285: Don't Go Breaking My Heart

This episode is sponsored by Betterment. Get up to one year managed free by visiting betterment.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. I am recovering from one of the worst migraines of my life yesterday. Okay. And that's why the show was a little bit late coming out. And that's why there's a big truck coming right next to my studio. Thank you very much, neighborhood.

So in dealing with this, I've decided to start doing some research on it. Now, you said Botox was an option, which I thought was really interesting. That's funny that you mentioned that you were having massive migraines yesterday because I was actually supposed to have dinner with two friends, Helen and Suzanne, both of whom suffer from migraines and both canceled because they had migraines yesterday.

One of them, one of my friends, Helen, has tried Botox and says it works. I have another friend that also gets very bad migraines and has done Botox treatment. That has also worked. Another friend of mine has extremely bad migraines. A lot of people seem to suffer from this that I know, which is kind of odd.

And he swears by edibles. So I don't know if you want to go that route. I think I'll pass on that route. Me and pot, I don't do the pot. It's very bad for me. I'm a very paranoid person already, so I don't need that. But those are the solutions that I'm aware of for migraines.

And if you'd like me to connect you with somebody who's done the Botox, I can happily do that for you. I will take you up on that. But I'm also doing something else because as I was researching this, I slow down on the drinking in my old age. And because I came across something called wet brain. Have you heard of this? Yes, I have.

Yeah. It's terrifying. Yeah. It is terrifying. Basically, your body stops absorbing vitamin B1 or thiamine. And 20% of the people that get this die. And I've been a heavy drinker basically since I was like six. So in a scientific way, I want to get rid of all the variables that could be causing the migraines.

So I'm done. No, no, no, no, you're not. I have two pieces of advice for you here. I have to. Yeah, I know you have to, but cold turkey never works. No, it's not cold turkey. No, no, no, no, no. Never ever works. Not doing cold turkey. Also because Amy Winehouse scares the shit out of me because she quit drinking and died.

Well, let me give you just a little bit of advice and you can take it or leave it as it were. There was a period of time where I started to realize that the bottle of wine was disappearing every single night. And I was like, oh, time to knock that off. And obviously, cold turkey, again, doesn't work. So two options for you here.

One, get married because a wife is not going to put up with that shit. And that certainly happened with me. And the second thing that is just to slowly taper. Do not. My suggestion to you, get a decanter. I don't know what your intake is. Let's just say it's a bottle of wine every night.

Get a decanter. Pour out half. Again, you do your own math on this. Pour out half that bottle of wine into a decanter. Cap that sucker. Put it in a drawer so you can't see it. Can't think about it. And just, you know, go from one to a half and go that way. Because trying to do anything more than that is you're destined to fail.

You're going to wake up next to three bottles, empty bottles of wine with a big headache. I'm going to taper off, but I've got my method. I've talked to professionals on how to do this. And that is part of it. Yes. You know, slowly getting it down because you have you with alcohol. You cannot stop because it can kill you.

Right. See, you see previous comment on Amy Winehouse. But it's one of those things where it's like, OK, I got to get I got to narrow down the variables because as we get older, as we are grumpy old geeks, shit just starts to break, you know, and reading all of the stuff about wet brain, man, it terrifies me because you can also get dementia from, you know, too much booze over time.

And I saw what that did to my grandmother. And I do not want to go down that road just because I know what kind of toll it can take on the family. And, you know, it was really hard on my dad when my grandmother got it and she had it for 10 years. So I do not need that in my life.

So I'm going to stop while I'm still relatively healthy. OK. And maybe I'll drop a few pounds. Generally, you will. That way. Then I can get then I can get married because I'm not going to get married in the state I'm in. That's for damn sure. I don't know. You saw me. I'm not exactly what you would call a catch right now. There's there's all kinds of stories about how women prefer chubby dudes.

I have the double dad bod. OK, you have two dads, two dads rolling around rolling with two dads. But I'm going to put some links in the show notes about wet brain. So if you are a heavy drinker and you want to learn more about this and maybe stop it in its tracks.

Yeah, it's it's scary stuff. Yeah. Pop open a couple bottles of wine. Sit down and read all about it. Yeah. And then cry yourself to sleep. So I got my air on. It's here. Woo. Chair gate is over. All right. I love this chair.

It's not as good as the mirror, too, though. I have to say. No, it's not. No, it's not. I still have my air on down at my parents house and I've got my mirror up here. I way prefer the mirror. The thing I like about the mirror the most is when you sit like the panel that your butt sits on. Yeah, there's that part in the front that you can roll back a bit.

Yeah. For your legs. I love that bit because on my mirror, it was rolled all the way back. But I tell you what, this thing is quiet as a mouse, comfy as can be, but you just don't have any fart protection. That's the only downside of it, because if you if you toot, oh, my God, the whole thing is.

Well, you know, to be fair, you're alone in a garage. And the idea that you keep asking me to come out there, like, say, to record next Tuesdays is you're not selling it right now. Well, the air on is technically in the house. I'm a standing desk out here. So, OK, which which also has no fart protection.

Now that I think about it, somehow I have a feeling I'm going to be a little busy on Tuesday. We'll see. Oh, yeah. I'll skip the Mexican on Tuesday or on Monday night. Yes, please, please do. I don't know if you've noticed, but spam calls are way up again. We talked about this in the past and then they kind of went away from me for a while, but it's back to every day tax fraud calls.

And now I'm even getting calls in Mandarin. I don't even know what those are about. And it is my wife. She only speaks Cantonese. I thought maybe I got on some weird list because, you know, obviously my wife and she gets some Chinese stuff all the time. But no, you're getting them, too.

Yeah. It seems like really bad targeting. I'm getting. Yeah, I'm getting all these Chinese calls and it's from the same lady. And I don't know what she says. I need to save some and send them to Jordan Harbinger because he speaks Mandarin. OK, so I can actually have a voice message as well. So I can send that on to you because my wife is useless for this.

She's like, it's not it's not Cantonese can't help you. Yeah. Yeah. Jordan speaks Mandarin. So we can send them off to him and see what these things are about, because I was getting them all the time and I'm just like every day blocking another number, block another number. And now it's gotten to the point where I'm like, I just answer it to see what's there and then block it.

But most of the time there's nobody there. I'm getting five a day where there's no one there. I am also getting the same thing. It's tax. It's no one or it's or it's something in Mandarin. And my block list is now almost as long as my actual contact list. It's insane. My block list is way longer than my contact list.

That's crazy. Yeah. Now, speaking of China, we talked a little bit about Google and their Dragonfly project and the fact that, you know, a lot of people over at Google are pushing back and saying we don't want to work on this. We don't want to work on this. This is the search engine for China. This is the search engine for China.

The we're going to go ahead and go against all of our principles and build you a, you know, your own personal search engine that lets you control your people even more. They kind of found out that, yep, they're working on it. They're doing it. They're doing it. So according to representatives from Google appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Energy and Transportation earlier this week and basically kind of admitted that, yes, this is happening, but we don't know what the scope is or when it's going to roll out.

But we're definitely working on it. So that's not good. A lot of Senate stuff going on right now. A lot of committees and I'm a little distracted. I've got to be honest. We're 15 minutes away from the Kavanaugh vote and we won't get into it because it's not really tech. But God damn it.

This may be the straw that breaks this going to be a Canadian's back because presidents come and go. Supreme Court justices stick around forever. Yeah, that's the problem with that. They just fade away in 50 years. So but I have stayed away from that and I'm going to continue to stay away from that.

So I will let you have all the outrage over that. Yep. I will be waking up next to three bottles of wine. I've got some extra lying around, so I'll bring some over. OK. In the news.

Elon Musk is back in the news. Oh, no. Oh, no. Turns out the SEC is very mad at him. OK. They've actually filed suit against him for misleading investors with false public statements. And this comes this comes back to a tweet.

I'm telling you, Twitter is the most terrible thing that ever happened to humanity for many reasons, for many, many reasons. Let's just see. We'll go orange on that one. But, yeah, I don't know. What do you think about this? You're Mr. Regulation.

You're Mr. Regulation. They do. They have a point. But it seems to me there are far more pressing issues. The SEC could be looking into banking in particular and various other items. But, you know, come on. How many people were? Musk is always tweeting crazy shit.

We should be used to this by now. Well, and that's about it. OK, OK. I mean, OK, fine. I'm great. Fine. I'm that's the I'm totally OK with that. And maybe he'll be a little, you know, maybe somebody will take away the tweet bot from him. Yeah.

But that's not what they want to do. They want him to step down. And basically, it says the suit seeks to bar Mr. Musk, who is also Tesla's chairman, from serving as an executive or director of publicly traded companies like Tesla. Such a punishment is one of the most serious remedies the SEC can impose against a corporate executive.

Now, what what scares me is if this happens, does he have to step away from SpaceX? Yeah. I mean, in theory, right? Is SpaceX public, though? I don't think they are. Oh, I don't think so. So he may maybe he'll get to stay there. You know, and the wonderful move, because now you're going to stop one of the best innovators this country's ever seen from doing public companies.

That's that's what I'm worried about. That's that's just fantastic. Really well done. And what is it? He's done so much less than so many other people that got nothing, nothing. Yeah. Not even a slap on the wrist. 2008. Just go back to 2008. And did any of the people from Fannie Mae and all those people?

None of none of them got any sanctions or shit like that. So why are you going after a guy for tweeting? You know, I got to be a tweet hater. You know, why so much hate? And if we're going to go after someone for tweeting horrible. Things just say there's a better candidate out there that you can go after.

Just so stories, Jason, stories, Instagram stories, Snapchat stories. Now, Google is pushing into stories, even though they don't really have much in the way of a social network. So I'm not sure where these are going. So the photo and video montages are going to start.

Google is going to allow publishers to create stories that started back in February and get this. Of course, it's going to start using artificial intelligence to create its own stories that will appear in Google search and image results. The company will curate the stories using artificial intelligence technology, but we'll have human moderators check stories to make sure there aren't any glaring mistakes or issues.

Fuck you. That's all I got to say. So, yeah. So now when you search things for things on Google, you're going to get stories as part of the results. Great. Fantastic is that just now world needs stories might be the thing that finally makes me feel old and like I no longer belong on the Internet.

I hate them. I don't care about them. I don't like that. You can't engage in conversations with them as you can with posts on feed. All you can do is like direct message people. There's no public conversation that happens with them. I don't get the fucking point of them. I can't stand them. I don't make them.

I only view them because I get OCD and there's stupid red circles around them and I have to clear the red circles. I hate stories. I don't get it. I'm definitely old. I spoke to a millennial friend of mine who informed me that she likes to post stories because she can see who's viewed them.

So it's useful as a stalking tool. Did my bae or my potential bae look at my story? If so, dopamine hit. If not, sadness and increased effort and more stories. So stories are just even more fucking awful for humanity. I can't stand stories. Oh, my God. Yeah, the narcissism machine is heavy with stories.

And again, I don't understand it because the whole point of social networks is to increase engagement and there's no engagement with stories. There's no there's no commentary. There's no thing that follows on because you can't there's no public commentary on them. I don't get it, but they're popular. I know they are.

And I watched one for five minutes this morning while I was having my breakfast. It was Dr. Drew getting a PRP facial. I'm like, what? Why? Why am I watching this? Like, oh, it's Dr. Drew. And I like Dr. Drew, but he's getting a PRP facial. And I'm like, what? Why?

Why am I staring at this screen? And yes. And it was a half an hour like live stream that he did. And I was just like, oh, my God, I need to step away, step away. I stepped away from Twitter. For the most part, I've had to jump in a few times. Yeah, I've had to.

Mr. Mr. I'm getting off all social media for a while. See you later is basically just off Facebook. You're still posting on Instagram. You're still posting on Twitter. Well, the Instagram is easy because I have dogs and I have to post pretty pictures of my little dogs. And I've been dealing with the dog trainer. So things are a little weird around my house right now.

I'm not allowed to talk to my dogs for six weeks. So I'm not even going to get into that. But I will just point out. Make fun of me as much as you want about that. One cannot say one has quit Facebook if one is still on Instagram because Instagram is owned by Facebook. I guess you could say that it doesn't cross post to Facebook because my Facebook account is deactivated and it's staying that way.

How many emails have you gotten from Facebook? Zero. I've gotten none. Really? None. Not a one. Huh. Yeah. I have not gotten a single. Interesting. Hey, come on back and join Facebook again. I have not gotten a single one. Let me know when they come because they will.

I will. I will. Now, this is just this is in shake my head news. Spotify is teaming up with Ancestry to create DNA curated playlists. What does that even mean? That's a real title for an article about a cross platform.

I just I don't know what the fuck these people are thinking now. So if you have similar DNA to someone and you can share a playlist of music they like and that you might like to this. All right. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So basically it's going to split up my my cure and Depeche Mode tracks with some music because I'm German must must be must be this is the fucking stupidest thing I've ever heard.

That's why I put and we have talked about a lot of fucking stupid things on this show. I know this is this is right up there. This is just if this is some bullshit thing just to get press. Yeah. Dumb because nobody's ever going to use this. No. Yeah. Okay. I'm already worried about my DNA getting shared with, you know, the service that has it who they're sharing it with.

So I'm going to share it to a music service. What? Give you my DNA so I can listen to Spotify. Exactly. What the fuck? Oh, man. I know. It's just it's getting weirder every day. It's just getting weirder.

And now that I'm sober, it's going to get even weirder. Oh, man. Expect expect some more crazy news as this as this process happens. But damn. Yeah. So I updated to Mojave and Apple has made a big push for Apple News. In fact, I have to go and start fixing some things around my house because two of my iPads are pinging constantly because I guess that turned on automatically when I did the iOS update with the Mojave update.

Oh, it's so annoying. Apple News is going bing, bing, bing, bing, bing all around my house all day long. Yeah. Turn this stuff off. But there is a hope that this is going to solve the fake news problem because Apple News is doing curated stuff and it's on every Mac. It's on every iOS device and it's they're pushing it front and center and they're really hoping that you're going to get your news from there.

And apparently people it seems to be working. Business Insider is reporting that Vice's traffic is up. Other people's traffic is up because of Apple News. Slate themselves are also saying that their overall readership is up because people are using Apple News. So good. Yeah. The problem is there's no ad sales yet or no real way for that to work.

So traffic is going up, but it's staying within the Apple News reader. They're not going to the site. So they're still not getting any financial benefits from this. What I'm worried about is filter bubbles because, you know, Apple is all they're left, you know, so are they actually pushing news that's right as well?

And I don't want a news company run by my computer company. That's what it comes down to. Make me a computer. Don't make me read the news that you think I want to read. Period. I don't want it. Let me go find my own news. And that ship has sailed.

I know. But I'm just telling you, I don't like it one bit. I have deleted Apple News from my one machine that had Mojave on it, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So and I've turned off notifications for news long, long ago on all my iOS devices. But I still I can't figure out how to get it off the fucking watch because I'm still getting news alerts on my watch, even though I have it turned off.

Which one place I'm not getting Apple News alerts is my watch. That's the only place I get them. Everywhere else I'm getting them. Yeah, I've got it off of everything and I'm still getting them to my watch. And I'm like, the last thing I want is to read news on my watch. Period. Oh, I know. It's ridiculous. Oh, and let's talk about Ajit Pai, the big man with the big mug.

Yep. You want to talk about somebody who just needs to go away. This guy needs to go away. So the FCC finalized an order that will prevent city and town governments from charging wireless carriers about two billion dollars worth of fees related to deployment of wireless equipment, such as small cells.

And this comes down to the 5G rollout. Right. And what he's saying is that, oh, if we cut these fees, then the carriers will be more inclined to put cell towers in more rural locations. But the order has it says nothing about that.

There's no proof. There's no nothing. And the carriers haven't said anything about it. There's just nothing about it. This is just saving the carriers two billion dollars, which I'm sure as soon as he's out of office, which hopefully is really soon, he'll get a kickback from that. And there's just there's no proof that this is going to happen, that they're that they're going to spend any of this money that they save moving into rural areas.

They also take away a lot of the rules and regulations around what a city can do around making them pretty. You know, it's like, OK, if you want to put a cell tower in the middle of our town, it has to look like a tree. Nope. Can't do that anymore. So I completely took it away.

It's just it's unbelievable. The gall that this guy has. It's like, OK, net neutrality out the window. And let's just give back all the money to the carriers. And, you know, this is money that these towns need to basically be a town, you know?

Yeah. So it's just bullshit. Everything this guy does is bullshit. I mean, he's just terrible. He is terrible. I'm not a big fan. No. We've talked about areas of technology development. Like Toronto is way up in the AI and all that sort of stuff.

And obviously, we've got Silicon Beach and Silicon Valley here in California. There's a lot of stuff going on in Austin. But when I think cutting edge technology, Jason, the first state that leaps to mind is West Virginia. Oh, the the opioid capital of the world. Yes. Well, they have leapt far ahead of everybody else, because for the midterm elections, you will be able to use a Boston based startup called Voats votes with an A in it and a Z at

the end, because I guess we're out of words, because we're out of words and vote via the blockchain. Yay. West Virginia, a state where nobody has ever heard of. The blockchain or cryptocurrency. Now, again, OK, I have I have so many questions, so many questions about this.

First off, a listener, Perpetual Grumpy, wrote us about this very thing. So I want to read his comment. Hello to the king and prince of grumps. You can decipher who's who amongst yourselves. Longtime listener, first time commenter or some shit. I ran across this today and can't remember if you talked about it or not, but thought you'd find some amusement in it.

OK, amusement might not be the right word. West Virginia to allow absentee voting via mobile app during the midterm elections. Having spent several decades living in West Virginia before getting the hell out of there, I have next to no faith that this is a state that can implement this on a large scale while maintaining the integrity of the results.

Oh, but don't worry. They're using an ironically named startup called Votes to handle it, and it's secured by the blockchain. What could go wrong? A horrifically bad idea. That's all I have to share. Grump on. Yes, it is a horrible idea. How many tests have been done of this technology? How many rollouts have we done before?

I can't believe that we're just going to throw this in for an election without gigantic studies. Also, again, I have questions and I Googled this and I tried to research this and figure out how this would work. Because, again, the point of a blockchain is everyone has access to see all the information.

Voting is private. You are not supposed to know how other people voted. How does this work? If this is going on the blockchain and it's public, how does this work? How do we not see what and who people voted for? I don't think it's going to be a public blockchain.

I think it's going to be a private blockchain that the company can audit and the state can audit, but it's not going to be out there for the people to audit. Okay. I would hope so, but I've looked into this and I have found no description of the actual process of how it's going to go. None. Huh. Which is weird.

If you work at Votes, give us a call. Let us know how this thing works because we are dying to know. Yes. Uber. What have they done now? Well, they won. They won a big lawsuit, one that we had been following for quite some time and it's finally come through.

Uber drivers that hope to be treated as employees suck it is basically what Uber has said. A federal appeals court in San Francisco has overturned a ruling that would have allowed drivers to pursue their case as a class action lawsuit instead of going through individual arbitration, which historically favors companies over complainants.

So cited precedent as a reason, including both another ruling in favor of Uber from 2016, as well as a Supreme Court decision from May that said companies could make workers waive their rights to class actions for a number of disputes. So Uber said in a statement that, shockingly, it was very happy with the ruling.

Of course they are. Of course they are. So that's huge. That basically, you know, another nail in the coffin of workers' rights. So that's not good. You will never be an employee of Uber. You will always be screwed. But hey, they have to pay $148 million for their 2016 data breach cover up.

So there's that. Now, Amazon is rolling out yet another new retail store. We've talked about the ones before where you kind of just walk in and walk out and there's no transactions that actually take place and all that sort of stuff called the Go Store. Now it's launching another one called the Four Star Store, a shop devoted solely to products and popular categories that are either rated four stars or higher, top sellers or new and trending on the Amazon website.

That's not necessarily meaning that they're all rated four stars, is it? What could possibly go wrong with this? Now, yes, I'm obviously just too jaded anymore because all I can think of here is retail payola, right? Like you're going to pay to place your stuff in these stores. Yeah, because you're going to pay a bunch of people in the Philippines to rank your products higher.

That's all you do. Or just outright pay Amazon. Yeah. Make it part of the new and trending. Yeah. So that's, of course, going to happen. I will never probably go to one of these stores right now. It's only going to be in New York, but I'll tell you what I would go to. I would go to the George Takei rated store. Okay. So as long as we, if George Takei has done one of his ratings on an Amazon item and you carry it, I will go to that.

Sounds like a plan. Now we got a story from Nathan over on Twitter. Samsung Electronics Chairman Indicted on Charges of Union Sabotage. This dovetailed nicely with what just happened with Uber. Yeah. So this is in South Korea. He's been found in violation of South Korea's labor laws.

And basically they've been trying to ensure that their employees cannot get together and do any kind of lawsuits or, you know, collective bargaining or anything like that, basically killing the idea of unions again. So at least in South Korea, they said that's enough of that.

Well, that's some good news for them. That is some good news. So we're going to end on two bits of good news. That and WikiLeaks has replaced Assange as editor in chief, mainly because he no longer has any internet access. What? Yeah. So after the Ecuadorian embassy cut off his communications, they've acknowledged the fact that you can't have an editor in chief that isn't editing or chiefing.

Or chiefing. Yes, he's not chiefing anymore. So they have appointed legal project manager and Icelandic journalist, Kristen Hrafsnen, as WikiLeaks' new EIC. No word as to whether or not his cat remains on the board. This episode is sponsored by Betterment.

Get up to one year managed free by visiting betterment.com slash GOG. If you're a long time listener to the show, you know I can't get enough of that hot stock talk. I mean, did you look at Tesla today? I like to invest in the stock market. I'm always looking for a smarter, better way to do it.

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Investing involves risk. Grumpy Old Geeks listeners can get up to one year managed free by visiting Betterment.com slash GOG. That's Betterment.com slash GOG. Betterment. Outsmart Average. Security?

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

And I highly recommend it. This is where Dave kicks off his shoes and gets Davey in it. Gets Davey? I like that. Gets Davey. Davey. Wavy, gravy Davey. I like it. Yeah. Ooh. I know. I'm really, really enjoying that show. So keep doing it.

It's really fun. We're having a fun time doing it, as you can probably tell. And if you die, I'm just going to get Joe. So if you get hit by a beer truck, I'm just going to scoop up Joe. I'm going to scoop up Joe and bring him on. All right. Now we have a backup. He's going to hear this. You know that he's going to hear this. Yeah. One is none and two is one.

So now I'm set. That's actually an interesting idea. Yeah. And Joe could fill in for me if I ever do something crazy like take a vacation. Yeah. Or just stop doing this. Yeah, that's right. Your shows are doing quite well by themselves. Yeah. Like, oh, yes.

I piggybacked on you long enough. That's right. You plebes. Plebes, go away. I will wave to you in my rearview mirror. From my Bentley. My unhackable Bentley. Right. Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes. So, yeah. This week I gave you guys homework.

One of which you did it. One of which didn't. So we're going to talk very shortly here about Steve Rombaum. He always speaks at Hope. He's spoken at every Hope. And that's the Hackers on Planet Earth conference put on by 2600. And this is his final, final speech because he can't be seen to be associating with these people anymore, which is very interesting.

And we'll talk about that in a second. But Brian, you got a chance to watch it. You're like that asshole professor that assigns a hundred page essay right before spring break. Like, this isn't just a talk. It is like three and a half hours that you dropped in the day before the show.

And I'm like, I have a family and a life. And no, but I did. I put it on in the background. You know, I can't wait for him to put out a book. There could be a Ted's nose version of this. Actually, there is. You know, this is our show.

Right. He says everything that we say. So you just made me re-listen to our own show. But very well done. I got about an hour and a half into it. So I did half homework. So I get half credit. Oh, yeah. You get half credit. Okay. So the title of the talk is how your personal information is obtained and exploited to manipulate your emotions, your actions, and your vote.

And, yes, we have talked about all this stuff all the time. But basically, it's get off all social networks. Actually, just light your computer on fire and be done with it because there's no hope. Don't go outside and never talk to anybody ever again. Google is evil.

Facebook is evil. Apple is evil. Twitter is evil. They're all evil. And you're just giving away all your secrets. And you have no idea. None of us have any idea what they're going to do with all this data in the future. But you're screwed. Yeah, that's kind of what it comes down to with a lot of slides. I heard a good phrase yesterday.

This was on Twitter. I think it was Brian Green, or Matthew Green, the cryptographer from Johns Hopkins, said that trying to maintain your privacy online is like trying to keep helium in a balloon. I like that. It just leaks out. Yeah, slowly leaks out.

Yep, I like that. Yeah, speaking of things slowly leaking out, this kind of annoyed me. I know Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, known him for many years, had a very public feud with him way back in the day. Who haven't you had a very public feud with, Jason? Well, and does the other person always know that you're having this public feud with them?

I don't necessarily believe that they do. Who is this idiot that keeps tweeting me? Well, this was pre-Twitter. This was pre-Twitter. Okay. And he's the one that started it. Of course he is. So he did.

You should see the other guy. Yeah. No, I rebuilt the Locker Gnome website for Chris Perillo way back when, when I was working with Chris. And Matt's like, everybody should boycott, boycott Locker Gnome, because he rebuilt the website using tables instead of CSS. Talk about the most idiot nerd fight that you could possibly ever have.

Has he looked at the code for WordPress? Well, this was, this was back in the day, man. This was back in the day. Then when I moved to San Francisco, I moved, we, we both actually moved to San Francisco the very same day. And my friend MJ was like, look, here's what's going to happen.

You two are going to make up. So we met at a bar and we made up and we, you know, we're acquaintances ever since. You know, I've been to his house or his apartment for WordPress parties and things like that. So Matt's a good guy, but he did something very stupid this week. And I called him out on Instagram for it.

He said, starting the Camino de Santiago walk tomorrow. This is the bridge from Spain to Portugal. Matt is filthy rich. Yeah. Filthy rich. Okay. And he's posting where he's going to be. And I'm like, please tell me that your security is up to date and that nobody will see them because, I mean, just why would you do that?

Why would you post that? Because he is a prime target. Because everybody does, Jason. He's a prime. He's a smart guy. He should know better. And there he's posting other pictures along the way. And I'm just like, dude, I fear for your safety. But here I am telling everybody where you're going to be.

So maybe there's some karmic retribution coming your way. You fear for his safety. And yet you're advertising. You're part of the problem. Yeah. This is a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. By the way, everybody, this is where he's going to be. And that feud with him ain't over. Right. I still can.

Well, he ruined my trip to Big Bear. I was going to go snowboarding. And he ruined my trip because I had to stay home and rewrite the entire fucking site to be CSS compliant. But you're not still bitter. No. No. He's a nice guy. He's a nice enough guy for a gazillionaire. How about we move to stories that happened this decade?

Okay. Okay. Well, this is a breaking story. He is in Spain right now. So you can go find him. As you keep pointing out. Do you have his exact GPS coordinates? Would you like to add a Google map to the show notes? That's right. I actually could probably do that. I could figure that out.

Are we going to order up a drone hit on him or something? Well, there was a video of him washing his feet in a spring this morning. So I could probably find him where he's at right now. Yeah. That's how Instagram works. All right. So moving on.

Face scanning in U.S. airports. Now, we've talked a lot about security in airports in this segment. And if you've had misgivings about the effectiveness of Homeland Security's airport face scanning technology, let alone privacy implications, you are not alone. The department's inspector general has issued a report warning that the scanning system is struggling with technical and operational challenges, a.k.a.

It doesn't work. Customs and border protection could only use the technology with 85 percent of passengers due to staff shortages, network problems, and hastened boarding times during flight delays. They did catch over 1,300 people overstaying their allowed time in the U.S., but it may have caught more. And there were problems consistently matching people from specific age groups and countries.

Oopsies. So they're keeping up with it. They're going to keep working through it. But it's not they're not going to hit any of their target dates or anything like that. So it ain't going away. And there's lots of problems. Shocking. Shocking. There was a case a few weeks ago where they caught someone who was using he had a false passport.

It was an international traveler. I believe it was someone from South America. And the facial recognition pinged him for being someone other than who he claimed to be on the passport he was using. And when they pulled him aside, they found, I think, hidden in his shoe was his actual passport.

So, you know, there's a case of it working. That's why we have to take off our shoes. To look for hidden passports. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess it worked in that case. But I don't know how I feel about this. I suppose there's only so upset I can get about it at a location where we're already being scanned.

Scanned. Monitored. And coked and prodded and all that sort of thing. Reach around. Yeah. All that good stuff. I mean, this doesn't seem to me to be overly to be over the line in that situation.

But I cannot say that I'm I'm completely settled on it either. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I understand the necessity for it and the technology aspect of it and where you are, the context. But the things I always worry about is where is this data going?

And is it being stored? Is it being sold? Is it being anything? Who knows? Well, I also worry about how much money we're spending on it, because this is our money that we're spending on it. And I'm sure it is a boatload of money and it doesn't work. So. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Moving on to Facebook. Facebook has a lot of problems. Yeah. We had some breaking news today. I don't know if Jason had a chance to review that because I was not signed into the New York Times. But they've got a network breach, which we'll get to that in a second. What I thought was really interesting is you and I and Dave in this segment, we've often discussed doing experiments.

That we never get around to about different security aspects of things. We have great ideas. Wouldn't it be great if we did? That's a new segment. Yeah. We never put in the work. Yeah. But these guys did. This is us. Let's see. It's Cashmere Hill, which I know you love, Jason. You love her so much.

Oh, yes. Oh, God. Again. But she did the work, which we did not do. She ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. And he studies how privacy works on social networks. It had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways.

Specifically, shadow contact information, which we've talked about in the past here. All the different information that's collected by you from other people's cell phones. Things that you didn't necessarily turn over to Facebook. But they got anyways and attached to your profile.

And they found out that, yes, it does seem to be doing that. Advertisers can target basically your shadow information. So they found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about a new login to a user's account, that phone number becomes targetable by advertisers within a couple of weeks.

So they take it and they store it and they don't tell you that you're doing that at all. The researchers also found that if user A, who they call Anna, shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for user B, who they call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using that phone number about within a month.

So he can't access his own shadow contact information because that would violate Anna's privacy, according to Facebook. So he can't see or delete his own information and he can't keep advertisers from using it either. Raise your hand if you're shocked by this. I know this is an audio podcast, so nobody can see it, but I can guarantee you that nobody's hands went up.

It is fucked up. It is what it is. The one thing that I need to have here is we need to be able to see our own shadow information and remove it. Beyond that, I'm fine with what they're doing, but we should know and we should be able to edit it. I find this article, I think I read this yesterday, just thoroughly disgusted me and I think pushed me farther along the path of getting off of Facebook.

As hard as that's going to be. The thing that really gets me is using the phone number that you give them for two-factor authentication. You hand something over to them for the sole purpose of security. Yes. And they put that into the pool to make you a target for ads.

And I think that is disgusting. I think it's despicable. I think it's morally reprehensible. And to Jason's point, I think it's totally unsurprising because this is what Facebook does. And I'm just, I'm disgusted by it.

Tell us what you really think, Dave. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually just finished reading, what's that guy's name? Jaron Lanier's book, The 10 Reasons to Kill Your Social Profile. And I've probably been one of Facebook's biggest, well, obviously there's lots of problems and I shit on them all the time, but I talk extensively about how I enjoy Facebook.

And how it keeps me in contact with people. I wouldn't be in contact any other way. I do too. And I am getting pushed to that point where I'm like, I'm finding it very difficult to justify given all that I know and everything that we talk about on the show and you talk about on your show.

And it's getting difficult to justify staying on Facebook. It really is. Yeah. No, that's why I'm happy to be gone. And it's a couple of mouse clicks and then freedom. Freedom! Yes.

Yeah. The other thing about this is they talk about how folks who are under GDPR's protection. So if you're a citizen of the EU, one of the things in GDPR is the right to get the information that a company has on you.

And Facebook is resisting that by saying that, for example, if kind of like what you laid out here, Brian, if you are in my contact list, so if your contact information is uploaded to Facebook by me because you're in my contact list, Facebook does not consider that to be your information.

They consider that to be my information because it's information they got from me. But that's bullshit because if they're tying it to your profile, then that becomes that becomes a point of reference. I absolutely agree. Yeah, absolutely. You should be giving it up. Yeah. All of the shadow contact information, that whole concept is reprehensible and ridiculous.

What I hope is that the powers that be who are running GDPR will take this and dig into it and go after them. And the outcome I would like to see is exactly what you described, which is to say anything associated with me is considered me, my information.

And I have a right to see what that is and also a right to have it be erased. That is what GDPR does. So call the Internet police. I really hope that it gets interesting, though, is we'll say they implement this. You'll be able to delete that information from being attached to your account.

But I wouldn't probably you would who owns it because you would still have that information and about me in your account. I would just be able to remove it from my account. And what if somebody reuploads their address book? And again and again, and it goes on and on. Exactly. Yeah.

Where's the orberus in this? It's the right to be forgotten is how it's laid out in GDPR. And it's the ability to go to someone like Google and say, I want you to go through and scrub me from your databases. And so I don't know if there's an interval where every X number of months you're allowed to do this.

Or do they simply keep you in a database where every time you pop up, you've got basically a do not call tag on your on your name and they they blot you out. I don't know. But it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. And this also just as a programmer makes me think of, OK, so I need to create a database of people that I need to be forgotten.

And so anytime somebody uploads something that that is then forgotten. But then I have a database of people who want to be forgotten. Yes. So you have an entire database of basically information that isn't supposed to exist. Exactly. That's, you know, right. OK. Am I entitled?

Right. Am I entitled to see myself on your database of people who have asked to be forgotten? Right. And suddenly it's turtles all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a whole nother wrinkle in our ongoing conversation about what does delete actually mean? Yeah. Yeah. These things are hard and the feeling right now is that we're headed towards having our own version of GDPR in the U.S.

The Senate met about this this week and the companies from tech were there talking to them. And everyone seems to agree that we can't keep going on the way we are. And the tech companies want some certainty. And I think they're looking for some regulation. But, you know, time will tell.

Well, as my next story talks about, they are looking for some regulation, but they want to get this across the board quickly to stop states like California from enacting stronger versions. They want a watered down version compared to what California put through. So that is the battle that will be fought now.

So, you know, on the one hand, yay for the tech companies for recognizing that something needs to be done. But boo, because they're trying to make sure that it isn't anywhere near as strong as GDPR. Yeah, they want to be proactive and not reactive. They want to try to set their own destiny.

And they see where things are going. You know, something's going to happen. So I guess I can't blame them for trying to get in front of this. We'll just see. I don't know. With the current administration, I don't have high hopes for something being.

Well, well, this. There is that for me. I don't have high hopes, period. But for things being more consumer friendly than business friendly, obviously. But see our previous story on Ajit Pai and what he's done with the FCC earlier in the show.

Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, it is pushed to have something be federal rather than a patchwork of state laws makes sense as well. It just needs to be strong enough. It needs to be strong enough. Right. Because otherwise it's just like, why even bother?

And that's what they want. They want. They want a weak version, obviously, like you said. And we just we got to stand up for this stuff because it's getting it's getting to the point where Black Mirror is kind of like reality TV. And we kind of need to step it back just a little bit.

Well, just the simple fact that three of us sitting here talking about this week in, week out, who are pretty aware of operational security and are pretty involved with security in general are to the point now where we're throwing up our hands and saying we can't do this anymore.

Like, we got to get off Facebook. This is getting ridiculous. And what's happening with our data is just getting ridiculous. Yeah. And, you know, the three of us kind of know how to protect ourselves for the most part. And we're discovering we can't. Right. Well, it's just some anecdotal evidence. I know a lot of people who are, for a better term, Luddites, who don't really know that much about technology.

And even they're getting creeped out by Facebook and have deleted their accounts. You know, there's a lot of people out there who are listening to the news about what they're doing. And walking away from it, because that's all you can do is just walk away and stop giving them data, even though we know that they're still going to get more data. And why is that legal?

Why is that legal? I guess the thing that troubles me, and again, given everything we know doesn't surprise me. But what's deeply troubling is that there seems to be no one at Facebook with the power to say, guys, this isn't right.

This is simply this is simply morally wrong. We should not do this. And the attitude of Facebook seems to be that if we can, we will. And that's just the way it's going to be. Well, look at the, you know, the guys from Instagram who just left.

Right. They were just like, we're not going to do it. We're leaving. You know, so basically what you're doing is you're having a distillation of people who are morally corrupt, who are running one of the most basically the biggest country in the world right now. All because of shareholder value, because they have they are, you know, they have to provide shareholder value.

And that comes back to a long time ago discussion about if you got rid of that line about shareholder value and you did what was right, a lot of the shit would go away. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I when I think about someone like Tim Cook at Apple and certainly by no means is Apple a perfect company.

But there have been times when shareholders have said to him at shareholder meetings, why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing that? And his response is, I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't like it, you should get out of the stock. Right. Period. Well, yeah. And. I don't see that seems to be doing people like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, Apple's not perfect. And the certainly things that I disagree with the way they run certain things. But I certainly think that Tim Cook, for example, has a certain moral compass that evidence seems to show is lacking in Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look at the San Bernardino case with the phone. You know, Tim. Tim stood behind that. He's like, no, we're not going to do it. Right. And, you know, I agree or disagree, but I think he did the right thing. And so I think he does have a compass that is definitely pointing maybe not true north, but north ish.

North ish. More north than almost anywhere else in Silicon Valley, anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ah, Facebook. So let's beat up on Facebook some more. Sure. Why not? So as we're recording this breaking news, this was from the New York Times, that Facebook has suffered a network breach that they feel impacts up to 50 million users.

Drop in the bucket. Drop in the bucket. Well, one of the things I was thinking about was if your personal information is breached from Facebook, how could you tell? Because it's a feature. How would anything be different than business as usual?

Right. So, yeah. I don't know what to make of this. It's still really early on in this. I have to say I was a little surprised because I think Facebook is generally – this is not the thing I would expect from Facebook.

On the technical side of things, they tend to have their house in order, I think. Yeah, except they usually just give away your data for free. Exactly. You know, it's like, oh, here it is. Well, why would someone target – it's like busting down the front door when the back door is wide open. Why would you do that?

But all right. So we'll see where this goes. Again, you know, GDPR could have some ramifications depending on how quickly they revealed this and all that sort of stuff. They made 90 million people reset their passwords, so they're on it.

But I think one of the bigger issues is that the timing of this is just really bad. There is no good timing for Facebook anymore. They're just getting hit left, right, and center, and deservedly so many times. I do particularly like the fact that the vulnerability was introduced in July 2017 when developers updated a feature that allows users to upload happy birthday videos.

Karma! It's because we all love those things so much. Yeah. Yay, Zuck. Well, on that happy note – Yes, yes. I'm going to go deactivate my Facebook account. No, you're not. No, I'm not.

I'm close, though. That's the thing. If there were an alternative, I would be there in a second. But like you, Brian, I really enjoy it. I like keeping up with people and seeing friends and family and pictures and so on and so forth. But more and more, I'm finding I'm going there less and less.

I'm getting less and less value out of it. I even find the alerts I get on Facebook are less and less valuable. Oh, yeah. They're just crap. Definitely, especially since they've started rolling out all the Facebook Live stuff and you have to opt out of getting those notices. Right. It's just so useless now.

Can I give you guys a secret? Yeah. Ello? No, it's not Ello. What I've done since I've lost my Facebook account – I didn't lose it. I know exactly where it's at. But I actually call my friends and I talk to them on the phone. And then they tell me what's been up. So I've been on the phone the last three nights talking to friends who I don't get to see their updates anymore.

And then we talk and we'll – Do you know how long it's going to take me to call 491 people? Well, you're just Mr. Popular. I have three friends and it's very easy to keep up with those three friends. I find that hard to believe. Not that it's hard to keep up with them, but that you have three friends.

I know. I know. Two of them are dogs. Right. Well, there you go. Yeah, see? Actually, that's a good solution. And two of them sure as shit aren't you guys. Yeah. Just be friends with dogs. I remember when we did a show with Jordan Harbinger. He's like, you sure these guys are your friends?

I'm like, apparently not. Well. Dogs of Instagram. All right. Well, on that note, I will bid you adieu and I will talk to you guys next week. Bugger off. Catch up with you on Facebook, Dave.

Good talking to you, Brian. Apps and doodads. So, Brian, you and I both host Linode, right? No, I never ended up switching over. Oh, I thought you were still there. So, I was contemplating like, maybe I'll just get one of those cheap $5 a month instances and run WordPress on it for a couple friends that just need their site up.

And so, I did. I set up one of their nano instances. Well, that costs $7 a month or $7.95 a month. What they did, though, was they connected that to their new storage package, which lets you do, like, storage on the side.

And you can connect it to any instance. So, if you shut down your instance, your stuff is still there. And then you can go and attach it to another instance. They did that without me knowing about it. Guess how much that cost a month? A lot. $90. Way. So, I got a $120 bill for my other instance that's still up.

And then, plus that one. And I'm just like, ah, what the fuck? And they won't give me back the money. It's done. It's over. So, yeah. Unfortunately, I'm almost done with Linode anyway. I mean, for the main instance that I ran, they've been great for years.

But this one was just really tricky. They also have a new thing. When I logged into my account, they're like, oh, for new instances, we're going to auto-opt you in to backups, which you have to pay for. So, if you don't want them, then you have to opt out. Because, God forbid, we have an opt-in culture anymore.

Everything is auto-opt-in. Yes, it is. Yeah. And I did upgrade to Mojave. And I couldn't check my email for two days on my computer. Because AirMail, AirMail 3, which I use, did not work for a damn. They finally put out an update this morning that I got that's getting better.

But, I mean, I like the dark mode. But it's running a little weird with a lot of my apps. What's your take, Ben? It's been fine. Dark mode doesn't seem to work across the board. Opera doesn't support it, for instance. There's a couple different apps that I have that I'm switching from dark mode to just bright white normal.

Which is a little annoying. If it was all across the board, I'd be okay with it. But, honestly, other than the Apple News having to go in and shut that off everywhere, it's been fine. It's definitely, I seem to be running faster than I was before. I'm pretty happy with this update so far.

Okay. Okay. And there is a dark mode in Opera already that you can turn on, by the way. Yeah. It's just, you know, if you switch on the whole thing, the whole thing should switch over. Well, I mean, it's not going to change a website's default look. There's no way. No, no, I know. Yeah. Anyway, guess what's back?

Insta Scam of the Week. Okay. I was going around, and I saw an ad. Well, I saw a bunch of ads that we'll talk about. But the first one was the Magic Pill Lightning Adapter. Okay. And I thought, since you bought all those new cables from Amazon Basics, that maybe this would work for you.

Because it's a little thing that you stick into the end of your phone, which is basically a lightning connector. And then you can connect power and a headphone. Nice. They want $19.99 for it. Down from $49.99. Down from $49.99.

But you can just go to Amazon and get one for $8.99. Down from $49.99. Down from $49.99. Yeah. Okay. So I don't know if this will work with your case, but it looks like it might be a little bit longer. You can try it if you're willing to shell out the coin.

But I figured since you were talking about it and everybody listens to all of our conversations, that you would be getting ads for it anyway. You know, that's how it goes. I have not. I have not. Okay. So this one was just really random. I was scrolling through Instagram this morning, and there's an ad for a bulletproof vest came up.

And here's what I love. If you go to the site, it says, safe life defense for security officers, law enforcement, first responders, civilians, which is basically everybody. That's everyone. That's everyone. That was my point. I'm like, why don't you just save for everyone? But I'm getting ads for bulletproof vests in Instagram.

So that's where we've come. Again, targeting is going pretty well. Yeah. Love that shit. And so the next one I got, which was even better, it's called This Scope Will Freak You Out. Now, it goes to a blog page on Nomad Recreation, and it starts off with a video of two ladies.

I see a butt. Two ladies. I just see a butt. Yep. Sitting on a beach, minding their own business, and then they start zooming out, and you can see how far away you are from the initial thing. And it's funny. It uses a technology called optical stacking, which combines physical lenses with digital manipulation.

You know what this thing is? I love this thing. It's just a scope that you could stick your eye up to, but they've coupled it with an iPhone holder because you can put your iPhone up to any different scope. So click here to see if we have any left.

So I click on it, and of course they have some left, and it's the Black Widow V2 for $46.95. I've got to say, okay, I'm having a hard time with the world right now, obviously.

God, it must suck to be a woman. Of all the things that you could have used to demonstrate the scope, you could have zoomed in on a fucking bird. Yeah. You could have zoomed in on a car way off in the distance. You could have done anything. You chose, as a company, to create a video that involves stalking and creeping on women.

Yep. Yep. Fucking hell. No wonder women hate us. Yeah. I mean, come on. I'm telling you. This is a fucking joke. Like, this is actually upsetting me right now. I'm going to write this fucking company. No, that's what I said. This is ridiculous. This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

This should have gone a moron on the week. No, it should have. It should have. That's the next show. So then, of course, I did my due diligence, which I always do. And I found out that it was on Amazon. It was the Maverick Aviator Eagle Zoom Tactical Scope. So I looked at the reviews, and it's got three reviews.

It gets 1.4 out of five stars. Two one-star reviews and one two-star review. And it says, not a good product for me. The unit didn't work for me, so I sent it back. And the other one was, every review I have read on these says it's junk. Well, the company is junk.

So, yeah. And to get the full zoom, they're even lying about it. That optical stacking or whatever. So you have to zoom in with your phone. You're doing digital zooming on the phone, so the pictures are going to be shit anyway.

And you can also get their night vision app or plug-in. They call it the free bonus number one night vision plug-in. Which just turns everything green. That's all it does. It's like faux vision. But that was my third Insta-scam of the week.

All right. Well done. Now, we've talked in the past about K-Rock HD2. Yep. Which plays basically the music that I listened to in the 80s and 90s driving around in my car. And I think I turned you on to it because they play a lot of Oingo Boingo and stuff that you like from the past as well. Oh, wait, wait, wait.

Before you go any farther, there's another Instagram ad that I've been getting all week, which is Danny Elfman saying, come see us play at the Hollywood Bowl. Danny Elfman is looking scary nowadays. Well, that's a long time ago, you know. Man, he's looking scary. He's really looking like an old woman.

But again, the targeting is working phenomenally for you. It really is. They do. They have dialed you in, man. Yeah, seriously. Okay, sorry. Sorry. I had to. I remember that one. But go ahead. Well, Radio.com has come out of nowhere and snapped up a bunch of these stations and is putting them up everywhere, including they got K-Rock and K-Rock HD2.

So I know you and I were both listening to using it, Alexa, and we used to be able to just say, Alexa, play K-Rock HD2. And it did. It no longer does. Now you have to open up Radio.com. Wait. Radio.com app will then ask you what station. And then you say K-Rock HD2.

So just in case you haven't done that in a while, it's changed. You have to go through this method now, which is annoying. It's an extra step. Sucks. Okay. Screw you, Radio.com. Well, whatever, out of the deal, they must have gotten some money because K-Rock HD2 used to kind of just play music in a couple commercials.

Now they've hired all the old jocks, like the ones that basically were on K-Rock back in the 80s and 90s. So listening to it really is like being in a time machine and being back in high school, except I driving around a much nicer car. Well, that's kind of cool. At least, you know, somebody's getting some work out of it. That's right. Tammy Heidi, Freddie Snakeskin, all those guys are back.

Anybody that isn't on K- What about Rodney on the Rock? Is he back? No, Rodney's still on some weird local stations, same with Jed the Fish, which I would love to have them both back. And basically, if they aren't on Sirius XM's first wave, like Richard Blade is, they're on K-Rock HD2.

So if you grew up here in the 80s and 90s, all the old jocks are back. Oh, that's pretty cool, though. I like that. Yeah, me too. So with the app, I had to figure this out, too, because I used to listen to K-Rock on my Sonos. And so I had to go install the new Radio.com plugin into Sonos.

So now I can just go from my stations and hit on K-Rock 1 or K-Rock 2. But it does work if you have a Sonos. And it's pretty straightforward. The search is terrible, so it takes you a while to get it. But if you add it to your stations, then you can easily pop in any radio station that is on Radio.com.

Cool. And so I've got some follow-up on the Aura Ring. I've had some time to use it. It's pretty nice. I've got to say, the data that you get is pretty staggering. And it just breaks down your sleep cycles.

And it has different stuff for during the day. The heart rate stuff is a little different from what I'm getting from my Apple Watch, though. That's the real interesting bit. For my Apple Watch, my resting heart rate is like 99. And this one is hitting me about 15 points lower.

So what I do have is I have a blood pressure cuff in the house. So what I'm going to have to do for next show is I will actually put on the blood pressure cuff with the ring and the watch and figure out which one says. How many episodes ago was I saying there's no consistency between all these different apps?

Every single thing is I'm wearing 17 watches. Every single one of them is giving me a different count. It's ridiculous, isn't it? And it's not small amounts of inconsistency. No, it's not. It's a huge inconsistencies. Yeah. So I do have a medical grade version, you know, blood pressure cuff.

So that should give me a proper heart rate. And I can test both of them at the same time. But yeah, it's like it's insane. It's insane. And we're supposed to trust all these tech companies. That's the thing that drives me crazy. We're supposed to trust these tech companies. And none of them, all the data that they're collecting is all over the fucking map.

Yeah, it's insane. That's what you get. It's progress. They're disrupting. Disrupting reality. Move fast and break things. Yeah, don't break my heart. Brick a brick. It's that time of year. We're coming up on Halloween.

And I stumbled across this article on Mental Floss and loved it. The origins of 25 monsters, ghosts, and spooky things. Broomsticks. Weird. Became associated with flying because of witches' flying ointment. A potion made up of various hallucinogens like the fungus that grows on rye. Since ingesting the ointment orally led to a host of unpleasant side effects, witches chasing a high supposedly began to administer it through, well, other areas.

It felt like flying. So there's a whole bunch of things like this. And if don't you want to be the know-it-all that ruins a conversation, here you go. It's perfect. Love it. Now, this last one for Brick a Brack, a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, sent me this one.

And it is Vegan Black Metal Chef, Episode 4. Hail Satan. That's S-E-I-T-A-N. The meat substitute. Yes. Yes. And I even sent this to our friend Dario Rose. I'm like, you might get a chuckle out of this.

And she just wrote back, some people have a lot of time on their hands. And this is a black metal video about cooking. And he even has a website, veganblackmetalchef.com. It's entertaining for about 30 seconds. So I recommend you watch it for about 30 seconds.

But it was fun. It's entertaining for about 30 seconds. Although I am very curious about the Satanic Spellbook, which is their cookbook. I know. Although I don't like vegan. I'm not a vegan guy. But their merch is nice. I'd wear the sweatshirt. Yeah. I mean, they're doing it right.

But I'm definitely interested in the cookbook as I go more veg. But just like Ello, I see him more as a merch guy. Yeah. Yeah. Closing shout outs. Just a quick note on kind of the weirdness of technology and how things kind of linger around.

My sister-in-law is coming to visit from Canada. And I've got a phone sitting around here that I'm going to let her borrow while she's here so she doesn't pay the exorbitant Canadian roaming fees and whatnot. It was the one I got for my dad. My dad wasn't a big tech guy.

And he and my mom shared a cell phone until he ended up in the long-term care facility. So I picked one up for him then because they didn't have phones in the room so he could call me, call my mom, et cetera, et cetera. So I was looking through it, getting it, charging it up for my sister-in-law. And I have one and only one text from him because he wasn't a texter.

And I was looking at the phone and I know it's the only text he ever sent because I could go through and see it. And I don't think I can just bring myself to ever delete it now. So technology is weird. Fun times. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Cost 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 285. 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 on Thursday.

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