292: Ethical Old Geeks

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 292 if you want to play along at home. And if you're a new listener, make sure you check out at least two episodes because now we're doing two shows every week and each one covers different topics. Our Thursday episodes cover the news, media, books, moron of the week, and listener feedback and questions.

And the Monday show covers news, security with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire, apps, gadgets, and cool links we find during the week. So to make sure you get your full dose of GOG, listen to them all. Right. So there's some housekeeping for you. Okay. We just had some new people come in and they're like, what the hell? This is a weird show.

Ah, well, it's actually one in two. It's one show split in two. Yeah, exactly. Cleaved in half, as it were. Indeed. And I just want to say, even though our numbers are kind of a bit down lately, we do piss some people off, I guess. You know, we've been known to do that. The level of engagement from everyone is just awesome.

Yeah. We're getting so much cool stuff. But of course, please tell your friends about the show. And enough housekeeping. Shall we get on to this? Let's move on. How about a little follow up? I finally got my Apple data that I put in for on the 18th. I have requested mine. I have not gotten mine yet.

Yeah. Mine came in on the 22nd. So, and oh my God, there's a lot of data in there. Really? There's a lot. App purchases, all that sort of stuff. Everything going all the way back to 2003. Nice. Yeah. That's when I got my first iPod, I think, or something like that. I can't even remember when the iPods came out.

But yeah, I've got purchase history all the way back to 2003. And I can track all my old addresses in there because they keep all of that stuff for me. Oh, how nice of them. Yeah. Yeah. How thoughtful. And I just, a quick note, because this, I, everybody loves the onion and it's become just such a thing that when you see the headlines, you just kind of chuckle to yourself.

This one actually made me fall down laughing. Just the headline alone. You are all inside Amazon's second headquarters. Jeff Bezos announces to horrified Americans as a massive dome envelops the nation. This was pretty funny. I got to say. I just died. It was very funny. So well done, onion. You don't get enough credit for the things that you do.

No, they've been, they've been, uh, it's so weird because once Facebook started to put them as, you know, parody or whatever, it seemed like their links didn't get shared as much as they used to. Yeah. That's an interesting aspect of the algorithm because parody is basically fake news as far as the algorithm is concerned.

Yeah. And people are dumb. Yeah. That too. Speaking of dumb people, Lime is opening its first scooter lifestyle brand store in your town of Santa Monica. Of course they are. Yeah. They're going to rent vehicles directly from the store as well as charge them.

And, uh, they're hiring a full-time manager now. So, Hey man, if you want to get in on that scoot economy, you can just get a job at Lime. I'll become their retail store manager. I'm sure that'll go over well. Uh, you know, this isn't terribly surprising, especially since there's just so little brick and mortar here anymore. Um, you know, the main street is here in Santa Monica, even with the influx of all the money and the tech companies here has definitely suffered a couple restaurants have closed and not open because there are the rents are that they're asking for are extraordinary and a brick and

border is just suffering in general. I mean, Amazon, as much as we just read the onion joke has, has put a lot of businesses out and, uh, sure. There's open storefronts. Why not? Whatever. It's better than having an empty store. Yeah. You would think though that, you know, since there are so many empty stores, the rent might be going down.

You'd think that, but, uh, it doesn't seem to be, you'd be wrong. They'd rather some of these landlords, I guess, would rather just have an empty store than have somebody in there and drop their rents. So go figure. And I found this one over at MIT's technology review. It was getting shared around a little bit.

And since we've talked about this, uh, establishing an AI code of ethics will be harder than people think. You think we've had a hard time establishing a human set of ethics. Exactly. Exactly. And what's, what's interesting is, you know, I, we started talking about ethics in technology about a year ago.

We were talking about it way before that. I was just, I took a course at that point. So I kind of ramped it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And now it's everywhere. Everybody's talking about it because everybody finally sees what we've been seeing for decades. Yeah. I mean, the system is completely open for just nefarious stuff.

It's so easy to do. It is so easy for programmers to do really bad things. And now they finally done them and got caught. Yeah. Yeah. Or just even lazy things. That's that. That's the real problem is you don't have to be necessarily intentionally malicious to, to do something bad with your code.

You can just be lazy. Or just a shitty programmer. Well, that too. There's a lot of those. Wouldn't it be horrible if the entire world just craps out because somebody forgot to put in a semi-colon? Yeah. That would be nice, actually. Let's play some board games for a while. But what they're talking about is basically taking AI and just wrapping it around human rights.

You know, we've got a lot of, got a lot of organizations out there that basically are, their foundation is the protection of human rights. So why not use that? Right. But here's the problem, getting everybody to agree on what basic human rights are. That is, that is the sticky widget, wicked.

Isn't that the same? Sticky wicket. Yeah. Sticky wicket. Yes. There we go. And there was a, an op-ed from Kara Swisher in the New York Times saying, who will teach Silicon Valley to be ethical? Nobody. Well, it's kind of interesting because they're talking about hiring chief ethics officers and, you know, and I love this.

One consultant who focuses on ethics, but did not want to be named, told me, we haven't even defined ethics. So what even is ethical use, especially for Silicon Valley companies that are babies in this game? Okay. So if there is no definition of ethics, how are you an independent ethics consultant? What are you getting paid for exactly?

I could, why, why am I sitting here doing a podcast and not getting paid when I could be doing what that guy does? I've even taken a class in it. I, yeah, you're certified. You're certified ethical. So you should, I think it's time for you to, you know, change your, that's it. We're grumpy old ethicals.

That's right. Ethical old geeks. Ethical old geeks. Well, ethical old geek and company. Right. I think that'll be it. And they're talking about how to, you know, like they say, hiring ethics officers. So like they're putting like single points of failure in these things. And I was thinking this morning, I'm like, how about independent ethics councils instead of trying it that are, that are separate from the company, kind of like a board of directors for ethics.

Exactly. It has to be separate from the company. It can't be done within. We already know that doesn't work. Right. So, you know, you'd have your problems. You take them to the board. They're under NDA. They can't talk about it. So you can give them company secrets and then they can, you know, it'll be like the star chamber for slurping in people's address books.

All right. We got something new for Arianna Huffington to do. Oh, yes. In the ethics room. Great. And this one just made me chuckle. This CEO is paying 600,000 strangers to help him build human powered AI that's whole orders of magnitude better than Google. And this is a company called Hive.

They actually do have products out there right now with things like NASCAR. So they can, they basically can take all the footage from a NASCAR race and see how long advertisers logos were on the screen. Wait, I mean, I'm thinking, man, that, that curing cancer really, it's taken us, taken aside to, yeah, we need, that's what we need in the future is how long is my Gatorade logo on, you know, Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s car as it whips around the track.

Technology, Jason, solving the real problems of the world. Yeah, really solving the real problems. And it's so funny that they say in this article, the dirty little secret of artificial intelligence is that it takes a lot of human labor to make it all work, but Hive embraces this. We said that for so long now.

It's like, yes, AI is humans. AI is people. AI is people. And of course, they say they just use it to train them. But what's to stop somebody from just having 600,000 people on staff? And when an AI problem comes up, somebody actually looks at it and figures it out like a human would.

Yes. Yeah. This is supposed to be for training, but yeah, it's just, it just keeps coming back to the fact that AI is still people and it still needs to be trained and it still doesn't work all that well. And it still doesn't really, shouldn't be called AI. No, it shouldn't. But that ship has sailed.

Yep. In the news. Hat tip to friend of the show, David Teeter, who sent us this without comments because we've talked about this a couple of times and here's yet another company doing it.

Naoris is the world's first holistic cybersecurity, blockchain-based ecosystem. There we go. I'm not even entirely sure what any of that means. I just love that it's holistic. I think Kirk gently has moved into, you know, cybersecurity.

Great. Yeah. Well, there you go. Thanks. That's awesome. Over in Germany, German finance minister, Olaf Scholz, is calling for a global minimum tax on large technology companies because everybody's tired of these guys screwing everybody else and moving all their stuff offshore to tax havens.

Exactly. Will this work? I support this 100%. No, of course it's not going to work because somebody's going to want the business and we'll take it and offer them tax havens. It doesn't work. It's never going to work, but it should work and this is how it should be. Yeah. I mean, the EU's trying to figure this out because they're getting screwed hand over fist.

It's like, you know, just because you do business in our company but your headquarters isn't here doesn't mean we still shouldn't have some of the revenue because you make obscene amounts of money. Yep. And why shouldn't we get our cut? Yeah. No, I 1000% agree with this, but we can't even solve this on a micro level.

We can't solve this within our own country. That's why nobody shoots movies in Hollywood anymore. Tax rates are too high here. They'll go to Utah where tax rates are where they're offered. Tax rates aren't even just lower, not just for the people there, but they'll lower them even more than just for the normal people there to get the movie business to come to them.

Yep. It's all a shell game. Mm-hmm. That's why I was in Canada for a while, North Carolina for a while. Well, it just moves around to whoever's giving out the best tax breaks. Yeah. And I mean, look, we got Amazon basically making a game out of where they're going to put their new corporate headquarters, and part of the reason was tax.

Oh, yeah. But part of it was what tax breaks are you going to give us? Yeah. What are the incentives? How much money are you going to give us to move our company here? Yep. It's the way of the world, but it shouldn't be. I watched that play out when I was in Chicago when, you know, they were doing the dog and pony show. Rahm Emanuel was, you know, having all the Amazon execs in, and he's like, yeah, everybody clean up the city.

Make your bed. Hey, Amazon's coming. Right. And when they were, like, you know, giving them tours of the city, it was pretty funny. It was pretty fun to watch. It's like, you know, I could just see Rahm in the mirror, like, putting his hair down. He's like, do I look good? Do I look good? You know, going on his first date with Amazon. Yeah.

This one made me laugh a lot on Friday, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered a company called Transdev North America to shut down their, you're going to love this, a shuttle service, which was automated, you know, an automated autonomous bus with kids on it that they were taking to school.

Do we care about kids or not? Apparently not. Do we care about being healthy or not? Do we care about our weight or not? I don't understand what we do in this world anymore. I mean, we can't even be bothered to put seatbelts on normal buses, but now we're putting them in an autonomous ones that we know aren't working.

Only in Florida, I suppose, because it wouldn't be legal anywhere else. Well, let's see, here's the thing. It's not legal. And Transdev actually did not disclose the fact that it was a school bus. So that's why the. Oh, yes. They requested permission to use the shuttle for a demo project, which apparently involved putting kids on it and sending them to school.

Yeah. Yeah. That's they're shut down now. But yeah, they say it was a designated area and a safety attendant would always be on board, but they move fast and break kids. There you go. That's what happens.

More autonomous news. Ford's going to start testing self-driving cars in Washington, D.C., with an emphasis on equity. As for equitable development, it is in negotiations with the municipal government of D.C. Ford agreed to operate its vehicles in all eight of Washington's neighborhoods or wards in an effort to reach different types of residents.

Yes, they're going to instead of putting it in the rich people's neighborhood, they're going to be in every neighborhood. We're going to send them to the black people, too. Apparently so. OK. And that's the whole gist of it. But in D.C., have you ever driven around D.C.? I've actually never visited D.C.

It's one of the few cities that I really want to visit in this country that I have not made it to. So I know next to nothing about it. It's a very difficult city to drive in. But yeah, if you haven't been to D.C., you must go. It's fantastic. I've been there, I think, three times. And I go for the National Air and Space Museum.

That's my favorite. But all the museums, I mean, just block out a week, get your walking shoes on, and get some extra strong wheels for that stroller and head on out. Because, man, it is a great place to visit. So much history. Yeah, it's definitely been on my list forever.

But now it's like one of those things, because I have a two-year-old where it's like, well, now I've got to wait a couple more years, because this is something that would be really good for him. And he's got to be a bit older. So it's on the list, but it'll be a while. Now, this next one I found in Vanity Fair. And it says, can a drone army deliver Dara that $120 million bonus?

Now, this is, well, yes, we know that's the answer. This is talking about Uber CEO Dara and his need to diversify Uber before their planned IPO next year. Right. The article is bullshit. Nothing cynical about that.

Yeah. But, I mean, it's a terrible article. There's almost nothing here that we didn't already know. Now, the fun part about this is as a web developer, ex-web developer, I should say, I love these new sites where you go there and like, I went to the article, I started to scroll down, and then it clamped down like, you know, like a door on a spaceship.

There's a banner at the top. Access is everything. Yes. And so you have this thing. It's like, oh, would you like to subscribe? You can't keep going. You're out of free articles, even though I've only been to Vanity Fair once, probably in six months. And that was today. And so I kind of scroll back up and I'm looking at it and they do that crazy CSS thing where they blur out the text so you can't see it.

And I'm just like, I just shits and giggles because I see hyperlinks under there. So I'm like, I wonder if the hyperlinks work. And then I could just go find their sources and they worked. Then I'm like, hmm, well, if the hyperlinks work, that means the text is probably there. Oh, well, let me just copy and paste it, put it in the edit.

So the fact that, Brian, you can read the article in our show notes means that for all of their, you know, tricks and trickery, it's all still there. View page source. View page source and find the CSS rule to blur it out and just click it off. You can do that. That's pretty easy.

I mean, the smart ones like the Wall Street Journal, they actually don't put the entire article in the blurb. Right. You know, so you can't do that. But for people like this one, I just thought, I'm like, man, you got some bad, bad programmers over there. Well, again, I think it's just lazy.

Somebody was like, hey, we need we need we need some kind of paywall here. OK, how much are you going to pay me? Oh, really? That's it. All right. Well, here you go. Well, that's that's because all the real programmers have moved over to blockchain. Right. Oh, there's a study that came out that now blockchain engineers are making between 150 and one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars on average because there aren't apparently enough of them.

Again, where is all this blockchain going? Who needs this that badly? Why? Where are these people working? I don't know. But it's like blockchain developers, the new webmaster. Yep. It really is. It's if you're if you want to get into a business that has growth and probably no safety net whatsoever, none blockchain might be for you.

Yeah, because right now somebody is building the web, the WordPress of blockchain. I guarantee you that. Oh, I know. Yeah. A lot of them are definitely on demand. Blockchain is it's already out there. I've seen a couple of, you know, companies that are doing it. The thing about this, though, is that, you know, it's catching up to AI as the is the highest paid engineering field.

And it kind of drives me crazy that there's I don't know the whole blockchain thing, as you know, drives me crazy. But if you're even thinking about going into engineering to work on blockchain, I would suggest you pivot and go into cybersecurity. There are not nearly enough cybersecurity engineers out there right now and cybersecurity specialists.

You can go out, get a degree in like six months or at least certifications and walk into a job that would love to have you. It is so understaffed right now and it's going to be around forever. That's not going away. So if you really want like a career path, go into cybersecurity, screw the blockchain.

And, you know, this is going to be short term money. But what about when they do make the WordPress of blockchain and then you're out of a job? What are you going to do then? Trust me. As somebody who has been through the life cycle of the web, who we were, we were the blockchain programmers at one point. Then all the automated tools came out and nobody needs us anymore.

So now we're podcasters and we don't want you in our space. Stay out of podcasting, blockchain engineers. Agreed. Okay. I saw this on the Daily Beast. I don't know why I got to the Daily Beast. Must have been Twitter. Damn Twitter. Must have been. Yeah.

So for everything that Amazon says about, you know, we're trying to be nice. We're trying to be like, we don't want to be evil. You know, they were trying to take up the mantle of that. Amazon is pushing ICE to buy its face recognition software. Oh, joy.

Was it Recognition with the K? Yes, with the K. Yeah. And it's interesting because they, I mean, they're really pushing it. But the problem is it doesn't work very well. Yes, it does. As far as they're concerned. Yeah. They don't really mind the errors too much.

No. And that's the problem. Since it doesn't work that well, people are starting to, you know, stand up and say, hey, this is not a good idea. Sarah Saldana, who was the head of ICE during the last years of the Obama administration, said the technology doesn't sound ready for deployment. And here's a quote.

I don't see this technology being used on a wide scale basis as long as it's problematic. I think it makes a lot of sense for people to test, look at it and review this skeptically. I would be surprised if ICE would start using it without doing better than the results it's showing now. But other people that used to work at ICE say they're probably going to do it.

Damn the consequences. And because ICE is their mandate is to get as many people out of the country as possible. So, you know, it kind of looks like Jose. Put him on a bus. That's fine for ICE. Move fast in jail, people. Yeah, that's about it.

Oh, and Bezos was quoting recently, he said about immigrants. He said, I'd let them in if it was me. I like them. I want all of them in. You're right. Oh, yeah. And who was this? Oh, Jacob Snow from the ACLU says, it's disturbing that Amazon continues to actively ignore warnings from members of Congress, civil rights groups, the public, and its own shareholders and employees about the dangers of its technology.

Okay. Yeah. Now, finally here, this is the best thing of the day for me. This is so good. Developer Chris Ligman wrote a text game, like a choose-your-own-adventure text game, called You Are Jeff Bezos. Awesome.

It's a simple text adventure exploring the age-old question, what would you do if you had more money than any single human being should ever have? Right. Oh, my God. I played this for like half an hour this morning. It is so funny. I just, I'm falling into the rabbit hole right now.

This is hilarious. Yeah. I got, I got two bad endings and a neutral ending. I haven't been able to beat it yet, but I think, I think I found, I think I found a path, but it's fun going down all the different branches because this guy is funny as shit. This is very funny stuff. Yeah. No, definitely check it out.

I, I highly recommend it. So I gave him six bucks this morning as a, as in the tip jar because I thought, I thought this was, this was made me just happy. Everybody go check it out. Check it out. It's very funny. Yep. Link will be in the show notes. You mentioned a few weeks back that, uh, nobody had said anything about the third series

of a serial and, uh, lo and behold, there's a large articles take talking, talking about how absolutely wonderful serial season three is with it's morally complicated. Look at our broken criminal justice system. The podcast that revolutionized the form is now the best it's ever been.

Unfortunately, nobody's listening to it. It's still getting decent downloads, but it is. And I actually read this, uh, read this entire review of it over on slate and it actually sounds like it's really good. I mean, I might actually have to give it a chance. I started to read it and I'm like, ah, I don't want to, no spoilers in case I do want to go back and listen to it because I would kind of like to, you know, it's good to be up on these kinds of things since, since I think it's a work in the business.

We might be backtracking on our serial hate for the, for this third season. So I'm definitely going to have to give it a go. Well, yeah, I'm not backtracking on the hate until I've heard it. Yeah. And a hat tip to friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, who also writes our exit music and is a wonderful friend and good musician himself.

Uh, he's pointed out a new podcast that I'm listening to now called Disgraceland, which is really, really good. It's a bunch of stories about some of the worst people in the music industry. Worst, not as in the typical way you think of people being crappy in the music industry, but like really like shooting people dead, doing tons of drugs, abuse, suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And it is phenomenal. I'm really enjoying this podcast. So I would recommend taking a look at it, uh, looking at all the episodes and find a musician that you dig or are interested in and start there. It's pretty good. Oh, I might have to check that out. Yeah. I like it a lot. Netflix.

What the fuck, Netflix? Yes. Daredevil season three is out and Netflix did not tell me at all. I have watched every season of Daredevil so far. I have thumbs up the seasons. I even gave them five stars when you could do that when it, when they still had stars and it was not bubbled up to my main screen at all.

I found out a week later when I found out that Luke Cage and Iron Fist were both canceled and even going through all the panels on Netflix, I had to do a manual search for it to find it. Now I get it. Netflix is pissed that Disney's pulling the Marvel content, the Pixar content and all the crap out of their system.

But this is just blatantly retaliatory. And it will accept Iron Fist cancellation. Fuck that guy. But they're screwing their users. And it's okay. So this happened to you. And I didn't know about any of this until you put it in the show notes. I didn't know that Daredevil season three had dropped.

I didn't know that Iron Fist had been canceled. I didn't know that Luke Cage had been canceled, which means I don't need to go back and finish watching either of those shows because why bother? But when I loaded up my Netflix, lo and behold, first screen, Daredevil season three. Huh. Interesting. So I got it.

And I have never thumbed up or starred anything on Netflix. That is so strange. Yeah. Maybe they pulled their head out of their asses after you complained and realized that maybe we shouldn't bury one of our better shows. Yeah, it made no sense to me, but I didn't complain to them.

But, you know, maybe they're reading our show notes because they listen to the show. Doubtful. But yeah. They've hacked into us. Yeah. No, it's just it's it's crazy that they're canceling these hand over fist. I wonder if Jessica Jones is going to be on the chopping block or if they've already started shooting season three and can't cancel it.

Right. Who knows? I hope they don't chop it. But, you know, maybe they'll all be brought back when when Marvel launches their own streaming thing. Yeah, I don't know what the rights are with those because they were a joint production between Netflix and Marvel. I don't think the rights revert back to Marvel for them. I think they'll probably have to buy them back from Netflix.

Right. But that's that is just supposition. I don't know. I did watch another really good documentary on Netflix called Quincy. Quincy Jones. I've heard of this. Yes. It's supposed to be very good. It's incredibly good. Highly, highly recommended. I was never really, you know, I know who he is.

You obviously know his music, but I never knew like his whole backstory and impressive guy, man. Super impressive guy. He's just he's got a worker. He's a worker. And, you know, he was given some crazy ass honor at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony that I was able to attend.

Oh, cool. I got to see him speak live and people talk to him and all that sort of stuff. Talk about him. And it was really good. Really interesting guy. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I highly recommend this. You're going to love it. I think you're definitely going to love it. And I mean, just anybody who's like probably of our our age range is going to dig it. Well, if you're if you're into music, I think you're just going to like it.

He's just he's had his fingers on everything in the past 40, 50 years. Yep. And speaking of music, Enya, I'm guessing you were never a big Enya fan. I actually was. Really? I really I enjoy early ambient music.

And that's what I would classify that. I don't see much of a difference between Enya and the Cocteau twins to Moby's ambient albums. Oh, OK. Good. Good. I was a huge Enya fan. I loved all of her music. And 30 years ago last week, Orinoco Flow came out.

Great song. Yeah. And there's an article in TheRinger.com that is linked in the show notes that has a really cool write up on it and about how it went from, you know, this pop culture just explosion to being one of the most, you know, mocked songs ever. And I still can go back and listen to those those first albums.

Well, she only made six albums total and, you know, never toured. Barely ever plays out and is loaded, which is, of course, the way to do it, man. You don't have to go on tour. That is the way to do it. But she also did it when there was a music industry. Yes. Yes. When people actually had to buy albums and things of such nature.

Yeah. Yeah. I was always a big fan. I mean, not a huge fan, but I love Orinoco Flow and I like a lot of her other stuff. Good. Yeah. It's great background music when you're trying to work and don't need something, you know, I can either go with Enya or I can go with Rammstein. It's, you know. You got some range, man.

I do. You got some range. I do. I love me some Rammstein when I'm hacking out some code, but when I'm doing some design, give me some Enya. It's really nice. Right. Now, I've talked about this old video in the show before. I just put it back in here because we were talking about the blockchain and, you know, Bitcoin and stuff. My old friend, Doug Sarine, who used to play the ninja on Ask a Ninja, started a series and there was only a couple episodes in it called Poorly Explained.

And there's a there's a like a two minute episode called Bitcoin Poorly Explained. The link for that will be in the show notes. It has legs. It's still funny after a couple of years. Very funny. Very funny. At the library.

I have a fantastic book that everybody on the planet should read. Okay. It is called The Coddling of the American Mind. How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukenioff Luke Kenioff and Jonathan Haidt.

Okay. I've mentioned this on the show before because I was going to read it. Now, I've finally done it. Okay. And yeah, this is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today or has children or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

It's amazing. Yeah. It is an amazing book. It makes me extraordinarily angry. I was like wanted to beat up a lot of people when I was listening to this book. It's because I've been so removed from it for so long.

My college day is well in my past and I just don't understand what's even happening on college anymore. It's not what I went to. That's for sure. The classification of language as actual violence is a big issue. Yeah. And just these kids are so mollycoddled.

This is the participation trophy crowd finally getting to college and going to be entering the workforce in the real world soon. And I just don't want to be around any of these people. No, me either. I definitely need to read this book.

And as you well know, I, at least at the moment, have no intention of raising my child in this country because of this sort of stuff. I mean, he's fine right now, but I got to tell you, look, my kid is two and we put him in preschool early and we put him in a really good preschool. In fact, I went to a parent teacher conference yesterday for a two-year-old and they were brutal.

What? They were like, I mean, not brutal. They were doing what they should be doing. It's they didn't, you know, force feed us this. Oh, your kid is so good. Your kid is great. Blah, blah, blah. Go about your way. It was like, OK, he's doing good in this, but he needs some help in this and you should work on this with him.

I mean, it was exactly what I would want. And it's even for a two-year-old that the fact that we're starting him with that with goals and like trying to explain that to him and and no, like, no, no participation awards, no stars for nothing. You got to work for it. Yeah, I like that. OK, good. Yeah.

Raise him to be normal. Yes, exactly. These big wusses. Oh, I don't like what you say. I'm going to. Yeah. It's like they say words are violence and then they actually use violence. It's like, can you just step back a second and be a little bit more self-aware about what the hell you're doing?

Look at you getting on the Bill Maher train. I don't like so much. I don't like Bill Maher, but it doesn't matter. I don't like at least, you know, we can still agree on some things. It's not that I disagree with them. I just think he's lazy sometimes. Right. But he's also stoned a lot. So he gets a pass.

Hand in hand. Yeah. I got a new Amazon gift certificate this week. So I went out and bought something nice for myself. Okay. I never played D&D. I was never a Dungeons and Dragons player. I hung out with a lot of people who were though, but, and I loved going through the books.

I didn't understand it because I never played. I didn't get it, but I love the artwork in the books. And there's a new book out today called Dungeons and Dragons Art in Arcana of Visual History. And it's like a monster coffee table book. It's like 45 bucks and just goes through the history of all the art and how they did it for D&D.

It's just basically an illustrated history and it looks fantastic. And there's another article from Polygon in here that talks more about the book itself. So that'll be linked in the show notes, but I cannot, it comes today sometimes. I'll, you know, next, next week when we do at the library, I'll talk about it a little bit more.

But if you're a D&D fan, it drops today, which actually is Tuesday. So by the time you hear it, it'll be out for two days. I keep forgetting these things take time to come out. Yes. And I also bought another book called So Say We All, The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Battlestar Galactica.

I know you're going to hate it, but. Just needs one page. Ronald D. Moore ruined everything. But it's, I mean, it's a 700 page book. Look, I have no interest in the original series, though. The original series was so stupid and crap.

I don't even want to read about it. I would definitely read about the 2004 reimagining and all of that. But I think I'd have to skip the first half of the book. Okay. Well, see, I loved the original because I watched it from start to finish when I was a kid twice. Right. And I'm interested in that.

I loved Lorne Green. I loved Dirk Benedict, all those characters back then. So I want to hear the behind the scenes on those. And there are a lot of interviews with the showrunners and the people who were, you know, that made these, made these shows. So I'm, for me, this is, I want to go back and read about it because it was a huge part of my life. And I definitely want to hear about why Ron Moore fucked everything up.

Yeah, I want one sentence in that book. I want Ron Moore to admit that there was never a plan. Yeah. If he does that, I'll read the book. And I'm so very sorry. I wanted to apologize. And I'm so very sorry, Brian. Yes. Yeah, just for you, Brian. Then I'll read it. I finished a book, which lets me know that maybe I should give up struggling trying to read that Christopher Noir book because it's just not happening.

Because I was able to burn through Blood Communion, A Tale of Prince Lestat by Anne Rice in a week and really enjoy it. This book is definitely for people that are spot and sold and into this world already. And her latest books don't have the oomph or impact or intrigue of the original trilogy, as it were.

But if you were into it, it's a good tale. It is what it is. It's, you know, she's older now. She's not writing quite the way she used to. But it continues the story on very well. We're very well. All the characters are very true to the way she's been writing them and just continues on and keeps on going.

And I'm sure she will. And I'll keep reading them all. So if you like this stuff, you'll like the book. If you don't, don't bother. Okay, I won't. Okay. But you should definitely give up on the Chris Moore book. Sorry. I think it's time. It's just not happening. And it's actually the reason that I haven't had a book for this show in so long, because I just keep trying to bang my head against the wall.

Damn you, Christopher Moore! I know. Oh, well. He's written how many books? And this is the only clunker he's got. He's got a couple other clunkers, but this is definitely the worst of the bunch. Yeah. Bring back Jesus. Moron of the week! Oh, Julian Assange is our moron of the week this week.

Again. I almost feel he needs like a Kanye band from this area. I know, but this one is just so good. He is the gift that keeps on giving. He really is the gift that keeps on giving. He is apparently a terrible roommate, which we've discussed previously. But this comes back to his cat, Michi, who they just call Embassy Cat.

Well, he loves his cat. He loves putting his cat on Instagram. But what he doesn't love doing is feeding it right or cleaning up the litter box. Oh, lovely. Yeah. So the embassy is just over it. So they already took his internet away, and now they're threatening to take his cat away. So what do you do when, let's see, you're on the run from the law.

You need a place to go. Ecuador says, come stay at my house. And you're there for six years. And they've taken care of you. You're a horrible person. And they still take care of you. But now they're threatening to send you to Russia because you're such a bad roommate, which is, you know, that's one hell of a bad roommate.

It's like, go to Russia. You know. Right. You have a red timeout. Well, he sues them. He is suing Ecuador. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. He's suing them for breaching his human rights.

Okay. He does belong in here. I told you. I told you. Yeah. Fundamental rights and freedoms is what he's saying that he does not have any anymore. Right. I think I think Julian is part of that that, you know, that generation that we talked about with the coddling of America.

I think he's just the international version of it. He's the Australian version of it. But yeah. Yeah. Thanks for thanks for putting me up, guys. Give me a place to stay. Not sending me off to America so I can go to Gitmo. Oh, by the way, I'm going to sue you because I won't pick up after my cat.

Yeah. Yeah. My cat. Yeah. So. All right. There we go. Well, yeah. There we go. I have a hero of the week, actually. So this is good for me. I finally found one. European astronaut Samantha Cristo Ferretti, who is currently aboard the International Space Station, just tweeted a photo of herself in a uniform from Star Trek Voyager.

This is awesome. Isn't that awesome? That is so awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So hero and she and she busted out a Janeway quote, which I thought was pretty good. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Stephen, Dave and Paul.

And David writes in, I was surprised by your trusting Britannica more than Wikipedia, simply because of their name and reputation in quotes there. And he sent us a couple of links on some studies that Wikipedia is actually better than Encyclopedia Britannica was.

I can see that over time. I think the issue with Wikipedia is people go to it when there are breaking events and it can be easily gamed and hacked at those times, as we've seen many, many, many times. So over time, and if you're looking up something that isn't in current news or people aren't freaking out about, I'm sure it's just as good, if not better, than the Encyclopedia Britannica and certainly more up to date.

But the problem is, as we say, with the hacking and the shenanigans that take place there. Yep. So there you go. PayPal, we got some donations from Joe and Mark. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. And over on Facebook, Tamara writes in, I have a Discover card.

They have great customer service, cash back, and good rates and good limits. I also have great credit and other cards. I'm not forced to have a Discover. I choose to and love it. Well, good for you. Good for you. Welcome to 1982. Yeah, and friend of the show, Trent, obviously hit the whiskey a little bit and wrote, the fuck?

They might be giants like fucking Blink-182? Fucking Christ. Then even music while programming? That's called useless shit. I'm kind of with... Always enjoy your post, Trent. I'm kind of with them on that they might be giants versus Blink-182, though. They might be giants is a hand over fist better than Blink-182.

Oh, I agree. Yeah. Matt writes in, can you please track down the person responsible for the idea of the biometric shopping cart handle? I think you need to interview them and troll the fuck out of them. I must meet the type of idiot who comes up with these shitty ideas. Well, you can go check the patent they put in.

I'm sure it's got the authors on there. And really, on the pantheon of shitty ideas we've talked about on this show, this one's way down the list. Yeah, this is just... But this one got you. Got you for sure. Yeah, and Matthias wrote in regarding security and home speakers. From what I understand with the HomePod, if you try to do things like, hey, Siri, unlock the door, what it does is require you to unlock your phone, even if you talk to the HomePod.

I think if you have the Apple Watch on and unlocked, you can tap the watch to confirm. Well, hey, if they're building in this kind of security, good. But if you're requiring something physical on you, why not just have a key? Well, no. I mean, if you're in the kitchen and somebody comes to the front door and you want to let them in, I think that's a great way to do it.

But they're using two-factor. So it's your voice and a device, which is exactly what we talked about. Exactly. Yeah, except I just don't want a HomePod. Me either. No. And over on Twitter, Sean writes in, hey, guys, I think you and Bittner need to look at this. My wife got it from Amazon and I must be rubbing off on her because she read the package and didn't use it.

Why do you have to wait three minutes for a lightning adapter? And it's so much bigger. What the hell? And the photo is over on Twitter. And it is a, for the first time before using our product, please restart your phone. Please using the original Apple charging cord.

If you have any problem about our product or our services, please contact us. Okay. Well, you know, you get what you pay for, I suppose. Yeah, this is a weird one. And, you know, that big end on it, perfect for, you know, a Chinese chip to throw some malware on your phone. Interesting.

I'm just saying we should send one of these over to Bittner. Yeah, seriously. Right film, sleep, repeat, wrote us a couple of different things. I wonder what we think of the new Microsoft AI advert. It drives me crazy, of course. Of course, it does. And he said, horrified at commentary on those who adore the classic 2001 film.

I intend to call everything AI and retaliation. I just said it didn't age well. I understand why it's a classic. Yeah, it's just it's just. Not good. Sorry. And really, just the book is better. The book is considerably better. Randy writes in, I listened to Pod Save America before your podcast for a really long time now.

I recommend listening to more than one podcast. I hope he means episode because. Me too. Actually, the thing is, I've never listened to the podcast. I was actually doing a review of the TV show on HBO. I'm sure the podcast is fine. I just thought the TV show was horrible. Yeah. Yeah.

We haven't really checked that out. So it was definitely all about the TV show. So yeah. And Derek sent us a link to I love you like a fat lady loves apples dot com, which requires flash. So I was unable to see it. Yep. I just see a big button here that says get Adobe Flash players. So because I will not install Adobe Flash on any of my computers ever again.

So thank you for the link. I'm sure it's funny. And Mitch writes in China plans to launch an artificial moon that's brighter than the real one. And it's a link. Scientists are hoping to hang the first manmade moon, which is eight times brighter than the real one above the city of Chengdu by 2020. The satellites could replace street lamps in urban areas, reducing costs.

Interesting idea. Interesting idea. It'll probably never happen. No. This is one of those like news stories that you hear about and you go, oh, my God, how insane and crazy is that? And then you just never, ever hear about it ever again. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me. Tell me when the rockets are on the pad. And Kate the Great wrote us, since we have a million wonderful ideas, maybe Uber will fund them with a Twitter link for Uber, about a $2,000 fund for their great ideas if you enter their latest contest.

So as per usual, give us a really good idea. We'll pay you a small amount of money and then we'll make billions off of it. Seems smart. Remember, Uber doesn't make any money. We'll get funding for it for billions of dollars, spend all the money, and then you get nothing. Yes, exactly. And over at GOG.show, David writes in, I propose the following change to the show.

Whenever the word meditation appears, replace it with masturbation. I always do this mentally and it makes things so much more funny. Holly writes us, love the show. I read this article the other day and found it interesting to keep up with the theme of dystopia and stay grumpy. And it's a link to, it's an Apple News link.

So I'm not sure who the original source was immediately. But the headline was, a leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's been happening a lot. This is over at Vox. Painful. Yeah, it's a Vox article, actually. So what are you going to do?

Joe writes in, hi, Brian and Jason. Love the show. I know the two of you are skeptical about blockchain, and I was glad to hear your positive comments today on the Vox article on blockchain. Although you're both correct about a lot of the bullshit with cryptocurrencies, blockchain is more than a distributed Excel spreadsheet. Here's a link. That's right. It's got the comments turned on.

Yeah. Track changes are turned on. Track changes is on. Here's a link to view my blockchain presentation explaining why blockchain, when applied to the appropriate use cases, is revolutionary. Since you're both skeptics about the blockchain in general, I'd like your brutally honest thoughts on my presentation.

Tear it apart and point out any and all flaws. This will be greatly beneficial to me. Note, the presentation runs on VisMe and renders best on macOS or Windows 10 on the desktop with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. Okay. I'm going to be presenting this to potential employers. All comments, positive, negative, et cetera, are welcome.

Feel free to share the link with others. We will definitely share the link with others, and they can send us their comments because I personally don't take homework easily that I'm not getting paid for. So thanks for the link.

We'll put it in the show notes so anybody can go check it out, and they can send us any comments they have on it, and we'll send it on to you. But I work 70 hours a week. Sorry, I don't have time to go check out your presentation. I just didn't have a chance to do it. I will take a look at the presentation because I do want to be able to see if there's anything revolutionary about it.

Cool. So I will look for that in an upcoming show. Cool. Brian gets the homework. I'll take the homework on. Steve wrote us. Hey, guys. I heard Jason stating that he's using his phone more and more for two-factor authentication, and he hopes he does not lose his phone. Just so you know, I use an app called Authy for Android that stores all.

If you care about security, why are you using Android? That stores all of my two-factor authentications in the cloud. Oh, that's a double whammy. Android and keeps your tokens in the cloud? Yeah. On multiple devices, tablet, work device, and personal device. Yep.

I get it. I get it. I totally get it. But this is, you're like being super secure on the one hand and then hanging your ass out in the wind on the other hand. Yeah. Yeah. Might want to think about that a little bit, but I get it. I totally get why you're doing it. No, I get it. Yeah. I mean, and the two-factor auth stuff I'm using is basically app-based.

So all I have to do is, you know, re-download. If I lose my phone, I get another phone, re-download the apps, re-auth the apps, and then, you know, use my tokens to come back in. It's easy to redo it, but I would definitely much rather keep all my two-factor stuff on an iPhone than on an Android phone.

Yeah, me too. But this guy does seem to know what he's talking about. Yeah, he does. This little bit here, I protect my two-factor authentication with a password that is 24 characters long and stored in my password manager. That way, even if someone gets my Pi blob in an offline attack scenario, it would still take them 9.3800 trillion centuries to be able to hack it.

So thank you so much for writing us. He also says, also, I appreciate that you guys discuss mental health openly as someone that suffers from the same. I am glad I am not alone. Keep on keeping on. We shall. Jay writes in, I'm a longtime listener, and finally, bit in the bullet and given little snitch a go is Jason's recommendation. Only problem is that it doesn't work at all with OpenVPN.

There seems to be some threads with lots of technical details, but I thought I'd just ask Jason because I know you guys use private internet access. Did you have to do any wizardry to get the two working together nicely? No. With private internet access, it just works. So I don't know what's going on with OpenVPN, but that's why we don't recommend it on the show.

Rick writes us, curious to know, I'm using Opera on a new i7 Windows 10 box, and it's happened again. Once again, I suddenly have no sound on YouTube. So I once again, I Google the problem, follow advice, et cetera. Nope. This has happened on my previous machine just before it died. Of course, YouTube plays just fine on Explorer. Is this a Microsoft plot?

I'm paranoid, but I can't just be the only one. I'm sure it's not a Microsoft plot because they've been sued up the bejesus so many times for their browsers. I'm sure they're sick of even trying, and they know it doesn't work. So no idea what the problem might be, though. Have you restarted?

Turn it back up. Cycle the power. Cycle the power. Did you kick the box? I've never had that problem on Opera. I'm using Windows 10 on my PC, and I use Opera, and I go to YouTube all the time, and it's never had the sound cut out. So that's an odd one. I wonder if there's like a key command that you're accidentally hitting to, you know, kill the sound.

Maybe. I'm not sure. And just completely uninstall Opera and try a fresh install, too. Yeah. And Opera has forums, so check the forums and post that up there, and maybe somebody can help you there because I've never heard of that. And it's run flawlessly on my Windows 10 box and my Windows 10 laptop, too.

Yep. Linda writes in, hi, Jason and Brian. So now that my Mac is more secure, I can no longer watch any vids as PIA seems to be a banned substance. So private internet access is not letting her watch videos. So that's interesting. I think that depends on which service you're going to.

Where you're going to watch the videos. Yeah. And it's one of those things where what I recommend is if you're getting banned from a site, disconnect and reconnect if you have to. I mean, and this is if you're out and about. If you're at home, you don't really need to use PIA to private internet access to bounce around.

Yeah, you can just switch it off. Yeah. And so if you're home, don't worry about it. But if you're out and about, that's when you really need to do it. And you can also send a note to the video site that you're talking about telling them that you are using a VPN. And a lot of times what I've found is the tech guys there will just whitelist the block of IPs from the area that you're coming from.

So just say, look, this is the best VPN that's out there. And I don't want to switch, but I still want to see my videos. So please, you know, whitelist these guys. And she goes on to say, is this what all the Sweden references are about? I'm a new listener, but also a Patreon. So I feel a $10 a month entitlement.

So Sweden refers to BitTorrent because the Pirate Bay, who nobody uses anymore, was just based in Sweden. So that's we just whenever we talk about going to Sweden, it's just talking about getting a BitTorrent and grabbing whatever you need to get, no matter where it comes from. So seriously, any advice would be appreciated.

I'm just a lowly full-time musician missing her vids. By the way, it touched my heart to hear the Harper's Choice reference from Dave. I used to live in Columbia, Maryland in Elliott City. I have very fond memories. Thanks for all you do to help us be smarter. So yeah, just contact the tech support for the video site that you're going to and just tell them what the deal is and ask them to whitelist the IPs.

And you can also just change areas if you have to because there's so many regions. And it's not like one IP when you connect to a VPN. They have blocks of hundreds of IPs. So somebody might have been using your VPN, not your specific one, but the service to do something really bad and it got like on a block list for a while.

And those block lists usually tend to like time out after an hour or two. John writes us, hi guys, in episode 289, you discussed having your personal information removed from sites that aggregated the data from public sources and the difficulty of doing so when so many of these sites exist.

While it's indeed a huge endeavor to take on, if you visit inteltechniques.com, you will find a PDF workbook which lists all the sites which do this and instructions on how to request your information be removed. Additionally, it is updated when new sites are found. Thanks for all your work. Love the show. I went and checked out the site. It's a good source. It's a really cool site.

The classes are a little expensive, but man, I would love to take some of them. Right. And it took me a long time to find the Intel techniques workbook, but I did find it and a direct link to that will be in our show notes at gog.show slash 292. So if you want to get that PDF and grab, just grab it and go down the list, it's a pretty comprehensive list.

It's really nice. So it'll take you, it'll take you a Saturday to go get yourself off of all of these, but it does work. William writes in regarding a recent show comment about smart locks and Alexa, at least the Schlage smart locks require a voice pin to voice unlock them. Prior to implementing the pin, voice unlock was not available.

And here's the page that announces the feature. So we have a link to that in the show notes as well. Well, that's good. No, no default, no default voice unlock. That's, that's, that's what we're talking about. Doing it right. Schlage. Exactly. AJ writes us silly things down under this week. Our prime minister forgot to pay for his domain.

So someone hijacked it. Scott Morrison.com.au. Nice. And then there is proposed legislation to force companies to decrypt encrypted communications. All the major players have come out against it. Apple, Cisco, et cetera. Noting that it means they have to create vulnerabilities that others can exploit. Yeah.

That's a, that's not good. Yeah. Now we went through all this in the States with the, uh, the government wanting all the encryption keys and things like that. And we've talked about Australia's plan in the past and it's very not good. Not good at all. And Chris from Australia also wrote us about the same, uh, the same, uh, website. So very funny.

Very funny. And I like beer rights in on BGR HTC blockchain cell phone called Exodus. Love the show. I like beer. I'm drunk. So since he didn't give us a link, I actually went and found another story on the HTC Exodus and it's over at wired. And it is a, another blockchain secure cryptography phone, cryptocurrency thingy.

And what the, the, the long and the short of it is on every phone, there's like a trusted environment. Some of it's called the secure enclave. Some of it's called trusted something or other, but they're using that segmented, you know, secure memory area to store your keys and things like that.

Um, so that's what it is. It's, I don't think it's going to be a thing. It's still, you know, keeping your keys on your phone for all of your crypto. Not a good idea. Right. Not a good idea at all. No. And, uh, Gordy sent us a story, uh, from Toledo, a Toledo man is accused of stealing a motorized scooter from the university of Toledo.

Please say Anthony Scott stole the motorized scooter meant for use on the UT's campus. Please say it was obvious that the scooter was stolen because the credit card machine attached to the scooter had been broken off. Scott was released on bond. He is due back in court in November. And Gordy said, maybe he didn't have a credit card. They let him out. So maybe he can take a few more.

Nice. Over on iTunes S. Arellano from the U S gave us a five star and says now with 10% more grumpiness when you're feeling down and low because you can't understand the millennials crack open a beer and listen to these geeks who will always have your back. They're happy enough to leave the politics to the politicians sometimes. So set your mind on cruise control and enjoy some free geek wisdom.

Well, thank you, sir. Or ma'am. Thank you. And we got a five star from Pocono Charlie. Also in the U S I thought I was a grumpy old geek. Then I heard this podcast. I'm grumpy old over 50 and a geek, but these guys are the masters. Thank you. Thank you very much. Pocono Charlie. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.

Dot show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG dot show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. And if you have a friend, tell them about the show, please. We like that. Closing shout outs.

So before we went to air, I was watching, I was watching the Dodger score the other day and I didn't realize that it was game six. And when I heard they lost, I'm like, yes, no, no more World Series. It's over. It's done with. And then I read on to the news and said, oh, now they're going to game seven and they won.

So yes, my beautifully well-written thank you to the Dodgers for not having won. So I didn't have to put up with all this World Series bullshit for the next couple of weeks. Well, game one, five o'clock today. Screw you, Dodgers. I can't wait.

I got my spot held at the bar. I am very excited. So let's go, Dodgers. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schoenster. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Dodgers. 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.

Go, Dodgers. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go, Dodgers. And then go to GOG.show and click on the PayPal button in the sidebar. Go, Dodgers. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 292. Go, Dodgers. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like, like the Dodgers.

Stay grumpy and we'll see you Dodgers next Dodgers. Go Red Sox. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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