261: Money For Nothing

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Ah, the subdued version. Brian, we're recording at a very bizarre time. It's much later for us. This is a bit like our old school days when we would record actually at night. It is late on a Thursday evening because we've got Memorial Day weekend coming up.

By the time you hear this, happy Memorial Day. And there's all kinds of family stuff going on for me. So we've moved things around and I'm having a nice glass of wine and it's dark outside. And I feel like we should get drunk and shit on our old clients. Fuck yeah.

I'm having some, it's spelled Boatswain, but I think it's called Bozwin Double IPA from Trader Joe's, which is a lovely IPA at 8.4%. And a six pack will only run you $5.99.

So for the discerning drunk who really wants to get fucked up fast and has no money, I recommend the Bozwin Double IPA from Trader Joe's. Very nice. Very nice. So, ah, that was delicious. So I want to discuss a few things before we get into the follow-up.

Yep. Social networks. Yes. Now that I've moved back here to California and I've like been doing things and like revamping my studio and working in the yard and walking around the neighborhood, I have found that I give not a care in the world to checking my Facebook feed.

Well, yeah. I logged in the other day and there were like 38 notifications. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, I guess, what? And I just don't care anymore. When you're busy doing real life, the virtual life is much less important.

I totally agree with you 100% there. If I've got a lot of stuff going on in my life, as I've had the last two months with my father and my own kid and all that sort of, a lot of stuff going on. I'm not on anywhere near as much as I used to be because there's real life in front of me.

Yeah, and I'm at the computer as much as I usually am, but I don't find myself opening up the Facebook tab or the Twitter tab. Yeah. Because I've taken them off my phone like a long time ago. They're time fillers, Jason. They've always been time fillers.

They're time suckers. They're games. That's all they really are. And if you've got shit to do, you're going to get your shit done and then go take care of the other shit that you have to do. And you don't have time for that shit. Right. And when I'm taking a shit, I'm just playing Clash Royale with the GOG clan. So that's that's about as much shit as you can get with social media.

And it's, you know, I just I don't know. I don't know if it's I've noticed this with a bunch of people that people are kind of falling off and kind of going back to the real world. It's like the end of the Truman show where it's like, OK, Truman gets away and everybody's like, oh, what's on the next?

You know, just kind of just goes about something else. No, I get it. People come and people go and people don't you know, some people don't care as much. But I still stand by the fact that I think overall it is a good thing. There are so many people that I have maintained friendships and relationships with that I would have not done any other way if it wasn't for something like Facebook that we were all checking all the time.

I would have lost many of my friends that I still have in London. I would have lost many of my friends that I still have in New York, you know, because there's there's only so many people you can reach out to have phone calls with have text conversations with. And Facebook has kept me in touch with people that are really meaningful to me.

So I'm never going to 100 percent crap on it. There are obviously many issues, which we talk about every single week on this. We've got plenty coming up. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. But but overall, I still think that there is there is a place for this within my life. And I am happy that it is there for to to fulfill the needs that I am asking it to fulfill.

Yeah. And a shout out to my friend John Nicholson, who I found some. It's funny. Like we went to high school together and we're skateboarders together in the Midwest, which means your brothers for life, because we got chased by the jocks and the cops and everybody together. And I was going through my negatives this week and scanning them because I'm trying to scan everything I own the same project that I was working on back in Chicago.

If you remember, a couple of shows ago, I'm still working on it. And I found two negatives of him in on a stage with like weird shit drawn in marker on him with a microphone and one slipper. And I'm like, OK, this is random.

I have no I have no memory of the event whatsoever. And I posted to Instagram and he's like, holy shit, I can't believe you found that, because that's the first time I was ever on stage. And that started my stage career. And I'm like, well, damn, that's kind of cool.

So social media got me in touch with him like a year or two ago and just out of the blue. And so you are right. Sometimes it does have its place and sometimes it really does kind of cement those connections. But just lately, it's been like not really at top of mind.

Yeah, well, I mean, my argument would be that there is a valuable niche that it serves, but it's been a highly overweighted and overrated for the last few years. Yeah, it's all dial it back a notch, people. I also think it's because the unwashed masses came in and I've all I will stand by that.

Well, we will talk about that shortly. Yeah, we will. So I want to talk about opera for a second. We've been talking about opera and how everybody should switch to it and how it's such a fantastic browser. Yep. I want to go to whatever country they're in. I can't remember if it's Sweden or Norway or whatever Scandinavian country they're in and kick every developer there in the balls right now.

They done fucked up this week, didn't they? They done fucked up bad, bad. This latest version and subsequent versions, because I just got a new version and it's still messed up. Yep. They signed the code improperly. Oops. Yes.

The cryptographic signature for the code does not match the binaries that they're releasing. Now, we also talk on the show that we run a program called Little Snitch that protects us on our Macintoshes. Are they Macintoshes anymore or are they just apples? I think they're just apples, right?

Oh, I miss the Macintosh days. But anyway, on my proto Macintosh or whatever, future Macintosh, Little Snitch says, no, you cannot run this program. We are going to deny any outbound connection to the Internet from this program because it is improperly signed.

So, I get on the forums, I go to, you know, the Opera forums, and the link will be in the show notes to my post. I would like to point out that, as of now, no one from Opera has actually replied yet. Thank you very much. You get what you pay for, Jason. Oh, that's true.

It's free. That's true. And so, I thought the only option is, okay, well, then I have to turn off Little Snitch. But no, so I went and got the Opera developer version, which is like two in the future. We're on version 53 for consumers.

Developers are on 55. I got that, got my syncing working, had to redo everything just so it would work. And then somebody's like, oh, you can go create a rule in Little Snitch that says, you know, let outbound connections go. And there's a little checkbox that says, you know, ignore code signing.

I'm like, okay, I did that. But the problem is, no, like every time I go to a website, I'm like, I've got my sphincter clenches up because I'm like, what is this thing doing? Is this a hacked version of it? Like, oh, I can't remember. Oh, that video converter that you had. Yes.

You know, you told me about it and I went and got it. And it's like, oh, I got the only like version that was up for three hours with malware in it. Like, oh, great. Am I getting the Opera malware version? Right. Oh, have you had this problem yet? No, because you informed me.

And then I basically just did not allow myself to close out of Opera. So it restarted an update. So I've been running Opera continuously for five days now. Oh, God forbid you need a reboot. But I'll walk you through how to fix it. It's pretty.

And once you know it, it's pretty easy. But I still don't like it. I don't like the fact that I have to do that. No, they, yeah, they done screwed up. So fix that shit, Opera. So, and I also, when I was trying to do these reinstalls, I found a sneaky little gotcha. When you open the Opera installer, there is an options disclosure triangle that is closed by default.

Yeah. If you open it, there are two checkboxes. One is help improve Opera by sending feature usage information. The other is copy bookmarks and settings from the default browser. Those are both checked by default. Not good, people. And not, yeah, not front and center in the UI.

Well, dropped. Yeah, the drop down that you have to look at to even get to that. That's some sneaky ass shit right there. Yeah, it is. It really is. I was pissed off about that. I really was. I'm like. He is. He took a screenshot and put it in the show notes. Because I was always wondering why my fucking bookmarks were duplicated every time I had to do an Opera install.

And I'd have like 10 copies of my bookmarks. It's because the copy bookmarks and settings from default browser is set. And I didn't want that. But you have to like go and you have to know that that triangle is pointing the wrong direction. There's you have to know what a hypotenuse is and where it's pointing to know to click on that to change those options.

And you're sending your feature usage information by default. It pissed me off. So I'm having a bad week with Opera. But now that it's working again, I'm glad it's back. Okay. All is forgiven. The fat lady has sang. That's it. Okay, man.

Hey, you're the one that wanted to do this late. I've had a cocktail or two. All right. We're going to speed this up because I cannot be here all night. Let's get going. Moving on to follow up. I did buy my Wired subscription. Yep. Finally. What do you think? Send me your login information. I will.

But I wanted to say thank you to the fans of Grumpy Old Geeks because I bought it with your money. So we can continue doing that because I was getting locked out because I read Wired all the time and I was getting locked. There are three stories in our story notes that I have not been able to read yet because I forgot to actually do my subscription as well.

So I should probably do that. Okay. There's a the first article that I have from Wired is the line between big tech and defense work. Did not read it. Yep. I'm sorry. But here's the only quote that we need to know from this article. Amazon culture is more pragmatic and less idealistic than Google.

One Amazon engineer told Wired Amazon's ethos is about business ruthlessness rather than technical purity. And that does filter down to individual tech employees. This is going back to the story that we're talking about with Google's employees leaving because they didn't want to have drone software killing people.

Amazon's like, fuck it. We don't care. We don't care. Business ruthlessness. At least they came out and said, what's this? Don't be evil pansy ass shit. Come on. Well, it's funny. It's funny because I wasn't able to read the Wired story.

I found my own version over at fortune dot com. Amazon and Google are cultivating quiet ties with police and military. That's becoming a big problem. And the quote that I picked shits on Google instead of Amazon. So Google has also talked about setting up new ethical principles to guide its sales. Then again, Google has also just removed any references to its old don't be evil motto from its employee code of conduct.

Yeah, that's it. So how about we just say they're both bad and let's call the whole thing off? That's that's about it. OK. And here we go again. I want to stop talking about these goddamn motherfucking scooters.

I'm going to go outside and have a smoke while you do this. So just keep going. But this is not how things are supposed to work. This is not normal. This is the Trump of the new economy. Resist people. So everybody's been sending us these links. I didn't even. You know, that scene in what's a damn it.

The Scorsese film, not Scorsese. No, the droogs and all. What's the hell's the name of that movie? Why am I playing? Clockwork Orange. Clockwork Orange. You know, when they hold his eyeballs open. Yeah. Force him to look at things. This is how I'm starting to feel about bird and scooter articles that people are sending us.

Hey, man, you don't have a choice. So Martin on Facebook said, guys, I saw this and thought of you. Personally, I think the guys at the Atlantic listen to your show. So this is an Atlantic Arter electric scooter charger culture is out of control. I had a hard time figuring out what to pick out of this to read.

So I'm actually just going to say, go to our show notes because I'm not going to read this whole thing. Please don't read this whole thing. Please don't read this. And then there's another one that was on Slate called For the Birds. These are both basically one is a firsthand. The Slate one is a firsthand account of somebody who went out and became the bird wrangler, as we've discussed.

And I like the URL. I like the URL in this. Charging bird scooters overnight is like a much less fun version of Pokemon Go. And that's what she gets into. The first one is the Atlantic doing a big story about how it's become cutthroat, how fraud is all over the place, how people are doing all the things that you had talked about a couple of weeks ago, Jason.

There are people basically grabbing these things, letting the batteries drain out so that then they can get the bounties or just stripping them and selling them. The batteries apparently sell for 50 bucks a pop. Nice. Yeah. So people are doing all this. And then the firsthand account version from Slate.

I just like at the end of this, I'm just going to read it because she gets into she did it for a couple of weeks, two weeks, basically. Day 17 is when she stopped. And she said, I almost ran over one driving home, so I threw it in the car and called it at night. The schedule is wearing me down a bit, so I decided to sleep in and release the scooter late.

In theory, bird deducts from your payout in a prorated fashion for tardiness, but I have no idea what the penalty might be. You can't find it online. I try to drop the scooter off around 9 a.m., but the app fails and I can't electronically release the scooter. I'm stuck with it until later in the day. I don't get paid for it at all until I inquire, at which point I receive an adjusted payment of 66 cents.

You can't even buy fries for that. Every damaged bird, faulty app problem or payment issue has to be educated throughout the app where they have all the records and you just have an undifferentiated string of text penned by coily pseudonymous birds. At the end of it all, I made about $125 over two weeks for roughly 10 to 15 hours of effort and perhaps a few minutes more each day dropping them off in the morning.

I captured 24 birds and noted perhaps 70 to 80 cases of hoarding or fraud in the same time period. Instead of being a fun activity that affected my bank account, it disrupted my evenings and highlighted petty cheating all around the neighborhood. Instead of a pleasant walk, I spent hours tapping away at my phone in the dark while aggravated.

So this is the new world we're creating for ourselves, people. I love this. I love that this is. But the great part about this is this happens so fast. It's so fast. It's only been a couple months here in Venice. It's amazing. And people actively hate them now.

I see people just grab them and throw them. A good friend of the show was telling me about a guy who runs one of the bike repair shops on the boardwalk who came in and found like four birds sitting in his basically in the walkway up to his place of employment. And he just picked them up and threw them in the bushes.

People are killing them, smashing them, destroying them. Like, you know, all the I get it. Like tourists for the tourists. It's amazing. What a great way to get around a town. But for the people that live here, they are angry. Oh, this is fantastic. Oh, my God.

I love this so much. Yeah, it's good times. So we also have a little bit of follow up. We have found out what happened with that self-driving Uber that killed a pedestrian. Okay. So this is basically bad programming is what we've learned. Uber self-driving vehicles operating in Arizona were unprepared to safely encounter pedestrians and were fatally over-reliant on the mindfulness.

of human operators. Basically, they shackled the robot is what they were finding out from the NTSB. The sensors first perceived the person about six seconds before impact, more than twice the commonly accepted reaction time of 2.5 seconds. But the sensors struggled to classify the person as a person.

It was first classified as unknown object, then as a car, then as a bicycle, and then finally as a person. And it was they were unable to determine the expected path across the road, probably because from what we've heard is she was drunk. But at 1.3 seconds before impact, the system determined emergency braking was required, but that function was disabled under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior.

So they were supposed to send a message to the human in the car, but no message ever was sent. Oh, man. And this is why somebody died. Yeah. Yeah. There are two people, or actually there's probably a group of people and one person who are going to have a pretty crappy rest of their life knowing that they killed somebody because they fucked up.

The person in the car looked like they were playing with their phone, honestly. Yeah, they do mention that. Previously released footage showed that the operator had been looking down for an extended period before the crash occurred. Yes. But the fact that their entire system was built where they disabled the car from being able to put on an emergency brake, and then there was no methodology for that message to be sent to the human in the car, that is bad programming.

That's the other team that's going to have a hard time sleeping at night. In the news. In my absolute favorite article of this week, Jason, over at TheVerge.com, this actually made me feel the feels for the old school internet.

I know. And it also made me feel the feels for the joy of Snapchat going down in flames. Also, I know. Snapchat is so dead man walking and they don't even know it yet, but everybody else does, which is the craziest thing about Snapchat right now. I think all the Snapchat employees should just grab a bird and just ride out of town.

They really should at sunset. So this is over at The Verge. It's called The Decline of Snapchat and the Secret Joy of Internet Ghost Towns. If you are of us, if you are a grumpy old geek and you were around in the early days of the internet, go take a stroll down memory lane and bask in the glory of this article.

It's just wonderful. It does really, it brought back to mind the early days when it was just us out there building things and the unwashed masses had not arrived yet to destroy everything and monetize it and talk about, you know, all the different, all the shit that every, why everything is horrible online now.

So, but I did have one good quote about this just based on the Snapchat aspect of it, because I did like this. As Snapchat alienates its users and fades further into irrelevance, it has begun to feel, as many failing social platforms do near the end, LO, like a place to access the uselessness and unimportance, the sense of yelling into the void that the internet once offered before what we did here mattered.

Okay, yeah. Before we get to my quote that I loved, this is by Helena Fitzgerald. This is the only thing she's ever written for The Verge, but she's also written for New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Atlantic, GQ, not G-Clue, Vice, and a bunch of other stuff.

And Elle, she's a good writer, but this is her first article on The Verge, and I hope she writes more. Me too. I love this article. I really did. And there were so many good things about it. So my favorite quote of the piece is, perhaps more than anything else, what has sucked all of the joy out of the social internet in its current form is its exhortation to be useful.

We've arrived at a version where everything seems to be just another version of LinkedIn. Every online space is supposed to get you a job or a partner or a stronger personal brand so you can accomplish the big public record goals of life. The public marketplaces everywhere.

It's an interactive and immersive CV, an archive. It all counts and it all matters. Age fucking men, because it's true. There is no just going on and fucking off on the internet like we used to do. Well, part of the other problem with that, and she didn't really get into it in the article, but I'd love to have her on our show so we can talk about it, especially with Bittner.

One of the reasons that it all counts and it all matters is because none of it can ever be deleted. Oh, what does delete mean? It follows you everywhere. Except for the stuff that you want to find. Yes, except for the stuff you actually want. Yeah, the stuff that I want to find from when I first got on the internet.

I can't find that shit to save my life, but the time when I got harangued by these assholes on Gawker, you know, yeah, I can find that in two seconds. But like the old stuff in the old forums, can't find that anymore. Damn. No. Now, over at The Hustle, I found this today.

Snapchat execs are dropping light like flies as Spiegel tries to snap out of his slump. Good title, by the way. Yeah, not bad. VP of Engineering of, I think it was Marketing and Monetization. Something like that. Yeah, something like that. There was monetization in his title.

He left and he went to go work at Tesla. He's like, he drops it like, I'm out. I'm going for a real company. And that's the 10th executive since the year started. Since the IPO. Yeah, since the IPO. Man, they are going crazy.

Dead man walking. Yep. The stock has gone from $20 to $11 in three months. Thank you for the redesign. And who is the person? Which Kardashian basically tanked the stock?

Oh, I don't know. They're all the same. They are kind of all the same. A random Kardashian tanked the stock a while ago. Kooky eyes. I don't know what the hell their names are. Yeah, I don't either. I would like to just state for the record, since we have been going since before Snapchat was in existence, when Snapchat first came along, what did we say about Snapchat?

What the fuck is that? What is the business plan? Oh, that too. I guess we said that. Uber. Uber's back in the news today. Yep. They turned a profit. Sort of. Sort of. I was going to say, hell hath frozen over, sort of.

But so this new CEO is trying to turn everything around. And the company got $2.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2018, up from $2.4 billion in the last quarter of 2017. And the big news is that Uber turned a profit of $2.5 billion, to be exact.

And I'm reading this verbatim from Recode, so don't think that I'm trying to make this shit up on the spot. Because I feel like sometimes we don't give credit to the articles that we quote here. But yes. Well, that's why we do our extensive show notes that people are very happy with.

Yes. We let you see where everything comes from. So the big deal here is that Uber gained $2.9 billion after it merged businesses in Russia and Southeast Asia with local competitors. Oh, dear. Yeah. Okay. So hold on a second. Yep, yep, yep. Saying Uber turned a profit is a bit like saying, say, me as a single man who is unemployed and getting a check for $500 worth of government cheese per month.

Yes. And then managed to attract a young lady to move in with me, who happened to be very successful and made, say, $1,000 a month working at McDonald's, has increased my net income. By $1,000, yes.

Right? Yes, it has. Except not really. Not really. Yes. This is, I don't know if you remember when Twitter, the first time Twitter ever said they made a profit was because they fired everybody. Yes, they made a profit by decreasing their expenses, not by increasing their profits.

Yes. So this is a one-time, one-time offer here for Uber in Southeast Asia and Russia because they can't sell it again. Yep. So what are you going to do? Hey, you know what? From what I hear from the ads on every other podcast, every single drive with Uber is a way for them to increase their value to you.

Okay, so here's the deal. From last week to this week, once you mentioned the Uber ads last week, I'm like, I haven't heard any. What's going on here? And I started listening to Adam Carolla again and a couple other podcasts that I used to listen to. Oh my God. Those ads are everywhere.

Those ads are so patronizing and fucking ball. They have such big balls, this company. But the thing is, what pisses me off are the hosts that do these reads sincerely. Oh.

Well, the worst is Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell of all people. Oh, that was it. That was the first one. Yes, that was the first one. Malcolm Gladwell of all people should hate this motherfucking company. I know. The fact that he reads these things with such enthusiasm. Well, with his Gladwellness. He puts his Gladwell spin on it.

Right. It's like, you know, you listen to the ad and then it turns out at the end, Uber is trying to be great. You know, whatever. Like, you know. It's like all those books. It's like, let me tell you a story. And at the end, here's the clever ending. It's like, oh, he did that with the fucking ad.

And I'm just like, oh, man. Here's my solemn guarantee to every single person listening to our show, you will never hear a motherfucking Uber ad on this goddamn show. Ever. Never, ever. Oh, my God. Although, they are raising up to $600 million in the secondary round at a $62 billion valuation.

Well, if they're going to get that much money, please edit out that bit, Jason. I will. I will. I can retroactively edit out that bit if they want to send some of that scratch over. Thank you very much. Now, okay. So, first quarter ever of profitability, and now they're raising a, what was it, round 427?

Something like that. On, for a $600 million round. Now, these fuckers spend so much money every quarter that they have to raise money every quarter, but the valuation goes up every fucking quarter.

How does that work? How does that work? Period. Jason. Jason. Yes. That is the exact question that I asked you that started us doing the stupid podcast. We're five and a half years in. Not based on Uber, because Uber wasn't around yet. But, I mean, that was the question.

It was like, why do these companies that do not make any money whatsoever get valued at billions of dollars and keep having people throw money at them when they don't make money? They don't have a business plan. They don't have a product. It doesn't make sense. Oh, but they do have a product.

And here we still are doing it. They do have a product. They do have a product. They have an app. All right. Uber has an app. Remember, that is their only product, is they have a fucking app. Yes. I want everybody to remember that. Uber is not this thing where they make stuff.

You know what they do? They make people who need a few bucks drive around town and pick up other people. That's it. Yes. That's really it. But they have an app. And they're worth $62 billion for making you beat up your car for less than minimum wage.

Yes. Yes. Okay. I just had to get that out because I can't wrap my fucking head around this anymore. How is this continuing? I mean, you're talking to me, Jason. It blows my mind every day. It's the reason I drink. Yes. I mean, you know what it is?

I think it really is. Every rich motherfucker who has a bunch of money is just so enamored by the sunk cost fallacy. If you don't know what the sunk cost fallacy is, look it up. Because they have spent so much money, they can't stop. And it just keeps going and going and going.

And I hate to say this because it is my least favorite saying of the last 10 years. Rich people do have FOMO because they're not part of the Uber pool. And I want to punch every single person in the face that says FOMO because you don't even fucking understand what it means.

But, yeah, these are rich people with FOMO and have the sunk cost fallacy. That is the only reason that Uber is still in existence. That's the only way I can describe it. That's the only thing I can figure out either. Yeah. So let's move on to rich people that are actually making something but having some problems here.

We've got Tesla. Tesla's Model 3 is having some issues. It's not the perfect affordable electric car after all. But then again, nobody's really made one. So that's fair enough. Right. But they got the new CEO of monetization from Snap to come in and whip them into shape. Well, it looks like that's kind of what's going to happen is the Model 3 was going to be a base price of $35,000, making it accessible to people who could dream of owning one, you know, but it's not really happening.

And he's basically said, you know, we need to focus on the higher end version of these cars, which is about $80,000. Otherwise, this company is going to be in trouble. That escalated quickly. Well, but I mean, Tesla's always been crazy expensive. And the idea that they're trying to get to a model that is affordable is good.

But I just wish they wouldn't have promoted it so much as a stockholder because there's little issues going on right now. But I'm confident in Musk. He will turn this around. If not, to Mars. God damn it. Yeah. My brother's is still his waiting list time keeps going back and back and back.

Well, they're having a lot of problems. So they're having a lot of problems. What I really would like is if he got interest on the money that he gave them that they're making money on, you know, because that's that is part of their business model is they got all those pre-orders, all that money's in the bank, and they're earning interest on that and just pushing back the release date.

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. But, Jason, that's everyone now. Yeah. That's Kickstarter. That's this is the new business is you pay us and then we'll give you the product maybe someday at some point. Oh, no. I've got a better business for you, Brian. ICOs.

Oh, Jesus. We'll give you money for nothing and your chicks for free. True story. A new startup just raised three million dollars to identify ICO scams before they happen. All you need to do is go. Did it say ICO? Then it's a scam.

I know. Can somebody give me three million dollars now? There. I just solved it for you. Oh, you just totally ripped off my whole fucking bit, you dick. Sorry, man. The funny thing is this comes from True Ventures. They're the ones that put the money in.

And I know somebody at True Ventures. So I have to make a phone call and find out if they were in on this because I would have saved them three million dollars. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with people? People are so fucking dumb. Yeah, yeah. Their platform is to validate the authenticity and...

The authenticity of bullshit fake currency that has no value. Yes, exactly. Okay, just checking. That's why we fucked up. This is why we fucked up. We should have done this. We're way too rational and smart for our own good.

Oh, dude. Okay, we're going to change the name of the show next week. We have to. This has to because nobody's going to invest in grumpy old geeks. We have to be, you know, some kind of consultancy like, you know, crypto... Hyper Mega Global Media Company.

I actually still own that domain. You still have the domain for that. I bought that like 20 years ago and I still have that damn thing. I love that domain. Yes, we're going to Hyper Global Megacorp. Yes, that's where we're going to be. Oh, man. And Yelp and TripAdvisor are piling on to Google over their search monopoly.

Now, I don't know if you watch 60 Minutes because you're... I mean, you're old, but you're not like 60 years old, so... I'm not quite there yet, no. 60 Minutes did a piece on Google last week about local search with Yelp and TripAdvisor. I didn't watch the piece because I still, you know, like to do things with my life instead of watch 60 Minutes, but it's funny because these guys have gotten on board with a new consumer

advocacy group to say, hey, look, we're going to fix what Google's doing with local search because Google is actually pushing all of their paid search results instead of organic local search results, right? Right. This new advocacy group...

You can't make this shit up. Guess what they did? They released a plug-in for Chrome. That would be Google Chrome, by the way. Yes. Tell people, oh, Google is not giving you the right results.

How long do you think it's going to be until Google pulls that from the App Store? I'd imagine it's probably already gone. It's probably already gone. Oh, my God. People are just fucking crazy. And there's another advocacy group that's calling to break up Facebook. I saw that you put this in here, and I was like, this is such a non-story because this is never going to effing happen.

Oh, of course not. No, no. And it's freedomfromfb.com. And this comes from what are the... Demand Progress, Citizens Against Monopoly, Content Creators Coalition. There's a Content Creators Coalition? What the fuck? Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a weird one.

Move On is the only one I've ever heard of. Empower Change, Open Markets Institute, and Some of Us. S-U-M of Us. Nice play on letters there. Yeah. What the... No. What the hell are you people thinking?

Well, also, split it up into what? What are you going to break it up into? They want to break off WhatsApp, Instagram, and all of the different subsidies that they have, because what's happening is when Facebook goes into a market, they either bankrupt or buy all the competitors.

So... Okay. So what they're... What they want to do is take all of the different companies and put them back where they were. It's like... It's like the break of Ma Bell back in the day, you know? I was about to say, how about they go after the cable companies? No shit about that. And Facebook has also released its political ad archive.

So you can see all of the political ads and who paid for them. Did you get a chance to look at this? I did not, because I already know that we lost the election because of this shit. I just don't want to depress myself any more than I need to. Okay. Okay.

There you go. So if you want to go check it out, be my guest. It's at facebook.com slash political content ads. Way to make that URL easy to type. I just want to state, having crapped on that point a little bit, that I don't want to crap on this point, because it's not just an archive.

It's an ongoing archive, and we have primaries and elections coming up. And I think this is actually a very valuable tool right now. So before you vote, maybe you should go take a look at this. Okay. Well, wait. Responsibility? Are you promoting responsibility, Brian? Sometimes I try.

Media candy. The Expanse, revived for season four at Amazon, according to The Hollywood Reporter, until you actually read the story. Yes. No. Amazon Studios declined comment. As sources note, the deal is not closed. The deal is not closed, but it's looking pretty good.

So thank you, Bezos. You may have ruined Whole Foods and not saved journalism, but at least you, being the richest person in the world, while not curing cancer, fixing fake news, or sorting out poverty, the myriad of other massive world problems you could literally throw money at to fix, you managed to solve this problem.

Thank you. I'm sorry. Do you remember that quote that I had at the beginning of the show called, business ruthlessness is the ethos at Amazon? Yes, I know. I'm looking forward to this. And by the way, at the end of this week's Expanse, they had the preview for next week.

Did not watch the preview. I would just like to say, for everybody who's watching the Expanse and saw the preview, I called it at the end of last season. So yes, thank you very much. I will confirm or deny that next week. Oh, you will. No, there's nothing to confirm or deny.

You will confirm it. Okay. I actually caught up on Westworld last night as well. Wow. Holy shit buckets. The show is going bananas. What the fuck is the end game they're shooting for? How do they keep it going? I would love to hear that they have not been picked up or renewed because I want resolution and we know we're not going to get it because they're going to keep this thing going.

So that's going to suck. Oh, no, no, no. This thing is going fucking gangbusters. And I think the end game is humans and robots. That's exactly what they're going for. Battlestar Galactica living together in harmony. Exactly. They are going for the fucking, we're going to be Cylons at the end of Westworld.

It's good. It is such a good show. Oh, my God. I'm really loving it. It's so much better than season one. So much better. And it's so much better than you and I ever thought this was ever going to be. Oh, God. We shit on it so much. Remember when they first announced it? Yeah. And it's just so good. It is really good.

Over at fatherly.com, because I'm a dad and I follow them, they have some test footage of the Disney Millennium Falcon roller coaster ride. It's not a roller coaster, though. No, it's not a roller coaster. It's a motion sensor video thing.

It's a box you sit in and they jump you around a bit until you get out and go, wow, that was cool. But it does look cool. Oh, it totally looks cool. But it's not a roller coaster. No, it's not a roller coaster. I agree with that. And since a number of people have actually asked me, both on social media and in real life, if you do not have cable, if you have cut your cord and you want to see the World Cup, we've got you sorted.

Fubo.tv, link in the show notes, $14.95 a month. You can cancel any time. World Cup lasts a month. There you go. That's your uncle. Cheaper than Star Trek Ooptect. Way cheaper than Star Trek Ooptect for like 135 soccer games instead of nine episodes of a somewhat half-assed Star Trek episode.

Are there apps? Like, can I put this on an Apple TV and watch it? Yes, you can. Oh, sweet. Okay. The TV in my room only has an Apple TV. This works on your Apple phones, your Android phones, on Chromecast, on Amazon Fire, on Roku, and on Apple TV.

And it is fully licensed, 100%. This is legit. This is not pirating. They have deals with Fox Sports Telemundo. So you will get every single game from the World Cup if you pay for this. Goal! Completely legal. Very nice, Jason. I tried. I tried.

I hurt myself. Netflix has announced. Yeah, it sounded like it. Netflix has announced a release date for Matt Groening's Disenchantment series. Matt Groening, of course, known for The Simpsons and Futurama, is now doing kind of an adult. Well, not that those weren't really adult animated series.

Yeah, I'm like, those are pretty adult. But this is a bit of a, like, I guess, a fantasy animation adult thing. So who knows? I don't know. It centers on the dysfunctional Princess Bean, who flicks the bean.

No, it doesn't flick the bean. Well, you went there. You went there. I wasn't the one that went there, but you went there. This is what happens when I have the line. Who's accompanied by the demon Lucy and the dwarf Elfo through a magical realm known as Dreamland. I'm interested in this. I've liked, I really enjoyed Futurama. Obviously, The Simpsons until, you know, season 7,852 held my interest.

I've never seen more than, I mean, maybe like 20 episodes of Futurama. I never got into it. Oh, it's quite good. And my college roommate ended up being a production manager on Futurama. Nice. And I think he's working on this series, too. So I should actually reach out to him. Oh, cool. Get him on the show. It'll be fun. Yeah. Now, Vivo is finally shutting down.

The Vivo is the YouTube. Oh, really? Originally, it was going to be the YouTube competitor that was owned by the record labels where they would put up all their music videos. Well, because why is it surprising? They've actually been co-sponsored over on YouTube, and everybody's been going and viewing Vivo videos on YouTube anyways since basically they launched.

Oh, well, I figured they had a content deal with YouTube, and they were making money off all those views. And that's basically what's happening now. So they're going to shut down their own site and their own app and get rid of all that and basically just move everything over because, duh, nobody cares. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty much kind of what I thought.

Do you watch the Jim Jeffries show? No, because I don't even know where Comedy Central is on cable anymore. I can't tell you what the channel number is. You know me and Jim Jeffries have a very long love affair because... Well, I love Jim Jeffries, and it's actually somewhat sad that I'm not watching his show because I really do, but ever since Jon Stewart left The Daily Show, I couldn't tell you where Comedy Central is anymore.

You should find it and resubscribe just for Jim Jeffries because in the old days, when you and I would have the battle of the guns, I used to love my guns, and then you sent me the Jim Jeffries bit on...

On guns. It changed my mind because the only reason actually it changed my mind was because in the bit, he says, well, sometimes you get sad, and then you put the gun in your mouth. Well, that's what I did. And then I'm just like, oh shit, he was right.

So I've been a Jim Jeffries fan since then, but he's also fucking ridiculously funny. No, he is. I agree. He is ridiculously funny. He's one of my favorite comedians. The thing is, Jim Jeffries is really encroaching on Jon Oliver for quality of comedy for the week.

This week, he did a bit on emotional support animals that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and they actually registered an emotional support camel that they can legally take on a plane. That's amazing.

This thing is like 12 feet tall, but... Stuff that in the luggage compartment, United. Exactly. No, they're killing it over the Jim Jeffries shows, and they have a podcast that follows it. So every week, they do the show, and then the next day, they have a podcast that they record right after the show.

Yeah, I talked about the podcast on our show. Yeah, we both have. Yeah. But the thing for me was like, I don't watch the show, so it's not funny. Watch the fucking show. It is amazing. If you like last week tonight, you're going to fucking dig Jim Jeffries, because he's like Jon Oliver who says cunt.

That's pretty much it. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, guess what today is? GDPR day.

And we are back with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Hello, Dave. Hi, guys. Do you feel different? I feel different. I feel so much more secure. Hold on a second. I have another 35 emails that just came in.

Yeah, no shit. Do you feel more private? No. I definitely feel like I've been getting a lot of email from folks I haven't gotten email from in a long time. But have you been getting email from people who have been getting email? Because that's what I've been getting.

Emails, texts, tweets. Hey, what's up with all of this email that I've been getting? I'm like, if you listened to our show, you would know. No, I've been spared of that, thankfully. But, yeah. It's funny they're popping up today more than ever.

I guess there's no minute like the last minute, right? All right. Well, let's get into this. First off, we have a bit of feedback from a listener who took umbrage with our suggestion that you might be a bit silly if you care about security to own an Android. He says, in response to why buy an Android phone from last week, besides the obvious price and more selection, there's the ability to add a memory card, a removable battery.

You can copy any files, not only photos, to and from a phone without iTunes. And then he has a question for our segment. When cell phones stop receiving updates after a couple of years, what are their security implications and risks? Well. All right. You're not getting any updates, so you probably have a lot of security implications and risks.

Because half the reason that people update their software is for security reasons. Right. It's been orphaned. And so whatever security problems were in that phone when the updates stopped, those are the security problems you have. And then also over time, more security problems get discovered.

So that double whammy of not being updated and new problems being discovered means that that phone grows less and less secure. The XP-ification of your phone. Yes. That's kind of it. And if I could be a bit of a jerk for a minute and say that. By all means. By all means.

This is the one case where perhaps not having a removable battery on an iPhone is a good thing because it ought to be. For me, about two years, the battery starts to go. And that's enough motivation. It's all the motivation I need to upgrade to a new one, right?

Yes. And as far as I know, none of the iPhone batteries have exploded either. So there's also a plus with that one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and speaking of Android devices. Some low-cost Android phones shipped with malware built in. Thank you, TechCrunch, for this.

At no extra cost. Yes. I'm like, this came across right as I was reading the copy from Oliver. It saves you all the trouble of downloading a shady app. That's right. That's right. Yeah. You know what? Android pre-hacked for your convenience.

Yeah. Avast has found that many low-cost, non-Google-certified Android phones shipped with a strain of malware built in that could send users to download apps they didn't intend to access. And these are phones from ZTE, which you obviously can't get anymore anyway. Right.

Marcos and MyPhone. MyPhone, PwnedPhone. PwnedPhone. That's pretty much it. Well, and so these are low-cost phones. And, of course, Android is open source, so these are folks taking their own version of Android. It's mostly adware, so I think it's only adware.

So they're not coming after your information, but they're inserting their own information. So I guess you get what you paid for. It's that bargain basement thing. I was joking with Joe Kerrigan from Johns Hopkins today on the Cyber Wire about how, you know, this is a problem with low-cost Android phones.

And, of course, on the iOS side, there are no low-cost iOS phones. Yeah, exactly. So, you know. So you have to sell a kidney phone. That's why it's more secure. Right. So there's that. Yes. This next one comes back to an episode of The X-Files that Dave, you and I watched, but Brian was too stubborn to.

And MIT engineers replaced chefs. You're not going to let that go, are you, Jason? Oh, hell no. Every time, you just want to just keep just pounding Brian the fact that he didn't watch this X-Files episode, and you and I did. The thing is, like, I don't even care. Because out of all of us, I was the one that didn't waste 13 hours watching what was demonstratively a shitty season.

Right. But it was a good one-off episode, and this kind of proves it. I enjoyed it. So MIT engineers replaced chefs with machines at world's first robotic kitchen. And it does remind me a lot of the X-Files episode that we watched. That was a sushi bar that they had in the X-Files.

But this is kind of reminiscent of that. Boy, let me tell you guys, I feel like I'm missing out right now. FOMO. Yeah. Brian has FOMO, no mo. That's about it. So my first reaction to this was, isn't basically any pre-prepared food that you buy in the frozen food section prepared by robots?

Probably. Pretty much. Yeah. So the innovation here is that you actually get to see the robots make your food, and they only make one meal instead of $5,000 an hour or whatever the automated things are. Well, if anything, that's almost a step back, isn't it? Yeah, the box is just a little smaller.

Right. I guess it's fresh, and so it's clever. I can see the appeal here. It looks like fun. The other initial thought I had was, what could possibly go wrong by putting knives in the hands of robots? But it doesn't look like that's what's happening here. They're just plopping ingredients into a wok, basically.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. I think it's pretty cool. Yeah, it is cool. I would go – this is a place I would probably go check out for the novelty factor once. Yes. And if the food was good and it was convenient and it was fast and the price was right, then no reason not to make it a regular place you'd visit, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah, why not? They could probably – but the thing is, it's like Chipotle could pretty much do the same thing at this point, but nobody goes to Chipotle anymore because of disease. But it's just one of those things where I can see this spreading, spreading beyond the bounds of MIT.

Could be the shape of things to come. How hard is it to make McDonald's fries and chicken nuggets? Right? Well, you know, after working at McDonald's, I can tell you, not very hard. Yeah. Not very hard at all. Yeah. So we got a little bit of follow-up on the Facebook porn prevention system.

The one where you have to upload your junk? Yes. You're supposed to upload your own nudes to Facebook because they're so trustworthy with our data? Right. Right. Exactly. Step one, upload naked pictures of yourself to Facebook. I mean, come on. Why would you not do that nowadays after everything that's happened in the past couple weeks?

Well – This is insanity. It really is. And what strikes me is that I guess this program was successful enough in Australia that they feel like it's time to expand it to other countries, which means – Yes, lots of Facebook employees got to see lots of naked chicks. It's very successful.

I guess Australians might have a different attitude towards nudity than those of us in North America do. I don't know. I'm pretty sure that they do. Have you met Australians? They are pretty much just like – Yeah. It is a warm country. I'm going to put a shrimp on the Barbie and my dangle on the wangle.

That's kind of how it goes. They're pretty awesome people, actually. I do – yeah. I love the Australians. Who in their right minds trusts Facebook enough to do this, especially at this point? I'm baffled. I really am. Well, and who feels as though they're in a situation where this is a big enough threat that they would upload their pictures of themselves preemptively?

A lot of people who have made terrible life choices. That's who. There's just so many things that don't add up about this, and yet here it is. It's not a joke. It's a real thing. It is. You can't make this shit up. You can't. No, no. Okay. Now comes the meat.

Here comes the meat. Which is a phrase that the subject of our next story has probably uttered more than once in his life. Here comes the meat. I was about to say, and most specifically, it's ham in this case. So Politico has a story about Trump and how he's going rogue on phone security.

Guys, I am just going to step back and let you have at it because Brian originally brought this up. Just go back and listen to the first episode after the goddamn election. That's pretty much it. So guys, take it away. Well, I've been thinking about this, and I think this goes back to what we've talked about before about we didn't realize how much of the national security of our country depends on social norms.

Specifically that when the national security people come to the president of the United States and they say, sir, Mr. President, here is your secure phone and we'll be swapping this out on a regular interval once a month to make sure that it remains secure. And the president looks at those people and he says, well, you certainly are the people who know about security.

So that's fine. Whatever you say is best. I will abide by that. And that for every president in the modern electronic age, that has worked. And granted, that's probably only a handful of presidents. But what happens when now you get a president who says, yeah, I'm not doing that?

But her emails, Dave. It's just, again, this is, if I let myself think about this too much, my brain will literally melt into nothing. It's so frustrating and so stupid. And you cannot argue with the people that just want to be on his side no matter what.

There's no, facts don't matter. Rational argument doesn't matter. Pointing out the hypocrisies don't matter. Pointing out the fact that he is actually endangering our national security does not matter. None of it matters. But he's got Kaspersky installed on that phone. So, you know, he's safe.

Not for long. I love the fact that he has two. One is capable only of making calls. And the other is equipped only with the Twitter app and a few news sites. Yeah. Which, by that, we already know it's only Fox News. I don't know why. What came to mind when I heard that was, this is my rifle.

This is my gun. This is for fighting. This is for fun. That's good. Yeah, I don't know why. Well, the president's got two bits of things going on with him this week. First is his phone. And the second one relates specifically to that second phone.

Beta Bucket sent in this story from Wired, which was breaking news the other day. The courts have determined that Donald Trump is not allowed to block people on Twitter since he has decided to use his own personal Twitter account as a mouthpiece for the government. Right. He is not allowed to block people, so he is currently in violation of that.

So I don't know how that's going to get fixed, because there's an awful lot of blocks on that account. Somebody called Jack Dorsey. Remove the button. Oh, wait. Jack Dorsey doesn't give a fuck. Right. Does this mean that he suddenly discovers where the mute button is?

Could be. Because he can do that. And I wonder how this plays out. Again, what happens if he continues to refuse? Does this make its way to the Supreme Court? I'm not sure. I'm going to have to ask one of our Cyber Wire policy people. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is new, that no one has tread on this ground before.

So there's a lot of – it's all theoretical, I suppose. But here we are. Get Ben Yellen on the horn. Right. Exactly. What happens when the president says no? Then what? Well, we're going to find that out about a number of issues in the next year or two, is my guess.

The president just doesn't say no. He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like Al Capone with his taxes, wouldn't it be hilarious if – and by hilarious I mean tragic – if the president of the United States got hauled out of the White House in handcuffs because he didn't unblock his Twitter account?

You know what? I'll take it any way I can get it. Oh, my God. Right. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's the stripper. I don't care if it's the playmate. I don't care if it's the Russian meetings. I don't care if it's a dumbass son. I don't care if it's a dumbass son-in-law.

I don't care if it's Twitter. I don't care. Whatever. Pick one. Oh, no, no, no, because – I mean, this is at least entertaining, but when he's hauled out, then we get Mike Pence. At least I guarantee you he would use whatever phone the government told him to use.

True, the Jesus phone is the one that he would use, unfortunately. One step at a time. One step at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, let's not get ahead. Okay, so we have a new report out, and this one is from – as I scroll up to these 42-page – this comes from Big Brother Watch, Defending Civil Liberties and Protecting Privacy.

This is a U.K. organization, and they are saying that basically with the U.K. using so much facial recognition that it is just not good because there are so many false positives. And they are saying that, no, we do not want to be surveilled without a warrant, and we should stop this.

And I don't know if this is going to – I mean, yeah, okay, a 43-page PDF. I don't know if it's going to change public policy, but – Well, I mean, it's public policy in the U.K. specifically and in other places in Europe. I mean, this is just standard and has been for a long time. I don't see it getting dismantled and going away, and I certainly – you know, I would like to stop it before it gets too rampant here, but I doubt that's going to happen.

Well, and related to that, the story that I posted next is about Amazon making available a cheap real-time facial recognition technology available to the police. Dirt cheap. I mean, so cheap as to be inconsequential in a decision to use it.

And away we go, right? Yeah. What's interesting about what Amazon's doing is the police force has to upload a database of known images. So basically they could upload their mug book.

Like the Welsh did, and it worked out so well for them. And this software will match that, and they want to use it with their real-time cameras that the police are wearing these days, dash cams, things like that, but also street cams.

You can imagine all the things that could be tied into this system, and it's troubling. I was trying to think of a situation where this could be helpful, and certainly I suppose if you had a missing person, if you had someone who was being trafficked, you know, some bad dude has someone that he's holding on to, and you don't know who that person is, and the facial recognition can say,

hey, that's someone who got snatched away from their parents a while ago, something like that. The other thing I was thinking, a path I went down in a thought experiment was, would this be helpful if a police officer was chasing someone, for example?

I'm thinking of the situations where innocent people have been shot, right? Police officers chasing someone, the facial recognition says, this person is 15 years old, right? You know, is a student at, you know, whatever, you know, public high school number 57.

Could that information make, inform that police officer to say, whoa, this is a kid, right? You know, and maybe give them pause. Again, I'm sort of reaching here for the good parts of this, because overall, I find this thing kind of chilling, and yet at the same time, probably inevitable.

Well, somewhat relatedly, and rather conveniently, a new listener named Sean, who's just found our podcast, wrote in and said, just started listening on referral from the Cyber Wire. Your podcast is amazing. Since you both like Christopher Moore, you should check out Jasper Ford. Lastly, I thought you would find this article interesting.

Write exactly what we're talking about, except this is a city fighting it back. Barcelona is leading the fight back against smart city surveillance. And this is a pretty long article on Wired, but it's really interesting. They're trying to start up something they're calling Project Decode, which stands for Decentralized Citizen-Owned Data Ecosystem.

So rather than keeping these city surveillance systems private, where you don't know what kind of information anybody has about you, thank God they don't say blockchain, but they're at least making it public. So the plan is that they will continue to use technology smartly to patrol cities and to look at things, but that data will be public, which is not a bad way to go about it.

Well, is it public or is it accessible to individuals? I'm not entirely sure. I don't think they really know yet. So yeah, because I can see you not wanting it completely public for obvious reasons, but you do want to have some sort of oversight, ability to access your own information, all that sort of thing.

So interesting. Yeah, interesting pushback. Very European of them. Yes, very, very European. So going on with GDPR, we have often said, as we said earlier today, that I would rather have an Apple or an iPhone than an Android. And Apple has consistently been one of the better companies in terms of privacy, shockingly enough.

And they're kind of leading the vanguard again. They're launching a privacy portal where users can download all of the information and data the company has that's associated with your Apple ID. Right now, this is only in the EU, but it will be available around the world very soon. So everybody will be able to get this.

How nice of Apple to do that. Go check out this portal. Here is absolutely everything our company knows about you. Right. And is there a mechanism? Oh, there is a mechanism to correct the data. Well, there you go. Yes. All right. Way to go. Doing it right. The way it should be, I suppose. Yeah.

And then finally, our big last story. I do like the title of this article. You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened. Yeah. Sort of. This is a massive cock up on their part.

So basically, a Portland, Oregon couple received a phone call from one of the husband's employees earlier this month, telling them that she had just received a recording of them talking privately in their home. Unplug your Alexa devices right now. You've been hacked. No, no hack. No. But apparently, they did have a private conversation, which somehow got recorded by the Alexa and was somehow forwarded to one of the contacts as a kind of voicemail message that they had stored on their Alexa.

So there's quite a chain of events that has to occur there for it to happen in the first place. Still definitely troubling. And it didn't help that Amazon didn't exactly leap in right away to explain what had happened. They waited a couple days, and then they did explain what happened.

And I'm just going to read Amazon's exact explanation, and you guys tell me if you think this is plausible. Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like Alexa. Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a send message request, at which point Alexa said out loud, to whom, at which point the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer's contact list.

Alexa then asked out loud, contact name, right? Alexa then interpreted background conversations as, right? What do you think? Do you think that this actually played out that way? It seems highly unlikely.

I would say, as Judge Judy would say, this does not have the ring of truth. Personally. Yeah, the Amazon folks say that they came to this conclusion by looking at the logs from the device. Yes. Yeah, they did confirm that it 100% happened. This did happen.

Right. So, yeah. And what's interesting to me is that, the way I've thought of this is that, is this the infinite monkeys banging on typewriters scenario? Yes. Absolutely. Yes. It's just total, absolute, amazing happenstance and chance, and yes.

Yeah. Every now and then, this series of events is going to happen. And, you know, what are you going to do? I guess it's, you know, is this a major security issue? I don't think so. I don't think so. Because we have to happen in this order.

And we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's not recording constantly. We know that. And we know it's only keeping a small buffer of things. People have looked into this. There has been security protocols run on these things. This is just some weird, bizarre occurrence. It is troubling. You don't want this to ever happen.

But we're going to have to, I think, I'll assume that this is highly unlikely and very unusual. Yeah. That's why I have not updated my contact list and sent it to Amazon. That's one of the reasons. I don't want this thing being able to call somebody when it hears something in the background and then just leaves it on for people to hear whatever they want to hear.

I do not have my contact list coupled with my echo. Yeah, I don't either. I don't use that aspect of the service at all because I've got a phone. Why would I use my Alexa to send a message to someone? Yeah, just last week we had a guest on the Cyber Wire who's from a company named Checkmarks.

The gentleman's name was Erez Yalan. And they had done research with the Amazon Echo. And they'd come up with a clever way using the built-in Echo software to basically have the device eavesdrop on people. And they could listen in. What they did was they created a sort of a bogus calculator app.

And what they were able to do was have the calculator app when you would give it a command, it would keep listening to you. They figured out a way to get it to keep listening to you. And then the bad guys who did this would get a transcription of basically everything that was said in the room for an unlimited amount of time afterwards.

Now, to their credit, when they contacted Amazon on this, Erez said that Amazon was amazing in their response. They were quick. They were responsive. They wanted to fix it. They fixed it really quickly. So from that point of view, what I'm hearing from the researchers is that Amazon is not sticking their head in the sand.

They're interested in these things. And they're being very responsive when stuff's pointed out to them. So I think that's encouraging. Oh, definitely. I mean, this is the future of their business are these devices. So they are going to be on this like flies on the proverbial poop. Yeah, that's a really good point.

Yeah. Bad analogy, but good point. Yeah. Yes. A hundred percent agreed. What part was wrong? Proverbial or poop? Maybe bad's the wrong word. I don't know. Lovely. Pleasant. Unpleasant.

All right. Anyway, guys. Well, gentlemen, I am off to go see Solo, so I'm expecting we'll be doing a movie review again next week. Yes, as am I. As am I. Yes. You guys are the only thing between me and going to see Solo this evening. So let's cue it up.

Well, let's wrap it up then. What the hell are we doing? What are we doing, Gavin, here? Let's go make the Kessel Run, folks. I got a very good feeling about this. We'll see. Now, I talked about Science Alert last week, and I did find a really interesting article this week, and it's a bunch of fan guys sitting around recreating the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.

And this is like, you know, they're in Kentucky, and they're just kind of in a garage saying, we want to make an accurate representation of the Millennium Falcon cockpit. It does look pretty cool. It looks pretty cool. They did a good job. Come on. Yeah.

It does. Look, man, as a Star Wars fan, with, you know, the Han movie coming out. And by the way, have you noticed the kid who's playing Han Solo has a very wide face where Han Solo does not, where, like, you know, Harrison Ford does not? Have you noticed the jowl differential?

I'm not really going to get too deep into this. I refuse to. I'm going to try to enjoy the movie. Don't ruin it for me. Okay, but I'm just telling you, there is a jowl differential. I don't want to hear about the JD before I go in to see the movie. Okay, but I'm going to name this episode Jowl Differential just to fuck with you.

Okay, fair enough. Over at vice.com, I saw something that would benefit both of us. You and I both enjoy our brief forays into things like Budaphy and meditation apps, and I know that we both, you know, when I had the gotcha moment with you last week when you talked about how you didn't do anything gamified.

Yes, yes, you did. We both have the Apple Watch. Yeah. Yes, I did. But there's also the Breathe app as well on the Apple phone. But over at vice, they did this talk about this very long article about a breathing exercise that can calm you down in a few minutes if you're really freaked out.

I tried it once or twice. It's very nice. This is a very cool thing to do. I'm also throwing a link in the show notes because we talk about cooking an awful lot, and I decided every now and then I should share recipes that are extremely good. Filipino adobo pork or chicken with slow cooker variation. I made this two days ago.

It is fucking delicious. Okay. I'm making that on Sunday. Yeah. I did it with pork. It's probably equally good with chicken. This was stunningly good. I cannot recommend it enough. Absolutely delicious. Okay. I will definitely check it out. Now, let's get to the Impossible Burger.

So, I was taking a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles with a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, and he was telling me about the Impossible Burger. He's like, oh, this is the new meatless burger that everybody's talking about.

You can get it at restaurants, and it's the shit. Well, this week, I went to Fat Burger, and I ordered an Impossible Burger. $9. $9, I would say, for a burger that tasted like sandpaper and chalk.

What do they make Ikea furniture out of that compressed wood? Oh, compressed wood, right. Press wood? Yeah. Press board. Press board. That is pretty much exactly what the Impossible Burger tastes like, because it was impossible to make it taste like a burger for me, personally.

You know, the only people that I've seen raving, I've known, it's been very popular here, especially in the Santa Monica, Venice area, for a long time. It's everywhere, and every place talks about it, and I've yet to have anybody that actually eats meat regularly say anything good about it.

The only people that rave about it are the people that gave up meat so long ago, they don't remember what it tastes like. That's pretty much it. But even Bob said, yeah, it's not, it ain't the good one. There's another one that's better. But I went and looked at the ingredients on the other one that's better, and it's made with pea protein, and the first three ingredients are chemicals.

And I'm like, okay, mm, well, that's not good. That's not what you want. If you're having a veggie burger, you want the first three ingredients to be, I don't know, vegetables? Broccoli. Yeah. Broccoli and broccoli. Little black beans, whatever they're going to do with that.

And I will say, before I get into the next bit here, where I'm going to shit on this beyond belief, Dr. Prager's veggie burgers are actually really good. You can get them at places like Trader Joe's, and they're not burgers, but they're delicious. I'll give a shout out to Dr. Prager.

We get the Dr. Prager fish sticks for my son, and he loves them, and they're very healthy, and they taste very good. I did not know that Dr. Prager made fish sticks. You have just actually made my day. I will check those out. You can get both rice crusted and kind of like a regular, like a lighter, you know, standard bread crusting.

Okay. Okay. I will check those out. So here's the problem with the Impossible Burger that bugged me today and brought up an entire thing. So, well, Impossible Burger was founded in 2011.

It's all over the place. And here's the thing. The guy who did it is Dr. Pat Brown. If you're a Vandals fan from the punk rock days, you know, Pat Brown, try to put the cops down, then you know what I'm talking about here. He said, we don't have to get FDA approval, but we knew that was going to be something a lot of consumers would care about.

And they went ahead and started putting these burgers out without FDA approval. And then I dug deeper. And then I found out you don't have to have FDA approval for just about any food that you can sell in a grocery store. Right.

I figured you would jump in on this because you're the guy who's like regulation, regulation, oversight, whatever. But the FDA doesn't even care if you just say, yeah, it's safe. It's cool. Whatever. What am I? What do you want me? Like, there's no there's no tenant to anything being called organic either.

Oh, no, fuck organic. Nothing whatsoever. That's terrible. Like, that's a complete and utter joke. People can just flat out lie. It's all a load of shit. I think John Oliver has done something on the FDA before. I don't know if he's done organic, but I know we have because it's it. It's all bullshit.

So you just. No, no, your butcher. Get to know a butcher. Get to know. That's all I got to say. Like, you know where your food comes to get your impossible. Find your impossible. Find an impossible butcher. And don't stop eating meat. Damn it. Well, I'm not.

Now, now, Tara. Now, Tara is going to stop following me. Here's the deal. I do stop. I have stopped eating beef. I don't eat beef anymore, but I tried this thing. It will wait to screw up our next butcher box ads. Oh, shit, man.

Well, you can send me your meat. I'm eating. Brian, please eat my meat. We're on of the week. I'd like to thank friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, for sending us this first link. It's been a long time since we've done a screw Kickstarter story, but this one is pretty good.

As he said in his email with just the link, idiots. And this is a TechCrunch link. After tens of thousands of pre-orders, 3D audio headphones startup Asik disappears. And I'm pretty sure we talked about these guys at one point on our show.

I remember hearing about this. Well, as they say here, after taking tens of thousands of crowdfunding pre-orders for a high-end pair of 3D sound, end quote, which I love, headphones, the startup has announced this weekend it's shutting down the company, and backers will not be receiving any refunds.

What? The company raised $3.2 million across Kickstarter and Indiegogo, so they double-dipped, for their Asik X headphones, which they pitched as a pair of high-end head-tracking headphones that would be perfect for listening to 3D audio, whatever the fuck that is.

Oh, it's for VR, dude. It's for VR. It's all VR. Whatever. Whatever. What a load of crap. While the company also raised a substantial seed investment, in a letter on the Asik website, the company blamed the slow adoption of virtual reality, meaning, oops, our business model didn't work out, alongside the crowdfunding campaign's stretch goals that bagged down their R&D team.

So, again, you had no fucking business model, and you failed. They say, this was obviously not our desired outcome. The team worked exceptionally hard and created a production-ready product. Wait, wait, wait. You said this is not our desired outcome? Did they actually have to put that in their goals?

In their fucking press release? This was not our desired outcome? Yes. To fail at the five-yard line is a tragedy. We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible, including investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities.

Now, hold on a second. I want to explore this last sentence a little bit. We have invested our own savings and have been working without salary to exhaust all possibilities. Yes. What privileged fuck are you to be able to work for months without a fucking salary?

I could never work without a salary. Could you work without a salary, Jason? Dude, as someone who barely has a salary, no. Who the fuck are these fucking Silicon Valley fucking people that can do this thing where they work without a salary? I don't believe them.

I think they're full of shit. I don't think that they've invested their own savings into this. I don't think that they were working without a salary. I think that they lived off the $3.2 million that they're not giving back to the people that paid for their fucking products. That's what I fucking think. Well, there you have it.

You fucking assholes. So, there you go. Dan B1 Kenobi over at Twitter sent us this. For Moron of the Week, he sent a suggestion. Opprescient vision of anti-replicant bias. And this is a link over at Jalopnik. Dealership makes women sitting right in front of them confirm she's not a robot.

That's because they just print out forms from their online thing now. And that includes the CAPTCHA. Okay. So, there was an entire blank page that was just the CAPTCHA. And they made her check that off and sign for it to buy the car.

Okay. Because people are fucking dumb. Well, speaking of dumb fucking people and Canada, because I know you're moving there soon. And this has been everywhere in the news. This is the woman at Tim Hortons who dropped trow and flung poo.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about your Canadian overlords now? Huh? What do you think? I would rather have poo flung at me than bullets. Oh. Take that, America. Well. Well played. Well played, Mr. Schulmeister.

Yes. I will take a bow now. Look, the only reason I included this in the show because I wanted to say that I think that she delivered a coup de gras. Oh, very nice. Very nice, Jason. I think that the bullet comment actually wins the internet today.

Feedback loop. We've got a bunch of new Patreon subscribers, Michael, Rubin, Andrew, and Tim. And Tim comments, if people are starting to use the blockchain to store data like what videos you view on Netflix and such, I wonder if GDPR will have anything to say about that.

What do you guys think? I think that company won't be able to operate in Europe, especially if it attaches her name to it. That's basically what it comes down to. Yeah, blockchain is open source, open code that everybody has, and if you put in private data in there, GDPR is not going to be cool with that.

Yeah, pretty much it. Yeah. Neil over at Patreon also wrote in, Hi, Brian. Since you're into food documentaries, I thought I would suggest the movie Food Evolution about GMO foods, mostly because I want to hear your opinion. It is not well-funded or free to stream, so you'll likely have to pay for it or go to Sweden.

I'm a very pro-science to a fault, so the film really spoke to me, other than the Bill Nye cameo. I hate that guy. Oh, get in line. He's all right. Anyway, the film takes the GMO, whatever. The film takes the GMO subject seriously and posits that it is corporate greed, not the underlying genetic engineering technology that is negatively impacting the food industry.

I have not seen the Food Evolution movie. I have heard of it, but I basically 1,000% agree with the underlying tenet that we're talking about here. GMO is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is the corporate greed. The only problem I ever have with GMO is when they start to build in the genetics that kills off other crops, or you need something to unlock their crop and all that kind of like crap.

Again, that's the corporate greed aspect. I have no problems with GMOs, so I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, you're talking about Monsanto. Yes, yes, yes. It's the corporate greed aspect of it. It's not the actual science aspect of it that I have an issue with. I'm all for it. Over at PayPal, we got a donation from Kevin, and John sent us $6.66 with a little comment.

Ain't as good at the $7.77 from another kind listener, but works nonetheless. Keep up the great work. Feels like stealing if I don't contribute something. Thanks. So thank you. Thank you both, Kevin and John, for your PayPal contributions. Oh, thank you very much. Over at Facebook, David writes in, great podcast.

I really enjoy listening to you guys complaining about everything and anything. Keep up the good job. We shall. And Mitchie writes in, another five-star on Facebook. Great podcast if you're into tech or just curious about the tech around you and get totally pissed off by tech.

Yeah, well, that's what we do. Finally, a podcast that makes me feel like I'm not alone. Jason and Brian have awesome voices because they use proper mics and make a great listen also for falling asleep. Would you say we have dulcet tones?

We have dulcet tones. Because, Mitchie, fall asleep. Yes. Go to sleep. It's funny you're doing this right now because I literally just heard my wife put my kid to sleep. When I listen to GOG in my car, it keeps me fresh and awake.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a dichotomy there. Oh, shit. I pressed the wrong button and it put me to the top. Oh, shit. Hang on. It keeps me fresh and awake because they say a lot of interesting stuff and they are funny, too. Yep. Ah, well, there you go.

That was the end of that review. Let's keep moving here, Betty. Over at Twitter, AJ wrote us, said, I don't understand enough about hashtag blockchain to have thoughts on this. What do you think? And he sent us a link to educase.edu. Will blockchains revolutionize education?

I read this entire thing and I will say apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines. Okay, good. No, it will not. And so there's absolutely no reason to have blockchain involved in education. All they're talking about is, well, now you'll be able to certify your degree. Well, you have fucking pieces of paper for that.

Yeah. Yes, it's not that hard. Okay, next up, Mike Mee writes, email that's not Google, fastmail.com. Highly recommended. I think you probably work there, Mike Mee. Well, no, he also pushes something else here for robocalls.

Try jollyrogertelephone.com. Great fun. Okay. Some serious things. Okay, okay. I was just looking at the businesses that trust it and I don't know. Oh, oh, wait. DuckDuckGo actually trusts fastmail. So this might be good. Moz6502 sends us, the cloud is so wonderful.

And this link over at Reddit from the TIFU subreddit, which if you didn't understand, don't know what that is. It says, today I fucked up. And this is very funny. Today I fucked up by getting Google to ban our entire company while on the toilet.

I'm not going to step on this. I highly recommend you go to the show notes and read it. Okay, I got to check this one out. I missed this one. Oh, it's quite funny, Jason. In fact, I recommend you read it while on the toilet. Oh, oh, okay.

This is a very long thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll read it. Well, on the Kappa. Scott writes in, I'm going to set up a GOG podcast drinking game for every time JP Def and Slender Fungus have to use the term blockchain. Wish me luck and I pray I don't get alcohol poisoning.

Maybe I'll live to tweet it from a bird scooter. Yeah, actually, if you said bird, then you would be dead at this point. That's the way it works, yeah. And Oliver wrote us, and he said, I'm on the $10 a month tier at Patreon. Thank you so much for that.

Oh, thank you so much. But never wrote in anything for you guys to pimp. Well, I've got a band that would love a shout out, and I'd love if you guys listened. Where's the best place to give that info? Love the show. I'll be at $100 a month when I can afford it. I wrote you back. You haven't sent the band name yet, Oliver. Dude, come on. Give us the band. We want to get people listening to your band so you can afford to give us $100 a month.

No shit. Over at GOG.show, Stephen from Coatbridge, Scotland writes in. Oh, God, I love Scotland so much. Me too. Free on the bikes. Is this similar scheme to bird scooter and a Chinese unicorn mobile?

Mobike is about to launch in Brazil. I read the article. You obviously did not. So I will say, yes, they're not scooters. They're just bikes. But it's a dockless system. Again, dockless is always the goddamn problem. Yes, dockless is bad. Yes. Andy wrote us and said, can you please add a list of books you have recommended over the years to your site?

I'd love to check some of them out. But the only way I see currently to find them is to go back episode by episode, which seems rather tedious. I was in a bit of a snit last night when I wrote this back to you. So doesn't it, though? You know what would be even more tedious for us? Going back and figuring out all the books we recommended after Amazon pulled the rug out from under us and took our store away from us.

And we'd get no click throughs anyway. So we're not going to fucking do it because we're lazy. We had a store that had everything there. And then Amazon said, I was happy to keep updating it. And Amazon just, yeah, Amazon just killed it. And we weren't getting any click throughs anyway.

So I'm sorry about that. I'm sure that you can search for at the library. You don't have to go through every show. Go to our search engine. Search for at the library. It should bring up each thing. We didn't have at the library for most of our history. But if there's a book that you're looking for, type in the title of the book.

And if we covered it, it will be there. So that's it. That'll work. And Bezos, yes, he saved the expanse, but he fucked us on the library. Stefan writes in, hi, ihr rocker.

Yes, that's exactly how Germans do it. Why Germans love this podcast app. And this is a link to a podcast app in German, auf Deutschland. Yes, auf Deutsch, yes. Yes, in Deutschland. It's cracked me up.

Did you get a chance to check it out? It's called ProCast. I don't really understand what the article is not very well written to tell me why it's interesting. Other than you can swipe podcasts with a Tinder-like interface. Yeah, I don't get it. I did appreciate.

The only thing I really liked is the article itself has three lovely German fowl lines holding beers. So yay for that. But I don't understand why the podcast app is any different or good. So maybe you can write us back and let us know about that.

Fowl lines are good. Yes, fowl lines are good. And Seth wrote us and said, hey, guys, I just heard the show. And it seems like Brian didn't find his new investment platform. Have you all heard of Robinhood? I use them for all my small trades. Go to Robinhood.com. Covered it on the show.

I have checked. Yeah, we checked out. Robinhood does not do fractional chairs. So that's out. And I really don't understand their business model because they don't charge for anything. You millennials are crazy with this stuff. Like, I'm not going to put my money into something that doesn't have a business model and doesn't charge for anything because they're going to be out of business soon.

And where's my money? Where's my money? What's the name of the company on Silicon Valley? The show? Oh, Pied Piper. Robinhood and Pied Piper. A little too close in my book. Yeah, so I don't quite get it. And again, it doesn't do the fractional shares, which I'm interested in. Another listener recommended folioinvestments.com.

So I'm going to take a look at that. Okay. We shall see. I'm still on the hunt, everyone. Okay, Raf writes in, I finally found a coherent explanation why Bitcoin won't work, which is finally putting me at ease. And this is over at the Investors Podcast, and there's a link there. Episode 190 and 191 with Jim Rickards, who debunks it artfully, including Marvel, such as Bitcoin, with its limited supply, will create a deflationary situation in a growing economy.

Because while economies grow, we need more money to support it. And so this would destroy credit markets, which are pretty essential for economy. Very interesting takedown. That took me about 17 fucking minutes to read. I was about to say, I'm going to take everybody behind the veil, because I know Jason will have edited that.

I am now going to read the rest of these questions, because his IPAs have affected him way more than my Merlot has. Dude, I... Okay, moving on. I'm just going to read these now. You chime in as you feel needed.

Next up from Paul. Hello, I want to ask you, what software are you using for your website? I very much want to know what you're using for the Ask a Geek and Contact Us pages. Thank you so much, Jason and Brian. We're using basic, standard WordPress. That's it. I don't even know what... It's just the standard forms.

That's it. We did not spend any time. All right, moving on. Jason is sipping away on his... I'm not going to even talk now. That's it. I'm just done. Look, at the end of the day, I cannot read shit. I'm sorry. Elaine wrote us again, and he says, hey, guys, Berlin and Barcelona are working to crack down on Airbnb.

Yay. Berlin and Barcelona use sluice to root out illegal holiday lets. I love this. I love this. So there's Airbnb detectives that roam the streets of Berlin District, and they're looking for rent-a-bikes, or if it was here, they'd be looking for birds. Because the recent explosion of dockless bike hire schemes in Europe's cities have been decried by local politicians.

They're having the same issues that we are. But this is how they're finding people who have unregistered Airbnbs, because it's always the tourists that use it. This is genius. The Germans are very smart. Ryan Wall says, we're looking for more book suggestions. I hardly recommend the author Alistair Reynolds.

He builds his sci-fi worlds with a few rules and then explores those rules to the limit. A great place to start is the novel Revelation Space. It's a pretty self-contained story, but there are others in the series if you want to continue. Sounds great. I will definitely check that out at some point. Next up is Jake. Last week, you mentioned gamification of IT security.

The Department of Defense has been doing this for years. They introduced it about five years ago and never changed it again. It comes complete with scorekeeping, trophies, even a minigame where you build a house for three little pigs to protect them from a big bad wolf. I love that. This is exactly what I want my cybersecurity specialist to be doing.

I fucking love this one, yes. Every DoD employee has to complete it annually or else we have our accounts revoked almost immediately. It's pretty laughable, but honestly, people remember a lot more just from making fun of it than they did on the old written test that they Googled answers for. Here's a link for a video of it.

Unfortunately, well, unfortunately, unfortunately, he didn't send the fucking link. Yeah, we didn't get to look at it. Jake, please send us the link. Okay. Next one comes from Kevin. Kevin writes in. Hi, do you both love the show? Keep up the good work. Thanks. A simple film related question, if I may. If you were going to introduce someone to Star Wars for the first time, would you start them off by watching A New Hope or would you start them with episode one, The Phantom Menace, and then work through from there, including all the spinoffs?

To avoid explaining all the backstories or is explaining the backstories all part of Star Wars, the process. Brian, have you checked out all of the like redone versions that come, that you can get on, what is it, from Sweden?

No, I haven't done that. Where they have, you know, all the versions that are based on the original theatrical versions? No, I haven't. I would like to at some point. It's an interesting question because it's something I will have to deal with in a couple years because I have my own kid and I've been thinking about this and basically I'm coming down on and void the first three movies entirely.

Exactly. Watch the classic originals with your kid and let your kiddo discover and experience the disappointment of the rest of them all on their own. Mesa no like one, two, three. Yeah. So I really do think I'm going to do that when it comes time to do the Star Wars thing.

I'm going to do A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And if there is an interest in exploring beyond there, we shall see. But God, those first three movies are horrible and they're not even fun for kids. No, they're terrible. They're just, Jar Jar is not amusing.

But check out, definitely check out, I don't know if they're not the renegade versions or what, I can't remember the name of the versions. I can't remember either. But I have them all and they're great. Because when you watch them, they're like, oh, the timing is so much better. The pacing is so much better.

Before George Lucas went insane and came back and fucked them up, they're so much better. So definitely, if you're going to, you know, when you introduce your kid to those, get those versions. And one through three didn't exist. Yeah, exactly. Let him do that with his friends and they can pretend that they were good for a couple of years and then, you know, realize that they aren't.

You can bond over a beer with them talking about how crappy they were. Next up comes from Phil Doe. Hey, gents. Super easy question here. I haven't been able to find a reasonable solution to a registry for my wedding next year. And other than setting up an open Google Doc, I don't know how to build something to do what I think is a pretty simple job.

Do you know of any better options or a better yet a set of tools and languages I can use to make something? In the end, I'll probably just pay for a service, but I'd like to try to build one, even if I don't build it in time for my wedding. Love you long time and give my love to Dave. Also apologize to him for the whole Dark Lord Klittner thing I'd been drinking.

These things happen. I will tell you something as somebody who is a drinker and came up with a great Dark Lord Klittner thing and congratulations on getting married. There are a million pre-existing solutions out there. Don't reinvent the wheel. Do not waste your time trying to build this thing.

Go build something that's actually interesting to you because this will be the last time that you will ever be able to do something that is just for you. You have enough to deal with the not.com, Squarespace, whatever. There are tons of these types of sites out there that are perfectly set up to handle weddings.

You're going to be busy enough, dude. Don't do this. Do something else. Yeah, definitely. Now, Finian writes in, and I love this one. Hey, guys, I've been watching your show since the beginning. Is there something I should know?

I know I had the Chinese cameras for a while, but... They were tied directly into Twitch, Jason. Jesus Christ. And I love it so much. I listen to it every Monday morning as I walk to work. My question for you is, if you play any computer games such as Fortnite, and if not, or if you do, what is your opinion of Fortnite?

Do you think it's a fad or something that will run for a while? I never heard of Fortnite until I looked at my RSS feeds this week. It's huge with the kids. I don't know what the hell it is, so... It's just a shoot-em-up. Oh, a first-person shooter?

It's a first-person shooter. Super popular. A lot of kids are into it. It will shark fin, just like everything does. It'll be really popular for a long time, and then it'll just kind of go away. Well, being popular for a long time and then going away is not a shark fin. Like, Pokemon Go is a shark fin, where it's just like, hey, woo, whoa, God, only teeters left.

That's a shark fin. Well, it lasted a good year, you know. Yeah. It depends on how we define long time these days. People really like this game. People really do seem to like it. It'll be around for a while. It's not any kind of groundbreaking concept or anything. It's just, for whatever reason, people are into it right now.

New first-person shooter. Okay. If it's on Xbox One, I'll check it out. All right. And over at iTunes, we got a five-star rating from Germany, from Warrior, who says, great show. Thanks, guys. Enjoying the show. Very German. Short and brief. Terse. Terse.

Got to the point. Told us he likes us. Gave us five stars. And I'm out, guys. Yes. I'm in. I'm out. Good luck. 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. I know most of you may or may not have friends. Please tell them about the show and, you know, just say, hey, it's not bad.

That's all I'm saying. Closing shout outs. I hope everybody had a great Memorial Day. Until next time. Until next time. I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillipo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. If you'd like a refund for this particular episode. Then kiss my white shiny ass.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 261. From there, you can find old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week. You guys must be alcoholics.

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