259: All Your Blockchain Are Belong To Us

This episode is brought to you by RxBar. For 25% off your first order, visit RxBar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. 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 a very tired Brian Schulmeister. Oh, pretty Brian. What's going on, Brian? Not much. We had to shift our schedule a little bit, so it's a bright and early Mother's Day Sunday morning. There's not enough coffee.

I've been up for two hours already, had a shower, walked the dogs, had my breakfast, and even read some of the New York Times. So, chop, chop. Good for you. Friend of the show, Hannah Ward, is in town from North Carolina, so I was out with her and other friends of the show, Karen, and one-time co-host Fergal last night.

I got wild and crazy. I was out till almost midnight, Jason. I don't do that anymore. Oh, my God. How do you do that, Brian? I don't know. I'm in a lot of pain right now. You say you have that youthful ebullience. Not anymore. I think as soon as you have a kid, it just gets sucked right out of you.

Poor baby. Yes, I know. So, you know, I subscribe to the New York Times. I'm aware of that. I was a beneficiary of you subscribing. You still are, as far as I know. So, when I moved to Los Angeles, I'm like, ah, okay, just change of address, right?

Yes. You'd think it'd be easy. No. Three weeks in, today was the first day where they actually delivered me the correct paper. Right. Just because I moved to Los Angeles, people, does not mean I want your stinking Los Angeles Times. Oh, the LA Times is horrible. Oh, it's terrible. But the interesting thing is, on the New York Times website, they let you go in and put in, hey, something happened.

The paper was wet. You know, a cat crapped inside of it, and I have to give it back. Was that like a drop-down form? Cat crapped in it? Yes. It's like right in there, typed in? Okay. It's multiple. It's like a Mad Lib. You can pick animal, and then, you know, what, and then in paper. So, that's how it works.

Because out here, there are more rats than cats. Anyway, I finally got through to get them to send it back, and I finally got the first one today. But what I was saying about the website was that they don't let you actually make a change and request a redelivery until after they think that your paper should have been delivered.

So, my paper shows up at 6 in the morning. Right. They don't let me make a change until 8 and request a redelivery. So, I'm sitting here for two hours, and it shows up around noon, and by that point, I'm like, it's almost Monday. Who cares now? And then throw it away. This is old news. Exactly.

My God. Moving at the speed of dead trees. If only there was some sort of device to give you up-to-the-minute news. I know. Yes. I have my iPod in the shop. It's getting a new transmission. I can't put it on there. But it was just interesting that just because I changed my address, people think that you change what you're actually subscribed to.

How does that work? I'm not sure. Yes. Well, I have some tales of customer service experiences as well. All right. We discussed the Amazon webinar that I attempted to take, which I just never heard anything from and wasn't able to log in, even though I was given a special URL token that was specific to me because I had registered for the webinar in advance.

I never got a personal response at all, but I did get just a follow-up email from Amazon. We had high interest in our webinar, how building for voice differs from building for the screen, and hope you were able to join us on Twitch if you were unable to get in. First off, nowhere anywhere was I told that I could join on Twitch until now, which is a bit late.

Yeah. If not, you can now watch the webinar recording or download the guide and take the lessons with you so you can then start building skills. Well, that's very nice. Have you watched it? No. Have you? Because I sent it to you as well. Yeah. I've been busy.

I've been busy. That's the thing. I set aside the time to take this at the point in time, and no, I'll get around to watching it at some point. I will set aside more time again. Thanks, Amazon. Enjoy. Yeah. And I have two more customer service experiences that I had to go through this week, one good and one bad.

I will tell you the good one first. Up a baby. You do not. Okay. You're not aware of this company, Jason. I've never heard of this company before. They make strollers. They make high-end strollers that are very popular here for the Santa Monica mothers. They did a great job.

Like, we bought a recently, we just got a new stroller, a lighter weight one. Again, you don't understand anything. That's Jason. You go through a few. Uh, and it ripped, uh, some of the fabric ripped and I took a picture of it and I sent it in through their online form. And within a week, uh, I had received a completely new bit of fabric.

They sent the wrong part, unfortunately. So I took a picture of that and, and sent them, uh, an email. And the very next morning I got a tracking code for a completely new stroller that they're sending us. It's customer service. Now, let me contrast that with Verizon. Oh, Verizon wireless.

Uh, I have a network extender in our house because I do not get service inside the house for some reason. And rather than, you know, pay to have a landline and do that ridiculous thing. I spent the, what, two to $300 that these things cost. Would that be a femto cell? Yes.

One of those. They call them network extenders. Okay. So, you know, that's the, that's the more boring kind of name that they use. They don't go femto cell because I think that creeped people out. So yes, I had, that's why AT&T didn't, didn't work. Yeah, probably not. So I've had one since, uh, since we bought this condo and it's worked great, uh, for the most part, it's just, you know, plug it in and, and nine times out of 10, I have a decent

phone call, big long rant here about how phone calls are horrible and technology is crap. And somehow this is all better when we were kids, but you know, it is what it is. Uh, so it's mostly worked. And then as of about two weeks ago, it just stopped working and, you know, I've rebooted, I've spent countless hours with customer service.

Uh, this is one of those things where they actually say, you know, if you reboot it, it can take up to 12 hours before it's, it's up and running, which I don't understand, but apparently, uh, but it basically just stopped working. And finally, finally, they are sending me a completely new unit and they made it sound as if they're doing me a huge favor.

Of course they are. Ooh, this, this is, this is new technology, much, much better than the one that you've had for a long time. Now we're giving it to you for free. So lucky you. I'm like, how about I spent $300 on this thing and it just crapped out on me. Yeah. Jerks. So that's, uh, yeah.

Up a baby piece of cake. Take care of their customer. Verizon had to waste, I'd say easily nine hours on this stuck in their customer service. I used to have one of those femto cells from AT&T back in the day. I mean, this was like, you know, maybe seven years ago when they first came out.

Yeah. The reboot time on those things is incredible for some reason. It's insane. Yeah. I don't understand how nothing should take that long. Like, you know, this is like a car from 19 two. You got to get out front and crank it and then run back in and press the button and then press your, press your whirly gig and all that.

But those things were terrible and they apparently they still are. So I gave mine away because I was just so tired of the hassle. I'm like, I'd rather not talk to anybody, please. It worked better than nothing and it works better than the Wi-Fi calling does. I've got to say so. A Wi-Fi calling is such a piece of shit.

Wi-Fi calling is the biggest scam perpetuated on the on the human race. How about a little follow up? We've both been talking about depression and, you know, the fucked up brains that we sometimes have. And there's an article out this week by Wil Wheaton, which is it's kind of his liner notes for a talk that he gave.

And it says, my name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic depression and I am not ashamed. Fantastic piece. Did you get to read it? I haven't read this iteration of it, but he's been talking about this for quite some time now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty good one. And I swear it's like, you know, if I could go through this, it's basically a checklist of what I've gone through.

And except for the part where get meds, get help. That part is still in flux. I want to work on that one. I can't afford. I have no insurance. I can't. I can't go to a doctor. So guess what? I mean, after reading this, I'm like, shit, I'd like to make an appointment. But no, no, I got fired and have no insurance.

So at some point I'll get back to that. But it's a really good article. I thought it was worth putting in here. Yes. I'm a big fan of the fact that Wil Wheaton is out there talking about this. So me too. Next up is an article in the New York Times by Christopher Mele. It's called Robo Calls Flooding Your Cell Phone.

Here's how to stop them. Except not really. Not really. That's the thing about it. The first point is the most simple and effective remedy is not to answer numbers you don't know. That's not really stopping them. They're still calling you. I block them as they all come in.

But I'm getting, you know, 10 to 12 a day now. Nothing on this list really works, which is I found it kind of troubling that it's in the New York Times. Yes. And that the headline proposes a solution, then there's no actual solutions within the article itself.

Yeah. They've totally, the Robo Calls have massively ramped up in the last two weeks. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So what I do, yeah, I do the same thing as I just don't answer and I block. I just block the numbers. But, you know, it's, there's no stopping this.

It's just going to get worse. Unfortunately, it is because it is, the robots are taking over your phone. Yes. Back, back, back in the day when we first learned about what a Cody box was. Yes. Very exciting times and people laughed at us. Yeah. Brian Tomo Thompson was the guy in England that was the landmark case that you basically had a storefront that said, hey, come buy a box and you can get free shit.

Yeah. Arrested and sentenced. And he has to pay one pound back to the state. Fair enough on that. I think that's fine. Yeah. Basically because he's broke. Yeah. He spent all of his money on the court case.

But they did say if he does win the lottery, he may have to pay some more money. But right now, it's a pound. And we also talk about how there's never any consequences nowadays. Nobody gets fired. Nothing happens. This comes from BGR.com. And it says, the Cambridge Analytica scandal hasn't really hurt Facebook at all.

Which is what we predicted. Yep. That's pretty much what we predicted. They ran a poll. This comes from, I believe it was Reuters. Yes, Reuters did the poll. Specifically found that about 43% of surveyed Facebook users hadn't changed their usage habits in the weeks following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Completely acceptable. What's more, 22% of respondents indicated that they actually used Facebook more. Re-advertising, that's why. They're like, oh, what's this Facebook thing all about? I've got to read all about this Facebook scandal on Facebook. Exactly. And meanwhile, 16% of respondents indicated that they used Facebook less, with 3% indicating that they've deleted their account altogether.

And I would have to say, they didn't make the distinction between deactivated and deleted. Deactivated, yes. Yeah, because I'm sure it's mostly deactivated. Because it's really hard to delete your Facebook account. Yeah. And, you know, we both use that Facebook plug-in. Why do I always blank on the name, Jason?

Social Book Manager. No, the other one. Facebook Purity. Oh, yes. Facebook Purity. Which lets us know when people deactivate. Well, it just says delete their account. But it's deactivate. And I have definitely noticed, you know, less people have deactivated since the Cambridge Analytica stuff.

There was a period of time, about a month before that, where a lot of people were killing their accounts. But, you know, we get the notification that somebody has killed their account, if they're your friend, if you're using this plug-in. I'd say 90% of the people that have killed their accounts have come back.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. And they call me Boomerang. Jeez. So, yeah, as predicted by the grumpy old geeks, nothing changes. Nothing changed. Now, this one made me chuckle. I know it's going to sound mean, but biotech engineer found dead in sensory deprivation tank in D.C.

Yeah, that makes you sound mean. It does make me sound mean. But Aaron Trawick, who was 28 years old, he ran a company called Ascendance Biomedical. He ascended. Yeah, he did ascend. He was in an isolation tank, you know, one of those ones where you go in the dark and you float.

You floaty tank. Yep, found him dead. Cops say no real foul play at this point. They're going to run an autopsy. Now, I would like for the people who don't listen to every episode and remember everything we always say. Which is basically everybody. He was previously seen in Moron of the Week in episode 248.

He was the guy that shot himself up with the herpes drug and then went nutty on stage. Yep, give that man a Darwin award. Well, sounds like a... Oh, well. You know, I don't want to talk ill about the dead except... All right. I don't think we lost a winner here.

Yesterday, I deleted my Flickr and Yahoo accounts finally. Okay. Yeah, since Flickr is going to SmugMug, and it doesn't really matter. I had no photos in there. I just don't want another account getting bandied about, you know? Yeah. So in my Yahoo account, I'm like, okay, it's time for that to go anyway.

The only reason I kept the Yahoo account was because I had a Flickr account. Right. And since I don't have a Flickr account, I don't need a Yahoo account. And of course, they say it's going to take a while for it to be completely deleted from their servers. But I don't know about you, I'm just tired of leaving this trail of dead accounts around.

So it's like every time I can, when I see something old in my 1Password that I'm not using anymore, I'll just go in and delete the account and have it removed. Yeah. Or so we think. So we think. That's the problem, right? Like, I used to be on this rampage about, like, when I would install an app and then get rid of the app, I would track down how you're supposed to submit to delete everything.

But I don't think that anybody actually deletes anything. I really don't. So this is still, like, this is the episode that I need Bittner to come in on and, like, use his cyber wire powers to find out the truth. I want to do a what happens when you actually delete stuff episode. But it'll never happen.

It'll never happen because you'll never get. Because we'll never find out. You'll never find out. Yeah. Nobody's going to show you their source code. Exactly. In the news.

So Google had their big conference this week. They call that IO. IO. Yes. And I think. IO. IO. IO. It's off to scare everyone we go. So we got probably the most feedback that we've ever gotten about a single topic regarding the, let's see, Ivor sent us.

Okay. So this AI thing just got officially scary. Check out the Google duplex conversation from Google IO conference on this video. Right Film Sleep Repeat over on Twitter said we'll be interested in our take on this AI. News Story and a couple other people sent us about this as well. So this is the Google Assistant that makes phone calls for owners that they demonstrated.

Google has unveiled artificial intelligence software that books appointments over the phone on behalf of users by conducting voice-based conversations on their behalf. I assume you watched this video. Oh, of course I did. Yes. Yes. Okay. Thoughts? Those were the things that they interjected into that conversation from the AI and slash bot.

That really creeped the fuck out of me. Yeah. As I saw on Twitter, I can't even remember who wrote this, but Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human, not only without disclosing that it's a bot, but adding um and ah to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it horrifying.

Silicon Valley is ethically lost. Rudderless and has not learned a thing. True enough. True enough there. Yeah. They're trying to flex their AI might, but what they should have done said, hello, this is a call from Google bot. We would like to make an appointment for insert name at this time, insert time, you know?

Yeah. I think that's the way it should be, right? Yeah. Not try and fake them and fool them. Yeah. You know, it's just wrong. They're headed the wrong direction. Silicon Valley is headed the wrong direction. This is not the way it's supposed to be.

You know, our robot assistants are supposed to identify themselves as robot assistants. We're not supposed to pretend that we're not and do all this sort of stuff. The technology is fascinating, but I mean, really, it's not. I don't know. Last time you tried to call and make a hair appointment. It's not terribly difficult.

No, it's not. Hey, Floyd, when can I come in? Thanks. I'll be right there. The interesting thing is Sundar Pichai, the chief executive over there, started off the conference by saying, hey, yeah, you know, we're going to start to take a step back to figure out if this technology that we're building is actually good stuff or bad stuff.

Because he's like, because we're seeing, you know, how things can be used in the wrong way. And then they come up with this shit. Yeah. And this is exactly the wrong way. You know, I think in the future, the best thing would be that if everybody had their own bot APIs on their phone system, so I could say, hey, whatever in a tube, I need a haircut on Thursday, and then it will just use their API.

And then the haircutting place is whatever in a tube. Exactly. They talk to each other, and boom, it's done, you know, instead of like trying to hack the meat to get the person on the other end to say, it's like, why are you trying to fake this to pretend that you're a human? If you just say you're a bot, it would make the communication that much easier.

Exactly. I 100% agree with you on that, and that's the way it should be. The other thought that I had is I'm assuming that these calls are being recorded, right? Right. Because Google's got to be recording them so they can review the calls and they can improve the technology, but you are required by law to notify someone if a call is being recorded.

Right. So once again, Google is just blatantly breaking the law. Well, we don't know for demo purposes if that was a real person, because it probably wasn't. And I'm sure that they could say, hello, this is, you know, blah, blah, blah's assistant. This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes or whatever.

You know, it just takes a line to say that. You just have to tell them that it's being recorded. Right. Or they could do it in, like, what, hypersonic audio or subsonic audio? So nobody, no human can hear it, but the bots can hear it. We said it, but just because you're human, poor little human, you couldn't understand it.

Well, thanks, Google. Yeah. Yay. That's awesome. In fun news this week, Elon Musk is dating Grimes, which prompted me to go, what the actual F? And I was, who the actual F is Grimes? That is funny.

Look, the way I think about this is just the world is such a weird place. All right. So first off, this would be like when we were kids and finding out that Bill Gates was dating Susie Sue from Susie and the Banshees. Okay. That's how weird this is, because there's Elon Musk and then there's Grimes and Grimes is this very alternative, crazy artist, musician, girl, Canadian and whatever.

But then you find out about how they met. And this is when it's like, it's good to be the king. This is the, it's the, it's good to be the king moment. Elon Musk was like Googling. He wanted to tweet an obscure pun about artificial intelligence thought experiment, Rococo Basilisk.

And he discovered when he Googled this, that Grimes had already made this joke in a 2015 music video. And then because he's Elon Musk, he just like then saw that she was kind of hot and reached out to her. Now they're dating. Hey man, good work if you can get it. Yeah, exactly.

So yeah, just fun little weird story. I, I'm still, my, my brain hurts and there's a great article about this on Slate. Fans of Elon Musk and Grimes are worried their relationship has broken art and capitalism. And a lot of people complaining about it.

Very funny. Very funny. Do you remember clout? Vaguely. I think we talked about it at some point, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was a big deal for about 20 minutes back in the, you know, when, when social media was really starting to get up and it basically what it did was it gave you a score kind of like that Chinese, you know, I was about to say, did China not just buy them?

They should have. They honestly, they should have. And that's what cloud back then was, you know, it was kind of like that. And people were getting gigs based on their cloud score and not getting gigs based on their cloud score. And it was, I, you know, a lot of us just said, you know, no, we, we refuse to, to join the, the cult of clout.

And turns out that they finally shut down. They, I mean, there was a, they got like $200 million in funding back in the day. Or it was actually, it was sold for $200 million. Oh, sold in 2014 for $200 million. My bad. Oh, their VC funding was $40 million back in the day.

So this new company bought it, Lithium. And Lithium has, this is interesting. Their CEO talked to the people, the customers about the shutdown and said, the cloud acquisition provided Lithium with valuable artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

But cloud is a standalone service is not aligned with our long-term strategy. I would like to point out just because this drives me. Oh God. I just, I know I'm starting to sound like crazy old man with a beard shouting, get off my lawn, but starting to what the, but here we go again.

The cloud acquisition provided Lithium with a valuable artificial intelligence, AI and machine learning capabilities. While the art, the line right above that, right above that. And this article talks about how it's just a vague algorithm.

What is it? Is it an algorithm or is it artificial intelligence? What is it? It's an algorithm. I'm sorry. All the, all it does is scans your social graph, figures out how many followers you've got and what their reaches and what they're probably second and third tier reaches, wraps it up in a, in a, in a little cup, shakes it up, throws it out and yells Yahtzee.

That's all it does. There's, there's no AI in this. What kind of machine learning do you need to do to count followers? That's what it's doing. Counting followers. It counts followers. There's no artificial intelligence involved. Anyways, uh, related to this, I, I saw this article over at the lad Bible, which I still enjoy.

Instagram model reveals downside to social media stardom and shockingly enough, you'll discover that continually pushing yourself out there either literally or figured out there is a in her case is exhausting and it makes you unhappy. Oh, shocking.

In another note, uh, the first thing that I thought of was, does this Instagram filter make my ass look big? Because if you see the pictures, you'll get the joke. Yes. Anyway, in, in news that made me happy, I I've never said Warren Buffett news has ever made me happy, but this week Warren Buffett news made me happy.

Apparently he would love to own a hundred percent of Apple stock because he loves Apple. Uh, of course he can't do that, but, uh, they currently own about 5% of Apple stock over at Berkshire Hathaway. And, uh, thanks to them, my stock went, uh, up through the roof this week.

Well, I got a, I got a double bonus there because I not only do I own Apple, I own Berkshire Hathaway. Oh, that, uh, that went really well for me to this week. I've got to say, well, there we go. Uh, so we have some new news about the, the Uber, uh, fatal crash in Arizona.

Uh, apparently as speculated by us at the time, the software did indeed see the pedestrian. It just didn't react in time. Yeah, that's about it. Great. Yeah. It's the, uh, is the fault in the car's higher logic. Somebody forgot to code in don't hit person.

Yeah, seriously. See person. Swerve. Oops, we forgot the second line. Yeah. If person, swerve. That's pretty much it. Uber's kind of screwed on that one. There's just no, there's no getting around it. So it's good that their cars are off the road. Because, seriously, if you cannot program in thing in front of car rapidly approaching either brake or swerve, then you really should not have a car on the road, is all I'm saying.

I agree. Microsoft had their big thing this week, too. And, uh, now I'm sounding like the broken record. I found this on Engadget. Microsoft's AI cone recognizes faces and voices during meetings. Now, this is a new tool for meetings, which has this, literally, the cone.

Not the cone of silence, but the cone of. I was about to say. Yeah. The cone of not AI. Because nowhere in this entire article is AI mentioned again. Thank you, Engadget. Just in the headline. Just the headline. All right. Well done, Engadget. Yeah.

I don't even care about the cone anymore. Once I saw that, I'm like, I'm not even going to talk about you anymore. Now, over at The Verge, another AI article. This is, an AI speed test shows clever coders can still beat tech giants like Google and Intel. Somewhat misleading headline.

Really? Yes. Somewhat misleading headline. This comes from Stanford in a contest called the Dawn Bench Challenge. And this is where, you know, teams of AI engineers try and, you know, one up each other. Right. And there are a couple of the contests where people did better with novel coding styles and algorithmic options.

And, but Google still walks in with their, you know, tensor processing unit pods, which are these massive custom designed, basically machine learning chips. Right. And it'd basically kick everybody's ass. But, but because somewhere along the way, somebody did something decent, they have to say that, oh, people can still beat the tech giants.

Not, not really, unfortunately. Not really. Yeah. If you read all the way through this article, it gets to the point where saying, no, not really. Oh, well, you have a condo, but do you have plans to buy a new house in California anytime soon? Probably not in California.

Oh, okay. Well, probably smart. New homes in California will now be required to have solar panels on the roof. I like that. I think it's good. It's very progressive. And Elon Musk has the, that company himself that's, that's making these tiles.

They, they are very stylish and, and they are, I think by square meter cheaper than, than standard tiles anyways. That's the, that's the interesting part. Yeah. It's cheaper than standard tiles. Now, I wonder how much he paid to lobby, uh, Kelly, the state of California to get this, this law passed.

Well, he didn't pay anything. Actually. He, uh, he did the boring company. So he made this whole deep underground and he put all the lawmakers in there and didn't let them out until they passed this. Yeah. That didn't make it into the show notes this week. Did you see the new plans for what he's got going on? Yes.

Very cool. Look, I, I like this guy. Like he screws up all the time, but my God, he just keeps coming. Doesn't he? He doesn't really stop. No. And they're, they're going to have the, the, the first tunnel is basically almost done and they're going to start giving rides pretty soon. But the big free rides, the vision is to have, you know, these automated cars that you just basically hop in.

It's like shuttle service everywhere. Yeah. And I like this better than self-driving cars personally. Me too. Me too. Yeah. Because there's, there's less ways to fuck up and they're talking about just having thousands of stops around the city where you can just hop in, hop out. Then you've got the last mile problem.

But as soon as you get off, then you can pick up your new Tesla scooter powered by bird and zoom home. There you go. I knew we'd have to have to mention bird at some point. Uh, yeah, but I was going to have to, uh, we've got some more stories about them later, but nothing, nothing here. Now, this is just interesting and, uh, about the, the solar power requirements and it starts in two years.

So it's pretty quick. Yeah, pretty quick. So I'm, I'm all for it. I think it's, it's very smart, especially somewhere like, uh, uh, Southern California. Come on. It's, you know, sunny, uh, 360 days out of the year. This we're just wasting, wasting energy here. People. Yeah. It's because we live in a fucking desert.

Okay. That's true. What's next? Uh, drone delivery is finally coming, but only these 10 places will be allowed to have it. Uh, so the, uh, the, yeah, the government has finally passed, uh, some, some areas where, uh, we can try test out drone delivery. Actually, what they're doing is kind of selling it off to the highest bidder.

So they've said they've, they've established 10 different places, uh, cities of San Diego, Reno, the Chocotah nation in Oklahoma, Virginia tech, uh, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Lee County in Fort Myers, Florida, uh, Memphis, Tennessee, and the university of Alaska and Fairbanks have been a green lit as, as, as test areas for, for drone delivery services.

And that basically got to auction it off to the highest bidder. So, you know, Amazon is going to do this one and Microsoft is going to do test their stuff out here. Uh, so it's finally coming there. They're rolling it out. They're going to give it a go and see what happens as, as test cases, see what goes wrong and then hopefully put in some decent legislation about it.

Oh, that'd be good. Do we know who got, uh, San Diego? Uh, no, I don't believe I specifically know who got that one, right? Okay. That'll be interesting to see. Uh, because a friend of the show, Bob's down there. Yeah. We'll see. Hey, Bob, go outside and look up. Tell me. Yeah. Look up. See, see what's going on.

Yeah. And, and just make sure it doesn't land on your head. Yeah. Now Uber, this is, this is an interesting one. Uber reveals new drone-like prototype to create aerial taxi service by 2023. Look, if you can't make a car that doesn't hit me, I don't want you to make a flying car that doesn't hit me.

That's pretty much shit. Yep. Oh, the thing, the thing looks like it's got way too many moving parts on it is all I can say. That's a, there's a lot of blades that can chop my head off. There's a lot of blades and they have like, you know, they retract, they do all sorts of things.

And, uh, it looks like it's carrying missiles. I don't know what's happening. It just might at some point, but they want this thing to work by 2023. Uh, as far as I can tell, it's five years away. They aren't even going to get their self-driving cars working by then. Exactly. And even the, even the drone delivery regulation is, isn't going to even go into like, you know, testing phase with, with the, after these tests are done for another two years.

And these guys want to have a flying taxi and five smoking something over there. Yep. This episode is brought to you by RX Bar. RX Bar is a whole food protein bar.

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We thank RX Bar for sponsoring Grumpy Old Geeks. I have been looking for a micro-stock investment tool for quite some time, because I was using something called ShareBuilder, which then got bought by Capital One, which then got basically, you were grandfathered in.

If you signed up for it in the day, you got to keep doing it, but there were no more new sign-ups for it. And I'm looking for another one, because I want to do something for my son. I want to get basically five grand and buy fractional shares in a bunch of different stocks, get them the ones that I think are going to do really well.

So I'm Googling around and looking for this, and I found a company called Stockpile. It's an app that does it, and it does fractional shares. So I'm thinking about it, but then I read some of the reviews, and they weren't great. So I thought I'd use the power of this podcast.

Ah, you're crowdsourcing. I am crowdsourcing. If anybody knows a good, very reliable, going to be around forever company that does fractional shares, please let me know, because otherwise I'm going to take the dive with the stockpile, and I'm not too thrilled about that.

So I would love to hear anybody's opinions about this. If anybody uses something out there, please do let me know. I'm glad I waited until this segment, because I almost signed up this morning. I was checking about watching something. Well, I'm almost there, too. Yeah, I was there. I'm like, oh, this sounds pretty good. But I figured I'd wait to hear the review from you, because it could have been like, they stole all my monies.

And I'd be like, oh. Look, you know, Consumer Reports is on board. Wall Street Journal's done reviews of them. I think they're fine, but I would just, I figured we've got a lot of people that listen to this show that are into the stock market. If anybody out there has a recommendation, I thought we should hear that first before I drop like five grand on these people.

Good call. Good call. Why not just sign up and drop like 10 bucks and see how it works? Well, I mean, the thing is, see how it works. I'm sure it'll work fine in the short term. I'm thinking long term. Like, is this 20 years from now? It's an app, dude. Apps haven't even been around for 10 years.

Come on. Let me pull my crystal ball out of my ass and see if humanity will be here in 20 years. Well, see, this is why I worry about it, because you see the big banks are getting rid of these fractional stock sharing things, and it's only the apps that are still doing it.

So it's a bit worrisome. You know, in terms of long term and long term investing, which is what I'd be doing. Oh, there you go. So thoughts, listeners. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. I have a thought. Yes. I bought this thing on Kickstarter called the Fuse Reel. How does, uh, how, how, how did your Kickstarter purchase go, Jason?

Kickstarter purchase went fine. It was only a little bit late. The problem is, it was a piece of shit. Oh, it wasn't useful. It wasn't useful at all. Oh, interesting. Yeah. This was a little reel that you plug in your MacBook Pro power supply into and you twist it up.

And then when you go somewhere, you can just pull it out and plug it in. Like a garden hose thing that people have in their lawn. Kind of. Yes, exactly like that. And it's about as big as a garden hose. It was massive. Took up way more space than if I just, you know, actually use the little clips that come with a MacBook power supply and wrap the cord around like you're supposed to and throw it in your bag.

And this thing was so bad. It cost like 30 bucks when I got it on Kickstarter, maybe 35 with shipping, which is not cheap for a piece of plastic. No. Halfway from Chicago to LA, I'm just like, screw it, threw it away in a, in a hotel. I'm like, this thing is just taking up space and it's annoying.

It barely like held together. When you pull the cables apart, it would like pop out. It was useless piece of crap. So yeah. So that's my review of the fuse reel. Yes. Well, I had the site loaded and they sent me a little pop-up to say that somebody in the U S just bought one, two minutes ago.

Oh yes. I see that five minutes ago on my, yeah, yes. They don't have the one that says somebody returned it, you know, four minutes ago. Someone just crapped on it on a podcast three minutes ago. Yeah. Oh, I wish that, I wish we could have that kind of AI.

Oh man. Me too. I want to talk about the Tello quadcopter drone that a fan of the show sent me. So I finally found it. If it was in a box, I flew it, flew it in the backyard. I love it. It is so much fun. Super, it was like, you know, five minutes to set up and figure out how to pair it with the wifi and everything.

Flying was really easy and I can see, you know, I've taken up a hundred feet or so and I can see all my neighbors naked in their jacuzzis, which is a bug, not a feature if you've seen my neighbors, but it's neat. The camera is definitely better than I thought. You saw it from that other video from last week.

It's a good camera and for a hundred bucks, it's like a no brainer trainer. It's so easy to use. And I was first using it with my iPhone and then I was like, ah, screw it. I pulled out the iPad pro, which made it much easier and it didn't freak out the dogs, which was good. And is it loud?

Not really. No. Okay. The only time that Bam Bam freaked out was it's got this mode where it'll do flips and you can press the, you can like swipe and it'll do like flips all over the place. And when it does that, it, it winds up the motors really loud for a second before it does it, uh, kind of like store up the power to do the flip and that freaked him out for a second.

But for the most part, it's quiet enough where it doesn't really bother them and it didn't bother the neighbor's dogs either. So it's pretty, it's pretty quiet and you get about 13 minutes flight time. And I find that I got bored after about six minutes. So it was like, I got, I got all my, my flying out about six minutes and then just plugged it back in and went about my day and then played with it later in the day, uh, for a hundred bucks though, it really is a fun little, you know, a little quad copter to play around with.

It doesn't have like any, it really has like no bells and whistles. There's no GPS. It's not going to fly home. It runs out of juice. It is going to land, but it's going to land where it's at. It's not going to come back to you. Uh, as far as I can tell, I haven't run it out of juice yet because I don't want it to land on a neighbor's roof. But, uh, the, it has an auto land button, which is kind of nice.

I'm just like, press the button on my land. But it's, as far as you get, you know, it's, it's stable hovers pretty easily. It does have the, you know, toss to take off feature, which I didn't time right. So I basically threw it in the air and it landed for about a seven foot fall onto the deck, uh, on the cement deck and, uh, no damage, no damage at all.

So that was good. Uh, so it's a tough little guy. So if you ever come out, we can come play with my, play with my little copter. Okay. Now this one in the world of AR seven 11 launches Deadpool two augmented reality experience.

Cause there's nothing, there's nothing that I want more than going to seven 11 and having someone walking around the candy aisle, getting in my way, trying to take a selfie with Deadpool. I don't know if I, I don't know if anybody at seven 11 actually thought this one out.

I have not been in the seven 11 and probably 20 years. Oh, I'm in them all the time. At least I was in Chicago because they, they sold good beer in my seven 11 in Chicago. So I'd go over there and pick up some beer. But yeah, what you want out of your seven 11 is to leave as quickly as possible.

That's kind of the point of them. Right. So who's going to wander around like trying to find Deadpool and coupons with your phone? Um, so, and I thought it would be, you know, an easy thing. It's like, okay, what do you got to do here? So I looked at it. It's like, okay, you download the app, you open the app, you tap on the camera and then Deadpool appears to guide you through the experience and you can take a selfie.

Uh, and you can also find zap codes to unlock seven rewards, bonus points. Activities will change every week and you have some, you know, pain in the ass. You got to get the seven 11 app. Then you got to like futz around with the app and then walk around the store, waving your camera around like a crazy person.

Yeah. But somebody got paid to develop it. That's pretty cool. That's the only thing that that's the only upside of these. When I hear these stupid ideas, I'm like, you know what? That put a couple of families, uh, you know, food on the table for a couple of months there. That's good. Yeah. There you go. And somebody was super happy developing it. I would, you know, I wish I would get gigs like that.

Let me fun. Yeah. No, you don't. You don't want to be back in that business ever again. That's true.

Media candy. Fucking Hulu. Okay. Reactivated my account, charged me, didn't let me know that they were going to do it, even though it may have been my fault because I snoozed it, but they could have asked me or let me know that your account will be reactivated in five days or seven days.

And, uh, if I wanted to actually, you know, extend the, the sleep time on the account, nope, nope. Turned it on, charged me. Building in that simple little bit of code that would actually send out an email notifying you would mean they lose money, Jason. Why would they do that? Well, here's the thing. They lost a hell of a lot more money now because I'm never going to use them again because of that.

I, I deleted my account. I didn't snooze it this time. Completely deleted it. They're never going to get another dime from me. Thank you. Until they get a show that you like. Uh, well, let's talk about other shows that are on Hulu. Uh, the Handmaid's Tale season two is out now. Yes.

Fuck that show. Uh, a lot of people really like it. Uh, watch the first four minutes of the first episode and it is enough sadness porn to make me say no, no more, no more, no more, no more. It is, it's, it's a rough first four minutes and yeah, the show is not easy to begin with.

Right. But at least when I, after reading the books, I kind of knew what I was in for now that they're, they're off, they're off book as it were. And the, the, just, I don't, I don't even want to know where they're going with it because it was, it was a crazy opener and I just don't need that kind of stuff in my life right now.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the, you know, I, if I needed to watch this, I would just look at the news. Yeah. I mean, it's a show about powerless people getting quite literally fucked over and, you know, I know I feel powerless enough in my day to day life already, so I don't need to watch a show that's just basically an amplification for my outrage at a fictitious dystopian future.

But, you know, the more I, the more I think about all these dystopian, you know, fictions that we have, I think it might be a good thing for us because that makes us realize that we never really need to let these things come to pass, but maybe I was just in a mood, but either way, fuck you, Hulu, you can keep it, I'm out.

And more fun news, Killing Eve, have you heard of this show? No. BBC show has the woman from, was it Grey's Anatomy? Oh, right, right, right. She was also in the wine movie, Sideways. Ah, I never watched Grey's Anatomy.

I just, I remember her from the commercials and everybody talked about it. Killing Eve is basically a British show about spies and assassins. This is fun stuff. This is really fun stuff. It's only six episodes long for the first season. I'm guessing they're going to make more because it's based on a book series.

At least I hope they are because it's really, really good. The last episode comes out tonight, since we're recording on Sunday, May the 13th, and I cannot wait for it. Binge the first five episodes in a day. They were really good. Actress's name is Sandra Oh.

Sandra Oh, that's it. Yes. Oh, I forgot, Sandra. Sorry. Very cool. I've seen the posters for this. I've seen a couple TV spots for it. It looks good. So glad to know that you liked it. I will add this to my, and you know, my wife is a huge Grey's Anatomy fan. Oh, yeah. I think she'll probably want to see this. Yeah, she'll love it.

It's really, really good. My roommate loved it, too. It's really fun. Now, I would like to say that we need recurring mute filters for Twitter right now. Thanks to Brian Koppelman and Billions. I was about to say, because every Friday, our total Grumpy Old Geeks feed is completely useless. Well, that too.

That too. I actually have mute filters for just about everything everybody does for those, you know, whatever those follow Friday things. Yeah. Now, but every Sunday, Brian Koppelman goes out and talks about Billions, and there are some spoilers in there sometimes. Not intentional spoilers, but things that I don't want to see, so I have to go in and mute him for, you know, you can set a mute for a day, a 24-hour mute, which I do, but I have to do it every week.

It'd be nice to have a recurring, like, mute this person every week from Friday or from Sunday to Monday. I think that's a good feature that somebody should build in. So, TweetBot, please, get on it. And if you haven't seen Billions, great show, but Brian, shut up.

I love you, man, but shut the hell up. Right. And that's probably not something you want from a writer, is to shut up. We talked about the Cobra Kai coming back to YouTube Red, and we're like, ah, who needs that? Who needs that? Well, the first two episodes are out for free.

You have to get YouTube Red or Sweden to get the rest of them. I've watched the first episode and a half. I like it. It's pretty good. I've heard it's pretty good. Yeah. I highly recommend checking it out, especially the first episode. The first episode is just funny.

Right. You know, you have to watch it, because this guy's just so down on his luck. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. The problem is, I do feel like I would have to go back and actually watch The Karate Kid, because I don't really remember. You don't. You absolutely don't. They have flashbacks. They have enough flashbacks to give you the story, if you've forgotten the parts, that you don't have to, trust me, you don't have to go back and watch The Karate Kid.

You'll remember everything from the flashbacks. And it's very much, you know, it's built for people who have not probably ever seen The Karate Kid because they weren't alive then. Right, right. Yes. Okay. I want to check out the rest of the thing. I'm going to get the, because I never used my free trial for YouTube Red.

I use it for the TV, but not Red. So I think I'll do the trial and watch the rest of this, because it's pretty funny. And it's already gotten picked up for a second season, based on the feedback from the audience. So check that out. I did get to check out Black Panther this week.

Solid movie. Yep. Solid movie. Solid movie. I enjoyed it. Infinity War. I have a decent copy of it, and I watch the first 10 minutes of it, and I'm like, eh, I'm going to wait for it to go on sale so I can buy a copy of it and really watch it in full glory.

Everybody's talking about it, so it's spoiled, you know, completely for me. I don't really care about that stuff anymore. But all of that is to get me to the next one. This is a story that comes from MixaGG on Twitter. Did artificial intelligence predict the next Avengers, Infinity War? And this is more about box office predictions, not plot predictions.

Right. And it's an interesting story, but after working in the movie business for so long, this stuff is voodoo and witch doctors and throwing the bones and killing a chicken. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. There's so many variables that go into it.

And they're using historical data and all these different factors to try and figure out what the box office is going to be. And it's just, I don't know. I don't think it's going to ever be there. Because the thing is, you can't, okay, Batman, the new Batman movie with Ben Affleck.

You know, you look at it, you're thinking, oh, maybe, maybe. And then you see a trail and you're like, this thing is going to make 12 bucks. How is an AI going to tell you, you know, subjectively how bad Ben Affleck is going to be at Batman and then pull up, plug that into the algorithm?

You know, there's too many factors that go into it, but I appreciate the link mix of GG. It was pretty good. Yeah. And I'm sorry, Brian, but the expanse has been canceled. This is why I should never watch. You should never watch television. Ever. I got three episodes into the season.

I was getting caught up and I was digging it. And then this came across the wire. Look, I think it's going to get picked up by someone else. It's like Brooklyn Nine-Nine getting canceled. And all of a sudden, NBC has now got it. The Expanse is too good of a show to not get picked up in this day and age.

I know you put it in the show notes. This is like Farscape 2.0. That was a different time. Like the people didn't, you know, different networks didn't pick up other people's shows back then. And now that's all over the place and there's so many different places to go. I'm sure that the Expanse is going to end up somewhere.

Now we'll see what. And the difference here is that SyFy isn't bankrolling the production of the show. The show is actually produced by another company and sold. And the biggest issue was when SyFy got the rights to it, they didn't get enough rights. So they only had like. They only bought the live show instead of actual like digital streams.

Yeah. So that was like, that was dumb. Yeah. Like live first run only. And then everybody else got to, you know, got to run at it. So we'll see who picks it up. Somebody's going to pick it up. It is definitely too good a show. But I'm sure it's expensive as hell to make. But. Oh, yeah.

It's not like there aren't like, you know, three companies, at least right. They're throwing billions and billions of dollars at making shows every year now. It's like a drop in the bucket for Netflix or Amazon. And even Apple could buy it. Who knows? Oh, wait. No, sorry. Ron Moore is already there making his own crappy sci-fi show.

So I'm sure that they don't want to butt heads on that. Wait for that. Oh, man. Oh, Apple. You just can't get TV right, can you? Oh, well. Speaking of Netflix, something that we both found delightful. We're going to get a second helping of. There is more Somebody Feed Phil coming.

Awesome. This summer. Yes. Another six episodes will be released in July 6th. Very exciting. So we're going to get to Venice, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Cape Town, and New York. So very exciting. I just love that show. So I'm very happy about this.

I do, too. The only ones I don't like usually are the ones where they stay domestic. But I was wrong about Los Angeles because now I got to go get that sandwich now that I'm here. So. Exactly. So I'm excited to see what he does in New York, too. So, yeah, we'll see. And Nine Inch Nails have announced tour dates in another EP, finishing their triptych of three EPs that they've been releasing.

Interesting music, really. I didn't expect that from Trent. So it's, you know, it's not the heyday anymore. But he's still putting out some interesting stuff. I don't think I'm going to go see him play live just because big venues I don't get anymore. If I'm going to see a band, I want somewhere nice and small.

Yeah. I saw him at Riot Fest last year. He was good. He was good. And he had the magic tambourine of doom. Which was pretty fun. But he sounded good. Looked good. Yeah. And now I'm done. I don't need to see him. That was the first and last time I'll see Nine Inch Nails. I will say that if you're going to go see him, this is a good tour to do it because the Jesus and Mary Chain are opening and they're phenomenal live and a great band.

Okay. So another band coming back from the dead, as it were, Orbital are announcing their first new album in six years. And we have a link in our show notes where you can listen to the single that is out now. I love Orbital. They're one of my favorite EDM bands. Really smart stuff. Good music.

Yeah. Yeah. No, they're classy. I listen to them every week. They're on solid rotation in my office. Nice. And I'm very happy about this new album for sure. What do you think of the new song? It's not bad. It's not my favorite, but we'll see. Yeah. Didn't really get me jumping up and down.

But, I mean, they're going on tour, too, but no U.S. dates, which really sucks. I'm sure that they'll add them. So. I would like to, you know, see Orbital. They're very fun live. They're very fun. So, they would be a good show. Well, when they come to town, we're going to go.

Okay. At the library. Brian, do you remember the Themis books that I talked about by Sylvain Nouvelle? Yes, I do. I was actually going to, at some point, go and pick them up and read them, but I just have not had time to read recently.

Well, book three is out, and this is about the giant robots from outer space. Right. And, well, terrible, terrible finale. No. Unbelievably massive letdown to the first two books, and I liked both of those books a lot. It was solid setup, but he dropped the ball.

Terrible writing, and it was a totally juvenile plot. And it was, I mean, this is the biggest letdown for me since the three-body problem, or basically anything Daniel Suarez has written since Demon and Freedom TM. Okay. So, I'm not going to be reading those books. I would say skip it, honestly. Okay. And in sad news, I'm having a really hard time getting into this Chris Moore book.

I'm having a hard time finishing his last book. Which one are you on? I'm a secondhand... Oh, secondhand souls? Yes. I'm really stuck. Like, I cannot... I just can't finish it. Oh, man. I don't know why. I love him as an author.

I'm not into this book. Well, you know, if you're not into it, put it down. Yeah. Maybe. So, yeah. I was a little worried about his new book anyways, Noir, because I'm not a fan of the genre. Even poking fun of it, I'm not a fan. Yeah. So, I'm a little worried about it. And hearing you say that gives me some trepidation.

But I will endeavor to give it a shot as soon as I finally give up the ghost on this book. Okay. Yeah. Three times I've gotten through the first, like, two chapters. And I'm just like, when I go back, I put it down and I'm like, because it doesn't grab me enough to keep reading. So, then I go back and I'm like, ah, I gotta start over. Right.

So, I'm going to shelve it for a bit and see if I can find a better mood for it. So, I'm going to start reading a new book called Bandwidth by Elliot Pepper. Have you heard about this book? I have not, but I'm looking at the cover and it's very cyber. It is very cyber. That's the whole point about this one.

So, I don't want to read too much into it, but it looks like people are hijacking his feed and manipulating markets and governments. So, right there, I'm like, eh, let's give it a shot. What the hell? Right. You know, it's a 50-50 on this one.

It's got four stars on 331 reviews. So, I'm like, eh, okay, it just came out April 1st, so it's a newer book. So, I'm going to give that one a shot and see if that's any better. I have never heard of this author, but apparently, this is book one of two in a series. So, yeah, I don't know.

Let me know. I could use a new author. Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard of the guy either, but we'll see. If you don't try, you never know. That's true. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Welcome, Dave. Well, very well read. Thank you very much. Thank you. You guys wrote it. I just copied and pasted it. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Right, right. Well, it's good to be back.

How's everything going with you? Oh, it's going good here. Brian is not with us today. He has some daddy issues. I see. All right. And by that, he's got to deal with his dad. Ah, I see. All right. Okay. Well, I wish him well, of course. Yes, we do.

We do. So let's jump right in here because this one comes from Matt House on Facebook. This is an exclusive over at a German site called CT, which I've never heard of. And it's about Spectre NG, next generation, which is the next generation of Spectre-like flaws in Intel CPUs.

Have you guys heard about this one yet? We have. I want to say this caught our eye maybe a week or so ago. I'm looking at the date here. Yeah, that's about right. It's, oh, no, this is back in March. No, I'm sorry. I'm looking at the date wrong. They're using the European standard for the date.

It's in Germany. And it's like it's backwards in Germany. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, about a week ago is right on when they published this. So, yes, we did cover this on the Cyber Wire. A new round of Spectre-like vulnerabilities built into chips.

I would say I don't think we're terribly surprised in that after Spectre and Meltdown happened, everybody started digging in and taking a closer look at the chips. And also, Spectre and Meltdown really revealed a fundamental flaw in computer science.

You know, people were. Yeah. I mean, so people were rewriting computer science books based on that. So the fact that people went digging for new things and found new things, I don't think that's terribly surprising. It does look like one of the flaws in particular could be bad, particularly bad.

They're saying one of them they're saying is high risk and if you're running on cloud service providers running virtual machines, you could have some problems. It doesn't seem like it's going to affect home users that much, any of these, but it's the people running the cloud services with shared services that may run into trouble.

But well, considering that everything that all the consumers connect to is cloud based, you know, you could lose access to your services if these cloud services go down. So that would be the disruption. It wouldn't be a direct disruption, but it could definitely it could definitely be a side disruption once these if these virtual machines are attacked.

Right. And it seems as though what it will enable people to do is to escape their virtual machine, to jump to a different one running on the same server, things like that. There is no spoon you can get out of the matrix. That's right. So we'll see. They're being, I think, respectively quiet about what exactly the problem is, giving Intel and whoever else this involves.

I'm not sure if it involves AMG yet, giving them time to maybe try to deal with it and come out with patches and so forth. So we don't have a whole lot of the details other than there's more, you know, more to come. Right. Yeah.

As there always is. Yeah. And I do expect a lot more because now they know where to look. They're going to be digging in. And, you know, there these are eight new flaws, but I expect this to be going on for quite some time. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And it's one of those things. A spotlight has been shown on it.

So I think you're right. I think we're in for more of this stuff. And, of course, the problem is when it's in hardware, it might not necessarily be easy to fix. So we'll see. Dong, ding, dong, ding. Wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

We've had another story from Motherboard. An Android app with 10 million downloads left users' photos and audio messages exposed to public. Don't. This is an app called Droop. Have you ever heard of Droop? No, I have not heard of Droop.

I have not heard of Droop either. It's D-R-U-P-E. Not like a Droopy, Droopy whatever. And I guess it looks like it's some sort of a, I don't know what, like a contacts app. Contacts and messaging.

One of those all-in-one store your friends, text them, send audio messages and photos and so on and so forth. Yeah. Like a dialer, I think is what they referred to it as. Is that right? And so the developers accidentally stored a bunch of stuff in an unlocked Amazon S3 bucket.

Go figure. Yep. And it's funny, I buy on Twitter, the researcher whose name is Simone Margaretelli. Well done. Thank you very much. I saw this come by on Twitter over the weekend.

And he was, when he, when he, he announced that he had found it, but wasn't saying what the app was because he wanted to contact the people who wrote the app first. You know, good thing to do. And basically, basically within a couple of hours, he got outed.

Somebody else had figured out what the app was and announced what the app was. And of course he was like, you know, come on. I mean, we're trying to do the right thing here. So. Well, I guess if he's trying to do the right thing, maybe Twitter isn't the best place to have the conversation. Well, that's a good point. I guess if he, yeah, he could have just not said anything until he got verification back from the folks who made this.

So the folks who make droop say that, of course, it affects a small percentage of people and they fixed it within an hour of them being informed of it. This researcher drew attention to the fact that, as is the case with so many of these Android apps, that this Android app asks for a lot of permissions.

A whole heap and help and full. Yeah. That list was insane. There's a list in the article here and basically it's asking for everything as they do. I know. The one thing I was looking for, I'm like Android permission dot record underscore kitchen sink is what I was looking for because that's all that basically is.

Star dot star. Yeah. So it is the app is off the, at last check, the app was off the Google Play store. So we'll see if we, if we see it come back or not. One thing struck me about this. When this came by, I was thinking about how many more of these stories we get from apps on Android than we do on iOS.

I think it's fair to say that there are many more of these on Android than iOS. To be fair, though, that there is an, there is an iOS version of this app out there and it, the problem isn't specific to Android or iOS. It's specific to AWS.

That's yes. And bad. You're absolutely correct. That in this case, the mistake was not necessarily in the app other than you could, you could make a case that the app was asking for more permissions than maybe it needed. But you're absolutely correct that the app, it is how they configure their AWS was the problem.

So, but, but I sort of led me down this, this thought experiment of, you know, why, why do people choose to be on Android instead of iOS when there are so many more apps like this, so many more security issues on Android.

And I sort of came up with an analogy here. I'm curious what you think about it. I was thinking being on Android is like living in the city versus living in the suburbs. In other words, you know, if you live in the city, you know, there are probably neighborhoods you should not go into.

But there's also a lot of opportunity. There's nightlife. There's, there's excitement. There's, there's more people, but the potential for more danger. Whereas if you live out in the suburbs, which is iOS, it's a lot safer, but you also, there's not as much necessarily to do.

And by that, I mean, you don't have as much control over your device. You can't go to that bad neighborhood. Even if you, if you want to look for trouble and go to that bad neighborhood, right? If you live in the suburbs, you got to get in your car and go there. It's not walking distance from your apartment. Right.

See what I mean? So I don't know. What do you think about that? Is there anything, you think there's anything to that analogy? I think it's a fun analogy, but you know, I don't know the, the people that I know that use Android, a lot of them actually do have Macs, which I think is very funny. They do it for price, mainly price.

And nowadays though, some of these new galaxy phones are priced just as much as an iPhone. So the distinction breaks down there, but cheap Android phones. And also back in the day, Android phones, you could get a phablet and you could not get that.

The choices were so limited on size on the iPhone that people who just wanted a big ass phone would just go to Android because they didn't care. It's like, I just need a phone. Right. What's on sale? Give me the phone that's on sale. They're not, you know, nerds like us and we don't, they don't have a lot. They don't care. They're just like, okay, does it make calls?

Can I take a picture of my bum and can I send it to my girlfriend? Okay. Send it to me. I'll take that phone. Right. Yeah. That's an excellent point. I imagine someone standing there in the store and they see this Android phone for $49 and sitting next to it is a, an iPhone for $899.

And it's very easy to say, well, go ahead. I'm sorry. Make that case to me. Why? I can stay out of the bad neighborhood. I can do that. No problem. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I can stay out of the bad neighborhood. And then you don't give them a map to where the bad neighborhood is. Most of these people, since they're not technically literate, generally tend to end up getting, getting mugged in the bad neighborhood.

No, it's a good point. I, I, but I, but you know what, that, that, that brings up another excellent point, which is, I think that you tend to see people who have more technical savvy attracted to Android and, but because they're able to do better.

They know where the bad neighborhoods are. They know how to stay out of them. They know how to protect themselves. So they are better equipped to, they can benefit from the lower price, from a broader selection of hardware and all that. Kind of stuff and probably still stay safe.

See, I think it comes down to taste personally, because I think Android is just so ugly and I like, I like iOS because it's pretty. Yeah. I have a very, I have a very acute design aesthetic. That's why I will never use ugly software. Life is too short to use ugly software.

And that's why I stay away from Android. But, you know, I've got one. It's fast. It works well. I just don't trust anything that I load on it because I just never know. Well, I suspect we'll get letters because nothing attracts opinions than expressing one about iOS and Android.

So I'm genuinely curious to know what people think. So if you have a strong opinion about this, if you feel you have something to add to the conversation, not just echoing something that either of us have said here, please feel free to write us. We'll do some follow up. Brian. Right. Exactly.

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. He's not here to defend, not here to defend himself. That's right. Brian, in his infinite wisdom, left us with some stories that he can't come here to talk about. So I'll talk about him instead. This is an interesting TechCrunch story where researchers are showing how Siri and Alexa can be exploited with silent commands that are hidden in songs.

These are commands that are inaudible to the human ear, but can be picked up by Siri and Alexa. So what some of these things have been shown to do is mute your phone, then send it a command and then unmute after the command has been run. So you don't know that it's actually happened, which is kind of interesting.

And you can have it, you know, call some of those, you know, pay phone numbers that'll ding you for a couple hundred bucks just as soon as it answers on the other end. One of those scammer dealios send email. It's fairly limited at this point, but it just shows the fact that these things can hear what we can't hear, which is very scary when you think about how everything is moving to voice.

It seems like a kind of a big security flaw. I understand why they put it in there because then they can, you know, it's like a back door so they can control it. And I especially like that, you know, you see it in TV ads sometimes where it goes the opposite, where they put it in a frequency where it can't hear it.

So they control, they control the frequency. Well, there was that thing for a while. Wasn't, wasn't the Shazam app integrating with some ads where Shazam could hear cues to present you the second half of the ad or something like that? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, there was the previous thing the researchers had, which they called the dolphin attack, which was using like, what do you call it?

Hypersonic, I guess, ultrasonic, ultrasonic sound. So above what humans can hear, but still within the capabilities of the devices to hear. And that would trigger them. But this goes beyond that. This is sort of burying the sound within the music that it's playing.

And they've been able to do it. It's like you can't go through walls, but they've been able to do it through open windows inside. You know, they can stand outside. What was that movie with John Cusack with the boombox? Right. Say anything. Yeah. They can do it say anything style. Yeah.

But they just can't. It won't play through the walls. The walls muffle it too much. But if your windows open, you can do it. You can have a drive by drive by attack. Well, but, you know, I do remember when I got my latest iOS device, my latest phone, part of setting it up was having it train on my specific voice.

So to summon the lady who lives inside of my phone, you know, if I'm in a room full of phones, it will only hear me say that. So I know there's varying degrees of capabilities when it comes to that. I don't remember off the top of my head if Amazon or Google, to what degree they can do that.

But I know on iOS, you can train it to a specific voice, which, you know, I guess might not work in a kitchen situation where you want the whole family to have access. But if kind of like training your touch ID, if you could train your device to just the voices in your family, maybe that would be a solution.

Right. And I vaguely remember setting that up when I got this phone. But it was one of those things where you don't have to go back and redo it very often. So I've had to redo my thumbprints quite a few times because it just stops for some reason. So I have to go back and dump them all and retrain.

It'll like lose one thumb and then to get everything to work right, I just have to wipe it and start over. It's very strange. But I haven't done the voice yet. And there are ways that you can do that, I believe, with Alexa as well. I haven't played with that because I was always the only one in my house. So it's not like Bam Bam is going to start ordering, you know, bones from orders of kibble start showing up by the dump truck load.

You don't know who knows why. Yeah. So I will give that a try for next week. I will go and try on my Alexa to figure out what I can and can't do as far as voice goes. Because I have someone else in the house now so we can play around and see if, you know, I can set it so she can't talk to it.

Which would be maddening, I'm sure, for most people. Yeah. Especially if you sneak in and then you start, you know, you turn off everybody else's voice but just leave yours as the only one. And then they're like in the kitchen screaming at it trying to get it to work. And you just walk in and go, hey, what's up, baby?

And it starts working for you. That would be fun. I think you should try that. My wife, I annoy my wife in many ways. But the specific way that I annoy my wife is we have a home kit enabled light in our bedroom.

So, you know, you go to bed, you get in bed and you can say, you know, hey, Siri, turn off the bedroom light and the light gets turned off. But for whatever reason, she has trouble doing it. So she'll say it. Nothing happens. She'll say it.

Nothing happens. I say it turns right off. And as you might imagine, this doesn't go over very well. No. Because Siri likes you more. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Is she getting jealous of Siri? I don't know. Although, I mean, she has hers trained. Hers talks to her in some fancy Australian male voice.

So she's got hers tuned up to be the thunder from down under. So I got I got nothing, you know, I can't compete with that. So, oh, man, fun times. Yeah. So another story here about some criminals using a swarm of drones to surveil and disrupt an FBI hostage operation.

This is from The Verge. And the story here is about the FBI set up an observation post and the bad guys backpacked in a bunch of drones and use the drones to, I suppose, first of all, establish where the FBI was located.

And then they sort of buzzed these agents to get them out of their perch. Just, you know, flying around with drones, swooping around, annoying them. It's just grief and grief in the FBI pretty much. Yeah. That's awesome. Yes.

I mean, and there's the story doesn't say where it happened. The the border patrol people and the FBI folks are, you know, they don't want to reveal where it was. It's interesting, I guess, you know, spy versus spy off the shelf technology that the bad guys can use to keep an eye on the police.

They also said that the bad guys have been using this to establish the routines of security guards. So, you know, you basically have an eye in the sky and you figure out where's that that security guard who's wandering around the boat docks. You can write an eye.

Where exactly are they? And you get a drone high enough. You can't hear it from the ground. So you got an eye in the sky on the security guard. And when he's on the other side of the dock, that's when you send in the team to unlock that container and and profit.

How very like Daniel Suarez slash William Gibson of the story also talks a little bit about something we've covered before. Those anti drone guns that are supposed to jam the drones and make them fall from the sky, which, of course, the FCC has a thing to a thing or two to say about.

So, well, you know, you know what the remedy for that is, don't you go on? Eagles. Bring back the Eagles. Yes, yes, I have seen those videos where the Eagles take them out of the sky. I wonder if you end up if you how much does that work? Do you end up with a bunch of Eagles who are missing one or two of their little talons because of the because of the propellers?

So far, they said no Eagles were harmed in the capturing of the drones. But I think the program was killed after public outcry. It's like, OK, let's have let's have this beautiful animal try and catch a lawnmower in the sky. Right. Yes. Now the majestic eagle will approach the.

Oh, no. No, no. It's kind of like the WKRP Thanksgiving episode. Exactly. Right. Yes, exactly. All right. Well, moving on. The Welsh police have started to bust out their facial recognition program.

Got to put that A.I. in there. That's right. They just did a test at a sporting event and it flagged two thousand two hundred ninety seven people that it shouldn't have. Well, that's ninety two percent of all the people in their database, which is pretty.

Attack them as being criminals. Yes. Yes. So, I mean, that was that would be one hell of a footy match if that many criminals there. I'm thinking it turns out that this is the annual convention of legitimate businessmen of South Wales or something.

Exactly. So they did get one guy. OK. One guy. That poor one guy. I mean, how crappy does he have to feel? Like everybody here is a criminal. They get me. Just me. So they got somebody. So they got one hit that was accurate.

Mm hmm. OK. Out of two thousand two hundred ninety seven. That's pretty bad. And it turns out what they're training the system on are really low res mugshots. Hmm. Like really low res. Right. So, you know, you've played around with some AI and machine learning stuff.

You know that, you know, the lower the resolution, the lower the or the higher the chances of a match because you have less points of data to actually match against. You know, and they thought that, oh, this would work. What the hell? Not so much. What were they thinking?

Yeah. What were they thinking? I mean, it seems to me like you have a mugshot. You know who that person is. Next thing you go to your your DMV photo. Cross reference. Pull up your DMV photo, which is a high resolution, high quality photo.

Well, who knows in Wales? Who knows? Well, that's true. That's true. They might be using old Polaroids in Wales and scanning them on an old Epson like, you know. Yeah. Scuzzy belt scanner from back in the day. Yeah. But it seems like, yeah, they should have at least some kind of high resolution image that they can train these things against.

But they but they do say that they have arrested a total of 450 people so far using this technology. Well, it's coming. I spoke to someone earlier this week who was saying, you know, it's only a matter of time before all of those body cams that the police are using are going to be jacked into some kind of facial recognition system.

So every encounter they have with people, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I think that's a little farther off than people think it might be. I don't know. I mean, maybe bandwidth. Just think of the bandwidth. I don't know.

I mean, you know, I don't know. It's a it's an interesting question. Right. I mean, we get so you have a link to the car if you feed to the car. Right. Car has a if the car has a 5G connection. Right. Next generation. Connection to whatever the server that is actually doing the heavy lifting.

How many years away is that within five, I guess, something like that. So but you think of all the video from every policeman on the force the entire time, it would have to have some kind of triggering event where it says, OK, there's a face in this photo. Right. Well, remember, we did that.

We had a story not that long ago about the company who was replacing security cameras in 7-Elevens and convenience stores. They had an automated way of picking out. Basically, the system would flag something that it thought was bad behavior in the store.

Yeah, criminal behavior. And then it would put it in front of a human. So that way you could have many, many fewer humans than then you would otherwise need to keep an eye on many, many convenience stores. So, you know, it could be something like that. Yeah, I think a lot of the processing was going on locally for that instead of sending it over the air.

I thought they had a I thought they had a server on premises, but I could be wrong about that. But as cheap as computers are nowadays, who knows? You can just have it have it, you know, in your side pocket. They do have a utility belt for a reason. That's right. That's right. You know, well, I'd have a couple of quad core processors in the back there next to their cuffs.

That's right. Well, not completely unrelated to that. There's a story on ZDNet from Zach Whitaker, who has really built a reputation for hunting down these stories. He had an exclusive here about some researchers who did some work on some breathalyzers and found that the breathalyzers had some possible flaws.

It's that the way that they process the tests that they take had some problems could lead to some people's tests being thrown out. But the company who makes the breathalyzer company came after the researchers and basically pressured them into backing off their research.

Yeah, this was a really fascinating read, a little bit on the longer side. But one of the flaws that I had never even thought of was that the temperature of the breath actually changes the density of the alcohol in the in the breath. So the test results have to be modulated for what the temperature of the breath is when it comes into the machine.

And they apparently weren't taking that into consideration. Right. Even though the the algorithms that the state requires do. Right. And that was like one of the flaws. It's very fascinating that that that is, you know, one of the things that they just found from the source code. They never actually had one of the breathalyzers in in their hands.

They only had the source code in like a data set, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah. Another thing that in in Zach Whitaker's research into this and his reporting was I believe he came up with an email from some of the folks in the police force who basically said, let's throw caution to the wind and get these devices out there.

And I think the phrase they used was let's throw caution to the wind, which, you know, in a situation. Let us look up in our let us look up in our dictionary of cliches. And well, in a situation where you are potentially putting people behind bars, that's kind of something you want to get right.

And I would say air on the side of being conservative when it comes to your results. But evidently not the case this time. Yeah. You had a thunk. Yeah. You had a thunk. So we'll see how it plays out. See if more research gets to be done. But it's that it's that chilling effect of companies protecting their code, saying that the code is privileged property and saying, no, you can't look at our code.

Or, you know, you've seen quite enough there when you find something that that they move along, move along, nothing to see here. When you find something they don't like saying, OK, we're done here, there's nothing more to see and, you know, protecting it behind computer crime laws and things like that.

So there's a definitely a chilling effect there, because if we in this case, we want to know the truth. Right. Yeah. People who've been who've been charged with crimes because of this device deserve to know is the device accurate or not.

I don't think many people could disagree with that, but other than the manufacturers of the device, I guess. Well, because does that open them up to lawsuits from the people who are wrongly convicted from their machine not performing the way it should? Yeah, I don't know. Perhaps.

But I can see that's why they would be nervous. No, I totally understand why they would be nervous about it. But it's a shame that it got to this point. A lot of things went wrong along the way between the manufacturer and the Washington State Patrol saying, you know, let's get them out there.

You know, we got we got work to do. Yeah. And I don't understand why the software and this should be so proprietary. You're just analyzing, you know, alcohol content breath. Why should that? That should be open sourced so other people can look at it and say, oh, no, you screwed up here. You screwed up there.

Let's let's fix this. Let's fix that. It seems like more eyes on this problem would be better than less. And it doesn't seem like that really is a point of, you know, like a business practice that they really need to protect. It's like, OK, let's everybody have the most great, you know, at least the best software that we can have for this one problem.

The business side of it could come from having better sensors. Instead of just better software. And it seems as though from this article that there are not very many suppliers of these devices. One of the things one of the things they pointed out was that they put this out to bid and this this German company were really the only ones who bid on it.

So market opportunity. Exactly. There's a lack of competition in the breathalyzer industry. So there's there's an opportunity for you. Well, let's start. Open breath. Open breath. Yeah, we'll work on the name. But yeah, I'm not good at branding. What the hell?

What the hell? But they did say at the end of the article, the original researchers are off the case now. But there is a new researcher who does have access to the source code and said that, yeah, there's there's some troubling things. I can't talk about it, but there's some things that I have concerns about. Yeah, I mean, it seems like now that now that people know about this, you can bet some folks are going to be getting their hands on these and reverse engineering them.

Definitely. Yeah. Well, Dave, thank you very much. Of course. Hopefully next week, Brian will be back with his snarky repartee. I hope so. I hope everything goes well for him. I look forward to seeing him again. Yeah, I guess I do, too. Talk to you next week. All right.

There was a round of posts being made, especially on the Twitter that involved an old William Shatner commercial for, I think, a Commodore VIC-20 from 1981, which was absolutely fantastic. So then I also saw one that John Cleese did in 1983 for Compaq that was being posted.

And then I found the motherlode, Jason. I found the post of all these ads from the dawn of the computer era, and they are fantastic. This is a link over at Gizmodo. I love all these commercials. It is absolutely funny. Hysterical stuff.

I spent, yeah, basically, I went through all of them last night, and they were pretty great. Unfortunately, the Shatner one is down. I can't get to the Shatner one. But the Tom Baker and Lila Ward Doctor Who ads were fantastic. All of, of course, the John Cleese ads, as usual.

But these are really good. And I actually remember some of them. Me, too. The IBM ads, I definitely remember. And, of course, the 1984 ad. Of course, yes. I don't even know if that should even be in there. It's kind of a different beast. It's iconic, yes. Yes, it's Ridley Scott.

He's got, I mean, you know, it's unfair advantage on that one. That's true. Now, this one just annoyed the hell out of me. I've been checking out sciencealert.com in my feed. And this one, fasting for just 24 hours boosts the regeneration of stem cells study finds.

Okay. Yes, we kind of knew that. Fasting is good for you in small doses. But here's what got me. The study could even lead to a fasting in a pill. What would be in the pill then, air? See, honestly, that's what they should do.

Oh, man. Just don't eat. It's 24 hours. How fucking weak are you that you can't take 24 hours off to boost your stem cell regeneration? If that's what you need to do, do it. Why do you need a pill for everything?

Oh, because they make money off pills. And they don't make money if you're not eating anything. I see. This is true. This is very true. I was very let down by that because I'm a fasting proponent. But you don't need a pill. Just stop stuffing your face for a day. See how you feel. Okay.

Moving on. UPS has these new trucks that are going to be going on the streets of, I believe, London and Paris very soon. I just have this in here because these things look cool as hell, I think. They look like animated buses.

Like if you saw like, you know what I mean? Like if you were like seeing like the Incredibles or something like that or, you know, the what's the one with Stephen Carell where he plays the super evil guy. Oh, Despicable Me. Yeah, Despicable Me. If you saw like a minion bus pull up to like go around minion headquarters, this is what it would look like.

That's what I mean. They just look like they should not look. This doesn't look like they're real. No, it doesn't. They're awesome. Yeah. They're putting out 35 of them. They're all electric. And it's a trial program in London and Paris. And I really hope the trial goes well because I really want to see these in person.

They just look neat. Although I'm tired of the brown. They should really dump the brown. Yeah. It is a shame that they're brown. They kind of look like some weird suppository in that color. But they're cool looking trucks. They do. Very cool. Check them out. The link will be in the show notes to check out a picture. Moron of the week.

My moron of the week is the creator of... Tatattoo. Tatattoo. I just like saying it. I know. Oh, this is a VentureBeat article. Hollywood producer brings blockchain to the movies with Tatattoo.

Tatattoo. Oh, my God. I don't even know where to start with this one because here's what it's got. It's got Hollywood producers. Okay. Do they mention any of them by name? Oh, yeah. Andrea Averlino, who I've never heard of. I haven't heard of him.

Most producers you're never going to hear of. True. Yeah. But it's blockchain. He's bringing blockchain here. It's like, okay, blockchain lets Tatattoo record each transaction in an open distributed ledger, which ensures users and content providers get rewarded.

A digital rights management platform means that all talent distributors and studios have an accurate record of their work. And the whole point of this is that so you have a video on demand platform. Yes. And social networking and systems for rewards and video watching.

And it all goes through the blockchain to incentivize content consumption by offering digital tokens for views generated by users and their friends. It goes on to say, we need the blockchain to create a unique token that is universal and can be used as a rewarding system for our community of users.

We want to create an ecosystem. We want to create an ecosystem based on trust and fairness embodied by the principle of the blockchain community. Okay. Okay. That's not the only reason blockchain is being utilized here. The DRM is built on the blockchain to ensure film rights do not get lost.

There are many examples of studios being bought, going bust, and rights getting lost. Nothing, nothing that was said above requires the blockchain. Nope. Nothing. Nothing. He's a con artist. Yep. Tattoo. Tattoo.

F-U. Tattoo. I'll turn it. I mean, on the other side of things, not only is this just stupid anyways, but there have been numerous studies that have shown that when people think that their viewing habits are being tracked or published, they start to automatically just put a bunch of things like documentaries in their queue that they have no intention of ever watching.

So the idea that all of a sudden, everything that I'm going to watch is publicly available in a blockchain somewhere, so everybody can see what I'm watching, would inherently probably change my viewing habits or at least make me not want to use this platform. Because I don't need people to know what I'm watching.

I find it disturbing that Amazon is tracking everything that I would watch through them or that Netflix is keeping some sort of database of everything that I've seen. I like to clear those histories. So the idea that this will live forever in a blockchain, that I had a little bit too much wine and, like, watched some crappy movie at 3 in the morning forever, and it exists forever in a blockchain, I find a negative, not a positive.

Definitely not a positive. Well, it's a positive for the film companies, but a negative for the consumer. Yes. Oh, yeah. No, thank you. No, thanks. Enough with the blockchain. So, yes. F-U-ta-ta-too. Feedback loop.

Last week, I got a phone call after our show came out. Brian? Mm-hmm. It was from friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter. Oh. And he was calling to inform me that, once again, we had an ill-researched, poorly constructed show. Because, apparently, in his mind...

What specifically did we do that pissed him off? I called Pokemon Go a fad. Oh, no. And he completely denies that it's a fad. Because there are still people out there that play it, and, you know, mainly him. Festival of one.

Oh, yeah. So, I did throw this in here. Nantech details this year's Pokemon Go events. So, last year, they had the big Pokemon Go festival in Chicago, where 20,000 people showed up, killed the network, and then created a class-action lawsuit and sued them. So, we're going to try it again this year.

All right. And there's a bunch of them. There's one in Germany, another one in Chicago, and, as yet to be specified, third one in Japan. Okay. Well, I hope he's booking his travel. Yeah, yeah. 20 bucks a ticket, just like last year, that you'll be able to sue for later on and get your money back.

Oh, we kid, Teeter. No, we don't. No, we don't. It's a fucking fad. It's a fad. It's a fad. Yeah. All right. Well, over at Patreon, we have some donations this week. Anthony, John, and Jeremy have all become our Patreon subscribers, so thank you very much. And Jeremy says, this has been long overdue.

I have been a long-time listener and have enjoyed every episode since I started listening. I'm an avid tech news reader and love your insight, views, and spin on the topics in your shows. Thanks for doing the show and keep up the great work. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we got a couple donations this week as well.

Joseph sent us $7.77. Lucky Sevens, he says. Cheers. William has done a monthly recurring donation for us. Thank you very much. And David sent us a very generous one-time gift. We do appreciate that. Thank you. And he said, I just started listening to your podcast and think it's great.

I hope you both have jobs soon if that's really the way you want to go. Well, no, not really. But, you know, got to pay the bills. Got to pay the bills. Yeah. Over at Facebook, Matt House gave us a five-star rating and apparently nothing else. No, just a five-star rating. No, just a five-star rating.

Just a five-star rating. But we appreciate that. Easy enough. Yes. Yes. And over at Twitter, Infuriated Citizen Resistor writes, would be great to hear your comments on the next show. And he gave us a link to... This is Arvin Narayan saying, we're repeating this mistake as we rush to put AI in everything.

Today's AI slash ML is uninterpretable, biased, and fragile. When it works, we don't understand why. These systems are hard to maintain but harder to upgrade, and we'll be patching them for the next 50 years. And this is a big, long thread saying how AI and ML is just a mess, and we don't know what we're doing and rushing forward and doing it anyways.

Yeah. That's pretty much how humans roll, for the most part. It kind of is. It really is. Yeah. That's what we do. Oh. Yeah. PSN M1XH4 sends in... Mixer. Yeah. Mike Zuckerberg says it will take three years to fix Facebook.

What a terrible website. And it's a link over to Wired, where they basically discuss why it's going to take so damn long to fix Facebook. I would argue that there is no intention or desire to fix Facebook, because it is a feature, not a bug. Exactly. It's working exactly as it was designed to do.

It's working exactly as planned. Yes. And Joseph writes in, keep giving the bird to bird. We shall. We shall. And David also writes, the big difference between Nikola Motor and Tesla is that the latter has actually delivered stuff. He makes a valid point. Good point there.

Yeah. Mr. Dom sent Firefoxes adding ads, so much for Mozilla being all about sifting out the shit side of the internet and not succumbing to the ad, which is a browser is putting in its own ads. Well, okay. But it's only in like a couple different spots where you can not look at them.

Yeah. I can really not look at them because I don't have Firefox installed. It's pretty simple enough. And a bunch of people sent us, particularly, I just remember Mikey and Kyle sent us the vice bit on San Francisco cracking down on their scooters. So, you know, it's always nice to see the mainstream media pick up what we've been saying all along.

I feel like InfoWars right now. Let's go sell some powders and I'll take off my shirt. Oh, I got it. I got this email in from Daniel Jansonson and he writes excellent podcast and avid listener and follower regarding the data privacy issues you've been discussing.

I am in complete agreement with your viewpoints and invite you to read my recent articles in the Santa Monica mirror on this topic, including the bird scooters, which are really just a method of compiling data on users. Hmm. I say. So there's links to three different stories that he's written, opinion pieces over at the Santa Monica mirror that will be linked in the show notes.

Yes. Check those out. Check them out. I have not had a chance yet because this came through yesterday and I'm hungover. Yeah. Poor baby. Yeah. So, but thank you for it's hard. Yes, I know. Joe wrote in. I'm only listening to a handful of the shows, but loving every minute of it so far.

I thought you guys could get a kick out of this site in their promo video, a VPN built on top of the blockchain. What could go wrong? All they need now is an AI tag and their funding will go through the roof. Keep up the great shows and content linked to a site called Mysterium Network, which I would argue if you're going to call yourself mystery, you probably shouldn't have a blockchain which keeps everything publicly out there.

And also when I'm using a VPN, I may not necessarily want everything actually put into a blockchain that is publicly available. Exactly. Just, I don't get it. Oh my God. I just don't, I don't, I don't understand.

Oh. Oh, oh, blockchain. Oh, funding. Funding. Yeah, funding. ICO, blockchain. Exactly. And Grisalia writes in. Hey guys, two things. One, I super recommend the book Artemis by Andy Weir. Really hope it turns into a movie soon.

I believe it probably is because he, I think he sold the rights before he even wrote it and we didn't cover it on the show. Yeah. I've not read it yet. So I, that maybe I should switch over to that and just do that. I enjoyed it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's not nearly as good as the Martian, but it's a different book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And second, I just read this article that reminded me of you, Brian and your new Apple watch. And this is some students don't know how to read analog clocks. Is this the end of an era? Didn't we cover this last week? I think we might've mentioned it. I can't remember if I was just ranting about it in person, you know, privately or publicly.

I know. Yeah. I was screaming drunkenly at somebody about this. I can't remember if it was our audience or not, but yeah. Who cares? Like, who cares? We've moved on. Are we going to get upset that nobody knows how to build a sundial anymore? Yeah, probably. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate that from Brazil. Warm Brazilian hugs for you very much. Thank you. Yes. Beta Bucket writes us, there are way too many rich, foolish people in Silicon Valley that should be listening to the GOG podcast. The company, Zappo, is cashing in on their lack of foresight.

And this is a link over at Bloomberg. The wealthy are hoarding 10 billion of Bitcoin in bunkers. Zappo's billionaire backers include LinkedIn Corporation co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Wall Street trader Mike Novogatz, who's in the process of setting up his own cryptocurrency merchant bank.

Of course he is. Their bet is that Bitcoin is here to stay. The vault's fingerprint scanners were equipped with a pulse reader to prevent amputated hands from being used. Oh, my God. We have so few problems in the world, apparently.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Charles writes in. Gents, every time you get worked up about people tracking AI to everything, I chuckle. You see, I face something similar in my line of work. I am a quote unquote drone operator. We use these unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs to locate fires, lost campers, or for any other reason, an eye in the sky could be helpful.

Drone is our AI. Our vehicles are remotely piloted aircraft or RPAs, which is the accepted term. Drone gives the impression that these planes fly themselves, which they don't. There is a crew piloting the plane using RF communications to actuate the flight controls.

Although there are hold modes that can maintain airspeed, altitude, and heading, the aircraft is no more a drone than a car using cruise control or other driving aids. Fair enough. Which is why I was trying to refer to my Tello as a quadcopter in the drone. Because I was actually flying it.

But it does hover. But yeah, yeah. I see his point. I see his point as well. So I get why you're upset. I totally understand. Yep. El Duderino writes. Yeah. El Duderino writes in. When I heard you guys use opera on the show, I laughed. For years, people have been saying opera was great.

I'd try it and think it was trash. I gave it a try and wow, it's really good. And never seems to slow down from browser funk like Safari and Firefox. If you're skeptical, give it a try. He agrees with us. As we've been saying. Ivor writes in. The only thing that protects us from bureaucracy is its own incompetence.

And it's a link to hacking charges dropped against Nova Scotia teen who slurped public records from the web. Yeah, this is a pretty funny story. I don't know if we covered it at the time. But yeah, this kid just basically, you know, he downloaded a bunch of publicly available documents and somebody got pissed off at him for it.

Yeah. Yeah. He's like an Aaron Schwartz Jr. Yeah. But at least he got off. He got off. Seepsoak wrote us. Binance CEO calls ICOs necessary and 100 times easier than traditional venture capital. Hey, guys. Hope all is well.

I ran into this article. First thing I thought was let me send this to GOG and see what happens. LOL. Enjoy. Yeah. My head exploded. So. Oh, yeah. Stealing money from people is so much easier than raising it the traditional way. Isn't it, though? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brian writes in.

I live in the SF area. I ride the train into the city. I take my bike. I see all the bird, lime bike and rent. You are not alone. The regular bike riders hate them. I used to ride a motorcycle and we had a term for non helmet riders. We call them organ donors. Nice.

And Jay sends in. All right, guys. I know you hate crypto, but I reckon it's time you get with the program and get with the times. I found this gem for you. This website is worth checking out, but you simply must see the video to truly understand the greatness that lies before your eyes. And this is at matrix.io.

I look forward to the thoughtful and mostly positive and humorous discussion that ensues, I believe is what he meant to say. I watched this video. This could easily. I mean, my first impression was this has to be something that was made up for a movie. This is like a fake website that is for a movie.

It is absolutely fantastic. I cannot personally wait for the age of wonder when the rotating triangles will come over and take us over. I only got halfway through because the video crapped out, but to me, it felt like something out of South Park. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like just totally like faked like Silicon Valley.

This just this should be something from Silicon Valley. Totally. Yeah. I mean, the TV show, but it's actually just from Silicon Valley. Sadly, it's the world we live in now over at iTunes stuck in Florida, right? The court jester speak the truth. A great geek podcast with going down to the port level.

They bring up the current technology issues in the media in their own unique way. Their humorous presentations are great. Thank you very much. Stuck in Florida. We appreciate that. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. It is always please, please, please tell a friend. Closing shout outs. Well, today is Sunday, Mother's Day, but yesterday was May 12th.

And on 50 years ago yesterday, Tony Hawk was born. Jesus. Crispy, we're getting old. Yes, we are. Man, and he's still cutting it up out there. Love Tony Hawk. So that was a happy birthday, Tony. Big fan over here.

And congrats to friend of the show, Trent, for going into escrow on his first house. I know. Apparently, we're going to be going to a barbecue in Inglewood or wherever the hell he bought his house pretty soon. I do believe it's Inglewood or Hawthorne, somewhere around there. Buy SpaceX. We can go. We can take the tunnel. We can take the tunnel to Trent's house and go barbecue on the back lawn.

Very nice. Well, I'm looking forward to it. And congratulations. It is a big deal. So well done. Yep. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 259. 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. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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