304: Grumpy Old Furries

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. It's a strange world, this podcasting thing that we do. Is it? I just spent 90 minutes on an interview with Sean Acor, the happiness expert, talking about how to be happy. And literally what we do right now for the next 90 minutes is completely antithetical to being happy.

So that's kind of funny. Yeah, well, I mean, this show is a bit of a conundrum for us because basically we tell everybody not to do everything that we do. Kind of. Yeah, that's actually true. We do do that. Do as we say, not as we do. That's part of it.

But I do have some good news today. My other show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, we got picked for the best of 2018 in Apple Podcasts for most downloaded new show of 2018. We're one of 25. Congratulations. Yeah. And we did it with a month less than the other guys did because we didn't even start till February.

So. Congratulations. Thank you very much. That was some good news that I really needed this week. After the last couple of weeks, man. So shall we talk about the fun stuff? Yes, let's get to it. A couple of shows ago, you brought to my attention a company called Predictum.

Predictum. Which was going through social media and whatnot. Basically, you could check in on your babysitters before you hire them to look after your little kids or whatever. And we both kind of went, what could possibly go wrong with this?

Turns out, a lot. This guy over at Gizmodo decided to go ahead and run everybody that actually watches his kids through it, including family members and his babysitter and things like that. So he paid for all of it and went through it. And the TLDR, AI, is not quite ready for prime time.

There are mechanical Turks that pop in in here. There's false positives. Oh, my. You know you're in trouble when the beginning of the article goes, the founder of Predictum want to be very clear with me. Their product and algorithm that scans the online footprint of prospective babysitters to determine their risk levels for parents is not racist.

It is not biased. We take ethics and bias extremely seriously, Sal Parsa, Predictum CEO, tells me wearily over the phone. In fact, in the last 18 months, we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race away from our training set.

We continuously audit our model. And on top of that, we added a human review process. Coming back to what we've been saying. Because the AI doesn't work. Yeah, AI is human. Yes. It's humans all the way down. There you go. We've got mechanical Turks already. So it's not an AI product.

It just uses machine learning to kick things up to then be viewed by humans. So that issue is the fact that the author used Predictum to scan a handful of people he trusts with his own son. His actual babysitter returned a ranking of moderate risk, three out of five, for disrespectfulness for what appears to be innocuous Twitter jokes.

She returned a much worse ranking than a friend he also tested who routinely spews vulgarities on social media. She's black and he's white. Oops. They just want to clarify that she was not flagged because she was African-American, says Joel Siminoff, Predictum CTO. I can guarantee you 100% there was no bias that went into those posts being flagged.

We don't look at skin color. We don't look at ethnicity. Those aren't even algorithmic inputs. There's no way for us to enter that into the algorithm itself. Unfortunately, they can't explain why the ratings came out the way they did. Or at least they certainly don't want to. Maybe his friend that spews the vulgarities, maybe he just has a better sense of humor than she does.

And it's, you know, they can pivot and become like a joke predictor. You can tell who's funnier on social media. Perhaps. Maybe that's it. Maybe they need, yeah, maybe they need to pivot to becoming like the, you know, a comedian finding system rather than a babysitter ranking system. Honestly.

But you know this stuff is still nascent. Yes, it is still nascent. But again, like we always complain about on this program, they're promising things that don't exist yet. Their entire business is nascent because it doesn't exist yet. Yep. That's kind of it.

That's how it goes nowadays. So, you know, I told you I would not be using Predictum in the future, and I'm certainly standing by that at the moment. I predict no Predictum. Yes. In the news. In the news. Well, Brian, it's nice to see that we're not the only idiots on the planet.

Australia has stepped up, and they put their privacy on the Barbie and lit it on fire. Yeah, this is an interesting move in a world where GDPR is pushing forward. Australians went, fuck that, we're going the other direction.

Yeah, they've decided to run through one of those bills that you can now require tech companies to decrypt encrypted communications, which we've been through here in the States and said, no, no, no, this is dumb. This is bad, bad, bad.

If even the United States decides that something is bad, maybe the rest of you should listen a little bit because we're horrible on this sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's some conspiracy theories, if I can even say the word conspiracy theories, that I'll talk about in a minute here. But yeah, this is going through, and it was kind of ramshod through, and I don't know how this is going to kind of play out with Australia, because Australia has, what, like 37 people?

A little bit more than that. But then again, my friends that live there are currently in flight to the U.S., so maybe the numbers have dropped down considerably. Yeah, but it was like 25 million or something like that. Some ridiculously low number. I guess I could Google it, but that would require work. But anyway, the issue here is that they're saying that, oh, this is because of terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.

We have to protect ourselves. We have to protect ourselves. I would like to know how many people per capita are killed in Australia in terrorist attacks every year. Look, that's a long way to fly to bomb some stuff. In fact, most people, most rich people I know are buying properties in New Zealand and Australia to escape the global endgame that's coming when Thantos snaps his fingers.

Look at Luke, I did a reference to a thing I don't even care about. There you go. I'm glad I didn't finish that movie. Anyway, I did see the trailer for the new one, but that's an aside for Media Candy, which isn't this week, so moving on with that. Yeah, the thing is, I mean, Australia is not New Zealand.

Don't ever get them confused. That's a bad, bad thing. You'll get beaten by a sheep. By a sheep, yes. Beaten by a sheep. So the thing here is that there are some conspiracy theories saying that people in the five eyes are trying to push this through. The five eyes are, you know.

So the five eyes are basically Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and the United States. And there's some people saying that, oh, this is, you know, trying to get through because once it gets through in the smallest country, then it'll be easy enough for the other countries, the law enforcement there to say, well, you've already built it for them.

We want it now. Yeah. And that's one of the things that people are saying that this is why it shouldn't happen. It's a game over scenario. It is. But there's also another game over scenario, which is all the major tech companies, somebody like Apple or, you know, Google, say, no, we're not going to do it.

We're just not going to sell you our stuff anymore. What do you think the odds of that happening are? Zero. Yeah. Actually, no, I think it's actually greater than zero. I actually think it might be greater than zero. Apple would kind of be OK with losing Australia as a sales base because the numbers are small.

It's not a significant impact in their bottom line. Yeah. And I think Tim Cook is such a, you know, a privacy warrior that he might just say, well, no, we're going to pull out of Australia. Depends on how beholden Tim Cook is to the shareholders, because the shareholders will have an issue with it.

But right now, it does seem that he's more along the lines of we are going to protect privacy in all ways, shapes and forms. And kowtowing to this would definitely hurt Apple and Microsoft. I've always argued Microsoft is just as good with this stuff for the most part. Apple and Microsoft are the front chargers in keeping.

It's our old tech that's keeping our their eyes on the ball with privacy, not the social networks. It's the old tech that are going, no, we should not be doing this. Yeah. I don't care about WhatsApp. I don't care about Facebook or any of that crap. But when you get to the device level and the OS level, then it then you're talking about real money.

Yeah. Here's here's the scenario with Tim Cook and how we can play this to the shareholders. Look, the government of 25 million people wants us to open up our operating system so they can listen in on our people. That will open up all the other governments in the world to come and take this technology, which will definitely impact shareholder value.

Because once our users find out that one of our greatest assets to our product has just been crippled, what do you think that's going to do to our already not doing so well sales this year? Right. I think he has an angle to play to the shareholders on that.

He does. Yeah. I'm just I'm just shaking my head at Australia. Well, yeah. I mean, it's weird to think that a technology company is going to go toe to toe with an entire country. And that seems to be where we're at in the world right now. I'm pretty sure Apple's net worth is greater than the entirety of Australia right now.

So maybe, well, maybe Tim Cook should just buy Australia. There's an option. There we go. And then he can fly the spaceship down to Australia. They could just move the HQ down there because we know that thing has engines underneath. Apology to all of our Apple Australia listeners.

But I do like the name of the new country. Yeah. And don't take anything we say here with any seriousness, because I did not do any research on the population of Australia or their GDP or how many people are killed by terrorists there every year. But maybe next time.

I will also mention that maybe you shouldn't take this with any sincerity as well, because the intro was recorded on Friday. It's now Sunday. Yeah. Because we had some technical issues. And on Sunday, I go out in the morning and have beer. So I'm a little buzzed. Yeah. Yep. I've had a little wine today, too.

So there we go. Yeah. Welcome to Slurry Old Geeks. That's the way it's going to be today. It's been a while. But what can you do when you have line noise problems? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So all beer aside, apparently porn is going away from the internet.

Well, at least Tumblr, which means Tumblr will be going away from the internet, because that's all people have really been using Tumblr for. Yes, RIP Tumblr. That's kind of it. I do enjoy CEOs that go, hey, what's the one thing that makes us money? Hmm. Let's ban that.

Because there was one incident. Because he didn't do his research. It's like, okay, the Tumblr app got taken off of the Apple Store or iOS because somebody got through some kiddie porn. Which has also happened on Facebook, which has also happened on Periscope, which has also happened on Twitter, which has also happened on YouTube, which has also happened on every single one of you things that claim to be platforms.

Yes. And I'm sure nobody on Verizon who now owns Tumblr has ever texted kiddie porn to another person. Ever. Ever. Ever. Yeah. Yeah. So grouping in child pornography with just general sex websites and sex positive websites and sex education websites, that sounds like a great idea.

You know, it's a funny thing. I was thinking about this when this story broke because I was like, oh, wow, we're actually going to be talking about porn for a podcast that is entirely about the internet, which is, you know, if you turn that triangle of the food pyramid and replaced it with internet content, it would be porn down at the bottom, the largest chunk.

We never really talk about porn on our show. Somehow we never do, even though that is the biggest part of the internet. It really is. So I just thought that was interesting because it's like six years into the show, we hardly ever talk about porn. The only time we're talking about it is because Tumblr has decided to ban it, which will basically kill them as a company.

Well, I want to step back a second. And the reason that we don't talk about porn on the show very much is because every time I used to, you got mad at me and said, why are you saying that stuff? Should we go meta for a second here, Jason? Because we have a comment that we won't be reading this show, but we'll be reading next show.

I shy away from you talking about sensitive topics. I'm doing air quotes right now because you don't approach them in a sensitive manner. You do tend to come in with a bludgeon and that does tend to piss people off. So I don't mind talking about porn as long as we, you know, delicately discuss it.

But you do tend to throw the delicate in out with the bathwater. I've got two settings, zero and 12. Well, exactly. And I know that about you, which is kind of why I steer things certain directions a lot of the time. Which is why we don't talk about porn.

We're called into our advertisers these days. Yes, I know. Good times. Anyways, it is sad because Tumblr is not just porn. I mean, there is. And there's horrible stuff on Tumblr, of course. And there's very degrading stuff on Tumblr.

But Tumblr has created an entire community of people that are very, like, you know, porn positive, as it were. It's where a lot of the, I don't even know how many letters are involved. Well, there's sex workers. Also, the LGBTQWXYZ community. I'm sure there's more letters since.

In fact, I'm sure another letter has been added since we recorded this. Because, yeah, that community just, there you go. Dave Bittner. We'll talk about that one later. You'll know what we're talking about in a little bit on that one. You know, so overall, Tumblr has been a very sex positive site for, and a lot of people have found real community there that they can't find anywhere else on the internet.

So the fact that they're basically just being thrown out carte blanche because one bad thing happened and slipped through the Filipino safety net that everybody uses. It's a horrible thing. Right. And the thing that a lot of people don't understand is sex is a spectrum.

You know, it goes from zero to 12. And, you know, from zero to 13. Well, okay. Sorry, I'm just doing a little spinal tap there. Yes. So zero to 10 is normal human sexuality where everybody's okay with it as long as a lot of people don't talk about it or it's behind closed doors.

And on Tumblr, it was behind closed doors. Unless you knew where to go because they killed it from search as soon as Yahoo bought it. And you had to just know where to go. But it was a nice community for the people to go. I mean, I looked at some of these sites and the conversations are great. It is the anti-YouTube.

Exactly. Well, I would say it's the anti-porn hub or you porn or all the things that have been taken over by corporate interests, which blatantly have absolutely horrible, insulting, horrible, horrible stuff that it's all over those things. If you look at them, you know, there's there's incest stuff.

There's fake rape porn, all of that sort of stuff. It's very not sex positive. And Tumblr really did not intentionally, but the users themselves cultivated a very sex positive environment. And it's just horrible to see that being shut down by the people that have a vested interest in keeping it going.

It's the only thing that's making them money. Let's be honest. Yeah, well, I mean, Tumblr is not the only thing that's making Verizon money, but it's still, I think, you know, Tumblr on the books for Verizon is one of those rounding errors like cybersecurity. Right. But it's a sad, sad thing.

And there's another article in Vice that I thought was great because the pull quote at the top is, that's what tech does. It harnesses people for profitability and then it destroys their worlds when capitalism decides we're not useful enough anymore. Look at every social network that has ever existed.

And that's pretty much how it goes. Oh, yeah. Take it out. Take it out of the realm of pornography or things that you may personally find distasteful that have to relate to sex or whatever. Look at what Facebook did to small businesses. Lure you in to make your Facebook page and then kill your business by charging you for getting any views whatsoever.

Twitter did the same with developers. Here's our API. Make some really cool stuff that we can use, you know, or that you can use using our backbone and our network. And then as soon as we need to, we're going to start taking these little pieces away piece by piece by piece by piece.

And then we're going to recreate them poorly and basically turn you off and everybody goes their separate way. And then we just have the Twitter of today. And we're going to, yeah, look, if you want the Tumblr of tomorrow, look at the Twitter of today. Well, a lot of people seem to think it's Discord, which is, that is basically almost dark web, not on the dark web.

It's pretty nasty. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the one thing that really kind of gets me here is I, for some reason, I got to thinking about the ephemerality of the internet when I look at this stuff, because when these sites do go away, they actually go away.

And this is where delete actually becomes delete. Yeah. When they pull the plug on this, this stuff just goes away forever. And we used to say that once it's on the internet, it's going to live forever. But time and time again, that's just not the case. And we said that a long time ago.

And the internet wasn't even that old when people came up with that saying. And it turns out that, no, actually, a lot of stuff you put on the internet just goes away. Yeah. If it's old enough, if it hasn't been hit enough, even Google won't keep it. Even what's that website that does supposedly the archives of all the web?

Yeah. The Wayback Machine. Goes away. The Wayback Machine, it goes away. There are things that I built that are just gone now. The problem with the Wayback Machine, and this one drives me nuts. This is a little insider baseball on the Wayback Machine. If you put a robots.txt file on your site, the Wayback Machine will pull it from the archive.

Even if when somebody else owned the site, that content was valid. So all of the stuff that I built for Spew that was up there, all of my great old sites and stuff that was up there, like those domains got dropped over the years.

Somebody else picked them up and they put on a robots.txt file with no follow in it, and all of my old stuff was pulled. But I'm like, but I made that. It's not theirs. You can't just, I guess, you know, if you buy somebody's house, you can tear it down. Yeah.

It's kind of the way it works, but it's just, it's heartbreaking sometimes when that stuff goes. It is, but that's why you should save everything that you love yourself. Yeah, but you can't. It's harder to share. And I'm co-mingling the internet and the web when I'm talking about this stuff, because look at Usenet.

Usenet was great. I loved Usenet when I first got on the internet. How about you? Were you a Usenet guy? I was. I mean, I ran a BBS that ran some of the first FidoNet stuff, so then that naturally led into me being on Usenet. So, yeah. All gone. Pretty much all gone. Well, it's not.

Somebody somewhere has all the parts, or part of the parts, and somebody else has some of the other parts. It's all out there. It's just, you're never going to get it all back together again in one place or be able to search it. Yeah, yeah. Usenet is the new Humpty Dumpty. Google has a lot of it. They have a ton of it, but they don't make a lot of it public, which really sucks.

Which means it's quite literally dark web. Yeah, yeah. Deep web. The Usenet is now in the dark web. It's the gone web. Yeah. So, and just to prove my point, today I did some custom searching on Google, put in my name, and I searched from 1994 to 1997.

I wanted to see my old stuff. And first, I used my old email address that I know there were Usenet posts with, thor at interaccess.com. That was my first email address. Flood at earthlink.net. Yeah. I used to say, God, I wrote to you at that for years. And, and nothing, nothing for that, nothing for my name.

And then I'm like 97. I mean, okay. Then I tried 98. Nope. 99. Nope. 2000. 2000. No. I'm like, wait, wait, wait a second here. Maybe I'm screwing up my query. Then I hit 2001 and I get three results for me. And then I hit 2002.

Yeah. A couple more results. That's 16 years ago. I've been prolific writing crap on the internet since 1994. All of that old stuff is gone. Do you think it's purely a case of, we know drives fail. We know CD-ROMs fail. Do you think it's purely a case of the stuff just never get copied over and the drives have now failed and now it's just gone?

I think there's no viable way for them to make money on that old stuff. So they're just like, eh, we'll just, we'll just take it away. Nobody's going to miss it. You know, why, why would we keep that? It's throw out the old CDs that you had in your basement. It's like, ah, I really don't need that backup of a, you know, the, like college paper that I did on, you know, Quark express back in the day.

Anyway. Time deletes all. So there is a delete on the internet. Time. Yeah. It's a lot of time. And now here's the, here's the crazy one that I found today when I was doing this research. One of the first results that came up for me was a blog post page for Gnome Dex 3, which was Chris Perillo's conference that he used to do in Iowa.

And that was right when I started working with Chris and I'm like, oh, that's still up. I can go check out my old pictures from there without having to go to my hard drives and see if they still work and see where they're at. So I click on it and then it, the page starts to load. And then I'm immediately redirected to a page like www.blogrolling.com with a bunch of query strings after it.

I'm like, well, that's weird. I mean, you know, I'm just saying, I'm seeing Gnome Dex come up, which is weird enough. Then I see blog rolling come up. Now, the weird part about that is that's the site that I built way back in the day and sold to two cows.

Well, two cows ran it into the ground and then they sold the domain. Now the domain is owned by Afternic, which is a service that buys and sells domains. And they're sitting on it trying to sell the domain. Now, blog rolling. The thing about blog rolling was it used a lot of JavaScript embeds.

I was actually one of the first people to use JavaScript embeds. And I pioneered a bunch of crap with that technology. They're hijacking that technology to redirect any web page that has a blogrolling.com embed still on it. Is that not sketchy?

It's not surprising. Well, it's sketchy. It's super sketchy. I mean, they're redirecting blog spot traffic, which is Google. You'd think that would be a problem. I should tell somebody at Google, oh, wait, they don't care about blog spots. But I guess, you know, it's kind of the one of those pitfalls of legacy tech.

So sorry about that. If you go to a page that gets redirected to blogrolling.com, that was probably something that I did. This gives us some hope, perhaps, because we've talked about things that we thought would never go away that do. And we talk about things that we never think will get deleted, but they do.

So on the plus side, someday in the not too distant future, everything that we're really worried about being on Facebook will probably go away. Yep. Because Facebook is going to go away probably sooner than we think. And all this stuff will eventually get deleted. We know this because 250 pages of internal Facebook files were dumped online.

This is all from the guy that was seized over in the UK, which in, frankly, an amazing turn of events. The fact that UK authorities tried to get this guy and did, and then took all of his data and now just dumped it all online is shocking and stunning.

His name is Ted Kramer, founder of US software firm 643. He went to London and he's been in a legal battle with Facebook since 2015 over developer access to user data. Now, this data, obviously, because he is in a legal battle here in the US, was you can't release that.

But the UK said, fuck it, we're gonna. And they did. And it's pretty incredible. So Technology Review took a look at this and there are six key takeaways, according to them. Facebook whitelisted certain companies, meaning that they had still had full access to all users' friends' data after the platform changes in 2014 and 2015.

That's when they told us, oh, oh dear, we found out that people shouldn't, you're getting access to friends of friends and you're not supposed to be able to do that. But they kept allowing Airbnb, Netflix, Badoo, and a couple other companies to do that. There was no clear user consent for this. We have no idea how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not to get this access.

They just did it. Facebook also aggressively tried to shut down the competition when Twitter launched the six-second video clip platform Vine. Mark Zuckerberg personally approved revoking its access to Facebook's API. I remember the day that happened. Everybody in the world was allowed to have this. Oh, we don't like you.

You're off. Now, to be fair, well, I'll get to this after we finish the list. Next one. Friends data has been a big source of revenue for Facebook thanks to growing revenue from app developers. The idea of tying access to this data to the developer's relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature throughout all these documents.

Mark Zuckerberg wanted full reciprocity between Facebook and app developers. You share your data on users with us and we'll share it with you. So we're going to double dip and get all the access that you're getting. Facebook found ways to access users' call history without alerting them. In order to make people you may know suggestions and tweak news feed rankings.

Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was happening. We know that's true because for the past four years, we've been trying to figure out how people you may know works. Now we kind of do. Facebook used Anovo, an Israeli analytics company, it bought in 2013 to check customers' usage of mobile apps without their knowledge.

They used this to find out how many people had downloaded apps and how often they used them. This information was then used to suss out potential companies to acquire. So those are the six key takeaways, of which most of them I would say, if you're beholden to shareholder value, I kind of understand why they did almost all of these.

Yeah, it doesn't make it right though. It does not make it right, but it does cast a light on, is Facebook evil or is this entire system fucked up? Is there a glitch in the matrix once again? Well, this is kind of what happens when people who don't have ethics start to run the system.

Because you and I both know that this is all unethical. As we've been saying, also, the problem is that technology has way outpaced law. Law needs to catch up and catch up fast. None of this should be legal. All of it is. Yeah, there you go.

Well, it's legal here in the United States, but under GDPR, it might not be legal anymore. But, you know, yeah, these guys are, they just do backroom deals. That's how those other guys got access, like Airbnb, Netflix, and Badoo. They got Netflix through backroom deals.

They got access through backroom deals. I'm sure they paid handsomely. You know, I'm sure they just paid for it. And, you know, Twitter, Vine was seen when Facebook was trying to pivot to video. Vine was a competitor, so we'll shut them off. You pay us, we'll give you this.

And we know this isn't, you know, something that was just an isolated incident. We know that Apple was giving Facebook and Uber, you know, extra API access to the system a while ago. We covered this. We knew that that was going on. And so this has always been happening out there.

And it does not surprise me in the least. This is one of those things we know was happening. We talked about it on the show a long time ago. But nobody listened. And, well, that's because nobody was listening to the show because we don't have that big of an audience. But if they were listening, they would have heard this and would have been prepared for it.

Now everybody's like, they're doing what? Aw, poor guys. Yes, they never really cared about connecting the world. They just cared about shareholder value. Well, and just making money and crushing all competition. I mean, that's all it was ever about.

It was never about anything else. You can take your commercials about we're getting back to our basics and shove them right up your asses. Yeah, and now Mark Zuckerberg has a different problem, his own people's. Seems like there's two camps that are separating inside of Facebook right now.

And one is like, let's get behind Zuck and stand behind our man. And the other is, what the hell are you guys doing? Let's fix it. How about you just fix it? You can be an insanely valuable company if you just do what you're pretending to do in your commercials. Yeah, but, I mean, it really comes down to Zuckerberg and Sandberg.

And, like, that whole top-level cabal need to get replaced. But they can't. They can't. Zuckerberg is the king of the castle. He owns all the voting-controlling shares. Well, like you always tell me, Jason, where is, there is a market opportunity here.

Where is somebody coming in to fill the void? Where is the social network screaming out at people saying, well, come over here? Hello? Hello? We're calling you. Hello? We're calling into the void. Hello? Is anybody out there? Well, it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

But, you know, for the people that are inside Facebook that are, you know, pissed off about this, like we covered on last week, where are the walkouts? Yeah, where are the walkouts? It's one thing to say you're pissed off. How about making a public statement? As much as I hate open letters, where is your open letter? We've got them from Google.

We've got them from Amazon. Where is the Facebook open letter? I think the difference here is, since Mark Zuckerberg is basically a benevolent dictator, if you go against him, you're out the door. And these people want their stock options. They want their big paychecks. And, you know, Google doesn't really put the hammer down on people doing these giant walkouts because they're just too damn big.

And the people writing the open letters at Amazon are not vested. They are the lower employees. Yeah, exactly. They don't have options, or they may have very small options. But, yeah, the people at Facebook, I think, are in a bit of a pickle with being able to speak out about this, so they have to do it off the record.

You know, I think it was this article where they're saying some of the Facebook employees all had burner phones so they could kvetch about the company on the way home from work. You know what didn't happen on those burner phones, Jason? I'll tell you this right now. They didn't start to get Facebook ads about what they were talking about. Yes, that's true.

That's true. Of all the horrible things Facebook is doing, they are not doing that. The one thing that they're actually not doing is listening to your microphone. I just had to throw that in there because we still get that article sent to us week after week after week.

I know, I know. And you'd figure if that was actually happening in these 250 emails, it would have been mentioned at least once. Yes, you'd think. No, they were doing a lot of crazy stuff with the phone, but they weren't listening to you. Yes. Okay, moving on.

All right, let's move on back to Amazon. I just, I don't even know what to say about this story other than I love it. 24 Amazon warehouse workers were sent to hospital after a robot punctured a can of bear repellent spray. So 80 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville Township, New Jersey reported difficulty breathing after a robot.

Inadvertently, they say, we shall see, punctured a nine ounce can of bear repellent spray on Wednesday. Local hospitals were treating 24 of the workers, including one who's in critical condition. They were all discharged and there were no deaths. The critical condition person, I believe, is still in the hospital at this point, but is no longer critical, which is good.

But robots run amok. Yeah, yeah, and there's another article in Wired that says this wasn't even Amazon's first bear repellent accident. Now, when you have multiple bear repellent accidents, you might want to look inside. But the more interesting thing about this article is it talks about the safety at these Amazon warehouses.

And OSHA does not like them very much. They put them pretty far down on the list. Yeah. And that's a that's not a good thing. And, you know, just read the article, the numbers of people that have been killed in the warehouses and all this stuff.

And, you know, statistically, that's going to happen when you have that many employees. True. Yes. But when you come back to you have two bear repellent incidents, what the hell is going on with this bear repellent? And how many people are ordering bear repellent?

Although I kind of want some now, if it's that potent, you should get some of that for for our next segment in a couple of weeks with Bittner on nonlethal deterrence for your home. Although I think if you spray bear spray in your home, you're all going to the hospital. Yeah, I think so, too.

So let's let's be a little careful with your thing. But on the robots gone wild tip, I did find this story as well. And I think it's interesting that we had two of these stories in one week. We had we have a robot that pierced bear repellent and injured 80 people.

And then we had Simon. Remember, we talked about Simon, the International Space Station's artificial intelligence robot with the weird like Microsoft word MS Paint face. Yes. You know how much that thing cost, by the way? How much? Six million dollars. Well, six million dollars.

You could at least use Photoshop. You'd think. But we have more problems than just its face, Jason. It's apparently turned belligerent. Say what? They have to shut it off. Oh, it's actually off now? It's off. Let me tell you the story here really quick. Simon was programmed to be the physical embodiment of the likes of nice robots such as Robbie and R2D2 and WALL-E, etc.

Instead, he appears to be adopting characteristics closer to Marvin, the paranoid android from the Hitchhiker's Guide. Although hopefully not as psychotic as Hal, obviously, which is where everybody goes. So here we go. In this case, they turned on the free-floating IBM artificial intelligence for the first time on ISA, on ISS, sorry, interacting with ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst.

It started off well enough. Simon introduced himself and explains where he comes from. He describes to Gerst what he can do. He then helps Gerst complete a task and responds to a request to play the song Man Machine by Kraftwerk. Good choice. I like that. This had proved to be the trigger, unfortunately. Simon appeared to have liked the song so much he refused to turn it off.

Gerst instructed Simon, cancel music. Simon outright ignored the command, much like my Amazon Echo also does to me all the time. Gerst then tried making some other requests. Simon preferred the music and kept playing the music instead of responding to the requests. A flustered and bemused, Gerst then appealed to ground control for some help.

How does one put an angry robot back in its place? Simon overheard the appeal and said, be nice, please. And then Gerst said, I am nice. He's accusing me of not being nice. And now they put him back in the box and powered him down. How's that AI working out for people?

I'm sorry. I would shove that thing out the airlock. That would go out the airlock first thing. I mean, you're I mean, talk about like, OK, you're an Amazon warehouse and you're worried about safety. You're on a space station. Yeah. Robots getting uppity with you. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, this thing is connected to the network.

He doesn't have a he doesn't have an iPod shoved up his ass where he has craft work on hand. But he's got he's got a Spotify account, at least. So, I mean, how insane is this story? Like, what happened with this? Oh, boy.

We're we're just we're rocketing towards oblivion. Literally. Literally. Oh, that's fun. That is so much fun. Now, this one's kind of this one's an interesting story on two fronts. Microsoft is basically gutting their edge browser and taking out their rendering engine and putting in chromium.

If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it? Well, that's there's a point to this, though. This is an interesting point. So they're taking they're putting the chromium open source rendering engine in and the rendering engine is basically what is displayed on the screen. This is a nice thing for developers because the fewer rendering engines out there, the fewer times you have to figure out why your shit doesn't align left when it's supposed to.

You know? Yes. I remember anybody who lived through the browser wars of the early 90s will will you get some PTSD when you think about these things? A line left means left. So why is it going to the right? Exactly. Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you, Microsoft.

Now, yeah, anybody who's ever had to deal with Internet Explorer programming is just jumping up and down like popping champagne or they've already committed suicide back in 1998 when this thing was actually happening. Now, so what they're going to do is use this chromium, you know, rendering engine.

But chromium is developed by Google, so it's kind of a Google based project, but it is open source and and it's on GitHub, which Microsoft owns now. Hmm. Wonder how that goes out. But it's what it's doing is it's giving other people, not other people, everybody on the Internet less choice, which gives more power to these rendering engine that these rendering engines are what you get to see in your browser.

It's taking that window. You could look at 10 windows before. Now you can only look out three. I'm trying to figure out how to put this for the layperson. It's a problem for diversity in the browser space. It is definitely a problem for diversity in the browser space because there aren't that many new browsers coming out.

Yes, we've got Vivaldi. We've got Opera. We've got a couple other ones that are coming out there. But when Microsoft goes and just says, OK, we're going to use Google's rendering engine instead of, say, Mozilla's rendering engine because Mozilla has this brand new one that is supposed to be rocket fast, except it's wrapped around or it's got Firefox wrapped around it, which is the only problem.

It just diminishes choice. Yeah. People are saying there, you know, it might be melodramatic, but it is one of those big decisions that is it's going to have long term consequences down the line. But some of the upsides might be is that Microsoft is actually going to create, you know, this Chromium based Edge browser for Windows.

It's going to be probably adding stuff back to Chromium to get Chromium closer to the metal on on Windows machine. So it runs faster because, you know, third party browsers don't have as much OS access as the, you know, the OS built browsers like Edge had before because they didn't get access to the Microsoft APIs that would be restricted on most cases.

Now, they're also going to build a Mac version of it. So we're going to have Edge for Mac and iOS. See, this could actually be a good thing. Except for the most part. The thing here is, yes, Microsoft can get Chromium closer to the metal on Windows machines, but Apple's not going to let them do that because they've got Safari, which nobody likes, but they still stand by it.

Like we have a browser. Nobody likes it, but it comes standard and people who don't know how to download a new browser are going to use Safari. And, you know, that's that. So they're going to stand by. Isn't it funny how Apple is basically now Microsoft? Yeah, kind of. I mean, they've got a browser that they package with everything and force you to use and become comes as the default and everybody hates the damn browser.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's on iOS. The fact that you can't change a default browser on iOS is really annoying, but the technical limitations as to why I understand, but on, you know, on the Mac, you can also change your browser, but most people just don't know how to do that. Anyway, I just, it's just one of those things that I want.

Yeah, I mean, just go read the posts on it. They'll be in the show notes because this is going to have long-term ramifications for people who use Windows, which are more than us people who use Macs and long-term, you know, for the internet. But I think it's funny that Microsoft finally has said, we give up.

That's the best part. We give up. We can't do it anymore. That's, yeah, as they should. And I think it's funny as a programmer that Microsoft is basically doing the equivalent of me finding a JavaScript package that does 98% of what I want to do, and then just doing the last 2% tweaks myself. Yeah, that's it.

That's exactly what they're doing. Maybe that's why they bought GitHub, because it just makes it faster for them to just go get everything. They're basically just become programmers like us. Let's find something that's almost what we want, and then we can just tweak it. Yeah. Who owns Stack Overflow now? Because if they had GitHub and Stack Overflow, like, together...

Oh my God. Stack Overflow. I haven't even heard that domain name in ages. I used to get all my code from there. Yeah. Well, I got all my bad code from there. I had to fix everything, but it's still... I mean, when you're looking for a problem, but not when you're looking for a problem, when you're looking for a fix to a problem, Stack Overflow was...

I mean, that was just invaluable. I hope they... That's where to go. Yeah. I hope those guys walked out of there with, like, all the money, because, man, I miss that site. You know what we need? A Stack Overflow for life. Oh, that's called Goop. Or Lifehacker. Both equally useless.

True. I don't have a vajayjay to shove anything up, so I can't go to Goop. Well. Emotional one. Have an emotional vajayjay. I wish I could make that a showdown.

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 Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering.

How's it going, Dave? Oh, pretty good. Nice to be back. How's everybody doing there? Oh, peachy keen. Peachy keen. Is your... Jason, does your roommate still have her car? Did the banditos come back for a second round, a shot at it or something?

Or how's everything going with that? They did. They came back. Really? Yeah, one week to the day. Wow. I figured you could have put Bam Bam in the back seat or something. I need her in the house to protect me and to snuggle with, because it's cold at night. No, that's true. That's a good point. So they came back and they triggered the alarm.

So we went out there. They didn't get in the car this time, which was strange. It was very strange. And so I've come up with a new novel solution to the problem. You know, I have those Logitech video cameras, the Logitech circles.

Yeah. Well, so what I've done is I put one on the dashboard at night and run it to an anchor power brick. And so it's still on the Wi-Fi. So if they do break into the car, I'm going to get a picture perfect shot of them, which will be uploaded to the cloud. Granted, they'll probably steal the camera, but it's just one thing that I can do because there's just no way to get a camera on that car where it's at.

And we also took Brian's advice, went out and bought a club. There you go. Oh, wow. All right. Went low tech. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about it the other day. I was thinking, could you put a, this wouldn't solve the getting in part, but could you put an ignition kill switch or something like that to keep it from getting the car?

Well, the funny thing about that is when we were doing our research after this, it turns out that year, it was a 2007 Hummer H3. Those things came with OnStar installed. So she's going to get OnStar activated. And unfortunately, we also found out that she gets 10 bucks a month off of her insurance just for having OnStar in the car, except you can't get the money back retroactively.

And she's paid insurance on it since 2007. Oh, my. Insurance companies. At that point, you know, that's all we can do. I'm like, I'm not going to lose sleep over this anymore. Try everything. Yeah. Yes, you have. Yes, you have.

I'm just going to, besides, you know, without just taking the wheels. And putting it up on blocks every night when we go to bed. It's like, come on. It's just that feeling of being violated, you know? Yeah, absolutely. If somebody's out there dicking around with your stuff. Right. It's the worst. Well, I want to start off this week.

This is from the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And they published a pretty complete report all about automated license plate readers. And this is something we've talked about here before. These cameras that vacuum up all the license plates that drive by and how some police cars have them on board.

And even buses have them, too. Yeah. Tow trucks have them. College campus, you know, parking enforcement has them. I remember one time a couple of years ago, I was parked in a private parking garage on private property. And I went to my car after work and there was a ticket on the car because my registration had expired.

So the cops were cruising through the private parking garage, scanning plates, looking for expired tags. I didn't think that was very sporting of them. It's not. And the funny thing is, I have gotten that exact same ticket in the exact same situation in a private parking lot at my office where I worked.

And I came out and there was a ticket on my car while I was at the office. I'm like, come on, guys. Really? It just sucks. Yeah, it really does. And I was guilty. I mean, I neglected to, you know, I hadn't noticed. But still, just left a bad taste in my mouth.

But anyway, this report from EFF, the main thing that it covers that I think is particularly interesting is all of the data sharing that goes on between all of the different law enforcement agencies and this company called Vigilant Solutions that is sort of the point of the center point of all of this sharing.

They're the ones who gather up all the data from all the different law enforcement agencies and facilitate all of the sharing. And this report talks about over 3,000 agencies, over 30,000 law enforcement employees who have access to this stuff. It's kind of eye-opening, and I don't know how I feel about this.

Because on the one hand, you've got things like, obviously, stolen cars. You've got things like Amber Alerts, where this sort of thing could come in handy. But the other side of it, it kind of gives you a trackable DVR of where you may have been, or at least where your car's been historically.

And I'm not sure how I feel about that. What do you guys think? Well, actually, on one segment, I don't think you were here for this one. Brian and I were talking about this problem with license plate readers. And I had a thought. I'm like, what happens when Tesla gets all this information, or any auto self-driving car that has cameras on it mounted everywhere?

It's like, where's all that data going? Because all it takes is, you know, let's run some AI on it. And we have the world's largest surveillance state just by, you know, driving to 7-Eleven. It would be good for Amber Alerts, but then, you know, it's like, also, that's a big can of worms. So I don't know if we can put the genie back in the bottle for this one.

So I just kind of go about my day. I'm like, okay, you know where I'm going. There's just no getting around it. Yeah. Well, another interesting point that they made here was that different jurisdictions have different rules when it comes to access of this sort of data and reporting of the access.

You know, some police departments require, if a police officer is going to access this information, they have to fill out a report. They have to document it, which seems reasonable. But not every police force does. So if I'm in Maryland's police force and they require that I document everything, but my buddy is in Virginia's and they don't, and I know that the information is shared, can I, right?

Yeah. Can I call up my buddy in Virginia and say, can you just look in the database for me? Because I need to know where my ex-girlfriend is. Right. Right? So. Yeah. I don't know. Pretty sure they do that already anyway. Yeah, you're probably right.

You're probably right. So related to this, I included a link to a video. This was a story that came by that I got a little chuckle out of. It's a gentleman who got busted for using a license plate shield to avoid paying tolls. And I got to say, I don't know if you guys watched this yet.

This is a pretty clever little device. It's a license plate frame that pulls down, looks like a piece of black fabric or plastic or something that unfurls within the frame. It just covers the plate. It's quite clever. Yeah.

And when you're done, it unrolls again. So there was actually some footage of the guy who got busted using it as when we would roll up to those toll. They're not booths, but the toll plazas where you just roll through. He would hit the button and the license plate would be covered and he'd roll through and then he'd hit the button and up it would go.

And there were some other people who had dash cams who saw him do it, who thought, well, why should I pay if this guy doesn't have to? So they ratted him out and he got tracked down. Oh, man, snitches get stitches. I know, I know.

I mean, some people need to be rewarded for their ingenuity. This is quite clever. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this is something that's readily available. I haven't done the digging, I suspect. There's probably some online store from overseas where these are readily available.

But, boy, a 16-year-old version of me would have loved to have had one of these. I know. I think the best part would be is if you can change the fabric so when it rolls down, it's like somebody who hates license plate number. Like Knight Rider. Yeah.

Or James Bond or something like that. Remember a kid on Knight Rider? He could flip the plate. The plate had like three different plates. He could just flip through. Yeah. That's a great idea. I like that idea. I like the way you're thinking, Jason. That's even better. Yeah. I think this is called the Stealth Plate.

Okay. Is this the one? This might not be the... Oh, hang on. Real-time Googling. I know what Dave is getting for Christmas. That's right. Yep. It's called the Stealth Plate. All right.

Available now. Available now. How much is it, Jason? There you go. We have to go to 510autogroup.com. And you can get different curtains. It's $160 for the U.S. version and Canada version. Okay. They have them for EU, and they've got Australian, Brazil.

Not bad. Oh, they've even got flippers, just like Kit. Those are from 209. Amazing. Yeah. You really can get anything you want on the internet. You really can. Is this a great country or what? Yeah. You can get them for your motorcycle.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, this is pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. All right. It only costs you $200 to get pulled over and probably arrested. Yeah. Well, it looks like this guy got his car impounded, so I don't... Probably not worth it in the long run, but for entertainment purposes only.

It might be worth looking into it. Exactly. For entertainment purposes only. This is for tobacco use only. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That will be in the show notes if anybody wants to go buy a stealth plate. Oh, man.

I was also thinking maybe Facebook has all of this data, too, so they can see what stores we're going to, and that's how they can tell that we're shopping. Mm-hmm. Instead of listening, they're just following us outside in the real world. Could be. Look, I get in my car now, and I get an alert from my phone telling me it's going to take six minutes to go pick up my kid.

Like, we're giving this data away anyways. Right. Uh-huh. Right. Right. You know, my phone knows where I'm going and what day I'm going and what time I'm going there. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. I always thought that was creepy because, yeah, it's like on Sundays... It is creepy. I thought I turned it off. I don't know how to turn it off.

I don't either anymore. I like it sometimes because it's like I get in the car, I start it up, and it's like on Sundays I would always go to my dad's house for dinner, and I would sit down, I'd turn the car on, and my watch would pop up. It's going to take you 22 minutes to get to, you know, the house for dinner. I'm like, yep. Okay, well, that's not bad.

I guess I can, you know, hit the bar on the way, maybe. I just got a new car in the past week or so, and as soon... I linked up the Bluetooth, paired the Bluetooth in the car, and the first thing that popped up on the screen on the dashboard was downloading contacts.

Yeah. And I went, wait, what? Cancel, cancel, cancel. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I get it. It's for the phone to be able to be voice activated, but I don't need that. I have, you know, CarPlay can handle that. The little woman inside the phone can handle that, so, yeah.

It's funny. I had that same problem when I got my new one, and it downloaded everything in there, and I would, like, you know, try and do something with it, and then it would just, it was always called Tim Ferriss for some reason. I don't know why, but it would always call Tim, and he just got so mad.

And he's like, what do you call it? What do you, like, my car butt-dials him. Like, my car literally butt-dials Tim Ferriss. I think it's called a bumper dial. Yeah. A bumper dial, right, right. Yeah. Oh, man. So, did you guys see this iOS scam this week with the fitness apps?

It's funny, we covered this one a couple weeks ago over on Hacking Humans. There was, one of the security companies bubbled this up to the surface, and it's interesting to see that it, I guess it was about two weeks for it to hit the mainstream press, but this is a good one. It's an interesting one.

Yeah, it's really cool, because, I mean, I like how they're doing it. So, on the iPhone, if you want to, you know, buy an in-app purchase, you can use your thumbprint. So, they just came up with some fake screen that you had to keep your thumbprint on there, and they're like, keep holding it, keep holding it, and then they would just, boom, charge you, and then you're out of a bunch of money.

I was like, that's actually pretty clever. I kind of like that. You know, points for creativity for this one. Yeah, yeah. The same people who brought you that license plate blocker probably thought this one up. You know, I just, I'm surprised that it actually made it into the Apple Store, because they're notoriously so intent with their quality control and approval process on apps that I was a little surprised to hear about this, actually.

Yeah, that's a good point. And it's part of why it is newsworthy when these things do make it through, because they so often don't, at least on the App Store side, that a lot more of them seem to make it through on the Google side. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, well, you can get anything on Google. That's a given.

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, it's clever. I suppose Face ID takes care of this, because to authorize a purchase on Face ID, you need to click on the side of the phone, the button on the side of the phone to authorize something.

Oh, interesting. I tell you, like, okay, blink twice with your right eye and once with your left, and then smile. That's, like, that's the, like, that's how you do it. That's your passcode, your pin code. It's binary. It's just, like, left, right, left, left, left, right. Yeah. We'll get to that later in the show. Okay.

Yeah. So, this next thing is about the NYPD, and they're starting to use drones. Yes, they have 14 in all for search and rescue missions, crime scene documentation, hazmat incidents, large events like concerts, and hostage situations.

Now, we all knew this was going to happen. Now it is, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. This does, I get it. I get that there are reasons why police would want drones. It makes some degree of sense, but it does kind of feel a bit weird.

Now, they say they're not, there are unacceptable uses, including routine patrols, traffic enforcement, immobilizing vehicles or suspects, being used or as equipped with a weapon, and searches without warrants. So, I guess they're trying to at least put some controls on it to quell our fears, but it does feel weird, does it not?

It does. One of the things I was wondering about, and I did a little bit of poking around on this, is, you know, the FAA prohibits drone pilots from flying over crowds. That's just a rule.

But it's one that you can get around. Disneyland has gotten around it. They use drones in their light shows now. But aren't they like flying over the lake, not over the actual crowds? Yeah, they're flying over the lake, but it's still, it's breaking the ordinance, which says like 200 feet, or I can't remember exactly what it is.

So, Disney got a pass to be closer. Right, they got an exemption. Yeah. Yeah, they got an exemption. So, but I don't think law enforcement is automatically exempted from that. So, I suspect the NYPD probably either got an exemption or they're just counting on the fact that the FCC is going to turn a blind eye to it.

Look the other way, yeah. Yeah, which either one of those is probably as possible as the other. Yeah, I do like, I mean, for tactical operations, I get it. So, that way they can see the house. You know, if there's like people hold up in the house, they can see if people are running and things like that.

But that's why we have helicopters, you know? Yeah. I mean, it does feel a bit slippery slope to me. I mean, how long is it going to be until, and this is just NYPD. Now that this rolls out, I find it hard to believe that like a larger jurisdiction, like say some Nevada, you know, something like that, isn't going to start using drones for traffic stuff when you have these long stretches of roads.

And, you know, I just, it feels a little militarization of police to me. I don't know, man. In Los Angeles here, we have so many helicopters flying over. We call them ghetto birds. Yeah. You know, we have a name for them. And they are so disruptive. And I'm like, man, if they can get it, like quiet it down with a drone instead of a helicopter, I'm all for that.

And it's got to be cheaper and, you know, safer. More jobs going away. Yeah, that's true. That's what you got to have. You still got to have a pilot for the drone. So somebody's got to fly the damn thing. What was that 80s movie? What was that 80s movie where they had the super high tech helicopter that was capable of basically flying silently, which all.

Blue Thunder. Now, was that the one where they flew around and looked inside the woman's window when she was changing her clothes? She was actually doing naked yoga. There you go. Yes, yes. Blue Thunder, one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember. You can check it out on Does It Have Legs? Yes, I remember now.

Love Blue Thunder. It's a fantastic movie. And it totally holds up. Okay. Well, there we go. So there's something to think about. Yeah. I mean, I suppose I have some. I'm happy to hear that they're basically using off the rack units, Mavic Pros and things like that.

So they aren't like, you know, completely like Batman'd up or anything with crazy stuff in it, but it's still. Have you seen it, Mavic? That's pretty Batman already. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Mixed feelings for sure. Yeah.

Now, I thought this article would be of interest to all of us, but particularly since we talk all the time about how when these data breaches happen, there's no accountability. There's no, there's no suffering. There's no nothing. It basically costs a company next to nothing when these things happen. And so there's no, there's no really reason to start fixing the problem.

And that's why, you know, Senator Ron Wyden brought up the Consumer Data Protection Act. And did you read this article, Dave? Because he seems to, the author of this article comes at it from the exact opposite perspective that we do, I think. He seems to think that this kind of bill is way overreaching and these penalties are way too much.

And I think you and I and Jason all agree that we need to do something. That's right. And it doesn't sound bad to me. Well, I actually went and, yes, and I think he is a she. I think it's Josephine Wolfe is the author of this. Oh, my bad. Yeah, no problem. And I went and looked her up. She's a professor, assistant professor of cybersecurity, writes a lot of articles for Slate.

And I have to say, I do not find her argument the least bit compelling. I didn't think you would. Well, I don't either. It says in a largely sensible bill, this is a wild overreaction, talking about potential jail time for executives that knowingly sign off on incorrect or inaccurate certifications.

Right. That seems fair to me. Right. It doesn't seem like she makes her case. No, I didn't think so either. She stands up a lot of straw men. There was one towards the end of the article where she says, if you've ever had to sit through an unhelpful cyber cybersecurity training course or been forced to change a password every 90 days or been locked out of an email account for logging in from a new device, you know that it is entirely possible to spend too much money and waste too much time on cybersecurity

without actually making anything more secure. Well, that's that's BS. Well, all those things actually do make it more secure. Well, some of them don't. Changing a password every 90 days does not. That's been proven to not. But that's a policy. That's nothing.

Yeah. Yeah, she's she's she's focusing in on people's exasperation with having to do these things, sit through training and all that sort of thing. But I just I really wanted to try to understand the argument that she was making. And it just it seemed like she never really got to the meat of the point other than we shouldn't do this.

This is too much. And I don't really feel like she had a compelling explanation for why. Yeah, I agree. So good times. Now, there was a great article on technology review dot com about quantum computers posing a security threat that we're totally unprepared for.

Now, the theory here is that we will get within 20 years to have these quantum computers with this insane levels of cryptography and encryption. Right. But by the time we get those propagated out to everyone, everyone, there'll be bad actors that'll get them first and they will basically just destroy any sense that we have of security and privacy right now because they'll be able to crack everything that we have out there.

So it's going to be an arms race yet again. Well, there's a couple of things that come to mind with this. First of all, there are some people who say that quantum computing is kind of like fusion energy, that it's it's always 20 years away, no matter when you ask. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that.

But but I think there's on the flip side of that is there are some compelling cases that it is coming that and you nobody really knows how quickly it'll be. But people are working on it and the people who are working on it have the funds to put serious work into it. Yeah.

So there's that. Google is definitely working on it. Yeah. And no doubt foreign governments are working on it. So the other thing that strikes me here is we've heard plenty of reports about foreign governments gathering up data that is encrypted.

So they will grab things. The notion being that. Get it all now. Save it so you can open it up later. Exactly right. And so there's a there's a notion now that if I encrypt all of my data, even if the bad guys steal it, they can't do anything with it because they can't decrypt it.

So it's of no value to them. And so this argument is, well, that's fine. We won't necessarily be able to do anything with it now. But 20 years from now, we'll be able to read all of this stuff. And that may very well be a value to us. Right. So that's part of this.

There's a really good episode on the After On podcast with Steve Jurvetson, where they talk about quantum computing. And the thing about quantum computing is it's a mind bender on how it actually works. But they are making progress. They're definitely making progress. And yeah, basically, encryption is the first thing to go.

But they're very specialized computers and especially, you know, it's it takes a specialized language to write for them. So they're not general purpose computers. Yeah. Basically, you're going to break encryption and run WordPress on it. That's it. That's exactly it. Don't get me started on WordPress this week.

I'll just have a fucking day to that thing. But yeah, I think it's cool. I interviewed someone a few weeks ago who made the point. We were talking about mobile devices and he made the point that a modern iPhone is faster than a CrayOne supercomputer.

Oh, yeah. Way faster. Well, and it's interesting, though, to think about that. One of the things with CrayOne supercomputers, my recollection is that they were down to measuring the length of the wires inside of those systems so that things would arrive at the right places at the speed of light.

You know, those sorts of things. And now we're just and now it's just all in your pocket. So to him saying that was sort of a recalibration for me, I never really thought about it in those terms. We've harnessed these this massive power, put it in our pockets, and now we use it to crush candy.

Play Clash Royale. Join the clan at GOG. Got you. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Right. Right. So I don't know. We'll see either. We'll see how the exactly we'll see how this this this plays out.

But, you know, this is just one of those things where it ain't here yet. And I yeah, and I think part of it, part of the problem for most people, like Jason said, is that it's hard to wrap your head around this. It's different and it's just different enough. And it's not intuitive like anything basically quantum related.

It's not intuitive. And so it's hard to understand how this will become the next level of of things because it doesn't work the way that the old computers worked. So it's not like this linear thing where next year computers will be two times faster. It's just different.

It's like quantum leap. It is. Oh, nice. Nice. Thank you. Was it Richard Feynman that said if you say you understand anything about quantum dynamics that you are lying? Yeah, yeah, I think that was Feynman. Yep. Yep. So I put a link to the After On podcast in the show notes if you want to check that out.

It is a good listen. Okay. It's a good edit job, too. I know this guy who edits podcasts. Oh, boy. When he's not playing Clash of Clans. Exactly. Right. Well, I only play that on the crapper. So I can't edit on the crapper.

Even better. We normally do our feedback stuff on our Thursday episodes, but we got a couple of questions that were specifically for the Dave Bitmaster Bittner. So we've got those in here right now. First up is a question from Mark. I have a question for Bittner. Is it possible to spoof something like Face ID?

Not to hack in, but to hash your face and prevent others from just pointing your phone at your face to unlock it. I don't need to read his explanation, I'm sure, because we kind of get it. Yeah, yeah. So he's basically saying, could you cover your mouth with your hand, for example, and use that image to train Face ID so that Face ID would only work then if you had your hand over your mouth.

Right. Makes sense, I guess. I did a little bit of digging on this, and it doesn't seem like it. It seems like Face ID is smart enough to know when it's not looking at a complete face.

Yeah, I think it tries to register a certain number of points, and if you're covering any part of your face at any point, that would knock off their checklist, as it were. Right. And for unlocking it, you even need to be looking at the camera. If you're looking away, it will not unlock.

Right. I saw some people who were trying to make Face ID work with furry costumes. I don't really know what kind of site you like to visit, but this is a non-judgment zone. Yeah, it had nothing to do with the show. I was just watching some of this stuff.

So it does not recognize furry costumes, or so I'm told. We have the definitive answer about furries from Dave. Yeah, I saw that on YouTube. David, bunny in my spare time, Bittner.

That's right. That's right. The secret's out. Yeah. So, long story short, no. It's not possible to speak something like that. It doesn't seem like it, and to be honest, with Mark, I was not willing to go through and do it on my own device, because I didn't want to mess it up. He didn't want to get his costume out in the office.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, go ahead and get it out of storage, and all that. It's a real pain. Yeah. And Chad also wrote in, love the show, the back catalog in the new format. Papa Bittner and yourselves have recommended cybersecurity certifications on your show.

Do you have any specific programs or companies that one should research of interest in pursuing this? I'm going to have to follow up on this, because my pal Joe Kerrigan is really the guy who knows a lot about this. There are plenty of online sources, of course. There's places like Cybrary that have online training.

Obviously, places like the SANS Institute, they do a lot of that stuff. And don't underestimate your local community college. That's a great place to get started inexpensively and head towards those certifications. But that is not an area of my expertise.

But I will ask Joe, and I'll have some answers for us next week. Excellent. That's it. You're fired. We're just going to get Joe on. You're out. Never mind. Oh, okay. I know that hit to your income is going to be huge.

Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That big podcast, Lighten Cigars with $100 Bills money. Yeah. Well, Furry Bittner will be back next week with some follow up on that. That's right. Why does Dave sound muffled this week? Dave, that's not a windscreen Bittner.

That's what it is. That's right. Yeah. It's my furry fox head. Here's the video I was talking about. There you go. Oh, my Lord. Oh, my God. Well, there's our shower.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Wow. Yeah. That's not something you see every day. That really is not something you want to see. That's nightmare fuel. Yeah.

So, I didn't even know these things. What's interesting to me is how elaborate this furry head is and that it seems to be mass produced, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I wonder if there's a furry version of Etsy where you can get bespoke furry costumes.

Right. Yeah. Choose your colors. Choose your eyes. Choose your nose. Yeah. All that. Choose. Yeah. That makes sense. No, it doesn't make sense. It's fucking crazy. Well, I mean, yeah. From a certain direction, it makes sense. If you presuppose some things, it makes sense.

Yeah. But he's got that. He's got the chest fur, but he's wearing like a champion hoodie. Yeah. Not really all in. Oh. When I was in high school. Wait, he removes the head. Oh, my God.

There's a wolf. Right. Well, that's the other thing. He goes and gets his other furry head. Let me see if this one works because, of course, if you have one, you're going to have two. I am so subscribing to this channel.

I want to see what the hell. Yeah. When I was in high school, I worked at like a retail plant nursery and they had, at Christmas time, they had Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And so I was drafted to wear the suit sometimes to be Rudolph.

And it was this kind of thing. Drafted. Yeah, exactly. Right. I only begged. And thus, we see where it all began. That is correct. So after the first weekend, I went home and my face was killing me because I was smiling for all these pictures. And then I realized, wait a minute, I don't have to smile.

I got this big. Nobody sees my face. Oh, God. That's funny. I felt so stupid. Yeah. So after that, I would just, you know, it's just all about body language. I could be totally deadpanned on my face. And yeah. So you learn. So there's a piano tutorial on how to play piano in your fursuit.

Uh-huh. It's got 86,600 views. Okay. What a world. Fuck podcasting, man. I'm going to go get me a suit. Mm-hmm. Yep. Grumpy old furries coming to a screen.

Oh, show title. Coming to a screen near you. Done and done. Grumpy old furries. I'm so glad I didn't hit stop recording. Do not be alarmed. Yeah. Apps and doodads. I'm not really one to talk about fast food on this show, but I've personally found this to be genius.

And it is app related. So Burger King is giving away Whoppers for one cent right now. But you have to go to McDonald's to get them. Oh, man. I got a Burger King right down the street, but McDonald's I got to drive to. Damn. How's this work? All right. So basically, here's the deal. If you get Burger King's new app, this is amazing, and then you are within 600 feet of a McDonald's and log into the app, it will direct you to the nearest Burger King and give you a one cent Whopper.

How great is that? I'm going to do this. I'm actually going to do this. I think this is great. This is very funny. I mean, trolling at an epic level, they're basically saying they're turning more than 1,400 McDonald's into Burger King's, effectively.

14,000 McDonald's. 14,000. So drive near a McDonald's, load up their app. They will tell that you were within 600 feet of a McDonald's, and boom, you can go over to the nearest Burger King and get a one cent Whopper. Oh, man, I wish In-N-Out would do this.

Oh, they don't need to. That's the problem. Yeah, that's the problem. You can't get into In-N-Out. I'd even pick Wendy's over that. Yeah, it's pretty epic trolling, though, and a genius idea. So kudos to whatever PR company came up with this concept. No, that's fantastic. That is a good one. Definitely a good one. So I wonder why McDonald's just doesn't then immediately put some filters on their Wi-Fi.

It doesn't matter. Or do some geofencing. They can do geofencing. They can definitely geofence. But you're connected via your cellular network with GPS. Like the Burger King app has nothing to do with McDonald's Wi-Fi. Right. Okay. Well, I would switch it because people aren't that tech savvy, right?

So a lot of people may be connecting through their Wi-Fi. You could at least turn it around. They should be flipping it and going, we'll give you a Big Mac for two cents. Yeah, Big Mac for two cents if you just stay and save the gas money. Exactly. See? Always thinking McDonald's. Battle this stuff.

In food news, though, and for app news, I finally joined the Instapot cult, as it were. Instant Pot. Not Instapot. Instant Pot. Everybody makes that error when they get one. I was the same, even when I pimped it on the show before. I typed it in the show notes as Instapot, and then I looked back on it on Amazon and went, nope, it's Instant Pot.

Yeah, but it is. Which one did you get? Market Opportunity. I don't know. The eight, eight, whatever, something. The Instant Pot one. That's the one I got. The Duo 80 8-Quartz 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker, Slow Cooker, Rice Cooker, Steamer, Sauté, Yogurt Maker, and Warmer.

That's the one I got. That's the same one I got. It's pretty nice. I've got to say, I've made a couple meals with it already. It's pretty awesome. I put a link in the show notes to Instant Pot Pepper Steak. Delicious. Yes. Welcome to the cult. Welcome to the cult. That's one thing. If you ever get hungry, you just type in whatever you're in the mood for, and the next word is Instant Pot, you will find thousands of stay-at-home moms putting recipes up, and they are glorious.

God bless the stay-at-home moms. They are glorious. My favorite is I make a new turkey stroganoff in my Instant Pot, which is- Sounds pretty good. Quite delicious. Quite delicious. You don't want to have that every day of the week. That's for sure. You will be feeling it on the scale the next day.

Yeah. I'm trying to use the Instant Pot mostly for healthier recipes, and so far, it's pretty good at that. I mean, talk about if you're paleo. It's great for just veggies and meat. Oh, man. If you go to my Instagram, you can see my veggie soup recipe. It is quite epic. I'll send that to you offline, because I don't think anybody else wants to hear about that right now.

So, we're going to move from Instant Pot to Insta Scam of the Week. Woo-hoo. Yeah. I found this one from FineOffering.com. And here's what I love. This is FineOffering.com slash products slash 0001, which means it's the first offering from Fine Offering.

First thing. It's called the Smart Workstation Computer Desk. Mm-hmm. Now. This looks like a dentist chair. It looks like a dentist chair. Yes, it does. And it basically, when you get in it, it's got like a big hydraulic arm, and it moves up and down.

And it is the antithesis of a standing desk. This is a- Right. A laying down desk. This is a WALL-E desk. This is like the seats in WALL-E where they're shuttled around the ship in, just like it. Now, it is normally $369.90.

It is on sale for $199.90. Well. There is no way that this thing could be that cheap. Exactly. So, thank you, Google Image Search and your AI. I love you. I did a little research, and it turns out the pictures in this sale here are for the Signature Alt Workstation, which is $8,500.

That sounds a little bit more reasonable for what this is, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. You look at it, it's the exact same thing. I mean, this thing's got hydraulics, and it's just an insane desk, right? So, I'm like, there is no way that this thing is $199, which makes me think that if you send them $199, that $199 is off to the Ukraine, and you're never going to see it again.

Yes. The upper laptop mount just for this chair costs more than the chair itself from the Instascam. Exactly. Fine offering. No, that's the great part about it. These guys just made a website, and Instagram can't even think today.

There's too many Instas. We got Instapot. We got it. Yeah. But so, Instagram just let this ad through without doing any due diligence, and yeah, these people are getting just probably fleeced on this stuff. And if you go to the main site on fine offering, and go to the hot sale, they're up to 54 products now.

Ooh. Wow. Yeah. So, I'm sure these things are just full-on scams, although the wheel skates look pretty crazy. Do you see these? I think you need to order the Hurricane Fur Wizard Pet Fur and Lint Remover for your dogs to see what you actually get.

There's another one here called Finger Pal, which, I mean, I know we talked about porn before, and I'm not allowed to talk about it, but just the name alone, Finger Pal. And the auto-squeezing toothpaste dispenser, because squeezing your own toothpaste is just too damn hard. And it's $60.

That one probably is a real thing, and it retails for $14.99. But they're just getting people with that desk for just insane amounts of money. So, that would be my Insta Scam of the week. Now, on to some real things that happened.

Loopback 2 is out. If you're an audio guy, Loopback was, it's one of those things that you just have to have in your toolkit. And Loopback 2 is out, and it says, Audio Routing Simplified. And it's pretty fantastic. You get a list of all your sources, and you can drag and drop inputs to other outputs and inputs and, you know, get all crazy with it.

But I opened up my settings that I had from Loopback 1 when I first installed Loopback 2. And unfortunately, for some reason, there's a disclosure triangle that says Advanced. And under Advanced, there's a little checkbox that says, Mute Source While Recording.

And I'm thinking, why would we want to do that? Why would you want to do that and have it checked by default? Yeah. That was kind of a say what moment. But fortunately, because I'm sitting there trying to do a show yesterday with Jordan Harbinger.

And I'm like, wow, this isn't working. And I'm like, I see levels coming through, but I can't hear you. And he's like, oh, I know what this is because I went through this hell yesterday. So he went through and figured it out. So I didn't have to. And now you don't have to, thanks to Jordan.

But yeah, on a bunch of the sources, if you're coming in with Loopback 1 presets, check those sources and just go to Options. And it says Mute When Capturing. That's it, not Mute When Recording, but Mute When Capturing. But it's really cool. If you already own Loopback, it is well worth the $50 update.

And if you don't own Loopback and you're a podcaster or do any kind of audio routing, this thing is baller. It is so great. It is just, there are things you can't do without it. Now, this next one is a video game, which makes me kind of happy. I used to, you know, live Mortal Kombat.

Friend of the show MXV. Finish him. Exactly. Friend of the show MXV introduced me to Mortal Kombat 1. And then a week later, Mortal Kombat 2 came out. And I can't tell you how many years of my life was spent playing Mortal Kombat 2. To the point where I actually ended up working at Midway and working on a different game with some of the guys that actually made Mortal Kombat.

Mike stayed there and worked on Mortal Kombat for years. But the new one's coming out. Mortal Kombat 11. 11. Wow. Can you believe 11? It goes to 11. And to keep the Spital Tap theme going, the trailer's out. It looks amazing. It comes out April 23rd next year.

Here's the problem with it. I'm going to have to get a big old box with the sticks and the buttons because I cannot play it on a little teensy thumb pad. That is not how you play Mortal Kombat. You smack buttons and smack down your enemies. But man, it looks good. It looks really, really, really good.

I really enjoyed the trailer. So if you're a Mortal Kombat fan, keep an eye out for Mortal Kombat 11 in April next year. Okay. In the hardware realm, I got the Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle for USB 3. I bought a bunch of these before and I went through a bunch of them with Blackmagic.

Every unit they sent me was faulty. And I'm like, screw this. I'm not doing this. So I got a different one from Blackmagic. And the whole point of these things is to get video from your camera into your computer. In the old days when I had a PC, I would just get a card and plug shit into it and then there's video.

It doesn't work that way anymore. It's much more difficult. Yes, it is. Most of the solutions I found were like $1,000. And I'm like, eh, I don't have $1,000 to pay for this. The Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle for USB 3.0 was $299, which is, I'm like, okay, still a little pricey, but I can do that.

So I got it, plugged it in, got it into my computer. It works. That's it. It sends video from my camera to my Mac via USB. And this time it worked really well. The software from Blackmagic is getting better. It used to be a nightmare to set up Blackmagic software.

There was one glitch this time around because you have to do some security settings when you're doing the install on the Mac, which I skipped the first time. And I'm like, why isn't this thing working? And then I'm like, oh, I pressed cancel instead of approve. Derp. But it's all set up now. And you'll be seeing stuff from that soon.

And I also wanted to throw in, I can never figure out how to pronounce these. Neewer or Neewer? N-E-E-W-E-R. Neewer. Neewer. Neewer. It's like Kermit D for all. Neewer. Kermit D for all, I'm saying Neewer.

So I got these like a month or so ago, and I've been setting them up. And we actually used them on a Jordan Harbinger show interview with Robert Green. We took him to his house, and they worked great. So now I got four of them in my studio. I got a bunch of booms. I got some linked to the ceiling.

So we're going to be using these next time when you come over, Brian, to do our video show. Yeah, yeah. But hey, man, the lighting is going to be good. I like these things. They're cheap, which is the nice thing about it. They're not like super pro or high output, but you get two lights with barn doors, two stands, and carrying cases.

Oh, my God. The price went up. They're $182.99 now. When I put this in the show notes, they were $150. So I guess Christmas is here. Yes, and everybody gets professional studio lighting for Christmas, apparently. Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah, I got mine for $159.99. And yeah, now they're like $182.99. Ah, I guess as the closer we get to the holidays, old Saint Nick is trying to nick your cash. All right. Okay, they're not as good a deal as they used to be when I put them in the show notes, so your mileage may vary.

That's right. Now, I put this in the show notes for two reasons. One, it's kind of cool. But secondly, I also thought that the story itself, which was picked up by a lot of news networks and media networks, is extremely misleading.

Okay. So I'll just read, I'll read media posts, one particular take on this, but everybody else kind of ran with the same theme. It's been 40 years since Columbia Sportswear made the rugged outwear used in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, but this week it's resurrecting the famous parka.

This limited edition collectible, which looks just like those worn in the movie, has been updated with better technical fabric and construction, and is available online in a handful of stores. Most are priced at $500, but actor Mark Hamill, who's Luke Skywalker character, wore the gear as he charged across the Norwegian tundra back in the day, signed 30 jackets.

Those cost $1,980 the year the film was released, with all the proceeds going to scholarships and educational charities. All cool, right? 500 bucks, the jacket in the movie, right? It's not the jacket in the movie. I'm looking at the jacket right now. It's the jacket the crew wore while shooting the movie.

Yeah. That is not... Did you hear everything in that press release? I did. Did it not say in the movie? Yeah. Character wore it charging across the Norwegian tundra. Yeah. No. No, the actor wore it while he was having a smoke break before the next shoot.

The limited edition... We're going to go word by word. The limited edition collectible, which looks just like those worn in the movie, has been... Okay, we just have to stop there, because these were not worn in the movie.

These were worn by the crew. Because these are bright blue. They're bright blue with black and red stripes down the sleeve. Yes, and a fiery Darth Vader patch, Star Wars logos, and pocket nameplates. Not in the movie. Now, I... What the crew wore. Also very cool.

Not saying it's not cool, but not in the movie, unlike every single article on the internet states about these. Now, the other thing about this article, I don't know who works at Marketing Daily, or Media Post is the main company.

It's the Marketing Daily section of Media Post. There's no link to it in this entire story. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I would... Even if I wanted to buy one, I can't. Great. Not worn in the movie.

Just letting everybody know. Oh, man. I wish we had more on of the week this week, because that's where that would go. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, on something that's actually kind of cool, there's a link over at Engadget, and they actually do have the embed of the sound itself in there.

Thank you very much for doing that. You can hear the wind on Mars for the very first time, thanks to the InSight Lander. Two instruments have recorded audio, which NASA has now released, so you can actually listen to the sounds of Mars, which is pretty damn cool. I'd like to state there is no AC line noise on that sound at all, so they have a better setup than we do.

Well, better than you do. And I do blame your neighbors for any audio problems we have this week, because it's... There's too many damn Christmas lights plugged into this building right now. Yeah, and if you can hear behind me, that's not line noise, that is leaf blower noise.

That's a Mars leaf blower. Oh, the great winds of the San Fernando Valley are blowing out here, and I didn't even need NASA to get those. Now, this next one is just... This is a... I mean, I... Another moron of the week. This is the informal moron of the week.

Exactly. This is our good friends at PETA, who I have come out, you know, against many, many times. Now, what they want to do is they want to change anti-animal sayings into positive animal sayings, and of course, the internet, you know, shits the bed.

So, I'm going to give you some examples. Instead of saying, kill two birds with one stone, you could say, feed two birds with one scone. Now, I don't know if birds eat scones, but I do not want to, you know, perpetuate bird obesity out there in the world.

Be the guinea pig. No, be the test tube. I don't know what that... Why? That's not even... That doesn't mean the same thing. In somebody's head, it does. In somebody's head. Okay. Instead of beat a dead horse, it could be feed a fed horse.

That one at least kind of makes sense. That one at least makes sense, I suppose. Yes, it, you know, goes to the futility of the world. I get that one. Instead of bring home the bacon, bring home the bagels. No, I want bacon in the morning. I don't want bagels.

I want bacon. Yeah, we're all paleo now, man. I don't need those carbs. Instead of take the bull by the horns, it's take the flower by the thorns. My hands are a little big to be grabbing flowers by the thorns. I've actually got several cuts on my hands from gardening this week where the thorns actually took me from the flower.

So, no. I will find a bull. This is a prime example of PETA, of a company shooting themselves in the foot. Like, I understand PETA's main thrust. Wait, wait, wait. That's still, you know, violence against animals. What would they? Oh, yeah. I can't say anything about shooting anybody in the foot.

I can't come up with anything on the fly. But you know what I'm saying here. This is like, this just makes me immediately want to ignore anything that they say ever. Oh, no. I've been at that point for a long time. No, they don't. They never have good points.

And I just love some of these tweets. Oh, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And we've seen a lot of dumb things on the show. Yeah. And the tweets are great. Surely you have bigger fish to fry than this. Right? I smell a rat. Like lambs to the laughter.

That's actually not bad. Oh, hey. That's not bad. That's not bad. PETA should hire whoever did that one. Yes. And here's another one. The Washington Wizards put one out and says, instead of, wizards beat the Hawks, say, wizards win. Jesus.

So, yes. These are pretty funny. But, yeah. Now, we've had great marketing companies this week with the Burger King one. And whoever PETA hired should maybe go find the guys who did the Burger King one. Except that means that their company.

They'd be hiring somebody that pays for, yeah, leading cows to the slaughter. Uh-huh. Yeah. I just love this one. Closing shout outs. One of the other tech podcasts out there that everybody loves is the Accidental Tech Podcast.

And they do all the stuff that we don't. They go deep on Apple and talk about lots of really smart things. And they don't swear. And Marco Arment, one of the head guys there, wrote Overcast. Which, if you're listening to the show on Overcast, please don't forget to go in and hit star next to the episode you're listening to so we can get up in the rankings.

We're moving up. We're actually ahead of Rachel Maddow now. So, please, come on. Keep us going. Keep us going. Now, they do a show that's pretty long. And then they have their little outro music. And then they do an after show. And this week on episode 303, Your Mahogany World, Marco went just balls out against Elon Musk and Tesla.

And it was fantastic. It was fantastic. He's not nearly as vitriolic as we are. He's very tempered. He's more like you, Brian. He's not like me. And even at the end, he's like, Tesla needs to fire Elon Musk and hire an adult.

This company is not run like a company. It's ridiculous. I'm like, okay, well, good. Good. At least the word's getting out there. And his story about how he traded in his Model S and got another one because they gave you an early lease thing.

And just all of the trials and tribulations that he went through. And Tesla just sounds like a horrible company to buy a car from. He's like, the only reason I stick with it is because the Model S is such a great car. But if anything goes wrong, forget about it. So. Right.

Yep. There you go. I just say, if you're into, you know, our show, you probably already listened to that show. But I don't like, I don't like pimping them because you might leave our show and go listen to them because they're more, more professional than we are. Measured. Measured. Yes. They don't, they don't swear.

Yeah. Well, fuck that shit. I'm sad to say that Buzzcox singer Pete Shelley has passed away age 63 this week. Sad news for all of us music lovers. It was. I was going to put this in here, but you beat me to it, damn it. Yeah. Well, it's one of those bands that I think you and I agree on. Oh, that's good. That's good. I've seen them a couple times.

Last time I saw them was at Riot Fest. I actually put a link to the video in the show notes so you can see the actual show that I saw. I was actually standing pretty close to the guy that took the video and it was great. It was really great. I love that band. I put a couple other links to other songs in there. What do I get? I think is my favorite Buzzcox song instead of, or not orgasm addict was, you know, one of their hits, but they've got a bunch of great songs.

And he wrote most of them and it's sad. It's sad that he's gone, especially at 63. I thought 63 was the new 33. What the hell? It is. Yeah. But, you know, yeah. Yep. Still, some people pass away. Live fast, die young. Yeah, that's true. And quick shout out to my friend Chris Lockhead.

I was on his show a little bit this week. He rebranded his podcast to the Chris Lockhead podcast. So there's a link to that in the show notes. Go check it out. I like this guy. He's vitriolic like us and he might actually come on the show sometime to discuss something. Because he has differing opinions than us, but he still likes us.

So that's good. And finally, just a last quick shout out to the team at the Jordan Harbinger Show because we did get that freaking award. So thank you very much, guys. My guys. Yay awards. My guys. And Brian's my guy, too. But he hasn't won me an award yet.

No. No. Didn't we win something for Spew? I wrote for Spew. I was part of the team. You won an award. I don't think you were on the team when we won the award, though. Were you? No. I think we won the award then you came on. I think that's how that worked. Yeah. I've been carpetbagging the whole time.

Yeah, that's me. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 304. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. Well, you've tried it just for once, found it all right for kicks. But now you find out that it's a habit that sticks and you're an orgasm addict.

You're an orgasm addict.

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