253: Too Little, Too Late

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. That's Eero.com. And at checkout, select overnight shipping, then enter promo code GOG to make it free. 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. Welcome back. Thank you, man. I want to thank gunslinger Bittner for stepping in. Who knew he had a gun? It was much appreciated. And thanks to everyone that has reached out and said something to me about my dad as well. I really appreciate it. He has turned a corner.

But I got to say, I've got some emotional whiplash going on because you go from a week where it looks like you are going to lose your dad to basically a miracle diagnosis and treatment. And then, you know, the elation that comes with that. And then the reality, which is he still had a major surgery. There's recovery. He's in pain. He's out of it still a bit.

And, you know, it's just all it's going to be a long haul. But I'm happy to say my dad's going to be around for a while still. It's fantastic news. Fantastic news. Yes, it is. So. So enough with that. Let's get on to the stuff that pisses us off. OK, we've talked about bird a lot and we've talked about the bird charging system, how they've outsourced basically collection and charging of the scooters.

So you can get five bucks a night per scooter to to just take it into your home and charge it in overnight and take it back out. And we've discussed that before and discussed how I and friend of the show Mike sat around and tried to figure out how how many birds you'd have to charge every night if you wanted to basically supplement or pay off pay your rent in this area.

And I think we figured it out, too. It was like you'd have to get 20 of these per night every single night all month to pay your rent, which is a little crazy. But one thing I didn't really understand about the process and I put a link in the show notes to to an ad for people for bird charging.

And I know you had some funny points about that. So why don't you hit that first and then I'll discuss the other aspect of this. OK, because, yeah, the one thing your calculation doesn't take into account is the electricity cost for charging all the birds. Yeah, we just kind of avoided that as well as the time involved and, you know, the fact that you're only only basically making your your your shelter, not your clothing or your sustenance.

Right, right. Because, yeah, in the article that you sent that says that there's no limit to how much you can make. Well, time and outlets and transportation are actual limitations on how much you can make. So there is a limit. Yes, there is. Just wanted to say that there's a limit. We're used to people lying now at this point, aren't we, Jason?

Yes, we are. So the the other aspect of the charging is the what I'm calling the bird wrangling aspect of it. It isn't that, you know, these things that just don't magically. Well, I guess sometimes they do appear outside of the front your front door and you just take them in. You go get them.

Now, one thing I learned about this because a friend of a friend is doing this and he told me about the discussion he had with somebody who is doing this is the bird puts bounties on these scooters based on distance and how long the scooter has been out of the system.

So we're basically weaponizing a group of people into de facto bounty hunters that are going out and chasing all these birds to get them to bring them home to get the five bucks plus, you know, whatever the bounty is, which I'm sure is not that much money.

There's no way it could be. And he was telling me about a case where there was a bird that had been out of the system for like almost two to two days or something like that. And the bounty was starting to get relatively high. Now, it was in a locked and gated community. So people were cruising by.

A lot of people, I guess, were coming by and trying to get in to the locked community to get the bird. And security is saying, you can't. That's trespassing. You cannot come in here. So how long is it going to be? We're basically already incentivizing people to break laws in that sense.

And how long is it going to be before two people are chasing after a bounty? They both get up there at the same time and they get in a goddamn fistfight over this. Well, I got one. I got you one better. The person that's inside the gated community could be a bird wrangler and has it locked up to make the bounty go up so then they can turn it in later.

How long till that's going to become a thing? Well, yeah. Why wouldn't I just do that? Why wouldn't I just put it in? Well, I guess you wouldn't put it in your place because they could see. But and just let it go up. And then, oh, I found it. I mean, this is we are rocketing towards Thunderdome here. That's all I'm saying. This is ridiculous.

Well, we're rocketing at five to 12 miles an hour without a helmet. But yes. And the bike path and then just dumping it in the middle of so I can't get past with my scooter. Oh, yeah. I'm wondering when the battery runs out, if the GPS runs out, because it's simply a case of ride the bird till the battery runs out.

Throw it in your truck. Put it somewhere safe. Stash it for, you know, a week and then bring it back out and collect the bounty on it. Jason, you might have figured out the way that there is no limit anymore into how much you can make. Could be. You've broken the code. I have. Oh, man.

Okay. We know our business model when I get to town. I got a truck. We're going. Now, I threw this link in the show notes because it just reminded me of everything that you're talking about. The bike share oversupply in China, it is these photos, these amazing photos of these massive piles of abandoned bicycles from these bike sharing services that have since gone out of business.

Right. And it's amazing. Why doesn't everybody in China have a free bike now? They should. They're everywhere. Yeah, they should. And I hope, you know, if this happens here, that's what happens. They just, you know, the city will basically buy out all the bikes and or you don't even have to buy them out because the companies have gone out of business.

Redistribute them to the poor. There you go. You can rob and bird it. I like that. That's good. A little bit more follow up. This link came across and I thought of you. It's about genetic testing and false positives and other things of that. Now, it is a small study.

It was only 49 people. But there's a reason for that because these are people that got basically results that were very, very bad. So they went to a doctor to get real testing about it. And 40% false positive rate. Wow.

Now, that's high. Even in a small study, which is just 49 people, 40% false positive rate is shockingly high. Well, you get what you pay for. I mean, if you want a real DNA test, it's going to cost you like a grand. Yeah. It's not going to cost you like 150 bucks. Yes, the article gets into that, that these ones that you're just doing in mail order are super cheap.

And when they go to get real testing done, it is hundreds of dollars. Hundreds. And they're real. Yes, they are. And I have a new update from 23andMe because, you know, the algorithms are always changing. And so apparently is my makeup. I am now 28.4% Italian.

Oh, look at you. I've moved up in the world. So while I was reading that article, because it was on Lifehacker, and I saw a video that said, the best way to fold your socks. And it was like an autoplay. So it was playing while I was trying to read the article, which is always annoying.

And it's this convoluted way of folding your socks. And I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You grab them, you make a ball, and you throw them in the drawer. It takes two seconds. I went on a quest to find a video to offset that one, to show you the right way to do it. So the next one I found is a video on YouTube called The Right Way to Fold Socks.

Now, Lifehacker, because they can't come up with anything original, actually ripped off their sock folding video from this original that had 7 million views. Whoa. 7 million views on how to fold socks. Who knew this was such an issue? I think we need to start an app. I kept going, and I found the five amazingly compact ways to fold clothes for packing, also wrong ways to fold socks.

These things take like, you know, 30 seconds to fold a pair of socks. I'm like, ain't nobody got time for that? Now, I found the final video, which I don't know. It's just my luck. It is the best way to fold socks fast. It's on YouTube, and it comes from Nudeopedia.

That's right, Nudeopedia. But it's on YouTube, so it's not nude. Nice. I went to the main website. Yes, to get anything nudey, you have to pay for it. But all I wanted to do was have a video of somebody folding socks the right way, and I found it, so I would like the 30 minutes of my life back, but it was at least an interesting rabbit hole to go down.

That's awesome. I had these fucking millennials trying to figure out how to fold socks, right? You make them into a ball like we've always done, like the caveman did before us. That's right. That is the best way to do socks, and it's also the best way for when you're packing, because you shove them in your shoes. Yep, exactly. I don't need a little block of socks that look like a pocket square.

So I talked about Devumi before, the people that I bought my Twitter followers for for the experiment that have all gone away, and I'd been writing them saying, I would like my money back, please. Pretty please. So I finally wrote them again and saying, guys, this is ridiculous, and I got a refund. I got a quote-unquote pro-rated refund, though.

Right. They decided to keep a few bucks, so I got $79.12 back, which was more than I thought I was going to get. Well, I think they realized that if they don't give people money back, they're going to get their asses sued. Definitely. And it's interesting, because I was reminded of this, because I got spam from them about buying free plays on SoundCloud.

Right. Which is why nobody should ever host their podcast on SoundCloud, because you'll never get advertising dollars, because it's so easy to game SoundCloud. Anyway, I went to the site, and they still are advertising their Twitter services, and you have to dig deep to find a status page, which then tells you all Twitter services have been suspended.

Right. Yes. And this was from a couple months ago. So, of course, they don't want to pay people to get their money back, but yeah, everything that they've ever done has been undone by Twitter. Finally. Good. Finally. That's good. It only took a front-page article on the New York Times to get some action from Jack and his crew.

Nice. And speaking of Twitter, at some point in the last week, this crossed my eyeballs, and I just thought it was so funny I had to mention it. Jurassic Park, 1993, a documentary about a tech startup company which failed to apply ethical ground rules in order to maximize investor profits. That's pretty damn funny.

That's exactly it. That's it. Yeah. And speaking of ethics, I am shocked that you did not manage to finish the ethics course. Actually, no, I'm not. Well, yeah. I mean, I'm in the middle of a bunch of shit right now. I really don't have time to spend a couple hours going through it. And that week was really bad.

So I missed it. And I'm just like, I missed my homework deadline. I got halfway through it and then realized that, oh my God, there's another part to it. And I just, I couldn't do it before midnight and I just can't. Nah, I got you. If I would have been in the middle of taking it in the last two weeks, I would have dumped it too. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, that's when everything hit with the house and moving.

And I'm just like, you know what? I'm going to miss that 50 bucks, but I'm going to miss those hours less than I need those hours back because it's, there's a lot going on. And this morning I saw that Starbucks in California now must have cancer warnings. And I forgot what a batshit crazy state I'm moving back to.

It's just ridiculous. You know, it's, it's amazing because on the one hand we, we have this sort of thing, which is absolutely ridiculous and on, on that side, but then we also have bird and Uber and all these Silicon Valley companies all in California doing whatever the hell they want.

But Starbucks can't give you a cup of coffee because there may be some chemicals in that cup that causes cancer. Yeah. Give me a fucking break. And now it also dawned on me that I'm going to have to bring my own stash of grocery bags back because 10 cents a bag, you're fine.

Or just get a, it's really, I have a bag that's reusable. It's perfect. I keep it in the car. No problem. I've got a stash of Trader Joe's bags that I had from when I lived there before that I'm going to have to dig up and keep in the truck again, but it never matters because you never remember to bring them in only a checkout.

Do you remember that? Oh, I've got 10 bags in the car. Guess I'm going to have 11. Well, it starts to become muscle memory. Jason, you'll find out. I know. I did it for two years and I still couldn't remember. But anyway, last quick follow-up on DoorDash. Since I've had like no time to go out and buy groceries and half my kitchen is in boxes right now, I tried DoorDash again because I got a coupon.

I'm like, ah, why not? I'm hungry. I've got no food. It's nine o'clock at night and I'm not about to throw the dogs in the truck just so I can go buy some food. So I tried it and it worked perfectly and I've used it three times now and it's worked perfectly every time. Now, the DoorDash in California was apocryphal, but here it's fantastic and it's better than Uber Eats because the people who drive for DoorDash apparently know how to read and they have not messed up once with the instructions.

Well, that's good. It's great. Yeah. And they text you right before they bring the food to the door saying, I'm almost here. You know, they're great and they're really nice too. They're like, enjoy your meal and chatty and like, thank you. Go away. Perfect. Leave. And that's what they do. You keep those good memories of that because it won't happen here.

No, it won't. It won't. I've got, I've got a, they gave me 30 days of free deliveries. So I'm probably going to end up using, using a few more days of that before I go, but it is a little, a little pricey, but it's in a pinch. It's really helped out in the news.

I'd like to start this week off of in the news with an article I found in the New York Times called, can social media be saved? No, we, we'd always go back to better just loss and say no on that. And, you know, I'm of the mind that I think we should go back to smaller, you know, more compact networks instead of everybody's on the same damn network because that was fun back in the old days.

Now these behemoths are screwing everything up. Yeah. But I just want to point out in this article, one of their suggestions is making social graphs temporary rather than preserving them forever by default. It would undoubtedly be bad for most social network business models, but it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene.

Now I want to go back to 10 years ago, about a month after Twitter came into existence. And I asked for that feature right away from Ev. I'm like, Ev, give me an option to turn this stuff off. So it's not out of context down the line.

He's like, no, nobody would ever want that. That's stupid. And now I have to use a third party service that everybody's asking to use. So wrong Ev, but I'm glad that, you know, 10 years on the New York Times can come around to my side of thinking, which is this stuff shouldn't be online forever. And you lose the context and the zeitgeist around your posts.

So I say burn it all down once a month. I'm totally on board with that these days. I really am. And yeah, it doesn't make sense for their business models. That's the problem because then they can't collect all the data they want to collect about you. Well, they can collect it and just not tell you that it hasn't been deleted. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're at a weird kind of watershed moment right now where we're kind of waiting to see now that the public's eyes have kind of been opened up to what we've known all along about data collection and what they do with the data.

Are things going to change? Snapchat doesn't seem to think so. Because in the very week that Facebook is in a lot of trouble for what they've done with their APIs and the data, they're building the exact same thing.

Well, you got to compete. I know it is the business model. So also remember that Snap has decided to separate the timelines, which Facebook said no to. So it's like Snapchat is about five years behind Facebook in everything that they're trying to do.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there's hope for them at all. So Mashable posted some screenshots and published them on Tuesday, and it looks exactly the same as what Facebook has been doing. And as Recode points out, you can't make these things up. Now, I agree with you. I don't know if Snap is going to be around in a while, because I don't have any articles about this, but I live in Snap Central, and I have heard snippets of conversation out

in the street, but they're continuing to fire people, so they're in some serious trouble right now. Yeah, not going to shed a tear on Snap going away. Now, you can say what you will about Gizmodo, and we have said quite a lot, but I got to say they are worth following on Twitter right now, because whoever they've got riding their slugs is just knocking it out of the park.

Here's a couple of juicy ones that I really enjoyed over the last few days. Facebook says it will put all of your privacy settings in one place, and it was going to do that anyway, so there. U.S. agency debate how the Internet of Things could kill you. All right. I like that one, too. And Facebook, yeah, maybe now isn't the best time to launch our new speaker system designed to spy on you.

So whoever's writing those, a round of applause, you're doing a great job. Now, last week, the news came out, I guess, midway between your guys' show, because I heard you break in to talk about it, that actually, Facebook was collecting calls and text message data if you had an Android, and Time Magazine discusses that, and we have a link in the show notes if you are unfortunate enough to have an Android, about how to turn it off.

Yes, and there's a newsroom article over on Facebook called Fact Check, Your Call in SMS History, and they're basically saying, yeah, you signed up for this, you moron. It's all, it's there in the EULA. The chutzpah, the chutzpah that Facebook has, though, to call it Fact Check.

Fuck you. Post-facto check is more like it. They're not doing well right now with this crisis. There's another story that came out, and I, when I, my jaw hit the floor on this one. I love this one.

Facebook is defending itself again after an internal memo suggested growth was more important than user safety. This is a direct quote from the internal memo. Maybe somebody dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. We still connected, people. What?

The actual F, people. Yeah. No, this guy, this guy was, he's still there. They keep moving him around. Of course he is. But we'll see if he sticks around. But the long and the short of it, what was this guy's name again? Andrew Bosworth. The Boz.

Oh. The Boz. Well, the original article came out on BuzzFeed. There'll be a link to that in the show notes. And the Zuck has chimed in. He actually, it didn't take him a week. He didn't have to take his empathy classes so he could appear somewhat human to the masses.

Which is what I still think that five days was. Like, they threw him in an empathy chamber and fed him empathy drugs so he could kind of seem like he wasn't a robot before they shoved him on TV. Anyway, I digress. Zuck says, Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things.

This was one that most people at Facebook, including myself, disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justified the means. Bullshit. We recognize that connecting people isn't enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year.

After nine years of doing it the other way around because you were. Well, and this is classic Zuck bullshit that says nothing. It's a lot of words that convey absolutely nothing. No apologies, no defense, no here's how we're going to fix it.

Just more nothing. They're really kind of just losing it. They're, yeah, they are. It's amazing. And I don't know, just because I have the Facebook, what's that plug in again that we both use, the Facebook Purity. I get notification every single time one of my friends leaves Facebook.

That thing's been dinging, dinging, dinging. Yeah, between that and social book post manager. Those are my two go-to Facebook. One just lets me know when everybody's leaving. The other one lets me delete everything. So there's nothing left to read. I do want to point out something really quick to all of you that have left Facebook to just go on to Instagram.

Same fucking thing, people. Yeah, it's the same thing. They're owned by the same people. So, you know, you got to get off Instagram too if you really want to make your point. Pictures are pretty. So there's a Vanity Fair article where, you know, Zuck gets hit again by saying, you know, yeah, you guys agreed to this.

You signed the terms and conditions. We've got a bunch of links in here that kind of are just talking about the same thing that they're just screwing up on every single front. The point is, I mean, they're not wrong, but that's not the overall point here. The point is you need to change your business model now if you want to continue to be what you are because people are fed up with it.

They are not cool. They are not on board with your business model. So it doesn't matter that you're right. This is like, imagine you're arguing with your wife. It does not fucking matter if you're right. Do you want to keep the peace? Oh, how true. Do you want to keep the peace?

Would you like to sleep next to your wife tonight and not have her cut off your penis? Then who gives a shit about being right? Zuck. Oh, so true. So true. And the thing is, I know that they're probably just sitting around waiting to see how this kind of plays out and seeing if it really is just a, you know, Tempest in a teapot because yes, people are deleting Facebook, but you know, it's not, they've got 2 billion people.

You know, this is not a big thing in Zimbabwe right now or anywhere in Africa. Nobody cares about this. They just want to be able to connect with people easily. Yep. It's just, you know, us privileged folks that really have our butthurt about it. Now, the FTC is going to be looking into them because of all this stuff that's going on.

Now, there's a press release about it. It's listed in the show notes. But at the very end, I love this. The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition and protect and educate consumers. You can learn more about consumer topics and file a consumer complaint online or by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP. Like the FTC on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter. Read our blogs. There is a press release about them investigating Facebook. And there's a Facebook button on the page. And they say it right at the end of the article. Like us on Facebook. It's like, this is why I don't believe it's going to really matter.

Yeah. Nobody, it's so ingrained. Now, like us here. Like us there. Like us everywhere. Now, we've got more news out of Canada about, you know, Cambridge Analytica. And then with Aggregate IQ has signed on to say, no, we didn't do anything.

But then there was proof that they did. Yeah. And just the plot thickens. And like I said last week, you know, there are thousands of these companies we've never heard of. And you're just going to hear about more and more of them over time as, you know, people keep talking and this stuff keeps getting passed around. But will it change anything? Let me know.

Wake me up when it's time to give a shit. Yeah, I saw Christopher Wiley, who's who's the whistleblower, giving a testifying before somebody on C-SPAN or whatever. Cory Doctorow Jr.? Yeah. And I just he's so. You know, you and I, we did a lot of shows talking about what we thought about Snowden when when he did his whistleblowing thing.

And I think there was an honest debate there about it wasn't a good thing or a bad thing. Fuck you, Wiley. Fuck you and your bullshit pink hair, your crap bullshit piercing. Fuck the bird you rode in on, because I'm sure you did. You piece of crap. You know, you you can't whistleblow after the fact this far.

After the fact, you waited way too damn long for me to give you any sympathy. And you're trying to you're trying to trade on this now and make a career out of it. You fuck nut. I'm not a fan. Really, I couldn't tell. Yeah, I'm not a fan of this guy at all. Kind of petered out there at the end of your rant, but okay.

I know. I just can't build up the steam right now. I'm still too discombobulated. Yeah, I know. That's the thing. We've got some more links in here about it. But, you know, if he really cared about what was going on, he would have done it during the election. Not after. And this long after.

And this long after, yeah. It's been well over a year. So, dude, what you been doing? You know, I don't know. Maybe he has to dye his hair pink one strand at a time. And it just took him a while before he was camera ready. I don't know. And let's just let's just move on from this.

There's a bunch of links in the notes that you guys might want to go check out because there's there's a lot about it in the news. But let's talk about Trump. He's been in the news this week, too. So Trump Trump doesn't like Amazon. He wants to go after Amazon. So thirty eight billion dollars in market cap after Trump comes out and says that he wants to go after Amazon later.

Yep. So now Trump's a Kardashian. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that stocks fell, you know, and and they're rebounding, which is what it's going to happen. It's Amazon. It is. They're not going away. It's Amazon. They're not going away. It's it's the Trump effect. So brief, brief drop.

And then it'll come back up. You know, brief Trump effect. One minute. That's Stormy Daniels. It's about how long the Trump effect lasts. I'm not that there aren't some real points to curbing Amazon's power. There are some very valid arguments to be made that it should be valid.

So, yeah, so, you know, again, another another case in which I don't necessarily disagree with Trump. I just disagree with the way he went about it. So because I mean, you look at the data that Facebook gets, right? Yeah. Amazon has probably more than that, because it's like you can click on like on something and Facebook gets a little data point.

Amazon knows what you buy and they know where you surf because all of the retargeting goes through them. You know, they retarget to all the advertising companies that link back to Amazon. So all that stuff is out there. Amazon knows a hell of a lot more than you about Facebook. Trust me on that one.

Plus, the tax issues and, you know, they just come into a city and decimate it, then open up a new bookstore. Hey, isn't that convenient? Isn't that convenient? Uber. Now, you missed the discussion last week, Brian, about the Uber fatality.

And some news has come out this week with what they what they were doing. And the Arizona governor has said, no, you can't. No more for you, Uber. Now you're done out. You screwed up. And I was mentioning it to Bittner last week about how I thought Uber was so far behind on their tech.

And I was right. The average turnaround or the was it the average miles per intervention on an Uber car is about 13 in a Waymo is over a thousand. Whoa, that's pretty far behind. Now, I also heard that they had reduced the number of LiDAR detectors on the Uber that was involved in the crash and, you know, try to save money that way.

So that might have had something to do with it. But they also turned off the the collision detection that was built into the car. Oh, yeah. This switch. You mean hit this switch. OK. The car comes with built in collision detection and they turned it off. That's awesome.

You just can't win. And my favorite one of the week, though, comes from Mashable. An Uber driver takes a stairway to exit the parking lot. And this is up in San Francisco. And I know I know exactly where he drove down these stairs. And, you know, sometimes GPS just ain't your friend, bro.

Or maybe he was trying to get to the dispensary faster. I don't maybe you know what? Maybe the car slipped on some man poo and it fell sideways down the stairs. Who knows? But it's just go look at the picture of it. It's pretty. It's pretty. Well, I've always said, you know, we've been discussing this stuff for a while and it's just like normal, regular, everyday Uber drivers have gotten so bad.

I'd rather have the autonomous Ubers. Yeah, but you won't be having them in California because Uber has declined to renew their license to test them here. So Arizona's out. California's out. Don't know who's next. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows what they're going to do?

I mean, we said it before. They should just hold on to their hats, wait for somebody to do the tech better, save the money that they're spending on it so they can, you know, try and find that gap between subsidizing all the Uber drivers that they're doing now by the billions of dollars they're spending, wait for somebody else to come out with a decent fleet of self-driving cars and then buy all of those.

Right. Or maybe they can just crawl under the rock they came out from and die. Or that. I would be fine with that. And speaking of dying, Craigslist has shut down its personal section. What I've enjoyed about this is almost every single article that discusses it puts personals in quotes because we all know it's basically just escort ads.

That's pretty much it. Which, yeah, there was new laws passed about trafficking and things like that and it directly affects websites because you're not, it gets rid of the safe harbor provisions for websites basically. So if you're, if you're hosting. Yeah. The, the fight online sex trafficking act, that's the new bill that has everybody freaked out.

Yeah. So yeah, Craigslist and various other services have gone the way of the dodo, at least in terms of those types of ads, which, you know, good, I guess fine. I mean, it's not like they're not going to find something else. They will find something else, but you know, violence against sex workers was provenly down after Craigslist started their personal section.

Right. So it gave them a safer, a safer way to do business. So this, you know, this new bill that's going through actually has the opposite effect of what it should be doing. Yeah. And we're not addressing the main problem, which is the fact that this will continue to exist anyway. So maybe we look at prostitution loss, but that would make sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Legalizing prostitution. God forbid we do that. Oh my God. It only works in other countries. You know, why would we take something that's going to work and use it here? That's not the American way. No, it's not. Spotify, your favorite music service.

They told Wall Street that they're going to do great this year. Well, okay. Good. Well, we might have to run some secondary numbers to follow up on that. We're not just going to trust you saying that. Right. Well, that's the thing. It's like, hey, no, trust us. We're awesome. Trust us.

We're going to do great. We're not from America, so you can believe us. It's like, oh my God. Can we have some better numbers, please? Yeah, no. Prove it. Prove it. When is that IPO? It's coming up, right? It's pretty soon, I think. Yeah, on April 3rd.

All right. So that will be out the day after this show airs. So we'll have some follow up. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, they're just trying to boost it before the IPO. Yeah, of course. Get some good news out there. Do the dog and pony show. Do the song and dance. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by the new second generation Eero and Eero Beacon.

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So let's just keep running with this creepy what apps know about us and how this data can leak out there in unintended ways. There is a new app called Chatwatch. Chatwatch? It can combine WhatsApp data from two of your contacts to make an educated guess if they've been talking to each other.

So if two of your friends were both online for the same consecutive five minutes in the wee hour of the morning, there's a decent chance they were messaging each other. It's a trick that the app developers hope will bring more attention to how Facebook handles our data, along with how other companies access and analyze it, which I kind of like.

They've put this out there and said, look how creepy this is. Look at how your data is being leaked. Look what you could do with the data that you didn't think you could do. Pay attention, people. Now, it's not free. They charge. It's $199, and you get the ability to spy on two of your contacts for a week, and that's it for your $199.

But they're not keeping the money. They're using partially to maintain the app, and secondly, to fund an anti-Trump political nonprofit. Okay. So, all right. It is. But I mean, they're just using public data, and it's just, yeah, who's available when.

Yeah, and then just kind of matching them up together. So if you're particularly worried that maybe your boyfriend is talking to your best friend, you can pony up $1.99 and find out. Look, it's cheaper than getting Stephen Rombaum on the case. Damn right. What are you going to do? This one's just for Trent Hamilton, friend of the show.

Amazon's new Game On API helps developers to add eSports competitions to their games. This is so you can run brackets and scoreboards and things like that, and tournaments and leaderboards. I worked with Trent on a leaderboard for a Muppets game back in the day, and it was such a damn nightmare that I never want to do it again.

So I don't know if he's going to need brackets and tournaments and leaderboards over at Dollar Shave Club, where he's now working. But if you do, this is the thing for you. I wish this would have been around back in the day. I was so... I hated writing scoreboards. Right. Did you ever take it you never did?

No, I never did. So I always, yeah, stayed the hell away from this. Good man. Good man. This one was just fun. HQ Trivia disappeared from Apple's App Store for a little while because somebody forgot to update the credit card information in their Apple developer account. Oopsies.

Derp. Derp. It's probably the same guy that forgot to update Oculus' security certificate. You know, this brings up a much wider point about how sloppy people are these days, because you know that the person who originally signed them up is probably no longer working for the company, so it went to an email address that doesn't exist anymore, and nobody provides check seats anymore, and nobody does the due diligence anymore, so this is not surprising that this happened.

But, I mean, it is actually, it's a little bit surprising because you still need to log into that developer app a lot when you're pushing out updates. Oh, that's true, and nobody just looked at the notifications. Yeah, you know what it probably was? There was a master account, and then there were developers on the account that could update the app. Right. And those people were the ones that didn't see it, but, ah, whatever.

Whatever. It's been a long time since I logged into the developer portal on Apple. Me too. I think I did it for four years, or five years even, 100 bucks a year, and never once developed an app. Do you remember Lytro, that camera that let you just take a picture and focus later? Yeah.

The near-field camera? They're dead. Dead in the water. There was talk of them being bought by Google. So, after 216 million bucks in funding and a really dumb-looking camera. Actually, they had two cameras. The first one was just a little box that looked like one of those things you look through that you'd get from Great America or Disney.

Right, right. With the pictures of you and your friends in. Yeah, they're dead. I guess the band is breaking up, and I was surprised. I thought Google was actually going to pick them up, because if they could get that technology into Android phones, that would be baller. That would be pretty cool. Yeah. I found a really great Twitter account to follow.

We've spent a lot of time on this show talking about being independent contractors and working in the creative industry, and we talk about that a lot less these days, but this is a good callback to some of our original bread and butter on the show. It's forexposure underscore dot TXT. Some people expect artists to work for free.

These are real quotes from real people who want you to work for exposure. No naming or shaming. I like that part as well. So it's a lot of redacted bits of information, but I have heard so many of these so many times. It's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely fantastic.

Fun to follow. I have been trying out Diaspora and Mastodon again, because in a lot of the articles I was reading about, you know, what can we do about social networks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I wanted to see what the state of affairs was with these two. So Mastodon still, mostly Japanese. I signed up.

I've got a Mastodon account. I was, you know, bouncing around looking at the global feed and the feed on the server that I signed up for. And yeah, it's a lot of Japanese. You can filter it out, but then there's almost nothing going on. But Diaspora looks interesting to me now. I've made fun of them since the get-go.

Right. And when one of the founders killed himself because they took all the money and figured out that they couldn't make it happen. Well, apparently they've finally gotten something working. And I signed up for one of the pods today. I think they call them pods. Mm-hmm. And it's kind of neat that you can just grab the software and run your own. Right.

I like that part. So it's an off-the-shelf open source social network that you can run. And you can tie it into the global network if you want to, but you don't have to, which is kind of cool. So, you know, at some point maybe we can spin up a Diaspora pod for GOG fans because I've got a server that's basically doing almost nothing right now.

So maybe you can spin it up and try it. Me too. So that's funny. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. I'll spin up a Diaspora instance and you can spin up a Mastodon instance on yours. So we can have Twitter and Facebook on our servers and just say, screw the world.

Nice. But the problem with that is when we tell people where to go, nobody will ever find it. No, we'll just be answering the same damn question every day on Twitter, every week on the show. We'll get private messages about it. I'll have to post it on Patreon 17 times. Yep.

Yeah. What's the clan name again? Oh, God.

Media Candy. I have found my new favorite show. All right. It is called McMafia. Okay. So this is based on a book that came out a while ago that I read by Misha Glennie. And the book is a real book about, you know, real organized crime and things like that.

But this is a fictional version of it. It's on AMC and it's got a great budget. And I think it's got to be by the same people that did The Night Manager. Did you ever watch The Night Manager? No. It's a John le Carre miniseries that they did that was awesome. If you get a chance, watch it.

It's only like six parts. But man, when you talk about good spy stuff, I mean, it's John le Carre. So you know it's going to be good out of the gate. But the production value is really good. And the guy that played Loki is the main character in it. Nice. In the Thor movies. And he's an amazing actor. So definitely, if you like The Night Manager or, you know, Russians at this point, McMafia is a pretty interesting show.

There's four episodes out now. And it's on AMC. So highly recommended. All right. And speaking of Russians, The Americans is back for the final season over on FX. I've loved this show since the first season. I don't think that they've had a bad season. They've had certainly better seasons some than others.

But nothing has been bad. It's been a great show. I'm very excited about the finale whenever it comes. I have not watched the first episode yet because, you know, crazy week. But I have a bottle of wine and I plan to sit down and watch one tonight. So very excited. I'm saving these up until I get to L.A.

Because my friend that I'm moving into is a huge American fan, too. I got her into it. And we're going to get a couple in the can so when I get there, we can binge them and have some wine, too. Nice. Yeah. The X-Files. Let's talk about The X-Files for a second. Sure. Let's talk about The X-Files because the finale occurred while I was gone.

And as I said, I have not watched any of it. And I was going to wait and see if they wrapped up the Bane plot line. And if so, then I would go back and watch the season. One headline caught my eye. It's the only thing I've really seen about The X-Files, but it kind of put the nail in the coffin for me. And I will just read the title. The X-Files finale was so horrible, I completely understand why Gillian Anderson isn't coming back.

Oh, God, yeah. Man, so the first two episodes of the season were shit. The last episode of the season was just weird. It was just really, really weird. It's like David Lynch came in and did it, but it was actually Chris Carter. About the same difference nowadays.

Wow. Yeah, talk about unceremoniously getting rid of some main characters. I'm not going to say anything else, but. So I'll just, I'll just a couple of choice lines from the, this is an article over on io9 and it says, the X-Files season 11 did not start out well and I'm unhappy to report it didn't end well either.

It says here, why anybody, actors, writers, or fans would come back for more X-Files after last night's episode is beyond me. There are lots of times the X-Files could have or should have ended, which would have put it into classic sci-fi history, but Chris Carter's persistence to keeping it open-ended and dragging characters through nonsensical muck is almost incomprehensible.

And as she ends, the X-Files cannot be salvaged, do not attempt it again, leave Gillian Anderson alone, the end. Sadly, I must concur. All right. If it was just the one-off episodes, it would have been great because all of those this season were phenomenal. They were, I loved every single one of them, but I, I've never liked the overarching story line.

I always liked the one-offs. So I, you know, for me, it was nice to have those back and I enjoyed them thoroughly, but when they get back to the main plot line, it was, it made no sense whatsoever. I, I'm just so glad I saved so much of my own time. Oh, I mean, God, what the hell?

Seriously. I, I want to, I want to believe Chris Carter is now like banned from writing another TV show. You know, yeah, there, there's your, your list of people that you will never watch shows from again. Chris Carter is on my list. Yeah, I'm, I'm with you. I think Chris Carter is, is joining a, what's his face from Battlestar Galactica in hell, in my opinion.

Exactly. Jessica Jones season two. I finally got to the end of it. Yep. I did not like it. I thought it was good, but not great. Season one was definitely better. Uh, my main problem was the protagonist this time around and I don't like her sister and obviously they're gearing up to make her a major, major character.

And she was a major character this season as well. So the problem is, okay, Jessica was annoying this season beyond annoying and the, everybody is, I mean, it's just everything about this season was just way over the top dark.

Yeah. Way over the top dark. And it didn't need to be that dark, but yeah, her sister annoyed me plot in, in a lot of places was just incomprehensible. The only time, the only episode that I really, really loved was when David Tennant came back.

And that was my favorite episode. As soon as he was back, I'm like, yes, bring him back. You know, he was a good enemy. When you have an anti-hero, it's always difficult, difficult to have a good protagonist. And they nailed it the first season. David Tennant was, was phenomenal in the role and the writing was fantastic.

And they, well, wouldn't he be the antagonist? Isn't Jessica the protagonist? Well, yeah, an anti-hero and a protagonist. Sorry, my bad. But yeah, yeah, it had, it had problems. It really soured me on the, it soured me on it. Look, it's still the best of all those Marvel series, as far as I'm concerned.

I see Daredevil still beats it for me. Okay. Ready Player Dumb, let's talk about, let's talk about Ready Player One. Oh, sure, I guess. Look, I knew this wasn't going to pan out well. And one of the reviews says Spielberg's Ready Player One is a visual Marvel, but this convoluted fantasy has nothing smart to say about technology and nerd culture.

So they've ruined yet another sci-fi classic. My favorite line from that review is, that our orphan hero is much more invested in saving his game world from Sorrentino's clawed grasp than in mourning his in real life loved ones taken from him, speaks to the skewed stakes in this messy, convoluted, interminable, and occasionally fucked up fantasy.

Yeah, I mean, look, my biggest fear was that they were going to take Ready Player One, which was a nuanced book, and turn it into an action movie. And that seems to be exactly what they did. Oh, yeah. And of course, because it's Steven Spielberg, you have to have marketing tie-ins.

So they did this terrible marketing tie-in with Carl's Jr. with a fake food talking about the Spielburger. And they should have just called it a failburger, because it was the dumbest thing I've seen. I mean, Carl's Jr. could actually create a Spielburger line, so you could have the indie, you could have the Jaws, you know, you could have all of his different movies in different flavors of burger.

Yeah. Which would be kind of fun, you know? Spielburger should just open up a burger chain like Wahlburger, you know? He can go into that business, because I don't know if he's going to be making movies that much longer. He's 70, so we'll see. Well, he's got plenty in him still, but... I think he's got plenty in him, too, but...

I'm still going to see this movie, because I want to see it. And I was able to... I did the same thing with Ender's Game. I was able to separate the book that I love and treat this as just a science fiction movie that happens to have characters that use the same name from the book that I love. But this has nothing to do with the book that I love.

Yeah, exactly. I have not been able to do that with The Gunslinger yet, because I really love those books, and I really hate Matthew McConaughey, but... Don't watch the movie. Don't watch the movie. All right. I mean, I kind of was starting to get into the books, but it just took too damn long, but the movie was just incomprehensible.

All right. Granted, maybe if I'd read all the books, it might have made more sense, but to me, the movie was just shit. Right, right. I'm going to skip that. I am going to see Ready Player One. I'd like to see it in a nice theater. I just don't have time right now, so it might just be at home when it comes out.

Well, I mean, speaking of books that have been converted into movies that have totally sucked, now, The Three-Body Problem is not exactly one of my classic sci-fi series of all times, but we've all read it, and we've talked about it on the show, and it was good. No, it wasn't.

Until the end. The first book was enjoyable. The second two were god-awful. Yes. Well, Amazon doesn't seem to agree. They have dropped $1 billion to be able to make a Game of Thrones-style TV show out of it. Now, Amazon does not exactly have a great history of taking even simple sci-fi, Man from the Hightower, and making it watchable, so I don't know what they're going to do with this book that is basically almost entirely...

I can't even imagine how they're going to visualize half of this stuff. Oh, I'm sure they'll be able to, but the thing is, this is not a series for us. This is a series for China. Yeah, that's true. You know it's going to be geared towards China, because this is one of the biggest books that have ever come out of China, and it's huge over there, and that's where they're going to make their money back on this.

But yeah, for me, it was a one-body problem at the beginning, because it was a one-book wonder, and the other two were just terrible. It suffered from Hunger Games-itis, I think. Yeah, I can see that. And I assume you are a Frank Miller fan, would that be correct?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I figured so. So he's got a new book coming out about King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake. It'll be out in 2019, but they're doing a TV adaptation in real time for Netflix along with it, so that will flesh out characters and all that sort of stuff.

I am interested in this cautiously. We talked about the ethics course and continued education a couple years back, just because I'm super into it. I took a class at UCLA all about the legend of Merlin and Arthur, so I'm super into that. I've read almost every single series out there about Arthur and Merlin, so I'm very excited.

I'm interested to see what they do. I liked Excalibur the movie. I still remember Merlin's line. Come on. Gotta give me some props for that, at least. You get some weird-ass props for that, but I think you Googled it.

No, I didn't. I know that. Trust me. I know that one hands down. All right. Fair enough. And I want to do a shout-out to friends Kyle and Kenny of the show. They've got a new podcast called Today's Special over at Good Stuff FM, and they celebrate a different food each day.

This is a short, like, you know, five to ten minute podcast that they just pick a food, and they talk about it, and basically Google it and tell you the interesting facts about it. Okay. It's one of those light ones that, in the morning, is kind of a nice little palate cleanser for the day, because it's not deep, and it's not depressing.

Trust me, it's no Sam Harris, but it's a lot of fun, and I like it. I really, really like it, so I hope they keep that up. Now, let's move into the meat of this. All right. All right. I have not been listening to Geeks and Beats for a while, even though I am a Patreon supporter, and I'm like, why aren't they on my list?

So I grabbed them and grabbed the latest show, Apiso Drake, and where they talk about the new software platform, Vezd. Yes. V-E-Z-T. Now, as soon as I heard this, I'm like, okay, I'm going to unleash Brian on this one, because this is an intellectual property rights marketplace that lets music fans buy rights in their favorite songs.

Now, I continue to listen to Geeks and Beats, and I listen to this as well, and I was just going to take a total pass on it. I wasn't even going to discuss it on the show until you popped up and said, we got to discuss this on the show, and I was like, oh, shit. Let me give a little bit of a full disclosure first.

Steve Stewart, the CEO and co-founder of Vezd, we have mutual friends about a year ago, which is when he says in his interview that he started this company, our mutual friends put us in touch with each other. I exchanged a couple emails with him. He used to manage the Stone Temple Pilots.

He is a very smart guy. He knows the music industry very well. And we, you know, I was maybe thinking I would go do some work with him, and it just, you know, the way things do, it just kind of fell by the wayside and nothing ever happened. But I like the guy, and he's very smart. So, now, having said that.

Before you, did you mention that we worked on the Stone Temple Pilots site together at Box Stop? Oh, no, I forgot about that. That was one of our first jobs together. Way back in the day as well. So, I don't even remember talking to him back at that point. But, yes, you and I did both work on the Stone Temple website way back in the day. So, having said all that, I will now proceed to destroy this entire concept.

Actually, first, I would like to get your impressions, what made you think it should come to the show in the first place, and maybe you can just give the basic overview of what it is and what you think about it. Okay, this is what I took away from it. So, rights holders can slice off a portion of their ownership and sell those rights to fans, and then the fans can buy equity in it, and then the fans, like, then the owner gets basically paid out from it, and then the fans get a portion of the proceeds from the royalties from that song.

That's kind of the overview I got of it. Yes. Now, on paper, it sounds like it's an interesting way for fans to kind of do it. Second, as I thought about it more, I'm like, this just smells like a scam. I think scam is rough.

And again, I appreciate how many different, this is going to save the music industry platforms and concepts have we talked about on the show just in the five years we've been doing it. A ton. Yeah. But I support anybody that is trying to figure out a way to get money into the hands of artists to rethink and reimagine the way that the music industry works.

And I support anybody doing that. And there are some good, if this would have been around 20 years ago, this would have been awesome. Right. Now? All right. So let's get into it. Now, the basis of my critique, I have to be honest as well, is purely his Steve Stewart's interview on Geeks and Beats, which is about 30 minutes-ish.

I didn't have the time to go and do due diligence, which one should always do if one's going to invest. So I, but to be fair to me, a 30-minute interview with the CEO and co-founder should tell you everything you need to know about the company. So if I'm missing stuff and if I misinterpreted it, it's half my fault and half his fault, I would say.

Okay. There's lots of sizzle. There's very little meat. There are a number of things that you and I despise that are thrown into the mix here. The very fact that they trademarked the term ISO for initial song offering, obviously playing off the ICO, cryptocurrency slang and buzz.

And initial public offering as well. Yes, that as well. They also throw crowdfunding and micro-investing into the mix of buzzwords. We don't like crowdfunding. Micro-payments certainly don't work. And micro-investing... Oh, micro-payments work, but not for music. But for different things, yeah.

Yeah, they'd never take it on in a larger context. So first off, it's not really investing. As the interview goes on and they ask more questions about the investing aspect of it, you discover it's not really an investment. You're buying a piece of a piece of a piece and getting a small amount of payments if they make money.

And it's only through certain... Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. Now, in the interview, one of the first things he says is that... He talks about how all music is the same and he wants to change that. It's all the same producers and the same artists making the same sounds and the same hits.

I don't see how this would change that at all. Because if you're approaching it as an investment platform, you would invest in the things that make money, which are those things that all sound the same, done by the same producers, and having the big hits. Those are the only ways that you would make money. You would not make money investing in unknown artists that are doing something crazy and weird.

So this can, by definition, should not change that paradigm at all. So I don't understand how that's part of their story. He said the initial target market is 13 to 18-year-olds. Now, while I understand that those are people that get super into music, as far as I know, when I was 13, I didn't have a lot of extra cash around to invest in something.

I didn't know what investing was until I was well over 18, really. But that's why he's talking about small amounts like $5 here and $1 here or whatever. Yeah. Well, I can't imagine talking to my 13-year-old about investing in music.

And again, if you're going to invest, you should have an understanding of the industry. There is no more convoluted accounting and math in the world than the music industry. Threading through this stuff and understanding. Maybe the movie industry. But again, I get where he's going for it because he says the question is how to monetize fans.

That is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in the music industry right now. Everybody is trying to figure out how to get money out of the fans' wallets and into the artists' wallets because music itself is a loss leader. Touring and merchandise is basically all you got right now.

There are a lot of people out there that are trying different things. There are companies that do ticket sales for an extra buck or two. Then you get a downloadable album or weird stuff that they've done exclusively. They're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Exactly. Premium experiences where you can buy in for meet and greets.

There's data gathering at venues where if you give them your information, they'll give you a discount on the t-shirt or a hot dog or whatever. And then it would be interesting to see how those companies are going to do given what's going on with Facebook. That's just what I was thinking. I'm like, I don't know if that model is going to really work for much longer.

You know, they're all just sitting there praying that this Facebook stuff blows over and everybody gives up on their privacy again because that model ain't going to work. So yeah, so there's that. I mean, the artist and management will set the value of whatever share of the publishing is being given away. I guess that's okay.

That's not really how investing works. The market sets the value. Value doesn't change at all. It's a certain term and then it just switches over. And it's ridiculous to think that they do make it sound like there's a lot of money involved in streaming payouts.

We know there aren't isn't. We know for a fact there isn't. There's Spotify artist payments are declining in 2017. I've got links in the show notes that show music streaming royalties explained. You see how small, how small the amount of money that artists actually make from their streams.

And we have to remember what you're buying with vests is only a part of a part of a part of half of the royalties because you're only getting the publishing. You're not getting the mechanical. This is when it gets all super difficult. Okay, real quick. What's the difference? What's the difference between publishing and mechanical?

Publishing is whoever writes the song gets a piece of publishing. So they wrote the song. You get that. And then mechanicals is based on literally old spins. Like when you would spin the record, a mechanical play of a song on the radio gets a payment.

And that is and when you make that payment, you also as the I get so complicated, I don't think I can explain it without this being a five hour show. Okay, that's it. I got you. You just move on. Okay, it's super complicated. Anyways, so you're getting a piece of a piece of a piece of the publishing.

There's no money in there. There's just not. And so at the end of the day, I applaud the idea for if you're super into a band and you want to give them some money and you want to feel like you have a stake in ownership and that makes you feel cool and groovy. Great. Treating this as you're actually going to make any money.

No. It's that is never going to happen. And another key of investing is in anything is the ability to sell. You buy a stock. It goes up in value. You sell it. So you've made your money. In this case, you're just getting a percentage of the money that the artist made.

So let me ask two questions here. Well, the first thing is, what is the value of the artist selling a piece of their publishing? If they know that their song is doing well and it's making money, they don't want to sell their publishing. They want to keep it and make all that income themselves.

The value in selling it is if you stop making the big money, then you can sell it and just make some money from your fans. And that's that. Now, the other thing is, if you can't sell as an investor, they're saying it's a coming soon feature for them. That doesn't really work for me.

And as we've talked about a million times on the show, companies should only be able to promote the product they actually have, not the one that they want to have. That's false advertising. Yep. Wishful thinking or vaporware or like we used to call it. Exactly. And then my final point about this, which struck me earlier today, insider trading.

I'm pretty connected to the music industry. I talk to music supervisors and producers and things a lot. What if I knew a song was going to be used for a big upcoming movie or an advertising campaign or whatever before the general public ever knew of that? Because that's where most of the publishing money is made anyways, is when you license your song to something.

So if I have access to that information and I'm able to get in on the ISO or whatever the hell they call it, isn't that insider trading? Because if you're doing this as an investment thing and there is no oversight at all, which this has no oversight, that seems pretty weird to me.

So if this is either going to become a thing and maybe it's just a small thing, that's no big deal. But if it becomes a big thing, there will have to be oversight like the SEC. Anyways, it's very complicated. But I and again, I applaud the thought. I just like you and I do and have done all of our lives.

This is devil's advocate. Me picking this thing apart piece by piece by piece by piece and seeing problems. Well, that's our job. I'm sorry. That's our job. That's and the other interesting thing is, you know, you're talking about insider trading about being able to buy a song and when it goes up in value and all that stuff. If somebody is about to license their song to a major motion picture or TV commercials or things like that, why would they put their song on Vezed at all?

Exactly. That makes no sense. If you know something's going to go well, you don't get rid of your publishing. And I also found it a little bit disingenuous that they talked about these big artists like Drake has sold a piece of his song. No. No, he did not. No, he didn't. His co-writer, who is completely unknown, sold a piece of his publishing.

Drake in no way, shape or form has signed off on this or endorsed this. He didn't get rid of his own publishing. Somebody else that co-wrote the song with him. So you're getting you're buying into a share of half a share of publishing. That's because you're not getting Drake's publishing. You're getting this other guys. Now, I get why third party people, people that aren't really well known, might want to do this.

That totally makes sense to me, because like, yeah, say you've only written one song with Drake and every other song that you've written hasn't done anything. So why not go for the quick cash grab? And again, it also reverts back to you eventually. Anyways, these have periods of time. So you don't get to keep this forever.

You are basically renting a little slice of potential investment. So it's gambling, basically, is what you're saying. Yeah, of course it is. I mean, if you wanted to say that it was investing in the long tail of the music industry catalog, that would make a little bit more sense. But trying to push it off like you're going to be able to invest in hits.

Yeah. That's disingenuous. It is a little bit. I mean, it's an interesting take on it. And again, a reminder, it's not like this hasn't been done before in a different way. Remember, David Bowie floated his entire music catalog as Bowie Bonds. And they did all right for a little while, but eventually they got classified as junk bonds.

And a couple of other people have done it in the actual real stock market as bonds. And this is when music still sold. These things didn't work out. Nobody made money. It's so funny that you mentioned Bowie. I had trouble with my credit for a point, and I couldn't get a credit card or a bank account.

But what I could get was a Bowie card. He was one of the first artists to put his name on secured credit cards that you could get over the internet and secured bank accounts. Yeah, he was pretty trailblazing. His first card was a Bowie card. He saved my ass being able to cash my checks and actually use a credit card again until it was wiped from my record.

So I have a debt to David Bowie. I'm sorry we killed him. Yeah, me too. Okay, moving on from that. I saw this trailer for a new drone film called Elevation, How Drones Will Change Cities. And it's from this design magazine called Dizine. I guess that's how I'm saying it.

It's an interesting magazine. They've got a lot of interesting articles in there. I signed up for their RSS feed, so I'll be digging into it. But did you get a chance to watch the trailer? I did. It looked really nice. I mean, it's beautiful. It looked really good. Yeah. Well, I hope so. Coming from a design magazine. I'm guessing the design's going to be decent.

But it looked kind of interesting. So we're going to keep an eye on that. It's not out yet, but links are in the show notes if you want to follow along and play at home. Last thing I saw is just a walk down memory lane for me. Goth Lyrics with Murray Lachlan Young. I'm unfamiliar with him.

He is a British poet, and he takes a lyrical look at the shadowlands of goth and the gothic. Really, it's just a pretty nice playlist of some of the classics of my youth, some great goth music, and a few, you know, beats some of the Spotify playlists out there. I'd recommend giving it a listen. Security?

We're back this week with Dave Papa Bullets Bittner from the Cyber Wire. Hey, Dave. Hi, guys. Hey, Brian. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be back, and you did an amazing job. My mouth hit the floor when I found out you were a gun owner.

But good for you. Responsible. Well, you know what? Yes. Let me frame this a little bit better. I am a zombie apocalypse gun owner in that I have a gun, and it was a gun I inherited from my grandfather when he passed away.

It is a terrible gun. In fact, I asked a gun dealer friend of mine what it is, and he referred to it as a junk gun. It is a .38 caliber revolver, basically good for holding up liquor stores, and that's about it. You could not hit the side of a barn with this thing, although if I had it up against your chest and pulled the trigger, you would probably die.

Unless it exploded in your hand, and then you both die. Exactly. 50-50. What could go wrong? Right. The other part of this is that choosing to live an evidence-based life and having children in my house, the gun is not in my house. It is somewhere else, and it is in one place, and the ammo is in another place.

However, both of those places are within walking distance should civil unrest begin and the zombie apocalypse come down upon us. The gun is, you know, less than an hour walking from should I possibly need it. So that's the only reason I have it, and, you know, I'm also one of those people that if the law – well, first of all, I live in Maryland, which is a highly restricted gun state.

Very hard to get a gun in this state, and I'm fine with that, actually. I'm fine with that. So if the government came to me and said, hey, give us your gun, I'd be like, oh, okay, here. Here you go. Fine. It's fine. It's good. It's all right. It's all right. I'd be fine with a paintball gun, actually, the one that Jason likes with the pepper spray.

Yep. Yep. And the problem is now I can't order the pepper spray because pepper spray is illegal in California. Oh, well, if you – I can buy an AR-15, but I can't buy any pepper spray. Right. If you need a friend in Maryland to buy it for you, just, you know, let me know. Let me know. Okay.

Yes. I guess I can buy that. I probably can't buy an AR-15 here, though. I'll send it along the pepper road. Should we set up a trade? Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's it. Anyway, so security, right? Yeah. Security.

This message brought to you by the NRA, getting back to security. Okay. It's back. It's back. Yeah. Christopher Wiley. Commander Pink. This guy. Yeah. Mr. Pink in the library with the bullshit.

That's what killed us this week. I already had a rant against this guy earlier, so just rewind and listen to me calling him a dickhead. If you want my opinion of him. Okay. So this comes from the outline, and he quotes, Apps that pull audio. It's for environmental context.

It's to understand where you are, to improve the contextual value of advertising itself. Are you outside? Are you watching TV? What are you doing right now? But then he goes on to say, yeah, they could probably listen to what you're doing and then turn it into ads. But they're probably not. But, you know, that's not my thing. But he put it back in the goddamn zeitgeist, and I hate this guy for that.

Yeah. We're done. We finished. We put a cork in it. There is no reason for him to discuss this at all, or even mention it at all. He's got other questions to be answering at the moment, one would think. Why did it take you so long? Yes. I mean, clearly, I think we've reached the point where they've all figured out that this is a topic that generates clicks.

Yes. So it just keeps getting recycled over and over again. Why don't we get any? Because we're saying it doesn't exist. Flat out. It's bullshit. Stop posting about it. And nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear the woo-woo stories. I'm surprised that this headline doesn't end with a question mark, because that's the sure way to get people to come, you know, read your link, ask a question.

Anyway, so Facebook's, speaking of Facebook, Facebook's bad week continues. There is an article in TechCrunch called Facebook starts fact-checking photos, videos, blocks millions of fake accounts per day, to which I can say, what took you so long?

And too little, too late, right? I mean. Yeah. Well. Horses out of the barn, guys. Right. There was no value in removing these things or blocking these accounts before. Now there is a perceived value as the ship starts to sink that perhaps we should do what the people are telling us we should do.

So they're finally doing it. Yeah. So yeah, this is the same thing that Twitter had that we talked about earlier in the show. It's like Twitter could have done this a long time ago. They just didn't because that means their active monthly users goes up instead of down. And if they start deleting accounts, then those numbers change, not for the better for them.

Yes. And Facebook never wants to do this. So millions of fake accounts per day, that means their user accounts go down. So, you know, now we got to figure out how many millions that they're blocking because that might jump their number from 2 billion down to like, oh, 1.94. I don't know. But we'll see what they're going to do.

But yeah, too little, too late is definitely the way it goes. Let me ask you this. You know, earlier this week on Twitter, Walt Mossberg, the tech journalist, floated the idea of a premium version of Facebook, you know, basically a privacy premium version where you just pay a monthly fee like you do for Netflix or whatever.

Would either of you guys be interested in something like that? I would. I would. I would totally do that. I would do it in two seconds. Facebook will never, ever do it. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, we've covered that idea for years and it's a point of contention between me and Brian. I used to want it, but now I don't.

Now I just don't care. I want micro networks, micro social networks because you know what I figured out when I was researching this this week was I don't really like having all of my friends in the same room. You know, that's kind of, it kind of bugs me. Both of them? Because I've got friends that like this stuff.

I've got friends that like this stuff. I get on with two different groups and having them all in the same room sometimes isn't the best course for like open conversation. But just having a story like that. Isn't that this segment? Exactly. Exactly.

Right. All I'm saying. Oh, that was good. It was awfully lonely last week. Now see, I, I, oh, that was like the best takedown of Jason ever. Well done, Bittner.

Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very good. He just kept on going too. That's what I admire about him. He did not break stride. He just kept on going right through it, plowed through it like it never happened. Yeah. I did. See, I, I do disagree with Jason. I, I like the randomness of, of two friends of mine that have never met each other that then get in a conversation on, on comments or comment thread on my Facebook.

I like that. Now I, I, I agree in person getting all your friends together can be absolutely a horrible, but I find it to be quite enjoyable in the virtual room. So, yeah, I, I, I enjoy keeping tabs on everybody and I find out about things that I otherwise wouldn't and just keeping my favorite, I think we've covered this before.

My favorite description of things like Facebook is ambient awareness. I, you know, I, I have awareness of my friends without actually having to call them up and say, Hey, what's going on? And there's something pleasurable in that. Um, but I think we've, we've, we've hit a tipping point, so we'll see how it all plays out. I also think there's a, there's an unfortunate psychological tendency to let the ambient awareness overtake everything.

And then all of a sudden you just stop calling some people. So that is a downside to it, but I definitely agree. I enjoy it in general. And I have to kind of make a point of making sure to reach out to individuals that I haven't talked to in a long time because it becomes too easy that way. Yeah. To, uh, combine a couple of the articles we, we just talked about, uh, on Twitter, a gentleman named Dan Barker had a nice little sort of infographic he put together, if you will.

It's a guardian article. It's been shared almost a hundred thousand times. And the article is, is called all the Facebook data and all the data Facebook and Google have on you. Um, but of course within the article itself, there are four sets of Facebook tracking, nine sets of Google tracking, and two Google ads using all of that data.

And so sort of a do as I say, not as I do lesson there. Um, and people have pointed out rightly that the author of the article, of course, has nothing to do with the guardian placing all these trackers on the article, but, uh, kind of a little, uh, lesson there on the state of the industry and, uh, how things run.

Hello? Still there? Yeah. Okay. Is Jason still there? Oh, I'm not talking to you guys. Fuck off. You can finish the show without me. All right. Very well. Uh, so Brian, uh. Yes. Should we just skip Jason's stories? Huh? Should we just skip Jason's stories?

Who? I'm sorry. Who? Jason. Oh yeah. That guy. Yeah. Yeah. The old host. He's self-playing with his friends. This is, this is what I deal with. This is what I deal with. Right. He's feeding his dogs. He's feeding his dogs. Dogs provide unconditional love. I'm gonna go find out where your gun is now. Jason, while Jason is sitting here so upset over one very funny, well-timed joke, I would like to remind both of you that while I was missing the show because my father may have been passing, you guys tasked me with homework to check on the privacy rights of the deceased.

Which was pointed out by a couple people on Facebook that that was a little bit fucked up. What else, look, what else are you gonna do while you're killing time in the waiting room at a hospital? Yes. Anyways. It's a welcome distraction. I did get to that homework and I will get to it, but go ahead, Jason, let's do your stories, please.

Okay, Boeing got hit by WannaCry this week and they say it has caused little damage. Now, Dave, I'm guessing you guys covered this in more in depth on the cyber wire. We did. Do you have anything to add to this? Not really. I mean, it's an interesting, first of all, it shows that WannaCry is still out there, still active, and you still need to protect yourself from it.

It also shows that how these things sort of play out because when Boeing first discovered that they were hit with it, it was an all hands on deck, you know, everybody get on a conference call, let's figure out how bad this is and what's going to happen.

Turns out that Boeing had pretty good network segmentation, that's what we've been hearing, and we're able to contain this very quickly and it had minimal effect on things. And Boeing did it right. So, bravo for Boeing. It also points out that a lot of what happens with these sorts of things are third-party systems that are running Windows.

And so, Boeing may not be in control of the updates for those systems. Some of these systems, you can't just update them. You know, you cannot update them at all on some of these systems. So, it's easy to criticize, but, you know, patching is hard.

Patching is harder than you think it is on these huge connected systems like, oh, I don't know, making jumbo jets. Right. Yeah. Just the network segmentation is good, though, because we don't want to cry in the jumbo jet. Well, yes. And, of course, the scary headlines tried to point their fingers towards that, and Boeing was quick to say, what do you think, we're crazy putting Windows and any control systems in a jumbo jet?

Like, no, there are no Windows systems in a jumbo jet, period, end of statement. Thank you. Please move on. Nothing to see here. We use iOS. Right. Right. Android. Yeah. Android inside. Come on. Turtle.

We use Turtle. All right, man. So, Julian Assange is back in the news. Yay. Our favorite little prick. He got his internet privileges revoked from the Ecuadorian embassy. Yes. I mean, he's got to be bored out of his mind already in there, and just, you know, annoying the staff to no end, because he doesn't look like he's that easy to get along with.

And he's now an Ecuadorian citizen, so they can't just kick him out, which is annoying. Yeah, we saw reporting this week that evidently he's a terrible roommate as well. The stories from the folks inside the embassy say that he lives as though it's a hotel, that he doesn't have to do any cleaning, or that it's practically a biohazard.

A biohazard in the space where he lives now. Oh, a computer hacker that's dirty? Oh, I never would have known that. Yeah, is there a stereotype convention in town? The other thing is, I remember last time this happened to him, that he got some folks to sort of walk around the embassy with little mifis to try to give him his access back.

So, it'll be interesting to see if that's the route he goes again. Well, I just love this because, I mean, it was cut off because he was in breach of his agreement that he had with the Ecuadorian government, which was, you will not interfere with any foreign governments. So, I can just imagine the meeting.

Somebody walked in and said, now, what did we tell you? Yeah. He said not to interfere with any foreign governments. What did you do? You mean me? Well, I interfered with the foreign government. Oh, you mean that government. What are we going to have to do now? Oh, you mean that government?

Oh. Yeah. Was that wrong? Oh, that one? Should I not have done that? Is that actually a government to technically? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So, that must have been a fun meeting. Someday, he'll man up and walk out the front door, but maybe not. And 10 gazillion drones all around the world will go. And it'll be awesome.

Now, see, I almost hesitate to talk about this story because, given the last two weeks, it seems almost quaint and kind of ridiculous. This is just an old school data breach. No big deal, really, in the grand scheme of things. These days, 150 million MyFitnessPal users, which is an app that Under Armour, the underwear and workout brand, has out there.

So, usernames, email addresses, and hash passwords were exposed. So, 150 million people. This just seems quaint. It's like nothing compared to what we're dealing with on a daily basis these days. But it happened. And we used to report on these things.

My biggest question is, they're investigating this now, and it is just the MyFitnessPal app. They also have MapMyRun, MapMyFitness, Record, and the company's namesake application, which makes me wonder, why does one crappy workout clothing brand have multiple fitness apps?

Yeah. Yeah. I have not gotten any kind of notification about this because I am a MyFitnessPal account holder. Ah, well, you've been breached, potentially. Yeah. I used it with my trainer for a while. He had me track everything, my workouts and my food. But I have not been notified of any breach.

Well, they have been overall complimented about how quickly they got the word out. I think it took them four days after they discovered it. So overall, people are saying that they've handled it as well as could be expected. That's interesting you haven't been notified. Yeah.

I was going to say, can't they notify the people who have been breached by chance? Well, but that's part of what they were saying is that they notified the people who've been breached before they notified the general public. Oh, so then I guess one would assume, Jason, that you have not, your bit of information was not breached in theory.

Either that or it's in a spam folder. Yep. Or that. Could very well be. All right. So you guys tasked me with homework last week and I did hear that. And actually, I was quite knowledgeable about this ahead of time because unfortunately, as we are all getting to this age, my uncle has not been well and has a terminal illness and I was asked to be the executor of his will.

So I am somewhat aware of the privacy rights of the deceased and what happens. There are two main things that kind of affected the Freedom of Information Act and then the Federal Privacy Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA.

So the Privacy Act itself is very clear. It does not apply to dead people. Once you die, your information is no longer protected under that law. Court precedents have shown that privacy concerns of surviving family members will weigh in on decisions to release information via the Freedom of Information Act. So that act in and of itself doesn't do anything for you.

It's all judges and things like that that will determine whether any information about you is released. But again, you have to make a Freedom of Information Act request to get that sort of stuff. So this probably wouldn't apply to 99% of us. We weren't running mafia scams or there's no fraudulent financial things going on that would require people to look into you.

HIPAA itself, the other one, is actually there on purpose to protect you. It protects a person's privacy, which extends indefinitely even after death when someone dies. Basically, that control and decision passes to either a family member or an executor of a will.

So I would be responsible for my uncle's privacy and I would make the decisions about what information would and would not be released. Now, obviously, as we've talked about a lot on this show, law has not kept up with technology. So how all of this would play out with social media, with Twitter accounts, with Facebook accounts that may be private, who the hell knows?

So, you know, that's kind of where we're at in terms of death and privacy, at least legally at the moment. A couple of things come to mind here. First of all, I have a friend who is an attorney and she specializes in estate planning. And one of the things that they work on these days is what happens to your social media accounts when you die.

So that's become a standard part of estate planning now. And part of that can be the, you know, the attorneys basically having your passwords in escrow or, you know, that sort of thing and deciding who gets access to what. So they're kind of on that. But this HIPAA thing, it made me wonder what happens if someone, if after I die, somebody needs my blood for something.

Because is blood, is dead blood still blood? Is that blood that, dead blood that's inside my body that may be used for evidence, is that medical or is that just stuff? Well, if it needed to be used for evidence, then it would be, it would have to be a Freedom of Information Act request and then it would go to judges and things of that nature.

If it was just, you know, we would like to get said person's blood for some reason and there's no legal reason to do so or anything like that, then it would be the estate or family member that would either say yes or no and be totally up to that. Yeah, okay.

At least that's my understanding of the law as it is now. Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense. But like you said, there's a lot yet to be figured out with this, with the intersection of these things. And that's fascinating. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I had a story that one of my colleagues here at the Cyber Wire sent over.

This is from HelpNet Security, which is a well-known security website. And the title is, You Can't Hide from This Top Trend at RSA Conference No Matter Where You Operate. And RSA Conference is, of course, the big cybersecurity conference every year coming up in a couple weeks in San Francisco.

I will be there, I don't know, 30,000 of my best friends in cybersecurity. And so this caught my eye because these researchers, I believe professors at Virginia Tech and some folks from RSA, ran all of the paper proposals, the call for paper submissions through some natural

language processing and came up with the top topics for the past 10 years or so of the RSA conference. Now, last year, we spoke about what was the hottest topic in cybersecurity.

Gentlemen? IoT? No, no, no, no. We've talked about it here many, many times, probably more than anything. It is Brian's favorite subject. Oh, AI? Yep. AI. AI. AI and machine learning. Last year at RSA, you could not walk around that conference, swing a dead cat, and not hit somebody who was talking about AI or ML.

It was the buzzword. I mean, it became a joke how much it was the buzzword. Now, natural language processing is a form of? AI. Right. Now, what doesn't show up on any of these lists?

AI. AI. It is gone. Which, of course, leads me to the only rational solution. It's hiding itself. Exactly. Exactly. Skynet is self-aware, people. Right. Exactly. And he's hiding in plain sight.

The AI knows that we're onto it, and it's hiding itself from these lists. That's the only reasonable rational explanation for it not being on this list. That GDPR is a perfect distraction. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it's, anyway, it's an interesting article, but that just, you know, it's crazy that that's not on last year's list as the most popular thing.

That was the buzzword. Right. It's not even on the list. So, I'm not sure what's going on with that, but it's wrong. So, this year, I think they're probably right. GDPR is a hot topic because that's coming up at the end of May. Yep. There's nothing wrong with this list, but not having AI on it or machine learning is just, makes the whole list seem kind of nutty.

So, check it out. It's worth a look. Very cool. All right. So, when I was in my 20s, I had just graduated from high school, and I was working in video production. Wait, you graduated from high school in your 20s? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. College. Graduated from college. Thank you. Thank you for editing me on the fly there.

Graduated from college. I thought we had a smart guy on the show. Exactly. Right. Yeah. I'm like, damn. Yeah. It took me a few times to get through that senior year. So, graduated from college. In four years, I might add. Thank you very much. Went to the University of Maryland, and when I got out of school, started a video production company when desktop digital video was brand new, and my first client was the University of Maryland.

We produced highlights videos and coaches shows and that sort of thing for the university. So, I'm hanging out in the football equipment room because we're doing the football TV show, and I used to travel with the teams and all that sort of thing. Great job for when you're in your 20s. Then, when you have kids, you don't want to do that anymore.

Yeah. So, hanging out in the equipment room with this guy, his name was Ronnie, and he was exactly as you would imagine a football equipment room guy to be, kind of grouchy and handing out footballs and doing laundry of sweaty athletes all day.

So, we're hanging out there, just, you know, shooting the shit, and he comes by. And so, he had one of those sort of half-height doors that people would have to come up to to request things. And one of the football players comes up to the half-height door, and he says, Hey, Ronnie, I've been working all weekend at my grandmother's house, and I made up these special t-shirts.

And I'm wondering if it would be okay if some of the guys wore them under their uniforms. And Ronnie looks at the guy, and he goes, Yeah, I don't care. That's fine. Sure. Whatever. Great. The guy goes, Oh, great. Great. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks so much, Ronnie. Thanks. And he goes away all excited. And Ronnie turns to me, and he goes, Kevin Plank has this idea of starting a t-shirt company.

That's awesome. Yeah. Isn't that great? That's pretty amazing. Yeah, pretty amazing. And as they say, the rest is history. Yes, it is. I like to think I was there when it began. I actually had the opportunity to tell Kevin Plank that story. I ran into him at a University of Maryland alumni event, and he smiled and said, That's a great story.

I'm not sure he believes that it actually happened, but I was there. And here you are now talking about how his company had a massive data breach. Full circle. So it's full circle. It all comes. Right. Who's laughing now, Mr. Plank? I think he's still laughing on his big pile of money.

Yeah, probably. Probably. All right, gents. That's it for this week. Take care. All right. Thank you. Glad you're back, Brian. Thanks. It's good to be back. Jason's still ignoring us, I think. Yeah. Fuck you guys. And the number of friends went down to one. Paul S. over on Evil Facebook sent us a great link.

The top 12 oldest websites still online today. Oh, look at that design. It's amazing. And somebody who did one of your favorite activities back in the day, Domain Squatting, got Milk.com. And they've still got it and still waiting for that payout, I guess.

You'll be able to get Milk.milk soon before he gets paid. I think so, too. So, yeah, it's a good walk down memory lane. I only know one of the sites that were on there. But I'm going to put this in the show notes. My original website, Spew, was put up in 1994.

Yeah. And I found the graphic that I created for the homepage. And I got to say, it's not too bad for 1994. Hey, man. It was good enough for me to write for you. Yeah, that's right. Flood's music reviews. That's right. Pretty cool stuff.

Pretty cool stuff. And the other cool thing that I saw this week over at ScienceDaily.com, prosthetic memory systems are successfully tested in humans. How cool is this? So, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California, my alma mater, have demonstrated successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person's own memory patterns to facilitate the brain's ability to encode and recall memory.

This is sci-fi crazy-ass shit right here. Oh, my God. Hurry up and euthanize them and stick them in a vat so we can recall the memory later. Yeah, maybe there's something to that company that we crapped on two weeks ago that wanted to kill you. I know. So, we're skipping at the library this week because we didn't have any time for books.

But I want to talk about one book real quick. I watched last week tonight with John Oliver. And he created a Marlon Bundo book to go up against the vice president's Marlon Bundo book. Yes. It is temporarily out of stock. Nice. Right now. It was temporarily out of stock the day after I tried to go buy it.

It is number one most sold on Amazon charts. It has 4,859 reviews and it's a 4.9. Nice. Now, if I scroll down the list, I get to the original Marlon Bundo's book with 335 reviews and a 4.6.

Number 11. John Oliver kicking ass. This is genius. And I saw a lot of people complaining, especially liberals, people on my side, about how this isn't helpful and it's not really doing anything to which I say. Bullshit. It's funny. Makes me laugh. He's a goddamn comedian.

He's not a politician. He is doing his job. And it is damn funny. So, you know, shut up. I was listening to, what was it, Dubai Friday with Max Temkin from Cards Against Humanity. And he was pissed off because he's like, this is something we should have thought of.

Yes. It was pretty funny. Yeah. There's a very long article over on thenation.com on how big wireless made us think that cell phones are safe. A special investigation. Now, the interesting thing about this is they're talking about how new 5G technology is basically going to be everywhere.

But the distance between the endpoints is so short that there's going to be a metric shit ton more radiation out there coming from all of these new antennas. And they're getting this stuff rolled out with basically no scientific oversight.

And some of the scientists are saying, hey, guys, no, it's not really ready yet. You should do more testing on it. Right. Now, I always go back to the bullshit episode on cell phones and cancer research and things like that. And at the time, all that stuff made sense. But this is new technology and new wavelengths and more radiation.

So it makes sense that they should actually be able to do a little bit more testing on it before it goes live. I agree. You know, I keep my cell phone in my front pocket and I'm just glad. Right next to your balls. I'm glad I've already. You don't need another one. Exactly. I've broken it already. And now I don't have to get my tubes tied. Awesome.

Thanks. There you go. Now, speaking of people who go with the rules, the FCC just gave SpaceX the go ahead to build a space Internet. Yes, the proposed system will include 4,425 low orbit satellites that will be in connectivity with the frequencies in the Ka and Clue bands.

Now, a little scary on those names there. It does make me feel like bad guys from Superman. Let your tinfoil hattiness commence there. And it's expected to go online next year. So that's they got to get 800 satellites in orbit first. So that's a lot of launches.

Did you see the launch this morning, by the way? No, you had mentioned it. And it was just it was a slow moving morning for me. So I didn't go outside to take a look. Besides, it's been very overcast here. So I don't think I would have seen anything. OK, yeah, because it was it was, you know, from the same spot the last time that everybody thought the UFOs were landing.

Yeah, that that I saw. That was beautiful. So, yeah. So fortunately, I'll be I'll be local soon. So I'll be able to get to see some of those, which will be very fun. I'm all for this. I mean, Google was supposed to put up all the balloons and we'd all get awesome, you know, Wi-Fi everywhere. But it looks like once again, Elon Musk is going to be the one to get it done.

Well, Project Loon has been giving Internet to Puerto Rico. Remember, I had that article a while ago where you can go on one of the flight track websites, one of the ones that you should have used, by the way, when you're waiting for your wife. And you can actually see the flight pass of all the balloons because they have to register with the FAA.

So you can go and see historical timelines of how these balloons are moving around Puerto Rico, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I'm moving ahead. I totally forgot about Puerto Rico, just like our government did. Yeah, I see what you did there. Now, I want to talk about somebody who has not been forgotten, and that's DonorsChoose.

I've always been a big fan of DonorsChoose. Over the years, I've donated $10,000 at least to fund different school projects back when I had money. I had a stack like two and a half feet tall of letters from the kids that I got in, a lot of handwritten letters and stuff. They got lost in a move one time. I was kind of bummed about that because they were great letters.

And I highly recommend if you ever have some extra cash, go on to DonorsChoose and fund a couple projects in your neighborhood because it'll make you feel good. You'll be helping the kids. And it's just a really good thing. But you're going to have to wait a little bit because the company Ripple, in a fucking amazing move, donated $29 million and funded every single project on DonorsChoose.

Over 35,000 projects in one day. That is amazing. Is that not the coolest thing? It warmed the cockles of my cold, dead heart. Yep. I'm sure it would. That's why I wanted to end this week on something nice. Since we weren't around last week, we've got a bunch of people to talk about.

From Patreon first, Ray S, SSJI, Derek C, Colin C, Jeremiah C, and Martin K. Martin K writes, just heard you talk about companies building their web presence in walled gardens and how that is not sustainable. Do you know IndieWeb? Thanks for producing this excellent and fun podcast.

Yep, I know that whole IndieWeb crew. They were my old friends in San Francisco and Technorati, like Kevin Marks, who was the real podfather, Tontek Celik. The IndieWeb is kind of a branch off of Microformats, which is a community that I was into way back then. So totally know about the IndieWeb. It's still the same group of guys not really getting that much traction, though, unfortunately.

And I just want to quickly correct. It's Ray H at the beginning. If you're giving us money, we're going to get your last initial right, damn it. Oh, what did I say? I'm sorry. Ray S, no big deal. We fixed it. Dyslexia. Thank you for the timely feedback on my speech. No problem. And William E wrote in on Patreon as well.

Okay, you two, after sitting around at the $10 a month level and listening to you every week, I decided to stop being a grumpy old cheap-ass geek and push it up to $50 a month. Woo-hoo! Which is still nowhere near what your podcast is worth, but it's the least I could do for now. Keep up the awesome podcast. You make the drive home on Mondays enjoyable.

As a 40-plus grumpiest geek ever, if you ask my wife, your show is by far the best podcast ever. Keep it real and keep calling out the bullshit that is tech these days. My wife says you guys yelling about it rather than me has probably saved me a few years of life from not having to stay as grumpy as long. Keep it up and hope to give more when I can.

My wife would like to talk to your wife. Because she's sick of me doing this. But thank you so much. And really, $50 is, I don't even, that's crazy. Thanks. We really do appreciate it. We really appreciate it. And next up on Patreon is Jared. So I'm curious what the dog and cat do during the day while we are gone at work.

I'm also trying to prove that it's Lucy, the cat, that attacks the Kleenex box and not Midnight the dog. So I'm looking for some suggestions on budget home security cameras that I can put up. Any words of advice? You still got that box of Chinese security cameras sitting around, Jason? Nope. I gave that to my friend Kevin down the street.

The Smonet. He got the Smonet ones because I couldn't expand it and I needed more cameras. So I gave that to him. And what I've gone through with trying all the different cameras, I've got a couple of them. But I think for what you want, the Logitech Circle One cameras, the Circle Twos are out now, but I hear nothing but bug crap with them.

They're just very, very buggy. So I recommend the Logitech ones. The nice thing about them is they're fairly cheap, but you get 24 hours of internet recording time with it. So you don't have to pay for another service. You get the camera and then you can watch them from work on your Logitech app and you can see who's doing what to whom and then you're good to go.

And every now and again on Logitech.com, they go on sale. I got a couple of them for like $109 because I've got five of them in my house. But the other nice thing is they're wireless. So you can pick them up and move them around because they're rechargeable batteries and they're pretty cool. I highly recommend the Logitech Circle Ones.

When the Circle Twos update, I'll probably move over to those. But for now, these work great. Awesome. And we have a bunch of direct donations over at PayPal as well. Thank you to Steve R, Bread J, Mike K, Elizabeth J, and Bill B, who writes in. Hey, guys, I'm writing to you from June 6, 2015, episode 113.

I'm still listening to your show and I think you do a great job. I do feel like I need to keep listening so I can hear the answer to life's biggest mysteries. Does Jason stay in LA? Well, how timely is that? Well, he'll hear this in two years. By the chance, I might be back in Chicago.

Who knows? That's true. Does Brian's brain get sucked out by corporate overlords? No, that job went away. It crashed and burned. Will Uncle Bob finally say, fuck you guys, I'm doing voice work for Viagra commercials? I wish he would get that gig. It'd be interesting. By the way, we bought 1Password. I still support the music industry.

I buy CDs. Hard to find these days, buddy. Keep up the good work. Sincerely, Bill. P.S. Try to take it easy on law enforcement. There are bad apples in every profession. If everybody says FTP, it makes it harder for the good guys to do their job. I think we're pretty even-handed on that sometimes.

I think we always are, yeah. Sorry if you got the impression we didn't. We do like our cops. Yes, and some days we do get down on them. Now, Al S. writes in, have a brewski on me, broskies. By the way, you can long touch the reading mode button on Safari and have it use it for all sites or always use it for the current site.

I love that. Thank you for the tip. Yes, and John N. wrote in, love your podcast. I'm a project engineer with a structural engineering degree. We got some alerted listeners. I'm about 20 years older than you guys. When computers first showed up in construction companies, there were no IT guys. Engineers like myself were the default programmers.

My training, one university course with a card, reading mainframe computer the size of a bus. We cut down your story a little bit because it goes on, but here we go. I'm writing this from Zimbabwe, where I currently work. I don't long for the good old days, but I'm amazed that more people don't question how unlimited content is affecting their lives.

I often tell younger staff that new isn't automatically better. I 100% agree with you that paying for good quality content rather than sifting through unlimited free content, both real and fake, is a no-brainer, yet most people choose the latter. I can easily see myself going off the grid entirely, but I'm not there yet.

I'd miss your podcast and the other content that I enjoy via the internet. Thank you, John. Thank you. That's pretty cool. Coming from Zimbabwe. Yes. Over on Twitter, Mitch S. writes in, very interesting about Equifax, since we actually had the fee waived for the credit freeze because of their breach.

Had to pay the other two, so really all three made bank. Yeah, shocking. Yeah. Yeah, and Clued V. writes, pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is happy that the Cambridge Analytica shitstorm happened before GDPR. Yes, I'm sure he is. I bet he is. Barrett R. writes in, I know you're always looking for movies to check out.

I'd recommend Control. That's K-O-N-T-R-O-L-L. It's Hungarian with subtitles from 2003. Has a Trainspotting Fight Club vibe. We'll definitely check that out. Yeah, I watched the trailer look pretty cool. And Kenny sent in, after the last podcast hit, 134 minutes.

I may have to lean on the speed slider a little. I'm with you, Kenny. Oh, well. Tough shit. Yeah. Now, let's skip over down to our iTunes ratings. We've got a ton of feedback and just too much for us to deal with in one show. So what we're going to do when Jason makes his trek cross country again is we're going to do a feedback only show because it's going to be a tough week for Jason to keep up on the news and there's timing issues when he loses internet and all that.

So an all feedback episode will be coming very shortly. So if you have a question or a comment and you want us to talk about it at length, ad nauseam, and still have a 134 minute show with no news whatsoever, just feedback. Now's your chance. Write us immediately. So send us all your questions.

On to the iTunes reviews for right now. Austin Desert Fuzzstone Rock gave us a five-star rating. Nothing is sacred. Not Bitcoin. Not even Luke Skywalker. While I don't agree with everything they say, these guys are very knowledgeable about a lot of stuff I'm not. I learn and laugh during every show and GOG is priority listening, aka high on my list now.

My only advice, don't take advice from anybody. My only advice is pick which way you want to spell advice. I hate to pick on you for this, but you did it with an S and then you did it with a C. So continue what you're doing and proving upon excellence along the way. Thank you, Austin Desert Fuzzstone Rock.

Sorry about Brian shitting on your spelling, but he's right. Ryan H. Writes in, great show. I've been listening for months now and this show is great. Relevant, up-to-date topics, and just fun overall. The show is entertaining from beginning to end and a must to add to your podcast list. Well, thank you very much, Ryan. And another five-star rating for Breeze C in the UK.

Grumpy and awesome. I started listening to the show a few months back and it's quickly become one of my favorite tech podcasts. With so much going on in the world, it's a great way to get a weekly digest when I haven't had time to keep up with things and the hosts are hilariously irreverent. Keep it up. If you want your question and comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. Tell your friends and send us your questions that we can put in this feedback slash Q&A episode because that's going to be fun. I think so, too. Be nice to take a week off from tech news. Oh, God.

It'd be so nice. Closing shout outs. I want to do a shout out to all the amazing registered nurses that are out there. We had a shit ton of specialists working on my dad and it was an RN that said, hey, let's try this, which ended up being the game changer and brought my dad back to us.

So thank you so much and respect them nurses. Oh, definitely. They're fantastic. And big shout out to Brian Shaw. He's a listener who works in broadcast engineering in Maryland who's sending me some swag for my RE20. It was a very nice surprise this morning. So thank you, Brian. That's very nice of you. All right.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo. 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 253. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week. Okay, that does it. Screw you guys, I'm going home. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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