277: I Am A Cautionary Tale

This episode is brought to you in part by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. This episode is sponsored in part by Privacy. It's like a burner phone for credit cards. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, go to Privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up at Privacy.com slash GOG.

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, I hate computers. We're in the wrong line of business then. Wednesday night, my laptop just all of a sudden, this is my editing laptop that I basically do all my editing work on, just rebooted for no reason.

Came back and, yeah, was not coming back ever again. So I started to do the old, you know, okay, let's get the time machine back up going. Okay, oh, shit, I stopped it five days ago, so it's not really up to date. Thank God I work on an external disk for most of my stuff.

And I started to pull up the backup. Started out with 40 hours to go. Right. Then it got up to 72 hours to go. Yep, been there, done that. So eventually I wisened up and plugged it into the ethernet and plugged it directly into the router.

And it only took overnight. But now it's like, of course, nothing works the way it should. Right. Nothing. Ah, computer. So I hope you got some stories for me this week because I've been screaming at the freaking wall. Yeah, we've got some stories.

We've got some follow up. Going back to our DNA testing, there's an interesting article that was written by John Edward Terrell, who happens to be a professor of anthropology. So he knows of which he speaks that talks about his unhappiness with the with these DNA tests and the popularity that they're getting and the way they're kind of being marketed because they are reinforcing what he considers to be terrible and scientifically inaccurate concepts of ethnicity.

So he goes through these statistics and math on this that basically says, you know, once we get a couple steps removed from our ancestors, we have as much in common with Genghis Khan as we do with them in terms of our DNA. And what worries him is that these companies offer offering personal genetic testing seem to report back to those sending along a sample of their spit that they are a mix of different ethnicities.

This is more than simply statistical nonsense. He fears this can also be dangerous, claiming that it is possible to map ancestry in this passion, maybe giving discredited old ideas about ethnicity and race new visibility, which is something we don't need in this current climate, I would say as well. Ah, well, there you have it.

There you have it. So it's a really interesting article that gets into the math and specifics of it. So if you are considering or thinking about doing a DNA test and, you know, all of our talks about the security aspects of that haven't turned you off yet, go read this because because he's basically saying a lot of this is crap.

Go figure. Yeah. And on to my favorite topic, scooters, the electric scooter startup. Now, we've had some some major developments here. First up, we have Recode talking to a couple of days ago about the bare knuckle tactics that Uber used to get its way with regulators is not going to work for scooter startups.

Now, we all know that they're following the same playbook, as they say in this article here. The startups that put them there burden Lime employed a tried and true playbook written a few years back by fast growing riot hail firms, Uber and Lyft. Launch your service in a city without permission, become wildly popular with consumers and then ask for forgiveness when regulators try to throw you out.

When that doesn't work, send in your adoring customers to fight for you. Oh, and a handful of lobbyists. Never forget the lobbyists. Can't forget the lobbyists. Yeah. So things are different now. What has changed since Ubers did their land grab? Why do cities have the upper hand this time around?

They're arguing that for one, many cities are better equipped to deal with these tech species, invasive tech species, because this is their second time dealing with it. And they learned from Uber and Lyft. Within weeks, cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica responded methodically to the unregulated launches, and they delivered cease and desist orders, etc., etc.

It also helps that many of these cities have been through this with bike sharing, because we've all had bike sharing before these scooters came in. And scooter companies don't have the same leverage that Uber and Lyft did, because they just had more money. Right. So we've known all that. So what's been going on? Well, this week, Lime offered $1.5 million to the city of Santa Monica to stay here, which I like this idea.

This is smart. They offered one not as a bribe. They said, we're going to give you $1.5 million to help improve your infrastructure that will make it safer and better for these scooters. Smart. Well done. I like that. Yeah. Not a lot of money, though. That's kind of like, you know. It's not a lot of money, but Santa Monica isn't that huge.

So that's true. That's, you know, when we're talking about the things that we're about to talk about. So yesterday, the decisions came in for Santa Monica and San Francisco. Bird and Lime will be officially allowed to operate their scooters here in Santa Monica, along with Lyft and Uber scooters. So starting in September, only these four companies will be permitted to manage fleets of 2000 scooters and 1000 e-bikes in the city for the next 18 months.

The idea is that these vehicle caps can be increased after the companies demonstrate that people are using them frequently and responsibly. Oh, yeah, well. Yes. All four companies will be allowed to launch with at least 250 scooters to start. Lime and Bird will launch with 750 scooters each.

Lyft and Jump, Jump is the Uber one, will each have 500 e-bikes on Santa Monica city streets. Now, here is the fun part. This is where the $1.5 million from Lime is going to be helpful. In addition to partnering with a limited number of vendors, Santa Monica is taking some of the most progressive steps to find and fund for safe places to ride and park.

In other words, getting rid of the dockless idea. Cool. Which is all I really want. Yeah. So because that's the problem. The problem is these things are just dumped everywhere. So the city is creating designated sidewalk boxes for parking dockless vehicles in a way that won't impede right away and pedestrians and other cars.

And a proposal from Bird, so Bird is also getting in on this, to give Santa Monica $1 per scooter per day to pay for improvements, became part of an intentional commitment from the company to help develop bike lanes in cities where its scooters operate. So we'll see. Promising. Potentially. Potentially.

Wasn't that part of the thing that the Bird guys were trying to do and get the other scooter companies to sign on for? Did anybody ever sign up for that? No. Any of the other scooter companies? No. How embarrassing. Right. Well, they've got some other problems because San Francisco also finally made their decision about who's going to be able to operate in their city.

This is fascinating. Lime and Bird are out. Yeah. Uber and Lyft are out. The winning applications were for two companies called Scoot Kick and Skip. Never even heard of those. Never heard of those. That sounds like a really bad Saturday morning cartoon from like the 70s.

I'm Scoot Kick and my Skip. An early morning radio program, you know, one of the zombie ones. Scoot Kick and Skip, here in the morning for you. So, yeah. So, they're going to, as of October 15, 2018, they will allow a maximum of 625 scooters per company for six months and then will possibly increase the number of scooters to a cap of 2,500 for the remainder of the 12-month pilot program.

So, San Francisco basically booted the big boys out. Hmm. That's really odd. That really is odd because that's their home. So, I guess they weren't really greasing the right palms or have enough bad blood for operating previously. Without, you know, getting permits that they said, no, we're going to punish you on this one.

That's pretty interesting. I like it. I like it a lot. So, we'll see. I like the direction that this is all heading. You know, regulations, money, money put into infrastructure, people thinking about things, setting up. You know, they were talking about how even, like, in residential neighborhoods where it's really a pain in the ass to just see these things everywhere that we would, you know, at the start of every block, there would be a little space, you know, to just leave them.

That's where they go. They don't go anywhere. They go there. So, we talked about natural cycles a couple episodes ago, which is the contraception app for your phone. Yes. The pregnancy app. Yeah. Because I like to call it. Exactly. So, yeah.

The FDA said that they have clearance to market it as a contraception device, which is unbelievable. Same with EU certification. But, this is interesting. The company is under investigation in Sweden by the medical regulator after a local hospital reported a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of the app.

What? Don't. Who could have seen that coming? Literally. Oh, okay. That was bad. That was bad. But they were also trying to do Facebook ads, and Facebook said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do that either. But I just think it's funny that they're from Sweden.

They're a Swedish company. Yeah. And they have certification as a contraceptive app, which is just, you know, mind-bogglingly stupid to begin with. Yes. But now, they can get governmental approval, but Facebook says no. I love it. Well, Facebook is the biggest government on the planet right now, I think.

They truly are. They truly are. And, unfortunately, we had some Avengers news, because we talked about this when you were on with your review of the show, which was, this movie was shit. And I backed you up on that, and I said, everybody's coming back anyway. It doesn't matter.

So, apparently, there's a new theory out there, and I'm not going to spoil it in case people don't want to know what the theory is. But there's a link to BGR.com in our show notes that talks about how things might be undone. Because, you know, they're going to be, they can't kill anybody in the Marvel Universe because they make too much money.

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In the news. In the news.

Well, 45. Now thinks Google is rigged against him. Oh, God. In a pair of early morning tweets on Tuesday, President Donald Trump complained that Google news algorithm is rigged against him, and he threatened to address what he claims is an unfair bias that hurts conservatives. The tweets appear to suggest that the president had arrived at the conclusion by possibly Googling himself.

It's more likely, however, that he picked up the talking point and 96% statistic from a Monday night Fox News segment. As we know, that's where he gets all of his news. Exactly. Yeah. The tweets are the only the most recent example of Trump's longstanding theory that the media is biased against him. Listen, everybody. Listen, reporters.

We need to stop calling this the longstanding theory. It is his playbook. This is what he's using to get people riled up. He is doing it purposefully. He is not doing this as some sort of theory. He is doing this on purpose. He knows it's not true. Anyways, in 2017, he similarly claimed that Facebook, along with the New York Times and Washington Post, two of his most frequent fake news targets had always been anti-Trump.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed Trump's assertions and suggested that both liberals and conservatives are upset about ideas and content that undermine their political ideologies. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Even Trump's favorite media platform has not been exempt from his attacks. Last month, the president accused Twitter of shadow banning Republicans. So it's just continuing and going on and on and on.

And of course, you know, the Google results are rigged, but not against him. They're rigged to make money. That's the way it goes. That's the way it works. Yeah. So speaking of Google, they are expanding their digital well-being projects to show how long you've been staring at YouTube.

Rolling out as of yesterday or a couple days ago, I believe, there is a new time-watched menu that shows how many hours and minutes you have spent watching YouTube today, yesterday, and over the past seven days. There's also a weekly average to show you in cold, hard numbers how long you spend on the site. Stats come from your viewing history, and it's holed up across all the devices logged into your account.

So they give you four tools to help you curb how much time you spend watching YouTube videos. The first can be enabled to remind you to take a break. Then there's an autoplay next feature that can be switched off to help prevent you from falling into a black hole of content. And the third tool is called Schedule Digest, and when enabled, you'll receive just one YouTube notification per day.

That's nice. And finally, there is a Do Not Disturb tool for switching off notifications in the hours where you don't want to be disturbed, such as during the night. Alternatively, there is something called self-control. I was wondering when you were going to get to that. But apparently, we all need to be handled by our technology these days instead of handling the technology ourselves.

Speaking of, there is that new feature in iOS 12. Yes. That will tell you how much you've been using the phone and how many times you've opened it and looked at what apps and all that stuff. So I finally bit the bullet last night because none of my computers were working already.

So might as well just make them all broken. Take them all down. I installed iOS 12, the public beta onto my phone. So hopefully by the next episode, we'll have some interesting information on my usage habits on my phone. I'm really dying to try this new Siri stuff, though.

That's what I really want to try. Like, you can make your own Siri workflows and things, which from everything I've heard on other shows, people are just digging the hell out of it, and it's pretty cool. I'm going to give that a chop. But the interesting thing is, and I got it in my head to install the iOS 12 public beta after I saw a report on some tech blog that says, oh, a lot of users are getting this really

annoying message to keep updating iOS 12 every time they turn the phone on. And I'm like, oh, okay. Didn't think about that. Just thought, oh, maybe I'll try iOS 12. Yeah, every time I turn my phone on, it was cool.

The entire time you've been telling me this, in the back of my head, I was like, I can't believe you're doing a beta again. You swore you wouldn't do any more betas. I just don't care. I mean, I did not throw my laptop through the wall when it would not boot, and I really needed it to boot.

And I thought the self-control that I showed there, you know, I deserved some kind of treat. So I'm thinking, okay, maybe iOS 12 will just work for me this time. Because everybody says it's been great so far. As far as betas go, it's been one of the best betas of all time.

Until, of course, I install it now. It's, you know, flawlessly broken. Flawlessly broken. Flawlessly broken. That's another good title. Yeah. That's pretty much kind of how it works with me in these updates. And I'm still trying to get it to work on the watch.

But no luck there yet. No luck there. All right. No joy. Well, we have spent a lot of time on the show talking about one of our biggest things that we miss about the good old days of technology and back when we used to build things, the fact that you would opt in instead of having to opt out and how that has changed over the entire tech universe.

And it is probably one of the worst changes that's ever happened, as far as I'm concerned, because it just sucks. It's bullshit. And if you want a great example of how much that can that can really suck. Well, look at Australia. What have they done? Oh, boy. Oh, boy. They have a new program that they've started called My Health Record.

It's actually quite a smart idea. It's very much, you know, let's let's make health care more efficient. Let's allow medical providers to better communicate with another every everybody. Let's let's do this. Let's spend a lot. They spent billions of dollars building this digital health care initiative for the entire country. And unfortunately, they discovered that many citizens didn't care for it.

With less than 25 percent of the citizens signed up in the first few years, the government decided instead, well, we're going to make this opt out. We're signing everybody up for it. You're in unless you want to be removed. What they quickly discovered was that there wasn't really a good opt out process.

It was difficult, kind of impossible because the government already had health records for people and there was no easy way to delete them once they were created because programmers can be stupid. And, yeah, so that was that. So now the entire country is opted in and can't really get out, even if they don't want to be in it.

God. I don't know. People just don't learn. They just don't learn. No, they don't. But some people learned. I found this article over on Recode, and this made me very happy. Now, there's a whole new breed of entrepreneurs out there creating these huge consumer brands that are mostly big with millennials, MVMT and Tuft and Needle.

And a lot of these, you know, no brick and mortar shipped to you, product direct to you, all that sort of stuff. And a lot of these people are doing it without going and getting startup money. They're doing it the old school way, bootstrapping it and then investing in themselves. Right.

And only spending money that they have. What a novel idea. It is such a novel idea. You mean you don't have to, like, kiss VCs ass to actually start a company nowadays? Yeah. So this guy, they interviewed this one guy, Moise Ali, who started Native, which is a maker of natural deodorants, apparently.

And he said he was embarrassed mingling in the Bay Area because he didn't get money. And all they would do is ask him, who's investing in you? How much money do you have? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And he didn't do it. So his company has made money. He sold his company for $100 million in cash just two and a half years after launching.

And he owned more than 90% of his business. Wow. So look at how that works if you just do it the old way. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. And then there's the people that don't do it the old way. The FTC is now investigating a crowdfunding campaign for fraud.

Okay. Which one? Shocking. This one is called iBackpack, a smart backpack that included a mobile hotspot battery pack and connectors. I think I saw this one. Yes. They raised over $700,000 between Indiegogo and Kickstarter in 2015 and 2016.

Nothing has shipped. The only supporters only received some pre-release accessories and the Kickstarter's campaign's last news update was back in March of 2017. Some supporters have reported that their information has been sold to other crowdfunding companies. So they're getting deluged with, you know, the emails and spam about signing up for something else.

And it looks like the FCC is starting to look into this. People are getting emails from them now. And so hopefully, hopefully, these guys will get to, they got to find these guys. Basically, the guys disappeared. Well, his name's Doug Monahan and he's from Austin, Texas. So I'm just looking now because the Indiegogo page is still up.

Yeah. But there's no real updates. $720,000. Wow. For a backpack. Yep. For a fucking backpack. Yep. Kickstarter's awesome. Oh, it's so awesome. Amazon's awesome, too. I love Amazon.

But we've talked many times about how it's probably going to take over the planet and eat the world at some point. And Bernie Sanders seems to think so, too. What the hell is Bernie up to nowadays? I thought he would just go away after he didn't get picked.

He still wants to play. That's true. That's true. But he wants to start legislation against these giant companies like Amazon and Walmart because they're doing what he calls corporate welfare, which we have actually talked about on the show before, especially with Walmart, where people have to go on welfare just to be able to work at Walmart.

Yes. And Amazon's calling, no. They say bunk. No, prove it. Show us your work. So have you dug into this? What do you think about this? We know he has a point. Yes. I don't know. We know this is happening.

I don't know if it's specifically happening with Amazon. We've heard stories that people working in the warehouses and things like that are barely getting by. It's unskilled labor. I don't know what to say about it. We know it's happening. And Sanders has fought back and said, if your claims about wages and working conditions at Amazon are inaccurate, then prove it.

So they're both saying, show your work. Exactly. Amazon is telling Sanders to show his work. And Sanders is saying, well, you're the company. Let's see. Let's see what's going on. Let's make public the number of people you hire through temporary staffing agencies and make public the hourly rate and benefits these workers own. Yep. Yeah. It's funny.

Amazon says that the median salary at the company is twenty eight thousand four hundred and forty four dollars, which is less than Bezos makes every ten seconds. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt this is happening. So I'm kind of with Sanders on this. So I'm glad somebody is looking into it. We'll see how it goes.

We'll see how it goes if Bernie just, you know, happens to disappear one day. Lost it. Lost in transit. Picked up by an Amazon drone and flown over the sea. Exactly. I read an interesting article over at Slate because you and I both work from home now.

I've been working from home for nay on 20 years at this point, but I've been doing it a lot more recently. And it was just an interesting article for any of you out there that listen to us that also work from home are considering doing it about how it's changed the management and the relationship between the employee and the boss and all that sort of stuff.

So I just thought it was it was good info for anybody that's thinking about doing this. It's worth a listen to or not to listen to. It's worth a quick read. OK, I had man. I'm so on the fence. I mean, I hate going to an office. I really do because you're on somebody else's schedule.

I like having my time, but I am so sick of these same four walls. It's like, yeah, I mean, you've got to get out of the house. You've got to build that sort of stuff into your day. I mean, that's a whole different conversation and just about how you personally survive it. One of the things that they talk about most in this article is about how, you know, working from home, you're actually missing out on some opportunities because you don't do that bonding with a boss or a mentor that the way you would if you're in the office and seeing each other every day.

And you have to have to kind of force that to happen digitally, which is very difficult. So, yeah, it really is. I just yeah, I mean, I know that I've suffered relationships with some of my clients because I don't see them face to face often enough. Yeah, yeah, no, those relationships.

I have to degrade over time. I can I can totally stand by that. And it's it's a tough it's a tough thing to do. So I'm trying to figure that out myself, you know, since I do since all my clients are never around, you know, I barely see anybody anymore. And those, you know, it's just like you kind of lose touch and stuff.

Well, that's why we're going to a big conference this next week. We're going to Canada where I'm pretty sure they're just going to take us out in the woods and shoot us at this point. But pretty much this will be, you know, one of the last shows. And oh, Yahoo. Oh, Yahoo. I didn't know there's still a thing.

But, you know, Yahoo email, which has always been fantastic. Well, it turns out everybody else in the in the industry of, you know, email stopped reading your email to sell you ads a long time ago, especially Google. That was the big one. They said, no, we're not going to we're not going to scan your emails anymore.

Well, it turns out Yahoo still does. So if you're still at Yahoo for your email, you might want to reconsider. I mean, it's 2018. Come on. I think Yahoo is one of the only emails that I never had of all the big ones, you know, back in the day, because you just got them right.

You collected them. You got an MSN email address. You had a Google email address. You had everything. I never, ever had a Yahoo one. I don't think I did because of my Flickr account. Yeah, Flickr. I was about to say I figured you probably would for that. Yeah, that was it. I never used it for email. God, why would I want to do that?

No, but I've always had my own domains, my own email servers and my own Gmail account. So between all of those, I just never found the need for it. And I never had an MSN email address. Thank God. Never went, never went down that. But you were a PC guy. So I was a PC guy and you had to have it for certain things, of course. Yep.

And this one, this next story makes me very, very sad. Eight out of the 10 top universities are offering blockchain courses here in the U.S. So they're teaching Excel? That's it. Okay. That's it. Yeah, that's it.

I don't know why. You know, I know it's the big thing. Everybody wants it to be, you know, the next web, the next internet, all this digital currency. But it seems kind of silly. Yeah, I don't get it. I really don't get the... I don't understand why it's such a buzzword.

But it is. It is. I mean, it's a fine enough concept. But the usage case for it is so small. Well, not if you go to Silicon Valley because everybody's on the blockchain. And if you really want to... The main use case now is to get money. That's funding.

Just say you're part of the blockchain. Exactly. Let's put funding on the blockchain. If you want to go and get the most courses, go to Stanford. They have 10 blockchain-based courses. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you in part by Hover.

Brian, you and I have been buying domains for well over 20 years. And it has been miserable, hasn't it? If only we would have held on to some of those first ones we bought, though. Oh, I know, I know. Oh, imagine the monies that we would have been rolling in for about 10 seconds. But yes, it's been a miserable process.

Can you remember when the only option was network solutions? I do, I do. And it was just terrible. And you had to pay a $75 fee just to the National Science Foundation. And you had to have your own servers. Nowadays, you don't, which is fantastic. You need nothing.

You need a Hover. That's all you need. You need Hover. Honestly, when Hover came on the scene a couple years ago, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. This exists now? This is a thing? I can go to a website that is designed well. They're not upselling me on everything under the sun.

I don't. Yeah. Okay. Do I want t-shirts? No, I'm buying a domain. I just want to buy a domain. And as per usual, Jason tells me about this and I ignore him for about two years. And then I finally pay attention to it. I'm like, my God, he was right. Yes, I know because nobody ever listens to me on the first time.

So fortunately, this is not the first time you're hearing about Hover. But if you need to buy a domain name, you have to go to Hover. They're Canadian. They know what they're doing. They're nice. They have the best in-class customer support team that you will ever, ever interact with.

That's right, eh? Yeah, eh? I called them, eh? And they answered the call immediately. It was a real person. I did not go to India. I did go to Canada. And they helped me, within like five minutes, get everything done that I needed to get done.

To be fair, duly noted, they did not send them any maple cookies. No maple cookies. Yes, Brian. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me about that. No problem. And they've got this cool new Hover Connect feature that allows you to connect your domain name to like a bunch of websites with just a few clicks.

You don't have to go through and you don't have to set your A records. You don't have to set your C name records. It does it all for you. You know all those menus you have to go through with those other domain services to do all that? Oh, God. Try setting a C name. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

Oh, my God. They've also got personalized email services as add-ons if you don't want to go the route like, you know, we do with setting up our own email server like somebody I know. Because we're dumb. Or using, you know, those services that scan and read all your emails. Because you're dumb.

Yeah, exactly. But they also have free Whois privacy, which I have spent probably thousands of dollars over the years on Whois privacy. And they give it to you for free. What? You mean I could not be getting all those emails I get every single morning about my domain names? Exactly. Spam free domain registration.

Just imagine. Just imagine. And they've got 400 plus domain extensions to choose from, including the classics, but fun and niche extensions like .ninja. But I also just got .productions for JPD.productions, which is pretty cool. To get started today, go to hover.com slash GOG and get 10% off your first purchase.

That's hover.com slash GOG to get your awesome domain today and get 10% off your first purchase. Apps and doodads. I would like to talk about one app that could have saved my bacon that I do love and I do use a lot, but not nearly enough.

And it's Carbon Copy Cloner for the Macintosh. It is fantastic. You can dupe disks and set up schedules and things like that. And I usually use it when I travel. I'll make a, you know, I'll clone my laptop, make a secure backup on a secure external disk that, you know, is encrypted and keep that with me in case something happens to my laptop and I could have to go and, you know, buy a new laptop and reload the OS and all my stuff from it.

And when I'm home, I forget that I should be doing that all the time. So once I fix this goddamn thing, I will definitely have a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner going all the time and backing up all my disks.

I do that for all my externals already, but I just didn't do it for the main machine because I've got, it's always running and backing up all my external drives to each other down the line. So I've got three, eight terabyte drives that are in perfect sync all the time. But silly me forgot to actually back up the main machine that I'm using.

Great. Here I am just with an old time machine and I'm better, more secure than you. The problem with my time machine, though, is that I have to keep turning it off when we do shows because it, you know, it takes up a lot of bandwidth if it starts running while we're actually on the air. And if I forget to turn it back on, don't, don't, you find, I am just a cautionary tale.

That's all I'm saying. So Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to go. So quickly, I just want to talk a little bit about the state of Alexa and other voice, voice market stuff. Apparently, Alexa is losing her edge in the marketplace. Now, we don't know for sure because get this, Amazon, Google and Apple do not report the sales of Echo Home or HomePods because they prefer to shelter them from investor scrutiny and lump them into categories such as other products when they report earnings.

So we don't know exactly how much, but, you know, some people are able to go through third party market research firms, hints, tips, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But a consensus has kind of emerged on broad trends that we do know about. So apparently Google Home devices are rapidly catching up to Amazon Echo devices and worldwide sales and may have already surpassed them.

The HomePod isn't selling as poorly as some initial reports suggested. And Samsung is now launching its own smart speaker. And China is the fastest growing market for smart speakers, and neither Amazon nor Google are significant players there. So it's mostly Samsung and Apple in China.

So Alexa is basically losing the stranglehold. They had a market share of upward of 75% as of just last year, and that's gone. So why did that happen? Well, they say the secret to Google's success lies elsewhere. Big budget marketing. And the other big thing?

Retailers, brick and mortar. They don't like Amazon. They don't want to stock Amazon stuff. They'll stock Google's. Seriously, yeah. Why would we? You're Amazon. Go screw yourself. We don't want your stuff here. Yeah. So that's kind of what's going on there.

So interesting to see how the trends are going. So we'll see what Amazon does to kind of battle back on that. I don't know anybody still that has a Google Home, but I have been getting some error reports on some of the other shows I work on where they're like they're asking to play a podcast, and it's actually playing the wrong podcast on Google.

Really? Yeah. And there's really no way to fix it that we can find, which is really scary. So it's not good. Well, the problem with all these things is there's never any way to fix it, and there's no customer service to go to, right? I know. Yeah, that's it. So if something breaks on these things, it just breaks.

You can't go in and tweak anything. You can't go in and fix it. It's just it's broke, and there's no one to go talk to. You must be cated. Yep. That's the way it goes. So my kid has started preschool. I think I mentioned that. He's only been going for like a week and a half, but his language skills are just exploding.

So I'm going to have to start looking into some of these different parental controls. Amazon has one for their Alexa. It's a kid mode called Free Time. And there's an interesting article about this over on Slate that talks about how it works and kind of what safe for kid means and how it'll answer things.

And I like this. Everything that I read about it in this article, I'm definitely going to have to turn this on and figure it out because it does things like it won't say who Stormy Daniels is. It won't point you towards anything. It won't play music that has dirty language in it, et cetera, et cetera. It just won't.

It'll say, sorry, I don't know anything about that, or I can't find that, or it'll play something else, blah, blah, blah, which is great. But then the author of this article gets into a little bit of a weird – this article takes a weird turn for me because it's talking about how what would happen if a kid asked Alexa about Santa Claus.

And it doesn't lie specifically, but it's sneaky about it. It basically just kind of says, you know, you should talk to your parents and blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. So it doesn't really lie to kids, but the author of this article is freaking out about the ethics involved here and what these smart speakers should be doing to kids.

Are they allowed – should they be allowed to lie to kids, blah, blah, blah? I'm like, yes, they're kids. Yeah. It's fucking Santa Claus. Lighten the fuck up. Yeah. What's wrong with talk to your parents? You know? I'm not qualified to answer that question. Talk to your parents. Yeah. It's just ridiculous.

So I'm going to switch this on in the next week or two just because he's already starting to string together everything except for the commands. He's able to activate it and he's able to say the name of the song, but he always forgets play. I'm sure that will be coming soon. So I'm going to turn this on and see kind of how it works and I'll get back to all of our listeners about it for those of you with kids.

Get into it. Get into it with some existential questions. It's like, does God exist and things like that? Yeah. I mean, that's the plan is I'm going to switch it on at night at some point and just kind of run through some fun scenarios and see what happens. So something you may not want your kid to be seeing, but if you've got a fire pit or a barbecue or anything like that, I wish I would have had this back in the day.

These are fireproof human skulls for your gas fireplace, barbecue or fire pit as found over on Boing Boing. They're $65 each handmade from lava granules plus significant heat ceramic refractory. And they're available in black and white. I love those. They're awesome. OK, a friend of the show MXV.

You want to go click on this link and go buy a bunch of them for your fire pit right now, because this will definitely fit into your home aesthetic. It's very cool. That's pretty awesome. Instagram and their verification is back in the news. I saw this on The Verge. Instagram's verification system is useful, fair, and Twitter should copy it.

Well, because Twitter doesn't actually have one right now because they turned it off. Thanks, Nazis. And I went and I checked it out. And this morning I actually applied to be verified because that's the way it should work. You can just go into the app and say, request verification. If I'll be verified or not is a completely different, you know, it's a completely different beast.

But with all of the corruption that was around Instagram verification, yeah, I mean, somebody's really sad right now because they were making so much money pushing through those those verifications. And I know people that have spent $10,000 to get verified on Instagram. Bet they're kicking themselves now.

I guess I should do that for our account, huh? Yeah. Get on it. Get on it. Although I don't think you have a grumpy old geeks driver's license that you can send through. Oh, so, yeah. Well, then that's kind of useless if you can't get brands verified. I'm sure there's got to be a way.

Let's let's do some more investigative investigating on that one. But, yeah, as soon as I find out if I've been verified or not, I'll let you know and look for that checkmark. Me and all 700 people that follow me on Instagram. Yay. I've been talking with friend of the show, Seth Miranda, this week because Nikon has put out a new full frame mirrorless camera.

They've actually got two of them, but I want to talk about the Z7. It's expensive. It's like, you know, over three grand. Got new lenses, totally new mounting system and all this stuff. But Seth got hands on with this thing right when it came out because he's, you know, super pro over at Adorama.

And all week long, he's just been pissing and moaning to me about all of the haters out there about this camera because there's so many Sony fanboys out there who think that Sony, you know, can do no wrong. So I'm going to put a link to some of his videos in the show notes here about the Z7.

If you if you're interested in cameras and this new camera, it looks awesome to me. And he says it's awesome. And everybody that's used it says it's awesome. But apparently there are just a lot of haters out there. But it looks really cool. It's just expensive as hell. And I don't need another camera. But it's he does a great job with the video.

So definitely go check it out. Very cool. Now, I found one other thing online. I spent some time looking at this and it was awesome. We talked a while back about like the digital David Bowie exhibit that was out. That was really well done. The London Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum's website has now done a digitized Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and you can go through them digitally.

It's pretty awesome. Nice. I highly recommend checking it out. They've only done one of his notebooks so far, but they're going to do two and three shortly. They plan to make it all fully viewable by 2019. So very cool stuff. There's a lot of those codecs out there, though.

I know Bill Gates owns one of them. I wonder if he's going to loan it over so he can be digitized as well. He'll probably want it on Microsoft's website. You're going to have to get an MSN email address to view that one. Damn it. I have to talk to Clippy's Clippy. Show me Da Vinci. Yes.

Security. We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free community driven cybersecurity news service based in beautiful Maryland. Dave is also co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering.

Dave, what are the top stories from the Cyber Wire this week? Well, the top story, the most interesting story, I guess the most interesting interview that I had in this past week, I spoke with Andy Greenberg. He's a senior writer at Wired, and his story about the NotPetya attack came out in the past week or so.

You guys check this one out? I thought it was, I mean, this is a super interesting article. Like, who knew how in-depth all this stuff can go, how crazy it all is. It's just stunning to me. Yeah, Andy always does interesting work. He's actually got a book coming out next year about Sandworm, which is the group in Russia that they think is responsible for all this stuff.

And so the article itself is well worth checking out. It's a good long read. But a couple of take-homes for me that I found particularly interesting, some points Andy made in our interview. He said, for example, this was a act of war in that the Russians were attacking the Ukrainians using cyber attack and this ongoing conflict that they've been having with Ukraine.

And everyone else was sort of residual damage. It was, it only hit companies who had a presence in Ukraine. Yeah. So you could have a single computer in there. You were, it was this accounting software that people use, this Ukrainian localized accounting software.

And if you use that, that's how it got into your system. And that's how the big companies like Maersk and FedEx and so on, they got hit. So what's really an interesting takeaway, I think, is what does this mean for warfare? And it reminded me of a biological attack where you could have all the best intentions with a biological attack, but it can get out and it spreads.

And that's what happened here. The best intentions in a biological attack. Never before have I heard that phrase. Well, the bigger point is, do we need international treaties or some such thing in the same way that we have them for biological warfare?

Are we coming into an age where we need those sorts of norms, dare I say, in a world where we, where our leaders look at norms, laugh at them and throw them out the window? Do we need some agreed upon international norms when it comes to cyber attacks in the way that they could spread?

We do, but, you know, they ain't going to be coming from us. I think we've got to look at the EU and will Russia care and pay attention? And without, say, you know, the other biggest superpower standing up to them, I don't think it'll make much of a difference.

Yeah, it's crazy. Ten billion dollars estimated damages from this. And, you know, containment is not the strong suit in these sorts of hacking attempts. So they get out and, yeah, unintended consequences are or maybe not so unintended when the point is just to do damage and anywhere, really.

Well, and Andy made the point that some of the folks we talked to over at Cisco's Talus Group said that they wonder if this was also a way for the Russians to say, hey, you're doing business with Ukraine? It's for you.

Yeah, it'd be a shame if something happened to you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of that mob mentality going around right now, isn't there? So, yeah, I don't know. I definitely agree that it's time that there be some sort of treaties. This is this is the future of warfare. This is more damaging than biological weapons.

It's more useful to go after finances and businesses than it is after soft targets, as they say, meat. What's the point in, you know, actually killing civilians when the real power is with the money?

Now, it's interesting that there was there as far as they can tell, there weren't any direct fatalities from NotPetya, despite the fact that it basically shut down several hospitals in Ukraine. Right. So I but but it's only I it's only a matter of time, I suppose.

Someone's sounding a little dour himself now. Well, it rubbed off on me, Brian. I was in a chipper mood. I leave for two minutes and then everything falls to shit. What's going on? You got a little good show in there, Jason. Don't worry. OK.

The one thing that I would add to this, I have talked about this at length with Dr. David Teeter, who's a friend of the show and was on a long, long time ago. And, you know, some of the things that are happening, like, you know, our attack on Iran in the, you know, the reactors or the centrifuges that we took out.

Yep. That is technically an act of war. If you look at it on, you know, in the old school way, we did attack their their infrastructure. But since we're kind of in the lead right now with a lot of this stuff, we don't want those treaties out there because it kind of hamstrings us to do the things that we need to do.

That was kind of, you know, what we kind of agreed on after a couple of gin and tonics. So take that with a grain of salt and a salted glass. But it's it's going to get it's going to get messy. Yeah. And there's been a deliberate reticence to draw any lines in the sand with this stuff.

Nobody wants to say this is the line that that we will not cross. So that's a really good point, Jason. Well, that's fun stuff. Great way to lead off. More fun stuff. I really enjoyed this article over at Slate called Beware of Tech Companies Bearing Privacy Laws.

Now, we've talked a little bit about the California law that passed, which is the landmark privacy bill here. Not quite as strong as GDPR, but pretty good. Pretty good. And it's freaked out the tech companies. So as the article states, the Fox is a drawing up plans for a lovely new hen house.

The New York Times is reporting on Sunday that all the big tech companies are lobbying the Trump administration to start outlining a federal privacy law that would supersede the California law. Because they don't want the California law to be here. Great. Right. And you thought this wasn't coming?

Of course it was coming. But, you know, it's just it highlights everything that's really wrong. It's it's the lobbying instead of. And again, how do we fix it? I don't know, because the people in power, the people drawing up these laws don't even understand the technology at all. So to some degree for to them, it makes sense to go to the experts, these tech companies.

But we all know that that's not going to work out well for us in the end. Right. I do. But I do agree that there should be a federal law instead of state by state, because it is just going to become a miserable patchwork of fuster cluckiness. And, you know, but yeah, when the tech companies are writing the laws, that's when it gets to be a sticky wicket.

Well, and the article also points out that a lot of times what can happen here is that whichever state has the strictest laws, that becomes the de facto standard because it's easiest to it's easier for a company. Yeah, right. You adhere to that.

So there was a high likelihood that California's would become the de facto standard. And so if you're a tech company and you don't like that, well, your other avenue is to turn on that lobbying machine and try to get a federal law that takes better care of you.

Right. Yeah. Well, while I was rooting around in Slate's technology section, I brought up something that I think most people should know, but I just want to remind everyone in case they don't know. This is an interview with an IT guy at a fairly large company who basically says and just wants to remind you all that anything that you do on a computer owned by a company or using their Wi-Fi or using their connections or using their email or using their anything they own and they have the right to.

Right. And they can look at it and they can see what you're doing all day long. You have no privacy in the workplace. Now, not every company is draconian like that, but they can be. So just a good reminder. Oh, yes, they can be. Yes, they can. Well, I thought it was a great article.

Yeah. And even though it says secure in your browser doesn't mean that they're not basically men in the middling you at work. Yes. Right. Yeah. When I when I worked at BLT, that ad agency in Hollywood, there was a basically kind of a coup inside and half of the main staff was let go and a lot of people were left behind.

And what they did there was monitored the Wi-Fi. So and this great girl, she was she was one of the assistants, came in one day and her phone automatically connected to the Wi-Fi, which it did all the time. But she sent a text message or an iMessage more more to be more precise to one of the guys that got, you know, fired.

And within 30 seconds, security was there, boxed her up and threw her out the door because they were watching everything everybody did. And that's it. And she didn't even realize that she'd done anything wrong and was completely surprised that she just got fired because all she did was send like, you know, just a little text message to one of the people that were gone.

And they're like, no, you're you're given company secrets. You're out. So you have to be careful when these when these people want to watch. They can watch everything. Yeah. Yeah. Keep keep them separate. Keep them separated. Yeah. God.

Sorry, offspring. My 90s past comes back all the time. OK, so we have talked about the the I'm going to use the word because somebody pointed it out this week that I love this word. The kerfuffle between between Google and Fortnite and a real catty wumpus over there, isn't it?

It is. Yep. You have another sticky wicket. And the the boss over at Epic says, you know what? This big problem here is Google's fault. It's not our fault. When that hack came out, Google rushed to actually, you know, talk about the exploit before Epic had a chance to fix it in what they fixed it.

But as we know, with most software platforms, it takes a while for things to propagate, especially on Android. Right. And he just he called them out, which I thought was I thought that was a smart thing to do. And say, hey, guys. Yeah. The folks at Epic had specifically gone to Google and said, can we sit on this a little while to allow more people to be updated?

For everybody's sake. And Google said, no, no, no. You know why they did that, though, right? Why? Because because Epic went around the Google Play Store and released Fortnite as a side loaded app. So to them, they're like corporate warfare.

It is. You guys don't want to play by the rules and pay the you don't want to pay the ferryman. Well, guess what? We're going to throw you off the boat. Right. So that's one of the other things you get when you actually play by the rules is you get the protection of the platform. When you when you try and sidestep the platform. Well, the gloves are off.

I wonder how this will ultimately play out in the long run for the long term. I mean, obviously, Google's not going anywhere, but for the long term health of Epic Games, will they a year from now, will they look back on this move of sidestepping the Google Play Store? Will they look at it as being the right decision or not?

We'll find out right now. I'm thinking there's thinking it may have been a bad idea, but we'll see. Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. That 30% is a is a big motivator. Yeah, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Yeah.

And I guess kids don't care. I mean, that's who plays this game. Mostly the kids don't care about distribution or who makes it or platforms or anything like that. That that takes me back to my music days when, you know, when record labels thought people cared about them.

No kid cares what label their band is on. Nobody wants to come to your label website. Nobody wants your label mailing list. Nobody cares about the other bands. It's they want what they want. They don't care about the corporate overlords. Yeah. Another great release from Columbia Records.

Yes. Ooh, I suppose. I mean, yeah, that's it. That's really interesting point. I'm because I would immediately came to mind is Motown. And I wonder, do you just perceptions of organizations like that only come in the rearview mirror where you look back on something like Motown and you go, well, look at all the great music coming out of there.

And in the moment, did anybody care about that or where they just they just wanted to hear the next great song on the radio? Right. I think, you know, Motown is an interesting example. I think it's and I think it transfers to tech as well. I think it's only for certain like very niche things.

You know, like there are labels that are known to put out very, very good jazz or very, very good classical recordings, things of that nature. Right, right, right. When you're talking when you're talking something the size of a Google, like a universal music. No, there's no cohesive thing. There's nothing there. You know, I'm laughing because I'm thinking Wyndham Hill, Wyndham Hill.

I need my relaxing music from Wyndham Hill, my Wyndham Hill sampler so I can so I can fall asleep. Next up, Zage, I think it's pronounced Zage, X-A-G-E Security. We've talked about this company before. You guys remember these guys?

Because I think we couldn't remember how to pronounce the name back then either. This is the blockchain security company. I only put this in here because it's a TechCrunch article, but they have a new security automation tool. They say the blockchain helps ensure that if or when a bad actor does penetrate the system, they won't be able to move freely throughout the network.

If something does go wrong, then it's localized. If you have a bad acting node in the blockchain, it's detected and you can lock down that sector. It makes it much more difficult to spread the software across the entire grid or region. So how? Well, first of all, well, everything's better with the blockchain.

So everything is better. We might as well move on. I had a lovely blockchain gin and tonic last night. It's delicious. I don't know, but if you guys have tried this yet, but I had blockchain sex with my wife last week. It was amazing. It was amazing. Were you a bad acting node? Well, I can't get into details.

But yeah, let's say there was some heavy processing power being used there. Many GPUs were killed. That's right. I was actually talking to Dr. Teeter about let's put funerals on the blockchain.

That's the next one. So we can prove that you're dead. Yeah, well, maybe the directory for the cemetery you could put on blockchain, something like that. Everything's better on the blockchain. I tell you, I will. Next time I talk to Rob Lee from Dragos, I will ask him about this.

And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that he's going to laugh. But I will not take that bet. I don't know. Maybe there's something to this. It could be the thing that saves the world. But I don't know. Are we being too cynical that we've become anything that mentions blockchain?

We think we automatically think that it's snake oil? Yes. Pretty much, yeah. For the most part, yeah. It's just good reason. When I see blockchain, it's like seeing the word as promoted by goop. I'm out. As promoted by goop.

This does nothing. I'm out. Right. That's it. We're actually going to go on Shark Tank. And we're going to have an as-seen-on-blockchain, like, you know, new brand for everything that we sell. Right. Maybe we need blockchain homeopathy. Oh, there we go.

Essential blockchain oils. Right. Exactly. Ooh, blockchain oil. Now, blockchain goodness. Oh, God. So I saw this next one over at Ars Technica. Researchers find a way to spy on remote screens through the webcam mic. And, of course, this comes from Tel Aviv.

Actually, I was going to say, the thing that surprised me most about this is that it wasn't the guys from Ben-Gurion. Because they're- Right. I mean, yes, we have Israelis here, but it's usually the Ben-Gurion guys. But not the main Israelis.

Well, now. Yeah, so interesting, interesting stuff. I guess not surprising. Describe the story. Describe what's going on here, Jason. So, I don't know if you guys, do you remember the book Cryptonomicon by Neil Stevenson?

They talked a lot about Van Eckfreaking in that book. And that was the first time I heard about it. And it was basically using radio signal emissions from your monitor to be able to read what's happening on the monitor. And, of course, in traditional Neil Stevenson fashion, he went on for 50 pages on how this guy wrote shell scripts to fix it.

It was just crazy. But this is like an acoustic version of that, where they can hijack the webcam mic and try and figure out what's going on on the screen through the audio that's being kind of emitted from the monitor. It's just like, nothing is safe.

No. Nothing is safe. No. Two things come to mind with this. First of all, going way back into the back of the rack, the deep, deep stacks. I remember early on, the first computer I ever really spent a whole lot of time with was a TRS-80 Model 1. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was a program that Radio Shack sold called Dancing Demon.

And it was this little graphics thing. This little demon would come out and tap dance. And the TRS-80 Model 1 had no sound. So, the way that you heard the tap dancing was you would take a little portable AM radio, hold it next to the computer, because the Model 1 had horrible RF leakage.

Yeah, there was no shielding on that thing. That's why they stopped making the Model 1 and had to make the Model 3, because at some point the FCC came in and said, listen, guys, cut it out. So, whoever made this program figured out a way to make little clicky sounds using the RF emissions from the computer.

Very clever. Yeah. Yeah. Before computers had sound, you could just use their RF leakage to make sounds on an AM radio and dancing demon. Yeah. Which is funny, because when you actually loaded a program on those old TRS-80s, you were using an audio cassette for the most part.

That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I remember those days. I can – I know what that – I remember what that sounded like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, the other thing that this made me think of was they are, of course, using the terms artificial intelligence and machine learning.

But I think in this case, it's sort of a – it's an enabling technology in that they're able – they're using that to increase their chances of being – the chances of being correct with the guesses they're making as to what's on the screen. Right.

And I think that's interesting. Well, the only thing that came to mind for me immediately is if you're good enough to be able to hack into the webcam, Mike, you're probably going to get into the computer anyways. Good point. So, do we really need this? Yeah, pretty much. Well, but let me ask you this. What if you were able to hack into the mobile phone?

That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm like, okay, we just need a microphone in the room. It doesn't have to be the webcam. Right. Right. Gotcha. Or, you know, use some of the super crazy, super sensitive audio stuff. You know, straight out of Mission Impossible movies already where you're like – got that thing from like the football games with the big round radar looking thing and you're pointing it at somebody's computer screen from a hotel room across the way.

Yeah. There's the one where you can – my favorite is the one where you can bounce a laser off of a window. Yep, mine too. I love that one. The deformation of the window can be read and turned back into audio. That's a good one. And it's real. That actually exists. Yeah. Pretty cool.

Pretty cool stuff. Nothing is safe. Privacy is dead, people. Get used to it. And John McAfee's unhackable BitFi wallet got hacked again. Again. I really don't care that much about John McAfee anymore.

He just follows me on Twitter, so I have to like throw in some – Oh. Some stories about him every now and again. I'm fancy. Yeah. I'm sure he's checking in on you. Of course. Yeah. I mean, John McAfee and Kevin Mitnick both follow me. Both probably have never read a single tweet that I've ever written, but hey, it's good street cred.

Anyway, yes, his new wallet got hacked again. And have you guys – I think, Brian, you haven't seen the documentary on John McAfee. No. It's been on my to-do list, but I haven't gotten around to it. Dave, have you seen it? No, I haven't. Okay. Is it worth our time?

There is a part of the – there's a part of the documentary where his – one of his wives from way down south there talks about some of his sexual proclivities. Okay. And I don't want to go into – Is he on the blockchain? I don't – He's a bad acting node.

He is definitely a bad acting node. But let's just say she would like to do things to his face that would make his mustache smell probably not so fresh. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. So every time I see a picture of John McAfee, I'm like, oh, get rid of the mustache, dude. You know how they have flavor savers?

They call mustaches flavor savers? I do know that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. This saves a lot more than that, which is probably extremely unhygienic. So I recommend checking out the documentary. It was actually really good. I'll dig it up and put it in the show notes. With that recommendation, boy, how could I not want to see it?

Unrelated, my pub trivia team for the last six years, his name was Nerdy Sanchez. Nerdy Sanchez. You get my reference. So, yes. It's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Fun times. Quite a – The thing that I'm reminded of with this is that hubris gets you every time.

I believe that to be true. In my life, the times when I have expressed the most hubris about something, that is inevitably the time I get bit in the butt. And I think McAfee saying that his BitFi wallet is unhackable, well, it just paints a big old bullseye on his ass, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. All right, Dave. Well, thanks for stopping by. And we will not be talking to you next week because Brian and I will be being murdered in the woods of Canada somewhere way in the middle of nowhere. Murdered with blockchain. I was going to say. Yeah. Don't forget to pack your blockchains, boys. Take care.

Brick a Brick. Researchers at Harvard and MIT have broken ground, or as the article says here, technically skin, on a procedure that uses a special kind of ink to evaluate certain health markers. So these could be like smart tattoo inks, which could monitor your blood sugar levels and another tattoo that can measure dehydration levels.

And if the ink detects a shift, it changes colors. How cool is that? That's pretty cool. Now, I hate the name of the project. They dubbed it Dermal Abyss. Dermal Abyss. Why? What? Exactly. What? There's got to be a million better names for this.

This is cool. This is smart tattoos. How badass is that? Yeah. I mean, smart tattoo. Why not go with smart tattoo? There you go. It's right there. Dermal Abyss. So, and if you don't... What? Dermal Abyss. Yeah. I don't get it. Oh, God. So this is cool as hell.

I mean, once this comes out, I would definitely get another tattoo with this. It's pretty badass. They also are suggesting using an invisible ink that can only be seen when observed under the light of a smartphone for people that don't want to actually have a tattoo. Ah, pussies. Come on. Get some ink. Now, I've got great news for me.

I've been waiting, waiting, and waiting for Disney to open up their Star Wars land. I'm a huge Disney freak. I'm a huge Star Wars freak. This is everything coming together. I can't wait to go. And we got even better news. You beat me to the punch on this when I had it lined up to go in the notes, and I saw you added it.

I'm like, oh, Brian's going to love this. They will be opening up a watering hole, Oga's Cantina, which will have booze. Finally. For the first time in its 63-year history, guests will be able to enjoy an alcohol beverage inside Disneyland, outside of the very secretive invite-only Club 33 that is hidden in New Orleans Square.

Finally. I'm so excited. I bet you are. How many times, though, when you were a kid, did you sneak booze into Disney? Not very often, actually. They were very good with their security. We always drank in the parking lot. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. You pre-drink it when you pull up in the parking lot. Exactly. Kids will be kids.

Yes, they will. Now, speaking of something that I think you should be very excited about, because it's just in the nick of time, we are about to get on a plane to go to Toronto and then drive north from there to do the Fireside Conference. But what we'll be opening up while we're at the conference, so you can stop back on the way home, Jason, is an online—not an online—a sex doll brothel in Toronto.

That sounds like the grossest damn thing I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah. Would you borrow another man's fleshlight? No, you wouldn't. So why would you borrow another man's sex doll? So many show titles. So little time.

Aura Dolls, the company behind the brothel, states on its website that its vision is to bring you an exciting new way to achieve your needs without the many restrictions and limitations that a real partner may come with. I thought this would be right up your alley, Jason. Oh, God. It's slated to open September 8th. We fly back the 9th. Prices range from $80 for 30 minutes with one doll to $960 for four hours with two dolls.

Why— That's patreon.com slash GOG. Now, why—why would you need two dolls? It's not like when one's—when you're using one, the other one's doing something. Okay, we'll just stop there. We can just stop there. We can just stop there. Oh.

So Jason will bring you a full report on the first podcast after Fireside. No, we won't. No, we won't. I've gone down that road. That's—no. Patreon.com slash GOG. Closing shout-outs!

Now, I'm not a big fan of the Twitters. No, really? But I do have a trifecta of redheads that I'm a big fan of. Carrie Byron from Mythbusters being one of them. And she liked one of my tweets the other day. I've also gotten a like in the past from Shirley Manson from Garbage, so I basically have one left for my redhead Twitter love trifecta.

I need to get a like from Mickey from Lush. It's the little things, Jason. It is the little things. So congratulations on that. Thank you. And I want to give a shout-out to Clint Dempsey. He is retiring. He is basically the best soccer player the U.S. has ever had. It would be sad to see him go. He was a wonderful player and a good guy, by all accounts.

I've got a shout-out to friend of the show, Brian Schulmeister, for doing all the legwork this week because, oh my god damn, computers were broken. So thank you, Brian. I did all right. Thank you, Brian. No problem. No problem. It took a little extra time on my part, and I had to decrease my evening wine consumption to get this done.

But I'm happy to help out. Yeah, yeah, this is payback for when you were gone for a month, so this is my turn. Fair enough. All right. Until next time, which may be recorded on a plane for all we know, I'm Brian Schulmeister. Or from a sex doll brothel in Toronto, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

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