293: Data Industrial Complex

This episode is sponsored in part by Betterment. Get up to one year managed free by visiting betterment.com slash GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason 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.

So Brian, I hear Blink-182 is back in the news. Huh, interesting. Yeah, just the other episode we were talking about Tom DeLonge and his crazy UFO company that ran himself some 30 million odd dollars in debt. And I went, hmm, smells like a reunion might be in the near future for Blink-182. And that does appear to be the case. They already had rescheduled a Vegas residency, but that was not, obviously they're touring right now without Tom.

But now they're posting memes around with each other saying we miss you and fans are going, hmm, I wonder what's going to happen here. So I'm betting a payday. Nailed it. Totally nailed it on that one. Sorry. Sorry, people who think we're always wrong. No, sometimes we're right. That's right. We were wrong about Serial Season 3, I'm sad to say.

I was stuck at the DMV yesterday because in California we have this thing called the Franchise Tax Board and every now and again they will just steal all your money and they stole all my money. So I had to go get a California driver's license so I could open a new bank account that will take them at least a little while to steal all my money. So I was there for a very long time. So I binged the first six episodes

of Serial Season 3. That should tell you how shitty the DMV is in California that I could listen to six episodes of an hour-long show while I waited to get my driver's license. Just leaving that there on the table. I would like to hear anybody in any state that tells me how wonderful the Department of Motor Vehicles are. I think this is a consistent thing throughout humanity, Jason. That's true. I mean, Illinois was not bad and the only reason I actually got out of there with a license intact is because I

had a previous California driver's license. And this was the funny thing. They were looking at my previous license and they looked at my Illinois license and they said, back so soon? And I swore to God that you paid off everybody at the DMV because everybody said it to me. So say we all, DMV. So say we all. It was ridiculous. Everybody's like, oh, back so soon? I'm just like, fuck you. God damn it.

Showmeister. Well, it's good to hear that Serial's good. I will have to give it a listen then. It's not good. It is epically good. I mean, this is what they spent a year on this season embedded in this courthouse and doing real work to just expose the injustices in the legal system, in the justice system. And you know what? Sarah Koenig has actually grown up quite a bit from that

first season of Serial. Her tone, her timbre, everything about it has completely changed. And it's not very NPR-y anymore. You know, that with all the dramatic pauses and crap like that, they still do have the cheesy music behind it, but it's not bad music. I got to say, this season of Serial is actually really fucking good. I would never thought I would say that.

But, you know, you spend a year on something for like eight hours of audio or however many episodes they're going to have, and you can actually do some amazing stuff. So I don't begrudge them their success on this season at all. And I got to say, it is well worth the listen because they fucking knocked it out of the park. I will definitely give it a go then.

Daredevil season three follow up. Have you had a chance to watch any? I'm four episodes in. Okay, I'm six episodes in. And I got to say, knocking it out of the park as well. I'm enjoying it as well. It's a different show, obviously. Not getting into spoilers here, but it's good. I mean, it's been consistently good. My only complaint about Daredevil is the same complaint I've had since season one. Way too much kung fu for me, but it's good.

Well, see, I love kung fu. I love kung fu. Episode four is hands down the best episode so far because of the hospital scene. That was just epic. It took me back to the long shot in season one, the hallway scene where he just was just kicking ass. And I was watching it. Friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, was here like hanging out at my house for a week. I was teaching him audio editing.

And we watched that episode and we were just like, our jaw was on the floor. It was so good. Episode five sucked compared to episode four because they spent all their budget on episode four. Good thing I went to bed after episode four last night. Yeah. Episode five, you're going to be like, this is really, really boring. But we watched them back to back. So it could have been a thing where when you watch episode five, it might be great. But I just got to say, Daredevil is killing it.

Love it. I don't see that one getting canceled anytime soon. Well, and also we did have some follow up on Jessica Jones. They are already filming. So it is not getting canceled for season three. So we will get a season three of Jessica Jones. Hopefully it won't suck as bad as season two. I didn't hate it as much as you did.

I hated it. I mean, I actively loathed it. Well, I don't have good feeling about that for you for season three then, because I think it's going to be a lot about the sister. So. Oh, God. Yeah. Well, are you familiar with a company called Helios and Matheson Analytics, Jason?

Yes, I am. We actually talked about them on the show last week. Yes, we do, because they're one of the shell companies that holds MoviePass. Yep. And they have not been doing well, obviously. So what they've done is the board has greenlit a preliminary plan to spin out a subsidiary MoviePass entertainment holdings that would take control of all the shares of both MoviePass and any other movie related assets within that shell company. So it's just, you know, shell games.

It is a shell game. And we told you this was coming. Oh, this is a funny thing. Somebody sent me some feedback on the last episode when I said that that MoviePass or actually that Helios and Matheson was kiting. Right. Kiting. They're basically taking money from Paul to pay Peter type of thing. And he thought I said kiting and I'm like, uh, one, I would never let that go through. Exactly. No, I'm

like, uh, and I identify as Jewish. So I would never say that. It was very funny. So I had to send him like, no, I said kiting K-I-T-I-N-G, which is a way that you used to be able to do it with credit cards. And you'd like get credit cards and pay off the other credit cards with the new credit cards. And so, so the kite was in the air all the time, but no, I did not say kiking. That would be, I mean, even for me, that would be out of fucking bounds.

That's true. It would. Jason would never even go that far. No, I would never. I mean, I would never say that period, but it was, it was a funny years on the show. I have, I have nixed many, many things that Jason has said, but none of them have ever been close to that. Nothing I've ever said was racist. That's all I got to say. And that would be beyond, beyond the bounds of even my, you know, retardedness as they say. Thanks Jason. You had to work that in, didn't you?

I did. I did. So yeah, we saw this coming. They're trying to distance themselves because they're in a class action lawsuit from their shareholders. And also we told you this was coming news. Alibaba has launched their cloud blockchain as a service buzz. Yeah. I can't wait until Amazon launches. Ah, exactly. Oh, actually they, I, we can't like, you know,

with recognition, they replaced the C with a K, but there's already K in blockchain. So how did block a chain? I don't know how they're going to do that, but yeah, no blockchain as a service is a thing now. Exactly. It's exactly what we said was going to happen last week. So all you well-paid, uh, paid blockchain engineers better start doing what we did when world press came out, start podcasting or go into cybersecurity. Like we said last episode.

Yes. And I was on the, on the crapper this morning and this came across my Twitter feed and it's a, it's a Quora comment, uh, actually an article. And it was a sponsored article in Twitter, which makes me think that this is just, you know, propaganda, but it was a very well-written article and it is, what is the revenue generation model for duck, duck, go and Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO and founder wrote a very intelligent piece about why duck, duck,

go can make money and why every other search engine and every other partner that's out there can do the same thing without taking all of this information from everybody. It's like, look, here's what we care about. You come to our search engine. Every time you come to our search engine, it's like, you've never been there. You type in a keyword. We will show you ads based on that keyword. That's it. That's it. We don't need any learning algorithms. We don't have to follow you

around the internet for fucking weeks because you typed in some joke gag gift that you're going to get your friend like, you know, poop emoji pillow, which I did. And it followed me for weeks. And it is a very cogent piece on why all of this shit that we're dealing with is just so wrong and how they're going to still make gazillions of dollars. Facebook and Google will still make a ton of money if you

just do it on the shit that people want. Yep. And I love this. And, you know, it makes me really want to switch over to DuckDuckGo. I just wish they were a better search engine. You know, that's going a little bit against the argument because somehow, for some reason, the other search engines work better. Well, they just have better search technology. I mean, DuckDuckGo gets you 80% of the way there, but Google gets you 99.999% of the way there. They have better search

algorithms than DuckDuckGo. But it just, it makes me want to give this guy a hug and say, preach on brother. Yeah, I read it. I liked it. I get it. It makes sense. And because for the second week in the row, the onion has just made me fall off my chair laughing. I'm just going to do the the onion headline of the week. Uber hires marketing firm to help decrease brand awareness.

In the news. Here we go with the scooters. Los Angeles based attorney has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of nine plaintiffs against e-scooter operators. The case contends that e-scooter companies, including Bird and Lime, are guilty of gross negligence for inaction in addressing safety issues associated with the devices. In other words, putting a sticker on it saying you need a helmet and you need to be over blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, isn't doing

enough. The suit also blames the companies for causing, I love this, civil unrest, citing individuals who have tossed scooters into the Venice canals and buried devices in the sand. Yeah, this is unbelievably the first class action suit filed against either Bird or Lime. So, yeah, I love this. This is exactly, you know, I hate the fact that our society is this litigious, but this seems to be the only way to get people to do anything. So I drove my dad from LAX to my house

last week and I just I just said, look for the scooters. And he was just like, my God, they're everywhere. And and just watching. I saw like three people fall off of them while we were driving through Santa Monica and Venice. It was awesome. But yeah, yeah. Civil unrest is really what they have been fomenting. They have been. And so, yeah, the it's it kind of works both ways, which I kind of like about this because the some of the plaintiffs were women struck by

a car while riding an e-scooter. The other ones include pedestrians who've been injured by riders and, of course, riders who have hurt themselves while operating air quote, faulty devices. Yeah, they were faulty, but yeah, I think look within look within thyself. Yes, I just I really love this. It's about goddamn time.

Yep. And in other class action news, Google and Facebook have been accused of secretly tracking users location. Is it is it really a secret? It's not. Well, we know if you listen to this show, we know that it's not a secret, but there is a class action suit filed in the in California, of course, former Facebook app user Brett Heger has sued the social media giant for allegedly continuing to collect user information

for his location from their mobile phones, even after he had taken advantage of its option to turn off location tracking. Right. Yep. And the suit also accuses Facebook of violating its 2011 consent decree with the FTC and which was not to misrepresent in any manner to the extent which it is privacy or security covered information. And so basically what he's saying is, yeah, you said that you weren't going to do it, but you're still doing it. So I'm going to sue you.

Well, I can't wait to get my two dollars. I want my two dollars. The problem is none of this is going to change unless we pass our own version of GDPR. That's it. So. Yep. And the same with Google, you know, you have to you have to disable the web and app activity settings in Google to make sure that you're not tracked. But he's saying that, nope, they still track me anyway, which I completely understand. You know, if you go to a website that asks for your location and you say, OK, I'll share my

location with this website and they have a Google tracker on it. That location gets sent to Google. Yep. Yeah. It's just it's some serious bullshit. And let's talk about the 90 million dollar blowjob right now. OK. This is a New York Times article on Andy Rubin, the the father of Android. Yeah. Yeah.

You've really done a great service to the world with Android there, buddy. He got let go. Well, he didn't actually get let go. He retired after a woman said that, you know, she basically forced him to give him oral sex in a hotel room when they were right on a trip and Google just swept it under the rug. So this is this is the 90 million dollar blowjob, which is the antithesis of the 20 million

dollar tweet from Elon Musk. All right. So 90 million bucks. And it's a whole story about how Google has swept sexual harassment. And honestly, it boggles the mind. And this guy came back and said, no, it's bullshit. My wife is conducting a smear campaign because we're getting a divorce.

And I don't know. What do you think about this, Brian? I don't doubt that Google has swept plenty of things under the rug. And I don't doubt that there have been people that have done very, very bad things. It's somewhat human nature. And we know that the tech industry does tend to attract assholes for lack of certainly men. We weren't there for how long? Come on.

And certainly men with with poor female relationship skills. So the fact that this is happening, I don't doubt at all. The fact that it's being covered up, I also don't doubt at all. This particular case, though, he seemed from what I understand from scanning the article, he'd been having an extramarital relationship with this woman. She was staying in the hotel room

with him. So I see she seems to have been bought into this whole thing for lack of a better word. So I seriously doubt it was a coerced blowjob. Yeah, I think it was a consensual blowjob. So there might be some truth to the ex-wife being quite annoyed about this. Oh, I wish we could have consensual blowjob as our show title. But I don't think that would pass. No, I don't think we're going to do that. So I don't know. I don't know anything about this. This one seems a little bit

more less cut and dry to me than probably about 20,000 other ones that you can pull out from Google employees. Yeah, I mean, it goes through a like a laundry list of other things that Google has swept under the rug. But yeah, but I mean, you know, this is super got guys super high up and it doesn't.

Obviously, the optics are not good here. No, they're not. Yeah. So the long and the short of it is, yeah, Google probably did some evil here. Even if it wasn't this particular case, if you go through all of them, chances are that they have because I mean, they're they're like a small country with that many employees. It's a subset of the nerdy American public. And you're going to have all personality

types in there. Mostly people who don't know how to handle women from what we know and the people I know at Google. Yeah, they're just kind of a bunch of nerds. But in good news, Tesla has finally had a good quarter. They're in the black. Yeah. Yeah. They made three hundred and eleven point five million dollars last quarter. Wow. Well done. Well done, Tesla. And I got to say, I am seeing Model 3s

everywhere now. Me too. They're starting to appear left, right and center around here. Yeah, they are the new Prius in my neighborhood, which is fine, which is fine as long as you don't drive like a Prius driver. Exactly. So far, Tesla drivers seem to be a bit better, but we'll see.

My dad thought I was I was joking when I always used to say that, you know, every time I see a Prius, I'm like, fucking Prius. And he got to see it firsthand when we were driving from LAX to my house. And he's just like, my God, you're right there. They're they're idiots. They don't know how to drive. So, yeah, I'm just saying that, again, we were right. But this is good. This is good news for Tesla. And he does say that there will be down quarters when they have to repay their debt

because they have a lot of debt. But that's on schedule. And the stock price went up like 12%, which is good because I have Tesla stock now. I have I have because I use M1 finance that you turned us on to. I have like point zero zero zero one percent of a share. But, you know, it went up a quarter. So I'm good with that. I told you, I mean, I'm long on Tesla. I really I don't care about all the bad news that people have been hearing on. I really thought I and I stick to

it that he was a punching bag for almost two months there. And oh, completely, completely people who were shorting the stock and all that crap, you know? Yeah. Well, and continued Elon Musk's good news, the boring company, which is the test tunnel under Los Angeles that he's been working on, although saying under Los Angeles is a bit disingenuous as it's like maybe a mile tops right underneath his headquarters. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's in Hawthorne, which is like not really Los

Angeles. It's a little south of LAX. He announced via Twitter that it's going to be open soon. And when it's complete, the system will be able to carry pedestrians, cyclists and private vehicles at speeds of 155 miles per hour. So in that one mile will take, what, 10 seconds? I don't know. Yeah, that's going to be a short ride. That's going to be the most depressing, like you're waiting in line like at Disneyland. And then all of a sudden it's over. It's over. Yeah. Like this sucked.

Can't believe I waited all this time for that. But there's going to be you'll be able to try out the loop for free at a special event at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne on December 10th. Now, as Engadget points out, it's important to remember that Elon Musk tweeting a date doesn't actually mean that this will happen. True. True that. A Twitter follower even went so far as to ask whether this was in real time or Elon time, referring to the fast that Musk tends to overpromise when it comes to schedules. And Musk wrote back saying, pretty sure. Pretty sure. Pretty sure is all we

can get nowadays. Well, remember when California passed their net neutrality law a couple of months ago? Yeah. Yeah. And the entire broadband industry sued California. Yes. Well, and the government. They're doing it again with Vermont because Vermont said, yeah, you know what? We want net neutrality to be in place if you are pitching to get government contracts. And of course,

everybody sued Vermont as well. Right. Yeah. This is just says every ISP who who looks you in the eye and says, we believe in net neutrality is fucking lying because if they did, they wouldn't be suing anyone. This is utter. I mean, you get to see like how horrible these people are when when the you know, the gloves come off and they wouldn't be suing these states if they really cared about net neutrality

because they don't. They want they want to be able to sell your traffic at a higher price to other people. That's what they're in business for. So don't believe the hype. Exactly. I agree. Last week, we talked about Lyft getting into a deal with Ford for autonomous vehicles. This week, we find out that they bought an AR company to help bolster its self-driving car efforts. They picked up Blue Vision Labs, a UK based augmented reality firm whose underlying technology helps cars both know their

location and understand their surroundings. So they're joining Lyft's level five team, whatever that is. Oh, well, no. Level autonomy. Yeah. Level five. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The autonomous. I thought that was the name of their team and they all had like little sweatshirts that said it. No, they level five is what everybody's going for the fully autonomous cars. So that makes sense that they have a level five team.

I was going to say that I think that would be kind of cool to be in a car and have AR like if they can turn the windows in the car to screen so you can actually, you know, have augmented stuff like playing as you go by. That would actually be really cool. You know, it's like, okay, here's the Getty.

Let me give you some history on the Getty Museum when you're stuck on the 405 for six hours and you could learn. Here's the homeless encampment from all the people that used to work. It's Snapchat. Here's Skid Row. Yeah. Here's the people that used to be blockchain engineers. Yeah. Block Row and Snap Row. Those are two different, two different homeless encampments in LA. Yeah. Fortunately, we'll be, we'll be reporting from podcast row, sadly.

Oh man. Don't even get me started. But I think it, I think it's a cool tech if they can make it, make it work. That would be fun. Yeah, I agree. MIT came out with an interesting global survey on the moral and ethical decisions that autonomous vehicles should be programmed to make. We've talked about the trolley problem often on the show about that. But basically, some general preferences have come out, including prioritizing human lives over animals. Thank you. Younger and healthier people

over the elderly and saving more lives over fewer lives. Thank you, Spock. People also preferred to spare bystanders who were obeying the law over jaywalkers. Okay. So this is a, over 2 million people from 200 plus countries participated in the survey. So this is definitely one of the most wide and sheer scale ones that we've talked about. And that is a very good sample size. I got to say. That's a good sample size. Yeah. So it's, it's interesting stuff and

well worth the read to see, uh, kind of what people are thinking about in terms of when we're basically talking about putting the lives of human beings into AI's hands. They're basically, yeah. So the general preferences seem to be pretty similar almost everywhere, except that in Eastern countries, including many in Asia, respondents were not in favor of prioritizing young lives over the elderly, which makes sense because there is respect for your elders and those. Exactly. Come on people. We're your elders. Don't

fucking run us over with your shitty cars. To be fair, we have a vested interest in this because we will be very old by the time these things actually happen. That's true. That's true. We're going to be out there with our grumpy old walkers, but why can't they just make a self-driving car that doesn't run over anyone? You know, that'd be nice. Have you heard of brakes? That's all I'm saying. Now there's a interesting bit about this, uh, all the technology that's going into cars. Now turns out that even

just a small fender bender can cost you a small fortune because there's so much technology in all these cars that are coming out right now. Like this comes from Mars technica. It said even a small fender bender can cost you $5,000 because they have all of this crap in the bumper and in the front of the car. So even if you just like get it a little like, you know, rear ender, that could be very expensive. And that makes sense because that's where the sensors need to be. So I'm thinking maybe

they need to get hardened sensors, like maybe do some mill spec on those and make sure that maybe we just get the super cheap ones from China that are spying on us. Well, there's that too. We could do that. Anyway, there's a really good article in Mars technica about like the breakdown of how much these things cost. Uh, so I recommend checking it out. The link will be in the show notes at gog.show slash 293. Nice. Now, uh, over at Engadget again, I, I cheered for a second when I read this

headline, Facebook uses machine learning to fight child exploitation. Now, obviously one would cheer for the general concept because this is a good thing, but no, I did not bring this into our show notes because of the general content. I was so happy that they said machine learning in the title instead of AI. I was like, Ooh, a victory for the writer and for the real journalist over the copy editors. Unfortunately, if you go on to read the rest of the story, every single time that they say machine learning, they also then add and AI. Oh my God. Because the editors had to do that because,

you know, clicks. Tim Cook is on a tear. Oh my God. I love this man. He is like my new hero. He's like Steve jobs done. Right. As far as I can tell, he has taken up this privacy banner and just is not mincing words about it. Be nice. If he would have picked it up a bit earlier, let's be honest.

Well, he has, I mean, come on. They, the San Bernardino shooter. He was, he was front and center with that. Every time that there's a privacy issue with Apple, he is out in front saying we want to protect our users privacy. So, but now he's, he's coined a new term called the data industrial complex. He was at, he was at a, uh, a conference. I think it was in Brussels. Yeah. It was in Brussels.

And he says, our own information from the everyday to the deeply personal is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. The scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold taken to the extreme. This process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm.

We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. Fuck. Yeah. Tim cook. I love you. I, I, I, I'm sitting here literally flabbergasted right now, Jason, that you did not, I was waiting for it and it didn't come. What are you ready for this? Okay. It's the data industrial complex. The dick. No, I'm sorry. I'm not, I'm not going there because I just, this is just, to me, this it's

heartwarming to see the CEO of one of the biggest companies ever to say this. I a hundred percent agree to have Tim cook coming out against the dick. I think it's massive. Well, we know Tim cook's personal preferences, so I don't think he's actually coming out against the dick. One would even say it's huge. He, he likes the huge dick. Uh, no, he does not. So God, um, I'm glad we've had a,

we've had a turn of phrase here that, uh, is not from me. This is good. I was waiting for it. I couldn't believe you didn't do it. As soon as I read it, I was like, he's going to say the dick. Nope. And you, I didn't even put the two together. Nope. That, that means you are the one talking. You're the one that is, you're the one that's focused on the dick this episode. Right. So we've talked a lot about a job automation and how many jobs we might lose due to AI and all that sort of stuff. And, uh, what I found interesting about that

is every time that we talk about it, people are throwing out completely different numbers and it's quite confusing. And, uh, Rico has put this into perspective for me. No one really knows how many jobs automation will replace. It's impossible. The data isn't good enough because it only measures what we know. And this is all what is unknown. So they go through almost every major study that's been done.

Exactly. The known unknowns and the unknown knowns. So they went through every major study that's talked about this and it is everywhere from like 2% to 98%. they're all over the place. Nobody fucking knows anything. Yeah. Nobody knows. Everybody's just making this shit up as they go along, but they're getting paid a lot for it. Oh man, we got to get that consultancy company going. I know. I just don't want to buy it.

Yeah. Well, BS, BS industries. Your name is Brian Schulmeister. So we could get away with it, you know, or we call ourselves the Dick, the data industrial complex incorporated. Dickie. Oh yes. The new word for the new term for Dickies. Oh my God. Now Google has come out with a new program to teach children how to act online. Oh my God. Steal everything. Sell it for as much as you can.

Oh no. And lie about it. their new program. It can be put into a simple phrase, be internet. Awesome. Oh God. Oh, Julianne Yee says, uh, she's the one who leads the program over at Google. She says it's been proven useful to kids, teachers, and families around the world. Oh, has it been proven? Well,

the PTA doesn't seem to seem to agree because they can't get behind it that much because they're not allowed to from their charter. But, uh, Jim, a cacomando, he's the president of the national PTA said that the organization does not endorse any commercial product or service. Although companies to give money to the group may receive promotional consideration. Isn't that the same thing? I'm thinking. And he says, Google is a great example of a partner that aligns with our goals and they

have deep tech knowledge that they bring to the table. Yeah. Let's get the kids in early. Get it. Sign up for Google account kids. Uh, we're going to, we're going to suspend, uh, COPA, the child online privacy protection act just for you because we want you to be internet. Awesome. So get your parents, your Gmail accounts. Yep, exactly. Oh my God. Internet. Awesome. Brian, are we internet? Awesome.

No, I'm more Melania Trump. Uh, be better. Neither of which are going very well. Okay. This episode is sponsored by Betterment. If you're a long time listener to the show, you know, I can't get enough of that hot stock talk. I mean, Elon Musk alone has provided hours of enjoyment recently.

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Betterment. Outsmart. Average. Security? Ha! We are not back this week for security because Dave Bittner is on vacation. He wanted to go see some Harry Potter shit at Universal. So he left us all alone. So we will not be talking with Dave this week, but I guess he's coming over tomorrow to meet the puppies. He doesn't want to meet me. He just

wants to be my puppies. Right. But let's talk about Trump for a second. Oh my God. The New York Times posted a piece called, When Trump Phones Friends, The Chinese and Russians Listen and Learn. Have we not, Brian, been saying this since the day he got into office? Since day one. So this is a huge

article on... Huge problem and it's a huge article. And Donald, of course, replied to the article on Twitter. So since I cannot do a Donald Trump impersonation very well, I'm going to read Donald Trump's tweet as Cartman from South Park. Yeah. Because I think that it, I think that works too.

Donald J. Trump writes, The so-called experts on Trump over at the New York Times wrote a long and boring article on my cell phone usage that is so incorrect. I do not have time here to correct it. I only use government phones and have only one seldom used government cell phone. Story is so wrong.

Screw you guys. I'm going home. Nice. So I like that. I think it should. You need to make a filter that just does that for everybody. I think that's going to be highly enjoyable. Every time you get a Trump tweet, it's just going to read it as Cartman. Screw you guys. You're so wrong. Well, get that prepped for a second, Jason, because it didn't stop there. Oh, no. He, of course, couldn't just tweet once.

He tweeted a second time, which I'll just read in normal voice. The New York Times has a new fake story that now the Russians and Chinese, glad they finally added China, are listening to all of my calls on cell phones, except that I rarely use a cell phone. And when I do, it's government authorized. I like hard lines, just more made up fake news. Now, here's the kicker, Jason. Yeah, go ahead.

It was sent from Twitter for iPhone. Nice. Busted. What an idiot. What a fucking douchebag. Oh, my God. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, people. Sorry, Trump lovers. Sorry. Sorry, snowflakes. But yeah, that's just that's just such bullshit. He's bad opsec. He can't be doing it. He's lying about it. He needs to use he needs to do what he's saying he's doing and he's not doing it. So yeah. So he's the fucking president

here. Let's have a goddamn secure phone. Shit, man. Oh, God. Um, jQuery. Everybody uses jQuery. It's a JavaScript plugin that makes life better for everyone, except when it gets hacked, when it gets you want to get it. It wasn't a hack so much as there was a vulnerability in it. And, you know, this is the problem with open source that I've also been saying since we first started this show. Everybody starts

using it. And I think the first one that we really covered on the show, like maybe four or five episodes in was like a graphics plugin that everybody used on WordPress. And of course, it was, you know, it was Tim thumb, Tim thumb. Now, I think that was the one. And that vulnerability is probably still out there with people who have like WordPress 2.0 sites that are still

online. This one, though, jQuery is a big fucking deal. Everybody uses jQuery and not a lot of people are going to go and update their embeds. Now, what I love is the guy who figured this Larry Cashdala. That's his name, Cashdala. He's a security researcher for Akamai, and he discovered

the vulnerability. And it's like a basically an upload vulnerability in PHP that he found. And it's just not good. So if you do have jQuery running on everything, which everybody does go update your embeds. I personally have to go update all my embeds because I've got like five sites that still run jQuery and they run an old version of jQuery where I know that this exploit still lives. So it's just

guys, you know, just everything is hackable. So this is a problem with this segment. Everything is hackable. Everything is hackable, which dovetails nicely into what I'm about to tell you. OK, if you're wondering what sophisticated, stealthy new cyber tools the U.S. government was cooking up to combat Russian interference in our elections, the Pentagon has just announced its first cyber operation to protect the midterm elections. It'll be centered on the Internet's

original sin pop up messages. Oh, no. Cyber command plans to use a variety of digital alerts, including text messages, emails and pop up windows to warn Russian operatives meddling in the midterm elections that their actions are being monitored. I love it because we know we can't stop it. We know we can't really do anything about it. We're just going to let them know when we know they're doing it. Yes. Hello, comrade. That's all we got. Hello, comrade. Click OK to

continue. Oh, my God. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So that's great. There's also a really good article about, you know, we just heard about this again. This yet another massive Facebook hack that happened and why they aren't doing anything and why most companies aren't doing anything for this. And it's what we always talk about all the time on the show. The laws have not kept up with the technology. Facebook's reaction is not out of the ordinary when it comes to protecting users. After a hack, there's a general inclination to do the bare legal minimum.

And in most cases, that means all you have to do is notify those affected by the breach. That's all that's required under most state laws. Again, this is why we need a GDPR here. Yep. Damn it. Yeah, that's the way it goes, man. Yeah, they have to they have to protect shareholder value. Don't forget. Don't forget. And this one coming comes back to Apple again.

Have you ever heard of gray shift? By the power of gray skull? No, it's not by the power of gray skull. There is no skeletor here. But there was a there's a company called gray shift and they had a product called gray key, which was a way to like bypass the iPhone passcode hack. You know, one of those things that we've talked about many times. Surprisingly, this wasn't an Israeli company. They're in the

they're based in the US, but iOS 12 apparently kills the hack. So nice. So update people update always ups and doodads. Jason, you've talked to me many, many times about the fact that your biggest gripe with the wonderful air on chairs that we use is that they don't have a fart filter. There's no fart protection on the air on. Yes. Herman Miller dropped the ball on that one. Well, we got another solution

here. First, we we had a pair of underwear that was supposed to help. Now there's a UK based company called Shreddies. Shreddies. They make fart filtering jeans that promise to eliminate your worst smells before they can escape into the wider world. They are lined with activated charcoal. Oh, my God. It's exactly what you'd put in your home air filters or purifiers. So it's within the jeans itself. And they last about two to three years, at which point you'd probably be getting a new pair of jeans anyways. However, they are quick to point out that that is not enough alone. You still have to

have some personal vigilance in order to be effective. Okay, the jeans have to fit tightly against the skin, ensuring that your gas is absorbed directly into the fabric to avoid flatulence escaping around the filter. We recommend that you stand with your legs together and try to let your wind out slowly. Okay. When sitting, keep your knees together so that the flatulence escapes through the carbon panel. As long as the jeans fit correctly, the filter should absorb all of the foul odors leaking

out of your body. No word if there is a sound machine that kicks in to mask the sound. I love these. Wow. Talk about something the world never needed. Or we just didn't know we needed. Yeah. Oh, God.

Ye who smelt it, thus dealt it. It will never be uttered again if you have your jeans. Oh, my God. I found a search engine called Ecosia. Right. You know, we talked about DuckDuckGo at the beginning of the show and how they don't track anything. And but Ecosia is basically a search engine where when you make a search, they plant a tree. Okay. I don't know how the economics work on this, but apparently they've

planted a bunch of trees so far. Now, I did a search on it. And of course, I searched myself and the results were actually not bad. I didn't do much into it, but they say they've planted over 40,700,000 trees. And if you go to their homepage, it's actually, you know, the things ticking up. I don't know how fast they can plant a tree, but apparently they can plant them very quickly. Right.

I want to hit that thing with a bot. That's how we're going to save the planet. Yeah, seriously. Let's just do bot searches, send bot searches to it every two seconds. Yeah. And they say they respect our privacy. They don't sell our data to advertisers and have no third party trackers, unlike most other search engines. There's definitely something in the air right now, though, because again, as we're seeing, there's there's this search engine that's popped up out of nowhere. We're seeing DuckDuckGo actively promoting themselves and buying ads and things like

that. You know, we're seeing people are pissed at Google and not getting it. And there's even more of that going on. This is a great story over at Wired about a guy that decided I'm done with Google. Data hoovering is creeping me out too much. It's attitude towards location tracking, Google plus privacy failings. What happens if I just use Bing?

He used only Bing for three months, and it's a hilarious, it's well worth a read. He called it Bingapalooza. And what he quickly realized is that search is search is search. If all you're doing is searching, all of them work just fine. Google's a bit faster. Some of them are better. Some of them lay things out easier. So if you don't want to go clicking onto stories, Google is actually better. And that's where he found the problem is recipes. When he was getting

into recipes, Bing would try not to send you to the site. They would try to keep you within Bing, and it would there'd be like read full directions and you just get the list of ingredients. And it's like, all I wanted was to go to the recipe page. Yeah. So yeah. So they all have their weird ass faults, but there's definitely something in the air and it's well worth a read. You and I dance around the idea of leaving Google and then never do it because we try it. It works. Yeah. It's like if I need to

find something, I'm going to I need to find something. That's it. It's like, you know, if I want to find a news article, I go to the library, I don't go to the magazine stand. You know, that's the way it works. And by the way, the Ecosia team is the German. They're out of Berlin. And Christian Kroll, Christian Kroll is the CEO and founder. But it's funny, they list. I don't know how they list these people, but the happiness officer, Alexis Banger, is the first on the list. I'm like, okay, well,

apparently she trumps the CEO. It's very strange. It's all about being happy. It's all about being happy. Trees make us happy. But yeah, it's a German company, which is, you know, surprising. But yeah, you know, it is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, going back to our decision to stick with Google for search, at least for the time being, they have updated their Google search privacy situation where you can review and edit what search data the company stores. It's very easy to find out,

be clear, they have not changed anything. It's just right there on the homepage right now. So you can click in and you can set it so it doesn't track your location in theory and doesn't record your stuff in theory. Whether they actually do any of that will be part of class action lawsuits for future shows that we'll discuss about. But at least right now, in theory, it's easy to at least turn off all those wonderful features that Google provides turned on for you. Well, that's good because for the first time in history, I actually turned on location and search tracking with Google because I needed to

do something with maps that I couldn't do because I was like in my car and I needed to do it quick. And to do it quick, they had me turn it on. So I have to go back and turn off, you know, location and web search history. And it's just annoying as shit that they do that. I do. Why, why, why are they coupled? Why are they coupled? Why can I not set my home address in Google maps without giving them all of my search data? That makes no sense at all.

Nope. No, it doesn't. Fucking assholes. Yeah. And I've got one other quick point that struck me this week as I was dealing with some things. We've talked a lot about how there are no true adults anymore and everything has to be gamified. And then remember, you were like, I don't do anything that's gamified anymore. And I said, Jason, you and I do something gamified every single day.

Our apple health exercise rate. Oh yeah. Gamified to exercise. And one of the things I've always said that there's, there's a real problem with gamifying everything because it also incentivize people to cheat or figure out a way to game the game. And I had that experience this week in particular. I've been really good about closing all my rings and I've got my, my move is up really high. It's like a thousand calories. I know you keep yours a little bit lower, but I've been working really hard to close

them all and close them all and close them all. And I've done like the, all this, all this month, I've closed them all every single week. This Sunday, I was super busy. I was able to close my move ring. I did enough walking for that. Uh, it's always easy to close the stand ring because that's ridiculous. But I was having problems with my exercise ring cause I didn't get a bike ride in the morning. It was slow walking with the kid and all that sort of stuff. And I was pissed. I was pissed.

And it was like 11 o'clock at night and I was exhausted. And I was like, I'm just going to walk around my house. And if you've ever walked around your house from like more than four minutes, you start to realize how utterly boring that is. And I had like, I had four minutes to go and I did four minutes of walking, but it only clicked it up one minute. And I'm like, I can't do this. But then I thought to myself, I bet there's a way to break the system.

Yep. And I strolled through exercise and I saw yoga and I just turned on yoga for three minutes, sat, finished my glass of wine, got my exercise ring closed. Nice. Nice. So this is the problem with game of vacation. If I didn't have these rings to close all the time, I would have been perfectly happy with my 28 minutes of exercise or whatever, instead of the 30 that I needed. But because I had to close

the ring and get the stamp for the perfect week, I cheated. Oh God, you're such a dork. Oh, I was drunk. That's usually what I do it too. I'm like, Oh shit, it's 1159. And I'll just sit there and spin my hands in the air. Like I'm punching like a speed bag and that just gets it done. It gets it done.

Well, I found a lazier solution, Jason. Just do a yoga workout. I'm actually going to turn that on right now and see how much, how much exercise I can get before we finish this show. Because right now I've got nothing. It doesn't, it doesn't count anything. It just counts the time because you know, you could be doing a standing. It just, whatever, however long you leave that exercise on for those are exercise minutes you get. Oh, that's fantastic. That is fantastic. Yoga

is the key to everything. It really is. Namaste. Brick a brick. NASA was having a problem with the Hubble, specifically the gyroscope, the past couple months really. The designers prepared for gyroscope failure by equipping the observatory with a backup.

Unfortunately, when one of the gyroscopes conked out in early October, the backup did not work as expected. It was rotating too fast and wouldn't be able to hold the telescope in place when it needs to stay still and lock it on a target. Obviously a problem for, you know, a telescope. Right. NASA has since been able to reduce its rotation rates and fix its issues by implementing the age-old fix for malfunctioning electronics. They turned it off and turned it back on again.

I love it. Love it. Now, obviously it's not quite that simple as many stories then came out and talked about how incredibly difficult it was to do all the things that they need to do. But in its very essence, yes, all they did was turn it off and turn it back on again. I love it.

And it fixed the problem. Oh my God, that's amazing. Closing shout outs! As we're sitting down to record, the Dodgers are down 2-0 in the World Series, but game three today in LA, so here's holding out hopes. Come on, boys. Let's at least not get a sweep.

Shut out! Shut out! Let's look for a shut out. Whatever. Big shout out to my friend, Dr. David Teeter. I was supposed to be hanging with him yesterday, but the franchise tax board stole all my money, so I had to stay home and go to the DMV all day. So thanks, brother. You and Chen, I miss you. I wish I was there.

And shout out to David Bittner, who we missed this week on security because he's out on his anniversary trip. And hopefully we'll see him tomorrow with the puppies. But I hope he's having a fun time at Universal today. And congratulations on so many years of marriage, my man. That's an accomplishment.

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.

Go Red Sox. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 293. Yay, Red Sox. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, and ask questions and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week, Red Sox. You don't give a fuck about the Red Sox.

I don't.

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