302: Security Badgers

This episode is sponsored by Betterment. Get up to one year managed free by visiting betterment.com slash GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, what a week this has been. Yeah, you had a bit of a week. I've had a bit of a week. The day started off or the week started off, not the day. Well, it was a day of the week. It was Monday.

And I take the dogs out. Then I go have my abluchments in the bathroom sitting on the sitting on the throne. And then all hell breaks loose. My phone just starts blowing up. I'm like, what the hell's going on here? Like all my ring doorbells are going off. I got security cameras going off and I came out and I'm just like, what the fuck's going on?

And my roommate's like, I think somebody just broke into my car again. Well, sure enough, they did. This crew is going around town and this is at 5.50 in the morning. Who breaks into a car at 5.50 in the morning? Seems a fairly reasonable time to do it.

No, two in the morning seems a reasonable time to do it. 5.50 in the morning is when somebody's probably up and getting ready to go to work. So at least in my world, I don't know about yours, but it was a strange time. And what they did, we're going to cover this more on the security segment.

But yeah, it was just, it's strange. It'll be in my Twitter feed if you want to see the video of them breaking in. They don't, we don't actually have the car on video because of the way the house is laid out. But yeah, we'll, we'll cover this more. So that was, that was Monday. Yesterday morning, I take a shower and I'm getting ready to sit down.

I'm, I have a great day planned yesterday. I, yesterday was going to be freaking awesome. You know, I've got like a bunch of shows to edit and like just a lot of stuff to get done. I take a shower, I get out and I see a text from my roommate saying, I've been hit by a car at Ralph's help come now.

And I'm like, uh, oh shit. And I'm thinking, oh, well, she got hit in her car. No, she got hit by a car. Right. And I have said many times on this show that Southern California parking lots are the most dangerous places in the world. Turns out.

Yep. Well, I mean, I'd argue Mosul might be a bit more dangerous, but, but I'm with you on this. I don't know, man. Every day there's a, there's a fire truck out at Ralph's or target, especially target. Target is the worst. Right. Um, so I get there, there's a fire truck. They're like six squad cars, uh, from the police.

And I run in, she's got blood everywhere. Uh, this idiot from Vista Ford of Woodland Hills. And I mentioned them by name because the funny part is that's where I got my car from. And I'm, I'm going to negotiate a better rate on my damn lease buyout.

These assholes. This guy was one of their drivers just was, he was looking right and turned left. Okay. That was interesting. Head on to her. Like she was, had a shopping cart head on right into her cart. Cart flew up, hit her in the face.

Uh, groceries were 15 feet away from her. So that tells you how, like how hard he hit her. This was like, not a, just a, like a love tap. Her groceries were 15 feet away from the cart. And this guy just like ruined my day, ruined her day too. Obviously I, I'll be, I think he, I think he may have ruined his own day because when, when I got there, a woman from Vista Ford showed up.

This like seven foot Amazonian blonde woman was like, I'm from Vista Ford. Uh, he was on our payroll when he hit you. And I'm like, if this guy is there when I show up to renegotiate my lease, uh, we're going to have some words. Cause I will never buy a car from you again. If this guy cannot negotiate a parking lot, you know, successfully without almost killing someone, why is he driving your cars?

But anyway, yeah, I spent the day in the ER, uh, nursing my roommate back to health. She's, she's a mess. So it's, uh, that was a fun week so far. All right. Yeah. You always, you always talk about almost getting killed by a Prius, but my roommate was literally almost killed by a Ford.

Right. I was so bummed too. Cause when I, she showed me the pictures, I thought it was a Prius and I'm like, yes, I've got some really good material for the show. Like I literally have somebody that was hit by a Prius. Ah, shit, it's a Ford. Damn it. So what are you going to do? And, uh, you, you've been putting these onion stories of the week in follow up.

And I found one that is sadly not the onion, but real architectural drawings of what New York can look like in the future where Amazon takes over. And these drawings are awesome. It's like they, they, yeah. Yeah.

It's funny. I mean, it's straight up like the beginning of Silicon Valley, right? Like it's just these massive Amazon things that have taken over New York and there's drones everywhere. And yeah, you know, I know it's supposed to be satirical, you know, but it could, it could quite possibly be possible.

Yeah, no, it was, these are really funny drawings. I definitely recommend you check them out. Um, and the other one is like, Oh, I love my blue apron. We've got our blue apron this week. I've had it for dinner. And then the next thing I get is we are emailing you because of one of our suppliers is conducting a voluntary recall of its sesame tahini product due to the potential presence of salmonella.

Yay. I'm telling you this week, just the hits just keep on coming. Well, we're going to see this more and more. I mean, we are seeing this. I mean, Romaine lettuce had this thing as, as our food chains become more commodified and more Amazonified and ah, no, no, no, no, no.

I read a really good op-ed on, I think it was on the, it was on, it was actually a Twitter thread. This is a problem with fucking Trump's immigration policies because we are losing a lot of our immigrant workers and the supply chains are getting fragmented because everybody's terrified to show up to work.

So we don't have the people that are there to do the safety inspections that we had before because, oh my God, we're being overrun with immigrants. I hate to break it to you. This country is fucking built by immigrants, but that's a different story for a different show. Anyway, that's the problem.

It's not, it's not this Amazon shit that's doing it. It's the fact that people are scared to show up to work because they think ICE is going to raid them. Okay. I'd like to point out that for once, it wasn't me that pulled the Trump card. Yeah, I'm, look, man, I'm getting, I'm getting more and more pissed off about this, but then I got a follow-up email from Blue Apron that says, oh, wait, here's another version of the same supplier with the same tahini product from August.

I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is a retroactive recall from a product that you shipped me in August. That you basically consume week of? Yeah. Uh-huh. Because this stuff doesn't last longer than a week. Why didn't you tell me in August?

That would have been really helpful. Fortunately, we didn't get sick, but I would like to point out that I was actually pretty sick in August a couple times, which is not the norm for me. So I wonder if I actually got something from this, but I have to say my roommate didn't. So probably not. But it's still one of those things where it puts it in your head and you're like, how can I trust you now?

If only they had their supply chain on the blockchain. Supply chain on the blockchain. There you go. And to continue with the good news, fuck you, Netflix. Uh-oh, what happened now? They canceled Daredevil. Really? They canceled. It was doing so well. It was so good.

I think this is just, this is the Netflix versus Marvel fight, right? This is that, it's Disney. Well, it's Netflix versus Disney. Yeah. So let's be honest. We know Jessica Jones is probably not going to get renewed now either, and they're all going to move over to Disney's online streaming service. I know. This is so stupid.

But fortunately, we'll get another Jessica Jones from the same team because that's already filming. And it turns out, like, Luke Cage season three, they were already halfway through the scripts when it was canceled. Right. But they're filming Jessica Jones. Okay, so we're definitely going to get a Jessica Jones on Netflix.

So that's fine. But that'll be the last one there. And you know what? I have watched basically every documentary and every cooking show I could ever possibly want to watch on Netflix, and that's all they really have. So maybe I'll be canceling Netflix and subscribing to Disney in the future if they pick up all these shows. Yeah. At this point, I've got a hate unsubscribe coming, you know?

It's just really pissing me off what the fuck they're doing over there because this is, all they're doing is, you know, yeah. Okay, they've got a beef with Disney, but we're the ones who are going to get the, you know, we're suffering here. We're suffering. We don't get daredevil. I know.

You get stupid rich people problems. I get it. I know. But it is. I mean, it's exactly what we've been talking about for four years on this show now about, you know, cutting the cord and all that. And I've always said, and you've agreed with me on this, that it's not going to work out well for the consumer. It's going to be a case of us subscribing to 17 different services at $9.95 a month to be able to watch one or two shows on each service.

I mean, that's the way we're headed. No, actually what it is is me paying for a really good private tracker on BitTorrent and just stealing everything because that's the way this is going. Yeah, that's true. So we can pay just $9.95 a month to one illegal service to make sure that we get everything done and done.

So, you know, you guys are stepping on your own gifts here. Take a cue from the music industry, people. Not that it's really worked out terribly well for the musicians, but, you know, for the most part, everything is on every single service. So it doesn't matter which one you subscribe to, you get all the music. There's no reason.

Well, I mean, there's obviously a number of financial reasons and political reasons, but sort it out. TV networks and Netflix and Hulu's and all these things that are creating original content, they need to start treating themselves just like their record labels. You have a product. You want to get it out there in front of as many people as possible.

So you want it available everywhere. Yeah. Make it easier. We're going to steal it. We've been screaming that since day one. Yeah. And we've gone from, OK, we can't get it so we can steal it. Oh, my God, it's everywhere. Then it's just fragmented because Netflix is too popular for their own good.

They showed that they can make it. You can make a streaming service for video that is going to be profitable. That's their downfall is that everybody says, well, shit, we can do that. Why not? Yeah, we've got the content. Why don't we just go do that? Especially when you're Disney, you know, I mean, for Disney, it makes sense.

But Disney has so many properties. Star Wars alone with the amount of shows that they're probably going to try to roll out on that network. Yeah, it's going to be, you know, Star Wars, Marvel, you've got and then all the stuff for kids straight up because it's Disney. I mean, it's it's going to be a behemoth. Makes sense for them to do it. Still annoying. But I remember when we had laws on the books about monopolies and people actually enforce those.

I remember that. That was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Oh, nice. Nice callback. Yeah, I remember when shit like this wouldn't fly. But yeah, apparently nowadays you're just fucked. We're going to be paying this stuff if you want to watch it.

Or if you're like us and you're really good at it, you just go steal it. Yeah. For somebody who makes fun of people who post stupid shit on Instagram of them, like destroying birds and other people's property. That was probably a dumb thing to say. But you know what? I stand by it. Fuck it. I they got to fix this.

They got to fucking fix this. It has to be some way to license this stuff across all the services. Going to get worse before it gets better. The only way it's going to get fixed is when these people start to realize, oh, my God, it's not working because people won't pay for too many services. You know, CBS on is online is struggling.

That's why they're rolling out more Star Trek shows. They didn't have enough content. So many Star Trek shows, you know, and they're going to realize that, you know, people are aren't going to be willing to pay or not even be able to afford to pay for more than two to three. One music thing, maybe two video things a month is the max that I think people are going to be willing to pay.

Yeah, at the most. I mean, and Hulu is going to be the first to go, I think, because I don't know anybody that has Hulu anymore. Me either. Although they advertise everywhere. They're like the Twitter. Like they must have the same advertising company or the same PR company as Twitter because Hulu is everywhere, even though I don't know a single person that has it.

Yeah. And the show's on there. I'm like, yeah, I can skip that. I'm like, especially with The Handmaid's Tale. I'm like, oh, God, I watched that first episode. I'm like, this is the most depressing thing I've ever seen. I'm not going to pay for this. Speaking of that, she's a sequel. Yeah, she's good. I'm very excited about this book.

I am extraordinarily excited about that. And she's flat out said that it basically is going to involve a lot of current political themes. Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, she has a rich well to dip into right now. She has a very rich well to dip into.

And I'm so excited about that. I was just like, oh, I wonder how that's going to work for Hulu. Because they just went off and did their own thing for season two. So we'll see. And also, fuck you, Mozilla. I think this episode should just be called Fuck You. They replaced my friend Veronica Belmont on that IRL podcast with Manoush Zomorodi.

Okay. Now, I've got nothing against Manoush Zomorodi. I mean, I think she's probably capable. She's fine. She's hosted a bunch of shows. She's fine. But why would you get rid of Veronica Belmont, the queen of the fucking internet? This makes no sense to me.

And it's just annoying. It's annoying that they felt like they had to change things up there. Because the only reason that I listened to that show was Veronica. Because she did a great job with it. And it was a good show. And now I'm just mad. I'm just fucking mad.

Okay. Well, since we're running with one of our longer 20-minute intros again. And we're talking about things that piss us off. I've got a couple things as well. So I'll chime in. First off, Amazon. Yep. All right. I order two Fire Kids tablets from Amazon.

They come in a nice little package. My niece and my nephew would like them for Christmas. They come in a perfect package. One with a blue cover. One with a pink cover. Nephew. Niece. Perfect. They're at a discount for two of them. You place the order. You think it's a package.

They're shipping separately. All right. Whatever. I don't claim. Nobody claims to understand Amazon's supply chain. But it must be working for them. Because they're the biggest company in the freaking world at the moment. So it's working. So they're shipping separately. Who cares? It's not even December yet. They'll get here in time.

One of them shows up. Perfect. Great. Open it up. There we go. There's one. The next one shows up three days later and required a signature. First one didn't require a signature. Weird. Why does this one require a signature? And, of course, you know where this is going. I was home.

They just didn't bother to ring my door. Or knock on my door. Or anything. They just stuck the note up there saying, you needed a signature. We'll try again some other day. Ring my bell. I was here. I was here. Yeah. All right. Of course. Moving on. Yep. People. People. I have to go pick something up from someone's house.

A letter came to somebody else's house. And that person is out of town. But someone else is staying in their place right now. So here's the number. Arrange the pickup. Okay. No problem. I write text. I say, I need to come pick this thing up. Why don't you just leave it in the mailbox?

I'm not sure what time I'm going to be able to make it over there today. Perfect. No problem. Writes back. I'm here all day, so don't worry about it. I'm not going to put it in the mailbox. Just come knock on the door. First off, I was trying to make it easy for all of us. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. God forbid anything be easy.

Yeah. Just the mailbox is right there. Just leave it there. It's fine. I don't need to come knock on your door. I don't know what time I'm going to be there. Who knows what you're going to be doing? Of course, 25 minutes later, I get the text. I'm going out for a while, so I'm just going to leave it in the mailbox. We could have skipped all this step. We didn't need to do the roundabouts.

I told you exactly what to do. It was easier for you. It was easier for me. And now we ended up there anyways, except we had to exchange 17 texts to get there. See, if you'd have just sent a Fiverr driver over, you could have just gotten it that way. And finally, just a throwback. Task grab it.

You could have task grab it. Yeah. I could have. I could have. Because I don't even use iTunes anymore because it pissed me off so much. And destroyed so many of my playlists and everything and whatnot. I still did have. I really worked hard on making a great Christmas playlist in iTunes about three or four years ago.

Uh-huh. I know I listened to it last year. I obviously would not think to look for a Christmas playlist throughout the rest of the fucking 11 months. But when I looked for it today, gone. Oh, bye-bye.

Where did it go, iTunes? You have to go to North Carolina. iTunes hasn't even crashed in the past year. It just disappeared. You have to drive to North Carolina and go to their, like, data center down there and just hunt through it with a flashlight saying, Where's my playlist?

Anybody seen my playlist? Where's my playlist? No, so I Google this. And of course, you know, if you have iTunes Match or whatever on, it's in the cloud somewhere. But I have too much music to have the cloud! Welcome to the new world, my friend.

Isn't this all just going wonderfully? How can they lose a playlist? Merry fucking Christmas, everyone. How can they lose a playlist? I don't know. All the music is still in there. It's just the playlist that's gone. This has been a great week. Let's get to some news. In the news.

One real quick thing before we get into the news. I've been getting a lot of email asking about the drinking thing, and it's going fantastic. And I appreciate everybody's outreach. And I have to say, since, Brian, you and I, when we got back from Fireside Conference, I'm down 20 pounds and a t-shirt size.

Congratulations. Thank you. And thanks for everybody for asking. Everything's going great. Everything is on track. And life is good. Now, let's talk about some news. Oh, man. These guys over in China have decided to edit some baby DNA.

Right. Oh, man. This story is everywhere right now. This guy has crispered some baby embryos to be HIV resistant and impregnated a woman. And these babies are probably going to come to term. He Jiankyu is the guy's name.

And, yeah, he's kind of being investigated by his own people for breaching the ethical norms of what should be done. Now, there's a lot of different things that come into this, which is really interesting. You know, A, using CRISPR to edit baby genes is, you know, proof of concept.

And he apparently did a lot of the testing on animals beforehand and thought that this was going to be successful. And in the U.S., you can't do that. But in China, eh, kind of gray area. What do you think about this? Let's just start with that real quick. What do you think about this?

I have a couple thoughts. First off, this is the way things are going to go. I don't doubt for any two seconds that it's not. And what he decided to attempt to do with this is a relatively good use. It's noble. I'm not usually the one on this show to put on the tinfoil hat, but I'm gonna.

If you think for two seconds that there aren't already children born that have been genetically altered through different governmental programs by various governments, including China and probably our own, you're a fucking moron. This is just the first one that's been thrown out there in the public.

Yep. Yeah. So this one is, is, is, is theoretically a fairly noble reason behind it. I don't doubt that there have been some very unnoble attempts using CRISPR already with kids that may already be out there.

So I don't even know if they even came to term or there. They may have been like preterm abortions that they, I mean, I'm not going to go. I'm not going to go that into the tinfoil hat, but you're not going to go that tinfoil hat. But you know that this has been done already. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, um, you know, China's decided to halt this, uh, according to some stories that, uh, they believe they crossed the line of morality and ethics adhered to by the academic community.

And this was shocking and unacceptable, uh, agreed. Um, I don't think that this should be happening yet, even though I'm sure it is. Uh, this should wake everybody up to the fact that we are so far ahead in our technology. And, uh, we talk about this on the technological level. And I suppose this is still technology, even though it's meat space.

Um, it's absolutely technology. Yeah. Yeah. The law has not caught up with any of this stuff and, and we better fucking hurry up is all I'm saying. We, if there's not a governmental, uh, on the international level task force to start dealing with making new laws and at least guidelines and ethics and task forces about these technologies, we're in for a world of hurt.

Yeah. I mean, we are, uh, the, the problem is this technology is going to be so ubiquitous. Uh, there's an article I put in here from science mag with, uh, geneticist George church who was interviewed about this and he played a, you know, he, his lab at Harvard was like one of the pioneers of CRISPR.

And he's like, yeah, uh, it, it kind of seemed like they were doing things by the book, but what the interesting thing was, he was like, I think the more, uh, irresponsible thing that people have done is like, you know, starting to put out the genomes of like, Oh, say the 1918 flu virus or smallpox in the public domain.

Well, of course it's even more like that's insane. Of course it is. Of course it is. You're giving people the tools to create a worldwide plague pandemic. I mean, like, yeah, basically 12 monkeys. This is, you know, 12 monkeys.

And it's also, I mean, it's Gattaca. All this stuff is, is going to happen at some point now that we can do this kind of stuff, which is crazy. It's just really, really crazy that this is actually happening in our lifetime. Well, and the fact that the tools are available to be used by people that don't have the training that aren't in the scientific community.

I mean, you and I can buy a set and download one of these things online and just fuck around in our basement and destroy the human race. I think it's a little harder than that, but not much pretty soon. We're going to have a, you know, death as a service. It ain't going to be that far. We see how quickly these things move. Well, get on it.

You know, we didn't make any money on the internet. Let's just, let's just start. Kill them all. Let God sort them out. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It's a pretty crazy story. I mean, it's again, I'm torn on the one hand. It's exciting. On the other hand, it's, it's almost beyond terrifying.

Yeah, I think it's more exciting than terrifying personally. I think there's definitely going to be some, some really bad fuck ups and some really horrible people are going to come into existence from this. But in the long term, maybe it'll be the next step. Who knows? You know? Who knows? Although, you know, I'm sure everybody saw Jurassic Park.

That's right. Life finds a way, my friend. Life finds a way. And speaking of finding ways, Tesla has celebrated 1 billion autopilot assisted miles. A billion with a B. That's pretty insane. A billion with a B. Google self-driving vehicles have clocked up to 1.2 million miles without getting a ticket.

Might have killed a few people. No, no. Google's never killed anybody. Trust me. It's only Uber that kills people. That's right. Without getting a ticket. And Waymo announced its self-driving cars had hit 10 million miles, but Tesla has upped the ante, as Elon Musk is wont to do, saying that they've covered more than 1 billion with autopilot engaged, which is pretty impressive.

It is impressive, but that's apples and oranges. It's apples and oranges, because autopilot is assisted driving, and Google and Waymo are, you know, complete autonomous driving. So you can't, I mean, granted, it is an impressive milestone, but it is still apples and oranges.

You say tomato. I say CRISPR enabled tomato. Yes, radiation resistant tomato. Thank you very much. Remember that scene in 28 Days Later where they go into the grocery store and everything is withered and died.

There's all these tomatoes that are just perfectly ripe. And he's like, ooh, irradiated tomatoes. Yes. It was so good. Now, going back to some Elon Musk and Tesla news here. Not so much Tesla, but Elon news. The Boring Company has given up on their tunnel.

Aw. Well, not the one that he's already built, which is under his... It's not under his property, but yeah. Under his own property. But he was going to build one under the 405 freeway along the west side by LAX, which would have been not particularly useful to me, but certainly probably would have helped traffic around that area.

Well, if we're doing shows in person, it would have been helpful for both of us if we got to take the 405, but that would have been kind of nice. We could do more of these in person, but not anymore. Sorry. These community groups came back and said, oh, well, you know, why are they getting a pass on these environmental studies before we do it?

And they said, no, we're going to put the kibosh on this. And so they came to an agreement and said, okay, we're not going to do your tunnel, but we're going to go to Dodger Stadium instead. I'm super excited about that. It'll be like the first time ever people in Los Angeles have seen either the first three or the last three innings of Dodger baseball.

Yeah, no doubt, because you never go for the whole game. No. This traffic is just too damn bad. Yep, it sure is. So it'll be interesting to see if they can make this one work, because Eric Garcetti's behind it. Oh, yes. I'm sure this will get done then. Yeah, like everything else that he's tried to do.

What a useless piece of shit he is. If this guy ever runs for president, I'm just, anybody that doesn't live in L.A., do not vote for this motherfucker. Yeah, he's going to run. He's going to run. He better not. He's so useless. He's so useless. Oh, you know what we're going to get? We're going to get President Gavin Newsom instead, which will just be just as bad.

Our new governor. All right, all right. It's like having. I tell you what, I've met, I've met the man. Get too mad. I've met the man in person. Gavin Newsom in person is fucking Bruce Wayne. He is that handsome. He looks just like, you know, what's his name in the Batman movies?

He's a dead ringer for it. But as a politician, he's a piece of shit. So and he's our new governor, you know, so at least, you know, Jerry Brown at least pardoned the podcaster on his way out. So that was cool. We at least have that to go back to.

OK, enough local politics. Let's move on a little bit here. Google employees have a head full of steam these days. They've now published yet another open letter on Tuesday on Medium demanding that the company cease work on Project Dragonfly. Now, we've been hearing this a lot. They've been complaining. Google employees have been voicing concerns about this a long time.

But this is the first kind of organized appeal to say we should not be doing this. The search engine. There would be a search engine for the Chinese government that they would be able to control and censor certain results and surveil users. And international human rights organizations have stepped up about this and said that this is probably not something that should happen.

And Google employees are joining in the fight here and saying, no, we better stop doing this. So we'll see what happens. We're going to see what happens here, because I think at some point Google is just going to say, OK, you're fired. Yeah. You know, that's kind of I think what's going to happen.

I don't think they're going to acquiesce to their requests, you know, forever, because there's going to have to come a point where they put their foot down and say, you work at Google. If you don't want to work at Google, then fuck off. And I have a feeling that might be happening as well. But Will Erasmus over at who writes technology over at Slate asked a really interesting question because we've seen Google's various employees standing up a couple of times now.

We've seen Amazon employees standing up a couple of times now. We've seen Microsoft employees have also pushed back against their company's work with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. And he asked, wherefore art thou Facebook employees? Why are you not stepping up? Because they're waiting something about your company. They're waiting to vest.

They're waiting for their stock to vest because they want to be, you know, one of those guys with fuck you money. They're just, you know, they're kids. They're all kids over there. Facebook does not hire anybody like over 26. So these guys don't have the wherewithal to say, no, screw you guys.

These other companies hire very smart people. The hiring process at Google alone is just ridiculous. So, you know, you have to be really smart and somewhat ethical, I think, to get a job at these places. And these people are standing up for what they think is right.

And then good for them. Good for them. If you work at Facebook, yeah, just go die in a fire. Now let's go over to Airbnb. I just thought this story was a little bit funny. Speaking of die in a fire. Yes. Back in 2016, Airbnb created an innovation lab called Samara, which was focused on rethinking houses and urban planning.

So they've announced a new initiative now, a project dubbed Backyard, that will prototype new ways that homes can be built and shared. Backyard isn't a house. It's an initiative to rethink the home. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia told Fast Company, homes are complex and we're taking a broad approach, not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things.

We began with a simple question. What does a home that is designed and built for sharing actually look and feel like? The answer is not simple at all, Gebbia said in a statement. Let me tell you, Gebbia, it's called a fucking hotel. Exactly. We've solved this problem. We know what a home that is built for sharing and short-term stays looks like.

They're everywhere. It's called a fucking hotel. So here's this whole press release is such fucking gobbledygook. It means nothing. And there is an answer. And it's not you guys.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the thing about this is, it just reminds me of Amazon. It's like, let's kill the bookstores. Okay. So we can build bookstores. We kill the bookstores, so let's build a bookstore. Exactly. Yes, let's kill Toys R Us.

Now let's have a toy catalog. Exactly. It's the same shit over and over again. These guys are like, we're about disruption, dude. We're going to disrupt everything. And then we're going to remake it just so we own it. Fuck you. Yeah.

So. There's a little vitriol this week. Continuing with the stories that have really pissed me off this week. This is another one over at Salon. This is written by Chris Impey, who is a scientist. And he gets really into, he's an astronomer. And he's got, you know, his pet peeve, obviously, as an astronomer, is UFO accounts and astrology and things like that.

That is just completely ridiculous. And he's talking in this article about the, you know, we've been talking a lot about fake news right now. But we really need to start paying attention to fake science because that is all over the Internet. So I just like this particular thing. He did a, he got really upset.

Like, you know, he should probably be on our podcast. And he did a series of web searches. He compiled a list of the top 100 topics associated with superstition or pseudoscience or conspiracy theories. The 100 million web pages devoted to ghosts and auras were not a surprise. Oh my God. But I didn't expect to find 10 million on levitation and a similar number touting flat earth.

There are 100 wrong head concepts that tagger a total, a total, a staggering 1.3 billion web pages. Wow. So fake news is not, again, this is not what we created the Internet for.

But, you know, you can put anything out there and people are. And that is just terrifying to me, again. Because, again, as we've talked about now, you used to be able to, when we started on the Internet and you searched for something, you got the facts about that thing. Now you can search for anything that will tell you anything that you want.

Whatever position that you take on something, you will find a web page that confirms your belief. And that doesn't mean anything. We need to start working on this. So he's working now with a, he's trying to work using machine learning and AI.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I know. He wants to create, the goal is a web browser extension that will work in the background to flag sites with a color-coded measure of their scientific veracity. Green means the content is reliable. Red or orange means it's bogus and the user will be offered a better website on that topic. Here's the problem with that.

Anybody that would use this plugin has the brain capacity to figure this shit out on their own already. Oh, God, yeah. Nobody who is going to flat earth pages to confirm their theory about it being a flat earth is going to install this extension or use it.

Nope, nope. It's a self-selecting sample, people. Oh, that's fucking fantastic. Oh, God. This week is great. It's been a hell of a week. Oh, but we're going back to the moon. Elon Musk is, anyways. Are we going?

NASA is going back to the moon. They are going to basically build a space station around the moon, and we're going to be living on the moon in about 10 years. Bullshit. Because everybody keeps defunding NASA. Yeah, unless it says Amazon.com on that big lunar ring.

Here's the problem. I don't think we're getting there. Here's the problem. This is part of Trump's space policy directive. Oh, it's the Space Force. This is Space Force. Space Force One. So it's going to be militarized. Oh, well, we'll see. But they want us to go to the moon, and I don't see any budget increases for NASA.

Yeah. They've listed a bunch of people who are going to be helping out with this, but we'll see. We'll see how this goes. Yeah. There's a lot of infrastructure that NASA doesn't have at the moment unless they've been hiding it from us. The fact that we can't, like, actually send people to the space station is kind of one of those things.

It's a bit of a problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want this to happen. Please. Please let this happen. Take my tax money. Not more of it. Just, you know, use the stuff that you're already screwing around with. Yeah. Let's make this happen. Yeah. It's like they get, like, nothing out of every dollar that we spend on taxes goes to NASA.

It's ridiculous. But speaking of militarization, Microsoft has won a $480 million contract to outfit soldiers with the HoloLens. Oh, great. According to a government's project description, if successful, the contract could result in orders of more than 100,000 of the HoloLens headsets to increased lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide, and engage before the enemy.

Now, me being me, I think this is actually a good thing, because what it's going to do is going to get rid of false positives, and it is going to make our soldiers better soldiers, because their job is to kill people.

Their job is to kill the bad guys. Yep. It's the military. That's their fucking job. So there are a lot of people that are just like, oh, God, Microsoft is, you know, helping kill people. I'm like, people are going to get killed no matter what. I'm telling you this right now. What this might do is help stop killing innocent people, you know, collateral damage, civilian deaths.

And for that, I'm like, good on you. Give it a shot. Yeah. What I don't want to see is a fucking cop pulling me over for a ticket wearing a HoloLens. That's what I don't want. It needs to stay military, not police. It also needs to stay U.S.

They shouldn't be getting contracts selling these to other companies. Oh, there's no way that they can sell this to anybody else. Oh, Trump and the Saudis. Oh, yeah. Oh, don't even fucking get me started on that shit. What a traitor that motherfucker is. Oh, God. Anyway, yeah.

Back to the back to the topic at hand. I think this like from a technology standpoint, if they can make this work, that's great. Yeah, I think it's great, too. I mean, my other question about this is, is this the exact same version that I'm able to buy and walk around? Oh, hell no. Or is there better not be?

Because I was like, how easily can you hack these things? You know, if it's the same as a consumer grade model and, you know, some, you know, they can buy them in Russia and pull them apart and figure out how to figure out to do whatever in it, that's that's going to be a problem. So this better be. No, this is very, you know, toughened up military grade version.

Yeah. You know, these can't like get me one of those. They're going to put they're going to put FLIR cameras on them and shit like that. And, you know, but who knows? Maybe x-rays. I don't know what they're going to put on them, but these are this is going to be military grade. So that's the problem with this with journalism is they shouldn't be saying then that it's they're writing it the HoloLens.

They should just say they've won a contract to build an AR slash VR headset for the military because it's not going to be the HoloLens. It's going to be something different. The way this journalist story makes it sound like is, you know, I can they're just going down to Best Buy and picking up one hundred thousand of these things.

Right. Yeah. No, I mean, this is just HoloLens is just at the forefront of what we can do with AR right now. So that's why they got it. So they have to increase like the field of view significantly from like up to one hundred and ten degrees, which is good because it doesn't do that right now.

But there's a ton of other stipulations where, you know, it has to be a certain weight and it has to do a bunch of other stuff. But you're not going to be able to pick one of these up at the store. These are going to be military devices, which is good. I'm fine with that. And I remember when I was reading the book about the the raid on Osama's camp where the SEAL team that was training, they're like, wait, we're going to go in there on Blackhawks.

We're dead men. And then the guys walk out and they see the helicopters that they're going in on. It's like, nobody told me we're going in on a fucking transformer. This is great. You know, that's why they blew the thing up, because there's there's military shit out there that we don't even know about that is like next gen stuff.

And this is what Microsoft is going to build for them. But if it keeps our guys safe, fuck it. I'm in. That's it. You know, if there are bad guys, we got to kill them. At least do it responsibly. So for me, this is not a not a bad article. Killing Responsibility and as always, I have a bunch of extra stuff, but we're running a little long right now because we're angry this week.

And those will be in the bonus link section. So if you go to the website at GOG dot show slash 302, you will be able to see all of those links that you that we're going to be in this week in A.I. Dumbassery, but we just don't have time for this episode is sponsored by Betterment.

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We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in the beautiful state of Maryland. And Dave is also the co-host of the new unbelievably funny Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, who, if Dave is ever hit by a truck, will join us on Security Ha!

Where they take on social engineering. Dave, what's up this week? I'm doing good. It's good to be back. Did everyone have a nice Thanksgiving break? We did. Lots of turkey. Lots and lots of turkey. Well, as we'll get into in a second, this week has been a little interesting. Aw.

By the way, Joe Kerrigan, my co-host on Hacking Humans, he is totally up for filling in for me when, if I, if I cannot. He is ready, on standby, eager and waiting, microphoned in hand. So, if it comes to that. You might want to, you might want to, you know, like, make sure you pour your own drink when you're in the same room with Joe, because he might try and take you out.

Yes, because these lucrative security segments. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. All this podcasting money. Yeah. He's going to, he's going to, uh, uh, what do you call it? Kneecap me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to get Nancy Kerrigan.

Right. So, uh, you had some excitement, uh, this week, Jason? Yeah. Well, this is the excitement we covered at the top of the show, but I want to get more deep into the, uh, the Monday episode where my roommate's car was broken into by a roving gang of car thieves.

Uh, well, they're not technically car thieves. What they do is they go around and they steal people's registrations and then they sell the registrations to chop shops. The chop shops then forge the documents to get cars out of the country. So these are kind of like half-assed car thieves.

Cause I'm like, you're in the car. Why didn't you steal the fucking car? We're scratching our heads going, this is a Hummer H three. These things are like big in Ukraine right now. You should just take the car, but they didn't. They just took, well, they took her Dr. Dre CD.

They took her gum, which unfortunately has been discontinued. So she was really pissed about the gum and they took her registration. And this is a second time they've done it. So we talked to the cops and what we figured out was it's a three person team. They're driving around in a stolen car already.

This is a Mercedes that, that rolled up on us. And the two guys in the car, they stop, they get around and they, um, check the handles on all the local cars just to see if anybody leaves a car unlocked to just break into it. The third guy walks behind with a frequency scanner and for older cars, he can unlock the car with his scanner, which is what happened to her car.

What the thing does though, it will unlock the doors, but it will not deactivate the security system, right? So they have 10 seconds to get everything they can before the full security system steps in and starts honking and blinking the lights and going crazy because there's a little beep, beep, beep, you know, like a low level thing to say that, okay, security system notices that you shouldn't be here.

And then the big one will kick in. Hmm. I got the whole thing on video except for the part where they're in the truck because it was behind some bushes and we can't park in front of our driveway. Yeah. I saw the video. Yeah. We see all three of them, you know, and the third guy comes running up because it looked at the first part.

I'm like, wait a minute, where'd the third guy come from? And the cops told us that's a common technique. They have a walker where they call it a walker behind the car and they just go through the neighborhood and just steal stuff from everybody. So this is different from the ones we've been covering lately where they kind of have a repeater that triggers the key fob inside the house.

Right. And this, yeah, this is also like, you know, the record and playback attack. Right. It's not that either. This is, they're just, they're just scanning the whole spectrum. I see. Seeing what they can unlock. And the cops said they can buy that on the internet for like 20 bucks. They're basically brute forcing the codes on the car.

Yeah, exactly. What opens and what doesn't. Now, what's going to, help me understand, because I don't, the, is there something special about the registration paperwork in California? Because back here, back here in good old Maryland, it's just a piece of paper with your information on it.

So is it, is it the, the data that's on that, that they need, or is there some kind of hologram on the paper or something special? It's not really, it's not that special. I mean, it's, it looks like just a computer printout, but they can take that information and forge like, you know, different VINs onto it or create a new VIN for the car that's going out of the country.

Right. You know, they'll just stamp a new VIN and then put that in. And so when they get to like customs control, they just show the registration with the VIN and the VIN matches and then they can get it out of the country. I see. Because she's, like I said, she's got a Hummer H3, which are just huge targets around here because in Europe, those things are just gold.

Everybody loves them and they're really hard to get because they don't make them anymore. So, and she can't upgrade. She has to get a whole new security system to upgrade the frequency on it because it is an older car. I mean, the thing's over 10 years old. So was there any damage done to the car? None.

Interesting. And there, and this really isn't going to hurt her in any way if this registration, right? Like it's not going to come back on her at all. It's just, it's been used to ship out a different car nefariously, but it's not like, it's not like it's ever going to come back on her.

So it's almost a victimous crime. Except that she has to go to the DMV and get a new registration and pay for it, which is, you know, close to a hundred bucks. Right. Okay. Because, I mean, fortunately the car's worth less because in California you pay for your registration based on the value of the car. Yeah.

It's not like other states where you paid like 20 bucks. Right. They, they, the whole thing with the registration in California is because everybody used to go to Nevada to buy their cars cheaper and then just drive them back over. And the state of California said, Hey, you're getting a bunch of expensive cars over there.

So let's make the registration based on the value of the car, uh, which, which sucks, but she still has to pay, you know, a decent chunk to get her registration back. And she has to go to the DMV, which is the most humiliating part of the whole thing because nobody wants to go to the DMV ever. But what I wanted to ask you guys is in the thing that has freaked me out and is, is the, you know, the problem that we're trying to solve against is what do you do when the thieves have a key to your car and you cannot turn it off?

That's the real thing that has me freaked out. I'm like, these guys can get into these cars. What can you do? Well, like you said, the, the problem is that they didn't steal the car. If they were stealing the car, we just go old school and everybody goes and buys the clubs again, like we all had in 1980, um, you know, but if they're not trying to actually steal the car and they're just trying to get data, a number, there's not much you can do.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't even know why you need to break into a car to get a VIN. You can probably look these things up on the database. It's not the VIN, it's the registration paperwork. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Right. Yeah. Cause it's got the, it's got the state, it's got the state seal on it. It's a, it's an official document you get from the DMV. Hmm. So it, I mean, it doesn't have a hologram or anything like, like Dave was asking, but it still has, you know, it's, it's an official, official document that you have to present.

Take a picture of it and, uh, keep it in the lock and safe in your house. Well, the thing that she's going to do is she's just going to keep it in her purse. Yeah. Or that. So it's not, it's not going to be there. Yeah. That's what everybody in the neighborhood's done because almost everybody in this neighborhood has been hit by this. It's crazy. It comes like every year or two, like a swing through the neighborhood and get a bunch of registrations and then sell them for 50 bucks.

Cause these are the, you know, five 50 in the morning was when this car was broken into. And I was talking to Brian about this, which is like a weird time to break into somebody's car that this to me seems like, okay, sun's coming up. I need to get my hit on, you know, give me some math, whatever, whatever I'm smoking today and I need that 50 bucks to go buy a rock.

And that could be simplification of the entire process. But, you know, and the funny thing is, I don't know if you guys, Dave, you said you watched the video. They were wearing like, you know, like Christmas beanies with the little baubles on the top, you know, it was weird. They're on their way back from a party or something.

Yeah. It's, it's such a strange thing. So the thing I could recommend is, uh, leaving an angry badger inside the vehicle. Yes. We must go old school. Attack pigeons, um, attack ravens, you know, get some of the eagles that are built to take down drones to take down the registration thieves.

Yeah. I mean, it's almost like, I remember way back in the day, people would put stickers on their cars in New York city that said no radio. Yep. Right. I wonder if you could, if you slow them down, if you said registration, not inside, but yeah, you know, they're not breaking windows or anything.

They're not tearing things out of dashboards. That's a strange one. Yeah. We've kind of gone old school. I have these motion detecting lights that we use for the yard that were like 10 bucks on Amazon. So we put one in the cup holder at night. So if somebody comes up to the car, they stick their head in, it is blinding light just shows and then, you know, they go away.

Now, does this car actually have a physical key that you can open the door with? Yeah. Yeah. It's not one of the ones that you keep the key in the pocket. It's a 10 year old Hummer. Well, I'm saying it's like a fucking tractor. Could you disable the auto unlocking and go old school and use an actual physical key?

No, you can't. You can't. Okay. No, it's still part of it. Even if it was just a physical key. I mean, I think what we've always talked about is door locks, house locks, car door locks. They're a false sense of security. If somebody really wants to get in, they're going to get in. Right, but I'm saying if they're scanning the neighborhood with this electronic thing and just walking down the street waiting for doors to pop, hearing the click, and in this case,

if yours was, if you pulled the fuse, right, for this automatic thing, they would walk by your car because it didn't unlock. They'd just go to the next one. Yeah, they have been known to break windows, though. So it's like, do you take the risk of turning that off and then having them break your window instead?

So it's hit or miss. Here you go. Well, how about you leave a decoy registration on the dashboard of the car? That's interesting. Right. That's interesting. We can just make a photocopy of it and leave it up there and say, here, here you go. Right.

And leave the actual one hidden somewhere in the car, under the spare tire or something, you know, but leave a decoy one in plain sight so that they can, if they want it, they can get that or leave it in an envelope under the windshield wiper. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

It's funny that she was pissed off more about the gum than the registration, but the other thing is, this happened before. They stole her registration before when it was parked on the street. Right. And she was really pissed off because they looked in the glove compartment, they looked in the little, like, armrest holder, and she's got a bunch of cassettes in there, you know, that nobody wants.

So nobody took those. But she did have a Dr. Dre CD, and she's like, they didn't even take the CD. And this time, they took the CD. Because nobody has a CD player in their car. Yeah. This time, she was like, at least they took the CD this time. But they also took, like, the death notification for her father that she had. And they took her dry cleaning tab.

And so she had to go to the dry cleaners and say, hey, if anybody shows up, let me know. Because it was like a $70 dry cleaning bill, but it's like, they're not going to do that. They were just grabbing everything willy-nilly, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So you have to think outside the box when the thieves have a key to your car.

That's what I really wanted to get your take on. Yeah. I'm going with the badger. Yeah. I think security badgers are the way to go. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole series of commercials. Can we put badgers on the blockchain? Hey, now you're talking.

Now you're cooking with gas. There's a whole series of old commercials. Remember the trunk monkey? You ever seen that? Never heard of that. Yeah. Look it up on YouTube. It was a series of commercials that local car dealers could buy, sort of donut commercials where you can put your own car dealer information in this nicely produced spot.

And they had one for the trunk monkey. And it was to prevent your car from being stolen. And so somebody goes in and steals- It's a monkey with a shotgun. Actually, he's got a tire iron. And so- You Google it. He's got a shotgun. Oh, okay. Well, in the ad, I think he's got a tire iron.

And somebody steals the car. And you see this monkey in the trunk. And he kicks the back seat down. You know, it's a chimpanzee. And you see the bad guy stealing the car. And the monkey's sitting there, you know, tapping the tire iron in his hand. I think the next thing, the car stops on a bridge and you see the bad guy being thrown over the side of the bridge or something like that.

But it's trunk monkey. Check it out. It's actually pretty well done. All right. It's pretty cool. Anyway, getting on to some security issues that affect more than Jason and his lovely roommate.

Big news breaking here as we record this today. Marriott announced that data from almost half a billion guests were stolen. What? In a four-year breach. 500 million guests. They discovered that guests at their Starwood properties had- Well, they discovered an intrusion in their Starwood properties in September of 2018.

And when they investigated, they found that the bad guys had been in there since 2014. So, four years. And it's actually an interesting process. The bad guys had gathered up all the data, encrypted it on Starwood's servers, presumably so that when they started exfiltrating the data, it was encrypted and it wouldn't be noticed as being what it is.

Quite clever. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. They got a lot of information. They're saying that 327 million of the guests have their name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, their Starwood account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date and communication preference.

Right. Some people got their credit card information taken as well. They're still trying to figure out how many people that was. But, you know, those numbers, as we know, these numbers tend to go up. Yes. So, uh, so, uh, so we'll see, uh, as, as is the thing with these things, they're offering folks a free year of monitoring of their information.

But, um, I guess we all just, are we at the point now where we just shake our heads and, uh, pardon me, where we just, uh, shake our heads and, and say, well, here's another one. Kind of. What else, what else is there to do? Um, you know, Marriott's not going to go away.

Um, I suppose, uh, this is interesting in that you would breach this big. You're guaranteed that some of these people are European citizens, which mean that this will trigger some GDPR stuff. So, uh, we'll see. What's always interesting to me is, I mean, I understand getting a credit card number and I also kind of understand getting a passport number, but all the rest of this information to me would seem to be relatively useless.

Unless you're going to do some identity theft and steal their identity and get credit cards under their name address. Yes. I suppose there's that because you have the full mailing address and things like that. But, uh, yeah, uh, again, as we, we've kind of established until, until government agencies decide that there needs to be a serious fine involved with these sorts of things.

There's, there's no, there's, there's nothing to this. It's just going to keep happening. Yeah. There's, there's no financial incentive big enough for these companies to step up data protection, um, because the, the fines are so low when, when something goes wrong. Or God forbid jail time.

Yeah. Oh, God, come on, come on. Now you're talking crazy talk. I know. And you realize that somebody's been in their network for over four years. That just seems egregiously, uh, unresponsible for their company not to recognize that at some point.

Yeah, I think to put it in perspective, I think the average time that, uh, that the bad guys are in an organization before they're discovered is still just under a year. So this is more than that, obviously. But, um, I think most of the time they're in there longer than most people would think they are.

It's not a, it's not a smash and grab kind of thing. They go in and they buy their time. They're very patient. Right. Oh, my God. And this just in. Dunkin' Donuts has been breached, too. Yes, they had a donut hole in their security. They did have a donut hole in their security.

Oh, boy. Not as delicious as the ones that you brought over, so. Ah, there you go. See? Ah, nice, nice, nice callback. Yeah. But speaking of GDPR, Google is up against GDPR over a complaint over deceptive location tracking.

Hmm. And this is from the Norwegian. This is the thing where you kept being unable to turn it off no matter what you did, right? Ah, it's not that. It's the fact that they're doing, like, dark pattern, like, dark design patterns to get people to enable it when they set up a new phone.

Right. And this is a Norwegian watchdog group that are saying that, yeah, their dark pattern designs are really, by Google and Facebook, they're meant to manipulate users by nudging them towards privacy intrusive options. Right.

And they also examined Microsoft, and they said Microsoft was okay, you know? Yeah, they tend to be. Yeah, and it's one of those things where I had to turn it on because I just, I needed some directions. And to turn it off is really hard. So, and people aren't that tech savvy, so they're going up against this.

This will be an interesting one to watch because this is, you know, a pretty big case going up against Google for GDPR. So there haven't been that many cases so far for GDPR. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's good.

I think it's good that we're seeing these sort of pushbacks. Now that they're enabled to do it, now that they have the actual force of law behind them, maybe we'll see some real changes. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe Trump monkeys might fly out of my butt. I thought you said Trump monkeys.

And I'm like, oh, Trump monkeys. That's a new one. Yeah. Trump and his flying monkeys. This next one, though, is pretty insane because we always talk about attack vectors. And, you know, the way that I didn't even I was surprised this one didn't come from the Israelis because these guys, the Israelis always figure out how to just, you know, screw everything up.

But this is this comes from Sennheiser. If you had Sennheiser headsets and you had to run their software, they were installing basically bad certificates that people could use to let any other website that is SSL HTTPS compliant be spoofed and basically cause a man in the middle attack.

And I'm like, OK, now I have to worry about my damn headphones. No, you don't, because you get a really nice pair of headphones that don't need software. I don't know, Brian, if you want you need software for your headphones, the exact same thing.

I need a quarter inch or an eighth inch jack. That's what I need. Yeah. Not everything needs to be on the Internet. Well, it does, because no phones have a fucking plug anymore. So you have to get Bluetooth and then they have to have control software and they have to have their own thing.

It's not like you can just plug your headphones into your phone anymore. I suppose that's true. But I come on. I mean, I look at the new Sony ones, the new Sony noise canceling ones. It's like they even use your phone to like get background noise to to figure out how to strip it out of the headphones.

There's a ton of stuff out there. All these new headphones. It's like smart TVs. You know, there's a market opportunity here for us as grumpy old geeks in the security segment. I think we need to come up with a set players. Well, no, back to basics tech like we can make stuff that is a Bluetooth enabled headphones that have nothing else in it except the damn headphone.

There is no software. There's just this little thing that lets you connect to Bluetooth. You can't remove background noise. You can't pump up the volume on yourself. You can't double tap it to do this or that. Just back to basics for the paranoid and we'll make them all tin colored. That's right.

It'll be just aluminum foil that has an old Sony headset with a Bluetooth receiver. I like it. Yeah. So this is this was out there for a long time, too. And it's not good. No. And in the funny thing is their first attempt to fix this was completely botched.

They left the old certificates on your computer and it was still, you know, totally able to be to be hacked. But yeah, your headphones are conspiring against you nowadays. It's a wonder that when you look through the details of this, it's a wonder that they shipped this.

It's just so bad. It's so basic. Just all these things in clear text. I don't know how he was on the on the actual. It gave you the private key, which is really easy to reverse engineer. It took him seconds to figure it out.

You know, right. You wonder what was going on behind the scenes. You know, did somebody say, screw it. We have to ship today. Get this done. You know, Bob, Bob, the intern or I don't know. It's just a head scratcher. Right. Total head scratcher.

But hat tip to Clever Barnes on Twitter for sending us this one. This was a good one. I liked it. Cleaver Barnes, although he was clever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I was trying. Clever Cleaver. Now, I'm not one of those people that go to Starbucks to work. There are quite a few of them here in L.A. in particular.

We call them out of work actors that are basically writing their screenplays at Starbucks before they go to their waiter and waitressing jobs. But if you do do that, by all means, be sure that you're using private Internet access while you're surfing from Starbucks. Go to GOG.show slash VPN to get your private Internet access on.

And even if you're doing that, please remember you're in a public place and do not start watching pornography. Yeah. Apparently, this is a big enough problem. And it's been going on for such a long time that an anti-pornography group called Enough is Enough, which is an organization that has already pressured McDonald's and Chick-fil-A to block pornography over their free Wi-Fi, forced Starbucks to take action after an online petition amassed over 26,000 signatures.

Now, apparently, this was 26,000. I'm not going to get out of bed for 26,000 signatures. Come on. There are probably more Starbucks than that. There are probably. Yeah, there are. But Starbucks did announce that they would filter pornography and child sex abuse images through their Wi-Fi with a public announcement over two and a half years ago.

They have not done it because, you know, why should anybody do anything that they say that they're going to do? So they will be rolling out a solution in U.S. stores in 2019 that will actually filter stuff. Now, there are plenty of these things out there. I don't know why it took them that long to just plug something in. Because they don't give a shit.

Because they don't give a shit. Okay, but here's the other thing. How much of a problem is this really? There's nothing. That's what I was thinking, too. Actually, you know what? I was thinking the exact same thing, but I listened to a radio program here called Frosty, Heidi and Frank in Los Angeles, and they picked up on this story.

And as I was just sitting working, listening to them, they had people call in with the worst situations of catching people watching pornography. If you're in public, ever. Apparently, it's quite a problem. Well, are you really watching coffee shops? Planes, I can see, but like coffee shops.

No, no, no. You have a couple cocktails on the plane. You just want to see some girl on girl action. Yeah, you know. You get the blanket from the stewardess and then just kind of cover it up and rub one out. It happens. And I've talked to stewardesses who've done that.

Thus, Jason is now just proving my point about radar being an issue. I've talked to stewardesses who said that that is actually a problem. And that's why Jason has to take the train. Hey, hey, hey. Now, I've never been an offender of this individual crime, so give me a break.

Yeah. I have a friend who did IT. I go to the bathroom for that kind of action. Come on. All right, because you're a gentleman. I am a conscious citizen of the airline. Come on. I see. All right. All right. I have a friend who did IT for a public library system, and she said this was a big problem there as well.

People watching stuff. Now, the problem I have with this article, the thing that got my radar going is how these – what's the – oh, the group, Enough is Enough. Yes. Okay. Obviously, an anti-pornography group, but they keep conflating pornography with child sex abuse.

Yes. And, okay. Combining the two is a real issue. As if they are the same thing. And they are not. They are not. No, they're not. Not even in the same damn ballpark. One should never, ever, ever be dabbled with, and the other, please just don't do it in Starbucks. Yeah. I don't want a latte in Bukkake, please.

Go home. I don't want to think of the foam on my latte with what you're watching on the screen. No, I 100% agree with you, and I do think it's obviously being blown out of proportion by this organization. I just thought it was a funny story. Yeah. No, it is. Yeah. I just – I don't like this group.

Enough is enough. Give me a break. I like the people watching pornography in Starbucks less, but I do dislike this group as well. Yeah. Seriously. So this last one this week just popped up in the past day or so, and I put this in here not so much because of the security problem, because it turns out there probably really isn't a security problem, but more just the reaction that things like this get.

So somebody on Twitter was reading through their – the privacy policy of a sleep number bed. Right. Got themselves a sleep number bed, you know, the bed where you can – Can I just pause for a second and say that we now live in a world where a mattress has a privacy policy?

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Good point. Nobody reads the TOS. Yeah. So this gentleman is reading the privacy policy on his sleep number bed, and it says that it may collect audio in your room to detect snoring and similar sleep conditions, as well as sleep-related data such as movement positions, respiration, and heart rate while – Missionary, doggy style.

Exactly. Right. Right. Exactly. So he puts this out on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. He puts this out on Twitter, and the reaction is what you would expect. People were completely calm, reasonable, and fair about it.

No, they lost their freaking minds. Dave, your wife does not have red hair and does not call you daddy. Right. Right. So – Who is this? Yeah. So first people assume that there's a microphone embedded somewhere inside the mattress.

Mm-hmm. And then people say, no, no. It's probably just that there's software on your phone that connects with the mattress, and that could be doing what, you know, phones do. Because your mattress has an app now. Well, exactly. And then some people said, well, no, there's a microphone on the control unit that's attached to the mattress, and that can – that's voice activated.

Mm-hmm. So this keeps going and going and going. Then finally somebody says, hey, everybody, why don't we ask sleep number? That's not how we do things on the internet. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Let's just make some stuff up until we get an answer. Yeah. So the sleep number people respond quickly, and they say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

There's nothing recorded. No sleep number products, including our app, record any audio. This was a mistake. We had a product that was – we were testing out. It was a prototype that had a snoring tracking feature. That product was never launched, and we're going to clarify this in our policy statement.

Now, of course, this response triggered people to have a reasonable, rational response. No. No, of course not. No. This just fueled the conspiracy because everyone now is saying, well, that's a non-answer.

They didn't say there isn't actually a microphone inside my mattress. They didn't say that they might change their policy later. So I think to Brian's point, yes, we are at the point where your freaking mattress has a privacy policy. Really, is there a more intimate piece of furniture in your house?

Toilet. You call it – well, furniture? I don't know how much time you spend in there. I do a lot of reading there. That's true. Right? Touché. I stand corrected. I sit corrected. In fact, every single segment of On the Library at least involved partially.

Right, right. So anyway, it looks as though all's well that ends well with these mattresses. But just a nice little example of how things spin out of control so very quickly when these things get spun up online.

By the way, I guarantee that these new, like, Japanese toilet seats that have, like, the bidets and stuff in them that you can install on your toilet, I bet they have a TOS too. So, Brian, you might want to read that if you get one of those things. As long as they don't have an app, because some things were meant not to have an app.

Like headphones. Yes. Or mattresses. Mattresses. Right. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what we've got this week. Excellent. I will talk to you guys soon. Apps and doodads. Well, if you're thinking about getting any Apple products for your loved ones for the holidays, I suggest you do it right now, because President Trump is threatening a 10% tariff on iPhones and other Apple products.

If negotiations at the upcoming G20 summit fall through, as he says, I can make it 10% and people could stand that very easily. Trump said a price increase is resulting from the tariffs on iPhones, Macs and other devices. Has he seen how much a fucking Apple Mac costs? He must, because he still uses his to tweet, although he says he doesn't.

My God, what a dumb shit. Yeah. No, that's going to not. I mean, it's like $1,200 to buy a phone anymore. I can't even afford to upgrade mine. No, I can't afford an iPad. 10%? Oh, yeah, I can afford that. Fuck you, Trump. Idiot. Yep. So go buy it now if you want them.

Yeah. How'd those promises with GM work out? Huh? How's that working out for you? Mm-hmm. Oh, we're going to get some angry emails. Ah, fine. Fuck off. I did check out the DJI Osmo Pocket, which is a new little toy that DJI came out with.

And it is a basically like a self-contained camera gimbal that you can actually plug into your phone if you want to. It's got different attachments for different types of phones. This thing is super cool. It's 4K video, 140-minute battery life, does 4K, 60 frames a second.

It's awesome. It's unfortunately $350, which is a lot. It is pretty expensive. But, you know, if anybody wants these 4K, super high-quality, stabilized videos of dogs. That would be me. Patreon.com slash GOG.

Yeah, Patreon.com slash GOG. Please. If you want to see Bam Bam stabilized in 4K. Then we can do that. Yes, there you go. Yeah, I won't. I still can't even use my... I had to actually tape pennies onto the side of my DJI Osmo mobile because it's not big enough for an iPhone 8 Plus.

Like the gimbal won't balance right. So I had to tape pennies to the side until I got it to balance right. But I have that and I still never use it. So I guess I would probably never use this one either. It's just cool tech. Probably not. Yeah. It's just cool. Yep. Now, I know you've scaled back the drinking recently, Jason, but the holidays are coming and you might want to pour yourself a little glass of something as you sit there and stroke your dog.

A little something. So I might recommend that there is a new... The official Star Trek website has revealed that the third drink in Silver Screen Bottling's line of Trek-themed drinks is a blended Scotch whiskey called, of course, Montgomery Scott. Oh, man. The tagline, go boldly, drink responsibly.

Nice. Nice. I like that. Now, you did note I said the third one. They also have a 10 forward and vodka, which is kind of weird. And then they have the James T. Kirk whiskey. Hmm. Man. Yeah, I think that's just shitty marketing.

I'm just not... I'm not going to buy that stuff. I'll go to Costco and get me some Kirkland, which, you know, is the way to go. If there are any drinkers out there, if you go to Kirkland and buy, like, you know, their whiskey, that's like, you know, the high-end stuff. All of...

Anything that Kirkland is is like the high-end version, but it's just cheap. So go buy Costco. That's the way to go. A friend of the show, David Teeter, turned me on to that. And unfortunately, because we drank an entire bottle of that whiskey one night, and oh, my God, the hangover was epic.

Yeah. Now, I did some Christmas shopping. I wanted to get some Echo shows for the family in Toronto, since my family here in California already have them, and we use them to keep in touch with each other all the time. So I went and bought some. They're on the second generation now. You can no longer even buy the first generation.

And it looked so sexy that I felt the need to upgrade ours as well. So I've got two sitting in a box, and one I've plugged in and hooked up. It is beautiful. The screen is bigger. It's a full touchscreen now. The speaker's in the back. The sound is significantly better than the first generation.

Yes, it sounds great. Okay. But it is bigger. So if you're used to the small amount of space that the current one takes up, it's a good two, three inches wider. And it's a bit thicker because the speakers are now in the back instead of the front. So it sounds real good. It looks great. The new software is pretty good.

You've got a lot more controls on the home screen now, so I can take off a lot of the advertising, which is thank you. That is great. I like that a lot. You have a lot more control over the various look and feel on it now. So it's a really good upgrade. I'm quite pleased with it. Of course, now I have an Echo Show first generation I don't know what to do with.

So if anybody out there wants to buy it off me, it works great, too. Oh, we'll talk after the show. I might take you up on that. Yeah, because the second generation is nice. It looks much nicer. You know, it looks a lot nicer. It's a lot sexier, but that's really about it. When I got that, I also picked up two of the Amison smart.

Well, it's a two pack. I'll read the Amazon thing because we haven't done that in a while. Amison smart Wi-Fi plug two pack mini socket smart outlet. No hub required. Control your devices from anywhere. Works with Alexa and Google Assistant. OK, pretty easy to set up. I think this is the one that you ordered. No, no, these are different.

These are different than the plugs I have. The plugs I have still work with Amazon, but I don't. I didn't connect them. But yeah, no, these are these are different. But it's kind of the same concept. Same concept. And it looks like it's screaming, which is a little odd. Yeah, it does. You know, there you go. It does.

So I've hooked them up and they're great. They're pretty easy to set up. You need to get another app, which is a pain in the butt. But once you get that and you, you know, configure it and install it, it works pretty seamlessly with Alexa. And it's great because now I can basically go, Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree. Bonk. Alexa, turn off the Christmas tree.

Bonk. Oh, that's actually so much easier than. Cool. Ah. It's a great use for it because, you know, I just totally set it up with that. So now you can you don't have to get to the plug anymore. You can tuck everything in the back. It's a great life hack. Oh, my God. I so I've got the geek bees. Those are the ones I have. I think I might have to set those up for my Christmas lights because I've got like I've got four of the plugs and I have four sets of lights that I have to go around the house and plug in and plug unplug every night.

So if I can just tell. Yeah. Well, there you go. And if you use the Amyssen ones or I'm sure it's the same for yours, you can you can connect them so they can be done individually or you can set a code word to turn them all on and off at the same time. So it's super easy. It's a great hack for Christmas. Oh, that's awesome. I am.

I'm so setting that up today because I've got a bunch of them just sitting around not doing anything. And I'm like, what am I going to do with these? Cause I use them to turn off my, cause I have a plasma TV in my bedroom, a 55 inch plasma TV. And I just don't want the, the, you know, the vampire power sucking up all the juice and having to pay for it.

So I have a geek bees in front of it. And so I turn it off and on with that. So, you know, it's not getting any power during the day, but I think this is a better use for that. I think I'll just unplug the TV and plug it back in when I have to use it because I haven't used it in a month. So that's the way to go. This is a, that's a great hack.

Thanks. Thank you. No problem. And I found one other thing while I was searching around Amazon, which I just thought was cute and clever. The Santa camera ornament, Santa cam ornament, Santa spy ornament, Santa's watching Christmas elf accessory, Santa spy camera, elf camera. It's basically a bulb painted with a camera on it that says Santa cam, but it's, it's actually not a camera.

It's just a, it's not a camera. It's just, it's just cute. Yeah, it is very cute. And I found millennial, I can't even just wrap my head around this monopoly for millennials board game. Now, Brian, I was going to buy this for you for Christmas, but it's $54 and 90 cents, which I, I'm not paying that much for a board game, but the tagline is forget real estate.

You can't afford it anyway. The funny thing is this appears to be an official product. This is real. This is Hasbro gaming. Well done Hasbro. That is good marketing. This is real, but it's a collector's item. So you have to get it from, you know, you know, different vendors.

But I love this. There's no real estate. It's collect experience points by visiting the hottest destinations from your friend's couch to the vegan bistro to a week long meditation church. Isn't that fucking awesome? I swear to God, if they didn't think ahead and if one of the little characters that goes around the board isn't a bird scooter, they have missed a massive opportunity.

I'm looking at it. They've got emojis. They've got sunglasses. They've got hashtags. They got cameras. They've got e-bikes. But I think this came out before the scooter came out. So yeah, but the hashtag is pretty funny. Yeah. I love the participation medal that he's wearing.

Oh, my God. He's wearing a participation medal. Genius. Oh, man. Okay. Hasbro, you guys win for now. Well done. Well done. Brick a brick. Now, I'm never in favor of making fun of a small child.

Really? Shaming them in public. However, that being said, I saw this story and I just don't even know what to do. I agree. I don't think that the child should have been mocked in person, but the parents certainly could have stand it a little mocking.

A Southwest Airlines gate agent at John Wayne Airport here in Orange County is accused of being awful in front of a five-year-old girl and on social media because of her unique name. The girl's mother said the agent made fun of the name and even posted a photo of her boarding pass on social media for others.

Five-year-old ABCDE, Redford, pronounces her name Absidy. Absidy. Absidy. Now, if you name your child ABCDE, you best be ready for a long life of people making fun of you.

Ask Moon Unit Zappa how she felt about her name. Yeah. And this is considerably worse. Now, just ABCDE? What? Come on, people. Well, she's teaching the child the alphabet. Five letters at a time. That's it.

Middle name F-G-H-I-J. Exactly. Now, I agree that the agent should have not said anything to them individually, but I defend the agent's right to take a photo of that boarding pass and post it on social media and say, what the fuck?

Oh, man. Poor kid. Poor kid. Just a life of torture. Yep. Yeah, just go listen to Girl Named Sue. Yep. I have the winner of the internet for the entire year of 2018, and it's Payless Shoes.

Excellent. Payless Shoes set up a fake store in Santa Monica and invited influencers to come and buy their high-end shoes. 80 people showed up, and they sold over $3,000 worth of shoes, some people paying up to $650 for a pair of boots that usually retail for $19.99.

Nice. I am so in love with Payless right now. This is just amazing. This is amazing. And, of course, they had to have these people sign waivers when they came in to say that they're going to be on camera because that's what these people want. They want to be influencers. They want to be on camera. And now they're making ads with these people paying all this money saying that these are amazing shoes.

It's just the build quality. The design is awesome. And then you can just go to a Payless and buy them for $20. They are going to get sued. Best thing ever. They're going to get sued by some of these people. But this is hilarious. They called the store Paylessy to make it look old-fashionedable.

This is amazing. Yeah. It's awesome. This is fucking fantastic. Well done, Payless. Oh, my God. This is the best thing I've ever heard in a very long time. Oh, man. Now let's talk about Amazon Treasure Truck. Okay. Did you get an email from Amazon this morning about the Amazon Treasure Truck?

I did, but I got so many emails from Amazon because of my Christmas shopping, I think I just deleted them all. Oh, so it says, Spreading joy with one hand-picked, can't-miss item at a time. We send you a text revealing that day's must-have item. You buy it on Amazon and choose a pickup location.

You meet us at the truck and get the goods. Yeah. Another play after just one more week of Amazon making you do the hard work of getting your shit. Mm-hmm. Come on. Now, it doesn't even tell you, like, where the pickup location would be.

Like, I'd want to know that ahead of time because this is Los Angeles, people. If I have to go more than five miles to get something, that's an hour and a half commitment. No shit. Yeah. Seriously. You choose the pickup location. Okay. Well, the pickup location is my front door where everything that I buy from Amazon shows up.

Yes. That's what I want. I go to Amazon to get you to bring it to my house. That is the social contract that we have agreed to. That's why I give you $130 a year for my Prime membership. Not so you can deliver it all in one day. Not so I can go find a truck to get it from.

What the hell are these people doing? Yeah. It's ridiculous. But, I mean, it makes sense to them and people are doing it, right? If people are doing it, they're going to keep rolling this stuff out. We'll see if anybody's doing this. If you want to go find one of these trucks, I might have to buy something from the truck just to go see if anybody shows up or if it's just some, like, intern in, like, you know, a converted food truck sitting there with a pair of headphones going, you want to get hacked?

Here's some headphones. You want to get hacked? Here's some headphones. At least for this or today right now in Los Angeles, it is literally a food truck because the special is USDA Prime Baseball Cut Steaks. So I can go find the truck to go pick up some steaks. Or I can go to the grocery store. Yeah.

Or I can pay Whole Foods to deliver it directly to my door. I don't know what's going on over there. The social contract. As you keep saying, Jason, something is definitely wrong in the Matrix. I stand by that.

I completely stand by that. Closing shout outs. My closing shout out this week is to the team at Ralph's in Woodland Hills on Topanga for helping my roommate after she got hit by a car. They were great. Everybody was great.

The firemen were great. The paramedics were great. The cops were, ah, the cops were dicks. But, you know, what are you going to do? But, you know, thanks to everybody but the cops. You guys sucked. Fuck the police. I do not support that statement. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. And if you'd like to give a one-time donation or a recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 302.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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