265: 5 Easy Ways To Keep Facebook from Listening To You

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by RxBar. For 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm back and I'd like to thank Kyle for co-hosting last week. I listened to the show, you guys did a great job, and we should all get together, ride a bird, and have a beer. Oh, I can skip the bird ride. Me too.

My balance ain't what it used to be. So how are you doing, Jason? I'm imagining the part of Los Angeles that you were in is always hot, so you're probably sweltering, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. That was kind of a bug in the system for this new studio that it does get, even with an air conditioning and three fans, it can get up to 100 degrees in here.

That's rough. It's been a stressful week trying to figure out how to kind of fix this without, you know, spending any money. Well, it's a little cold here, so I'm actually wearing my jacket, my I wish Donald Trump would fall into a dumpster fire, don't you, jacket. But it's just a jacket, snowflakes. It doesn't mean anything.

We'll get to that later. We'll get to that one later. Let's talk for a second about ads, Jason. It's been two weeks since I've been able to talk to you, and I've been seeing these everywhere from Facebook's, Sorry we screwed up. Won't you come back? We're going to make it just the way it was before when you really liked us to Wells Fargo.

We're reestablishing ourselves this year to Ubers. Every ride is a new chance to whatever the hell they're trying to say to Blue Shield saying, When it comes to our life, our health, every choice we make matters. The new advertising model is really, hey, we're totally shit, but you caught us out on it.

So we're going to try to be better now. Yeah, that's how it goes. That's it. That's it. I love it. It really drives me crazy. 2018, the year of we fucked up. Yeah, that seems to be so for everybody. Now, we've talked about the trolley problem often on the show, usually having to do with the aforementioned Uber and self-driving cars.

Now, somebody has done a study on the trolley problem saying, You know what? This is probably all crap. Okay. It's really, it's an interesting article over at Slate where, you know, basically this researcher is saying what we say when it doesn't really matter.

This is like Kobayashi Maru stuff. Like what we say in a theoretical is not probably the same thing that we actually do in real life. If we actually came, if push came to shove when this actually happened, we probably wouldn't do what we say what we do. Right. So it's all a load of crap. Yeah.

I mean, adrenaline is going to kick in and you're not going to have the problem of social, you know, pressure. It's like, oh, should I do this? Should I do that? What are people going to think of me? It's going to be like, oh, shit. Boom. Figure something out on the fly. Exactly. That's how it works. That seems to be. So the trolley problem is actually just completely useless.

And let's just stop talking about it. Well, somebody's going to have to talk about it because they're going to have to figure out what they're going to do with all these self-driving cars. This is true. This is very true. Well, luckily, robots don't have the kind of problems that we would have. 99 problems, but a conscience ain't one of them. Nope.

And speaking of not having a conscience, let's talk about Bird again. Big news this week over here in Santa Monica, they have approved a 16-month pilot program that will allow the dockless shared mobility rental companies like Bird and Lime to continue operating here in Santa Monica. There will be caps on usage, but they will be able to go over the cap if they can prove that each device is being used at least three times a day.

So not what I'd hope for, but at least they're trying to figure out something. But in better news for me, while they were doing this and setting up a pilot program here in Santa Monica, Los Angeles lawmakers basically said, to hell with you. They've banned all dockless transit rentals, so none of them can be in L.A. itself, just in Santa Monica.

So you're talking about L.A. City, not L.A. County. Yes, of which Venice is part of. So that's going to be interesting because Venice and Santa Monica border each other and people go back and forth between the two along the bike path and all that sort of thing. So it's going to be quite interesting to see what happens with that.

You see, they need to do the thing with the bird scooters and the Lime scooters that they do with the DJI drones. You have no fly zones. So if you start to come up on a border, it'll just start to shut down, turn around, and take you back home. Yeah, I'm okay with that. And Microsoft employees are up in arms over their cloud contract with ICE.

We've seen this with Google, where Google has complained, saying, hey, we don't want to be involved in this stuff. Well, now Microsoft employees have started a big petition, and they're very angry about the fact that ICE has been using their Azure system, Face API, facial recognition software in particular, and also that they had, ICE had gone to Microsoft to help build artificial intelligence tools for ICE.

So as the horrible news has come out over the last two weeks about everything that's been going on, Microsoft employees are saying, hang on a second. We don't want to be doing this. I'm sorry, but if you build it and you sell it, they will come. That's how this works. That is true. You know, do they get up in arms that ICE probably has, like, all their machines are probably Windows laptops?

Is anybody bitching about that? Probably not. So, you know, yeah, you can pick and choose your battles here, but, you know, your company is not innocent already. Every bad person on the planet probably has a Windows PC in their office.

And they most likely have iPhones. That too. And Apple employees aren't screaming about that yet. So, on AI, this one just blew my mind today. And this, I hope that Quora is not saying that this is their AI in action.

I got an email that says, as someone who knows about Paramount Pictures, can you help Rosalind Shimsie? And so Rosalind Shimsie asks a question. She wants the answer to, why is knowledge paramount? Now, I did work at Paramount Motion Pictures, but I don't know why knowledge is paramount.

Because when I worked at Paramount Pictures, there were very few knowledgeable people. But, as you can see, this is just really, really bad search matching. It is. That's quite interesting. And it's weird that Quora would have it on file that you worked at Paramount Pictures. Unless you had answered something about Paramount before with them.

It's in my profile. I actually added that to my profile. Oh, you have a profile with Quora. I do not. Yeah. I used it quite a bit when it first started, because it was kind of fun. You could actually answer some good questions. Right. Well, let me just tell you, Rosalind, really quickly. If you just look around, you'll see that knowledge is not paramount. And I found a good article this morning called, The Machine Fired Me, by Ibrahim Diallo.

And it is a great tale about how his company got taken over and his old boss got really lazy because he got fired and didn't put his contract renewal in the new system. So, when the time came up for him to actually, you know, he was supposed to still be working, but his old contract didn't get transferred to the new system.

So, basically, this, you know, rogue set of cron jobs fired him and wouldn't let him back in. Our brave new world. Oh, my God. It's so, it's just like, you know, it's a cascading series of failures. And it took him three months without, you know, even getting paid or whatever to get even back in the door.

It's like, come on. I mean, this is, he said it was a multimillion dollar product that he was working on. I'm like, well, you need to hire a multimillion dollar IT team for just your HR and your sysadmins. What the hell? Yeah, that's pretty crazy. It's a fun read, though. In the news.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the dangers of parenting and cell phones and screen time for kids and kids watching TV and parents basically handing cell phones to their kids and how that's really bad. Well, the new study comes out and says that's actually not the really bad part.

The really bad part is you using your phone and not paying attention to your kid. Well, you knew that was coming. Yeah, I know. I filed this under the no shit category. I do see this everywhere, though. So I guess we have to get the word out because, like, even when I take my kid to the park, like, I just see a bunch of people just sitting on their phones letting their kids eat dirt.

Yeah. Well, you know, we do have to cull the herd somehow. We do. We do. This is true. A big change over at Facebook. I don't know if you saw this this week, Jason, but they're going to start. Well, they have started already charging monthly subscription fees for access to a group.

So if you set up a group, you can now put a paywall on it if you'd like. You know, in theory, I actually would like this if Facebook wasn't such a dumpster fire. I actually think this is a great idea. I really do like it. I'm not particularly involved in any Facebook groups, but my wife is.

There's a couple of different parenting groups. And, you know, if they were able to charge a couple of bucks to keep the trolls out because it will keep the trolls out. I think that's a great thing. No, I'm down with that. It's just one of those things where it's like, man, I could we could totally have a podcasting group over there. Grumpy group for people who didn't want to use Patreon or PayPal.

They could just, you know, sign up for the grumpy group for a dollar a month. But I don't want to use Facebook. It's I in the past couple of weeks, I've signed on like maybe once every five or six days. Right. That's it. I don't care anymore. I'm like, I believe I've gotten past the, you know, the first stages of withdrawal.

So I think I'm good. I'm impressed. Well, good for you. But I think it's a good move for their on their part. In other news, gaming disorder is now officially recognized by the World Health Organization. We had this. We had this before on the show when this was like, you know, in committee and it was going back and forth.

And it just sounds like bullshit. It really does. There's there's enough. Yeah. Yeah. The symptoms are real. But, you know, you go back and forth with anything on this and you've got you've got doctors on both sides saying, no, it's real. It's a real thing. Then we can charge for it. And, you know, we can make more money off of it.

And you got other doctors going. That's a little horse shit. They're video games. They're not. They're not. No, no, no. Get this out of there. I think it would just be under any addiction. I think addiction in and of itself would count, you know, gaming, gambling, booze, whatever. It's all the same thing as far as I'm concerned.

Now, I probably should have put this article up when we were just talking about Facebook. But somebody quit Facebook for 10 days and the social network wouldn't let him forget it. This is by Henry Grabber over at Slate. And it's quite funny. Have you been getting all the kind of emails that he's been getting? No, because I'm smart enough to turn off email notifications from Facebook.

There you go. I've switched that off about 10 years ago. Granted, if I was trying to do a piece on this, you know, a shock piece, then it would be one thing. But no, I have no notifications from Facebook. I don't check that stupid email address that they set up for you. You know, your name at Facebook or FB.com.

What was that thing? I've gotten rid of it so long ago now, but they gave you an alternate email address. Yeah, I don't even know if those still exist. I don't know. I turned it off so long ago or at least tried to at least turn the notifications off because I went in and I looked at it and there were like, you know, 2000 messages in there.

And I'm like, select all delete because I mean, there's nothing in there that I'm sure I wanted. Yeah. Yeah. This was cute. It was a fun article. Yeah. Now back over to Airbnb, one of my other favorite companies. Barcelona has been doing a really good job dealing with Airbnb.

They wanted to get rid of the illegal vacation apartments. They cracked down on it pretty bad. The city told the site to remove over 2,500 listings that it found to be operating without a city-approved license or they would face a fine. And now they've launched a new partnership with Airbnb.

It's an agreement that gives Barcelona officials access to data about what's being listed around town. So they've found a way to kind of make it work legally and with Airbnbs probably grudging help. So I think this is great.

This is a really great thing. And this is pretty big significance because it's basically a ready to go model that any city can now say, all right, well, we're having a problem too. Why don't we do what you're doing in Barcelona? Let's do it. Now, here's the funny part. I don't know if you remember this or not, but the system that they built is exactly the same one that we proposed on the show about two years ago.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's exactly what we said they should do. Exactly. We're like, okay, you have licensees for the buildings and the rental properties. They have to put their license number into Airbnb. Airbnb does an API call to the city if the license doesn't check out or is expired.

No bueno on the rental. So that's exactly what they did. And so, where's our check? God, we're motherfucking geniuses. This episode is brought to you by RX Bar. RX Bar is a whole food protein bar.

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Free sample offer ends June 30th, so get on it. Again, for 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG at checkout. And please do enjoy. They are quite delicious. Tops and doodads! Apple has released some new guidelines for their App Store, which includes a total ban on crypto mining.

If you've got anything in any of your apps that involve cryptocurrency mining, no go, which is great. The whole point that they were saying is, you know, it could overheat the device and, you know, the processor. And also, it's kind of crappy for people to do that.

Yes. Yes, it is. So, the cool thing about this is, if you remember on a previous episode of Security Ha, when JavaScript crypto mining had first started to hit, and I was like, ooh, maybe we can put, like, an overpowered JavaScript crypto miner on a site, send somebody a link that we can, you know, spearfish somebody, and then when they're looking at it on their phone, their phone will explode, and the glass will hit them in the neck and it'll kill them.

It's like our new assassination JavaScript. Yes. So, I was a little over the top, but I wasn't too far off. No, not too far. They do want the excessive heat problem to go away. But I was on to something. I was on to something. You were. You were. Matthew over on Twitter sent us a link.

It looks like Google's going to launch a podcast app via The Verge. So, according to a snippet of code spotted by 9to5Google. God, that must be a fun company to work for. The latest version of the Google app has a hidden prompt asking users to get the Google Podcasts app. I don't know if this has launched you, Jason.

Yep, it's out. It came out earlier this week, and I've installed it on my Android device, and it's not bad. I got to say, it's not bad. It is actually better than the iTunes app or Apple Podcast app. Well, what isn't?

True. This is very true. The integration is really good, and it's got, even if you don't have the app, it'll open up Chrome to a kind of a web player, so you can get podcasts and stuff. We'll have links on GOG.show soon, so if you have the Google Podcast app and an Android device, you can just click and play.

It's really cool. I set this up for the Jordan Harbinger show yesterday, and it's pretty easy to set up. So, if you do have a podcast and want to set it up, it is definitely not that hard. All right. I found a link over at Gizmodo. These tests will show you just how good your eyes are at seeing color.

I probably went to this because I'm starting to get a little bit sensitive about my reading and my vision for that these days. But guess what? My color perception is still perfect. Now, did you do the 40 block test or the 72 block test? I did both. Ah. And you're perfect on both?

I am perfect on both. Nice. I only did the 40 block test because I don't have that much time or don't really care that much, but I did get a perfect on the 40 as well. Nice. So, we're both pretty good with our color perception. Yep. I'm just blind as a bat, but I can tell what color I can't see. That's right.

Now, I've got a gripe about my Apple Watch 3. Okay. I initially set up the cell phone service because I wanted to try it. Why not? It's there. And then I discovered after the first free month that I got with Verizon, I did not use it once. So, I shut it off.

Mm-hmm. Which is great. Except for the fact that I get notifications on my phone constantly. Could not set up cellular open Apple Watch app to finish setting up the cellular service. And there's no way to make it stop. Oh, man. I can't find any way to make this message stop.

And I get it 50 times a day. Ooh, that sucks. I've Googled it. No way to stop it. Can you- Help. Help. Can you re- Well, have you tried resetting the watch and, like, going from scratch? Yes. Oh, no.

You know what you have to do? I have to go to the Apple Store. I have to go to the Genius Bar, don't I? Or pay for it. Set up your cellular signal. And then turn it off. That's what got me in this mess in the first place. Yeah, well- If anybody out there has any idea, please, for the love of God, it's driving me insane.

Okay. Anyways, now, I got an Amazon show. Well, technically, I bought three Amazon shows. Okay. My dad has gotten home from the hospital, which is great. And I've gotten sick of the idea of the fact that I have to call my parents on the phone to tell them to open up Skype so I can videoconference with them and they can see my kid and all that sort of stuff.

So I said, to hell with it. Let's try the Amazon show. So I bought one for me. I sent one to my parents. Well, I had to go set that one up, obviously. And I sent one up to my sister so the whole family can do videoconferencing very easily now. It's fantastic for that.

It really is. It works very, very well. And it's very simple. It's very simple for parents to use. If you are away from loved ones living far away and you want to do this, it is so easy. I can't even stress how easy it is. And I found out it's actually quite useful.

I've set mine up in the kitchen because that's just, you know, we can just sit at the table and do the conference call. And having a video echo device in the kitchen has been fantastic. It's been really easy, especially for like recipes. You can like look things up. You can see little videos of stuff. I've found myself using the Amazon show more often than I ever.

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, basically, my Alexa is nothing more than a streaming music device. I'm actually using the show. It's pretty good. The one thing I find really annoying is the home screen is not customizable enough. It needs to be like Apple Watch, I think, did a great job with their home screen customizing.

The home screen for the show is not very customizable. They really should get on that. It would make it such a better device. And it's really annoying because one of their attempts, as we've always talked about, you and I, Jason, that the biggest problem with all these voice devices is you don't remember what you can do with it or what any of the commands are.

So their way of solving this on the show is the home is basically just a continual rotating screen of suggested commands. Oh, that's cool. Which is kind of cool, but I also feel like I'm just getting all these constant ads scrolling by. I would love to be able to turn it off. Right.

You know what I mean? It just gets annoying because it's always there. So, but I mean, I really enjoy the device. I'm surprised at how much I'm liking it. I had a feeling you would. I just had a feeling that it was going to be somewhat useful. Did YouTube ever finish making a deal with them?

Can you watch YouTube videos again or are they still gone? No, you can do it now. It's working. That integration needs some help. It's a little, it's really slow. But yeah, it's there. So. Okay. Yeah. Just get an iPad for that, I guess.

If you really need it quick. Yeah. Because that was, they were pulling out all of the advertisement on the YouTube videos and YouTube said, yeah, that's not very cool, dude. So I guess they fixed that. Now I came up with an idea for a hack for the Amazon buttons. Because everybody was trying to figure out, you know, okay, they can be, you can figure out how to play Simon on it.

Like, you know, Dave Bittner came up with. And some people, it's just for trivia apps. And I thought, get them in different colors and put them on top of your stove for kitchen timers. So I was like, okay, two-minute timer, boom, hit the yellow one. Five-minute timer, hit the green one. Ten-minute timer, hit that one.

And that way you just start to timer on your Echo. And you don't even have to think about it. That's the only other thing that I've thought about that might actually be useful for those. All right, we have three uses now. Yeah, that's it. Or you could, if you have multiple Echoes in the house, you can, you can like pick one button for each room.

And then when you hit it, it calls to that Echo and says, ding, ding, ding, time for dinner in that room. Or, you know, get to the kitchen, emergency, or bug out. You can have different household messages for panic buttons. They can basically be panic buttons. Okay.

You know, that's, you got to, you got to stretch at some point with these because it's just a fucking button. It is a button. Or even better, when you hit it, when you hit it. I'm sorry, I had a lot of coffee today. I didn't sleep last night. I think we have to do our entire episode just on Amazon buttons.

Let's button it up. But, but you basically, you tie the button into your hue lighting system. So everything starts flashing red. And then all of the Echoes at once start playing the Star Trek red alert sound. Oh, that would actually be fun. That would be kind of cool, I thought.

Okay. That's it for my ideas for the buttons today. Tune in next week for Jason on buttons. Yes. So I'm trying out the Vivaldi browser. Okay. It's not bad so far. It is very opera-like. It is extremely fast.

Mm-hmm. But it's still, you know, I don't think it's all there yet. But I can't do Firefox. I can't. I know. I know. I actually attempted to switch back to Firefox and I don't like it. Oh my God, it's painful. It's clunky. Yeah. It's really clunky. Half the things don't work right.

Like half the rendering on most of the sites I go to don't work right. And I'm like, it's 2018. Come on, guys. Why is your rendering engine not working right? Half of me just wants to say, screw it, screw it. Here's my browsing history, China. I don't care. And stick with Opera. That's kind of where I'm at. Yeah. Because Opera is just so good.

But Vivaldi does have Chrome extensions, so we can't do that. Okay. I'll let you know as I go with it. Yeah, let me know. If it's an easy switch from Opera, fine. But for now, Firefox is just going in the trash. It's just not. It's not working for me.

Right.

Media Candy. Now, Brian, you weren't here last week. Nope. I purposely did not want to talk about this one. I wanted to wait for you to get here. Okay. Were you watching in real time as Chris Hardwick's career melted into oblivion?

I did, yes. That was an interesting one, I thought, because this was an allegation with no one named, but enough information, obviously, to point out the person who it was. You didn't need to name him. Yeah. There was no doubt. No, I know that. But that's the interesting thing about it.

And then she disappears after the allegation and hasn't answered any questions about it. Chris has come out denying it. Chris's wife has come out denying it, saying that this is not Chris. And basically, well, even Adam Carolla is on his side. But those are about the only two.

That doesn't mean too much. That doesn't mean much. Adam Carolla has come out on the side of some very not particularly wonderful individuals, such as Dinesh D'Souza. Yes, and I still believe that Will Wheaton has not said anything on the topic. Yeah, that'll be interesting. Yeah.

I mean, it's his best friend. He made a tweet that's like, sorry, my best friend of 30 years has been accused of this. Give me a moment before I reply to 3 million people. I'm like, okay, no problem there. Fair enough. But pretty much dead silence so far, which really sucks because I was enjoying Chris's house shit tweets or his Instagram posts.

Those were really fun. I wanted to see how that house turned out. Now, it might be on the market, so I'll be able to go get that. Right. Yeah. We knew this was coming. Yeah. You knew it was coming. Well, what was coming? One of these things was going to happen where we still don't know what's what.

You know, it's one of those things where you almost can't say anything about it because you're on... It's a he said, she said right now. Yeah. But in this climate, she said is enough. I know. You know, the thing that was really just irking me about it is this is a personal relationship, not a business relationship. Right.

Not like he was abusing his power as her boss, like most of these things have been. And this is just, you know, bad boyfriend material and abusive boyfriend material. I mean, yeah, if it's true, he's a raging asshole and all that. But it's still, he said, she said at this point, and she's not saying anything back.

So, I don't know. Right. So, just losing his entire empire over this is like premature, I thought. Yeah. Yeah. But the old rules don't apply anymore. This just makes me feel a lot. Again, I don't know. We don't know what happened yet.

Nobody does. Right now, I'm feeling very much like it's a Weinstein and Al Franken. And somehow got lumped in together when what they did was so vastly different. Yeah. Right. And Al Franken lost his entire career over a joke. Be, you know, you can feel whatever way you want about it.

Maybe you feel that he should have lost his career for that. But my argument would be Harvey Weinstein and Al Franken's actions are in completely different fucking universes. Oh, yeah. One's a rapist. One is a comedian, you know. Right. But everybody gets painted with the same brush now. So, maybe this is happening to Chris.

Maybe it's not. We don't know yet. Mm-hmm. So, but it, I know you're, you, you, you do make a valid point in that this was a personal relationship and it had ended in some time ago and he's married and he never abused his power with her in that sense, other than just personal relationship power, whatever struggles go on in every relationship.

Um, so it is a different thing. Yeah. Different beast altogether. So, I just wanted to bring it up. We've got links in the show notes to cover it if you, if you want to dive into it. But yeah. Um, yeah. I'm, I'm just really curious to see how this thing is going to play out in the next, well, probably two to three years.

Yeah. This is not going to be something easy to come back from because the, he's the, you know, the paint is already dried on the canvas for most people. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, what I, I found an interesting article that kind of basically uses it as a touching off point to discuss about the internet in general. This is by Rebecca onion who doesn't write for the onion, but actually wrote for slate.

I just thought it was funny that her name was onion at this point. Um, so it's called falling out of love with the Nerdist podcast. And I just want to read a couple parts of this article. Uh, the, this hashtag me too case feels like the end of a chapter for podcasting. And maybe I dare say for the internet as a whole, Chris Hardwick, who resuscitated his failing career by starting a podcast, then a podcasting empire, then a lots of other things.

Empire was a symbol of the possibilities of the internet circa 2010 or the possibilities. The internet circa 2010 opened up for people with enthusiasm to spare between 2012. And okay. She just goes on and on. Her point here was that, you know, there was this period of time and Chris Hardwick kind of is the, is the poster boy for it where you could do what you wanted to do and make a living doing it.

And it was fantastic. And this feels like the end of it, dare say for the internet as a whole. And I'm just like, Oh, shut up, bitch. We've already seen the internet ruined at least three times, if not more. Something new is going to come along and then that's going to get ruined too. That's the way of the internet now. Yeah. I'm sorry.

Yeah. Kristen invent a blogging. That was one of the first ones. People made lots of money doing that. Then there's podcasting and Adam Carolla was one of the first ones with that. Not just Chris. Um, and there's all sorts of different things out there. Then there's crypto. Woo. Yeah.

Woo. And somebody is going to be a VR star and there's YouTube stars and that's already starting to end. And it just keeps on going and going and going. It's cyclical. It is. Everything is cyclical. And Hey, don't remember, don't forget, you know, Tom from my space, you know, he made a good chunk. Yeah. The my space days. But yeah. Yeah.

Talk about a little hyperbole there with your, uh, with your article in the morning. Yeah. Uh, now Dave Bittner and I both loved Han Solo. Have you had a chance to see it yet? Nope. Sure. Haven't. Okay. Well, it was a fantastic movie, but unfortunately not fantastic enough, at least financially, even though it did make a crap ton of money, it didn't make the large enough crap ton of money that they were expecting to get.

Uh, so they put on hold development of any future star Wars spinoff films, uh, at least the one offs, including the rumored Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett movies that we were theoretically going to get. Uh, the studio is instead focusing on star Wars episode nine or 10 or whatever the last nine that's going to have to save the travesty that was the previous last one.

Yeah. But then they gave, then they gave Rian Johnson is another trilogy for himself. So I can't, I can't wait to see what other pieces of Canon that he can absolutely destroy. Destroy. Yes. And, uh, they're going to focus on that. And then another new star Wars trilogy that'll be done by the game of throes showrunners. Um, so no one-offs, a couple more trilogies is what we're going to get.

Great. Just what I was looking forward to. You know, the thing is the, the one-offs have been the best movies. In my opinion, I really liked a rogue one and I really liked Han Solo. They were both fantastic movies and I think they, they're going the wrong direction with this, but it is Disney and they want money.

Yeah. They need money. They need money. Yeah. I actually had lunch with somebody who, who's a significant other works at Disney, uh, yesterday. And, uh, turns out that, uh, things aren't, aren't that great over at the mouse in some different divisions. So. Yeah, definitely not. Uh, now a hat tip to Sean Bonner on this one.

He has been, uh, posting this, this, uh, link to a YouTube. It's a movie. It's a documentary called hyper normalization by Adam Curtis, uh, done on for the BBC. Uh, he's been, uh, promoting this left, right, and center. You ever wonder how we got to this horrible dumpster fire of a world that we're in right now?

Uh, this, this document documentary basically preverts to tell you how, um, so I tried to watch it last night. I, I, around 10 30, my wife went to bed and I loaded it up and started to watch it. And, uh, I think I got about a half an hour in and then, uh, I don't know entirely what happened, but at three 30 in the morning, I, uh, woke up on the couch and, uh, went to bed.

So it's, it's slow. Um, it's three hours. That's great. It's three hours long. The soundtrack is great. And this, it felt a little tin hattie to me, but I have to give it another chance because I didn't get far enough. Right. I think it's a, uh, the bits I saw were a lot tin hattie. I put an interview, uh, from the guardian with Adam Curtis and, uh, talks about it.

It talks to him about it and some of his other, uh, documentaries that he's done hyper normalization. He made for 30,000 pounds. So you get what you pay for. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a little rough, but I'm going to give it another go because, uh, certainly does feel like something's gone wrong somewhere.

So let's see if he, uh, if he cracks the nut. We'll see. Yeah. And a friend of the show and one time guest, Felicia Michaels has, uh, thrown her hat back into the podcasting arena. She started up a new podcast called the Liars Club with Jessica Wellington and Felicia Michaels.

Awesome. Um, so this, the concept behind this is, uh, well, they're all standups, which is great. So they're, these, the two hosts are standups, obviously Felicia, and, uh, they have two of their standup friends come on to each episode and their friends will tell two stories each, one of them real and one of them a complete lie.

And then their job is to figure out which of the two stories was the lie. And because they're all standups, they're funny and they're good at telling stories. So there's only one episode out. I listened to it today while I was doing my bike ride. It was great. It was really funny. So good job. Cool. Yeah. I expect nothing less. Yes.

Felicia was pretty awesome when she was on the show. Yeah. Dig has jumped on what I think is now their editorial bandwagon. I was looking at my newsletter this morning cause I, I get, you know, I get some pretty good stories from the dig newsletter still. It's not bad. And they had an article why there's likely no good ending in sight for movie pass.

We told you that last year. And there is no business model that works without, you know, selling all of your personal data, which also came out that, you know, the CEO was saying, we even know where you're going to go at a dinner before you actually come watch the movie.

Should have run that one by the PR department first there chief. Yeah. Which led to them backpedaling on a lot of stuff. I know friend of the show Chen has a movie pass and loves it. I had it for three months and never went to a single damn movie. But the thing now is that AMC is coming out cause they've been AMC and movie pass have been going head to head over this.

AMC doesn't like that movie pass is going to be making the money off of it, but AMC doesn't quite understand that there is no money to be made off of this. AMC is only going to lose money on this. So I don't understand what the fuck's going on here. Well, that's exactly my point. I put in that link about AMCs and I said, here's what I don't understand.

You take a look at a failing product. You look at movie pass and then you double down on it. You go hold my beer movie pass. I don't understand it either. I don't get it. It's failing. It is losing money left, right and center. It is not working.

And then AMC goes, we'll take that and we'll do it too. Yeah. I don't know. I don't understand the world. Yeah. No, if you read the article, there's a bunch of stuff in here about AMC and movie pass and and their, uh, their history, but yeah.

And links to some of the other stories about how we've gotten here so far, but I still just love that they, they had to reference Gotti, which has the, uh, the, the, the rare honor they say of a 0% on rotten tomatoes. Yes. 0%.

Man. I did watch the Gotti, um, documentary that was out the other day, like the two-parter I think it was on AMC. Really good. It's about John Gotti Jr. Right. Pretty good. I got to say, not too bad. Now, Luke Cage is back today because we're recording this on Friday.

Uh, did you watch last season? I tried. I got about three quarters of the way through and I just, it wasn't for me. Cause they had the C team, I think on Luke Cage. I think that's what the C in Cage is for the C team. Cause it wasn't that good. I got through it. You know, um, I liked him much better in the defenders and all, and also in Jessica Jones.

I thought he was great. So hopefully they've remedied it this time and he got a better team and better writing because, I mean, the writing was terrible. The acting was fine, but the writing was bad and the effects were bad. It's like they got, you know, just the C level DPs in there.

Everything was C level. That was it. So, yeah, I didn't think it was great. Uh, still better than, uh, whatever that, what's the other one? Iron fist. Anything is better than iron fist, but Luke Cage was not that great. No. Are you going to give it a try? Uh, I will wait to hear from you.

Okay. So you will tell me if you like it. I will have a review next week. Okay, perfect. Since the, since the dog has the cone of shame and is recovering, I'll be spending a lot of time in my, my room watching TV, keeping him safe until he's right. Till his little, till his little Willie is fixed or guy. Yeah.

And I just have too much soccer for me to be watching anything else. Right. Yeah. I just, I was going to, and then I'm like, you know what? I'm going to spend a lot of money on that package to watch it. And then I'm going to watch like maybe a game and a half. And then I'm going to go, yeah, this isn't, this isn't for me. It was fun when we used to do it with connectics, quick cams, when you were in, you know, Santa Monica and I was in Chicago and we could like be up at four in the morning.

And stream our reactions. That was fun. But this time I think we've kind of outgrown that. Okay. We should have done it with echo shows. That's true. Those, uh, no, the expanse is almost over. Have you been up? Oh God. Last episode was awesome. It's so good. I don't know. I love this show.

I don't know what they're doing. Thank you, Amazon. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff Bezos for doing, you know, you don't do a lot of things right, but this one you did right. So hopefully it's not going to take another two years for them to come back with, uh, new episodes. But, and, uh, of course, Westworld, which you've been talking about, uh, whoa, Nelly Westworld.

That's all I got to say. Yeah. They're blowing stuff up. Yeah, they definitely are. And I saw a lot of people saying unfortunate timing for that last episode of Westworld. So with all the suicides in the news, it seemed to be, uh, yeah, but that's not what you hope for.

No, but I mean, those are thousands of people kill themselves every day. They can't build a show around it. You know, that was done a year before this and predicting anything. So you got to know this is a Westworld's great. I mean, I'm really loving it. I have no idea what the hell they're going to do next season. Yeah. I don't either.

I mean, come on. Yeah. I don't know.

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 apparently we're turning him to the dark side. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Hi, guys.

Hello, Dave. Open the Rant Bay door, Dave. Well, you know, what good is it being on a show called Grumpy Old Geeks if you can't be grumpy every now and then? And there's something that has been making me very grumpy lately. And I know you guys have covered this parade of apology ads that seem to be dominating advertising right now.

It's either, you know, Facebook or Wells Fargo or whoever. But I wanted to start off by weighing in on the one that has me yelling at my TV. I've also seen this ad. Just one? Well, it's the one that makes my wife look at me from across the room and say, really?

Really? Yes, you are becoming one of us. So this is the Facebook ad, which is in heavy rotation right now. Yes, it is. I've seen it at the movie theater. What?

Yeah. They're running it before the movie at the movie theater. Wow. But the part that really gets my goat, the part that gets my dander up, the part that makes me scream at the TV is at the end of the ad when the narrator says, because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer.

All right. First of all, what this place was built for was rating pictures of hot college girls against one another. So this notion that they had any sort of good intentions from the outset is absurd revisionist history.

But to be fair, people were trying to get a little closer to these girls. I stand corrected. Second, and I realize I'm nitpicking here, but. I might as well, right?

That's what we started this podcast for. Since the snowball is rolling down the hill, the narrator in this spot annoys the hell out of me with this affectation that I blame on Zach Braff from back in his Scrubs days.

But I think he solidified it in the movie Garden State, which is this acting affectation from the actors of his generation, which is that you show you are sincere and heartfelt by mumbling. Right?

Yeah, it is the male vocal fry. Right. So if I wanted to say, let's say my line was, you know, Jason, the fact of the matter is I can't hide my feelings anymore. I really love you. Well, if I were Zach Braff, I would say, Jason, the fact of the matter is I can't hide my feelings anymore.

I really love you. And that is how you would know that I really meant it, because I mean it so much that I cannot articulate the word. The consonants don't come out. It's just a stream of vowels. That's how you know that I'm acting.

The anti-annunciation generation. There you go. That's right. And so endeth the rant. Bravo. Bravo. Yes, I like it. You're doing well, young Padawan. I've been meaning to. I've been looking forward to getting that off my chest for a while now, and I feel much better.

See, GOG is therapy. That's why we do this. That's right. Exactly. Oh, it keeps us from kicking our dogs and throwing our phones at the TV. Yeah, exactly. I have thrown, well, I have spare phones to throw at the TV.

That's why I keep all those old iPhones around, so I can throw them at the TV. Your decoy sacrifice phones. Yes. All right. Well, anyway, let's dig in here. The big news, and it is big news, is the Supreme Court ruled on tracking cell phone data location.

This is a big deal. I've got to say that in the entirety of the time that we've been doing this segment, even before you came and joined us, this is one of the first times we have good news. Yeah. I think it is good news, and- Don't get used to it, guys.

Don't get used to it. Well, I mean, there are many interesting things about this. So, a 5-4 opinion with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberal judges, so showing his ability to be a swing vote when it comes to these sorts of things. And so, it's really the first ruling that kind of cleaves that third-party doctrine, taking

away this universal belief that's been around for about 40 years, that basically any information you provide to a third party, the phone company is the most commonly cited example, is open. There's no expectation of privacy for that.

So, in the old days, that was the police had the rights to get your, the phone numbers that you dialed, they had the right to get bank records, and so that was extended to your location data with your phone. Well, thanks to this, they have said, the Supreme Court has said, no, this is different, location data is different, and in many cases, it will be a requirement that you have to get a warrant to get location data.

And, uh, this is a big deal, a big, big, uh, I saw someone on Twitter today say, this is Christmas for privacy nerds. It's, uh, I, I'm thrilled that this actually went this way. I didn't, I didn't expect that it would. Uh, it's a good sign for, for us.

I think so. Jason, what do you think? Deliveroo! That's what I'm going to say every time I'm happy now. All right. That'll be my, that'll be my exclamation of joy. Yeah, no, this is fan, this is fan-fucking-tastic news, and, and, uh, some of the first good news we've had in a very long time, uh, particularly if you care about your privacy.

Um, this is amazing. I, I honestly cannot wait to see it enacted, and, and people just start, I mean, obviously, companies are going to have to start selling their data immediately, I'd assume. When's the, when's the appeal process start, and when will it be overturned? Well, I guess that's the whole point of the being in the Supreme Court, is, uh, that this is it.

This is the law of the land now, yes. Right. Shit out of luck for you, Court. Now, earlier, uh, I spoke with Ben Yellen, who's our law and policy guru over on the Cyber Wire, and he was saying that, um, the, some privacy folks were hoping that this ruling would, would, uh, shine a, a more clear light than it did.

In other words, it doesn't lay out, you know, what exactly, um, is, uh, falls under third-party doctrine and what doesn't. It's, it's not as specific as some people have hoped it would be. So, there's going to be some wiggle room for companies. There will be some wiggle room.

Um, it's also interesting, I, I wonder how this is going to affect mobile companies and their ability to sell or give away this information. Um, we saw a story, what, a few weeks ago about, uh, a law enforcement organization that was buying the information from a third party that was aggregating it from the phone company.

So, basically. Well, yeah, basically the CIA, the CIA and the NSA have been doing that forever. So, this was. Doing an end around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I think this is what a lot of us had hoped for. We said, if you want this information, fine, but convince a judge that you need it. Uh, you can't just have it.

It's not just there for the taking. And so, uh, interesting that John Roberts agreed that things are different. This is a different thing. Um, and I think we're headed in the right direction with this. So, this is a happy, I'm happy about this one. Yeah. Me too. Oh, happy day.

I found, uh, a story about a filter that will make your photos indecipherable to facial recognition software. Now, for people who are super crazy about privacy, there are real world products like face off hats, which is a hat with a trippy pattern, 3d printed masks that fool face scanning software.

I think you'd all be a bit odd if anybody owned these, uh, but if you're worried about photos that pick get posted online and, uh, being tracked that way, there will be a filter that will keep AIs from spotting your face from photos that get past you. Uh, engineers from the university of Toronto have built a filter that slightly alters photos by a couple pixels really, but it's a, it's enough to throw off any AI scanning that currently exists.

Of course, this is just going to start a war, right? Right. The AIs will get better. And then the facial recognition software gets better. And then somebody has to, you know, make you look like Dumbo the clown because it's just good. It's eventually you're not going to be able to fool it, but at least for right now, there is a way to basically process any image that you post online that would then stop Facebook's algorithms or whatnot from, from tagging you.

Well, how about this? How about you just don't post your, your mug online if you don't want people to know that it's you. I think that ship has sailed, Jason, and that's not even up to you. So you could be in the background of a photo. I think that's, that's the issue. But of course, the problem with that is how do you run the filter on a photo that you don't control? Exactly.

That's my point. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that it's able, and we've seen this in a couple different instances where AI gets tripped up in strange ways, strange modifications to images think, make, you know. Oh, I don't know. Like, say if you're black.

That's not exactly where I was going. I was going to say it makes the eye think better. I just remember that big story. It makes me think that, like, for example, a pickle is a duck. But we could, but I guess it would also be if you were black. Yes, it could be that as well. But yeah.

So it's interesting that to a human, I guess my point is, and I do have one, is that it's indistinguishable to humans, but AI systems seems to have this strange ability to be tripped up by these things. I think you're absolutely right.

I was thinking the same thing. This just ups the arms race. Yeah, that's all it really does. So. And speaking of arms races, Apple is closing an iPhone security hole that police were using to crack devices. Now, we've long said on the show that Apple is probably one of the best companies out there in terms of privacy and whatnot.

And they just continue to keep doing that. So good. Yeah, it's interesting. So basically what they're doing is they're making it a default where after an hour, the the the what is it? Lightning connector on the phone can't be used for anything but charging.

So no data can flow without unlocking the device. So that's a change. And good, good, good change. Police aren't happy about it. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I already saw some stories that are there's a couple of companies that are claiming that they've already got a workaround for this as well.

So again, arms race. Here we go. Yep. Yeah. And oops, a DNA testing company accidentally sent strangers spit to five customers. I don't know why anybody is trusting any of these DNA companies out there right now. I'm just glad it wasn't a fertility testing company.

Thank God for that. Honey, what did you order? Strangest looking mayonnaise I've ever seen. Tiny dual jars. Just don't get it mixed up with the with the blue.

Oh, damn it. What's the name of that company? The food delivery service. Blue apron. They have it. Stepped on my own joke. Timing. Timing. Timing. Yes. Yes. And right film sleep repeat sent in the smart lock that could be hacked in seconds.

Now, I saw multiple stories about this. There was this one where there's the technical thing, but then also another researcher pointed out that like on the front of this thing was a screw. And and so if all you had to do was unscrew that thing and you could literally take it apart physically.

And that was it. And the person sent into the company and said, you know, hey, do you guys, is this a joke? Like there's a, you know, all I need is a basically a screwdriver to undo this thing. And they said the response was something like, yes, it's not expected to be able to withstand adversaries who have screwdrivers.

Oh, my God. Because, you know, like master locks, I can unlock a master lock in like three seconds with a shim. OK. That's easy because you can you can create a shim out of a, you know, a soda can. And those are super easy to open. So I can do a master lock in seconds.

And this this looks the same have the same mechanism. So I bet I could shim this one just as fast. But you don't need to. You just need a screwdriver. Sometimes disruptions. Not so great. We're disrupting the lock. Oh, crap. We just made it easier.

Yeah. But you have to unscrew it and sell the firmware and plug it into the USB. Oh, that's right. Oh, hey. And our last story this week is has caused me to feel much the same feelings that that our illustrious Dave Bittner felt about the Facebook ads.

I can't believe this is back again. This is sent to us by multiple people. Andy Solomon, Mark Andre. So they all sent us this article from Vice. And I'm very upset with Vice. I'm very upset with Vice for publishing this because Vice has been doing real journalism.

Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia. No, it's not. Here we are again. No. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. This has been debunked. I call bullshit. It is not. Yeah. The Sam Nichols guy did exactly what Jason did.

And he's calling this some sort of like scientific method. All he did was say some words. And then he got some ads that were related to those words that he apparently never, ever said. If this were fucking true, I have spent the last three months of my life talking about nothing, nothing other than health care products for the elderly.

Not a single motherfucking ad. This is not happening. Here's the part. Stop it. Here's the part that's new that bugs me that I'm trying to decide if I want to put the energy into tracking this down. So they interviewed one Dr. Peter Henway, who's a senior security consultant for cybersecurity firm Asterix.

If only there were someone on this show who had access to cybersecurity people. So according to Dr. Peter Henway, and I quote, from time to time, snippets of audio do go back to other apps like Facebook servers, but there's no official understanding what the triggers for that are.

Whether it's timing or location based or usage of certain functions, apps are certainly pulling those microphone permissions and using those periodically. All the internals of the application send this data in encrypted form, so it's very difficult to define the exact trigger. Okay. I am calling bullshit.

Me too. Yeah. Complete bullshit. And I have seen no one else who has looked into this say that they have discovered encrypted audio data being sent back to Facebook. Facebook denies vehemently that they do this.

So I'm just trying to decide, do I want to take the energy to get in touch with this guy? Don't waste your time. And say, prove it. In a nice way. I know. Okay. In the nicest way possible. Well, the thing about all these, what this guy did was the same thing that you and I did, Dave.

But it's not a clean room. It's not a clean phone with clean accounts. And it's not scientific in any way, shape or form. They're not doing packet sniffing in collection from what's going to the apps, what's going out of the phone altogether.

There's a real easy way to do this, you know, spend a week in a room with a brand new iPhone with a brand new account. And you start talking at the phone when Facebook's open and see if you get an ad for something that you, you spoke. And then you, you correlate a recording of your voice with the data that's coming out of the phone, getting captured.

And when you can see a spike and then an ad shows up, and then there's some correlation between what's actually happening, then you come back to me and you write this article. Till now, go fuck yourself. Yeah, I got really angry. I think this, I think with this, the title of this article should really be, um, articles about Facebook listening in on your phone generate clicks.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's very disappointing that Vice would put this up. Uh, Vice has better standards than this typically. Apparently not. They don't because they put this up, but, um, it's frustrating. And yeah, it's, you have one cybersecurity doctor, professor, security consultant saying something that nobody else in the entire history of, of this argument said is happening, is happening

with no proof, um, no discussion of, of any mechanisms or anything. Yeah. Like, there's nothing here except a couple claims that aren't backed up by anything. Yeah. No. Yeah. Back it up. Show me your work. Show me your work.

Yeah. It's one of those offhanded comments that I think, you know, he, he, who knows if he was taken out of context or whatever. I mean, if trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, um, who knows, but it's, oh boy, this is aggravating. For instance, if you open up the camera in the Facebook app and record a video, then yes, it is sending your voice to Facebook, but that's the only case that I can think of.

But this notion that it is, that it is, that it is listening, um, all the time, waiting for trigger words and then encrypting that data, sending it back to Facebook. And here's, here's the thing. Here's what we've established time and time again. It doesn't need to.

Yeah. There's no need to. Right. In fact, actually, I cut an article out of the show notes that was basically the ways that Facebook is tracking you. Right. And they don't need your voice. In fact, that's a sloppy, wasteful way for them to do it because they would have to process everything. There would be this entire organization developed and hundreds of man hours all the time of people processing all this, correlating all this, putting it into databases, attaching it.

They don't need to. You're giving them all the information they need. Yeah. To send you an ad that you're not going to click on statistically. You know, you're a 0.06% likely to click on that ad. Why would they go through all this trouble to send you these things? So here's the thing, gentlemen. Yes.

Shall we make a pact that this is a story that we shall not talk about anymore on this show? Do we have the discipline to resist or is our anger entertaining enough to ourselves? Unless there is any further information, we will be putting this in Moron of the Week should it pop up again.

All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, then Dave's going to have to come on for Moron of the Week because we need his voice on this. Oh, that's true. All right. Maybe we'll have a special sub-security moron. Yeah. Would this section just be called, no? No. That's it.

No. It's a story that will not die. No, apparently it will not. So. If we could only find a way to get clicks on our headline when we talk about the fact that this is not a story, it's one of the downsides of podcasting.

Well, you know what? The title for this episode is Facebook is listening to you. No. No, no. We've got to make it a listicle. We've got to make it a listicle. Ten ways. Five ways that Facebook is listening to you. Right. Ten easy tricks to keep Facebook from listening to you.

There we go. Yeah. Perfect. There you go. Done deal. See, people? Now you know how the sausage is made. Yep. All right, guys. Good to talk to you. All right. Nice to be back. We'll talk to you again next week. Be safe. All right, Dave. Have a good one. Talk to you next week. I like Mental Floss.

It's a great little site where you just run across some random stuff every now and then. And this week, I found an interactive map that shows where your house would have been 750 million years ago. It does a little bit more than that. This is called Ancient Earth. It's an ancient Earth globe. You type in any address that you'd like.

It shows you where you are right now with a nice little spinning globe. And then you can either pick however many million years ago, or you can do things like first multicellular life, first land plants, first insects, whatever. And it will put together the continents the way that they were at that time point and show you where, like, how my house has slid down to Mexico, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. I looked at my house here now, too. And, yes, I would be in Tijuana. I'd be seeing a donkey show in Tijuana. And when the first multicellular life showed up, I would have been off the coast of Pangea. It doesn't really give me much more information on that because it's kind of useless for that one.

Yeah. It is a little useless for that one, but it was kind of fun. Moron of the week! Now, this has been all over the news because it just happened yesterday. And it's Melania Trump wears an I-really-don't-care jacket to visit Immigration Children's Detention Facility.

Oops. Yeah, yeah. This just comes under, what were you thinking? That's so amazingly tone-deaf. But then again, if you watch any of their family's tweets, they're good at being tone-deaf. See, I like to think that she wasn't talking about the children. She was talking about her husband. I mean, that's the angle I really like to think.

It's just, you know. I think what she was doing was, like, you know, as she was walking away to get on the plane so Trump could read it. And, you know, it's like, this is our marriage. That's all I'm thinking. This is our marriage I'm talking about. I'm going down for the kids. I think I'd be okay with that. You know, interestingly enough, though, the person that I thought of as I saw this unfold in real time online, Jason, was you.

Why? You know how when things like the bird flu used to come along and you were super quick with registering domain names and you would make a quick buck or two here and there based on public outcry or fears? As soon as this happened, people were making I really care shirts.

Somebody had registered I really do care dot com or something like that and set it up as charities to for immigration and children's needs. People leapt all over this the way that you used to leap over things. They were like flies on ship. Well, you see, that's why I go where the fuck's going to be, not where the puck was.

Right. So they were very quick and I was just like, huh, this is straight out of Jason's playbook. Yeah. See, I bring the goodness to the Internet and then I don't make any more money off of it. Take it away. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers since it's been a couple of weeks since we've actually done this section and feedback loop is going to be a little long today.

So we'll try and hustle through. I've had a lot of coffee, so let's make this quick. Over at Patreon, we have Paul, Derek, Jason, Gregory, Alan, Pierre, Stefan, Thomas and Justin. Justin writes in. Hey, guys, I'm Justin Vandenberg. Thank you very much for your awesome podcast. Your pessimistic humor helps me get through even the shittiest of days.

I've been looking for more tech podcasts out there similar to yours, but I can't seem to find anything. Any recommendations? P.S. Thank God for Castro AirPods and GOG. You guys got me through my daughter's severely boring choir concert. Totally appreciate it. I was laughing my ass off. This article about ignoring your children because of your smartphones.

Yeah, I was posting pictures of it on Twitter. I was laughing my ass off. I'm like, hey, at least we can help, man. And nope, I wish on the other podcasts because most tech podcasts are trying to be family friendly to get a bigger audience. And we're stupid, so we swear a lot. So only degenerates and heathens listen. So if anyone from the audience has some recommendations on shows like ours, send them our way so I can have them killed.

And Eric upped his pledge over at Patreon, so thank you so much for that. Over at PayPal, we got direct donations from Dale and Christopher and a recurring donation from Steve. And Christopher wrote in, not to throw a wrench into the bird and weed theory, but Atlanta has become a haven for those scooters now, but weed is still illegal.

Keep up the great work. Sorry, Kyle, your theory has been debunked. Over at Facebook, Walter wrote in, God, I love these guys. Half the time, I have no idea what they are talking about, partly because I'm not American, partly because I'm not a geek, but does it matter? No, Jason and Brian are totally fun and talk about really interesting shit.

Everyone should give them money and listen to their podcast and learn something for good. Me, I'm just a troll waiting for FB to do me in. No, seriously, I will donate beer bucks before Christmas. Thank you. Nice. Thank you very much. And over on Twitter, MixaGG writes in, I think you and Brian would love this.

And it's an article at Bloomberg titled, Deleting Your Online DNA Is Brutally Difficult. And this person went through and signed up for basically a dozen DNA companies. Yeah. And then went back and tried to get all of her data out. Good luck. Yeah.

So there's a researcher studying the privacy policies and said if a company did offer to delete all your data, it's unlikely that it could really purge your information from all the places it already wound up. He said they've already bundled it with other users' data and stripped it of your name and aggregated it and either sold it or shared it with other third parties.

Even that kind of anonymity might not be enough to shield your information from prying eyes. In two studies in 2013, researchers showed that it was possible to identify people from anonymous DNA information. Like we've always said, they're never anonymous. Yep. So there you go.

It's a pretty good article and it's, yeah, it is what it is. But fortunately for the most part, as we know, those DNA things, you know, you got a 50-50 shot of actually getting some right data in. That's true. So saving grace on that so far. We got a lot of stuff over at GOG.show.

First up is Man Boobie. Hi, Grumps. Here's a story from Melbourne, Australia. We have had our own dockless push bike scheme like your bird fiasco, where bikes were being dumped in rivers, put up trees, and left recklessly in doorways and laneways. The city and state governments tried to fix the Singapore-based company's attitude towards taking responsibility for their property until finally the EPA took charge and got them for littering at a cost of $3,000 per offense per bike.

Wow. Ooh, nice. So they are in the process of picking up their bikes and going back to Singapore. Goodbye and good riddance. Nice. Well, that is definitely one way to deal with it. That's for sure. And Ivor Davies writes in, please make it stop. There's an article on Futurism. Putting Pokemon on the blockchain takes microtransactions to their inevitable, insufferable end.

And I looked at this, and it's basically a, what do you call it, just a test bed for a, well, actually what it is is a proof of concept for a microtransaction blockchain service. That, you know, they can do like super tiny transactions on the blockchain super fast.

Right. And it's super stupid. Yeah. And then five minutes later, he wrote a second message. No, seriously, make it stop. And then this is another link at Futurism. There is now a religion based on the blockchain. Yes, really? Yeah. Yeah. And this is from, this is from the guy who created Ethereum.

Yes. So it's just, these people are, these people are insane. They spent way too much time inside coding. Yes, definitely. Shanna wrote in, see, these guys know how to do scooter shares correctly. Thank goodness. And it's a Scooby, a scooter sharing company launching in Pittsburgh, hopes to have people zipping around the city by the end of the month.

Scooby ride costs $5 for the first 20 minutes and 20 cents for each minute after that. It's a cheaper alternative to lift an Uber and an easier one than pedaling around in a healthy ride bike. Now, these are actual real scooters, though. Yeah, these go 30 miles an hour. These are, these are, have to have a license, have to wear a helmet, real scooter.

So yeah, that's great. I like that. Yeah. I think you have to have a driver's license. You don't need to have a motorcycle license. Yeah, exactly. So they're pretty cool. But I wonder if they have Scooby School to teach you how to ride them. Because I know a lot of people that might just hop on a scooter and, you know, drive into a tree.

You know how there's Uber Eats? They got, they're, they're missing out on something if they don't do Scooby Snacks. Oh my God. Oh my God. Just saying. Oh, that's fantastic. Andrew writes in, for some reason I thought of you gents when I noticed this AI powered suitcase on Indiegogo that runs artificial neural network for computer vision algorithms, which enable OVUS to automatically follow and avoid obstacles.

It's nothing more than amazing for any number of reasons. Now, this is a suitcase that follows you. It's great. You can't, you can't carry it. You're some lazy bastard. Now, if they made this in an R2-D2 version, I would buy it instantly. Yeah, no. You know, maybe I can just get some R2-D2 stickers and put it on it.

I'm sure you could. Yeah, you could totally just get a wrap for it. That'd be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Obi-Wrap. That's right. Or OVUS, OVUS. Oh, if it was named Obi. Obi, you know, that would even be better. That's more Star Wars action. There you go. Paul wrote in, hi, Browser Opera. I have started using Vivaldi, which is supposed to have ex-opera staff working for them.

Seems okay so far. Well, Jason is testing that out, so we will find out. Yep. So that's one for Vivaldi. Mm-hmm. Gordy McKinney writes in, according to the article in my local paper, Bird and Lime scooters are growing in popularity. They continue to find new funding, so that means we can all look forward to tripping over these damn things in the future.

Yeah. And we'll have a link to that article in the show notes. And then Keith wrote in, says, I'm a techie, but former or recovering, as in I made the transition to management about a decade ago, and predictably, my coding skills have suffered. Well, join the club. One of the ways in which they've suffered is that it used to be that I'd keep up a web server somewhere, serving anywhere from two to possibly a dozen different projects, including blogs and entrepreneurial things.

My default platform for building things was always WordPress, as it was easy to install and set up and customize, and it did all the things. And just as predictably as I did less and less engineering, my attention and capabilities waned on the web server and WordPress support side as well. Of course, my dependency on WordPress creates a monoculture of risk, and sure enough, all my sites have gotten hacked, as I didn't stay up to date on the release train, and I really didn't do the work necessary to stay on the way front of understanding.

So now I've got some time and wherewithal to start rebuilding some things and building new things, and I'm faced with a choice. Should I follow the old paths, or should I find a new way? Is this a duh, Squarespace dude kind of answer, or is building and supporting my own WordPress blogs worth the time and effort? Note that I want to build businesses, not get into the IT support business for myself.

Do I retool and own it myself, or do I outsource this, and to who? Is this ever really outsourced, or will I still have to track and manage things to make sure the site doesn't get hacked? Cheers, Keith. Well, Keith, that's a complicated answer. Isn't it, though? I just, I can't stand WordPress.

I really can't, because it's WordPress, and it is a massive target, since it runs so much of the internet. Building a business on top of Squarespace, that's just a no-go. You don't do that. If you do want to run WordPress, there are a lot of hosting companies out there that do keep the updates up to date for you.

I can't really remember any off the top of my head, because they keep changing. Some go out of business, some get bought up. A lot of them are just way too expensive. Yeah. It's also important to note that while they will keep up with the updates for you, that doesn't mean that they go through your entire site and make sure that something didn't break.

Yes, yeah, exactly. You still have to do that. They'll update it for you. Yeah, they'll update it for you. Yeah. But if it breaks on the update, you're kind of screwed. If you're, you know, if you're going to be doing this stuff, you're going to be in the IT support business no matter what. Yeah, you can't be building websites and not be in the IT support business.

It doesn't happen. Yeah, I mean, they're tied at the hip. So, yeah, I don't know. Getting back into WordPress just makes me really want to just go jump off a cliff. But I hear it's getting better. But, I mean, you can at least turn on auto updates or go to a hosting provider that will do it for you.

Me, personally, I always kept all my sites locally running MAMP and, you know, everything on my machine. And then I would push everything out through, like, get gateways and stuff. So, everything stayed updated and all that. It was very complicated and very not fun.

So, here's the deal, man. Why are you getting back into it? Yeah, why? Why? There's so much other stuff out there. That's the bigger question. Yeah. Because, I mean, I was thinking I was going down that path, too, just a little while ago. And I was doing what Jason was doing. I was setting up everything locally and then pushing things through. And I was like, I'm not getting paid enough for all this.

Like, this is a lot of work for and nobody wants to pay anything for WordPress sites. So, I was just like, this is a waste of time. Yeah. I mean, I've got a couple of WordPress sites up right now that I really, really, really never want to see again.

But it's like GOG.show. Check it out now. Exactly. Go hack it now while it's still available before we move to Squarespace. I mean, it's powerful. I'll give you that. It's powerful. But nowadays, I just, I would go find something else to do. Go be a barista in Maui or something.

That's a good plan. I like that. Yeah. So, Thomas Griffiths writes in, hi, gents. First of all, a big thank you for your previous advice on using the unintuitive clusterfuck that is Squarespace. It's fantastic. My wife, who has just started her own life coaching business, now has her own website with analytics.

See, that's what it's for. That's what Squarespace is good for. One person or two people who want to build a website and don't have to deal with anything. And, you know, it's not really feature complete, but it gets the job done for most people. It gets the job done. In fact, I'm actually doing one for a friend now who's a musician. I was just like, let's just do Squarespace.

You don't need that much. This is perfect for you. JPD.me, my personal site. That's on Squarespace. So, there's stuff out there. So, continuing. Best of all, she accomplished all this without my help, which is the way you want it to be. As the default lifelong technical support person for my immediate and extended family, this is a big win.

No updates, no coding, no troubleshooting, etc. Squarespace should be throwing you the monies for your recommendations, as should 1Password. No complaints about that on our side. We would like the big monies. And, shameless plug for her website here. That will be linked in the show notes. Secondly, I, like many others, have followed a similar browser journey as yourselves, Firefox, Chrome, Opera.

However, instead of going full circle back to Firefox, I'm now using Vivaldi, original creators of Opera. So, there we go. Number two for Vivaldi. Two for Vivaldi. All right. Thank you. Cheers from New Zealand. Yep. Martin writes in, Firefox maker is working on voice-controlled web browser called Scout. I like the idea, but I can see some poor schmuck telling his browser to look up porn at the wrong time.

I can see some poor schmuck on the other side of the cubicle yelling at the other guy's browser to look up porn. Yeah, that'd be pretty funny. Because that's what I'd be doing. Yes, yes, it would be. Brian writes in, I was just listening to your most recent show and heard that you were looking for a pop-up blocker for Firefox.

Well, try out Ghostery. You know what? No, I'm just... I'm going to skip Firefox. Sorry. Right. Well, for people that do use Firefox, he says he uses it and has not had a single pop-up since he started using it about two years ago. It also blocks most trackers and is highly customizable.

So, there you go. Drew writes in, here's a story that shows how to deal with the share economy. Companies that go rogue, find them for littering. Well, that same story from Melbourne. So, that we just discussed. So, yeah, there you go. That's the way to do it. Mark writes in, Tim Hortons drops even further in consumer trust rankings after introducing Bitcoin Donut.

This saddens me because I have a special love in my heart for Tim Hortons. But, uh... Yeah, that's where you go and you want poo thrown at you. And a damn fine breakfast sandwich, I gotta say. Okay. Martin writes in, McDonald's new self-ordering kiosks ring the death knell for many fast food jobs.

Guys, what do you think of this? I understand why Mickey D is doing this, at least in my area. No one wants to work for these guys. However, I hate the idea that the ATMs are taking over. I go to the clown every day for an iced tea, and when I do, I start an order on the ATM and then abandon it halfway through. I know I am one person, but I figure I mess up thief's stats.

One guy coming in every day about the same time and starts an order, abandons it. What is going on? Please ask others to do this if for no other reason to mess with them. All right. Luddites. Throwing shoes in the works. Yeah, seriously. I personally don't care about this. It's McDonald's.

I don't go there. I see where the problem might be for some people, lower income people who need that job, but that job is terrible. I did it. That was my first job was working at McDonald's, and I wouldn't really want that for anyone personally. But people do want those jobs. That's the thing. That's why we may need a UBI pretty soon.

Well, here's the deal. You know, if more people are ordering through kiosks, they can order more food faster because people are really slow, and then they need more cooks. So you just move from the front of the house to the back of the house. Well, if you're getting that much McDonald's, you're going to die soon anyways, too. Yeah, we're culling the herd no matter what.

Yes. Ben Schuster writes in, one question I have for you guys is, what do you think about SRWare browser? My brother seems to think it's the best browser on the market, but you guys use Mozilla and Opera, which I've never seemed to get into. I really like the simplicity of the Chrome browsers available. Keep up the great work.

I look forward to your next podcast. Okay. SRWare is built on Chromium, and it's all open source, which for me is kind of scary because I looked at some of the dates on the news on the site, and I think the last news update was 2016. Yep.

And yeah, that for me is not good. I did check the Mac version, and they just did an update in March. So they are, it is under active development, but look, I ain't got time for that. I really don't. Also, it's just got a bad name. Yeah. Rebrand people.

SRWare. SRWare. Andrea writes in, hey guys, great show. I keep hearing you guys ranting about dockless bike and scooter sharing systems, but I have to tell you that it is not that bad if the people using it are decent. Aha! There's the rub, Andrea. Therein is the rub. I live in Zurich, and for the last six years and the last couple of years, smide.che e-bikes popped up.

I have yet to find a bike parked in the middle of the sidewalk, though. Every bike comes with a helmet attached to it, which you are required by law to use since the bike goes up to 50 kilometers per hour and needs a license plate. Wow. That's a motorcycle. That's not a bike. If you want to check it out, the website is smide.ch. There's also an English version.

Don't get scared from the German. So not all dockless sharings are bad. Keep up the good work. Well, that's because you're better people than us. Yeah, Europeans are... Look, I got nothing good to say about Americans right now, so... Neither do I. Let me tell you what. If one of these bikes was left in front of my place here in Santa Monica, first off, somebody would steal the helmet within five seconds.

Secondly, somebody would then just jump on it and go at the max speed through stop signs, and then they would just dump it in the middle of the street and walk away. That's exactly what would happen here. I've seen at least three Instagram videos this week of people who are trying them out for the first time, and they were in the middle of the street in Santa Monica, two on a bird, no helmet, and taking video at the same time.

Yes, of course. Of course. Damon writes in, M1 Finance, great for buying partial shares, but there's no link. Did you check it out? Have you been able to find it? I googled it. It seems that they are still doing it, so I will look into that a little bit more. So thank you so much, Damon. Okay.

I.T. Black Sheep writes in, a possible Lightroom replacement is Darktable. It is available for all platforms, darktable.org. I looked into this, and it's just kind of, I don't know, it's kind of ugly, and it's open source, which means, you know, not update.

I like giving people money for software for the things that are important to me. Yeah. So with that, I'm going to stick with the one that I, with Capture One, I believe. Right. Pierre writes in, hey guys, I just subscribed for the poor pledge of one buck on your Patreon. Hey, we'll take it, man.

Appreciate it. I wanted to let you know that I am so glad to listen to your podcast every Tuesday when I do my shift for Deliveroo with my bike. I love when you guys say, Deliveroo, listening to you guys with the same fascination for technology as I have without the blindness of all the Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon bullshit is so refreshing.

You make my burger. Yes, five guys have invaded Paris, and burgers are the new pizza here. Well, wait till you come over here and get a real burger. Five guys, not so great. Makes his burger delivery so much more easy. Anyway, please say Deliveroo a bunch of times for me, and you'll make my next Tuesday. Keep up the good work, and I hope you guys are getting better every day.

Cheers from France. Pierre. Deliveroo. Next up. Next up, Marshall wrote in, here's a creative use of the bikes you hate for a high school senior break. It's linked over at Reddit, and a bunch of high school students got a shit ton of these bikes and parked them, I'm guessing, in the faculty parking lot.

Yeah, that was pretty much it. That was pretty good. All right. Over on iTunes, Bear the Hairless writes in, five stars. What a couple of grumps. My kind of guys. These guys are the best way to stay up to date on all the tech news that's fit to know about, and a bunch of it that isn't. Along with sidekick Dave Bittner, they also cover security and the like, other than a slightly unnerving hatred for bird scooters, which is made up for with great taste in music.

These are some of the best and most intelligent voices on the internet today. Start your week off right. Stick Jason and Brian in your ear holes. It'll make you a better person. I think. Maybe. I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't go that far. Why is our hatred for birds slightly unnerving? I don't know. It's not just us.

Look at all the people writing us in about them now. Yeah, man. We're just the spearhead. That's right. We're just the spearhead. Yes. A little slime gave us a five star rating as well. Excellent perspective. These guys provide a somewhat pessimistic view of up and coming technology. Not everything new is great. I love the insight and usually agree with what they say.

Blockchain be damned. Indeed. Danny. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, zero, nine, eight, seven. Funny and interesting. And this is a five star. I like the perspective and you guys are so funny. Good stuff. Great name. I like that. Yes. And another five star rating from Russia fire. A great start to my Monday.

You guys are the best. I listen to your show on Monday whilst working. And they always cheer me up. I usually get a good laugh from Brian and Jason. You are the best tech podcast since the old maximum PC, no BS podcast from back in 2007 and 2008. Keep it up. We shall. So if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And preferably the shorter, the better. If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. And please tell a friend. Grab someone's phone and download our podcast there. Closing shout outs.

So I missed a father's day on the podcast. It was a bit difficult this year as my wife and I couldn't stop thinking about all the children separated from their families. So we've donated to R-A-I-C-S, RACES. So these children can get the legal representation they deserve. Please consider donating. We'll have the link in the show notes.

Also, quick healthy life tip. I go to the farmer's market every Sunday. There's a flower seller there. Ten bucks for a massive bouquet. They last all week. They're gorgeous and they really brighten up the house. Do yourself a damn favor every now and then. Get yourself something nice. I should have been doing this for years. I've been doing the flower thing forever, man.

It's great. You just get some cheap flowers, put them around your house. I go to Trader Joe's. They always have deals. I've got, I've literally got a nice purple orchid in my bathroom right now. Smells the place up really nice. Especially on those days after I had too much Fodgas. Too much Deliveroo.

Yes. And super important news coming out of Moscow during the World Cup right now. The beer supply is running low. Oh no. They're going to have to switch to vodka. That's not good for me. That's not good for anybody. Okay. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash gog. Tell us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give it 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 265.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week. No, nipples, huh? Hmm. No, sir. I don't think I have any use for rubber nipples. I'll tell you what, though.

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