305: Stay Classy

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We've got a little bit of follow-up on our Whopper deal, the one-cent deal from Burger King. As soon as we recorded the last episode, I went in the house and I'm sitting down, had a glass of wine, sitting with the roommate, and she had the news on.

Up pops a story about a man who tried to use the app to get his one-cent Whopper deal and was eventually charged over $1,000 for his meal. Right. Well, I'm sure that this was just a very stupid cashier error. Well, the thing is, he was using the app to buy the stuff.

Burger King was like, oh, we don't even know if we're part of this promotion. The order didn't come through. And then he tried to use the app to order just a couple of burgers and fries to go. And when he pulled out, it was like $1,030 or something, which completely overdrew his bank account because he used a debit card, which you should never do.

You should use privacy.com slash GOG for all of your credit card needs. But anyway, yeah, talk about a royal screw-up on that one. Oops. Yeah, that's not what you hope for when you want a Whopper. Well, you got a Whopper of a bill, just nuts. That's really what it ended up being.

And I wanted to talk about porn on the Internet for just a second because we discussed it last week, how we never discuss porn on the Internet. And I thought about it because it was kind of driving me a little crazy. I'm like, why don't we talk about it? Oh, you know why? Because there has been no technological innovation in pornography in a long time.

We talked about teledildonics a little bit and just kind of jokey stuff. But yeah, porn got taken over by the man, as it were. Well, yeah, it was taken over by a bunch of kids in Canada, but that's kind of it. And they just keep buying up all the sites. So yeah, YouPorn, the Red Tubes and all those guys, it's all the same company now.

And yeah, of course, they don't care about copyright. They just take what they want. They post what they want and they do what they do. Porn on the Internet has always been just rife with copyright problems. And the copyright is kind of what killed it because everybody was giving away so much free porn and then everybody thought it was free.

So nobody thought, oh, maybe somebody owns this stuff now. And they basically ate themselves. Right. That's the whole problem with porn. And now it's just like, yeah, anybody can put up a video and not profit from it. That's kind of it. Kind of like podcasting or music.

Mostly music. At least we're making a few bucks off podcasting. Just a few. A few. Not many. But speaking of the porn thing, we've talked about how these walled gardens, they basically give you everything you want until they hit a tipping point and then they take it all away.

Yeah. Just like Facebook did. And we talked about the Tumblr issue last week. And I noticed I was flipping through Twitter and my friend Coop, the artist, said, OK, well, I guess I got to do this now. And he posted a post says, I guess I'm back on.

But he did it on WordPress dot com, which I'm like, I'm going to have a chat with him about this because it's like he's like, well, Tumblr doesn't like boobs anymore. So I guess I'm coming back to WordPress. I'm like, you can see my comment up there. I'm like, well, until WordPress hates boobs, then you're screwed again. You have to have your own website in a place that lets you do what you want.

Yeah. And it's relatively easy to have your own WordPress website without going through WordPress themselves. Yeah, it really, really is. I mean, my site's on WordPress dot com, like the business class, but that's because I'm not going to post anything that's, you know, even remotely controversial, except the words.

The words are probably controversial, but I'm not. I do think it's funny of all things to that, that Tumblr changing their their terms of service is what's making people actually go out and do their own thing again. All the things Tumblr. Yeah, I know.

But I mean, Tumblr was the one that was open to posting whatever you wanted. Twitter was not. Facebook definitely is not. And I mean, Facebook has problems the other direction where they're taking down people, you know, photos that aren't even controversial. So I mean, you can pretty much post anything you want on on Twitter. Porn is on the porn side.

That that is completely open game. But that's not a social network. That's just, you know, you screaming at the void, hoping somebody is out there listening. Yes. And to have your own website, just it's all going to come back to that. And it's like, if you want to be on the Internet, control your message.

Get your own website. Yeah. And hope that people look at it. Well, yeah, that's the thing. It's like, you know, back in the blogging days, it was fun. We see, you know, maybe RSS will make a comeback now. Maybe I still use it every single day. I love RSS. I love blogs. I love new sites that have RSS.

And maybe it'll come back. But maybe, you know, here's the thing for I in this goes into, you know, the mainstream masses who just don't know technology and they just want it spoon fed to them. We're technologists. We understand what it takes to do this kind of thing. And honestly, I don't care if the masses pick it up or not.

You know, these are supposed to be groups that are looking for their own kind. I really don't care if you have a unicorn valuation of a billion dollars or whatnot. It's like, all I want to know is where I can go find my tribe. And if that's on somebody's blog that's hosted on Linode, like in, you know, just in a corner somewhere, fine.

Who cares? This doesn't have to be a world of walled gardens that everybody goes to where everybody's at. You know, we can go back to a time when people just kind of congregated in groups and just did their own thing. Yeah. Can we, though?

I don't know. I feel I've felt that way about music forever. I miss subgenres and they sort of exist still, but not really. Not in any, I don't know. It's just different now. It is. It is. But I mean, the prices have come down so much where anybody can build their own blog and control their own presence.

Right. That it's not, you know, it's not a real barrier to entry anymore. And the tools are so much easier than they used to be. It's like you go up, you go to Linode, you spin up an instance, takes a few minutes, then you press the WordPress button. And, you know, you have you have a WordPress site, you figure out how to customize it.

You put on BuddyPress or whatever, if you want to have, you know, communities. Right. You're done. That's it. It's so easy. That's true. Yeah. So we have a bit of follow up about the Bloomberg spy chips from the Chinese that was supposedly on the super micro servers. And as we've been talking about in our security segment with Dave Bittner, nobody's been able to find one yet.

One of these chips. So no harm, no foul. Apparently, Bloomberg is not recanting on their story. They're saying that it's still they're standing by their message. But there has been an independent audit now. And the independent auditors, Nardello and co conducted this total audit and they could not find anything.

There is no evidence of unapproved designs or rogue software anywhere. Go figure. Yeah. So they're not saying that there can't be any out there. Just we haven't been able to find them. So seems like much ado about nothing. And it's going to be interesting to see if Bloomberg ever does recant or not on this because nobody's found a damn thing.

Yeah. A super micro needs to see the shit out of them. I agree. They really do. Because, I mean, that's just it's terrible for them. Apple's not going to do it just because of the PR slant. You know, Apple's like we said we didn't have anything. Now nobody's found anything. So let's move on. And Apple doesn't want to keep the story going at all.

Notice, you know, nobody really would want to. Amazon doesn't either. So super micro is really the only invested thing here that kind of needs to go after them. Yeah. I mean, they definitely have brand damage, you know, a brand damage suit against them. No question about that at all.

Yeah. It's like Bloomberg, show your work. That's it. That's really it. It's like if you if you have pictures or if you have a chip, let's see it. Otherwise, it's hearsay. Google Plus is shutting down faster than we thought. Guess why? I didn't even know it was still going.

Let me guess. Another hack? Yep. That's about it. Oh, no way. They were going to shut down in August next year, but they're moving it up to April. I'm like, why don't you just turn it off now? Why don't you just flip the switch now? Yeah. All 12 people might get upset at you that still use Google Plus.

But yeah, there's nobody's home over there. Get over it. It's an interesting choice to keep it going, especially since they got hacked yet again. Unbelievable. Brian, there's a new article in the New York Times.

Your apps know where you were last night and they're not keeping it secret. Right. This was not a secret. This is everything we've known for the last decade. Oh, yes. Yes, it is. I mean, I remember specifically a year ago around Thanksgiving, we were talking about this because Dave Bittner found an interesting story about how they were doing deep analytics work on figuring out where people went for the holidays.

Like, we've known this for a long time. We've known this for almost a decade. As soon as GPS chips went into the phone, that was it. And we even knew that before. Even when you had a flip phone, you could still do cell tower triangulation and people knew where you were. And this whole thing is just like doom and gloom and just reiterating it.

It's been passed around. I've seen it everywhere. And I'm like, guys, guys, yeah, we know. Stop writing. This is like the New York Times is turning into the reply all of, you know, professional journalism. It's shit we already know. Thank you very much.

Can you please move on and go do some better journalism? I'm OK with this. I think it's a good thing. Again, as you were just stating in our intro segment, we are technologists. We know this sort of stuff. The layperson does not. And the fact that they're bringing this out and shining sunlight on it is a good thing because just you and I screaming about it, that's never going to change anything.

When the general public goes, oh, my God, I need to start deleting some of these apps. I can't believe this is happening. That's when maybe, hopefully, app developers will start going, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. Yeah, but the problem is the general public are morons and they're going to overplay the case and they're going to think that it's worse than it actually is.

Well, and that gives us lots of fodder for our show. Then, Jason, case in point, Texas House Representative Ted Poe in in his questioning of Sundar Pichai of Google, there is an article, not an article, a video sent over to us by Michael Fry.

Thank you very much. Hat tip to Michael for that. And even he said, it's like, this is the most uncomfortable 81 seconds I've ever heard. Let's play that right now for the Peoples. I have an iPhone. And if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends, which will make them real nervous.

Does Google track my movement? Does Google through this phone know that I have moved here and moved over to the left? It's either yes or no. Not by default. There may be a Google service which you've opted in to use.

And if so, Google knows that I am moving over there. It's not a trick question. You know, you make a hundred million dollars a year. You ought to be able to answer that question. Does Google know through this phone that I am moving over there and sit next to Mr. Johnson, which would make him real nervous?

It's his question. It's yes or no. I wouldn't be able to answer without looking at. You can't say yes or no. Without knowing more details, sir. If I walk over there and sit next to Mr. Johnson and carry my phone, does Google know that I was sitting here and then I moved over there?

You're welcome anytime, Judge. Yes or no? I genuinely don't know without knowing much. I'm shocked you don't know. I think Google obviously does. What the hell was that all about?

Oh, well, the problem is, again, we need some younger people and some savvier people like my own representative, Ted Lieu, here in California, who actually understands technology. It'd be helpful if some of those people were making the laws. Yeah. Because this guy's like, it's a yes or no question.

I'm like, no, it's not. It's not a yes or no question. What did you install? What did you turn on? And what have you granted access to Google to? And that's, it's not a yes or no question. And I mean, Sundar had to be just like, you know, curling his toes wanting to scream at this guy.

Yeah. And we're going to have basically the roundup of his testimony next week. I haven't had time to go through all of it yet, so I don't want to get too deep into it because it sounds, it's fascinating. It's like three and a half hours long and I just haven't had time to finish up all of my thoughts on it. But we'll cover that on the next show with.

You know what? There's a, there's a market opportunity here for a clever developer that's listening to the show. Somebody should make an app, build an app that basically scans through all your settings and lets you know every single app that you have and which ones have location data enabled on them. Somebody should invent this.

Apple should make it. Well, they do. You go, you go under settings and you go under privacy and you're going to go under location and you can see every app that has access to your thing. And there's toggles next to every single one of them. It's not, that's true. Yeah. Apple already made it. We don't need a third party developer to do this.

Nevermind. I was just trying to make it easy for the masses. If you make it any easier, come on. That's the, that's the problem. I think making it too easy, then people just get lazy. Well, that's what ruined the internet. Yeah, honestly. Well, many things have ruined the internet, but yeah, this, uh, it's, it's just go figure out your damn technology.

This is driving me. It drives me crazy. Even my roommate yesterday, she got a zip file in and she keeps clicking on it and I'm like, and it keeps, and she's like, it's not doing anything. And when you double click on a zip file on a Mac, it just decompresses it and you go from there. And she's like, it's just keeps going.

And I'm looking at it in the list view and it's like zero bytes for the zip file. I'm like, well, you got a bad zip file. Yeah. And she's like, no, it's, I, this worked at the office. I opened this at the office and I went and did it. And it's like, no, it was a completely different zip file. And she had screwed up, but it's like, I don't understand this.

And then she's like, can I, can I move this full? They're like, how do I move these pictures over to here? I'm like, drag it. It's like, she's been on the internet for 20 years. Yes. But as you've mentioned on the show many times, you're not allowed to have an Amazon Echo in your house because of her.

Yes. And she's had a little paranoia. She's had a computer for 20 years. This is a thing. And my dad is the same way. And just people like maybe like 10, 15 years older than us, they don't want to learn the basics of how their technology works, how their computer works, how a file system works. You know, they still don't understand the difference between RAM and hard disk, the basics.

They don't know how folder structures work and it drives me bug nutty. And that's why I'm like, there's only so far you can dumb shit down for the masses before we just, you know, it gets worse for us. It's like, maybe we should make it harder for them to use it. So maybe they'll learn something.

That's all I'm saying instead of making it easier. Right. Okay. Deep breaths, deep breaths. Now, speaking of Google, they've released Google Earth Studio. It's a private beta. Now you have to sign up for it. But this thing is really cool. Did you get a chance to check this out, Brian?

I did. It's really, really cool. I don't know what I'd ever do with it, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah. It basically makes, it's like kind of After Effects for Google Earth. You can, you know, do timelines, do animations, do geopoints and routes and things like that and export it out to use on TV.

You can move the camera around, do pans and zooms. It is so cool. Here's the other cool part. It runs in the browser. Yeah. That's great. That's the crazy part. This thing runs in Chrome. Now, I don't know if it'll run on a Chromebook, but because the problem with it right now is it's, you have to do, you know, it's the private beta and you have to be invited in to, you can, you know, sign up and tell them who you are and they'll maybe let you in.

But until it goes, you know, full, full open, I can't really check it out and I just don't have the time right now to play around with it. But just watching the videos and some of the, uh, uh, the little demos that they have, it is so damn cool. I mean, Google, Google Earth is cool no matter what, but this is a, this is a really neat tool and I hope it comes out soon because I definitely want to play around with it.

Right. That's very cool. Now let's talk about something a little less cool. Uber. We haven't talked about them in a while. A little less cool. So remember back in March when they had the fatality where the, uh, the woman was hit? Yes. In Arizona. Killed unfortunately by a self-driving Uber testing car.

Um, just days after Uber has announced its plans to resume testing of its self-driving cars because they stopped for a while to try to figure out what the problem was and all that. Well, you know what the problem was. They turned off all the safeguards. Yes. They turned off all the safeguards. We do know what the problem was. So one would assume that, uh, basically they just held off on testing them for a while for more PR purposes than anything else.

Uh, they've decided to resume them and unfortunately for them, a whistleblower has come out from nowhere. Uh, Robbie Miller, who used to be a manager in the testing operations group, sent a cautionary email to a number of Uber's executives and lawyers prior to that fatal accident, warning that the vehicles were routinely in accidents resulting in damage that is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology.

Basically saying this shit is not ready for prime time. Maybe we should stop doing testing. Yeah. Get it off the road. Yeah. So the email was prompted by an incident in Pittsburgh where just a few days before Miller sent the message and Uber prototypes were completely off the road and onto the sidewalk where it continued to drive.

Okay. I figured it out. Basically what they do have over there at Uber, their AI division, they've got a bunch of programmers from ISIS that have, that have, you know, gotten into the system and their programming. I was like, drive on the sidewalk.

Let's run some people over. That's all it can be. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. So according to Miller's email, the episode was essentially ignored for days until Miller raised it with other managers. He also noted that toward the end of 2017, it took two weeks for engineers to investigate the logs of a separate Arizona incident in which an Uber vehicle almost collided with another car.

Miller has since left the company. And according to a colleague of Miller's at Uber, none of the executives ever responded to the email. And that was about it. Wow. That's insane. Yeah. I mean. Well done, Uber. Yeah. If you have an incident, shouldn't that be like, you know, investigated immediately instead of waiting two weeks?

One would think. Yeah. You know, the FAA has that like emergency response team that goes out. Yeah. Anytime anything happens, not even a crash near incident. Even a near miss. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they get out there and they have this emergency response team that goes out to figure out what the hell happened and how to figure it out.

We need an FAA for self-driving cars. That's really it because that's why it's safe to fly. That's why you can get on a plane right now and pretty much not have to worry that much that you're going to die. That's why the FAA exists. So we need an FAA for self-driving cars.

We honestly do. Especially if they're now that they're getting, you know, licensing and regulation that allows them to be on the roads with everybody else. Like we need an independent body looking after these things. Yeah. And was it the FTSB, Federal Transportation Safety Board? They're not doing a good enough job.

No. At all. They've got their hands full with regular cars. Exactly. We've had enough idiots on the road already. It's like, yes, we don't need robot idiots to deal with. Come on. Look, we're busy with just Prius drivers. You want us to do this too? Seriously. Yeah, we need something. But, you know, as we're moving away from regulation and things like that, it's probably not going to happen until enough people get killed and the furor finally gets loud enough that people will do something in Washington.

Right. Now, I found a really interesting article by Joe Morgan over on Slate. It's called, I'm a developer. I won't teach my kids to code and neither should you. Bravo! I thought this was really interesting. Yes, love this man. Thank you very much.

Holy shit. We have budget for a bell? I went out and I bought a bell. Sorry. Okay. It's actually been here for three years. It's the first time I've used it on this show. Nice. So, he's noticed that there are a lot of books now out there about teaching children to code and there's a lot of online, you know, summer coding classes and camps and after school code clubs and stuff that even, you know, Minecraft is basically the basis for a lot of this stuff as well.

Yep. And he's just saying, why would you do this? Because there's, coding in and of itself is not that big of a deal. It is straight up. It's not the new literacy. Yeah. Coding books for kids just present problems with correct solutions. It's basically just learning a formula. Developing is a completely different thing because developing is about creating something that's brand new.

And problem solving. And seeing if it works and trying again and problem solving, et cetera. All this stuff is basically the equivalent of us going out to, you know, grabbing open source code that does exactly what we need it to do and plugging it in. Yeah. You want to learn to solve problems, not to code. And that's his argument. Having said all of that, though, I do have to say that learning basic as a kid was very helpful to me.

So I'm not entirely sure I 100% agree with him. I mean, I agree. Focus on the problem solving stuff. But I think that there is a place for a basis, a baseline of code. Yes, I think you're right there. This has to be tempered with the fact that learning how to code actually is a good skill, but it's not the be all end all.

You're not going to go to code camp and come back with $100,000 a year salary. You know? No. It's not the way it works. You learn the basics. I mean, my entire career started because I got learn Perl in 30 days. And it took me four years to read the book, but so I'm like, when the hell am I going to use an XOR operator in Perl?

Right. Because I'm using text now. But anyway, yeah, learning the basics of how to code was fun. I mean, I do think that it's fun, but... It'll show if you have an aptitude for it, certainly. Oh, yeah. And if you don't, then get the hell out and stop doing that and do something else. Yeah, go to a liberal arts school then, you know?

Yeah. Because, I mean, it does teach you logic. Logic is good. We like logic. The problem I have with it, though, is at this young of an age, you know, depending on how young your kids are, it could be too young. I know that programming rewired my brain to see the world in a different way.

And it's not a good way, you know? No, that's why we're sitting here complaining all the time. Yeah, you know, it literally is, you know, you're a one or a zero. You're alive or dead. But it also taught me to see problems in a way that I'm like, okay, if I write this, how can somebody exploit it?

So that really started to get into when I was doing, like, a lot of PHP stuff with bigger systems. I'm like, okay, this works just fine right now if everybody puts in shit like they're supposed to. What if? There's a lot of what ifs when it comes to developing.

And you start to see the world in what ifs. I'm like, okay, what if this guy that's driving up the street from me decides to go left four feet and runs into me? You know, you just start to see how everything can fall apart. You start to see how everything can be broken. Yes. And you start to, there becomes an assumption in your head that somebody will try to break it, which is not a great way to think about humanity.

It's a truthful way to think about humanity. As you and I know, developing things all the time, people find every single possible way to break your stuff. But it does wire your brain to look at everything that way, which is not necessarily pleasant. No, it's actually really not a good thing.

That's why I'm so happy that I don't develop anymore. But it is so hardwired in me after 22 years of thinking that way. Oh, yeah. I can't get rid of it. We deconstruct things on this show all the time. We look at it and go, if we would have built this, we would have done this because that makes sense because we know people would try to do this with it.

Yeah. We would have also locked down our AWS, you know, S3 buckets and things like that because people will come and get it. That's one of the things I think a lot of these kids that are programming now that we see all these breaches from come from this stuff.

It's all lazy and they don't have that viewpoint that we do where maybe they should have started coding younger because they don't think the way that we do. Yeah. Let's look at every single possible way this can be torn down. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Think about the world as, you know, everybody wants to break your stuff.

That's it. And that's why I like when Dave Bittner was saying that, you know, data should be seen as toxic. Like you want as little of it in your system as possible because everybody's going to try and get it, which I love that viewpoint. And that's a viewpoint I think that probably both of us had most of the way through what we did.

I didn't want anything. It's the exact opposite of what everybody is doing right now, which is everybody wants their app to collect every single possible data point they possibly can. And they want all the datas. You want as little data as possible. Yeah. All the data equals profit in their mind. All the data in my mind says, oh, this just makes me a bigger target.

Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I'm on the fence about this. I do think programming when you're a kid was fun. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. It was for me, too. You know, making that stupid dragon that breathed fire and basic. Yeah. Yeah. That was awesome. I made a castle with lightning hitting it.

That was mine. That was fun. But anyway, let's move on to more fun news. AI. We've got two articles here. And what I love about this is because you can see things from one side or the other. The Pew Research folks came out with a new report this week.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans. Dun, dun, dun. Bum, bum, bum. So at Axios, they have an article titled The AI Crossroads, Dystopia vs. Utopia. And The Verge has one called The AI Boom is Happening All Over the World and It's Accelerating Quickly.

Mm-hmm. The Axios article is pretty much doom and gloom. Right. And experts argue AI may make unfair decisions, displace an enormous number of human workers, and lead to geopolitical upheaval. Yep. And The Verge article says, not everything is doom and gloom.

Part of the philosophy behind the AI Index report is about asking the right questions and making sure that people making policy, the public, and leaders of the AI industry have data to make informed decisions. Woo-hoo! You know? As we were just talking about, the people that are making the policy do not have that information.

We need to really solve that problem. The people that are making policy don't understand any of this. No. We barely understand any of it. Yes. We barely understand any of it. I do not have a good outlook about AI. I'm with the Axios article. Of course you are.

If I could be one of those nearly 1,000 tech experts that they interviewed, and I would be with the people, the other two, the two-thirds that expect technology to make most people better off in 2013 are fewer than two-thirds. I'm sorry. So I would be with that group. So I don't think that this is going to roll out in a good way.

And I think it's such a game-changing technology, if we ever get there, that it's going to be problematic. Yeah. The report this time around, though, does expand a little on last year's report. Last year's report was basically centered around North America. This year is global. And they do break down different parts of the technology because it's like, you know, okay, AI is a wrapper for all of this shit.

It's like they kind of lay it out. It's like, ah, it's not just this. Here's machine learning. Here's different types of machine learning. Here's visual learning and things like that. Here's mechanical Turks. Yes. And there's people on the back end. It's still all people all the way down, folks. But what they do mention is that visual recognition has really made massive jumps.

Yeah. And what's slowing down is natural language processing as it gets closer to human understanding, which I call bullshit on because I still can't get Siri to do anything she's supposed to do half the time. And I haven't turned my Alexa on in a while, so I don't know how she's doing lately.

Oh, it's getting better. It really is? It's getting a lot better. Yeah, it really is. Okay. I'm going to put it in my office and play around with it. Yeah, stick it in your office. You should play around with it a bit because it's surprising me how much better it's gotten. I mean, my wife still can't use it for shit, but. Yeah. It never understands her, but, you know.

Yeah. So, yeah, I'll check it out. But this is an interesting report. It's very long. All the links will be in the show notes to both those articles and the report itself. So check that out at GOG.show slash 305. Mm-hmm. And a little bit of follow-up, sort of, about Bird Scooters. I think the last time I even mentioned them, they had been thrown in the rivers and the lakes here and the marina here in Santa Monica.

People are just dumping them all over the place. So this article over at Slate by April Glasser asks, why do people keep throwing electric scooters into rivers and lakes? And what should companies like Bird and Lime do to stop them? They do it because people are jerks. Yeah. If Jason and I had started these companies, we would have thought of this.

Yeah. And built something ahead of time to make them not do it. So, yeah, they're just showing up everywhere. And the problem is, of course, you know, these are kind of shifty, crappy batteries that are being thrown in water. It's not good for the environment. No, it's killing the fish and could kill the birds.

Like, literally kill the birds, not the bird scooters. Literally kill the birds. Yeah. And in a lot of the cases, the GPS, you know, the last known location is before it went in the water. The companies aren't really, initially, they weren't going and getting them. They just counted them up as a loss and bought new ones. And yeah, it's not good.

So now people are starting to ask questions. A third-party site called Scooter Map has come up and they basically track all the scooters that have been thrown in water, which is pretty crazy. And they're asking, you know, who's supposed to go get these now? And obviously, the scooter companies should be the ones that go get them.

They're the ones making the money and it's their property. So they're starting to do that now. And they've got enough money that they can go ahead and afford to go deep diving for them and pulling them out of the water, which they're starting to do, thankfully. Just very funny stuff that you're hearing about here. So yeah, it just happens.

People are jerks. That's why they throw them in the water. And it's up to the companies to go fix these damn things. Yeah. That's why we have a show, too, because people are jerks.

I was sitting around the other night and scrolling through Netflix, as one does, looking for something to watch, and I discovered that Russell Brand has a new special. He's kind of been out of the spotlight for quite a while. And I always, I have mixed feelings about Russell Brand.

I think he's funny, but I also think he can be quite a, well, full of himself. But that's kind of his brand. That's Russell Brand, isn't it? Yeah. So it is what it is. You take Russell Brand and you know what you're getting. So he has a new special called Rebirth.

And I watched it, and I thought it was hilarious. And as it came to the end, I wrote you and said, you need to put this on right now. And I did. And you did. I watched the whole, well, you gave me a clip at the end. You started at like one hour and eight minutes or something, or 56 minutes. I'm like, okay, put it on and watched his epic rant.

And I'm like, yep, that's on, that's on target for us for sure. And then I finished it. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. I just, I wrote you because I was like, this could be our show. He could be on Grumpy Old Geeks. This rant is exactly what we do all the time. Yeah. He just makes a lot more money doing it.

And so I finished it and then I watched the rest of the show. Then I went back to the beginning and watched the whole thing again, even the rant and the ending again. It was really good. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I highly recommend it. It was actually, I was surprised at how good it was. So it's one of the best comedy specials I've watched in a long time.

The thing about Russell is I, you know, I was on the douchebag fence for a while. I'm like, ah, is this guy really a douchebag? Is he not a douchebag? I read his book, my bookie book or something a long time ago, and it didn't really sit that great with me. But then for the day job, we interviewed him for the old show that we had and he was amazing.

He was, he was a genuinely awesome human being. Right. And I'm like, okay, well, that really screws things up for me. My worldview of Russell Brand has completely changed. And hopefully he's going to be back on the new show early next year.

I highly recommend this. I think this is one of your best finds so far this year. Definitely good. It's definitely very funny. And the thing about him being a douchebag is he knows he's a douchebag and he plays clips of himself being a douchebag and talks about him being a douchebag. Right. So the self-awareness of it is kind of makes it okay almost.

Yeah. And I love his use of language. He's very, very intelligent. That's the one thing that he is. You know, when he first came out, I'm like, ah, this guy's just, you know, kind of an idiot. But turns out he's the anti-idiot. He was doing that for effect back then. But now he's, you know, he's changed.

He's got a kid. He keeps bees, you know, and generally just kind of a, he's a changed person, I think. Right. Yeah. Seems to be. And, but still very funny. So highly recommended. Now, I don't know if we talked about this when it was first announced, but as we all know, Disney now owns Star Wars and the Star Wars universe, and they are squeezing every, every last penny out of it that they can try to do.

One of the things that they decided to do was make these things called the Star Wars Galaxy of Adventures shorts for YouTube, which would be animated short bits that tell all the original first three Star Wars stories in like one minute clips using original dialogue and sound effects from the original movie, which is kind of cool.

So I haven't watched any of these yet, but apparently the six first, the first six ones are up now, which they're all under a minute long. They ripped through stuff like Luke getting his lightsaber from Obi-Wan, Darth Vader stalking around and surveying his troops, brief introductions to R2-D2, C-3PO, as well as Chewbacca. There's narration that helps bring context and bring first time viewers and kids up to speed on what's going on, which I guess you would need to do if you're taking a two hour movie and doing it in like six one minute clips.

Yeah. I haven't checked it out, but I'm definitely looking forward to taking a look at it. My son's still too young, so it's not like time I can watch it with him yet, but I will check it out for myself because I'm a Star Wars fan. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, just still, I understand this, the cliff notes for Star Wars, but you know, just go watch the movies.

They're not bad. Well, some of them are really bad, but those four, five, and six ain't so bad. Right. And in other news of stuff coming back, The Good Place is returning for a fourth season. I just particularly like this, uh, this little bit here.

The best sitcom on TV will return for more surreal ethics dilemmas, shrimp cocktail feasts, bad janets, Jacksonville Jaguars soundouts, and the oddly plausible afterlife scenarios. I'm excited about this. I'm happy it's coming back. I'm not surprised because it's done very well. So this isn't like, oh my God, is it going to come back or not?

Of course it's coming back. Yeah. But it's good news. Have you, where are you at in season three? I am, uh, caught up. Okay. I just, I had fell off for a while. I had episode eight on my DVR and then I'm just like, eh, I'm just not really in the mood and I let it go. I've got to say somebody, one of our listeners on Twitter said something about that before we were even watching, like I had just started watching it and he said, I don't know about season three.

Season three was not the best. That's for sure. But, uh, you know, shows sometimes do that. They go up and down. I mean, look at Homeland. I think that's the best example of good season, bad season, good season, bad season. Uh, it happens a lot. So hopefully season three was a bit of an aberration and you know, they'll come back strong.

I, you know, I did enjoy season three though. Although it was good. It just wasn't as good. Yeah. Because you kind of know what's happening. And, uh, so I just finished episode 10 last night. I, I, cause I saw you put this in the show notes. So I'm like, ah, let me go get caught up on it. And I did. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

I don't know. Is the season over now? Uh, I think there's two episodes left. Okay. One episode probably. I don't know. I'm not. I think they do 13, 13 episode runs, but we'll see. Uh, anyway, uh, so far so good. I, I, I still enjoy it. It's really fun. It's so clever.

It's so clever. And for somebody who has hate sitcoms to say that, it's mean something. Yeah. It's incredibly well written. I'd have to say it's probably the best written show on conventional networks. Now a little followup on anchorman. You gave me the homework of watching anchorman.

Yep. And I'm like, oh, I don't think I'm going to do this. And then somebody on our clash of clash Royale, uh, clan chimed in and said, Hey, are you going to do anchorman this week? I can't wait to hear what you think. And I'm just like, ah, shit. Must die.

So after I was done with, uh, after I was done with the good place last night, I, I had, I have a computer in my room again, unfortunately, because of the last show I had to set up an editing station. So right next to my bed, I have a big 4k monitor with my laptop plugged into it.

And I'm like, you know what? Can we throw some headphones on and I'll just put it on while I nod off to sleep. And I watched about 40 minutes of it. Um, I'm actually, I'm closer to halfway. A little, like right about halfway in the movie. And I got to say, it's a fucking masterpiece.

It's amazing. All right. I, I do not like Will Ferrell and I actually like him a lot in this movie. It's so strange. I do have to say that man needs to get his teeth fixed. Cause that was, it's so jarring to see his bottom teeth are so janky.

I'm like, how do you watch anything from England? Well, I kind of don't have it on a 4k monitor three feet from my face to start with, but it just, it really kind of threw me out every time. I'm like, Oh dude, go get that fixed. You have more money than you possibly could use.

So, you know, go to the dentist. But anyway, so far, I think it is, I think it's a fantastic movie. I am so surprised that how good it is. It is a classic. It really is. I'm glad that you're finally watching it and enjoying it. Now I get a lot of yourself, San Diego. Now I get a lot of jokes that everybody has been saying over the years and they're like, it's Anchorman.

I'm like, I love lamp. Don't watch Anchorman. They're like, what is wrong with you? Now I know why. Yeah. It's so good. I'm glad you're watching it. Also in announcements, Stranger Things season three has a new teaser trailer. If you like listening to vintage synthesizers, watching gigantic letters slowly come into view or learning the titles of television episodes, you won't get to watch for months.

Then this trailer is for you. Yeah. I went and watched it and I'm like, okay, this is, yeah, this is. It's dumb. I have to admit though, it's been so long since I've heard the theme that I got little goosebumps. I got goosebumps too. I can't wait. I know, but it's not going to come out till October.

So. I know. Yeah. I was kind of bummed about that. But in another interesting turn, we've been ragging on Avengers Infinity War for so long now. It dawned on me that I've only seen the first 20 minutes of it twice because I keep falling asleep because I put it on and then I just fall asleep.

I'm like, I'm going to get through this damn movie. So I sat down and had, uh, I had a couple, we have, uh, we make rum balls for the holidays, which is basically just Nilla wafers, sugar and rum and nuts. And, you know, they get you a little buzzed, but they also give you a massive sugar high.

So I can't go to bed for a couple hours after I have a couple of them. So I'm like, I'm going to rum ball the shit out of Infinity War. So take this with a grain of salt because I was high on sugar, had a little rum and a little wine before I, before I watched it. I really liked it.

I finished it and I was just like, that wasn't bad. I kind of really dug it. And I mean, it does have 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. So other people do agree. But yeah, the, the beginning part, I was just like, what the hell is this? Cause I'm, I'm so kind of over superhero movies.

I just have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it because I'm just like, this is just a waste of time. Like, like superhero movies, fantasy movies. I'm like, you know, even, even give me a crappy episode of Mr. Robot. There's something more based in reality. And I'm happier with that. But see, this fantasy crap, I'm just kind of over, I guess I've, I've passed peak fantasy in my life, but I did enjoy this movie.

I thought it was well done. And I, you know, I, I was kind of with Thanos on this. I'm like, yeah, let's just kill them all. Let God sort them out and let's get back to business. Yeah. See, I'm just over superhero movies. They've got to be like quirky, like Ant-Man or something like that, or really funny.

Like the last Thor was, I liked those a lot. But I just didn't care about this at all. And I, after you told me that you liked it, I did a quick Google search just to see what was coming up. And I thought there was a really interesting article over at Salon that argues that because the trailer for the next one just dropped, Avengers Endgame, that basically argues unless there's some emotional weight and end game and like people don't survive, if they bring everybody back, this is just stupid and it was all a waste of our time.

There has to be some emotional weight to this. Somebody has to die. Right. And I agree with that. And I will not see it until I find out. I will, I want spoilers before I waste another two and a half hours of my life. Right. Yeah. I think, you know, I mean, here's my, my instant take on it.

Everybody that died at the end is going to come back except for Gamora. She's gone. Anybody that died, like actually died, those people are gone. But, uh, you know, anybody that died when the, when Thanos snapped his fingers, I think those people are going to come back because, you know, Dr. Strange did that thing where he just kind of fuzzed out.

He's like, I've seen 14 million permutations on how this is going to end and only one works. And when he did that and then he gave up the time stone, I'm like, okay, well, this is the one he's going, he knows what's going to happen. So he's going that route. So I'm pretty sure that Dr. Strange is going to save the day and it, like the time will just flip back to where it was.

That's my guess because nobody dies in the Marvel universe except Stan Lee. I know. He ain't coming back. No. Now I found an old album this week that I was, I was trying to get some work done and I'm like, ah, I need something. And I was listening to some, uh, some French music that I like to listen to.

And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. I used to love Cirque du Soleil soundtracks and I dug up the soundtrack for Alegria, which is hands down the best Cirque du Soleil show ever made. And also the best soundtrack of all of those. And I had it on loop. I love this soundtrack. If you've never heard it, definitely give it a shot.

It is. It is very good. I totally forgot about all those soundtracks. There are most of them are fun. Oh yeah. Cirque du Soleil does music well. And I mean, I've seen almost every Cirque du Soleil show multiple times, but, uh, yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm a Cirque nerd. And my friend, Jenny from Boing Boing, she used to call it Cirque du Soleil.

She's so gay, but, uh, not far off on that one, but it is still, it's still a really good soundtrack though. I, I had the, uh, like a cut of the show from like the nineties. It was on VHS and I wore out the VHS tape because I just had it on the background while I was working.

So I highly recommend go, go check out Alegria. If you're looking for some nice music to, to work to the Spotify link will be in the show notes. Now this next one I just discovered, uh, it was, uh, it's been doing the rounds, particularly from Richard blade who hosts, uh, one of the shows on, uh, Sirius X, XM on the, um, they call it first wave, which is all the music I like.

It's the, you know, eighties, all the eighties alternative music stuff. So, uh, and he posted this. So that's how I found it. I don't know how long it's been around for, but it's deaf leopard, deaf leopard covering personal Jesus by Depeche mode. And it is phenomenal. It's so good. It's so good.

Now I used to actually be into deaf leopard when I was a kid and before I discovered alternative music. So this is kind of like, uh, you know, my past coming back to haunt me, but it is actually amazing. And the video is actually pretty good too. I can't believe how old these guys are. I don't know about the closeups. Oh, I started watching and I'm like, holy shit, these guys are old.

And then I like, I'm like, oh wait, we all are now. Uh, man, they look like, they look like beat up luggage from the sixties that. Oh yeah. Yeah. They have, but, uh, it is absolutely phenomenal and well worth the listen. I couldn't believe how good it was. Uh, an excellent cover.

At the library. I finally read Artemis, the, the followup novel by Andy Weir, um, following up from the Martian, which was an amazing novel and a really good movie as well. So, um, Artemis, I actually really liked it.

It was very good. Good. I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the Martian, but I enjoyed it a lot. Yeah. That was pretty much my takeaway too. It's like, I, I enjoyed it as a standalone sci-fi novel. It was definitely not as good as, as the Martian was.

It did have a lot of, you know, that let's fix some shit porn in it. Lots of that. Yeah. But, uh, for the most part, I thought it was, I thought it was a pretty good standalone little book. Pretty much read like a screenplay, which means that he's, you know, bucking to get another movie made. Bingo.

That was my biggest problem with it. It didn't read like a novel. I could see the movie being made as I was turning the pages. It read like a screenplay, which, so it didn't get in as in depth as, as the Martian did the book because the Martian book was like, Ooh, it dug deep. And there was a lot of stuff that never made it into the movie.

This pretty much felt like a screen. Yeah. This is, this is an hour 35 minute popcorn film. It really is. And I would have preferred it be more of a book, but, uh, it is what it is. So it's well worth the time. It was a good read. Definitely. We have made a lot of jokes about mechanical Turks when we're talking about AI.

Wow. Russia just went all in on this high tech robot shown on Russian state television has turned out to just be a man in a suit. Oh, Russia 24 praise the Android during coverage of a youth forum dedicated to robotics, boasting that robot Boris has already learned to dance and he's not that bad, but sharp eyed bloggers were dubious.

The Russian website. T journal listed questions about the robot's performance. Where were Boris's external sensors? Why did the robot make so many unnecessary movements while dancing? And why did the robot look like a person would fit perfectly inside of it? Because one day. Later photographs of the robot were posted on social media showing the very visible neckline of the person in the suit.

And it turns out, uh, Boris or Aloysia, the robot is a costume made by a company called show robots. It's a 3000 pound costume pound as in British. Yeah. I'm like, that's one strong dude in that suit equipped with microphone and tablet displays that creates the near total illusion that before you stands a real robot, you know, what would have been the best reveal on this if they took off the head and it was Adam Savage and this was just like his Comic-Con costume is cosplay.

Yeah, nice. So that was pretty funny stuff there. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Jimmy, Paul, Doug, Jeslyn, and Ramsey. And Ramsey said, saw this and thought of how you gamed your fitness measurements with yoga.

Really good article on unintended consequences or not. And also some privacy stuff to scare you. And it's over at the outline.com. The article is your boss wants you healthy for all the wrong reasons. And it basically says that they're just tracking everything that you do. Yep, exactly.

So that's not exactly what you hope for. And Jim also wrote in on Patreon. Here's a perfect example of why it's so hard to quit Amazon. A few weeks ago, I started working about 8 a.m. in my home office. I immediately realized that my laptop charger is fried. Do I take a few hours off to go get one and fuck up everything I'm supposed to deliver for the day?

Nope. Found one on Amazon. Chose same day delivery. When it got to my door, my battery was at 35%. Amazon is an awful company and they're fucking everything up. But I don't know how you can beat that. And yes, I was just a little bit ashamed of myself for a while after that. But not enough that I won't do it again. And I just want to make a quick note here about how much we appreciate all of our friends that have upped their pledges recently.

There's been a lot of you. It's really, really appreciated. To those of you that brought them down or stopped for whatever reason, we appreciate the support you gave while you could. It is literally the only reason we're still doing this. Yeah, seriously. And over at PayPal, we've got a couple new donations from William, Tedford, and Joseph. And Joseph writes in, It seems that PayPal will no longer allow me to offer my two cents to folks and now demand one dollar minimum.

Fuckers. And I guess he did a cheaper transaction before he was, was he one of the couple cents ones? Yeah, I think we got like a penny from him that first time around. So thank you for that. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Over on Facebook, we got a few messages.

Morton Rhoda says, Move fast and break the bank. Uber is heading for a crash. This is a New York Magazine article about how basically Uber is not doing very well. Yeah. Which we could have told you already. So it's not looking good. The financial situation in particular is kind of weird for them at the moment.

But they are, you know, they've already announced their intention to go public. So that should probably fix that because a lot of people will invest in them because they're dumb. But both Uber and the investors. Yes. Yes. And Paul Rhoda, so you guys may want to go to Sweden for this. The IT Crowd, a UK comedy.

Now, Jason talked about this a long time ago. Oh, yeah. And I totally forgot that he talked about it. And then I watched it and talked about it. And I just could never get into it. Yeah. You'd think we've you'd think it would be perfect for us. And I think the problem is it's too perfect for us. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like that's why I can't watch Silicon Valley.

It's yeah. It's like I don't want to watch my job. I don't watch a TV show about my job. And especially when they get things wrong, you get twice as mad. Yeah. And when I was deeply embedded in doing music industry stuff, I couldn't watch Anourage. It just it was too show business for me.

I just couldn't do it. Yeah. And you can't watch Empire. And I love Empire. You know? Yeah. I can't watch Empire at all. So that's and Benjamin wrote us. Gotta love WordPress. WordPress botnet infects over 20,000 sites and turns them into attack bots. Yay. Yay. Of course.

WordPress. Oh, and you see version five is out. I did. Yeah. Yeah. Ruined almost a whole day. I think I mentioned that last time when I was posting the show. It just kind of shit the bed on us. Great. Thanks, guys. Woohoo.

Just what I want. Oh, my God. And that new the new editor that they have. Have you played with that? No, not yet. Oh, I got so many messages from friends like saying this is just such a giant steaming pile of shit. I think friend of the show MXV was the most prolific.

He was just like he's like someone needs to Schillinger that fucking Gutenberg and Schilling during Schilling during is a reference to the old TV show Oz. If you've never seen it, there were there were several episodes where Schillinger like to fist other inmates with the hand covered in motor oil.

Yes. So it's beachy. Oz was Oz was a fantastic show, but you don't want to watch it before you go to bed. You will have nightmares. I'll keep that. Yeah. Over on Twitter. Yappy Fox writes in. I'm a grumpy old furry geek. Nine fursuits all started with Chuck E.

Cheese in 89, much like Bittner's reindeer. So what animals would you be? Not. No judgment zone, but I don't even I got nothing, man. I got absolutely nothing. I have no idea, but I've done the suit thing before when I had to do some, you know, just side jobs.

It is kind of fun to be anonymous in those suits. So I don't know what animal I would be because I never thought about it, but maybe I'll think about it and I'll get back to you. Yappy Fox. No, I can't wait. And Moss 6502 wrote in saying, I love the young Bittner job stories. We like all the Bittner past stories.

They're very funny. Yeah. I did get a call from a friend of the show, David Teeter, who actually literally had to pull his car over that he was laughing so hard. He called me and told me about it. But yes, it was very fun. Good stuff. Kenny writes in. You've been saying it for ages, but anyway, puzzle solving won't stop mental decline.

We know. Yes. Thank you for the link. We'll put that in the show notes from BBC, their health division. But yes, we know puzzle solving won't do it. It's called Time. We're made of meat. I can't even remember the name of that company, but they got sued, didn't they? They had to stop all their advertising because it was misleading.

It wasn't Headspace, was it? No, it was the brain dumping. I can't remember. I tried it out. Go back to like... You used it for a year. Season one of our show. Yeah, you used it for a year and the fact that you can't even remember it shows how well it worked. Exactly. And Ken writes this.

I love the guys at GOG Podcast, but I also kind of like imagining the reaction of when Jason DeFilippo sees this video of Bird Scooters. And this is over on Adweek, and Bird has created an imaginary carless society, which is exactly that. It's imaginary. Oh, God.

No. And unfortunately, I can't see the video because you have to pay for access to it. So, but I'm sure, I'm sure I would just, you know, probably blow against it. Strickey writes in, I keep getting emails from you guys like this. Each one I report to your phishing email address.

However, I never get any feedback. At the moment, I don't believe any emails I get from Apple. Am I right not to trust these emails? And this was an actual tweet to Apple support, and they cc'd us on it. So apparently there's a problem with Apple emails. Well, I wrote him back, and I'm like, view the source, first off, so you can see all the header information from the emails.

And even easier, just check the links. If they don't go to Apple domains, they're phishing. And it ain't Apple's fault. Well, here's the problem with that advice, is you never want to click on links from somebody you don't know sent them. You don't have to click on them. You just kind of mouse over them and see what the URL is if you're using a decent email program.

Yeah, yeah. Find the source. You know, you can, but a lot of these things have redirections in them, too. So if they're sending out from a service, it'll be like, you know, a giant MailChimp string because they track your clicks. They want to know because they can track your opens with the tracking pixel, and then they track the clicks so they can track engagement.

But if I ever do that, I only open those. I actually have a virtual machine running that I can open up and drop stuff into and then run it from there because I'm paranoid. I don't want it to run. I found I just never click on anything.

That seems to work. That also works. Yes, that definitely works. But I have a parallels, like minimal instance that's generally always running. So I've got windows open so I can just open it up in edge, which is not going to be edge anymore. Right. And Barrett over on Twitter sent us a meme image at, with the rise of self-driving vehicles, there will eventually be a country song about how your truck left you, too.

I think that we need to write that song. You're the musician. Let's get on it. I'll get some lyrics going. I don't know how country you are, though, because that's got to be a country song. I could do a little twang on the acoustic. All right. Quantum Leap writes in, about DNS-based filtering, you probably were pointing at PyHole.

Yes, PyHole, that was the one. The other one you didn't know the name of is AdGuard Home. Never heard of that one. A way simpler in there. SDN, simple domain name filter, works amazingly good. No fine-tuning required. I have never heard of AdGuard, but PyHole was definitely the one that we were talking about. Yeah. And he also says, if you don't want the hassle of running your own DNS server, just use the free DNS server on your router and use DNS crypt.

But the thing is, I just kind of moved over to that new DNS service that we got the other day that's being run by Cloudflare, and I put that on my Eero system, so everybody in the house is using the Cloudflare DNS, and it is fast as hell. But I've also got on the Eero, I've got Eero Plus, which does ad filtering for me anyway.

So I'm not going to do that. But if anybody wants to check this stuff out, there will be links in the show notes. Okay, over at GOG.show, Casey writes us, Guys, check out the story where a garbage truck had to dump its load in a parking lot after a lime scooter battery started the trash on fire. Five scooters were found in the load. Keep up the grump, Casey.

Yeah, that's great. And, you know, it's great that they're being dumped in the oceans now, too. Yeah, literally a dumpster fire. Yep, yep, literally. Deb writes in, where do you recommend buying Apple peripherals like external drives? Since it looks like OWC has recently started selling lots of fake Apple products. I really don't trust Amazon these days with all the third-party counterfeit products.

I'm just an older basic Mac user with a 2012 Power Mac G5. Wow. That needs a time machine external drive. Now, I don't trust OWC or their Mercury Elite Pro externals after reading so many one-star reviews on Yelp. Thanks for the input. Get them from Apple or go to an Apple store.

But also, as we learned a few weeks back, Apple will start selling their products directly on Amazon now. And as part of that deal, a lot of those resellers, the shady ones, will need to get verified now. So they will be disappearing very quickly. So in a very short period of time, you will be able to get all your Apple stuff from Amazon and mostly trust them.

Yeah, I mean, I get Western Digital Elements drives. That's what most of my drives are that I use for Time Machine now, besides my Synology. But yeah, the Western Digital ones have been rock solid. Actually, you can go to Best Buy, too. You just go to Best Buy and pick one up there. That's true. They've got everything that you need.

And I'm pretty sure they're not selling counterfeit goods from Best Buy. Yeah. Graziello writes us, Hey, guys. Hope you're all well. Quick question. What paid antivirus would you recommend for PCs and smartphones? Thanks. Keep grumpy. I was always happy with Symantec on my PCs, and I've heard their smartphone stuff is pretty good, too.

What are you using these days, Jason? I'm using, I still have Symantec on my PC because I got it free with my cable subscription when I was in Chicago. And you can also check about that because a lot of cable providers will give you, if you get internet through them, they'll give you a free subscription to antivirus software.

And if you do buy an Eero and Eero Plus, they give you free malware and virus protection, too. There's a lot of places to get that stuff. But, yeah, last time I checked on my, oh, wait, no, no, no. I take that back. It's not Symantec. I'm running Norton on my PC.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I got a free Norton account that still works even though I don't have my cable account anymore, which is kind of funny. Yeah, I mean, any of the big ones on PC are pretty good, so see if you can get one for free. Stay away from Kaspersky. You don't want some Kaspersky right now. Nope, nope.

That one you don't want. No. Lamar writes in, I know you guys have been asked this question multiple times, but what podcast player do you recommend to listen to your show on on Android devices? I recommend an iPhone. I don't recommend an iPhone. Google Podcasts is really good. It should be on your Android device if you have even remotely recent ones.

So just make sure that Android is up to date and you should see a thing for Google Podcasts. And if you go to GOG.show and in the sidebar on the right, there is a link to subscribe in Google Podcasts. So you should be able to get right on that. There you go. I should probably check to make sure I actually made that link before we put that up, but we're going to go with it anyway.

If not, just go to Google Podcasts and search for Grumpy Old Geeks. Right. And Eric, the accountant writes in, this is in my Facebook feed every day. I must be profiled by Facebook as a special kind of idiot. I love how it pulls away from a Ferrari and the scooter. I think for two bills, you get a toy Isetta that can sit on your desk and a better urban lifestyle.

Unfortunately, the link has stopped working to this. The YouTube video still works, but I think it's basically a tiny car, right? It's like the smart cars that we have here in the U.S., but it looks so much better. I think this thing looks pretty cool, actually. Well, I will tell you in one second, because of course I have to wait to skip the ad.

Oh my God, what is that thing? What is that thing? It's a little mini car. I'm kind of like, it feels very Italian. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's much better than the smart cars that we have here, which you can take a look at the link in the show notes for those. No, this thing is actually kind of cool.

I'm not hating it at all. Nope. No, if I saw one on the 101, I would probably just laugh at it, because you're going to die. But yeah, I do like how the thing opens. The whole front of the car pops out.

It's kind of neat. There's no side doors. It's just in the front. So I don't know how this is rated for crash tests, but we'll see. Snuggly. This is not a car for fat people. No. This is definitely not a car for fat people. Zachary writes in, this question is mainly for Jason.

What is the model of your Synology? I'm looking to get a NAS, and I know you've had positive things to say about the one you have. Also, what drives did you get, and what did you end up going with? I was thinking just the standard WD Reds. Thanks in advance. And keep up the great work. There was no K on that.

But unfortunately, the Synology I have has been discontinued. But I've got one of the, just get the basic four bay ones. So mine has four bays. I've got Seagate server drives in it right now, but I think I'm going to get rid of those and retrofit it for SSDs.

Because it is slow. I will say that. It is not great for speed if you're moving files around. I mean, you're still limited by the network, but when you've got four, like, stripe drives, it can take a while. So if you're going to get one, just check what they've got on market right now, because I think I'm three versions behind, because I've had it for a couple of years, and they keep releasing them.

They're great. I love my little Synology. I don't use it that much, except for playing things that I bought from Sweden on the TVs around the house anymore. But, yeah, because I have eight terabyte removable drives that I move around the house. But for what it is, it's great. I haven't played with it in a while, and you can make your own, like, Dropbox alternate, and it's just a Linux server.

That's all it is. Yep. So you can do a lot of fun stuff with it. I just haven't had the time because work. And Jason writes in, Hi, guys. They had a great epic rap battle against Musk versus Zuckerberg, and sends us the YouTube link. Had to share it in case it didn't come across your radar. Stay Grumpy, Jazz.

Thanks for sending that. David writes in, Hey, guys. Got a couple of interesting interrelated things for you. One is a link to a Medium article about the cost of JavaScript in 2018, and the other one is a developer slash dot dot org story about Electron and the decline of native apps.

As someone who does a bit with Angular and has been thinking about an Electron app, it's food for thought. I don't think client-side web frameworks or web on desktop apps are going away. I do remember the good old days of trying to compress images down below 100K for 100K total for an entire page.

Oh, I remember that, too. Oh, my God. Also, developing JavaScript without frameworks. Sure, the new frameworks give us some great functionality and well-tested and well-built stuff, but the web sure isn't any snappier than it was in 56K modem days. Ain't that the truth? Ain't that the truth. Because JavaScript is the fucking devil.

I hate JavaScript. Me, too. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to stop developing. I just can't stand it. Carl writes in, Love the show, geeks. This message is coming to you from the land. Jason managed to escape. Illinois, the only place where governors are elected for four-year terms but ended up serving 10 to 20 years in prison. That's true.

Here's an interesting lawsuit before the Illinois Supreme Court on biometric data collection and a debate as to when a person is aggrieved. An amusement park chain, Six Flags, is arguing that it has a right to collect your biometric data, fingerprints in this case, without your permission as long as they don't compromise the data. That's kind of like saying it's okay for me to take nude photos of my neighbor without permission just as long as I don't let the pictures get published.

One more random thought. I know your frustration with the term AI. Would it be more appropriate to say AI stands for algorithmic intelligence? No, the problem with me is the intelligence part, though. Final random thought. The book about selling air that you were looking for. Yeah, no, I got nothing. Stay grumpy, geeks. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Holly writes in, How could anything go wrong here? And it's an article over at The Intercept and it's titled Homeland Security will let computers predict who might be a terrorist on your plane. Just don't ask how it works. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Matt writes in, Hey, grumpy old geeks, fellow grump here.

Great podcast. It's nice to be able to listen to people speak their minds and not worry about political correctness, etc. Now, I try not to get on my high horse and rant about shit, but our Aussie politicians have out-trumped your Trump with dumb shittery. Check this out. And this is the Australian encryption bill that we talked about in the last episode. So, yes, we agree.

It is stupid. And over at iTunes, Great Show But. That's the title of the review. I really enjoy the show with two grumpy old geeks when they talk about technology, which is 99% of the show. However, please, for God's sake, stop talking about politics and other stuff you have quote-unquote opinions about that have nothing to do with what most people want to hear from you.

I absolutely don't want to hear F the police. And based on what you think is going on in a very complex and fluid environment, you have no clue about other than the fake news you read, hear, or see. And that was a five-star. Yes, thank you for the five-star rating about a show that apparently you don't like.

No, he does like the show. And here's the thing. Well, he doesn't want to hear our opinions. That's all the show is, our opinions. Well, I understand. Look, I'm taking this to heart. I'm not mentioning politics or anything, or any of the crap that's happening. We're just sticking to tech because I can take creative criticism when you give us five stars.

Dig it. Well, thank you for listening and fuck Trump. On a more serious note, though, since you're convinced we're only reading, seeing, and hearing fake news, by all means, please go visit GOG.show and send us a note with news sources you think we should be checking out because we love finding new news sources.

We really do. Yes, and we're pretty good at figuring out which ones are bullshit. Anyway, so if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or question that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review or feel free to rip us a new asshole, but as long as you give us that five stars, we might actually take your advice to heart.

Tossing shout outs! Shout out to Derek Nickel for his video advice on getting shit set up in my studio. He's been DMing me over on Twitter and just been very helpful for tossing out ideas and stuff. So thanks, Derek. Thank you. And a shout out to NASA.

NASA's been doing some pretty incredible things even though we have no idea. We don't give them any money. We don't have any idea if there will be a NASA or if they will have guns in the near future. But in addition to, you know, landing the rover on Mars, Voyager 2 has exited the heliosphere, the plasma bubble created by the sun that encompasses most of our solar system and entered interstellar space joining the first Voyager, which did this in 2012.

How cool is that? V-ger. It's more than 11 billion miles from Earth, which is pretty awesome. Both spacecraft, and this is about to blow your mind, are still technically within the solar system and they will be until they exit the Oort Cloud, a large collection of distant objects that are still affected by the sun's gravity.

It is not known how wide the Oort Cloud really is, so scientists are estimating that it will take between 300 years to maybe 30,000 years to exit the actual solar system. If it doesn't run into anything by then inside the Oort Cloud, we'll see how that goes.

But we'll never know. Will we? We won't. Well, you and I certainly won't. We'll be dead. We'll be dead, so fuck it. And because I want to end on a funny note and we don't have a spot for this week, there is a site called EnglishRussia.com that I follow on Twitter and this is a Russian blogger is cosplaying different stars for, they say, for low budget.

It's kind of like, you know, a fiver. Right. But it's just a bunch of pictures. Go look at them. They will pretty much make you crack the fuck up. It's pretty damn funny. This guy is really, really funny. I think my favorite is Freddy Krueger. I think he did a great job with Freddy Krueger.

I'm a big fan of the Rihanna one, actually. Okay. That's pretty good, too. That's pretty good. So go check that out if you need a laugh because not everything has to be serious. So until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Chilmeister. 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 on the sideline. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 305. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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