269: Winehousestein

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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. Woohoo! It's almost over this giant goddamn heat wave. No, it's not. I don't know if you check the weather for next week. Oh, man. So, I did something drastic and radical this week.

We have central air in the house. Yes. And I went and got an in-window air conditioner just for my bedroom. Oh, okay. That'll work. I tell you what, I haven't slept this good in six months. It's fantastic. Because it was six months. And six months ago, it was still winter in Chicago and I like to sleep cold.

And I was looking at all those gadgets that, like, you know, Tim Ferriss and his friends all talk about the chilly bed. Yes. Keeps you cool at night. And that's like $1,000. I'm like, dude, I'm just going to go to Home Depot, spend $200. I'm going to spend a Mexican guy to plug it in for $100 and put it in the window. $300 out the door.

Same effect. And I don't have to worry about a dog with claws jumping on it in the middle of the night, puncturing the water sacks and then electrocuting all of us. Okay. I think this is a fine Southern Californian solution. I think it's a good one. I've got two cheapy ones for you that I can't believe you didn't try first.

One, freeze water bottles and sleep with a water bottle. I've heard people actually do that. And two... Sweat. I don't like to sweat on them. You set up a fan in front of a cooler full of ice. Okay. Now that's a little too much. I already had three fans going in my room before this happened because the AC just couldn't keep up.

At some point, you get to the point where the fans are generating enough heat to undo the positive benefits they're giving you. That's the thing. You hit that tipping point and then that's where technology fails you. It's like, how can we haven't figured this out? Oh, we have. Just go to Home Depot. Great. That's a good new tagline for our show.

That's where technology fails you. Yeah. Oh, man. So, yeah. I've gotten sleep. This is fantastic. I get so much work done now. I feel like a new man. So, let's get into this. All right. Well, we got some follow-up here. You did a big tech news rant last week and I had one article that actually didn't work, so we pulled it out.

But I did have something. Now, you have told me how horrible Lifehacker is for a long time now. And I generally agree with you. Occasionally, they do throw up the interesting and good and useful articles. But I did stumble across two things randomly within five minutes of each other.

And I found it a little too unbelievable to put up with anymore. So, the first article I stumbled across was, If your iPhone keeps dying, check for weirdly behaving apps. And it basically goes in to describe how you should basically do the swipe through thing and close apps that are doing strange things.

I see where this is going. To save the battery life. Five minutes later in my Facebook feed, from Lifehacker, quitting all your apps in iOS can actually worsen your battery life. Yep. Which is it, guys? You know what they don't have over there, obviously?

An editorial. Yes, they don't have an editorial director over there. Well, and it makes sense from the standpoint of what all online sites are trying to do these days, which is just get the click-throughs. And as you were saying last week, everybody has to put up the same articles. And what better way to capture everyone is if you present the two exact opposite viewpoints.

And that way, whatever somebody's searching for, they can find. This is anti the promise of the internet, people. The point of the internet was we were all going to get smarter because it would be full of good and useful and correct information. Not everything. The wealth of human knowledge and unknowledge.

Unknowledge. The wealth of human knowledge and speculation. Or as we could call it, and we'll get to that later, the wealth of human knowledge and goop. Oh, God, yes. So I found this one on 9to5Mac, and it's a how to get the Apple Watch Guide for free. Wait, there's an actual RTFM?

Yes, there is. There is an M to RTF of. Oh, nice. And it's just a link that shows you how to get it. But, I mean, the only thing that's useful about this is the link to where to go download it because it's really not hard to do that. You know, you could go find it, but I just didn't know where the guide was.

So I think one of the things I'm doing, I upgraded my roommate's phone. She was on iOS 10, and now she's at iOS 11. So I'm having to tell her everything that's been, like, you know. Changed. Yeah, perfect, that I've been doing for a year. And she's like, why did the, well, this is all wrong. It's broken.

I'm like, no, this is how it works now. And so going through it, I'm like, I'm finding new things on my phone because I never read the manual myself. And I'm like, oh, oh, that's how you do that. Like, I figured out how to turn on that do not disturb while driving manually. So if you want to just tell somebody you're going to the store or going on a trip, you can turn it on manually, and they'll get notifications if they try and ping you that says you're driving to make, to, you know, to really kind of round out the subterfuge.

Right. It's always a good thing to have. But since you're a new to the Apple Watch guy, I thought I would send this for your benefit. Also mine, because I'm always finding new stuff to do with my watch, and I kind of dig it. I do appreciate that. I'm happy to have it. I'll take a deeper dive through it. I immediately went through it to see if I could figure out my problem with continually getting the announcements about cellular not being set up correctly.

And nothing in there about that. Also, breaking news as of this morning, apparently Verizon has switched the service on for my for my watch yet again. So I'm going to have this time. I'm just going to call them because the online chat thing is too excruciating. Yeah. Unless you Tyler Durden Verizon.

I think you're kind of you're kind of at the whim of getting on the phone. We're going to see a genius. Yes. Oh, man. I wish you had an AT&T watch. I'd trade you. But no, I'm really glad I don't have AT&T because it's always been historically crap here in L.A. Oh, God. Don't even don't even get me started about that.

Now, some charging pad issue follow up because you could not get your you have an eight plus or do you have an eight? Yes, I have an eight. You have an eight. OK, my roommate has an eight plus. And that's when I upgraded her iOS, you know, to 11 to see if it would. Her phone would work on my charging pad because it wasn't working just like yours.

Took it out of the case, laid it on the pad. No, no bueno. And what happened to me? Upgraded to the latest iOS. Tried it again. Nothing. Rebooted the phone a couple of times just to try that. Nothing. And I tried it on all four of my pads.

Same thing as you just doesn't work. So I went around and I mean, I tried it on all four of them. I have four charging pads around the house. Works great on my phone. Works great on my my my was a Galaxy S7 Edge. Fine for that, too. Her phone. No go.

And I was just wondering, maybe it's your phone. It could be. I returned the first pad. I got a second pad. Tried my phone. Did not work. Tried my iPad. Did not work. Tried my watch. Did not work. Tried my wife's seven phone. I don't think it works on the watch.

I think I think I was ready to put the kitchen sink on the damn thing to see if I got to charge. That's that's where we're at with this point. And I tried my wife's phone, which is a seven. Also did not work. So I'm returning the second pad and I am off chargers until we get version 2.0s. OK, I'm actually just putting my watch on right now.

And the verdict is give me a drum roll. Nah. Like I said, I was I was literally throwing everything at it that I could think of just to see if anything would work. So apparently not. I've either gotten two bum ones in a row or they just don't work with my particular stuff.

So it ain't worth it for me anymore. I think it's the phone. I think you have I think you have a problem with the phone because yeah, my mind works great. My roommates doesn't. So the pads work. I have gotten the pads to work. But yeah, her particular phone.

I don't know. Maybe you guys just maybe sat on it someday and broke the little chip. I don't know. But anyway, sorry about that. Yeah, that's OK. So yesterday, because this little follow up again, because I think we have to cover this every single time on every single episode at this point, I told my son he was going to have pizza for dinner.

And then I was sitting down and I was going through my Facebook feed really quickly. And there was a Domino's ad for pizza on my feed. My phone is listening to me. Chase. No Domino's is one of the biggest advertisers on Facebook ever anywhere. So it's not surprising I would get an ad for it.

Did this ad happen to coincide maybe around, you know, the time that you would be sitting down to dinner? Oh, same dinner's time? Yes. As a matter of fact, it did, Jason. I didn't think about any of that at the time, though, because I'm concerned because I wear tinfoil hats and I think everybody is evil. Oh, my God.

Chemtrails. Pizza trails. We'll just call this pizza trails. Now, Bird. The L.A. Times had a good opinion piece on Bird. And this opinion piece has been around for a while, not just even about Bird, but just about the Venice, Santa Monica area, because we have this confluence of the incredibly rich and the incredibly not so rich and the homeless here.

This entire article is reiterates everything that we've been saying about about these stupid scooters to begin with. So it's worth the read. And it's done in great language. I particularly like his paragraph talking about how every day he has a near collision with a bird scooter rider. Then he defines bird scooter riders as these like idiots, which they are.

And then he gets into the real problem here is it's enabling all the rich young people that work at these various Googles and Silicon Beach companies here to basically just blow past all of society and not see the things that are happening around them, which I kind of agree with.

Well, to be fair, I don't think they really look to begin with, even when they were walking because they were just busy looking at their phones and Snapchatting the whole time. Well, see, we have had this article in many iterations even before bird because of exactly those things. And the other thing that everybody always tells me about the bird apologists, whenever people come to me and ask for me to start ranting, because I think they just like to see me go slightly crazy.

And then they do apologies for it. And they always come up with that. Well, what about the last mile problem? And in this article, he says it perfectly perfectly. Is it a problem for a 20 something to walk a single mile in Venice itself? Venice is the solution. The weather is perfect. The ocean is right there.

Each block has something interesting to see. How is walking a mile a problem here? There's no snow. There's just man poo. That's more sand. Well, there's a good bit of it down there. But yes. And somebody of my own heart over at Instagram started an Instagram account called Bird Graveyard, where they solicit people destroying birds.

There are lots of fantastic videos on here of people's anger and frustration. And dumping them and setting them on fire. And I would highly recommend that nobody do this because you're putting up, you know, basically you're giving yourself proof that you've destroyed property. But it is hilarious.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, here's here's the proof that I'm a vandal. Great. You know what we should do? We can go make an Instagram account for what is it? Bird helmets. And it'll just be no photos found. No photos. Just leave it empty. One text, one text update said we couldn't find any. Yeah.

Bird helmet. Yeah. But was it the Alliance of Bird Helmet Riders or something like that? Yeah. Because there's never going to be anything there. No. And when the scooter scourge first started, we talked a lot about how Segway really missed the boat on this one. Well, they're trying to get themselves back in. They're doing electric skates that attach to your own shoes.

Okay. I looked at these. Now, I used to have a friend named Tontek Chalik. He's, you know, he's a couple of years older than I am, I believe. He actually wrote Internet Explorer 3 for the Mac. Very smart guy. But we were hanging out one time and he had bought some of those shoes that you could like do a little flip and they turned into roller skates.

Yes. Yes. You know, 40 some year old man doing these skates. And when I saw these, I just thought of him and everybody around him, like we would all go out together, like a bunch of us, you know, just Technorati people or, you know, just everybody in the crowd, the micro formats crowd.

And he would pop on his skates and start zipping around and all of us would immediately stop walking and let him get at least like a hundred feet in front of us because we didn't want to be seen with him because, man, that looks silly. These look just as silly. But there is no shame anymore. And I'd just like to say anybody that gets these, these will quickly be banned on the boardwalk as well as they finally done with the scooters.

And it's been great watching people getting tickets the last week. Oh, really? You got to take some photos of that. Oh, there is there is nary a scooter to be found on the boardwalk anymore. So my bike rides are finally decent again. Oh, thank you, government. Oh, that's fantastic.

And the Segway does have that other little gadget that they've got out now. I don't know if you've seen it. It's like a like a low profile Segway where it just kind of chops off at your knees. Oh, that's what those things are. I've seen a few of those around the air. Yeah, that's Merlin Mann has one of those.

He loves it, but they look pretty cool. The only big issue is like, you know, they're heavy and you got to carry it. If you live upstairs, you got to carry them up and down the stairs. But they also have this crazy follow mode where, you know, when you get off of it and like, say you're walking through the store, it will follow behind you and then you can put your like groceries on it and stuff.

I don't know. It actually looks kind of fun, but I still didn't. I don't want to be seen in person with one of these or seen in public with one. Yeah, there's a problem with that. And I also seem I would have a problem with the follow mode because does it have like collision avoidance as well? Because how closely is this thing following you?

Is there a kid in the grocery store that's going to be get between you and your device? Seems a little wonky to me. I don't know. Google that shit. I didn't even I didn't look at that much or not because I don't care enough. Yeah, right. Well, you just came back from Toronto and you're thinking about going back to Toronto at some point in the near future for good.

Yes, I am. Bastard. Well, I found this in the technology review from MIT. Toronto is the center of new technology jobs in North America. Yes, it is. They're adding tons of new jobs. So even though you don't want to be in technology anymore, if you did go there, it would be just like leaving Silicon Beach.

You'll just have just the nerds are going to follow you. Well, on the plus side, on their birds, a flock, the flock of nerds on their birds. There is there is a slightly different corporate culture in Canada. So older, older, wiser people are welcomed, not not considered a liability. And there's a lot of consulting work beyond just coding work as well.

And a lot of think tanky stuff. So I would actually fit in quite well there. And I think I would be able to get a job if that's something I wanted to do that didn't involve being a, you know, a graying code monkey. Well, considering that Toronto is also becoming the head of AI in North America, you can you can get a job at a think tank for AI saying, no, that'll be a job.

We've had many conversations about how being the devil's advocate is never particularly enjoyed, but maybe Canadian culture is a bit different. Could be. Could be. We'll see. In other surprising news, my jaw hit the floor when I saw this. Chris Hardwick is returning to AMC and his talking series after a quote unquote comprehensive assessment by the network.

Didn't see that one coming. You were right, Jason. Tell your sister you were right. I was. I was. And they actually hired a law firm to actually go through this Loeb and Loeb, which is I saw that. And I think Lisa Loeb. She's got a lot. Lisa Loeb.

No, she does children's music and it's actually quite good. Oh, that's cool. Good for her. Yeah. Bet you didn't know that. No, I didn't. That's why I said cool. Yeah. I mean, this is good news because apparently he did nothing wrong. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't seem to matter too much to a large segment of the population who now feel that he's been tainted no matter what.

And that's that. Well, you know, that's going to happen. That's what you're found guilty in the court of public opinion. You're fucked. Yes. And you know what, though? I'm going to watch his shows and I'm going to listen to his podcast. And I want him back because, God damn it, I want I want his house shit video feed from Instagram because I was so interested in him building out that podcast studio and all the cool stuff that he was doing.

And then it just went dark when he went into exile. And I don't know how it turned out. I'm sure he hasn't touched the house since then, but probably not. Yeah, probably been a bit busy. Yeah, I think he's probably been a little bit busy. Now, here's the thing, though, when the news came out and I saw I'm like I logged into Twitter and I saw Chris Hardwick was trending and I'm like, oh, no, oh, no, he fucking killed himself.

It got to him and he killed himself. Because now, any time I see it like a celebrity's name trending on Twitter, they've either Amy Winehouse or Harvey Weinstein. Those are the two options that I have right now. I like how you did that. Yeah, that's kind of it. And then I seen Winehouse deemed and then I saw Jeff Goldblum and I'm like, no, we didn't lose Jeff.

No. And then he just got a new show. And then this morning it happened again. Nicole Kidman got a new show. And I'm just like, oh, no, we don't want to lose Nicole. Oh, congratulations, Nicole. It's like I just get dread every time I see a celebrity's name in Twitter now. I think this is more user error. This is this is your brain, which is now wired itself to do that.

It's been trained by Twitter to just catastrophize anything that's in trending news because there's almost never any good news in trending news or in mainstream news or in fake news. Oh, there's just no good news. So I guess that's how it works. Yes, pretty much.

Oh, man. So, well, I'm glad for Chris, though. I'm glad he's glad he got cleared. We like to see people get not what they don't deserve. See the triple negative there, I think. Well, we'll see if he I don't know if he got kicked off of NBC for the wall or not, but we'll see if he comes back on that.

That show was fun. It was a uplifting show. Anyway, speaking of uplifting and flipping, remember that burger robot that was in Pasadena that we said we were going to go check out that we never did? Never did. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I lived in Chicago, so it was a hell of a long commute for a burger. But you like to go to Dodger Stadium.

I do. Well, they're taking that burger flipping robot from Pasadena and they're going to make it cook chicken at Dodger Stadium. It's going to be frying chicken tenders and making tater tots. OK, well, when is it started? Because I haven't been to a game yet this year, but I will try to make it there just for this.

It's going to be there in August, so. OK, well, as soon as. Post season. All right. I think it's in August, but it doesn't say how long it's going to be there. Yeah, Flippy will start up in August. OK. I will get my ass to a game. This episode is sponsored in part by Eero.

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And speaking of somebody who we thought might be dead, but is maybe just financially dead, Mark Zuckerberg was trending a lot this week. I would hardly consider it financially dead. He still has more money than God. He just has less money than he previously had. Yes. He still does not have more money than Bezos, who is God now.

But man, Facebook had a week, didn't they? I mean, we've been saying when's this going to come for a long time. We've been saying almost all these companies are way overvalued. We've been wondering when the hammer is going to drop on Facebook because it really did seem that nothing, nothing mattered for Facebook.

But finally, it did. The interesting thing about this is that, you know, yeah, they lost $123 billion in value in one day and it's probably snapped back now quite a bit. But this whole thing comes down to growth. When you have the entire world as your customer, this is where Wall Street falls apart because they rely on growth.

Yes. Once a company has taken over the entire sector, they're no longer so valuable. Right. It's like even though they've taken over the entire sector or the entire planet. Yes. Well, I mean, speaking of that, the irony of this, which I thought was great, was on Facebook.

Everybody is laughing at Facebook stock collapse. And I'm like, nope, I'm buying. And I bought a crap load of Facebook because I'm not worried about it. And it was a good day to buy. That is funny. So what's it back up to now? I haven't. It hasn't bounced back that much.

In fact, I think it's still going down a little bit. So if that's the case, I'm going to actually buy some more today. It's at $173.53 right now. It is down $2.73 today. Oh, yeah. Still going down. Still going down. I wish I had $173.64, but I just bought a new air conditioner.

Well, I'll tell you how to get partial Facebook stocks later in the show. Okay. I will take that to the bank, as it were. And I found this really cool thing on Reuters. Graphics.Reuters.com, which I'd never heard of before. But they have these really cool charts on Facebook's basic, you know, their trend over the years.

And it doesn't really look that good. No, their business model, as we've stated and said all along, is kind of failing. And it's kind of topped out. But this is the thing. Assuming that somebody smart is in charge of Facebook, and if Zuckerberg does not prove to be that person, he will get booted eventually and be replaced with somebody who is smart.

They have enough capital to pivot and do it successfully and move into something new, whatever that may be. Well, I think what they're going to start doing, and I heard a couple rumors about this, is they're going to start taking, like, WhatsApp and Instagram and just rolling all of that into Facebook.

Because they have to. Yeah. And their costs are, like, through the roof. Yeah. I mean, they have multiple versions of everything split all over the place. They can slim down considerably just by consolidating things. Yeah. Their cost for Q2 in 2018, $7.4 billion.

That's just in cost. Are you sure? Is that in dollars or is that in rubles? Oh, funny, funny. No, that's Trump's campaign re-election fund. But, yeah, it's interesting. And, you know, since they can't get into China, they're losing a huge market there.

That was big news. That was fast. Sure, you can open an office. Wait, hold on a second. Yeah. Never mind that one. They got approval by the local magistrates to open an office, but then when the bigwigs heard that, they're like, oh, roll that back. Roll that back.

You're not welcome here. You are not going to come eat our egg rolls. And I don't even think egg rolls are. Egg rolls aren't traditionally Chinese, are they? Well, it's kind of sort of. Let's not get it. That ain't our show. I mean, I can do a half an hour on this.

I can get my wife in. I can. Let's not go down the rabbit hole on that one. And we did see the departing Facebook security officer's memo that was leaked. Did you get a chance to read that one? Yep. Oh, my favorite line here. We need to listen to people, including internally, when they tell us a feature is creepy or point out a negative impact we are having in the world.

Yeah. We need to deprioritize short-term growth and revenue and to explain to Wall Street why that is okay. Well, that's the real issue, though, isn't it? That's the hard one. It's hard to fault Facebook for the things that they have done because they're public, and that's what they need to do.

Now, we all know that ethically, Facebook would be having next to no problems. Most of their issues wouldn't be here now if they just did things ethically all along. There wouldn't be this hatred towards Facebook. There wouldn't be people leaving. I saw that you deactivated your account again yesterday.

Yep. All that sort of stuff wouldn't be happening if they would have been a good company all along. But Wall Street doesn't value people doing that, sadly. Right. And he ends it with, we need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues, and we need to be open, honest, and transparent about our challenges and what we are doing to fix them.

Now, there is no more we here. This would be you because he quit. Yeah, sadly, he quit. This is exactly the kind of person that Facebook needs to have in their company, and wherever this guy goes, I'm going to look at that company and see if he's going to put his money where his mouth is.

Oh, God. Please don't let it be Uber. Please don't let it be Uber. Please don't let it be Uber. Well, Arianna Huffington certainly didn't fucking fix Uber, did she? Oh, that heaven room didn't really get the... No. It didn't work out. Shocking. God. Well, some good news here. Virgin Galactic's third supersonic test flight hits Mach 2 in 170,000 feet.

They're halfway there. They're halfway to space. So I'm glad this thing is back. The VSS Unity is doing well. Doing well. I'm hoping they fix that one problem where if one guy, like, pulls the wrong lever, the whole thing explodes. That was a definite design flaw in the last version.

But, yeah, no, I'm hopeful for these guys to actually get up there soon because if not, basically, Bezos is going to just start shoving people in rockets and shoving them up there anyway. So it's a race. It's a space race. It is a space race and lots of good space news this week.

Evidence has been detected of a gigantic lake beneath the surface of Mars. There is water on Mars, people, which means there could very well be life. I mean, obviously not Martians. Marvin the Martian is not up there. But we could be looking at some, you know, basic cellular stuff on another planet, which, I mean, come on.

That's amazing. When I was reading all this news, I'm like, man, I want to go back and listen to Stranger in a Strange Land again because that is such a good book. It is a good book, yeah. So, yeah, the water on Mars stuff is super interesting. So we'll have links in the show notes. You can go check it out. We won't go through all the science, but it's pretty badass.

It is pretty cool. What's also pretty cool is MoviePass tried to do a reverse stock split and their value immediately plunged 50%. Apparently, it's going even worse because, God bless our listeners, when they know we hate a company. They and Nundated us with news. We just got tweeted 12 minutes ago by Seth Blockchain-Lassans that here's a little something for the next show.

It looks like MoviePass literally ran out of money. Hilarious and sad at the same time with a link to a current article. And TJ also tweeted us MoviePass is on life support with a different article saying that they're basically about to die. Couldn't have happened to a better business planned company. This is what happens, kids.

Somebody needs to actually pay us to do these predictions on the show because didn't we predict exactly this? I was going over our history this morning in the shower because we're preparing for this live show that we have to do. And I'm like, what are we going to tell these people in Canada? I'm like, oh, oh, that we're usually right.

If we were baseball players, we'd be making $50 million a year. We're batting way over $500. I know. I mean, the problem is we just have to wait for our predictions to come true. But generally, I think we're batting at about $900. I'd say so. In other new news, which I think just kind of follows up what we were talking about last week, where car companies are just getting scared shitless that people are going to stop buying cars in the coming years.

GM has launched a peer-to-peer car sharing service. There's another company that already does this, but this is GM. They're coming up with the Airbnb of automotive. Yeah. Pivot. It makes sense. Look, we already know millennials don't give a crap about owning a car or even driving for that matter.

So your market's going away. So yeah, do what they're doing. I mean, I love driving. Not in LA, but in general. Yeah. I love driving everywhere but LA. I will always want to own a car, or maybe not. Maybe things will change so much in the next 20 years, it would just be ridiculous to own one.

But so smart, smart move on GM's part. Yeah. We'll see how this comes out. Here's this thing, though. They need better marketing. It's called peer cars. Yeah, that's stupid. Yeah. How many times is it going to take for somebody to see a peer car sticker on somebody's car and then just get a little white out or just cut off the R?

So then you have P cars. P car. Which it just might be if somebody bars the car. I took my turd scooter to the P car. Oh, God. And speaking of which, your next story. Oh, shit coins.

Oh, yes. Shit coins. This is a thing. This company called Fornew, they got $30 million in private equity to basically turn garbage into cryptocurrency.

So you're taking something physical and turning it into something virtual? Yeah. Yeah. How does that happen? What they do is they take your garbage, they turn it into electricity, and then they make Bitcoin. If only there was something else that we needed electricity for.

Yeah. I don't know. But here's the thing. These guys have power plants already in England, so it's not vaporware. They're actually making this stuff. Okay. I will not be buying it. I took a look at Coinbase for the first time in like two months. And my $60 investment is holding steady at $35. Hang on to that.

It's always going to bounce back. It is funny. I've been watching this new show, Condor, on the audience network, which you've probably never, ever heard of because it's AT&T's network. The show is fantastic. It's got William Hurt in it. It's got, how is it, Mira Sorvino in it. It's got a great cast.

It's based on Three Days of the Condor, that old movie. It's a fantastic show. I highly recommend everybody who doesn't have DirecTV, which is the only place you can get it, go to Sweden and steal the show immediately unless there's some place to buy it. So in this show, there's this crazy assassin chick and she goes to this hacker and, you know, she needs some work done and she throws cash down on the table and he goes, what's that?

She's like, it's cash. Think of it as paper Bitcoin. Well, speaking of paper Bitcoin, there's a great article on Slate, No Shirt, No Swipe, No Service, about how businesses are starting to refuse to take cash. And it asks, the article is pretty long form.

It says cash is a miracle. It's one of the things that enabled our entire society to move forward. It gives us privacy. It gives us security. It gives us all this stuff. So why are we stopping to use it? And it's because everybody's happy using their cards. Nobody wants to carry cash anymore and people are lazy and don't see the pluses of actual cash.

It's a very long article about it. I implore everybody to read it because I know most of my friends now are always shocked at me because I always have like 200 bucks on me. I always carry cash on me. Well, look for somebody to roll you next time you go to Pub Trivia because they know you got 200 bucks on you.

I do the same, except nobody knows where I live and I don't go to Pub Trivia. So good luck finding me, suckas. But yeah, I always have 200 bucks on me, minimum, because I pay in cash for just about everything. I hate putting stuff on my cards unless it's something that I can expense to my company.

If I can expense it, it goes on a card. Everything goes on the card then, yes. Yeah. Otherwise, I pay cash. So that's just the way it goes. This next one I found, Scraper Bots in the Secret Internet Arms Race. This article should have come out in 1999, I'm believing.

It's a story about bots. This comes from Wired. And I'm thinking maybe they just exhumed this article and put a fresh coat of paint on it. Yeah, they scraped it off one of their older articles. Yeah, Wired's new story AI is just scraping old episodes of Wired to see what they can repurpose.

I can't wait for Wired to repurpose all their hot buzzwords articles. Those are always my favorite. Push! Push is back! Push! Push technology! Oh my God. So anyway, it's a funny read if you're a programmer that has ever written a bot to go scrape websites because I know I've written probably 50 of them, you know?

I think my first one was to scrape who is to find out dropping domains and then, you know, wrote another API to go and buy the domains as soon as they dropped and all that stuff because you could have made money on that back in the day. But anyway, this is just like Walmart and Amazon going toe-to-toe trying to get their prices, you know, the same.

It's very funny. Now, this next one is interesting. And it's interesting because this is something that I don't know if you remember. Back in the old day, if you went to a service, you could take your data with you. Your social graph was not proprietary to whatever service, Twitter and Facebook, motherfuckers.

And you could take your friends with you. Now, with the backlash, with all of this data protection stuff, and thanks, in huge part, to GDPR, Google has launched the Data Transfer Project. Now, this is a new open-source service-to-service data portability platform, so all individuals across the web can easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

Something that we used to be able to do all the fucking time until you guys said, oh, wait a minute. People can leave our service. This stuff is worth something. Yeah, this might be valuable. So, I mean, I can still remember the day when Twitter used to be able to let you import your contacts from Facebook, and Facebook said, no, not anymore, and shut them down.

Now, I mean, on BlogRolling, the site that I sold in 2004, data portability was one of my selling points for people to join my service. And people stayed on my service because they're like, well, this is great. I don't have to, if I want to go somewhere, you're just going to give me an OPML file of all my links that I can just take and insert somewhere else?

I'm like, yes, it's your data. It's not my data. I'm just a steward of your data while you're paying me. When you don't want to pay me anymore, please take your data and go fuck off because you're not paying me anymore. What is this paying you for services thing of which you speak? Oh, that's right.

Did that get scraped up from the past as well? That's right. I forgot. In 2002, I built a service that people could pay me for to use so I could eat and pay for servers and things like that. It was freemium. There was a freemium tier. But this was back when freemium was like, what's that mean?

I'm like, oh, I'm going to give you a basic service for free. And the people who pay for it overpay to kind of offset some of the free stuff. And if I give you a good enough service, you're going to pay me for it. And when you pay me for it, and even if you didn't pay me for it, your data was still yours.

That was, we were open, the open web back in the day. So I see this now that this is news and this pisses me off so much. You have no idea. I'm like, I was screaming at my computer when I saw this. I'm like, oh, you are so magnanimous now giving us back our data and letting us switch services.

Go die in a fire. All of you, screw you all, big four, five, whoever you are. This just irks me because this is the way the web used to be. And now they have to come back and re-engineer the web so we can have what we used to have.

People being nice to each other and not trying to hoard your data. The emphasis on your. Get off my gopher sites. Yeah, get off my gopher. Oh man. Okay. Sorry. I need to take a breath after that. Deep breath. Deep breath. Yes. And now I saw this one on Gadget.

DARPA is pushing for AI that can explain its decisions. We've talked about AI and how people are like writing these, you know, these, these systems that are coming up with answers, but they, it's a black box. They don't know how the AI is doing it. So this is basically DARPA coming back and saying, um, when you guys are developing these things, can you ask it to show its work?

That's all it is. It's like, it's like a fifth grader, you know, um, the math teacher comes over and you, you have the answer down there, even though you did it in your head, they're like, show your work. So now this is it. This should be called the show your work foundation because that's what it's all about.

Yes, I agree. Oh man. That's funny. Okay. And, uh, the final story I've got in the news is how Microsoft is profiting from the Amazon backlash. And you may ask yourself what Amazon backlash. You may ask yourself. Yes, this is not my beautiful backlash. Uh, you have to remember that Amazon has two distinct businesses, both of them extremely profitable.

The first is the store that sells everything. And the second is the, the infrastructure of the web, Amazon web services, the, the hosts, the serving, the databases, all of that sort of stuff is, is as big of a deal to Amazon as their store itself is because they basically outsource that to everybody else in the world.

So does Microsoft and Microsoft is now getting a windfall from basically every company that's trying to compete with Amazon because they are refusing to use Amazon web services. They want to use somebody that isn't competing with them. So Walmart has made it a deal. Like anybody that works with Walmart, if you, if you are, if you do anything with Walmart, if you sell them stuff, you are not allowed to use AWS.

Holy shit. Walmart will drop your business. You have to use, you don't have to use Microsoft, but you can't use AWS. And a lot of companies are starting to do this now. That sounds illegal. Target is getting their business off AWS. Kroger is getting their business off AWS. And they're going to Microsoft or Google, HP, Adobe, all these people that are basically looking at Amazon as basically a competitor now are refusing to use their web services and trying to find competitors, which makes total sense.

Why would you put more money in the coffers of the company that's trying to put you out of business? That just sounds illegal to me though. I don't know. Why? Because to do business with us, you can't use a certain third party provider, which is, has nothing to do with the main business.

I think that's the, the part that just has me confused. It's like, okay, this is computing. You cannot use somebody else's computers if their computers are Amazon. It's like, right. You know? Yeah. And honestly, Amazon and AWS should be broken up. Those should be two different companies.

They really should. But I, the whole point is, and this is the funny part, which I was laughing my ass off when, uh, was it a prime day went down. The reason AWS existed in the beginning was because when black Friday rolled around, Amazon had to have so much infrastructure to just keep the website up that they built out this entire massive server farm.

And they're like, you know, 99% of the year, it's just sitting there idle. Let's just sell off the compute power and then that's what we'll have. So when, when prime day rolls around, they've already, they've sold off so much compute power to everybody else. They can't even keep their website up on prime day, which is a totally bullshit holiday that they made up themselves.

So they did this to themselves. So I was, I had a good chuckle about that, but this is, yeah, this is kind of interesting that, uh, yeah, it's going to be fun to watch. And, uh, you know, as a, as a person who owns stock in both Microsoft and Amazon, I'm, it's a win-win so far for me.

Yeah. It's just six and one half dozen the other, the needle just moves to one direction or not. Exactly. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Have you used Azure lately? Uh, I have not, but, uh, speaking of, of technology companies in Canada, uh, what the big company that I'm always in touch with, and I'm very good friends with the CEO, he's all Azure.

Their entire company runs on it and he says he loves it. Interesting. I know, I know some people that have done it when they first started, they didn't have a PHP instances. So I'm like, eh, can't use you. I'm not, I'm not going to start to learn and learn a.net when I'm, you know, in my early forties. No, thank you.

Yeah. That is kind of the issue, right? Yeah. Well, you know, Microsoft has to make money somewhere. So good for them on that. This episode is sponsored by Privacy. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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That alone is worth the price of admission. And oh yeah, the price of admission. Yes, it's free. They make their money the same way debit cards do with the interchange fee paid by merchants. And Brian, you and I know we're skeptical of free services here on Grumpy Old Geeks, right? Little bit. And these guys have actually come up with a business model to back up what they're giving away for free.

So that gives them the Grumpy Old Geeks. What do we call it, Brian? A seal of approval. A shocked amazement that they have a business plan. That's exactly it. And I actually reviewed them on a show way back when they first launched. And we're not just pimping these guys because they paid us, but they did.

And we like that. But I am an actual customer and love what they're doing. And if you use a password manager, and why don't you? Because you listen to this show. You should definitely use this. You don't use the same password everywhere. So why use the same credit card? And cards are locked to a merchant. So you don't have to worry about changing your card everywhere if one gets hacked, which we all know it will at some point.

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That's $5 free to spend anywhere by signing up. Where can they find that, Brian? Privacy.com slash GOG. Cops and doodads. I've been decrying the death of my beloved share builder investing account for a long time now and then threw it out to listeners of the show for a replacement, all of whom recommended, a number of whom recommended M1 Finance.

I finally found the time to go ahead and check that out. And I love it. It is fantastic. It does exactly what share builder used to do, except better. You can set whatever amount of money you want to put into the account at whatever frequency you want to put into the account.

You can set up what they call different pies, which is different options of stocks or whatnot. And it's great. It does exactly what I want it to do. It's perfect. You can do regular investing through it as well. But the best part about it, again, is the partial shares. So say, okay, I set up, say, a FAANG account, right?

So that's a Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix. And it used to be Google, but now it's Alphabet. So I guess now it's more of a FAANG account than a FAANG account. But it's, you know, colloquially it's been called FAANG. So I set that up. So it basically, I can transfer and say like a hundred bucks a month and it will buy partial shares, 20% of that hundred bucks for every single one of those stocks and just build and build and build.

So it's fantastic for that. I highly recommend this for everybody, especially for people that don't have, like, say, you know, you really want to own Amazon, but you don't have two grand sitting around. Well, if you got 20 bucks sitting around, you can send that over and own a partial share of Amazon. And over time, you will end up owning a share of Amazon.

It's great. So hopefully they won't go out of business anytime soon because they seem to be the only people that are doing partial shares anymore. If you're interested in this, I highly recommend going to the site. They have great videos that walk you through how everything works that totally makes sense. And if you want to sign up, of course, they're doing the social sharing sort of thing.

So we'll have a code in the show notes. And if you sign up using that code, I get 10 bucks and they'll give you 10 bucks. So that's a free $10 to invest. Well, good for you. You just should have just got 10 bucks because I just signed up. What are the trade fees on this? They vary.

So that's part of the stuff. I don't have that right in front of me, but it's really, I mean, it's certainly lower than Charles Schwab was, but it's not free like Robin Hood and other things, but you do get partial shares. Okay, cool. Yeah. Because I've got an E-Trade account, but yeah, they did partial shares before. That's why I have like such a weird number of Apple shares.

Yeah, you'll probably have to sell them because my share builder got bought out by E-Trade and they gave us a final date where you'd have to sell all your partial shares by. Oh, I haven't gotten anything about that. That's interesting. Okay. You might want to log in and check your messaging. I logged in yesterday and I didn't get anything. So yeah, man, I was very happy.

I bought Apple at 118 and then I saw what it was yesterday and I'm like, ah, retirement, except I have like two shares. I could buy two days of retirement. I could buy two more air conditioners and I'm set. I can't buy the electricity unless I go to that garbage company and get some shit coin and go from there.

So I was, I don't know how I found this one, but I was looking at PC laptops because I've got, I've had, have this history of getting these really shitty HP PC laptops that aren't great, right? They're, they're okay, but they're cheaply built. They're not solid.

It's like they feel hollow. Like there's nothing in there except like maybe a rodent on a wheel and in some cheese. And this one, the one I got, I actually covered on the show. It's one of the ones I got at woot.com and got it for like 200 bucks and then spent 400 bucks on RAM and an SSD on it.

So it is decently fast, but I just hate the build quality. I'd like, you know, I'm used to Mac books that are just like chunks of metal and things like that. And well, the one I found is not exactly a chunk of metal. It is really fucking beautiful. It's the razor blade 15, which is a 15 inch, you know, uh, windows laptop from razor razor used to make gaming mice.

I still do make gaming mice that I used to use back when I was in, you know, semi-professional quake land. And this thing looks sweet. The interesting thing is, no, it doesn't. Oh, I love it. What is it with you and rainbow colored PCs? Oh, well, that's a, that's the only thing they come in now.

I'm guessing you can change the color of the keyboard, not to be, you know, pride day and just have white. I'm hoping, um, but the difference is you look at the price on this, which is, you know, loaded to the gills and you compare it to the new Mac book pro and you can buy two of these for the same price.

And it's faster than the Mac book pros. All right. Okay. Look, I scrolled down on the site. There is a one shot of the product that actually has it that the key is just white. Thank God. And it actually seems to have a non tattooed version of Kitty crystal on the screen. Our friend of the show. That's funny.

Uh, oh my God. It kind of does look like Kitty. Right. Um, yeah, so you can do the white, the white keys on it, which is nice. Cause I like that, but it's a, it's a beast of a little machine. I, cause I, you know, that's what I was doing. I was looking for the new gaming keyboard that I was talking about a couple months ago on the show.

Cause I, I wanted to get a gaming keyboard for my PC, even though I don't have a place to put my PC together, which is the downfall of downsizing. I'm like, I have no desk, therefore I cannot game. And, uh, so I was looking at the thing and then I saw this cause this is a new, new machine that they just came out with and man, it looks nice.

Very nice. And this next one just blew my mind. Sony has come out with the world's highest resolution image sensor for phone cameras. This thing is a 48 effective megapixel sensors, 8,000 by 6,000. And they say it's the highest pixel count in the industry, which yeah, I'm guessing it is.

And it does a, it does a lot of tomfoolery to get you all those megapixels with the size of the pixels and overlapping and all that stuff. And it's a lot of technical crap. Does it use any AI? No, it does not use AI. It uses a quad bear color filter array. Is that better?

Okay. So these sensors are going to start shipping next year. And they sell for $27 each. Just, it's just a sensor. And they go to, you know, manufacturers, $27 for 48 megapixel sensor. Yes. I have a Nikon D810. It's a 36.6 megapixel camera.

It comes from Nikon. I mean, granted you get more than just the sensor with the camera, but so the sensor for the Sony is third $27. I paid $27 for my D810. That's a hell of a markup on sensors nowadays.

And I was, I was talking to a friend of the show, Seth Miranda, because he just sold his D810 and got like, you know, less than half of, you know, the sticker price for it. So I ended up, I ended up keeping mine because I still like having it around, but it just shows like how, how much this stuff is advancing so fast in a phone.

You're going to have a 48 megapixel camera in a phone. Yeah. Yes. I feel like, I feel like, I feel like going back, I remember the beginning shows when we were doing this, like, man, remember zip disks? And that was like such a leap.

Do you remember how much the first hard drive you bought costs? And it was probably like one meg. I was a 20, it was, it was 20 meg actually. And yeah, my mom bought it for IBM XT. Yeah. Yes. After, and then, which I promptly deleted because I didn't know that Dell star dot star didn't work in the directory that I was, or Dell star.

And I did it from root and basically wiped the hard drive. So yeah, she didn't really teach me a lot in the beginning. I learned, I learned through trial and error in a lot of being grounded after I dumped all of her work. But, uh, I told her stick to floppy drives.

Why do you, why do you want a hard drive? We got floppies. Look at, look at all the floppies. You can stack them up and they're as tall as me. What's wrong with these? We don't need anything else. We have a hole punch. We can make them double density. We don't need a hard drive. Double density. Yeah. Now the last thing I found in for my doodads this week, Star Trek fans can now buy Vulcan wireless earbuds to look the part over on the verge.

They do understand all we want is a communicator that actually works, right? That's true. That's true. The thing about this, the thing about this, and I'm looking at them again right now, we covered these on the show about three years ago. They weren't being sold as Vulcan earbuds back then.

They were fairy buds. They were elven fairy buds. Remember that? Yes, I do. Now that I'm looking at it, I'm like, these guys pivoted. They pivoted. They went to Vulcans. Yeah. I think maybe, yeah, I think maybe ThinkGeek saw them and said, hey, man, we can sell these for Vulcans.

We, we don't, you don't need no stinking fairies on ThinkGeek. That's true. $39. Uh, yeah, Barrett also sent us that on Twitter and I was just, I mean, not that I would go to Comic-Con, but this would complete my outfit. I would wear these and, uh, the Segway, uh, skates.

Media candy. Best news of the week. The Deadwood movie is finally a go at HBO. Finally, fucking cocksuckers actually greenlit the thing. Woohoo! I can't believe I'm going to have to hear about this show again from you on non-stop.

It's not non-stop. It's when it comes out, I'll be talking about it, but until then, you probably won't hear a thing. They're supposed to start filming in October for an early spring release in 2019. It will be obviously premiering on HBO. So I just, thank God. Finally, finally.

So next up, the Glass trailer is out. Now this is the follow-up to Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalama Ding Dong. Movie of gazillions of years ago that everybody was waiting for. And did you get to watch the trailer?

I did. And I really found myself not caring. I didn't think you would. You're not a Shyamalama Ding Dong fan. Well, I was until he started to really suck. Until everything after The Sixth Sense in Unbreakable? Pretty much. Yes. Yeah, he had two hits.

That was it. He had two hits. But I thought, what was the latest movie with the crazy guy? I can't even remember the name of it now. Oh, I heard that that one was actually okay. It was good. It was really good. It was really good, especially for the last 30 seconds of the movie where Bruce Willis shows up. I'm like, oh, doggie.

Now moving on to other trailer news. Alita Battle Angel finally has a trailer. Okay. They had a teaser trailer before, and everybody was like, man, her eyes look creepy, but now they have a full trailer. And I didn't realize this was directed by Robert Rodriguez. I thought James Cameron was going to direct it, but I forgot that he's making 17 Avatar movies that nobody will ever care about right now.

That nobody will care about and that will never be released. Yeah. Yeah. This looks good. This looks really good to me. I was a fan of the original back in, I originally saw it in 1994, because if you go look at my Twitter headline, or was the big graphic at the top there, my masthead, that was the first graphic that I made for spew, my first real website.

And there is a picture of Alita Battle Angel on that, on that masthead. So I've been loving that show forever and I haven't seen it probably since 1994, 1995. So I went to eBay and bought a copy. So on DVD. On DVD. I first had it on VHS.

Yes. So. Yes, of course. So I can't wait for this one. This actually looks like they're doing it right. And, you know, Robert Rodriguez for me is hit and miss, but this looks like it might be a good hit. I finally got around to seeing Ready Player One. I thought you'd seen it already. I'm surprised to see this in here.

Nope. No. Hadn't seen it. Never got around to it. Had hoped to make it to a theater. Shit happens. Never did. Finally came out on a home video or streaming or whatever the hell we call it these days and sat down to watch it. Sweden. I should have done Sweden. But really, not bad.

Told you. Didn't hate it. Yeah. It was okay. As long as you don't, you know, as long as you're not looking for a straight up interpretation of the book, it's a decent movie. That's what I said. Yeah. It's like, it's not the book. It's a fun movie. If you just go with it. I watched it again this week, too.

Surprisingly. That's why I was surprised to see this in here. And I was going, I was actually coming in to put it in the show notes when I saw that you had it in here because Ready Player One only has one play in it. This is not a replayable movie. If you watch this movie again, you are going to be bored out of your mind.

It, it, it, it's a one trick pony. So I would say you watched it once. You liked it. If you go back and watch it again, kind of like the last Jedi. You're going to hate it. Even you're going to hate it. So, although last Jedi, you just hate it out of the gate. But, uh, this movie, I, I, this is like, does it have legs?

If we were going to do a, does it have legs on this immediately? Right now. Three months later. Yes. It does not have legs at all. The only thing you're going to notice is a couple new little background characters. It's like, Oh, that's cute. Funny. Okay. Yeah. You, you were born in the eight or you were born in the seventies and like the eighties.

That's it. You know, it's like, okay, one trick pony get, move on. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. I kind of felt that it was going to be that way. Uh, I also watched, uh, most of the second season of Luke Cage. Oh, you got farther than me. It's better than the first season, but still not good.

Yeah. That's basic. Like I put it, it ended up just being kind of background noise as I was, uh, doing the show notes last night. So I ran through like three or four episodes. I, I love him as an actor. He's great. He's fantastic. I just don't care about the plots or the show itself. Uh, bring me more Avengers or whatever they, the punishers or whatever the hell they called him when he was with the other group, the defenders.

Uh, I love him in that. Uh, don't care for him in his own show. That's just, uh, don't bother going back to it. Okay. Cause I watched the first episode and then I promptly forgot that it existed and have not gone back to it. Even though it's like front and center when I log into Netflix, it's like, want to watch Luke Cage?

I'm like, Oh no, what's next? What's next? Oh, there's a new comedy special up. I'll watch that. Oh, maybe I'll watch somebody, somebody feed Phil. Uh, yeah. Anything but Luke Cage. I'm like, even, even last night I'm watching like this billionaire who helps businesses on like CNBC.

I'd rather watch that than go back and watch Luke Cage. So yeah, it just did not hook me at all in the first episode, especially all the social media crap at the beginning. I'm like, this is just desperate. And especially after, after the utter disappointment that was Jessica Jones season two.

Didn't hate it as much as you did. I just did not like, I did not, did not like how dark it was and it was just, nah, not for me too bad. But what might be for me and it probably won't be actually, they're doing a new Buffy, which has me kind of scared, but at least the show runner came out and says, don't call it a reboot.

It's not a reboot. We're not going to replace your old favorite characters. I can't say much more, but it's, it's going to be something different. And I'm like, which is fine because there were lots of slayers. That's the whole point, you know, Buffy came around because the previous layer was killed and that started the whole thing.

And then she got killed and then all the slayers came out. Thank you for Eliza Dushku. Thank you. Pretty much saved the show for me. And, uh, yeah, so I, we'll see how they do it. You know, it, it all comes down to execution and writing like Luke Cage, you know, could be great, crappy writing.

Look at the Punisher. Punisher could have been crap. There's never been a good Punisher until they redid the Punisher. And that was fantastic because of the writing. They just don't, I don't know why they don't like Luke Cage or can't find a decent story for him. Right. Uh, in music news, I, I, I found this, uh, it was like a surprise performance of cars with Gary Newman with nine inch nails from London in 2009.

And I don't know why I was about to say music news. This is scraped up. Oh yeah. Well, for me, it was new news because I'd never seen it, but it just, it was one of those videos that just made me extremely happy to see. And it was extremely happy for the first two thirds of the video, because if you've ever listened to the song cars by Gary Newman, you know that the last third of the song, you can just turn off because it's just instrumental playing the same notes over and over again, instrumental fade out.

Yeah, it's way too long. But as soon as he stopped singing, you can just turn it off. But I, I, I liked the energy and cause I saw a couple new videos with Gary Newman and nine inch nails, which were pretty good. And a friend of the show MXV really got me into listening to the newer Gary Newman stuff because he just, that's really good.

Oh man, it's so good. Yeah. He just happened to get a pass to go shoot him at a show in Chicago. Chicago and he came back and he's like, Oh my God, this was amazing. And we started listening to it in the house cause we lived together and he was the DJ. So I listened to a lot of Gary Newman and he really got me into it.

So, uh, I went and was checking out videos and I just, I ran across this one serendipitously and I really enjoyed it. So it's going to be in the show notes. If you want to go check it out, if you're a fan of nine inch nails or Gary Newman, mostly Gary Newman, because nine inch nails just sits in the back going, okay, I'm going to play this song now.

Yeah, it's great. It's really good. I mean, that's the, the good old days of music back when, uh, back when Trent Reznor was still writing songs and doing stuff. So it was good stuff. And I'd also say like, as soon as Gary Newman comes out and they hit the first bars, just look at the faces in the audience. That's what really got me. Everybody was just like so happy and excited.

And I'm like, okay, good energy. I like that. Yeah. And, uh, in new music news, underworld and Iggy pop, uh, I talked a bit about, uh, the one song that they had put out a while back as a collaboration. There is a four track collaborative EP called tea time dub encounters, which is out today, including a video for the EP's final track called trapped, which is online.

Cool. Interesting stuff. Um, I still prefer my underworld sans guest hosting or guest singing duties, but, uh, Iggy pop is pretty cool. And what they did is fun. It's interesting. It's definitely worth a listener to. Okay, cool. I'll definitely check it out. I like underworld. I like Iggy pop. You know, I don't know if they're two great tastes that taste great together, but I'll give it a shot.

Yep. I found these two articles, uh, and I'm not going to go on too long about these, but I just want to say that they're going to be in the show notes for anybody who is a podcasting person. Uh, okay. Cause I had, I had actually made a little note for myself. Go ahead and take a walk during this segment. Cause I figured this might be a while.

There's an article from near Zickerman. He's the anchor co-founder and CTO, and it's called why you should never pay for podcast hosting. And the second article is a followup from, uh, Jason Snell that says there's no such thing as free podcast hosting.

So, uh, yeah, you might not want to write that, but, um, I, I am on the side of Jason Snell on this one. You should pay for your podcast hosting because there is no such thing as a free lunch in my, as we've covered on the show many, many times.

If somebody is trying to give you something for free, they're, they're monetizing you in another way and sometime you might not like that. So it's worth it to pay a couple bucks a month to keep control of your show than it is to rely on somebody else's advertising department. Because what we've also found is that there is a power law to these things and the big shows get all of the attention from the sales teams.

The smaller shows, once you hit a certain tipping point, get no love from anybody and you get the scraps. So I would say host your own show, sell your own ads. And if you have somebody who can sell ads for you, like we have Libsyn selling some of our ads for us, but we also sell some of our own.

That's the way to go. Cause that way, at least all of our eggs aren't in one basket. That is the way to go if you're a podcaster listening to the show. So that's my advice today. Now, last thing I have here is planet of the apps star Gary Vaynerchuk attributes shows failure to Apple's bad marketing.

I love you, Gary, but the show's downfall was because it sucked. It was horrible. It was a terrible market of this all day long. Every day. Nobody would give a shit. It was bad. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig and there's only so much lipstick for Gwyneth Paltrow because she's too busy on gooping it up, which we'll talk about shortly.

But yeah, sorry, Gary. No, love you. Love you, man. But man, no, the show sucked. We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

I'm going to read this ahead of schedule to see if Dave changed anything for me this week. So it doesn't seem so. So the Cyber Wire is still a free community driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. And Dave is also still the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast along with Joe Kerrigan, Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute.

Wow. Nice ad libbing there, Jason. It was not actually in the script. I figured last week's script just got copied over to this week, but evidently not. But top notch work there. Top notch. Well, thank you very much. I'm a professional. Welcome back, Dave.

Thank you very much. How's everybody doing? Oh, we're fantastical. Just dandy. Dandy. Yeah. I wanted to start off this week, guys, with a little discussion. I found Ross Albrecht is on Twitter. Yes.

Sort of. Kind of, sort of. Sort of. But I don't know how I feel about this. What do you guys think? Well, okay. First off, he's not technically on Twitter. He is dictating his tweets over the phone to somebody that he has given access to his account for.

So that is an interesting twist. We know prisoners are allowed to make phone calls. And they certainly are allowed to pass on messages that should be passed on to somebody else. And he is just doing that in a very cyber way. Well, back up for a second. For the purposes of our listeners, Ross Albrecht is?

The mastermind behind the Silk Road, who is in jail for two life terms for trying to have people killed and selling lots of drugs to people who also died using those drugs in a plethora or a plethora of other charges, I believe. But to be fair, Jason, it was just a platform.

It was just a platform. That's right. Okay. So having said that, he is not physically tweeting himself. He is he is dictating. And I guess comments are being printed out and mailed to him also allowed. I assume these things are looked at when they come in.

That's that's generally what happens when you're in prison and you get or send mail. These conversations are recorded that he's having over the phone. That also happens when you're in prison. So it's a weird workaround. I'll give you that. It feels weird that somebody who is supposedly being stripped of rights is tweeting.

But by the letter of the law, what could a judge say that he's not allowed to do this anymore? I suppose they could. Right. Gosh, I wish a judge would decide someone wouldn't be allowed to tweet anymore. There's a long list, right? It starts with one.

There are rappers out there who are banned by judges decree from social media. So the judge could have banned him from social media. And by the way, this whole dictating of tweets and all this other crap, this did not come out till later. So when I first found this, his latest tweet was started a new workout routine on Monday and it's already kicking my butt.

Burpee, pull up and run today. And I'm like, oh, OK, what the hell is going on here? Why is Ross Ulbrecht, somebody who is in jail for two lifetimes, telling me about his workout routine? How is this a thing in this day and age? Well, isn't the part of this that he's trying to petition people to for for clemency?

So, yes, this is going to move on to that. Yeah. I mean, this is a PR campaign, I suppose. He's being very nice and right. It's I guess wanting people to see the human side of Ross Ulbrecht. Yeah. Having run Twitter for a number of famous people in the past, this may not even be him at all.

This could all be concocted PR. I've certainly done that for people in the past. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm watching in real time how many people are signing the petition to let him go. And there are like about one or two a second right now. He's at 40,500 trying to get to 50,000.

I'm sure there are absolutely no bots involved with that whatsoever. Oh, God, no. Also, you know, thank God that change.org petitions are directly involved in our legal system. Exactly. This goes straight to legislature, doesn't it? The Founding Fathers really wanted it to be a popularity contest.

That's what they were all about. Ah, Republic schmuglic. Yeah, I guess. I mean, wouldn't part of this come down to how you feel about our prison system? How much of it is for punishment?

How much of it is for protecting society from people? Where do you fall on that spectrum? And how much is for rehabilitation? Right, exactly. Exactly. I would state categorically that Twitter is not going to rehabilitate anyone.

That is not in their TOS. Right. But suppose, I mean, if you're allowed to have visitors in prison and you're allowed to send messages out with those visitors, is it okay for them to restrict those visitors from passing along your message?

I guess it's the same thing. My understanding is no. So it is the same thing. It's just, as everything is these days, amped up on a giant megaphone. Right. Okay. I just wanted to throw that out there because it kind of made me feel a little gross. No, like I said, it feels unsettling.

I agree. But by the way it's being done, it doesn't appear to be breaking any of what we, well, as we talk about all the time on the show, legislation does not keep up with technology. And as far as I, as far as I understand the rules behind prisoner communication right now, nothing is being, no law is being broken here.

And again, like you said yourself, Jason, the judge could have banned him and that could still happen. Maybe somebody, maybe lawyers are already talking about that right now. So until the judge says you can't be on social media, this is what's going to happen. And maybe that's going to become part of sentencing moving forward.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it seems as though he hasn't tweeted anything really controversial yet. They're very sort of careful and look what a reasonable person I am. Yes. Speaking of people who tweet and aren't reasonable, let's talk about Julian Assange for a second.

That was a wonderful transition there, Jason. Thank you. Thank you very much. Because right now, as of right now, British and Ecuadorian authorities are discussing the fate of Julian Assange. Well, it looks like the horseshoe that he's had firmly up his ass for years now is starting to fall out.

The rust has kicked in. So it's not as lucky. I just want to know what's going to happen with his cat. Oh, the poor cat. The poor cat. I bet the staff at the embassy is going to keep the cat because they like the cat more than him. Right. Yeah. And the scuttlebutt about this is that he's been a terrible house guest.

Yeah. Oh, surprisingly, a computer nerd doesn't know how to clean up after himself or have social skills. I can't imagine. I've lived with a few of these guys before, and I couldn't get out of the house fast enough. So I agree. I didn't even have to do the beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, breaking news thing.

Right. It reminds me of my oldest, my 19-year-old, who just, you know, I'm like, really, we don't set that many rules. And leaving your clothes all over the bathroom floor is a common courtesy. And evidently, Mr. Assange is also not very fastidious.

The reports from the people who've, the lucky people who've been tasked with cleaning up after his unappreciative ass. Oh, my. Oh, Julian Assange's ass. That would have been a good show title, but I think we've already got one.

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess it comes down to a lot of, is he going to face the death penalty anywhere? That's the real trick, because Ecuador won't let him go if he's going to face the death penalty. And he's not going back to the charges of rape in Scandinavia because they dropped those charges.

But there is this whole big thing about the United States of America is not very happy with him right now. Right. And whether or not the Brits will extradite him to the U.S. Exactly. So, this is an ongoing story, but it is damn fun to watch. This is an interesting one that came by from Krebs on Security.

Always a good source there. And Google claims that they have pretty much neutralized employee phishing. They say that none of their 85,000 plus employees have been phished since they started using these USB-based devices for their second factor of authentication.

Of course, we talk all the time here about how something's important to you. You want to have that second factor. But they're using these keys. Are you guys familiar with these? Have you ever used one of these? The YubiKeys. Yeah. I have two of them. I'm not familiar with them.

My wife uses them for her work. Ah, okay. A long time ago, I bought one for the show, and we discussed it on the show, and it turned out to be a giant pain in the ass, so I stopped using it. Because I was trying to use it for my Facebook login. And how so? And it just, the setting up of it was so difficult that it just turned into a thing that was just like, you know what?

This isn't worth it. Well, for most people, Jason, they don't have to set it up themselves. The company's IT departments do it and then hand them out to people. That's true. That's true. And I just got a new one. I got the next generation one from Wired for free when I signed up for my $25 a year subscription to Wired.

They sent me one. So I've got two YubiKeys now. And what I want to find out is, because the thing that they say on the YubiKey site is that if you're going to start using YubiKeys, you should probably get two so you can back one up. And I'm like, okay, well, why don't you just sell two packs? You can't buy a two pack.

Right. So now I've got two different generations. So I want to see if my older one can back up my newer one, and then I might give it a try. But yeah. And here's the other issue that I was thinking. I was thinking about this before we started recording today. They're USB sticks, right? Right. USB-A.

So yeah. Most of us use Macintoshes. Not a lot of USB ports these days. Unless you're like me or Brian who have old Macs. I've got, you know, Mac. I was at the 5K.

And I've got the, I've got two 2015 laptops. Ports. We have ports. Yes. In the future. In the future. Glorious ports. You don't have ports. Well, I'm looking forward to my Bluetooth YubiKey. Yeah. Right, right.

What could possibly go wrong with that? No. No. I remember an old, old version of this, maybe a decade ago, where the key actually had a little LCD on it that would spit out a code. Do you remember those? Yes. I remember that as well. I actually did have one of those once.

Yeah. Okay. Those kind of came and went. So I suppose, I mean, this is supposed to be better. And I don't doubt that it is. But I don't have any personal experience with them. The funny thing about those is I was dating a girl who used to work at 2600. And she had one on her key chain for a car and would always like, you have to use it to log in for her work stuff.

But she always lost her car keys. So most of the time when she had to log in, we were traipsing around her apartment trying to find her damn car keys so she could do her work. So therein lies the flaw. Yeah. The physical keys. It wasn't clear to me from this article.

And again, since I haven't actually used one of these up-to-date ones, do you have to insert the device every time you log into, for example, Google? Or does it somehow authenticate the device once and that sticks for a certain amount of time? Do you know?

From what I remember with trying to set it up for Facebook, when you went back to the site, you had to have it plugged in. To use the site, you had to have it plugged in. Okay. I could be wrong, but that's, you know, I'm old man, drink a lot and my memory's faulty. But from the docs that I was reading, you had to always have it plugged in.

And so anytime I needed to look at Facebook, I'd have to go find the thing and plug it in. I'm just like, ah, it's too much trouble. But if you're working... One would think that there's settings for that. So... Yeah, you're right, right, right. Well, I'm sure our listeners will tell us, right? Yeah. They do tend to do that. Email brian at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

The avalanche of... Great. Yeah. All right. Well, and then we also had a little follow-up on this from the folks over at KnowBe4. They handle a lot of training for these sorts of things, help people not get phished.

Coincidentally, full disclosure, they also happen to be the sponsors of the Hacking Humans podcast. So I'm familiar with them from that. And we've talked about them on the show before. Stu Sourman is, you know, a friend of the show. Yeah. We like them over there. And although after this blog post, we may have to go have a little chat with Stu, but because the blog title is, yes, Google Security Key is Hackable, even though in this completely long blog post, there's no evidence that it is actually hackable.

He's just saying it's technology. So at some point in the future, this will be hacked. Theoretically, it's hackable. Right. Right. Yes. They didn't actually go and test it. They weren't successful in any attempts at it. He's just saying, theoretically, of the attacks that I cover in my talks, eight of the 12 of them could be applied to this.

And I mean, technically, he's correct, but I guess it's not a very satisfying article overall, right? We call it clickbait. It's called clickbait. This very much reminds me of my days when I'd be sitting in the boardroom at a music company and I would be talking to the heads and who didn't understand digital at all and tell them, no, there is no such thing as a secure digital file.

Nothing. Yeah. There is no secure digital audio. Anything that you play can be recorded and a copy can be made of it. And it's not very satisfying to them to hear that. Right. But there has to be a technological solution. If it, I mean, if it, if it's on a computer and it's playing, you have to be able to lock it down.

Right. It's like, no, if you can hear it, remember these things called tape recorders back in the day? If there's noise being made, you can record it. So it's very similar. It's, it's, yes, everything can probably be hacked at some point. I can't tell you how, but it probably will happen.

Mm hmm. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that the bottom line though, I mean, it's certainly a, from Google's point of view, that's a large test group and for them to have no, I mean, it sounds like a hundred percent success or at least that's what they're crowing about.

That's, that's a pretty good recommendation for this. If, if you're one of those people, I guess, who can deal with whatever the inconveniences are and you need it, that's a good option, I guess. Well, it seems like, you know, when you go to work, you plug it in and then. You work all day, then you take it out and you go home.

That's fine. But if you're working on. Thank God that they have the little piece of sticky tape with the writing on it over the USB ports that say only put in your key. Do not put in any other USB devices. If someone hands you a USB device out in the parking lot, do not insert.

Yeah. Words to live. Do not insert. Basically my dating life in my teens. Yes. Oh, poor Jason. Oh, hang on. Oh, I thought this was on. Do not disturb. Sorry. Oh my God. Amateur move. Amateur move.

God, I forgot to turn my phone off. Oh. So, speaking of amateur moves, let's talk about LifeLock. Yeah. So, back again to Krebs on security, LifeLock evidently had a bug that could expose millions of customer email addresses.

Oh, the irony. Well, I think that's what makes this story fun, really. It is. If this had been JCPenney or something, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun as LifeLock. My favorite comment about this story is that hopefully the people who've fallen victim to this will get a year's free subscription to LifeLock because that's, that everyone gives away when there's a breach that the go-to is, well, we're going to give you a year of LifeLock and everything, all is forgiven, right?

So, um, and your credit card will only be charged after 12 months and it'll cost you $79.99 thereafter, but it's free for now. And you probably won't get that email telling you they're going to auto charge you. Right. It doesn't seem like a terribly serious problem here. People would have been able to get your email address and known that, and be able to know that you use LifeLock, which could be used for social engineering kinds of things, but it wasn't like, you know, they could get into your actual LifeLock account.

No. This is what we call an edge case. Yeah. This is totally an edge case. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So what they did was you basically had your subscriber key equals with a query string, and then somebody, some hacker could write a, write a bot like we talked about earlier on the show that basically just loops through every known number until they hit the end.

And you can just scrape for the email addresses and get a list of all of the LifeLock subscriber emails, but there's no proof that anybody actually did this. So this is what we call the tempest in the teapot. Yeah, I think so. I think that's right. I think that's right. But it's fun because it's LifeLock.

Yes. Oh, it's so much fun. I, I, my main takeaway from this is that they were sold for $2.3 billion and acquired by Symantec. I did not know that. And I'm like, $2.3 billion for, for them? Come on.

Remember when a billion dollars used to really mean something? Yeah. Yeah. Soon we'll be talking about real money. Not so much anymore. Uh, another interesting one came by. This is from Motherboard. It's a pretty interesting article called The Sim Hijackers. And this is about people being able to take over your SIM cards and your phones, being able to hijack them and, and, and then using that as the stepping off point with which to get a hold of your other account.

So swinging back to multi-factor authentication, um, probably the most popular way to do that is to have the, um, the company that you're trying to log into send you a code on your phone. And so that's tied to your phone number, which is tied to your SIM card. So if someone can get in and, uh, get control of your SIM card or, or have basically transfer your phone number over to another SIM card, then they can have that second factor be sent

to them and they can own your account and, and, uh, these accounts have value on the black market so they can sell them, particularly if you're a celebrity or, or some have a large following, uh, these accounts can be worth some money.

This is not a new story though. They, I mean, they did a really good deep dive on it, but this has been around for quite some time because I remember a couple of years ago, security researchers were saying that you should not use your cell phone for two factor auth. At least for the SMS or text feature, you can get an app, one of the authenticator apps that kind of work like the old, uh, LCD thing that we talked about.

Right. So you get a code that's, you know, algorithmically generated that you then type in, but using your SIM card or using cell phone basically because it is your SIM card and that can be socially engineered that you should not use that for two factor auth. So I thought that this is, I mean, it's, it's a rehashing of an article that we may, we may have talked about other places in the show about toxoplasmosis and it's like somebody may have,

uh, dragged this up from the, the archives and, and brought it back to life. Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's possible. It's a good read. I, it's worth checking out. Um, I was talking to somebody this week. I think it was Johannes Ulrich from the SANS Institute.

He's the, he hosts the, uh, internet storm cast podcast. Fancy. Yeah. Yeah. Good guy. Uh, super smart. And, uh, he was telling me, I think it was him and he was saying that, um, you can actually assign a pin to your SIM card in your phone.

And I didn't know you could do that. So you, you can do that right through your phone. It's in the settings there for your SIM card. I don't remember exactly where it is, but you can go in and assign a pin. And that way, if someone tries to transfer it, they can't do it without the pin. So a little extra bit of security there.

Uh, I guess no reason not to do that. Yeah. It's, uh, it's apparently, you can also do that. This is, it's a, it's a pain in the butt to have to do that. Like, you know, multi-factor every time your phone reboots, but, and cause most people won't remember it and they'll maybe use the same pin, but, um, you can also do that on your PCs.

Like on the CMOS, you can actually set a pin like pre-boot. So that's another way to keep hackers from your computer if it's ever stolen. And it reminds me of that. Hmm. Yeah. Interesting. You can do that on a PC or a Mac. You can actually, you know, boot into recovery mode on a Mac and actually set like a pre-boot pin number that you have to type in before the actual machine boots.

And this is the same kind of thing. And a lot of people are, let's just say almost no one is ever going to do this unless you work for the three letter agency, but it can be done. I found it interesting that Instagram is now building non-SMS two-factor auth because of this article.

Right. So apparently like, you know, the security team there was not around for the original version of this article a couple of years ago. And now they're like, you know, oh, scrambling to set up for that. But I think everybody should go to the app-based two-factor auth. That's what I'm using for anywhere that I can. That's what I use.

I use an app, either like Microsoft's app, Google's app, Battle.net's app. I've got three generators, three key generators that I can use to get into my different accounts, especially after my Google account was hacked not too long ago because I'm an idiot. Yeah.

We do the same thing. We use one of those apps. I think most of them give you a choice. And I suppose I can see why using the text one, the SMS one is convenient. But the app ones really aren't that much more inconvenient, really.

Maybe a little bit, but it's because of the added security, I suppose it's worth it. Right. Well, Jason, as you mentioned, maybe nobody except somebody working at a three-letter agency would be adding a pin to their SIM card.

They can do that all they want. But if they're using any of these fitness apps, they're still fucked. That's what we're quickly learning here. So we talked about the thing that happened with Strava in the past, which is mostly a biking app, but it was inadvertently revealing sensitive military-based locations because of the global heat maps that were coming out.

Now, to me, this falls under the no-shit Sherlock category of if you're talking about an app that tracks your physical activity and then posts it publicly or allows you to share it, then you're going to have an inherent privacy issue. Are you not? I believe you are. Okay, well, this article is basically saying maybe these things should be social.

They found out another app called Polar, which is quite popular. There was some sort of problem between the privacy setting and search features that had holes that allowed them to learn the location of military staff, intelligence operatives, and employees at nuclear weapon sites. Using information gleaned from the app, the investigators were able to find names and addresses of personnel at intelligence agencies such as the NSA, the secret service, the UK's GCHQ and MI6 and the Netherlands, MIVD.

So maybe we should stop letting people use these apps or at least make them private. Well, it seems, yeah, privacy should be the default setting. And I think, didn't Polar say that it was the default setting? I think they said only a small percentage of people shared their activity.

But still, that's enough, I guess. Apparently, it's enough. Yeah. With the amount of people using it. And some people were switching it on. And apparently, there was also some other issues with the API. So some shoddy programming was involved as well that they had to go in and fix once it was discovered.

Gasp! Shoddy programming! I know, shocking! Oh, my God! So, yeah. Wait, wait, wait. What's a unit test? I don't know what you mean by a unit test. What's a unit? So, yeah, if you're using any of these, you might want to check your privacy settings.

And especially if you happen to be working in sensitive locations, please do, you know, for the rest of us. Now, I have an Ars Technica article that I only kind of briefly put in mostly for the headline and kind of the basics on it. But apparently, this bothered you, Dave. It did. Okay.

So, Snoopware installed by 11 million plus iOS, Android, Chrome, and Firefox users. So, apparently, there are all these different browser extensions and apps that have been keeping a list of every website ever visited by you and send it on to servers operated by the developers.

Snoopware sounds like a marijuana app. It's his new clothing company. Right. Fo' shizzle. Or Charles Schultz. Okay. Yes. Yep.

There's that. There's that. Showing your age, Dave. Showing your age. Well, and my tendencies as well compared to yours. Oh, don't front. Don't front. It's legal here, buddy. Yeah. It's legal here.

What do we? We have medicinal now. And we are on our way to, what's the other category? Free-for-all? Yeah. Right. Exactly. We need the tax money. We need the clouds of weed smoke that I now bike through on the boardwalk. That's right. Yes. That.

Yes. We're looking forward to it here in Maryland. So, what annoyed me about this article? Let me count the ways. Okay. So, let's, mainly it's the headline. So, let's just review the headline here. Yes. Snoopware installed by 11 million plus iOS, Android, Chrome, and Firefox users.

Now, which of those was listed first, gentlemen? iOS, which is probably the least likely. iOS, right, right. Because- I thought it was going to be the last comma that bothered you. No, because iOS, oh, you had to point that out, too. Now that I'm looking at it, it's really bothering me. No, I mean, well, they do use the Oxford comma. Oxford comma. So, I'm behind that. That's good.

But 11 million, because iOS, of course, is the link-baitiest of link-bait things. Yes. So, when you look through the wares and the places that they list out here, they say Android app, 100,000 installs. Chrome extension, 1.4 million.

Firefox, 120,000. Android app, 5 million. Battery saver, 1 million. Apple lock, 500,000. Clean droid, 500,000. Chrome extension, 2.3 million. Firefox, 50,000. Chrome extension, 41,400, 10,000. And then they say, on the iOS, it's hard to estimate the user's count, as it's not distributed via the app store.

Which means, basically, next to nobody has it installed. So, that means you have to sideload this thing, which is not easy to do on iOS, right? Nope. You have to really, really want this thing. And so, that's what annoyed me about this article.

It seemed link-baity to me, the way that they listed all these things. So, there, damn it, I've said it. I've said my piece. Okay. I'm with you on that. But still quite a lot of people, and they just shouldn't have had iOS in the headline. I agree. So, we'll go with what we always say in this segment.

If you use a Google phone, you're screwed. Well, you just can't install anything. If you want to make a phone call, you're fine. You just don't install anything. In fact, some of them come pre-installed, so you might be screwed anyways. We discussed that. Man, I just got a new case for my Galaxy S7 Edge because I wanted to start using it more.

Damn it. Don't. Well, and don't get one from LTE or Huawei, right? That's the other part. Oh, yes. I did, yes. No, mine is a clean phone from a friend of the show who works at a conscious company who does social stuff.

So, we like them, hopefully. I don't know. I'm not going to outer on the show. Time will tell. Right, exactly. Yeah. Hubris gets you every time. Don't outer on the show because next week we could be talking about your phone that got hacked. Right. Exactly. Right.

My last article for the day comes from digitaltrends.com. It's how 3,000 streetlights turned San Diego into America's smartest city. Now. Going to take more than streetlights for that city. Well, I like San Diego. It's a fun place. I'm kidding. San Diego's nice.

It is. It's the best weather, right? Pretty close to it. We can go that far, but. I think that's what they say. It's the most consistently nice weather of any U.S. city is San Diego. I've always enjoyed this city when I visited. It's lovely. I have, too. I have, too. A friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, lives there with his lovely wife, Stacy, who works at the San Diego Zoo, where I love to visit whenever I get down there.

So, now, when I go down there, I'll be looking at the streetlights, but I'll be looking at them for a different way. So, San Diego has embarked on a project to install thousands of more intelligent streetlights that can monitor parking spots, listen for criminal activity, vague much, and check for air quality, building out its own Internet of Things.

Right there. That's it. You had me at Internet of Things. Yes. So, they're going to talk about video cameras, microphones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and sensors that can measure temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and even magnetic fields. So, I have to get my tinfoil hat on.

And the added computing power can allow smart lights to help drivers find open parking spaces or give you a ticket if you parked in one illegally. And tell where you shot off your gun in the middle of the night on a rowdy San Diego street, which probably happens more often than you think.

So, what possibly could go wrong with this? Well, obviously, there's the hacking element, which is definitely a problem. But what I have is, it just feels like surveillance state, and we're just, it's slippery sloping our way there every day more and more and more. We're on our way to London.

The fact that, like, it says, even tell traffic enforcement when vehicles are illegally parked. I thought the societal contract here was, if you're going to decide to illegally park, it's a gamble. Yeah, it's a game. It's a game. These things should be installed to help us and not out us.

Like, it should be, you know, if you get away with it, you get away with it. Good. If not, and somebody drives by, that's a cop or whatever, and sees you, they can give you a ticket. I don't like the use of something that is being purported to tell us that they're making our lives better, policing us as well.

I don't think that's what we all signed on for. I think that's a load of crap. Measure temperatures, by all means. Measure humidity, but don't use it as an extension of the police force. See, now, we could get into the debate where you can extrapolate that out to murder instead of parking illegally.

And, because that's what they're, that's the other thing. But we have that already. Security cameras are basically everywhere, covering almost everything all the time. So, why can't they just do that for illegal parking as well? I don't know. You have a good point. I'll just throw my hands up in the air and quit. Well, but parking, I mean, so, but we've got a civil violation versus a criminal violation, right?

There is that. So, there's that. I've seen some criminally bad parking jobs on the streets of L.A. You've probably been responsible for one or two years of. But imagine being able to triangulate a gunshot. Yeah, we have that already, you know?

We do have that in a lot of cities. Not quite as blanketed. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly what they're doing with this as well. So, put some checks and balances on it. I'm kind of okay with it. Let this become a free-for-all for law enforcement. That's when I start to have a real issue. So, one thing that I thought of with this, would you rather have government doing this or the private sector?

Oh, government. That was my thought as well. Because private sector just means the data starts to get sold. Right. And even more horrible things start to happen. Unintended consequences of private sector are through the roof. Government is just incompetence 99% of the time. I'll take incompetence over blatant capitalism breed any day.

Yeah, we have another story coming up in feedback about one of our listeners who is part of one of these megacorps who are now basically privatizing police work. And it makes us very scared that this is actually happening. I mean, this is supposed to be the purview of government.

Yeah, this is the point. This is why we pay taxes. This is why we enter into the societal contract. Not to have a private company do this stuff. Yeah. But to have our government do it with oversight and the ability to vote people in and out and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I have mixed feelings about this.

There are things that I think could be very beneficial, like you said. And some of the futuristic things, like if I'm walking down a street late at night and these lights are tracking my movement and it sees suddenly a group of people heading towards me very quickly.

And if it either notifies law enforcement or just starts a lot of the lights flashing or something like that, you know, it puts a spotlight on me or somehow indicates, you know, hey, you're hey, he's right there, guys. Right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Here he is. Yeah. Thanks. That's exactly what would happen to me. But let's move into gate recognition. And it sees that I'm stumbling home because I've been too drunk. Does it call me an Uber or does it call the cops to arrest me for public drunkenness? See, now that is a really good use.

That's a really good test, isn't it? Which should it do? Mm hmm. I would prefer a taxi besides an Uber or maybe it'll point me to the nearest bird. scooter. Who knows? It'll you know, a self-driving car will pull up next to you and offer you a ride.

Yeah. I mean, my feeling is, again, the difference between a civil case and something like murder, obviously. This stuff should be to help and not to hinder. So, yes. If we ever got to that point where they could tell that I was stumbling home and obviously drunk, it'd be great if a car pulled up and said, hey, you need any help, buddy?

It would not be cool with me if then, you know, the popo shows up and throws you in the dunk tank. So, especially in San Diego. I've seen pictures of the drunk tank in San Diego and you don't want to go there. No, sure, Jason. Just seeing pictures. Right. Yes. Seen pictures.

Sure thing. Yeah. I got it. I got to have some secrets, guys. Come on. Not with that new Google phone of yours. That's right. All right, gentlemen. We covered a lot this week. Yes, we did. We did. So, a lot to think about.

So, you know, if you guys have thoughts about this who are listening and on some of the things that we talked about, please send them to our feedback section and we'd love to hear from you, honestly. Just don't email me. Brian at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Right.

All right, gentlemen. As always, a good time. I'll talk to you guys next week. I have no idea how this came across my feed, but it did and it is cool as crap. This is some guy named Andreas Vrantis.

Not entirely sure. He's based in, or at least he's going to be in New York City pretty soon. He's got his own website. He's got his own Instagram. It's worth taking a look at. ASCII art tattoos. Talk about scraping back the old feels. Yeah, no doubt. I was trying to find some of them that I might have printed out back in the day, but mine were...

The dot matrix printer. Yeah, because mine were basically all naked chicks. Yeah, I had a collection of those as well. Yeah, that was our porn. But, you know, this guy's based out of Cyprus right now. That's where he's doing all these. So I think he's going to be in New York July 25th, so right now to August 2nd at Bang Bang NYC.

So if you're in New York and you want an ASCII tattoo, you better go now and check him out while he's there. Yeah, these are really cool. Yeah, they are extremely cool. I was like, damn, man, that's some patience right there. Yeah. And I like him even more because, I mean, you have tattoos.

You know how, like, inking something really dark sucks? So those little ones... All of my tattoos are really dark. Exactly. I'm like, man, those might not actually be too bad to get. So my next one, I just came across my feed somehow. There was this witch house in Poland that I saw that was really cool.

It's like a melty, you know, Harry Potter looking house. So I just did a search for witch houses in Google. And it's kind of crazy, some of these houses that are out there that look kind of witchy. It just kind of, this is one of those random, there's one that's even upside down, which...

I just scrolled past that one. Yeah, I don't know how they did that one, but it's a fun thing to just browse through. That's what bric-a-brac's for. It's just crazy random shit we find on the internet. And for some long period of time this week, I was looking at witch houses.

That's it. Time well spent. Yeah. Some other time well spent was over on Reddit. Somebody posted an archive with all the Mac and iOS wallpapers. It's just basically links to every Mac and iOS wallpaper that ever is or ever was.

And it's cool because I got one of the new ones for the next release. And I put that on my screen because it was a really nice one. They seem to have day and night versions of some of these. And yeah, I go, I always go for, I go dark. You know, dark is, I'm dark on the outside because dark is how I am on the inside.

And I really, I really enjoyed these. And some of them were just blasts from the past. That was, you know, just a little nostalgia. Walk down memory lane. So check those out. If you're into Mac wallpapers or have been using Macs since the dawn of time, like some of us. Now a rabbit hole, I went down a little bit, and this is one of these weird connected sort of things that happen occasionally.

And that if I had a tinfoil hat, I'd swear to God that Bittner was listening to me and seeing our show notes. You can see our show notes. Hold on a second. I ran across this article on Business Insider. A parasite found in cat poop has been linked to a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial behavior in people who get infected.

And I had two thoughts immediately. One, this is perfect for our break of back section. Two, I think we've talked about this before. Yeah, we have. Okay. So, yeah, Bittner made a tweet about this and said that this kind of sounds familiar.

It says, is it me or does this toxoplasma story seem to make the rounds every few years? And I said, yes, it does. And I posted a link to Trainspotting, which is the first time I've ever heard of it. But I have, they have brought this thing up with, you know, okay, if you basically don't wash your hands after you eat your cat, or not eat your cat poop, clean your cat poop.

If you're eating your cat poop, washing your hands isn't actually going to matter. That ain't going to help. But if you get toxoplasmosis, then basically you are less risk averse because that's the whole point of this disease or whatever it is, is to turn mice to not be afraid of cats so the cats can eat the mice, you know, that's the whole thing.

But apparently you can go become an entrepreneur if you have cats. I had cats. I know many people that have a lot of cats and they certainly aren't entrepreneurs. Yeah, I do too. That's where this falls apart. In fact, I would make an argue that the more cats you have around, the less chance that you're going to be an entrepreneur.

There's a tipping point with the number of cats you own versus your, either you're an entrepreneur or you're a hoarder. That's kind of it. But the thing, so after I saw that Vintner tweeted about it, I kind of like, I want to tie this in because there's been a recurring theme recently for us.

This kind of goes back to your, everybody has to post the same article because the thing that I, then I immediately did was I attempted to Google news search for, for the sorts of this kind of article to find one, you know, to see if it'd been recycled. Was this posted in 2014 and then back in 2011 too.

And everybody has reposted this same article so much in the last few days. After five minutes of drilling down, I couldn't find anything from a previous year. It was just every single website on planet earth on the internet is posting the same goddamn article. And I got, I finally, after five minutes gave up and I got bored.

But like I said, I totally remember covering the same story a few years back. Or do I? Oh, Berenstain Bears. Not the Berenstains.

Billions, which is not a show I've watched. I believe you do. I love that show. It is my, one of my favorite shows on, on the air right now. I am in no way going to take a knock on the show. Oh, this is just a quote. He did an article or an interview with Recode. So he said, who's he? Co-creator Brian Koppelman.

I was just getting there. Says everyone knows how to tell a great story, but few get the chance. To which I respond, they do? Really? Have you ever been to an open mic night? Have you looked at the internet? Not everybody knows how to tell a fucking great story, buddy.

In fact, I would argue very fucking few people know how to tell a great story. Very few. Okay, yeah. I think the biggest, the biggest takeaway from the internet experience at large is that most people don't know how to tell a fucking story.

Yeah. Cue YouTube. Okay. That's okay. That's all I got for that one. This one came across Wired for me and I had flashbacks of McDonald's coffee and McDonald's burgers and all the people that used to sue McDonald's for, you know, burning off their private bits or making them fat.

Juul. Yes. Juul. Yes. You were a nicotine user for a long time and I know you had some e-cigs, but I think you quit before Juul came around, right? I still have an e-cig. I don't use it very often. A little uptick recently due to the massive personal stresses I've been going through.

But in general, yeah, I never got one of these. These weren't around when I was getting into it. Okay. Well, throw that fucking thing away and get away from it. Don't go back to smoking. I don't need you smoking. Okay. Well, Juul, yes, is the darling of the e-cig revolution right now.

Has a shit ton of investment. They're everywhere. And now some of the users are suing them for getting them addicted to nicotine. Now. Right. I should be able to stop right there, but I know some people who listen to the show are going to be like, well, what's wrong with that?

Like, oh. So, let's say this. You buy a device that's designed to give you some nicotine. Then you get pissed off when it fucking works. Yes. Personal responsibility? Gone. You know, I guess. I don't sue Guinness when I have too many beers.

And if, you know. You should. Why not? It's game on now. Oh, God. Because I have morals. Personal responsibility. I know what I'm doing. I want to get fucked up. I'm not going to sue you because you gave me a product that got me fucked up.

It's right there on the tin. And the other part of this is there are people who are suing them because their kids are getting addicted. 15-year-old kids. Well, maybe if you were a better fucking parent and didn't let your kids vape, maybe this wouldn't happen, you piece of shit.

Well, there's that. I looked at the site and I went through the process of ordering one. It is rather difficult. You would do have to be, you'd have to have a credit card. You need to have a verification of address. They do some verifications that you're over 21. Certainly, you can get around a lot of those things. But kids, you know, they got to work pretty hard to get this stuff.

And yeah, maybe you should be paying attention as well. Well, you have to do it really hard by going to their website. I have got, I live here in the Valley in lovely Woodland Hills, California. There are six or seven vape stores in pissing distance from my front door.

And I guarantee you, the guys that work there aren't always checking IDs. It's just like trying to buy cigarettes from, you know, a bodega back in the day. And it's not hard to get that stuff. And especially in that age range, like, you know, a 15-year-old has 18-year-old friends because they go to school together.

That's true. You know, it's just like buying booze. It's the same thing. But, you know, if you're a parent and your kids are vaping and you know about it, then you let it go. Well, guess what? Get the kid a patch, get him off of it, and you're done. But suing the company, I hate these people that sue the company for selling a product that they know is addictive when they buy it.

Okay. So let's transition from a story about people getting pissed off and suing people for for a product doing exactly what it says it's going to do to a bunch of people that don't seem to give a fuck that the products being sold don't do fucking shit.

It's a polar opposite. They're all snake oil crap, and everybody eats the shit up. So New York Times did a big-ass long-form article about Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gwyneth Paltrow is going on the Kanye list of we're not going to talk about her anymore, not even in Moron of the Week.

She's off, but just this last time, and only because of one quote. The whole article's worth the read because it just tears her down and everything that she's trying to do. And it's not science, and it's a load of shit. These are modern-day snake oil salespeople, except they're making billions of dollars instead of being kicked out and run out of town when their chicken poop ointments don't work.

So the big detail in this profile of Gwyneth Paltrow is she planned to do a Goop magazine with Condé Nast, the big magazine corporation, but the deal broke down because Condé Nast insists that all articles have to be fact-checked, which you can't fucking do for Goop magazine because it ain't facts.

So she refused, and then they didn't do the deal. Yes, but she still makes a shit ton of money because people are stupid. This kind of reminds me of the Lifehacker articles that you posted at the beginning of the show. Okay, she's banned from this segment.

Well, I thank God that you put this one in because I had it in my two reads, and I just couldn't do it. It put me in such a bad mood. I figured that you were going to hate-read this, so I'm glad that you did. And I've had enough for this week.

So thank you, Brian, for exposing me. I took one for the team. I took one for the team, Jason. We have a couple new Patreon subscribers this week. Jim and Paul. Thank you so much, guys. Yes, thank you.

And over on Facebook, Tim Strange gave us a five-star rating and says, this has got to be one of my favorite podcasts. And he spelled favorite with a U, so he must be from a commonwealth country. Oh, yes, foreigners. Get them out of here. God damn it. On Twitter, Rosalinda writes in, cannot wait for my GOG podcast.

Bing, it says Bing listening. I'm like, oh, God, Bing has podcasting now? Oh, God, everybody's into it. It will be in the hashtag tub, hashtag self-care, and involve hashtag New York City pizza, or hashtag Girl Scout cookies. Grumpiness requires hashtag fuel. Makes perfect sense. Although, I don't know how you eat pizza and cookies in the bath.

Thank you for listening, Rosalinda. No good punk wrote us. The Department of Defense is naming their cloud Jedi. This is the most quintessential GOG story I could possibly think of. Contract Milestone brings Enterprise Cloud Solution one step closer to Warfighter. That's a scary title.

You know what you want? You want your Warfighter hosted on someone else's computer. Yeah, we're going to get to that in a second, too. Mod6502 writes in, love the episodes with substitute hosts, but super glad you're back together. Great show, as always. Thank you. Oh, thank you. And Christopher on Twitter, look what showed up here in the Midwest today, seemingly overnight with a smiley face.

And yes, they have been dumped with birds. Yep, over on GOG.show, Daniel writes in, data sale of your genetic information. Yep. Big Pharma makes $300 million bet on 23andMe. So they're getting some serious cash infusion over 23andMe. And Jason's data.

Yeah, yes. And Dino's, even though we don't know what he is yet. Jeff wrote it and said, I was listening to episode 266 with Jordan and hearing the usual Tesla and Uber talk. My Samsung pay gives me a push notification saying that I will get my first Uber ride for $8.

I know you continually say that my phone isn't listening, but I've never searched Uber in my life and I don't have the Uber app, nor have I ever. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Use Google for everything, including Golly Play for podcasts. Maybe that's why. Literally the only mention of Uber came from your podcast. Thanks.

See previous bit about Domino's Pizza being one of the biggest advertisers in the world. Yes. Also, though, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, which means it's Android and Golly Play for podcasts. Who knows with that one? Yeah. We were always talking about the iPhone, Facebook, that sort of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So that one, who knows? And T writes in, breaking researchers at CERN break the speed of light. And this is an article at physics-astronomy.org. Brian, what do you think about this? To which I would say, hey, T, thank you. We appreciate you listening.

Please check the publishing date on that article. You might notice it's April 1st. Confused Korean writes in, I've recently been hearing about the U2F security keys. YubiKey, I guess, would be the most common one. I'm wondering what your take on them is. Well, go check out the security segment.

We actually just talked about this, and that's right before this one. So you've probably heard your answer by now. Yes. I have two of them, too. Do you want them, Brian? You can have them. No, I'm good. I'm good. Jim wrote in, hey, guys, I love the show. I've been listening for a few years, but I'm just now catching up on some episodes I've missed.

Just heard Brian's story about accidentally teaching the little guy the F word. A few months ago, I was looking for a remote, one that I particularly dislike. Is it the Apple TV remote, by any chance? Maybe. And seemed to spend a lot of time looking for. I yelled to my wife, I can't find this thing. And my three-year-old son answers, Dad, do you mean the fucking thing?

I guess you'd heard me get frustrated with it before. Anyway, stay grumpy. Yes, I'm looking forward to these sorts of things happening with great frequency. Of course, of course. And I'm sure that it was the Apple remote, because I say that every time I look for the fucking thing. Naveed writes in, hey, guys, I love your show. Can't get enough of it.

Just sending over some pretty big news today at the company I'm working for. We've pretty much become the largest private provider of public safety services in the U.S. I was looking through this article, and I am of two minds of this article.

Naveed, congratulations. You're working at a company that is now privatized basically almost everything. All of our police force. And good for you. Good for you. I don't necessarily personally feel it's a great idea. I am so sick of the privatization of everything our government is supposed to be providing.

And it comes back to, you know, like, you know. Damn, Jason, I have been turning you into a socialist these past few years. Pay for prisons. Even the phone companies in prisons are merging this week. So, like, you get charged out the wazoo if you're in jail and you have to make a phone call. And these people only make a dollar an hour because they're working at the privatized basically sweat farms that these prisons do.

So, this is just, like, another notch in the belt of we've just sold the country to any big corporation that has some kind of crap to sell that people don't want to do themselves. So, good for you. Bad for America. That's what I'm saying. Oh, my God. I just said bad for America.

What the fuck is happening? I don't know, but I'm really enjoying it. And we got a five-star rating over at iTunes from Udro Poo. Simply the best. Love these guys. Enough said. Sweet and to the point. 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 a snarky review. Closing shout-outs! As most of you that have been listening know, I've been having a bit of a rough time of it recently. There is something kind of nice that kind of came across my eyeballs.

This old man's advice about dealing with death has been called the best internet comment of all time. I'm not going to bum anybody out by reading it, but if you're feeling a little bit down and worried about this sort of stuff, it's quite beautiful. It might be the best internet comment of all time. To be fair, that's a low bar because comments or sections are cesspools of humanity.

Yes. I did read this and a tear almost fell up out of my eye because R. Kelly was in the news this week, so I was thinking about trapped in the closet. And of course, I always have to, I miss trapped in the closet. That was his high point. But this was a great comment. It's great.

And something that I had to miss and that kind of randomly came across and got me all misty again. I miss Six Feet Under a lot. And somebody had posted or talked to me about Sia recently. I think a friend of the show, Otis, actually mentioned he didn't know that she sang for Zero Seven, was talking about that. And that made me go watch the Breathe Me Six Feet Under finale video again, which is the single best ending of a TV show of all time.

I went out and I actually just got goosebumps thinking about this. When the finale aired and that song came on, I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack. Yep. So there's been a lot of changes recently, specifically with me. I've obviously lost my dad. Yesterday was the last day with our nanny.

My kid is going to be starting school next week. Good friend of the show, Fergal. This is his last week here before moving back to Ireland. There's just changes left, right and center. I know. Fergal's leaving? Oh, man. Fergal is leaving. I haven't even gotten to see him since I moved back. Damn. Come down to Finn's tomorrow.

He's having a goodbye party from one to five. Oh, well, thanks for letting me know. Sorry, if you can make it. I've been a bit busy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anyways, the point being, and we threw this out to our Patreon subscribers, we are looking at our scheduling and trying to figure out a better, more easier way to do the show.

So we are thinking about switching the show into two different releases, one with kind of the more softer news, which is the media and all that sort of stuff, and then one which is the harder stuff, the more tech stuff news. So you would get two grumpy old geeks per week instead of one for the price of none, as per usual.

So that may be happening soon. If anybody has any strong thoughts about that, please reach out to us. Let us know what you think. Yes. And we've already asked the Patreon subscribers, and they get precedence. So if you have a really strong opinion, get a Patreon subscriber, and then your vote will carry more weight.

Just like at the government. That's true. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. It costs us a buck a month, and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 269. 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. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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