258: Divestment Of Responsibility

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by the new Eero and Eero Beacon. For free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, go to Eero.com. That's E-E-R-O dot com. Select overnight shipping and use the code G-O-G to make it free. 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. Guten tag, Herr Brian. How you doing, Jason? Shweaty. Shweaty balls. It is finally warm. Finally a warm day in L.A. It's been a while. Yeah, I am not looking forward to today and tomorrow.

Yeah, well, you got air conditioning in that makeshift studio you're building? Yes, I do. Okay, there you go. It doesn't work that well, but it was 80 degrees in here yesterday. That's a bit warm. It's a dry heat. That's right. So we talked last week about the registering for that Amazon webinar.

How'd that go? You and I are kind of done with the coding thing, but I think we're both kind of interested in the voice recognition thing and kind of learning a lot about that and maybe getting into the space a little bit because obviously that's where a lot of things are headed. So you couldn't do it because of time and I figured, well, one of us should definitely do it for sure.

And I moved around my schedule to be able to accommodate, shifted some nannies and some other work things and whatnot. And I registered for the webinar and I was told I was in it and given a special link that was just for me because I registered. Yeah.

And? For the webinar. And then I sat down at the appropriate time and I loaded up the webinar and I got, the session is full. Please contact the organizer. Nice. No emails to contact anyone. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

What a load of crap. Oh man. You'd think that the largest provider of cloud computing software and infrastructure in the world wouldn't be able to have a full webinar. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong because I was not able to take the webinar and I have not gotten any response from the email that I sent back to the email that provided me with my own personal registered link.

And, uh, you know, so typical customer service, isn't the internet a wonderful thing? Oh yes, it is. Yes. So no webinar for me. Too bad. I was kind of curious to see how that went. Well, me too. Me too. I bet you were. Yeah. All right.

So let's get onto the bird thing again. Uh, I, I, you know, I've said my piece about this and, and I, I do appreciate everybody that is agreeing with me and sending on links saying, look, it's everything that you guys said, boy, these things are horrible. Uh, but, uh, you know, Twitter is a, is a, as we've talked about, it is a megaphone for everyone, which is fair enough.

And, uh, we heard from an Adam Brouse, uh, whose Twitter profile says he's rethinking higher ed at make school. He's a software engineer, founder of recklessly optimistic. And he went after us because of our feelings about bird. So here we go again, because you can just say anything on Twitter without any facts.

Now I appreciate his optimism. So he said something along the lines of these scooters move slower than bikes and way less. I'd go back and check why you hate them. I'm pretty sure some automotive gasoline PR guys are high-fiving right now because they got you again, just Google bird and read any of the news stories or, you know, listen to the show where we discussed it.

And you hear exactly why we don't like them. And as I replied, we go into great detail about why we have problems with them on our show. They are great in theory. I've always said this. I like the concept. It's shoddy business practices and the actual rollout that I have the issue with. So then he says, is it the scooters is in the scooters or our cities that have never made the commitment to having enough bike parking and large enough bike lanes.

Okay. Well, since that almost made sense since bird launched without ever bothering to get a business license in Santa Monica or tell Santa Monica or San Francisco for that matter, that they were going to roll these things out, that would have made it very difficult for the city to plan for them in advance. I'd imagine.

Correct? Yes. So then he says, do we need business licenses to start businesses? What is this? Vietnam? They pay their taxes. They follow the law. They provide a progressive green service. Give them a break. No. Well, first off, yes, you do need to get a business license to start a business because this isn't Vietnam.

It's a, I think even in Vietnam, you probably have to get a business license to start a business. That's how it works. And that is how actually cities discover you. So you can pay taxes. So by not getting a business license, a lot of people do that to avoid paying city taxes. They follow the law.

Actually, they didn't follow the law since they lost their lawsuit to their city. Yeah. So they didn't follow the law. They lost a lawsuit from the city saying they didn't follow the law. So they did not follow the law to which he replied. I mean, they follow the law generally, pay taxes, hire employees, etc.

If some NIMBY city hates on them, I'm not surprised. Doesn't mean that their offering is bad or that they are bad. Their cities are bad. Nope. Wrong again. Okay. So the cities are bad. I just got it. Yeah. So at that point, I just said, well, I looked at his profile. He lives in San Francisco. So I guess he should leave that NIMBY city of San Francisco he lives in because they also have the same issues with these services that we have.

Oh, Jiminy Jeepers Crispy. So after getting into this with this guy and it's fine, everybody's allowed to have their own opinion, but he did drop, you know, he never answered any of my factual bits at all. Of course. Ever. Because you don't. I actually spent a lot more time thinking about this.

I didn't want to. I really want to stop thinking about bird, but. You had all that extra time since you couldn't get into the Amazon webinar. So. Yeah. I had all this extra time. So I thought a little bit more about it because most of my complaints so far have just been kind of, you know, straight up, you know, how they're actually functioning.

Why? You know, being parked on the sidewalk, being dropped off, people not following the rules, people riding them recklessly, which is going to end up causing an accident, which is going to end up costing the taxpayers more money because we're gonna have to pay for all this sort of stuff. I went down to the basic roots of why I have a problem with this. This is basic psychology 101.

If you do not have personal ownership of something, you're lazy about it. This is why bird and related systems do not work. You are not personally invested. So you do not care at all. So you treat it like shit. You treat the thing itself like shit. You don't follow the rules and you just, you're not invested.

You have nothing involved in your personal self to do things correctly. It's why Los Angeles is a total cesspool. It really is trash everywhere. No graffiti everywhere. Nobody seems to care. It's a transient city and people aren't invested in it. I've traveled a lot. I go to other places.

People care about their communities. They keep them clean and beautiful and they pick things up. That's not LA. Nobody here is invested because they're here to make it and they move from place to place and then they leave and you're not invested in it. So fuck it. I'm going to dump my mattress or my toilet or whatever on the street because I won't be here in a month and I don't care and it's not my community.

When you own something, you deal with it. You, you take care of it. You paid for it. You worked for it. It's yours. When you rent it, fuck it. We see that with rental cars all the time. This is what happens. In fact, we had a story on this show a while back about somebody who was talking about, oh boy, when we have automated cars that nobody owns, they're going to be the grossest things the history of humanity has ever seen.

That's just true. It's basic psychology again. And this is the problem I have with this shift to not owning things. We are seeing the consequences of this all the time. No one cares. Your customers are horrible. Of course they are. You're giving them a license to be assholes. They have zero investment in any of this.

You pay $5 tops to use it. You're going to dump it in the middle of the sidewalk and walk off. I paid way less than a hotel room. I'll just leave your Airbnb a total mess. Why, why would I clean it up? It's an Uber. Sorry. I threw up in it. Whatever. Hey, it's the new world order. Great. So this is my thoughts.

More thoughts on Bird. So I think we can start to get around this by people actually having to put down a deposit that they can lose for being assholes. Call it asshole tax. You do that when you sign up for a hotel room, you give them your credit card, they charge it for incidentals and possible damage, and then you get the money back if you leave it nice.

I think that that should maybe be something that these new people might not want to disrupt because it kind of works in some places. It does. And if you're tied directly to it and, you know, somebody, if you paid a deposit and said that you're going to follow the rules and then somebody can find out, you don't even need a picture of it.

You've got GPS. You can find out that somebody dumped it in the middle of the sidewalk. They lose that five bucks. Done. See, we can solve all these problems. It's solvable by the grumpy old geeks, as usual. As usual. In the news.

Spotify is back in the news. Not in a good way. Nope. Spotify's stock has gone significantly down after it posted their first earnings report after going public. Right.

Yeah, they're not doing so well. Well, I mean, why is this surprising? None of these companies make money. Isn't that okay? That's why we're all investing in them anyways, right? That's right. That's right. It's the hope of future growth. They've got a total user base of 170 million people with 75 million paid subscribers, which is actually in line with expectations.

But the company is still losing money. They're going to lose money for a long time. They're serving files and paying royalties. What the hell, people? Yeah. And they're not really charging all that much, to be honest. $9 a month to basically have all of humanity's recordings available to you on tap anytime you want?

That's cheap. That's nothing. Well, it is cheap. That's why I still pay it. Yeah. You know, honestly, even if it was $20 a month, I'd still pay it. That's what we used to spend on like a CD back in the day. Yes, exactly. So the idea that they're not making money is not surprising at all to me.

And they're not going to make money ever unless something changes. They go out of business and somebody else does it again and again and again. I mean, honestly, once again, it feels like most of these Web 2.0 companies, and I don't even know why I still call them Web 2.0, but like MoviePass, their entire business model is the gym business model.

We want you to sign up and never, ever use our service. And if you do, we will make money. If you all sign up and use our service, we are screwed. It's the whole set it and forget it mindset. This is the set it and forget it economy. That's what we're looking at nowadays. Yeah, because the reality for Spotify is if even more people sign up and they all stream an awful lot of music, they got to pay all the royalties on that.

So that's going to mean they still lose money. Tesla. How's your Tesla stock doing? Speaking of stocks. I didn't look at it because I heard things did not go well. And then he went a bit rogue as part of the press conference and release. So, you know, I'm long haul for this guy.

I'm long haul on Musk. OK. Yes. Nikola Motors is suing Tesla. So I think that shouldn't be allowed just because the names that really shouldn't be allowed. No, it shouldn't be. Tesla's being sued for $2 billion over alleged design patent infringements.

Did you get a chance to read the argument on this one? I scanned through it. I don't quite follow all of it because I just don't get that too much into it. But isn't this over the exact same thing that that Elon Musk actually just released like a couple years back? He released all the design for it and said, here, have at it.

That was the Hyperloop. Yeah, that was the Hyperloop, not the truck. OK. So I went through the actual lawsuit. And to me, they kind of have a case because of the timing and the design kind of ripoffs that they've taken on it.

Right. So I don't know how this one's going to go, but, you know, they're both ugly as sin. Yeah. I mean, they're hideous. I have to say, I like the Nikola one better than the Tesla. Yeah, I do, too. The Nikola one looks like a refined Star Wars stormtrooper from the recent movies, while the Tesla semi is definitely Star Wars episode one.

Yeah, me said no like. All right, I mean, episode four. Sorry. I know what you meant. I think Nikola's got kind of a case here, and I bet Tesla will settle with them. Yeah, I think they probably will. It's just it's such a weird. I feel like everybody in this space is suing everybody else over the same concepts.

Right. Except, though, Nikola filed patents. Right. That's the issue here. It's like, hey, we came up with this stuff first. We're going to file our patents. Then we're going to release it. And Tesla just said, ah, fuck it. We're going to release it. Here you go. Here's what ours is going to look like. The other damning information is that Tesla was trying to hire away one of Nikola's head people.

Boy, isn't this just Google and Uber all over again? And Apple and Facebook. And Apple and the same thing. So we'll see how this one plays out. But yeah, I thought it was interesting because I actually went and read the suit on it. And I'm like, normally I would say, ah, they're just trying to get some of that big Tesla coin.

But I think Nikola actually does have a case. I'm no lawyer, and I do not play one on the Internet. I saw this this morning. Telegram has called off their ICO. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Anyway, I don't use Telegram.

I use Signal. But they raised $1.7 billion in investment money. So they said, ah, we don't need your stick in ICO. We got enough cash for now. The crazy thing is that $1.7 billion in investment was only from 175 people.

Well, you know, that's because we don't have a middle class anymore. Well, it's a Russian-based company. So I'm guessing they got a lot of oligarch money coming in for that one. I'm guessing that as well. Speaking of that sort of stuff, I don't have a story in the news in our show notes here. But I did see that I use WhatsApp because a bunch of my friends happen to be on that.

And you go where your friends are. Right, Facebook? You know that very well. So, yeah, I do use WhatsApp. And I saw that the head is now leaving because he is disagreeing with what Facebook wants to do with it in terms of privacy. So apparently they want to degrade the crypto on it and, you know, open things up a bit more so they can get their grubby little claws in there.

Good timing, Facebook. Well, I think that comes back to, remember all the issues that they had with Brazil? Like Brazil basically kicked them out because of that? Yeah. So maybe they need that Brazilian money. Yeah, I saw the articles I read because it's the actual founder of WhatsApp.

It's been with them since, you know, Facebook bought them for billions of dollars. And it said that he wanted to go. The articles that I read said he wanted to go play Frisbee and buy more Porsches. But I thought that was pretty funny. But I didn't see that he was actually disagreeing with somebody and taking a stance on something.

Wow. Yes. That's rare. We've got to appreciate that, right? That's why I felt the need to mention it. We like that. Okay. Good on you. Moving along. Let's talk about social media again. This is, uh, stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what? Asked TechCrunch. They said, we're at the cusp of the visual communication era, which we figured out since everybody just uses emojis instead of words these days.

Yeah. Story creation consumption is up 842% since early 2016, according to consulting firm Block Party. Much better band than a consulting firm, I'm thinking. Well, here's, I want to stop you right there before we start to go into this. The story's creation and consumption is up 842% since early 2016.

It's because they didn't exist in 2016. Remember when Star Trek, whatever, Star Trek Discovery came out and they're like, we are getting record subscribers. I'm like, because the service just opened. Every subscriber you have. Every new one is a new record.

Imagine that. I'm sorry. Stories have not been around since 1916. No, this is new tech. And, oh, since Instagram stole it from Snapchat and put it in there, why are we surprised that story's creation and consumption is up?

Nobody had it before. When once Instagram got it, boom. I hate stories. I agree with you 100%. I hate stories as well. But as you know, this percentage is complete bullshit because of that. But even you have to agree. I certainly noticed amongst my friends, they're all posting stories now.

I hate them. I've never posted one. I had no idea. You know, there's Snapchat. They're on Instagram. They're on WhatsApp. They're on Facebook. And now Messenger, apparently. So you've got all these stupid slideshows that people are putting instead of their feed. So it is what it is. It's huge.

So it's definitely growing and people are moving towards it. And I'm not thrilled about that. It says this article, the repercussions of this medium shift are vast. Users now consider how every moment could be glorified and added to the narrative of their day. Social media platforms are steamrolling their old designs to highlight the camera in people's stories.

And advertisers must rethink their message not as a headline, body text, and link, but as background overlays and a feeling that lingers even if viewers don't click through. Kill me now. Fuck no. Me first. Me first. So I have used stories in Instagram just on the dogs account because when they play, it's kind of fun.

I can just pop it out and do a quick video of it. But the thing about it is they're ephemeral and they go away. So I'm not going to spend any time on it. I mean, it saves it to my camera roll so I can look at it later. But the biggest issue I have with them is a they're all vertical, which I hate. But, you know, when you're looking at them in the context of the app, that's how you have to shoot it.

So later on down the line, if you want to go back and look at the videos, you get all this crappy vertical video, which just sucks. I mean, who wants that stuff? Well, the other thing about it is that it doesn't foster the community sense because you can't comment on them. You send direct messages and things like that, but there's no thing where like you don't start any sort of conversation because they disappear, you know, exactly.

So that goes back to the whole ephemeral thing. I like ephemeral social media, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time making stories that because that that's a tweet. Sure. Go away. You know, I want all my tweets to go away after a day because usually actually I want them to go away right after I write them because most of the time I'm drunk and get in trouble.

But yeah, this this whole no, this is not this is not a paradigm shift of for social media. It's not. It's a it's a fad. Remember when people used to call things fads and then they would go away? Oh, like Pokemon Go was a fad. No, it's the next big thing in AR, which was really stretching the boundaries of what we call AR, by the way.

Anyway, this is it must have been a slow news day. Please tell me it was a slow news day and people don't really believe this shit. It's it. No, sorry. Damn. We talked a lot about automation and what that'll mean. I found a really interesting article on marketplace.org.

If a wave of automation is coming, what countries are best prepared? So enter the Automation Readiness Index, the ARI, a research project put together by The Economist and funded by Swiss robotics giant ABB. It's a globalist ranking the nation's most prepared to smoothly integrate intelligent automation into their economies.

So this is a really good article and I have to give them a lot of credit for not really banging on about the term AI too much in here. They were very good about just sticking to automation and not all the rest of the stuff. So it'll sadden us to know that the U.S. is at number nine, which you'd think, you know, with all the startups and technology innovation that comes from here.

However, we have no governmental program while a bunch of other developed countries like Germany, which is at number one, has an entire program getting prepared for industry 4.0 or AI or robotics or anything like that. The second thing that's dragging the U.S. down is educational policies.

Shocking. A lot of the U.S. educational system is geared towards getting people into higher education. What's missing is essentially what used to be called vocational training. So this is a really interesting report. I recommend everybody go take a look at it and prepare to move to either Germany or Canada, who are doing a lot better than us. Canada is number five.

Yeah, not bad. I think they need to hire a cartographer for this infographic, though, because where they put their bullet points for the U.S. is, I think, in Canada. And Canada is almost in Alaska. Yeah, it's not the best bullet points system there.

Definitely not. But yeah, South Korea, number one. Sorry, Germany is number two. I thought it was number one. Oh, yeah. Singapore, Japan, Canada. And let's see, then we go Estonia. Imagine that. France, the U.K., and then finally the U.S. Wow. Who's last on the list?

I want to figure out who I don't know. Oh, Indonesia. So we don't go to Indonesia for that. Or we go there if we want to just escape all this sort of stuff. And live somewhere. That's true. In a jungle or something like that. I don't know. Welcome to the jungle. I found another really interesting think piece article.

Say goodbye to the information age. It's all about reputation now. This is by Gloria Origi, an Italian philosopher and a tenured senior research at CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research. She has a book out called Reputation, What It Is and Why It Matters. So I think this would be a really interesting read.

She kind of gets into facts. Facts don't matter anymore. What does matter is how we basically build up our connections and what people have come to believe from us and we can basically get away with whatever as long as we've built up a good reputation.

So this is a bit like the social hierarchy system that they're building in China, really. And she's saying that we're kind of heading towards that way where you'll get a social score. Your peers will rate you and that's what will really matter. Oh, fantastic. Right?

Isn't that great? So I had this. I was going to put it in the show notes and I'd forgotten about it until you just mentioned this article. I was walking down the street down the way and I saw a sign, hairstylist and manicurist with a following wanted, not with skills or talent, not with a degree in cosmetology or whatever the hell you call it.

No, they just want people with a following. Well, because that way, you know, you're getting built in customers coming in the door, right? Of course. And that got me thinking back in the day and you you've you've railed on this before about what's Amanda fucking Palmer. Like, yes, she went to a studio, the studio built her up or the label built her up, spent all this money to make her a star.

Then she left with her following and then basically made all the money off of it. And I was just thinking because, you know, it was like five in the morning walking the dogs. I'm thinking, man, I remember when you were nobodies, then you were found and then you became a star. Now you have to become a star on your own to actually do it.

And just this whole thing is mind boggling. Well, my understanding is that's how the entire modeling industry works. Now, people don't go out and find models anymore. They just troll Instagram. And once you've hit a certain amount of people, you can become a model. I'm pretty sure that's how it works with photographers, too, on the other side of it, because I was talking with Seth Miranda when he was talking about his Instagram and how he sets it up and he gets jobs and other people get jobs based on their follower count.

It's insane. It's just insane. You got to hustle. You got to have your side hustle going. You got to have your followers and your social media marketing strategy. Oh, can you kill me from the other one? Yeah. Yeah. Well, some good news.

Cambridge Analytica is shutting down. Woohoo! Yeah. Wait. Hold on a second, everybody. Hold on. It's just in. Hold this just in. Peep, peep, peep. They may have shut down Cambridge Analytica, but they've started a new company called EmmerData. So they didn't really go away. They just shut it down and said they went bankrupt and they have financial insolvency because of the scandal.

And a bunch of the key figures just started a new company so they can continue going off and doing the same crap. Yeah. Yeah. This is not good. Also, nobody knows where the data is going. Ah, fire sale. Nobody knows where all that data is going. Yeah, we do. To the highest bidder for the fire sale.

Right. We talked about this long ago because we were like, those databases live on forever. And the great part about it is those databases, they have password hashing and things like that that are based on old tech. And they just sit in a locker for a long time.

And then as technology keeps moving forward and those databases finally come back out in some kind of fire sale like this, people can go back, break the passwords, then you get them back and then they back out on the market. Yep. And remember, this happened with Radio Shack. Radio Shack was basically selling customer data when they went bankrupt.

So it's going to happen again. So all this stuff will be out there again, I'm sure. Yay. That's good times. Facebook had their big developers conference this week, F8, or as I call it, Fate. Mm-hmm. Fate. Yep. So they basically were hoping to change the news cycle that's going on about Facebook.

I don't think it's working. Really? Judging from every article that I've read, because anything that they've talked about developing, everybody then goes, but what are the privacy implications? So we'll start to talk about that. They've also had some other really bad news coming out this week. Spyglass security founder Jackie Stokes tweeted that a Facebook security engineer was using his access to personal data to stalk women online.

Oh, surprise, surprise, surprise. Now Facebook has confirmed that that was indeed happening and fired the employee in question, because I'm sure there's only one sad dude doing that. So glad they found him. Oh yeah, the one. He was the one.

This isn't fucking Highlander. It's not there can be only one. It's the other way. There's only one honest guy probably at Facebook, and everybody else is dicking around. Just because we've seen it. We know. Look, we've always had this thing as developers called God Mode, and it's called God Mode for a reason.

And it's very difficult to pull yourself back from being God when you've got God Mode. Absolute power is absolutely awesome. Yes. Oh man. And I saw a New York Times article, Facebook's privacy changes leave developers steaming. Oh no.

So this is basically, you know, it's kind of the same thing as the guy that was originally selling the data to Cambridge Analytica, a site that made quizzes and other kind of crap called CubeU for years. They were, you know, doing the same thing, using the data for research and business purposes.

And Facebook finally said, nope, you're out. And of course, the CEO of CubeU is all pissy now. He's like, Facebook threw us under the bus. And he said, Facebook became what it was because of us developers. Now they want to blame us for everything that has happened to them. Well, two points here.

Like, two points here. One, get your own goddamn data. If you're that good at it and that important, get your own goddamn data. Get people to come in there. You cannot build your company in somebody's backyard and get pissed off when they turn on the sprinklers. I've said it before, I'll say it again.

And it's just, how does this guy have the balls to bitch about it? Yes, Facebook did become what it is because of the developers. That's your fault. Yes. It goes the other way around. It became something very bad, didn't it? Exactly. You made it to something really bad that they are now trying to fix in order to keep all the people there.

This was a terrible symbiotic relationship. And you should have learned from Twitter because Twitter kicked out all the developers ages ago. That's a sentence I never thought we'd hear. You should learn from Twitter. Well, he should have. The only difference is, here's the thing.

The reason that we're not talking about all the privacy implications of Twitter is because they did kick out all the developers and their site is a piece of crap and their service is a piece of crap. Now, Facebook kept all the developers, turned it into this monolithic, horrible thing, and are finally coming to terms with, oh, yeah, developers might not be the best thing.

Opening our platform to anybody that has an online account might not have been the best thing to do. Speaking of that, I got notices because I built different apps for tons of the bands that I worked with. Back in the early days when you had to make an app basically to even put a widget on a website.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Kind of message commenting on things and things like that. So I've been getting all these notices because Facebook is revamping them, and you have to go in and basically make all these changes. The amount of man hours involved in this, and since I know everybody that hires developers is cheap as F, I'm wondering how many of these apps are just going to disappear because they're not willing to pay or put in the time to go in and go through all the hoops that Facebook is making you go through to fix them now.

Yeah. And I'm wondering if I'm going to hear from any of my old clients. I doubt it. I doubt it because they're just going to let the stuff go. Yeah. No, this is all going to cobweb and just go off into the ether. Yeah. So here's one of Facebook's first big mea culpas that's coming this week.

Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is building a new privacy control called Clear History. It will allow you to see all the information Facebook has collected about your use of websites and apps, such as the ones I was just talking about that I built, that employ Facebook's tracking tools. And then if you want, you can tell Facebook to forget that information, much like the Clear History button on your internet browser.

So he, I'm not going to get into his explanation about it, but basically it sounds really good, right? Yeah. Well, from a privacy perspective, this move is one of the most significant in Facebook's history. It signals that the company has taken seriously the user backlash and threats of regulation in wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and congressional hearings.

But I am waiting for the butt to drop. Here comes that Facebook shoe. Note that clearing your history won't entirely delete the information from Facebook's servers, however. Rather, Facebook said it will clear the information from your account. So this is what I always say delete actually means.

Exactly. Delete just means you don't get to see the data anymore. That's it. That's it. That's it. Display equals zero. That's all it is. So they say that means it will store your browser history, but it will do so in a way that doesn't identify you as the person who is doing that browsing.

Facebook will also let you opt out of that kind of tracking in the future. Although again, it will still track you in an anonymized way. And as we all know, there's no real such thing as total anonymization and things can be de-anonymized very, very easily. So again, all it does is remove your ability to see your information, not theirs.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Oh, and I wanted to throw this one out there. Somebody on our Clash or Battle Royale Guild asked what I was using and you were using to kill our Facebook messages, the historical one, Social Book Post Manager is the one.

It's called Social Book, not Facebook. Yeah, Jason uses it. I'm going to start using it because this is just starting to get ridiculous. I hadn't yet because I just figured, oh, whatever, but it's time. Yeah, but I mean, it's still just setting the display flag to zero, but at least other people can't see it. Only they can see your data.

But yeah, Social Book is what it's called, Social Book Post Manager. And it works pretty well, but you have to use it in Chrome. Yes, which is, you know, it is what it is. It is what it is. It's just, it's basically a script widget that goes through and clicks delete and OK for you a lot of times. That's all it does. Yeah.

So one of the things that Facebook has announced at Facebook hate or F8 or whatever the hell they're, I'm just calling it Facebook hate now, I've moved on, is they're going to move into the online dating arena, which has Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble acting like spurned lovers. Well, this should not be surprising to anybody.

If there's any area out there that is getting traction, Facebook's going to try to open up something. The question for me is, could this be, what are they thinking in terms of timing? Oh, dear. Everybody is complaining about privacy, and now we're going to throw our love lives and all that data into your hands?

Yeah. As Paul on Facebook pointed out to us, is this just another way to get more data? Yes. Yeah. Yes, it is. Zuckerberg is now in your junk. Yeah. Junkerberg. That's what we'll call him from now on. Junkerberg. I'm surprised that they're just building out their own. I mean, why not just, they've got enough money.

Buy Tinder. Buy Bumble. But why would they do that when they can just recreate it? They've got all the data. They've got all the connections. Why would they actually need to pay money for it? Or even more confusingly, they'll do like what they did, and they'll buy WhatsApp, but still have their own messenger product. And then they have two things doing the same damn thing.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm just wondering why it took them so long. Yeah, me too. Do you think this would have been something they would have rolled out a long time ago? But they're going to bring it to us, so it doesn't matter to me, but enjoy that, Jason. Oh, yeah. No, thank you. No, thank you.

I am terminally single. That's okay. All right. Well, the other thing they're rolling out is Oculus Go, which they hope will bring virtual reality to the masses. Now, I did not read too much about this because I'm really not interested in this stuff, but Jason, you've got a lot in here. Well, I checked out the initial offering for Oculus Go, and it's $199, doesn't require a PC or a smartphone.

That's affordable. I wanted it. I want it. Right. You know, I don't have $200, so I cannot get one. Patreon.com slash Grumpy Old Geeks. Yeah, please, please, pretty much, pretty please drop us some money. Yeah, no, I am just, I am like dirt poor right now, so I can't get one to try it out.

Right. It looks cool, though. It looks really cool, and it's, I would like to try it, but I can't. So if anybody's tried it yet, let me know. I've sent a bunch of people links to it, so hopefully they will purchase it, while I cannot. And they've actually put out a new version at Fate.

It's called, well, it's just basically part of the Rift line, and this one I think is really cool because they're actually pushing the tech forward now. Right. They've got this new thing called varifocal displays, and it's, you know, it's got more shit inside of it because it's moving the lenses around to change the focal point on it, which I think is really cool.

And what's even better is it's got sub-millimeter precision, which is crazy in a headset that's stuck on your face. Yeah, that is pretty crazy. And a bigger field of view. The current, you know, slate of them out there only go up to about 110 degree max, and these new ones will go to 140 degree, which is kind of cool.

Well, I keep hearing word that, especially here in LA, there's going to be these VR arcades that are going to be opening up, so maybe we'll be able to go to someplace sometime soon and be able to try them all out. I can tell you right now, you don't have to go to a VR arcade. Go to Best Buy. They have stations set up that you can go try them.

And I checked that out. Maybe we'll do a Grumpy Old Geeks field trip. Yeah, yeah. If you want to come to the Valley, because I sure as shit ain't going to Santa Monica. I don't want to get hit by a Prius or a bird. I want to do a virtual bird ride where I can just throw the bird in somebody's window. Now, that's the other thing I wanted to ask you about with the birds.

Since they're just left on the street, isn't that just abandoned property? Can't you just take one? I mean... Well, I suppose they're locked. There's no business license there. People are just riding them around and leaving them. You pick one up, you throw it over your shoulder and go home and it's yours.

Is that really theft? I don't know. I've seen some weird stuff. I've seen people not near the end of the day where there's the bird bounty hunters that are picking up the birds to go charge them and make their bounties. I've seen people in the middle of the day throw them in the back of their car and drive down the street. I'm like, what?

I don't even understand what's going on. It could be just chargers. People going out and getting the bounty on the charge. Could be, I guess. And the thing is, how would you know the difference? They don't have uniforms because that would cost money. Bird's not going to pay for a uniform. Well, and they're not officially employees. That's true. I mean, what do you get when you sign up for Uber?

A sticker. So you probably have to print out and pay for yourself. Probably. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, moving on. Moving on. Let's talk about Snapchat really briefly. Snapchat's redesign isn't working as Snap delivers weak earnings and poor user growth.

Who would have predicted that? Yeah. That's one thing I've learned when I moved back here to LA. I've got friends who used to just all be on Snapchat. And now that I see them all the time, they're just saying, nobody uses Snapchat anymore. That redesign was terrible. We all left. Yeah, everybody's just using Instagram and the story's there.

Snap is done. They don't realize it yet, but they're done. One of the interesting statistics that came out of this Recode story, which I thought was very funny. Netflix added almost twice as many paying users last quarter as Snapchat added free users. Well, there you go.

Oopsies. Oh my God. So yeah, Snap will continue to limp along, but it doesn't look, it's not looking pretty good for them anymore. That's got to say that. TechnologyReview.com had an interesting story. I was debating putting this in Moron of the Week just because I thought it was very funny, but I didn't.

It's actual, I mean, it is news. It's interesting. But I just like the headline, if quantum computers threaten blockchains, quantum blockchains could be the defense. The ever going race. Oh God. So quantum computers will break conventional blockchains. So then we will have quantum blockchains that will be impervious to quantum breaking, but then we'll come up with something else that'll break the quantum blockchain and then we'll need a something else chain.

Yeah. What comes after quantum? I don't know. A leap. I guess we'll have leap chain. Leap chain. Excel chain. That's what I think we should call it. There we go. Oh man. Yeah. So Stripe, the payment processor out of San Francisco, land of men, they're upset about the housing crisis that's going on in San Francisco.

Okay. So they have donated $1 million. So that'll buy a half of a house? This is a $9 billion payment company and they donated $1 million to YIMBY, a pro-housing development advocacy group.

Yeah. Do you remember a few days ago when we talked about the Bitcoin company, the cryptocurrency company that spent $25 million in one day on DonorsChoose? Yeah. Yeah. These guys have more money than they do and they spent a million dollars. Hey, I get you.

I get the point that you're coming from, but it's so very rare for any of these companies to donate anything. I will go ahead and say that this is a good thing. It's better than nothing, which is what most San Fran companies are doing. Nothing. I'm going to tell you right now, this million dollars is not, nobody cares about housing.

It's Stripe. What it is, is the guy who buys the ad spots for Stripe came back and said, hey, how much ads do we get for a million bucks? Okay, what if we just spend that money on good press and we just do public outreach and say, hey, the housing sucks.

Let's find something. It could have been homeless, whatever, but the whole same thing. Let's just spend that million dollars and we'll get everywhere because we are the crusaders for, you know, pro housing in San Francisco. I bet they get more than a million dollars worth of press out of this.

We're talking about them. That's right. Wouldn't have talked about Stripe for any other reason. I've covered them on the show before. I have. I use Stripe. I've been a Stripe developer. A lot of people do. I think it's actually quite a smart thing. I mean, my hairdressers use it. All the food trucks use it. It was a genius idea.

No, I mean, as far as payment processing goes, they're a very good built-in payment processor with just a little bit of JavaScript. It's fairly easy to use. The only thing that they can't figure out how to do is unsubscribe me from all of their fucking emails that I get every week.

Apparently, nobody can crack that nut on the Internet anymore. Yeah. No. Anyway, Goldman Sachs is going to open a Bitcoin trading operation. This comes from the New York Times. Okay. They're not going to be actually buying and selling Bitcoin at the outset.

Okay. But here's the – this is one of the great bits of it. Rana Yared, one of the Goldman executives overseeing the creation of the trading operation, said the bank was clear-eyed about what it was getting itself into. And then goes on to say, I would not describe myself as a true believer who wakes up thinking Bitcoin will take over the world.

For almost every person involved, there has been personal skepticism brought to the table. Apparently not enough. Can I just point – can I just point out that this is the New York Times, which normally I'm very pleased with. Their headline is Goldman Sachs is to open a Bitcoin trading operation.

The story is saying there will be no trading. Yep. There will be no operation. All they're going to do is start to – they're basically doing an exploratory committee to look into it. Exactly. That's it. That is not a Bitcoin trading operation. That's right. Because the next thing I was going to say, well, Goldman will not initially be buying and selling actual Bitcoins.

A team at the bank is looking at going in that direction if it can get regulatory approval and figure out how to deal with the additional risks associated with holding virtual currency. They are doing what any investment organization should be doing, which is looking at this thing that is out there in case it becomes something.

But that is not opening a Bitcoin trading operation. That is vastly different. I bet somebody removed the word seeks. Goldman Sachs seeks to open Bitcoin trading operations. But, no, somebody just – oh, it'll be shorter. They probably had an SEO plug-in that gave them a score back on how good their title would do on SEO.

And they're like, oh, we just fudge it a little bit. So we're saying that Yoast is basically making all headlines completely the opposite of what they should be. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. This episode is brought to you by the new Eero and Eero Beacon.

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Boom! Free overnight shipping to the US or Canada. That's Eero.com. Select Overnight Shipping and use the code GOG to make it free. Ups and doodads! Brian, with this move to Los Angeles, I've found that I've had to re-sign up for different loyalty programs locally here.

And I just want to talk for a second about the state of the loyalty program application. Okay. Do you have any of these? Have you used any of them? I do. Yes, I do. I have one because I get a good gas discount if I do enough grocery shopping.

Oh, would that be with Ralph's? It would be, yes. It would be with Ralph's. Yes, I used to use that with Juul back in the day. Now, this morning, I spent probably what is $100 of billable hours trying to get an app to work that would save me 35 cents off of an avocado.

It dawned on me how terrible these things are. So, I've used the CVS one before. Doesn't work. CVS pay doesn't work. They always break. I've actually had to take my app to a stand to scan a QR code to print me out a physical coupon to walk back to the cashier with.

Right. There is so much money to be made in all of these loyalty programs that it boggles my mind that nobody out there can figure out how to write good software for them. I just don't use the apps. I just have everything tied through a fake phone number. Well, that too.

You can do that. But the thing with Ralph's is they have what's called digital coupons. Oh, right. So, you have to have the app to go in and click on a button that says add to my card. So, then when you go in and use the card, which mine is also under a fake phone number, because they give you quote unquote virtual cards now.

Yes. And they just don't work. That is a space that is rife for disruption. That's all I'm saying. Somebody out there should go and fix this problem. I agree. I'm just saying. Okay. I've also tried a new app called Beyond Menu.

Oh, do they go beyond the menu? Oh, yes, they do. Oh, they go beyond the menu and beyond the law in some spots. Oh. I was trying to get some delivery because I was exhausted from moving everything and just my back hurt. I'm just like, I need food now.

And so, I found an app called, well, actually, I found an app through a restaurant that I wanted food from. And so, I got the app and installed it and no delivery charge or anything. It just put the order in, went straight to the restaurant, and then I paid through Apple Pay.

This is key. I'm going to tell you why in a second. Okay. So, then I used it the next day because then I'm like, I looked at the list of restaurants on there, and I've been craving Persian food for two years. I love Persian food. So, I got me some cash to bottom June and some gourmand sabsi and some yogurt with shallots.

And same thing, went straight to the app, paid through it, came right away. So, I was going to talk about it this morning. Then I went and I said, let me check out some reviews here because I don't see what their business model is. And there's no little thing. I'm thinking like, oh, first 30 days, no delivery charge or whatever.

But they are just a pass through to the restaurant. Yeah. There's a reason why they're just a pass through to the restaurant. Would you like to guess what that is? No. Go ahead and tell me. They're stealing people's credit cards. What? And charging them.

It is a massive scam. I went to this site called Sight Jabber, and there are over 100 one-star reviews saying, right after I used this app, my credit card was dinged for several hundred dollars in an offshore phone scam. Some people are saying they're in China.

Their address has been listed at two different places in Illinois. But almost everybody, even restaurant owners, are saying, nope, they hijacked my reviews. Everything is like the biggest scam I've ever seen. That is amazing. So I think I dodged.

Well, here's the difference. I didn't dodge a bullet because I used Apple Pay because if they had gotten my credit cards, there's no money on them anyway. So I would have probably been exempt from it. But it still would have been a hassle, and they would have racked up about another $8 in charges that they could have gotten off that card because I'm right at the limit of that food that I bought was the last thing I could put on my Amex.

But with Apple Pay, it's unscammable. They can't take the number and charge it again. So plus one for Apple Pay right there. That's right. So they can't get your credit card number. Hey, look. We found a food delivery service app that actually has a viable business model.

Exactly. They just steal your money. They just steal all your money. That's it. So I would say avoid Beyond Menu if you can. I think that would be wise. The reviews are amazing. It's a fun read. By all means, go to our show notes and check that out. Yeah. GOG.show slash 258.

There will be a link there. And wow. I was like, you know what? Hats off. Hats off to you for just not giving any fucks and just taking the credit card numbers and saying, we're just going to take your money. Yep. Amazing. That's amazing. All right. So I talked last week about the Apple Watch that I have recently gotten.

And my one big complaint being the fact that I like to wear the watch pretty close to my wrist. So I would always like bang up against the button that would then launch Siri. And Dan B1 Kenobi over on Twitter sent a little note to me and to the show as well that says, love every episode.

And have you tried flipping the crown orientation? Looks unconventional, but barring larger forearms might prevent accidental Siri activations. Also makes scrolling easier with the opposite hand. And he sent a little photo and that looks like a really good idea. So I might have to try that. That sounds like a fantastic idea.

Yeah. I'm totally going to do that. I'm totally going to do that. So thanks for the tip. Can't believe I didn't think about it myself, but awesome. Fantastic. Yeah. And let's see. I also saw some other news because I know you'd like to do your Insta scamming segment, which I haven't found anything. Yeah. I haven't found anything this week.

It's going to get a lot easier now because Instagram is now launching their own pay system within Instagram. So you do not have to leave Instagram anymore. You will. They're rolling this out to some users now. So you will be able to buy that overpriced item that's being advertised right away without even looking. Oh, my God.

That's not good. Given everything that you've been discovering about the ads on there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. Somebody is about to make a gazillion dollars, and I think you and I need to look into drop shipping right away. Right away. Yes. Because this might be the way that we retire because podcasting ain't cutting it.

Coding didn't cut it. But selling overpriced shit to kids who like to look at pictures of their friends, that might be the actual way that we finally cash out of this damn ecosystem. All right. Let's get on it.

I found an interesting article over on the New York Times called Pirate Radio Stations Explode on YouTube. When you hear that, what do you think of? I think of, what was that movie with Christian Slater?

Oh, Pump Up the Volume. Yes. I think Pump Up the Volume, except for the digital age. I think copyright infringement, personally. Well, of course. Obviously. Obviously copyright infringement. But that's got to be tough to police in real time because if it's like a radio station that's just streaming and it's, I'm assuming it's just like individuals that put out their own shows whenever they feel like it, that's going to be tough to catch.

I'm guessing. I'm guessing some people have had their channels shut down. And these are kids that are basically using the live streaming feature of YouTube. Yeah. So they're just, you know, turning on a stream, pumping something to it, and letting it play. They're pumping up the volume. Yeah. There used to be a lot of different services like that, all of which eventually got shut down because, yeah, copyright infringement.

If you're not paying the radio license fees to the different music institutions, then you can't do that. You can't just play music anytime you want for public consumption. You just can't do that. Yeah. And here's the thing. A lot of it's like, you know, chilly EDM type of stuff.

And I think a lot of these kids are pretty smart. They figured out a way around it. Yeah. Start their own label. Well, there you go. They started their own label so all the music that's on there are their musicians or their friends. Yeah. So it's free promotion for them. People get exposed to the music and nobody's harmed in the process, which I thought was pretty damn clever.

Yeah. That is very, that's getting around the system. I'm sure YouTube will figure out a way to shut it down, but very clever. It's not against the rules. It's their music. They own the copyright or they have rights to it. I guess the hard part there is getting people to come listen because it's new music that they may not like.

But apparently that's what they like about it. Good. Excellent. Go kids. This is like a little punk rock thing. I'm good on them. Yeah. I mean, they're only making like five to ten grand a month, but you know, that's not bad. Currently, that's more than I make. Right.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Brian, would you like to start making some music? Sure. You know what? We can compose while we're figuring out what kind of crap to sell on Instagram. Exactly. The music to sell to Instagram by will be my first album. I brought my little Yamaha keyboard that my brother gave me here.

I've got a studio now, so come on over. Look, I like it. I like seeing all this stuff. I like seeing these little hustlers. I like seeing these ways around. I like people seeing, you know, building their own new things that actually make them money. That's great. I'm all for this. That's fantastic. This is exactly what this stuff should be for.

I'm with it. So good on them. I know you haven't caught up with The Expanse. It's continuing to be very good. The Americans is continuing to be very good. A little slow, but very good. They're heading somewhere. I don't know where yet. What episode are you up to? I'm caught up.

So episode five. Okay. Five brought it back. One was good. Two through four were... And I thought five was... It finally got back to something that I could get into. Yeah. It's heading somewhere. And the other thing that I did this week, you know, the baseball is back.

My Dodgers. I like to watch my Dodgers. It's very relaxing for me. There was a game this Thursday. Dodgers versus the Diamondbacks. Big series. Dodgers are starting to do a little bit better. So definitely wanted to watch the game. See what was going to happen. Not on broadcast TV.

Okay. Not on Spectrum's channel that I pay for specifically. That is all Dodgers all the time. Every single Dodger game. No Facebook watch. Bought an exclusive. So I had to watch on Facebook. I mean, I suppose I could have watched on my TV by throwing it to my Apple TV or something like that.

Boy, oh boy, you kids today, if this is the way that you want to watch TV, I don't know about this. I found it incredibly annoying. So if you bring up the screen, the default, of course, is very Facebook-y. You see names of other people that are watching.

There's a continual stream of people commenting about the game. There's a continual upstream of, you know, different Facebook emojis. Thumbs up. Mad face. Blah, blah, blah. All going all over the place. You can see what friends of yours are watching the game. So shout out to a friend of the show, Ryan Gamsby, who was sitting there watching the game with me.

You can talk to each other while watching the game. I don't want any of this. So thankfully, there is something called quiet mode. You get that. So you don't get all the crap. So I switched that on and I was able to just watch the game and that was fine. Not great, but fine.

They do a very good job of synergy because every baseball player basically these days has an Instagram page. And they don't do ads, so they have a lot of time to fill because baseball could be a very slow game. Yeah. So, of course, they throw up the Instagram videos from different players in the game and talk about it throughout the whole thing.

So it's a very millennial sports watching experience. And the best thing of all was the jock commentators. They don't have – you could tell they were being fed things by the tech team to try to explain what was going on. So listening to them try to describe how to turn on quiet mode so you don't get all that stuff because they kept having to say that because people were really annoyed at seeing all this stuff when they just wanted to see the game.

So you could tell they were getting in their headsets. Explain the quiet mode thing again. Swipe. Swipe on your TV if you're watching it on your TV. Swipe? Really? Or hover over, not physically, I mean with your mouse or finger. They want you to hover with your finger.

Because the – yeah, it was bad. Because, I mean, the reality is you could be watching it on like 25 different devices, all of which have different UIs, right? Yeah. So how are they going to explain all that? It was the best. It was very funny. So, you know, Facebook TV or Facebook Watch or whatever the hell they're calling it, I can see it being a thing someday.

But it's just very funny right now. And it was quite the interesting experience. Sounds like it. Now, one of the things that we had back in Chicago was you could – everybody hates the TV commentary for the most part. So we love the radio commentary. So what you could do is you just turn off – you mute your TV and then you buy a little Cubs radio.

The Cubs radio has a genius feature. It's basically like a TiVo. So depending on where you're at and where your signal is and how – like how to sync it, it has a little knob that you can offset the timing. Oh, that is genius. So it will absolutely match what you're seeing on TV.

Is that not the coolest thing ever? That is very cool. I like that. I wish the Dodgers get on that. Yeah, it was like $20. I'm sure there's probably a generic radio that you can get to find that. But, yeah, it was just a little portable radio with an antenna that you put some, you know, double A's in and you put it by your TV and you literally can just turn the knob to sync it right up with your TV.

I thought it was amazing. Very cool. Yeah. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from The Cyber Wire. How's it going, Dave?

Pretty good, gentlemen. Glad to be back. Hope everybody's doing well. Oh, of course we are. Of course. Of course. It's not guaranteed. No. Especially by the time we get to this part of the show. Yeah. True dat. True dat. Well, it's, you know, it's been such an upbeat show until this point.

Is that right? I can't wait to listen. It's been such an upbeat week. Everything's coming up roses, right? Yes. At least we're not Kanye. There you go. So we got a little follow-up on Twitter from our discussion with our dealing with our parents and technology last week.

6502 says, years ago, I bought my parents' iPads with keyboards. It really cut down on support calls. An option, perhaps, for all of us. Yeah. I think it's not a bad idea. In fact, I think iPads are great for seniors in particular. I think it's a really good choice, and by the way, I love MOS 6502's handle there.

Everybody know what the 6502 is? Enlighten us, Dave. No, it's the microprocessor in the Apple II. There you go. Thank you very much. It's also our friend, Gabriel Pagan, down in the lovely place of Puerto Rico with no power. With no power still.

Well, it's variable power now. Yes, variable. That's an important number from my childhood, the good old 6502. So there you go. Other news, as everybody has probably heard since just recently, Twitter said, hey, you know, you might want to go change your password.

This is one of those abundance of caution kind of alerts. Turns out that Twitter discovered in some logs with some of the, I think it's some of the hashing functions that they do on passwords. They found a log that was deep inside the system that had a bunch of passwords that were saved in plain text.

And oops is right. And best they can tell, nothing was accessed, nothing was breached, nothing got out there, but they're just warning everybody. Out of an abundance of caution, go ahead and change those passwords, which is a good idea. And we would add, while you're at it, if you're not already using a password manager, this would be an excellent, it's kind of like how they tell you to, you know, change the batteries in your smoke detectors when you switch from daylight savings time.

Well, this breach is a great opportunity for you to start using a password manager. And we recommend one password over here on the Grumpy Old Geeks. There you go. This segment brought, this password breach brought to you by. Actually, by nobody. Because those bitches ain't paid us in a long time.

But we still like the product. Yeah, we do. We still like their product, even if they haven't come back to advertise with us again. Another interesting thing, though, about this password breach is some folks are speculating that the discovery of, there's been several discoveries of some of these log files lately.

I believe there's one over on GitHub recently, and there's speculation that this is because of the looming GDPR regulation. Well, the R stands for regulation, so that's redundant. So for the pendants in the audience, I'm sorry. I know you just spit out your coffee. But so that's coming.

And so that prompts a review of a lot of security items by various companies to try to make sure that they're going to be in compliance with it when it comes online on the 25th of this month. So there's just interesting speculation that that is likely or a possibility for how they may have come across these logs, that a lot of people are looking through the stuff to see exactly how do we store that data?

And, you know, all that stuff we've been pack ratting for the past decade, that might run us afoul of GDPR. Yeah, and you know it's just some, you know, developer that left five years ago that just wrote a log function in his test code to see, oh, what's being passed to this function?

Oh, let's dump it over here and then just forgot to comment it out or take it out a long time ago. And I'm sure a lot of people are finding those little log files that are just stuck somewhere on the server that they've never seen or, you know, just any developer worth their salt is always writing logs when they're doing it.

So I think a lot of companies are going to find these lying around. So we might have to change our password a lot. Well, let's hope not. But anyway, like I said, it's not a huge data breach or anything, but just for the heck of it, if you're on Twitter, go ahead and change that password to a nice, long, secure one.

Yes. And speaking of people looking around to see what might what interesting information might just be laying about Palantir, which is Peter Thiel's dating binding company. There is a very long form article on Bloomberg that gets deep into the weeds on what he is doing, what he has done, what Palantir is doing specifically using war on terror tools to track down American citizens.

And they say the scary thing is they are desperate for new customers, as shown in the privacy breaches at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica with Thiel and Palantir linked to both sides of the equation. The pressure to monetize data at tech companies is ceaseless. The interesting thing about this article for me is we've kind of been having an ongoing discussion here in this segment about how technology has outpaced rapidly our laws and our procedures and even our ethics about how to deal with data.

And it seems to me that Palantir and Peter Thiel in particular are so far ahead of the curve in terms of big data collection and what they're starting to do with it. It's somewhat frightening. I cannot disagree. In fact, I interviewed an author recently.

He's got a new book out. It's called Habeas Data. Privacy versus the Rise. Yeah. Good title. Privacy versus the Rise of Surveillance Tech. The guy's name is Cyrus Farivar. And really interesting guy. I recommend this book. It's just coming out as we speak.

It's just out now. But he goes through a lot of the legal cases. He goes back to the Supreme Court cases that have led us to where we are today when it comes to a lot of these regulations and how they lag. His initial interest in all this was the license plate readers that the police have.

He lived in Oakland, California for a while. And he lived overseas in Germany for a while and was struck by how different their attitude is towards security and safety than ours is. But another thing that struck me in this article was there was a paragraph here where they said the platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brain calls the secondary surveillance network, the web of who is related to, friends with, or sleeping with whom.

One woman in the system, for example, who wasn't suspected of committing any crime was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates.

So, again, big data can give us outcomes that we really like, like catching a serial killer, and it can give us outcomes that maybe we don't like so much, like discovering that you might have a disease and then the healthcare industry finds out about that and jacks your rates or that you're sleeping around a little bit.

Should we name that? Should we name that Diddlebot? Diddlebot. Yeah. Thomas Griffins over at Twitter sent us one to us and the Cyber Wire, which I thought was kind of amusing. This is a tweet from Harold Sinnott, and it says, lots of hashtags.

I'll leave out the hashtags because we just start to sound like parody when we put them in. Next in cybersecurity, scientists warn artificial intelligence could actually hack your brain. No. This is like Kevin Mitnick whistling up the launch codes for all the nukes.

Yeah. You know, this is a video that's been put out by the World Economic Forum, and I've got to say, you know, I need to get hired by the World Economic Forum so I can just make these sorts of things. It's a wonderfully, like, socially viral made video. And, you know, yes, maybe in 30 or 40 or 50 years we could start worrying about this, but we're nowhere near this, as we all know.

And this is just kind of, you know, this is a little security masturbation as far as I'm concerned. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. And I guess the notion behind this is that they can read brainwaves and then also they could transmit brainwaves to influence your brain.

Yes. So I'm going to start buying up stock in tinfoil hats. I don't know about you guys. Yes, definitely. So, yeah, the idea here being we will get to the point where we'll be able to, you know, track the passages of neurons and the firing of neurons in your head and figure out what you're saying or thinking.

And then the opposite of that being we could trigger them and make you think whatever we want. We can't figure out how to get scooters to work on the streets of Santa Monica. How the hell are we going to make this work? Well, the other thing that strikes me about this is that this is the complex solution to a much simpler problem.

Influencing people. Look at magicians and sleight of hands artists and pickpockets. Or Facebook in the last election. Exactly. Exactly. There are much cheaper, much easier ways to do this. I suppose this makes for good movies. And, yes, perhaps there are some highly specialized cases where nation states might be able to make use of this.

Who knows? But I don't know. For this to be something that's going to be happening that any of us need to be concerned about on a daily basis in our regular, normal, everyday lives, I don't think so. We already know how to program meat with words and advertising.

We don't really need AI to do that. We do not. But we can move on to some scenarios and thoughts that we perhaps should be worrying about. This is over at Technology Review, and this is another wonderful article for this segment that scares the crap out of you. The Black Mirror scenarios that are leading some experts to call for more secrecy on AI.

Artificial intelligence could sway elections, help Big Brother, and make hackers way more dangerous, suggests a new report called the malicious use of artificial intelligence, forecasting, prevention, and mitigation. And they provide four dystopian vignettes involving artificial intelligence that seem taken straight out of the Netflix science fiction show Black Mirror.

Did you guys read this? Well, actually, this is the research itself. The underlying research is the article I was talking about last week that I suggested everybody check out. And it is one of the best AI research papers that I've read in terms of being approachable and entertaining read and thought-provoking.

So I do recommend you check it out. What did you guys think of it? I really enjoyed it. It was very, very good. I found, having read that last week and then reading this one this week, the thing that struck me about this particular one is the four scenarios that they propose, a smarter phishing scam, the malware epidemic, a robot assassin, and a bigger Big Brother, don't necessarily require AI.

We could have all of these scenarios sans AI. With just AI? Yeah, with just AI. Or A. Or A, for that matter, yes. But you put the two together, and now you're cooking with gas. Hey, your peanut butter got in my chocolate. I remember growing up in the age of T and A, not AI.

It was a better world. My favorite was the robot assassin. I thought that was pretty clever. I did like that one. Basically, yeah, inserting another cleaning robot into the mix at an organization that's been, you know, a hack to, on cue, blow up.

It was a clever, clever idea. Wasn't that part of the X-Files episode where the Roomba basically turned on Scully and tried to kill her? Yeah, yeah, you know what? I did not watch this latest abomination of X-Files. That's true. That's true. That was a question for Dave, since you, Brian, didn't even want to participate.

So your opinions don't matter on the robot assassin. Yes. Okay. But I guess my point being is the original article that you pointed us to last week was actually kind of very good, while this was kind of the sci-fi scenario take, piss take from it.

Right. Right. And we talked last week about the situation with the genetic catching of the serial killer, because one of his family members submitted to, I can't remember the name of the real one, because we got yelled at by some people about that.

But it was breaking news in our defense when we were talking about it, so not all the information was in. But the conversation has in a long-form article about how your genome has probably already been hacked, talks about all of these genetic for-profit genome testing companies like 23andMe, etc., make money in part by selling anonymized genomic data.

And as we all know, there is no such thing, and all these things can pretty easily be de-anonymized. So they're basically saying that all this stuff is probably out there already. It's a little bit late in the game, but if you are worried about your privacy, make sure that you and your family members do not do these cheek swab tests and send them off.

And the concern, of course, which I didn't really get to last week, because I was more just kind of thinking larger-scale implications of ethics on it. The real concern, of course, is when this data gets into the hand of things like employers or insurance companies.

GEDmatch, by the way, was the name of the site. Yes, GEDmatch. Thank you. Well, and I wonder, because of the way genetics works, like you said, if my biological brother submits his information, that could be the ballgame for me as well, right?

To a certain degree. Yes, in terms of, yeah, if an insurance agency happens to know your brother's genetic information, then it's going to hedge its bets and assume that you're very similar. Okay, note to future serial killers. Kill your family. Leave no DNA behind.

Start there. Start with your family. Go genetic trace behind. Go as far as... Use a lot of bleach. Yeah. And today's story on unintended consequences... Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, the other interesting point in this article...

In this article is it talks... It gets into how actually really useless most of this information is for health reasons, which is the reason why so many people sign up for this in the first place, is there is this thought, certainly pushed by 23andMe and the other companies that are out there, that you are doing yourself a good health...

You're doing something very healthy for yourself and your family by getting this testing done, but the science does not seem to be bearing that, really, that there's very little benefit from genomic data in terms of, at least at this point in time, health. Yeah, and we talked about this, that we're like the first generation that's doing this, so we're not going to know until a generation or two later, once we've had enough big data.

I did it for the shits and giggles. I don't think they had that on the actual advertisement, but yes, I did it for the shits and the giggles, and it worked out pretty well, especially with the dog DNA. But yeah, the health things that 23andMe has thrown out at me have been basically useless.

I agree. I did mine as well, and for me, it was a little more interesting because I am adopted, so all I had was some family lore that, from my parents, my adoptive parents, they had been told when they got me that I was part Native American.

And so, now because of this, remember, it was the early 70s, because of this, well, because of this, in deference to my heritage, my parents, my sweet, loving parents, dressed me in moccasins, and, yeah, and all that, and of course, anything that, you know, I was, I have, just as luck would have it,

I was a pretty fast runner, so of course, that was because, exactly. Big, itchy foot. Yes, so. Well, it was a different time. Cultural appropriation was not frowned upon at that point. If only Coachella had existed when you were around.

I was actually just thinking how relieved your parents must be that you don't have to kill them when you go and become a mass murderer. Well, right. So, you can leave your family alone. There's a benefit to that. So, I went to get the test, and of course, I fully expected that when it came back, it was just going to confirm the only thing I knew about my heritage, which was that I had, was part Native American, and sure enough, came back, and no Native American.

None. Zip. I am straight out of the middle of England, so, yeah. All right. I've seen pictures of you. Yes, I could have called that one. Yeah, I mean, I have dark hair. Yeah, I mean, I could see that I could have had a Native American grandparent, a great grandparent in there somewhere.

It's not implausible. I'm not, you know, blonde and blue-eyed. Yeah. Nordic. I am dark. You know, it's my swarthy complexion. It could, yeah, you could, it wouldn't be out of the question. But according to the genetic stuff, absolutely not, so.

Well, you know what? Also, it said that I was not very Italian, and every week I get a new batch of results that's saying I'm more and more Italian, so. Wow. Who knows? Day by day, you're becoming more Italian thanks to the Italian supplement, DNA genome you were taking. Hots every day. That I bought on Instagram.

They're activated viruses. They go in and rewrite your DNA, and you haven't been able to resist playing Mario Kart ever since. Don't be racist. Exactly. He's got his wife, Peter, his red jeans. Yeah. Gold chains.

He comes with gold chains, yeah. Right, right. And an iRock. In addition to activating the Italian genes, they activated all of the stereotype genes in you as well. Gigantic mushrooms are growing in his yard. He's already keeps jumping over. He has a big bushy mustache and a chef's hat.

Right. I sleep in a bed of pasta. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That actually sounds kind of nice. I love this security segment. It's kind of odd, isn't it? We're going to get emails. Send them to Brian at grumpyoldgeeks.com. See, if it weren't for genetic testing, we would not have gone down this primrose path.

The Mario hole. Yes. Now, I'll tell you the other thing that can come from these. My wife found her birth parents thanks to Ancestry.com. Wow. She was also adopted. And out of the blue, got email from someone else who said, who had just gotten their DNA tested.

And it said, I'm getting a thing here that says you and I are closely related. And sure enough, this woman turned out to be my wife's aunt. Now, her aunt, who, by the way, was not aware that my wife existed. Right. Okay.

So, this woman's brother, my wife's birth father, had some splaining to do. I think these are going to have a new segment. Unintended consequences. You're 23% milkman. Yeah. So, it's all worked out great.

It's all, you know, it turns out they're very nice people. Both of her birth parents are still around. She's very happy and has started a new relationship. And her adoptive parents are happy. You know, it's just, in this case, it's been a very good thing. But, you know, an interesting thing that can happen with these, for better or for worse.

I've heard of other cases where people have had bad news. Similar types of news that has torn apart families, where people have discovered that they are not related to who they thought they were. Or their parent is not their parent. And so, it can go both ways.

You know, we were lucky that it went a good way. But that's another thing I think people need to be wary about with these tests. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's one story that, I forget what it was, but this guy was raising like nine kids. Turns out none of them were his. I think those of us that kind of live a relatively normal life tend to assume that everybody else does.

But what I've discovered, even within my own family, for instance, I had an uncle that had a child that none of us knew about until after he passed away and she appeared at the funeral. People are weird. There's a lot of weird stuff out there. No matter how normal you think your family may be, I think as these testing things become more and more prevalent, we're all going to discover some secrets.

Everybody's a freak. I remember, this was before these tests came out, someone did a study, I think it was in the UK, and now, you know, they have the royals, so that throws things off a little bit. But it was in the UK, and they found that, I want to say it was between one and two percent of people were not fathered by who they thought they were fathered by.

I do remember hearing something like that. It wasn't just like on Maury Povich. This is like a real study. Right, and so one out of a hundred, one out of 50, that's pretty significant. You know, someone you're, in your circle of friends, chances are there's someone who is not parented or not genetically fathered by who they thought they were.

So, yeah, they are interesting humans, aren't we? The tangled webs we weave. Yes, the stories that we tell about ourselves are not necessarily so accurate. Yeah. All right, well, last but not least, something came across here that I'm including just because I think it's pretty darn cool.

Someone has come up, it's a company called Lobe, and we've got a link to their website. It's lobe.ai, and they've come up with a visual interface for deep learning. Before you continue, there's .ai? Why are we not GOG.ai?

I think we need to grab that, actually. Oh, my God. Let's make that happen for the next show. Oh, man. It's the suffix we were born to have. Oh, yes, we are. Can we make sure we get GOG.ML as well, please?

So when I get angry later. Is there a difference? Really? Yeah. Which one was off to which one, right? Yeah, but so John Gruber, who writes the Daring Fireball website, writes a lot of Mac stuff.

I think he had a good way to put this. This is kind of like how Adobe Illustrator made the whole world of PostScript available to anyone. You didn't have to do any hard coding. This Lobe thing makes deep learning available to just about anyone.

It's drag and drop. It's fun. It's interesting to play with. If nothing else, they have some interesting videos that'll help you understand how deep learning works. And it seems like one of those things that, boy, the right people could really have a lot of fun with this. So check it out.

It's an interesting thing. Of course, the wrong people could also have a lot of fun with it, right? It is pretty interesting. And, you know, hot dog, not hot dog came out of this. Oh, is that right? Yes. Yes. It's listed under their examples page. So that very clever Silicon Valley send up is right here.

All right. Very good. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what I've got this week. Until next time, be safe out there. And as a follow-up, because we have to just mention this, unfortunately, GOG.ai is a Korean company and it exists.

Yeah. Damn. All right. Well, we know where to send our botnet. Have a great weekend, guys. You too. Have a good week. Rinker is not my favorite site, but they occasionally have really cool and interesting stuff.

I thought this was fascinating. It's the art of 3D facial reconstruction. It's a technique which has been doing a lot, been used for forensic anthropology and has helped modern historians, professionals, and amateur alike finally come face-to-face with some of the most important individuals in human history.

Basically, this has been going on for a long time. It's been used to solve crimes and things like that where they rebuild faces. Now they've got the technology to the point where they're able to do really interesting things like be able to tell how much fat layers there was on a skull and things and soft tissue placement and where that was.

So they're able to do 3D modeling of like these famous historical figures. And it's kind of cool. A little uncanny valley. Everybody kind of looks like a character from some, you know, sort of a Game of Thrones thing. Some Game of Thrones game that you went to a while back.

But it's interesting. It's definitely kind of cool. And I thought it was a little clever and worth taking a quick scroll through. It's, yeah. I'm going to upgrade that from kind of cool to pretty damn cool. I really enjoyed it. I was flipping through it. I was hoping there were more. I really wanted there to be more.

Yeah. So it was really interesting. You find out like Robespierre obviously had the pox or something because he's got these marks all over his face. And I like to like Jesus Christ or whoever was under the Shroud of Turin. Exactly. And if you actually followed that, it's probably Leonardo da Vinci who was under the Shroud of Turin.

That is a very big, was it a conspiracy theory? Yeah. But anyway, Jesus looks befuddled is what I really like about that. All right. The other cool thing I found out this week, scientists figure out why roses don't smell as good as they used to.

Who knew? But basically, we've been breeding roses for their look and not their scent. And historically, roses smelled a lot better. So they're going to try to fix that now. Oh, that's good. Because, yeah, they don't really smell like anything anymore, do they? No, they really don't, do they?

No. Yeah. The rose's natural scent has faded over time, according to Science News. So now they're going to use some genetic tweaking to try to build the fragrance in with the actual look. So that would be nice. We could smell a rose again, Jason. Oh, that's good. By the way, do you remember the movie, The Name of the Rose?

I do. That was a great movie. I'm just throwing that out there. That is quite the upside. Yeah, it was. And I put this one in here for you. Watch these robotic soccer players play a nail-biter of a match. Well, not so much a nail-biter, but it was interesting.

These are, they're all robots made by SoftBank. Yep. And they're designed according to the requirements of the standard platform league, which is a robotic soccer league. Yes. Yeah. They could have just put random directions into most of these things.

They're just wandering around. They were. Did you watch any of it? I did watch it. I have two thoughts. First, to the writers at TechCrunch, I deplore your lazy use of the tagline, I, for one, welcome our soccer playing robot overlords. Yeah. That's weak sauce. Secondly, played just as good as the U.S. men's team, which is not going to the World Cup.

Yeah. Well, calling them a writer for this article, I think, is a stretch in and of itself, because there wasn't really much writing going on in this piece. Good point. Moron of the Week! Jason, you and I both use Slack.

We use it to keep in communication about the show. I know you use it for other things as well, and I briefly used it with a couple different projects that I worked on. I'd say it's an interesting and good method of communication for business. I don't know if I'd call it good. It's starting to really fucking annoy me.

Okay. Well, this won't annoy you at all. Okay. There's a new tool for Slack called Shlack. Shlack? Shlack, which finally gives employees the power to shield their private conversations with end-to-end encryption. Developed by information security consulting firm Minded Security, Shlack allows users chatting via DMs in there to trade encryption keys and protect their messages from prying eyes like their boss, because it's primarily a business communication method.

Tools like Shlack are an unfortunate necessity for users communicating over Slack because the popular platform doesn't offer any sort of native support that protects conversations. So if you wanted to talk to your other coworkers and you didn't want your boss to hear about it, maybe you could not do it in Slack because you could text or you could send an email or you could call them or you could go and do what we used to do, which is go over to the water cooler and talk about how the boss is an asshole.

Yeah, go to the office supply room, get a copy of Signal, maybe Telegram if you want the Russians to hear it too, but this is fucking stupid. Right? Why did they spend the time to build this?

Why? I'm sorry, if I'm at work, oh God, I'm sorry, this is just the stupidest thing I've seen in a very long time. Well, that's why it's in this segment, Jason. Oh my God. And I needed something to put in here that wasn't Kanye.

Oh, I know, I know, poor Kanye. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, by the way. It's good to point that out. But anyway, these people need to be checked for their mental health because I'm sorry, if I am a boss and then I just see a string of jumbled text rather than the contents of the communication, guess what?

You're fired. Guess what I know you're doing. You're fired. That's the dumbest thing in the world. Yeah, no, and I know all about how Slack does their different modes for how corporations can pull the messages, what the rules are around them, and you know what?

They are very good about announcing to employees that, okay, the messages that you are now sending, even if they're private, may be read by your company. So you get a heads up. It's not like, oh, you know, one day I can go in and see every message that you've sent to somebody else, even if I own the channel.

No, Slack doesn't let you do that. But what you've just done by installing Slack is point out to me that you're saying some shit on my time that you shouldn't be saying to somebody else. So therefore, you're fired.

Yes. God. Fucking morons. Feedback loop. We've got a couple new Patreon subscribers, Casey, Lucas, and Jared. And Jared had a note. Jason, have you had any chance to try out the Telo drone you have?

Been wondering how you were liking it. I have not. It is stuck in a box, and I cannot find it yet someday when I dig myself out of this mess that I'm in. Because it is almost literally 50 pounds of shit going into a five-pound bag from what I had to where I'm moving to.

So, yeah, someday I'll get to it. I'm looking forward to it, but I haven't yet. Right. Jason also sent another note. I realize I put these out of order. He said, so tonight the local news station did a story about a convicted murderer who has been working for Uber in the Bryan College Station area.

They said Uber is investigating into how he was able to get hired and drive for the company. The unit mentioned in the story is a high-security unit. When I worked in the prison system, it is one of the toughest units in the state of Texas. Nice. Well done, Uber. This is not surprising to any of us. Neil also sent us a long message on Patreon.

You guys did a lot of wild speculation on the Golden State Killer investigation. Wild! Yes, we did. Well, I mean, it was a breaking story when it came out. So he gets into talking about how it was GED matched, not major companies like 23andMe and Ancestry. Yeah, we didn't really know much of this at the time.

So, yeah, we'll put the message in the show notes so everybody can read what he had to say about it. And I also just found another. More work for me. Yeah, sorry. Well, you just copy and paste. It's pretty simple. I cleaned it up. Don't worry. Oh. I also included a link about how the Golden State Killer's DNA search is like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

So this is an ongoing ethics discussion that needs to be had. What are ethics? Both on Neil's side and other sides of the opinion. Yeah, what are ethics? That's a good point these days. Yeah. All right. Over at PayPal, we got a donation from Juergen. He said, thank you very much for making my daily two-hour commute an interesting and fun event.

I'm looking forward to many more episodes. My best wishes for you and the two and four-legged family members. Juergen from Germany. Nice. And over on Facebook, Christopher writes in, love the show. I heard about the Tello because of you. I made a little video. And it's a cool little video. Yep. For drone stuff.

Yeah. No, I thought I had a comment here, but I think I left it on the YouTube page. Yeah. It is a cool video. I can't wait to play with it now because I can see what it can do. It's pretty cool. Good resolution, too. I thought it was going to be crap, but this actually looks pretty nice. I was surprised, too, actually, because I didn't think that was much of a drone.

And it's pretty nice. Yeah. Maybe I'll get one. Yeah. I won't. No, you can come play with mine. Okay, there we go. Over at Twitter, WriteFilmSleepRepeat says, something positive, perhaps. And he sends a link. Cancer researchers need phones to process data. This is over in the UK. So they're trying to link together a bunch of phones to use the processing data to chug through some big data.

So that's kind of cool, which made me think, is SETI still running? Because I did that for years. That was the donate some of your computer processing cycles to the search for intelligent life. I did SETI, which was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Extraterrestrial intelligence.

Yep. I'm so stuck on artificial intelligence, that's where my brain goes these days. Yeah. But I also did protein folding at home. I used a lot of processing on my original Xbox. Is that a euphemism for something, Jason? No, there was no protein folding. Gotta go do a little protein folding. Well, I did use my Xbox, and that kind of, you know, who knows?

Oh, God. Mr. Dom writes in, I agree with the GOG podcast about the new Snapchat spectacles. They are ridiculous. But I guess they have lots of money to burn and don't mind killing the world with more plastic junk. I don't think they have that much money left to burn as the stock keeps falling.

But we'll see. We'll see how that goes. My favorite part of that entire tweet, though, is I love you for this, Mr. Dom. I'm going to start to use this forever. He created an emoji for dumpster fire. It is pretty damn good, I gotta say. Because that is, yeah, that is the emoji of 2018 as far as I'm concerned.

Dumpster fire. I'm sure that will be one of our Instagram posts this week. So be sure that you're subscribing to our Instagram feed. Moss 6502 says that Alexa for kids thing will probably be excellent. My kid had an old fire with parental controls. It provided excellent service.

I could even remote to it. Might be an alternative for Bittner, too. We'll make sure he hears about it. Thank you for that. All righty. Tuju Master writes in, not sure if you all covered this yet, but I'm sure Brian will be elated. Yeah. And this is an article over at CBS News about cities vowing to crack down on litter bikes.

Yeah, this gets really deeply into the dockless thing, the dockless scooters, the dockless bikes, and relying on people to not be animals, which is obviously not working. Again, it's that it's personal responsibility thing. So the dockless just means people dump it wherever they want.

He also wrote in saying, topics for next week's show, Best Buy and Disney now send emails with self-playing video. They always scare the piss out of me. Thoughts from the grumps. Fuck self-playing video. Dumpster fire. I would immediately unsubscribe from those mailing lists. Well, I also want to know how they did it.

Me too. I'm actually curious about that. Because the technology behind that is pretty incredible if you've ever actually had to do fucking email blasts to people. Yep. Actually getting them to look right is even a nightmare. But actually having a self-playing video, that's new.

That's really new. If you wouldn't mind, actually, would you forward one of those to podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com, please? Yeah, I'd like to see it. The last campaign I worked on email blasts for was Dancing with the Stars. And, oh my God. Oh my God.

They wanted self-playing video in there, but we had to basically put in a GIF in a table because you could only use tables, inline font tags. Oh, my God. I hate building out mailers, especially for people that don't understand how they work. Oh, no.

And that's everybody. Every agency. Oh, yes. Well, how come it didn't work on this person's email? What email program were they using? What did they have their personal settings to? Oh, they have their own custom CSS and they wonder why it doesn't look right? Oh, well, just, I want you, I know that we are in a wonderful ad agency that is on the 15th floor.

I would like you to see that, see that window over there? I would like you to run head first at it and go out the fucking window. Yeah. All right. Over at GOG.show, Ivor wrote in, Jason, I bought this mechanical keyboard a couple of weeks ago. Great price and it works really well. I'm going to link over to it.

It's the Gigabyte Mechanical Cherry Red Keyboard, GKForce K83 Red. The interesting thing about that keyboard is I saw that same exact keyboard with about a thousand different logos on it when I was bouncing around Amazon. I am saving up for the Razer Black Widow Chroma V2 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Ergonomic Wrist Rest, Tactile and Silent Razer Orange Switches.

I had to throw that in because it was an Amazon title. That's the one I'm saving up for because I did some research and that's the one I want because I'm going to be playing games on it. So I need some kind of good gaming keyboard and Razer makes good stuff. It's fantastically ugly and it'll go very well with your piece, your ugly piece. Oh, it's fucking hideous and it's going to match like a motherfucker.

Yeah, the mechanical keyboard looks pretty cool, but we podcast and Jason already yells anytime I touch a keyboard. So, yeah, no, no, no clicky keyboards on podcasting, please. No clicky keyboard. Yes. Blair writes in, I watch tip. So it's an Apple Watch, but if on a call using the Bluetooth in your car and you need to send a text or add a reminder, you can mute your phone and ask your watch Siri to do it, which is actually not a bad tip.

It says great when someone is on a ramble and you think of something you need to do. They also sent in a link for the wireless keyboard for Windows Logitech MK520. Nearly worn the key labels off of mine. Yeah, it doesn't seem too bad either, actually. Yeah, the Apple Watch tip is pretty good. Siri basically uses Siri on your phone when you're using your watch.

So the text to speech is good and generally works. I haven't tried it much because I know that actually here and also in Illinois, you can get pulled over for talking to your watch if a cop sees you. Yep, as you should be. Mm-hmm. So Spencer writes in, hey guys, I recently discovered you through Reddit.

Really? Mm-hmm. I would love to know how. Anyways, and have become enamored with your podcast. The question I want to ask you was, what email service would you recommend? I'm mostly stuck with Gmail in the past because, but I've become wary of Google in recent years. I'm currently trying out ProtonMail, but the security features that originally drew me to their service are making it difficult to integrate into my daily life.

Sending good vibes from Tennessee. Well, Jason, I still use a very old school personal email server. But his emails! Like Hillary Clinton. I've tried out ProtonMail. I actually like it, but yeah, the security is a little strict, so you kind of have to deal with their stuff there.

I'm still on Gmail. I'm sticking with it because I have run email servers, and I'm sorry, but I never, ever, ever want to do another SMTP configuration file again. Never. That is a pain in the ass. Oh my God, it's such a pain in the ass.

So I'd just say stick with Gmail, fuck it. Yep, I kind of tend to agree with that. But I'm eventually, I've been, it's been on my to-do list to migrate my email, my personal email to Gmail for like a year. At some point, I'll actually get around to it. Yeah. It's just, it's so much easier, and I send so few emails now.

Oh, yeah. Again, email is kind of dying out. Not a lot of it anymore. All I get are lists that I've subscribed to and a few back and forth from people who I just haven't gotten on a Slack channel yet. You know what we need? We need a better desktop text client. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Messages on the Apple works okay, but not great. It's okay, but not great. But 99% of my conversations and communication is through texting now, not email. Oh, so few of mine is. But anyway, Brian writes in, I was just listening to your podcast. I would recommend the Logitech MK520.

So that's another recommendation for that. Yeah. And Ryan wrote in, hey guys, keep up the good work. I thought you'd enjoy this ad I saw in Newark Airport. I'm sure you'll be triggered. And it is very funny. What's lurking in your systems? Dark Trace. World-leading cyber AI.

Not just AI. Cyber AI. With a picture of an alligator sticking its eyeballs out of a swamp. We've got sharks in our system. Or alligators in our system. Or alligators. I got this one this morning. This came actually from my contact form on jpd.me, my personal site.

This is from Alberto from Italy. And I'm just going to cut out most of this because the subject is Saturday Night Fever has legs. No, no, no. Hi, Jason. You have a nice voice. It's why I listen to GOG.

Well. Dulcet tones. Dulcet tones. Thank you very much. And the rest of the email has led him to Does It Have Legs, my other old podcast that has gone stale. And we did a review of Saturday Night Fever there. And he recommends that I go watch Staying Alive to get the whole story. There is not enough money in the world to make me go watch Staying Alive.

But anyways, he finishes off with, anyway, really nice listening to your podcast. I even installed Opera on both the phone and Linux laptop. I want to get your doorbell webcam stuff that sends you pics of delivery men and stuff passing by. Yeah, super cool stuff, man. Well, thank you, Alberto from Italy.

Much appreciated. But no, you are completely wrong about Saturday Night Fever. It's a movie about a bunch of rapists and horrible, horrible people. Different times, Jason. Different times. Different times, yes. Over at iTunes, we got a couple of five-star ratings. The first up is from Toxic Princess.

The title is Amazeballs. Although I am unfortunately part of the millennial generation, I absolutely love the show. It's helping me stay current with technology. And I see I am not alone when it comes to certain gripes about different software and product updates. All right. And Ravanov from the Netherlands writes in, Great podcast.

Love the podcast. Each week, I'm looking forward to the casual chit-chat. K-U-T-W. Oh, keep up the good work. Keep up the good work, Jason. Oh, I don't know what these kids are saying nowadays. K-U-T-W. Yeah. K-U-T-W. Well, there you go. It still works.

It still works in the Dutch, I guess. Yeah, that could be from the native Dutch. K-U-T-W. Keep up the good work. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And as always, please, for God's sake, tell your friends. Closing shout outs. We're recording on Friday, May the 4th, which has somehow become Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you. Get it? Yeah, for people with speech impediments, may the 5th be with you.

That's right. So I do feel compelled to point out, even though you'll be hearing this a few days after, since it is Star Wars Day, I feel compelled to point this out again. Now that The Last Jedi is canon, I want all of you Last Jedi apologists to enjoy that whole, we can just put a droid on a ship, point it at what you want to blow up, go into hyperspace thing that totally invalidates everything that has taken place before.

The biggest battles for the Death Star in those two movies? No point in those. Building the Death Star in the first place? No point in that. Building the Starkiller system? No point in that. All of that, now completely invalidated by the new canon that is the piece of shit, The Last Jedi. Happy Star Wars Day.

There you go. And also, speaking of Star Wars, I went to Target yesterday to go find a super soaker so I could spray my dogs when they get a little rowdy in the backyard. Turns out, all of the summer gear that would normally be by the pool section in Target has been removed for Star Wars schwag.

I asked a Target employee, I'm like, I just need a super soaker. You guys used to have them everywhere. They're like, eh. They took it all out. We got more Star Wars shit over in aisle four. Literally, that's what he was like. I'm like, damn. So thank you, Star Wars. Now I have to throw buckets of water on my dogs if I can catch them.

My shout-out this week is to Pods. I know this is silly, but that big-ass box that I put everything in in Chicago that they drove on a truck to California and put outside my door, that was honestly one thing that broke that was not my fault.

And it was a jar of relish. That was it. You shipped a jar of relish. It was unopened. I don't have to pay for weight, so I took my whole kitchen with me. Fair enough. So I had a brand-new jar of relish. I'm taking it with me, but it just didn't make it.

And I lost one 24-inch shitty LG monitor because I stacked it wrong. Everything else made it through that move perfectly. So I would just like to say I've got fucking Jedi-level packing skills, is all I'm saying. And Pods did not bounce it around.

It just came in the customer service. I mean, everything about Pods was fantastic, and especially the price. So if you've got to move or you just want storage where they'll come pick it up and put it in storage for you so you don't have to move everything to a storage unit, dude, check these guys out.

They have changed my life. I am such a fan of them. As somebody who has lived in a family that has moved over 100 times and sued every major moving company in the United States for breaking our shit, Pods, the best way to move. And that was an unpaid endorsement.

Yes, it is very unpaid. I've got to say we should put a little bookmark here for two years from now when you move back to Chicago. Since you're putting all your food in there and they're so good anyways, next time you can save some money and time and just pack yourself in the pod and send yourself back to Chicago. Yeah, but the problem with a pod with me inside, then it would become a pood because where are you going to go poo?

Well, you pack a toilet in there too. I think they might ding me for drilling a hole in the floor. Maybe I can get one of Uncle Bubba's – was it – no, Uncle Goober's bumper dumper. Remember that? Oh, yes, I do remember that. I'll get a bumper dumper and stick it off the end, and while we're traveling down the highway, I'll just stick my ass out the back.

We are problem solvers. Exactly. Until next time, I'm Brian Schoelmeister. 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 258. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week.

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