before she went back to LAX.

And I obviously always have my pub trivia on Monday. And I had another friend in town that was going to join me for that. And they were very close to each other, uh, in time wise, but not distance wise. There was no way I could, uh, get to both walking. And because I was meeting said first friend for drinks and then pub trivia involves drinks, I was not going to drive myself because that would be stupid.

So I sucked it up and took an Uber. Now, yes, I could have taken a Lyft, but I, for the show, I decided it's been at least, it's been well over a year since I've taken an Uber. I think last time was summer in Toronto or something like that. So I said, all right, I'm just going to do it.

I'm going to take an Uber there and then take an Uber over to the pub. Not only do you not get free waters anymore. On this particular drive, I got to listen to a Hispanic woman, talk to her friend the entire trip, berating her husband in Spanish. Um, she also had no idea how to drive, didn't know where she was going, uh, which, you know, there's an app for that now, but she was way too engrossed in her conversation to pay any attention to directions.

And it's always great when the driver thinks you don't know the language. So I heard her entire conversation. Anyways, Uber is no better than a cab anymore. It is the same old, same old. The only difference is the convenience of the app. And that is it. Like they're horrible. They're horrible now. Well, I mean, here's the issue.

Uber X, I think is the issue because any schmo can become an Uber X driver. Right. I, you get an Uber black, you still get the water. You still get silence when you request it. And you know, you can, you can even choose your own radio station, but you pay a premium for Uber black.

Right. And you know, if I'm going to the airport, I will, I've done Uber X a couple of times. And if I have to, in the future, I will definitely be doing Uber black a little bit more money, but well worth not listening to the life story of the guy that's driving you there in his Dodge Astro minivan.

Yeah. I think I was in a Nissan Sentra or something like that. Yeah. That's common. But yeah, my last one was like a very rusted out Dodge Astro van, which was, they kind of smelled like shoes. Right. But well, I think that that's it for Uber for me. I will go ahead and install a Lyft for the occasional times when I want to be safe and do the correct thing.

So, well, yeah, good luck with Lyft. Just don't take the 405. Don't take the 405. I never take any service that far. So, we'll see. Last week, I also talked about the activity tracker, the ticker on the right-hand side that used to be there.

And I was wondering where the hell it went. You're talking about Facebook, right? Yes, on Facebook. Sorry. And I thought you'd mentioned maybe Facebook purity could be the problem. So, I uninstalled that. I tried it on multiple browsers. No, I cannot get that activity tracker anymore. Then I did the thing I should have done immediately the first time anyways, which is what I always yell at people who call me with questions about, did you Google it?

So, I Googled it, and there you go. I'm not crazy. Facebook axed it basically in early December of last year. So, it's gone. It doesn't exist anymore. It's another one of those things that Facebook has just decided, yeah, you don't need that anymore. I kind of liked it when it was there. I liked it a lot.

I didn't miss it when it was gone, but I did like it when it was there. I found some good stuff from it. I liked seeing what my friends were listening to music-wise, because that would pop up in the feed, and that would spark me to go listen to some stuff. I'd like to see. I liked it. I always saw good stuff, and I liked to see what my friends were up to.

And it was much, you know, even back then, it was better than your main news feed in terms of seeing what your friends were doing. I was going to say, so wait, you liked the service because it was showing you the things that the service was designed for, and then they took it away. That's pretty much what you're... That's the gist of it. That is the gist of it. And speaking of that, Facebook has made yet another decision.

Remember, there was a lot of brouhaha, and we were all talking about how Facebook has decided, well, we're going to go ahead and separate the page feed from the news feed. And that is a good thing if all you want to do is use the service for your friends, and a bad thing if you are a publisher, because you'd be on a separate feed now.

Well, shockingly, after, you know, their stock price dropped, and people started to complain in terms of the people that advertise on the site, they've decided they don't want to do that anymore, and they're putting it on the people. They're saying, people do not want two separate news feeds.

Now, they're probably right about this, because they did do extensive A-B testing. They gave it to a lot of people, and people apparently just don't like it. So they're backing away from that. They are not going to have separate feeds anymore. That's because people are stupid. I want two feeds.

You know, I mean, yeah, they're A-B testing against the ignorant, unwashed masses. And the people who, you know, know how to use a service know that they want their shit separated. But yeah, no, Joe Schmoe can't figure it out. I actually may not agree with you on that. And I want to give a hat tip to Graziella, who sent this to us on via our website, gog.show, as well.

She sent us an Apple News article about it. But I think I may disagree. I don't mind them combined. But what I did a long time ago is I went through and really massively culled the pages that I follow. Like, I still, for the life of me, don't understand anybody that goes and likes Coca-Cola on Facebook.

So I did go through and I did a big cull. I kept things. Well, lifehackers get in the boot now. I kept things that threw up news stories that would work for the show. And I kept things like the bands that I really like because it's the best way to get information about them.

So I'm kind of okay with it, but it doesn't involve doing a real good cull. We talked the other week about how Snapchat's redesign rolled out and they lost a ton of market value because Kylie Jenner said Snapchat was dead. Well, Snapchat is running for what Facebook is now saying doesn't work.

They are splitting and have split their feeds between friends and actually celebrities. And even Evan Spiegel is sticking by it, apparently. He did have an interview where he said that Snapchat's redesign is meant for your friends and celebrities are not your friends. So they're sticking with it for now, maybe.

All right. Let's see how it works out for him. There's a lot of like there's a lot of different articles coming out about it. Some are saying that they're going to roll it back and some are saying that they aren't right now. He's holding his ground. So I'm sure by the time we finish recording this, there will be 25 articles that say the exact opposite again. Exact opposite, of course.

Yeah. And we also talked a couple shows back about 50 Cent, who supposedly had like a million dollars in Bitcoin or something like that. Like a million or something like that. That he wasn't aware of. Well, apparently that was just rapper posturing in his bankruptcy documents.

How this guy has gone bankrupt is beyond me, but it seems to happen all the time. He says that he has never actually owned any Bitcoin. So he's either he either lied about it in the first time just to get press and to be a rapper or he's lying about it now because he doesn't want to pay even more taxes on things.

Somewhere he lied. Somewhere he lied. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know exactly where, but somewhere along the way, 50 Cent is a liar. Yeah, he is. So and then last week I was I wanted to talk about I can't remember who the commercials were for anymore. Uber.

Uber. I was talking about Uber's commercials and how they pissed me off this week. Maybe we need to make this a new segment. I think we need to talk about the LinkedIn podcast commercials that are running or as Adweek refers to them, LinkedIn's new integrated marketing campaign, which is seeking to smash its white collar stereotype.

So they're running a campaign because they're they're not happy with just having their target audience anymore, which is white collar people looking for new jobs. And they're running some insane commercials. What the hell value does an MMA fighter get from being on LinkedIn?

I think she probably gets more value than a rancher out in the middle of nowhere with his laptop and his pickup truck. I haven't heard that one yet. I watched it. Well, I watched them in the link that I put in from Adweek. They have their actual like commercial commercials. Right.

But they're all black and white to be artsy. Oh, and it's they're ridiculous. They make no sense. No sense whatsoever. The only value that I think any of these people in these commercials get from LinkedIn is the money they got for being in the commercials. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is an awareness campaign, but awareness of what that LinkedIn exists apparently is all that it basically portrays. Yeah. There's really nothing in these commercials. It's like, I do this. I do that. I rope them doggies and I like LinkedIn.

It's like, OK, great. Where has LinkedIn made your life any better besides deleting the emails and notifications that they send you all day long? Exactly. So that just killed me. It just killed me when I started hearing these commercials. I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

What ad agency? How is this ad agency in existence? Yeah, I looked up the agency. I'd never heard of them, but you should definitely watch the commercials because it's way better with sight and sound. OK. Like, yeah, because, I mean, you have to see the farmer. I mean, the farmer is a caricature of a farmer.

And is it worse than a farmer's only commercials? Well, those are just comic relief. But this one is a little bit different, but definitely go check them out and watch them. And talking about NASA, you brought up NASA, it was last week or the week before, saying how much you missed NASA because now that they're selling the International Space Station.

I found an article in Daily Coase, which I never check out. I think Swell from Twitter, a friend on Twitter, retweeted this. And what it is, it's an article about how NASA averted the 2060 apocalypse. Well, see, NASA's worthwhile. NASA is extremely worthwhile.

And what they're talking about here is when NASA had a budget and they could do what they called the blue sky research, which is something that had, it was like scientific investigation with no immediate real world applications. Right. They were just, they were, they were being scientists. They were studying things.

Right. And that's when they found out, oh, we're eating the ozone layer with hairspray and chlorofluorocarbons and all these other stupid chemicals. And they pushed forward and got UN and governmental law, not law, but, you know, like one of those accords.

It's called the Montreal Protocol, like the Paris Accord. This is the Montreal Protocol. And what they basically said was that we saved the world. And here's one of the great lines. But it has led to the best NASA spinoff Michelle Thaler can think of, grandchildren.

Because at this point, by 2060, there would have been no crops. We would be living underground if we had killed the ozone layer. So NASA's blue sky research saved the planet. So let's fund them, please. Let's give them a few pennies, please. And I'm happy to say that I lived through that period of time where I could use Aquanet and thus have my Robert Smith hairdo in high school.

So shortly after that, no more hairspray. No more Mohawks. No more Robert Smith hair. But they fixed it. You can still buy Aquanet, I checked. Aquanet is still out there. Or you can just use Elmer's glue like everybody else. That's true. Yeah, that helps.

Or like a little egg wash. That's pretty good for the hair if you still want to do that punk thing. Yeah. And you talked last week about 1Password and the integration with checking to see if your passwords have been pwned and all that. John has written in over at our site and says, this is the article I mentioned in Clash of Clans, of course, he's writing you there, and about how it checks the password so it clears up a bit of the confusion about how they do it.

It's a MacRuburns article so you can check that out if you're interested. And because people continue to write in, the clan name is GOG.show. Jesus. People. Seriously. GOG.show. This is, and we were joking about this on the chat, the clan chat.

It's a litmus test. We say it in the show all the time. If you cannot remember what the name of the clan is, which is our URL for the show. It's our website, people. Then you don't deserve to get in. It's full right now, but I'll be doing another culling over the weekend.

So by the time this comes out, there'll probably be a few new spots because there's a lot of laggards on there. But yeah, GOG.show. Quit tweeting me, people. In the news.

Our first article this week comes over from Jacobin, which I'd never heard of. JacobinMag.com. This is by Bradley Babindir. It's called Let Them Eat Experience and sums up a lot of the things that we always talk about unpaid labor. But turns out that there are some new laws or rules in place that govern unpaid interns.

Now, in the past, there were there were like these six specific rules. Now there are seven. And a lot of people broke the law with unpaid interns back in the day. Yeah, seriously. But now they can still get unpaid interns and kind of not break the law is what it works out to.

These stupid new rules. I hate this government. They're just destroying everything. At least before, you know, we knew what you were doing was illegal. Now we have to pay another lawyer to come figure out if it's illegal or not. The lawyers always win. But yeah, this is a it's a great article.

And I love how the the last line in the article is what it comes down to. The only winner is capital because there's going to be a lot more unpaid interns. And nowadays, it's just it boggles the mind. You know, I know people are trying to get experience right in these in these businesses and they try and go on their own.

Nowadays, it seems to me the best experience you could get would be bootstrapping the same type of company on your own and getting the experience yourself while building something. Like if you want to go work at a magazine, get magazine experience. Why not just start a magazine? It doesn't cost anything.

Yeah. Print on demand, digital distribution, work at a music label. Well, that's just silly. Work at a TV station, do all sorts. You can almost any major media outlet or things like that. I think the only thing that really it comes down to is like, you know, law and financial institutions where you really can't just go out on your own.

But there's always some value to being in the real world existing thing that's going on. I mean, and there's the connections and the networking that happens from from being in those places, which is good. Oh, you get treated like dirt. Nobody remembers your name. That's how interns. Well, yeah, I mean, it depends on the company and how they use the interns.

If it's just doing coffee and all that, that's that's a load of crap. But I've always argued that interns should be paid positions. It shouldn't be free. It should be minimum wage. Yes, but it should be paid. Part of part of the process of learning all this stuff when you enter the workforce is learning the value of money as well.

And, you know, that's a big part of it. And when you're not paid and you're it just I hate it. I'm with you on this. There's a case that could be made, though, that you really learn the value of money when you're not getting any for your work. Yeah, well, I also I mean, there's a there's an aspect of it that that people don't ever talk about anymore, which is the only people that can afford to take unpaid internships are already coming from the, quote unquote, privileged classes.

If you're poor, you cannot afford an unpaid internship. You just can't. So we're creating a definite separation in society. Right. Yeah. I mean, when I was a photographer, I would I would be, quote unquote, an intern. But we called it assisting. I would be a photographer's assistant and I would get paid a couple bucks an hour to schlep gear, set up lights and learn from the photographer.

You know, it it wasn't so much an internship as it was an apprenticeship. So that kind of that kind of really worked for me in that trade. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, who really uses interns that can't afford to pay them nowadays? I don't think very many big companies do that.

They can afford to pay. They just don't want to. They just don't want to. And speaking of not paying, Instacart. Have you used them? I've used them twice. What always happens with my wife is they send out the promotional, you know, first times free or severe discount for whatever. And my wife saves all those like no tomorrow.

And she pulls out a stack every now and then and was like, all right, well, we don't have to go to the grocery store this time. I've got this delivery for free thing. So we gave it a go. And of course, they screwed a lot of stuff up. But that happens. Also, like the 75,000 text messages that you get because they can't find the thing that you specifically stated that you wanted.

That's all good time. Oh, this was you talked about this on the show. They're like, they don't have organic broccoli. Can I get broccoli? Yeah. So I've used them. But they've got a bit of a problem. This shocks me. They're worth $4 billion, $4 billion grocery delivery startup.

They admitted in a blog post last Friday that it mistakenly withheld tips from some of its workforce. So not paying them. And it failed to waive service fees in some instances when its customers requested to. I requested a waive service fee the second time we used them. And we did get that one.

So that's nice. They're blaming the errors on a technical bug related to product updates made at the end of 2017. So they rolled out some crappy software, theoretically, that was probably intentionally designed to screw people. But we don't like to say that. So they sincerely apologize for this. And they're committed to doing better going forward.

Always blame the devs. Always blame the devs. So theoretically, they're going to go back and pay out the tips to the affected workers and refund the customers who had asked for them. And it said that it had impacted less than 1% of Instacart orders during this time period. So they did ask him for an explanation of how they discovered the bug and how the bug may have gotten in there.

And they have not heard back from them. Oh, shocking. Oh, yeah. I actually signed up for them when I was researching this article that you put in here. And they are in my area. And I looked at it. And they're like, oh, would you like to try Instacart or yeah, Instacart Express?

It's only like, we'll waive the first two weeks at $14. And then as soon as it's over, we'll charge you $149 a year. I'm like, nope, skip that one. No, thanks. I'll take my first free delivery. And I went and looked at all the different places. And you can get booze. I was like, oh, well, it's probably going to be cheaper than that service that you used.

What was it, Drizzly to send me? Yeah, Drizzly. Yeah, to send me my 12-pack that you gave me because thank you, Twitter, for doubling your character count. So I got my double beer. But I might try it for the one delivery and then delete the app or whatever. Yeah, I would say go for it.

I mean, it's free. Why not, right? Yeah. I mean, I've had mixed results with Uber Eats, but I think I'll give these guys a try. I just, I don't like paying into the quote unquote gig economy, but you know, if people need money, you kind of, I kind of, it's a really double-edged sword.

I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to promote it. But then on the other hand, I'm like, eh, I got, I can't leave the house right now. I'm tired and whatever. Unless you're a farmer or an MMA artist that is being targeted by LinkedIn. It's very difficult to avoid the gig economy these days, especially, I mean, in a major city.

I don't know what it's like in small towns. It's probably very, very different. But if you're living in Los Angeles or if you're living in Chicago, the gig economy is everywhere. It's really hard to avoid it. And I try not to put money into it either because I don't like it. Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago, you'd get off your, get your ass off of the couch and go to the store like a fucking adult.

But now, no, let's, let's use our phones and have someone bring me grape seeds and palm fronds. And there's, yes, there are even delivery apps for massages. So you can get someone to come give you a massage while someone else delivers you grapes and you can totally roam the fuck out on the gig economy.

I guess is what we're saying. Yeah. Anyway, Rome fell. But South Korea, on the other hand, has decided to reduce its work week to only 52 hours down from 68. Wow. Man, we thought we had it bad.

The average employee in South Korea works 2,069 hours a year. In the United States, it's 1,783. In France, it's 12, but we don't count. So, yeah, and the interesting thing is South Korean birth rates have fallen because of their workaholic culture.

So they're trying to, you know, give people a break because they're killing themselves and there won't be very many South Koreans soon if they don't stop. All right. Well, so I guess in that 12 hours a week that you're now saving, you should be getting busy. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully Tinder's in South Korea is all I'm saying. I'm sure they are.

We've had a change in California here. The California DMV has made a new rule that announced or actually just rule changes that announces that you can now test autonomous cars here without having anyone behind the wheel. Previously, they did require somebody to just sit there and man the controls in case something went wrong.

Now you don't have to anymore. And before you get all excited, Uber, you still have to apply and get permits to do it. I thought they finally did. I thought they finally put in the application for California after all the bullshit that went through in San Francisco. They did actually.

Finally. I just like to pick on them because, you know, they don't. Yeah, rules aren't for them, really. It's not their thing. No. Fake rules. Fake rules. So now the upside, Brian, is you can be killed by a Prius that's absolutely autonomous. So you can't even beat up the driver when you get hit by the car.

I was about, yeah, this is the real problem with this is I can't yell at the Prius anymore. Well, I mean, I can, but I'm literally now just yelling at the Prius. Yeah. Not the person. Yeah. There's going to be some guy in a room somewhere that's monitoring the car unless he's eating a bag of chips and playing Call of Duty that supposedly has, you know, the big red button to stop the car and intervene in, in, you know, specific cases when they have to.

But I hope they seriously have on those rigs where these people are watching the cars. I hope they have eye tracking monitors. So if they take their eyes off the monitor, like alarms go off and things like that, because otherwise, right. Just, you know, have a chat with Joe from down the hall.

And while, you know, they're plowing down innocent civilians. But that's just my, that's my black mirror ask sense of sense of dread about the future. Gotcha. But what I think is really happening is we're in a race to the bottom with regulation on this because of China, because China is basically letting everybody over there do what they want.

And we're falling behind in the autonomous division. So everybody is just saying, hey, look, China is going to beat us. We're number one. We're number one. So we have to, you know, get back on, get back on the horse, as it were, which is what we'll all be, I'll be riding fairly soon after all these cars have killed everybody.

But it's terrifying that, you know, China is kind of dictating our public policy with their lack of public policy. Yeah, that's kind of where we're at. Well, speaking of China, their government over there, President Xi Jinping is, he's basically trying to become the uber dictator of the world over there right now.

And if you if you listen, Vogue, yeah, yes, it is. It's happening everywhere. Yeah. Who is the dictator du jour? So if you've been following the news on that, it's it's pretty kind of scary what's going on with them. But their censorship division is, you know, they've always done crazy, stupid things.

They have been, you know, Twitter doesn't work over there. Google doesn't work over there. All that kind of basic stuff. Winnie the Pooh. You can't see Winnie the Pooh over there because people make fun of the president and equate him to Winnie the Pooh, which I think is fairly funny. Now you can't read George Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, which that makes that makes sense.

But they also banned the letter N for a short time. The letter N now. OK, the letter N. I just this was going to go in more under the week, but I thought it fit here and follow up with going to involve a lot of editing on Sesame Street episodes.

This episode was not brought to you by the letter N. Oh, damn. Show title. Anyway, so I just thought I thought that was fairly funny. Yeah, that's that's pretty funny. Now, Twitter invested in SoundCloud a while back to the tune of 70 million dollars, which you'll have a comment on shortly.

That investment is completely wiped out. No surprise. Because SoundCloud sucks and it was dumb. I can't believe SoundCloud is still a going thing. It won't be for much longer. Well, it was a going thing because Twitter gave him 70 million dollars to keep the lights on for a bit. Right. Yeah. How the hell? 70 million dollars.

That's a lot of money. How many? That's a lot of money. What is the run rate over there? It's like they can't have that many employees. It's crowdsourced. I mean, they need an IT division to keep the servers spun up and pay for bandwidth. Seventy million dollars goes a long ass way to servers and bandwidth.

Last time I checked. No crap. You want to talk about just right time, right place and everything. And we've talked about that before, about how to some degree you and I were in the right place at the right time and that we were able to have 20 year careers doing web stuff and tech stuff. And in some ways we weren't.

You've talked about how all the ideas that you had, you know, you didn't make a lot of money on and somebody came along and basically did the same thing. 10 years later and all of a sudden they're just taking money baths, right? Like SoundCloud got 70 million dollars from Twitter. I, with a couple friends, put together iTunes MP3 pay downloads before iTunes came out.

And the most that anybody would give us was a million dollars at the time, which we figured out we could not make work. There was just no way. These guys get 70 million dollars for nothing. Yeah. Goddamn. Wrong place, wrong time. That's it, man. Yeah. Our aim sucks. It really does. You know what else sucks?

Recode. Because, yeah, the title, Twitter's 70 million dollars SoundCloud investment. Now, truth of the matter is they got 66.4 million dollars. They did not get 70. Now, last time I checked, 3.6 million dollars.

That's one hell of a rounding error. You know, I mean, yes. Okay, you could say 67 million dollars and everybody would be fine with that, even though you're rounding up from 0.4, which you should technically round down from there. Still quite a lot of money. Yeah. But 3.6 million dollars is one fucking big rounding error.

So come on, Recode. I know you need the headlines, but Jesus. I think we need to do an entire show that is purely just based on headlines that are factually incorrect, just to get it off our chest. That would be the longest episode in the history of Grumpy Old Geese. It would take us three weeks.

It really would. In one week of collecting headlines, we would probably have an eight-hour show. And if we put in spelling and grammatical errors, then we would just, that's the end of the show. We would basically talk until we're dead. Yeah. Well, the reason I actually, I was going to kill this story, but the reason I kept it is this particular line right here in it.

It's a reminder that even though consumers have embraced free and paid music streaming services, the companies that run those services generally aren't making a profit. Cue Spotify, which lost 1.5 billion dollars last year, but is going public this week. They have filed to go public with a $1 billion US SEC listing.

They will trade under the name Spot, under the New York Stock Exchange. See Spot run. See Spot run away with your money. Yes. And as I was reading this news, and I mean, it's straight up in both of the industries that I used to work in, I was very interested in this.

And I think this is a good point, a good time to point out that, yes, Spotify lost 1.5 billion dollars last year. The major labels are all major investors. So if the stock does well, they will all make a lot of money. And B, that money will not go to the artists who will continue to make nothing from Spotify.

I'm not a business PhD. I don't have an economy PhD, but it sure feels fucking wrong. Yeah, it does. Yes, it does. And speaking of other things that feel fucking wrong that I saw today, the NRA fight between Delta and Georgia could basically screw up Atlanta's Amazon headquarters bid.

So good. Come to come to Chicago. Come to Chicago. Delta has come out against against the NRA, as have many companies right now. They're not going to offer by coming out against them. By the way, all that means is they're not giving them a group discount anymore.

Yeah, no, that's all. No Groupon for the NRA. No Groupons for the NRA is all Delta Airlines has done, which many other companies are doing right now. And because of that, and because it is all politics, and because apparently Georgia is in the NRA's pocket, Georgia then went, well, guess what, Delta?

If you're not going to give them their discounts when they fly, you can't have a big tax cut. So because of that, now that's a problem. And now Amazon will probably not be going to Atlanta because I don't know why it's politics, politics, politics. I've got a radical idea here.

Okay. Maybe, maybe, just maybe, maybe we should treat everybody the same way. Us normal people are treated. Maybe no organization should get a discount from a company. And maybe no company should be getting a hefty tax break. Call me crazy. You're crazy. Welcome to the real world.

I know. Yeah, AAA wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't get that 10% discount if that was the case. Yeah. Well, that's fine. Let's all just pay market, let's all pay market value. Let's not have all these crazy discounts anymore, and let's not give, have states be able to give massive tax breaks to companies anymore.

Everybody pays what they should pay. Let's try that for a little bit and see what happens. Never going to happen. That's never going to happen. And speaking of things that are never going to happen, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, there is a call being put out for them to clarify their goddamn rules.

They don't know what the rules are. In other words, have a fucking manual. Yeah. So that's never going to happen. So yes, people are saying, hey, because of everything that's going on, how about you clarify what actually gets you banned on your sites? And then, how about you actually enforce the rules that you supposedly have in place now, because you aren't.

And this is just ongoing. So it's never going to happen. Never. It's tough. It's a tough one. Yeah. And it goes back to something that we always talk about. They always go back to the, we're just a platform excuse. We're not a media company. We're not a news outlet.

We are just a platform. Well, Twitter's trying to change that. They're trying to change that because they put out a new initiative to find out exactly what it means to be a healthy social network in 2018. They don't exist. Of course, they don't exist. They're trying to figure out how to make themselves one.

Now, they put out this whole big thing. Jack is trying to figure out, where am I going to go? I don't know what to do. I've turned the world into a cesspool in 140, I mean, 280 characters. I have no idea what I'm doing, is basically what Jack Dorsey says.

And that's right, because you're a moron, Jack. And please resign and go away. We told that to you guys on episode one. Just saying. And so there's a new article in Wired that says, what would a healthy Twitter even look like? Nobody knows. And here's the problem.

The metrics that they're trying to base this new contest on to get research grants to study what would make Twitter healthy are fine. They can come up with these criteria to do studies on and research.

But, and I love the end of this article. For now, no one really knows exactly what a healthy Twitter would look like. There's at least a consensus, though, that the social platform is certainly not there yet. No shit, Sherlock. Twitter asking outsiders for help could improve its platform for millions of people.

Alternatively, it might be a sign of just how bad things have gotten. And this is the greatest quote. We are in deep shit on the internet in so many ways. This is an example of the depth of that shit pile. And this is coming from somebody from Mercer's College.

This is, that's beautiful. The depth of that shit pile of the internet. It is generally a sign that you don't know what you're doing when you basically throw open the doors and say, hey guys, general public. Let's crowdsource my job. Maybe the unpaid interns can go in there and fix it.

Now, over in Europe, they're doing a much better job of cleaning that shit pile of said shit pile. The European Commission wants Facebook, Google to remove terrorist content within an hour after it being flagged. An hour. All right. Let's get on that. The internet moving at the speed of light.

Yes. Yeah. The European Commission has sent out new guidelines aimed at Facebook, Google, and other tech companies to remove terrorist and other illegal online content. Now, this goes to everything from, you know, child sex abuse, counterfeit products, copyright infringement. Yes. Buy Pinterest.

Bye-bye Pinterest. Bye-bye. There will be no European Pinterest anymore. Yes. And other material that incites hatred and violence. Now, this is interesting. An hour. The Philippines have to be jumping for joy over this because all of those interns over in the Philippines are going to be getting a shit ton of work right now.

Yeah. Yeah, they are. Look, again, we always talk about how we would have built these things when we were building these things. I used to always, like any kind of mass, you know, user-generated content, all that sort of stuff, you would have a flag option and people could flag it.

And if it got a couple of flags, then you would put a little thing on it saying this content has been flagged or whatever. So enter at your own risk sort of thing. And if it got a lot of flags, you pulled the content and reviewed it. Yeah. Why is this so difficult for people? Because it apparently is.

And, you know, yeah, that's exactly it. There's their flag thresholds. There is, you know, this is under review, and then you pull the content and you send it to the review board. Boom. Done. Exactly. Bob's your uncle. It's like four lines of code. It's really not that hard, but apparently...

I think I've got some of this in, like, Perl and PHP back in the day. If you want it, Google. Google it. I'm sure it's out there somewhere. What's funny is I was going to say, you know, no, everybody uses Node.js and JavaScript now, but no, Facebook is written in PHP. God bless them. That's right.

Poor coders over there. Woo. At least it's not written in Perl. That's right. So also over in the EU, you know, people have the right to be forgotten, right? This is a thing that's been going on. And apparently Google has received 655,000 individual requests since 2014 when this went into effect.

That's actually less than I thought it would be. Well, I can't believe it's 2014 when that went into effect because I remember talking about it on the show. I'm like, God, we've been doing this for a long ass time. There's something else that came out in 2014 that we'll be talking about soon, which still boggles my mind. But here's the interesting thing.

The board that is made up of people that look at these requests is all put together by Google. That's it. So Google builds the board. Their star chamber is a bunch of people that they pick.

And then the board looks it over and says, yay or nay. And I hate to say this, but one of the lines in this article is, but as NPR notes, what this really means is that a private company has the power to determine what is or isn't in the public interest, which rides a dangerous line between one's right to privacy and straight up censorship.

And the point here is that Google has an unbelievable amount of power in saying that, yes, you can be forgotten or no, you can't. Right. And the ethics behind that, which I'm also in the middle of my ethical course.

By the way, as an aside, I finished my homework at 1150 on Sunday night before the deadline at 12 o'clock. I'm very... See, there are two types of people in this world, Jason. Yes, there are. You were 10 minutes from the deadline.

I was two weeks ahead. Yeah. I still haven't looked at week two's content yet. So I know what I'm doing this weekend at 10 o'clock on Sunday night. But anyway, yes, this power that Google has over there, it seems to me that the EU screwed up a bit by not providing basically a third party court to look at these issues.

There needs to be basically somebody that's not tied to Google that needs to look over these things and approve or decline them. But giving Google that power is just... How did they fuck that up? It's ludicrous. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. It's dumb. Well, speaking of that, I don't know if you've Googled yourself recently.

It is what people tend to do. But within the last, I'd say, five years or so, instead of getting all the results where you're actually mentioned or you're in something or an article that you wrote ages ago shows up, now it's all these weird-ass sites that have your information so people can find you.

It's Spokio. It's White Pages. It's PQ. It's all these different sites that come up that have your information. Luckily, you can opt out of a lot of these if you find yourself. And let's see. It's Lifehacker again. So what are you going to do? Sometimes they're okay. Anyways.

So you can go to this link in the show notes over at Lifehacker. And they have a whole host of these different sites and basic instructions for how to get out of them if you find yourself on them. It's pretty easy. It took me about five minutes to run through all of these, of which I was on probably half of them. But when I say on half of them, they gave me a middle name I don't have.

They had an address from 10 years ago, all that sort of stuff. It's hit or miss. But why have that information out there if you don't have to? Really quick, go in, do all this. The own caveat I have to say, White Pages is a bitch. Yeah. I mean, I hate them. This is unbelievably complicated.

It is unbelievably complicated to get your information out of there. And in fact, it doesn't work the way Lifehacker says it does, because I think they've made a change. You have to sign up for a White Pages account to basically remove your own information. And even if you do get that far, it involves an automated phone call, which is crazy.

But the thing that I noticed is you cannot sign up for White Pages accounts for free anymore. So if you want to pull your information from White Pages, you've got to pay them. Oh, sneaky bastards. Which is a load of crap. Yeah. Yep. No, I've done this a couple times. I've gone through all the sites and removed myself from most of them.

But it's whack-a-mole, because there's always a new site that pops up. They'll just rebrand themselves and white label the same data in the same database over and over again. So you're just going through the same rigmarole over and over again. And until you find... It's like killing the head vampire, you know?

You can't... Unless you get to the main database and get your stuff removed from that, they can still use it on all these other databases. So hitting all the sub data, killing all the minions of the vampire is not going to do you any good until you get to Rutger Hauer and, you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and solve the problem.

But it is a pain. And I found one last week that was just... I mean, it had everything on me, my family, everybody I've ever known. It's like the fucking Liam Neeson of personal information. They have a certain set of skills and they are going to use it to get every dime out of me to get myself removed.

And we finally have our first relatively large casualty of the Facebook algorithm chicanery that's been going on. A company called Little Things, which is a digital publisher that focused on inspirational and how-to content for women. They closed their doors yesterday and they basically just said, we can't do it anymore.

Facebook has totally screwed us. All of our money and all of our traffic came from social medias like Facebook. And since they changed their thing, they've killed us. I love this quote. He says, no previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation. The position it put us in was beyond dire.

No change that they've been alive for. Welcome to Google during the SEO fight days. Many, the panda update that killed everybody. This happens all the time. And we always tell you. We always tell you. Build your brand on somebody else's platform.

If you pitch your tent in somebody else's backyard, do not get pissed off when they turn on the sprinklers. That's how it works. There you go. So, sorry, little things. But I went to it yesterday and it was still up. I was surprised. And no mention of them shutting down. Interesting.

Yeah. Maybe somebody came to the rescue and bought them out. But, yeah. Maybe Twitter's throwing around more than the millions of dollars. They just throw at bad companies. Bad ideas. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's end it with a little bit of good news, which is just kind of ridiculous, actually.

There's going to be 4G Wi-Fi on the moon as soon as next year. How cool is that? Vodafone, Nokia, and Audi are the ones making it happen, basically to get a press release that mentions them. It seems to be the real thing. But they are going to send up all this equipment.

We'll be sent to the moon using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And before you go, why would you need Wi-Fi on the moon? The point of it is that they're actually going to have streaming HD images coming from the moon, and it will be taken over this network, which will be pretty cool. Okay. But nothing happens on the moon. They could just send back a still image.

Instead of having a still image as my desktop, I could now have a HD video and watch the little Martians play? I don't know. Well, Martians are on Mars. This is the moon. Well, they get around. Here's what they need to do. They need to send up a couple, you know, because they're saying they're setting up these networked Audi Lunar Quattro rovers, right?

Yes. What they need to do is send up an Audi R8 with big fat moon tires on it and let you drive it for like a buck a minute and stream the video back for that. That would be fun. I just hope Elon Musk hears this and just sends another Tesla up and lands this one on the moon.

They've got Wi-Fi built into those things, right? Spaceman's already turned around. He's flipped a bitch and he's heading back to the moon. He's like, no Audi is going to be here first, Tesla bitches. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by the new Eero and Eero Beacon.

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Brian, I was listening to the radio this week, and I heard that they were redoing 9 to 5 with the original cast. Except everyone, except for Dabney Coleman, who was the boss in 9 to 5. Okay, I have questions. Okay. What are they doing?

Nobody knows. Nobody knows. It's got to be set in, like, a nursing home. The three women are coming back, but Dabney Coleman is not. So, in my, you know, I'm just like, in my non-coffee addled morning brain, I said, Hey, woman in a tube, is Dabney Coleman dead?

And it came back saying, No, Dabney Coleman is alive. And it gave me his age. I'm like, Oh, I found a fucking use for my Echo. It's great. I told you. This was one of my in-a-bar pitch ideas a long time ago.

It was my app idea. It was dead or not. Okay. I totally wanted to do it. But now, see, I would be out of business. It's built in. I would be put out of business. It's totally built in. Because they have, remember, Amazon owns IMDb. Right. So, Echo has access to the IMDb database, which is, I think, what they probably referenced, because she came back and said exactly how old he is.

I'm like, okay. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm really glad we never did the Is Abe Vigoda Alive app for Echo, but yeah. There you go. All right. So, if Dabney Coleman dies this week, it is totally our fault. Unfortunately, that one's on us. Yeah. Sorry. And, man, Apple is like the Windows 98 of 2018.

My Apple Watch 3 stopped pairing with my phone. And I'm like, okay, let's just turn off Bluetooth, turn it back on, should come back up. Nope. Three hours of rebooting, wiping, reinstalling, just to get it back to where it would talk to my phone again.

Yay. I have no idea what's going on with Apple. I got some more Apple stuff in the future, but I want to talk about my adventures in PC Land for a second. Okay. I like Windows 10. It's not bad. I moved my Tron's Taint PC down to the dining room and set up just basically an entertainment PC.

So, that's my entertainment place. All the work happens in the studio and all of the light stuff happens downstairs because I had it switched and I was doing editing down there and recording. It was a mess. My workflow was just schizophrenic. So, now I've just got, I did all the research for this episode on my PC.

I got a big 32-inch monitor and unfortunately, it's one of those monitors that is like HD res. So, the pixels look like, you know, gumballs. After my 5K monitor on my iMac that I'm looking at now, it's just like, wow, I can't see a thing. But I go down there and I'm like, oh, there's seven pixels in that R. Okay.

That part makes it easier to read though when I'm doing research. So, when I'm reading articles, it's great. But Windows 10 has been solid as hell. I've had no problems with it. And I've got enough muscle memory from using PCs for 20 years that I can go from command to control, like, without thinking about it.

I'm like, oh, I'm on a PC. So, I just hit control. Like, my hands work that way. So, I can go back and forth without an issue. Right. And I just, I'm really enjoying messing around with the PC. I've got all my games installed on it. I played some StarCraft on it. It's fun. I like having a PC now. Look, I gotta be honest with you.

I switched to Mac a couple years back now. I've been happy with Mac. But since then, I feel like I've somehow jinxed Mac because Apple just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Seriously. When it comes time for me to get another computer, I may go back to Windows. I really may.

Yeah. I mean, I can't because I work in Logic so much and I'm not going to change my, I'm not going to Pro Tools. I hate Pro Tools. But because Logic is beautiful and I can do everything I need to in it quickly. SoundForge looks pretty good, though. So, there might be an out for me. And what I notice is when I'm doing all of the stuff on the Mac, I'm using Reader 3, which is my RSS reader.

But since I don't have that on the PC, I went to Feedly because my Reader 3 app is fed by my subscriptions on Feedly, all my RSS stuff. So, I started using Feedly in the browser to go through all of the stories because, you know, I go through 8,000 stories a week just for the show.

And the interface in Chrome for Feedly, or I'm sorry, in Opera, I don't use Chrome for that, is so much better than Reader for the Mac that when I come back to work now on my Mac, I just use the web browser.

Reader 3 is pretty much dead to me. Feedly has such a great interface, and I'm probably going to end up throwing them some bones for the Feedly Pro account just because I want to support them. Because I pay for Reader, and if I'm using Feedly, why not pay for them, too? And I got through so many stories so much faster using the Feedly interface.

So, if you like RSS and want to get back into it, definitely check out Feedly. They've got it going on over there. I'm pretty impressed. Right. I will. And speaking of things that are dead to me, Twitter is killing off the Mac app, which sucks. I use Twitter's Mac app. Oh, my God. It sits right over on the right-hand side.

It's fine for everything I need. Get TweetBot. It does exactly. Get over it. Well, that's what I was going to ask you is what I have to switch to because they are killing it. They announced on Friday, February 16th, the app is no longer available for download. And as of March 16th, it will no longer be supported.

And now, what that means, I don't know. Will it just shut down or will it just continue to work and they just will never bother doing any updates? It'll probably keep going because they can't remote delete it from your machine. But what the thing is, it actually uses the Twitter API. So, they do have a kill switch on their side that they can shut off.

Yeah. That's what I was thinking. So, we'll see what they do. I'm sure they won't. But, yeah. So, if you use that, that's it. So, switch to TweetBot, apparently, which is what Jason is telling me. TweetBot's great. I do like in their notification that they ended it on an upbeat note. Not to worry, for the full Twitter experience on your Mac, visit Twitter on the web.

Well, fuck you. Fuck you. Seriously, I just, I hope. Really, Jason, 20 years ago when we were doing all this stuff, did you think it would end up like this? No. No. The problem is all of us left.

All of us who knew what the hell we were doing left. Oh, man. No. Yeah. Get TweetBot. It's great on the Mac. You can have multiple accounts. I switch between all my different accounts very easily. Great interface. It gets the job done is really all that it comes down to.

You've got filters. You've got better mute filtering than you do on Twitter itself. And it syncs. So if you have TweetBot on your phone and TweetBot on the Mac, it'll sync all of your mute lists. It'll sync where you're at, your scroll position and everything.

It works. Okay. It's a few bucks. It's worth the money. Highly recommended. All right. Well, there we go. Yeah. Now, Nokia's banana phone from the Matrix is apparently back. Yeah. The only reason I wanted to put this in here is because it's not, this is not the same phone from the Matrix by any stretch.

The phone in the Matrix had a spring-loaded mouth cover. This does not. You have to slide it with your hand. This looks like a cheap piece of crap. And the only thing that's the same is that it's curved and you have, and the thing slides down, but you have to slide it with your fingers. It's going to be under a hundred bucks.

And I did some research trying to find on eBay, like the originals, you cannot buy one from anybody in the United States. Everybody is in Slovakia, apparently, that has all of the Matrix phones. So it was never sold here. It was never sold in the United States. So it's not surprising, but I'm not going to buy a relic of my past just to have one on the shelf.

Like my razor is speaking of Burns, Michael Burns, where the hell's my razor that you were sending me? But I'm not going to buy one of these. This is just, it's a silly marketing ploy. You know, like how they screwed up the new Nokia that came out, you know, they screw it up by trying to, they're reliving the past, but making it new.

No, I want the same exact thing that they put out before with just new guts inside new radios. I want the exact same experience, morons. Way to, way to fuck up a reboot. Well, guess what, Jason? There's a new social network in town and it's feeling good.

Yes, it is. Not really. So Vero is going viral as part of the backlash against Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat. There's a, there's a new kid in the ring and everybody's downloading it and talking about it. Well, no, they're not. Here's what I, everybody I know is doing.

They're downloading it and saying, I guess I'm on here now with a resigned sense of like, ah, shit, not another one. 10 minutes later, they go, I just deleted it because it doesn't work. Yes, it's L-O-L-O all again. First off, nobody's there. Secondly, it's, it's not ready for prime time.

It's certainly not ready for the amount of users that they're getting. It took me 18 tries to be able to sign up for it and I finally signed up for it and I've not looked at it again. Yeah. Now it's, it's a piece of shit. And, uh, the big thing here's the, here's the, the important thing. L-O-L-O is four years old.

We first started making fun of L-O four years ago and they're still there. They're still going. I still get notifications every week from them, from some porn star that is signed on to make me go watch her webcams. But it's amazing that that's still around.

Uh, Vero has been around since 2015 and still sucks in the entire time. That they've been around. They haven't been able to figure out how to get people to sign up and apparently accept a friend request. Now, the big thing that came up is, uh, the backlash against their quote unquote shady founder.

So that's the new thing that everybody's pissed off about because this guy apparently, uh, ran a company for his dad, like the family business over in Saudi Arabia. And, uh, yeah, on his watch, they had 31,000 complaints of non payment of wages. So he should go work for Instacart and say, fuck Vero.

I know. Yeah. Yeah. In other news, uh, Amazon has acquired ring, the video doorbell company for a billion, billion dollars. These are the guys that were on shark tank and couldn't get funded by the way. And now Amazon has bought them for a billion dollars.

Robert Herjavec at least had the common sense to go back and invest after he saw how good they were. So he just had a giant payday. Yep. Everybody I know that has a ring loves it. They've been a sponsor on my shows and everybody, they sent me one. I gave it to friend of the show MXV and he loves it. Everybody I know loves it.

I just can't use it because I don't have power. We do way, way too many internet of things stories for me to ever do one of these until I know security is in place. Right. Yeah. I think this is, this is basically a buyout because nobody, I mean, nobody was buying the Amazon camera that you're supposed to use for when people come into your house and they're like, okay, we give up.

We all right. This is okay. This is the fire phone part two and nobody bought it. So we're going to put this on the shelf with the, the, does this make my ass look fat camera? And we're just going to go buy ring and suck it up. So pretty much. Yeah. So good for, good for ring.

You know, they, uh, they got a good payday. They make a good product. Uh, I don't know about the security on it, but I've never heard of any breaches. So yeah. Well, and the reality is we all know that, uh, door locks are nothing anyways, five minutes on, on YouTube and you can figure out how to pick a lock.

So yeah, you're not really in any greater danger. No, I mean, but the nice thing about the ring is it's motion detected. It's doesn't, it has nothing to do with a lock. It's just a camera outside of your house, not inside of your house. So when somebody comes to the door, you get a notification that somebody's at your door and you can talk to them at the same time, which is kind of cool.

So if somebody is at your door and it's, you know, uh, somebody with a copy of the watch tower, you can say, go, go fly a kite. But, uh, if it's the mailman, you can say, Hey, can you leave the package under the bush on the left? And it works out better. Now drone news, the Skydio, the self flying camera has arrived.

As they say, did you get a chance to check out the website for Skydio? I did. Skydio is, I also like to call it the flying laptop. Um, is this big square that you basically just throw in the air and it follows you and takes your photo and your video and all that stuff.

And it's got 12 cameras that just for positioning. And so it doesn't run into a tree. One camera to take pictures of you. And it looks like an impressive piece of technology. But the biggest impressive piece of technology from the video on the website is how does that, that woman parkour person that they have keep her shirt tucked in the entire time when she's jumping over those trees and doing flips and shit because her shirt didn't move.

I think that's the most impressive technology to come out of this thing. It is pretty impressive. So this is a $2,500 flying stalker. Yeah, I know. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. And imagine somebody puts a tracker on you, buys a Skydio, hacks it, and then puts a little C4 on it.

And then boom, that's your uncle. You know, that's just how I like. I think we have the new Suarez book. I mean, this, this is the original book. This comes back to the original books. This is, but now we have off the shelf technology to do it before you had to go build it yourself at like a hobby shop.

But now this thing just, you know, $2,500 bucks though, man, that's impressive. And they're all handcrafted in California and there's a month waiting list to get one. It looks like it does what it does fairly well. I, I, I have no problem with the technology. It looks like it does what it does.

My friend, I found out about this because my friend was trying one out, uh, who's a drone expert and, uh, he said they're pretty cool. I'm not that narcissistic where I need a, a flying laptop taking pictures of my ass as I walked down the street, honestly. Right. Another piece of impressive, I mean, utterly unbelievably impressive technology I found out about this week is the Leica BLK 360.

This thing is amazing. It's a little kind of looks like an, it looks like a trash can basically. That's about a, you know, a foot tall that you take to a space, set it down and it uses LIDAR to map a room in 3D.

It kind of looks like an evil R2-D2. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and for the price you should get R2-D2. It's $18,500. Wow. It's Leica. Of course it's going to, I mean, it, like it doesn't make anything that starts under $10,000 anymore.

But this thing, I, I just really got into following this this week. I went down the rabbit hole on following the guys that are using this and building virtual studios with it. And all this, there's a video in the, in the show notes at a GOG.show slash two four nine to check out about this guy who went to a sound studio and basically mapped it with this thing.

So then he could build a 3D model of it. So then he could build virtual sets in it. This whole like, you know, virtual storyboarding community is something I never knew existed. And I'm just, I'm fascinated by what these guys are doing and the technology behind it. But this Leica is just insane.

You can just take it and map like, you know, a street, get the buildings, get everything. And it builds these giant point maps that you can then build 3D models out of. It's like, wow, for $18,500 back in the day, this would have been a $500,000 piece of kit. And this fits in a backpack and is rechargeable.

You know, I think it's pretty cool. Now, the dumb piece of tech I found this week, we've talked about Adam Savage a lot on this show and how we thought his, his career and his podcast have gone down the crapper. Well, he's pivoted. He's gone down the Zane Lamprey route now.

He's making stuff. Yes, he's making stuff. Well, he is a maker. Well, here's the funny thing. He's not making stuff. He's outsourced the making of stuff. He has the Trump style, the Savage Industries, EDC one EDC for people who are not in the know is everyday carry. And he has a bag that's for sale now.

If you go to adamsavage.com, it's all about the bag. And it's made by a company called Mafia Bags. And they used salvaged sailcloth to make their bags. So they basically get recycled sails from boats and they make bags out of it. Now, here's not the problem.

There's two problems with this bag. One, unbelievably ugly. I would not be seen carrying this bag on your shoulder, let alone mine. It is hideous. The other problem is it's $225 from recycled material.

Come on. You need to at least give me a break on the price if you're using somebody else's crap that they threw away. It's terrible. Have you looked at it? I've looked at it. It is ugly. It only comes in white. And rule number one, once you have a kid, own nothing in white. Well, that's rule number one in life.

Own nothing in white. Unless you're getting married, own nothing in white. And I love this. Each bag is identified with a handwritten serial number indicating the model and production number. Like, that'll never wear off. And bags come wrapped in tissue paper printed with a drawing of my original toolboxes.

Yeah. Okay, so what am I supposed to do? Take the wrapping of the overpriced bag I had and frame it and say, look, Adam Savage sent me something. Yeah, pretty much. What a crock of shit. At least Zane Lamprey makes really good hoodies. But this is the ugliest bag I've ever seen in my life.

I was pretty disappointed by it when I saw it. Yeah. I was like, okay, this will probably be pretty cool. Maybe I'd want one. And I was like, nope. Nope. Not in the least. Next up, I've got the LED Tactical Flashlight Wizzeroon, W-S-I-I-R-O-O-N.

So I'm going to pronounce it Wizzeroon. 1600 lumen XML-T6 handhold flashlight-portable, zoomable, waterproof, super brightness with five light modes for indoor and outdoor use, two pack. Paren, batteries not included.

That's my entry into the Amazon title of the week, by the way. I like it. I like it. So I have a Surefire Digital LumaMax L2, which was $225 when I bought it, and it had a blinding 200 lumens back in the day. This was a tactical flashlight back in the day.

Couldn't carry it on an airplane. It came with a DOD warning sticker when it was mailed to me, right? $225. I bought two of these, two of these for $17.79. Why do you? Okay. No, I'm not.

You have spent more time talking about flashlights on this show than I've thought about them in my entire life. Well, you're not going out in the dark every night with dogs. You're not walking the streets of San Francisco at night. You know, the place is an awful lot of technology for a flashlight.

Well, yeah, it was back in the day because this was before, this was when LED flashlights were a new thing. And this, the Lumimax L2 was designed for 747 pilots. So they could stick their head out of the window in the cockpit and use it to illuminate the wings to see if there was ice buildup.

This was built for 747 pilots. But by the way, I don't buy that in any way, shape or form. That was the marketing material. You've been on a 747, right? I have. You know what a 747 is shaped like, right? I do. You know that the windows on the front are little tiny windows and then there's this giant bulb behind you?

Yes. You can't see past the bulb when you stick your head out of that little window. So I don't care what flashlight you have. Unless it's an x-ray flashlight, you cannot see through the cabin compartment to look at the wings. So I believe Surefire was slipping me a Mickey on that one.

But anyway, I got these two flashlights for 18 bucks and they're fantastic. Way brighter than the digital Lumimax. The reason I got it was the Surefire takes these lithium batteries that are ungodly expensive. So for what it would cost me to buy another set of batteries for my flashlight, I bought two flashlights that take AAA batteries that I can recharge for nothing.

Right. So if you're looking for a flashlight, I know you're not because you don't leave the house at night unless you're going to pub trivia and then you're going to Uber. I'm sorry, lift your way there. So you're all good. Yes, I'm good. Oh man. And Brian, I know you don't play video games at all. Well, not anymore.

I used to talk about Alto's Adventure on this show as one of my favorite games of all time after I beat Tiny Wings, which I am in a very elite pantheon of people who have ever done. I got Alto's Adventure and then I beat that and I've been waiting for years. But now Alto's Odyssey is out.

Okay. It is the follow-up to Alto's Adventure and it is awesome. It is very good. It's fine. It's kind of the same game, but not. They added in a bunch of new stuff. The game developers went on Ars Technica to talk about their development.

All of these will be linked in the show notes. And I had a problem with the game. It wasn't syncing between my devices. So I tweeted at them this morning. I sent them a DM. They're basically the owner got on the horn with me and was walking me through how to fix my problem, went to the tech team, sent me a bunch of stuff, and we finally got it figured out.

And that is customer service. For a $5 app, that is customer service. I cannot be more impressed with the level of just detail that they gave me and how to fix it. And they were just super nice. I mean, and got back to me within five minutes.

That's great. Yeah. I am floored by the customer service for this because I'm sure that they are slammed right now with stuff because they were like app of the week in the app. Store and are getting huge amounts of press. But I'm just I'm more impressed with how they handled my problem than I am with the game.

And the game is amazing. Trust me, I'm going to be playing this thing nonstop until I beat it. But yeah, check out Alto's Odyssey. Links will be in the show notes. It is so fun. You're not going to do it, though, Brian, because you don't play games. No, but your kid might like it.

It's pretty easy to play. You just push the screen and make the guy jump and snowboard. Probably a little early for him, but he'll get. I don't know. OK, and because funny, there's a Chrome browser extension out there that replaces the word blockchain with the phrase multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet.

That's really all it is. That's all it is. That's what I love that. There's just so there's so much making it so complicated. There are entire books out about explaining blockchain. It's multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet. That's all blockchain is. It is not any any kind of new technology.

Well, it is new technology because they made the way to replicate the giant Excel spreadsheet. But yeah, I just I love that so much. That just sums up everything in the world. Pretty much media candy.

Breaking news, Brian. Weird Al has dropped his new Hamilton single. It's a polka. Oh, boy. Yay. Yes, this is somebody I'm telling somebody who doesn't like polka, Weird Al or Hamilton. Now, that's not true.

I was a huge Weird Al fan when I was 12. OK, well, I'm 46 and Weird Al is my fucking spirit animal. So shut up. I listened to it probably 10 times this morning. It is so good. I saw that. I saw that you were super into it.

So I grabbed a link for you. We have a link in the show notes of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jimmy Fallon reacting to listening to it for the first time. I thought you would enjoy it. I did. And I also had this. I had another thought. I had another thought. I thought when I saw you freaking out about this, I was like, he's going to talk about this longer than the song actually is.

No, I'm not. I'm done. The song's five minutes long, but this is really good. He does the whole show in five minutes and in perfect Weird Al fashion. All right. Excellent. All right. Moving on. Kevin Smith, unfortunately, had a heart attack last week. Yeah, I saw that.

That's I hope he's feeling better. He is. He is. He I watched. He did a Facebook live thing for like half an hour and talked about what happened. And he thought he had some bad milk and was just had to have a lie down. But no, had a massive heart attack. 100 percent blockage of the Widowmaker. And he's lucky to be alive.

And you kind of scared the shit out of me because Kevin Smith was born on August 2nd, 1970. I was born on August 5th, 1971. All right. Granted, Kevin Smith is 100 pounds heavier than I am at most times in his life.

But it's like he was a big boy. Yeah, it looks like he's a very big boy. It's like he slimmed down a bit, but it's hard to tell because he still wears those big ass shirts. But I'm sure he's still bigger than I am. And it was funny in the Facebook live video. He was talking about how he freaked out because they wanted to take his shirt or cut his shirt off.

They're like, you're taking my shirt off? No. Yep. Typical response for a fat man. I know that so much. So I found that link on Deadline when this happened. And unfortunately for Deadline, they like to put TV spoilers in the headlines.

Which drives me fucking insane. So I had to go run and watch The Walking Dead midseason premiere. And my Xfinity DVR only had 15 minutes of it. And that's actually wrong. I put 15 minutes here in the show, but it was five. It was five minutes of the show.

And this is directly to the provider. There's no reason that this should be broken. Ever. So, hello, Sweden. And it was faster. It was literally faster to go to Sweden, get the show, put it on my Synology and watch it on TV, than it was to go through the Xfinity menu system to try and get it and figure out how to, you know, re-record it and all that crap.

I'm like, it took me three minutes to get the show off of a torrent and put it on my Synology and hit play with no commercials. Piece of shit. Anyway, it's still better than any TV over the internet I've found so far, except for the fact that sometimes it doesn't work.

Yeah. The Tick is back. Are you a fan of The Tick? Okay. I have not watched it. I mean to, but I never get around to it. Okay. This was an evening, like the first six episodes dropped, and then I'm like, where's the rest? And they finally dropped the final six, and I watched it in one sitting, because they're only like 22-minute episodes.

So you can push through the six of them pretty quick. Fantastic. It's so much fun. You want something lighthearted, Brian? Something to put a smile on your face? That's The Tick. Yeah. Okay. I'll get around to it. I really have been meaning to, so I'll finally watch it.

It's family-friendly, too, so the kid might like it. Okay, cool. What's not family-friendly? Well, it is family-friendly, but what also disappointed me was The Grand Tour Season 2. Yeah. For the most part, I loved every episode of the season, except episode 11, which I was surprised with, because last season there were 12.

They had 10 this season, plus a bonus episode. The bonus episode soured me on just about the previous 10. Did you get a chance to watch it yet? I've only gotten through episode 9, so I haven't seen the last ones yet.

I have friends and friends of the show that are very into it that have burned through it all and that said it was horrible. The last episode was really bad. It's just rough, because the guys, I like the guys. I like the guys' personalities. I think they're funny when they're just winging it.

Everything is so meticulously staged and written out, and when they do that, they aren't funny. Do me a favor. They're joking. Go back and watch an episode of Top Gear and see if that is as non-scripted as you think it is, because I went back and watched one recently, and it is the exact same show.

It is not off the top. It's probably not, but it feels, it was funnier. Like, the stuff that they're writing now, maybe they just have bad writers now. Maybe they need the original writing team, because this is just not funny. It just isn't. Yeah. I mean, it's not the same by any stretch.

It's different, but I think, yeah, I think they have too much time and too much money. I think they need more constraints to focus them. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Because that really would help things go along. But, yeah, I went back and I watched Top Gear, and it is still as scripted as this is.

It's just, it is not as funny. So, I think that the production schedule of the BBC and the constraints of the budgets kept them on track. I think Amazon gave them too much money and too much time. Gotcha. And I am now in full swing preparing for the Americans' final season on March 28th.

I'm going back and watching season five, just to get back in the spirit of it, because it's been a while. And I love that show. Thank you so much for making me watch that one, Brian. Oh, no problem, man. It's just, it's a really solid show. Like, a lot of these shows that we talk about and we've talked about over the years have good season, bad season.

The Americans has just been solid. Every season's been good. It's a fantastic show, and I'm really sad that it's actually ending. Yeah. Yeah. And we get a new Jennifer Lawrence Russian spy thing. I saw the commercial for it the other day, and I thought, oh, is that the Americans? Oh, no. Because I thought maybe she was going to do a cameo on the Americans.

But no, they just ripped off the Americans for this new Russian spy movie. Well, I'm excited about that, and I'm also excited, don't forget, that Jessica Jones drops March 8th. That'll be the week that you're listening to this podcast, so we will both probably be feverishly watching that, so that'll be really good.

And besides Jessica Jones, Brian, Netflix is releasing 50 original shows in March alone. 50. Wow. Yeah. I think over the course of the year, what they said was there's going to be 700 Netflix originals this year. Jesus. 700. Wow, they've got some money.

Yep. That's what those billions will get you. You know, Apple has billions, and we get a carpool karaoke, and another show we'll talk about in a minute. But Netflix is just like, they're a content factory at this point. It's insane. So yeah, 54 new shows on Netflix.

Some of them are foreign language. But you know what I've been doing, Brian? You might want to try this, too. The comedy specials they have out, they've got a lot of foreign comedy specials out, but that are still in English. There's a lot of guys in, like, Malaysia and Singapore and Southeast Asian that are doing comedy specials that are actually pretty good.

Right. It kind of breaks you out of the normal, you know, hey, what's Trump doing kind of shit? And it kind of expands your world a little bit. They're pretty fun. I'll find some for next week, and I'll put them in the show notes, and we can talk about them. But yeah, they're really fun. But yeah, Jessica Jones, dude.

It's what it's all about. I can't wait. Six days. But speaking of what Trump's doing and all that shit, Fahrenheit 451 is getting a movie. Oh, I saw. Starring Michael B. Jordan. This is definitely an update for the X Games generation. Yes, it is.

So there's a lot of running and shooting and fighting that I don't remember in the original book, but it looks good. It does. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, it looks pretty good. I was pretty surprised by the trailer. I was like, I was never a Fahrenheit 451 fanboy. Didn't really care for the book that much, but I get it.

But yeah, this looks like I'm surprised they didn't get Will Smith to do this one, because it seems like it's right up his alley. But well, I'm glad they didn't. So I know you don't like how it goes. You should still go watch that Netflix movie with him. It was pretty good. No. And by the way, Homeland, I'm still hanging on by a thread.

I don't know why. I'm so glad I stopped watching. I love Mandy Potemkin too much to not watch it, even though he's a bastard. In real life, in a horrible human being, I still love watching him on the screen. I'm sorry. I am in Diego Montoya. What am I going to do? I'll just go back and watch that rather than Homeland.

So in episode two of Homeland, there are three. By the time this comes out, it'll be at four. But in episode two, Carrie was browsing 4chan and got a download from somebody, opened it, and then got ransomware. Now, that alone should tell you how silly this is.

Okay. She's ex-CIA operative on what's probably a secured laptop that her crazy super hacker friend gave her, and she still gets ransomware, then tracks the guy down, almost kills him, beats the shit out of him, just so he can unlock her laptop.

And in the meantime, of course, they have the, hey, I've got your laptop, show me your tits scene. It was, in every way, shape, and form, one of the worst episodes of television I've ever seen in my life. Okay. But yet, I still watched episode three, so what's that say about me?

Well, that's kind of typical for you, isn't it? Don't know when to give up. Oh, yeah. And speaking of showing us your tits, I finished Altered Carbon. Oh, yes. Naked Kung Fu. It was, yeah, Jesus Christ. It was good enough for me to look forward to season two, I gotta be honest.

I was surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did. And I gotta think, you know, I'll give him credit for the nod to gender equality with the full frontal male nudity. If you're gonna have your actresses basically walk around completely nude for 10-minute sequences, you gotta toss a little dick in there, I suppose.

And they did. Now, I didn't review the tape on this, so I'm just kind of going off memory. The two female leads, the leads in the show, had extended full frontal sequences. Basically, one of the leads was nude the entire final episode, as far as I could tell. And I believe it was only a male extra or two that schlonged up.

So not quite gender equal, I guess. Well, you need to go back and review the tape, because there is a scene pretty early on where the male antagonist walks in, schlong, waving around. Okay. Well, good on them, then. But here's the thing.

I don't know if you remember who the main female antagonist was. I can't say who she was in the show, because it'll be a spoiler. But she was in Dollhouse. I don't know if you remember Dollhouse. Okay. Vaguely, yeah. Yeah, she was one of the main assassins in Dollhouse.

It took me about five episodes to figure out who she was. But yeah, she was a main character in Dollhouse. And I remember, it just came back to me in a flash. I'm like, oh, Dollhouse! That was a show! I remember that show! Because I was so hot for Eliza Dushka at that point that I couldn't see anybody else in the show.

But I do remember her. Gotcha. Because she's kind of funky looking. I actually went and saw a movie in a theater. It's something my wife and I do maybe once or twice a year. But we had a babysitter over this last weekend, and we went and saw Black Panther. How was it? I haven't got... I don't have a babysitter, so I haven't seen it yet. I am not...

As you know, I'm not into the superhero movies. I love this one. You know? Great. It was this and the first three-fourths of Wonder Woman are the two superhero movies I've truly enjoyed. And this also, you know, near the end, it's a bit of an extended fight sequence that doesn't have to be quite as long as it is.

But all in all, this was absolutely fantastic. And I knew absolutely nothing about the character, which also helped. So it's an origin story for the most part. Really good. I look forward to there being more of these. Cool. Yeah. I want to go sneak out and see it next week if I can get the... It's definitely worth it, man.

Okay. And since I know you're not into the superhero movies, but you liked Wonder Woman, you like this one, check out Thor Ragnarok. That's what people keep telling me. Yeah. Dude, it's not the same because it's written by the New Zealand guy and directed by him. So good.

So better than... I still think it's the best Marvel movie they've ever made. But I'll check out Black Panther. I might be shaken from that. Now, M. Night Shyamalan Ding Dong is back in the news. No joy. Yep. Talking about original content, he's joining Apple's original TV ranks.

Okay. Yep. He's going to produce a show over there. Along with him and Ronald D. Moore, another one of your favorite people on the planet. So, we'll see what Apple's got coming out. I think that they should join forces and it can be an entire series where you think something's going to happen and then Ronald D. Moore writes a really shitty twist ending.

But here's the thing. Yeah. If they put their shitty twist endings together, they might come up with something that actually works. Oh, God. No. And speaking of what is sadly probably going to be potentially very bad TV, I was almost waiting to... I was going to hold this story until Ready Player One and its eventual inevitable disappointment came out.

So I could talk about how I hate it when people make any kind of movie or TV shows for my favorite books. Discworld is coming to television. Here's the problem. Discworld has been on television. And it hasn't been good. It's been fantastic. No, I disagree with you.

You like these... You love... I love them. You love your low-quality, low-budget BBC shows and I cannot stand them. Did you watch them? Yes. I didn't like it. I loved them. I thought they were fantastic. The three that were out, I thought they did a great job and they were anything but low-budget.

Those are high-budget shows. They are coming back for more, so we're going to get a 10-episode run focusing on the City Watch. I cannot wait for this. I am a Sam Vimes fanboy, so I am going to give it a try. I know you just like to poo-poo things out of pocket, but I will check this out.

That's what I do. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that on security shortly. At the library. Brian, I got through a couple books this week, believe it or not. I'm impressed. I still haven't.

Yeah. One of the things that having no money and being at the edge of your seat all the time makes you focus. And I'm like, ah, okay, I have a thousand things to do and I'm going to listen to audiobooks while I do it. So I read three books. Sandman Slim by Richard Kadri.

I don't know where I found out about this book. I want to think it was Warren Ellis' newsletter, but this is a new series that I found. The original book, Sandman Slim, came out in 2009, I believe. Never heard of it. You will love it.

Cool. You will love it. This is right up our alley. Because what I wanted, I wanted a fantasy kind of book, but not like, you know, fantasy. This is a guy who comes back from hell after spending 11 years there and he comes back as a hitman trying to basically get revenge on the people that sent him there.

It's kind of like The Crow meets Books of Magic or something like that. It's really good. It's really well written. Just everything about it was spot on. I love this book. Turns out it's a series, which makes me sad. But I did the one thing that I swore that we wouldn't do and I didn't immediately buy the next one.

So what I did was I changed gears and then I read Conspiracy, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday. This is a deep dive on Peter Thiel's taking down of Gawker. Holy shit.

We covered this story ad nauseum when it was happening. Yeah. Not even scratched the surface of what went on. It is an incredible book. I mean, I like Ryan Holiday and I like his books, but this is his best work to date by a thousand yards.

And it is really just how a conspiracy works, how Peter Thiel pulled it off, and just the entire story from soup to nuts. It is amazing. I cannot recommend this book enough. I was floored by it. I literally got it in the morning when I woke up because I pre-ordered it, showed up.

I finished it by eight o'clock that night. Nice. That fast. And it's a 10-hour book. I had to two exit, but it's incredible because I didn't need to retain it. There's not like facts and figures. But the story is just mind-bogglingly engrossing. Highly recommend it.

And finally, I read Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein. Okay. I don't think I ever read that one. This book came out in 1953 as part of his series for children. It was a juvenile series. It's not that juvenile, by the way.

Well... Juvenile in 1953 has a different... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a different time. Mm-hmm. There were no participation awards in 1953, let's just say that. No. It was fantastic. And at the beginning of the book, it really hooked me when this kid's running away from home and he gets picked up by a stranger who, like a truck driver, who's helping him out get to where he needs to go.

And they go into this restaurant and the guy's talking about the restaurant and there are people in the restaurant and this pretty girl comes over to serve them breakfast. And he's like, yeah, those guys did a robot diner down the road, but everybody left because pretty girls beat robots any day.

And I'm like, that's how we beat the robots. Pretty girls. That's it. That's how we beat just about everything. That's true. That's true. So highly recommend it. It's a one-off, just a great, great book. Great sci-fi from, I mean, from 1953, this is how sci-fi was done back then.

I mean, you've got Faster Than Late Travel, you've got lots of math, you've got, you know, problem porn like The Martian. You've got all this stuff in it. Brave New Worlds. It is a fantastic book. I don't know why I've never heard of this before, but it was just one of those ones where I just picked up on a whim and turns out to be an amazing book.

Highly recommend it. Cool. And in final news, your favorite person, Neil Gaiman, waiting for the smirk, the chuckle. I can hear it. I can hear you. I don't mind Neil Gaiman. I don't know why you think I hate him.

I just don't like him as much as you and I can't stand his wife. Okay. I know you. Yeah. Amanda fucking Palmer. Yes, that's right. Neil Gaiman is turning the Sandman into an expanded comics universe. Okay. So he's got other people that are going to come in and write stories for four new comic series.

These kick off on August 8th and I got my comiXology warmed up and ready to go for him. I'm kind of excited about this. He's like kind of handing the reins off. I like that too. I like Sandman. I think it's interesting. So I'm very excited about this as well.

Yeah. Fun fact, I never finished the comics. Oh, really? That's good. The last 15, I never read because I never wanted it to end. I own them all. I have first pressings of every Sandman ever made and I have them all on comiXology, but I can't bring myself to read them. So I think this might be the thing that puts me over the edge.

Because now it's not ending. Yes, you should read them. 30 years later, I might finish the damn series.

We are back this week with Papa B. What's up, Dave? How you doing? Hello. Hello, gentlemen. I'm back. Okay. No saucy stories this week, though. I have to tell you, a friend of the show, MXV, texted me immediately after listening to the episode saying that the Rubhub story was the single best bit we've ever done on the show.

Well, I'm glad people enjoyed it. As I said last week, it is an absolutely true story. And, you know, gosh, college back in the day when we had our neon outfits, our rollerblades, and a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh.

Rollerblades. I can't associate with you anymore. I'm sorry. As an ex-skateboarder, we're not allowed to be around people like you. Yeah, yeah. Get a haircut. Actually, I need one. That's okay. So, Dave, bring us in, please.

Because you brought the thunder. Well, it's the... I'm sorry. Really? So, just categorized under stories that refuse to die, the old Facebook is listening. To You thing popped up a couple times this week.

One of them was from the Twitter account of Shannon Morse, who... I don't know how to say this. I guess she should know better. That's what I was thinking, too. I looked into her background. I'm like, oh, come on.

Yeah, I don't... And, you know, it's not fair of me to judge. I'm sure she's a wonderful person and loves her family very much. And likes puppies and hates kittens. Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, if anything else, that points to how pervasive this is and how convincing it is.

You know, there's a whole thread of Twitter about... She says, yep, Facebook app definitely listens to conversations. Yes, I downloaded it. She was complaining to her husband about folding a fitted sheet and then got an ad an hour later for how to fold a fitted sheet, which is something I've never seen on Facebook before.

I'm kidding. They see things for folded sheets on Facebook all the time. So that was one. I just stuck that in there to show you that it never dies. But then also on CBS News did a story about this. And to me, when these stories hit the level of being on the network news, I don't know about you guys, but I usually think that they're officially dead because...

Yes, thank you. Thank you. I thought you were going the other way. I'm like, no. No, don't say it. Don't say it. Okay. Yes. No, because it usually takes... Well, I don't know. In this case, what? Six months, I guess? I mean, how long... We've been talking about this for a year. Come on. Okay, at least. Yeah. So, you know, always with their finger on the pulse of the latest things going on.

Now, to their credit, the CBS News people did get... They talked to someone, a former Facebook employee. They did actually go and visit a computer forensics person who was able to analyze a phone while they were talking to it. And so, you know, it wasn't just a fluff piece.

They actually did some good reporting and verified what we've been saying all along, which is that Facebook is not listening to you. It would be impractical for them to do so. It would also be a total shitstorm if they did it. You know, so anyway, I just revisited that because I know how much we all enjoy revisiting it, but as much to just say it won't die.

It will not go away. It doesn't die, and there's no sadder thing about humanity than going through and listening to Shannon Morse, or going through Shannon Morse's whole thread about that, because it is full of people saying, I knew it. This has happened to me.

Of course they are. This is why I deleted everything. Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening. And one lone person saying, neither of these two ads require conspiracy theory explanation. It is entirely plausible that they were targeted at you based on other demographics. Also, there would have been hundreds of other ads served to you during the same time.

So one rational person is stupid. Well, and the rational person being shouted down, of course. Exactly. So the broader issue here, though, is that when the rational person gets shouted down, what do they do? They just go away. They're like, okay, fine. You know, and I think this is the disproportionality of the stupid, right?

Well, there's your show title. Welcome to the United States in 2018. Right, right, right. No, look, Dave, you're 100% right, because this literally happened to me last night. A friend of mine from high school who lives down in the suburbs posted something along the lines of Uber slash Lyft.

What are your thoughts? Because I guess they're going to start using one of these services down there. And I posted, don't use Uber. They're a horrible company. Here's a link to five different news stories, not even just about their service, just about the people that run the company, the shenanigans that they've gotten up to. Don't use Uber.

And I was shouted down, like thousands of comments after that were like, Uber's always been great to me. My mother drives for Uber. Uber's fantastic. I don't know what that crazy person is talking about. And like you said, I just walked away from it. I'm like, what am I to do? Well, I don't ever get a flu shot.

And I've never had the flu. Yes, that's exactly. That is the internet in a nutshell. So yeah, the rational person walks away from these things because there's, you can't argue with stupid. I think we need, gentlemen, I think we need to really make a special episode of Grumpy Old Geeks where we just put this to bed and let it out to the universe so maybe we can get some good press about this for once.

We don't even have to. We could just go back to the first one we did, edit it into a single show and put that up. Make it a best of at Christmas time this year. Just edit together all of the... I don't know, yes. Best of shit that's actually not happening. Right, right. Oh, God. Okay.

Let's talk about the X-Files for a second. Dave, did you get a chance to watch the episode I sent you? I did. I watched it today while I was eating my lunch. Excellent. Brian, I know you didn't watch it because you're a grumpy old curmudgeon. I did not. Yes. I'm not going to watch it. I refuse to watch... Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I refuse to watch any more X-Files until I find out that they actually wrap up the main story arc.

Me, me, me, me, me, me. Okay, Dave, what did you think of the episode? I enjoyed it. Now, I have to say I am not a regular X-Files viewer. I have seen an episode or two over the years, both back in the original days and today, but I have a very, very loose knowledge of everything X-Files and what goes on and what is normal for an X-Files episode or whatever.

So, to me, this was really a standalone episode and I enjoyed it very much. It felt like a Twilight Zone episode to me. Yeah. See, that's the thing about this episode. You don't need to know anything about the X-Files whatsoever to watch this episode and enjoy it because it is everything that we've ever said about how home automation technology can come and ruin your life.

And there's a twist at the end, which I saw coming from the very beginning, but it was still fun to see at the end that it paid off. And I wish Brian would have watched it so we could have a much more interesting debate about it, but Brian is a meh, meh, meh, meh, meh kind of guy, so we're not going to have him chime in on this.

He's just going to put a link to somebody else who pisses on it, but yeah, so this is a- No, look, you told me that this was like a fantastic, wonderful, amazing, one of the best episodes ever made, and Gizmodo says it's actually a horrible piece of crap.

Well, it's Gizmodo. So you're going to go for a 30-cent-an-article blogger over somebody who has watched X-Files for their entire life, knows the backstory of how home automation can come fuck with you, and find on their side instead of mine. Much like I just posted pure facts about Uber and then got shouted down and walked away, I have stated why I'm not watching the X-Files.

It has nothing to do with this episode. It has nothing to do with you. I am walking away. But here's the deal. If you don't vote in the election, you're not allowed to bitch about politics. If you haven't watched this, then you can't bitch about it. So, sadly, Dave and I agree that this was a great episode of the X-Files that everybody should go watch, and it will enhance their life, make their penis bigger, make their bank account grow, and have their hair regrow, because it is that good.

But I did take some notes, a couple things. Well, no, no. Oh, it's a review show again. I was upset about the weaponization of hyperspace in this episode of the X-Files. So, a couple things I noted here.

TV and movie interfaces never behave like real interfaces, and it annoys the crap out of me. The interface in the restaurant bloops and bleeps the ways that no real interface ever does, because they always make noise when... On TV and in movies, computers always make noise when real computers don't, and they don't make noise when real computers do.

That's a truism. And nobody that types in a TV show or movie ever uses the space bar. Oh, that's true. Yeah, that's true. I didn't notice that one. One thing I noticed that I thought was interesting about the experience of actually watching the show, I went on to the Fox website to watch the show, and it allowed me to watch the most recent episode of the X-Files, so I was happy about that.

I didn't have to go off to a foreign land to try to find it. But there were some interesting things about that experience. One, it kept a countdown clock running over the image of the show the entire time, telling me how much time I had in my free sample, so that was a little anxiety-inducing.

That sounds like a trip to the clinic. Would you please give us a free sample so we can... Right, or at the other type of clinic, I'm sorry, our 50 minutes are up. We'll have to leave the check by the front door. But the other thing was, whenever there was a commercial break, it gave me two options.

I could either watch four ads in a row, four 15-second ads in a row, or one interactive ad. So I opted... The first time, I opted for the interactive ad, which showed me a little ad about Big Mac, and then said, find the McDonald's nearest you.

And I was like, no, I know where the McDonald's is nearest to me. I can walk there from here. And this is not a mystery to me. One of the first things I do when I go to any neighborhood is find out where the nearest McDonald's is to me. But I could not get out of that screen without telling it where I was, so it could tell me where the nearest McDonald's was to me.

How very prescient, based on the episode that you're watching. Well, the good thing was, it gave me the opportunity to give feedback with a little smiley face, neutral face, or sad face. And I gave it a sad face. And then for the rest of the episode, I watched the four ads rather than the interactive ad.

But I just thought that was an interesting little choice that it gave me there. I mean, that really is funny, based on the episode that you're watching. That's kind of hilarious. Without giving any spoilers away, it's pretty funny. Yeah, the episode had really nice sound design.

The lighting was oblique, yet emancipated. Yes, I went to film school. It reminded me when there was a part of the episode where they're trying to speak to an automated system, and the system keeps not understanding them.

And it reminded me that I do that exact same thing when I talk to an automated system. I speak like this so that the system can understand what I'm saying better. And I do that when I talk to Siri on my phone or whatever. Well, that was a point we made a couple shows back where we were talking about how these artificial intelligence devices that we have, we're not training them, they're training us.

We're learning to speak so they understand us, not the other way around. I actually heard a podcast this week that kind of brought that into stark reality, where they have a kid who's always talking to their Echo, and the kid's speech pattern is being kind of modified by how it has to get it to play the songs that it wants.

And I was thinking about that as this morning, my Echo was not responding to me to change the volume. It decided to have the volume at 10. And I'm screaming at it, volume 5, volume 5. And I had to walk over to the other side of the room. And I turned the knob.

It went down. And I sat back down. And it went back up to 10. And I'm like, okay, I'm in an X-Files episode now. Yeah. I had one about a week ago where I said I summoned the device on my phone who I'm not going to summon right now.

And I said, yes, I said, play David Bowie's Station to Station. And it said, now playing David Bowie's Radio Station. And I went, no, so close, so close. And I said, stop playing.

I said, play David Bowie's album, Station to Station. And it got it. Yeah, album is key, especially if there's a title track in the middle of the album or anything similar. It's a big pain. I have that problem with R.E.M. all the time. It's annoying. Anyway, okay, so the jury's in.

Brian's vote doesn't count. This episode of the X-Files is one of the greatest episodes for the GOG audience. And you guys need to go watch it right away. It's fun. It is a fun ride. And it's got a sweet ending. I enjoyed it very much. It's very good. Very good. All right. Jakub writes in, hey, guys, love the show.

Not sure if you'll see this message, but I wanted to pass along something amusing. David Bittner mentioned wanting to have his kids have a sound as a middle name. And it reminded me of this old Fry and Laurie sketch. And it's called Your Name, Sir. And did you guys get a chance to watch the sketch? It is very funny. Yes.

Yeah. I don't think I ever saw that before I came up with this idea, but who knows? It looks like an old sketch. So it's, well, and that was, you know, pre-internet days. So chances are I wouldn't have seen it. But, you know, that's what you say, Mr. Nipple. There are no original ideas. No. Funny, funny, though.

We're checking out. So I got hit by the Memcache D attack this week. The reflection attack on my server. What happened? It was bad. It was bad. Because I host on Linode, or Linode, or however you want to pronounce it.

I say Linode. And I got multiple emails from them saying that my bandwidth allocation has been peaked for the last three hours. I'm like, okay, you could have gotten that to me a little bit sooner. But, yeah, I went and I checked it, and I couldn't get into my server, period.

It was locked out. It was pushing so much traffic that I couldn't SSH into it. So I had to go to the control panel and reboot it. Then I could sneak in, and it would be up for about 30 seconds before it happened again. And again and again. Kept going over and over again. So I finally got in long enough where I could just, like, pseudo and do a yum remove Memcache, period.

And once that happened, done. All gone. So you guys talked about this on your show this week, Dave. So can you give us kind of a background on what this Memcache reflection attack is? Because it's kind of serious. It is. This is an amplification attack. And I guess the simplest way to describe how it works is if you have Memcache running on your server, Memcache, which my understanding is a pretty simple system, not heavy.

It's a way for storing. It does exactly what it says it does. It caches things in memory. Yeah, what it kind of is, it's kind of a small database where you have keys. It's like, you know, a key value registry that you can store in RAM. So, and the bite size is, you know, predetermined.

So you can small, like, store small chunks. This was invented way back in the day in 2003 by Brad Fitzpatrick for, wait for it, LiveJournal. Because they were getting hammered so much. And everybody's kind of used it since then as just a way to do small key value pair stores that are going to get hit a lot.

So you can give it a memory buffer and then you can just slam stuff into it. But it's not meant to be hit from the outside is the big problem. Correct. And so my understanding of this is that if you basically do a status check with memcache, you ask it for its status, it responds with a very verbose response, a response in the kilobytes of verboseness.

So what that means is if I want to hit your server with a denial of service, I spoof your IP address, and then I go out to a bunch of memcache, places where I know there are memcache servers, hit them on the port where this status request is sent.

Then the memcache server responds with several kilobytes of status reports. So what that means is if I only have to send a few bytes to get a few thousand bytes back, and that's the amplification part of it. So if you have a botnet running and you're hitting a bunch of memcache servers, you can very quickly overpower someone's connection by sending them all of these status reports.

Now, like Jason said, memcache isn't designed to be hit from the outside, but as these things often happen, people leave it open to the outside. I forget the exact port number. We mentioned it on the CyberWire. It's like 11-something. Yeah, it was 11-something.

It's easy to look up. Don't listen to the CyberWire if you want to figure it out, people. Yeah, when did we talk about it? I think we talked about it on Thursday's show. Yeah, Wednesday or Thursday, we talked about it. So if you're correctly configured, you will not have a problem with this, but it's one of those things that's also easy to overlook correct configuration.

So check it out. Yeah, and that's exactly what I did because I just did a base install and then configured it for my machine, but I didn't realize that it was open to the outside. It's one of those things where you have to, like, go figure out what it is, and there's definitely a port that you can block that it won't be able to reach it.

But if you have, like, a cluster of servers, you want it to be able to be reached from kind of the outside from those other servers because generally you make a memcache cluster. So you need to kind of, like, figure out how to do that. So I guess that's where that kind of comes in.

Memcache is kind of built to be clustered, so that is going to always be turned on. And most people now that are using memcache are using it as a booster for WordPress because you can have a memcache plugin that will boost the performance of your WordPress website.

And that's where I think a lot of these people are getting hammered because they do the basic install. They do what WordPress tells them to do, but they don't do that lockdown port for not being part of a cluster. And I think it's really easy to test, to go sniff around and see if someone has this running because you just hit that port with the request.

And if you get this verbose response back, bingo, now you've got, you know, another member of your botnet. Yeah. So, of course, people immediately jumped on this and started having fun with it and hammered GitHub with a record 1.35 terabits per second denial of service attack.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. But they weathered it, which is the amazing part. They did. They did. I'm trying to think. I'm looking here what the previous record was. I think it was Mirai was the, when Mirai brought down Dine, that was the largest one.

I don't recall off the top of my head. Yeah. I thought it was like around 800 megabits per second. I think you're right. Definitely in the ballpark there. It wasn't over a terabit. I know that. No, this is the first terabit denial of service attack I've ever seen. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So, I guess the good part is that the defenses against this seem to be working and that people are preparing for this, this inevitability.

So, the countermeasures are getting more sophisticated as well. But one to keep an eye out for. No, it was, that's amazing. The GitHub actually weathered that. Kudos to them and their security team. Wow. Yep. So, I found an article on The Verge.

Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology. And, wow. I mean, Palantir is front of mind right now for me because I just read that Peter Thiel book about the, you know, the other case.

And he's the founder of Palantir and, oh my God, the fact that nobody knew about this because they just kind of skirted around all of the, you know, the general ways that they could get into a municipality as kind of like an altruistic type of foundation to get it done.

So, they did it for free in New Orleans so they could sell millions of dollars of it to other cities. It's almost a social engineering story, isn't it? Kind of, yeah. Of how they got into the city, you know, circumvented the social and administrative barriers of the city to have a test bed to run this on.

Yeah. Yeah. Somebody called Chris Hadnagy. I think the thing that really gets me about this is what they're generally doing is they're profiling past behavior to predict future behavior, right? Right. So, in looking up, that's a term that I use on one of my other shows a lot because it turns out to be true some of the time.

So, I went back and I researched the foundation of that phrase and I found a Psychology Today article that basically says, no, that's actually not true. It's very true for a very narrow scope of human behavior.

But when you factor in time and circumstance, things change. So, the foundation of Palantir's technology, I think, is basically flawed, which is the really scary part of why this, you know, got my antenna up and why I put it in the show.

Because they're saying that anything that somebody does in the past, they are bound to repeat in the future. Time is a flat circle. It's going to happen again, you know. And that's what really kind of freaked me out about this is that, okay, we've got this company out there using this predictive policing technique to profile criminals that are in their city.

But it is possibly fundamentally flawed at a basic level. What do you guys think about that? Well, the first thing it made me, I agree that it's creepy and I think the way they went at it is problematic.

But I – the other side of that is I think about how frustrating it is for law enforcement when it comes to things like domestic violence, when you have someone who is threatening someone and the police come back and say, well, we can't arrest him until he actually commits a crime.

You know, we can't – and we understand, you know, why – Yeah, we can't come back until the wife is dead. Yeah, we can't protect you until he's beaten the crap out of you. You know, that – obviously, I'm exaggerating, but that sort of thing. So – No, you're not. That's actually something that cops have said.

It's a problem with domestic violence is that they can't come back until you're either dead or he's beaten the shit out of you. It is a massive problem and a lot of police talk about that. It's not – you're not – it's not hyperbole for you to say that. So if we had a system where we're able to track via social media versus – if, for example, I don't know, if someone posts on social media, you know, I've had enough of my spouse and I'm going to – I'm going to kill them or I'm going to beat the crap out of them or whatever.

I guess – I mean how do we handle suicide announcements, those sorts of things? If someone declares something, to what degree can we go detain them or just even go have a serious conversation with them based on – I guess it's different if you declare something versus you – a series of behaviors, right?

A series of behaviors are different than a declaration. Yeah. Right, yeah. A declaration that I'm going to hurt this person or kill myself, that's something actionable. They're using relationships to do the prediction. So if I talk to this person in the past, this person has a bad history. I talk to this person in the past, this person has a bad history.

Ergo, I must have a bad history. It's more about relationship mapping than it is with intent mapping, I believe. But it will show me a video of how to fold fitted sheets. Of course it will. Of course it will.

Anyway, yeah, we can dig into this later, but I just wanted to bring this up because it is a really good article and really – for The Verge, surprisingly, there are only about seven typos. It's chilling. A long read, but certainly a lot to think about with that one. We have some news from the Olympics.

Apparently it got hacked. I guess we're so used to these things now that I actually – this didn't even cross my radar when it occurred. So I didn't even know that the Olympics got hacked, but shockingly, it seems to be Russia. Imagine that. Oh, big surprise. Wonder why. Why would Russia be upset at the Olympics this year?

Can't imagine why. I can't imagine why. They attempted to make it look like North Korea was responsible through very clumsy means that apparently nobody had problems seeing through. Yeah, it's interesting. What they did was they affected a lot of the systems for the opening ceremonies and affected things like people being able to have their tickets scanned.

And that sort of thing. And the interesting thing on the cybersecurity side is how reticent people have been to say that it's Russia while saying that it's Russia. Well, you can't officially say it's Russia.

Right. It's a nudge wink, right? It is. It's the nudge wink theory. It is. So is this a false, false flag? Well, that's the thing. You know, attribution is difficult and it's easy to do false flags. And, you know, is it a double agent?

You know, it's that sort of thing. But is it North Korea pretending to be Russia, pretending to be North Korea? Right. And is it so sloppy that Russia knew that there was no way they were going to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and they're just so bold and brazen that they did the misdirection just kind of as a, yeah, you know, we can do this.

But, yeah, it's us, you know, like this is OK. This is what boggles my mind. Yeah. You've got Russian hackers, right? Right. Right. They're in Russia. So we trace the IPs back to Russia. Nothing gets by you, Jason. Here's let me finish.

All right. Go on. Let me explain. Let me explain. You have Russian hackers in Russia who are hacking somebody else. Right. Right. Right. Russia has airplanes and laptops. Why would you not send your elite hacker team to say, I don't know, Belize for the weekend to hack and then come back home after they're done?

Well, because what we've learned, what we seem to be learning every time with these Russian hackers is it's not really a state sponsored organization. It just kind of is. And they're kind of they're maintaining a causal distance a lot of the time. And they're basically just like saying to groups of people or anybody out there that happens to know how to do this.

Boy, we'd love it if somebody went and did this. Yeah. That seems to be the basic modus operandi from from these Russian groups and that they're not really they're not sitting around in the government building. Absolutely right. And yeah, the way it's set around here is it's a distinction without a difference between the Russian mafia and the Russian government.

Everybody drink. Yeah. Yep. Yep. No, distinction without a difference is part of the Grumpy Old Geeks drinking game. We talked about this on the. Oh, is that right? Battle Royale clan. Every time Dave says distinction without a difference, everybody has to drink. Oh, is that right?

Yep. Oh, nice. I guess I've had a heads up about that. Oh, well. Well, you do now. Me too. We're not in the clan. So we'll see. That's being in the clan has its advantages. GOG dot show. Don't tweet me. There's I was going to say there's an excerpt that that's going to get pulled from the show.

Being in the clan has its advantages. Oh, my. Wow. That's a good one. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Didn't didn't was it Fancy Bear or Cozy Bear have have a location that was hacked by the the Scandinavians that they they had a location.

So there is a place where the the bears go in Russia to hack. Isn't that didn't we just cover that a couple episodes ago? I still think it's a more of a loose thing there. It's not it's not as as structured as would require for for them to be thrown on planes, taken to Belize.

It's not hard to make it look like you're coming from somewhere else on the Internet. Also, so apparently it is. That's true. Because they figured it out. But yeah, anyway. Anyway, I want to talk really quickly about my own personal experience this week with security as as the term security for security reasons will come up again later in the show.

I just think it's funny that this is something that's bandied about. And I think it's important as a public service announcement to mention this sort of thing. Companies are playing really fast and loose with for security reasons. I want to get a magazine subscription for my for my dad.

My dad likes soccer. There are no good U.S. soccer magazines. It's very difficult. Back in the day when there used to be newsstands, I used to be able to find this magazine, buy it and take it down to my dad. The world has moved on. We don't have newsstands anymore. Luckily, I was able to order this magazine online.

And for five years, I have been basically redoing it with my credit card online. They ship it over from the U.K. to my dad. And my dad is happy. For some reason, they decided that they couldn't process my credit card this time. Fine. Okay. I have to call to the U.K. I have to say, very, very nice.

This was not outsourced. And they were very pleasant. They were very British about their customer service. Oh, sir, what is your social security number, please? Well, no. They didn't ask for that, surprisingly. But they took my credit card. They took address. They took my credit card. They took the expiration date.

They took all of that. And then he asked for my date of birth for security reasons. And I said, why? And then I just got back, well, we need that for security. I've been getting this magazine. You've charged me every five years for this magazine without you having it.

And I don't think it was for any security reason. Because as soon as I did a little, the tiniest bit of pushback on this, it was just dropped. Yeah. So we all know the date of birth was for their demographic. Marketing. Right. Marketing reasons. But it was not for security reasons. So I want everybody out there that's listening, push back on these people that do that.

It is not for security reasons. People are just throwing that out there to get your information now. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. They need address. Or actually, they don't even need the address. They need the postal zip, the CVV in the card number, and the name on the card. That's it.

That's all they ever need. Expiration. Oh, an expiration. That's right. Yeah. Yep. So, yeah. So don't buy this for security reasons crap that people throw around. Okay. Soapbox off. The truth is out there. Yes.

And it involves pizzas. Brick a brick. I saw this little piece of news, and I thought it was super interesting. How scientists are using plant-based DNA barcodes to bust counterfeiters. This is pretty cool. This is security kicked up a notch.

They started with basically, like, you know how the little die bags explode in cash when you steal it? And then they started putting these little, they would take DNA from plants, and they would modify it a little bit to make it, you know, so you can't, it's very difficult to replicate, and they're all individual.

And they would put it on the cash, and then they'd be able to track where this cash went and all this sort of stuff. And it's super cool. It's really interesting. And all these guitar manufacturers are now putting these little DNA tags to stop counterfeiters for their very expensive guitars. So every guitar, every Martin guitar is marked with a unique invisible DNA barcode, and that stops the counterfeiting, because you just check the barcode, and it's probably put on one of those Excel spreadsheets that are spread around everywhere really quickly.

So you can then track and make sure that the guitar that you're purchasing is actually really a Martin guitar. Very cool. That is cool. Very cool stuff. Yeah. And our sister show, Geeks and Beats, who don't know that they're our sister show, had a really good rundown of Twitter satire accounts based on Star Trek in this last episode.

And a lot of them are pretty funny, and I've got to say, Riker Googles is for the win. So there's a link in our show notes. You can go check them out. Picard Tips, Worf Email, Quark Tips, all very, very clever. It's funny. I actually followed all those accounts long before then. Okay, cool.

Yeah, and it's Riker Googling, not Riker Googles, by the way, in case you want to do that while you're listening to the show. Over at Boing Boing, I found a video that explains the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and it's from our friend 3Blue1Brown, back in the day who did the machine learning videos that we talked about a couple episodes ago.

And it's pretty good. I mean, it's 20 minutes long. You don't need to watch the whole thing. You said, Brian, it got a little bit dry, because I only made it through a couple minutes. I watched the whole thing, so you don't have to. The first two minutes, if you don't get it from that, you're not going to get it from the next 18, because the next 18 requires a math degree.

Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I watched the first two minutes, so I think I got what I needed to get. Cool. Now, this is my favorite prank of all time. This really is. Someone put a statue of Jason Voorhees. That's Jason from Friday the 13th movies in a Minnesota lake for scuba divers to stumble across.

That's awesome. Oh, my God. Is that not the craziest thing you've seen? It's like... That is amazing. That is a prank among pranks. I want to know who did it so I can buy them many beers, because it's 120 feet down. It's not like right at the surface.

They got this mannequin, dressed him up as Jason Voorhees, chained him to the bottom of this lake 120 feet down, just so other divers could find it. That is dedication. That is fantastic. Yes, it is. Moron of the week!

My moron of the week, Brian, is Barbra Streisand. Okay. I know this comes as a shock, because I know you didn't think I was a Barbra Streisand fanboy. I'm not. But Barbra Streisand cloned her beloved dog into two of them, not just one.

This is what happens when you have more money than you could ever possibly need. Yes, yes. She took her favorite dog and made two more of them. One for backup purposes. Hey, man, one is none and two is one. That's what they say. If you only have one or something, you got nothing.

That's right. Learn from the seals, people. So she says they do have different personalities, and she's waiting for them to get older so she can see if they have the same brown eyes and seriousness of her original dog. Now, NPR reported that Somme Biotech Research Foundation was charging around $100,000 to clone a dog in 2015.

Now, another company, Viagen, has cut that price in half. Now, they charge $50,000 to clone a dog and only $25,000 to clone a cat, because let's be honest, nobody likes cats. And they can just do genetic preservation for $1,600. So they have to do a biopsy on your pet to remove a pound of flesh and throw it in a freezer.

$100,000 to clone her favorite dog. While there are dogs everywhere in rescues that could be picked up for next to nothing. And she could have donated that $100,000 to animal preservation in many other ways instead of cloning her fucking dog. Barbara Streisand, you have more money than cents, so you are the moron of the week.

We've got a bunch of new Patreon subscribers this week. Eric H., Richard L., John J., Michael E., and also over on PayPal, Dan O. Book him, Dan O. Yes, thank you so much. Thank you, Dan O. We've got a lot of people riding over in on GOG.show, so we obviously can't get all of them anymore, so we'll just do a couple.

Jason, I am a fan of Mac Power Users podcast. Heard about this and thought of you. It's a Power Users Chicago meetup. But now that you're switching to PC... I used to listen to that show all the time and basically knew everything that they would talk about every week, so I found out that I'm a Power User.

So I will not be doing the meetup because it's downtown also, and I don't go downtown. Bill writes in, When using Firefox, the plug-in container will be using 800 plus K of memory, and even with just one window open, there will be four Firefox EXE running according to the task manager.

In your opinion, why is this happening? Because you're using Firefox. Yeah, because they suck. That's basically it. It's bloatware now, and it's natural progression of a lot of software, so switch over to Opera. It's much better. Yeah, they've updated their version recently to that new engine, but we tried it.

Opera's better. So go back to Opera. Yeah. Yep. And Scott writes in with basically a thought experiment. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but he's basically saying, since we're recording and uploading so much stuff, pictures on Instagram and videos on YouTube and all this, is this sustainable?

Our storage capacities are growing by leaps and bounds, but will it be enough for current and future web users who insist on showing the world their every restaurant meal? Yeah, it will, sadly. We're never going to get away from Kardashians. Yeah. Now, like you said, memory technology is increasing in leaps and bounds, so yeah.

We're not running out of hard drives anytime soon, and old stuff gets archived and put in cold storage and just goes away, but it's always there somewhere. You're not going to run out of space anytime in the near future, or the far future, for that matter. Nope. No, you're not.

Monkey13 says, in case you have not seen this yet, and a link to how to make wine in an Instapot, Jason, you may not need those delivery services anymore. Oh my God, yes. Monkey13 is a friend of the show, John Chevron, and oh my God, I'm in. Okay, next week, I will tell you how this goes. You don't have an Instant Pot yet, do you?

I do not. Okay. So maybe we'll take some of that fine GOG filthy lucre that we have coming in and send you an Instant Pot so you can try it too. Okay. And Brian writes in, hey, just wanted to follow up on the Twitter comment I made under the handle, Hack You! Regarding Canary Tokens, Risky Biz Podcast belongs to Patrick Gray.

So it's not his podcast, but he highly recommends it. Funny to hear my handle pronounced that way. I decided on it years ago when I started doing online challenges as I thought it was a clever way to say hack. But only years later, one of my kids says, Hack You! And I also saw some Middle Eastern people actually have that name as a first or second name.

So he stuck with it. And this is interesting. Feds can now probably unlock every iPhone model in existence. This is a Forbes article. And he's wondering if it has anything to do with the source code for the secure enclave that recently got leaked. I bet it does. Yeah, probably.

And I kept this last one in because this is the state of the people that are being employed at record labels to run their IT departments these days. Anonymous, hey guys, super random, but I'm actually trying to get in touch with Brian. I work at Warner Brothers Records and work on the Goo Goo Dolls. Brian is listed as the current owner of the band's YouTube channel, and we're trying to get control back of it for security purposes.

Security purposes! It would be awesome. I know. It would be awesome if you could get in touch so we can get it sorted! Exclamation point. My email, blah, blah, blah. Thank you. I'm not hard to find. You could ask the lead singer of the band to give me a call. Uh-huh. Now, you could Google me and get my email address.

That's pretty out there. Well, Brian, real quick, I used to work at Warner Brothers Records, as you know. Yes, I do. Yeah, I was the head of technology for Warner Brothers Records for 30 days! The only tech job I was ever fired from. Now, you were legendary inside of Warner Brothers Records as the single most difficult person to deal with that they've ever had, so.

I know. Isn't that great? It is great. Because, you know why, Jason? Because I didn't want to do the stupid crap they recommended, and I didn't want to do things that didn't make sense. Yep, silly me. I was there for the American Idiot launch for Green Day, and I'm like, oh, I know Brian and Wendy from Slender Fungus.

They handle Green Day. And they're like, there was a collective sigh in the room going, them. Which is probably why I got fired, just because of your sorry ass. No, actually, it was because I never showed up for work.

But 30 days in, they never got me my own computer, and I still had to bring one from home. I could get a free stereo. They could give me the best stereo in the world, but they would not give me a computer of my own. Head of technology from Warner Brothers Records could not get a computer. Anyway, moving on.

And then they wondered why I wouldn't listen to them. Yep. Anyways, moving on. Over at Twitter, Radio Teacher says, wow, Ericsson truly uses AI, and sent us a link to Ericsson is building AI networks for our 5G future. And wait for it, in the sub-headline, they say, intelligence, algorithms, and machine learning.

There you go. So, sorry, Radio Teacher. No. 8502 Chip writes in, great companion podcast to Icarus documentary. And it's a link to an Overcast page, and it says, Lance Armstrong is surprisingly a good interviewer.

Yeah, I guess so. I'll check it out, maybe. I don't know. I don't like the Lance Armstrong that much. I listened to his podcast a little bit, but, yeah, he kind of tainted the waters. Well, he did, but at least he's trying to do some good with whatever clout he has.

That's true. You can't complain about the Armstrong Foundation. Yeah, look, everybody gets a chance at redemption. So, you know what? I'll give it a shot. I'll install it this weekend. Yeah, maybe I'll even redeem my reputation over at Warner Brothers Records and reach out to that guy. Fuck them. They fired me.

You're not allowed to talk to them ever again. Well, look, to be honest, I gave them a full list of absolutely everything when I stopped working with the Goo Goo Dolls, which included the fact that I had these properties, XYZ, XYZ. If you want them, reach out to me, get in touch with me. Let's do transition. And it's not my fault they never got around to it.

This guy's probably worked there for three days. I know. Yeah. They put him in charge of getting attached with me. That's fantastic. They've got a folder called the B-Files. It's like anything you can get back from Brian. He's the Fox Mulder of Warner Brothers Records now. There's a poster of me.

I want to get that. I want to get YouTube. Okay. Moving on. All right. Okay. Over at iTunes, we have some five-star ratings. Thank you all so much. Crash Down says, Bittner led me here. Hey, guys. Great podcast. I was originally led here by Dave. And now you're part of my weekly listening routine.

Keep up the great work. Thank you. We shall. Hodme writes in, snarky and informative, useful information about all the awful things done in the tech world, with just enough news about the good things to keep you from wanting to move to a shack in the woods. As someone who works for a big faceless tech company, I find their take on the industry to be insightful and hilarious.

And Muneb777 says, I am a nerd myself. I really love listening to you because of two reasons. First of all, I am a nerd myself, a computer science graduate, and a soon-to-be information technology master class student. I listen to you guys because I want to improve my English. Plus, you guys speak. You're going to be cussing a lot.

Plus, you guys speak my mind. Technology is going towards something crazy. My father used to tell me that there will be flying cars everywhere when you grow up. All I can see is technology used for sex bots and vibrators. Yes. Love you. Love you guys. I am Muneb from Pakistan. And Muneb, I am assuming you must be using a VPN, preferably the one that we push, because you managed to be from Pakistan and get your rating in the US iTunes store.

So good on you. He's a computer science graduate, of course. Yes. I wish I could meet you in Pakistan someday, but I'm barred from ever entering the country. I will be arrested on sight. As I am to Warner Brothers, Jason is to Pakistan. That's true. I bet my Warner Brothers ID still works.

You can go in and I can send it to you. You can just go in. It's all right. Anyway, next up comes from Flash Jervis, a good friend of the show. Five stars come for the podcast day for the show notes. Four stars for this excellent podcast about the internet and things and sometimes the internet of things.

Awarding an additional star for the show notes. Yes. I'm seriously considering making it my homepage as I spend much time following the links as I do listen to the podcast itself. Cheers. Thank you, Flash Jervis. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs. It's almost time for Dodgers baseball. I do wish people would shut up about baseball being back. It's spring training.

These games don't count. And I don't care if they're on TV. Baseball is not back yet. Opening day is the end of the month, but I'm excited. Okay, good for you. I think I might actually take up the mantle of the White Sox this year. Oh, look at you. The Cubs have won. They got their thing. I don't like the Cubs.

I don't like that blue. And I think the bear is stupid. Fair enough. I think I might go rogue and be a White Sox fan. Nice. And probably get my windows broken in my neighborhood. But why the hell not? Maybe. A friend of the show MXV goes to White Sox games all the time.

And he says the hot dogs are superior there. So I think that's enough for me to join Team White Sox. Nice. So my closing shout out is to Dr. Seuss. He was born this day. We're recording on Friday. He was born this day in 1904 as Theodore Geisel.

Nice. And my dad just started again this week at the Dr. Seuss Gallery in Water Tower Place in Chicago. So if you're in town and want to go buy a Dr. Seuss piece of art, go ask for Gene and tell him Grumpy Old Geek sent you. Because I just re-hung my Dr. Seuss on the wall.

I have the booby trap by Dr. Seuss. Link will be in the show notes so you can take a look at it. It is one of my favorite pieces of art because Dr. Seuss did a lot of work with the army back in World War II with a lot of people like Frank Capra and Mel Blanc to do a lot of propaganda for the troops.

You know, good propaganda, the good kind. The good kind. And this drawing came directly out of that. It is one of my favorite pieces of Dr. Seuss art. You will not see it in a children's book because there are exposed breasticles. Yes. So there it is. So happy birthday, Dr. Seuss.

Very cool. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm still Jason DeFillippo, sadly. 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 249. 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. Nothing to add? I fully support everything you just said. Hey, you cut the one where he said Brian is my spirit animal.

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