262: Domin-Uh-Ohs

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Hello, Jason. I just want to make a quick note because this just struck me and I think it's kind of funny. We recorded a little early last week because it was Memorial Day weekend. So we recorded on Thursday. And Jason, you brought up to me during the show as kind of a bombshell.

You're going to post the show early because you wanted to go and have a nice barbecue on Monday. And then that kind of the two thoughts hit my head immediately when you said that. And I didn't say them out loud. I wish I would have. First, I was, oh, crap, because normally I sit down and like Sunday evening, I write up all our social updates while I'm like watching John Oliver or whatever.

And I'm like, great. Now I'm going to have to do that early. And then the second thought was no fucking way. There's no way Jason is going to get the show out early. At best, it's going to come out late, late, late Sunday night, normal Monday time. As all of you listeners know, Thursday is when our show came out.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wasn't going to pressure you to do the socials early because I want you to have a good weekend. I figured you'd do them at the same time every week. And I was just trying to get it out early. But then disaster struck. I had all of the greatest intentions in the world of getting this out early. I had all the, you know, like all the things were placed and ready to go. The stars were aligned. And then I ordered Domino's pizza.

Now I've had food poisoning twice in my life. It is. I would not wish it on on an enemy, but at least for me, clears out fairly quickly. This this knocked you out for five days, several days, because it wasn't just that it triggered something else.

Because I've had like, you know, really bad food poisoning before that one time when I had the bad prosciutto and stayed in bed for 14 days and watched five seasons of the Big Bang Theory. And I still and now now that I look back on it, I think the Big Bang Theory was what was actually keeping me sick. Might have been. But yeah, it was like two week old prosciutto and it really like screwed me up. It was it was it was really touch and go for a while there.

But I don't know if this triggered something from that or if this was just not food poisoning because I've had food poisoning before, too. I've had it a couple of times. And while this had kind of the the whiff of food poisoning, it didn't have all the hallmarks of food poisoning.

But it affected my me and my roommate differently. And because she was. Well, I having been in touch with you all this week, I think we should spare the listeners some of your more colorful descriptions of what occurred to you. We're going to definitely, definitely skip those.

It was unpleasant. But what was really annoying is there were there were times when I would have really liked to go gone to the emergency room, but I don't have insurance. So I really can't do that, which really kind of sucks. But you have your own insurance stories, I'm sure. Well, let me tell you about how little difference that actually makes.

No, I don't want to get into it too much. I've also had a very kind of rough week. As anybody listening knows, my dad has been having a lot of health issues the last two months have been pretty stressful. I don't I'm not going to get too into it here, but go listen to the old shows if you want an update on that.

You know, it's it's been one step forward, one step back. My dad hasn't really caught much of a break. He's back in the hospital this week, so been trying to get down there to, you know, at this point, it's just try to keep his spirits up because you got to get through this. You got to push through this. You'll he'll get where he needs to get.

Fingers crossed. But it's it's been rough. And I've got to say this last two, two and a half months has been a very I talked to you off air about this. It's been a very eye opening experience about the state of health care in this country. And you know what? Anybody that's trying to to pass legislation to get rid of the Affordable Care Act doesn't have a dad or a mom that has has has has health issues.

Honestly, you know, fuck you guys. Fuck you guys, because health care is so motherfucking bad in this country. It is so insurance is such a goddamn mess. You know what? Fix it. Fix it, people. I'm sick of this shit. I'm moving to Canada to hell with it.

Yeah, you only have to dodge some poo in Canada, although if it hits you in the face, you might get dysentery. But then at least you can go to the hospital for hey, you're covered. You're good. So that's that's where it's at. Anyway, covered in more ways than one. For those of you that come here every week for an awesome show about technology where we crap on everything and make fun of it.

You're not getting that this week because we've had both had a rough week, but we're cobbled together something. So here we go. Oh, yeah. And if you if you're a new listener, please come back next week. Yes, come back next week and we'll be back to our normal ramblings. Absolutely no bird news this week, which is amazing.

I've gotten a lot of texts from people who are traveling and are like, these fucking birds are everywhere. I know they're everywhere, aren't they? It's pretty crazy. I'm sure we'll be back on that next week. There's a new meme that is going around and occasionally I do like these. They're a lot of fun. And I've got to say, I posted this one on my Facebook last night and I've gotten other than cute pictures of the kiddo.

This is like my most responded to post in a long time. So this is a pretty funny one. The meme going around is that the number one song on your 14th birthday defines your entire life. And everybody is starting to post these and it's it's rather fascinating because you don't realize it really made me go back and go, boy, you kind of whitewash your past and everything is kind of crammed into one one thing.

Like all these songs seem like they came out the same year, but there's vast age differences between a lot of my friends that are posting. And it just feels I'm like, wow, those songs really came out 10 years apart, that sort of thing. It's been kind of blowing my mind. But mine was a U2's With or Without You, which I don't know.

I don't really know that that defines my life. I don't even like U2. I do spend a lot of time in Irish bars, though. So perhaps. Yeah, I don't know. Mine is Shout by Tears for Fears. And while I do like to talk a lot and shout at things, I really can't stand that song.

So I don't know what's going on there. Next week, though, is The Power of Love by Huey Lewis in the news. That's more me. I think so. You think? Or actually. Stylistically, I think you, you know, Huey. Yeah, yeah. You go back. You go back a few days or a few weeks and it's A View to a Kill by Duran Duran.

Now, that's very nice. That one more kind of slots in with, I think, my temperament. Right. Yeah. So a lot of people have been posting this. It's kind of fun. So just go Google, you know, figure out what your 14th birthday was that year and that month. And you can just quickly Google it and find out what the number one song was.

It's pretty, pretty interesting. All right. How about a little follow up? I didn't read the first one. So let's just go into the expense. Told you it's going to be a short show this week, guys. Yep. That's fine. So last week we had the article about how Amazon was saving the expanse from cancellation, except it wasn't confirmed yet.

Now it's confirmed. That's awesome. It is official. Season four is coming. Amazon will be bringing it to us. And because I live in Los Angeles, of course, there is now a semi-personal story. A friend of the show that I met up with the other day said he was at Library Alehouse here on Main Street, which is a fantastic place, and ran into Amos, a.k.a.

Wes Chatham, the actor, who was in there celebrating that he still had a job. That's awesome. That's awesome. He's one of my favorite characters on that show. Me too. I really like his character. He's pretty cool. Pretty awesome. And by all accounts, a very nice guy. In the article that you posted, I watched the video of when it was announced. And man, everybody lost their shit.

Well, it's one of those shows that, like, everybody was scratching their heads going, yeah, okay, it's not getting amazing viewership, but everybody that watches it loves it. It is a fan favorite. It's a great show. So very happy to hear it's coming back. And everybody I know watches the show.

And everybody's very excited. I need to slip, like, Jeff Bezos, some old DVDs of Farscape, so maybe he can bring that back, too. Maybe. This one, this is a scratcher of the head. We've talked about Pinterest on the show before and how they make money and how they do it so damn illegally.

Yes. Their sales in 2017 rose 58% to $473 million. I love the fact that you can just slap advertising on somebody else's copyrighted materials and take the money. I think we call that the internet.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It kind of makes me sick that these guys are making that much money off of photos that are almost all the content on that website is stolen. What do you mean almost? There is no original content on that site. Some people actually post a few of their own photos on that site.

All right. Very few. That's why I said almost all. Yeah. And finally, a Pew report has come out. We always like to talk about the Pew reports. Teens are abandoning Facebook. And I love the fact that they have to put in the headline, for real this time.

Nobody abandoned Facebook for real. That's because for the last five years, we've continually been told that teens are abandoning Facebook. Starting with five years ago, a 13-year-old named Ruby Carr sent a shockwave through the social media world when she wrote a blog post for Mashable headlined, I'm 13 and none of my friends use Facebook.

Well, this was not true because all the reports were showing that they did until this year. This year is the first time that U.S. residents aged 13 to 17 are showing a decrease in Facebook usage. It is no longer the dominant social network for teens. The three, the big three are YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, which Snapchat will be happy to hear because God knows there's still dead men walking.

I don't care what they say. Definitely. Yeah. But can you really call YouTube a social network? That's what I was thinking, too. I mean, there is, well, the comment section, that's social, right? Yeah, the cesspool of the internet. Yeah. And you can do messaging and it's as much as a social network as anything else.

It's just not the primary focus, right? The whole point is videos, but all the hallmarks and various parts of a social network are there. I guess if your channel is like your blog, you post your own videos, people can comment on it. There is kind of no functional difference between that and a blog, except you're posting video instead of words.

Exactly. Huh. I didn't think about it that way. It's a social network. Ups and doodads. I ran into an interesting article about the Amazon Echo. You and I are both people that have them and have had them for quite a long time now.

We're in the Amazon ecosystem as far as our voice-activated AI goes. Wouldn't this be called an echo system? Ba-dum-ching. An echo. Boom-ba. Look at you. So Will, oh no, sorry. This is by Christina Bonington. I haven't read anything. I thought it was Will Orasmus or whatever his name is, who always writes the good articles on tech over there, but it's not.

So these are the five types of Alexa users. Which one are you? The article asks. The first type is the creeped out owner of an overpriced paperweight. Okay. Which I know a few people that feel that way about it, and I'm like, well, you don't have to plug it in.

Yeah. My roommate is one of those people. That's why I just moved my echo to my office today. And then there is the early adopting Die Hard, which is kind of where we could have gone, I think you and I, but we didn't because we don't use our echoes for too much. Because we can't remember all the damn things that it can do.

We can't remember the trigger words. Exactly. That is the big problem. The third type is the streamer, which I believe we both fall into that category. We basically just use our smart speakers. They're basically just smart speakers for us. All I do is play music and podcasts off my echo. That is really it.

I don't play podcasts off the echo. I play basically talk radio from around the country that I can't get because I don't own an actual radio that's not in my car. So I play a lot of things off tune in, like Chicago radio, sometimes NPR, believe it or not.

I believe it. And K-Rock in the morning. And K-Rock 2 in the afternoon when I would like my old dose of 80s. But yeah, I just basically use it for music now. Yeah, pretty much. The next type is the weather summoner, which is people who just use it for weather, which in Southern California, not terribly useful.

Yeah, I kind of was doing that when I got here. And it's like, oh, it's pretty much the same. Yeah, it's sunny. Okay. The person who really just needs a clock that I don't understand at all. I do that every morning when I wake up. I'm like, hey, Alexa, what time is it? Yet you have an Apple Watch.

Well, it's turned off. You know, I've got it on theater mode and I don't if I'm if I'm asleep and I'm like just laying there, I don't want to have to raise my arm and tap the screen because I have to tap it. And that means I got to take my arms out from my pillow and it's just too much of a hassle.

So I have a dot next to my bed so I can find out the weather and what time it is. Gotcha. The next type is the Alexa denigrator. These are people who basically have it as a punching bag and they yell at it. My roommate did a lot of that. Yeah. And the last type is the apologist.

People who are appalled by the behavior above and think of it as their friend. I think I could probably keep this in the house if we could change the trigger word to hey, bitch, because that's what my roommate kept calling. Hey, bitch, set a timer. You know, that really should be a hack for these things.

Unfortunately, it's not. Yeah. Give it time. Give it time. Yep. And I found a very useful browser extension this week, particularly for us, because we do this show and we grab links all the time and all the links always have tracking tokens on them. And this is a simple plug in that basically strips out all the Google tracking so we can have nice, clean URLs in our show notes.

It's funny because I usually I clean them up by hand when I do. Yeah, I used to, too. Yeah, I know you used to. I have to go back and do it. But the annoying thing is the software that we use, Quip, for our show notes, when you as soon as you paste it in, that is the canonical URL.

So even if I edit it in the visual version, the it comes like when I copy everything out, it's still got that old version. So this is actually going to be useful for me. So it'll save me about, you know, 10 minutes every week going through and cleaning up all the damn URLs.

You're welcome. Thank you very much. My roommate this morning sent me an article about Walmart and how they were kicking Amazon's ass and coming back from the dead and going to be the top dog. But they were talking about their new jet black service. Right. And I'm like, oh, are they doing airplanes?

Because that's what it sounds like to me, you know, because they've got like I figured, you know, some kind of jet concierge service. No, no. Jetpack is the easiest way for busy moms to shop. Branding. What what what about shopping says jet black jet black?

Yeah, that's a horrible name for something that's that's that's this you know, that should be this should be a high end concierge service for like billionaires, not exactly. So it's only in New York right now in a very small subset. But when I opened up the website and I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, OK, I watched the video and I scroll down in the first picture of the kid.

I'm like, is that Brian's kid? Kind of reminded me of your kid. I actually just opened that and I was like, that does look a lot like my kid. I know. It's definitely an outfit I'd have him in. There's no doubt about that. I know. And I'm like, OK, well, Brian is a is a needy mom for shopping. So here we go.

I thought maybe this might actually be perfect for you. Well, Jason, I was tired of waiting for you to get our podcasting consulting service off the ground. So I started getting feedback on how bad my name is. So I'm going to have to rename this. OK, this is your side hustle.

Yeah. Oh, man. And speaking of the podcast service, you need to get your butt out here. That's all. Well, I was going to go in this week, but somebody was stuck in this. Somebody was not available. Let's just leave it at that. See, if I could have used your service for more toilet paper, it would have been great.

And there's a new one password update out. One password seven is out. This is a really nice update. Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't really delve into it. It's so functional for me. It's just I launch it. I use it to log into sites and that's that.

So, well, I use the I take a deeper look at it. Well, what I like about it is the the extension used to be for all the browsers. When you click on it, it would be a drop down. And it would go away when you mouse off of it. So if you miss, it would be like kind of a pain in the butt. Now it opens up in its own little mini window and gives you all of the different options.

But it also gives you your identities and your credit cards. So you can put it off to the side, do all your work, and then click the different things that you want. So if you're filling out a form, you can pick the identity that you want to fill out to match the credit card that you then can click right after it. I really, really like it. Yeah, it's pretty groovy.

Well done, guys. And I was going through the Watchtower service that they have this morning, and I found a lot of passwords I need to change because it tells you all the sites that were compromised with your logins that you should go change things. I don't know if you've played with that. We talked about it when it first came out, but if you haven't used it, I recommend going and checking it out because a lot of the stuff, yeah, was compromised, it seems.

So check it out, 1Password 7. Great. Yep, we love them. Wish they'd advertise with us again. Media Candy. We finally got a new Common Sense with Dan Carlin.

Did we? Which has always been one of my favorite shows. Yes, you alerted me to that, so I did download it and I listened to it, and I'm not sure that we needed an entire show about how he doesn't know how to do a show in this current reality. I know. I think that was kind of understood. That's why he hadn't done a show.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, either step up or shut up and get back to your hardcore history because this one was just like, I wanted my time back when I was done. And I love Dan, but this one was just kind of him going, I don't know what I'm going to do. Things are crazy. No shit. I like probably how all our listeners feel listening to this show.

At least we have some, you know, recommendations in this one. Yes, we do. So there was big news this week. As per usual, celebrities can tend to get themselves in a little bit of trouble on Twitter. And boy, oh boy, did Roseanne get herself in some trouble on Twitter this week.

Just a little. Just a little. Now, I don't even know where to start on this one. So I'm just not going to get too deep into it. I don't think we need to cover this. Everybody kind of knows about it. Everybody knows what's going on. I like the Vulture's take on it. We'll have the link in the show notes about how this is a sudden cultural shift and a good thing because it got canceled so swiftly.

And it's theoretically showing that, okay, maybe we're done with this whole racism thing and we can't just let it go anymore. Maybe. We'll see. I think the absolute. I was going to say, I think what we need to do before we, you and I need to go make a T-shirt.

It should be, but her Ambien. That is my favorite part of this whole story because first she did say she apologized and said she was quitting Twitter. What she has done now instead is double down. And she is tweeting and yelling at everybody and getting in fights with some of her co-stars and getting in fights with everyone.

And she just take the phone away from grandma. Someone is what's going on right now. But the best part is she did try to excuse it because she was on Ambien and the drug company that makes Ambien tweeted that racism is not a known side effect.

Which is just so genius that a company would do that. I'm in love with them. Yeah. You know, sometimes Twitter comes through. Sometimes it does. And Twitter has just been giving this week. It's been pretty fantastic. Yep. I watched a few Netflix things this week that I want to talk about.

Michelle Wolf, who is now infamous, never heard of her before until she did the correspondence dinner and had that amazing speech that really kind of got her in some trouble. And not really, though, because it was just funny. Has a show. Netflix gave her a show called The Break.

It is a John Oliver-esque type thing, except she also throws in sketches and things of that nature. I want to like this show. She talks out of the side of her mouth the entire time, and it's kind of a vocal fry, and I just can't do it.

I can't do it. It's too millennial for me. Okay. I never heard of her until you put her in here. I probably saw the ad for the show, but nah. Okay. I'm glad now that I don't even have to try it. Yeah. You don't have to try it. Don't worry about it. Stick with John Oliver and Jim Jeffries if you want to.

That stuff. I'm going to. I watched all of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. All the way up through Howard Stern? Oh, I watched Howard Stern last night and really enjoyed that one. Oh, good. I thought he was fantastic. So I've seen every episode. They're all pretty good. The beard is distracting, but it's Dave Letterman.

I've missed the guy, and he does good interviews. I wish my one complaint about it, and a friend of the show, Mike, said the same thing to me when I was talking about it, is it's edited. I wish it was just straight, no edit. You know what I mean? I don't like the asides where they leave and go do something and then come back to the interview.

Yeah, not a fan of that either. No, not a fan of that. Just the straight up interviews would be fantastic, but well worth the time and some interesting people in there. Evil Genius is quite popular at the moment. People are talking about it, so I watched it. It's a pretty interesting documentary about, I guess, I don't remember this when it took place, but it's a true crime, a bank robbery in Pennsylvania, which ends in the bombing death of a pizza delivery man.

He was sent into a bank with a bomb strapped around his neck, and it went off, and he died. And this gets into the entire case. It's four episodes. They're each about an hour long. It was really interesting. I really enjoyed watching it. I would recommend watching it, but I would argue about the title because I would argue that absolutely nobody involved in this was a genius.

It was just a lot of really dumb people, the criminals and the cops, a lot of dumb people. We just actually reviewed this on Feedback Friday on the Jordan Arbinger show yesterday, and that's pretty much, we said the same thing. I'm like, these people are not like the perpetrators of the Italian job right here, you know?

No, this is not a lot of geniuses going around in this series. No, but they couldn't get fucked up rednecks is the title. It wouldn't possibly not. Yeah. So it was good, though. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Yeah. No. I've been recommending it for a while now.

This was one of those ones that I randomly caught on the first day because it was a Netflix recommendation because I watched weird shit like that, and I thought it was really good. I really enjoyed it. What I enjoyed even more about it is that it's only four parts.

Yes. Yes. Wild Wild Country I really enjoyed, but it was way too long. And that's why I haven't watched it yet. I looked at the episode listing, and I was too daunted. The thing about it, just do them here and there, but it's really good, and they do, they could have, that should have been like a 20-parter if you really want to get into it, but there was no fluff, but it was just a really long story to tell.

Yeah. So the Americans series finale is over. Did you watch it? Yes, it is. I did. My wife even stayed up late to watch it. Okay. What are your thoughts on that? I'm very happy with it. Okay. We're not going to do any spoilers.

All right. I'm very pleased with it. At least we know where Henry is. That's my favorite joke about this because the season three through five or whatever is where the hell is Henry? We know where he is. He's about the only one who we know where he is for sure.

Yeah. Honestly. I liked it a lot. I liked the fact that it was really kind of left very realistic and very open-ended. The reason I'm okay with that is because they didn't open up every single show saying the Jennings have a plan. Oh, get over it, man.

Get over it. ESG was like 20 years ago now. It doesn't matter. I'm still, look, I made you laugh. That's true. Yeah. So I was okay with it. I really was. I thought they did the show justice. They ended it basically the way the whole show ran. This whole, the show was never about, you know, big, huge action sequences and amazing things occurring.

And oh my God, this happened. It was always a very slow boil. Yeah. And that's how they ended it. Yeah. I have to say that the acting I thought was perfect. And the way that they ended it was, well, we'll talk about this after the show because this is good stuff. But I, I, I, it was the, the emotional ending that I was hoping for.

It was pretty much everything that happened. Like you said, no shoot them ups or shit like that. But the, the scenes that you're waiting for, for seven years when they actually happen, I was like, you know, I was grabbing the tissues when it was over and they went to commercial.

I'm like, that was well done. It was very well done. Slate has a really interesting article about it that I think you'll enjoy reading now that you've seen it. The Americans perfected the art of the anti-climax. Yeah. Basically gets into what you and I were just saying. So it's, it's a good, because I already missed the show.

That's the sign of a really good show is my wife and I looked at each other and went, oh man, it's over. Yeah. Well, we'll, we'll, trust me, we'll talk about this off the air over a beer because we have, I have, we have thoughts. You have thoughts. Yeah. And even, even my roommate who watched it, who wasn't a fan of the ending, even like, you know, two hours later, we were still talking about it.

So that is the sign of a good show. Yeah. Another good show that is back is Animal Kingdom. I've talked about it on the show a couple of times. Season three just started this week and they're going after it this season with completely changing some stuff up and doubling down on some other things.

If you know what I'm talking about, I guess there's, there's a major spoiler at the beginning of the show. If you've Googled it, you're fucked, but it's a, it's, I love this show. It's just, you know, cause I equate it to what was the Keanu Reeves show with the surfers point break. I feel like it's point, it's point break meets leave it to beaver.

Okay. That's all I can really say about it, but I really enjoy it and I'm glad it's back. And I didn't, you said I was going to see billboards now that I'm back in LA and I had, didn't, haven't seen one billboard. Oh wait, I haven't left the house in a week. That's right. Nevermind. Also it's TNT.

I don't know if they actually have any money. Oh, good point. Good point. So, you know, you'll see Amazon and Netflix billboards everywhere. Yeah. God, if I see another Ozarks billboard, I'll, I'm going to shoot myself. Oh yeah. They're everywhere. Aren't they? For your consideration. Great show. Only in LA. Only in LA.

Some new music this week that I found a underworld has released another new song. And unlike last time when it was just an instrumental, that was a little bit boring. This has Iggy pop on, on vocals and it's kind of a banging little track. I really enjoyed it. New to me, as I was schooled, there's cold frapp as an album out has had an album out for a year.

I posted it as if it just came out because to me it had, because I somehow this totally dropped off my radar completely. The album's called silver. The whole album is absolutely fantastic. The reason it popped up for me is they're doing a re-release of one of the tracks, Ocean, and David Gahan from Depeche Mode is doubling down on the vocals on the re-release, which is amazing.

It's really good. It's like the best Depeche Mode song that's come out in 20 years and it's not Depeche Mode. Oh, nice. Very good. And Gorillaz have announced that they're going to have a new album called the Now Now. That'll be out June 29th. And they have dropped the single called Humility and have released a video.

which is entirely shot in Venice Beach. And as you know, if you've been listening to this show, all I've been doing is complaining about how all people do in Venice is record themselves and put themselves up on YouTube. And that's what this entire video is. So now you know what they've been filming. Yes, apparently.

So except that it's got the 3D people in there. But if you'd like to see basically the streets that I walk up and down, there you go. The entire video right there. All right. Well, there you have it. And finally, I just want to mention that Netflix, along with the makers of Ambien, have won the internet this week for being very funny.

Also related to Roseanne, they tweeted out. Reminder, at One Day at a Time is a sitcom about a tight-knit working-class family that tackles extremely topical social issues in a smart and innovative way. You know, if you're suddenly looking for a show like that. Well played. Well done, Netflix.

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

And Dave is their overlord. Welcome back, Dave. With the dippy so. Yes, that's right. I rule with an iron, multi-gemmed fist. Nice. All of the Infinity Stones. That's exactly right. Right, exactly. Look, I got that right without even seeing the movie.

Very good. Very nice. Very nice. Well, it's good to be back. How's everybody doing? Oh, it's been a week. It's been a week. Yeah. So I gathered from your other social media sources. Well, I hope things calm down for everybody and settle in.

It's been kind of a quiet week for cybersecurity news, actually. Wow. Just as we're coming to record here today, the news just broke that Google has planned not to renew its contract for Project Maven, which I think sounds best in a Jerry Lewis voice.

Project Maven! That's their controversial drone AI imaging program. And there was a lot of discord within Google that they were involved with this at all. And I have to say, I'm pleased and somewhat surprised that Google decided to, that they're not going to renew it, it means that it's going to run through 2019.

But after that, they're out of there. Yeah. I guess their new slogan is, we'll just do a little bit of evil. Evil with an expiration date. Right, exactly. With a finish line. Yeah. So... Well, that's good. That's good news. I think so.

Our next story here is about CSS, cascading style sheets. Yes. And hopefully you guys can fill in some of the technical details that are a little fuzzy for me here. But some researchers have found, this is a story from Bleeping Computer, they found that they can use CSS to de-anonymize Facebook users.

Yeah. Yes. This is actually not really that new. Is that right? Yeah. You've been able to fingerprint users for a long time using different bits of CSS. Well, actually, a lot of it was the JavaScript canvas.

But also, CSS... Well, CSS has now gotten so powerful and involved that it's supplemented some of the JavaScript stuff that you used to be able to do to kind of do these kind of hacks. So... Yeah, yeah. Basically, it's looking like you can move div scans across the stack to iframes, which should not be possible.

It wasn't back in the day when I was doing this. No. Wow. So it's sort of like... Iframes were sovereign Terran Tori back in the day. Well, so... Terran Tori. Help me, help me. Terran... Yeah. Good director. Terran Tori. Yeah, exactly. So help me understand this here. My impression is this is sort of like a CRT scanning an old tube television, that they're going along pixel by pixel and being able to report back the value of each pixel.

Is that how it's working? Basically, in a nutshell, that's kind of what it's doing. It's interesting because it's obviously an error. Google and Mozilla are both providing fixes for this. So you should not have been able to do what you are able to currently do.

Yeah. So that's not good. Yeah. Well, I think it speaks to the growing power of the browser. And, you know... Also, I was curious, can you guys think of any... What would the legitimate useful purposes of this functionality be?

Pairing a cookie to a username on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. There isn't really a legitimate need. There's a reason iframes were always kept separate. You were supposed to be able to pull in other content and not be able to, you know, read any of the data from that content.

It's supposed to live within its own stack, not cross the streams, as it were, to, you know, go Ghostbusters with it. Right. Yeah. Dom used to say no go for that. Yeah. I can't think of a legitimate reason. I can only think of illegitimate reasons that you would want to do that.

Jason, anything come to your mind? Yeah. It's a cool hack. Yeah. There's nothing that should... There's no reason for this. No. No. That region around the iframe should be verboten for any type of scanning from any other process. Right. Because very often we find ourselves, when these new features get announced, you know, there was the one a couple weeks ago where they started what they gave...

They gave Microsoft Excel some JavaScript capabilities. What could possibly go wrong? Right. Well, and we were all saying, who asked for this? Yeah. Right? And so is it... Where do we cross that line where the product people are saying, hey, we got to add more features?

We got to add more features, you know? Well, you have basically a feature complete product. Well, she had a builder value. The new ones. Well, exactly. Exactly. You know, I mean, you could have started this podcast, Dave, with us with that, who asked for any of this is what we've been asking for the subtitle.

We didn't even want Blink! What the hell? Nobody wanted Blink! Who asked for this? The grumpy old geek story. Exactly. That'll be the oral history when the time comes 25 years from now when we're all in our retirement homes. And we'll make it autoplay.

You know, it is funny because now that Jason and I have really scaled back being developers, watching the state of these things roll out, it's very amusing. I'm so glad I don't do this much anymore for a living because keeping up with this stuff used to be our job, and now I can just kind of look at it and laugh.

Yeah. Unfortunately, all of the people like us are sitting back and looking at it and laughing, which is why it's going to hell in a handbasket. Interesting. Well, the next story we have here is from Wired, and boy, this headline's a little... There's not a lot of ambiguity here. It's the bleak state of federal government cyber security.

Yeah. Now, it's interesting because... It's right there on the tin. It's right there. When President Trump came into office, we all held out a little bit of hope because one of his priorities seemed to be... The cyber security.

Right. That was one of the first things he did was put out that executive order, and this is something that has bipartisan agreement. Everyone agrees that the cyber is important. And so, this report is... This is a result of that executive order.

He demanded that the various government agencies put together reports on basically how they're doing, and the reports have come back, and the answer is not so good. Of the 96 federal agencies assessed, 74% are either at-risk or high-risk.

That is not good. Yeah. Yeah. They said 38% of government cybersecurity incidents, they never identify the attack vector, which means they... Wow. They don't know how it happened.

It just happened. I don't know why this big gaping, burning hole in the ground is here, but it is. All I can say is, nyet, nyet, nyet. Right. When you think about all the various things that we talk about in this segment on this show, the hacks from these companies that literally spend millions upon millions of dollars on cybersecurity, and they still get hacked, and then you think about our government, which

is not doing apparently anything, and has extremely important data, it's terrifying. Yeah, and no shortage of resources, right? No. Just not being allocated. These are national security issues, and when you pile on top of that, things like the removal of the head of cybersecurity for the White House, and not the elimination of that position, which

by all accounts was sort of the person who wrangled everyone else and provided leadership, they're saying now that without that person writing that, that the agencies will just kind of do their own thing, and it makes it easier for them to avoid accountability.

Wasn't the responsibility for that transferred to John Bolton's mustache? Well, it's like a filter, Jason. In a way. It's a filter that the cyber has to go through. In a way. Okay, because I don't want to have any pictures of anybody writing John Bolton's mustache.

Yeah. It's the mustache firewall. Yes. Better reboot that thing. I'm getting Firestache.com. That's my new. Firestache. That's my new dancer name. Right, Firestache. Yeah, this is not a good report. No, not at all. On the plus side, it looks like you're going to be employed for quite some time, Dave.

I know, I know. And I think what makes it even worse is that it's not like there's a big plan to make it better. There's no plan. It's sort of defeatist, you know. We're just, nobody's manning this ship right now in a meaningful way.

And like you said, it's kind of terrifying. We don't know what it really means, you know? Well, I think it goes back to just the optics that we had when Zuckerberg was testifying. You had a table full of people, median age, probably 74, who don't understand any of this.

And these are people that are in charge and would be the ones, other than Ted Lieu, screaming about this sort of stuff. The people that we have in office are either way too old or totally unqualified to do any of this stuff.

And they don't seem to think it's important. All you do is you put the task force together and you put somebody who knows in charge and then they go and fix things. We all know this needs to be fixed. I don't understand how it's just been, all right, well, we're going to get rid of the position and well, oh well.

But don't you think, don't you think this is also a result of the erosion of expertise where if you're an expert. What I call the iPhone effect. Yeah. I really do call it that because we went from a point in time where, where people like Jason and myself were the ones that were doing things that we understood them and we built them.

Then the iPhone came along and all of a sudden you had a tweet app and you were on the internets and you don't, no longer was there any understanding of the processes or the culture that that was involved with the internet. It just, everybody was there because it was so easy and there was no expertise anymore.

I totally agree with that. But I'm coming at it from a little different direction and saying that we have this dismissal of the actual experts of saying, you know, like, oh, well, who are you going to believe? You're going to believe those elite cybersecurity experts or are you going to believe good old real Americans like me?

Right. You know. Well, it's, it's the fake news effect and it's sad and that's what's happened. It's, it's, we will dismiss experts and what I feel is more important than what you know. Right, right. I, I, again, I think that's another one of those things we were holding out hope for when this administration came in, that even if we had limited intellectual capability at the top, that as long as they put good people in the important positions, then maybe, you know, everything would be okay.

And we've seen the opposite of that. Yes. The swamp is filling up. Yeah. Yeah. It is not being drained. Limited intellectual resources. I'm going to use that one. I like that. That's on my business card. I don't know what that says about me. That's right. Exactly.

Oh, it's diplomacy. Yes. All right. One just quick thing here. I included a link. We've had reports this week. There's been recommendations from the FBI and other organizations for everybody to reset your router. Just, just the easiest thing you can do is unplug your router, count to 30, replug it back in again.

Have you recycled the power on your, on your device? Yeah. We've got this thing making its way through called VPN filter, which is infected. Oh, I don't know. Half a billion routers around the world. It got through the fire stash. That's right. That's right. And it maintains itself in the router's RAM.

So, if you reboot, it's gone. So, Johannes Ulrich, who is a regular over on the Cyber Wire, has a nice little write-up here of various ways you can reset your router. And he's got a lot of good advice in here about strengthening your password and so on and so forth.

He's a guy who knows about these things. So, if you're not satisfied with just unplugging your router, cycling the power, which absolutely everyone, please do. If you want to dig into it a little deeper, we'll have a link here. You can find out a little more details on how to take it to the next level.

Yep. Guess what I'll be doing at my parents' house this weekend. Yeah. Me too. You know, a good reminder. All right. Well, most importantly this week. Yes, let's get to the importance. What I've been waiting all week to be able to talk to Brian about. Yes.

I have actually held back on sharing my opinions on social media because I wanted to unpack it here first. Well, let's get into it. I slid things off the last one of these we did, The Last Jedi. So, Brian, why don't you kick us off with the Han Solo movie?

I found it to be a fully satisfying one-off movie. I enjoyed it immensely. I feel that the actor Aiden, whatever his last name is, had a few creaky moments, but overall embodied the Harrison Ford-ness of Solo.

And I really did enjoy it. I've talked to people who thought it wasn't great. It was a heist movie. It wasn't a big swashbuckling adventure. It wasn't supposed to be a grandiose, you know, world-changing thing. It was just a pleasant movie with some great characters.

I agree. This was the most fun that I've had at a Star Wars movie since the original trilogy. Yeah, I agree. I actually do think I enjoyed it even more than Rogue One, which was surprising for me. And I think what really sealed the deal for me was Donald Glover just killed it as Lando.

Yeah, he was great. Absolutely killed it. He was great. He was fantastic. So, yeah. I mean, we don't really need to go into spoilers. We don't have to in any way, shape, or form. It was a highly enjoyable movie. And I guess it helped that I went into it with some trepidation.

I wasn't sure what I was going to feel. I wasn't terribly excited for it because I didn't really think that we needed this. I would still argue that we didn't need it, but I'm glad we got it. Yeah. And I enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. And I heard some people criticizing and say, well, why do we need to know about some of the things that were revealed in this movie?

You know, why can't we just leave those things mysteries? And I enjoyed just about every one of them. I found them really satisfying and fun, and there were moments of genuine delight. I caught myself halfway through the movie, I caught myself just sitting there with this big grin on my face going, I am just having so much fun.

And I think that's an important distinction because when people – I get asked a lot, you know, people know my love affair with Star Wars, and they say, what's your favorite Star Wars movie? I say, well, my favorite Star Wars movie is A New Hope. I think the best Star Wars movie is Empire Strikes Back.

Yes. There's a difference. And so I think the distinction here is that I think this is a really, really fun movie. Doesn't mean it's a great movie, but I think it's a really fun movie. And what I was thinking was in the same way that I think Top Gun is a really fun movie, right?

It's not Oscar winning. No, it's not a great movie. But boy, is it fun. And the other thing that – in a similar way to Top Gun, you know, I saw the original trilogy when I was, what, eight years old, 11 years old, and 14 years old.

So when Princess Leia came out in that gold bikini, I was the exact right age for it to have the maximum amount of impact on me and hardwire itself into my brain. And I felt myself feeling those same sorts of feelings where this film wired into all of those deep emotional pleasure centers that I associate with Star Wars despite myself.

I just couldn't help it. So I highly recommend it. If you're the kind of Star Wars fan that I think Brian and I are, I think you're going to have a good time. I totally agree with everything that you just said. And you're making me, like, revisit how I was feeling in the theater at the time.

And you absolutely nailed it. I felt like I was a teenager again. Yeah. I have not enjoyed a movie this much in quite a long time, particularly sci-fi. Because sci-fi has been – there have been much better movies. I would actually even say Rogue One is probably a better movie.

But nothing I've enjoyed quite as much as this in a very long time. And you're right. All the reveals, sure, we didn't need to know them. But I enjoyed them. I thought they were fun. They made me smile. We'll do – if you have not seen this yet, we'll do one little spoiler because there is one note in the entire movie that bumped me.

Okay. And I'll tell you what it is. You can go into that in a second. I'm going to take my headphones off. And then I'll be back in like two minutes. Okay. I don't want to be – I don't want to be spoiled. I'll be right back. Okay. No problem. All right. Wow. Jason's actually going to see it. Wow. Okay. So the one thing that bumped me, not Darth Maul being there, because I knew from hearing about the comics and the animated series that he survived and ended up being part of the crime syndicate and all that.

Right. That didn't bump me. That didn't bump me. What bumped me was why did he light his lightsaber when he's basically on a Skype call with somebody who is now a second lieutenant. Right. Right. Right. Is he like one of those guys – one of those butterfly knives, you know, the guys who just can't help but just flicking their butterfly knife around, right?

Yes. Yeah. That is the one thing I was like, ooh, Darth Maul. And I was like, why did he do that? He's on the phone. And I understand that was a reshoot, that that was not – the lighting of the lightsaber was not in the original shoot, that that is one thing that Ron Howard went back and changed.

But without that, there would not have been a lightsaber in the whole movie. And I would have been okay with that. I didn't miss it. I didn't miss there being Jedis in this film. Me either. It was nice to see the rest of the universe, really. And one thing that I did also find a little bit jarring but not unsurprising is how dark the universe is actually painted in this movie.

Like, it is a dark, dangerous universe. There's no doubt about it. Right. Right. Yeah. So, highly recommended. I can't wait to go see it again. My whole family enjoyed it. There was about a group of – about 10 of us who went to see it.

And every single one of us came out smiling and really enjoyed it. I'm surprised that it hasn't done better business than it is. What I'm hoping is – I wonder if that's Star Wars fatigue. It's just we're getting so hit with it. Yeah. And some theories were so many people disliked The Last Jedi.

It might be tainting people going to see this. Yeah. If that's the case and that was the case for both you and I, this certainly – this cleared the taste out of my mouth. Well, and that's another thing I'm wondering about is what's the breakdown there? Is it the people who did not enjoy Last Jedi, are they going to enjoy this and vice versa?

Right? Right. Are the people who loved Last Jedi for all those wrong reasons, are they going to not enjoy this one? Because that to me is fascinating as well. What are the things about this that make it feel like a Star Wars movie to people like you and me who grew up with these movies?

And how is that different from the people who really, really like Last Jedi? My sense is maybe a half generation behind us who are coming at it from a more, I don't know, intellectual maybe? A more, I don't know, grown up.

They were older when they first were exposed to it. I don't have a clear understanding of that, but it's something I think might be interesting to keep an eye on. Yeah, I agree. And I do wonder if – is it the people that grew up with those first three prequels?

Because that is so also not Star Wars. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. I don't know. You know, it is weird to talk about a series of movies of which there are, what, 10 now? And, like, half of them are crap, and we don't like half of them, but yet we're so invested in this universe.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Anyway. No, this felt 100% like a Star Wars movie from the original mold of the original, you know, Holy Trilogy. Yeah. And it was just a delightful surprise. So, go out there and see it, folks.

Support this film, and we'd love to know what everybody thinks. I can't wait to find out what Jason thinks of it when he finally ever goes and sees it. If he takes a side trip off to Europe to check it out. Right. I see his walkers. Have you guys done sucking each other's lightsabers? Can we get back to this now? Yes.

In fact, yes. Actually, I think we're done stroking our sabers. That's right. Okay. That's right. Fantastic. All right. All right. Until next time. Yeah. Have a good one, guys. I'll talk to you soon. All right. In keeping with, I guess, the theme of today, which is companies going ahead and going for it online, I'm sure this wasn't actually sanctioned by Google, but Google Translate did a very

good job smacking the crap out of some flat earthers, and this does deserve a round of applause. If you were to go to Google Translate and type in the words, I am a flat earther in English and select the French translation, I do not read French. Jason, do you? Yes, we are. I do not, but I can pronounce it.

And if you were to swap the languages back and retranslate that French slogan into English, it reads, I am a crazy person. Well done. Now, for the record, these guys do a lot of crowdsourcing at Google for the translation services.

So that just shows the people have spoken. So that just shows the people have spoken. Southwest Airlines. Boy, airlines have had a rough go of it recently. This is no different. Southwest Airlines is at it again, according to fatherly.com, despite having all the proper documents in hand.

One mother had what she called an uncomfortable and hurtful experience this week when a Southwest Airlines gate agent at Denver International Airport asked that she prove her one-year-old biracial son was actually hers. She is a basketball coach at the University of California, Berkeley. Her name is Lindsay Gottlieb, and she had flown with her son on the airline dozens of times in the past.

Still, the Southwest employee insisted on seeing her son's birth certificate because the two have different names. This is not good. I have a biracial son. My wife did not take my last name, so this could easily be me. Now, Jason made a valid point.

Go ahead. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. No, I was just wondering who the moron was here because nowadays everybody is so quick to judge and quick to scream internet outrage that it could have been the woman who just thought she was being discriminated against because Southwest does have policies for this kind of thing to, A, to make sure the child is over two years old because if they fly in your lap, it's free.

Also... Under. Under two years old. Oh, under two years old. Sorry. Over, under. I'm thinking gambling here. Do my gambling. But no, yeah, they make sure that the kid is under two for free but over for tickets. Yeah. Anyway, back to it. But it also comes back to human trafficking where people do take babies, Angelina Jolie being the prime example.

So they want to make sure the children aren't being Jolied away to go other places. And I can see how people can get butthurt, especially if they're in a hurry. And, you know, that brings down a lot of empathy. And also the gate person might have been having a bad day and been an asshole. So I was just wondering from your side who the moron of the week is here because this one seems like kind of a crapshoot.

I see how you could feel that way. I am sticking with Southwest Airlines being the moron if, according to apparently across multiple social networks, because apparently this woman, Lindsay Gottlieb, has both tweeted and posted on Facebook about it. I guess her Facebook is public since people can go see it.

That she published a tweet and posted on Facebook that not only did the Southwest employee ask her to confirm her son's parentage, they also asked if both the baby's parents were present. So that's not really kind of the direction you want to go with that. I understand checking the age.

That's fair. Beyond that, moron. We've got some new Patreon subscribers. Sikonth, I believe that's how it's pronounced. Probably wrongly. David, Darren, who upped his pledge.

Thank you very much, Darren. And Andre. Andre writes, love your show. You are awesome. There is only one thing that bugs me. As a Firefox contributor and mozillion, I really feel sad when geeks promote and use proprietary browsers. Maybe it's just that grumpy geeks use Opera and non-grumpy ones use Firefox or Firefox focus.

Oh, AI, AI, AI, and blockchain. Smiley face. Fair enough. We've got another comment about Firefox coming up where I will discuss this topic. Okay. And we just, to all of our Patreon subscribers, thank you so very much.

Jason and I are discussing doing potential one-off segments for our subscribers when we hit the 1K mark. So keep on donating. We appreciate it. Yep, we'll figure it out when it happens. But you guys make it happen, we'll figure it out. Yes. And over at PayPal, we have a continuation of the random donations number-wise.

Joseph sent us $8.88. And he says, I hope things are improving for the both of you. If you've heard of the show, they haven't. If you have a moment, check out the podcast, The Hilarious World of Depression. Perhaps some of your listeners dealing with this difficulty can get a smile out of it. I found the first season to be the most enjoyable one.

And we have a link in the show notes to that. So thank you very much, Joseph. I will definitely check that out. I think I've heard it before. I'm pretty sure I've heard it before in my travels. But I'll check it out again. And over on Facebook, Barry writes in, protesters toss scooters in the streets to block tech buses in SF. Oh, talk about being hoisted upon your own petard.

Yes. Very nice. I like that story a lot. So over at Twitter, we have a number of comments this week. As Seth says, here is a potential new name for your show, Grumpy Old Geeks, the blockchain edition. We said it, so fund us, motherfuckers. I like that one. Me too.

And Moz6502 writes in, look at the amount of followers enchanted by his tweets. And this is a link to Clint Eastwood, who hasn't tweeted. This is not. Nor is it apparently an official account. And he's just pointing out that there are 82,000 followers for an account that may not be official and has no single tweets whatsoever.

Yeah, that's insane. Amazing. Michelle says, I think drunk Jason is my favorite Jason. Thanks for making me LOL at work. Were we really that drunk? The multiple crying emojis. I wasn't so much drunk as I was tired because we did it at night and I don't do well at night.

Yes. Christopher writes in, I believe Boatswain is pronounced Bozen, as in Bozen whistle. But I call it Bozwin, not Bozen. Okay, so I was close. I was close. And he says, nautical pronunciations are messed up. And he gives a link, which has too many S's.

Let me fix that right now. But yeah, Forecastle is pronounced folksal. I know that because I worked on Titanic. How about them apples? How about that? You're such a seaman. Oh, shut up. Write film, sleep, repeat. Writes in, do you think maybe Tesla should stop calling it autopilot?

Probably. We've got to go to the marketing department on that one. But they just hired the marketing guy from Snapchat, so maybe he'll fix it. Maybe. Mr. Dom writes in, when you had enough of assistance in a speaker and no direct, open, direct audio connectivity, and don't want to rely on an app to stream audio to a speaker, this beauty comes to the rescue.

The Aura Studio 2 wireless home speaker with ambient lighting. It's pretty. It's pretty. I've tried those things before, though. Every single one of them has not had the balls to even fill the room to even get loud enough so I can hear it. Right. But if it's got balls.

Right. And Random Funk sends, it is so next level, I can hear Brian's short-circuiting now. And this is a link to Patrick Monaghan. Oh, no, please don't. The rest of the show business would be so owned. And that's a retweet of somebody named Jack Posobiec, who I don't know. Roseanne, Tim Allen, Kevin Sorbo, Stephen Baldwin, and other blacklisted content creators should start up their own version of a blockchain-funded Netflix.

I welcome that, and I hardly think that they're blacklisted. Oh, yeah, I don't think Kevin Sorbo was blacklisted. I don't know what he's done. Stephen Baldwin is just a no-talent ass clown. Roseanne is not blacklisted, and neither is Tim Allen. It's just that the networks that were funding their shows decided to stop.

They're more than welcome to go do anything they'd like. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ed Jensen writes us over at GOG.show. Hey, Grumps, the Opera browser is majority owned by a dodgy Chinese company that has been caught behaving badly on more than one occasion. It should come as no surprise that they're using dark UI patterns.

God knows what else is going on under the hood. You might want to reconsider recommending it to your listeners. Have you tried Firefox lately? It's really good. Love your show. Two thumbs up. Now, since I got this, I had totally forgotten that Opera was bought out by that dodgy Chinese company. And now I'm even more freaked out that I have little snitch with open rules doing whatever the hell it wants to do.

So, I have tried Firefox lately as of yesterday morning. I ported everything over to see how difficult the process was. Not that difficult. They do have a URL syncing service, so I can sync it between all my systems since, you know, Xmarks is gone and Firefox is doing their own thing.

So far, it's been a pleasant switchover, and I got to say, it's faster than Opera, believe it or not. Oh, God. I want to switch back again. I know. I don't want to, but it is faster. I'm just worried about the Chinese, like, you know, doing whatever they want since I've got my basically little snitch ass to the wind right now for Opera.

Oh, wow. You had Chinese webcams for, like, three years. I still do. Everybody that has a webcam has a Chinese webcam. Look where every webcam is made, and then you tell me nobody has a Chinese webcam. Fair enough. ARP writes us, little snitch allows you to record PCAPs that you can analyze for shenanigans.

If you don't know Wireshark, you can use Explicco. So, I've tried that before, and it is a pain in the butt if you don't want to spend a lot of time on it. It just doesn't go, oh, here's my PCAP file. Let's open it in Wireshark, and then you just go through it, and you have to know what you're looking at. I kind of know what I'm looking at, but I'm not great at it, and I never really wanted to go that deep to figure out all of that stuff because I'm like, fuck it.

You know, there are some days when you just really don't care about cybersecurity, but I've used Wireshark and a couple other tools to run PCAPs files, and it's interesting. It's definitely interesting, but I'm not about to do that with my web browser because so much data goes through it that it's just going to be...

Too deep of a dive for me. Yeah, yeah. You've got the NSA problem where they've got so much data to go through. So, I'm not going to bother with that, but that's pretty cool that they allow you to do that. I did not know that. So, in the future, I might actually use that for some apps. Zakanth Dasari writes in, hey, Jason and Brian, I love your podcast.

I listen every week. I just subscribed as well. Thank you very much. I am first movie, TV, comics nerd, and next software developer. All right. That's good because, you know, the first gives you joy. The second does not. No. I love you guys discussing about various TV shows, movies, technologies, et cetera.

By the way, I like your Star Wars discussions. Well, good, because we're having one today. I found this YouTube video very interesting about Star Wars. I hope you might have watched it already. Did you get a chance to watch this one, Brian? I did. Star Wars, the complete canon timeline. Very interesting. Geeky, but interesting.

All right. We like that. Another small suggestion. Hope you don't mind. Can you spend 10 minutes in your show about politics with technology, politics using technology, politics abusing technology, and how it's affecting common man life? Sorry if you already covered that in your previous episodes.

Well, here's the thing. When Donald Trump was elected, we did discuss this quite a bit, and the people who listened to the show stopped. So, I don't know, Brian, what do you think? I think we do touch on it every week.

We did last time with the phone, Trump and his phone. Yeah, but any time that we start to talk about this, we're told that we just, you know, we're snowflakes and people tune out because they can't handle any logical discussion about things. Stick to making fun of Airbnb, you snowflake, twink, whatever.

Yes, we're allowed to crap all over Bird all we want, but we can't talk about the fact that Trump is using an unsecured phone. Uh-huh. That's about it. That's the way it seems to work. In a nutshell, that's kind of how it is. Yeah. But we sneak it in there as often as we can because sometimes things are just so egregious that we can't not.

So, and we will continue with that. Hey, we talked about Hillary's emails and servers and all that, too. We did. We totally talked about it. We did. We did. We got no props for that one. All right. Next up is AJ. Hey, guys. Love your work. This recently popped up in a news site here in Australia. I like that he put it in quotes.

And I thought I'd send it through. It really feels like they were desperate for content. While the tips aren't completely useless, they only managed to come up with really four basic tips. I was disappointed that they didn't play the Facebook is listening to you line. Oh, man. Yeah. This is a site called news.com.au.

And it's a smart gadgets, ways to minimize privacy and security risks. And, yeah, there's not too much here that you don't already know. Except an autoplay video. Yes. There's that. We would like to skip those as much as we can. Zachary Garner writes in, just wanted to share this with you guys to give you props.

Saw this article on my feed this morning and laughed. They suggested using the Have I Been Pwned tool. I remember you guys talking about this site what seems like over a year ago. Maybe even as far as three years. Yeah. All I can say is sponsors pay the man. Y'all on top of your shit.

As always, keep the great work. Keep up. Keep up the great work. Yep. Yep. Yep. We've been talking about that site for a long time. So Mad Mike writes in, says, hope everyone is feeling better. Again, spoiler alert. We're not. I did check the archive before writing this and couldn't see anything.

So maybe you haven't covered it. Useless Ethereum token. UEToken.com. Whoever created the site has a great sense of humor. Enjoy. It is very funny. This is the greatest thing. The logo. I don't know if you noticed the logo. Oh, it's so good. Middle finger. As soon as I saw the logo, I'm like, okay, I'm in.

I am in with this one. Yeah. Ether contributed. I had a feeling someone would waste their money. IT Black Sheep writes in, long time listener, first time commenting. As a grump, mid-aged geek working on his gray beard, I enjoy your guys' take on all things tech.

I meant to post this a few weeks back when you were discussing the Google duplex. It's how the real call went, and it's a YouTube video that we'll have in the show notes. So you can go check it out for yourselves, guys. Also, some shows back when you were talking about someone DDoSing an Indiana spam call center.

Here's some audio from one of that one as well. So there's another YouTube link that you guys can check out. And thanks to Jason, I can't listen to any podcast on less than 1.5x now. They all sound drunk. Ain't that the truth? But if you listened to our show last week, we were. Those are pretty good YouTube videos.

Thanks for sending that in. For the first time in a long time, we don't have any new iTunes reviews. That makes me sad. It makes me sad. Although, to be fair, we could have some international ones. We usually don't get those. No, in fact, we don't. Sadly, sadly enough. All right. Well, come on, people.

Help us out. Toss us a bone. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show.com and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top as well as tell all your friends.

And like Brian said, steal their phone and subscribe. It is today is Friday, June 1st. While we're recording, I just happened to notice a couple of birthdays. So wishing a happy birthday to Alan Wilder, who's the ex Depeche Mode member, Simon Gallup, the bass player for The Cure, and Mike Joyce of The Smiths, the triumvirate of bands that kind of got me through high school.

Yeah, that's kind of crazy. Yeah, pretty crazy, right? Yep. And a good shout out to my friend Jason Sanderson, who came all the way from Manchester, England to hang out, and then we didn't really get to that much. Half because of Domino's problems and half because the weather in our United States blows.

So until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 262. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week. Well, I was actually going to roll into it, but then I didn't want to do the thing where we both start talking at the same time. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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