299: Donate Your Data Today!

This episode is sponsored in part by Hopsy, the Keurig for beer. Go to tryhopsy.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG to get the sub-home draft machine, two mini kegs of beer, two Hopsy glasses, and free membership in the monthly beer club for $99. Terms and conditions apply.

This episode is also brought to you by Hover, the world's greatest website to buy domains. Go to hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. That's hover.com slash GOG for 10% off your first purchase. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. What up, B? Uh, well, the kid and the wife have been batting a cold around and so far I had stayed out of the game, but this morning I woke up fully engaged. Oh no. Shitey.

Oh no. Well, if you're sick on Wednesday when we're supposed to do our live 300 episode, we might have to punt on that. I do not need your germs. Yeah, we might want to just do that via, maybe we can do video cameras or something, we'll figure it out. But yeah, I don't have high hopes because first the kid was knocked out for a couple days and then the wife got it and she's been knocked out for a few days and then she gave it back to the kid and both of them have been knocked out.

And I was, you know, I was, you know, ha ha ha, I'm totally fine and today I've got it. So, but I tend to have a stronger disposition than my wife. So we'll see if I can fight it off quicker. Sounds like you guys are playing like typhoid volleyball. You got the ball, you got the ball.

It is exactly what happens when you have a kid and it's particularly when the kid goes into the petri dish of a preschool. So yeah, especially in your town where they don't vaccinate. At my school, it's a requirement. I made sure about that. You do not get into that school unless you have your full vaccination cards.

Awesome, awesome. So there's going to be a day that we're taking off because every now and again, we need a vacation. Pretty pleased with sugar on top. So there will definitely not be an episode on November 26th when there normally would be one.

The Monday following the Thanksgiving holiday. Yes, Thanksgiving here in the United States of America. America. Yep. Yeah, not the Canadian one. Yeah, we're going to have turkey hangovers. Yes, so there will be no Monday episode coming out as Dave Bittner and I will be spending time with our families and Jason will be cooking up a dog turkey, I suppose.

Dog turkey? The hell's a dog turkey? I don't know. You're sitting around with Bam Bam and Pebbles or whatever the hell you know the other one. Dino, yes. Dino. No, we'll not be doing that, but we will definitely be setting up the Christmas decorations because that's what one does the day after Thanksgiving here.

Not the day after Halloween. No, not the day after Halloween. Although I do have to admit that we have our Christmas tree up already because we bought one. Jesus. Well, we had to get a new one and we had to put it up to see if it worked instead of sending it back. You know, it's like, okay, does this tree work in the space that we have?

And does it look right? So we put it up. I'm assuming then that you do not have a real tree, you have a plastic one because trees tend to be trees and they work as they are because they're a fucking tree. No, yes, we have a very pink Christmas tree with red lights on it. It is very, very L.A.

I've yet to cut down a tree and go, huh, this tree is defective. Yeah. I need to take it back to the forest. Let's have the little elves fix it up for me. Right. No. So, yeah, that'll be that'll be the day after Thanksgiving.

But I do plan to be stuck, you know, on the couch with my hand down my pants, like doing what's his name from Married with Children going too much. Yeah. Ed Bundy. Not Ted Bundy. Yeah. That's a big, different, big difference there. And a quick apology about the lateness of the episode this Thursday or Friday or whenever that Thursday, the Thursdays are when they come.

I get so confused when we're recording and releasing. You can explain the catastrophe that happened to you by all means. But in fairness to you, the episode was actually not late. You put well, it was in terms of when you post it onto onto Libsyn and it goes to iTunes and all of that sort of thing.

But I don't ever post anything on socials until 9 a.m. Pacific time about the episode being out. And the only reason it was late for that is I assumed you were going to be really late. And I was on my bike halfway up to Malibu when you came to me at 9 a.m. saying the show was ready. So the show was technically on time.

Right, right. But I don't get you. The socials aren't when the show goes live. The socials are, you know, the nice promo bit. But when the show goes live, it gets downloaded to people who subscribe. And if you don't subscribe, you should. Pretty pleased with sugar on top. And then it's ready for the morning drive time because it usually comes out at midnight or 12.01 on Thursday morning.

But I have an Anker USB 3 hub that decided to go kaput, completely kaput in the middle of a save. And that save was near the end of, you know, a two-hour editing session for the show. And I was so livid that I could not go back and do it again.

So I had to wait till the next morning and just go yell, fuck, a lot around the house. I think I yelled at you on Slack for about 20 minutes. You did. And I muted you. Yes, I was very upset. Very upset. So I replaced the hub and we're all good to go now. Because I couldn't get any of my drives to work because of the way the studio is set up, the hard drives are, like, way away from the computer.

And it doesn't work to do stuff. So that and I was just pissed off. Yes. All apologies, everyone. How about a little follow-up? I got some thoughts on self-driving cars. I've been thinking about this for a bit because these are coming and we've got some stories about self-driving cars in the show.

And, you know, they've got all these cameras on them. And I've been, you know, reading up on AI and facial recognition and all the crap that's coming out and just trying to get, you know, a little up to speed on everything like I always do every single week. And I was wondering if the cars who have the cameras and are the self-driving cars, if they can have automobile recognition and say, oh, that is a, you know, a Toyota 4Runner.

That weighs 4,800 pounds. This is a Civic. It weighs 1,800 pounds. And knowing the cars that are around them, then they could extrapolate from that and figure out what the average stopping distance of those cars is to make it safer for following distance and things like that to be around people in cars because we know that we're not going to jump into self-driving cars on their own everywhere ubiquitously out the gate, which is what you and I want.

We're just like, okay, let's everybody trade in their car for a self-driving car and then we'll just, you know, move on. Nobody has to drive anymore. But because I was thinking, I'm like, okay, I'm driving my new Tesla Model 17 because that'll be the time when I can get one. And I got a semi tailgating me. Well, the car should know that, oh, if I slam on the brakes right now, what are the chances of that truck turning me into a smear on the road?

And things like that. I was just, I was thinking about how to make the AIs smarter, the, you know, the self-driving car itself smarter. I don't think the issue is ever with regular driving, though. The issue is with emergencies. It's with, you know, crazy swerving and drunkness and all that sort of stuff.

It's the complete unexpected that come out of nowhere where, you know, even knowing the average stopping distance wouldn't be of any use. Actually, it would be of use because if you had to swerve in front of a car and hit the brakes, you would want to swerve in front of a car that is smaller and not larger.

So I think it's just more information would make the car actually safer because, okay, I have to cut off this Civic and slam on the brakes. Chances of him hitting me are less than somebody in a giant pickup truck hitting me, and the damage will be reduced if I get hit by the Civic. You know, there's your trolley problem, you know, in a nutshell as far as that situation goes.

I see what you're saying, but, you know, I look at the Internet and I go, more information hasn't made the human race smarter. Yeah, but that's why I'm talking about machines. I don't care about humans. We welcome our new driving overlords. Exactly. And I was also wondering, man, I wonder if they've built in license plate reading systems into these cameras yet.

You'd think that they would, which is terrifying on a privacy level. Yeah, but, you know, if it's in the EULA, your camera is sending images back to Tesla, and it will be sending back to other companies out there. And Waymo's got, you know, other cars coming out that we'll talk about in a minute.

And I'm just wondering if, you know, license plate readers on these things is just going to be de facto standard. Because I tell you what, the one thing that would be good about that is it would make one hell of an amber alert system. Yes, because we'd always know where everyone is at all times. Exactly. Exactly.

I got a problem. Which is the downside of it. Yes. There's an upside and there's a downside. I have seen Minority Report. Yeah, go watch the car chase scene for Minority Report if you want to know what good and bad can come out of it. And have you had a problem with the Tesla Model 3s in Santa Monica yet, Brian?

I've seen them around. I wouldn't say I'm having a problem with them yet. We're too deluged with jump bikes and bikes and bird scooters. The scooters and the bikes are the bigger problem here. They've even overtaken the Priai. Okay, because, yeah, the Priai used to be the big problem for you.

Out here in the valley, turns out Tesla Model 3s have become the new Prius. I have almost gotten run over by three of the little bastards this week because you can't hear them coming. And people are on their phone not paying attention. I'm out walking the dogs. They come around the corner not paying attention.

And I've almost gotten clipped three times this week. Now, to be fair, I also almost got hit by a Toyota pickup truck. But that was because the guy was backing up and wasn't paying attention as well because it was also on his phone. The phone is the common denominator here. But certainly there is something about these electronic cars that people seem to zone out and think they don't have to pay any attention anymore.

But, I mean, they're just so quiet. I can't hear them coming up behind me. Sneaky little fuckers. Yeah, come on. Put some, you know, get some throaty rumble into those things. I understand, you know, it's better for the environment that everything is silent now. But for public safety, it sucks. Yes, it does.

One last piece of follow-up here. We covered the story about the couple who ran the GoFundMe account for the homeless guy. They gave him $20 when it was like his last $20. And they made $400,000. And then the couple got busted for spending all the money. Right. Well, turns out, they were all in on it.

And it was all bullshit. The whole thing was bullshit. So, hat tip to Chris Lockhead of the Legends and Losers podcast who sent this one to me. I skimmed it when he first sent it. I'm like, oh, we covered that already. And then I popped back up. And I'm like, oh, wait. That's the same one Chris sent.

There must be some new news. Oh, shit. Busted. Yeah. So, they just set up a page. And then they found some homeless guy after the past. And the husband, I guess, sent a text message to a friend saying the story was completely made up right after they set up the page for donations.

Yeah. Instant karma. Well, not instant, but that's a karmic retribution right there. In the news.

Delay, deny, and deflect. How Facebook's leaders fought through crisis. This is the new blockbuster piece on the New York Times that everybody's talking about. Did you get a chance to read this epic tome, Brian? I did. Facebook is having a no good, very bad week.

I'm willing to bet. A year. I'll put down some money saying it's not going to affect them that much right now, though. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. People seem to be getting upset with the Facebook. People are. People are. They're certainly true. But it's happened before. It'll happen again. I don't see a lot of people ditching Facebook.

I wouldn't know because I ditched Facebook. I can't tell you how many people are leaving. Yeah, there was a big wave when you left, but I haven't seen anything come out of this New York Times thing yet. I haven't gotten any notifications about people leaving or haven't gotten any. Posts. I mean, some people have reposted the story and that sort of thing, which is, you know, ironic in and of itself.

But they're still on it until there's an alternative. I don't see people going anywhere. So it's a market opportunity out there. I don't know why nobody's jumping on this. It is such a market opportunity right now. Yeah, the problem is moving that many people over. That's the issue.

We've seen onboarding issues with other social networks. Yeah, but you still don't need to have all the people that Facebook has. If you do it like NeoCities does and you just get a bunch of people that are willing to pay a few bucks, there you go. Bob's your uncle. Well, if you didn't feel like reading the entire massive New York Times report, I think Slate did an excellent job of encapsulating it.

And I just love the title of their article as well. Facebook is a normal, sleazy company now. Yeah, it's a great title. And it's true. It's true. So they said, thanks to some deep reporting by the New York Times reporters, we now know that CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent the year after the 2016 presidential election largely checked out and clueless about the monster he had created.

Now, I will say in his defense, you and I could have built Facebook easily and we would have been just as clueless about the size that it got to. The problem that Zuckerberg had is he decided to stay CEO. I think you and I would have gladly taken our large bags of money and just spent, we're on the board and we're going to find somebody who actually knows how to run a company to run this thing.

Yeah. And that is not what he has done. Well, he kind of did. I mean, Sheryl Sandberg has been kind of running the show behind the scenes. She's the chief operating officer and she pulls the strings and does all the, she's like the bag man for Facebook. And until now, she has been largely scandal free and looked at as, as a, you know, this is a great thing.

She's written this wonderful book about empowering women. The woman is in charge. Unfortunately, this story shows that she's just as much of a sack of shit as everybody else over at that company. Yeah, kind of. It's kind of the same thing. It's just so her job was to repair the leaks and do damage control.

And she went into, I mean, she's a powerful woman with a lot of powerful connections and she's gotten involved with some kind of iffy things, including a right wing opposition research shop, dabbling in the PR dark arts, as they call it. Yeah. So she's hired them and she's played the political game, getting Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in her pocket, who got him basically run interference for the company within his party to keep investigations on the minimum.

The story goes on saying that, you know, I can't, we can't just, we talk about this all the fucking time. We know what the problems are with Facebook. And as we've said all the time, it is not a problem. Facebook is doing exactly what Facebook was built to do. These are features. This is what it is meant to do.

They built Facebook to do this. The problem was always the business model. The business model is the problem with Facebook, as they say in this article, is Facebook. It is what it is. Yeah. So, and they say we are stuck in the world Facebook made. It was a terrible idea in the first place, but as long as advertisers, authoritarians, and Chuck Schumer protect it, Facebook will face little significant pressure in most of the world.

All Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to do is write out this moment, boast about making a good effort to clean things up, and keep the campaign contributions flowing, and Facebook will just be fine. And democracy will not be. And that's what they've been doing. They made a blog post, of course. It's, you know, pull out the playbook. What do we got to do? Oh, shit, we got to blog.

Okay, here we go. Let's blog. The thing that pissed me off about the New York Times article was there was one small little note in there about Facebook quickly adopted a strategy to basically say that we're being the good guys.

So, what they did was they came out in favor of the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, which we know is a bill that has a fucking body count because it is a terrible bill, and it has let the pimps go run wild with sex workers, and it has knocked back the sex working industry decades.

All the progress that they made for empowering women and men to do their job that they want to do, it completely screwed things up for them and made people less safe. And if Facebook wouldn't have gotten behind this, I don't think it would have passed. So, this is the one bit of this that really pisses me off.

The rest of it is just business as usual. Yeah, you're a multi-billion dollar company. You're going to be a dick. I mean, that's how you become a multi-billion dollar company. They throw elbows in the NBA, you know? Yeah, I mean, this is par for the course, but, you know, the fact that they used the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act as a crutch to get their publicity back up to, you know, kind of pull away from the Cambridge Analytica stuff and all that is really just disgusting to me.

Yeah, I'm with you. Well, the one good thing that may come out of all this, even though my personal experience is I'm not seeing actual users flee Facebook, we are seeing some rumblings in terms of Facebook employees, and we've seen how powerful that can be recently just with Google and Amazon.

So, when your employees start to get pissed off, change starts to happen these days as opposed to, you know, since we got rid of the unions, now it's just this unorganized bullshit of people being angry. So, Facebook's turmoil has reportedly hit employee morale quite hard. Under 29,000 workers of the more than 33,000 in total at the company participate in a biannual pulse survey.

Okay. Which takes place each April and October in the most recent poll, just over half reportedly said they felt Facebook was making the world a better place, which is a drop of 19 percentage points from last year. That's a pretty good drop. Yeah. Not so many people drinking the Kool-Aid anymore. Yep. 70% said they were proud to work at Facebook, down from 87%, which is also quite a big drop.

And overall favorability towards the company dropped from 73% to 70% since last October's poll. Workers said they plan to stay with Facebook for another 3.9 years on average, down from 4.3 in late 2017, and around 12% apparently plan to leave within the year. So, you might see a lot of people jump and ship like you're seeing with Snapchat right now.

Yeah, they're taking their bags of money and going home. Boo-hoo-hoo. All right. So, moving off Facebook for a little bit. Here we go again. We've been doing this for a couple years now, and every week there's an article saying, Yep, it's real.

Your next ride share could be driverless in as soon as a month. So, theoretically, again, even though we're saying it's going to be at least 10 years, Waymo is about to unveil the world's first driverless ride-hailing service as soon as next month. They have yet to announce a new name for the project.

Might I suggest Operation Bloodbath? Nice. The service will be limited to a handful of authorized cars in a 100-square-mile area across a number of Phoenix suburbs. Now, I don't know if you've been to a Phoenix suburb. I have. Recently. They are massive and well-plotted out and new and in perfect grids and gigantic streets.

So, it's the perfect place to roll out something like this. I'll give them that. Yeah, but, you know, you can still, by accident, run over people like Uber found out. Which will most likely happen, which is why this will not be happening in as soon as a month. It's going to be years, years, and years before you see anything like this in L.A.

See? Oh, yeah, in L.A. for sure. But the funny thing is, you know, five years ago we said it was going to be 10 years. So, if we keep doing this show, they'll eventually get it together. That's true. They will. But it ain't going to be as soon as next month. It's going to be in L.A. for futureism.com.

It's in your name. Futurism. It's going to be in the future. The future. Well, what's not in the future. The year 2000. What's not in the future is Lime is going into the car sharing service. Can't they just stay in their own lanes?

No. Pun intended. No. No. No. The car services are doing scooters. The scooter services are doing cars. Cats and dogs are getting along. Cats and dogs living together. Oh, my God. So, yeah. They're going to basically, in Seattle, drop about 1,500 cars.

Now, these are not like Zipcar, where they have parking spots that are assigned to them at different places, like shopping malls and gas stations who have, you know, spare shopping or not shopping places, parking spaces. These are just going to be randomly left around the city, kind of like dockless cars.

They're dockless cars, kind of like Car to Go and another one called Reach Now. And there was another one down in San Diego that might have been Cars to Go. But the deal is, 1,500 cars into a major metropolitan area. No, that's not going to fuck with parking at all.

Yeah. This isn't like who's responsible for parking tickets. Who's responsible for if a car is left on Tuesday night and street sweepings Wednesday? Like who? Lime. Do you get dinged for that? No. Or is Lime going to ding that? I would just go and get these cars and make sure I park them somewhere illegal all the time.

Oh, that's true. That's true, because we know they don't have any user reputation, you know, points going on for that. Free-floating car sharing. They're calling it free-floating car sharing. Fuck you. Yeah. And it's called Lime Pods. What's with the pod?

Why the pod? You know, we've got the podcast. You can listen to a podcast and listen to the potty awards while you're in your Lime Pod. Now, if they put grumpy old geeks in every Lime Pod, I would be okay with that. That's 1,500 new listeners. All right, I'm in. But no, nope, not quite.

So, yeah, this is just going to be a nightmare for Seattle. They are pretty small cars, but yeah, it's insane. I mean, dropping 1,500 scooters into cities cause chaos. Yeah. You think dropping 1,500 cars isn't going to? See, I've been to Seattle plenty of times. There are parking issues.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. It's just going to make things... They're not making the world better. They are making things worse. Right. Now, Amazon has announced their cities. They're going to be... They're going to Northern Virginia and New York City for their HQ2s.

And we didn't touch on it too much when it was going on, but the idea that they were holding basically contests and saying to cities, what you're going to give us to open up our thing there is ludicrous. And people are coming out against this saying that you should never... No city should ever, ever agree to some kind of contest like this again.

What we found out is that New York will reimburse Amazon to the tune of $1.7 billion for choosing to put its business there. The state of New York will spend up to half a billion dollars to build Amazon's offices, just as other states build football stadiums for NFL teams, which I also have a problem with.

The state will offer $1.2 billion in tax credits if the company creates 2,500 jobs. 25,000 jobs. Yeah, sorry. $48,000 per job of tax cuts, which is probably like a lot of these people's salaries. I'm sure it's twice what their salary is.

It's insane. This is ridiculous. Amazon doesn't need this. Amazon is fine. They can afford to do what they're going to do. All these businesses can afford to do what they're going to do. You want to give tax credits, give it to mom and pop shops to stay open. This is ridiculous. Virginia got a slightly better deal.

They're going to invest a couple hundred million dollars in Amazon's new site and will offer $22,000 in tax credits per job. It's fucking crazy. It's ridiculous. It's all so gamed. It's unbelievable. The rich get richer. That's how it works. That's how it works. And that isn't even now.

There's also a great article over on Slate. These are the outrageous incentives that the losing cities offered Amazon for HQ2. So they didn't even get it. This is awesome. Montgomery County, Maryland, $8.5 billion. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, $5.7 billion. Chicago, more than $2 billion.

Atlanta, more than $2 billion. Newark, $7 billion. Columbus, $2.8 billion. We're giving you billions of dollars to come and, you know, make money. Yeah. That's awesome. It's so ridiculous. So ridiculous. And the whole point is, like, you know, the only plus of an Amazon being there is to get the tax money and you're just giving them all that money right back.

Yeah. No, that's the silly thing. You know, they've got warehouses everywhere now. They've finally given up the ghost on that. So there are warehouses just everywhere now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're going to do one-day shipping, you have to have warehouses everywhere. Same-day shipping for a lot of stuff.

Same-day shipping, yeah. But the thing about this HQ2 was they were going to pick one city and that was going to be the winner. And then they even did a, oh, we're changing the deal, Lando, and split it up. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah.

They're crafty over there at Amazon. They are very crafty. They are. There's a reason that they're one of the biggest companies in the world. Yep. The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have subpoenaed Snap and requesting information about its March 2017 IPO. Somebody listens to our show, apparently, because we said these numbers were bullshit before they went to IPO, and now somebody there is finally getting on the bandwagon.

That's exactly it. The complaint alleges that Snap misled investors with its use of, I love this in air quotes, growth hacking or using methods to make Snapchat usage look larger than it actually was. What do we say on this show? Analytics are bullshit. Statistics are bullshit.

They cook the books because nobody fucking pays attention, and all of it means nothing. Nothing. So, yeah. Yep. There you go. Well, it can't happen to a nicer company. Yeah. Snap is saying, of course, that the lawsuit is meritless and its pre-IPO disclosures were accurate and complete.

We know that they aren't and they won't be, and news of the subpoena sent shares falling after opening Bell on Wall Street on Wednesday. Shares were down now more than 4% at $6.40. Shares overall down more than 54% this year alone. Oopsies. Yep. Couldn't happen to a nicer company.

Now, let's go over to our original favorite punching bag topics, crowdfunding. Mm-hmm. We even had a segment for a while called Kickstarter in the balls. That's right. Well, Indiegogo is actually doing something interesting about this.

They're calling it guaranteed shipping to ensure refunds if campaigns fail. So, the biggest problem with all these crowdfunding campaigns, of course, is that a lot of people, they aren't businessmen. They don't know how things work. They don't know how to do things like supply chains. They don't know how to get it. Sometimes they just take the money and run.

But a lot of these things never come to fruition and you're just out your money. Well, not anymore. Indiegogo is going to... They haven't really entirely figured out how they're going to do it yet, but they're probably going to hold back a good amount of the money from the people, which thus kind of defeats the entire purpose of crowdfunding, right?

Yeah. Because all of a sudden you're not getting the capital to do what you need to do, but they're going to hold on to some of the funds until the creator confirmed that they would be able to ship products sometime. They're basically putting in oversight as a company, so I'm assuming that they're going to also take a bigger percentage now because that's going to increase the amount of work that Indiegogo has to do.

We'll see. We'll see how this plays out. But I mean, this is, you know, it's stepping back away from crowdfunding as a concept, which is probably a good thing because it hasn't been working all that well. Yeah. I mean, it works for some cases, but for most of them, you barely get anything and it's never on time.

I want a late fee for these people. You know, when we had Zane Lampre on, he told us that what, like 99% of Kickstarter campaigns are late. Yeah. So like that. So yeah, that 1% should get a bonus. Well, Indiegogo has definitely taken a look at it.

They realize that there's a fundamental flaw in their business model and they're trying to figure it out. Airbnb, I'm not a big fan, but they did do something nice. They donated $5 million towards helping the homeless in San Francisco. They never took an official stance on Prop C, which is the proposition that passed that is taking percentage of a company's income that make over a certain cap to put into a homeless fund.

But they are donating $5 million, which I'm assuming is tax deductible. Well, that's nice of them. I'm sure it's going to be tax deductible, but who cares? I mean, that's good. It's a move in the right direction. As they say in the article, it's a far cry from what some called the tone deaf attitude a few years back when the company ran Dear San Francisco ad campaigns telling the city how to spend the taxes it collects from the company.

Yep. Well, better than nothing. Better than nothing. Better than nothing. Hey, you know, we report on the shitty things these companies do. When they actually do something nice, we're going to throw it in there too. Yeah. I mean, it's just so rare that it's a fucking unicorn. Never happens. I know. It's why we don't have a Hero of the Week segment. Yeah, it's just so random.

And Comcast, one of my favorite companies in the world, they're forced to pay refunds after its hidden fees hurt customers' credit. What? Yeah. Comcast has agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds and canceled debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts.

Okay. Yep. Yeah. Hey, that's what they do. You know, come on in. That's their business model. Yeah. The early termination fees were what really killed them. It's like some people had to pay up to $240 to cancel contracts, even when they downgraded services to a more affordable package. So it's like, we're still going to give you money, but we're not going to give you as much.

So they just like, oh, well, we'll still take that $240. Thank you very much. And some people just couldn't pay. And the problem was they advertised a $99, quote unquote, lock-in rate. Which didn't lock anybody into anything. Yeah. And they didn't disclose any of the fees for, you know, the equipment or the other crap that went with it.

It's like, oh, $99, but you don't get a box. Would you like a box? Well, that's going to be another $12 a month. Would you like, you know, installation? Installation is going to cost you a couple bucks and things like that. Walmart. Talked about Walmart recently. They're working with Ford on self-driving grocery delivery pilots.

Yeah. Or just pilot programs to get their stuff in. They're working with Postmates, which is interesting. Well, that's a step forward. Isn't Walmart the company that was asking employees to drop things off on the way home? They were. They were. Hey, Joe, can you swing by the Smiths and drop off this toilet paper?

You know, we can put a pallet on the top of your car. The interesting thing about this is, you know, Ford is going the self-driving route. They've got a lot invested in it. Walmart wants it. Every delivery service wants self-driving because they don't want to pay for anybody anymore. And this is where things are going.

You need to pay attention to this stuff because if you want to drive for a living, get over it. You know, a couple of years, once these things actually do work, that's gone. So everybody now is getting in on this. And I think the thing about it is it might actually jumpstart some of the actual technology behind it because we've at least got more people trying and figuring out the problems.

The other problem is they don't talk to each other because this is a competition. This is business. So, you know, if one one car company figures out a really good way to stay in the lane and the other car company figures out a really good way to not hit kids on their way to school, they don't talk to each other. So that's one thing that kind of sucks.

I wish there was an open source self-driving collective where all of these companies were putting all of their knowledge in. But I guess that wouldn't just wouldn't be good business, would it? That wouldn't be capitalism. No, it wouldn't. Too bad. And speaking of capitalism, we've got our next story, which is a hat tip to Wesley.

It's supposed to be a feel-good story, but I don't feel very good when I really read it. So WeWork, we know, we've talked about WeWork a lot. This is the, it started in 2010. It's the global network of co-working spaces, which charges customers. We all know what co-working spaces are.

And you only get four beers now. Yes, you can, the company that limited beers, the company that also issued a company-wide meat ban, citing environmental concerns. So it's selling point is community. And it's community is a people that don't like to eat meat and can't drink a lot of beer, apparently. So they're very judgmental about what you can and can't do, apparently.

But they're moving into something called WeGrow. It's a first foray into education. Oh, I thought it was in the pot. I would have preferred that. They call themselves a conscious entrepreneurial school. That sounds very goopy to me. Okay. Inspired by the Montessori approach to learning that gives children the freedom to discover and choose their activities so their creativity and curious nature is preserved.

They say the goal is not to create next generation startup CEOs. But so far, from what I've been able to find out, this stuff has involved kids growing fruits and vegetables, then selling it in WeWork locations. Okay. So Rebecca Newman, who runs this, is saying, we've seen kids do these things forever, every time they're running a lemonade stand.

That's what that is. Lemonade stands aren't part of fucking school. Yeah. That's what you did on your time afterwards. Now, here's where it becomes a real problem. They've opened their doors this fall after launching a pilot program last year. Currently, 46 kids are enrolled in classes from pre-con garden to fourth grade.

The school costs between $36,000 to $42,000 per year, depending on the age of your child. That's a lot of fucking vegetables. They say 60% of its students are receiving some type of financial aid paid for by WeWork. Okay. Here we go. Here's where I start to get really angry.

Okay. You can start every morning with live music, followed by yoga and meditation. What? Time and nature, and opt to take either Hebrew or Mandarin courses. They will also learn science, math, social studies, and language arts. The company has yet to determine what type of standardized tests it will incorporate to benchmark their progress. You'd think this is not a school.

Yeah, you'd figure that out before you open the doors. It's not a fucking school. Like, there's no... It's fucking hippy-dippy commune. They're just charging money to do whatever with no oversight and no standardization and no nothing. There's no way in hell I would send my kid to this, much less pay for it.

Yeah, that's a lot of money to get yoga. That's a very expensive yoga class. I don't understand how it's even legal. You can just open up a school and not do anything and charge people for it? And do you really want your pre-kindergarten kid to learn meditation?

Is that really what you send them for? I mean, out of all the things, that might not be bad. Meditation followed by pure, you know, pure capitalism. Okay, we're done meditating. Let's go make those fruits and vegetables and sell it to people. Yeah. Okay, you're making farm workers. Okay, that can speak Hebrew and Mandarin.

So again, I mean, I think this is supposed to be a feel-good thing, but I don't feel very good. No, I felt kind of creeped out. Yeah. Yeah, not good, not good. Speaking of not good, are you still into the cryptocurrency, Brian? I open up Coinbase once every month or so to see if I still have any money in there.

There's a trickle. Okay. Not what I put in. Okay, so you've definitely gone down. Oh, yeah. Okay, well, it's gone down even more, I'm afraid. Bitcoin, as of this recording, I'm looking at it right now, Bitcoin is down to $5,533.86.

And this is because of a big scare because of this Bitcoin cash fork that's coming. And there's just so many people that get this. I hate the cash fork. Cash fork. Yeah, there's all these factions that are trying to do different things. And, you know, here's the deal with this.

When I buy a dollar, I expect that dollar to be worth the dollar, give or take a few cents, depending on global, you know, cash fluctuations and things like that. There's not a bunch of nerds who are behind the scenes going to make it just worth nothing the next day.

Yeah, the Winklevii. Yeah, and it's just, oh, the Winklevii have to be crying in their Winklebeer right now because, yeah, Bitcoin's price has fallen more than 12% in 24 hours. It got down to $5,400, so it's on the rise again. But, yeah, people are selling this stuff off.

Ethereum is down. Bitcoin cash is down. They're all down because of these nerd fights. So, I put $20 into Bitcoin, $20 into Bitcoin cash, and $20 into Ethereum. My grand total now is $15.47. You should have put it into Twitter.

You might have actually made something. No shit. I think I made $4. I put $300 in when we first started that experiment, and I walked away with like $304 after fees. So, I made $4. I got out when the getting was good. This episode is brought to you by Hopsi, the Keurig for beer.

Brian, we finally won the podcast lottery. We're getting paid to drink free beer. It's all been worth it. Yes, five, almost six years of podcasting, and it's finally all paid off with some suds. That's right. Hopsi is awesome. They've got this sub-draft system that brings beer on tap to the comfort of your own home without the price tag many beer drinkers have come to expect.

It's right there in your home. Well, for me, it's in my studio. I have it next to my desk, of course. My studio is in my home, so same, same. Yep, there you go. Have your own beer bar at home or your studio with the sub, a countertop appliance that fits neatly in your kitchen, bar, living room, or the aforementioned studios.

Yes, it fits very nicely, and it's very cool. It actually looks kind of nice, too. So whether you're a hop head, malt mouth, I've never heard that before, or a palate partier, you can enjoy a variety of beer styles from big and small breweries, which rotates monthly. They have a stellar selection of IPAs, which is the cool kid on the block right now.

I'm sure, Brian, you know all the IPA folk out there. I do, and there's a party in my palate, and I want you all to come. Hopsy partners with a long list of breweries and ships mini kegs to your home or office, but not if you're at WeWork. No, not at WeWork. You can't get a hopsy at WeWork.

So I got a stout and a porter, and we're not allowed to tell you where we got them from because the cool thing about hopsy is they partner with local breweries, so you get fresh beer from local craft breweries. So all of the different places around the country have different partners, and the stout and the porter I got, though, were both excellent.

And next time, I am going to get some of those aforementioned IPAs for my next delivery. Yes, they partner with local places, so depending on where you are, that'll define what kind of beers you'll be getting, but they're all fantastic. I got an IPA myself, personally, and a Kolsch.

Can't recommend the Kolsch's enough. It's low-alcohol content and perfect for maintaining that midday WeWork buzz that we always like so much. Just kidding. And the IPA was absolutely fantastic. I cannot complain. Both were fantastic. I've already ordered two more. They're showing up soon, much to my wife's dismay, but I'm very excited about this.

That's awesome. And the setup for the sub was super easy. I just plugged it in, stuck in basically the mini keg that they give you, and you wire it up, and within a few minutes, it's good to go. Not quite a few minutes. You've got to chill that thing, because it comes out nice and super cold.

But if you pop those things in the fridge first, it comes up super fast. It's amazing. Yeah, I had mine in the fridge, because I always had... It's beer. It does not sit outside. Yeah, well, I was in a hurry when it showed up, so, you know, I plugged it in right away. Ah, of course you were. Of course you were.

Yes. It's convenient. It's super easy. It's fun. It looks cool on your countertop. It tastes great. I mean, you know, you could go down to a bar, but why? It's just a bunch of millennials not drinking. Stay home. So, if you want to try Hopsy, go to tryhopsy.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG to get the sub-home draft machine, the actual machine, two mini kegs of beer, which is equivalent to two six-packs, and two Hopsy glasses, and free membership in the monthly beer club for $99.

That's tryhopsy, H-O-P-S-Y, dot com slash GOG, and use the promo code GOG to get all of that beer-y goodness for $99. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you in part by Hover. Building your own online brand has never been more important, and your online identity begins with your domain name.

It's the foundation, the rock, the center of your digital persona, nay, your digital brand. And buying a domain name for yourself and your passions is the first and biggest step to building your personal brand online. Your domain name tells your online community who you are and what you're passionate about.

Web hosts and websites evolve as their brand website, and hosting needs change, keeping their domain separate from hosting gives users flexibility to choose the right platform for their business. No one wants to be stuck with a solution that doesn't meet their needs. With Hover, your domain name can be connected to any host or website builder with a few simple clicks.

Separation of church and state is important there, people. It is definitely important. And the great thing about Hover, I've said it before, you've heard me say it before, I love Hover. It is the greatest website known to men for buying a domain. They've got no upsells and a super clean user interface.

Best in class customer support team. You call, they pick up the phone, and they're Canadian, so they're not going to be jerks to you, which is important. And Hover Connect, this is a new thing they've got, which lets you, with just a few clicks, connect your domain name to a lot of website builders. It is super easy, and it's just boom, done.

No more trying to figure out, like, was that an A record or a C name record I was supposed to update? I can't remember. You also get personalized email that matches your domain to further support your online identity. Also, so you won't look dumb with that at AOL.com email address anymore. You also get free Whois privacy, which is always an expensive upsell on previous domain registrars, but it's completely free with Hover.

400 plus domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics and fun niche extensions. So get started today. Go to Hover.com slash GOG and get 10% off your first purchase. That's Hover.com slash GOG to get your awesome domain today and get 10% off your first purchase.

We love Hover. 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 beautiful Maryland.

Don't listen to Brian. He's never going to be doing the security ha intro again. You're going to be under the bus like that. Dave is also co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. What's up, Dave? Well, gentlemen, it's good to be back.

Lots going on this week. Why don't we start off with the company we love to hate, and that is Facebook. Oh, more? As if we haven't been talking about them enough already this episode, but there is a security implication as well. Yes. I figured you probably had been, just a little bit, just a little bit.

It's an extra long show today, thanks to Zuck. I know it gets to be redundant when you say Facebook had a bad week, but... Yeah, we'll see if any of it actually matters, but here we go. The New York Times reports that Facebook failed to properly monitor how hardware manufacturers were handling personal data from hundreds of millions of its users.

This follows a report in June that Facebook was not disclosing to users that their data was being shared with hardware manufacturers in the first place. Really puts that new portal into perspective, doesn't it? Doesn't it, though? Yeah. Here's the thing that gets me. You're already under a consent decree, right?

So the reason that Facebook had to go under these audits at all was because back in 2011, the FTC put them under a consent decree that they had to be externally audited. And so Facebook gets to sort of cherry pick who's going to do the auditing.

Right. And even the people that they cherry picked came back and said, guys, this is not at all adequate. Yeah. PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted an audit examining seven of the data sharing agreements in 2013 and found that there was, I love this, the legalese is so fantastic, limited evidence retained to demonstrate that Facebook monitored or assessed the service provider's compliance with Facebook's data use policies.

So even Facebook didn't read their own EULA. Yeah. Yeah. Just piling on at this point. But I'm sure you guys probably touched on this earlier in the show, but I just can't. It's what kind of company is Facebook?

I mean, what the terrible one. Yeah. A terrible one. Like almost all the other companies out there. That's kind of the thing. They're beholden to shareholder value. They are doing what almost any other company does, which is whatever the hell it wants. The main problem, as we discussed earlier in the episode, is their business plan.

Right. They have a fundamentally flawed business plan, and they don't seem interested in changing it. Oh, but they're going to have an independent oversight group that they're putting together next year to help with their problems. I hope Ariana Huffington's on that group. She always seems to show up on these damn things. It doesn't do a damn thing.

Oh, that would be awesome. That would be awesome. And Gwyneth Paltrow. FOOP. It'll be the FOOP Oversight Committee. Right. So, we've got one other data breach this week. Now, this is probably the smallest data breach that we've ever discussed on this show, but I had to because it happened to 1-877-CARS-4-KIDS.

And now, that song will be stuck in your head all day long. I have to admit, I don't think I've ever heard this jingle before. Oh, we're going to send it to you on a loop. It'll be on a loop. I went and looked it up. I found it on YouTube, and it is horrible.

It has run on radio stations and local TV stations here in LA for the last 15 years of my life. I didn't actually know it was a countrywide thing until the story, so I thought it was just tormenting me. See, I thought the same thing, because I started to listen to WGN radio when I moved to Chicago, and it's every other ad.

And that's the one that made me come up with why I was so mad that I couldn't go, lady in a tube, mute for 10 seconds, or mute for 30 seconds. And then I had to figure out, lady in a tube, volume 1, and then I would count to 30, and then I would go, lady in a tube, volume 5.

You hum the Jeopardy theme in your mind. Lady in the tube, set a 30-second timer. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of it. Yeah, it's terrible. Oh, so they had a data breach. So basically, their database was ass out in the wind, no nothing on it, and people were able to get 21,612 records and climbing, representing weeks' worth of data.

Like I said, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the breaches that we normally talk about, but I just needed it for the punchline and for the song and for the title for the episode, so I crammed it in here. Yeah. I wonder, Jason, if you could use Siri's shortcuts to accomplish what you were trying to accomplish there, if that would be a possibility.

I don't know if Siri will talk to Alexa, though. That's the real trick. Probably not. But that's why I just wanted, you know, lady in a tube, mute for 30 seconds. That's all I wanted. So maybe I'll make my own skill. Right. Because now you can make your own skills, so I can just have it set volume to zero, set a timer, and set it back to whatever the volume was.

Talked about making a skill about 7,000 times on the show, and we get to make one. You know, the thing is, they keep coming out with tools to make it easier, so once they finally get to one where I can just... Skills as a service. I want a skill that I can just say the skill, and then it just does it, and then that's it.

You know what those are called? Those are called other humans. Oh, yeah. Maybe that needs to be a... Now we're back to Mechanical Turks. Maybe that needs to be a square on Grumpy Old Geek's bingo, make an Alexa skill. Yeah. Boy in Philippines, turn off my Alexa for 30 seconds and turn it back on.

Right. That's right. Oh, man. Mozilla has released a privacy report on which holiday gadgets they think are too creepy. Did you guys get a chance to look at the actual page on Mozilla? I did. Yes. What I love is, they start off at the top with, not creepy.

And then as you scroll down, it gets a little creepy. And that a little creepy is only after six products, and it's a longer page. Yeah. And then when you get down to the very bottom, it's super creepy. And super creepy is the Amazon Echo, the Amazon Echo show, and that stupid little clock where if they took out the camera, I would buy in a heartbeat, the Amazon home camera, and another baby monitor called Freddy.

Yeah. I've never heard of Freddy before. I haven't either. You did, Jason. Yeah, because I don't have a baby. And I was thinking to myself, oh, it's another unsecured baby monitor. And then I went and I looked at the picture of Freddy, and Freddy looks like a little dog.

He's a puppy. He's a little puppy with a little camera in his nose, which makes him that much more creepy. And they use a really interesting stock photo of a baby to pair with that. The baby looks like, oh, my God, you caught me without my clothes on. Right. Exactly. Right.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that was just poor choices all around there. Yeah. Yeah. I love that Freddy uses a default password of 123 and doesn't seem to have a privacy policy. Yep. No security updates and no encryption.

Nope. Nope. But it's probably $29.99 on Amazon or something like that. There you go. $35.99 to $45.99, actually. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah. So still cheap. Cheap at twice the price. Yeah. Half the privacy. Yeah. And if you scroll up a little bit, then the Nest Cam is super creepy.

The Google Home is super creepy. A little dinosaur that I just want to kick is also super creepy. There's all sorts of stuff. But yeah, for the most part, it's everything we've talked about on the show. I don't believe my Logitech cameras are in here for some strange reason.

So, hey, I got a winner. I finally got a winner. There you go. Even though they're still made in China. Yeah. Speaking of the Amazon Lady in a Tube, a judge has ordered Amazon to turn over two days worth of Amazon Echo Recordings in a double murder case.

This is interesting. Yes, it is. Because we've had this come through before, and Amazon's stuck by their guns, and they're saying, no, we're not going to do it without a court. Oh, court order? Oh, shit. Oh, you mean that court order? Oh, damn. Do we know how long they hold on to recordings?

Forever. Do they eventually slough off? Yeah, that's the problem. I don't know. I had the same question. I don't know how long they hold on to recordings. I know you can go in and individually remove things using the app or their website. You can set visibility to zero.

It doesn't say delete. That's a good point. We are stuck with that again. We should know all this stuff. This should be front and center information with these devices. Yeah, Amazon runs the biggest hardware system in the world.

They've got more hard drives than anybody else on the planet. Them deleting something doesn't really, it's like, no, we don't have to delete anything. They could just spin up another AWS, can't they? Exactly. We need to record more. Yeah, now we have two more headquarters, so let's just put some more hard drives in there. You know, again, I really think that there should be some, we need the legislation to speed up here.

When you buy this device, not that you get a manual, but in the manual it should be, we keep these recordings for this long, et cetera, or forever. And let you know how to delete stuff, and really delete stuff, like, not just visibility set to zero.

We should know that everything that we say to our ladies in the tube is being kept forever, if that is the case. Yeah. Dream on. Dream on. They can say they delete it, but do they really actually do it? I love that, just the sense of defeat that we all just felt for a few seconds.

Like, we know this is never going to happen, even though it's a no-brainer and it should, and we all just kind of went like, yeah. Well, there are some companies, for example, I've heard some folks from Cisco talking about how they've, you need to shift your notion of data as not, no longer being an asset, but being radioactive.

Right. So the collection of data is not, you don't want to keep it around. Too much data and you're going to end up being a super fun site. Yeah. We talked about that last episode. Yeah. Right. So I think some people are, they're at least giving lip service to that notion, but you're right.

If I can, I think everybody tends to be a pack rat because, well, why not keep it around? It's human nature. Yeah. And it's cheap now. In the old days, it was expensive. Now it costs nothing to keep this stuff. No. It's free. It's free. Yeah. And I just quickly fired up my Alexa app and I'm, you know, you can go through your history, but it's individual delete.

There's no like select and delete all. So, and again, like you said, Jason, it's probably not, we know it's not a real delete. It's set visibility to zero. Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things they put in or they pointed out in this article is that, you know, it's likely that they only have the actual commands that were given every now and then it'll pick up something accidentally.

But it made me think about, you know, it was a, Hey lady in a tube, how do you clean blood stains out of a carpet? Right. Yeah. So the fun part about that is, yeah, the, the, the, the fake trigger word, if it thinks that it's the trigger word and it's actually not, then it still records it.

Yeah. Which is why some people have their, you know, their entire conversation sent to somebody else, which is why I will never, ever pair my contact list to my lady in the tube. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It happens all the, I mean, not all the time, but certainly occasionally I'll just be, sometimes I'll be, uh, you know, reading my daily script for the cyber wire and all of a sudden my phone goes off and, uh, the lady in the phone responds and says, I don't understand what you meant.

And I don't know what, what phrase I said that sounded like, Hey dingus, but, uh, off you go. And yet my wife is still completely unable to actually ever get, get it to work when she says the right word. I love that. Right. My favorite ones are when I'm just like talking to my roommate and I'm like swearing like a sailor and Siri will jump in and say, Jason language.

I'm like, what? Yeah. Really? I don't know. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's, it's the creepy one. They've got a lot of somewhat cute things in there that they think are cute. Huh? Yeah. And remember the, the one, the undocumented one that I found was back up and it would like lower the volume a bit on the echo.

It's, it's an undocumented keyword. You can't do it, but I would, I would say, oh, it was, no, it was down. It was down. I would say down to bam, bam to get off the counter. And then the volume would duck on my echo. Hmm. It's really strange. The stuff that they have that they don't tell you about that's going on in there.

I had one, um, last week, a friend of mine said to me, Hey, what happens when you ask Siri this specific question? And so, and it had just, it was, um, you know, when does daylight savings time start in the United States? So I asked, and she, she becomes pedantic and says it's daylight saving time.

Yeah, no, it's not the Bob it's Siri. Yeah. So she answers that, but on his phone, when he says that exact same phrase, when does daylight saving time start in the United States? And it responds and says something about, I guess the, the British equivalent.

Right. And he can't get it to not say that. And we're, and he doesn't have anything on his phone set for that. He's in the UK or anything like that. It doesn't have the British voice going on because he can set different voices. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of weird. So. Right.

How random. Yeah. Very random. Anywho. Well, I picked this next article because I, I love the guy who wrote the title. What a crane in the ass. Bug leaves construction machinery vulnerable to evil command injection. Okay. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah. US cert is advising some customers of tele crane construction cranes to patch their control systems following this to the disclosure of a security bug that could allow a nearby attacker to wirelessly hijack the equipment. It is basically a replay hack. So you can like sit there with a recorder and record the, the commands that are going to and from the crane and then just replay them with your own stuff built in.

But I just, I love the title on that. That was just so good. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose, you know, it points out that, uh, these being able to remote control a gigantic piece of industrial machinery. Maybe not the brightest idea.

Not ideal. Well, in an era when raspberry pies and RF, you know, um, software controlled radios are a dime a dozen in these, these things become, can become problematic. Yep. Yeah. You might want to put some encryption on that there, buddy.

Yeah. Um, this next one, uh, caught my eye. Um, a videographer has sued Adobe after losing what he claims is a quarter million dollars worth of data through a bug in premiere pro. Oh, uh, this gentleman named Dave Cooper filed a class action suit, uh, saying that basically a version of premiere pro came out that it was buggy and it deleted a bunch of his footage

files and what caught my eye here is that it deleted files that premiere had never even touched. Ooh. So, uh, so yeah. So he had footage files that were in adjacent folders to where he's, his premiere projects were.

And, uh, somewhere along the lines, premiere went in and deleted them. Now, how do you guys feel about this? Because there's a side of me having, having been in this world before, there's a side of me that says, well, you knucklehead, where, there are a lot of lawsuits I should be filing right now. Yeah.

Well, yes. First of all, yes. Uh, we've all been there. First off, I, I, there, we have a class action lawsuit against iTunes. I can't tell you how many times I destroyed my music library. Oh yeah. Yeah. Before I just threw my hands up in the air and went to Spotify, but yeah.

Right. Yeah. Where, where, where is backups? Right. Where, where, where, we all know as computer professionals, if we don't have three copies, we don't have any copies. Yeah. It's about, if you claim that you have quarter million dollars worth of stuff here, spend a thousand dollars on.

Yeah. Several hundred dollars. Petabytes. You don't even have to spend that much, I'm betting he's probably on a Mac, he could have a time machine backup like I have. Right. I mean, it's not that difficult, so. Exactly. Yeah. So, on one sense, I, I agree with him. Yeah. On the other sense, uh, your fault, buddy.

Yeah. I'm sure there's something in the EULA from Adobe that says, if you boot this software, we are not responsible if your computer bursts into flames and the whole neighborhood burns down. So, they're going to claim that, but, um, it'll be interesting to see what happens if, if they just settle with them to make them go away.

Most likely. Or if they get their, um, their class, uh, status at all. Yeah. We'll see. Back up your files, folks. Back up your files. Back up your, you moron. Well, it's like we were saying earlier, this data is basically free. So, I mean, data storage is so cheap.

Yes. So, back it up. It's insanely cheap. I've got three eight terabyte drives here. They're all redundant sitting here on my desk, and they cost $220 each. It's ridiculous how cheap storage is now. And that's why, you know, keep one in a fireproof box. Every now and again, I send one out of state.

Yep. And I don't even have anything that's worth any money on these things. I'm just, I'm just nervous Nelly. Yeah. These kids today with their data. Yes. God. So, speaking of kids these days, Julian Assange is back in the news.

Right. Yeah. Have you guys, have you guys seen this one? He has been secretly charged in a U.S. prosecution that was accidentally released as part of something going on with Robert Mueller. Isn't it ironic, don't you think, that it got leaked?

The WikiLeaks guy got leaked on. Yeah. And they're saying it was probably an errant copy and paste from a different document. Yeah. I've used that one. I've used that one before. So, what are you going to do?

You know, but now he knows we're on to him. We're coming for him. That's the bad part about this. He didn't assume that anyways. Right. But now he knows. Before, he was just probably like sitting there playing with his cat going, I wonder if they're going to come for me. Now he's like, oh shit, they're coming for me. Right.

Pack your bags, Mr. Mittens. We're out of here. I don't know where else he's going to go. Russia. Yeah. Russia's about it. He and Snowden can hang out together. Oh, that's like going to dinner with a vegan. That is the worst party ever. Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

True that. True that. Yeah. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. Well, I think that about covers it for this week. It does. Doesn't it? And we will not be speaking to you next week because we'll be taking the break for Thanksgiving. So, I hope you have a lovely break.

Thank you. Thank you. Right back at you. Enjoy turkey if that's part of your Thanksgiving celebration. I know it will be at our house. It will be for us as well. Yeah. Jason's a ham guy. Oh, yeah. Ham's good, too. Ham's good, too. I don't know. Nothing against ham.

We usually do a Christmas ham, but Christmas and Easter are ham holidays in our family. But I certainly hold no ill will for someone who substitutes ham for turkey for Thanksgiving. And then next week on our cooking shows, we'll be talking about our sweaty balls.

That's right. Here comes sweaty balls. All right, guys. I'll see you next time. Cops and doodads. Lemonade. That's cool, refreshing drink. I love that Eddie Murphy bit. Long in the past. But there's a new app called Lemonade that I found, surprisingly, on Instagram.

Lemonade is a site where you can go get renter's insurance. I don't have renter's insurance. I need renter's insurance because the world around me has burned to the ground. And I was terrified because the world around me burned to the ground and all my shit was going to go with it.

So now I used Lemonade to actually get a renter's policy. It was really easy. I got the app. I put in a bunch of stuff. And boom, I got my renter's insurance for like $30 a month for everything I've got. Unfortunately, Bam Bam is not covered on the insurance because she is a high-risk breed.

So if Bam Bam eats somebody, then I'm screwed. But if this place burns down, then I get my money back, which I'm pretty happy about. It was a really easy site to use. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you want to get some renter's insurance if you are a renter. I always forget about it when I get to a new place.

And then something happens. And I'm like, oh, my God, all my stuff's going to go away, which would suck. So if you're renting, it's, I mean, all my stuff, $30 a month. And I got a lot of stuff. It's cheap. I'll give you that. There's a few things that set off some warning bells here.

Maya, our charming artificial intelligence bot, will craft the perfect insurance for you. It did a fine job for me. I don't know if it was artificial intelligence or some dude in a cubicle in the Philippines. And I think I'd like a little bit more detailed explanation about how lemonade works rather than the hand-drawn pizza pie charts with a glass of lemonade illustrating their process.

But, okay. Yeah. But they're, I mean, they're an A-rated company. So. That's fair enough. That's good for that. So I would, it's very, very clever. Yeah. And they've got the notarized documentation to back that up. So. There you go. Well worth checking it out. Check it out. Now, Amazon has finally released their Alexa-powered microwave.

And Gadget did a review in which they called it YaBasic. YaBasic. YaBasic. So, yes. I don't understand why they would need voice control in a microwave. And the article, the review basically goes on to say that that's pretty much the case.

You don't really need it. But it does save you from having to think about how long to heat up food for because it's got a bunch of presets in there that kind of know how to, like, defrost things or cook a meal or things like that. The real thing it's pushing, though, is stuff like popcorn because it obviously has a popcorn setting.

And you can also enter in how much bags of popcorn you have. And it will tell you if it runs low and automatically reorder it because it's basically just an Amazon dashboard. Oh, that's how that, that's the sneaky bit. That's why they're doing it. Now, before you continue, I have one question.

Before you continue, can I put in a cup of tea and say Earl Grey hot? That's all I want to be able to do. If it does that, then no. And they mentioned that specifically in the article because the guy who reviewed it had a bunch of English friends who drink tea and they have a preset for coffee.

They haven't built one for tea yet. So they just have to say coffee. Man. So you'd think that they would have thought of that right away. And I'm sure that will be an upgrade in the near future so you get the tea and you can do that. That would have been perfect. That would have been the best selling point in the world.

Come on, Amazon. The microwave in my house, my wife and I are pretty dialed in with cooking and things of that nature. So the microwave is purely a reheating leftovers device. But I think that they're not marketing this towards you or me, Jason. We like to cook. We're older, et cetera. I think they're missing their target market by not also having an Amazon Alexa powered basic mini fridge.

And you should be able to stack these things together like a Marshall amplifier stack. It's the perfect gift because they're super cheap. It's 60 bucks for the microwave. You make the thing, you make it 100 bucks total for a mini fridge and a microwave that are Amazon Alexa enabled. And it's the perfect gift for high school grads going to college for the first time.

Yeah. Like that's a no brainer, man. Yeah. If my microwave can say you're out of, you know, Totino's pizzas and order some more, that's fine. And even better if they put, you know, put like a Roomba type of robot with it, they can take the pizza out of the fridge, put it in the microwave, put it back on the plate and put it in my greasy fingers and even better.

But, you know, that's stage two. And the mini fridge can say you're too young to have that beer in there. Yeah. Yeah. See, perfect marketing. Make it, paint them like a Marshall stack. It'd be fantastic. That's great. Now, I found something else over on Engadget that I thought you might be really interested in. This is the Google Pixel, not the Amazon Pixel, the Google Pixel cameras are coming out with a new camera mode that is a pure software upgrade called Night Sight.

Did you look at this? I did. It's impressive as hell. We have like complete and total utter night vision photography now. Like it's unbelievable. It's not perfect night vision, but, you know, the picture that she took in the closet with no light and you can actually still see something.

And the colors. Yeah. You see the color. It's not like, you know, Paris Hilton porn. Yeah. It does a lot of stuff with, you know, it's taking in a lot of data and it does a lot of interpolation. So that's why it's a software update. Because there was a thing a long time ago. I mean, in the 90s where they were taking World War II footage from film and then just taking the still images and interpolating them together to make these massive high-res images.

You know, if the camera was stationary and you could see a bunch of stuff and, you know, it's like 16 millimeter or eight millimeter film. But with enough frames and enough noise, you can actually generate a really sharp image. And that's kind of what they're doing here. And my thing is, who has Marmite in their home?

She's got Marmite on top of her Nutella. This is kind of gross. But the, yeah, no, the photos are insane. The difference. The little slider, how you can, like, check the two. Very, very nice. I don't, this won't come down to any of my cameras because I've only got like a, what is it, 7 Edge S or whatever that one is.

Right. You have to have the Pixel. And have you seen anybody with a Pixel in the wild? Nope. A friend of mine, Kevin Rose, had one and he liked it for a bit but then dumped it. I don't know if he's jumped on the Pixel 3, but he said the other ones were just too expensive for what you got.

So, but this camera, man, I mean, I'm almost willing to switch except the Pixel 3 is really expensive. I'm sure that this, this technology will trickle down to all of our cameras. Eventually, eventually. Yep. And this one's interesting. Speaking of cameras, over on Apple Insider, they have a patent filing from Apple on putting in cameras in the watch band for the Apple Watch.

Okay. Which, you know, I can see for the Dick Tracy side of it where you kind of want that camera. But I think part of the reason that the Apple Watch is doing so well is because there is no camera. We don't want cameras in our watches.

We don't want these things because you know what they're going to run into? The problem that Google Glass ran into, you know? Yep. Glass holes. Wait, are you recording this? What the hell's going on? Yeah, you can't wear your watch into a locker room anymore, the bathroom, because you never know who's recording. You know, you want these cameras to be seen.

And, you know, yes, we can actually do hidden cameras pretty easy. We can do button cams and things like that, but you don't want to make them ubiquitous. That's really the problem. It's like if everybody's got a camera, then there's no privacy anywhere. And, yeah, okay, the light might come on, but we know we can hack those things. That's silly.

So I think putting a, you know, this is just a patent filing, which they do all the time with things that might never make it. This is just one of those, I think this is a preemptive patent, but I just hope they don't make this. I really don't. This would be a bad idea.

And I've been checking out OBS Studio this morning. Have you checked this out? No, I've heard of it, though. Yeah, I've heard of it before, too. It's open broadcaster software because I need to figure out how the hell we're going to do a live stream for our live show. And I'm just running up against a wall, but OBS Studio works with Twitch, so I can kind of make this work, I think.

But if anybody's got, like, any good tutorials on using OBS or has used OBS to do Twitch streams with multiple camera setups or multiple inputs, like if Brian's in one place and I'm in another because he's Typhoid Mary right now, I would prefer him to stay home. And he would obviously like to stay home because Topanga Canyon is still closed, and he can't actually get to my house very easy.

Yeah, I forgot about that, too. Yeah, yeah, these fires are just, they're wreaking havoc out here. You can't go anywhere. The traffic is so bad. There are people sleeping on my street who have been displaced and still can't go home. Like, up and down our street, people are out here all the time sleeping in their cars. All right, so let's figure out a way to do this over Skype.

I think we'll have to figure that out. It's a bummer. I set up all the lights today in here, too. It's turning into a nice studio. But, yeah, I'm reaching out to the audience for any help for setting up OBS Studio. If you have any history with that, I would appreciate it.

And my last app is My Talking Pet. It's a $4 app that I got from the Apple App Store, and it's, you know, My Talking Pet Pro. I got the pro version. If you go to Instagram.com slash BamBamRotty, you can see my first attempt with it.

I took BamBam and gave her the speech from Taken 1 because why not? And if you have a pet, this is pretty awesome, I've got to say. I'm not posting a lot of the ones that I make. I'm just texting them to friends because it's, you know, I can annoy them with it and they won't unfollow me.

But, yeah, if you have a pet, you could probably do this with your kid, too, Brian. I wonder if it would work on my toddler. I think it would. You just set up the face and the mouth, and then you can just record some audio, and then it does, like, you know, the mouth moving thing. And it's pretty cool for five bucks, for four bucks.

It's well worth it. It is really well worth it. The technology is actually really nice. I've got to say, they did a really good job with it. Because it's that time of year, you might need some help. Over at Mental Floss, they have how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, according to the experts.

Deep fry. Now, basically, well, that is popular, but basically, it all comes down to the brining, apparently. So, brine it, bitches. Although, I want to share my tip. I don't. I've started making a somewhat untraditional turkey for Canadian Thanksgiving. I leave the traditional one to my mom for American Thanksgiving.

It's easy to put together. It tastes amazing with a slightly Asian feel, thanks to the soy and mirin. So, I've included the recipe. It's from Bon Appetit magazine. Bon Appetit. It's turkey in the show notes, and I highly recommend trying it out. It is delicious. And as part of the same issue magazine that I got, this has now become a staple in our family.

It's the cornbread sausage and pecan dressing. It is delicious. I end up making it three times a year now. I make it for Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, and it's demanded at the post-Christmas get-together in Toronto with my in-laws. It is wonderful. So, go check that out in the show notes. Huh. I might have to look into this.

How do you get the day-old cornbread? You make the cornbread the day before? Oh, that sounds like too much work. I'm impatient. I want to buy my day-old. You make the cornbread the day before. That's how one gets day-old cornbread. No, I don't like that. That turns it into, you know, 20- It's Thanksgiving.

Put some fucking effort in. No. No. I buy a ham. I'm one of those guys. Closing shout-outs. Sadly, Roy Clark, one of the hosts of Hee Haw, died this week. I'm a pickin' and I'm a grinin'.

I watched so many episodes of Hee Haw when I was a kid. I think I've probably seen them all. Were you a Hee Haw guy, Brian? A friend of the show, Trent Hamilton, posted about this as well. It's weird because I think Trent is a bit younger than me. Most of the people I saw posting about this are a bit older than me. I think I missed the Hee Haw thing by a couple years.

It wasn't really part of my growing up. I saw it a lot, like repeats at my grandma's house, but it wasn't a big thing. Okay. Well, you were also in Orange County, which I don't think is really what we'd call Hee Haw country. No. Trent's from North Carolina. I'm from the East Coast, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, all that area.

So, you know, we were a Hee Haw family. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes to episode 124 with Johnny Cash, which is pretty fun to go back and watch these. It was a terrible show, but it was a fun show.

I mean, it was a really fun show. It was just a variety show every week that was basically, you know, country music and it was a lot of fun. And man, these guys could, they were knocking it out every week doing these live, live performances.

And Roy Clark could sing. I remember my dad had the Roy Clark how to play guitar book and it was stickers that you would have to put on the frets. And then you could, it was kind of like playing rock band back in the day because you would look at the music and then you would just, you know, learn the fingering based on the stickers and based on the book.

So Roy Clark has been in my life for a very long time and it's sad to see him go, even though I have to admit that I thought he was already dead. See, that app idea I had like four years ago, dead or not. Yeah. Yeah. I thought he was already dead.

Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear it. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulmister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo and I'm still a picking and a grinning. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 299. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.