295: Vitamin Melanoma

This episode is brought to you by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. And get your domain today. 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. Brian, I hate computers. I hate them. I hate them. Hate them. I've had three beautiful Macintosh computers until this week, where I now have one. Two of my laptops have died on me.

How does this happen? What happened? The batteries have gone. You can get those replaced, right? I did. I took one of them to the Genius Bar. And apparently there's some other problems with it, too. So the first one I took in was a 2013 MacBook Pro, one of my favorite laptops ever.

$900 to fix it. Ouch. Yeah, that's a doorstop now. So that one's dead. And the same problem started to come up on my other one, which was a 2015 MacBook Pro. And I fear taking it to the Genius Bar because, oh man, I can't afford it.

Rip off that bandage, man. Find out the damage. Yeah, I gotta do it. I gotta do it. Or do I? Maybe I'll just wait and work on my little 5K iMac. You know, I paid a fortune for it. I'm still paying this thing off. So maybe I'll just use that and not work in my bedroom anymore. How about them, Apples?

How about that? You've got iPads for your bedroom. Yeah, a little separation of church and state. All you do is talk about how easy it is to do everything on these big iPads these days. So how about you kick the laptop habit, man? Yeah, but I can't edit. You know, it's nice to be in the house and be able to chill with the pooches and all that.

Great work and state, man. I know. You've spent a lot of time setting up your studio. Use it. Yeah, I gotta use it. Poor puppies are gonna miss me. But yeah, man, it's just a bummer that these things died within like a week of each other. And I think it's because I've been using them in clamshell mode.

Because I've had the top closed, so they don't get as much airflow as they say they do, you know, with the keyboard open. And I think that maybe prematurely killed them. There's no, there's no, uh, fruit juice will not fix it. You know, I tried that running, running that, that little battery app that we run for the laptops and they're just toast.

I rebooted 10 times yesterday and I got like maybe an, I think my longest stretch was half an hour. It's just like, oh man. Yeah, that's a bit useless. Yeah, pretty much. A little follow up on the auto blow AI from last week. I didn't actually read the article that anybody sent in because a couple of people sent it in.

Um, because it had AI in it and I figured you'd read it because you read all the feedback stuff. And I did tend to not. Well, it turns out auto blow AI comes from Brian Sloan. Uh, that's the guy that actually made the auto blow too, that we tried out on the show. You know, amazingly enough, I didn't remember that because I did not try it.

Yeah, yeah, I did. But I also sold in my domain twatpot.com. Right. Uh, which has turned into nothing. It's a big bunch of nothing sauce. But it's very funny that, uh, I went back and I'm like, Brian Sloan. Okay. Let me like search in my email. So I popped it into airmail three.

And sure enough, there's the whole thread of Brian and me talking about blow job devices. So it's the same guy. That's really funny. You should probably reach out to him and see if you can get a free new model, you know? Yeah, no, I think I'm going to pass. The first, the last one wasn't that great. I mean, it got the job done, but it, uh, yeah, no, I tried to sell it at a garage sale, but Oh, I can't imagine that went over well.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was living with friend of the show MXV at the time and he's just like, no, you are not putting this out at the garage sale. Detachable penis. Yeah. Remember that song? That was the whole thing he found. Yeah. Anyways, garage sale. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, a little follow up on grab it.

The people who are doing the advertisements in your car window, if you're doing your side hustle, you're, this is the side hustle on your side hustle. Yeah. Yeah. From last episode, it's in a side window. That's what I said. Uh, you said the back window. That was, that was the thing.

And that's why I'm like, you need your back window. Well, it is, it is definitely the side window. And I'm like, you kind of still need the side window. It's not safe. Yeah. It is completely not safe. And it is the side window on the sidewalk side. So it's on the passenger side of the car.

Now somebody, somebody tell me how it can be that you can get a ticket for tinting your side windows, but you can stick one of these things up there. This cannot possibly be legal. That's true. It absolutely cannot be true. Although, I mean, you do have sunshades for babies when they're in the car and you don't get a ticket for those.

You know, I don't know. I don't know how this works, but, uh, it just, it seems very unsafe. Yes. So I was looking at my Instagram feed last night and, uh, I follow Kristen Ritter, you know, Jessica Jones. Yep. And she was posting some pictures of her with Carrie Ann Moss, who's now her bestie.

They're besties, which I thought was pretty funny. Uh, cause Carrie Ann Moss isn't on the show that much, but they're, they're, they're really good friends. And then I went to Carrie Ann Moss's Instagram feed and I saw a post that she made about the matrix because she was Trinity in the matrix, which is one of the greatest movies ever made.

And some of the worst follow-up movies ever made. Exactly. It's just like, Oh yeah. The first one, best movie. The other ones just completely crap on the legacy of the first. But, uh, she mentioned that it was 19 years old back in March and I'm thinking it's next year.

It's coming up on the 20th anniversary of the matrix. Where the fuck does the time go, dude? I don't know. I remember going to see the first matrix at the theater down here in Santa Monica and not knowing anything about it and being blown away coming out of it. Then I remember going to see the second and third at the same theater and being less than blown away.

I would have to say they auto blew. They did auto blow. Uh, yeah, I saw the first one in the theater with my friend, Dave Shaw. It was the first time I like, it was a friend of my roommate. I met him and we went and saw it together. Neither one of us knew what it was. And then we walked out of there with our jaws on the floor and it was just like, wow, that was amazing.

And then, yes, I went back to the second one when I was in Pennsylvania by myself and just came out of it going, what the fuck was that? That's all I could say to myself. I'm like, should I go see it again? Maybe I missed something. But no, I didn't. It was just a terrible movie.

Yeah, I actually recently rewatched all of them, maybe about a year ago or something like that. And I'm sure I've talked about it on the show, but it was like, wow, the first one is so good. What the hell were they thinking for two and three? I know. I know. And now that I know that like the freeway scene on in two was filmed at that airbase that they did all the Mythbusters crap at.

Yeah. I'm like, I can't not unsee that. I can't not unsee that. But I watched them about a year ago as well. And I didn't hate them as much as I used to because I had it in my head that they were so terrible that they were unwatchable. No, by no means are they the first three Star Wars movies terrible.

Yeah, no, there's Mesa take the red pill. Yeah, they're not they're not that bad. But I do have to say the the rave sequence in the in the Jerusalem city or whatever that what do they call that city again? Freedom City. I can't. I know what they called it.

That rave scene was was Jar Jar Binks cringeworthy. But the rest of it, actually, I mean, there's some decent philosophy in there. I look back at and I think about like, oh, who was the what was the name of that character that the white haired guy, the architect? I love that.

I love that whole sequence. That was a great sequence. I do have to say that I agree with you on that. I love the whole idea of the Indian couple that were the rogue programs that had a rogue program child. And they were trying to save the child by getting the child out into the Matrix instead of I mean, there's some really good stuff in there, but there's also some really horrible stuff.

Oh, there's some definitely horrible stuff. But I did walk out of there thinking the the architect scene was actually really good that the entirety of the you know, that city and and letting people out was just like kind of a release valve. Yeah, yeah, you know, for for just anomalies in the algorithm because they just didn't know what the algorithm was doing and they couldn't make it perfect.

So this was the, you know, the umpteenth iteration of that city. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, that was cool. Now I should now I got to go watch them again because they're out on 4K. So maybe I'll go get it just to have the first one on 4K. I have it on Blu-ray, but I don't know.

I don't think I have a 4K HD Blu-ray player anyway. So I just thought it was really cool that Carrie Ann Moss was talking about the Matrix because she wasn't even in town when the whole thing came out. She was like out of the country and she came home and she like went by a theater and like the line was around the block and she's like, oh shit, this might be a thing.

You know, I'm reasonably sure she probably got a call from her manager. I'm pretty sure she didn't notice that it was a thing by driving past the theater. Okay, so she was just she was humble bragging. Yes, I think so. So everybody on the planet has sent us either a tweet, an email or a text.

I got I got seven texts last night about the new South Park episode, the Halloween episode, which is about the e-scooters. Did you get a chance to watch it? I watched some of the clips online. I have to be honest. I don't think I've watched South Park since the Matrix came out 20 years ago next year.

Not that it's not good. It just isn't on my radar anymore. There are some things that have just dropped off. I don't know why. Family Guy, also very good show that I just never watch anymore. Simpsons disappeared a long time ago, even though I hear it's still very good. But yeah, South Park a long ago just kind of dropped off my radar.

So but I did watch you sent me some of it and some of it from Sweden, I assume. And there's some YouTube clips. And I've got to say, I think we deserve a writer's credit. I think we absolutely deserve a writer's credit on this one. It was a great episode. I watched it this morning and I said, yeah, I sent you the entire copy of it, by the way.

Sweden. Thank you very much. They nailed it. They absolutely nailed it. Everything that we talk about that we hate about them is just like, why are they here? Where did they come from? And who's doing this? You know, Xander, Vander, whatever his name is.

Yeah. No. Anyway, it was it was really fun. It was a really funny episode. Yeah. I've got to say just really quickly as another bit of follow up here. There are two things that I think we've gotten the most feedback from ever. The first is the South Park thing. Everybody wrote us about this. So thank you very much. The second one is Spaceballs with the canned air.

I totally forgot about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody has written us about this. So I totally forgot about that. So, yes, you're right. But I'm telling you, my memory comes from a sci fi book, not a movie. And now people are sending other movies where there was canned air and stuff like that. This was definitely a book. And I don't think it was a book that was ever made into a movie.

So keep your brains on on the book theme here for people collecting air and selling it. And anyways, thank you so much, everybody. And thank you also for reminding me about Spaceballs, because after we got all these tweets, I rewatched Spaceballs. And that movie holds up. It's still damn funny.

It's got legs. It does. Okay, cool. All right. Well, yeah, keep your ears to the ground, people. And let us know where that canned air comes from. In the news. I generally don't check out Vice as much as I used to, because I kind of got their formula and it was starting to annoy me.

It's like it's that same thing where if you watch too many episodes of a TV show in a row or you read a serialized novel, like our rule is that we're not allowed to read, you know, part two of a book series back to back. You mean that rule you keep breaking? Yeah, the one.

Well, I've stopped. I've stopped. I've definitely stopped. And well, Vice kind of turns into that for me, because then you can see behind the curtain. But there's a new article that I thought was really good.

I love this because when I was running a page for a D list female celebrity that basically was attempting to turn her career around by wearing less clothing.

Is that the crazy one that you hooked me up with? Yes. Oh, yeah. OK. I know what you're talking about. I would get ads banned all the time. Ads refused all the time. Continuously, because it was against community standards, even though she was fully clothed in these pictures.

And these people just there's no there's no rules. There's no consistency and there's no accountability for the shit. Oh, there's totally not. Yeah. It's insane. The only person that got shut down at like they did the hundred sitting U.S. senators.

All of them were approved, but they also tried to run an ad as Mark Zuckerberg. That one was rejected. Yep. That's in the flag list, I'm sure. Yeah. And it's funny. I've been flagging a lot of Instagram ads that come through because they have no oversight on those.

For some reason, they have started sending me ads for holsters. I don't know why. I don't have a gun. I don't have a gun anymore. Well, I and when I did, I did not have a, you know, a pistol. I had a shotgun. So they're sending me all these ads for holsters.

So I started flagging them and actually putting them in and reporting them as appropriate. And it's funny because I got an email or not an email and I mail, I guess, is that we'd call a message on Instagram this morning that said, thank you for sending this in.

This definitely broke our terms of service and we have removed the advertisements from Instagram. Ten minutes later, I'm on Instagram. Another holster company is sending me ads. Well, they only flagged the one, Jason. They didn't go through and do due diligence or anything.

Why would they do that? That would cost money and time. Yeah, exactly. So I flagged that one as well. So I'm waiting to hear back. But yeah, since it's the, you know, it's the same machine behind all of these because they're, you know, it's it's Facebook. It's all Facebook all the way down. Right.

Well, a little bit more scooter news. Hot on the heels of South Park. Quite literally hot on your heels. Guess what else came true that we were thinking about when these things first rolled out? They got to blow up. Batteries are in this thing. They got to go boom, boom. Yeah. Well, electric scooter company Lime has announced that a manufacturing defect in several isolated instances could cause batteries on its vehicles to smolder or even in some cases catch flames.

And you want to take these into your house at night to make 45 cents to charge them. Well, like I said, we've already had a house fire in Venice from somebody that had daisy chained a couple scooters. So that did not go well. But this is just coming straight back to that hoverboard thing that some of the batteries in these things are cheap and old and blow up.

Yeah. I mean, it's basically you're you're running around with with a giant bomb under your feet and hopping curbs and doing stupid shit that I mean, you don't know what the guy in front of you. And you don't know what kind of battery is in there because it's a very specific battery that's causing the main problems.

It's a Segway nine bot or something like that. And you don't know. So the defect apparently arose in one of the two types of batteries used in early scooter models. And it was they were manufactured by Segway nine bot. So it's not like you could see that or no. So anyways, it was really interesting.

This is a Washington Post report. And they did an interview with a Lime employees with a bunch of Lime employees, all of whom raise concerns over scooter safety. And in an internal slack message in a chat room for mechanics, one employee apparently wrote, I get that the scoots are expendable and replaceable. But are we now resigned to say that the same for the safety of employees and customers now this is the business model?

This is not what you rolled out, like quite literally rolled out with. Yep. On one sense, it's really gratifying to have absolutely everything that we said about these things come true. On the other hand, it sucks because we've been screaming about it for like two years and nobody's paying attention until now. I know my friend was sending me stuff about it last night and I'm like, you know what?

It's really annoying that everybody's sending us all these stories that other people are doing and getting all the credit for. And we've been saying this since day one, since the day they showed up in Venice. We have been talking about this because you were you were at ground zero. Yep. And it's annoying.

It is so annoying. OK, Washington Post. Yeah, I don't see a credit in there from you. Brian, we've talked about WeWork in the past. Yeah, actually, it's funny because you mentioned Instagram ads. I get Instagram ads for WeWork constantly. I have never seen those. I don't get those.

I have some some Instagram ads coming up. Insta Scam of the Week is back, by the way. But this one, my roommate actually sent to me because she's on the on the lookout for fun tech ads. WeWork to limit free beer all day perks to four glasses.

Apparently, they've been giving out free beer like all day long to people who rent their studios, which if I'd have known that, fuck this place. I'd have been at a WeWork studio. Free beer. I know. I don't know if that is happening here because this story is specific about New York City. So it may have just been in New York City.

If they are offering unlimited beer here and they haven't capped it yet, I think you and I know where we're going to do show 300. Yeah, exactly. Because I did the math on this, considering how much alcohol you and I can take out and how much it would cost for us to go in.

And basically, if you treat this as a bar, you're coming out way ahead. Way ahead. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. Talk about who the fuck thought this was a good idea to begin with. WeWork. Like, I mean, I get they're trying to attract clientele, but free beer while you're supposedly working.

Yeah. So now they're going to only have the taps on between between noon and 8 p.m. And it's always noon somewhere. See, that's what I was thinking. I'm like, if they're specific, specifically saying that it's now noon to 8 p.m. That means that they were always on before and you could just get beer whenever you wanted.

Just like an airport. Damn it. We missed it. We missed it. Oh, man. It would have been great. This is a trial. It's expected to last between 30 and 90 days. And you have to swipe your card to get access to the tap. And then you get beer.

And when you hit 4 within that time frame, then it shuts it off. And it says, WeWork has been working on piloting an innovative software-driven mechanism to help manage the provision of alcohol in our spaces for some time. In addition to the supervision already provided by our community management team, mechanized tap controls will enhance this amenity we provide to our members.

And apparently it's because people are getting drunk and being assholes. That's what is shocking. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, you and I can go to this place anyways, and then we can basically just go around and find the people that are actually trying to really work that wouldn't be drinking and asked to borrow their cards.

That's exactly what I was thinking, too. Like, how do we hack the system? All systems can be hacked. Yes. I'm like, oh, that's right. You don't drink. Can I borrow your card for a second? I lost mine. Okay. I'll be right back. Come back with four pints.

All good. But at least I got to say that they're saying software-driven and not AI-driven. Yes. Thank you for that. And do you remember Leap Motion? Vaguely. I'm sure we crapped on it at some point. Well, no. We talked about it, and I was going to get one, but my friend Richard bought one.

And he tried it out, and it was okay, but it was also fairly buggy. It's a little device that you would put in front of your monitor that you would wave your hands over, and you could use your hands in the air to gesture and do kind of crazy things like Minority Report.

Like, you know, the Star Trek theme with your theremin? Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. You could play an air theremin. An airman, as it were. But yeah, he just said it was just a little too buggy for primetime. But these guys got into Best Buy. They were a big deal. And apparently Apple tried to buy them, but the guys who ran the company were such douchebags that even Apple said, no, we're not going to buy you.

Twice. Twice. And now they're on the shopping block because nobody's buying this thing anymore. And it's kind of crazy. It looked like it was going to be great tech. They've got over 100 patents. But, you know, these are kids. These are kids that are running this thing.

And, you know, we were dumbass, arrogant kids, which is why we're broke and all that. But these kids just, like, let the golden goose go. They just crapped all over Apple and said, we're not going to work for this piece of crap company. You guys aren't innovating anymore. And we don't want to be any way associated with you.

So I thought it's a very funny story. It's on Business Insider. So take that with a grain of salt right now. Well, over at one of our favorite things, the MIT Technology Review, I still love checking out their site. It's amazing. But I found this story about actors that are digitally preserving themselves to continue their careers beyond the grave.

So this is actually really happening now. Now, we've seen Carrie Fisher, obviously, in Rogue One, a Star Wars story, who was de-aged. And then we've had the Amy Whitehouse hologram. We've had the, what was the character? Tupac. They actually completely, Tupac, who played Coachella. But I was thinking the Star Wars movie.

Yeah, yeah. The, uh... Yeah, who had died years ago. And they brought him back. Hoff for something or ever. Yeah, whatever his name is. Grand Moff Tarkin. Moff, yeah, that's it. Not Hoff. Not the Hoff. The Hoff is still alive. The Hoff. Well, the Hoff is debatable. He probably should go get himself scanned as soon as possible. If you've seen him, he's definitely had some work done.

That's for sure. But, uh, so earlier this year, The Last Jedi visual effects supervisor Ben Morris told Inverse that the Star Wars franchise is now scanning all of its leads just in case to complete total digital scans of all the lead actors in the film. For celebrities, these scans are a chance to make money for their families post-mortem, extend their legacy, and even in some strange way, preserve their youth.

So, a digital domain, whom you and I both know, and reaching back to the Matrix, a lot of the Matrix special effects, is now basically offering the service to individuals. celebrities, although it's not publicizing it. They're basically saying, if you want to come in and get yourself scanned at your current state, we will do so, and we will hold on to that forever.

So, um, you can, uh, basically keep doing whatever you're doing at your, this age or after you die. I, you know what? I think it's a great idea. I do too. I honestly think it's a great idea. And just go for it. I mean, why not? Yep.

I like the fact that, you know, it will generate some revenue for the family later on. Let me tell you something bad that's going to happen, because this is what we do. This is digital information. This is digital information, which will be able to be hacked and put out on the dark web or downloaded for free or gotten from Sweden.

So, in the not too distant future, if you would like to have sex with Natalie Portman in your, you know, whatever device, in your VR, AR device, you will get yourself a hack Natalie Portman bot and go to town. Um, so this is our brave new future, everyone.

You know, I was just thinking Sam Jackson could be like my, my personal home assistant. You're like, what the fuck do you want? You know, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't going the gross way that you just went. I was thinking more of like, you know, I want to have like all these cool people around me in, in AR and it would be fun to have that, but you had to go to the sex route.

Well, the tables have turned, the tables have turned here. You've, uh, you've infected me, Jason. And now I think horrible thoughts all the time. Awesome. Awesome. Uh, speaking of horrible thoughts, uh, we talked about Facebook stories and how they're going to be doubling down on stories and how you hate stories.

Well, they've got a new AI that is trying to take stories and then build basically captions for the stories. So people who with disabilities or I, I, you know, no, just lazy.

I'm sorry. I, it's, it's not, it has nothing to do with anything that they said in this article and what the team is talking about. They're saying it's for people with disabilities or people who don't have like high bandwidth connections. What it's for is for the AI or the machine learning algorithm that is going to be going to give you ads to pull context from the stories.

That's exactly what it's for. The largest problem that they are having right now is figuring out how to monetize stories and how to get ads into them. And this is their first solution. This is the first solution. It's not the final solution, which is completely different. And, uh, we don't talk about that here on the show, but, uh, the first solution is to do captions for what's happening in the stories.

And from that, they can infer context. They can send that to their advertising algorithm, which will then give you an ad in the middle of a story or a banner or whatever. Desperately want to call this show the Facebook's final solution, but I know we can't. No, no, no, no, no.

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But Hover is the best. Hover.com slash GOG. 10% off your first purchase. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in the beautiful state of Maryland, which we all love and adore and would go vacation any time at. Yeah. You hear that, people? Always. Maryland rules. Dave is co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering and make it funny.

Dave, what are you up to, man? Well, first of all, do you know where us Marylanders vacation? Where do you vacation? California! Woo-hoo! Yes. I'm sorry I missed you. Unfortunately, I had a family in town as well, and the timing just didn't work out.

But I hope you had a great trip, and I hear you got to see Jason. We did. We had a lovely little get-together. It just worked out. The last day I was there, before we headed back to the airport, we got to spend some time together. I brought over some Dunkin' Donuts, and we enjoyed that, and I got to meet the doggos, both Bam Bam and Dino.

Bam Bam-Tried to eat him? She was a little, yeah, a little standoffish, but that's okay. Yeah, yeah. Bam Bam has a thing where she, like, on first meeting, she'll try to eat you. The second meeting, she will try and kiss you to death. But the first meeting, she will always try and eat you.

And this is why I go directly into the studio. Yeah. Yeah, but it was nice to put muzzles with names, I guess. And that was really nice. So, nice after all this time. It's been a couple years now we've been doing this to finally meet face-to-face.

So, it was a real treat. And the rest of the vacation was great as well. We did a lot of the touristy things, went to SeaWorld and Disneyland and Universal. And, you know, enjoyed all that stuff. So, yeah, it was a nice trip. Good to be home. It's funny.

As happens, I came home Saturday, woke up Sunday morning with a terrible cold. Which is what you get from. It's the planes. Yeah, it is. You know, five hours and a plane, that'll do it to you. So, still on the trailing edge of the cold, but I'm hoping this weekend will be the final knockout for that.

But, anyway, thank you, Jason, for your hospitality. It was really great getting to meet you in person. Definitely. Thanks for making the drive over from the far land of Encino. Yeah. It was lovely. Dave Bittner is literally Encino man.

That's right. That's right. Yep. Yeah. Lovely view off from the hillside that someday the house will slide down the hill with earthquake. Or the mudslide or something. I don't know. Yeah. That's why I live in the flats. There you go. Good call. Interesting stuff happening this week on the cyber realm.

We're going to lead off today with some proposed legislation from Senator Wyden. He's a Democrat from Oregon. And he's got a plan that aims to protect private data, restore the do not track capabilities.

That's sort of a zombie function in current browsers. Yeah, the one that nobody cares about. Right. Everybody ignores. It doesn't work. But here's the one that caught my eye. And I think, Brian, in particular, you'll enjoy this one, too. Jail reckless CEOs.

I saw that. I think we all enjoy that one. Jail time? What? Yeah. Consequences? Yeah, absolutely. Wow. I can't see this passing, but I like it. Well, you know, I guess it's an interesting first step in the negotiating process.

Yeah. We have to. It seemed to be inevitable that we're going to have our own version of GDPR here. So it's just a matter of how it'll happen and how far it'll go and how it'll get lobbied and negotiated and get its edges sanded off and so on and so forth.

They've thought about a lot of things in here. And again, it feels like they've been listening to our show. I really particularly like this one passage because they're aware that such a move, implementing these rules as they are, would drastically impact, read, crush companies such as Facebook, whose entire business model revolves around its ability to track users for marketing purposes.

The bill offers a simple solution. Companies would be allowed to notify users that the only way to continue using a service or website for free is to allow the tracking, but they cannot deny service to anyone who refuses that. Instead, they must offer a paid version of the service. I like that.

Yeah. I love that. The internet would be a much better place if this were in place. I love this. I love it, too. I was actually sort of trying to puzzle through that in my own mind. And I think, you know, I would probably pay 10 bucks a month for a non-tracking version of Facebook, basically a good parts version of Facebook without the downside.

It would be the good place. We could go to the good place. Yeah. I wouldn't mind it. I think I would be a little bit leery of a $10 a month thing just because I feel that we as a society are going to be buried under $10 a month fees fairly soon.

That's true. A couple bucks a month I would be happy to pay for. And haven't they done the math on what we're worth to them per month anyways? $7.85 a year. There you go. I'll pay that. Yeah. I think this article quotes it as being around 20 bucks a year.

Not for a month, though, right? No. $20 per user per year. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll pay. I'll give them that right now. I'll give them 25. They can actually make more money off me if I give them 25 bucks and say, just bugger off. Yep. Well, I was thinking, too, because if you have a bunch of people opt for the pay for it option, then that makes, wouldn't that make the tracking option less valuable since

your pool of people that you're tracking is smaller and worth less? Correct. That's exactly what I was thinking because the revenue for the ads would go down drastically based on how many people were paying for it. But then this is a good thing. Yeah. Well, but I guess I don't have a problem with them offsetting that by it being more than $20 a year.

Again, you know, if it was, I mean, five bucks a month. Okay. See, 60 bucks a year, whatever. That's not going to, to me, that's a good value. What I would get out of Facebook. Yes. I guess it would kind of be like, well, it's funny.

I've been thinking about, because I have been really been putting a lot of thought into quitting Facebook lately. And what struck me is that quitting Facebook, I think, is probably a lot like quitting smoking. And I've never been a smoker, so I don't know. But I think that it's that similar kind of draw to something where you, there's lots of good things about it, but you know it's bad for you deep down.

So I was thinking like, this would be like, you know, smoking without the lung cancer and the stinkiness and the, you know, all the bad parts of. So paying for Facebook is like vaping. Yeah, I guess it is. Yep. All right. Nevermind.

I would, nevermind. Nevermind. I mean, yeah, it's just the whole article was lovely. I like the plan. It's, it's well thought out. We've always laughed and kind of made a joke on this segment in the show that people in charge and in government and don't know what they're talking about.

This guy does. Or at least he's certainly surrounded himself with people who understand the industry. He's got the best interns in the world. There you go. It's a brief little beacon of hope, I guess. So we'll, we'll certainly keep an eye on this one, but I have to get your hopes up.

No, no. But I felt good after I read this article because there's nothing in it that makes me think that to Brian's point, there's nothing in this that makes me feel like the, this guy just doesn't get it. The things in here are practical and realistic and could be doable.

So we'll see where it goes. He's been at the forefront of all of the really like decent cyber regulation. So I, I have faith in him that he knows what he's talking about. There are another, you know, 99 senators that I don't agree with, but he's one of the good guys.

Yeah. He's outnumbered. Another thing caught my eye this week. Like this was after, you know, Apple had their big event recently where they, they launched the new MacBook air and the new iPad pros and what else? A new Mac mini. And one of the things that came out from this was that their new T2 security chip actually physically disconnects the microphone when the laptop lid is closed.

Like it's a hardware disconnect. Nice. The wiring from the microphone to the rest of the circuit board. Yet we will still be getting stories about how Facebook is listening to you. That's right. Yeah. It'll never end.

No, this is really good. This is smart. Like this is a great idea. I mean, it follows right along in line with, again, in the continuing theme in this segment is that Apple does seem to particularly really care about our privacy and our security. Yeah. Yeah. I think they do. So, you know, hats off to Apple for taking the time to engineer something like this in.

To me, this is a competitive advantage. So, we'll see if other people follow. But I think it's a good thing. Speaking of Apple, this is a really interesting article from iFixit about how basically if you expose your iPhone to a high enough level of helium, it'll brick the device.

Siri just doesn't talk in a strange voice. Yeah. Siri doesn't go, hello, can I help you? Right, right. That's what happens first. That's how you know it's on the edge. But I just think this is really interesting because helium, what, helium's an inert gas, right?

It's been a long time since I took high school chemistry. But what happens is some of the, I think it's the gyroscopic sensors in the phone and also one of the, it's something that has to do with the phone's timing.

There's some, it's not a chip. Quartz oscillators? There you go. It seems to, yeah, there it is. And so, the actual helium atoms, because helium is so small, it can get in places that other molecules can't. That's why your helium. It gums up the works. That's why your helium balloon leaks after a few days, right?

Yeah. So, the helium gets in there, it gums up the works, and eventually bricks the phone. And, interestingly enough, you know, Apple says you can sort of dry the phone out, give it a few days, and the helium... Put it in rice? Well, yeah. The old rice drink.

Put it in nitrogen. Right. Or whatever. Put it in a bell jar, I guess would probably be the best way to do it. But, the helium will disperse, and you should be able to get the device back. But, it just struck me as a very strange, odd thing.

I don't know... And, how they found out about this was, there was a helium leak at a hospital, because MRI machines use large amounts of helium to cool the big magnetic cores of the MRIs. And so, the gas from that helium, they boil off helium to cool those things, and the gas from that helium is usually vented outside of the building, and in this case, it wasn't.

So, they ended up with an unusually high amount of helium in the building. It wasn't enough for anyone to detect or to hurt anyone, but there's this rash of iPhones being bricked all over the hospital, and they finally tracked it down to...

They got in touch with Apple, and they tracked it down to this leaking helium from an MRI machine. So, I guess, be careful if you're at a birthday party, where the kids are popping... You know, if you're in a small room, and the kids are popping helium balloons, or, you know, making their voices sound funny with helium, don't...

If you make your voice sound funny with helium, don't record it on your iPhone. Right. You could brick your iPhone. So, anyway, it's just amusing, but I thought it was cool enough to include. It's really interesting, too, because I know helium is... We have a shortage of helium right now.

Yes, yes. And there is no more. I mean, helium is one of the biggest or, what, most abundant elements in the universe, but the amount... We got none. Well, the amount we have on Earth is evidently limited, and because it's elemental, you just can't go out and make more.

And so, there's some people who are upset that we're using our limited supply of helium on things like birthday balloons when there are devices that really need them, like MRI machines. Right. And I've actually seen stories where people are saying that there's been ideas to bank helium, to store it because it's only going to go up in value.

Yeah. No, there are people that are actually doing that. When you mentioned this story, I remember this from a couple of years ago, because if you even go to the party store, helium balloons have gotten really expensive now because it is rare. And that's one of the things that people are trying to figure out if they can mine asteroids for.

Right. They think that there's going to be trapped helium in these asteroids that they can then bring back to Earth because we're running out. Crazy. I'm going to invest in helium futures. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck Tesla. I'm going for helium. Helium. Yeah. You've cornered... You have all the...

Yeah. You've cornered the helium market. You've cornered the helium market. Right. Right. I can be a helium baron. Yeah. Or it'd be... Right. Exactly. It's a pain in the butt to store, but you'll get your justification in the end. Yeah.

This next story is about an IOT thermometer. Why? I could go wrong. Yeah. Which reminds me of my favorite thermometer joke. How do you tell the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer? The taste? There you go.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yes. Yeah. So this is an IOT-equipped thermometer, which I guess at first seems like a not crazy idea. You can take your temperature and you can have it automatically connect to your phone so you could track your temperature if you're doing something like tracking your temperature, maybe for fertility or something like that.

You know, it's a practical use for it. Reporting data to your doctor and that sort of thing. But it turns out that the company... God forbid you just type it into an app because it's only three numbers or four numbers. Yeah. Well, who has time for that noise? Who has time for that? No, no.

I'm not an animal. So evidently, the company who makes this thermometer has been selling the aggregated data. What? I know. Never have we ever heard about an IOT device selling data to somebody who doesn't deserve it.

Never. It gets better. Companies like Clorox, who sell disinfectants, are using this aggregated data to figure out where to best spend their advertising buys. Now, I read this, and I thought, doesn't Google already do this?

Google puts out information about flus and things of that nature and where they're hitting and spreading for free. So I think I could go save Clorox a hell of a lot of money right now. And I think the Centers for Disease Control do too. It's not direct marketed. Yeah, but it's not directly marketed to you.

So when you go to Target... No, but they're not doing that, Jason. They're not doing that. It is aggregated data. It's not direct marketed. It's direct marketed to areas, which is the same thing that Google does. It shows you where the flu is spreading and where they're projecting it's going to go. Right.

Okay. But still, the fact that they don't tell you that they're doing that is... Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's totally wrong. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Let's roll it back here. It is wrong, for sure. I mean, this thing should be free. You shouldn't have to pay for this thermometer because they're getting your data. This is ridiculous.

This should be like a free thing. They should be giving it away. Instead, you're paying and then getting screwed on the back end where the thermometer sometimes goes. Where the other thermometer goes, yes. I was thinking about, you know, your whole family gets the flu and one of those billboard trucks just starts driving down the street back and forth in front of your house.

So, you know, ads for Clorox or whatever, you know, so they would get the jiggas up. But, you know. Anyway, another fun one. Oh, IOT. So, I found this next one over at servthehome.com, which I'd never heard of.

But it is an incredible breakdown on why Bloomberg's Super Micro Stories are utter bullshit. Did you guys get a chance to look through this? I did. I mean, I don't think anybody has time to read the entire thing because it's extraordinarily long.

But it is incredible how they broke down this story and said, no, no, this did not happen. There is no way this happened. Has there been any follow up on this? Because I have not really kept up on the story other than, as we discussed, you know, nobody has shown up with a chip.

What is Bloomberg's take on it? Or are they just kind of pretending it didn't happen at this point moving on? I mean, Bloomberg is standing by the story. But they haven't offered any additional evidence. They haven't. Basically, they've said nothing except we stand by the story. We have this many interviews with this many, you know, anonymous sources.

But they have not they've not released any photographs of any motherboards or any additional information. But her chips! But her chips! Yeah. Yeah. Great. But in the meantime, you know, we've got all the companies involved in this have have said in no uncertain terms and in terms that if they were lying would get them in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yeah. So they've all said there's nothing to this story. So, yes. If Apple comes out as a two billion dollar company, they will not make a statement that will cause them any problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Even if they're a two trillion dollar company. Or two trillion.

Yes. I'm getting my numbers wrong. Okay. But, yeah, this is a this is a great breakdown. So I highly recommend everybody go check it out if you want to get down to the nitty gritty on in even the funny part was that in the Bloomberg article, they said, even if the computer is off, they can they can exfil data.

It's like, excuse me, excuse me, sir. Computers need power to run. It's like that's even like the most basic one, but they get down to all of the BMC, you know, network management server like services and things like that.

And it's just it gets really deep into it. But I highly recommend you go check it out if you want to figure out why Bloomberg is so full of shit right now. Yeah, it's the most detailed breakdown of this that I've seen so far. So if you're interested in how this is played out, this is a really good one to check out.

So this one is it I'm I'm scratching my head on this one. Mariah co-author gets six months confinement and eight point six million dollars in fines for the Rutgers attack. This is one of the authors of the Mariah botnet. Right.

What do you guys think of this sentence? He got twenty five hundred hours of community service, six months home confinement and an eight point six million dollar fine to pay back to Rutgers University. I'm thinking he doesn't have eight point six million dollars. Well, I don't think he has eight point six million dollars, but why no jail time?

That's interesting. How many years is twenty five hundred hours of community service to have any estimation on that? It's got to be a few years of full time. Yeah, I know. If only one of us had some device in front of us that was capable of calculating numbers or something, or if we did any work ahead of the show to have these numbers in front of us.

He'd be working for one hundred and four point one six six, six, six, six, six, six, six days consecutively to actually pay pay that off. OK, but and if you divided that by let's say eight hours a day.

Real time math. Yeah. Pod. Yeah, this is great. But yeah, I'm not even going to bother with that. But it's one hundred and four days of not sleeping. So it's a lot. Right. OK. OK. So, yeah. A few years of his Saturdays are all taken up with watching these cars and fire engines.

He ain't playing Red Dead Red Dead Redemption two very often. Mm hmm. But it's six months house arrest. What? None of this really makes too much sense to me. I'm surprised there's no jail. I don't understand the completely unfeasible restitution pay.

Like, is he never are they just going to garnish his wages forever and he just never makes any money ever, ever, ever like that? He's he's never to be able to pay eight point six million dollars back. Right. Especially not if he's working community service for a full year. Yeah. And who's going to hire him? Yeah.

No, this guy's going to be homeless. I don't get it. Yeah. This guy's going to be homeless in a minute. And he lives in New Jersey. Poor guy. Well, the thing about this is I I'm on the fence with this. I thought that there should be jail time. But, you know, I'm also on the side of intellectual crimes of this nature should not include jail time unless there is a prison that is designed for people who are doing cyber crimes, because all it's going to do is turn them into more hardened criminals.

And that's one of the things that I watched a bunch of stuff on Kevin Mitnick when he was in jail. And if you've never watched the documentary from 2600 on Kevin Mitnick, it's fantastic. You should definitely watch it. But a lot of these kids go into jail and they come out as actual criminals.

It doesn't rehabilitate them. It turns them into criminals. So the house arrest, I think I changed my mind on that. I think it's OK. But I think that we definitely need cyber jail. You know what they should do? They should put them in a large complex that has a whole bunch of Wi-Fi connections.

But they're all those free Wi-Fi connections that you connect to, but then you can't actually connect to the Internet. It's called. Yeah, it's honeypot state prison. There you go. That's all we do. Isn't cyber jail just not being able to connect to the Internet? Isn't that that's cyber jail, right?

Kind of. I just I just wanted your take on this as to do you think that he deserves to go to jail for this or do you think that this is a I don't know about the deserving thing. But if this were me, I would rather go to jail for a year or two than owes eight point six million dollars for the rest of my life.

And what happens when he inevitably can't pay it? Does he just end up back in jail? No, no, you don't. That's not how I think we have debtors prisons anymore. No, yeah, we don't have debtors. That's not how it works. If you don't have the money, you can't pay it back. They can put debt collectors on you and then he could actually just file for bankruptcy and get it get it removed.

Oh, huh. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So this next one I found is smart lie detection system to tighten EU's busy borders. So the EU is going to put in lie detection systems called iBorderControl. Yes.

It sounds like a William Gibson novel title. Yeah, it kind of does. So what do you guys take on this one? Because I am kind of freaked out about this one. Hmm. Well, lie detection systems have historically been bunk.

Bunk. But it's OK. I agree with you. But the thing is, it's only step one. Now, I the traveling, the amount of people traveling, the amount of pressure coming through, the amount of people, the weights and all that sort of stuff. If they feel that this is a step one, that if you can get through this, you just breeze on through your merry way.

You don't have to talk to anybody else. You're done. You're through. Great. They're not saying if you don't pass it, we're we're going to throw you in jail. Then you just go to what is the normal step one, which is you go up to an agent, you talk to them. So I'm kind of OK with it. Yeah, I feel the same way that as a first step, I think it may be useful.

Something that I've heard over and over again from folks in the intelligence community when it when I express my skepticism at polygraph, you know, clear clearances that are based on polygraphs. What I hear back from the people who use them and have been through them is that it's not so much about detecting whether or not you're lying.

It's about it's just being a tool as an interrogation technique. The fact. Right. They're able to observe you being hooked up to this thing. And that just sort of changes the equation. So I suspect this could have a part of that as well.

If everybody goes on to step two, but, you know, the person who's nervous and twitchy and all that stuff goes to a more stringent step two than someone else, then that's fine. I guess the problem would be if, you know, we find that all of a sudden everybody with brown skin is going to the stringent step two and everybody with lighter skin is going to the is breezing right through.

Well, then maybe that algorithm, you know, needs to be looked at or a little tweaked out or whatever. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess the other worry, the other worry is that the algorithm really gets really, really, really good. And then who's in control of that technology when all of a sudden we have a complete foolproof algorithm for detecting lies.

That's there. This is dystopian sci fi novel one on one if you take it to that level. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because what happens if because now you have a system you can train. So as you're taking people to step two, if it turns out they were lying and you can then feed that back into the system and say you are observing this person and sure enough, they were lying.

Well, now the system is getting better and better at it. That's a really interesting thought. Yeah. Because I think about, you know, as a step one, I think it's good because I think about the the airports in Israel. You know, they have it down to a science there. They know to look for body language.

They know to like everything about the person. They know how to spot and they have trained their the people well on how to spot it. So, you know, if those are the people that are training the algorithm, maybe it's OK. But, you know, as in to come back to the polygraph thing, my ex-girlfriend, her dad was basically a spook and he had to do one of those three day polygraph tests.

I think it's called the lifestyle poly. Yep. And, you know, he passed, but he said it was just terrible. It was absolutely terrible. But they were not looking at the output on the polygraph. They were looking at him. You know, they had they had specific people that could read body language in the room that were looking at him and were not looking at the actual output on the polygraph.

They had they had a guy that was like, you know, circle in the polygraph stuff. But the people that really mattered were the other people in the room. Yeah. And so let's extrapolate this. What happens when five years from now the data from this is readily available and you can have this on your phone?

It's on GitHub. Yeah, exactly. So you go out on a first date. You just have your phone sitting there on the on the restaurant table. And it goes straight through your Google glass. Right. Yes, that's true. Yeah. Right. Or for your kids or whatever. I mean, so that's that's another thing to think about.

Right. Because, you know, this is five years out from being, you know, in the in the private sector. So we can all just go get it. It's just an app. Yeah. But this book is I'm not kidding about this science fiction dystopian thing there. This book is stuck in my mind for years and years. It's a very old book because it was writing into the future, which would have been the year 2004 at the time.

Right. So it's a bit old. It's called The Truth Machine by a guy named James L. Halperin. And this was a whole America where all of a sudden we knew that we could find out the truth if people were telling the truth. Oh, no matter what. And it completely changes society. And if you're interested in this mind experiment, since we've been talking about this story for five, six minutes now, we are.

I would highly recommend you guys go read this. I don't know how well it's held up with technology, obviously, because, again, it was written, I think, in the 90s or something like that. But it is exactly it's a terrifying. I've always held this novel in the back of my mind, because if you think, you know, the idea of being able to get an algorithm that 100 percent can tell if somebody is telling the truth or not.

That's a fucking scary world to live in. Oh, yeah. Because what you really start to discover is that so much of social niceties are built on things like white lies and things of that nature. And if that foundation gets completely rocked, we will be in a very strange world. Yeah. It's been proven that radical honesty just doesn't work.

It does not. And what's also what's also terrifying is when I put the truth machine into Amazon, the first title that comes up is the truth machine, the block chain in the future of everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that one. Yeah. No, this is the James Halpern version. By the way, I just very good book.

I just wanted to say, not for nothing, that Jason is much more handsome in person than he is even in his profile picture. Well, how about that? And that's the truth. Bam Bam is not going to be behind the gate next time.

Yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. You're going to dip me in gravy before I come over with bacon bits or something. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that, buddy. Yeah. You're a pal. I know. As he says from 3,000 miles away.

See, it's safe over here. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck Maryland. I know. It's terrible. It's a dystopia over here. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, it's as good a place to leave it as any. I will talk to you guys next week. And until then, try to stay safe.

You too. Dick. That was very funny. Very funny. Ups and doodads. Brian, this week I turned off autocorrect on all of my devices. And it has been glorious.

Well, you know how to spell, though. I was the fourth grade spelling bee champion. That's right. Most people I know don't. Well, the problem is the autocorrect, you just you start typing and you don't even think about it anymore. And then you send an email that sounds like you're completely drunk.

And when I'm completely drunk, I can still spell. So it's it's totally bullshit because what we've noticed over the years is that the autocorrect on the iPhone used to be amazing. And now it is just utter garbage in a trash fire.

So the same has happened on Mac OS. And I'm finding that it's just autocorrecting words that I actually want to say to something else. So I turned it off. Yeah, I find that I would say 75 percent of the time autocorrect is giving me something I don't want or trying to correct a word that I'm trying to type into something I don't want at all versus the 25 percent that actually catches something I spelled wrong.

Right. So you still leave spelling check on. So it gives you the red underline. But you have the advantage of not saying something stupid. So I recommend everybody turn this off. And it'll also turn you into a better speller because you're actually have to think about it.

So when it's underlined, you go look at it and you go, oh, then you learn what the correct spelling is. And then, you know, you might get smarter. I think that's the way it should work. I'm 100 percent on board with you on this. I'm going to do this because, like I said, I find it to be more of a nuisance than a help. And I'm getting rid of it.

Now, my biggest problem with this is, as you were doing this, I know you type everything and a lot of people do. But this will not solve the problem that I get from a number of my friends who text me completely unintelligible things because they basically use Siri to send texts. Oh, yeah. God, I hate that so much.

It is useless. I don't know what store bought five nine means. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, you meet you at the bar in five. Oh, OK. Well, store bought five nine doesn't mean that to me. Yeah, that you cannot infer context from some unintelligible Siri bullshit.

So, yes. If you're using Siri to send your messages, please look at what you sent. Oh, God. And you know what? You know who is the worst subset of people on the planet? People who send you voice memos. Oh, oh, those people need to die in a fire right now.

I'm like, I could have read this in six seconds, but you sent me a minute long voice thing that I have to, like, stop what I'm doing and listen to. You do realize I work in audio, which means most of the time I have to listen to other shit and I have to stop what I'm doing.

There is a change cost, obviously, between going between contacts and I have to listen to you ramble. If you could just not be so fucking self-centered and just type what you mean, then everything would be fine. But no, you have to waste my time by sending me a voice memo.

People like that need to die in a fire. I'm sorry. All right, everybody. Just stop reaching out to Jason. Yeah, please. If you're going to send me a voice memo, definitely stop. I've been trying to tell people to send me those all the time. I'm like, I'm not going to listen to this. What do you want?

That's what I send back. I'm like, no, I don't have time to listen to your five minute fucking voice memo. No. If you want to call me and have a conversation, fine. I'll actually get on the phone with you, but I'm not going to listen to a one-sided conversation anyway. Moving on. Instascam is back.

I found the portable self-defense staff for $24.95 plus an unspecified shipping amount. This comes from Tumblecat. And it's kind of like a Chinese staff that you keep in your pocket. You know those old cups that you used to get, the plastic cups, drinking cups, that you could telescope up and turn into a cup?

This is the same thing, but it turns into a staff. Well, it's a stick. It's basically a stick. It is $24.95 plus shipping. So as I always do, I went on the internets and I found where people get this and what people are actually charging for this.

So you can go to eBay and you can get the silver metal appearing cane wand stick stage magic trick gimmick for $2.99 plus $1.99 in shipping. And the fact that it is a stage magic trick gimmick means that you're probably not going to be able to defend yourself with it, you know?

Well, first off, you would have to have some skill to begin with. True. You don't know how to use these sorts of sticks. It does not come with lessons. Yeah, there's no Kung Fu lessons involved with this. You just get basically a tin stick that you could probably whack on your desk and break in half.

So if you wanted to be Daredevil for Halloween, this might be nice. Otherwise, not so much. Now, what I particularly love about the eBay one is the it's coming from Shanghai, China. So you will get it between Wednesday, November 28th or Wednesday, January 2nd. Yeah, you do not buy this if you're in a rush.

Not for Christmas. No, this is definitely not. At least no guarantee. Yeah, but it's five bucks, you know, compared to $24.99 plus unspecified shipping. Unspecified shipping. Yeah, no. And you can find some that are closer, but they're a little bit more.

They're around five bucks plus shipping. But yeah. Or you could just buy a stick. You could buy a stick. I like that. Or go find a stick on the ground somewhere while you're playing Pope and Mon Go. I've been digging ScienceAlert.com a lot.

It's a great site. Yeah, it's really fun. And the one that I found this week is 150-year-old advice on Sunshine being good at killing bacteria just turned out to be true. Somebody took the old wives' tale and actually ran an experiment on it.

Makes sense. And it works. As it probably should. I mean, the sun is very good for us. It does a lot of things that we need. It helps battle depression. Unfortunately, it can also give you melanoma. Yeah, there's a balance to everything. You know, the poison is in the dose.

You got to remember that. Yes, it is. Sometimes you get vitamin D. Sometimes you get vitamin melanoma. Yes, a little vitamin melanoma. Show title. And moving on, I found this great thing also on ScienceAlert, which is a creepy video of a forest breathing.

And it turns out, no, it's not breathing. But at least they put breathing in quotes. They know that it's not breathing. What it is, it's a forest in a windstorm. And sometimes the root system of these trees goes so deep and they're pulled in a certain way, it looks like the entire forest floor is breathing.

It's just really fun to watch. So definitely check this out in our show notes. It'll be at GOG.show slash 295. Go check out the videos because there are a couple of them and they're really fun to watch. They're really cool. Right. It's very cool. I love this video. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's really fun, isn't it? Mm-hmm.

So I also found a game this week called GeoGuessr. Of course, they spell it wrong. Did you get a chance to play with this one? I didn't because as soon as I tried to click on it, and it could be my Opera browser or something, whenever, and I just clicked on it again right now.

I did this last night. Oops, something went wrong. The page didn't load Google Maps correctly. See the JavaScript console for technical details. Then I go look at the JavaScript console and it says, oops, the page didn't load correctly. Oh, man, you know what? I just loaded it too. Damn. Oh, well, I guess we broke it.

This is not working very well. Oh, shit. Okay, maybe we should just kill it then. Damn. No, I think it's funny. Leave it in because we tried and it didn't work. Like, why would we kill this? This is what we do on our show. They fucked it up. They did fuck it up. Oh, man, because it's a fun game. It's really cool.

They drop you in the middle of nowhere, and your whole point is to drive around Google Maps and then figure out where you are. I bet they just went over the API limit because... Oh, I'm sure they're probably using the free one, so... Yeah, it was so much fun. And I got my first guess within 49 miles.

I was so proud of myself because then, basically, you're driving around, you're figuring out where you are, and I saw people in a field, and I looked at their clothes and their hats, and I'm like, those people look like they're in Brazil. And then I went to the map, and I just clicked on a spot in Brazil, and I got it within 49 miles.

I was pretty damn proud of myself, so if it ever comes back online, check it out because it's really cool. They've got a lot of different maps that you can play with, and hopefully they'll get their shit together because it was a really fun game. And they do have a premium version, so they've got to be paying for something.

I don't know. And my final link is... This comes from CityLab.com. It says, I took adulting classes for millennials. Did you read this article? I did. What do you think?

I think the world's in trouble. I don't, actually. The funny thing about this is, as I read the article, I actually changed my mind about a lot of things about millennials and where they're coming from and what they're doing.

And the fact that they are being proactive with adulting classes, I actually think is a good step. Because... I suppose. Here's my rationale for this. When we were growing up, we had adults for parents. And you and I are not adults.

Your child has a giant man-child for a parent. We're, you know, in our mid-40s, late-40s, and we haven't grown up. We're 19-year-olds in old man-bodies at this point, you know? And... No. Yeah, you are.

You are. Okay, you tell yourself that. You go play trivia and drink beer every Monday, and I hung out with you all fucking week. Yeah, I know you. You are a big man-child. As do many adults. Yes. Okay. I have a 60-year-old roommate who is also 19 years old. You know? All the adults I know are not adults.

Because we don't have the struggle. We don't have the shit that makes adults adults. So, you don't have to figure a lot of stuff out. Because they haven't gone through it. And most millennials still... Or not most. A third of millennials still live with their parents. You know? They've never been out in the real world.

They haven't had to figure shit out on their own. And I kind of respect the fact that they're trying to take these classes to learn how to figure shit out. But it's one of those weird things. I mean, I crap on millennials all the time. But I think that Gen Z, the one that came after millennials, is the real problem.

Those guys are fucking stupid. I kind of see your point. But I don't. It's good they're taking classes. Not enough of them are. It's weird that they feel the need to take classes when we are living for the first time in all of history. We're with devices in our pockets that can tell you and show you and instruct you in how to do anything you could think of that you'd want to do.

Right. But that's the problem. They know that. Right. So, they don't try and figure anything out for their own. And they don't try and do it proactively before there is an issue. It's like, okay, now I have the problem and figure it out. Now I'll figure it out. Yeah. Okay, I get you. I can see how people older than us are like...

I remember my mom was shocked that I didn't know people's phone numbers. I'm like, why would I know anybody's phone number anymore? Yeah. I mean, like mid-1990s, we stopped remembering phone numbers because we didn't have to. The address book on the cell phone was invented and then we stopped remembering numbers.

And, you know, it comes back to being... I don't know if you ever read the book from... Was it Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile? No. Oh, it's a great book. It talks about how a lot of this stuff is happening and how to be antifragile.

And that doesn't mean being, you know, like super on point on everything. It just means that, you know, when shit happens, that you can bounce back from it. And that's what I kind of equate this to. So some smart millennials are actually trying to do something good for themselves.

And I can never, ever, like, bag on somebody who's trying to learn. And that's why I first, I put this in here because I was like, oh, God, this sounds so stupid. Fucking millennials. Fucking millennials. And then I changed my mind.

I'm like, you know what? Good for them for at least trying. And I don't know. Check it out. Check the article out. Send us some email and let us know what you think about this. Because I'm, you know, it's one of those things where I was on the fence at the beginning and now I'm just like, you know what? Good for them. Yeah.

It depends on what they're learning. Like, okay. Anyways, I'm not going to pick on millennials anymore. Closing shout outs. Big shout out to a friend of the show, David Bittner, for coming by and bringing me munchkins.

I love munchkins, even though they're not good for me. But yeah, Dave Bittner came to the house and he brought me a big bag of Dunkin' Donuts munchkins. So it was finally nice to see him in person. It was really cool to hang out for a bit. So big shout out for Dave. I'm sad I couldn't be there. Yeah, I know. I know.

He was only here for a little bit because he had to go to the airport. But he drove all the way from Encino. And it was just, it was fun finally, like, seeing a face to the face. Right. Yeah, but next time there will be beer, not donuts.

Agreed. And I'll be there. Yes. There'll be beer. Yes. If you're here, there will be beer. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulmeister. 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. Costs us a buck a month and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to gog.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 295. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like and stuff we don't like sometimes.

Stay grumpy and we'll see you next time. We did what now? Do you want to listen to a podcast, baby?

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