297: Double Rage Latte

This episode is sponsored by Eero and Eero Plus. Get $100 off the Eero base unit in two beacons package and one year of Eero Plus. Visit Eero.com slash GOG and at checkout enter code GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I hate burying the lead on this show, Jason, and sometimes we have stories that I consider to be the lead, but they're not until later in the show. So I want to put this up here, even though we're not going to talk about it until the security segment. We've been bitching and moaning on this show for a long time now about how we've already lost trust in images because of Photoshopping and expert work done there and how it would only be a matter of time before we wouldn't be able to trust video anymore either because it could be easily manipulated and then we'll have nothing.

We're not quite there yet, but apparently the White House seems to think we are and they tried. They fucking released a fucking doctored video. The White House to the spread of the journalist. I want everyone to let that sink in and let me know if this is the world that you would like to live in.

So we will talk about this in security with Bittner and I think he'll be as angry as I am. Yeah, I think that'll be a topic to stick around for, for sure. Yes. And there's probably going to be a lot of background sounds going on today because, well, the Santa Ana winds are here, so my entire building is shaking constantly because winds are about 30 miles an hour off and on, gusting up to 50.

Yay. But the other problem is the entire city's on fire. Basically, yes. The airdrop jets like to fly over my little studio here pretty much where I could hit them with a rock. They're coming over the hill so low and so slow that, you know, my desk shakes from them for a while.

So that might come through. I do have my gate on, but we'll see. And also Ventura Boulevard, which I'm right next to, every emergency vehicle on the planet is using that as their high speed route to get everywhere they got to go. Of course, going 90 miles an hour with their sirens blaring the whole way.

And yeah, I kind of miss the snow today, but I did see this one before we went to air. Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, and of course, Yeezy have been forced to flee their homes because of the wildfires. Well, Alyssa, if you're listening, feel free to come over to my place.

You can use my Wi-Fi to continue your political tweets. I would be very pleased with that. Okay. Yeah, I did see just, I took my morning bike ride today and I rode up to near Malibu and I could just see this massive, massive cloud of smoke centered basically where your house is.

Yep. Yeah, and I looked at it and I was just, I was blown away by it. And yeah, the air quality in LA is going to take a dive pretty soon. I already shut all my windows and I'm rolling out the portable AC because it's hot today. But yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a nasty day, but I'm looking forward to hearing the rumbles over your overhead from your mic.

Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be great. Fun times. I've pulled out all of my air filters as well. Clean them this morning because I'm probably gonna have to clean them every day. Most of this stuff looks like it's probably going to go over the ocean, but you know, it's going to go up and then come back and fall back on our heads. Exactly. Because there was, there was ash in the air this morning when I was out with the dogs.

I could see it in the, in the flashlight and I'm just like, oh man, because like the air quality is any good here anyway. That is the only nice thing when the Santa Ana's come through. It's like we get clean air for two days. It blows everything out. Yeah. Except now it just blows everything up. How about a little follow up?

We were talking about, uh, proposition C up in San Francisco a little bit before the election. This was the proposition that would, uh, raise the city's gross receipts tax by an average of 0.5% on companies that had gross receipts of over $50 million. So square lift, et cetera, things like that.

It passed, um, at, uh, 60% in favor with 99% of the vote counted. Uh, as we discussed, the problem was with the gross receipts and I still think that's an issue, but, uh, it is what it is. It's passed. So that's good. I think. Well, I use, I use Stripe and Stripe is going to get hit pretty hard with it.

So hopefully my Stripe rates won't go up. Yeah. Well, as we all know, these things will be passed along to the end users. Unfortunately. Yes. Me being the end user. That's why I'm, I'm worried about that. Yeah. We'll see what happens. Uh, I mean, there's still some challenges. There's some legal challenges that are being, uh, brought up against it, uh, to basically get rid of it altogether, which I, again, I think you and I both agree would be unfortunate.

It just, they should change it to net. Not gross. Yeah. Yeah. Simple changes. Simple changes. Yep. And, uh, Google had their big walkout, uh, last week. And apparently, uh, I can't remember how many points do they have. They had a seven point manifesto. I hate using the word manifesto for a good thing.

Manifesto has been kind of taken over by people wearing hoodies. Oh wait, they're all wearing hoodies over. Yeah, they are. I think, I believe it was five points, five points. Well, they got one of them. So Google has announced Thursday that it will end forced arbitration policy for sexual misconduct claims and update its reporting mechanisms and mandatory trainings for sexual harassment.

So that was one of the five. We'll see what else continues to happen with this. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I did put a link into the, the actual press release from the Google walkout people. Of course it's on medium. So if you want to go check that out, be my guest and yeah.

And recently we've been talking about blockchain and some of the actual good uses that might come about because of the technology. Uh, yes. Uh, cryptocurrency not being one of them, but, uh, supply chain management seems to be like a good place to start. And IBM and Seagate are actually going to put together one of the first end to end blockchains for their supply chain, because apparently there's a big problem with people making fake Seagate drives.

So we'll see how this goes. I mean, those things kind of flood the market everywhere, right? Like I've even heard of people buying what they thought were official Seagate drives from Amazon and having them be fakes. So, yeah, I'm sure I've gotten a couple of them because, you know, there was a long time where I'm like, Seagate drives suck. Why are people buying these things?

Because mine would like last a year and then they would fall over dead. And I don't know if I just got a, I'm assuming I got a, you know, a fake one because, you know, if you get a real good one, that's what is in most of the data centers out there. And I do have Seagate drives running in my, my Synology now, and I've had no problems with them.

So I got some real ones on that one. But yeah, I mean, this is a perfect use case for blockchain. It's exactly what it should be used for. Yep. And of course, they're going to try and make this into a product so they can sell it to other, you know, verticals in, in different supply chain management systems. So, you know, blue might be back.

We'll see. Big blue in the cloud and off the chain. Oh, God. Some people, though, are, they've joined the cord cutters. A lot of people have joined the cord cutters over the last quarter in the tune of about a million.

Wow. Okay. Which is impressive. Yeah, there's a study out that shows that how many, how many people have left paid TV and AT&T, Comcast, Charter, and Dish alone lost a combined 887,000 subscribers during the last quarter.

That's a lot. That is a lot, but they're still getting paid for their internet service. So I don't know what they're bitching about. True. Yeah. I mean, you still have to get the internet service to use all these services to get your programming without the cable. Yes, but you have to admit that they were using both before.

They were paying for their internet and their TV, so they just cut their bill more than in half, the way most TV packages work. The way all these guys are getting around this now, though, is if you don't have a bundled service, they jack the prices. So your internet service is getting higher and higher. It's not the same price as if you were doing cable with them as well.

And, of course, they're doing things like throttling and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course. We know that's coming. There's no winning. That's why they're so gung-ho against net neutrality because they need to be able to pay more because the TV business is going down the crapper. And I'll tell you what, the TV business would be fine if it wasn't for sports.

If it was not for sports and all of the ridiculous fees that everybody has to pay, the people who don't watch sports have to pay, you know, the price would come down drastically. I don't want ESPN. I don't want to pay for it, but I'm forced to. So if they started to, you know, cut those deals and make those deals properly, maybe they could get the TV business back by not having to charge so damn much.

Yeah. There should potentially be a bundle that just doesn't include any sports for you heathens that have no soul. We talked the other week about the Vice News thing where they basically ran ads for 100 U.S. senators on Facebook as well as ads for paid for by Mike Pence and ISIS, and they all ran through.

Business Insider ran a similar stunt recently, running successful paid for by ads for the now-defunct British data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, thus proving there is zero oversight over there on Facebook. Now, I like this. This is over at Gizmodo, but I just like this line. A litany of screw-ups drove Facebook to be more transparent about political advertising.

But now, a litany of screw-ups is halting those very same plans. They just can't get it right. The big problem being here, of course, is that Facebook doesn't seem to understand that people lie. And there's no oversight in this stuff. So as long as you have no conscience and you can just outright lie, all of your ads are going to go through just fine.

Talk about a loophole. It's like, well, it's in the terms of service that you have to tell the truth, and then, you know, that's their out. They know people are going to lie. They know people are going to fake their way into this. But it's in the EULA, so their hands are, you know, their hands are clean. Yes. The very idea that they just did it as an honor system is absolutely ridiculous.

Facebook has no clue how to fix this, or at least no interest in fixing it. They have a clue how to fix it. It can be fixed. You throw money at the problem. You hire people. But they're not going to do that. I think they need stations in every city in the world where you can come, show your driver's license, and get your account verified so they know exactly who you are.

Ah, verification. Do you really want that in the hands of Facebook? Give them more data about you? And that's the funny thing. They know so much about who everybody is, yet you can get through their filters and lie about it? Oh, because you're paying for ads. They want the money, Jason.

I know. Follow the money. But that's why everything seems so disingenuous. They know everything about everybody. That's kind of silly. But a little side note on this article. This was over at Gizmodo, and I'm trying to read this article. And there's one of these goddamn autoplay videos in the middle of the page.

Yep. And so it's distracting, you know? I pause it, and I keep reading, and then I scroll a little bit, and the video starts again. I know. Then I have to pause it again, then I have to scroll a little more, and then the video starts again. How douchey can you get, Gizmodo?

They've got to pay the bills. They need the fake bullshit stats, which is, that's counting as minutes watched. You didn't watch it? No. It's complete bullshit. Yeah, I actively wanted to not watch it, but they forced it on me. Yes, but that counts. That counts. That counts. I know it counts. And the annoying thing is, it was for their internal video.

It wasn't even an ad. Right. Ugh, annoying. Well, that department needs to get their views up so they don't lose their jobs. Correct. Yeah. It's a fucking ass fuck. It's unbelievable. I'm pissed off today. Anyways, let's talk about Twitter, one of my least favorite sites on the internet.

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams says, in retrospect, that showing how many followers you have wasn't healthy. Oh, really? The same goes for the suggested user list, a project that Williams was highly critical of when he was CEO. If you're highly critical of something as the chief executive officer, you can fucking stop it, can't you?

Pretty much. Okay. Executive officer. Chief. Right there in the title. If you didn't like it, it should have been gone. Yeah, it was right there on the tin, Ev. I know you're not a very, you know, upfront, forthgoing, or what do you call it?

He's not a, well, I would not say stand-up guy, but that's, Jack is definitely not the stand-up guy. But Ev isn't really a forceful person. So I can see him getting run over by pretty much anybody with a, you know, wet noodle in tow. But yeah, that, the suggested user list was such bullshit.

If you got on that list, you were, you know, you were golden. You were golden. But the idea that you can even have a Twitter without the count is ridiculous because you need these analytics. That's how people make money. That's how people can sell ads. That's how people can promote things and have repercussions outside of the Twitter sphere.

Like the idea that you wouldn't have it just because it's healthy is ridiculous. You wouldn't have Twitter without follower counts. Well, he does say that. He's like, yeah, this might not been a good idea, but you know, if we didn't do it, somebody else could have come in and eaten our lunch and then Twitter would not be a thing. So it's like, do you make the bargain with the devil?

Of course you do because you have shareholders and you must maximize shareholder value. And this whole thing from Ev just is so fucking disingenuous and hypocritical that it drives me nuts because the first thing I did was I walked over to Medium where he is now the CEO and, you know, head honcho, clicked on a page for an author and guess what I found?

Follower counts? You got it. Oh, interesting. If it's that big of a problem, you know, eat your own dog food and turn the shit off, Ev. Well, what we've learned here is that if you're CEO, that doesn't mean anything, apparently. Or at least if you have Williams as CEO. Exactly. He might disagree with him, but he's not going to do anything about it.

Dumpster fire. Everything is just a goddamn dumpster fire. Yes, it is. Well, literally around here it is. I can see the smoke from my backyard. Yes. Oh, man. Speaking of dumpster fires, Walmart. You ever go to Walmart and you know what I'm talking about. Walmart is, this is driving me crazy.

TechCrunch writes, Walmart is building an AI lab inside one of its stores. Okay. They're going to call it the Intelligent Retail Lab or IRL. Get it? R-HAR. In real life? Yeah. Yeah. So they're putting basically a bunch of nerds inside of a Walmart to come up with some ideas.

Now, this is what drives me crazy about this. There's really nothing in here that is AI. All they're talking about is inventory management inside the store. Right, which they can now purchase from IBM on the blockchain.

Exactly. So they don't even need this team. It drives me crazy. Yes. Led by an internal team called Kepler, Walmart also envisions using the technology to identify spills, better understand when shopping carts are running low near the entrance, and identify when items are on the wrong shelf, but also so they can proactively replenish stock.

Right. Um, where is the AI? All right, let's talk about something fun again. Waymo has admitted in a blog post that one of its test vehicles hit a motorcycle in Mountain View. This is over at Engadget. And again, this is mainly for the headline, Waymo Blames Self-Driving Collision on Pesky Human.

Yeah. And that's exactly what they did. They're clarifying that the event was caused by human error. The test driver took control of the vehicle after seeing a passenger car to the left moving into their lane. And Waymo says that if he had just left it alone, the AI would have taken care of it. Yep. Yep. So this guy didn't check his mirrors before he merged into the other lane and basically ran over a motorcyclist who was taken to the hospital.

Wasn't killed, but he had to go to the hospital. Yes. Nice. Again, this is, uh, you know, I've always said we can't, I don't see any situation in which self-driving cars and real people in their cars can be on the roads together without there being a lot of incidents. Mm-hmm.

It's all or nothing, people. Yes. As far as I'm concerned. Yes. And, uh, Ford is getting into the e-scooter thing, Spin, which pivoted from being, uh, docked bikes to now scooters because why bother with docks or anything like that? And hell, there's money to be made with the scooters.

So they started doing that. And now Ford has basically bought them out, uh, approximately 40 million, I think is what they're guessing that the thing was. And they're going to aggressively open up Spin, uh, launching in over a hundred cities over the next 18 months. So if you weren't sick of Bird yet, here comes Spin.

Oh joy. Because we need more of these things everywhere. And in more scooter news, Bird wants people to report poorly parked scooters. Okay. So what you get, what you can do now is you can basically tattletale on somebody who left a scooter in the wrong spot and making it a nuisance.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's called community mode, which basically means you do the work for us. Yes, exactly. It's outsourcing for free. Mm-hmm. Community mode gives any individual the power to engage with Bird in real time. We can work together on making our streets safer and people friendly.

So here's what I want to know. Are they going to start giving riders scores kind of like Uber does? So when, when a douche nozzle piles up their scooter in front of a business, they get dinged and then they won't be able to rent a scooter anymore because that would be awesome. Well, first off, they're never going to not be able to rent a scooter because why would they lose money like that?

But it would be awesome. I agree with this. They, they should do that. They, they should be, cause you can trace who last had this. Of course, the problem is they can't really trace if the person dropped it off right there or if somebody just kind of picked it up and moved it later. So there's going to be problems with attribution here.

And I personally, in my opinion, community mode means just picking these things up and putting them in the nearest dumpster. Yeah. Yeah. So I, to my point on that, it would be great if, you know, they could track where it was and if the scooter had been moved even a little bit, then, you know, you can't get, you can't get dinged for it.

But that only works if they track the location exactly as it was dropped off. And, you know, we know the programmers are lazy nowadays. They're not going to code that in. So that won't happen. That definitely won't happen because I was going to say, pick them all up and drop them in front of a hospital.

So even more people get dinged even more. So they all get one star ratings and can't use them again because on Uber, if you, if your rating drops below a certain point, you can't get an Uber. Yeah. People won't come and pick you up. Right. No, actually, I think you're banned from the system if you hit a certain threshold and like for it, for not, not forever, just for a little while because they still want your money, but it's to teach you a lesson to not be a dick.

Right. And just because I like the term so much because you used it just right now and I haven't heard this in a while. Hey, douche nozzles, you know what solves this entire problem? Docking areas. Speaking of docking areas, Santa Monica is actually installing in-street e-scooter parking corrals.

Great idea. Yeah. They're taking up, they take a parking spot and say, put your fucking scooter here. Here's my problem with it. I'm paying for it. My tax dollars are paying for it. I want Bird and Lyft and all these other companies to be the ones paying for this, for creating.

They've, they caused the problem. They want to be active here. They're getting pissed off that we're putting rules on them and saying they can't be here. Pony up, bitches. You pay for it. Why the fuck am I paying for it? Yeah. And why are they not paying for the real estate as well? Where's the rent?

Exactly. It's not, we already have crowded streets already with cars and bike lanes and sidewalk traffic and stores putting banners out on the sidewalk now because it's a free for all these days because nobody follows any rules. We have very limited room anyways.

So find spots for docks. Great. Love the idea. Require people to put them in the docks because right now that's not part of the law. So it's great that you're putting them there. But now we're relying on the same thing that got us in trouble in the first place, which is user users being humans and they aren't. So this isn't going to help unless we pass the law saying they have to be docked.

So let's do that. And also, again, why am I paying for it? Yeah. I'm pissed today, Jason. I got that. Something in the air. And it's not just the smoke. I'm surprised you didn't even call out the fact that the photo of the parking lot on the street in Santa Monica, there's a picture of a girl riding a bird with no helmet.

But at least she's in the bike lane. And she's the only person on it. Yeah. Oh, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I actually saw some of these being put up today as I was coming back from my bike ride. And I love the fact that they basically ban you from putting your bike in it. There's like, this is only for e-scooters and e-bikes.

You can't put your own bike in there. So whatever. Let's see. If anybody uses it, great. If everybody uses it, fine. Awesome. This should be happening. If we're not going to get rid of these things, we got to start docking them. What's even better is the second picture where they're putting one of these things on the street. If you look in the background, there's a bike that is, you know, chained to a, like a bike stand that has been completely robbed.

Well, you know, it's still in Santa Monica. Some things are going to happen. Yes. Back to some Amazon news. I found this one absolutely infuriating. Toys R Us is dead. So Amazon will mail you toy catalogs instead. Yeah.

Amazon is just driving people out of business and replacing them. I think their new motto should be kill and replicate because that's all they're doing. Okay. We're going to kill stores so we can take over their, you know, their spaces. So they, they did that to Toys R Us. Yep. Fine. Okay. Toys R Us is dead.

And now they're just taking a thing out of the playbook for Toys R Us. And they're just going to start shipping out catalogs for kids, which is, you know, I, I'm okay with the catalog shipping. I just don't like that. It's Amazon doing it. Yeah. I got this actually, by the way, we, we got this last week and I, I was pretty sad about it.

I was like, man, you know, all you did was you drove all these other companies out of business and now you're just doing what they did because you're missing out on market share. Oh, poor Jeffrey. Poor Jeffrey. It's sad. It is sad, but my kid will never know the difference. It'll always be Bezos instead of Jeffrey.

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Visit Eero.com slash GOG and at checkout enter GOG. That's E-E-R-O dot com slash GOG for $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package. We are back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland, which Jason apparently hates. Dave is also co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Dave, what are the top stories you covered on the Cyber Wire this week? Well, hello, gentlemen.

It's good to be back, as always. I want to start this week with something that happened to me this morning. I was at a breakfast meeting for a local nonprofit organization that I volunteer some time with and sitting around a table with some folks. And somehow the conversation turned to online shopping.

And someone mentioned how creepy it is when you look at something on Amazon. And then a few minutes later, you see it show up in your Facebook feed. And this led, of course, to someone saying, well, what about that thing where your phone listens to you? My wife and I were having a conversation about mattresses.

And sure enough, I started seeing ads to mattresses right away. Now, let me just say I'm not proud of the way I responded to this. I'm pretty usually a pretty calm, measured guy.

And I don't know if it was because it was early in the morning and I hadn't had enough caffeine or whatever. But I found myself thrusting my arms towards him and saying, no, no, no. I think you've been doing this show with us for far too long, Dave.

Dave needs a vacation. I just had a vacation. So, of course, all eyes turned to me. And now I'm, you know, so now we're down the path. Now I have to explain it. So now we're talking about secure enclaves and low power devices and bandwidth and legal.

And I'm just like, guys, it's just easier if you just trusted me. It is a very compelling illusion that this is happening. Anyway, the thing I wanted to check in with you guys on was how do we handle this? When we're out and about and this thing comes up, there's two ways I've thought about this.

Do we say nothing? Like when you're at a party and someone mentions that they're feeling a little sluggish or down and it has to be because mercury is in retrograde. Right. You know, like, do you just sit there and smile and just let it roll past you? Or like when you're at your kid's daycare and somebody, one of the other parents says they're not sure about vaccinating your kids.

Like that situation, I would pipe up because I think, yes, I would definitely pipe up in the second case. Yeah. Younger me would pipe up in all of these cases. Well, as I've gotten older and realize that people aren't going to listen and you're just pissing them off anyways, I do tend to keep my mouth shut unless it directly involves me or my family's health.

See, that is exactly what I was getting at with the thing about mercury and retrograde. That is the wisdom that comes with years, right? Just learning that you're not going to change this person's mind. And so why start the argument? I'm also so weary now about fighting the fight about the phone listening to you that I just have given up.

If you believe it's listening to you, well, you're still carrying it around. So obviously your beliefs aren't strong enough to make you stop doing anything. So fuck you. I'm not going to argue. I tell people the best thing you can do is as soon as you get home, wrap it in tinfoil and only take it out whenever you have to make a phone call.

And that way, from then on out, you can tell people that have found my advice because they're out at the coffee shop and they pull out their phone and they have to gingerly unwrap it to check Facebook and then wrap it back up and put it in their pocket. I mean, on the plus side, Dave, you are coming at this from a position of being an expert.

You are one who would know about these things. So perhaps you should continue the battle while Jason and I kind of cheer you on from the sidelines. I just want to punk everybody. You can, yeah, you can be the rational one. I'm just going to punk everybody. I don't know. I'd say you guys certainly have on this topic.

You guys certainly have as much, if not more expertise than I do. You guys have been at this, carrying the flag for this, the three of us. It's one of those, like a friend of mine says every now and then you got to look behind you, see if there's anybody else in that parade you're leading. Yeah, Dave, at this point, the flag I'm carrying is the white one and I'm waving it.

Yeah, I understand. So anyway, so that happened. Let's talk briefly about what I think is probably one of the biggest stories of at least this administration, if not ever. The White House press secretary used a fake InfoWars video to justify banning CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

The White House released a fake video. The White House released a faked video on purpose. Do you think that this is just not par for the course? I mean, what has...

This is new. What has got your ire up so much about this? It's against all norms. This is one step too far. It was one thing when he used Obama's inauguration photo instead of his own. Okay, there's a fake photo. We've now...

Because we've been talking about in the show about how once we cross this Rubicon of fake video, what do we have left? And when the most powerful office in the land, in the world, is now using fake video, what do we have left? But it wasn't technically faked video, it was altered video.

They just jacked up the frame rate to make it look like he was hitting it really hard. Is that not the very definition of a faked video, though? I mean, it has been doctored to change the meaning. Yeah, I see fake as a different beast, but doctored I can get behind.

Okay, he didn't use deepfake. They didn't put Jim Acosta's face on some male porn star. I'll give you that. Do you think that this was a case of the White House deliberately seeking out a doctored version, or was it just as likely them being lazy and going to, just looking for the clip and finding someone who is on their team, and so they shared the InfoWars video, not knowing

that perhaps InfoWars had done a little massaging to it, and here we are. Yeah, I mean, I don't believe that the White House intentionally went out and asked people to create a video for them, and it landed in their laps from people that are pretty associated with them.

I'm sure it was handed to them, not digitally. I'm sure it was pointed out. Look at this video. You know, what any other administration ever, or any other possible administration, be it Republican or Democrat that could be in there right now, would do, would be to just use the C-SPAN footage.

And that's what everybody is comparing this to, and it's not the same. Well, and of course, yes, and on the other hand, it seems to me like this is yet another big distraction, that the video itself doesn't really matter as much as...

What we should be arguing is he has no... He should not be banned. Correct. He should not ban a reporter. Correct. That's what we should be arguing, and what we're all doing is screaming about a video now. Right. So, once again, they win. But it is a beyond... To me, it's a beyond disturbing precedent, and I'm very upset about it.

Yeah. I agree. I agree. It's... But at the same time, I feel so beat up by this, you know, that... Well, of course... I mean, we've graded this administration on such a curve that, you know, it's like, oh, there's our press secretary again.

There's another lie. There's another hole. You know, we're just... Like, we're just waiting for this to pass. It does feel that way now. I've just kind of run out of shits to give. Yeah. I'm out. It's almost added to my frustration that Jason doesn't give a shit.

I'm, like, having to double down on my own frustration and anger right now. Thanks a lot, Jason. Right. You can have a double rage latte on me. I am. I am. Because this is just... This is unthinkable. Even... First off, no Democrat. Democrat would have ever banned a reporter anyways, much less released a fake video.

I also don't believe any... Mitt Romney, if he would have won, would never have done anything like this. No. This is so out of the norm of human decency and what we expect from the people that are working for us. I'm literally flabbergasted by this.

Look at what Ronald Reagan went through with Sam Donaldson. Yeah. Right? I mean, this does not rise to that level of being badgered by a White House press reporter. So... Yep. The Colbert Show did have a pretty funny take on it.

Yeah, that was amazing. We'll include the link there. So check it out. It's pretty good. Pretty good. Have you guys tried this USPS mail scanning service where you get an email in the morning of the mail that's going to arrive at your house the same day? I do not need to be notified of the shit ton pile of catalogs that I'm just going to throw in the recycling bin, so no.

No, I have not. In fact, I would say we probably... We don't go get our mail every day anymore because there's so little in there that requires any sort of immediate... I mean, all of our bill paying is done by other means, so...

Anything that's actually delivered to me is coming from Amazon and they tend to drop it off at my door instead of me going to look at the mail. Yeah, so no. Have you? Yes. It's called Informed Delivery. And recently I moved from Chicago to lovely Los Angeles, which is now burning to the ground, so I might go back to the snow anytime now.

I miss the snow. So I left my old place and I was going to the new place. So I signed up for this so I could get the emails from my old place and the new place to figure out if something was going to get dropped through the cracks while I was in transit or after they forwarded, how long it's going to take if something came through that I really needed to see.

Right. Because I don't do... Some of my bill pay is electronic, but I do get a lot of physical mail that is important. Right. And as I was setting it up, I was thinking to myself, my God, this is just ripe for abuse because it didn't really take much for me to get set up at the new address that I was going to at all.

And so I was seeing my roommate's mail before I even got here or could even get anything set up. And I'm thinking, my God, this is going to be the greatest little scam thing that I could get because if I could just sign up for this for all of my neighbors, I could see what everybody's getting in the mail.

How fun is that? Well, it's also illegal. But I thought about it and I thought about it. I told my roommate, she's like, ah, nobody's going to care about that. Well, thank God I wasn't alone on this. Brian Krebs is on the case. And he points out that he talked about this a year ago.

I missed it. I missed the post. Maybe I did read it and it was stuck in the back of my head. But the Secret Service is now in on this saying that people are actually using this to steal money from other people and they use it to get credit cards. And so they know when the credit cards are going to show up so they can wait and abscond with them before the people even know that the credit cards even came.

And then they can just jack up a bunch of charges on it and you're never the wiser. So it's a pretty interesting thing. And the post office, the setup on this is just so laughable. It is so easy to set this up for somebody and them to never know about it.

Of course not. In my immediate thought, you should be able to have an opt out for yourself. So you could flag somewhere where you can say, never sign me up for this. I never want to get this. But of course, they don't have that. Right. Yeah, yeah. This isn't like a credit reporting system where you can freeze the account.

This is just the post office sending you pictures of all the mail that they scan, which is also kind of scary that they do scan all your mail. But I mean, we've known this has been going on for decades now. But now you can get it delivered to your home. It's the outside of all the envelopes. They're not scanning what's in them.

So you think. Actually, my cocaine package has arrived. Yeah. Yeah. My first my very first job when I got out of college was for the postal service and they had a television network of their own, like a private in-house television network.

This is when the postal service was still on top of the world. You know, 800000 employees before email had done what it's done to them. Or people at the post office started shooting each other. Well, that was well, that's actually sort of to my point is that I really got an inside look at how the postal service runs.

And it's relentless. I mean, you had people who their job for eight hours was to sit at a terminal and letter slides in, they read the zip code, key it in, letter slides out, letter slides in, they read the zip code, key it in, letter slides out. That's your entire day.

Now we have AI to do that for us. Well, exactly. And so some of these things were just coming online. I remember we did these training videos for the the MLOCR, the multi-line optical character reader, when this was cutting edge technology to be able to read addresses, you know, very, very quickly.

So the postal service has actually been on the leading edge of this and by necessity, the volume of stuff that they handle. But so the fact that they would be able to just use the pictures they're already taking and send them to you, that's pretty neat. But it reminds me of I remember what decades ago it used to be a common prank you could play on someone would be to have just submit a change of address form for them when they didn't

actually move and have all their mail go somewhere else for a while until they realize that there's something wrong. Again, highly illegal, but fun nonetheless. Yeah. And simple. Yes. Yeah. That's interesting. The article does say that that the postal services started sending a verification via, wait for it, the mail to make to to verify that you actually have signed up for this.

But evidently, the bad guys are taking advantage of it anyway. They can turn it around fast enough that they can actually make use of it before you may even get that letter in the mail from the postal service. Right. And since you have informed delivery, you'll know when the letter gets there so you can go steal it anyway. Right. Right.

Right. That's funny. Does the informed delivery notification go out via informed delivery? About your verification of informed delivery. Right. It does. It actually does. It does? Yeah. That's awesome. Well, there you go. So, yeah. I told you it was laughable. I told you it was laughable.

Yeah. That's good. That's good. So, I just feel so much vindication. I'm just like, ah, my roommate just dismissed me out of hand. Nobody's ever going to do that. I'm like, well, somebody did it to the tune of $400,000. Somebody will always do everything. That's the thing. Somebody is always going to do everything.

Yeah. We have another postal service story here. Canada has just recently legalized marijuana everywhere, and they were ready to go. The Ontario Cannabis Store sells weed online, and they've already had their first problem, a privacy breach involving 4,500 customer orders.

The source of the leak, unfortunately, was not them. It was Canada Post, the country's state-owned primary postal operator. They admitted that someone used its delivery tracking tool to obtain sensitive information like postal code, date of delivery, and the name or initials of the persons who signed upon delivery. Oopsie.

Yeah. The people whose data was exposed were remarkably laid back and cool with it. Canada Post did add that they were confident that the individual who accessed the information only shared it with Canada Post and deleted it without distributing further.

And they say in this article, if that doesn't make sense to you, you're not alone. However, it makes total sense to me. Even Canadian hackers are nice. That's right. That's right. Here's that information I was able to get. Thank you very much. Yeah. I've deleted all copies. Here you go.

Yeah. Oh, man. These guys are going to be mad soon when they start running out of weed. Oh, that's right. They already have started running out of weed in Canada. Don't. Yeah. Who would have thought there'd be so much demand? Yeah. Really? Especially in this day. And now, Dave, I put this one in the show notes because I heard you talk to somebody about gate recognition this week.

Yeah. On your show. Yeah. And this is an article in TechCrunch about how China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk. Yeah. And I didn't think this was new. What about the way they talk? Yeah. Oh, God. Sorry. It was right there.

It was right there. So, yeah, this is a company out of China called Waitrix or Watrix. I don't know how you say it over there. Yeah. But it's a combination waitress dominatrix. Oh, OK. I think those girls work in Hollywood when they're waiting for a role.

Right. But I didn't think this was new technology. I thought this has been around forever. And, like, I read about it in Little Brother, Cory Doctorow's book. Oh. So, and now you did it this week. You talked to somebody who I don't believe was this company, but it was another company, right? Yeah, that's right.

They were using behavioral biometrics is the term of art. And basically what that involves is you have a system that's constantly keeping an eye on you to verify in real time that you should be given access to the things you have access to.

So, for example, it learns what the typical cadences of your typing or your mouse movement or it could be your your how you shift in your chair in front of your computer or something like that. And if something one of those things goes awry, then it either sends up a flag or makes you verify some other way or something like that.

I found this fascinating because, I don't know, about four years ago, a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine came to visit from out of town and we were meeting up down in downtown D.C. And he was probably a block and a half away, far enough away that I couldn't yet recognize him.

But I recognized him by his gait. I recognized him. You know, he's been a friend my whole life. And I just saw the way he walked from a distance. And I was like, who's my friend? And I knew it. So this this sort of resonated me with just because I'd had that moment a couple of years ago where, yeah, absolutely.

Someone's gait is is is like a fingerprint. I thought it was interesting, too, in the piece that you did where he was talking about how this really came out in World War Two, how how the telegraph operators could tell from other people's, you know, cadence, who it was. And I was just I was screaming at my podcaster saying it's called fisting, which is really it's it's funny that they did actually call it when they knew different operators.

It was by their fist, which is what they called the cadence of their typing. Yeah, I would not recommend you do a Google search on that term. No. We can do World War Two fisting or fist. No, no, nothing. Nothing ends well. Nothing is going to end well.

That includes that term. Nothing. Nothing. No. Moving on. So this is pretty crazy, though. I mean, the fact that they're going to be doing this just on such a widespread thing and not, you know, not for security reasons for. Well, I mean, I guess for security reasons, but not in the way that, you know, these biometrics are being used for companies.

Yeah. I just I just see an entire everybody in China is going to learn how to walk like the Fremen in Dune now. Yeah. It's crazy. Well, gates. So the sandworms don't come. Right. A rock in your shoe. Exactly. I was just going to say I was just going to say put a rock in your shoe. I've heard people say that that that can be as simple as that to throw throw off your gate.

But or put a lift on one shoe one day and a lift on the other shoe the other day. You can you can put noise. You'd like introduce noise to the system. Just ride a bird everywhere. They're not walking. Great. Now, it's also interesting that when I tried to find Little Brother on Amazon, it took me like three minutes because there's so many knockoffs of it out there to find the actual original one.

It just took forever. But the link will be in the show notes. If you've never read Little Brother, I do believe that was Cory Doctorow's last good book. So I've not read highly recommended. Check it out. Oh, highly recommended. Highly recommended. And Microsoft's president was on Recode talking about how we need to regulate facial recognition tech before the year 2024 looked like the book 1984, which seems kind of silly since they sell facial recognition.

Yeah. Well, at least they're saying we need some regulation about this as opposed to just carrying on and saying, don't we don't want any regulations. You know, again, Microsoft is feeling very Apple to me recently in that they seem to be aware of the repercussions or potential repercussions of the technologies that they're developing and are kind of sounding the alarms ahead of time.

Yeah. Come regulate me, bro. Mm-hmm. What do you think about this, Dave? Well, I mean, you've got, yeah, you run into Fourth Amendment types of things. I mean, there's generally, you know, you don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place.

However. However, the cameras and the recording of it is a completely different thing. Well, I guess that's at least that's an area where it needs to catch up. At least it feels that way. Yeah, exactly. Right, right. I think most of us feel like we're straying into an unintended consequences kind of area where if am I, are you, should you be allowed to have anonymity when strolling down a street?

And I think most of us would say, yes, that strolling down a city street, you shouldn't automatically be logged and, you know, be stuck a pin in a map as to where you were and when you were so that anybody can rewind the recording if they need to and find out where you were when based on how you walk.

Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I think we're going to have to have some regulation about it. The question is what pushes us there? We need to know what, like, where is this data going? Are they selling it? Because this is what we've learned from all these companies right now, that we're not aware of what happens to our data.

It's bought and sold in markets that are kept hidden from the consumers and from the people generating the data. So, you know, this is the kind of regulation that I would want on this sort of stuff. I don't want this. I don't want City Street stuff sold to Walmart to know how often I walk near them.

I don't want that sort of thing. I want limits on the amount of time that this data is kept. I don't want a year's worth. A couple days? Okay, fine. I might be okay with that. I don't know yet. We need to have the discussion and see kind of what the consequences could be.

And I applaud Microsoft for at least standing up and saying, hey, let's pay attention here. I'm going to tell you right now, the consequences are going to be all bad. So don't worry about that. They always are. We've got that covered. We've got that covered. We almost always are. What if the data gets stored, but in order to withdraw it after a certain amount of time, you need a warrant?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a possibility. Although I'm still – I know it's a new world and we're headed there. The idea that there will be records of everywhere I walked and everywhere I went and everywhere I drove, it really freaks me out.

Although – If you had an Android phone, they'd already have it. The phone companies have it. Yeah. I would say, this is nothing new. They've already know – they already know this stuff. This is all out there already, but it's in private company hands. It's not in the government hand yet. So that's the difference, at least at the moment. As our friend Steve Rombaum would say, privacy is dead.

Get over it. Either you guys have a robot vacuum cleaner? I do. So this is of interest to me. I do as well. And I'm actually on my second one. The first one, battery died and it was hard to get a replacement battery, so I got a newer one.

And it was really interesting to me to see how much more advanced in the, I don't know, year and a half since I bought the first one, how much better the second one was at doing its job around the house. How much smarter it was, how it was better at getting out of little jams and more thorough in the way that it went around and cleaned things and all that sort of stuff.

But now we've got some of these from iRobot, the actual Roomba brand, that are really doing some mapping of the inside of your house. Right. They use the spatial data from how far the thing travels and they use some low-res camera data.

And so I guess this is, there's an upside to this. You could tell it, hey Roomba, go clean the kitchen and it'll go clean the kitchen. Yeah. Which is good. But on the other hand, do you want Google having a map of your house where all the furniture is and everything?

I don't know. No. No, I don't. I mean, the answer is no, but on the flip side, I don't know. What would they use that information for if they were to have it? I don't, what's the, what's his, what is the bad use of it? Yeah, they're going to use it for their Google Home devices.

So you can, it can better map the house and figure out where you can, where you should put your Google Homes and things like that. Well, let me, let me posit something here, which is Jason, you and I do, do this a lot on our show where we talk about a technology and we see a kind of vaguely disturbing privacy aspect to it.

And we ask ourselves, well, how would we have done this? Why isn't there a memory chip on the device itself where all of that is stored and it isn't sent home? That would be easy enough to do, but they don't. Yeah. Why, why do they want to send it home?

They, yeah, they want to send it home because they want to use it. Why do they want to send it home? Why don't we want to keep it here? It could very easily, all these Roombas could very easily have a simple tiny chip on them that you, when you set, you know, you, this is the kitchen, all the maps are stored there. They never have to go to a server farm ever at all, but that's not the way they build these things.

I can see, I can see a use for it for big data so they can figure out how to make their product better. I can, I can see a, a use for that, but I don't think that is a valid use for that, but I can, I can see what they would say as far as how it gets back to my earlier thought about the facial, facial recognition and the tracking.

I don't see what harm could come from, from this data right now, but I also don't know what's going to happen in the future when they have this data and I don't want to give them the data and I don't know where this data will go. Google can sell it. We don't have any rights to this data.

We need some sort of rights to our own data where we can say, I will give it to you. You cannot sell it, or I don't want to give it to you. Give me an option where I keep it and we don't have any of that. Move to Europe. GDPR. Move to Europe. Yeah. It's coming. They do say though that the images from the camera do stay on the device, but the maps are sent back to Roomba HQ.

I saw an interesting Twitter thread this week related to this where someone had put a raspberry pie on their Roomba and they were using some kind of, what do they call it?

Some kind of like neural learning type of thing to basically reward- Financial intelligence, Dave. I didn't want to use that word in front of you, Brian. I was trying to dance around it without actually using it because I know it's a trigger word for you. He actually programmed it to give it a reward system to not bump into things because he wanted it to be clean as efficiently as possible.

What he found was in a short amount of time, the robot vacuum cleaner just started cleaning the entire house in reverse because, in other words, running backwards because there were only bumpers on the front of it. And so it was being rewarded for not bumping into things.

So he had to change the programming so that it would be rewarded for not bumping into things when it was going forward. Right. Because the robot learned, you know, so it's an interesting unintended consequences kind of thing. So give me a set of rules and the robot figured out a workaround on its own.

Right. That was maybe that is AI. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah. You know, again, it's just all this stuff about all this data being collected by all of us. And we all think, what harm could there possibly be? But we just we don't know.

We don't know where the data is going. We don't know what what people could do with this in the future. Yeah. You know, I can sit here and say, who cares if somebody knows the layout of my house? They could go to city records and find that anyways, but they would have to go to city records and call it up to find it as opposed to this mega gazillion corporation that has gazillions of points of data about me that are now able to tie in the layout of my house to that, too.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm just starting to see people think of data. I'm starting to see more and more people in the industry anyway of saying that you should treat your data not as if it's precious, but as if it's radioactive.

In other words, don't you want to keep as little data as possible. And if you get too much data in one place, you know, it could go supernova on you. So that's a good way to think about it. That really is. I like that. Yeah.

So I don't know if I don't know how much that's gaining traction. I don't know how much of it is actually just sort of lip service. You know, your privacy is important to us. It's a great idea, but nobody. The real question is, how do you achieve it? That's that's the real question.

Right. So, you know, it's one thing, you know, again, Roomba used to be an individual company. So, OK, Google's getting data for me from my Google searches, but they aren't getting data for me from my vacuum. But now they bought my vacuum. So now they're right, you know, and it's, you know, and then just the ease of having a house that is all, you know, in one ecosystem, you know, am I supposed to now, OK, I use Apple for this.

I'm going to get a Google Home instead of my Amazon and blah, blah, blah, and split everything up. But they all work together well. Yeah. And if you don't have them working together well, you're losing out on some of the services and I love it. Google is Google is actually vacuuming up your data now. Quite literally.

Yeah. It is like that episode of the X-Files that Jason and I watched that one time. Oh, Christ. That was a really good one. I love that. It was. Was it though? It was. It was. That was the best one of the whole, like, run for the season. I did read the Wikipedia entry for it, so I got it.

Yeah. You had to see it to believe it. It was good. It was actually a good episode. The one. All right, gentlemen. It was the one good episode. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, that's what we got going on this week. Stay safe out there. Keep an eye on your vacuum cleaner.

Your tooth hurts less. Yeah. Fighting a little bit of a toothache. Make sure you don't go to it. The dentist that has a partnership with Google. That's right. They'll map your teeth. That's right. Or the guy from Little Shop of Horrors. Seven, two, two, one, three, five, five, two, three.

All going to Google. But we also, I can already tell you what time you're going to the dentist. I mean, that's a given. I can tell by your big data what time you're going to the dentist. Oh. Two-thirty. Predictive data. Oh, two-thirty. Oh, God. Not that disappointing note.

All right. I'm not even a dad and I got the dad jokes. Cut them. Ching. Adios. Apps and doodads. I saw this article over at BGR.com and it's titled, Report. The number of people who are fine with paying app subscriptions is growing.

Two problems. I got two problems with this. Just because you have to pay for it doesn't make you fine with it. Amen, brother. We don't have a choice. That's the thing. We don't have a choice anymore. Yes. We do not like software subscriptions here on the show and app subscriptions are the same thing.

Which brings me to my second point. In this report, they're actually talking about apps like Spotify and Netflix. Those are not, they're not apps. That's a different beast. It's a completely different beast. You're not paying for software. You are paying for a content service.

It just happens to be on the phone. You can actually go to your computer and pay for Netflix and watch it and never put it on a phone. So, you know, this whole thing is, it's a really not well thought out study, in my opinion. Because it's the definition of app that they're using is the problem.

Yes. It's mixing too many signals. Yeah. Which is a problem. I mean, of course, yes, software companies love the app subscription model because they just keep making money. It's printing money for them. And if it works out, this is why I'm fine with it. In some cases, like the case for 1Password, I looked at the cost for the subscription and I looked at their average cost for the next version of the software.

It is exactly the same. I do not pay any more money and I get more features because they know that they're going to get that money on. I'm like prepaying for the next upgrade is kind of what it goes into. That's how I'm looking at it for them. A lot of other companies, not so much. It'd be like five years before your next upgrade because they're off in Belize, like, you know, swimming in their money like Scrooge McDuck and not writing any more software.

But I just think this is a really bad report. And I don't I do not take it at face value. And I am damn not fine paying with any app subscription. Also, as I was going through and reading this, there's no there's nothing in here that says people are fine with it.

They're just looking at the numbers. More people are doing it. Yeah. They didn't do like a survey asking, do you like subscription models? They didn't ask anybody that. They're just going off. Well, more people are paying for subscriptions now. That's, again, because we don't have a choice. That has nothing to do with people being fine with it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a completely different beast. So, yeah, I don't know what the hell's going on with that. But, yeah, way to shit the bed on that one. Yeah, well, the portal and the portal plus from Facebook are now out. And I read a review over it and gadget about it. It's talking about the three hundred and forty nine dollar portal plus is the bigger, more expensive version of the portal.

The large display that can be rotated between landscape and portrait modes, blah, blah, blah. It's much too big and unsightly to be practical for most people. Like the smaller portal, it uses algorithms to enhance video calls, though this feels creepy at times. As with the portal, two voice assistants can get confusing because apparently you can say a portal or a Echo or Amazon or whatever, because it's got that built in.

And app functionality is limited if you're a messenger fan who insists on blah, blah, blah. My whole thing is if I'm reading a review that involves the word creepy, I'm never buying the product. Yeah. Like creepy is in there. I don't want something that feels creepy. And I think we all feel this way about it.

So they do get into the privacy bit. There's a button on both that can shut off the camera and the microphone via an electronic switch. They both come with a physical camera lens cover if you're feeling extra paranoid, which is nice. According to Facebook, all the video chats are encrypted and the company doesn't listen, view or keep records of your calls.

The AI on the camera and voice features, which is an AI, are run locally, not on Facebook servers, though the camera doesn't use the shape of your face and voice to track your movements. There's no facial recognition technology here yet, yet, because they will be updating these. And like Amazon's services, your voice history is stored online, but you can delete it manually.

You can delete your portal's voice history by going to your Facebook activity log, as Facebook is well known for making those things very clear and easy to find. That is irony, everyone. But as we discussed, it's not really everything as it seems, because now they've admitted to the fact that they do collect some types of information from video chats, such as usage data, length, frequency of calls.

So that can be used to serve you ads. Of course. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. No, we knew this before it came out. I am not ever going to get one of these. I am quite pleased with my Echo show. Yeah, which, you know, can also be called creepy, because unless you turn off that drop-in feature, it is super creepy.

It is creepy, yes. I do not like that. Did that come, like, turned on by default, or do you have to turn on the drop-in feature? I had to turn it on, but that's because I bought mine before they rolled out that feature. I don't know what the case is now. If you were to buy one a brand new now, it would probably come switched on automatically.

Okay. Yeah, if anybody got a new one, let us know, because... Yeah, let us know. Yeah, I'm not going to buy one. It should be opt-in, not opt-out. Yeah, I've got iPads and FaceTime, so I don't really need any more of these devices. Yeah, you're all right. I just, I like it for my family.

Samsung is finally putting out a foldable phone. It is a screen that you can basically fold out, so going from a phone to an iPad, but it looks bulky. There's a hinge in it, which is a problem. So it's not quite the dream foldable paper screen that we were all hoping for, but it's a step in the right direction, so it's interesting to look at.

We'll see what it's like. It looks really thick. It does. It looks extremely thick. Yeah, I don't want to put this in my pocket. But kudos to them for making it, and hopefully they'll just keep taking it further. It's an interesting concept that, when brought to fruition, will be pretty damn cool.

Yeah, I mean, it's a first version, so I mean, go back. It's funny, I was looking at my first iPhone this week, because I was going through this pile of phones I had to make room, and I'm recycling them all, but I had to keep my first iPhone. I had to keep my first iPhone, and I had to keep one of my Razors, because it's a Razor, you have to have them.

But yeah, I look at the first iPhone now, and it's just like, wow. And that was groundbreaking, and it was thick, and it didn't do a whole hell of a lot. So, you know, at least they're innovating. Yeah, I still have my Model 1 iPod. Oh, yeah, I wish I'd have kept mine.

And I found this over on VentureBeat, which really made me happy. It's an article called, Why Blizzard is Remastering Warcraft 3, and what it's changing. A, I know that they just did StarCraft back in the day. It might have been StarCraft or StarCraft 2, but they just redid one of the StarCrafts.

I think it was the original StarCraft, and remastered it for new graphics, so it doesn't look like, you know, four pixels on the screen. Because I think we used to play that at 640 by 480. So I'm kind of curious to see it. I would definitely like to see it. But I like playing StarCraft 2.

That still works fine for me. It's a decent res. But Warcraft 3 is a fantastic game that I really miss playing. So I'm really kind of looking forward to this one, because it is such a fun game. It's not like an MMORPG. This is just an old, real-time strategy game.

And I used to play it with a friend who is not a friend anymore. Rest in peace, Dave Naked. And it was just, we had so much fun playing this game. So I'm really looking forward to this when it comes back out. So I might be hitting up the audience if there are any Warcraft 3 players out there to get in on a new clan with.

What was that game that we played back at the company that we all worked for, you, me and Riggs? What was that called? Marathon. Marathon. We played a lot of Marathon. Yeah. We played more Marathon than we did work. Yep. Brick-a-brick.

Sometimes the internet is just there for you. And you didn't even think that you would need it. I ran across this article. We've just gotten a new fridge. What's the smartest way to organize it over at Slate? And you'd think that you kind of know everything about where you should put your food. But then you get shocked by things that you didn't know.

And it's just a fun little read. I just loved it. And I don't know why. The internet just provides these things where you grow up thinking things worked a certain way. And then you find out there's better ways to do things. So if you think you know how to put your fridge into a perfect organization, think again and go check out this article.

Okay. I'm surprised there aren't many photos in here. Yeah. You'd think they would have done a better job with photos. They just straight up describe it. But yeah, I did like the main point is even if you get this right, good luck maintaining it if you live with other people. Right. Because nobody's going to do what you want them to do.

Oh, tell me about it. Tell me about it. I'm like, where's the cream cheese? It was with the cheese. Like, no, I put it with the butter. Why? Yes. Why did you do that? Oh, I just want something for my bagel, please. It shouldn't be this difficult, but it always is.

No. I found this one over at our new favorite site, Science Alert. The ozone hole will be completely healed soon. Imagine if humans just worked together more. And that just made me sad. I'm like, you're right. You're right. The Montreal Protocol back in the day that basically banned big hair and Aquanet for a while.

Yep. Back in 1989. Ruined my hairdos. Exactly. It worked. It seems to have worked. The hole is almost gone. Well, thank God we're going to be rolling all this back here in the States. Exactly. We need something to fight against. That's why we need a common enemy again, except the common enemies we already have that are making us more common enemies.

That's great. This is amazing that it actually really worked and they're able to prove it. That's good. Let's keep it up. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. Yeah. Forgot about that. Anyway. Now, this is a fun story. We've covered the flying motorcycles that a couple of companies have made.

The first one, I think, was a Russian company, which is basically four upside down lawnmowers on a bench. That looks safe. Looks safe. Yeah. Are you looking at the picture of the current one? Yep. It's the same concept, yes. It's four upside down lawnmowers, and you basically sit on top of them.

You sit on top of them. With no protection. Well, he does have knee pads, just in case. Thank God. But I think his shins will probably get cut off or lose a foot if he goes wrong on this thing. The Dubai police have started training on these. And it's actually a California company called HoverSurf that's making them.

So I think they stole all the ideas from the Russians and are making their own hover bikes. Now, the thing about it, I put the stats in here, which is kind of interesting. That weighs 253 pounds. It's got 802 pounds of thrust, a max speed of 60 miles an hour, and safe flying altitude is 16 feet, which, you know, yeah, you can still fall from 16 feet and be okay.

It'll hurt like a mofo. But flight time with pilot, 10 to 25 minutes. That's not a lot, so you better catch them quick. And it takes two and a half hours to charge, and it costs $150,000. These things have got to be so incredibly loud, too.

Oh, I bet they are. I bet they are. I mean, ridiculously loud. Yeah. The interesting thing, too, is you don't need a pilot's license to fly these. Great. Yeah, let's go fly the flying lawnmower into a crowd. Okay, that's what we need now. The thing about it, though, it looks like it's going to be hella fun to fly.

I would love to have fun. It does look like it'll be fun. And they're working on some ducted fan versions. So that'll get rid of the, oh, if I slip up, I cut my leg off problem. Or if you do an indo and go over the handlebars, then you're decapitated.

But I recommend everybody go take a look at these things. The link will be in the show notes at gog.show slash 297. It looks awesome. And of course, of course, Dubai is the one that's getting these first. Of course they are. Well, just the other day we had a mass shooting here out actually closer to you, Jason, in Thousand Oaks.

Right up the street. Yeah. Here's the stat that I just I find a hard time wrapping my head around. There have been 307 mass shootings so far this year in the 312 days. You can pick the five days that there wasn't a mass shooting in the United States. We've talked a lot about gun control on the show before.

I'm not going to rehash it. In fact, my opinion is even starting to change. I'm not entirely sure that gun control is going to stop any of this. There is something seriously wrong with with the society. And it's only us. Nobody else is having these problems. So let's fix it somehow.

Yeah. Good luck. Let's figure this out. Yes. No, there's a fundamental flaw in the matrix right now. We know that. It really is. It really is. On a happier note, I want to give a big thanks to Anthony Rossbach who turned me on to iFixit. I knew about the site and I never even thought about it because all the Macs currently you can't get open to save your life.

But my old laptops, you can take apart. Right. So I can go buy replacement batteries for them for like a hundred bucks. Now, it's extremely complicated to put these things in. And I'm probably going to fuck it up. So, but it's a hundred dollar gamble, which is, you know, I can throw a hundred bucks down if I can get my laptop back to pristine shape because physically these things are in mint condition.

It's just the batteries finally, you know, kick the bucket. So thank you, Anthony, for bringing that to my attention. And hopefully soon I'll be able to order one of these and give it a shot. Might I recommend not no cocktails before doing it. That's what I was going to say. I was going to, I recommend you do this first thing in the morning, not later in the afternoon.

Exactly. I got to say, though, the less drinking plan has worked really well. Really well. Congratulations. Down three quarters from what I used to be and down like 12 pounds. So, hey, I'll take it. You take it. And I want to give a shout out to friends of the show, the Goo Goo Dolls, who I'm going to see for the first time in like five years tonight to go say hi.

Maybe I'll see them. Actually, I'm not entirely sure. I saw enough Goo Goo Dolls shows in the 15 years I was working for them to basically take care of that forever. Go out and see them if you want to. It's the 20th anniversary of the Dizzy album, which means 20 years ago I started working with them. Wow. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah. This isn't your website, though, is it?

The Goo Goo Dolls dot com? No, no, no. I haven't worked with them for over five years now. OK. OK. I was like, man. This is why it's just a stupid standard, you know, templated bullshit. Yeah. Built by the people that I used to work for. Yes, it is. But that's what everybody does now, which is why I'm here doing a podcast with you, Jason.

Until next time, I'm Brian Shulman. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 297.

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