291: Disambiglyuationess

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you in part by ButcherBox. For free bacon and $20 off your first box, go to ButcherBox.com slash GOG and enter promo code GOG. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is also brought to you in part by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off of your first purchase.

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. A little follow-up from last week, Brian, or last show. I can't even remember anymore. These things get so discombobulated on when we're doing this. Yes. And apologies to everybody for the change in schedule last week. We just had some issues with recording that made it, everything just go sideways for a bit.

But we're back in it now. It's good. When we were talking about drones and knocking them out of the sky, you mentioned, you know, put something up around Disney. I'm like, oh, that would be cool if, you know, drones weren't allowed at Disney. But drones are allowed at Disney, and they're Disney's drones. So they kind of can't do that, I'm guessing.

I'm thinking they could. Why wouldn't you be able to do a geofence not letting anything in or out so that Disney drones stay inside and outside drones stay outside? You'd have to have special drone qualifications. Disney, they can afford it. I think they can manage to cover that.

I'm not sure who the Intel, I would say, I think Intel is the one that does Disney's drones, but I'm not sure. But I'm sure they've got to be on some kind of different spectrum. That's what I'm guessing as well. Because you don't see any commercial, any third-party drones flying over Disneyland. You would totally see them at this point if it was possible.

Yeah. Okay, so maybe they already do it. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. In the New York Times, I ran across their AI glossary. Oh, how nice. Yeah, I just was extremely frustrated reading this entire thing as I was going down the list until I got to weak AI.

And just the definition is perfect. Our current level of AI. The opposite would be strong AI, also known as artificial general intelligence, which is what a lot of people think that AI stands for. Which is why they're trying to do the disambiguation of the term. But it is so ambiguated at this point, it's got ambiguosity coming out the wazoo, that, yeah, we just need a sea change on the terminology for that.

Hey, man, we're in a post-fact world. Who gives a shit? That's true. That's true. Maybe somebody will write an AI that will come up with a new term for itself. Yes. They'll just call it Bob. Bob. Then Microsoft would sue them. That's true. Can you sue an AI? I don't know.

That's a question for the courts, I guess. And speaking of the courts, MoviePass's parent company is under investigation for fraud. What? Yeah. Helios and Matheson, the parent company of MoviePass, you know, they ran out of money because they bought MoviePass.

Yeah. And they were just basically trying to kite their investments, getting more investment in to pay off the old investments and, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And, of course, the shareholder said, excuse me, excuse me, sir. This might not be what we call kosher in the business.

Can you can you look into this, Attorney General? And they are. So the New York Attorney General is looking into them. So I have a feeling that somebody will be, you know, arrested for this one. Maybe. Oh, wait, I forgot. Nobody gets in trouble anymore.

Yes. There are no consequences. None. Yeah. And we also spoke a little bit about the Banksy's Girl with a Balloon, the half shredded painting that immediately doubled in value when it half shredded at auction house. Correct. Apparently, it was supposed to be completely shredded.

You know, it was given to its previous owner back in 2006. So 12 years is a long time for a built in shredder with batteries and a radio to sit in waiting for a one time use. So something, you know, obviously went wrong there. Now, what was your biggest frustration with this whole story? That he had an Instagram account.

Yes, yes. And he's supposed to be he's supposed to be anonymous. Mm hmm. And it's a verified account. Guess what else he has? A YouTube account. He has a YouTube account because that's how we found out it was supposed to get shredded completely. He put up a director's cut video. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to know how many people are involved with this because you can hear some girls like giggling in the background when the first shredding test works. Right. So there are there are a lot of people involved in in goody good old Banksy here. Yes. And as many people have stated, there is a thought out there that Banksy is involved or one of the members of massive attack.

There's been some, you know, some different things related to, you know, his artwork would appear coincidentally with their touring schedule, etc. Now, Banksy is basically known as a street artist, a graffiti artist for the most part. And interestingly enough, massive attack announced just yesterday that they encoded their entire 1998 album, Mezzanine, which is a phenomenal album, by the way.

It is. If you don't have this in your connection collection, you need to go get it now. But they converted it all into DNA and the album is now available in a spray paint can. Go figure. A limited number of spray paint cans will contain DNA encoded audio with matte black paint. Each can will contain approximately 1 million copies of the album.

You know, the digital bit stream of the album converted into ACT and G sequences. And Massive Attacks 3D, also known as a graffiti artist, said, it's an interesting way to vandalize your back catalog, although DNA encoded spray paint is unlikely to be adopted by street artists seeking anonymity.

Anonymity. I love that. I know it's early. Never say that word right. It's amazing. It's your crypto needy. It is. It is. So, you know, just interesting timing about street artists and graffiti and then Massive Attack doing something that kind of relates to street artists and graffiti.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really could point to a collective. I think it is. Just like Massive Attack is a collective. Right. Hmm. Now, where do I get my DNA player so I can listen to the album? Well, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Spotify.

Oh, DNA base playlist. We already talked about that. Yeah. Maybe I can send it to 23andMe and they can send me a USB stick. Yes. There you go. And you can plug it right up your ass. Lovely. We have a little local news. I felt bad not having any bird or lime scooters or anything like that in the news recently.

But never feel Venice. Never feel bad about that. Please. You know, Venice, which is like a little local microblog news thing, has reported that eight scooters have been dumped into Venice's Grand Canal. And now, unfortunately, these scooters are polluting the water and that dead fish could be seen under the scooters. This is not the first time that people have dumped scooters in such a manner.

And they go on about how Venice's residents are so fed up with this. But please, let's not vandalize things and kill animals. It's a really dumb thing to do, actually, because, you know, lithium ion batteries, big ones are in these things. Yes. Let's not dump them in the ocean, people.

Yeah. Just throw them in trash cans like everybody else does. Yep. And recently we've been going back to the problem with all the streaming accounts and everybody having their own streaming service. And, you know, we've been saying it for a couple of years that this is going to happen where everybody's going to have their own streaming service and it's going to cost more than just having cable.

Yep. Well, TechDirt has an article and it's from the from the history repeats itself department. And studies have suggested that every broadcaster on the planet will likely have their own streaming service by 2022. And what that's doing? Guess what that's doing?

It's it's it's making it more expensive than cable was. Exactly. Exactly. But it's also sending more people to Sweden. Yes. Torrenting has seen an uptick after a, you know, a historic dive that it's been taking because because, you know, people did have a way to buy the stuff.

But now people are getting frustrated because there are too many services. So people are resorting to piracy again. Yes. The great unbundling is never really actually happened very well. And now we can see where it's going. And it's yeah, it's definitely like I'm not going to pay six bucks here, seven bucks here, twelve bucks there.

Nineteen ninety five a month there. Screw that. I'm just going to get it for free. They need to unbungle the unbundling. Yes. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you in part by ButcherBox. ButcherBox. Who doesn't love ButcherBox? It seems like today everybody's either doing the keto or the no sugar, no grain diets.

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In the news.

There's a great story in Wired this week called Drivers Wildly Overestimate What Semi-Autonomous Cars Can Do. Because people can't read the fine print. And it's interesting that I think it was 75% of the people that they surveyed think that self, like self, semi-autonomous cars, I mean, can actually drive themselves.

That's 70%, yeah. Right. They think that fully autonomous cars actually exist. Right. They don't. No, they don't. And it's an interesting read because they actually go through some of the issues that are going around right now and kind of label the cars that can and can't do certain things.

Right. Which is pretty good. It's pretty good. I love this. 11% said they'd be tempted to have a nap, read a paper, or watch a film while using one of the highway-assisted features available today. Even though every automaker peddling the tech requires drivers to pay attention on the road at all times, it's really worrying that consumers are believing the hype.

Don't believe the hype, people. Don't believe the hype. That is the big problem. I mean, we're seeing this happen all the time. We're seeing people watching movies instead of driving. What the hell are you doing, people? Well, they're dying. The guy that was. Yeah. Although it was, I guess it was debunked that the one guy was watching a Harry Potter movie. Right.

Yeah. That was debunked. But he was in a Tesla. And now Tesla has come out with a new option for the Model 3, a cheaper option. But when doing that, they quietly dropped the full self-driving option because they labeled it as causing too much confusion, says Elon Musk.

He's doing the right thing there. He's going against the hype. He's saying it is not a self-driving car. Yeah. Pay attention. I think he reads Wired. Yes. That's probably where that comes from. Yes. When he's stoned and not tweeting. Yeah. And there's a new lawsuit this week that I thought was pretty interesting. eBay is accusing Amazon of illegally poaching their sellers, like their power sellers, the people who just have tons of crap and just put it up, you know, buy now.

Buttons on eBay. Well, apparently at least 50 Amazon reps from all over the world, including the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Australia, and Singapore, were using, like, the DM function on eBay to try and pull away the big sellers and bring them over to Amazon.

Okay. And I'm thinking, okay, why is there a lawsuit here? But turns out- Me too. It's against the terms of service. You're not allowed to do that. Ah, you can't contact them using their own messaging system to try to get them to go somewhere else. Right. You can only contact people about stuff that's happening on eBay.

But the other interesting part is- Those pesky TOSs. Yep. Yep. The TOS is usually a POS. But it also tells me that eBay is reading your mail. Yes. Yes, they are. Yeah. So don't be sending any nudes through the eBay DM service or trying to- Yeah, the proper way to do it on eBay is to take a picture of a shiny object while you're naked.

Yep. We all know this. I mean, it's classic eBay. Everybody should know that. That's how you get your junk out there on eBay. Exactly. Besides the junk that you're selling, it's junk. Yes. It's junk all the way down. It's meta junk. Now, it's another week.

So obviously, Facebook is in trouble for something new this time. This one's a big one, though. Oh, a big one. Yeah. Well, this is one that you and I have been complaining about. The pivot to video. Yep. So this article says, once again, the media is righteously furious with Facebook, this time for allegedly misleading advertisers as to how many people were watching videos on the social network.

So basically, they did back in 2015. That's when they started the big push to video. Yep. And kind of ruined everything because nobody wants to watch these stupid short videos. I want a headline and I want a top paragraph to know what the story is. I don't want to have to watch a produced video.

But Facebook told all the publishers that the metrics were unbelievable. What do we always say about analytics on this show, Jason? They're bullshit. And they were bullshit. In fact, this time, they weren't just kind of bullshit. They lied on purpose.

And they knew it. And they pushed everybody to do this. And as a result, guess what? A bunch of journalists got fired as advertising budgets moved towards video. And all these stupid video things were being created instead of actual real journalism. And we're in the shit show that we are now.

Thanks a lot. Again, Facebook. Yeah, this company has done nothing good for the world. Nothing. Yeah. Yes. So one of the things that they did was they had a key metric, which was average video, average duration of video viewed. The problem was Facebook only counted views longer than three seconds in its average.

So they completely ignored the vast majority of people who were totally ignoring and scrolling past the videos and not watching them at all. Yep. That's going to change your numbers quite a bit. You think? Unbelievable. Like, this is the one. This one actually upsets me more than any of the other stupid shit that Facebook has done.

Data, privacy concerns. We knew what we were getting into, getting hacked, shocking. Nothing is unhackable. We know that. This is flat out bullshit that has changed the entire face of the internet. Well, it's fraud. I mean, it's not bullshit.

It's fraud. So they need to be held accountable for this. They need to have their feet held to the fire. Well, they're being sued. Hopefully by everybody. Whoever spent money on that. I want a class action. Yeah, seriously. If you've ever watched a video on Facebook, here's your two cents.

Yep. Oh, man. No, this is one of the big ones. Yeah. And hopefully. It's not good. Yeah, I mean, it's coming from the advertisers who are filing the lawsuit, but this is crazy. It is crazy. Zuck, what are you doing?

Oh, I know what he's doing. He's taking all of his money and putting it into Opportunity Zones. Have you ever heard of Opportunity Zones? No, but I know Sean Parker's involved in it, which means it's probably bullshit. Yes. He crafted a little known part of the tax code called Opportunity Zones, and now every one percenter in Silicon Valley wants in.

And what it is, it's basically a way to create tax havens for your money and get really good PR, and everybody wants in on it that has a bunch of money so they can avoid paying taxes because they don't have enough money already, apparently. I don't understand it, but.

How the hell is Sean Parker crafting any kind of tax legislation to begin with? You know. Who approved this? Lobbying. Probably lobbying. And it's incredible. Like, you know, the ability to defer paying capital gains tax through 2026 after selling your company, for instance, appetizing the chance not to pay any capital gains tax on any money you make on top of that payday if it's invested in an Opportunity Zone, the real ka-ching.

Awesome. Yep. And I know somebody who actually just moved to Texas to avoid paying taxes. Go figure that. We will not name names on that one, but you know who I'm talking about. The rich get richer because they know what to do. Yeah, and they can afford to do it. And they can afford to do it. Yeah. And I do know who you're talking about.

Well, there's some more shenanigans going on over at Microsoft. A Microsoft executive allegedly attempted to embezzle $1.5 million. Million. Jeff Tran, the former director of sports marketing and alliances, was charged with five counts of wire fraud this week for allegedly trying to embezzle $1.5 million from Microsoft.

He's also accused of stealing and selling more than 60 Super Bowl tickets belonging to Microsoft, pocketing over $200,000 in the process. Well. Bye-bye. You got busted. Yeah. Oh, man. And, well, he can get a job when he gets out of jail because Uber is now testing an on-demand staffing service.

Just what we needed. Yeah. I love this. This is an article I found in Engadget. It's like, and it's called Uber Works. And so they say right at the beginning because they know what's going to happen here. It's like, cue the Uber Works. No, it doesn't, jokes. Yes. And, yeah, they're trying to become the Amazon of services, they say.

That's great. Yeah. So you can't just get a job anymore. Now you have to get a job through Uber and then they take even more of your money. Job listings indicate the company is looking for people who are willing to be on call during the busy periods of nights, weekends, and holidays and who have a strong interest in the on-demand labor space. Nobody has an interest in, a strong interest in the on-demand labor space.

They have a strong interest in getting paid because they can't find any fucking work anymore. Yeah. Or side hustle because, you know, they got fired from their regular job and now this is all they have left. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. We'll see how this one plays out. Where we're going. It's been working in Chicago and they did do a trial run here in L.A., so expect this to be rolling out soon.

Yay, Uber Works. Oh, here's the other one, though. Uber Works will let companies recruit short-term workers such as security guards. Just what you want, a short-term on-demand security guard. Exactly.

Look, we can't trust a Microsoft executive that was getting an amazing paycheck. We're going to trust an on-demand security guard. We know how good their background vetting is, you know? Now, I never really knew how to pronounce this company's name. If it's Withings or Y-Things, I always just say Withings because it sounds like a snooty European butler.

Withings, I'd like some tea. Withings, call me a delivery. That's kind of what it goes with. But the founder of Withings bought his company back from Nokia not too long ago because it didn't do too well over there. And now they're, of course, getting into the e-bike business.

Okay. And it's called ZOOV because we're out of words. We're totally out of words. Zizzix is my new company. Well, these guys have a stationed e-bike sharing system, which is good. Good.

Stations. And what they're doing is really cool because they're like really compacted stations. It's like you can put 20 bikes in the size of a parking space. And they're all kind of jammed together. And, you know, you just pull one off the end and kind of go with it.

It's not like the ones now where you have to like, you know, with the ones that were in Chicago. But, you know, you could pick anyone that's in the rack. But the way these work, they're so crammed together, you just have to take one off the end and go about your merry way. So it solves a bit of a problem with the space.

And they're going to be giving them the stations away for free. They're installing them for free, at least. Okay. I like this. As long as we're docked, I'm happy. Yeah. I don't think this is a bad one at all. I especially like that they figured out how to, like, you know, bring the space down. That's a really good thing.

So now if they can just figure that out for birds. That'd be nice. Yeah. And I'm going to start a new segment on the show called This Week in Dystopia. Isn't that just our show? I was going to say, it kind of is just the theme of the show nowadays. Yeah. I saw this one on BGR.

Virtual reality experience forces people to lose their jobs and homes to boost empathy. Okay. So, you know, you see people on the street and you don't give them any change because it's like, ah, homeless guy, who cares? So what they did was they created a VR experience that you go through where you lose your job, you lose your home, you can't get hired, Uber works won't even take you, can't even afford a scoot-scoot to get around town, and you become homeless.

Now, my theory on this is they're not trying to build empathy in humans, you know? No. They're just training us on what our imminent future is about to look like. That's exactly it. Yeah. This sounds ridiculous.

I don't, no, come on. You gotta be, ah. This should have been Moron of the Week. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And it's coming out of Stanford. Oh. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, and the, yeah, the VR experience is called Becoming Homeless. Right.

Worst game ever. Right. Now, we've, it kind of is. It is. Yeah. It's that, uh, the virtual, of that virtual reality is going to go away at some point. That's the problem. Exactly. It'll just be, they're just going to drop the, yeah, they're going to drop the V.

Yeah. All right. Anyways, we make fun of blockchain an awful lot on this program because it is not the end all, be all of technology. And right now it's just a buzzword to get extra funding. But there are uses for the blockchain. And Vox, uh, did a nice long form article getting into it and how the blockchain is going to be here and going to be used and actually makes sense in some areas.

Uh, they say De Beers is putting diamonds on the blockchain. Walmart is putting lettuce on the blockchain. Startups are putting skincare and liquor and fancy watches on the blockchain. But there is a point to this if you are dealing with heavy duty shipping and fat and distribution. So it, it makes sense to put things on the blockchain.

It'll save lots of money. You'll lose, you know, you'll solve problems like theft and loss and breakage and all that sort of stuff. Cause you'll know exactly where everything is at all times and everybody will know. So there are uses for it. There are you, but there are, you know, you could do the same things with an Excel spreadsheet.

That's true, but the way it works and I've, I've actually seen this from another company that's trying to do this and the way they explained it was actually very smart because when you're dealing with supply chain management and multiple vendors, yeah, it's easy for one vendor to go back to the blockchain and see where, like, you know, check the provenance of the product that got to them basically from when it started to be created to construction and where all the parts are and all that stuff that makes sense.

It makes sense for supply chain management. Totally. Baseball cards and virtual. Not so much. Not so much, but this is an actual use of it and it's not a public thing. This is just for the companies. It's B2B. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's all B2B. So, and that's going to make total sense and it'll save lots of money.

So good on you blockchain for that. And it doesn't require an ICO. Yes, it does not. And just a little bit of fun news. This isn't for this year, but the story is making the rounds because it's pretty funny. For Halloween 2019, when the Simpsons will air their Treehouse of Horror episode 30 or 300.

No, it's... I can't believe it. Or episode... No, no. It's the 30th. It's the 30th Treehouse of Horror episode. Right, yeah. Which is insane. It will be episode number 666. Excellent. You can't beat that. I wonder how many times they had to rejigger the schedule to make that work.

You know they messed around to make sure that worked. Oh, yeah. No way. There is no way that they got that lucky. Bob, we're going to take next week off because we have to have one extra show. Yep. Or you're working overtime because we got to pump it up. It's down the list. Yep. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you in part by Hover.

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10% off your first purchase. Hover.com slash GOG. Security? We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland.

Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. What's up, Dave? Well, hello, gentlemen. Nice to be back. Just as we go to record this, a story just dropped over on BuzzFeed News.

And the title of the article is, Apple CEO Tim Cook is calling for Bloomberg to retract its Chinese spy chip story. Right. So this is the story we've been following for a couple weeks here. Bloomberg dropped that bombshell story that there were all sorts of supply chain issues coming out of China, that China was putting rogue bits of equipment, technology, hardware, silicon, whatever, on the motherboards to report back to China.

And, of course, everyone and their brother has denied it. There's been no pun. No one has gone on the record to say, yes, this has happened. No one's come up with a motherboard. And no one showed up with a chip. Yeah. No one showed up with a chip or motherboard. And we talked about, right off the bat here, the three of us talked about, the hunt was on, right?

As soon as this happened, everybody was going to go look for those super micro motherboards to try to find one of these. And no one has. So Bloomberg still stands by the story. But the interesting, here's the quotes from Tim Cook. He says, I personally talked to the Bloomberg reporters along with Bruce Sewell, who was then our general counsel.

We were very clear with them that this did not happen and answered all their questions. Each time they brought this up to us, the story changed. And each time we investigated, we found nothing. Then later on, he says, email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records.

We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep. And each time we came back to the same conclusion. This did not happen. There is no truth to this. Stop wasting our time. Imagine how much money Apple spent doing all of that. So they got to be mad.

Lucky for them, they have all the money. That's true. That's true. They do. They do. And just as a tangent, because it's still like, I understand that BuzzFeed has actually been doing real news for like three or four or five years now. It still bumps me when I see breaking news and actual journalism coming from BuzzFeed.

Right. I just, I can't wrap my mind around it. Well, remember, it's not coming from BuzzFeed. It's coming from BuzzFeed News, which I think is still different. Yeah. Is there still just BuzzFeed? Because this comes from BuzzFeedNews.com. I'm guessing there's still BuzzFeed.com, which is just a wasteland of listicles.

Yes. Well, I just went to BuzzFeed.com. This story is top on it, but it's followed up with 32 cheap things you want to wear all fall. And I swear to heck, these are the very best GoobFest pupper posts from this week. 23 products that'll keep you organized while you're traveling.

Yeah. Okay. So they're still there. Yeah. We'll see what happens with Bloomberg. They're steadfastly standing by the story, but it's harder and harder for them to defend it. And I don't know. How are people going to take them seriously on any of their InfoSec reporting from now on?

Yeah. Because there's always, you know, repercussions. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And this is not the first time they've gotten a story wrong. So. Oh, I just have to put this one out here because I think this will affect everyone here today. So you do need to go to BuzzFeed right now because this comforting mac and cheese quiz will reveal your best quality.

All right. Pause the recording. I'll be back in 10 minutes. Exactly. I'm going to go make some mac and cheese. Oh, God. So, yeah. I mean, they really should have rebranded BuzzFeed News. Something else. How can you take that seriously? Although, the funny thing is I take them more seriously than Bloomberg right now.

That's the problem. What a world, gentlemen. What a world. Oh, speaking of Apple, have you seen the new privacy homepage that they've rolled out? I have. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty nice. I think it is. I got to say, Apple products are designed to protect your privacy.

And we think that they're, they're actually pretty serious about that. This isn't blowing smoke up the bum. If I were Darla Davidson, I'd be really pissed that my message is being shown on Apple's homepage. Oh, Darla. That is not private at all for Darla.

That's right. She left the key for the dog sitter in the mailbox. I mean. That is serious abuse right there. We know where a key is. Right, right. Yeah. Worst off-sec ever. Darla Davidson ends up dead. And seven minutes ago, she was at the candy store in San Francisco, so.

Right. And Amy Frost is sharing location. I mean, come on. I believe that Apple is sincere and all of these things about security and privacy are heartfelt from them. The only kind of caveat I have with this is that they still take Google's, whatever, $10, $15 billion a year to have Google be the default search engine on all the iOS and macOS devices.

So, yeah. Does that make them complicit in all of that tracking? If you're getting paid for it, I think it sort of does. Yeah. That's a good point. I prefer it because that makes me not have to go switch it back to Google.

Because what are you going to do? Give me DuckDuckGo? Well, yeah. I mean, that would be the alternative. Yeah. I understand your issue there. But, I mean, the reality is, luckily, Apple's business model isn't about collecting and selling our data.

It's about, you know, getting us to spend $1,000 on a phone. It's about being paid by someone else. Right. It's about being paid billions of dollars by someone else who collects your data. Yes. So, you know, buyer beware, I suppose. Yeah. But I think the things they cover here on this privacy page are right on.

I think, you know, they're not being weaselly about the things that they do that are important to them. I believe that they are. Nobody's perfect, I guess. They're better than most, which I guess these days is the best you can ask for, right?

Not really hard, but it seems to be the way the world is going now. Our elections are coming up. Well, he's not as bad as the other guy. Yeah, their dumpster is just smoldering. It's not actually on fire. So. Oh, no. Great.

They do have a new thing now where you can get all of the data associated with your Apple ID account. I don't know if this comes back to, you know, being GDPR compliant, but whatever made them do it. It probably has something to do with it. Yeah, I'm guessing so. They built it, so they might as well give it to everybody. It takes a while, is what I'm finding out.

Did you do this? I did it yesterday morning. Okay. And I selected everything. I'm like, give it all to me. I want to see everything you guys got. And they give you a chunk size. They're like, we'll let you, you can download it in however many gigabyte chunks you want. So I selected the 25 gigabyte chunk.

I thought that would be okay. So I wouldn't have too many downloads, but they say it can take a couple of days to get you the data. Okay. And it's taking a couple of days to get me the data. Well, 25 gigabytes. That's a lot of. That's per chunk. Wow.

So it could be more than that. It could be even more than that. And since they have all of, you know, my iPhoto data and things like that, or photos data, whatever they call it this week. And I don't even know, man, wouldn't it be great if all of my, uh, Apple music match stuff, whatever they call it was, it was, uh, iTunes match.

Wouldn't it be great if they sent me all my music back? That would be awesome. No, they don't though. It's right here. And they're, uh, you don't receive copies of music videos, apps, or books. You're just getting a list. So I'm wondering why, why it is going to be so big in theory. Oh yeah. You don't get the photos though either.

Do you? I don't, it doesn't say messages are encrypted on your device and can't be accessed by anyone without your device passcode. So you don't get messages. I'm not saying anything about photos specifically. No, it says data that you store with iCloud, such as contacts, calendars, notes, bookmarks, reminders, email, photos, videos, and document.

Just document. No documents. You only get one document, but it's a really big one. It's a really big document. It's a doozy. Yeah. Mother of all document. I guess the photos is the obvious culprit there for what could bulk the file up, but.

That's the interesting thing though. I wonder if they're going to have historical photos in there because I deleted everything from my iCloud photo account about six months ago and I've only shared about four photos. That's why I'm wondering why it's taken so damn long. Well, let us know next week. Yes.

Well, if it's here, I might still be downloading next week. Well, someone at Apple is running around having seen your request and they're going, crap, crap, crap, crap. I was supposed to delete his photos last week. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. But I'm pretty sure that what's happening, isn't it, since this is a new thing and it got pretty well picked up in the media, that their servers are just going, I got to make another zip file, make another zip file, make another zip file.

Because I think everybody's doing this. Well, except you guys. Yeah. Well, we just wait. You are our guinea pig for both Brian and I. You're the early adopter. You're the one we send out. You go first. Let us know how it works.

Right. Go ahead and click on that link, Jason. I will. Get those Chinese security cameras. You tell us how those work out for you. Let's not get ahead of ourselves now. All right. Well, it seems like so far we've had an all Apple show, but that's the way the news has been this week.

There's a story from Motherboard about police being told to not look at iPhones to avoid activating Face ID's lockout function. Oh, like it happened to, what's his name on the big reveal for the Face ID? Right. Exactly. Right.

Was it Federici? It was Federici. That's right. That's right. And they mentioned that in the article. And so we've talked about before the whole notion of biometrics unlocking the phone and that so far the rule with the...

I'm just in my own mind. I'm going, don't look at it, Marion. Don't look at the arc. Close your eyes. Okay, continue. I got that off my chest. Yeah, that's good. We've talked about before about how the state of the law right now is that they cannot compel you to give up a password, but they can compel you to unlock a device with your fingerprint

and with your Face ID. So, but the thing with Apple devices is if you get a wrong attempt to log in five times in a row, it will then request a passcode. So, even holding the phone up in front of a face that is not your face, it's not very hard to get to that number five and where they have to unlock it.

So, it's just interesting. I guess the word is getting around to the police that if you have one of these phones that's unlocked with Face ID, don't point it at yourself or anyone else. Keep it face down if you're hoping to use Face ID to unlock it.

Police are going to be walking around with little black bags like they used to put over the suspect's head to take them to the second location, but they're just going to use it for the phone. Right. Or over their own head. They'll be having ski masks. Although, I suppose the Face ID will leave them. Yeah. Yeah. It fits these eyeballs.

It locks in. Yeah. I wonder how it works with those big mirror sunglasses that cops used to wear. Maybe those can fool it, but that would be a fun trick to try. Anybody got one? I don't know. The picture in the article has a guy in full tactical gear with a whole face cover and big ski goggles and a helmet.

Yeah. They just pulled that off Shutterstock, though. Yeah. Yeah. And I still wonder, you know, would Face ID see that and recognize human and say no? I think it probably would. I think it probably would. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. So, yeah, they got to bag it. Bag it real quick.

Bag it and tag it, as they say in Coplandia. That's right. And speaking of stock photography, our next article, this is from Defense One, and it's the Department of Homeland Security downplaying a report that data thieves are selling millions of voters' data.

Before we get to the story, another piece of stock photography here. For some reason, there's a picture of a laptop and next to it are professional video batteries. And I don't know what that has to do with anything, but as someone- That's the secret to hacking a voting machine, Dave.

Anton Bauer quad charger with a couple of bricks on it. That's a flashback to a former life of mine, but I don't know why it's- All right, well- Doesn't seem germane to the- Nothing to do with the article whatsoever.

Ah, here it is. You know what this is? This is a scene from the voter hacking room at DEF CON 2018, where hackers were able to compromise voting machines' data in less than 20 minutes. If you roll over the image, that's what the alt tag says about that. So, this must be at DEF CON.

So, it must be true. It must be true. I wonder, still, why are they using- Why are they using the batteries? High-capacity film and video batteries, but we digress. As we do. Yeah, that should be the subtitle of this whole show. Random Tangent!

So, DHS is following up on a report that there's increased attacks on the voting systems, and DHS is saying, hmm, not really. There's increased reporting on the possibility of accessing the voting system, but they're not really seeing the big ramp up that folks were afraid of.

And the other interesting point about this is that information that they are seeing for sale in dark web markets and things like that, this is information that's publicly available. You can go to most states' voter organizations and buy the voter information.

And this is what folks who are running for office use to do their mailers and things like that. Also interesting that there's some organizations who are crowdfunding the purchase of all the voter rolls, and people aren't sure who they are or what they're up to, but there are some folks out there who are trying to, and I'm sure they're up to just perfectly good things.

They're up there trying to buy up all the voter rolls in all 50 states. So, it's an interesting little side note. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, but that could be any of the myriad of marketing companies that we talk about that, you know, we've talked about every week for the last two weeks. Yes, but they would just buy it, whereas they wouldn't crowdfund it.

I don't suppose. Oh, okay. Got it. Right. So, who knows, but it's interesting. And finally, because we cannot have an episode of Grumpy Old Geeks without talking about video cameras, Honeywell has been hit by, well, they've been accused by the IP Video Market website.

This is sort of a trade site for folks who are involved with these IP Video cameras for basically taking some banned products from Dahua and slapping the Honeywell logo on them and just- Well, to be fair, they painted them too. They are a different color. That's true.

But they are identical to the point that if you fire up the Dahua software, it will recognize a Honeywell camera as being one of its own. Right. And so, Honeywell is selling these. The U.S. banned these products. Now, to be fair, the ban doesn't actually kick in until next year, but they're saying, well, why would Honeywell still be selling these?

Because you're not only banned from buying them, you're banned from using them. So, even old ones that you bought, you're not allowed to use on a government network. So, Honeywell's taking a little bit of heat for this. We'll see if anything comes of it. Hopefully, they'll do the right thing and move on to another supplier.

But, as we've talked about, what does that mean? You look around on Amazon, any of these low-cost video cameras, they all look exactly the same, coming out of the same factory. Yep. Yeah, and they've all got the same super micro whatever chips that are on there for Bloomberg.

Yeah, there you go. There you go. See, it all just comes right back around again. Yeah, we should just call this the hunt for chip October. We must give this American a wide berth. Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only. One ping only. All right.

Well, it's actually been kind of a slow week this week, but... Thank God. Yeah. I guess we've earned one. We'll see what happens as we come up to the elections. I was going to say, listen to the rest of the show if you need your dystopian fix. We got you covered. Yeah, we covered. We covered a lot. I'll definitely look forward to that.

Traveling next week, taking a vacation with the family and coming out your guys' way. So, hoping to perhaps meet up. Maybe we can, if nothing else, take a selfie together with one of Jason's video cameras. Right. I got a drone. I can bust out the drone. Well, awesome.

Yeah. I'm actually just looking forward to maybe I get to meet Bam Bam and what's the other one's name? Dino. Dino. That's right. Yeah, I should remember that. Bam Bam and Dino. That makes sense. Be fair. Jason leaves Dino out a lot on the show. Bam Bam gets a lot of mentions.

Well, you know. If I were Dino's agent, I'd be pissed. First born, it's always the way it goes. Exactly. There's an old thing. There's a gazillion photos of your first born child and like two of your second born child. Yeah, well, I mean. That's true. It kind of is.

Yeah. And Dino's kind of a dick, so. Oh, well, there you go. All right. All right, gentlemen. I heard about second born. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. As always, I will talk to you soon, hopefully in person next time. All right. Apps and doodads.

Now, Brian, you know I love me my sleep trackers. I've got my aura. You do. I've got my aura ring going. It's not too bad. It is getting a little bit chafey, though, I'm noticing, because it's very thick on the sides. What are you wearing it on? My right ring finger. Oh, okay, good.

I thought maybe you'd check that out. No, no, no. They don't make them in that size, unfortunately. They also don't make manuals. True. No. So I was intrigued when I saw this new one that came out called Better.

B-E-D-D-R. Because, yes, again, dumb names are back in vogue. That sounds like a good app opportunity for, like, hookers. Yeah, exactly. Ashley Madison does their mobile app. Yeah, totally. You know you want to better get the app.

Now on iOS and Android. Well, the company is better, but they launched a device called SleepTuner. And this one's interesting because it's FDA registered. It's a wearable. But it does some things that, you know, you can almost get at a clinical sleep study.

Right. So it's kind of made to measure if you have sleep apnea or not. So it measures blood oxygen level, which is one of the main things that you need, which my aura does not do. Heart rate, sleep position, and stop breathing events. So it's definitely a higher quality wearable.

The thing that pisses me off about it's only $149. My aura was, like, $250. And that was with the early mover discount. It is kind of stylish. It's just starting to hurt my finger. But, yeah, I thought this was decent. If you think you have sleep apnea, this might be one of the things, instead of going for one of those miserable sleep studies that I know a ton of my friends have done and say are just terrible to do.

Right. You can just do this at home, and it will at least give you a better insight into if you do need to go actually get the study. Because if you just, you know, can't sleep because you drink too much and had coffee at 7 o'clock every night, you just might be an idiot. But if you actually do need to go seek clinical help, this might be a good thing for you to get.

And $150, it's worth it. If you happen to be living with somebody that has trouble sleeping, Amazon Alexa is here to help you. They've rolled out something called Whisper Mode. Now, this must likely be useful around children. I certainly will be using this during nap time. But if you whisper normal commands to Alexa now, the smart assistant will whisper right back at you.

I kind of like this. I wonder if you can have it only in Whisper Mode, because that way I can sneak one in the house and still use it without my roommate knowing about it. Right. Well, it's pretty cool. I mean, it's moving forward in terms of Alexa recognizing conversational cues. So it's going to respond to the environment in yet another way, which is very cool.

Because sometimes when I'm asking Alexa when the Dodger game is, and I've forgotten to lower the volume since listening to music earlier in the day, I'm almost blown out of my chair. So I might be whispering. They're waiting! They're waiting! Well, I am pretty excited these days about how well they're doing.

So we'll see. Well, we'll find out tonight. Yes, we will. So by the time this airs, we will have a World Series set up. I'm actually wearing my Dodgers hat today, just, you know, for you. Look at you. Good luck. Well, that, and I didn't wash my hair this morning, so I kind of needed it. Well, that too. Now, I had a question for you, Jason.

Christmastime is rapidly approaching, and I reached out to, actually, a friend of mine reached out that works for Apple and happened to mention that there is a deep discount available to me if I want. And it is time for me to update my iPad. So I wanted to know, what is the difference, or what would you recommend, the iPad Pro versus a regular iPad?

Because the price difference is significant, and I don't really see much of a benefit. There's a lot of differences between the two. The main one is that the regular iPads, the iPad 4s, do not have smart connectors. I love my smart connector because that way you can pair it with a keyboard or, like, you know, any kind of case with the smart connector, and you don't have to charge it.

You don't have to sync it with Bluetooth or any crap like that. You just click it, and it works. Love that. I've got multiple, multiple cases for my iPad that use the smart connector. They're more powerful. They have a lot more features. I actually put a link in the show notes that has the comparison so you can see all the differences with it.

Now, that said, I've got an iPad Pro, one of the 9.7s, not the current generation, but the one before it. And the thing is still, like, fucking great. I love it. I use it every day with my Apple Pencil. Before, the recent version of the iPad 4, you could not use an Apple Pencil with it, but you can now.

I have an iPad 4 in the house. My roommate has one. We just got it for her. And as far as specs go, it's almost as good as my Pro iPad, but there are certain features that it doesn't have that drive me crazy. The main one is the great screen, the anti-glare screen.

The regular iPads are very shiny. I do not like that at all. And it definitely feels cheaper. But, I mean, if you're on a budget, the iPad 4 is great. Although, on October 30th, we're going to get new iPads, so you might want to hold off a bit.

I'll be waiting for the announcement, yes. Yeah. See, I'm not really an iPad power user. I use it to watch some TV when the kid needs to watch his cartoons instead. I use it to read, as you know. But I don't really work on it, so I'm thinking the iPad 4 is just going to be, or 5, depending on what they announce on the 30th, is going to be good enough for me.

Yeah. If you're buying this one for yourself, I'll just sell you mine, because I'm going to get a new iPad Pro when these new ones come out. Well, perhaps I'll do that. I've been looking to upgrade to the 12-inch. I'm a power user on the iPad, and I love it. I use it every day. I do my email on it. It's really good for email if you're just doing quick emails, and you just need to blow through 100 emails that you just need to get through.

I also use it for reading the news for the show, so I can just scan through, save articles, and then go back later on my computer and follow up on them, and a bunch of other stuff. And it is really nice for watching Netflix on. The bigger screen especially is nice for that. I was actually watching The Good Place last night when I was going to bed, and it looks great.

So I'm a pro user. I do not want to get one of the cheaper ones anymore. I really do dig them quite a bit. So I'm really excited to see what these new ones have because they're supposed to have face ID, have a lot less bezel on them. So I just – I really want one.

And I want the bigger size. Yes, it is – it's ginormous, but if you're typing a lot on it, it's really nice. But, you know, I don't know. I just like the big ones now. I really want to get one of the big ones. I need to start selling some shit to get that. So if I sell my iPad to you – We'll see what they announce. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah. So, yeah, we'll keep an eye out on October 30th. It's only, you know, two weeks away, less than two weeks away. So that'll be fun. And maybe we'll get the whole air power thing that they've been, you know, saying is going to come out sometime this year. But what I really want is an update to the AirPods. I want a new version of the AirPods.

That would be nice. Yeah. I mean, these work great, but I would like the wireless power on them. And I would also like a few new features. But it would be cool if – I could blue skype, but I'm not going to because we're not that type of show. No, we're not. Yeah, sorry about that. I know.

I forgot who I was and where I was at. Damn. Yeah, it's almost like listening to one of those tech podcasts that does well. Oh, that's right. The people that have listeners. Shit. And I saw this this morning. Chrome 70 is out now. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I checked. That's what I'm running, Chrome 70.

And it now does picture-in-picture support for video. Now, I thought, oh, God, this sounds terrible because when I was reading the article from The Verge, they mentioned Android Police reports that it's now enabled by default. And when I hear that, I, of course, get – I want to smack people.

Of course, get chills. I'm like, I don't care what it is, but what are you doing? So, I went to go try it out because you can try it out on YouTube. Right. So, you have to double right-click a video and then it will give you an option for picture-in-picture. So, I went and grabbed a John Oliver video, popped it out, dragged it off, and then went about my merry way and let it play in the corner.

And it's actually really useful. If you want to just have a video that you can move around and put on your desktop somewhere instead of having it stuck in the browser, it's actually kind of cool. All right. Yeah. And it doesn't really – you have to manually trigger it. They're saying that they're probably going to fix the interaction with it to get it to play because a double right-click is really weird.

I've never double right-clicked on anything before. So, I recommend checking it out if you're ever – like, you're stuck on YouTube and you need to watch some videos but still need to, like, do email and shit just to have it in the background. It's a cool little feature. It works. It actually works fairly well. Now, Brian, continuing on with This Week in Dystopia, there's an article over on Science Alert that talks about how insects are rapidly disappearing around the world, leaving scientists horrified.

Oh, great. Now, for me, this is great. I hate bugs. I like living, though. I do like living. And I like the animals that eat bugs, like birds. Birds are nice. I kind of like birds. And, you know, I've been known to eat them every now and again. But I still like the ones that fly around my yard and, you know, hummingbirds and things like that.

But they – whatever. This is a very scary story. So, in – oh, God. I don't even want to get into the numbers because if you're driving, you just might drive off a bridge. But go check out the article in the study. It's one of those things that people haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to.

But in the decrease in flying insects in the past few decades has people very upset. And the tropical invertebrates are going away. It's not good stuff. No. I read this article and they talked to – at the very end of it, David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved with this research, added this quote.

This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read. Uh-huh. Yeah. I read it and after you've read Jason's article and I say you do need to do so because it will depress the hell out of you, read mine. Four things you can do to cheer up according to neuroscience.

That's why I put mine ahead of yours. Yeah, so this is a neuroscientific approach to maintaining emotional well-being and a lot of it makes sense. It's quite a long article and gets into it, so I'm not going to talk about it too much here. But this is a good way to, as we've always, fake it until you make it is basically the TLDR here.

Put a pencil between your teeth and smile. Is that in there? That's one of the old ones that Tony Robbins used to – It gets a little bit more involved than that. The power of touch, making sure that you're the decider, making a decision will force yourself to kind of release some oxycontin. Oxycontin?

Oxytocin. That's definitely a good article to read. If you can get free oxycontin. Whoa. I'm moving to West Virginia with that one. Make a mint. Naming specifically what it is that's bothering you so you can deal with it and move past it and getting your brain's attention. Some really good tips in there, actually.

So it's a lot of mindfulness stuff, really. Okay. And if that doesn't work, you can go to a Wisconsin brewery which has rolled out a candy corn beer and just get drunk on candy corn. I hate candy corn. People fall into two camps. I like it once a year. That's it. If somebody gave me a piece of candy corn in March, I'd hit them in the face.

But October, you get a pass. But October, I'm in. I'm all in. So I would actually try this, but I'm not in Wisconsin, sadly. So link is in the show notes. If you're nearby, go check it out. Let me know how it tastes. Yep. And I found this one over on Polygon, which is a really nice article. If anybody who's listening has ever gone to Disney Quest.

Did you ever go to Disney Quest? No. Yeah. Because you went to the one in Anaheim. So this was at Disney World. And it was a five-story, 100,000-square-foot space that was basically a VR arcade back then and a bunch of other stuff. But they'd opened one in Chicago.

And I went there, like, right when they opened with the family. And we had a blast. And the one thing that I remember the most is there was a roller coaster simulator. So you build on a, like, you know, on a screen. It was a touchscreen. And you build your roller coaster. And then you get into this pod, which is basically a 360 gimbal that, you know, with a screen on it.

And you rode your roller coaster. That's pretty cool, actually. It was phenomenal. I did it with my dad. And so I'm terrified of heights. And, you know, regular roller coasters, I'm not so good on. But this thing gave you all of the experience without any of the, you know, soiled underwear.

It was really fun. No soiled underwear, always a plus. Especially at Disney, you know. You don't want to mess yourself at the happiest place on earth. But this is a really good story about the history of Disney Quest. Because it's all gone now.

The Chicago one died a long time ago. But when we went, I was looking at some of the videos. They have the video for the launch of the Chicago one. And, like, all the rides that we went on there. Like, the paddling down the river. It was a fun place to go back then. Because this was, like, 1998 for the original.

And the one in Chicago opened in 1999. And it was just a ton of fun. I do miss that kind of thing. So, maybe if they can, you know, recreate that type of thing with VR nowadays, it might have some kind of legs. But everybody now just puts the helmet on. These were kind of more immersive experiences.

And group experiences. Like, there's one where you're on a raft going down a river. And everybody is on the side of the raft. So, you're paddling with the family. You know, you have to paddle backwards or forwards to make the screen do what you want it to do. It was fun stuff. Right. Now, this one I put in just because.

For you. For me. This is over. You need to cheer yourself up a little bit. Exactly. This comes from Science Alert. Dogs might understand human words better than we suspected, study shows. So, because most people are saying that, no, it's all, like, inflection and, you know, body language when you're talking to Fido.

Or Bam Bam, as it were. And so, what they're doing now is they're shoving dogs in fMRIs and doing different tests on them. That sounds awesome for the dog. I'm sure it is. They get a treat. They get a treat. But it just ends with saying, dogs may have varying capacity for motivation for learning and understanding human words.

But they appear. Yeah, you know what it's doing? It's going, get me the fuck out of this. But they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they've been taught beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response. And I tell you, this is completely true because I've trained my dogs with several different words where they don't even have to see me and they know it and it works.

And I can do it with different intonations. That's my kryptonity word. Intonations. We're definitely having some verbal issues today. Exactly. So, this is a really good article if you're a dog lover. Go check it out. Closing shout outs.

Well, not to stay dystopian and sad, but yet another good friend of mine was just diagnosed with breast cancer. So, any female listeners or, you know, you're males with females in your life, go get them boobies checked out by a professional. I mean, you know, do whatever you want in your own time for fun. That's your own business.

But, you know, get a professional to look at them. Yeah, and those iPhone X cameras, they don't actually do boobies. They just kind of look like boobies on the ads. Yeah, I saw that and that's burned into my brain now. So, thanks for that, Jason. What has been seen cannot be unseen. And a shout out to my dog trainer, Dana, from the Dog Psychology Center, who actually had to stop training Bam Bam before I moved to Chicago because she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

But, fortunately, she beat it, which was great. And after that, she got married and celebrated her first wedding anniversary last week, which is awesome. And now she's back to training Bam Bam and Dino now here at my house, which is awesome. It's one of those happy stories that when I heard that she was back in action and actually beat it really made me happy.

She's so awesome. That's fantastic. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss 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 291. 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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