260: A Laurel and Hardy Handshake

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I just want to give a quick shout out to all of our listeners. We have had a massive, massive uptick in listener response. You guys are writing us, tweeting us, Facebooking us, everything-ing us, and we really do appreciate it. So the one thing that we will ask you to do, please tell a friend, tell a like-minded friend, and get more people listening. We would really appreciate that.

So Brian, happy birthday! Oh, thank you. It was Wednesday, and I appreciate the listeners that somehow found out and let me know. So thank you. Yeah, I may have left a hint on our Clash of Clan Battle Royale board. Oh, well, thank you. That was very nice. I got a number of messages from everyone, so it was very much appreciated, and I had a wonderful birthday.

Awesome. Are you still hungover? No, I actually did nothing. I think I had two glasses of wine all day, so that was it. So it was a family-filled day. Oh, one of those. Yes. Boo. Yeah. Well, that's what happens when you get old. How old are you now?

I am 45. Okay. Youngin. Yeah, I don't feel it. Green, wet behind the ears still. Well, got a lot of follow-up this week, so let's get to it. We do. We talked about the big Google AI demonstration where they made phone calls that would, you know, plan things out for you and make your haircutting appointments and all of that.

And we have some breaking news, I guess. Okay. Hat tip to Darren on Facebook, who sent us this message, or this link from Vanity Fair. Did Google fake its big AI demo? Uh-oh. Betterage would say no, but what's the verdict? Well, we don't know. Google's not answering any journalist questions about this. As Axios pointed out on Tuesday, that the demo was impressive. It was also pretty unsettling. And as many people quickly noted, it was horrifying.

So they asked, is it possible that this is too good to be true? And so they noted that there was something a little off in the conversations the AI had on the phone with businesses, suggesting that perhaps Google had faked or at least edited its demo. Unlike a typical business, Axios called more than two dozen hair salons and restaurants.

The employees who answered the phone in Google's demos never identified the name of the business or themselves, nor is there any ambient noise in Google's recordings, as one would expect in a hair salon or a restaurant. At no point in Google's conversations with the businesses did the employees who answered the phone ask for the phone number or other contact information from the AI.

And as I pointed out last week, they state here, further, California is a two-party consent state, meaning that both parties need to consent in order for a phone conversation to be legally recorded. Did Google seek the permission of these businesses before calling them for the purposes of the demo? Was it staged in the simulated manner of reality TV?

And Google is not answering anybody's questions yet. Oh, somebody over there needs to pick up the phone and... I guess their AI doesn't know how to answer. Exactly, exactly. So, since we've been talking about AI, I found that the Wired Guide to Artificial Intelligence.

So, this is going to be homework for the next week. It seems to have a history of artificial intelligence and breaks down the different types. But, I would like to point out at the very opening of this piece, artificial intelligence is overhyped. There, we said it. Okay.

Yes. And I found a link over on Netflix for you, because we talked about last week your viewing activity, and how you would like to delete some things, and that, you know, you may have accidentally watched late at night that might be screwing up the algorithm.

If you go to netflix.com slash viewing activity, you can see everything you've ever watched, and you can remove things from your list. Yeah, I think we were talking about that because there was some new system, some new app that was coming out that wanted to store all your viewing in a blockchain. In the blockchain, yes. blockchain, and I was like, well, what if you don't want this stuff out there forever for everybody to see because it's open Excel spreadsheets.

It was a tattoo-to-to-to-to. Yes, it's good to know that they're doing that. And I actually did a quick Google as well. So, we have a link in the show notes over to Engadget, who lists out both Netflix and Amazon how to get in there and delete your or edit your histories as you desire. So, you can at least keep the algorithm in check and not, you know, get you all that late-night stuff that you accidentally watched.

Well, that's very nice because I used to sneak over to my friends' houses, and I would sometimes maybe go through and find a lot of movies that didn't really kind of jive with what they normally watched, and I would like five-star them all. So, when they came in, their algorithm would be off.

Boy, you're a jerk. I am. I am kind of a dick, but it's still funny. Yes, it is. And the police are now realizing that the SESTA and FOSTA Acts are actually making their jobs harder, like everybody told them across the board before this thing ever went to a vote.

Right. I don't think we ever really talked about that on the show, but not too much anyways, but this was the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act that basically shut down Backpage completely and other numerous sites. Yeah, Backpage had another problem, that they were complicit in sex trafficking for many years.

That was the real issue with Backpage, but it shuts down all the other sites too. And yeah, this is basically going to have a body count at this point. So, it's kind of terrible, and they should reverse it if possible, but we'll see how that goes.

But yeah, there's a Tech Dirt article in the show notes if you want to get a rundown on how bad it is. Oh, and you can go listen to Reply All if you want, because they did a story on it too. Yeah. Well, I think the grumpy old geeks collectively come down on the we're against victimless crimes sorts of things.

Oh, you think? Yeah, a little bit. Well, I mean, I get what they were trying to do. They want to stop sex trafficking. Totally get it. Yeah. They just did it wrong. Yes. And this link comes from Jeff Donaldson, and this is like, it's about a week old because I forgot to put it in last week, but it's still relevant. Austin Bike and Scooter Rules debuted a mixed reaction from companies.

What? Well, of course, it's going to come with mixed reaction from the companies. Austin has put out 10 pages of rules and six pages of licensing requirements for the birds and lime bikes and scooters and all the crap that want to clutter up the streets. And they're, you know, they're pretty strict about it.

All of the scooters and bikes, they need to be able to be locked up. So there's only one company that has that so far. They need lights at night and reflectors and a bunch of other stuff. And the other thing that I think is really good, they have to submit a performance bond of $100 per device and have insurance of at least $500,000 per occurrence covering bodily injury or property damage.

And the insurance must list the city as an additional insured party. That's pretty interesting. That makes sense. Yeah. That's kind of what you would need to do if you're going to do these things. So good. Good on you, Austin. So yeah. I just, we cannot stop talking about this.

It's amazing, but it's kind of funny. So Moss 6502 over on Twitter sent us a link. There's now yet another dockless scooter startup in San Francisco. Boosted Boards, the popular skateboards with remote controlled electric motors have launched Skip, yet another dockless electric scooter company in San Francisco.

They've raised over $6 million to open up another scooter system in a city that's already overrun with scooter systems. Yeah. Like I wrote back to him on Twitter. I was like, it's just proved Silicon Valley doesn't believe that there can ever be too much of a bad thing.

Yeah, no doubt. So yet another one. So I have a bird story this morning as I usually take a bike ride first thing in the morning to kind of get a little exercise in and get the brain going. And I was riding my bike down to the Santa Monica bike path, which is the path I usually take. And I got stuck behind a douche of birds.

A douche of birds. A douche of birds. So let's just go down by the numbers here. Five guys, four birds. So two guys on one bird. Zero helmets. Zero stopping at stop signs, even if there was a car that was there before them. Zero stopping at red lights.

Oh, God, nobody follows the rules with these things. So shocking. So shocking. So shocking. Anyways, and another follow up. Just I just thought this was weird because I know I had mentioned this last week that we had talked about a story about how self-driving cars were going to be the most disgusting environments on the planet.

And that was like two years ago, right? Yeah, it must have been. And as I was looking at Slate this week, brand new article saying the dirty truth coming for self-driving cars. A completely new article that says the exact same thing that just gets into these are going to be so gross.

Who's going to clean these things? And then they get into really interesting facts that I didn't know, like something like motion sickness. One out of 10 people have motion sickness in cars. That's going to be a lot of puking in cars. And that doesn't even include like children or pregnant women who are prone to vomiting. Anyways, so yeah, these cars are going to be disgusting.

And I just thought it was funny that all of a sudden there was another article about this. Oh, they're going to need a vomitometer inside. They can be alerted when somebody yaks in the car and it has to drive home to home base. So somebody that's making like six bucks an hour can clean it out. How fun. Yes.

Well, the Senate has voted to overturn FCC's net neutrality repeal. Yay. Somewhere a very large oversized cup of Reese's peanut butter coffee just slammed onto a desk. Somewhere, yes. Unfortunately, it still has to pass the house and the Cheeto.

So don't get your hopes up just yet. Yeah, it is. It is not back from the dead yet. No. But here's hoping. I mean, good news. Finally. Yeah. One out of three. One out of three. Getting there. Yeah. And I had some interesting news that's a little bit insider baseball, but it's kind of not because as we've always discussed, internet statistics, online statistics are absolutely meaningless.

Metrics mean next to nothing. And as we've now discovered, same is true in podcasting. There's a company called Podcast Influencer that promises to get your podcast into the iTunes top 10 for 15 grand per month. You can buy your way into the Apple charts. You kind of always could have, but somebody finally put an article about it because there were a couple of guys in there that were really kind of not supposed to be there.

These Amazon marketers. And they were just, it's like, it was so blatant that they should not be in the top 10. And that is just like, dude, no, we know that you're gaming the system. We don't know how, but we know you're gaming the system. Totally. And as they note later on in the article, according to those we contacted who are familiar with the iTunes charts, a top 20 placing may not actually always result in more downloads.

And we can attest to that having been in the top 20 more than a few times. Exactly. No, it doesn't. It's basically done for a press value and that's about it. So yeah, the iTunes charts are, there's such insider baseball. And you get almost nothing out of them.

Unfortunately, we've been at the top of technology because nobody at, I'm sorry, at Apple now with their whole podcasting thing, nobody changes things anymore. The what's hot category has always been human picked. We got lucky and we're at the top of what's hot and have been there for over a year.

And you know how many downloads we get from that? It's like nothing. Nothing. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is, it's pretty insider baseball, but these guys are spending a lot of money for just about nothing. They could have given me the $15,000 a month. I'd have done whatever they, I was just saying, we can always pivot our planned company that we're going to do together about podcasting and we can just take people's money and pretend that we're going to get them up in the charts.

That's true. That's true. I can send them screenshots all day long that I Photoshop. Exactly. Okay. We did cover the Google employees protesting against the Pentagon contract a while back. And finally, about a dozen employees have left the company and people are really trying to say, hey guys, we really don't want you to do this.

Yeah. And over 4,000 people have signed the petition at this point to get them to stop. But they haven't yet. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. And I just had a final thought because this week, actually, apparently, randomly, just a few people that I know passed away in the past this week.

And you've discussed before in the past, you know, coming up with these different ideas like death fault and things like that. We just need some sort of plan with social media after people pass away. It is just jarring and weird to see birthday notices for people that have passed. It's kind of weird. Oh, yeah. It sucks.

It really sucks. It really does. Yeah. The last time I got one from Ted Reingold from LinkedIn to congratulate him on his work anniversary. Yeah. Way to go, guys. Yeah. In the news.

Yanny or Laurel, Jason? It's the audio clip that's tearing the internet apart. It's the green slash blue slash gold dress of 2018. I actually like this stuff. I don't mind this stuff when it hits the internet. I think this is what the internet's for. This is interesting, fun stuff. What did you hear?

Yanny. I heard Laurel. Yeah. You probably have better ears than I do. I don't know. Yeah. I guess it's more of a high pitch. What they've broken it down to is if you're focusing or attenuating to higher pitches, you'll hear Yanny. And if you're focusing on or attenuating to lower pitches, you hear Laurel.

And that's really what it comes down to. Some people have been able to hear different things. It can depend on number of factors, how old you are, how much time you spend talking on the phone. It can be influenced by if you're listening to it off an iPhone or a computer that has slightly better ranges of different sound ranges, all that sort of stuff.

What kind of headphones you're listening to. All of these things can actually alter which one you're going to hear. So yeah, I guess, you know, there's not a hearing test. It isn't better hearing. But I mean, there are things that could affect that with that. It's just fun. It's interesting. I liked it. Yeah. The New York Times has a tool so you can slide it to hear both because it changes it for you.

And I got to say, I think the White House did a fairly funny job of getting in on the social on this one with the surprise ending video. I chuckled. I lulled. Yeah, it was it was funny. It was definitely funny. I enjoyed it as well. And some other people had a lot of fun with it. Yanny, the multi-instrumentalist, has had a lot of fun with it.

So he is his. It's the first time I've ever looked at his Twitter feed and it'll probably be the last time, but it was enjoyable. And I think Marlee Matlin actually won the Internet because she wrote, don't ask me. I can't hear shit. Yep. Well, pretty good. Pretty good. That was pretty good.

Now, there was a long form article over at Slate called, Are You Really the Product? As we've always talked about, if you're not paying for a service, then you are the product. This boy gets into this is almost a book and it gets into the history of where this came from, which actually came from TV.

And it basically just says that this is kind of a dangerous idea because we throw our hands up in the air and say there's nothing we can do about it because we're the product. And we should not feel that way. If we don't like how Facebook is treating us, we shouldn't throw up our hands and call ourselves the product of a system over which we have no control.

We should act like people, customers, workers, citizens, whatever, who have the power to demand change. And I agree with that. There you go. There you go. And speaking of change over at Facebook, they have closed over 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018, which is pretty impressive.

It's a lot of fake accounts. It's a lot of accounts. So the article also says they've taken moderation action against almost 1.5 billion accounts and posts, which violated its community standards in the first three months. The article gets into how they're doing it.

Obviously, they've hired a lot more people, but most of it's been AI-based tools, which is really good at finding nudity, but not so great at hate speech. So that we really actually still need people for. Bring the peoples. Well, at least they're doing something.

They're doing something. They could have been doing it all along. It'd be nice if they would have done it before the election. Yeah. Yeah. Now, after the YouTube shooting, we talked about this a little bit, but people were taken to Zuckerberg Hospital and Zuckerberg General Hospital and Trauma Center.

And we're like, really? Is that is that really it? And yeah, yeah. It turns out, yes, they Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg donated a ton of money to $75 million, to be precise, and got the hospital named after him. Turns out people aren't too happy about it.

And I love one of the nurses said the name Zuckerberg scares the patients and that they're in charge of keeping our most vulnerable people private and protected. And how much is my privacy protected at a hospital with that name on it? Well, that's a little ridiculous, but OK.

It's kind of silly. Yeah, it's a bit silly. It's just the name of the damn hospital because they gave $75 million to the hospital. You know, they didn't replace the operating system with Facebook Messenger. That you know of. That you know of.

At least not yet, anyways, right? Right, right. And I think the thing that spooked a lot of people was when the Cambridge Analytica thing came out was that one story about how Facebook was trying to go like de-anonymize or get hospital records and then de-anonymize them.

Yeah. Which is the scary bit. Which we don't want. Yeah, that is scary. Yeah. But I don't think that somebody naming the hospital means that they get to go ahead and do that. For $75 million, you never know. That's fair enough. That's a lot of scratch. Now, Chrome.

You don't use Chrome anymore, do you? Only for this. Yep. That's about it. So they were trying to stop autoplay audio. Right. Which I think is great. A noble cause. I'm like, you go, girl. Problem is, it broke a lot of stuff.

Like web games, HTML5-based games. And they've rolled back their original changes and said, okay, guys, here you go. Here's a little bit of code, put it in your games, and then you'll be able to play your games again. And a lot of people are like, we don't even have the source code of these games anymore.

And I'm thinking to myself, it's an HTML5 game. You have to have the source code to actually see it. But apparently some games, like all these old cobweb games that are out there, like, you know, people can't even get to their servers anymore. And I'm like, boo-hoo. Who's still playing that crap anyway?

But yeah, Google's like, we're going to roll it back for now. We're going to give you some time. We screwed up on this one. We understand. Mea culpa. But they're going to be rolling this out in October in Chrome version 70. So if you are a developer that wants to annoy everybody with your autoplay audio, by all means, get on it.

By all means, have at it. I can't believe we're at version 70. Well, they put one out every other day. I know. I know. But still, it just blows my mind. I still remember, like, when Mozilla 2 came out. That's true. Best viewed on Internet Explorer 3.

Oh, God. That's right. Oh, the old days. So you weren't here on the episode where David Bittner and I talked about Deliveroo. No, I heard it, but I was not here for it. Well, they are feeling generous. And they have given their staff of 2,000 employees a bunch of stock.

OK. Yeah. $13.5 million in Deliveroo shares. Ask the folks that worked for Blue Apron and got some of their stock how that's going for them. True that. True that. So this is a TechCrunch article that goes on and on about, yeah, well, the people who work there got all the benefits and none of the people who actually drive or they call them riders actually got anything out of this because they, you know, it's trying to keep the little man down.

And I don't know what your take on this was, but I thought it was a little overblown for, you know, them trying to do something nice for their employees. Yeah. I mean, it's a you can't get mad at them for doing what is kind of the industry standard. I mean, I suppose you can. I'm mad at all these companies. I think if, you know, if you're if you're driving for this company full time, you should be a full time employee.

End of story. You're not a self-employed. You're not any of that. Like we've talked about this. Countless times over the past couple of years, so these people should be employees, but they're not. And they did something nice for the people that were full time employees. Well, that's great.

But now, you know, maybe do better, do better, do better. Well, somebody that's trying to do better is Uber. Oh, God. Oh, God. Don't get me started. The commercials. Have you heard the commercials on every other podcast known to man? No, definitely never going to run these commercials.

Uber is improving day by day. We want to give you the best experience possible. Blah, blah, blah. Screw you guys. But now they're going to let you rate your driver mid-trip. How does that really do anything? I just want to know how fucking slow of a news day was this.

It was everywhere. And I'm like, seriously? I don't tip me if reviewing mid-trip. That's just what? What? That's like the old Frazier joke about like, I want to start. I want to sit down at a restaurant with a stack of bills. And as the service gets worse, I just take money away.

It's actually pretty good. Yeah, but why? Why was this news? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why anybody would want to do that. You're going to give them a negative review halfway through? Then they're just going to do what they did to Jason and dump them off in the middle of the street. Seriously. And fortunately, though, they were smart enough to not let the drivers do the same thing because they should be, you know, driving.

Yes, we should not be reviewing. No, they shouldn't. And there's an article in here that I really want to get into, and it's going to be more homework for next week. It's an older article called The Rating Game, How Uber and its Peers Turned Us into Horrible Bosses. And I put this in here. It's from October 2015, but I haven't read it yet.

And so sorry about that. But it's in the show notes if you want to check it out for next week, and we'll talk about it then. Twitter is changing up their APIs. Again? And some people are not happy about it. Favestar is going out of business because of it. And I'm like, some people still use that thing?

I didn't know it was still around. But since they announced the shutdown for the old APIs and then people need to switch over to the new APIs, they changed it from June 19th to now it's August 16th. So if you're a Twitter developer, you have a little bit more time to get any money that you can out of your current customers because they're shutting down a bunch of stuff.

Now, I find this curious because I haven't really dug too deep into the Twitter API in a very long time. I think the last time I did it was when I was writing Twitter bots for you for like Coldplay or something. And because it's like they keep shutting down the APIs.

It's like, why would you build anything on their APIs if you possibly can avoid it? Because they do keep shutting things down. And, you know, it used to be the circle of life. And then we would just get paid to redo it for our clients and things like that. But now clients don't want to pay you to redo anything. So it just kind of goes away.

Yes, it does cobwebbed. Yes. Now, let's talk Bitcoin. We haven't talked Bitcoin for a while. We've been focused on the ludicrous blockchain aspect of everything. So let's talk Bitcoin. This is my favorite headline of the week, for sure. Bitcoin's energy use got studied and you libertarian nerds look even worse than usual.

It's just a great headline. So Bitcoin's energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist, which is where I found this article, first wrote about it six months ago. It's expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, Bitcoin will be gobbling up 0.5% of the world's electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.

This is a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, Bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all of the world's solar panels currently produce, about 1.8% of global electricity. According to a study's predictions, that would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

A fluctuating Bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency's energy footprint growth rate to just 20% per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, Bitcoin will consume all of the world's electricity by January 2021.

All of it. Progress! This is not sustainable, people. This is stupid. And obviously that's not going to happen. Government regulators will surely come to their senses by then. But it is a sign of Bitcoin's disastrous growth rate. There is nothing good about Bitcoin.

No, no, there's not. No. Okay. And in funnier news, the SEC set up a fake ICO to warn naive investors against cryptocurrency scams. Nice. They made a coin called HowieCoin. It's pretty funny.

There's an article in the Next Web if you want to go read the whole thing. But just the fact that they did it was pretty damn good. Yeah, I liked it. Good one to them. Yep. Tip of the hat to the SEC. They're really stepping up. They are. And somebody has to, obviously, for obvious reasons. As just pointed out, all the world's electricity.

Apps and doodads! I was just looking around the interwebs this morning, and I noticed TweetBot for Mac 3.0 was out. And I'm a TweetBot fan. I've used them forever. And I like their Mac version a lot because I can do lots of stuff.

Now, as we just talked about with the API, you know, I always expect this thing to just die on me someday and never come back. And on the homepage for the TweetBot for Mac, it has this blurb, which I find amusing. TweetBot is an award-winning, full-featured Twitter client for the Mac.

It has a beautiful interface with light and dark themes, multiple column support, and much more. Now, after full-featured, there's a little asterisk. And if you scroll down, it says, Twitter does not grant third-party apps access to every single feature that is available on Twitter's website. So how the fuck can you say it's full-featured if you just say it's not full-featured?

You're turning into me. Oh, that's such bullshit. TweetBot is an award-winning, full-featured from the features that they allow us to use, Twitter client for the Mac. Let me explain what full means. All of them. Good God, people.

I still bought it, but man, that's annoying. That's funny. I haven't updated yet. I actually use TweetBot as well, but now I'm officially annoyed with them for a little while, so I'm not going to update. Okay. Well, it's nice. I like it. It's only $10 for the new version, so I like to support them.

And like I mentioned before, Favestar is shutting down, so there's a link to that story in the show notes if anybody wants to go read up on it or why. If you do actually want to check them out, it's a nice look at, you know, 10-year-old web design. Right. It's definitely not aged well.

And Alexa developers are getting eight new free voices to use in their skills, courtesy of Amazon Polly. Polly, want a cracker? So this is when you actually create a skill and have Alexa read something to you, you get – there are more voices to actually use now.

So I was – as I'm reading this, I was like, hmm, let me dig it a little deeper and look at it. I'm still kind of – I'm kind of jazzed. I want to make an Alexa skill soon because if you do and you publish, you get like free T-shirts and stuff from Amazon. That's like their carrot and stick.

It's like, here, make a skill and you can get a T-shirt. And if 1,000 people sign up and use your skill, you get a backpack. Like, man, come on. Well, first off, if we're going to – if you're going to make a skill, we should make a Grumpy Old Geeks one and maybe we should do it together. Secondly, I have taken half of that Alexa webinar, How Building for Voice Differs from Building for the Screen.

And I've got to tell you, Jason, it will remind you about why we don't program anymore. Oh, really? It's rough. I got halfway – because I also was very excited about the possibility of, okay, well, maybe let's get into this a little bit. Let's look into it. My eyes started to gloss over. My ears were shutting down going, no, I don't want to code, no code, no programming.

Oh, no, no programming. And also, I found it really funny that for a webinar that is entirely based on voice interactions and how you should be interesting and how you take the whole idea of a webpage or an app and move it towards a conversation, they have the most boring two guys in the world who have no skills whatsoever with conversation giving it.

Oh, man. So what language do you have to use for these things? Is there a plethora of them? There's a bunch. There's a couple of different ways that you can go around it. But they also have a pretty involved Alexa skills kit, which is almost kind of drag and drop for pretty basic application stuff, which I think you and I could probably knock out something pretty quick using just that.

That would be interesting. At least you can get a shirt then. Ooh, yeah, it can be my, what was it, my Dimsy or what was that, that really horrible social network that lasted for like a week? Imsy, Imsy, that was it. I have an Imsy shirt. You're the one that got in a fight with me on Twitter. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Yeah, I forgot about that. That's in my rag drawer now. Way to go, Imsy. Now, and I don't know if you've seen this, Red, the people who make the cameras. Yes. They're coming out with a new phone called the Hydrogen One. It's expensive.

It's very expensive. Well, it's only a hundred and some odd more than an iPhone X. Well, it can go up to like 1600 if you get the titanium version. But this thing is supposed to be like this crazy holographic screen that nobody's seen in action yet.

They don't know if it's going to say there's no example of that on this page. No, none. I mean, I looked around and this thing has apparently been pushed and pushed. But the big news this week is that AT&T and Verizon have signed on to support it this summer. Right.

So that will be interesting. I want to see it in person. Yeah. I don't know what the hell it's going to do. But they say it's, you know, holographic without glasses. And I don't know. For that price, it better do something. I want to be able to play the chess from the Millennium Falcon on it.

Oh, yes, that would be nice. That would be nice. That would be good. Anyway, keep an eye out for that one. We'll make fun of it much more as the launch date comes closer to reality. And I saw this one in Gizmodo UK. Watches are now being banned from GCSE and A-level exams.

Apparently, there are so many ways to cheat with a watch. They're just saying, nope, you can't have any watch anymore. Because a lot of those Android-based watches look like a real watch if you put the right face on them. And then you can flip over to actually getting stuff out of them, you know, getting cheats and everything.

So I thought that was good. People need to start paying attention to this stuff. No, it's smart. You've got the entire, you know, more power than sent the man to the moon, if you believe that they actually did that, on your wrist now. So, of course, you'd be able to cheat. You know, even at my weekly pub trivia, he says, if I see you staring at your wrist for too long, we're going to boot you out of here.

Really? Yep. Wow. I guess you could, you know. Hey, we take it seriously, you know. Yeah. Because I guess, you know, you could turn on Siri when the question's being asked and then it comes back. Well, there you go. No cheating at pub trivia.

No cheating at pub trivia, man. We're there for the booze.

Media Candy. Now, Brian, I'm a huge fan of Queen. So, I was ecstatic this week when I saw the teaser trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody, the new Queen movie that's coming out, starring Rami Malek from Mr. Robot. Yes, the show we no longer watch.

So, did you get a chance to watch the trailer? I did. It looks great. I mean, he embodies it perfectly. Like, that mustache is amazing. That should get a special effect award. Yeah. No, I was, you know, ready to hate it. But then when I saw it was him and, like, you know, his fucked up teeth are custom made for this role.

I mean, he looks just like Freddie Mercury. So, he really, I mean, he's in much better shape. Like, go back and, like, look at the old photos of Freddie Mercury. Like, he did not have washboard abs like Rami does in this. But, uh, looks great. He looks, he looks the part.

He does. And when I found out that it was, like, basically done by the, the old Queen bandmates, I think that kind of gave me a little bit more, uh, a little bit more to look forward to, I believe. I think it's going to be quite good. Yep. You know what else is getting quite good?

The now-canceled Expanse. Last night's episode, well, I, it was, I guess it was Wednesday. I watched it last night. It was phenomenal. Wasn't it good? It was one of the best episodes I've seen on, of anything in a long time. Total, like, Battlestar Galactica quality sci-fi. Absolutely amazing.

I, I love where the story is going. I love the pacing of it. Of course it's getting canceled. Of course. Well, somebody's going to pick it up. It's too damn good. Yeah. Now there's an io9 article that says last night's The Expanse was a fantastic example of why canceling it was so dumb. And I could not agree more.

It was, it was really good. It is the show I look most forward to right now of, of anything that even with the Americans, which is getting good. It's a really slow boil over there, but I look forward to The Expanse when it airs now. Yep. Me too. Yeah. Uh, Anthony Bourdain is back with Parts Unknown.

The first episode was a bit depressing, but it's picked up since then. I still, I know it's a formula, but I, I like the damn formula. The problem with it is I don't know what season he's on or where he's been. I've seen so damn many of them. It's hard to pick up and figure out what's new and what's not. That's true. It is a little bit difficult, but I just, uh, you know, I use the DVR.

I set up a season pass for it. So I get all the new ones right through there and all the old ones are on Netflix. So you can catch up with it that way. Maybe I'll do that. And speaking of Netflix, I started watching Ugly Delicious, um, because, uh, we like food documentaries in this house and this is, uh, David Chang.

Is this Dave Chang? Yeah. The, the, the, uh, the chef and it's basically a Bourdain-esque kind of thing. We've actually covered this on the show before. Yeah. Yeah. You've covered it. I've, I hadn't watched it before. Oh, I thought you had watched it. Okay. Yeah. I think I got, I think I watched one and I didn't care for it, but now I've gotten into it.

So it's quite enjoyable. I like it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. You'd, you'd at least seen up to episode two where it was just a boring episode of him basically having Thanksgiving dinner with his family. Yes. Now I've gotten past those episodes and I'm enjoying the rest of them quite a lot. So. Okay. Don't hold your breath for the last episode.

It wasn't. Well, I mean, it's, it's, that's not like riveting must see TV. No, it's not. Passes the time. So yeah, it's good background. What was riveting must see TV is the second standup special from Ali Wong, hard knock wife. Oh my God. This chick is fucking funny and do not watch this with anybody that doesn't enjoy jokes about rim jobs.

That's all I'm saying that she is a dirty, dirty comedian and she is really goddamn funny. I highly recommend this special and it's, it's very relevant to me in my life too, because she just had a kid. Now she's back with, she's pregnant again. My wife was dying. There's a lot of stuff about, you know, Asian white, all that sort of stuff.

So very fitting to my life, but still very funny in its own right. Highly recommend. I'll check it out. Her last special didn't do it for me. So you may not care for her humor then, because this is more of the same and dirtier. Maybe I'll skip it. Okay. There was a new article in wired called more artists are writing songs in the key of a I thought you might like this.

Oh, and it, it's a kind of a rundown of different AI. I have to say it, uh, systems that people are using to make music. Did you get a chance to listen to any of these? I did. I mean, this stuff has been around for a long time, uh, a long time.

There's, I remember, you know, early days in the PC, there was different software programs that would kind of extrapolate and, and put together different, uh, you know, sheet music for you and there were different synthesizer based stuff for you. Uh, Brian Eno has a number of different apps for your iPhone that you can use that generate that self-generate music and compositions, both of which are a lot of fun.

Um, yeah, it's interesting stuff and, and, and it is getting better and better. And it's part of the reason why everything sounds exactly the same right now. Yeah, that's true. People have dialed in exactly what humans tend to respond to, to it musically. You know, we know if you go two minutes and 30 seconds, now you got to pump it up, pump it up, pump it up, bring it back down.

It's, it's a formula and you know, it generally works, but we're definitely losing something to music here. Yeah. Well, I mean, since musicians don't make any money anymore anyway, so why not just get rid of them all together? I suppose we could, but then I wouldn't be able to go see the church celebrate the 30th anniversary of their, one of my favorite albums of their starfish on a fall North American tour, which actually, sadly, I won't be seeing anyways, because the LA date is the music tastes

good festival at Long Beach, California. And at a festival, they don't get a long enough set list to play the entire damn album. That's so stupid. I know. I'm going to have to go somewhere else to see this damn show. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. I noticed that because I was like, well, because they're usually on those festivals, they're banned from playing within, you know, like a hundred mile radius for X amount of time.

For X amount of time. So unless they swing back at the end of the tour, which at least at the moment, they're not planning on doing, you're not going to be able to see this in LA, which is a drag because I highly recommend this album. It's awesome. And I would love to see them play it in its entirety. Well, hop a bird on, go up to San Francisco because I think that's the closest one.

Man. Yeah. Speaking of music, YouTube music is being reinvented and launched with a premium version that costs $9 and 99 cents a month. And if you add a whopping $2, you can get YouTube red and watch all those Cobra Kai videos. Right.

I don't know. What do you think? Sure. It makes sense. I don't know how many people you're going to change their behavior on because they go to YouTube and listen to music for free, but sure. Okay. I'm down with it. And I'd like to, you know, I hope that their payments are about the same as Spotify and everybody else's to the actual artists themselves and things like that.

How does this, you know, how is it different from just going to YouTube? Are they going to start to pull down all the videos that people listen to for the music for free? I doubt it. So, you know, you can get it for free or you can pay for a slightly more curated and intuitive experience to find music.

Sure. Okay. Yep. And it enables, the new app will enable background listening and you can download it. So you can listen offline, which you can't, which is nice. I mean, that's what everybody, you know, it's what everybody else does. Yeah. What you can do with Spotify. It's what you can do with, you know, so it is what it is. Good for them.

Very much. So we'll see if it, uh, knocks the Spotify stock down anymore. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I, the only thing I can see is people that are already watching YouTube red may just go, okay, well, I'll do my music with you as well. So you might get a lot of like the younger kids into it that way.

Who knows? We'll see. Does anybody pay for YouTube red? I think a lot of parents pay for it for their kids. Cause there's all those kids, uh, shows on there, right? Like, uh, tweens and things like that. There's a ton of stuff on there. Okay. So I haven't checked it out. I didn't, I still haven't gone to go watch Cobra Kai on my, my red trial because I ain't got no time for that.

So, uh, YouTube now has a feature though, that gives you information on, uh, music videos, which is pretty cool. Yeah. I, that's it. This is new metadata. I haven't even seen it in the wild yet, but, uh, as soon as, as soon as it pops up, we'll definitely check it out.

Have you seen this in action yet? I haven't seen it in the wild, but I mean, this is something that, you know, three days after YouTube launched, I was like, well, how come we can't get the digital equivalent of liner notes? So, you know, it's nice that 15 years later, they're coming around to my idea. They're a little slow.

Yeah. At the library. All right. So this week at the library, I listened to Bandwidth by Elliot Pepper. Okay. What'd you think?

Cause it's in my key. Damn. So it's basically a story about, it's a near future story about a company who owns what's called the feed, which is supposedly an unhackable internet with all of your life shit in it.

Basically, Facebook is what they tried to recreate with this. Is this better or worse than the circle was? Yeah. I think it's actually worse. Cause I finished the circle. I wanted to throw my phone through the wall halfway through this one. So there's a group of hackers who have hacked the feed and are using the, they're, they're using psychology to subtly get people to do what they want them to do by just injecting different stories into the feed.

And I'm like, okay, come on, dude, come on. We all read the news. What's going on here. And this was all, this was all about climate change and how they're trying to change a climate change summit. And I was just like, no, I can't even buy it. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be so bad if the writing wasn't so God awful.

Oh, it's terribly written. All right. Yeah. I'll be skipping that one. Yeah. Save your money, please. Okay. Well, I still haven't found the time to actually read anything, but I will get there. I swear to God, but I did find an article that relates and we, you and I have had the discussion more than a few times, but studies have now proven that students still learn way better from print textbooks than screens.

So we discussed this because, you know, schools are starting to assign kids iPads and everybody likes to use the pads and read digitally. Instead, students overwhelmingly prefer to read digitally, but reading was significantly faster online than in print and students judge their comprehension is better online than in print, but that is not what is actually happening.

Comprehension is way better for print versus digital reading. Uh, the medium doesn't matter for general questions, like understanding the main idea of the text, but when it comes to specific questions, comprehension is significantly better when participants read printed texts as opposed to digital texts.

So there is something to that paper. I wonder what's going on there. Yeah, me too. I don't know, but it's, it's definitely interesting. This is the kind of stuff that got me super interested in psychology. I kind of wish, you know, born too soon kind of thing. I would love to be in school right now studying this.

Yeah, really. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. And the Cyber Wire is a free community driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland.

Welcome back, Dave. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome back for me. Good to see you. And Brian, I want to say welcome back to Brian, actually. Missed you last week. Yes, sorry. I could not be here, but I did enjoy the segment as per usual. Good. Good. Glad you're back. So before we get going, Jason, I noticed last episode you touched on the new Cobra Kai show on YouTube.

Yes. And I watched the first two episodes yesterday. And I have to say, midway through the first episode, I caught myself going, I am really enjoying this. Like, I'm kind of tingly inside. Like, I felt like I was getting a little nostalgia back scratch or something.

It was all, it's really good. It's really, really well done and funny and not over the top, but I just, I highly recommend it. If you're from that generation, which I think the three of us are who, you know, know all about the Karate Kid, it's well done.

So you're basically saying that for a return to our youth, Cobra Kai is infinitely better than The Last Jedi. Yes. Yes. Yes, I am. Yes, I am. But it was unexpected. That's the thing. I went in watching it going, oh, this will be funny, you know, how, but no, it really triggered some genuine affection in me.

So I recommend it. If you're of our generation, check it out. They've done a good job, in my opinion. It's much better than you think it's going to be. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I'll be signing up for my YouTube Red free trial to give it a go. Well, that's the thing.

That's what I'm up against. I've watched the first two episodes, which are free, but they give you 30 days, right, on YouTube? Yeah, I believe so. So I think I can watch the whole series in 30 days. The last thing I need is another TV subscription. Yes.

Anyway. So let's dive into some actual stuff here. Yeah. This one I thought was really interesting. It came across my desk yesterday. Trump eliminates national cyber coordinator job. Gives Bolton key to the cybers. This is from Ars Technica. Yeah.

And this is a little scary. What does Michael Bolton know about cybersecurity? He should really stick to the saxophone. Oh, I... Come on. He's a no-telling-ass clown. What are you going to do? I think a better question is, what doesn't Michael Bolton know about cybersecurity? I think a sadder point is, we'd be better off if Michael Bolton was doing this.

Right. Right. No, this is National Security Council Director John Bolton, who is going to be handling all of the cyber now. Yes. Yeah. They've eliminated the cybersecurity position in the White House against everyone's advice, against the advice of industry, government, the national defense organizations, national intelligence.

There's nobody really... Basically everyone. Yes. Gentlemen, just for a moment, let us cast our minds back to the first few shows after the election, where we all kind of collectively agreed that the one good thing that might come from this administration is that they seem to have a strong position on cybersecurity.

That is true. And we were hoping that this would be a good thing that would come from this administration. That is true. And here we are now. That is true. It's been a year of having our hopes dashed, hasn't it? Hasn't it? Yeah. I'm just imagining someone.

I don't know who. I'm not making any accusations or anything, but I'm imagining the president on the phone with someone. And that's someone on the other end of the line with a thick Russian accent, you know, saying, what do you need the Russia? What do you need the cybersecurity person for? Get rid of that position.

It is not necessary. John Bolton keeps all the cybers in his mustache. There you go. There you go. So, yeah, it boggles the mind. It just makes no sense. It makes no sense at all. But that's the world we live in today.

Yes. And speaking of the world we live in today, apparently it's about anybody can buy your exact position in it. This is pretty frightening. U.S. cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data. In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone within seconds by using data obtained from the country's largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon,

T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary called LocationSmart. The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant, and he's pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful surveillance. But now we know about this company, but just not much about them, called LocationSmart, and they do obtain real-time location data on millions of Americans.

And we do not understand how required consent from all of us was obtained, or who else has access to this data. So this is kind of the worst-case scenario, nightmare scenario that we've always discussed about cell phones, and we've now found out that it's real. I'm sure it was in the EULA somewhere.

I'm sure. Well, here's the thing that caught my eye. Now, let me read this for you first. So this paragraph, Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government.

It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies who then may disclose that same data to the government. Now, gentlemen, you know me. I don't like to curse. But when I read this paragraph, I was sitting here at my computer, and I said, you have got to be fucking kidding me.

Well, Dave, I've been saying that a lot last year. He went on to call that loophole one of the biggest gaps in U.S. privacy law. You think? A person's precise location can be returned in as little as 15 seconds, according to another case study, and data is usually not cached for longer than two minutes.

There is a real-time map of every single person in this country at almost all times now, and that information is available for a price. Well, and you know what? It just gets better because yesterday, Krebs on security, Brian Krebs, of course, well-respected security researcher, published.

I guess the other shoe in this story dropped. He reported on this story about the company LocationSmart, who are the ones who are aggregating this real-time information about everyone. Well, it turns out on their website, they had a feature where you could try out their services and put in a name and an email address.

You had to register, and then you had to put in your phone number, and they would get consent from you to do that, and then they would tell you where you are located. Well, a researcher discovered that it was child's play to circumvent the login part, so basically anyone could put in anyone's phone number and pull up their location without having to register.

What a world that we've created for ourselves. What a world. It has gotten the attention of Congress. Senator Wyden has his hackles up. He issued a statement this past Friday saying that, in part, the threats to American security are grave.

A hacker could have used this site to know where you were in your house so they would know when to rob it. So he's requested information from the FCC to see what they think about this. So it has attracted attention. Like you said, Brian, I guess the good side is that now we know, but, geez, the bad side is, like I said, are you kidding me?

Yeah. You know, that's funny. I went to the site, and I plugged in Donald Trump's phone number multiple times, always on a golf course. That's funny. That's funny. Every time. All the best people. Yeah, it's funny, except when you extrapolate that out to the not funny ones. I mean, most people just use Facebook to tell when you're not at home to go rob you.

But, you know, if you're trying to track down the, you know, your ex-wife to go beat her up because she's stole a kid or something, then, you know, that goes into a much more, like, serious area. Yes. Felony as a service. That's right. Oh, we're back to that one. We're back to that.

Great. Yeah, well, hopefully this will go away, but somehow I don't think it will. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the telephone companies respond to this if they shut down the firehose of information to these third-party providers.

We'll see if there's any pushback from law enforcement, who evidently are counting on this loophole to be able to do what they want to track you down without a warrant. So there's that. It's just, it's amazing to me how we're just finding more and more as all this stuff happens, how much of our services that we're paying for that then are turning around and making money by selling our data off.

It's just crazy because my cell phone bill is already, aren't you getting enough money from me to not have to then sell off more parts of me? It's amazing. It's amazing. Brian, they're maximizing shareholder value. I was just going to say the exact same thing. Exact same words are going to come out of my mouth.

That is what it is. Squeeze every little drop out of that stone. Yes. So did you guys ever use PGP for your email back in the day? I experimented with it a few times, but of course it's famous for- Back in college when I was three.

Yeah, exactly. When I was poor and I needed the money. But it's famously known for being hard to use or I guess not easy to use. So yeah, that was what kind of waylaid me. And then I was halfway through it and went, what am I really doing this for?

Right. I don't care if anybody sees my email. Yeah. I used to try it back in the day too. And I mean, PGP for Mac was always just a shit show. And it turns out there's a, it still is. For 10 years, you've been able to actually go in and break some of these old PGP encrypted emails.

And they call the, they call it e-fail. Did you guys cover this yet on the Cyber Wire Day? We did indeed. I want to say on last Thursday's show, we had someone on, Johannes Ulrich. He runs the Internet Storm Center podcast. Did an excellent job explaining all this.

He really understands the technical stuff way more than me. And so if you're interested in getting under the hood with it, I recommend just go, go grab that show. He does a really good job explaining it. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's an interesting hack to get the actual contents of an old encrypted email out.

I just think I, you know, this made the rounds and it sounded pretty big, like it's a serious flaw. But I've been polling everybody I know who has, you know, been using email since back then. And nobody that I know has ever used PGP for their email. Really? I thought maybe Sean Bonner.

He must have, right? You'd think? He was the one person I probably didn't. Well, it's a, it's just, it's horrible that my email from 2002 was hacked. And now they know that I sent the dancing baby to my mom. Yeah. Well, you, Johannes said on our show that he sort of offhandedly quipped that, you know, the good thing is nobody uses this.

Nobody, nobody encrypts emails. And he actually got some pushback on Twitter about it. Someone called him on it and said, really? And he said, yeah, I said in the past year, I may have gotten maybe 10 emails that were encrypted using PGP. So I think there's something to that.

Hang on. You're saying that somebody on Twitter disagreed with someone else? Hard to believe. I know. Shocking. Shocking. There was pushback on Twitter from any point of view? I can't believe it. Yes. About something someone said on a podcast? My goodness. So I guess this is one of those things where if it affects you, you know it.

And you know what to do. They're recommending you disable HTML in your email client. That gets you a good bit of the way there to protecting yourself from it. You should kind of do that anyway because it's just annoying. That seems like a good enough point to begin with unless you really want all those sales emails.

Yeah. Those HTML footers that people love to send. Usually real estate people and social media marketers. Those are the two people that put their photo in their damn email footer. Drives me nuts. Now, I saw an article on the Next Web that I was banging my head against the wall on.

It's called How Gaming Can Help Solve Cybersecurity Woes. Now, it's an article about how they can gamify the process for a company to, you know, get better at the cybers. Now, beat my head against the wall on this one because gamification is so, what, 10 years ago?

Why are they trying to exhume gamification for this? I'm like, yay, I got a badge because I didn't, you know, click on a link and install some malware. You should get a paycheck for that, not a badge, you know? Yeah. But the biggest problem I had was that you have to get to the very end of the article before you discover that it's a sponsored piece.

It's actually a paid article by PwC and the Next Web promoting their conference because they're going to do a capture the flag thing together. And the whole thing is just BS. And when, I mean, hey, I wanted to ask you, Dave, do you think gamification is good for the cybers?

I don't know. I will say that what I'm hearing from the folks who do this sort of thing is that you're much better off using a carrot than a stick. So positive reinforcement works a lot better than negative reinforcement. If somebody accidentally clicks on that link, it's your responsibility to, you know, fix it, mitigate it, teach them what they did wrong.

But you really shouldn't fire them for it or, you know, dress them down for it because, you know, it was your job to protect them from it in the first place. So, yeah, educate people. But you want to build a team, not have people, you know, looking over their shoulders afraid that IT is going to come down from on high and, you know, tell them what an idiot they are.

So. Oh, that was my job for so long, though. And it was so much fun. I bet you were really good at it. So. But the thing, you know, so so if this can go along those lines of making something fun rather than a chore, then the idea is good. I just don't know that I've ever seen a really good execution of this that that's that's stuck.

Right. Mm hmm. I've seen lots of attempts at it. Right. But I don't know that I've seen any that are really that I would say, oh, I want to go back to that. I can't wait to go back to more of that gamified training. Yeah. When was the last time any of you guys got a badge for anything? Hmm.

Look, you've reeled about this stuff for a long time. Yeah. Foursquare, I suppose. Or, you know, no, actually, Jason, you and I both do with our Apple Watch for using the activity. Oh, that's a good point. Damn it. Yeah. So we do. But I actually find it annoying.

It's for me. It's just like I never in a million years thought that when I grow up, there would there would be no concept of adulthood or being an actual human adult anymore. We're all still just kids and we're being treated like kids. Gamification is for kids. It is not for adults.

Well, grownups are just kids with money. Apparently, that is what we've become. Can you imagine your parents being swayed by it? I can't even. My dad would have been like a badge. Yeah. For what? Exactly. I don't understand. I'm not a policeman. I don't understand. We don't need no stinking badges.

It's true. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. It's a different world we're in now, and I really don't get it. I don't. I just don't. I mean, I guess we were that first generation to come up and get gold stars on our homework, right? Our parents didn't get that. I suppose. Yes. So that's true.

What a world. And Brian, I sent you this link during the week because this was one actual breach that I think affected every single person I know. Yes. Who was a web dev. Red Hat has a little problem with some DHCP injections going on.

Just a little problem. And if you run, yeah, basically Fedora, Cent, any of those variants, which I do. I run CentOS because it's my favorite. And, yep, had to go patch because this is just a slight, you know, root remote code execution hack that you can basically send remote code execution to a DHCP client on basically any Red Hat machine that hasn't patched yet.

And it's kind of a bad one, I think. Yes, it is. Just a bit. So I took care of that. Okay. Because I'm sadly still doing a little bit of hosting. But, yes, thank you for that. It's been a busy week. I sent this to everybody I know that has a server. And, well, you did it, but you never replied.

Thanks for that. But I think I'm the only person that actually patched my machine. So if you're out there, go get them. Teach them a lesson. Now, now. This is not the stuff we should be promoting on this second. I'm sorry. I know. I know. Carrot. Damn it. Carrot. Carrot.

Carrot. I've got to remember. Carrot. And since we'd like to talk about the Internet of Things, I've looked at an article on TechCrunch about this company called Zage. With an X. Which sounds like, you know, it sounds like a, yeah, Commander in Mortal Kombat. Right. Zage. Fatality.

This is a company that's trying to do fingerprinting of IoT devices. Basically, you know, you do a snapshot of the software, all of the configuration files, things like that. And if something changes, you do something. You do something. You do something. Yeah. And it's specifically industrial IoT devices.

Yes. So critical infrastructure stuff. Yeah. Like fuel pumps and, you know, switches and things like that. Things that keep us alive. Right. Like when the language switches from English to acrylic. Yeah, that too. That would be good. And of course, you know, since this is Grumpy Old Geeks, the only secondary reason we bring it up is because they're using the blockchain to make it unhackable.

Well, actually, they're using the blockchain and the cloud. As you do. Yeah. The cloud chain. I don't know where you guys are on your buzzword bingo today, but I am one word away. I'm already playing the drinking game.

Ah, all right. Hmm. Yeah. All right. The advantage is yours. The other thing that caught my eye on this was the author keeps using the phrase that they're going to shut it down. It says, you know, if the fingerprint comes back and it can't be authorized, then they'll shut it down.

And I just want to make the point that the phrase shut it down is not something that you use when it comes to industrial IoT. If a fingerprint doesn't come back, you don't shut down the electrical grid. You don't shut down the nuclear power plant. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, they have fail safes, so they have a specific ways that they, if something does go wrong, you know, safety first and all that sort of thing.

So that stood out to me in the author's choice of words, shall we say. What is TechCrunch? Come on. What do you want? Yeah. It's not like we pay for it or anything. No. And then finally, there's this one caught my eye that Interpol has some new software and evidently lots of law enforcement agencies are using software that uses voice recognition.

Right. It's called the Alexa Project. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking a lot about photo recognition, you know, capturing, recognizing people and nabbing bad guys and that sort of thing. But I guess this hasn't really caught people's attention so much, but they're doing it.

And, of course, there are all sorts of privacy issues. Think about all the – the thing that struck me was, well, it's a good thing that there's no extensive online catalog of voice recordings of the three of us, right? Yeah. Seriously. They're never going to catch me, copper. Oh, wait.

Episode two. Shit. Well, it's interesting when you think about this technology and the way that they're using it. And then you also have the – remember that piece of software that Adobe had that would be able to take, I think, maybe 10 to 15 seconds of someone's voice?

So it's 20 minutes. 20 minutes of their voice and completely recreate it. Oh, you need 20 minutes of somebody's voice and then you can recreate it. So, again, it's cat and mouse, right? Because I could start doing this entire podcast in Barack Obama's voice if I start using this software. Yeah. Again, it seems something that seems to be – if you are somebody that is a law-abiding citizen, you are – you're being caught with this.

And if you're somebody who wants to get around this, there are ways to get around it. Well, that's right. And what if I use that Adobe software to put stuff out there that says, I absolutely killed my next-door neighbor. I'm responsible for the death of – I am the serial killer.

And, you know, or I do that to my enemy, to my nemesis. You know, I just auto-generate that. Would this software be able to tell? And is there some sort of responsibility? It's kind of like they were talking about with the Google thing when – with the Google, you know, automatically ordering the haircut.

Is there some responsibility to flag these things as being computer-generated if you're imitating someone? Again, you know, the policy is catching up with the technology. Yeah, they were talking about with the Adobe stuff that they were working on fingerprinting technologies for the actual audio stream.

So they could be shown as not being real. But where's the fun in that? That's right. Come on. That's right. Yeah, that's interesting stuff. All right, guys. Well, that's what we have this week. Woo-hoo. All right. Blockchain forever.

Brian, this one is a story of technology gone too far. Isn't that our entire podcast? This is true. This is true. A high school in China have added three cameras above the blackboard, and they are using facial recognition to tell the teacher if the kids are paying attention.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I'd have been kicked out of class. I never paid attention. And if I did, I was – I had my – I can have my head down. And not look at the teacher and still, you know, learn. This is – this is – this is technology gone wrong, I believe.

I agree. This is pretty messed up. I'm not down with this. Not down at all. Fortunately, we're not in China. But – That's true. You know, that's how things are going. This next story is kind of – kind of disturbing. And this was on a lot of different sites, so it was making the rounds.

A banned CFC is destroying the ozone and nobody can find its source. Now, CFC stands for chlorofluorocarbon, and this is why we, you know, basically banned it and couldn't have Aquanet for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, it was like back in the 80s when we had to get rid of all of our, basically, sprays that we're making this giant hole in the ozone.

Well, somebody – somebody is still making this stuff, and nobody can figure out who. I will turn it off if you give me $1 billion. Yeah, it's kind of creepy that nobody can figure out where this damn thing is coming from. It is creepy.

I'm not – it's weird. So, this is not good. No, no. I just threw that out there because I'm like, oh, this is kind of a scary one. So, if you guys notice somebody – you know, if you see something, say something. If one of your neighbors has a whole lot of hairspray in their backyard from the early 70s, early 80s, then, yeah, turn them in because we need to fix this.

Now, this is a new site for me. I've never heard of this one before. It's called WealthX.com. Okay. Because I'm not wealthy, that's probably why I've never gone there. They have the WealthX Billionaire Census, and it has revealed that billionaire wealth has surged by 24% to a record level in 2017, and the billionaire population rebounded by 15%

to 2,754 individuals, surpassing the previous peak of 2,473. That's a lot of billionaires. That's a lot of billionaires. That is a lot of billionaires. That's all I can say. There's a lot of billionaires out there.

There's a lot of billionaires. A lot of the money being concentrated in just a few people's hands. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Anyway, I ran across this one because this was kind of funny. Lucy Bellwood is a cartoonist, and she has a little book called 100 Demon Dialogues, and it's a collection of comics for anyone who deals with a little voice in their heads that says, you're no good.

And it's cute. Aw. Yeah. It's a fun little book. She's got a print version coming out, but you can actually read them all on her website, which will be linked in the show notes at GOG.show slash 260. Nice. Now, I'm going to read a sentence to you, Jason. Okay. This is one of the most interesting things I've come across in a long time.

I'm going to read a sentence to you, and it has perfect meaning. It means something. Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo. Okey-doke. Where they roam. That is a sentence that has meaning. Because there are multiple meanings, some of them old and relatively obscure for the word buffalo, that is a full sentence that has...

Wikipedia suggests you can read it this way. We'll break it down to where it gets to somewhere that makes sense. Those buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo. If that's still a little too difficult, you can refine it a bit more. Those buffaloes from buffalo that are intimidated by buffaloes from buffalo, intimidate buffaloes from buffalo.

And in plain English, the sentence actually can be translated as, bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison in their community. Okay. So, you can just say that as buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.

This is all real. Link in the show notes. Well, we've got another phone that's coming that details are a little bit sparse on. This one is by HTC, and it's the first native blockchain phone.

All right! It's being dubbed the HTC Exodus, but the news raises two immediate questions. What is a blockchain phone, and why would anyone want one? You know why it's called the Exodus? Because if you store all your Bitcoin on it and somebody steals it, then all of your cash has made an Exodus!

Basically, as the article states, it's unclear what exactly makes a blockchain phone stand out from a normal phone, other than it will just come with some Ethereum or Bitcoin software preloaded onto it, as opposed to you having to download it and load it on yourself.

Yeah. That's it. It's kind of like when you got the U2 iPhone, and it just came with all their albums on it. Oh, yeah. So, as far as I can tell, that's all that's happening here. So, yet another company just putting blockchain on the name of something and hoping that they'll make money.

Feedback loop! Got some new Patreon subscribers this week. First up is Jerry, and then Joe. And Joe writes us a little note. I love the show, guys. Glad to see there are old guys like myself complaining about the same things I do. I said fuck it to Hulu and canceled my subscription for some of the same reasons you guys hate them.

Then I thought I would just redirect that monthly fee to you guys. At least this way, I know my $10 will provide something entertaining on a weekly basis, unlike I was getting from Hulu. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to future shows. Well, we thank you very much, and suck it, Hulu! Yes, thank you so much.

We also have another new Patreon, Cohen, who wrote in and said, I discovered your podcast while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Probably the only person that has discovered our podcast in the Dominican Republic. At 3 a.m., 10 minutes into the podcast, I've bugged, irritated, and annoyed my girlfriend by waking her up and keeping her awake because of my two-hour continuous laughter.

Not only is it funny as hell, but all the stuff does interest me. Thanks for the hilarious times. By the way, was it your podcast that mentioned the Apple remote troubles, switching the top and bottom and solving it with a piece of tape? Yes. Yes, that was us. And an update for me. I put the damn remote in a drawer and just used the app on the phone.

Right. Much, much easier. It's probably a much easier way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Krista writes in, Hey, guys, regarding robocalls, I've been using an app called Nomorobo, and it's pretty amazing. It's about two bucks a month, and when it's working, I get about one robocall per week, down from about four per day.

It's definitely got some bugs and sometimes craps out, but in my opinion, it's totally worth it. And there'll be a link to Nomorobo in the show notes. Perfect. And over at PayPal, we got some more donations as well. Thank you so much, you guys. Steve has sent in a recurring payment for us.

We'll be dinging him once a month, which is fantastic. And Christopher, who also said, Happy birthday, Brian. Many happy returns. I've been a huge fan of the show for the past couple of years. Keep up the great work. I normally donate on Patreon, but I'm throwing in a little extra so you can go buy a six pack and have a few birthday beers on me.

Cheers. P.S. There's always a spot for you in the Clash Royale clan if you want to ever come back. We miss you. I don't think Jason would let me come back because I don't play enough. So he'd kick me out again in like a week. I only kicked you out because you said you were going to leave.

That's the only reason. Yeah. All right. Over on Facebook, Jonathan writes in five stars. The cynical viewpoints presented in this podcast are a breath of fresh, air to an IT professional like myself. And Matt, tip of the hat there. He sent us in the HTC link as well. So he says, you haven't hit peak blockchain till you have bought the blockchain phone with blockchain.

And Fernando sent us a link, sent us some blockchain is bullshit articles, a couple of different ones. And Joshua sent us the crypto candle, which is a candle that's got its own tokens. And you can then retrieve your Bitcoin. Oh my God. From a candle. But it does have the crisp peppery scent with notes of oak moss, sandalwood and amber patchouli, which is much more valuable than Bitcoin.

Token can be retrieved when cotton wick has burned down. Yes. It's also got a smooth rubbed metal exterior. Yes. Very nice. Saucy. We had a lot of people writing us on Twitter this week. I'm sorry. I totally dropped the ball on that and didn't grab any of them before the show.

So thank you so much for all your comments. A lot of the links that we discussed, you guys sent us. And I think there was another one or two recommendations for robocall blocking apps. So if you're interested in that, just check our Twitter feed. Before we move on to the next one, I swear to God this morning, I woke up and checked my feed and there was one of the guys made us some shot glasses.

Oh, that was actually over on Instagram. And thank you for reminding me about that. It is Dobby Van, let me bring it up so I can get his name right. Dobby Wine Glass, who's written us a bunch of times and is a good old listener of the show who makes his own glass products for the things that are legal in some states and not others at the moment.

But he also made us some shot glasses and he wants your address and he'll send them over to you. Oh, why don't you give him your address? Okay. I'm sec. I'm, you know, I'm off the grid, man. Nobody can find me. Woodland Hills. Just look for the garage. That's pretty much it.

Shit. Old man Zeus writes in your thoughts, please. And he sent an article. Google's new algorithm creates original articles from your content. So this is a story about how people do abstractions and paraphrasing.

And currently right now, artificial paraphrasing with abstractive summaries. They, about a third of the summaries contain fake facts, which, you know, is pretty much par for the course right now. But Google has a new way of taking data from multiple articles and creating new articles that are factually accurate.

And this whole thing is about creating jet, like generating from whole cloth English Wikipedia articles. Right. And I read some of the, the actual paper on this. I am, it's above my pay grade. Did you check the algorithm out? I did. I did.

And that's another one of those, like right along with that Amazon webinar. I'm like, I don't want to do this stuff. That's pretty much it. I'm too tired to program anymore. Kind of. Yeah. Puppies and children make it, make programming. No fun. Yes.

AJ sent us a message. The bird flu is spreading. A bike share border war has started in Boston. And so I'm going to add, put a little pin into my grumpy old geeks map of stupidity. Boston has now joined a bunch of other cities. Now they don't have scooters yet. This is just bike share, but the real problem, my argument with all this, all this stuff is I don't care what it is, scooter or bike.

If it's dockless, it's a problem because people suck. And that's what's happening in Boston. Now people are just dumping these things everywhere. Well, the problem also in Boston is they have let people like basically claim territories. And people are taking the bikes from one territory to another.

So it really is a border war. Yeah. That's crazy. And yeah, well, I think the biggest problem also is the city of Boston owns part of one of them. So like conflict of interest there, guys, for sure. Yeah. Hey, when you're a jet, that's all I got to say. And Jay Lister writes in, Hey guys, your advertising game seems to have gotten stronger over the past few months.

Is the newer Apple data a factor? Just curious. No, no, not at all. Just because so many of you out there are listening. And because so many of you were kind enough to waste a few minutes of your time about two years ago and fill out that demographic survey.

We're just, we're just lucky to get some ads from our, from our provider lips in every now and then. So it's great. We don't really make a ton of money, but there's some beer in there. So, but keep those Patreon and PayPal donations going. Cause that's, what's actually really paying to keep the lights on here. Yeah. Yeah. There's pretty much pennies that are coming in from those ads, but you know, they sound good.

I think. Go buy some RX bars and some Eero. I love my Eero. I actually do. Me too. It's pretty good. Next up is Elaine Trembleu who says, Hey guys, I hope all is going well in your world this week. I thought this was a good article about our rights online.

Jillian Triggs joins call for digital rights reforms after brush with data's dark side. This is over at the Guardian. I thought it was a really, yeah, it was a really good read. So he also says, there also seemed to be some good comments below the line. My one surprise was that no one mentioned fingerprints. I believe that most people are opposed to the idea of governments having fingerprint databases of all its citizens and would consider it an invasion of privacy, but we seem happy to hand them over to tech companies.

Ditto for DNA. On a different topic, I think it'd be interesting to hear Brian's reaction to this one word, Eurovision. Well, I am a, I am definitely a Euro fan. I like all European music and I like European sports and European soccer, but I have blissfully avoided the entire Eurovision thing.

I understand it exists, but no thanks. My brother's big into that and I caught a little bit one time. Not for me. Yeah. He actually sent in a couple different comments. So here's another one. He said, I was asking about a micro investment tool.

All I can say is index funds, get a Vanguard account. I have a Vanguard account already. The whole point of this was I wanted to buy one share or, or, you know, a thousand dollars worth of, of stocks that I think just for fun for my son, the, the big ones, Amazon, Apple, et cetera, and just see what happens to that thousand dollars over the next 18 years of his life.

So it's kind of more of a, of a fun experiment than actual investing. I have a Vanguard account personally. We do have money invested for my son already in a Vanguard account as well. So thank you. Seriously. Unless Jason really does have a crystal ball, his arse or Warren Buffett, your chance of predicting what stocks will work is pretty low.

And then he said, I heard about this on a BBC podcast, uh, Viola dot AI from their fact Viola AI harnesses artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to develop a lifelong relationship advisor. What could possibly go wrong? They have an ICO currently suspended. They mentioned blockchain. They mentioned AI, your whole relationship history stored in blockchain for everyone to see.

Yeah. Uh, we talked about that. So, yeah. Yeah. And I went back today and cause I thought we did, but I couldn't find it in our old show notes. So I went back and watched the video and the video is just terrifying. Yeah. I mean, you talk about how people don't want their Netflix watching history in the blockchain for everybody to see.

You want your whole relationship history out on the blockchain? No, thank you. Thank you. No. All right. John Neveson wrote in Expedia listing room unavailable because Lodge isn't Expedia client. Oh dear.

Got to pay to play. Yep. Got to pay to play. Oh, well, sucks to be you. Yep. Remember they're just a platform, just a platform. Yeah. Link for that will be in the show notes, but yes, it's a small British Columbia lodge that has not, has been listed as unavailable for two years. Yeah.

Which is screwed up, but you get what you pay for. Next up is DC. Hey, still listening after more than two years. It helps me to get to and from my long commute. I'm sure people are wondering what the hell I'm laughing about most of the time. So keep up the good work. He asked about sites that let you do micro shares. I've been using an app called stash for about a year now.

Let's you invest in things you like things you believe in things you want and certain companies. I actually like this because it helps you diversify your portfolio and you can invest as little as $5. I'd be interested in hearing what you learn about it and what you end up choosing and why keep being grumpy. I will look into that because I will keep being grumpy. Yes.

Raf writes in by the way, Hulu fucked me up too. I once tried it out for a weekend and canceled way in advance of trial trial period just to be extra sure. I won't get charged and forgot about it to my horror. I noticed a year later that my cancellation has not gone through and I was charged each month after losing my shit with their support.

They claimed I never canceled and they were only able to refund up to six months. I get that it was my negligence for not noticing the charge for so long, but what is this six month limit? They could tell I haven't logged in once since the time I tried it. I hate those fuckers so much. Yes, Raf. Join the club.

You're in good company. If you had put that fact that you had paid into a blockchain, you'd have always known about it. So you would not have forgotten about it. So that's we need personal blockchains. Personal blockchain. Next up is Mad Mike.

He says, hey, guys, listening to shows from two years ago and just finished one where Jason was hopped up on way too much caffeine or something, followed by the show where Jason shared with the audience the mental health troubles he was going through. I do. I miss those coffee days, Jason. First, it's sad that you didn't hear anything from the listeners after that heartfelt confession and say, first off, he did.

He totally did hear from people. He's so full of shit. So he heard from people and people poured out and reached out to him and everybody was very nice to him. Secondly, now that we've heard from both of you, just a thanks for being so open. The more people that are open about it, the more accepted it is for everyone else to talk about it.

On a lighter note, just caught the trailer for the Queen biopic and it actually looks really good, as we agreed to earlier in the show. I've been listening to current shows for about eight months now. And I have to say, despite Jason's prediction from 2016, Brian, you still don't talk about the kid stuff half as much as Jason does about the fur babies. But that's okay.

I love my fur baby almost as much as I do my real kid. So I get both sides. Keep up the great work, guys. Best podcast in my rotation. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mad Mike. And over on iTunes, Moo Man Sam writes in with five stars. Great tech podcast. Great podcast to stay aware of all things tech in the cybersecurity section is fantastic.

Highly recommended. And we got another five star rating. Apparently, something is up with people's names this week on iTunes. This is Goram Fracker. Goram Fracker. Corrimps Unite. Awesome podcast. Stop what you're doing and subscribe to this podcast. Even if you're not grumpy or old, Brian and Jason will have you nodding your head at all the stupid things that are happening on the internet.

And remember, AI does not exist. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback, your questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

And don't just tell a friend. Grab their damn phone and subscribe to our podcast on their phone. Make it easy for them. Closing shout out this week to Margot Kidder, my Lois Lane, and somebody who had a lot of mental health issues and tried to do good after she got better.

And she's sorely missed. By the way, she was stunning. Absolutely stunning, girl. She was beautiful. So she will be missed. Also, Tom Wolfe passed away this week. So shout out to him. A great author. I know I've been lax on my reading recently, but I love Tom Wolfe.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was absolutely fantastic. I love Bonfire of the Vanities. If you've only seen the movie and never read the book, go read the book. It's awesome. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 260. 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. As Honorary Chairman of the Welcoming Committee, it is my privilege to extend to you a laurel and hearty handshake. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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