254: Pedantic Fail

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I've got a story for you, Brian. Okay. I was sitting around Easter dinner with my dad and my family, and they were telling me about a new coffee shop in Naperville, Illinois that just opened up, and they went to go check it out. And the story had me so befuddled that I couldn't focus on anything else over dinner.

So they go into this new place. They get their two new coffees. It was $9.68. Okay. That already has me befuddled. I don't understand how coffee is so expensive, but, you know, I'm just an old man now. Yeah. Well, it is Naperville, which is, you know, one of those hoity-toity suburbs. Okay. And now this is where it gets interesting. They hand the college-age girl behind the counter, who obviously is smart enough to get the job, handed her a $10 bill.

Okay. $0.32. They had to go to the change drawer, open up all of the change rolls because they apparently had never made change. So they had to crack open all of them. Then this is the point where it gets fun. She could not figure out $0.32. So she's staring at it, trying to figure it out, trying to do math in her head, looking at the thing, trying to press the buttons on the pretty picture console that she's got and can't figure it out.

Calls over her friend who's making the coffee. They're trying to figure it out. My stepmom at this point has already told them the answer. Just $0.32. Give me my $0.32. And they proceed to tell her, no, get a calculator. I shit you not, they had to get a calculator. These are college-age women in Naperville, Illinois.

And it took them five minutes while the line got longer and the people got angrier, but they finally figured it out and gave them the $0.32. Now, you're working in retail. You have a cash register in front of you. Sometimes you have to give people money back.

Apparently, the problem was the screen had changed. Like, her friend came over and started to plug in another order, so the change amount had disappeared. And she couldn't figure it out on her own that it's $0.32. You know, I mean, there are multiple things here. Like, a lot of people just, which, people have stopped using cash.

So, a lot of these people are not used to this anymore. They're, you know, you wave your phone and there you go, it's all done. And off you go, off to the races. But, I mean, I've been screaming about these touchscreen things for a long time now, since we started this show. The pictographs and the removal of any sense of work for these cashiers.

And it's only slowed things down. The idea behind it was, we'll speed it up. There's a pretty picture of a cheeseburger. They ordered a cheeseburger, pressed the cheeseburger picture. No, everything has slowed down. Everything has slowed down. And this is directly related to the rise of Amazon.

Because if I can avoid going to a brick-and-mortar store these days, I do. Because the experience is just awful. Although, I don't really think that applies to food. No, I think that was a little bit of a tangent there. It is. Yeah. When it just comes to common sense and base human knowledge, it doesn't take much to figure out how to count change.

Yeah, well... You keep adding money until, in your head, you start at $9.68, and it's like, okay, so then I put two cents in, that's $0.70. Then I put a quarter and a nickel. Hey, we're done! Wow, that was easy. Yeah, I mean, this is the exact same sort of thing that's made me come around to self-driving cars.

People are so stupid and awful driving that now I embrace the self-driving car. Now I am embracing the robots that work at these stores instead of actual people. Because people just can't seem to handle it anymore. It's mind-boggling. It really is. In, like, you know, 25 years, these people have just turned...

It's turned into idiocracy in, like, the 25 years when you and I were, like, at the same age when we were working those same jobs in retail. Yeah, I worked at a bookstore. I made up change in my head all the time. And I had a machine in front of me that also conveniently gave that information as well.

It's not that hard. For you millennial listeners, a bookstore is a place where you used to go get books. So I have not left Facebook yet. And as I was looking at Facebook yesterday, I have a couple friends that live up in your favorite city, the Manpu capital of the world, San Francisco. And one of my friends posted, Guys, what's going on?

Yesterday, there were no scooters. And then he posted a photo, and there were roughly 30 scooters on one sidewalk. What happened? So, yeah, Bird. Not just Bird. I was going to say, Birds migrate north. Apparently, they do.

Not just Bird has hit San Francisco. All three of the big companies that we talked about, Spin, Bird, and LimeBike. LimeBike was the one that we were alerted to from a listener of the show that hit Washington, D.C. All three of these in the last two weeks have ended up in San Francisco, which makes sense, because if you want to get money for stupid ideas, there you go.

So they're all there now, and they're not going there away anytime soon. And Curbed, which is kind of like a hyper-local site, much like you used to run, Jason, for San Francisco, has a great article about everything you need to know about the great electric scooter takeover of San Francisco.

And it basically says, are they legal? Yeah, kind of. Are they legal to ride on sidewalks? No, but everybody is. Are people riding them on sidewalks? With impunity. Fury-inducing. We need to figure out something here. Fine. Where can I ride them? This is a couple places. Where are they docked?

Everywhere. Just look outside. You will trip over them. They will be in the way of anything that you want to get to. Everything that I've been complaining about, it's a funny little article. Are riders wearing helmets? No, of course they aren't. What about scooters piling up? Yep, that's happening everywhere. That's just great.

Oh, yeah. Well, all right. Well, now you got it too, San Francisco. It's spreading. Now, I posted a commercial in here from the University of Phoenix. Yes. Called We Can Do It, also known as We Can Do IT. Did you get a chance to watch the commercial? I did. What did you think?

I think that they have very clever marketing. They are tapping into a market that people are starting to become increasingly aware of, and hopefully because of us, because all we do is scream about this. I thought it was a well-done commercial for what it's trying to do, which is get people to go learn some new stuff at the University of Phoenix.

Yes. But I like your comment in here. Go ahead. Take it away. Well, you should go watch the video first. It's well done. It's a nice little animation. It's got a Cranberries cover song. It tugs at the heartstrings. It's about a single mom who's choosing to adapt instead of being left behind as automation takes over her manufacturing job.

And I was like, first off, shouldn't they be using What a Feeling or the Irene Cara thing from Flashdance? Because she did an automation job, right? And stripped. It was a different song. I'm just saying. So, yeah. She was a welder, you know. It's very well done. But as I scrolled down and I read through the comments on YouTube, one of them really just made me chuckle.

It said, ironic. Real actors replaced by animation depicting people replaced by automation. Ha ha. I thought that was pretty good. Yeah. It's not. Look, University of Phoenix is much better at producing commercials than I think they are at educating people. So, well done. I was going to say, yes.

They're better at producing animations than graduates. Yes. Unless they have an animation department that actually made the commercial. But I tend to doubt that. Me too. I'm pretty sure that that's outsourced. I mean, it is Pixar level quality. It is. It is. It is that high quality.

So, now the other day, I'm, you know, logging in at night, trying. Before I go to bed, I just wanted to check something on Facebook because we had something going out. And a survey popped up and I looked at this and I stared at it and I stared at it and I'm like, what?

Wait, wait, wait, what? It is a survey that said, do you think Facebook is good for the world from Facebook? Of course I click no. Yeah, of course. As I imagine most people will. Did you get this survey? I did not.

Okay. Maybe it's a Facebook. Well, you're a Facebook developer still, right? Yes, I am. Oh, man, because I thought it was from Facebook developers. I don't know. If anybody else has got this, tweet at us. I'm at JPDEF, J-P-D-E-F on Twitter. And you can always do at GOG Podcast. And Brian is at Slender Fungus.

Let us know if you got this too, because, you know, I had a couple glasses of wine, but I didn't have a couple bottles of wine. So, I'm pretty sure this happened. Yeah, I didn't get that. I did get a notification that there have been updates to their product and business tools terms. So, I need to go look at those because I'm sure they'll be chuckle-rific as well.

Yeah, and incomprehensible. Yeah. And I just wanted to... Things have been a bit weird for me recently, you know, things with my dad and whatnot. And I've also just been reaching out to a lot of friends for other reasons. And a lot of friends of mine have been a little down recently.

It's been a rough year, particularly if you believe in sanity. And I just wanted to make a quick note about happiness. I've been happy for the majority of the run of the show, for the majority of the run of my life, all grumpiness that we present here aside. I'm currently struggling a little bit, and I'm going to seek some help for that.

And I encourage anyone listening to do the same, and not just keep track of yourself, keep track of your friends. We think that we're connected to everyone because of the social media age. It's not enough. Reach out to people that you think are hurting right now. Don't be crazy YouTube chick, and don't be like Jack.

Yeah, no, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm sorry to hear that. I went through that before I left Los Angeles, and it sucked. Yeah, it's a drag. But, you know, I've got good people around me. It's going to be fine. You know, there are touchstones in my life that I need. I need my bike rides. I need to be reading books.

I need to be challenging myself. All those things have kind of fallen by the wayside because life happens, and it happens fast. But, you know, I'm just keeping chabs on it, making the time to make myself happy. Good. Everybody should do that. That is a good thing. And when I get out there, we can go have more beers at, I keep wanting to call it Flogging Molly's, because it's been so long.

Flogging Molly has played there, Finn McCool's. Finn McCool's. Yeah, same initials. That's why. You saw Flogging Molly at Finn McCool's? Yeah, a long time ago. Oh, my God. I still have never seen them. Pisses me off to this day. They played every weekend in Los Angeles, and I'm like, I'll catch them next weekend, catch them next weekend.

And then next week, the one week that I was like, oh, maybe I'll go see Flogging Molly. No, they're opening for Green Day at AT&T Park in San Francisco. I'm like, okay, they're done. Never going to see them again. I have accidentally seen Flogging Molly like 10 times. Like, I've just walked into a pub and they've been playing, and you've never seen them.

That's the thing about it. It's like, because they were playing so much, I was just like, ah, I'll catch them next week. I'll catch them next week. You know what? You got to grab the Molly by the flogging when you need something out there. You do. You do. In the news.

Well, Brian, I don't even know where to start with the YouTube shooting. There are many, many points of entry. There are very, very many points of entry, and it's like we have like a shit ton of notes here. A lot of which are no longer valid.

That's kind of the problem is this story evolved so much so quickly just over the couple days. So I don't really know where to start either, and it's something that it's a difficult thing to talk about because obviously, you know, it's horrible that this happened, and you feel bad for the people that work at YouTube.

To some degree, you almost feel bad for YouTube, but I also have a lot of, I feel really bad for this woman. I feel horrible for her. Now, she's obviously has some mental issues. You know, she's not all there, and it's not, she wasn't all there. I was going to say, past tense, past tense.

Yeah, past tense. What she's angry about, she had a right to be angry about. Yes. You know, she didn't react appropriately, but her feelings and her, she's not wrong. She wasn't wrong at all. It sucks.

And this, again, this comes back to the happiness thing and what I was just saying about, like, keep an eye out, like, on your friends. Because apparently her father saw her spiraling and called a little bit too late. Yeah, and I don't think he knew the severity of it and what she was willing to do.

Yeah. Because she was definitely a little unhinged at the end there. Yeah. She needed professional help, for sure. But the triggering event, though, was her getting demonetized from YouTube. Yeah. And if she was making a living off of it, and, you know, that's the thing. Don't mess with people's money.

And that's what they're doing in huge swaths. YouTube pulled the rug out from underneath her completely. She was one of those people that just meant not a great living. She wasn't that Paul Logan guy or whatever the hell his name is. You know, she's not one of the one percenters, but she was making enough to get by, and she was living her admittedly crazy, weird life and doing it.

And YouTube basically just shut the door on her. Right. And this comes back to what we've talked about a lot in the show is, you know, digital sharecropping is real. Yeah. It's one of those things where, you know, people are making a living, but they're doing it on somebody else's farm.

And when the farm owner kicks you off the property, the sharecroppers are going to revolt. Now, this was definitely, obviously, an overreaction, but they have to expect this kind of thing in the future because these people are, they're putting their trust in the company and the company is just, you know, willy nilly treating them like dirt because they have other problems.

And these people just get innocently caught up in the aftermath of it because this all came about with the videos, like the video farms that were coming out of China. And those places that were, you know, targeted towards kids videos. Yeah. That's what originally prompted this whole, you know, move to you have to have X amount of views and X amount of view hours and things like that.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people probably got caught up in this and they probably think, ah, these people aren't making that much money anyway. We're just going to run the numbers. But what they're not looking at is they're not looking at the high end of the bell curve where people are, you know, probably doing enough like this woman was to make enough money to live and they just cut them off without, you know, a second thought.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I, even when they, YouTube announced this policy, I mean, I was thinking now, okay, Twitter's verification system is a joke, granted, but why didn't they do some sort of verification system instead of a cutoff? It just, you know, there was, it would have been easy enough for them to go, okay, this is a real woman.

She is making videos and she is being monetized and that's fine. There's not a problem with that. That is, this is not the person that you're trying to block. They could have done this. YouTube's parent is Google. So they live and die by the algorithm over there.

Yeah. And if, you know, if you can put parameters on it, they'll do it. They're not, they don't want to answer the phone. They hate talking to people. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about this as I was taking my mental health break bike ride this morning because Google does own YouTube and, you know, those of us that don't engage in the YouTube ecosystem that, that aren't involved in making videos or watching them religiously like me, I'm not really a YouTube person at all, except for some kid stuff for my, for my kid.

It's easy for us to just dismiss what happened and not think about it and just go, yeah, so what? A bunch of people that are just shooting stupid viral videos that aren't making a lot of money just got cut out. Take it a step further. What if you or me, Jason, who basically make our lives on the internet in one way, shape or form, what if Google just kind of, as a parent company, just kind of instituted some sort of new weird ass rule that basically wiped us from existence from Google?

What if, you know, the only way that people could find our show is if they happen to know the URL. Right. You know, any search in Google does not return anything. That was, that was called the Panda update, I believe. A lot of, that happened to a lot of people. Yeah. But I mean, you know, they, they're perfectly in their rights to do that.

Google can just wipe you from the internet if they decide they want to. They haven't done that yet, but they're just kind of did that to a lot of people on YouTube. They didn't wipe them, but they certainly took away something that did exist, a way for them to make a bit of money. It's, you know, you're, it always goes back to, you need to own your own content.

You need to host your own content. But, you know, that ship has kind of sailed. Well, it hasn't sailed, but people have just gotten lazy and they don't know how to do it anymore. And especially when it comes to video, everybody's like, well, that's where everybody's at. It's like, well, you know what? Historically, things change.

They can change again. And if you have, like everybody now that I know that creates their own content, they don't market through Google anymore. They don't market through social media. They market through their email list. So they have direct, you know, contact with the people who want to get their stuff. And it's hard to get people on that list.

But once they're there, they can talk to them without having to rely on Google because Google ads, Facebook ads, Twitter, Twitter ads, Jesus. They've all shown to be completely unreliable for building audience. So people have gone back to the oldest school that there is, email, you know?

So there are ways that you can do it. And it's not hard, you know? Go to University of Phoenix, figure out how to build a website. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg would like to introduce you to this thing called Facebook video. Oh, God. I mean, I can't say it enough that if you really want to make money on the internet, stop relying on other people's platforms.

Yep. Speaking of that, we should probably really start a Grumpy Old Geeks mailing list. We should, I guess. But then we'd have to write something. Ugh. Now, this is very timely because Amazon customers are taking to social media because guess what? What? Amazon's mysteriously closing their accounts now with no explanation and no recourse.

Oh, shocking. Yep. So there is a, surprisingly, a Facebook group. I checked it this morning. There's about 2,800 people in it talking about the mysterious closures. I did not sign up because I'm wondering out of that 2,800 people, how many of them are tech journalists and bloggers?

They're just trying to take a peek at what the people are saying. So I didn't want to add to that. The interesting thing, and this just drives me crazy, when you go back to privacy and Facebook and how it's all effed up, I went to the group page and I could either join the group or I could see everybody who's in the group.

Yeah. If it's a group that I'm not part of, why should I be able to see everybody that's there? I'm reasonably sure that that's actually a setting, so we would call that user error. But then again, Facebook makes this all so complicated that God knows if you could even find the button easily to make it more private.

But it's one of those things where, why does that exist? If I'm not part of the group, I shouldn't be able to see who's inside the group. I agree. Okay. Anyway, this is not good timing for Amazon. No. With the YouTube stuff. Yeah. And now, I thought this was interesting, too. The shooting victims from the YouTube incident were taken to Zuckerberg Hospital.

Thumbs up. And I thought about this and I'm like, is it really? Zuckerberg General Hospital? That's a thing? I mean, is this like the Zuckerberg family from your? It's a hospital that has been there since forever that I never heard about when I lived in San Francisco. Nope. Nope.

Nope. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife donated $75 million to the hospital, so they renamed it to him. That's fine. I'm okay with that. Okay. That does not bother me. I mean, I wouldn't want to go to that hospital because, you know, they got rid of poke. Anyway, it's just funny that, you know, Facebook's competitors' victims are going to his hospital.

And we'll talk about some of the things that Facebook was doing with hospitals shortly. Oh, yeah. Now, yeah, the interesting thing this week, though, is did you listen to the Ezra Klein show? This was the first time he really kind of went on the air when this whole thing started this week.

I didn't, no. Okay, so he did an interview with Ezra Klein on Vox. Now, I'm not a big fan of Ezra Klein, but the interesting thing was just you have to listen to it. You can't rely on the transcript. You have to listen to the interview because Mark should not be on the mic.

He should not be on camera. And neither should Ezra, by the way, but that's neither here nor there. Now, but one thing that really caught me, that, okay, Facebook, two billion users, obviously the largest government in the world. Yeah, basically. You know?

And it's run by this asshat. Well, you know. It's completely run by this asshat. A lot of governments are run by asshats, too, so. True, but they're not as big as Facebook. And he kept saying over and over and over again about the community.

Yeah. He kept calling everybody, everybody that uses Facebook, the quote-unquote community. Two billion people. Yeah. All across the globe. Now, I'm going to read you a few definitions of the word community for a second. Tell me if any of these hit. A group of people living in the same place are having a particular characteristic in common.

Nope. Sound like Facebook? Nope. A group of people living together in one place, especially one practicing common ownership. Nope. Nope. Not Facebook. A particular area or place considered together with its inhabitants. Nope. Not Facebook.

A body of nations or states unified by common interests. Nope. Nope. Nope. And it just goes on and on. There's nothing in the definition of community that is Facebook. And this guy keeps thinking that since he has a website that a lot of people sign up for, that it is one community.

It's not. You've got to stop treating it like that. They've been saying that since day one. And what Facebook does is enable people to create communities. It is not a community in and of itself. But that's not how they treat it from the mountaintop.

Nope. Which, you know, that just shows a complete lack of vision on what they've created. It's like, come on, guys. This is not a community. This is a tool to put people together to create other communities. But it is not a community on the whole.

And I think when you see it like that, it causes problems because you can't treat everybody the same way. Right. No, I agree. I mean, that is part of the problem. And they don't see Facebook in the same way that the users see Facebook. It's definitely an issue. And I'd like at this point to propose a drinking game.

Next Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying before U.S. lawmakers in two separate hearings, both of which will be on C-SPAN. And I suggest that we sit down with some beers. And every time that he refers to Facebook as a singular community, we drink. Okay. Wednesday.

Let's see here. I'm up for it. I'm up for it. Let's record it. Let's record it. Maybe live stream it to Twitch. We will be passed out within an hour. I'm guaranteeing you. Oh, I got to pick up my friend Bob from the airport at seven. So I might have to call him an Uber if we start playing that game.

Yeah. Now, Facebook is obviously in the news quite a bit this week. They've announced all the news. Yes. Well, first off, the numbers keep getting modified and they keep going up and up and up. And as I posted on our Grumpy Old Geek social media this week, it's I've given up even posting any more stories about this because the numbers just rose and rose and rose as somewhere like they're saying 85 million now.

More than that, I think, at last time, that's just for the. Yeah, that's for the Cambridge Analytica side. Yeah. But then then there's the other bombshell. Which is everybody. Basically. Yeah. They basically just came out and said everybody's data as somebody out there has got it because third parties were able to go in and scrape the stuff before they had any checks in place.

Now, I am curious because I have kept my Facebook account private for a very long time. I wonder if they were still able to get my data. I'll be able to find out soon enough about Cambridge Analytica because they have announced that they will have a tool starting on April 9th. Also, just before he goes to talk and testify.

So we'll be able as of then to there'll be a little pop up and it'll say, you know, if your data was stolen by not stolen, it's a feature, not a bug. Exactly. Yeah, if your data was given to Cambridge Analytica specifically.

So that'll be interesting. And I am very curious to see if my data made it out or not, because I did keep I have kept my Facebook account pretty damn locked down the entire time. I'm fine with Twitter being open. I've locked down my Instagram just because I had a kid and it just doesn't make sense for that to be public.

So we'll see. I'm really curious to see if they got my information. Yeah, I'm guessing yes. But I mean, when it comes to the two billion number, that was just people like trying to get probably just getting your Facebook IDs. Yeah. And because just that's that's the important part is then they can link it to other stuff and use it for correlation down the line.

Because, yeah, if you you can find out who the person is, if they have a Facebook account. But if it's locked down, you can't really get that much out of it. Yeah. So we think. So we think the tool's been taken offline, so we can't really tell how how it works. Yes. And in the continued scramble to not look like horrible people, they have actually just Facebook has now updated their apps and website login deletion tools because you used to have

to go through and delete every single thing one at a time, which took forever. So they added bulk, which, you know, programming one on one people. It's super easy. Yeah. It's called a checkbox. Yeah. Not hard. Checkbox. That's all you got to do.

So I did it this morning. I got rid of 19 apps. I got rid of stuff that I haven't used in, like, 15 years that I was like, if not 15 years, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah. I was like, what the hell is this? Like, I logged into this once a long time ago, and I thought I had deleted it. So go check it, everyone.

You may have. They just brought it back. Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. So it's like the iOS update. Every time you every time they do an update, you get a new app back. Yep. Now, going back to the hospital angle, apparently Facebook was sending doctors on secret missions to get patient data that was supposed to be anonymized, but then they were just going to de-anonymize it and link it to your Facebook account.

That was the loophole that they were going to try and use. It's like, if you give us the anonymized data, you know, then we can just take the anonymized data. You are ethically still in the right, and then we can take it and then just de-anonymize it and link everybody back up. Yeah. And then we'll have healthcare data on all these people.

I don't know if you- Fortunately, nobody had done it. I don't know if you made it far enough into the data ethics class where they discussed specifically all this kind of- not this case, because we didn't know about this yet, but I have so many questions about this. First off, yes, you can de-anonymize the data.

That is definitely going to happen. It's ridiculous to think that you can't. Do you remember the original case of anonymized data that got out there that was, yeah, the big bulk of anonymized search data that was then de-anonymized within, like, hours?

Remember that one? I do. Remember who that was? No, I don't. That was AOL. Was it AOL? AOL search. Yeah, AOL search, yeah. So that's- secondly, what the fuck does Facebook want information from a hospital for? The way this data is supposed to go is the other way around. It should be researchers and hospitals asking Facebook for data that will help them to find cures for things, not the other way around.

What the actual fuck? I'm sorry. The place where I post cat videos does not need to know if I have gout. No. Sorry. That's- it's crossing the line. I don't understand- Crossing the fucking line. You know, I've been on the fence. I mean, I understand everybody's anger towards Facebook, and I'm watching my friends, even though Mark Zuckerberg says nobody's actually leaving Facebook, bullshit, because I get notifications every goddamn day.

Now, I think the way he's skirting around that is it's really, really difficult to completely delete your account. So I think what a lot of our friends are doing is just deactivating their account. So Zuckerberg can actually claim that they have not left. They have just deactivated and can reactivate at any time. So that's a way to get around that.

But people are deactivating left, right, and center. And the more I hear about this company, the more I'm inching towards me wanting to do it. But again, the problem is it's the only way I stay connected to so many people in my life that live somewhere else geographically. And it's easy. That's the real problem.

It is easy. I know. Make an email list. Yeah, I can make an email list like friend of the show, Sean Bonder, and then complain when people unsubscribe every week. God. That is so funny. He's like, oh, seven people. I'm like, oh, write more interesting shit. Yeah, and friend of the show, Dr. Teeter, deactivated his.

And I saw that he liked my latest post. So I guess he de-deactivated, too. People do that. It's like, oh, I left. Now, what am I going to do? You're not going to go to LO. I had deactivated my Facebook account once like five years ago just for like a month because I wanted to, basically.

I was just like, I wanted to try to unplug a bit, all that sort of stuff. And I remember they sent numerous notifications and emails. And if you accidentally clicked on anything, boom, your account was reactivated just like that. Instantly reactivated.

Yeah. So it's honestly nothing. It does nothing. No, it does nothing. People can search for you and they can't find you while it's deactivated. But all it is, it's like logging out and logging back in, you know, with an extra step of clicking deactivate. Yeah. Yeah. Deleting your account takes a couple extra steps.

I've deleted my account before and it did take a while to do it. Yeah. But at this point, I'm kind of going through my list of things that all the apps now, since I look at the apps and I can see what I'm using to log into certain things. And every single one of them, once I use Facebook to log in, I automatically create a new login on the site using an email address.

So it's like not necessary anymore for me to keep Facebook to log into something else. Yeah. I've been slowly migrating all my stuff to doing independent accounts instead of using Facebook. Yeah. And, you know, as when Dr. Teeter left, I asked him, I'm like, why'd you leave?

He's like, it does not bring me joy anymore. Right. And I'm like, that is the best reason. Fuck all the security stuff. The fact that it does not bring you joy is the greatest reason in the world to do something. Yes, it is. And speaking of somebody not having any joy, Facebook fact checkers are apparently miserable.

Wow. Gee, shocking. Yeah. Interesting article on Gizmodo UK. There was the Tao Center. Is it Tao or Tao? T-O-W. I mean, I don't know. Tao Center for digital journalism because it's digital journalism.

So it seems like it would have more gravitas if it was the Tao Center. The Tao Center seems like it's a podiatrist's office. But anyway, they did a study talking about fact checking organizations. And apparently all of the people that are, you know, trying to do all the fact checking on the articles that people are posting to Facebook are just miserable because the tools that Facebook wrote are terrible.

Wow. Shocking. They don't even unique the URLs. It's like, you know, there's like thousands of duplicates in there and people are like, you know, recreating work. It's silly. It's like because it was just a hodgepodge that they slapped together to try and make the public happy. Yeah. They probably put an intern on it and said, here, make a tool for these people so they can go to Snopes and click yes or no.

So that's about all it is. Pretty much. Yeah. Anyway. So let's move into some more different news. Okay. Because I'm kind of tired of talking about Facebook. Me too. And I'm sure everybody's tired of listening about Facebook. The president of France. Macron. Macron. Macron. He gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence in his country.

The French government is going to spend $1.85 billion over five years to support research into AI, encourage startups, and collect data that can be used and shared by the engineers. The goal is to start catching up to the U.S. and China to make sure the smartest minds in AI choose Paris over Palo Alto.

Well, I hate to break it to them, Canada beat them to the punch. Yeah, they're choosing Toronto. That's where everybody's going. Toronto is rocketing to be the head and center of AI research in the world. No doubt about it. But good on, I mean, it's smart. It's good on Paris. You know, good on France.

You got to start chasing this stuff. They're pretty smart doing that. You know, it makes a lot of sense. The problem, France has immigration problems that put the U.S. to shame in terms of their policies. That's the problem. So, you know, you've got to be open to immigrants and very, very open to immigrants if you want to be a big AI center.

That's just the reality. So good luck with that. Yeah, seriously. So, I mean, give it a shot, but we know AI doesn't exist. Or does it? Because now there's a project over at Google called Project Maven. Okay. And thousands, thousands, I say, of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in Project Maven, which is a Pentagon

program that uses AI to track the movements of vehicles and people from drone footage from the United States government. They do not like being the tools of war. And they're fighting back and saying, we should not be, here's the thing, we believe that Google should not be in the business of war, says the letter.

See, there you go. That's exactly what they said. I knew I was getting there somewhere. You got it. Slowly, I'll make it around. If I just had an AI to track my words and get me on the right path. But I read the letter. It's interesting that these people are coming out against it. And they even, quote, don't be evil in there as the company's motto.

But we all know. That is not the motto. We all know. That's the, it's not the motto. That has been depreciated. For a very long time. Deprecated, actually, is the term. Yes, my bad. It's okay. Now, trust. I used to say depreciated. And then somebody, smart-ass engineer.

Yeah. It's deprecated. Wow. I'm like, okay. Yeah. I think I punched him in the balls. That's true. Depreciated is more of a financial. It is. So this is an ongoing story. As of the time of this recording, there are, there's no new news. It's developing. So we'll hopefully pick it up in two weeks when we're back with another news show.

Because next week, we are going to have the question and answer show. Yay. So please keep sending us questions. Lots of them. Yes. Free, please. And the SEC has charged founders of a cryptocurrency ICO. Mm-hmm. It was promoted by Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled.

And they charge him with fraud. First off, DJ Khaled is a fraud. He is not a DJ. He is not a musician. He is a fraud just to begin with. He does nothing except for point up in the air and say his own fucking name. So fraud. Fine. Good. So anyway, they caught one of these guys leaving the country the other day.

And they're like, ah, no. Get off that plane. You're coming with us. So these guys, like, weren't going under the radar. Like, they got Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled to talk about the ICO. The ICO raked in $32 million. That's a decent amount of change.

Respectable. So, you know, those, yeah, class action lawsuit had already been out wanting the money back. So now the SEC is saying, yeah, give back the money and you can never work in the C-suite again or work in securities. Yeah, good. So. Okay. That's good.

That's fine. I would prefer jail time. Yeah, me too. This is exactly what you and I said was going to happen with all this cryptocurrency stuff. It's starting to happen. The government's just saying, hey, enough of this crap. You're stealing too much money. You're being way too shady. This is all a house of cards, damn it. And without Kevin Spacey. The biggest issue, like the ICOs, they're not providing value for the money.

No. Yeah, you have to have a value for security that's worth trading. Yep. They're not providing that. And as it could be told, this guy was skipping town. Yeah. All right. With the money. Yeah. Well, speaking about not providing value, Spotify went public and its first day of trading ended up being really normal.

Everybody was worried that this is going to be a shit show because they did a very non-standard IPO. But it was totally fine. You know, Spotify is doing fine. The stock price isn't fluctuating crazy. It's doing okay. You know, but the one thing I have to say again about all these things, it's just yet another tech company that has never, ever made a profit doing pretty well on the stock market.

What a world. Do you ever use the Google URL shortener, goo.goo? I have never used that one. No. I haven't either. I always stick with Bitly or Amazon. Well, I don't really use any of them anymore, to be honest. Like, those are going the way of the dodo, aren't they? Really?

Yeah. Well, so is Google. However you want to pronounce it. They're shuttering it. As of April 13th, new people will not be able to create links, and existing users will be able to use it for a year. Okay. So they're moving over to what they call Firebase Dynamic Links.

That's a mouthful. It is. It's part of their Firebase. Isn't it ironic that a shortening procedure has a mouthful for a name? Like, I need a URL shortener just for the name. No doubt. Can I go to fd.l, please? So the interesting thing about this, and this makes a lot of sense, because nowadays, if you have a URL for, like, customer support, right?

Yeah. You put your link into customer support. It can be accessed from many different devices on many different platforms. So this is a smart short link solution that will, like, if you're on a web browser, it'll point you to the URL. If you're on an Android phone, it'll point you to, you know, the app URL.

Right. So it'll open in the app, and same with iOS. Which is very smart. Yeah. I'm surprised nobody's done that yet. Well, apparently they have. It's called Google. But I'm surprised any of the other shorteners didn't think of that, because it makes sense to be able to sniff the platform that the user is on and then deliver a different link based on location.

Yeah. Instead of having to do it yourself. It seems like a no-brainer. You know, have a sniffer on your own end, which is what we used to do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It's like, these shorteners, it seems like it would have been a no-brainer to do. But yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, really, anybody that relied on Google to...

No. Almost everybody. I think it was built into stuff. Yeah. Almost everybody I know used Bitly. Yeah. Oh, I know one time I did use it. I used it to get a short URL to my Google Plus page. You know, I would have used it if I was still working with the Goo Goo Dolls when they rolled it out, because, you know, it would have made sense.

Ah. If you could have gotten Goo.Goo, that would have been pretty good. So, Phantom Auto is a new company on the block, and I like this one. I actually like this one. What this company does is, when your autonomous car takes a shit and can't figure out where to go if, like, the lights go out and it doesn't know how to drive.

They have a remote fleet of drivers who will swoop in and drive the car for you. Okay. They've got cameras around the outside of the vehicle, and they sit down in these cool chairs. They look like gaming chairs, like an arcade game from the 80s, and they can take over the car and drive it.

It doesn't work in quick solutions, because it takes about 30 seconds for it to kick in. And then they can take over the car. But if the car is stopped and it doesn't know what to do, it's like, derp, I don't know where I'm going to go, then these guys from Phantom Auto can come in and drive it.

It's a pretty neat idea. I like it. It is a neat idea, but I would argue that nine times out of a 10, you would need it for a quick solution. Not something like, say, when we start the podcast, you tell me at 10 a.m. and I open up the link and then 10 minutes of troubleshooting to get everything working right and correctly going. So yeah, that is not going to be very useful.

But early stages, early stages. Right. So I do like the idea of there being some sort of backup. And it's funny that a third party would be the solution, not something internal. But OK, whatever. That's not a bad idea. I'm cool with that. And here's the thing. I figured out how Uber can have self-driving cars.

They put these rigs in kids' homes who are video gamers. Yep. And then they can just sit down in their rig and get behind the wheel of any car that's out there that's ready to go. And then they can drive the car. Screw the whole self-driving car thing. We're just going to have remote drivers everywhere.

The only problem is when it goes cattywumpus when you're in a dead zone and you lose signal or somebody turns on the microwave next to your old Netgear router and you can't get connection to the car. But, you know, I can see fleets of people sitting in their home driving for Uber without ever leaving their house.

Yeah. Why bother with all that pesky LiDAR? Just pay a bunch of kids. I think I just saved Uber. I think I'm sorry. Well, I mean, I think I just saved Uber. You know, it is kind of the main plot of Ender's Game, but you can claim that you came up with the idea. Shut up. The movies suck. And finally, some good news.

Virgin Galactic is back in the news. The VSS Unity went supersonic yesterday. It's the first flight since the 2014 disaster, which broke my heart when that thing happened. The pilot was really injured and the co-pilot was killed because somebody didn't figure out that, oh, if I pull this lever, the wings pop up and at, you know, Mach 1.5, the whole plane will blow apart.

So they fixed that, hopefully. That's good. It's good. But they're back in the news and they flew yesterday and it's working. Cool. It's working. Get back to space, please. We need some good news. Yes. And Elon Musk needs some competition. That's right. Even though it's a different, it's a different space thing that Elon Musk, but I want space tourism.

God damn it. Apps and doodads. Well, this is something that nobody ever expected. Apple is reportedly killing laptops with Intel processors soon. Okay. And I'm sure that they're going to be doing that with their other lines as well at some point.

Probably not for the Pro or the iMac, but yeah, they make pretty snappy chips now. And of course they want everything in their ecosystem. So they control everything because they are, you know, the second most valuable company in the world or something like that. I haven't checked the market today. Me either. But I mean, everybody saw this coming.

Yeah. At some point it was going to happen. I don't want it to happen. I don't care either way. I doesn't, it makes, it really makes no difference to me at all. It's fine. I'm sure they'll be fine. All I care about is that they don't screw with the Mac OS and make it more iOS like.

Other way around is fine. Make iOS more like the Mac OS. Yep. But not the other way around. Hey Apple, if you're listening, Microsoft tried this and everybody hated it. So don't do it. Seriously. That's honestly, that is what pushed me to finally switch to, to Apple. You know, we were trading off places here, but when Microsoft rolled out that operating system, I can't even remember what their name for it was.

That was it for me. I was like, I can't, I do not want my desktop to be like a portable device. And this is horrible. And that's what brought me over to Apple. And Apple has started sucking ever since you came over. So maybe it's time to go back and I know, but I've been spending a lot more time on my PC just mainly because I've been scanning all these negatives so I can sell my scanner because I need money desperately.

But since I'm on it all the time, waiting for the scans to go, I'm just using it like a normal machine. I still haven't got my email client right. You said Thunderbird. Somebody else just keeps saying Outlook and I'm like, no, Outlook is the most horrible piece of crap ever made. It's like, yeah, it's terrible. Same with mail app on the Mac.

I use Airmail 3 on my Mac and I love it because it syncs with all my devices. I just love Airmail 3. Spark was good, but Airmail 3 is the way to go. But I need something that's akin to that for the PC. So if anybody out there has any ideas, please, I'll take them that it's not Thunderbird or Outlook.

I get why you don't like Thunderbird. Trust me, I do. The only reason I used it forever is it always reminded me of Eudora and it was just a blast from the past. And it works fine. It works completely fine. You know, I had to do some really deep dive email stuff on an export from a Google email address and do a bunch of reformatting and stuff.

The tools that are in Thunderbird are really impressive because they kept all of the deep stuff in there. So you can do some really cool stuff with email in there. I give them that. I just can't look at that fucking interface. It's terrible. Well, you can customize the hell out of it. You just have to put the time in then.

I don't want to put the time in. I want to open it up, put in my credentials and check my mail. I know. It's funny. Let's just, this is a tangent because you and I had a little couple conversations. I think it was last week about this very thing because you and I used to customize the hell out of everything.

We used to get pissed off at software that didn't let you customize it. We would put the time and put the effort in. And I can't remember, oh, it was private internet access that wasn't working for me like two weeks ago for some reason. It's working fine now. And I remember remarking to you, I used to love to debug this sort of stuff and now I just want it to effing work.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent in ResEdit in System 7 and 8 customizing, like drawing my own icons. I know. Me too. I used to always get custom icons and everything and now I just can't be bothered. Now I just like, I don't even bother setting it.

I'm using the same background screen that I've had for like 10 years now because I just can't be bothered. And even now, it pains me to say it, but I am using the stock hard drive icon on my iMac and it says Macintosh HD.

Oh, nice. Before, all my machines were named after like either characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Farscape, all that shit. Had custom icons. They were beautiful. And now I'm just like, it's a computer. I don't want to look at it anymore. Get it done. Just get this done and go, go back, go back to playing with my dogs.

Exactly. That is so funny. But I am enjoying the PC more. And I think the only thing I'm really missing is a decent set of audio tools and I could use it full time if I had to. And yeah, I mean, the interface is a bit uglier, but for 950 bucks, that thing is just as fast as this like $4,000 iMac I'm on.

I know it doesn't come with the 5k display that the iMac comes with built in and a bunch of other stuff, but you know, it works. It is just hilarious having you say everything that I used to say to you back to me now. I know it works though. I'm just, I'm amazed.

I mean, come on, man. I like last time I used windows. It was like, what was the one after windows XP? Oh crap. I can't remember. It's been so long. Hell, it might've just been XP that I was on. It's been so long, but it just works now. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you have to turn off, but it, cause all the privacy shit that they try and get from you.

No, I don't want Cortana on there. I don't want all this other crap on there and I just have to go turn off a ton of stuff, but I'd rather just be able to go turn it off and then have a machine that works. I might go back when it's time for me to get another computer. We'll see. Oh, don't please. Cause then that's going to start sucking.

If I go back, then you can't. No, I'm not going. I mean, I'm not going anywhere. I've got this. I've got seven max. Yeah. Well, let's see here. I've got the iMac 5k. I've got three Mac minis and I've got two, uh, 2014 MacBook pros. So I think I'm still stuck in the, the Mac world, but I do have an HP laptop and I do have that gamers Republic piece.

Yeah. I can see why you're looking at selling a scanner to make some money. Well, I, the minis are not worth shit. I still need those for Skype calls. I mean, the Macs are for work. I use all of those for work. Right. The PC, I got the PC laptop and for, you know, doing a bunch of stuff for customer support.

Like, so if I had a, uh, we're doing a call for the Jordan Harbinger show and a guest comes on and they're on a, on a PC, I need to have a PC ready to like walk them through setup and things like that. So I got the laptop for that. The PC, I can't remember why the hell I bought the PC.

I was probably drunk, but I don't care. I like it. It's cool. It looks like Tron's taint, but I'll take it anyway, moving on. So we'll see what Apple does in the future. We never report on upcoming Apple theories, but I thought that one was an important one.

Uh, HTTPS everywhere. Do you use that a browser plugin? I don't, I use it on my laptops when I'm out and about, but I don't use, I don't have it on my home machines, but now the, I mean, the interesting thing about it before was when you installed the extension, it got the lists of places that it could, you know, switch over to HTTPS.

If you were on an HTTP connection, it's just a background thing that just flips you to the secure connection. Very simple plugin. Everybody should run it. If you're on a laptop problem was every time that they wanted to update the lists, you had to go update the extension.

And now they finally figured out a way, well, Oh, we can just dynamically update the extension with the new lists. I'm like, I don't know why it took them that long to do that. Cause it seems like a pretty straightforward operation. It might've been a browser thing that it wouldn't let them like pull new data and store it and retrieve it with local storage and things like that.

Maybe I don't know. Or it could have just been bad programmers, whatever it is. It's gone now. So every 48 hours with the new extension, it'll grab the lists and update itself. So it's just, it's just one of those things. It's, it's, it's easy protection that you can throw on if you're just, you know, bouncing around and you forget to put in the S.

Yes. Cause I mean, everybody types in the URLs of all their favorite websites nowadays. Exactly. Uh, we talked a while back about Adam Savage's Savage Industries, EDC one, his bag that he made that, uh, yeah, you know, I want to like everything that Adam Savage does.

I'm finding it more and more difficult. Nowadays, it turns out we like nothing that Adam Savage does. I don't give a crap about cosplay. So his podcast has become basically unlistenable and his bag was horrible. It was ugly. It only came in white. It didn't really do anything for me.

I expected a lot more from it. It wasn't great. Uh, the reason I bring this up is, uh, somehow I stumbled across an awesome bag, the Wayfair Canvas Equipment Bag. It's currently on sale for $89.95 with a list price of $179.99. So that's probably bullcrap.

Uh, it, it's a great looking bag. Dude, I got a bag boner off of this one. I want this bag. The only thing I've bummed out about is it doesn't come in, you know, my favorite color, black, black, so, but the brown and the, the khaki are pretty nice. I would.

Yeah, I would definitely go with the brown on this one. It looks very Indiana Jonesy with the brown. It does. So that's a cool little bag. I like it. Glad you liked it. I thought, I thought that would be for you. Yeah, I'd like to see one in person before I buy it because there are so many gotchas with bags that I kind of need to see it in person before.

There's always something that the designer made a really dumb mistake on. It's never perfect. That's why we keep buying so many bags because we're just almost always there. And I think that maybe that's why they put those flaws in to begin with because that way you still have to buy another bag. It's like, oh, this one's close, but it's not what I want.

Oh, that one's even closer. No, you know. Well, you'll, you'll be happy to note that at least at the link that I found it at and put it in the show notes for you, there is a hundred percent guaranteed return. So you can order it and send it back if you don't like it. All right. Can I have $89? No.

Shit. Yeah. Okay. Moving on. The other thing I found was something over at amdestore.com. I don't even, I've never heard of a lot of these. It's the Star Wars betting sets. Boy, has stuff come a long way since we were kids. It's insanely cool. The Chewbacca one, you've got to like, go to the link in our show notes, check it out.

This stuff is amazing. I've got to get the Chewbacca one. It's so cool. And my kid is going to love this stuff if he gets into Star Wars. So this, I mean, leaps and bounds from what we had as kids, the crappy sheets that just had like, you know, X wings on it. This is amazing. Yeah.

No. And it's the AMD e-store and it stands for ambitious and dedicated. Okay. Well. Now I'm going to, I'm going to point something out on this website here. Under the size where you pick the size and add to cart, there is a ticker. Yes. That says zero days, zero hours, 53 minutes, 38, 37 seconds, only 14 left in stock.

That is 1000% bullshit. Of course it is. That is psychology bullcrap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're using a, they're, they're, they're making you use a, I can't even remember. I do so many of these things. It's, it's, it's a scarcity, a time scarcity thing to make you buy it.

This isn't, this isn't real. There's a thousand of these sitting in a box. Exactly. That makes me think that they're a reseller for this. And maybe if we do some research, we can find somebody that has it cheaper. That's true. This sounds like one of those things that I would pick out on Instagram. I haven't seen any good ones on Instagram lately.

That's why I don't have one this week. But, um, I think, uh, if, if we do some searching, we might be able to find these for cheaper because, but they're, they're fucking cool. Yeah, they are really cool. And I figured out why kids nowadays have these things and we didn't have them because these are the things we wished we had.

So when we grew up, people like us went and made them. That's very true. And the technology is there to do this sort of stuff, which it didn't used to be. And, and speaking of Instagram, uh, if you want to remember your vacation better, post less pictures of it on Instagram. Yep. Mental floss did a study on this, or at least reported on a study, uh, that concluded that recording an experience may prevent people from remembering the very events they are attempting to preserve.

Put your phones down people and enjoy your vacations. I was talking to my photo professor and I'm, I'm waiting to hear back from him on this quote that I swear he told me in the history of photography. And it was miles Davis in a small club doing a concert. A woman stood up, took a picture.

He stopped the performance and told her by capturing the moment, you've missed it entirely. Yeah, that sounds about right. Cause that's when, you know, Kodak was a capture the moment type of thing. That was way back then. I'm waiting for clarification on that quote from him because you know, this was 30 years ago that he told it, told that in class.

So I'm probably completely wrong. It might've been Devo at the palladium for all I know, but I think the, the intention is still the same, but yeah. If you take less pictures, you're, you're going to enjoy yourself more and you're not going to be worried about the photos. You're going to be enjoying the trip and you're going to remember. That's right.

Makes sense. Now a fan of mine, I don't know if this is a fan of grumpy old geeks or the Jordan Harbinger show or the other show that I used to be involved in remained anonymous, sent me a drone. No boy. They sent me a, this is a, it's a small little $99 drone that you can get from, well, you can't get it right now because it's sold out, uh, from DJI store.

It arrived yesterday. I, I, I, I charged it. I did not power it up in the house because I've learned my lesson. I would like to keep my fingers, but I would like to say thank you to whoever sent me this thing. It's cute. It's very cute. It's very tiny.

I was really hoping that I could bring it with me on the trip, but I can't. So it's not going to fit in the truck. I was about to say, are you sure this person is actually a fan of yours or he is aware of the fact that the last time that you had a drone, you almost lost your fingers. It could be Putin.

I bet there's polonium on those blades. This is, this is the, this is the delivery mechanism to finally snuff me out. This is some news that had me really sad.

I'm moving back to Los Angeles and it turns out Meltdown Comics just closed. Yeah. And with that, the Nerd Melt showroom also closed. I used to go there all the time and see standup and different shows. It was great.

It was a great little venue and now it's gone. I'm so bummed about that. It's a bummer, but, uh, you know, what are you going to do? Well, Nerdist has enough money. They should go open up a new place. I've been fascinated since Chris Hardwick left Nerdist. I've been fascinated with the podcast studio he's building.

I've been following on his Instagram stories. He has the tag house shit. It's, it's him building this new place and it looks fantastic. I mean, this is a multimillion dollar house renovation with, he's turning into a podcast studio. I'm like, I hate you because I bet the sound quality is going to be shit.

He never has good sound quality on his shows. But the house looks amazing. I can't wait to go maybe find somebody who knows him that can get me an in. I've asked all my friends and everybody's like, nope, sorry, not for you. Speaking of LA podcasting studios, Mark Maron is finally selling his house in his famous garage where he interviewed Obama.

It came on the market for $749,000. Now, nobody can figure out this number because I asked, I asked my real estate broker friends, my real estate realtor friends. And they're like, that's stupid low. What the hell's going on there? I know.

I was really confused by it. Then I went and looked at the listing and I was looking at the space and it's beautiful. Now, the one downside is it's not in the part of LA that I'd like to live. But Highland Park is a nice area. It's very close to Pasadena. There's no way that this there's no way that my condo in Santa Monica is worth more than this.

But apparently it is. Yeah, the estimates that everybody is saying it's going to sell for $1.2 million. That's reasonable. Yeah. And yeah, it needs work. It definitely needs work. But the outside spaces are gorgeous. You got the garage, which I was surprised at how crappy of a job he did on his garage renovation.

He's even got like a window AC in there. I'm like, how can you have a garage with no ventilation and just a window AC when you're doing podcasts? Because you have to turn that off. Yeah. Like, oh, it's got to be hot as balls in there. So it probably stinks, but I don't know. I was not impressed with his podcast studio garage, but the house looked really nice.

I'm surprised he's leaving. Need some rentals, but yeah. It was only 900 square feet, though, too. So that's kind of tiny. It is small, but it's a lot of outdoor space. And, you know, it's California. Yeah. You want to be outside most of the time anyway. Now, Denny's is in cahoots with the solo movie, and they made a commercial, which is just kind of a little movie premiere.

Now, I watched the commercial and I still don't want to see the movie, but damn, I'd fucking kill me a Sith for a moons over my hammy. Ugh. Disgusting. I love moons over my hammy. Yeah. It's just Disney synergy in motion. You know, as soon as Star Wars got sucked into the Disney universe, we knew that the cross promotions were going to fly fast and heavy.

So here they are. And this movie's probably going to suck, isn't it? It looks terrible, but I mean, if the last Star Wars movie was any indication. Stephen Fry is back in the news. I haven't heard from him in a long time. I miss Stephen Fry since he got run off of Twitter.

The new podcast is called Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years. The stories behind inventions. And it sounds like that old series that I used to watch. What was that called? The one with the guy with James Burke. And he would like, you know, go through inventions over history and tell you like how you remember you went from like, you know, a pig crapped in a trough and then we get radar.

Yeah. Yeah. The old James Burke series was called Connections. So cool. And but it's Stephen Fry. So he's, you know, he's researching and recording them themselves. But this is what gets me. This is what you get when you're Stephen Fry and you want to do a podcast.

The music was composed by Guy Farley with a full 75 piece orchestra recorded in Abbey Road. Yeah. Yeah, that's not a podcast, dude. It's an audio book. Sorry.

It's pretty impressive. It is impressive. Well, I was actually thinking of you this week because I'd read this story and I thought it was very funny and I was driving down to see my dad in the hospital. So I was listening to terrestrial radio briefly and I got treated to what was billed as a mini podcast from Arco, the gas company.

It was a 30 second commercial that they called a mini podcast. So I just wanted to I knew that would drive you crazy because the width and breadth of what falls under podcasts these days includes Stephen Fry with a multi billion dollar budget and an ad that's called a podcast.

If I was in the car, I would have driven 100 miles an hour straight into a wall. I figured as much. It's like NPR. We make podcasts. No, you don't make podcasts. You make reruns. NPR podcasts are not podcasts. They're reruns because they already aired on the fucking radio.

Anyway, Facebook is using AR to make movie posters more interactive. And since this is a Facebook story, but it's about movie posters. So that's why it's in media candy. And they're using some of the new AR tech. So when you look at your look at a movie poster through your phone, you get some animation.

You know what the more interactive version of a movie poster is? What? The movie. Yeah, it's just a movie. Oh, yeah. I looked at some of the Ready Player One stuff and it's cute. It's useless.

Somebody's going to make a lot of money off of this. Exactly. That's my thought. Exactly. Somebody is getting paid to create this stuff. So good on them. If, you know, if we were still doing what we were doing, we'd be building these things. We'd be making it. We'd be making it right now for every movie that we worked on. You have no doubt about that.

Oh, speaking of Ready Player One, you haven't seen it yet, have you? No, not yet. Okay. I'm going to give you the two second review. I liked it. I heard it's good. I've heard it's good. As long as you, you know, separate the book from the movie, it's all fine. That's why I didn't reread the book before the movie.

So I barely remember the book. I remember I liked the book. And then when I watched the movie, I'm like, this was actually a pretty good movie. I enjoyed the entire I enjoyed the shit out of Ready Player One. Okay, that's good. Speaking of stuff and a quick review. I have watched the first two episodes of Silicon Valley.

So you don't have to, Jason. I watched the first episode. Okay. And then that will be the last episode. What they really should have done is they should have just called the show this season Silicon Valley 2.0 because all they really did was reboot it. It's basically just restarted the show because they brought Belson back and he's running Hooli and he's battling against a nerdy boy again.

It's the exact same plot of the first season. Yeah. Exactly. Like, why bother? Money. Okay. Eyeballs. Right. Yeah. Okay. Ugly Delicious. David Chang's new Netflix series about different types of food.

Have you had a chance to watch this yet? I really liked the first two episodes. I was getting into it. And then after that, man, did it go off a cliff. Yeah. It's like the first two episodes were great. And then the third episode, it's Thanksgiving dinner at his house.

Yeah. What the hell is this? I agree with you. It had a good intro. Like the first, I think one, one and a half episodes I was super into. And I just started to get really bored by it. And then everything after that, I skimmed through it really quickly and nothing, nothing stuck with me.

See, I watched the whole series because I just had it on the background while I was scanning. And like when they would cook something cool, I'd look up and like take some notes on the recipes they were doing. Because that's kind of all I do now with these things. I have a notebook and I just take notes on some of the recipes, like try later. Like, oh, that looks really good.

Let me write down that mix or whatever. And so when I have a kitchen again, I don't have a kitchen right now. I'm living off of Organifi, RX bars and ramen. But if I don't have rickets by the time I get to LA, we'll know that that stuff works. But yeah, yeah, man, I was so stoked that this was going to be a great show when I first started watching it.

And man, it fell off a cliff. But they had so much budget. He went everywhere in the world and just was like, yeah, damn, it's, you know, it's just not it's not like the other guy. What's his name? Bourdain. Phil. Phil. Oh, Phil.

Yeah. Yeah. Phil's show was good. This guy was definitely. I got some new music news. The breeders have came back recently. And now one of my favorite bands from that day is a belly is also back. Belly is an alternative rock band formed in 1991 by former throwing muses and breeders member Tanya Donnelly.

I've always loved their music. So happy to hear a new song called Stars Align. We have a link to that in the show notes. Underworld has released a brand new track called Brilliant. Yes, that would be. It's an instrumental. So don't get your hopes up so quickly. It's but it's very beautiful. I like instrumentals.

It's a great instrumental. It's lovely. And they shot a video because they were playing Reykjavik in Iceland for the first time since 1994. And they put some money into a beautiful landscape video for it. So it's an enjoyable watch as well as a listen. So check that out.

Another band that I really loved back in the day, Lady Tron, is actually back as well. And they have a new song called The Animals with a video that's out now and an album coming soon. People are making videos again. Wow. Yeah, they are. Because, well, you know, it's the whole revolution thing, right?

It's cheap and easy to do it yourself. You got to be on YouTube, too. Don't forget. Exactly. Yes, that, too. And a friend of the show, Fergal, sent me a link to something called musicmap.com. Now, I remember this from a long time ago. This is the tourist map of music. Basically, it's it. I described it as an AI deep learning machine intelligence learning tree.

Basically, you type in an artist and it generates a little map. And shows, you know, related artists, the closer they are to the artist that you typed in, the more they kind of people that like this artist will like the other artists. It holds up pretty well. I'm curious if, you know, I don't know anything about them themselves.

They're part of GNOD, the Global Network of Discovery. I don't know if anybody uses them. Like if Spotify is pulling this in for their for their matching services or not. I know nothing about it, but it's kind of cool. It works really well for larger artists. Obviously, more well known. You put in Depeche Mode.

It's pretty spot on. But if you dig deep into, you know, kind of more obscure artists, it starts to fall apart, obviously. But pretty cool. We're checking out. Kind of fun. And finally, I watched the Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling, the Judd Apatow directed documentary.

I was a huge Gary Shandling fan. And boy, this was great. And got a little dusty in the room. You and everybody else that I follow on Twitter have seen this. I haven't seen it yet. It is. I don't have the HBO. But everybody said they cried like a baby at the end.

Yeah, it's very good. And if you're not a fan of Gary Shandling or don't know who he is, do yourself a favor. Go back and watch a bunch of his old shows. Unbelievable. Oh, God, yeah. When the Gary Shandling show premiered, I watched the first episode when it came out. And it was fantastic. And I think I watched the whole run.

It's been so long, though. Yeah. The brain, she deteriorates. It does. At the library. I have not finished this book, Brian, but I liked it so much that I wanted to bring it up and talk about it for a second.

Okay. When The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink, which you covered on the show already. I did. And you actually might be closer to finishing the book than you think because, like, the last three quarters of the book felt like it was all footnotes. Okay, good. Because I think I've gotten everything I need to out of it.

Because I stopped there because I'm like, I want to implement the stuff that I learned at the front half of the book. And a lot of these, honestly, a lot of these books, the page count is dictated by the publisher. So these could be 50-page books. There's a lot of filler.

Yeah. Look, I'm going to give you a pro tip. I read a lot of self-help-y type books for my work. And the way you do it is you read the first three chapters. Then you scan the table of contents. The table of contents gives you the bullet points of what's in the last half of the book.

And if you need to dive in on them, you can. But almost everything that you need to know is in the first three chapters, three or four chapters of these books. And then they just reiterate it throughout the rest of the book and throw in a little bit of a concept here or there. Yep. That's how you can read a self-help book in like, you know, under two hours.

What I liked about how Daniel Pink did this particular book, When, is actually he split every chapter into two parts. The scientific explanation and the practical application to your own life. I would suggest only reading the practical application to your own life. And only if you are interested in that particular topic, then you can go back and do the scientific stuff because you don't really need that.

What you want is the guides to fixing your own life. Yeah, I have to go download the PDF and print it out before I pack my printer because I really want to go through all of the practicals like his, you know, his little hacker sections because I'm listening to the book. I'm not reading it, so I don't get those until I go get the PDF and print it out.

But, man, I've already changed up like how I time half my day based on this book. Yeah, a lot of it makes sense. And, you know, I wish this book would have existed for me when I was in my 20s and 30s and pre-kid. And it'll probably be helpful again once the kid's a bit older because I can't move my schedule.

My schedule is dictated by my kid. End of story. So that it's hard for me to implement the things that he talks about, but they certainly make a lot of sense. And it's a great I thought it was a great book. But even if you can't like change your schedule, there are tricks in there to mitigate some of the effects of what happens at certain times of day and how you're feeling and what your brain does at certain times of day.

So there's still some tips in there that you can definitely implement with having a kid because a lot of my schedule is dictated by other people, too. You know, I have to do shows in the middle of the day. So I'm like, OK, if I can get some tips out of there to get fresh again before I have to do a show.

Fantastic. And this book really I really like this book a lot. I did, too. I thought it was great. I mean, I think I finished it three weeks, maybe a month ago now, and I still haven't managed to get a Nappuccino in. But I'm going to try, damn it. Oh, that's funny. I mean, he's he put a term on it, but that's something that us sleepy hacker guys have been doing for 10 years.

Right. That's it's just what you do, because I take, you know, have like a little espresso and then do a 20 minute pizziz. And then, boom, by the time you wake up, it's the coffee. Yeah. Yeah. And pizziz is still fantastic. I don't like all the fancy shit they put in it.

I still go back to the classic Napp that they have, and it works just fine. I don't want all this new agey shit. I like the original. I like the OG pizziz. Yes. Anyway, moving on. Christopher Moore has a new book coming out and God damn it comes out on April 17th, the day that I arrive in L.A.

I wanted this for the drive, but it's called Noir. It's his new novel. And it's Christopher Moore. I don't care what he's writing about. I don't I just don't care. So I'm going to read it. Yeah. I mean, I'm not I don't like Noir fiction. I don't like Noir films.

I don't like Noir as a genre, but it's Christopher Moore. So it's going to be good. So here's the deal as well. Yeah. I don't like Jesus, but he wrote a goddamn great book about Jesus. That is true. He did do that. And speaking of Christopher Moore, I just discovered as of yesterday that I never finished reading Secondhand Souls, his last book that he was released.

I know, man, I found it. I was getting out a suitcase and I found the book in the suitcase because I had taken it with me to Toronto or whatever. And the reason I didn't finish the book is because I got a signed hardcover. I don't read physical books much anymore. So I bought an e-book and now I'm halfway through finishing it.

Oh, man. It's such a great book. I'm really enjoying it. I'm glad that I remembered that I'm glad I found it and then discovered that I didn't finish reading it. So back in it now. I swear, I don't know of any Christopher Moore book that's bad. None of them are bad. Some are obviously better than others.

Some of his earlier stuff is a little hit or miss, but still funny. I mean, he's just like it's like Kurt Vonnegut. There's no such thing as a bad Kurt Vonnegut book. There's no such thing as a bad Christopher Moore book. End of story. I don't know about that Kurt Vonnegut thing, but you say so. I do.

Security. We're back again with Dave. I like to cut deep Bittner from the cyber wire. Yes, yes. Jason and his two friends. See, the thing about last week is I didn't hear the joke because I was too busy going on my rant.

I had to go back and listen to the edit and cut it out so everybody else could hear it, but I didn't hear it when it was going. We all had a good laugh at your expense. Yes, we did. Speaking of a good laugh at somebody's expense, it's called Magento, not Magneto. I listened to the cyber wire this week, and I was just like, Dave, Dave, Dave, come on.

So here's what happened. First of all, okay. Yes, we had a little error there. I don't know if it was damn you autocorrect or somebody's finger slipped or whatever. We did indeed publish the initial edition of the podcast where I said Magneto, not Magento.

I thought Magneto was pretty cool with X-Men and all that kind of stuff. I agree. But I don't know, about 10 minutes in. Magento is not cool. Yeah. As an ex-Magento developer, it is not cool. Yeah, about 10 minutes in, our staff developer said, it's Magento.

And of course, you know what that throws into process. You know, everybody starts running around and recording. And so we got it published. But I guess you were one of the lucky ones who downloaded quickly and got the one with the mistake, which is now a collector's item.

Ooh, too bad I deleted it. I should have saved it. Damn. Yeah. So, yep. That on us. It happens. It actually surprises me it doesn't happen more often than it does. That's true. You know? That's true. Yeah. But, so, a little bit of follow-up on my Under Armour MyFitnessPal account issues that I had.

And I, like I said, that I was a user and I never got notified about it. And so I went to go log in and see if there was anything there, like a notice or anything. And it's like, oh, I went to go log in and said, put in my email address and put in my password. And they're like, oh, there's an account with this name, but the password's wrong, so reset the password.

No, there's no account with this email address linked to it. And, I mean, it was a comedy of errors. I finally got back in by going through a Facebook login and getting through it. And then they're like, yeah, you were a member so long ago that it didn't really matter and we've deleted your account.

So, there's nothing here. But, man, their password recovery system is so bad. So bad. Yeah. Because it said I had an account with that email address and when I put my email address into the password recovery tool, it's like, there's no account with that email address. It's like, okay, okay, what's going on here?

I had the exact same thing, actually, because I got a notification from them and I don't even remember ever having an account. Apparently, I did at some point and went through the same process and eventually I just gave up. But I figured, well, I obviously don't have an account anymore somehow. So, yeah, they're so bad at everything that I don't even know what the hackers could have gotten that was useful.

Yeah, that's interesting. Anyway. I had a thing happen earlier this week where a security researcher pal of the cyber called me up and said, hey, do you have an old email address? We're doing a little research here and I just want to test something out. So, I gave him an old email address, one I don't use anymore. He's like, all right, I'll call you back in a little bit.

He calls me back in a little bit and he says, it took us a minute and 32 seconds and I'm going to read off some passwords for you. And he starts reading off some passwords for me. I'm like, yep, yep, yep, yep. That was one I used to use. Yeah, that was one I used to use too.

Yep. And of course, meanwhile, in my mind, I'm thinking to myself, are there any crass or inappropriate passwords that I used over the, right? And fortunately, with this particular one, there were not. But, you know, and all they were doing was they had downloaded all of the big databases that are available and had, you know, come up with a way to cross-reference them and search them and all that kind of stuff.

And we all know that that's happened. But I have to say, it really comes home to you when someone starts reading off your passwords and how easy it is to get them. It really puts it in your face there. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of scary.

Yeah. I would say to anyone, just why not just go change all your passwords? And, oh, by the way, the other point that this researcher brought up with me was that if there are parts of passwords that you reuse, if there's a number or a word or something that you use as an easy little thing to connect in your brain that you sort of recycle over and over again, don't do that.

That is an easy way for people to narrow the search. Why not just go the extra step right now and just say, go ahead and get yourself a password manager? It doesn't have to be a Herculean task. You can do it over time. What I would suggest to anyone is get something like 1Password, install it.

And as you go throughout your life, your weeks, your months, as you sign into a site, change your password, put it in your password manager, have it be completely randomized. Not that that really helps so much, but, you know, just do it. It's easy. Yeah, it really is. I know there's resistance.

I was resistant to switching to a password manager because I thought it was going to be a pain in the butt. And now I can't imagine living without it. It's actually easier. Yes, I agree. Highly recommended. So recently we were talking about the infamous trolley problem and about driverless cars and all that sort of thing.

And Jason was pointing out that he thought you could randomize some of the decisions that the autonomous vehicles made. And that would help with some of these decisions, help with some of the liability and so on and so forth. There's an article in The Atlantic called Enough with the Trolley Problem that kind of digs into this issue.

You know, the bottom line is that the trolley problem is kind of by necessity an oversimplification and assumes that all bits of knowledge are known. One of the things we talked about before with this, the thing with the Uber car running over the person walking the bike across the street was that we were surprised that the sensors didn't do a better job of knowing that that person was there.

And that so a lot of these things like the trolley problem, they assume that all information is known and that therefore a complete, a decision can be made based on having that complete information. And the point being that quite often there are things that are unknown. Ah, the unknown, unknown problem.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What did you guys think of this? I had two thoughts. First, I was hoping this was going to be an in-depth dive into the trolley Dodgers or the Dodgers history and talk right in Vince Scully's voice. And I was very disappointed to find out it was not. The other thing that I really enjoyed about this is the fact that the MIT engineers have built a crowdsourced version of a decision making process that they decided to call the Moral Machine, which I find to be a lovely name.

You know, it's it is a problem and it is an oversimplification. And when you start to really dig down into it, it just feels weird to know that at some point a decision will be made by a non-human that will result in people dying.

I would like to point out that the URL, which was probably the original title of the article, is got 99 problems, but a trolley ain't one. That's good. I like that as well. There are many good things about this story that have nothing to do with the actual content of the story. Yeah. Somebody got overridden at the last call.

They're like, you can't use that. That's a good catch. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting one. I think there's so many variables, you know, is the road wet? Is it sunny? Is it dark? Is it, you know, as we head into this transition, I think we're going to learn a lot.

It's not going to be as simple as we thought it was. And it'll be interesting to see how it affects things like insurance and all that stuff. So interesting times ahead, particularly for, I think, the next generation for whom all this driverless car stuff is going to be a lot more normal.

We've been talking a lot about Facebook, as everybody has, even though it is not a hack. And as we repeatedly say, it's a feature, not a bug. Everything that has happened. But I did enjoy the Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Wired and did a he's sitting down with everyone to try to tamp this down.

It's just not working because he can't say the right things. I like this article that Slate came up with because he basically made a statement to the effect of he wants to fully confirm that no Facebook community data is out there, which the writer then says, I can only assume he was speaking figuratively, hyperbically or disingenuously.

Because as we all know, once something is out there digitally, it can be copied very quickly and you cannot stuff the genie back in the bottle. It's also interesting to me that as he's making his rounds, he keeps using this term community.

Oh, we just did 20 minutes on that. Oh, is that right? Oh, yes. I yield my time to earlier in the show. Facebook is not a community. Jason pulled out dictionary definitions.

And as I pointed out, it says Facebook is a tool to allow people to create communities. It is not a community in and of itself. Yeah. All right. Well, I look forward to hearing what you guys had to say about this. But to me, I'll just add this, that I think this could point to one of the fundamental misunderstandings that I think Mr. Zuckerberg has about this tool that he's created.

I think you will enjoy the segment immensely then. Yes. All right. Well, we won't take up any more of our listeners' time. I'm glad that you agree with us. All right. Very good. Very good. The data spill analogy is great. I was thinking about this as being like a Superfund site.

Right. And I also wonder, the other thing I wonder about this is if we, if there comes a time when we get our privacy under control, where as a society, as a globe, a global society, we say we're going to follow more of the European model and respect privacy more.

Does that mean there's going to be kind of this lost generation of the folks who had no privacy, that poor generation where everybody knew everything about them before we knew better? And I wonder if there are any previous times in history where something like that has happened, where, you know, there was a generation that had something in history happen to them that the future generation said, oh, you know, feel bad for them.

I don't know if some kind of plague or some kind of, you know, you think about it. Yeah. I believe we call that history. Well. Plague and World War I, World War II. Right. I'm going to go back to this because I was thinking about this during my lunch break.

I think I would call that the 12 colonies in the Cylon problem because they made some bad technological decisions that got out of control, came back and bit them in the butt. So what I was thinking is sometime in the future, we will create a new social network called Adama that is not networked, much like the Battlestar Galactica was not networked, to solve these problems of the Cylons that we have created now, but we call it the Facebook.

All right. Okay. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. So we look towards our own version of the future to inform how we can handle things. I like that. But yeah, science fiction is a lesson. That's good. That's good. I like it.

Yeah. Well, we're just going to change the ending because the ending of Battlestar sucks. Don't make me go through the ending of BSG again, especially not in real life. Well, we're going through it right now, actually. Speaking of, so there was an article that came out, and this was covered everywhere, where it says Facebook is not going to extend the GDP or privacy protections beyond the EU.

Now, this turns out that it might either be Zuckerberg has flip-flopped after the massive backlash after this came out, or that the initial reporter got it wrong. Gentlemen, you've read the articles. Zuckerberg may not have gotten the memo from his own company.

I don't know, because it seems to have been, it was, the initial statement is an official Facebook statement that they will not extend the privacy protections. And then the backtracking is Zuckerberg on his media tour. So I think, I think they had no intention of doing it.

And then the backlash hit and Zuck made an executive decision, as it were. Okay, because what I read was it was a Reuters reporter that got it, that did the initial reporting that, quote-unquote, may or may not have got it wrong. Right. So that was, it wasn't an actual official announcement.

It was in an interview with Reuters. Okay. Well, either way, we seem to have ended up with an outcome that we want, which is we will be getting these privacy controls in theory. In theory, but they might look like, they might look different than they get in the EU, which makes, what?

I don't know what he's talking about. He's like, you're going to have the same protections, but it might not look the same. It's like, what the hell does that mean? Separate but equal. You know, I, my take on this is, I think aligns with Brian in that I was thinking, well, what is the, what is the reflexive way Facebook would handle this?

And the reflexive way would be to minimize privacy as much as possible. So that makes me believe that their initial risk, their initial plans were that Europe gets GDPR, the rest of the world, we just carry on as if we, as, as the way that we've been doing the whole time.

And like Brian said, this backlash hit and they said, oh, you mean privacy? Yeah, of course you'll get that privacy. No problem. We meant to give it to you all the time. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. It was in the EULA. Don't you remember? The thing you signed? 10 years ago?

Well, I mean, also keep in mind the, the idea that now they're floating, the idea of they're being, you know, separate and it'll be different here and whatnot. In much the way that our political system right now is functioning, so do these tech companies try to get around what they're doing by, by making it as confusing as humanly possible.

Like everything, through confusion, they can slip a lot of things in that we probably wouldn't be too happy about. And that is starting, it's very 1984 doublespeak stuff that we're starting to see seeping out everywhere. It's obfuscation and circumlocution. Yes. That's how they do it.

Zuckerberg's going to go testify before Congress. And so it'll be interesting to see, I think, on both sides. It'll be interesting to see how many members of Congress are able to seem like they actually understand this issue. How many people, yeah, how many are going to get up there and do political grandstanding, which I suppose in some ways they've earned.

All of them. And how much, and what his responses will be. He is, I think other people have pointed out, you know, he does a really bad job of appearing to be empathetic at all. And he's just a terrible person to put up in front of in an interview.

You could have stopped a terrible person. That's okay. And I invite you to enjoy and participate with us in the drinking game that we made up for his testimony. Go on. Which is, you have to take a drink every time he says, community. Ah. Yes, all right.

I'm in. I'd clear your schedule for the afternoon. Yeah, you don't drive to work. Take an Uber. Or if you have one, take a bird and drop it off in front of your office and get an Uber home. Boy, if it timed out, wouldn't it be fun to do, you know, like a YouTube live with the three of us just watching, have that running in one window and the three of us.

We could really just record a clip of us all banging our heads on the desk. And just. Right. And drink. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, I like it. I like it. So it has come out. We covered it a little bit earlier in the show, but I just want to bring it home with Papa B on the show that, yes, Facebook hackers have collected personal data of two billion users.

And they're not hackers, really, because it wasn't a hack. They were using the tools as they were intended, and they were just scraping the data. And when you leave the back door open, don't be surprised when your apple pie is gone when you come home. And they've cut that. They killed the tools, which was being able to search for people by phone number or email.

So that's gone now. Yeah. That's done. And now the new fun one that came out today is Facebook has decided to start retracting Zuck's messages from recipients inboxes. So when you send a message to somebody and you delete it, it doesn't delete it from the other person's inbox unless you're the Zuck.

And this has been confirmed. And there is a TechCrunch article. They create a new term in here called conspicuously. And I don't know what the fuck a conspicuously is, but conspicuously is an actual term.

No, it's not. But conspicuously. Conspicuously. Oh, I'm sorry. Conspicuously. How do you spell pedantic, Jason? Hey, hang on. Pull the podcast back. We have a mistake. Right. We got 10 minutes. Quick. We've been doing this for two and a half fucking hours.

What's your excuse? Listen, look, I actually have a real question about this that I want to pose to both of you. Are we upset about the fact that only Zuck can do this and he did it himself? Because email in and of itself has always functioned this way.

You cannot delete an email that you have sent out. Most communication. His platform, his rules. Yeah. But I'm just confirming that the only reason we're upset is because he changed the rules for himself, right? We're not upset that we haven't had this ability. We're not upset about any of that. Yeah. I'm not upset at all.

I just think it's funny. Yeah, it's like you were saying, you know, everyone is equal, but some people are more equals. And well, that's also how life has always been. Yeah, that's true. But I think it's funny. The tech writer Walt Mossberg tweeted earlier that he checked in with Facebook and they were claiming that this ability is a feature that's in beta, that they're rolling out soon.

And the timing is just coincidental that someone discovered this with Zuckerberg's messages. But everyone's going to be getting this feature really soon. Well, again, I have two thoughts on that. The first is it's great that they're going to roll that out for everyone, because if you really want to wipe all your Facebook data, one thing you want to do is delete all your Facebook messages.

So that's good. The second comment is what I always come back to in this segment. What does delete mean? Are they still on a Facebook server somewhere? I just can't access them or the person I sent them to can't access them anymore because it wasn't that the whole idea of Snapchat in the first place.

That's why Snapchat became a thing, because you could send something and it would delete and nobody kept it, except we found out later Snapchat kept it. I would like to know what the over under is on the fact that this went into beta. The first time that an article came out exposing the fact that Zuckerberg's emails were being or messages were being deleted.

Right. And I think that's what Mossberg was pointing out. He did not believe Facebook's claim that he was not buying it. There was another story this week about how people were downloading their Facebook data, which you can do, and I highly recommend everyone does.

And what they found was videos that they had uploaded to Facebook, not posted. deleted and deleted were still in their Facebook data. Yeah. Yes. Because delete means nothing. Again, Facebook claims this was a bug.

It's not a... Remember when they were saving all of the data when you would start to type a message and then delete it, but they would still keep it? Mm-hmm. And then use it later for, you know, autocorrect or things like that or profiling. Like, oh, if you type a long missive and then you delete it, that's still information that you were going to send to the service.

So we still have a right to it because you were typing it in our form on our website. Yes. It's like, oh, guys, guys. By the way, I think, Jason, you talked about this earlier this week that you got a survey question from Facebook. Yes, I did.

I did, too. Oh, you got it. And... Yep. I did, too. It popped up on my phone. I wasn't drunk. I might have been drunk, but I wasn't hallucinating. The alcohol was not the cause of the issue. You were definitely drunk. Yes. These are not mutually exclusive, but... And it said...

I forget exactly. I should have done a screen capture of it, but it said, you know, I agree with the following statement. You know, Facebook cares about my privacy. Oh, no. Mine was verbatim. Do you think Facebook is good for the world? Oh, no. No, mine said something about Facebook cares about my privacy, and it had five different answers, and the bottom one, which I selected, was Facebook does not care about my privacy.

But see, they're A-B testing things. They're definitely A-B testing, because, yeah, mine was, do you think Facebook is good for the world? And as soon as I saw... I mean, that snapped me out of it. I was just like, wait, what? I figured I was hacked, but no, it came from the developers.

And I'm just gathering that Facebook has read enough of my updates and has plugged that into a system that they didn't even have to bother asking me, because half my updates are Facebook, you fucking suck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, interesting. They're, you know, they're using their platform to test the waters, and I'd be very interested to see the answers that they get.

Oh, I'd love to see those survey results. We will never see those. Love. No, we won't. Maybe under Stipina. Unless there's an API that we can go tap into at some point. Right. Right. Give it time. It's very interesting, too, because I looked at all of the APIs that they're rolling back, and they're really killing most of the Instagram APIs.

So, unfortunately, I think my Flume app is going to stop working soon. Yep. Because it, yeah, looks like they're pulling as much stuff as they can. So, we'll see. Too little, too late. Mm-hmm. There's an interesting story that came up this week about Russian submarines lurking near underwater cables.

Yeah, that's great. This one pops up then. This is not, I think I've seen this one within the past year. It's sort of one of those evergreen things. And I wonder how much this is them being, what's the word, conspicuously, conspicuously?

I'm not sure. Fuck you, I think is the word that accounts. Right. I think that's how it's pronounced. Right. Anyway, Magneto. I think they're being conspicuous about allowing themselves to be seen near these cables. I wonder, I wonder if they're doing that to just say, hey, these are some nice cables you got here.

Be a shame if anything happened to them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the thing is, if you look at the map of undersea cables, there's a lot of them. Submarines drive around a lot. Every now and again, they're going to come past a few. So is it somebody just picking that out and cherry picking it to make it news?

Because I'm sure our subs are by those cables every now and again, too. I'm sure they've done traffic analysis, and it's not just happenstance for there to be this concern. Oh, the AI has told us. Yes, exactly. The AI wrote the story. I would suspect that everybody knows where everybody else's cables are.

And in a situation of war, that would be something. That's something that you may want to take out. So that's, you know, they're not hidden. There's no way to hide one of those cables. The article is interesting to talk about the methods for fallback. And there are other cables, and there are satellites, and so forth.

But, you know, we've been reporting this week that with all the stuff going on with Russia, with the poisoning in the UK, and Russia denying that they had anything to do with it, that one of the things people are expecting is some sort of cyber reprisal from Russia in exchange for the sanctions, you know, that they're being unjustly blamed for this chemical weapons poisoning, which, of course, everybody believes they did, because they probably did.

It was Colonel Putin in the library with the polonium. So I wonder if that has anything to do with this, that this is them, you know, rattling cages and that sort of thing. Could be. But the problem is, those cables go both ways. Yeah. So it behooves them to have access to, you know, our power grid if they're going to try and hack it.

So why would they cut the cables for it? Yeah, it's going to hurt us more than it hurts them, though, at the end of the day. And that's kind of a knock on Russia more than it is anything towards us, because we are just, we're more digitally evolved. We're more reliant on these systems than Russia as a whole is.

But the problem is, there's thousands of underwater cables, and the internet is built to route around failure. The internet was built for a lot of things that don't work the way they're supposed to anymore, Jason. I did not create the internet for this falconry, as Al Gore would say. Right.

But it's an interesting point, because I think it will, something like this would affect the insular countries less than the open countries. So a country like China, with the infamous Great Firewall of China, their citizens wouldn't notice as much as we would.

And that's an interesting reality. Well, that's enough to scare the crap out of us for this week. So let's take a break. And Dave will not be joining us next week, as we'll be doing our early show as Jason heads back to Los Angeles. But we'll be thrilled to have you back in two weeks. And you have plenty of time to make me buy new underwear.

Actually, we won't have Dave back in two weeks, because he's going to be at the RSA conference. Oh, that's right. That's right. So it'll be a couple weeks. But I look forward to catching up with you when I return. And by then, Jason, you'll be back on the West Coast, right? I will be on the West Coast.

Yes. All right. Well, safe travels. I hope everything goes well. I hope the dogs do well. And as smoothly as possible for you. So I'll check in with you then. And if you run into Magento at RSA, say hi. I will. Or Magneto. Or him. He's pretty conspicuous. This is what I deal with.

I almost want to name the show Magneto or Magento now. We have been discussing the Amazon Echo buttons for quite some time now and how we can't figure out what exactly they're supposed to be for other than potentially trivia games.

Well, Amazon can't figure it out either. So they're opening up the doors to development and pleading with people to please figure out something to do with these things. We bought a lot of them and we can't get rid of them. Can you tell us what we could do? We literally have like five warehouses full of these.

Somebody figure out something. So we are getting, wait for it, a game of Simon. Bittner called it. Yes, he did. He called it. Yeah. So basically, Amazon's going, all right, Internet, what you guys got? Come on. Hello. We got nothing.

$100 developer credit. Anybody? Oh, my God. Yeah. So that's fun. Have you tried the new Echo Announce thing this week? No, I missed that. It's a new feature that you can, if you have multiple Echoes in your house, you can tell the lady in the tube to tell all of the Echoes a message and it will broadcast it to the rest of the house.

Well, see, my house might be slightly bigger than Mark Maron's house, but not that much bigger. So I can basically, whatever I say in here, I can hear in the other room too, so don't need that. I tried it. I tried it this morning and it was just like, no, we cannot find other Echoes in your house.

Oh, great. You mean the one that I used to listen to the radio this morning that's next to my bed? Okay. Can't find it. Thank you. Awesome. And we haven't had a good drone story in a while, so I found one that I love. Want to know why male drones aren't ready for prime time?

Russia can tell you. The Siberian town of Ulan-Ud was expecting to beam with pride as organizers tested a postal drone in the area for the first time. But unfortunately, the inaugural flight went spectacularly wrong. The hexacopter courier went haywire moments after takeoff, smacking into the side of a building at high speed.

Video is included in the link in the show notes. It went from technological triumph to an embarrassing pile of scrap metal in a matter of seconds. And better yet, apparently this drone cost almost $20,000. I was in tears. I was crying so hard when I watched this video that I couldn't breathe.

It was so good. I've kept this bookmarked for any time that I feel worried about the drones taking over the universe or Skynet going self-aware. I will just re-watch this video. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers.

We've got Anesto C, Eric S, Brad A, Kevin M, Mada G, Aaron S, and Peter S. Lots of S's going on. Thank you all so much. We really appreciate it. Our Patreon's going great. It's pretty awesome.

Thank you. Yes, Jason needs some money. Papa needs new everything. So it's all good. Yep. And over on Facebook, Ivor D, who is a longtime listener and has written in a bunch of times, I totally recognize the name, gave us a five-star rating. And he said, a couple of rabid Mac-captured communists, but bloody good despite all that.

And conveniently then, Facebook gave us all his personal information. Thank you so much. Yeah. Over on Twitter, BP writes, and just remember, it's a bro code to clear your buddy's browser history. I don't know what that is about, but you put it in here, so what is it?

We were talking about the privacy after death issue that you guys- Ah, what happens when your buddy dies and there's porn under his bed? That's what that was about. Yes. And I believe I wrote back saying that it goes down to the executor, unless it's explicitly stated about the explicit materials.

Yeah. And Bear the Hairless wrote it a couple times. He said, I'm not even sure that living have much right to privacy these days. True. True that. And in reference to the bird and your bird stealing flights of fantasy, Jason, he says, put the bird in a Faraday cage. No GPS signal. Also would require a big Faraday cage being built on the back of your truck.

Well, actually, it's not that hard, because what I found by living in San Francisco is chicken wire works really well. So if I just put chicken wire in the back of my truck, I can shove a bunch of birds in there. The plan thickens. Yes. And Kyle Roderick writes in, here's one for the Amazon Title Hall of Fame.

Okay. This is going to take a second. King of the sickle ergonomic billhook brush sickle tools, long handle, pure steel, brush, tropical, sickle imported steel with its fine sharpened blade clears brush fast. The efficient design with an attractive and ergonomic long wood handle reduces back strain.

Please be noted that this is sickle, not machete. That's a good one. We have a winner! I believe we do. Very nice. Thanks, Kyle. Over on iTunes, we got a couple five-star ratings. First from CapsLockStuckOn. Thankfully, he didn't keep it on for the entire review.

GOGs need to stick together. It's hard to catch anyone's attention in this day and age of instant gratification. It's nice to listen to some people who generally feel the way I do about things. Keep up the good work. Thank you. We shall. And Asheen writes in, effing awful language. Just kidding, guys. Great work.

Honest, raw, and definitely unbiased. To the guys, I'm technically a millennial. So a big thank you from this geek for inspiring me to do better than the current swill of Silicon Valley, frost-tipped, unicorn-loving, platform-building sellouts you feature each week. When they ask me how to build it, I'll have hours of content on how not to do it.

Until that day, if you're a geek with half a brain, you'll love the grumping and the grumbling as I have. Cheers. Well, thank you, Asheen. Thank you, Asheen. But I would like to point out that actually he did make a typo, or maybe he didn't. Until that day, if you're a geek with half a Brian. So you can have half of me.

Fuck, I'm already a geek with half of Brian's shit. Yeah, thank you so much. Anyways, next week, again, everybody, is our all-feedback show. We will not be doing any news or anything else, just taking your questions and trying to answer them as best we can. So if you've got one, you've got a couple days to head over to gog.show slash contact, or better yet, patreon.com slash gog, and drop us a buck or 50, and we will take all your questions next week before Jason throws the dogs and the Faraday cage.

in the car, then heads back to LA. Yes, and yeah, Tuesday. Tuesday is the day. So this comes out on Monday, so you have till midnight on Tuesday to get us the questions, because we're going to record this on Wednesday. Because after that, I have no internet, no TV, no computers.

All I have is a Faraday cage and a feral pack of dogs. So if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review.

And as always, please, for the love of dog, tell your friends. I'm very happy to announce that baseball is back. It gives me something to do and fill some time and space and some mindless enjoyment.

So even though the Dodgers are sucking, yay baseball. That's all I got. Baseball season opened in Chicago with snow. Yesterday was the Sox opener, and it was snowing. I'm sorry. Like that one bit. Well, you know, you're coming back to the land of sun. That's why I'm leaving.

Until next time. Not really. No, no. Not really. Not really at all. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 254. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

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