268: Fiddlesticks

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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. Brian, you've been traveling a lot. Yes. And I've been doing the bulk of the work on getting all the articles in for the show. Yes. And this week, I went through about 6,000 titles. And it shows. In my RSS reader.

And because I got my system down with my iPad and reader now and flipping through. Okay, this one goes to pinboard, read them later, all that stuff. And I've noticed something profound. What's that? I read the same fucking headline nine times. Yes. Yeah.

I've started culling everything. I'm like, okay, so Engadget or Gizmodo doesn't matter because they're going to give me the same stuff. So I stuck with Engadget. I keep Gizmodo UK because they at least have something different. The Verge, almost useless because it's the same as Engadget.

All of these things have so much overlap that it's such a waste of time. Everybody's writing the exact same articles. And I know this because I went in and did last night. I stayed up and was starting to collect a bunch of different stories. So it wouldn't all be you.

And as I went through, I found the exact same stories that you had already posted just from different sites. Yep. That's kind of it. And I want to point this out to everybody because there's one story that I thought was kind of the canary in the coal mine. And I saw it early in the week. And I'm like, okay, nobody's going to follow this story because it's so fucking stupid.

And of course, by the end of the day yesterday, it had been on every major site. And here's what it is. This is on tech news sites, right? Okay. So one tech news site that had a really like crappy day getting their, you know, getting their numbers up by the end of the day.

Like, oh shit, we got to post something. What are we going to post? They posted an article about high-heeled Crocs. Yes. And they're flying off the shelves. Yes. And I saw that like maybe on Monday, maybe Sunday. And by yesterday, every single tech news website was posting about high-heeled Crocs.

Now, you tell me how that is tech news. It isn't. It isn't at all. But it is tech news for us because now we get to discuss this again. And it is all about page clicks. This is the world that we have created for ourselves. No site. The idea of there being like some sort of editorial or focus on a site is so gone because everybody needs the clicks.

So you have to have every single story that everybody else has because you might be missing out on clicks. And if you don't have clicks, you don't have money. And if you don't have money, you don't have a site. And this is it because nobody wants to pay for shit. This is the real me too movement because everybody wants to post what everybody else has.

Yes. It's such a, I mean, we talked about this years ago when we started going back through the news and, you know, we could say, okay, let's find the original source for this story and go back from there and then we'll post the original story. Now, it's like a Gordian knot of bullshit to try and figure out where a story actually came from in the beginning because everybody's linking to somebody else because it just depends on who saw it first in their news feed and said, oh, we got to put this on our site too.

Yeah, I know. It's crazy. It's absolutely insane. Oh man, so my brain hurts from this week because I went through thousands and thousands of them. Granted, at least I can with my swanky iPad set up in the Apple Pen, which really does help. I love my Apple Pen so much.

Well, I suppose this is why we're here, Jason. This is what we're doing. We are basically being editorial for all the tech news. So all you people listening don't have to go down the stupid rabbit holes that Jason and I do every single week. We are your pseudo AI shit filters.

That's what we are. We use pseudo AI to bring you the best of the bullshit every week. And we're paid about as well as pseudo AI folks are everywhere. That's kind of how it goes. So let's get to some follow up. I saw this on dig.

A dude figures out how much he's actually making per hour driving for Uber. And he says it roughly works out to about 42 cents an hour. And it's kind of a fun piece. Like, you know, he puts his numbers up and it's the first time he's driving for him. He doesn't have his stuff down.

And, you know, a lot of it is for the article in the video because it's a video piece. And I think a lot of it was, you know, just kind of puffed up a bit just to make a good title. So people would click on it and watch the video because he needs the clicks, too. But his math was fairly sound.

I have to say. Did you watch the video? I did. And, you know, we've heard these stories before. We've seen these kind of numbers break down before. But then Uber just comes back and says, some people make $100,000 a year. Who? Find us one. The CEO. Yeah.

Basically. I'm sorry. That's per minute. The only people that make money working for Uber are literally working for Uber. Not as drivers. But working for Uber. Definitely. And it's pretty interesting. Yeah. Uber drivers are now subject to continuous background checks. So apparently they've hired some new companies that are going to keep tabs on their drivers to, you know, see if they've created.

Like, you know, oh, have you raped today? That's the new service. Have you tried to rape today? I'm sorry. I'm going to Mel Brooks now. Have you done armed robbery today? Or, yes. Are you a felon today? That's kind of what it is.

So, you know, they're trying real hard. But it's only for the U.S. So, yes. Well, let's. How's this disruption working out? Because more and more, they're just becoming more and more like regular taxi companies where you have to get a license to drive for them. And, oh, interesting. Hmm. Disruption.

Not working out quite as planned. Did you try to disrupt today? Yeah. Seriously. Well, I mean, it's working out for the company. They're only spending, what, $2 billion a quarter to keep this, keep these balls in the air until self-driving cars come along. But anyway. And again, I will weep because they lose money every quarter.

Yet they're valued at gazillion dollars. Whatever the hell it is today. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Again, why we started the show. Me going to you, Jason. How the F are any of these companies doing well? Yeah. A little Chris Hardwick follow up.

He has been booted from AMC's The Talking Dead. And super fan actress Yvette Nicole Brown has taken over for The Talking Dead and all of his panels at WWDC. That's the nerd. That's the different nerd conference.

Yeah, you should see the cosplay at that one, man. Do you see the pocket protector on that guy? Oh, my God. He's an Apple IIc. So, yeah, she's taken over. And apparently, AMC is doing a deep dive, like, investigative discovery thing on figuring out what Chris did.

So, we'll see what happens with him. Well, I got some breaking news for you about Chris Hardwick. Did you know he's become a magician? What? He's disappeared, hasn't he? He's made himself disappear. Yes, he has. He's in the same disappearing cabinet right now with Louis C.K. And all those other people. Yes.

We'll see what happens with that. A little Twitter follow-up, too. Twitter says it doesn't have the bandwidth to fix verification right now. Wait. Fixing it implies that there was something, some sort of system in place in the first place. Not just somebody worked at Twitter and figured out, hey, I want to verify this person.

Well, that's kind of how it used to work, yes. Exactly. There's no system. There's nothing to fix. No, it's just a black box. It's a black box. But, yeah, because they're ramping up for the election now. And they want to put all of their mental energy into making sure that the elections go smoothly and that Twitter doesn't get the blame for this Trumpian nightmare that we're already in.

Don't worry. We're all going to blame Facebook. But the funny part is they don't have to put bandwidth towards fixing much. Delete Trump's account. That will go farther than anything else that they could ever do. But, no, Jack won't do that.

No, they won't do that because, yes, exactly. It is the most popular account on Twitter, sadly. I don't know. I think a Kardashian probably beats him. Okay, fine. As long as, God, as long as they don't run. Please, God, don't run. Give it time. I know.

Give it time. We're inching closer to idiot. Well, actually, we're firmly in the middle of idiocracy right now. We're not inching towards it. I was going to say inching towards. We're rocketing to the moon. Yeah. It's got electrolytes. Oh, fuck me. And we talked last week about Apple's self-driving car dealio because we're like, they're doing self-driving cars?

Huh? Well, it turns out they have a lot of cars on the road already. Well, look at Apple go. Yep. Look at them go and see you. Bye. They're not doing, like, the full autonomous stuff, so they still have drivers in the car. But they got 11 new cars on the road this week, and they're going to be partnering with Volkswagen for some stuff.

And I guess they're going to do some T6 transport vans to self-drive the employees to the office so then they can walk into the transparent walls when they get to work. Look, this is the way it should be done. This is the way a real company would do this.

Apple has not released any press releases talking about the things that they don't have. I'm looking at everybody else that's doing self-driving cars. They've just quietly started development on it. That's it. And you know what? They'll let us know when it's working. Yeah. Maybe. We'll see.

Maybe. Yeah. And just a little bit of follow-up on the guy who was stealing the self-driving car secrets from Apple last week. He has pled not guilty in court. Okay. That's it. All right. I'm not guilty. Okay. I guess we're going to find out then.

Now, and also on our final bit of follow-up, do you remember that ridiculous Kodak Bitcoin scheme that they had going on where they were going to license their name to these? Yes. They're called the Kodak Cash Miners. Yes. Yes. Well, apparently that has all collapsed now, and the original company that was doing it is now going out of business.

And Kodak says, well, we never officially licensed it. Way to walk that one back, Kodak. Like, you have anything else to give to the world right now except a cautionary tale. That's right. In the news.

So we have talked about artificial intelligence, machine learning, decision trees, all of that. Pseudo AI. Pseudo AI. That's the new one that we have now. Pseudo AI, because pseudo AI is people. Oh, so I have a new segment. We have to get Bob to do a bumper for this one.

It's called, This Week in Artificial Machine Decision Learning Tree Bullshittery. Yeah, I like that. Get Bob on that. So I was trying to do my best Bob there. I went through, like I said, so many articles this week. I am going to give you a list of some of the ones that popped out to me this week.

These will all be linked in the show notes at GOG.show slash 268. So you can go down the rabbit hole if you like. I would rather say put some bamboo under your fingernails. It's probably more pleasant. But these are the top headlines from this week in Artificial Machine Decision Learning Tree Bullshittery.

AI Weekly says, how to regulate facial recognition to preserve freedom. Academic expert says, Google and Facebook's AI researchers aren't doing science. And then the next one comes from Facebook. Facebook AI research expands with new academic collaborations.

And the next one comes from the next web. The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI. Or any AI. Well, then the next web also goes on to say, quick guide to understand the, and this is going to tell you how well these people are. Quick guide to understand the hype around deep learning.

AI headline machine broke there. AI headline broke. A beginner's guide to AI. Computer vision and image recognition. Also from the next web. They're doubling down on their AI bullshittery over the next web. This one comes from Bleeping Computer. New AI algorithm can fix grainy images without looking at clean photos.

Then we move over to VentureBeat. And this one's a really scary one. Digital Surgery's AI platform guides surgical teams through complex procedures. Shudder, shudder, shudder. Hashtag shudder. Now, this one comes from Quartz. Google is using AI to see inside the brain like never before.

Okay. Microsoft and National Geographic team up on AI research grants because they just want the monies. Yep. And then IBM researchers to train AI to follow code of ethics. We'll see. Asimov's laws. Great. Haven Life uses AI to underwrite life insurance for non-citizens and people with chronic illnesses.

What could possibly go wrong? That is just basically the most 2018 headline I've ever read. That's the most 2028 headline I've ever read. And here's the next one. An app that uses AI to help you improve your basketball shot just raised $4 million.

That one made me want to go jump off a roof. Oh, no. Care Dash detects fraudulent reviews with the help of AI. DeepMind, Elon Musk, and others pledged not to make autonomous AI weapons.

Okay. Great. Thanks. Oh, and here's where it really goes deep. This is what the world needs right now, Brian. This is the best use of AI all week. Watch out, birders. Artificial intelligence has learned to spot birds from their songs. Oh, boy.

Yeah. All those birders are now out of a job. Artificial intelligence is automating Hollywood. Now, art can thrive. What? What? I'm telling you. This is the shit that I deal with every day. Promethean AI uses artificial intelligence to help artists fill out game worlds.

Okay. So, you're lazy. It's called copy and paste, people. Anyway, it still gets better. Former soldiers use AI to wage war on convenience store lines. Oh. Okay. And finally, one that might actually work.

AI plus a chemistry robot finds all the reactions that will work. Now, that seems just like a loop for a couple of arrays for me, but I don't know where you need AI. I could write that in basic. That's just a for then loop. Exactly. Oh, my God. So, that is This Week in AI Bullshittery.

All right. That's good. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that. You know, back in the day when we were young and kind of interested in the internet and creating things just for shits and giggles, I would have gone back and written a plug-in for a browser that would be an AI inserter into headlines. Just any headline on any site that you go to, no matter what it's about, it'll insert AI.

I was just thinking one that just turns AI into bullshit. That'll work, too. Yeah, just a find and replace that turns AI into bullshit. Yeah. All right. Let's get to the real news here. Okay. It was Prime Day this week. And, oh, God. I had so many stories about this.

These are the greatest deals on Prime. Go get them now while they're hot. I used to say that Twitter had the best PR in the world because hashtags and all that is on everything all the time, even though Twitter really doesn't quite get the traffic that some other sites do. I'm starting to think that Amazon has the best PR ever because Prime Day is such a load of crap, and all of a sudden, everybody has to talk about it.

They've made it into an actual real holiday. I know. It's fucked up. And the funny thing is most people don't realize that it's Amazon's way of getting rid of all this shit in their warehouse they couldn't sell. Yes. Here's a deal on something nobody wanted to buy all year long, and we need the space.

So we're going to give you this piece of shit that you would normally pay $5 for for $4.75. Get it out of our warehouse. I think it's just a virtual outlet mall. Yeah. There's all the old crap. Well, the people in the EU, I don't even know if England is part of this one because they're not going to be part of the EU anymore.

Oh, they're listed. Amazon boycott unites workers, gamers, shoppers for Prime Day protests. Basically, everybody that works for Amazon in Europe said, you guys suck. It sucks working here. We're going to take a day off and protest. Good on them.

Yeah, and unfortunately, it didn't really do a damn thing for the bottom line, but it's good that people over there are fighting back, and maybe they'll get better working conditions because we've had many stories about how horrible it is to work in the Amazon fulfillment centers.

You know, long hours, slave drivers, like, you know, they won't even turn on the AC in some of them, which is just crap. But here's the bright side for these people. AI and robots will soon replace their jobs. This is true. You won't be working there for long.

Yep. Don't you worry about it. Yep. Wave that flag of protest while you can. And I did have a hell of a time getting some of the stuff that I wanted on Prime Day, and it wasn't even Prime deals. I was just going to get my normal stuff, and I couldn't even check out. It was crazy.

Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of reported outages on Monday. Let's see. What does it say? According to the website Down Detector, Amazon began experiencing issues at around 3 or 4 p.m. Eastern time, and more than 20,000 people have flagged issues with the cart tool, Prime Video, product pages, and other features.

The issues appear to be ongoing, but it did not stop people because they made a boatload of money. Yeah. Yep. The biggest sales day in its history. Yeah. Oh, my God. Far exceeding $1 billion in sales this year. $1 billion.

Over 100 million products were sold. Jeez. That's a lot of shit that people didn't need. Yes, it is. And here's the fun part, because if you went to Whole Foods in the morning and spent $10, you would get $10 in Prime Day credit, so you'd have to go home and then spend that $10 on Prime Day crap, which you know you're never going to hit the normal $10, so it was a thing to say, oh, well, this is $11, so I'm going to spend $2 extra, and they'll upsell you on it and crap like that.

So I went to Whole Foods. Okay. And I looked around. Yes. Whole Foods in California is one of the most ridiculously stupid overpriced stores I've ever been to in my entire life. You have to be quite savvy to shop at Whole Foods, which I am, sadly.

Okay. Yes. So they just opened a Bristol Farms down the road, and as you know, Bristol Farms is, like, where the really snooty people go shop. Oh, yes. Bristol Farms prices are way better than Whole Foods. It's ridiculous. Yeah, Whole Foods can be a little crazy.

And, yeah, I mean, even with my prime discount, I'm like, I'm not paying $3 for an avocado. I don't care if this is the best avocado in the world. I don't care if this avocado is going to blow me before I eat it. No, I'm not paying $3 for an avocado. It's ridiculous. So I skipped my $10 credit for the day.

Did you? Oh, you were in Canada, so you couldn't even do it. I wasn't here. So, yeah, I was not around. I was just watching the mayhem occurring online and wondering where we all went so wrong. And, of course, with all of that, then Jeff Bezos became the most richest man in history for a little bit.

Yeah, when adjusted for inflation, of course. And when adjusted, of course. Yeah, yeah. I'm telling you, a supervillain in the making right there. Mm-hmm. We'll see what he's going to do. Now, speaking of other supervillains, Google was fined a record $5 billion by the EU for their Android antitrust violations.

That's a lot of coin, even for Google. Even for Google. That's a bunch of cash. Yep. And now they're saying they may have to charge for Android now to get around the regulations. Because saying that, oh, we're giving away Android and requiring you to put Google on the homepage, that's an antitrust violation.

So now they may have to start charging for it. Way to go, EU. You know where they won't ever have to do that? Here. True, true. Because, you know, we don't care about such things anymore. Antitrust. What is that? What is that? Oh, you know what it is? It's a mediocre movie from the mid-90s.

That's what antitrust was. Although I did kind of enjoy that movie. I'm sure you didn't. Never saw it, I don't think. You never saw antitrust? Oh, you got to go watch it. It's fun. It's very fun. You know what it is? It's like the circle 20 years before the circle came out and done much better.

It's weird that you mentioned the circle because I actually saw 30 minutes of it the other day. And I'm like, why the hell am I watching this piece of crap? Hopefully you poured some, like, you know, peroxide in your ear to get it out of your brain. Anyway, we've got a couple links about the case in the show notes if you want to go deep on it.

But yeah, for the most part, they're just saying that they're using this free OS that is for everybody, but they're putting caveats on how people can use it, what they can do with it, how you can't fork it and make your own versions of it. There's just too many restrictions around the base platform, and they're forcing people to put Google in it to put it out there.

So that's where the antitrust really comes in. Now, I found this one on The Verge. It's a cute little movie called MoviePass is using you to ruin the movies. And I really like it. It's like a four and a half minute video. It's well worth watching. And it kind of breaks down how MoviePass just sucks.

And how they didn't have any business plan and the financials never made any sense whatsoever. Oh, you mean everything that we said about the company since they went into business and came on the radar? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. Oh, so it says all that stuff, does it? It does say that stuff, but it goes a little deeper and it talks to some theater owners and things like that.

And it's just, it's funny now that, okay, yes, now MoviePass is out there. Now AMC is like, hey, that's actually not a bad idea, but we're only going to do it for our theaters. We're going to charge more because we don't want to lose money. And we'll see how that works out.

But at least for AMC doing it, I think AMC making a subscription plan is not a bad move. But the MoviePass move is just pure, just, you know, put the money on the ground and light it on fire. There's just nothing that's going to come out of this. There's no way that they're going to make this profitable.

I don't care how many users you have. The more, actually, the more users you have, the more it costs the shareholders. Yeah, exactly. It's, yeah, I mean, that's exactly the model. But this being where we are as a society, what's the point in just having one bad business model out there?

Other people should copy it. What? Right? So there's another one called Cinemia. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Which is exactly MoviePass, except they're doing even more to try to get people to sign up for it. They're now offering, in addition to the movies, for a price that is not sustainable for them to run a business, they're also going to offer you free dinner.

You get $25 in freerestaurant.com gift certificates every month with your subscription. Oh, man. So they went, they're doubling down on the dumb shitter. MoviePass, you're losing money left, right, and center. Hold my beer. Exactly.

This is the hold my beer economy. Exactly. You've got a horrible idea. Let's do it, too. Oh, man. Oh, you're giving, you're giving, you're not giving away enough money. Let's give away some more. Exactly. So you have $25 free restaurant.com gift certificate.

And I'm sure that restaurant.com is banking on nobody ever using that gift certificate. Well, again, the same thing with MoviePass, it's, it's the gym model. Please, please, please forget that you're paying us this every month and never, ever use it. Because if you do, we're screwed. Yeah, exactly.

We're going to sell you something that if you actually use is going to break our business. Yeah, I think, you know, I, if I was going to invest in a company, I would say, what if 100% of the people that you're selling this product to actually use it? In most cases, that would be a good thing.

That would really be a good thing. I've got 100% market penetration for my product. Everybody that I sold it to is using it. You're so web 1.0, Jason. I know. I haven't pivoted, Brian. No. I have not pivoted. You have to pivot to losing money, Jason. Oh, you got to pivot to disrupt, man.

You got to pivot to disrupt. I'm just trying to make a song out of that in my head. Cruel to be kind. Okay. Pivot to disrupt. Call Andy Stachansky. Get him on that. Okay. We'll work on that. We need, we need more songs in these shows. I agree. We got some great articles from our listeners.

So thank you so much for that. The first is from Seth Blockchain Lessons. I just love that he has blockchain in there. He sent us a link. Facebook's moderator's disturbing policies exposed in undercover footage. Undercover. Yeah. So this is one of the, one of the outsourced companies over in Dublin, Ireland, where people are going through stuff and, and, you know, taking it down basically.

And a content moderator trainer can be seen in the clip saying that the only time they follow up on disturbing content is when it meets their escalation criteria. So they showed all these different things, kind of just getting through a horrible stuff. You can read through, through the article if you want to. And it's funny because he sent this a couple of days ago.

And just yesterday I attempted to post a YouTube link to an official video for a client and promote it on Facebook. And they refused, refused to allow me to do so. They kept not approving my, my, my, uh, ad by saying the video does not meet their content guidelines with no explanation of how or why it's not meeting content guidelines in it because it's just a fucking music video.

There's nothing in it. It's a music video and I can't get that posted, but all of this weird ass shit gets through. Oh, nice. Oh, well. So, and then write film sleep repeats sent us, uh, an article Facebook will not remove fake news, but we'll demote it.

And he says, you have to marvel at the hypocrisy. And I do. So yeah, it's, it's insane. So instead of just out and out banning fake news on the site, they're going to use their algorithms so it doesn't get spread so much. Okay. Or you could just fix the problem.

Fix the problem. Jesus. Yeah. And he also sent us one, the cameras that know if you're happy or a threat. And he says, he thinks that we could be in some trouble now with this development because, they're using AI tech to spot specific, suspicious behavior by reading facial cues, imperceptible to the untrained eye.

So they're going to start being able to figure out what kind of mood we're in. Oh, is this, is it the FU cam? Pretty much. Yeah. Here comes grumpy Brian. Call me when they have the grump prediction in and then I'll, I'll, I'll go buy one. But no, what these people, people, people, people.

So again, as you're seeing through a lot of the headlines and the news stories being sent to us, I don't think Twitter has to worry too much. Everybody is hating on Facebook right now. So here's another one that we got sent from Paul. Congratulations, Mr. President Zuckerberg secretly called Trump after the election. Internal documents show Facebook's own marketing strategy was influenced by what it learned from its most valued customer, the Trump campaign.

Yeah. No collusion. No collusion. Nope. Nope. All those rubles put to good use. Yes, they were. Oh, and, and, and the, I don't know if you listened to the recode interview with the Zuck. I couldn't, I couldn't.

Oh boy. He stepped on his own dick a few times, didn't he? I, I couldn't listen to it. I, I don't care about this kid anymore. I really do not care about this. It's become increasingly clear that he actually has no idea how people really use Facebook. Cause he's not human. He's not. And he doesn't understand how it's actually being used.

And he seems to be stuck in some like ivory tower somewhere just taking money baths. Well, I mean, yes, he already knocked down all of his neighbor's houses and has like Mossad agents protecting him all like 24 seven. So yeah, he's, he's in a world of his own.

He just never, he's, you know, he's like, he's like a child star, never got a chance to really grow up and whatever. But, uh, and the new one, and by the way, he is Jewish and he says Holocaust deniers are making an honest mistake. So we're not going to remove their posts from Facebook.

Um, how is it an honest mistake? No, they're just fucking retarded. I'm sorry. They are. So there you go. That's it. That, that, that I, I, I don't say that very often, but on this one, I will, I will drop the, the R word, the R word, I'm going to drop the R word. I attempted to get banned from the show, but Jason snuck one in again.

I did sneak one in, uh, new laws are forcing Airbnb to open its books to New York authorities. Interesting. I would, I, I look forward to seeing these books. New York city council has voted in favor of a new law requiring Airbnb and similar home share company.

Who, who else is out there? There's a bunch. Anybody like the size of Airbnb though? I've never heard. No, no. So there's a lot of hyperlocal ones and things like that though. Okay. Yes. Uh, so they basically say it's common sense for the local government to be informed of the number and nature of residents using this service.

Yes. That's how government works. Exactly. God. Yes. We're trying to stop illegal short-term rentals here. That's what it's all about. Transparency and accountability people. Oh yeah.

And Airbnb has been warned that it breaches EU rules over pricing policies. Okay. So we'll see how this goes out. They're basically on the hook now to get back to the EU and say, Hey, um, you guys are kind of not doing things right.

You're, you're charging people money that wasn't on the bill at the beginning and you're charging them after they leave for cleaning and other services and other add-ons. And they're saying, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on a second there. So you're saying, you're telling me that Airbnb is doing the same things that normal hotels always do to us.

Pretty much. I thought they were disrupting the hotel industry. Wait, now they're becoming the same thing. Interesting. You become what you hate, Brian. You become what you hate. Apparently you do. Yes. And IBM is demanding $167 million from, get this, Groupon for using its patents.

They don't have $167 million. That's the only reason I put this in the show notes. I'm like, does IBM not know it's Groupon? They've got like seven bucks left. Come on. That's okay. Groupon is going to give them a Groupon to get a discounted price for that. Normally you would pay $167 million, but for you, $20 million.

Oh my God. Oh, and by the way, fuck IBM for enforcing software patents. I agree with that one. Yeah. And BMW is getting into the ride sharing service in Seattle. Why? Why? Oh, I know why.

Because nobody's buying cars anymore because everybody's using ride sharing services. So the only way people are going to be able to have cars in the future is if they drive for one of these damn services. Yeah. They're seeing the writing on the wall about the future in 10 years. It's like, oh God, nobody's going to buy a car. We're fucked. Yep.

Pretty much so. Yep. That's why GM's into it. Toyota, Volvo, everybody's getting into this because the cars are going to cost $300,000 in about 10 years because they're only selling, you know, 100,000 of them every year. This episode is sponsored by Privacy.

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They make their money the same way debit cards do with interchange fees paid by the merchants. And you know how skeptical we are of free services here on GOG. And these guys actually have a business model to back it up, which gives them the grumpy old geek seal of approval. I actually reviewed this product when they first launched.

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That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Come on. Privacy.com slash GOG. This one's a no-brainer. Get on it now. Privacy.com slash GOG. Caps and doodads. So, Brian, I know it was Prime Day, but I was looking for something different.

I was looking for an adjustable overbed sofa table couch laptop table portable computer desk from 27.6 inches to 39.4 inches on wheels laptop cart for hospital and home office with bracket. Wow, that's a very specific thing you were searching for. Well, fortunately, that's the Amazon title for the object that I found.

I look at it and I'm like, there's something wrong with this picture, and I just can't put my finger on it. Did you take a look at this? I did. And a friend of the show, Wendy, has done many, many pieces of very strange artwork wearing animal mask heads. I did not expect to see one for a desk on Amazon.

That is currently unavailable, I might add, because probably because it's a horse's head. The funny thing is, it was available when I first found it. There's a gentleman wearing what I think is a llama head mask looking at his computer on this desk.

It is, I hope this is somebody's performance art. I really do. I hope this isn't a real product. They somehow snuck this in there. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of interesting. But the link will be in the show notes. Just go check out the picture. I was just like, well, that's a little odd, is all I could say.

Oh, man. So I got a new camera app for my iPhone. It's called Moment Pro. It's one of those fun ones where you get to get raw files and change things on the fly, like your aperture and your shutter speed and your ISO and all that good stuff.

Not bad so far. It's not bad at all. It's a pretty cheap app compared to some of the ones I bought. 645 Pro was one of the big ones. So when I got this app, I had the brilliant idea of getting rid of all of my photos on my phone that have been synced to iPhoto.

I've been using iPhoto for like three years now. This sounds like a bad idea. Yeah. Well, it's not, actually, because I'm always worried about it because I can't delete a photo on one place without it getting deleted from everything. And I don't know. It's all that stupid file format shit that Apple's using for their new photos from the phone.

So I had to upgrade my iMac to High Sierra overnight, let that go, and cross my fingers that when I woke up in the morning, my computer would work. Fortunately, it did. So then I could open up iPhoto because I couldn't even get the stuff out of iPhoto without upgrading to High Sierra, which is, okay, a pain in the ass.

Yes. Then I exported everything, 9,470 some odd photos from iPhoto as full res JPEGs and movies like 4K video and all that stuff. And then just brought it into Lightroom and then deleted everything off iCloud. Gotcha.

So that's a couple of years worth of photos from my phone. So it's sphincter clenching to do that. But I'm tired of just having been like, you know, stuck with this damn stupid format that they're using on the iPhones now. Yeah. You know, I just, I don't like it. It's not very good.

That's why I was checking out Capture One a couple, it was like almost a month ago now, because you can at least like pull in those photos in Capture One. But I kind of still like using Lightroom. So it's like, yeah, convert it to JPEG and pull it in there and make it work. So I'm just, I'm getting away from, I'm just trying to get away from storing stuff on iCloud.

And that way you can, if you can turn off the, you know, that format in, in your phone settings, and then you can use software to just pull it off your phone, take the files off and then back them up in your normal workflow. That's, that's what I've gone to now, because I'm just, I'm terrified that iCloud is just one day going to go, no, you can't have them back.

Yeah, exactly. We lost them. Yeah. We've been through this before me and you, usually with music. Yes. But, but with photos, I'm, I, you know, I have a very, you know, strong connection to my photography since that's what I was for so long.

And I just want to keep all my photos and make sure they're safe. So yeah, I'm done with iCloud with that. I just had to get rid of it. So good move. That was, that was the morning fun times, fun times. But that's why like with the moment stuff, it's cool. Cause I can get raw files out of the camera and they actually are a little bit better.

They're pretty big, but you don't get the artifacting you get with JPEG. So if you're trying to take photos or, you know, like, you know, some kind of semi-professional use on your Instagram that you put your, your slogan over, you know, you're, you're saying in the morning, you're whatever, whatever self-realization bullshit that you're going to post on Instagram.

You can at least do it in raw format now. Oh, joy. Yay. Exactly. And this one I put in for you because I saw this and I'm like, oh, Brian's got to get one of these. It's the ThinkGeek Star Wars Coffee Press R2D2 limited edition four cup French press. And it includes a glass carafe, plunger and filter.

Nice. I do use a French press for my coffee every morning. I actually think that I have talked about this on the show before. If only, as, as many of our listeners have complained, if only our search worked decent on WordPress. I know. I know. I know. Yeah. I saw you put this in. I'm like, I'm almost positive.

I put this in the store in the show before. I thought maybe you had to have, and I was just forgetting it, but it's still pretty cool. So if you want a cool like Star Wars French press, you can't, you can't go wrong with R2D2. No, you can't. Now this one is, is interesting.

It's not, not normal tech that we talk about. This is the Resvani tank. This is a $300,000 SUV. We're going to need a lot more Patreon subscribers. We really need you to bump up your Patreon donations for this one.

The link is in the show notes. The only reason I'm looking at this thing is because my roommate saw them here out, because we live out by Calabasas. Yeah. And, uh, and that's, that's where all the rich people live. That's where Kanye lives. It's where the Kardashians live. You know, Dr. Dre lives like a mile away.

We're in that, we're in that little part of town where it's like, you know, dilapidated. All the poor people live and it's right over the crest of the hill is like, you know, you go over and there's rainbows and unicorns and money. We're not in the money part of town, but we get to see all the money people driving by and people are driving by in these things.

And I swear to God, if I was rich, I would get one of these in an instant. They're bulletproof. They've got smoke screens. They've got run flat tires. This is like the new Hummer, but I don't unfortunately have $300,000. They've got gas masks inside.

Bulletproof. Come on. It's cool. I got to tell you, it's good looking. Like I would buy a Jeep. I would buy a Jeep that looked like this. This is a cool looking car. Uh, but yeah, it is funny. The, the website, numerous defensive features. It's just one of the, one of the bullet points there.

And when you scroll down, it's totally like smoke screens, electrified door handles, flat run tires, blinding lights. It's pretty bad-ass. And you can get it in the available 770 horsepower Hellcat V8 engine. Oh man.

This thing is just, and you can't take the tires off. There's just so much in this thing that it's just like, this is fucking Batman. I want to be Batman. It is. It is. But does it come in blue? No. Well, actually for that much money, I think they'll paint it whatever color you want. You can get it in cornflower.

They'll paint it for you for another $100,000. Exactly. You can get this in cornflower blue. Yeah. So Target has a secret app for super fans. There's a super, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Back, back the truck up there. There are super fans of Target. You should have said back the tank up there, Jason.

Oh, I'm sorry. Back the tank up. There you go. Apparently there are. So this is basically an Instagram clone, really, where they have pictures of products and people post comments. And basically they're outsourcing their product development to people that shop all the time at Target.

They keep the group at roughly 600 people, which is about 0.002% of its weekly shopper base. Their members are personally invited to take part, recruited online via online research and receipt polls. They are not paid for the service because why would they pay anyone?

Let's pay to have people do work. Nah, we can get it for free. That's why I put this in here. Here we are once again, basically selling ourselves out and offering up something that is of value for free. Well, not totally for free. You are getting discounts and gift cards and they say the larger incentive is that these fans get to be part of a feedback loop, seeing and sometimes trying products early while encouraging targets to develop products that they will love to buy.

They help to they get to help shape target into the target they want. Oh, my God. This is the world that we have made. No life. Oh, man. Anybody with a real job that works for a living would be like, well, you want me to do to do what for free?

I'm supposed to tell you how to improve your own products for free. Yeah. Isn't that your job? I'm pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things, making your products better is, I don't know, your job. Hey, outsource where you can, man.

And if people are dumb enough to go for it, I guess that's where we're at. So, yeah, we spent a couple weeks, months, whatever, over a year or two talking about Kodi devices and the Kodi boxes, which is the ways of getting TV illegally. Basically, of course, not just illegally. Obviously, there's Internet programs that you can get with this completely legally, which is what everybody's using it for.

It's funny. I've never used my Kodi box to actually download anything illegal. I watch, like, cable access channels from Ireland and sheep herding and hurling. Right. I have a Kodi box. I've got my Mugu Guy Pan box, but I've never actually downloaded anything illegal on my Kodi box, which I thought is pretty funny.

Well, there was a married couple in England who has made almost a million dollars by selling over 8,000 illicit streaming devices and setting up streaming services, and they've been caught and are sentenced to five years in jail because it's illegal. People, people, people.

You don't actually set it up with the illegal stuff on it. That's the workaround. Yes, you can have a website on your, a page on your website that tells people how to do it. Yes, you can. Just don't do it themselves. Come on. That's the way it works.

It's kind of like if I bought my new MacBook and it came with, you know, a subscription to my favorite torrent tracker and a copy of Transmit, like, open, pulling the feeds from it. That's, that would be illegal, but I can, I can buy a MacBook and then install that.

That's the whole point. So if you sell a Kodi box, you don't configure it for the user. You dumb shits. They deserve to be in jail just for sheer stupidity. There you go. Well, they are. And as a somewhat related story, Fast Company is now reporting that over 5 million Americans will pull the plug on pay TV this year alone.

A lot of people are cutting the cord. Wonder what they're replacing it with. It's funny. I had a direct TV box installed this week and into my bedroom so I could, because we have a direct TV system in the house and I'm sitting there chatting with the, the installer and he's like, yeah, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be having a job.

Everything's kind of moving to streaming. You can even stream all of the direct TV stuff without having a dish now. And like, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be out here in the hot sun turning people's dishes to the Southwest or whatever, Southeast. Right. And, uh, he was, he was like, he was legitimately concerned that he wasn't going to have a job in a couple of years.

Well, he's smart to be thinking about it this early. Mm hmm. Yeah. So you and Jordan talked about the anchor, uh, chargers when, when, uh, when you did the show without me and, uh, it sounded wonderful. Yeah. So I immediately went and bought one and it doesn't work with any of my devices.

What the hell? Do I just have a, do I just have a bum unit? Do you have, you might have a bum unit. Do you have a massively thick case on your phone? I tried taking off the case on my phone and trying it without the case and it still would just blink blue. It wasn't charging. That I think you got a bum unit because I've got four of these around the house and I can basically put, I've got a pretty thick case on my phone.

I've got one of those Amazon basics, like super hard plastic cases on my phone. It works with my, my iPhone eight. No problem. I've got it. Uh, it works with my galaxy, uh, S seven edge. No problem. So maybe you just got a bum unit because this thing is just fantastic.

The only problem that I've discovered with it is it looks like a coaster. So I have actually put my beverages on it. That's the only thing. Yeah. There's that. But yeah, for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. I would send it back and try again because mine works great.

All right. Yeah. I will try that. And, uh, my Apple watch issue is back. It, uh, the entire time I was in Canada, I guess, I guess there wasn't able to obviously connect to the Verizon network. Uh, as soon as I came back home, even though I've called Verizon and I had them shut off the Apple watch subscription for the third time, it's back.

It just keeps trying to connect. I keep getting messages on my phone all the time. It's so annoying telling me that I need to go in and set up subscription service. I'm going crazy. I have to go to the stupid genius bar. Oh man. I'm so bummed out about this. It's so annoying. Well, at least you don't have to go to the genius bar for your flying car.

I've yet seen this new, this new company called opener. They, they launched their new vehicle called black fly. Mm. I, I don't know about the name, but that name, uh, they're Canadian. I guess it's okay. In Canada. Uh, did you watch the video on this?

I did. It's cool as hell. I want one so bad. They say that it's, it's, it's all electric has fast charging and it'll, it'll like supercharge in 30 minutes, uh, automatic return to home features. And it will cost about as much as a, you know, a high end SUV. Now, now that we know what a high end SUV can cost, which is $300,000 for the tank.

Yeah. I'm not super excited about it, but, uh, this thing is cool. And the big news that came out about this is it's partially funded by Larry page. I haven't heard Larry page's name in years. Nope. He's been kind of on the down low. So Larry page has three of these companies.

Now he's got a Cora, which is a two seater flying taxi. Then he went with a sporty flying boat called flyer. Both of those are from a company called Kitty Hawk. And now, uh, opener is the next one. I don't know why they named their company opener for a flying car.

I don't get that. Um, it should be called bird. It really actually should, you know, maybe they can buy it from bird when they go out of business because that's going to be pretty quick here. I thought we were going to get through this whole episode without talking about these goddamn scooters, but yeah, bring it up. Chance.

Not a chance. Anyway. Yeah. The, the only problem with the, the black fly is it's a one seater. They need a two seater because I agree. It'd be hard to go out on a date by yourself. Yeah. Cause I mean, honestly, that's the, that's the proposition for this thing.

It's like, Hey baby, want to go for a ride in my flying car? Cause I mean, that movie with Michael Keaton where they were the advertising executives. I just always remember that one line, uh, Porsche for, for guys who want hand jobs from women. It was actually, uh, it was Jaguar because I know, do you know, do you know, I know this quote, why there's a poster in the movie Jaguar for women or for men who want hand jobs from women.

They don't know. It's, it was an eight foot poster on the wall of the advertising agency. When I worked at Paramount, my friend, John had that poster that he got from the set and he gave it, he gave it to me and I had it in my house for years and I never put it on the wall.

And when I moved, I eventually gave it to somebody else. It's, it's, it's still out there somewhere, but I had that poster from the movie in my house. That's amazing. That is absolutely amazing. That's Jaguar for men who want hand jobs from women. They don't even know. And now we have a show title.

And I don't think it was Michael Keaton. It was, uh, the guy from Arthur. What's his name? Oh, Dudley Moore. Dudley Moore. I thought it was Dudley Moore. Well, we'll dig that up and put a link in the show notes. I've never actually seen the movie, but I'm pretty sure it was Dudley Moore. It's hilarious. Ah, yes. So there you go.

So when you, when you want to reach around from the back of the cockpit, there you go. Get yourself a black fly.

Media candy. The other night I was watching the Jim Jeffries show and he announced that he had a new special on Netflix and I'm like, what? Oh shit. So I stayed up to like midnight watching it in my room and, uh, I was crying. I was laughing so hard.

He's still my favorite working comedian and his new special is called Jim Jeffries. This is me now on Netflix. And it's just as funny as all of his other stuff. It was so good. Uh, I don't know. Have you got a chance to watch it yet? I have not watched it yet, but I will.

Cause I'm a, I'm a big fan as well. Okay. Yeah. It's, it's well worth it. He's, he's just so damn good. Yep. Well, Bill Maher has a new comedy special live from Oklahoma and it's on HBO. I did watch that. And I have to say, if you watch real time with Bill Maher, you don't need to see a standup. Uh, well, I don't watch the same thing.

Yeah. I don't need to watch it at all. Cause you know, my feelings about Bill Maher. Yeah, I know you're not a huge fan. It's a bit like if Adam Carolla were to put out a comedy special or a book or anything, because if you listen to his podcast, he's just recycling all that stuff. And Bill Maher is recycling all his bits from his show. Well, uh, Adam Carolla just, uh, recorded his Netflix special.

Well, can't wait to not see that. Yep. And, uh, he's got it. He's got a new book coming out too. So it's like his fourth or fifth book. Can't wait to not read that. Uh, his book, his last book, uh, like we're all be, we'll all be chicks in 50 years or something like that. Uh, it was actually pretty funny. I enjoyed it. I don't, I don't say that they're not funny, but it is all.

Cause I listened to his podcast regularly. It's all, it's all taken from his podcast. I've heard every single joke before. There's not a single new thing in there. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, the problem is he's podcasting all the time and doesn't go out and have enough new shit happen to him. Exactly. That's, that is one of the problems with, uh, being on the air all the time.

Um, now remember the podcast S town? I talked about it on the show when it came out from the people who made cereal. Mm. Uh, they're being sued by the, by the estate of the dead guy. In S town. And I'm like, yeah, I can see that.

I can see that. Cause they, they, they never actually got written permission from the guy who they talk about in the stories to actually publish his stories, especially some things about his sexual orientation and exploits. So, and the guy's dead now and he can't come back and say, uh, yeah, you shouldn't have said that stuff.

So, you know what? Go for it guys. I hope you win. You, you think NPR would have been better about this? Well, well, NPR is claimed in the suit, but also cereal because it was, it's, you know, it was a separate company at that point. Right. Right. Um, but, uh, yeah, cause I think the, I think the guy was at NPR when he first started the saga to do that.

But yeah, all in all, it's like, you gotta, you can't just put people's stories out there without a written release. You have to at least have a release, even, you know, a recorded verbal release, which they didn't have. No, they're going to, I think they're going to lose this one in, in massive fashion.

Yep. I think so too. And I think that will be the end of this particular company. No, it won't be. Well, actually it might be because you know what? Serial was kind of a flash in the pan. Serial season two sucked. Yep. Remember that with the soldier. Yep. And I guess they're working on season three or maybe season three has even come out and I haven't even heard about it, but.

Definitely possible. I think the days of serial are over. I hope. I hate that overproduced bullshit. Listen to our underproduced bullshit. Yes. That's what we do. That's what podcasting is all about. The voice of the people. All right.

So you mentioned I've been traveling and I used to do a watch. Basically, I would watch all my movies when I was flying and I would get very drunk and come and do a drunk airplane movie reviews. Now I have a kid and I fly with the kids. So we have painfully sober airplane movie reviews. Again.

Okay. What you got? Blade Runner 2049. Yes. Didn't need to see it. Didn't need to have been made. It looked pretty. Here's the thing. You watch this on an airplane. If you'd have seen this in the theater the way it was meant to be seen, it's really good.

It's an experience. It's an experiential movie. The movie itself is kind of meh. But when you're in a 70 millimeter theater with everything going on, it was actually really enjoyable. I was expecting some story. Nah, there wasn't much story.

No, there wasn't. So I also saw Justice League. I'm sorry. Not as bad as I was led to believe it would be. This has the same issue that Superman versus Batman had, where it's like you expect it to be the worst thing ever in the history of movies.

And it's just like, meh, it wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad. I thought it was fine. Meh. And finally, I watched stars. I gave it two mehs up. And finally, I watched The Post, which was exquisitely well made, exquisitely well acted, and incredibly painful to watch because, you know, the world that we live in now.

It was obviously crafted to win Oscars, but it was good. I started to watch, and I found it exquisitely boring. I liked it. I thought it was very good. Okay. I just, I did not find that worth watching at all, so I deleted it.

That's what I do. And now HBO has ordered a science fiction series from Joss Whedon. We'll see. He's going to write and produce this one, and it's called The Nevers. I don't know. I mean. You swear you lose me. It will be about a gang of Victorian women who find themselves with unusual abilities.

What? And will face off against relentless enemies. This is basically Buffy 1800 edition is what it sounds like. Yeah. But you know what? After The Avengers, I would rather him do this than anything else. I didn't like the dollhouse.

I thought the dollhouse was shit. Even Eliza Dushku couldn't save it, even though I think she's one of the hottest women on TV ever, but because she played Faith in Buffy, and she was so hot in his faith. But I couldn't even get past that. So the dollhouse was crap, and the Avengers, whatever.

And now this, we'll see. I just, go back to Firefly. Finish that. Damn it. Bit late. I know. I know. Serenity kind of killed all my favorite characters. So what are you going to do? I got a bunch of stuff this week over on Audible.

I got Unseen Academicals, the old Terry Pratchett novel from the Discworld. Now, this is a new version, and I think this is in partnership with the BBC, because it has all of the major players in it, and it's about soccer. I don't know if you remember Unseen Academicals.

I do. Yeah. It's a great story. It's very funny. It's Romeo and Juliet wrapped in soccer, and it's called Foot the Ball, is what they called it in the show. Foot the Ball. It was very funny, and the production was amazing. It was about four and a half hours. Well done, so it's abridged.

But all in all, I thought it was excellent for, you know, just a full cast, serious recording. It's not one of the—this is not a podcast. This is a serious production with all of the trimmings from the BBC or Audible, whoever did it.

It was great. I fully recommend this if you're a Terry Pratchett fan and love the book. It was well done, extremely well done. Next up, I broke the rule, Brian. I'm sorry. Okay. I broke the rule. I got the next version of the Expeditionary Force series.

Should you have waited a bit longer? I should have. I really should have. There's a reason that we have the rule, and I broke the rule, and by the end of the book, I'm like, okay, I need to take a break. It was a very good book. It was a very good book.

I'm not sad that I got it, but it was—a lot of the tropes were wearing thin by the end, because the snarky AI is very funny in small doses, but at the end, I'm like, okay, enough, enough. He thinks we're monkeys. Great. Enough.

We'll get it. He's smart. God damn it. See, you need time to forget that from the first book. Exactly. That's the thing. That's why we have this rule. Yeah, you have to forget. And have you finished the second book of the Murderbot Diaries? I am 75% of the way through it and enjoying it.

Okay, good. I'm only 33% through. I'm enjoying it, but I don't find it as good as the first one yet. So I will trudge through that by next week. Someday we'll get there. But I did listen to another book called Starship Grifters, a Rex Nileo—Nileo—Nileo—Nileo—Cornholeo—Cornholeo.

So I listened to Starship Grifters, a Rex Nileo adventure by Robert Krause, or Krause, or I don't know how you pronounce his name. But this is one of the funniest books I've read-slash-listened to in a very long time. It is very much like if Douglas Adams wrote the script of Star Wars, or Solo, because Rex Nileo is very much the Han Solo character.

Gotcha. There's robots. There's—it's a very complicated story, but it is extremely well done and extremely funny. Oh, and you have to throw in a bit of space balls in there as well. Nice. Yeah. If you want a very funny sci-fi story, it is top of my list.

Top of my list. It's about an A-minus. I would give this an A-minus. It wasn't as—I mean, it's not as good as, like, you know, a hitchhiker's would be. But it is very reminiscent of the Douglas Adams style. It is just funny as shit. So I highly recommend this book.

And I am going to wait. I'm going to wait. There's a second one, but I'm going to wait. I promise. I promise. This was kind of my step back away from the other two series. And I think I might need to read, like, some Elizabethan fiction or something to clear my mind from all the sci-fi that I've been reading.

But you cannot—you can't go wrong with this book, Starship Grifters. I've got something that you could maybe read as a palate cleanser. It's not a book. It's a long, long, long-form article over on The Verge about books that we will never cover on the show. Romance books.

Oh, is this the big terpuffle? This is Cockygate. Oh, Cockygate. Oh, come on. This is a wonderful read. It is thoroughly enjoyable. Hats off to the author, Sarah Jong, I believe. I started reading this thinking, okay, I'm going to get, like, three minutes into this.

And I'm going to get what I need to get to put it in the show notes because it's all about how these authors kind of banded together into different cabals and figured out ways to game Kindle's unlimited algorithm to basically win. And I just kept reading and laughing and reading and laughing.

And this is a wonderful read. It is just fantastic. Go read this, Jason. It is hilarious. Diving into this world. These authors are crazy. But what they figured out, very smart. They did figure out a way to game the system there. So they did it. And I'm not going to spoil it.

You've got to read it. Fantastic. All right. I will check it out. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Binner from the Cyber Wire podcast. Back from the beach.

Hopefully he didn't get too much sunburn. The Cyber Wire is a free community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the amazing new Hacking Humans podcast along with Joe Kerrigan where they take on social engineering. Well, thank you. Somebody changed my notes for me and I was like, what the hell is that?

Yeah. I also, I should have put in that he's tan, rested, and damn handsome. Chiseled jaw, abs of steel. Ladies love him. Right. Men want to be him. Children respect him. Yeah. That's me.

I write it here. It comes out there. Yeah. Obviously, I don't spot check my own copy. That's how it works. It's good. Well, good to be back, guys. And yes, I am feeling rested from a couple of days last weekend at the beach with young Jack who Cyber Wire listeners are familiar with.

He's a regular guest on our show. We do fun things with him. But a busy week this week. Jumping right into it, this news about the SamSam ransomware hitting LabCorp. They are, of course, the largest clinical lab in the U.S.

They do all sorts of blood testing. Yes. And they got hit by SamSam ransomware. Couldn't happen to a worse company. God, I hate their billing. Yeah. I mean, is there a medical company out there right now where you feel good about their billing?

No. No. That's fair. At least in the U.S. For our international listeners, yes, it really is that bad here. Now, what's interesting, one of the reasons I put this in here is I was actually in a LabCorp location earlier this week with a family member.

This was announced last Monday, and I was at a LabCorp on Tuesday, and there was not a powered-up computer in the place. Oh, old school. Everything was being done with pen and paper. They were writing names and birthdates on vials of blood.

Dusting off their fax machines. Exactly. Exactly. It was – you could tell they were a little bit harried, but afterwards I reached out to some of the folks I know, security researchers, and they said, yeah, basically LabCorp was using an abundance of caution when it came to this attack.

And it sounds like they did a good job with it. They were not down for very long. It did affect thousands of servers, but when you're – yeah, 1,900 servers, 7,000 systems. When you're a company as big as LabCorp is, that's a drop in the bucket. So it sounds like their team did a good job of getting on this quickly.

It says that under an hour they were able to neutralize it. It can be done, people. It can. And, you know, good for them. They're an easy company to not have good feelings about if you're somebody in the United States, but got to give at least their security team credit.

It sounds like they were on top of this one. Yeah. This one I found this morning from Bleeping Computer. Half a billion IoT devices vulnerable to DNS rebinding attacks. And always remember, the S in IoT is for security. So – or – yeah. Armus.

Armus is a cybersecurity firm. Have you guys covered those guys on the CyberWire before? Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. I haven't heard of them. So this is a new one for me. But they have discovered the BlueBorn vulnerabilities and the Bluetooth protocol. And basically what is happening is this DNS rebinding attack where they can change your DNS servers in your IoT devices and then point basically any domain to where they want it to go.

Honestly, I was having a hard time wrapping my head around – I had to read through this a couple of times to really get a sense for what really is going on here. Is it clear to you? Do you get what they're doing here? Right. When you control the DNS server – you know, because basically at any time you type in a URL, it goes to the DNS server.

The DNS server translates that name into the IP address where it should go, where the actual request should go. So if they can get in there and switch the DNS servers to something that they control, well, then it's just, you know, game on. And then they can, you know, take the information that's coming from your client, look at it, analyze it, and forward it on to the actual client if they want to.

But it's kind of like a man-in-the-middle attack, sort of, where they can point it to their servers, do whatever they want to with data that's coming in, or send you back false data, or pass stuff on. Very dangerous stuff. That's why you always want to be in control of your own DNS.

The big problem here is how many devices are vulnerable to this? Half a billion is not we. It's not we. It's not a small amount, no. Yeah, and they're finding flaws in Blizzard apps, so no more StarCraft for me today. U-Torrent, which most people on PCs, if you're going to Sweden, you're going to use U-Torrent.

Google Home, not a small one. Roku TV, which I have, fuck. And Sonos devices, which I also have, double fuck. So hopefully these people are going to be putting patches out for this stuff, but we know how that goes. But yeah, this is kind of a major one.

It really is. And I guess the bottom line is that this allows them to have a view inside your local network that they otherwise would not be able to have. Yes, absolutely. And they can also send back payloads that could actually, you know, compromise the devices that are there.

I mean, they've already compromised it with the DNS, but they can actually put on more payloads that come back and then can be run on your devices. If only people working in security had been saying something about the potential downfalls of the Internet of Things. Oh, I wonder who would have said that.

Oh. It's a shame that nobody threw out a warning, you know. Just a shame. Security is expensive, though. Security is expensive. We cannot be competitive if we have to be secure. Spend money on securing these devices.

Yeah. And now I'm kind of freaked out because I just put in a new smart plug that I bought, like, ages ago. One of those smart plugs that are, you know, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and all that in my bedroom to turn on my TV and stuff to, like, so the vampire power for my TV doesn't cost me more money.

But now I'm just like, oh, maybe that was a bad idea because connected to that is goes through the power to the Xbox, the DirecTV, the Roku stick and my regular TV and a couple other devices. I'm like, oh, man, I don't think they can do anything with it.

But I just I don't like these smart home, you know, just attack vectors that are out there. Yeah. I was so happy to have a dumb TV in my room. And what's the first thing I do? Plug it into a smart plug. Do you attach a smart plug? I'm an idiot. Yeah.

Well, and I suppose that I mean, the coverage of this seems to indicate that there really is no easy fix. It seems like it's something we're stuck with because of how many devices that it affects and how many of these devices are kind of set it and forget it devices. Yeah.

And how many companies have gone out of business? Yeah. And there is no more support. Yeah. It's a great point, too. Yeah. And you only need it only takes one, right? You only need one of these on your network and they're in. Mm hmm. Yeah. And this I mean, this attack is over 10 years old, so it's nothing new.

Right. So we can just give up. Let's just go home. We're calling it a day. Dave, go back to the beach. We're done. Well, let's just turn off all the like they did at LabCorp. Let's just turn off all the computers and everything by paper. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine with killing trees. Forget it. OK.

Well, you're not really not going to want to hear this next story if we're ready to call it quits just after the IOT, because, you know, that election hacking that didn't happen because it's fake news. That's right. Didn't. No collusion. Again, it didn't happen again, I guess. The election hacking that didn't happen, but that the Russians are really happy to coordinate with us the research into the hacking that they say didn't happen.

Yes. Best idea ever. Right. OK. Go on. Proceed. Proceed. Well, Microsoft has disclosed on Thursday that it once again did not happen. OK. No. Oh, wait. Hold on. I think they're saying it did and that they just caught him doing it again. Apparently, it has identified and helped thwart hacking attempts on three congressional candidates earlier this year, marking the first publicly known hacking efforts targeting candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.

Tim Burt, Microsoft's vice president for security and trust, said at the Aspen Security Forum earlier this year, we did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks. We saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for election in the midterm elections.

Microsoft said that they worked with the government and were able to take the domain down and block the phishing messages. They did not disclose the name of the candidates or what particular parties that they were for. But I have a guess. It is worth noting that they're saying that they're seeing fewer instances than they did in 2016.

But they were careful to say there's still plenty of time for things to ramp up. Also, midterm elections, not quite as important as what we voted for in 2016. Yeah, that's true. I would expect it to be a little bit lower level, but I'm expecting it to be happening.

And we now are basically being told that, yes, it is happening. Right. Right. Well, you know, to Microsoft's credit, this came through the news this week.

Microsoft is asking Congress to regulate facial recognition technology. Now, did any of you, any of you ever see this one coming? If there were going to be a company that would do it, that is involved within it, it would be Microsoft. You think, Mike, not Apple?

That's a good point. Okay. Apple and Microsoft, I both see as pretty social or pretty security focused companies, all things considered. Certainly more so than Google or Amazon or Facebook or any of the other large companies that we think of. The difference there, though, is that Apple does not run a cloud computing infrastructure that people are using to run facial recognition technology on.

So this is like they're beating Amazon to the punch on this one, saying, hey, guys, our resources are being used for facial recognition technology that we don't actually agree with. So maybe we need to regulate this kind of stuff. So I, you know, I give feather in their cap for Microsoft for coming out first and saying that, yeah, this could be really bad because, you know, all of the stories that we've ever had about facial recognition, none of them were actually, you know, happy.

So, I mean, remember, you know, remember whales. That's all I have to say. Remember whales and not whales in the ocean, whales, the country with football and that kind of thing. But yeah, I'm pretty happy about this. And the ACLU has come out for a moratorium as well, saying that, yeah, this is really not where it needs to be right now.

And we need to have some regulation about who's doing it, what's what you know, what the technology is and should law enforcement have access to this nascent technology? Because we know most of the time it doesn't actually work. Not not very well. Certainly at this stage.

Not entirely unrelated to this. You know, when I was at the beach last week, I was down in Ocean City, Maryland, which is where my family got arrested for selling meth. Oh, he wasn't going to. Yeah, I got I got flagged. Yeah. Yeah. But I've been vacationing there with my family since I was a young, young lad.

So, you know, it's a place I have great affection for. And I noticed I was reading through one of the the little, you know, throwaway newspapers, little resort newspapers that was in the condo we were staying in. And they were talking about how they had updated the parking technology for the main parking lot by the beach to use a license plate reading technology with your smartphone.

So when you drive in, you tell them how long you think you're going to be there and you give them a credit card. It scans your license plate. And then on the way out, if you don't exceed that, you're fine on the way.

If you if it does, it charges you. You can add hours on your on the app, you know, that sort of thing. But it was interesting to me because here's like when you say what's the upside to this? Well, that's a I think that's a good use of of license plate scanning technology.

However, we saw another story related to this in the past week or so where a chain of malls in California were being accused of sharing their license plate scanning data with ice. Yeah. I mean, the problem is it's always unintended consequences.

It's you look at something and go, OK, I can see a case use for this here. But then you think, oh, well, this company wants to make more money, so they may sell this information. And that's where the real problem comes, because who knows where it then goes. Yeah, I think it's interesting that we're starting to see some of the big companies call for regulation on some of these things to I do.

You suppose is that they're looking for a fair playing field or trying to get ahead of potential litigation? It seems like there's multiple directions this could that could motivate them to do this. Yeah. If you're going to be cynical, I think it's getting ahead of potential legislation and lawsuits and things of that sort that that will come out after this.

I mean, I would I would like to think it's it's done out of some sense of of of ethics. But of course, generally, that's generally never the case. You're so funny. But I mean, we have seen recently a lot of companies employees basically standing up and saying, you know, we don't agree with the with the direction this company is going or working with the government or working with the military.

So maybe there is more ethical movements going on within these companies that we're not aware of. Who knows? But I'd like to I'd like to be a dollar short. You know, I mean, it's it's stuff's already out there. It's in the hands of the, you know, the corporate public. And well, I mean, you can make the Pandora's argument all you want about the box being open, but it's open, it's not it's never going to it's never going to close.

So the question is, what do we do about it? And as we always say on the show, regulate, regulate, regulate. Well, you see, yes, I think part of it also is if you have it done nationally, then as a company, you don't have to deal with it state by state where you could have a different regulation in every state.

You know, for example, California takes the lead on privacy things. So if you have one, it's easier to have one rule and be able to lobby for one rule that you can agree upon rather than having 50 different states all with their own individual rules. And, you know, that sort of quagmire you get into with that.

One rule to regulate them all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. So let's move on to our other favorite IoT device, smart TVs, which I just mentioned earlier. There are a couple of senators who actually want the privacy invading crap that we've seen on smart TVs to be investigated.

Remember the Vizio debacle? I think I'm I think I can't remember who I misquoted who it was when Jordan Harbinger was here and I said it was some other TV maker, but it was the Vizio TVs who were selling our data in our viewing habits. So Senator Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal are trying to get the FTC to actually, you know, investigate this stuff and maybe have some regulation about it.

I'm fine with that. I'm totally fine with that. You guys. I'm totally fine with it. I think one of the biggest problems we're experiencing now with with this this golden age of the Internet and big data is is we don't know where our data is going going. It's one thing for the smart TV to be collecting my data to give me a better service.

That's fine. It's another thing entirely for them to turn around and then sell that data to people I don't even know. And I don't know who they're selling it to. That's that's just not right. I think that what we need really is a blanket, you know, blanket legislation on if some company puts a microphone or a camera in your home.

what they can do with that data, period. Right. You know, because if we're doing device by device, it's going to take forever to get through all this crap. And there should there needs to be kill switches on all this sort of sort of stuff. You should be able to turn it off easily without having to, like, go deep into a system.

Well, and I mean, to extend that, should could we see could we or should we see a requirement for all these things to be opt in? Yeah. Oh, oh, absolutely. Oh, dream on. Dream on. I know. I know. Yes. I know.

It's all skittles and daisies. It is an opt out world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the whole this whole notion that basically you can give away every shred of privacy by simply clicking through a EULA, I think, has to come to an end.

Yes, I 100 percent agree with you. It's just getting ridiculous at this point. So next up, we've got a story from Gizmodo. This is from their UK edition, which I noticed that it was from the UK edition because I was reading it as I was reading it. They mentioned the American state of Oklahoma.

And I thought, wait a minute, this must be this must be the UK version. Sure enough, it was. They're reporting on an American engineer who is facing prison for taking a bunch of military secrets from the U.S. Navy and shuttling them over to his Dropbox, which I find interesting because Condi Rice, you know, is on the board for Dropbox.

So I thought maybe you just, you know, once you signed up for a Dropbox. Yeah, I thought maybe once you signed up for Dropbox and pay the fee, maybe you get clearance. You know, I thought maybe that was the perk for Dropbox. I thought I thought it was kind of like when U2's album just showed up on your iPhone. I thought if you got a Dropbox account, you got drone secrets.

Well, it's not as hard to get a clearance as it used to be. Right. Yeah, at least at least to keep one anyway. So this gentleman, his name is Jared Sparks. I thought you were going to say Jared Kushner. I'm like, oh, I know that guy. Something about Jared's.

His name is Jared Sparks, and he's from Oklahoma. He was found guilty of multiple counts of theft of trade secrets. According to the Justice Department, he could face up to 10 years in prison for each of these counts. So he was working, I believe he was working for a contractor.

Yeah, he was working for a company called LBI. I'm not familiar with them. They're out of Connecticut, and they make underwater drones for the Navy, which sounds kind of cool. Super subs. Yeah. So he had access to all kinds of classified information, and he uploaded them to his Dropbox, and now he's probably going to jail.

Yes, I do. I'm in particularly love with the last sentence of this article. It's a good reminder to avoid saving internal documents when you leave your place of employment to work for a competitor, especially if both of those companies are contractors for the U.S. military. It's a little reminder there.

Yeah. You think this would be in the HR review when you sign on, you know, just chasing to go back to our earlier Mel Brooks things. Did you try to steal government secrets this week? Exactly. Oh, man.

What are you going to do? Yeah. It's a shame, but I think it points out how easy it is to do this, you know. Yeah. But also, it seems like they're watching, so. Yeah. They put super glue in my USB port, so I couldn't put it in the thumb drive, so how the hell am I going to work from home?

Oh, I just throw it on my Dropbox account. Whatever. No, nothing's going to happen. I'm thinking about that, because it always, you know, the stories used to always be the USB sticks, and you couldn't bring a USB stick into facilities and things like that. And, like, we've just totally leapfrogged that with this just constant connected wireless everything now. The cloud is apparently all the government's computers now.

Yes. Yeah. This next one I saw on Ars Technica, a $225 GPS spoofer can send sat-nav guided vehicles into oncoming traffic. I can't wait for driverless cars. I, you know, these guys are up in the game.

I was just thinking, I want a backpack where I can just, like, deploy a stop sign anywhere. So, you know, freak the car out and be like, oh, stop. But this is way, way better. So it's, you know, a little chip that you can buy, or you can put all the pieces together yourself, stick to the underside of the car, and then tell it where to go.

It works best in urban environments, and they say it works best in urban environments where the driver doesn't know where they're going. But for the most part, the fact that you can change the turn-by-turn directions on somebody's GPS device is pretty interesting. I got to say, I like this one.

Well, it is interesting. Yeah. I'll go with interesting, but not so much like. Well, here's the reason I like it, because when these things, because we're not there yet with, you know, driverless cars and all the automated bullshit that we're all waiting for, this means that people have to harden their systems before they're deployed.

So things like, hacks like this mean that people are going, it's in the public now, they're going to have to harden their devices to hacks like this. So I'm okay with that. You're right. That's exactly what the entire Internet of Things community has done since knowing about all these things. They have hardened their systems.

But the Internet of cars is a little different. Those guys know that the liability that they face means that they have to fix this crap. One would hope. This reminds me of a couple of things. First of all, you know, GPS jamming has not, that's, that's been a military thing since GPS has been around.

So jam, jam the GPS so your enemy doesn't know where they are or where you are. But now there are, I'm trying to remember because there are multiple, there's a, there's a Russian version of GPS. They have their own system of satellites up.

And I believe a lot of the modern phones can read that as a fallback, which I think is interesting in that if you think about this sort of thing, if you're trying to make a fail safe, or you're trying to have a system that looks to verify that what it's seeing is correct.

If you have more than one GPS system and you compare the two against each other, that could be a way of checking to make sure that things are within the realm of where you think they should be in. If they're not, then, you know, pull this car over to the side of the road until we can figure out what's going on.

The other thing it reminds me of is, I don't know, gosh, about a decade ago, I had a buddy who lived overseas and came over here to visit. And he brought with him a cell phone jammer. Oh, yeah. I had one of those. Yeah. Did you? Of course you did. Well, if anybody was going to have one of those.

Well, it's 2000, 2009, I went to Bangkok and I went to like the big electronics mall in Bangkok and I bought a tri-band cell phone jammer and, you know, got it back here to the States, which, you know, when I think about it, I was so fucking stupid because it's a felony to be in possession of one of those.

Yes, it is. And here's the crazy part. I put it in my checked luggage and my checked luggage was delayed because my flight was delayed. So it went through probably extra screening. But I was smart enough to drain the battery before it actually got into my luggage. But so they delivered my luggage the next day and I was just waiting.

I was waiting for the FBI to show up. I was just I'm like, oh, man, I bought it. It was like 50 bucks. Tri-band cell phone jammer. I eventually gave it away to somebody who is more nefarious than I am. And also more, you know, I'm somebody less risk averse than I am because I'm like, this is a cool toy.

It works. I can go to a restaurant, turn it on and everybody's cell phone in the restaurant's turned off. But I just don't need to have this in my life. This is a bad thing. Also, my friend used it in movie theaters. I've done that, too. I did that, too.

I also did it like hacking for good. Right. The other problem was I did it when I was on the highway. When people were talking on their phones, I'd pull up next to them and turn it on. And then the problem was they would look at their phone even more because they're like, no signal, no signal, no signal. Because I'm thinking, oh, in the, you know, the highways of L.A., like everybody's looking at their phone and not paying attention to driving.

It actually had the opposite effect that I was looking for. That's the exact equivalent of like me being on the bike path here in Santa Monica and ringing my bell. Now people start acting crazy and random and jolt left and right. When if I just ignore them and weave in and round them, I'll be fine.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me when I was in college, my roommate was in the university's ham radio club. Get off my lawn. And so he was because he was a licensed ham radio operator.

He was licensed to transmit on certain frequencies. And one of those frequencies he was allowed to transmit on was like the K band frequency that radar detectors use. So he built himself just a little box with a button on it and he kept it in his car.

And basically, anytime somebody drove by in a, you know, car that was likely to have a radar detector, he would just press this little button and you see the brake lights come on and they'd slow down because he was just jamming that frequency, lighting up that frequency with just this little transmitter, you know, size of a pack of playing cards.

But he was, but he was legally licensed to transmit on that frequency. So he was not, not breaking the law. So there's a little fun pranking with, uh, when the back in the days of, uh, radar detectors before we had things like ways. Yes.

Uh, love, love the old days. I love the old days. Yeah. I really, really hope the statute of limitations has run out. Or maybe doing some last minute edited. Can somebody get Ben Yellen on the line? I need, I need, I need actual counsel here.

It would be, yeah, it'd be interesting to see, uh, if one of the listeners could keep a running tab on the number of crimes that have been admitted to over the course that you guys have been doing this show. Now, okay, let's cut that bit out because somebody will.

You're included in that, by the way, so you might not want to put that challenge out to the audience. Sexy time pizza delivery. Anybody? Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. I never, all right. I, I withdraw the statement. That'll be $20 for me to edit that out.

Thank you very much. All right. That's right. All right. That's my business model. For next week's episode, you'll be hearing the prison, uh, announcements over our. Right. Why is there so much reverb? Oh. Because we're in prison. You are getting a call from the state potentiary. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, guys.

Well, you guys have a great weekend. Let's. All right. Put a button on it. All right. See you next time. Brick-a-brick. I found this story while I was digging around and it's called how I got banned for life from Airbnb. Oops.

Yeah. Now this is an interesting read. It's kind of self-serving and boring, but there's one key takeaway here. You can get permabanned for Airbnb by leaving a review for your Airbnb stay on an external site. Well, that's a load of crap.

That's a load of crap. Yep. So no Yelp reviews or Google reviews or anything like that. And if they find them, you're kicked out for good with no way to get back in. Right. Talk about controlling the message. Yes. And I checked it the other day and he's not like Airbnb has not said, oh, you can come back now.

Nope. He is basically banned for life because he had a really crappy place and he made a Google review and that was it. So, you know, a little too much power, I'm thinking. If people are going to be having to use these sites, I mean, honestly, I'd say just get a hotel.

It's not like your life was any different before Airbnb than it is after Airbnb. You stay in a hotel like every other person on the planet. But yeah, it's a very interesting story. So that's you don't have to read it because I just spoiler alert there.

But yeah. So if you do stay at an Airbnb, keep your reviews to the Airbnb site, lest you may be banned for life. Right. TechCrunch has an article says, yes, open office plans are the worst. Duh. Duh. You, Brian, have you worked for yourself for the last 20 years.

So I doubt you've been in an open office very recently. Not too recently, no. I mean, I've done a couple stints with various companies where I was working, you know, two or three days outside in their offices and the rest of the time at home. So I've been in a few and they are horrible. Absolutely.

I mean, most of the ones I've worked at, Technorati was open office. JPEG magazine was open office. Metrically, the startup that I did, we were in an incubator, which was massively open office. Every company was in the same two floors, an open room with a big slide and little assholes riding around on scooters.

Scooters, yes, but they were razors back then. But the interesting thing is when you have an open office, interpersonal communication actually goes down, not up like they expect it to. So I'm really curious if Apple is going to change anything because the spaceship is basically one giant open office, except for when people run into the walls.

So I'd like this study. I do like this study because it does show what we already knew. Anybody who's ever worked there in an open office, the first thing you do is bring your noise canceling headphones to work because you need people to shut the hell up. So fortunately, I work in an open office right now and the only other people in my office are the dogs and they don't really talk back.

So unless there's a squirrel outside, then they talk. But anyway, yeah. So if you work in an open office, send this article to your managers and say, can we have doors, please? I don't want to give a hat tip to a friend of the show, Brian, who has pointed out to me that there is a Portillo's, which is a Chicago specialty, right here in Buena Park, California, where I can finally go get a nice Italian beef sandwich.

When you go there, don't say Portillo's, it's Portillo's. Whatever. As someone who comes from Chicago and lived a mile away from one and have gone there my entire life, it's Portillo's. You know what, though? I have never, ever, ever gone into, say, a McDonald's and said, hey, it's great to be in this McDonald's.

So I don't think I'm going to say the restaurant name while I'm in there. I'm just giving you some backup here, man. Would you like to go to Portillo's? And then somebody thinks it's like a fancy French restaurant that you're going to. And then, like, you know, you can get sausages and Italian beefs. But yeah, no, it's a good place.

It's a good place. I'm excited. I'm sure you are. Heart attack on a plate. This last one I found from the, what was the name of that podcast with the QI people? No such thing as a fish, which is exactly what I was going to tell you. They just covered this.

Yeah, no such thing as a fish. I was listening to it this week, and they found the BBC Sound Effects Beta Program, which has 16,000 sound effects from the BBC library, and it's awesome. Chicken, interrupted. Yeah. Their episode about this was really funny, and then I went and checked it out, so I put the link to it.

I had to go dig up the link and put it in the show notes, because it is really fun. If you're using it for, you know, any kind of purpose for making money, you can't use it. That's why it's not on the show, and we're not going to throw anything in there. But for personal, educational, or research purposes, you can actually go play with these sound effects, all 16,000 of them.

Yes, and these definitions are as hyper-specific as any Amazon purchases are. Oh, way, way more, way more. General atmosphere in a busy machine shop with some indistinct speech. Exactly. Hey, man. You got to give them credit for that.

That, you know, I'm down. Moron of the week. Drumroll, please. This is a very strange Moron of the Week for us. Our Moron of the Week is Elon fucking Musk.

Talk about somebody who stepped on their own dick this week. I missed all of this because I was traveling. So, tell me, Jason. What did he do? I heard he was very stupid. One of the stars of the Thailand Cave Rescue said in a very public way that Elon Musk's little, you know, kid-sized submarine thing was just a PR stunt and it was bullshit and it was never going to work.

And then Elon Musk, in a probably drunken rage, said that the guy was a pedophile on Twitter to the public. Oh, no. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, you know, there are some things that are worse than the R word that I try to get you to not use on this show.

Pedo would be it. Well, you know, that's... Oh, God. So, Tesla's stock fell 4%, which I'm sure you were really happy about since you are a... I did see that news. Yeah. I'm sure that piqued your interest. He finally kind of apologized.

Kind of? Ish. Ish. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit. A little bit. He's like, you're still an asshole, but I shouldn't have called you a pedo. Sorry about that. Can I have my stock back? And the guy was threatening to sue, so we'll see what actually happens. And, you know, why Elon Musk might actually be a supervillain.

He was also unmasked as the top donor to the House Republican PAC. Oh, boy. Yeah. Okay. Okay. The plot thickens. It does. Yeah. He might be hanging out with Chris Hardwick soon. I don't think he's quite that.

Not there yet. No, no. At least he can afford his own volcano island with a super base. That's true. Because he has a spaceship to get there. Yes. Yeah. Quantum Leap on Twitter sent us the story as well, saying, did I hear some doubts of Elon Musk being a dimwit some episodes ago?

He sure isn't able to counter criticism humanely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that wasn't good. I also have an additional moron of the week. Well, morons of the week. A few days ago, Forbes magazine broke the news that Kylie Jenner could potentially be the youngest ever self-made billionaire.

That's all in quotes, revealing that she's raked in a whopping 900 million from her cosmetic company. So she needs $100 million to become a billionaire. And some people are so eager for her to reach it that they're donating money to her in a crowdfunding campaign. Are you fucking kidding me?

The GoFundMe campaign, which was set up by Instagram star Josh Ostrovsky, who goes by the nickname The Fat Jew. So it sounds like it's a bit of a piss take. They're saying, I don't want to live in a world where Kylie Jenner doesn't have a billion dollars. We must raise $100 million to help her get to a billion. Please spread the word. This is extremely important.

But people are actually doing it. They're actually donating money. Okay. I like where this guy's coming from. I really like where this guy's coming from. I love setting it up as a joke. Is he going to turn over the money to her? I hope there's some small print where he gets to keep all the money.

I really do hope there's some small print for that. So but also a hero for the week, dictionary.com. Whoever is running dictionary.com social media needs an award, needs to get paid more. They do this often, but this one is just great.

They decided to throw some shade at Kylie Jenner and posted self-made means having succeeded in life unaided. Used in a sentence, Forbes claims that Kylie Jenner is a self-made woman. Oh, man. Well done. Mic drop or I guess dictionary drop.

Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Steve, Michael, Andy, Ted, and John. And John says, hi, guys. Greetings from Dublin, Ireland. I eventually got around to pledging you each month for the phenomenal podcast you create. Woohoo. You make my commute a fun way to watch the world burn around us as all our dreams come true.

But as in the great stories, it doesn't bring us the happiness we expected. Well, thank you, John. And we have a recurring payment from Steve over on PayPal. We appreciate that very much. Over on Twitter, Moss 6502 wrote and said, I have not mouth and I must scream is a good intro to Ellison. You can read it here.

Provides a link. I liked his short stories and his comics. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Derek writes in, if you liked Ursula K. Le Guin's books, I just directed her tribute a few weeks ago. Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin on literaryartstribute.org. That link will be linked in the show notes.

Yes. Very cool. Thank you so much for writing in. Daniel writes in over at GOG.show. Hey, fellas. I just listened to the show with guest host Jordan Harbinger. Jason and Jordan were talking about Plex and integrating it with a network attached storage device. I believe Jason has the Synology 2 Bay NAS disk station DS218 plus diskless.

As we said on the show, rolls off the tongue. Rolls off the tongue. Says, I don't know. I've got the 16, by the way, not the 18. Okay. I didn't know about either of them until now. I'm a bit of a noob in the geek world. Anyways, I'm currently stationed overseas, but I'll be moving into a new home in Colorado pretty soon. I started with one question.

How else can I use a NAS besides a media server? And now I have a million questions. Initially, I was thinking about getting the same one as Jason, but okay, it gets really technical here. Blah, blah, blah. So I went down the rabbit hole and now I'm stuck. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the deal. The Synology does a million different things because it's got an app store on it.

So you can run your own security setup. Like all my security cameras in my house can write to the NAS, which is pretty awesome. So you have local storage on that. I prefer cloud storage because that way, if somebody breaks into my house, steals the NAS, then you see how that goes.

You can run, you can just run all types of stuff. You can create your own Dropbox for different family members. It does so much stuff for so little money. It's really, really cool. So I recommend picking one up if you really want to get into it. But first go to Synology.com and just RTFM.

That's it. And you can find out everything it does. And that's it. That's the only way to do it. Sorry. RTFM. I agree. Next up, Ted wrote in, I usually listen and enjoy your show, but I fear Brian is going to lose his bleeding heart liberal membership from calling Rebecca Onion a bitch.

White male privilege much? Oh, the patriarchy. I suspect he will need to say at least 10 Hail Hillary prayers at his next stream at the Sky event or risk having to turn in his pussy hat. Actually, you know what, as I was saying that and as I called her a bitch, I actually had a twinge going, hmm, hmm.

But then I went, ah, we're not that PC. To hell with it. Come on, man. I can do the FR sometimes so you can get off with Rebecca Onion is a bitch every now and again. Next one comes from Gritar. Just another chapter in the No Privacy Saga. Venmo defaults to having all your transactions, messages, and comments public.

And this article is about a researcher that was able to identify couples having fights, people buying from their weed dealer. What kind of junk food they eat, et cetera, with names attached, but chose not to publish them. Oh, my God. Well, you know, I hope they're using the blockchain for that. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Blockchain. Yeah, that's that's not good. I'm glad that I don't actually use Venmo for anything. No, I don't either. Yeah. Martin Sweeney sent in. Here's another scooter story. And this is a bike pulling out of Singapore and people put in their money for deposits and things like that.

And guess what? They're not getting them back. Shocking. I thought we covered that last week. Oh, I must have left it out of the notes. I think this is just the money aspect of it. So he also sent in this comment about hilarious. Every time we turn around and hear that Facebook is getting better, another source tells us it's not.

And this is Consumer Reports. Basically, Consumer Reports. Researchers find that Facebook privacy settings maximize data collection. Again, go figure. Go figure. And he said, by the way, bird hunting season will be coming up in a few months. You can't not shoot a bird while it is on the ground, only while in flight.

So I'm going to have to figure a way of getting those bird bike things off the ground. Trebuchet. Go make a trebuchet. There you go. A bird trebuchet. Yeah. AJ writes in. Hi, guys. There have been a number of articles in the Australian press over the last week about this one. I facepalmed when I read the first one. Some really simple security controls that no one bothered to put in place for a mandatory system of transferring large amounts of money.

It couldn't possibly go wrong. Right? Yeah, and apparently the MasterChef contestant over in Australia and her husband were left homeless last week when $250,000 from the settlement of their recently sold property was stolen by hackers who set up third-party accounts to breach the electronic property transfer system that they have there.

Oops. Oh, man. That sucks. That sucks. You win and you lose. Yeah. So that's not good. Fix that. Kay writes in. Wanted to know your opinion on static site generators. May not suit all cases, but may be a good WordPress alternative to point people, too. Oh, and you guys are great.

Always looking forward to your podcast. It keeps me sane in this crazy world of screwed up progress. I mean, static site generators are fine. There's nothing wrong with them. You're just not going to find a client that doesn't think that they can do it all themselves and wants WordPress because of that. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's one of those things. It's tomato, tomato. You got to go client by client. But Spencer writes in. Hey, guys, I just got done listening to the show, and I found something that will hopefully ease your concerns over the Chinese stormtrooper laser gun. And this is a YouTube video about this guy who makes lasers.

And I've seen a bunch of this guy's videos, and they're awesome. And he just tears the shit out of this thing with math. He has. I mean, he breaks it down with, I mean, physics and everything. And I mean, I don't know what the hell he's saying, but he shows his work.

He does show his work. He does show his work. So good. Yeah. Maybe we don't have crazy lasers. Yeah. This seems this thing seems like, you know, just a pie in the sky dream. Yeah. And we got a crap ton of iTunes reviews, all of them five stars. So thank you so much. The first from Oshawa pilot two in Canada. A must listen podcast.

Jason and Brian are my spirit animals, both hilarious, witty and often sarcastic at just the right moment with a large helping of grumpiness on top for good measure. It all makes every single episode a great listen for any self-professed geek, grumpy or old or not. Keep up the good work, guys. And Tipsy Canuck writes in, are you feeling lucky?

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'm impressed. Very impressed. You're either my hero or fellow alcohol loving Canadians. If you are sober enough to listen to the actual show, it's really good.

Great guys. Great stories. Great snark. Thank you so much, Tipsy Canuck. Yes, thank you. And Helen14E from France writes, fun and tech. What you needed to look forward to on Mondays. Fun and informative. Thank you so much, guys. Keep up the good work. And congratulations on the World Cup win. Yeah, congratulations.

That's awesome. Ben Michael Johnson writes in from the UK. So much fun. Love this show. The episode with Jordan was big fun. Keep up the great work, guys. Well, thank you, Ben Michael Johnson. Thank you. Two Manly Games writes in, not bad. Damning with faint praise.

Five stars, but then not bad. Interesting. Every time I work, I feel empty while staring at a computer screen. Nothing but depressing thoughts. But now, thanks to this podcast, I can now have two guys bickering about stuff that's wrong with the world and laughing about it. So thanks. I've come. I've really come a far way. Nice. Not bad.

Not bad. Quibble writes in, better than ever. This podcast has won the Quibble's best tech podcast for the fourth time. Four years in a row. First show to achieve this feat. We're waiting for our trophy. Come on, Quibble. Send us our trophy. Trophy would be nice. Yes. DST8722 writes in, great show.

GOG is a great podcast about everything tech, security, and the like. Brian and Jason, along with Dave, make for a hilarious time as they grumpily jest about what's wrong with everything on the Internet and beyond. Stay grumpy, gents. We shall. KR Gannett writes, an excellent podcast. Whether needing a good commute podcast or a primer to the week's tech news, nothing is better than the GOG.

Keep up the great work. We shall endeavor to do so. Yes, thank you. 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 if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And also, just steal your friends' phones and install us in their podcast player of choice. We'd really kind of appreciate that. Yes, please. We know it's sneaky, but, you know, we didn't get where we're at by not being sneaky. Closing shout outs! And I will be saying a final goodbye to my dad tomorrow, so this one's for you, Dad.

I miss you a lot. I'll do my best to say fiddlesticks instead of fuck, because he always had an aversion to cursing and used to get mad at me if I posted on my Facebook with bad words. So, for you, Dad, less fucks in the future. Less fucks in the future. I wish that could be our show title. Me too.

But we know it's not true. No, that's also, yeah, there's that. So, I want to give a huge thanks to a friend of the show and writer of our outro GOG theme music and all-around badass, Andy Stochansky, who put together just a fantastic playlist for my dad's memorial that we'll be listening to tomorrow from the era and groups he loved.

We'll have the links in the show notes. It'll brighten up your day. Give it a listen. It's some good stuff. It is. I actually checked it out this morning. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's a great little playlist. So, thank you so much, Andy. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. To us is a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 268.

And yes, there will be links to all of the AI news that I talked about at the beginning of the show. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy, and we'll see you next week.

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