267: Everybody's Heard About the Bird

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome back, Brian. It's good to be here-ish. How you doing? I'm alive. That's good enough, yeah? Yep. Okay, that's all could be expected right now. Thank you, everybody who's reached out and said something. I appreciate it. Yeah, we're here. Life goes on. Circle of life. Blah, blah, blah.

And speaking of, how about those damn ties in the cave rescue? You know, you know, yeah, pretty awesome, right? Like, you know, look, a government loses some kids and is able to find them. Amazing. Wish ours could do that. Yeah, this is true. Oh, starting early.

Starting early. Well, it was at least a little good news, a little bright spot in an otherwise bleak and miserable world. Except for, of course, petty officer Saman Gunan, who didn't make it out. But what a hero. Total hero. Yeah, that was some pretty great news. It's interesting being in Canada. I've been in Canada for the last 10 days or so. Very removed from what would be considered normal news in the U.S.

So, yeah, it was a big story here. And I was not really under a dark cloud for the last 10 days anyways, because, you know, we kind of ignore what's happening south of the border when you're up here. It's nice. Yeah, it must be. Yeah, it is. How about a little follow up?

We've talked a bit about how Facebook is trying to clean up their mess with their advertising system and everything that kind of happened in the last election. And they wanted to bring some sunshine to their political ads and created a whole transparency system where you could go and you could see the ads.

And they now told you who was paying for them. The problem is, it's so Byzantine, who pays for what, that it's actually still kind of useless. Oh, nice. So this entire article gets into how, sure, they're showing you the names of the organizations that are paying for these ads, but then you have to go and do your own research to find out who the hell these organizations are, who's sponsoring them, who's funneling money to those people, and who's funneling money into the funneling money account for the funneling money account for the funneling money account that goes into that particular ad group.

So it's still basically a black box, and we have no idea who's paying for what that we're seeing. Obfuscation all the way down. Yes. So my simple solution is, how about Facebook just doesn't take any political ads whatsoever? There's an idea. Huh. Like that's going to happen. I know. Oh, well.

And as I've mentioned, I am no longer in Santa Monica. I've taken a brief break to kind of get away from everything that I was dealing with on a daily basis there, and I came to Canada land. So I haven't seen a single damn scooter. Not one. Must be nice. Well, I've been hearing from all my friends back in Santa Monica that it's gone apeshit crazy there again, because initially Santa Monica passed a cap, and there was going to be a new program and restrictions in the city of Los Angeles shut them down completely.

The boardwalk is apparently a free-for-all, because multiple government jurisdictions take place on it, and apparently it's a big loophole, and there are just—it's apparently become insanity down there, just in the 10 days that I've been gone, to the point where it's hit the news.

There's a big thing, and there's a big deal, but there's a big deal, and there's a big deal, and there are no more news vans down there than there are almost our scooters, and it's just going crazy and apeshit down there. And what I love about this, I have a story from the Santa Monica Daily Post that kind of goes into the whole thing again that's in our show notes, but what I really love about this is they've contacted like Lime, and Lime is saying, we didn't put any of them there.

It's not our fault that people take them and then drive them there. Again, yes, it is. It's your product. I'm so sick. All these companies are like, it's the users. Anyways, I'm not there, so I'm going to not let it spoil my Canadian vacation.

That sounds like a mighty fine idea. I would stick to that. Yeah, and I just wanted to say, quickly pointed out by a friend of the show, Mike, who's been keeping me in the loop on the bird shenanigans taking place down there right now. He pointed out that if you go take a look at Bird's official Instagram account, not a single helmet to be found.

Every picture of people riding birds on the official Bird Instagram account are all riding them illegally. Well done. Oh, my God. You'd think somebody would point that out. You know, somebody in PR.

But, Jason, nobody cares anymore. We have not only reached the Web 2.0 economy, we've reached the no one gives a fuck economy. Bird is so blatantly like they've been yelled at about this and then they're giving away free helmets and they've had to take out ads with Santa Monica and put things on buses saying you have to ride legally, you have to wear a helmet.

They care so little about following the rules that they're being forced to follow. Their entire Instagram account is full of awesome pictures of really cool looking millennials riding birds illegally. That's where we're at as a society now. Shit's given point. Oh, exactly.

Nice. There's a really good article in Recode about the scooter wars will be a bloodbath and Uber will win because while you are gone, Uber has decided to throw their hat in with a bunch of money and they're getting into it. And it's a pretty interesting article.

Did you get a chance to read this one? I scanned it a little bit. It makes sense because Uber's got the most money, right? They just do. I mean, I know people were sending us articles left, right and center about how birds now have been valued at $2 billion, which is ridiculous. I do like just a side note.

Apparently, people are going around in Santa Monica and Venice and they're passing out turd stickers to go over the bird. Nice. So they say now that you can find them all and they all say turd. So that's pretty good. Yeah. So it makes sense. If Uber wants to get into it, why not? I mean, they've got more money. So they'll win.

They've also got a pretty built out infrastructure for doing ride share matching and things like that. So it's a no brainer for them. But I kind of agree with this article saying that Uber will win because I think they will. I think they're just going to squash or buy anybody else. Yeah, I agree, too.

At the end of the day, it always comes down to who has the most money, right? Whoever spends the most money is going to win. End of story. And we got this article in. The Rise of Pseudo-AI, How Tech Firms Quietly Use Humans to Do Bots Work. You know how we always say AI doesn't exist?

Well, here's your proof. Michael sent this to us. Stuart sent this to us on Twitter. A couple people sent us this. But it is perfect. It makes perfect sense. I'm not surprised by this. Are you? Oh, God, no. No, not at all.

But I love how they're calling it Pseudo-AI. It's not Pseudo-AI. It's shit work. It's cheap labor. It's cheap labor. Human labor. That's what you're using. And by the way, I want to mention this because I had to... Remember a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about my Apple Watch, and it kept giving me the set-up cellular service thing, and I couldn't figure out how to shut off the warning.

But what I found out was Verizon actually switched back on the service for some reason. Somehow, without me ever talking to Verizon, they switched it back on. So the watch was trying to set it up since it detected that I was paying for the service for the watch again, which really pissed me off.

So then I had to go back to Verizon. I had to demand money back and all this other stuff because I was like, I never asked for this to be on. This should have been off after the first month, which was supposed to be free. I should never be charged anything. I want my money back. And I was just... I didn't call them because I was here in Canada. I didn't want the billing and all that.

So I used their online chat, right, which is a big mistake because that always takes 25 hours longer than it should. Anyways, I did all that, and it felt like it was a pseudo-AI. It didn't feel like a real person. But here's where it really gets me. How far have we come as a society where even customer service doesn't have to be customer service anymore?

At one point, they went away for a little bit, and then they came back, and they typed, I had to argue with my supervisor to get you your refund, but I did it, LOL. Oh, my God. This is Verizon's customer service now is now LOLing me. I don't need fucking LOLs for my fucking customer service.

Hashtag winky wink. I'm sorry. I'm just speechless. I'm speechless. We're not even adults. We're not adults anymore. We're not adults anymore. Like, it's... Oh, there's no professionalism. There's none. None. Why am I getting winky face LOL from customer service about something they screwed up on and just getting some money back?

Yeah, I don't know. Pseudo-AI. Yeah, it must have been Casual Friday over there at Verizon. And in the Philippines, yeah. And the funny thing is, you know, we always talk about all the articles that say AI is going to, like, you know, ruin the economy. There's so many jobs lost.

Well, the jobs are lost to people here in the States who are doing customer service because the pseudo-AI over in the Philippines is probably raking it in right now. Yeah, well, at a much lower rate than they would pay us to do it. But that's, you know, that's the global economy, right? That's how it's going to work.

In the news.

A hat tip to Brendan for this first one on Twitter. It's a landmark legal shift opens Pandora's box for DIY guns. Great. If things weren't going crazy enough. When we first started doing this show, this libertarian, Cody Wilson, had just done his first 3D printed gun.

This was, like, right when we were starting the show. Yep. And we're like, oh, this is great. This is just what we need. Again, our other catchphrase, what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? And he's been fighting in court for the last five years to basically have the right to 3D print his guns and share the files to do it.

Turns out he won. It's just data. It's just data. No, it's just a platform. Yeah. Free speech, man. Free speech. So, yeah, that's great. Just, you know, thought we should follow up on that a little bit since it's been five years.

Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm against this. I think this is ridiculous, you know, because 3D printing guns, completely untraceable. I mean, we might as well give up on trying any gun control if this is going to pass. This is basically the nail in the coffin on gun control ever.

Kind of. Ever. Because if you're 3D printing your own guns, they can never be traced. They can never be tracked. They can never be registered. They can never be anything. Yeah, they're just disposable. They're just disposable. Yeah. So I guess we've decided this is what we want. So, okay.

Great. Yep. Load up and get strapped. I am staying up. I'm staying up north. I don't think I'm going to come back over the border. Okay. That's probably a wise idea. I'm going to ride down the boardwalk on my bird shooting my 3D printed gun into the sky going, yee-haw, motherfuckers.

All while getting shot with your selfie drone so you can post it on YouTube later. That's right. What a brave new world we're making for ourselves. Oh, I love it. I love it. And this was an interesting bit of news. Apple is going to deploy 1Password to all of its 123,000 employees, and they're in talks for an acquisition.

As Apple does. As Apple does. I didn't know Apple had 123,000 employees. That's a lot. Biggest market cap in the world, Jason. Yeah, but, you know, are they giving it to all the Chinese factory workers?

Come on. Do they get 1Password, too? They're not employees. They're subcontractors, Jason. Exactly. So, I just thought that was a high number. But, you know, good for 1Password. Yeah. Look, hey, we've supported them for a long time. You know, it sucks that we're not going to get any more ad revenue from them, I'm guessing.

Probably not. Yep. So, I guess we'll have to start backing somebody else. But there won't be anybody else, because as soon as Apple bakes this into their program, that's that. Yeah. And you know what? That's going to save me 60 bucks a year. So, I'd be okay if they bake it in and give it to me for free.

Well, as long as they make sure it works with all browsers and not just Safari. True that. True that. Didn't even think about that. There's that. Oh, man, I hate Safari. Me too. So bad. And I have gone back to opera full time.

I just can't. I can't. It's like, I just don't have the bandwidth to do anything else right now. It's nice to be back, though. I did have to relearn where the close tab button was again, but what are you going to do? Now, I don't know if you've seen this one. An ex-Apple employee has been charged with stealing autonomous vehicle secrets.

Okay. I'm not even going to try and pronounce this guy's name, but if you'd like to give it a go. Zhao Lingzeng. Yeah, probably. That's pretty good. He was stopped by federal agency. I just came back from Dim Sum with the whole family, so I'm pretty sure that's right. Okay. I forgot.

You have an in. Yeah, so you stopped at San Jose Airport, and you got a last-second ticket to China, and they got him trying to leave with a bunch of secrets that he stole from Apple while he was still there before he left. I thought Apple was supposedly not working on an autonomous vehicle.

Yeah, they've been working on it for years. They never said they weren't. Well, they never said they were. That's true. But they never said they weren't. This is a good point, Jason. So, here's the deal. They were. This guy got the docks, and he was trying to ski-dabble.

And they caught him. That's what happens. That's not what happened with the Google guys. They didn't get caught. Well, a little later. This guy got caught before he could at least share the documents. Yeah. Right. The other guy made it out and at least started the truck company before the whole Uber thing happened.

But what are you going to do? And Apple is combining their machine learning and Siri teams. Right. And they're creating a new AI-slash-ML team. Now, doesn't that seem kind of redundant? Because what's the difference between the two? Well, I thought the point was we keep working on ML until we get AI.

Have AI. I don't know. Because we don't have both, Apple. No. We don't. We just have ML. Let's just call it Apple Intelligence. Yeah. Okay. Instead of Artificial Intelligence. But, yeah. So, they're trying to pare down over there. And I just thought it was interesting that they have an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team.

If Apple stayed on their old brand, it would be iIntelligence. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I just read this headline, and I thought it was hilarious because the guy's name, which you didn't say. I was like, Apple combines machine learning and Siri teams under gonorrhea. That's what I thought, too. But I didn't want to be culturally insensitive.

So, hopefully, Siri will get better. But I'm not holding my breath. It is just a dumpster fire. It never does anything right for me. It's far worse than Alexa, that's for sure. They've definitely fallen behind. Mm-hmm. Now, the only thing that's been somewhat decent is the voice-to-text.

Yeah. Yeah. That's actually quite good, which is really the only thing that I ever use Siri for is if I'm texting while I'm driving. So, it's been very good for that, I have to say. I got a new app that we'll talk about later in the show. It uses the Siri's built-in speech-to-text to do transcriptions of the stuff that I record on my watch.

And it's pretty not bad. It's pretty not bad? It's pretty not bad. I wonder what we're going to be done with that sentence. It's not pretty good, but it's not not bad. So, it's pretty not bad. Like most things Apple, apparently, these days. They're not not doing it, but they didn't say they were doing it.

But it's not bad, but it's not good. So, more Uber news. New York City considers new payrolls for Uber drivers. So, the regulators are moving towards significantly raising wages for drivers for Uber and other ride-hailing apps. Shocking! So, if a driver's earnings fall below $17.22 per hour over the course of a week, the companies would be required to make up the difference.

How about that? This could actually bankrupt Uber, from what we understand, because the last time that we had stats on this stuff, Uber drivers were averaging $4.00 to $5.00 an hour. Yeah. Right? Yeah. That's what I remember hearing. So, Uber's going to have to pay all their drivers $13.00 an hour.

Yeah. It's saying here the median net hourly earnings in the industry were about $14.25. But I call bullshit on that. Me too. That's not what the study that we heard was. And Uber was supposedly going to come back with a big FU, and here's actually our numbers to that study.

And as far as I know, they never did. We certainly would have heard about it and talked about it on this show. So, I'm thinking that if this passes, this will bankrupt Uber. It's not going to bankrupt them. It's not going to bankrupt them. They'll pull out of New York City. Yeah. If probably. Yeah. Because they do have a lot of money in the bank, but this would definitely be a faster drain on their runway.

Yeah. It wouldn't make much sense for them to stay there. No. Take all that money and put it into their self-driving cars. Oh, wait. Your next story talks about that. Yes. Barrett on Twitter sent us, So the purge begins. A link that Uber has terminated its self-driving car operators in Pittsburgh.

So they've laid off everybody there as they're rethinking their autonomous vehicle strategy following the fatal crash in Arizona. Earlier this year, they held a meeting this week and informed about 100 autonomous vehicle operators, people who are monitoring the self-driving cars there in Pittsburgh, that they were terminated.

They were eliminating the position and said that they were free to apply for other rules at the company. Interesting. Like drivers. They actually have to drive this time. Yeah. Because that's interesting because that's where their main operations are for self-driving cars because that's where they got all the people from Carnegie Mellon.

Yeah. When they when they pulled them away, it's looking more and more like Uber is just going to pull out of the R&D on this and they'll probably just rent a fleet from Tesla or Waymo or Waymo. Yeah. After, you know, after that whole thing happened, they're like, oh, well, we had your tech. We couldn't make it work.

So I guess we'll just lease your cars. Maybe that'll be it. Yeah. We'll see how that that pans out, because I guess they're really trying to make nice now. This new CEO from is really trying to make nice with Google because, you know, they need them. There's yeah. There's no way that they're going to get somebody.

They're not going to do it by themselves anymore. I mean, that's that's become clear. Yeah. It's either going to be, you know, Waymo, Tesla or GM. Those are those are like the top ones that are going to going to make it, I think. But we'll see how that plays out. But yeah, it sucks for these people then in Pittsburgh for sure. But it doesn't say that they're actually laying off any of the engineers yet.

So no. So far, it's just the people that were sitting in the cars. So, yeah. Tough job. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Now, this one, this one got my goat. I wanted this last week, but you weren't around. So I waited on it. Court rules copying photos found on the Internet is fair use.

Everybody is pissed off about this one. Well, basically, it just says there's no such thing as copyright then. Mm hmm. Like we don't own anything like nobody owns a damn thing. And if you put it up on the Internet, it's now a free for all. That's kind of it.

So how much money to Pinterest pour into this thing? Yeah, seriously. You know, their lobbyists were in the back high five at each other when this came down. No shit. It basically gives them a business model, which has been lacking for the inception of Pinterest. Yeah. Yeah. Virginia federal court has made a decision that photographers won't be happy to hear.

No shit. But the court ruled that finding a photo on the Internet and then using it without permission on a commercial website can be considered fair use. Well, how? OK, but how does this not then slippery slope to? Well, I found music on the Internet. It's fair use.

I found video on the Internet. It's fair use. I don't understand any differentiation between a photo or any other version of media. If you find it on the this to me, this ruling. Well, obviously, it's going to have to go to the Supreme Court and get shut down. There's no way we can have a society with this rule in place.

We can't. Yeah, I mean, it's a seven page ruling. You can go read it if you want. The link will be in the show notes. It said the use was transformative and non-commercial, which if you're putting a photograph on a commercial website, that's bullshit. The use was in good faith. Oh, no, God.

No, it wasn't in good faith. They stole it. Fuckers. And the use was of a factual photo and instead of creative photos. And the use was a previously published photo. Well, anything on the Internet is a previously published photo at that point. The use was only a crop rather than the whole.

And the use didn't hurt the potential market for that photograph. Well, OK, there you go. There's your loophole. But I mean, now you're now you're in the opposite case. You're guilty until proven innocent because now you have to prove that you could have made money off that photo. And how do you do that? And how do you do that?

And are you going to take somebody to court every single time that they use your photo? That's ridiculous. Yeah, it's it's not good. It's not good. So this is good. This is going to have to get overturned. It must. It must. Which means it probably won't. That's good. That's a good point. Welcome to our society again.

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Again, that's for 25% off your first order. Visit rxbar.com slash gog and enter promo code gog at checkout. We thank RX Bar for sponsoring Grumpy Old Geeks. Cups and doodads. So, I want to talk about one app that I mentioned earlier in the show called Just Press Record.

And if you go to their website, it says, now with dark mode. And we were just chatting before we started recording. Is it not bullshit that people are charging you money now in the premium version to get dark mode? Like in TweetBot, you have to have, like, you know, the paid version to get dark mode.

And some other apps that I've had that is like, okay, you know, here, give us your subscription if you want to enable dark mode. I'm like, how about I just delete mode, you cheap bastards? Well, there's all kinds of things like that that just drive me crazy. I can't remember exactly what it was, but Instagram was making a big hoo-ha out of rolling out some new feature in the past couple of days.

And I was like, when Jason and I were building stuff, we would never have launched a program without this feature. You're rolling it out five years in with gazillions of dollars behind you, and I'm supposed to be impressed? I'm like, you idiots. You release half-baked bullshit, and then you act all proud of yourself when you put in, like, a feature we would have considered as part of the beta release.

Yeah. Oh, man, the new one with Instagram that has me really pissed off. For, like, a week, they had this really cool feature. When you got to where you already were, it says, you're caught up. So you didn't have to keep scrolling. I don't know if you've noticed, they took that away. No, I saw it today. I didn't see it today.

I check it every day. Maybe you haven't updated yet. No, I haven't. Yeah, I've got auto-update on it, updated it, and now it's gone. And I'm like, that's some bullshit. That was a great feature, but you know what they're not seeing, or not getting, are the people who just keep scrolling, not realizing that they've already gone past where they already were, and loading more ads, because there's an ad every third photo now.

Yes, that's true. They probably saw their ad numbers drop, you know, precipitously when they rolled out that feature and said, oh, we can't have that. That's too good for the user. Let's take that back. That would actually make sense. We must get rid of this feature. Yeah. Assholes. Anyway, just press record.

I got this because I always like to take voice notes, and we talked about it a long time ago. You made fun of me quite a bit, because I had my Zoom H1, because it's just a, pick it up, one button to record, done. Put it back in my pocket. Don't have to fumble with the phone, unlock it, find the app, open it, and record. Yes, as opposed to picking the phone out of the pocket, you know, pressing the thing that unlocks it.

Exactly, because when I'm walking the dogs, it's pretty hard. So, I saw this because it works with the Apple Watch, and it is actually pretty cool, because now I just have, I literally raise my wrist, tap it, and can record straight from my AirPods into my watch. Don't even have to have the phone around. Then when the phone gets next to it later, it can, it'll sync everything over, and then it's got built-in transcription inside of it.

So, it'll use the speech-to-text and give you a transcription if you want, which when you're out walking or doing something, you just need to take quick notes. It's fantastic. I think it was like $10, well, well worth it if you take a lot of voice notes. And also, if you want to be really, oh, it's only $5 right now, definitely worth it then for $5.

Once you turn recording on on your watch, you can just let it go. So, if you're trying to like, you know, it's illegal in California and probably most states, but you can record surreptitiously with the watch now in a very easy manner. Illegal shmeagle.

Nobody else cares about laws. Nobody cares anymore. Just don't get caught. Yes. But it's a pretty nice little app for $5. Highly recommend it. Cool. And I don't know if you've seen the new Surface Go tablets that they just came out with. I have.

I like them. They're pretty cute. They're pretty cute. And like for $400? Yeah. The problem is the price point. Like, you mentioned something in the show notes about it, like replacing an iPad. It's a little bit cheaper than an iPad, but not much. Like, they used to be considerably cheaper. Now, they've made these things pretty badass, and they're about the same price.

Yeah. Yeah. The 64 gig, 4 gig of RAM version is $399. The 128 gig with 8 gig of RAM is $549. Yeah. But, and of course, the cover and the pen are sold separately. Of course. But, you know, for a nice little Windows machine that's probably a little bit more powerful, you can probably do more on it than on an iPad.

Oh, yeah. It's not too bad. So, you totally can. It's basically like a mini laptop. It's like an Air. So, you know, if I were back all PC, I would totally have this over the iPad. But, you know, I'm all Apple right now. Yeah. And speaking of Apple, I got the new MacBook Pro update email yesterday that the new ones were out.

They look nice. They finally moved to the Intel Series 8 chips, because everything else has been running on 7s, but Windows machines have been on 8 for ages now. And the 15-inch, 1-terabyte version with 32 gig of RAM, $3,600. Fuck that noise.

They're staying on brand. Yeah, they are. I'm sorry. That is very expensive. That is ridiculous for a laptop. I mean, I'm sure I paid that for all my other ones, but, man, my used 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pros work fantastic. So, there's no way I'm upgrading.

Oh, and they come with ports, too. Mine have ports on them. I've got USB ports. Mine have ports, too. Yes, I've got an audio port. I've got, you know, a couple Thunderbolt ports. I have an HDMI port. No dongles. I'm just moving my head around right now, and I'm observing and gazing lovingly at all my ports.

Look at all these ports, Jason. They're beautiful. Yeah. So, I'll be skipping that one. And there's a really fun article on Ars Technica. It's 1990 meet 2018. How far does 20 megahertz of Macintosh 2SI power go today? And it's a fun little walk down memory lane where this guy tries to get his 2SI to work and what he can and can't do with it.

It's fun. I really enjoyed it. And if you've ever used Mac in the old days, he was running System 755, which was, you know, one of the solid releases back in the day. Yeah. But it's fun to see all the old interfaces. Again, Netscape and, you know, Word and all that crap. It was just a fun little walk.

Oh, Netscape Navigator 3. Yeah. Site best viewed with Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 2. Oh, the old days. Oh, the old days. I miss them. I miss them so much. I found this one over on VentureBeat. HoloSuit promises full body VR tracking and haptics by November 2018.

This is like the ready player one suit, like actually in the wild. And I'm looking at it and it's like, oh, I got like halfway through the first paragraph. And I'm like, oh, this thing's never going to see the light of day. Nope. Yes, because the holosuit just reached its funding goal on Kickstarter. As soon as I saw that, I'm like, oh.

Now, the fun part is if you go to the Kickstarter page, I was slapping my forehead on this yesterday. So they have raised a total of $65,081. So far. Yeah. Right? From a total of 41 backers.

41 people. Yes. That's it. That's it. It looks cool if it worked. Yes, it looks cool. But it looks like one of these should cost about $65,000 for development. Oh, yeah, yeah. And here's the pledge $99 or more and you get a holosuit one finger glove.

Ooh, one finger. I think, yeah. It tracks your hand and your index finger. Yes, if I could put it on my middle finger, it'd be much more appropriate. Yes. But this thing is like, it's pretty funny. Like, there's almost, yeah, 41 backers like paid for the big packages.

But if it works, it'll be cool. But this thing is not coming out by November 2018 in any way. It will never ship. We will be doing a story in November about how they're never going to ship and everybody lost their money. Uh-huh. Pretty much. Pretty much. And while I was bouncing around as Technica, I found this one.

Would you pay $700 plus a monthly fee for a digital license plate? No. No. Absolutely. What's the point? My license plate works. It works in sunshine. It works in the dark. I don't have to charge it. And even better, my current license plate doesn't come with RFID and GPS chips that anybody can track.

What the hell? I don't get it. There's only 1,000 of these on the road right now in California. I'm surprised there's even that many. Yeah. Well, look, they've gotten permission for the first 1,000 plates.

If they're out there that aren't on a review car, I'd be surprised. But you can have it say different things while you're driving around. I don't see the point of this. I do not see the point of this at all. No. Nobody cares. Yeah, nobody cares.

About wasting money. Now, this one is terrifying. China brings Star Wars to life with laser AK-47 that can set fire to targets up to a kilometer away. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah. I think I was bouncing around Twitter, and Charlie Strauss was talking about this thing, too.

He was like, God forbid they have a mirror or it starts to rain when you're shooting this thing. But this is like a terrifying weapon. Like, basically, you can just catch fire and not even know where it's coming from. I like the fact that it's classified as being non-lethal, but produces an energy beam that cannot be seen by the naked eye, can pass through windows, and cause the instant carbonization of human skin and tissue.

Yeah. Sounds pretty lethal to me. Oh, you're going to have a shitty day, but you might not die. If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire. Burn through clothes in a split second. All right, so I guess we just walk around naked. Yes. The pain will be beyond endurance.

Okay. Well, if it's beyond endurance, that probably means you're going to die. It's now ready for mass production, and the first units are likely to be given to anti-terrorism squads and the Chinese armed police. Great. Okay. Stay in Canada. Stay in Canada. And Amazon.

This is kind of cool, and I expected this to happen, but it's happening faster than I thought. They're taking their Fire HD 8 and HD 10 tablets and turning them into the, they're calling it show mode, but it's basically turning it into the one that you just bought for your kitchen. Yep, yep, super nice, and actually, the really cool thing about it is the app will do it no matter what, so the cool thing is, I don't, we don't have a show up here in Canada at my in-laws, but if I want to call my mom, I can do it from my iPhone and still have the voice call through the show.

It's fantastic. But can you do video through the app? Not a voice call, a video call, video call, I mean, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, so anything that you can put the app on, basically. Oh, that's kind of cool, except for the Fire 7s, which is what I've got, because I gave my Fire 8 away to my friend Jason. And now I've just got a Fire 7, and it is not powerful enough to do it.

Well, you can do it with, you should be able to do it with your iPad, if you get the app on your iPad. Give that a go. Okay. I just don't have anybody to call, so I have to wait till you get home. Yeah, we'll try when you get home. I'm home next week, Jason. Okay. I don't know. You never know with you in Canada. Maybe. Maybe I'm home next week. We'll see.

First up, I want to do a shout-out to a friend of the show, Seth Miranda. He's got a cool new podcast over at Adorama, where he's been doing a lot of demos and media stuff, and it's turning into quite the Adorama celebrity over there.

So they basically gave him a new podcast with Suzy Squiat. That's a mouthful, but you have to say it's Suzy, because it's S-U-Z-E-E, so she's like my new Deliveroo of podcast hosts. I was about to say, is she like the CEO of Deliveroo? Yeah.

No, but check it out if you're a photographer or into that kind of stuff, photography, video, audio, give it a listen. There will be a link in the show notes. Awesome. I finished Goliath Season 2. What the flying fuck-a-doodle-doo was that? Is that the Billy Bob Thornton one? Yeah.

Yeah, I liked Season 1. My wife and I have been watching The Marvelous Miss Maisel, which is fantastic, but they start every single show with the trailer for Goliath Season 2, and my wife turns and looks at me every single time and goes, what the fuck is that show about? Yeah. He's a lawyer, and he basically lives in a hotel right by where PCH and Main Street kind of join up.

Oh, yeah. I recognize the hallway he's walking down in the trailer. Yeah, yeah. That's where they film that thing, which has to be great for traffic, I'm sure. But, this season was just so fucking weird. I mean, it was really, really weird, and the ending was just not good.

It was just not a good ending. So, I had to cleanse the palate. So, I started to watch Sneaky Pete. I'm sure you've seen trailers for that, too. I have. About every six minutes. That show is awesome. It's about a con guy who gets out of jail and takes over somebody else's identity. But, it's fantastic.

Fantastic show. Highly recommended. Watch. We basically binged both two seasons in like a week and a half. Nice. So, if you're looking for something fun, not too heavy-handed, somewhat light-hearted, and about con men, not bad. Okay. It's worth a watch. And, as just mentioned, I've got to say, The Marvelous Miss Maisel, we just finished the first season.

There's only one season out last night, or now, and we just finished it last night. It's phenomenal. It's really good. And, Tony Shalhoub makes this phenomenal. He is unbelievably good, and he better win an Emmy for his portrayal of this. Awesome. So, what's it about?

Is it a period piece? It sounds like it's a period piece. It's a period piece set in the 1940s, 50s. And, she, the main character, gets a divorce and becomes a stand-up in a time period where most women don't do that. Oh, interesting. Okay. It's quite good.

And, she is phenomenal. This is Rachel Bronson, whatever her name was. She was from, what's that movie with, or not movie, the show with Kevin Spacey that got canceled. Oh, House of Cards? Yeah. She played the character at first or second season that was, like, kind of the prostitute that then went into hiding and all that.

Oh, yeah. Man, she was gorgeous. So, she is beautiful, and she's beautiful in this show. You'll really enjoy this show, Jason. Watch it. I'll check it out. Trust me on this one. I think you should check it out. Okay, I will. And, by the way, House of Cards wasn't canceled. It's coming back in November. No, well, you know. Just without him. I mean, I stopped watching it after the fourth season anyway, so it's canceled in my mind.

It should be. It was last season. A couple seasons have been so terrible. I watched, like, the first two episodes and the last two of last season, so I could just kind of get a recap of what was going on. But, man, it was not good. Right. And this one's for you because you are such a big Downton Abbey fan. We're talking about really random stuff on Media Candy this week.

No, the Downton Abbey movie is officially starting to film. I don't know if we need it. I was happy with how the show ended, but I'll take it. I hope it's good. Yeah. As long as we get What's-Her-Face, I'm a happy man. Who's What's-Her-Face?

Maggie. Oh, yes. Maggie Smith. Yes. As long as there's Maggie Smith. Because as Tony Shalhoub made Marvelous Miss Maisel for me, Maggie Smith made Downton Abbey. Oh, absolutely. I need just a Maggie Smith. Yeah. It says the main cast is returning, so we'll see. We'll see. Good.

Good. All right. Well, hopefully I'm okay with the movie. I'm glad we're not getting any more of a series. A nice movie should be okay. I'm okay with it. Yeah. As long as it don't end on a cliffhanger or kill off Maggie Smith. Yes. And speaking of things that we may not need, a couple people have tweeted us this.

Star Wars 9 has announced that they're casting Billy Dee Williams to return to the franchise. Okay. As Lando Calrissian. And as two of my friends pointed out on Facebook, why? Why not? And my answer was, because everybody else is dead and they needed somebody.

That's true. They were planning on this whole third one being about Princess Leia and she died. Whoops. So we've got to have somebody. Harrison Ford won't come back. He's dead. We killed off Luke. They killed off Han. They killed off Luke. Maybe Chewie could just be it.

And the actress that played Leia died. So we're screwed. So we need somebody. Oh, man. At least they're not making it all about Jar Jar. Yeah. Thank God. Things could be worse. Things could be worse. And we just went through the summer of the cure over in London. And luckily, because we live in this day and age, you can actually hear and see almost everything.

I've got two links in the show notes. First off, the Robert Smith Meltdown there and back again set, which you can listen to all of it. And there's more than a few live videos of it. And then the whole big 40th anniversary concert that they just finished at London's Hyde Park. All of it available for streaming and viewing.

Pretty cool. Are any of them professionally produced? Yes. Okay, good. The second one, I'm guessing. Second one, yes. Okay. Because, yeah, I looked at the first one. It's a very nice. A lot of shaky phone cam stuff in there. Yeah. The audio, though, is straight off audio board. So you can listen to the audio from that one, which just sounds fantastic.

And then the second one, almost all of it, I think, was shot by the BBC. I'm not entirely sure. Oh, nice. That one I'll check out for sure. And this is an oldie, but a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, sent this one over. What your favorite 80s band says about you? It's on McSweeney's. Did you get a chance to read some of these?

I did. It was quite funny. Yes. Wham. You have made nachos while on ecstasy. And the cure. You have several bracelets or rings you cannot remove. That one's funny because it's true. I figured that one was true. Dead or Alive. Your pet smells like Goldschlager. Brian Adams.

Your hair smells faintly like barbecue sauce. I don't know if I get it, but they're funny. They're just cute. So they are quite funny. Yeah. And the new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil has dropped season 2.A, I guess. Yeah. 2B. I don't know what it would be.

Yeah. A few more episodes have dropped. But more importantly, what I love about this is he's launched a new website, Phil Rosenthal World. And rather conveniently, as they should do for these sorts of things, you can basically click on every single city he's went to and found every single place that he went to. In that city.

It's perfect. Oh, that's great. Yes. It is convenient. This is exactly what somebody needs to go and do for Anthony Bourdain for all of his shows. And it is all of his shows, not just I'll have what Phil's having at Somebody Feed Phil. Both of them are in here. So every single city that he's been to, you can see every place he's gone.

Oh, that's great. Because, yeah, there's some places in L.A. I didn't want to have to go back and watch the whole episode, but I want to eat at some of the places that he went to in L.A. now that I'm back here. And I really want to go get that. I want to go get that pastrami sandwich, but I don't really feel like driving all the way downtown for it. It's like, you know, it's still a sandwich and it ain't going to be it ain't going to be good enough to get me to drive to downtown L.A.

in back. Right. No way. And the Emmy nominations are out. And I've got my fingers crossed for the Americans this year because Matthew Rise and Keri Russell are both up for lead actor and lead actress. So maybe since the show's over, they'll give him a nod. Yeah, me too. I hope they get it.

And as I said, Tony Shalhoub is up for best supporting actor for Mrs. Maisel. Totally deserves it. And Sandra Oh is up for killing Eve. So I'm kind of torn on that. I kind of want her to win. But I really want Keri Russell to win. Yeah, me too. All right.

We've got a bunch here at the library since you've been gone for a little bit and I've had a chance to actually go through some some books. I want to start off by The Singularity Trap by Dennis Taylor. Yes. Now, unfortunately, I don't think you're going to be able to read this one because I thought it was an audio only production. We'll have to we'll have to check on that.

But this is his first non Bobiverse book. And I enjoyed the ever living crap out of it. Oh, you can get it on Kindle. So you can get it on the Kindle. Good. I highly recommend this book. It's a standalone story. And honestly, it still had a lot of the humor that he had in the Bobiverse books, but some you know, more really good, solid sci fi.

I don't know. I just I really enjoyed the crap out of this book. And it's about a guy who finds an alien artifact that's left by, you know, an old race. And there's AI and all this other stuff. But it's like it's but it's good. It's it's done well. It's done completely well.

So I highly recommend that book. Well, I was such a fan of the Bobiverse. I'm not surprised by that. And just a quick update for everybody out there that was thinking about going to get this. It is audio book only until October 5th. Oh, OK, I missed preorder the Kindle edition, but there will not be a print or, you know, not not audible version until October.

OK, yeah, because I don't see that because I already ordered the audio book and I just see Kindle Kindle Unlimited here. But OK, definitely you want to add that to your, you know, your upcoming stuff. Next one, I got an I don't know where I got the recommendation for this. I don't know if it's from a listener or whatnot, but it's a book called All Systems Red.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. It's a Kindle single. And I it was short. It's like 160 pages. So I sent it to you so we could actually read something together for the first time in a while. And I wanted to see what you thought. I actually really loved it.

It's the first thing I've probably read in a long time. I think this partially has to do with the whole thing with my dad. It was just a bit overwhelming. I didn't have time to read. And then when he passed, all of a sudden I was like, I don't know, something just I need to read a book. So you sent that to me and it was short and that was like felt doable.

And I burned through it in one night. It was awesome. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I went through it as well. And I went through it in like a couple of days because I only read on the crapper with the Kindle. And, you know, I wasn't having that much fiber that week. So it took me a little longer to get through it. And it was I love this book. I loved it so much.

I immediately went out and got the second one and preordered the next two. So I'm halfway through the second one. And I got to say, it's just as good as the first one. It's different, but it's good. I recommend these. Yeah, I will definitely be reading the second one because I really did enjoy the first one a lot.

Yeah, it's about the same size. They're short. You know, you can you can burn through these pretty quick. The next one up is Columbus Day Expeditionary Force Book One by Craig Allenson. This was a suggestion from a listener like a couple of weeks ago. This came in and I went and picked it up because I had some extra credits on Audible.

And he had mentioned that the narrator on this one was really good and was up for an award for it. And oh, my God, this is such a fun book. I love it. It's it's more sci fi done right. And there's a snarky AI in there that they call Skippy, who's like, you know, a million year old A.I. from an advanced civilization.

And it's funny as hell near the end. At the beginning, it's not so funny, but near the end, it gets hilarious. And I am I'm cooking through this one. I've only got like an hour left. I can't go get the next one because I think there are like six books in this series because we know what happens when you go back to back on these things.

So I think I'll finish the Murderbot Diaries 2 first before I bounce to something else and maybe read another book in between because I don't want to get too down the rabbit hole on a single series because, yeah, we know that that doesn't ever works out well. No, it does not. So and speaking about the damn breaking for me in terms of reading, I have been stuck on Christopher Moore's secondhand souls for over a year now.

Oh, my God. I finished it. What do you think? It was good. Yeah, it was really good. I enjoyed it. It wasn't one of his best, but I don't again. I don't know what the block was and it went away. So thanks, dad, for that because I'm reading again and I'm very excited about that.

So I was happy to finish that. I ordered. I got myself a noir because I'm going to go ahead and try to read that, but not right away. I think I'm going to skip back over and maybe we'll both read the the Murderbot Diaries book for for the next time. OK. And yeah, I'm very happy. And secondhand souls. I don't know what the block was.

It was great. It was a good book. Very funny. OK, good. Yeah, I have that same block for noir. So I read the first third of that book three times now. And the problem is, like, I get the block. I don't go back to it for a while. And so when I go back, I have to start from the beginning again.

Right. So maybe maybe I'm going to let you read that one. You can tell me if it's worth it or not. OK, we'll do. So were you ever a big fan of Harlan Ellison? Yes. Yes. Unfortunately, he passed away last week or two weeks ago. Yeah. Because I had this in the show. I never really got into him, but I saw a lot of interviews with him.

I thought he was a cool guy. He was a very opinionated guy. He had a mouth on him. That's for sure. Yes, he did. But for the most part, I never really read any of his books. Is there anything that's like outstanding that you would recommend by him? I'm not really. I mean, I like to stuff.

But again, nothing that nothing that I would say you have to read. So, you know, I was a fan, but I didn't go out of my way to get his books. You know, no, no, I think you're good. OK, I think you're good. Yeah. That's all I need to know.

Security. We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Welcome back, Dave. Hello, Joe. It's been a while. It has been a while. It's good to be back.

Brian, I've been thinking about you a lot. I appreciate that. No, it's nice to be back with you guys. It's nice to have the whole band back together. That's right. That's right. Yeah, we've been doing tribute bands for the past couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah.

But no, it's good to be back. And, you know, lots going on this week. Lots of breaking news. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted today 12 Russian intelligence agents on hacking charges related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

But no collusion. That's right. You know, for a witch hunt, you can't turn around without running into some fucking witches, can you? That's right. It's like Halloween. I'm just saying. Yeah. It's like Salem up in here.

And I think, that's right. And I think, but does it float? But I think this seems to confirm, or at least, I don't know, reinforce what people have been saying, which is that the Russians use spearfishing to get into the Democratic National Committee and get into some individual accounts.

And also, this accuses them of creating Guccifer 2.0, which was the persona that claimed responsibility. So, I think this is going to be interesting to see how this plays out, and to, in particular, to see how our president responds to this, if at all.

He won't. Fake news. Fake news. That's my guess. You know, he has a meeting coming up. I wonder if it'll come up. A private one. So, we won't know. You know what I find really interesting? Of all the things that were hacked, Hillary's private email server, not so much. Oh, interesting.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As far as they can tell, that that was not touched. This was pure DNC systems. You know? It's just a year in, and we're just kind of confirming the stuff that we basically, you know, most agencies are saying, yeah, we think this is what happened.

We're pretty sure this is what happened. Now, it's 100. Well, I guess not 100% confirmed, because these are just indictments. They have to have their trial, I suppose. Right. But not looking good for us and our OPSEC as a country. No, not at all.

And, of course, you know, the next set of elections are coming up right around the corner. Round two. Yeah. So, and, of course, you know, these guys have not slowed down. It's interesting, you know, to see that, for example, you know, Twitter had a big purge this past week.

Yes. Again. Did you guys lose any significant numbers of followers? No. I don't believe so. Because we don't have a very significant number of followers to begin with. In order to have them, yes. In order to lose them, you must have them first. Our followers are so small, they are obviously organic. Yeah.

Well, I'm right there with you. I'm at 2230, and, yeah, that's pretty much par for what it's been. Yeah. Slightly going up every day. I did see some folks with larger following saying that they lost a few percentage points. Yeah, considerable, yeah. Yeah, like Twitter. Who lost the most out of everybody?

Lost over 5 million followers. Yeah, yeah. So, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, how much of this is political and diplomatic, rather than actually bringing anyone to justice, which, of course, is unlikely. Well, that does, the one thing that is giving me a little ray of sunshine up my ass, which I'm sure will be destroyed and be taken over by black clouds soon enough, is that what I've seen so far, Rod Rosenstein and a lot of the Republican response so far seems to be, instead

of just immediately saying fake news or naysaying, they seem to be, well, we should really look at this in terms of a non-political view. We need to look at this for the good of our country. We should not be viewing this as a Republican versus Democrat thing. So, that is a good response, not a response that we've heard much so far with any bit of information, which alone kind of tells me that this is relatively serious and people are being told, guys, this happened.

Yeah. Yeah, that drip, drip, they're starting to, you're starting to notice that they're all wet, so. Yes, yes. Yeah. Interesting. Other news this week, California had some interesting legislation that they passed. Yeah. It's the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.

Yeah. I actually spoke with, you know, Ben Yellen is our policy guy over on the Cyber Wire. I spoke with him about this. And he was saying that, you know, California has their, what do they call it, a ballot initiative where you get enough people to sign off on something and they can put just about anything.

What am I telling you guys for? You guys live out there. Yes, we do. Like, I'm telling you, yeah, it's like you guys telling me how to make crab cakes. No, I got this, guys. We're good. Yeah, it's good. All right. So, I don't need to explain that to you. So, for our listeners, for our listeners' benefit, yes.

Yeah. So, anyway, it's interesting because they're comparing this to GDPR and California's economy is so big. And, of course, so many tech companies are out there that a lot of people are wondering if this could be the beginning of this rolling through the rest of the United States.

Because if you're going to do it for California, it's going to be easier to do it everywhere. Yeah. It's interesting because this has passed and was going through the process of passing. Well, I'm actually currently in Canada. I'm in Toronto right now. And I was talking to a number of people I know that run businesses that are global here.

Hopefully, some of them who will be giving me a job when I need to escape the orange menace at some point. But they were talking about how it's been difficult enough with GDPR. And their real worry at this point is that the 50 states will all pass 50 different laws. Which, as you can imagine, as a business, he's all right.

One of the guys specifically I was talking to was like, California, fine. But if this goes through and all of a sudden we have to deal with GDPR and then 50 different states, different versions of privacy legislations, we're not going to be able to handle that. Yeah. No business will. Well, and they're already dealing with that to a certain extent because of disclosure laws where if there's a breach, the requirement to tell your customers, that varies from state to state right now.

So if you are a company who does business in all 50 states, then you're already dealing with that headache. Yeah. So I think you're right. They're trying to head that off. I guess it's, you know, the devil you know versus the devil you don't know in a way. Yeah. To sort of standardize it across the...

I guess that wasn't a perfect metaphor, wasn't it? Yeah. I'm happy about this. I'm good. One of the things that, you know, we had talked about with GDPR is, well, we see the trickle down. Well, here it is. Right. Right. You know, it's a forward stinking thinking stinking forward stinking.

I do like California. I wish we would separate and become our own country. But, you know, it's a forward thinking state saying, OK, well, Europe just did this. Let's protect our people and passing it and kind of throwing up the flag to see what happens. Right. Right. Well, also, because if the ballot initiative went through, it was going to be insanely hard to change any part of that law.

But since it went through the standard lawmaking process, it'll be easier to change. And I think that's really what they what it came down to. So, you know, and the guy, the real estate magnate who was pushing the the original ballot initiative through step back and said, OK, I'll let you guys take it if you can if you can get it signed.

And that's why I got signed so fast. And basically, before anybody knew what the hell was going on, it's like, here, here's your new privacy. But what? Where did that come from? I'd like to make a brief proposal that says maybe we should not have real estate magnets be involved with politics anymore. That's the thing, though.

It's California. Anybody can. That's the whole ballot initiative. You can actually put something up, Brian. I know. No more scooters. No more scooter legislation coming soon. And really, when it comes down to it, aren't we all real estate magnets? I have no idea what that means.

I don't either. I don't either. Yeah. I'm sweating in a garage that's not even mine. So I don't know. There you go. Next up, we have a new extortion scam that's been going around, which is kind of funny. This is one where these guys are going to websites on the dark web, getting password dumps and email addresses, then sending people an email saying, hey, you, we got you naked on the internet, we turned on your camera and we got a picture of your bum.

Give us some money. Okay. And turns out it's all BS. There is. It's just a scam. People are just they have a password and email address. They're not hacking the person's computer. They're just sending them emails saying, would you send us some money? Because we say we have here's your password.

So we know your password, which means we have all this other stuff. But they're not sending any pictures because there aren't any. So I saw this on like every security site that I troll around today saying, you know, beware, beware, it's bullshit, it's bullshit. But you know, these guys are going to make some coin on it somewhere. Of course they are because people are dumb.

Yeah. Yeah. And scared and don't know. So fair enough. It's smart. I'm surprised that this wasn't going around even sooner because it's quite easy. Right. Like as soon as you have a name, you haven't you wouldn't even need a password. You just need an email address. You could send this out. You'd probably get as much money. True.

True. Well, yeah. Like all these, you're just playing the odds of, you know, gosh, what are the odds that someone using the Internet had visited an adult website? God, that never happens. I know. Because I mean, I can go to a Russian bot farm, get a million emails for like $7 and then profit.

Yeah. Yeah. And then profit. You know, one one tenth of one percent may send you a hundred bucks and you've made a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody keep your eyes peeled for that one and don't believe the hype. That's right. Keep your eyes peeled, but don't peel off your clothes. Well, actually, I think they can they can peel at will.

Yes. Nobody's really there. Yeah. And then the last story that I saw this week actually was sent to us by a PSN slash M1X4H on Twitter, which I'm sure means rolls off the tongue. I was going to say the exact same thing.

Yeah, he sent us a link, Gmail and other services let third parties read users emails. So they may have promised to stop scanning the inboxes of their own accounts, but they're still letting third party app developers read your private messages from the Wall Street Journal, which has reported that these companies use algorithms.

Thank God they didn't say AI to trawl through your emails for keywords. Some allow their employees to examine them, too. So I guess at this point, the first thing is, you know, people are upset that actual physical people were looking at these because apparently they just thought it was, you know, algorithms that were trolling through.

But no, real people were actually looking at people's emails. There are two particular companies. The first is called Return Path, which is an app that analyzes inboxes of users who have signed up for one of the free apps in its partner network. That's why free apps suck. So let's see, they claim that two years ago, Return Path employees have read about 8000 emails to help train the company's software and another company called Edison Software, which makes the Edison Mail app for iOS, which also have let workers read thousands of emails to help train its app's smart reply feature.

Any relation to Edison research? As far as I know, no. I don't know. Maybe. So, so basically what these guys are doing, they're using pseudo AI to read all your emails. Call back to one of our first stories. Yes. The pseudo AI, which is actually people training things.

Yeah. Pseudo AI is people. God, you guys are reading my mind today. I was just thinking, because that's why I was just laughing to myself. I had the exact same thing in my mind. Yeah. And I think this is new.

I mean, I guess all of us had grown accustomed to the notion that Gmail was algorithmically reading our email. But this, honestly, in my mind, I have, I had imagined some sort of, let's call it a firewall for lack of a better word.

That's not the right word for it. But just, I had imagined that this was not possible. I had, if you had asked me, how does Google, how does, if someone had come to me concerned that Google was reading their email, I would have said, oh, no, it's, it's merely, it's a machine that's reading your email.

It's not, it's not an act. Believe me, trust me, an actual human is not reading your email. Google would never allow that. Well, it turns out. Well, they did. And they do. And yeah. Yeah. I just don't believe anybody anymore. This is what I just keep learning through this, this section in this podcast is every single one of these companies lies and, and every assumption that we make about separation of data, anonymous data.

Surely no human being is actually looking at, at this. It's all lies. It's all lies. I figured, I mean, when you give these companies access, even if you're using something like a boomerang or things like that, it gives those apps the ability to go into your mail and see it.

So, you know, at some point somebody's going to peak, you know, somebody's going to have some, some sneaky peeking going on. And it reminds me of the old days of email, you know, where the initial, uh, idea was don't put anything in an email you wouldn't put on a postcard.

Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, that's wise. Or something even further back that, that we seem to have lost with the internet, which is you get what you pay for. All of a sudden we're all using free services and think that there's no cost attached to it. And now we're finding out what the real costs are, which is people are looking at your shit.

I mean, that's what, that's it. If you're using other people's servers, that's what's going to happen. People don't be surprised. Yeah. I was, you know, it's funny. I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was trying to imagine an alternate version of the internet where this was not the path of monetization that had occurred.

Micropayments everywhere. Just which I would have been totally fine with. Yeah. Whatever it was, um, if, you know, for better, for worse, because certainly there are things that we wouldn't have if it went that way. But, you know, I guess it's like trying to imagine what would happen if there had been no iPhone or what would have happened?

Had there been no iPod or what would have happened? Had there been no Sony Walkman? You know, these kind of where things set off in one direction and, and things build off of that. But, uh, it's an interesting little, little, uh, mental game to play with yourself, right? Cause the, the unintended consequences of various things have been huge.

Yeah. Yeah. And just this terrible place we find ourselves when it comes to how business works online. Everybody always talks about, they want to create a time machine and go back and kill Hitler. I want to create a time machine and go back and kill Jack Dorsey. Oh, imagine, imagine how better the world would be if there was no, you know what though?

Somebody's going to hear that. And all of a sudden you're going to get banned off Twitter, but all the Nazis will still be all over the place. Right. Right. Cause that's how things work. That's how technology works. Yes. I think I've already been banned. I think my, I think my Facebook app has already called Jack and said that, uh, yes, I'm there.

Yeah. You're getting some, some cold Twitter justice. Oh my God. Well, speaking of cold justice, Ross Albrecht is back in the news. Remember him from the Silk Road? Yes. Yes. Well, he petitioned the Supreme court to hear his case and say that he was basically, you know, he's overcharged with what he's done.

Cause he's got a double life sentence and he's not getting out. And a lower court has already like the lower court of appeals that said, nope, no, you're not getting out. So the Supreme court says, nah, we're not even going to review it. You're staying in jail forever. Wow. Right. So no love for the Silk Road.

Enjoy your time with us. It's, um, it's a hard one to argue on his side for. It is, especially after all of the stuff that we, you know, we now know, as we start to learn everything that was happening on Silk Road, it's, it's hard to justify something, but it's, it's also, you have to do some mental gymnastics in your mind to, to hear this, hear this ruling on him, but then also hear the ruling that we talked about earlier in the show, which is,

Oh, everything that's put up on the internet is, is fair use now. Right. Which is it? Like, can you just do whatever you want on the internet or can you not do whatever you want? I, we seem to be tearing ourselves into two different directions here, depending on the, on the day of the week.

And I'm just, it's so confusing. Uh, I'm seeing if there's anything else we got. Cause we're only at 17, 17 minutes is fine. That's fine, man. It's, it's a short show. It's a short show. Dave is somewhere near a beach and I'm somewhere in fucking cold Toronto drinking a cold beer.

So surf is calling me. I'm sweating my ass off. Surf is calling me. It's not that I don't love you too. It's just that. By all means. Get to a beach. I am with a spitting distance of a beach. Yeah. We will, uh, we will all be back home and in our normal existences next week. So we can go longer if we wish.

There you go. I'm in a 96 degree garage. With no lights and it's dark and I'm not wearing pants. So I will be in the same spot next week because it's so damn hot. Hit it. Get, get the two a TGI Fridays. They're a condition. Jason. Oh God. Never. I'd rather sweat than eat chicken fingers at TGI Fridays.

There are some things man cannot stand for. So you guys go off and have your nice days. I'm going to go back here and sweating at it. So. Okay. All right, gentlemen. Well, a great, uh, being back together again. I'll look forward to doing it again next week. Me too. Enjoy your, uh, enjoy your beach, Dave.

And I will talk to you all next week. All right. Bye-bye. See ya. Bye everybody. Another great article from mental floss popped up. Um, I think two weeks ago, I've had this kicking around for a while. Uh, it says most people consistently visit 25 different places in their daily lives.

That's it. Okay. So we move around a lot less than our daily lives than you might expect. This is data on 40,000 people from a study on human mobility. We tend to frequent only 25 places at any given time in our lives. So we'll, we'll knock off a few. We'll find a few new places, but, uh, we basically tend to hover around, you know, the studies have said that like, you know, you have 10 to 15 friends in your life and things like that.

And any particular time, close friends, uh, this is about places and they're, you know, this is, they were finally able to kind of study this basically through smartphones and tracking. We've kind of figured out what people do. And in general, we keep a steady group of about 25 places that we go to all the time.

And it stays around that number throughout our entire lives. The places may change, but that's about all we can fit in. Yeah. That's, I think that's twice as many as I do at least. Well, I was about to say, you don't go to too many places. So, you know, you're, you're, you're the lower end of that bill. Yeah. I'm like, okay, I got the liquor store.

I got Trader Joe's. I got Ralph's. I got CVS and I got the pet store at maybe, maybe on a good day. I'll go to target, but that's about it. Interesting. I also work from home, which makes it a lot easier. Uh, I, there's an, I put this one in here for you because, uh, you're, you're, you're a footy fan.

It's, uh, why does every soccer player do this from the New York times? And they're talking about whenever somebody misses a goal, they grab their head and go, ah, I missed. Boop. Um, and it just talks about the psychology of it. I thought it was a pretty interesting read. So I recommend checking it out.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. I thought it was really interesting as well. It's like a universal gesture. Even, you know, monkeys do it. And yeah, it's, it has nothing to do with just soccer players. Everybody does it. You screw up, you grab your head and go, God damn it. That's the way it is. We're just, cause we are just monkeys after all.

Don't forget. Now I saw this, I don't even know where I found this. It's a company called alternative ballistics and they make this gun attachment that cops can now put on their gun. It's kind of like a little plastic thing that slides over the barrel and in front of it, there's a big metal ball.

So what happens is when the gun shoots, the ball captures the bullet, fuses it to the metal inside so it can't pop out. And then the big ball hits the bad guy and apparently probably hurts like a sumbitch and that's supposed to stop them. And then after, and then the plastic piece flies off. So your gun is actually live after that.

But it's like, it's kind of like a first shot, uh, you know, just warning shot. So you can still use your gun, still be ready to fire after, but every cop in the world needs this. This is, I think it's a great invention. Hopefully I can 3d print it. I believe you probably can.

Feedback loop. We got a bunch of Patreon subscribers since we last had feedback loop. Welcome Whit, Trenton, Robert, Brendan, Nicola, Allison, Buster, Kevin, Sarah, Peter, John, and Mike. Thank you all so much.

Very, very much. Yes. Thank you. And, uh, Jared wrote us over on Patreon. Well, the city of College Station doesn't have electric scooters, but we do have yellow bikes. There's a new story that was run about them. Apparently they want to add more since we have Texas A&M in the area. I get the convenience for the students to get around town quickly and easily, but I have yet to see one of these bikes left in a bike rack.

I see them left all over town, in the sidewalks, in random neighborhood yards, parking spaces, and parking lots on campus, et cetera. I've even seen a few left around the A&M golf course. My girlfriend just told me she's seen a few on top of street signs. It's becoming a big issue in town. It's becoming a big issue in every town, isn't it, everyone?

Yes, it is. Oh, man. Yep. And over at PayPal, we got a new recurring subscription from Judge. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have a five-star rating over on Facebook from GrinningWolfMike. Now, I thought Facebook had done this whole thing where you absolutely positively had to use your real name.

Well, maybe that's his real name. Maybe that is. Okay. Every week, it fills me with joy to listen to these fellow grumps. I even started supporting them on Patreon. I wonder if there are still stickers available. There are. Just write us. After listening to them for over six months, currently listening back to older episodes at episode 200 right now, just to keep the week filled during my commute to and from work while waiting for the next one.

They definitely tell their ideas about the latest articles and stories that go around, sometimes not too mildly. But hey, that is what being a grump is all about. Definitely a go-to podcast if you like tech, reading, and security and need to get away from the boring daily routines that is called life. Grump on. Oh, thank you very much, GrinningWolfMike.

And over from Logan, we got a link to a YouTube video on Bird Electric Scooters from Realistic Marketing, Inc. Did you watch this? It's very funny. Okay. Well, check it out. It's worth it. Yes. This is a, you know, it's, it's honest trailers about birds. Nice. Okay. I'm in. Over at Twitter, Dushant wrote, Bird scooters are now available in Columbus, it seems.

Now I can experience the annoyance firsthand. Great. Hey, at least it'll make the GOG podcast rants even more entertaining to me. Yep. And write, film, sleep, repeat, writes in, wonder what GOG podcast make of this article. Profit at any price? And it's an article from bbc.co.uk called Nazi-themed goods found on Amazon Marketplace.

Well, it is a marketplace and Amazon, remember, is just a platform. It's just a platform. Yeah. I actually had some quotes from the article, but why bother? They're doing the same argument. It's a platform. We just set it up. Anybody can sell anything that they want on there. Oops. I guess we should shut that down. We'll get around to it.

Eventually. Yeah. And Brian wrote, I know Brian, Brian, writing in for Brian. Thank you. I know Brian was looking for stock with partial shares and share builder is gone. My friend at KC say put me up on a YouTube channel, a YouTube video. And I thought you guys would like, and I thought about you guys, sorry, it says, and it's about M1 finance again.

So it's an M1 finance review and we have the link in the show notes. And yeah, I'm going to take a look at that because it seems to be the only company that's still out there doing this. So we'll see. All right. And the Droidian writes in, this is the best ad from Facebook this week. Truly shows the power of AI. It's an ad that says artificial intelligence makes 6 billion translation happen on Facebook each day.

And this is coming from Facebook's actual account where you can learn how Facebook AI translations work. So yeah, our favorite, our favorite. That's good stuff. And, uh, be random says the ever expanding utility of the Amazon dash button and sends a link to a raspberry PI.org article.

That's an Amazon dash hack with raspberry PI and Python, which basically lets you program your dash to do just about anything. Uh, see, it says the internet of things has two flaws, the name and the need to get your phone out of your pocket, unlock it, swipe it to the appropriate app and wait for the app to load before you can perform a basic task, such as turning on a light buttons are handy for a reason.

So now they want you to program an Amazon dash button instead of using the fucking button that's on the device itself. Like say the light switch or the fucking on button. Yeah. A little too much technology. I gave away my, my raspberry PI a while ago and you know, I, I don't miss that.

So yeah, yeah, we, we, we invented light switches a long time ago. I was reading this article and thinking this has to be a joke. You're telling me I need to now program a button to replace the button that's sitting on the device itself. Buttons all the way down, baby. Oh God. Oh man.

I, I'm so happy. There's no real problems in the world. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Over at a GOG that show. Tristan writes in security question on the, we collect cookies. We request your permission dot, dot, dot pop-ups. Is it safe to click yes or no, or does it open one's vulnerability surface to drive by downloads?

Sincerely an annoyed tech geek with little network security knowledge. Also, I would like to say that I love the show, but can't yet contribute as all my time is spent on linear algebra and eating Rotel beans. Stay on the air long enough. So I can, we'll try that. Okay. So no, it's not safe to click yes or no.

If you ever get this pop-up, shut your laptop down immediately and throw it into a fire. No, he's just talking about the week like cookies thing, man. It's safe. It's fine. God. You're all good. You're all good.

Throw it in a fire. Burn the witch. Burn the witch. Oh, man. Yep. You're all good. So. Yeah, you're good. T writes in. Hey, guys, was listening this last week and heard you all talking about Plex. I also heard Jason and Jordan talk about Plex for about eight hours.

It wasn't that long. The Xbox app is. Hey, that show turned out shorter than this one. Because I edited most of it out. But yeah. Yes. The Xbox app is kind of sucky. Try out Cody and download the Plex add on. I think it runs smoother than the app itself. If you've listened to the show for a while, you know, we we briefly went down the Cody rabbit holes.

So, yeah, we know that works. Yeah. But the problem is I only have the Xbox hooked up to the TV because it is a dumb TV. It's kind of old. So I think I'm going to stick with the Xbox app for now because otherwise I got to go find up where my Mugu guy pan box went. It's in a drawer somewhere. I used it once and had it. Dude, I'll just I'll just give you my fire stick that I installed Cody on.

You can have it. I've got a you know what? I've got a what's the what's the Google one Chromecast. I've got a Chromecast Chrome Chrome. I can just install Cody on the Chromecast and stick it in because I got the the Chrome stick when I tried that really crappy YouTube TV for a month and they gave me a free one and then I immediately, you know, canceled YouTube TV because it was so bad.

But now I still have the stick and it's in it's probably in the drawer next to the Cody box I have. So I have to dig that up. Right. And Elaine writes in. Hi, guys. Just writing to give you a podcast suggestion. Slow burn. It's about the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Riveting stuff. Yeah. OK. All right.

I'm just watching it in real time right now. We'll see how it goes. And Barrett writes in. I've got a web hosting question. Currently, I use HostGator, but their support is giving me a lot of grief. I'd like to find a new one with a high inode limit for hosting my photo video galleries. HostGator locks me down after 100,000, which isn't very useful.

Any ideas? Thanks. As always, love the show. Try out Linode. That's who we use. I've been using them for a couple of years there. I did send I sent Barrett. The link to sign up. And I'll put that in the show notes, too, if you want to use Linode and get a little bump from our referral code.

If you use it for 90 days, you get some money back. But I yeah, I've been there for years now and unfortunately still have some servers there, which I am desperately trying to get rid of. All right. We got to figure that out. I got to buckle down and figure out what I'm doing with mine. Yeah, we'll sort that out off the air.

Yeah, I actually I actually logged into the server this way. Hey, Barrett, want to host us? Yeah, seriously. I logged into the our server this week because I added a new page called an at a glance page for the podcast. So it lists all of the shows that we've done in order.

It's not it's not quite ready for primetime yet. It'll be done soon. But so I had to I had the SFTP in. I had the SSH in. I had to actually VI a WordPress template and put in some custom code and create a new page template and all that stuff. Surprisingly enough, it took like three minutes to get back on the horse.

It came back so fast. I was like, I remembered all my VI commands. I didn't use VI in three years and I just complete. It's all muscle memory. It still worked. And believe it or not, my first pass on WordPress didn't crash the site. It actually worked. That's pretty impressive. I was I was pretty happy with myself on that one.

So, yeah, but check out line out. It's pretty good. Right over on iTunes. We've got some five star ratings from Narvella Vickers. Best tech podcast ever. You guys are funny and smart. Thank you for making my commute to work more entertaining. Deliveroo. Nice.

Oh, that worked out perfectly that you read that one. Next one. Five stars from Felicity. Uncompromising analysis at the tech news and geek culture. Jason DeFilippo and Brian Schallmeister use the tech news as an excuse for sharing their knowledge and experience of technology and geek culture in a very entertaining way. Thank you very much.

And keep grumpy. Also, thanks to Dave Bittner, who introduced me to this podcast. Nice. I thank you, Dave. Next one comes up from Monica Mileva from Australia. Narf snort every single time. Must be some Australian saying. Must be. Garf snort. I'm assuming it's complimentary.

I hope so. She's crazy. She does have some crying emojis. And we did get a five star. So, Garf snort. Yes. Yes. Next up, another five star from Anthony La Scala. Love the show. I'm a 20-year-old system administrator, and I love listening to your podcasts on the commute to work. I agree with many of your stances and enjoy it when you tear apart the villains of the tech world.

Oh, so many of them. Check out Decenturian. Decenturian. Decenturian. Okay. Might be a good candidate for Morons of the Week. Blockchain-based state. Oh, joy. Okay. I'm in a good mood right now.

Maybe I'll look at it later. Oh, man. Oh, God. Decenturian is the first decentralized autonomous state where all the resources such as money, power, and glory belong to the residents. Oh, my God. We're going to have to definitely look at that one.

All right. That's going to have more on in the week next week or next year. Next week. Another five star from Tipsy Canuck. Are you feeling lucky? Woo! I like to turn this show into a drinking game. Every time they swear or talk about birds, take a drink. If you make it through the whole show, I am impressed. Very impressed.

You're either my hero or fellow alcohol-loving Canadian. If you're sober enough to listen to the actual show, it is really good. Great guys, great stories, great snark. Deliveroo! That's awesome. 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.

If you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. And please tell a friend. Or just steal their phone and install it for them. We'd like that better. Yes. Closing shout outs! Big thank you to Jordan Harbinger for stepping in last week and also Kyle for stepping in before that.

We appreciate you guys filling in while Brian had stuff to do. Yes, thank you. And everybody who wrote in with their condolences. Much appreciated. Thank you very much. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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.

Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, you can also go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 267. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

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